Film Theory in France

Ever since the Lumière brothers screened their first film in 1895 at the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, the fascinated response that this shadow world elicited pivoted on questions of understanding exactly what the new phenomenon was that the viewers were seeing and experiencing. The initial captivating potential of cinema inspired the speculative concerns of the very texts that were to form the body of early film theory in France, eclectic though such writings on film within the classical period were¹ The ontology of film, its impact on its spectators, its hermaphroditic birth as both art and science, its relation to and difference from the other arts, its connection with its context, whether sociological, geographical, or historical: these were just some of the varied focal points of theoretical interest. The era of energetic, non-systematic theorizing that extended, roughly, from cinema's inception to the end of the Second World War may now be long gone, but its legacy is still being worked through. The present state of film theory in France registers this, albeit tacitly at times and in spite of the declarations of epistemological breaks and historical turns that have occurred over the years. Likewise, the multiple changes that have taken place since the end of the war also feed into debates at the cutting-edge of film theory today.

During the post-war period up to the late 1950s the theories of André Bazin were highly influential. Bazin (1918-1958) was one of the co-founders, with Joseph-Marie Lo Duca and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, of Cahiers du cinéma in 1951; in this and other publications he championed Italian neo-realism and also celebrated a particular style of filming that valorized duration, the long take, and deep focus (inaugurated by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane in 1941). He also sustained a belief in the indexical link between film and its filmed subjects (that is, between the subject and his or her imprint on photo-sensitive material), a connection he had first proposed, with reference to photography, in his article 'Ontologie de l'image photographique', an early version of which appeared in 1945² This short piece reveals a further element in Bazin's thinking that contributed to the impact that his work would have on his contemporaries and which would persist into current film theory: he argued poignantly that the photographic image contended with mortality but actually saved its subject from a second spiritual death. The image of the Turin Shroud that accompanies the publication of 'Ontologie de l'image photographique' (1958) suggests a bond between the material and the spiritual dimensions, and this is a connection that two theorists indebted to Bazin — Amédée Ayfre (1922-1964) and Henri Agel (1911-2008) — were to focus on in their work on film. Both men were interested in producing a phenomenology of film, an endeavour cut short, in Ayfre's case, by his untimely death in a car accident, but continued thereafter by Agel³ Ayfre believed that phenomenology unveiled a truth that could not be reduced to logic⁴ For Agel, rather than approach the art work from the standpoint of linguistics or some other discipline, one must give oneself over to it on its own grounds, which are those of experience rather than of knowledge or science. In his understanding, which reveals the influence of both Bazin's and Ayfre's thinking, cinema is the experiential site of the expression of a world. In this particular theory the cinema screen was deemed to provide the window on to a beyond, whether a world of essences or a spiritual dimension. Praised for their originality but criticized for failing to engage with the material conditions of cinema⁵ these thinkers were nevertheless the first to bring a phenomenological approach to the field of film theory. The current resurgence of interest in phenomenological film theory owes a great deal to subsequent critical dialogue with this first emergence, yet is underpinned by a different philosophy. Although such interest is principally rooted in an Anglo-American context, its philosophical heritage lies in the work...