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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
The Founding of Art History and the Invention of Cinema: Hapticality and Opticality
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2003-10-01
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2003-10-01
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Cinéma & Cie
Angela Dalle Vacche
2003/10/01
Georgia Institute of Technology 
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The Founding of Art History and the Invention of Cinema: Hapticality and Opticality
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THE FOUNDING OF ART HISTORY AND THE INVENTION OF CINEMA:
HAPTICALITY AND OPTICALITY
Angela Dalle Vacche, Georgia Institute of Technology




A Game of Cards

  Paul Cézanne (1838-1906) was a contemporary of the Lumière brothers, Auguste and
Louis, and Georges Méliès. And Cézanne passed on to the fathers of filmmaking a fasci-
nation with the iconography of card playing. Indeed, modernity itself can be under-
stood as a game of cards, a series of movements with high stakes. The turn-of-the-cen-
tury was an age of risk and chance, when the only possible unit of experience was the
moment.
  Regardless of its length, the moment is a finite form of temporality that does not last,
because it exists in a world filled with movement and change, in a society obsessed with
time running out. The suspenseful atmosphere of the modern age fits the card playing
scenario, or the gambling table at the casino. To play one’s own hand of cards means to
participate in a wheel of chances transforming themselves into a reel of images spin-
ning through the shutter of the filmic projector. By using card playing as an allegory
for the mapping of perception, one inclusive of the optical and haptical ways of seeing,
I will demonstrate that Cézanne and André Bazin share a common interest in tempo-
rality as well as in nature. My premise is that Cézanne and Bazin were both influenced
by Henri Bergson’s philosophy of temporality as a dimension of experience, highly per-
sonal and interior, distinct from space, which defined the social world and public
images. While Bazin knew of Bergson through secondary sources, no evidence exists
that Cézanne ever read or met the philosopher. Yet Cézanne was interested in the qual-
itative, psychological aspect of time over its quantitative, conventional measurement;
and Bazin was fascinated with the extraordinary, the subjective, and the surreal ele-
ments of daily life as compensation for a general sense of alienation in the aftermath of
World War II.
  The cinema’s reel of images plays itself out while it tracks the changing configura-
tions of the modern self, and the shifting arrangements of perception in relation to new
forms of space, time, and art. The privileged sites of the close-up shot, namely the face,
the hands, and objects – including cards – are nothing but a reminder of a certain hier-
archy in the human sensorium. The organization of the five senses is a dilemma which
art historian Aloïs Riegl (1858-1905) had invoked to distinguish between haptic and
optical ways of seeing. A Viennese art curator, Riegl was one of the founders of art his-
tory as an academic discipline. He conceived of vision in terms of the near view, that is,
seeing the world as flat, in planimetric, geometric, tactile terms, and a distant view,
namely seeing the world in depth, with curving spaces and floating particles of light,
dust, snow, and color.1 While the near, “haptic” way of seeing for Riegl is typical of

CINEMA & Cie, no. 3, Fall 2003                                                         ­19
ANGELA DALLE VACCHE

Egyptian art and it leads to abstraction, the distant, “optical” view includes Greek art’s
penchant for three-dimensional realism, Renaissance perspective, seventeenth-century
Dutch painting, and French Impressionism.
  If related to Riegl’s concepts of haptic and optical vision, Cézanne’s art and the inven-
tion of the cinema share at least one common feature, that is the combination in differ-
ent degrees of both modes of seeing. In his 1956 essay “Cézanne, Bergson, and The
Image of Time,” George Heard Hamilton writes: “From about 1910 to 1930, Cézanne was
interpreted as the master of three-dimensional structural expression achieved through
his exhaustive scrutiny of forms in space and their presentation in planes of color.”2
Hamilton’s statement suggests that the painter transformed Impressionist, optical
color particles into haptical surfaces, or “planes of color”. And, with Cézanne, planes of
color become forms of movement. The latter vibrate with a level of emotion closer to
the imagination or mental abstraction than to the painted world or referent. As a result,
Cézanne’s chromatic moment looses its measurable, finite size to become a form of pic-
torial movement with a qualitative, experiential impact. The scientific motivation of
the Impressionist optical space is, thus, overcome by a phenomenological sensitivity
according to which the psychological, qualitative aspect prevails over the measurable,
quantitative information.
  Hamilton’s expression “three-dimensional structural expression” hints at Cézanne’s
predilection for three basic forms: the cylinder, the sphere and the cone.3 These three geo-
metrical figures amount to the three visual dimensions of Renaissance perspective –
depth, width and height, respectively. In contrast to classical painting, with Cézanne, the
cylinder, the sphere and the cone exchange height, width and depth among themselves,
one form turning into another, one dimension potentially swapping places with the other.
By reducing the world to be depicted – objects, landscapes, and people – to an on-going per-
mutation of three basic forms, Cézanne specialized in still life, landscapes and portraits,
with frequent outings into nudes and occasional flower-painting. But it was especially in
his landscapes of Provence that he bypassed, without completely rejecting, the difference
between flatness and depth, which correspond to Riegl’s near view and far view. As a
result, Cézanne’s images were neither completely figurative nor utterly abstract: they
appeared to be characterized by a puzzling internal, proto-cinematic mobility.
  Despite his generational kinship with the Lumières and Méliès, Cézanne disliked the
cold eye of photography which he associated with the artificial space of Renaissance
perspective. As far as Riegl’s categories are concerned, his contemporaries in film, the
Lumières can be said to lean more towards an optical, or a quasi-documentary style,
whereas Méliès became famous for his Orientalist, Egyptianate, but also haptical, proto-
surrealist fairy-tales with on screen magic tricks.4
  In the early 1890s, Cézanne produced five versions of The Card Players, the only genre
painting he ever produced. Cézanne’s Man with a Pipe (1895-1900) and The Smoker
(1895-1900) are portraits. Most likely he was familiar with a previous example painted
by Mathieu Le Nain; Cézanne might have seen Le Nain’s Soldiers Playing Cards at the
Museum Granet in Aix-en-Provence. Cézanne painted five versions of this genre scene.
The two earliest variants assemble five and four figures, respectively; this first stage is
executed in a perspectival, optical mode with a sense of spatial depth. The three subse-
quent versions are reduced to two players facing each other. The final result is struc-
tured across the two-dimensional picture plane, because space itself has disappeared for
the sake of a haptic, quasi-hieroglyphic mode based on the plane.

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                                                                 THE FOUNDING OF ART HISTORY

   Besides Cézanne’s ties to Le Nain’s work, the iconography of card playing is linked to
Caravaggio’s The Fortune-Teller (1595), and to Georges de La Tour’s The Trickster or The
Cheat (1635-1640). The trope of card playing was also restaged in the Lumières’ Partie
d’écarte (1897), a short film with three elderly men sitting outdoors. As the title of the
film itself suggests, in Partie d’écarte, a game of cards becomes a game of words involv-
ing the verb écarter, to separate, to distinguish among the family members and friends
involved in this home-movie. The cast includes Antoine Lumière, the owner of a pho-
tography business in Lyon and the father of Auguste and Louis; Felicien Trewey, a magi-
cian famous for his shadowgraphs or shadow plays of historical characters, animals,
and funny faces made by his supple use of fingers. Finally, the third player is Alphonse
Winkler, a friend of the Lumière family whose two sons married the two Lumière
daughters. As a result of this web of family and social relations, one wonders if the title
of the film, Partie d’écarte, is ironic in the sense that it has become impossible to sepa-
rate photography from magic tricks, and friendships from newly-acquired in-laws.
   In the wake of Cézanne’s The Card Players and the Lumières’ Partie d’écarte, Méliès
explored the trope of card playing in his trick-film The Living Play-Cards (1904). The
result is a tour de force celebrating the magician-filmmaker’s powers.5 In the Méliès’
trick-film, shot in the studio, the emphasis is on the character depicted on the card com-
ing to life and stepping out of the card-frame, only to disappear again or morph into a
different individual. The trick of Méliès’ film amounts to a parade of inanimate pic-
tures. By so doing, the film equates the game of cards to a moving picture gallery, a
museum of ghosts born out of the imagination, if not the unconscious, of the all-pow-
erful filmmaker.
   In comparison to these art-historical and filmic examples, the duration of thought
and a sort of collective loneliness, or intimacy interlaced with anonymity, characterizes
Cézanne’s two card players. They sit in front of each other with the same combination
of togetherness and indifference which film viewers experience sitting next to each
other in the movie theatre. In addition, Cézanne’s two players resemble each other,
without quite being the same person. Significantly, they are distinguished from each
other by their noticeably different hats, two metonymies for their respective faces as
the privileged sites of individual identities.


Cézanne: Sensation as Motion

  Art historians agree that Cézanne’s still lifes are comparable to motion studies, with
objects and fruit nearly falling off the table. By contrast, his portraits require the sitter
to be as still as an apple on a table. In The Card Players the superiority of the human
body over the inanimate object has ceased to function as the binding principle of the
classical tradition Cézanne knew so deeply. The wine bottle, for example, looms much
larger in Cézanne’s composition than in the Lumières’ Partie d’écarte. As well, in the
painting, the figures of the players’ themselves are elongated into the shapes of two
bottle-like bodies facing each other. The visual echo between the two bodies and the
bottle in between them suggests that, for Cézanne, figures can become objects, but
this anti-anthropomorphic morphing happens to them without giving up the inten-
sity and duration of their most intimate thoughts. The point here is that the two card
players have become abstract presences. Facing each other, they are no more than hap-

                                                                                          ­21
ANGELA DALLE VACCHE

tical shapes. They look like two figurines in an Egyptian mural, or two silhouettes of
a shadow play by Trewey. Hence, knowingly or not, Cézanne worked in a space right
between Riegl’s notion of the image in painting and Christian Metz’s definition of cin-
ema as an “imaginary signifier,” or magic sign with surreal ancestry forged out of an
absent presence.6
  Working by himself in the countryside of Provence, Cézanne wanted to pierce the
“veil” of routinist perception as well as the auratic patina of art-historical “taste.”
Cézanne’s ambition was “to see” nature in a new way: in his various depictions of Mont
Sainte Victoire, the hierarchy of background and foreground is gone, and distant ele-
ments far away from the observer are as visible as the near ones. At the same time, the
near ones, at first sight so accessible to the point of being nearly inside of the observer,
are as impenetrable as the far away ones. Still the latter as well as the former are first
and foremost emotionally felt. Put another way, the observer’s eye cannot rest between
far and near, depth or plane, as the background and foreground themselves are con-
structed to be seemingly interchangeable and, therefore, movable, one into the place of
the other. This possible swapping between two opposite elements results in the gener-
ation of a third state, producing a new, emotional level of perception in the onlooker.
  Cézanne conceived painting as a medium to see nature in a new way, much like Bazin
viewed cinema as the medium that could provide a new image of the natural world.
The film critic’s love of nature is well-known, and many of his film essays include
metaphors that have to do with the outdoors, such as the thick vegetation blending
with the ruins of Romanesque churches in the district of Santonge, or the bed of small
rivers with paths of stones leading from one bank to the opposite side. The connection
between Cézanne and Bazin requires a brief detour into their respective versions of
experience and realism. At the end of his career Cézanne declared that his agenda was
not to replace the past, but only to contribute “a new link,” one in which, for Cézanne,
the painter’s eye can go inside things, while the landscape can think itself in the
painter. This dialectic of inside and outside is not only about the back and forth
between abstraction and figuration; it is also a form of objectivity in time, a de-person-
alization of what is external and visible, in order to show the movements of the mind,
the painter’s psychological absorption of the outdoors into himself. Cézanne’s paint-
ing, then, is not too far from Bazin’s notion of realism as an ontology, a way of showing
the world specific to cinema’s photographic origins. In other words, Bazin’s ontological
realism is clearly an artistic style, but one devoted to the revelation of inner life through
a penchant for the random, the fortuitous, the debris, the disposable dimension of
images which are nevertheless utterly special, if not miraculous, because they seem to
be borne out of an accidental click of the camera. If for Cézanne landscape is a mental
experience, as well as an experiential record, Bazin stresses that only the cinema can
make clear “the importance of an environment which can be inhabited and studied at
the same time.”7
  Bazin’s interest in cinema’s depiction of nature was based on “the subtle perception of
an order which seems to emanate from the accidental arrangement of things.”8 For
Cézanne painting was no longer a way of seeing or describing or telling, but instead a
mode for inner feeling, thinking, stumbling upon and sensing. This transition is most
clearly evinced in his abandonment of the static geometry of perspective for the sake of
a pictorial element equivalent to motion, namely color. By definition, color is always
relational and never stands still. Last but not least, the dialectic of inside and outside for

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                                                                     THE FOUNDING OF ART HISTORY

Cézanne had to find a sort of unison between landscape and painter, subject and object,
perception and matter. Bazin’s film theory was heavily influenced not only by Bergson,
but also by the radical Christian theorist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The latter argued
that all matter – organic and inorganic – had some degree of consciousness or interior-
ity. This resulted in a “noosphere,” or envelope of intelligence surrounding the earth. In
his book on European film theory, Ian Aitken explains:

 A geologist by profession, Teilhard aspired to establish a synthesis of scientific and religious
 values within his discipline, and this led him to develop a metaphysical theory of geological
 formation. One of Teilhard’s key concepts […] was that of the noosphere, or “earth spirit.”
 Here the earth was conceived as possessing a consciousness, the noosphere, and Teilhard
 argued that the traces of this planetary consciousness could be discovered through the close
 observation of natural phenomena. Teilhard’s mystical, empirical evolutionarism, when
 combined with the emphasis on social and spiritual renewal […], was to provide Bazin with
 the utopian, metaphysical perspective which he would later use as the basis for his theory of
 cinematic realism.9

  Eventually, comparison between Cézanne and Bazin via Bergson may take on an iron-
ic twist. We can read echoes of Bergson’s philosophy in Cézanne in order to understand
how his painting paved the way toward abstraction. At the same time, combining
Bergson’s phenomenology with de Chardin’s synthesis of matter and spirit helped
Bazin to defend photography and argue for realism in the cinema. And, on top of it all,
Cézanne associated photography with the most narrow and hopelessly positivistic ver-
sion of scientific modernity.


Conclusion

  At the end of “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” written in 1945, Bazin refers
to Cézanne. By then, Bazin had already read Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s famous essay
“Cézanne’s Doubt,” which was also published in 1945. In defence of the photographic
origins of the filmic image, Bazin writes: “All the arts are based on the presence of man,
only photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake
whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty.”10
  With photography, Bazin points out, the randomness of nature rejects art, but, simul-
taneously, nature replaces the artist. With Cézanne, the artist replaces nature, by allow-
ing nature to behave like a moving image on the canvas of his brain. For Bazin, cinema
is a medium and not an art. With Cézanne, the artist is the medium. Specifically, as art
historian Jonathan Crary explains, Cézanne used his own nervous system or brain like
a highly sensitive plate on which to record the transient, time-bound sensations of
foliage, the thickness of trees, the thinning of grass, the inner movement of the terrain
on Mont Sainte Victoire.11
  Cézanne’s attitude toward the landscape is not far from Bazin’s definition of cinema
as a thinking machine, an observer, an explorer, whose primary task is to imbue with
duration, namely to preserve visually, that which is already there, in the world, and sub-
ject to decay. Whereas Cézanne disliked turn-of-the-century modernity, Bazin was trou-
bled by post-World War II regimentation and alienation. It is precisely after the death

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ANGELA DALLE VACCHE

of God that, for Bazin, the filmic image offers an opportunity to redeem mankind of its
sense of emptiness.
  In his conclusion to “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Bazin credits
Cézanne for having solved a problem of form through color, and, in so doing, summa-
rizes the argument I have just outlined:

  Only when form ceases to have any imitative value can it be swallowed up in color. So, when
  form, in the person of Cézanne, once more regains possession of the canvas there is no longer
  any question of the illusions of geometric perspective.12

  By overcoming the difficulty of rendering time through artistic form, the ever-shift-
ing sensations of color and paint, Cézanne’s work amounts to “subjectivity” in space,
while it eschews the addiction to the static illusions fostered by Renaissance perspec-
tive. Due to this subjective emphasis, Cézanne’s painting marks the turning point from
realism to abstraction, to painting as a medium reflecting on its own properties. By con-
trast, for Bazin, cinema is “objectivity in time,” because its origin is photographic.
Cinema can be simply the world in time, life moving along, in its full temporal dimen-
sion of time passing, the object “mummified” in front of the camera, or embalmed by
the cinema. But Bergsonian time always involves perception, the same way memory
lives in matter, and matter would not exist without memory. Thus Bazin’s objectivity
lives in the subject, while his emphasis on the indexical dimension of the cinema leaves
plenty of room for symbol and icon. Bazin’s realist orientation accommodates both
Orson Welles’ baroque, off-centered opticality and Robert Bresson’s stern hapticality, as
long as abstraction remains either above or below the figurative image. In other words,
abstraction is not about the loss of figuration in the film image, but, as Jacques Maritain
understood, its most profound inner secret: “An ideogram of the mystery of things – of
some interior aspect and meaning caught in the reality of the visible world.”13 And this
sense of mystery, inside the organic as well as the inorganic world, is that which pho-
tography is privy to and which cinema brings out most forcefully.14



1 Aloïs Riegl, “Leading Characteristics of the Late Roman Kunstwollen,” in Donald Preziosi
  (ed.), The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998),
  pp. 169-176.
2 George Heard Hamilton, “Cézanne, Bergson, and The Image of Time,” College Art Journal,
  no. 16 (Fall 1956), p. 3 – emphasis is mine.
3 Cézanne discusses the function of the sphere, the cylinder and the cone in his letter of 1904
  to Émile Bernard, as stated in Richard Verdi, Cézanne (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992),
  p. 147.
4 The best source to understand Méliès’ orientalist inclinations is: Antonia Lant, “Haptical
  Cinema”, October, no. 74 (Fall 1995) .
5 On Méliès, see Elizabeth Ezra, Georges Méliès (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
  1988). Most importantly, Méliès’ The Living Play-Cards was a radically different studio-based,
  proto-surrealist remake of his previous Une partie de cartes. Méliès shot this first version out-
  doors in Montreuil, thus aligning himself with the Impressionists and the Lumières.
6 I am here referring to the title of the famous groundbreaking book by Christian Metz, The

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                                                                      THE FOUNDING OF ART HISTORY

     Imaginary Signifier: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
     1982).
7    Dudley Andrew, André Bazin; foreword by François Truffaut (New York: Oxford University
     Press, 1978).
8    D. Andrew, op. cit., p. 218.
9    Ian Aitken, European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction (Bloomington:
     Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 181-82. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) was a geol-
     ogist, anthropologist, paleontologist, philosopher and a Jesuit priest. His most important
     book is The Human Phenomenon (1955).
10   André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in Hugh Grant (ed.), What Is
     Cinema?, Vol. 1; foreword by François Truffaut (Berkeley: University of California Press,
     1971), p. 13.
11   On Cézanne, movement, Deleuze, early cinema and perception, see Jonathan Crary,
     Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century
     (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990). On Cézanne, see also Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of
     Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999).
12   A. Bazin, op. cit., p. 16.
13   D. Andrew, op. cit., p. 24. The quote here is from Jacques Maritain, Rouault (New York:
     Abrams, 1969 [1954]).
14   My conclusion warrants expansion in a longer and forthcoming version of this article. In fact,
     my reading of Bazin’s film theory in this version of the essay does not deal with the question
     of animation cinema as discussed by David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style
     (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997): “Bazin’s ontological realism is suspect as a can-
     didate for film’s essence: cinema can exist perfectly well without photography. We have car-
     toons which are animated drawings, or which are drawn directly on film, or which are gen-
     erated on computers” (p. 74). On animation and cinema as the art of the index, see also Lev
     Manovich, What Is Digital Cinema?, <http://jupiter.ucsd.edu./~manovich/text/digital-cine-
     ma.html>.




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