- action, hierarchy, reality -

"If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process." (Marx: The German Ideology) 

The idea that ideology inverts reality, expressed with camera obscura metaphor, Marx contends that reality appears upside down in ideology, much like the photographic process provides an inverted image. The inverted image is telling; it is a recognisable depiction of reality, even if it is at the same time a distorted one. This Marx metaphor is crucial for his concept of action. In order to "make things right" revolutionary action is the response that reverses social hierarchy. Cinema, with its narrative structure, in comparison to photography, poses different ideological problems, in relation to hierarchy:

"Cinema is true. A story is a lie." (Jean Epstein)

In these lines, Jean Epstein lays bare the problem posed by the very notion of a film fable. Cinema is to the art of telling stories what truth is to lying. It discards the infantile expectation for the end of the tale, with its marriage and numerous children. But, more importantly, it discards the ‘fable’ in the Aristotelian sense: the arrangement of necessary and verisimilar actions that lead the characters from fortune to misfortune, or vice versa, through the careful construction of the intrigue and denouement. Life has nothing to do with dramatic progression, but is instead a long and continuous movement made up of an infinity of micromovements. This truth about life has finally found an art capable of doing it justice, an art in which the intelligence that creates the reversals of fortune and the dramatic conflicts is subject to another intelligence, the intelligence of the machine that wants nothing, that does not construct any stories, but simply records the infinity of movements that gives rise to a drama a hundred times more intense than all dramatic reversals of fortune. 

This is why the art of moving images can overthrow the old Aristotelian hierarchy that privileged muthos—the coherence of the plot—and devalued opsis—the spectacle’s sensible effect. Cinema revokes the old mimetic order because it resolves the question of mimesis at its root—the Platonic denunciation of images, the opposition between sensible copy and intelligible model. The matter seen and transcribed by the mechanic eye, says Epstein, is equivalent to mind: a sensible immaterial matter composed of waves and corpuscles that abolishes all opposition between deceitful appearance and substantial reality. 

- character, mimesis, marx -

A character mask (German: Charaktermaske) in the Marxian sense is a character masked or disguised with a different character. The term was used by Karl Marx in various published writings from the 1840s to the 1860s, and it is related to the classical Greek concept of mimesis (imitative representation using analogies) and the Roman concept of persona. The notion of character masks has been used by neo-Marxist and non-Marxist sociologists, philosophers and anthropologists to interpret how people relate in societies with a complex division of labour. As a critical concept, bearing character masks contrasts with the concept of "role-taking" because "social roles" do not necessarily assume the masking of behaviour, and character masks do not necessarily assume agreement with roles, or that the roles are fixed. Peter Sloterdijk comments: 

"Besides the critique of mystified consciousness, Marx's theory harbors a second far-reaching variant of ideology critique, which has shaped the critical style of Marxism, its polemical sharpness: the theory of the character mask."

The concept of character masks refers to the circumstance that, in human societies, people can take on functions in which they “act out” roles, whether voluntarily chosen, by necessity, or forced. In those roles, some or all of their true characteristics and intentions may be partly or wholly masked, so that they appear different from what they truly are - “public face” and “private thoughts, interests and emotions” diverge. This implies that persons and their relationships may no longer be quite what they seem to be, and there is a difference between their personal and functional relationships. 

Marx uses the term "character mask" analogously to a theatrical role, where the actor represents a certain interest or function. His concept is both that an identity appears differently from its true identity (it is masked or disguised), and that this difference has very real practical consequences (the mask is not simply a decoration, but performs a real function and has real effects, even independently of the mask bearer).

- character, model, mimesis -

The image of the world around us, which we carry in our head, is just a model. Nobody in his head imagines all the world, government or country. He has only selected concepts, and relationships between them, and uses those to represent the real system." (Wright Forrester, American computer engineer and systems scientist)

The ‘model’ is the single word that appears most often in Notes on Cinematographer, written by Robert Bresson, film director. Model is also the term most evoked by critics trying to describe Bresson’s cinema language. To Bresson the model refers simply to the performer who lays bare their soul to the camera. Term "model" also has the meaning of ‘template,’ a prototype:

“Models. Mechanized outwardly, Intact, virgin within”

“An actor needs to get out of himself in order to see himself in the other person. YOUR MODELS, ONCE OUTSIDE THEMSELVES, WILL NOT BE ABLE TO GET IN AGAIN”

- true and mimesis in cinema -

According to Bresson, the true in film is not encrusted in the living persons and real objects. It is an air of truth that their images take on when you set them together in a certain order. With this remark, the mimetic relation between the imitating and the imitated, or the representation and its original, is completely overturned, such that the representation becomes originary and takes precedence over both the true and the reality.

Bresson's solution to the problem of reality and it's photographic representation consists simply in suspending the sense of the image. By the suspension of its sense, the image seems to cease function as an image. It ceases to be an image of something and withdraws to being just an image. It is thus like an ‘empty' or a flat image, apt to take on other meanings in the film. This is why Bresson prescribes: ‘Work on insignificant (non-signifying) images.'

The ‘BEING' of the model is in fact this withdrawal, this self-effacement before the camera. His being is not the identity of a self that the filmic image is apt to reproduce. This withdrawal undermines not only the identity of the model, it undermines at the same time the referent of the filmic image. With the withdrawal, the immediate sense of the image is suspended, and we are left with an ‘open' image that can take on new significations. 

"Mechanics gives rise to the unknown." (Bresson)

Mimesis, as Deleuze says, is no longer the question of ‘modern' cinema. But it is a power that ‘restores our belief in the world' in that it continuously creates our world anew as fiction.