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As to the devotees of the circulating libraries, I dare not compliment their pass-time or rather kill-lime with the name of reading. Call it rather a sort of beggarly day-dreaming, during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness and a little mawkish sensibility. While the whole material and imagery of the dose is supplied ab extra by a sort of camera obscura manufactured at the printing office, which pro tempore fixes, reflects, and transmits the moving phantasms of one man's delirium, so as to people the barrenness of a hundred other brains afflicted with the same trance or suspension of all common sense and all definite purpose . . .
Samuel Coleridge, Bibliographia Literaria (1817)
In The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt cites this passage from Coleridge to illustrate an early nineteenth century critique of the mass production and consumption of private feelings and fantasies by means of the market place of literary fiction.1 But Coleridge's complaint- written nearly 80 years prior to the development of a system to project pictures in motion for commercial profit- uncannily anticipates the argument of critics of movies in this century as well. Moving phantasms of the camera obscura have been the direct experience of billions of movie-goers, and the conditions of viewing (a darkened theatre, a luminous rectangle before our eyes) have only served to heighten the suspicion that fiction, collectively experienced, is essentially hypnotic, that the will of the mass reader or viewer is necessarily weak. Movies, like novels before them, therefore have often been dismissed as escapist fare, if not a dangerous drug.
Watt, in The Rise of the Novel, and André Bazin, in his writings on cinema for various European periodicals in the 1940s and 50s, both assume a different critical stance toward the pleasures of novels and movies, a stance grounded in their respect for the special quality of "realism" they locate in these forms of fiction. It is the convergence and divergence of their ideas on the aesthetics and ethics of this realism which I wish to explore here. At first, and probably second, glance the subject and scope of Watt's book and Bazin's essays may seem radically different. Bazin tends to root his commentary in the...