Why Films Are Necessarily Existential

Once in a while, one is in the mood for an existential film. However, evaluating what qualifies as an existential film proves elusive. A cursory search, be it on internet forums or through distinguished archives, unveils a spectrum that spans from Ingmar Bergman’s acclaimed Seventh Seal to David Lynch’s enigmatic Eraserhead. The complexity of this categorization is echoed in Walter Kaufmann’s discourse on existentialism. Known for liberating Nietzsche’s philosophy from the dark shadow of the Third Reich, Kaufmann elucidates in his anthology that existentialism is “not a philosophy,” but rather “a label for several widely different revolts against traditional philosophy.” This unruly categorization hints at a shared essence between the so-called existential philosophers and these films—an audacious departure from traditional philosophical paradigms, delving into the profound abyss of human experiences like suffering, dread, and despair. Kaufmann underscores that these thematic elements were central to religious discourse for centuries. However, it was the conscious unshackling of philosophy from religious orthodoxy, a path bravely charted by Sartre, that truly marked the birth of existentialism.

An unfortunate predilection seems to prevail amongst filmlovers, wherein films that resist easy interpretation are hastily branded as philosophical. Encountering a film imbued with a pervasive sense of anxiety and shrouded in enigma often leads to its classification as existential—a simplistic categorization mistaken for comprehension, perhaps a veil for intellectual laziness or a reluctance to earnestly engage with the art. Here, I contend that films are inherently existential, mirroring the evolutionary arc of philosophy in a post-theistic epoch. Much like how philosophy transitioned into existentialism in the vacuum left by the Nietzschean death of God, the ontological attributes of film, as articulated in Roland Barthes’ 1980 book Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, pave the way for an atheistic introspection of death.

The work starts off with an analysis of the ontological features of the photograph, in which Barthes writes: “It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funeral immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb.” The photographic image is created by photosensitive paper that is exposed to light. This character of photography in which the image is created by the object it aims to represent—similar to how the fingerprint is created by the finger—is what Barthes means when he writes the photograph “carries its referent with itself.” Prior to Barthes, the film theorist André Bazin wrote in his essay “Ontology of the Photographic Image” about the direct relationship photography has with the world. 

“Photographic image is the object itself,” he writes, and thus “photography does not create eternity as art does, it embalms time”. It is this basic thought that photography immortalizes time that leads Barthes from reflections of photography to reflections on death. 

At a cursory glance, one might align photography with the art of painting; yet, for Barthes, photography most closely resembles theater “by way of death”. Theater for Barthes was a ritual where the actors took on the role to embody characters that were dead; in other words, “to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead.”

In the way that photography presents itself as “lifelike” to what is past, it is similar to the double nature of life and death of theater. However, where in theater under the mask of what is dead we find what is living, in photography all we have is “a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see dead.”

Thus, it’s within the realm of photography that Barthes discerns the place of death in a society. Intriguingly, the architectural framework of his argument mirrors the structured deliberations of existentialist philosophers. The essence of death, inexorable and omnipresent, seeks a haven within the societal fabric. As religious dogma recedes or loses its fervor, the representation of death seeks refuge elsewhere; perhaps within the visual frame that captures death even as it seeks to immortalize life.

When Nietzsche made his famous proclamation that God is dead, he did not end there: he thought that if the seat of God is absent, it does not remain empty, but someone must be sitting there. For Nietzsche it meant that we must become gods ourselves.

“Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I… Is this greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

Now, if there is no longer God, it was man who had to take on the role of God that characterized existentialism for Sartre. In a similar vein, the absence of God did not usher a cessation of contemplation on death; rather, it found a new vessel—photography. The lens, in capturing the fleeting moments, confronts the eternal silence, embodying existentialism’s essence in a tangible, visual medium. By taking up the subject of death in the absence of God, we can say that photography is existential.

The analogy Barthes employs, drawing parallels between photography and theater, elucidates the profound relationship between photography and death. However, I believe film, as a medium, appears to offer a closer relationship with theater than photography does with theater. If the essence of theater is in the process of animating the inanimate by way of putting on masks of the dead, film, a medium consisted by 24 frames of stills (or deaths) per second, exhibits a kinship with theater in that it too is a medium that functions by animating the inanimate. It is for this reason that it is somewhat puzzling that Barthes, despite positioning photography as the privileged site for the discourse of death, is at the same time hostile to the cinema: “In the cinema, no doubt, there is always a photographic referent, but this referent shifts, it does not stake a claim on its reality, it does not mourn its previous existence; it does not cling to me: it is not a specter…”

If in Barthes’ time the only way of accessing cinema was in movie theaters, it may make sense to say that, in making contrast between photographs, “something that has posed and remained there forever” and in cinema where the “pose is swept away and denied by continued of denied by the continuous series of image”, the two mediums have a different phenomenology. However, in an age where we can watch movies and videos from our laptops, where we have the freedom to stop a video at any given time, we have become increasingly aware of the inanimate which hides behind the animate. Behind the mask of the moving image—as the ingenious title of Laura Mulvey’s Death 24x a Second suggests what we find is 24 deaths per second:

“The cinema combines, perhaps more perfectly than any other medium, two human fascinations: one with the boundary between life and death and the other with the mechanical animation of the inanimate, particularly the human figure.”