We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
THE FILM OF FACT 213
move— suppression of the story— conforms to Proust's profound observation that revealing camera statements presuppose emotional detachment on the photographer's part. Photography, Proust has it, is a product of alienation,* which implies that good cinema is inconsistent with the enticements of an intrigue. The second move— acceptance of the storyfinds support in Ortega y Gasset's judicious remark to the effect that our ability to perceive and absorb an event profits by our emotional participation in it: "It appears that those elements which seem to distort pure contemplation—interests, sentiments, compulsions, affective preferences— are precisely its indispensable instruments."38
The conflict between these two antinomic moves, which are natural outlets for the realistic and formative tendencies respectively, materializes in the very form of the musical. No sooner does the real-life intrigue of a musical achieve a certain degree of consistency than it is discontinued for the sake of a production number which often has already been delineated at a prenatal stage, thereby corroding the intrigue from within. Musicals reflect the dialectic relation between the story film and the non-story film without ever trying to resolve it. This gives them an air of cinema. Penelope fashion, they eternally dissolve the plot they are weaving. The songs and dances they sport form part of the intrigue and at the same time enhance with their glitter its decomposition.**
The demand for the story, then, re-emerges within the womb of the non-story film. In fact, the body of existing documentaries testifies to a persistent tendency toward dramatization. But how is it possible for the film maker to follow this tendency— tell a story, that is— and yet try to capture the flow of life? Or to put it this way, how can he do justice to the two conflicting principles according to which the story both obstructs and stimulates camera explorations? In rendering the world around us, he seems to be faced with the dilemma of having to sacrifice either its alienation or its fullness.
Note that the two opposite principles are not as irreconcilable as the form of the musical which mirrors them tends to suggest. And of course, the same holds true of the dilemma in their wake. It would be insoluble only if the tentative hypothesis that the story as such goes against the grain of the medium could be upheld. Then the recourse to a story— any story— would automatically preclude the display of cinematic life, and the dilemma confronting the film maker would indeed be a genuine one. Upon closer inspection, however, this hypothesis turns out to be too broad to cover all the relevant cases. It requires qualification. It must be replaced
* Sec pp. 14 ff.
** For this passage, see pp. 148-9.