Realism

Film, A Sound Art by Michel Chion

by

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner

Chion, Michel. 2009. Film, A Sound Art. Translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

In this giant text, Michel Chion attempts to revise the way we think of film’s relation to sound, specifically to move towards a way of thinking about images and sounds in an inextricably entwined way such that any analysis which takes the two realms as separate (or even ignores one) would be seen as fundamentally deficient. In an attempt to make his argument as forcefully as possible, Chion splits his text into two parts, with the first tracing the technical and aesthetic history of sound’s relation to image in cinema before a longer section that sees him more thoroughly investigating some of the claims, theoretical nooks and crannies, and expansions of the ideas first presented in the history section.

The history section contains Chion’s most thoroughly organized thoughts on how ideas about sound’s integration with image developed via a complex interrelation between technological advancements, artistic experimentation, and cultural factors (the prevalence of disembodied sound via the radio, for example). Here he calls what is traditionally termed “silent” cinema “deaf cinema” instead (a play on the French term “mute cinema”) because it was never silent in the first place, it just couldn’t fully respond to the sounds that were being played alongside the images. He also claims, convincingly, that sound film is a palimpsestic art form where the silence of the first type of cinema remains underneath the integrated sound film, waiting for the soundtrack to die down to return. In this section he also writes about the way that the technology advancements of the 70s (problematically but still effectively collected under the branded Dolby designation), which featured not just the splitting of audio tracks into locationally distinct speaker locations (aka surround sound) but also a broader dynamic range of possible sounds, allowed for the (re)development of impressionistic creation of space via sound. The introduction of digital recording and playback is the last technological advancement that Chion writes of in this section, and he claims that it allows for true silence in a way that optically recorded and played sound couldn’t, as well as the further development of microediting sounds that makes sound effects a more powerful and varied tool for filmmakers.

The second part of Chion’s text takes a different tack, abandoning a linear progression of events and developments for a topic-by-topic trip through the various ways that sound and image relate to each other on film. One big theme that runs through this section is that the relationship between those two realms is not nearly as neat or easy to understand as it seems. He calls the audiovisual relationship a continuous “vertical” Kuleshov effect because at every moment the image is influencing how we perceive the sounds while the sounds influence how we perceive the images (231). Sounds come from different realms, ranging from simple on-screen representation to complicated interplays of off-screen sounds and music and dialogue that can greatly effect how an image is understood.

Chion also writes about how sound creates a sense of time and place within (alongside? throughout?) a film. Because sounds have a definite duration (even if that duration is endless) they are the elements of film that create time more profoundly than the shot, the image, which might be as short or as long as the director wants. A ticking clock creates a sense of time much more than the image of a clock does. Similarly, the filmmaker can use sound to create a sense of an expansive vista with wind sounds and the recorded (or recreated) sounds of bugs chirping in such a way that gives more life to the image of such a scene. Sound can expand beyond the screen, and so can be used to manipulate the way an audience feels about the images they are seeing on that screen.

Chion writes also of the critical role voice plays in film, noting that even films that decenter intelligible speech (the works of Tati, to call out Chion’s favorite exemplar) still rely upon the vocal to structure the film and specifically the sounds of the film. Even sounds of speech that cannot be distinguished from each other and given their full meaning are being used to specifically deny the vocal’s power. He also writes that the voice might be considered another kind of special effect as actors manipulate their voices for volume, intelligibility, and timbre, to say nothing of post-processing that further changes that vocal performance. Of course, voices can sing as well, and join in with the musical element of filmmaking, and we all know examples of dialogue that have been called melodic. Again, things are not easily categorizable.

Finally, Chion writes convincingly about the way that music structures film experiences, as most films do not feature a full-length score. The music then becomes an important signifier of crucial moments, either as a type of drumroll that sets up an important action, scene, or bit of dialogue, or instead plays underneath such an event to color that event differently (either increasing or decreasing the intensity of the event or instead providing some other way of thinking about it entirely). Music with words, Chion argues, is largely useful for turning the specifics of a scene into a more universally applicable situation. A love scene with a song featuring lyrics about “she and he” or “you and I” turns that love scene into a scene about all romantic pairings, including ones featuring the “I” of an audience member.

Chion concludes the book by writing about how sound is used to “equalize” film, to smooth off the edges of the film viewing experience to create something immediately understandable and graspable in the way that, he says, great art does. It returns us, he claims, to the state of the child experiencing things anew and marveling at the way they work rather than categorizing them into hierarchies in the way that our society would expect of us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG-HRiBWrlM

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

The scholar most frequently cited in this text is Rick Altman, the other major theorist who wrote primarily about the use of sound in film. Even then, he is most frequently cited to say that another scholar has indeed already touched upon the idea at hand. Chion doesn’t overly reference other scholars, instead taking a pretty (although not entirely) wide base of films up for discussion as his method for ensuring a breadth of ideas. It is clear, from the title through the text itself, that Chion’s project is an intervention into the discussion of aesthetics, poetics, and the history of film arguing that those areas of film scholarship have ignored or downplayed the importance of sound to film. Even though the introduction of sound is indeed a large part of film history, Chion still thinks that scholars have not yet fully understood or dealt with the implications of its introduction on cinema or lasting effects.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

As I wrote about above, the book is split into two parts. In the first half the ideas are presented chronologically, following the development of sound technologies, strategies, and effects as they were introduced to film. In this section the technology becomes the dominant element, and the theory and examples come out of it. In the second section, which is arranged thematically around big ideas or kinds of film sounds, Chion will often start with one big idea or term before outlining several different ways that cinema has operationalized those ideas or terms via copious examples. This might also happen several times in a chapter as Chion touches upon a few different but related ideas or bits of theory.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

The biggest rhetorical move that Chion engages in is to first call forth a (bad or incomplete) understanding of how something related to sound in film works before explaining why it is wrong and then explaining his way of conceiving it. This works pretty well for his project to assert the importance of sound in the analysis of film.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

Probably the biggest complaint one might make in regards to Chion’s text (aside from its length!) is the somewhat limited scope of his filmic examples. He brags at one point about how he’s not afraid to look at the non-auteurist works that his fellow French theorist apparently ignore. But that largely amounts to an obsession with (the admittedly great) Blade Runner and everybody’s favorite, Hitchcock. The rest of his examples come from American and European Art House movies with brief stays in Japan ever few chapters. This aligns him pretty strongly with the stuffy movies that people think film theorists usually write about. Plenty of Tarkovsky and Bresson here, for example. He claims to be working on a book that would complement this one focused on world cinema, and I hope he does eventually publish it if only to broaden his scope beyond the staid grounds he’s mostly treading here.

Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

He’s got a whole glossary and invents a new term or two every chapter, so he’s got a heck of a lot of key terms. The ones that stick out for me are: sound, image, synchresis, time, space, music, voice, Dolby, silence, montage, onscreen, offscreen, the “fundamental noise of cinema,” realism

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

The “whirring of the machine” is, of course, the first noise of the cinema. This noise that would persist, concretely or symbolically, into the sound film is what I call the fundamental noise, in other words the sound that refers ultimately to the projection mechanism itself. (8)

This is what the so-called sound cinema made possible, even when films were not taking advantage of its ability to make dialogue audible. The new cinema standardized film projection speeds once and for all (at twenty-four frames per second, imposed by the demands of sound reproduction), whereas previously both cameras and projectors could run at variable speeds, generally anywhere between twelve and twenty frames per second. Henceforth the cinema could literally count on constancy in the reproduction of actors movements and gestures. Moreover, it allowed the auteur director, the era’s king (think of Stroheim before his problems with the studios or of Murnau, Gance, Eisenstein, and Clair), to control the music – and the silence – down to the second and to know that all audiences would hear exactly what he desired. (35)

But even before Dolby, in the history of the sound film, sound slowly expanded farther into the low and high frequency ranges; It became denser and more refined. This often went unnoticed. No one said at a particular moment that the sound was different. But things on the screen were perceived to have more physical presence, and the film’s time became more urgent. […] On the screen everything looks right, but in the découpage, the construction of screen space, everything has changed. The image no longer establishes the scenic space – sound does that – now the image only presents points of view on it. (119)

There is no pure silent cinema on one side and sound (or talking) cinema on the other; they mutually implicate each other. (184)

The absence of a clear rhetoric for sound is also linked to the absence of any symbolic mediator of our hearing, something that would function as the “symbolic microphone” allowing us to participate in the effects and at the same time keep our distance from them, a double position readily occupied by the “symbolic camera.” (212)

Indeed, as I see it, the audiovisual relation is 90% a generalized Kuleshov effect, but it is a Kuleshov effect that is “vertical” (through the projection of one element onto another simultaneously) instead of “horizontal” (projection of the meaning or the effect of one element onto another that precedes or follows it), such that it is much more immediate and perennially produces an illusion of redundancy. (231)

Synchresis can thus override the perception of realism. Cinema has created codes of “truth” – in fact what feels true – that have nothing to do with what is true. Cinema prefers the symbol, the emblematic sound, over the sound of reality. The proof is the alarm or siren sound in city scenes. (241)

Can’t we say that the voice is the mother of all special effects – one that requires the least technology and expense? A good actor or comic imitator, and practically anyone who has had some training and practice, is capable of altering his or her voice and giving it all kinds of inflections, using only the natural bodily resources that nature has provided. Moreover, an individual’s voice changes through life much more than his or her face changes (this is particularly so for males, whose vocal timbre changes significantly at puberty). Though it is common to see facial features in childhood photos that survive in the grown adults, there is unlikely to be any relation between an individual’s voice as a child and his or her voice in middle age. (337)

A song would seem, a priori, to be the opposite of a talking film: the first is set to music while films are mostly spoken; a song is often composed of verse, with rhyme and rhythm, while movie dialogue is in prose. A song posits an I, you, he, and she that are indeterminate, often symbolic or generalized, while sound films present specific characters. A song takes place over a short, highly structured length of time with predictable symmetries and repetitions, while a film is expected to advance without repeating itself. Finally, a song can have extremely varied modes of existence – played with instruments only, hummed, whistled, shouted, la-la-la’d, recited – while dialogue most often comes in only one form. It is precisely because the song is so different that above and beyond its centrality to musicals, in many films it takes the role of a pivot or turntable, a point of contact. The song opens a horizon, a perspective, and escape route for characters mired in their individual story. The song is what often creates a link between individual characters’ destinies and the human collectivity to which they belong. When we hear a film referring to “you and me,” in a scene where two characters are getting together or breaking apart, we think of a “she” and a “he” that transcend the woman and man we see on the screen. We leave behind any individual psychologism that often circumscribes the sound film. (428)

These fundamental noises are like reminders of the sound of the movie projector, the mechanical place from which the film unwinds to begin and then returns at its end. The fundamental noise – always a complex sound mass – is the emergence of the background noise of the film’s apparatus; it represents the sound out of which everything emerges and into which everything melts back and is reabsorbed. (454)

The Eloquent Screen by Gilberto Perez

by

Perez, Gilberto. 2019. The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Perez examines how film makes its imprint on its audiences via a wide-ranging study of different filmic techniques and their effects. He does this in order to counter some prior theories of film’s effects (particularly Lacanian and apparatus theory) and posit an alternate study of the “way construction elicits response” (xix). Perez explicitly places rhetoric between studies of poetics and reception to more thoroughly examine the relationship between the two.

Though Perez focuses mostly on American film, it is clear that his desire is to build a way of looking at film that will work across boundaries of time, space, and different groups of audiences (even if that last part is more implicit than explicit). In other words, Perez occasionally runs into the problems of creating a universal spectator, undifferentiated and unexamined, which feminist, race, and queer theorists have problematized.

Perez does rescue some films from previous interpretations that have portrayed the films (such as Ford’s The Sun Shines Bright and Young Mister Lincoln in the opening section) as one-dimensional by the likes of the folks at Cahiers du Cinema. The penultimate section, on melodrama, similarly reexamines some films that have been dismissed by the genre(?) affiliation, as well as some movies (horror in particular) that have been, by some, pushed outside of that genre’s boundaries.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

I’ve already addressed who this work is responding to and why, so here I’ll tackle its intervention in a bit more detail. I’ve read (and studied with) some rhetorical narrative theorist here at OSU, and I am intrigued and convinced by it as a theory of literature. I had thought of some ways it might apply to film, but hoped that a book like this would come along on my reading list to make some of the arguments and connections for me. Perez succeeds on this account, using genre, metaphor/synecdoche, and identification theories to think about how movies make their meanings and how audiences understand those meaning-making devices.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Split into four sections, Perez (usually) starts by developing a general idea of what is going on with the area of rhetoric that he’s examining in that section then spins out from there, looking at interesting little examples and strands to explore the boundaries of the way of thinking he’s proposing. The first and last sections are a little different, with the first being an extended study of John Ford’s films to explain why rhetoric is an interesting way of studying movies and the last being a short coda looking at how identification (with characters or situations) differs from the apparatus theorists who posit an unfailing suturing into the film (identifying most with the camera) whereas Perez shows (through talking about horror) that the audience more frequently shifts their identification between different characters, situations, and camera positions throughout the film depending upon the film’s construction and their own thoughts and feelings.

In the second, and first big section, Perez discusses the idea of cinematic tropes, particularly metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche. Following structural linguist Roman Jakobson, Perez theorizes that these aren’t just tropes but “ways of making the connections of meaning,” with metaphor acting as a “way of similarity” and metonymy as a “way of contiguity” (57) Metaphor, in other words, says, look, this is like that, while metonymy says, look, this comes from that. Perez continues to develop this theory by diving into synecdoche, which takes metonymy one step further to say, look, this is part of that. He calls film a “thoroghly synecdochic medium” because every shot refers to the larger whole of the film, and therefore the study of the relationship between details (at whatever level, mise-en-scene, shot, scene, sequence) and the whole will help us understand the intended effects developed by the implied author of the film (63). I find this to be very convincing. Perez uses this understanding of how film works to walk through how political and social messages are created and transmitted through film, how characters come to stand in for ideas and how camera movements or editing can be representative of different ways of thinking.

In the third, and second big section, Perez looks at melodrama as a genre/mode that draws on the pathos part of the rhetorical triangle. He interestingly theorizes that melodrama isn’t the exact opposite of realism, as we might expect, but that they both operate as related reactions to classicism, which presents only what it needs, through excess: melodrama as an excess of emotion and subjectivity, realism as an excess of detail and objectivity. For me, this is a great way of thinking about how to classify different movies based on what they’re focused on and remove from the discussion of realism and melodrama (a pet interest of mine) some of the value judgements that have haunted them in the past. Perez spends the rest of the section teasing out how a film will create that excess of emotion through film techniques and what implications those emotional excesses have on audiences.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

I’d call this one very useful. I am very interested in merging rhetorical narrative theory with film poetics to discover why and how films make us feel and think what they do. Perez nicely explains several (though certainly not all) ways that this happens and opens some interesting doors that I’ll keep exploring as I read theory and watch films. Indeed, the area that might be most interesting to me is the one that gets the least attention from Perez, identification, so I’ll keep puzzling through what he claims here and thinking of ways of expanding upon it.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

As covered above, rhetoric, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, melodrama, identification.

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

We may think of identification as personal affinity, putting ourselves in another’s place, as when we identify with a character in a movie. But we never simply identify with a character; we identify with an action, a situation, an emotion, a motive, an interest, a point of view, something the character represents. Our identification with a character usually works together with other identifications that precede it, accompany it, modify it, complicate it. (13)

The part for the whole, the general in the particular: synecdoche is too important a figure to be subsumed under metonymy. Particulars, which are all the camera knows, are synecdochic inasmuch as they have a meaning, which is always something general. Film is a medium of particulars invested with meaning as parts of a whole. Each image on the screen shows something in particular, but something that has a place in a construction of the general. Out of the bits and pieces the camera renders, a film puts together an inclusive picture. Synecdoche is the figure of inclusion. (60)

Nothing is more important to the rhetoric of a work, to the way it affects its audience, than our sense of the author’s attitude toward the characters. (158)

Truth and beauty are goals of art as well as life, ends to be sought. But they are also means of persuasion. The best way to tell a lie is to envelop it in truth, with truth used as a means to make the lie more persuasive. That’s just what a movie does when it enacts a fiction in actual locations; the ambient reality makes the fiction more convincing. Beauty, too, serves to win us over. Usually the hero or heroine we are to side with is beautiful. Tropes gain much of their effect through the persuasion of beauty; a metaphor expresses something more forcefully because more beautifully. Often truth and beauty are looked up to as ultimate things and rhetoric is looked down on as mere deceit, but as Kiarostomi knows, truth and beauty are regular instruments of rhetoric. (196-7)

Realism is often opposed to melodrama, but both realism and melodrama are modern forms that emerged in opposition to classicism. Classicism is art that exhibits just what is necessary, the right measure of information and emotion, the perfect fit of form and meaning. Realism feels real because it exhibits more than seems necessary in the way of concrete observation, because it imparts the sense that the world exceeds our assumptions of meaning, that there are more things out there than we can account for. Both realism and melodrama are excessive relative to the norms of classicism. Realism is excessive objectively, in its representation of fact; melodrama is excessive subjectively, in its expression of emotion. Melodrama is to the inner world as realism is to the outer world. Like the inner and the outer, the subjective and the objective, melodrama and realism may be opposed but are better looked upon as complementary. (203)

A cut at once interrupts and connects, breaks off something and links it to something else, thereby having it both ways: the break that links, the fragments of modern life pieced together on the screen. Conjunctive cross-cutting, which began with Griffith’s last-minute rescues and is still going strong, takes the form of a rupture anxiously looking forward to its mending. Film is able to combine the fragmentation of a modern art with the completion of a classical art. (296)

In identifying with the camera, however, we identify not only with the visual perspective in each image but with the governing intelligence we sense behind the arrangement of images. We identify, that is, with the image maker, the implied author, which to some extent we must do in order to follow a film, just as we must identify with another person in order to engage in conversation. Our identification with characters is always part of a larger play of identification. (349)

The World Viewed by Stanley Cavell

by
Citation: Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The World Viewed. Enlarged Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
  • Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?
    • Cavell is undertaking an attempt at defining what film is, ontologically speaking, and exploring the ramifications and implications of that definition. Cavell first writes as the field of Film Studies is beginning to develop in universities (1971), and so this falls into the category of trying to set base terms for discussion and only infrequently addresses other film theorists. The World Viewed remains important in understanding some of the history of the field as well as for having developed a “theory of everything” within the film world. He addresses actors, screens, cameras, directors, sound, color, and more in trying to figure out what film affords its artists as a medium.
  • Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?
    • Cavell’s interlocutors come from two areas of study. First, his film theory predecessors, primarily Andre Bazin and Erwin Panofsky, provide Cavell with at least a few jumping off points, primarily in the areas of film’s relationship with reality. Otherwise, his interlocutors are primarily the continental philosophers that you’re used to seeing in these kinds of things: Hegel and Nietzsche, and so on. These two kinds of interlocutors make sense for his project as they come from different angles to the same question of what film is. I’ve seen Cavell referenced in other works, here and there, so his musings remain at least somewhat relevant for film theorists of today.
    • As a book written just after the collapse of the Hollywood studio system in the 1960s, there’s an interesting thread of Cavell mourning the loss of what was once great in that system while being wary of what the new way of making movies in America was starting to bring. He writes of the loss of stars like Bogart, noting that the actors of his era at the start of the 70s were less memorable or noticeable as those of the past. This historical positioning also, necessarily, limits the text. The most “modern” movie he writes about is 2001: A Space Odyessey, which means that he was writing about the movies that predated the blockbusters that are my particular area of interest.

  • Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?
    • Cavell primarily pays attention to Hollywood produced films, with reliable standards like Vertigo, Rosemary’s Baby, and Breathless getting extended analysis and smaller works like The Mortal Storm popping up here and there. These analyses are provided in support of the attempts at writing an exploration of the ontology of film. Occasionally, Cavell will take inspiration from other philosophers of art in order to explain how their theories apply (or not) to film, and in order to distinguish film from other arts.
  • Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?
    • Cavell develops his theories in what seems like fits and starts. Each chapter is relatively short, and what starts as a chapter on, say, color in film might end up as a musing about time and futurity. This makes Cavell’s overall motive and progression of ideas somewhat difficult to parse. Luckily, he provides a pretty solid rundown in his final chapter. Cavell states that film is both of and outside the world, reality, and it is because film presents a viewing of reality (as constructed as it may be) without us in it that we are drawn to it. He claims several times that films waken us from our own subjectivities by showing us something that is outside that subjectivity, and in this way it reveals reality to us, even if that reality is not a full or complete reality because it is necessarily limited by the frame and time.
  • Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?
    • While this text is a little more philosophical than where my usual areas of interest lie in the mechanics and mechanisms of films themselves, I always appreciate reading through another person’s developed perspectives on a medium that I love so much. I found in it many passages that spoke to things I’ve only thought in nascent ways, and that’s often a helpful thing for me. I also appreciate it as a way of understanding “reality” as separate from a naturalistic, Bazinian understanding of filmic “realism.” Here reality doesn’t need to be quotidian or only natural in origin, but is understood as being infinite in its permutations.
    • It is a bit difficult to get through and parse, and Cavell could have been more cognizant of the differences that inflect audience response to films (race, gender, class, so on). He’s got a major case of the universal audience member, one that he pretty directly says is himself. I’m always wary of that.
  • Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?
    • Key terms: realism, automatism, fantasies, subjective, photography, stars
  • Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

So far as photography satisfied a wish, it satisfied a wish not confined to painters, but the human wish, intensifying in the West since the Reformation, to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation–a wish for the power to reach this world, having for so long tried, at last hopelessly, to manifest fidelity to another. (21)

After The Maltese Falcon we know a new star, only distantly a person. “Bogart” means “the figure created in a given set of films.” His presence in those films is who he is, not merely in the sense in which a photograph of an event is that event; but in the sense that if those films did not exist, Bogart would not exist, the name “Bogart” would not mean what it does. The figure it names is not only in our presence, we are in his, in the only sense we could ever be. That is all the “presence” he has. (28)

Works that do provide me with pleasure or a knowledge of the way things are equally provide me with a sense of the artist’s position toward this revelation – a position, say, of complete conviction, of compassion, of delight or ironic amusement, of longing or scorn or rage or loss. The fact is, an artist, because a human being, does have a position and does have his reasons for calling his events to our attention. What entitles him to our attention is precisely his responsibility to this condition. (98)

Viewing a movie makes this condition automatic, takes the responsibility for it out of our hands. Hence movies seem more natural than reality. Not because they are escapes into fantasy, but because they are reliefs from private fantasy and its responsibilities; from the fact that the world is already drawn by fantasy. And not because they are dreams, but because they permit the self to be wakened, so that we may stop withdrawing our longings further inside ourselves. Movies convince us of the world’s reality in the only way we have to be convinced, without learning to bring the world closer to the heart’s desire (which in practice now means learning to stop altering it illegitimately, against itself): by taking views of it. (102)

Reproducing the world is the only thing film does automatically. (103)

Film takes our very distance and powerlessness over the world as the condition of the world’s natural appearance. It promises the exhibition of the world in itself. This is its promise of candor: that what it reveals is entirely what is revealed to it, that nothing revealed by the world in its presence is lost. (119)