Introduction
Today, it is just about admitted by the majority of film critics (as the certain effect of a certain amount of pressure) that every film is an ideological product, that it is made in and diffuses an ideology, and that by dint of this fact, however“artistic” it may claim to be, it has something to do with politics. Two symptoms of this recognition of the ideological status of the cinema can be seen in: 1. the increasing number of special issues dedicated to“political cinema” or “politics and cinema” in magazines and journals which until now have had a predominantly cinephilic orientation; and 2. the inflated number of films in the cinema market with an explicitly political theme.
But there is still a point of blockage, where the strongest resistance to a critical analysis of the ideological inscription of the cinema manifests itself, and this point, curiously enough, is not the demand for an autonomy of aesthetic processes; rather, it is the insistent demand for an autonomy of technical processes. A certain number of critics, filmmakers, and, of course, the majority of technicians themselves, energe-tically forbid everything that participates in the domain of film technique– its instru-ments, procedures, norms and conventions– from any ideological implication what-soever. They are (more or less) happy to grant that films entertain some relationship with ideology on the level of their themes, their production (their economy), their diffusion (the ways in which they are read), and even on the level of their realization (the director as subject) – but none of them are ever willing to see the practical techniques and apparatuses that, bit by bit, make the film, in the same way. They demand that film technique be given a place off to one side, sheltered from ideology, outside of history, social procedures and signification processes. Film technique, they tell us, is precisely a neutral technique, capable of being used to say anything and everything, not saying anything in and of itself, and only saying what it is made to say (whether by the filmmaker or the technician). It is a vehicle, an instrument, something that conveys a message, and, to this end, it effaces itself in this convey-ance. Indeed, there is no lack of common sense examples showing us that cameras have been indifferently used to make both fascist and communist films, or that the close-up intervenes in Hollywood films just as often as it does in the films of Eisen-stein, and so forth.
Let us acknowledge this demand for a“place off to one side” for film technique, and let us question precisely this place. Whence comes the fact that the widespread,
persistent discourse of the technicians (which is often reiterated by filmmakers and critics, especially at present, when the question has become more urgent) endeavors, by protecting the field of technical and instrumental practices from any ideological attack and/or impact, to keep technique behind the scenes as a self-evident fact, and not on the stage, where meaning is played out? After all, placing technique off to one side, keeping it in reserve, also entails making it take up a specific position, and making it fill in a specific slot in the ideological discourse of the technicians– that is, in technical and/or technicist ideology. In order for this discourse to be main-tained, a certain conception (a certain image) of film technique must first be consti-tuted– one which in turn constitutes this discourse – and it will subsequently have the function of confirming and perpetuating this same discourse.
Because it has the merit of formulating the implications of this discourse-of-the-technicians, the long study by Jean-Patrick Lebel, “Cinéma et idéologie,”1 will here serve me as a principal point of reference (only with regard, of course, to the ques-tions of concern to us in this text; many other points raised by Lebel call for other discussions). Lebel writes:
The cinema is indeed a scientific invention and not a product of ideology, since it rests on a genuine knowledge of the properties of matter that it brings into play;
the proof is that it works, and that, employing certain material (various instru-ments + properties of light + persistence of vision) in order to film a material object, it obtains a material image of this object.2
And:
It is not the filmmaker, but the camera, a passive recording apparatus, which reproduces the filmed object(s), in the form of a reflection-image constructed according to the laws of the rectilinear propagation of light rays; and these laws, indeed, define the effect known as perspective. This phenomenon can be ex-plained in a perfectly scientific manner, and has nothing ideological about it.3
These fragments are very clearly inscribed with the presuppositions that lie at the basis of Lebel’s text and that give focus to the discourse-of-the-technicians targeted here (a discourse which can be heard and read in film schools and universities where film technique is taught, and in the manuals which profess it, etc.):
1. Jean-Patrick Lebel,“Cinéma et idéologie,” initially appearing in La Nouvelle Critique, nos. 34, 35, 37 and 41, then, under the same title, supplemented by previously unpublished passages, released by Éditions sociales in 1971. Needless to say, it is necessary to refer to all of this study, but here I only discuss certain theses from the first part of the text (appearing in no. 34 of La Nouvelle Critique).
2. Lebel,“Cinéma et idéologie,” La Nouvelle Critique, no. 34, p. 70.
3. Ibid., p. 71.
1. The fact that film technique somehow has a scientific heritage. (We will interrogate the importance and legitimacy of this heritage later. For now, we will maintain it as a given principal.)
2. From this point, it is concluded that technique inherits, as an added extra, the scientificityiof this science, or, in this case, the twin virtues of precision and neu-trality.
Before examining, therefore, the ideological avatars of a particular technical proce-dure– namely, cinematic depth of field, chosen for its exemplary status – I will have to pass through some questions pertaining to the phenomenon which has taken on the mythical name of the invention of the cinema, that is, to the ideology, and even the mythology, invested in the relationship of film technique (in its origins) with its
“foundational sciences.” (It goes without saying that I will here only be able to indi-cate some axes of investigation, to be taken up and developed more systematically later, as the complexity of this problematic– as yet little explored – demands that we return to it more than once, and from more than one angle.)