Since its invention, film has distinguished itself in its unprecedented visual capabilities. Yet its particular “gaze” has presented many ambiguities. A parallel reading of two books by Bela Balázs—The Visible Man (Der Sichtbare Mensch, 1924) and The Spirit of Film (Der Geist des Films, 1930)—gives us precious proof of this fact.1 In The Visible Man, the idea emerges of a device that leads us to regain our sense of sight. Balázs writes:
The lens of the cinema reveals to you the single cells of the vital tissue, it makes you feel the material and substance of the concrete life anew. It shows you what your hand—that you neither observe nor notice at all—does while it caresses or hits something. You live through it without seeing it. It reveals to you the intimate face of all of your vital gestures through which your soul appears and you are not conscious of it. The lens of the cinematographic apparatus will project on the wall the shadow with which you live, without seeing it, and it will recount the adventure and destiny of the cigar in your oblivious hand, and the secret life—the unnoticed life—of all the things that accompany you throughout your existence.2
Film offers to the gaze what we would otherwise let slip away. It opens (or reopens) our eyes and allows us to seize the reality in which we are immersed. This is true above all for the human face. Framing it, film restores to us its entire range of features, laying bare “type and personality, hereditary and acquired elements, one’s fortune and will.”3 As a result, film ends up giving back to us the polyphony of sentiments occurring on the face. The face “becomes the everything in which the drama is contained,” particularly with the close-up.4 Indeed, every shot brings us straight to the heart of things. It returns the substance of what has been captured; it makes us experience the breathing of the entire world. Balázs illustrates this effect, for example, when he describes the portrayal of the crowd: “With a series of close-ups, of medium close-ups and detailed shots, it shows us the single grains of sand that make up the desert, so that even in the presence of the total picture the buzzing life of atoms lingers. In such close-ups, we feel the living spiritual material of which the masses are part.”5
Six years later, in The Spirit of Film, the need for the camera to masterfully command the sense of sight persists, but the glances it casts on the world reveal a more subtle quality. A face on screen not only incarnates the elusive spirit of its subject but also revives the experience of being seen by someone, in a certain way, from a certain perspective. “A physiognomy in and of itself does not exist. There are only those we see,” Balázs explains, “and they change, according to the point from which we see them. The physiognomy depends on the point of view; that is, the shot. The physiognomy is not only an objective fact but also our relationship with this fact. A synthesis.”6 Thus, film redeems the human gaze, at the same time anchoring it in a perceptive act. A seeing subject, a seen object, and a mode of framing this relationship all come into play in the cinematic gaze.
The consequences of this relationship are crucial. The gaze loses its immediacy: in seeing reality on the screen, we inevitably bring ourselves out in the open. “In the image, we see our position at the same time, or our relationship to the object,”7 Balázs observes. Moreover, the gaze loses its neutrality: in seeing reality on the screen, and in seeing it from a certain perspective, we adopt a certain attitude and orientation. “Every visual angle on the world implicates a vision of the world,”8 Balázs continues. Finally, the gaze loses its fullness: seeing reality on the screen, we see only what the adopted perspective allows us to grasp. The world, then, becomes like a kaleidoscope. As Balázs glosses it: “In fact, we do not see one image of certain things, but a hundred different images, according to the different views through which we look at them.”9 The real is no longer before our eyes, ready to reveal itself. We see that it is we who are seeing, seeing in a certain optic and partial way. In this sense, the argument of The Spirit of Film alters the logic of vision. And yet the desire of a productive and generative gaze lingers on. Anticipating the advent of color film, Balázs foresees that “it will be able, in close-ups, to reproduce even the most subtle nuances; it will reveal a new world of which we know nothing, although, in reality, we see it every day.”10
It is useful to note that in the interim between the two works by Balázs, Erwin Panofsky published his celebrated essay “Perspective as Symbolic Form.”11 In that essay, attention returns to one of the key moments in art history: the perspectival representation emerging out of the Renaissance. The Renaissance conceives pictorial representation as the level intersection of a “visual pyramid.” The ideal observer raises his eye to the pyramid’s apex, and the entire field of vision is constituted by the lines that irradiate from this same eye. This means that the space that spreads out on the surface of a painting is presented not as reality in and of itself, but as something seen: what supports this perspective is the gaze that contemplates (and controls) the world. Panofsky rightly notes that the perspectiva artificialis appeals to a mathematical base that flattens and normalizes representation. Yet the presence of an observer in his or her singularity is never completely canceled. “Perspective subjects the artistic phenomenon to stable and even mathematically exact rules,” Panofsky writes, “but on the other hand, makes that phenomenon contingent upon human beings, indeed upon the individual: for these rules refer to the psychological and physical conditions of the visual impression, and the way they take effect is determined by the freely chosen position of a subjective point of view.”12 It follows that the act of seeing continues to constitute an essential reference. However abstract the constructed gaze that organizes, the painting is always a unique “view.”
The most advanced modernity, as Panofsky reminds us,13 will be suspicious of mathematical reference and ready to emphasize perspective as “view.” It might be opportune at this point to make another reference, which moves from the field of painting to that of literature, from the Renaissance to the years that saw the cinema’s birth and development. I cite the ample series of prefaces and essays that Henry James wrote from the decades spanning the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.14 Many scholars have pointed out the correlation between these writings and the birth of the cinema.15 James recommends narrating an event as if it were passing before the eyes (or the consciousness) of a character. There are various motivations that prompt such a choice. There is the pull of finding a center to the narration that can give the story coherency and intelligibility, but also the need to intensify the tale, tying it directly to the perceptions and sensations of those acting within its diegetic world.16 Whatever the reasons might be, to narrate means to offer an “ocular witness” of an event. James defines this “ocular witness” in various ways, all of which are significant: the perceiver, to underline the function of the observer within the field itself; the reflector, to show the capacity to shed light on events with a well-positioned ray of sunshine; and the block, to highlight the function of registering the consequences of the facts in one’s own eyes and consciousness. The presence of the “ocular witness” is decisive. Indeed, it becomes the narrative’s focal point, the true essence of the story. But its presence is decisive in another way as well: guided by it, the narration inevitably adapts a “limited perspective.” What comes into view is only what he or she sees from his or her point of observation.
Let us linger for a moment on the idea of “limited perspective,” illustrated by James’s now-famous image: the narration as a building with infinite windows.
The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million…. At each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other. He and his neighbors are watching the same show, but one seeing more where the other sees less, one seeing black where the other sees white, one seeing big where the other sees small, one seeing coarse where the other sees fine. And so on, and so on…”17
The result is an undeniably personal vision:18 perception of the world belongs to the individual—it is not a divine, omniscient gaze. This vision is thus also inevitably contingent: perception depends on the “window” through which we look, or rather, the window where we happen to be in the course of our own existence. Finally, and above all, this is an inevitably partial vision: the observer is able to gather only a small slice of the “human drama,” especially if he or she stands before a simple sliver or “crack” of vision opening onto to the world. Perception of the total picture is forever barred. This is what we can call the crux of the Jamesian lesson. Every story implicates a gaze and this gaze is tied to a point of view. The point of view coincides with the presence of an observer who, at the same time, depends upon specific conditions for observation. This point of view is the “locus” in which the gaze is incarnated in a scopic subject, and is situated in a particular circumstance. The “locus” assigns the gaze the “ego-hic-nunc” that makes it “worldly” at last.
If the modern gaze has a typical characteristic, it is precisely that of being a “worldly” gaze, inescapably embodied and positioned. With his valuable analysis founded in a study of nineteenth-century physiology, Jonathan Crary drew attention to the rise of the new paradigm: early physiologists stressed how seeing relies on physical and mental processes that hinge upon both the body of the observer and the situation in which he or she exists. Through this new theory, the Cartesian model—according to which the eye constitutes a simple point of passage that puts reality and its mental image in direct contact—was questioned and then eradicated. To see is to transform data, to reelaborate and reconstruct it.19 In this context, the gaze suddenly discovers its own limits. It responds to a subject, rather than to the reality. It operates on partial elements, rather than a total appreciation. It acts in the moment, rather than outside of time. The absoluteness of the gaze seems to disappear: what emerges instead is the field of tensions in which it is rooted. This is a realm in which the task of comparing the part and whole, subjectivity and objectivity, contingency and necessity, plays an essential role.
It would be fruitful perhaps to comment further on the consequences of this new idea of vision, as others have done,20 but let us return to Balázs and film. Our slight detour into the work of Panofsky and especially of James allows us to understand the urgency at the heart of The Spirit of Film—even if the Hungarian author had no direct contact with the Jamesian debate. His inspirations were, if anything, Eisenstein’s films, with their idea that every representation of the world is necessarily “oriented.” Moreover, Balázs worked on a theory of filmic representation that was independent of the notion of an “ocular witness” within a story. Yet there is something that ties his position to the Jamesian problem: against the backdrop of the pressures of modernity, both writers seize on the exigency of a point of view, and with it, put an end to the idea of an all-embracing gaze that is abstract and absolute. The standards for measuring vision are inverted: limitation, subjectivity, and contingency become primary. Seeing becomes a riskier endeavor.
Let us look more closely at one of these three elements: the limitation of the visual field. Each glimpse can only catch fragments of the world, and the world becomes a whole of fragments. The theory is widely circulated. We encounter it in James, with his metaphor of the house with many windows. We recognize it, as well, in Benjamin: in analyzing the features of the modern experience, he brings to light primarily its loss of coherence and unity.21 In film, the limitations of the cinematic gaze also spring from a technical aspect. What the film is able to show is more narrow than our natural field of vision. Enrico Toddi, in an irresistibly ironic 1918 article, lamented this reduction of the visual field due to the size of the frame, and dreams of a film in which the form and range of the screen image can expand itself: “Though the camera imitates as perfectly as possible the human eye, a heterogeneous element is suddenly introduced: the molded rectangle of the frame: 25 by 19 mm.”22 Eisenstein returned to this issue in the early 1930s, questioning whether the filmic image is confined to an invariable shape, or whether it might rebel against this fate.23 The discovery that the cinema has its own point of view would allow us to confront this problem in all of its complexity.24
In The Spirit of Film, however, Balázs does not merely discover the existence of a point of view that limits our field of observation—he continues to dream of a gaze able to seize the world in its breadth and significance, as he had in The Visible Man. Under the pressure of modernity, the goal of a full vision collapses. Within the scope of modernity, however, this fullness still has a chance. The value of Balázs’ insights consists in having systematically inscribed in his own reflections the contrast between the overdetermination of modern vision and the absolute perfection to which it still aspires. He keeps these two poles alive, without forcing only one to emerge. From here comes the question that film poses to the twentieth-century gaze. Should it move in the sphere of partiality, subjectivity, and contingency? Or should it aspire to completeness, objectivity, and necessity? Should it accept limits or try to surpass them?
Film effectively seized this emergent duality of modern vision, assuring a dialogue between the two. With the shot, film puts a limited perimeter of vision on screen; but every film-take seeks to restore a striking, “epiphanic” vision of the world. Through editing, each shot proposes one and one vision only, but the sequencing of shots permits multiple—even ubiquitous—perspectives.
Some years before Balázs, Jean Epstein concluded his essay “The meaning 1bis” (“Le sens 1bis,” 1921) with the phrase “I watch” (“Je regarde”).25 This treasonous phrase openly rewrites the Cartesian principle of “cogito,” and establishes an indissoluble tie between vision, its subject, and the concrete act of seeing. Seeing—at the cinema, as well as in “real life”—is always an individual, idiosyncratic act in any given situation. It is a seeing from a point of view and therefore inevitably partial, contingent, and subjective. Yet film discloses an extraordinary capacity in vision: at the movies, we get the heart and the soul of the world. Epstein writes: “There is a pregnant air of expectation. Life sources gush from corners we believed to be sterile and explored. The skin gives off a luminous softness. The cadence of the crowd scenes is a song. Look…. Film sees on a large scale.”26
How, then, to penetrate this question of the unique and universal, the part and the whole, the limited point of view and that which is beyond? If it is true that the power of film lies in tackling these polarities, keeping the extremes alive, and seeking to negotiate itself among them, then it is a question of identifying a series of instances in which film performs these operations and of attempting to understand their internal logic. In confronting this challenge, I will pursue a slightly unpredictable path. I will begin with three very different films and try, with some provocation, to uncover the ties that make this path crucial.
THE EAGLE, THE FLY, AND THE EMPEROR
If I had to sum up the basic problem at the heart of Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927), I would say that it recounts a destiny that emerges from single episodes drawn out of one life. The story begins at Brienne, Napoléan’s military college. It continues at the Club des Cordeliers, where Josephine first appears. Then it moves on to Corsica, the siege of Toulon, the Terror, Vendemiare, the Reaction: though these are only steps, they are nonetheless fulfilling a luminous path. The moral: we can only illustrate mere fragments of existence, but in each fragment pulses the sense of the whole.
Naturally, this question of a tension between the part and the whole is not isolated to the narrative plane. Gance’s initial project envisioned the reconstruction of Napoléon’s biography in six films. The film he finally made was only the first installment. His ambition, then, was not just to detail the relevant episodes of Bonaparte’s life but to offer its full scope.27 The treatment of single episodes, together with the immensity of the complete picture, are proof of this desire to permeate the part with the whole. Each shot contains but a slice of reality, like each biographical episode: it is a question of restoring its limits, capturing reality within a global vision. Gance’s manipulation of certain defining cinematic techniques in Napoléon—the split screen, superimposition, rapid montage, swish pans—seem the perfect illustration of this tension and, at the same time, an attempt to resolve it.
Let us consider the split screen. We find a striking example in the initial episode, set at Brienne college. During the pillow fight, the screen is divided at first into four boxes, then six, then nine, in order to depict the many phases of a fight in progress.28 What does this segmented composition suggest? Each portion of the screen gives us only one fragment of the event: each is seen from a specific perspective and in a specific instant, and therefore taken from a single point of view. Yet the entire screen incorporates side by side the various portions of the event, combining perspectives and moments, and therefore generating a point of view born from the sum of those preceding it. The effect is that of offering a composite whole in which the meaning of each part survives, but in which the sense of the whole comes forward as well. The filmic image is a true mosaic in which one can see individual tesserae, but in which there is also a design that both incorporates and exceeds them. The act of filmmaking thus signifies working with fragments, and above all knowing how to transcend them. At the cinema, to see means to break through the limits to which we are anchored by everyday vision.
Superimposition obeys the same principle, thanks to the multiplication of levels of the image, and Napoléon makes frequent use of this technique. In addition to creating metaphors, the use of superimposition aims to combine various elements that are not easily separable. This is again the case with the snowball fight at Brienne college. After the intertitle “He gave orders in the midst of the confusion,” we see repeated superimpositions of Napoléon in close-up and the fight as it happens, in order to underline the intimate harmony of the leader with the events he commands. This is similarly the case at the Convention, in which we find a quadruple superimposition—the Assembly, a stormy sea, Napoléon among the waves, and an eagle—to mark the entire picture of all elements at play, both present and future. In this sense, superimposition offers a “comprehensive” image that gathers, unites, and fuses. We see a single point of view, but we also see it as the product of an intersection of several points of view. Naturally, there is the risk that individual elements become no longer recognizable, as Gance shares: “I found some negatives from Napoléon where there are sixteen images, one on top of the other. I knew that it was impossible to see anything after the fifth image, but they were there, and from the moment that they were there, their potential was there as well.”29 Some intelligibility may be lost, but what persists is a feeling of density and concentration.
The same accumulative logic lies behind the use of rapid montage, which joins brief clips. Napoléon makes frequent use of this technique, beginning with that same snowball fight at Brienne. The tight close-up of the young Bonaparte (compressed into only a few frames) is alternated with close-ups and details of the ongoing fight, again represented through very brief fragments. In the ultra-rapid montage, the different shots are not truly present in the same image as they are in the split screen or the superimposition. Here, the different points of view follow in succession, but quickly enough as to give the impression of blending one into the next. Integration is obtained through the course of the film, rather than in the space of a single filmic image. But this is an integration in every sense: we see the close-up of Bonaparte, but we have no way of lingering upon it, and thus we end up taking it in “together” with the other fragments making up the battle scene. In short, we are dealing with a filmic gaze that frees us from the limits of a single glance. I would add that this principle emerges again—though purged of its radicality and brought to a sort of objectivity—in the shot/reverse-shot, the principle technique of the classical cinema. Here as well, we find an integration of partial elements into a comprehensive vision.
Finally, we have brusque camera movements—mainly swish pans, dollies, and fast tracks—that are often carried out by hand. These are techniques that recur almost obsessively in the film. In addition to their virtuosity, they give us the idea of an entirely unstable frame that desperately seeks to move beyond its limitations and capture new parts of reality. The lens moves without settling on anything, as if it wanted to follow the multiplicity of the world.
It is not difficult to recognize in these techniques the logic of cubist or futurist synthesis. Through them, we are similarly dealing with a mode of grasping the world simultaneously from many sides or in many moments, knowing well that the eye by itself only glimpses it from one side or in only one moment at a time. In other words, the futurist or the cubist painter knows that vision depends on a “here” and a “now,” but he tries to enact a gaze that is able to penetrate them with a complex appreciation, without giving up those “heres” and “nows,” and thus without being forced into abstraction. At the cinema, this game seems almost spontaneous, above all when one moves from the “avant-garde” techniques like those discussed here to more standardized techniques. I mentioned the shot/reverse-shot as a normalization of rapid montage, but I could equally have brought up the distribution of the filmic image on different planes of depth as a companion to the split screen or the superimposition. Beyond these possible parallels, the fact remains that film is an intrinsically futurist and cubist art, and one in which the cubist and futurist gazes are made seemingly “natural.”
Gance’s stylistic choices also recall a larger set of literary techniques of his time. I am thinking of Blaise Cendrars, one of Gance’s collaborators. Describing the film experience, he writes: “Beneath the heads of the spectators, the cone of light flickers like a dolphin. The characters, the individuals, and the things—the subjects and the objects—spread out on the screen. They are immersed, they turn around, they pursue each other, they meet, with an enormous, fatal precision.” We are not dealing with an “abstract symbolism, obscure and complex, but a part of a living organism that we catch, drive out, defeat and that has never been seen. Barbarian evidence.” The result is that the fragments of reality come together in a whole, like the letters of the alphabet in a new language: “Captured life. Life of depth. Alphabet. Letter. A B C.”30
Cendrars evokes Gance not only conceptually but also through his writing style, replete with sliding meanings and word aggregation. But let us return to Napoléon. Its final great “triptychs” represent the culmination of a search to construct a gaze able to go beyond its own limits, to seize the whole of a phenomenon. As is well known, Napoléon ends with a long section dedicated to the Italian Campaign, in which the central screen is flanked by two other screens. The image is tripled in width. This enlargement is twofold. In some cases, we have a vision that is wider in scope: the two lateral screens offer some images that fit with the central one, which produces a panoramic gaze. In some other cases, we have a composite vision: the two lateral images are like the wings of the central one, and the result is a figurative structure similar to an altarpiece. Hence, the landscape and the polytych: on the one hand, it is a question of seizing the entire width of the horizon, and saturating the visual space; on the other, it is a question of gathering the whole of phenomena, resulting in a phantasmagoria. Even if these two types of “triptych” differ, the impulse behind them is the same. In both cases, there is an attempt to “embrace” the real, to keep it together, beyond the partiality inherent in every point of view. It does so by literally “breaking through” the screen and thus destroying the most obvious limits of the filmic vision. Simply put, in one case this action refers to the eagle—a majestic bird surveying the world from above—that often appears in the film as the young Bonaparte’s companion, foreshadowing the destiny of the future emperor. Walter Benjamin could have made reference to an eagle when—discussing masses and film—he writes: “A bird’s-eye view best captures assemblies of hundreds of thousands.”31 In the other case, the reference is to the fly—an insect with a kaleidoscopic gaze—that is often evoked by theorists of the age, who saw its faceted eye as analogous to that of the cinema. Cendrars for instance points out: “The cinema has given man an eye more marvelous than the multifaceted eye of the fly. One hundred worlds, a thousand movements, a million dramas occur simultaneously within the field of this eye.”32 The landscape and the polytych: a wider vision and a composite one. The eagle and the fly: Napoléon aspires to see on a grandiose scale.
The gaze that Gance imposes on his film—a gaze that goes beyond the limits of the scene to grasp the whole of reality in one single embrace—takes up, after all, the very attitude of the protagonist. It breaks barriers, not stopping at the here and now, but conquering the world. Gance is like Bonaparte: he seeks to construct an empire, a visual empire. The director’s speech to his troupe on the first day of filming confirms it:
To collaborators of all kinds, to all in leading and secondary roles, operators, painters, electricians, stagehands… to all, but particularly to you, the extras; you will have the weighty load of finding the spirit of your forbearers; you will present, with your good-spirited unity, the awesome face of France from 1792 to 1815. I demand more: the need for the total oblivion of small personal considerations and an absolute dedication.33
Filming is like going into battle, and thus demands the same kind of attitude. Conversely, if Gance was inspired by Bonaparte, Bonaparte behaves like Napoléon. His gaze throughout the film is directly modeled after the operating film reel. His vision is characterized by speed, by ubiquity, by synthesis, which are characteristics typical not only of this film but also of the cinema in general, and characteristics typical of modernity.34 This identification reaches its culmination in the dialogue between the future emperor and the late great fathers of the Revolution: the vision of the film and the vision of the protagonist line up perfectly.35 But precisely when we are ready for the apotheosis—and in the screen explosion, we have confirmation that the Hero, in making History, is also capable of seeing its realization to the end—it is here that two other scopic subjects—the eagle and fly—insinuate themselves. The construction of a visual empire must draw upon other kingdoms, such as the animal one. Who is, ultimately, watching in the film? Who is the owner of the gaze: who is really able to pass from a narrow vision to an all-embracing one? And what kind of whole is in our gaze?
In one way, the multiplicity of scopic models that has emerged doubtlessly carries a limited sovereignty. Napoléon embodies Bonaparte’s gaze, but his gaze is not exclusive. Moreover, he also proves to be a subject incapable of seeing, as the extraordinary sequence at Josephine’s house demonstrates. Napoléon is blindfolded to play blindman’s bluff,36 and so robbed of his eyesight (he himself comments, “In love, one mustn’t see more than this”). This blindness echoes the holes in vision such as those that Gance himself reveals with regard to superimpositions. The same holes can be perceived in a montage in which it is too rapid to see things distinctly, and in a split screen that is too complicated to be entirely understood. However full, every vision is inevitably imperfect. Yet the multiplication of scopic models offers us a confirmation that film is capable of “embracing” the world. It is able to hold all the spheres of nature in its hands—the human, the animal, the mineral, the vegetable. In taking possession of these realms, it is also able to adopt their various points of view.
Blaise Cendrars’s The End of the World Shot by the Angel N.-D. (La fin du monde filmée par l’ange N.-D.) provides an excellent example of the same move.37 This unrealized film project tells a mad story of God as producer and proprietor—having nothing better to do than film the history of the universe to its end, and then rewinding the film to its beginning. In this script, God’s vision becomes a string of single shots, taken by the cameraman Angel Notre-Dame, each describing a single moment of the history of the universe. And, at the same time, God’s film involves the entire History of the universe, from Genesis to the Apocalypse and back. So, The End of the World can be read as cinema’s most radical dream of appropriating reality through a gaze that adapts itself to all situations in order to grasp their entirety. Both in Cendrars’s script and in Gance’s film, this gaze must be, however, a plural gaze. That is to say, a gaze that recalls many sources, many moods, many points of view, and weaves them together without ever being able to prevail over them completely. Corresponding to this gaze is an idea of the whole as a partitive unity; its various elements converge, making their presence known in a play of superimpositions and fusions that is never restrictive.
Richard Abel emphasizes the nature of the “deliberately plural discourse” in Napoléon, analyzing with great acumen its implications at thematic, stylistic and syntactic levels.38 He takes into account the film’s slightly disordered gigantism, its frequent changes in rhythm, the introduction of digressions and narrative deviations, the uncertainty in the structure of the enterprise itself. What interests me, however, are the implications of this plural gaze. Caught between singularities that carry with them inevitable limitations and a whole that in itself risks never being realized, film seeks a mediation. It finds this in a gaze that weaves scopic subjects and combines and superimposes points of view in an image that grows ever wider than a single frame. Certainly, the result has a decentered and dispersive quality that renders the total creation unstable and in some way elusive. It is, furthermore, the conquest of a visual empire that opens itself to its deconstruction. Nonetheless, this plural gaze seems a necessary response to the tension between the parts and the whole: aimed at the latter, it keeps contact with the former. It is here, then, that the three emblems I have used—the eagle, the fly, and the emperor—become, in their bizarre differences and practical incommensurability, not a common denominator, but the paradoxical triumvirate that sustains a film based on aggregation. The eagle, the fly, and the emperor: it is through their eyes that the visual realm of Napoléon is formed; it is through their eyes that the World and its History are refracted.
WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO THE BLACK MAN?
Robert is sought by the police; he is accused of murdering the actress for whom he worked as dramatist. He is on the run in search of evidence that will exonerate him. Erica, the chief inspector’s daughter, and Old Will, a vagrant who has seen the true culprit’s face, help him. The two are in the hotel hall where the murderer (recognizable by an eye tic) is likely hiding. The camera, beginning with a high full-shot of the hall, suddenly drops down, points toward a jazz orchestra, and then goes forward, before pausing in a close-up of a drummer in blackface. He has a tic. He, in turn, notices the man and woman: the camera advances, this time toward them, before resting in a medium close-up on the couple. The musician recognizes Old Will as the vagrant he had met before. He is disconcerted by his presence, as he is agitated by the appearance of the police, who are really there in search of Robert. He begins to play off tempo; at last, people begin to notice. At this moment he collapses to the ground, unconscious. Erica, stopped by the police along with Robert, dashes toward him to help. She wipes his face, and discovers the tic. The murderer is caught.
The finale of Young and Innocent (Alfred Hitchcock, 1937) is interesting in many ways. Let us consider the camera movements described above: first, the crane shot that, gliding in a fascinating and unyielding manner, moves from the high full-shot of the hall to a close-up on the murderer. The shot is the result of great technical skill, which Hitchcock himself recalled in his interview with Truffaut.39 Yet it proves exemplary for the kind of gaze that it embodies and for the manner in which such a gaze treats narrative events. This crane shot, more than seeking to grasp the whole of the situation, chooses to concentrate itself on only one part of the scene. As such, this part emerges from the rest. A lone individual is singled out from the crowd in the hall, and he thus acquires a particular importance. He is the murderer who has been sought at length, and whose presence is now revealed. The vision is subject to restriction, but it acquires an extraordinary significance in exchange—it gathers only a portion of the world, but what it gathers is truly valuable. In other words, there is the choice of a detail, together with an emphasis of its importance. If we are content with a fragment, it is because it is at the heart of the action. This logic is contrary to that presented by the preceding film. In Young and Innocent, the gaze works on concentration instead of enlargement; on the limits of the visible space instead of what breaks through it; on the salient element, instead of the total design; on quality instead of quantity. The choice of the one makes up for the loss of the other. On the other hand, once the principle element has been identified, it makes us reconsider the whole.
It is not difficult to recognize in this dynamic the imitation of the process of attention. Hugo Münsterberg was one of the first to define a true psychology of the cinema. Indeed, he dedicated an entire chapter of his 1916 book The Photoplay to attention. “Of all internal functions that create the meaning of the world around us, the most central is the attention,” Münsterberg writes. “The chaos of the surrounding impressions is organized into a real cosmos of experience by our selection of that which is significant and of consequence.”40 The process follows four stages. In the accumulation of stimuli offered by the external world, there is something that strikes us, and that in this way becomes more vivid, more clear: it stands out in the center of our own consciousness. This impression acquires importance, while all the others lose clarity, until they finally fade away: attention is always accompanied to some degree by an oversight of the rest. It is here, then, that our body reaches out toward the emphasized object: our senses sharpen, in order that the most precise impression possible is formed. Finally, “our ideas and feelings and impulses group themselves around the attended object”:41 the latter is able to order our perception of the whole, placing itself at the center of a total organization of the world. These are the four steps of the process of attention, steps that we carry out both voluntarily (when we scan the reality before us, moved by interest or curiosity) and involuntarily (when it is reality itself that attracts us and shows us what is important and what is not). One of the fundamental elements of art consists in controlling this process, in a way that the audience follows the path traced by the work. Film excels in this action, having several expressive means that it employs to elicit and orient attention. Among them are captions (which indicate where our attention should be with words), actors’ movements (which always catch our eye and hold its attention), and the layout of action along the depth of field (which magnifies the foreground while shading the background). Above all, there is the close-up: through it, as Münsterberg notices, “any subtle detail, any significant gesture which heightens the meaning of the action may enter into the center of our consciousness by monopolizing the stage for a few seconds.”42 In parallel, “the detail which is being watched has suddenly become the whole content of the performance, and everything which our mind wants to disregard has been suddenly banished from our sight and has disappeared.”43 Through the close-up, a film concentrates on what matters, even if it is only a detail. By virtue of its relevance, such a detail redefines and recalls the surrounding whole. In this way, the observed world acquires a new face. It is outlined according to our mental processes. As Münsterberg writes: “It is as if that outer world were woven into our mind and were shaped not through its own laws but by the acts of our attention.”44
Let us return to Young and Innocent. The camera movement discussed above—followed by another crane shot, which concludes with a medium-close shot of Erica and Old Will—seem literally to mime the movement of our attention. The eye reaches out to the detail, which breaks away from the rest and finally becomes the center of the action. Yet there is an essential difference between the two camera movements. While the first presents an “objective” vision, which implicates the simple identification of the murderer, the second offers a “subjective” vision (we see Erica and Willie from the murderer’s point of view) and the sketch of an interpretation (the murderer connects the elegant man before him with the vagrant he had met previously, and concludes that he has been discovered). Thus, we pass from the objective to the subjective, and from identification to interpretation. Attention implies both dimensions: if it gives importance to a portion of the world, it also compels the body and the senses to reach out toward the object. And if it isolates a detail, it also demands the reconstruction of the entire situation around it. In this way, Young and Innocent seems to want to saturate the entire process of attention. In fact, a detective film could not function in any other way. It is a genre in which the protagonist seeks to recover clues from the world at large, and, with the clues as starting points, it tries to reconstruct the crime. It is a genre that focuses on the objective identification of telling signs, but also on the subjective interpretation of the facts as they have taken place.
Hitchcock is most certainly playing with this objective-subjective dialectic. More specifically, he is suspicious of interpretation. It is not by chance that the film is full of misunderstandings that stem from the incorrect reading of details. Think of the two women on the beach where the body of the actress resurfaces. They see Robert leave. Is he looking for help or is he fleeing? But let us also recall Erica’s aunt as well. During her little party, she realizes that Robert and her niece are embarrassed. Do they have something to hide, or are they simply in love? To identify something or somebody implies interpreting as well, but the interpretation is not always certain and, above all, it is not always good. Hitchcock’s ironic play goes even further. During the beach sequence at the beginning of the film, he gives a close-up of a flying seagull and its strident cry. Its presence, though strongly featured, does not have a precise function or significance. The bird just reminds us that identifying something or somebody implies interpreting as well, but our attention is not always led in one particular direction, and sometimes it is openly fruitless (unless, through some mad game of philology, one can link the seagull in Young and Innocent to the birds of the eponymous film, or through Norman Bates’s work of taxidermy in Hitchcock’s Psycho). In short, the steps to interpretation are many, and they are filled with obstacles and traps. The fact remains, however, that Young and Innocent seems to want to remind us, with irony and reserve, that attention and interpretation are connected, and that fixing the eye on a detail always implies arriving at an understanding. In this light, attention leads to the construction of a new form of the whole. It is not based on a gaze that seeks to conquer the entire world by enlarging it, but on one that fixes on a simple portion of reality and finds in it the keystone to the entire situation. Thus, a whole is not the sum of the parts; if anything, it is an investment in only one part, in the conviction that it will open up to the whole. What counts is the significance of the detail, its strength. That means that we have an intensive whole (to paraphrase Pudovkin),45 in contrast to the partitive unity put forward by Napoléon. And we are dealing with a penetrative gaze, as much as the former was a plural gaze.
In Suspension of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, Jonathan Crary explores the development of the strong interest in attention that occurred between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.46 It emerged against the backdrop of a profound transformation of the idea of perception itself: the world no longer seemed comprehensible “in terms of immediacy, presence, punctuality.”47 On the contrary, it seemed to escape a subject who is ever more convinced that his or her “perceptual and sensory experience depends less on the nature of external stimulus than on the composition and functioning of our sensory apparatus,”48 and who liberates “the perceptual experience from a necessary relation to an exterior world.”49 Seeing (though seeing is not exclusively at stake) is thus articulated through subjectivity, contingency, and limitation. Attention is the answer to this problem, as it restores a structure and functionality to perceptual processes. In subdividing the world into centers of interest, it disciplines the subject’s body and eyes. In bringing portions of the world into close-up, it offers the subject the idea (or the illusion?) that its relationship with reality is still efficient and fruitful. Making the whole turn around the fragment, it offers the path to an otherwise impracticable synthesis. Attention can then appear to be “an imprecise way of designating the relative capacity of the subject to selectively isolate certain contents of a sensory field at the expense of others in the interests of maintaining an orderly and productive world.”50
Film’s role becomes apparent within this framework. It is a medium that privileges exercises of attention, in order to secure a cognitive control over reality. The close-up is an exemplary field for such exercises. Epstein depicts it in his essay “Magnification” (“Grossissement,” 1921) as a perfect synthesis that unites concentration, interpretation, and mastery of the object. Epstein writes: “The close-up limits and directs attention. I have neither the right nor the means to be distracted. Present imperative of the verb ‘comprehend.’”51 But film’s control over reality is also exercised through more complex techniques.52 I am thinking in particular of the analytic editing—découpage—in which the passage from one shot to another follows the movement of one ideal observer’s attention within the story: we are able to investigate the represented space, at the same time finding ourselves always at the right time and place. As a result, we can say that we have the world depicted on screen “in our hands.” Pudovkin explained it perfectly in his Film Technique, a book that was to be influential both in Europe and America. What he calls constructive editing “[builds] the scene from separate pieces, each of which concentrates the attention of the spectator on only that element important to the action. The sequence of these pieces must not be uncontrolled, but must correspond to the natural transference of attention of an imaginary observer (who, in the end, is represented by the spectator).” Moreover, “This guidance of the spectator’s attention to different elements of the developing action is, in general, characteristic of film. It is its basic method.”53
About fifteen years after Pudovkin, André Bazin returned to découpage in terms that were not dissimilar.54 Bazin recognized that the technique had been exhausted, substituted by the long-take and by depth of field, which seem to leave the observer in control of his or her eyes, without waiting for the director to impose a particular vision. Yet these two new techniques do not imply a radical reversal of the game: the ball simply passes to the spectator instead of the film, and the weight of voluntary attention supersedes that of the involuntary. Spectators in the theater can thus regain the role they risked losing—a loss that could potentially have led to distraction.55 Thus, we are not spared visual stimulation, fixation on a detail, and its emergence from the whole. It is simply that we perform this on the film instead of the film performing it for us. We need a center of attention around which a situation is made to move. This center of attention is of course fragile and temporary. Hitchcock’s lesson is still relevant here. The so-called “modern cinema” will insist on this fragility, rendering any presumed crucial point banal or even ridiculous.56 But it is also a center of attention able to capture our gaze and reflect it all around. A fragment, precisely. Nothing more than a fragment, but one around which the whole is redistributed.
There is, however, one more path by which film seeks to offer a total vision, despite the inevitable partiality of the gaze. It is no longer a question of adding fragment to fragment, in order to construct a whole as the sum of its parts—nor is it a question of making the fragment grow, to grasp in it all that keeps the whole together. Instead, we are dealing with the recognition of what is missing from the fragment, and placing the true core of the action there. In short, this third path avoids the “logic of the emphasis,” which leads either to widening the gaze onto other portions of the real (to have more information available), or limiting the gaze to only one detail (in order to properly accentuate it). On the contrary, it obeys the “logic of litotes”: if the image is limited, we can benefit from its limits.
Fritz Lang’s M (1931) can help us to introduce this topic.57 I am thinking especially of the first sequence, opening with a fade-in. A group of children are singing a nursery rhyme, “Schwarz Mann.” A woman interrupts them, ordering them to stop singing the lugubrious song. The woman chats with Elsie’s mother, who is waiting for her daughter to return from school. The cuckoo clock strikes noon. The schoolchildren leave, and Elsie is among them. A friendly policeman helps her across the street. Elsie’s mother sets the table. Elsie skips down the street, playing with her ball. She bounces it off the poster promising a reward for the capture of a serial killer—the shadow of a man falls on the poster. The mother is in the kitchen, and the clock strikes twenty after noon. There are steps on the stairs, but they belong to two other schoolchildren. Next to Elsie, a man with his back turned buys a ball from a blind man. Someone rings the doorbell, but it is the mailman bringing a dime novel. The mother calls for her daughter in vain; the clock strikes one o’ clock. The stairs are deserted. The attic is empty. There is an empty plate on the table. In the park, Elsie’s ball rolls in the field. The ball purchased earlier gets stuck in some electrical wires. A gust of wind blows it away. Fade out.
M opens with this sequence, which is dominated not only by a crime but also by the fact that the crime is removed from view. The film gives us this information without showing it to us, almost obeying the women who told the children to be quiet and stop singing “Schwarz Mann”. An obscene act, the crime is kept off the scene. The result makes evident the partiality of the cinematographic gaze. In showing one thing, it can and perhaps must leave something else out, even though what escapes us is sometimes at the heart of the story. Everything visible is accompanied by the invisible, and the invisible may constitute the essential.
In the film’s opening, the invisibility concerns an event that we do not see, since it takes place in a space beyond the limits of the frame—offscreen. We must remember that Lang often uses offscreen space. He does so in this same film, which also offers us many examples of a minute exploration of setting. For example, let us recall the scene in which beggars search the house where the murderer has hidden. The struggle between one of them and a guard is discernable, though not shown. Lang does this in other films as well: we have only to remember the beginning of The Big Heat (1953). We observe a hand taking a gun from a desktop, then we hear a shot, and finally we see a head collapsing onto a desk. Once again, there is a crime—this time self-inflicted—that our gaze is denied. Besides these examples from Lang’s work, the use of offscreen space is a technique that brings us to film’s basic foundation. It stresses how the filmic image is bordered: a rectangle (or squarish)—that is, a space limited by four sides. The borders serve to circumscribe the world on the screen and, at the same time, to differentiate it from the real world of the spectator. In this way, the rectangle’s sides are like the frame of a picture or photograph, which both identifies an image and separates it from its surrounding environment. These borders also serve to define the portion of space caught by the camera, contrasting it with other ones that could have similarly been shot, like window jams that cut one glimpse of landscape and not another.58 The edges shut in, but they also separate. Particularly in the second case, such borders separate a space that is well in view from one that seems reachable by the camera (were it to extend the shot and reposition itself, as it is able to do). In short, edges of the screen separate an “in” space from an “off” space that is potentially within reach. This almost but not-quite-accessible view makes what is excluded from the screen all the more clear.59 Consequently, there is always something in a film that we do not see that exists alongside what we do see. There is always something that we do not see precisely because we are seeing something. The offscreen space thus reminds us of a basic truth: at the cinema, exhibition always implies concealment.
But there is also a second invisibility in M ’s opening sequence. We see the serial killer buy the ball for Elsie, but we cannot make out his face. Here, what is beyond our gaze is not an event confined outside the borders of the image (in the “off” space), but a hidden detail within the image (in the “in” space). The image hides something within its own folds. Thus, it is a question of an invisibility that penetrates the visible, more than circumscribing it. The scene is well within view, though it nevertheless is seen as a shadowy area.
It is once more appropriate to recall that Lang often resorts to this second order of visibility in representing the “invisible.” In M, the killer’s face is hidden for most of the film, and when it is at last revealed, it appears deformed by the grimaces he makes in the mirror. The opening sequence of The Big Heat proceeds to the widow of the man who has committed suicide. She finds the letter on the desk, opens it, reads it, and runs to make a telephone call. The spectator is not shown the pressing contents of the message. Something is under our eyes, but we cannot grasp it. This “shadowy area” takes us back to film’s basic mechanism as well. In a film, what falls under our eyes really hides a significant part of itself, on at least two levels. In one respect, the filmic image possesses such complexity that it is nearly impossible to completely decipher. It “unfurls” without allowing all its contents to come into focus. It is also for this reason that classical film composition created zones that were endowed with an immediate significance, such as the image’s center. Such zones helped us not to get lost in the potential convolutions of the image.60 In another respect, the filmic image is formed by running the film in the projector. Through projection, however, both the single frame and the black leader between one frame and the next are made imperceptible (that is, we cannot see the two elements that constitute the actual material form of the image). This means that we see something on the screen, but we do not see the foundation of what we are seeing: the filmic image can “unfurl” because its constituent parts “withdraw.”61 Again, at the cinema, exhibition always implies concealment.
Thus, the visible and the invisible are inextricably interconnected. In this context, the whole at which the gaze is directed changes. It appears as a dislocated whole: present, perhaps, but not before our eyes. Enclosed by four borders, often not entirely discernable,62 the filmic image will always be a fragment, a glimpse of the world that gathers only “heres” and “nows.” Yet it is precisely “beyond” what the image shows us—if not “beyond” the filmic image in itself—that we find the key to everything. “Beyond” what the image shows us, it is often hiding the root of what we see. In Lang’s film, it is the evil that inhabits the earth; elsewhere, it is desire, utopia, the divine design, the unexpressed, etc. More generally, in the off-screen or a fold within the scene, we may find what constitutes the source of the events—what represents the potentiality that finds in the image a single realization, a proof. It sets itself as the all-encompassing realm to which every aspect of film refers. But there is also a “beyond” the image itself. Outside the four edges that designate the rectangle of the screen, there is a theater of spectators. Before the scene portrayed there was the camera in action. And, hidden in what we see, there is the black interval between one frame and the next. These radical “offscreens,” which the image can never depict, refer us to the image’s origin and destination, and recall its conditions of existence. They, too, constitute a horizon, not of the filmed, but of the filming. These various “offscreens” are what render possible the single result taking shape before our eyes.
Thus, “beyond” the image, “beyond” what it portrays, in this space of the potentially represented and filmed (the representable and the filmable), is that in which we can find the whole that is denied to the screen. This is a whole that is dislocated, as it is not directly before our eyes. But it is also whole in every sense: an infinite horizon to which the image and its depiction are inclined, placing themselves, in their temporariness and incompleteness, as its concrete expression.63
Victor Freeburg dedicated an entire chapter of his The Art of Photoplay Making (1918) to this space “beyond” the image.64 He focuses first on that portion of film which is “off stage,” subtracted from our vision, outside the edges of the picture. Then he offers examples of images that hide something within themselves, either because they keep the filmed object at a distance (and thus make its borders more vague), or because they transform the actors into simple silhouettes (and thus obscure the details of their bodies), or because they present shadows instead of objects. Freeburg praises the use of these techniques: “Let [the screenwriter] rather suggest part of his picture by leaving it outside the frame. Or let the scenario writer utilize the vague and subtle effect of distance.”65 He does so essentially because, in this way, film restores to the spectator his or her power of imagination, which would otherwise be taken by a meticulous and exhaustive reproduction of reality. Undoubtedly, “the motion picture has the amazing power of capturing physically and projecting onto the screen a vast number of things which in stage play had to be left entirely to imagination,”66 as Freeburg notices. Yet no film truly succeeds in making us see everything; we continue to exercise “the mind’s eye as well as the body’s eye.” For Freeburg, this use of imagination—stimulated by the absence of something on the screen—often borders on fancy. But it is also fundamentally the suggestion of what is not there, an evocation so strong that the absence becomes in some way a presence. Consequently, Freeburg can talk about his experience as spectator, emphasizing his ability to see and feel even what the film does not offer. For example, he relishes his capacity to infer actions omitted from the film as seemingly uninteresting (either parallel to the story being told, or coming before or after it.) But he also enjoys the capability of hearing sounds in a silent sequence. Through these mental exercises, it becomes clear that the filmic image has its limits, despite its extraordinary power: but it also becomes clear that precisely, owing to these limitations, we search, and find—in our imagination—the whole.
Freeburg’s considerations can be tied to contributions by early twentieth-century psychologists who analyzed film from a perceptual and cognitive point of view. For example, a 1911 study by Mario Ponzo pointed out that sensorial associations triggered at the cinema allow us to see and hear what is not there.67 But I will jump ahead now and complete this discussion with a later text: Notes on Cinematography (Notes sur le cinématographe) by Robert Bresson. This text spans the beginning of the 1950s to the mid-1970s and is worth reading even without familiarity with Bresson’s films. From Bresson’s aphorisms in this work emerges the idea that the more film accepts the limitedness of the screen, the greater the extent to which the sensory horizon can be stretched. “One creates not through adding, but taking away,”68 Bresson intones. Therefore, “Do not show all the sides of things. A margin of the indefinite.”69 Working with actors also reflects this principle: “Model. Withdrawn into itself. Of the little that is let to escape, take only what suits you.”70 All of this is not, however, for the sake of minimalism. It has to do with capturing the essential, as these messages illustrate: “Drain the pond to get the fish”71 and “Model, its pure essence.”72 Bresson strives to achieve that breadth of vision that is possible only by closing one’s eyes: “Your film must look like what you see when you close your eyes.”73 What is therefore opened through the invisible is the presence of a potentiality, of a stimulation of imagination. The screen, seemingly empty, can thus contain the whole.
I will not go beyond this bit of wordplay. Some terms, like “imagination,” require deeper analysis.74 Simply put, the idea that the image is always inadequate is as prominent in filmic practice as it is in the theorization of film (and we may wonder, in fact, why movies did not develop into an art of the invisible rather than the visible).75 This deficiency is not, however, a disadvantage: through it, the breadth of horizons irretrievably lost by the single image can be recuperated. Only as a part can the image aspire to recover the whole.
Let us try to bring together some of the threads of this exploration. Film seems suspended between two great poles. On the one hand, its gaze has proven limited, tied as it is to a point of view (that of the camera and its operator). The world is always captured on the screen from a certain perspective, which inevitably emphasizes one piece and not another, one feature and not another, one phase and not another, etc. On the other hand, film’s gaze possesses a particular force: reality appears on the screen in all of its richness and density, liberated from the habit and indifference that has obscured our normal view. But herein lies a basic problem: how to maintain this force, while simultaneously managing its limitations? How to restore the sense of the whole of things, despite the inevitable partiality of the pieces? How to develop the potential of the gaze, making up for what it loses?
Nineteenth-century modernity had already encountered a similar tension. There we find a progressive and powerful extension of the dimension of sight. We have only to think of the growing diffusion of images in books, newspapers, city walls, the presence of performances and optical devices such as the panorama, diorama, phenakistoscope, praxinoscope;76 the rapid success of the photograph, in both everyday and institutional practices (with its ever more widespread use for medical and police purposes). In parallel, we have only to think of the two factors that allow the eye to conquer new segments of the world. The first is the progressive development of artificial light, with the gas lamp, then the arclight, and finally the incandescent electric light. The second is the availability of new methods of rapid transport, such as trains, that come into common use by the century’s fourth decade. They allow vision to pass over the horizon, and thus to widen the range of its perception.
Yet this broadening of vision77 has its inverse. As the world seemed to become wholly visible—either directly or through images—shadowy zones and blind spots emerged. The experience of the train ride is exemplary in this regard. As the train advances, new and different horizons come into view. Though the landscape seen from the window moves too quickly, it seems screened-in by passing poles, vanishing when the tracks climb the viaducts, disappearing suddenly as the train passes through tunnels.78 This “loss of landscape” is a widespread given: it goes back, for example, to Monet’s series of paintings of the Rouen cathedral, to his desire to grasp the world in its single moments, capturing all its variations, resulting in a quasi-unintelligible painting.79
The gaze thus widens, and at the same time encounters black holes. Film in some way absorbs this situation, and bears witness to it. On the one hand, it exalts its own visual capacity and, on the other, it denounces its limits, attributing them a point of view. Beyond bringing this dialectic to light, film also works to intervene in it, to make the two poles converge. Each frame gives us back only a fragment of the world: it is enough, however, to condense into one image many gazes, to select the significant details, to go beyond the edges of the picture, and this partiality will be corrected. The sense of the whole can then be restored, though a posteriori and imperfectly. It is sometimes a question of a partitive whole, in which the fragments make themselves known as such and nevertheless they add to each other. At other times, we have an intensive whole, in which the fragment is loaded with references and becomes the center around which the entire action develops. Finally, there is a dislocated whole, in which a return to the beyond takes place. These wholes keep open the interplay between the two opposing exigencies—the pleasure of the larger vision and that of the detail—without necessarily ending the game.
The negotiation between these two measures has had different moments of equilibrium throughout the course of film history. One moment is the typical preoccupation of classical cinema with visibly recuperating what would ordinarily escape the gaze (the shot/reverse-shot technique serves this end); another is “modern” cinema’s preoccupation with marking the fact that a certain incompleteness persists and cannot but persist (it is one of the effects of de-framing).80 In this light, after World War II, “modern” film is permeated by a sort of painful awareness tied to the idea of the “impossible whole.” The French critic Serge Daney made reference to this, speaking of films in which “the sphere of the visible ceased to be available in its entirety: there are now absences and holes, necessary voids and full abundances, images forever absent and gazes always failing.”81 The eye no longer seems to have a “hold” over reality, and makes room for a nostalgia for that which is eclipsed.
In this vein, I would like to conclude with a film that introduces the modern cinema, though it also represents the culmination of the classical. I am referring to Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), an extraordinary reflection on visibility in the world, and in particular on the strength and limitation of the gaze.
Let us think about the narrative structure of the film, which is based on a series of flashbacks, plus newsreels, framed by a prologue and an epilogue.82 This structure tells us that every story is inevitably a biased account, with a narrator and point of view. The newsreel obeys this principle as well, and thus does not put into play facts, but rather a certain way of referencing or not referencing them; it is, in truth, the omission of a detail (what does Kane’s last cryptic word—“Rosebud”—mean? What is not said and not seen in the reportage?) that redirects the investigation. The various versions that Thompson the journalist gathers shed light on different dimensions of the story because they are based on different points of view; each reveals one thing, while hiding others. The most resounding example is Susan Alexander’s operatic debut: it is recounted from two opposite perspectives that collect the facts as seen both from backstage and from the audience. It is the same episode, yet it seems another. Nonetheless, the inevitable partiality of each account can be redeemed in at least two ways. In the first place, each witness’s account, once narrated to the journalist, becomes public. In this way, each loses its status as an individual vision and becomes a vision shared by the collective. Subjectivity becomes intersubjectivity, and partiality, once shared, acquires fullness and weight. This always happens at the cinema. If it is true, as Balázs maintains, that every frame reflects a point of view, then this point of view—made of a million spectators—becomes a collective gaze. Consequently, what appears on the screen is a part of the world that everyone sees. In the second place, the accounts of each witness intersect, completing each other reciprocally. What one does not see the other sees, and vice versa. This is the principle of the shot/reverse-shot: the alternation of shots allows the combination of both views of the scene. The joining of flashbacks in Citizen Kane forms an immense Shot/Reverse-shot on the life of a man: like a puzzle, the pieces complete each other, little by little. And yet two half-truths do not make the whole truth. Details can be added to details, but what truly matters can always slip away. In fact, it is not by chance that none of the witnesses can tell us what “Rosebud” is. No account contains the key to the mystery. The puzzles that help Susan Alexander pass the time at Xanadu remain incomplete.
One could protest that we do finally see the sled stamped with its name in the epilogue.83 “Rosebud” appears at the end: the invisible offers itself up to be seen. In retrospect, the final sequence, more than resolving the enigma, shows us the density of its mystery. The clarity with which the object sought in vain is placed in sight—an obvious, excessive clarity—serves only to elicit our suspicions. On the one hand, we can and perhaps must ask ourselves if this sequence does not also have a view of its own or if, moreover, it cannot but have one. It thus becomes legitimate to read this as an act of omission. It effectively leaves something out of the scene; Kane himself is by then irretrievably removed from the gaze. On the other hand, it is precisely its audacity that makes us understand that we have already seen what it is showing us, without seeing it. The sled was already present in the key scene of Kane’s farewell to his childhood home, without us realizing it. Similarly, Kane’s comfort object, the snow-globe that he holds in his last moments of life, was already present in the scene of his encounter with Susan Alexander. There is always something that is taken away—offscreen, among the folds of the image.
Thus, the sled sequence shows us how vision is directed at the whole and, at the same time, can never be complete. In this picture, “Rosebud” becomes the name of all that is not perceptible to the eyes, of what escapes, what is lost. It is not a coincidence that Citizen Kane is punctuated by a string of losses that recall each other in turn, which demand impossible ransoms. Let us remember, for example, that the protagonist meets Susan Alexander the evening in which he goes in search of furniture from his old family home. Later, he will force his new wife to become a singer in order to realize her own mother’s unfulfilled dream. In other words, if “Rosebud” brings us to the sled, the sled brings us to Kane’s childhood, which leads us to his mother, who brings us to other dreams that lead to another possible life. Bernstein, when questioned by Thompson as to “Rosebud” ’s significance, gives the only right response: “Maybe that was something he lost. Mr. Kane was a man that lost almost everything he had.” To see is to lose. It is a place of conquest, but also of tragic loss. It is filling one’s eyes with an image of the world, but also letting this image be transformed into a falling tear.
“Cinema… appeases a certain sense of nostalgia that lies dormant in our hearts, nostalgia for countries never seen that will perhaps never be seen, but where it seems that we have already lived in a preceding life,”84 remarked the Italian journalist Fausto M. Martini in 1912. That is cinema: nostalgia for something.