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78 II. AREAS AND ELEMENTS
Aside from their staginess, historical films have another characteristic difficult to bear with: they are finite; they obstruct the affinity of the medium for endlessness. As the reproduction of a bygone era, the world they show is an artificial creation radically shut off from the space-time continuum of the living, a closed cosmos which does not admit of extensions. Looking at such a film, the spectator is likely to suffer from claustrophobia. He realizes that his potential field of vision strictly coincides with the actual one and that, accordingly, he cannot by a hair's breadth transcend the confines of the latter. True, films dealing with current subjects may also unfold in staged locales, but since these locales duplicate real-life surroundings, the audience is free to imagine that the camera roams reality itself without being hampered in exploring it. Historical films preclude the notion of endlessness because the past they try to resurrect no longer exists. This is what Laffay objects to in them: 'Take, for instance, a picture of the siege of Paris in 71. Excellent composition, impeccable taste. . . . The gardes mobiles do not in the least look as if they came from the costumier. All is perfect. What prevents me from admiring? . . . One cannot help feeling that, if the camera were displaced, however slightly, to the right or the left, it would only chance upon the void or the bizarre paraphernalia of a studio. . . . Now the cinema must, on the contrary, feature the inexhaustible by sustaining the impression that the place photographed is a random place, that one might have selected another as well, and that the camera eye might, with no damage done, move about in all directions."2
At this point a science-fiction fantasy of Elie Fame's comes to mind. He dreams of a documentary film made now of the Passion of Christ from a far-distant star and sent to the earth by a projectile or rendered accessible to us by means of interplanetary projection.3 If this dream materialized, we would be eye-witnesses to the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, the agony in Gethsemane. Film being film, we would moreover be in a position to take in all the seemingly insignificant happenings incidental to those momentous events— the soldiers shuffling cards, the clouds of dust whirled up by the horses, the moving crowds, the lights and shadows in an abandoned street. Fame's fascinating proposal helps to corroborate the observation just made. Let us for the sake of argument assume that a historical film about the Passion has been staged which matches his imaginary documentary in every respect. Obviously this ideal production will nevertheless differ from the latter in that it does not convey the impression of probing a universe at the film maker's free disposal. There is no potential endlessness in it. The spectator will admire it for showing things as they could have happened, but he will not be convinced, as he would be when watching Faure's documentary, that things actually hap