New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

190 CINEMATIC REALISM
photographic reproduction, for both Kracauer and Bazin, assured the
essential “objectivity” of film. That the photographer, unlike the painter or
poet, cannot work in the absence of a model, was presumed to guarantee
an ontological bond between the photographic representation and what it
represents. Since photochemical processes involve an indexical link between
the photographic analogon and its referent, cinematography bears
unimpeachable witness to “things as they are.” Thinkers as diverse as
Panofsky, Kracauer, Bazin and Pasolini emphasize film as an “art of
reality” and even Metz, in his early work, contrasted the “arbitrary” and
“unmotivated” linguistic sign with the “analogous” and “motivated”
photographic image.
IDEOLOGY AND THE CAMERA
In the wake of the events of May 1968, the French film journals Cahiers du
Cinéma and Cinétique sought to extrapolate Althusser’s theoretical
practice in order to forge a scientific understanding of the cinema as an
ideological apparatus. Theorists such as Marcelin Pleynet, Jean-Louis
Baudry and Jean-Louis Comolli questioned the idealization of the cinema’s
presumably inherent truth-telling capabilities, claiming that bourgeois
ideology was built into the cinematic apparatus itself. Jean-Louis Baudry
argued, in “The Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic
Apparatus,” that the apparatus must be examined in the context of the
ideology which produced it as an effect, contending that the specificity of
the cinematic apparatus as a mode of representation and as a material
practice consisted in its way of literally realizing the very processes by
which the subject is constructed in ideology. The specific function of the
cinema, as support and instrument of ideology, was to constitute the
subject by the illusory delimitation of a central location, thus creating a
“phantasmization” of the subject and collaborating in the maintenance of
bourgeois idealism (Baudry, in Rosen 1986). Marcelin Pleynet pointed out
(in Harvey 1978: 159) that the technology of the camera was conditioned
by the CODE OF RENAISSANCE PERSPECTIVE, i.e. the convention of
pictorial representation developed by the Renaissance painters of the
quattrocento, who noted that the perceived size of objects in nature varies
proportionally with the square of the distance from the eye.
The quattrocento painters incorporated this code into their paintings in
order to project three-dimensional space onto a flat two-dimensional
surface, thus producing the impression of depth, an innovation which
ultimately led to impressive trompe-l’oeil effects. As absorbed into the
camera, this code functioned, as Marcelin Pleynet put it, “to rectify” any
anomoly in perspective, so as to reproduce in its full authority the code of
specular vision as it was defined by Renaissance humanism.” 1 By
incorporating the perspectiva artificialis into its reproductive apparatus, the