In considering the space between imaginary action and social action, I intend to push the boundaries of the filmic notion of diegesis as ‘the viewer’s mental referent’ beyond that which Noel Burch in the early 1970s in his address to film students at the Royal College of Art defined as the mental referent that connects the viewer to that which is viewed. At that particular historical moment the term could be said to have contained a certain dialectic which connected theory to practice, an opening to an understanding of the production of knowledge that engendered possibilities for a counter cinema, now lost in the institutional framework of education and, some would say, devoured by the television zapper and music clip.1 I take as given the existence of a certain contemporary conjuncture: a mental and corporeal ever-changing and sophisticated relationship between screen action and social action (and beg the question of cinematic intention and indeed intervention) and a social and cultural progression whereby postmodernism and indeed the social fabric of society are undergoing quite radical forms of transition. There would seem to be an urgent need to re-assess a number of definitions that have become part of media folklore and my intention here is to re-evaluate the notion of the diegetic space of cinema as a ‘place between’ and a ‘place beyond’ the binary concept of a representational world and a social world. In the struggle for the teaching of a cinema of knowledge (involving the pleasure of knowledge, the pleasure of critical thinking and the pleasure of critical practice), I aim to recuperate the term diegesis from its now institutionally bound usage as particularly seen within the frameworks of Cultural Studies and Film Studies as well as a now fairly common mode of description within film schools and independent film practice in general.
I
Let us look at the term diegesis. Etymologically, the word suffers from differing French and English linguistic translations from the Greek διήγησις (De Grève 2007). It was first used by Plato in The Republic to describe direct narration, the telling of a theatrical story or poem through the presence of the narrator, so the term did not refer to the narrative content per se but the ‘telling’ of the narrative. It was then revised by Plato’s pupil Aristotle as a ‘mode of mimesis’ (Taylor 2007), the ‘enactment’ of the narrative. Mimesis translates from the Greek as ‘imitation’ bringing it closer to the problematic description of the reflection of reality as corroborated by Paul Ricoeur (1984: 180) who reminds us that Plato did not separate mimesis from diegesis but recounted two forms of diegesis, the one ‘plain’ diegesis which is direct narration (the voice of the narrator) and the other ‘by imitation’ whereby the narrator imitates the voice of the character. Aristotle, in separating the two, recognised mimesis as the term most descriptive of the development of narrative form. Consequently, decontextualised adaptations of the term diegesis for cinematic usage have slid between the French distinctions of the Platonic form of the ‘pure’ (Biancorosso 2001) or ‘plain’ (Ricoeur 1984: 180) delivery of a narrative by the narrator in contrast to the mimetic function of the narrative demonstrated by illusory third parties, by now in the form of actors rather than the narrating poet. Ricoeur warns that we have to be constantly on guard against the superimposition of the two. In the context of cinema, the term was first used by Etienne and Anne Souriau and a group of French intellectuals in the 1950s as part of a series of descriptive technical terms (such as profilmic and afilmic)2 but spelt diégèse differing from Plato’s ‘pure’ narrative (or ‘narration’ in the sense of the absence of ‘impure’ dialogue) spelt diégésis. The Souriaus’ intervention defining diegesis as the world within the narrative resulted in the use of the term as narrative content. However, it was Gérard Gennette in 1972 who, in returning to the Souriau definition, reinforced the term as a potentially radical post-Aristotelian space, contextually innovated by the conscious action of the viewer in recognising the diégèse as ‘the universe where the histoire (story/history)3 takes place’ (Genette 1988: 17–18). In keeping with the French double meaning of histoire this universe may be considered as not just the story or narrative bracketing but as a social structure that also contains the history of its meaning and the context of its future regeneration within the diégèse. The diegetic now becomes an ideological black hole that sucks into the nature of its existence not only the formal articulations that bracket the signification of the narrative but also the history that gave birth to the ideas and articulations and the social, ideological and economic contexts that engendered the history in the first place. Burch’s recent postformal perspective,4 might read Genette’s holistic approach to the diegetic as dystopic, commenting, as Burch does, on what he now considers to be an irreversible victory of the dominant system of representation and ideology contaminating ‘all there is I see’ (see chapter 14). This includes profilmic, filmic and postfilmic5 referents wherein is contained not just the history but also the desires (imaginary future) of the audience. Earlier Formalist and Structuralist notions from Burch (1973) and Christian Metz (1973) however, would have had more in common with Souriau’s separation of profilmic reality and filmic reality in his reference to ‘all that I see on the screen’ (Lowry 1985: 73–97; emphasis added), imbuing the diegetic with a representational framework which depicts the filmic reality operating through the relatively autonomous self-contained reality that each individual film brings with it – ‘everything which concerns the film to the extent that it represents something’ (ibid.; emphasis added). This definition, tending to separate representation from reality, contains the kernel of certain structuralist and deconstructive approaches to cinema from the 1970s which emphasise the signifier over the signified whereby the interpretation of representation privileges the form over meaning and distances the subject from the means of expression. Burch attributes his own use of the term to Metz (see chapter 14) but Metz re-attributes it back around to Etienne Souriau (Metz 1982: 145). Metz argued that modern-day use had distorted its Greek origins particularly with the two different spellings in French, and I argue now that the English translation as ‘narrative or plot’ (Concise Oxford Dictionary 1999) disappointingly avoids the potential of the philosophical aspect of the French meaning altogether (which I would call ‘contextual imaginary’) which, although still operating on the plane of the illusory, at the level of ideas maintains a perspective for a polemical imaginary. In contradistinction to this complex interpretation of the diegesis, the English usage conflates the Greek origin with a literal French rendition didactically neutralising the reading of the word from its representational, worldly and Other dialectical possibilities. The English definition depoliticises the essence of the French translation rendering it harmless to the dominant cinematic system compared to the Burchian more radical expectations of a diegesis invoking active, dynamic and potentially disruptive relationships between the viewer and the viewed. Since that time it has been assimilated (incorrectly, I believe) within film theory and practice at best as ‘on-screen fictional reality’ (Hayward 2006: 101). But what does that mean and what are its implications for practice? Sound theorist and practitioner Michel Chion has described the use of onscreen and offscreen music as diegetic and nondiegetic – descriptions that have since been used regularly in film teaching and reflected in student essays and journals. Chion brings the concept of the nondiegetic to the fore, suggesting that, for instance, background music is nondiegetic and synch dialogue is diegetic (Chion 1994: 67). Although he quite amply describes sounds that ‘dispose themselves in relation to the frame and its content’ (68) as onscreen and those that ‘wander at the surface and on the edges’ (ibid.) as offscreen he still distinguishes others that ‘position themselves clearly outside the diegesis’ (ibid.) such as voice-overs that belong on the balcony or orchestral music that belongs in the pit. But does this empirical use of the term serve to simplify and transform a motivating philosophical concept to one that becomes a predetermined code of cinema? From my own perspective, which I discuss later as operating within the postdiegetic social world, the notion of the ‘nondiegetic’ is a historically relevant but now redundant term useful only to the period of the poststructuralist discourse and a red herring for those working with the non-binary poetics of theory for practice. Chion admits that his definitions and diagrammatic explanations of the concepts of onscreen, offscreen and nondiegetic space, which derived from his earlier work La Voix au Cinéma (1982), have become problematic and have been ‘denounced as obsolete and reductive’ (Chion 1994:74). Notions of the diegetic and nondiegetic manifest as codes of cinema may be the consequence of the confusion over the term diegesis, after all Metz and Burch wrote avidly on the codes of cinema. As an example of diegesis Burch alighted upon the ten-gallon hat as a sign of the ‘cowboy film’6 which legitimatised the viewer to enter that space from their own, socially implanted, imaginary set of relations with the world of the film. Burch was an avowed Althusserian. Louis Althusser promoted a philosophical and politically analytical approach to the study of culture, emanating from a late Marxist examination of the State Apparatus and its implications for ideology. At this time, the concept of the sign, imbricated with semiotic activity and embraced by optimism for cultural counter insurgency, was a theory steeped in potential for political and cultural empowerment in the wake of 1968 power relations in France and elsewhere in mainland Europe. In the UK, through the pages of Screen in particular, the Ideological State Apparatus became a blackboard for the development of film theories and practices that responded to and attempted to displace dominant ideology. The world of mental referents heralded a battlefield for a war on ideology where Roland Barthes’ analysis of the front cover of an edition of Paris Match, the image of the young black soldier saluting the French flag, was, to some, as much a romantic anti-narratological call to arms as it was contradictory heroism within the narrative of the photograph itself (Fig. 1).
Figure 1 The world of mental referents heralded a battlefield for a war on ideology. Cover of Paris Match 25 June –2 July 1955
The telling of the story of the photograph became as iconic as the notion of black youth/French flag. Postmodernism absorbed this image until it became the equivalent of a new French flag, bringing to mind John Berger’s well known reference to the Mona Lisa as an example of acquiescent entrapment within the perspective of Walter Benjamin’s notion of mechanical reproduction as demonstrated in Ways of Seeing (1972). The expressive awareness and observations of Modernism were shifting from creative acts of discovery to ironic reactions to consumerism. The apparent innocence of the signification of social mass consumption and built-in obsolescence in a Warhol silkscreen contained its own sense of contradiction and the potential for the postmodern irony of the next two to three decades. Structuralism, in representing the critical voice of late Modernism, had laid the path for the elision of Capitalism with cultural radicalism. After the failure of the left in France in 1968 and the failure yet again in the UK in 1984 no longer could aesthetic exploration be seen as a struggle in consciousness but rather as ‘the expression of a new social conservatism’, as Fredric Jameson remarks in the introduction to Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, (1984: xvii). Terry Eagleton indicates in After Theory (2003) that the shift from the philosophy of philosophy (for example, the study of the floating signifier) to the application of the result (for example, the study of Hindu nationalism, or the study of the shopping mall) could be welcomed on the one hand but was ‘not entirely positive’ on the other. It had become ‘typical of a society which believed only in what it could touch, taste and sell’ (Eagleton 2003: 53).
The notion of the diegetic had by this time, observed through my own teaching practice, become part of the vocabulary of the relatively new Humanities disciplines of Film Studies, Media Studies and Cultural Studies and by default part and parcel of a consuming and growing industry of education. It had lost its meditative force in favour of the descriptive and had been drawn into pragmatic academia. I say this by no means as an attack on the good intentions of the academics and committed university lecturers but about its very exploitation by the institutions in which they are contained. There, the fervour of a supply and demand approach to education saw the multiple expansions of student numbers and off-shoot related courses, leading to often weakened programmes and a most definitely alienated film and media industry. Within this revisionist historicism, discussed by David Bordwell as a result of the professionalisation of film research (Bordwell 1997: 139–40), the diegesis became another term for the narrative, not simply as storytelling but as a framework for the containment of narrative. D.N. Rodowick describes diegesis as the ‘denoted elements of story’ (1994: 113) and defers to Metz’s suggestion that the aim of narrative in film is ‘to efface film’s material conditions as a discourse in order to better present itself as story; in sum, the diegesis or fictional world is given as the expression of a signified without a signifier’ (Rodowick 1994: 134).
As an extension and an oversimplification of this conceptual proposition, not only could institutional academia now speak of the world contained within the film’s diegesis but also of the world outside the diegesis. The often misused notions in film studies of diegesis as ‘the main narrative’ (Tredell 2002: 158) or that which stands outside the story as ‘extra-diegetic’ (159), or that which is present but does not exist within the narrative as ‘nondiegetic’,7 belies the philosophical complexity of diegesis and its special place within the triangulated modernity of form, content and context. It generates a reductive description of onscreen or offscreen space as the place of the diegesis as it relates to the Platonic truth of the narrative. Offscreen space is referred to often in Burch’s writings. This is not so-called nondiegetic space, but is exactly what it says on the label – the space of the world not framed. It is not the nondiegetic space that Chion separates from onscreen and offscreen, but it most certainly plays a role in the diegetic nature of the viewing experience–after all, the diegesis as I will now define it, is present in the total experience of the viewing subject, whether in the realm of what we see and think or in its opposite state of absence in the world of the unobtainable Other (born from language and operating on the symbolic level of the unconscious).8 You see, the diegetic is not a ‘thing’ it is a process, it is not sustainable as the diegesis or the absence of the diegesis in its own right. If the imaginary presence of the diegetic is experienced when engaged in the act of viewing a film and it is the mental referent embedded in myth and locked between the subject-being in (permanent) transition and the object of desire (which is both the filmed image and the image-in-the-world) then its self-perpetuating culture expands from the frame and the mind simultaneously. Intangible as it is fleeting, diegesis occupies the place of the Other and is as enabling (desire) as it is disabling (fantasy). Its real home is in the represented world but its breathing apparatus exists in the lived-in world. We are the subjects of its gaze; we are its Other. The diegetic of any subject or moment does not only produce a meaning for us – we are also the meaning produced by it as it weaves within our post-viewing consciousness, both individual and collective. Its function within the social sphere of the cinematic apparatus appears to be in its overriding powers of connectivity and in particular, belief. The viewer is situated as being phenomenologically locked in a binary duality of both belief and disbelief. Burch alludes to this in Life to those Shadows:
As Christian Metz reminded us some years ago (1982: 101), ‘belief’ in the cinematic image as an analogue of real phenomena, if it were ever a hallucination (such as might be induced by drugs or psychosis, for example) has long ceased to be one: it is indeed a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, in Coleridge’s words, an emotional involvement which may certainly attain great depths of anguish or compassion, but which is always grounded in the awareness that the subject is ‘only watching a film’. (1990: 243–4)
Jacques Aumont goes further into this duality in referring to David Bordwell’s cognitive descriptions of the assumed knowledge of the film spectator:
On the one hand, he or she activates general cognitive and perceptual processes which enable him or her to understand the image; on the other hand, he or she uses forms of knowledge that, to some extent inhere within the text itself … The seemingly irreconcilable difference between theories of knowledge and belief demonstrates that the psychology of the image-spectator is an inextricable mixture of knowledge and belief. (1997: 80–1)
Burch’s early desire to return to the codes of primitive cinema was not born of nostalgia but was an epistemological enquiry based in historical materialism which demanded a re-opening of the question of affect on the viewer’s sensibility, where the interaction of seeing, hearing and believing empowers, or otherwise awakens, their place in the diegetic process. This process was present during and before (in theatre) silent cinema, but the advent of sound broadened and heightened its perspective. The beginning of the ‘full diegetic effect’ (Burch 1990: 244), which, according to Burch came with the advent of sound on film was witnessed by Maxim Gorky, whose review of the films of Lumière seen at the Nizhny-Novgorod Fair and printed on 4 July 1896 in the Nizhegorodsky Listok newspaper expressed feigned hallucination (Burch 1990: 23), differentiated from complete illusion by its absence of synchronised sound. It was not until 1929 that this ‘full’ effect became a parasite on the back of the sound film. It is helpful to my hypothesis – that ‘diegesis’ is not a code of practice – and in the endeavour to clarify the misuse of the term and indeed in redefining it beyond postmodernism,9 in particular reference to its use in relation to narrative, that Burch takes the Gorky example as an indicator of the modern viewer’s difficulty with the codes of silent film: ‘I take this as a preliminary indication of the relative autonomy of the narrative and diegetic principles’ (Burch 1990: 245). This duality of polarity and harmony, image and sound, however, enabled a binary approach to the deconstruction of the codes of cinema as they mirrored everyday life. There was now a direct and formal relationship between representational sound and image - turn off the sound and there was no longer (as there had been during the era of silent cinema) a coherent narrative. Consequently, as a way of deconstructing cinema, sound was now being addressed, in particular by the newly developing discipline of Media Studies, as either a part of the narrative’s diegesis or extra to it. So-called nondiegetic sound was referenced, typically in Media Studies handbooks, as sound which does or does not live in the fictional world of the narrative. Branston and Stafford produce a condensed definition:
non-diegetic’ sound – sound which doesn’t come from the fictional world of the narrative. The clearest example is theme music. Music playing on a jukebox in the scene is diegetic. (2003: 329)
Stephen Deutch, composer of film scores and Professor of Music Design, takes this further in elaborating five kinds of ‘non-diegetic’ uses of music in film, here summarised as:
1. non-diegetic narrative support – music composed to the linearity of the film
2. non-diegetic ironic – music and images tell different stories
3. non-diegetic iconic or referential – music stands for the film (e.g. 2001, A Space Odyssey)
4. non-diegetic irrelevant – music takes the place of the atmos track (e.g. in Jaques Tati films)
5. combination of 1. and 3. the non-diegetic iconic narrative support where every action has a musical sound (e.g. Tom & Jerry cartoons).10 (Deutch 2003: 31–3)
Carter Burwell, composer of scores for the Coen Brothers, describes a scene from Miller’s Crossing (1990) noting certain transitions from one mode to the other as ‘diegetic music becoming non-diegetic’ (Burwell 2003: 203) within the continuity of the same piece of music.11 In the scene the character, played by Albert Finney, is seen putting a record on his record player. Finney is a mobster boss and his choice of the Irish tune ‘Londonderry Air’ (‘Danny Boy’), is, for Burwell, significant in understanding the use of music to show the personality of the character. The music we hear is chosen (in these terms diegetically) by this character, not by the film composer nor playing on the radio. As the character leaves the room to walk through the scene of mayhem and murder he has orchestrated, the music comes with him and becomes ‘non-diegetic’ (Burwell 2003: 204). This literal interpretation of diegesis as the world of the narrative, so often used within Media, Cinema and Film Studies, reinforces Aumont’s argument that the viewer is caught in a blend of knowledge and belief without being offered the means necessary for that belief system to be challenged, at least not by narrative deconstructive awareness alone.
A Burchian perspective (both earlier and of late) might tentatively consider that it is diegesis, that imaginary conveyor of the belief system, not narrative, that made cinema (and subsequently television) the most powerful medium of the twentieth century. My reading of Genette’s consideration of the diegetic containing its own history (even if one takes the translation of ‘histoire’ to mean story, for me the notion of ‘story’ would contain its own history), enables an exploration of dialectical and historical materialism and posits the diegetic as much in the lived world as the represented world. Within the context of late Capitalism, Burch’s caveat on the diegesis of ‘all there is I see’ (see chapter 14) is also all there is I know or could know. His concern that everything is tainted pre-empts not just the filmic diegetic but a diegetic society. As such my contribution to the knowledge of the diegetic is on the one hand to cut away the elements of the definition that are impinging on the awareness of its involvedness – diegesis is not only not the narrative, there can also be no such thing as nondiegetic space in film nor extra-diegetic. All elements of form, content and context cinematically contribute to the diegetic space of prefilmic and postfilmic consciousness.
For Burch, the cinematic diegetic was the space of the mental referent that enabled a collective consciousness of identification for the viewing subject, which from his Marxist perspective was a false consciousness. Deconstructing the codes of cinema, for him and for Metz, potentially encouraged the viewer to transform that world through the awareness of its construction. This suggests however that there may be a truth beneath the surface of artificial structure. This idealism would lead in part to Burch’s current volteface regarding the uselessness of form as a vehicle for consciousness raising, leaving only accessibility to radical content as a method of intervention in Western culture. Whereas Burch has renounced his association with the formal qualities of cinema (see Myer 2004) in favour of accessibility, my own view is that the diegetic problem is not contained in the codes of cinema, in form, and certainly not contained on the level of content. Rather, I would argue, the diegesis resides primarily in the notion of context. My advance from Burch’s definition of diegesis is that I remove it with more certainty from its confinement in narrativity, suggesting that its idealised doppelganger exists in the lived world, rather than any view that the lived world is reproduced or reflected on the screen. Accordingly, I consider a new framework for the workings of diegesis today within the evolution of the ‘postfilmic subject’. In so doing I refer to Genette’s comment on the notion of metalepsis (the transition from one narrative level to another), as he cites Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) and the works of Jean Genet and Alain Robbe-Grillet, invoking the diegetic boundaries of the two worlds they cross: the world in which one tells and the world of which one tells. Genette quotes Jorge Luis Borges from Other Inquisitions (1964: 46): ‘Such inversions suggest that if the characters in a story can be readers or spectators, then we, their readers or spectators, can be fictitious.’ ‘The most troubling thing’ wrote Genette ‘lies in this unacceptable and insistent hypothesis, that the extradiegetic is perhaps always diegetic, and that the narrator and his narratees – you and I – perhaps belong to some narrative’ (1980: 236). The question now becomes a consideration of how we ‘belong’ and it is here that I beg to free the diegetic from the confines of the illusory world of the so-called fictional cinema to examine its impact on another realm of the moving image that it has so impinged upon since the inception of cinema: the nonfiction film.
II
Here I suggest the transition from Burch’s notion of the ‘full diegetic effect’ to that of a more socially bound concept of the ‘full diegetic affect’ in an attempt to release diegesis from the confines of narrative form and place it in the imaginary of the social world. This begs the question of the possibility and validity of a special place for diegesis within nonfictional cinema, the cinema that I would suggest is most directly associated through the afilmic with the social world. Proposing the amendment of Burch’s definition of the full diegetic effect to the full diegetic affect or ‘a’-ffect reverses the signification of a model of communication between reality and representation that, before the reversal, could be formulated as:
lived world ↔ represented world
The switched perspective endeavours in its reversal to signify that which lies beyond the first model taking the diegetic with it into the post-representational theoretical arena of socialised action which, by default of collective consciousness could be formulated as:
represented world ↔ lived world
The significance of a single phoneme, particularly the use of the letter ‘a’ has been demonstrated by both Jacques Lacan in his use of the term ‘petit a’, the small unconscious struggles of the subject during the process of socialisation and Jacques Derrida in his use of the term ‘differance’ combining the meanings of difference and deferral. For Lacan the ‘objet petit a’ is by definition an object that has come into being in being lost ‘it leaves the subject in ignorance as to what there is beyond the appearance’ (Lacan 1994: 77). This is a basic fantasy for Lacan who illustrates the proposition with:
$ ◊ a (Lacan 1994: 209)
The ‘barred’ or alienated subject ‘$’ is divided through attraction to and repulsion from the object of its unconscious desire. It is correlative to (‘◊’),12 the fantasised lost object, the object petit a or petit autre (‘a’) being the object cause of desire. This is similar to Sigmund Freud’s fort-da game where a toy dropped by a baby elicits pleasure on its return, which Freud maintained was a metaphor for the absence and presence of the mother (Freud 1920: 14–15). The debarred subject stabilises its position by constructing a fantasy about how the subject is held in the Other, evident only in partial objects, the gaze or voice of his/her love objects, a hair style, or perhaps a filmic representation that can be enjoyed as compensation for its primordial loss of the maternal object. These partial objects, one must assume, can exist representationally within the diegetic space of the viewing subject and can in part account for the fascination, the drive of the viewer in his/her acquiescent relationship with what is seen on the screen. Even more so for Derrida whose notion of the deferral of the drive’s fantasies is also represented by the letter ‘a’. Differance is the concealed way of seeing something that is deferred out of (collective) consciousness through our diversion with the imagery that captures our notice. ‘Differance is the … formation of form’ (Derrida 1967: 63). It is the ‘historical and epochal ‘unfolding’ of Being’ (Derrida 1972: 22). The linguistic significance and cyclic possibility/impossibility of the metonymic use of the letter ‘a’ reveals a playfully serious dialectic with the representational and post-representational inversion in my reference to the ‘diegetic affect’. The use of Lacan’s ‘petit a’ within Derrida’s ‘difference’ may be read as ‘differ-petit a-nce’ and is not insignificant in the complexity of readability within the post-representational cinematic apparatus of nonfictional collective consciousness. This signifies a diegetic rebound that is perhaps more evidently present in nonfiction film than it is in fiction film, in part due to the perception of ‘the unshakable reality of the documentary film’ as stated by Peter Brook (2005). It is an iconic and graphic expression of the imaginary, enabling a theoretical model for the full diegetic affect. It demonstrates the conceptual remodelling of the social imperative as one which is, at the very least, coloured by the stains of representation and operating as an ideologically determined permeable membrane between the lived world, its reception, construction and reconstruction, present for example in some of the nonfictional film work of the artist Jeremy Deller (2004).13 The socially constructed, individually apperceived diegetic rebound, then, is fundamental to the proposition that collective consciousness (see below) is an important agency in the delivery of the belief system of nonfictional film awareness.
The diegesis of nonfictional film resides in space and time in correlation to fictional film. The spatial-temporal dimensions and attributes that comprise the moving image can appear more apparent in the fictional context and tend towards opacity in the case of nonfiction. Bill Nichols questions whether
…our emphasis on people, places, and things, facts and figures has obscured our understanding of the degree to which the indexical film image, as utilised by nonfiction, has as its referent a temporal dimension. And is this temporal direction not the domain of lived experience rather than strict chronology? Is it not, in other words, history … historical consciousness? (1994: xii)
The distinction between fictional and nonfictional, contextualised within the concept of historical and indeed, collective consciousness, lies in the claim of nonfictional film to have a direct relationship with and, beyond the relative, to actually represent reality. Fictional film has never successfully staked that claim – it may make reference to being based on a true story, it may even use the real characters from an event but it can claim nothing more than reconstruction. Conversely, documentary dramas may use the illusory techniques of documentary film, the handheld camera or the attempt at natural characterisation by actors assuming to act naturally, such as in the early films of Peter Watkins and Ken Loach, but ultimately they fall within the diegeses of dramatisation and narrativity. The space between the fictional diegetic and the nonfictional diegetic has become an increasingly prevalent concern for academic discourse concurrent with the development of acceptable modes of production that extend beyond traditional forms of film and television practice. Nichols recognises that:
Inevitably, the distinction between fact and fiction blurs when claims about reality get cast as narratives. We enter a zone where the world put before us lies between one not our own and one that very well might be, between a world we may recognise as a fragment of our own and one that may seem fabricated from such fragments, between indexical (authentic)14 signs of reality and cinematic (invented) interpretations of this reality’. (1994: ix)
The question, then, is more complex than simply the difference between factual and fictional moving image making and may indeed reside as difference in both forms in the explicit viewing assumptions of the audience and as differance in the implicit readings of the audience. The ‘zone…between’ to which Nichols alludes may be heightened and accentuated within the realm of nonfiction film as implicit differance and equally heightened in the realm of fiction film as explicit difference in the knowing of the watching of a film, the consciousness of the spectatorship and the viewers’ knowledge of themselves as subjects of the world represented. In her book on the politics of documentary, Paula Rabinowitz (1994) raises questions of the appeal of the documentary form to both the Left and to the establishment based on its duality of place between subject and object, asking whether the invocation of reality reinforces realism or destabilises it. This most interesting place between is also the site for exchange, she continues to argue, where the audience of documentary, like the listener of a joke, participates in the degradation of the third, the object of scrutiny, the butt of the joke – but it also degrades the documentarian as an outsider. This, she establishes, is crucial to the rhetoric of documentary, the knowing outrage, the joke is on everyone (Rabinowitz 1994: 7). Thus, the role of the gaze in Lacan’s ‘$ ◊ a’ is a knowing gaze, which could be construed as that which lies inside (Nichols’ ‘space between’) the duality of the contradictory cinematic gazes of the pleasure of looking, as depicted by Mulvey:
(There are) two contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking in the conventional cinematic situation. The first, scopophilic, arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight. The second, developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identification with the image seen. Thus, in film terms, one implies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen (active scopophilia), the other demands identification of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator’s fascination with and recognition of his like … the tension between instinctual drives and self-preservation continues to be a dramatic polarisation in terms of pleasure … they have to be attached to an idealisation. Both pursue aims in indifference to perceptual reality, creating the imagised, eroticised concept of the world that forms the perception of the subject and makes a mockery of empirical objectivity. (1990: 32)15
The knowing gaze is that which is simultaneously used by the viewer to see while at the same time the viewer is looked back upon by the screen. Both become imbricated as object/subject in a Sadean struggle for dominance.
Sexuality may indeed be the driving force of this relationship, but in a post-representational society this pervasion embraces more than the notion of pleasure as a mechanism, the penetration residing, I will argue, in the realm of ‘collective consciousness’, a term coined by Emile Durkheim in 1893. Durkheim recognised the dilemma of the relationship between the individual and society, between what we think we are and what we are formed to be, though debates continue today between the supporters of Durkheim’s theories and those of his contemporary Gabriel Tarde who argued that society is comprised of both individual consciousness and their compound, the sum of the consciousness in individuals.16 Durkheim contested that ‘social life is made up of representations’ (2002: 276), collective representations through religion as a system of symbols that enables society to becomes conscious of itself. The content of this collective consciousness, iconically religious in Durkheim’s time, has transformed, I would suggest, to a post-biological content ideologically embracing representation itself, whereby religion is disempowered in favour of the diegetic relationship with representation as the new social construct. In the overlap between Durkheim’s instigations in 1893, two years prior to the ‘birth’ of cinema, and Freudian and post-Freudian analyses of self, we can make connections with the primary cinematic illusion of selves (collective recognition rather than individual consciousness) and the illusory intangibility of the Other, as Lacan questions and signifies in the fifth chapter of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis:
…the reality system, however far it is developed, leaves us an essential part of what belongs to the real a prisoner in the toils of the pleasure principle. … The primary process … the unconscious … apprehended in its experience of rupture, between perception and consciousness, in that nontemporal locus … what Freud calls … the idea of another locality, another space, another scene, the between perception and consciousness. (1994: 56; my emphasis)
Here I will raise the question of the relationship between the nonfictional notion of reality, perceived to exist outside the realm of the film, half of the equation of the full diegetic affect, and Lacan’s notion of the Real – the third order in the psychoanalytic field of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real17 – the place where that which is not trapped in the unconscious (naturally) can be traumatised psychotically. This is quite different to the filmmakers’ nonfictional reality but, I would suggest, imbricated within the lozenge of the full diegetic affect equation as, indeed, the space between perception and consciousness. The nonfictional real of representation shields the kernel of Lacan’s Real, a persecutory image that cannot be mastered through verbal (or visual) symbolisation. According to Alan Sheridan, in his translator’s endnote of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, Lacan’s work on the Real began:
…by presenting, in relation to symbolic substitutions and imaginary variations, a function of constancy: ‘the real is that which always returns to the same place’. It then became that before which the imaginary faltered, that over which the symbolic stumbles, that which is refractory, resistant. ‘The real is the impossible’, that which is lacking in the symbolic order, the ineliminable residue of all articulation, the foreclosed element, which may be approached, but never grasped: the umbilical cord of the symbolic. (1994: 280)
There is, in a sense, a state of collective trauma brought about by the relationship between the non-assimilatory nature of the Real and transference through the constancy of repetition, and that which is left behind and embedded in the viewing subject through the residue of the mirror phase, the inculcation of the ego on the infant at the moment it recognises itself as ‘other’ to its mother:
The relation to the real that is to be found in the transference was expressed by Freud when he declared that nothing can be apprehended in effigie, in absentia – and yet is not the transference given to us as effigy and as relation to absence? We can succeed in unravelling this ambiguity of the reality involved in the transference only on the basis of the function of the real in repetition…
We are now at the heart of what may enable us to understand the radical character of the conflictual notion introduced by the opposition of the pleasure principle and the reality principle – which is why we cannot conceive the reality principle as having, by virtue of its ascendancy, the last word’. (Lacan 1994: 54–5)
Central to my concern, in this respect, is the reliability of diegesis in nonfictional film. As, according to Freud, both the reality principle and the pleasure principle have a tendency to dominate the psyche (1920: 6–8) and henceforth simultaneously the diegetic space of the film subject (whether fictional or nonfictional), the deferred superior gratification offered by the reality principle in exchange for the constant search for pure pleasure (the constancy of the pleasure principle) can be seen as a potential subliminal arbitrator in the relationship between the diegetic space of fact and the diegetic space of fiction. The referent in any form of nonfiction film plays a vital part in the inter-textual role between the space of the reality consciousness of the viewer and the readability of the image. Susan Scheibler examines the bridge between the Freudian/Lacanian Imaginary and its operability in nonfiction film:
In the documentary form, [knowledge] establishes itself within the conventions associated with the constative dimension of verifiability and facticity … The imaginary of the documentary, the imagined real, joins with the documentary’s symbolic in its concern with language, culture, history, and the other to produce a subject within the promise of the constative …The spectator is invited into this space of authenticity through the ontological and epistemological promise of a constative that relies on its spectacular effects to suture the subject into a presumed imaginary relationship to his or her own relation to the symbolic order, to culture and language. (1993: 143–4)
She defines the difference between the constative and the performative by the constative’s:
dependence on a belief in the possibility of a knowledge that is able to guarantee the actuality and presence, the facticity, of its observations and remarks. The performative, on the other hand, is unconcerned with its relation to facticity, to truth or falsity, performing its enunciative function apart from and outside of issues of verifiability and authenticity. (1993: 139)
The explication and the foregrounding of the diegetic in this context relies on an epistemological progression between the disembodied knowledge18 of the classical documentary and the embodiment of ‘process’ in more radical films that takes on the mantle of ascription to which Nichols, in referring to avant-garde films in the 1990s that have confounded fact and fiction, has given the title ‘performative documentary’ (1994: 93–106). This nomenclature is fashioned particularly to those films that have sustained a ‘sense of historical consciousness in the face of a postmodern tendency to forget the past’ (Nichols 1994: xi). History presents itself only in the temporal act of viewing and meaning construction – that is, not reconstruction of a priori events but the subaltern of accumulated readings within collective consciousness, fractured to include temporal disassociation and differentiation. As in any mise-en-scène, the particularity of the diegetic exists not in the objects as such but in the filmmakers’ choice and arrangement of iconographic and indexical representations with their discursive interplay of fracture, whether normative (such as classical codes of editing) or non-normative (such as avant-garde film). A problematic superficiality of certainty exists in the binary opposition generally posed between definitions of documentary and fiction. All film work is philosophically both – in documenting that which is placed before the camera, and in so doing fictionalising that space. The problematic does not lie centrally in the question of whether there is a difference between fiction and nonfiction (clearly there are strategic, linguistic and cinematically receptive differences of form and perception held by the producing and viewing subject), rather it lies within the question of specificity in cultural meaning production and reception within film pertaining to deal directly with the social iconic and the social metaphoric. Of course, the metaphoric also exists within the iconic and vice versa and are both linked to the social.
Nichols treats ‘fiction and nonfiction as blurred or fuzzy boundaries’ (1994: 109). He takes the position that the boundaries in film between documentary and reality, fact and fiction, ‘defy simple definition and static identity’ (1994: xiii), that they are subject to change and development and though perhaps beyond control are shapable. Nonfiction film serves as fiction ‘(un)like any other’ (1993: 189) stabilised by the belief systems maintained by the spectator. It adds another layer of complexity of narrative to procure the image as evidence assumed to speak for itself, an assumption, in my view, closely linked to the insecurity of the diegetic. This is compounded by the effect of the institutionalisation of postmodernism at the cutting edge of media form. In the absence of any positive philosophical direction everything is important and nothing is important. In containing, and by so doing, disarming the debates, postmodernism became more than the sum of its parts. In the reflexive critiques of the institutions of power and the plurality of theory, it became, instead of a counter-theory, a practice-based theoretical institution of its own – one quite at home inside the dominant ethos that its constituent elements attempted to fracture. This illuminates Burch’s switch away from the formal. There was no longer an aesthetic that was dangerous. There was no longer history, not even a history of history. As the past became contained within its own representation it quickly became a commodity. As Vivian Sobchack notes, the self proclaimed mission of the television History Channel, was to offer the viewer: ‘All of History. All in One Place™ – if you couldn’t be there the first time, here’s your second chance’ (1996: 4). Nichols takes this further by suggesting that one of the outcomes of this meta-institutionalism resides within the actions of the social subject reflecting the displacement of lack in social interaction. The problematic contrivance of the way nonfictional events are narrativised within the interlocking codes of fictional representation are designed to appeal to a sense of emotion rather than a sense of action and leads primarily to the consuming of a sense of event, a sense of experience, interiorised within the space of the habitat of the viewing subject. What ensues is a false sense of satisfaction, a need that is constantly nurtured in the adage of ‘giving the audience what it wants’. Occasionally, the consumption of emotion may lead to misplaced action. The viewing subject is caught in an illusive self motivated action of an imaginary relationship misrecognised as an actual relationship to a social situation. Whereas fictional forms direct our attention to events and things, nonfictional forms open up a given awareness of the space between representation and that which is represented. We already know, have knowledge of, the nonfictional represented world, after all we (believe we) live it every day. The satisfaction of the reconfirmation is of a different order to that of the intrigue of the fictional world. Real danger, which is shown on the news as war, hurricane, famine does not seem as dangerous as fictional danger which plays with desire, unspoken misplacement and romanticised heroism.
What we end up consuming, in a sense articulated by the work of Jean Baudrillard, is an incongruity, digesting simulacrum and (mis)knowing the historical world. An acquiescent deferment whereby we mean no harm and are not harmed, a fort da of production (of misknowledge) and consumption of a carved up representational carcass of the world we believe we live in. There appears to be a logical pessimism through Burch’s contemporary volteface regarding the now impossible task (in the West) of any radical film form existing as a counter-dominant ideological strategy (Myer 2004: 73). Despite this seemingly defeatist outlook there is, I believe, a new perspective – one that considers epistemological filmmaking to be highly discursive. Paradoxically Burch’s position frees us from the tyranny of film form whilst Nichols invokes the performative documentary as a way of understanding the world in the manner of [my emphasis] Bertolt Brecht’s notion of alienation, despite Burch’s perceptive insistence that the new alienation within postmodernism is by no means Brechtian. What it potentially does is to give precedence to the experiential quality of the subject’s relation to the sign, to make sense of the world rather than be encapsulated by its logic (Nichols 1994). In Baudrillard’s critical philosophical approach we see representation dissolve into simulation and a critique of the object of desire of the intellectuals (2001). The end result is, for him, documentary’s loss of force which must lead by default to the false expectations of reality television. He dismisses theories whereby the gaze is external to its object as Burch dismisses Mulvey’s understanding of the male gaze and Brecht’s notion of alienation as having any use today as filmic modes of distancing or strategies for radical counter-cinematic action (Myer 2004: 77). For both Burch and Baudrillard, reality effects become inextricable from experience of the real. Social order generates simulation, a hyperreal. No longer bound by representability, the implication for nonfictional film is the absolution of responsibility for the transposition of reality to representation. However, this absolution, in my terms, recognises the role of both collective consciousness and the filmic and postfilmic diegesis as residues of the social imaginary and considers the ideologising of representation as a primary necessity. It allows entry back into the filmed system and signals that which comes after postmodernism to be quite reusable. The thought that everything is permissible within the representational perspective of postmodernism leads, not to defeatism, but towards a conscious perspective of posthumanist film practice, a repositioning of the relationship between history and the present, the replacing of metaphorical inverted commas to re-enable comment by including both representational history and the process by which that particular version of history representationally materialised.
Here I look to the later film work of Jean-Luc Godard and the theoretical work of Jacques Rancière. In Godard’s eight-part film Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988–98) he reworks historical cinematic representation to produce new meaning. This is by no means a return to the 1960s and 1970s American and British experimental and structuralist work of the Film-makers’ Co-ops, rather it is a nonfictional work of diegetical consciousness that demonstrates that all representation is capable of a constructive reallocation of meaning. In ‘The Place of Desire in Documentary Film Theory’, Michael Renov quotes Paul Ricoeur’s statement that ‘consciousness is such as it appears to itself’ (2004: 98) invoking Freud’s challenge of the supremacy of consciousness in Western thought. As he points to Freud’s statement, that everything conscious has an unconscious preliminary stage (1965: 651), that which is conscious is but a small part of that which is not, then for the viewer, unknowing is greater than knowing in the presence of the cinematic representation yet is intimately linked to the collective diegetic space – the space between seeing and understanding in cinematic consciousness. Here too is a link between Durkheim’s observation of the role of religiosity and the post-religious dominance of the representational that can be seen in my own film work in Dorothy Carrington, Woman of two Worlds (2006) and Song of the Falklands (2008) as an example of contemporary ideological residue of the totemistic. It is what Godard refers to in Histoire(s) du Cinéma (Part 1: 1988) when he sharply combines religious iconography in the form of a detail of a Renaissance painting of the Resurrection superimposed with a clip of the young Elizabeth Taylor rising from the sea. The voice-over proclaims ‘The martyrdom and resurrection of the documentary. Oh, the wonder of watching what we cannot see. Oh, sweet miracle of our blind eyes.’ With nonfiction film we watch with the desire to know, as Elizabeth Cowie elucidates in her essay on Reality and Documentary, ‘it is an epistemological project, requiring that we not only see but are also brought to know’ (1997). However, it is desire itself which intervenes in the knowing process as Renov quotes Julia Kristeva: ‘The knowing subject is also a desiring subject, and the paths of desire ensnarl the paths of knowledge’ (2004: 100). The attempted resolution of desire in the thinking subject brings with it a conflicting paradox between recognition of representation and the recognition of self. In cinematic terms this leads ultimately to representation as stereotype as the subject struggles to connect with an estranged image of the world it thinks it understands. An amalgamation of tacit knowledge, acquired social values and a constant need for the reaffirmation of self provides the individual with the necessary stability through a sense of collective consciousness. Daniel Frampton in Filmosophy quotes Walter Benjamin on cinema: ‘an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man’ (2006: 6). But in the context of my concern that the diegetic space of collective consciousness has engendered a post-representational ideology, a space of confusion between the ‘represented’ world and the ‘lived’ world (which automatically contains the represented world), this quote takes on more meaning than just the difference between the ‘real’ world and the filmed world. The space penetrated (by the nonfiction camera) transforms here to a space of collective consciousness even with Benjamin’s professed ‘conscious’ intervention of man. The representational image created by this intervention does not provide us with a complete knowledge about the world it assimilates, but creates a further complexity within the brackets of the specificity of form and content. It provides us with further knowledges which are themselves subject to the paths of desire. These elements of knowledge are then arranged and potentially rearranged to initiate and excavate complex readings of the relationship between the represented world and the believed experience of the conscious subject. This dichotomy between the represented world and the conscious subject is at the heart of the construction of Godard’s film. The fracturing of this seemingly homogenous and ideologically unproblematic status, developed and honed by language-like cinematic conventions in general and the nonfictional documentary apparatus, that which the audience perceives as a truth of the world, is strategically embedded in the creation of the film. The intervention is not determined by a set of rules as such but rather through a focusing and refocusing of the subject film and subject viewer being placed and then re-placed, pushing and pulling the diegetic space within its own parameters. In other words, a de-figuration process of the ‘subject’ takes place between the subject/form/content of the film and the subject/viewer to evolve as a re-figuration within the bricolage of the filmmaking practice. According to Rancière, a work of de-figuration19 is the process of reinterpolation of cinematic meaning, to add meaning onto meaning, serving to contradict expectations or to review, reread and rearrange (2006: 8) and refers as such to Histoire(s) du Cinéma:
Godard takes the films these filmmakers made and makes with them the films they didn’t make. This calls for a two step process: the first recaptures the images from their subjection to the stories they were used to tell, and the second rearranges them into other stories’. (2001: 171)
Godard in my view fulfils the expectations of a methodology previously stated in his much earlier film Le Gai Savoir (1968). In the film the main character Emile Rousseau (great-great-grandson of J.-J. Rousseau),20 played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, explains the methodology to Patricia Lumumba (Juliet Berto):
The first year we collect images and sounds and experiment. The second year we criticize all that: decompose, recompose. The third year we attempt some small models of reborn film.21
De-figuration as strategy suggests not just a fracturing of the diegetic space and mental referent in nonfiction cinema but questions the relationship between the perception of the image-in-the-world and that of its representational cinematic avatar.22 The dialectical possibilities of filmic de-figuration are exemplified by Rancière in his invocation of the work of Godard and similarly with that of Chris Marker, with specific reference to Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma and Marker’s Le Tombeau d’Alexandre (The Last Bolshevik, 1992). Both auteurs and both oeuvres recognise and depend upon the relationship between history, memory and representation and in their creative de-figuration of existing ideas and representations invoke a crisis of confidence in collective consciousness and diegetic construction. If the diegetic space of the nonfiction subject/viewer is the ideological habitat of the subject/viewer then the poetic conflict produced through the intellectual montage of these films illuminates this entrapment. Rancière extols the power of documentary to rise above classical poetics23 in its ability not to be ‘bound to the “real” sought after by the classical norms of affinities and verisimilitude’ (2001: 161) of fiction cinema. He considers the ability of nonfiction film to entwine signs, voices and time, to ‘combine meanings freely, to re-view images, to arrange them differently, and to diminish or increase their capacity for expression and for generating meaning’ (2001: 161).
Within the shifting terrain of nonfiction film the viewing subject becomes more complex, less formally structured in their relationship to knowledge and exponentially more complex in the light of the unknowable Other. Bill Nichols’ notion of blurred boundaries attests to this as does Paula Rabinowitz’s implication of the knowing subject’s paradox of the knowledge of realism. The dominance of the relationship between television and the internet’s viewing-subject and their viewed-object has shifted the balance away from the anterior domination of fiction as genre and we are witnessing a rebirth of new forms of documentary film in the guise of nonfiction in television, the internet and consequently, cinema. This is the new context of the post-filmic representational subject, the imaginary world implicitly formed on the internal screen of the viewing subject. The notion of the viewing subject suggests that there can no longer be, in the West, a subject separated from viewing, a subject removed from the desire to see and to know. Representation embalms the viewing subject in diegetic knowledge, outside of real space and time creating a space beyond lived experience. Nonfictional film theorists and filmmakers have approached this problem in different ways. The notion of the performative documentary has been an important field for the progression of an understanding of the problematic as well as a method for understanding the nature of a potential for a discursive film practice. It may well be the case that representational performativity in the guise of experimental and reflexive documentary work can fracture the norm of the dominance of documentary form, momentarily, but my conclusion is in agreement with Burch when he refers to the world of music videos having incorporated the radical and ending up as postmodern empty viewing and bad cinema (see chapter 14). To confirm this I return to Burch’s association with Genette’s holistic approach to the diegetic containing the universe where history occurs and the dictum that ‘all that I see on the screen’ becomes the normative. At a conjuncture when cinema is reinventing genre in order that it might commodify audiences and re-classify their interests, documentary feature films serve to extend the range of available choice and are developing further as a popular and award winning form. Within the debate between fiction and nonfiction, the feature documentary appears to be settling down as an acceptable genre alongside other new forms engaged in the use of new technology, such as the computer game film adaptation and even subtitled foreign films are becoming a part of the expanded normative. However, standing to one side of Burch’s fully pessimistic view, I infer that in recognising the significance of the inevitable role of collective consciousness in driving the social imperative, a praxis can operate and remain in a state of alienation with recuperation by working within the diegetic at the intensity that Barthes has indicated, as second-level myth at a second or even third level of diegetic interchange – the place where the first level of myth, the sign, can be engaged and re-mythified. For Barthes, the social subject exists within myth, within language itself as a structured subtext of society (1957). Representation, a metadiscourse of language, then exists as a second level purveyor of myth, operating through differently structured codes depending on the particular form of representation. To counteract the illusory nature of being-in-the-world that representation invokes, it was necessary for Barthes to engage with myth itself, to create other levels of myth rather than draw back from representation to any semblance of a real world. The problem of demystification, common to the aims of structuralist and experimental films that attempted to deconstruct meaning, such as those of Wollen and Mulvey, Film Work Group and Noel Burch’s early film practice, is that the attempt to operate outside conventional film codes is cyclical. Simultaneous to breaching a filmic code a new code is established. Barthes acknowledged the impossibility of working outside myth. Rather, he suggests, it is possible to create another level of myth in order to play myth at its own game. It is possible to mythify myth and in so doing work on the level of the imaginary that is neither false consciousness nor true consciousness. The first level of myth, the sign, is taken forward, recontextualised and recoded to become another signifier - the second level of myth - and a chain of signification is established between the piece of work and the reading/viewing subject. Myth, according to Barthes, has a double function: ‘it makes us understand something and it imposes it on us’ (1957: 117). I accept and extend Barthes’ original concept in the knowledge of its limitations – that it, too, is contained within the very ideological system that is under review. That which is filmed is delivered to the conscious subject as natural and in order for both the filmmaker and the viewer to engage, rather than passively transmit and receive, it is necessary to enter the myth and work within myth itself, to produce ‘an artificial myth’ (Barthes 1957: 135) and acknowledge that one can only work within representation, not outside it. This is what has driven Burch back to transparency – the ultimate frustration of not being able to be radical with form without immediate recuperation.
At the time of Brecht in Germany in the 1930s and even earlier, at the time of Sergei Eisenstein in Russia in the 1920s, the social contexts enabled this to be an altogether more direct process of estrangement. Social democracy, according to Burch (Myer 2004: 72), has turned this on its head and alienation is now used as an institutional form of social distancing as difference has itself joined the ranks of commodification. This is not to suggest that the original tenets of alienation and distancing in striving to produce a dialectical relationship with an audience are of no value. They are, however, in need of more complex consideration as part of the process of post-representational incorporation and the necessity to work within myth rather than fruitlessly attempting to operate outside ideology. Rancière’s definition of the process of de-figuration, to facilitate contradiction of expectation, or to review, reread or rearrange (2006: 8), needs to be understood as operating at both the source of production and at the place of consumption. The strategy of enterism as a way of dealing with myth empowers the filmmaker and the viewer to reconstruct new meaning, to begin to take back control of the image and sound as exemplified by Godard whose work brings Eisenstein’s conception of intellectual montage24 to a contemporary discursive engagement with collective consciousness whereby the notion of intellectual montage running parallel to the notion of the diegetic and through contemporary critical practice can remain current as praxis. The filmic relationship between Eisenstein and Godard is clear. For Godard, montage is the essence of cinema, the one aspect that if stripped bare would remain intact. In a filmed conversation between Godard and Serge Daney in 1988, Godard stated that ‘montage is what made cinema unique … Eisenstein naturally thought he had found montage … But by montage I mean something much more vast’ (in Temple & Williams 2000: 17). Frampton concurs that Godard’s use of editing and superimpositions, sharp shifts and sounds cut short take up where Eisenstein left off: ‘Iconographic montage-thinkings such as Histoire(s) du Cinéma … are exercises of thought, using a souped-up version of Eisenstein’s intellectual montage’ (2006: 69). The next step for intellectual montage and intellectual cinema then will be to go beyond the notion of the exercise towards the contextualised fulfilment that Eisenstein predicted and Rancière suggests: a renewal of the dialectic that is not anchored to binarism, occupying the discursive spaces of the diegetic between form/content/context, fiction/nonfiction and the gaze of the spectator/gaze of the screen.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Althusser, L. (1971) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: NLB.
Aumont, J. (1997) The Image. London: BFI.
Barthes, R. (1957) Mythologies. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Reprint, St Albans: Paladin, 1973.
Baudrillard, J. (2001) Selected Writings. 2nd edn. Oxford: Polity.
Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books.
Bordwell, D. (1997) On the History of Film Style. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Borges, J.L. (1964) Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Branston, G and R. Stafford (2003) The Media Student’s Book. 3rd edn. London: Routledge.
Brook, P. (2005) Peter Brook in conversation with Michael Kustow. [Symposium at Hay-on-Wye Literature Festival]. 29 May.
Burch, N. (1973) Theory of Film Practice. London: Secker & Warburg.
_____ (1990) Life to Those Shadows. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Burwell, C. (2003) ‘Composing for the Coen brothers’, in Sider, L., Freeman, D. and Sider, J. (eds) Soundscape: the School of Sound Lectures 1998–2001. London: Wallflower Press, 195–208.
Chanan, M. (1998) On Documentary: The Zapruder Quotient, Filmwaves, 4, pp. 22-23.
Chion, M. (1982) La Voix au Cinéma. Paris: Editions de l’Etoile.
_____ (1994) Audio-vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press.
Concise Oxford Dictionary (1999) Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Debray, R. (2000) Transmitting Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.
Derrida, J. (1967) Of Grammatology. Les Éditions de Minuit. Reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
_____ (1972) Margins of Philosophy. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Deutch, S. (2003) ‘Music for interactive moving pictures’, in Sider, L., Freeman, D. and Sider, J. (eds) Soundscape, the School of Sound Lectures 1998–2001. London: Wallflower Press, 28–34.
Durkheim, E. (2002) Suicide. Abingdon: Routledge.
Eagleton, T. (2003) After Theory. London: Allen Lane Penguin.
Frampton, D. (2006) Filmosophy. London: Wallflower Press.
Freud, S. (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey. Reprint, London: Vintage, 2001.
Lyotard, J.-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Genette, G. (1980) Narrative Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
_____ (1988) Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Hayward, S. (2006) Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts. 3rd edn. London: Routledge.
Lacan, J. (1994) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. London: Penguin.
Lowry, E. (1985) ‘The filmology movement and film study in France’, in D. Kirkpatrick (ed.) Studies in Cinema No. 33. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 73–97, 184–9.
Metz, C. (1973) ‘Current problems of film theory: Jean Mitry’s l’esthetique et psychologie du cinema, vol. II’, Screen, 14 (1/2 Spring/Summer), 40–87.
_____ (1982) The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mulvey, L. (1990) ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, in P. Erens (ed.) Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 28–40.
Myer, C. (2004) ‘Playing with toys by the wayside: an interview with Noel Burch’, Journal of Media Practice, 5, 2, 71–80.
Nichols, B. (1993) ‘Getting to know you … knowledge, power, and the body’, in M. Renov (ed.) Theorizing Documentary. London: Routledge, 174–92.
_____ (1994) Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Rabinowitz, P. (1994) They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary. London and New York: Verso.
Rancière, J. (2001) Film Fables. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Reprint, Oxford: Berg, 2006.
Renov, M. (2004) The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ricoeur, P. (1984–88) Time and Narrative, 1–3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rodowick, D. N. (1994) The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Scheibler, S. (1993) ‘Constantly performing the documentary: the seductive promise of lightning over water’, in M. Renov (ed.) Theorizing Documentary. London: Routledge, 135–50.
Sobchack, V. (1996) The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event. London: Routledge.
Souriau, E. (1953) L’univers Filmique. Paris: Flammarion.
Temple, M., J. S. Williams and M. Witt (eds) (2004) For Ever Godard. London: Black Dog Publishing.
Tredell, N. (2002) Cinemas of the Mind: a Critical History of Film Theory. Cambridge: Icon Books.
Prince, G. (2003) A Dictionary of Narratology, Revised Edition. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.
FILMOGRAPHY
2001, A Space Odyssey (1968) Directed by Stanley Kubrick [DVD]. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.
Miller’s Crossing (1990) Directed by Joel Coen [DVD]. USA: Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation.
Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988-98) Directed by Jean-Luc Godard [DVD]. Spain: Prodimag.
Dorothy Carrington: Woman of two Worlds (2006) Directed by Clive Myer [DVD]. Wales: Eclectic Films Ltd.
Song of the Falklands (2008) Directed by Clive Myer [DVD]. Wales: Eclectic Films Ltd.
Le Gai Savoir (1969) Directed by Jean-Luc Godard [DVD]. USA: Koch Lorber Films.
Le Tombeau d’Alexandre (The Last Bolshevik, 1992) Directed by Chris Marker [DVD]. USA: Icarus Films.
NOTES