So far, the difference between standard and revised models of Bazin’s realism has had to do with his description and analysis of canonical realist films. If this were all, it might be possible to suitably modify the standard reading. But there are deeper issues here. On the one hand, we have Bazin’s commitment to the realism of film as following from the ontology of the photographic image. On the other, we have a variety of styles that require an account that shows how and in what way Bazin thinks of them as realist.
These are styles like Bresson’s spiritualism and the Vasiliev brothers’ Marx-ism that seem not to be predicated on a relation to visual or even physical reality. The task is to devise an account of how Bazin uses realism that ac-counts for both aspects of the term.
The standard reading can resolve this tension in one of two ways. The simplest is to ignore the moments when Bazin discusses “realist” styles that do not fit the conditions of direct or perceptual realism. But this leaves too much of Bazin’s critical work unaccounted for.
The other option is to deny that considerations of ontology are central to Bazin’s realism. This has at least the virtue of intellectual honesty. A so-phisticated version of this position will note that Bazin himself insists on the connection between ontology and style but will argue that it is a theo-retical mistake to do so and that his arguments about various films and stylistic movements are best understood apart from the ontological consid-erations (see C, p. 45).65Henderson has made the most extensive argument in this regard, dividing Bazin’s work between systems of ontology and
criti-66. See also Staiger, “Theorist, Yes, but What Of ?” p. 107.
67. Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge, 1969), p. 257. Other places where Cavell develops the idea of acknowledgment include Cavell, “The
cism (and then, within the latter field, between ontological and historical criticism). Henderson tries to show that, when examined, the two systems turn out to be irreconcilable and that the range of Bazin’s criticism does not follow from or respond to the ontological arguments. He writes, “The his-tory system involves far more complex, multifaceted judgments; as a struc-ture 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).
The advantage of Henderson’s account is that it is able to cover the range of styles that Bazin calls realist. He writes, “it is not the term ‘realism’ itself, but how Bazin qualifies that term that is the center of the critical act. Realism becomes the name of the problem to be solved, a kind of x. . . . Realism is Bazin’s touchstone or basic critical concept; but it remains in itself a blank or open term” (C, p. 45).66Certainly, the openness of realism is the feature of Bazin’s argument that is usually ignored by the standard reading.
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). Second, the ab-sence of the role of ontology comes at a cost. The trouble is not simply exegetical. The ontology of the photographic image is central to the pro-ductive tension between style and reality that lies at the heart of Bazin’s understanding of realism. Bazin writes, “To define a film style, it is always necessary to come back to the dialectic between reality and abstraction, be-tween the concrete and the ideal” (JR, p. 84). It is only by paying attention to the relation between style and ontology that we can discern why Bazin thinks certain films to be realist in the first place.
The initial definition of realism given above involved a film constructing a style that gives a meaning or significance to the physical reality it presents, turning it into facts. I’ve described this process in a set of loose phrases: the film “responds to,” “takes into account,” or “takes an attitude towards” the reality of objects in the images. I want to collect these under the general heading of acknowledgment, a concept that allows us to link the two aspects of realism together: its ontological foundation and its aesthetic variety.
The idea of acknowledgment is developed in Stanley Cavell’s early work.
In contrast to simply knowing something, for example, that someone is in pain, acknowledging involves actually doing something with that knowl-edge, responding to it in some way. Cavell writes, “Acknowledgment goes beyond knowledge. (Goes beyond not, so to speak, in the order of knowl-edge, but in its requirement that I do something or reveal something on the basis of that knowledge.)”67Cavell leaves the terms of this acknowledgment
Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” Must We Mean What We Say? pp. 267–353 and The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford, 1979), pp. 329–496.
68. Michael Fried, “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons,” Art and Objecthood (Chicago, 1998), pp. 78, 88. It is a running subtext of this section that the terms of modernist criticism, including those that came out of the writings of Clement Greenberg, can be of help in explaining the work of an ostensible realist like Bazin. Another direction this essay could take would be to show how Bazin offers us a more nuanced and compelling picture of such central modernist ideas as medium specificity and reflexivity.
69. Fried glosses “deep convention” as that aspect of a painting without which “the enterprise of painting would have to change so drastically that nothing more than the name would remain”
(Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Art and Objecthood, p. 169 n. 6).
open, a troubling feature for a concept that is supposed to be foundational for ethical practice (sadism, for example, could be seen as relying on a per-verse acknowledgement of another’s pain). But what makes it problematic for ethics is exactly what is of value for aesthetics. The open-endedness of acknowledgment means that it avoids being defined as a particular set of terms, emphasizing instead the process by which a relation between style and reality is generated. It doesn’t specify the content of the relation so much as the specific mechanism that produces it.
Michael Fried has provided the most extensive application of acknowl-edgment 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. Fried notes that, for artists such as Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, “the continuing problem of how to acknowledge the literal character of the support—of what counts as that acknowledg-ment—has been at least as crucial to the development of modernist painting as the fact of its literalness.”68The nature of the medium becomes the basis for the artwork; the work of the artist is to figure out the appropriate way, given the particular situation of the artwork (in a tradition, in a society), of acknowledging it.
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. Recall Bazin’s claim that an object in a photograph is ontologically identical to the object in the world (how-ever murky this idea may be). This is the basic feature of photographic me-dia, their “deep convention.”69A film, if it is to be realist, must construct a style that counts as an acknowledgment of the reality conveyed through its photographic base; it must do something, in some way or other, with this knowledge of its medium. But what it does is left open for individual films to achieve. In the acknowledgment, a film produces a particular reading (an articulation or interpretation) of the reality in the photograph, thereby generating what Bazin, in his discussion of neorealism, calls a fact (a social fact, a political or moral fact, a spiritual fact, an existential fact, and so on).
70. The failure to see this distinction leads to criticisms like the following assertion: “Reality, if one reads Bazin carefully, sheds very quickly its material shell and is ‘elevated’ to a purely metaphysical (one could justifiably call it a theological ) sphere” (James MacBean, Film and Revolution [Bloomington, Ind., 1975], p. 102).
71. Fried, “Jules Olitski,” Art and Objecthood, p. 146 n. 12.
This argument requires a distinction in the way Bazin talks about reality that is implicit, though not overt, in his writings. On the one hand, there is the brute or physical reality of objects in a photograph. On the other, there is what the film takes as its reality, which is already the result of the ac-knowledgment of physical reality. It is the latter use of reality that I have used the term fact to denote. The facts created in the acknowledgment can pertain to an understanding of social reality (Renoir), or they can dem-onstrate a certain feature about the world and one’s existence in it (Ros-sellini). The kinds of facts developed, the second level of reality, are the forms the acknowledgment (of physical reality) takes—this is the mecha-nism underlying Bazin’s theory of realism.70
The framework of acknowledgment allows us to see that Bazin’s refusal to define “the real” is not, as Henderson argues, a crucial failing for realism but its greatest strength (C, p. 18). It leaves the stylistic resources of realism open, despite the grounding in the ontology of the photographic image. We cannot determine from contemplation of the medium itself what a realist style can be. Nor is it the case that there is only one fact that can be acknowledged by a given artwork, or only one way of doing the edging. As Fried notes, “what, in a given instance, will count as acknowl-edgment remains to be discovered, to be made out.”71The task is to discover, from looking at a film, what it is that its style is acknowledging—what it takes the fact of the film to be—and whether that involves doing something with the knowledge of its ontological foundation. Satisfying the latter con-dition brings the film under the general heading of realism; the form an acknowledgment takes specifies its kind of realism.
One of the strengths of the revised model of realism is its ability to cope with films that go beyond the film/reality correspondence of the standard reading. Take Bazin’s description of the final image of Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, a white background with the black outline of a cross and a text being read over it (fig. 3). He writes, “the screen, free of images and handed back to literature, is the triumph of cinematographic realism”
(“SRB,” 1:141). There seems to be a paradox here. Given the ontology of the photographic image, how are we to make sense of his claim that the lack of images, the very absence of physical reality, is the “triumph” of realism?
Bazin’s argument, as I understand it, is twofold. First, the realism of the shot (and the film) involves the problem of showing spiritual grace or
tran-figure3. Journal d’un cure´ de campagne, dir. Robert Bresson (1951).
72. Describing another film’s “phenomenology of sainthood,” he writes of its “refusal not only to treat sainthood as anything but a fact, an event occurring in the world, but also to consider it from any point of view other than the external one. [The filmmaker] looks at sainthood from the outside, as the ambiguous manifestation of a spiritual reality that is absolutely impossible to prove” (Bazin, “A Saint Becomes a Saint Only after the Fact,” Bazin at Work, p. 208). See also Bazin, “Cinema and Theology” and “La Strada,” Bazin at Work, pp. 61–72, 113–20. Bazin describes Bresson’s film as a “phenomenology of salvation and grace” (“SRB,” 1:136).
73. See Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” pp. 263–64. A similar understanding of the use of negation occurs in Adorno’s remarks on Michelangelo Antonioni’s La notte (1961). See Theodor W. Adorno, “Transparencies on Film,” in The Culture Industry, ed. J. M. Bernstein (New York, 1991), p. 180.
scendence on film. Bazin is explicit, throughout his career, that genuinely religious cinema will not show this in visual terms, since grace does not have a physical manifestation. No external criteria can determine who is a saint and who isn’t. Thus, since film is indelibly connected to the physical, Bazin will argue that the spiritual existence Bresson is interested in cannot be shown; as an inner state, it cannot take exterior form.72What Bresson does, as Bazin sees it, is give us this spiritual state, and at the same time acknowl-edge the ontology of the medium, by negating the visual dimension of the image. Because negation is not simple denial but a moment in a dialectic that implies the existence of the term being negated, there is still a relation to the physical reality (despite the absence of filmed images). Negation is not incompatible with acknowledgement.73Bazin writes, “The black cross
74. I take Bazin’s qualification as a way to avoid a regress to an antecedent reality. One might think that, since the novel resembles reality, for the film to be faithful to the text it must reproduce the look of the world. By placing emphasis on “style,” Bazin makes it clear that the film takes the text qua text as its reality.
75. Another example would be Soviet cinema. Although Bazin sometimes criticizes it for a lack of realism, he tends to describe it as being realist prior to whatever film he is discussing at the moment. In “The Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema,” for example, he argues that realism does not fail until films are made in which Stalin’s screen presence violates the basic canons of a Marxist analysis. Bazin opposes an authentic Marxist cinema, for which he coins the term “historico-materialist realism,” to the films in which Stalin is presented as having “traits of omniscience and infallibility” (Bazin, “The Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema,” p. 29). Films in a Soviet realist tradition (Bazin gives Chapayev [1934] as an example) concern themselves with the relation between individuals and history. See Bazin, “The Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema,” pp. 23–40.
For a similar argument about the role of the individual in a socialist realist film, see Sergei Eisenstein, Beyond the Stars: The Memoirs of Sergei Eisenstein, trans. William Powell, ed. Richard Taylor, vol. 4 of Eisenstein, Selected Works (London, 1995), pp. 751–71.
on the white screen, as awkwardly drawn as on the average memorial card, the only trace left by the ‘assumption’ on the image, is a witness to some-thing the reality of which is itself but a sign” (“SRB,” 1:141). In the moment of the priest’s transcendence (becoming a saint, as it were), Bresson turns physical reality itself into a mere sign, suggesting that what is happening is something that cannot be shown; it is spiritual, not of this world.
Second, Bazin argues that the film is not just about the inner salvation of a priest but about the relation of film to literature—the screen is “handed back to literature”—specifically the Bernanos novel on which it is based.
He writes, “In this case the reality is not the descriptive content, moral or intellectual, of the text—it is the very text itself, or more properly, the style”
(“SRB,” 1:136). In saying that the film takes the text itself to be reality, Bazin depends on the distinction I’ve argued for: an adapted text does not have physical reality in the film—in this case, it seems like a metaphysicalentity—
but is a part of second-order reality (a fact). To make this explicit, Bazin qualifies himself and says that the reality that has to do with the text is not brute reality but the reality of the style, that is, the already interpreted re-ality.74Bresson enacts a “dialectic between fidelity and creation. . . . It is a question of building a secondary work with the novel as foundation. . . . It is a new aesthetic creation, the novel so to speak multiplied by cinema”
(“SRB,” 1:141–42). By negating the image and retaining the voice, Bresson articulates the prominence of word over image and thus novel over film.
In order to make sense of this and similar discussions in Bazin’s work,75 realism cannot be a limited and closed set of styles. What is at work is a relation between style and reality, but this can take many forms. Even films, like Diary of a Country Priest, that depend on a nonvisual style still ac-knowledge, by way of negation, the physical reality that objects in a pho-tographic image have. With Hitchcock (a filmmaker he isn’t fond of), Bazin
76. Bazin, “The Man Who Knew Too Much—1956,” The Cinema of Cruelty, p. 166.
77. Ibid.
argues that the narrative itself is taken to be part of the basic material of the world: “It is not merely a way of telling a story, but a kind of a priori vision of the universe, a predestination of the world for certain dramatic connec-tions.”76Hitchcock’s work concerns how best to establish a relation to this stuff, to make it explicit (to acknowledge) that the film is about the way in which the story is told, the dramatic movement itself. Hence the importance of suspense. Hitchcock is described as a purveyor of a “light realism,” with a delicacy of touch that serves as a counterpoint for the metaphysical status of narrative.77
Bazin’s conception of realism opens up the wide range of ways in which physical reality is caught up in and mixed with rational, discursive, and spir-itual facts (and the styles that generate them). If we apply his definition of neorealism to his own theory, we might say that realism, for Bazin, is not a noun, not any one thing, but an open set of styles that fall under a general heading because of a shared mode of approach: a way of interpreting, in acknowledgment, reality.