Opening Bazin by Andrew Dudley Joubert-Laurencin Herve & Hervé Joubert-Laurencin

Author:Andrew, Dudley, Joubert-Laurencin, Herve & Hervé Joubert-Laurencin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2011-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

But how are signs born of such agonizing, “incoherent spasms”? How is the carnal imprint made “legible”? Bazin’s discussion circles around cinema’s semiotizing process; its paradigm is the human face. What he struggles to describe, we shall see, is a more elemental “dialectic” of the image than the workings of découpage or of montage syntax, narrative or poetic; yet it is predicated on a reconsideration of the passage of the image into language. This is not the seemingly dismissive afterthought—those famous last words—of “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” where language appears as an addendum to the absolute identity of nature’s imprint but a more advanced exploration of their imbrication that the above citation from Bazin’s great essay on Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d’un curé de campagne, 1951) suggests.2 A revision of the ontological realism raised in the earlier writings seems here underway, decisively breaking with the medium specificity into which such an “ontology” might slip, and preparing for a more nuanced conception of a dialectic of the image as it emerges from mute visual presence into signification. In this argument the face—the supreme visual entity so heralded in 1920s film theory and practice—is in fact set against the pure opticality which Bazin associates with the first cinematic avant-gardes. Sound, voice, language infuse a literary and theatrical but also philosophical charge into the human countenance which now emerges as measure for the dialectic of imprint and text, of image and sign in the cinema. Working through Bresson’s film, Bazin defines a systemic negation, self-alienation, what I will also call a reticence of the image.3 The face—turned outside-in, as it were—assumes this dialectic, emerging as a medium through which Bazin projects a new, postclassical cinematic avant-garde.

Echoed here is Alexandre Astruc’s call, three years earlier, for “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo” that was to be taken up in the more ambitious reaches of the New Wave.4 Bazin’s own search, in this as in other essays, for a new cinematic consciousness of his time—bound up with a conception of temporality, and of historicity as applied both to the postwar, and to sound cinema’s postclassical condition—can be seen as a brilliant elaboration of Astruc’s manifesto. This dimension of Bazin’s essay thus exceeds a critical account of adaptation, or of a stylistique of one particular filmmaker. In this it is more profound than the essay’s ostensible conclusion, famously cited by Truffaut in his manifesto against the cinéma du papà: “After Robert Bresson, Aurenche and Bost are merely the Viollet-Le-Duc of film adaptation” (WCB, 159). In fact, Bazin’s most radical insights peak early in his essay, interlaced with his struggle to describe a dialectique—the term recurs—which is, in effect, a semiological consciousness at work in the cinematic image. His insights, or premonitions, suggest a consideration of the rhetoric of the image, with a view toward increasing its flexibility as a sign. This semiotic dimension precedes, in principle, the syntactic considerations of montage. Even as the cinematic image is molded

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