Cinema as Change Mummified: Objectivity and Duration in André Bazin’s Theory

Abstract

This article focuses on objectivity and duration as main features of the realistic understanding of cinema defended by André Bazin. In so doing, it establishes a dialogue between Bazin’s ideas and those of contemporary theorists such as Gunning, Rosen and Carruthers. It is thus observed that the “essential objectivity” of the photographic image, which Bazin associates with its “automatic” or mechanical origins, demands a central position for the subject, who recognises the images projected as evidence of the world. Cinema adds duration, the “mummification of change”, which Bazin understands in a Bergsonian sense. Cinema thus snatches reality from the flow of time, halts the inherent decay of that flow, and incorporates it into a moment—the moment of its projection—that is not its original time and that can be revisited ad infinitum.