Status Updates From Change Mummified: Cinema, H...

The first vehicle of this subjective project is maintenance of the body against decay in the context of a belief in an afterlife, amounting to
an obsession with the problem of “embalming time.” Thus, we can call the founding obsession preservative. The history of the representational
arts can then be seen as sublimations of this impossible impulse to defeat death

This subjective project—or subjective projection—finds increasingly intensive satisfactions in a long-term, progressive succession of representational technologies.

No matter how much it matches the spatial
organization of a photograph, a painting does not have the former’s degree of credibility since it cannot serve as evidence of the presence of
the referent at some moment of production of the sign. ….Spatial likeness and deviance are finally not the crux of Bazinian realism.

It is precisely the activity and desire of the subject—“‘our obsession’ with realism”—that makes indexicality the crucial aspect of the cinematic image for Bazin.

Ch1: Subject, Ontology, And Historicity in Bazin