8. Bazin on Marker (1958)

Objects in Time; Artefacts in Artists’ Moving Image

“…Both André Bazin and Roland Barthes have theorized photographyand by extension, film -in such terms. Bazin says that photography gives us 'the object itself, but liberated from its temporal contingencies', 4 to which film adds duration, 'the mummification of change'. 5 Barthes claims that the photograph testifies not to reality but to the passage of time; although this is also true of film, the flux of images in a film is protensive rather than retentive, giving past time a future.…”

Studying Film with André Bazin

“…Chaplin, so to speak, is not the author of this or that film, his work does not align itself in a filmology, he is Charlie's creator and guarantor. 27 Just as Bazin maintains that Chaplin cannot be understood using categories that are foreign to him, so too does he imply that established academic methods, such as filmology, are unfit to offer an appropriate study of cinema. In another essay, 'Introduction to a Symbolic of Charlie ' (1948), Bazin elaborates on Chaplin's typical 'backwards kick' as a gestural expression of his capricious dismissal of the past:…”

“…25 Such an approach that engages with a statistical mind-set fits within a more general 'epistemological break with traditional notions of determinism' 26 in the earlier days of cinema, which Mary Ann Doane analyzes at length in a chapter called 'Temporal Irreversibility and the Logic of Statistics' in The Emergence of Cinematic Time (2002): 'classical cinema', she writes, 'aligns itself with the logic of statistics as a way of measuring and hence mapping chance events, contingency'. 27 Like Schrödinger, Bazin appears to reject this probabilistic logic that informs classical cinema as 'the exemplar of temporal irreversibility, as the most effective means of clarifying the idea of an "arrow of time"'. 28 As Doane points out, the connection between quantitative accumulation and modern technology can be found, for instance, in Walter Benjamin's seminal essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction ' (1936), when he writes that:…”

“…26 Bazin's mention of the myth of Icarus in this passage is anything but anecdotal: portrayed here as preceding the antiheroes of a technological invention, driven either by financial profit (the Lumière brothers and Thomas Edison) or scientific achievement (Etienne-Jules Marey and others), Bazin places Icarus among those 'fanatics, the maniacs, the disinterested pioneers' who had first imagined cinema. 27 Cinema, of course, is an inherently mechanical art, but Bazin subordinates the technological inventions to the power of imagination: 'Cinema', he famously wrote, 'has yet to be invented!' 28 With the myth of Icarus, Bazin not only solidifies the connection between the invention of film as imaginative rather than technological, but also nuances film histories that draw parallels between cinema and industrial (or military) needs.…”

“…26 Bazin's desire for tradition, to move from the ephemeral shadows towards 3-D, is clearly tangible in this passage. In 'The Myth of Total Cinema', he initially defends the talking film as an imperative stage in the development toward integral realism: techniques such as sound, color and ultimately relief all contribute to an increased realism, 'the recreation of the world in its own image' 27 -the ultimate, aspired equality between object and image. Yet recreation, I have just argued, also functions in his film critical work: to use Truffaut's formulation, when Bazin discusses aquarium light he is at his best, 'like a fish in the water'.…”