Central to Rossellini’s grand project for pedagogy through the image are the films he made for television on three eminent figures from western philosophy: Socrates, Descartes and Pascal.1 Rossellini’s intention is to transmit to a television audience, to the ordinary men and women of his time, the word of great innovators of thought. He wants to transmit it in a non-abstract way, through the image, making it perceptible to all. But the word of the image should not lend itself to ambiguity. Making thought perceptible does not only mean giving it a form supposedly more accessible to untutored minds. It also means opposing the letter which kills the living mind with the thought incarnate in bodies that put it into action. The task is not to make an image of the philosophers’ doctrines with examples but to show philosophers’ bodies, bodies that bear witness to what philosophy is as lived experience and concrete intervention.
How is this philosopher’s body to be represented? At first glance three main forms are discernible. The final sequences of Cartesius show them in succession. We see Descartes confronted by his contradictors. The incarnation principle is very simple here. The textual exchange between the Objections marshalled by Gassendi, Hobbes, Arnauld and others against Descartes’s Méditations métaphysiques and his Réponses is transformed into an oral debate. The written texts are entrusted to bodies who recite them. On one level, they are pure bodies of enunciation arranged in a scene in the image of our seminars or academic panels. But they are also historicized bodies. They wear black robes with high white collars and big hats. Descartes himself resembles his Frans Hals portrait. The arguers are composed into a period picture in which the text of Descartes and his contradictors is lodged rather like the heads stuck through holes in a fairground photographer’s comic picture. Embodiment here clearly has the illustrative function of dressing up declarations.
From the seminar theatre we pass on to the printing shop where Mersenne is supervising the publication of the Méditations. Here we are being shown the conditions under which the philosopher’s thought is diffused. These conditions are twofold. Firstly they are the material procedures of printing: the hand operated press, the paper drying like linen on washing lines. We have here a period picture that marks the tension between the primitive techniques being used and the very fact of printing, the synonym for the transmission of modern thought to the largest number of people. But the conditions also include the risks of censorship. The men in big hats are those on whom the book’s circulation depends. So we see Mersenne reading the dedication to the masters of the Sorbonne in which Descartes deferentially addresses the guardians of dogma. We catch the echo of the same debate between Brecht’s Galileo Galilei and his disciple: what concessions must be made to the carriers of dominant error in order for the truth to be transmitted? Here the use of images is no longer simply illustrative; we can call it documentary.
There follows the closing sequence of the film. As it is not a conventional biography there will be no journey to Sweden, no philosopher’s death. The final sequence first shows us Descartes in conversation with Huygens who is offering his condolences to one who has just lost his father and his child. But the private conversation telescopes into the statement of what appears to be the thinker’s philosophical testament giving up all tangible affections: ‘I will now close my eyes, I will block my ears, I will even erase from my thoughts all images of corporeal things …’. The reader will have recognized the exordium of the Third Méditation. In the Cartesian text, this mise en scène of the first person singular clearly performs the function of creating a conceptual character, in the Deleuzian sense: the character of one who no longer knows anything of what everyone knows. This dramaturgy of ignorance, we know, will soon lead the philosopher to a certainty of the existence of God, of the eternal truths and of the whole edifice of science. But here Rossellini cuts away from that whole journey and transforms the philosophical scenario into an existential one, the conceptual character into a suffering being. The closed eyes and blocked ears become signs of mourning and meditation; the experience of thought becomes a withdrawal from the tangible world. It is on this withdrawal by the philosopher that the film ends, as if the thought had now found the body fit to incarnate it. At this point the philosophical declaration is no longer simply illustrated or documented, it is subjectivized. It is attributed to a living character, a fictional character, whose pathos it constitutes.
Thus, there are three main ways of making philosophy tangible: by illustration, documentation and subjectivization. One of them is classic and largely risk free: this is the second, the documentary method which makes philosophy tangible by showing it in its milieu, struggling with its conditions of exercise. That way through the entourage is the way of the mediator. One character occupies it in the film because he occupies it in the history and legend of Descartes: Father Mersenne, the sage and priest open to novelties who managed the relations of Descartes and Pascal with the intellectual world and the official world. Mersenne in a sense is the representative of Rossellini in the film. Inversely, Rossellini puts himself forward as the Mersenne of the television age, the go-between arranging transmission of the philosophical word to the authority that succeeded the Catholic Church – public opinion. But to transmit the word addressed by Descartes or Pascal to their own time – and not just the arrangements that rendered it acceptable – the other two ways are needed, the risky ways.
The risks of illustration are simply stated, if not easily avoided. The robes, collars and headgear worn by the doctors discussing the Méditations may remind us of the Second Meditation in which Descartes describes these cloaks and hats he sees from his window and attributes to men passing by, although perhaps they are just covering ‘spectres or painted men who only move by clockwork’. But more than that, they recall an illustrious text from Descartes’s ritual adversary – both in Rossellini’s view and the whole tradition – Pascal’s text on the misleading powers of the imagination. In it the authority of judges, doctors and scientists is reduced to their ermines, cassocks and square caps. ‘If they had genuine justice and if doctors had the real art of healing, they would not have to make square caps.’ The comment does not figure in the film. It would backfire too clearly: if philosophy were present here, one would not have to make black robes, white collars and big hats any more than the library. Illustration of rational thought is inseparable from illustration of its imagery.
But the risks of subjectivization are even more severe. One quite sees the advantage in placing the philosophical word on the lips and in the heart of a living man, and authenticating it for example with the suffering of a bereaved father. Surely someone mourning a child is worthy of some credit? Rossellini’s compatriots, Nanni Moretti and Marco Bellocchio, are here to remind us of it. But it is a double-edged weapon. The character’s credibility is exercised at the cost of what he should be transmitting. The use of the beginning of the Third Meditation is exemplary in this respect. On the one hand, subjectivizing the refusal to read sensory messages as an expression of a man’s suffering operates clearly to the detriment of its subjectivization as a philosophical experience. On the other hand, those ‘closed eyes’ signify a dismissal of the image. Trying to give a body to the philosopher’s word on screen means running the risk of seeing – inversely – the word and the image cancelling each other out.
But this risk itself sends us back to a fundamental aporia. In its strictest sense does the portrait of the philosopher not mean the portrait of a body that conceals the thought it contains? Over the question of the philosopher’s body, there is a large, looming shadow. That shadow is the one cast by Socrates, more precisely of the master of Alcibiades who directs The Symposîum. The image of Socrates composed by Alcibiades is effectively one of total dissimilarity between the inside and the outside. The Silenus-headed man contains within him the precious treasure, the words of gold. But it is vain to aspire to appropriate that treasure of wisdom by harvesting the exact words that come out of his mouth, like the naïve Agathon who sticks close to the master; and it is vain to offer to pay for it with his body, as Alcibiades proposes. That, the master replies, would be a fool’s bargain: such knowledge is too precious or not precious enough to be bought in that way. There is nothing else to do then but keep listening, at the risk of neglecting public affairs and spending your life in the shadow of the master, like an ageing child still in love with enchantments. The Platonic text makes the body of the exemplary philosopher a paradoxical body, doubly resistant to the enterprise of transmitting thought in images. His exterior does not resemble or express the thought he contains in any way. And that thought itself carries characteristics of the inexchangeable, the intransmissible. It cannot be learned or applied. The hero of rational wisdom mainly induces trance states and deters his disciples from being men useful to their city.
The role played by this portrait of the philosopher in the imagination of philosophy teachers is relatively well-known. It offers them the image, if not the method, of a pedagogic practice whose essence includes the actual impossibility of pedagogy. For the filmmaking pedagogue the paradox presents itself differently. Rossellini is first and foremost a film director before being an educator keen to introduce everyone to the thinking of great masters of the mind. And as a filmmaker he has maintained a special relationship with paradoxical bodies, deviant ones that take a shortcut by breaking the normal rules of exchange. This is what Irena, the heroine of Europa ’51, does after missing the bus home and taking a wrong turning that leads her deep into the world of sub-proletarians, prostitutes and thieves and concludes with her incarceration in the lunatic asylum. We also recall the girl Nannina, an idiot whose apparent pregnancy is variously attributed to rape and divine intervention, in ‘The Miracle’ from an episode of Woman/Ways of Love (1948, co-scripted by Rossellini from a story by Fellini). At first sight there seems to be a kinship between the paradoxical philosophical body described by Alcibiades and the Rossellinian cinematic body, the scandalous body that breaks the rules of identification and exchange. And the director had himself made Irena’s incarceration into a modern version of the trial of Socrates. So it is worthwhile considering what this cinematic bias can produce in terms of representing the philosopher subject. It is even more worthwhile to test it when Rossellini puts Socrates on screen.
A setback awaits us on the appearance of Socrates in the film that carries his name. A banquet has taken place before his arrival, but neither he nor Alcibiades was present. The guests are only Athenian notables who talk about how to behave towards the Spartan occupiers and inform us the Spartans have decided to distribute food to the citizens. The distribution provokes a popular uprising, the kind of disorder Rossellini often features in his films: for example when the mob chases Nannina, or when the couple in Voyage to Italy is swept away by devotees of the San Gennaro miracle. Here it is Socrates himself who finds himself being jostled. But this street disorder is a means of establishing order in the image. In the event everything turns on changing a declaring body. ‘Thou hast the head of a Silenus,’ said the enamoured Alcibiades. Here the remark is attributed to one of the young hoodlums attacking the philosopher. The paradoxical eulogy of the young iconoclast becomes a banal insult from the ignorant rabble demanding that the philosopher, critical of the learning of others, tell them in what he is himself so learned, and eliciting in close-up the expected answer: ‘I know that I know nothing.’ The paradox form becomes the transmissible sentence par excellence, the sage’s eternal lesson to the presumptuous. Socrates is extracted from his bothersome kinship with the idiot Nannina or the madwoman Irena. He becomes the spokesman of his own image, representative of a smiling and peaceful wisdom, victim of the upsets of politics and the presumption of the ignorant. Alcibiades and Callicles complained he was distracting well-born young people from serving the City. Here on the contrary he becomes a civics teacher to explain the workings of Athenian democracy to a small child. With Alcibiades, Agathon and Plato thrown out, there remains the image of good guy Socrates who recites the recognized sentences and fixes the accepted portrait of the philosopher as the free mind who teaches himself to think by casting doubt on established opinions and learning.
Doubtless Rossellini’s Socrates film is an extreme case in which the illustrative function has devoured the subjectivizing function, cancelling out the philosophical body and the cinematic body at the same time. I mention it mainly to ask the question to which the more elaborate fictions Cartesius and Blaise Pascal will suggest answers: how should the philosopher’s body be represented, as the basis for certain statements and as intervening subject during a certain period in time? The pedagogical plan requires in effect that the philosopher’s body be not simply that of the representative of a discipline but of the hero of thought, the innovator who acts in his own time as the carrier of times to come. That assumes a certain relation between the three functions – illustrative, documentary and subjectivizing – that I have isolated. Giving body to the philosophical statement is not a simple matter of dressing it in robes and square hats. It does not just mean surrounding it with accessories suggesting a place and a time. It means inscribing the philosopher’s thought in a material universe, making it stand out from that universe as a way of interpreting it and acting on it.
There are three main ways of doing this. The innovator can be presented with his time. Thus Descartes and Pascal are seen surrounded by material emblems of reason in action, those that belong to their time or that they have themselves invented: printing press, telescope, dissection table, calculating machine, but also new mercantile activities including the omnibus Pascal is said have originated. We can also show the innovator as against his time, struggling with the forces of resistance: routine, the wisdom of proverbs spoken by a servant mistress, but also superstition and fanaticism. Pascal is a witness in a witchcraft trial or is challenged in the street by retrograde elements, Descartes watches a hysterical monk shouting beside the bonfire on which the libertine Théophile de Viau is being burned in effigy. But the third way, the most interesting, is the one that shows us the innovator in his time, reason in action caught up in the materialism of a way of life but also a system of rituals and a whole world of emotions and feelings. That particular time bears a strong resemblance to the one described by the historians of the Annals: it determines what may be felt and thought. The onward march of reason draws its energy from the surrounding soil, the compost of material modes of production and collective forms of sensibility, feelings and beliefs.
This is Rossellini’s preferred way. And it is immediately apparent why the man Socrates is less than perfect for this role: he is a character from the old kind of history that features exemplary lives. It is doomed visually to the papier mâché of reconstitutions. The image of the living Socrates can never catch the force of timeless provocation seen in the Platonic text. Descartes and Pascal on the other hand are characters from the new history, the one that shows us thought emerging from the soil of material life. So it is not through simple documentary zeal that Rossellini eagerly takes us into the Pascals’ kitchen and even into their stables, that he places Descartes at inn tables or in the kitchen where his mistress and maid Hélène is bustling about: these are all opportunities to compose pictures in the style of Le Nain or Vermeer and to receive into them emissaries straight from a painting by Frans Hals or Philippe de Champaigne. This is to place them, literally, in their time – the one whose men, Marc Bloch said, resembled it more closely than they did their fathers. That time, Lucien Febvre added, was essentially marked by the scansions dividing up the day, rituals that adjusted and adapted people’s thoughts and actions there. Thus there are numerous waking-up scenes with curtains being drawn back by a servant, in a dual-use gesture that symbolizes everyday routine but also serves as a metaphor for the awakening of thought and the brightening of the image. Behind the curtain, there is Pascal’s suffering body or Descartes’s nonchalant one, which his servants or friends have trouble dragging out of bed, sometimes at the cost of having to record the resolutions born out of sleep (‘I have decided to criticize all opinions including my own’). These images of curtains being drawn, of morning prayers or ablutions, put the philosopher in his time. But they are dangerously close to the rituals with which the powerful deploy displays apt to capture the imagination: for example the king’s awakening in La Prise du pouvoir de Louis XIV or, in Blaise Pascal, that of the chancellor Séguier who while dressing receives the delegation of scientists bringing the young Pascal’s calculating machine, and reminds them paternally that the most appropriate judge of any invention is the king. We are reminded of the scene in Life of Galileo in which the enlightened pontiff, as he assumes the garments of his function, gradually comes around to the arguments for persecution. The question then remains: how can the construction of the true and speaking image of the philosopher in his time be distinguished from the fabricated image that the man of power assembles to subject men by imposing it on their imaginations?
It is perhaps this question that gives the film on Pascal its strategic importance. It was Pascal who weakened in advance the ‘portrait of the philosopher in his time’ by showing how long robes and square caps suffice to compose the appearance of a man of the mind. He added, it is true, that display was necessary to the functioning of societies and that the men of power who fabricated it and the men of the people who honoured it were wiser than the half-smart individuals forever eager to reveal the underside of the scene. But can the argument that suffices to justify judges’ ermines be applied to the incarnation of the philosopher without reducing that to a social display like any other? The philosopher’s reasoning alone seems to ruin in advance any plan to show on screen the republic of science in action.
But if Pascal places the cinematic incarnation of the philosopher in an aporia, it seems only fair to answer in kind by using his own image to resolve the aporia. It is he who must lend himself to an incarnation of philosophy that is not a display. That is why the film gets the author of the Pensées to justify the director’s method with one of his most famous comments: ‘We can only think of Plato and Aristotle in grand academic robes. They were honest men, like others, laughing with their friends, and when they diverted themselves by writing their Laws and their Politics, they did it as an amusement. That part of their life was the least philosophical and the least serious; the most philosophical was to live simply and quietly.’ But we should pay attention to the context given to this quotation. In a sense, it could figure in every other episode of the film and Pascal might well have produced at that moment some other illustrious remark: ‘All human unhappiness comes from not knowing how to stay quietly in a room’ or again – he was to say this later to the same interlocutors – ‘The sciences have two extremes that meet. The first is the pure natural ignorance in which all men find themselves at birth. The other extreme is that reached by great intellects, who, having run through all that men can know, find they know nothing’.
In another sense though, the sentence comes at the right moment. It is presented as the lesson of the episode preceding it, and a lesson given by the subject who is appropriate to state it. The remark is addressed by a convalescent Pascal to the two Jansenist surgeons who had given him St Cyran’s book as a means of rectifying his humours, and to whom he is soon to explain the theory of the void that his enforced rest has enabled him to conceive. This double illumination concludes an episode that allowed the director, as a good historian of mentalities, to make a cut inside a real, lived-in universe where he has crossed each of its layers to unite the most material with the most spiritual, the tools and practices with mentalities and beliefs. The wound of Pascal’s father and the fainting of the son allowed us first to see the domestic panoply – the bowl in which herbs are prepared for the father’s plaster, the warming-pan Jacqueline uses to heat her brother’s bed – and then the surgeon’s panoply. The experience of the void explained by the convalescent is the opportunity to display that of the experimental scientist: the multiplicity of retorts, vials and syringes that the camera reveals as it tracks out, in a way superseding the books and the bookish science laid out in the foreground. And a little later the spirits in the bucket for Pascal to soak his feet and improve the circulation in his enfeebled legs will serve as commentary to the rise of mercury in the tube where a vacuum has been made. Meanwhile the inventor will have explained to the Jansenist doctors the vision of the infinite universe and unknowable God implied by his private experiments on atmospheric pressure. We thus move without any sort of jump from the most vulgar material practices (maids spitting on the leaves for the plaster) to philosophical speculations on infinity and the pure beliefs of the Jansenist faith. The philosopher’s speculation is rooted in a dense tissue of practices and beliefs, while the scientist’s practice, making equal use of laboratory instruments and domestic utensils, is kept as close as possible to the ‘lessons from things’ that once served to teach science to small children.
But this passage through a material universe is also a subjectivization. It produces the right body to state these thoughts. A body that, on the one hand, delivers the eulogy of a philosophy concerned with living simply and, on the other, opens up the vertiginous prospect of an infinite universe, is not only a body rooted in the density of a palpable world in which the greatest thoughts are formed in contact with the lives of the humble. It is also a sick body. The thought of the void is the thought of a mind whose body can no longer support it, of a body that can no longer stand up on its own two feet. In Life of Galileo the priests mocked Galileo and the rotation of the earth by pretending to fall over each other. But here there is no pretence. It is a sickly body that takes the lead in contrasting awareness of infinity with the Cartesian world system and thus reconciling the teachings of science with the mysteries of religion. For whatever Rossellini may say about it, his film shows us nothing whatsoever of the conflict between science and faith. There is none of that in what we see: a body that cannot support its own weight professes the vertigo of a human creature lost in the infinite void; a man in the grip of fever grows feverish at the discovery of the true religion. The good body, the right one to incarnate ideas, to render them perceptible and bring them to life as feelings, is a sick body.
Pascal’s physical feebleness is an established biographical fact. But it is also easy to see what role it plays in the strategy for representing the philosophical body. What has to be avoided at all costs is the talking head framed in the photographer’s viewfinder, the body present merely to recite the great thinker’s best-known phrases. It is not enough merely to show Descartes or Pascal sauntering along explaining to members of some learned society the principles of their own philosophy or their objections to other doctrines. Nor is it sufficient to substitute telescopes, retorts, dishes or body parts awaiting dissection for verbal explanations of doctrine. The same body that cultivates their thought has to appear recalcitrant to its expression. Pascal’s ill-health nourishes his thought and keeps him off the public stage. Descartes does not have the health problems of his contradictor but the audience sees him in bed just as often. Nothing short of a letter from Mersenne announcing some important scientific event will suffice to drag him out of it before noon. The prudence that led him to delay the publication of his treatise on The World after hearing of Galileo’s condemnation seems in keeping with his generally nonchalant attitude to the publication of his thoughts. And the very text of Méditations with which he entered into battle is transformed into the testament of a thinker who withdraws from the world on observing that science has prevented him from living. The television audience that was supposed to see an illustration of the development of reason in history instead witnesses a strange entropy, weakness or failure as a constituent of thought.
Blaise Pascal, Roberto Rossellini, Orizzonte 2000, 1972
It is true that this failure is itself carefully controlled. Descartes’s lazy body and Pascal’s sick one, which turn thought into a form of scandal, are also there to conjure up still more scandalous bodies. Such is, at the beginning of Blaise Pascal, the recumbent suffering body of Michelle Martin, the possessed woman whose inquisitors have broken both her legs to force her to confess to her relations with the Evil One. The young Pascal cannot believe any of this and the film, like him, will dismiss the devil out of hand. By the same token he will dismiss in general the action of the supernatural, even under that form essential to Pascal’s thought and in his life, the miracle. We may think of the miracle of the Holy Thorn, healing Gilberte Pascal’s daughter. But we also recall other miracles that the filmmaker Rossellini had worried about taking on, those of Saint Francis in Flowers of St Francis, but also the miraculous liquefaction of San Gennaro’s blood in Voyage to Italy, and also of course the miracle (or fraud) of Nannina’s pregnancy in The Miracle. When we see Michelle Martin stretched out in chains and hear her tearful account of the seduction by the Evil One that has caused her to repudiate Jesus and the Virgin Mary, it is difficult not to think of Nannina, hunted by the mob, hands gripping the iron rings on the church wall, gasping out the name of the Lord. One thinks too of Irena locked up in the lunatic asylum whom Rossellini at one time compared to Socrates. He meant, of course, the Socrates whose body is silent on what it contains, lending itself more readily to shared drunkenness than the transmission of knowledge, provoking its judges rudely enough to be suspected of having courted death, but perhaps in the final analysis only a fiction by Plato, whose severity is forever contrasted with its own good nature. That obscure kinship of philosophical ideas with fictional bodies in cinema and the excitement of individuals and crowds is something Rossellini had repeatedly explored in earlier fiction films, when he put representatives of northern Europe, the Protestant Europe of merchants and enlightened reason, face-to-face with the extravagances of Catholic southern Europe and its images, devotions and superstitions. Clearly Rossellini believes a small amount of this folly is necessary to the subjectivization of the philosopher on screen. But not too much. Descartes alone makes the journey between the superstitions of Catholic France and the Protestant unconcern of Dutch merchants. And in doing so he seems to learn to shelter his body from the cold and his doctrine from persecution. Rossellini in his pedagogical mode can no longer accept his extravagances as the director of The Miracle or Europa ’51. He wants reason to triumph over ignorance and irrational emotion, and with the aid of images that speak better than books. At that point he finds himself in an inter-space. The mediator wants to transmit to a contemporary audience the advancing science of Descartes or Pascal in their own time. He does it by requiring his images to establish the link between ideas and historicized bodies. But the right regime bringing together the historicized body and the idea turns out to be the one containing the stationary body, possessed by idleness or sickness.
The Father Rossellini-Mersenne now has to organize the passage from stationary bodies to ideas in action. But the passage is threatened by a double risk: that the ideas could be overruled by the feebleness of the bodies that give them palpable life, or that the bodies could be consumed by the statement of the ideas to which they lend their appearance. So the mediator stays in his print shop, behind his camera, in front of his programme, torn between familiar phrases that no one hears any more and the broken or shaking legs supposed to give them body again. One wonders indeed if this race from one pole to the other does not place the cinematic pedagogy project in a dilemma forcing the audience to choose at every moment between pedagogy and cinema, with the permanent risk of finding neither.
1 I leave aside the film on St Augustine which belongs to the same overall project because it features the bishop rather than the philosopher and is more interested in the end of the Roman Empire seen from the African provinces than in the birth of a philosophical tradition.