Total War

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Total war, total history, total cinema:
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André Bazin on the political perils of
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cinematic realism
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.. FEROZ HASSAN
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The intensive recovery of André Bazin’s work over the last decade or
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so has taken place within a broader disciplinary revaluation of the
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.. significance of classical film theory. This revaluation has itself taken
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.. place against the development of digital technologies that have once
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1 For an overview of the concerns .. again foregrounded the fundamental, or rather ontological, questions
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informing the revaluation of ..
.. about image-based media.1 In relation to Bazin, some scholars have
classical film theory, see Johannes ..
von Moltke, Erica Carter and D. N.
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.. sought to demonstrate that the realism he championed was much more
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Rodowick, ‘Dossier: what’s new in ..
.. complex than he has been given credit for, linking him with
classical film theory?’, Screen, ..
..
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Surrealism, Deconstruction and modernism in general. Others have
vol. 55, no. 3 (2014), pp. 396–420, ..
and Dudley Andrew, et al., ..
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called attention to the range of films and media he wrote about to
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‘Roundtable on the return to .. suggest that the problem of perceptual realism may not be as central to
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classical film theory,’ October, no. ..
.. his work as traditionally thought.2 This opens up the resonance of
148 (2014), pp. 5–26. ..
.. Bazin’s work within our own media landscape, which is characterized
2 See, for example, several ..
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contributions to Dudley Andrew .. by fluidity and hybridity.
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and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (eds), .. What is missing from these acts of recovery is any sustained address to
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Opening Bazin (New York, NY: ..
Oxford University Press, 2011);
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.. those who had been most critical of Bazin, the ideology critics of the
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Philip Rosen, ‘Subject, ontology ..
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1970s. Certainly the appreciation of the breadth and complexity of
and historicity in Bazin’, in Change ..
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Bazin’s work rescues him from the caricature of the naive realist, upon
Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, ..
Theory (Minneapolis, MN: ..
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which the ideological critiques of his work had been built. In addition,
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University of Minnesota Press, .. the ‘paranoia’ of ideology critique from that era has long ceded
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2001); Daniel Morgan, ‘Rethinking .. disciplinary space either to more fine-grained historical scholarship about
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Bazin: ontology and realist ..
.. the medium and its audiences or, in theory, to more phenomenological
aesthetics’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 32, ..
..
no. 3 (2006), pp. 443–81. .. ‘reparative’ paradigms of reading and viewing that affectively negotiate
38 Screen 58:1 Spring 2017

© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
doi:10.1093/screen/hjx013
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3 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid ..
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the ideological frameworks of films.3 I argue in this essay, however, that
reading and reparative reading, or, ..
..
..
we need to invoke ideological critiques of realism not so much to address
you’re so paranoid, you probably ..
think this essay is about you’, in .. Bazin’s earlier critics but because his theoretical stances had themselves
..
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Touching Feeling: Affect, .. been constructed on the basis of a critique of the ideological dimensions
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Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, .. of filmic realism – something that has so far gone unremarked in the
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NC: Duke University Press, 2003), ..
.. reappraisals of Bazin.
pp. 123–51. For an example of film ..
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scholarship that may be seen as in ..
.. We are yet to sufficiently appreciate how much Bazin thought the
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line with Sedgwick’s .. cinema to be the medium of its time. We take him to hold to an idea of a
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characterization of ‘reparative’ ...
approaches to cultural objects ..
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timeless, idealist drive to the reproduction of the world that the
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ideologically hostile to their ..
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technologies of cinema work to realize; as I suggest later, he may be
readers/spectators, see Laura ..
.. partly responsible for this supposition. By arguing that Bazin considered
Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: ..
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Stillness and the Moving Image .. cinema of its time, I mean not only that cinema was shaped by the
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(London: Reaktion Books, 2006). .. experiences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also that a
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.. certain idea of history attended its development. ‘Of its time’ may mean
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.. many things: the industrial modernity of the late nineteenth century; the
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.. transition from realism to modernism in the arts (however that may be
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understood); the time of revolutions and world wars, of democracy and
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fascism; the struggle between emergent nationalisms and imperial and
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anti-imperial internationalisms; the spectre of nuclear warfare, and so on.
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.. Equally, this time of cinema may simply mean that it is a medium that
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.. most readily feasts on the present. I propose that for Bazin it was all of
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.. these things, individually and collectively, for the time of cinema was
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.. quite simply the time of the drive to totality, amidst an epochal
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.. experience of modernity as technologically driven dispersal and
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democratization of history. A time, in many ways, not unlike our own,
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and so our turn to Bazin and to classical film theorists in general must
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.. take into account not just the fluid media landscape of their time but also
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.. the historico-political background against which they examined the status
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.. of the filmic image.
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.. Totality may most readily be recognized as a Marxist category that
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.. seeks to frame history as a dialectical movement driven by the relational
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.. contradictions of the particular and the universal. But as Martin Jay
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points out, it is also a long-standing one in western philosophy, which
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gains a modern valence with the Enlightenment’s introduction of the idea
4 Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality:
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of progress into the understanding of history.4 Whether we think of
The Adventures of a Concept from ..
.. modernity as a time of fragmentation or one in which new and previously
Luka cs to Habermas (Berkeley and ..
.. ignored aspects of existence come into sight and thus reconfigure
Los Angeles, CA: University of ..
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California Press, 1984), pp. 26–32. .. existing worldviews, it was often experienced as a drive to grasp history
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.. whole, to understand how the multitudinous modern existence may be
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.. recontained within an overarching framework. Both reactionary desires
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for a restoration of the old order and progressive desires for a new and
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better one worked within this imperative for totality. Through a rereading
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of those among Bazin’s writings that most directly address the
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.. relationship of cinema to history and politics, I argue for his recognition
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.. of the medium’s ambivalent but deep relationship to this drive to totality
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.. seen in the fatal conjunction of its three iterations: total history, total
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39 Screen 58:1 Spring 2017 Feroz Hassan Total war, total history, total cinema: André Bazin on the political perils of cinematic realism
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war and total cinema – terms that Bazin drew from the discourse of his
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time.
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.. To sketch out Bazin’s critique of realism, I start with a rereading of his
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5 André Bazin, ‘The myth of Stalin in
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.. essay, ‘The myth of Stalin in Soviet cinema’,5 in which I identify an
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the Soviet cinema’, in Bazin at .. unmarked response on Stalinist terror to the philosopher Maurice
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Work: Major Essays, ed. and trans. ..
.. Merleau-Ponty that is essential to demonstrating Bazin’s engagement
Bert Cardullo (New York, NY: ..
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Routledge, 1997), pp. 23–40; ..
.. with debates in the political philosophy and political events of his time.
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originally published in a longer .. In this debate we see Bazin engaging one version of totalizing history,
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version as ‘Le cinéma soviétique et ...
le mythe de Staline’, Esprit, vol. 8, ..
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that of Soviet Marxism, which then lays the ground for my revaluation of
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no. 170 (1950), pp. 210–35. ..
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Bazin’s theorization of the relationship of realism to politics. The second
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.. part of this essay takes up his analysis of cinema’s role in a world of
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.. ‘total war’, a term with particular relevance to propaganda films. The
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.. final section will turn to the original version of ‘The myth of total
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.. cinema’ to uncover a very different argument from that essay’s 1958
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.. version, one which bears on cinema’s political role defined by the very
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6 André Bazin, ‘Le mythe du cinéma ..
.. moment of its emergence.6 In this section we also see Bazin invoking
total et les origines du ...
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another model of ‘total history’, that of the Annales School.
cinématographe’, Critique, no. 6 ..
(1946), pp. 552–57. ..
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.. When speaking of Bazin’s historical context and his philosophical
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.. milieu, scholars have often pointed to the influence of Emmanuel
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.. Mounier’s personalism, Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism and Maurice
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.. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. The problem with articulating this
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.. influence has been that the historical dialogue seems unidirectional and
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Bazin a more or less faithful disciple to the more illustrious figures, since
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the philosophers only occasionally or never wrote on the cinema, and
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.. Bazin’s writings on cinema are informed by a larger philosophical
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.. framework that remains necessarily underelaborated. Only in the case of
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.. Sartre has it been possible to complicate this narrative of influence, partly
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.. because of Bazin’s response to him on Citizen Kane (Orson Welles,
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.. 1941) but also because of a sustained rather than occasional aesthetic
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.. engagement on Sartre’s part, against which Bazin’s own positions can be
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better measured and distinguished. Here I will attempt to complicate this
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narrative of influence in relation to Merleau-Ponty, tracing Bazin’s
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response to him not on the question of phenomenological aesthetics but
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.. on that of the phenomenology or philosophy of history.
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.. In a 1984 essay Janet Staiger points out that Bazin’s ‘The myth of
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.. Stalin in the Soviet cinema’ was written after Merleau-Ponty’s own
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.. examination of the Stalin trials in the journal Les Temps Modernes,
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.. which became the basis for the book Humanism and Terror, published in
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7 Janet Staiger, ‘Theorist, yes, but ..
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1947.7 She suggests that we read Bazin’s denunciation of the Stalin myth
what of?: Bazin and history’, Iris, ..
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in light of Merleau-Ponty’s own attempts to distance French communism
vol. 2, no. 2 (1984), p. 107. ..
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ..
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from Stalinist communism. Merleau-Ponty in 1947 was, however, far
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Humanism and Terror: An Essay on .. more ambiguous than Staiger suggests on the question of the Moscow
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the Communist Problem (Boston, ..
.. show trials of the 1930s. I therefore argue that Bazin’s own account of
MA: Beacon Press, 1964); first ..
.. the trials is a direct if unmarked response to Merleau-Ponty’s argument
French edition, 1947. ..
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.. rather than simply following it.
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Bazin begins the essay on Stalin by highlighting and commending the
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originality of Soviet cinema in representing living or recently dead
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.. historical personages. He argues that in the western tradition, historically
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.. important public figures have to wait for their death, even a very long
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.. time after their death, in order to become fit subjects for representation.
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.. He points to certain exceptions, but notes that such people are almost
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.. never politicians and often tend to be celebrities who have acquired a
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.. legendary character in their lifetimes. This points to two interrelated
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assumptions in this tradition: that the meaning of a person’s life is only
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fixed after his or her death, and that the only historical subjects generally
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.. fit for representation are those whose life can serve a mythic purpose. As
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.. such, representations of historical characters in the western tradition is
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.. ‘para- or post-historical’. Against this ‘transcendental’ conception of
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.. human life, Soviet films such as Chapaev (Georgi Vasilyev and Sergei
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.. Vasilyev, 1934) and The Turning Point (Fridrikh Ermler, 1945) present
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.. us with characters who participate in recent history as actively engaged
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individuals. And yet they do not stand over History as its sole engines.
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What Bazin argues for in these films is what he calls the ‘dialectic
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between Man and History’, in which the unfolding of History is what
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.. defines the individual, and the individual’s participation is what makes
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8 Bazin, ‘The myth of Stalin in the ..
.. History.8
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Soviet cinema’, pp. 25–26. I ..
.. There is an important difference, however, that would have
sometimes refer to ‘History’ with ..
a capital ‘H’, in keeping with
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.. consequences for a historical materialist cinema. An individual’s death
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Bazin’s usage, to designate a ..
.. greatly curtails the possible meanings that can be ascribed to it, whereas
teleological understanding of
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the meaning of History has a more paradoxical character. On the one
history. ..
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hand History’s meaning is provisional in a radical sense, both because it
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.. has no end that is equivalent to human death (the prospect of the world’s
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.. nuclear annihilation admits no meaning) and also because it depends on
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.. the unreliable subjectivities of the humans who live and shape it; they
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.. cannot be relied upon to meet the demands of historical progress. On the
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.. other hand the nineteenth-century progressive conception of history is
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.. forever looking over the horizon for the next signpost of progress. Some
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versions of Marxist historical understanding, which is an important
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variant on this nineteenth-century conception, actually posit an end to
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history in the form of a classless society. This is an instance of what Jay
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.. calls the ‘longitudinal totality’ of history, the hypothesized movement
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9 Jay, Marxism and Totality,
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.. towards utopia.9
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pp. 26–32, 64–67. ..
.. For Bazin, the challenge for a Marxist cinema, understood against the
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.. skeletal framework of longitudinal history, would have been the
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.. negotiation of the individual’s finitude in relation to the paradoxical
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nature of history, both radically open yet experienced as mediated by a
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desire for utopic closure. Whatever gains are made in this direction by
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the films referred to above are betrayed when it comes to films in which
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.. Stalin appears as a character. Stalin is played in these films as the source
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.. of the idea of the class struggle, the victory of the proletariat and the
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.. engine of this triumph. In short, he appears as History realized, as
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.. ‘History incarnate’.10
10 Bazin, ‘The myth of Stalin in the ...
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The argument that Bazin makes here goes far beyond a simple critique
Soviet cinema’, p. 33. ..
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of Stalinist propaganda, and is instead aimed at the tendency within
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.. Soviet Marxism to insist on the perfect immanence of its teleological
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.. destination and, worse, the identification of this with an individual. Bazin
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.. could criticize the emphasis on the individual while remaining within the
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.. logic of Marxism, given its suspicion of individual agents. But what must
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.. have been more provocative was the critique of the perfection of history
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.. itself when, despite the wars of the previous three decades and the
...
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still-fresh memory of genocidal violence, many Leftist intellectuals in
11 For a discussion of how much
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France continued to believe in its possibility.11 Moreover, Bazin not only
French Marxism was still tied to ..
.. suggests that the movement of history is inevitably compromised by
the Soviet doctrine, see Sunil ..
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Khilnani, ‘French Marxism – .. individual subjectivity, he goes on to argue for it with a digression on the
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existentialism to structuralism’, in .. logic of Stalin’s show trials. It is here that he takes on and contests an
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Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy .. important meditation on the trials and the ‘Communist problem’ by
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(eds), The Cambridge History of ..
Twentieth-Century Political
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.. Merleau-Ponty.
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Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge ..
.. Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist
University Press, 2009), ...
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Problem was a response to the debates around Arthur Koestler’s novel
pp. 304–7. ..
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Darkness at Noon, which was published in France in 1945 (five years
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after its original publication in the UK). While the polemical and divisive
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.. responses to Koestler’s work along pro- and anticommunist lines
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.. predictably dominated public debate, one troubling aspect of the novel
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.. did not go unremarked. Its central character Rubashov, put on trial for
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.. crimes he did not commit in any literal sense (such as actively
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.. collaborating with hostile nations, falsely implicating loyal Soviet leaders
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in treason), nonetheless decides to confess to them. He recognizes that
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whatever his intentions may have been, and however insignificant a
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.. tactical error he may have made in his dealings, in an ‘objective’ sense he
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.. may have betrayed the revolution because it was rendered vulnerable by
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.. his ‘actions’ – whether by using an ambiguous word that could be
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.. construed as criticism of the regime by its enemies, or neglecting with an
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.. ill-judged silence an opportunity to identify a threat to the revolution.
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.. Merleau-Ponty seizes on this aspect of Rubashov’s testimony, and
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also the testimony of the real-life Soviet leader Nikolai Bukharin
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(1888–1938), on whom Koestler based Rubashov, to argue that ‘the
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Moscow trials might be seen as the drama of subjective honesty and
12 Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and
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.. objective treason’.12
..
Terror, p. 44. ..
.. Those who read the trials simply as a deliberate misjudgement by
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.. which the innocent were convicted fail to understand what even those
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.. sentenced to death understood: that they were joined to their prosecutors
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.. by the logic of a revolutionary trial in which intentions, values and acts
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13 Ibid., pp. 29–33. ..
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found justification only in their realization and not in themselves.13 This
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is, for Merleau-Ponty, the necessary tragedy of politics: one cannot
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escape subjectivity because one does not know the future, but it is only
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.. through the objectivity that arrives with the future that present
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14 Ibid., p. 64.
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.. subjectivity can or cannot be justified.14 Within this logic the trials appear
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.. to be unnecessary, but they are still illustrative of the drama of
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.. revolutionary politics that acknowledges the necessity and justification of
...
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violence if it serves to overcome violence in the future. The logic of the
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trials escapes the easy morality of liberalism, which hides from itself its
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.. own history of violence (of past and present colonialism) when
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15 Ibid., pp. xiii–xv.
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.. condemning violence in the abstract.15 Thus, Merleau-Ponty asks, ‘Why
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.. should it be necessary to hide what there was of Soviet patriotism in the
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16 Ibid., pp. xxxiii–xxxiv. ..
.. purges when one reveals what honor there was in the opposition?’.16
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.. Bazin never mentions Merleau-Ponty directly, but in what he says
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.. about the trials it is clear that he is drawing upon and responding to his
...
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arguments. On the subject of the trials, he begins by pointing out, as
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Merleau-Ponty does too, at one point, ‘the astonishingly subjective
17 Bazin, ‘The myth of Stalin in the
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.. nature of the show trials’.17 The trials are not a simple case of measuring
..
Soviet cinema’, p. 31; ..
.. guilt by ordinary legal criteria, which seek to establish whether certain
Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and ..
.. acts designated as illegal were committed or not, but attempt to uncover
Terror, p. 27. ..
..
.. the tragic conflict of subjectivity with history. Bazin argues that if these
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.. trials had indeed brought out the tragic dimension of revolutionary
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.. politics, the course taken by the Soviet revolution, contrary to
...
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Merleau-Ponty’s belief, had actually worked to suppress rather than
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acknowledge this dimension. Bazin writes:
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.. From a rigorously Marxist point of view, it would suffice to declare
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that Bukharin, Rajk, or Kostov embodies tendencies that the Party has
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decided to combat because they are historically incorrect. The physical
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elimination of these men then wouldn’t be any more necessary than
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that of our own ministers who resign. But from the moment that a man
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has taken part in History, from the moment he has been mixed up in
... such and such an event, a part of his biography is irrevocably
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.. ‘historicized’. An intolerable contradiction now exists between this
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.. definitively objective part, frozen in the past, and the physical
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existence of a Bukharin, a Zinoviev, or a Rajk. One cannot reduce man
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solely to History without in turn compromising this History through
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the subjectivity present in the individual. The living communist leader
18 Ibid., p. 32, modified translation;
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is a God sealed into history by his past acts.18
Bazin, ‘Le cinéma soviétique et le ..
..
mythe de Staline’, p. 221. In the ..
...
Merleau-Ponty had written that, ‘once he has been arrested, Rubashov
last line of this quotation, Bazin ..
..
..
the opposition member becomes in truth a traitor’.19 What Bazin tries to
actually refers to the Roman God ..
of boundaries Terminus in order ..
..
show in the quotation above is that this logic of historical ‘becoming’
..
to indicate the fixed quality of .. was inoperative in the actual Soviet context. If its leaders had contributed
..
the Soviet leaders’ subjectivity. ..
.. in the past to the making of history, Soviet Marxism could not tolerate
19 Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and ..
.. that they ever again stood apart from it. If they did, it would compromise
Terror, p. 8. ..
..
.. a certain version of Marxist historiography that affirms not only the
..
..
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.. reciprocal character of individual subjectivity and historical objectivity
..
..
...
but aims to harmonize them in the teleological progression of the
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revolution. It would suggest that subjectivity can engage and disengage
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..
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from the course of history, be with it at one moment, against it at the
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.. next, indifferent to it at others. Bazin argues that in the Soviet
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.. understanding of History an individual’s subjectivity is once and for all
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.. either with it or against it:
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..
..
...
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From the perspective of Stalinist Soviet Communism, no one can
..
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become a traitor, because this would mean that he hasn’t been one all
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along, that his betrayal had a beginning separate from the beginning of
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.. his life. It would also mean that the man who has become detrimental
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.. to the Party and to History had once been useful to both, had been
..
..
20 Ibid. ..
.. good before he became evil.20
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This explains the practice of rewriting the place of individuals in history
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... in order to eliminate what Merleau-Ponty called the ‘drama of subjective
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.. honesty and objective treason’. Bazin concludes that
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our bourgeois conscience, ‘hypocritical’ and ‘idealistic’, can accept
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.. the historical evidence that Pétain is both the ‘victor of Verdun’ and
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.. the ‘traitor of Montoire’, whereas the liquidated old comrades must
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.. disappear from the painting of Soviet history itself, [because] for the
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.. communist only death can reabsorb all subjectivity into event.21
..
Soviet cinema’, p. 31, modified ..
..
translation; Bazin, ‘Le cinéma ... This provocative comparison with the history of the occupation also
soviétique et le mythe de ..
..
.. follows Merleau-Ponty’s comparison of the trials to the postwar purge of
Staline’, p. 221 ..
..
.. collaborators in France. Merleau-Ponty had argued that there were
..
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.. perhaps cases where the collaborators were in the same position as the
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.. Soviet leaders put on trial, where they may have sincerely if misguidedly
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thought that they were acting in the national interest by collaborating with
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the Nazis, doing the only thing that prevented France from being
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..
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completely overrun by Germany. This still does not mean that they were
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..
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innocent. But the French purges were a judgement on the past that could
... well be made without putting the collaborators to death, whereas the
..
..
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.. Moscow trials of the late 1930s were a wager on the future of the
..
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.. revolution whose course needed to be secured from aberrant
..
22 Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and ..
.. subjectivities.22 Bazin would agree with this logic, but would deny that the
Terror, pp. 36–44. ..
..
..
trials were really oriented towards a political future still in the balance.
..
..
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Bazin speaks of the rare cases in the Soviet context where a public
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..
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mea culpa sufficed, generally in the cases of intellectuals or artists who
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..
..
had no claims on political power. This form of self-criticism functions as
... a confession in the Christian sense, something that Merleau-Ponty also
..
..
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.. points out. But Merleau-Ponty believes that the parallelism is further
..
..
.. evidence of the necessary tragedy of politics in an alienated world:
..
..
..
.. To the extent that alienation and transcendence persist, the drama of
..
.. the opposition member in the Party, is, at least formally, the drama of
..
..
.. the heretic in the Church. Not that communism is, as is vaguely said, a
..
..
..
.. religion but because in the one case as in the other the individual
..
..
...
acknowledges in advance the jurisdiction of the event, and, having
..
..
..
recognized a providential import in the Church, an historical mission
..
..
..
in the proletariat and its leadership, having acknowledged that
..
.. everything that happens is due to God or the logic of history, he can no
..
..
.. longer back his own opinion against the judgment of the Party or the
..
23 Ibid., p. 68. ..
.. Church.23
..
..
...
..
..
Bazin refuses this analogy between the Church and the Party because he
..
..
..
refuses the understanding of Christian confession and absolution as a
..
.. procedure that can rewrite an individual’s life to make it suitable for
..
..
.. personal or historical salvation. In his review of Federico Fellini’s Il
..
.. Bidone (1955), Bazin argues that salvation as an idea is valid only to the
..
..
.. extent that it allows for the acknowledgement of life’s contradictions, but
..
..
24 André Bazin, ‘Il Bidone, or the ..
.. does not erase them.24 Here, he points out that the Church and the Party,
..
road to salvation reconsidered’, in .. as Merleau-Ponty describes them, are not the instruments of the
..
Bazin at Work, pp. 221–24. ...
..
..
necessary tragedy of action but instead help in overcoming such tragedy
..
..
..
by a process (the confession) that Bazin calls ‘exorcistic’ in relation to
..
.. history; something that conjures away the unwelcome phantoms of the
..
25 Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and
..
.. past.25
..
Terror, p. 32. ..
.. The Party’s role as exorcist leads Merleau-Ponty to hope that ‘[it] will
..
.. perhaps rehabilitate those whom it condemned once a new historical
..
..
..
.. phase has altered the significance of their behavior’. His proof is that the
..
..
.. Party has made available the Report of Court Proceedings and ‘translated
...
26 Ibid., p. 69. ..
..
[it] into every language of the world’.26 Bazin’s argument suggests that
..
..
..
Merleau-Ponty was looking at the wrong document. If only he had been
..
..
..
to the local film club to watch Soviet films, he would have known that
..
.. the logic of History had found its culmination not in a classless society
..
.. but in the person of Stalin. There he would have seen that the parallel
..
..
.. between the Church and the Party is rendered explicit, though not as a
..
..
..
.. way of substituting the path towards a classless society for the Kingdom
..
..
.. of God. In The Vow, the classless society gives way to the ‘consecration
..
..
...
of History’ in Stalin, with the blessings of a now-dead Lenin represented
..
..
..
using Judaeo-Christian iconography. Thus it is cinema that helps Bazin
..
.. clinch an argument with Merleau-Ponty, in which he accords with the
..
..
.. latter’s understanding of the nature of political action as an inevitable and
..
.. often tragic drama of subjective and objective factors, while refusing his
..
..
.. hope of eliminating the contradiction between the two.
..
..
..
.. As Staiger, Philip Rosen and Ivone Margulies point out, the essay on
..
..
.. the Stalin myth reprises the central presuppositions of his most prominent
..
..
...
theoretical essays, ‘The ontology of the photographic image’ and
..
..
..
‘The myth of total cinema’: the mummy complex of the first and the
27 Rosen, Change Mummified,
..
..
..
myth of teleological history of the second.27 They point out how both
pp. 32–36; Ivone Margulies, ..
.. these principles are denuded of their hypothetical and open quality.
‘Bazin’s exquisite corpses’, in ..
.. The hypostasized counterpart of the ‘mummy complex’ of Ancient
Andrew and Joubert-Laurencin ..
..
(eds), Opening Bazin, pp. 186–99; .. Egypt, which Bazin had argued lay behind the filmic impulse in general,
..
..
Staiger, ‘Theorist, yes, but what ..
.. turns into the literal mummification of Lenin, which prepares the ground
of?’. ..
..
.. for the consecration of History in Stalin; and the asymptote principle of
..
..
...
film history, by which film technology and style approach the perfect
28 Bazin, ‘Le cinéma soviétique et le ..
..
..
reproduction of reality without realizing it, has its counterpart in Bazin’s
mythe de Staline’, p. 223. ..
29 André Bazin, ‘The ontology of the ..
..
claim that in Stalin ‘the asymptote between Man and History is
photographic image’, in What Is
..
.. surpassed’.28 Bazin argues in the essay’s conclusion that cinema’s role in
..
Cinema? Volume I, ed. and trans. ..
.. bringing about this consecration cannot be overestimated because, unlike
Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los ..
.. language and iconography, photographic cinema has the ‘irrational
Angeles, CA: University of ..
..
California Press, 2005), p. 14. .. power to bear away our faith’.29
...
..
..
It is astonishing that the essay should end with an observation that
..
..
..
Soviet cinema’s representation of Stalin has in fact traded on this basic
..
.. power of the cinematographic image at the core of Bazin’s fascination
..
..
.. with film. Margulies notes that this ‘cut-and-dry’ ending is very unlike
..
.. Bazin, who was fond of phrases of audacious paradox for summing up
..
..
.. his essays as a way to keep the experience of the image open. The reason
..
..
..
.. for this, she argues, is that Soviet cinema’s misuse of his cherished
..
..
.. powers of the cinematographic image points to a ‘real impasse’ in his
...
30 Margulies, ‘Bazin’s exquisite ..
..
ontological theory of film, showing up its blind spots.30 This remark
corpses’, p. 192-93. ..
..
..
suggests that, in accounting for the Stalinist use of cinematic realism that
..
.. no longer relies on montage editing, he becomes aware of how the
..
..
.. asymptotic principle may become inoperative. But to imply that he
..
.. becomes aware of this in 1950 is to forget the lines he wrote in 1946 to
..
..
.. conclude a review of other propaganda films, the Why We Fight series
..
..
..
.. (Frank Capra, 1942–45): ‘I think that, far from moving the historical
..
..
.. sciences toward more objectivity, the cinema paradoxically gives them
...
31 André Bazin, ‘On Why We Fight: ..
..
the additional power of illusion by its very realism’.31 I would argue that
history, documentation, and ..
..
..
Bazin’s invocation of cinema’s ontological powers in the context of their
newsreel’, in Bazin at Work, ..
p. 191; originally published as ..
..
degradation should be read as a mark of the broader coincidence between
..
André Bazin, ‘A propos de .. his aesthetic philosophy and the question of politics, or more precisely
..
Pourquoi Nous Combattons: ..
.. the question of the propaganda film. It is to this I now turn in order to
histoires, documents et ..
.. bring out how deeply aware Bazin was of the dangers of realism, and the
actualités’, Esprit, vol. 6, no. 123 ..
..
(1946), pp. 1022–26. ..
.. political background against which it operates in the cinema.
..
..
..
..
..
...
..
..
..
It cannot be overstated how much Bazin’s critique of Stalin is more than
..
.. a simple piece of Cold War ideological denunciation. We see in his
..
..
.. engagement with Merleau-Ponty his refusal to fall back on categories of
..
.. innocence and guilt when discussing the Moscow show trials, arguing
..
..
.. instead via the logic of revolutionary politics. Similarly, on the level of
..
..
..
.. aesthetics, Bazin is far from condemning the propaganda film. As a
..
..
.. starting point in his recognition of the importance of propaganda, I have
32 Bazin, ‘On Why We Fight’, p. 187. ..
..
...
picked a sentence from his review of Why We Fight: ‘The time of total
33 Roger Chickering, ‘Total war: the
use and abuse of a concept’, in
..
..
..
war is fatally matched by that of total History’.32 I have already discussed
..
Manfred F. Boemeke, Roger ..
..
cinema’s conjunction with the total history of Stalinism, though I suggest
Chickering and Stig Förster (eds), ..
.. that here Bazin has in mind another idea of total history. First, however,
Anticipating Total War: German ..
.. I wish to take up the idea of ‘total war’, a concept often used to describe
and American Experiences, ..
..
1871–1914 (Cambridge: .. World War II, that emerged towards the end of World War I and was
..
..
Cambridge University Press, ..
.. elaborated on during the interwar years, so that by 1939 it was in
1999), pp. 16–17. ..
34 Roger Chickering and Stig
..
.. general use.33 As an ideal type it is meant to identify the features of
..
Förster, ‘Are we there yet?: ..
...
twentieth-century warfare, such as the complete mobilization of a
World War II and the theory of ..
..
..
society’s resources beyond the military for the war effort, the blurring
total war’, in Roger Chickering, ..
Stig Förster and Bernd Greiner ..
..
of distinction between military and civilian targets, and the aim of total
(eds), A World at Total War:
..
.. surrender or destruction of the enemy.34
..
Global Conflict and the Politics of ..
.. Bazin’s own reference to it can be best understood in relation to the
Destruction, 1937–1945 ..
.. use of propaganda for the mobilization of civilians in the war effort.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University ..
..
Press, 2005), p. 2. .. He may have had in mind the most dramatic use of the term, one of
...
..
..
particular significance to film propaganda. Joseph Goebbels, the German
..
..
..
Minister of Propaganda, used the term in a February 1943 speech to rally
..
.. civilian participation in the war immediately after the surrender of
..
..
35 Joseph Goebbels, ‘Nation, rise .. German soldiers at Stalingrad. Arguing that the Soviet Union had
..
up, and let the storm break .. mobilized the whole of its society in the war effort, he called on Germans
..
loose’, in Randall L. Bytwerk (ed.), ..
.. to overcome the ‘bourgeois’ distinction between soldiers and civilians
..
Landmark Speeches of National ..
Socialism (College Station, TX:
..
.. and emulate the enemy’s example. Stating that ‘Total war is the demand
..
Texas A&M University Press, ..
.. of the hour’, he ended the speech with ‘People, rise up, and storm, break
...
2008), pp. 112–39. Central to
..
..
loose!’35 Bazin would have been familiar with this speech and its
Goebbels’s effort to rally German
civilians was Kolberg (Veit
..
..
..
emphasis on civilian mobilization,36 but his citation of the idea of total
..
Harlan, 1945), the most expensive .. war as civilian mobilization, in a review of a US cinematic effort to
..
Nazi propaganda film ever made. ..
.. justify the war to its citizens, must be seen as a recognition of the special
David Culbert’s remarks on the ..
.. relationship of the cinema to not just any propaganda but to the totalizing
film’s scrupulous realism ..
..
underline Bazin’s argument about .. propaganda demanded by a world at total war, which itself was not the
..
the increasing importance that ..
..
.. purview of the totalitarian regimes but a generalized condition.
cinema’s ontological realism ..
acquired with the war. David
..
.. Before I return to this conjunction in the Why We Fight review, some
...
Culbert, ‘Kolberg: Goebbels’ ..
..
words on Bazin’s position on the propaganda film in general are in order.
Wunderwaffe as counterfactual ..
..
..
His tackling of this form is not limited to the essays on Stalin films and
history’, Historical Reflections,
..
vol. 35, no. 2 (2009), pp. 125–41. ..
..
on Why We Fight, but is actually worked out most sustainedly in relation
..
36 See the French newsreel from .. to Italian neorealist films. Bazin’s extended reflection in 1948 on Italian
..
the occupation era, ‘Goebbels ..
.. neorealism straight away lays down the political situation that defines
appelle l’Allemagne et l’Europe a ..
.. this school of filmmaking. Italian liberation, he says, is nothing like the
se mobiliser contre le ..
..
bolchévisme’, 5 March 1943, ..
.. French, and is actually comparable to the Russian situation after the
Jalons version découverte, ..
..
.. revolution. The French liberation became part of history almost
<http://fresques.ina.fr/jalons/ ..
fiche-media/InaEdu00251/
..
...
immediately, as French national life decided to pick up from the moment
..
goebbels-appelle-l-allemagne-et- ..
..
before the occupation began. The Italians, however, were confronted
l-europe-a-se-mobiliser-contre-le- ..
.. with the task of breaking from the fascist moment and building new
bolchevisme.html> accessed 13 ..
December 2016.
..
.. terms for their sociopolitical existence.37 In such an atmosphere it is
..
37 André Bazin, ‘Cinematic realism .. impossible to think of a cinema without a social mission, and propaganda
..
..
and the Italian school of ..
.. is a valid form for its expression. In fact cinema may have been the only
liberation’, in What Is Cinema?, ..
ed. and trans. Timothy Barnard
..
.. art form that still could validate propaganda not only on historical
..
(Montréal: Caboose, 2009), ..
.. grounds but also aesthetic ones.
pp. 219–21; originally published ..
..
in a special issue on postwar ... The problem is that didacticism, apologetics, and politics still remain
..
Italy, whose other contributions ..
..
.. the major scandals [...] of the cinema. Novels, paintings, and plays
also foreground the question of ..
political art: ‘Le réalisme
..
.. with a thesis have themselves not survived the nineteenth century [...]
..
cinématographique et l’école ..
.. Only the screen has provided the twentieth century with
italienne de la libération’, Esprit, ..
..
..
unquestionable instances of a propagandistic art that lose nothing in
vol. 1, no. 141 (1948), pp. 58–83. ..
38 André Bazin, ‘Neorealism, opera
..
..
comparison with any of the classical aesthetic categories [...] It would
..
and propaganda (Forbidden ..
..
be childish [...] to remain blind to the current ideological needs of art.
Christ)’, in André Bazin and ..
..
..
It does not matter if communism in itself is, either through reaction or
Italian Neorealism, ed. Bert
... directly, the cause of this blindness: the cinema cannot afford to ignore
Cardullo (New York, NY: ..
..
Continuum, 2011), pp. 99–100, ..
.. its own propagandistic power, even less so today, in 1951, than in
modified translation; originally ..
..
.. 1925. The ideas of our time will use it, with or without artistic
published as André Bazin, ..
‘Néo-réalisme, opera et
..
.. merit – and use it with all efficiency.38
..
propagande: Christ Interdit’, ..
.. As the quotation indicates, Bazin affirmed this position in 1951, exactly a
Cahiers du cinéma, vol. 1, no. 4 ..
..
(1951), pp. 49–50. .. year after the Stalin essay and in relation to another film whose
...
..
..
propagandist agenda he detested. The film in question was Il Cristo
..
..
..
Proibito/Forbidden Christ (1951), made by an Italian novelist and
..
.. intellectual notorious for his ideological see-sawing. A one-time fascist
..
..
.. intellectual who ran foul of the establishment, Malaparte had joined the
..
.. Italian Communist Party after the war and then made his one and only
..
..
.. film on the salience of Christ’s sacrifice for healing the psychological
..
..
..
.. wounds of the war.
..
..
.. In an important essay, ‘The language of our times’, Bazin goes so far
...
..
..
as to call ‘almost all films [...] implicitly propagandistic’, as they exploit
..
..
..
the realism of the image in various ways to subliminally shape our
39 André Bazin, ‘Le langage de notre
..
.. consciousness.39 However, comparing his essay on Forbidden Christ
..
temps’, in Jacques Chevalier and ..
.. with his essays on the Stalin myth, Why We Fight and Bicycle Thieves
Max Egly (eds), Regards Neufs ..
.. (Vittorio de Sica, 1948) provides us with some distinctions within this
Sur le Cinéma (Paris: Peuple et ..
..
Culture/Seuil, 1972 [1953]), p. 17. .. generalization. A Bazinian typology of propaganda films would have
..
..
The book’s publisher was the ..
.. three categories. First there are propaganda films, such as Malaparte’s
popular culture organization ..
Peuple et Culture, whose
..
.. and those of the Soviet avant garde of the 1920s and Eisenstein’s works
...
film-related activities were ..
..
of 1930s, in which film style corresponds to the demands of explicit
co-ordinated by Bazin. ..
..
..
rhetoric, and such instances remain aesthetically valid whatever one may
..
..
..
think of the ideologies they support. Paradoxically in this category of
..
.. films, despite the parallels with linguistic tropes, language as such
..
.. remains noise. Thus the complete identification of ideology and
..
..
.. aesthetics remains incomplete. The second category of propaganda films
..
..
..
.. are those in which there is a fatal impression of coincidence of image,
..
..
.. language and ideology, as in the Stalin films and Capra’s documentary
..
..
...
series. Finally there are the examples of Bicycle Thieves and Paisan
..
..
..
(Roberto Rossellini, 1946), which play a game of avowal and disavowal
..
.. with ideology in order to go beyond its articulation to something like its
..
..
.. lived experience. Here I discuss the second and, very briefly, the first of
..
.. these categories; discussion of the third, which for Bazin is the ideal of
..
..
.. the political film, would require a thorough reconstruction of his
..
..
..
.. ontological account of cinema as well as the Franco-Italian historical
..
..
.. context, which is not possible here.
..
..
...
In the first category Bazin likens Malaparte’s film to Eisenstein’s
..
..
..
talkies Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1944) and Alexander Nevsky (1938) for
..
..
..
their baroque style and purpose, and links all three with Eisenstein’s
..
.. films of the 1920s. The three films, Malaparte’s and Eisenstein’s talkies,
..
.. are all highly stylized but give greater consideration to profilmic reality
..
..
.. than the Soviet films of the 1920s, which for Bazin is really an effect of
..
..
.. the demands of the talking film rather than of a different historical
..
..
..
.. moment. Whether the ideological agenda is Soviet Marxism or Christian
..
..
...
propaganda, whether the historical moment is Soviet Russia – in the
..
..
..
aftermath of the revolution or in its Stalinist phase – or postwar Italy,
40 André Bazin, ‘Neorealism, opera
..
..
..
the rhetorical mode of film style is adaptable to all of them.40 This
.. non-coincidence of style and a specific ideological agenda leaves a
Christ)’, p. 102. ..
.. margin, however narrow, to respond to the rhetorical force of
..
..
.. propaganda, while accepting or rejecting the theses that it proposes.
..
..
.. The acceptance or rejection of the theses would have essentially, though
...
..
..
not entirely, extracinematic motivations with this type of film. By way of
..
..
..
contrast, when discussing the Stalin films, Bazin points out their almost
..
.. obsessive use of real-scale war scenes, tracking shots and other classical
..
41 Bazin, ‘On Why We Fight’,
..
.. techniques that augment their realism in the fatal service of a myth.41
..
pp. 28–29. .. We can now tie Bazin’s essay on Capra’s Why We Fight to the one on
..
..
.. the Stalin films, as both are dealing with the second kind of propaganda
..
..
..
.. films. ‘On Why We Fight: history, documentation and the newsreel!’,
..
..
.. published in 1946, is a recognition of, among other things, a condition
...
..
..
resulting from half a century’s accumulation of newsreel footage, which
..
..
..
saw a rapid multiplication immediately following the war:
..
..
..
.. We live more and more in a world stripped bare by film, a world that
..
..
..
tends to peel off its own image. Hundreds of thousands of screens
..
..
..
make us watch, during news broadcasts, the extraordinary shedding
..
..
..
performed each day by tens of thousands of cameras. As soon as it
..
..
..
forms, history’s skin peels off again. Before the war a filmed news
..
... report used to be called ‘the eye of the world’. Today this title is
..
..
.. hardly pretentious as countless Bell-and-Howell lenses, placed all over
..
..
.. the world where important events take place, prey on the picturesque,
..
42 Ibid., p. 189. ..
.. bizarre, or terrible signs of our destiny.42
..
..
.. These lines, speaking about film as a technology for preying upon
..
..
.. history, were written not in the twilight of a career, in which the promise
..
..
..
.. of the cinematic image has been degraded through exposure to thousands
..
..
.. of films, but at its very beginning. This is Bazin as ‘the theorist of the
..
43 Paula Amad, ‘Film as the “skin of ..
...
image in an archival age’, in Paula Amad’s apt phrase.43
history”: André Bazin and the ..
..
..
But we also need to be careful, for while the words ‘skin of history’
specter of the archive and death ..
in Nicole Védrès’s Paris 1900 .. suggest that the image has a privileged share in the identities of the
..
..
(1947)’, Representations, vol. 130, .. events, people and objects it records, we must not see in this a guarantee
..
no. 1 (2015), p. 88. ..
.. of identity. This share of the image in the identity of what it records and
..
.. what has already passed instead makes history radically dependent on the
..
..
..
.. images whose representational capacities are backed by unprecedented
..
..
.. claims to truth and which, to maintain these claims, constantly seek to
..
..
...
efface traces of their mediating role in our relationship to history. In ‘The
..
..
..
language of our times’, Bazin writes that cinema is ‘a language which
..
..
..
presents itself in the forms of the sensible world and which aims to merge
..
.. with it [...] Film is at once representation and language but it is only as
..
44 Bazin, ‘Le langage de notre
..
.. representation that it is above all and universally understood.’44 He then
..
temps’, p. 17, 14. ..
.. speaks about how cinema insinuates ideas into our consciousness ‘under
..
45 Ibid., p. 17. ..
.. the fallacious alibi of reality’.45 Therefore, despite the fact that cinema’s
..
..
.. impression of reality makes it a privileged medium for recording the
..
..
...
dynamic movements of history, this very impression is well placed to
..
..
..
blind us to the complex field in which historical events take place.
..
..
..
Both the fact of film’s mediation of historical experience and the
..
.. impression of transparency through which this mediation takes place
..
.. were thoroughly intensified as the result of a not entirely foreseen
..
..
.. development. Bazin talks about the importance that military cameramen
..
..
.. acquired in the war, for two slightly different purposes. The first is the
...
..
..
fascination engendered by the ‘real’ (Bazin’s quotation marks) record of
..
..
..
the war, and the second is the utility of this record for restaging the event
..
.. along conventional dramatic lines. Thus Bazin refers to Roger
..
..
.. Leenhardt’s speculation that we are not far from the moment when the
..
.. recordings of war are made to serve semi-fictionalized documentaries
..
..
.. starring Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy in the role of the generals.
..
..
..
.. But more significant than this is the third development that follows when
..
..
.. these images, along with the millions of others collected over half a
...
..
..
century, are dissociated from their original use and become part of a
..
..
..
general international archive ‘complete enough to contain an event as
..
.. intimate in its historical nature as Hitler’s war dance at the Rethondes
..
46 Bazin, ‘On Why We Fight’, p. 190.
..
.. Crossroads’.46
..
When Bazin revised this article ..
.. Images floating free of their contexts can now be borrowed for any
for publication, he made note of ..
.. function whatsoever, so that the purpose of using images in a radical
John Grierson’s claim that he had ..
..
invented this ‘dance’ by using ..
.. sense precedes (in significance, not in time) the occasion of recording.
..
editing to repeat a leg movement ..
.. Bazin does not state this explicitly, but it can be inferred by putting the
by Hitler. The fact of this ...
manipulation and Bazin’s failure ..
..
essay on Why We Fight and newsreels alongside the one on Stalin, and
..
to notice it in 1946 underscores ..
..
this is crucial to the overall argument that he makes about documentary
his argument about the dubious ..
..
..
propaganda. In the Stalin essay Bazin talks about how newsreel footage
status of film images as historical ..
evidence. .. of world leaders had existed for a long time and was often recorded
..
.. explicitly to glorify their personalities. The stylization of the
..
..
.. cinematographic image, however, always left some possibility that those
..
..
..
.. images could be read against the grain. Thus ‘Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph
..
..
.. of Will (1934) [...] appears to the democratic viewer to be an argument
..
...
against Hitler’.47 Why We Fight uses images that fall somewhere in
Soviet cinema’, p. 31. ..
..
..
between images shot for the purposes of the film and images summoned
..
.. from the archives, since the film relies heavily on the material originating
..
..
.. from the Axis powers in order to represent them against their own
..
.. images.
..
..
.. Quite contrary to Forbidden Christ, Bazin grants the essential
..
..
..
.. correctness of the argument of Capra’s film as well as the cause in which
..
..
.. it was mobilized, but is damning of its methods, and those methods are
..
..
...
not those of montage in itself. As Amad discusses in her insightful
..
..
..
comparison of Bazin’s Why We Fight review with that of another
..
..
..
compilation film, Nicole Védrès’s 1900 (1947), which had him in
..
.. raptures, he was thoroughly alive to the possibilities of the compilation
..
48 For another article discussing the
..
.. film’s reorientation of our sense of history.48 Where Védrès lets the
..
compilation film, see André ..
.. images themselves guide her editorial and textual construction, thus
Bazin, ‘Television and cinema’, in ..
.. preserving their basic autonomy and opacity as records of the belle
André Bazin’s New Media, ed. ..
..
and trans. Dudley Andrew ..
.. époque,49 Capra’s films not only invent meaning out of the images but
..
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: ..
...
also create a special relationship between them and the linguistic
University of California Press, ..
2014), pp. 153–56. ..
..
meaning of the commentary: ‘The best-edited documentaries up to now
49 Amad, ‘Film as the “skin of
..
..
..
have been only narratives; those under consideration are speeches’.50
history”’, pp. 94–97. ..
.. Bazin had already raised the question of language and propaganda films
50 Bazin, ‘On Why We Fight’, p. 189. ..
.. in the article on Forbidden Christ. In that film, he argues, Malaparte was
..
..
.. able to find an ingenious solution to the paradox that a propaganda film
..
..
.. cannot do without speech (‘A silent revolution would be a historical
...
51 André Bazin, ‘Neorealism, opera ..
..
monster’),51 and yet to give place to speech runs the risk of
..
..
overwhelming the image. This solution was to use speech that was more
Christ)’, p. 101. ..
.. in the operatic mode than a realist one, thus complementing the fantastic
..
..
.. visual rhetoric and, similarly, abstracting the ideological content – and
..
.. abstraction is what justifies propaganda for Bazin. The mode of the Why
..
..
.. We Fight films is essentially pedagogic rather than propagandist in
..
..
..
.. the sense that Malaparte’s or Eisenstein’s films are. And unlike the
..
..
.. run-of-the-mill pedagogic film whose commentary precisely comments
...
..
..
on the images, these films use images to support speech: ‘The principle
..
..
..
behind this type of documentary essentially consists in giving to the
..
.. images the logical structure of language, and in giving to language itself
..
52 Bazin, ‘On Why We Fight’, p. 19
..
.. the credibility and proof of photographic images’.52 It is the principle of
..
(my emphasis). ..
.. sobriety, cast in the rational mould of language, itself propped up by the
..
.. irrefutability of the cinematic image, which makes this genre of film
..
..
..
.. more threatening than mere propaganda. For even if Capra’s films served
..
..
.. the right cause in the war, and even if the arguments presented were
...
..
..
largely correct, it cannot be guaranteed that the procedure will always be
..
..
..
used for the right ideological reasons.
..
..
..
The essay concludes as follows:
..
..
..
..
I think that, far from moving the historical sciences toward more
..
..
..
objectivity, the cinema paradoxically gives them the additional power
..
..
..
of illusion by its very realism. The invisible commentator, whom the
..
..
..
viewer forgets while watching Capra’s marvellously edited films, is
..
..
..
tomorrow’s historian of the masses, the ventriloquist of this
... extraordinary prosopopeia that is being prepared in all the film
..
..
..
.. archives of the world and that wills the men and the events of another
..
53 Ibid., p. 192. ..
.. time back to life.53
..
..
.. I have already compared part of this quotation to the ending of the Stalin
..
..
.. essay, in order to point out that Bazin had been aware of the dangers of
..
..
..
.. the realism of the filmic image long before the confrontation with
..
..
.. Stalinist cinema, and in relation to a work aligned with very different
..
..
...
ideological motivations. For Bazin the reason for the failure of the
..
..
..
asymptote principle of cinematic realism is not to be found in the filmic
..
..
..
image itself, because the image will never coincide with the object
..
.. completely; it requires certain other factors to supervene. The factors that
..
.. we have come across in this discussion are the dissociation of filmic
..
..
.. images from their original context, which makes them available as
..
..
.. floating signifiers, and the subordination of image to language’s rational
..
..
..
.. claims. However, neither of these are sufficient or even necessary
..
..
...
conditions for the absolute identity of image and idea or image and
..
..
..
object. Rather the overarching conditions that make this possible are to
..
..
..
be sought in the historical moment of cinema’s emergence. Bazin
..
.. addresses this at the outset of the Why We Fight review.
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
...
..
..
Speaking about the importance of cameramen to modern war, Bazin
..
..
..
speculates on the reasons for their relevance beyond the narrowly
..
.. political use of images for rallying the citizens, controlling the war
..
..
.. narrative, and so on. He talks about the coincidence of the camera’s
..
.. appetite for unstaged reality and the war’s ability to produce such reality
..
..
.. on an unprecedented scale. The opening of the essay bear citing at length,
..
..
..
.. to give a sense of the dramatic picture conjured up by Bazin:
..
..
..
... Nothing suits us better than the unique event, shot on the spot, at the
..
..
.. very moment of its creation. Such a theatre of operations [that of the
..
..
.. war], when compared with the other one, has the invaluable dramatic
..
..
.. superiority of inventing the play as it spontaneously unfolds. It is a
..
..
..
kind of commedia dell’arte in which the scenario itself is always being
..
..
..
reworked. As far as the technical means are concerned, there is no
..
..
..
need to insist on their unerring efficiency. I would simply like to
..
..
..
underline the fact that these means reach a cosmic scale and that they
..
... need fear only earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, and the
..
..
.. Apocalypse itself. I think that the number one broadcast in the series
..
..
.. News from Heaven will certainly be devoted to a lengthy report on the
..
..
.. Last Judgment, compared to which the report on the Nuremberg trials
..
54 Ibid., pp. 187–88. ..
..
will somehow look like the Lumieres’ Workers Leaving the Factory.54
..
..
.. A footnote by Bazin referencing the hydrogen bomb completes the
..
..
..
.. picture of this historical moment, whose events, owing to a combination
..
..
.. of unpredictability and scale, are ideal material for satisfying the appetite
..
..
...
of the medium, even as the annihilation of the world threatens to satisfy it
..
..
..
once and for all. However, we need further explanation for the desire of
..
.. the audience for the products of this fateful conjunction of history and
..
..
.. medium:
..
..
..
..
..
But the war report above all responds to another need which explains
..
..
..
its extremely widespread nature. The taste for newsreel, combined
..
..
..
with that for cinema, is nothing but the will to presence of modern
..
..
..
man, his need to attend the unfolding of History, a need in which
... political evolution, as much as the technical means of communication
..
..
..
.. and destruction, are irremediably mixed up. The time of total war is
..
..
.. fatally matched by that of total History. The governments have
..
..
.. understood this well, which is why they try to give us cinematographic
..
..
..
reports of all their historic acts, the signing of treaties, the meetings of
..
..
..
Great Men, etc. Since History is not at all a ballet absolutely fixed in
..
..
..
advance, it is well to place the maximum number of cameras in its way
55 Ibid., p. 188, modified translation;
..
..
..
to be sure of catching it in the act (in the historical act, of course).55
Bazin added the phrase ‘volonté ...
..
de presence’ in the lightly revised ..
..
With a judicious pun on Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ (volonté de
version collected in André Bazin, ..
..
..
puissance), Bazin’s ‘will to presence’ (volonté de presence) places the
Qu’est-ce Que le Cinéma? ..
I. Ontologie et Langage (Paris: .. cinema between the Nietzschean concept and its Foucauldian afterlife.
..
Les Editions du Cerf, 1969
.. Democratization in politics is the democratization of access to history.
..
..
[1958]), pp. 31–36 (my emphasis). ..
.. Here we can extract another meaning of total history that Bazin seems to
..
..
...
..
..
invoke in this essay and that is intimately linked to the camera’s
..
..
..
compulsive recording of the world.
..
.. The ‘longitudinal’ idea of totality that informs the progressive versions
..
..
.. of history, including Hegelian and Soviet Marxist ones, has its
..
.. counterpart in the ‘latitudinal’ one that informs the empirically intensive
..
..
56 Jay, Marxism and Totality, p. 32. ..
.. approaches to history.56 A latitudinal totality is primarily concerned with
..
..
.. a spatial totality over a temporal one. Certainly the longitudinal versions,
..
..
.. implicitly or explicitly, contain within them latitudinal totality.
...
..
..
Latitudinal totality can function at several scales of unity and may
..
..
..
concern itself with the internal unity of parts or the overall unity of parts
..
.. within an all-encompassing whole. Thus a latitudinally total history may
..
..
.. be about the internal unity of the political, economic or social
..
.. configurations of society, or the unity of all these and any other aspects
..
..
.. of the whole society.
..
..
..
.. What Bazin had in mind when using the term ‘total history’ in an
..
..
.. essay that also points to the intense accumulation of visual records of
...
..
..
historical detail of any scale was most likely the latitudinal approach of
..
..
..
the Annales School, a school of French history that had already started to
..
..
..
dominate the practice of historiography. The phrases ‘total history’ and
..
.. ‘global history’ were often used by the Annales practitioners to describe
..
57 Peter Burke, The French Historical ..
.. their ambitions of making history the sum of all social sciences.57 This
..
Revolution: The Annales School, ..
.. model of history is dominated by a desire to treat a social formation in all
1929–89 (Cambridge: Polity, ..
1990), p. 114; Michael Harsgor,
..
.. its aspects, starting from the geological and taking in climatology,
..
‘Total history: the Annales ..
.. economics, cultural practices, and so on. The downplaying of two
School’, in Stuart Clark (ed.), The
..
..
...
elements, however, differentiates this model of ‘total history’ from the
Annales School: Critical ..
Assessments, Volume I (London: ..
..
progressive version. First, in trying to oppose the prevailing model of
..
Routledge, 1999), p. 258. .. treating history as an accumulation of grand political events, the Annales
..
58 Harsgor, ‘Total history: the
..
.. School markedly ignored political history and events in this vein.58
..
Annales School’, p. 264. ..
.. Second, its focus on the longue durée rather than conventional
..
.. periodization of history de-emphasizes progress and thus treats historical
..
..
59 In fact, in a fascinating essay that ..
.. temporality in more spatial terms.59
..
could be highly suggestive in ..
.. Ludovic Cortade has traced Bazin’s considerable exposure to the
linking the Annales practice to ..
Bazinian aesthetics, François
..
...
Annales School to his education at Saint-Cloud, where he was also
..
Fourquet describes Fernand ..
..
exposed to a great number of pedagogical documentaries and
Braudel’s work as a ..
..
..
photographs.60 If we think back to Bazin’s lines about the accumulation
mise-en-scene of history in which ..
the significance of framing is .. of images as the ‘skin of history’ and link them to the ones on the ‘will to
..
ultimately defined by what lies
.. presence of modern man’, we see a clear connection between the
..
..
outside of it. François Fourquet, ..
.. democratization of history and the democratization of access to it.
‘Un nouvel espace-temps’, in ..
.. However, the intensely apocalyptic picture that frames this dual
Stuart Clark (ed.), The Annales ..
..
School: Critical Assessments, ..
.. democratization warns us that the Annales conception of total history has
..
Volume III (London: Routledge, ..
...
not dislodged the longitudinal impulse to a totality of history but exists in
1999), pp. 215–30. ..
60 Ludovic Cortade, ‘Cinema across ..
..
tension with it. Thus the democratic opportunity to participate in an idea
..
the fault lines: Bazin and the ..
..
of history still defined by the big events is an ambiguous one. This
French school of geography’, in ..
.. ambiguity is captured in the example of Fabrice, in Max Stendhal’s 1839
.. novel The Charterhouse of Parma, to whose experience Bazin refers
(eds), Opening Bazin, pp. 13–31. ..
..
.. when describing the chaotic battle scenes in a Soviet film. Fabrice’s
..
..
.. desire to be part of the Napoleonic moment sees him trying desperately
...
..
..
to join the French forces in the Hundred Days War of 1815. He buys a
..
..
..
dead soldier’s uniform and catches up with the army on the eve of the
..
.. Battle of Waterloo. Not making it much closer than the chaotic sidelines,
..
..
.. and inviting the ridicule of those around him, he finally spots from a
..
.. distance the attack on the French and exclaims, ‘Ah, so I am under fire at
..
..
.. last! [...] I’ve seen firing!’ But after a period of chaos in which he is
..
..
..
.. unable to make sense of the action, he asks, ‘Monsieur, this is the first
..
..
.. time I’ve been present at a battle, [...] but is this a real battle?’, and after
...
..
..
the event his doubt is compounded when he wonders, ‘Have I really been
61 Maurice Stendhal, The
..
..
..
present at a battle?’.61 Fabrice is a young nobleman trying to do what the
Charterhouse of Parma, trans. ..
.. nobility perhaps thought it should aspire to, but at a moment when the
John Sturrock (New York, NY: ..
..
Oxford University Press, 2006), .. ownership of history is at least nominally extended to the masses, we are
..
pp. 47–48, 67. .. all liable to feel the same pull as Fabrice. Cinema and its use by the
..
..
.. forces of history addresses that need, while sparing us the ridiculousness
..
..
..
.. of Fabrice’s situation. The times of total war and total history, combining
..
..
.. latitudinal detail with longitudinal movement, are fatally matched by that
...
..
..
of total cinema.
..
..
..
For further evidence that Bazin thinks the ‘invention’ of cinema is
..
..
..
‘timely’ in its conjunction with a historico-political moment, we need to
62 Bazin, ‘Le mythe du cinéma total
..
.. turn to the original version of ‘The myth of total cinema’.62 In the 1958
..
et les origines du ..
.. version published in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma,63 Bazin makes an
cinématographe’, pp. 552–57. ..
.. argument that is substantially different in detail from his original. He
63 Bazin, ‘The myth of total cinema’, ..
..
in What Is Cinema?, ed. Timothy ..
.. argues in the first version that the subject of his essay, the first volume of
..
Barnard, pp. 13–20; André Bazin, .. Georges Sadoul’s Histoire générale du cinéma (1946), is a ‘psycho-
..
‘Le mythe du cinéma total’, in ..
Qu’est-ce Que le Cinéma? I,
..
...
sociology of the invention’ of cinema rather than a purely material or
..
pp. 21–26. ..
..
technological one. Bazin asks:
..
..
..
.. How do we grasp with certainty the subjective motive of an invention?
..
..
..
What psychoanalysis would give an account of the relative importance
..
..
..
of a technical progression, sometimes accidental, and of myths more
..
..
..
or less confused that consciously or not orient the research?64
..
cinématographe’, p. 554. ..
.. The reinvocation of the trope of psychoanalysis as access to the
..
..
...
subjectivity of a historical phenomenon reinforces the links with the
..
..
..
earlier essay, in whose very first line it appears. But more than
..
..
..
psychoanalysis, which Bazin employs as a rough metaphor, this interest
..
.. in a psycho-sociology behind the invention of cinema once again ties in
..
.. with the Annales School’s interest in a depth-psychology of history.
..
..
.. I described earlier the contradictions involved in Marxist
..
..
.. historiography’s necessary challenge to relating individual subjectivities
..
65 Lucien Febvre, ‘History and ..
psychology’ and ‘Sensibility and
..
.. to objective history. A different version of this challenge poses the
..
history: how to reconstitute the ..
...
question not in terms of the subjective and the objective, but of positing
emotional life of the past’, in ..
..
..
some form of collective subjectivity. In early twentieth-century France in
Peter Burke (ed.), A New Kind of ..
History: From the Writings of ..
..
particular, several figures were preoccupied with formulating this
..
Lucien Febvre (New York, NY: .. problem. In the 1920s the psychologist Charles Blondel called it
..
Harper Torchbooks, 1973), ..
.. ‘collective psychology’. Lucien Febvre, the cofounder of the Annales
pp. 1–11, 12–26. The original ..
publication years for these essays
..
.. School, drew on Blondel in the 1930s to pose the question for history.65
..
are 1938 and 1941 respectively. .. For Febvre, the shift of the subject of history from individual actors to the
...
..
..
masses posed precisely the problem of reconstituting this collective
..
..
..
subjectivity. Febvre argues for interdisciplinary holism so that this
..
.. subjectivity might be located at the intersection of objects, practices and
..
..
.. expressions. Thus when Bazin poses the question of ‘the subjective
..
.. motive’ for the invention of cinema, he is congratulating Sadoul’s
..
..
.. materialist history for engaging a deeper conception of (film) history in
..
..
..
.. which the material both acts on and is produced by Blondel’s and
..
..
.. Febvre’s collective psychology.
...
..
..
The two versions of ‘The myth of total cinema’ provide very different
..
..
..
accounts of the collective subjectivity of cinema’s invention. In the 1958
..
.. version Bazin recounts this subjective dimension by asserting that the
..
..
.. cinema is an idealist phenomenon because its invention cannot be
..
.. deduced from its scientific history alone. This is the case, he argues,
..
..
.. because the principles behind its functioning and the rudimentary
..
..
..
.. technology were at least theoretically available for a very long time
..
..
.. before its actual invention. And this is because most people who
...
..
..
attempted to invent it were not scientists who patiently worked through
..
..
..
each step of the process –finding a suitable base, fixing the image, adding
..
..
..
sound, and so on – but enthusiasts who tried straight away to invent it
..
.. whole, full of sound, colour and depth. This argument appears in the
..
.. original too, but its points of reference are very different. The original
..
..
.. version may still be read as ‘idealist’, provided we recognize its
..
..
..
.. philosophical valence in trying to align material and epochal experience.
..
..
.. The historical scope here does not stretch back insistently through
..
..
...
Renaissance to Antiquity to the myth of Icarus. Instead the locus of
..
..
..
attention is the late nineteenth century and, more particularly, the
..
.. difference between the apparatus and productions of Edison and
..
..
.. Lumière.
..
.. The relevant difference between the devices of Edison and Lumière is
..
..
.. that the Kinetoscope was used by individuals whereas the Lumière
..
..
..
.. apparatus projected the image for communal viewing. Tom Gunning
..
..
.. suggests in his own reappreciation of the ‘Myth’ essay that Bazin does
..
..
...
not pay attention to the history of projection but is more interested in the
66 Tom Gunning, ‘The world in its
..
..
..
history of the recording apparatus.66 But the idea of projection is indeed
own image: the myth of total ..
..
..
absolutely central to the first version of the essay. While Edison was
cinema’, in Andrew and Joubert- ..
Laurencin (eds), Opening Bazin, .. caught up, Bazin argues, in tying the Kinetoscope to the gramophone, the
..
p. 121.
.. ‘fetish of a recording disc placed at a narrow window’, other inventors
..
..
.. were busy trying to refine his invention for projection. But projection as
..
..
.. technology is not the whole issue at question, since it is a moot point that
..
..
..
.. the Lumières were the first to hold a screening, and it is certain that they
..
..
...
were not. What clinched the ‘invention’ of cinema for them was the
..
..
..
combination of recording, development and projection within the same
..
..
..
device, and the mobility of the device that allowed it to be transported
..
.. with ease around the world. Again, this is not a matter of technical detail
..
.. but its experiential and historical meaning:
..
..
..
..
..
..
...
..
..
The genius of Louis Lumière would not have bought him the place
..
..
..
that he occupies in the paternity of cinema if it was only a matter of
..
..
..
technique. Lumière knew how to make the first films that responded to
..
.. a certain expectation of a collective conscience when faced with this
..
.. new invention, and to create at once a true spectacle. While Edison, in
..
..
.. his Kinetoscope, merely ran some scenes whose interest did not go
..
..
..
.. beyond the curiosity of a faithful reconstitution of movement,
..
..
.. Lumière, with his light camera, could go and catch ‘nature in the act’.
...
..
..
Workers Leaving the Factory, Arrival of a Train are the ancestors of
..
..
..
our newsreeels and of documentary reports with which one whole part
..
..
..
of global production is profoundly occupied. It suffices to recall Dziga
..
.. Vertov and the Russian school, or the recent war films.67
..
..
cinématographe’, pp. 556–57 (my ..
..
It is the fact of the ‘collective conscience’ that would clarify for Bazin the
translation). ..
..
..
emphasis on projection as opposed to the personal apparatus of a
..
..
..
Kinetoscope. What passed through Edison’s Kinetoscope, Bazin writes,
..
... were mere curiosities that simply satisfied the appetite for the synthesis
..
..
.. of movement. What the cinematograph recorded, and what responded to
..
..
.. this collective conscience, were fit subjects for newsreel, scenes that
..
..
.. would, following the dream of Vertov (whom he also references in the
..
..
.. Why We Fight review), create an archive of modern life. ‘Nature’, as the
..
..
..
subjects of the Lumière films instantiate (the factory, its workers, the
..
..
..
train, the bourgeoisie, the foreign), is thoroughly historical, and the desire
68 We see Bazin restating this
..
..
..
for ‘the world in its own image’ is the desire for history.68
position some years later when ..
..
..
This historical ‘timeliness’ of the invention of cinema in Bazin’s
considering the possibilities of
... understanding is thoroughly effaced in the rewritten version, leaving us
widescreen technologies. He ..
..
argued that the mode to which ..
.. with a ‘timeless’ argument. But here is what the timely argument tells us:
these technologies were best ..
..
.. finally enabled by cinema to ‘catch it in the act’, we become, Bazin
suited was documentary, which ..
emphasized the experience of
..
.. suggests, voyeurs of history; the emblematic device of modern power,
..
space in relation to the human ..
..
the Panopticon, has in its sights just Peeping Toms. As psychoanalysis
figure. For Bazin the widescreen ..
..
..
insists, voyeurism and exhibitionism are closely intertwined in
also increased spectatorial ..
participation by trading the fixity
..
..
scopophilia. In a characterization of this intertwining, Lacan writes, ‘[The
..
of Renaissance perspective and ..
..
voyeur] believes he desires because he sees himself desired, and because
encouraging the lateral ...
.. he doesn’t see that what the other wants to snatch from him is his gaze’.69
movement of vision. Projection ..
and the difference of the Edison-
..
.. The democratic gazes of spectators, stemming from a desire to see
..
Lumière apparatus, therefore, is ..
.. themselves as the subjects of history, remain but its objects. Films such
central to Dudley Andrew’s ..
..
.. as Why We Fight and the Stalinist films exploit the exhibitionism of the
elaboration of a Bazinian ..
conception of cinema. André
..
..
cinematic image to reduce the experience of democracy to voyeurism.
..
Bazin, ‘Cinerama: a bit late’, in ..
..
I have already examined how, according to Bazin, Why We Fight
André Bazin’s New Media, ..
..
..
consolidates the credibility of language with the realism of the image. He
pp. 220–26; Dudley Andrew, ..
What Cinema Is!: Bazin’s Quest
..
..
discusses a similar process in relation to the Stalin films when he
and Its Charge (Malden, MA: ... describes the battle scenes in the Soviet film The Great Turning Point as
..
Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), ..
..
.. chaotic, the way Fabrice might have seen them. There is no order to the
pp. 74–75. ..
69 Jacques Lacan, Television: A
..
.. action except when we cut to Stalin sitting at his desk, plotting the war on
..
Challenge to the Psychoanalytic ..
.. a map, at once guiding and explaining its course. His language would not
Establishment (New York, NY: W. ..
..
..
be so convincing without the visual ‘evidence’ whose ambiguity it seeks
W. Norton, 1990), p. 86 (my ..
emphasis).
..
..
to conjure away, but neither language nor image would be so compelling
...
..
..
without the convergence of democratic desire and technological spectacle
..
..
..
(both of the cinema and of what it captures) that defines modernity’s
..
.. drive to totality. Thus the manipulation of the cinematic image to satisfy
..
..
.. this drive is hardly accidental or down to bad faith. It is better known that
..
.. Bazin would argue for a different realist aesthetic, one with ellipses and
..
..
.. decentred framing, that respects the democratic impulse behind film
..
..
..
.. spectatorship and the ambiguities of interpretations that it provokes. In
..
..
.. the absence of the deeper background of his critique of realism, ideology
...
..
..
critique had found his emphasis on ambiguous realism naive. But with
..
..
..
this knowledge we can treat it in the complex manner it deserves, where
..
.. the task will be to understand how the perils and promises of cinematic
..
..
.. realism inform each other in Bazin’s work, and whether his critical
..
.. interest in a variety of film forms is not distinct from his interest in
..
..
.. realism but proceeds directly from a resistance to realism’s ideological
..
..
..
.. lure.
..
..
..
...
..
..
..
..
..
Jean-Michel Frodon has argued that the image was not as much of a
..
..
..
‘stakeholder’ in Bazin’s time as it is in ours, and that there existed an
..
.. acknowledged distinction between reality and representation which is
..
70 Jean-Michel Frodon, ‘Film as ..
.. now attenuated.70 I hope, however, to have demonstrated that for Bazin
..
plaster: the mold of history’, in ..
.. the cinema had very early on, perhaps from the very beginning and in its
(eds), Opening Bazin, p. 83.
..
.. essence, brought about an unsettling of the distinction between the world
..
..
.. and its image. At the outset I noted that our turn to the fundamental
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questions asked by classical film theorists of the filmic image must take
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place with an awareness that something in our own historico-political
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.. moment resembles their own, which was marked by catastrophic wars,
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.. economic crises, mass displacement and nuclear fears. Against this
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.. background, writers including Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter
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.. Benjamin responded to the filmic image with alternating suspicion and
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.. faith, and it is this alternation that makes their work critically and
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.. politically compelling again, more so than the programmatic suspicion of
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ideology critique of the 1970s. But also the aspect of Bazin’s work I have
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described here opens not only onto questions of realism in fiction film
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but much more onto the matter of how the realism of film/video/digital
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.. images mediates our relationship to active and institutional politics. The
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.. desire for live history that, according to Bazin, lay behind the realist
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.. impulse in film history is now addressed by a variety of recording and
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.. display devices.
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.. While the role of social media in political movements across the
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world, from those in the Middle East and North African regions to Black
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Lives Matter in the USA, has been a subject of discussion in relation to
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the transformation of grassroots politics, we also need to note the
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.. stubborn persistence of top-down appropriation of image-based media by
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.. governments around the world. Political leaders still fake improbable
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.. photographs to consolidate their public personas, holograms of strong
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.. leaders now campaign for office in their stead, and, in looking at the
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history of US presidential elections, the importance of an appearance of
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sincerity (now aligned with a critique of the ‘insincerity’ of political
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.. correctness) sometimes overrides others forms of scrutiny on the path to
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71 Ellen Barry, ‘A changed Russia
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.. public office.71 What pushed the Turkish people to choose between an
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arches an eyebrow at Putin’s .. undemocratic coup and a democratically elected but authoritarian leader
..
staged antics’, The New York ..
.. in 2016 seems to have been the live appearance of Recep Tayip Erdogan
Times, 5 October 2011, <http:// ..
..
www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/ ..
.. on a video-chat app, urging them to resist a faceless coup. While the
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world/europe/putins-diving- .. scale and modalities of visual media have intensified and diversified
..
exploit-was-a-setup-aide-says. ...
html> accessed 13 December ..
..
since Bazin’s time, the experience of institutional politics that they
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2016; Prasun Sonwalkar, ‘How ..
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mediate has not altered drastically. The terms of his analysis still retain
London techies helped Modi ..
.. the potential to orient us as we seek to understand the relationship
create campaign buzz’, Hindustan ..
..
Times, 25 May 2014, <http:// .. between visual media and politics.
..
www.hindustantimes.com/india/ ..
..
..
how-london-techies-helped-modi- ..
.. A version of this paper was presented at a graduate student colloquium in the Department of Screen Arts and Cultures,
create-campaign-buzz/story- ..
.. University of Michigan. I would like to thank everyone for their participation and feedback. I am especially grateful to Matthew
qyIwywmPnsRg3YohLtRBgL. ..
..
.. Solomon for suggesting I study Bazin’s connection to the Annales School, and to Dudley Andrew and Johannes von Moltke for
html> accessed 13 December ..
... their valuable comments and corrections.
2016.
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38 Screen 58:1 Spring 2017

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