“The faithful
reproduction of reality is not art. We are constantly told that it consists in
selection and interpretation….That it why up to now the ‘realist’ trends in
cinema, as in other arts, consisted simply in introducing a greater measure of
reality into the work: but this additional measure of reality was still only an
effective way of serving an abstract purpose, whether dramatic, moral, or
ideological…. Realism subordinates what it borrows from reality to its
transcendent needs. Neorealism knows only immanence. It is from appearance
only, the simple appearance of beings and of the world, that it knows how to
deduce the ideas that it unearths. It is a phenomenology”
– Andre Bazin, “Vittorio De Sica: Metteur en
Scene” (64-65)
In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Andre Bazin points out the
indexical nature of the cinema, the objective character of photography which
provides it with a quality of credibility absent in the other arts. We are
forced to accept the reality of the object presented, or “re-presented,” by the camera because the image it creates, like a
fingerprint of reality, “shares, by virtue of the process of its becoming, the
being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model” (13-14, emphasis in original). Bazin’s essay ends,
however, on a note that seems to contradict most of what has come before: “On
the other hand, of course, cinema is also a language.” If we are to understand
that film is not only indexical, but, like language, then, also symbolic,
constructed through an arbitrary connection to the object represented, how can
we speak of cinematic realism, “an
integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image” (“The Myth of
Total Cinema” 20)? In order to answer that question, we must first distinguish
between the different types of realism that Bazin discusses.
