16
Popular Culture Review
message, narrative, or meaning. The uniqueness of the medium - and hence its
teleology and justification - depends on its form and substance, and not on its
subject matter or effects. Whereas the latter properties are characteristics of all artand media forms, the former involve cinema specifically and exclusively. Overtly
commonsensical as it may seem, it is the quahty of material differentiation which
facihtates the broad array of artistic media that we have. Put simply, what makes
for instance Citizen Kane a movie is not that it tells the story of the rise and fall of
its main protagonist, but that it moulds such a story into a cinematic form and
substance. What I am trying to suggest here is that the notion of filmicity is not a
means, a vehicle for the object of the audience’s desire (putatively the story); rather
it is the end of our desire itself. Cinephilia, then, is more than the designation given
to the so-called film buffs; it is the precondition for our transactions with film in
the first place. When, due to the effect of perceptual realism, we mistake the
simulation of film for film, we similarly and inadvertently simulate our desire for
the filmic. With regard to the question of realism, one might maintain that the
audience here is twice duped. Not only is the world on the screen — which the
viewer processes as perceptually “real” — not constituted by the particles of actual
reality, it is not even composed of chemicals and hght but of a chain of computerized
algorithms. For the audience, this situation no longer involves perceptual reahsm
in relation to cinema, but a kind of hyperreahsm (in Baudrillard’s sense) in relation
to what for a lack of a better term could be referred to as post-cinema.
The argument above, which is based on the significance of qualitative
differences between photographic and digitahzed images, might seem vulnerable
to charges of tautology (“digital imagery is not classifiable as film because it is not
filmic”). If so, this is a serious misapprehension. In any examination of the
definitional status of a given substance, the identification of necessary and sufficient
conditions represents a legitimate foundation for establishing qualitative differences
between two phenomena. The substance of digital imagery is clearly sufficiently
different from that of photographic imagery to warrant the emergence of a separate
ontology. W hether the prosthetic image in film is used extensively or only
intermittently, as is yet usually the case, and whether viewers perceive such imagery
as photographic or not, is strictly speaking immaterial in the present context.
Leaving the qualitative difference between photographic and postphotographic
images aside, we may go on to explore the consequences of this difference for an
understanding of the issues involved in the advent of digital manipulation. However
unpopular any hints of an essentiahst assumption might be, in the case of cinema
the notion of material essence is inextricably hnked to the question of functionahty,
or purpose. Like Bazin, I would argue that the supreme aspiration of the filmic is
to record, document and ultimately preserve the memory of physical reahty by
capturing its traces onto film.^- “Bazin proposes,” David Bordwell writes, “that