on reading Bazin:

yesterday i found myself in that spacey caffeine headspace of too much theory and not enough praxis - so i decide to practice.

i closed my and eyes and repeated the gayatri mantra until i found myself floating above a cloud of thoughts. i looked down and saw the workings of the lower mind; i saw Bazin bickering with his own "Ontology of the Photographic Image:"

(Que dirait-il?)

he says:

The image helps us to remember
the subject and to preserve him
from a second spiritual death.

i ask:

is not every moment its own death?

he says:

It is no longer a question of survival
after death, but of a concept,
the creation of an ideal world
in the likeness of the real,
with its own temporal destiny.

i ask:

is there any world but the ideal?

he says:

If the history of the plastic arts
is less a matter of their aesthetic
than of their psychology then
it will be seen to be essentially
the story of resemblance, or,
if you will, realism.

i ask:

what is the aesthetic?

he says:

The expression of spiritual reality
wherein the symbol transcended its model.

i ask:

and what of realism?

he says:

It is purely a mental need,
of itself nonaesthetic,
the origins of which must be sought
in the proclivity of the mind towards magic.

i ask:

how does film alleviate this need?

he says:

The solution is not to be found
in the result achieved but
in the way of achieving it.

i ask:

how is this achieved?

he says:

By a mechanical reproduction
in the making of which
man plays no part.

i ask:

why do we find comfort in the lifelessness of the machine?

he says:

The photographic image is the object itself,
the object freed from the conditions
of time and space that govern it.

i ask:

why do we find comfort in the lifelessness of the machine?

film theorist André Bazin, looking very hip