The Fraternal Image

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Jacques Rancière, interviewed by Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana

Originally published as ‘L’Image Fraternelle‘, Cahiers du Cinéma, nos. 268-269, part of a special issue dedicated to “Images de Marque” (July-August 1976).

Cahiers: If we consider two films, ‘Milestones’ (Robert Kramer & John Douglas) and ‘Numéro Deux’ (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville), it seems to us that the first has a genealogical dimension that is completely absent in the second. We could say that ‘Milestones’ has a place in a history of “genres” (American cinema) while ‘Numéro Deux’ has a place in a history of “forms” (European cinema). The result is that ‘Milestones’, but perhaps also the American cinema in general, is less cut off from the history of the US than ours, and that, in a way, it is more “materialist”.
Particularly striking in American cinema are the characters: they are never caught in a discourse that has already been told, they are free in their practices, gestures, behaviors. They bear gestures rather than ideas, behaviors rather than political ideals. And this doesn’t prevent them from relating to a global, ideological and mythical representation of America. They are the children of a great ideological discourse: that of free enterprise, a discourse that no-one has to completely take responsibility for (because it goes without saying).

Rancière: I guess we can take that as a starting point to ask ourselves what can be, here and there, a film of or about the revolutionary left. Kramer and Douglas can directly give the word to the left, render sensible the formation of a camp, the transformations of a militant form and ideal, because they have a certain genealogical tradition of American cinema behind them. While our film tradition, which is profoundly amnesic, lives off codes and typologies, regularly playing with easy displacements which permit, every six months or so, to welcome a new tone in our cinema, the American cinema has always been playing around, showing the legend of the formation of codes, the system of gestures, displacements, exchanges that lead to what a community recognizes as its own just as it recognizes its law.

Behind the journey that starts with the exit from a prison and ends with a deliberately symbolic birth, we can recognize a fiction à la River of No Return (Otto Preminger): in its first scene there’s a prisoner chopping down a tree to construct his house with and at the end of a series of ordeals, there’s the city, the law and American morality. Of course this genealogical tradition doesn’t present anything more than the American society’s “discourse on itself” and the materialism that we used to admire, or the material force of a national ideology, its capacity to create characters and organize fictions. Nevertheless there is a also certain way of rooting ideas in bodies at play here, which makes possible certain reversals or the posing of different questions.

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Our cinema, by contrast, reproduces a fundamental trait of our political culture: this indifference of genealogy that discards the fictionalization of history to the level of commemoration. I’m struck by the concordance between the terms of the debates animating our political culture and the modes of fiction in our cinema. Basically it functions on the basis of an extreme codification of conditions, characters and social spaces, and at the same time of “the small difference”, the effect of the real applied to the code, which is also a supplement of dream induced to the real: small office workers leaving their desk to start dreaming, factory workers discovering the delicacy of sentimental emotions that used to be reserved for the bourgeois dreamworld, characters escaping their social role, having their wandering followed by a camera that is all of the sudden mobile, their words finally seeming to have found the justness of the everyday.

This supplement of conscience induced to the social topology is a bit like the family picture in which there’s always a happy cousin wearing costumes or making faces so that the image wouldn’t procure a family picture, and it is basically given form as a “partage” (at once a sharing and a division) between a “heavy” commercial cinema showing the hidden suffering of the bourgeoisy (executives, doctors, small business owners etc) and a “light” commercial cinema – a role allotted to the young cinema – taking the worker out of the factory and the struggle – too decoded – to follow his or her love affairs (Lily, aime-moi, Maurice Dugowson) or sexual disorders (Claude Faraldo).

This play between observing code and a decoding that in itself is perfectly coded I also see in debates à la “Marx or dream”, in which we find on one hand the discourse of the apparatus, on the other the freshness of the real, desire, dream, the productive/militant force transformed in the wandering of deranged workers and lost militants. A lot of those who pretend to subvert the discourse of the apparatus today, do they do anything else than once more pitting the very superficial discourse of this supplement of the real which is the supplement of dream? The gauchiste doxa finds itself closely depending on the modes of commercial fiction, caught by fetishism, illusion of spontaneity produced by the new registration machines (camera–soundrecorder).

Knowing by contrast how a militant ideal is formed, how the gestures of a body are converted from submission to resistance, how a culture of revolt can be formed and transmitted – including by way of its legend – those are questions that are absent from our fiction and covered up, in our theoretical space, by the stereotypes of “life”. We are always in the order of mythology, not of the legend, of the effect of the real on the code, not of its genealogy. The long repression carried out by the culture from above has meticulously destroyed and replaced the forms of culture and memory from below, producing this amnesic culture which allows for commemorations (La Commune, “la chanson des Canuts”, the former suffering and exploits of the people..) but not for a theoretical reflection or a fictionalization of power and revolt into their material invention.

If we consider a film such as Costa Gavras’ Section Spéciale, we realise that the theoretical figuration à la (André) Glucksmann (the power and the plebs)* is completely dependant of this traditional mode of fiction in our cinema: on one side the power, the apparatus, the ministers, the people from above, the hushed universe of antechambers, and on the other the good guys or the good proletarian communists of Costa-Gavras, with their joie de vivre and their weight of workers’ humanity.

Concerning the representation of power, there’s even more significant things to detect in (Serge) July’s enthusiasm in Libération for Francesco Rosi’s Cadaveri Eccellenti (review 12 June 1976). July doesn’t seem to think that this figuration of power in the form of occult conspirators, long distance phone calls, concealed microphones, mysterious cars pulling out of high walled villa driveways and running over all too nosy investigators, has something in common with the big international conspiracy such as we find in “Tintin” books; nor is he troubled by how in this figuration plebeian honesty is embodied in the figure of the good police officer who sticks to traditional plebeian methods of intimidation and house search, prefiguring the socialist police of tomorrow.

To come back to our starting point: Milestones is able to give voice to the American left, to make it tell its own story because it is a film posited within a culture in which it is natural to represent oneself under the guise of a travelogue. Yet it does not raise any issues of ‘representation’, and it is a bit disturbing (deceiving) to see these characters given as real, who ask each other questions in front of the camera and at the same time organized within a fiction of hope. Conversely Godard (in Numéro deux) denies the left the possibility of telling any story. He radically deconstructs all the lies of the figuration of the left, which also means that he bars any possible reflection about militant history by confronting, from the outset, all militant discourse with its own lies, with its collusion with the modes of fiction of power and of capital. Decisive pedagogy but, in a sense, also suspicious: it seems to boil down to “propedeutics”, asking questions: how does a sound or an image work etc., to teach us how to see and then how to fight. But in reality it rather acts as a sort of endgame, a kind of bird of Minerva that rises when the adventure is finished. It’s the discourse of the old militant, extraordinary condensation of all the Comintern adventure stories ((Jan)Valtin in particular*), spoken in a voice which condenses all the voices of the old proletarian communists that we could have heard, but also pure discourse of death: we can only represent a militant ideal, a sequence of sounds bearing militant code and memory, because it’s something “from the past”.

In a way, doesn’t the pedagogy of Godard, by barring all “right to histories”, run the risk of proposing a pacifist response to the violence of the images of the bourgeoisy? But also: isn’t this too perfect discourse itself a bit rigged, a bit violent, in excess (of despair) on its own principles?

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What do you mean exactly by the “society’s discourse on itself”? And can we see how this discourse on itself submits the cinematographic practice, and to what ends?

Instead of “discourse on itself” we should rather talk about dominant fiction, which I understand as the privileged mode of representation by which the image of social consensus is proposed to the members of a social formation, and to which they are asked to identify with. It functions as a stock of images and operator of histories for the different modes of figuration (pictorial, novelistic, cinematographic etc). The amnesia I was talking about seems to echo some distinctive features of our dominant fiction. The American dominant fiction à la “birth of a nation” can represent the codes as the result of a history, replaying the contradictions of that history under different figures (Whites/Indians, North/South, law/lawless, etc.). But the particular features of our history have made such a fiction, as representation of our social concord, impossible : it’s impossible to unite the considerations in the fiction “look at where we come from” without bumping into June 1848 or la Commune, images of the class struggle that are difficult to represent in function of the destiny of that struggle and its relative stabilization since the Third Republic and according to a very unequal development, as factor of a conflicting balance.

If the bourgeoisy would have completely annihilated or domesticated the workers’ resistance, perhaps they could have put forward positive images of Versailles, rendering the communards as happy just as the most distinguished producers of westerns have been able to do with the Indians. The type of ideological compromise (school for all) or political compromise (different forms of the Union sacrée* and contractual politics) that the bourgeoisy has wanted to secure with the working class since the end of the last century prevents them from producing such images or even proposing positive historical images of the reconciliation. Thus power hardly makes itself loved as law, in a fiction à la “here is where we come from”: it makes itself acceptable/forgettable in a fiction à la “we are like that”, a tabular representation of social diversity, in which the policeman, for example, is less the representative of the law than a voyeur going through a set of social types and at the same time part of the typology.

In this fiction that our cinema hasn’t invented but doubled via the prestige of its specific effect of the real, the class struggle is neither represented nor suppressed, it is taxonomized. It seems to me that Marx has brilliantly anticipated the formation of this mode of fiction in his relentless attack against Les Mysteres de Paris (Eugène Sue)*. What is proposed here is not only the first big mode of democratic figuration, likely to provide an image of society which is immediately readable for all classes (and in particular for the workers who start to benefit from the Guizot law concerning primary school); it’s also a fictional structure inherited by cinema, taking up the function of dominant figuration. This is what I call the “voyeurist-unanimist” fiction, a fiction that displays the spectacle of social diversity and particularly the one of its slums, margins etc, under the double glance of a voyeur who feels as comfortable in high as in low places, and of a reformer who acknowledges the social plagues and makes up remedies.

In the curious look of a young writer, amateur of “physiologies” and philanthropist who wanted to mend the social wounds, Marx seized the moment when, in becoming love writing, this voyeurist-unanimist glance, stemming from the right, transformed into political doxa of the left: politico-fictional unanmism formed via the “Montagne” group of the 2nd Republic*, the big legend of the exiles of 2nd December and the big national reconciliation in the 1880’s that still has a weight today, as much in Mitterand’s electoral declarations of universal love as in the infinite tenderness with which the anti-electorist Truffaut films an unhappy childhood, in Thiers or elsewhere (L’argent de poche). No matter what Truffaut does, it’s Mitterand who’s the doctor of the plagues he displays.

This mode of fiction has been able to become dominant, as well as dominant as culture of the left, and this goes back to the eradication (June 1848, La Commune) or the lamination (1914-1918) of the workers’ left but also to the relative weakness of the fictions of bourgeois power In France. On one hand, film is, because of the high costs involved, entirely dependent of capital; on the other, power has established the monopoly on television. But they hardly display this monopoly (this is why the images of power on television are mostly insignificant, simple pretext or illustration for voice). The right who holds political power hasn’t been able to define a positive politics of images, to overcome its distrust of the cinematographic effect of the real. It has bit by bit given away the control of the only representable national fiction – the unanimist fiction – to the left.

Taking images, editing images, composing a fresco of the people: these functions have become in a dominant way the functions “of the left”. The wonderment in front of the real, browsing through social diversity, the displaced, the tramps, the girls of pleasure or the humble melancholic workers, working class solidarity or bohemians between world wars, drowsy workers, “loulous” or the outcasts of today, this whole little world that emblematizes our national fraternity, it’s the left who has managed it, setting up its cultural hegemony from the inside, as part of the political hegemony of the bourgeoisy. In the balance/struggle of classes, the force that manages the working class struggle also tends to be the force that manages the national fiction.

If cinema has played an important role in this historical and cultural compromise, at the same time as it has become the dominant figuration of our times, it’s clear that the voyeurism of its principle and the unanimism of its effects are so natural, so inherent to its being, that nobody cares to pay attention to it (at least untll Godard puts his foot in it). The camera is dead on time to get rid of those redundancies of love writing, for one simple reason: the camera is itself love: just look at the tenderness oozing from our cinema.

The cinema is the art that always holds a supplement of the real or the dream. Most of the time that supplement is simply created from image to sound. We needed the talkie before there could be an unanimist cinema as major piece of the new leftist culture, which became in itself only possible after 1930 (because of the progressive national reconversion of the Communist Party). Or from image to image, as in Le Juge et l’assassin (Bertrand Tavernier), in which the luxuriance of the landscape unites the gauchiste fiction (the wandering of the outcast in the new “Icarie” of the Ardeche) with the revisionist hagiography (the decadence of the old ruling classes, contradiction overtaken by inhuman bureaucracy and wild anarchism, proud songs of the people’s women uniting the calm and responsible strike with the legend of La Commune). The force of Godard and his importance at a time when unanimism takes on new prestige (on the remains of May 1968), can be found in his criticism of the effect of the supplement.

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But isn’t there a heavy responsibility of the political and syndicalist apparatus, apparatus of memorization and archiving, but also of forgetting and repression (in France, the French Social Party) in this hagiographisation/loss of legend? You just summed up in one sentence something that we have been trying to say in an article in Cahiers about ‘Section Spéciale’: the story of the big apparatus, of stifled ministries and those incarcerated or subjugated. Why is this the mode of representation of power that structures all cinema of the left? In what tradition does this belong?

It seems to me that, once again, Marx has put his finger on something important when he criticized (Victor) Hugo’s L’Histoire d’un Crime: a conspiracy, something that happens to society from above or from outside, this is necessarily how the bonapartist coup d’état appears for the representative of la Montagne, this new left that claimed power in the name of the people after having fired at them in 1848, and will also cover up the workers memory (that of the fighters of June) with the commemoration of the martyrs of the Republic.

In other words, the responsibility of the left goes far beyond the birth or the degeneration of the Communist Party. It’s about something else than a gap or even the inescapable pressure of the apparatus on the spontaneity of the popular archive. The big tradition of the left, that we inertly relate to 93 and Jacobinism, has in reality taken form with the Montagnards of the 2nd republic who have killed the fighters of June twice: first with arms, then by taking their place as victims. One of the first times when the outlaws of 2 December were able to affirm their legitimacy while commemorating the burial of a worker who died in exile, there was a provocateur present, the worker-poet Joseph Déjacque, to remind them that they had shot at the same person in June they ware burying now. Provocateurs like him died in misery or madness, and the big tradition of the left has been able to settle the game of their commemorations.

So the paleness of the images that the left can produce has a double cause. On one hand, the right gladly leaves them in charge of the commemorations (8th May, for example), leaving them the images of national revolutionary history, but also affecting them with a déjà-vu effect (soldiers of the 2nd year in the processions of the Front Populaire), yellowed photographs, images that are in advance considered as stereotypical, that the left can only produce at the price of redeeming them with commentary. On the other hand, the history of the left (except for the brief moments when there were attempts to set up a political workers left, breaking with the “Montagnard” tradition) has a very precise tradition: it has to legitimize the demand for power of the left with a history of its popular exploits and sufferings of which the left is heir or healer. In order to mask that the left has taken part in the violent repression of the streets or the soft repression of forms of popular culture or memory, it can only represent the contradiction as the opposition of life and the conspirator’s death drive. In this fiction/commemoration, the body and the voice from below will never represent anything else than the plebeian lust for life, the suffering in times of bad government, the demand for good government.

In opposition to the legend of the revolt (element of an autonomous culture, song brought back to its voice, dream or memory reinvested in practice), the hagiography of the people is inscribed in gestures, voices and gazes of people, the demand for power of its representatives. At the end of Tavernier’s film we can see a remarkable condensation of these hagiographic signs: the banner of a factory on strike, suggesting the responsible workers movement, the pride of the woman of the people, facing the power’s uniforms, taking side with her brothers, a voice singing La Commune and the lilas, black images with leftist rhetoric comparing the numbers of victims made by the maniac and those made by capital. There’s not one of those signs that doesn’t flatter the spectator of the left or gauchiste, who takes pleasure in recognizing its good side.

Hence the questions I’m posing in regards to the use of the notion of popular memory. The Cahiers have introduced them in the criticism of the “cinema rétro”*, as a memory of the resistance against the couple retro/submission. It has also functioned a bit as a return to the proper experience of the revolt against militant stereotypes. But if we don’t think about the contradictions of this notion, aren’t we at risk of loosing sight of the revisionist forest behind the retro tree (easily recuperated as sign of decadence of old ruling forces and the madness of bad government)? And aren’t we at risk of falling back on unanimist bliss, providing only a supplement of soul to the commemorations of the electoral left? Reading the letters that (Serge) Maoti received about Pain Noir*, I was struck by the way in which this “memory of the people” that didn’t have any apologetic intentions was spontaneously acknowledged by people such as the delegate of CGT (the national trade union), who didn’t consider it as their memory but as the abstract history of their class. Similarly, I haven’t seen Bertolucci’s film (Novecento), but I felt a bit terrorized by the love declarations to the big Communist Party accompanying his ecstatic account of popular memory.

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Popular memory is something that unites the gauchiste demand for a substitute for code with the demand of the left for a supplement of code. Regaining memory: we have to know what we want to say by that. On one hand, the memory of struggle vanishes or spreads in the time of the struggle and that’s an affair for the current politics. But when culture from below has been the object, not of a simple cover-up, but of a double process of destruction and re-inscription, it’s useless to pretend to regain popular memory, because then we risk only illustrating the last re-inscription. We only have the scraps of the history from below or its legend, with which we have to produce something new. It’s not a problem of restitution but of production, because it’s not about uniting but about dividing. If the past interests us in the ‘Révoltes Logiques,’ it’s in its division.

On one hand it seems necessary to provide the elements of a real knowledge about all these questions which are subject of the arrogant chatter of the non-culture of our political doxa. For example: what is workers power, how does the oppressive faculty arise; how can workers fall for a political code (communist or other), how does submission work, etc? But it’s not only a matter of giving the material to politicians and theoreticians. It’s about making a division of their discourse. We don’t want to restore the voices from below but make their division heard, stage their theories in its present provocation. Because the problem today is producing the elements of a new culture in which the image has to have a decisive role.

For Sartre’s programs – of which we don’t have any expertise – we should probably have had this practice: play out the reciprocal provocation of past and present. But the discourse/illustration form probably wouldn’t have allowed to go very far. There should have been a possibility to get out of this double trap of testimony and commentary and that’s a question that forces us to re-pose the problem of fiction.

How to divide what spontaneously unites: memory, cinema? How to represent that division? These questions are urgent in the light of the vertiginous acceleration of the constitution of an official culture “of the left”, of all that is affiliated according to the logic of the supplement. The recent Italian cinema warns us for the sudden convergence of all fictions towards the PCI’s (Internationalist Communist Party) demand for power: images of the decadence and anarchy of power (Salo, Passolini), the vanity of the petit-bourgeois leftism (Allonsanfan, brothers Taviani), the regained memory of the people (Novecento, Bertolucci), the vindication of the vigorous popular police (Cadaveri eccellenti). Rosi’s film is fascinating because it’s not so much a fiction of historical compromise than it is a compromise of the state of fiction. The marxist political doxa that used to define Rosi’s films (the investigation that raises facts about social domination) is reduced to the slenderness of a completely literal and apolitical fiction of power. But the conspiracy/investigation fiction has in turn gotten rid of its spontaneous politics: immediate political positivation of the good investigator, the corrupt apparatus calling out to the healthy state with a popular police, manipulated masses calling out to well managed masses. The production of fiction immediately becomes political doxa. We take in the story of a crime as pure fiction of the demand for power.

This communal program of fiction, this official culture of the left… in many ways we see it invading our cultural space, with the prospect of 1978. Mitterand already established in Le Monde the official writers of the future reign. And we can already sense what scattering there will be on the gauchiste side, given the enthusiasm with which Libération receives every manifestation of the new cultural unanimism of the left, its affection for the new heroes of social-fascism, such as the worker Potapov (La Prime, Serguei Mikaélian) or inspector Rogas (Cadaveri eccellenti).

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But how is it that the power (in Europe) submits so easily this medium which is cinema? Historically, we know that it was first the army that used it. We remember the newsreels before the war in which cinema was a way of proving the national influence abroad (in the colonies). In contrast to the other arts, cinema is very easily requisitioned by power. Today, for example, we have seen television asking all French spectators to send in their family films, amateur productions, in order to edit and broadcast them – to code them, while these images have actually been taken outside of any code. This is all happening as if the power, on top of having the monopoly of the historical archives, also wants that of amateur images.

I don’t thing cinema is requisitioned by power, “in contrast to the other arts”. It is in another way. Godard has not become an official institute of the Republic like Boulez or Vasarely. There where art has lost all function of social figuration, power can officialize it as an element of cultural development, without requiring any compromise of the artists. The requisitioning of cinema obviously has a different meaning since it is the figurative art par excellence, of which everyone is more or less consumer of producer. Cinema is the shortest road between the archive of power and the forms of recognition of every individual. It’s normal that power wants to glean something in the voyeurist delirium that characterizes our contemporary culture (the frenzy of the direct take, of documentary, ethnology etc.). Currently there is no corner left in our social space where there is no look, camera or sound recorder, looking for a surplus on the effect of the real. Power wants its part. But it’s also because it lacks it terribly. Our power takes little images and hardly stakes on images. Even on the inside of the state monopoly of images (television) the division comes into play: it’s generally the left that fictionalizes, particularly in regards to history.

The upholders of political power hardly want to show their images of the masses and their struggles, for example. They rather work on the insignificance of the image. The images of the power’s discourse on television, in different genres, all seem to obey one law, which is much more about the annulation than the production of meaning. There are first of all images of power that only reflect its double (the visits of state leaders); there are the broadcasts of Michel Droit in which everything is in the voice commenting the images which are mostly insignificant. This voice creates a reactionary political effect, less by its thinking than by its non-thinking. (Foucault has rebelled against the spontaneous thesis of the left: power is stupid. Regardless I think that the stupidifying effect produced by our television does not come from intelligence but from the stupidity of its contractors.); there are the broadcasts à la “Dossiers de l’écran” in which the often worthless images, characterised by déjà-vu and moreover affected by its role as pretext, introduce a spectacle of discordant voices, which represent the conflictual balance of our society and of which we have in advance heard all what they have to say. So we add a déjà-dit to a déjà-vu. Either the image is only used to align with the voice of power, or it ensures, by its insignificance, the power of the commenting voice, or it returns the discordant voices to the vanity of their déjà-dit and the spectacle of their complicity.

Spontaneously our power only acknowledges the image as support and pretext of the voice. It cancels it out or it is cancelled out by other voices. It prefers to command images (those of the fiction of the left or those of private individuals). In a way, this demand is a sign of weakness, or rather it would be if it wasn’t answered. This is not really the case. It is part of a broader problem. We have a power that occupies more than it produces (on television or elsewhere). It is always looking for supplements, images, imagination, that the left and the gauchistes jointly provide. And this poses the problem: when we are not a party, when we don’t want to supplement giscardism nor the left, how can we keep and use their experiences, their images, their imagination?

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It is true that the French cinema is completely a-genealogical. But at the same time, when cinema is directly in the service of politics, whether it’s the militant cinema here or the official cinema in socialist countries, it always has a function of commemoration, as if it has to re-stage, re-affirm something already gained, already judged (this was true of the Soviet cinema as it is of the Chinese cinema today). What brings us to a double question. Is this an inevitable part of making political cinema (militant or propagandist, official or not)? And, on the other hand, isn’t there something there that is connected to the specificity of cinema as a medium?
Besides, you have seen ‘Darboy’, what do you think of it? Do you think militant cinema can play a positive role in the constitution of a memory, in a re-genealogisation (!) of cinema?

I don’t think that cinema holds this aspect of reaffirmation of what is already judged, anymore than other worlds of figuration. The lure of the “real” is in way more constitutive of its diffuse political function than its characteristic repetition. If we leave aside all these films of “the left” that are only political due to the spontaneity of their fiction (the political/commercial cinema of which Italian cinema provided the best example), we could say that there are two big types of political cinema: the one that militates in the service of political power, illustrating its slogans, establishing its legend, and more generally assuring its hegemony. This is the case for Soviet cinema that can of course also inspire the cinematographic practice of militant groups who don’t hold any power but who already consider themselves apparatus of the State to come.

And then there is the militant cinema such as Un Simple Exemple (Collectif Cinélutte) that tries to do politics by its own effect, through its participation in a dynamics of accumulation, representation, exchange of experiences. Its title explains the problem it poses: what does “exemple” mean? In one sense, it is the illustration of a theory. Thus the film is framed with black images displaying two pieces of a citation of the Communist Manifest about the revolt of productive forces against the relations between production and the inexorable catastrophe of capitalism. To use Godard’s words, the elsewhere of an enigmatic citation that needs us to give it a bit of body and the here of one of the innumerable struggles of the industrial restructuring that needs proving that its not one of those classic jolts that precede the definitive liquidation of companies, that it is a small life in the big wheel of revolution. Is this citation not an easy way of producing the + sign : theory of Marx + workers struggles = revolution to come?

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That is to say that for them, it was a rather a simple matter. It wasn’t really thought over on the level of the production relation between one and the other. What was important for them was marking that it took place in a period of crisis, that it was a moment of crisis. And the only way we could figure out is this sentence with images that are actually images of 68. It wasn’t more ambitious than that: we hadn’t thought of it as a project: and perhaps, indeed, in return it poses questions.

Yes, but then we are sent back to the other meaning of the word “exemple” and the political fiction it supports: that of “it is possible”. The question of the film is on the level of its spontaneous politics, which is ours, that of the leftism after May 68 that lives off exemplary struggles, privileged moments when workers have invented again, taken up power. These moments, these inventions, these “exemples”… we reproduce them, we amplify them, showing them to those who supposedly will do the same. We put struggles in images in order to provoke other struggles, but aren’t we evacuating the problem of the qualitative jump, aren’t we concealing the burying in the “exemple”? And the necessity of the “exemple” obliges us to erase the important aspects of the constitution of a power of struggle. The main character of the film doesn’t come from the workers world, but from Vincennes, from the student uprising, from May 68. At that moment it’s not only about the constitution of a power of exemplary struggle, but the course of the gauchiste tribe, the constitution of a certain camp. And this aspect is evaded. What becomes significant is the plumpness and the joviality of the character which gives him the weight of a worker, rooted firmly in class.

The film reveals another shady element of our political doxa: the relation with the political-syndical apparatus. On one side, the exemplarity of the unanimity to represent, requires that we erase certain contradictions, especially certain tensions with the union inside the factory. On the other side, it functions on the basis of the spontaneous gauchiste opposition between the electorist illusion of the left and the real struggles lead by the workers, without asking itself (but there too it’s not the film but the whole of our doxa which is responsible) if there’s no complementarity of this “real” and this “illusion”. Hence this slightly bizarre sequence in the film in which the colors of the posters are laughed at. We have the impression that’s it’s there as a sort of counterweight because the filmmakers are embarrassed that they have to thank the union. But there’s also the real problem that stays intact: what is this “real” struggle? Is it a syndicalist struggle with a small supplement of soul? Is it something else? Is the circulation of images going to lead to the constitution of a camp or its illusion?

The other problem for me concerns the camera. In an ordinary struggle, the camera is normally not there, ready to film every gesture, every meeting. Its too natural presence, like the natural workers’ weight of the main character, evades a bit the elsewhere present in this struggle. It’s not a look filming the exemplarity of a workers struggle. The images are taken from a certain place that is also the one where the main actor of this struggle comes from. I agree that the militant camera shouldn’t loose itself in the problems of meta-language or feel guilty about its status, its right to be there etc. Nevertheless, the exemplarity obliges to mask the problems that are part of the constitution of this camp that the militant cinemas has to help form.

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It seems to us that what legitimizes the militant cinema is the fact that the films are distributed in the factories on strike, in the places where there is no cinema, where there is a monopoly of the representation of struggle (like the union in 1968 showing La Vache et le Prisonnier (Henri Verneuil) at Renault). But in relation to a larger audience, the audience of cinema, television, the audience of gauchistes as well, we don’t know what sort of demand there is for workers representation. We have the feeling that there’s a division of work: the militant cinema shows the struggles, television the defusing, someone like Godard thinks about “how a struggle images itself” and the commercial cinema (Lily, aime moi etc) stages a playful image, proletarian demobilization. As if everyone manages in their own way the workers body.

For me, the big problem concerns the ghettos operating on the level of distribution. For example, for the supposedly revolutionary worker in the factory or on strike, there are militant films that show the workers struggles; for the supposedly petit-bourgeois worker who goes to the cinema on Saturday evening, there are films showing dimwit, fun-loving workers, with the head of Rufus for example, workers who don’t really care about the workers struggle. So the bourgeois cultural hegemony works in big part through a segregation of genres which is at the same time a segregation of audiences: heavy commercial films for the masses, light commercial films for the intellectual petit-bourgeoisy, militant films for the militants. There’s a double danger there: we inscribe ourselves in the bourgeois segregation, we live in its ghetto, but we also act as if we believe one aims at another audience than its own: just like the gauchiste press, the militant films don’t have the tendency to justify the shortcuts of their pedagogy through the affirmation that they are not aimed at intellectuals, while they still are their principal consumers.

Don’t the gauchiste words and images use as an alibi the fact that the masses don’t hear certain embellishments to confirm the simplism of the intellectuals? The import thing is to take diagonal routes, to produce for each ghetto films that shatter their genre, that provoke and displace the perception of its own audience. (Jacques) Fansten says interesting things about that in his interview with Cahiers (n° 266/267, may 1976). But obviously the destiny of his venture makes you wonder.

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You have seen Ici et Ailleurs. What do you think about the way in which the question is posed how to serve a cause (or how to be useful for a cause – which is perhaps very different). And also, how to use a political cause in order to bring about (or liven up) a reflection on cinema?

I don’t know about being useful for a cause. It already has the merit of being harmful to quite a few “good” causes. It is without any doubt the only contemporary film of our political situation, arriving just in time to question the culture of the communal program. I’m thinking of the scene with this too pretty Lebanese woman who is asked by the filmmaker to redirect her head so that she would better play the role of the militant Palestinian who is happy to give a son to the revolution. There is an exact counterpart, I think, in the final scene of Le Juge et L’Assassin, in which an actrice who is also too pretty holds her head up too high to sing a too lilas-perfumed version of La Commune. Godard takes up a function that is decisive today: provoking and dividing. But I think that it’s rather useful to people than to causes. But then to who? For Ici et Ailleurs it’s undoubtedly to us more than to the Palestinians. Which usefulness?

It could be simply the kind of service that helps us not to die stupid. It could be more: the principle of a new vigilance. But then there’s still this aspect that I think is problematic, what I called his pacifism. Godard tells us that it’s shameful to take images, shameful to combine them with sounds that make them lie, shameful to tell stories, shameful to repeat the everyday violation of the representation of power. It’s true, but not the whole truth. One also has to produce images and stories, one has to divide but there also has to be a way of uniting. We cannot stay in a position of culpabilisation, a bit similar – even if it goes back to a infinitly more intelligent practice – to that of post-gauchiste political discourses, culpabilising every political action because it necessarily puts forward a power that necessarily oppresses etc.

If we don’t want to stay disarmed, we have to put forward powers, produce images and fictions that will always be a bit suspicious. We have to divide (the here and elsewhere) but also produce (condense in a certain way the here and elsewhere). This is the time for dialectics. How to divide, who unites and on the basis of what? For example, I Wouldn’t criticize La Cecilia (Jean-Louis Comolli) for taking liberties in relation to the questioning of Godard, but I would perhaps criticize it for unifying too easily on the basis of an idea (the sweet dreams anarchy: images carried by the anarchist song) and then dividing too easily on the basis of the same idea. (closing of the dream outside of the real class struggle): we have to, in one way or another, show that this real struggle also has its closings and collapses (Union sacrée, for example*).

We have to accept Godard’s provocation and yet find ways to go beyond it. Because behind the appearance of a return to the positive (see what the Palestinian fighters whose voices we buried under our noisy ‘Internationale’ actually said, learn how to see, how to listen etc.) there is an aristocratism that is a bit suicidal.

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Translated by Stoffel Debuysere (Please contact me if you can improve the translation).

In the context of the research project “Figures of Dissent (Cinema of Politics, Politics of Cinema)”
KASK / School of Arts

translator’s notes
* “André Glucksmann, former spokesperson for les ‘enragés’ of May 1968 and the Maoists of ‘La Gauche Prolétarienne’ published under the title La Cuisinièr et le mangeur (The Cook and the cannibal) the first manifesto of the so-called ‘new philosophers’ who went on to build their fame on denouncing ‘concentration-camp Marxism’ and identifying with its victims. From this side, the revolutionary people was liquidated en bloc, turned into pure embodiment of the Marxist dream of mastery, pure justification for the mass crime of the gulag. On the one hand, the denunciation of ‘master-thinker’s simply revivified the old reactionary discourse for which dreams of purity and social justice necessarily lead to the crimes of totalitarianism. But, on the other hand, the purity denounced immediately resurfaced in a new guise when Glucksmann and his colleagues opposed to ‘concentration-camp Marxism’ a plebs endowed with a constitutive virtue of resistance to the assaults of that leviathan power whose final avatar was the Soviet state. The new embodiments of the popular body that the supposed ‘new philosophers’ opposed to Marxism actually reconstituted the same dubious alliance between positive and negative on which Marxism itself lived. And once again the celebration of the suffering and struggling people served to benefit its self-proclaimed representatives. The ‘proletarian’ intellectuals speaking in the name of the builders of a new world were replaced by the new ‘dissident’ intellectuals speaking in the name of the victims of that ‘new world’.” (Rancière in Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double)
* Jan Valtin was the literary pseudonym of Richard Julius Herman Krebs. Krebs, a Soviet and German spy, was author of the best-selling Out of the Night (1940)
* L’Union sacrée (French for Sacred Union) was a political truce in France in which the left-wing agreed, during World War I, not to oppose the government or to call any strike.
* Karl Marx criticized Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris in The Holy Family (1845). Marx found Sue unintentionally making a mockery of mystery, turning character into caricature. Marx’s basic point was that although the social conditions of Paris under Louis Philippe had indeed improved, the underlying belief systems were still medieval. Whatever sympathy Sue created for the poor, he failed to come to terms with the true nature of the city which had changed little.
* The Montagnards controlled the French government during the climax of the Revolution in 1793–94
* Cinéma Retro was discussed in an interview with Michel Foucault in 1974. Pascal Bonitzer & Serge Toubiana wrote: “Lacombe Lucien, The Night Porter, Les Chinois a Paris, Le Trio infernal, etc. These films, whose avowed aim is to rewrite history, are not an isolated phenomenon. They are themselves inscribed into a history, a history in progress; they have – as we are sometimes criticized for saying – a context. This context, in France, is the coming to power of a new bourgeoisie, of a fraction of the bourgeoisie along with its ideology (Giscard, president of all the French; a more-just-andcaring society etc.), its conception of France, and of history. What goes by the name of ‘apres-gaullisme’ is also an opportunity for the bourgeoisie to rid itself of a certain heroic, nationalist but also anti-Petainist and anti-fascist image, which was still reflected if not by Pompidou, at least by de Gaulle and Gaullism. Chaban’s electoral defeat marks the end of this heroic, exaggerated and somewhat grotesque image (cf. Malraux) of recent French history. Something else is beginning to be written and represented: that France wasn’t all that anti-fascist, that the French couldn’t have cared less about Nazism, that anti-fascism and the Resistance were only ever, precisely, this derisory image of Gaullist ‘grandeur’ which is now showing its false nose. What is emerging is a cynical ideology: that of big business, of the multinational and technocratic culture that Giscard represents. The French, it is thought, are ripe for this cynicism (cynicism of the ruling class, disillusionment of the exploited classes): a cynicism illustrated, on the screen, by the phenomenon known as the ‘retro style’, i.e. the snobbish fetishism of period effects (costumes and settings) with little concern for history. This false archaeology of history had to be denounced in all its implications and all its effects. A true archaeology had to be – has to be – put in its place: the popular memory of struggles (of all forms of struggle) which has never really been able to speak – which has never had the power to do so – and which must be revived against all the forces which are constantly bent on stifling it – on silencing it once and for all.”
* Pain Noir: TV Mini-Series from 1974-1975, based on Georges-Emmanuel Clancier’s series of novels in which he told the story of his family, and his maternal grandmother, taking place in the period 1880 – 1936.
* Rancière wrote for Révoltes Logiques from 1975 to 1981. See Staging the People Volumes 1 & 2.

Mark Images

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By Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana.

Originally published as ‘Présentation‘, Cahiers du Cinéma, nos. 268-269, the introduction of a special issue dedicated to “Images de Marque” (July-August 1976).

1. A “mark image” first of all makes sense in advertising. A product that doesn’t associate itself with an image is a product that sells badly or not at all. The absence of the mark itself has to be marked out in order to be seen (“here’s washing powder x”). We have always suspected that the publicitary cinema wasn’t the unworthy margin of cinema, but its truth. The dominant cinema, as they say, is most of all aimed at the management of “mark images”. It’s the one of the sponsor (financier), the benchmark (taken for real) of the good cause (to serve once more) or the parent company (“you can find everything in store x”). The dominant cinema only makes publicity for its off-screen.

2. A “mark image” makes (more and more) sense in politics. A minister who doesn’t associate him or herself with an image is a hopeless scandal (it’s the function of polls to watch over it). A cause without images isn’t only ignored, it’s lost. The big scandal, in the eyes of the Europeans, is not that there might be massacres in Cambodia, it’s the audacity of a small country deemed cynical for not feeding its images to the chains that were set up to cancel them out in the first place. And in these chains, the ones of the globalizing media, the watchword is always the one used by the first policeman arriving on the scene: circulate! The Cambodian silence echoes another scandal: Munich 72, the Palestinians taking advantage of the existence of a global stage to make something heard. A frail sound, judging by the consensus (tacit, without images), that risks accompanying the elimination of the Palestinians and their cause (today, 10 July 1976, new attack on the camp of Tell-el Zaatar, without images).

3. The mark is “the sign used to recognize something, to distinguish it from something else, to identify a function”, but it’s also “the trace that a bruise or a blow leaves on the body”. The image marks (it has a power and force in and of itself) but is marked in return (it bears traces of forces, of power that wants to make use of it). Its future as an image? Becoming, in the dreadful circulation of signs, an abutment, an emblem, a signature, a stimulus. Solidified power, a node of domination. Its function? Taking the place of a link in a chain, preventing all other images from being seen.

4. Taking images, arranging them in chains, reducing them, is, as we know, the function of the media. But perhaps we still have naive ideas about that. The first observation made by those who look at, for example, press photographs, is that those pictures are – paradoxically – scarce, timidly or underused. It’s one thing to observe that the power (whatever it is) is eager to install, to strengthen its monopoly on images (taking, circulating, archiving them), it’s another to conclude that it knows how to subject them, manipulate them to its benefit, making them speak for it. Images are – in contrast to an idea that is quite widespread on the Left – for the moment at least, rather frightening the whole world. And if “the audiovisual” (a rather shaky and vague category, coming from above) takes part in the mechanisms of power, it’s rather by making us, every day more and more, blind (only capable of ruminating on what we have seen before) and deaf (for all what is not on the level of the automatic answering machine).

5. What is true of state power, is as true of the parties that have their heart set on the management of that state (and its cultural and information apparatus). At a time when the monopoly of imaging the history of the “people of France” and its social struggles comes back to the filmmakers situated in the Leftist union movement, it seems important to examine under which conditions, on which terrain, this monopoly could play out. It was therefore necessary to bring out the dominant traditional trait of French cinema, which is amnesic and without any genealogical dimension. This is what we have done with Jacques Rancière.

6. This interview derives in the wake of the one we have done in 1974 with Michel Foucault*. At that time, the important event (that we perhaps weren’t always able to see) was the resurgence of what we can call a certain desire for history. This desire expressed itself in two ways, more adherent than we guessed: on one hand, through “retro”, a real curiosity (and its inevitable recuperation by the right) that disrespectfully countered all commemorative and fossilized thinking; on the other, through the reclaiming of a certain “popular memory”, a pious exorcism.

Why Jacques Rancière? Because reading Althusser’s Lesson, more than a year ago, helped us to distance ourselves from a certain fossilized (and sterile) dialectics in which classes, instances and ideologies could only abide and stand by like faience dogs. This book allowed us on the contrary to better understand the game of ideologies, the system of their interleaving and their opposition. A work that is continued by J. Rancière in the magazine ‘Les Revoltes Logiques’.

This interview has a history of its own. Different strata come together. We had to start off with the criticism of Althusserian positions, the post-leftist philosophy, the Glucksmann current etc. And cinema? Unaware of the relation Rancière has developed with cinema, we have been given a few films to see, amongst them some that still haunt us: Milestones, Ici et Ailleurs, Numéro Deux, Un Simple Exemple, etc.

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Translated by Stoffel Debuysere (Please contact me if you can improve the translation). A translation of the interview with Jacques Rancière mentioned here (“The fraternal image”) will be published in a later post.

In the context of the research project “Figures of Dissent (Cinema of Politics, Politics of Cinema)”
KASK / School of Arts

translator’s notes
* See ‘Anti-retro: entretien avec Michel Foucault’, Cahiers du Cinema 251-2, July-August 1974) Michel Foucault interviewed by Pascal Bonitzer and Serge Toubiana.

The Way South. Johan Van der Keuken

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By Serge Daney

Originally published as ‘Vers le sud. Johan Van der Keuken’, Libération (2 March 1982).

We tend to overlook the work of this gliding Dutchman, one of the greatest practitioners of contemporary “documental-fiction”*. The eye of this filmmaker without borders is like a scalpel.

To start off, an answer to the question: who is Johan van der Keuken? He’s Dutch, born in Amsterdam, forty-four years old. An excellent “documentor” (a word I propose to use indefinitely instead of “documentarist”*); The Way South comes out just in time. The films of Van der Keuken were on their way to be more known than seen, more reputed than distributed. Thanks to Forum-distribution the scandal is avoided: the Paris audience gets to see this 28th film of the persistent Dutchman. His seventh long film. His best.

When a documentor comes from the North and has a bona fide passport and conscience, a camera and a good eye behind it, where does he go? Towards the South, of course. Matter of initiation (Brueghel, Van Gogh, Ivens). Since quite some time now, Van der Keuken has been heading “towards the south”. To Paris where he, at the end of the 1950’s, studied cinema (at Idehec) and practiced his first craft (photography). Later, between 1972 and 1974, he composed, bit by bit, an ambitious “North-South” triptych (Diary, The White Castle, The New Ice-age). It was a matter of finding a form of cinema that responded to the third-world sensibility of the time. Imposed figures: the effects on the South of the politics decided on in the North, unequal exchange, ecological disaster. Van der Keuken takes them very seriously. We see him everywhere: Cameroon, Peru, USA, Spain, Morocco. This eye of a lynx has seen countries, this attentive ear has been around the globe, this nose has bumped into the real.

There is (without a doubt) a Batavian “school” of documentors, of which Van der Keuken today and Ivens before him are the most beautiful assets. But contrary to the old Ivens, Van der Keuken hasn’t put his knowledge of filming in service of the world’s most powerful communist states. He has entered the stage later, at a moment when communism has disappointed us (a bit, a lot, madly) and when even the idea of “third world” has gone rancid. Today, the filmmaker who wants to commit his work has to pass the mission to himself. End of the militant mission, arrival of the “filmmaker without borders”. In 1981, filming “towards the South” simply means to head towards the sun and towards the misery, there where it feels right to witness. It’s filming more poverty than one knows. And, “somehow”, being fond of it.

The South, as the reader must have guessed, is a state. A geopolitical state and a physical state. The work of Van der Keuken could be subtitled “the misery caused by the global capitalist system and the infirmity it ensues for the human body.” It’s with the tenderness of a scalpel that the eye of the filmmaker captures what doesn’t work between someone and one’s immediate environment. Van der Keuken is a champion of discomfort, when vital space is lacking. Impeded, twisted, disabled bodies, bad in their skin, bad in their language. His most astonishing film is still Herman Slobbe, Blind Child (1964) in which morality is born out of obscenity and vice versa. The relations between North and South start there: all that is in front of the camera is in the South, the camera is always in the North. The camera is a compass.

But going to the South means loosing the North. The Way South is Van der Keuken’s most simple and direct film to date. It’s the account of a journey, some pages torn from a log book, a travelogue. The filmmaker leaves from Amsterdam and, two hours and 20 minutes later, looses himself completely in the Caïro crowd. He passes by Paris, the Drôme, Rome, Calabria. Those who he crosses paths with and respond to his questions have nothing in common except for this: they have accepted their environment, they don’t want anything else, they want to stay where they are.

In Amsterdam, youngsters get organized to squatter, go head to head with the police and the housing crisis. In Paris, in the neighborhood of Goutte d’or, Ali, who’s abated by an occupational injury, lives in a room surrounded by his medicines and correspondence courses. In the Drôme, some old lavendiers know that lavender doesn’t sell well, but they abide. In Rome, an old Eritrean woman recounts her life, which is quite something. In Calabria, a stubborn priest fights the rural exodus, by setting up a sewing atelier. And then, we arrive in the South. Terminus: Caïro. The filmmaker gets off. The real film begins.

Because I’ve failed to mention something: Van der Keuken is an extraordinary cameraman. One of the greatest. He pushes the passion for the frame towards unsuspected paroxysms. I’ve said it well: passion. Agony and ecstasy. Cinema, for him, is twenty-four frames a second. The remorse of a photographer? Between film and cliché, image slipping and image freezing*: a very particular, a bit asphyxiating, practice of cinema.

Thus in Egypt, nothing much comes out of the interviews. One lies easily to the man with the camera. Aggrieved, he heads off to the road and starts filming the circulation. A packed train, a crowd in pajamas, carts out of a sword-and-sandal film, cars threading slowly, astonished children, deranged animals, fine dust and, in between, faster than them, the eye of the filmmaker. Images without a stake, bath of images, images that have – finally – lost the North. Fantastic.

The culture of Van der Keuken is photography and jazz. He once made a nice film on Ben Webster (Big Ben) and the musician he usually works with is none other than Willem Breuker. He films like Charlie Parker or Bud Powell play: all the notes at a breathtaking speed. Lost in the Caïro crowd, Van der Keuken “plays cinema” like one plays the saxophone; he plays all the frames, very fast. Pan shots as the introduction of the theme, nervous deframings as riffs, reframings as chords, etc. It doesn’t happen often that one can “play” cinema like this, because of the awful way television uses the optical tracking shot. The soloist must be in good shape. Matter of gymnastics.

Some years ago, Van der Keuken told me something that struck me. “Having to carry the camera obliges me to be in shape. I have to find a good physical rhythm. The camera is heavy, at least for me. It weighs 11,5 kilos, with a battery of 4,5 kilos. In total 16 kilos. It’s a weight that counts and that implies that the movements of the machine can’t take place candidly, every movement counts, weighs.”

The great cameramen know better than anyone else how to play tricks on others. In order not to get outrun by their unscrupulous love of filming, they often invent a guard rail, a play rule, each in their own way. I love it that for Van der Keuken, morality goes through physical fatigue. It’s a matter of discrepancy between the time of speech and the time of a look. Talking takes time, looking doesn’t. There’s something diabolical in this discrepancy.

Imagine our documentor of the North behind his camera which is a bit too heavy, asking questions and filming the responses and at the same time, behind the viewfinder, imagine this organ that is excited by every little thing, distracted by everything, exuding frames like one breathes, that goes too fast, capturing more things than aspired; involuntary comedy, emptiness, easy fetishism, scandalous beauty: the immoral eye that, literally, doesn’t give a damn*.

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Translated by Stoffel Debuysere (Please contact me if you can improve the translation)

The Way South will be shown at KASKcinema on May 3th 2012.

In the context of the research project “Figures of Dissent (Cinema of Politics, Politics of Cinema)”
KASK / School of Arts

translator’s notes
* documental fiction = “documensonge”, a word play with “document(aire)” and “mensonge” (lie, artifice)
* documentor = “documenteur”, documentarist = “documentariste”
* image freezing = “arrêt sur l’image”, a pun on “arrêt sur image” (the French term for “freeze frame”) but means much more than this. See also this translation.
* the immoral eye that, literally, doesn’t give a damn = “l’oeil immoral qui, à la lettre, s’en fout”. I’m sure there are other, perhaps better ways to translate this.

The cruel radiance of what is

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By Serge Daney

Originally published as ‘La radiation cruelle de ce qui est’‘, Cahiers du Cinéma no. 290-291 (July/August 1978).

There are, properly speaking, no scenes in the films of JVdK, but fragments. Not parts of all that is to come and certainly not the pieces of a puzzle to reconstruct. But fragments of cinema, that is to say: carrying in them, with them, on them (that’s the whole issue) traces of a mining of the real, an imaginary operation of which they are the enigmatic rests. There is something chirurgical in these fragments, that doesn’t only derive, in the case of Van der Keuken, from his past as a photographer but also from his position, or rather his posture, as cameraman, man-with-camera or man-as-camera: the eye riveted on the peephole of a camera that is too heavy, the eye that sees and chooses at the same time, that is to say: cuts, slices, clean as a laser. There is an extreme, tyrannical attention for all that frames, and the lived sentiment, undoubtedly nauseating, of an excessive frame, everywhere, always, which implies that there is nothing left to overframe, reframe, deframe. And that which constitutes the frame, of course, is first of all that: the frame that isolates it from the rest, that directs the rest to the limbs of the out-of-frame. Furthermore, it’s the fragment that fixes our look, appropriates it and, in turn, looks at us. Cut off from everything, the fragment of cinema gives us the eye.

When we say that the fragment makes us loose the whole – the whole constituted by “all that remains” – it concerns equally the rest of the world, the rest of the images of the world, the indefinite rest of all that could have been in the same place. The fragment is also that what the professional documentarist has to avoid at all costs – he who has as a mission to make us forget the arbitrariness in the choice of images. The paradox of JVdK who, if he ever becomes well known, will be certainly classified as “documentarist”, is that he makes films against himself, like swimming against the tide, against that part of himself that is content with the easy beauty of images. VdK has made his cinema into a strange machine to de-confound, un-startle, a war machine against the enigma of halted movement, against photography. Not by “denouncing” the illusive seduction of images, but rather by way of excess (at which point the plastic sumptuousness of his most recent film, De Platte Jungle, has something discouraging or even excessive). And the only way he has been able to set up this machine is by making us witness and accomplice of this imaginary operation (the mining, the grafting) that breaks the image into fragments.

The fragment is affected by two possible futures: fetishistic and dialectical. Either it’s self-sufficient, makes us forget about the rest, confounds and startles. Or it stands as a moment in a process, a link in a chain, articulation to what is not itself but that which works with it (what for? For sense, always to come, having the last word, never outspoken). But the opposition only appears to be settled. Or rather: it only meets, with a maximum of acuteness, in the work of filmmakers who are the mystics of real inscription, who besides JMS and JLG we should also include JVdk. It’s in their work that the oscillation between the two futures of the fragment is experienced with the greatest violence – and seriousness. At times the petrification of time in an image, fetish that opens up to (perverse) pleasure, at times the stages, the phases, the inbetween, the dialectics that covers up the desire. It’s in their work (and in Eisenstein’s of course) that we see best at which point, in cinema, the willingness of dialectics has always something to do with the exorcism of the fetish.

Don’t we call dialectics this craft, for filmmakers, that consists of not ceasing to retrace their steps, towards their own productions, their images, to feign to find them changed, become “other” (changed by the look of the spectator – this rival), and giving themselves the right to go back, “covered up by dialectics”. Refusal to abandon them, refusal to manipulate them, shame to the spectator for seeing them wrong, duty to do something about it, it’s one single operation, but in multiple times, comparable to the act of the painter who “takes distance” from his canvas, to see it in another way (detached, as if it was made by somebody else), before the silent order to go back to it is suggested (and, between two strokes, the word of order is precisely: don’t touch!). That is how one can turn his productions into objects of his thinking, this is how the two futures of the fragment come together, in this detour which is going and returning at the same time*. I’m thinking of Godard having the “obligation” to go back to certain moments in his film (Victoire becoming Ici et Ailleurs), like going back to the scene of the crime, or Straub-Huillet filming a book that they’ve read and filming the author of that book reading today what he has written yesterday. Or Van der Keuken remaking Blind Kind.

There is an expression that summarizes well the cinema of VdK, form as well as content: unequal exchange. It indicates a political reality which is the last word of the relations between the rich and poor countries as well as the status of all cinematographic fragments. Every fragment is seized (at the same time victory, extortion and mining) from something, cruelly, arbitrary. The unequal exchange constitutes the fragment but in return the fragment makes us forget about the unequal exchange and tends to play fetish. The unequal exchange finds its way about in the situation of filming (extortion of over-imaging) as well as in the choice of places or framings. It’s through this omnipresent dimension of unequal exchange that the moralization of the relation between film and spectator is brought about (the possibility that a film is abject). One could go on to say that every fragment (all that results from a decision, a choice, a toss of the dice) is injust.

And this unequal exchange, if it can’t be abolished (it is inescapable), at least it has to be made present, it has to mark the images and make the spectator responsible. “Every scene”, writes Fargier (Cahiers 289), “even before being incorporated in a sequence, sees itself already being stratified during the shooting by the telling collision of the real and a look.” Since about fifteen years, the films of VdK (that’s where their political dimension lies) don’t stop proclaiming that every exchange is unequal.

Unequal exchange (1): filming/filmed. Only in the act of filming manifest itself the impossible reciprocity between the one who films and the one who is filmed, which VdK illustrates, in the most radical way, by making infirmity one of his favorite themes. Facing the blind (in Herman Slobbe, see also the text by Fargier), the deaf (in De Nieuwe Ijstijd the Dutch workers are deafened by the factory work), the ones who do not dispose of vital space (in Vier Muren, small film about the housing crisis, the impossibility of holding up – see Cahiers 289, “Espaces contraignants”), facing all these limitations of perception, there can be no “good place” for the filmmaker. The unequal exhange, if I dare say so, stares you in the face.

It’s here that VdK commits himself, risks something. He doesn’t turn himself away from these boundary situations (that he visibly holds dear), no more than he enwraps them in the abjection of a discourse of assistance due to the most “disadvantaged”. He pushes the search for the “wrong place” as far as he can. And if the good place, in cinema, is where we forget our bodies, the wrong place, the one of the moralist, is where the body reminds us of ourselves. In order to better bring forward the inescapable character of the unequal exchange, one has to draw out the two poles of exchange, that is to say: one has to bring forward the body of the filmmaker. I refer to the words of VdK, which show evidence of lucidity with regard to what he does: “The camera is heavy… It’s a weight that matters and entails that the movements of the machine can’t take place freely, every movement counts, weighs…”. We are spectators twice. We cannot have a just relation to those who are filmed (all infirmed in one way or another, because they are being filmed) than from the moment where we also have a relation with the pain, the work, the shame (physical and moral) of the filmmaker.

The moral of a filmmaker is always the search for a triangulation: filmer/filmed/spectator. It is always, in the way that it implies a posture of the filmmaker (or an exhibition, a pose), indissociable from a dimension of scandal. The identification of Van der Keuken with Herman Slobbe is scandalous (the exchange is too unequal) because it is scandalous that the difficulties of the filmmaker’s work echo the existential difficulties of a young blind man. In the same way that it is scandalous that Godard tries to make a young welder understand that the gestures of his craft are also the gestures of writing, writing being the craft of Godard (Six fois deux: nobody here). But these scandals are precious. Because it’s on this condition (bringing forward the filmmaker’s body) that Blind Kind sends back to oblivion all that it could have been (humanitary docucu to shameful voyeurism) and ends up giving us access to the character of Herman Slobbe, as he also exists outside of the film, with his own projects, his callousness, and most of all – that’s where the biggest scandal lies – his relation to pleasure. The film ends with a strange “each one for himself” that doesn’t make sense except for the fact that, for twenty minutes in the film, everyone has been (everything for) the other in regards to the spectator.

Inequal Exchange (2): here/elsewhere. Why would there be cinematographic fragments, if there are people for whom there is nothing to see or hear? This question, we just saw, allowed to highlight, almost ad absurdum, the unequal exchange between filming and being filmed, and all of the sudden, the arbitrariness of all fragments. There are other questions, also present in the films of VdK, that have more to do with his ideological and political choices and his rigorous anti-imperialism. Why film here, in this country, if the key of what we are filming is elsewhere, in another country, situated at the antipodes? In the three films that he has devoted to the relations between rich countries and poor countries (the North/South triptych), VdK doesn’t deal with the “good place” as much as he takes infirmity as subject. All the more so because he knows that the exhange between rich countries and poor countries is more and more unequal. It’s a similar reality – imperialism – that all at once yields one people dependant of another, chains them (pillaging, unequal share of the crumbs of pillage) and exotisizes them more and more (folklorisation). It’s also imperialism that allows the filmmaker to interweave diverse fragments: an icecream factory in Holland, a shanty town held by leftists in Peru, a supermarket in the States, fishermen in the Balearic Islands etc.

This game of here and elsewhere subsists even though the third-worldly sensibility (and rhetorics) of the seventies gives way to a certain disenchantment. At the moment of the war between Vietnam and Cambodja or the Marrocan intervention in Shaba, it’s first of all in Europa (Voorjaar), and then where he lives, in Holland (De Platte Jungle), that VdK pursues the dialectics of here and elsewhere. In this shrinkage of political horizon, this passage from macro to micro, it’s always the same search for chainings that moves the filmmaker, who nourishes his coming and going between fetish (the link making us forget about the chain) and dialectics (chain that doesn’t want to know about links).

What accomplishes itself is a ecological sensibility, already present in the triptych and what is without a doubt – for Van der Keuken as for all the moralists of real inscription – the only way to save politics. Which is to say: follow other chains than the chains of economic exploitation, follow the thread that binds the animalcules of the Waddenzee to the workers at sea and the ones in the nuclear power stations. There is, in this dialectics of nature, a politisation of the idea of environment which in return permits to get across the line between here and elsewhere, not only between the continents, but also between things that are infinitly closer, in the same place, at the most in the same scene.

Unequal exchange (3): this/that. It’s the third operation, which consists of marking the arbitrariness of the fragment in the act of filming (it is therefor essential that VdK is his own cameraman). It consists of displacing the attention towards the edges of the frame and towards the immediate out-of-frame. “When I shoot I sometimes try to look a bit towards the left or the right, and when there is something very insignificant or too significant introducing itself, then I go back.” In this strange practice of deframing, it is as if the fragment doubles itself before our very eyes, unhitching from itself, producing the time for hesitation, in a sort of oscillation, the cruel arbitrariness of the cut by the same glimpse that excludes (beyond the edge, the outer-edge). Practicising a right to look, certainly, but of a very particular kind. Because what is produced in this movement of going and returning, is not a dramatisation of the out-of-frame as a supposed reserve of what threatens or boggles the frame, but what Bonitzer calls (in his text about deframing, Cahiers 284) a “suspens non narratif”. Its function is rather to insinuate a doubt, a distrust in regards to the legitimacy of the frame (filming this… but this, next to it, might also be good…). The fragment dramatizes itself, detaches from itself, in order to signify what is a toss of the dice (arbitrary, happenstance) but also a stroke of force.

In the last analysis however, VdK’s struggle to dialectisize the fragment (we have successively seen an intersubjective dialectics, a dialectics of history, a dialectics of edge and outer-edge) stumbles over the irreducibility of the fragment. Of the fragment of cinema, this fetish. Writing about Nietzsche, about ”la parole de fragment”, Blanchot writes: “A speech that is unique, solitary, fragmented, but, by virtue of being a fragment, already complete in the breaking up from which it proceeds and of a sharpness of edge that refers back to no shattered thing.” It is not coincidental that Blanchot signals the sharpness of the fragment, adding at once that it doesn’t refer to any shattered thing. Nor any enlightened thing. Because the shatter leads us towards the light. Writing about the fetish, Rosolato (in Unknown Binding) signals: “the dullest, dirtiest objects always have this ability, proven in a way that is much more blatant than it imposes itself, a contrario, for a glowing that only exists because of the sole attraction that is conferred to them by way of their role as fetish.” And thereby, the light, the dissemination of luminous sources and points in VdK’s work originates in a sort of intimate illumination. The list of points, rounds, luminous circles would be long. Jewels or shiny filth. From the shimmer of a turning door (Vier Muren) to a piece of bloody meat. Eyes built into a wall or onlooking pebbles (Lucebert); Empty orbits of blind children (first version), redoubled from an opening of the diaphragm, to innumerable television stations, lit up or put out. This light, this materialization of a point of view is not the result of an illumination, but of a grafting. A grafting, an implant of light in the fragment. A quick scene in De Tijdsgeest shows a newspaper announcing the successful implant of a baboon’s cornea in South-Africa. The newspaper cutting has itself the shape of an eye. It’s this grafted light that outlines the empty place of the eye, sometimes literary, that also makes the fragment into a fetish, that is to say: an impossible object in which we can gaze at ourselves.

* It can only be a matter of coming-and-going. Absorbing ourselves in the fetish is, à la limite, impossible (it would be like flirting with one’s own images, like Wenders). Adjourning sense ad infinitum in the name of dialectics is, to say it in a vulgar way, “reculer pour mieux sauter”. In Straub/Huilet’s Fortini/Cani, for example, the retroactive game of signifying blocs, the interrelation of all the fragments, the difference of the last word doesn’t prevent the film from closing itself with one of the marxist fetish phrases (the one where it is a matter of concrete analysis of a concrete situation).

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Translated by Stoffel Debuysere (Please contact me if you can improve the translation)

In the context of the research project “Figures of Dissent (Cinema of Politics, Politics of Cinema)”
KASK / School of Arts

translator’s notes
(1) The title of this piece is borrowed from James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941):
“For in the immediate world, everything is to be discerned, for him who can discern it, and centrally and simply, without a either dissection into science or digression into art, but with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands: so that the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no symphony can: and all of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is.
That is why the camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time; and is why in turn I feel such rage at its misuse: which has spread so nearly universal a corruption of sight that I know of less than a dozen alive whose eyes I can trust even so much as my own.”
(2) JMS = Jean-Marie Straub. JLG =Jean-Luc Godard

Anabasis of Terror

eric-baudelaire-the-anabasis.JPEG

Anabasis of Terror — Trying (Not) to Understand
Pierre Zaoui

Originally written in the context of the exhibition “L’Anabase de May et Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi et 27 années sans images” by Eric Baudelaire (Delme, 20 May – 25 September 2011). The film with the same title was shown as part of the Reverberances programme @ Courtisane festival 2012.

“The sole and only work and deed accomplished by universal freedom is therefore death — a death that achieves nothing, embraces nothing within its grasp; for what is negated is the unachieved, unfulfilled punctual entity of the absolutely free self. It is thus the most cold-blooded and meaningless death of all, with no more significance than cleaving a head of cabbage or swallowing a draught of water”.
– Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“I have behind me two or three coffins for which I will no longer forgive anyone.”
– Antonin Artaud, Rodez Notebooks

It is hard to imagine a more horrid and absurd act than the terrorist attack of May 30th 1972 at Lod Airport in Israel. Three Japanese kamikazes 5000 miles from home shot blindly into a crowd — mostly made up of Puerto Rican Catholics on a pilgrimage — in the name of the Palestinian cause and of world revolution. One is not quite sure whether to break into laughter or tears, so much does ridiculousness clash here with bloody abjection. So one wavers between Dostoyevskian moral repulsion (“Demons!”) and Monty Pythonesque disbelief (the Judean People’s Front in The Life of Brian comes to mind).
But one need only spend a little more time thinking about the twenty-six victims of that attack, the vile purges that preceded it within the United Red Army, their fascination with violence, and their total confusion between reality and images, between internationalism and nationalism, between freedom and death, to stop laughing altogether. These tragic excesses — not of a generation but of a few lost Japanese — are not fascinating; they are wicked, lamentable. A lament that forces us, symmetrically, to abandon any overly moral perspective. Because after all, in their own way these young members of the Japanese Red Army did not lack morality. At least, they lacked none of the courage, selflessness, loyalty to community, solidarity, sense of sacrifice and other virtues that are the stuff of the most common morals. And it is hard not to detect a profound moral regret in the fact that after this attack, none of their “operations” aimed to kill, as they got lost instead in pure terrorist spectacles. Search as one might, interpretation will always reach a dead end. There will be no “perfect” scumbags nor even “banal” scumbags, in Arendt’s sense of the word. So these terrorists do not inspire laughter any more than do their victims, because like them, they do not make good objects of mockery. The situation is a little more serious than that.
Here it is rather Hegel’s words describing revolutionary Terror that ring truer than ever: their liberation and revolution ideal was nothing but an ideal devoid of content, without mediation, a confusion between images and reality, feelings and reason, deprived of all feeling and all dialectical thought, which could only lead to “the most cold-blooded and meaningless death,” in reality as well as in images. In other words, the Lod attack and the whole associated story of the Japanese Red Army are not intolerable for aesthetic or moral reasons, but because they stem from a political sensibility and mindset that are essentially impatient. Indeed, as Hegel showed persuasively, beyond all morality, impatient sentimentality is the absolute worst political fault, much worse even than patient, well-considered Machiavellian cruelty. It is a disaster for the mind, taking the apparently highest and most generous thought of universality and reducing it to the most insignificant particularity. And it is also a disaster for the body, reduced at worst to the level of an obstacle without importance, at best to the level of an image without real content.
As true as Hegel’s judgment may seem, it is not necessarily wholly adequate for today’s world. First, because he could only formulate it after the event, from the perspective of a subsequent reconciliation between abstract freedom and concrete moral community, specifically the Empire, then the Hegelian constitutional state. But which subsequent reconciliation enables us to speak of those terrorist attacks of the 1970s? What have the Palestinian question and the chances for peace in the Israeli-Arab conflict become if not an endless despair? What has terrorism become today if not a sinister profession of the future? And if the revolutionary perspective has been discredited by bloody, loathsome acts, what has become of the thought on its underlying causes — oppression, inequality, poverty, exploitation?
Second, and most importantly, because Hegel claims to fully understand the terrorist act. That fury of abstract universality has a determined place in his system as a pause in the life of the spirit which must be overcome. Yet who can really claim to understand terrorism, no longer of the State but by various splinter groups? Claiming to fully understand it amounts to either condemning or excusing it, that is, contenting oneself to judge and therefore not really understanding anything at all.
In this respect, a more fruitful approach might be the kind taken by Eric Baudelaire, who aims to understand and not to understand at the same time––to understand up to the point that one no longer understands––and also to show, refusing to understand or explain, so that with a dreadful feeling of confusion we are surprised to find ourselves understanding, discovering a subtle sympathy, telling ourselves that maybe monstrosity is our shared condition. He sets before us a kind of ever-divided desire: the desire to understand and to not understand, the desire to understand what we do not understand and the desire not to understand what we are afraid of understanding all too well. Or it could be written: the desire (not) to understand, in its threefold sense — to see, to hear, and to share.

***

Where does this desire come from, if it rejects from the start not just all fascination, all nostalgia, but also any elevated position from which to pronounce “the” truth of the past? Perhaps from today, actually, from our latter-day reluctance to understand and not understand what happened and what was lost in those years of powder and lead. What went off the rails? Where? Why? We do not know. The unpardonable criminal failure of those young idealists of yesterday in no way clears us of our own failure, our current inability to offer anything more than talk of an unthinkable new departure and an impossible return. This could almost be expressed as a fake Zen proverb: the certainty that someone else is lost does not in any way guarantee that we have found ourselves, nor even that we have the ability at least to find ourselves.
Taking up the profound intuition of Alain Badiou, who sees in Anabasis — understood as an embarking, a wandering and a return — one of the possible symbols of the century that has (or has not) just ended, Eric Baudelaire suggests that we take another look at one of the movements that drove this modern form of anabasis to one of its highest levels of insanity: the Japanese Red Army.
It is a matter of being precise, however. Not about the idea of insanity, which explains both nothing and too much, but about this very notion of anabasis. Because what exactly is it about here? The anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu and that of Masao Adachi is, in truth, much more literal than Alan Badiou’s. His is a metaphor for a century’s wandering and returning, symbolizing the poetic space opened between Saint-John Perse’s lyrical anabasis and Paul Celan’s tragic anabasis. Eric Baudelaire is by contrast more mistrustful of poetry and metaphor. It is no refusal, so much are his silkscreen prints and his tracking shots of Tokyo and Beirut fraught with tragic poetic richness; yet more mistrustful. Or put otherwise: he is naturally on Celan’s side, deaf to the heavy pathos of the likes of Saint-John Perse. His anabasis does not try prophetically to speak the truth of a century, but circles around absent images of a crime, gropes among its traces, and focuses on those who were not so much actors as spectators of that atrocious expedition from Japan to Beirut and back again. A bit like in Circumambulation, one of his previous films, when he circled around Ground Zero with his camera: wanting to understand, circling, filming, wanting not to understand, refusing to see, his head lowered. And when it is a matter of anabasis, of a wandering and a return, maybe it is better to circle and film than to speak — the literality of images versus poetic metaphor.
For this reason, Eric Baudelaire is also much closer to Xenophon’s text itself. You could even say that he follows its sequence more precisely. What in fact does this so-called “march of the Ten Thousand” entail?
First the departure elsewhere of young men from all of over Greece, thirsty for adventure, glory and money. The elsewhere of that period was Persia, geographically the present-day Middle East. But the goal was already ancillary, mercenary; they were helping Cyrus overthrow his brother, much in the way that, mutatis mutandis, the Japanese Red Army placed itself at the service of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). No romantic indulgence here — not the call of the desert, nor the call of the road to the unknown. Anabasis is primarily the story of an initial confusion between thirst for the outside and mercenary interest.
Next, a wandering, when Cyrus dies in the battle of Cunaxa and the Greek army finds itself lacking any plan or goal. Victory no longer means anything more than warding off defeat. Both groups suffer deep solitude, leading to arguments, division, treason. The destitution of an uprooted herd. And nostalgia for the kingdom of water (Greece? Japan?): “thalatta! thalatta!”. And even worse, boredom. Xenophon is obviously not a great author. He loses himself in images, instead of getting down to construction and verisimilitude, and you get bored stiff reading his work, but it is doubtless a boredom worthy of what the Greeks experienced as they spent months crisscrossing foreign lands in search of some sort of sanctuary from despair.
But this is not a neutral wandering. It is not an intoxicating journey or a series of picaresque encounters, but an organized, compulsory crime. What can a routed army survive on if not plunder, pillage and murder? Even Xenophon could not hide this. At heart, Anabasis is the story of crimes that are paradoxically both necessary and pointless; a very strange war of conquest that has suddenly become defensive, the defense of self outside oneself, hunted conquerors, compulsory criminals that dream they are glorious heroes.
Hence the return. But it was far from being an organized retreat, however much Xenophon may have showered himself with praise at the time (his genius, his know-how, his prudence). It was more of a chaotic flight. How many men had set out? How many returned? Anabasis is a return to the same thing, worse off; it is the sterile dialectic of an enthusiasm and a disappointment that lead back to the point of departure, only burdened by a few more deaths and regrets. And even a collapse: returning not to one’s city steeped in glory, but instead home to Mother, or to no one if she is already in prison. Anabasis is not the tale of a ruin of the ruined, but of a ruin of ruiners, of people who are the chief architects of their own ruin. Once again, Xenophon is no Homer, and Anabasis is the poor man’s Odyssey.
Finally, an apology, a perpetual justification. No matter what some specialists say, Anabasis is essentially an exercise in self-justification. And there is no reason to reproach it for this, so well do we understand why. After surviving one’s own rout, what destiny can one hope for other than having to endlessly justify, to keep mulling over one’s crime, its necessity, the error it represents, and to bunker down behind one’s initial noble reasons? Especially when this justification coincides with a much greater rout, the collapse of Athens. Over subsequent centuries, Athenians were to recognize themselves in this story, which came to symbolize their destiny, and Anabasis was to enjoy considerable success. Understood in terms of its historical reception, it is thus no longer simply the tale of a few lost youths, but more the story of their rout at the heart of an even greater rout that was to mark the end of an era. Ruin within ruin, Athenians of yesterday just like people in today’s societies who are no longer quite sure who is manipulating who, or even for what reason (a past or a future? a private image or a collective destiny?). You would think that not only the failure but its vain justification had been — in itself and in face of an even greater failure — part of the plan all along.

***

There is no question then of giving in to a romanticization of anabasis, ancient or modern, nor to an unequivocal, too comfortable condemnation of its actors. They certainly had a wretched homecoming as criminals without glory, but we ourselves are still wandering, away from the scene of who knows what new and even viler crimes.
What is the good of such a realization? Is it nihilistic despair, or the same old song about impotent youth, forever spectators of a past that eludes them as much as the present? Maybe not, since this is where everything turns around, where we are seized by vertigo. Eric Baudelaire’s exhibition, in fact, is not a political analysis, it is an art exhibition. We are not dealing primarily with ideas, but with images and voices, images that are indirect, clouded, controlled, and manipulated in both senses of the word. Raw voices, neither judged nor decrypted (in the name of which higher code?). One cannot help thinking of the primitive gestures of contemporary art: of Duchamp diverting common objects and images, of Malevitch melting all figures into the abstraction of color. And of its original purpose: saving the concrete by means of diversion and abstraction (which no longer has anything to do with philosophical abstraction); saving the beauty of the world and the landscape by refusing its human, all too human aestheticization; saving art by denying it. In short, going back to an entirely different anabasis, that of contemporary art, which never stops searching for something new in the point of rout that leads to a return, a reprise, a remake.
So is this the vertigo of analogy, as Jacques Bouveresse would say? An infinitely doubtful vertigo that will end up placing the indistinct suffering of men, all men — Jews, Palestinians, Israelis, Japanese, Greeks, Puerto Ricans — at the service of artists? Absolutely not.
First, because if we accept Gerard Wacjman’s assertion in L’Objet du siècle (The Object of the Century) that contemporary art begins with Duchamp and Malevitch, we have no choice but to recognize that the anabasis image has a much longer history in art than in politics. If art’s interest in this image gives it meaning today, it is perhaps not so much as a lifeline, but as a disturbing mirror that shows a reflection of one’s time and at least provides food for thought. It was neither politics nor poetry that first modernized that ancient image of the anabasis, it was the visual artist working with images, conscious of their perpetual fall and resurrection in a world closed anew.
Moreover, it is hard to deny that in a sense today we live in societies of widespread anabasis where in art, politics and science, in the most public lives as well as the most private, we hear people speaking of nothing but that: of new departures and returns, of conquests and quagmires, of the loss and rediscovery of meaning.
Finally, because if we concede that the greatest wisdom consists in more than just “not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn,” to use Spinoza’s words, but also not to understand as Spinoza would rather have wished, only to convey everything that has happened, with all of the nebulousness and the nagging questions the past entails, then we have no choice but to recognize that art makes use of the past as much as it does not make use of it, makes use of the present as much as it diverts from it to find something new.
In any case, latching onto this anabasis image at least seems a little more interesting than speaking of a postmodern world, the end of history or a clash of civilizations. It allows us to avoid sterile contrasts between fervor and brooding. We have no choice, our age has set itself up between the two, and contemporary art was the first to understand this. And above all, this liberates us from all nostalgia for the past as well as all hope for a more glorious future. Our age is not a great one, and its art must therefore forbid itself from trying to be the greatest art, true art in the Hegelian sense or propaganda art like that of the last thurifiers of revolutionary terrorism. But although this lucid realization can liberate us from all of the garbage of grandeur — glory, fanaticism, sacrifice, war — the modest art of today, which Eric Baudelaire’s work embodies rigorously, deserves its fair measure of thanks. It is an art of peace, of questions, and a call for more sharing, instead of more judgment and conflict.