Full Text:
What Cinema Is! by Dudley Andrews. Oxford,, UK: Blackwell, 2010.
145 pages. Paperback, $26.95, cloth, $84.95.
In What Cinema Is!, Dudley Andrew presents a detailed
historiography of film theory while offering perhaps the most insightful
and comprehensive review of Andre Bazin's on the cinema. Bazin, a
prolific critic and major force in post-World War II film studies, fell
out of favor with academics during the 1970s, a time in which
Bazin's theories were thought by some to be anachronistic. Andrew,
however, reminds us that we have much to learn from Bazin's
theories, arguing that Bazin's aesthetic extends beyond the
ever-changing body of film criticism and academic issues that arise with
each new phase in cinema's history.
Andrew initiated his extended project on film's historiography
in the mid 1970s with The Major Film Theories and has published several
books now considered staples among film scholars. His biography on
Bazin, Andre Bazin (1977; updated, 1990), outlines both the life and
cultural involvement of this prolific critic and traces the development
of Bazin's now famous theories on cinema. In What Cinema Is!,
Andrew expounds his own well-developed theories, building from the
foundations established by Bazin. His title is a play on the four volume
selected collection of Bazin's work, Qu'est-ce que le cinema?
(originally published in French from 1958-1962), but while Bazin was
reluctant to establish a definitive definition of the cinema, Andrew is
much more assertive concerning his own notion of what constitutes cinema
both today and in the past. Much akin to Bazin's notion of cinema,
Andrew views filmmaking practices as continuously evolving, and he draws
on many of Bazin's theoretical positions to define new phases of
cinematic discovery. As Bazin's foremost expositor, Andrew attends
to the complexities of the French theorist's theoretical positions,
bringing Bazin into conversation with such diverse theorists as Serge
Daney, Gilles Deleuz, Tom Gunning, and Stephen Heath. Andrew's
conceptual architecture links some of the most significant debates in
film theory, providing an arching framework that illuminates the
trajectory of film theory's controversial history. Andrew
identifies Bazin's quest as an objective to track the way
cinema's past leads to its future, taking this objective as his own
charge in writing about film in the twenty-first century.
Andrew breaches the divide between Bazin's open-ended
question, "What is cinema?," and the ominous proclamations in
recent film scholarship asserting the imminent death of film studies. On
the contrary, film studies remains alive, evolving to explore new issues
as the cinema itself evolves. The most recent change in film discourse
involves the "mutation" known as new media, which has put
cinema's regency into question. Andrew is less concerned with the
digital than with the discourse surrounding its impact on the cinema,
which he believes wrongly predict that digital media will surpass
cinematic representation. Such discourses often overlook the element of
interpretation involved with spectatorship. Bazin's legacy teaches
us that cinema is about self-discovery. For both Bazin and Andrew,
cinema is a living historical document both enshrouded in specific
moments of history and part of an evolving body of art that answers our
human quest for meaning and progress through the "aesthetic of
discovery." Andrew traces this aesthetic of discovery to the axiom
established by Bazin and developed by the Cahiers du Cinema writers of
the 1950s. The axiom, explains Andrew, claims that cinema has a unique
rapport with material reality but that reality is not what is
represented. Ultimately, while the cinema points to the world beyond, it
is shaped by the filmmaker's perception, design, and formatting.
Yet, it remains up to the spectator/critic to derive meaning from the
images captured, arranged, and projected. Digital effects do not alter
cinema's inherent nature; for, as Andrew points out, technology has
merely shifted the emphasis from shooting to post-production. The
danger, Andrew believes, lies in distraction by new media discourse,
which endangers the taste for encounters of discovery once championed by
the Cahiers writers.
Andrew's notion of cinema does not rise or fall with
technological advancements. As he explains, "A cinema of discovery
and revelation can employ any sort of camera," and true cinema
begins with shooting film (60). He differentiates between composing
(filming actors in real space wherein the construction occurs
simultaneously with shooting) and compositing (adding real actors to
virtual spaces wherein composing occurs on the editing table or computer
monitor). His main objections are when CGI effects are used to control
and alter reality, as he sets out to prove in his criticism of Le
Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain (2001), or when the digital
divorces the camera from its physical referent completely, as
demonstrated in Beowulf(2007), believing such effects to be an
infringement on the viewer much the same way Bazin believed montage to
be. Andrew's distinction between composing and compositing
resonates with Bazin's famous statement in "The Evolution of
the Language of Cinema," when he proposed to distinguish between
filmmakers who put their "faith in the image and those who put
their faith in reality." For Bazin, faith in the image connotes
symbolic representation, while faith in reality refers to the image as
photographic referent to nature. Similarly, for Andrew virtual space
(compositing) indicates a largely symbolic relationship while composing
creates a relationship between the image and real space. For both Bazin
and Andrew, when a filmmaker focuses on symbolic representation over
realism, the film travels outside the bounds of the cinema. Andrew
believes, however, that movies produced according to the time-honored
templates remain the norm. Thus, his aesthetic "owes nothing to the
digital," while it can benefit from the speed and convenience of
technological advancements. The revolution in cinema instead manifests
itself in how audiences experience movies, in the realm of the image
projected.
One of the most interesting arguments put forth by Andrew likens
the screen to a threshold, a wardrobe-like apparatus through which the
spectator passes from one space to another in a journey from the viewing
world to a Namia beyond the screen. Andrew agrees with Bazin's
notion of cinema as a unique recording medium which captures the
material reality of the world, only part of which can be registered
within the frame. For Andrew, the Narnia beyond the threshold is not
purely imaginary nor is it a reflection of the real world. Rather, it is
a place wherein heterogeneous spaces communicate with one another, where
the images filtered by the filmmaker's design meet the imagination
of the spectator. The threshold is opened when the viewer can imagine a
volume deeper than the image projected. Andrew points to some of the
same techniques championed by Bazin decades earlier, namely the use of
off-screen space by Jean Renoir and deep focus by Orson Welles. Perhaps
most significantly, this book extends Bazin's contributions to film
theory to include films produced after Bazin's death. Andrew
expands Bazin's analysis by examining modernist and postmodernist
cinema, which each likewise disrupt the narrative architecture of the
frame. For Andrew, the screen is a porous space through which the
spectator passes not merely to encounter the picture, but to engage with
the images in a world deepened volumetrically. Films that attempt to
control and "white-wash" both subject matter and image
prohibit the spectator's interaction with what lies beyond. The
best films, instead, create a space wherein, "The best filmmakers
meet the best critics at the threshold of the screen, where images take
charge but only so as to lead beyond themselves" (94).
For Andrew, the cinema remains unique in its ability to register
the material world itself while the best films maintain a friction
between reality and projected dreams and illusions. This tension was
birthed during and just after World War II. Thus, for Andrew, the
standard cannon of classic films (and Bazin's seminal articles)
must not be dismissed but should remain as a standard by which to
compare contemporary films. In the same way the screen acts as a
threshold apparatus, What Cinema Is! teaches us to cross the threshold
of academic theory to see cinema for what it can be: a journey through
the past to beyond the institutional framework of contemporary
perceptions.