Week Two: Realism and Ambiguity

Like everyone else, I was struck by - and skeptical of - the emphasis that both Bazin and Kracauer place on the idea that film should directly reflect reality. They are eager to articulate and isolate the specific properties of film, those things that distinguish it and set it apart from other media and forms of storytelling. I found Kracauer's claim that film is not art in the traditional sense because the recording "obligations" (Kracauer 153) of the medium must be prioritized over any artistic elements. In order to be aesthetically legitimate, film must "build from their basic properties . . . they must record and reveal physical reality . . ." (Kracauer 151). The film makers' role is to reveal rather than to create, to see and emphasize aspects of reality but to, at all times, hold a mirror up to reality. This is interesting when compared to Bazin's ending claim that film had reached a point where " . . .we can finaly say that at last the director writes in film. The image . . . has at its disposal more means of manipulating reality and of modifying it from within. The film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last, the equal of the novelist" (Language 53). He seems to be defining film in comparison with other arts, though the comparison with the novelist seems to privilege writing, while Kracauer wants to point out all the ways in which film can do things that no medium has ever done before. It can reflect reality, or even be a better version of reality if " a staged real-life event evokes a stronger illusion of reality on the screen than would the original event if it had been captured directly by the camera" (Kracauer 149). I have always been fascinated by the idea that there are certain stories that lend themselves to certain media or that, indeed, can only be told in certain media. (An example that comes to mind here is Tony Morrison's short story: "Recitatif," which I studied in a class on film and literary adaptation as an example of a work which would lose its main theme if translated to a visual medium). Bazin's point seems to be that the changing technology of film allowed a return to ambiguity because the film-maker is no longer obligated to excerise such precise control to make a point. The better film gets at creating illusion, the closer to reality it can come, perhaps even doing a better job at portraying reality than reality itself does. The film-maker has a goal and a vision, even if, as these theorist would argue, that vision is to expose rather than create. Film contains an internal structure that reality does not, giving meaning to the ambiguity of film that the ambiguity of reality does not have.