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An Absent Presence
In "The Ontology of the Photographic Image"1 French critic André Bazin (1918-1958) argues that in a movie theater, with the lights turned off, we all dream the same dream. Thanks to its oneiric quality, film functions as a collective unconscious that fulfills a spiritual need to share a common remi-niscence. Of course, this characteristic does not apply to cinema alone. At the origins of all visual arts there is a "mummy complex"2; that is, a psychological desire for humans to portray themselves in order to overcome death and tri-umph over time. What is peculiar about cinema, though, is that it provides a representation of the world through a mechanical reproduction of the material world itself.
Unlike other visual arts that preceded it, such as painting and sculpture, the photographic image (on which cinema is based) does not simply imitate nature or resemble the world; it is the world. In a similar way, the mummy with its wrapping is not a portrayal of the dead person, it is the dead person.3 Or rather, photography stands for the world; by sublimating the desire to freeze the moment, it creates the effect of replacing the world even when the original and specific object that was registered from the world onto emulsions no longer exists. In this sense, the value of photography lies not just in its alleged objectiv-ity, but rather in its capacity to inspire in the spectator an irrational credulity. As for cinema, it appears as the completion in time and movement of photography (which runs through a projector at a speed of 24 frames per second), and thus does not represent objects, it re-presents them.
"The Ontology of the Photographic Image" includes one illustration, a pho-tograph of the Shroud of Turin, shot by Giuseppe Enrie (1931). The Shroud's origin is similar to the photographic process of imprinting a trace. Although no one would question that, at a certain point, a wounded human being was in the Shroud, only its status as a sacred relic allowed some to assert that the man in the Shroud is Christ. Bazin's case study of Christological ontology proves that, in theory, any photography appeals to belief the way the Shroud does. Both the automatic record produced by Enrie...