NOTES

1 “CINEMA HAS GIVEN ME SO MUCH”

1 July 7, 2010.

2 As the founder of the Cinémathèque française, Henri Langlois (1914–77) was singlehandedly responsible for preserving thousands of films. A whole generation of cinephiles, many of whom would later become directors, attended the daily screenings and in this way owed their education to Langlois. – trans.

2 CINEMATIC CULTURE

1 Émile Chartier (1868–1951), commonly known as Alain, was an influential French philosopher who taught in secondary schools and contributed numerous short essays to newspapers over the course of his career. This quotation comes from his article “La musique mécanique” (June 3, 1923), collected in Préliminaires à l’esthétique (1939). – trans.

2 That is why the naïve expression “the film is as good as the novel” should be defended. Its artlessness encapsulates the problem as well as the choice we have to make.

3 A French filmmaker (in the years 1914 to 1920) who mainly transposed boulevard comedies to the screen.

4 A French filmmaker (d. 1952) who had the dubious honor of making the first in the long series of Count of Monte Cristo films.

5 An example of this is the scene in Alexandre Astruc’s Les Mauvaises Rencontres (Bad Liaisons) where Jean-Claude Pascal picks Anouk Aimée up in his arms and carries her into the bedroom.

6 The last three films of each of these directors were, respectively, Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black), Marguerite de la nuit (Marguerite of the Night), and La Traversée de Paris (Four Bags Full); Le Salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear), Les Diaboliques (Diabolique), and Le Mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso); Jeux Interdits (Forbidden Games), Monsieur Ripois (Knave of Hearts/US title Lovers, Happy Lovers!), and Gervaise.

7 A theoretician and director whose principle was “to attain psychological precision” and whose techniques were technical innovation and the “monologue.”

8 A proponent of intellectual cinema, featuring a complicated, outmoded style. His one “great work,” El Dorado (Eldorado), has become unwatchable.

9 A very original film made by the Austrian director Friedrich Feher. There is an excellent analysis of this little-known work in Claude Mauriac’s L’Amour du cinéma, published by Albin Michel.

10 A French poet and dramatist (1868–1918) best known for his play Cyrano de Bergerac. – trans.

11 A Canadian novelist and playwright (1879–1961) whose series of sentimental novels were best-sellers. – trans.

12 A terrible film by Léo Joannon, starring Pierre Fresnay.

13 René Clair’s latest film (1955).

14 By borrowing a certain number of ideas from À nous la liberté (Freedom for Us) to make Modern Times, Chaplin testified to his admiration for René Clair much more surely even than Renoir did his for Stroheim when he said he had seen Foolish Wives ten times before he made Nana.

15 Between 1919 and 1928 Erich Von Stroheim gave the cinema several of his masterpieces: Foolish Wives (1921), Greed (1924), The Wedding March (1928), and the never-completed Queen Kelly (1928). His directorial career was destroyed by the Hollywood production system.

16 Abel Gance, another director destroyed by the production system, gave us, among others, La Roue (The Wheel, 1923) and the tremendous Napoleon (1927).

17 A minor film by Jean Vigo (1930).

18 A young Spanish director whose three films, Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist), Cómicos (Comedians), and Calle Mayor, admittedly contrast with Spanish cinema’s current lackluster state.

19 A new trend in American animation that replaces Walt Disney’s insipid imagery with “two-dimensional” forms borrowed from caricature.

20 Badiou is referring to Gaston Bachelard’s book Water and Dreams (1942). – trans.

3 REVISIONIST CINEMA

1 In no particular order: The Night Porter, Lacombe Lucien, Le Chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and The Pity), Français, si vous saviez (French People, If You Only Knew) …

2 The pernicious, vile Barry Lyndon.

3 The coalition, originally agreed upon in 1972, between the French Communist Party and the Socialist Party. – trans.

4 They will be put into practice, and corrected, in the future, by examining specific works, by political intervention, by struggle. I am just setting out a few principles here, which are the result of a preliminary assessment.

5 An annual open-air festival organized by the PCF’s newspaper, L’Humanité. – trans.

6 In fact, like all bourgeois, the revisionists are based on the political division of the people. At the heart of this arrangement is the labor union dictatorship of the worker aristocracy over the productive masses of semi-skilled workers, youth, immigrants, and women.

4 ART AND ITS CRITICISM

1 It will be objected: that doesn’t work where music is concerned. Be patient, though! I have a few ideas about progressivism in music, although they are still too sketchy. I will nevertheless venture the following remark. Notwithstanding the apparent primacy of formal questions, the principles of progressivism in music are no different. The difficulty lies in the fact that the subject of a musical work entertains a relationship of proximity with form that is without parallel, even in painting. This was something that had already been seen by Plato, who classified musical modes according to ethical criteria, exactly like Jdanov, who said that serial music was hysterical. But this is not an insurmountable obstacle, as far as I am concerned.

6 A MAN WHO NEVER GIVES IN

1 Cited from the text of In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni. [For some of the citations from Debord’s text below I have used, with modifications, the English translation by Ken Knabb (http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/ingirum.htm) – trans.]

2 Ibid.

3 Cited from another of Debord’s films: Refutation of All the Judgements, Pro or Con, Thus Far Rendered on the Film The Society of the Spectacle.

7 IS THE ORIENT AN OBJECT FOR THE WESTERN CONSCIENCE?

1 While the film was released in the US as Circle of Deceit, its title has also been translated more literally as False Witness. – trans.

8 REFERENCE POINTS FOR CINEMA’S SECOND MODERNITY

1 Co-authored with Philippe Noyel.

2 Badiou’s first play, a romanopéra, published in 1979 and staged in 1984 by Antoine Vitez, with music by Georges Aperghis. – trans.

3 Richard Dindo, a Swiss documentary director, whose film Max Frisch, Journal I-III (1981) Badiou mentions below. – trans.

9 THE DEMY AFFAIR

1 Although Demy’s film, a sort of “popular opera,” was unanimously acclaimed by the critics, it was a box office flop. The same week it came out, in October 1982, another film, Gérard Oury’s L’As des as (Ace of Aces), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, became an instant hit, going on to become the second highest grossing film of the year in France. A spirited polemic arose around Une Chambre en ville as critics, reacting to the extensive advertising campaign for L’As des as, published articles and petitions in support of Demy’s film in Libération, Le Monde, Télérama, etc. and called on the public to boycott L’As des as. – trans.

2 May 10 was the day the Socialist candidate François Mitterrand won the presidential election in 1981. – trans.

3 The French Section of the Workers International. – trans.

4 Small and medium-sized enterprises and industries. – trans.

5 General Confederation of Labor, the largest of the five national confederations of trade unions and, at the time of this article’s writing, closely linked with the French Communist Party. – trans.

6 Pascal Bonitzer, an actor and screenwriter turned director, also wrote several books on cinema, including Le Regard et la Voix (1976). – trans.

11 INTERRUPTED NOTES ON THE FRENCH COMEDY FILM

1 In French farce,“Ciel! Mon mari!” is the typical outcry of the unfaithful wife in bed with her lover when her husband returns home unexpectedly. – trans.

2 A prolific author, Eugène Marin Labiche (1815–88) transformed French comic vaudeville into the bourgeois farce, a genre in which he was matched only by Feydeau. One of his most popular plays, Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (The Italian Straw Hat, 1851), was adapted into a film by René Clair in 1928. – trans.

3 “Enlisted soldier,” i.e., “barracks humor” films, of which, at the time of the writing of this article, at least nine had appeared, with such titles as: Les Bidasses en folie (Rookies Run Amok), Les Bidasses s’en vont en guerre (Sadsacks Go To War), Arrête ton char … bidasse! (Gimme a Break, Rookie!), etc. – trans.

4 Author (1858–1929) of numerous comical and satiric novels, sketches, and plays in which bourgeois attitudes and institutions are skewered. Fun in Barracks is the English title of the 1932 film adapted by Maurice Tourneur from Les Gaîtés de l’escadron. – trans.

5 Written by Louis Pergaud and published in 1912. – trans.

6 This phrase, no doubt alluding here to Fernandel’s horse-like teeth, is from French poet Saint-John Perse’s Exile (Saint-John Perse, Collected Poems. Trans. Denis Devlin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971, p. 149) – trans.

7 The gentleman thief Arsène Lupin first appeared in what was to become a series of crime fiction novels written first by Maurice Leblanc and later by the mystery-writing team of Boileau-Narcejac. – trans.

8 In the 1970s, Gérard Jugnot was one of the founders of the comedy troupe Le Splendid (see below), which adapted a number of its hits for the cinema. Well known in France for the roles he played in Les Bronzés (French Fried Vacation, 1978), Les Bronzés font du ski (French Fried Vacation 2, 1979), and Le Père Noël est une ordure (Santa Claus Is A Stinker, 1982), he eventually achieved international fame in the role of the music teacher in Les Choristes (The Chorus) (2004). – trans.

9 These were comedy troupes founded by a collection of writers and actors in the 1970s who went on to become some of the most significant actors and directors in French cinema from the 1980s on. – trans.

10 Bazaine and Trochu were generals responsible for France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1. In World War II General Weygand surrendered to and collaborated with the Germans as part of the Vichy regime, headed by Marshal Pétain. – trans.

12 Y A TELLEMENT DE PAYS POUR ALLER

1 Text co-authored with Natacha Michel.

2 The eponymous, Chaplinesque hero of Jacques Tourneur’s 1933 film starring Albert Préjean. – trans.

3 This is a play on words involving the river mouths in the South of France (les bouches du Sud) and the “mouths from the South” – i.e., the way of speaking of the characters who come from the south, from Tunisia. – trans.

4 La Goulette is the port of Tunis. – trans.

5 André Schwartz-Bart’s prize-winning novel about the Holocaust, Le Dernier des Justes (The Last of the Just), was published in 1959. – trans.

6 Traditional Tunisian dress, a wide coat covering the whole body. – trans.

7 Triangular-shaped pastry traditionally stuffed with tuna, herbs, and an egg and fried in oil. – trans.

8 Tunisian fig brandy. – trans.

13 RESTORING MEANING TO DEATH AND CHANCE

1 Paul Nizan (1905–40), a close friend of Jean-Paul Sartre, was the author of three novels, Antoine Bloye, Le Cheval de Troie, and La Conspiration, and several essays, which reflected his Communist political convictions. – trans.

14 A PRIVATE INDUSTRY, CINEMA IS ALSO A PRIVATE SPECTACLE

1 A film directed by Louis Malle (1974).

2 Il Portiere di Notte (1974), a film by Italian director Liliana Cavani.

18 “THINKING THE EMERGENCE OF THE EVENT”

1 Interview with Emmanuel Burdeau and François Ramone.

2 On August 23, 1996 the French riot police raided the Saint-Bernard-de-la-Chapelle Church in Paris, which had been occupied since June by several hundred sans papiers (undocumented workers), arresting and evicting them. Some were eventually deported. Thousands of Parisians later marched to protest the brutality of the police. The Saint-Bernard occupation became a cause célèbre, with commemorative marches for many years thereafter. – trans.

3 See n. 6 in ch. 9, this volume.

4 Before making Du Jour au lendemain (1997), which was based on an opera by Arnold Schoenberg, Straub and Huillet had directed two other films also dealing with Schoenberg’s works: Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’s Accompaniment to a Cinematic Scene (1973) and Moses and Aaron (1975). – trans.

20 SURPLUS SEEING

1 The nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet claimed that history was “a complete resurrection of the past.” – trans.

2 In French, the adjective “nouvelle” can be placed before or after the noun “vague.” Thus, “la Nouvelle Vague,” or “New Wave,” refers to the renowned film movement of the late 1950s–early 1960s, while “une vague nouvelle” can mean “a new (or different) wave.”– trans.

3 The play on words here is based on the homophony between “m’abuse” in “Si je ne m’abuse” (“If I’m not mistaken”) and Mabuse, the surname of the doctor protagonist in three films by Fritz Lang. – trans.

4 La Monnaie de l’absolu (The Coin of the Absolute), published in 1949, was the third volume of Malraux’s art history series La Psychologie de l’art, later expanded and issued as Les Voix du silence (The Voices of Silence). – trans.

5 See n.1 in ch. 2, this volume.

6 The French – “il ne faut pas faire tant d’histoire(s)” – plays on the expression “faire des histoires,” “to make a fuss or a big deal about,” by simultaneously alluding to the “histoire(s)” of the film’s title. – trans.

21 CONSIDERATIONS ON THE CURRENT STATE OF CINEMA AND ON THE WAYS OF THINKING THIS STATE WITHOUT HAVING TO CONCLUDE THAT CINEMA IS DEAD OR DYING

1 L’Organisation Politique is the activist group of which Badiou was a founding member. – trans.

22 THE CINEMATIC CAPTURE OF THE SEXES

1 Diafoirus and Trissotin are two ridiculous pedants in Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire and Les Femmes savantes, respectively. – trans.

25 “SAY YES TO LOVE, OR ELSE BE LONELY”

1 Alain Badiou interviewed by Élisabeth Boyer, Daniel Fischer, Slim Ben Cheikh, Denis Lévy, Annick Fiolet, Emmanuel Dreux, and Anaïs Le Gaufey on June 5, 2002.

2 The French word for “threads,” “fils,” is written in the same way as the word for “son” or “sons,” and Badiou is playing on the homology here. – trans.

3 Alain Badiou, “Esquisse pour un premier manifeste de l’affirmationisme,” Utopia 3, La question de l’art au IIIème millénaire (Actes du colloque international Université Paris-VIII-Université de Venise, Éditions Ciro Giordano Bruno), GERMS [Groupe d’Étude et de recherche des médias symboliques] 2002.

26 DIALECTICS OF THE FABLE

1 This text derives from a paper delivered in March 2000 in the context of a day-long workshop on “Cinema and Philosophy,” organized by the Philosophy master’s program at the Université de Paris-VIII.

2 Arles: Actes Sud, 1988.

27 CINEMA AS PHILOSOPHICAL EXPERIMENTATION

1 In English in the text.

2 In fact, the slightly different quotation is from the Preface to Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. xiv.

3 “Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma,” Verve, vol. II, no. 8 (1940), p. 33.

29 THE END OF A BEGINNING

1 Text of a lecture delivered in Nantes on February 14, 2003 at the invitation of the Association La vie est à nous, as part of the “Jean-Luc Godard: années politiques” retrospective.

2 A “post-party” militant organization founded by Alain Badiou, Natacha Michel, and Sylvain Lazarus. From 1985 to 2007 it dealt with housing, immigration, and labor issues, among others, and was particularly active in support of undocumented migrant workers (sans papiers). – trans.