Talk of the non-dit and its opposite, the dit, implies a linguistic paradigm in which
meaning is constructed around a speaker and
a receiver. The non-dit exists only within the communicable, that is, within symbolization. The non-dit can refuse symbolization but it cannot move outside it. It can refuse but it cannot transcend communication.

This, however, is precisely what the work of art tries to do. The workof art wants at once to say
something in its capacity as the dit but at the same times hides things from us. But hiding is not quite the right term. The artwork insists that its non-dit is not a willful withholding of some communicable meaning, but rather that it is inherently incommensurable. The artwork thus gives us a different way of seeing the non-dit.

The non-dit, in this sense, is semantic indeterminacy. The work of art is not a puzzle. How are we to conceive of this non-dit? The indeterminacy of the non-dit is communicated, however. It is not just formally indeterminate or absence of signification, but a system of meaning radically different from the familiar communicative approach.

Taking my cue from both André Bazins theory of realist film and from Martin Heidegger’s notion of truth and world, I will try to sketch a way of saying something about the non-dit as it appears in film.

Part I; Shooting the Non-dit

Before we can examine what Bazin means by realist film, we must take a look at what Bazin means by reality as depicted in film. Bazin believes that film can present us with an alternate subjectivity. Film does this by recreating a reality with which we have a different affective relationship than with the reality which is reproduced:

Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled-up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all its virgin purity to my attention and consequently to my love. But the power of photography, the natural image of a world that we neither know nor can know, nature at last does more than imitate art, she imitates the artist. (15, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image", 1945)

Nature imitates the artist in that the artist makes nature and not the subjective viewer, the center of her work. Art thus returns nature to its naturalness.

How can the camera create a different reality? There is only one technique for this, Bazin claims. He sets up a dichotomy between montage, which he calls manipulative and artificial, and the depth of field shot which is ambiguous and thus true to reality. Both types of shots, I shall show, imply a theory of truth and art.

Let us start with montage. Montage is psychologically manipulative in that it aims to reproduce a certain and determinate state of affairs in the audiences mind. It is, in word, didactic. Bazin writes:

Classical editing, deriving from Griffith, separates reality into successive shots which were just a series of either logical or subjective points of view of an event. A man locked in a cell is waiting for the arrival of his executioner. His anguished eyes are on the door. At the moment the executioner is about to enter
we can be sure that the director will cut to a close shot of the door handle as it slowly turns. This close-up is justified psychologically by the victims concentration on the symbol of his extreme distress. It is this ordering of the shots, this conventional analysis of the reality continuum, that truly goes to make up the cinematographic language of the period. (28, "An Aesthetic of
Reality" (1948))

Montage constructs reality through the manipulation of the spectators faculties. It reduces the spectators point of view t the point of view of the camera. The film thus tells the viewer what to see and how to see it. We get not just the doorknob, but the affect of what the doorknob means, in other words,
fear. But what Bazin means here by the edited film is not restricted to montage alone. Think also of the manipulative music in Titanic or in Schindlers List. It transmits a message through a code which has become so common that we have stopped noticing it. Montage, in other words, is ideological by nature.

Manipulation requires that the
manipulator and the manipulatee share a common language, a language in which the statement "the cup is full" means the same thing for both. Or more filmicly, a language in which the shot of a baby in a carriage rolling down the Odessa steps fills both with the same feeling of terror.

Montage thus implies a correspondence theory of truth. In J. L. Austins formulation such a theory states that in order for a truth to be expressed, the state of affairs
to which a statement is conventionally taken to be referring, must obtain. In other words, the state of affairs and the statement about it are only bound together by conventions, just as in montage.

Let us now move on to the depth
of field shot, which, in its extreme form, forgoes montages manipulation. Bazin writes:

Whereas the camera lens, classically, has focused successively on different parts of the screen, the camera of Orson Wells takes in with equal sharpness the whole field of
vision contained simultaneously within the dramatic field. It is no longer the editing that selects what we see, thus giving it an a priori significance, it is the mind of the spectator which is forced to discern the dramatic
spectrum proper to the scene. (28, "An Aesthetic of Reality" (1947))

Rather than being guided through a set of events by the editing of the film, the spectator must orient herself in the reality of the film coming to terms with it as she would in her daily life. The subject matter depicted in the film is no longer metered out in easily digestible shots. The viewer is confronted with a quasi panoramic view of the scene. She must decide which filmic event is important and how one event relates to another.

Bazins favorite example is Roberto Rossellinis 1946 film Paisan. In an extended metaphor Bazin discusses the mental gymnastics necessary to understand Paisan, a film which restricts itself almost entirely to the depth of field shot:

The mind has to leap from one event to the other as one leaps from stone to stone in crossing a river. It may happen that ones foot hesitates between rocks, or that one misses ones footing and slips. The mind does likewise. Facts are facts, our imagination makes use of them, but they do not exist inherently for this purpose.

For Rossellini, facts take on a meaning, but not like a tool whose function has predetermined its form. The facts follow one another, and the mind is forced to observe their resemblance; and thus, by recalling one another, they end by meaning something which was inherent in each and which is, so to speak, the moral of the story a moral the mind cannot fail to grasp since it was drawn from reality itself. (35-36, "An Aesthetic of Reality")

By forcing the viewer to divide the film up into events according to the logic of the situation the viewer enters into a relationship with the film very much like the relationship she has with reality. The viewer must make her own discoveries in the film because she is not limited by conventions such as we saw in the montage film.

I would like to link Bazins idea of the viewer jumping from fact to fact, interpreting as she goes, to Heideggers concept of world.

For Heidegger, Dasein is always already in the world, that is, we are always already absorbed in our day to day activity. Heidegger calls this coping. Coping skills are pre-reflexive, which means that they do not stop to theoretically determine whether a cup is a cup, that is, what use a certain object might have been meant for. Dasein relates to the cup as the viewer relates the filmic event. Both interpret according to the situation rather than according to some theoretical code. The same piece of pottery I just drank out of could also be used, for example, as a paperweight just as the filmic event of the shot could mean the death of a friend just as readily as the death of an enemy. Meaning is not arrived at by authorial intention. Heidegger and Bazin both reject the communicative approach which I have been calling the dit.

In order to understand Bazins
notion of fact a little better we now turn to Heideggers theory of truth as disclosure. Heidegger writes that truth too is dependent on the coping strategies of Dasein. Truth, unlike in the correspondence theory discussed earlier, is not related to a pre-established correspondence between a conventional statement and a state of affairs. Rather, for Heidegger truth is always disclosing something as something else according to Daseins coping in the world.

An example: I am thirsty and walk into my kitchen, I see a piece of pottery filled with some liquid. My being thirsty discloses the pottery containing liquid as
a cup filled with water. The truth about the object in my quest for something to drink is that it is a cup filled with water. However, I might encounter the same object while trying to keep a few pieces of paper from blowing away and disclose the erstwhile cup as a paperweight. The point is that the piece of pottery is open for whatever use I find for it in the pursuit of my various objectives.

After this philosophical detour let us now return to film. I will now bring the two together.

What Bazin has been calling
filmic facts are a more specific instance of my example of objects. A piece of pottery is a fact, just a as a downwardly mobile carriage is. Both facts can be interpreted from within the context of the film or the life situation. The difference between this and the film relying on montage is that the viewer enters the reality of the film and
becomes absorbed in it. She is in the world of the film. The depth of field shot solicits the viewers attention while the edited film directs the viewers attention. Solicitation without direction leaves the viewer stranded if she relies on symbolic clues to interpret the film.

If, however, the viewer adopts a different interpretive strategy, and I use this term cautiously, she will be able to orient herself in the world of the film. Indeed, it is only Heideggers account of being which can make sense of the reality depicted by the depth of field shot.

I will show this by recapping the argument so far and adding some new points which will move us into the direction of elucidating the non-dit.

Part II; Saying the Non-dit

• I have argued that montage functions through the use of conventions such point of view shots, editing and other uses of symbols and editing technique which roughly mirror the correspondence theory of truth. The montage film thus depends on the uptake of authorial intention by the receiver, in other words, the dit.
  
• The depth of field shot, on the other hand, is inherently ambiguous because it lacks all the conventions that montage employs. It is the non-dit. It presents the viewer with a panoramic vision of the scene, must like in ordinary reality.
• The symbolic interpretation solicited by the montage film is in opposition to the non-symbolic in the depth of field shot film. The less montage there is, the fewer symbols there are.
• The more depth of field film shots are used in a film the more world is opened up and the more the film must be interpreted under the aspect of world.

Now we come to the significant
difference between montage and the depth of field shot. Up to now I have only spoken of the director of the montage film. The depth of field film also has a director, of course. But in what way are the two ways of making a film different? Do not both directors choose a script and direct actors. Do not both ultimately manipulate the viewer? How can the depth of field shot be both constructed and remain radically open? I believe that Bazin suggests a way out of this paradox, a paradox which has long haunted aesthetics. By employing the Heideggerian language I introduced earlier, we will be able to see exactly how.

I said that montage and depth of field shots were on opposite ends of the spectrum. The total absence of montage means the total absence of symbolization, and thus the radicalization of the non-dit.

By introducing the concept of world, however, we can see how the non-dit can become intelligible after all. To do this we change our epistemology. The director of the depth of field shot film, in the most extreme example, opens up a world through her directing, a world which lacks symbols. The viewer, however, is not hindered by this because the directors world does not exclude her own world. World permits the spectator to enter into the directors world and therein disclose her own world.

The idea of world thus delivers us from two conceptual impasses in the interpretation of film. Firstly, it is a way of interpreting films which lack a coherent symbolic or logical structure and secondly, it absolves us from having to seek recourse to authorial intent.

Let me anticipate two objections. The first is: "what distinguishes the world-oriented approach from a purely subjectivist interpretation?" The answer to this is simply, but not unproblematically, that world is always shared. The second objections will thus be: "but have you not staked your whole argument on the opposition between the intersubjectivity implied in symbolization and world?" The answer to this is even more simply: Yes. It is clear that at this point we need to know a little more about world.

Being in the world is being with others and being amidst things. Since we are always already with others the Cartesian problem of intersubjectivity never arises. Language is not necessary to create a bridge between my subjectivity and the subjectivity of others.

For our purposes, the idea of world as shared can be explained as a community of Daseins who are intelligible to each other through coping rather than through symbolization. When I disclose a world in a neo-realist film, it is dependent on my coping in the world in general. Disclosing a world is generally disclosing world in such a way that it remains within the grasp of other Daseins around me.

I disclose the shot that is fired in episode one of Paisan as the American soldier being shot by the German soldier to my neighbor. My interpretation is intelligible to him not because a shot can mean a fixed number of different things, one of which I have just named, but because the world of the film discloses the shot to him in this way too. Our interpretations are linked through our being in the world together rather than through a code of conduct and of language.

Conclusion; Some Suggestions

In this paper I have been arguing that the concept of world and the epistemology it entails is a way of comprehending films devoid of the dit, that is, the signs we generally use to interpret films. The shift in epistemology, of course, changes the results of our inquiry. World does not make the non-symbolic film dit in the sense that it was non-dit, but allows an understanding on a different level, a level which is not related to the Cartesian view of the world but which operates, rather, from the point of view of Being.

I have tried to break apart the opposition between the dit and the non-dit. Bazins ontology of film opens up a way to release the non-dit from its austere silence and give it a place in concrete human experience rather than making it into empty formalism. Bazins theory of film allows us to conceptualize a way to go beyond the decontextual, formal theory of art by discovering world within the films boundaries and making meaning possible again.

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