Abstract

Andre Bazin's realist theory of film and television includes four claims. First, film and television images are made automatically; second, images represent an underlying reality of appearance; third, film images represent the world by resembling it; fourth, artists fashion unbiased pictorial representations by remaining neutral. Critics attack this program, because they think it rests upon the myth that artists perceive the world and make their works with the eye of a mindless perceiver. My strategy is to support each thesis in the realist program in a new way. ;A film image is automatically made only when it is at the end of a chain of electromagnetic events which never originates from a person who is at the same time necessary for the production of the final image, considered without regard to its form. ;As for the denotation of "reality," I begin with Andre Bazin's notion that each image is prior to meaning. Then I advance an axiom: the visible aspect of an object is given as a private visible field that is privileged to the individual spectator. This axiom helps explain how a person self-determines the correctness of information obtained from symbol systems. ;I take the position that no single category of resemblance gives privileged access to actual events. Andre Bazin goes too far when he states that the images shot "in depth," by means of deep focus cinematography, resemble events more closely than other styles do. Still, resemblance remains a coherent mode of representation. ;On the question of unbiased works, I bring in the concept of representative sampling. Although the technique of omission is often used to misrepresent popular movements, some editors intervene to ensure that archival footage is representative of the times and places mentioned in narrations. So, intervention does not logically entail misrepresentation. ;Images have a special value because of their capacity to exemplify and represent a privately received visible aspect which enables one to regard oneself as a nonmental thing. Some of the images of the documentary film Shoah are especially valuable, because they pictorially represent and denote each privately received visible field possessed by any person who actually lived the events of the Holocaust