# Daniel Morgan (2006). *Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics*. : The University of Chicago Press. > [!INFO] > Type:: [[&]] > Title:: Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics > Author(s): [[Daniel Morgan]] > Year:: 2006 > Tags:: > DOI:: 10.1086/505375 > Citekey:: morgan_rethinking_2006 > ZoteroURI:: [Open in Zotero: Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics](zotero://select/items/@morgan_rethinking_2006) > ReviewedDate:: [[2022-10-01]] ## Citation ```latex [@morgan_rethinking_2006] ``` ## Related ```dataview TABLE file.aliases AS "Title" FROM [[@morgan_rethinking_2006]] and -"Plans" and -"resources" ``` ## Summary - ## Other Comments - – — — ### Annotation (02/10/2022, 14:35:48) “The classical theories now seem inadequate and irrelevant.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 443) “Unlike much of contemporary media theory, classical theories are interested in the kind of physical objects images are.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 443) “By contrast, it is often said that digital images as such have no physical existence, that they are merely contingently at-” (Morgan, 2006, p. 443) “attached to various physical bases.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 444) The work of Timothy Binkley provides a clear exposition of this view. See Timothy Binkley, “Camera Fantasia: Computed Visions of Virtual Realities,” Millennium Film Journal 20–21 (FallWinter 1988–89): 7–43; “The Quickening of Galatea: Virtual Creation without Tools or Media,” Art Journal 49 (Fall 1990): 233–40; “Transparent Technology: The Swan Song of Electronics,” Leonardo 28, no. 5 (1995): 427–32; and “The Vitality of Digital Creation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55 (Spring 1997): 107–16. “The materiality of the image cannot be avoided; it is crucial to how we think about the [[aesthetics|aesthetic]] possibilities, circulation, affective register, and so on of images of any sort.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 444) “They provide a needed corrective to recent theories by emphasizing the productive tension between the form in which an artist expresses subject matter and the kind of thing an image is, between style and ontology.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 444) “A more subtle interpretation of Bazin allows for elements in classical theory to emerge that are important for thinking about images however they are produced.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 444) “generally accepted standard reading of his essays” (Morgan, 2006, p. 444) “a film is realist insofar as it comes closest to or bears fidelity to our perceptual experience of reality.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 444) “deep feeling for the integral unity of a universe in flux” (Morgan, 2006, p. 444) “Two propositions lie at the heart of this reading. First, Bazin argues for a necessary and determinate relation between the [[Ontology]] of the photographic image and the realism of film. Second, Bazin gives an account of the [[Ontology]] of the photographic image that is best understood in terms of a commitment, via the mechanical nature of the recording process of the camera, to the reproduction of an antecedent reality.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 445) 이 독서의 중심에는 두 가지 명제가 있다. 첫째, 바진은 사진 이미지의 온톨로지와 영화의 사실성 사이에 필요하고 결정적인 관계를 주장한다. 둘째, Bazin은 카메라 기록 과정의 기계적 특성을 통해 선행 현실의 재현에 대한 약속 측면에서 가장 잘 이해되는 사진 이미지의 온톨로지에 대한 설명을 제공한다. “A closer examination of more of Bazin’s critical writings on individual films will expand and transform the parameters of our understanding of how his realism works.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 445) “I want first to explain why we should reject the standard reading of Bazin’s ontological argument and focus instead on his claim that objects in a photograph are ontologically identical to objects in the world.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 445) I agree this point “First, Bazin sketches a psychology of art based on the historical origins of the impulse to make representations.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 446) Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What Is Cinema? trans. and ed. Hugh Gray, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1967, 1971), 1:9; hereafter abbreviated “O.” Gray’s translations often obscure important aspects of Bazin’s arguments; where necessary, I have modified them. ““a defense against the passing of time” by allowing the “[[Körper|corporeal body]]” to survive after death. Art emerges when this ambition moves away from preserving the actual body in favor of creating a representation of the dead person.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 446) “Second, there is an argument about [[aesthetics]], which investigates the realistic or mimetic telos inherent in the psychology of art.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 446) “Third, in the section that lies at the heart of discussions of the [[Ontology]] of the photographic image, Bazin moves beyond the function of photography in the history of art to the question of what a photograph is.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 446) “On the standard reading, photographs are primarily regarded as indexical signs; light reflects off an object and causes the photographic plate to react. A photograph’s iconic properties are a function of its indexical status. I will call this view of the [[Ontology]] of the photographic image the index argument.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 447) “We believe that a photograph is an accurate indication of the presence of objects in front of the camera at a past time not because of criteria of resemblance but because we know how the image was generated.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 447) See [[Philip Rosen]], “History of Image, Image of History: Subject and Ontology in Bazin,” Wide Angle 9, no. 4 (1987): 13, and MFT, p. 138 “He then tries to categorize different kinds of images according to the means by which they are produced, the relation between the image and the object it purports to represent.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 448) “Bazin claims that “we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented” (“O,” 1:13–14)” (Morgan, 2006, p. 448) “Bazin argues is something far stronger, more powerful, and, in some deep ways, stranger.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 448) ““Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake” (“O,” 1:13);” (Morgan, 2006, p. 448) ““something more than a mere approximation, a decal or approximate tracing” [un de ́calque approximatif ] (“O,” 1:14).” (Morgan, 2006, p. 448) “A photograph, Bazin asserts, has a closer tie to its objects than simply being a sign of them, even an indexical one.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 449) “The image is no longer wholly dependent on an antecedent object for its meaning.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 449) “Does this mean that we should understand photographs as having a reality wrested from the objects themselves? It is clearly false that photographs somehow diminish thereality of the world.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 449) “The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from temporal contingencies [libe ́re ́ des contingences temporelles]. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it proceeds, by virtue of its genesis, from the ontology of the model; it is the model [elle proce `de par sa gene `se de l’ontologie du mode `le; elle est le mode `le]. [“O,” 1:14]” (Morgan, 2006, p. 450) “Bazin, as I understand him, is dissatisfied with Sartre’s ambiguous analysis, as Sartre resorts to notions like “quasi-person” and “irrational synthesis.”” (Morgan, 2006, p. 451) “Bazin makes an important distinction within the terms of ontological identity.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 452) “he does not claim that the two are identical in all respects.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 452) “He says that the image is the object itself, but freed from temporal contingencies.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 452) “We can see this in Bazin’s claims that “the photograph allows us . . . to admire in reproduction the original that our eyes alone could not have taught us to love” (“O,” 1:16).” (Morgan, 2006, p. 452) “The idea of being “freed from temporal contingencies” implies the possibility of forming relations to objects in photographs that are not possible with respect to objects in the world.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 452) ““We might say of the cinema that it is the little flashlight of the usher, moving like an uncertain comet across the night of our waking dream, the diffuse space without shape or frontiers that surrounds the screen” (“TC,” 1:107).” (Morgan, 2006, p. 453) “For Bazin, the separation is twofold. First, there are the general categories of space and time in which we experience an object. Bazin says that photography frees an object from “temporal contingencies,” but he does not say the same with regard to space.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 453) “A photograph does change something about space, but this has to do with contiguity to what is beyond the frame. Bazin’s use of the image of an usher’s flashlight as a metaphor for the contingency and instability of the frame suggests that, though it makes sense to ask what is beyond that boundary, there is no sure answer” (Morgan, 2006, p. 453) “The connection to a world outside the frame is, if not exactly severed, at least loosened.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 453) “Photographygives us the freedom to form new associations, to have different kinds of relations with the objects in a photograph than we do with the same objects in the world” (Morgan, 2006, p. 454) “For Bazin, the ontology of the photographic image is intimately related to his view of realism in film.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 454) “he claims that “the realism of the cinema follows directly from its photographic nature” (“TC,” 1:108).” (Morgan, 2006, p. 454) “Behind the logic of direct realism is the presupposition that the world of a realist film ought to look like what was before the camera when and where the film was made.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 455) “Bazin himself is careful to avoid the model of direct realism.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 455) “Welles’s respect for the unity of space is the foundation for the shot’s emotional resonance; Bazin suggests that the scene would lose its effect if broken down, via montage, into five or six shots.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 456) “BecauseWelles uses amatte, there are in fact three different shots superimposed in one frame (the glass, Susan, and the door)” (Morgan, 2006, p. 456) “What Bazin treats as the preservation of the integrity of space is actually the effect of internal montage.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 456) “Bazin does not claim that Welles is being faithful to an antecedent reality but that he is producing an effect that allows “an impression to remain of continuous and homogeneous reality” (OW, p. 77; my emphasis)” (Morgan, 2006, p. 456) “His interest is in the effect the shot creates, which is based on an impression, but only an impression, of coherent space” (Morgan, 2006, p. 456) “A film’s world, if it is to be sustained in the spec- tator’s mind, must replicate the manner in which we experience our world.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 456) “Our experience of space is the structural basis for our concept of the uni- verse” (“TC,” 1:108; my emphasis)” (Morgan, 2006, p. 457) “It’s not space so much as the “experience of space” that allows the world of the film to be held in place.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 457) “A film is able to construct a world with its own “autonomous temporal destiny” [un des- tin temporal autonome] (“O,” 1:10).” (Morgan, 2006, p. 457) “tin” (Morgan, 2006, p. 457) ““The world of the screen and our world cannot be juxtaposed. The screen of necessity substitutes for it since the very concept of universe is spatially exclusive. For a time, a film is the Universe, the world, or if you like, Nature” (“TC,” 1:108–9).” (Morgan, 2006, p. 457) “For it to become our world, it has to allow us “normal” modes of perception and experience.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 458) “, Bazin does not describe the films of Renoir or neorealism as realist on grounds that they resemble the experience of reality.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 458) “He is also explicit that perceptual or psychological realism is an inadequate criterion for realism (see JR, p. 29)” (Morgan, 2006, p. 458) “Bazin describes as realist a large number of films that have little to do with resem- blance predicated on the contingency, flux, and ambiguity of reality.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 458) “and Eisen- stein is, at some points, acknowledged as belonging and contributing to a general realist [[aesthetics|aesthetic]]” (Morgan, 2006, p. 458) “Bazin will be inter- ested in realism in films where worlds do not form or at least do not self-evidently form.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 458) “As Bazin notes, “There is not one realism, but several realisms. Each period [or film] looksforits own, the technique and the [[aesthetics]] that will capture, retain, and render best what one wants from reality.”4” (Morgan, 2006, p. 459) “Renoir was one of the most important directors for Bazin” (Morgan, 2006, p. 459) “but also a potentially rich ambiguity of meaning”” (Morgan, 2006, p. 459) “Renoir’s realism preserves the integrity of dramatic space, respecting the manner in which we ordinarily encounter the world in its openness.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 459) “The work of style is to generate a social fact by taking up an attitude towards physical reality, showing it in a par- ticular way. As Bazin notes, realism is a way of “giving reality meaning” (JR, p. 84).” (Morgan, 2006, p. 461) “the faithful rendering of reality on film” (Morgan, 2006, p. 461) “He identifies Renoir’s “genius” as the ability to bring a specific increase of meaning to an image of reality—” (Morgan, 2006, p. 461) “of authenticity,” (Morgan, 2006, p. 461) “of “fidelity” to reality.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 461) “No more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect [[aesthetics|aesthetic]] illusion of reality there is no more cinema.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 462) “He claims that Rossellini’s films do not progressively fall away from neorealism just because they exhibit “less concern for social realism, for chronicling the events of daily life” (“BT,” 2:96).” (Morgan, 2006, p. 462) “Gilles Deleuze, drawing explicitly on Bazin, gestures towards such a reading of neorealism with his idea of the “encounter”; see Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis, 1989), pp. 1–10” (Morgan, 2006, p. 463) “Instead, neorealism is a verb, an activity, a particular [[aesthetics|aesthetic]] relation that follows general contours but is specific to each film- maker (and film).” (Morgan, 2006, p. 463) “We might say that a neo- realist film starts with a particular fact that it treats as subject matter for the film, a sequence, or even a shot. It then constructs a style that functions as a response to that fact, a way of bringing out its meaning within the par- ticular context in which it is placed” (Morgan, 2006, p. 463) “Else- where, Bazin describes this achievement as the refusal to impose a viewpoint on reality” (Morgan, 2006, p. 463) “It is not about reflecting the world, but taking its reality and using sound and image to give it meaning.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 464) “Bazin often describes this as a dialectic between the concrete and the abstract, the physical level of reality and the style that gives it meaning (see “DR,” 2:101; JR, p. 84; and “E,” 1:39).” (Morgan, 2006, p. 464) “terms of Rossellini’s answer center around the capacity of the statues to provoke Katherine’s imagination, to allow her to depart from and in a sense go be- yond their physicality and the banality of the guide’s remarks.61 The drama of the sequence is the way these flights of fantasy are moti” (Morgan, 2006, p. 465) “The other option is to deny that considerations of [[Ontology]] are central to Bazin’s realism.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 469) “Henderson has made the most extensive argument in this regard, dividing Bazin’s work between systems of [[Ontology]] and criti-” (Morgan, 2006, p. 469) “cism (and then, within the latter field, between ontological and historical criticism).” (Morgan, 2006, p. 470) “He writes, “The history system involves far more complex, multifaceted judgments; as a structure of thought it is also far more difficult and complex than the ontology system. . . . It is not derivable from the [[Ontology]] system” (C, p. 38).” (Morgan, 2006, p. 470) “The advantage of Henderson’s account is that it is able to cover the range of styles that Bazin calls realist.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 470) “Realism is Bazin’s touchstone or basic critical concept; but it remains in itself a blank or open term” (C, p. 45).” (Morgan, 2006, p. 470) It's also the same the montage for Eisenstein “Henderson’s argument, though, fails on two counts. First, Bazin does not think that just any film can be realist; to his eyes, German expressionism is certainly not, and neither is Soviet cinema (sometimes).” (Morgan, 2006, p. 470) “The ontology of the photographic image is central to the productive tension between style and reality that lies at the heart of Bazin’s understanding of realism.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 470) ““To define a film style, it is always necessary to come back to the dialectic between reality and abstraction, between the concrete and the ideal” (JR, p. 84).” (Morgan, 2006, p. 470) “a style that gives a meaning or significance to the physical reality it presents, turning it into facts.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 470) “acknowledgment” (Morgan, 2006, p. 470) “its ontological foundation and its [[aesthetics|aesthetic]] variety.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 470) “[[Michael Fried]] has provided the most extensive application of acknowledgment to [[aesthetics]], using it to describe how certain modernist artists construct works in response to what they take to be the features “that cannot be escaped” of their medium.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 471) “Acknowledgment gives us a conceptual framework for conceiving how film can be oriented by its medium and at the same time produce a style that is not, strictly speaking, faithful to it.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 471) “On the one side are realists who “put their faith in reality”; on the other, antirealists who “put their faith in the image” (“E,” 1:24).” (Morgan, 2006, p. 475) “The “Evolution” essay has a more specific ambition, however, and that is to defend sound cinema as a valid [[aesthetics|aesthetic]] form.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 476) “Rudolf Arnheim is an effective representative of such theories: “Film will be able to reach the heights of the other arts only when it frees itself from the bonds of photographic reproduction and becomes a pure work of man, namely, as animated cartoon or painting.”” (Morgan, 2006, p. 476) “My sense is that Bazin winds up overstating his case—even on his own terms. We can see this in the way he talks about Eisenstein. In the “Evolution” essay, Eisenstein is opposed to the realist school of filmmaking.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 477) “Eisenstein is in the other camp: “the creation of a sense or meaning [is] not objectively contained in the images themselves but derived exclusively from their juxtaposition” (“E,” 1:25).” (Morgan, 2006, p. 477) > "그러나 바진은 다른 지점에서 아이젠슈타인과 드레이어를 동일시하고 다른 곳에서 "예술과 정치 모두에서 혁명적 인 아이젠슈타인, 푸도프킨, 도브 젠코의 러시아 영화를 특징 짓는 사실주의에 대한 추구"를 네오 리얼리즘의 야망과 연결시킨다 > > “But Bazin equates Eisenstein with [[Carl Theodor Dreyer|Dreyer]] at other points and elsewhere links the “search for realism that characterized the Russian films of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Dovjenko as revolutionary both in art and politics” to the ambitions of neorealism (“AR,” 2:16).” (Morgan, 2006, p. 477) “What is striking is that Bazin tries to analyze Ivan with the tools of realism.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 477) ““Eisenstein may have consciously chosen a style for his film that rejected psychological realism from the start and that required for its own [[aesthetics|aesthetic]] realization the systematic magnification of a thesis, that is, the elaboration of a thesis without benefit of nuance”” (Morgan, 2006, p. 478) “Eisenstein takes a certain fact as the point of his filmnamely, its status as propaganda—and makes that the basis of his [[aesthetics|aesthetic]].” (Morgan, 2006, p. 478) “Bazin’s complaint is that German expressionism “did every kind of violence to the plastics of the image by way of sets and lighting,” advocating a primacy of the image at the expense of physical reality (“E,” 1:26; compare “SRB,” 1:139).” (Morgan, 2006, p. 478) “realism describes the specific attitude a film takes to, on the one hand, the ontological basis of its medium, and, on the other, what the film holds as its central facts.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 481) “Bazin’s moral imperative for films and film criticism goes something like this: It is only with things outside ourselves, things that stand freely of our capacity to impose an order on them, that we can establish meaningful kinds of relations—even if that involves their transcendence, as with Bresson.” (Morgan, 2006, p. 481) ### Related ```dataview LIST FROM [[@morgan_rethinking_2006]] and -"Plans" and -"resources" ```