What Is Real?

Of course, film is photography, or a form of it. The common technological origin is important, and is the source of much of the authority and allure of film as a medium.

Or to be truly precise, the set of ideas we have built around that origin is the source of this authority and allure. These ideas all involve the notion that a photograph will inevitably reveal something about reality, as if every scene could be read like a crime scene.

Stanley Cavell reminds us that a film is always a film of something: even if the scenery is fake, it’s real fake scenery.

The suggestion is not that the camera cannot lie, but that it cannot close its eyes.

“Photography and the cinema”, Andre Bazin says, “are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism”.

Everyone and everything, surely. We can’t unsee what we have seen, not heard what we have heard.

Often, the visual evidence will convince us once we have made a series of supplementary connections — we put together the implied historical or fictional world and are content with the result.

Sometimes, as so often in Hitchcock, the apparent evidence will simply lie to us.

Our eyes, if we are watching North by Northwest (1959), show us a man holding a dead man in his arms and a knife in his hand. Anyone would think the man who’s alive has killed the man who is dead, and pretty much everyone in the film does. Whom are we going to believe? Cary Grant or our own eyes?

Very often, when the medium of film is put to its most interesting work, a tense dialogue between what we see/hear and what we believe will structure the whole work, placing a strong emphasis on the sheer temptation to believe our eyes and ears - a temptation that I take to be essential to the medium, that is stronger in the cinema than it can be anywhere outside.

Or rather, our own strange compulsion, let’s call it a prejudice in favor of the visual, as if it were a friend or a relative we wish could perform far better than they can, is compounded by Hitchcock’s intimate awareness of our compulsion, and by his having placed a light bulb inside the milk, creating a glow which seem like a promise of crucial knowledge.