CMPL200 Presentation Script

I wrote this for a presentation I gave on Andre Bazin's "The Ontology of the Photographic Image". I am unable to include the slides, however they only present quotes that have been largely integrated into the following script.

slide 1: Andre Bazin was a prominent French film critic and theorist of the 20th century. He was born in Angers, France in 1918. He moved to Paris with his family in the early 30s and began writing essays, largely on cinema, in the early 40s. He continued to write until 1958 when he died from leukemia. In 1951, in Paris, helped to start the film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma which is often credited with creating the fields of film criticism and film theory. Throughout the mid to late 1950s Bazin and Cahiers du Cinema collaborators André Astruc and François Truffaut jointly developed the auteur theory which posits that a director is the primary force behind a movie and proposes that the relationships of control and expression between director and film, and author and literary work, are equal. The auteur theory has faced much criticism throughout history, yet it remains foundational to the study of film, the creation of a post-world war II French cinema and the French New Wave, and essentially all of subsequent film history. Bazin has retrospectively become associated with humanism, as this philosophy seems to be a theme underpinning much of his writing. His humanist tendencies are apparent in his belief in, as I mentioned, the auteur theory, in cinematic realism, as well as in his popular text “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.

slide 2: Bazin wrote The Ontology of the Photographic Image in 1945. The work was first translated into English by Hugh Gray in Berkeley, California and published in 1967. Through the title of this text, Bazin tells his readers that he will be aiming to answer the question: “What is a Photograph?” He begins his essay discussing the intentions and impacts of visual art. He explains that the plastic arts hold “a mummy complex. The religion of ancient Egypt, aimed against death, saw survival as depending on the continued existence of the corporeal body. Thus, by providing a defense against the passage of time it satisfied a basic psychological need in man, for death is but the victory of time. To preserve, artificially, his bodily appearance is to snatch it from the flow of time, to stow it away neatly, so to speak, in the hold of life. It was natural, therefore, to keep up appearances in the face of the reality of death by preserving flesh and bone.” These sites were often pillaged and thus ancient Egyptians began to place terracotta statuettes alongside the sarcophagus as substitute bodies incase the sarcophagus faced destruction. Bazin cites this practice to illustrate “the primordial function of statuary, namely, the preservation of life by a representation of life.” He writes that visual art “was torn between two ambitions: one, primarily aesthetic, namely the expression of spiritual reality wherein the symbol transcended its model; the other, purely psychological, namely to duplicate the world outside.” However, Bazin, in thinking with the mummy complex on why the plastic arts exist, decides that the history of the visual arts is a matter of its psychology, and thus realism is essential to understanding how these arts function. 

slide 3: Bazin notes that all art has long confused true realism and pseudorealism. He explains that pseudorealism aims at “fooling the eye (or for that matter the mind)” with “illusory appearances” and that true realism aims to “give significant expression to the world both concretely and in its essence.” He believes that “photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness… satisfy[ing], once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism.” Essentially he is saying that a photograph, being a pseudorealism as close as possible to what an artist and people actually witness, gives way to true realism. He explains that a painting, “No matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to an inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a human hand intervened cast a shadow of doubt over the image.” Bazin says that pseudorealism “is not to be found in the [painting or photograph] but in the way of achieving it.”

slide 4: Bazin describes the photograph as an “illusion by mechanical reproduction in the making of which man plays no part.” He says that photography permitted, for the first time, an image of the world to be formed through a nonliving agent and without the creative intervention of man.

slide 5: When reading this text I found myself skeptical of Bazin’s arguments. Maybe photography is in fact better at depicting realism than painting is, but Bazin seems to be so confident, even too confident, in this assertion, that he seems to disregard the role of the human photographer in photography. Bazin writes: “The personality of the photographer enters into the proceedings only in his selection of the object to be photographed and by way of the purpose he has in mind. Although the final result may reflect something of his personality, this does not play the same role as is played by that of the painter.” It was this quote that cemented my skepticism of Bazin. Here, Bazin disregards the fact that nearly everything in a photograph is subject to a photographer’s choices. I wanted to acknowledge my position as an interpreter of this text in 2023. From my position, I do not immediately think about photography as confined to a singular medium. I understand a photograph not only by what lies within its image but also through a photographer’s choices of camera, how they edit the photograph, etc. The contemporary photographer makes more choices in creating pseudorealism. I can chalk up my disagreement with Bazin here to a temporal disconnect, but I remain concerned with his absence of a mention of the fact that a photographer is produced by and situated in certain cultural conditions.

slide 6: I grounded my skepticism in Venuti’s text Invisibility of the Translator. Bazin’s quote “The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it,” reminded me of Venuti’s quote in which he describes and questions the ethical grounds of domestication as they are rooted in “the transcendental concept of humanity as an essence that remains unchanged over time and space.” Venuti describes domestication as a method in which it is believed that “accuracy in translation depends on generating an equivalent effect in the receiving culture.” Domestication takes an original text and re-presents it as the original text to a target audience, despite the text passing through time, space, and cultural borders in its becoming of its translated form. Bazin believes photography does the same. He believes that something is governed by time and space, but he does not assert that things are also constructed by time and space. This misunderstanding, or rather disregard, of how things interact with their environment in also present in domesticating translation. Venuti notes that domestication is “symptomatic of a complacency in British and American relations with cultural others… [that is] imperialistic abroad and xenophobic at home.” From here I turned to Orientalism.

slide 7: Said’s Orientalism explains that Orientalism only exists through Western othering of the East in an effort to uphold and rationalize Western power. Bazin's assertion that the photographic image represents the object freed from temporal and spatial constraints mirrors Orientalism's framing of the Orient as the "other." In both, there is a selective representation that reflects the interests and perspectives of the empowered and autonomous subject - that being the West or the photographer. Bazin's idea that the photographer's personality is embedded in the selection of the object draws a parallel to the Western scholar's geopolitical identity influencing the knowledge production about the East. Bazin’s view of a photograph as realism reflects Western hegemony’s view of orientalism as the orient. The camera-object-photographer dynamic in photography is mirrored in the relationships between the West, the Orient, and Orientalism.