Coda

Summary

How is it possible to admit that an image of the body of the other assumes that ‘a life has been lived’, and that in the absence of the image, the other is ‘sustained by no regard or testimony, and ungrieved when lost’, and still engage with Emmanuel Levinas's antipathy for the image and art in general? It has been my objective in this book to demonstrate that what Levinas's thought offers to film studies is more than a critique of the altericidal vio-lence of the image or an acknowledgement of images that are critical of their own visual being. Levinas's conception of the face and his understanding of the tensions between the ethical and the visual are nuanced such that there can emerge alternative possibilities from within his iconoclasm to think and appreciate the image in affirmative ways. Levinas assists us to see the tensions that are constitutive of vision while the thrust of a Levinasian approach can reveal what the image does to vision in order to restage these tensions. The image can even be taken to show attributes analogous to the ethical epiphany of the face, as an originary meaningfulness, rather than the meaningfulness of intentionality. The image is where the breakthrough of the other, but also its withdrawal, takes place.

Whereas Levinas founds his ethics on a condemnation of ontological regimes that dominate vision, I have attempted in this book to demonstrate how his ethics can be hospitable to notions of cinematic realism that resonate with the originary structure of exposure. At the same time, I have tried to show how the thought of André Bazin, revered as one of the prominent ontologists of cinema, and several other film theorists can assist us to locate the ethical in the body–camera encounter where ‘otherwise than being’ can be borne witness to. While Levinasian ethics can be read to appreciate the visuality of the cinematic image, Bazinian realism can similarly be reworked to map out the ontological instabilities of the filmic rendition of the body which alter a gaze that would otherwise grasp the other to return to the familiar.