16

CAN A FILM BE SPOKEN ABOUT?

There is a first way of talking about a film that consists in saying things like “I liked it” or “It didn’t grab me.” This stance is indistinct, since the rule of “liking” leaves its norm hidden. With reference to what expectation is judgment passed? A crime novel can be liked or not liked. It can be good or bad. These questions do not turn that crime novel into a masterpiece of the art of literature. They simply designate the quality or tonality of the short time spent in its company. Afterward, we are overtaken by an indifferent loss of memory. Let us call this first phase of speech “the indistinct judgment.” It concerns the indispensable exchange of opinions, which, like talk of the weather, is most often about what life promises or withdraws by way of pleasant or precarious moments.

There is a second way of talking about a film, which is precisely to defend it against the indistinct judgment. To show – which already requires the existence of some arguments – that the film in question cannot simply be placed in the space between pleasure and forgetting. It is not just that it’s a good film – good in its genre – but that some Idea can be fixed, or at least foreseen, in its regard. One of the superficial signs of this change of register is that the author of the film is mentioned, as an author. On the contrary, indistinct judgment gives priority to mentions of the actors, of the effects, of a striking scene, or of the narrated plot. The second species of judgment aims to designate a singularity whose emblem is the author. This singularity is what resists the indistinct judgment. It tries to separate itself from what is said of the film within the general movement of opinion. This separation is also the one that isolates a spectator, who has both perceived and named the singularity, from the mass of the public. Let us call this judgment “the diacritical judgment.” It argues for the consideration of film as style. Style is what stands opposed to the indistinct. Linking the style to the author, the diacritical judgment proposes that something be salvaged from cinema, that cinema not be consigned to the forgetfulness of pleasures. That some names, some figures of the cinema, be noted in time.

The diacritical judgment is really nothing other than the fragile negation of the indistinct judgment. Experience demonstrates that it salvages the films less than the proper names of the authors, the art of cinema less than some dispersed stylistic elements. I am tempted to say that the diacritical judgment stands to authors in the same relation that the indistinct judgment stands to actors: as the index of a temporary remembrance. When all is said and done, the diacritical judgment defines a sophistical or differential form of opinion. It designates or constitutes “quality” cinema. But in the long run, the history of “quality” cinema does not trace the contours of any artistic configuration. Rather, it outlines the (consistently surprising) history of film criticism. This is because, in all epochs, it is criticism that provides the reference points for diacritical judgment. But in so doing, it remains far too indistinct. Art is infinitely rarer than even the best criticism could ever suspect. This is already obvious if we read some bygone literary critics today, say Saint-Beuve. The vision of their century offered by their undeniable sense of quality and by their diacritical vigor is artistically absurd.

In actual fact, a second forgetting envelops the effects of diacritical judgment, in a duration that is certainly different from that of the forgetting provoked by indistinct judgment, but is ultimately just as peremptory. “Quality,” that authors’ graveyard, designates less the art of an epoch than its artistic ideology. Ideology, which is what true art has always pierced holes in.

It is therefore necessary to imagine a third way of talking about a film, neither indistinct nor diacritical. I see it as possessing two external traits.

First of all, it is indifferent to judgment. Every defensive position has been forsaken. That the film is good, that it was liked, that it should not be commensurable to the objects of indistinct judgment, that it must be set apart … all of this is tacitly presumed by the very fact that we are talking about it. In no way does it represent the sought-after goal. Is this not precisely the rule that we apply to the established artistic works of the past? Are we brazen enough to think that the fact that Aeschylus’ Oresteia or Balzac’s Human Comedy were “well liked” is at all significant? That “frankly, they’re not bad”? In these instances, indistinct judgment becomes ridiculous. But the diacritical judgment fares no better. We are certainly not obliged to bend over backward to prove that the style of Mallarmé is superior to that of Sully Prudhomme – who in his day, incidentally, passed for a writer of the highest quality. We will therefore speak of film on the basis of an unconditional commitment, of an artistic conviction, not in order to establish its status as art, but to draw out all of its consequences. We could say that we thereby pass from the normative judgment – whether indistinct (“it’s good”) or diacritical (“it’s superior”) – to an axiomatic attitude that asks what are the effects for thought of such and such a film.

Let us then speak of axiomatic judgment.

The second feature of the judgment about a film is that no element of the film can be mentioned without its connection to the passage of an impure idea being established. I have already said two things with respect to the art of cinema, namely:

To speak about a film comes down to examining the consequences of the proper mode in which an Idea is treated thus by this particular film. Formal considerations – of cutting, shot, global or local movement, color, corporeal agents, sound, and so on – must be referred to only inasmuch as they contribute to the “touch” of the Idea and to the capture of its native impurity.

As an example, take the succession of shots in Murnau’s Nosferatu that mark the approach to the site of the prince of the undead. Overexposure of the meadows, panicking horses, thunderous cuts, together unfold the Idea of a touch of imminence, of an anticipated visitation of the day by the night, of a no man’s land between life and death. But there is also something mixed and impure in this visitation, something too manifestly poetic, a suspense that carries vision off toward waiting and disquiet, instead of allowing us to see the visitation in its definitive contours. Our thinking is not contemplative here, it is itself transported, traveling in the company of the Idea, rather than being able to take possession of it. The consequence that we draw from this is precisely that it is possible to think the thought-poem that traverses an Idea – less as a cut than as an apprehension through loss.

Speaking of a film will often mean showing how it summons us to such and such an Idea through the force of its loss, as opposed to painting, for example, which is par excellence the art of the Idea as meticulously and integrally given.

This contrast brings me to what I regard as the main difficulty facing any axiomatic discussion of a film. This difficulty is that of speaking about it qua film. When the film really does organize the visitation of an Idea – which is what we presuppose when we talk about it – it is always in a subtractive (or defective) relation to one or several among the other arts. To maintain the movement of defection, rather than the plenitude of its support, is the most delicate matter. Especially when the formalist path, which leads to supposedly “pure” filmic operations, presents us with an impasse. In cinema, nothing is pure. Cinema is internally and integrally contaminated by its situation as the “plus-one” of arts.

For example, consider once again the long crossing of the canals at the beginning of Visconti’s Death in Venice. The idea that passes here – and that the rest of the film both saturates and cancels – is that of a man who did what he had to do in his existence and who is consequently in suspense, awaiting either an end or another life. This idea is organized through the disparate convergence of a number of ingredients: There is the face of the actor Dirk Bogarde, the particular quality of opacity and interrogation carried by this face, a factor that really does belong to the art of the actor, whether we like it or not. There are the innumerable artistic echoes of the Venetian style, all of which are in fact connected to the theme of what is finished, settled, retired from history – pictorial themes already present in Guardi or Canaletto, literary themes from Rousseau to Proust. For us, in this type of visitor to the great European palaces there are echoes of the subtle uncertainty that is woven into the heroes of Henry James, for example. Finally, in Mahler’s music there is also the distended and exasperated achievement, marked by an all-encompassing melancholy, that belongs to the tonal symphony and its use of timbre (here represented by the strings alone). Moreover, one can easily show how these ingredients both amplify and corrode one another in a sort of decomposition by excess that precisely serves to present the idea as both passage and impurity. But what here is, strictly speaking, the film?

After all, cinema is nothing but takes and editing. There is nothing else. What I mean is this: There is nothing else that would constitute “the film.” It is therefore necessary to argue that, viewed from the vantage point of the axiomatic judgment, a film is what exposes the passage of the idea in accordance with the take and the editing. How does the idea come to its take [prise], how is it overtaken [sur-prise]? And how is it edited, assembled? But, above all, the question is the following: What singularity is revealed in the fact of being taken and edited in the disparate “plus-one” of the arts that we could not previously think or know about the idea?

In the example of Visconti’s film it is clear that take and editing conspire to establish a duration. An excessive duration that is homogeneous with the empty perpetuation of Venice and the stagnation of Mahler’s adagio, as well as with the performance of an immobile and inactive actor of whom only the face is, interminably, required. Consequently, in terms of the idea of a man whose being (or desire) is in a state of suspension, what this captures is that on his own, such a man is indeed immobile. The ancient resources have dried up. The new possibilities are absent. The filmic duration – composed from an assortment of several arts consigned to their shortcomings – is the visitation of a subjective immobility. This is what a man is when he is given over to the whim of an encounter. A man, as Samuel Beckett would say, “immobile in the dark,” until the incalculable delight of his torturer, of his new desire, comes upon him – if indeed it does come.

Now, the fact that it is the immobile side of the idea that is brought forward here is precisely what makes for a passage. One could show that the other arts either deliver their idea as a donation (at the summit of these arts stands painting) or invent a pure time of the Idea, exploring the configurations that the influence of thinking may adopt (at the summit of these arts stands music). By means of the possibility that is proper to it – of amalgamating the other arts, through takes and montage, without presenting them – cinema can, and must, organize the passage of the immobile.

But cinema must also organize the immobility of passage. We could easily show this through the relation that some of Straub’s shots entertain with the literary text, with its scansion and its progression. Alternatively, we could turn to the dialectic established at the beginning of Tati’s Playtime between the movement of a crowd and the vacuity of what could be termed its atomic composition. That is how Tati treats space as a condition for the passage of the immobile. Speaking of a film axiomatically will always be potentially disappointing, since it will always be exposed to the risk of turning the film in question into nothing more than a chaotic rival of the primordial arts. But we can still hold on to the thread of our argument. The imperative remains that of demonstrating how a particular film lets us travel with a particular idea in such a way that we might discover what nothing else could lead us to discover: that, as Plato already thought, the impurity of the Idea is always tied to the passing of an immobility or to the immobility of a passage. Which is why we forget ideas.

Against forgetting, Plato invokes the myth of a first vision and a reminiscence. To speak of a film is always to speak of a reminiscence: What occurrence – what reminiscence – is a given idea capable of, capable of for us? This is the point treated by every true film, one idea at a time. Cinema treats the ties that bind together movement and rest, forgetting and reminiscence, the impure. Not so much what we know as what we can know. To speak of a film is less to speak of the resources of thought than of its possibilities – that is, once its resources, in the guise of the other arts, are guaranteed. To indicate what there could be, beyond what there is. Or again: How the “impurification” of the pure clears the path for other purities.

L’Art du cinéma, November 1994. Reprinted in Petit Manuel d’inesthétique