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Filed under Book Reviews in Issue 39

The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man and The Stars by EdgarMorin

by Karl SchoonoverKarl Schoonover is completing a book on postwar film realism and violence. He has alsowritten on performance, spirit photography, and video art. He received his PhD in ModernCulture and Media from Brown University in 2004. In September, he will join the filmstudies faculty at Michigan State University.

I first came across Edgar Morin’s writings almost a decadeago. Having just finished a graduate seminar in classical film theory, I was eager to helprecover pre-1968 approaches to cinema, and so it seemed fortuitous when I discovered aneglected 1960 paperback edition of Morin’s The Stars in a second-hand bookstore that wasgoing out of business. I recognized Morin’s name from his co-directing credit on the seminaldocumentary film Chronique d’un été (Morin and Jean Rouch, 1961) (by some accounts,Morin coined the term “cinema-verité”) and from Jacques Aumont’s essay on the close-up(1), but I bought the book for its cover: the young Brigitte Bardot appears on the outside, cutout like a newsprint paper doll and pasted onto a luminous sea of magenta. Her figure posesiconically – hands on waist and hips swung – under a small crowd of sans serif letters. I felt Iwas rescuing a piece of pure ’60s Pop.

Opening the covers of this Grove Press edition of The Stars is like unlocking a time capsule:the inside of the book brazenly combines Pop Art collage, devotional reliquary, industrialhistoriography, and sociological speculation. Visually it is laid out much like a 1950s moviestar magazine (or fan’s scrapbook): paparazzi images bleed to the edges of the pages, comicbook covers mix with movie stills and French soap advertisements featuring beauty tips fromLauren Bacall. It is amazing that a book that promises to examine stardom as a sociologicalphenomenon would so self-consciously invoke the graphic conventions of “trash” culture.From this book’s collision of academic rhetoric and ephemera – its resolute admixture of

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high and low – emerges a beguilingly promiscuous methodology, one in which Eisenstein’sfamous stone-lion-comes-alive montage from Battleship Potemkin (1925) appears quitecomfortably alongside a close reading of Katharine Hepburn’s nuanced make-up changes.How brilliantly fitting that a scholarly investigation of Hollywood’s institutions of bodycommodification should choose as its jacket liner the poster for House of Wax (André DeToth, 1953).

The University of Minnesota Press has just reprinted The Stars.The new edition retains little of the visual quirkiness of the 1960 edition (though it doesreproduce several images central to the prose), but the evocatively unidiomatic title hassurvived, as has Morin’s once boldly idiosyncratic and today surprisingly currentinterdisciplinarity – a methodology that combines industrial history, popular criticism,anthropology, social psychology, audience reception study, and political philosophy. Thechapter on James Dean remains a canonical essay for the study of stardom. It is important tohave this book back in print, especially accompanied by Lorraine Mortimer’s lucid andconcise introduction. Perhaps even more intriguing is the publisher’s decision to print thefirst English edition of Morin’s The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, recently translated byMortimer. Originally published in France in 1956, this book represents a fascinating juncturein the history of pre-1968 efforts to theorise the cinematic image. While Morin was oftencited by major figures like Aumont, Christian Metz, and Siegfried Kracauer, and morerecently by Fredric Jameson, Noël Burch, and Lisa Cartwright, his writings have neveroccupied a prominent place in the Anglophone canons of film theory.

Mortimer introduces The Cinema with an essay betraying the symptom that marks manygood translations: an empathic identification with her subject. (Morin was, in some capacity,personally involved with this translation.) More than simply teasing out the lineage of herauthor’s ideas, Mortimer pursues the impulses behind Morin’s passionate assertion thatsocio-anthropology is the best means of investigating cinema. Morin insists not only thatcinema deserves serious scholarly study, but he also raises the spectre of methodologies leftbehind in many film studies. Cinema seems to demand, for Morin, anthropology.Anthropological writings on cinema receive little attention in mainstream academic filmstudies. Studies of myth and the “archaic man”, with the exception of Carol Clover’s work onhorror films, have been largely ignored as an approach to understand the lure of the medium

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(2).

Understanding what drives Morin methodologically, Mortimer argues, reveals the criticalvalue of Morin’s writing for contemporary film scholars. Mortimer believes that an overlyrational approach to analysis dominates the academic study of film, an approach that risksflattening the experience of cinema. In her view, a monolith of film theory threatens todisembowel the very qualities that grant the medium its power, through a series of analysesor clinical dissections that are especially insensitive to cinema’s subjective lures. Morin’sperspective, by contrast, demands that we recognise how essential affect, participation, andchance are to the institution of cinema. He seizes on the magic of cinema, regarding it as astructured form of enchantment which, to be understood, must be appreciated for its anti-rationalising reason.

In his 1978 preface to The Cinema, Morin admits that he originally chose to work on cinemabecause it physically possessed him unlike any other medium. Morin argues that a seriousinvestigation into cinema does not require critical distance from a personal experience of themedium. In fact, he feels the truth of cinema will only be revealed to those who “plunge,without getting lost, into the fundamental contradictions that define cinema” (pp. 216-217).He aims to uncover the subjective lures of cinema. Yet, in trying to access why films so easily“possess […] and tear me apart,” he doesn’t retaliate in kind (p. 221). He refuses to dissect ordismember the medium under investigation. Instead, he examines the cinema as anencompassing experience, akin to seeing “corporeally” (p. 158). Plunging himself into itscontradictions, Morin seeks to “envisage cinema in its human totality” (p. 4). From thissensual history of technology, more a vivisection than an autopsy, the cinema emerges assupernatural – more real than reality. Cinema is neither simply a reflection of society norjust another of civilisation’s tools or inventions, like the airplane. Cinema is not to beunderstood as an epiphenomenon because it never simply supplements, extends, nor mirrorsour world. Since it stands at the threshold of both individual consciousness (“imagination”)and engaged interaction (“participation”), cinema reveals a socio-anthropological fact aboutthe human’s relation to the world, according to Morin: “The cinema allows us to see theprocess of the penetration of man in the world and the inseparable process of thepenetration of the world in man” (p. 204).

The astonishment that audiences felt in their first encounters with cinema a century ago is,he argues, only slightly different from the enchantment that cinema brings to viewers today.Something about cinema serves an “archaic” need, a central human desire, and thus itswonderment does not dissipate even as popular knowledge about the technology proliferatesand as filmgoing becomes less of a novelty and more a quotidian activity. The thrill is nevercompletely gone; our current wonderment with the cinema is actually continuous with theastonishment felt by the first audiences of the cinematograph. André Bazin, in his analyses ofCharlie Chaplin’s slapstick and a documentary on bullfighting, suggested that repetition iscentral to cinema’s magnetism (3). The affect generated from watching corporeally denseimages is not just maintained with repeated viewings but amplified with each new projection,according to Bazin. In a similar fashion, Morin explores why cinematic replay does notdiminish astonishment. Cinema may have its mechanical genesis in replication, duplication,reiteration, but we rarely experience the “objective presence” of the image as a recurrence(see Chapter 5 and the 1978 “Preface”).

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In the most general terms, both The Stars and The Cinema ask us not only how institutionsof wonderment survive in a hyper-rational culture of modernity, but also how such a culturepropagated them in the first place. In a world where the irrational has been granted centrestage in the arena of politics, the hegemony of the rational may now seem a quaintly 1950ssentiment. Nonetheless, Morin’s attention to the subjective lures of images reveals just howmuch further we need to go in developing a language that critically engages in the terms ofwonderment. Always attentive to the corporeal and affective qualities of motion pictures,Morin speaks to the concerns of recent work; e.g. embodiment and emotion as criticalcategories (Linda Williams and Vivian Sobchack), the notion of the ghostly as a means totheorise the cinematic image (in very different ways Tom Gunning, Slavoj Žižek, and GilbertoPerez), an interrogation of the utopian promises of universal participation (Jameson andMiriam Hansen). For Morin, cinema is a “complex of dream and reality” (p. 149), or “theproduct of a dialectic where the objective truth of the image and the subjective participationof the spectator confront and join each other” (p. 147).

Morin also argues that, in much the same way that theories of cinema can benefit fromanthropology, the discipline of anthropology should no longer avoid a theorisation of cinema.Despite the camera’s ubiquitous presence in modern anthropological study, Morin claimsthat the institution of cinema has rarely occupied anthropologists. He feels cinema is an idealobject of study for anthropologists because it simultaneously combines the relations of self-to-self, self-to-other, and self-to-world. In fact, cinema’s dual nature – as both perceptualand participatory – presents a necessary challenge to the discipline of anthropology itself. Itradically historicises human anthropological need. “Among all the possible aesthetics andvisions of the world, films take up and establish those that are established for them by actualhuman needs” (p. 170).

In the early ’50s, Morin accepted the position of researcher at the Centre National deRecherche Scientifique, studying under the prominent sociologist Georges Friedmann.(Roland Barthes was a colleague at the CNRS during this period.) With Friedmann, Morinco-authored the 1952 article “Sociology of the Cinema”. The following year and three yearsbefore publication of The Cinema, Morin produced what is probably the first serious meta-study of audience data. In an article entitled “Research on the Cinematic Public”, Morincompiled sociological and industrial surveys of cinema attendance, comparing statistics fromvarious countries hoping to acquire a vision of cinema as a global institution. This project’smission – to examine cinema spectatorship as a transcultural phenomenon and to ascertainthe general anthropological needs answered by the cinema – originates from basically thesame question that The Cinema tackles from a more speculative perspective. (Morinaddresses these concerns to a more general audience in The Stars, where he explicitlyforegrounds combining empirical evidence with abstract speculation.)

The Cinema and The Stars were published at a crucial time: just before an explosion ofmodernist European films hit the world market (including the French New Wave and thecanonical European art films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, and FedericoFellini) and a decade after the publication of Bazin’s definitional essays and the seminal textsof the French Filmology movement. (Gilbert Cohen-Séat’s Essai sur les principles d’unephilosophie du cinéma, for example, came to print in 1946.) Poised between the ontologicalrealism of Bazin and the semiotics of Metz, between postwar humanism and post-’68 leftistcritique, Morin occupies an unusual place in the history of ideas about the cinema. Morin’s

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work from the 1950s eagerly anticipates the academic study of cinema, and yet these writingsrepresent an outsider’s stance towards circles of the legitimated cultures of film criticism andscholarship. Morin aligned himself only briefly with Filmology, and his contributions haveremained outside the canon of French film theory. Still, his persistent presence at themargins of a nascent academic discipline recalls Stanley Cavell’s relationship to film studiesin the US. Morin remains a prolific and controversial figure in French intellectual publicculture, writing more on politics and ethics than cinema.

* * *

To today’s reader, the dialectical structure of Morin’s prose inThe Cinema and his ontological mode of inquiry may feel dated. Yet this kind of anachronismdelivers both the most frustrating and most productive aspects of the book. Specific films areinfrequently mentioned, and the volume does not contain a full analysis of an entire film oreven a sequence. (Morin had originally intended this to be the first instalment of a two-volume set, the second of which would address examples of cinema’s formal language moredirectly.) From a broad perspective, the chapters provide structured interrogations ofcinema’s phenomenological characteristics (technology, the image, the audience, language).At the level of the prose, the seemingly endless descriptions of cinema’s ontology, the at-times circuitous logic, the repetitions (how many times must the reader forgive Morin’sreferencing the naïveté of desert Nomads?) give the effect of an over-fed predator hesitantlycircling its prey. For example, Morin’s dependence upon syllogisms can, at times, take hisconclusions to the brink of tautology.

It is easy to understand how this meandering descriptive essay spanning over 200 pagesmight have struck the first generation of academic film theorists as decadent, indulgentlybloated, and obstinately apolitical. However, over the last ten years ontological approachesby many mid-century critics, such as Bazin and Kracauer, have proven useful to a morerecent generation of scholars. Once considered naïve celebrations of technologicaldeterminism, these approaches have been re-embraced for their sensitivity to cinema’s lures– as the work of Dudley Andrew, Philip Rosen, and Hansen reminds us.

Furthermore, the descriptive excesses of this book are also what make it most curious,historically peculiar, and perhaps useful to understanding the evolution of film theory.

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Morin’s descriptions now stand as more than just paths not taken, nearly-forgottenprovocations or ill-fitting diagnoses. Today, when many films flaunt the digital origins oftheir special effects alongside ideologies inherited by analogue photography, and when thecinematicity of video games increases, the photographic foundation of cinema has become anartefact for speculative reconsideration. Never so much as now have the semantic andillusory densities of mechanical reproduction been appreciated for what Morin calls the“doubleness” of the image (pp. 23-34), its “syncretism” of the apparitional and theevidentiary, or its incessant dialectic between the real and the unreal (see Chapter 5). Motionpictures demand a “divided consciousness,” he states, forcing us to remain “participating andskeptical at once” (pp. 155).

It is in our moment, then, that Morin’s unyielding effort to describe cinema gains currency:given recent efforts to historicise classical film theory, the anomalies of this project emergeas this book’s lasting contribution. Morin’s socio-anthropology represents a key juncture inthe intellectual history of the idea of the cinematic when it was possible to imagine amethodology uniting four areas of investigation now often segregated: 1. theoreticalspeculation on human subjectivity; 2. observation of affect and participation; 3.historiography and cultural history; 4. empirical data such as audience surveys and othersociological measurements. While it is difficult to imagine adopting Morin’s anthropologicalapproach today, many scholars may find compelling what he is able to achieve with thismethod, especially those theorists aggressively trying to incorporate empirical data orhistorical documents without neglecting the formal complexities of the cinematic image andthe subjective nuances of filmgoing.

As much as this book stands as an anomaly, it also foreshadows many of later film theory’scentral concerns. Perhaps in an effort to pitch Morin’s current relevance, or to pose him asthe return of what film theory repressed, Mortimer has left the task of drawing out thesehistorical correspondences to future writers. (Edward Lowry’s 1985 book, The FilmologyMovement and Film Study in France remains one of the best discussions of Morin’s work oncinema in English.) When I finished The Cinema, I craved a full historical account of itsimpact upon French film theory.

In spite of refusing Marxist theory and semiotics, Morin offers descriptions in The Cinemathat also presage two decades of theories about cinematic subjectivity, including accounts ofsuture, fetishism, spectacle, and heterogeneity/homogeneity (part-whole relations). Withfurther study, Morin may join Bazin, Cohen-Séat, André Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre, MauriceMerleau-Ponty, and Jacques Lacan as a crucial influence for Aumont, Metz, Jean-LouisComolli, Jean Mitry, and others. When Morin describes cinema’s “omnipresent eye”heralding a new empire of ubiquitous surveillance, rapidly expanding in all directions (p.205), it is hard not to think of film theory’s adaptation of Michel Foucault’s panopticon. JeanBaudrillard and Guy Debord come to mind in the passages where Morin ponders theimpossibility of knowing the world beyond its images, of understanding any experienceindependent of representations, or of societies considered outside of their spectacles. AMulveyan consciousness about the spectacle seems prefigured in Morin’s description of howcinematic spectacles enable detachment and, in turn, the illusory sensation of mastery.

The Cinema’s foreshadowings and continuities with the history of ideas about cinemabecome even more complex to consider in the context of Morin’s larger commitment to

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studying film spectatorship as a collective and social phenomenon. While sensitive to theaffective and perceptual specificity of cinematic representation, he would never surrender theexperience of cinema to solely psychological or cognitive operations. As a result, The Cinemacontains passages in which formal attributes of cinema come alive in their social complexityand historical specificity. In fact, some of his justifications for an anthropological approach tocinema include his most interesting observations: how our minds handle the varying sizedistortions of screen media, the affective challenges of slowed or stilled motion in cinema, orthe notion that our ability to maintain attention to the image belies our fundamentalcognitive tendency towards abstraction.

Morin also attends to other qualities of the cinematic image that are often elided. Forexample, he locates the dynamic essence of cinema participation in the beam of theprojector. When Morin speaks of projection, he is less interested in its psychoanalyticconnotations of identification, recognition, and transference; rather, the idea of projectionfor Morin involves possession by or immersion in the beam. In these passages, Morin echoesJean Epstein but also anticipates the work of ’60s and ’70s visual artists, like Anthony McCalland Peter Kubelka, who were transfixed by the shape of the projector’s ray beam and themateriality of cinema’s light. Related to projection, Morin’s comments on the cultural historyof the shadow may seem also particularly relevant today given recent interest in this topic.

Like Bazin, Morin mines the language of scientific and pseudo-scientific phenomena todescribe the complex experiences of cinema. For example, Morin understands the cinema’sscreen as a membrane – a permeable, transparent border. His descriptions of thismembrane are meant to characterise the institution’s way of mediating screen, image,filmstrip and viewer, as well as the textual articulations of the relation between spectator andspectacle. His references to chemical, biological, and geological phenomena stand less as anattempt to legitimate the study of cinema and more as a turn towards a richer theoreticallanguage that is poetically evocative while allowing for complex relational structures. Proof ofthis comes from his indiscriminate use of scientific entities alongside pseudo-scientificphenomena. Some of his common analogies use natural phenomena to describe the cinema’smost ineffable features, including the volatile, mutable nature of the film image. He mostoften turns to materials like colloidal solutions, diastase, placental secretions, and cancerousburgeonings. These substances all imply a relationship between bodies – they occupy acertain parasitical stance, an interstitiality, or a transformative relation to what surroundsthem. By invoking the structure of mutually determining phenomena (or “mutuallyfermenting agents” [p. 209]), Morin attempts to flesh out the contingencies of cinematicrepresentation. Metaphors allow Morin to describe the reciprocal relationship of spectator toimage, a quality of cinema otherwise hard to analyse or even to access critically.

At one point, Morin goes so far as to describe films as “ectoplasms to keep the soul warm” (p.210, other key passages that mention ectoplasms appear on pp. 134, 218). “Ectoplasms”refers to the name early 20th century spiritualists gave to the messy materialisationspurportedly concocted in a séance by a psychic medium who turns her insides outside toreach “the other side”. These excretions suggest that mediation demands a convulsingcorporeality and participation comes in these messy terms. As fantastical allegories ofrepresentation, ectoplasms speak of a threatening but potentially transcendent permeabilityand they explore projection as both ritualised mediation and as violent exchange (4). Withthe invocation of spiritualist lingo, Morin again asserts the duality of cinema – ectoplasms

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are on the one hand obscenely material and messily carnal, and on the other handsupernatural and otherworldly. For Morin, then, the cinema’s apparitional qualities suggest aspectator who is never afforded the security of distance from the image. Projected motionpictures are not detached transparent angels, hovering in the diaphanous quasi-materialityof a glow. The ghostly images of film engage us mortals in a very physical interaction;cinema’s apparitional qualities pack a visceral punch, and its images carry a sticky viscosity,leaving a messy residue or plasma akin to the mess left behind by séances in the early 20th

century.

This sticky semi-fluidity belies film’s materiality: not only the materiality of its storage (thejelly-like celluloid substrate) but more properly its materiality as a medium. In other words,this description gets at how cinema mediates – the nature of its brand of participation, howit exploits, supports, plays into pre-existing affective phenomena. In these descriptions Morinimplies that the image remains a porous carrier, sensitive to the densities of other vestiges,leftovers from the past. He also indicates that the image is as easily infected by the present asit is infectious to the present; this quality soils our ability to detach viewer from image withany exclusivity. The image’s porous and adhesive condition guarantees that the cinema cannever service cultural forces of reification exclusively. The irreducible “physical”characteristics of cinema – its irrepressible affectiveness, the messy viscosity of its imagetransfer, its promiscuous flirtations with both the uncanniness of stillness and motion –guarantee that the things cinema represents are “not hardened in their identity” (p. 72). InThe Filmology Movement, Lowry has written that for Morin, “the cinema, unlike the photo,does not crystallize the image, allowing it to be an object of fetishism” (p. 117).

Morin’s elaboration of cinema’s dereifying visuality (what might be called its ectoplasmicmateriality) betrays a more dynamic version of history and the historicity of humansubjectivity contained in this book, an appreciation for the historical frailties of the subjectoften overshadowed by his frequent recourse to categories like the primitive, the naïf, or thechild. Among his references to the archaic instincts imprinted on the modern subject, hisidentifications of the primal desires etched permanently on the human mind, or his otherindulgences of the more universalising sides of anthropology, sociology, and archaeology, wesuddenly come across a passage where Morin boldly asserts historicity. Morin’s moreevocative descriptions of film style often assert a tension between the archetypal and thehistorical, between the universal and the specific, between inherent human need and thesubjective fault-lines of history. Morin’s descriptions of colour films invoke this tensionelegantly (the grace of Mortimer’s translation comes through here as well).

Color is only a luxury of perception but any luxury, taking root, becomes a need. Itdoes not have the powers of black and white, but it develops others. Color goes handin hand with sobriety and splendor. It is when it is able to be discrete and sumptuousat the same time that it triumphs. At the moment, it is learning how to be as natural asblack and white and at the same time to gain an aesthetic effectiveness; it is alreadycapable of sometimes effacing itself behind objects and action, and sometimes effacingobjects and actions behind it.

So, if color is on the way to becoming necessary to film, it needed twenty years ofperfecting and insistence to begin to devitalize black and white, which had not waitedfor its arrival to institute a total universe. (p. 138)

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Here Morin reads the evolution of film aesthetics as a history of perpetual adaptation;cinema is always adjusting itself to the ebbs and flows of spectatorial expectation andsubjective needs. He suggests how colour’s arrival in the film image derives not only fromtechnological innovation but also social experience. Even more striking is Morin’s sensitivityto how audiences from different periods read colour into the image in distinct ways. A historyof film style, this approach implies, expresses the juncture between human need and whatculture can supply (where human need rubs against the grain of technological and aestheticinnovation.) In other words, variances in the stylisation of color (i.e. the different ways filmsexploit colour) reveal the historicity of human subjectivity. Technique is not the only site inwhich to trace the outlines of history. Morin also insists that broader imagistic effects, suchas realism, are never purely transhistorical or universal facts of human experience: “[E]verysystem of fiction is, in itself, a historical and socially determined product. The two apparentlyintangible arches between which flows the combined stream of film reality and unreality […]are themselves historically determined” (p. 168).

* * *

In his prose, Morin’s liberal indulgence of other writers’ words (some paragraphs consist ofcitations strung along in a series with little exposition between them) results in a fascinatingcomposite of phenomenological explorations of cinema not unlike the scrapbook qualities ofmy early edition of The Stars. There may be value in understanding this bricolage as itself aform of historical document. (Many of the passages cited were previously unavailable exceptto readers of French.) In the half-century since the publication of The Cinema, or TheImaginary Man, cinema has emerged as a fully fledged area of study, a legitimate academicdiscipline, complete with specialised scholarly journals, subdivisions of publishing imprints,PhD programs, and named faculty chairs. In this context, Morin’s books on cinema arethemselves anthropological artefacts from film theory’s prehistory. These books documentthe cross-section of texts available to a cinephilic scholar in the France of the 1950s, theprimeval quagmire of film study’s pre-institutional past.

At the back of The Cinema, the reader will find Morin’s attempt to create a “total”bibliography of writings on cinema (p. 263), a project that he sees as impossible (orinevitably flawed) but one that he pursues vigorously nonetheless. Poised on the threshold ofa moment when studying the totality of cinema was still imaginable, this bibliographytestifies not only to the wide variety of texts read by the first generation of academic filmscholars but also to how a generation imagined the horizons of the medium itself. A few yearslater, the corpus of cinema would already seem too vast for one person to watch in a lifetimeor even to imagine. In the meantime, however, Morin, the unwavering cinephile, invokes thisspectre: he imagines the mass of all films ever made and gives it the final word. He concludeshis bibliography and The Cinema with a sentence that stands alone at the bottom of the page:“And, preferable to everything, without discrimination: films” (p. 286).

The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, by Edgar Morin, translated by Lorraine Mortimer,University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2005.

The Stars, by Edgar Morin, translated by Richard Howard, foreword by Lorraine Mortimer,University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2005.

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Click here to order The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man directly from

Click here to order The Stars directly from

Useful resources related to Morin’s work in cinemaDudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory, Oxford University Press, New York, 1984, pp. 21-25.

____________, “The Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology in Film Theory”, in BillNichols (ed.), Movies and Methods: An Anthology, vol. 2, University of California Press,Berkeley, 1985, pp. 625-632.

Mick Eaton (ed.), Anthropology – Reality – Cinema: The Films of Jean Rouch, British FilmInstitute, London, 1979.

Georges Friedmann and Edgar Morin, “Sociologie du cinéma”, Revue Internationale defilmologie, vol. 3, no. 10, April-June, 1952, pp. 95-112.

Fereydoun Hoveyda, “‘Cinéma vérité’, or Fantastic Realism”, trans. David Wilson, in JimHillier (ed.), Cahiers du cinéma 1960-1968: New Wave, New Cinema, ReevaluatingHollywood, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1986, pp 248-256.

Edward Lowry, The Filmology Movement and Film Study in France, UMI Research Press,Ann Arbor, 1985. (See, in particular, Chapter 6, pp. 99-123.)

Ivone Margulies, “Chronicle of a summer (1960) as Autocritique (1959): A Transition in theFrench Left”, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 21, no. 3, July-September, 2004, pp.173-185.

Edgar Morin, “Pour un nouveau cinéma verité”, France-Observateur, June, 1960.

_________, “Recherches sur le public cinématographique”, Revue Internationale defilmologie, vol. 12, no. 4, January-March, 1953, pp. 3-19.

Lorraine Mortimer, “We are the Dance: Cinema, Death and the Imaginary in the Thought ofEdgar Morin”, Thesis Eleven, vol. 64, no. 1, 2001, pp. 77-95.

William Rothman, “Chronicle of a Summer”, in Documentary Film Classics, CambridgeUniversity Press, New York, 1997, pp. 69-108.

“Special Issue: Edgar Morin”, French Cultural Studies, vol. 8 (Part 3), no. 24, October, 1997.(See, in particular, Margaret Atack, “Edgar Morin and the sociology of May 68”, pp. 283-307, and Brian Rigby, “The notion of ‘the anthropological’ in Morin’s cultural analysis”, pp.333-340.)

Steven Ungar, “In the Thick of Things: Rouch and Morin’s Chronique d’un étéReconsidered”, French Cultural Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, February, 2003, pp. 5-22.

Endnotes

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An English translation of Aumont’s essay “The Face in Close-Up” is printed in Angela DalleVacche (ed.), The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History, Rutgers University

Press, Piscataway NJ, pp. 127-148. For an account of the film studies critique of anthropology, see the writings of Fatimah

Tobing Rony, Bill Nichols, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. “Charlie Chaplin”, What is Cinema?, vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray, University of California Press,Berkeley, 1967, pp. 144-153; “Death Every Afternoon”, trans. Marc A. Cohen, in IvoneMargulies (ed.), Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, Duke University Press,

Durham, 2003, pp. 27-41. Unaware of Morin’s metaphoric use of this phenomenon, I pursued the possibility ofectoplasms as an analogy for photographic representation in “Ectoplasms, Evanescence, and

Photography,” Art Journal, vol. 62, no. 2, Fall, 2003, pp. 30-41.

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