This is the seventh in a series of essays in honor of André Bazin . . .

In an article on film and painting, André Bazin argues that the frame around a painting has the purpose of cutting it off from the real world, establishing the limits of a conceptual field necessary to analyzing the painting in its own terms . . . while the frame around a cinematic image is not a boundary marker but merely a masking device, blocking out an infinite expanse of space which we are meant to imagine as existing outside the mask.

This doesn't seem quite right to me.  There are certain kinds of painting which evoke the world with an optical integrity, an über-photographic reality, which make it not only possible but desirable to imagine a universe beyond their frames.  Much Victorian academic painting has this nature — it was a quality of painting which modernism rejected but which still had its virtues.  Some “classical” painters used this quality — Vermeer, for example.  The conceptual universe of Vermeer's paintings does not end at the edges of his frames.

And the frame of a cinematic image is often much more than a mask — a device for focusing attention.  It sets the boundaries for creating a drama of space, exactly as the proscenium arch does in classical ballet.  The distance or nearness of two dancers in a ballet only has dramatic meaning in relation to the space defined by the proscenium arch.  In ballet, the frame of this arch doesn't just demarcate an arena of theatrical illusion — distancing it from the real world inhabited by the spectator — it has a functional role in defining the expressive terms of the dance.

It's true that in photographed cinema, as opposed to animation, say, we can readily imagine a world beyond the frame with the same ontology as the actual objects photographed within the frame, but there is a counter impulse to discount this peripheral world in order to read the space within the frame as a theatrical arena whose dramatic content only makes sense within that frame.

Take the scene in The Searchers, for example, when Debbie appears in the far distance on top of a ridge behind Nathan and slowly moves towards and into the foreground space they occupy.  This becomes a visceral objective correlative to Nathan's dawning acceptance of Debbie as an individual human being, not just a symbol of his sense of disenfranchisement as a man, an object for the vengeance he wants to visit on life.

The shot is an image of a real place in a real moment of time, but we cannot imagine the world beyond its frame, we cannot imagine the space as seen from Debbie's perspective, for example, and still experience the full meaning of the shot.  The frame here acts as a frame does with most paintings — it creates a conceptual field distinct from the world beyond its borders, and only within that conceptual field does the shot “work”.

Bazin's formula is just too simple.  In the paintings Alma-Tadema did of the ancient world, we feel that the frame is indeed just a mask — a window onto a whole lost world beyond its frame which we delight in imagining.  And conversely, when we are swept into the space of a great animated cartoon, it's hardly necessary to seriously imagine a whole cartoon universe beyond its frame.

We can imagine such a universe beyond the cartoon frame, just as we can, with much less effort, imagine a world beyond the ridge Debbie appears on, but it's the way the frame limits such images, takes them out of the larger world, that makes their meaning in purely cinematic terms possible.

The sixth in a series of essays in honor of André Bazin.

Movies
achieve their highest aesthetic enchantment and greatest power to move
us emotionally by creating the illusion of spaces on the other side of
the screen which we can inhabit imaginatively.  It's not the fact
that moving pictures move that moves us, it's the fact that movement is one of the chief ways that spatial illusions are created.

The coherence of the spatial illusion is crucial, not just in
individual shots but in the combination of shots through editing. 
Single photographic images have a kind of built-in spatial coherence,
though they can be lit and composed in ways that counteract this
inherent quality — flattening the image, for example, so that we have
a hard time evaluating the depth of the space recorded.  But even
images with spatial depth all shot in a single location can be combined
in such a way as to confuse us about the totality of the space they are
meant to suggest.

Almost any competent director can create the basic illusion of a
coherent space.  The simplest way to do this is to follow
what has come to be the standard “studio style” — to start each scene
in a particular location with a master shot showing the overall space
of the scene and then cut in to closer shots of people or objects
within that scene, whose place in the spatial scheme has already been
established.  There are endless variations of this method. 
One can open a scene on a close-up of an object or an actor and then cut to a master
shot, but the master shot always serves as the ground of the illusion,
the point of orientation, even if that orientation is delayed.

We would find it very difficult to imaginatively inhabit a scene whose
spatial coherence was impossible or difficult to read — even if we
could construct it intellectually in our minds based on disparate
visual cues.

But the illusion of spatial coherence is merely the bottom line for
imaginative participation in a cinematic shot or scene.  The
greatest, most pleasing and most powerful films create spatial
illusions that seduce us into the imaginary spaces of the work — which
invite or viscerally compel us into the spatial illusion.

This is where the art of cinema begins, and all great directors have
known how to seduce us in this way.  They seem to have come into
possession of this knowledge by instinct, almost to have been born with
it.  It doesn't, in other words, seem to be a knowledge that can
be taught, except perhaps by example.  We have no language for
analyzing this knowledge systematically.

But there is a system to such seduction.  It can be used in
complex and subtle ways to manipulate our emotional involvement in and
reaction to the narrative elements of a film.  Allowing us to
enter the illusory space on screen at our own pace, as with a
deep-focus shot in which the choreography of the actors emphasizes the
space slowly and subtly, creates a different emotional effect than
hurtling us into an illusory space by a rapid movement of the camera,
one mounted on the top of a speeding train, for example.  A master
shot looking down on the scene has different effect than a master shot
looking straight-on.  A master shot which tracks in on a detail or
a character has a different effect than isolating the element with a
cut, and a master shot in which an element moves towards the camera
into a close-up has a different effect again.

Such variations of effect have been part of the crude methods of cinema
from the beginning, and account for the omnipresence of the chase as a
climactic device.  Even if it has no logical raison d'etre,
a chase is almost always cathartic — by creating the illusion of rapid
movement through space the chase reaffirms and satisfies our attraction
to the basic
method and charm of cinema.  It creates emotional involvement with
the characters, the pursuer and the pursued, quite beyond any conscious
involvement arising from the dramatic narrative.  When Orson
Welles said that every great film was a chase he was acknowledging this
fundamental principal.