What Cinema Is! E-Book

Dudley Andrew

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Manifestos
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 284

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

What Cinema Is! offers an engaging answer to Andre Bazin's famous question, exploring his 'idea of cinema' with a sweeping look back at the near century of Cinema's phenomenal ascendancy.

• Written by one of the foremost film scholars of our time
• Establishes cinema's distinction from the current enthusiasm over audio-visual entertainment, without relegating cinema to a single, older mode
• Examines cinema's institutions and its social force through the qualities of key films
• Traces the history of an idea that has made cinema supremely alive to (and in) our times

Leseprobe

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Prologue THE TARGET OF FILM THEORY

Chapter 1 THE CAMERA SEARCHING IN THE WORLD

Is a Camera Essential?

The Cahiers Axiom

Tracing Bazin’s Trace

Images Contested Today

Notes

Chapter 2 THE EDITOR’S DISCOVERY OF FORM

Bazin’s Forerunners

Documentaries in the Cauldron of History

The Cahiers Line

Pursuing Cinema in the Twenty-First Century

Notes

Chapter 3 THE PROJECTOR AS SPECTATOR’S SEARCHLIGHT

The Power of Projection

Opening the Screen’s Dimensions

Frame as Threshold

Writing out of the Frame

Notes

Chapter 4 THE EVOLUTION OF THE SUBJECTS OF CINEMA

Modern Film: Between Classic and Avant-Garde

The Ontogeny of Cinema

Credits and Auteurs: An Ecology of Adaptation

Fidelity: The Economy of Adaptation

Notes

INDEX

This edition first published 2010

© 2010 Dudley Andrew

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To David Bromwich and Francesco Casetti

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book came out of seminars I offered in Yale’s Film Studies doctoral program. The participants over the past five years know their share in its design and, like it or not, in its argument. We had fervent discussions about what cinema has been and might, in their lifetimes, be. I know they profited – though not nearly as much as I – from reading and meeting Garrett Stewart, Mary Ann Doane, David Rodowick, Vivian Sobchack, David Bordwell, Fredric Jameson, Yuri Tzivian, James Lastra, Phil Rosen, Robert Ray, Christian Keathley, Tom Gunning, and Edward Branigan. They profited even more from my colleagues who have made Yale’s young program so vibrant. My ideas were sharpened in long conversations with many of these, especially Francesco Casetti, Noa Steimatsky, John Mackay, Charles Musser, Brigitte Peucker, and David Joselit. Toronto has been this book’s second city. It came together in 2004 at the University of Toronto’s Humanities Center, where Charlie Keil organized an intensive seminar with a half-dozen gifted students. And it came to a close in 2009 at York University, where Temenuga Trifonova invited me to test my chapters in an ideal intellectual climate. In preparing all these seminars, the ideas that came to mean most to me were born in excited dialogue with Angela Dalle Vacche, and in steady exchanges with James Tweedie, Nataša Ďurovičová, Daniel Morgan, Prakash Younger, and Louis Schwartz. And then there is Thomas Elsaesser, constantly perceptive, invariably brilliant at Yale and around the world. Scholarly interchange should always be so abundant and rewarding.

A great many French scholars have taught me by example as much as by argument the significance of more than one line of film theory: Raymond Bellour, Roger Odin, Jacques Aumont, Michele Lagny, Marc Vernet, Michel Marie, and Philippe Dubois. Years ago, Jean Narboni encouraged my work on Bazin, as did André Labarthe. It has been wonderful to keep up with them. Their presence reminds me of the absence of Janine Bazin, who was a dear friend. I’m sad not to be able to send her what I’ve written. I thank everyone at Cahiers du cinéma, where I frequently barged in to breathe its tradition and to talk with Claudine Paquot, Emmanuel Burdeau, and Jean-Michel Frodon, who staunchly carried on and extended that tradition even as the journal’s ownership was changing underfoot. May it persist and continue to contribute to France’s peerless film culture. Happily I run into Jean-Michel around the world, including New Haven where, thanks to Delphine Selles and Sandrine Butteau at New York’s French Cultural Services, he has been accompanied more than once by Arnaud Desplechin, whose films I admire even more after having heard him hold forth so profoundly about Bazin, Truffaut, and Daney. My largest debt by far is to Hervé Joubert-Laurencin for his contribution to what we know of Bazin and how we will think of him tomorrow. I owe to him not only many of the notions at the heart of this book, but the ambition to search for a more elusive Bazin, and then to read him against the pious norms of the past, and for all he’s worth. That quest has taken me to many places and to many films, and it has done so over many years – though still not enough – with Stephanie.

I was invited to pre-test some of these ideas at several institutions. Let me single out memorable discussions at Pittsburgh with Colin MacCabe, at Stanford with Scott Bukatman and Pavle Levi, at Concordia with Martin Lefebvre, at Vanderbilt with Sam Gurgis, and at Cambridge with David Trotter.

Versions of sections from this book have appeared in print as follows: Film Quarterly, 57(3) and 61(4); Cinémas, 17(2); Cinema Limina (Chicago: Udine, 2007).

The book cover from Republic of Images, by Alan Williams, appears courtesy of Harvard University Press; copyright © by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. The book cover from French Cinema: From Its Beginnings to the Present, by Rémi Fournier Lanzoni, is reprinted by permission of Continuum; copyright © 2004 by the Continuum International Publishing Group.

Dudley Andrew

Prologue

THE TARGET OF FILM THEORY

The essence of a thing never appears at the outset but in the middle, in the course of its development, when its strength is assured.

—G. Deleuze, Cinema I1

What is Cinema? Let Me Show You!

Such is the haughty charge of this “manifesto,” a charge I’d love to execute with a plethora of examples. After all, Bazin’s quest took the form of 2,600 articles that “reviewed,” in the full sense of that term, about a huge number of movies of all sorts. But this book has another mission, so that even were there space enough I’d still not hold up many movies, since not any title pulled from the teeming thousands that flow through projectors every year will do; not every roll of photographed celluloid belongs to the category “cinema” as it makes sense to me to define it.

Naturally, it is all a matter of definition. So let me be forthright: the cinema came into its own around 1910 and it began to doubt its constitution sometime in the late 1980s. I’m not the one to send out this tardy birth-announcement; Edgar Morin did that in 1956 in Cinema: Or the Imaginary Man when he headed a chapter “Metamorphosis of the Cinematographe into Cinema.”2 Morin was actually expanding on Andre Malraux’ intuition in his 1940 “Sketch for a Psychology of Cinema” that effectively distinguished the presentational attractions produced by the Lumiere’s invention from the representations constructed through an articulation of shots that involve the spectator but seem independent of him or her.3 In 1983, Gilles Deleuze would apologize for Henri Bergson’s 1908 dismissal of the apparatus by insisting that the philosopher had considered only thecinématographe and had not yet felt the difference of cinema, which soon emerged as a complete mutation.4 Deleuze fashioned his astounding catalogue of types of films, making gargantuan claims for the art’s prowess, just when digital processes were first imported into studio production practices and when videotapes had begun to alter distribution and exhibition. After Deleuze, another mutation, grossly labeled “new media,” has put the cinema’s vaunted regency in question, to say the least.

Traditional film studies is indeed on the defensive, for the “idea of cinema” is changing underneath us. Young scholars, hedging their bets on the future, compile bibliographies concerning “The Decay and Death of Cinema”; they draw lessons from Siegfried Zielinski’s sassily titledAudiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History.5 Might cinema have already undergone an irremediable transformation, being so sensitive to changes in technology and culture (more so than, say, the novel)? Even were this the case, I take cinema to be privileged within the spectrum of audiovisual phenomena. This preamble aims to clear some of the clutter of ideas left in the wake of the digital tidal wave. Then I can sketch a film aesthetic that owes nothing to the digital, though it can coexist with and profit from new technologies. In fact, the digital is not really in question in this book so much as the “discourse of the digital,” some of which would arrogantly de-center or surpass mere cinema.

I do not mean to alienate devotees of post-film or of precinema, by urging that we grasp what cinema thought of itself when its identity and prowess went unquestioned, when it achieved, and then expanded upon, a mature sense of its place and possibilities. One can reference and enjoy the distinctiveness of the vast variety of forms going under the names “early cinema” and “new media,” while nevertheless tightening down on what the cinema became in its heyday and, as I will argue, remains. So, displaying neither nostalgia nor retreat, let’s keep the standard canon in sight, the bull’s-eye of a target made up of a series of concentric rings. The movies that developed a solid shape after World War I, and reigned for 70 years as the world’s most popular and vibrant artform, boldly stand out to be viewed and reviewed. What other candidate might Zielinski identify as an “entr’acte in history” except the broad-shouldered feature that, in his view, has stood too long in the doorway, blocking other media? What else do critics have in mind when they say the cinema is in decay except feature films as we have known and studied them?

Of course there have been other types of films exemplifying “ideas of cinema” different from this dominant one. What shall we call the products of the medium’s first decade, when the word “inventor” applied not just to those filing patents but to the artisans who turned out films and the entrepreneurs who funded them and found (or built) audiences? However named, the medium developed in relation to journalistic, entertainment, scientific, and even spiritual practices, each of which affected nascent filmmaking and viewing in its own way. “The Cinema of Attractions” identifies an idea of cinema hovering over this period. It includes and organizes certain uses of technology, certain practices of filmmakers and exhibitors, not to mention the habits and dispositions of spectators apparent in accounts provided by reporters and cultural commentators; it even, indeed especially, includes protocols and laws established to regulate this new phenomenon.

Since it was advanced in the mid-1980s, “The Cinema of Attractions” has become a powerful and distinct idea of cinema. For better and for worse, the splendid variety embraced by this particular idea was gradually replaced by, or channeled into, a normalized fictional mode and then into the “Classic (or Studio) System,”an idea applying not just to an integrated industry of entertainment, but to a conception of that industry’s polished product, the feature film. Whether coming out of one of the eight Hollywood studios or produced anywhere in the world after the fashion of the “movies as usual,” classic cinema dominated the interwar years; indeed, it represented the norm long after that (and remains on offer in a good share of the screens at our multiplexes today). But by 1965 anyone deeply interested in cinema recognized the limitations of the classic conception. Even in the 1930s and 1940s plenty of “unusual” films competed with standard fare, often backed by the political or aesthetic ideas of independent producers or institutions of the state. With increasing insistence, they asked: How should films function in society? How should they be made and seen; how should they look and sound? From the 1920s right up to the New Wave, such questions were answered by both brash and discreet alternatives that veered away from a norm whose presence nonetheless was felt to be dominant, if not inevitable.

Throughout the prime era of the studio system, the strongest alternative ideas of cinema, aside from animation, survived in nonnarrative modes: the documentary, the avant-garde, the short subject, as well as in the educational, industrial, and amateur film. All these modes, and the expansive ideas concerning cinema’s uses and powers that they put in play, force a comprehensive view of the medium, as they stake out territory we can plot in concentric circles at varying distances from the bull’s-eye of the feature. Here we follow André Bazin, who may have been impressed by “the genius of the system” and who wrote copiously on Chaplin, Preston Sturges, and William Wyler, not to mention the western, but who felt equally compelled to promote animation (McLaren), archival compilations (Paris 1900), and the bizarre scientific shorts of Jean Painleve. Still, the institutionalized critical legacy surrounding the feature film has caused the most heated and robust debates in film theory, no doubt because of the social consequences of its ubiquity, its easy crossover to the aesthetics of the novel and theater, as well as its ties to a worldwide entertainment market.

Such debates, whether triggered by ideas coming from within the realm of the fiction film or challenged by modes that circle outside it, have made cinema studies among the liveliest sites in the humanities for the past half-century. The prospect of the decline of those debates is more worrisome than the putative mutation of their topic. For our increasingly seasoned understanding of how the movies have functioned, and how they came to function this way, can guide the study of whatever “audiovisions” attract our attention, whether those that preexisted the movies or those being born this new century. Like the general public, scholars and intellectuals have been drawn to narrative cinema because of its sheer quantitative bulk, because of its psycho-social effects, and because of the ingenious efforts of those who sought to alter its course from within or from without. Many of the best minds in the humanities have taken detours from their literary, philosophical, sociocultural, or historical pursuits to account for the most imposing medium of the twentieth century. They have produced often complex, ingenious, and passionate arguments and positions. They have produced a way of thinking, have cultivated an instinct of looking and listening. Even if much of what has been written could be discarded without real loss, this discourse – this drive to understand the workings of the fiction film – is precious. To have this subsumed by some larger notion of the history of audiovisions, to have it dissipate into the foggy field of cultural studies, say, or become one testing ground among others for communication studies, would be to lose something whose value has always derived from the intensity and the focus that films invite and sometimes demand.

The emergence of the digital encouraged Zielinski and others to lift their sights from standard cinema as the chief target of what has gone under the name of film studies. Indeed, the academic profession appears disoriented, at least momentarily, as questions of new media and of digital processes have sidelined or preempted other theoretical topics in journals and at conferences. A new set of conceptions has arisen at every level, from production to spectatorship. Rather than support or decry millennial proclamations about the complete transformation of the mediasphere, let’s use the occasion of cinema’s undeniable digital inflection to rethink the art’s past and its potential.

Today’s audiences assume that filmmakers completely structure audiovisual experience, encouraging the notion that movies have always been nothing other than a suite of special effects, “the cinema effect,” as Sean Cubitt titles his ambitious book.6 This is the view that Lev Manovich forthrightly proposes; for him, films are instruments that serve two purposes, “To Lie and To Act.”7 Posed this way, cinema articulates perfectly with political and social history, wherein films, as “machines of the visible,”8 are deployed either to structure pre-designed representations that are inevitably misleading (“biased,” we used to say) or to engender direct and calculated viewer response.

I mean to advance quite a different idea of cinema, one that is in accord with the title of neither Cubitt’s nor Manovich’s texts: cinema is not, or has not always been, a primarily special effects medium. The films some of us most care about – and consider central to the enterprise of cinema in toto – have a mission quite other than lying or agitating: they aim to discover, to encounter, to confront, and to reveal. If anything is endangered by the newly digitalized audiovisual culture, it is a taste for the encounters such voyages of discovery can bring about. Apparently, many today feel that the world and the humans who inhabit it have been sufficiently discovered, that no new revelations await, at least not in a medium dominated by entertainment and advertising.

Ironically, it was in the service of advertising that several of the first great voyages of cinematic discovery set off. Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922) was sponsored by a fur company, and Black Journey (La Croisière noire; Léon Poirier, 1924) by Citroën. As filmmakers always have, Flaherty and Poirier controlled and manipulated their materials for effect, but they did so in a more or less visible contest wherein recorded images and sounds put up a certain resistance, creating an expressive and significant friction that I am determined to register. Edgar Morin insisted on just this: that while all the arts project our dreams and desires, cinema is unique in doing so through the material world itself, or, more precisely, through a double of that world. Hence all films are uncanny evocations, partly – but only partly – belonging to us. This tension between the human and the alien, between the personal and the foreign, while exploited in all periods and in countless modes and genres, came increasingly into play during and after World War II, right up to the many New Waves of the 1960s, when it is abundantly evident.

Jacques Aumont encourages me to zero in: “1945–1960 is incontestably the richest period from the point of view of the history of ideas about the cinematographic art.”9 I plan, in fact, to dip back somewhat earlier than this and I will certainly carry this era’s discoveries through to their consequences in our own day; but Aumont has it right: this postwar period, over which Andre Bazin exercised his generous rule, deepened cinema’s conscience and self-consciousness, while expanding its cultural sway until it stood proudly with the other arts, a resource for philosophers, theorists, sociologists, and anyone concerned with the human situation in modernity.

The idea of cinema best articulated by Bazin applies to all sorts of films, genres, and modes, and in all periods. Still, prime examples that self-consciously display this idea leap to mind, like Nanook of the North . . . and like The 400 Blows (Les Quatre cent coups, 1959), which was dedicated to Bazin. Stepping outside the studio system, indeed stepping outside the studio, The 400 Blows, as well as its young hero, is in search of discovery itself. In one emblematic sequence, Antoine Doinel, playing hooky with his “classmate,” wanders into an amusement park where he enters a human centrifuge. Incarnating Doinel but being himself, JeanPierre Leaud is flattened against the side of the rotor. This boy – not yet an actor – spread-eagled as a spectacle before us, seems pinned and powerless, yet exhibits pure sensation on a ride that spins like a zoetrope as it animates him. A reverse field shot shows the world as he sees it, the camera hugging the wall, turned upside down and whirling at a mighty rate. A dizzy Léaud staggers from the cylinder’s doorway, followed by Francois Truffaut, whom we glimpse in cameo, the boy’s compatriot or big brother, more than his director. In the end, Léaud – this anonymous boy picked out of a pack of others in the summer of 1958 – will be spun from this ride out to the end of the land, where he turns to stare down Truffaut and the spectator in a final freeze frame. The film fades out on the close-up of a kid who got his education on the streets, confronting the world and confronting us. He will not be entirely manipulated by the “director” nor fully known by us.

Pure sensations of a boy. The 400 Blows.

Let Léaud’s 14-year-old face serve as an icon of cinema’s ambiguity, a record of our shadowy encounter with a genuine boy playing a role in a story projected onto the Paris of 50 years ago. The freeze frame, the mechanical intermittency of the cylinder, and the director’s fugitive appearance, all lift The 400 Blows to an abstract level at odds with both the realism of its images (boy and city) and the story it puts in play. This is a film about the prospects of cinema as much as about the prospects of Jean-Pierre Leaud, whose life would never be the same. It is the record of the difficulties and joys of filming as well as the difficulties and the joys of adolescence, the moment when youth separates from parent. In a touching and symbolic coincidence, Bazin died on November 11, 1958, the day shooting on The 400 Blows commenced. Truffaut raced to be with his mentor and foster father as he slipped away. A film that has always been read as autobiographical is also a film about the idea of cinema that Bazin stood for and passed on to the son.

In another self-conscious moment, Léaud and his friend duck into the movies, then return later to the theater and rip from the wall an advertising still of the alluring Harriet Andersson, playing Monika in Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika (Sommaren med Monika, 1953). For Truffaut and all the critics clustering around Cahiers du cinéma in its first years, Monika was an icon of liberated sexuality, and Bergman of liberated filmmaking. Drawn to the same film, Godard said that Bazin had taught him how to catch, and then fathom, the exquisite complicity between actress and spectator unavailable in classic cinema. Harriet Andersson slyly nods to us, like Giulietta Masina at the end of The Nights of Cabiria (Le Notti di Cabiria; Fellini, 1957) and, let me add, like Jean-Paul Belmondo early on in Breathless (A Bout de souffle, Godard, 1960).

Bazin evidently approved of the adolescent fantasy of performer coming out of role, almost leaving the screen, to interact directly with adoring spectator. But let’s not too quickly disparage adolescence, a period of questioning and self-consciousness. Bazin and Godard understood the actor to be both person and character, alive not just inside the fictional world but as a human being present to the spectator. Self-consciousness does not undercut fiction (at least not necessarily), but allows us to see the spark that jumps from the world to the work. “To reinvent the cinema,” “to film as if for the first time”: such a mantra could be recited only by those who knew the history of the cinema by heart, and the New Wave directors, who were schooled at the Cinémathèque française, proudly constituted themselves as the first generation to possess such knowledge. Self-consciousness was taken paradoxically to be a condition for the re-enchantment of cinema.

An actress comes out of role. The Nights of Cabiria.

Léaud’s unpredictability, his saucy ingenuity, expresses the cinémania alive at Cahiers. This attitude, let us call it an ethic, has been thought to characterize French cinema in toto, so much so that the famous frozen frame of The 400 Blows stares out from the cover of the standard history of that national cinema.10 As Alan Williams, the author of that history, explicitly understood, adolescence is a period of maturation as well as of rebellion and libido. The exuberance of the New Wave shows off the growth spurt the medium had experienced in its enlarged self-conception after World War II. For the camera began to stray outside familiar territory and to confront an often shocking world; it strayed, as adolescents do, from entrenched norms, from the cinéma du papa that had shielded French youth from real sex, real death, real history. Meeting Monika’s gaze in the theater, then audaciously stealing her image, taking it home to fetishize it, may seem a puerile gesture; but it is a gesture of encounter whose value can lead to discovery and sometimes to confrontation. This is the value whose line of flight forms the arc of this book.

A searching cinema.

An enticing cinema.

***

While this arc aims to involve cinema at all times and everywhere, for convenience and clarity I make it pass mainly over France, the noisiest forum for debate of competing ideas of cinema, the nation with the most film journals, the widest spectrum of films on offer, and arguably the deepest penetration of the art into the culture at large. Also for convenience and clarity I draw on ripe examples, such as – repeatedly – Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain (Jeunet, 2001). How can I avoid Amélie, whose winsome face adorns the cover of an up-to-date survey of French film,11 competing with Alan Williams’ in a duel of iconic images. Amélie’s director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, boasts an updated idea of cinema, explicitly rejecting that of the New Wave, and drawing fire from Cahiers in the process. Whereas Truffaut discovered Léaud in a cattle call of street urchins, Jeunet, like thousands of others, spied Audrey Tautou posing on a billboard above the Place Clichy.12 This simple, though telltale opposition will lead to countless others that altogether deliver not just two very different films, but two competing ideas of cinema that face off today in Paris and around the world.

By idea, I mean an overriding conception that can be felt at every level of the film phenomenon. The decisions made by producers always have some tacit conception at their base; usually this coincides with what audiences understand their experience to be, or what it should be. Modes (fiction, documentary, animation) and genres (science fiction, docu-drama, anime) instantiate an idea of cinema. So too do critics, blogs, and casual conversations among friends as they discuss what they have seen, calling on, if not articulating, the values at stake. James Lastra has shown how, at the birth of motion pictures and again in the transition to sound, inventors, producers, and critics held ideas that did not quite overlap.13 The same is doubtless true in our transition to the digital. Still, throughout these transitions, and across the entire history of the medium’s existence, cinema has raised (and sometimes pressed) a claim about realism that no other art before it could make. Of all who have ever thought deeply about this claim, Bazin best recognized the way it displaced, or could displace, human domination of the natural and social world we inhabit, the world ostensible in movies. The strategies he is famous for promoting, such as long take, deep-focus photography, and the values promised by such techniques and styles (revelation of the overlooked, ambiguity, the uncanny) do not exhaust what this idea makes possible. Every era finds its cinema already caught in a network of particular technologies, techniques, styles, and genres; Bazin’s idea of cinema applies beyond the postwar network. I take seriously one of his most quoted phrases, “In short, the cinema has not yet been invented.” To track the way its past leads to its future was Bazin’s “quest,” concentrated in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? I take this as a “charge” not to be forsaken in an era very different from that of 1958, when Bazin laid it down. Even if the “cinema’s existence precedes its essence,” so that Bazin would never have credited an answer to his question, or have accepted my deliberately provocative title, we may still say something essential about it. And so let’s say this: that in whatever manifestation or period, real cinema has a relation to the real.

***

In order to discover, and then to encounter, this forceful idea of cinema, I propose an excursion into a field that has already been staked out and partially cultivated by traditional film theory. Whereas literary criticism can be bisected into ideas about texts on one side and ideas about reading on the other, film theory has tended to break into three areas of inquiry corresponding to the three phases, or moments, of transformation by which any film comes into being: recording, composing, and screening. Each phase can be associated with its chief dedicated apparatus: the camera, the movieola (editing bench), and the projector. The recent agony of film theory, if not of cinema itself, can be blamed on the modification, updating, or mothballing of each of these pieces of equipment, with twenty-first century digital technology supplanting what is effectively nineteenth century machinery. The digital is thought to perfect whatever operations its analog or manual predecessors were designed to perform; the digital enhances, expands, and alters those operations, achieving ultimate control. Such a technological revolution nudges us to return to cinema’s fundamental operations, one phase at a time, to see what remains of the phenomenon of cinema after the sweeping changes of the past two decades.

These operations are interfaces between humans and what is outside them. Each of these three interfaces – named after its filmic apparatus – merits a full chapter of discussion, with current digital pressure put on ideas that matured in the middle of the last century. An additional chapter asserts itself, one dedicated to the primacy of “subject matter,” and the special place it holds in film theory and criticism. For if Bazin is right, the cinema has grown into itself – and continues to evolve as itself – through encounters with and adaptations to the world for which it was made. The chief themes of the final chapter, cinema’s inherent impurity and its penchant for adaptation, establish the tone for this book’s paradoxical mission: to identify the abiding characteristics of a phenomenon that exists only in relation to something beyond it.

Notes

1. Gregory Flaxman opens his introduction to The Brain is the Screen with this sentence, taken from the third page of Deleuze’s first Cinema book. I open my own study with it as a blessing and as an apology for concentrating on the years 1938–68, cinema’s middle years, when its strength was most definitely assured and when it came to interrogate what must have appeared to be its destiny.

2. Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), pp. 47–83.

3. André Malraux, “Sketch for a Psychology of Cinema,” Verve, 8 (1940); anthologized in Suzanne Langer (ed.),Reflections on Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958).

4. Gilles Deleuze,Cinema I: The Movement Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 1–3.

5. Siegfried Zielinski, Audiovisions:Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999).

6. Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004).

7. Lev Manovich, “To Lie and To Act: Cinema and Telepresence,” in Thomas Elsaesser and K. Hoffmann (eds.), Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable?: The Screen Arts in the Digital Age (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998), pp. 189–99.

8. Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” in Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism, 3rd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 741–60.

9. Jacques Aumont,LeCinémaet la miseen scsène (Paris: Armand Colin, 2006), p. 73.

10. Alan Williams, The Republic of Images (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

11. Rémi Fournier Lanzoni, French Cinema from its Beginnings to the Present (New York: Continuum, 2002).

12. Amélie press kit.

13. James Lastra,Sound Technology and the American Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 13–14.

Chapter 1

THE CAMERA SEARCHING IN THE WORLD

Bad filmmakers have no ideas and good filmmakers have too many, while the greatest have but one. Set firm, it lets them hold the road as they pass through an ever-changing and always interesting landscape. The cost of this is well known: a certain solitude. And what about critics? It would be the same for them, [but all are unworthy]. All except one. Between 1943 and 1958 André Bazin was that one . . . In the postwar French world, Bazin was at once inheritor and precursor, figure de proue et passeur.

—(Serge Daney, Cahiers du cinéma, August 1983)

Is a Camera Essential?