The Reality of Film by Richard Rushton;

Author:Richard Rushton;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2011-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Subjectivity

That is the reality of film for Cavell. The experience of sitting in front of a movie screen and seeing the stairwell distort in Vertigo is a real experience. It is not a real ism, for how could one prove or even claim that the effect of the distorted stairwell is an accurate reproduction of what one would see in the real world? And yet, all the same, it happens there in front of me on film when I watch Vertigo as a reality of the experience of watching that film (as something, in other words, that really does happen). It might be understandable, given his faith in photography’s ability to capture reality and of the correlative ability of the world to exhibit itself on film, that Cavell has often been thought of as a realist. He goes to great pains to try to clarify his perspective on photography, but even then Cavell’s thoughts are not entirely clear. Perhaps this is merely an outcome of what Roland Barthes referred to as the ‘photographic paradox’: that when we see a photograph of a thing, we see, at one and the same time, the photograph and the thing itself (Barthes 1977a). This is a far more difficult argument to accept than the one, even more common now than it was when Cavell was writing The World Viewed, that argues that the camera lies or that ‘there is no way in which a photograph really represents a real object’. The logic of this kind of argument is one that stresses the ways in which a photograph can never be the same as reality or never really capture the realness of the real; in other words, photographs will always be removed from reality or a distortion of reality. Such arguments insist on the sanctity of a reality that is entirely separate from a photograph, which is to say that they insist upon the separation between the realm of representation and that of reality. To put it simply, this is an attitude we have come across again and again in this book: that films, as much as photographs, are ‘only representations’; they are illusions entirely distinct from the reality of a real that is ‘out there’. Cavell’s view is both more straightforward and more difficult than such a dismissal: that in a photograph reality and representation are conjoined.

This photographic paradox does not mean that in a photograph we cannot distinguish between reality and its representation, it merely means that if we conceive of a photograph as a representation then that representation carries with it something of reality. Cavell is more or less content to call this a photograph’s mystery; we cannot somehow explain away the mystery whereby a photograph of Napoleon’s nephew ineluctably shows us ‘the eyes that looked at the Emperor’ (as Barthes so astonishingly puts it; 1981: 3). Cavell argues that ‘the relation between photograph and subject does not fit our conception of representation, one thing standing for another, disconnected thing, or one forming a likeness of another’.

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