The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man

by Edgar Morin; trans. by Lorraine Mortimer
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London, 2005
292 pp. Paper, $19.95
ISBN: 0-8166-4038-6.

Reviewed by Martha Blassnigg
University of Wales Newport

marthablassnigg@yahoo.com

The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man by Edgar Morin, emeritus director or research at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique and president of the Association pour la Pensée Complexe, has been regarded as one of the hidden treasures of cinema and film theory. The long overdue English translation of Le Cinema ou l’Homme Imaginaire originally published in 1956, (with a revised preface by the author from the 1978 edition) deserves celebration.

Morin was member of the French Resistance when he was young, and subsequently his understanding of communism was formed by his war-time experiences. Since the 1950s he has dedicated his work to reconnecting and reforming fields of knowledge between the "humanities" and "sciences", and his oeuvre includes works on scientific method, philosophical anthropology, social theory, popular culture, and contemporary life in its complexity. In 1956 with The Cinema or The Imaginary Man Morin introduced a more complex approach to an understanding of the cinema and its audiences than has been dealt with before or since, which makes this work amongst other so contemporary and relevant. Drawing on the work of a variety of thinkers from various fields such as sociology, philosophy, psychology, Morin reintroduces the imaginary as fundamental human condition, exemplified in the process of cinema perception.

He departs from an understanding of cinema as the product of a dialectic where the objective truth of the image and the subjective participation of the spectator confront and join each other. As we know, film as object, even in its projection in an empty theatre is nothing more than a meaningless orchestration of shadow and light. Only through the mediation of the human mind, film becomes what we understand of it in an interpretative, narratological, cultural, aesthetic sense. Following this, Morin sees the function of art to enrich the affective power of the image, which inherits magical qualities through the potential presence of the double. He speaks of the nascent quality of magic in an intermediate zone, which commonly is called sentiment, soul, or heart. If we transfer psychological states of our mind onto the image, affective qualities of the image are revealed, and if these affections become alienated and projected into objects (as in the doubles on the screen), then magic is no longer external belief, but interiorized feeling. The magic in cinema is transformed into an affective-rational syncretism in aesthetics and serves as an analogy for Morin to what he calls the ‘archaic’ worldview. In this way Morin lays open processes of the human mind, even calling cinema "mind-machine", where projection and identification produce our ‘affective participation’ in and with the world.

For Morin, the aesthetic is not an original human given, but "the evolutionary product of the decline of magic and religion" (p. 211); in this sense the cinema is a historical mirror and, at the same time, a vanguard of mechanization. Cinema, the "personality factory" (p. 213) has externalized the psychic processes of the human mind. Cinematographic (affective) "participation equally constructs magic and reason, [ . . . ] that finally, magic, sentiment, and reason can be syncretically associated with one another" (p. 181/182). For Morin, not only reason but also magic and sentiment are means of knowing, sometimes contradicting the realms of reason, but always their necessary double. Cinema offers the ideal exemplification of this and constitutes a privileged medium of an incorporation of these processes, where the objective reality of the photographic image, saturated with its charm or magic power (‘photogenie’), and the subjective interpretative processes of projection and identification converge. The presence of optic illusions of reality in film, "reveals to us the reality of the need that cannot be realized" (p.208). In this sense, the imaginary always precedes technology and any form of invention in their "oneiric fulfillment of our needs" (p.210).

According to Morin, the genesis of the art of film cannot be explained apart from looking at the complex processes and fierce competition of early years of cinema. The apparent contradictions in the early developments of cinema between the needs of the audiences and the needs of rising capitalism, visible in the product of the films reflect for Morin a similarity to a genetic anthropology: the study of human transformations throughout history. Cinema, originally an invention serving science, for example in the Lumière brothers’ search for 3-D visualization or the analysis of movement of Marey and Muybridge, has been taken over by the imaginary, and Morin most importantly points out that the ‘total cinema’, including color and sound, did already exist at the very beginning of its invention (Morin refers here to the first film ever know to be screened in the Edison laboratory being a sound film, the early color experiments of the Lumière brothers, and huge panoramic screens at the world exhibitions and the Crystal Palace in London around 1900). While Morin still regards the final outcome of the cinema as necessary development, he moves away from the usual teleological account of a technological determinism towards an analogy with the human mind searching for expression and external reflection. He emphasizes that it was the imaginary of the audience’s participation, mediated by conjurers and magicians (like Méliès) who understood the needs and aspirations of the audiences that transformed the cinematograph into cinema. Similar minds have postulated such arguments, only recently profound research has been published into early cinema and thicker accounts of the converging forces shaping cinema technology mainly through the interventions and active participation of the audiences. (See for example Michael Punt’s recent paper, "What Shall We Do With All Those Old Bytes? Saving the Cinematic Imagination in the Postdigital Era." Design Issues 21 (2) : 48-64). While Punt’s more complex accounts of the history of technologies are becoming more widespread, Morin’s work on cinema as a complex phenomenon is finally being translated into English. It seems as if after a long period of the establishment of film studies with a focus on the film as text, using linguistic, psychological, cognitive, or cultural analysis, separated from the history of cinema as institution, the time has come for profound transdisciplinary studies of cinema as analogous to processes the human mind and body in their historical context.

Morin in this sense postulates an anthropological approach to cinema, by incorporating both, the imaginary of technology and the magical qualities of human myths, into the psychological processes of the human mind. Such an approach is broadening film and cinema studies, an enterprise that has always been characterized by its interdisciplinarity. For, according to Morin, "the world [in cinema] is humanized before our eyes. This humanization illuminates the cinema, but it is also man himself, in his semi-imaginary nature, that the cinema illuminates" (p. 215). Such a move brings cinema and film studies together in a common enterprise and enriches the treatment of film as art form or expression of culture with a profound meta-discourse at the core of what has been considered the enigma, soul or magic of cinema. For a long time the discipline of film studies has been abstracted and transcended in a Platonic universe, separated into singular and often exclusive discourses. Morin’s radical intervention aims to open up the discourse around cinema with its content of films to the corpus and specificity of human aspirations and activity to "reintegrate the imaginary in the reality of man" (p. 218).

It is well known that translators often are specialized authorities on the subject matter; in this tradition, and in this spirit Lorraine Mortimer, senior lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology at La Trobe University in Melbourne, has contributed more than a translation to this edition. In particular, the introduction reads as a scholarly exposition rather than a translator’s commentary. This is welcome and valuable to the new reader; however, what is a little disturbing is the inclusion in the footnotes of additional commentary beyond the normal remit of translation. Although these are clearly marked, it is in my view a questionable practice in terms of giving a first hand account of the voice of the author.

Concurrently with The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man, The University of Minnesota Press has also published in translation Morin's The Stars (Les Stars), (first published in 1957) which will be reviewed here later this year. The University of Minnesota Press is to be congratulated on this timely intervention. Given the actuality and originality of Morin’s work, one hopes that his other publications, for example L’Homme et la Mort dans l’Histoire (Paris: Corrêa, 1951) and his L’Esprit du Temps: Essai sur la Culture de Masse (Paris: La Galerie de Grasset, 1962) will also be made available for the English speaking parts of the world.