A look into how Offside reveals reality through its use of different filmmaking techniques. Faith in reality or faith in the image is the main theme of the session. A Royal Holloway powerpoint.

1. MA1052 CRITICAL THEORY AND TEXTUAL ANALYSIS SESSION 4
FAITH IN THE IMAGE OR FAITH IN REALITY
Offside (2006, Jafar Panahi, Iran)

2. André Bazin (1918 - 1958), French film critic and founding editor of Cahiers du
Cinéma. His 1958 essay ‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema’ (translated
for English publication in 1967) is a composite of three separate articles initially
published in 1951, 1952 and 1955.

3. Bazin’s Evolution essay
Two broad and opposing trends
I will distinguish, in the cinema between 1920 and 1940, between two broad
and opposing trends: those directors who put their faith in the image and
those who put their faith in reality. (Bazin 1967: 24)
Those who put their faith in the image
By ‘image’ I here mean, very broadly speaking, everything that the
representation on the screen adds to the object there represented. This …
can be reduced essentially to two categories: those that relate to the plastics
of the image [framing, lighting, set design, costume, make-up etc.] and those
that relate to the resources of montage … (Bazin 1967: 24)
Those who put their faith in reality
[For those who put their faith in reality] the image is evaluated not according
to what it adds to reality but what it reveals of it. (Bazin 1967: 28)

4. Faith in the image: what cinema adds to reality
The Cabinet of Dr
Caligari (1920, Robert
Wiene, Germany)
MontagePlasticity of the image
Old and New
(1929, Sergei
Eisenstein, USSR)
Faust (1926, F.W.
Murnau, Germany)

5. Faith in reality: what cinema reveals of reality
The 1940s: Hollywood deep
focus and Italian Neorealism
Between 1920 and 1940:
Murnau and Stroheim
Sunrise (1927,
F.W. Murnau,
USA)
The Magnificent
Ambersons (1941,
Orson Welles, USA)
Paisà (1946, Roberto
Rossellini, Italy)
The Wedding March
(1928, Erich Von
Stroheim, USA)

6. In Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà and Germany Year Zero and Vittorio de Sica’s
Bicycle Thieves, Italian neorealism contrasts with previous forms of film realism
in its stripping away of all expressionism and in particular in the total absence of
the effects of montage. As in the films of Welles and in spite of conflicts of style,
neorealism tends to give back to the cinema a sense of the ambiguity of
reality…. The means used by Rossellini and de Sica are less spectacular but they
are no less determined to do away with montage and to transfer to the screen
the continuum of reality. (Bazin 1967: 37)
Source: Bazin (1967) ‘Evolution of the Language of Cinema’, What is Cinema?, vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 23-40.

7. Film will be able to reach
the heights of the other
arts only when it frees
itself from the bonds of
photographic
reproduction and
becomes a pure work of
man, namely, as animated
cartoon or painting.
(Arnheim 1958: 175)
Source: Arnheim, Rudolf (1958) ‘A New Laocoön:
Artistic Composites and the Talking Film’, Film as
Art, London: Faber, pp.164-189. First published
1938.

8. The changes of point of
view provided by the
camera would add
nothing. They would
present the reality a
little more forcefully,
first by allowing a better
view and then by
putting the emphasis
where it belongs. (Bazin
1967: 32)
Source: Bazin (1967) ‘Evolution of the Language
of Cinema’, What is Cinema?, vol. 1. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 23-40.