In memory of Edgar Morin (1921–2026), who passed away on May 29, this week e-flux Film Notes returns to one of his most suggestive writings on cinema as a modern apparatus through which structures of magic, dream, the double, and the imaginary reappear withing the technical image. The excerpts published here come from “Metamorphosis of the Cinematograph into Cinema,” a third chapter in The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man (1956), that traces the passage from the cinematograph as an instrument of recording to cinema as a medium of transformation. Morin addresses early cinematic tricks to develop a broader account of magical vision, where technical reproduction becomes entangled with enchantment and the animation of the world.1
The Metamorphosis
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We should first of all examine the common nature of Méliès’s various tricks. They are those of the theater of fantasy and the magic lantern: although enriched by innovations, they all aim for effects that are precisely magical and fantastic, to use once again the terms associated with these spectacles that preceded the cinema and that have nourished it.
Magical and fantastic, these tricks, like these spectacles, are of the same family as sorcery or occultism. Prestidigitation, like sorcery, produces apparitions, disappearances, and metamorphoses. But the sorcerer is believed to be a sorcerer, whereas the conjurer is known to be a trickster. Conjuring spectacles, like Méliès’s tricks, are decadent and fairground offspring in which the fantastic has ceased to be taken literally. The fantastic, nevertheless, constitutes the lifeblood of these spectacles. And, although aestheticized and devalued, it is the magical vision of the world that is perpetuated through them.
We still cannot provide the essential characteristics of this magical vision of the world, for the cinema will illuminate them as they will illuminate it. Let us make it clear in the meantime that we are referring to magic not as an essence, but as a certain stage and certain states of the human mind. If, in order to describe it, we refer to the vision of the archaic world, it is because there alienation is manifest, fetishized. If, furthermore, we grant a preeminence to the archaic vision of death, it is because no empirical veneer, none of the sludge of reality, prevents us from considering its fantastic nature.
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Magical Vision
Indeed, if we consider magic in its pure state, that of death, it appears that the survival of the double is only one of two forms of immortality, the second being that which, immediately or later, makes the dead person be reborn as a new living being, child or animal.
The survival of the double and death-renaissance are found, at every level of belief, always symbiotically associated, according to variable combinations where one or another of the two immortalities predominates. Most often, the phantom-double lingers for a determinate time around the living, then goes to the dwelling place of the ancestors, whence come the newborn.
Like the survival of the double, death-renaissance is a universal of archaic consciousness. It is, as we have shown elsewhere, a universal of oneiric consciousness, a universal of poetic consciousness, a universal of infantile consciousness.
Death-renaissance is present at the very heart of the vision of life: the latter is a perpetual movement where death fertilizes life, where man fertilizes his action upon nature through death (sacrifice) and accedes to different stages of his existence through these veritable death-renaissances that are called initiations. Finally, the very mechanism of the perpetual metamorphoses that govern the universe is that of death-renaissance. In this sense, death-renaissance is a particular, or internal, aspect of the universal law of metamorphoses.
Metamorphoses imply, and here we agree with L. Lévy-Bruhl, a fluid universe where things are not hardened in their identity, but participate in a great cosmic unity that is in motion. This fluidity explains and accounts for the reciprocity between the microcosm man and the macrocosm. The analogy of man and the cosmos is the magic fulcrum where the fluidity of the universe and anthropo-cosmomorphism are articulated.
It has long been noticed that animals, plants, and things seem, for archaic peoples as for children, animated by human feelings. In some cases, they are believed to be inhabited by spirits, they are spirits themselves: in other words, doubles (the dead) are found installed in the very heart of the fluid universe. At a certain stage of evolution, the universe is nothing other than a vast tribe of spirits nestled in the bosom of all things. This is what has been called animism. This animism is deeply rooted in a fundamental process through which man experiences and recognizes nature by projecting himself into it: anthropomorphism.
Reciprocally, archaic man is inhabited by nature. It is not the presence of a “self” that he feels within him. His “self,” the double, is outside. Inside him the world is swarming. Thus the Kanak, as Maurice Leenhardt points out in Do Kamo, sees the sap flow in the veins of his arms. 2 Archaic language, conduct, masks, ornaments, possession phenomena, show us that men, while knowing themselves to be men, feel inhabited, possessed, be it by an animal or by a plant, at any rate by cosmic forces. In the same way, children who mimic animals, the storm, the wind, the airplane, are, without ceasing to know that they are children, animal, storm, wind, or airplane. Cosmomorphism, through which humanity feels itself to be nature, corresponds to anthropomorphism, through which nature is felt to have human features. The world is inside man and man is spread throughout the world.
Leenhardt quite correctly insisted on the importance of cosmomorphism, but he distinguished it chronologically and logically from anthropomorphism. In our opinion, these two terms cannot be separated; that is why we will be compelled (very often, unfortunately) to use the word anthropo-cosmomorphism. The totem animal, the parrot of the Bororos, for example, is one of man’s cosmomorphic fixations. Man, acting in good faith (he continues in other respects to act practically as a man, but does more than perform, he lives his identification with the bird), believes himself, feels himself to be a parrot; he mimics the bird in his festivals. At the same time, the totem parrot is anthropomorphized: it is the ancestor, it is man. Thus it is in relation to this anthropo-cosmomorphism, where man simultaneously feels analogous to the world and experiences the world under human conditions, that we must conceive of the magical universe.
Totemism is only a stage of crystallization in a much more general process. In fact, the micro-macroscopic analogies flow on naturally from anthropo-cosmomorphism. The cosmomorphized man is a miniature universe, mirror and summary of the world: the anthropomorphized world teems with humanity. In the midst of this immense fluid relationship bathe all things that have become living, colloidal. All metamorphoses—that is, death-renaissances—are possible and real, from microcosm to macrocosm and within the macrocosm itself.
Thus magic appears to us: a vision of life and a vision of death, common to the infantile part of archaic peoples’ vision of the world and the childish part of modern peoples’ vision of the world, and to neuroses and psychological regressions like the dream. We have, since Freud, often compared the vision of the child, that of the “primitive,” and that of the neurotic. Without entering into the dispute that has arisen around the validity of this comparison, let us say that it is not our intention to identify the primitive, the neurotic, and the child, but to recognize, in what is analogous in them, a common system, which we precisely call magic. This common system is determined by the double, metamorphoses and ubiquity, universal fluidity, the reciprocal analogy of the microcosm and the macrocosm, and anthropo-cosmomorphism. That is, exactly the characteristics constitutive of the universe of the cinema.
Dziga Vertov, in defining the ciné-eye, in his own way recognized the dual and irreducible polarity of the cinema: the charm of the image and the metamorphosis of the universe—photogénie and montage.
From the Image to the Imaginary
In a manner corresponding to its spatiotemporal metamorphosis, the cinematograph enters into the universe of fiction.
This obvious point, however, needs to be amended. We have already said that the first films of Edison, even before those of Lumière, portrayed scenes of fantasy, playlets, music hall shows. Moreover, the era of the cinematograph is as much that of the music hall or of filmed theater as documents taken from real life. In the end, it is conceivable that, without being transformed into cinema, the cinematograph could have been used to spread those works of the imagination that are theater pieces.
Conversely, Vertov’s ciné-eye and all the great documentary movements, from Flaherty to Grierson and Joris Ivens, show us that the structures of the cinema are not necessarily tied to fiction. Better still: it is perhaps in documentaries that the cinema utilizes its gifts to the maximum and manifests its most profound “magical” powers.
Granted these reservations, fiction remains the dominant trend in the cinema: it spreads with the cinema and the cinema spreads with fiction. Méliès’s discoveries are, as we have seen, inseparable from the fantastic film. Those of the Brighton school are made in the framework of fantasy scenes and equally fantastic. From Edison on, it can be said, an irrepressible push precipitates the new invention toward fiction. In 1896–97, the very year of its baptism, comedy, love, aggression, fictionalized history, are introduced into film from all over the place. The cinematographic image is literally immersed, carried along in an imaginary stream that will not cease to swell. The cinema has become synonymous with fiction. This is astoundingly obvious. The currents and the contents of this fiction are of such importance that we will devote another study to the great trade winds of the imaginary.
Here again it is noteworthy that the fantastic was the first, decisive, and great wave of the imaginary through which the passage from the cinematograph to the cinema (Méliès and G. A. Smith) was accomplished. The fantastic is certainly going to recede, to be reduced to a genre. But this reflux leaves the techniques of the cinema and an imaginary deposit on the shore: fiction.
We enter into the kingdom of the imaginary when aspirations, desires, and their negatives, fears and terrors, take up and mold the image to order according to their logic, dreams, myths, religions, beliefs, literatures, precisely all fictions.
Myths and beliefs, dreams and fictions, are the burgeonings of the magical vision of the world. They put anthropomorphism and the double into action. The imaginary is the spontaneous magical practice of the dreaming mind.
So we see, here again, how the objective cinematograph and the fiction cinema are opposed and linked to each other. The image is the strict reflection of reality; its objectivity contradicts the extravagance of the imaginary. But at the same time, this reflection is already a “double.” The image is already saturated with subjective powers that are going to displace it, distort it, project it into fantasy and dream. The imaginary casts a spell on the image because the latter is already a potential sorceress. It proliferates on the image like its natural cancer. It is going to crystallize and deploy human needs, but always in images. The imaginary is the place common to the image and the imagination.
Thus, with the same continuity, the world of doubles blossoms within the world of metamorphoses, the image is heightened in the imaginary, and the cinema deploys its distinctive powers in cinematic techniques and fiction.
Dream and Film
Henceforth, the objective image is going to resemble that of the dream—the imaginary museum of our childhood thought: magic.
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“In short, it is like a scene in a film”—a sentence that psychologists and psychoanalysts know well from people relating the visions from their dreams or when they were half asleep. “It was like something you see at the cinema.” “I did nothing, I watched as in a film.” Dr. S. Lebovici notes “this frequent slip of the tongue during sessions of analysis, a number of subjects speaking of a film while meaning a dream.”3 Moreover, the same clinicians are themselves brought around to discover profound analogies between the universe of film and the oneiric universe. Dr. Heuyer declares that the delirium of daydreaming resembles cinematic vision.4 Dr. Desoille notes that in the daydream, there are scenarios.5 From the first daydreams directed according to his method, Desoille notes the appearance of metamorphoses, of mirrors, that is, of the same magical elements that were present at the birth of the cinema. Lebovici clarified and defined these connections already found all over the place,6 and that Jean Epstein summed up in this way: “The processes used by the discourse of dream that allow it its profound sincerity find their analogues in cinematic style.”7 The dynamism of film, like that of the dream, disrupts the boundaries of time and space. The enlargement and expansion of objects on the screen correspond to the macroscopic and microscopic effects of the dream. In dreams and in film, objects appear and disappear, the part represents the whole (synecdoche). Equally, time expands, contracts, is reversed. Suspense, frantic and interminable chases, situations typical in the cinema, have the character of a nightmare. Many other oneiric analogies could be noted; in dreams as in film, images express a latent message, which is one of desires and fears.
Film rediscovers, then, “the dreamed, weakened, shrunken, enlarged, brought closer, distorted, haunting image of the secret world we withdraw to in the waking state as in sleep, of this life greater than the life where crimes and heroics that we never accomplish lie dormant, where our disappointments are drowned and our maddest desires take root.”8
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Unreality, Magic, Subjectivity
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Unreal: that is the negative, empty label. We must unravel the structures of this unreality, its logic, its system. Then the magical vision of the world appears, just beneath the surface, under the cinema, as it had already under the cinematograph—but this time in its totality, in all its fullness.
No—we have not meandered away from our subject. Establishing the magical system allows us to get away from the soporific power of a word that has become a catchall. It allows us to see that the passage from the cinematograph to the cinema did not come about by chance. Automatically, certainly, but once more, logically. The “enchantment of vulgar matter” of which Apollinaire spoke had commenced secretly within the invisible, beneath the objective image. Méliès liberated the chrysalis. Film was subjugated, gobbled up, digested, transfigured.
Magic is our frame of reference, or rather, better, our blueprint, our pattern. For, we have often said, but we must reiterate, we do not at all identify the cinema with magic: we are bringing out analogies, correspondences.
In fact, we wander from the spectator to the image, from the interior soul to the fantastic exterior. The universe of the cinema possesses magic genetically, structurally, yet is not magic; it possesses affectivity but it is not subjectivity either. Music, dream, fiction, fluid universe, micro-macrocosmic reciprocity—so many terms, each of which is slightly applicable, yet none entirely so.
It is a veritable magical-affective flow that pushed and animated the camera in all directions, opened huge gaps in the objective image from shot to shot. It swells and overflows, surges and gushes forth; it carries along and mixes the subjective quality of memory and the magical quality of the double, the Bergsonian durée and metamorphosis, animism and state of the soul, music and real objects. Carried along by what need?
To recognize the depth of this need, we must go deeper into the subjective structures of magic.
But the truth is we are already starting to recognize ourselves: however opposed they seem, magic always appears as the other pole of subjective sentiment, the alienated, externalized, solidified, recognizable pole. Sentiment, music, dream, magic: there is something unique in them, but at diverse moments of differentiation. Have we not seen that there was always a connection between the most fantastic of Méliès’s tricks and the most elementary, quasi-subjective structures of the cinema?
Film Notes editor's note: originally published in French as Le Cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire: essai d’anthropologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1956); the English translation is based on the 1978 edition. These excerpts were sourced from Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, trans. Lorraine Mortimer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 47–83.
Maurice Leenhardt, Do Kamo: Person and Myth in the Melanesian World, trans. B. M. Gulati (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). —Trans.
S. Lebovici, “Psychanalyse et cinéma,” Revue Internationale de Filmologie 2, no. 5 (1949): 53. Compare E. Leroy, Les visions de demi-sommeil (Paris: Alcan, 1926); C. Musatti, “Le cinéma et la psychanalyse,” Revue Internationale de Filmologie 1, no. 6 (1950): 190.
Conference at the Institute of Filmology, 1952.
R. Desoille, “Le rêve éveillé et la filmologie,” Revue Internationale de Filmologie 1, no. 2 (1947): 1971.
Lebovici, “Psychanalyse et cinéma.” Furthermore, an interesting similarity is suggested by certain contemporary psychoanalytic research. Psychoanalysts (such as B. D. Lewin in particular) have observed in their patients that “every dream appears to be a projection on a screen.” This phenomenon has been described through the introduction of the new concept of the “dream screen” (verbal communication with J. P. Valabrega).
Jean Epstein, L’intelligence d’une machine, in Écrits sur le cinéma, vol. 1, 1921–1947 (Paris: Éditions Seghers, 1974), 315.
Jacques Poisson, “Cinéma et psychanalyse,” Cahiers du Mois, nos. 16–17 (1925): 176.
