8

REFERENCE POINTS FOR CINEMA’S SECOND MODERNITY¹

• Mention Godard first. He was also part of our historical frame of reference: the New Wave. The line of demarcation, the difference between the New Wave and what we are attempting to call cinema’s second modernity, passes through him.
• Note that, inasmuch as it is not a movement, a genre, or a school, it is a cinema that is not measurable. It is not a region of cinema but rather its furthermost tip.
• Can we say: a cinema of subjectivity? Rather, a cinema of the encounter with the question of the real, as an elusive term denoting the capture of subjective processes. A cinema of the question of the real, as such, in an opening made solely by its representation.
• Therefore, a cinema of modernity, as the generic identity of a cinema of truth [un cinéma de la vérité]; that deals with the question of truth. This is different from cinéma vérité (the latter enabled neorealism to be assimilated): it is its negative, in fact.
• For the record: Prior to Orson Welles, classical cinema experimented with the whole repertoire of its technical resources until mastery was achieved, in an atmosphere of ideological harmony; transparent propaganda, actually. Orson Welles introduced a reversal of perspective whereby cinematic processes would have to account for the production of images as specific ideological forms. Cinema refracts the worldview through its own prism: the scene in the hall of mirrors at the end of The Lady from Shanghai is the most spectacular metaphor of this.
  Since the way the image was organized could be perceived, Orson Welles invented a cinema that exposed this organization to view and asked the spectator what the basis of the story was.
• At the heart of modernity is anxiety about the death of classical cinema returning in the form of its failure: that of messages.
• The cinema has nothing left to give. With its repeated divorces from synchronization has come a lack of self-confidence, as the breakdown of communication. While for many directors this means adapting literary texts as the only way around the problem, doing so is sometimes accompanied by a simple recourse to the book of the Law (each having his or her own one).
• In Duras’ case, after the destruction of the codes of representation came the time of the prohibition on images as the supreme law of the impossibility of representation.
• Included in the question of that impossibility: the issue of a partition of the real – what, of the real, might make cinema possible? No longer in the dimension of refusal, subject to the laws of the imaginary categorical imperative (Duras, Debord), nor in the stance of a permanent guarantee either (Straub), but in the wager on the present.
• Straub, again. We said that the guarantee, where he is concerned, is permanent. His is a Leninist cinema. As opposed to Godard (see below), what it is important to choose has already been established. Truth does not circulate; it insists, even in distanciation.
• Godard, again, the only one who really takes on the question of what a truth for today might be: his willingness to be truth’s traffic cop [agent de la circulation de la vérité], not by putting the causes of a crisis on trial but through an encounter with present conditions.
• Even though the stakes are clearly defined, the confrontation with the real in his two latest films nonetheless amounts to an esthetics of subjective indecision. What is left unresolved is whether taking sides is such a small part of the real. Thus, there is an oscillation (reminiscent of the blinking light in Alphaville) in which indecision prevails as a maximum subjective surface area for a limited real.
  A repetition, in fact, of the questions raised in Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Every Man for Himself), serving, moreover, the interests of the truth of cinema’s current challenge: courage – as the political name of its transmission – versus anxiety – as the law of its guaranteed paralysis.
• The cinema of modernity: the emerging cinema of this dialectic.
• Therefore, something that cannot be represented, a real that slips away through the point of obscurity of its capture: the decision to take sides. The first approach consisted in saying that it is a cinema of the off-screen (its encounter with the real cannot be shown).
  The question raised by these problems is: What acts as an obstacle to such an extent that it is something unintelligible?
• And yet, the profoundly heterogeneous nature of all this. Under the name of “modernity” it is difficult to bring about any synthesis. This is moreover why modernity is itself part of the crisis; it is itself in crisis. It does not ensure a second foundation of cinema. It manipulates the suspense regarding cinema’s existence as art to the point of denying it, as does Debord, for the greater glory of the text. Duras’ temptation.
• Digression: Are there any ways for art to exist today other than in the spectacular epic mode (as is my case in L’Écharpe rouge² and Natacha Michel’s in Le Repos de Penthésilée)? Because, in that case, by creating something out of what is not, art can operate in the context of its failure vis-à-vis the real.
• Modernity – its obstacle: space. After all, space is the support of representation. Modernity could be said to be suspicious of space. In the past, there was a meticulous, creative, theatrical method of fabrication (the studio), but there was also wide open space (adventure). After Welles’ breaking of the frame and after the Godard of the 1960s – who took the image apart, used collages, subverted signifiers, pinned a character against a wall, with no distance, in a two-dimensional frame – modernity foundered on space. As though in order to gain more of the real, to get truth going, the frame had to be restricted. Reduce the resources to increase the gains.
• In Every Man for Himself the slowing down of the action already suggests that speed (the traversal of space) needs to be redefined. In Passion, the blue sky is a tribute to openness, saturated with religious music. It is a tribute to the bygone days of light. The rest, in terms of clutter, is tightly packed, jammed together: stairs, balconies, doors, kitchen, and then the implausibly frozen disarray of the paintings. Modern cinema, the film is saying, is an enigmatic sort of graphic design.
• Space, 2. In Duras’ work, space is a nowhere place, an exile in non-being, which is refracted in the mirror: dizziness for the spectator, directly faced with the disappearance of the real from the image.
• Space, 3. Wenders’ itinerary, which was a deep, fresh breath of air until its abrupt curtailment in The State of Things. An almost breathless cinema. Whereas Kings of the Road invents a modern kind of breathing, at once full and problematic.
• Space, 4. Straub. Space signifies forcefully. But all representation of space is like concrete. There is a huge system of constraints, an extreme ponderousness. The prime example of this is the complete closed circuit in the camera’s great pan over the countryside in Fortini/Cani: there’s where the dead are, there’s nothing but stillness there, but the filmic mass of space forces the meaning, forcefully.
• Space, 5. There is a certain strangeness about Dindo³ that comes from his self-confidence. His approach may quite often precede his own formulation of the categories that would explain it. As a rule, there is no indecision where he is concerned, since he is only too happy to follow the process of montage. In Dindo’s work there are “felicities of montage style,” the way we say there are “felicities of writing style.”
  In Max Frisch, only the lighthouse really signifies a space, because there is a sort of lack of formal resolution in it. All the rest of the system of places is generated by the text. The lighthouse comes back as the return of a certain real, the emblem of chance.
• Space, 6. Allio. An extraordinary clarity in his work. A depth, a colorful substance. In Retour à Marseille (Return to Marseilles) there is the same breadth of field as in Straub, but the depth is different.
• Space, 7. Space, then, as the designated place of the real, resists any sensible representation. Captured in the figures of absence, of enigma, of fragmentation, the real tends to be subject to accounting operations, as a proof of its certainty. Yet we are very well aware that the real can’t be measured, that we can’t be certain about it: we can only choose to be a part of it. And what is unconsciously brought about in this way by the ultimately invariable pitfalls of “the impression of reality” (accounting) is the avoidance of that truth.
• Space, 8. The representation of space. Follow Denis Lévy’s approach in L’École de mai and Mémoire en blanc: the deconstruction of the urban landscape’s frame of representation so as to prevent any figurative repercussions. An opening that reconstitutes space as a poetics of the sensible real.
• Modernity: The elements of dignity of this cinema in their confusion. To put an end to the influence of the other arts and the misconception of the image, which is obliged to be the ultimate, eternal guarantee of the reality effect.
  Thus, the coherence of this jumble of investigations, or even contradictions: the foundations of an art of the future.
• Modernity: The issue of cinema’s survival is not a matter of the future or the present, since, once the image has been shown to be nothing but a media entity subservient above all to its market, as merchandise, the image, that which is linked to its fetishistic status, is in the process of dying from an overdose: inflation as the rule of every market.
• Modernity: We will say, on the contrary, that cinema exists in the order of rarity today. Rarity as the only possible exception to the general rule, inflation. To say that cinema is rare today, even very rare, is a truth that proves that Les Cahiers du cinéma (the standard of cinema criticism) is lying. Gauging cinema’s existence as broadly as possible may be in line with the journal’s obsessive management of its readership numbers, but it amounts to betraying the essential truth of art: that it is always exceptional.
• The text, again. Modern cinema subdues the text in order to inject subjectivity into it. In French cinema, this runs up against the obstacle of the biographical, of personal sentimentality, the junkyard of which is so-called “French intimism.” Even in Marguerite Duras’ work, the voice, her famous voice, allows sentimentality in.
• The actor, 1: Arbitrarily place the actor, as the unnamed stakes, at the heart of modernity’s problematic issues of representation.
• The actor, 2: At the beginning, and for a long time thereafter, the actor was the support of theatricality, imported into the cinema. The theater has always had its actors; painting, its models; literature, its characters. Cinema incorporated all three of these to turn them into a whole: by creating the star, it afforded itself the quintessence of the actor (performance), the model (reality), and the character (identification), for the greater glory of a lifelike cinema.
• The actor, 3: In the interests of its own particular esthetic, modernity adopted the lessons of the New Wave to some extent – using the actor as the negative of his function in order to disrupt the process of identification – but it also removed the actor from the screen in all the versions of the relationship to this absence: from the way his quest was organized to his elimination, as being impossible.
• The actor, 4: Temporarily, the actor, the instability of perplexity, circulates in modernity as the place where truth is obfuscated.
• The actor, 5: In the meantime, pay attention to the productive processes of this perplexity: the attempts to eliminate the figurative effects connected with the body, as the removal of a first layer of obscurity. With Max Frisch, Dindo succeeded in making a film with characters but without actors, or the opposite case with Godard: the actors as non-representation of characters. And again the actors in Straub’s or Duras’ work as radical impossibility.

L’Imparnassien, May 1983