Approaching the Real: Bazin and Indexicality

(A few months ago, while speaking of indexicality, I mentioned I’d write a follow-up post on the relevance of this topic to the film theory of the great French critic André Bazin. Here it is, or a portion of it anyway.)

Bazin addresses the indexical nature of the photographic and cinematographic image most explicitly in his 1945 article “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” but this topic will reverberate throughout his writings, in particular in the essays he writes on Italian neo-realism and its legacy. For Bazin, realism in the cinema is not simply a question of style, as it is in other artistic milieus. A novelist or painter who describes their work as “realist” is referring to a style they have adopted vis-à-vis the objective world. (So, for example, a realist painter will painstakingly attempt to duplicate, as much as possible, the minute details of the environment that they have before them and which they wish to represent in their painting.) In cinema, the indexical nature of the image means that realism is never simply a stylistic choice on the part of the filmmaker. Realism, in an important sense, is already there in the image; realism is given. The objective world is captured by the camera through an indexical process. Thus, Bazin argues, cinema is realist at its basis. Realism is the starting point of each film; whereas realism is the end goal for a realist novelist or realist painter. The issue in cinema then is what the filmmaker does with this realist base. To what extent does the filmmaker acknowledge and embrace the fragments of reality – the fragments of the real – that they have accumulated for the purposes of making a film, and to what extent are they forgotten, ignored, repressed?

Bazin’s love for Italian Neo-realism (and it’s important to stress here that Bazin not only helped popularize the idea of neo-realism but also ensured its continued relevance for the cinema that followed in its wake) is precisely related to the way the filmmakers associated with this movement embraced the everyday world of people and things that had been largely forgotten in the studio-based, star-driven films that characterized not only classical Hollywood film, but also the fascist variation found in Italy and Germany. Filmmakers working in this brand of commercial cinema had little interest in affirming the realist base of film. The distinction between fiction and documentary in this tradition was simple and clear. It is precisely such a division that was undermined by the filmmakers of Italian neo-realism, shooting their films on the streets of Italy with a cast of non-professional actors, or a mixture of professional and non-professional actors (resulting in what Bazin called an “amalgam”, each transformed by contact with the other). There is much talk about the documentary impulse in neo-realism. This is true enough, but let’s not overlook the more fascinating point: the neo-realist filmmakers did not reject fiction in the name of documentary; instead, they created a new hybrid from that is part-fiction and part-documentary – a hybrid form that is, I would argue, truly cinematic. And it was precisely their embrace of the indexical nature of the medium that meant that they never forgot, nor let us forget, the reality at the basis of the cinematographic image.

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Bazin is often quoted as saying that there are two kinds of filmmakers: those that place their faith in the image and those that place their faith in reality. Bazin most admired those that fell into the latter camp. But we need to be careful here not to assume we understand so easily exactly what Bazin means by the term “reality.” People often quite stupidly think that when Bazin writes about reality and realism he is simply talking about mimetic replication or representation, as though all he were saying was that films should be more realistic. To say this though would mean that we already know in advance what reality is; hence the goal would be simply to duplicate what we already know, what we already understand. Bazin never presumes such foreknowledge. In fact, more than once, he describes reality as “fundamentally ambiguous”. Indeed, it is precisely this ambiguity that makes realism a vital enterprise for the artist to pursue; it is precisely this ambiguity that makes realism an aesthetic choice. And if cinema is the most vital of all artistic forms to explore such an aesthetic it is because the realist basis of the medium allows the filmmaker to interrogate reality in an intimate and direct way. The realist filmmaker seeks to attain reality, the real, without knowing in advance exactly what it is; and the viewer comes to participate in this search, this open-ended quest, through the process of viewing the film. Deleuze articulates this point well when he says, in the opening pages of Cinema 2: The Time-Image, that, in Neo-realism, reality or the real is "no longer represented or reproduced but 'aimed for.' Instead of representing an already deciphered real, neo-realism aimed at an always ambiguous, to be deciphered, real."

Neo-realism means new realism and this is exactly what Bazin wishes us to understand as the potential of cinema: through the experience of watching a film, the spectator can be brought face to face with "reality" in all its complexity, mystery and force. It is this kind of realism that is exemplified, for Bazin, by the work of the Italian filmmakers, and this mode of existential inquiry lives on outside the mainstream and the brand of contemporary commercial cinema dominated by CGI-manipulation. Anyone who thinks debates on cinematic realism are old-fashioned or quaint should see films by such contemporary filmmakers as Jia Zhang-ke (e.g., Unknown Pleasures and The World), Abbas Kiarostami (Close-Up and A Taste of Cherry), and Carlos Reygadas (Silent Light), just to name a few. Indeed the first two filmmakers mentioned demonstrate, in their most recent films, the role that digital film can play in this rich, varied counter-cinematic tradition.

S I-G