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Popular Culture Review
In the preface to the 1990 edition o f his biography o f Andr^ Bazin, Dudley Andrew prompts us to
ask the question “H ow appropriate and, indeed, necessary, not how correct, were his ideas then,
and how rich are they now?” (vi). It is with an implicit reference to Andrew’s question that this
paper proceeds.
This state o f affairs is also underscored by Andrew: “Digitalization allows for the indefinite
manipulation o f the image, including the photographic image, until its indexical function is
obliterated” (In Lehman 78).
Several decades earlier Emile Zola expressed a similar sentiment: ‘you cannot claim to have
really seen something until you have photographed it’ (quoted in Sontag 87).
This conflict can to some extent be resolved by introducing Monroe Beardsley’s distinction between
sensorial properties o f an artwork (color, texture, form) and purely physical ones (acoustics, light
waves etc.). The former pertain to a work’s phenomenological level, the latter - which are then
beyond perception - to its material level (29-34).
Tarkovksy has addressed the question o f the purpose o f cinema quite explicitly, asking “Why do
people go to the cinem a?... The search for entertainment? The need for a kind o f drug? All over
the world th ere are, indeed, entertainment fum s and organisations which exploit cinema and
television and spectacles o f many other kinds. Our starting-point, however, should not be there,
but in the essential principles o f cinem a... I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema
for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had” (63). Although Tarkovsky presents his answer
more abstractly than do Bazin and Barthes, all three thinkers seem to share a common understanding
o f the function o f photographically based film.
A critic who underscores this kind o f epistemological quality in photography is David Brubaker,
who submits that “representational images in film have a special epistemic function. Prosecutors,
journalists, scientists and political activists may cite Bazin’s account to justify their contingent
preferences, in some matters o f practice, for photographs, films and videotapes” (65).
For a more extensive discussion o f the nuances and differences o f meaning which these two
concepts have, see Christian Metz. Language and Cinema. Transla. Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok.
The Hague: Mouton, 1974. 50-60.
In a defense o f Bazin’s argument in “The Ontology o f the Photographic Image,” David Brubaker
writes that “Andrd Bazin is right that photographs are made without the kind of human intervention
which occurs during the production o f other artworks, such as paintings. Photographs and film
frames are automatic in an exclusive sense, because they are the effects o f a particular kind of
causal chain that is not associated with paintings” (65).
In his treatise on Bazin’s seemingly paradoxical advocacy of the objectivity and ambiguity o f the
photographic image, Igor Kor?i? maintains that “It is this experience of ambiguity, the result of
the mechanical reproduction process that is crucial in Bazin’s theory” (79).
Matthews’ recent plea for a return to a Bazinian philosophy of film expresses a similar concern.
“At no other period in its history,” he writes, “has cinema been so enslaved by escapist fantasy and never have we been less certain o f the status of the real” (25). Most contemporary film
theorists, notwithstanding, appear reluctant to revive Bazinianism, inhabiting instead a kind of
position exem plified by Gregory Currie, who claims that “There is too much in Bazin that is
confused or simply wrong for his work to constitute the basis o f a theoretical renewal” (xxiii).
In 0/1 Photography, Susan Sontag espouses a view o f photographic practice that accords with
Bazin’s and Barthes’ emphases. “All photographs,” she says, “are memento morC (15), and “the
force o f photographic images com es from their being material realities in their own right, richly
informative deposits left in the wake o f whatever emitted them” (180).
Whereas trick cinematography is as old as Georges Mdli^s, computer-generated imagery is first
encountered in films like Tron (Steven Lisbeiger 1982) and Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn (Nicholas
Meyer 1982).
A similar observation is made by Deborah Foster and John F. Meech in their article “Social
Dimensions o f Virtual Reality.” In Karen Carr and Rupert England. Eds. Simulated and Virtual
Realities. Elements o f Perception. London: Taylor & Francis, 1995. 212.