The second in a series of essays in honor of André Bazin.

The
one thing that defines the world of dreams, the spaces and the places,
the people and the creatures and the objects we find there, is that we
experience them as “real” — as having the substance and coherence of
the physical world we inhabit when awake.

It is only upon reflection after we awake that we realize how “unreal”
the dream world was we just experienced.  We met the dead there,
perhaps, still alive, we discovered a new wing of the house we had not
known existed, we jumped and sprang twenty feet into the air.

We remake the waking world in our dreams in order to press it into the
service of emotional needs, but those needs would not be served if we
couldn't believe in the reality of the dream world.  We may for
example feel, psychologically, in our waking life as though we are
being pursued by demons — activating primal fears of pursuit by
animals or persons intent on doing us harm.  But we cannot see
those demons, which is disorienting.  In dreams we give the demons
shapes, the shapes of real creatures, and thus ground ourselves in the
familiar.  Of course we feel terrified by those tigers chasing us
through dream streets — they're tigers,
for God's sake, with claws and fangs.  So much more reassuring,
paradoxically, than the unseen, undefined forces in waking life that
seem to be dogging our heels, bent on devouring us.

In dreams we reconcile the complexities of psychology with the
simplicities of the physical world.  Dreams are a kind of
rear-guard action against advanced ratiocination, which takes us into
realms we cannot always comprehend fully or navigate.

This is not entirely a retrogressive process, since dreams re-orient us
towards the dynamics of the physical world, even if those dynamics as
they operate in dreams are not precisely aligned with the dynamics of
the physical world.  There is a twofold consolation, a twofold
wisdom, in imagining psychological fears as physical threats within the
precinct of dreams.  We
are, first, reminded that we live in a world of physical threats,
against which we must take precautions — emotional distress does not
obviate the need to avoid stepping in front of moving cars.  At
the same time we
encourage ourselves to believe that psychological fears can be dealt
with as physical threats are dealt with — by fight or flight.

André Bazin believed that the “ontology of cinema” was rooted in the
absolute connection between the photographic image and its subject — a
connection similar to the connection between a death mask and the face
of a corpse, or a footprint and the foot that left it.  This may
be an inescapable quality of the traditional still photograph, but the
source of the enchantment of cinema lies elsewhere — which is why
hand-drawn or computer-generated animation can be just as cinematic as
a photographically-based movie.

The first in a series of essays in honor of André Bazin.

Nothing
is so inaccessible to mainstream intellectual thought as popular
art.  Popular art derives much of its glamor from the sense that
it is new, at one with its time — to see its roots in the past is to
disenchant it.  At the same time, its very currency, the
perception that it is wholly of the present, robs it of value, brands
it as transient.  Add to this the modernist notion that art with
mass appeal is fatally compromised by commercialism and you have a recipe for
confining popular art to an intellectual ghetto.  It can be
studied as a sociological or political subject, as a stepchild of high art or as
amusing, suggestive ephemera, but it cannot be examined on it own terms.

The modern academy, and the critical traditions associated with it, may
sometimes attempt to examine popular art as an aesthetic and historical phenomenon
but the standards for such an examination are shabby — they would not
be tolerated by any other academic discipline.

The proof of this, I think, can be seen in the fact that we have no
critical language for discussing the unique visual methods of
movies.  The standard critical concepts for discussing movies are borrowed
from literature or painting.  The unique methods of cinema must be
suggested impressionistically or simply avoided.  In their
critical study of the films of King Vidor, Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simmon state
honestly that they have made no attempt to analyze Vidor's visual
methods, feeling that it's impossible to do so apart from the physical
presence of the films.

Of course it's easier to critique a work of art, especially a work of
visual or plastic art, in the physical presence of the work, but that
is not to say that critics have nothing useful to say about painting or
sculpture or dance — that their physical effects cannot be evoked and
discussed in words.

André Bazin took an heroic first step towards creating a critical
language for analyzing the plastic phenomena of film images but it has
never led to a general system of terms and concepts.

By the same token, there has been no systematic examination of the
aesthetic roots of cinematic technique, except insofar as these were based in the
literature of the novel or the stage.  There has been no
comprehensive investigation of the history and aesthetic of the comic
strip, though the comic strip has been with us since the beginning of
the 19th Century, and no comprehensive investigation of the history and aesthetic of Victorian academic
painting — that is to say, painting in the age of photography. 
Yet the comic strip and Victorian academic painting were far greater
influences on movies, on the aesthetic methods of movies, than the
literature of the Victorian stage, from which movies are customarily seen to have derived.

Intellectual fashion and a territorial segregation of word and image in
the academy have left the crucial arts of our time unexamined.  On
the whole this may be a good thing, since art that is unexamined in
this sense tends to be more innovative and vital than art which feels
itself accountable to an intellectual and academic authority.