CRASSH

The paper will explore the possibility of ‘authenticity’ in cinema, understood as the disclosure of man’s ontological position in reality, and his finitude before that which transcends him: Benjamin’s ‘blue flower in the land of technology’. The genealogy of cinema will be traced from the settings of Renaissance theatre and the development of perspectival representation. Theatres such as the Globe presented a panorama of the world as the stage of man’s Godlike dignity in the face of his tragic mortality, his ‘quintessence of dust’. These spaces remain porous to divine or demonic influences, which lie beyond human powers of representation or control. Such an openness to a mysterious reality within a privileged setting and event is eclipsed by the revolutionary conceptions of modern science, in which space and time are homogenised – a quantifiable mathematical system declared applicable to all areas of reality. As André Bazin has noted, the infinite space of cinema is the correlate to the unparalleled elevation of man to the position of Godlike observer of the universe after the spiritual crises of the Renaissance, Reformation and rationalist Aufklärung; man arrogates to himself the divine privilege of absolute independence and self-sufficiency, aseitas. It is precisely this metamorphosis which leads to the eclipse of any sense of a divine presence and to a corresponding sense of loss, loneliness and mourning in modern culture – in Thomas Hardy's phrase, 'God's Funeral' – a mood captured in films by Bergman and Tarkovsky. By carrying forward Bazin's meditation on the spatiality of cinema and the ontology of the photographic image, the paper will conclude with a consideration of the possibilities of such cinematic representation to break through the 'prison-house' of its own artifice; to open itself towards the deeper uncontrollable objectivity of the 'blue flower' and the secret influences which lie beyond representation.