Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 1, January 2002
André Bazin
The Life and Death of Superimposition (1946)
The opposition that some like to see
between a cinema inclined toward the almost documentary
representation of reality and a cinema inclined, through
reliance on technique, toward escape from reality into
fantasy and the world of dreams, is essentially forced.
Méliès's _Trip to the Moon_ (1902) did not
negate the Lumières' _Arrival of a Train at the
Station_ (1895). The one is inconceivable without the other.
The cries of horror of the crowd at Lumière's genuine
locomotive coming toward them prefigured the exclamations of
wonder of the spectators at the Robert Houdin Theater.
[1] The fantastic in the cinema is possible only
because of the irresistible realism of the photographic
image. It is the image that can bring us face to face with
the unreal, that can introduce the unreal into the world of
the visible. It is easy enough to give the
counter-proof of this proposition. To imagine, for example,
_The Invisible Man_ as an animated film is to understand
immediately that it would lose all interest. What in fact
appeals to the audience about the fantastic in the cinema is
its realism -- I mean, the contradiction between the
irrefutable objectivity of the photographic image and the
unbelievable nature of the events that it depicts. It is not
by chance that the first to comprehend the artistic
potential of film was Georges Méliès, a
magician. Three American films released in
France right after the war reveal, however, the relativity
of realism and the conditional believability of special
effects. I'm referring to _Here Comes Mr Jordan_, _Tom, Dick
and Harry_, and _Our Town_. None of these films presents us
with spectacular special effects of the kind found in the
classics of the science-fiction genre. It seems that
Hollywood is giving up on traditional special effects in
favor of creating the supernatural in a more purely
psychological manner, as in _Here Comes Mr Jordan_, where it
is left almost entirely up to the audience to interpret the
image on the basis of the action alone, as would be the case
in the theater. For example, three characters are on the
screen, one of whom is a ghost visible to only one of the
other two. The viewer must keep his eye on the relations
among these three characters -- relations that never depend
for their existence on the plasticity of the
image. From Méliès's _Les
Hallucinations du Baron de Münchhausen_ (1911) to
Marcel L'Herbier's _La Nuit fantastique_ (1942), the dream
remains the epitome of the fantastic in film. Its recognized
form has always included slow motion and superimposition
(sometimes shots in negative, too). In _Tom, Dick and
Harry_, Garson Kanin preferred to use accelerated motion to
indicate when Ginger Rogers was daydreaming; he also
distorts the appearance of certain characters by means of an
optical effect that recalls the distorting mirrors of the
Grévin Museum. [2] But above all, he built
the drama of the dream sequences according to the tenets of
modern psychology. In reality, the devices that have been
in use since Méliès to denote dreams are pure
conventions. We take them for granted just as much as do the
patrons of outdoor screenings at travelling fairs. Slow
motion and superimposition have never existed in our
nightmares, however. Superimposition on the screen signals:
'Attention: unreal world, imaginary characters'; it doesn't
portray in any way what hallucinations or dreams are really
like, or, for that matter, how a ghost would look. As far as
slow motion is concerned, what it may actually signify is
the difficulty we often have fulfilling our desires in
dreams. But Freud has entered the picture and the Americans,
who are fond of him, know that a dream is characterized far
less by the formal quality of its images than by their
dynamic sequence, their inner logic, in which the
psychoanalyst recognizes the expression of repressed
desires. Thus when Ginger Rogers, in _Tom, Dick and Harry_,
tries to please her mother-in-law-to-be by incongruously
caressing her face, she is performing an act that social
etiquette would have forbidden but that perfectly expresses
her will. The comedy that fills Rogers's daydreams doesn't
take away at all from the intelligence and the psychological
realism of this film, which, in my opinion, outdistances by
far many more pretentious films with their falsely aesthetic
oneirism. If a director does want to employ
special effects, he can use devices that are much more
sophisticated and elaborate than the tricks handed down to
us by Méliès. All he has to do, really, is
find a technique that makes a small advance, but an advance
that is nonetheless sufficient to render the usual special
effects ineffective and therefore unacceptable. Thus, in
_Our Town_, a young woman in a coma, dreaming she is dead,
relives in her mind a number of moments from her life in
which her ghost appears along with her. One scene takes
place in the kitchen at breakfast between mother and
daughter (the woman who is now 'dead'); the latter, who is
already supposed to be in the next world, tries in vain to
re-enter the event of which she used to be part but on which
she can no longer have any influence. The ghost wears a
white dress and appears in gauzy superimposition in the
foreground of the set, while the other characters appear in
the background. Up to this point, everything is normal. But
when the ghost happens to walk around the table we feel
strangely ill at ease: something abnormal is occurring and
we can't quite figure it out. On closer inspection, we
discover that our uneasiness resulted from the fact that
this strange ghost was for the first time behaving like a
real ghost -- one that is true to itself. The ghost is
transparent to the objects and persons located behind it,
but is apt to be hidden like you and me when there is
something in front of it, and this ghost does not lose the
power of walking in the most natural way through objects and
people. Practice has shown that this little finishing touch
to the properties of the occult makes traditional
superimposition look like a very inadequate approximation of
a ghost's appearance. The Swedes made abundant use of
superimposition in their heyday (the period of _The Phantom
Carriage_), when they were turning the fantastic into a
national speciality. One might have thought that the process
that had helped so many films to achieve the status of
masterpiece had once and for all gained its patent of
nobility and credibility. In fact, though, we lacked points
of comparison at the time for criticizing superimposition,
and now America has rendered certain uses of it obsolete
through the perfection of a process called
'dunning'. Up until recently it was easy enough
just to superimpose two images, but they remained
reciprocally transparent. Thanks to dunning, to certain
improvements due in particular to the use of bipack film
(two layers, one orthochromatic and one panchromatic,
separated by a layer of red filter), [3] and to an
important improvement in the synchronization of sound and
image through the use of masking and counter-masking, it is
now possible to obtain an opaque superimposition of the two
images, or, as in _Our Town_, a one-way opacity for one of
the two images, a device that is even more extraordinary.
Thus the ghost in _Our Town_ can be hidden by objects in the
foreground without ceasing to be transparent to the objects
behind it. If you think about it, such
supernatural phenomena are essential to verisimilitude.
There is no reason why a ghost should not occupy an exact
place in space, nor why it should blend mindlessly into its
surroundings. And the reciprocal transparency of
superimposition doesn't permit us to say whether the ghost
is behind or in front of the objects on which it is
superimposed, or whether in fact the objects themselves
become spectral to the degree that they share space with the
ghost. This defiance of perspective and common sense becomes
most annoying once we are aware of it. Superimposition can,
in all logic, only suggest the fantastic in a conventional
way; it lacks the ability actually to evoke the
supernatural. The Swedish cinema probably couldn't get the
same results today as it did twenty years ago. Its
superimpositions wouldn't convince anybody
anymore. Translated by Bert Cardullo University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
Missouri, USA This essay first appeared in French in
_Écran Français_ in 1946, then was included in
Volume 1 ('Ontologie et langage') of _Qu'est-ce que le
cinéma?_ (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1958-1962),
pp. 22-30. Translated here, for the first time, with the
permission of Madame Janine Bazin. Translator's Footnotes 1. This was Méliès's own
theater, named in honor of the renowned French magician,
with whom he had been acquainted (and who also received a
tribute from the American Erich Weiss, whose stage name
became Houdini). Before he began making films and showing
them in his tiny theater, Méliès used the
space for fantastic sketches and magical acts, which he
performed with the aid of trap doors, mirrors, invisible
wires, and all the other trappings of stage
illusion. 2. Famous museum of wax figures in
Paris. 3. Bipack film is another name for
integral tripack film, whose three layer emulsion Bazin
describes. Yet another name for this type of film is
monopack -- called so because the three layers of emulsion
are imposed on a single base material. The dunning process
is a method for the combination of separately photographed
foreground and background action. The foreground action is
lighted with yellow light only in front of a uniform,
strongly illuminated blue backing. Panchromatic negative
film is used in the camera as the rear component of a bipack
in which the front film is a positive yellow dye image of
the background scene. This yellow dye image is exposed on
the negative by the blue light from the backing areas, but
the yellow light from the foreground passes through it and
records an image of the foreground action at the same
time. Filmography _Arrival of a Train at the Station_,
Louis and Auguste Lumière, 1895. _Les Hallucinations du Baron de
Münchhausen_, Georges Méliès,
1911. _Here Comes Mr Jordan_, Alexander
Hall, 1941. _The Invisible Man_, James Whale,
1933. _La Nuit fantastique_, Marcel
L'Herbier, 1942. _Our Town_, Sam Wood, 1940. _The Phantom Carriage_ (aka _The Soul
Shall Bear Witness_), Victor Sjöström,
1921. _Tom, Dick and Harry_, Garson Kanin,
1941. _Trip to the Moon_, Georges
Méliès, 1902. Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_
2002 André Bazin, 'The Life and
Death of Superimposition' (1946), _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6
no. 1, January 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n1bazin>.
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