Theory of film : the redemption of physical reality (1960)

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304 EPILOGUE what happens in each of these moments, says Erich Auerbach, "concerns in a very personal way the individuals who live in it, but it also (and for that very reason) concerns the elementary things which men in general have in common. It is precisely the random moment which is comparatively independent of the controversial and unstable orders over which men fight and despair; it passes unaffected by them, as daily life."32 Even though his poignant observation bears on the modern novel, it holds no less true of film— except for the fact, negligible within this context, that the elements of the novel involve the life of the mind in ways denied to the cinema. Note that Auerbach's casual reference to "daily life" offers an important clue. The small random moments which concern things common to you and me and the rest of mankind can indeed be said to constitute the dimension of everyday life, this matrix of all other modes of reality. It is a very substantial dimension. If you disregard for a moment articulate beliefs, ideological objectives, special undertakings, and the like, there still remain the sorrows and satisfactions, discords and feasts, wants and pursuits, which mark the ordinary business of living. Products of habit and microscopic interaction, they form a resilient texture which changes slowly and survives wars, epidemics, earthquakes, and revolutions. Films tend to explore this texture of everyday life,* whose composition varies according to place, people, and time. So they help us not only to appreciate our given material environment but to extend it in all directions. They virtually make the world our home. This was already recognized in the early days of the medium. The German critic Herman G. Scheffauer predicted as far back as 1920 that through film man "shall come to know the earth as his own house, though he may never have escaped the narrow confines of his hamlet."33 Over thirty years later Gabriel Marcel expresses himself in similar terms. He attributes to film, especially documentary film, the power of deepening and rendering more intimate "our relation to this Earth which is our habitat." "And I should say," he adds, "that to me who has always had a propensity to get tired of what I have the habit of seeing— what in reality, that is, I do not see anymore— this power peculiar to the cinema seems to be literally redeeming [salvat rice] ,"34 Material evidence In acquainting us with the world we live in, the cinema exhibits phenomena whose appearance in the witness stand is of particular conse * See pp. 71-2.