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Back to Bazin Part 1: The Ontology of the

Photographic Image
Posted on 23 September, 2008

Its been a long time since Ive read Andre Bazins writings but, having included them on a syllabus
this semester, Ive had to return to them. Bazin is rather unfashionable, his ideas on cinemas special
relationship to realism dismissed as naive or simplistic, his Catholicised rhetoric seen as rather
quaint, and if he has been taught at all, hes been set up as a straw man to give film students their

first chance to take down a major figure in film criticism. It isnt difficult to counter Bazins teleological
approach to film technology, but this is not to say his work is not useful or interesting. I want to write
down a few thoughts to summarise two or three (thats not a figure of speech it really will depend
on how much time I have to prepare this in the next couple of weeks!) of his short essays and invite
comment on their continued relevance or obsolescence. Its worth noting that Bazins film criticism
was as important a part of his work as the theoretical writing, and it wouldnt be accurate to posit
any over-arching interpretation of what he stood for. I would refer you to Brian Hendersons
excellent overview of The Structure of Bazins Thought (see links section below), which suggests
that Bazins work cannot be thought of as a continual reiteration of the same concept of an objective,
realistic cinema, but instead should be divided up into the historical and the ontological writings; there
is little crossover between them, and the theoretical positions on the ontology of the photographic
image are not simply applied to critiques of particular films.
This post should be a starting point, and there are links at the bottom if youd like to explore more
about Bazin from those who see his work as still valid to the study and appreciation of cinema.
The Ontology of the Photographic Image
Bazin begins his essay with the now well-known mummification analogy:
If the plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis, the practice of embalming the dead might turn
out to be a fundamental factor in their creation. The process might reveal that at the origin of
painting and sculpture there lies a mummy complex. The religion of ancient Egypt, aimed
against death, saw survival as depending on the continued existence of the corporeal body. Thus,
by providing a defense against the passage of time it satisfied a basic psychological need in man,
for death is but the victory of time. To preserve, artificially, his bodily appearance is to snatch it
from the flow of time, to stow it away neatly, so to speak, in the hold of life. It was natural,
therefore, to keep up appearances in the face of the reality of death by preserving flesh and bone.
If I was a film-maker, Id feel flattered by Bazins suggestion that I was the inheritor of a tradition that
could be traced back to the Pharaohs. This totalising idea of film as the achievement of a longcherished human desire to reproduce itself in images in defiance of time and mortality can never get
to the heart of how technologies develop, and nor can it explain how individual instances of filmic
practice come into being (Im assuming there are not many directors who go onset because they
cannot resist the pre-programmed instinct to cheat death): its like evolutionary theories of sexual
selection that might tell us what kind of person were biologically predisposed to mate with, but cant
stop us falling for someone with a dirty laugh or a shared passion for Mystery Science Theater 3000.
In Bazins extended analogy of mummification, representational art becomes the repository of these
death-defying instincts, since mummification could offer no certain guarantee against ultimate
pillage: making images of people, we are to presume, became a substitute for the preservation of
actual bodies. In turn, preservational representation gave way to a larger concept, the creation of an
ideal world in the likeness of the real, with its own temporal destiny. Is this Bazins poetic articulation
of films unique capacity to embalm time, with photographic registration grasping a fragment of the

world and preserving it indefinitely (consider this in contrast to paintings attempts to reconstruct, with
all attendant subjective inflections, a picture of that world) as both a living (i.e. moving) and a
deadened (i.e. not actually present) thing? Or is he actually saying that a hard-wired human need to
counter-act bodily ephemerality drove and inspired the development of technologies of
representation? It is difficult to know, but the argument which is built upon it seems tendentious from
being founded on such ambiguous, historically vague groundwork.
One of the most enticing and least contentious claims Bazin makes for the importance of the
photographic image is that it uncoupled other art forms from a slavish debt to resemblance:
In achieving the aims of baroque art, photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession
with likeness. Painting was forced, as it turned out, to offer us illusion and this illusion was
reckoned sufficient unto art. Photography and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries that
satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism. No matter how
skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to an inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a
human hand intervened cast a shadow of doubt over the image. Again, the essential factor in the
transition from the baroque to photography is not the perfecting of a physical process
(photography will long remain the inferior of painting in the reproduction of colour); rather
does it lie in a psychological fact, to wit, in completely satisfying our appetite for illusion by a
mechanical reproduction in the making of which man plays no part. The solution is not to be
found in the result achieved but in the way of achieving it.
So, rather than supplanting painting and sculpture by doing their jobs more effectively, photography
took on those aspects which plastic arts could perform less efficiently. There is a teleological
argument here it implies that painting was incomplete, that its own codes and conventions were
malformed precursors of something that required more advanced technologies for its realisation. This
always precipitates the most common criticisms of Bazin, that he posits film as an objective medium
of record, whose truth claims hinge upon a privileged link to reality. It forms this link by having a
direct, indexical relationship between image and referent. That is to say that, because the film camera
operates as a photochemical process independent of human intervention (except the interventions
needed to prepare and commence the running of the equipment), it can be seen as less subjective,
less prone to the manipulations of the human hand that always divert, even minutely the passage of
an objects image into its painted or sculpted representation. When the shutter on a camera opens to
let light in, the light reflected from the object in front of the lens causes a chemical change in the lightsensitive material of the film itself. Hey, Im not a scientist: if you want to know a bit more about how
the process of photography actually works, you could do worse than follow this link. The point for
Bazin is that photography and film are distinct as art forms because of their very basis in mechanical
processes which take away the element of human activity. Whatever is done with those images
afterwards, their origins always confer a particularly authentic status that provides a heightened
sense of presence, along with a concomitant sense of absence you know that what youre looking
at in a photograph was really present in front of the camera, even as the images relocation to a 2dimensional space in front of your eyes marks it as simultaneously absent, only an image.

On this issue, Bazin has been superseded by decades of critical theory and criticism that have
demolished notions of an objective reality that can be represented truthfully. The path from
phenomenological reality to spectator is always one which will branch, fork, twist and undulate
according to the specific capabilities, experiences, knowledge or desires of the apparatus, the artist
and the spectator. Regardless of the photochemical relationship between the image and the
represented object, the image is always selected. It does not give the viewer a window into an extant,
continuous reality, but instead offers a limited perspective, around which meanings and inferences will
be generated by viewers with varying frames of reference and intertextual knowledge bases. Bazins
ontological claims, it is argued, are irrelevant in light of the images subjection to ideological, technical
and heuristic influences. In short, the camera cannot operate objectively, because its images are
always constructs that are open to interpretation.
I may be defeating my own purpose here. If I wanted to concur with those critics who assert the
continued relevance of Bazin (youll find plenty in the links below), I probably shouldnt have started
with his most obviously flawed article. I first became interested in Bazin when I began my PhD thesis
on special effects, and I was looking for some theories that would help me to examine the instability
or otherwise of the film images claims to authenticity. One of the ideas that was sparked by reading
Bazins ontology essays was that the spectator is often measuring the onscreen images against a
perceived notion of reality, even if that notion might be a subjective one. When watching a fantasy or
science fiction film that involves a lot of special or visual effects trickery, that same kind of measuring
takes place, with the spectator trying to discern the illusion by sorting the profilmic from the
fabricated. That residual belief in an inherent difference between, for instance, live action footage and
computer-generated characters might be a holdover from Bazinian ideas of the fundamentally
objective ontology of the photographic image. His faith in the ability of long takes and deep focus to
preserve that objectivity is mirrored in a set of devices of authentication which are still deployed in
cinema today, whether it is in the extended takes inside the taxi of Abbas Kiarostamis 10, where a
dashboard mounted digital camera fixes on the faces of the passengers or the driver for many
minutes at a time, or in the virtualised camera that circles the moving car in Spielbergs War of the
Worlds, for which a seemingly impossible long take through heavy traffic has been seamlessly
stitched together from multiple takes and augmented with digital objects.

In each case, a sense of engrossing access to a continuous space is generated by the impression
that the camera is present to capture, rather than construct, a moment in its entirety. But neither film
depends upon an indexical relationship between image and object. The long take can be made to
perform the effect of a filmic reality, either by using small, intimate digital cameras (where no chemical

reaction between light and film takes place), or visual effects (where the continuity, and the
spatial fluidity, of the shot is an illusion).
I hope to find time to develop these thoughts in relation to some of Bazins other writing, but I
welcome comment on what Ive written so far.
Links
Peter Matthews puts up a strong defence of Bazin here.
Girish Shambus blog has an entry on Bazins writings with a useful comments section.
Andy Slabaugh on Bazins ontology at Cinesthesia.
Donato Toraro, Bazin Revisited. PART ONE & PART TWO.
Bazins article, The Life and Death of Superimposition, in which he looks at trick effects.
Eva Baaren, The Total Myth of Cinema: About the Continuing Need for Reality in Digital
Cinema.
The following articles are available from JSTOR if you have access, and on old-fashioned paper
even if you dont:
Ian Jarvie, Bazins Ontology Film Quarterly 14:1, 60-61.
Brian Henderson, The Structure of Bazins Thought Film Quarterly 25:4, 18-27.

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R E L AT E D

Back to Bazin Part II: The

Myth of Total Cinema
In "Andre Bazin"

Back to Bazin Part III: De

la Politique des Auteurs
In "Andre Bazin"

Done Away
In "celebrity"

Back to Bazin Part II: The

Myth of Total Cinema
In "Andre Bazin"

Back to Bazin Part III: De

la Politique des Auteurs
In "Andre Bazin"

Done Away
In "celebrity"

This entry was posted in Andre Bazin and tagged Andre Bazin, Bazin, criticism, France,
ontology, photography by Dan North. Bookmark the permalink
[https://drnorth.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/back-to-bazin-part-1-the-ontology-of-thephotographic-image/] .
15 THOUGHTS ON BACK TO BAZIN PART 1: THE ONTOLOGY OF THE PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGE

Heather MacGibbon
on 10 October, 2008 at 6:35 pm said:

I have been pondering the same issues over the last year because my
original work during my MA and PHD studies was about Documentary film
and although flawed I still love Bazin. I think that the indexicality and
meaning of the image are still important as far as spectatorship is
concerned. We believe in what seem to be photographic images even
when we know that images can be tampered with, altered, or completely
created without the idexical (chemical) process. I am interested in anyone
discussing these topics if there is a group out there doing so.
Thanks
Dr. Heather MacGibbon (NYU)
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Dan North
on 10 October, 2008 at 11:00 pm said:

Thanks, Heather. I dont know about another group, but I wouldnt mind if
a discussion started here, especially once this site gathers some
momentum (hoping that it will). Im planning a couple more Bazin posts
when I have time.
Im quite old-fashioned in that I want to have some trust in the image I
feel fairly capable of distinguishing between a manipulated image and one
which is a direct recording of something. We dont need to be suspicious
of everything we see just because its possible to deceive and fabricate.

Theres still something special going on when you know for sure that a long
take is giving you a moment of continuous performance.
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Dan North
on 11 October, 2008 at 5:10 pm said:

I should add a disclaimer that I didnt mean to use the same image on this
post as the one on Girishs blog entry about Bazin. We mustve just both
copied the same image, which is the one where Bazin looks most like a hip
French intellectual
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Carl Looper
on 21 May, 2010 at 4:01 am said:

Bazins realism has its roots in Stoic philosophy, and differs from what
Platonists meant by the Real. In a platonic world it is Forms (formulas,
ideas, classifications, structures, blueprints) that are real whereas specific
objects are just instances (copies, reproductions, images, impressions) of
the real. But for the Stoics there is a functional relationship between an
image (impression) and reality, irregardless of whether we are aware of that
relationship or not. A process shot, for example, may appear to an
observer to be an impression of a giant ape astride a skyscraper but, in
reality, it is no such thing. It is an impression of what the artists thought that
such a thing would look like. There is no functional relationship between
Platos Forms and the Stoics Impressions.

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Carl Looper
on 26 February, 2012 at 3:09 am said:

Much of contemporary media theory has forgotten how realism (and

surrealism) was not about the real as some inaccessible other beyond the
grasp of the image/effect, to which all images must therefore be
inadequate, but that the real (for want of a better word) was something
that, on the contrary, could emerge in an image, that there wasnt just a
nothing there in an otherwise mindless (mechanical) process. For the
surrealists this something (rather than nothing) was an example of what
they otherwise understood as the unconscious. The machine (automaton)
became important in such. Machines are not capable of consciousness, or
rather, the consciousness they are otherwise given (eg. a urinal behaving
as a urinal) can be disrupted, and rather than a void resulting, an
unconscious aspect can come to light (a urinal behaving as an art object),
the automatonomy of which (the machinic process of the urinals
becoming), was the beautiful thing (in addition to the disrupture). Realism
and surrealism are very closely related. The gun in the bushes of Blow Up,
represents the unconsciousness of an otherwise conscious fashion
photograph. Where surrealism might disrupt the fashion attributes of the
photo it would not disrupt the gun on the contrary it would (if it saw it)
amplify such because the gun is there when its not supposed to be there.
Realism does the same thing (would keep the gun) but otherwise maintains
the fashion codes that are in operation.
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Carl Looper
on 13 April, 2012 at 1:06 pm said:

While Bazin is probably not someone up on quantum physics, it is

nevertheless quantum physics which demonstrates an important
disjuncture between the comprehension of a real as prior to an image and

the image itself as a reality. A comprehension takes place in relation to a

given image and one may (or may not) project that comprehension as the
cause of the image. Bazin certainly leverages that formula and it is a
common understanding (or misunderstanding), that the photographic
image is an image of that which is understood to have caused the image.
But of course that is impossible. A photograph can not be the result of
ones own comprehension of it. What Bazin is tapping into is what an
incredibly weird thing photography is, or does. Trying to characterise this
weirdness is very difficult. Not even quantum physicists have worked out
how to explain the existence of a photographic image. Theyve been trying
for close to 100 years now. Literally. Sure theyll pretend its explicable, but
they really dont know. Nobody does. Not yet anyway. So what chance
does Bazin have of explaining it. But he knows there is something there.
He gets the difference between photographic images and other types of
images. He is that great advocate of the photographic image. The true
believer. And when I look at films through Bazins eyes I see an extremely
beautiful world.
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Carl Looper
on 13 April, 2012 at 1:28 pm said:

The criticism of Bazinian realism, as totalising doesnt hold. While he does

invoke some melodramatic flourishes of a destiny in the birth of
photography, the various works with which he identifies are not about the
construction of self enclosed totalities. On the contrary Bazins reality
extends as for so long as a shot survives, at which point a new reality takes
its place. The universe starting from scratch again. Where we might
comprehend continuity across the cut Bazin doesnt see it that way. When
the mother in Mallicks The Tree of life, demands God give her child back,
God recipricates, restarting the universe from scratch again. But what
occurs the second time around is not the Lord who taketh away but the
mother who giveth. She gives her child to God. In that act she becomes
the equal of God. Not that Im religious but I get it.
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Dan North
on 14 April, 2012 at 7:48 am said:

Thats a very interesting take, Carl. I suppose what I was getting it,
in exploring the objections to Bazin, is that he was, in his ontology
essays, looking for a general theory of the photographic image,
one that might explain the effect of all photographic content. When
these theories are put into practice, as you suggest, they have to
flex to take account of all the variations and modes to which film
makers can apply the apparatus.
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Carl Looper
on 15 April, 2012 at 12:12 am said:

Yes, hes attempting to genralise something that is extraor

dinarily difficult to generalise.
The ontology begins in terms of the image as an image of
reality which is where I disagree with Bazin. But where
Bazin is heading, as distinct from where hes coming, is re
ally quite open ended, remarkable and next to unthinakble
in conventional theory the image as a reality in itself, more
so than an image as of some pre-existing reality.
Bazin, like the Stoic philosophers, does not see any dis
connect between an impression (eg. death mask, finger
print, photograph) and the objects to which such can be
said to correspond.
For Bazin there is a relationship between object and pho
tographic image. But its not the one we might otherwise
assume. The relationship is one of equivalence. Literally,
not just figuratively in the same way that there is a rela
tionship of equivalence (an equation) between mass and
energy in Einsteins famous equation.
Plato, on the other hand, differentiates between an object
and its image that they are not the same thing. Plato
goes further. What is real is the Form (the formula). What is

an image, on the other hand is the Imaginary. An instance.

In Platos version of the world it is the relationship between
things that is real whereas the things themselves are not.
For example, a square / square root function is real be
cause it embodys the relationship between, for instance, 9
and 3, or (another instance), between 25 and 5. The in
stances themselves are not real. It is the Form which is real
(because eternal, universal, infinite, etc)
Now Bazin is not interested in the relationship between
shots but in the shots themselves. The shot is real whereas
the relationships between them is what the Stoics would
have contemptuously called a Universal which they de
scribes as a figment of the imagination.
The difficulty we might have with Bazin is treating the
equivalence he sees between objects and images as a fig
ure of speech, and the ontological frame of reference as
not so. But in Bazin its the other way around. Or at least
that is what Id argue.
What is at stake in both camps is not necessarily which is
preferable: the Real or the Imaginary. Both prefer the Real.
Its just that they disagree on what the word Real means.
Is it formulas or things?
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Carl Looper
on 16 April, 2012 at 11:58 pm said:

Here is my attempt to separate out the two dominate uses of the word
reality and why, if not separated, the word can have us going around in
circles.

A general understanding of the word reality is that the word refers to what
is (or is at) the origin or source of something. Let us leave this as the same
idea in all uses of the word reality.
For example, we might say that in reality a mirage is not of water on the
horizon, but something that looks like water, due to the refraction of light in
very hot air. The phrase looks like is important. It refers to the image as of
something. So when we are talking about reality in relation to a mirage
we are wanting to distinguish between the signifieds: water or hot air, and
which corresponds to reality. Now interestingly enough, what is signified
by a mirage, is actually water. We call it a mirage in order to treat the
signified: water, as misleading. If what we saw was not misleading we
would not call it a mirage.
So a mirage is simply a misleading image. Once we comprehend the
mirage as signifying not water, it is no longer a mirage, because the
image is no longer misleading.
Now a mirage/image, irregardless of whether it leads or misleads, is an
image. And in most debates the image, in itself, is not an issue. Rather, it is
in what the image signifies that is at issue: for example, water or hot air? Or
indeed, whether this should be an issue.
But how do we know a mirage is a mirage? It is, of course, knowledge and
context. We acquire knowledge that if we are in a desert (context) looking
for water and see something shimmering on the horizon, it is more than
likely well discover it was a misleading image of water, rather than a
leading image of water. Those who have discovered this out before us,
have investigated why it looks like (signifies) water, and come to the
conclusion that its due to the refraction of light in hot air. We learn this from
them, or we learn it ourselves, through investigation.
So reality in this sense, is something we come to comprehend or
understand rather than necessarily experience as such. The experience is
the image. Reality is not given in the image but through a conception. A
theoretical position. An idea. Now importantly, in this interpretation of the
word reality we can not then say an image is of reality, but rather that our
concept of reality is of the image, or rather, is a function of all sorts of
images that we have tested. From tests we create an idea of reality to
which the signified conforms or does not conform. The image itself is not
really at issue.
Now the other important use of the word reality, is in reference to the

image. This is not in dominant usage but it has historical currency and it is
the sense in which Bazin uses the word. For example, if we see a
shimmering on the horizon then this shimmering is an image. This image,
whether it signifies water (a mirage) or hot air (a reality) can be regarded
as a reality. We do not need to know (yet) what it signifies. We can
recognise it as an image, but not yet what it signifies. It can be understood
as a reality in its own right. What follows on from this type of reality, is then
our comprehension of it, which eventually contributes to the other use of
the word reality as an interpretation of the image in the context of all
interpretations and tests weve done over the years.
Carl
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Carl
on 11 September, 2012 at 10:53 am said:

Bazin, I think, taps into something Deleuze identifies.

In the Logic of Sense, Deleuze elaborates a fourth aspect of the
proposition (which the Stoics first discovered), and that others have
rediscovered at different times and epochs.
The first three components of the proposition, which are in relation to a
proposition, are:
1. Denotation. When one indicates something. There is a tree. There is a
dog peeing on the tree.
2. Manifestation. The speaker. The I. Descartes cogito. I see (and say)
that there is a dog peeing on the tree.
3. Signification. Universals. The Platonic ideal. God. The dog peeing on the
tree represents the idea of such. The mind of God.
Deleuze notes there is a circularity in the above. One can take any of these
as grounding any of the others. For example, Descartes formula is:
I think therefore I am

I (manifest) think (denotation) therefore (signification) I (manifest) am

(denotation)
One could just as easily propose:
I am therefore I think
Or more perversely:
I think I am, therefore I am, I think
So Deleuze (following the Stoics) adds a fourth relation (or expression): to
break the circularity
4. Sense. The effect.
Sense is incorporeal (not existing). An effect. But in a reversal of Platonism,
Deleuze, following the Stoics, moves Ideas (relation 3) out of the domain of
causes (fundamentals), and into this domain of effects (relation 4). Ideas
become effects. And Sense (or nonsense) will be where ideas will now
*become* such, rather than exist as such. The idea no longer exists. It
becomes.
Sense becomes the domain of logic and dialectics, but now as an effect.
As superficial. But we are to take ownership of this word superficial. It
has no depth but it has breadth. Its also impersonal. Its not a cause. It is
not the world. It is not the I that speaks. It is not God. Its an effect. Not a
cause.
Now it is this effect (of impersonal Sense) that Bazin is aiming at when he
otherwise uses the words objective, real, etc.
I think :)
Carl
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on 11 September, 2012 at 11:44 am said:

I should add that Deleuze doesnt read Bazin in quite the same way I am.
In Deleuze, Bazin is is definitely on the side of Deleuzean Sense, but he is
positioned as involved in more of an embryonic sense (the seeds of sense).
Deleuze uese the term organic in relation to Bazins sense.
Carl
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Daniel Chavez Moran

on 10 April, 2013 at 4:02 am said:

Appreciate this post. Let me try it out.

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