The ultimate journey: remarks on

contemporary theory
Nicole Brenez
Uploaded 22 December, 1997 6,580 words
Abstract
[Editors' Note: This article originally appeared in
French in Art press, un second sicle pour le cinma,
hors-srie 14 (1993): 65-72. In every translation there
are bound to be a certain number of errors. The editors
of Screening the past would like to make use of the
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have kept the referencing system in the original article
for this translation. Notes by the translator appear in
square brackets throughout what follows.]

(1.) [Trans. Note: This translation

is by William D. Routt, with
immense and irreplaceable
assistance from Adrian Martin and
Danielle Pottier-Lacroix, as well as
the author herself. Most of the
notes are as they appeared in the
original. When one or another of us
has been able to locate English
cognates for French references that
information has been added to the
Notes.]

This article attempts to describe what I know of

contemporary French theory, in so far as it informs
experience, as it matters to me and as I have need of it.
There are bound to be some errors and omissions but to
start with I will not omit the respectful silence that
welcomed two publications by Christian
Metz: L'nonciation impersonnelle, ou le site du
film (Meridiens Klincksieck, l99l) and the Christian
Bourgeois reissue of Psychoanalysis and cinema - the
text that made possible a number of reflections on what
was in question during the eighties: the body, emotion,
the figurative (in the rhetorical sense) economy of
fiction. Question number one: what is it, today, that
makes these texts, not in the least unreadable, but on the
contrary so definitively beyond question that they are
unread and unused? (2)
(2.) At the same time the
The experience of theory does not take place just
through books, a lot is transmitted orally, particularly in theoretical work of Christian Metz
found itself celebrated, feted,
the field of cinema. Often films have to be introduced

and film theory is manifested more euphorically in that commented on . . . closed off.
always friendly and always problematic event in which (See Christian Metz et la thorie
du cinma, Iris no. 10, special
a word suddenly changes what you see. These
issue, April 1990, Mridiens
discourses are not always reproduced, but perhaps they Klincksieck and 25 ans de
are more alive than they would be in the state of
smiologie, dossier edited by Andr
Gardies, CinmAction no. 58,
published texts. A book would have remembered for
me, but then I would have been able to forget. Here are January 1991, Corlet-Telrama.)
On L'nonciation
some instances of things that struck me deeply because impersonnellesee the review by
I heard them: what Jacques Aumont, talking
Roger Odin in Iris no. 14-15,
about Puissance de la parole [Godard, 1988], called the Autumn 1992, pp. 201-211. [Trans.
note: an English translation of a
principle of symphonic editing (this was in l989);
Raymond Bellour's analysis of emotion as the genesis portion of L'nonciation
impersonelle appeared as "The
and setting into the world of the effective body (l992); impersonal enunciation or the site
Bernard Eisenschitz's portrait of Nicholas Ray as an
of film (in the margin of recent
experimental cinaste in Hollywood (l990); or again,
works on enunciation in cinema)"
in New Literary History 22 (1991):
Sergio Toffetti's historical comparison of the double
747-772.]
birth in l896 of cinema and football in Turin and the
mutual indifference of the two great popular spectacles
of this century (l993). These theoretical discoveries
remain to this day speech events. The desire comes to
me all the more strongly to take note of this kind of
thing as something proper to the analysis of cinema,
which Serge Daney's posthumous book, L'exercice aura
t profitable Monsieur (POL, l993), an interior
monologue where writing, speech and conversation, an
intimate diary and a sketchy article are mixed together,
accomplished with staggering facility. On the other
hand, now that I have done a little editing myself, I have
come to understand better what a book is and, for
example, why the politique des auteurswould be a more
effective trap in the field of writing than in that of the
cinema. There was, for a time in the early eighties, one
exceptional locus of theorisation, a collection of books
in which each volume was equally important both for its
conceptual invention and as a model of methodological
freedom. Camera lucida by Roland Barthes
(l98O), L'homme ordinaire du cinma by Jean Louis
Schefer (l98O), Souvenirs cran by Claude Ollier
(l98l), Nosferatu by Michel Bouvier and Jean-Louis
Leutrat (l98l), Pour un observateur lointain by Noel
Burch (To the distant observer, French translation,
l982),Le champ aveugle by Pascal Bonitzer (l982), La
rampeby Serge Daney (l983)...; this was Jean Narboni's
"collection grise" for Cahiers du Cinma/Gallimard,
composed of texts which all irrigated the theoretical
monument of this decade, Gilles Deleuze's Cinma
1 and 2(Minuit, l983 and l985) and which above all

demonstrated that the theory (of cinema) never

manifests itself better than as a movement, capable of
carrying in a dynamic ensemble [dynamique
d'ensemble] thoughts that would otherwise be
absolutely singular and irreducible to each other.
Question number two: what runs through all those
books, compelling us to read them, to get to grips with
them over and over, to reflect on them together
[ensemble]? Another editorial determinant: certain
ideas, certain formulations of the ancients (in the timescale of the cinema) are only making their appearance
today and, having remained secret until now, they
appear very new both because they were unremarked
and because now they appear weighted already with
history: the clear history of political censorship, the
mysterious history of the judgements of taste. In this
light, I know nothing more timely and dazzling - in a
word, more enabling - than two collections [ensembles]
(3.) Vsevolod Meyerhold, crits
of reflections dating from early in the century. The first sur le thtre, vol. 4 1935-1940,
of these are the remarks on cinema by Meyerhold, who edited and translated by Batrice
observed, with enthusiasm and melancholy, the cinema's Picon-Valin, Lausanne, L'Age
d'Homme, 1992, p. 321. [Trans.
accession to power in the actor's craft. Meyerhold,
Eisenstein's teacher, played a unique role in the weaving note: none of Brenez's citations of
Meyerhold appear in the two
together of those historical and aesthetic lines that
volumes of English translations I
connect theatre and cinema. His work produced major have been able to consult.]
texts on acting and the stylisation of gesture, eminently
cinematographic material that has largely remained
(4.) Ibid., p. 327.
unthought. A figural thinking [une pense du figural] is
(5.) Ibid., p. 83.
deployed in Meyerhold's work which deals with the
actor's performance in the unprecedented terms of cuts,
a thinking which is the result of a long period of work
bearing simultaneously on the body and on the look.
Meyerhold went behind the scenes of a ballet by Fokine
in order to study the costume of a Caucasian
montagnard at close range, and this became the
occasion for this incisive spectator to demonstrate that
the body does not fit the shape of the silhouette: "there
was too much thick linen, padding, and the devil knows
what getting in the way so that during the show I had
not the slightest view of all the lines of the body [je n'en
avais pas moins vu toutes les lignes du corps]". (3) But I
also like the infinite movement of invention in his work,
that lan that embraces everything and stops at nothing.
I read him, wrongly perhaps, as the Godard of theatre
history. How could I do otherwise in the face of a
remark like this: "When I staged La dame aux camlias,
I was hoping that some pilot might pilot his machine

better because he had seen my show". (4) In the same

way that Meyerhold found he needed a forgotten article
by Lessing on the structure of the epigram (5) in order to
understand Modern times, so we can have recourse to
Meyerhold's work in order to envisage something of
that which, in an actor's performance, partakes of
experimentation, of vitamins, as he himself said about
popular song.
And then there is Vachel Lindsay. "Excuse me, I am
late. I have just finished my book for the blind - The art
of the moving picture". An American poet whose work
generously spills over into the field of cinema, Vachel
Lindsay inaugurated no less than two traditions in the
United States: that of the great film critics: Balzs,
Delluc, Kracauer . . . up to Serge Daney, the spinneret
of the thinkers of the immediate (Lindsay was a
journalist with The New Republic); and that of
theoreticians in the traditional sense of the term.
Lindsay was able to elaborate an aesthetic system for
the cinema at the same time that, as an enthusiastic
spectator, he was in the process of discovering the
cinema himself. The art of the moving picture (1915)
(6) constructs a vast comparative system - how the
cinema appropriates the other arts - having as its
outcome the production of a certain number of analytic
categories feeding into a principal thesis: the cinema
invents new modalities of the visible. (Whence the
joyous and ironic remark that I cited above). The
cinema reformulates the world by means of light and
rhythmic effects. This theory thinks of films in terms of
splendour and speed. "The key-words of the stage are
passion and character; of the
photoplay, splendor and speed". (7) What is it that is
radically alive in Lindsay's reflections, that transforms
these forgotten pages, so beautiful and so witty, yet
active in the history of the cinema (Griffith
distributed The art of the moving picture to his actors),
into texts that are at last publishable and readable in
French, into indispensable texts? And another question
to put the response to that one in perspective: how are
we to talk about the overthrow of theory when Lindsay
made the first analysis of the cinema? In fact, the
history of theories of cinema demands to be rethought
in the light of Vachel Lindsay, in the light of what he
called his proposition: "My overall proposition is that

(6.) Macmillan - due to appear in

France thanks to Marc Chnetier,
who has exhumed, established and
translated Lindsay's writing.
[Trans. note: what this means is
that the references in French are
not keyed to a published text. I
have done what I could to tie
Brenez's quotes to the 1970
Liveright reissue of the 1922
version (see note 7 for complete
reference), but some of them come
from places other than The art of
the moving picture - especially
from Lindsay's letters and from his
unpublished book on the
cinema,The greatest movies now
running. The first quote is from a
letter to Ms. Montague, 16
September 1915, in the University
of West Virginia Archives
(N.Brenez, letter to W.Routt, 23
July 1997).]
(7.) [Trans. note: Lindsay, The art
of the moving picture, New York:
Liveright, 1970, 193.]

(8.) [Trans. note: The greatest

movies now running, 130, cited in
Laurence Goldstein, The American
poet at the movies (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press), 32.]

the United States is a great movie". (8) We should

attempt to attend fully to such a statement, and this is
not the place for that. But I can sketch out such a thing
here: if Lindsay has thrown out a thread that has been
broken which might tie up contemporary theories again,
it is because he thought of the cinema not as a simple
reflection, the redoubling of something that already
existed, but as the emergence of a visionary critical
activity. The cinema is for him that art which renders
images first of all capable of detecting the structure of
the present. Seeing Douglas Fairbanks in The thief of
(9.) [Trans. note: Lindsay, 78.]
Bagdad "the American idea" can be understood, which
is "to destroy in the fraction of a second the repose one
finds between two heartbeats". But images can also
anticipate phenomena to come, which figurative
analysis brings into the immediate present. For
example, on the subject of the representation of the
crowd in films, in remarks that form a diptych with
those written ten years later by Soviet cineastes or
Walter Benjamin, Lindsay prophesied, "as we peer into
the Mirror Screen some of us dare to look forward to
the time when the pouring streets of men will become
sacred in each other's eyes, in pictures and in
fact". (9) In this way the cinema is much more than an
heuristically high-powered technology: it is a mode of
thought, thought based on visual (splendour) and
temporal (speed) properties, which produces humanity.
(A contrario, Lindsay wrote, "this book is intended to
fight against the non-humanity produced by
undisciplined photography"). And it is this
fundamentally moral idea of a cinema with the power of
political perspective and figural responsibility which
brings Lindsay into today's reflections on the cinema by
Deleuze, Daney, Schefer, Straub or Godard.
Theoreticians, like cineastes, base a part of their
meditation (written or filmed) on two common premises
which Lindsay argued at the edge of cinema theory: the
idea that film, because it does not imitate a referent but
allows it to come forth from the real, can eventually
provide the world; and the corollary that an image is not
a plastic phantom but a dynamic principle endowed
with powers that demand to be deployed and reflected.
From that spring the three axes of theorisation which
seem to me to have been of major significance through
this decade: work on the powers of the image, on the
figurability of the subject, and on the thinkable relations

between the cinematograph and history.

(10.) [Trans. note: portions
In the beginning was Jean Louis Schefer, because he
ofL'homme ordinaire and L'image,
completely reconsidered the question of analogy in
la mort appear in English
cinema. In 1980 Schefer published three texts devoted translation under the title of
wholly or in part to the cinema: L'homme ordinaire du "Cinema" in The enigmatic body:
cinma (op. cit.), L'image, la mort, la mmoire (with
essays on the artsby Jean-Louis
Raoul Ruiz, a Cinma, Albatros) and La lumire et la Schefer, edited and translated by
proie, anatomies d'une figure religieuse - Le Corrge Paul Smith (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995:
1526 (Albatros). (10)To which one ought to add the four 108-138). The whole ofLa lumire
articles appearing in the out-of-series issue of Cahiers et la proie also appears there, under
du cinma entitledMonstresses, edited by Pascal
the title of "Light and its prey" (65Bonitzer [1980]. To describe what he was talking about, 107). Citations of Schefer in what
Schefer invented a new syntax which works in such a follows will refer to the translations
in The enigmatic body whenever
way that, just when you believe you are able to
possible.]
reasonably get hold of a firm thesis, suddenly the idea
slips away by means of a false grammatical relation and
the movement throws you back at the text like a
spinning top. This stylisation of the ungraspable draws
you along as part of the very proof of that which the
theoretical elaboration is constructing: the description of (11.) "The cinema makes visible
the unknown relations that the cinema installs between the effect of the alterity of the
the subject and its experience (of the world, of others, of world" (L'image, la mort, p. 47).
the image). The cinema, according to Schefer, comes to
pass as a whole [ensemble] (unsystematic in appearance
only). Proofs of its strangeness: it comes simultaneously (12.) "This sudden raising within
as "the effect of the alterity of the world" (11)and as the us of a phantom existence, of an
fecundity of the unknown in the very heart of intimacy. unsuspected vampire" (L'homme
ordinaire, p. 113); ". . . like a
But this intimacy becomes the most precarious of
angel that assists the
places, it is no more than a decoy of interiority that the guardian
spectator and would be the ideal
cinema transforms into a precipitate of anxiety by
place, the scarcely projected place,
means of addressing itself to the spectator's "yet more of a realisation of a perceiving
unknown" impulsive body (this man called ordinary that body which is known only as the
chimera of a living body (L'image,
Schefer describes now as a vampire, now like a
guardian angel (12), about whom he solicits above all, la mort, p. 67).
aphasia and fear). "I wanted to explain how the cinema
(13.) L'homme ordinaire, p. 17.
stays within us as a final chamber where both the hope [Trans. note: The enigmatic
and the illusion of an interior history are
body,114.]
caught". (13) For Jean Louis Schefer the cinema is
(14.) [Trans. note: The enigmatic
neither a world nor a way of knowing and still less a
body, 94-96.]
corpus of films, but a phenomenon: the problematic
work of disproportion. For example, it is the
(15.) "The notion of the analogy is
disproportion of the visible that withdraws my body
evidently, logically, an 'aberration'
from myself and metamorphoses it into "experimental in the proper sense of the term",
consciousness". It is the disproportion of sense [sens] cited in the illuminating and
that introduces a fable of death into the picture, unsticks necessary historic analysis of

it from its stage to project it in time and obliteration (see

the section entitled "film" in "Light and its prey" (14). It Shefer's work by Jean-Louis
is the final improportion that will not synthesise all the Leutrat in Kaleidoscope, P.U.L.,
1988, p. 13.
"ends of humanity" presented by the screen into some
ultimate lesson about the stranger. It is time, the
(16.) "L'accident" in Cet enfant de
monster. It is in this sense that one should understand cinma, edited by Alain Bergala,
the assertion that analogy is "evidently" a (logical,
Institut de l'Image, 1993, p. 39.
optical) aberration. (15) Nothing exists in the future or
(17.) L'homme ordinaire, p. 198
the present of the cinema to which it would be
analogous. There is only a protracted problem of
resemblance (which is doubtless Schefer's real subject),
that is to say, that which, despite everything else, links
all the terms of the disproportion. Pure proof of
diversity, the cinema has affected us like "a fold along
which all the variation enters us (including what has not
been done) in the spectacle of others, enlarged people
and things, incomprehensibly cut apart and joined
together" (16) and having done this, it propels us into
that dizziness which Schefer often calls "the new" and
even, in a quite Rimbaudian fashion, "the renewed
world of affects" (17). It is obvious that in this
examination of the aporiae of the visible which is also
an affective ethnology of itself there is no longer a place
for a terrestrial referent of any sort. (However, this is
really a question of a resolutely historical description, as
will be seen a little later on). The cinema leaves the
referent, and analogy gets to work on the terrain of
(18.) Hubert Damish discusses
resemblance, elaborates the presumptions of the subject. Cassirer's phrase in "Panofsky am
After Schefer's formulations, a dividing line arises more Scheidewege" in Panofsky, cahiers
clearly between modern theorisations whichever side of pour un temps, Centre Pompidou,
the argument (in the literary sense of the term) they are 1983, p. 106.
on - including Vachel Lindsay (the theoretical
[Trans. note: the French
movement taking up in its spiral again the unreadable (19.)
translation of Adorno's Aesthetic
bits that floated in previous constellations) - and
Theory, quoted in Brenez's note,
classical theorisations, which postulate the existence of has "le montage est la capitulation
intra-esthtique de l'art devant ce
a world, or better, a subject, to which the cinema is
referable a priori: the work of Christian Metz, notably. qui lui est htrogne" (trans. Marc
Klincksieck, 1989: 201).
Having placed the world out of consideration, modern Jimenez,
The English translation is "Viewed
theories find their area in considering the cinema no
aesthetically, montage was the
longer as a scientific construction or as narrative, as
capitulation by art before what is
different from it" (trans. G.
classical readings would have it, but as a critical
Lenhardt, London: Routledge &
proposition, a hypothetical gesture, an essay. All the
shots of a film do not originate in the same space or in Kegan Paul, 1984: 222).]
the same time as thought. Letting a body advance in a
field does not necessarily engage the advent of a
presence. The interstices between shots reserve places
for absent images. These are some of the consequences,

among others, that provoke the rupture of the analogic

pact between image and world. Whether the film
enquires into something or whether it problematises its
linkages with a big Other (reality, experience, death),
either course has the effect of unleashing it, of throwing
it into the history of humanity. At the end ofSoigne ta
droite [Keep up your right, Godard, 1987] we see
presented in a very masterly fashion the event of the
suppression of those closures (the 'clausal' effect of end
credits) which habitually serve not so much to politely
dismiss the audience as to guarantee the integrity of the
film and of the place where it has been shown. As
theory today reflects it, the cinema appears before
everything else as the negation of what art historians
would call a "symbolisation", which designates a work
of conciliation, a "conquest of the world as
representation" (18). On the contrary, the cinema has not
ceased tearing itself apart, making its fractures deeper,
making the powers of discontinuity and its double
(repetition) deeper, working over caesurae and allowing
defection to work as if it was a question, in Adorno's
words, of "capitulating before heterogeneity" (19).
What has assisted the contemporary theorising of the
cinema? The massive recuperation of certain defective
images and the elaboration of economies of
representation (filmic and textual) set in train by these
images themselves. Which images? The ones from the
concentration camps. Returning endlessly to the
unsettled character of the disappearances, the theory of
cinema (which is, strikingly, produced these days by
isolated individuals and not by schools or laboratories
as is the case in other fields) is collectively and whether
it knows it or not, Blanchotian. The two major works of
this period were actually structured like Maurice
Blanchot's Death sentence. On the absolute terror of the
Second World War; on the blinding and absent images
of the camps; on the necessity of retrieving a body all
the same, on this "Rio Zero" (20), pivot the two
theoretical agglomerations that are most important for
the cinema: Gilles Deleuze's Cinema and Jean-Luc
Godard'sCinema History(s) (1989). Both initially
presented themselves in two volumes (video chapters in
Godard's case), both finished their first volumes and
started their second with the same moment of the
cinema and with the same cineaste: Roberto Rossellini,

(20.) "They are now convinced that

they will perhaps one day find the
source of this river, but they doubt
they will ever find representatives
of the human race. Father
Duchartre baptises the river, 'Rio
Zero'." Jean Renoir, "Magnificat
IV", 1941, translated by
Dominique Villain, in Oeuvres de
cinma indites, collected by
Claude Gauteur, Cahiers du
cinma, Gallimard, 1981, p. 109.
(21.) A project that one can now
read as well as see: Alain Bergala
collected Rossellini's writing in Le
cinma rvl, for ditions de
l'toile in 1984. Fragments d'une
autobiographie, translated by
Stefano Roncoroni, appeared in
1987 (Ramsay).

a tutelary figure who had intensely taken as his charge

the narration of that catastrophe. During this decade
many ideas of the cinema and ideas of filmic analysis
were born from his proposals or were verified on the
corpus of the Rossellinian project (21). One only has to
consider the vital role that Rossellini plays throughout
the last pages of Daney's L'exercice aura t profitable,
Monsieur. Of all these ideas, let's retain this one, which
traverses Deleuze and Godard: the cinema offers the
possibility of a body. What does that mean?
For Deleuze it means first that the modern history of the (22.) See Bruno Alcala, "Temps et
pense" and Marie-Claire Roparscinema is no longer oriented solely according to
Wuillemier, "Le cinma, lecteur de
movements and aesthetic schools but that across these Gilles Deleuze" in CinmAction no.
sites there is a question of describing the invention of 47, 1988 ["The cinema, reader of
singular anthropologies. Deleuze's logical and
Gilles Deleuze", Camera
philosophic models (Bergson, Peirce) have already been Obscura18 (September 1988): 120commented on, as well as the systematic construction 126], Les thories du cinma, a
dossier edited by Jacques
and the variable relations of concepts to their object
Kermabon; Reda Bensmaia, "Un
from The movement-image to The time-image. (22) In philosophe au cinma", Le
sum, the structure of the Deleuzian architecture has
magazine littraire no. 257,
been well described. But this enterprise articulates two September 1988; Jean-Louis
apparently incompatible energies: it constructs a system Leutrat, "Deux temps, trois
mouvements" and "L'araigne"
at the same time that it maintains always an effect of
inKaleidoscope, op. cit.
being an enquiry: it imports strong conceptual models at
the same time that it seems to be taking its concepts
from the films themselves. What can be found to bring
these two postulates together? Doubtless it is the
analytic mesh that constitutes Deleuzian developments
and condenses itself by returning to and varying the
same questions: how does a figure inhabit its body, how
does the body concentrate itself or open itself out as a (23.) So Viktor Shklovsky wrote in
22 of Zoo (1923, translated
result of its gesture, how does the gesture splice or not Letter
by Vladimir Pozner, Gallimard,
splice space and time? Here are some of the
1963, p. 93) about literature insofar
instrumental figurative concerns that permit a
as it is able to be inspired by the
arts of spectacle: "All contrasts end
distinction among regimes of liaison between
by being exhausted. So only one
phenomena: rational and organic liaisons in the
remains: to move to
movement-image, intermittent and complex liaisons in solution
'isolated moments' [passer aux
the time-image. But the Deleuzian innovation is not to 'moments isols'], break the
be found entirely in the story of the evolution of forms relations which have become scar
tissue". [Trans. note: again there is
by such clear and operative different routes, from
a significant difference in the
action-image to crystal-image, perception-image to
translation: "Finally, all
description, affection-image to pure optics and sound. English
contrasts are exhausted. Then one
This history of form(s) has already been sketched out choice remains - to shift the
elsewhere (23); and the history of film has already
components, to sever the
thrown up several roadblocks in its path, like Quentin connections, which have become

Tarantino's Reservoir dogs (1992) which, beginning as

scar tissue" (Zoo, or letters not
an ensemble demonstration of what the idea of
about love, Ithaca: Cornell
performance signifies in an actor's performance,
University Press, 1971: 81).]
finishes by completely confounding the narrative effect
with pure optic and sound, which Deleuze had thought
of as two mutually exclusive image regimes. What
seems to me most precious in Cinema 1 and 2 is the
idea, nourished and intensified by each analysis, that the
image (its regime, the economy of its sequencing and its
cutting) is charged with formulating an ontological
proposition, in a mode of thought where being does not
necessarily precede its figuration where, as well, being
is not necessarily oriented towards figuration. This is
the reason for the privileged attention accorded by
Deleuze to cinemas of anthropological decentring Welles more than Ford, Dreyer more than Lang, and
even Antonioni more than Rossellini, the latter putting
humanity where Antonioni effaces it - those stylistics
that work inside and outside the human figure, indeed
against it, in the greatest suffering, on the signs of its
viability or of its impossibility of being, on the signs of
its disappearance and of its return. (Signs which will
later be placed again in play and with such plastic
grandeur in Godard's Nouvelle vague [1990]). So that at
bottom what structures Cinema, at least as much as a
conceptual logic, is the desire to restore confidence in
the world, to rediscover a possibility of believing in the
body. Because he forgets nothing of the shocking
history, nothing of the weakness nor of the fragility,
because he has taken in obliquely everything which in
the cinema evokes absence and disintegration, Deleuze
is able to write (and of course this is about Philippe
Garrel, who continues to burn the screen with black and
white lights that reaffirm the figure in apparition):
We must believe in the body, but as in the germ of life,
the seed which splits open the paving stones, which has
been preserved and lives on in the holy shroud or the
mummy's bandages, and which bears witness to life, in
this world as it is. We need an ethic or a faith, which
makes fools laugh; it is not a need to believe in
something else, but a need to believe in this world, of
which fools are a part. (24)
Retrieving a body. This motif often recurs in Godard's
work also - for example when he declares, "If I make

(24.) Cinma 2: l'image-temps, p.

225. [Trans. note: this quote is
directly from Cinema 2: the timeimage, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press,
1989: 173.]
(25.) 10th interview with Nol
Simsolo, " voix nue", France-

cinema it is already a resurrection". (25) How does such Culture, 1989.

a phrase make sense, why isn't it sheer insanity? To
understand it, one must take account of the movement
of conceptualisation that Godard has imprinted on the
notion of the image, intertwined with history, rethought
by him along three principle lines, three conditions of (26.) Ibid., 1st interview. The
the theoretical possibility of establishing a history of
citations that follow are taken from
cinema. First, the cinema enters into a particular rapport this radio series [ensemble].
with history: it proves that people have a memory, a
predictive memory to boot ("the cinema being the
souvenir or the presentment of a history" (26) it
interrogates the idea of having a history, reattributing an
experimental character to the very notion of history here Godard invents a concept of his own: that of
History By Itself [Histoire seule]: "This kind of history
unreels by itself, like the history of the stars. History is
independent, in a certain way, of characters. Novelists
know this perfectly well: this history is by itself". This
means also that it unreels between, between people,
between temporalities, betweenimages, in that interval
which exceeds the human and which only the work of
montage is able to put into question. Second, three
particular relations between the cinema and its own
history exist. It is the only art which is able to conceive
of its history in its (own) distinctive material, with
images and sounds (on account of which this history is
called "true"). Its history is that of a double betrayal:
betrayal by industry, which has reduced the continent of
cinema to a single fiction by itself, and betrayal by the
public, which is uninterested in documentary because it
detests its work. It is necessary thus to recount a
potential history for the cinema, to restore to the cinema
the history of its potentialities. "The cinema ought to be
spoken of as something that has existed, which was able
to exist otherwise and which is a trace of what people
have between themselves and which they call history".
This is why the History(s) of cinema insist on
unfinished films or films which were not able to be
realised: Max Ophuls'L'cole des femmes, Welles' Don
Quixote - and that the cinema responds better to this
concept when it accomplishes itself as virtual, as the
very idea of the possible, that is to say, when it
anticipates effective history - but it always anticipates it.
"The cinema does not show, it previsions ... when it is
artisanal, it is ten or twenty years in advance, when it is
factory-made, it is two or three years". Now, from this
predictive capacity is born precisely the ultimate

scandal which always wedges the cinema off from its

own history, that in some way tears it away from itself
and hollows it out, not in an external but in an internal
way, creating that depression around which
the History(s) will turn. "From Vienna to Madrid, from
Siodmak to Capra, from Paris to Los Angeles and
Moscow, from Renoir to Malraux and Dovshenko, the
great directors of fiction have been incapable of
controlling the vengeance that they have staged so
often". (This citation and the following are extracts
from Toutes les histoires). Renoir, Malraux, had
previsioned the war and described Guernica; George
Stevens' colour film had recorded the discovery of the
camps. But the cinema had been able to do nothing to
forestall [prvenir] the catastrophe. The most exact
premonitions, like that of the little rabbit killed in La
rgle du jeu, had not sufficed as a warning: the cinema
found its terrible limit. So the work of the possible is
here confounded with historical powerlessness, and
barren anxiety transforms itself into culpability. "1941,
1942, 1943, 1944. Nearly five years during which the
people of the darkened rooms burned up the imaginary
so that they might heat up the real again. Now the latter
takes vengeance and wants real tears and real blood".
Third, a particular rapport exists between the history of
the cinema and one who relates that history: history
being "a general model of feeling", the narrator recounts
it as if he had lived it, in the form of a personal novel
where chronology does not intervene except as a
reference point ("like a railway signal"). In this
enterprise of identification between history and its
narrator, history being that of all the virtualities and the
narrator the one who evokes them and reconstitutes
them with choleric melancholy, the subject opens itself
indefinitely and becomes, literally, the possible subject
[le sujet du possible].
These principles inscribe themselves in the stylistic
structure of the History(s) of cinema, in the integral
comparativism(27) [comparatisme] of that style which
slows down images and speeds up montage. Short
alternating superimpositions become Godard's principle
videographic figure, this living beat that makes the
images palpitate, suppresses the very principle of the
shot as a unity and makes it so that an image is first an
ensemble being [tre-ensemble], the overlapping of two

(27.) [Trans. note: this is a real, if

obsolete, English word, not simply,
or wholly, the French-influenced
jargon of pseuds like me.]

motifs, of two procedures, of the image achieved with

that which remains to be achieved, the triumphant
image and the scratched photogramme. An image,
according to the History(s) of cinema, presents itself at
once as a temporal atom that must be split by sheer
force of slowing it or by conflicting it; an ensemble
being which has always already a rapport with its other,
with what is editable [montable] - and a proposition, a
hypothesis, an opening to sense which is able to
authenticate itself by this warrant as unacceptable or as
inaudible, the way all thought is. (In
theHistory(s) moreover, however familiar an image is, it
can become unwatchable by being shown with too
much compassion - little Edmund's leap, for example.
Or with too much pain - Elizabeth Taylor's happiness
in A place in the sun.) This force of opening, the
product of a systematic investigation into the powers of (28.) Le rapport Darty, Jean-Luc
Godard, 1989
what is editable, carries the image to its conceptual
plenitude: it becomes that which constitutes the
projected subject [le sujet en projet], it moves the
human over to the side of the figurable, "because it
brings it back to the earth". The image is what puts the
possible back into the world. "It is a property of images
to come from elsewhere, and that elsewhere is here, and
in no way elsewhere". (28) In a very fine text entitled
"L'accident", which perhaps could not have been written
before theHistory(s) of cinema -whether its author had
seen them or not - Jean Louis Schefer revealed the
setting of his first time at the movies:
I recall simply the hall lit before the projection and a
little girl two rows in front of us talking to her father,
"Papa, you haven't told me about [bien racont]
'Buchenwald'". Attentive, with a soft voice like a
professor, "You must say (pronounced in German)
'Bukenvald', it means 'beech forest'". A kind of
overwhelmed silence fell over the hall. The light went
out and the film began: Neapolitan children making a
living shining shoes. (29)
Surely after this the cinema could no longer be anything
other than the mutual anamorphosis of two
incommensurable sorrows. Deleuze, Godard, Schefer,
the Straubs when they dedicated Antigone to the Iraqi
dead whom the audiovisual media had denied, theorised

(29.) In Cet enfant de cinma, p.

43.

(30.) "To make the visible a little

hard to see", thus begins P. Adams
Sitney's book, Modernist montage:
the obscurity of vision in cinema

the history of cinema in a genuinely scientific fashion,

like Leverrier discovering Neptune as a consequence of and literature, Columbia
the unexplained perturbations of Uranus: the history of University Press, 1990. [Trans.
note: the phrase actually occurs in
cinema is made as a consequence of difficult images
the second sentence of his book,
and damned images, those one does not know how to and Sitney attributes it to Wallace
make, those one has not wanted to see, troubling images Stevens's poem, "The Creations of
that perturb and darken. (30) (One film tests this to the Sound".
limit by organising an eclipse of images: this is Jean
Eustache's last film, which dates from 1980 - Les
photos d'Alix.)
Modern theories of cinema in fact unceasingly return to (31.) Pierre Legendre, Le passion
d'tre un autre, Seuil, 1978, p. 154.
"the simplest question: the body, how do you find
it?" (31) The great analyses of the last years have looked
into the ways in which film presupposes, elaborates,
gives or abstracts a body, not hesitating to pose again
such primitive questions as what texture is it (flesh,
marble, plaster, affect, doxa)? What is its framework
(32.) "The body cannot be remade
(skeleton, semblance, becoming, a structure of
into a noble object: it remains the
formlessness [plastiques de l'informe])? What destroys corpse however vigorously it is
it (the other, history, deforming its contours)? What kind trained and kept fit", Adorno and
Horkheimer, The dialectic of
of community does its gestures allow it to envision
enlightenment, 1944 [London:
(people, collectivity [collection], alignment with the
Allen Lane, 1973: 234].
same)? To what regime of the visible has it submitted
(apparition, extinction, haunting)? What is its story
(33.) 'Vogage en Italie de Roberto
Rossellini, Yellow Now, 1990 and
really (an adventure, a description, a panoply)? What
"Antonioni annes cinquante: une
creature is it at bottom (an organism, an effigy, a
de l'oubli"
cadaver)? (32) In sum, they have explored the ways in esthtique
inCinmathque no. 2, Yellow
which a film invents a figurative logic. Thus Alain
Now, November 1992.
Bergala's work on Voyage in Italy or on Antonioni's first
features (33) shows how the real suddenly seizes the
film, blindsides it [le sidre] in spite of what the human
(34.) In Cahiers du cinma nos.
figures [les figures] expect and lead us to expect,
331 and 332, January and February
according to logics of irruption (Rossellini) or of
1982.
effacement (Antonioni) which extract the characters
from the narrative and transform them into subjects of
history (of the human community in Rossellini; of the
war in Antonioni). Charles Tesson's articles, in the very (35.) "Sacha Guitry ou le thtre au
dispersion of their objects and their methods (aesthetic, cinma" in Thtre et
historic, economic) everywhere mark the problems of cinma,Studio 43-Dunkerque,
the constitution of filmic bodies, beginning with that of 1990.
their mythic origins. For example, in "La momie sans
complexe" and "Profils de monstres" (34), Tesson
analyses scenarios of the body in fantasy cinema and
retraces the figurative economies that presided over
their beginnings: the logic of the assemblage in Joe

Dante or the logic of resemblances in Jacques Tourneur.

Or, again, to take a very different cinematography,
analysing body-speech [le corps-parole] in Sacha
(36.) Monstresses, [Cahiers du
Guitry (35), Tesson reuses a schema of Lessing's in
cinma, hors srie, 1980], Photos
designating Guitry's thoracic cavity as the centre of
de films, edited by Alain Bergala,
gravity around which his films turn. Which is to say that 1978; Marc Vernet, Figures de
figurative analysis seizes upon problems in advance of l'absence, ditions de l'toile,
1988; Jean Narboni, "La robe sans
their social admissibility and notably in advance of
couture" in Roberto
normal film usage as genre or within established
Rossellini,Cahiers du cinma/La
aesthetic divisions. Perhaps because of his pulmonary cinmathque franaise, 1990;
madness, Guitry is more monstrous than the hero
Pascal Bonitzer, Le champ aveugle,
ofVideodrome with his VCR-abdomen. Perhaps his
op. cit.; Michel Chion, La voix au
cinma, ditions de ltoile,
theatrical realism is more profoundly fantastic than
Cronenberg's simple organic and mechanic montages. 1982, Le son au cinma, ditions
de l'toile, 1985,
There are a lot of texts and a lot of questions to point to
here: those out-of-series issues of Cahiers du
(37.) Bazin's emphasis, "De Sica,
cinma (Monstresses, Photos de films), Marc
metteur en scne" in Qu'est-ce que
Vernet's Figures de l'absence, Jean Narboni's "La robe le cinma, vol. 4: Une esthtique
sans couture", Pascal Bonitzer's books, Michel Chion's de la ralit: le neo-ralisme,
ditions du Cerf, 1962, p. 88
which instruct us in the elaboration of the sonorous
[Trans. note: "the subject exists
body, and still others. (36) For me the invention of
before the working scenario, but it
figural analysis for the cinema definitively began in
does not exist afterward" according
1979 with Godard's mise-en-page for his issue 300
to the English translation (What is
cinema?, vol. 2, Berkeley:
of Cahiers and, very precisely, with the montage that
argued, "See how Krystyna Janda acts in a bad dream of University of California Press,
what used to beOctober". Such is the Bazinian exigency 1971, 77)].
maintained in the heart of a type of non-Bazinian
analysis that no longer takes the real as second nature or
as the second nature of film and which, in every way,
does not have the same conception of the real (rather
Lacanian these days): to find the way the cinema
discovers human experience (and this could be a door as
unexpected as Cocteau's mirror-pools, the anxious face
of an actress in a tendentious film [film thse], the
formless shot of a bus with which nothing can be done)
and the way the cinema sets that experience forth naked,
in its radical strangeness, in that which is unnameable in
it. Moreover, this is why we remain still a little behind
Bazin, who was capable of writing about Umberto D,
"The subject (of the film) exists before, it does not
exist after".(37)
the look and the drama. If there is painting in Godard's
cinema, it is there no longer only henceforth in the
reprise of certain representations but in the
appropriation, the renovation or the abduction of

(39.) My emphasis. "Godard

peintre" in "Jean-Luc Godard - le
cinma", Revue Belge du cinma,
no. 22/23, edited by Philippe
Dubois, p. 42; reprinted with

pictorial problems and more largely in its relation to the modifications in L'oeil
interminable, op. cit., p. 227.
visible. (39)
Decisive also because of its historic frame: neither the
pictorial nor the cinematographic exist in themselves,
they consist only of changing, conflicting elaborations
which suggest becoming [dont le devenir doit tre
pens] (the history of the inventions of the frame
in L'Oeil interminableought to be followed by its
mutations in focus [en point] in Godard). Decisive for
its consequences and notably for its reworking in Du
visage au cinma where the question of the face allows
a singular enrichment of the question of the portrait.
From one book to the next, we move from a history of
the problematisation of plastic constituents (the
successive creations of the frame, color, light ... by
painting and by the cinema) to the analytic elaboration
of the chief problem of the cinema: that of the face. In
other words, the confrontation between cinema and
painting has not been a matter of plastic forms, it has
constituted the foundation of a poetics, no longer of
parameters, forms or styles, but a poetics of problems,
which Jacques Aumont has inaugurated with the most
important study of all.
Face, portrait, self-portrait: three terms of the question
of identity have been submitted to an intense
questioning throughout this decade. Raymond Bellour's
fine book,L'Entre-images, which describes with great
delicacy the movement of the image between fields of
art that are apparently very close: photography, cinema
and video, ends almost with these words:
the works that we have traversed all pose the question,
"Who am I?" even if they do not formulate it exactly
like that. They respond by making of this "I",
sometimes caught fleetingly, a scattered entity, of
excess, of drift [drive], of play, and the visible support
of an anonymity that contrives an access to the seizure
of the word as to the forces of personal anxiety. You see
here subjects lured by the most intimate side of
(40.) L'Entre-images. Photo.
themselves [attirs du plus intime d'eux-mmes]
Cinma. Vido, La Diffrence,
towards a new form of "thinking of the outside", based 1990, p. 330
on the constraints and the possibilities of image and
sound. (40)

I believe that I can finish on this note: the subject of the

cinema as contemporary theories have grasped it is that
creature haunted by heterogeneity which, more than
knowing itself, prefers to verify that something else is
still possible (a body, a friend, a world). The cinema that
describes this is thus a cinema with a very elevated
figural responsibility. It employs and deploys the image
according to its powers (without presuming on its
abilities ), (41) and it begs for anthropological analyses
in the manner of Jean-Pierre Vernant drawing the
frontiers of the Grecian body thanks to the vocabulary
of the Iliad, in the manner of Claude Ollier describing
the modes of the destruction of the other in the films of
Feuillade. (42) Gilles Deleuze wrote magnificently to
Serge Daney, "You find . . . that film itself still has
endless possibilities, and that it is the ultimate
journey". (43) En route I have omitted many things that
were nevertheless outstanding: texts by Nol Burch, by
Patrick Lacoste. I would like to talk about the
intellectual evolution that marks the different analyses
of Dreyer's Vampyr, the theoretic fetish of this
decade . . . and this piece is already too long. That will
be for the third century.