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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

– I –

On the notion of “the situation of cinema”

There is no “objective” situation of cinema. That is, the situation of cinema – or, the current conjuncture of this artistic procedure – cannot be situated “in itself.” “What is happening” (the films which are released) does not produce, on its own, any sort of intelligibility. There are general reasons behind this lack, but there are also reasons linked to the singularity of the cinematographic procedure.

(a) General reasons

The relation of thought to the current moment in art is one of a localized prescription and not a description. Everything depends upon the point at which one is subjectively situated, and upon the axioms which are used to support judgments. The point at which we choose to situate ourselves is called L’Art du cinéma, which claims a local status quite different to that of a simple review: a group of thought, possessing an orientation and particular protocols for “inquiry.” It possesses two foundational axioms; drawn from Denis Lévy’s work:

1. Cinema is capable of being an art, in the precise sense in which one can identify, among the undividedness of forms and subjects, cinema-ideas.

2. This art has been traversed by a major rupture, between its identificatory, representative and humanist (“Hollywoodian”) vocation and a modernity which is distanced, involving the spectator in an entirely different manner. Naturally, this rupture has a complicated genealogy, which dictates the group’s vision of the history of cinema

The “current situation of cinema” (or conjuncture) can then be called the legibility of an indistinct real (films which are made) on the basis of two axioms. One can then produce derived propositions, or propositions of the situation. These propositions identify the situation, not “objectively,” but on the basis of engagements concerning something which has recognizable artistic autonomy. This is a little like parliamentary politics, in a given situation, only being identifiable on the basis of the statements of the Organisation Politique.1

In what follows what must not be forgotten is that it is the films of Oliveira, of Kiarostami, of Straub, of the early Wenders, of a certain Pollet, of some Godards, etc., which prescribe the conjuncture, or which provide the measure (whether or not it is explicitly mentioned) of derived judgments. They are what allow us to identify everything in the situation which is relatively progressive from the standpoint of art, even when this progressivism occurs within frameworks or references foreign to what L’Art du cinéma terms modernity. They also provide the measure of the new, precisely because they were the new. The new does not enter into a dialectic with the old, but rather with the old new, or the new of the preceding sequence.

(b) Particular reasons

The latter are attached to a thesis which has been incorporated into L’Art du cinéma’s doctrine: that of the essential impurity of cinema. Up till the present, this thesis has signified above all that the passage of an idea in a film presupposes a complex summoning forth and displacement of the other arts (theater, the novel, music, painting … ), and that as such “pure cinema” does not exist, except in the dead-end vision of avant-garde formalism. This thesis of impurity must be expanded and the following principle proposed: The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art. No film, strictly speaking, is controlled by artistic thinking from beginning to end: It always bears absolutely impure elements within it, drawn from ambient imagery, from the detritus of other arts, and from conventions with a limited shelf life. Artistic activity can only be discerned in a film as a process of purification of its own immanent non-artistic character. This process is never completed. Even better, if it was completed, thereby generating the supposed purity of experimental cinema (or even certain radical normative statements by Bresson on “cinematographic writing”), then the artistic capacity itself, or rather, its universal address, would be suppressed. Cinema’s artistic operations are incompletable purification operations, bearing on current non-artistic forms, or indistinct imagery (Rimbaud’s “idiotic paintings”).

The result of all this is that the dominant forms of non-art are immanent to art itself, and make up part of its intelligibility. Hence the permanent necessity of inquiry into the dominant formal tendencies within current production, and of the identification of circulating, even industrial, schemas of the visible and the audible; because it is upon the latter that artistic operations are potentially performed.

– II –

Four examples

(a) The Godardian technique of “dirty sound” (inaudible phrases, superimposition of sounds, parasitical noises, etc.) is an attempt at a formal purification of what has invaded contemporary production; that is, the constant confusion of music (in its post-rock form), brutal sounds (arms, explosions, cars, planes, etc.) and dialogues reduced to their operational ineptness. In current production, there is an imposition of sound, or a submission to the demand, characteristic of contemporary youth, for a permanent rhythmic background accompanying every activity, even speech or writing: this is what Godard transforms into an adulterated murmur. By means of this operation, what Godard does is treat the confusion of the world as artifice, as voluntary principle of the confusion of thoughts.

(b) The usage of car sequences in Kiarostami or even Oliveira’s films works on an overwhelming stereotype of contemporary imagery, thanks to which the opening scene of two films out of every three is a car sequence. The operation consists of making an action scene into the place of speech, of changing what is a sign of speed into a sign of slowness, of constraining what is an exteriority of movement to become a form of reflexive or dialogic interiority.

(c) Sexual activity, filmed directly on bodies, forms a major part of what is authorized by dominant contemporary imagery. It is opposed to the metonymy of desire, which was one of the key characteristics of classic cinematographic art, and which aimed at avoiding the censor by sexualizing tiny details. The artistic problem is thus: what usage can be made of sexualized nudity in its tendentiously full exposition? The attempts at purifying such material are innumerable; whether they turn it towards speech (in contemporary French comedy), or ritualize it (certain of Antonioni’s sequences), or make distanced citations of it, or render it banal by incorporating it into a genre (as Eastwood does in The Bridges of Madison County), or overpornographize it in an abstract manner (Godard at times).

(d) Special effects of any kind, the formalized spectacle of destruction, of cataclysm, a sort of Late Roman Empire consummation of murder, cruelty and catastrophe: these are the obvious ingredients of current cinema. They are inscribed in a proven tradition, but there is no longer much of an attempt to embed them in a consistent fable with a moral, indeed religious, vocation. They derive from a technique of shock and one-upmanship, which is related to the end of an epoch in which images were relatively rare and it was difficult to obtain them. The endless discussions about the “virtual” and the image of synthesis refer to nothing other than the overabundance and facility of the image, including the spectacularly catastrophic or terrorizing image. Here again, attempts at purification exist, directed towards a stylized inflation, a type of slowed calligraphy of general explosion; the grand master evidently being John Woo.

– III –

A thesis and its consequences

One can then formulate the following principle: A film is contemporary, and thus destined for everyone, inasmuch as the material whose purification it guarantees is identifiable as belonging to the non-art of its times.

This is what makes cinema, intrinsically and not empirically, into a mass art: its internal referent is not the artistic past of forms, which would suppose an educated spectator, but a common imagery whose filtering and distancing treatment is guaranteed by potential artistic operations. Cinema gathers around identifiably non-artistic materials, which are ideological indicators of the epoch. It then transmits, potentially, their artistic purification, within the medium of an apparent indiscernibility between art and non-art.

Whence, to think the current situation of cinema, a number of directions for our inquiry:

(a) Of course, we will maintain the idea that the artistic operations of modernity consist in purifying visible and audible materials of everything which binds them to the domination of representation, identification and realism. But we will add that the current challenge is that of extending this treatment to everything which binds the materials to the pure formal consumption of images and sounds, whose privileged operators today are: pornographic nudity, the cataclysmic special effect, the intimacy of the couple, social melodrama, and pathological cruelty. For it is only by purifying these operators, while recognizing their necessity, that one gives oneself the chance of encountering a real in situation, and thus of assuring the passage, or the visitation, of a new cinema-idea.

(b) What is thus required is knowledge of materials in their real movement, and knowledge of the dominant tendencies which organize the latter.

(c) Cinematic works must be dealt with and hypotheses of configuration made: this on the basis of the operations of purification and displacement of materials and their operators; operations through which cinema-ideas will occur which are effectively contemporary and which have a universal address.

At this point in time, it is quite probable that the basic unit of investigation is not so much a film in its totality as some moments of film, moments within which an operation is legible. Legibility means the following: one grasps, at the same time, the subjacent material, which assures that the film is contemporary, the protocol of purification, which is the artistic index, and the passage of the idea (or encounter with a real), which is the effect of the protocol. In the current phase of transition, within which the weight of non-art is crushing (because, and we will come back to this, in general, nothing else is opposed to it apart from a formalized distance), it is necessary to engage in the work of identification of operations, including those occurring within films which are globally deficient. In this work we will not be entirely guided by the notion of auteur, because, no doubt, nobody as yet maintains a mastered and consistent relation to the mutation of material (what is it to make films when every image is facile?). If such a relation emerged, then we would have a great mass auteur on our hands, such as Chaplin or Murnau, and without a doubt we would have such within a determined genre born from the situation. Yet nothing of the sort is on the horizon, neither in explosive neo-thrillers (despite the existence of auteurs of quality such as Woo or de Palma), nor in gore films (despite Craven’s subtle displacements), nor in pornography (Bénazéraf has not kept any of his promises), nor in social melodrama (despite the efforts of a few English filmmakers).

There is thus a necessity for an inquiry into the details, guided by the sense of possible situations, by our “consumerist” visits to the cinema (to a certain degree we should share in the innocent fairground mass aspect of “seeing films”), by our instinct, and by the decoding of current criticism.

– IV –

Exceptions

One should set apart the cases in which, for a certain period of time, a vast political modification, a global event, authorized the discredit of ordinary industrial materials (let us say Hollywoodian materials, or Indian, or Egyptian), and made possible an original grasp of the evental site. During at least one temporal sequence, the cinema’s mass dimension was not incompatible with a direct concern to invent forms in which the real of a country occurs as a problem. This was the case in Germany, as the escort of leftism (Fassbinder, Schroeter, Wenders … ), in Portugal after the 1975 revolution (Oliveira, Botelho … ), and in Iran after the Islamic revolution (Kiarostami). In all of these examples it is clear that what cinema is capable of touches the country, as a subjective category (what is it to be from this country?). There are cinema-ideas concerning this point, such as its previous invisibility is revealed by the event. The cinema is then both modern and broad in its action. A national cinema with a universal address emerges; a national school, recognizable in everything up to its insistence on certain formal aspects.

– V –

Formal operators and dominant motifs

Besides national exceptions, the inquiry must determine the situation with regard to conclusive operations practiced upon a certain number of dominant motifs, more or less coded within genres. What virtual ideas are at work in these operations?

(a) The visibility of the sexual, or, more generally, the motif of erogenous nudity. The question is that of knowing what this motif, purified, but without any possibility of a return to the classical metonymies imposed by censorship, can bring to bear concerning the non-relation between love and sexuality. Or how can it prove an exception (when first of all it confirms it) to the contemporary subsumption of love by the functional organization of enjoyment. What degree of visibility can be tolerated by what one could call the amorous body? A simple critical analysis of pornography is only the first stage, as can be seen in Godard’s abstract pornographic scenes, for example in Sauve qui peut (la vie). As yet no conclusive work has been done on this point, and the identification of some attempted operations upon this motif would be welcome.

A subsidiary question would be that of asking oneself whether pornography, X movies, could become a genre. Let us agree that what is termed “genre” has given rise to artistic enterprises. Otherwise, one can speak of specialities. Is pornography necessarily a speciality and not a genre? And if so, why? This is a particularly interesting question with regard to the very essence of cinema insofar as it is confronted with the full visibility of the sexual.

(b) Extreme violence, cruelty. This is a complex zone, which includes the theme of the torturing serial killer (Seven), and its horror gore variations (Halloween, Scream … ), the violent neo-thriller, certain films about the mafia (even Casino contained shots of an unmeasured cruelty), and films about the end of the world with various tribal survivors cutting each other’s throats. It is not a matter of variations of the horrifying film as a genre. The element of cruelty, the slashing, the crushing of bones, the torture, prevails over suspense and fear. It is an ensemble which actually evokes the late Roman Empire, because its essential material consists of its variations on putting-to-death.

The point is one of knowing whether all this could be exposed to a tragic treatment. Before judging these bloody torturing images, one must remember that tales of horrendous executions, the variety of murders, and the monstrosity of actions, were all major elements of the most refined tragedies. All one has to do is reread the tale of Hyppolite’s death in Racine’s Phèdre. After all, one can hardly better the Greek story of Atreus and Thyestes, a major narrative commonplace in tragedy in which one sees a father eat his own children. Here, our inquiry is guided by a simple question: do embyronic operations exist which announce that all this material – which acts like an urban mythology for today – will be integrated into attempts at contemporary baroque tragedy?

(c) The figure of the worker. It is well known that there has recently been a return, via England, but also in American documentaries, of social melodrama. Even in France, all sorts of attempts, from Reprise to Marius et Jeanette, aim at giving a verdict on a certain figure of the worker, in the milieu of the PCF [French Communist Party] or May ‘68. The problem is then one of knowing whether cinema can contribute to the subjective generalization of the autonomy of the figure of the worker. For the moment the cinema only deals with the latter’s end, and as such gives rise to nostalgic operations, like those of Brassed Off.

The history of this question is very complex, if one thinks simultaneously of Modern Times (Chaplin), of French noir romanticism (Le Jour se lève), of the epic Soviet films, and of the films of the sequence opened by ‘68 (Tout va bien, Oser lutter … ). Today the question would be: What is the formal operator which purifies this figure’s passage of all nostalgia, and contributes to its installation? That is, to its detachment from any social objectivity? What is at stake is the very possibility of a real encounter of cinema and politics; no doubt the figure of the worker would have to be the film’s unfigurable real point much as it is sketched, after all, in Denis Lévy’s L’École de Mai (1979).

(d) The millenarian motif. This occurs in the register of planetary catastrophes from which some Yankee hero saves us. The subjacent real is globalization, the hegemony of one sole superpower, and also ecological ideologies concerning the global village and its survival. The fundamental imagery is that of the catastrophe, and not that of salvation. Moreover, this “genre” already comes with its own ironic version (see Mars Attacks). The point lies in knowing whether the motif of a general threat can provide the material for an operation which would transmit the idea that the world is prey to Capital in its unbridled form, and by this very fact rendered, globally, foreign to the very truths that it detains in its midst. This time it is clear that it is the possibility of an epic film which is at stake, but of an epic whose “hero” is restricted action, truth procedures’ confidence in themselves.

(e) The petit-bourgeois comedy. Here we have a highly prized modern variation of the French intimist tradition. The comedy revolves around a young hystericized woman, of a certain vacuity, who is fraught by her amorous, social and even intellectual wanderings. As such, this genre is linked to Marivaux and Musset, as it is to the Marianne of Caprices, and given its clear delineation in the work of its founding father, Rohmer. Almost all recent French “auteurs” have been involved in this business. It is still a minor genre with regard to the American comedy of the 1930s and 1940s, which is similar in many respects, termed by Stanley Cavell the comedy of “remarriage.”

Why such minor inferiority? We should be able to respond to this question. For example, it could be said that the central weakness of these films is that the central stakes of the intrigue remain undetermined. In the American films as in Marivaux there is a decision or a declaration at the end of the day. The comedy of uncertainty and the double game is articulated around this fixed point. This is what allows Marivaux’s prose to be simultaneously underhand and extremely firm. If Rohmer remains superior to his descendants, it is because among his Christian allusions to grace, he occasionally finds something which is at stake. In Conte d’Automne it is obvious that the main motif is: “Happier are the simple of mind, the grace of love is reserved for them.” Nothing of the sort is to be found in the work of a Desplechin, a Barbosa or a Jacquot. In the end, this genre only gains artistic force when it gives itself, on the basis of an unshakeable confidence in love’s capacities, a fixed point, such as required by all comedies in order to tie down their internal wanderings.

Psychoanalysis, made much use of by current auteurs (including the sad Woody Allen), is a dead end, because, paradigmatically, it is the place of the interminable.

We can no longer symbolize the fixed point by marriage or even remarriage. No doubt, as Rohmer suggests, and sometimes Téchiné, it is to be found where love encounters another truth procedure. It would then be necessary to formalize a subjective ex-centring, a conversion, a visible distancing, and finally, a displacement with regard to the dominant conception, even if the latter serves as initial material, a conception which is a mix of narcissism and hystericized inertia.

– VI –

Cinema and the other arts

The generalization of the notion of impurity must not cause us to forget that it is first of all an impurity with regard to other arts. What are the contemporary forms of this question?

(a) On cinema and music. The schema must be drawn up on the basis of rhythm. We will call “rhythm” not exactly the characteristics of the editing, but a diffused temporality which fixes, even if it is a matter of a sequence shot, the tonality of the movement (staccato, or hurried, or expanded, or slow and majestic, etc. … ). Rhythm engages every element of the film, and not only the organization of shots and sequences. For example, the style of acting or the intensity of the colors contribute to rhythm just as much as the speed of the succession of shots. At base, rhythm is the general pulsation of filmic transitions. Music is a type of immediate commentary upon the latter, often purely redundant or emphatic. Yet it is clearly rhythm which ties cinema to music.

The twentieth century, which, after all, was the century of cinema, essentially witnessed three types of music. First, there was post-romantic music which maintained the artifices of the finishing tonality, such as found in Mahler or Tchaikovsky’s symphonic melancholy, and which continues, via Strauss or Rachmaninov, right through to the current day, and singularly in cinema. Second, the great creation of American blacks, jazz, which has its major artists from Armstrong to Monk, but to which we must also attach, in its entirety, everything which falls under the term “youth music,” from rock to techno. Finally, there was a continuation through rupture of veritable musical creation, which, from Schoenberg to Brian Ferneyhough, liquidated tonality and constructed a universe of musical singularities, serial and post-serial.

At the cinema, we have watched a massive movement, as yet incomplete (because every neo-classical film reclassicizes music), from post-romantic music to post-jazz music. This accompanies, at the level of rhythm, a passage from an emphatic esthetic of dilation (taken to its extreme in the openings of Westerns, which are genuinely symphonic) to an esthetic of fragmentation, whose matrix, as everyone remarks, is the video clip, a sub-product of youth music.

The central problem seems to be the following: could a rhythm be invented which would tie cinema to the real of music as art, and not to the decomposed forms of symphonism or the demagogic forms of youth music? How is it possible that cinema has left aside the entirety of contemporary musical creation? Why, besides post-romanticism and post-jazz, isn’t there a cinema of post-serial music? Do we not have here – it being a matter, after all, of what has been, for a century, genuine music – one of the reasons which – cinema being the essential mass art – relegates the sole restrained action of musical creation to the shadows? We must return to the few attempts at filmic and thus rhythmic incorporation of the music of our times, in Straub or Oliveira’s work, in order to discern the operations which make a strength out of it, but which have also limited it.

(b) On cinema and theater. L’Art du cinéma has spent a lot of time working on this question. In order to progress further the best question to be asked is probably the following: What is a cinematic actor today? This is a question which traverses all the other questions. Today, an American actor is dominated by the imperative of sexual visibility, by confrontation with extreme violence and by millenarian heroism. He is an immobile receptacle for a type of disintegrating cosmos. He alone bears the latter’s consistency, or what remains of it. In the end, he forms a type of invulnerable body. Moreover, this is why the actor is essentially a man, an impassive athlete. Women are almost uniformly decorative, far more so now than in the previous epoch, during which they were able to occupy the pernicious center of the narrative. Or, in the case of neo-comedy, women are mere figures from magazines, neurotic prey for “women’s problems.”

We should ask ourselves what exactly is going on in cinema’s impurification of the theater actor. The reappearance within cinema of the subtle actor or actress – that is, one who would divert the evidence of the image through their acting, who would keep him or herself in reserve with regard to this evidence, and who would poeticize it – such a reappearance would be welcome news, and it is news whose traces must be tracked down (they exist). Obviously what is in question in the film must allow the actor to act in such a way; this means that the gap between what is shown and the subjective fold of such showing must remain measured. Téchiné, for example, succeeds in doing just this in several sequences. In any case, what is certain is that one cannot lend support to a subtle actor if one incessantly juxtaposes him or her, as some sort of resistant massivity, to a visual and sonorous harassment, or if his or her body and its gestures is abandoned to the interminable plasticity of neuroses.

– VII –

A general hypothesis

At a completely global level, we can frame the particular inquiries which we have just set out by formulating, at our own risk, the following hypothesis: The moment is one of neo-classicism.

This hypothesis signifies three things:

Yet, against formalism, whose encounter with any real is improbable, or exterior (hence the ends of formalist films, which most often relapse into sugared realism, as if saying or affirming supposed a renunciation of the movement of form) one can predict an academic reaction, which has even already begun here and there.

We will term neo-classical the effort at an internal purification of the academic reaction and its regime of visibility. There is already something of this genre in the best sequences of Titanic, or even Brassed Off. It is a matter of operations which assume the reactive conjuncture, but which work it on the basis of the saturated modern sequence. A little like Picasso between the cubist sequence of the 1910s, and the opening, from the 1930s-1940s onwards, of genuine non-figurative art. He accepted a certain return to representative forms, but he worked them from the standpoint of cubism itself.

Our last question will be: What are the few clues of such an effort worth today? What do they promise?

L’Art du cinéma, March 1999