The Question of the Cinema

One way of understanding better what a film is trying to say is to know how it is saying it.

—Andre Bazin

In Plato's Sophist, Theaetetus and his interlocutor—a character known, appropriately enough, only as "the Stranger"—embark on a dialectical hunt, a quest to "find out what a Sophist is" (220d) and uncover his true nature. Their inquiry leads them to ponder questions of existence and nonexistence, identity and difference, and (perhaps most important) being and appearance—the original and the copy. The "art of image making" proves critical to their inquiry. In pursuing it, Theaetetus and the Stranger discover that, paradoxically, even the most lifelike images of reality depend upon calculated distortions and partial perspectives. Referring to "sculptors or painters whose works are of colossal size," the Stranger observes:

if they were to reproduce the true proportions of a well-made figure, as you know, the upper parts would look too small, and the lower too large, because we see the one at a distance, the other close at hand. . . . So, artists, leaving the truth to take care of itself, do in fact put into the images they make, not the real proportions, but those that will appear beautiful.

(235e–236a)

An image or copy seemingly faithful to the reality it reproduces "only appears to be a likeness of a well-made figure because it is not seen from a satisfactory point of view, but to a spectator with eyes that could fully take in so large an object would not even be like the original it professes to resemble" (236b). The dream of a perfect likeness, the Stranger suggests, is inevitably undermined by the deficiencies of subjective perception: representations of apparently natural and noble figures belie the artful distortions upon which they depend. Every presumably accurate representation is also a misrepresentation.

The Sophist dramatizes Plato's enduring obsessions with truth and deception, with knowledge and illusion. The dialogue consists of an elaborate dialectical effort to hunt down and capture the Sophist, "a very troublesome sort of creature" (1961, 218d), because he is the most formidable breeder of deception. The interlocutors posit that one may capture the Sophist by naming him, by disclosing the truth of his counterfeit nature. In order to do so, Theaetetus and the Stranger must sort through all of the snares and trickery—the false appearances—he leaves in his wake. On first inspection, the Sophist appears to reinforce a veneration for ideal and original phenomena that denigrates perverse and misleading appearances.

Further scrutiny, however, reveals that the Sophist simultaneously accommodates an entirely different insight concerning the relationship between image and reality. In order to arrive at it, one must scrutinize the Stranger's role in the dialogue. Throughout its dialectical progression, he supplies premises that sustain the momentum of the hunt, that establish categorical divisions between truth and illusion. But the Stranger's conspicuous anonymity makes the source of these insights forever uncertain, curiously unidentified, and therefore perpetually questionable. Indeed, might the Stranger—at once identified and unidentified, named and unnamed—be a Sophist himself? If so, the dialogue's carefully delineated calculus of truth and illusion might be the product of chicanery itself. Perhaps the Sophist offers a truth wrought by deception, much like those sculptors and painters whose colossal works appear real precisely because they deceive, because their proportions have been artfully misshapen.

The Sophist offers ironic testimony that the ontology of an image is more elusive and changeable than we know. Irreducible difference permeates the self-same identity of every so-called likeness. Consequently, the putative truth of an image lies not in an ideal object that it imperfectly replicates but in the irreducible difference that suffuses—that in fact constitutes—our perceptions of the real. Like an un-grounding ground, the operations of difference pervade the identity of every image.

How, in the art of image making, does one image this persistent questioning of the real? If such questioning produces continual difference—if it discloses the ontological indeterminacy that is indeed the only truth of the real—then how does one image such questioning without transforming it...