Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard, Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic Thinking

THE PAST THREE DECADES HAVE WITNESSED A BURGEONING interest in the intersection between philosophy and cinema studies. From Stanley Cavell’s Wittgensteinian forays into American cultural morality to Fredric Jameson’s explorations of the filmic postmodern, to the Deleuzean movement toward cinema as a medium of particular philosophical interest, this interdisciplinary intersection continues to foster debate and new theoretical developments, generating self-applied methodological terms that range from the positivist (“cognitive”) to the methodologically experimental (“filmosophy”).¹ Despite its often rigorous juggling act that keeps afloat so many concepts, texts, and intellectual histories, however, the field that has popularly come to be called “film-philosophy” seems to have moved past—without ever clearly addressing—fundamental questions concerning what film and philosophy share. That is to say, is—and, if so, how is—the medium of film philosophical? How might the moving image help us to understand our mental and perceptual processes, our internal structures and our interaction with the world external to our bodies, and even offer us new organizations of these relationships?

Mine is certainly not the first attempt to engage this disciplinary intersection, but I hope it will serve a useful role in the skeletal basis for what has proven and promises further to be a realm of productive and progressive scholarly work. Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema project provoked an entire genre of metaphysical approaches to cinema;² more recently, Nöel Carroll and Berys Gaut have surveyed different vistas for the terrain of film-philosophy in, respectively, cognitive and more generalist fashions;³ and John Mullarkey has greatly cultivated our knowledge of how philosophers have approached or been applied to cinema and media studies.⁴ Engaging with these and other theorists, and placing the field of film-philosophy within the wider history of film theory and criticism, I aim in this book to ground film-philosophy in a central foundation: what about film form aligns it with philosophical thinking, especially the modern philosophy of the twentieth—or “cinematic”—century? And, how can cinema help us to challenge, transform, or expand our way of perceiving, understanding, and engaging with the world?

I argue that the experimental cinematic practices of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, taken together, offer unique insight into these questions, and this study will provide referential consistency and clarity to the foundation of film-philosophy by systematizing its theoretical content within a comparative and close reading of a handful of texts by these two directors. While Resnais and Godard are often considered philosophical directors who explore issues of great historical and existential depth, the actual connection between their work and philosophy has not been thoroughly explored; Where Film Meets Philosophy conceptualizes their philosophical importance according to how the audiovisual construction and deconstructions of subjectivity (Resnais) and objectivity (Godard), thematic across their respective work, provide experiments in understanding memory, reflection, and expectation—in short, experiments in cinematic thinking. It is important to clarify here what this phrase from my title means, given that much of this book struggles against what I view as oft-cited facile claims to cinema as thinking or perceiving: the cinema does neither of these, of course, as it is a formal medium. However, there are ways through which cinema’s configurations can offer us new ways to think—not because film itself thinks but because it offers us alternative relational organizations or distributions that might, in fact, challenge the way that we think. As such, “experiments in cinematic thinking” refers not to cinema in the process of thinking but to how the use of cinematic form—as Deleuze might put it—carves new paths for our own modes of thought. The questions posed above must be asked in order for us to understand the relevance of moving-image analysis to the evolution of human self-understanding and our relation to the world around us, which should always remain an important goal of academic inquiry. I will illustrate that this topic can be distilled to the fundamental question of what I call subject-object relations, a conceptual focus central to philosophy from Descartes to Hegel to Deleuze, and of special interest to much film theory from the formalism of Hugo Münsterberg to the semiotics of Kaja Silverman.

Film has a unique ability to transform and shift its sensory focus between the auditory and visual, a flexible malleability that can be reduced to shifting dynamics in subject-object relations. Where is the origin of meaning? How are we positioned in relation to this meaning? How fixed is this meaning? Where Film Meets Philosophy situates film form’s ability to challenge traditional subject-object hierarchies and configurations within a larger conceptual philosophical framework, one that reconciles the two seemingly unbridgeable methodologies that have been most influential to the field of film-philosophy: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and Deleuze’s image-philosophy—two philosophies that have been so fruitful for moving-image studies precisely because of their shared central goal of challenging conventional theories of the relationship between subject and object, interior and exterior, real and imaginary. While most studies of postwar philosophy and twentieth-century French intellectual history convey the importance of these two thinkers, they are rarely attributed common ground. Yet Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze often inform works on film-philosophy for the very same reason they meet in this book; as Elena del Rio has written, in a rare consideration of the pair: “The drive to determine a clear dividing line between subject and world, perceiver and perceived, objective reality and subjective experiences, is equally suspected and accordingly undermined by both thinkers.”⁵ That Del Rio incites these authors in a study of Godard’s later films is not anomalous to the frequent use of philosophy in studies of art cinema; however, like many similar works, hers goes both beyond the image (including Godard’s extrafilmic presence, as is inevitable in his work from the 1980s) and also not far enough, as it does not ground the two philosophical influences in respective methodologies, nor does it acknowledge that these philosophers themselves have historical ties to writing about cinema.

My task is to systematize the relationship between film and philosophy through a framework that renders it possible to situate such opposing poles as phenomenology and semiotics within an overarching set of terms. This book is, in other words, metatheoretical, reformulating previous arguments in film theory according to the problem of subject-object relations, with hopes that this systematic mode of analysis may serve as a useful point of departure for future theorists with a wide range of approaches and applications. Film can be seen as the site of intersection for many voices and gazes, both diegetic and extradiegetic, and I will look at how such voices and gazes are distributed and organized according to sets of formal relations. I call the site of this intersection the immanent field of the film image, defining it first and foremost as an arena of possibility through which meaning can emanate, and I will focus this study on the structuring of film meaning according to relations of subject and object within this immanent field.

The immanent field ought not to be confused with the “plane of immanence” as developed by Deleuze, though like so much of this book my notion of the immanent field is indebted to his thinking and ought to be sketched out accordingly. D. N. Rodowick is apt to note: “Like many of his philosophical ideas, Deleuze’s definition of the ‘plane of immanence’ shifts in subtle and interesting ways in different books.”⁶ To isolate a useful point of comparison between my immanent field and Deleuze’s plane of immanence, one should turn to a Bergsonian citation from Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement-Image: “The infinite set of all images constitutes a sort of plane of immanence. The image exists in itself, on this plane. This in-itself of the image is matter: not something hidden behind the image, but on the contrary the absolute identity of the image and movement.”⁷ Ron Bogue astutely observes that Deleuze diverges from Bergson in his conceptualization of the plane of immanence, using it as a conflation between matter and light: “By equating matter and light … Deleuze brings to the fore the implications of Bergson’s theory of perception for an analysis of visual images and reveals the potential of that theory for a conceptualization of the relationship between the cinematic visual image and the material world. If things are light, then what we commonly call visual images, whether directly perceptual or cinematic, are made of the same matter.”⁸ While I certainly consider the image as existing independently, my immanent field—unlike Deleuze’s plane of immanence—does not take the film image concretely as matter but as a dynamic of relationality that produces connotative meaning through this very relationality. Complementing Bergson’s theory of perception, which tends to conflate object and image, with a phenomenological model, I aim to view the moving image both as something and also as an image of something, and the relationship between these two is the centerpiece of my study. The immanent field refers to this “between,” a site of potentiality and becoming, a malleable structuring of subject-object relations that makes possible an infinite variety of relationships between spectator, diegetic world, and the real, constructed according to the configurations of its formal elements. This process of configuration is what I hold to be the film image’s capacity to experiment with “thinking,” as I will argue through a phenomenological and then semiotic framework, and therefore provides the object of primary inquiry in terms of understanding where film and philosophy meet.

As can be concluded above, I use the immanent field to bracket off the film image as a transformative process that exists between the world of filmic meaning and the material reality of both the image’s referent and the viewer. This act of bracketing has traditionally elicited skepticism in cultural studies because of its minimization of the importance of praxis so central to Marxist discourse, but hopefully we will find that my project acts instead to bolster and to add a new facet to the consideration of praxis. Moreover, I am steeled in the usefulness of this simplified methodology by the recent work of scholars such as W. J. T. Mitchell, who provides the same act of isolation in order “to shift the location of desire to images themselves, and ask what pictures want.”⁹ Through this concept of subject-object relations I will build a theory of the immanent field as being structured by a dynamic interdependence between the immediate intentionality of the image (the objective pole) and the point of reference or perspective relative to which this intentionality is signified (the subjective pole), a push and pull that can be boiled down to how the sound-image arranges our relation to meaning—not necessarily what the image wants, as Mitchell puts it, but how it organizes, and how it offers us ways of thinking.

This point of reference is a position that is signified as the origin of the image in order to connote a certain status of the image. It can be a diegetic subject-function (the character) or the external or absent subject-function (the apparatus) and is often a blend of the two or a permutation of their components; the structure of the image relative to these points of reference produces what I call, respectively, subjective and objective images, and films consist of a constant fluctuation between gradations of this polarity. I will hereby conflate intentionality and enunciation into an interdependent dynamic that I call a system of reference, which is not a concept concerning the semiotic notion of “reference” but is more akin to Deleuze’s epistemological “systèmes de référence” (systems of reference). Deleuze equates the subjective and objective poles of representation, only “according to one or the other of two systems of reference.”¹⁰ In other words film signification can—and must, I will argue—be analyzed as a function of how its system of reference is framed. The immanent field is organized in a particular way to construct a system of reference, and it is through the stabilization of this sign (immanent field / system of reference) that an order of meaning, or system of logic and values, can be guaranteed, affirmed, reified. Since the actual ideological roots of cultural representation are an abstract given, postulated many times over yet difficult to analyze, I will look instead at the form of the image and how this form’s internal organization of subject-object relations engenders the systems of reference that are the condition for conveying this ideology. I hope to reveal that this concept of subject-object relations is as central to the problems of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology at the heart of cinematic realism as it is to the Bergsonian temporal philosophy in Deleuze’s film semiotics. That is, I posit this book on the common ground between two disparate models of thought whose diverse methods are geared toward a similar goal: the destruction of classical divisions between subject and object, and the revelation of the relationship between the system of reference and the status of the image.

My reconceptualization of cinematic thinking has a strong affinity for the theory of human experience described in phenomenology and owes much to the long history of kindred harmony between phenomenology and cinema. In his 1945 presentation to help christen l’Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (The Institute for Advanced Cinematic Studies, or IDHEC, France’s national film school from 1944 to 1985), Merleau-Ponty claimed that cinema shows how things signify, that it reveals to us how structures of representation produce meaning through the spatiotemporal arrangement of elements.¹¹ I reframe this proposition in the following way: through its organization of subject-object relations, the film image refers to itself as a particular type of image, implying a certain order of meaning that relates to the text’s explicit meanings but also to the philosophical method of its connotative form. This book is not in itself phenomenological, but it applies a structure of phenomenological notions to a study of film signification and ultimately holds a goal not entirely unlike American film rhetoric, which considers the conventions of organization provided in film narration.¹² Yet, while questions of narration—including narrative content (the “story” of a film) and narrative structure (the ordering of narrative information)—are relevant to any film’s overall meaning and specific significations, I will argue that narration is a product of the film’s form and not its origin, thus associating my work more with the theories of Deleuze than with the tradition of Christian Metz and David Bordwell. It is with this assumption about the formal essence of film that I hope to provide a model that can then be applied to more narrative approaches to film analysis such as genre analysis or national cinema. After all, different film movements, world cinemas, and genres may provide us with very different manifestations of the subjective and objective poles of expression: however, each must distribute the sensible (as Jacques Rancière would put it); that is, each must “distribute spaces and times, subjects and objects, the common and the singular.”¹³ In order to do so, I believe it would benefit each to build a basic theory of this process of distribution.

Inspired by the forefathers of twentieth-century aesthetics such as Erwin Panofsky and Rudolf Arnheim, who attempt to see artistic products first and foremost as “formulations of material,”¹⁴ I will show how these “formulations” structure the differentiation between subject and object. As such, I hope here to return the problem of film subjectivity to Noël Burch’s seemingly obvious but often neglected dictum: “Film is made first of all out of images and sounds.”¹⁵ This book’s conceptualization of film meaning will come to involve various individual elements and combinations of these images and sounds, including the following (in the order in which they will appear):

Having had their feature-length fiction film debuts within a year of each other (1959 and 1960), Resnais and Godard were both engaged in the artistic and intellectual movements of the 1960s. Moreover, each departed from the commercial scene for an extended period in 1968.¹⁷ This justifies, despite the prolific nature of their careers (both of which are still active at the time of writing this in 2012), my isolation of the period between 1959 and 1968 for this study. Moreover, I have selected these two filmmakers for particular reasons, including the placement of their early periods at a critical breaking point in the modern evolution of both French cinema and French philosophy, as the 1960s saw a dramatic reconfiguration of French intellectualism, as well as a larger politicization that unified arenas of art and thought. The academic climate in France shifted with the proliferation of mass-market journalism as part of what Richard Neupert has termed “the new ‘culture industry,’” and in the 1950s the Parisian ivory tower descended to the streets; just as Jean-Paul Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and others had been instrumental in wartime and postwar grassroots activism, precursors of structuralism such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes found a highly receptive audience among France’s urban weekly readers.¹⁸

Moreover, the philosophy of the 1960s gravitated toward the increasing social and political unrest of the decade. Greatly affected by Nietzschean concepts of power and history, French philosophers of the 1960s—Deleuze and Michel Foucault being the most influential—had a particularly strong faith in the present as an opening for change, as well as an unfailing belief in the interconnectedness of philosophy, social behavior, and cultural practice. In Reading the Figural Rodowick prefaces his chapter on May ’68 by making a connection between the moment’s philosophical rupture and the radical temporal disjuncture provided in Alain Resnais’s I Love You, I Love You (1968), noting French cinema and philosophy of this period as connected within “this apocalyptic present marked by the collective belief that the passing of time is a carnivalesque Event … where the future is open to an infinite set of possibilities.” Rodowick takes the link between philosophy and culture during this period so far as to suggest, based on Maurice Clavel’s report, that French poststructuralism was “one of the primary causes of the student and worker protests” that defined the paroxysm of May ’68. Nietzsche’s presence in this decade’s philosophy, Rodowick claims, led to the emergence in French audiovisual culture of “a new philosophy of history in images” in which “space becomes an Event defined by the force of time as becoming and virtuality.”¹⁹

Although I will move away from the role of Nietzsche as conceptual predecessor and the Lyotardian terminology of the Event, Rodowick makes a crucial connection between the rupture occurring in French philosophy at this time and that occurring in French film culture. The changes that took place in France’s film industry during this time have been well documented in a number of New Wave histories, changes that occurred as much on the textual level as on that of production.²⁰ While mine is not an industry study, it is worth emphasizing the important role that these directors played in bringing avant-garde practices to mainstream cinema, as the critical and commercial success of Resnais’s and Godard’s earliest feature films indicates an important social openness to philosophically challenging texts—they only needed a window of desperation in the old guard of finance and production to foster such an experiment. As the eminent French scholar Geneviève Sellier notes with regard to Resnais’s feature debut: “Hiroshima, mon amour is the first full-length fictional feature film made for commercial release that critics perceived, whether approvingly or disapprovingly, as belonging to the avantgarde.”²¹ Reflecting philosophy’s deepening impact on the arts and the crossover appeal between intellectualism and mass-market media, these filmmakers provided systematic attempts to deconstruct classical conventions and to offer cinema as an important intersection of the arts and humanities.

Also, helping to structure this study according to a dialectical progression, these two filmmakers provide an invaluable polarity of film expression. Godard once remarked that he and Resnais were comparable to a journalist and a novelist,²² a telling couplet of metaphors considering that I will argue that their oeuvres are concerned with challenging cinematic codes, respectively, of objectivity and subjectivity. I hope here to cultivate an understanding of their work as deconstructing conventional divisions between subject and object in order to open the immanent field as the site of dialogic interaction between discourses and agencies.²³ Representatives of a shift in European cinema toward self-reflexivity and metatextuality, Godard and Resnais reveal conventions of classical film language by reorganizing the formal basis for these conventions. Their works embody an “alternative” trend in cinema history, alternative “in so far as they transform the relations of representation and representing,”²⁴ relations that I will explore according to my fundamental framework of subject and object. For this their texts provided a glimmer of hope for a generation of theorists: their films both articulated and served as inspiration for theories of phenomenology, semiotics, and poststructuralism, and I hope to use their films to forge a common ground between such diverse theories. As such, their presence here serves to illustrate the problems being systematized in this study and not to prove any particular claim about cinema per se.

Like many such studies inspired by the experimental, I run the risk here of limiting my scope to a particular strain of European art cinema; however, Godard and Resnais provide us with the sick cases through which we might elucidate certain conditions and symptoms of the healthy cinema as it has been naturalized over time and through industrial practices, and in doing so perhaps throw into question this very distinction. The vocabulary of the “sick” and “healthy” used here is, of course, metaphorical, extrapolated from that used in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, which often focuses on oddities or aberrations of human perception in order to explore the standards of normalcy that are implied as points of reference and to determine contradictions to them. Merleau-Ponty’s exploration of the human experience is grounded in the belief that the “normal” is not necessarily the “better” but is, instead, that which has adapted to a conventional ability to differentiate between self and world, sound and image. This framework for understanding “normal” acts of perception derives great complementary strength from the example of alternatives to the norm, including clinical medical conditions but also subjective states altered, for example, by hallucinogenic drugs.²⁵

In addition to Merleau-Ponty’s scientific discourse, the paradigm of “sick” and “healthy” is also meant here to evoke the discursive practices of Western institutional processes of inclusion and exclusion as theorized in Foucault’s work, especially Madness and Civilization and The Birth of the Clinic, both of which were, not coincidentally, published in the early 1960s and led the structuralist movement toward a widespread critique of modes of social organization, especially in terms of the dissemination of subjectivity and agency.²⁶ While I certainly do not want to encourage the ghettoization of any set of film aesthetics, certain norms have been historically secreted within the canon of Western cinema at the exclusion of others. The “healthy” in this book will refer to the classical norms originating primarily in the Hollywood cinema of the late 1910s and 1920s, and achieving a widespread monopoly on Western commercial practices with the ubiquitous distribution of Hollywood to Europe during the late silent period and the rigorous regulations imposed by the technical limitations of the early sound era.²⁷

Though these pages aim to exonerate the virtues of the “sick,” I have chosen not to address the circulation of aesthetic practices simply because the theoretical distance between Resnais’s collaborative production process and Godard’s origins as a critic for Cahiers du cinéma would greatly complicate any attempt to analyze the similarities of their influences or intentions. However, by isolating the image practices from their creative origin, I can analyze how these filmmakers provide mutations on the principles of conventional cinema as developed by Griffith and others and as outlined in the commonly used textbooks of scholars such as John Belton and Bordwell and Thompson: clarity, continuity, and logic.²⁸ The narrative norms (three-act structure, causality, closure), aesthetic and especially editing codes (shot/reverse shot, eye-line match, voice-over flashback), and guiding ideological principles (clear division between good and evil, male heroism) of what is referred to here as “healthy” cinema are so deeply entwined with the conventions of social structures and other art forms, and so dependent on the arbitrary historical triumph of a certain type of cinema as the mainstream norm, that it is admittedly problematic to remove this study completely from the dynamics of production, distribution, and exhibition that established and perpetuated them as norms. Such normative practices, however—which are not the same as those considered normative or conventional in non-Western cinemas, such as popular Indian (or Bollywood) or Japanese cinema—correspond not only to such material factors but also to a deep philosophical tradition that is the focal point of criticism in the works of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze.

I acknowledge the limitations of maintaining a Western-centric corpus and can only call on experts in other cinemas and intellectual histories to take the encouragement provided here to explore similar intersections between cinema and philosophy. As I have already noted, this study focuses on a momentous period that witnessed a concurrent shift in both the praxis of intellectual culture and the cinematic division between commercial and experimental textual practices. Keeping in mind the lessons of Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s Unthinking Eurocentrism, I do not hope here to conflate Western cinema as all “cinema” nor merely to consider two French philosophers as speaking for all of philosophy. Instead, I hope that this study, while cordoning off a certain part of the world’s philosophical and cinematic practices, will suggest that the moving sound-image provides unique formal parameters for challenging the link between traditional modes of thinking and normative artistic practices. These filmmakers used film form, and the decodification of conventional uses of film form, to challenge the ways in which normative film practices reify and perpetuate classical philosophy. This may well be what makes them so provocative to spectators, so influential to filmmakers across the world even fifty years later, and so invaluable to this book. Before launching into this study, however, let me begin by introducing the theoretical background on which this book is based, define some key terminology I will be using, clarify what I hope this book will contribute, and confront some criticisms that may be leveled against it.

Essentially, Barthes’s interest in cinema manifests itself multiple times in terms specifically of film connotation. During the aforementioned 1963 interview, he continues: “How does the cinema make manifest or converge with the categories, functions, structures of what is intelligible as elaborated by our history, our society?”³⁰ This, for Barthes, is the essential object in a semiotics of cinema: how cinema intersects with modes of thinking, how it juggles sense and nonsense through the forms of its representations. This is what I will elaborate as film connotation: how the status of the image is constructed through the subject-object organization of a system of reference and the order of meaning this organization entails. While classical philosophy and sociology—according to Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Deleuze—insist on a rigid differentiation between sense and nonsense, right and wrong, us and them, these binaries are part of a larger order of meaning that necessitates particular configurations of subject and object that were quickly absorbed into conventional film practices. These configurations are exactly what Godard and Resnais undo, and I will ground the analysis of what I argue to be a philosophical challenge as a question of connotation, the deconstruction of formal coding and the breakdown of what is intelligible and how it should be so—experiments, as I put it, in cinematic thinking.

A study of what Barthes calls “ideas-in-form,”³¹ this book looks at how we transpose orders of differentiation onto formal media, in this case cinema, and how this process extends larger philosophical paradigms that determine our understanding of experience and our interaction with the world. The means for this transposition can be found in our conventional modes of transformation, or codes. While this book is influenced by Barthes’s notion of code, and especially his argument that all codes are formed in the connotative register, I will lean more toward Umberto Eco’s formulation of the cinematic code. In “Articulations of the Cinematic Code,” for example, Eco argues that structure in general exists “through a choice of operative conventions” that “rest on systems of choices and oppositions.”³² In this book I hope to give a phenomenological structure to this semiotic dualism in order to project this problem onto the immanent field. These structures of opposition, which are intertwined with the dynamic of subject-object relations, are a problem of film form: for Eco, as Julia Lesage points out, such codes refer not only to what is conventional, as far as behavior or action is concerned, but also “how to present that action in a representation.”³³

According to this understanding I will use the framework of subject-object relations to shift the focus away from the problem of referential meaning, studied by realist theorists, as well as to move away from apparatus theory’s focus on the ideology behind our conventions of representation, and toward a question of how systems of reference are organized within the immanent field itself and how this process of organization corresponds to philosophical concepts, method, and purpose. The connotation specific to cinema, then, is less one of explicit value concerning the judgment of its viewed objects than it is the connotation of the film image itself as a type of image. In other words the image connotes itself not only as a world but also as a way (truthful, biased, trustworthy, ambiguous, certain, uncertain, indifferent, impassioned) of viewing the world and, as such, provides an important philosophical intersection between the essences explored through phenomenology and the constructions addressed in semiotics. The problems of film subjectivity and film connotation are important issues that seem to have been dismissed with the recent academic move away from semiotics in general. I hope that the regeneration of these problems, in the framework of subject-object relations and the immanent field, might reveal the kindred natures of phenomenology and structuralism in a way that will permit me to reconceptualize film as an object of their mutual concern. As semiotics falls from favor in film studies and phenomenology comes back into fashion, it would be useful to illuminate some characteristics they share, and perhaps this work might even sketch a way to extrapolate from phenomenology a metaphysical foundation with which to revive film semiotics. To do so, it will be necessary to dispel Dudley Andrew’s myth (perhaps well-founded in its corroboration of popular thinking) that these two approaches are “archrivals,”³⁴ or that they are methodologically incompatible, a task that might be achieved by analyzing the film image as a process of organization.

The philosophical bookends of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze stem from a strong recent surge in what Carroll calls cognitive-value claims in media studies: “that these arts bring about the possibility for new perceptions, that they change perception, or that they incarnate the mind or consciousness, or that they exemplify some new form of consciousness.”³⁵ Such claims can be traced back to interwar avant-garde notions of the grand power of cinema to tap into subconscious arenas, which found a particularly focused platform in the postwar movement self-titled filmologie. In his oft-neglected yet seminal text in this movement, Essai sur les principes d’une philosophie du cinéma (Essay on the principles of a philosophy of cinema), Gilbert Cohen-Séat writes: “It is, in effect, in and during representation that the object and the new object, instituted by cinema, meet.”³⁶ Cohen-Séat suggests here that a clue to the workings of cinema and cinematic meaning lies not in the ostensive, photographic dimension, nor necessarily in the spectator’s psyche, but in what happens in and during representation, or within what I call the immanent field. The implication here is that, as I will not cease to rearticulate in different ways, film is a process. More precisely, it is a process of organization and redistribution, a system for forming relations; this is a notion that innately links even the most different representatives from a century of film theory. My attempt to situate this process according to the framework of subject-object relations must begin with an introductory review of this formulation’s most influential philosophical precursor, which is the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty.

As indicated by a recent title in film-philosophy, Film Consciousness: From Phenomenology to Deleuze,³⁷ the two most influential thinkers on the realm of film-philosophy are arguably Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. Yet, despite being constant points of reference, these two and their fundamental methodologies are consistently held apart as irreconcilable, if not in opposition. It is essential now to pose the pressing question: what do the primary philosophies engaged by this book have in common, and how do I aim to utilize them here? First, on the larger level of practice, these philosophers share a notion of what philosophy should serve, which is not the status quo but the embrace of the challenging and even (according to our conventions) the nonsensical. When discussing the role of the philosopher in Signs, Merleau-Ponty writes: “Our task is to broaden our reasoning to make it capable of grasping what, in ourselves and in others, precedes and exceeds reason.”³⁸ Just as Merleau-Ponty insists on taking into consideration that which does not usually fall into the realm of the rational (the classical object of philosophy), Deleuze insists that philosophy ought to challenge the very notion of the rational. Taking this dehierarchization of the object of philosophy further, and rejecting what he considers the “sedentary” classical philosophy of representation, Deleuze argues: “Philosophy is at its most positive as critique: an enterprise of demystification.”³⁹ I will view the works of Godard and Resnais as engaged in the very same philosophical goals, which derive from the same historical rupture and are articulated according to the same basis: the deconstruction of classical subject-object divisions and hierarchies.

In terms of influence I agree with Leonard Lawlor that all French critical theory and philosophy of the 1960s were “explicitly or implicitly in dialogue with Merleau-Ponty,”⁴⁰ and in speaking specifically of cinema, Merleau-Ponty makes an important link between twentieth-century philosophy and cinema. In his aforementioned address, “Cinema and the New Psychology,” Merleau-Ponty draws many connections between cinema and his approach to philosophy, including this one: “The philosopher and the movie maker share a certain way of being, a certain view of the world which belongs to a generation.”⁴¹ Merleau-Ponty ties his generation of philosophers to the Seventh Art in unmistakable terms, and we can view here a profound contemporary sympathy bred in the 1960s spirit of rejecting convention. In his model of existential phenomenology Merleau-Ponty rejects the suppositions assumed by conventional empiricist and psychological approaches, attracted instead by the gestaltist claim that the formal structure of perception is inseparable from personal subjective experience. Gestalt theory, which originated with the Berlin School at the threshold of the twentieth century, focuses on the ability of human sensory perception (and especially vision) to transform external stimuli into a coherent formal structure or whole.

Influenced by this approach, Merleau-Ponty builds on the assumption that there is a process of transformation between external phenomena and subjective signification, based on formal organizations that result from the innate elements of human perception; these acts of organization, though necessary and inevitable, are also arbitrary. These organizations, for Merleau-Ponty, are where the objective world and subjective experience meet—not where they separate, as classical Cartesian philosophy may hold, but where they meet. Merleau-Ponty claims in the preface to his seminal work, Phenomenology of Perception, that the most important development provided by phenomenology is “without doubt to have joined extreme subjectivism with extreme objectivism in its notion of the world,”⁴² a binary that for Edmund Husserl, Merleau-Ponty’s predecessor, was focused primarily on the subjective side of human experience. Merleau-Ponty sets out to rectify this imbalance. As Vincent Descombes aptly summarizes, Merleau-Ponty insists on a symbiotic flow between subject and object and chooses to focus on what lies between consciousness and the thing, between “for-itself” and “in-itself,” but refuses classical attempts to formulate this relationship in a rigid binary: “the alternatives of classical philosophy rejected, solution of antithesis is found in a ‘finite’ synthesis, an unfinished and precarious one.”⁴³

The terms unfinished and precarious are particularly important here, as Merleau-Ponty—like Deleuze to follow—posits philosophy’s role as navigating the constantly changing and indefinite ocean of meaning in human existence, never to achieve a final and absolute understanding but instead to embrace and be a part of the constantly changing world. Merleau-Ponty challenges the logics of certainty and totality, central to classical philosophy, in terms of the fundamental paradigm of subject-object relations, what he referred to as “the subject-object correlation that has dominated philosophy from Descartes to Hegel.”⁴⁴ Insisting that the subject-object dynamic “transpires within incompletion, non-coincidence, penumbra,”⁴⁵ Merleau-Ponty brackets off this organizational process for his phenomenological model, and I use this principle of bracketing as a way of applying Merleau-Ponty’s methodology to the immanent field of the film image, the arrangement of which is also a necessary and inevitable, yet arbitrary, act. I will bracket off the immanent field of the image just as Merleau-Ponty brackets off the organizational process at work in human perception and, as such, argue for the validity of a transposition of philosophical method onto film theory. Furthermore, for Merleau-Ponty experience and meaning cannot be reduced to an external subject’s unilateral understanding of the world but are, instead, the offspring of the subject’s implication in the world itself: “I consider my body, which is my point of view on the world, as one of the objects of this world.”⁴⁶ This statement leads to two important conclusions. The first, which I will explore further in chapter 1, implicates our coexistence in the world as not only a coexistence of separate beings, but instead as part of an “interworld” from which derives the symbolic and abstract meanings of our experiences; this “interworld” is projected onto the immanent field of the film image, where character and spectator meet, where subject and object coalesce.

The second implication of this statement, and the more useful at this introductory moment, is that the human being is both interior and exterior, depending on the point of reference: a subject that is at the same time an object, a body in the world and the place where exterior and interior are joined. Could we not describe cinema in the same words? As a form of representation that takes real objects as its original material, cinema provides us with a viewing subject that is also a viewed object; therefore, according to Merleau-Ponty, “cinema is particularly apt to reveal the union between the mind and body, between the mind and the world and the expression of each in the other.”⁴⁷ In other words cinema can show us how the subjective and objective interact, overlap, coexist, oppose each other and are united, a meeting place between cinema and philosophy that was not lost on French film scholarship to follow. As Andrew points out, Merleau-Ponty had a direct influence on the theorists of filmologie such as Cohen-Séat,⁴⁸ but I will explore his relevance beyond this. Like many writers based in psychology, thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty and the anthropologist Edgar Morin became interested in cinema for the same reasons that film theorists remain interested in phenomenology: cinema poses fundamental questions concerning the relationship between the interior and exterior, subject and object.

The similarity between cinematic representation and human subjective experience has led to many idealist notions of the “essential objectivity” of the camera, a connotation fallaciously entrenched in the fact that the French word for a camera lens is objectif.⁴⁹ In this way champions of cinematic realism such as André Bazin have argued that film has a phenomenological capacity because it holds the possibility for a sort of formal reduction in the phenomenological sense, a direct exposure to phenomena as opposed to a careful arrangement of the objective world. Though aware of its artificiality as staged fiction, Bazin and others view cinema as uniquely capable of—and indeed ontologically responsible for—representing an essential quality that emanates from sensory appearances. We can see here a belief in cinema’s capacity not only to produce a copy of the world of external phenomena but, actually, to uncover something in it while also respecting its ambiguity. The question of “realism” is the crux of postwar French film criticism’s most explicit encounter with phenomenology, the work of Amédée Ayfre, whose “Neo-Realism and Phenomenology” explores the connection between this (at the time) topically popular philosophical method and the most influential European film movement of the immediate postwar period: Italian neorealism. For Ayfre, as for Bazin, filmmakers such as Rossellini have philosophical implications because of their extreme humanism, and they are phenomenological because—as I will argue with Godard and Resnais, only in less abstract terms—in their films “the mystery of being replaces clarity of construction.”⁵⁰

Bazin embraces a similar argument concerning the philosophical potential of cinema, the height of which rests in the medium’s ability to preserve the authentic ambiguity of nature. Ultimately, Bazin speaks of the film image as an immanent field in the way I will approach it, but I will distance myself from Bazin’s defense of visual realism, hoping to show his argument as an argument for a particular type of image—a connotative argument, a logic or philosophy. Also, this notion of the camera apparatus’s inclination toward the observational value of appearances makes it easily comparable, through a simplistic metaphor, to phenomenology, prompting Christian Metz’s suggestion that “the topical apparatus of cinema resembles the conceptual apparatus of phenomenology.”⁵¹ I will argue against such allegorical notions of the phenomenological nature of the cinematic apparatus, siding with later theorists who view this as an illusion constructed through the positioning of filmic subjectivity.

Furthermore, the similarity between film form and characteristics of the human subject has led many to consider film phenomenological in that its form is structured according to characteristics analogous to those at work in natural perception. Vivian Sobchack points out, for example, that film expression is an organizing activity much like human vision, which is structured and selective.⁵² This position echoes two of the earliest systematic analyses of film form, Münsterberg’s and Arnheim’s, each of which were influenced by the Gestalt group and each of which attempts to define film representation through a comparison with the human subjective apparatus. Münsterberg argues that film representation overcomes the objective forms of the world by adjusting them to inner, human processes, such as attention and memory.⁵³ Is the apparatus of cinema therefore anthropomorphized? Some of the effects Münsterberg discusses are formal, such as depth and focus, whereas some stem from combinations of images, attempts to transpose the image onto the subjectivity of a character, such as the representation of memory through a flashback. I will ground the idealism of Münsterberg’s insights with the acknowledgment, as Arnheim insists in Film as Art, that film is not an imitation or duplication of its source but is “a translation of observed characteristics into the forms of a given medium.”⁵⁴

These theorists mark an attempt to understand objective representation as itself subjective, transformative, and in some ways based on a formal simulation of the human subject. Later theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Stephen Heath frame this duality as the starting place for an ideological critique of classical, or illusionist, cinema. Stemming from various angles of Marxism and psychoanalysis, such approaches are concerned centrally with the production and situating of subjectivity as an ideological problem. Influenced by French thinkers such as Julia Kristeva, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Lacan, these film theorists focus on the connotative structures of sociocultural institutions and mark an important historical alignment between intellectual culture and film culture in France. And, while I strongly disagree with the psychoanalytic bases for many of these theorists’ conclusions, much of this book works alongside their assessment of film meaning being predicated on the signification of subject-functions, and I would agree with these theorists that the problem of film is, therefore, concerned with “the relations of subjectivity and ideology.”⁵⁵ I will, however, direct this argument away from the problem of ideology and toward a more phenomenological analysis of the immanent field itself and the formal relations through which this subjectivity is constructed.

As Andrew notes, for these theorists “identification with characters and stories is based on an identification with the process of viewing itself and ultimately with the camera which views.”⁵⁶ In other words there is what Metz and others have referred to as a double identification on behalf of the spectator: identification with the viewing apparatus and identification with the people viewed. This is the fundamental observation made by apparatus and suture theory that I will reframe in Deleuzean terms of the image in a state of flux between subjective and objective systems of reference. Many theorists, however, tend to merge different subject-functions—the diegetic subject-function of a character as point of identification, the camera subject-function such as is provided by camera movement, and the subject-function posited through classical editing techniques—all into one notion of what Baudry calls the “transcendental subject.”⁵⁷ I will untangle this by specifying which formal configurations produce respective subject-functions and how different configurations must sometimes vie within the same cinematic moment. I hope in this book to illuminate, furthermore, the gradations by which these two identifications can shift, interact, overlap, and oppose each other. Instead of focusing on the ideology behind the image, or the psychology that governs the spectator’s interpretation, I will map out the construction of this duality as an internal organization of such formal elements as the frame, montage, and the juxtaposition of speech and image.

Although I find the conclusions reached by Baudry to be invaluable to an understanding of film form and film subjectivity, his theories have inherent flaws that must be recognized, especially concerning the psychoanalytic and ideological rhetoric of his methods. Psychoanalytic theorists, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith criticizes, “cannot rest content” with the argument that meaning is produced without any subject of that production.⁵⁸ This is perhaps psychoanalysis’s greatest contribution to my study: as a method it rejects the conventional myth of an internal construction that does not produce some framework of differentiation. Yet, while I agree with many conclusions reached by such theorists, and we should appreciate the critical nature of their enterprise, we must also be suspicious of a film theory that appropriates another discipline’s method without skepticism, often even verbatim. In his response to this trend, Charles F. Altman takes psychoanalytic film theory to task primarily for its methodological appropriations of a master-theory (psychoanalysis) that is, itself, only a set of working hypotheses.⁵⁹ Can a theoretical approach so far removed from its object of analysis be methodologically robust?

Projecting familiar problems of film representation onto a heightened polemical arena, such theorists’ political stance has also been disputed over recent years. Carroll, for example, challenges much of this theory for being focused on subject positioning as an ideological issue, when film—he claims—is not inherently ideological.⁶⁰ This critique marks a reaction, over the past thirty years, against the highly stylized cinema and politically polarized criticism of the 1960s, bringing under scrutiny the entire formalist project and the demystification of cinematic illusion. In this book I construct a middle ground between these. I believe very much that film is, as a sociocultural phenomenon and economic industry, without question ideological. While this does not mean, as theorists such as Daniel Dayan may argue, that classical cinema can be systematically rejected as a vessel for bourgeois Western ideology, we must nonetheless acknowledge that the formal base of cinema itself, through its modes of organizing meaning, disseminates certain values and assumptions that can be found in larger social bodies of thought and belief.

Rather than view it solely as a tool for hegemony, I view the structure of the film image as a condition either for perpetuating or challenging modes of thinking through the construction of different sets of relations. In doing so, I hope to use a phenomenological basis to establish a semiotics of film connotation, thus extending Merleau-Ponty’s central method to the image-philosophy developed some forty years later by Deleuze.

The problem of subjectivity or the subject-object divide, the centrality of which I have already argued in reference to Merleau-Ponty, is pivotal to Western philosophy since Descartes and may well have reached a breaking point with the works of Deleuze, whose codevelopment (with longtime collaborator Félix Guattari) of schizoanalysis challenged the very bases of subject theory in traditional psychoanalysis.⁶¹ Fortunately for lovers and scholars of the moving image, Deleuze did not leave it to us to transpose his philosophy onto the cinema; instead, he provided some five hundred pages, in two tomes, of the most engaging, respectful, insightful, and sometimes confusing prose ever written on the Seventh Art. Dividing both cinema history and philosophical logic into two spheres, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image serve up a smorgasbord of twentieth-century philosophical inquiry, auteur study of the great directors of international cinema, and an attempt to completely rework the relationship between cinema and philosophy and to reframe the overall role that cinema played in twentieth-century history.

Deleuze’s Cinema books, which Rodowick identifies succinctly as “primarily works of philosophy,”⁶² mark an important and unprecedented metaphysical turn in French philosophy toward cinema as an object of inquiry, as also evidenced in the work of Jean-Louis Schefer and Jacques Rancière, among others.⁶³ Instead of addressing what films say about the world (which we could refer to as the philosophical message of their denotations), the central question in French film-philosophy seems to be, Can cinema offer us new ways to think, and, if it can, how has it done so? Attempting to reframe the causal relationship between art and spectator according to his bipartite theory of cinematic image-types, Deleuze claims: “We can consider the brain as a relatively undifferentiated mass and ask what circuits, what kinds of circuit, the movement-image or time-image trace out, or invent, because the circuits aren’t there to begin with.”⁶⁴ Instead of containing cinema within the empirical premise of classical rationalism, as most Anglo-American cognitive theorists do, these French writers reframe the twentieth century as having been the locus of a great change in human psychology and existentiality. As Rodowick claims, this brand of film-philosophy seeks to “show how images and signs in movement or time are conceptually innovative; that is, how they renew our powers of thinking.”⁶⁵ Deleuze serves as such an important model for new theories of cinema because his writing turns away from overt discussions of bourgeois ideological institutions and avoids any psychoanalytic or linguistic preconceptions, moving instead toward a conceptualization of cinema that rejects classical notions of fixed and rigid binary relations.

I cannot overstate, and have no doubt already revealed, the profound influence Deleuze’s work has had on this book, and I must acknowledge the large amount of recent Deleuze-based film scholarship and attempt to situate my own work therein. In his introduction to the recent Deleuze and World Cinemas, David Martin-Jones provides a wonderfully insightful summary of the critical interest and tools that Deleuze offers to film studies, as well as a number of its limitations—its Eurocentrism and reliance on art cinema being the most central.⁶⁶ These are merited constructive criticisms that Martin-Jones makes precisely because Deleuze’s film writing is so inspiring and, while providing a powerful springboard, must also be continually developed and built upon to accommodate the great diversity of industrial and aesthetic practices in world cinema. Unlike Martin-Jones’s work, which seeks to make Deleuze more flexible for exploring popular and world cinemas, I hope to reveal its connections to other philosophical frameworks and to demonstrate how opening it to a larger study of film theory might help sharpen the methods of film-philosophy. Because of the innovative nature of his concepts, Deleuze provides a fecund soil for analyzing new and unconventional modes of film expression; and because of the flexibility of his somewhat uncentered film writing, Deleuze provides a powerful but often scattered beam of light for projecting larger critical movements, such as feminist film theory, beyond its original representational focus and onto concerns of the ontology of the image and the sensory viewing experience.

In Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation, for example, Barbara Kennedy applies problems of embodiment and intersubjectivity to what she articulates as a specifically postfeminist goal. In an innovative but slightly obtuse rhetoric characteristic of many works inspired by Deleuze, she proclaims: “We [feminist theorists] need to rethink a post-semiotic space, a post-linguistic space, which provides new ways of understanding the screenic experience as a complex web of inter-relationalities. The look is never purely visual, but also tactile, sensory, material and embodied.… This book seeks to reconfigure corporeality and the role of the mind/brain/body within the notions of sensation, through Deleuzean philosophy.”⁶⁷ Attempting to critique the dependency of feminist theory on psychoanalytic frameworks and to provide a neoaesthetic, Kennedy introduces the now-trendy term film-philosophy as a less-than-modest concept for her own mode of “exploring ‘affect’ and ‘sensation’ through experimental visual engagements.” Arguing against the masculinist concept of the fixed and unilateral subject, Kennedy claims that “a postfeminist” agenda is concerned with the “micrology” of “lived experiences, across and between the spaces of any fixed, sentient, or even fluid gendered subjectivity.” Postfeminism, she continues, is “about more than the lived experience, but is about thinking processes at a fundamental level,” trying “to bring back materiality and to understand the basis of experience as having a material and affective basis, as much as sociological, cultural or libidinal.”⁶⁸

To what degree fundamental thinking processes are “about more than the lived experience” is difficult to understand, but Kennedy’s explanation of the usefulness of Deleuze clarifies the centrality of his work to this movement in general. Derived very much from his philosophical inquiries, Deleuze’s cinema writing moves beyond dualistic and binary Platonist thinking processes, thus permitting us to understand the film experience as something more than just the relationship between textual meaning and spectatorial subjectivity: instead, as Kennedy asserts, a Deleuzean viewing experience is “an experience that is perceived as an event, as a processual, aesthetic event of sensation, articulated beyond subjectivity.”⁶⁹ Although film works strongly on the level of sensation, I will argue that this “event” is akin less to sensory experience or perception and more to philosophical activity; and, far from functioning beyond subjectivity, it plays with the notion of subjectivity in order to experiment with modes of thinking.

Applying the politics of nonrepresentational cinema to a gender-oriented notion of sensory-evocative sound-images, Laura Marks’s The Skin of the Film acts as an important precursor for the appropriation of Deleuzean concepts to a feminist-oriented (or, at least, antipatriarchal) position. Such arguments tend, as in Marks’s and Kennedy’s cases, to favor new, unconventional modes of film expression that aim to challenge clichés of cinematic language in accordance with shifting ideological norms concerning difference, identity, and the status of film criticism. These central interests have provided a new generation of scholars with the tools and paradigms with which to renovate outdated models of national, auteur, and genre cinema, as is also illustrated through the work of Martin-Jones, Martine Beugnet, Emma Wilson, Patricia Pisters, and Steven Shaviro. Soliciting a collection of films that employ “cinema’s intensely tactile quality” from the last decade of French cinema, Beugnet employs Deleuze as a foundation for generating a contemporary theory of national French cinema.⁷⁰ Beugnet evokes the intellectual history of Bataille and Artaud to posit as a trans-genre national movement the near-ubiquitous presence of graphic sex and violence that is used to destabilize narrative clarity and to reconfigure traditional subject-object binaries. Although Beugnet does not necessarily cite it as such, this phenomenon can be traced to the radical manifestation of intersubjectivity and intertemporality articulated by particular films and filmmakers isolated by Deleuze—in particular, Alain Resnais. In Alain Resnais, Emma Wilson transforms Deleuze’s focus on Resnais into a resurrected form of auteur theory. Working from Marks’s and Joan Copjec’s studies of the sensory nature of spectatorial trauma, Wilson focuses on the ambiguity of textual meaning and subjectivity provided through a subversion of the “status of the images viewed.”⁷¹ Like Wilson I will look primarily at Resnais’s early feature film work and will return to her readings regularly in chapters 3 and 4; however, it is the gendercentric theoretical focus of these authors that I hope to avoid (though issues of gender and sexuality will be addressed), as well as the application of Deleuze’s analytic tools to reaffirm traditional methodologies of cinema study. Moreover, instead of embracing Deleuze’s rhetorical loopholes in order simply to apply the term time-image to any unconventional film practice that is of interest, I aim to provide a comparative analysis that includes specific counterexamples and conflicting discourses within the work of a director and, sometimes, within a single text and even a single shot.

While Wilson, Beugnet, and Marks explore a similar terrain of art and avant-garde film selection as my own, there also exists prolific scholarship aimed at resurrecting the critical study of popular and mainstream cinemas through Deleuzean lenses. In Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity: Narrative Time in National Contexts, Martin-Jones does an excellent job of utilizing Deleuzean concepts to address the alternative practices and implications of shifts in temporality in major studio films, especially those of recent Hollywood cinema. While Martin-Jones and others have demonstrated the usefulness of Deleuze to approaching highly cinema-literate and cleverly constructed films such as Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) and Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), I argue in the conclusion—as I will with certain texts of Godard and Resnais—that these are ultimately plays on the denotative fabric of the text, especially the narrative structure; and, while they can provide allegorical insight into larger issues of national and transnational identity, these films fundamentally subscribe to a conventional order of meaning that reverts in the end to classical philosophical notions of subjectivity and time.

Regardless, in each case these scholars embrace the Deleuzean connection between cinema and philosophy in order to invest substantial personal and human importance in the influence of moving-image culture. Cinema’s ability to affect our personal and social philosophies is based on two important aspects of its ontology and history: its fundamentally transformative form, and its historical place in the evolution of image culture. Contextualizing cinema alongside a larger development in human thought, Deleuze maps out what he calls a “natural history” of the evolution of film signs, or image-types, through which his ultimate goal is “to produce a book on logic, a logic of cinema.”⁷² This logic is not, however, limited to cinema but is a dynamic model of a civilization that is itself cinematic, a humanity that has been altered by cinematic form and whose image culture reflects a transformation in paradigms of thought. While the chronological determinism of Deleuze’s claim to a “natural history” has rightfully drawn criticism from a number of sources, it is relevant here in that the seeds for his “logic of cinema” take root in his philosophy of the 1960s, which was both influenced by Merleau-Pontian trends and aimed to reflect a breakdown in philosophical and ideological conventions that was echoing through the alternative film practices coming to the forefront of French film culture. Rodowick notes this intersection, and Deleuze’s second volume devotes much focus to the films of Godard and Resnais as exemplary of cinema’s potential for philosophical thinking and, as such, “is especially useful for defining the exemplarity of French film and audiovisual culture since 1958.”⁷³

Even though such intersections between form and philosophy are boldly apparent in the works of these thinkers and filmmakers, drawing out this connection has met with a resistance primarily due to a suspicion of film-philosophy’s abstractions and general disillusionment with formalist film theory. Addressing the latter of these points (which I hope will allow us to solve the former) brings to the forefront a problem that has been raised specifically concerning the works of Godard and Resnais. Echoing Pauline Kael’s infamously disparaging remark about the snobbery and vacuity signaled by the prominence of stylistic technique in Resnais’s work, David Bordwell writes: “Godard … raises as does no other director the possibility of a sheerly capricious or arbitrary use of technique.”⁷⁴ In many ways this remark illustrates the neglect of film connotation in much film criticism, but it also provokes a question: can we not analyze the significance of how our images are structured? Should we not? Indeed, I argue in this study that the work of these filmmakers raises the problem of form to a philosophical level. However, in order to promote such an argument, perhaps film form needs to be analyzed according to formats different from those used to study film narration, for example. “What does stylistic patterning offer us?” Bordwell demands rhetorically, responding: “It cannot have causal unity, and … seems to have no clearly designated units.”⁷⁵ But does it not have causal unity, embedded in its organization of subject-object relations? And can we not designate certain units by which it can be analyzed, units concerning the interactions within and between particular formal elements that organize the immanent field in certain ways?

These questions point toward the need to reformulate the notion of film form in general, not only as a tool for supporting the denotation of a story, nor as a question of mise-en-scène and visual style or even visual symbolism, but as an essential source of film meaning. Godard and Resnais are exemplary for this argument. Raised in the Cinémathèque and film school culture of postwar France, filmmakers like Godard and Resnais grew up surrounded by the clichés of classical cinema. Yet, as Merleau-Ponty argued, they were also part of a generation disillusioned with conventional systems of thought. Fed up with the complacent and closed orders of meaning offered by classical forms, the cinema of the 1960s waged a systematic assault on conventional structures of differentiation by deconstructing the formal codes from which such structures are built.

At the heart of this assault is a challenge to the stability of our orders of meaning, the totality of any worldview—and, in challenging this, these filmmakers insist that the form of denotation itself is both significant and in need of our critical attention. As Andrew writes concerning Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and the genre of “art” or “modern” cinema of which it is emblematic: “By taking our powers and aspirations for explanation, totality, and identification to the limit, such films bring out into the open the value, the labor, and the fragility of representation in the cinema.”⁷⁶ Resnais and Godard achieve this, I argue, by shifting the semiotic focus of their films onto the connotative level of film signification and inviting the spectator to consider the immanent field itself as a dialogic source of signification. Their works resist the desire for denotative certainty, revealing the constructed basis of representation and—in the spirit shared by Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze—challenging the classical divisions between subject and object. I have selected Godard and Resnais as my examples and believe that this selection will prove itself justified, though I fully acknowledge that this is nonetheless a limited portrait of film practice, and in my conclusion I consider how such a study might also extend to mainstream Hollywood cinema and other traditions. Furthermore, in constructing a system of comparative analysis between the two filmmakers and also within their respective oeuvres, I hope here to work alongside contemporary scholars toward a method of formal and textual analysis that integrates different cinematic approaches into a common conceptualization of the dynamic relationship between philosophy and film.

Similarly, the focus of this study necessitates the marginalization of certain critical methodologies, including, most notably, spectator theory, as well as approaches, such as auteur theory, that have typically been applied to these directors. While other theories have much to offer by way of elucidating certain problems of film representation, the suppositions on which they are built make them peripheral to the primary concerns enumerated here. I acknowledge that spectatorship is largely diverse, and the spectator holds at all times a complex agency for relating to, identifying with, or rejecting the implications of any image. I do not intend to prove that filmic meaning rests solely or even primarily with either the image or the viewer: it is my purpose, rather, to reveal how the structure of the image offers different modes and levels of interaction or entrance for the spectator’s agency, which here necessitates the bracketing off of the form of the image—between the content and the spectator—in order, hopefully, to expand it once again.

Such a critical endeavor as this one cannot work without the evidence of close textual reading, and the films of Godard and Resnais are instrumental in bringing to light the problems addressed in these pages. As my goal here is to systematize the concept of film connotation according to the phenomenological notion of subject-object relations, I begin by addressing phenomenology and the basic cinematic differentiation between viewing subject and viewed world. Chapter 1 explores the allegorical notions of the image-as-perception and the image-as-thought, reconciling such divergent theories as Eisensteinian montage and Bazinian realism under an umbrella rubric of subject-object relations. Using Merleau-Ponty to work through such phenomenological film writers as Edgar Morin and Jean Mitry, chapter 1 addresses the problem of how cinema’s basic visual apparatus designates a viewing position meant to simulate the human perceptual mechanism, while also offering the possibility to nullify this unilateralism. Applying phenomenology to ways in which the visual design of the image divides viewing subject from viewed world, I perform detailed textual analyses of Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962) and Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1966). These films, I argue, illustrate a range of practices that either provide a conventional mode of visual subjectivity, in which the camera aligns with a singular viewing subject in the text, or, conversely, break such conventions down through formal deconstructions, such as through the refraction of viewing positions or the subjectification of material objects.

Godard throws the cinematic claim to objectivity into question by directly interacting with—and subverting—conventional film codes of subject-construction. Film is not just perception; it is codified perception and thus requires a semiotic approach to complement the phenomenological. Chapter 2 engages in depth with the problem of a semiotics of film based on the codification of subject-object dynamics, turning to Eco, Barthes, and Pasolini for complex notions of cinematic coding and how they might apply to a theory of subject-object relations. Using these theorists to develop an understanding of how film codes rely on the repetition and subversion of subject-object configurations, this theoretical path arrives at Deleuze’s semiotic project and frames his work as a problem of connotation in order to situate it—as is rarely done—within a larger theoretical genealogy. Positioning it thus allows me to focus on two major aspects of Deleuze’s argument: formalism and the immanent field. Deleuze’s focus on the formal specificity of cinema shifts focus away from film content and toward its constant process of transformation between image-types, each of which can be defined through its particular arrangement of subject-object relations. These relations shift and evolve within what I appropriate from Deleuze as the immanent field, the network of formal relations existent within the sound-image whose composition determines the subject-object relations through which denotation is produced. Unlike Deleuze studies such as Gregory Flaxman’s anthology The Brain Is the Screen or Rodowick’s Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, my reading aims to ground the metaphysical nature of Deleuze’s concepts within a larger framework of subject-object configurations, while also finding in it the basis for a semiotic understanding of film connotation that has yet to be attributed to his work.

Chapter 3 further explores the immanent field of formal elements by including and focusing on the problem of sound. This chapter provides close readings of Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) in order to analyze sound-based subject-object configurations. I look in particular at Resnais’s use of sound to deconstruct any form of absolute spatial, and especially temporal, subjectivity, including the subversion of conventional divisions between voice-overs and dialogues, diegetic and nondiegetic sound. Paralleling the shift to Resnais with a new theoretical dimension, this chapter utilizes Deleuze’s Bergsonian notion of intertemporality to provide a temporal complement to the spatial intersubjectivity conceptualized in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Whereas Merleau-Ponty insists on the coexistence of subjects and objects in space, Deleuze uses Bergson’s philosophy of time to stress the coexistence of past, present, and future, as so uniquely captured in nonlinear cinema. Resnais’s films are to Godard’s as Deleuze is to Merleau-Ponty, I argue, making use of the conclusions reached in chapter 2 to add the essential aspects of time and editing to chapter 1’s study of space and frame. Balancing film theory on sound with Deleuzean image-philosophy, this chapter uses a comparative analysis of Resnais’s texts to include sound into the basic premise of subject-object dynamics, building on those employed in chapter 1’s analysis of Godard in order to offer an approach balanced between visual and aural elements. Whereas many studies that apply phenomenology to film, such as Sobchack’s Address of the Eye, remain very imagecentric, my work insists that sound theory must transcend its usually limited place in technical analysis and be appended to visual theory in a larger philosophical understanding of film’s immanent field.

The impact of intertemporality on the classical notion of subjectivity, as illustrated through Resnais’s deconstruction of sound-image codes, introduces the premise for chapter 4. This chapter is divided into three parts: an analysis of the codes for creating subjectivity in cinema; how these codes are utilized and deconstructed in the films of Alain Resnais; and an in-depth analysis of an often-neglected gem of his early work, The War Is Over (1966). Specifically, I show how Resnais deconstructs what I term the code of subjectivity in order to experiment with understanding the individual’s relationship to the world in terms of political action. This chapter challenges popular readings of Resnais as providing a cinema of consciousness or thought, which I hold to be erroneous and counterproductive analogies. Instead, I reframe his cinema as part of a connotative subversion of the implications of certainty and unilateralism implicit in classical conventions and constructions of subjectivity, and thus I position it in more clear philosophical terms—that is to say, how can cinema challenge the classical representation of linear time or chronological memory? How does Resnais reconfigure formal codes to question the conventional monistic view of personal experience?

And what about the other pole of representation? Whereas chapter 4 is concerned with subjective representation, or the system of reference that implies a direct connection between the form of representation and a character in the film, chapter 5 builds on the tripartite structure and theme of the previous chapter as a stepping stone in order to return full circle to problems addressed in chapter 1 concerning perception and objectivity in cinema. This chapter explores the connotations of objectivity in cinema and the countercinema of Godard, building a lengthy textual analysis of Contempt (1962), in which Godard throws into question what I term the code of objectivity. Unlike Resnais’s film discussed in the previous chapter, Contempt addresses the politics of cinema as an institution and representational machine and helps to close out the larger concerns of this study of film and philosophy through Godard’s extensive but unique mode of self-reflexivity. Unlike Resnais’s films, which open up to a seemingly infinite possibility of meaning, Godard’s cinema closes in on itself, engaging the very process of film expression in its inquiry and, in doing so, destroying any fixed illusion of certainty or containment. Confronting cinema with the problem of how it reflects on the world of which it is a part, Godard fractures the connotations of objectivity through which many worldviews are guaranteed as natural.