Sutured Reality: Film, from Photographic to Digital

Abstract

The advent of the digital image changes cinema’s relationship with physical reality.1 No longer, the story goes, are we dealing with an image based (as with photography on film) exclusively on a direct record of objects placed in front of the camera, the essential link between the world and its representation thus established. The digital image has the ability to offer us a representation of things without ever having need of things themselves, thanks simply to the elaboration of an algorithm. The consequences of this situation are weighty. Faced with an image on a screen, we no longer know if the image testifies to the existence of that which it depicts or if it simply constructs a world that has no independent existence. Does this spell the end of the realistic nature of the cinema—the end of its ability to show us the world as it is, extending, in a certain sense, its life? Many scholars, including Lev Manovich and Sean Cubitt, maintain that the advent of the digital pushes cinema further from reality and closer to animation.2 Without rehearsing the current debate in depth, the following pages suggest that questions about the relationships between cinema and reality should be situated within a wider history of “realism.” First: from its inception, film theory has focused its attention not only on the peculiarity of cinema as a direct record of the physical world, but also on its capacity to create an impression of reality. In this light, it is important to reconsider the recent attempts to go “beyond indexicality”; cinematic realism does not depend solely on a “trace” left by objects on the filmstrip. Second: an impression of reality is not simply a feeling experienced by the spectator: it is an effect triggered by a set of discursive practices that film has acquired along its history. Italian Neorealism is the climax of such a develop-