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.”
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