Andre Bazin’s Philosophy on “Ambiguity” in Film

By Gabrielle Guz

(Written in October 2020 for my Film and Media Theory class at Columbia University.)

The very act of defining the word “ambiguity” is ambiguous, but were it given a meaning via a list of some rudimentary yet similarly ambiguous synonyms, it would go as follows: vagueness, uncertainty, and dubiety. “Mystery” is how Andre Bazin denotes “ambiguity.” In one of his essays, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” he claims that if there is any art form that holds an ontological relation to truly lived life, that isn’t only aesthetically (spiritually) but also psychologically (resemblance-wise) resonant, it is cinema because it “preserves the passage of time” ( 310). And if cinema forgoes an over-manipulation of sheerly symbolic, metaphorical montage and expressionistic stylization, then it is able to wholly respect the “continuum of reality”(Bazin, 311). Bazin upholds that cinema, specifically that of the long take, the deep-focus, the continuous panning, the spatially-temporally open, is the predominant art that helps spectators measure the multidimensional mystery of “reality” reproduced on screen.

Bazin’s point about cinema’s advantageousness for representing life realistically, in its “ambiguous” nature, is grounded in a historical obsession for combatting the transience of time. It is exemplified through the“mummy complex” — the fact that one of the first works of art in Ancient Egypt and later on in England, like that for Louis XIV, were sodium-petrified, tanned statues and Le Brun portraits, respectively. The function then had little to do with any notion of rational connection between image versus model. Remembering and winning against time was the sole objective. But to the extent that life itself, and death for that matter, has always been malleable, later plastic arts during the Renaissance and Baroque periods preserved “reality” only in “tortured immobility” (Bazin, 312-313). Painting and sculpting were soon realized as frozen-in-time interpretations of nature instead of documentations because of the tendency for them to intervene between a so-called “model” and an artist’s subjective perspective. That kind of interventionism had taken the viewers’ chance to participate fully in the original “ambiguity” of the notion of change mummified. For instance, Baroquian tendencies in contrasting light and shadow, dramatic tensions, and grandeur naturally directed the viewers towards a point of reference, instead of letting them choose where to look. Cinema, in that respect, has lived up to the “ambiguity” of reality because it does not begin with a blank canvas that eventually develops a point of reference for the viewer; the mechanism of the camera captures an indexical, unillustrated movement, whose points of reference are the mysterious workings of time and space.

Bazin’s precise admiration of the cinematic power for documentation cannot be overstated; he lauded only a particular kind of cinema, the one that arose in the 1940s, though whose precursors were those like Jean Renoir, Robert Flaherty, Erich von Stroheim, and F.W. Murnau from the 1920s and 1930s. Those early filmmakers had, what he called, a “faith in reality” that they carried on to future heirs of cinematic legacy, like Orson Welles and William Wyler. Even at the “heart of the silent film era,” the predecessors elevated cinema into a “dialectical step forward” (Bazin, 318-321). For Bazin, Flaherty’s notable honor of the duration of time as Nanook hunts for a seal in Nanook of the North, Stroheim’s extreme long takes in works like Greed, and Marnau’s attention to the “realism” of dramatic space and its unfolding in Sunrise were commendable. More important, he appreciated Renoir’s critical reassessment of compositional space over optical illusions ubiquitous in the 1930s, like superimpositions, associative, accelerated, parallel, and attraction montage. Bazin and Renoir considered montage as a mistaken endorsement not of film, but of still photography. Montage to them, as crucial as it has been to the evolution of film language, can become a mere photographic, rather than cinematic, “accessory” that favors a camera’s movements over actors’ movements (Bazin, 320-321). Favoring the camera over the actors is problematic precisely because it is manipulative. In a sense, the camera becomes an unreliable narrator on its own that rids viewers of the chance to even spend enough time in actors’ spaces and in their complexities of development. Bazin’s talk of the “faith in reality,” for those reasons, denotes a greater reliance on the metaphysical-ambiguous aspect of film that involves viewers’ more relational and active participation in the unraveling of certain actors and their respective scenes.

Although Welles can be considered the “father of deep-focus” through his seminal Citizen Kane, Bazin takes an even greater liking for the Italian Neorealist objective perhaps because he has always been known as the scholar who clarified not only the seriousness of film but also the essence of film. As a fervent believer in works that if not necessarily entirely documentaries, then at least grounded in history, Bazin assigns to film an obligatory function to become people’s open-ended “window” into the world, which once again, would give audiences an ambiguous vision left to their interpretation, not an exhaustive message. Neorealists, he claims, stay consistent with their intent on bringing back the “ambiguity of reality” without depending on any kind of “revolution of editing” (323). Their films can show entire one-shot sequences about seemingly nothing, but, in the justice of “ambiguity,” everything all at once.

For instance, Roberto Rossellini’s obsession with the theme of “seeing” in Paisan parallels his desire for his viewers, too, to create their own multivalent perspectives on what they “see.” For instance, one of the first scenes in the film captures an American GI, Joe, and a Sicilian girl, Carmella, conversing in a ruinous cave, the very texture of which gives the viewers the chance to ruminate on that post-war period of Italy. (A peninsula that is stereotypically considered to always be “warm” and “shiny,” is in shambles.) The camera’s almost motionless “look” into Joe and Carmella reveals an ambiguity in their very relationship. Are they falling in love, or are they merely connecting over conversation about shooting stars and family and grief? Will one betray the other? And why exactly does Carmella, at the end, choose to risk her life for a stranger like Joe? That observance of a representation of historically-informed life is exactly in Bazin’s liking. And Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D would propose something similar, though of course under a different context. By observing a woman go about her daily activities — waking up, cooking, cleaning — the viewers might feel frustrated with the lack of plot, but their frustrations at least motivate them to stay in the spaces of the shots, to trust their eventual relevance to the story, and to confront the mystery that is provided. After all, questioning enforces an encounter with ambiguity, and that is already far more productive than following a predictable plotline.

To gauge what Bazin unfavored, though, Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike could be considered. In its renowned final scene: As a group of factory workers riot against their bosses, the workers run and nearly topple each other, through hills and fences and fields. Via crosscuts, a cow is slaughtered, instantly without even a chance to resist. That montage defines for the viewer Eisenstein’s metaphorical message: the workers’, like the cow’s, even momentary resistance is pointless because, ultimately, they will be killed, too. Eisenstein’s arguably superfluous montage makes interpretations. The workers are like the cow. They are running from an oft-offscreen enemy. The government officials are shooting the workers. The people are on the ground because they have been shot. There is no place for the viewers to phenomenologically engage with the motion picture in front of them. They then become part of a mindless and propagandistic consumption. The real history, of course, of pre-revolutionary Russia isn’t as clear-cut as animal-metaphors that Eisenstein liked to incorporate.

All of that, however, is not to suggest Bazin’s rejection of montage. In his aforementioned essay, which has been consistently referred to above, he concentrates his objection to montage when it’s in “excess” (321). An effective film is believable without a need for suspending disbelief. For as discerned, he does not only relish in historical-based stories and documentaries but also in fictions and comedies. In another essay of his, “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage,” he asserts that while, for instance, Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon is nothing without montage, it also does not owe anything to it because the viewer, already aware that there is artifice in the film, can expect that “the imaginary on the screen must have a spatial density of something real” (48). Even a completely imaginary filmic tale can preserve the “ambiguity of reality” as long as the creative fiction onscreen intends to substitute for the “real.” “Essential cinema,” he writes, “is to be found in the respect for the unity of space,” and even when something is ostensibly a myth, it can be “real” as long as its narrative artifice is realized and accepted (Bazin, 47). Though the balloons in the film represent hope and peace against an otherwise mute setting, the vivid, not editorially chopped, juxtaposition between color and muteness gives the viewers space and time to reflect on their interpretations of the film’s themes.

Though Bazin’s consistent emphasis on the importance of “ambiguity” is difficult to concretely expound upon, his reference to Pierre Braunberger’s The Bullfight in “Death Every Afternoon” is most definitive of his claims. He describes the fascinating appeal of the 1951 film, which is about Spain’s national sport and its psychic meaning, as a confirmation of the “faith of reality,” or of cinema’s ability to represent the elusive. Even when cinema captures death, “the reproduction is as moving as the real instant that it reproduces” because suddenly even the temporal becomes permanent through a recording (Bazin, 30-31). And the cinematic permanence of the temporal forces the viewers into a state of introspection, void of clear answers. “Ambiguity” is the vessel to confronting the “real,” the “real” that most people try to escape. Perhaps in that way, for Bazin, “ambiguity” in film is an antidote to escapism.

Works Cited Page

1. Bazin, Andre. “Death Every Afternoon.” Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, edited by Ivone Margulies and Mark A. Cohen. Duke University Press, Durham and London 2003, pp. 30-31.

2. BAZIN, ANDRÉ, JEAN RENOIR, DUDLEY ANDREW, and HUGH GRAY. What Is Cinema?: Volume I. University of California Press, 2005, pp. 47-48. Accessed October 12, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt5hjhmc.

3. Bazin, Andre. “What Is Cinema: The Ontology of the Photographic Image; The Evolution of the Language of Cinema.” Part 3: Modernism and Realism: Debates in Classical Film Theory. (Precise Name of Edited Book and Its Publisher Unknown), pp. 310-323.