- 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.