Diagonal Thoughts

By Jacques Rancière

Originally published in the booklet accompanying the Pedro Costa retrospective at Tate Modern (25 September – 4 October 2009). The French text was published under the title ‘Politique de Pedro Costa’ in ‘Les écarts du cinéma’ (La Fabrique editions, 2011). Translated by Emiliano Battista.

How are we to think the politics of Pedro Costa’s films? The answer appears simple at first. His films are about a situation seemingly at the heart of the political issues of today: the fate of the exploited, of people who have come from afar, from former colonies in Africa, to work on Portuguese construction sites; people who have lost their families, their health, sometimes even their lives, on those sites, and who yesterday were dumped in suburban slums and subsequently moved to new homes—better lit, more modern, not necessarily more livable. A number of other sensitive themes are joined to this fundamental situation. In Casa de Lava, for example, there is the repression of the Salazar government, which sends its opponents off to camps situated on the very spot from where African immigrants leave in search of work in the city. And, starting with Ossos, there is the life of young people from Lisbon who, due to drugs and deteriorating social conditions, have found themselves in the same slums and under the same living conditions.

Still, neither a social situation nor a visible display of sympathy for the exploited and the neglected are enough to make art political. We usually expect there to be a mode of representation which renders the situation of exploitation intelligible as the effect of specific causes and, further, which shows that situation to be the source of the forms of consciousness and affects that modify it. We want the formal operations to be organized around the goal of shedding light on the causes and the chain of effects. Here, though, is where things become difficult. Pedro Costa’s camera never once takes the usual path from the places of misery to the places where those in power produce or manage it. We don’t see in his films the economic power which exploits and relegates, or the power of administrations and the police, which represses or displaces populations. We never hear any of his characters speaking about the political stakes of the situation, or of rebelling against it. Filmmakers before Pedro Costa, like Francesco Rosi, show the machinery that regulates and displaces the poor. Others, like Jean-Marie Straub, take the opposite approach. They distance their cameras from ‘the misery of the world’ in order to show, in an open-air amphitheatre designed to evoke ancient grandeur and modern struggles for liberation, the men and women of the people who confront history and proudly proclaim the project of a just world. We don’t see any of this in Pedro Costa. He does not inscribe the slums into the landscape of capitalism in mutation, nor does he design his sets to make them commensurate with collective grandeur.

Some might say that this is not a deliberate choice, but simply the reality of a social mutation: the immigrants from Cape Verde, the poor whites, and the marginalized youth of his films bear no resemblance at all to the proletariat, exploited and militant, which was Rosi’s horizon yesterday, and remains Straub’s today. Their mode of life is not that of the exploited, but that of a marginalized group left to fend for itself. The police is absent from their universe, as are people fighting in the name of social justice. The only people from the city center who ever come to visit them are nurses, who lose themselves in these outskirts more from an intimate crack than from the need to bring relief to suffering populations. The inhabitants of Fontainhas live their lot in the way that was so stigmatized during the time of Brecht: as their destiny. If they discuss it at all, it is to wonder whether heaven, their own choice, or their weakness is responsible for their lot.

What are we to think of the way Pedro Costa places his camera in these spaces? It’s common to warn people who have chosen to talk about misery to remember that misery is not an object for art. Pedro Costa, however, seems to do the very opposite. He never misses an opportunity to transform the living spaces of these miserable people into objects of art. A plastic water bottle, a knife, a glass, a few objects left on a deal table in a squatted apartment: there you have, under a light that strokes the set, the occasion for a beautiful still life. As night descends on this space without electricity, two small candles placed on the same table lend to the miserable conversations or to the needle sessions the allure of a chiaroscuro from the Dutch Golden Age. The motion of excavators is a chance to show, along with the crumbling buildings, sculptural bases made of concrete and large walls with contrasting colors—blue, pink, yellow, or green. The room where Vanda coughs so hard as to tear apart her chest delights us with its aquarium green walls, against which we see the flight of mosquitoes and gnats.

The accusation of aestheticism can be met by saying that Pedro Costa has filmed the places just as they are. The homes of the poor are on the whole gaudier than the homes of the rich, their raw colors more pleasant to the eye of the art lover than the standardised aestheticism of petit bourgeois home decorations. In Rilke’s day already, exiled poets saw gutted buildings simultaneously as fantastic sets and as the stratigraphy of a way of living. But the fact that Pedro Costa has filmed these places ‘as they are’ means something else, something that touches on the politics of art. After Ossos, he stopped designing sets to tell stories. That is to say, he gave up exploiting misery as an object of fiction. He placed himself in these spaces to observe their inhabitants living their lives, to hear what they say, capture their secret. The virtuosity with which the camera plays with colors and lights, and the machine which gives the actions and words of the inhabitants the time to be acted out, are one and the same. But if this answer absolves the director of the sin of aestheticism, it immediately raises another suspicion, another accusation: what politics is this, which makes it its task to record, for months and months, the gestures and words which reflect the misery of that world?

This is an accusation which confines the conversations in Vanda’s room and Ventura’s drifting to a simple dilemma: either an indiscreet aestheticism indifferent to the situation of the individuals involved, or a populism that gets trapped by that same situation. This, though, is to inscribe the work of the director in a very petty topography of high and low, near and far, inside and outside. It is to situate his way of working in an all too simple play of oppositions between the wealth of colors and the misery of the individuals, between activity and passivity, between what is given and what is seized. Pedro Costa’s method explodes precisely this system of oppositions and this topography. It favors instead a more complex poetics of exchanges, correspondences, and displacements. To see it at work, it might be good to pause a second over an episode from Colossal Youth that can, in a few ‘tableaux,’ sum up the aesthetics of Pedro Costa, and the politics of that aesthetics.

The episode places us, first, in the ‘normal’ setting of Ventura’s existence: that of an immigrant worker who shares a run-down place with a fellow Cape Verdean. As it starts, we hear Ventura’s voice reciting a love letter while the camera-eye frames a grey corner of the wall which is pierced by the white rectangle of a window; the four glass bottles on the window sill compose another still life. Urged by the voice of his friend Lento, Ventura’s reading slowly fades out. The next shot introduces a quite brutal change of setting: the still life that served as the set for Ventura’s reading is succeeded by yet another colored rectangle taken from a still darker section of wall: a painting whose frame seems to pierce with its own light the surrounding darkness which threatens to encroach on its edges. Colors quite similar to the colors of the bottles outline arabesques in which we can recognize the Sacred Family fleeing to Egypt with a sizeable cohort of angels. The sound of footsteps announce the character who appears in the next shot: Ventura, who is leaning with his back against the wall, flanked by a portrait of Hélène Fourment by Rubens, the painter of the Flight to Egypt of the previous shot, and by Van Dyck’s Portrait of a Man.

These three well-known works are specifically situated: we are seeing the walls of the Gulbenkian Foundation, a building that is obviously not in Ventura’s neighborhood. Nothing in the preceding shot announced this visit, and there is nothing in the film to suggest that Ventura has a taste for painting. The director has brutally transported Ventura to this museum, which we suppose by the echoing footsteps and the night light to be empty of visitors, closed off for the shooting of this scene. The relationship between the three paintings and the filmic ‘still life’ that immediately precedes them, together with that between the decaying home and the museum, and perhaps even that between the love letter and the paintings on the walls, composes a very specific poetic displacement, a metaphor that speaks in the film about the art of the filmmaker: of its relationship to the art in museums, and of the relationship that one art and the other forges with the body of its characters. A metaphor which speaks, in short, about their politics.

The politics here might seem quite easy to grasp at first. A silent shot shows us a museum guard who is himself black walk up to Ventura and whisper something in his ear. As Ventura walks out of the room, the guard pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes clean the traces of Ventura’s feet. We understand: Ventura is an intruder. The guard tells him later: this museum, he says, is a refuge, far from the din of poor neighborhoods and from the supermarkets whose merchandise he used to have to protect from widespread shoplifting. Here, though, is an old and peaceful world that is disturbed only by the chance visit of someone from their world. Ventura himself had already manifested that, both with his attitude—he offered no resistance to being escorted out of the gallery, and eventually out of the museum through the service stairs—and with his gaze, which scrutinized some enigmatic point situated, it seemed, well above the paintings. The politics of the episode would be to remind us that the pleasures of art are not for the proletariat and, more precisely still, that museums are closed off to the workers who build them. This becomes explicit in the gardens of the Foundation, in the conversation between Ventura and the museum employee during which we learn why Ventura fits into this displaced setting. There used to be nothing here at all but a marsh, bushes and frogs. It was Ventura, together with other workers, who cleaned up the area, laid down the terrace, built the plumbing system, carried the construction materials, erected the statue of the place’s founder, and planted the grass at its feet. It was here, too, that he fell from the scaffolding.

The episode, in sum, would be an illustration of the poem in which Brecht asks who built Thebes, with its seven gates and other architectural splendors. Ventura would represent all those people who have constructed buildings, at great danger to their health and lives, which they themselves have no right to enjoy. But this simple lesson does not justify the museum being deserted, empty even of those people who do benefit from the work of the Venturas of this world. It does not justify the fact that the scenes shot inside the museum should be so silent; or that the camera should linger on the concrete steps of the service stairs down which the guard escorts Ventura; or that the silence inside the museum should be followed by a long panoramic shot, punctuated by bird cries, of the surrounding trees; or that Ventura should tell his story, from the exact day of his arrival in Portugal, on 29 August 1972; or that the scene should brutally end with him indicating the spot where he fell. Ventura here is something completely different from the immigrant worker who represents the condition of immigrant workers. The greenery of the scene, the way Ventura towers over the guard, the solemn tone of his voice as he seems to recite a text that inhabits him—all of this is very far from every narrative of misery. Ventura in this scene is a chronicler of his own life, an actor who renders visible the singular grandeur of that life, the grandeur of a collective adventure for which the museum seems incapable of supplying an equivalent. The relationship of Pedro Costa’s art to the art displayed on the walls of the museum exceeds the simple demonstration of the exploitation of workers for the sake of the pleasures of the aesthete, much as Ventura’s figure exceeds that of the worker robbed of the fruit of his labor. If we hope to understand this scene, we have to tie the relationships of reciprocity and nonreciprocity into a much more complex knot.

To begin with, the museum is not the place of artistic wealth opposed to the penury of the worker. The colored arabesques of the Flight to Egypt show no straightforward superiority over the shot of the window with four bottles in the poor lodgings of the two workers. The painting’s golden frame strikes us as a stingier delimitation of space than the window of the house, as a way of canceling out everything that surrounds it and of rendering uninteresting all that is outside of it—the vibrations of light in the space, the contrasting colors of the walls, the sounds from outside. The museum is a place where art is locked up within this frame that yields neither transparency nor reciprocity. It is the space of a stingy art. If the museum excludes the worker who built it, it is because it excludes all that lives from displacements and exchanges: light, forms, and colors in their movement, the sound of the world, and also the workers who’ve come from the islands of Cape Verde. That might be why Ventura’s gaze loses itself somewhere in the ceiling. We might think he is envisioning the scaffolding he fell from. But we might also think of another lost gaze fixed on an angle of another ceiling, the ceiling in the new apartment he is shown by a fellow from Cape Verde who in many ways resembles the museum employee. He is, in any case, just as convinced that Ventura is not in his element in this apartment, which Ventura had requested for his fictive family, and also just as eager to wipe clean the traces of Ventura’s intrusion on this sterile place. In answer to the spiel about the sociocultural advantages of the neighborhood, Ventura had majestically extended his arms towards the ceiling and uttered a lapidary sentence: ‘It’s full of spider webs.’ The social-housing employee cannot verify the presence of these spider webs on the ceiling anymore than we can. It could be Ventura who has, as the saying goes, ‘spider webs in the attic.’ And anyway, even if insects do crawl up and down the walls of this housing project, they are nothing when compared to the decaying walls of his friend Lento’s or of Bete’s place, where ‘father’ and ‘daughter’ amuse themselves seeing, as good disciples of Leonardo da Vinci, the formation of all sorts of fantastic figures. The problem with the white walls that welcome the worker to the housing project is the same as the problem of the dark walls of the museum which reject him: they keep at bay the chance figures in which the imagination of the worker who crossed the seas, chased frogs from the city center, and slipped and fell from the scaffolding can be on a par with that of the artist. The art on the walls of the museum is not simply a sign of the ingratitude towards the person who built the museum. It is as stingy towards the sensible wealth of his experience as to the light that shines on even the most miserable homes.

We’ve already heard this in Ventura’s narrative about his departure from Cape Verde on 29 August 1972, his arrival in Portugal, the transformation of a swamp into an art foundation, and the fall. By placing Ventura in such a setting, Pedro Costa has given him a Straub-like tone, the epic tone of the discoverers of a new world. The problem is not really to open the museum to the workers who built it, but to make an art commensurate with the experience of these travelers, an art that has emerged from them, and which they themselves can enjoy. That is what we learn from the episode which follows Ventura’s brutal fall. It is an episode constructed around a double return: the return to Ventura’s reading of the letter, and a flashback to the accident. We see Ventura, his head now in a bandage, returning to a wooden shack with a dilapidated roof. He sits hunched over at a table, imperiously insists that Lento come play cards, and continues reading the love letter he wants to teach to Lento, who can’t read. This letter, which is recited many times, is like a refrain for the film. It talks about a separation and about working on construction sites far from one’s beloved. It also speaks about the soon-to-be reunion which will grace two lives for twenty or thirty years, about the dream of offering the beloved a hundred thousand cigarettes, clothes, a car, a little house made of lava, and a three-penny bouquet; it talks about the effort to learn a new word every day— words whose beauty is tailor-made to envelope these two beings like a pajamas of fine silk. This letter is written for one person only, for Ventura has no one to send it to. It is, strictly speaking, its own artistic performance, the performance Ventura wants to share [partager] with Lento, because it is the performance of an art of sharing [partage], of an art that does not split itself off from life, from the experience of displaced people or their means of mitigating absence and of coming closer to their loved one. The letter, however, and by the same token, belongs neither to the film nor to Ventura: it comes from elsewhere. Albeit more discreetly, it already scanned the ‘fictional’ film of which Colossal Youth is the echo and the reverse: Casa de Lava, the story of a nurse who goes to Cape Verde in the company of Leão, a worker who, like Ventura, has also injured his head, but on a different construction site.

The letter first appeared in the papers of Edith, an exile from the big city who went to Cape Verde to be near her lover, sent by Salazar’s regime to the Tarrafal concentration camp. She stayed there after his death and was adopted, in her confusion, by the black community, which lived off of her pension, and thanked her with serenades. It had seemed, then, that the love letter had been written by the sentenced man. But at the hospital, at Leão’s bedside, Mariana gave the letter to Tina, Leão’s younger sister, to read, as it was written in Creole. Tina appropriates the letter, which becomes for the viewer not a letter sent from the death camp by the deported man, but by Leão from a construction site in Portugal. But when Mariana asks Leão about it, as he finally emerges from his coma, his answer is peremptory: how could he have written the love letter, if he doesn’t know how to write? All of a sudden, the letter seems not to have been written by, or addressed to, anyone in particular. It now seems like a letter written by a public scribe adept at putting into form the feelings of love, as well as the administrative requests, of the illiterate. Its message of love loses itself in the grand, impersonal transaction which links Edith to the dead militant, to the wounded black worker, to the kitchen of the erstwhile camp cook, and to the music of Leão’s father and brother, whose bread and music Mariana has shared, but who would not go visit Leão at the hospital. They continued, nevertheless, working on refurbishing his house, the house which he would not enter but on two legs, all the while making arrangements so that they, too, could go and work on construction sites in Portugal.

The letter that Pedro Costa gives Ventura to read belongs to this wide circulation: between here and elsewhere, committed city folk and exiled workers, the literate and the illiterate, the wise and the confused. But in extending its addressees, the letter doubles back to its origin and another circulation is grafted onto the trajectory of the immigrants. Pedro Costa wrote the letter by mixing two sources: a letter by an immigrant worker, and a letter written by a ‘true’ author, Robert Desnos, who wrote his letter sixty years earlier from camp Flöha in Saxony, a way-stop on the road to Terezin, and death. This means that Leão’s fictional destiny and Ventura’s real one are brought together in a circuit which links the ordinary exile of workers to the death camps. It also means that the art of the poor, of the public scribe, and of great poets are captured together in the same fabric: an art of life and of sharing [partage], an art of travel and of communication made for those for whom to live is to travel—to sell their work force to build houses and museums for other people, in the process bring with them their experience, their music, their way of living and loving, of reading on walls and of listening to the song of humans and birds.

There is no aestheticizing formalism or populist deference in the attention Pedro Costa pays to every beautiful form offered by the homes of the poor, and the patience with which he listens to the oftentimes trivial and repetitive words uttered in Vanda’s room, and in the new apartment where we see Vanda after she has kicked her habit, put on some weight, and become a mother. The attention and the patience are inscribed, instead, in a different politics of art. This politics is a stranger to that politics which works by bringing to the screen the state of the world to make viewers aware of the structures of domination in place and inspire them to mobilize their energies. It finds its models in the love letter by Ventura/Desnos and in the music of Leão’s family, for their art is one in which the form is not split off from the construction of a social relation or from the realization of a capacity that belongs to everyone. We shouldn’t confuse this with that old dream of the avant-garde in which artistic forms would be dissolved in the relations of the new world. The politics here, rather, is about thinking the proximity between art and all those other forms which can convey the affirmation of a sharing [partage] or shareable [partageable] capacity. The stress on the greens of Vanda’s room cannot be separated from the attempts—by Vanda, Zita, Pedro or Nurro—to examine their lives and take control of it. The luminous still life composed with a plastic bottle and a few found objects on the white wooden table of a squat is in harmony with the stubbornness with which the redhead uses his knife to clean, the protests of his friends notwithstanding, the stain from the table destined for the teeth of the excavator. Pedro Costa does not film the ‘misery of the world.’ He films its wealth, the wealth that anyone at all can become master of: that of catching the splendor of a reflection of light, but also that of being able to speak in a way that is commensurate with one’s fate. And, lastly, the politics here is about being able to return what can be extracted of sensible wealth—the power of speech, or of vision—from the life and decorations of these precarious existences back to them, about making it available to them, like a song they can enjoy, like a love letter whose words and sentences they can borrow for their own love lives.

Isn’t that, after all, what we can expect from the cinema, the popular art of the twentieth century, the art that allowed the greatest number of people—people who would not walk into a museum—to be thrilled by the splendor of the effect of a ray of light shining on an ordinary setting, by the poetry of clinking glasses or of a conversation on the counter of any old diner? Confronted with people who align him with great ‘formalists’ like Bresson, Dreyer or Tarkovsky, Pedro Costa sometimes claims a whole different lineage: Walsh and Tourneur, as well as more modest and anonymous directors of B films who crafted wellformatted stories on a tight budget for the profit of Hollywood studios, and who didn’t for all that fail to get the audiences of neighborhood cinemas to enjoy the equal splendor of a mountain, a horse, or a rocking chair—equal because of the absence of any hierarchy of visual values between people, landscape, or objects1. At the heart of a system of production entirely subservient to the profit of its studio heads, cinema showed itself to be an art of equality. The problem, as we unfortunately know, is that capitalism is not what it used to be, and if Hollywood is still thriving, neighborhood cinemas are not, having been replaced by multiplexes that give each sociologically-determined audience a type of art designed and formatted to suit it. Pedro Costa’s films, like every work that eludes this formatting process, are immediately labeled as film-festival material, something reserved for the exclusive enjoyment of a film-buff elite and tendentiously pushed to the province of museums and art lovers. For that, of course, Pedro Costa blames the state of the world, meaning the naked domination of the power of money, which classes as ‘films for film-buffs’ the work of directors who try to bring to everyone the wealth of sensorial experience found in the humblest of lives. The system makes a sad monk of the director who wants to make his cinema shareable [partageable] like the music of the violin player from Cape Verde and like the letter written jointly by the poet and the illiterate worker.

It is true that today, the domination by the wealthy tends to constitute a world in which equality must disappear even from the organization of the sensible landscape. All the wealth in this landscape has to appear as separated, as attributed to, and privately enjoyed by, one category of owners. The system gives the humble the pocket change of its wealth, of its world, which it formats for them, but which is separated from the sensorial wealth of their own experience. This is the television in Vanda’s room. Still, this particular deal of the cards is not the only reason behind the break in reciprocity and the separation between the film and its world. The experience of the poor is not just that of displacements and exchanges, of borrowing, stealing, and giving back. It is also the experience of the crack which interrupts the fairness of exchanges and the circulation of experiences. In Casa de Lava, it is difficult to tell if Leão’s silence as he lies on the hospital bed is the manifestation of a traumatic coma or the desire not to return to the common world. So, too, with Edith’s ‘madness,’ her ‘forgetfulness’ of the Portuguese language and her confinement to booze and Creole. The death of the militant in the camp of the Salazar regime and the wound of the immigrant who works on construction sites in Portugal establish—at the heart of the circulation of bodies, medical care, words, and music—the dimension of that which cannot be exchanged, of the irreparable. In Ossos, there is Tina’s silence, her loss as to what to do with the child in her arms other than take the child with her to their deaths. Colossal Youth is split between two logics, two regimes of the exchange of words and experiences. On one side, the camera is placed in Vanda’s new room, which is sterile white and filled by a doublebed of the type one finds at discount stores. There, a mellower and plumper Vanda talks about her new life, about her detox, the child, the deserving husband, about her treatment and health issues. On the other, the camera follows the often silent Ventura, who now and then utters an imperious command or lapidary sentence, and who sometimes loses himself in his narrative or in the reciting of his letter. It portrays him as a strange animal, too large or too shy for the set, whose eyes sometimes shine like those of a wild animal, and whose head is more often bent down than held up: the distracted gaze of a sick man. The point with Ventura is not to gather the evidence of a hard life, even if it is in order to figure out who cinema can share [partager] this life with, and to whom it can give it back as his or her life. The point is rather to confront what cannot be shared [l’impartageable], the cracks that have separated a person from himself. Ventura is not an ‘immigrant worker,’ a poor man entitled to be treated with dignity and to share in the pleasures afforded by the world he has helped build. He is a sort of sublime drifter, a character from tragedy, someone who interrupts communication and exchange on his own.

There seems to be a divorce between two regimes of expression in the passage from the dilapidated walls, the colorful sets, and the loud colors of the slums to the new furniture and the white walls which no longer echo the words of those in the room. Even if Vanda is willing to play the role of one of Ventura’s ‘daughters,’ even if Ventura sits at her table and chats in her room, and occasionally even does some baby-sitting, the crack in Ventura casts the shadow of this enormous and broken body, this enormous body which has been displaced into the story of Vanda’s new life, on her narrative at the same time that it lends vanity to it. We can describe this intimate divorce using terms taken from on old quarrel, one summed up more than two centuries ago by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the Preface to The New Heloise. These family letters, are they real or fictive, the objector asks the man of letters. If they are real, then they are portraits, and we expect portraits to be faithful to the model. This makes them not very interesting to people who are not members of the family. ‘Imaginary paintings,’ on the other hand, interest the public, provided they resemble, not a particular individual, but the human being. Pedro Costa says things differently: the patience of the camera, which every day mechanically films the words, gestures, and footsteps of the characters—not in order to make films, but as an exercise in approximating the secret of the other—must bring a third character to life on the screen. A character who is not the director, nor Vanda, nor Ventura, a character who is, and is not, a stranger to our lives2. But the emergence of this impersonal also gets caught up in the disjunction in its turn: it is hard for this third character to avoid becoming either Vanda’s portrait, and as such enclosed in the family of social identifications, or Ventura’s painting, the painting of the crack and the enigma which renders family portraits and narratives futile. A native of the island says as much to Mariana, the well-intentioned nurse: your skull is not fractured. The crack splits experience into those that can be shared [partageable], and those which cannot [impartageable]. The screen where the third character should appear is stretched between these two experiences, between two risks: the risk of platitude, in the life narratives, and of infinite flight, in the confrontation with the crack. Cinema cannot be the equivalent of the love letter or of the music of the poor. It can no longer be the art which gives the poor the sensible wealth of their world. It must split itself off, it must agree to be the surface upon which the experience of people relegated to the margins of economic circulations and social trajectories try to be ciphered in new figures. This new surface must be hospitable to the division which separates portrait and painting, chronicle and tragedy, reciprocity and rift. An art must be made in the place of another. Pedro Costa’s greatness is that he simultaneously accepts and rejects this alteration, that his cinema is simultaneously a cinema of the possible and of the impossible.

1 See Pedro Costa and Rui Chaves, Fora! Out! (Porto: Fundação de Serralves, 2007) 119.
2 Fora! Out!, p.115.

By Jacques Rancière

A first version of this text was presented on the occasion of the award ceremony of the Maurizio Grande prize organized by the Circolo Chaplin in Reggio de Calabria in January 2004. The French text was published under the title ‘Les Écarts du cinéma’ in nr. 50 of Trafic and as prologue for the book with the same title (La Fabrique editions, 2011). Translated by Walter van der Star.

I did receive a prize once. It was the first, after leaving the lycée a long time ago. But the country that awarded it to me for my book Film Fables also happened to be Italy. This conjunction seemed to me to reveal something about my relation with cinema. That country had been important for my education in the seventh art in more ways than one. There was Rossellini, of course, and that one night during the winter of 1964 when Europe ’51 had blown me away even though I still resisted this trajectory of the bourgeoisie towards sainthood by way of the working class. There were also the books and magazines that a friend, a cinephile and lover of Italy, sent to me from Rome and from which I tried to learn about film theory, Marxism and the Italian language. And there was that strange backroom in a Neapolitan bar where, on some kind of crudely stretched bed sheet, James Cagney and John Derek spoke Italian in a dubbed black-and-white version of a film by Nicholas Ray called A l’ombre del patibolo (Run for Cover, for the sticklers).

If these memories came back to me when I received this unexpected prize, it was not simply for circumstantial reasons; and if I mention them now, it is not because of some sentimental trip down memory lane. It is because they present a fairly accurate outline of my rather singular approach to cinema. Cinema is not an object that I have delved into as a philosopher or as a critic. My relation with it is a play of chance encounters and gaps that these three memories will enable us to define. In fact, they typify three kinds of gaps* in which I have attempted to speak about cinema: between cinema and art, between cinema and politics, between cinema and theory.

The first gap, symbolised by the makeshift cinema where Nicholas Ray was being shown, is that of cinephilia. Cinephilia is a relation with cinema that is a matter of passion rather than one of theory. It is well-known that passion does not differentiate. Cinephilia was a blurring of accepted views. First, a blurring of places: a singular diagonal traced between the film clubs that preserved the memory of an art and out-of-the-way neighborhood cinemas showing a disparaged Hollywood film in which cinephiles could nevertheless discover treasures in the intensity of a horseback-chase in a western, a bank robbery or a child’s smile. Cinephilia linked the cult of art to the democracy of entertainment and emotions by challenging the criteria for the induction of cinema into high culture. It asserted that cinema’s greatness did not lie in the metaphysical loftiness of its subject matter nor in the visibility of its plastic effects, but in the imperceptible difference in the way it puts traditional stories and emotions into images. Cinephiles named this difference mise-en-scène without really knowing what it meant. Not knowing what you love and why you love it is, so they say, the distinctive feature of passion. It is also the way of a certain wisdom. Cinephilia explains its loves only by relying on a rather coarse phenomenology of the mise-en-scène as the establishment of a ‘relation with the world’. But it also called into question the dominant categories of thinking about art. Twentieth-century art is often described in terms of the modernist paradigm that identifies the modern artistic revolution with the concentration of each art form on its own medium and opposes this concentration to the forms of market aestheticisation of life. We then witness the collapse in the 1960s of this modernity under the combined blows of political doubts about artistic autonomy and the invasion of market and advertisement forms. The story of the defeat of modernist purity by the postmodernist attitude of ‘anything goes’ passes over the fact that in other places, like the cinema, this blurring of borders occurred in a more complex manner. Cinephilia has called into question the categories of artistic modernity, not by deriding high art, but by returning to a more intimate, more obscure interconnection between the marks of art, the emotions of the story and the discovery of the splendor that even the most ordinary spectacle could display on the bright screen in a dark cinema: a hand lifting a curtain or playing with a door handle, a head leaning out of a window, a fire or headlights in the night, glasses clinking on the zinc bar of a café… Thus it initiated a positive understanding, neither ironic nor disenchanted, of the impurity of art.

This was undoubtedly because cinephilia found it difficult to think the relation between the reasons of its emotions and the reasons that allow us to orient ourselves in the conflicts of the world. What relation could a student first discovering Marxism in the early 1960s see between the struggle against social inequality and the form of equality that the smile and the gaze of little John Mohune in Moonfleet re-establishes within the machinations of his false friend Jeremy Fox? What relation could there be between the struggle of the new world of the workers against the world of exploitation and the justice that is obsessively pursued by the hero of Winchester ’73 against the murderous brother, or the joined hands of the outlaw Wes McQueen and the wild girl Colorado on the cliff where the lawmen had followed them in Colorado Territory? In order to establish the link between them, it was necessary to postulate a mysterious equation between the historical materialism that gave the workers’ struggle its foundation and the materialism of the relation between bodies and their space. It is precisely at this point that the vision of Europe ’51 becomes blurred. Irene’s trajectory from her bourgeois apartment to the tenement blocks in the working-class neighborhoods and the factory first seemed to correspond exactly with these two materialisms. In the physical course of action of the heroine, who gradually ventures into unfamiliar spaces, the plot development and camera work is made to coincide with the discovery of the world of labor and oppression. Unfortunately this nice straight materialist line is broken in the short time when Irene climbs the stairs, finding her way to a church, and descends again, returning to a large-breasted prostitute the good works of charity and the spiritual path to sainthood.

It then became necessary to say that the materialism of the mise-en-scène had been diverted by the personal ideology of the director. It is a new version of the old Marxist argument that praised Balzac for revealing the reality of the capitalist social world, even though he was a reactionary. But the uncertainties of Marxist aesthetics then double those of cinephile aesthetics by implying that the only true materialists are those who are so unwillingly. It is this paradox that seemed to be confirmed by my dejection at seeing Staroye i novoye (“General Line”), whose cascades of milk and multitude of piglets being weaned by an ecstatic sow had caused my aversion, just like they caused the sniggers of a movie theatre audience, most of whom, like me, probably sympathised with communism and believed in the merits of collective agriculture. It has often been said that militant films only persuade the convinced. But what if the quintessential communist film produces a negative effect on the convinced themselves? The gap between cinephilia and communism seemed to close only when aesthetic principles and social relations are foreign to us, like in the final sequence of Mizoguchi’s Shin Heike Monogatari (“New Tales of the Taira Clan”), when the rebellious son and his comrades in arms cross the prairie where his frivolous mother joins in the pleasures of her class and speaks these final words: ‘Nobles and courtiers, amuse yourselves while you may! Tomorrow belongs to us.’ The seductiveness of this sequence was undoubtedly due to the fact that it gave us a taste of both the visual charms of the doomed old world and the charms of the sound of words that herald the new.

How can we close the gap, how can we conceive the equation between the pleasure we take in the shadows that are projected onto the screen, the intelligence of an art, and that of a vision of the world – this is what we thought we could expect from a theory of cinema. But none of the combinations between the classics of Marxist theory and the classics of thinking about cinema have enabled me to decide whether climbing or descending the stairs is by nature idealist or materialist, progressive or reactionary. They never enabled me to determine what separated art from non-art in cinema, or to decide which political message was conveyed by an arrangement of bodies in a shot or a cut between two shots.

Perhaps it was necessary to reverse our perspective and ask ourselves about the unity between an art, a form of emotion and a coherent vision of the world that exists under the name of ‘theory of cinema’. We needed to ask ourselves if cinema does not exist precisely in the form of a system of unbridgeable gaps between things that have the same name without being parts of the same body. Actually, cinema is a great many things. It is the material place where we go to be entertained by a spectacle of shadows, although these shadows induce an emotion in us that is more secret than the one expressed by the condescending term “entertainment”. It is also the accumulation and sedimentation of those presences within us as their reality is erased and altered: the other cinema, which is recomposed by our memories and our words, and which, in the end, strongly differs from what was presented when it unspooled during projection. Cinema is also an ideological apparatus producing images that circulate in society, images in which the latter recognises the present state of its types, its past legend or its imagined futures. It is also the concept of an art, in other words, a problematic dividing line which, at the heart of productions of an industrial craft, isolates those productions that deserve to be considered as inhabitants of the large artistic realm. But cinema is also an utopia: a writing of movement that was celebrated in the 1920s as the great universal symphony, the exemplary manifestation of an energy animating art, work, and the collective. Finally, cinema can be a philosophical concept, a theory of the actual movement of things and thought, as it is for Gilles Deleuze, who discusses films and their procedures on every page of his two books, which are neither a theory nor a philosophy of cinema, but strictly speaking a metaphysics of cinema.

This multiplicity, which challenges every unitary theory, elicits different reactions. Some want to separate the wheat from the chaff: that which belongs to cinematographic art from that which belongs to the entertainment or propaganda industry; or the film itself, the sum of frames, shots and camera movements that are studied in front of the monitor, from distorted memories or added words. Such rigor may be shortsighted. Limiting yourself to art means forgetting that art itself only exists as an unstable limit that has to be constantly crossed in order to exist. Cinema belongs to the aesthetic regime of art in which the old criteria of representation that distinguished between the fine arts and the mechanical arts and confined them to their own separate place no longer exist. It belongs to a regime of art in which the purity of new forms has often found its model in pantomime, the circus or commercial graphic design. This means that if we limit ourselves to the shots and procedures that form a film, we forget that cinema is an art as well as a world, and that those shots and effects that fade in the instant of projection need to be prolonged and transformed by memory and words that give consistency to cinema as a world shared beyond the material reality of its projection.

For me, writing about cinema means taking two contradictory positions at the same time. The first is that there is no concept that brings together all these cinemas, no theory that unifies all the problems that they pose. The relation that exists between Cinema, the title shared by Deleuze’s two books, and the large theater of the past with red chairs where the news, a documentary and the main film were shown in that order, separated by ice cream during the intermission, is one of simple homonymy. Conversely, the other position states that every homonymy arranges a common space of thought, that thinking about cinema is what circulates within this space, exists at the heart of these gaps and tries to determine some sort of interconnection between two cinemas or two ‘problems of cinema’. This position is, if you will, that of the amateur. I have never taught cinema, neither the theory nor the aesthetics of cinema. I have come across cinema at different moments in my life: with the enthusiasm of a cinephile in the 1960s, as someone questioning the relations between cinema and history in the 1970s, or as someone questioning the aesthetic paradigms that were used to think about the seventh art during the 1990s. But the position of the amateur is not that of the eclectic who opposes the wealth of empirical diversity to the dull rigor of theory. Amateurism is also a theoretical and political position that challenges the authority of specialists by re-examining the way in which the limits of their domains are drawn at the junction of experience and knowledge. The politics of the amateur acknowledges that cinema belongs to everyone who, in one way or another, has explored the system of gaps that its name arranges, and that everyone is justified to trace, between certain points of this topography, a singular path that contributes to cinema as a world and to its knowledge.

That is why elsewhere I have spoken of ‘cinematographic fables’ and not of a theory of cinema. I wanted to situate myself in a universe without hierarchy where the films that are recomposed by our perceptions, emotions and words count as much as any other; where theories and aesthetics of cinema themselves are regarded as stories, as singular adventures of thought that have been induced by cinema’s multiple existences. During forty or fifty years, while discovering new films or new discourses on cinema, I have retained the memory of more or less distorted films, shots and phrases. At different moments I have confronted my memories with the reality of these films or called my interpretation of them into question. I saw Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night again in order to relive the overwhelming impression made on me by the moment that Bowie meets Keechie in front of the garage door. I couldn’t find this shot because it doesn’t exist. So I tried to understand the singular power of suspension of a narrative that I had condensed into this imaginary shot. I have seen Europe ‘51 again twice: once to reverse my original interpretation and validate Irene’s sidestep, when she leaves the topography of the world of workers which was laid out for her by her cousin, the communist journalist, and passes over to the other side where the spectacle of the social world is no longer imprisoned in schemes of thought elaborated by the authorities, the media or the social sciences; and a second time to put into question the all too easy opposition between the social schemes of representation and the unrepresentable in art. I have seen the westerns of Anthony Mann again in order to understand what had seduced me: not simply the childlike pleasure of cavalcades across great spaces or the adolescent pleasures of perverting the accepted criteria of art, but the perfect equilibrium between two things: the Aristotelian rigor of the plot which, through recognitions and wanderings, brings everyone the happiness or misery they deserve, and the way in which the body of the heroes played by James Stewart, through their meticulous gestures, escapes from the ethical universe that gave sense to the rigor of the action. I have seen Staroye i novoye again and understood why I had rejected it so vehemently thirty years earlier: not because of the ideological content of the film, but because of its form: a cinematography conceived as an immediate translation of thought into a characteristic language of the visible. In order to appreciate this it would be necessary to understand that all those cascades of milk and litters of piglets were actually not cascades of milk or piglets, but the imagined ideograms of a new language. The belief in this language had died out before the belief in agricultural collectivisation. That is why I found the film physically unbearable in 1960, and perhaps why it took time to grasp its beauty and see it only as the splendid utopia of a language that survived the catastrophe of a social system.

On the basis of these wanderings and returns it became possible to define the hard core designated by the term cinematographic fable. First, this name recalls the tension which is at the origin of the gaps of cinema, the tension between art and story. Cinema was born in the age of great suspicion about stories, at the time when it was thought that a new art was being born that no longer told stories, described the spectacle of things or presented the mental states of characters, but inscribed the product of thought directly onto the movement of forms. It then seemed to be the art that was most likely to realise this dream. ‘Cinema is true. A story is a lie’, said Jean Epstein. This truth could be understood in different ways. For Jean Epstein, it was writing in light, no longer inscribing onto film the image of things, but the vibrations of sensible matter which is reduced to the immateriality of energy; for Eisenstein, it was a language of ideograms directly translating thought into visible stimuli, plowing Soviet conscience like a tractor; for Vertov, it was the thread that was stretched between all the gestures that constructed the sensible reality of communism. Initially the ‘theory’ of cinema was its utopia, suitable for a new age in which the rational reorganisation of the sensible world would coincide with the movement itself of the energies of this world.

When Soviet-artists were asked to produce positive images of the new man and when German filmmakers came to project their lights and shadows onto the formatted stories of the Hollywood film industry, this promise was apparently overturned. The cinema that was supposed to be the new anti-representative art seemed to be just the reverse: it restored the linkage of actions and the expressive codes that the other arts had tried hard to overthrow. Montage, once the dream of a new language of the world, seemed to have reverted to the traditional functions of narrative art: the cutting-up of actions and the intensification of affects that ensure the identification of the spectators with stories of love and murder. This evolution has nourished different forms of skepticism: the disenchanted vision of a fallen art, or, conversely, the ironic revision of the dream of a new language. It has also nourished, in different ways, the dream of a cinema that would rediscover its true vocation: there is Bresson’s reaffirmation of a radical break between the spiritual montage and automatism that are characteristic of the filmmaker and the theatrical play of cinema. Conversely, there is Rossellini’s or André Bazin’s affirmation of a cinema that in the first place should be a window opened to the world: a means to decipher it or to make it reveal its truth in its appearances as such.

I thought it necessary to return to these periodisations and oppositions. If cinema has not fulfilled the promise of a new anti-representative art, this may not be because it has submitted itself to the laws of commerce. It is because the wish to identify it with a language of sensations was contradictory in itself. It was asked to accomplish the century-old dream of literature: to substitute the impersonal deployment of signs written on objects or the reproduction of the speed and intensity of the world for the stories and characters of the past. However, literature was able to convey this dream because its discourse of things and their sensible intensities remained inscribed in the double play of words that hide the wealth of the sensible from view and let it shimmer in the minds. It could only take over the dream of literature at the costs of making it into a pleonasm: piglets cannot be piglets and words at the same time. The art of the filmmaker can only be the deployment of the specific powers of his machine. It exists through a play of gaps and improprieties. This book is an attempt to analyse some of its aspects on the basis of a triple relation. First, there is the relation of cinema with the literature that provides it with its narrative models and from which it is trying to emancipate itself. There is also its relation with the two poles where it is often thought that art is lost: where it reduces its powers, putting itself at the service of entertainment only; and where on the contrary it strives to exceed them in order to transmit thoughts and teach political lessons.

The relation between cinema and literature is illustrated here with two examples taken from very different poetics: the classic narrative cinema of Hitchcock, which retains from the plot of the detective film the scheme of an ensemble of operations suited to create and then dissipate an illusion; the modernist cinema of Bresson, which relies on a literary text to construct a film demonstrating the specificity of a language of images. Both endeavors, however, experience the resistance of their object differently. In two scenes from Vertigo, the master of suspense’s ability to let the narrative of an intellectual machination coincide with the mise-en-scène of visual fascination seems to fail him. This failure is not accidental. It touches upon the relation between showing and telling. The virtuoso becomes clumsy when he hits upon that which constitutes the ‘heart’ of the work he has adapted. The detective novel is in fact a double object: as the supposed model of a narrative logic that dissipates appearances by leading from clues to the truth, it is also overlapped by its opposite: the logic of defection of causes and of the entropy of meaning, whose virus has been passed on from high literature to the ‘minor’ genres. Because literature is not only a depository of stories or a way to tell them, but also a way of constructing the world itself in which it is possible for stories to happen, events to follow each other and appearances to deploy themselves. This is proven in a different way when Bresson adapts a work of literature that is an heir of the great naturalist tradition. The relation between the language of images and the language of words in Mouchette is played out from inverted perspectives. The tendency towards fragmentation, meant to ward off the danger of ‘representation’, and the care taken by the filmmaker to rid his screen of the literary overload of images, have the paradoxical effect of subjecting the movement of images to forms of narrative linkage from which the art of words has freed itself. It is then the performance of speaking bodies that has to restore the lost thickness of the visible. But to that end, it must challenge the all too simple opposition made by the filmmaker between the ‘model’ of the cinematographer and the actor of ‘filmed theatre’. While Bresson symbolises the vices of theatre in a representation of Hamlet in a troubadour style, the strength of eloquence that he gives to his Mouchette secretly accords with that which the heirs of Brechtian theatre, Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet, give to the workers, farmers and shepherds taken from the dialogues of Pavese or Vittorini. The literary, the cinematographic and the theatrical then appear not as the characteristic of specific arts, but as aesthetic figures, relations between the power of words and that of the visible, between the linkages of stories and the movement of bodies, which transgress the borders assigned to the arts.

Which body can be used to transmit the power of a text – this is the same problem that Rossellini faces when he uses television to bring the thought of great philosophers to the public. The difficulty is not, as is prevailing opinion, that the flatness of the image runs counter to the depths of thought, but that each of their characteristic densities opposes itself to the establishment of a simple relation of cause and effect between them. Rossellini then must give the philosophers a rather special body so that a certain density can be felt within the forms of another density. It is the same passage between two regimes of sense that also plays a role when cinema, with Minnelli, attempts to put the relation between art and entertainment into a mise-en-scène – and into songs. We may think that the false problem of knowing where one ends and the other begins was resolved when the champions of artistic modernity had opposed the perfect art of acrobats to the outdated emotions of stories. But the master of musical comedy shows us that the labor of art – with or without a capital A – consists entirely of constructing transitions between one and the other. The tension between the play of forms and the emotions of stories on which the art of cinematographic shadows feeds tends towards the utopian limit of pure performance, without being able to disappear in it.

This utopian limit also led to the belief that cinema is capable of closing the gap between art, life and politics. The cinema of Dziga Vertov presents the perfect example of thinking about cinema as real communism, identified with the movement that is itself the link between all movements. This cinematographic communism, which challenges both the art of stories and the politics of strategists, could only put off specialists on both sides. What remains, however, is the radical gap that enables one to conceive the unresolved tension between cinema and politics. Once the age of belief in the new language of the new life had passed, the politics of cinema became entangled in contradictions that are characteristic of the expectations of art criticism. The way we look at the ambiguities of cinema is itself marked by the duplicity of what we expect from it: that it gives rise to a certain consciousness through the clarity of a revelation and to a certain energy through the presentation of a strangeness, that it simultaneously reveals all the ambiguity of the world and the way to deal with this ambiguity. Onto this we project the obscurity of the presupposed relation between the clarity of vision and the energies of action. If cinema can clarify the action, then it may do this by calling into question the evidence of that relation. Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet do this by leaving it to a couple of shepherds to argue about the aporias of justice. Pedro Costa in turn reinvents the reality of the journey and wanderings of a Cape Verdian mason between a past of exploited labor and the present of unemployment, between the colorful alleys of the slums and the white cubes of social housing. Béla Tarr slowly follows the accelerated walk towards death of a little girl which epitomises the deceptiveness of great expectations. In western Algeria, Tariq Teguia combines the meticulous trajectory of a surveyor and the long journey of migrants on their way to the promised lands of prosperity. Cinema does not present a world that others have to transform. It conjoins, in its own way, the muteness of facts and the linkage of actions, the reason of the visible and its simple identity with itself. Politics should use its own scenarios to construct the political effectiveness of art forms. The same cinema which, in the name of the rebels, says ‘Tomorrow belongs to us’ also marks that it has no other tomorrows to offer than its own. This is what Mizoguchi shows us in another film, Sansho Dayu, the story of the family of a provincial governor who is driven from his post because of his concern for the oppressed peasants. His wife is kidnapped and his children are sold as slaves to work in a mine. In order for his son Zushio to escape so that he can be reunited with his imprisoned mother and fulfill his promise to free the slaves, Zushio’s sister Anju slowly drowns herself in a lake. But this fulfillment of the logic of the action coincides with its bifurcation. On the one hand, cinema participates in the struggle for emancipation, on the other, it is dissipated in the rings on the surface of a lake. It is this double logic that Zushio takes into account when he resigns from his functions to join the blind mother on her island as soon as the slaves are freed. All the gaps of cinema are summed up in the movement with which the film, having just presented the mise-en-scène of the great struggle for liberty, says in one last panoramic shot: These are the limits of what I can do. The rest is up to you.

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translator’s notes
* The term ‘gaps’ in English summons notions of absence and inadequacy. Rancière’s choice of the term ‘écarts’ does not simply imply the inadequacies of cinema. The gaps of cinema are the results of cinema being other to itself – this internal heterogeneity producing extensions or relations with literature, politics, and other art forms. Gaps and extensions make cinema overflow itself. These ‘gaps’ are precisely what make it excessive in the sense of extending the questions and experiences it produces to other ‘non-cinematic’ fields. Commenting on this notion of gaps in Les écarts du cinéma, Rancière recently explained: ‘The problem of gaps…calls into question the idea of cinema as an art form that is thought to be a product of its own theory and specialised body of knowledge, by pointing out the plurality of practices and of forms of experience that are brought together under the name of cinema. From this starting point, I was prompted to bring together the texts I had written since Film Fables from the point of view of the gaps which, by drawing cinema outside of itself, reveal its inner heterogeneity’ (‘Questions for Jacques Rancière around his book Les Écarts du Cinéma: Interview conducted with Susan Nascimento Duarte’, Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 2 [2011], 196-7). Endnote written by Sudeep Dasgupta, with special thanks to Jacques Rancière.
* This is a slightly revised version of the text found on Necsus.

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Below you’ll also find the transcript of an interview with Rancière around, as found in Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image.

Questions for Jacques Rancière around his book Ecarts du Cinéma
Interview conducted by Susana Nascimento Duarte (New University of Lisbon)

CINEMA (C): Just like La fable cinématographique… (published in English as Film Fables), your 2001 book that was also entirely dedicated to cinema, Les écarts du cinéma, recently published by La Fabrique, is a collection of texts, which together provide support for your singular approach to cinema, and whose prologue attempts to explain the logic of this approach after the fact. How did this book come about, and how did you decide on the structure?

Jacques Rancière (JR): The theme of gaps was at the centre of the text that forms the prologue to this book. This text was a post hoc reflection on Film Fables, and shifted the axis of reflection somewhat. Fables looked at cinema through the lens of a tension between two regimes of art: the aesthetic regime, including the novelty of a writing with movement and the dream of a language of images; and the representative regime, with the resurgence of the art of telling stories in cinema, and distinctions between genres, which had been renounced in the old noble art forms. The problem of gaps is more a reflection on my own approach to cinema and all that this implies about the idea of cinema as an object of knowledge and discourse. It calls into question the idea of cinema as an art form that is thought to be a product of its own theory and specialised body of knowledge, by pointing out the plurality of practices and of forms of experience that are brought together under the name of cinema. From this starting point, I was prompted to bring together the texts I had written since Film Fables from the point of view of the gaps which, by drawing cinema outside of itself, reveal its inner heterogeneity: gaps between cinema and literature, which question the idea of a language of cinema, transformation of film-makers’ politics, which are also tensions between cinema and the theatrical paradigm, paradoxical relationships between entertainment and art for art’s sake, and so on. At each turn, it needs to be shown how an art form is intersected by other art forms, how it is impossible to separate the transformations that set it apart from itself, how it cannot be neatly assigned to a specific area of knowledge.

C: It could be said that the logic underlying these essays is the idea of the gap. However, you come back to the concept of fable, as a way of bringing together but not eclipsing the varieties of gap which, you say, characterise cinema and on which you have focused your writings about it. The fable is synonymous with a tension between the story and the constraints imposed on it by causality, and of a set of images that function as a way of suspending the story. But this is not specific to cinema. In your view, to what extent does the idea of the fable seem decisive to the way cinema is thought about today and the contradictions you have identified as having existed from the outset?

JR: The fable is a core idea of the representative regime, and within this regime the fable defines the connection between the incidents that occur in the poem, and the art forms for which the latter acts as the norm. In this way, it is an essential way of measuring to what extent a new art form has adopted such a logic. From the start, cinema was caught between two opposing regimes: on the one hand, in the representative regime, the fable was what set cinema apart from simple popular entertainment, and on the other, it was what separated cinema from the forms of artistic novelty which renounced the fable and which saw in the art of moving images an art form that would be able to transform the will of art into perceptible forms, by dismissing story and character. The history of cinema is, to me, the history of this tension between two logics. This is not just a tension between the story and the image that arrest it. I attempt to bring out the divided nature of the fable in my analysis: there is a visual plot, which modifies the narrative plot, or there may even be a tension between two visual plots. This is the focus of my analysis of Robert Bresson’s Mouchette. Shots play two different roles in this film, and this leads to the development of two different visual plots. On the one hand, the shots tend to become emptier, and thus act as a pure sign in an arrangement of images – a glance and a gesture, or a gesture and its outcome. It is thus made to serve the narrative in a story of a hunt, in which the young girl is only prey. On the other hand, the shots become more dense, and serve as a frame for a deviant performance by Mouchette’s body: half of her is resistant to the messages and looks of others, and half is inventing deft gestures which form her own performance and which trace a narrative path that is distinct from the hunt, although these strands remain entangled throughout the film.

C: In the prologue to Film Fables, you directly related cinema to a pre-existing conceptual framework, the one concerning the “distribution of the sensible” and the regimes of art, while in your new book, although you return to the questions that you addressed in Film Fables, these are posed more explicitly from within cinematographic experience, which in your view is the experience of the cinephile and the amateur. You refer to a politics of the amateur, rather than that of the philosopher or the cinema critic. Could you explain the nature of your philosophical work on cinema, and how you see the relationship between philosophy and film?

JR: I talk about the politics of the amateur in this book, and this is consistent with the rest of my work: a way of practising philosophy that moves away from the dominant view that philosophy provides the foundation or truth of whatever practice we may be considering, be it politics, an art form or anything else. I have practised a philosophy that questions the division between disciplines and skills, and the division between practices and the metadiscourses that claim to be able to explain them. In my view there is therefore no single relationship between philosophy and cinema; rather, there is a variety of philosophical nexuses that can arise from various aspects of cinema. For example, in the article on Hitchcock and Vertov, the relationship of cinema to philosophy is implicit in the literature it adapts; in the article on Bresson, it is consistent with the idea of a language of images; in the article on Rossellini, it is the incarnation of thought in the philosopher’s body, and so on. None of these nexuses arises from a specific body of knowledge that might be called a theory or philosophy of cinema.

C: You write about the privileged experience that constitutes an encounter with a film. What is it that defines this encounter, which paradoxically manifests itself as a gap, in that it is impossible to identify cinema completely with art, or theory, or politics?

JR: This idea of the encounter should not be seen as religious. This is partly linked to the generation in which I grew up: the status of cinema as an art form, the criteria for judging films, and the hierarchy of directors were all rather uncertain. There was no settled canon. The relationship between artistic and political judgements was also somewhat fluid: the Brechtian paradigm that was dominant at the time was very useful for criticising images in the media, but provided little by way of a framework for judging films as such. Under such conditions, the effect produced by one or more films was often what provided the feeling of the specific nature of cinema, or established a connection between the emotions of cinema and political affects. This situation is linked to a methodological question. Precisely because cinema is not a language, it does not delimit an object of knowledge that arises from a systematic reasoning, learning cinema lends itself particularly to the application of methods of intellectual emancipation: as Jacotot said, “learn something, and relate everything else to it.” Cinema is “learned” by widening one’s scope of perceptions, affects and meanings, which are built around a set of films.

C: Your relationship with cinema is built around three gaps: between cinema and art, cinema and politics, and cinema and theory. For you, cinephilia is an illustration of the first type of gap, in that it throws confusion among the accepted judgements about cinema; and at the same time, it enables you to highlight the other two types of gap: if cinephilia calls into question the categories of modernism in art, and introduces a positive understanding of the impure nature of art, it is because it “struggles to comprehend the relationship between the reason underlying its emotions, and the reasons that enable one to adopt a political stance towards world conflicts.” One shifts from an intimate relationship between art and non-art (as determined by the difficulty of identifying criteria which can distinguish one from the other) to the impossibility of reconciling the appropriateness of a director’s gesture with the political and social upheavals in society. What is the relationship between these two types of gap? To what extent has theory shown itself incapable of filling these gaps, and (in your view) to what extent has it become, conversely, the place in which these gaps are rendered manifest?

JR: In one sense the cinephile gap is an extension of an old tradition whereby artists and critics contrast rigorously accurate performances of minor art forms with culturally accepted forms. These gaps, which are a matter of taste, are always difficult to rationalise. But, in this case, this gap in taste arose at the same time as the huge theoretical upheaval that is summarised by the word “structuralism” and which claimed to be able simultaneously to renew the paradigms of thought, science and art. Passion for cinema was therefore swept up in the large-scale rationalisations of the 1960s, when the desire was to bring everything together into a general theory. It was claimed that these theories corresponded to the political agitation of the time, to anti-imperialist and decolonisation movements, to the cultural revolution, and so on. There was a large gap between taste-based judgement, theory and political commitment, which was difficult to fill using the notion of mise-en-scène alone, which itself seeks to hide the heterogeneous nature of film, and to associate it artificially with a single artistic will. Conversely, awareness of this gap could encourage a practice that is very different from “theory”: the object of this practice is understood to be the product of an encounter between heterogeneous logics.

C: There is the encounter with a film, but you also mention the experience of returning to a film, watching a film or films again, either to make comparisons with one’s memories — for example, the “vivid impression” left by a particular shot, or the more general impression left by a work that beguiled us — or to question an interpretation that was provided previously. Could you explain your relationship with cinema when you revisit films in this way, given that re-viewings are transformations, deformations and prolongations by memory and speech of the material object that is film, and lay open the variations in your thoughts within the territory of cinema? In what way has the unstable reconstitution of the perceptions, affections and traces that have been left by the films you have encountered been influenced by changing theoretical, political and philosophical concerns over the course of your life? What is the relationship between films you have watched and re-watched, your thoughts about cinema, and your work in the political and aesthetic fields?

JR: Here we see the conjunction between a structural necessity and a contingent reason. The first is part of the aesthetic regime of art. The idea of art is defined less by a way of doing things than by whether or not one belongs to a universe of sensibility. The codes and norms of the representative regime are replaced by other ways of “proving” art, which consist of a weaving together of memories, stories, commentaries, reproductions, re-showings and reinterpretations. This woven fabric is perpetually shifting: in ancient theatre, Dutch painting, “classical” music, etc., there is a constant metamorphosis of the ways in which these art forms can be perceived. The same is true of cinema. There is a practical problem, however: cinema, which is said to be an art that is technically reproducible, was for a long time an art form whose works were not accessible to methods of reproduction. You never knew if you would see a film again, and it changed in your memory, and in the texts that discussed it; you were surprised when seeing it again to find that it was very different from how you remembered it, particularly since individual and collective perceptual frameworks had changed in the meantime. This is the idea behind my various visions of Europa ’51 (1952): the representation of the communist people, and of the marginal world on the edges of it; the acts of the well-meaning woman who attempts to navigate between the two; her experience of the brutal speed of the production line; the relationship between what she does and the communist explanation of the world or with psychiatric rationalisations — all of which is amenable not only to judgement but also to completely different interpretations, seen in the light of the time of the cultural revolution, the lessons of the Left, of Deleuze etc.

C: In the essay about Hitchcock and Vertov, these two directors represent two opposing ways of coming after literature. What does this mean in each case? This essay, as the title indicates, travels from Hitchcock to Vertov, i.e. from submitting cinematographic machinery to the mechanism of fiction and the Aristotelian logic, to a cinematographic utopia which denies the possibility of a storytelling art form, and back to Hitchcock via Godard, who, in his Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-98) seeks, in a Vertovian gesture, to release the shots created by the master of suspense from the plots in which they are trapped. However, in your view, the analogy goes no further. What is the difference between the way in which Vertov dismisses story-telling and the way in which Godard dismantles stories?

JR: Vertov’s work is part of the system of historical modernism: eliminating stories and characters, which also means eliminating art itself as a separate practice. His films are supposed to be material performances that link together all other material performances, and these connections are meant to represent communism as a tangible reality. This aesthetic communism, in which all movements are equally possible, is a way of distancing the model of historical plotting on which the Soviet state found itself dependent: a model of strategic action supported by faith in a historical movement. As for Hitchcock, he used moving images to serve his stories, in other words he relegated machines to the status of instruments of narrative machination. Godard wants to release images in order to allow cinema to achieve its primary vocation and atone for its previous servitude to stories, in which is included the bad side of History in the form of 20th century dictatorships. The fragments that he thus isolates, though they link together as smoothly as those of Vertov, have little in common with the energies that Vertov wished to let loose. These images inhabit an imaginary museum in the style of Malraux, and they are testimonies and shadows that speak to us of the horrors of History.

C: In your analysis of Mouchette (1967), you try to show that Bresson’s search for cinematographic purity, detached from references to theatre and literature, from classical theatrical and literary conventions, had precursors in literature and theatre. What are the gaps that are examined here?

JR: Bresson is emblematic of the idea of pure cinema as a language of images. He makes fragmentation into a way of avoiding representation. The paradox is that this idea of a language of images ends up being a “linguistic” theory of montage, in which each shot is an element in a discourse-like statement. From this there results an over-emphasis on causal and organic relationships between elements. And yet this is exactly what is at the heart of the representative system. It is as though the Aristotelian model of the poem as an “arrangement of incidents” were applied to the combination of meaningful elements. Images lose their independence, their own duration and their ability to generate a variety of aleatoric image series. The body of the actor — the model, according to Bresson — is the element that must reintroduce this potentiality. This is accomplished using the gap between the actor’s behaviour and the traditional psychological expressive acting. However, the gap that Bresson distinguishes between “cinematography” and “filmed theatre” was in fact first identified by theatre reformers.

C: In your analysis of The Band Wagon (1953), in the essay “ars gratia artis: la poétique de Minnelli” [“ars gratia artis: the poetics of Minnelli”], to what extent is Minnelli’s cinematography both merged with and separate from that of the modern avant-garde director, with whom you compare him, and who dreams of the end of boundaries between art forms, and the equivalence between great art and popular entertainment?

JR: The Band Wagon is an adaptation of a Broadway show. Minnelli came from a show business family, for whom popular entertainment was an art. His work as a director was firmly within this tradition, and this is why he put so much emphasis in this film on the clash between the music hall artist and the avant-garde director. The director proclaims the great avant-garde credo: art is everywhere. What matters is the performance, not whether the subject is noble or lowly. This credo is, above all, a way in which art can give meaning to itself, by showing itself capable of absorbing anything, while remaining equal to itself. The result is a surfeit of the spectacular. Minnelli takes a different route. For one thing, he adheres to genre conventions: a musical comedy, which is primarily a series of musical and dance numbers, and melodrama, which is primarily defined by the emotions its subject can excite. Using this as a starting point, he deploys cinema’s ability to displace genre requirements, by incorporating romantic emotion into the musical performance, and choreography and visual fireworks into melodramatic episodes. Art involves metamorphosis, not displaying itself. His films are faithful to MGM’s motto: ars gratia artis, or art for art’s sake. This is true for “popular” films, even though the term is often reserved for works aimed at connoisseurs.

C: The essays on Straub and Pedro Costa clearly demonstrate that a film is not a political message and cannot be measured by its theme or by well-intentioned relationships with what is filmed. In your view, where does their cinematic politics reside, exactly?

JR: Politics in film is not a simple strategy by which awareness and activism are elicited, using well-defined means — as montage was, once upon a time. It is a complex assembly of several things: forms of sensibility, stances adopted towards the current world order, choices about the duration of a shot, where to place the camera, the ways in which the entities being filmed relate to the camera, and also choices about production, funding, equipment and so on. These assemblages give rise to various types of adjustment. Straub and Costa are on the side of the oppressed. They work outside the mainstream, use non-professional actors and make films that are distanced from dominant fictional paradigms. Beyond this point, their methods differ. Straub constructs films around literary texts, but he never “adapts” them. These texts work in two different ways. Initially, they provide, in a Brechtian way, an explanation of or judgement on the characters’ experiences. More and more, though, they specify a particular type of high register or nobility of speech, and the amateur actors, portrayed against a backdrop that illustrates the condensed power of nature, are there to test the ability of common people to utter such speech and rise to its level. This dual purpose is presented in an exemplary way in the extract from Dalla nube alla resistenza (1953) on which I comment, in which a shepherd and his son discuss, as they do in Pavese’s story, the reasons for injustice. Pedro Costa disposes of explanation, and of the heroic aspects of the backdrop and speech. He plunges with his lightweight camera into the life of immigrants and those on the edge of society, and into their relationship with time. He films these people first in shanty towns and then in new social housing. He is committed to showing that these people are able to create ways of speaking and attitudes that are equal to their own fate. He seeks to distil from their lives, environments and stories the nobility of which all people are capable. The film is in the style of a documentary about their lives, although all the episodes were invented as the film progressed, as a way of condensing their experience and making the film less personal. They use different methods, but in neither case do these film-makers seek to express their politics by denouncing a situation; rather, they demonstrate the capabilities of those who are living it.

About Dalla Nube alla Resistenza by Straub-Huillet

By Serge Daney

Originally published as ‘Une Morale de la Perception (De la nuée à la résistance de Straub-Huillet)’ in ‘La Rampe. Cahier critique 1970-1982’ (Cahiers du cinéma, Gallimard)

The latest Straubfilm is composed of two separate parts, one mythological, the other modern, without any apparent relation. The Nube part: six of the twenty seven Dialogues with Leuco (‘Dialoghi con Leucò’), written by Cesare Pavese in 1947. The Resistenza part: extracts of another book by Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfires (‘La luna e i falo’), published in 1950, a few months before his suicide. This last part is not a surprise: every Straubfilm is an examination – archeological, geological, ethnographic, military as well – of a situation in which men have resisted. To Nietzsche’s claim that “the only being known to us is being that represents itself”, the straubs would respond: only those who resist exist for sure. Resist nature, language, time, texts, gods, God, chiefs, Nazis. Mother and father. This is how the shot, basic atom of the straubian cinema, is the product, the “reste” (remainder), or rather the “restance” (remaining)* of a triple resistance: texts resisting bodies, places resisting texts, bodies resisting places. One has to add a fourth: the public resisting shots “designed” like that, stubborn resistance of cinema’s public to something intractable, something which renounces it as a public.

I will not come back to this. First of all because the past fifteen years we have written a lot about this in Cahiers. Furthermore because what is striking in the Italian Nicht Versöhnt which is Dalla Nuba is something else: the sensuality, the taste of narration, the joy of language and something like a will to elucidate this “be that as it may, we have to follow through” which almost impels me to say that this film has some elements of a psychoanalysis of the Straubs by themselves. As if, after finishing their Jewish triptych (composed of Einleitung zu Arnold Schönbergs “Begleitmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene, Moses und Aaron and Fortini Cani), after having brandished the signifier “resistance” as an absolute (because, without a doubt, being Jewish means resisting and, most of all, resisting the Book), they pitch into its genealogy. Resistance is the point of arrival of a story that has begun elsewhere, earlier, with the cloud. What is this story that straddles two millennia, entangles men and gods, and then men with the most terrible – and the most modern – of divinities, History? When did resistance begin? Why resist? And what is it one is resisting, exactly?

Against the spectacle. But what spectacle?

The six dialogues constituting the first part of the film recount an unique event: the gods separating from men. All proximity between them has been eclipsed, as well as the alliance, the promiscuity, the intermixture. The new law is announced in the first shot of the film by the nymph Nephele, the cloud, while sitting on a tree. “There are monsters”, she says. From then on those who – like the centaurs – have engaged in a dual nature realize they are monsters and go into hiding. Every dialogue marks a deepening of the separation. I summarize: the gods dissociate themselves from men, abandoning them (second dialogue: the Chimera), they separate men from things by giving them a name (third dialogue: the Blind), they separate them from themselves and transform them into animals (fourth dialogue: the Werewolf), they separate some from others by way of sacrifices (fifth dialogue: The Guests) and the separation is complete when they idly content themselves with watching these sacrifices (sixth dialogue: the Bonfires).

This last dialogue marks, at the same time as being the end of the first part, the beginning of the resistance, if not of the revolt, and prefigures the second part – the “modern” part – by way of the theme of bonfires. It’s worthwhile to linger here for a while. To his father who explains him that these fires have to be lit up, a young peasant answers: “I do not want to, you understand, I do not want to. They do well, the masters, to eat our marrow, if we have been so unjust among ourselves. They do well, the gods, to watch us suffer.” Purposely, Straub leaves out the end of Pavese’s dialogue (‘the son adds: “siamo tutti cattivi” – we are all vicious –and the father treats him like an ignorant before renewing his offering to Zeus). In the same way, he has not kept the first two sentences of the dialogue (Pavese began by making the son say “the whole mountain is burning”), instead starting with the son’s assertion that “Our bonfire, nobody sees it.”

We have spoken too much about the Straub’s meticulous respect for texts to not notice how they violate them here. Because these cuts haven’t been made haphazardly, nor is the fact that the theme of looking is privileged. The resistance begins at the moment when, once their separation from the gods is complete, men imagine themselves as the spectacle in which the gods take pleasure, from afar. Beginning of the resistance and also beginning of the pose, of theater. There is a taste of antique theater – toga and tunic – in Straub’s work that refers to Cecil B. De Mille as well as the situations of Terror it connotes. Beginning of indulgence, of aestheticism, of a “m’as-tu-vu” reserved for the human body. Between the carefreeness of Ixion who doesn’t take what the nymph says very seriously (first dialogue) and the first No! (sixth dialogue: the camera zooms in on the boy’s hand, a hand hesitating to clench itself into a fist), the distance between gods and men, in growing larger, has become the space of aesthetic contemplation. “Son: They are unjust, the gods. Father: If it were not thus, they would not be gods. One who does not work, how do you want him to spend his time? When there were no masters and people lived with justice, one had to kill someone from time to time to let them enjoy themselves. They are made thus. But in our time, they don’t need that any more. There are so many of us in a bad way that it is enough for them to watch us.” So the misfortune of men is one and the same as their transformation in objects of esthetic pleasure for the idle gods. Of course, the gods are also the chiefs, the spectators – all those who don’t work. And resisting them is first of all refusing being looked at. This means, for example, turning your back on them.

Refusal of spectacle, shame on the spectator-god, this spoiled brat. Describing the gods to Ixion, Nephele says: “They feel everything from afar with their eyes, their nostrils, their lips.” The construction of the Straubian shot comes down to a practice of framing that breaks with this distance, teaching us to “look closely”, bending the homogeneous space of paranoiac contemplation with which the gods-spectators dispossess men (actors) of their misfortune and with which men, while trying to please them, change into histrionics of their lot, which has become fate. It’s this refusal of a backdrop, of a background (arrière-plan) that confers on Dalla Nube this immediate, pathetic sensuality, inclining that the memory of a world “where we could be at home”, of a intimacy with things, has to be entrusted to senses that are better placed outside of the body – hearing, touch. Not the look.

True inscription or superimposition?

There is no background (arrière-plan), so be it. But is there all the same a shot (plan)? Or else, what is the content of what is called, by convenience, a shot? Content has to be understood literally here. In a short film entitled Toute Révolution est un coup de dés, the Straubs have the actors say a poem by Mallarmé at the Pere-Lachaise graveyard: the “actors” (each a typographical character) are disseminated – as a lively form of writing – over the slope of a small hill. It’s under this hill that the victims of la Commune are buried. But this is not made explicit in the film. In Fortini Cani, the camera wanders several times through the Italian countryside where, during World War II, civilian populations have been massacred. The content of the shot, stricto sensu, is what it hides: the bodies under the ground. From this we could deduce a sort of necrophiliac piety, conducted by the Straubs against the spectator, summoned to know or to keep quiet in respect for the dead – and those particular dead most of all. Impossible coalescence between the perceived and the known, the content of a perception and the perception of a knowledge. In this sense, the politics (and the morals) of the Straubs is a politics (and a morals) of perception. In this sense, it is materialist, but à la Lucrèce or Diderot. In Dalla Nuba too, the shots have a content. It’s, for example, the wheat-field that the Guest (Herakles) watches and admires (fifth dialogue), although he knows that every year it’s fertilized with the blood of a victim of sacrifice and that he has been chosen to be this victim. It’s the magnificent shot of “the grass and the acacias” in front of which, at the end of the film, Nuto reveals to the bastard that this is the place where Santa was killed, before being burned by the partisans. It’s finally the shot of the werewolf (fourth dialogue) of which the hunters ask what to do because, according to them “It is not the first time that a beast has been killed / But it is the first time that we have killed a man”. These three examples are nevertheless sufficient to instill doubt. Doubt as for what we see. Because what happens in this “passage” from polytheism to monotheism – which interests the Straubs a great deal – if else than that we are less and less able to make out what is metamorphosing? Blood in wheat, man in wolf, woman in fire, etc.

So there are two limits to the Straubian shot. One, internal, is what it contains – the shot as a tomb. The other, unrepresentable, undecidable, is that all things filmed, framed, risk being something else as well. Lycaon, the crying werewolf, wouldn’t be this upset if the hunters wouldn’t refer to him as being a man (“He defended himself as an old man, with his eyes”) and if their embarrassment wouldn’t stem from a more profound doubt, a doubt related to their own identity (“Are you so sure of yourself that you don’t sometimes feel Lycaon like him?”). Sudden risk of being one and the other. In this sense, if we take up the issue of “true inscription” again*, we can say that there is certainly something that inscribes itself materially, indisputably, hic et nunc, in the film and on the magnetic tape, except for we don’t know what it is for sure.

That’s why this idea of resistance is at this point essential for the Straubs. It also has a conjuratory value: resistance is the only indication that doesn’t deceive, that attests to some reality or other, to a node of contradictions. It is, in the Freudian sense, a symptom. Where there is resistance, one has to film. But one doesn’t know what one films and the more one can describe it, the less one knows. In the true inscription, there are only traces of inscription of which we are sure of. The rest is metamorphosis, avatar, double identity and double appertaining, error, betrayal. It’s this suspicion, better: desire to voice this suspicion, that can be perceived for the first time with such exemption in Dalla Nuba.

A shot without image or two images in a shot?

There are tricks the Straubs never use – and even seem to be the negation of their cinema – such as superimposition or cross-fading. Every time an image overlays another (unless one image contains the other), every time an image prefigures another (unless one image is already the other’s memory). The time of superimposition is that of the active work of forgetting: a voice tells us: “you will forget, you have already forgotten”. This infringement of an image on another is one of the two limits of the Straubian shot. The other is the black (or empty) screen. In Moses und Aron there was the bedazzlement of an empty shot, of a non-image. In Dalla nube, there’s something else, there is a disclaimer: whatever you are looking at, a cultivated field, a hill, an animal, don’t forget that what you see is always human. If seeing a film, in the Godard-Miéville version, is about equating dad with the factory and mom with a landscape, in the Straub-Huillet version it’s about equating the factory and – more and more – the landscape with mom and dad. Humanism then, in the sense of a prevalency, of a pregnancy of the human image in all things. It is in this sense that these films “are watching us”: someone is watching us in the depth of each image, in an impossible superimposition. Cinema is what permits to suspend the enchantment which makes us think that we see all around us other than human things, while they are only cultivated fields, cut down trees, unknown cemeteries, animals-who-might-be-human (thus forbidding to kill them). Old Marxist humanism as well, in the sense that Brecht said that a picture of the Krupp factories taught us nothing about the Krupp factories. What is missing? The work of men and men at work. And what is there to learn? Always the same thing: men create gods (or the workers create chiefs, actors create spectators) and in return those gods bereave them of their world, turn them into strangers, alienate them. Because it’s clearly about alienation and re-appropriation, experience and bad experience, an entire existentialist problematic to which Straub’s cinema clings to. All of the sudden we understand their horror for the already-made esthetic categories: finding a shot of a landscape “beautiful” is bordering on blasphemy, because a shot, a landscape, is, in the end, someone. There is no beauty if not moral. It’s not about anthropomorphism. There is pregnancy of the human figure in all things, but not the other way around. If we consider a filmmaker important in so far as one studies, from film to film, a certain state of the human body, then the Straub’s films are but documentaries about two or three body positions: sitting, bending over to read, walking. It’s already a lot.

Humanism or hommanism?

When Fortini Cani came out, Straub declared that his film was a bit like Hawks. This comparison failed to convince anyone and even shocked some. While watching Dalla Nube, I wondered if it shouldn’t be taken seriously. The two filmmakers have something in common: an almost total interest for all that is not the human body: a talking and moving body. A male body. Their humanism is also based on a play of words: is it men (biological species), Men (human essence) or men (human in its male form)? We have talked a lot about the Hawksian misogyny but little about the Straubfilms from the angle of the difference of sexes. Yet it‘s clear that, at least since Geschichtsunterricht, we are in a heroic world, a world of warriors, where women are scarce, up to the point of almost disappearing completely in Dalla Nube. There are no women in the Straubfilms, I mean no figuration of women. No mothers either. Undoubtedly because in the eye of a mother, “humanism”, that is to say heroism without object that her offspring shares with little friends, will always be a bit derisory, touching and not far-reaching. Humanism, as we can see more and more, is an invention of men. It’s, as Lacan says, a “hommanism”, the sympathetic and sublimated version of the alliance of men against women.

Dalla nube alla resistenza opens with the somewhat unreal image of the death of a goddess (the admirable Olimpia Carlisi) and closes with the story of the death of a woman, Santa, whom the partisans had to kill because she, too, had betrayed them. At the beginning of the cloud and the end of the resistance, there is a double play, a double pertaining that has, twofold, a feminine figure. A figure materializing what the Straubfilms explore: betrayal. Because beyond these stories of idle gods and revolting men, it seems to me that Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet silently speak about something that remains largely unsung (because the solidity of the social bond depends on this ignorance): that there is a profound indifference of women for all belief in an ideal. An indifference dryly contrasting with the somewhat melodramatic piety of which the relations between men are made up (see the pathos in the father-son saga of Fortini Cani, or, in Dalla nube, the friendship between the bastard and Cinto, the little boy with the knife). Here’s what resists against humanism and what hommanism feeds off: women. Resisting those who are resisting, men. Women, stones. Because “the stone is not touched with words” (third dialogue). Stones: indestructible elements that Straub, not at all pantheist, avoids calling nature. “The things of the world are stone”, says the blind Tiresias – who was a woman for seven years – to a blind man to be – whose name is Oedipus.

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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
* The translation of six dialogues by Cesare Pavese for English subtitled prints of Dalla nube alla resistenza can be found on Lumen.
* The ideas of “reste” (remainder) and “restance” (remaining) stem from Jacques Derrida. In ‘Others Are Secret Because They Are Other’ (“Autrui est secret parce qu’il est autre”) he wrote: “A trace is never present, fully present, by definition; it inscribes in itself the reference to the specter of something else. The remainder is not present either, any more than a trace as such. And that is why I have been much taken up with the question of the remainder, often under this very name or more rigorously under that of resistance or remaining. The remaining of the remainder is not reducible to an actual residue, or to what is left after a subtraction, either. The remainder is not, it is not a being, not a modification of that which is. Like the trace, the remaining offers itself for thought before or beyond being. It is inaccessible to a straightforward intuitive perception (since it refers to something wholly other, it inscribes in itself something of the infinitely other), and it escapes all forms of prehension, all forms of monumentalization, and all forms of archivation. Often, like the trace, I associate it with ashes: remains without a substantial remainder, essentially, but which have to be taken account of and without which there would be neither accounting nor calculation, nor a principle of reason able to give an account or a rationale {reddere rationem), nor a being as such. That is why there are remainder effects, in the sense of a result or a present, idealizable, ideally iterable residue. What we are saying at the moment is not reducible to the notes you are taking, the recording we are making, or the words I am uttering—to what will remain of it in the world. The remains of what remains cannot be calculated in this way. But there will also be remainder effects, sentences fixed on paper, more or less readable and reproducible. These remainder effects will thereby have presence effects—differently in one place or another, and in an extremely un- even way according to the contexts and the subjects that will get attached to it. A dispersion of the remainder effects, different interpretations, but nowhere the substance of a remainder that is present and identical with itself.” (published in Paper Machine (2005). trans. Rachel Bowlby)
* Inscription vraie: “true inscription” (or “inscription of truth”) refers to the photographic trace of the world as a bearer of truth. On the subject, see texts by Pascal Bonitzer (‘J.M.S et J.L.G.’, Cahiers 264) and Jean Narboni (Fortini/Cani, Cahiers 275). Bonitzer wrote: “Something striking in the work of Straub is at which point he is concerned with true inscription. Moreover, we are aware of everything that a clever and modern criticism could reveal in regards to “metaphysics” in this issue of truth. But it’s more interesting to explore how this truth is produced, how it is thought, and what it subverts of the visible field, of the cinematographic specter.”

By Gilles Deleuze

Originally published as Preface to Serge Daney’s ‘Ciné journal 1981-1986’ (Cahiers du cinéma, 1986). Revised version from the one found on straub-huillet.net, taken from ‘Gilles Deleuze: Negotiations 1972-1990’ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), translated by Martin Joughin.

Your previous book, La Rampe (1983), brought together a number of articles written for Cahiers. What made it a real book was the way you based the arrangement on an analysis of the different periods Cahiers had gone through, and more specifically, on your analysis of various functions of the cinematic image. An eminent earlier analyst of the plastic arts, Riegl, distinguished three tendencies in art: the beautification of Nature, the spiritualization of Nature, and competition with Nature (and he took “beautification,” “spiritualization,” and “competition” as historically and logically fundamental factors). You, in the periodization you propose, define an initial function expressed by the question: What is there to see behind the image? And of course what there is to see behind an image appears only in succeeding images, yet acts as what takes us from the first image to the others, linking them in a powerful beautifying organic totality, even when “horror” is one element in this transition. This allows you to say the initial period has as its principle The Secret Beyond the Door, “the desire to see more, see behind, see through,” where any object whatever can play the role of a “temporary mask,” and where any film is linked to others in an ideal mirroring. This first period of cinema is characterized by the art of Montage – culminating in great triptychs and corresponding to the beautification of Nature or the encyclopedia of the World – but also by a depth ascribed to the image taken as a harmony or consonance, by a network of obstacles and advances, by dissonances and resolutions in this depth, and by the specifically cinematic role of actors, bodies, and words in this universal scenography: the role of always furthering a supplementary vision, a “seeing more.” In your new book you offer Eisenstein’s library, the Cabinet of Doctor Eisenstein, as a symbol of this great encyclopedia.

Now, you’ve pointed out that this form of cinema didn’t die a natural death but was killed in the war (Eisenstein’s office in Moscow, indeed, became a dead, dispossessed, derelict place). Syberberg extensively developed some remarks of Walter Benjamin’s about seeing Hitler as a filmmaker… You yourself remark that “the great political mises en scène, state propaganda turning into tableaux vivants, the first mass human detentions” realized cinema’s dream, in circumstances where horror penetrated everything, where “behind” the image there was nothing to be seen but concentration camps, and the only remaining bodily link was torture. Paul Virilio in his turn shows that fascism was competing from beginning to end with Hollywood. The encyclopedia of the world, the beautification of Nature, politics as “art” in Benjamin’s phrase, had become pure horror. The organic whole was simply totalitarianism, and authoritarian power was no longer the sign of an auteur or metteur en scène but the materialization of Caligari and Mabuse (“the old business of directing,” you said, “would never again be an innocent business”). And if cinema was to revive after the war, it would have to be based on new principles, a new function of the image, a new “politics,” a new artistic finality. Resnais’s work is perhaps the greatest, the most symptomatic example of this: he brings cinema back from the dead. From the outset, through to his recent L’amour à mort, Resnais has considered only one cinematic subject, body or actor, a man returning from the dead. Thus in this book itself you compare Resnais to Blanchot, Writing the Disaster.

After the war, then, a second function of the image was expressed by an altogether new question: What is there to see on the surface of the image? “No longer what there is to see behind it, but whether I can bring myself to look at what I can’t help seeing – which unfolds on a single plane.” This changed all the relations between cinematic images. Montage became secondary, giving way not only to the famous “sequence shot,” but to new forms of composition and combination. Depth was condemned as “deceptive,” and the image took on the flatness of a “surface without depth,” or a slight depth rather like the oceanographer’s shallows (and there’s no contradiction between this and depth of field, in Welles for example, one of the masters of this new cinema, who shows everything in one vast glimpse and does away with the old kind of depth). Images were no longer linked in an unambiguous order of cuts and continuities but became subject to relinkings, constantly revised and reworked across cuts and false continuities. The relation between the image and cinematic bodies and actors changed too: bodies became more Dantean, were no longer, that is, captured in actions, but in postures and the ways they’re linked (this also you show in the present book, in relation to Akerman, to the Straubs, and in a striking passage where you say an actor in a drunken scene no longer has to add something to his movement and stagger around as in earlier films but rather has to adopt a posture, the posture that allows a real drunk to stay on his feet. . . ). The relation between images and words, sounds, music changed too, with basic disymmetries between the aural and visual that allow the eye to read images, but also allow the ear to imagine the slightest noise. Finally, this new age of cinema, this new function of the image, was a pedagogy of perception, taking the place of an encyclopedia of the world that had fallen apart: a visionary cinema that no longer sets out in any sense to beautify nature but spiritualizes it in the most intense way. How can we wonder what there is to see behind an image (or following on from it. . . ), when we can’t even see what’s in it or on the surface until we look with our mind’s eye? And while we can identify many high points in this new cinema, it’s the same pedagogical path that leads to all of them – Rosselini’s pedagogy, “a Straubian pedagogy, a Godardian pedagogy,” as you said in La Rampe, to which you now add Antonioni’s pedagogy, by analyzing the eye and ear of a jealous man as a “poetics” registering everything evanescent, everything that might disappear, a woman on the desert island in particular. . .

If you belong to any critical tradition, it’s to that of Bazin and Cahiers, along with Bonitzer, Narboni, and Schefer. You’re still looking for a fundamental link between cinema and thought, and you still see film criticism as a poetic and aesthetic activity (while many of our contemporaries have felt the need to turn to language, to a linguistic formalism, in order to preserve the seriousness of criticism). Thus you still subscribe to the grand idea of cinema’s first period: cinema as a new Art and a new Thought. Only for the first filmmakers and critics, from Eisenstein or Gance to Elie Faure, the idea is bound up with a metaphysical optimism, a total art for the masses. The war and what led up to it, though, generated a radical metaphysical pessimism. But you’ve managed to salvage a certain critical optimism: cinema for you remains linked, not to a triumphant collective thought, but to a precarious, singular thought that can be grasped and sustained only in its “powerlessness,” as it returns from the dead to confront the worthlessness of most cinematic activity.

This reflects the emergence of a third period, a third function of the image, a third set of relations. The question is no longer what there is to see behind the image, nor how we can see the image itself – it’s how we can find a way into it, how we can slip in, because each image now slips across other images, “the background in any image is always another image,” and the vacant gaze is a contact lens. And with this, you say, things come full circle, with Syberberg we’re back to Méliès, but the mourning is now endless and the provocation is pointless, threatening to pitch your critical optimism into a critical pessimism. Indeed, two different factors meet in this new relation between images: on the one hand, there’s the internal development of cinema as it seeks new audio-visual combinations and major pedagogical lines (not just Rosselini, Resnais, Godard, and the Straubs, but Syberberg, Duras, Oliveira. . . ) and finds in television a wonderful field to explore, with wonderful resources; on the other hand, there’s television’s own development, as competing with cinema, as actually “perfecting” and “generalizing” it. Yet however interconnected, these two aspects are fundamentally different and don’t operate on the same level. For if cinema looked to television and video to “relay” a new aesthetic and poetic function, television for its part (despite a few early experiments) took on an essentially social function that disrupted from the outset any relay, appropriated video, and substituted altogether different forces for the potential of beauty and thought.

Thus began a development reminiscent of the initial period of cinema: just as authoritarian power, culminating in fascism and major state intervention, made it impossible to continue the first form of cinema, the new social power of the postwar period, one of surveillance or control, threatened to kill the second form of cinema. Control is the name Burroughs gave to modern power. Even Mabuse changes his method and operates through television sets. Once again, cinema faced no natural death: it was at the very beginning of its new explorations and creations. But the threat this time would come, not from an image always having another image as its background, and art reaching the point of “competing with Nature,” but from the way all images present the single image of my vacant gaze contacting a non-Nature, a privileged spectator allowed into the wings, in contact with the image, entering into the image. Recent surveys show that one of the most highly prized forms of entertainment is to be in the studio audience of a television show: it’s nothing to do with beauty or thought, it’s about being in contact with the technology, touching the machinery. The prying zoom has been taken out of Rossellini’s hands to become television’s standard technique; continuity, through which art beautified and spiritualized Nature, and then competed with it, has become the televisual insert. A visit to the factory, with its rigid discipline, becomes ideal entertainment (seeing how they make a program), and edification becomes the highest aesthetic value (“an edifying experience”). The encyclopedia of the world and the pedagogy of perception collapse to make way for a professional training of the eye, a world of controllers and controlled communing in their admiration for technology, mere technology. The contact lens everywhere. This is where your critical optimism turns into critical pessimism.

Your new book leads on from the first one. It’s a question, now, of taking up this confrontation of cinema and television on their two different levels. And, although you often allude to such matters in your book, you don’t inscribe the problem within some abstract comparison of the cinematic image with newer kinds of image. Your functionalism fortunately rules this out. And from your functionalist viewpoint you’re of course aware that television has, potentially, just as significant an aesthetic function as any other form of expression and, conversely, that cinema has always come up against forces working within it to seriously impede any aesthetic finality. But what I find so interesting in Ciné-Journal is that you try to establish two “facts,” along with their determinants. The first is that television, despite significant efforts, often made by great filmmakers, hasn’t sought its own specific identity in an aesthetic function but in a social function, a function of control and power, the dominance of the medium shot, which denies any exploration of perception, in the name of the professional eye. Thus any innovation that does occur may appear in some unexpected corner, some unusual situation: you cite Giscard producing an empty shot on TV by walking off the set, or a brand of lavatory paper reviving American comedy. The second fact, on the other hand, is that cinema, despite all the forces it has served (and even launched), has always “preserved” an aesthetic and noetic function, however fragile and misunderstood. We shouldn’t, then, compare different types of images, but cinema’s aesthetic function and television’s social function: you say the comparison not only is asymmetric but has to be asymmetric, only makes sense in an asymmetric way.

We must, then, determine how cinema comes to embody this aesthetic function. Here, by asking yourself what it means to be a film critic, you come up with things I find very intriguing. You take the example of a film like Verneuil’s Les Morfalous, which does without any press viewing, rejects criticism as thoroughly pointless, and seeks direct contact with “the social consensus” as its audience. This is perfectly reasonable, because this type of cinema doesn’t need critics to fill, not only the cinemas, but the whole range of its social functions. If criticism has any point, then, it’s to the extent that a film bears in it something supplementary, a sort of gap between it and a still virtual audience, so we have to play for time and preserve the traces as we wait. This notion of “supplement” seems to have various resonances; perhaps you take it from Derrida, reinterpreting it in your own way: the supplement turns out to be a film’s aesthetic function, a tenuous thing that can, however, be isolated in some cases and some circumstances, with a bit of skill and thought. Thus Henri Langlois and André Bazin are for you two key figures. For one of them “was obsessed with showing that film should be preserved” and the other had “the same obsession, in reverse” to show that film preserved things, preserved everything that mattered, “a strange mirror whose silvering retains images.” How can one claim that such a fragile material preserves anything? And what does it mean to preserve things, which seems a fairly humble function? It’s nothing to do with the material, it’s something to do with the image itself: you show that the cinematic image in itself preserves, preserves the one time in his life that a man cries, in Dreyer’s Gertrud; preserves the wind, not great storms with their social function but moments “where the camera plays with the wind, runs ahead of it, turns back into it” in Sjöström or the Straubs; preserves or watches over whatever can be watched – children, empty houses, plane trees – as in Varda’s Vagabond, and throughout Ozu’s work; preserving, but always out of step with things, because cinematic time isn’t a time that flows on but one that endures and coexists with other times. Preserving is, thus understood, no little thing; it’s creating, constantly creating a supplement (that beautifies Nature, or spiritualizes it). It’s in the nature of a supplement that it has to be created, and therein lies its aesthetic or noetic function, itself something supplementary. You might have developed this into an elaborate theory, but you choose to speak very concretely, keeping as close as possible to your experience as a critic, insofar as you see the critic as “keeping watch” over the supplement and thereby bringing out cinema’s aesthetic function.

Why not allow television this same supplementary force of creative preservation? There’s nothing in principle to stop it adapting its different resources to this same end, except that TV’s social functions (seen in game shows, news) stifle its potential aesthetic function. TV is, in its present form, the ultimate consensus: it’s direct social engineering, leaving no gap at all between itself and the social sphere, it’s social engineering in its purest form. For how could professional training, the professional eye, leave any room for something supplementary in the way of perceptual exploration? And if I had to choose among the finest passages of your book I’d pick those where you show that the “replay,” the instant replay, is television’s substitute for the supplement or self-preservation, of which it is in fact the opposite; I’d pick those where you rule out any chance of jumping from cinema to communication, or of setting up any “relay” between one and the other, since a relay could only be set up in a form of television that had a non-communicative supplement, a supplement called Welles; I’d pick those where you explain that television’s professional eye, the famous socially engineered eye through which the viewer is himself invited to look, produces an immediate and complacent perfection that’s instantly controllable and controlled. For you don’t take the easy path, you don’t criticize television for its imperfections, but purely and simply for its perfection. It has found a way of producing a technical perfection that is the very image of its complete aesthetic and noetic emptiness (which is how a visit to the factory becomes a new form of entertainment). And you find Bergman agreeing-with considerable mirth, and considerable enthusiasm for what television might have contributed to the arts-that Dallas is completely empty, but a perfect piece of social engineering. In another area, one might say the same of Apostrophes from a literary viewpoint (aesthetically, noetically) it’s empty, but technically it’s perfect. To say television has no soul is to say it has no supplement, except the one you confer on it as you describe the weary critic in his hotel room, turning the TV on once more, and recognizing that all the images are equivalent, having sacrificed present, past, and future to a flowing time.

It’s from cinema that there’s come the most radical criticism of information, from Godard for instance, and in a different way from Syberberg (this not just in things they’ve said but concretely in their work); it’s from television that there comes the new threat of a death of cinema. So you’ve thought it necessary to go and “have a close look” at this essentially uneven or asymmetric confrontation. Cinema met its first death at the hands of an authoritarian power culminating in fascism. Why does its threatened second death involve television, just as the first involved radio? Because television is the form in which the new powers of “control” become immediate and direct. To get to the heart of the confrontation you’d almost have to ask whether this control might be reversed, harnessed by the supplementary function opposed to power: whether one could develop an art of control that would be a kind of new form of resistance. Taking the battle to the heart of cinema, making cinema see it as its problem instead of coming upon it from outside: that’s what Burroughs did in literature, by substituting the viewpoint of control and controllers for that of authors and authority. But isn’t this, as you suggest, what Coppola has in his turn attempted to do in cinema, with all his hesitations and ambiguities, but really fighting for something nonetheless? And you give the apt name of mannerism to the tense, convulsive form of cinema that leans, as it tries to turn round, on the very system that seeks to control or replace it. You’d already, in La Rampe, characterized the image’s third phase as “mannerism”: when there’s nothing to see behind it, not much to see in it or on the surface, but just an image constantly slipping across preexisting, presupposed images, when “the background in any image is always another image,” and so on endlessly, and that’s what we have to see.

This is the stage where art no longer beautifies or spiritualizes Nature but competes with it: the world is lost, the world itself “turns to film,” any film at all, and this is what television amounts to, the world turning to any film at all, and, as you say here, “nothing happening to human beings any more, but everything happening only to images.” One might also say that bodies in Nature or people in a landscape are replaced by brains in a city: the screen’s no longer a window or door (behind which. . . ) nor a frame or surface (in which. . . ) but a computer screen on which images as “data” slip around. How, though, can we still talk of art, if the world itself is turning cinematic, becoming “just an act” directly controlled and immediately processed by a television that excludes any supplementary function? Cinema ought to stop “being cinematic,” stop playacting, and set up specific relationships with video, with electronic and digital images, in order to develop a new form of resistance and combat the televisual function of surveillance and control. It’s not a question of short-circuiting television – how could that be possible? – but of preventing television subverting or short-circuiting the extension of cinema into the new types of image. For, as you show, “since television has scorned, marginalized, repressed the potential of video – its only chance of taking over from postwar modern cinema… taking over its urge to take images apart and put them back together, its break with theater, its new way of seeing the human body, bathed in images and sounds – one has to hope the development of video art will itself threaten TV.”

Here we see in outline the new art of City and Brain, of competing with Nature. And one can already see in this mannerism many different directions or paths, some blocked, others leading tentatively forward, offering great hopes. A mannerism of video “previsualization” in Coppola, where images are already assembled without a camera. And then a completely different mannerism, with its strict, indeed austere, method in Syberberg, where puppetry and front-projection produce an image unfolding against a background of images. Is this the same world we see in pop videos, special effects, and footage from space? Maybe pop video, up to the point where it lost its dreamlike quality, might have played some part in the pursuit of “new associations” proposed by Syberberg, might have traced out the new cerebral circuits of a cinema of the future, if it hadn’t immediately been taken over by marketing jingles, sterile patterns of mental deficiency, intricately controlled epileptic fits (rather as, in the previous period, cinema was taken over by the “then hysterical spectacle” of large-scale propaganda. . . ). And maybe space footage might also have played a part in aesthetic and noetic creation, if it had managed to produce some last reason for traveling, as Burroughs suggested, if it had managed to break free from the control of a “regular guy on the Moon who didn’t forget to bring along his prayer book,” and better understood the endlessly rich example of La Région centrale, where Michael Snow devises a very austere way of making one image turn on another, and untamed nature on art, pushing cinema to the limit of a pure Spatium. And how can we tell where the experimentation with images, sounds, and music that’s just beginning in the work of Resnais, Godard, the Straubs, and Duras will lead? And what new Comedy will emerge from the mannerism of bodily postures? Your concept of mannerism is particularly convincing, once one understands how far all the various mannerisms are different, heterogeneous, above all how no common measure can be applied to them, the term indicating only a battlefield where art and thought launch together with cinema into a new domain, while the forces of control try to steal this domain from them, to take it over before they do, and set up a new clinic for social engineering. Mannerism is, in all these conflicting ways, the convulsive confrontation of cinema and television, where hope mingles with the worst of all possibilities.

You had to go and “have a look” at this. So you became a journalist, at Liberation, without giving up your connection with Cahiers. And since one of the most compelling reasons for becoming a journalist is wanting to travel, you produced a new series of critical pieces in the form of a series of investigations, reports, and journeys. But here again, what makes this book a real book is the fact that everything is woven around the convulsive problem with which La Rampe closed in a rather melancholy way. Any reflection on travel hinges perhaps on four observations, one to be found in Fitzgerald, another in Toynbee, the third in Beckett, and the last in Proust. The first notes that traveling, even to remote islands or wildernesses, never amounts to a real “break,” if one takes along one’s Bible, one’s childhood memories, and one’s habits of thought. The second, that travel aspires to a nomadic ideal, but it’s a ridiculous aspiration, because nomads are in fact people who don’t move on, don’t want to leave, who cling to the land taken from them, their région central (you yourself, talking about a film by Van der Keuken, say that going south is bound to mean coming up against people who want to stay where they are). Because, according to the third observation, the most profound, Beckett’s, “we don’t travel, as far as I know, for the pleasure of traveling; we’re dumb, but not that dumb.” So what reason is there, ultimately, except seeing for yourself, going to check something, some inexpressible feeling deriving from a dream or nightmare, even if it’s only finding out whether the Chinese are as yellow as people say, or whether some improbable color, a green ray, some bluish, purplish air, really exists somewhere, out there. The true dreamer, said Proust, is someone who goes to see something for himself… And in your case, what you set out to ascertain in your travels is that the world really is turning to film, is constantly moving in that direction, and that that’s just what television amounts to, the whole world turning to film: so traveling amounts to seeing “what point in the history of the media” the city, or some particular city, has reached. Thus you describe Sao Paulo as a self-consuming city-brain. You even go to Japan to see Kurosawa and to see for yourself how the Japanese wind fills the banners in Ran; but as there’s no wind that particular day, you find wretched wind-machines standing in for it and, miraculously, contributing to the image the indelible internal supplement, that is, the beauty or the thought that the image preserves only because they exist only in the image, because the image has created them.

Your travels, in other words, have left you with mixed feelings. Everywhere, on the one hand, you find the world turning to film, and find that this is the social function of television, its primary function of control – whence your critical pessimism, despair even. You find, on the other hand, that film itself still has endless possibilities, and that it is the ultimate journey, now that all other journeys come down to seeing what’s on TV – whence your critical optimism. Where these two strands meet there’s a convulsion, a manic depression you’ve made your own, a vertigo, a Mannerism that’s the essence of art, but also a battlefield. And there sometimes seems to be an interplay between the two sides. Thus the traveler, wandering from TV set to TV set, can’t help thinking, and seeing film for what it really is, extricating it from game shows and news alike: a kind of implosion that generates a little cinema in the televisual series you set up, for example, the series of three cities, or three tennis champions. And conversely, returning to cinema as a critic, you can then see all the better that the flattest of images is almost imperceptibly inflected, layered, with varying depths that force you to travel within it, but on a supplementary journey, out of control: with its three speeds, in Wajda, or more particularly, the three kinds of movement in Mizoguchi, the three scenarios you discover in Imamura, the three great circles traced out in Fanny and Alexander, where you once more, in Bergman, come upon the three phases, the three functions of cinema – the beautifying theater of life, the spiritual antitheater of faces, and the competitive workings of magic. Why three so often, in so many forms, in the analyses of your book? Perhaps because three sometimes serves to close everything up, taking two back to one, but sometimes, on the other hand, takes up duality and carries it far away from unity, opening it up and sustaining it. “Three, or Video in the Balance: Critical Optimism and Pessimism” as your next book? The battle itself takes so many forms that it can be fought on any terrain. Fought out, for example, between the speed of movement that American cinema keeps on stepping up, and the slowness of the material that Soviet cinema weighs and preserves. You say, in a fine passage, that “the Americans have taken very far the study of continuous motion, of speed and lines of flight, of a motion that empties an image of its weight, its materiality, of bodies in a state of weightlessness… while in Europe, even in the USSR, at the risk of marginalizing themselves to death, some people allow themselves the luxury of exploring the other aspect of movement, slowed and discontinuous. Paradjanov and Tarkovsky, like Eisentein, Dovzhenko, and Barnet before them, observe matter accumulating and piling up, a geology of bits and pieces of rubbish and treasure slowly taking shape: theirs is the cinema of the Soviet ramparts, of that immobile empire…” And if the Americans have actually used video to go even faster (and to control the highest speeds), how can one return video to the uncontrollable slowness that preserves things, how teach it to slow down, as Godard “recommended” to Coppola?

By Serge Daney

Originally published (without title) in ‘L’exercice a été profitable’ (Paris: POL). Written in 1991.

1. THE DEFEAT OF (CRITICAL) THINKING

Why do people like me, film critics – tardy heirs of a world of light and shadow – find themselves so quickly in a state of unemployment, early retirement or in the position of the last of the Mohicans? It’s a question. Why did I stop playing film critic, although I largely wrote what I wanted in a magazine which was spontaneously “cinephile”? It’s my question. I remember that when I left Cahiers du Cinéma for Libération in 1981, for the first time I had the feeling that the discourse on the “crisis of cinema” – which had always left me indifferent – would end up being true and that the countdown undoubtedly had already begun. It was at the time of Diva (Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1981)*, a film which inaugurated the eighties rather well, being at the same time vacuous and insular and in the end without any grandeur.

As there were a lot of things I was not able to do at Cahiers, those years at Libération were at first euphoric: I made up for my own lateness, I recycled all the prolongated experiences – rather radical, rather rough – of the seventies. I was being served well by the exigencies of the daily, the talent of the newspaper and the maneuvering space it permitted me at the time. But all the same I became, bit by bit, a sort of moral consciousness of the film criticism that once was – melancholic, dignified and finally grouchy. Indeed, it’s difficult to maintain the idea of a common thread, of a “follow-up”, of a memory, in the voluntarily amnesic world of media.

I started – it was my luxury – asking myself if the place accorded to cinema in the media (especially in France) wasn’t more extensive than the real need for cinema in people’s lives, a need that has become rather weak. It was the era when we started talking about “the death of cinema”, like we nowadays talk about the “end of history”. What became clear is that since some time films no longer generate debate, they don’t leave a lot of traces, and the cinephiles themselves infuse them with a disenchanted loyalty rather than a tormented passion. In short, in the expression “coup de coeur”*, so typical for the cynicism of those years, it’s the word “coup” (punch) that counts, because in regards to “coeur” (heart), it’s rather a leukaemic state of affairs.

Once passed the euphoria, I continued to talk about cinema, but in an attempt to relate it to something else that extends it or perhaps even denies it – I didn’t know very well: television, publicity, communication, the idea of information etc. I had to get away from the rancid self-satisfaction of the “big family of cinema” and the bad habits of the cathodic communication’s parvenus. This permitted me to write little amusing day-to-day chronicles, to become a professional “zappeur” for a while, critic of films “on television”, observer of televised info etc. It was a rather special shuttle in which I ended up finding myself a bit too lonesome. When one doesn’t belong to the César family or the 7 d’or family*, the people who actually do belong to those families take pleasure in going through your pockets without mentioning your name or setting up a pedestal for you in the back in the garden, where nobody goes. It’s normal, since we are in a period in which families – all families – take revenge for the past twenty years in which they have been put to challenge.

Still there is a very simple thing I have finally understood: criticism can not justify itself unless it responds to a desire, most likely that of the author. Where there is a rather strong desire (and desire is always violent), the critic has to answer present. It’s like in tennis: we don’t hit back all the balls under the pretext of them “being symptomatic”, but we are forced to react to the serves. Yet, the phenomenon typical for our societies is that the border between desire, caprice, whim, hobby and parlor game is being recomposed. A lot of the current films no longer stem from a desire to make a film but rather from the desire of being a filmmaker at least once in a lifetime. Why not? Me, I don’t mind Jean-Philippe Toussaint making Monsieur* but I don’t see how or why I will criticize this film, because it doesn’t entail a “follow-up” for anyone.

Criticism was necessary when, in society, there was a place where violence, sense, the need to say or make, made some kind of bond, some kind of abscess. But it looses this necessity from the moment when “the right to create”, as the communists used to say, is open and acknowledged to everyone. Criticism provided news from certain high-risk travelers: Tarkovski, Godard, Cassavetes, Fassbinder, people like that were all travelers. Criticism is of no use now that all that has been replaced by the touristic auto-programmation of the individual. A film like L’ours (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1998)* doesn’t appeal to film criticism, it only appeals to some big competition giving as first price the right to assist to the shooting of the film, because the shooting itself is undoubtedly the only adventurous thing about the project. The critic is a “passeur” between two poles: between those who make and those who see what has been made. What has to clear is the order of priorities. For me, the critic first sends an open letter to the author and this letter is then read by the possible audience of the film. The critic represents the interests of those who “make” on the side of those who don’t. Like some kind of lawyer. This seems to me at the same time normal and moral. But for others, it’s the contrary: they represent the interests of the audience on the side of the creator. They rather act like judges. Some function rather well following the model of criticism which sorts out “what passes“ and doesn’t. It’s the consumer guide, even enlightened, even insolent, or pretending to be.

This quickly leads to pure and simple conformism because, by definition, every audience, even enlightened, even adult, wants consensus. But it’s perhaps more profitable today to only see in a film the “societal phenomenon” aspect and fly to the assistance of “what works” – just a matter of adding one’s supposedly “personal” opinion.

What I’m saying is of course very debatable. It all goes back to never taking the side of the group against the individual. But I think that the beauty of the cinema of the 20th century was it being a gigantic asocial machine that has, paradoxically, taught millions of people to live with one another, thus as a society, while never forgetting that there is more than the society in the world. But when there is only the horizon of the social, when the world has disappeared, we find ourselves cemented to the mediocrity of the global village and even if this village is ultra-communicative, it remains a village. And a village doesn’t need criticism, it needs griots, supporters, rural sheriffs; in short it needs television.

2. THE DAWN OF CINEMA

When I was a child, in the 1950’s, at the beginning of “The Glorious Thirty”*, cinema was the luxury of the poor. It told us that we were poor while, at the same time, showing the rich. It was a strange art, perhaps not even an art but certainly an unique moment in history: the right blend between shadow and light, the individual and the collective, an art that was popular and elitist, the beginning and the end of the 20th century, with on one hand the “science for all” aspect, and on the other bodies stemming from the circus.

Cinema has great difficulties accompanying the current age, which it has partly aspired and nourished. Perhaps it’s normal. The modern individual lives in a society with an “abundance of choice” and cinema is only one of the possible choices, prestigious certainly, but a bit too heavy. The modern societies have become unstable organisms, transparent for themselves, and the “social” is, thanks to the artificial respiration of surveys, what we consume, market share by market share. As for approaching the “truth” of beings and things, art has stopped replacing religion. So, on one hand, art becomes ornamental again, and on the other, religion reclaims its old debt in post-modern guises (“new age”, tele-evangelists , fundamentalism and other doldrums). Cinema was a collective way of camping between faith and believe, without being scorched by faith or vegetating too much on believes.

Naturally, it is television which, in its resistible ascension, has been impelled to destroy all of that. The attentive traveler: that was yesterday. The blasé tourist: that is today. It suffices to watch Paris-Dakar. We are shown some roaring racing cars in the desert and we are told: see, the proof that this race exists lies in the fact that you get to see some fragments of it on television, believe us on our word but don’t ask about the story of the African kid who was run over, that of father and son Sabine*, or that of the small-time amateur who saves up for one year in order to be able to participate: these experiences are not to be communicated anymore.

So, when by contrast I see an old Hawks film from the 1930’s about car racing, The Crowd Roars with Cagney, I see very clearly that there was still a simple contract with the public of that time: Hawks, who was a pilot, tried to share – by way of cinema – a bit of his experience. That is what “access to the world” was all about: this idea that experiences, even distant ones, could all the same be communicated. Today, the only experience that television communicates to us is that of the American tourist behind the windows of his motorcar, with tinted glass and air conditioning. It’s nice but is a bit meager and it ends up with CNN.

3. THE GIRL, HER PIMP AND THE PLAIN-HEARTED

I’m told that the media are the first propagandists of cinema. Not really. The media function by way of “Misters”. They need to have a “Mister books”, a “Mister weather forecast”, a “Mister tomato juice”, a “Mister cinema”. As soon as they’ve found their personage and warmed him up, that’s it, that’s enough. I remember that Godard blamed Claude-Jean Philippe* for always smiling when he presented Ciné-club, as if cinema was so derisory, minor and futile that it felt as if we had to squirm on our seats under the mocking gaze of (Bernard) Pivot, who was so convinced of his superiority that he quickly got rid of this cumbersome object: “the love for literature”*. For my part, I was ashamed of us, former rats of the cinemathèque who were definitely not presentable for normal people (and who is more normal than Pivot?).

Why this shame? Because there is something taboo on television and this something is the familiarity that someone can have with what one loves and what one knows. It’s this idea that when we love and know something very well, we have a chance that we can talk about it well. It’s particularly painful for cinema because – especially in France – cinema would have never constituted a culture if it hadn’t been endowed with a veritable oral tradition, one of the only ones still alive. Like a dream, like poetry, like everything that shrouds time, film is difficult to summarize, hence difficult to mediatize. This tradition went as far as inventing, hallucinating shots, entire scenes, but it preferred to dream them collectively rather than to re-vision them solitary on videotape.

Things won’t work out well. Nowadays, Philippe would have been a transitory and useful figure, but considering the way television evolves, I think it will soon do without this kind of “passeurs” and that it will likely use its “house” staff – thus ignorant – to cover it all. And the more they are ignorant, the better it will be because their ignorance will be the same that we suppose from the public. I say “that we suppose” because in the end celebrity presenters are like pimps who earn royalties from the supposed pleasure of the client, pleasure of which they know nothing (they don’t know anything but “satisfaction rates”). It’s the girl who knows but she doesn’t tell, otherwise she would get killed. The girl – who experienced so much and aged so well – is cinema and today she only serves to dredge clients towards the display window of the audiovisual shop. And when the client goes in, he’s hardly informed anymore, he is just being sold something else, cinema is not being talked about at all.

3. ART IS DEAD, LONG LIVE CULTURE?

Perhaps we are at the end of a process, a sort of wrestling fight between art and culture which started in the 1960’s. In 1968, a lot of people of my age experienced this in a reactive and ambiguous way. We considered art as a second religion, superior to the old religion because it was much more emancipatory, and we considered culture as a venture which recuperated all this emancipation by way of Capital. And at the same time – funny contradiction – we were fighting for access to cultural goods for all.

Culture has finally won out and the likes of Barthes, Bourdieu and all those semiologists, sociologists, cultural animators, young wolves, advertisers and communication experts have marked out the economical field of culture. This has developed from what I mentioned earlier: the explosive extension of the “market of cultural goods”, “added value” as it is horribly called, and the apparition of the new hero of our times: the consumer. Not the one to whom an experience has to be transmitted, but the one who is solely asked to buy and who, in the best case, can be guided through the abundance of consumable choices. What is forbidden is to question the real “freedom of choice” of the consumer, to suspect that behind the fiction of five million unique and singular consumers, a real though soft conformism continues to exist (provoking boredom and gloom all around).

4. THE AMNESIC IMAGE

Let me come back to this idea of “experience”, which I found rather rancid when I was younger but now seems to have become useful again. The question to be asked in regards to modes of audiovisual expression is “what can we share with the characters”? Me, I have never carried a gun in my life but in the course of viewing police flicks, I have developed a right intuition for the moments when “it has to be like that” and moments when it’s obviously stylized show-off. Cinema has given me a second experience, not completely concrete nor completely dreamed, which permits me to separate the true lies from the false lies. Cinema is on the side of the true lies, television on the side of the false lies. Knowing when we are being lied to is perhaps our minimal definition of spectator. It’s not enough but it’s under this condition that we remain human.

One of the exigencies of an individualist society based on the market is that experiences remain personal property, the individual’s possessions which shouldn’t be brought up in public space. On one hand, I don’t have the right anymore, as a critic, to complain about the decorative embellishment of public space. On the other, I don’t have the right anymore to interfere in the private space of “personal experiences”.

And yet, when I see Le Grand Bleu (Luc Besson, 1988), I don’t see the sea, I see an advertising concept of the sea that has once and for all replaced the sea*. At the same time, when Besson sells me – by way of advertising – the idea that he has dived in person and that it’s an extraordinary experience, I am supposed to believe him on his word. At a pinch, the real criticism of the film consists of the list of diving clubs. We could say: here are the addresses, you will have a ball, we won’t tell you anything. Moreover the typical catch phrase of youngsters nowadays is “I won’t tell you”. At a glance it means “I could talk about it for hours” but in reality it means what it says: no more narration, no more sharing by way of narration, by way of talking cinema. So, the illustrious “crisis of the scenario” we are pestered with is there: in the privatization of experience and the aphasia it produces, especially among the youngsters.

5. THE SILENT STORY

Here’s a funny paradox. On one hand, the history of the 20th century merges with the history of cinema. On the other, the history of cinema can hardly be told anymore. In spite of enormous gaps and dead-ends, someone like me could still – but almost in extremis – have the feeling that this history has started with his grandparents when they were still alive. My grandmother has always told me about a silent film series that petrified her as a child and that I later identified as Feuillade’s. When we went to Chaillot, at Langlois’, we were likely going to dream an ideal history but at the same time we also dreamed about those of two generations before us. Today this history is as hard to bear as the century that is drawing to an end – a bit in the spirit of “save while you can”, considering its millions of deaths. We can see that television, fifty years old by now, plays no role at all in the construction of whatever collective memory. Students of cinema almost have to be begged to go to the cinema once in a while, only by swearing that that they wouldn’t regret it. Something has broken in the idea of transmission itself, and not only in cinema. The proof is that the great French tradition of art criticism, that has begun in the XVIII century and that has never ceased since, seems to be wasting away. It’s a tradition of the artist-critic, that of Baudelaire, Berlioz, Delacroix, Proust, Malraux, Breton, and in cinema, it went as far as the Nouvelle Vague: Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, etc. They must have been the last, because although we have tried to continue with dignity, we didn’t add anything decisive to what they have said, and today it’s still Godard who tries, alone, to propose a shattering “History of cinema and television”, which doesn’t interest a great deal of people. Is this weight too heavy? Since some time, we see reemerging in France the profile of the filmmaker who says nothing, doesn’t theorize anything, doesn’t write and is all proud of it. For me, this elegy of lobotomy in the country of critical talent is anything but reassuring.

6. THE OCCUPIED IMAGINARY

The French cinema is not the American cinema. It’s a cinema in which reflection always prevails somewhat over practice. It’s like that. It’s even for this reason that in France, the “author cinema” has been able to resist longer in the international marketplace. Today I have the feeling – see the Gulf War – that the world of the image has completely tilted towards the side of power. And the desire of submission to power. Today, all power (economical, military, sportive, religious) has “its visual” and what else is the visual than an image purged of all risk of meeting with the experience of the other, whatever it is*. Evidently, there are magnificent resistances, small films (Recordações da Casa Amarela, João César Monteiro, 1989) and even big films (The Godfather: Part III, FF Coppola, 1990) of which we don’t speak anymore. Or it’s done in a bad way, like our bluestocking colleagues of Teléramucha (sic) or Le Monde, with their Madame Verdurins-like* flutters defending the courageous author cinema in the same way we deplore the Kurds on television. But it’s normal that in a period of occupation there is no talk of those who resist. And media is occupation. A very soft and livable occupation, that consist of occupying the screens and the people, leading them towards a dead end. Still there is also the memory of the only occupation that France has never forgotten, that of ’40-’45, which is now coming back from all sides: in its third age form with Uranus (Claude Berri, 1990), in its modern art form with Merci La Vie (Bertrand Blier, 1991), with its post-modern look in Delicatessen (Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, 1991). We can hardly say that this encourages us to put out our flags.

I wrote the Libération article on Uranus* a bit for my own amusement, to remind this journal that it was still possible to perform an independent task of film criticism. I was naive. I was not surprised by the weakness of the film but it brought back a lot of questions with which some people of my generation have never really reconciled, even if it concerns the biography of their parents. Histories of mourning, more or less. Histories of transmission, once again, transmission by way of cinema. Because cinema is not an art like the others. It is the only art in which, when a filmmaker admires another, he can ask him to feature in his film, in flesh and blood. When Godard, who made all the decisive gestures before anyone else, invited Fritz Lang for Le Mepris, this was an unique moment (1963!). But when Bertolucci wanted Sterling Hayden for Novecento (1972) it was because he wanted living proof of Johnny Guitar and McCarthyism. But when Wim Wenders accompanied Nicholas Ray towards his death in 1980 (Lightning Over Water), he closed the loop. All this means that cinema has a completely original connection to filiation and when this connection ceases to exist, like today, cinema risks to cease as well, finding itself replaced overnight by images of another country, by a genetically produced visual.

Loving cinema is loving this idea that we always make do with bodies that have already served, that have existed for others. Maybe there is an insuperable contradiction between the exigencies of the market (which wants to turn us into proprietors of our own life) and those of cinema, which forbids us to have the monopoly on what we film and what we see.

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

translator’s notes
* Diva inaugurated what Daney famously dubbed “le cinéma du look” — a lovingly art-directed, style-overscript aesthetic of which Beineix and Luc Besson were the prime movers. Daney wrote that “Diva‘s success stems from Beineix attempt to moralise the publicity legacy by proposing a new way of combining the unsellable (soul, creation) and the presold (objects, clichés)”.
* The expression ‘coup de coeur’ is quite often used in consumer guides, indicating “favorite” products.
* The Césars and the 7 d’ors are the prices awarded for respectively the best French films and television products.
* Jean-Philippe Toussaint is a Belgian writer. He made a film version of his novel Monsieur (1986) in 1990.
* According to Daney, films such as L’Ours marked the beginning of the era in which “the dominant form of cinema (the kind that ‘works’) reached a post-advertising stage. Cinema now inherits prefabricated shots, ready-to-use ‘cliches’, in short – immobile images.”
* Les Trente Glorieuses (“The Glorious Thirty”) refers to the thirty years from 1945-1975 following the end of the Second World War in France.
* Thierry Sabine was a racer and founder of Paris Dakar. He was killed when his helicopter crashed into a dune in Mali during a sudden sand-storm on 14 January 1986. After the accident his father Gilbert took over the helm.
* Claude-Jean Philippe has presented “Ciné-Club” on France 2 from 1971 till 1996. In 1976 he also created the weekly radio programme ‘Le Cinéma des cinéastes’, which was succeeded, in 1984, by Daney’s ‘Microfilms’.
* Bernard Pivot is a journalist, interviewer and host of French cultural television programmes, notably ‘Apostrophes’, an hourlong show devoted to literature which ran until 1990, on Antenne 2.
* In regards to Le Grand Bleu Daney wrote that a new hero had emerged within the sea of images. In the film Besson invented a “self-legitimating automaton”, who dives into the big blue with nothing to assist the viewer in the task of seeing. All that has happened is the elaboration of a “promoter’s film”.
* See also Daney’s article ‘Montage Obligatory‘: “Where there is also the other, that’s the cinema image. And where there is only One (neither small nor large but swiftly ‘gross’, swollen, full of itself), that’s the ‘visual’ of television. And if the visual is taking over today, that is because the more or less well-negotiated return of identity phantasms has happened everywhere. So not only is the image becoming rare; it is also becoming a form of stubborn resistance, or a touching memory, within a universe of pure ‘signalisation’.”
* Madame Verdurin is a character from Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. In the novel she owns a bourgeois salon, where she assembles a clan of “loyals” around her, on whom she wants to impose her own artistic taste.
* In Uranus Daney saw the return of the ‘retro-style’ which was already present in films such as Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien (1974) which presented French history in such a way that it countered the posing of the right questions in regards to the occupation and all forms of struggle in general. Daney wrote that even a statement that is politically true can be “taken over, carried, by its worst enemy on a terrain where it can have no impact at all”. The foundations of his distaste for this so-called “vichyssois” aroma were laid by Michel Foucault’s response to Lacombe Lucien and Cavanis II Portiere di notte, which appeared in 1974 in Cahiers du cinema during Daney’s tenure as editor. This disdain is in part founded on the analogy, in an extension of the Foucauldian commentary, whereby: “France is occupied and the studio represents the Occupation in the field of cinema”.