Back to Bazin? Filmicity
in the Age of the Digital Image
When you see a photograph o f yourselfy do you say you* re a fiction?
Jean-Luc Godard
In a 1999 article for Sight and Sounds Peter Matthews ponders the current
state of film theory, making the following concession: “in so far as a compulsive
skepticism and a jaded cynicism have become the orthodoxies of our age, this may
be the moment to start rehabilitating reality - and Andre Bazin” (25).
While my aim here is not to do exactly that, I will in this paper address a set of
issues involving perhaps not so much the relationship between film and what one
somewhat equivocally calls realism as the representational opposition between
photographic and digital film imagery. In an experiential, phenomenological sense,
the film image is devoid of any material substance; it is but the chemical reflection
of a space that belongs to the past, a ghostly apparition impossibly claimed both by
the fictional and the real.’ One may wish to maintain that in a literal sense, the
substance of the image must be its material base. However true that is, in our
everyday encounters wit h film what we interact with is not the tangible celluloid
but the non-material shapes and colors projected from it. Regardless of how
extensively any given film is edited, the fact remains that if we are to speak of the
phenomenal (as opposed to the material) image as constitutive of a particular
substance, it must be the textualized derivative of the profilmic event itself.
Etymologically, the meaning of the word ‘substance’ shares an affinity with the
concept of ontology. Whereas in The New Oxford Dictionary o f English ‘substance’
is codified as “the real physical matter of which a person or thing consists, and
which has a tangible, solid presence,” the meaning of the Latin substantia is ‘being’
or ‘essence.’ The former stresses the material aspect, the latter the philosophical.
In his book Sculpting in Time, Andrey Tarkovsky revealingly pinpoints the substance
of the filmic thus:
Cinema uses the materials given by nature itself, by the passage of
time, manifested within space, that we observe about us and in which we
live. Some image of the world arises in the writer’s consciousness which
he then, by means of words, writes down on paper. But the roll of film
imprints mechanically the features of the unconditional world which come
into the camera’s field of vision, and from these an image of the whole is
subsequently constructed (177).^