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ABSOLUTE FILM 175
out any literary constructions, in fact achieves the polar opposite of what it intends. It is not more real than any fairy-tale, because in it bare reality is turned into pure phenomenon and is diluted into a mere impression. Films presenting bare facts come by inexorable logic to be the most unreal, the most abstract of 'absolute' films. For any object by itself alone is always a withdrawal from reality, because without explanatory references to one another the things of reality are not real, things being not only themselves but at the same time links in chains of events and causalities.
There have been such masterly reality-films as Basset's Market on the Wittenbergplatz. We saw lots of reality. The setting-up of booths. Piles of fruit baskets. People buying and selling. Animals, flowers, goods, garbage. The single pictures have neither meaning, nor reference, nor actuality. They are a spectacle of mere existence. An old woman combs her hair. A horse dips his muzzle in a bucket of water. A wet bunch of grapes gleams in the sunlight. We are pleased to recognize familiar things, to be able to say 'Yes, that's just what it looks like ! ' But this picture of a market is still the picture of something objectively given, the presentation of some reality existing in time and space, a reality which has its own independent being outside the picture. Our impression is that the film has merely shown us certain existing things. The picture has not absorbed the object.
ABSOLUTE FILM
The Dutch film-maker Joris Ivens, one of the greatest artists of pictorial poetry, no longer wanted to show objective realities to the spectator. His famous impressionist films Rain and The Bridge do not represent either objects or facts which we might have possibly seen in their actual being. The spectator might in principle himself go to the Wittenbergplatz market and see there everything Basset photographed, even though possibly in less attractive form. But the rain-pictures of Ivens could not be seen by anyone else in any rain; at most he could recognize them after seeing the Ivens pictures and after his eyes had been sufficiently trained by them. Ivens'