change mummified

Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory Philip Rosen (Minneapolis·London: University of Minnesota Press 2001)

p6 But more indicative is his(my note: Bazin's) general conception of the history of filmic textuality as an ongoing, never-completed dialectical sequence of representation strategies attempting to move toward total flexibility and completeness in encountering the real.I would emphasize two related temporal assumptions of this mode of thinking first, the present is always already different in some respect from the past, and second, reality is definitionally temporalized, in the sense that it always involves change or at least the consistent potential for change. In chapter 3, we will see that these are fundamental assumptions of modern historicity.

p12 Bazin is quite consistent in his phenomenological solution to the subject-object split. For his phenomenology, the subject's projections toward exteriority are definitive, and Bazin can almost be read as analyzing the status of the objective for the subject. That is, "objective" here can be put in quotes with greater clarity, for the "objective" is always inflected by the "subjective," never available except through the processes of the later. Bazin often expresses this with the terminology of abstract and concrete,which should again remind us of his continental philosophical heritage: the world can never present itself or write itself apart from the abstracting drive of the subject to find meaning; the pure, brute concrete real in his totality and apart from the intentionality of a subject is simply unavailalbe as such to humans.

p15 It is not surprising that those who objected to 1970s film theory made perspective a major are of engagement.... Another recent alternative is Jonathan Crary's more or less Foucauldian position. While agreeing with 1970s film theorists such as Comolli that perspective constructs an ideal subjectivity, or position of "the observer," he argues that by the time of cinema appeared in the nineteenth century, the Renaissance spectatorial ideals emphasized in 1970s film theory had already eroded. The notion that it was possible to objectively or reliably map space according to the procedures of scientific optics (philosophically associated with the camera ob-scura and its successor mechanisms) had been replaced by another, more relativistic model. This model was associated with research on perceptual illusions , the bodily temporality of perception and so forth. It was part of a discursive field stated on the thesis that there is always on a subjective shaping of objectivity in visual and other perception, as opposed to a single ideal position of knowledge. (my note: discursive field for Bazin's theory, especially his phenomenological take)

p 16 In fact, the function of perspective in Bazin's theory invites us to displace consideration of the special appeal of cinematic "realism" from spatial similarity or dissimilarity between image and world to issues of temporality.
p17 This historical function can be described by saying that perspective provides a sort of credible code -- to put it in necessary oxymoronic terms, a reliable illusion--whose credibility can then be lent to automatically produced images. But then, by a peculiar inversion, it ultimately becomes the mechanical process that was previously a supplement to the spatial illusion of likeness, which, once established, lends its credibility, to the spatial configuration of the image. Thus, there is a distinction between perspective and the special credibility of the automatically produced image.

P17 It is precisly the activity and desire of the subject-- "our obession with realism"-- that makes indexicality the crucial aspect of the cinematic image for Bazin.
p23 So what is usually regarded as Bazin's ontology describes a subjective intentionality for automatically produced images based on a preservative obsession.
p27 Since the ground for Bazin's position is an account of a generalized subjective obsession, he must finally make imagination, fantasy, the illogical a root of any true realism.
(note: Bazin sees in film, and perhaps art in general, an generalized subjective obsession with preserving the past)

p31-32 In Bazin's work generally, the explicit concern with the flow of time and the various ways a subject obsessively apprehends the past is pertinent not only the filmic subject, but for the theoretical/critical subject-- sucha as Bazin himself. In Bazin's critical writings, filmic procedures are consistently conceived within the history of cinema, film style, and, to some extent, their wilder contexts.
P32 (w)e may also ask whether his work does not include a subtext on the compulsion and fascinations of history, the sublimations and attractions of the past, even outside cinema.

p32 It is possible to section Bazin's interest in historicity, considered as manifestations of the human concern with "pastness" in cinema carried to the prestigious knowledge claims of historiography. The most obvious and influential sector of this interest is surely his dialectical-evolutionary history of filmic styles.
(myth-- total film, American Western, soviet film)

p36 For even if there are individual and cultural variations in the ways that this projective desire of subjectivity is met, the desire is itself posited outside of change and history.
p37-38 The universality of the ambition for perfect reproduction of the world is the universality of the preservative obsession, the characterization of the subject that is Bazin's founding theoretical axiom. The axiom here finds reconfirmation in history. But the consequence is a waffling on any historical explanation of transformations among media and styles.
(note: To Bazin, the preservative obsession becomes a historical explanation for film history)

modern time awareness time-oriented labor cinema as kind of junction of indexicality and rationalization

"indexing history" p109 An emphasis on critically examined primary source materials in the training and work of historian has been extraordinarily functional in justifying the establishment of and claims to professional disciplinarity.
(note: the primary sources can be understood a species of indexical signs)