Changing Courses: Tracing the Development of Film Studies through Notions of Medium Specificity

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Changing Courses

Tracing the development

of film studies

through notions

of medium specificity

Mark van de Schilde 0126918

27 June 2014 Master’s Thesis UvA MA Film Studies Supervisor: Abe Geil

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to my supervisor Abe Geil. Without his invaluable

suggestions, positive feedback and ever-pleasant demeanor there is no doubt I would not have been able to finish this thesis, at the very last moment it was still possible for me to graduate. I am not sure what one should call the person directly responsible for rescuing one from forever detecting a slight sense of disappointment in his mother's eyes. I suggest "savior."

I am also grateful to Charles Forceville for assigning Abe as my supervisor, as well as being so gracious to be the second reader of this thesis.

Finally, I wish to extend a huge thank you to Doetsje de Groot, who kickstarted this project for me by contacting the proper people, without me even asking for her help. It may not have been more than placing a couple of phone calls and sending an e-mail, but this probably meant the difference between having thrown away four years of my life and reaching the milestone I honestly doubted would still come. A small act of kindness really can make a huge difference.

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Introduction

In the years between 2001 and 2014 that I have been studying film on and off at the university of Amsterdam, the curriculum has had three different monikers, confusing even me whenever someone asks me the name of my study. From “Film and Television Science” to “Media and Culture” to “Film Studies,” it is clear that as an institutionalized object of study, film is considered as just one participant in a larger and interconnected field, thereby diluting the focus on the specific medium of film. In large part this has to do with the fact that it is hard to pinpoint what, exactly, the medium of film entails, especially in our current time. In our media saturated society, film has lost the unique status as the primary medium of moving images it held until roughly the end of the Second World War, when the introduction of television heralded major shifts in the media landscape. More recently, digital

technologies have transformed the technology, economics and aesthetics of film. The material basis of film, the strip of celluloid, is fast disappearing from the production of films, as high-definition digital video offers cheaper and faster ways of shooting, and digital technology such as previsualization, non-linear editing suites and image manipulation through digital processes like color correction is

infiltrating every stage of production. The “end of cinema” has also been heralded by the shift in spectatorial practice from the public movie theater to the personalized experience of the television, home computer or iPad. Video games have taken over films as the major moneymaker in the

entertainment industry, and people spend more and more time online watching free content bite-sized videos on Facebook and Youtube than they are watching actual movies.

These changes in the cinematic landscape have also been reflected in the field of film studies, a field that has had to incorporate these “new” media (how new they really are will be discussed further on in this thesis) in its curriculum. As theorists grapple with the decline of film as a material medium in the face of the digital, the field has taken a turn towards the history of film theory and its concepts, both in search of a theoretical framework for understanding new media and as a way of examining the current state of film studies and the uncertain future digital technology seems to pose for it. In this historical, or metacritical, turn film studies has taken, we witness a resurgence of questions of ontology long-forgotten or ignored; André Bazin's seminal question “What is cinema?” has returned to the fore and seems to be more current than ever, at the precise moment that its object of inquiry is under threat of becoming a relic of the past.

At the heart of Bazin's question lies the concept of medium specificity. Medium specificity asserts that it is the medium of an art form, its material base, that defines what makes the art form unique and determines how it should be used. Medium specificity has classically been used to legitimize and differentiate art forms, implied in Bazin's question as it points our attention to a possible essence, a set of features decisive in defining cinema as a uniquely identifiable art form. Bazin's use of the concept, revolving around the inherent realistic qualities of film based on the

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transcription of light onto a photochemical base, has been instrumental in taking film seriously as an object of study, appearing at a time when film theory was just starting to get institutionalized. In recent light of the disappearance of the medium of film and the threat that poses to the continued relevance of film studies, it makes sense for film theorists to return to the concept. Rethinking what film is,

updating its definition to the current moment, is the first step to rethinking film theory as a whole, a move currently signified by the explication of its own history.

In this thesis, I want to take the return to medium specificity one step further. Looking back at the history and development of film studies, it seems to me that the interplay between new definitions of the medium of film and changes in theoretical discourse is a recurrent theme. Even when medium specificity is not explicitly evoked, as it is in Bazin's theory and currently in the historical turn film studies has taken, it still lingers in the background of many theories. Theorizing about film starts with thinking about what film actually is, how it can be defined, and the materiality of the medium is a natural starting point for such a definition. What I want to assert in this thesis is that we can trace the development of film studies through the notion of medium specificity. Examining how notions of medium specificity have changed over time and how they functioned within their respective

discourses will give us a historical perspective of the current state of the field, which I believe to be of vital importance at these uncertain times for the discipline.

The concept of medium specificity grew in the eighteenth-century in reaction to the

neoclassical tradition of ut pictoria poesis, literally meaning “as is painting so is poetry,” wherein all the arts were judged by the same aesthetic criterion of imitating the beautiful in nature. Thinkers began to oppose this type of criticism by differentiating the arts from one another. Probably the best known work of this sort was published in 1766 by the German dramatist and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Lessing's treatise, called Laocoön: an Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, explores the definitive, material differences between painting and poetry, painting being characterized as essentially a spatial art and poetry a temporal one(Price 2008, 3). Lessing argues that painting employs wholly different signs from poetry - “the one using forms and colors in space and the other articulate sounds in time” (Lessing 1969, 91) - and should therefore signify the appropriate,

corresponding subject matter. Thus the true subjects of painting are bodies, i.e. objects or parts of objects that exist in space, and the true subjects of poetry are actions, i.e. objects or parts of objects that follow one another in time.

As a concept, then, medium specificity involves determining what is essential to a particular medium and having that essential element dictate its proper subject and use. Today the concept is often thought of in terms of its application by art critic Clement Greenberg, who took the concept to its most extreme use in his championing of the turn from representational painting to abstraction,

evacuating the subject altogether in making painting the proper subject of painting. Greenberg felt that emphasizing the flat surface of the canvas and abstract use of paint and colors were truer to the nature

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of the medium of painting, as opposed to the traditional use in representational painting of trying to create the optical illusion of depth, a characteristic that is arguably more suited to photography, as we will see. (Price 2008, 4)

Film theorist Noël Carroll neatly characterizes the doctrine of medium specificity as consisting of three principal arguments:

1. The criterion of self-identity: “[...] if the medium in question is to be truly regarded as an art, then it must have some range of autonomous effects” (Carroll 1996, 3).

2. The identification of aesthetic a priories: arts may and should be differentiated in terms of the uniqueness of a medium. This means isolating either an essence or a function that may resolve all subsidiary aesthetic questions asked of the medium.

3. The injunction argument: the unique essence of a medium directs what an artist should and should not do within the medium. (Rodowick 2007, 34)

Thus, in film theory the doctrine of medium specificity asserts “that each art form has a distinctive medium; that the material cause, so to speak, of an art form - its medium - is also its essence (in the sense of its telos); that the essence of an art form - its medium - indicates, limits or dictates the style and/or content of the art form; and finally, that film possesses such an essence” (Carroll 1996, 50).

In the history of film theory there has never been a general consensus concerning the essence of film. There have been many conflicting debates on the identity of film in medium specific terms. Cinema has been defined through terms such as the photogénie of Louis Delluc and Jean Epstein; Béla Balázs' defense of the close-up; the montage of attractions of Sergei Eisenstein; Walter Benjamin on mechanical reproducibility and the decline of the aura; Siegfried Kracauer's photographic affinities; and so forth. (Rodowick 2007, 11) Early film theorists of the 1920s such as Rudolf Arnheim and Hugo Münsterberg were especially interested in defining the essential characteristics of film in order to make it legible as art, culturally as well as institutionally. One of the biggest hurdles for them to overcome was disproving the general notion that because of its mechanical basis in photography, film simply mechanically recorded physical reality, leaving no room for artistic expression. The early film theorists, therefore, drew attention to those elements of film that could distort physical reality, i.e. the expressive possibilities of film. These included, among others: framing, slow motion, superimposition, expressive lighting, and the fragmenting of space and time through editing. Rudolf Arnheim stated very specifically that “Film will be able to reach the heights of the other arts only when it frees itself from the bonds of photographic reproduction and becomes a pure work of man, namely, as animated cartoon or painting” (Arnheim 1957, 213).

Up until the end of what can be termed the classical period of film theory, running approximately from 1915 up to the 1960s, when it became institutionalized in the university, film

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theory was mostly preoccupied with aesthetic considerations embodied by the concept of medium specificity. However, as Brian Price explains:

Theory not only seeks to explain the nature of an object (cameras, screens, stylistic elements) but is likewise concerned with understanding the ways in which those objects function in social, economic, and political ways. To have a theory about cinema is to want to understand not only how a particular object works, but also what the larger consequences, or precedents, of that functioning might be. (Price 2008, 3)

This is reflected in film studies when, by the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s, film theory moves away from strictly aesthetic theory to pose broader, political questions about the role of cinema in the propagation of ideology, seemingly leaving questions of medium specificity behind. This period of film theory merged aesthetics with semiotics, psychoanalysis and Marxism, an amalgamation of theories that would open up film theory to all new kinds of discursive fields and vice versa, which, according to Dudley Andrew, saw film studies rise to prominence in the humanities in the second half of the 1970s. (Andrew 2009, 900)

This movement away from the narrow focus on the aesthetics of film towards a more varied and politicized approach was founded in large part on a dialectic between the figure who is commonly seen as the last, and certainly most influential of the classical theorists, André Bazin, and the newly emerging generation of film critics in the aftermath of May 1968 in France. A proponent of these more politicized film theorists, Jean-Louis Baudry, developed perhaps the most influential account of what came to be known as “apparatus theory.” Baudry applied the work on ideology by the French Marxist Louis Althusser to cinema, as well as psychoanalytic concepts developed by Jacques Lacan, which opened up film theory to a much broader and, arguably, more important cultural domain than before, signalling a more scholarly, or methodological approach to the study of film. While Baudry's theory is not commonly thought of in medium specific terms, I will rethink his theory through the concept of medium specificity, drawing out the elements that provide a link with the theories of the classical period, in particular Bazin's.

While since the 1980s the notion and use of medium specificity has been criticized heavily and been branded as outdated or even unusable - most vehemently by Noël Carroll - the digitalization of film has returned the notion to the forefront of current film studies. Bazin's notion in particular has seen a resurgence in critical attention and re-evaluation, thanks in large part to his idea of the indexical link between film and the real world, a link that has started to erode under the influence of the

creational powers of digital imaging.1

1 See for example Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is! (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Dudley Andrew with Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, ed., Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife (New York : Oxford University Press, 2011); Markos Hadjioannou, From Light to Byte: Toward an Ethics of Digital Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Daniel Morgan, “Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics,” Critical Inquiry (Spring 2006): 443-481; Andy Stafford, “Bazin and Photography in the Twenty-First Century: Poverty of Ontology?” Paragraph 36.1 (2013): 50–67; Jefferson T. Kline, “The Film Theories of Bazin and Epstein: Shadow Boxing in the Margins of the Real,” Paragraph 36.1 (2013): 68–85.

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In focusing on three different theories that represent different discourses within film theory - aesthetical, epistemological, historical - and the role medium specificity plays in these theories, I intend to show that medium specificity is a crucial, yet under thought concept in film studies, forming the basis of each new discourse, either explicitly or implicitly. It is through reevaluations of film's medium specificity that we can start engaging with technological or cultural changes, and such changes point film studies into new directions.

In chapter one I will start by explicating the canonical notion of film's medium specificity put forth by André Bazin, arguing that his classical use of medium specificity formed the foundation of film studies in legitimizing film as a subject worthy of academic consideration, as well as in providing an early example of polemical theorizing that would allow film studies to advance.

In chapter two I will argue that the concept of medium specificity lies at the base of Jean-Louis Baudry's apparatus theory, a theory that is not classically considered in the tradition of medium specificity. Baudry's theory is representative of the epistemological turn in film studies that brought the discipline to the fore of the humanities, emphasizing theory over purely aesthetical considerations, and reading his theory in terms of medium specificity will show that the concept provides a natural entry point for new ways of theorizing about film, even when they are positioned as a polemic against the classical use of medium specificity.

In chapter three I will turn to a recent notion of medium specificity put forth by American film scholar D.N. Rodowick, arguing that his appropriation of Stanley Cavell's notion of automatisms repositions medium specificity as an essential concept for thinking about film in its new guise as a digital medium, which prolongs the relevance of film studies at a time when film itself is slowly disappearing from view, indicative of the current historical turn in film studies.

Finally, in chapter four I will return to the notions of medium specificity put forth by Bazin and Baudry to see how they relate to Rodowick's notion of digital cinema, in order to provide a historical perspective on the current relevance of these earlier notions, through which we can begin assessing the foreseeable future of film studies.

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In order to explain the role medium specificity plays in the development of film studies, we will have to start by looking at a classical example of the concept that lies at the beginning of that development. This will provide a reference point for the subsequent notions of medium specificity described in this thesis, as well as for the respective discourses those notions are exemplary of.

It seems to me that the natural starting point for this examination is the notion of medium specificity put forth by the reputable French critic and theorist André Bazin. Writing at a time just before film studies started to develop into a proper academic field in the 1960s, Bazin developed his notion over the course of some 2,600 articles, fifty-two of which (twenty-six in the standard English translation) were collected in the seminal What is Cinema?, published between 1958 and 1962. At the base of all his writings lies the idea of film's intrinsic relation to reality due to its photochemical base, which proved to be so influential that we are currently witnessing a return to Bazinian thought in film studies, as the discipline is still trying to come to grips with the purported loss of that relation to reality in digital expressions of film. Since chapter three of this thesis deals with this return to Bazin, and chapter two deals with a direct critique of his ideas, it is important to offer a clear explication of Bazin's theory, which can be read in classical terms of medium specificity. I will argue that Bazin's notion of medium specificity forms a cornerstone for film studies, constantly being reworked and readapted as the field reacts to technological and cultural changes.

1.1 The mummy complex

As noted in the introduction, early film theorists were keen on indicating similarities between film and the plastic arts in downplaying the photographic base, thought of as being essentially inartistic. These theorists felt that the introduction of sound would be the death knell for the art of film, since sound would tie down cinema to the real world again, limiting film's expressive qualities. For these theorists, film as art peaked with the silent cinema in 1928. For André Bazin, however, sound did not come to destroy cinema, but in fact to “fulfill the Old Testament of the cinema” (1967, 29). What defined cinema and set it apart from the other arts was just that fact of mechanical reproduction of reality. Cinema, for Bazin, was the perfection of an idealistic need of mankind to reproduce the world around us, in all its complexity and ambiguity. The art form was not born out of the invention of photography (film's main component for Bazin), but rather it was born out of a cultural need to go beyond the already existing means of reproducing the world, which led to the invention of photography and culminated in cinema. In his article “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (1945), which introduced the cornerstone of his conception of film, Bazin refers to this idealistic trajectory as the “mummy complex,” the defense against the passage of time satisfying a basic psychological need of man. (1967) This found its genesis in ancient Egypt's religion of embalming, preserving the actual physical body from the decay of time. When this proved to be impossible, the Egyptians created terra cotta statues to substitute for the mummy. By representing life, life would still be preserved. This idea

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carried over into painting, most notably in portraiture, which was seen as a more sophisticated, less “magic” way of preserving life. In our time, Bazin argued, “the making of images is no longer a question of survival after death, but of a larger concept, the creation of an ideal world in the likeness of the real, with its own temporal destiny” (1967, 10). The invention of photography was a big step in the history of the plastic arts by offering a clear reproduction of a certain object. Cinema, therefore, with the addition of movement and audio, was seen by Bazin as the closest realization of the idealistic need to represent life most accurately.

This belief, this philosophical idea of mimesis, is at the base of all of Bazin's writings on film. For Bazin, the medium specificity of film lies in its photographic base and its direct relation with reality, offering the most advanced way to embalm life, which led him to champion certain filmmaking techniques over others, considered truer to the specificity of film.

1.2 The ontology of the photographic image

Bazin believes mankind has always had a need to represent reality as accurately as possible. Painting could only satisfy this need up to a point, since the painter would inescapably transfer some form of subjectivity to the image. Photography frees painting (and the other plastic arts) from their “obsession with likeness” through its essentially objective character:

For the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent. For the first time, the image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man. The personality of the photographer enters into the proceedings only in his selection of the object to be photographed and by way of the purpose he has in mind. Although the final result may reflect some of his personality, this does not play the same role as is played by that of the painter. All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty. (1967, 13)

This passage, which clearly announces the medium specific nature of Bazin's theory, points to a psychological realism rather than a physical realism (although the latter certainly plays a part as well). The realism of a photographic image lies not so much in the accuracy of the reproduction, but in the spectator's belief about the origin of the reproduction. In painting this involves the skills and the mind of the artist, whereas in photography it involves an indifferent automated process confronting an object. The fact that the photograph is of the same nature as the object (purely physical and subject only to physical laws) makes it ontologically different from traditional types of reproduction:

The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture- making. [...] we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say, in time and space. Photography enjoys a

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certain advantage in virtue of this transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction. (1967, 13-4)

The “transference of reality” to its reproduction is what constitutes the ontology of the photograph, its “irrational power” as Bazin called it. Bazin confusingly writes that the photographic image is the object itself, an absolute impossibility of course, but he means that by means of the mechanized process of capturing the object, the spectator is confronted with the actual object as it once existed in space and time. A photography, the raw material of cinema, is not reality itself, but the tracings left by reality on celluloid, like a mold.

This notion of the direct connection between photography and reality is what informs Bazin's ideas on the aesthetics of film:

The aesthetic qualities of photography are to be sought in its power to lay bare the realities. It is not for me to separate off, in the complex fabric of the objective world, here a reflection on a damp sidewalk, there the gesture of a child. Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled-up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love. (1967, 15)

For Bazin, reality should be preserved as much as possible, since reality is already complex and ambiguous enough to be the subject of film, and it follows from the objectivity of photography that we should not try to transform reality into a creation of man. That could now be pursued by the other arts. From this belief Bazin champions several stylistic cinematic techniques that, in preserving as fully as possible the reality film captures automatically, best exemplify the medium specificity of film.

1.3 Cinematic techniques

We have seen that, for Bazin, the essence of film is the direct relation to reality through its

photochemical base. In the classical use of medium specificity, such an essence indicates or dictates the style and/or content of the art form. We will now turn to Bazin's ideas on the proper use of the medium.

In his article “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema” (1955), Bazin distinguishes two broad and opposing trends in cinema: “those directors who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in reality” (1967, 24). Putting faith in the image could be done either by manipulating formal aspects of the image, like the lighting, the composition, the style of the sets, or by giving the images a specific context through montage. As explicated above, Bazin puts his faith in reality, believing that reality has its own aesthetic validity, an intrinsic quality that is automatically transferred to film by the photographic process, which should be respected and even embraced by the filmmaker. Bazin describes this aesthetic power of reality beautifully in writing about a medical film:

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What cinema of the imagination would have been able to conceive and convey the fabulous descent into the inferno of the bronchioscope where all the laws of “dramatization” of color are naturally implied in the sinister bluish reflection of a cancer which is visibly mortal? [...] The camera alone [i.e. the crude mechanical reproduction] possesses the sesame of this universe in which supreme beauty becomes identified, at one and the same time, with nature and chance: that is to say identifies with everything that a certain traditional aesthetic considers the contrary of art. (qtd. in Andrew 1976, 144)

For Bazin, the filmmaker should create his vision using selections he makes of reality, not from the transformation of reality. This position is most clearly defined in his favoring of deep focus

cinematography over montage.

Film theorists before Bazin used montage as a way of interpreting events, similar to the stylization of objects through lighting or use of color. This was particularly obvious in the Russian montage theories of, among others, Eisenstein and Pudovkin. They would conjoin images together according to an abstract principle or idea, creating meaning through the relation of the images to each other instead of within the images themselves. A second, more widely used type of montage is the psychological editing that breaks events down according to the natural way our mind would understand them, for example the shot/reverse shot editing when two people are having a

conversation. This style was perfected in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s and has become known as classical Hollywood continuity editing.2_{Classical editing appears so natural that the audience}

completely forgets the manipulation at play and is fully focused on the narrative of the film. Deep focus cinematography, on the other hand, allows for events to play out in different planes in the same shot, all in focus, usually over a longer period of time (i.e. in a long take).3_The

drama is staged within the frame instead of between frames. Bazin prefers this shooting style to montage because it is inherently more realistic. Firstly, it preserves the spatial realism of the objects filmed, creating a homogeneity of space. This is destroyed by montage, chopping up the event in different chunks, isolated from each other in space and time. In preserving spatial realism, deep focus cinematography emphasizes the essence of Bazin's medium specificity, its direct relation to reality. Consequently, preserving spatial realism implies “both a more active mental attitude on the part of the spectator and a more positive contribution on his part to the action in progress” (1967, 36). This is important to Bazin because it gives the viewer a kind of freedom, a personal choice to interpret the image as he wishes, instead of slavishly following the intention of the director. It reintroduces ambiguity into the structure of the image, where montage presupposes a unity of meaning of the dramatic event. And nature, or reality, is ambiguous as well as meaningful for Bazin. He sees

2 The standard text on this subject is Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson's The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and

Mode of Production to 1960 (1988).

3 Bazin mentions several different cinematic techniques that are connected to deep focus, such as camera movement, depth-of-field staging, medium-long shots and the already mentioned long take. While all these techniques can be used

independently from each other, they are connected in Bazin's theory, and for matters of brevity I will use “deep focus” as an umbrella term for all of them, unless stated otherwise.

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ambiguity as a value that should be preserved by cinema, since cinema is able to capture reality in all its complexities.

It could be said that classical editing does preserve a kind of psychological realism for the spectator. It is designed to present events in the way we would naturally understand them in our minds. For example, when we are scared an intruder will come into the protagonist's bedroom, it is natural to cut to a close-up of a turning doorknob. This will not feel like an unnatural cut for the audience, as it is exactly what everybody would direct their attention to in that same situation in real life. Bazin, however, sees this not as true realism, since a piece of reality is interpreted in only one way. Just because it is logical or natural to look at a turning doorknob when someone tries to enter your room, that does not mean it is the only available response. There is always a free interplay between human perception and its objects, no meaning or organization is ever truly fixed:

Classical editing totally suppresses this kind of reciprocal freedom between us and the object. It substitutes for a free organization, a forced breaking down where the logic of the shots controlled by the reporting of the action anesthetizes our freedom completely. (Bazin 1978, 58)

Bazin's preference of deep focus over montage thus amounts to an ethical disposition: the spectator should have the freedom to engage freely with the world recorded in the film playing before him, just like he has in real life. Real life is already full of significance and does not always need the

interpretation of an artist.4_{It also takes skill to select the most powerful and appropriate images from}

reality in order to reveal their significance. This is why Bazin was such a fan of Italian neorealism, since films in that style tried to transfer the social complexities of the real world unto celluloid with as little artifice as possible (shooting on location, using natural light, non-professional actors, simple narratives, etc.).

What defines Bazin's theory, then, is an idealist view of the natural world and of cinema as a natural extension of that world. The world has a sense, one that cinema should lay bare, instead of transform: “It is the art of nature first because it comes to us automatically through a photochemical process and second because it reveals to us aspects of the world which formerly we were unable or unwilling to see” (Andrew 1976: 169). As indicated by the title of one of his most famous essays, Bazin believed in the evolution of cinema towards the “myth” of a perfect representation of reality. As we have seen, this myth has been an ever-present desire of mankind for preserving life, a desire that cinema came to fulfill through its mechanical base.

1.4 The influence of Bazin's medium specificity on film studies

Bazin's influence on the development of film studies can hardly be overestimated. As Dudley Andrew puts it:

4 I say “not always” because Bazin is not completely opposed to imaginative techniques like montage. He considers montage as another element in the filmmaker's handbook, one that can be utilized as a counterpoint to the more realistic techniques.

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The postwar period [1945-1960], over which Andre Bazin exercised his generous rule, deepened cinema’s conscience and self-consciousness, while expanding its cultural sway until it stood proudly with the other arts, a resource for philosophers, theorists, sociologists, and anyone concerned with the human situation in modernity. (Andrew 2010: 16)

Not only is Bazin seen as an influential proponent of the still popular auteur theory through his championing of directors such as Welles, Renoir and Wyler - all of whom used the realist style Bazin favored - a theory (if one can call it that) that was instrumental in taking films seriously as both an art form and an object of study, but his theory is also illustrative for the way film studies would respond to technological and cultural changes of or challenges to its object of study. As Bazin encountered many films that broke stylistically with most movies of the silent era, not just through the

incorporation of sound but also through the use of different camera and lighting techniques, editing strategies and subject matters, he developed a notion of medium specificity that reflected these changes, that took these changes as arising naturally from the medium itself, edging ever closer to the ideal of representing reality to its fullest. It is only logical for film studies today, as we are confronted with the digital “revolution” that replaces the analog technology Bazin based his theory on, to return to Bazin's notion of medium specificity. Once again the medium of film is confronted with severe changes and challenges, as the photographic base of film is both figuratively and literally

disappearing. The question is how film studies should respond to this change. I will return to this question at the end of the thesis, after examining two other notions of medium specificity, both of which build on the one examined in this chapter.

Considering the notion of medium specificity examined in the next chapter, it is apt for Dudley Andrew to explain cinema as the art of nature because “it reveals to us aspects of the world which formerly we were unable or unwilling to see,” as quoted above. In the context of Bazin's empiricist idealism, this is meant as a celebration of the intrinsic beauty of the natural world and the reproductive capacity of cinema to attune us to that beauty. For the new wave of film theorists following Bazin, however, the same phrasing could have been used for a cinema that did the exact opposite of Bazin's notion of cinema, namely purposely drawing attention to the fabricated nature of cinematic images, creating a knowledge effect about what lay behind the seemingly value-free natural world. This new wave of film theorists, interestingly enough emanating from the influential and newly politicized film journal that Bazin himself set up, Cahiers du Cinéma, heavily criticized Bazin's “naive” view of the powers of cinema.5_{According to Dudley Andrew, these theorists reviled Bazin “as}

a mystified and mystifying idealist responsible for the excessive adulation of films and auteurs that continued to pour from the pens of mere critics” (Andrew 2009, 899). They were intent on leaving Bazin and his narrow aesthetic focus - and, by association, all of classical film theory - behind and

5 I put “naive” in quotation marks because Bazin's theory can really only be called naive if we look at the standard readings of Bazin. His writings, however, show so many nuances as well as contradictions that this standard reading can easily be rejected. It doesn't serve the argument of this thesis to undertake such a project, but recent revisionist takes on his theories can be found in the works of Dudley Andrew and Daniel Morgan, listed on page 8.

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adopting a more politically sensitive as well as a more scientific stance - science understood according to the conception of Louis Althusser, whose work was highly influential for what, according to Philip Rosen, has come to be called “1970s film theory.” (2001, xx)

2. Ideology and the Cinematic Apparatus: Jean-Louis Baudry

Following the failure to produce radical change of the events of May 1968 in France, when an unprecedentedly large number of French students and workers went on strike in reaction to class

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discrimination in French society, several theorists in the 1970s looked at the role institutions like the mass media played in reproducing and/or maintaining the class structure that governs our everyday life; in other words, their ideological effects. Film theorists, starting with Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, who had assumed the editorship of Cahiers du Cinéma in 1969, argued that the kind of deception that the cinematic illusion wrought upon the film spectator was a precise exemplification of the kind of deception wrought by ideology upon the individual.6_{Whereas Bazin treated cinema as if it}

was almost a natural phenomenon (“like a flower or a snowflake”) the new generation of film theorists looked at cinema from the top down, as an artificial system that should be analysed in order to

understand and be able to reject the mechanics at work, a tactic that would take would prove vital for the development of film studies.

Jean-Louis Baudry, in two famous essays published in the 1970s, analyses the ideological effect of what he calls “the cinematic apparatus,” the technological base of film production and projection in relation to the spectator. I intend to show that in focusing on the effect of the technical and material means of cinema on the spectator, Baudry was just as much a theorist of the medium specificity of film as Bazin, albeit in an entirely different context.

Because Baudry's theory of cinema represents a break within film studies from purely aesthetical considerations, it is necessary to first explain the discursive context in which his theory emerged, before pointing out its medium specific elements. In order to explain the relationship between film texts and film viewers, Baudry combines the concept of ideology and “ideological state apparatuses” (ISAs), as developed by the French Marxist Louis Althusser, with the psychoanalytic concept of mirror misrecognition and the role it plays in identity formation, advanced by Jacques Lacan. Baudry's theory is not concerned with an analysis of a single film or any specific cycle of films as Bazin's was; instead it concentrates on the way film viewing is a social activity. Baudry does, however, also envision a proper use for cinema, arising from his deconstruction of the cinematic apparatus as ideology machine. We will look at this injunction argument after illustrating his analysis of the medium specific elements of the technological basis of cinema, specifically the camera and the projection apparatus, that provide the realistic illusion for the spectator, which makes him vulnerable for ideological positioning. With regards to the apparatus of projection, Baudry also draws an analogy to Plato's allegory of the cave, outside of his ideological theory. Because this analogy sheds an interesting new light on his position vis-à-vis Bazin in the larger context of the influence of medium specificity on the development of film studies, I will briefly turn to this analogy before finally juxtaposing Baudry's theory with that of Bazin.

2.1 Althusser's theory of ideology

6 For an overview of the debate between film theorists in France directly following the events of May 1968, see Francesco Casetti, Theories of cinema 1945-1995 (Austin: University of Texas, 1999) 184-196.

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In the essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970), Louis Althusser states that “ideology is a 'representation' of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (1971, 162). Ideology is not something that arises as a fully formed entity, it is created by ISAs, organizational groupings such as the church, school, the police, or even family. Althusser claims that “an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices” (1971, 166). Through the various ISAs an illusion of individuality is created, by creating subjects. As Noël Caroll explains, for Althusser, a subject refers “both to one's belief in oneself as a unity, an autonomous 'I,' the center of one's own experience, and as the source of free action; and it refers to one who is subservient to some system of domination” (1988, 58). The creation of subjects occurs through a process that Althusser refers to as “interpellation” or “hailing.” For example, when I receive a notice from the Student Loan Administration stating I have to pay off my loan, I am being hailed as debtor to the state, forcing me to undertake actions to fulfill the specific role set out for me (in this case, work to earn money to pay off the debt), instead of me being the caring son or film lover I also am. ISAs position individuals as subjects of ideology by assigning them a certain role which they see as natural, while in fact that role is forced upon them.

Although the ISAs may be public or private, they are called “state” apparatuses because they function to reproduce the capitalist relations of production and therefore serve the interests of the capitalist (ruling) class. The classical Marxist example of this is that of bourgeois ideology. The bourgeois state accords civil liberties to all its citizens, and these political rights bestow legitimacy upon the state (the state is ruled by the freedom of choice of its civilians). However, these political rights serve to mask the real state of affairs wherein one ruling class (the bourgeoisie) exploits another class (the working class). Normally, the bourgeoisie is unaware of the difference between the

conditions of life as envisioned politically (everybody has the same rights and freedom) and life as it is actually lived (the ruling class exploits the working class), for it is not in the interest of the ruling class to perceive this difference: “the beliefs about society that are held within any given form of social organization tend to promote and sustain that form of social organization. These beliefs are ideological because, although held to be true, they turn out to be false in the light of a wider view of history” (Allen 1995, 9-10).

Thus, where reality for André Bazin was a given, natural, value-free domain (albeit rich and ambiguous) that could be re-presented in all its splendor on the cinema screen, for Althusser, our everyday, lived-in reality was never neutral. Reality, or more specifically, society, the structured system of human organization for large-scale community living, is always infused by ideology. To Althusser, most truth-claims about the world are unavoidably ideological. Truth is really a function of the system of concepts that produce it. This form that knowledge takes when it is ideology is what Althusser calls the “empiricist conception of knowledge”:

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The empiricist conception of knowledge presents a process that takes place between a given object and a given subject. [...] What defines it as such is the nature of the process of

knowledge, in other words a certain relationship that defines knowledge as such, as a function of the real object of which it is said to be the knowledge. (1979, 35)

Althusser compares the empiricist conception of knowledge to the metaphor of knowledge as vision, which proved to be very important to the politicized film theorists such as Baudry. This metaphor describes an ideal of unclouded, transparent perception of the real object (the “truth”) by the percipient. But the empiricist conception of knowledge does not present the percipient with a transparent perception of the truth; rather, it masks the ideological work behind the knowledge. The Consequently, the ideological functioning of cinema is situated not simply in the content of films, but in the view the technological apparatus presents its objects, its truths:

Rather than reproducing the “world” spontaneously and automatically, as the ideology of realism would have the spectator believe, the cinematic apparatus always operates selectively, limiting, filtering, and transforming the images that are its raw material. The impression of reality is thus defined as an ideological effect - the apparently spontaneous creation of a believable, fictional world as an imaginary relation produced by a historically specific industrial and technological practice. (Rodowick 1988, 77)

Since ideology presents itself as a reality that is unquestioningly accepted as true, as realistic, it is easy to see why Baudry sees cinema as an ISA, as playing an important role in the ideological process: it reinforces the impression that what looks realistic must be real, thereby reinforcing the ideology it reflects.

Only the domain of science exists outside of ideology, since Althusser states that “all scientific discourse is by definition a subject-less discourse, there is no 'Subject of science' except in an ideology of science” (1971, 171). It is the work of science, of theoretical practice, that can transform ideology into knowledge, true knowledge, creating an epistemological break with the previous ideological frame of reference. This is the ultimate goal of Baudry's film theory: to transform the film viewing audience through breaking the illusionistic transparent vision presented by realist or classical film.

2.2 Lacan's concept of misrecognition

The second, related aspect of Althusser's theory on the creation of subjects that was directly incorporated by Baudry in his theory of the cinematic apparatus was the concept of misrecognition, articulated by Jacques Lacan. In his essay on Freud and Lacan, Althusser wrote that psycho-analysis has discovered “that the human subject is de-centered, constituted by a structure which has no 'center' either, except in the imaginary misrecognition of the 'ego,' i.e. in the ideological formations in which it 'recognizes' itself” (1971, 218-219). In other words, the human subject is fragmented, but falsely believes itself to be a unified whole. According to Lacan, this happens in the early life of a child through seeing himself in the mirror (or in the gaze of the other) as a unified body image, as a body

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separate from its parents. Althusser uses this theory of misrecognition in his explanation of the way in which empiricist conception of knowledge structures experience of the human subject. For Althusser, the subject that recognizes himself in the mirror as a unified whole is like an individual who believes he is a free, autonomous being capable of discriminating truth from falsehood. But, as we have seen, this belief is created through a set of values and beliefs (of a particular culture or society) imbedded by ISAs that functions exactly to imbue the subject with that idea, while hiding the effect itself has on the subject. Thus, ideology creates a subject that thinks it can make choices and judgments without presuppositions, when in fact those choices are made within a context of presuppositions that are hidden for the subject precisely because of the subject's application of those “free” choices: “The human agent is someone whose capacity for judgment is founded upon a blindness to the arbitrary character of the ideas and values that define the field of possibilities within which opinions are expressed and decisions are made” (Allen 1995, 12).

I shall now turn to Baudry's application of this theory of ideology and the notion of misrecognition of the subject to the cinematic apparatus.

2.3 The cinematic apparatus

In his influential essay “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus,” Jean-Louis Baudry applies Louis Althusser's theory of ideology to cinema. As the title of the article indicates, he locates the ideological effect of cinema in its “basic cinematic apparatus,” i.e. the technological or

instrumental base of film, including production (in particular the camera as site of inscription) and projection (individual strips of film rapidly displayed to form continuous movement on a screen). His goal is twofold: he wants to analyse the ways in which the medium specific elements of cinema perpetuate or reinforce ideology by offering an empiricist (and therefore false) conception of knowledge, and from this he wants to uncover the possibility of a form of modernist countercinema that is not ideologically infused. In this way, while using much broader concepts than Bazin, Baudry still very much operates within the doctrine of film specificity: he determines the material elements that are unique to film, he defines an essence (film is essentially ideological), and from this essence proposes the proper uses for the medium, albeit actually in opposition to its essence, as we shall see.

Baudry begins his argument by questioning whether the technical nature of optical instruments serve to conceal not only their use in ideological products but also the ideological effects which they themselves may provoke. Referring to optical instruments, in a passage that could be read as a direct criticism of Bazin's (and earlier theorists') almost naïve view on cinema, Baudry states that “Their scientific base assures them a sort of neutrality and avoids their being questioned” (1986, 287). Here Baudry immediately recalls Althusser's critique of the empiricist conception of knowledge, the failure

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to question the way in which knowledge is produced against an already ideologically infused background.

Baudry continues by establishing the place of the instrumental base in the set of operations which combine in the production of a film: “Between 'objective reality' and the camera, site of the inscription, and between the inscription and the projection are situated certain operations, a work which has as its result a finished product” (1986, 287). This work being firstly the mutation of “objective reality” (in as far as that exists) into cinematic images through the lens of the camera and, subsequently, through montage, and secondly the projection of the film onto a screen, through which light and movement to the images is restored, thereby restoring the reality image for the spectator. Through this account of cinematic work, Baudry explicitly refers to cinema's medium specificity in its link with Althusser's theory of ideology:

Cinematographic specificity (what distinguishes cinema from other systems of signification) thus refers to a work, that is, to a process of transformation. The question becomes, is the work made evident, does consumption of the product bring about a “knowledge effect”, or is the work concealed? If the latter, consumption of the product will obviously be accompanied by ideological surplus value. (1986, 287)

The allusion to the production of a knowledge effect when the cinematic work is made evident points to the use of the medium Baudry champions, to which I shall return after the analysis of the medium specific elements of Baudry's theory. First, we have to look at his argument of how the cinematic apparatus creates ideological surplus value. This argument rests on two phenomena: the concealment of the work that turns reality into cinematic representation and the construction of a subject, which Baudry calls a “transcendental” subject. Both of these phenomena are possible through two components of the cinematic apparatus: the camera and the projector.

2.3.1 The camera

In Baudry's account, the first way in which the camera creates an ideological effect is through the use of monocular linear perspective. The camera, fabricated on the model of the camera obscura,7_permits

a construction of an image analogous to the perspective projections developed during the Italian Renaissance, whereby space is organized on the basis of central perspective.8_{The conventions of}

linear perspective create the position of the subject, and through this creation provide a literal realization of the metaphor of knowledge as vision that underlies the empiricist conception of

knowledge. (Allen 1995, 20) Baudry states: “Western easel painting, presenting as it does a motionless and continuous whole, elaborates a total vision which corresponds to the idealist conception of the

7 The camera obscura is an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a facing surface by a convex lens in an aperture.

8 Even when lenses are used to distort the image, the linear perspective still plays a normative role, marking the distorted image as being out of the ordinary.

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fullness and homogeneity of “being,” and is, so to speak, representative of this conception” (1986, 289).

Since the conventions of Renaissance perspective are copied by the camera lens, the empiricist conception of knowledge as ideology is also reproduced in the cinema. The spectator, as a subject, is unaware he is being positioned as part of a set of rules and, literally, a certain perspective, and believes that he has a clear vision on and knowledge of the world being depicted.

Because linear perspective is not specific to cinema - Baudry uses the example of Western easel painting - this element has to be compounded by something else. Baudry continues by stating that the mechanical nature of the camera does not just permit the shooting of individual frames, but also “destines it to change position, to move” (1986, 291). By creating movement instead of just capturing movement (in the reality of what's being filmed), the camera provides the “eye-subject” at the base of artificial perspective with “elevated” powers over the world being depicted, thereby creating a transcendental subject:

And if the eye which moves is no longer fettered by a body, by the laws of matter and time, if there are no more assignable limits to its displacement - conditions fulfilled by the possibilities of shooting and film - the world will be constituted not only by this eye but for it. The mobility of the camera seems to fulfill the most favorable conditions for the manifestation of the “transcendental subject.” (1986, 292)

As Richard Allen explains, “the spectator is not simply positioned by the image but assimilates her own vision to that of the camera-eye with limitless power of vision and sees the world viewed through this eye in a way that appears unmediated” (Allen 1995, 20). As with Althusser, the subject believes himself to be the originating site of knowledge, while in fact he is only positioned as such by the technological bases of cinema. This is reinforced by the second technological component of the cinematic apparatus, projection.

2.3.2 Projection

The fundamental difference between cinema and photography is the element of movement, created through the projection of a series of still images, most commonly twenty-four per second. To the series of discrete static images, each almost identical to the one before it but with small differences, the projection operation (projector and screen) restores continuity of movement. However, projection works by effacing the differences between the images, thereby concealing its working in the same way ideology does. Baudry writes that projection is “difference denied” (1986, 290), whereby the

mechanical apparatus both selects the minimal difference and represses it in projection. The individual images themselves have no meaning, but in suppressing the differential elements through projection, the illusion of continuity is created, alongside that of movement, unifying the images in a meaningful whole for the spectator.

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This unifying of discrete elements into a meaningful whole is further enhanced by the reproduction of the formative scene of Lacan's mirror recognition stage in the theatrical setting of a film. As we have seen, in this stage the child produces the first instance of an imaginary self, i.e. an ego. According to Baudry, Lacan states there must be two complementary conditions for this ego-production to be possible to occur: immature powers of mobility and a precocious maturation of visual organization. (1986, 294) The immature powers of mobility are recreated in the cinema through the seating in soft, static seats, reducing motor activity, as well as being “aimed” at the screen, forcing the spectator in a way to fix his gaze on the screen in front of him. Because of this extreme visual

concentration - the only thing you can see in a cinema is the screen (in a time before mobile phones, anyway) - the precocious maturation of visual organization is also recreated.

For Lacan, the ego or the “self” is created in the mirror stage through identification with a secondary body the child sees in the mirror (literal or metaphorical), the body of the child that had not yet identified himself as a subject, a unified and autonomous “I.” Baudry characterizes this process of mirror recognition in cinema in the form of a double identification. Unlike Lacan's mirror stage, the spectator obviously doesn't identify with his own body on the screen. The first level of identification (called “secondary identification”) is attached to what is presented in the image, the world of the film, already given as a meaning (through the apparent coherence of a movie narrative continuity provides).. The second level of identification (“primary identification”), is that of the self as the originator of the perceived mirror image, which creates the transcendental subject: “The second level permits the appearance of the first and places it “in action”- this is the transcendental subject whose place is taken by the camera which constitutes and rules the objects in this 'world'“ (1986, 295). The transcendental subject feels he is the one who unites the discontinuous images and multiple viewpoints into the meaningful, continuous whole that is a classic narrative film, believing himself to be the originator of this unification, just like the mirror assembles the fragmented body of the child in a sort of imaginary integration of the self.

Thus, in summary, the spectator in the cinema, perceiving the cinematic image as an illusion of reality, is given what appears to be a transparent, unmediated perception of the world of the film, which is endowed with a unified meaning. However, the world that the spectator perceives, and the position from which he appears to perceive that world, are engendered by an apparatus. The idea of the subject hides the reality of the construction of that subject through either social (in the case of Althusser) or technological (in the case of Baudry) mechanizations. The film spectator, like the subject in ideology, believes himself to have complete control over the film world, while in fact that

perception is determined by a large set of mechanizations and contexts that are concealed by the cinematic apparatus:

What emerges here (in outline) is the specific function fulfilled by the cinema as support and instrument of ideology. It constitutes the “subject” by the illusory delimitation of a central

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location - whether this be that of a god or of any other substitute. It is an apparatus destined to obtain a precise ideological effect, necessary to the dominant ideology: creating a

phantasmatization of the subject, it collaborates with a marked efficacy in the maintenance of idealism. (Baudry 1986, 295)

2.4 Plato's allegory of the cave

So far we have been looking at the way Baudry develops his idea of the essence of cinema - its ideological effect - through the technological base of film. At first glance this seems to have almost no bearing on Bazin's classical use of medium specificity, but the two conceptions start to come closer together when we look at a second famous essay by Baudry, called “The Apparatus:

Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema,” published in 1975. In this essay, Baudry situates cinema as the latest incarnation of a shared human desire to entertain illusions dating back thousands of years, a “proto-cinematic wish” if you will, drawing an analogy with Plato's allegory of the cave. In Plato's allegory, prisoners are chained to a wall in a cave, unable to move even their heads. Above and behind them a fire burns, through which shadows are cast upon the wall of the cave opposite to the prisoners by passersby walking between the fire and the prisoners. The prisoners perceive only these moving shadows and take them for reality. This is how Plato sees the “knowledge” of ordinary people: as a deception, a play of shadows, based on an illusion.

Baudry considers Plato's cave to be analogous with the cinematic apparatus, stating that it “doesn't merely evoke but quite precisely describes in its mode of operation the cinematographic apparatus and the spectator's place in relation to it” (1986, 302). He lists multiple analogies: the cave is a dim space, just like the movie theater; the prisoners are seated and immobilized, or, when they finally are unshackled, are not willing to leave, like the film spectator who refuses to leave the seat in fear of missing a crucial plot twist; the shadows are like projections on the “screen space” of the wall of the cave; the projection even comes from above and behind the prisoners; and most importantly, there are two scenes at work: one is the real world, the world that creates the shadows, the other is that of the shadows themselves, the “film” being watched. Plato even introduces sound into the mix by suggesting the prisoners could hear an echo of sounds of the real world, necessarily supposing that sound came from the images in front of them, which underscores the analogy for Baudry:

Plato constructs an apparatus very much like sound cinema. But, precisely because he has to resort to sound, he anticipates an ambiguity which was to be characteristic of cinema. This ambiguity has to do with the impression of reality: with the means used to create it, and with the confusion and lack of awareness surrounding its origin, from which result the inventions which mark the history of cinema. Plato effectively helps us to recognize this ambiguity. For, on the one hand, he is careful to emphasize the artificial aspect of reproduced reality. It is the apparatus that creates the illusion, and not the degree of fidelity with the Real [...]. On the other hand, [...] by complementing the projection with sound, [...] he certainly seems to comply with a necessity to duplicate reality in the most exact manner and t make his artifice as good a likeness as can be made. (1986, 305)

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What we find here is the exact same idea that lay at the basis of Bazin's ontological theory: the need of man to represent reality as precisely as possible. Just like Bazin, Baudry appropriates Plato's allegory of the cave to establish cinema as a fulfillment of what Bazin called the “basic psychological need in man.” Baudry even follows Bazin's tracing of the historical trajectory leading up to cinema through different technological inventions, from the magic lantern to the praxinoscope to the camera obscura, but also through other art forms:

Would it be too risky to propose that painting, like theater, for lack of suitable technological and economic conditions, were dry runs in the approximation not only of the world of

representation but of what might result from a certain aspect of its functioning and which only the cinema is in a position to implement? These attempts have obviously produced their own specificity and their own history, but their existence has at its origin a psychical source equivalent to the one which stimulated the invention of cinema. (1986, 307)

What we encounter in Baudry's rethinking of Plato's allegory as a kind of proto-cinematic wish is the same idealistic desire of man (the mummy complex) that lies at the base of Bazin's notion medium specificity. But where Bazin's notion of medium specificity is purely ontological, Baudry takes his into a more scientific direction, opposing it directly to Bazin's purely idealistic notion in an attempt to create true knowledge, in the Althusserian sense, by constituting an epistemological break. Bazin's development of his medium specific theory led to him championing a realist cinema, that imposes no forced meaning unto the images, which were left to speak (or, more accurately, show) for themselves. Baudry's development, in contrast, following from his exposure of the ideological workings of the cinematic apparatus through his analysis of the medium specific elements, leads to a championing of a modernist cinema that calls attention to its material base, a “countercinema” able to induce a

knowledge effect in the spectator. Along the lines of Brechtian “epic theater,” which aimed at distancing the audience through anti-illusionistic tactics in order to actively think about the play instead of just consuming it, as well as Greenberg's preference for modernist painting, Baudry wants cinema to focus on its material elements, thereby exposing and breaking the ideological conventions of realistic cinema:

[...] concealment of the technical base will also bring about a specific ideological effect. Its inscription, its manifestation as such, on the other hand, would produce a knowledge effect, as actualization of the work process, as denunciation of ideology, and as critique of idealism. (1986, 288)

At the end of the essay he elaborates:

Thus disturbing cinematic elements - similar, precisely, to those elements indicating the return of the repressed - signify without fail the arrival of the instrument “in flesh and blood,” as in Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera. Both specular tranquility and the assurance of one's own identity collapse simultaneously with the revealing to the mechanism, that is, of the inscription of the film work. (1986, 296)

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We could envision such an “arrival of the instrument 'in flesh and blood'“ in aesthetic strategies such as the emphasizing of the flatness of the image instead of depth illusion; elimination of continuity editing to stress the formal integrity of each shot; the use of freeze frames; temporal jumps in the narrative; and the rejection of realistic representation to fracture the illusion of a complete and meaningful fictional world.

Through these examples it becomes clear that Baudry's countercinema is dialectically opposed to Bazin's realistic cinema, even though they both envision cinema as the fulfillment of the idealistic need of mankind to reproduce the world. Both accounts of film's medium specificity situate the reproduction of reality as its essence, but whereas Bazin classically follows this essence by

championing a realistic style, Baudry appropriates the concept by denouncing realism. Seen through the ideological spectre of Baudry's apparatus theory, the ethics of Bazin's theory were based on an empiricist conception of knowledge that Baudry opposed. Bazin's notion of the freedom of the spectator, given the time and space in the image to discover the many hidden secrets of reality, becomes for Baudry a positioning of an unwitting subject, subservient to the one great dominating hidden secret of reality: ideology.

2.5 The influence of Baudry's medium specificity on film studies

Now that we have seen how Baudry's ideological theory still entails medium specific considerations, we should situate Baudry historically in relation to Bazin. In chapter one, I illustrated that Bazin was purely concerned with the aesthetics of the film medium: since the photographic basis of film is what distinguishes film from other media, it is the automatic recording of reality that dictates its proper use and aesthetical strategies, i.e. re-presenting reality as naturally as possible through such techniques as the long take, deep focus and depth-of-field cinematography. For Baudry, however, cinema does not simply represent reality; it creates an illusion of reality that hides the production process of that reality. The cinematic medium is a system of component parts wherein the spectator is simultaneously a part of the machine and its product - it creates a subject-effect. In this way, cinema works as ideology in the description of Louis Althusser. The medium specificity of cinema, located for Baudry not just in the camera but also in the projection of the images in a darkened auditorium on a screen, is thusly analysed in light of a much broader arena than just that of aesthetics. Baudry shows that artistic institutions like the cinema are not as neutral or value-free as they have been classically perceived. Rather, they are both socially conditioned and socially conditioning. Consequently, in a reversal of the typical strategy, the proper use of the medium is in fact not dictated by its specific qualities, but rather in opposition to them, for, as we have seen, the medium specific qualities of film automatically lead to the ideological positioning of a subject.

Changing Courses: Tracing the Development of Film Studies through Notions of Medium Specificity