From below the world, untouched by human hands
(2014) Thinking Reality and Time through Film — Location: Lisbonne (6.May.2014)
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- Abstract
- Cavell defines film as the world being present to us while we are absent to it. This very disempowered and distant position of the spectator grounds the possibility for the recorded images to be viewed at distance, anonymously, free appearances made of light and darkness moving on the screen. The aim of this paper is to show how this passivity on behalf of the viewer paradoxically supports the idea that cinema is intrinsically a realist art: it is because projected images of the past are so ungraspable, so close to mere ghastly shadows, that film is able to return to us and to extend our first fascination with the objects by delivering events in their un-dramatic happening and by letting things appear according to their own weight. But this revelation of an intact world to the viewer also supposes an under-stated and reserved relation of the filmmaker as to what is being filmed. The obsessive engagement of Bazin towards realism and the meditative study of Kracauer of the redemption of material reality can only be explained through this claim that cinematic gesture does more than violently capturing appearances (as the idea of embalming and mummification of the first, and the stress on physical basis in film of the second tend to suggest): it also delivers life imprisoned in recorded images in freeing them from any imposed meaning whatsoever. It is because it plunges us into passivity that the projection of such images makes able the world to be viewed as unseen, that is to say as it is before culture, society or human consciousness. This litany of the real has nothing of a mystic or naïve conception, but takes seriously the idea that to clichés which domesticate and frame the real through the imposition of abstract significance, we have to oppose realism which does not contradict aesthetic refinement, but only refuses to master and to totalize the world, hence allowing to things and events to reveal their own meaning. As it emerges, and to put it in Kantian terms, (1) free appearances made of real, (2) the benevolent opening-up of the filmmaker to what comes to him, and (3) the disinterested judgment of the spectator have to go together and presuppose each other. Against realism of content or of style, genuine realism, as advocated by Cavell, Kracauer or Bazin is hence the revelation of something of our equivocal presence to the world, a world irreducible to its indexical capturing.
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Lebedev, O. (2014). From below the world, untouched by human hands. Thinking Reality and Time through Film, Lisbonne. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/197881