Hassan Melehy
With the publication of Film Fables in 2001 (English translation 2006), Rancière added cinema to the broad array of subjects to which he had devoted major works. Before that, by writing extensively on film in articles and shorter sections of books, he had already shown that cinema was an important component in his thinking on aesthetics. Film turns out for Rancière to present a special case, highlighting a problem that stems from a basic contradiction of art in the modern era that he develops in many of his writings. This problem has to do with the relationship between art and reality during what he terms “the aesthetic age”, the period following the creation of the branch of philosophy called aesthetics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, among whose principal theorists are F. W. J. Schelling and G. W F. Hegel. During this period, art claims an autonomy by freeing itself from its representational or mimetic function. According to Rancière, this development in the theory and practice of art lead them to run up against impasses. As a result of these impasses, cinema especially among the arts is involved in what Rancière terms a “thwarted fable”, an idea that I shall examine further in the first section below.
Closely related to this problem, since the relationship of art to reality has to do with the role of art in the social world, is the inevitable confrontation between aesthetics and politics, which Rancière sees played out very strongly in cinema. For Rancière, cinema is both an artistic and a popular medium, and it must be viewed in its constant contact with everyday life. In his account, some of the impasses of art come to the fore in the transition from cinema to video and digital media. In order to illustrate Rancière’s understanding of how the relationship between cinema and television affects the contradictions of art, in the second section of this chapter I shall examine the chapter from Film Fables on Fritz Lang. At the same time that such developments occur in art, they occur in the philosophy of art, which according to Rancière must look at cinema in its continually unfolding manifestations in order to work through the contradictions of the aesthetic age. In the third section below, I shall present Rancière’s reading of the philosopher who in his view confronts these contradictions while remaining caught in or thwarted by them, Gilles Deleuze. In the fourth section, I shall consider Rancière’s interpretation of the filmmaker whom he regards as having understood most effectively the aesthetic powers and pitfalls of cinema, Jean-Luc Godard.
In the prologue to Film Fables, Rancière situates the cinema with respect to the major conflict of the aesthetic age, that between the conception of art as, on the one hand, representational and, on the other hand, expressive. A principal characteristic of cinema, its unprecedented capacity to record reality, enables it to capture and present myriad details of things in the world; cinema thus offers images that evade subordination to the causal linkages of narrative and thereby become expressive. Rancière opens Film Fables with a commentary on Jean Epstein’s 1921 essay entitled Bonjour cinéma: cinema “records things as the human eye cannot see them, as they come into being, in a state of waves and vibrations, before they can be qualified as intelligible objects, people, or events due to their descriptive or narrative properties” (FF 2). That is, cinema presents the world such that it may continually exceed the determinations of narrative, cognition and ideology.
Such expressivity is the defining characteristic of what Rancière terms “cinematographic modernity”, the two principal thinkers of which, later in the book, he identifies as André Bazin and Gilles Deleuze (FF 107). For Bazin, who wrote mainly in the 1950s as editor of Cahiers du cinéma, cinema brings out aspects of reality more challenging and revealing to the intellect than any offered by painting, photography or unaided vision. According to Bazin, this realism is actualized when cinema moves away from the narratively ordering techniques of montage and relies mainly on long shots in deep focus; such filmmaking invites the spectator to a much greater independence of thought than he or she can have in being required to follow the imposing hand of the director (Bazin 1967: 35–6).
Rancière’s starting point in Film Fables is the modernist account of cinema that Epstein’s Bonjour cinéma exemplifies for him; according to this account, the seventh art presents the greatest challenge to one of the oldest conventions of Western poetics, that of the “Aristotelian hierarchy that privileged muthos – the coherence of plot – and devalued opsis – the spectacle’s sensitive effect” (FF 2). (Rancière is here referring to chapter 6 of Aristotle’s Poetics.) Rancière explains that it is the Aristotelian definition of muthos (translated into Latin as fabula) or fable that interests him: this definition is at the heart of the “representative regime”, which Rancière elaborates in his writings on aesthetics and which has been described at length in previous chapters of this book. For Rancière, the fable is the main dimension of artistic representation: it is “the arrangement of necessary and verisimilar actions that lead the characters from fortune to misfortune or vice versa, through the careful construction of the intrigue [noeud]” (FF 1). He begins his book with Epstein in order to examine the latter’s theses on the essential opposition between cinema and storytelling or the fable. Rancière remarks on Epstein’s modernism, “Cinema seems to accomplish naturally the writing of opsis that reverses Aristotle’s privileging of muthos” (ibid.).
However, Rancière immediately announces that, although such expressivity is indeed a property of cinema, the claim to reverse the Aristotelian hierarchy is untenable because it simply sets aside the intimate connections between cinema and the representative regime that has dominated Western art. Epstein enthusiastically takes up modernism’s challenge to representation and overlooks the contradictions and unresolved problems that Rancière finds lingering in it. Epstein presents cinema as the culmination of the art of the aesthetic age, as the fulfilment of the modernist dream of a total aestheticization or pure expressivity of art. Rancière sees a decisive movement in this direction in Gustave Flaubert’s technique of saturating novelistic narrative with descriptive detail; Flaubert depicts the pathos of static moments in the life of Emma Bovary, a practice that foregrounds the modernism of literature and painting. But Epstein, according to Rancière, obscures a good part of the aesthetic functioning of cinema by omitting any consideration of the links between representation and the modernist project of a full artistic apprehension of the unordered details of the world (FF 9).
In treating cinema as a development of the aesthetic age, Rancière underscores his understanding that the technology of cinema was a response to developments in the theory and practice of art, not the other way around (Guénoun 2000: 252–3). Here Rancière takes strong issue with a longstanding interpretation of cinema as developing, unlike the other arts, from a technological innovation, an understanding exemplified by the opening premise of Erwin Panofsky’s famous essay on motion-picture style in 1934 (Panofsky 1995: 93). Because it entails a mechanics, which can in principle operate independently of the artist’s hand, cinema may have appeared to furnish an undirected or passive vision of reality. But it is precisely this technology that, as a consequence of developments in aesthetics, allows cinema to offer itself spontaneously as passive – in contrast to the other plastic arts, which their practitioners must push to be such. Authorial agency then harnesses the passivity of cinema in procedures that, even when they de-emphasize montage, necessitate wilful decisions about camera placement and exposure. In its subordination to the guiding intelligence of an artist, cinematic expressivity is once again rendered representational, through a disposition of its material according to an authorial logic.
In his extended commentary on Epstein in Film Fables, Rancière situates him with respect to the triumph of modernist art in the twentieth century and also cinema’s place among the arts. The result is that Epstein’s reasoning is caught in shortcomings. To sum these up, Rancière offers “the very simple reason that cinema, being by nature what the arts of the aesthetic age strive to be, invariably reverts their movement” (FF 1). That is, because cinema is a development of the aesthetic age, it reveals the limitations of this age while fulfilling its dream. Hence cinema presents its central problem, to which Rancière devotes the analyses of his book – that of the “thwarted fable”.
Rancière concludes this part of his argument by characterizing the thwarted fable as stemming directly from the basic contradiction of the aesthetic age, played out in the novelistic narratives that succeeded Flaubert and accompanying phenomena in the other plastic arts: “In the age of Joyce and Virginia Woolf, of Malevich and Schönberg, cinema arrives as if expressly designed to thwart a simple teleology of artistic modernity, to counter art’s aesthetic autonomy with its old submission to the representative regime” (FF 10). That is, by the very fact that it is the fulfilment of the modernist dream, functioning as a medium capable of rendering panoramas made up of small and variegated details of reality, cinema turns against modern art in so far as it is a technology in the hands of an authorial agency that brings it to serve the logic of the fable – and hence, ultimately, commercial interests. However, the fable of cinema, by its nature involving the unruly expressivity of the image, also thwarts the fable as a pure disposition of narrative events. Rancière explores those moments in cinema when the representational and the expresive fables of cinema run into each other.
Engaging in close analyses of a number of directors’ work in Film Fables, Rancière extensively develops the notion of the thwarted fable. He finds in the films of Fritz Lang a measured negotiation of the relationship between the two contradictory fables of cinema, manifested as the tension between screenplay and mise en scène. But it is also at the juxtaposition of these two aesthetic functions in Lang’s movies that Rancière sees a staging of the relationship between art and social and political reality. In the progression between Lang’s M (1931) and the film that Rancière terms “in some ways, [its] American remake” (FF 48), While the City Sleeps (1956), Rancière explains, Lang shows an increased pessimism with regard to the powers of cinema to offer social mimesis, or an image of a society by which its members may apprehend and understand it. While the City Sleeps has often been understood as an expression of the director’s disillusionment with American democracy; he manifests his pessimism, in Rancière’s account, in the role he accords to the televisual image as the rising form of social mimesis. For Rancière, the most important question in this transition from the 1930s to the 1950s and from Europe to America is the fate of democracy as social representation under the consolidating reign of the televisual image. This image, bearing its fable of complete social mimesis, thwarts the poetics of expressivity that would effect a breach in the overextended narrative of the determination of social roles and destinies.
Rancière’s reading of these two movies provides an excellent example of his concrete analysis of cinema from the perspective of the thwarted fable. Both movies tell the story of a serial killer and the mechanisms by which he is brought to justice. In this chapter of Film Fables, Rancière juxtaposes two sequences in which, in each film, the murderer is in effect apprehended. In While the City Sleeps, the striking image is that of journalist Ed Mobley appearing on television to trick the murderer into revealing himself by indicating that his identity is already known. The film stages the ubiquity of the televisual image, able to reach the murderer because it reaches all citizens; citizenship has become equivalent to spectatorship. Rancière notes an inversion of the common conception of the televisual image as a picture transmitted from a distance to spectators that the broadcasting agency cannot see or know. Television instead targets the spectator, putting an image of him or her on screen; the person represented on television then becomes, in fact, the one watching. In this technological set-up, the spectator sees him-or herself designated from a distance. According to a second meaning of the French word télévisé (“televised”), then, this person is the télé-visé, the one aimed at or seen from a distance (FF 46). This polysemy suggests the power of television to dominate social mimesis. In detailing a composite description in which the murderer, Robert Manners (John Barrymore Jr), recognizes himself, Mobley is able to present an image of omniscience:
That requires an apparatus that institutes a face to face with someone who is closer to you than any policeman can ever be, precisely because he is farthest away, because he only sees you from far away; a face to face with someone who is instantly on intimate terms with you, who speaks to you while speaking to everyone else, and to you just as to anyone else.
(FF 47)
In this face to face enabled by the mimetic powers of television, Manners has no choice but to feel enveloped by the approaching discovery of his identity. Rancière describes John Barrymore’s face in this moment of identification, the very limited expressiveness of which tells the fable of the encroachment of television into all realms of social mimesis. Rancière contrasts Barrymore’s facial expressions, which indicate stereotypical reactions of, first, satisfaction at his accomplishments and, secondly, panic at being discovered, with the much greater range of Peter Lorre’s performance in M, twenty-five years earlier, at moments when his character comes under pressure of accusation. Lorre’s expressiveness contributes to the expressivity of the sequence, which thwarts the fable of the apprehension of the criminal in an inflexible social role.
Rancière comments on the sequence in Lang’s M (1931) that cuts from the police, who find damning evidence in the apartment of the murderer, to the latter standing with a little girl whom the narrative marks as probably his next victim; both of them are happy, and Lorre’s character appears to have forgotten his narrative role. Rancière characterizes this interaction as a “moment of grace” (FF 49), an interval during which the screenplay pauses and “the mise-en-scène grants him his chance at being human” (ibid.). That is, against the film’s narrative fable in which Lorre is a mass murderer who will be hunted down, the mise en scène offers a contrary fable of humanity in the moment in which the shot shows Lorre and the little girl, smiling, looking through the window of a toy store. Rancière explains this moment as marking the conflict between a representational or mimetic poetics and an expressive one:
Aristotle’s requirement that the narrative must lead the criminal to the point where he’ll be caught and unmasked runs into a new, and conflicting, requirement: the aesthetic requirement for suspended shots, for a counter-logic that at every turn interrupts the progression of the plot and the revelation of the secret. In these moments, we experience the power of empty time …
(FF 49–50)
This “empty time”, Rancière explains, is not simply a pause in the narrative; it is a basic change in the nature of the incident, such that a transformation in character occurs, allowing the murderer to live a humanity that is not subordinate to the persecution to which the narrative will bring him. “The new action, the aesthetic plot, breaks with the old narrative plot by its treatment of time” (FF 50).
M stages the key problem of aesthetics in modernity, which is one of producing moments in a work of art that exceed the mimetic determinations of narrative time. Rancière here returns to his analyses of the close relationship between cinematic and literary expressivity: “Literature came upon this pure power of the sensible between Flaubert and Virginia Woolf, and Jean Epstein, along with a handful of others, dreamed of making this power the very fabric of the language of images” (ibid.). But Lang is striking in that he never wholly accepted a modernist aesthetics. Rancière points out that the director never liked the label of expressionist that film history placed on him – that is, that he was quite aware of the problem of the thwarted fable (FF 59). In maintaining a foothold in mimesis, in understanding cinema as a necessarily representational art even as it embodies an immense expressive power, Lang negotiated the tension between two contrary artistic fables that the aesthetic age tried to surmount by suppressing one of them:
True, the allures of this language never fully seduced Fritz Lang, nor did he ever embrace the notion that cinema was the new art of aisthesis that would supplant the old arts of mimesis. Lang understood very early on that cinema was an art insofar as it was the combination of two logics: the logic of the narrative structuring the episodes and the logic of the image that interrupts and regenerates the narrative.
(FF 50)
Closely related to Lang’s understanding of the necessary interdependence of these two logics in the conception of the relationship between cinema and reality is the relationship between art and politics. For Ran-cière, one of the great values of Lang’s work is its examination of the socially representative function of the cinematic image that stems from its mimetic function: “Lang also noticed early on that the combined logic of cinematographic mimesis bore close ties to a social logic of mimesis, that it developed as much in reaction to the social logic as under its shelter” (ibid.). The outcome is the televisual mimesis that Lang stages in While the City Sleeps, which Rancière underscores through another comparison between the two movies. In M, the murderer faces a trial put on as theatre by the criminal element of the city, in which prostitutes and thieves assume the roles of grieving mothers and purposeful attorneys. Rancière characterizes this scene as one of broad social mimesis, one that dramatizes the interchangeability of roles that is basic to a democratic society, in which representation of particular interests occurs in a public forum. Not only can a prostitute imitate a mother’s cry to the point of effectively representing it, but the serial murderer can in turn mimic this cry in order to signal his own distress. That is, the mimesis at the heart of democratic social functioning can give place to a narrative that defies the strict determination of social roles; this mimesis can bring into public vision alternative accounts of a person’s place, such as in the criminal’s happiness at the very moment he is discovered (FF 51–2).
To mark changes in the process of bringing a malleability of social roles into the realm of knowledge, Rancière considers Mobley, a quarter-century later, in a televisual image able to control social functions through a newly far-reaching knowledge.
This is, essentially, the knowledge of the actor, and it is as an actor that the journalist combines in himself all these roles. Mobley confiscates the power of mimesis and its performance and identifies them with the position of the one who knows. He chains this power down to the place filled by his image, the place of the one who sees and knows.
(FF 53)
The fable told by the mise en scène of While the City Sleeps, then, is that of “democracy’s identification with the tele-visual” (FF 57), of the variety of social roles becoming, through the extended mimesis that television offers, subordinate to the authoritarian agency of the talking head. It is through his continued adherence to mimesis in the aesthetics of cinema, in his sceptical disposition toward the pure expressivity of cinematographic modernity, that Lang is able to show the shortcomings of the emerging form of televisual mimesis through a fable that counters it.
By enlisting the work of Lang and a number of other classical filmmakers, such as Sergei Eisenstein, F. W. Murnau, Anthony Mann, Nicholas Ray and Roberto Rossellini, Rancière builds his account of cinematographic modernity in Film Fables, an important thrust of which is his critique of Deleuze. Rancière presents Deleuze as the major philosopher of cinematographic modernity, who offered a “solid foundation” to Bazin’s often unfinished, intuitive formulations (FF 107). At the outset of his chapter on Deleuze, Rancière restates the challenge to representation that the expressive image posed: cinematographic modernity “confronted the classical cinema of the link between images for the purposes of narrative continuity and meaning with an autonomous power of the image whose two defining characteristics are its autonomous temporality and the void that separates it from other images” (ibid.).
In this phrasing, Rancière alludes to the main concepts that Deleuze introduces in his two monumental books on cinema, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983; English translation 1986) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985; English translation 1989). Over the course of these two volumes Deleuze analyses a vast number of films from the entire history of cinema: he devises a complex system of image classification that boils down to two major categories, corresponding to the subtitles of the books. The movement-image is the image that captures movement and operates in it, taking shape in sequences produced by narratively inflected montage. Over the course of film history, in about the middle of the twentieth century, this mimetic image gives way to the cinematographic manifestation of modernism, the image that captures time and is autonomous with respect to the temporal progression of narrative, not subordinate to its requirements. The time-image, then, is more closely linked with reality, and its expressivity is a furthering of the expressivity of things themselves: in its most accomplished form (for Deleuze, the cinema of Godard) it thus presents an “outside” to human thought, radically challenging any perceptual or conceptual unity that human beings might experience with the world (Deleuze 1989: 173–88). However, Deleuze is not hard and fast in this taxonomy: Rancière points out that his predecessor analyses the work of Robert Bresson in both books, treating the latter’s films as offering examples first of the movement-image and then of the time-image. Deleuze does the same with the work of a number of other directors. This dual status of many cinematographic images is a principal basis on which Rancière, always interested in the interaction of these two versons of the poetics of the image, is able to launch his critique of Deleuze.
The difference between the movement-image and the time-image, Rancière explains, might then be understood as two points of view on images: the movement-image would stress the relations among images, their sense as produced in the motion from one to the next and in a series; the time-i mage would involve their autonomous expressive power, even if they are still situated by montage. “Tenable as this perspective is,” writes Rancière after citing a number of directors whose work is analysable according to both perspectives, “Deleuze won’t allow it” (FF 114). Deleuze continues to insist on their separation, which turns on a historical breach that occurs in the aftermath of the Second World War. Like many philosophers and cultural critics, Deleuze sees a crisis of artistic and media representation in its failure to convey the horrors of the war. The immensity of these horrors produced unfamiliar types of spaces that eluded the narrative of the progress of history, and hence also eluded representation; a new kind of image was necessary for an apprehension of these spaces, one that was not subordinate to the conventions of representation for which the war presented unfathomable events. Deleuze sees cinema as broadly responding with its valorization of the time-image (Deleuze 1989: 11–12).
In the work of Alfred Hitchcock, Deleuze finds a concentration of the crisis of the cinematographic image. Hitchcock’s cinema sums up prior technical and expressive developments of the art; relentlessly dramatic, his movies are heavily dependent on montage. Yet the effectiveness of the montage stems from the quality of the “opsigns” (optical signs – the word is conveniently close to opsis) or purely expressive images, such as the white intensity of a glass of milk in Suspicion and that of snow in Spellbound (FF 114). That is, the expressivity of Hitchcock’s images wrests them out of the movement in which his exacting montage places them. Rancière explores Deleuze’s interest in two Hitchcock films involving immobilization, both with James Stewart: Rear Window (1954), in which Stewart is a photographer (a maker of images) handicapped by a broken leg, and Vertigo (1958), in which the actor plays a detective (or discerning observer, another producer of images) immobilized by acrophobia. Rancière characterizes Deleuze’s analysis as an allegory of the paralysis of the movement-image such that it may be transformed into the time-i mage. But Rancière raises the problem of Deleuze’s reliance on the narrative dimension of these films in order to make a case for the expressivity of their images, in a philosophical treatment that overtly opposes the narrative emphasis in cinema. Rancière wonders if Deleuze’s allegory is necessary: the paralysis, after all, does not move beyond its fictional status as an element of an otherwise undisturbed narrative – it does not extend to the Hitchcockian images themselves, and the latter continue to function as both time-images and movement-images (FF 115–16).
Here Rancière makes his most scathing statement about Deleuze’s cinematographic fable: “The movement-i mage is ‘in crisis’ because the thinker needs it to be in crisis” (FF 116). This is the case because Deleuze’s attempt at transforming the movement-image into the timeimage is a story or fable of the redemption of the image, of the restoration of its function as an expression of things themselves, away from the subordination of the image to the cinematographic fable or muthos. Deleuze’s own cinematographic fable, Rancière remarks, is itself a thwarted fable: in order to accomplish its redemption of images, it must tear them out of their material disposition in montage, a gesture of philosophical subordination. “The gesture of restitution is always also a new gesture of capture” (ibid.). Rancière thus discovers that Deleuze himself is effecting the paralysis he slyly attributes to Hitchcock’s “manipulative thought” (ibid.) – that Deleuze rather than Hitchcock is responsible for the manipulation.
Through this treatment of Deleuze, Rancière arrives at what he sees as the most accomplished set of cinematographic fables, Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma, an eight-part television programme the director made between 1988 and 1998. In much of his work on aesthetics and politics, Rancière continually returns to Histoire(s) du cinéma. In the title, Godard makes the pun usually rendered in English as “(hi) story,” taking advantage of the fact that the French word histoire betrays the rootedness in storytelling of the practice of history. Godard further emphasizes the intermingling of history and story by suggesting, through the use of parentheses in his spelling, that each may spill over into plurality. In the 1994 book that Rancière devoted to historiography, The Names of History, he mentions this hackneyed but telling pun in order to signal just this close connection between the writing and even the occurrence of historical events and the narrative organization of their telling (NH 3–4). In other words, in that book he also examines the narrative ordering of events, or their placement in a muthos or fable.
In the case of The Names of History, the valorization of the story and stories of history contributes to a retelling of history such that a greater democratization might be possible, for example in the works of nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet, who shifted the subject of history from royalty to the people (NH 42–60). In similar fashion, Godard tells one or several histoire(s) or story(ies) of cinema in order to rewrite the history and histories of cinema, with precisely the aim of pointing out the failure of cinema to apprehend history. Godard accomplishes this rewriting by emphasizing the expressive power of images initially placed in narrative montage; like Deleuze, Godard is very interested in Hitchcock. As Rancière describes Godard’s project in The Future of the Image, “To Alfred Hitchcock’s obsolete stories [Godard’s words] oppose the pure pictorial presence represented by the bottles of Pommard in Notorious, the windmill’s sails in Foreign Correspondent, the bag in Marnie, or the glass of milk in Suspicion” (FI 30).
In Film Fables Rancière focuses more pointedly on the relationship of Godard’s project to history: “[T]he history of cinema is that of a missed date with the history of its century” (FF 171). The expressive power of images, wrested in Godard’s presentation from the narrativ-ity of montage, enables an apprehension of the complex realities of history, which elude classical film narrative. Godard’s prime example, similar to Deleuze’s complaint, is the failure of cinema to represent the death camps between 1939 and 1945, other than in a few very notable exceptions such as Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942). In this final chapter of Film Fables, Rancière is able to further explore many of the issues he raises in The Names of History on the apprehension of history in words and images. (In “L’Inoubliable,” his essay in Arrêt sur histoire, Rancière more explicitly takes up the capacity of cinema to apprehend history.)
Just as Rancière sees cinema as a result of the development of art in the aesthetic age, Godard is interested in pointing out that the images of cinema form a series with the images of prior epochs in the history of art, that a rigorous understanding of aesthetics demands a view of art in which cinema is part of that history. Segments of Histoire(s) ducinéma are devoted to demonstrating the affinity between a certain cinematographic image and in particular a painting with religious power, such as in the superimposition of Elizabeth Taylor in George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun over Giotto’s painting of the resurrection of Christ (FF 184). Godard’s aim is to show that cinema has largely failed to recognize the power of its own image, “its inheritance from the pictorial tradition”, and that it has done so by subordinating its images to its stories, “heirs of the literary tradition of plot and characters” (FF 171). In what qualifies as a commonplace in his comments on cinema, Godard continually faults the majority of filmmakers for not recognizing the difference between an image and a text. Rancière assesses the story of cinema that Godard tells as follows:
The thesis thus counterposes two types of “(hi)stories”: the stories the film industry illustrated with its images with an eye to cashing in on the collective imaginary, and the virtual history told by these same images. The style of montage Godard develops for Histoire(s) du cinéma is designed to show the history announced by a century of films, whose power slipped through the fingers of their filmmakers, who subjected the “life” of images to the immanent “death” of the text.
(Ibid.)
Godard goes about this restitution of the redemptive capacity of the cinematographic image – here its power to make contact with historical reality and be effective in it – by a practical version of the reading Deleuze effects on Hitchcock, a montage of many different images that wrests them from their narrative imprisonment. Rancière considers a part of Godard’s justification for doing so, which is that despite the density of Hitchcock’s suspenseful narratives, such images as the illuminated glass of milk in Suspicion (in which Hitchcock put a light bulb in order to shoot Cary Grant carrying it to Joan Fontaine) make a far more powerful impression on viewers than the narrative motivations for their placement in Hitchcock’s movies. “Hitchcock’s cinema, Godard is saying, is made of images whose power is indifferent to the stories into which they’ve been arranged” (FF 172). But Rancière raises an obvious objection to Godard’s observations, which is that the images derive their power precisely from their narrative placement – from the suspense they carry in the movement of Hitchcock’s stories, which every viewer recognizes (ibid.). What Godard does with them, then, far from simply freeing them from narrative determination in order to show the power of their involvement with reality, is to situate them according to the fable of the necessity of recognizing the redemptive power of the cinematographic image.
But Rancière is not saying that, through montage and voice-over narration, Godard is telling a merely fictional or imaginative fable that gives to the images something they do not already have. Hitchcock’s images, and those of many other directors whose work Godard shows in Histoire(s) du cinéma, do indeed have the relationship with things in the world that Godard claims for them; it is Godard’s particular situating of them that shows it. Borrowing a text from Elie Faure on Rembrandt and the “new painting”, through a montage that involves both sound and image tracks, Godard underscores how cinema records the small details of everyday life that bring to history the pathos and meaning of its events. Rancière reprises here some of his observations from The Names of History on nineteenth-century historiography as a democratization of history in its attention to “the essential gestures and emotions of everyday life that succeed the pomp that normally surrounded exalted subject matter and memorable exploits” (FF 176–7). Just as Rembrandt was viewed retrospectively in the nineteenth century as having made available to vision a reorientation of history, Rancière understands in Godard’s resituating of Elie Faure’s observations on Rembrandt a furthering in cinema of the same movement of the democratization of art.
In assessing the effectiveness of Histoire(s) du cinéma, Rancière signals that Godard’s dazzling montage of short clips from thousands of films is possible only through video technology. One of the fables that Godard’s project tells, then, is that of the progress of the cinematographic image through the video image; Godard uses the latter to advance a redemption of real things in the artistic image. Here Ran-cière’s treatment of the video image contrasts wth his characterization of its function in the work of Fritz Lang, in that it may contribute to the extension and complication of cinematographic vision. Rancière mentions that Godard thus overturns reigning dogma concerning the video image as the play of the simulacrum and the complete loss of any connection with the real (as the work of Jean Baudrillard has it) (FF 185). Rancière sees Godard as furthering the major problems of the aesthetic age involving the autonomy of the work of art with respect to its representational function, the creation of a purely expressive form that was the wish of Romantic aesthetics. In its valorization of the redemptive capacity of the image, in its placement of the image in contact with historical reality, Godard’s cinema provides Rancière with an episode in his own fable, that of the efforts of art to engage the details, feelings and systems of everyday life, which amounts to art’s democratization.