The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man

331 Pages·2005·8.48 MB·English

by  Edgar Morin

The Cinema, or
The Imaginary Man
Edgar Morin
Translated by Lorraine Mortimer
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
This book was originally published in French as Le cinema ou /'bomme imaginaire.
Essai d'tmtbropologie (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1956). This translation is based
on a second edition of the text, Le cinima ou l'bomme imaginaire. Essai d'tmtbropologie
sociologique (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1978).
An earlier version of the translator's introduction was previously published as
"We Are the Dance: Cinema, Death, and the hnaginary in the Thought of Edgar
Morin," Thesis Eleven 64 (2001): 77-95. Reprinted by permission of Sage
Publications Ltd. Copyright 2001 Sage Publications Ltd.
Copyl'ight 2005 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
pennission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Morin, Edgar.
[Cinema, ou, L'honune imagina.ire. English]
The cinema, or The imaginary man I Edgar Morin ; translated by Lorraine Mor
timer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8166-4037-8 (he: aJk. paper)-ISBN 0-8166-4038-6 (pb: alk. paper)
I. Motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures-Psychological aspects. I. TI tie: Cinema.
II. Title: Imaginary man. ill. Title.
PNl995M613 2005
791.43-dc22
2004028081
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
12 II 10 09 08 07 0~ OS 10987654321
Film art . aspires to be an object worthy of your
meditations: it calls for a chapter in those great
traditions where everything is talked about, except film.
-BELA BALAZS

Contents
ix Translator's Acknowledgments
xi Translator's Introduction
The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man:
An Essay in Sociological Anthropology
3 Prologue
5 1. The Cinema, the Airplane
13 2. The Charm of the Image
47 3. Metamorphosis of the Cinematograph
into Cinema
85 4. The Soul of the Cinema
117 5. Objective Presence
149 6. The Complex of Dream and Reality
171 7. Birth of a Reason, Blossoming of a
Language
201 8. The Semi-imaginary Reality of Man
219 Author's Preface to the 1978 Edition
229 Notes
263 Bibliography
287 Index of Names Cited

Translator's Ack now led gm en ts
M
any people have helped this translation come to life. I
would like to thank Barrett Hodsdon for first drawing
my attention to the original French text, Johann Amason
for exposing me to more of Morin's oeuvre, and students
in the departments of cinema studies and sociology and
anthropology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, who have
found Morin's work both useful and inspiring. I was forn1-
nate to be able to refer to the Spanish translation of the
book by Ramon Gil N ovales, published in 1972. Dana
Polan generously passed on drafts of his own translation of
three chapters of the book, completed when he was a grad
uate student. Chantal Babin worked with me on translation
difficulties throughout, and F uyuki Kurasawa worked on
early chapters, helped mold my conviction that Morin's
work should be better known in the English-speaking
world, and then found me a publisher. It would be hard to
ask for more! In the end, of course, all decisions regarding
translation are my own, and any errors come back to me.
Glenda Ballantyne compiled the index. Library staff at
La Trobe University, Eva Fisch in particular, provided on
going, indispensable research support. I also want to thank
Alain Masson, Faye Ginsburg, David MacDougall, Wendy
Haslem, Simon McLean, Gabrielle Murray, Wayne Lynch,
x I '.&anslatorli Acknowledgments
Cass (especially for the tables) and Declan Mortimer Eipper,
and Chris Eipper, among others too numerous to mention.
Mention must be made of Edgar Morin himself, who
was supportive of the project from start to finish. I have
benefited greatly from engagement with his work-indeed,
I have needed it to be there. So it is a pleasure to be able to
present this translation as a gesture of appreciation.
Translator's Introduction
The partitions and distinctions within the human sciences
prevent us from grasping the profound continuity between
magic, sentiment, and reason, although this contradictory
unity is the Gordian knot of all anthropology. ...
. . . Magic and sentiment are also means of knowing.
And our rational concepts are themselves still imbued with
magic, as Mauss observed.
-Edgar Morin, Le cinema ou l'homme imaginaire:
Essai d'anthropologie sociologique, 198 5
I
n the desert of film theory in the 1970s and 1980s, to come
across Edgar Morin's The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man
was to be s~rprised by a plenitude.1 After May 1968, a
politicization of a discipline had begun. Film studies sought
legitimacy in the academy and a "scientific" status. The old
impressionistic, "romantic" criticism had to go, and, inspired
by Louis Althusser's brand of Marxism, film scholars advo
cated a kind of surgical practice, one that tended to cut out
the heart, soul, even the guts of the film experience to get to
the cancer of Ideology. With Dr. Lacan assisting, they be
gan to treat the radically debiologized subject/spectator as
an effect of the film text, all (unconscious) mind, stripped of
flesh, poetry, skepticism, and imagination. In the attempt to
xii I Translatorj Introduction
examine and expose the ways that ideologies that enslave us
are in the very air we breathe, many theorists practiced what
Morin has described as "ideological immunology,'' barring
enemy ideas as though they were viruses, refusing to recog
nize common ground with an opponent for fear of contam
ination or recuperation-fearing complicity because they did
not lmow how to be complex. 2
In his intellectual autobiography, Mes demons, Morin tells
us about an incident at a gathering of French intellectuals
around 1960, when he declared his love of westerns and an
indignant Lucien Goldmann leapt to the platform to explain
that the western was "the worst of capitalist mystifications
destined to anaesthetize the revolutionary consciousness of
the working class."3 Goldmann, as Morin remembers it, was
greeted with thunderous applause. After the appearance of
Morin's book on mass culture, L'esprit du temps, in 1962,
Pierre Bourdieu, says the author, tore the book to pieces
for its "two major mystifications": Morin had claimed that
Charlie Chaplin and Edith Piaf were enjoyed across classes
and ages and, in Chaplin's case, across societies, and he was
guilty of concealing the fact that mass culture was "an in
strument of alienation at the service of capitalism to divert
the proletariat from its revolutionary mission."4
In The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, ·Morin had seen
Charlie Chaplin as the exemplary test of the universalities
involved in cinema:
Chaplin is the first creator of all time who wagered on uni
versality-on the child. His films ... have been wdcomed
and accepted ... by adults, blacks, whites, the literate, and
the illiterate. The nomads of Iran, the children of China
join Elie Faure and Louis Delluc in a participation and an
understanding that is, if not the same, at least common.5
If not the same, at least common-a way of thinking in
which different audiences, different groupings, are seen to
have a separateness and a relation to one another. Those in