Reality is Bleeding: A Brief History of Film from the Sixteenth Century

The past several years have seen a surge in the number of films that call into question the nature of the reality represented within the diagetic borders of the screen. In some cases this is a result of the blending of the diagetic reality into other represented realities, and in one extreme case--The Blair Witch Project of 1999--reality broke out of the very borders that define it as fictional and was perceived as "real" by its viewers. ¹ I will argue here that this thematic convergence is not new, but is rather the logical extension of a narrative trope whose history predates the invention of film and, in fact, reaches back to the invention of theater in the sixteenth century. ² This trope, which I refer to as "bleeding," has been the obsessive concern of writers ever since spectacle began to be organized in such a way as to presuppose an ontological distinction between the space of the viewer and the space of the character. Moreover, the splitting central to this organization of space, this rending of experienced space into "reality" and some other dimension that "represents" it, is foundational for a good deal of cultural production in the modern Western world, particularly that involving narrative, theater, television, and film.

In the first section of the essay I distinguish between two ways of making represented realities "realistic." One, which I call "illusionism," functions by convincing the spectator that the medium--the film, the pixels, the oil and canvas--is an object; the other, "realism" proper, convinces the spectator that the object is merely a medium for another, not yet discovered, object. Whereas technological innovation has its largest cultural impact on the experience of illusionism, the sort of subversion of the spectator's place and peace of mind that is associated with bleeding is, I claim, a function of realism. In the second section I trace the history of this mode of realism back through the history of recent film to its origins, then further back to the beginnings of modern theater, in order to argue that the bleeding proper to realism is one of the constitutive mediatic tropes of Modernity. In my conclusion, I apply this media-historical account of the experience of viewed space to the philosophical notion of Reality per se that has dominated epistemology since the seventeenth century, in order to argue that philosophical realism, along with aesthetic or narratological realisms, is itself the product of media, and that media-theory and history therefore underlies, in some fundamental sense, the epistemological questions central to (at least some branches of) modern philosophy.

Realism versus Illusionism

In the summer of 1999, The Blair Witch Project was released amid an internet-enhanced media blitz that ensured (in many cases) precisely the reception its makers had hoped it would have: terrified viewers believed that what they were seeing was "real"--that is, they believed they were seeing the actual footage left behind by three young film makers who disappeared while making a documentary about a legendary witch. It is worthwhile asking, however, in what exact sense viewers flocking to see Blair Witch perceived it as real. They did not merely take it to be historically real, as in "based on a true story." Moreover, they obviously did not experience what was occurring on the screen as immediate reality, a misperception associated with at least some fictionalized versions of psychosis. ³ The Blair Witch experience of reality was somewhere in between these two extremes: viewers believed that the moving images they were perceiving were in fact reproductions of images recorded by and about the protagonists of the story they were engaged with. In other words, they experienced the images as a kind of testament, a synthetic eye witness to a real event.

Given this distinction, it would seem uncontroversial to deduce that the sense...