Belief in Cinema - Lisabeth During and Lisa Trahair.pdf

ANGELAKIjournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 17 number 4 december 2012

Perhaps a world without God becomes a world

of the gods and of the fates they dispense.

Andre Bazin, ‘‘The Destiny of Jean

Gabin,’’ What is Cinema?, vol. II

Andre Bazin is cinema’s first and foremost

pedagogue and among the most significant

figures in the philosophy of film. Described by

Andrew Sarris as a figure as ‘‘important to film

aesthetics as Freud is to psychology,’’ he is also

one of our greatest cinephiles. Born in Angers,

France in 1918 and dying of leukaemia at the age

of forty in 1958 just as Franc�ois Truffaut began to

shoot Quatre cents coups [400 Blows], Bazin’s

legacy outstrips his short life many times over.

During the war years Bazin founded a cineclub to

screen films that were banned by the Germans

before joining Travail et Culture in 1944 and

showing films in trade union halls, factories and

film clubs. He worked as a film critic for Le

Parisien libere and in 1951 co-founded Cahiers

du cinema (with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Lo

Duca). In the post-war period he continued to

screen films and became the mentor of the

generation of film critics who would, after his

death, become the filmmakers of the French

nouvelle vague (Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer,

Rivette and Chabrol).1

In 2005 the editors of this issue discovered a

mutual interest in Bazin. In 2007 we undertook to

produce a volume of essays by writers who could

address Bazin’s work in fresh and unorthodox

ways, essays that would engage film theory but

not defer to it. In this spirit we sought out

contemporary cultural commentators whose

expertise was in philosophy, literary criticism,

art history, comparative literature and anthropol-

ogy as well as film studies.

Since conceiving the project the world has

caught up with us. In 2007 Film International

launched ‘‘The Andre Bazin Special Issue,’’ with

a collection of essays edited by Jeffrey Crouse. In

2011 Oxford University Press published Dudley

Andrew and Herve Joubert-Laurencin’s edited

collection Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory

and its Afterlife, which sourced many of the

papers presented at the ‘‘Ouvrir Bazin/Opening

Bazin’’ conference at the University of Paris VII

(Denis Diderot) in 2008. Bert Cardullo has also

been hard at work editing collections of Bazin’s

work. Since the publication of Bazin at Work:

Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and

Fifties, trans. Alain Piette (New York:

Routledge, 1996), he has edited Andre Bazin

and Italian Neorealism (New York: Continuum,

2011) and French Cinema from the Liberation to

the New Wave 1945–1958 (New Orleans: U of

EDITORIALINTRODUCTION

lisabeth duringlisa trahair

BELIEF IN CINEMArevisiting themes frombazin

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/12/040001^8� 2012 Taylor & Francishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2012.747326

1

New Orleans P, 2012). And a new translation by

Timothy Barnard (available only in Canada) has

refreshed Bazin studies, correcting some of the

errors and editorial omissions from the publica-

tion published by the University of California.

For this issue of Angelaki we asked our authors

to address themes that originated in Bazin’s work,

whether by acknowledging its theological inclina-

tions or sharing in his belief in the promise of

cinema. The spectrum of cinema’s ‘‘promise’’ to

filmmakers and film theorists has encompassed

such diverse utopias as the non-mechanistic

representation of time, the realisation of a

universal language, and the discovery and oper-

ation of an optical unconscious. Film has been

praised for its ability to present a kind of sensuous

thinking, its power to revitalise ethical judgement

through aesthetic form. In responding to this

proposal, our authors were invited to move

beyond a conventional film studies framework

and to focus on Bazin’s realism.

Everyone knows that Bazin is identified with

realism. But what is realism anyway? No matter

how often Bazin’s film criticism has been

described as an apology for ‘‘realism,’’ the

question remains ambiguous. ‘‘Bazin’s critical

judgements,’’ James Phillips writes, ‘‘deploy a

mobile and open assemblage of realist criteria.’’

The success of realism as a practice depends on

the way the notion of reality is understood.

Modernity – the age of cinema – copes with a

plurality of worlds, competing and co-existing.

Reality is not just there for the taking. Phillips

understands Bazin’s distinction between techno-

logical realism and aesthetic realism as peculiarly

responsive to the emergent conditions of philo-

sophical modernity. In fulfilling art’s mimetic

quest for the self-identical, Phillips argues, the

technological realism of cinema disintegrates

reality by multiplying spatio-temporal horizons

ad infinitum and thus undermines the very basis

of the transcendental mode of apperception that

would for Kant constitute the ground of knowl-

edge. The aesthetic realism that Bazin champions

(even as it eludes him) is a way of recovering

from the splintering of identity set in motion by

cinematic technology. Yet such a recovery

requires some ethical changes as well: we may

have to learn again what it means to be embodied.

Of particular interest to Phillips are the

pressures put on aesthetic realism – and percep-

tual realism – by pornography and death. Bodily

insistence – the urgency, the expressiveness of the

human body naked or clothed – can’t help but be

a different matter when it is film not theatre or

painting or poetry that takes charge of the

relation between flesh and time, physicality and

meaning. Responding to a Heideggerian worry

about the evacuation of the world through human

imitation and technological duplication, Phillips

proposes the anomaly that is human animality

before the eyes of the camera. The world in the

film is an alternative reality, even though what we

see in it looks alive. When we, as spectators or

voyeurs of the erotically-intended image, accept

the film as believably ‘‘realistic,’’ we may well –

as Phillips argues is the case with Mizoguchi – be

assenting to the dead or a cult of death. Is

violence what connects the animal in us with the

ghost we recognise as our kin? Phillips’s conclu-

sions are bleak but absorbing:

The realism of the film is the senselessness

(which is distinct from triviality) of its suffer-

ing. The camera captures the human object in

its suffering, in the passivity and unmaster-

ability – the unobjectifiability – of its suffer-

ing. What this suffering teaches, and what

cinema, following Bazin, is ideally capable of

conveying as an automatic medium for

reproducing reality, is the human being’s

exposure to a world beyond the means and

ends of either the individual or the collective.

Kathleen Kelley’s essay ‘‘Faithful Mechanisms:

Bazin’s Modernism’’ also considers how Bazin’s

writing on cinematic realism stands in relation to

other modernist tendencies in the arts, most

particularly Clement Greenberg’s writings on

modern painting. In investigating the possibility

of a rapprochement between cinematic realism

and aesthetic modernism, Kelley nuances the

positions of both Bazin and Greenberg to bring

them into dialogue with each other. She thus

finds Greenberg not so much an intransigent

formalist or essentialist as an historicist attuned

to the capabilities and competencies of art at

different historical junctures (most notably the

Enlightenment). Greenberg, Kelley argues, goes

editorial introductioneditorial introduction

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to some trouble to devise means to champion

art’s continued importance for society when the

belief in its necessity was in doubt. Along with

the other authors in this issue, Kelley sees Bazin

as neither a ‘‘naıve realist’’ nor ‘‘humanist fool,’’

and every bit as concerned with medium

specificity as Greenberg. But one cannot under-

estimate the difficulties attending a formalist

conception of realism. Kelley takes up Daniel

Morgan’s recent insistence on the importance of

style in Bazinian realism.2 Qualifying Morgan,

she insists that it is not just a question of style

attuning itself to reality. Rather, the cinematic

medium has the power to alert us to the difficulty

that reality presents to us, and to the impossibil-

ity of finding a common measure between the real

and the form.

John Mullarkey’s interest lies less in the

aesthetic of realism than in realism’s relation to

the Real. Raising questions about the stakes of

Bazinian realism – whether it is ontological or

aesthetic – he ultimately sees in the particularity

of Bazin’s conception of cinematic realism the

capacity to embrace realities that exceed those of

human subjectivity. Beyond the human, reality

includes physical space, animality and objects,

and these inclusions should be seen as ‘‘a

democracy of the viewer-viewed that installs

intersubjectivity in the Real.’’ Bazinian realism,

Mullarkey argues, is particularly sensitive to a

space that includes the non-human. Against the

anthropomorphism that has ruled philosophy and

artistic practice, Bazin develops another kind of

immanence: not the immanence of objects in a

human consciousness but the ambiguous co-

dwelling of things and minds, animals and

machines, the living and the non-living. One of

the best places to see this wider horizon of the

real is in a cinematic genre Bazin did not

explicitly study: the horror film, and in particu-

lar, Japanese horror. Far from neorealism but

similarly anti-sentimental in its awareness of

ambient violence, the horror film, Mullarkey

writes, is trying to show us something important

about our everyday perceptual judgements.

Vision, we realise, is a moral test. To live up to

the demands of realism requires a surrender of

our anthropomorphic privilege and a willingness

to surrender epistemic certainty. The ‘‘tragedy of

the object,’’ like the co-existence of animal and

human, calls for a higher degree of participation,

an ethics of action as well as belief.

Realism and the fake, like sincerity and

inauthenticity (or absorption and theatricality)

are contrasts that define not only aesthetics but

also modern love. Rex Butler addresses the issue

of performativity in film by examining

Kiarostami’s film Certified Copy. Although the

setting is a departure from most of Kiarostami’s

work, for Butler the film is an exemplary case of

the director’s ongoing interest in the relation

between fiction and documentation, artifice and

truth, copy and original, authenticity and pre-

tence. The film’s narrative pretext of a concern

about authenticity in art (figured as the relation-

ship between the original and the copy) is

continuously transposed onto the question of

the status of a man and a woman’s relationship.

As Butler suggests, it is only through the

fictionality of performance that we can get close

to reality. Kiarostami’s interest therefore is not in

‘‘exposing the fictionality of the real, seeking to

break the suspension of belief, but documenting

the reality of fiction, of that always repressed ‘lie’

or ‘copy’ that structures and makes possible

reality.’’ Butler’s analysis speaks to Stanley

Cavell’s thesis that the diegeses of American

romantic comedies of the 1940s emblematise

American democracy. As the (ideal) republic

offered an imagination of community to its

argumentative speakers, aiming towards a

national conversation, so marriage (or the film’s

version of that) provides a space for male and

female characters to acknowledge and negotiate

their differences. While Butler says little about

the relationship between the couple jostling with

each other and Cavell’s work, his point is

intriguing because of the many openings it

creates to that philosophical project.

Jay Bernstein’s essay ‘‘Movement! Action!

Belief? Notes for a Critique of Deleuze’s

Cinema Philosophy,’’ while initiating a dialogue

with Deleuze via Hiroshima mon amour and

Bazinian realism, also has vivid (and explicit)

Cavellian resonances. Kiarostami debates the

ambiguities of the couple in a number of his

films (Butler has a brief but intriguing reading of

Through the Olive Trees). What makes couples

during & trahairduring & trahair

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couple? What makes two people a couple? How

do you know if you are one? Cavell’s thesis about

marriage in American cinema seizes on the

improvisational, and the transformational,

nature of the creation of the couple, and puts

the criteria of authenticity (if there are any) into

suspension. But truthfulness matters. Imperative

for Bazin, for whom truth-fullness is one of the

sacred resources of realism, and much more

important than naturalism or plausibility, truth-

fulness worries Bernstein and inflects his objec-

tions to Deleuze’s film theory and periodisation.

Bernstein’s critique of Deleuze’s philosophy of

cinema takes issue with the ontological priority of

the time-image over the movement-image.

Bernstein argues that the effect of this priority

is to force a reading of modern films, of which

Resnais and Duras are exemplary, that empha-

sises the virtual over the actual. If virtuality

trumps actuality, Bernstein continues, who is to

say that there is any difference between the

human and the zombie, the living and the

automaton? A world so depleted, so ontologically

eroded, will need a more than human recognition

if it is to be sustained at all; hence the turn, which

Bernstein deplores, to a quasi-religious ‘‘faith’’ in

Deleuze. For Deleuze, the structure of the time-

image provides a sufficient means of schematising

modern cinema. Against that claim, Bernstein

returns to Bazin’s vision (given an Arendtian

tone): it is not belief that underwrites a modern

relation to (in)authentic reality but love. This

love is nothing other than the relation to reality

that Bazin endeavoured to make cinema’s voca-

tion more than half a century ago.

Like Bernstein, Robert Sinnerbrink argues

that what Bazin’s work continues to offer

contemporary film theorists has nothing to do

with the way film’s technology claims ontological

or epistemological privileges when compared with

other forms of representation. Rather, it offers an

experiential or existential means of revelation.

What cinema reveals is not reality itself but

reality transformed. Sinnerbrink thus emphasises

the aesthetic dimension of Bazin’s thinking about

cinema and realism, pointing to the numerous

ethical and philosophical implications of the

Bazinian position. Film is the true democratic

art, not just because it refuses to exclude any

possible audience but because its relation to

reality is never finalised: there is no ‘‘authorised

version’’ for film. The promise of cinema as

revelation is inherited from Bazin by Cavell for

whom cinema is involved in a modern response to

the sceptic’s disappointment with the limits of

human knowledge. Like love, the experience of

film-viewing clarifies the demand of intersubjec-

tive acknowledgement as the condition of know-

ing. How do we, finally, manage to believe in

cinema? Will it always be true that the image can

‘‘carry, depict and elicit conviction for us’’? For it

is not that we assent simply because we are

manipulated by some magical trick of the

apparatus, providing the mystery of photographic

likeness, nor do we believe because of some

shared and unreflective readiness to subscribe to

well-seasoned aesthetic conventions.

As many of the authors in this issue observe,

Bazin and Deleuze agree on the importance for

cinema of Wallace Stevens’s poetic question:

What am I to believe? The answer, Sinnerbrink

argues, has to do with myth and with history.

Because in film the image is the model it has the

capacity to reveal social and cultural meaning. It

acknowledges its status as image but stands as a

meaningful fact within the cinematic world. For

Bazin, the medium’s inclination towards issues of

an existential nature brings it face to face with

theological questions. In pursuing this tendency

Sinnerbrink goes beyond the standard outline of

religious themes and cinematic hagiographies

discussed by Bazin and lingers instead on what

he calls the individual’s experience of the numi-

nous. Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life is a

mythopoeic narrative, a story of creation and

Fall, apocalypse and redemption. Ambitious to a

fault, it attempts an aesthetic transfiguration of

time, place and action in a unique cinematic

world. Like Malick’s other films, it uses images,

memory and emotional intensity to argue that the

everyday world is a site of spiritual and moral

seriousness. More than Malick’s other films, The

Tree of Life engages with cultural memory and

history’s claim on the destiny of human beings.

Aesthetically, the realism that Malick employs

assigns fierce attention to the beauty and the

treachery of contingent nature, to the torment

and joys of individual subjective experience and


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those collective experiences that transcend the

particularities of history. The guiding duality of

the film is the Christian opposition of nature and

grace, despair and hope. Malick, Sinnerbrink

argues, uses the contrasting authorities of the two

parents (mother as the way of grace, father as the

way of nature), the dynamic tension between two

inseparable dimensions of existence. But thereby

the director risks a staggering spiritual arrogance:

he puts himself in the position of God. Where

Bernstein argues that one of the problems that

emerges from Deleuze’s pre-modern understand-

ing of cinema is a pre-critical return of cosmol-

ogy, Sinnerbrink proposes the opposite,

identifying the cosmological with the

Romantics, our core ‘‘moderns.’’ The power of

ontological revelation that cinema wields is not

conventional or pre-modern. Cinema’s mythic

dimension is out of time. When it works, as

Sinnerbrink thinks it does for Malick, cinema

restores a love for the world. Other viewers, more

critical, observe that it induces in its audiences a

state of ontological restlessness.

Ontological restlessness also plagues the film

industry, unsure about the uses of its own

devices. And the quick-moving mutations in

technological production can push film theorists

into a very uncomfortable place, ready at the

same time to over-react and to under-react, and

not doing a very good job in either guise. As an

academic field, film studies may be losing its

object and its rationale. Gregory Flaxman takes

on these anxieties and shows how they relate to

the Bazinian question of belief. ‘‘Behind the

question of film studies,’’ Flaxman writes,

‘‘looms the question of cinema itself, an aging

techne that seems to have hung around in the

midst of new(er) media that lay claim to the

image as their province.’’ James Cameron’s

Avatar renews the licence on cinematic spectacle

through 3D technology. But our desire to believe

in the cinema may not be satisfied by its promise

of absolute immersion. Bazin had welcomed the

cinema on a rather different ground, not its

ability to reproduce nature (its god-like power to

save the fleeting matter of the world in a

persisting image) but its ‘‘more elusive power,’’

to create that which cannot be seen. Here realism

bears with it a spiritual dispensation.

For Flaxman the question of the cinematic ‘‘off-

screen’’ or ‘‘out-of-field’’ is central, and exposes

the failures of Cameron’s bloated science fiction

compared to an earlier (and very different)

science fiction, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A

Space Odyssey. What happens to the out-of-

field in digital reproduction? What does this

extension of virtual reality – and other notions of

the virtual in Deleuze – do to our understanding

of reality’s ‘‘inside’’ and ‘‘outside’’? Flaxman’s

key concepts are the screen, the frame, and the

logico-mathematical notion of the set, all impor-

tant to Deleuze and all ways in which Bazin’s

concern for the integrity of the mise-en-scene is

established on different terms in a post-cinematic

medium. They are all also brilliantly exploited by

Kubrick, no technological determinist but fasci-

nated by the metaphysical problems these cate-

gories introduce. The destiny of the cinema (a

very Bazinian theme) is re-imagined by Flaxman

in an ironic mode. The cinema can find its future

only in the past it has lost.

To say that the prototype for belief in cinema

is religious faith could mean many different

things. We left this open for our contributors to

respond to as they saw fit. It might, for example,

simply mean that cinema replaces the Church in

becoming the opiate of the masses; or it might

mean a transference of the belief in the mean-

ingfulness of existence to the meaningfulness of

cinema. It might mean a belief in the need to

reflect through aesthetic form on the world of

mundane reality. Or that cinema beats all the

other arts to the post, assuming the guise of the

‘‘one true’’ aesthetic technology to assure us of

the meaning of reality. It might be the beginning

of a new secular but inspired worldliness, not

requiring belief in the absolute as supersensible.

Rather, in an attempt to bring divinity back down

to earth, the cinema makes the secular and the

profane the sole theatre of grace.

For Bazin, cinema’s power to make ordinary

things visible is miraculous. The spiritual in

cinema cuts between the rough ground of the

everyday and the giddying heights of transcen-

dence and the supernatural. Film’s intrinsic

‘‘naturalism’’ allows it to operate with images

that in another medium would defy belief. It is as

comfortable with monstrosity and fantasy as it is


5

with the scrupulous mirroring of the mundane.

Our interest in the strange paths of the spiritual

in modern cinema is reflected in the papers by

Hill, During, Ahmadi and Ross, and Trahair. The

mystery of sainthood, of course, was one of the

traditional ways in which mainstream cinema

responded to the prospect of a religious audience,

and to that audience’s taste for the spectacular

and colossal. But the ‘‘saints of the ordinary,’’

like Bresson’s worried provincial cure and his

self-sacrificing donkey, belong to something

quieter, the imperceptible disclosure of grace,

not its revelation in glory. Anxious, almost

unseen, the spiritual heroes of modern cinema

test the presumption of the human will; they fling

themselves into the unknown without guarantee.

This, our authors suggest, resembles the cine-

phile’s trust.

When cinema takes on religious iconography,

it is drawn to figures of the martyr, the sacrifice,

the holy fool, and the damned, as well as the

saint, the virgin and the devil. Leslie Hill’s essay

on Straub-Huillet, Godard and Holderlin looks at

the mythical figure of the pre-Socratic philoso-

pher Empedocles, who, like the artist, might be a

mediator between humans and the gods. Does

cinema suspend myths or prolong them? Does it

continuously execute its own gods – desiring the

grace of their absence – while wanting them to

return, immortal and astonishing? What counts in

poetry in modern times should not be the secret

persistence of the divine, nor the ‘‘covert prox-

imity’’ of the gods, but ‘‘their enduring absence.’’

Cinema’s future and the end of cinema are linked

in Hill to a more challenging notion of the future

‘‘as what resists the present’’ and refuses the

endless recurrences of myth. Can we affirm

finitude and transcendence at the same time? Just

as cinema, in exposing its own mechanism, used

realism to defer spectacle, so the three filmed

versions of ‘‘The Death of Empedocles’’ – Straub-

Huillet’s three unfinished repetitions of

Holderlin’s unfinishable dramas – defer the

false transcendence of sacrifice and apotheosis.

Hill follows the intricate paths of repetition,

fragmentation and the renunciation of sacrifice in

several key texts of Romanticism and modernism

(Godard, Holderlin, Straub and Huillet, Brecht).

As he argues, the stakes here are political (and

frightening); they are also crucial to the way

philosophy is done in a world where the gods

have withdrawn. For all of the modernist artists

Hill attends to, the past is both enigmatic and

explosive, and the question of legacy an unfin-

ished one.

If Bazin is film history’s saint, and his early

death one of its painful losses, his enthusiasm for

the most varied types of movie-making (only

expressionism seemed to leave him cold) saves

him from any suspicion of asceticism. But the

temptation of denial and renunciation remained

strong in modernist aesthetics, cinematic or

otherwise, even when its role in religious practice

has declined. During’s juxtaposition of Robert

Bresson and Simone Weil draws attention to the

seductive role of the ‘‘poetics of impersonality,’’

an aesthetic code represented by Bresson’s

‘‘Notes to the Cinematographer’’ and at least

partially honoured in his movies. Weil, on the

other hand, is both the most spectacular and the

clumsiest of modern ascetic saints: she never

quite got the self-immolation she desired, but her

personality, life and works impressed a number of

recent filmmakers, most prominently Godard and

Rossellini, and any number of important critics,

musicians, artists and stylists. Like Weil, Bresson

was a heretical Christian who acknowledged the

purifying effects of suffering. His desire for a

language and a thought that would escape the

corruptions of the ‘‘I’’ has, paradoxically, pro-

duced a remarkably personal body of work. The

politics of commitment, which both Bresson and

Weil subscribe to, helps their work to avoid any

sickly perfume of holiness or sentimentality. True

to Bazin’s spirit, the dying priest, in Bresson’s

masterpiece, redeems himself not by sacrifice or

miracle but by writing. Like his diary, the film

patiently spells out the unmysterious secrets of

a soul.

Amir Ahmadi and Alison Ross’s essay ‘‘Jim

Jarmusch’s Dead Man: The Cinematic Telling of

a Modern Myth’’ examines the film’s departure

from the conventional mythological structure in

which the hero is reintegrated into the society

from which he has been marginalised. Like

Butler, Ahmadi and Ross also take up the

question of fiction inasmuch as they understand

Jarmusch’s William Blake as ‘‘exploring the


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cultural existence of living a meaningful lie.’’ If

the modern hero fails to be restored to the

diegetic community, his destiny is nevertheless

circumscribed by his partial absorption into the

tale itself, in this instance into the story told by

Nobody, who understands this William Blake’s

destiny because he read the poetry of another

William Blake at an earlier point in his life. That

this William Blake experiences the events that

have beset him as chance occurrences doesn’t

stop him giving in to the story that Nobody tells

even while he admits to not understanding it, but

from his perspective this is to inhabit a role

determined by others without fully understanding

its meaning or purpose. Ahmadi and Ross make

no bones about it, the real recipient of this story

is the storyteller himself. This for Ahmadi and

Ross is the ‘‘troubling double vision of life as

both destiny and accident’’ that defines the

existence of whoever finds themselves exiled

from home.

Lisa Trahair’s essay also deals with chance and

destiny, with a protagonist who wrestles with

destiny, but whose fate is determined not, as the

story goes, by accident but by the hand of God,

and with a director who wants both to play God

and restore the operation of chance into the

unfolding of images. Despite theology’s habit of

reading in prophecy and prefiguration, it is

difficult to disentangle accident and design;

when they can’t be kept apart, the language of

grace intervenes (the film’s use of the name

‘‘Pascal’’ is not incidental). In a Bazinian spirit,

Trahair shows us how images ‘‘teach.’’ While this

is one of Godard’s persisting motifs, it is also a

rebuke to the philosophical appropriation of film,

which often neglects the specific ways in which

film uses thinking. Like most of the films studied

in this issue, Je vous salue, Marie ‘‘reflects on

the notion of belief,’’ in the religious and the

epistemic senses. Trahair undertakes a reading of

Je vous salue, Marie that sees Godard in dialogue

with Bazin about the significance of the uncon-

scious in cinematic automatism, the function of

montage and the parameters of the pure image.

The biblical tale of the Virgin Mary is recast here

to consider the conditions under which the real

can reveal itself in the image, and our faith in

both film and the world restored.

In our proposal, we imagined a collection that

went beyond a tribute to Bazin and those who

acknowledge his inspiration. We hoped to

encourage in our writers and (with luck) in our

readers a generous and even spiritually attentive

conception of cinema and a more ambitious self-

understanding for cinema and media studies. Part

of this ambition would be realised by including in

this project themes or problems that are ethical,

aesthetic, anthropological and theological.

Another part of the same ambition was energised,

in ways we did not expect, by the discovery of an

historical insight that a number of our contrib-

utors shared. Modernism, as the aesthetic coun-

terpart of cinema in its entry into the world, is

looser than it looks. As T.S. Eliot might be

pleased to say, the classical is the modern, the

modern is the classical.

In a memorable scene in Godard’s Bande a

part, a harassed teacher of Shakespeare writes on

the board: Classique¼Moderne. We find our-

selves agreeing. With Bazin

behind us we add: realism¼

modernism. Provocative claims.

We hope this issue lives up

to them.

The Australian Research Council (ARC)

Discovery Project scheme (DP1092889) sup-

ported Trahair’s work on this issue.

notes1 Ginette Vincendeau, The Companion to FrenchCinema (London: BFI, 2006) 28^29.

2 Daniel Morgan, ‘‘Rethinking Bazin: Ontologyand Realist Aesthetics,’’ Critical Inquiry 32 (2006):443^81.


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Lisabeth During

School of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Pratt Institute

200 Willoughby Ave

Brooklyn, NY 11205

USA

E-mail: [email protected]

Lisa Trahair

School of the Arts and Media

University of New South Wales

Sydney, NSW 2052

Australia

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Belief in Cinema - Lisabeth During and Lisa Trahair.pdf

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Transcript of Belief in Cinema - Lisabeth During and Lisa Trahair.pdf