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–16. 153 Andrew, Dudley, André Bazin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), pp. 25–9. 154 Gray, Hugh, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in Bazin, André, What Is Cinema? Volume II (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 2–4. 155
In formulating a notion of filmic reality, this book offers a novel way of understanding our relationship with cinema. It argues that cinema need not be understood in terms of its capacities to refer to, reproduce or represent reality, but should be understood in terms of the kinds of realities it has the ability to create. The book investigates filmic reality by way of six key film theorists: André Bazin, Christian Metz, Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Rancière. In doing so, it provides comprehensive introductions to each of these thinkers, while also debunking many myths and misconceptions about them. Along the way, a notion of filmic reality is formed that radically reconfigures our understanding of cinema.
The book aims to provide a balanced appraisal of Eric Rohmer's oeuvre in historical context. Although interpretation of individual films will not be its main objective, representative examples from the director's twenty-five features and fiction shorts will be presented throughout. The focus is on production history and reception in the mainstream French press. This key stylistic editing trait cannot be appreciated without reference to André Bazin's concept of ontological realism, of which Rohmer was a major exponent at
One of the first commentators to attempt a balanced reassessment of Pagnol was Cahiers du cinéma founder André Bazin, who in his 1959 classic
relatively whole and time can be given its due, the time of an event being simply the time of the shot, hence the length of takes with these new techniques (the opening of Welles’s Touch of Evil, for example, and the scene in the hotel lounge near the beginning of Visconti’s La Morte in Venezia). André Bazin would argue (rather too sweepingly) that such techniques rendered the real more fully than did montage and that rather
perceptual relation between subject and object. In effect, there is a deeply inherent relation between the subject who speaks about the world and the world as recounted, between experience and narration. The perceptions of Rossellini imposed themselves against conventional representational formulas. The realism of Paisà moves in a phenomenological light, emphasized by Amédée Ayfre and André Bazin. It is the film-maker who is
‘location’, they invariably reconstruct that location to suit the demands of the film. This is a cinema, then, which pulls against the ‘ontology of the photographic image’ identified by André Bazin. According to Bazin, the cinema has a privileged relation to the real, and ‘enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of this transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction’ (1967, 14). We find instead in these films a working on, a distortion, or a fabrication of fictional worlds, into which, as we have argued in the previous chapter on 800 balas, shards of social
meaningful because it is picked out for us. In Preminger’s film, the process is reversed: we pick it out because it is meaningful. The emphasis arises organically out of the whole action; it is not imposed.58 V.F. Perkins’s writing on Rope challenges both Pudovkin and André Bazin: ‘The true originality of Rope lies not in the initial decision to use the ten-minute take, but in the method of using it – sacrificing the “best” points of both Pudovkin’s montage and 142 The life of mise-en-scène Figure 4.2 River of No Return (1954) the Welles/Wyler long-take.’59 Closer
2 Realism, reality and authenticity 3 Searching for reality: Chronique d’un été (Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin, 1961) I n terms of the distinction outlined in the previous chapter of this book, one might ordinarily think that André Bazin’s position in the history of film theory is set. He is a realist and that means, quite simply, that his understanding of cinema is predicated on a distinction between illusion and reality. Some films – especially those with excessive editing, or with fanciful stage settings – will deliver illusion, while others – particularly