To browse Academia. The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. At its limit this theory states that photography and cinema are not icons that resemble or represent the world; rather, through indexical registrations of objects from the world onto photographic emulsions, they represent , and hence are, this world.
As any student of contemporary film theory knows, however, Bazin's ontology of cinema is but one pole of a dialectic, the other half of which states, as Bazin does at the end of this same essay, "Cinema is also a language.
It is not surprising, then, to find the Meese Commission quoting the above passage from Bazin in its efforts to detail the special dangers of pornography. To the commission, the filmic representation of an "actual person" engaged in sexual acts is exactly the same as if witnessed "in the flesh. Realist theories of cinema often come up against this problem of an "ultimate" obscenity of the medium at some point in their thinking.
Seeing an "object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it" would, he hoped, empower us. But when he came up against some of the "hard-core" "objects" of this liberation, Bazin could be seen to be grappling, and much more thoughtfully than the Meese Commission, with the pornographic limits of his realist ontology.
Writing about a newsreel sequence showing the execution of Communist spies by members of Chiang Kai-shek's army, he anticipates current concerns about "snuff" films:. The Handbook of Visual Culture, ed. Heywood and Sandywell, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Minor structural shortcomings and slightly contentious claims notwithstanding which anyway are natural to occur in a work of such daunting breadth , Misanthropy is a vibrant, well-researched, and enlightening scholarly work on a subject that has always flown under the radar but is fully deserving of all the studious attention that Gibson so generously bestows upon it.
