Hallucination as a Fact

Sorry folks for keeping few of you (unfortunately and thankfully) waiting! Remember I told something about my discipline in that first post? For further excuses: had to reformat my computer the day before yesterday. Below are those images referred in the classroom. I will not comment much regarding why I cited the first couple of photographs which are definitely not surrealist ones; but I consider them to be more surreal – stuff out which nightmares are made – than the latter, properly surreal one. Before you view them, the passage which provoked it…

Photography can even surpass art in creative power. The aesthetic world of the painter is of a different kind from that of the world about him. Its boundaries enclose a substantially and essentially different microcosm. The photograph as such and the object in itself share a common being, after the fashion of a fingerprint. Wherefore, photography actually contributes something to the order of natural creation instead of providing a substitute for it. The surrealists had an inkling of this when they looked to the photographic plate to provide them with their monstrosities and for this reason: the surrealist does not consider his aesthetic purpose and the the mechanical effect of the image on our imaginations as things apart. For him, the logical distinction between what is imaginary and what is real tends to disappear. Every image is to be seen as an object and every object as an image. Hence photography ranks high in order of surrealist creativity because it produces an image that is a reality of nature, namely, an hallucination that is also a fact. The fact that surrealist painting combines tricks of visual deception with meticulous attention to detail substantiates this

– Andre Bazin, The Ontology of the Photographic Image (translated by Hugh Gray).

Viewing Degree Zero

Viewing Degree Zero. That’s something which crosses my mind sometimes.

While writing here, sometimes I am trying that, revisiting Film Studies and starting from degree zero. Keeping in mind how much you freshers know after a month of classes and maintaining the vantage-point. Not a particularly easy thing to do. But viewing degree zero is something else, though somehow related.

Thinking of the moment when mankind encountered cinema for the first time. Thinking of the moment when a human being…when I encountered cinema. Trying to recall when I understood that this is a magic for a lifetime! Regretfully, these are memories and emotions which you are bound to lose forever, it slides into your unconscious, therefore probably emerges in appropriate guises in our dreams. Have you ever dreamt of films? I have. But afterall we are inundated with images each waking hours. It damages…the virginity of our vision, as one of my teachers said. And once you spend few years immersed in images and sounds, thinking about cinema, helped by a career of course, you might reach a moment when you wish you could have started again. There are so much overkills.

Teaching Andre Bazin gives me an inkling of how it might have been: viewing, reading degree zero. There are ways to teach Bazin. Elaborating the context, giving a broad overview, reading what his discursive opponents meant, then again the reappraisals. It gives you a very good spectrum of what was happening during those key moments in the history of our discipline.

But this year I haven’t attempted it. I felt that I will miss precious hours. One might instead devote the class-hours reading him entirely and just think aloud, think laterally and perpendicularly, the way his words provoke. In the initial moments you might find his propositions naive (now that also depends on my efficiency; I might fail in convincing you), probably he also knew it. But you will understand, after you have read a tonne of others’ writings and if you revisit this man after completing your course (yes, after completing it; you need to read him not out of compulsion, but out of curiosity) that here was an extremely intelligent man who had a hunch of probably all counter-arguments his words will invite.

We have just read half of an essay (we will read a couple in the classroom this semester and a couple more when we will discuss neo-realism), we have read nothing of his ideas on cinema. So, it might be a bit premature discussing further. Still, would like to underline few things broadly…

Speaking of the man trapped inside Gotham City

Is The Dark Knight stinking of Imperialism? one of my dear friends asked, rather answered affirmatively in that post I have quoted. I have still not been able to view the film (holy lethargy and weariness of mine) but I thought I might deal with the question tangentially. Christopher Nolan is a favorite director and I wish to write a bit about his films in few forthcoming posts (thanks Prithwish and Aniket! Did I get your names right?).

I don’t think Nolan’s Dark Knight will stink of imperialism. But there are immense possibilities of doing so. I don’t think it will, because it is Nolan and Batman, or, because of the way Nolan approaches Batman, recalling Batman Begins. I think it might, because Hollywood is a big powerful conservative system, greater than individual visions.

For last few years, blame my middle-youth for that, I am hooked to one of the most enduring genre (genre? or style? or movement? or simply a phase?) Hollywood has ever produced: the Noir. Now, my eccentricity doesn’t allow me to watch more, I am sure that’s the better way to appreciate. Few noirs I have seen triggered thoughts, and I have enjoyed more by thinking about it. Noir builds a ‘world’ of its own, and to me, that is the modern-metroplitan, noir is. The more you brood noirish, the more the America in the ’30s and ’40s, during the Prohibition, after the Great Depression and between the Wars, will haunt you. And it is not exactly the documentary history, but the history as it is viewed through Hollywood what haunts. It is history which turns into a mindscape, filtering out certain essential drives out of events and anecdotes, creating a ‘world-view’. I will gush in a next post about noir, but to sum it up: noir had the courage of viewing America’s darkness without any resulting skirting of issues, neither providing easy solutions. It is noir’s cynicism, its reversal of standard values, its uncompromising tendency to unsettle, its knack for troubles rather than trouble-shooting which has made it probably the most revisited genre in Hollywood’s history. Take any director of substance, he has dabbled with it at least once.