Chance

In the previous chapters I had occasion to evoke the reflection of André Bazin, the most influential post-World War Il French cinematographic critic, founder of the Cahiers du cinéma and forefather of an interpretative line of modern cinematography in which Deleuze's thought is also inscribed. Bazin's idea of the poetics of Italian neorealist directors, to which he dedicated many essays and articles, can be well summed up in the parallel between the facts alternating as in the mechanism of a gear (the plot of classical cinema, in which each scene is replaced by the subsequent one as for the scheme of perception and action), and the images presenting to the spectator as unrelated, fragmented, each with its own narrative and aesthetic autonomy (the hesitation of the camera, the persistence on the scene of modern cinema and purely optical and sound image). But the theoretical nucleus of Bazin's thought, that is, the constitutive relationship between cinematographic image and reality, is already in place in his 1945 seminal article 'The Ontology of the Cinematographic Image'. Those few pages, which after the death of the author in 1958 were chosen to open the comprehensive edition of his writings, I clearly present such a relationship not as a rhetorical, political or ingenuously idealistic device— as it has been often mistakenly portrayed— but rather as the necessary outcome of the features and possibilities of the cinematographic device capable of offering an extremely faithful reproduction of our world. Thanks to its 'mechanical genesis', cinema is configured as a 'digital imprint' of reality: the film is impressed by a trace capable of adhering to life and showing the true nature of things and human beings.