One day, for the first time since leaving school long ago, I was awarded a prize. But this time the prize, for my book La Fable cinématographique, was awarded in Italy. The conjunction seemed to me to say something about my relationship with cinema: for in various ways, that country had been instrumental in educating me in the seventh art. There was Rossellini of course, and that winter evening in 1964 when I had been over-whelmed by Europa ’51, while experiencing an equally strong resistance to that tale of the bourgeoisie acceding to sanctity through the working class. There were the books and magazines that a cinephile Italianist friend used to send me in those days, from which I tried simultaneously to learn cinema theory, Marxism and the Italian language. And then there was the strange back room in a Neapolitan pub where, on a sort of badly hung sheet, I watched James Cagney and John Derek speaking Italian in a dubbed monochrome version of a Nicholas Ray film called A l’ombra del patibolo, better known to movie purists as Run for Cover.
If these memories surged back when I received that unexpected prize, it was not for simple circumstantial reasons; and if I mention them today, it is not out of misty-eyed nostalgia for years gone by. It is because they outline quite accurately the particular nature of my approach to cinema. Cinema is not an object on which I could have leaned as a philosopher or critic. My relationship with it is a play of encounters and distances which can be discerned through these three memories. They summarize the three types of distance through which I have tried to talk about cinema: between cinema and art, cinema and politics, cinema and theory.
The first of these divergences, symbolized by the wayside backroom theatre showing Nicholas Ray, is that of cinéphilie, or the love of cinema. Cinephilia is a relationship with cinema governed by passion rather than theory. It is well known that passion lacks discrimination. Cinephilia was a jumbling of the accepted criteria. A jumbling of venues: a zigzag line between the cinémathèques where the memory of an art was preserved and the old movie theatres in remote parts of town showing derided Hollywood movies of all kinds, where cinephiles sought and unearthed their treasure in the intensity of a Western cavalcade, a bank raid or child’s smile. Cinephilia was a link between the worship of art and the democracy of entertainment and emotion, challenging the criteria through which cinema was gaining acceptance as high culture. It affirmed that the greatness of cinema lay not in the metaphysical high-mindedness of its subjects or the visual impact of its plastic effects, but in an imperceptible difference in the ways of putting traditional stories and emotions into images. It called that difference mise en scène – staging, direction, production – without being too sure what it meant. Not knowing what it is that one loves and why one loves it is, they say, a characteristic of passion. It is also the path to a certain kind of wisdom. Cinephilia used to discuss the objects of its passion in terms of a rather rough-and-ready phenomenology of mise en scène seen as establishing a ‘relation to the world’. But in the process, it questioned the dominant categories that existed for thinking about art. Twentieth-century art is often described in terms of the modernist paradigm: identification of the modern artistic revolution with the concentration of each art on its own medium, in contrast to the mercantile aestheticization of images from life. That sort of modernity appeared to crumble during the 1960s under the combined effects of political suspicion focused on artistic autonomy and the ever-growing avalanche of commercial and advertising forms. But this view – that modernist purity succumbed to the post-modern ‘anything goes’ – ignores the fact that such blurring of dividing lines developed in a more complex way in other settings, including cinema. Cinephilia questioned the categories of artistic modernism not by deriding high art but by restoring a closer and less obvious linkage between the types of art, the emotions of the narrative, and by discovering the splendour that the most commonplace objects could acquire on a lighted screen in a dark auditorium: a hand lifting a curtain or fumbling with a door handle, a head leaning out of a window, a fire or car headlights in the night, drinking glasses glittering on a bar … it introduced us to a positive understanding, in no way ironic or disillusioned, of the impurity of art.
Probably it did so because of the difficulty in reconciling the sense, the rationale behind its emotions with the reasoning needed to navigate politically through the world’s conflicts. The smile and gaze of the young John Mohune in Moonfleet establish a form of equality with the scheming of his false friend Jeremy Fox; but how was a student discovering Marxism in the early 1960s to relate that to the struggle against social inequality? The obsessional quest for justice by the hero of Winchester ’73 hunting the murdering brother, the joined hands of the outlaw Wes McQueen and the wild girl Colorado on the rock where they are cornered by the forces of order in Colorado Territory – what relation did they have to the struggle of the new workers’ world against the world of exploitation? To bring them together one needed to postulate a mysterious equivalence between the historical materialism underlying the workers’ struggle and the implicit materialism of the cinematic relation of bodies to their environment. It is at this very point that the vision conveyed by Europa ’51 introduces a problem. Irena’s progression from bourgeois apartment to working-class suburban tower block and the factory floor seemed at first to connect the two materialisms perfectly. The physical advance of the heroine, venturing gradually into unfamiliar zones, made the progress of the plot and the camera work coincide with the progressive uncovering of the world of labour and oppression. Unhappily, the fine straight materialist line broke when Irena went up a flight of stairs leading to a church and then descended towards a consumptive prostitute, charitable good works and the spiritual itinerary of sainthood.
To deal with that, one had to say the materialism of the mise en scène had been deflected by the filmmaker’s personal ideology, a re-run of the old Marxist argument praising Balzac for showing the realities of capitalist society despite holding reactionary views. But the uncertainties of the Marxist aesthetic then redoubled those of the cinephile aesthetic, by suggesting the only true materialists are materialists unintentionally. This paradox seemed to be confirmed, in the same period, by my appalled viewing of The General Line, whose multitudes of piglets suckling from an ecstatic sow amid torrents of milk I had found repellent, in a sniggering audience most of whose members nevertheless, like me, must have had communist sympathies and believed in the merits of collectivized agriculture. It is often said militant films preach only to the converted. But what is one to say when the quintessential communist film produces a negative effect on the converted themselves? The gap between cinephilia and communism could apparently only be narrowed where the aesthetic principles and social relations depicted were fairly remote from our own, as in that final sequence from Mizoguchi’s Shin Heike Monogatari, when the rebellious son passes with his companions in arms above the plain where his frivolous mother is enjoying the pleasures of her class and gives the closing lines of the film: ‘Enjoy yourselves, rich ones! Tomorrow belongs to us.’ Doubtless the charm of this sequence stems from the way it showed us the visual delights of the doomed old world along with the aural delight of the words announcing the new one.
The problem of how to narrow that gap, how to engineer an equivalence between the pleasure derived from shadows projected on a screen and the intelligence proper to an art or a worldview, led to the thought that some sort of cinema theory might be needed. But no combination of classical Marxist theory and classical thought on cinema enabled me to decide whether the ascent or descent of a staircase was idealist or materialist, progressive or reactionary. No combination would ever make it possible to identify the criteria distinguishing what was art in cinema from what was not, or to read the political message carried by the placing of bodies in a shot or a sequential linkage between two shots.
So, perhaps the thing to do would be to approach the matter from the other direction, to examine that apparent unity between an art, a form of feeling and a coherent worldview, and call the study ‘cinema theory’. To wonder whether cinema exists only as a set of irreducible gaps between things that have the same name without being members of a single body. Cinema in effect is a multitude of things. It is the material place where we go to be entertained by the spectacle of shadows, even though the shadows touch our emotions in a deep and secret way not expressed in the condescending term ‘entertainment’. It is also the residue of those presences that accumulates and settles in us as their reality fades and alters over time: that other cinema reconstituted by our memories and our words, which can be distinctly different from what had been projected on screen. Cinema is also an ideological apparatus producing images that circulate in society and in which society recognizes its modern stereotypes, its legends from the past and its imagined futures. Then again it is the concept of an art, a problematic dividing line that isolates those works meriting consideration as high art from the merely competent output of an industry. But cinema is also a utopia: the scripture of a movement celebrated in the 1920s as the great universal symphony, the exemplary manifestation of an energy inhabiting all art, labour and society. And cinema, lastly, can be a philosophical concept, a theory of the actual movement of things and of thought, exemplified by Gilles Deleuze whose two books Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image mention films and their processes on every page while being neither a theory nor a philosophy of cinema, but more a metaphysics.
That multiplicity, proof against any unitary theory, elicits a variety of reactions. Some try to separate the wheat from the chaff: to distinguish what relates to cinema as art from the output of the entertainment and propaganda industries; or the film itself, the aggregate of prints, shots and camera movements one studies in the monitor, from the deforming memories or added statements. Perhaps such rigour is shortsighted. To restrict oneself to art is to forget that art itself exists only as an unstable frontier which, to exist, needs to be crossed incessantly. Cinema belongs to the aesthetic art regime where the old standards of representation for distinguishing the fine arts from the mechanical arts and setting everything in its place no longer exist. It belongs to an art regime in which the purity of new forms is often derived from pantomime, circus acts or commercial graphics. To consider only the shots and processes that compose a film is to forget that cinema is an art as well as a world to itself, that those shots and effects that vanish in the moment of projection need to be extended, to be transformed by the memory and words that make cinema exist as a shared world far beyond the material reality of its projections.
Writing on cinema, for me, means assuming two apparently contradictory positions. The first is that there is no concept that covers all forms of cinema, no theory that unifies all the problems they pose. Between the word Cinema that unites Gilles Deleuze’s two volumes and the old-time large auditorium lined with red plush seats showing in succession a newsreel, a documentary and a feature, separated by intermissions with ice cream, the only link is the homonym. The other position holds on the contrary that where there is homonymy there must exist a common thought environment, that cinematic thought is what circulates in that environment, working from inside the separations and trying to determine this or that tangle between different cinemas or ‘problems of cinema’. This position could be called an amateur’s position. I have never taught film, film theory or aesthetics. I have encountered cinema at different moments in my life: during the cinephile enthusiasm of the 1960s; the examination of relations between cinema and history in the 1970s; or the 1990s effort to map the aesthetic paradigms underlying thought on the seventh art. But the amateur’s position is not that of an eclectic supporting the wealth of empirical diversity against the colourless rigour of theory. Amateurism is also a theoretical and political position, one that sidelines the authority of specialists by re-examining the way the frontiers of their domains are drawn at the points where experience and knowledge intersect. Amateur politics asserts that cinema belongs to all those who have travelled, in one way or another, through the system of gaps and distances contained in its name, and that everyone has the right to trace, between any two points in that topography, an individual route that adds to cinema treated as a world, and adds to our understanding of it.
That is why I have spoken elsewhere of ‘cinematic fable’ and not of cinema theory. I wanted to position myself in a universe without hierarchy where the films recomposed by our perceptions, feelings and words count for as much as the ones printed on the film itself; where cinema theories and aesthetics are themselves seen as stories, as singular adventures of thought generated by the multiple character of cinema. For forty of fifty years, while continuing to discover new films or new discourses on cinema, I have also retained memories of films, shots and snatches of dialogue that are more or less deformed compared to the original. At various moments I have confronted my memories with the reality of the films, or reconsidered their interpretation. I watched Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night to relive the dazzling impression of the moment when Bowie encounters Keechie in a garage doorway. I did not find this shot since it does not exist. But I tried to understand the singular power of the suspension of narrative that I had condensed into that imaginary shot. Twice I returned to Europa ’51: once to overturn my first interpretation, and validate the sidestep taken by Irena, leaving the topography of the working-class world arranged for her by her cousin, a Communist journalist, to move to the other side where the spectacles of the social world can no longer be imprisoned in the modes of thought elaborated by government, media or social sciences; and a second time to re-examine the all too-easy contrasting of the representation’s social schemes with the unrepresentable in art. I watched Anthony Mann’s westerns again to understand why I had been so fascinated by them. It was not simply the childish pleasure of cavalcades across great landscapes or the adolescent pleasure of perverting the received standards of art, but also the perfection of balance between two things: the Aristotelian rigour of the plot which, by way of realizations and vicissitudes, gives every character their due happiness or misfortune, and the way the body of the heroes played by James Stewart extracted itself, through the fine detail of its movements, from the ethical universe which gave meaning to that rigour in the action. I saw The General Line again and understood why I had been so repelled by it thirty years earlier. It was not its ideological content but its form – cinematography conceived as the direct expression of thought in a specific language of the visible. To appreciate it one had to understand that those torrents of milk and platoons of piglets were not in fact torrents of milk or piglets but the dreamed-of ideograms of a new language. Belief in that language had perished before the belief in agrarian collectivization. That is why, by 1960, that film was physically unbearable; and why, perhaps, we had to wait to grasp its beauty until all we could see in it was the splendid utopia of a language, surviving the catastrophic collapse of a social system.
From these meanderings and returns it was possible to pinpoint the hard kernel signified by the expression ‘cinematic fable’. In the first place this term signifies the tension that underlies the gaps in cinema, the tension between art and history. Cinema was born in an age of great suspicion where stories were concerned, a time when it was thought that a new art was being born that no longer told stories, no longer described the spectacle of things, no longer disclosed the emotional states of characters but inscribed the product of thought directly into the movement of changing forms. It seemed the art most likely to fulfil that dream. ‘Cinema is truth. A story is a lie,’ Jean Epstein said. This truth could be understood in different ways. Jean Epstein saw it as writing with light, inscribing on film not images of things but vibrations in a palpable material reduced to immaterial energy; Eisenstein saw cinema as a language of ideograms expressing thought directly as palpable stimuli tilling the soil of Soviet consciousness like a tractor; and Vertov saw cinema as the thread stretched between all the acts that were building the palpable reality of communism. The ‘theory’ of cinema had first been its utopia, the idea of a scripture of movement, in keeping with a new age in which the rational reorganization of the palpable world would coincide with the movement of that world’s energies.
That promise seemed to have been broken when Soviet artists were required to produce positive images of the new man and German film directors went to cast their own light and shadows on the formatted stories of the Hollywood industry. Cinema, supposed to be the new anti-representational art, seemed to be doing the opposite: restoring action sequences, psychological plotting and codes of expression that the other arts had striven to break up. The montage which had been the dream of a new language for a new world seemed in Hollywood to have reverted to the traditional functions of narrative art: slickly cut action sequences and intensified emotions to encourage audience identification with tales of love and bloodshed. This development elicited various sceptical responses: disenchantment with a fallen art or alternatively, ironic revision of the dream of a new language. It also contributed in different ways to the dream of a cinema reverting to its true vocation: Bresson saw it as the reassertion of a radical split between the spiritual montage and automatism specific to the cinematograph and the theatrical games of the cinema. For Rossellini or André Bazin, it was the other way round, assertion of cinema primarily as a window opened on the world: a way of deciphering it or making it reveal its inner reality even in its surface appearances.
I thought it necessary to go back over these phases and these contrasts. Although cinema has not lived up to the promise of a new anti-representational art, it is not because of any capitulation to the rule of commerce. Rather, there was always something contradictory in the very wish to identify with a language of sensation. Cinema was being asked to fulfil the dream of a century of literature: to replace yesterday’s stories and characters with the impersonal deployment of signs written on things, restoring the speeds and intensities of the real world. Literature had been able to carry that dream because its discourse on things and their intensities stayed written in the double game of words, which hide from the eye the palpable richness which shimmers in the mind. Cinema just shows what it shows. It could only take up the dream of literature at the cost of making it a pleonasm: piglets cannot be both piglets and words at the same time. The art of cinema cannot only be the deployment of the specific powers of its machine. It exists through the play of gaps and improprieties. This book attempts to analyse some of its aspects in terms of a triple relationship. Firstly cinema with literature, from which film draws its narrative models and from which it seeks to emancipate itself; and also its relationship with two extremes in which art is often said to lose its way: where it applies its powers to the service of mere entertainment; and where it tries on the contrary to exceed those powers to transmit thought and teach political lessons.
The relationship between cinema and literature is illustrated here by two examples taken from very different poetics: Hitchcock’s classical narrative cinema, a detective thriller plot containing the plan for a sequence of operations to create and then dissipate an illusion; and Bresson’s modernist cinematography, constructing a film based on a literary text to demonstrate the specificity of a language of images. The two attempts experience the resistance of their object in different ways, however. In two scenes from Vertigo, the ability of the ‘master of suspense’ to make the narrative of an intellectual machination coincide with the presentation of visual charm becomes deficient. There is nothing accidental about this deficiency which touches on the relationship between showing and telling. The virtuoso filmmaker becomes clumsy when he gets close to the ‘literary’ heart of the work he is adapting. The detective thriller in effect is a double object. It is the presumed model of a narrative logic that dissipates appearances by conducting the evidence towards the truth. And, it is also bitten by its opposite: the logic of defection from causes and entropy of meaning, a virus that great literature has passed on to the ‘minor’ genres. For literature is not just a reservoir of stories or a way of telling them, it is a means of constructing the very world in which stories can occur, events link with one another in sequence, appearances arise. The proof of this is given in a different way when Bresson adapts a literary work descended from the great naturalist tradition: in Mouchette, the relationship between the language of images and the language of words is played out in reverse. Bresson’s tendency towards fragmentation, intended to drive out the peril of ‘representation’, and the care he takes to evacuate the literary burden from his images have the paradoxical effect of subjecting the movement of images to forms of narrative sequencing from which the art of words had been freed. So, it is the performance of speaking bodies that is left to restore its lost substance to the visible. But to do that, it has to reject the simplistic contrast made by the director between the cinematic ‘model’ and the actor in ‘filmed theatre’. While Bresson symbolizes the vices of theatre with a representation of Hamlet in troubadour style, the power of elocution he gives his Mouchette discreetly joins the similar power bestowed by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, two directors influenced by Brechtian theatre, on the workers, peasants and shepherds borrowed from the dialogues of Pavese or Vittorini. The literary, the cinematic and the theatrical thus come to seem not the specific qualities of different arts but aesthetic forms, relationships between the power of words and that of the visible, between the sequences of stories and the movements of bodies, that cross the frontiers assigned to the arts.
Rossellini has the same problem – what body to use to transmit the power of a text? – when he presents the thought of philosophers to a mass audience on television. The difficulty is not, as prevailing opinion suggests, that the flatness of the image crudely resists the depths of thought, but that the density specific to each makes it impossible to establish a simple relationship of cause and effect between them. So Rossellini has to give his philosophers very singular bodies to make one density perceptible in the forms of the other. This passage between two regimes of meaning is again in play when Minnelli stages – with songs – the relationship between art and entertainment. One might have thought the false problem of where the one ends and the other begins would disappear once the champions of artistic modernity had contrasted the perfect art of acrobats with the fusty emotion of stories. But the master of musical comedy shows us that all the labour of art – with or without the uppercase – is to construct transitions between the two. Pure performance is the utopian horizon towards which, while unable to reach it, there strives the tension between the play of forms and the emotion of stories: the tension on which the cinematic art of shadows lives.
That utopian extreme was also what made cinema seem capable of eliminating the gap between art, life and politics. Vertov’s films offer the finished example of cinematic thought as real communism, identified with the very development of the links between all three movements. Such cinematic communism rejecting both narrative art and strategists’ Realpolitik could only repel experts in both disciplines. But it is still the radical gap that enables us to think about the unresolved tension between cinema and politics. Once the belief in a new language for a new life had faded, cinema politics became entangled in contradictions specific to the expectations of critical art. The gaze focused on the ambiguities of cinema is itself marked by the duplicity expected of it: that it should raise awareness by the clarity of a disclosure and arouse energy by presenting an oddity, that it should reveal at the same time all the ambiguity of the world and how to deal with that ambiguity. The obscurity of the relationship assumed to exist between clarity of vision and the energies of action is projected onto it. Cinema can illuminate action, but perhaps only by casting doubt on the obviousness of that relation. Straub and Huillet do it by giving two shepherds the task of arguing the aporiae of the law. Pedro Costa does it by reinventing the reality of a Cape Verdean stonemason’s meandering progress, between an exploited past and unemployed present, between the garish alleys of the shantytown and the white cubes of the housing estate. Béla Tarr charts slowly the accelerated passage to death of a young girl, and in doing so he captures the deceitfulness of great hopes. Tariq Teguia in the West of Algeria crosses a land surveyor’s meticulous measurements with the wandering course of migrants bound for the promised lands of prosperity. Cinema does not present a world others might have to transform. It combines in its own way the muteness of facts and the sequencing of actions, the rightness of the visible and its own simple identity. The political effectiveness of the forms of the art is something for politics to build into its own scenarios. The same cinema that speaks for the rebellious by saying ‘Tomorrow belongs to us’ also signals that it can offer no tomorrows other than its own. This is what Mizoguchi shows us in another of his films, Sansho the Bailiff. This one recounts the family history of a provincial governor who has been forced into exile because of the concern he showed for oppressed peasants. His wife is kidnapped and his children, Zushio and Anju, are sold into slavery. To enable her brother to escape, to rescue her captive mother and to fulfil her father’s promise to liberate the slaves, Anju sinks slowly into the waters of a lake and commits suicide. But this completion of the logic of action is also its bifurcation. On the one hand cinema participates in the struggle for emancipation, on the other it is dissipated in circular ripples on a lake surface. Zushio is to take up this double logic on his own account at the end when he abandons his duty to seek out his blind mother on the island even after the slaves have been freed. All the gaps in cinema can be summed up by the film’s closing panoramic shot, which signals a shift from the great battle for freedom we have been watching up to this point. With this shift we are being told: These are the limits of what I can do. The rest is up to you.
Sansho the Bailiff, Kenji Mizoguchi, Daiei Studios, 1955