Faith in the Image, Faith in Reality

The history of film style is structured by a division between two types of images, each with a unique relationship to the reality that they have commonly been understood to represent. André Bazin's canonical essay “The Evolution of Film Language” established this critical distinction between two “stylistic families with fundamentally different conceptions of cinematic expression”: “filmmakers who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in reality” (Bazin 2009: 88). Whereas the silent-era “realists” (epitomized by the work of Stroheim, Flaherty, Murnau and Dreyer) exercised their faith in reality through an “objective” style that sought to reproduce the spatial coordinates and temporal duration of profilmic reality as accurately as possible, the “imagists” (German Expressionists and Soviet Montagists) did violence to the “plastic” surface (lighting, décor, composition, acting) or altered the inherent duration of filmed events through recourse to montage-style editing, to articulate “subjective” states of mind. The imagists dominated the cinema from 1915-1930, but by the late 1930s they were unseated by Italian neorealism and the “spatial realism” of American auteurs Orson Welles and William Wyler. Bazin famously praised the realist overcoming of the imagists as a dialectical step forward in the history of film style towards ever-greater realism.

Yet the clear-cut division between the realists and the imagists starts to muddy when faced with the following question: How can faith be put in the psychic—and not just social—dimension of reality?