DOI issue:
Zwrot kinematograficzny w praktyce i teorii sztuki / The Cinematic Turn in Art Practice and Theory
DOI article:Dalle Vacche, Angela: André Bazin's film theory: art, science, religion
Citation link:https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/artium_quaestiones2020/0210
204 Angela Dalle Vacche
history of media slowly emerges. When they sit in the dark, spectators become
as motionless as plants, and, as such, they resemble the stillness of photography
and painting. Spectators can also become animals in motion, to the extent that
they respond to nervous stimuli triggered by moving elements on screen, ena-
bling them to explore the world vicariously through camera movement. Finally,
spectators can also become gravity-defying machines, like an airplane during
an aerial view that miniaturizes the world; or they can reduce themselves to
an insect's size when they look at gigantic elements on the screen in close-up.
To be sure, Bazin's embodied spectatorship depends on how his ranking
of the arts with time and literature is comparable to his "tree of the scienc-
es."31 This "tree" branches out into interrelated disciplines, from biology all
the way down to mathematics. As far as the ranking of arts, literature, editing,
and the thinking mind are on top; theater, camera movement, and the world
are in the middle; painting and the senses are at the bottom. Bazin's tree of
the sciences reverses the arts' mind-world-body sequence. There, time, space,
and the senses are ranked in such a way that language and thought have pri-
ority over the sensuality of pictorial images.
As soon as we further connect Bazin's "tree of the sciences" within the in-
terfaces of contingency with biology and abstract logic with mathematics, we
realize that within Bazin's system, biology sits at the top from which it points
to the finite and inevitably frail organisms of all living entities. The chemistry
and physics of interaction with the world are in the middle; while the math-
ematics of the rational, abstract mind sit at the bottom. This placement of
human logic at the bottom of the "tree of sciences" is no denial of logic, but
a sobering and anti-anthropocentric gesture that makes room for the inexpli-
cable and the fortuitous, while balancing out the prominence of literature and
thought in Bazin's system of the arts.
In the cinema, Bazin's system of the arts and the tree of the sciences com-
plement each other in such a way that lifelike motion compensates for physi-
cal decay, while the blind spots of subjective perception prevail over the proofs
of scientific knowledge. In the end, the medium of cinema mediates between
the Self and the world, subject and object. This mediation, however, is a call
to action rather than an abstract philosophical position. Neither an academic
nor a politician, Bazin never claimed to be a philosopher. Besides working
as a journalist, he made a living by travelling to cine-clubs and running film
discussions. As a cultural activist, Bazin always embraced paradoxes. Thus he
avoided both binary systems and Hegelian syntheses. For him, cinema's illu-
31 A. Bazin, "Un musée des ombres: magie blanche, magie noir," Ecran Français 1948,
182 (21 December), n.p.: "I’arbre de science delà photographie."
history of media slowly emerges. When they sit in the dark, spectators become
as motionless as plants, and, as such, they resemble the stillness of photography
and painting. Spectators can also become animals in motion, to the extent that
they respond to nervous stimuli triggered by moving elements on screen, ena-
bling them to explore the world vicariously through camera movement. Finally,
spectators can also become gravity-defying machines, like an airplane during
an aerial view that miniaturizes the world; or they can reduce themselves to
an insect's size when they look at gigantic elements on the screen in close-up.
To be sure, Bazin's embodied spectatorship depends on how his ranking
of the arts with time and literature is comparable to his "tree of the scienc-
es."31 This "tree" branches out into interrelated disciplines, from biology all
the way down to mathematics. As far as the ranking of arts, literature, editing,
and the thinking mind are on top; theater, camera movement, and the world
are in the middle; painting and the senses are at the bottom. Bazin's tree of
the sciences reverses the arts' mind-world-body sequence. There, time, space,
and the senses are ranked in such a way that language and thought have pri-
ority over the sensuality of pictorial images.
As soon as we further connect Bazin's "tree of the sciences" within the in-
terfaces of contingency with biology and abstract logic with mathematics, we
realize that within Bazin's system, biology sits at the top from which it points
to the finite and inevitably frail organisms of all living entities. The chemistry
and physics of interaction with the world are in the middle; while the math-
ematics of the rational, abstract mind sit at the bottom. This placement of
human logic at the bottom of the "tree of sciences" is no denial of logic, but
a sobering and anti-anthropocentric gesture that makes room for the inexpli-
cable and the fortuitous, while balancing out the prominence of literature and
thought in Bazin's system of the arts.
In the cinema, Bazin's system of the arts and the tree of the sciences com-
plement each other in such a way that lifelike motion compensates for physi-
cal decay, while the blind spots of subjective perception prevail over the proofs
of scientific knowledge. In the end, the medium of cinema mediates between
the Self and the world, subject and object. This mediation, however, is a call
to action rather than an abstract philosophical position. Neither an academic
nor a politician, Bazin never claimed to be a philosopher. Besides working
as a journalist, he made a living by travelling to cine-clubs and running film
discussions. As a cultural activist, Bazin always embraced paradoxes. Thus he
avoided both binary systems and Hegelian syntheses. For him, cinema's illu-
31 A. Bazin, "Un musée des ombres: magie blanche, magie noir," Ecran Français 1948,
182 (21 December), n.p.: "I’arbre de science delà photographie."