CM: There was a certain conjuncture in the 1970s where film and philosophy joined up, at least for a while. In the last thirty years there has been a huge dissipation between the two spaces which is why I called this conference BEYOND, the Theory of Practice in order to bring back together some of the original thinkers about the nature of a theoretical practice with some new people who are interested in both theory and practice and to see where we might go from here. The main questions are very simple – what sort of theory do we teach our film practice students now and why has film practice gone in one direction, towards a mini-industrial process while theory has gone in a different direction, which is more-or-less to avoid practical work altogether. That’s the kind of general premise for the whole conference.
NB: So I’m supposed to respond to that. Well look, as for the why all this has happened, just look at the world. This mostly concerns me in a very anxious and I would almost say sickening way. What’s happening to the world is why I’m getting politically active in the Green Party in this country, part of my life as it is now, but as far as apparently the nostalgia that some people, maybe not yourself, but some people seem to still have for the 1970s I want to tell one of many anecdotes that took place around 1980 and for me in any case sums up my own revisionism.
I went back to the States for a couple of years after the defeat of the left in this country after 1979. I absolutely hated it, it made me quite ill and now I’ll probably never return. When I was there I was teaching undergraduates Film Production and Film History. It was actually the last time I ever taught elementary film making. One day I was showing Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) to a class of around a hundred students and I gave this speech about the abstract space and the relationship of the frame, etc. and then I went out to do something in my office and a student came by and said ‘Professor, this film is absolutely wonderful, but tell me something – what does that girl want?’ Then I have to say the penny dropped and I went back and asked these 75 kids who Joan of Arc was and there were two who knew and I said to myself there’s something wrong, I should be perhaps talking about what the films are about. This and some other experiences in retrospect were moments of absolute truth. If I had to teach students film production today, I would be teaching them how to be inside the codes of what we used to call dominant cinema, because I think it’s the only one that’s readable. Today I’ve become very critical of avant-gardes in general, be they political or not – the historical interest of Vertov, etc. Okay but nobody was interested in those films, they had absolutely no political effect. The point is that it was all wrong-headed to my mind, the only films that I have personally made that I still feel have any value are two documentaries, which I’m sure you have not seen because they are never shown. They were co-produced by Channel Four, it was the Head of Independent Film Alan Fountain’s last project and he left before they were due to be shown and they were never programmed, but not because they were anything like avant-garde, one was a film I made on the American left, Sentimental Journey: Refuzniks USA (1994), it was viscerally anti-American, it was shown here on TV with a certain amount of success actually. I made another film a couple of years later with Michèle Larue, Cuba: Entre Chien et Louve (Cuba: Mothers and Machos, 1997) which was about male/female relations in Cuba. It showed here on Planète, a documentary cable channel, as they co-financed it and I think it’s really interesting but some of my formalist friends thought it was like a radio programme.
It’s nice to have films look OK and know how to put the camera where you should put it. These are the things that one has to teach students – anybody can teach them who has any kind of pedagogical capacities. I was actually blackballed from teaching in film school in France and England because of my interest in revolutionary formalism at the time – IDHEC1 [now La Fémis]2 didn’t want me because I was a Communist and The National Film and Television School [NFTS] in the UK didn’t want me because they felt I was trying destroy the British Film Industry, which was rather flattering at the time but they were totally correct, it was totally useless. As far as my writing is concerned, I have published one book, which I really am proud of which I wrote in collaboration with a woman, Geneviève Sellier – I prefer working with women and have for a long time as a matter of fact. The book, La Drôle de Guerre des Sexes du Cinéma Français: 1930-1956 (1996), is an analysis of the representation of gender in French classical cinema during that period, which I really think is a good piece of path-breaking work in this country, because nobody has ever done that here or anywhere for that matter – it’s not exportable because nobody cares about that cinema anywhere else but here it’s a big success, which is interesting because here people are very anti content analysis, but it is cinema that is so despised in this country, all those 1930s and 1940s films, anything before the New Wave is in for a dig.
CM: What about the book you’ve just finished?
NB: The book I’ve just finished [De la Beauté des Latrines (2007)] is a critique of Modernism. It’s about cinema criticism; it’s a critique of the historically modernist bias of French film criticism since Louis Delluc and even way before that. On the one hand it is a sort of plea in favour of a gender-based grid of evaluation of films, which is no longer aesthetic but which is political, content orientated and concerned with ambiguity. It’s about different things, it’s a big book but it is primarily a critique or at least the offensive part of it, in both senses of the word, as far as French criticism is concerned. I found a few people who actually quite like the book here; it’s a sort of a deconstruction, as they say, of the dominant thinking about film in this country, because we’re dominated by aesthetics basically from the word go, something which I contributed to in my sort of naïve way, without knowing it. I thought everybody here was into content when I was writing Theory of Film Practice (1968/1973), but of course it wasn’t true.
CM: Your anecdotes are interesting, but of course came at particular moments that have now moved on. From the idea of looking back at Theory of Film Practice I would put it to you that some of the main concerns in that book and possibly some of your recent concerns, not for you personally, but as a problematic in the world in fact have not moved on that much and have not been resolved, such as the question of dialectics, the place of Marxism within the general space of the shift from Modernism to Postmodernism.
So I wonder whether making this absolute shift from form to content, which seems to be what you’re saying, is in a way avoiding the kind of responsibility for the contribution you actually made to that work historically and which has been fantastically important. As for your anecdotes on moments of truth, these could be balanced by other more positive instances such as shifts in the school curriculum adding materialism to the history lesson as well as the development of Film Studies and Media Studies. People that have come out of that period of the 1970s, who themselves are now either filmmakers, teachers, professors or researchers have passed on methods of working, methods of analysis – a critique which was not just to do with cinema but was a political critique. We’ve come to a position – as suggested by Terry Eagleton in After Theory (2003) – that has simultaneously attempted to instigate debates on questions of the production of meaning but actually makes them even more problematic and recuperative in today’s context. Media Studies has become a dominant subject choice for entrance to universities. Whereas in the 1970s people were looking at classical texts for their Doctorates, they may have been looking at Bram Stoker, now they’re doing their theses on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and popular television. Eagleton suggests that whereas in the 1970s and 1980s Cultural Studies students were interested in sexuality, now they are interested in sex. There is a kind of overdetermining of the problem alongside the development in the world of globalisation, there no longer being a dichotomy of the struggle of two superpowers (though there may be newly developing superpowers). The grand narratives which themselves were based in form rather than content have gone, so rather than go backwards into finding the other space (of content), to enter that other non-formalistic space – where form and structure are no longer dominant over what they’re actually portraying, Eagleton concludes by suggesting that we should look for new spaces, ones that are now being created by globalisation itself. My fear regarding your position is that if one leaves these issues of form alone, you are going to find in another 10 or 20 years that students of today will not have been enabled to deal with future reconstructions and myth.
NB: I’m fairly familiar with the argument and I read Eagleton – I haven’t read After Theory but I know most of his previous work and I think his analyses are on the whole quite accurate, certainly his critique of what Cultural Studies has become. Last year I was at the SCS [Society for Cinema and Media Studies] conference for a prize for my life’s work – it was absolutely ghastly. I mean it was all Buffy the Vampire Slayer or the equivalent. It was the run up to the Iraq war and there was even a seminar devoted to that, but they had nothing to say, they couldn’t say anything – it was terrifying. I am so completely and absolutely pessimistic about the possibility about these new spaces – the new spaces are conducive to this fragmentation, individualisation, narcissistic jouissance, things that precisely inform Cultural Studies. The marginalisation of Marxism, the marginalisation of feminism in so far as it was a critical space. My own feeling is that, as far as audiovisual production and more largely artistic production is concerned, well I do believe that probably in the South – what we used to call the Third World there is a sense that new things could possibly emerge that precisely are in many respects renewing the kind of thinking one was doing in the sixties and seventies. But as far as the countries of the centre are concerned, forget it – I have become completely cynical about that. I think that, for example US hegemony is almost irreversible until the decline of the US is such that the whole thing implodes and there will be a crisis, out of which will emerge undeniably perhaps other things, other possibilities, but as far the actual current tendencies are concerned, no. I ought to say for one thing I do feel, strangely enough, that it is not through documentary that anything political or culturally dynamic and provocative and expressive of dissident currents can express themselves, but rather through fictions and I have to say that there was a rather remarkable period in the nineties of about seven or eight years, it seems to be over now for reasons which everybody understands, where as far as the North was concerned, it was in the US, a sort of semi-independent film production, totally within Hollywood codes. I’m not interested in the underground, but films like Freeway (1996), which were startlingly expressive of political correctness, which I take to be a good object – I’m ‘politically correct’, at least in the face of people like Bush you understand, i.e. I share the ideals of the Western left – I’ve even written a bit about that. Anyway I’ve seen twenty to thirty films from that period of independent production in the US, but today that seems to have died on the whole and obviously the climate in the States has become what it is and it’s become much more difficult apparently. Besides which, those films were, I learned more recently, practically unseen in the US, they were shown on videocassettes basically and who knows how, where and when. My friend Jonathan Rosenberg who is a critic in Chicago had never seen most of these films – they only came out in LA, maybe New York and nobody’s interested and so they go to video.
CM: Can you mention any other names of films you’re talking about?
NB: Signs and Wonders (2000) by Jonathan Nossiter, Very Bad Things (1998) by Peter Berg, There’s Something About Mary (1998) – I thought that was an absolutely remarkable film about male sexuality and the way men create women as images, etc. Nurse Betty (2000) is another remarkable film and others you probably haven’t seen.
CM: Would you pose those against films coming out of New York in that period – like Harmony Korine’s Gummo (1997) or Darren Aronofsky’s Pi (1998) – independent low budget feature films?
NB: They haven’t come here, as far as I know.
CM: What about work coming out of Denmark – Dogme films, have you seen those?
NB: All I know are films, where this guy makes these terribly misogynistic films, which make me vomit every time I happen to see one.
CM: Not necessarily films directed by Lars Von Trier, but films like The Idiots (1998) and Festen (1998) – films on the edge one might say.
NB: I saw them and I think they are just nonsense. On the whole I think European cinema is partly nonexistent as far as I am concerned. I saw a Stephen Frears film a few weeks ago, I think we sat through it but I thought it was an absolutely revolting and exploitative film. I hardly go to the movies anymore, it just depresses me – I go to the opera if I can and that’s about it.
CM: Let me go back to something that might interest you. George Monbiot, a journalist, and environmental activist in the UK, wrote a book called The Age of Consent (2003) in which he says everything has been globalised except our consent. I think he’d agree with you in as much as you would suggest that America has won, there’s no kind of argument that averts the way that world history has developed economically. But rather than attempt to counter that, which would be futile, flow with it, which in a sense is a parallel to your entrism of going into the film industry and flowing with it in order to ride on the crest of globalisation, use its opportunities to actually develop this realisation of one world, where there is the possibility through communication of being in touch with African countries, Asian countries, and lets face it, a lot of interesting cinema more than anywhere is coming out of those countries now.
NB: OK, look if we’re talking about art, I should counter that by saying my judgment of films has essentially become a political judgment. Not so much because I appreciate films that put forward positive messages, but I appreciate mostly films that put forward real contradictions. In other words because I think that is basically what art is about and in a way if I’m going to judge a film or a novel as a work of art it’s on those grounds, it’s in the way in which it works through real contradictions in the world. OK, that sums up half of the book I just finished, but to be frank with you, I do not believe that art has any political effect – I don’t believe that anymore, I think it’s absolute crap. I now think it’s about political action, ‘altermondialisme’ we call it in France, we don’t call it anti-globalisation any more – because obviously globalisation, there’s something wrong with that. What’s wrong with it is the fact that it’s Adam Smith’s dream come true, so to speak. The question is how to combat that – right now for example I am trying to put together some work with Allan Sekula who is a photographer who has been working on the political and is a theoretician, a Marxist/feminist like myself, he’s been working on the political economy of the sea for many years. He made a travelling exhibition of photographs called Fish Story (1999) – he is quite famous in photographic circles, he has sort of infiltrated photographic circles, he’s not really an artist, he’s an agitator and we’ve been trying to put together a feature length film on the political economy of the sea through his vision. The point being that it’s been impossible to find any money for this, because this is indeed an attempt to talk about what’s really going on, i.e. the way the sea is the place of exploitation; the worst exploitation and the basic exploitation, the whole infrastructure. All this globalisation is because of these ships that go back and forth with shoes made in China, etc., this is really what its all about. The sea also has a mythological aspect that we’re embracing, this reality of containerisation, the reality of work and transportation – all that is hidden from view; the working ports are further away from the cities and other ports are being turned into places of leisure and into places of a kind of sublime of the sea. One of the most interesting examples is the Gary Museum in Bilbao [Guggenheim] – this ancient shipyard/seaport was completely destroyed by the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and European dictates to Spanish economy and they’re now trying to turn it into a leisure spot with this ghastly pretentious museum that Guggenheim put up there and somehow tried to turn Bilbao into a tourist spot – it’s not really working and they’re trying to build these museums all over the world, like hamburger joints. We got some money from an art foundation in Holland, we got half the money. No television channel here will even contemplate putting a cent into this thing [The film went into production in 2008]. I still am motivated by the idea of saying it through television preferably, because cinema is not I think on. It’s true that Bowling for Columbine (2002) I guess has had some impact, which is something I admire.
CM: Where would you put Chris Marker now?
NB: Which Chris Marker?
CM: If you’re talking about content, the potential of using the contradictions of art to actually politicise a particular space, then the Chris Marker of the essay film, which in a sense is what you’re talking about, it means that you could actually produce this film within a context.
NB: It’s becoming so difficult to do them. In this country it’s become, I would say, absolutely impossible. Chris Marker is a great man, go talk to him and he’ll tell you how it’s absolutely totally impossible to do anything like even what he was doing. He did make something not too long ago, but he has a name, Godard still makes these crazy things that nobody understands. But today I have many friends who are coming up against stone walls trying to do anything which has any kind of ambition like that. The producer who was going to try and produce Sekula’s and my project here just failed to find any money at all and has given up making TV documentaries because he feels that it’s totally impossible to do anything that he wants to do. He told a terribly revealing story, which I think feeds in a bit to this issue here. Last year he produced simultaneously two products, one of them a documentary where a guy drove round in a taxi and talked to his customers and it was cute and was raved about in all the press [Taxi Parisien, 2002]. At the same time he produced a very remarkable film by a Belgian woman, Bénédicte Liénard called Une Part du Ciel (2002) somewhat in the tradition of ultra-realist Belgian films, which I find kind of interesting in a way but often very boring. Her film had no positive criticism worth mentioning and it was a beautiful film – I’m sure nobody heard of it anywhere and that is a film he spent three years on – down the drain, nothing. I’m talking about Jacques Bidou the most prominent left-wing producer in France. The penny dropped and he realised where we’re at today. So this whole question is in an impasse and one can dream about riding these waves and all the wonderful things that are going to happen in the future and so on, one can fantasise about Braudelian cycles of decline and suggest that Iraq and all that is a sign of America’s weakness. I’m sure it’s true and in the long run obviously civilization is not going to die but it’s going to shift to another place.
CM: There are fiction films still being produced in Europe and elsewhere that could be considered as radical, dealing with social issues rather than overt politics. I think of Abbas Kiarostami’s film Ten (10, 2002) and the French film by Claire Denis Vendredi Soir (Friday Night, 2002), which are also rides in taxis. Also interesting is the work of the Dardenne Brothers in Belgium such as Le Fils (The Son, 2002).
NB: I haven’t seen them, but then who does see them? I’m sorry, that’s the other side of the coin. Their audience is solely made up of bobos – the bourgeois bohemes, the people who are in this party that I’m in [the Green party]. There isn’t a worker in it, that’s one of the problems with this party; it has only this middle-class constituency. And this is the problem, if you like, with ‘committed art’, even the Columbine film, I’m a very great fan of Michael Moore obviously, but at the same time this is not mass audience stuff because it just cannot be. It is by definition, for all sorts of reasons, even if it runs on television it runs on ARTE3 so it’s really looked at by the same people. The complexity of the forms of domination are such that it is difficult for people to be able to understand that it’s not nature taking its course, which is what most people today have been taught to think. That’s one of my main concerns in writing little tracts that we distribute in the neighbourhood to try and link all these things together but it’s extremely complicated and these linkages are only, I think, perceptible by the enlightened middle classes. You tell a worker who has been out of work for a year that a fulfilling life is not one devoted 100 per cent to work and that work itself should be less alienating and they look at you – yeah but how am I going to pay the rent? All the things that are happening today are making it more and more impossible to put across these complex reasons for struggle and areas in which the struggle can take place and so on. So I do think the dynamic today is totally opposed to that and explains what cinema has become, because just have a look around us and look at what plays – this mass of American spectaculars, very sensually fulfilling things, which the young people are totally involved with in a totally uninvolved way, if I may say so, this extraordinary idea that everything is kind of a joke – the biggest success on television here over the past few years was the French equivalent to Big Brother. I have a student who has been doing work on these reality shows and kids watch them in order to laugh at the people in them. In other words it’s this mixture of distance, a sort of Brechtian distancing, everything is now distancing. I have to say I wrote a piece about that in the early 1980s, which Miriam Hanson trashed at one point, accused me of cultural pessimism, but I think I was bloody right, distancing has become one of the weapons of the ruling class, distancing with regard to almost everything has become really dominant. There’s one point in which we were totally wrong – the whole idea that distancing is a radical tool, the most subversive things you can make today are the most involving things.
CM: Is it distancing or is it voyeurism?
NB: Voyeurism is a kind of distancing, I’m not sure there’s a great difference in a funny way. Voyeurism implies an erotic dimension to it, OK let us call it indeed a kind of erotic distancing. Obviously it no longer has Brechtian content, Brechtian distancing this certainly is not, but at the same time it is – there’s no question. Look at all this American Tarantino and David Lynch kind of stuff, which is distancing for the chic middle classes who are laughing at mass culture. Also even films like Mars Attacks (1996), I don’t know if that had success, I think it did whereas Starship Troopers (1997) did not, but they function the same way – this kind of distancing where in a sense people are laughing at their own pleasures in a way. Scary Movie (2000) is a movie in which people go in order to laugh at their own relation to Scream (1996). It’s all very fascinating and Baudrillard and people like that can write fascinating books about it. It is totally fascinating but it is totally revolting.
CM: Can you bring that back to the philosophical, political critique that we talked about, whereby in a sense what’s happened is a popularisation of Postmodernism? In the 1970s one was really still a Modernist and this notion of the pluralism of meaning had not yet evolved. One was battling between two fixed spaces; the left and the right and then the relationship with Cultural Studies. The people who are making these programs are in fact our own students who have come out of film schools, which have now multiplied in number and output a hundred fold. They’ve taken on board some of the things that we have taught at film schools, they are semi-politically conscious, I won’t deny them that, but they have lost a kind of space in which there is a focus; there is no longer a focal point towards which the reasons they’re doing the things they’re doing are moving.
NB: Then we’re going to have to talk about Postmodernism. In a sense, Postmodernism, if it exists, is a reading of what is happening to the world. It is not the definition of what is happening in the world. Postmodernism, in so far as it is an intellectual framework or in so far as it is an artistic practice, is simply opportunistic - if you can’t lick ’em, join ‘em. All the things that we’ve been talking about today, for example in cinema, these Hollywood films that can be qualified as Postmodernist, Tarantino, etc., how should I say? They are basically I think the products of a certain cynicism, which has become in the US a dominant political ideology. It is no longer a question of believing the great myths of America, man and his destiny and all that, it’s a matter of believing nothing and that’s enough to keep the system going. I’m quoting my friend Thom Anderson in the film I made about the American left. That’s how it functions and that has produced, for various levels of consumption Scary Movie at one level and lets say Starship Troopers at another. This was a film that failed at the box-office but which here was regarded as a great progressive movie by the critics, believe it or not.
The point is that indeed the collapse, the betrayal of the left, the social democratic left, is absolutely fundamental, as much as the collapse of the Soviet Union has been to the current hegemony of market society. I’m very much in debt to Christopher Lasch’s analysis, not his stupid remarks about feminism, of course – he was an older man when he wrote that stuff - but nonetheless basically The Culture of Narcissism (1979) is really a description of what has happened in our societies. So we have this sort of ideal, this atomisation and so on, which is happening, whereby everything is everywhere. There are a few who celebrate this sort of generalized relativism, I feel they are really vile – Richard Rorty and his work simply appals me. But the real problem of course is that there’s this imbrication, Eagleton alludes to it a little bit in The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), of indeed new forms of struggle which have arisen in feminism, ecology, ethnic groups and so on, which are perfectly legitimate struggles and indeed are part of the general picture of oppression and so on. But at the same time, particularly because of the way America is, always has been, having no tradition of class struggle really, at least one which has completely been perverted for so long, that these progressive ideals have become fundamentally confused with the values of liberal capitalism, everything becoming marketable and culture itself becoming simply another market value. The confusion is such that it is almost impossible to extricate the one from the other and this is what has broken down, I think, any kind of serious cultural or political resistance. If you want to call that Postmodernism, OK, let’s call it Postmodernism, but it’s a scam essentially and it is something which I think has become practically impossible to combat as well because it’s so omnipresent and the confusion is so extraordinarily great. Of course what has also happened, one of the things that strikes me the most, as Jameson points out at one point early on in his writing about Postmodernism, is that Postmodernism is indeed a recycling of certain aspects of Modernism and in particular, despite all the attentiveness to mass culture and so on, it is essentially elitist because it is this kind of camp reading of Buffy the Vampire Slayer for example. I counted that in America at that SCS thing there were 10 seminars on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with young feminists apparently giggling over the kinkiness of this thing. It was absolutely fascinating how that elitist attitude has been ‘massified’ in a funny way. So it’s all very democratic in a terrifying way, but it is totally and fundamentally depoliticised in so far as politics is about power relations and I do still remain a Marxist fundamentally about the economic power relations. You see I’ve refused to accept the idea that everything is equivalent.
CM: Well here is a view of where I think the problems are with the more recent generations of film students in the UK and America. Since I left the RCA, I’ve been teaching in film schools and universities for the last 30 years. I’ve seen students, say from 1979, young people who had come to understand the world only during the premierships of Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher. These students grew up in a completely different social and economic environment, and therefore ideological environment, than I grew up in and I’ve seen, as I’m sure you have, the nature, the essence of the student itself change and develop from a very different sort of person; one almost without a sense of desire. They have become absorbing, instead of developing and that to me is a tragedy caused fairly directly by the economic and political system through which they traversed. Instead of developing their individuality they have absorbed the ideology and developed as the self-centric individual. However, I think that is changing and that’s why I’m more optimistic, not pessimistic about it. I’m very interested to know that you would still consider yourself a Marxist, because slowly but surely, in a strange sort of way, people seem to be now coming back to it, particularly in America. I gave a paper at a conference 5 years ago and some American sociologists were there. I was talking about Emile Durkheim and collective consciousness - which I’d like to discuss with you shortly - and they were saying do you know for the first time we can talk about Marxism in America, because we haven’t been allowed to until now and now people are beginning to be interested in that academically. I just want to hold onto that on one hand and on the other hand talk about what you said about the elitism of Postmodernism, because you touched on it; it’s both elitist and populist at the same time and that kind of contradiction produces its nothingness that you’re talking about. I think what we’re witnessing and why I’m quite excited still, is that I think we’re seeing the end of Postmodernism and I think that’s going out with the development of globalisation, because there is nothing to any longer disentangle and pluralise; you don’t need to pluralise it anymore, we’re going somewhere else. Where is that else?
NB: I suppose I can talk a little bit about France, though in a way somehow I tend to focus on America, even though I don’t go there and intend never to go there again actually because it just makes me ill. Here it’s considerably different in the sense that Postmodernism exists only in certain avant-garde circles – the universities don’t give a damn about that, they’re much more conservative in a sense, which is in a way perhaps almost positive. For about seven years I was a Film professor in Lille – and taught young students, most of whom came out of a lower, middle and working class background, which was new to me, before that I had only taught in Paris where they were all trendy middle class students. After a while I began to realise these kids were very open to a lot of things; they were perfectly aware that Godard was just shit, whereas in Paris the students were saying ‘oh you can’t talk about that’ – I’m referring to what he’s done for the past 20 years, not his earlier work, which is problematic, but certainly not shit. Because of their class background, often they were of North African extraction, they were incredibly open to a sophisticated feminist discourse. I and my friend Geneviève Sellier with whom I wrote that book [La Drôle de Guerre des Sexes du Cinema Francais: 1930–1956], were the only people who have ever taught Film Studies in this country from a gender perspective – two people – and she had a great deal of difficulty getting into the university at all and then finally was appointed a professor at the age of 55. So it’s been ridiculous, but when you do bring these ideas to kids like that, those kids; their response after a few years - it took a while - was amazing but it died because they replaced me with some formalist of the worst kind. It’s another matter all together in the States. The same sort of students there, even Doctoral students, were aware of their own historical oppression and its continuing impact today but they were totally unaware of the affect of these American policies on the rest of the world. Surveys show that only 20 per cent of Americans have passports and in Congress 85 per cent are proud never to have set foot outside America. There are 60 million born again Christians who are the base of the right in America. The right may lose the next election but they aren’t going away. They may, as you say, be teaching Marxism again in universities but the university world in America is so isolated that it doesn’t mean a thing to the rest of the country.
CM: Here’s another major contradiction you’ve just put your finger on, that 80 per cent of America has not travelled outside of America, while 100 per cent of American culture has travelled outside of America, which is still, if one can use the term, dominant culture. It brings me back in a circle to this question of cinema or film or if you prefer, representation, because we haven’t talked about DVDs or the internet or other methods of the circulation of representation. I can understand your anti-art discourse, what I can’t understand is, given what you said about the metadiscourses going around, which is going back to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the fact that American culture dominates the world. I can understand your decision to stand inside politics and political struggle, but I have to say I would challenge your position, which comes from the very first thing you were saying about your revised perspective, which now rejects the struggle that is inside representation itself. It seems to me that it has become even more important during the last thirty years. Given that the hegemony is totally a cultural one now, don’t the inadequacies of political expression become subservient to an ideological one? How can we not remain and develop as film representational makers in struggle?
NB: For me, art is dead, art as it was understood for many centuries in the West, I think it is really dead. It is dead because in a way it has, how should I say, I suppose it’s because anything goes in a way and that includes any kind of aesthetic innovation in so far as you consider art to be in the socially linked tradition of aesthetics, it is dead, which I’m happy to accept. I watch old movies on TV and, gee, they don’t make movies like that anymore, but that’s not important, I’m not worried about that, but the problem is as I say, since anything goes, you surf on the net and you can find anything, it’s all there in this fragmentary ultimately meaningless way, you see.
I remember we had a teacher at IDHEC, who was sort of a conservative composer, who used to go on about 12-tone music – how it was like grains of sand in a glass, some black, some white, you shake it and it all gets together and becomes grey, but you can keep on shaking it forever and it will never get black and white again. I didn’t understand at the time what he was on about because I didn’t even know about 12-tone music yet. In a sense that is what has happened today, it’s all there indeed – just look at the television programmes. There are something like 500 films a day, there are seven channels showing old movies, it’s much better than America if you’re a film buff, it’s just incredible. It’s mad, it’s totally insane, you go into a shop and you have hundreds of different kinds of mobile phones and this has broken down the possibilities of constructing meaning about the world. I think this is really the difficulty and I think in a way art, in so far as that was what it was about ultimately after all, that’s what Rembrandt is about in some way or other. I think that the problem is value, the whole question of artistic value, aesthetic value, all that is gone. So what have you got left, you’ve got this communication, this information, these flows of information and who controls them and so on and everybody gets excited. People get all excited about the internet, these cyber anarchists – the whole idea that they’re going to break down the system, they are the people who are going to send viruses because that’s what they’re about, it’s a kind of anarchism. Okay and I’m sure they bug the big companies, but department stores have always integrated 30 per cent loss for shoplifting, its no big deal, there’s always some way of incorporating that, all that’s absolutely hopeless it has no use. The circulation of information indeed, one can find out all these things Americans don’t know, but it doesn’t matter in a way because of the way it’s out there you see, a headline in the New York Times or USA Today has a million times more impact than what you could read on Truthout for example, to take one site I happen to look at from time to time. That’s going to keep going, because the whole point is in the great achievement of capitalist globalisation – ‘late capitalism’ I don’t think it can be called – is precisely this enormous fragmentation, this diversification, this thing in which the individual picks out his/her little thing, and that is ‘their’ great victory in a sense, because ‘they’ have completely disorganised everything, including I would argue the possibility of creating meaningful art. Because of the context in which everything is being produced today, such that it is going to be diluted into this general circulation of ‘merchandise’ that this is why, I’m sorry to say it, but when I read the programme of your colloquium I find this playing with toys by the wayside. It is sure that if I were young today and had the same level of awareness, I would certainly not choose to be a filmmaker, I would certainly not choose to teach filmmaking, I would be a sociologist or perhaps an historian.
CM: So, if you were starting again as a student you would want to study Sociology or Anthropology, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, but not Film? Just talk a little bit more about that because I think there’s an interesting clue to how film might ally itself to certain other sciences, if you want to call film that for now. If you could talk about why you would want to do this.
NB: Because I would not be concerned about film, I would treat film in this other alternative, impossible existence of mine as the way anybody does. You look at a movie from time to time and maybe a documentary of some sort, though I look at very few of them because I find that it is in documentaries that there’s the least politics oddly enough, except for the occasional exception. I’m saying that I myself, the reasons why I got into film had to do with being a great artist, there’s no question about that, and sort of going down in history as someone who created something unique and irreplaceable and all that crap. For the exact same reasons I began writing about film; I couldn’t make films so I began writing about them and about how I ought to make films that would have that quality of uniqueness and be irreplaceable. This motivation I find absolutely absurd today and I find it very, very depressing when I encounter it in young people, as of course one does, because young people still have these ideas of becoming great artists essentially and in fact the attraction in a funny way, there are two kinds of attraction which the profession exerts on people – one of them is to become a great artist, I think actually perhaps less than before, and the other is the prestige attached to being in the media. So all of that I would be able to eliminate and I would be interested in trying to contribute to understanding, particularly understanding history, I’m very much into history today – I used to hate history, when I was a kid, American history was taught in an absolutely shameful way so that you would hate it, Edward Said talked about that very brilliantly in a piece he wrote about the Iraqi situation. It is absolutely true; history-teaching is one of the essential keys to the understanding of American alienation.
CM: Absolutely, but if we park art and let’s make the statement ‘film is a branch of philosophy’.
NB: That’s what Deleuze would say, but the point is look at Deleuze; those books, I feel sort of embarrassed about Deleuze because Deleuze was a great fan of mine, he was the first famous person who ever wrote me fan mail and I then realised after a year or so that he was, not ripping me off, but in a way he was precisely translating Theory of Film Practice into philosophy. I’m being pretentious there, but I was struck by that and then I realised when I tried to read it – I can’t read that stuff, it falls out of my hands, but nonetheless I realise enough about what’s going on in there to see that he is indeed, it’s true what he told me, that Theory of Film Practice was like a big revelation to him. That’s the problem you see, in a sense its philosophy getting turned into art, because in a sense, where as for me Marx said it and I repeat it, philosophers want to change the world and OK maybe people making films want to do that, but it seems to me the whole problem is that the social status of the audiovisual object today is such that it can only be aestheticised philosophy. I do not think that its inscription through television – the only way to reach a lot of people is through television - the very nature of television is such that I think nothing vital can be conveyed. In the 1970s I think I told this to you guys as students, that I do not believe in any case that film can have any kind of positive ideological impact, except in let’s say a revolutionary situation – Cuba 1960s, to some extent perhaps the Soviet Union in the 1920s – there are a lot of questions to be asked about that and perhaps some other examples I can’t seem to think of right now. But otherwise it’s just art and entertainment.
I honestly think that its OK to teach students to think about film, think about form – why not, obviously in these film schools they’ve got to do something right? They might as well give some satisfaction to their teachers and so on and students may get into this even if later on they’re bound to be frustrated. But I have to say that I cannot, I have to be sincere about my own feelings about that, it has become this totally illusory activity. There’s no reason why people shouldn’t learn to make innovative entertaining, involving beautiful audio visual objects – why not, fine, it’s an activity among others but I think that to want to privilege it, that’s the big problem. That’s one of the big problems about the film world, because we’ve always thought of ourselves as the centre of the world, particularly true here – being a cinephile is like a magic word, you’re this person who understands that films are the most important things there are, this is really what the definition of cinephelia is. This is our big illusion and in France, in a way, this could be extended to all of culture.
There’s a cult of culture in this country that the world envies because we spend much more money on culture than anybody else, we’re fighting to keep culture out of the market and all that stuff, the ‘exception culturelle’4 and all that’s fine. But the fact of the matter remains that the relation to politics and the relation to the horrors that the world is undergoing today, the poor people of the world as a whole – the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, all that is absolutely, in my opinion, impermeable to whatever innovations, agitations, that culture may provide. But after all, what I’m saying is totally in keeping with what the Pope calls the hedonism of the northern middle classes, which I have to say is something I feel totally ambivalent about, since I benefit from it, there are all sorts of pleasurable things available to me personally, which I certainly benefit from with a strong sense of guilt, but nonetheless what else is there to do, and at the same time I have a terrifying sense of what this really means in the larger view - with regard to the way we treat the peoples of Africa for example.
CM: It seems to me that you may have three balls in the air at the same time – one being the subjective self, the second is a desire for popularism, which may be the wrong word, but there is a large scale problem in the world, of which the aesthetics of film culture does not touch and there is the third which is philosophy and the theory of theory if you like, and probably all three have to exist simultaneously. But it brings to mind something Terry Eagleton wrote – ‘ideology is around to make us feel necessary, philosophy is on hand to remind us that we are not’ (2003: 210). I say that because if one remains within the notion of film as theory, for film as philosophy, for theory as theory, for the moment parking ego and self, parking mass world problematics, but working within the notion of philosophising philosophy itself then a branch of which would be the philosophy of culture. Then there are some serious real issues still in there.
NB: No I’m sorry, I don’t know if I was ever really into what I would call theory for theory’s sake okay – with the underlying belief that it’s all useful, like mathematics. To the extent that I got into that, it is probably what I reject most violently today and I do feel that philosophy, in a sense by its very definition, that philosophers have always felt this way, I sound like a postmodernist, I guess in a way I am a postmodernist in the sense that I feel a very strong hostility to high Modernism and everything it implies. I realise that I’m not really into this Habermassian association between Modernism in the arts and the idea you can change the world. Okay, if that’s a definition of it then I guess I’m still a modernist, but I’m a postmodernist in the sense that I certainly reject Adorno for example, with his hatred of mass culture and his belief that only the avantgarde is really dissident. Yes it’s dissident alright, but it’s dissident like philosophy in this sense, that is to say indeed it’s sort of above the fray fundamentally and I feel that in a way for me what you’ve just described is a way of being above the fray and its been a long time now since I’ve been convinced that art is by definition, or pseudo-art that is to say, more above the fray than it was in the past. But then in a way the pseudo-art of today is probably less above the fray because it’s so much in favour of the status quo ultimately in its way, whereas it’s true that art at one point could seem to be oppositional in some way or other, that probably was true, but I think it was fundamentally an illusion because no one could find any instances in the whole history of humanity, at least I think, where art has actually been an essential part of any kind of progressive or revolutionary change. I think it has always been an accretion of it in some way or other – some often interesting, but only as such and not in terms of any actual practical thing. So I think theory should be much more concerned about how we’re going to get out of this mess if you like.
CM: You see you took us back into art then and we’ve parked art because I wanted to take you from theory and philosophy into the areas you’re interested in, which are sociology and anthropology. If there is a triumvirate relationship between various disciplines, still at a theoretical level, at some stage they have to de-theorise to the point of practice, because practice in that sense cannot be purely theoretical, it has to engage problematically with the world and no longer becomes pure theory and that practice is in this sense an audiovisual one.
NB: Okay, I would accept that there is probably some way in which in an ideal world, okay, I agree with that. Indeed, the articulation between these different forms of knowledge and audiovisual practice – yes, absolutely one could assume or suppose that there, in some ideal world, which is not this one, there are ways of rearticulating them perhaps. I continue to say that the environment in which the way that money circulates, I mean there are millions of determining factors in what can be and what is produced today and tomorrow and are such that this articulation can only feed the machine. I don’t think it can in any sense be grains of sand – I don’t believe that, I think that the hope that the tail can wag the dog is a vain hope and in the audiovisual production, as all other artistic or pseudo-artistic productions are the tail, they are superstructural, in the old Marxist sense and I do think that precisely because of what is called globalisation, but which is obviously something much more complicated than that. I think it’s an illusion to think that one can change things, that this articulation at the School level lets say, of anthropology and history or whatever – I’m sure students can find ways of making student films which appear to be doing something, but its not going to be of any use to them afterward and I think whereas I used to believe fundamentally of course that they were all going to get together and change, indeed as the NFTS feared, for example the British Film Industry, well I mean look at Channel Four in the first years of Channel Four there were these illusions. I would say that one of the pennies that dropped about that same period was the following: my companion Hannah and I were watching the Channel Four thing where you could go into a box on the street and criticise programmes and a woman came in, sat down in front of the camera and she said ‘there was a film the other night– on The Eleventh Hour I think it must have been, it was a feminist film and I was really quite interested. But then the camera began doing this…’ and she was on a rolling chair in this box and sort of slid in and out of the frame, it was Pam Cook who made the program I think and it was one of these deconstructive things. ‘I completely lost the thread of the discussion and was really very annoyed with this’. Hannah and I slapped each other on the back and began to understand. This was mid 1980s, 1984 maybe, I mean the early Channel Four, you know I made the Year of the Bodyguard (1981) which was the first programme commissioned by The Eleventh Hour which was pioneering work. I saw it the other week, in Germany they did a retrospective of my oeuvre – it’s ridiculous, so self-conscious and confused. It was a period when we did believe all those things, a lot of us did, you guys made Justine [JUSTINE, by the Marquis de Sade, 1976] but I do think it was utterly wrong-headed. The point is at that time there was a space and one dreamed about it, but of course in a way it was the tail end of that whole idea that television had from Keynes on, which was the idea that one could educate the masses through the mass media and of course it was all a tremendous mistake – one has to find ways of introducing politics into variety shows, but ‘that’ll be the day’, as John Wayne puts it in some movie or other.
CM: You just mentioned that you don’t know what use it is to students, which is the same question that the pragmatists in film theory and practice institutions also use when they insist that theory is of no use to practitioners who make films, which I would consider to be a theoretically misguided and potentially right wing discourse and they don’t mean it the way you just articulated it, they mean it won’t get them jobs in the industry.
NB: From their point of view that’s genuinely how they feel about it, it’s one of the reasons why on the whole you see I was teaching in Lille in this very curious situation, which is that in film departments in this country there is only one film school that is currently worth mentioning, the rest are private and are extremely expensive and on the whole the universities do not teach production because they don’t have enough money, so kids who can’t get in to La Femis will enrol in these film departments, where they spend some time fooling around with a little camera, but there are no classes in production, etc., therefore they are studying history and theory, but they have it in the back of their heads that they want to be filmmakers, well most of them, at least half of them anyway and consequently they’re obviously bored by all this theory and history stuff. Now I was able to get them interested to a certain degree, precisely because it was so politicised and because of their class origins in part, so I would relate to that and some of them actually went out there and made some documentary films and so on. I haven’t had an opportunity to teach film production students in about twenty years and I think once or twice I turned down the opportunity because I know I don’t have anything to say they want to hear. I gave a series of lectures in Argentina to a university where they teach 500 students at a time film production – they had to attend, it was obligatory. So they were all there and they started walking out after about an hour and it was absolutely terrifying because they were all bored shitless you know and it was just obvious I had nothing for them, it was all about Hollywood and representation and women in Hollywood films, something like that, things I’m interested in writing about. They weren’t the least bit interested and why should they be?
So the discourse you’ve just been putting forward is not simply a right-wing discourse, it is a spontaneous discourse of film production students, for all sorts of reasons they come in there thinking they’ve got all they need to know about the world and what they need to know is how to express this, how to express themselves. That’s perfectly natural and spontaneous and so on. One wants to break that down, wants to give them some kind of political consciousness – that’s certainly what I would be doing if I were teaching film today, as I did in Ohio State, I made those little macho bastards make films about rape and things like that and set them projects like that or else I’d show them radical films to illustrate technical sound procedures. That was just smuggling in my ideas, but this whole question about the battle of theory and all that kind of thing, I’m sorry I feel it is just part of the illusions that were ours in the days when we thought the revolution was imminent.
CM: But in the interim what do you make of the sort of film theory that’s being taught in film schools now, which one could call cognitive theory – David Bordwell and people like that coming from America? I don’t know how dominant that kind of work is, but it certainly goes against the post-Althusserian, Lacanian, post-Freudian kind of work and way into another direction.
NB: I hardly know Bordwell’s work to be honest with you, but what I’ve read of it I found to be just another version of formalism – do you feel that’s really different from that in some way?
CM: I’d say it was more based on psychology rather than psychoanalysis. Therefore in essence the tabula rasa isn’t blank, that there is a subject in the world that isn’t simply implanted upon, there are essences, and there are genetic implications. All these kind of things that have developed in the last twenty years, which suggest that we’re more complex as human beings than we think we are. That has been said by some of the left and therefore in a sense that the left was wrong in the past and this is why that kind of Marxist and post-Marxist theory is of no use to film students. I think this is the battle that’s going on.
NB: I don’t know his work well enough to really discuss it, but what I’ve read of it seems to me nonetheless to be very much – I don’t know how to say that – I feel more sympathetic to Janet Staiger if you like, although I feel there are problems with that too, she fetishises material traces and so on, which I think is a mistake because there are things that are happening in films that relate to people precisely through the unconscious but I do think contextual reading is what is most important. For example one of the key chapters in my book is about what I call the tendential ambiguity of the Hollywood movie and I feel that Hollywood has produced films with double and maybe triple meanings ever since the beginning you see and I think specifically Hollywood – I think other national cultures have done this much less, interestingly enough, and I think that’s one of the strengths of Hollywood in a way; its one of the ways in which Hollywood manages to appeal to a large audience, to men and women for example, and that in certain points in time this has become materialist because these ambiguities become the portrayals of social contradictions; I think that’s true in the melodramas of King Vidor, in Hitchcock and a few others. In a way I think that perhaps joins up somewhat with Bordwell except that fundamentally – you see for me what matters most is social realities and that films for me can only be evaluated in terms of their relation to the rest of life, the rest of social life and so on, but only that. The psychologisation, Bordwell’s psychologisation is for me a way essentially of disdaining the primacy of the real social world, which has been a tendency and has worked from the word go, even though it had other forms in the early days, it was much closer to the stuff I used to write actually. Robin Wood is someone I admire, up to a point, there are times when he’s mistaken, but on the whole Robin Wood is the author who I most often refer to – he’s been very seminal, I only discovered him very late in life and it’s funny, we had a brief exchange on email and he explained to me how one day he’d come to the Slade just after I’d been there talking about Kenji Mizoguchi and had James Leahy slag him off because ‘Noel Burch has just explained that Mizoguchi is all about form’ or some shit like that ‘and you’re going on about culture and that type of thing is just out of date’ and Wood had been very upset by this apparently. I only read his work five years ago perhaps for the first time, I think there are certain pieces of Robin Wood that I think are absolutely crucial, for example his analysis of Taxi Driver (1976), which was confirmation I found of this whole question of ambiguity in Hollywood film. His work on Sternberg, etc. So, Robin Wood and of course the women writers, on the whole there are a number of women who are for me absolutely crucial, such as Tania Modleski’s work on Hitchcock and of course my friend Geneviève Sellier who is now writing a book on the New Wave, which is going to make a lot of people very angry, but which is absolutely spot on. It was Geneviève who taught me I suppose the basics of how do you teach film – ‘what does it say and what does it mean’ was the way she put it once and for me this is absolutely crucial and this remark has become in a sense my motto as far as teaching people how to look at movies. Obviously, meaning is produced by all means possible, form included, but nonetheless it is a question of how it inscribes itself in society in a given time. I’m slagged off very regularly in this country for preaching this notion, but I think my work is still very solid – nobody knows it in English because it’s untranslated. It’s sort of frustrating for me, what I’ve written for the past 15 years not a word of it is translated into English and it is work I’m proud of and work which if you like certainly articulates all this crap I’ve been saying here I think much more convincingly – I like to think so in any case, because its historically based and it is fed by a great deal of reading that I’ve done of basically feminist writing. I am at a point in my life where I can hardly deal with men anymore, I really agree with Louis Aragon about women and the future of humanity [‘la femme est l’avenir de l’homme’5] and I really feel that, not just in film, in literature women’s transformation of the landscape in general and this includes the history of opera, this includes a million things you could mention, it is absolutely decisive and I have basically been learning from women and I guess a few gays like Robin Wood, because I think its not irrelevant that he is gay and has an attitude that is so fundamentally anti-formalist; I mean as anti-formalist as I am. That I feel is not uninteresting in that the composers of the twentieth century who have written music that I find most amenable today are people like Benjamin Britten.
CM: I’m fascinated about what you’re saying. In a sense what you seem to be saying is that there is an ontology of the make-up of human consciousness dependent upon its classification by gender – male, female, gay.
NB: No, it’s a social phenomenon, I don’t feel there’s something ontological about it at all – it has to do with the place of women in human society over the centuries okay and this place has bequeathed to them, I should say, a broad spectrum of insights which they could not formulate for many years, but which now, actually for some time if you look back and discover what feminists were writing a century or two ago, but obviously it’s been isolated and some don’t even consider themselves feminists, but certainly Rachilde’s6 take on male/ female relations is unique in her time and absolutely astonishing to us today still in a way. She considered herself anti-feminist but nonetheless she was a woman and occupied a certain space. Social space has nothing to do with biology, except very indirectly the fact they’d been consigned to taking care of kids and the family and this whole role of nurturing and all that kind of thing. But that was a social decision in itself wasn’t it and it doesn’t apply to all periods of history. But I absolutely fundamentally believe that, for example take one essential example of this – it was in the 1970s I first began to understand about the centrality of work and the male fetishisation of work and so on. And how to understand this I was in a textile factory in Eastern France doing a video for the Party and there were all these women and they began talking about work and their relation to work and how different it was to the men’s relation – there were no men there, it was just a women’s meeting – and it was extraordinary, they were saying men obsess about work and all the rest is nothing, we aren’t like that. On the contrary work is work and the rest is the rest and we have many different activities and so on. These were not especially intellectual workers, but she had just understood that and understood that women have a different attitude toward work. Feminists do understand it and have written about it. But this is only one example. Feminists within Modernism, for example, Virginia Woolf’s approach to Modernism is fundamentally different to that of Joyce as I think several authors have been at pains to develop, in particular Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert who wrote The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) and especially the three volumes of No Man’s Land (1988 - 1994). This is about women in modernism and is absolutely fundamental. These books have been very important for me to understand that there’s been a critique within modernism of the male tendency for abstractionism and all that kind of thing.
CM: Do you think people like Julia Kristeva were taking up a male discourse?
NB: There are things that people like Kristeva have contributed but it’s always limited by the fact that they’re part of the French University system – Kristeva has lived all her mature life with the most misogynistic of contemporary French writers, Phillipe Sollers, who has written a huge anti-feminist tract called Femmes (1984), so somehow she has to deal with this, so she deals with it in a way which my feminist friends find on the whole unsatisfactory. Real French feminists have no truck at all with what is called in England French Feminism, its something that people don’t understand outside the country.
CM: De Beauvoir of course in the same context with Sartre.
NB: No, no, actually yes, de Beauvoir also had tremendous blind spots, she lived with Sartre and Sartre was basically someone who didn’t really deal with women very well, okay he has a few insights, he learned a few things from her but not much. His Flaubert [The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821–1857 (1971)] is in part informed I feel by de Beauvoir’s sensibility. The situation here is very difficult to understand for anybody who doesn’t live here. There’s a militant feminism which is quite interesting, which even has working class dimensions today, but intellectual feminism is like what we call ‘preaching in the catacombs’, it’s completely marginalised. Most of the feminist scholars are still teaching in secondary schools you know, can’t get jobs in a university and can’t get roles of authority, it’s very difficult. It’s getting a little better, particularly in areas like Sociology, but Humanities and Film Studies - forget it!, Even in Literature and that kind of thing it’s very difficult for serious feminists to make any kind of headway.
CM: Luce Irigaray is an interesting French feminist.
NB: Well it’s the same category, no. But you should have a look – I managed to translate the preface to one of the really important feminist books published in this country. It was a book published in 1982 called La Poétique du Mâle, by a woman called Michelle Coquillat who died a couple of years ago and had spent a great deal of time in America and this is an example of what I would call real French feminism. She does for French literature from Madame Lafayette [1634-1693] onwards what Leslie Fielder did for the American novel with Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) a basic book for American culture and society in general, as this is basic for understanding French culture. I translated the introduction and the first chapter for a British feminist magazine. I added a little preface about this whole misunderstanding in the Anglo-American world about French feminism – what it is, where it is and who is doing it – historians of literature, sociologists or whatever and there’s a lot of work - often extremely useful, stimulating work, etc., but it’s totally unknown outside this country, absolutely 100 per cent unknown because it deals with French culture and I suppose that’s one of the reasons because it doesn’t deal with T. S. Elliot and Proust you see.
CM: You’ve talked about feminist theory and some gay theory – you haven’t talked about black theory.
NB: The last two can be quite problematic, not just for me but for others too. Black history study is obviously extremely interesting, but let’s put it this way – yes, I have been known to go so far as to say that as far as understanding questions of representation are concerned and I am obviously talking about questions of representation within the West, I looked at Japan but that was very trivial, the way I dealt with it anyhow - I would say that gender is primary. It has the same role in the private sphere as class struggle has in the economic history of the world, it’s the motor. I believe this absolutely and there’s a chapter in Theresa de Lauretis7 where she suggests that indeed it’s the male/female conflict which is the core conflict of literature and in general of narrative and I would say in representation in general, because its true of painting as well. I think this is absolutely true, it’s one of the reasons why I have become primarily involved in questions of gender – not out of sympathy for feminism, which of course I have total sympathy at least for feminism as I understand it and as my friends understand it, which is not necessarily about difference but about equality, if you get the distinction that I make. It was when we studied French cinema and we confronted our work with that of the male historians of French cinema, who are sort of Marxist or crypto-Marxist, who are desperately seeking ways of seeing inscriptions of class struggle and history with a big H in these movies, and never really succeeding and we discovered that it was very clear why they weren’t succeeding, because the films weren’t about that at all, in any way. They were about male/female relations, that’s all they were really ever about, everything else was secondary.
One of the main revelations in this book I have written with Geneviève Sellier is that during the war, during the German occupation, films in France were far more centred around women and were indeed often sort of feminist, sometimes in a right wing way, but nonetheless, than ever before or since. Well this is a paradox and people hated us for that and particularly certain progressives and also for revealing that after the war French cinema becomes the most misogynist cinema in the history of the world for about five to seven years until things settled down. Of course it was also the Liberation, a moment of extraordinary social progress, (which the present government is trying to roll back), so here is a contradiction and this was not because society had become misogynist, but because cinema was reacting to a social evolution. The men making these films were terrified by what women were becoming and doing, so that’s what they’re making them about. Hollywood is exactly the same and I think this is also true of literature, which Marxists never understood. If you read Lukács’ analysis of Thomas Mann’s first novel Buddenbrooks (1901), it’s absolutely fascinating to see that he doesn’t know what to do with this female character who occupies half the book. He thinks she’s a mistake in the book because he doesn’t understand that Mann is actually talking about the oppression of women under patriarchy, but since this concept is totally outside his ken, he just thinks she’s a mistake in the book. I want to write something about that because it seems to be an extraordinarily revealing moment of the blindness of Marxism in every way.
CM: I’m much clearer now about where you are and why and how you’ve got to where you are. What I can’t clarify in your thinking is that there’s a distinction I feel between film studies and filmmaking and a slight contradiction here between your admiration for films like There’s Something About Mary and what you’ve just said. I can see the connection now, I can see why you would admire what I consider to be a dreadful film. However, coming back to the basics of what kind of theory does one teach filmmakers or film students who are becoming filmmakers, why would you not be able to make that transition from a development of feminist theory through to a development of filmmaking and forms of filmmaking, because film language has to be a male dominant language to start with.
NB: No, I don’t believe that at all. Mulvey was all wrong, particularly with her idea that there was another language. It’s like music, Serialism is all wrong because there is a socially dominant – I don’t think it’s necessarily biological, though it may have something to do with it, resonant bodies and so on - but there is a socially dominant musical system(s), let’s say modality, tonality if you like, which is how people communicate and relate to music and the idea that one can abolish that or that there is any point to abolishing it, is just stupid. Mulvey’s idea in Riddles of the Sphinx (1997) that one can abolish, as it were, the common language of the spatial relations of bodies, the things I theorised, originally to criticise them, but in point of fact I think the ultimate result of the work is not there and I’m glad about that. My book Life to those Shadows (1990) was about that, how one can go back to this ‘primitive chaos’ and find models for an alternative cinema. It’s the same error as Mulvey’s basically, which is somehow about how we’re going to have to abolish the reverse field because it’s patriarchal, the male gaze and that kind of thing. No, that’s nonsense. My friend Jennifer Hammett, who I have a tremendous admiration for, has written a fundamental, philosophical critique of this whole critique of representation, the feminist critique of representation. It appeared in 1997 in Cinema Journal, it’s called The Ideological Impediment: Feminism and Film Theory. She’s a philosopher and it’s an absolutely rigorous demolition of that whole thing and what she finally says is what feminist cinema needs is new contents, not new forms, not a new language in any case. I agree absolutely and that’s what I did in so far as I was teaching students who had it in the back of their minds they’re going to make movies. I was teaching feminist theory if you like – in other words what was really going on in all these movies, most of it detrimental to women, some of it not, and how to distinguish between the two and things like that. Hopefully, if they went on to make films, and a few of them did and most of them who did took this into account, because they were mostly women, because women were the most sensitive to what I was on about, who could understand it really. Some of the men tried to and pretended to, but it was very hard and I understand that - they have a different experience in relation to films, whereas women were not on the whole cinephiles you see. So they were able to go on and some of them have been making really very interesting films about the women who are around them and things like that. I’m talking about working class women actually. I would have liked to have had an opportunity to do that kind of work with production students. I’ve completely lost this tendency to setting forth prescriptive garbage, as I was once accused in print of doing by somebody in England, because I do think that basically the language is a common language, It’s like an actual language and I don’t believe at all, not for one second, in any kind of theoretical rethinking, global theoretical rethinking of ‘the language’ if you like. Because that’s already been done by other video clips we see, this is going on all the time. Every music video you see now is a kind of implementation of all the critiques of continuity and illusory space – so who cares – it’s obviously of no relevance whatsoever.
CM: I think it was Deleuze who said that our mistake is that in fact film is not a language and therefore in his notion of becoming, there is still a perspective of a consciousness which can go in a direction yet unknown.
NB: Film is not a language, that’s absolutely correct. Film is a much more complicated affair than a language, but it involves languages, but nonetheless which have to be shared in common by the masses if you like because they’re the only people worth reaching. Anyone who just wants to reach a few people I don’t want to talk to, I want to talk to people who hope their stuff can be shown on television, because that’s a fundamental criteria and therefore readable as it were in the Barthian sense – readability is not predicated on indeed a simple linguistic model, I’ve always said it was a question of modes of representation, but there is a shared mode of representation today, which is no longer that of 1905, or even that of 1935 as a matter of fact, because you show students black and white films and they don’t understand them any more, literally – and not to speak of silent films. There is this problem of what I would call communicability or readability, I think the Barthian term is very well chosen and obviously it was a bad object for him ultimately, but who cares. It was an interesting concept and a very good distinction and therefore I am a great defender of readability, absolutely for me it is a basic thing. Well from that point on, how to be readable? It’s something that an intelligent student will learn in any good film school, I’m sure we both agree with that. Beyond that, the ideal film school seems to me a place where indeed they are learning things which are in appearance divorced from film in a funny way.
I went to IDHEC the very first year after it opened, after they chased the communists out, in 1952. I remember at the time being very taken aback by this because we had courses on literature, history, art and music which had nothing to do with film. People were essentially not talking about cinema and I thought it was ridiculous, what are they on about? Whatever these courses were worth, I expect they weren’t worth much because they were academic university teaching, but I certainly would say today, I could make an educational programme out of what seems to me to be necessary - political economy, indeed feminist literary history– I mean a whole continent of feminist work that is not of the theoretical kind, it wouldn’t be Judith Butler, it would be as I say Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert and people like that. Susan McClary’s book on Carmen (1992), this is really something in which one begins to understand how all this works, has worked and is working. Terry Eagleton obviously– The Aesthetics of Ideology, no, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), interesting slip! There’s a lot of different directions where it seems to me that knowledge has been produced that should be useful to a filmmaker, but on the other hand they should learn how to make readable films then they do with that what they want. Somebody who gets up and says the readable film is a bad object, which is what I was doing to you guys in the 1970s as you will recall; there was a strong lean toward the avant-garde and reading readable films as though they were unreadable, so that’s obviously just completely wrong-headed and hopefully nobody does that today. Though I am sad to see that there is a tendency to use my work in that direction, I find it absolutely appalling; I don’t know what to think about it. For example, people will tend to show Correction Please: or How We Got into Pictures (1979) but nobody seems to be reading Life to Those Shadows (1990). I see the curricula in the universities on the net, it’s like the tail is wagging the dog there again, and it’s completely crazy, meaningless.
CM: Actually I think there’s an interesting bit of space opening up in the UK at the moment and in some other countries, for instance Finland, where universities are allowing and in some instances encouraging research by practice, though mostly they are tagged ‘practice-based research’ which is more containable within the general milieu of Media Studies and safer. There are a lot of Universities beginning to do doctorates in practice and it’s a space where interrogative practice can be funded.
NB: Can you give me an example because I’m not sure I understand?
CM: For instance I’m doing a PhD part-time [completed May 2009], back at the Royal College of Art where the process can be called PhD by Practice because of the nature of the institution. These PhDs are 50 per cent theory and 50 per cent practice. But also conferences are developing, like BEYOND, the Theory of Practice, which I know is a small drop in the ocean but people are being able to get research grants to actually make films or to make art practices, not just to write. You might not like that idea.
NB: We do it here. I had a student who did a Masters on witchcraft and an amazing film actually, which was an hour in a prison with witches in the Middle Ages – they found a prison where they actually kept them and it’s an extraordinary thing. He wrote at the same time a feminist essay.
CM: All I’m saying to you is there is a new space opening up where it is possible to do work at an advanced level now. People are using, or could use, the expansion in education of Media Studies, which is not without problems of course, but it is opening up again, in a sense a bit like it was thirty years ago, where only a few film schools were actually investigating ideas through practice – critical practice, dialectical practice, and engaging representationally with the social world. I will tell you more later about the Film Academy that I’m opening up which only has Doctoral students; it doesn’t have undergraduate students, it doesn’t take MA students – it will only take students who are committed to a certain development.8
CM: That aside for a moment, I want to re-engage you with this question of the development of what might appear to be false consciousness and what I am referring to as collective consciousness. I’ve gone back to Durkheim to look at his notion of the ‘conscience collectif’, in a sense running parallel with Marx and instead of religion one could substitute ideology. One of the fundamental things that you talked about many years ago was this notion of a diegetic space and that’s something that if I were you I would now be very unhappy about the way it has been taken up in film schools and as you mentioned, on the internet as part of the curriculum, I think in a similar way that they look at your practice without your theory. The notion of diegesis is now being taught as simply either on-screen and off-screen space, or, what is internal to the narrative and what is external to it.
NB: What’s important about that?
CM: What’s important is that the correct definition of diegesis is not being taught, which I think is something you’ll still be interested in. It relates to your question of understanding what really goes on in the world, this accessibility that you’re talking about for a television audience, the space between the social world and the object itself. If one considers the diegetic space as the mental referent, the false world created within the frame, it has everything to do with how the reader understands the world through the film given to them. This is your explanation to me thirty years ago, which I have not forgotten.
NB: It’s through Metz, its nothing to do with me.
CM: It may be Metz but you introduced it to us. It seems to me that if one is opening up the space of collective consciousness then there is a problem. There is a difficulty in this notion of a mass ideology, if you like, of freeing the subject/object into some notion of a ‘real world’ of consciousness. Given the hegemonic position of representation now, that people are born into the world where everything is given to them as a fact which is represented to them before their experiences in the world.
NB: That’s right.
CM: It’s a kind of basic Walter Benjamin and John Berger perspective that has become so sophisticated in the last 20 years, so pluralistic and used by both the left and the establishment right that makes me, in a theoretical or philosophical sense, go back to the question of where is the consciousness of the viewer in understanding their own position within the world when it has been primarily given to them by representation? And that’s why I go back to collective consciousness. Look, for example, at the Mass Observation movement around the 1940s. They set out to document and photograph the working class; they photographed them with, in my view, a mistaken goodwill intention but then the statistics were used, amongst other things, for advertising purposes. This is where the diegetic space is important. It is a representational space on the one hand and a collective consciousness, which may not be just a representational space, on the other. The two of them work together, this is the problem. One could talk about false consciousness, but that’s very unfashionable, so it’s going back to this subject/object question of where is the subject in the world and how can one confidently actually ascribe meanings and readings to a mass television audience as you have suggested we ought to be doing?
NB: It’s totally impossible. I’m not sure, but I feel that, how can I say, one has to realise when one is tilting at windmills. Look, PlayStation constructs a certain relationship to the self and to visual representations, very clearly as far as I can tell and what you have is a subjected generation of young men, even young women, though fortunately a little less and that’s an interesting and important distinction. I think that one is really up against something that you can’t do anything about and I understand now what you’re saying about the significance of the confusion over diegesis. That’s obviously because in a certain sense, it’s ‘all there is I see’, it’s this whole idea that basically ‘dying is leaving the frame’. So, in a way oddly enough, it’s a sort of cinephile vision which has become practically a universal reality. Like this idea that the world exists inside that little box, a world which is obviously not the real world – as Octave Mannoni theorised at one point – ‘Je sais bien, mais quand même’ [I know, but anyway] (1969: 9–33) – but at the same time it’s the only one that matters and indeed that the isolation of it from any kind of larger imagination, which you were defining quite well there, I can’t do it as well. The problem is that these are symptoms, symptons of something else, they are not like phenomena in themselves okay, that’s where Marshall McLuhan was wrong. McLuhan has become fashionable again I guess, at least here – I don’t know if he is elsewhere, but because everything he said seems to be happening. Of course it’s true, but not for the reasons I think he believed you see, all that is happening is because of the universal merchandising and so on, the technological developments are in a sense a consequence also of the general production of the ‘individual as commodity’ I suppose, and individual consciousness itself has become commodity hasn’t it? They seem to be trying to recreate a sort of eighteenth-century free electrons idea of the individual being this sort of Brownian movement in society. But obviously this is a fundamental economic requirement of this crazy flight forward, this blind accumulation, this whole idea that basically only hurtling forward with more and more things, more and more money, more and more and more and more, we’re going to, I don’t know, not die – I’m not sure what the fundamental psychoanalytical motivation is but it’s obviously absolutely terrifying and it’s something which hopefully the African countries will begin to realise as they are realising now. Many people in Africa realise there is something wrong, that they’re being drawn into something which doesn’t concern them.
CM: They didn’t realise it during the development of Christianity did they? That’s why I’m going back to Durkheim where the parallel would have been the missionaries.
NB: Absolutely. That’s absolutely correct. But as I say again – you see if the feeling that my hostility, or at least my reticence before this whole problematic that you’re representing here in a way is that for me the struggle to modify or to get people to think about modifying representations within this context is just a lost thing ahead of time. Only by modifying the context in some fundamental way, I mean whether people are going to do this or whether the actual logic of the system itself is not going to finally cause such a crisis that it will have to be modified. I don’t know, but what is sure it seems to me is that in a way people will say the only thing to do is swing with it, they’re certainly not entirely wrong, though even that, I feel, can only have some kind of marginal effect. The whole area is so much in the hands of the machine you see that I feel that to get involved with it, there are all sorts of reasons to do so, it’s fun, you can make a lot of money okay, but to get involved in it because one wants to contribute to trying to stop this whole thing, this I honestly think is pure illusion today. I can’t help it. I’m therefore trying to teach this to people. It is certainly important though in a film school to bring in other areas to enrich students politically and culturally with things they probably didn’t get elsewhere.
CM: I will say that I partly agree and partly disagree with you. This is where I disagree. In a paper I gave a few years ago which was a critique of Postmodernism within post-biological representation, I used the preferential term ‘contextualism’ and it is something that I teach within scriptwriting theory and practice today. I examine the notion of what I call the trialectic, which is form, content, context. There’s nothing mystifying about that, but it’s a triangular model rather than a binary model and in that respect enables rather than restricts and I believe facilitates the continued and progressive use of form. But I also think that what you’re saying is right, I do agree with you in as much as it is within the realm of the other subjects where the work needs to take place.
NB: It can certainly make more interesting films than are being made today, yes absolutely 100 per cent.
CM: Not just more interesting, more politically relevant and ones which engage with the areas you’re talking about but still engage with representation in cinema.
NB: Yes absolutely, but one has to be very prudent to say the least about the illusions one has for the political efficacy or social efficacy of any such films, because 90 per cent of any such films are going to be addressing themselves to the already converted, as we know and I think this is a fundamental problem and even the idea of introducing radical ideas into TV series, which I’m all for – anyone who has tried to do this I’m completely in sympathy with. At the same time I think we’ve reached the stage where it going to be you know, a conversation piece for certain journals. In 1980 there was a series on American television called Centenary – do you know about this?
CM: No.
NB: It’s absolutely amazing; I saw bits of it in Minneapolis. It was a history of the United States from the point of view of Howard Zinn9 basically. It was filmed in a little town in the Rockies or somewhere. It was the history of capitalism, it was just incredible from beginning to end. Okay, it came and it went and has never showed again and there it is. Whatever the form, there was an adequate form to what it was talking about and obviously what it was talking about was totally mind-blowing in the American context. But it was part of the whole flow of information we get.
CM: Of course it came and it went, you wanted it to stick, but it’s got to go as soon as it comes.
NB: What I mean is it made no impact of any kind, hardly anyone noticed it.
CM: You noticed.
NB: A woman did the work on the impact, it was brought in by a scholar who had done research on it and clearly this discourse was inaudible, precisely because of the American context and there is no, how should I say, political relay, the only way consciousness raising makes any impact is in struggle. It’s in strikes, it’s in struggle, whatever the form it may take. And obviously film can have eventually some kind of role in this; one could perhaps say that something like The Day After (1983), that TV thing on American television about the consequences of an atomic war, I think that probably did, because it was made at a time when there was a rather strong campaign around these questions in America. It took place in this general movement if you like, why not. But there’s the question of the form that was used. It’s interesting, I wrote an article somewhere – I think I wrote a letter to Time Out because somebody had trashed it and I said you don’t understand, this thing is important and somebody else wrote ‘who is this liberal wimp Noel Burch who dares to defend this piece of vulgar trash?’, well because we were still in a period where people thought that things had to be artistically innovative to be politically impacting.
CM: These are two different issues Noel, one at the barricades – no problem with that, vitally important to be there and at that moment with that conjuncture there will be radical ideology and aesthetics again, I have no doubt about that. However, while not at the barricades, where we spend most of our lives, I suggest there is still an area of work to be done, which in a sense because it’s not a question of elitism or populism, it’s perhaps, I don’t know, scientific research or whatever you want to call it, but therefore surely must be done and if we do not understand mass consciousness then that work is vital.
NB: I’m quite sure that’s true, whether it can be done with actual films or visual products possibly, but I do say that the experiments or experiences I have observed or encountered in this respect have not been terribly convincing. But okay why not, certainly I have no problem about, for example, how today history is often taught using films. Well why not, that’s obviously one approach, certainly to the history of mentalities and so on, in fact it’s almost essential to use films if one wants to understand really what was going on in peoples minds in the 1930s.
CM: I seem to recall, I think it was you who wrote an article on the difference between the avant-garde and the vanguard (1976: 52–63) and you certainly defined a difference between the two and described what happened to the vanguard. So why shouldn’t those two things, both practically and intellectually, exist simultaneously and be a proposition towards a new vanguard?
NB: Why shouldn’t they, obviously not. I mean they exist anyway, I suppose they must exist or they can exist. Although you said at one point in your presentation that France was ahead, that’s absolutely untrue. The whole question of avant-garde practice as political practice was an entirely British thing and it became somewhat an American thing later on, but it was never here in France, except obviously with Godard, but he was practically alone you understand. I’m serious about this people here who made and still make films today of an explicitly political content are totally allergic to avant-gardism.
CM: What about to Duchamp and to Leger?
NB: We’re talking about other periods; I’m talking about the 1970s. Duchamp went to America and Leger was not making political films. He was a communist painter and his painting later on became indeed committed art, but that’s another period. The whole question of avant-gardism of the 1920s is a completely different matter in my opinion. I’m talking about the 1970s and an attempt to repeat all that in this funny way. I had a point I wanted to make there.
CM: It wasn’t the French…
NB: Absolutely not and I think that even today, even more so today, I know quite a few people slugging away in the shadows producing little documentary films, often quite interesting and informative and useful and often with somehow innovative forms I suppose, but there has never been this idea among those people, and the only person who keeps doing that is Godard – who keeps producing these films which become more and obscure and totally incomprehensible I find, I’ve stopped watching them frankly. Okay, but he’s a sort of a voice from the past, highly respected and all that. But it was an English thing essentially and I must say sometimes I wonder why, I’ve often tried to work that out. I had a certain role perhaps in that brief period I was in England at the RCA and so on, but obviously it was an ongoing thing – Screen and all that, which I had nothing to do with at all, I didn’t understand a word of that at the time. So there was this British thing and okay it’s interesting, but I think that here it was actually never the case and the documentarists, there are still many and they’re all political in some way or another, a lot of them are in any case, they are concerned with readable films, the problem was never raised in those terms and the whole problematics of Cinétique10 and all that washed over that world without leaving a trace you see.
CM: I don’t think it’s an issue of readability and non-readability. The main point is to do with the accessibility point at which the people that you are talking about have indeed real access to that knowledge, because that knowledge cannot simply be given to them – because of the space they already inhabit.
NB: Okay I agree. This is obviously true but the problem is again this cannot be broken down with the tools which are at the disposal of the filmmaker. The filmmaker is dealing with a given, which is intangible, in my opinion absolutely intangible and the idea of trying to come up against it, somehow attempting to deal with it fertilely, to modify a perception of the world let us say, which is implicit in that one we were just talking about. This is I think an undertaking that is absolutely doomed to failure. I guess that in a way is the bottom line. This is a glass wall if you like, there’s nothing to do about it, absolutely nothing. One cannot do anything about it, one can obviously hope to modify the context and by modifying the context, which is what we mean when we speak of revolution, whatever form that may take. Once you’ve done that then indeed I assume - it’s my assumption, that possibly will reappear questions such as those that were raised by the Russians in the 1920s, because for me there remains a kind of exemplarily moment of rethinking representation and as I say perhaps Cuba in the 1960s, I don’t know much about it, but otherwise no, it’s a bloody waste of time. We can hope that individuals can seek out individual solutions and maybe do innovative work in terms of the fact that they’ve studied the things that they wanted to study in the ideal film school. But this innovative work will be immediately sucked into the mass, or else it will never be seen. One or the other and that’s it.
CM: If one continued along that dystopic view, or even a utopian one that, as you say is still about struggle, then come near to some form of radical social change taking place, filmmakers might be unable to produce another ideological context.
NB: You mean your students’ grandchildren!
CM: It could be a real problem, this is why I disagree with you – it’s a minor but major disagreement. My position is that one has to actually continue that representational struggle because at the same time as working towards a reformed context in society, a social context, then if the work wasn’t continuing to be done on a formal or representational basis, there is no way at that moment that anyone is going to come along and be another Eisenstein or a Vertov. It’s too late, that’s what’s too late from my side of the fence because we are so sucked into a representational belief system that we will not know how to react in that situation. Therefore one has to continuously redefine.
NB: I certainly would agree with that, I just do feel that I think its pie-in-sky this assumption that the cake that one aspires to is just around the corner, I think that in a way, what is the expression – one has to teach people to live in a dangerous world, hostile to any kind of progressive ideas. Which is why we sort of withdraw into little communities and so on, which is obviously what we’re seeing all the time, is that it’s a kind of mode of survival and it’s perfectly understandable, it drives me mad, it infuriates me. But unfortunately all I know how to react with is anger. Oh, one can always hope that the ten students one is teaching this year will somehow or other receive the good word and go out and spread it. I guess one ought to be quite tolerant of the aspirations of most of the young – to just get on with it you know. Well, I’m not very tolerant of that and it’s one of the reasons I had to get out of teaching, I was glad to get out of teaching because it’s difficult to be telling people come on, you’re just barking up the wrong tree. What can you do, again it’s a context. There are certain moments – one can look at Chávez in Venezuela and so on and say it’s possible to resist up to a point maybe and that gives one some small bit of hope, but its very remote.
CM: On that point I totally agree with you and it was three years ago when I said I can’t teach undergraduate students anymore, because I’m not prepared to teach people who don’t want to be taught and they shouldn’t have been on this course in the first place.
NB: That’s exactly the case. I don’t know, I got into that actually. I structured my teaching in such a way, I had an amazingly privileged situation which was that I was teaching three undergraduate courses and one graduate seminar each week, all to the same students so they would sometimes be in the same classroom and we’d change classes, but they wouldn’t change rooms. I also managed to get it to be all year round; they put us on a semester system to be in tune with Europe but I and other teachers just said fuck that and we divided the course into an arbitrary two parts. So for a year I had these students for ten hours a week, plus I had them next year for another few hours in a Masters class, and this was like brainwashing, because it was all the same; it was all gender in various ways, gender in the silent German cinema, gender and orientalism in French and American cinema and gender in six great Hollywood authors, this was all I taught. At Christmas time they had to write this exam and nobody had understood anything, there was nothing, it was really terrifying. But by Spring the penny had dropped and I had the most amazing papers. It’s very rare that anyone can do that, it was because I was this honcho so I was able to impose this thing, nobody said anything, they just let me off. It’s very permissive here in the University, if you have tenure – and you have tenure as soon as you’re appointed to a full-time post – you do what you want, it’s not like anything at all in England.
CM: I’m in Wales.
NB: I know, but it’s all the same isn’t it – you have these controls, but here there’s nothing like that. So I just did this brainwashing, it took a couple of years and then it began to tick and I had only two people in my Masters class in the first couple of years and suddenly I began having twenty or thirty and it was very moving actually and they got into the thing and began doing really extraordinary work, which I showed to my friend Geneviève Sellier who teaches at the University of Caen which is a very middle-class university and she said Jesus if I had papers half this quality I’d be happy. She was going to get appointed at Lille after I left but she’s a very strong woman and that doesn’t go down well at places like that… So anyhow, these were undergraduates, they’d already had a year of bullshit from people talking about the history of the lap dissolve or whatever and so it took a while to get rid of that, but once you got rid of that, they were really available. I wasn’t the only teacher there but on the whole they had me and I was the only one they cared about because the others were mediocre.
CM: I’ve been fortunate to be able to have, on a smaller basis, a similar relationship with filmmaking practice students, whose work I think has been, you know some of it has been very fine, they’ve been able to produce in the same way that the essays you’re talking about, in a sense the films are the essays – very few and far between, not very many of them, but now I’m excited because I’m trying to put this film school together, which as I said only has a maximum of twenty students per year in it and who will be able to work within the context of the subject of the film they are making – for example, at the University there are Schools of Criminology, Law, Business Studies – all as Schools in their own right. The idea is that the two tutors of each doctoral student should represent the form and content of each film, one to be a film professor, the other – if they’re interested in say crime film, I want the other tutor to be a criminologist, not a film historian, so one can work with Criminology and Filmmaking or Law and Filmmaking or Business Studies and Filmmaking for producers.
NB: Absolutely, that I think is 100 per cent spot on.
Paris, October 2003
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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FILMOGRAPHY
Bowling for Columbine (2002) Directed by Michael Moore [DVD]. Amazon: Warner Home Video.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) [DVD]. Amazon: WB Television Network.
Correction Please: or How We Got into Pictures (1979) Directed by Noel Burch [Film]. London: Concord Films.
Cuba: Entre Chien et Louve (Cuba: Mothers and Machos, 1997) Directed by Noel Burch and Michele Larue [Beta SP]. Paris: Kanpai Distribution.
Day After, The (1983) Directed by Nicholas Meyer [DVD]. Amazon: MGM.
Festen (1998) Directed by Thomas Vinterberg [DVD]. Amazon: Universal Studios.
Gummo (1997) Directed by Harmony Korine [DVD]. Amazon: New Line Home Video.
Idiots, The (1998) Directed by Lars von Trier [DVD]. Amazon: Zentropa.
JUSTINE, by the Marquis de Sade (1976) Directed by Stewart Mackinnon [DVD]. London: Film Work Group.
Le Fils (The Son, 2002) Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne [DVD]. Amazon: New Yorker Video.
Mars Attacks (1996) Directed by Tim Burton [DVD]. Amazon: Warner Home Video.
Nurse Betty (2000) Directed by Neil LaBute [DVD]. Amazon: Columbia/Tristar Home.
Passion of Joan of Arc, The (1928) Directed by Carl Dreyer [DVD]. Amazon: Criterion Collection.
Pi (1998) Directed by Darren Aronofsky [DVD]. Amazon: Artisan.
Riddles of the Sphinx (1997) Direceted by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen [DVD]. London: Mulvey.
Scary Movie (2000) Directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans [DVD]. Amazon:
Scream (1996) Directed by Wes Craven [DVD]. Amazon: Dimension. Sentimental Journey: Refuzniks USA (1994) Directed by Noel Burch [Video]. Paris: Doc & Co.
Signs and Wonders (2000) Directed by Jonathan Nossiter [DVD]. Amazon: Strand Releasing Home Video.
Starship Troopers (1997) Directed by Paul Verhoven [DVD]. Amazon: Columbia/ Tristar Home Video.
Taxi Driver (1976) Directed by Martin Scorsese [DVD]. Amazon: Columbia/Tristar Home Video.
Taxi Parisien (2002) produced by Jacques Bidou [Video]. Paris: FR3.
Ten (10, 2002) Directed by Abbas Kiarostami [DVD]. Amazon: Zeitgeist Films.
There’s Something About Mary (1998) Directed by Bobby and Peter Farrelly [DVD]. Amazon: 20th Century Fox.
Une Part du Ciel (2002) Directed by Bénédicte Liénard [DVD]. Amazon: Seven7.
Vendredi Soir (Friday Night, 2002) Directed by Claire Denis [DVD]. Amazon: Tartan Video.
Very Bad Things (1998) Directed by Peter Berg [DVD]. Amazon: Bridge Entertainment.
Year of the Bodyguard (1981) Directed by Noel Burch [Video]. London: Channel Four.
NOTES