470 Daniel Morgan / Rethinking Bazin

cism (and then, within the latter field, between ontological and historical
criticism). Henderson tries to show that, when examined, the two systems
turn out to be irreconcilable and that the range of Bazin’s criticism does not
follow from or respond to the ontological arguments. He writes, “The his-
tory system involves far more complex, multifaceted judgments; as a struc-
ture of thought it is also far more difficult and complex than the ontology
system. . . . It is not derivable from the ontology system” (C, p. 38).
The advantage of Henderson’s account is that it is able to cover the range
of styles that Bazin calls realist. He writes, “it is not the term ‘realism’ itself,
but how Bazin qualifies that term that is the center of the critical act. Realism
becomes the name of the problem to be solved, a kind of x. . . . Realism is
Bazin’s touchstone or basic critical concept; but it remains in itself a blank
or open term” (C, p. 45).66 Certainly, the openness of realism is the feature
of Bazin’s argument that is usually ignored by the standard reading.
Henderson’s argument, though, fails on two counts. First, Bazin does not
think that just any film can be realist; to his eyes, German expressionism is
certainly not, and neither is Soviet cinema (sometimes). Second, the ab-
sence of the role of ontology comes at a cost. The trouble is not simply
exegetical. The ontology of the photographic image is central to the pro-
ductive tension between style and reality that lies at the heart of Bazin’s
understanding of realism. Bazin writes, “To define a film style, it is always
necessary to come back to the dialectic between reality and abstraction, be-
tween the concrete and the ideal” (JR, p. 84). It is only by paying attention
to the relation between style and ontology that we can discern why Bazin
thinks certain films to be realist in the first place.
The initial definition of realism given above involved a film constructing
a style that gives a meaning or significance to the physical reality it presents,
turning it into facts. I’ve described this process in a set of loose phrases: the
film “responds to,” “takes into account,” or “takes an attitude towards” the
reality of objects in the images. I want to collect these under the general
heading of acknowledgment, a concept that allows us to link the two aspects
of realism together: its ontological foundation and its aesthetic variety.
The idea of acknowledgment is developed in Stanley Cavell’s early work.
In contrast to simply knowing something, for example, that someone is in
pain, acknowledging involves actually doing something with that knowl-
edge, responding to it in some way. Cavell writes, “Acknowledgment goes
beyond knowledge. (Goes beyond not, so to speak, in the order of knowl-
edge, but in its requirement that I do something or reveal something on the
basis of that knowledge.)”67 Cavell leaves the terms of this acknowledgment
66. See also Staiger, “Theorist, Yes, but What Of ?” p. 107.
67. Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge, 1969),
p. 257. Other places where Cavell develops the idea of acknowledgment include Cavell, “The
 Critical Inquiry / Spring 2006 471
open, a troubling feature for a concept that is supposed to be foundational
for ethical practice (sadism, for example, could be seen as relying on a per-
verse acknowledgement of another’s pain). But what makes it problematic
for ethics is exactly what is of value for aesthetics. The open-endedness of
acknowledgment means that it avoids being defined as a particular set of
terms, emphasizing instead the process by which a relation between style
and reality is generated. It doesn’t specify the content of the relation so
much as the specific mechanism that produces it.
Michael Fried has provided the most extensive application of acknowl-
edgment to aesthetics, using it to describe how certain modernist artists
construct works in response to what they take to be the features “that cannot
be escaped” of their medium. Fried notes that, for artists such as Kenneth
Noland and Jules Olitski, “the continuing problem of how to acknowledge
the literal character of the support—of what counts as that acknowledg-
ment—has been at least as crucial to the development of modernist painting
as the fact of its literalness.”68 The nature of the medium becomes the basis
for the artwork; the work of the artist is to figure out the appropriate way,
given the particular situation of the artwork (in a tradition, in a society), of
acknowledging it.
Acknowledgment gives us a conceptual framework for conceiving how
film can be oriented by its medium and at the same time produce a style
that is not, strictly speaking, faithful to it. Recall Bazin’s claim that an object
in a photograph is ontologically identical to the object in the world (how-
ever murky this idea may be). This is the basic feature of photographic me-
dia, their “deep convention.”69 A film, if it is to be realist, must construct a
style that counts as an acknowledgment of the reality conveyed through its
photographic base; it must do something, in some way or other, with this
knowledge of its medium. But what it does is left open for individual films
to achieve. In the acknowledgment, a film produces a particular reading (an
articulation or interpretation) of the reality in the photograph, thereby
generating what Bazin, in his discussion of neorealism, calls a fact (a social
fact, a political or moral fact, a spiritual fact, an existential fact, and so on).
Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” Must We Mean What We Say? pp. 267–353 and The
Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford, 1979), pp. 329–496.
68. Michael Fried, “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons,” Art and Objecthood
(Chicago, 1998), pp. 78, 88. It is a running subtext of this section that the terms of modernist
criticism, including those that came out of the writings of Clement Greenberg, can be of help in
explaining the work of an ostensible realist like Bazin. Another direction this essay could take
would be to show how Bazin offers us a more nuanced and compelling picture of such central
modernist ideas as medium specificity and reflexivity.
69. Fried glosses “deep convention” as that aspect of a painting without which “the enterprise
of painting would have to change so drastically that nothing more than the name would remain”
(Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Art and Objecthood, p. 169 n. 6).
472 Daniel Morgan / Rethinking Bazin
This argument requires a distinction in the way Bazin talks about reality
that is implicit, though not overt, in his writings. On the one hand, there is
the brute or physical reality of objects in a photograph. On the other, there
is what the film takes as its reality, which is already the result of the ac-
knowledgment of physical reality. It is the latter use of reality that I have
used the term fact to denote. The facts created in the acknowledgment can
pertain to an understanding of social reality (Renoir), or they can dem-
onstrate a certain feature about the world and one’s existence in it (Ros-
sellini). The kinds of facts developed, the second level of reality, are the
forms the acknowledgment (of physical reality) takes—this is the mecha-
nism underlying Bazin’s theory of realism.70
The framework of acknowledgment allows us to see that Bazin’s refusal
to define “the real” is not, as Henderson argues, a crucial failing for realism
but its greatest strength (C, p. 18). It leaves the stylistic resources of realism
open, despite the grounding in the ontology of the photographic image. We
cannot determine from contemplation of the medium itself what a realist
style can be. Nor is it the case that there is only one fact that can be
acknowledged by a given artwork, or only one way of doing the acknowl-
edging. As Fried notes, “what, in a given instance, will count as acknowl-
edgment remains to be discovered, to be made out.”71 The task is to discover,
from looking at a film, what it is that its style is acknowledging—what it
takes the fact of the film to be—and whether that involves doing something
with the knowledge of its ontological foundation. Satisfying the latter con-
dition brings the film under the general heading of realism; the form an
acknowledgment takes specifies its kind of realism.
One of the strengths of the revised model of realism is its ability to cope
with films that go beyond the film/reality correspondence of the standard
reading. Take Bazin’s description of the final image of Bresson’s Diary of a
Country Priest, a white background with the black outline of a cross and a
text being read over it (fig. 3). He writes, “the screen, free of images and
handed back to literature, is the triumph of cinematographic realism”
(“SRB,” 1:141). There seems to be a paradox here. Given the ontology of the
photographic image, how are we to make sense of his claim that the lack of
images, the very absence of physical reality, is the “triumph” of realism?
Bazin’s argument, as I understand it, is twofold. First, the realism of the
shot (and the film) involves the problem of showing spiritual grace or tran-

70. The failure to see this distinction leads to criticisms like the following assertion: “Reality, if
one reads Bazin carefully, sheds very quickly its material shell and is ‘elevated’ to a purely
metaphysical (one could justifiably call it a theological ) sphere” (James MacBean, Film and
Revolution [Bloomington, Ind., 1975], p. 102).
71. Fried, “Jules Olitski,” Art and Objecthood, p. 146 n. 12.