Power, Pleasure, and Perversion: Sadomasochistic Film Pornography

Abstract

ANDRE BAZIN'S ONTOLOGY OF THE photographic has long stood as a key text a realist theory of cinema. At its limit this theory states that photography and cinema are not icons that resemble or represent the world; rather, through indexical registrations of from the world onto photographic emulsions, they re-present, and hence are, this world. As any student of contemporary film theory knows, however, Bazin's of cinema is but one pole of a dialectic, the other half of which states, as Bazin does at the end of this same essay, Cinema is also a language.2 But popular consciousness is the first part of Bazin's ontology of the photographic image that counts, especially when thinking about film or video pornography. It is not surprising, then, to find the Meese Commission quoting the above passage from Bazin its efforts to detail the special dangers of pornography. To the commission, the filmic representation of an actual person engaged sexual acts is exactly the same as if witnessed in the flesh. Thus, the reasoning goes, film audiences bear direct witness to any violence or perversion therein enacted.3 The unprecedented realism of movies seems to lead directly, then, to obscenity. Realist theories of cinema often come up against this problem of an ultimate obscenity of the medium at some point their thinking.4 Bazin believed that the technological evolution of cinema would ultimately lead to the discovery of new and liberating truths about life. Seeing an object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it would, he hoped, empower us. But when he came up against some of the hard-core objects of this liberation, Bazin could be seen to be grappling, and much more thoughtfully than the Meese Commission, with the pornographic limits of his realist ontology. Writing about a newsreel sequence showing the execution of Communist spies by members of Chiang Kai-shek's army, he anticipates current concerns about snuff films: