An art object cannot grasp reality, but it can abstract it to unveil the truths and beauty of the world and mankind. “Even in the simplest photographic reproduction of a perfectly simple object, a feeling for its nature is required which is quite beyond any mechanical operation” (Braudy, 283). Film theorists Rudolf Arnheim and Béla Balàsz believed the cinematic world should stray away from the inartistic demand for mirror sensations of the natural world, and should strive to liberate truth and let it speak through distortions of the recognizable. In the film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Arnheim and Balàsz’s desires come to life when the raw data and existing patterns of the world are given meaning through close-ups, framing, awareness of the cinematic medium, and the destruction of the spatial and temporal world. Two scenes from the film will be examined to see how their pictures express poetry that is perceived “by the heart, not the eye” (Braudy, 283) and how they each embody the theories of Arnheim and Balàsz.

Rudolf Arnheim believed that cinema is not a window into reality, but a prism (Andrew, 31). A gestaltist, he emphasized the importance of sensory behavior in film theory, specifically in respect to the visual recognition of objects. His theory declared that, “film art is a product of the tension between representation and distortion, […] based not on the aesthetic use of something in the world but on the aesthetic use of something which gives us the world”. With the camera set in a hospital bed, the opening scene of the film is shot through the eyes of Jean-Do Bauby as he awakes from a coma in his paralyzed state. Using blurring effects (as if tears are distorting his first sight), flashes of color and images of his son, un-centered framing, and distortions of focus, director Julian Schnabel plays with the limitations of illusionism and the stimulation of our senses to depict Jean-Do slowly regaining consciousness. Similar to the effects of a ‘shakey’ handheld camera or even a virtual reality ride at an arcade, this medium is realistic, however undeniably apparent to the audience. In congruence with Arnheim’s writings, Schnabel “consciously stresses the peculiarities of his medium [not in] such a manner that the character of the objects represented be destroyed but rather strengthened, concentrated, and interpreted” (Braudy, 286). In similar fashion, Balàsz stressed the importance of the audience’s awareness of the cinematic world through the polyphonic play of features.

Balàsz believed that we tend to only skim the surface of life that is brimming with meaningful riches. In an essay, Balàsz wrote that an individual looks at his life “as a concert-goer ignorant of music listens to an orchestra playing a symphony. All he hears is the leading melody all the rest is blurred into a general murmur. This is how we see life: only its leading melody meets the eye” (Braudy, 274). He argues that in cinema, the camera close-up uncovers life’s concealed treasures so as to broaden and intensify our perspective of the world. In the opening scene, close-ups reveal where we are, what is going on and the amplified significance of a single object or human action. In this scene, Jean-Do rarely speaks (not literally) to the orderlies and doctor with a full view of their face, providing us with close-ups of different parts of the person’s body, for example, the mouth, the eyes, beard stubble, hands, frown lines and wrinkles. These anatomical parts hold greater meaning because of the way they communicate their emotions and the gravity of the situation. In addition, the compilation of these close-ups create a certain significance or even identity. When Dr. Cocheton enters the room, we never see his face, yet the close-ups of his white coat, stethoscope, and hospital nametag tell Jean-Do and the audience that he is the doctor who holds the news we’ve been waiting for. Moreover, the close-ups of the orderlies’ quick turning of their bodies towards the door, their slow following of the doctor’s entrance, and Dr. Cocheton’s somber strut communicate to us that the diagnosis lacks hope for recovery. Balàsz argued that mere reproduction of reality is nothing but a stimulant of everyday life. The symbolism of a filmmaker’s vision of the external comes when a distorted, humanized and cinematic reality is situated in a real moment, rather than a reference to a real moment. The close-ups in this opening scene place us in this moment and reveal truths by showing us the human state, rather than the natural state.

In the second scene, we are placed inside Jean-Do’s imagination and memory as he discovers how “the harsh light of disaster makes [him] find [his] true nature”. Schnabel sequences an imaginative pattern of entirely different shots and presents it through a medium to provide us with the meaning we are seeking. This scene is perfectly congruent with Arnheim’s theory in that it makes the narrative secondary, the transposition of reality through a medium achieves truth and beauty, and expresses the Gestalt Principle of Totality (the conscious experience must be considered as a whole because the nature of the mind requires that each element be acknowledged as part of a sequence of dynamic relationships). This scene contains no shot that spans over the entire space: it is merely a composition of repeated single random shots that creates feelings of loneliness, helplessness and destruction. While narrative is not entirely eliminated (shots of the clock reading 2:30, Jean-Do’s breathing, and photos of his children provide some inkling), a focus on the visual is primary for developing the desired symbolism. In the first part of the scene, the following images are on a repetitive cycle: veins in his eye bulging, Jean-Do in a deep-sea divers suit underwater (suffocation), photos of his children, his son screaming, a cartoon of the fable Little Red Riding Hood (symbolizing him as the monster in bed), and the reflection of the open window (freedom) in his eye. Individually these shots hold no weight, but through transposition, they arguably create one of the most powerful scenes in the film expressing Jean-Do’s frustration and feelings of entrapment, lost opportunity and pain.

While the first part of the scene emanates chaos and frustration, the second part abruptly transitions into calm, quiet destruction. As classical music and Jean-Do’s narration ensues, images of a majestic, beautiful rock formation breaking apart and plunging into muddy ocean currents symbolize the silent deterioration of Jean-Do. The pieces of the glacier drift away like moments of happiness he was unable to seize. As Balàsz states in his essay, “the greatest landslide is only the aggregate of the movements of single particles” (Braudy, 274). This concept not only epitomizes this part of the scene, but parallel’s Arnheim’s train of thought. A scene is like the heart of the film, pumping life through its body. However, like all great scientific feats, the life of a film is found at the cellular level. This scene doesn’t simply provide audiences with deep symbolic meaning through transposition of life fragments: it breaks up temporal and spatial devices to create awareness of the cinematic medium. By sequencing individual shots of the hospital room, we have no sense of the area’s space. This emphasizes the fact that given Jean-Do’s physical state, we no longer reside in the literal world, but in the world of his imagination: the only space he has freedom to move in. Additionally, with only the single shot of the clock and the immediate jump to the rock formations, we have no concept of time. This arguably contributes to the nature of the scene and the story in the sense that Jean-Do’s paralysis makes five minutes feel like 5 days. As both Arnheim and Balàsz believe, the true beauty of cinema is taking the world that is already fragments, putting it in a story, humanizing it and translating it. This process derives truth.

The purpose of an artist is to translate and transform what has always existed: the give and take of the world. Arnheim and Balàsz found formalist film theory to be dangerous when it was overwhelmed by technique because we could lose any kind of meaning to cinema. Balàsz believed that we could narrativize the human drama of the world through close-ups, wide shots, transposition, face movement shots and other techniques, but we must be careful of a concrete cinematic language. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly uses the technique of defamiliarization through cinematic poetry to force the audience to see everyday things in an unfamiliar manner so as to enrich their perception of life. Though our lens takes the form of a single eye with limited range of motion, we recognize distorted elements of our world and interact with them. We are completely aware that this film exists solely in a cinematic world however it doesn’t change the truths being told and the “teeming substance of life being revealed” (Braundy, 274).