Impure Cinema

Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film

Lúcia Nagib, Anne Jerslev, Lúcia Nagib, Anne Jerslev

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781780765105
• eBook ISBN: 9780857734495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Andre Bazin's famous article, 'Pour un cinema impur: defense de l'adaptation', was first translated into English simply as 'In Defence of Mixed Cinema', probably to avoid any uncomfortable sexual or racial resonances the word 'impure' might have. 'Impure Cinema' goes back to Bazin's original title precisely for its defence of impurity, applying it on the one hand to cinema's interbreeding with other arts and on the other to its ability to convey and promote cultural diversity. In contemporary progressive film criticism, ideas of purity, essence and origin have been superseded by favourable approaches to 'hybridization', 'transnationalism', 'multiculturalism' and cross-fertilizations of all sorts. 'Impure Cinema' builds on this idea in novel and exciting ways, as it draws on cinema's combination of intermedial and intercultural aspects as a means to bridge the divide between studies of aesthetics and culture. Film is revealed here as the location par excellence of media encounters, mutual questioning and self-dissolution into post-medium experiments.
Most importantly, the book argues, film's intermedial relations can only be properly understood if their cultural determinants are taken into account. Scholars and students of film, cinephiles and students of the arts will discover here unexpected connections across many artistic practices.

PART I

THE HISTORY AND POLITICS OF IMPURITY

Chapter 1

From Impurity to Historicity

Philip Rosen

Much of the history of film theory was taken up by the question of cinematic specificity. This seems to go very much against the spirit of our own times, which emphasizes technical mixtures and cultural hybridities. Here, in a book whose very title refers to André Bazin’s term ‘impure cinema’, I want to address such concerns by thinking about Bazin in the context of so-called classical film theory. A central concern of classical film theory was to differentiate cinema from precedent forms and media. Classical film theorists treated cinema as a new medium and a relatively new art form, even though it was often acknowledged that it might draw on previous media and forms; hence the implantation of a strong tendency to define problems by notions of specificity. This line of thought could often become prescriptive, as various aesthetics based on various claims about unique formal or technical specificities of cinema coalesced with the drive for legitimation of the new global medium.

Such tendencies were associated with both aesthetically conservative and aesthetically modernist impulses. Take two prominent examples of sophisticated classical theorists who may be compared as individuals schooled in psychology as well as aesthetics. In the mid-teens, the distinguished psychologist Hugo Munsterberg argued that the then nascent techniques of mainstream film narrative mirrored mental states, and took a schematically neo-Kantian line on the aesthetics of cinema. But his aesthetic prescriptions were also implicated in a class-bound promotion of the emergent narrative norms of filmmaking for its morally virtuous potential, and he envisioned film as a means of social pedagogy. A decade and half later, Rudolf Arnheim drew not only on gestalt psychology and his knowledge of art, but also on Lessing in order to criticize dominant tendencies of mainstream cinema. His view of the relation of stylistic strategies and perception, unlike Munsterberg’s account of mentality and cinema, was friendly to formal abstractions and represented more modernist aesthetic predispositions. So the aesthetic proclivities of these two theorists look quite distinct from one another, yet both addressed the ‘new medium’ of cinema with reference to ‘old’ aesthetics.

But we can also note that they shared a certain broad modern problematic common in classical film theory, as opposed to the aesthetically modernist or anti-modernist prescriptions which distinguished them. They both sought to define what was radically new about cinema. Each made claims about the unique characteristics and potential of cinema as a technology and reasoned from those specific characteristics to aesthetic – and psychological – experiences, hence artistic possibilities that had to be associated with the medium. Furthermore, the modern and modernizing project of defining something as new and different was heightened by awareness in both theorists that cinema was disseminated as a medium of the modern masses. Each brought their considerable erudition in philosophy and current psychological theory to bear on this awareness and, to a greater or lesser degree, to counter it.¹

Their respective arguments are of interest in themselves, of course. But they also illustrate how classical film theory was in part a lineage of discursive responses to a recurrent experience of capitalist modernity, namely the innovation, dissemination and formalization of ‘new media’: ever more rapidly available and cheap print newspapers, mass magazines and books; photography; phonography and radio; film; television; digital media. As each new medium appeared, each was rapidly integrated into national and international commerce and capital circulation. Each interacted with pre-existing cultural practices and also participated in emergent ones, conditioned by awareness of and/or appeal to the modern masses. And each new medium was greeted and theorized by artists and intellectuals schooled in the previous new media – henceforth old media – and also often in what we might flippantly call ‘old aesthetic theory’. So one can frame classical film theory, with its characteristic and often productive yet tendentious formulations of cinematic specificity, as partaking of such complexes of discourses of the new.²

Specificity and Impurity in Bazin

If the question of the cinematically specific present in so much classical film theory can be positioned within discourses of modernity and modernization, it is not surprising that contemporaneous avant-garde and radical filmmakers were likewise attracted to the notion of specificity. As is often the case in avant-gardes, they sometimes produced their own manifestos, terminologies, aesthetic slogans and theories, partly to justify and explain their work by proposing technical specificities of cinema and by making claims about the transformations of cinematic specificities into films. Perhaps the most widely disseminated example of such a slogan was the central aesthetic term of 1920s Soviet film, montage. As we know from French film credits, montage can simply mean film editing, but as we also know from art history, by the 1920s it became a figure for a number of artistic activities. Within film theory, it was promoted as a genuinely expansive theoretical concept, and it was Eisenstein who did so with the greatest intellectual force. He quickly broadened the scope of the term ‘montage’ from its earliest meanings, and by his later theoretical writings, it came to serve him as a trope not only for a huge number of filmic relationships, but also for cultural practices, natural history and even human mentality itself. The more he developed the concept of montage, the more it seemed to outrun cinematic specificity.³ But the extensive nature of his theory rarely seems to have been comprehended by his contemporaries throughout international film culture or many of his subsequent followers. This is understandable enough, not only because of the complexity – and sometimes the wildness – of his formulations, and not only because the term montage had first appeared as an aesthetically militant slogan but also because so many of his later writings were inaccessible and left in unfinished form during his own lifetime. In the dissemination of film aesthetics centered on a slogan or even a theoretical conception of montage, editing most often appeared as the aesthetic sine qua non of the cinematic and cinematic art. And this most often partook of the sometimes vague discourses of specificity, posed as the basis for understanding cinema and making films.

Another example of a famous theoretical-polemical slogan about specificity from the 1920s avant-garde was the quite different notion of photogénie, as hyperbolized by Delluc and especially Epstein.⁴ It has had a surprising and interesting shelf-life, having been re-examined in the recent resurgence of interest in cinephilia as over and against television and the digital.⁵ But at the time, it could be aligned with another term often attributed to one of the contemporaries of Delluc and Epstein, Henri Chomette, who made a film in 1925 called Five Minutes of Pure Cinema (Cinq minutes de cinéma pur). Pure cinema became another of those polemical slogans in some avant-garde film circles of the 1920s and into the 1930s, in relation to a variety of filmmaking strategies and experiments. It could meld not only into other notions like absolute cinema, abstract cinema and so forth, but also bore a relation to the theoretical project to identify some postulated cinematic specificity and reason from it.

At this point, then, we have arrived at a terminology exactly opposed to the topic of this book, ‘impure cinema’. As the latter term is drawn from that towering figure in classical film theory, André Bazin, we may begin by noting its absence from the standard translation of his works. Hugh Gray did a tremendous service in the late 1960s with his ground-breaking translations of Bazin in the two English-language volumes of What Is Cinema? However, some of his translation decisions have had specific, long-lasting effects in the Anglo-American reception of Bazin. In the case of Bazin’s essay ‘Pour un cinéma impur: défense de l’adaptation’ he rendered cinéma impur as ‘mixed cinema’ rather than ‘impure cinema’. Despite any intentions Gray might have had, this aided 1970s critiques of Bazin that were soon common in the Anglophone world, by helping to obscure the possibility that there were anti-essentialist layers to Bazin’s argument. Indeed, in some quarters, it may still sound strange to describe self-conscious anti-essentialist impulses in Bazin’s writings.

For Gray’s English-language Bazin appeared at a historical conjuncture when structuralist and poststructuralist semiotics, as well as ideological analysis of cinema, challenged not only direct appeals to the real but also realist aesthetics, no matter how sophisticated. Initiated by French theoretical polemics, the critique of Bazin as ideological idealist became almost a disciplinary tic in rapidly institutionalizing film studies.⁶ It is true that the Anglo-American context was different than the French, where Bazin had served as a father figure in the great efflorescence of film culture and analysis of the 1950s and 1960s, and was therefore subject to revolt by his intellectual progeny. However, the two contexts overlapped. And a dominant tendency was to see Bazin as proposing a primordial cinematic realism, which served as the other for the new paradigm based on cinema as signifying process. With close semiotic analysis of textual systems the order of the day, Bazin’s commitment to realism seemed to fatally compromise his insights into stylistic systems. With the cinematic apparatus now understood as ideological, Bazin’s ontology was described as naively mistaken, and/or idealist, and/or essentialist.

Held up as prime evidence was Bazin’s own deliberate and repeated opposition to one of the great theoretical slogans coming out of the 1920s avant-gardes – namely montage. Even more egregious for Bazin’s reputation in the 1970s was that montage was associated with the radical political wing of classical film theory. In fact, in the 1940s, when Bazin began writing on cinema, montage aesthetics had dominated much advanced film theory for two decades, acknowledged as crucial even among those who might be identified with alternative paths, such as Balázs. A typical example is in Malraux’s 1940 essay on cinema, well-known to Bazin, where Malraux remarks: ‘The birth of cinema as a means of expression dates . . . from the time when the cutter thought of dividing his continuity into [shots]’ (Malraux 1961: 320).⁷ Even though Eisenstein’s later theory was formulated in the 1930s and 1940s, it was mostly unavailable to Bazin. So Bazin’s critique of montage was often an attack on the idea of editing’s primacy.

But montage was a primary theoretical prey for Bazin in part because he saw how the concept served as the foundation for more general attitudes towards cinema that he found limiting. Yet, within the history of film theory, one consequence of his critique of montage was the broad circulation of a persistent idea after his death in 1959, an idea that we might call the textbook version of Bazin. This idea was that Bazin’s distinctiveness as a film theorist consists in his substituting the preference for one stylistic level over another, based on an argument about what was most fundamentally specific to cinema. He was thought to have argued – in terms that may still seem familiar – not only that cinema’s unique capacity lies in the technological fact that the motion picture camera registers chunks of real space and time, but furthermore that this cinematic specificity is best exploited by long takes, deep focus and camera movement, which should be privileged over editing. This is a reductive, formalistic reading of a few (admittedly major) Bazin essays, and it often seemed suitable for the pedagogy of introductory textbooks. But my point here is to note how this reading fits Bazin completely within the line of classical film theory that grounds itself in definitions of cinematic specificity.

Given both this textbook reductionism as well as the 1970s critique of Bazin as idealist and realist, even at this late date it may still be ambivalently defamiliarizing to ponder the fact that Bazin explicitly opposed one of the other great slogans of prescriptive film aesthetics from the 1920s, pure cinema. One classic source of the long take versus montage opposition is ‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema’, whose earliest version was published in 1951. Yet, at almost the same time – in 1952 – he published ‘Pour un cinéma impur’. There is a certain polemical wit in this title, which we can only get by rejecting Hugh Gray’s translation and rendering it as the more straightforward English cognate: ‘For an Impure Cinema’. The term ‘impure cinema’ implied a very precise target within the history of European and especially French film culture: the historical avant-garde tradition, which generated slogans like pure cinema and absolute cinema.

In retrospect, the title also implies a deeper and more radical challenge to a central line of inquiry in classical film theory as it had developed to that point. Bazin is against reasoning from a postulated technical specificity of the medium to an exclusive definition of cinematic art or even spectatorial mentality or perception as in Munsterberg and Arnheim. In fact, to make the scandalousness of this polemic clear, the essay places literary adaptation at the forefront of the contemporary development of cinema – literary adaptation, which had so long been treated as an enemy by many avant-gardist practitioners and theorists who saw film as a purely visual art. In a profound provocation, the article argues that literary adaptation constitutes the true avant-garde of post-war French filmmaking.

It is true that the essay also includes sideswipes at montage aesthetics, but the problem with them in this context is that they are aligned with pure cinema. For us in the present, this provides a different purchase on the critiques of montage aesthetics in some of Bazin’s most famous writings, and it certainly obviates the old textbook Bazin. He is not just arguing against one specificity – one which would logically entail an aesthetic privilege for editing and/or montage – in favour of a different specificity, for example, one founded in the camera rather than editing. There is bigger game here. He is arguing against grounding film and its theory in any postulate of the cinematic as an ahistorical specificity, no matter whether one associates this specificity with montage or any other allegedly fundamental property or technique, such as the registration of real objects by the camera, the long take, deep space etc. Bazin’s notion of impure cinema not only opposes the historical avant-garde in cinema, but also a basic premise of much classical film theory. In so doing, it may superficially seem to go against the grain of the modern/modernist project, of defining the uniquely new in the cinematic.

Impure Cinema, Modernity and Historicity in Bazin

However, the ‘Impure Cinema’ essay certainly takes on board other definitive aspects of modernity, which it makes integral to cinema. For one, Bazin insists on its historicity. Over time, he indicates, there are shifting configurations and interrelations of technology on the one hand and aesthetic or formal qualities...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: The History and Politics of Impurity
• Chapter One From Impurity to Historicity
• Chapter Two The Politics of Impurity
• Part II: Intertextual and Intercultural Dialogues
• Chapter Three Contestations of Intercultural Collaboration: The Case of Whale Rider
• Chapter Four Adapting Frida Kahlo: The Film-Paintings
• Chapter Five Transatlantic Drift: Hobos, Slackers, Flâneurs,Idiots and Edukators
• Chapter Six Captain Swing the Fearless: A Turkish Film Adaptation of an Italian Western Comic Strip
• Part III: Literary Impurities
• Chapter Seven Adaptation by Degree: A Study of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves
• Chapter Eight The Supernatural from Page to Screen: Ambrose Bierce’s and Robert Enrico’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
• Part IV: Border-Crossing Films
• Chapter Nine An Art in the Rough: The Cinema of João César Monteiro
• Chapter Ten Relational Subjectivity, Impure Voice: The Video Essays of Agnès Varda, Bingöl Elmas and Kathy High
• Chapter Eleven Jia Zhangke’s Cinema and Chinese Garden Architecture
• Chapter Twelve Amidst Landscapes of Mobility: The Embodied Turn in Contemporary Chinese Cinema
• Part V: Post-Medium Films
• Chapter Thirteen Chantal Akerman: Moving Between Cinema and Installation
• Chapter Fourteen Projection as Performance: Intermediality in Japan’s Expanded Cinema
• Chapter Fifteen Shooting for a Cause: Cyberactivism and Genre Hybridization in The Cove
• Chapter Sixteen David Lynch Between Analogue and Digital: Lost Highway, The Straight Story and the Interview Project