On a Dual Origin

Here we must immediately specify that, in writing “Cinéma et idéologie,” Lebel intervenes in the debate opened by Marcelin Pleynet in Cinéthique and developed both by that journal and Cahiers. ¹ What did Pleynet say?

Have you noticed that all the discourses that can be held on a film, or on the cinema (and large quantities of them have been held), start off from the a priori non-signifying existence of an apparatus producing images, which can then be used indifferently for this or that purpose, on the right or on the left? Does it not seem to you that before interrogating themselves on their “militant function,” filmmakers ought to interrogate themselves on the ideology produced by the apparatus (the camera) that determines the cinema? The cinematic apparatus is a properly ideological apparatus, it is an apparatus which diffuses bourgeois ideology, even before diffusing anything else. [...] To wit: it is a camera producing a perspectival code directly inherited from and constructed on the quattrocento model of scientific perspective. It would be necessary [...] to show how the camera is meticulously constructed to “rectify” all perspectival anomalies, to reproduce in its authority the specular code of vision such as it is defined by Renaissance humanism... It is not without interest to note that it is precisely at the moment that Hegel brings the history of painting to a close, at the moment that painting begins to become aware that the scientific perspective that determined its relationship to the figure contains a precise cultural structure... It is not without interest to observe that it is at this very moment that Niépce invents photography (Niépce, 1765-1833, was a contemporary of Hegel, 1770-1831), summoned to reinforce the Hegelian closure, to produce the ideology, normality and censures of the perspectival code in a mechanical fashion. In my opinion, it is only when a phenomenon such as this is thought through – that is, it is only when the determinations of the apparatus (the camera) which structures the reality of its inscription are thought through – that the cinema will be able to objectively envisage its relationship to ideology. ²