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PARTISAN REVIEW
experimental. But they a ll rea ll y kn ew better. Ba lzac kn ew as well as
Baudelaire, who sa id so in print, that his practi ce as a noveli st made
him a "visionary," not a recording secretary. And lola's famou s letter
to Henry Ceard in l885 describes how he made " th e leap up to the stars
on the springboard of exact observation." Desp ite their cl a ims to
recordin g the rea l world, these three French masters were really
transfo rming the world into their heighten ed vi sion of it. We value
them fo r th e power of th eir imagina tion .
In this li ght we may loo k more closely a t Pano fsky's claims. I have
no dispute with his proposal tha t the a rts operate from top to bo ttom.
We have Gestalt theory and th e whole of Gombrich's fin e book,
Art
and Illusion,
to confirm thi s analysis. In perception as in representa–
ti o n , the whole is prior to the parts. Film, we a re now told, changes the
bas ic o rder of events. First o f all , Panofsky virtually elimin a tes the
conscio us agent: He spirits away th e a rtist, or director, who might have
imposed some preexisting shape or form on th e work. Then it is
possible to assert tha t the medium itself, the moti on pi cture, organizes
and manipulates materi a l rea lity. Does he mean tha t the camera is
simpl y there, framing, making ma rvelo us images? No t yuite, for in the
las t sentence quoted we lea rn tha t the medium is not the camera but
"phys ica l rea lity." In any case, there is no escap ing the implied
ma teri ali st conclusion tha t physical entiti es somehow form th emse lves
via th e camera into film . I find here the artistic equivalent of spontane–
ous genera tion , ma teri ali sm ca rri ed to th e verge o f animi sm . The
camera, unh eld by human hands, merely bein g a camera, permits
rea lity to redeem itself by materi alizing on film . Pano fsky is too
intelli gent not to qualify his sta tements somewhat. But he continues to
write in the passive voice without supplying a recognizabl e agent for
these momentous events. Anyone who fo ll ows recent film criti cism will
no ti ce that Panofsky's views anticipa te those of many stru cturalists and
semio ti cians in their campaign to eliminate th e
auteur.
In France
cr iti cs like Metz and Bell our seek every mean s possible to a ttribute the
crea ti on o f a film to the qualities o f the medium itse lf and to an
undefin ed co ll ective force hoverin g just beyond the reach o f their
ana lyti c vocabulary.
Ecriture,
th ey would demon stra te, has a life and a
will o f its own th a t usurps the projects and imaginings o f an y working
auteur.
Forty years ago, therefore, Panofsky produced an extreme affirma–
ti o n o f the film as document, as if it could make itself out o f undifferen–
tiated reality. Even Andre Bazin ventures onto thi s same ground when
he compares the sense of the document in nineteenth- century novelists
