Sara Tiago Gonçalves

The thematic group »the real and the reproduction of reality« makes us think of two great perspectives on the ontology of the moving image: the realism and the illusionism.

André Bazin (1918-1958) advocated the realistic perspective. To him, the excess of record is the greatest virtue of cinema: the fact that the camera always captures an integral piece of reality. On the other hand, Rudolf Arnheim (1904-2007) believed that the most aesthetically significant feature of the medium film is the ability to manipulate reality. While the first author believes in the presentation of objects in the film, the second considers movies as a mean of representation, not actually showing the real world. After reading »What is Cinema?«, we realized that the Bazin’s favorite directors are those who know how to preserve the aesthetic principles of objectivity, abdicating trickery and aligning as much as possible the camera's eye by the man's gaze. However, reading »Film as Art«, we find that Arnheim, unlike realists, does not reject the subjectivity in photography and cinema. In the article »On the Nature of Photography«, he even says that there is a match “between the physical reality and the creative mind of man…”.

The purpose of this communication is to show how these two authors support their thesis. Furthermore, we want to discuss what possible objections each of the thesis can raise.

Sara Tiago Gonçalves is a PhD student of Philosophy, specialzied in Aesthetics at the University of Minho in Portugal. Her PhD project is entitled »Philosophy and Film: an intersection between aesthetics and the morality of the film« (2015). She holds  a grant from the Portuguese FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology.