Back to Bazin
15
Bazin founded his entire theory” (25). Alexandre Astruc seems to have anticipated
such a development long ago. “The cinema,” he opined, “is not an eternal art. Its
forms are not unchanging. Each of the aspects that it reveals is linked inevitably to
the psychology o f a period" (emphasis added, quoted in Bordwell 46). Keeping in
mind Astruc’s postulation, it is possible to conceive of the transition in film from
documentation to simulation as a process parallel to that of refashioning the human
body through cosmetic surgery. In many ways, the manipulation of the image by
digitization is similar to the manipulation of the body by the scalpel. Both operations
are symptomatic of the emergence of an increasingly prosthetic culture. Intriguingly,
filmic and corporeal surgery no less than photography aim to resist processes of
decay. As Bazin submits, the latter “does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms
time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption” (14). Paradoxically, however,
where the photograph prevents corruption by preserving the object, surgery attempts
to do the same by transforming it. Inevitably, this enge nders yet another
contradiction, since surgical alteration is often a conservational procedure which
curtails the continuity of that sameness it attempts to insulate from the corruption
of time. As computer surgery modifies the substance of the body of the photographic
image, film becomes not the redemption but the negation of physical reahty.
In assuming what one might call a Neo-Bazinian position vis-a-vis cinema
and the photographic, I am acutely aware of the risk of embracing a thesis that in
theoretical terms appears reactionary, or at least antiquated. The disputant will no
doubt ask why I worry so much about the material basis of representational forms,
thinking this inconsequential in relation to the effects and messages fictional
representations are bound to convey irrespective of the nature of their materiality.
Moreover, she may add that phenomenology overrides o n to lo g y th a t is, what
does it matter that the stunning image of the chateau by the lake and the Swiss Alps
in James Cameron’s True Lies (1994) is devoid of photographic referentiality as
long as viewers approach it as a reproduction of actual space? Pictorial
verisimihtude, one may continue, has not so much to do with the substance of its
source as with the machinations of visual perception. When Stephen Prince in a
1996 article in Film Quarterly probed the consequences of the following question
- “What are the implications of computer-generated imagery for representation in
cinema, particularly for concepts of photographically based realism?” (27) - he
concluded that perceptual realism “can encompass both unreal images and those
which are referentially fictional but perceptually realistic” (32). He thus suggests
that the effects of perceptual reahsm supersede the problem of material realism.
Even if most viewers would fail to make a phenomenological distinction
between photographic and computer-generated imagery, one may still identify a
set of problems related to postphotographic practice and the status of the filmic.
Firstly, film is not a mere receptacle for a kind of extra-filmic content we call