by Jason Monaco
The economics of film determines its infrastructure—its foundations—and therefore its potential. The politics of film determines its structure: that is, the way it relates to the world. We understand film, experience it, and consume it from two different perspectives. The "sociopolitics" of film describes how it reflects and is integrated with human experience in general. Film's "psychopolitics" attempts to explain how we relate to it personally and specifically. Because film is such a widespread popular phenomenon, it plays a very important part in modern culture, sociopolitically. Because it provides such a powerful and convincing representation of reality, film also has a profound effect on members of its audience, psycho politically. The two aspects are closely interrelated, yet the differentiation is useful, since it focuses attention on the difference between the general effect of film and its specific personal effect.
Whichever way we look at it, film is a distinctly political phenomenon. Indeed, its very existence is revolutionary. In his landmark essay on the subject, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," the critic Walter Benjamin wrote:
One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.... it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition.... Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage [Illuminations, p. 221].
Benjamin's prose is a bit abstruse, but the points he makes are basic to an understanding of the way film (and other mechanically reproduced arts) function in society. The most significant difference, Benjamin is saying, between film and the older arts is that the new art can be mass-produced, reaching the many rather than the few. (This is the sociopolitical aspect.) This has a revolutionary effect: not only is the art available on a regular basis to large numbers of people, but it also meets observers on their home grounds, thereby reversing the traditional relationship between the work of art and its audience. These two facts about film— (1) that it is plural rather than unique; (2) that it is infinitely reproducible— directly contradict romantic traditions of art and therefore invigorate and purify. (This is the psychopolitical aspect.)
Film has changed the way we perceive the world and therefore, to some extent, how we operate in it. Yet while the existence of film may be revolutionary, the practice of it most often has not been. Because the channels of distribution have been limited, because costs have prohibited access to film production to all but the wealthiest, the medium has been subject to strict, if subtle, control.
In America between 1920 and 1950, for example, the movies provided the main cultural format for the discovery and description of our national identity. (Television quickly replaced movies after 1950.) Historians argue whether the movies simply reflected the national culture that already existed or whether they produced a fantasy of their own that eventually came to be accepted as real. In a sense, the point is moot. No doubt the writers, producers, directors, and technicians who worked in the large studio factories during the great age of Hollywood were simply transferring materials they had picked up in "real life" to the screen. No doubt, too, even if those materials weren't consciously distorted toward political ends, the very fact that the movies amplified certain aspects of our culture and attenuated others had a profound effect. Thus, two paradoxes control the politics of film: on the one hand, the form of film is revolutionary; on the other, the content is most often conservative of traditional values. Second, the politics of film and the politics of "real life" are so closely intertwined that it is generally impossible to determine which is the cause and which is the effect. This discussion mainly involves American movies. The relationship between politics and film is no less intriguing in other contexts, but it was the homogeneous factory system of the studios that most subtly reflected (or inspired) the surrounding political culture. Because Hollywood movies were mass-produced, they tended to reflect the surrounding culture—or, more accurately, the established myths of the culture—more precisely than did the work of strongly individual authors. Indeed, many of the most notable auteurs in film history stand out precisely because their work goes against the establishment grain, politically: Chaplin, Stroheim, Vidor, Eisenstein, Renoir, Rossellini, Godard, for example.
The basic truism of film history is that the development of the art/industry is best seen as a product of the dialectic between film realism and film expressionism: between film's power to mimic reality and its power to change it. The earliest film artists—the Lumiere brothers and Georges Melies—succinctly demonstrated this dichotomy between realism and expressionism. Yet, underlying the dialectic of mimesis/expression is another, more basic, premise: that the definition of film style depends on the film's relationship with its audience. When a filmmaker decides on a realist style, he or she does so to decrease the distance between viewer and subject; the expressionist style, on the other hand, looks to change, move, or amuse the observer through the technique of film. Both these aesthetic decisions are essentially political since they insist on relationships (among filmmaker, film, subject, and observer) rather than idealized abstract systems. In this way, too, the film is inherently and directly political: it has a dynamic relationship with its audiences.
To summarize, every film, no matter how minor it may seem, exhibits a political nature on one or more of these three levels:
• ontological, because the medium of film itself tends to deconstruct the traditional values of the culture;
• mimetically, because any film either reflects reality or recreates it (and its politics);
• inherently, because the intense communicative nature of film gives the relationship between film and observe a natural political dimension.
A political history of film, then, might very well be three times as complex as anesthetic history, since we should trace the development of all three political facets. We have space to examine only a few of the most salient features of film politics.
Ontologically, the best evidence we have that film has radically altered traditional values lies in the phenomenon of celebrity. Previously, heroic models for society were either purely fictional creations or real people of accomplishment (whom we knew only at one remove). Film fused the two types: real people became fictional characters. The concept of the "star" developed—and stars are quite different from "actors." The most important role Douglas Fairbanks played was not Robin Hood or Zorro, but "Douglas Fairbanks." (In fact, Douglas Fairbanks was played by Douglas Ullman—his original name.) Likewise, Charles Chaplin played, not Hitler or Monsieur Verdoux, but always "Chariot," the tramp and Mary Pickford (with Chaplin and Fairbanks the United Artists, the preeminent stars of their day) was forever typecast as "Little Mary, America's sweetheart." When she tried in the late twenties to change her public image, her career came to an end.
Early film producers seem to have been well aware of the potential phenomenon of stardom. They insisted that their actors work in anonymity. In 1912, however, the first fan magazines appeared, identifying "the Biograph Girl" and "Little Mary." A few years later, having been liberated from anonymity, Chaplin and Pickford was vying to see which of the two would be the first to sign a million dollar contract. Clearly, Little Mary and Chariot had struck responsive chords in audiences. The complex relationship between stars and the public has been a prime element of the mythic, and hence political, nature of film ever since. "Stars" act out their personas through nominal character roles. "Celebrities" appear mainly as "themselves" and are known, in Daniel Boorstin's apt phrase, "for their well-knownness." We tend to downplay the significance of this phenomenon, yet stars are extraordinary psychological models of a type that never existed before. We can trace the development of the phenomenon of celebrity back to the lecture circuits of the nineteenth century, where intellectual heroes such as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain (a "character," by the way, created by Samuel Clemens) played themselves to adoring audiences. Yet, until the "age of mechanical reproduction," these celebrities reached few people. The public outpouring of grief over the death of Rudolph Valentino in 1926, after his short and undistinguished career as a film actor, exceeded in intensity and dimension the reaction to any similar public death up to that time. It was only after politicians became celebrities that victims of assassination elicited such universal mourning. Although studio moguls tried to construct stars of this magnitude artificially, they seldom succeeded. Stars were—and still are—the creation of the public: political and psychological models who demonstrate some quality that we collectively admire. Clark Gable was objectively no more physically attractive than dozens of other young leading men of the thirties, yet there was something in the persona he projected that touched a responsive chord. Humphrey Bogart was not an extraordinary actor and certainly not handsome by Hollywood standards, yet he became a central role model not only for his own generation but also for their children. As the actors became stars, their images began to affect audiences directly. Star cinema—Hollywood style—depends on creating a strong identification between hero and audience. We see things from his point of view. The effect is subtle but pervasive.
Nor is this phenomenon peculiar to Hollywood. In the sixties, European cinema demonstrated some of the same mystical power of identification. When Jean-Paul Belmondo models himself on Humphrey Bogart in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960), he is announcing the second generation of celebrity, one that demonstrates a historical consciousness. Marcello Mastroianni became the epitome of existential European manhood. At his death in 1996 he was treated like a national hero. Jeanne Moreau was the model for wise, self-assured European womanhood, Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann the Swedish versions of the two models. Yves Montand served as the essentially Gallic Bogart. More recently, Gerard Depardieu has become an icon of his generation.
But these people are actors as well as stars, so the effect is muted. There are occasions in their careers when individual roles supersede star personas. As American films came back to life in the sixties, a new generation of stars like the Europeans developed, displaying critical intelligence as well as powerful personas. Politically, this is an important advance. At its most deleterious, the Hollywood star system worked psychologically to outlaw roles that did not fit its own images. It was acceptable to act like Bogart, Gable, or John Wayne, but until the late 1960s there was no male star who was not a tough guy (like this trio) or sophisticated and urbane (like Fred Astaire or Cary Grant). Because we can now be critical of celebrities, contemporary audiences enjoy a wider range of types. To a large extent, at least in nations in which film is dominant, the cinema helps to define what is permissible culturally: it is the shared experience of the society. Because its role models are so psychologically powerful, those roles for which it provides no models are difficult for individual members of society even to conceive, much less act out. Like folktales, films express taboos and help to resolve them. The cause-and-effect relationship is, as we noted, not very clear, but it is interesting to note that the quasi-revolutionary mores of the 1960s in America were predated by more than five years by the two major star personas of the f 950s—Marlon Brando and James Dean—both of which were notably rebellious. More specifically, Jean-Luc Godard's film La Chinoise, which portrayed a group of revolutionary students from the University of Paris at Nanterre, predated the uprising of May-June t968 by precisely a year and, indeed, students from Nanterre were in the vanguard during the aborted real revolution, just as they had been in Godard's fictional rebellion. In the age of mechanical reproduction fiction has a force it never had before.
Because it is so much more pervasive, television has taken over a large part of the folktale function of cinema. In Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool (1969), an incisive, brilliant analysis of the relationship between media and politics, a group of Black militants challenge a television reporter: "You put him on the six-, the ten-, and the twelve-o'clock news," they demand for one of the characters, "then he be real!" The function of media in determining the validity of an action, person, or idea was one of the central truths of radical politics in the sixties and has remained so into the age of the sound bite.
This unusual ability of film to "validate" reality is its most important mimetic political function. For example, one of the most telling social criticisms provided by the Black Power movement of the f 960's was its historical analysis of the inherently racist characterizations to which Blacks had been subjected as a matter of course throughout the history of film and television. In this respect, too, the media faithfully reflected the values of the society. But they also exaggerated the real situation. In general (there were some exceptions), films pictured Blacks in servile roles. More important, Blacks were used only to play Blacks—that is, in roles in which race was a significant element. One of the great accomplishments of the Black Power movement of the 1960's was to begin to crack that barrier. Black lawyers, doctors, businessmen—even heroes—are now validated by the media (if only intermittently). Yet it is still rare for a casting director to hire an African-American to play a role that isn't specified as "Black." As with so many other aspects of our culture, progress in racial politics seems to have been in a state of suspension for thirty years.* On the face of it, there were no more—or better—roles for African-Americans in the 1990s in mainstream films than there were in the 1970s. One of the brighter developments of the past few years has been the new group of African-American directors who have established themselves on the fringes of Hollywood. Yet there is nothing to connect the interesting work of filmmakers like Spike Lee, Matty Rich and John Singleton with the first wave of Black film 25 years earlier; they are not building on the work of the previous generation, they have had to start over again. Racism pervades American film because it is a basic strain in American history. It is one of the sad facts of film history that the landmark The Birth of a Nation (1915) is generally hailed as a classic despite its essential racism. No amount of technical expertise demonstrated, money invested, or artistic effect should be allowed to outweigh the essential racist tone of The Birth of a Nation, yet we continue in film history as it is presently written to praise the film for its form, ignoring its offensive content. This is not to imply that Griffith's masterpiece was anomalous. Until the late fifties, racial stereotypes were pervasive in a film, then in television. There had been liberal acts of conscience before—films such as King Vidor's Hallelujah (1929) or Elia Kazan's Pinky (1949)—but even these were almost without exception marked by subtle condescension. It was not until the late sixties that Blacks began to take on nonstereotypical roles in American film. We are speaking here of Hollywood. A thriving if limited African-American film industry, separate and unequal, dated from the 1920s, producing films about Blacks, by Blacks, for Blacks. But, of course, general audiences rarely saw these films. Native Americans were as poorly served until very recently. Since they were integral to the popular genre of the Western, they were seen on screen more often than Blacks, but the stereotypes were just as damaging. There were a few exceptions in this regard. Possibly because the battle had already been won against the Indians, films were occasionally produced that portrayed them in a positive, human light. Thomas Ince's The Indian Massacre (1913) is an early example, John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn (1964) a later instance. Despite their rapidly increasing influence in U.S. culture, Asian-Americans have been relatively quiet on the film front. Bruce Lee in the 1970s and his son Brandon in the 1990s both dominated the martial-arts genre before their eerily similar early deaths. Wayne Wang has had singular success dealing with Asian-American topics since Chan Is Missing (1981), Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (1985), and Eat a Bowl of Tea (1989). With The Joy Luck Club (1993), from the popular Amy Tan novel about immigrant mothers and their American daughters, he reached a wider audience. Smoke (1995), about a Brooklyn cigar store, marked a move into general subjects. Ang Lee has had perhaps the most unusual career. Born in Taiwan, he attended NYU film school, then returned home to direct The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), two unusual films about cultural attitudes social traditions. Without skipping a beat, back in the west he scored with Sense and Sensibility (1995) and the cold psychological drama The Ice Storm (1997). The trans-cultural resonances are quite intriguing.
The image of women in American film is a more complex issue. It seems likely that in the twenties movies did much to popularize the image of the independent woman. Even sirens such as Clara Bow and Mae West, while serving as male fantasies, were at the same time able to project a sense of independence and a spirit of irony about their stereotyped roles. Moreover, the image of women in films of the thirties and forties, on the whole, was very nearly coequal with that of men. A sensitive feminist can detect numerous stereotypical limitations in the films of that period, it is true, but for most of us to compare the thirties in film with the sixties or seventies or eighties is to realize that despite the awakened consciousness of contemporary women, cinematically we have only recently regained the level of intelligence of the sexual politics of even the mid-thirties. Actresses like Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Joan Blondell, Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy, Barbara Stanwyck, Irene Dunne, and even Joan Crawford projected images of intelligence, independence, sensitivity, and egalitarian sexuality the likes of which we have rarely seen since.
All this ended in the early fifties with the advent of the personas projected by stars Marilyn Monroe (the child-woman seductress) and Doris Day (the virginal girl-next-door). Of the two, the image projected by Day and similar actresses was to be preferred. She never achieved real independence, but she was often more than simply a male fantasy, like Monroe. It wasn't as if actresses of the caliber of the earlier stars didn't exist. Sidney Lumet's The Group (1966), for example, starred not one but eight young actresses, at least seven of whom showed talent. Yet only Candice Bergen achieved real success thereafter—and it took her more than twenty years. With the advent of the "buddy" film in the late sixties (the most popular early example of which was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969), what few major roles there were for women very nearly disappeared. The sexual politics of the past thirty years in American movies is one clear area in which film does not simply reflect the politics of reality. This may have been true to a certain extent in the fifties, when our national culture was intent on coaxing women who had gained a measure of independence during the war back into the home. But it was certainly a false picture of the real world in the seventies, eighties, and nineties when millions of women were raising their own consciousness, if not their spouses'. For instance, one of the first films of the seventies that was praised for its "feminist" approach was Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1975); yet that film presented us with a woman who, when deprived of the creature comforts of domesticity, couldn't survive on her own and, in the end, happily submitted to the role of helpmate once again. Why otherwise intelligent critics regarded Alice as in any way feminist is difficult to say, unless it was simply that the situation had deteriorated so drastically that any film that gave a woman a central role, no matter what its politics, had to be regarded as an advance. Despite a lot of hype, the feminist position in the film didn't advance much in the seventies or eighties. Such vaunted women's films as An Unmarried Woman, The Turning Point, and Julia (all 1978) did, it's true, use women as central characters, but with no discernible raised consciousness. Martin Ritt's drama Norma Rae (1979) gave Sally Field a powerful, Oscar-winning role as a protagonist but dealt more with union politics than sexual politics. Ironically, the film of that period that showed the most sophisticated understanding of sexual politics was Robert Benton's Kramer vs Kramer (1979), in which the woman (Kramer, played by Meryl Streep) was, if not actually the villain, then certainly the source of the problem, and the focus was almost entirely on the sensitive and painful reaction of the man (Kramer, Dustin Hoffman) to a classic feminist-inspired situation of the seventies. No film in recent years has shown this sensitivity and concern for a woman's point of view. Indeed, if we are to judge from Hollywood's evidence, the main benefit of the contemporary women's movement has been to free men from male stereotypes. This is true, but it is not anywhere near the whole truth. In the eighties, the "new women's movie" if hesitate to call it a feminist film) quickly became an accepted genre, but without any real emotional or political clout. Such modern-day "women's movies" as Steel Magnolias (1989), Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), Nine to Five (1980), or Thelma & Louise (1991), for all their virtues, don't tell us much about sexual politics. The first two deal with women in their own world, while the last two simply let them play the buddies the men usually play, celebrating the newly acceptable character of the liberated woman without extending the dialogue and without challenging accepted mores. So what else is new? From the mid-1970's through the end of the century sexual politics in America and Europe, like politics, in general, has existed in a state of suspended animation. The same issues were discussed on the twenty-fifth Earth Day as on the first. The same problems confront what we continue to call, inappropriately, "minorities" now as then. The struggle continues to continue. Yet, despite the fact that we can't point to a continuity of progress, the situation of women in the film now is better than it was thirty years ago. There is an indefinable sense that the balance between men and women is shifting. More important, it is now no longer unusual for an actress to be able to prolong her career as female lead well into her fifties: Jane Fonda, Shirley MacLaine, Tina Turner, Goldie Hawn, and Barbra Streisand suffered no decrease in earning power as they matured. And Susan Sarandon was past forty before she realized the full range of her talent. Sarandon is the first American actress in a long while to combine sexuality with mature intelligence in an ongoing star persona, just as Meryl Streep has carved a position for herself as a commanding "actor's actor." Indeed, here women have taken the lead in redefining our attitude toward aging. The generation that came of age in the 1960s, the "War Babies" and the "Baby Boomers," have decided to maintain a level of sexuality well into their fifties and sixties that was unheard of thirty years ago.
At the same time, paradoxically, Generation X clasped to its bosom a retrograde sexual mythology that echoed the worst of the 1950s. Madonna refashioned the Marilyn Monroe sex kitten into a campy Valkyrie whose armor was her underwear. Truth or Dare was a stage most of us leave behind as high-school sophomores. Actresses like Sharon Stone, Demi Moore, Kim Basinger, and Drew Barrymore are used and abused on a regular basis. Like their male predecessors in the 1980s—Sean Penn, Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze—this new generation of actresses plays on less admirable Hollywood traditions. It is not enough to suggest that these roles may be ironic; we all know what they are selling. In the 1990s, sex disintegrated into a commodity and a vaguely boring one at that. Hardcore "porn" like Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones—films which caused a furor when they were released in the early seventies—is now available on numerous cable networks in every living room and keeps most suburban video stores in profits. Since Flashdance (1983) and Dirty Dancing (1987), sex for teens and preteens has been a profitable Hollywood sideline and many theatrical features exploit their soft-core assets by releasing more explicit "video cuts" to the cassette market.*
Perhaps this is progress; perhaps it is necessary to pass through this phase to rediscover romance and nonpornographic eroticism; perhaps the AIDS epidemic requires more "virtual sex." In any case, it seems like the turn of the century is a good time to re-view Fellini Satyricon, and to remind ourselves that Clara Bow, the "It" girl of the twenties who introduced the idea of sex appeal, played her role with a wit and directness that revealed both a greater sense of self and a more powerful sensuality than we find in any stressful of current video cuts. Sexual politics in the film is closely connected with what we might call the "dream function" of the movies. Much of the academic criticism of the late seventies and eighties focused on this aspect of the film experience. The strong identification we make with cinematic heroes is simply observed evidence that film operates on our psyches, not unlike dreams. This is the inherent aspect of film politics: how do we interrelate with films? Since the early days, filmmakers have been in the business of selling fantasies of romance and action—or, to use the contemporary synonyms, sex, and violence. In this respect, the film is not much different from literature. Popular films, like popular novels, depend on the motivating forces of these twin libidinal impulses. The issue is complex: film satisfies the libido not only by giving a kind of life to fantasies but also more formally—the style of a film, its idiom, can be either romantic or active, sexual or violent, without any regard to its content. In addition, it is far from clear what precise effect this particular function of the film has on the people who experience it. Does it take the place of real experience? Or does it inspire it? This is a particularly interesting conundrum when expressed in terms of political action. A film in which the hero wins the day may simply convey to audiences that "business is being taken care of"—that there is no need to act—while a film in which the hero loses may be taken as a sign that action is futile. How can a political filmmaker, then, create a structure in which the audience is involved, but not to such an extent that the characters serve as surrogates? How can it be made clear that action is both possible and still necessary in real life? There are no simple answers. The question of surrogate action is more easily explained in terms of romance and sex. Here the characters are clearly surrogates for the audience and there is no real intent to suggest that the drama of the film be carried over into real life. In fact, the verisimilitude of the film experience suggests the opposite: that the experience of the film can to a great extent replace the experience of reality. We speak of film "fans" and film "buffs," but there is also a subculture of film "addicts": people with such a strong need for the dream experience of the film that it might very well be physiological as well as psychological. These profound effects of the film have not as yet been studied in sufficient detail. Much of the most interesting work in film theory during the next few years will concern such topics.
The libidinal effect of the film as dream also has a more practical aspect. Ever since Edison's Kinetoscope loop the John Rice-May Irwin Kiss (1896), movies have excited outpourings of moralism, which in turn have led to censorship. While in Continental countries film censorship has most often been political in nature, in the U.S. and Britain it has been anti-sexual and puritanical, a vestige of native puritanism and Victorian attitudes toward sex.
In 1922, in response to supposed public moral outrage at a recent spate of sex scandals involving film actors (notably the Fatty Arbuckle affair), Hollywood founded the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America organization (the MPPA), colloquially known as the "Hays Office" after its first president. The Hays Office performed no formal censorship, preferring to counter bad publicity with good, but gradually guidelines were issued. The first production code dated from 1930. When Joseph Breen joined the MPPA in 1934, the code began to be strictly enforced. (The Catholic Legion of Decency was founded the same year and exerted a marked puritanical influence until the early sixties.) The code made absurd demands on filmmakers. Not only were outright acts of sex and violence strictly prohibited, but also a set of guidelines was laid down (and strictly enforced) that prohibited the depiction of double beds, even for married couples, and censored such expletives as "God," "hell," "damn," "nuts"— even "nerds." The effect was profound. One of the greatest surprises awaiting a student of the film first experiencing precode movies is the discovery that in the late twenties and very early thirties films had a surprisingly contemporary sense of morality and dealt with issues, such as sex and drugs, that were forbidden thereafter until the late sixties. The effect is curiously disorienting. We have grown up with the late thirties, forties, and fifties Hollywood through the wide exposure of the films (usually recensored) on television. To experience some of the realistic films from the precode era is to discover a lost generation. One of the last vestiges of precode relevance, for example, was the cycle of Gangster Rims - Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932) among them—that attempted to treat political issues directly. In Britain, self-censorship by the British Board of Film Censors dates from 1912. Interestingly, the British system of censorship has had a less marked effect than the American code. Until 1951, British films were rated U, A, or H (for Universal, Adults, and Horrific—prohibited to children under sixteen). The object has been to protect young children from undue exposure to extreme violence (which is what "horrific" meant), an unobjectionable aim. In 1951, as sex became more important in the film, H was replaced with X. The American code was useful to producers throughout the Hollywood period. Although it set up maddeningly arbitrary rules, it also freed the studios from any ethical pressure to deal with relevant political and sexual subjects or even to treat milder subjects with a degree of sophistication. Hollywood settled comfortably in the mid-thirties into a style of filmmaking that generally eschewed relevance in favor of the highly prized, often hollow, fantasy "entertainment values" of the Golden Age. It was not only the direct proscriptions of the code that were significant. The code also had a general chilling effect on an industry that was particularly susceptible to economic pressure. In addition, this vulnerability yielded another type of censorship. The studios produced nothing that would offend powerful minorities in the audience. They were also very eager to please when the political establishment made suggestions. The lawlessness of the Prohibition era, for example, led to a cycle of protofascist movies in the early thirties--Star Witness (1931), Okay America (1932), and Gabriel Over the White House (1934) are examples. During World War IT, naturally, Hollywood rose to the occasion, not only by producing thousands of training and propaganda films (the most famous example being Frank Capra's Why We Fight series), but also by quickly erecting in fiction films a myth of the conflict that played no small part in uniting the country behind the struggle. A perfect example of this is Delmer Daves's Destination Tokyo (1943), which displays the usual varied ethnic group united against the common enemy. As a leader, Cary Grant stops in mid-picture to write a letter home to his wife in the Midwest. The sequence takes a good ten minutes. As Grant writes, justifying the war, documentary shots illustrate his lecture, the gist of which is that the Japanese and the Germans are racially despicable, while our allies, the Chinese and the Russians, are genetically destined to win and historically peace-loving people very much like ourselves! Later, this didn't fit very well with the mythology of the Cold War. By design or accident, many of the prints of Destination Tokyo available at the height of the Cold War lacked this powerful sequence. As World War 11 came to an end, there were occasional realistic treatments of combat that could almost be called antiwar in approach. The Story of G.I. Joe and They Were Expendable (both 1945) are two notable examples. After the war, Hollywood dutifully followed along as the national myths of the Cold War developed. In the quasi-documentary spy films produced by Louis de Rochemont (The House on 92nd Street, 1945; 13 Rue Madeleine, 1947; Walk East on Beacon, 1952), we can trace a smooth progression as Commies replaced Nazis as villains, without any alteration of the style or the structure of the films. During the fifties, the Cold War mentality was pervasive. There were cycles of Spy films and films glorifying Cold-War institutions like the Strategic Air Command and the FBI. But more abstractly, we can also discern Cold-War psychology in the popular genre of science fiction during the 1950s. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is perhaps the prime metaphor for the political paranoia of those years, while Forbidden Planet (1956) provides a more sophisticated approach. In the latter film, the monsters are not insidious, implacable, otherworldly beings against whom there is no defense short of complete mobilization, but rather creatures of our own kids, reflections of our own elemental fears. Once the characters of Forbidden Planet learn to deal with their own subconsciouses, the monsters evaporate. Obviously, the purges and the blacklisting that occurred at the urging of House Un-American Activities Committee in the late forties had a deeply disturbing effect. But this in itself is not enough to explain the widespread, nearly unanimous ideology exhibited by Hollywood films in the 1950s. Filmmakers were seized by the same paranoia that held the rest of the country in its grip. It was as if, having found a spirit of unification and purpose in the war against fascism, we desperately desired another enemy of equal danger to bring us together. When Cold-War myths disintegrated in the sixties, coincidentally, forces for social change were partially liberated. American films reflected these changes as well.
In Europe, the effects of World War U on film were, paradoxically, positive. In quiet, more sensible, and reasonable propaganda of films like In Which We Serve (Noel Coward, 1943), English filmmakers found a sense of purpose. As the documentary techniques of Grierson and his associates were applied to fiction, England discovered a national cinematic style for the first time. Politically conscious, historically intelligent, that style was reborn for a brief period in the late fifties and early sixties as the so-called Angry Young Men of the theater had their effect on film.
In Italy, the long drought of fascism was ended by a flood of politically active, aesthetically revolutionary films known collectively as Neorealism. Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946), De Sica's Bicycle Thief (1948) and Shoeshine (1946), Visconti's Ossessione (1942) and La Terra Trema (1947) set standards that inspired filmmakers around the world for decades. But the political relevance that marked both British and Italian cinemas during the forties did not survive long in the fifties. Not until the late sixties was it revived, in a series of French and Italian muckraking films that had proven the political effect. The main exponents of this style were Constantin Costa-Gavras (Z, 1969; the State of Siege, 1973) in France and Francesco Rosi (Salvatore Giuliano, 1962; The Mattel Affair, 1972) in Italy. There were very few examples of this muckraking style of cinema in the U.S. The most notable example was The China Syndrome (1979), released only weeks before the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island mimicked its plot. Since 1980, the relationship between politics and film has become increasingly skewed (as has the bond between politics and real life). The muckraking tradition continues to exist, but it has been almost twenty years since any European or American film has had a direct effect on real politics. Oliver Stone has established a unique niche for himself in Hollywood as the industry's last remaining politics, but his investigations of contemporary issues {Talk Radio, 1988; Natural Born Killers, 1994; and especially Wall Street, 1987) are overshadowed by his more popular historical panegyrics (Platoon, 1986; JFK, 1991; Nixon, 1995) obsessed with the events of thirty years ago. Perhaps the mixture of his obsessions simply mirrors our own, stuck at the end of the century between two political worlds—" one dead, the other powerless to be born."
Like all forms of mass entertainment, a film has been powerfully mythopoeic even as it has entertained. Hollywood helped mightily to shape—and often exaggerate—our national myths and therefore our sense of ourselves. It has likewise had a profound effect abroad. For the New Wave in France in the early 1960s, the phenomenon of American film cultural imperialism was an important subject of study. As recently as 1976, for example, only 40 percent of West German box office receipts was garnered by American films. By 1992 that figure had more than doubled, to 83 percent. American cinema is nearly as dominant in England, Italy, and France, and these are all major film-producing nations. American films consistently garner 50 to 60 percent of the French market. In smaller countries in Europe, and especially in emerging nations, the situation is even more unbalanced. In 1975, for example, 18 percent of Dutch film income went to native producers. By 1991 that figure had been reduced to 7 percent. (It should be noted that American market share can vary significantly depending on the particular films in release in a given year; American market dominance does not necessarily advance inexorably.)
At present, the overwhelming dominance of American films in the world marketplace is being challenged from several directions. Some countries have instituted quota systems. In the 1970s, Third World filmmakers worked to counteract Hollywood myths with their own, while a number of other filmmakers attempted a more radical approach, questioning the very premise of the Hollywood film: entertainment. This approach sometimes called the dialectical film, involved reconceiving the entertaining consumer commodity as an intellectual tool, a forum for examination and discussion.
This is a view of the film that not only admits the relationship between film and observer but also hopes to capitalize on it to the viewer's benefit by bringing it out into the open. Like the plays of Bertolt Brecht (see Chapter 1), these films want to involve their observers intellectually as well as emotionally. It is necessary, then, that the viewers participate intellectually in the experience of the film; they must work, in other words. As a result, many people who don't understand the dialectical ground rules are turned off. Waiting for the film to do all the work, to envelop them in the expected heady fantasies, they find that dialectic films— Jean-Luc Godard's work, for example—are boring.
Although it certainly does not guarantee an increase in market share, this approach, when properly understood, offers one of the more exciting possibilities for the future development of film:
• Ontologically, the power of film to deconstruct traditional values is enhanced and put to use.
• Mimetically, a film becomes not simply a fantastic reflection of reality, but an essay in which we can work out the patterns of a new and better social structure.
• Inherently, the political relationship between the film and the observer is recognized for what it is and the observer has, for the first time, a chance to interact, to participate directly in the logic of the film.
Hollywood film is a dream—thrilling, enthralling, but sometimes a political nightmare. The dialectic film can be a conversation—often vital and stimulating.
James Monaco/ HOW TO READ A FILM/ The World of Movies, Media, and Multimedia (Language, History, Theory)
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2000
edit in Grammaraly by Dejan Stojkovski
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by JAMES MONACO Film's relationship with music is altogether more complex. Until the development of the recording arts, music held a unique position in the community of arts. It was the only art in which time played a central role. Novels and theater exist in time, it is true, but the observer controls the "time" of a novel and, as important as rhythms are in the performing arts, they are not strictly controlled. A playwright or director can indicate pauses, but these are generally speaking only the crudest of time signatures. Music, the most abstract of arts, demands precise control of time and depends on it. If melody is the narrative facet of music, and rhythm the unique, temporal element, then harmony may be the synthesis of the two. Our system of musical notation indicates this relationship. Three notes read from left to right form a melody. When they are set in the framework of a time signature, rhythms are overlaid on the melody. When we rearrange them vertically, however, harmony is the result. Painting can set up harmonies and counterpoint both within a picture and between pictures, but there is no time element. Drama occasionally experiments with counterpoint--Eugene Ionesco's doubled dialogues are a good example— but only for minor effects. Music, however, makes a lot of interesting art out of the relationship between "horizontal" lines of melody, set in rhythms, and "vertical" sets of harmonies. (No, I'm not sure how to fit Rap, or Hip-Hop, into this equation. While Rap grows out of a centuries-old and fertile tradition of spoken rhythmic art, and while it was probably the most innovative artform of the 1990s, its eschewal of both melody and harmony suggests that it is "music" only because it is distributed on CDs and appears on MTV. Maybe Rap makes the point that the one essential element of music is rhythm. Perhaps we should consider Rap, at least in one sense, as the last gasp of abstraction—ironically, the only truly popular expression of the avant-garde abstractionist tendency. Or maybe it's enough to think of Rap as the musicalization of poetry: "All art aspires to the condition of music"—and to its market.) Abstractly, film offers the same possibilities of rhythm, melody, and harmony as music. The mechanical nature of the film medium allows strict control of the time line: narrative "melodies" can now be controlled precisely. In the frame, events and images can be counterpoised harmonically. Filmmakers began experimenting with the musical potential of the new art very early on. Ever since Rene Clair's Entr'acte (1924) and Fernand Leger's Ballet Mecanique (1924-25), in fact, abstract or "avant-garde" film has depended on musical theory for much of its effect. Even before sound, filmmakers had begun to work closely with musicians. Hans Richter's Vormittagsspuk (Ghosts Before Breakfast, 1928) had a score by Hindemith, played live. Walter Ruttmann's Berlin—Symphony of a City (1927) had a live symphonic score as well. Music had quickly become an integral part of the film experience; silent films were normally "performed" with live music. Moreover, the innovative filmmakers of the silent period were already discovering the musical potential of the image itself. By the late 1930s Sergei Eisenstein, for his film Alexander Nevsky, constructed an elaborate scheme to correlate the visual images with the score by the noted composer Prokofiev. In this film as in a number of others, such as Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), music often leads, determining images. Because film is projected normally at a rate of twenty-four frames per second, the filmmaker has even more precise control over rhythms than the musician. The shortest semihemidemiquaver that could be written in the Western system of notation would last 1/32 of a second—but it would be impossible to play live notes at that rate. The 1/24 of a second unit, which is the lowest common denominator of film, effectively exceeds the quickest rhythms of performed Western music. The most sophisticated rhythms in music, the Indian tals, approach the basic unit of film rhythm as an upper limit. We are ignoring, of course, music that is produced mechanically or electronically. Even before systems of sound recording had matured, the player piano offered an opportunity to musicians to experiment with rhythmic systems that were impossible for humans to perform. Conlon Nancarrow's "Studies for Player Piano" (the earliest dating from 1948) were interesting explorations of these possibilities. Film thus utilizes a set of musical concepts expressed in visual terms: melody, harmony, and rhythm are long-established values in film art. Although film itself has had a strong economic impact on music, providing a major market for musicians, it has had no particularly strong esthetic effect on music. The techniques of sound recording, however, have revolutionized the older art. The influence of the new technology was felt in two waves. The invention of the phonograph in 1877 radically altered the dissemination of music. No longer was it necessary to attend a performance, a privilege that was, over the centuries, limited to a very small elite. Bach's Goldberg Variations, written as bedtime music for a single wealthy individual, Count Kaiserling, former Russian ambassador at the court of the Elector of Saxony, to be played by his personal harpsichordist, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, were now accessible to millions of people who couldn't afford private musicians on twenty-four-hour call. Recordings and, later, radio broadcasts quickly became powerful pervasive media for the dissemination of music, parallel with performance but superseding it. This had just as profound an effect on the nature of the art of music as the invention of both movable type and the printing press had on literature. The technology quickly dominated the art. Just as the invention of movable type had opened up literature to the masses, so recordings democratized music. The historical significance cannot be underestimated. But there was a negative aspect to the mechanical reproduction of music, too. Folk music, the art people created for themselves in the absence of professional musicians, was greatly attenuated. In the end, this was a small price to pay for the vast new channels of dissemination and, in fact, the new musical literacy that recordings helped to create later redounded to the benefit of the popular musical arts, which have in the twentieth century become the focal point of the musical world as they never were in earlier times. While the invention of the phonograph had a profound sociological effect on music, it had a very minor technical effect. There were good technological reasons for this, having to do with the limitations of Edison's system, which will be discussed in the next chapter. As a result, it was not until the late 1940s and early 1950s—when magnetic tape began to replace the phonograph record as the main means of recording, and electrical transcription yielded to electronic methods— that music technique came under the influence of the recording arts. Again, the effect was revolutionary. Musicians had been experimenting with electronic instruments for years before the development of magnetic tape, but they were still bound by the limits of performance. Tape freed them, and allowed the possibility of editing music. The film soundtrack, which was optical rather than magnetic, had predated tape by twenty years, but in the context of film it had always been relegated to a supporting role; it was never an independent medium. Once tape entered the recording studio, sound recording was no longer simply a means of preserving and disseminating a performance; it now became a main focus of creativity. Recording is now so much an integral part of the creation of music that even popular music (to say nothing of avant-garde and elite music) has become since the early fifties a creature of the recording studio rather than performance. The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), a milestone in the development of the practical recording arts, was not reproducible in performance. There had been many earlier examples of this shift of focus, dating back at least as early as the popular records of Les Paul and Mary Ford in the early fifties, but the Beatles' record is generally regarded as the coming of age of recording as one of the primary creative musical forces. The balance has altered so radically now that "performances" of popular music (to say nothing of avant-garde performances) often integrate recordings, and much music simply can't be performed at all live. If the techniques of visual recording had had as great an effect on theater, then a standard popular theatrical performance today would consist in large part of film, and avant-garde theater would consist almost entirely of film! Clearly, the relationship between sound recording and the musical arts is very complex. We have described only the bare outlines of the new dialectic here. It may be most significant that, unlike the technique of image recording, the technique of sound recording was quickly integrated with the art of music. Film was seen from the very beginning as a separate art from theater and painting and the novel; but sound recording even today is still subsumed under the category of music. Partially, this is the result of the mode of recording—discs—that pertained until the 1960s. Unlike film, discs could simply record and reproduce their material, not re-create it. But the development of tape and electronic technology added an element of creativity to sound recording. If anything, sound recording is now more flexible and sophisticated than image recording. It may be only a matter of time before sound recording is seen as a separate art. If radio had survived the invention of television, this would have happened sooner, but coincidentally, just as sound recording was emerging as an art in its own right around 1950, radio art was being submerged by television. It is only now beginning to recover its flexibility. Significantly, sound recording as an integral component of cinema also languished during those years and has itself only recently begun to reemerge. Ideally, sound should be the equal of image in the cinematic equation, not subservient, as it is now. In short, film has only begun to respond to the influence of the art of music. James Monaco/ HOW TO READ A FILM/ The World of Movies, Media, and Multimedia (Language, History, Theory)
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2000 The Real WorldIn England, the movie theater was originally called "The Bioscope," because of its visual presentation of the actual movements of the forms of life (from Greek bios, a way of life). The movie, by which we roll up the real world on a spool in order to unroll it as a magic carpet of fantasy, is a spectacular wedding of the old mechanical technology and the new electric world In the chapter on The Wheel, the story was told of how the movie had a kind of symbolic origin in an attempt to photograph the flying hooves of galloping horses, for to set a series of cameras to study animal movement is to merge the mechanical and the organic in a special way. In the medieval world, curiously the one static form for another, in sequence. They imagined the life of a flower as a kind of cinematic strip of phases for essences. The movie is the total realization of the medieval idea of change, in the form of an entertaining illusion. Physiologists had very much to do with the development of film, as they did with the telephone. On film the mechanical appears as organic, and the growth of a flower can be portrayed as easily and as freely as the movement of a horse. If the movie merges the mechanical and organic in a world of undulating forms, it also links with the technology of print. The reader in projecting words, as it were, has to follow the black and white sequences of stills that is typography, providing his own sound track. He tries to follow the contours of the author's mind, at varying speeds and with various illusions of understanding. It would be difficult to exaggerate the bond between print and movie in terms of their power to generate fantasy in the viewer or reader. Cervantes devoted his Don Quixote entirely to this aspect of the printed word and its power to create what James Joyce throughout Finnegan's Wake designates as "the ABCED-minded," which can be taken as "ab-said" or "ab-sent," or just alphabetically controlled. The business of the writer or the film-maker is to transfer the reader or viewer from one world, his own, to another, the world created by typography and film. That is so obvious, and happens so completely, that those undergoing the experience accept it subliminally and without critical awareness. Cervantes lived in a world in which print was as new as movies are in the West, and it seemed obvious to him that print, like the images now on the screen, had usurped the real world. The reader or spectator had become a dreamer under their spell, as Rene Clair said of film in 1926. Movies as a nonverbal form of experience are like photography, a form of statement without syntax. In fact, however, like the print and the photo, movies assume a high level of literacy in their users and prove baffling to the nonliterate. Our literate acceptance of the mere movement of the camera eye as it follows or drops a figure from view is not acceptable to an African film audience, if somebody disappears off the side of the film, the African wants to know what happened to him. A literate audience however, accustomed to following printed imagery line by line without questioning the logic of lineality, will accept film sequence without protest. It was Rene Clair who pointed out that if two or three people were together on a stage, the dramatist must ceaselessly motivate or explain their being there at all. But the film audience, like the book reader, accepts mere sequence as rational. Whatever the camera turns to, the audience accepts. We are transported to another world. As Rene Clair observed, the screen opens its white door into a harem of beautiful visions and adolescent dreams, compared to which the loveliest real body seems defective. Yeats saw the movie as a world of Platonic ideals with the film projector playing "a spume upon a ghostly paradigm of things." This was the world that haunted Don Quixote, who found it through the folio door of the newly printed romances. The close relation, then, between the reel world of film and the private fantasy experience of the printed word is indispensable to our Western acceptance of the film form. Even the film industry regards all of its greatest achievements as derived from novels, nor is this unreasonable. Film, both in its reel form and in its scenario or script form, is completely involved with book culture. All one need do is to imagine for a moment a film based on newspaper form in order to see how close film is to book. Theoretically, there is no reason why the camera should not be used to photograph complex groups of items and events in dateline configurations, just as they are presented on the page of a newspaper. Actually, poetry tends to do this configuring or bunching" more than prose. Symbolist poetry has much in common with the mosaic of the newspaper page, yet very few people can detach themselves from uniform and connected space sufficiently to grasp symbolist poems. Natives, on the other hand, who have very little contact with phonetic literacy and lineal print, have to learn to "see" photographs or film just as much as we have to learn our letters. In fact, after having tried for years to teach Africans their letters by film, John Wilson of London University's African Institute found it easier to teach them their letters as a means to film literacy. For even when natives have learned to "see" pictures, they cannot accept our ideas of time and space "illusions." On seeing Charlie Chaplin's The Tramp, the African audience concluded that Europeans were magicians who could restore life. They saw a character who survived a mighty blow on the head without any indication of being hurt. When the camera shifts, they think they see trees moving, and buildings growing or shrinking, because they cannot make the literate assumption that space is continuous and uniform. Nonliterate people simply don't get perspective or distancing effects of light and shade that we assume are innate human equipment. Literate people think of cause and effect as sequential, as if one thing pushed another along by physical force. Nonliterate people register very little interest in this kind of "efficient" cause and effect, but are fascinated by hidden forms that produce magical results. Inner, rather than outer, causes interest the nonliterate and nonvisual cultures. And that is why the literate West sees the rest of the world as caught in the seamless web of superstition. Like the oral Russian, the African will not accept sight and sound together. The talkies were the doom of Russian filmmaking because, like any backward or oral culture, Russians have an irresistible need for participation that is defeated by the addition of sound to the visual image. Both Pudovkin and Eisenstein denounced the sound film but considered that if sound were used symbolically and contrapuntally, rather than realistically, there would result less harm to the visual image. The African insistence on group participation and on chanting and shouting during films is wholly frustrated by sound track. Our own talkies were a further completion of the visual package as a mere consumer commodity. For with silent film we automatically provide sound for ourselves by way of "closure" or completion. And when it is filled in for us there is very much less participation in the work of the image. Again, it has been found that nonliterates do not know how to fix their eyes, as Westerners do, a few feet in front of the movie screen, or some distance in front of a photo. The result is that they move their eyes over photo or screen as they might their hands. It is this same habit of using the eyes as hands that makes European men so "sexy" to American women. Only an extremely literate and abstract society learns to fix the eyes, as we must learn to do in reading the printed page. For those who thus fix their eyes, perspective results. There is great subtlety and synesthesia in native art, but no perspective. The old belief that everybody really saw in perspective, but only that Renaissance painters had learned how to paint it, is erroneous. Our own first TV generation is rapidly losing this habit of visual perspective as a sensory modality, and along with this change comes an interest in words, not as visually uniform and continuous, but as unique worlds in depth. Hence the craze for puns and wordplay, even in sedate ads. In terms of other media such as the printed page, film has the power to store and to convey a great deal of information. In an instant it presents a scene of landscape with figures that would require several pages of prose to describe. In the next instant it repeats, and can go on repeating, this detailed information. The writer, on the other hand, has no means of holding a mass of detail before his reader in a large bloc or gestalt. As the photograph urged the painter in the direction of abstract, sculptural art, so the film has confirmed the writer in verbal economy and depth symbolism where the film cannot rival him. Another facet of the sheer quantity of data possible in a movie shot is exemplified in historical films like Henry V or Richard III Here extensive research went into the making of the sets and costumes that any six-year-old can now enjoy as readily as any adult. T. S. Eliot reported how, in the making of the film of his Murder in the Cathedral, it was not only necessary to have costumes of the period, but - so great is the precision and tyranny of the camera eye - these costumes had to be woven by the same techniques as those used in the twelfth century. Hollywood, amidst much illusion, had also to provide authentic scholarly replicas of many past scenes. The stage and TV can make do with very rough approximations, because they offer an image of low definition that evades detailed scrutiny. At first, however, it was the detailed realism of writers like Dickens that inspired movie pioneers like D. W. Griffiths, who carried a copy of a Dickens novel on location. The realistic novel, that arose with the newspaper form of communal cross-section and human-interest coverage in the eighteenth century, was a complete anticipation of film form. Even the poets took up the same panoramic style, with human interest vignettes and close-ups as variant. Gray's Elegy, Burns' The Cotter's Saturday Night, Wordsworth's Michael, and Byron's Childe Harold are all like shooting scripts for some contemporary documentary film. "The kettle began it. ..." Such is the opening of Dickens' Cricket and the Hearth. If the modern novel came out of Gogol's The Overcoat, the modern movie, says Eisenstein, boiled up out of that kettle. It should be plain that the American and even British approach to film is much lacking in that free interplay among the senses and the media that seems so natural to Eisenstein or Rene Clair. For the Russian, especially, it is easy to approach any situation structurally, which is to say, sculpturally. To Eisenstein, the overwhelming fact of film was that it is an "act of juxtaposition." But to a culture in an extreme reach of typographic conditioning, the juxtaposition must be one of uniform and connected characters and qualities. There must be no leaps from the unique space of the tea kettle to the unique space of the kitten or the boot. If such objects appear, they must be leveled off by some continuous narrative, or be "contained" in some uniform pictorial space. All that Salvador Dali had to do to create a furor was to allow the chest of drawers or the grand piano to exist in us own space against some Sahara or Alpine backdrop. Merely by releasing objects from the uniform continuous space of typography we got modern art and poetry. We can measure the psychic pressure of typography by the uproar generated by that release. For most people, their own ego image seems to have been typographically conditioned, so that the electric age with its return to inclusive experience threatens their idea of self. These are the fragmented ones, for whom specialist toil renders the mere prospect of leisure or jobless security a nightmare. Electric simultaneity ends specialist learning and activity, and demands interrelation in depth, even of the personality. The case of Charlie Chaplin films helps to illumine this problem. His Modern Times was taken to be a satire on the fragmented character of modern tasks. As clown, Chaplin presents the acrobatic feat in a mime of elaborate incompetence, for any specialist task leaves out most of our faculties. The clown reminds us of our fragmented state by tackling acrobatic or special jobs in the spirit of the whole or integral man. This is the formula for helpless incompetence. On the street, in social situations, on the assembly line, the worker continues his compulsive twitchings with an imaginary wrench. But the mime of this Chaplin film and others is precisely that of the robot, the mechanical doll whose deep pathos it is to approximate so closely to the condition of human life. Chaplin, in all his work, did a puppetlike ballet of the Cyrano de Bergerac kind. In order to capture this puppethke pathos, Chaplin (a devotee of ballet and personal mend of Pavlova) adopted from the first the foot postures of classical ballet. Thus he could have the aura of Spectre de la Rose shimmering around his clown getup. From the British music nail, his first training ground, with a sure touch of genius he took images like that of Mr. Charles Pooter, the haunting figure of a nobody. This shoddy-genteel image he invested with an envelope of fairy romance by means of adherence to the classic ballet postures. The new film form was perfectly adapted to this composite image, since film is itself a jerky mechanical ballet of flicks that yields a sheer dream world of romantic illusions. But the film form is not just a puppetlike dance of arrested still shots, for it manages to approximate and even to surpass real life by means of illusion. That is why Chaplin, in his silent pictures at least, was never tempted to abandon the Cyrano role of the puppet who could never really be a lover. In this stereotype Chaplin discovered the heart of the film illusion, and he manipulated that heart with easy mastery, as the key to the pathos of a mechanized civilization. A mechanized world is always in the process of getting ready to live, and to this end it brings to bear the most appalling pomp of skill and method and resourcefulness. The film pushed this mechanism to the utmost mechanical verge and beyond, into a surrealism of dreams that money can buy. Nothing is more congenial to the film form than this pathos of superabundance and power that is the dower of a puppet for whom they can never be real. This is the key to The Great Gatsby that reaches its moment of truth when Daisy breaks down in contemplating Gatsby's superb collection of shirts. Daisy and Gatsby live in a tinsel world that is both corrupted by power, yet innocently pastoral in its dreaming. The movie is not only a supreme expression of mechanism, but paradoxically it offers as product the most magical of consumer commodities, namely dreams. It is, therefore, not accidental that the movie has excelled as a medium that offers poor People roles of riches and power beyond the dreams of avarice. In the chapter on The Photograph, it was pointed out how the Press photo in particular had discouraged the really rich from the paths of conspicuous consumption. The life of display that the photo had taken from the rich, the movie gave to the poor with lavish hand: Oh, lucky, lucky me, I shall live in luxury, For I've got a pocketful of dreams. The Hollywood tycoons were not wrong in acting on the assumption that movies gave the American immigrant a means of self-fulfillment without any delay. This strategy, however deplorable in the light of the "absolute ideal good," was perfectly in accord with film form. It meant that in the 1920s the American way of life was exported to the entire world in cans. The world eagerly lined up to buy canned dreams. The film not only accompanied the first great consumer age, but was also incentive, advertisement and, in itself, a major commodity. Now in terms of media study it is clear that the power of film to store information in accessible form is unrivaled. Audio tape and video tape were to excel film eventually as information storehouses. But film remains a major information resource, a rival of the book whose technology it did so much to continue and also to surpass. At the present time, film is still in its manuscript phase, as it were; shortly it will, under TV pressure, go into its portable, accessible, printed-book phase. Soon everyone will be able to have a small, inexpensive film projector that plays an 8-mm sound cartridge as if on a TV to screen. This type of development is part of our present technological implosion. The present dissociation of projector and screen is a vestige of our older mechanical world of explosion and separation of functions that is now ending with the electrical implosion. Typographic man took readily to film just because, like books, it offers an inward world of fantasy and dreams. The film viewer sits in psychological solitude like the silent book reader. This was not the case with the manuscript reader, nor is it true of the watcher of television. It is not pleasant to turn on TV just for oneself in a hotel room, nor even at home. The TV mosaic image demands social completion and dialogue. So with the manuscript before typography, since manuscript culture is oral and demands dialogue and debate, as the entire culture of the ancient and medieval worlds demonstrates. One of the major pressures of TV has been to encourage the "teaching machine." In fact, these devices are adaptations of the book in the direction of dialogue. These teaching machines are really private tutors, and their being misnamed on the principle that produced the names "wireless" and "horseless carriage" is another instance in that long list that illustrates how every innovation must pass through a primary phase in which the new effect is secured by the old method, amplified or modified by some new feature. Film is not really a single medium like song or the written word, but a collective art form with different individuals directing color, lighting, sound, acting, speaking. The press, radio and TV, and the comics are also art forms dependent upon entire teams and hierarchies of skill in corporate action. Prior to the movies, the most obvious example of such corporate artistic action had occurred early in the industrialized world, with the large new symphony orchestras of the nineteenth century. Paradoxically, as industry went its ever more specialized fragmented course, it demanded more and more teamwork in sales and supplies. The symphony orchestra became a major expression of the ensuing power of such coordinated effort, though for the players themselves this effect was lost, both in the symphony and in industry. When the magazine editors recently introduced film scenario procedures to the constructing of idea articles, the idea article supplanted the short story. The film is the rival of the book in that sense. (TV in turn is the rival of the magazine because of its mosaic power.) Ideas presented as a sequence of shots or materialized situations, almost in the manner of a teaching machine actually drove the short story out of the magazine field. Hollywood has fought TV mainly by becoming a subsidiary of TV Most of the film industry is now engaged in supplying TV programs. But one new strategy has been tried, namely the big-budget picture. The fact is that Technicolor is the closest the movie can get to the effect of the TV image. Technicolor greatly lowers photographic intensity and creates, in part, the visual conditions for participant viewing. Had Hollywood understood the reasons for Marty's success, TV might have given us a revolution in film. Marty was a TV show that got onto the screen in the form of low definition or low-intensity visual realism. It was not a success story, and it had no stars, because the low-intensity TV image is quite incompatible with the high-intensity star image. Marty, which in fact looked like an early silent movie or an old Russian picture, offered the film industry all the clues it needed for meeting the TV challenge. This kind of casual, cool realism has given the new British films easy ascendancy. Room at the Top features the new cool realism. Not only is it not a success story, it is as much an announcement of the end of the Cinderella package as Marilyn Monroe was the end of the star system. Room at the Top is the story of how the higher a monkey climbs, the more you see of his backside. The moral is that success is not only wicked but also the formula for misery. It is very hard for a hot medium like film to accept the cool message of TV. But the Peter Sellers movies I'm M Right, Jack and Only Two Can Play are perfectly in tune with the new temper created by the cool TV image. Such is also the meaning of the ambiguous success of Lolita. As a novel, its acceptance announced the antiheroic approach to romance. The film industry had long beaten out a royal road to romance in keeping with the crescendo of the success story. Lolita announced that the royal road was only a cowtrack, after all, and as for success it shouldn't happen to a dog. In the ancient world and in medieval times, the most popular of all stories were those dealing with The Falls of Princes. With the coming of the very hot print medium, the preference changed to a rising rhythm and to tales of success and sudden elevation in the world. It seemed possible to achieve anything by the new typographic method of minute, uniform segmentation of problems. It was by this method, eventually, that film was made Film was, as a form, the final fulfillment of the great potential of typographic fragmentation. But the electric implosion has now reversed the entire process of expansion by fragmentation. Electricity has brought back the cool, mosaic world of implosion, equilibrium, and stasis. In our electric age, the one-way expansion of the berserk individual on his way to the top now appears as a gruesome image of trampled lives and disrupted harmonies. Such is the subliminal message of the TV mosaic with its total field of simultaneous impulses. Film strip and sequence cannot but bow to this superior power. Our own youngsters have taken the TV message to heart in their beatnik rejection of consumer mores and of the private success story. Since the best way to get to the core of a form is to study its effect in some unfamiliar setting, let us note what President Sukarno of Indonesia announced in 1956 to a large group of Hollywood executives. He said that he regarded them as political radicals and revolutionaries who had greatly hastened political change in the East. What the Orient saw in a Hollywood movie was a world in which all the ordinary people had cars and electric stoves and refrigerators. So the Oriental now regards himself as an ordinary person who has been deprived of the ordinary man's birthright. That is another way of getting a view of the film medium as monster ad for consumer goods. In America this major aspect of film is merely subliminal. Far from regarding our pictures as incentives to mayhem and revolution, we take them as solace and compensation, or as a form of deferred payment by daydreaming. But the Oriental is right, and we are wrong about this In fact the movie is a mighty limb of the industrial giant. That it is being amputated by the TV image reflects a still greater revolution going on at the center of American life. It is natural that the ancient East should feel the political pull and industrial challenge of our movie industry. The movie, as much as the alphabet and the printed word, is an aggressive and imperial form that explodes outward into other cultures. Its explosive force was significantly greater in silent pictures than in talkies, for the electromagnetic sound track already forecast the substitution of electric implosion for mechanical explosion. The silent pictures were immediately acceptable across language barriers as the talkies were not. Radio teamed up with film to give us the talkie and to carry us further on our present reverse course of implosion or re-integration after the mechanical age of explosion and expansion. The extreme form of this implosion or contraction is the image of the astronaut locked into his wee bit of wraparound space. Far from enlarging our world, he is announcing its contraction to village size. The rocket and the space capsule are ending the rule of the wheel and the machine, as much as did the wire services, radio, and TV . We may now consider a further instance of the films influence in a most conclusive aspect. In modern literature there is probably no more celebrated technique than that of the stream of consciousness or interior monologue. Whether in Proust, Joyce, or Eliot, this form of sequence permits the reader an extraordinary indentification with personalities of the utmost range and diversity. The stream of consciousness is really managed by the transfer of film technique to the printed page, where, in a deep sense it really originated; for as we have seen, the Gutenberg technology of movable types is quite indispensable to any industrial or film process. As much as the infinitesimal calculus that pretends to deal with motion and change by minute fragmentation, the film does so by making motion and change into a series of static shots. Print does likewise while pretending to deal with the whole mind in action. Yet film and the stream of consciousness alike seemed to provide a deeply desired release from the mechanical world of increasing standardization and uniformity. Nobody ever felt oppressed by the monotony or uniformity of the Chaplin ballet or by the monotonous, uniform musings of his literary twin, Leopold Bloom. In 1911 Henri Bergson in Creative Evolution created a sensation by associating the thought process with the form of the movie. Just at the extreme point of mechanization represented by the factory, the film, and the press, men seemed by the stream of consciousness, or interior film to obtain release into a world of spontaneity, of dreams, and of unique personal experience. Dickens perhaps began it all with his Mr. Jingle in Pickwick Papers. Certainly in David Copperfield he made a great technical discovery, since for the first time the world unfolds realistically through the use of the eyes of a growing child as camera. Here was the stream of consciousness, perhaps, in its original form before it was adopted by Proust and Joyce and Eliot. It indicates how the enrichment of human experience can occur unexpectedly with the crossing and interplay of the life of media forms. The film imports of all nations, especially those from the United States, are very popular in Thailand, thanks in part to a deft Thai technique for getting round the foreign-language obstacle. In Bangkok, in place of subtitles, they use what is called "Adam-and-Eving." This takes the form of live Thai dialogue read through a loudspeaker by Thai actors concealed from the audience. Split-second timing and great endurance enable these actors to demand more than the best-paid movie stars of Thailand. Everyone has at some time wished he were equipped with his own sound system during a movie performance, in order to make appropriate comments. In Thailand, one might achieve great heights of interpretive interpolation during the inane exchanges of great stars. Marshall McLuhan/Understanding Media (The extensions of man)/ Movies: the Real World by Therese Giraud After May '68, Godard gets down to a problem: how to make political films politically? How to integrate consistently within the film the question of where the images come from? And, step by step, to combat the effects of the dominant ideology in cinema as in politics. This was a philosophical reflection, too abstract, too theoretical. An overly intellectual working method, too Parisian. Godard journeyed back to the provinces: away from the head and towards the body. For Godard comes up against a problem. Beyond the issue of political commitment such as it was being expressed - both by himself and more generally - are other issues, unexplored and forgotten; issues that had created their fair share of disillusionment in post-'68 militant circles: interior issues - the family, the body, sexuality - neglected and left in enemy hands, those of television, sentimental drama, porn cinema. A change of direction: to start no longer from theory but from the man. Sex and politicsTake one: Tout va bien. A woman's hand on a man's penis. An image not from a porn movie but from a photograph. The photograph as an object of discussion and argument, a nucleus (one of several?) of the contradiction between the man and the woman who are otherwise addressing the problems of their own political commitment. A photograph of an erect penis grasped by a woman's hand; the photograph and the sex as an exhibit: this is. But a photograph within a film, alongside a film - another place, another time. Take two: Numero deux. The issue of political commitment is no longer addressed alongside that of sexuality; it is a commitment starting from and about sex. Addressing the issue of sexuality in political terms takes centre stage. Being neither a sex movie nor a political film but a shattering of the divisions imposed by media imagery; within the place where these images speak - the family. Speaking politically about the issue of sex; resituating sex in its social cell, the family. Starting from an imprisonment ... The family, as the product of sex, of sexual relationships (non-relationships), of conjugal love, a product which reproduces itself and is obliged endlessly to reproduce itself. Production and the relations of production. The family: where the children are taught that what happens when mother and father are alone in bed is the two sexes kissing, that this is love, this is how they learn to speak. This is what it is all about. But the children, despite this rote-learning, see only buggery, rape and deaf, dumb, blind violence. They see one who, from the outside, ejaculates and fills the other who receives within, absorbs and swells. Overproduction. It goes in from all sides and does not come out. Forced in, blocked. Blocked up as in buggered. Buggered by the sex, up the arse, in the mouth (the rote-learning), by the ears (the headphones). Starting from this imprisonment, therefore showing it as that of the family, of a woman. Starting from this imprisonment, therefore showing it as that of the family, of a woman. With the man's sex designated as the guilty party. Lacerating bourgeois forms of representation to talk about sex: didactic images, imposed by an absence of fiction, music, and drama. Images which are imprisoned by darkness and off-screen sound. Sublimation, escape, projection into a fictional elsewhere - all these are denied the spectator, who is forced to see things for real. In place of the love that is sublimated as much through pornography as through sentimental drama, to show instead bodies side-by-side, bodies that don't connect, that collide, that do each other harm. The reality of things in imposed, imposing images, but images without the possibility of transformation. An enclosed, hermetic, blocked up film. Here are images, a chain of images, just images. Locked up in the dark. Is this the darkness of ideology?And where do these images come from? This is the question to which Godard has always forced himself to respond and which finds a response here in the shots at the beginning and the end of the film, two shots that bracket the film, that are no longer just images, where the ideological darkness has vanished and they fill the screen.They are the relations of production: it's me, what's-his-name, master of my work, my equipment, my celluloid, who has made all this, who has organized it in space and time. It is I who manipulate the sounds and images. His image: of man. His image: of a woman. Placed at the center of the film. The dynamic of the contradiction between man and woman. It appears that a woman participated in making this film, in the construction of these images. It's a film by two people. This 'number two', who we see neither at the beginning nor the end of the film, is reduced to the status of raw material, like celluloid, like something to talk about. I'm speaking in her place, because she cannot speak yet, for lack of the means of production, of knowledge of the language of cinema. I'm speaking in her place, still ... Making speech for her; taking power for her, the power of cinema and its images. For the machine that allows him to speak, which he speaks from, is noc solely the one that we see, that he shows us (controlling the means of production), but is also the one that we don't see, being hidden by the other. His sex, concealed, unacknowledged, shameful. The film's centre, recalling Tout va bien, except that here all is far from well, the sex here is never erect, never wants to be erect. A refusal to function, a state of retention, a voluntary castration but one for which it seeks to revenge itself. Because it functions, all the same, it ejaculates elsewhere, in the images, in his speaking. It functions as the phallus. Castration and vengeance. A hermetic film, full, blocked, like the woman and his image of the woman. In the same way as the only sex worthy of the name is that of the man. A film congested with sex, just as Godard is congested by his own sex, like a man who discovers how it works but doesn't know what to do with it, either with his sex or with its discovery. So he shows it. He shows it and shoves it into us all over the place - in the mouth, up the arse, in the ears - redoubling reality, its reality. I say what I see. It is a film about phallocracy. He imposes it upon us again ... in sadistic impositions and initiatory rites, just as the worldly grandfather imposes on the little girl the headphones and Ferre's melancholy, just as the parencs impose their initiatory discourse on love, as Godard number one imposes the recital of A bout de souffle on the children of number two. For the man has the sex, a privilege which starts to weigh heavily on some, such as Godard (a consciousness whose origin is concealed, just as his partner is concealed, as finally is the origin of these images: is not the ideological darkness to be filled by the words of the woman, by her images, and would one thus see less sex?), but he has only this. But not only; he also has all that is permitted by his sex, all that resembles him - the desire for power, the problematic of power and impotence which he cannot get away from, the desire to possess, to crush, to enclose the other in a film, in a succession of words and images. The other: what, in the woman, he glimpses as different, as inaccessible to the law of his sex/phallus. This other which he reduces to his same. He mutilates the sex on the sole condition of mutilating the woman's body, of rigging it out in the same desires, the same functions: veneration of the penis, violence of the penis. Woman alone: congested (with sex), lamenting, or masturbatory violence, the search for liberating ejaculation, only the sex uncovered, its body absent, veiled. The woman's word - filled with his sex or around his sex, in masturbating it. The mutilated body of the woman. transformed into a penis, an extension of his that engorges no longer. Return of the same. We never speak of the violence on the banks that enclose the river. Me, I speak of it and it makes me understand your violence. Your violence, my violence: the phallus sees only itself. Perhaps women will never know how much men hate them. No doubt it was for this reason that Godard made his film (and not their film). To enclose them once again within the objectivity of his discourse on sex, in another image of woman, but one marked by a troubled male conscience, an image of death. To exclude the other, the unsexed other. the other words that for him don't exist, to which he refuses existence and life. His image of woman: bloated, congested by the sex, the eternal victim. Or the woman-penis. Because men hate women to such an extent that they would like them to hate them as much in return, in the same way, with the same weapons. This would perhaps be the war in which male violence could explode without shame or guilty conscience ... Is this sex war that men dream of more than women perhaps lying somewhere behind this film? But this would again be a form of sublimation, and that is excluded: the images are stopped before anything - the slightest element of fiction, of projection - can occur. Closing off any such opening; imprisoning it; a sealed, hermetic film. And facing it, facing his images, Godard imagines himself as the grandfather (as Ferre?) who, under the table, can no longer get it up, and above it no longer has the words with which to speak of his life and its struggles. Life, its struggles left behind him. The desire for solitude, for death. War or withdrawal; death, anyway. The impotency of the phallus facing life, the struggle for life. Dichotomies: The dichotomy of the retention of sex but its discharge nonetheless through the words and images. The dichotomy of the retention of music (sublimation), but its oozing through all the cracks in the film, bursting in liberation over the final image. The music of Ferre: glancing towards solitude. glancing towards death. A glance towards cinema. Withdrawal? The final image: hands, sick and hesitant, on the levers. Sick of these sounds and images, too unbearable, without hope of transformation. Hermetic images, sealed and closed; fine as a way of speaking about others, of speaking theoretically about theory and practice. But it's simply too much torture to speak of oneself, of one's melancholy and one's anguish. There is here the question of a limit; the limit of a cinema, the limit of a man's talking about himself, of truly saying I, of giving up just a little bit of power. Translated by Chris Darke CAHIERS DU CINEMA Volume Four: 1973-1978: History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle Edited by David Wilson Introduction by Berenice Reynaud with Pascal Bonitzer and Serge Toubiana (Cahiers du Cinema 251-2, July-August 1974) Lacombe Lucien, The Night Porter, Les Chinois a Paris, Le Trio infernal, etc. These films, whose avowed aim is to rewrite history, are not an isolated phenomenon. They are themselves inscribed into a history, a history in progress; they have - as we are sometimes criticized for saying - a context. This context, in France, is the coming to power of a new bourgeoisie, of a fraction of the bourgeoisie along with its ideology (Giscard, president of all the French; a more-just-andcaring society etc.), its conception of France, and of history. What goes by the name of 'apres-gaullisme' is also an opportunity for the bourgeoisie to rid itself of a certain heroic, nationalist but also anti-Petainist and anti-fascist image, which was still reflected if not by Pompidou, at least by de Gaulle and Gaullism. Chaban's electoral defeat marks the end of this heroic, exaggerated and somewhat grotesque image (cf. Malraux) of recent French history. Something else is beginning to be written and represented: that France wasn't all that anti-fascist, that the French couldn't have cared less about Nazism, that anti-fascism and the Resistance were only ever, precisely, this derisory image of Gaullist 'grandeur' which is now showing its false nose. What is emerging is a cynical ideology: that of big business, of the multinational and technocratic culture that Giscard represents. The French, it is thought, are ripe for this cynicism (cynicism of the ruling class, disillusionment of the exploited classes): a cynicism illustrated, on the screen, by the phenomenon known as the 'retro style', i.e. the snobbish fetishism of period effects (costumes and settings) with little concern for history. This false archaeology of history had to be denounced in all its implications and all its effects. A true archaeology had to be - has to be - put in its place: the popular memory of struggles (of all forms of struggle) which has never really been able to speak - which has never had the power to do so - and which must be revived against all the forces which are constantly bent on stifling its on silencing it once and for all. No one was better placed to situate the guestion and to spell out its implications than Michel Foucault, whose work systematically uncovers what the official text represses, what lies forgotten in the damnable archives of the ruling class. We hope that the interview that follows may open up new avenues of research. P.B. and S. T. CAHIERS: Let's take as our starting point the journalistic phenomenon of the 'retro style', One might simply ask: How is it that films like Lacomhe Lucien or The Night Porter are possible today? Why are they so immensely popular? We think there are three levels that ought to be taken into account. First, the political conjuncture. Giscard d'Estaing has been elected. A new type of relation to politics, to history, to the political apparatus is being created, one that indicates very clearly - and in a way that is plain to everyone - the death of Gaullism. We therefore have to see, in so far as Gaullism remains very closely associated with the period of the Resistance, how this manifests itself in the films that are being made. Second, how can bourgeois ideology be mounting an attack in the breaches of orthodox Marxism - call it rigid, economistic, mechanistic , whatever you like - which for a very long time has provided the only grid for interpreting social phenomena? Finally, where do militants fit into all this, since militants are consumers and sometimes producers of films? What has happened since Marcel Ophuls's film The Sorrow and the Pity is that the floodgates have opened. Something which until then had been completely suppressed, that is to say banned, is being openly voiced. Why? FOUCAULT: That can be explained, I think, by the fact that the history of the War and what happened before and after the War has never really been inscribed in anything other than wholly official histories. These official histories are basically centred on Gaullism which, on the one hand, Was the only way of writing that history in terms of an honourable nationalism and, on the other hand, was the only way of casting the Great Man, the man of the right and of outdated nineteenth-century nationalisms, in a historical role. It boils down to the fact that France was exonerated by de Gaulle, and on the other hand the right - and we all know how it behaved at the time of the War - found itself purified and sanctified by de Gaulle. Suddenly the right and France were reconciled in this way of making history: don't forget that nationalism was the climate in which nineteenth-century history (and especially its teaching) were born. What has never been described is what happened in the very depths of the country from 1936 on, and even from the end of the First World War to the Liberation. CAHIERS: So, what has perhaps been happening since The Sorrow and the Pity is that the truth is making its return into history. The question is whether it's really the truth. FOUCAULT: That has to be linked to the fact that the end of Gaullism has put a stop to this justification of the right by de Gaulle and the episode in question. The old Petainist right, the old collaborationist, Maurrasian and reactionary right which camouflaged itself as best it could behind de Gaulle, now considers itself entitled to produce a new version of its own history. This old right which, since Tardieu, had been disenfranchised historically and politically, is coming to the fore again. It supported Giscard explicitly. It no longer needs to wear a mask, and so it can write its own history. And among the factors that explain Giscard's current acceptance by half the French (plus two hundred thousand), one mustn't forget films like those we're talking about - whatever the film-makers actually intended. The fact that all that has actually been shown has allowed the right to re-form along certain lines. In the same way that, inversely, it's the blurring of the distinctions between the nationalist right and the collaborationist right that has made these films possible. It's all part of the same thing. CAHIERS; This piece of history is therefore being rewritten both in the cinema and on television, with debates like those on Dossiers de I'ecran (which chose the theme of the French under the Occupation twice in two months). Film-makers considered to be more or less on the left are also apparently involved in this rewriting of history. That's something we have to investigate. FOUCAULT: I don't think things are that simple. What I was saying a moment ago was very schematic. Let me continue. There's a real battle going on. And what's at stake is what might be roughly called popular memory. It's absolutely true that ordinary people, I mean those who don't have the right to writing, the right to make books themselves, to compose their own history, these people nevertheless have a way of registering history, of remembering it, living it and using it. This popular history was, up to a point, more alive and even more clearly formulated in the nineteenth century when you had, for example, a whole tradition of struggles relived orally or in texts, songs, etc. But the fact is that a whole series of apparatuses has been established ('popular literature', cheap books, but also what is taught in school) to block this development of popular memory, and you could say that the project has been, relatively speaking, very successful. The historical knowledge that the working class has about itself is becoming less all the time. When you think, for example, about what the workers knew about their own history at the end of the nineteenth century, and what the tradition of trade unionism - using the term 'tradition' in its full sense - represented up until the First World War, it amounted to something pretty substantial. That has been gradually disappearing. It's disappearing all the time, although it hasn't actually been lost. Nowadays, cheap books are no longer enough. There are much more efficient channels in the form of television and cinema. And I think the whole effort has tended towards a recoding of popular memory which exists but has no way of formally expressing itself. People are shown not what they have been but what they must remember they have been. Since memory is an important factor in struggle (indeed, it's within a kind of conscious dynamic of history that struggles develop), if you hold people's memory, you hold their dynamism. And you also hold their experience, their knowledge of previous struggles. You make sure that they no longer know what the Resistance was actually about ... It's along some such lines, I think, that these films have to be understood. What they're saying, roughly, is that there has been no popular struggle in the twentieth century. This statement has been formulated twice, in two different ways. The first time immediately after the War , when the message was a simple one: 'The twentieth century, what a century of heroes! Churchill, de Gaulle, all those parachute landings, airborne missions, etc.' Which was a way of saying: 'There was no popular struggle, that was the true struggle: But no one, as yet, has said directly: 'There Was no popular struggle.' The other, more recent way - sceptical or cynical, as you wish - consists in opting for statement pure and simple: 'Well, just look at what happened. Did you see any struggles? Can you see anyone rebelling, taking up arms?' CAHIERS: There's a kind of rumour that's been going round since, perhaps, The Sarrow and the Pity. Namely: the people of France, in the main, didn't resist, they even accepted collaboration, they accepted the Germans, they swallowed the lot. The question is what that really means. And it does indeed seem that what is at stake is the popular struggle, or rather people's memory of it. FOUCAULT: Exactly. That memory has to be seized, governed, controlled, told what to remember. And when you see these films, you learn what to remember: 'Don't believe everything you were once told. There are no heroes. And if there are no heroes, that's because there's no Struggle.' Hence a kind of ambiguity: on the one hand, 'there are no heroes' positively debunks a whole mythology of the war hero in the Burt Lancaster mould. It's a way of saying: 'War isn't that at al1!' Hence an initial impression that historical untruths are being stripped away: finally we're going to be told why we don't all have to identify with de Gaulle or the members of the Normandy-Niemen mission, etc. But hidden beneath the phrase 'There were no heroes' is another phrase which is the real message-'There was no struggle': That's how the process works. CAHIERS: There's something else that explains why these films are successful. They make use of the resentment felt by those who did indeed struggle against those who did not. For example, in The Sorrow and the Pity people active in the Resistance see the citizens of a town in central France doing nothing, and recognize this response for what it is. It's their resentment that comes across more than anything; they forget that they struggled. FOUCAULT: What's politically important, to my mind, more than this or that film, is the the fact that there's a series - the network that's made up of all these films and the place they 'occupy' (no pun intended). In other words, what is important is the question: 'Is it possible, at the present time, to make a film that's positive about the struggles of the Resistance?' And of course you realize that it isn't. The impression you have is that people would find it a bit of a joke, or else, quite simply, that no one would go and see it. I quite like The Sorrow and the Pity. I don't think it was a bad thing to have done. Perhaps I'm wrong, that's not what matters. What matters is that this series of films corresponds exactly to the fact that it is now impossible - as each of the films emphasizes - to make a film about the positive struggles that may have taken place in France around the time of the War and the Resistance. CAHIERS: Yes. It's the first thing they say if you criticize a film like Malle's. 'What would you have done instead?' is always the reply. And of course we don't have an answer. The left should be beginning to have a point of view on this, but in fact it has yet to be properly worked out. Then again, this raises the old problem of how to produce a positive hero, a new type of hero. FOUCAULT. The difficulties don't revolve around the hero so much as around the question of struggle. Can you make a film depicting a struggle without making the characters into heroes in the traditional sense? It's an old problem: how did history come to speak as it does and to recuperate the past, if not via a procedure which was that of the epic, that's to say, by telling its own story in the heroic mode? That's how the history of the French Revolution was written. The cinema proceeded in the same way. The strategy can always be ironically reversed: 'No, look, there are no heroes, we're all worthless, etc.' CAHIERS: Let's come back to the 'retro style'. The bourgeoisie has been relatively successful from its own point of view in focusing attention on a historical period (the 1940s) which highlights both its strong and its weak points. For on the one hand that's where the bourgeoisie is most easily unmasked (it laid the ground for Nazism and collaboration), and on the other hand that's where today it tries to justify, in the most cynical way possible, its historical attitude. The problem is: how can we produce a positive account of this same historical period? We - that is, the generation that took part in the struggles of 1968 or Lip. Is this the point on which we should go in and fight, with the idea of possibly, in some way or another, taking the ideological lead? For it's true that the bourgeoisie is on the offensive as well as on the defensive on this question of its recenc history. On the defensive strategically, on the offensive tactically since it has found its strong point, the thing that enables it best co manipulate the facts. But ought we simply - defensively - co be re-establishing the historical truth? Ought we not to be finding the point which, ideologically, would take us into the breach? Is this automatically the Resistance? Why not 1789 or 1968? FOUCAULT: As far as these films are concerned, I wonder whether something else couldn't be done on the same topic. And by 'topic' I don't mean showing struggles or showing that there were none. What I'm thinking is that its historically true that among ordinary French people there was, at the time of the War, a kind of refusal of war. Now where did that come from? From a whole series of episodes that no one talks about, neither the right because it wishes to hide them, nor the left because it does not want to compromise itself with anything that goes against 'national honour'. During the First World War, after all, some seven or eight million lads were conscripted. For four years they had a terrible life, they saw millions and millions of people dying around them. Back home in 1920, what did they have to look forward co? A right-wing government, total economic exploitation and finally, in 1932, an economic crisis and unemployment. How could these men, who had been packed into the trenches, still be in favour of war during the decades 1920-30 and 1930-40? In the case of the Germans, defeat rekindled their nationalist instincts, so that this distaste for war was overcome by the desire for revenge. But when all is said and done, people don't like fighting bourgeois wars, with the officers involved, for the gains involved. I believe that was an important phenom_ enon in the working class. And when, in 1940, you have men driving their bikes into a ditch and saying, 'I'm going home', you can't just say, 'What a bunch of cowards' and you can't hide it either. It has co be seen as part of the whole sequence. This disobeying of national orders has to be traced back to its roots. And what happened during the Resistance is the opposite of what we are shown: that's to say that the process of repoliticization, remobilization, the taste for struggle was gradually revived in the working class. It slowly began to revive after the rise of Nazism and the Spanish Civil War. What the films show is the reverse process: after the great dream of 1939, which was shattered in 1940, people just give up. This process did indeed take place, but within another much longer process which was moving in the opposite direction and which, beginning with the distaste for war, ended in the middle of the Occupation with the realization that there had to be a struggle. As for the theme 'There are no heroes, everyone's a coward', you have to ask yourself where it comes from and what it grows out of. After all, have there ever been any films about mutiny? CAHlERS: Yes. There was Kubrick's film (Paths of Glory), which was banned in France. FOUCAULT: I believe that this disobedience in the context of national armed struggles had a positive political meaning. The historical theme of Lacombe Lucien's family could be picked up again if taken back to Ypres and Douaumont ... CAHIERS: Which poses the problem of popular memory, of its own particular sense of time, which doesn't correspond at all to the timing of events like changes of government or declarations of war ... FOUCAULT: The aim of school history has always been to show how people got killed and how very heroic they were. Look what they did to Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars ... CAHIERS: A certain number of films , Malle's and Cavani's included, tend to abandon any attempt to deal with Nazism and fascism historically or in terms of the struggle they provoked. Instead of this, or as well as this, they hold another discourse, usually a sexual one. What do you make of this other discourse? FOUCAULT: But isn't it quite different in Lacombe Lucien and The Night Porter? Personally, I think that in Lacombe Lucien the erotic, passionate aspect has a function that's fairly easy to pinpoint. It's basically a way of reconciling the anti-hero, of saying that he's not as anti-heroic as all that. If all power relationships are indeed distorted by him, and if he renders them ineffective, by contrast, just when you think that for him all erotic relationships are similarly warped, a true relationship is discovered and he loves the girl. On the one hand there is the machinery of power which leads Lucien more and more, from the puncture onwards, towards a kind of madness. And on the other hand there is the machinery of love which seems to be following the same pattern, which seems to be distorted and which, on the contrary, works in the opposite direction and re-establishes Lucien at the end as the beautiful naked boy living in the fields with a girl. And so there's a kind of fairly facile antithesis between power and love. Whereas in The Night Porter the problem is - in general as in the present conjuncture - a very important one: it's that of the love of power. Power has an erotic charge. And this brings us to a historical problem: how is it that Nazism, whose representatives were pitiful, pathetic, puritanical figures, Victorian spinsters with (at best) secret vices, how is it that it can have become, nowadays and everywhere, in France, in Germany, in the United States, in all pornographic literature the world over, the absolute reference of eroticism? A whole sleazy erotic imaginary is now placed under the sign of Nazism. Which basically poses a serious problem: how can power be desirable? No one finds power desirable any more. This kind of affective, erotic attachment, this desire one has for power, the power of a ruler, no longer exists. The monarchy and its rituals were made to evoke this kind of erotic relation to power. The great apparatuses of Stalin, and even of Hider, were also created for that purpose. But this has all disintegrated and it's clear that one cannot love Brezhnev or Pompidou or Nixon. It was perhaps possible, at a pinch, to love de Gaulle or Kennedy or Churchill. But what's happening now? Are we not seeing the beginnings of a re-eroticization of power, developed at one derisory, pathetic extreme by the sex shops with Nazi emblems that you find in the United States, and (in a much more tolerable but equally derisory version) in Giscard d'Estaing's attitude when he says, 'We'll march along the streets in suits shaking people's hands, and the kids will have a half-day holiday.' There's no doubt that Giscard fought part of his electoral campaign not just on his physical presence but also on a certain eroticization of his personal self, his elegance. CAHIERS: That's how he projected himself in an election poster, the one where his daughter is facing him. FOUCAUlT: That's right. He is looking at France but she is looking at him. Power becomes seductive once again. CAHIERS: That's something that struck us during the election campaign, especially in the big television debate between Mitterrand and Giscard; they were on quite different territory. Mitterrand seemed like a politician of the old school, belonging to an old-fashioned left. He was trying to sell ideas, themselves dated and slightly quaint, and he did so with great dignity. Giscard on the other hand was selling the idea of power as if he were marketing a cheese. FOUCAULT: Even quite recently, you had to apologize for being in power. Power had to be erased and not show itself as such. That was, up to a point, how democratic republics functioned: the problem was to render power sufficiently insidious and invisible so that it became impossible to get a hold on what it did or where it was. Nowadays (and in this de Gaulle played a very important role), power is no longer hidden, it is proud to be there and actually says: 'Love me , because I am power.' CAHIERS: Perhaps we should speak about the fact that Marxist discourse, as it has been functioning for some time, is somehow unable satisfactorily to account for fascism. Historically speaking, Marxism has accounted for the Nazi phenomenon in an economistic, determinist way, completely ignor_ ing what was specific to the ideology of Nazism. You can't help wondering how someone like Malle, well enough in touch with developments on the left, can play on this weakness, fall into this gap. FOUCAULT: Marxism defined nazism and fascism as 'the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary fraction of the bourgeoisie'. This is a definition completely lacking in content, and one which lacks a whole series of articulations. What is missing in particular is the fact that Nazism and fascism were made possible only by the existence within the general population of a relatively large fraction willing to take on and be responsible for a certain number of state functions: repression, control, law and order. That, I think, is an important aspect of Nazism. The fact that it penetrated the general population so deeply and that some power was effectively delegated to certain people on the margins. That's where the word 'dictatorship' is both generally true and relatively false. When you think of the power an individual could possess under a Nazi regime from the moment he joined the SS or became a Party member! He could actually kill his neighbour, appropriate his wife and his house! That's where Lacombe Lucien is interesting, because it shows that side well. The fact is that, contrary to what one usually understands by dictatorship, that's to say the power of one individual, in a regime like that the most detestable, but in a sense the most intoxicating, part of power was given to a large number of people. It was the SS man who had the power to kill and to rape ... CAHIERS: That's where orthodox Marxism breaks down. Because this implies that there has to be a discourse on desire. FOUCAULT: On desire and on power ... CAHIERS: That's also where films like Lacombe Lucien and The Night Porter are relatively 'strong'. They can handle a discourse on desire and power in a way that seems coherent. FOUCAULT: In The Night Porter it's interesting to see how, in Nazism, the power of one man was taken up by many people and put to work. That sort of mock tribunal they set up is fascinating. Because from one angle it begins to look like a psychotherapy group, but in fact its power structure is that of a secret society. It's basically an SS cell that has re-formed, that gives itself legal powers different from and in opposition to the power at the centre. We have to remember how power was dispersed, how it was invested within the population itself, we have to remember this impressive displacement of power that Nazism brought about in a society like German society. It is untrue to say that Nazism was the power of the big industrialists continued in another form. It wasn't the power of the top brass reinforced. It was that too, but only on a certain level. CAHIERS: Indeed, that's an interesting aspect of the film. But what seemed very questionable to us was that it seemed to be saying: 'If you're a typical SS man, that's how you behave. But if on top of that you have a certain "notion of expenditure", that's the formula for a great erotic adventure.' So the film never abandons the idea of seduction. FOUCAULT: Yes, it's like Lacombe Lucien in that respect. For Nazism never gave anyone a pound of butter, it never gave anything but power. You have to ask yourself, if this regime was nothing other than a bloody dictatorship, how on 3 May 1945 there were still Germans fighting on to the last drop of blood, if these people were not attached to power in some way. Of course, you have to take into account all the pressures, denunciations ... CAHIERS: But if there were denunciations and pressures, there must have been people to do the denouncing. How did people get caught up in it all? How were they ever conned by this redistribution of power in their favour? FOUCAULT: In Lacomhe Lucien, as in The Night Porter, this excessive power that is given to them is converted back into love. It's very clear at the end of The Night Porter, with the recreation around Max, in his room, of a kind of concentration camp in miniature, where he is dying of hunger. There love has converted power, super-power, into total powerlessness. Roughly the same reconciliation occurs, in a sense, in Lacomhe Lucien, where love takes the excess of power by which it has been trapped and converts it inca a rural nakedness miles away from the Gestapo's shady hotel, miles away also from the farm where the pigs are being killed. CAHIERS: Are we then perhaps beginning to explain the problem you were posing earlier: how is it that Nazism, which was a puritanical, repressive system, is now universally eroticized? Some kind of displacement takes place: a problem which is central and which people don't wish to confront, the problem of power, is bypassed or rather completely displaced towards the sexual. So that this eroticization is really a displacement, a form of repression ... FOUCAULT: The problem is indeed a very difficult one and it has not perhaps been sufficiently studied, even by Reich. How is it that power is desirable and is actually desired? The procedures through which this eroticization is transmitted, reinforced, and so on, are clear enough. But for it to happen in the first place, the attachment co power, the acceptance of power by those over whom it is exercised, must already be erotic. CAHIERS: What makes it all the more difficult is that the representation of power is rarely erotic. De Gaulle and Hitler weren't exactly attractive. FOUCAULT: That's right, and I wonder whether in Marxist analyses one doesn't sacrifice a little too much to the abstract character of the idea of freedom. In a regime like the Nazi regime, it's quite clear that there's no freedom. But not having freedom doesn't mean that you don't have power. CAHIERS: It's on the level of the cinema and television, television being entirely controlled by power, that historical discourse has the greatest impact. Which implies a political responsibility. It seems to us that people are increasingly aware of it. For some years now, in the cinema, there has been more and more talk of history, politics, struggle ... FOUCAULT: There's a battle going on for history, around the history that's now in the making, and it is very interesting. People want to codify, to stifle What I have called 'popular memory', and also to propose, to impose a grid for interpreting the present. Until 1968 popular struggles had to do with folk tradition. For some they had no connection at all with anything going on in the present. After 1968 all popular struggles, whether in South America or in Africa, find an echo, a resonance. No longer can this separation, this sore of geographical cordon sanitaire, be established. Popular struggles have become not something that is happening now, but something that might always happen, in our system. And so they have to be set at a distance once again. How? Not by interpreting them directly - you would only lay yourself open to all the contradictions - but by proposing a historical interpretation of popular struggles from our own past, to show that in fact they never took place! Before 1968, it was: 'It won't happen, because it only happens elsewhere'; now it's: 'It won't happen, because it has never happened! Even something like the Resistance, the stuff of so many dreams, just look at it ... Nothing there. An empty shell, completely hollow!' Which is another way of saying: 'In Chile, don't worry, the peasants don't give a damn. In France too: a few troublemakers and their antics won't affect anything fundamental.' CAHIERS: For us, the important thing when one reacts to that, against that, is to realize that it's not enough to re-establish the truth, to say, about the Maquis for example, 'No, I was there, it didn't happen like that at all!' We believe that to conduct the ideological struggle effectively on the kind of terrain that these films lead into you have to have a wider, more comprehensive system of references - of positive references. For many people, for example, that consists in reappropriating the 'history of France'. It was against this background that we spent some time on Moi, Pierre Riviere . .. because we realized that in the end, and paradoxically, it helped us to explain Lacombe Lucien, that the comparison brought out a number of things. For example, one significant difference is that Pierre Riviere is a man who writes, who commits a murder and who has a quite extraordinary memory. Malle's hero, on the other hand, is presented as a halfwit, as someone who goes through everything, history, the War, collaboration, without building on his experiences. And it's there that the theme of memory, of popular memory, can help us to make the distinction between someone, Pierre Riviere, who uses a language that is not his and is forced to kill to obtain the right to do so, and the character created by Malle and Modiano 8 who proves, precisely by not building on anything that happens to him, that there is nothing worth remembering. It's a pity you haven't seen The Courage of the People. It's a Bolivian film, which was made for the speClfic purpose of providing an exhibit for a dossier. This film, which can be seen everywhere except in Bolivia, because of the regime, is played by those who actually took part in the real-life drama it recreates (a miners' strike and its bloody repression) - they undertake to represent themselves so that no one will forget. It's interesting to see that, on a minimum level, every film is a potential archive and that, in the context of a struggle, one can take this idea one step further: people put together a film intending it to be an exhibit. And you can analyse that in two radically different ways: either the film is about power or it represents the victims of that power, the exploited classes who, without the help of the cinematographic apparatus, with very little knowledge of how films are made and distributed, take on their own representation, give evidence for history. Rather as Pierre Riviere gave evidence, that's to say, began to write, knowing that sooner or later he would appear before a court and that everyone had to understand what he had to say. What's important in The Courage of the People is that the demand actually came from the people. It was through a survey that the director first learned of the demand, and it was those who had lived through the event who asked for it to be memorized. FOUCAULT: The people create their own archives. CAHIERS: The difference between Pierre Riviere and Lacombe Lucien is that Pierre Riviere does everything to enable us to discuss his history after his death. Whereas, even if Lacombe is a real character or one who might have existed, he is only ever the object of another's discourse. for purposes that are not his own. There are two things that are successful in the cinema now. On the one hand, historical documents, which have an important role to play. In Toute une vie, for example, they are very important. Or in films by Marcel Ophuls or Harris and Sedouy, when you see Duclos waving his arms about in 1936 and in 1939, these scenes from real life are moving. And on the other hand, fictional characters who, at a given moment in history, compress social relations, historical relations, into the smallest possible space. That's why Lacombe Lucien works so well. Lacombe is a Frenchman under the Occupation, someone very ordinary who stands in a concrete relationship to Nazism, to the countryside, to local government, etc. We have to be aware of this way of personifying history, of bringing it to life in a character, or a group of characters who, at a given moment, stand in a privileged relationship to power. There are lots of characters in the history of the workers' movement whom we don't know about: lots of heroes in the history of the working class who have been totally repressed. And I believe that something important is at stake here. Marxism doesn't need to make any more films about Lenin, there are more than enough already. FOUCAULT: What you are saying is important. It's a characteristic of many Marxists today. They don't know very much about history. They spend their time saying that history is being overlooked, but are only capable themselves of commenting on texts: 'What did Marx say? Did Marx really say that?' But that is Marxism if not another way of analysing history itself? In my opinion, the left, France, is not very interested in history. It used to be. In the nineteenth century you could say that Michelet represented the left at a given moment. There was also Jaures, and then a kind of tradition of left-wing, social democratic historians (Mathiez etc.). Today that has virtually dried up. Whereas it could be an impressi"e movement of writers and film-makers. There was of course Aragon and Les Cloches de Bale, which is a very great historical novel. But it doesn't amount to much, if you think of what that could represent in a society whose intellectuals are, after all, more or less steeped in Marxism. CAHIERS: Film-making brings in something new again in this respect: 'live' history ... What relation do American people have to history, now that they see the Vietnam War every evening on television as they eat their supper? FOUCAULT: As soon as you begin to see images of war every evening, war becomes utterly accepted. In other words, extremely boring - you would certainly prefer to watch something else. But once it becomes boring, it's accepted. You don't even watch it. So what do you have to do for this news, as it appears on film, to be reactivated as news that is historically important? CAHIERS: Have you seen Les Camisards? FOUCAULT: Yes, I liked it a lot. Historically it's beyond reproach. It's a beautiful film, it's intelligent, it explains so much. CAHIERS: I think that's the direction film-makers should be taking. To come back to the films we were talking about at the beginning, another problem that must be mentioned is the confused response of the far left to certain aspects of Lacombe Lucien and The Night Porter, the sexual aspect especially. How might the right take advantage of this confusion? FOUCAULT: On this subject of what you call the far left, I don't really know what to think. I'm not even sure whether it still exists. All the same, a huge balance sheet has to be drawn up for the activities of the far left since 1968: the conclusions are negative on the one side and positive on the other. It's true that the far left has been responsible for a whole lot of important ideas in a number of areas: sexuality, women, homosexuality, psychiatry, housing, medicine. It has also been responsible for the diffusion of modes of action-which continues to be important. The far left has been important in the kinds of action it has taken as well as in the themes it has pursued. But there is also a negative balance in terms of certain Stalinist, terrorist, organizational practices. And there is equally a misapprehension of certain currents running wide and deep which have just resulted in thirteen million votes for Mitterrand, and which have always been neglected on the pretext that that was just politicking, party politics. Any number of aspects have been neglected, notably the fact that the desire to defeat the right has for some years, some months, been a very important political factor among the masses. The far left didn't have this desire because its definition of the masses was wrong and because it didn't really understand what it means to want to win. To avoid the risk of having vicrory snatched away it prefers not to run the risk of winning. Defeat, at least, can't be recuperated. Personally, I'm not so sure. Translated by Annwyl Williams Cahiers du Cinema /Volume Four: 1973-1978: History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle/Anti-retro/Edited by David Wilson
by Serge Daney
Learning, retaining
May '68, as we know, confirmed Godard's suspicion that the cinema was, in every sense, a 'bad place', at once immoral and inadequate. A place for facile hysteria, for the eye's filthy roving, for voyeurism and magic. A place where, to use a metaphor that was once all the rage, one came to 'sleep in the picture bed' (dormir dans Ie plan lit), to get an eyeful and in fact to see nothing at all to see too much and to see it badly.
The doubts cast by May '68 on the 'viewing community' - a community that secretes more images and sounds that it can see and digest (the image flashes by and disappears) - reached the generation that had invested most in it, that of the self-taught cinephiles for whom the cinema had taken the place of school and family, the generation of the New Wave, brought up in the cinematheques. From 1968 Godard was to react by pulling out and retracing his steps: from the cinema to school, and then from school to the family. Regression? Why couldn't one say 'regressionism'?
In 1968, for the most radical - the most left-wing - element among film_ makers, one thing is certain: you have to learn to get away from the cinema (from cinephilia and obscurantism) or at least forge a link between the cinema and something else. And to learn you have to go to school. Not so much the 'school of life' as the school of film. That was how Godard and Gorin came to transform the scenographic cube into a classroom, the film dialogue into a recitation, the voice-off into a lecture, the shooting into a practical, the film topic into course headings ('revisionism', 'ideology') and the film-maker into a schoolmaster, tutor or supervisor. School thus becomes the 'good place', the place that gets you away from the cinema and closer to the 'real' (a real awaiting transformation, of course). It's the place which has brought us the films of the Dziga-Vertov group (and already, La Chinoise). In Tout va bien, Numiro deux and lci et ailleurs the family apartment has replaced the classroom (and television had taken the place of the cinema), but the essential remains. The essential: people giving each other lessons.
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We need look no further to explain the extraordinary mixture of love and hatred, of rage and irritation, the moans and the groans that Godard's 'cinema' - pursuing a fairly tough Maoist line, initially - proceeded to unleash. Had Godard been 'recuperated by the system', people would have forgiven him a lot (even today, how many people are still indignant at the idea that he won't give them another Pierrot Ie fou?). Had he become totally marginalized, an underground figure happy with his underground status, they would have rendered him discreet homage. But what can they do with a Godard who continues to work, to teach and be taught, whether people come to see his films or not? There's something in Godard's pedagogy that the film world - the film world especially - won't tolerate: the fact that it is addressed to no one in particular.
Godard's pedagogy. School, as we were saying, is the 'good place' (the place where you make progress, the place you're bound to get out of) in contrast to the cinema (the 'bad place' where you regress and where your chances of getting out are nil). Let's take a closer look and pursue the analogy.
First, school is more than anywhere else the place where you are allowed, indeed encouraged, to confuse words and things/ to remain in ignorance about what links them, to postpone having to think about it until later (is there anything to vouch for the truth of what we are taught?). School means nominalism and dogmatism.
Now the sine qua non of Godard's pedagogy is this: you must never question the other's discourse, whatever it is. You must take it literally, unthinkingly. You must also take it word for word. Godard concerns himself only with things-already-said-by-others or things-already-said in the form of established statements (quotations, slogans and posters, jokes and stories, words on a blackboard, newspaper headlines, anything at all). Statement-objects, little monuments, words taken as things: learn them or not as you prefer, take it or leave it.
Things-said-by-others have the status of a fait accompli: whatever else, they exist, they consist of something. Their very existence rules out any attempt to reconstruct behind, before or around them the domain of their enunciation. Godard never asks any questions of the statements he receives - where they come from or what makes them possible, or what guarantees they offer. He never queries the desire they betray and at the same time conceal. His approach is anti-archaeological in the extreme. It consists in noting what is said (about which nothing can be done) and immediately looking for the other statement, the other sound, the other image which might counterbalance this statement, this sound, this image. 'Godard' would simply be the empty space, the black screen where images and sounds would co-exist, cancel each other out, recognize and point to each other - in short, struggle. More than 'who is right?' and 'who is wrong?', the real question is 'what could we oppose to that?' The devil's advocate.
Hence the malaise and 'confusion' with which Godard is often reproached. He always replies to what the other says (asserts, proclaims or recommends) by what another other says (asserts, proclaims or recommends). There is always a big unknown quantity in his pedagogy, and this is because the nature of the relation he entertains with his 'good' discourses (those he defends) is ultimately uncertain.
In Ici et ailleurs, for example, a 'film' based on images brought back from Jordan (1970-5), it's clear that the film's self-interrogation (the way in which it dissociates 'here' and 'elsewhere', images and sounds, 1970 and 1975) is possible and intelligible only because, early on, the syntagm 'Palestinian revolution' already functions as an axiom, as something that can be taken for granted (something already-said-by-orhers, in this case by Al Fatah), something in relation to which Godard doesn't have to define himself personally (and say not just 'I' but 'I'm on their side') or mark his position in the film. He doesn't have to make his position, his initial choice - for the Palestinians, against Israel acceptable, convincing or desirable. The logic of school, again.
Second, school is more than anywhere else the place where the master doesn't have to say where his knowledge and his certainties come from. And on the other hand it's the place where the pupil cannot reinscribe, use or Put to the test the knowledge imparted to him. Before the master's knowledge, and after the pupil's knowledge, is a blank, a no man's land, a question that Godard will have nothing to do with. the question of how knowledge is appropriated. He's only interested in (re)transmission.
And yet in every pedagogy there are values. positive contents, to be communicated. Godard's pedagogy is no exception. Every single one of the films made after 1968 latches on to (and distances itself from) what one might call with out any pejorative nuance - 'a correct discourse' [discours du manche]. Let's recapitulate: Marxist-Leninist politics (the Chinese positions) in Pravda and Vent d'est' Althusser's lesson on wrong notions of ideology in Lotte in Italia; Brecht's lesson on 'the role of intellectuals in the revolution' in Tout va bien and, more recently, snatches of feminist discourse (Germaine Greer) in Numero deux. Correct discourse is not a discourse in power, but it's a discourse that has power it is violent, assertive, provocative and fully constituted. Correct discours changes hands, so to speak, but it always comes from above and is quick to lay blame (things to be ashamed of, in turn: being a cinephile, being a revisionist being cut off from the masses, being a male chauvinist).
But Godard is not the conveyer - still less the originator - of these discourse which he asks us to believe in (and submit ourselves to). His role is more lik: that of a tutor [repetiteur]. A three-term structure is then established, a littl theatre a trois, where the master (who is after all only a tutor) and the pupil (who only repeats) meet up with what has to be repeated, the correct discourse to which master and pupils are subjected, if unequally, and which bullies them.
The screen, then, becomes the place where this bullying is experienced and the film its staging. But in this arrangement two questions are completely ignored: how the correct discourse is produced (in Maoist terms: where do correct ideas come from?) and how it is appropriated (in Maoist terms: what is the difference between true ideas and correct ideas?). School is not of course the place for these questions. The tutor appears as a modest and at the same time tyrannical figure: he makes the pupil learn a lesson which doesn't arouse his own curiosity, and to which he is himself subjected.
After 1968 this master-discourse is conveyed more or less systematically by a female voice. For Godard's pedagogy implies a division of roles and discourses according to sex. Man speaks but woman makes the speeches. The voice that reprimands, corrects, advises, teaches, explains, theorizes and even theorizes/terrorizes is always a woman's voice. And if this voice begins to speak about women's issues, precisely, it adopts the same assertive, faintly declamatory tone: the opposite of the naturalistic experience and concern. Godard doesn't film a revolt that can't speak for itself, that hasn't found its language, its style, its theory. In Tout va bien we see the character played by Jane Fonda move very quickly from dissatisfaction to a kind of theoretical explanation of her dissatisfaction (one that Montand doesn't understand). There is nothing at all before discourse, before things-said-by-others.
Third, for the master and for the pupils, each year brings with it ('back to school') a re-enactment, a repetition of the first time, a going back to the beginning. To the time when nothing was known, when the blackboard was empty. So that school - the place of the tabula rasa and the blackboard on which nothing remains for long, the gloomy place of permanent transition and waiting for things to happen - is an obsessional, non-linear place, closed in on itself.
From his very first films Godard has shown an extreme reluctance to 'tell a story', to say 'at the beginning, this happened' and 'at the end, that'. Getting away from the cinema was also getting away from this obligation, well formulated by old Fritz Lang in Le Mepris: 'You always have to finish what you begin: A basic difference between school and the cinema is that there's no need to please or to flatter schoolchildren because school is compulsory. The state insists on schooling for every child. Whereas in the cinema, to hold on to your public, you have to give them things to see and enjoy, tell a story (spin a yarn): hence the accumulation of images, the hysteria, the calculated effects, the retention and the discharge, the happy ending - the catharsis. The privilege of school is that it retains its pupils so that they retain what they are told; the master retains his knowledge (he doesn't say everything) and punishes the bad pupils with detention.
Keeping and giving back
School was therefore the 'good place' only because, as the place of endless deferral, it allowed you to retain the maximum number of things and people for the longest possible time. For 'to retain' means two things: 'to keep back' but also 'to delay', 'to defer'. You keep an audience of pupils to delay the moment when they might move too quickly from one image to another, from one sound to another, see too quickly, come to premature conclusions, think they're done with images and sounds when they have no idea of the complexity, the seriousness of what is involved in the ordering of these images and these sounds.
School allows you to turn cinephilia back against itself, to reverse it like a glove, taking all the time you need. This is why Godard's pedagogy consists in for ever coming back to images and sounds, pointing to them, matching them. commenting on them, putting images within images and sounds within sounds, criticizing them like so many insoluble enigmas: not losing them, keeping them in sight, keeping them.
A masturbatory pedagogy? No doubt. It has as its horizon, as its limit, the enigma of enigmas, the sphinx of the still photograph: it is what defies the intelligence that can never exhaust it, what holds the look and the meaning, what fixes the scopic desire: actively retains it.
For the place from which Godard speaks co us, from which he addresses us , is certainly not the secure place of a profession or even a personal project. It's somewhere in between, even a between-three, an impossible place that embraces the photograph (nineteenth century) and the cinema (twentieth century) and television (twenty-first century). The photo is what retains once and for all (the corpse to work on). The cinema is what retains for a moment only (death at work). Television is what retains nothing at all (a fatal spilling out:. a haemorrhaging of images).
Thus Godard's advance on other manipulators of images and sounds has to do with his complete disregard for any discourse on the 'specificity' of the cinema. You have to see how he finds a place on the cinema screen for both the still photo and the television image, how he quietly fits them in (the cinema's only specificity now consisting in - provisionally? - receiving images that Wet'e not made for it, in allowing itself to be taken over by them: Numero deux), to understand that Godard goes beyond any discourse on the specificity of the cinema, whether the spontaneous discourse of the spectator (that's what the cinema means to me), or that of those professionally involved (that's how you make films) or that of enlightened academics (that's how the cinema works).
The cinema, as we were saying at the outset, is a bad place, a place of crime and of magic. The crime: that images and sounds should be taken (torn removed, stolen, extorted) from living beings. The magic: that they should h; exhibited in another place (the film theatre) for the pleasure of those Who See them. The one who benefits from the transfer is the film-maker. That's Where the real pornography lies, in this change of scene: it's literally the ob-scene.
People will say: these are moral questions, of the sort addressed by Bazin and what's more, this type of symbolic debt can't be repaid. Indeed. But Godard's itinerary happens to poine to a very concrete, very historical question a question in crisis: that of the nature of what might be called the 'filmic contract' (filming/filmed). This question seemed to arise only for the militant or ethnographic cinema ('Ourselves and others'), but Godard tells us that it concerns the very act of filming. Is he exaggerating? One can't seriously think that this is one of those questions that can be resolved with good will and pious hopes (for the good cause - the artistic masterpiece or the correct militant action). It is going to arise and is bound to become more pressing as the traditional contract between the film-maker, the filmed and the film viewer, the contract established by the film industry (Hollywood), becomes ever more threadbare and the cinema, as 'a mass, family, popular and homogenizing art', reaches crisis point. Godard speaks to us already about this crisis; because it was this crisis that made him into a film-maker. But it's already a question of pornographic films (Exhibition) or militant films (Un simple exemple). A question of the future.
For Godard, retaining images and his audience, pinning them down in a sense (as butterflies are cruelly pinned down), is a despairing activity, and a hopeless one. All his pedagogy wins for him is a little more time. To the obscenity of appearing as the auteur (and the beneficiary of filmic surplus value) he has preferred that of displaying himself in the very act of retention.
The impossibility of moving on to a filmic contract of a new sort has therefore led him to keep (retain) images and sounds, not knowing who to give them back to. Godard's cinema is a painful meditation on the theme of restitution, or better of restoration. To restore is to give back the images and sounds to those from whom they were taken. It is also to commit them (a truly political commitment) to producing their own images and sounds. And so much the better if this forces the film-maker to change his way of working!
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A film in which this restitution-restoration takes place, at least ideally, is lei et ailleurs. Who can these images of Palestinian men and women that Godard and Gorin (invited by the PLO) bring back from the Middle East, these images that Godard keeps to himself for five years, be given back to?
To the general public eager for sensation (Godard + Palestine = scoop)? To the politically aware anxious to be confirmed in its orthodoxy (Godard + Palestine = good cause + art)? To the PLO who invited him, allowed him to film and trusted him (Godard + Palestine:: weapon of propaganda)? No, not even the PLO. So what does that leave?
One day between 1970 and 1975 Godard realizes that the soundtrack has not been translated in its entirety - what the fedayeen say in the shots where they appear has not been translated from the Arabic. And he realizes that basically there would have been few complaints (everyone would have accepted the superimposition of a voice-over). Now, Godard tells us, these fedayeen whose speech has remained a dead letter are themselves awaiting death, as good as dead. They - or ocher fedayeen like them - died in 1970, assassinated by Hussein's troops.
Making the film ('You always have to finish what you begin') then amounts, quite simply, to translating the soundtrack, making sure that people can hear what is said; or better, that they listen to it. What is retained is then released, what is kept is given back, but it is too late. The images and the sounds are given back, just as tributes are paid, to those to whom they belong: to the dead.
Translated by Annwyl Williams
Cahiers du Cinema /Volume Four: 1973-1978: History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle/Edited by David Wilson
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by Timothy S. Murphy What you want is always something within a complex situation in (of) present time. We will provide the situation without which what you desire will remain a phantom… the situation the complex of contents or conditions —Alexander Trocchi, ‘Advt.’ (1972:81) The opening thesis of Guy Debord’s 1967 Society of the Spectacle, the most sophisticated and influential document produced by the Situationist International (SI) in the course of its stormy 15-year existence, proposes that ‘[t]he whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation’ (1967:12). Three years earlier, in his cutup novel Nova Express, William S. Burroughs wrote that ‘“Reality” is simply a more or less constant scanning pattern—The scanning pattern we accept as “reality” has been imposed by the controlling power on this planet, a power primarily oriented toward total control’ (NE 53). The following year, in conversation with Conrad Knickerbocker of The Paris Review, Burroughs clarified that ‘[i]mplicit in Nova Express is a theory that what we call reality is actually a movie. It’s a film, what I call a biologic film’ (Knickerbocker 1965:70). What is the relationship between these two surprisingly similar claims, made by two of the most enigmatic figures to emerge from the global cultural ferment of the 1950s and 1960s? They never met or corresponded, as far as I have been able to determine, and they hardly make any direct reference to each other, yet they arrived at critical models of contemporary society that are remarkably congruent not only at the highest level of theoretical generality, but also at the more focused level of practical tactics for resistance. The key to this convergence, I would claim, lies not only in Burroughs’s and Debord’s parallel sensitivities to the postwar economy of the image, but also in the heretofore under-appreciated and unexamined role played by their common friend and ally Alexander Trocchi in translating between Debord’s primarily political analysis and Burroughs’s primarily aesthetic one and (perhaps) vice versa. Today, more than 30 years later, these critical models are still relevant to the extent that they retain their ability to dissect and displace the increasingly integrated economy of the image, whose global reach has only widened in the intervening decades. Despite the setbacks and even defeats they experienced, Burroughs and the Situationists continue to provide us with suggestive means to comprehend, and in so doing to resist, the spectacle of the present. I: A LOOSE CULTURAL VENTURELet us begin by examining Trocchi’s unacknowledged role as a conduit and translator between Burroughs and Debord. Glasgow-born Trocchi met Debord in Paris in 1955, while dividing his time between editing the avant-garde literary review Merlin and writing pseudonymous pornographic fiction for the Olympia Press (which would later publish Burroughs’s Naked Lunch). For the next eight years, even after his relocation to the US in 1956, Trocchi would move relatively freely between the discrete bohemian worlds of the Lettrist International (and after 1957 its successor, the Situationist International) on the one hand and the expatriate Anglophone literary community on the other (Marcus 1989:385–7). In his 1960 novel, Cain’s Book, which would soon bring him into contact and later friendship with Burroughs, Trocchi obliquely acknowledged his continuing involvement with Debord and company: late in the book, his junkie narrator writes: ‘Il vous faut construire les situations’ (Trocchi 1960:236). When Trocchi was arrested in the US that year on drug charges, his fellow Situationists published a resolution appointing Debord and others to ‘take immediate action on behalf of Alexander Trocchi’ and to ‘demand [his] setting free’ (IS 1997:160). Unsurprisingly, the years immediately following the publication of Cain’s Book would see Trocchi’s most ambitious attempt to participate in the articulation of the Situationist project—that is, to ‘construct situations’—an attempt that also involved Burroughs, whom he had gotten to know well during their scandalous joint attendance at the 1962 Edinburgh Festival (Morgan 1988:332–41). This would be, in essence, an attempt to construct a practical conduit between his two bohemian worlds, to establish an alliance between two distinct but overlapping modes of cultural resistance. The opening move of Trocchi’s effort was the composition of ‘Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’, a manifesto for what can only be called a revolution in consciousness and at the same time a proposal for the foundation of a ‘limited liability company’, initially called ‘International Cultural Enterprises Ltd’, which would manage the economic exploitation of the work of countercultural artists working toward such a revolution (1963a:190). This company would be a first step toward the establishment of a ‘spontaneous university’ similar to Black Mountain College that would in turn act as the ‘detonator of the invisible insurrection’ of the title (Trocchi 1963a:186–8, 191). I will examine these linked notions further in Section III, below. ‘Invisible Insurrection’ was first published in French in Internationale Situationniste 8 (January 1963) under the title ‘Technique du coup du monde’, which may be translated as ‘Technique for World Takeover’—‘coup du monde’ in contrast to the ‘coup d’état of Trotsky and Lenin’ (IS 1997:346; see also Trocchi 1963a:177). Trocchi was also listed as a member of the journal’s editorial committee for that issue. Later that year, the essay appeared in English under its original title, and in the following year it was incorporated into Trocchi’s open-ended Sigma Portfolio, along with a further elaboration of the notion of a countercultural company and university entitled ‘Sigma: A Tactical Blueprint’ (1964a; see also Trocchi 1964b, #2 and 3). A few months before the initial distribution of the Portfolio, Trocchi wrote Burroughs to invite him to join the board of directors of Sigma (as the countercultural company had been re-christened), which was apparently incorporated in London in the summer of 1963. ‘The bricks and mortar of our enormous factory’, he wrote, ‘are contingent upon the eventual assent of our nuclear cosmonauts to operate it’ (Trocchi 1963b:208). Trocchi hoped to raise capital for the Sigma ‘factory’ by signing up high-profile writers and artists, the ‘nuclear cosmonauts’ he mentions, as directors and clients of Sigma’s artist management service; in addition to Burroughs, Robert Creeley was invited to become a director, and Anthony Burgess, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, R. D. Laing, Timothy Leary and Michael McClure were named as ‘people interested’ in Sigma (Trocchi 1964b, #17). Along with the letter, Trocchi ‘enclose[d] a copy of the [“Sigma: A Tactical Blueprint”] essay to acquaint [Burroughs] with the methods we have already evolved’ (Trocchi 1963b:207); thus it seems fair to assume that Burroughs was at least superficially acquainted with Trocchi’s revolutionary ambitions and his Situationist perspectives by this time. There is no evidence that Burroughs was ever formally ‘registered as a director in the company’ as Trocchi wanted (Trocchi 1963b:208), but he did contribute a piece entitled ‘Martin’s Folly’ to the project, which was incorporated into a poster that became the first item in the Portfolio as it was originally distributed (Trocchi 1964b, #1). If we assume further that Burroughs later received a copy of the entire Portfolio, he would also have been able to read Trocchi’s translation/adaptation of the 1960 ‘Manifesto Situationniste’ that was included as well (for the original, see IS 1997:144–6; for Trocchi’s translation, see Trocchi 1964b, #18). Thus the conduit that Trocchi was trying to build between the Anglophone counterculture and the Situationist International began to take shape, although it would have little opportunity to function. All this work of independent but parallel practical organization did not go unnoticed by the leading members of the SI, who no doubt received copies of the Portfolio. In Internationale Situationniste 10 (March 1966), the editorial committee (headed by Debord and including the influential Situationists Michèle Bernstein, Mustapha Khayati and Raoul Vaneigem) published the following note of clarification regarding the group’s relationship with Trocchi: Upon the appearance in London in autumn 1964 of the first publications of the ‘Project Sigma’ initiated by Alexander Trocchi, it was mutually agreed that the SI could not involve itself in such a loose cultural venture, in spite of the interest we have in dialogue with the most exigent individuals who may be contacted through it, notably in the United States and England. It is therefore no longer as a member of the SI that our friend Alexander Trocchi has since developed an activity of which we fully approve of several aspects. (IS 1997:495; trans. Knabb 1989:373) Thus, despite the SI’s ‘interest in dialogue’ with his ‘exigent’ friends like Burroughs (whose Naked Lunch had appeared in French translation in the spring of 1964), Trocchi was effectively expelled from the group just as he was beginning to contribute to it, though in a kinder and gentler fashion than most of the others who were excluded earlier and later. Indeed, in Christopher Gray’s tabular summary of the SI’s membership, Trocchi is listed as one of 19 ‘mutually agreed’ ‘resignations’ (démissions) from the SI, rather than one of the 45 involuntary and rhetorically harsh ‘exclusions’ (Gray 1974:132–3). Debord’s recently published letters to Trocchi confirm this (Debord 2001:299–300, 309–10). In any case, cut off from one of his bohemian worlds, Trocchi was left without a strong political basis for his fundamentally artistic Project Sigma, which seems to have dissolved thereafter, along with his plans for another novel, into junkie recidivism. He spent the bulk of his remaining years dealing in used books, and died of pneumonia in 1984. II: RETAKE THE UNIVERSE If we accept the thesis that Trocchi did act as a conduit and translator between the SI’s milieu and Burroughs’s, then the first questions that follow from this are, what exactly did he translate or conduct, and in which direction? Pending a comprehensive investigation of still-unpublished archives (including Trocchi’s and Burroughs’s personal correspondence of the period, much of which is still in private hands), the evidence suggests that the direction of influence, if it indeed took place, was most often from the Situationists to Burroughs rather than the reverse. Most of the key statements of Situationist theory and method to which I will refer hereafter predate, sometimes by many years, the parallel texts by Burroughs that bear the closest similarities to those statements. However, the claim of direct or indirect influence must remain speculative until all the evidence becomes available, no matter how suggestive the similarities may be between Burroughs’s ideas and Debord’s. Nevertheless, a passage in one unpublished letter from Burroughs to his French translator Mary Beach does confirm some degree of recognition of their shared interests, strategies and tactics: Do you know of a French group called Situationist International— correspondence: B.P. 307-03 Paris? Seemingly a sophisticated anarchist group. I think they would be an excellent outlet for the short pieces I am writing now. Just read a very intelligent analysis of the Watt [sic] race riots by this group. (Burroughs 1967) This letter was written long after Burroughs’s brief involvement with Trocchi’s Project Sigma, during which time he presumably first learned about the SI, so his description of it as ‘a sophisticated anarchist group’ may be forgetful or ironic. His interest in the SI’s analysis of the Watts riots, however, is quite direct, and it will serve as our password into the extended comparison that follows. The convergence between Burroughs’s notion of the reality film and the Situationist theory of the spectacle manifests itself in a number of ways, some of which only become apparent when viewed through the lens of Trocchi’s Project Sigma. First of all, despite their common language of visuality, neither model is simply a critique of some perceived misuse of film, television or the mass media generally. As I noted above, for Burroughs, the very reality that the media claim to depict is ‘a more or less constant scanning pattern’ that ‘has been imposed by the controlling power on this planet, a power primarily oriented toward total control’ (NE 53). Similarly, for Debord, ‘[t]he spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images’ (1967:12). It is a control system of which the media are only a subordinate part, for it is ‘the self-portrait of power in the age of power’s totalitarian rule over the conditions of existence’ (Debord 1967:19). As Burroughs argues, to understand the present it is necessary to ‘[p]ostulate a biologic film running from the beginning to the end, from zero to zero as all biologic film run in any time universe—Call this film X1 and postulate further that there can be only one film with the quality X1 in any given time universe’ (NE 8 [note]). The issue of the film’s singularity connects it to Burroughs’s earlier and better-known theory of language as a totalitarian virus that people unwittingly internalize, expressed in Naked Lunch as follows: ‘The Word is divided into units which be all in one piece and should be so taken, but the pieces can be had in any order being tied up back and forth, in and out fore and aft like an innaresting sex arrangement’ (NL 207). Although ‘[t]he word cannot be expressed direct’ (NL 105) in its totality, it is nevertheless the immediate condition of human reality. The reality film, like the Word or the spectacle, is a totality that is not so much a set of words that we speak or images that we watch as it is a general condition in which we are immersed, even and especially when we are apparently not focused on words or images. It is the material horizon of our existence in that ‘[t]he spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image’ (Debord 1967:24). Despite the fact that we are allowed to make certain limited choices that are provided by that segment of the spectacle or film known as the market, we are not free because we are deprived of genuine activity. The spectacle imposes isolation and passivity as conditions of its control. This material reality of the spectacle thus constitutes a form of economic domination, but unlike earlier forms of domination, it is not organized so as to combat a fundamental scarcity of resources and a concomitant limit to production. Instead, the spectacular reality film produces and distributes scarcity as a subordinate component of a general economy of material abundance, which is the most significant consequence of the global mechanization of commodity production. Trocchi takes this shift for granted when he writes, in ‘Invisible Insurrection’, that ‘[c]learly, there is in principle no problem of production in the modern world. The urgent problem of the future is that of distribution which is presently (dis)ordered in terms of the economic system prevailing in this or that area’ (1963a:179). That is, the massive growth of production under global capitalism (understood in Debord’s terms as referring both to the Western capitalist nations of the ‘diffuse spectacle’ and to the Eastern-bloc socialist nations of the ‘bureaucratic’ or ‘concentrated spectacle’ [1967:41–3], an identification with which Burroughs agrees: ‘[T]he same old formulas’ define both sides [Job 72]) has resulted in a general situation of abundance that could in principle provide every living person with an acceptable standard of living— if a radical redistribution of consumption were carried out. Of course, it hasn’t been carried out, and instead scarcity and its correlates, poverty and passivity, are represented and reproduced through the spectacle itself. Even the struggle against poverty is determined by the logic of the spectacle, in that ‘reform’ (within the sphere of the diffuse spectacle) and ‘revolution’ (within the sphere of the concentrated spectacle) are equally denied the possibility of addressing the basic axioms of the system. Thus a new form of resistance is called for. Freedom now is the password of all the revolutions of history, but now for the first time it is not poverty but material abundance which must be dominated according to new laws. Dominating abundance is not just changing the way it is shared out, but redefining its every orientation,superficial and profound alike. This is the first step of an immense struggle, infinite in its implications. (IS editorial committee 1965:156) For Trocchi as for Debord, the new focus of resistance is not the sphere of production but rather its dialectical mirror image: ‘[O]ur anonymous million [minds] can focus their attention on the problem of “leisure” ’ (Trocchi 1963a:180). Like the Frankfurt School Marxists, the Situationists recognized that leisure was not relief from work but its continuation in another form—‘[t]he forms that dominate [the worker’s] life are carried over into leisure which becomes more and more mechanized; thus he is equipped with machines to contend with leisure which machines have accorded him’ (Trocchi 1963a:180). And thus the spectacle spreads its unfreedom into all the corners of everyday life, colonizing leisure time as it previously colonized non-capitalist spaces. At the limit, then, our unfreedom is defined by the fact that we are not allowed to turn the spectacle of the reality film off or to step outside it, to take back the material reality of abundance and action from the controlling image of poverty and passivity. To do so would not only trigger a defensive reaction from the administrators of image-capital, it would also threaten the very structure of the spectator’s subjectivity. One of the most disturbing consequences of the domination of the spectacle is the isolation it imposes on the people subjected to it. The spectacle inserts itself into all relationships and alienates them by proposing itself as a necessary point of exchange and communication. As Debord notes, ‘[s]pectators are linked only by a one-way relationship to the very center that maintains their isolation from one another’ (1967:22). The result is, in fact, the very opposite of communication considered as an intersubjective or dialogical process of exchange, for in the spectacle ‘ “communication” is essentially one-way; the concentration of the media thus amounts to the monopolization by the administrators of the existing system of the means to pursue their particular form of administration’ (Debord 1967:19–20). Burroughs had already recognized this in Naked Lunch when he satirized the fascistic ‘Senders’ who seek to establish control by means of ‘one-way telepathic broadcasts instructing the workers what to feel and when’ (NL 148). Thus even the emotional and psychological behavior of the individual is pre-programmed by the ubiquitous image: ‘The spectacle’s externality with respect to the acting subject is demonstrated by the fact that the individual’s own gestures are no longer his own, but rather those of someone else who represents them to him’ (Debord 1967:23) This insidious invasion of the subject’s consciousness (and unconscious) by the spectacle is thorough, but it is not complete. It can be successfully resisted, and has been for brief moments like the Watts riots of 1965 (to which the Situationist essay that Burroughs found so intelligent, ‘The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy’ [IS editorial committee 1965], responds). What both civil rights leaders and institutional leftist organizations fail to realize about the Watts rioters is that, [b]y wanting to participate really and immediately in affluence, which is the official value of every American, they demand the egalitarian realization of the American spectacle of everyday life: they demand that the half-heavenly, half-terrestrial values of this spectacle be put to the test. (IS editorial committee 1965:157) It’s not a question of living up to the abstract political ideals of the US Constitution, as the civil rights leaders would have it, nor of controlling the means of production as the institutional left insists, but rather of attacking the arbitrary limits imposed on consumption and activity, and hence on life itself, by the hierarchical power of the spectacle. It is a matter of replacing the spectacular logic of mere survival with an affirmation of abundance and the active life that should correspond to it. As Burroughs said with regard to Black Power a few years later, ‘[f]ind out what they want and give it to them […] [W]ho has a better right to it?’ (E! 99). Chief among the tactics by means of which such resistance expresses itself is what the Situationists called ‘détournement’, which is quite similar to the practice of cut-ups that Burroughs carried on throughout the 1960s. Détournement, ‘the signature of the situationist movement, the sign of its presence and contestation in contemporary cultural reality’ (IS editorial committee 1959:55–6), is the tactic of using the throwaway images of the spectacle against it by removing images or signs from their original or authorized spectacular contexts and placing them in completely different subversive contexts. Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can serve in making new combinations. The discoveries of modern poetry regarding the analogical structure of images demonstrate that when two objects are brought together, no matter how far apart their original contexts may be, a relationship is always formed […] The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the bringing together of two independent expressions, supercedes the original elements and produces a synthetic organization of greater efficacy. (Debord and Wolman 1956:9) Drawing on Dadaist and Surrealist precedents, Situationist propaganda made extensive use of détournement in comic strips (the dialogue of which was replaced with dialectical aphorisms), advertising images (which were given ironic new juxtapositions and captions), and most importantly, films. ‘It is obviously in the realm of the cinema that détournement can attain its greatest efficacy, and undoubtedly, for those concerned with this aspect, its greatest beauty’ (Debord and Wolman 1956:12). Cinematic détournement can operate effectively through the accumulation of small detourned elements, as in Debord’s famous film version of Society of the Spectacle (Debord 1973), which detourns a huge mass of pornographic photos, ads, journalistic images, scenes from Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and October, Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Gesture and Orson Welles’s Mr Arkadin, among other things. However, it can also function integrally in the détournement of entire existing works, like D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, which could in principle be detourned ‘as a whole, without necessarily even altering the montage, by adding a soundtrack that made a powerful denunciation of the horrors of imperialist war and of the activities of the Ku Klux Klan’ (Debord and Wolman 1956:12). Onetime Situationist René Vienet’s film Can Dialectics Break Bricks? applies the process of integral détournement to an absolutely generic Chinese martial arts film, which by the total substitution of soundtracks becomes an amusing dramatization of worker revolt against the bureaucratic administration of the spectacle (Vienet 1973). Burroughs’s work with cut-ups, the method to which he was introduced in 1959 by his painter friend Brion Gysin, parallels virtually all of these points. As he wrote in ‘The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin’ (1961), ‘[t]he cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still camera’ (3M 29). He found precedents in the work of the Dadaist Tristan Tzara and the American modernists T. S. Eliot and John Dos Passos (Knickerbocker 1965:66). At first, Burroughs treated cut-ups as simply another poetic technique, but soon he realized that their implications went beyond mere aesthetics. By physically cutting printed texts, written by himself and by others, into pieces of various sizes and then reassembling them in random order, he had found a way to evade conscious and unconscious patterns of thought, association and choice that had been dictated by the binary structure of the Word and the reality film itself (see Murphy 1997:103–7). Cut-ups were a form of practical demystification and subversion that could uncover the ideology at work in the political lines of the media—for example, revealing the structural collusion between the police and the drug market in the US and UK (see NE 52–3). Ideology is a constantly repeated pre-recording, and as Burroughs writes in his unpunctuated essay ‘the invisible generation’ (1966), the ‘only way to break the inexorable down spiral of ugly uglier ugliest recording and playback is with counterrecording and playback’ (now in TE 217). Through this insight, Burroughs realized that ‘[c]ut-ups are for everyone. Anybody can make cut-ups. It is experimental in the sense of being something to do. Right here right now. Not something to talk and argue about’ (3M 31). Cut-ups, like détournement, are directly subversive methods that can be practiced and engaged by everyone because they use the omnipresent material of the reality film against itself. Like the Situationists, Burroughs also applied his subversive methods to film. He too realized that cut-up recontextualization can function both on a local level, as in Nova Express (which cut together Shakespeare, Joyce, Rimbaud, Genet, Kafka, Conrad, pulp science fiction and other texts [Knickerbocker 1965:68–9]) and his films Towers Open Fire and The Cut-Ups (in Burroughs and Balch 1990), and also on an integral level, as he argued in ‘the invisible generation’: what we see is determined to a large extent by what we hear you can verify this proposition by a simple experiment turn off the sound track on your television set and substitute an arbitrary sound track prerecorded on your tape recorder street sounds music conversation recordings of other television programs you will find that the arbitrary sound track seems to be appropriate and is in fact determining your interpretation of the film track […] (now in TE 205) The closest Burroughs came to realizing this integral form of the cut-up was in his short film collaboration with Antony Balch, Bill and Tony, in which the talking heads of Burroughs and Balch swap names and voices halfway through the film and in the process become one another (in Burroughs and Balch 1990; see also Murphy 1997:206–16). Though less immediately seductive than Vienet’s detourned martial arts film, Bill and Tony is nevertheless an accessible and indeed pedagogical example of the potentials of the cut-ups. For both Burroughs and the Situationists, the final goal of this systematic deployment of guerilla citation is the total transformation of everyday life. The Situationists called the ‘tendencies for détournement to operate in everyday social life’ ultra-détournement, and insisted that ‘when we have got to the stage of constructing situations, the ultimate goal of all our activity, it will be open to everyone to detourn entire situations by deliberately changing this or that determinant condition of them’ (Debord and Wolman 1956:13–14). In the wake of a successful revolution, therefore, détournement would change its modality from being purely critical of the organization of the spectacle to being creative of new conditions of living. The result would then be the simultaneous realization and suppression of art: that is, the elimination of art as a particular sector in the social division of labor, access to which is limited to specialized producers (artists) and consumers (collectors and critics), at the same time that creative activity becomes the general condition of human life in all its aspects. As Trocchi put it, ‘[a]rt can have no existential significance for a civilization which draws a line between life and art and collects artifacts like ancestral bones for reverence’; in contrast, ‘we envisage a situation in which life is continually renewed by art, a situation imaginatively and passionately constructed to inspire each individual to respond creatively, to bring to whatever act a creative comportment’ (1963a:181). Such would be the revolution of everyday life made possible by the new economy of abundance. Burroughs too offers a model for this final goal of revolutionary theory, again as a consequence of his conception of the cut-ups. The cut-ups render visible or ‘make explicit a psycho-sensory process that is going on all the time anyway’ in every mind: ‘[A] juxtaposition of what’s happening outside and what you’re thinking of’ (Knickerbocker 1965:67–8). Burroughs encourages his readers to experiment not only with the cutting-up of printed texts but also with the experiential cutting-up of everyday life, as in ‘The Literary Techniques of Lady Sutton-Smith’: Sit down in a café somewhere drink a coffee read the papers and listen don’t talk to yourself […] Note what you see and hear as you read what words and look at what picture. These are intersection points. Note these intersection points in the margin of your paper. Listen to what is being said around you and look at what is going on around you. (Burroughs 1966:28) The reality film operates to integrate all these elements as coherently as possible into a seamless whole and thus prevent the reader from imagining that there is something outside of it, some other principle of juxtaposition; this is its ideological function. But multimedia cut-ups can challenge this integration. In his own practice, Burroughs compiled elaborate collage scrapbooks of found juxtapositions between places visited, words read, sounds overheard, and images and objects seen, many of which served as source material for his novels (see the reproductions in BF 156–83 and Sobieszek 1996:38–53). These mixed-media collages, which ‘spill off the page in all directions, kaleidoscope of vistas, medley of tunes and street noises, farts and riot yipes and the slamming steel shutters of commerce’ (NL 207), do not simply resemble Debord and Asger Jorn’s collages in Mémoires (see the reproductions in Sussman 1989:128–9); rather, like Debord and Jorn’s assemblages, they point toward and demand a practice of everyday life that would realize art on a mass scale and suppress it as a specialized market niche. The key to the large-scale success of ultra-détournement and multimedia cut-ups is the reconceptualization and reconstruction of the human environment, especially the urban environment. The SI called this reconceptualization ‘unitary urbanism’, by which they meant ‘the theory of the combined use of arts and techniques for the integral construction of a milieu in dynamic relation with experiments in behavior’ (IS editorial committee 1958:45). To counter modern urban planning, the spectacular integration of the human environment around the production and distribution of economic scarcity, the SI proposed the total reorganization of lived space around patterns of human affect and association. This would be the ultimate realization and suppression of art and the triumph of life over mere economic survival. Although Burroughs never conceived such a comprehensive project of urban reorganization, he was consistently interested in the unevenness and alienating effects of modern urban space. As I have argued elsewhere (Murphy 1997:47–50), Burroughs’s first novel, Junky (1953), examines the heroin addict’s navigation of the economic organization of urban space, and demonstrates that his reliance on the underdetermination of that space converts what was intended as a productive spatial order into an intermittently anti-productive one. That is, the junkie gravitates toward those parts of the urban landscape that undergo only inconstant and predictable surveillance by the authorities, and there he carries on his economy of theft and fencing as a parodic mirror image of capitalist production and exchange. While this economy of anti-production is not strictly analogous to the Situationist concept of non-economic unitary urbanism, it does identify and criticize the link between capitalist control and the experiential organization of urban space. Given their small numbers and bohemian attitude toward the accumulation of capital, it’s not surprising that the members of the SI never managed to put their grandiose dreams of unitary urbanism into construction. They got only as far as the mapping of urban space according to contours of affect and association, a mapping that parallels Burroughs’s focus on derelict spaces of anti-production. Indeed, in his later works, Burroughs favored Trocchi’s description of them both as ‘cosmonauts of inner space’ and considered his job to be that of ‘a mapmaker […] an explorer of psychic areas. … And I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed’ (cited by Morgan 1988:338). Similarly, the Situationists called their program ‘psychogeography’, ‘the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals’ (IS editorial committee 1958:45). Since most cities are organized into well-defined sectors, neighborhoods and quarters according to the demands of economic production, psychogeographical mapping sometimes involved ‘detourning’ or ‘cutting up’ city maps in order to defamiliarize the given economic landscape (for example, Debord’s psychogeographical map of Paris entitled Naked City [1957], reproduced in Sussman 1989:135 and on the cover of Knabb 1989). The theory of psychogeographical mapping was materialized by the Situationist practice of the dérive or ‘drift’ through a city. The dérive is ‘a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances’ (IS editorial committee 1958:45). Instead of following the planned lines of circulation through a metropolis, lines that are almost exclusively designed to smooth the turbulent flow of capital, commodities and their producers, the drifter would follow contours of personal affect, aesthetic juxtaposition, unplanned encounter and/or psychic association, and in the process discover an alternative city (or cities) within the spatial confines of the economically rationalized urban environment. Drifters would ‘let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. The element of chance is less determinant than one might think: from the dérive point of view cities have a psychogeographical relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones’ (Debord 1956:50). Clearly this notion of the dérivebears a striking resemblance to Burroughs’s advice to his readers for creating a multimedia experiential cut-up, including the clarification about the comparatively minor role that is played by chance. The dérive is also the nodal point of Trocchi’s understanding of the fundamental category of ‘situation’ as a kind of artistic ‘happening’. In his adaptation, the ‘Manifesto Situationiste’ (sic) included in the Sigma Portfolio, he insists that: ‘Within an experimentally constructed context, due attention paid to what we call “psychogeographic” factors, the situation is the gradual and spontaneous realization (articulation: happening) of a superior game in which each participating individual is vitally involved’ (Trocchi 1964b, #18/3). The other Situationists were, perhaps predictably, less inclined to see any genuine similarity between their covert, unspectacular dérives and the garish public spectacles of the professional (and thus integrative) artistic ‘happenings’ that proliferated throughout the 1960s: Our project has taken shape at the same time as the modern tendencies toward integration. There is thus not only a direct opposition but also an air of resemblance since the two sides are really contemporaneous. We have not paid enough attention to this aspect of things, even recently. Thus, it is not impossible to interpret Alexander Trocchi’s proposals in issue #8 of this journal as having some affinity—despite their obviously completely contrary spirit—with those poor attempts at a ‘psychodramatic’ salvaging of decomposed art […] (IS editorial committee 1964:136) In fact, the further development of this aspect of Trocchi’s interpretation of the Situationist project may have been the spur that led the other Situationists to expel him, rather gently, later that same year. Thus the SI’s concept of revolution as life taking control over the real production of abundance and eliminating the spectacular distribution of scarcity dovetails nicely with Trocchi’s demand for an ‘invisible insurrection’ of those trapped by their own commodified and spectacular leisure time and Burroughs’s appeal to the ‘invisible generation’ for a cut-up, detourned rebellion of ‘counterrecording and playback’ against the reality film’s insidious control: there was a grey veil between you and what you saw or more often did not see that grey veil was the prerecorded words of a control machine once that veil is removed you will see clearer and sharper than those who are behind the veil whatever you do you will do it better than those behind the veil this is the invisible generation it is the efficient generation (now in TE 209) Appropriately enough, and in confirmation of his intuition that the Situationist milieu would offer ‘an excellent outlet for the short pieces I am writing now’ (Burroughs 1967), Burroughs’s essay ‘Electronic Revolution’ (1971), the sequel to ‘The Invisible Generation’, was published in French in 1974 by Editions Champ Libre, the publishing house run by Debord’s close friend Gérard Lebovici that kept all the major Situationist texts in print through the 1970s and 1980s (now in Job). Burroughs’s rallying cries of ‘Total Exposure’, ‘Wise up all the marks everywhere’, ‘Show them the rigged wheel of Life-TimeFortune’, ‘Storm the Reality Studio’, and ‘retake the universe’ (NE 59) resonate with the Situationist-inspired slogan directing the reader to ‘[t]ake your desires for reality’ and thereby abolish the society of the spectacle (IS editorial committee 1969: 244). Only if we do so will we ever see ‘The Reality Film giving and buckling like a bulkhead under pressure’ (NE 59). III: SPONTANEOUS UNIVERSITY As noted above, the Watts riots offered the Situationists an example of the revolutionary interruption or realization of the spectacle that they sought, and so did the radical students’ takeover of the university quarter of Paris in May 1968. The Situationists had been attentive to the specific constraints faced by students for some time; indeed, they first attracted the attention of the mainstream mass media as a result of their collaboration with the militant students of the University of Strasbourg on a withering exposé of the ‘poverty of student life, considered in its economic, political, psychological, sexual and especially intellectual aspects’ (IS et al. 1966:319). In that pamphlet they argued that the spectacle ‘allots everyone a specific role within a general passivity. The student is no exception to this rule. His is a provisional role, a rehearsal for his ultimate role as a conservative element in the functioning of the commodity system’ (IS et al. 1966:320). Consequently, ‘the student cannot revolt against anything without revolting against his studies’ first of all (IS et al. 1966:325) because ‘the suppression of alienation necessarily follows the same path as alienation’ (IS et al. 1966:319). Or, as Burroughs later put it, ‘[t]he way out is the way through’ (WB 82). The early, abortive efforts of the international student radical movements, according to the SI, constituted a confused but nonetheless real revolt against the whole social system based on hierarchy and the dictatorship of the economy and the state. By refusing to accept the business and institutional roles for which their specialized studies have been designed to prepare them, they are profoundly calling into question a system of production that alienates all activity and its products from their producers. (IS et al. 1966:328) Trocchi had anticipated the SI’s contemptuous analysis of student discontent two years earlier, when he insisted that ‘[w]e can write off existing universities’, which are ‘hopelessly geared and sprocketed to the cultural-economic axles of the status quo’, as ‘factories for the production of degreed technicians’ (1964a:197). But Trocchi was also more optimistic, indeed utopian, about the politics of education and university reorganization than his fellow Situationists, who lampooned the fictitious spectacular ‘politicization’ of students (IS et al. 1966: 324–5), and Burroughs came to share that utopian optimism, though somewhat belatedly. Trocchi recognized that his ‘invisible insurrection of a million minds’ would need a ‘detonator’, and in that role he cast the spontaneous university, which he conceived as ‘a vital laboratory for the creation (and evaluation) of conscious situations; it goes without saying that it is not only the environment which is in question, plastic, subject to change, but men also’ (1963a:186). Unlike the existing university, the spontaneous university would not reflect the alienating divisions of labor from consumption, of art from life, of living space from affect that characterize modern survival; rather, it would attack those divisions through Situationist methods of détournement and unitary urban reconstruction in order to bring creativity to everyday life. There would be no fixed departments, exams or career paths, but rather constant experimentation. ‘What is essential is a new conscious sense of community-as-art-of-living; the experimental situation (laboratory) with its “personnel” is itself to be regarded as an artefact, a continuous making, a creative process, a community enacting itself in its individual members’ (Trocchi 1964a:200). Instead of reflecting and reinforcing the hierarchical totality of the spectacle, ‘[t]he community which is the university must become a living model for society at large’ (1964a:201). Events would prove Trocchi right, to a certain extent. When the series of occupations and strikes that now go by the name of ‘May 1968’ broke out in Paris, the Situationists were quick to leap into the fray despite their distrust of the students’ inadequate politicization. These events were very complex and are too well known to be summarized here, but the Situationist interpretation of them is quite relevant to our inquiry (see also Vienet 1968). The ‘May movement was not a student movement’, according to the SI, but rather ‘a revolutionary proletarian movement’ that ‘was able to concretely express itself and take shape only on the very unfavorable terrainof a student revolt’ (IS editorial committee 1969:229). What this means is that while the student movement did not ultimately dominate or determine the significance of the events that occured, the student uprising did act as precisely the ‘detonator’ of insurrection that Trocchi had been looking for. The student occupation of the Sorbonne and the Latin Quarter triggered the very first ‘wildcat general strike’ of industrial workers in history, and effectively though belatedly brought down the De Gaulle government (IS editorial committee 1969:225, 252). For the Situationists, this was ‘the complete verification of the revolutionary theory of our time and even here and there the beginning of its partial realization’ (IS editorial committee 1969:225), and by ‘the revolutionary theory of our time’ they of course meant their own conception of the spectacle and of the necessary means for its overcoming. ‘Situationist theory had a significant role in the origins of the generalized critique that produced the first incidents of the May crisis and that developed along with that crisis’ (IS editorial committee 1969:241). The strikes and university occupations constituted, they insisted, a ‘critique in acts of the spectacle of nonlife’ that corresponded to and dialectically realized Situationist theory (IS editorial committee 1969:226). Despite the high-profile presence of several Situationists at the Sorbonne during its occupation, they did not claim to have led any part of the revolt—neither the student struggles that detonated it, nor the workers’ strikes that gave it material force. All they claimed was the accuracy of their theory, which had been adopted in whole or part by a crucial subset of the rebels. ‘If many people did what we wrote, it was because we essentially wrote the negative that had been lived by us and by so many others before us’ (IS editorial committee 1969:227). Indeed, the Situationist interpretation of May 1968 downplayed its members’ activities during the occupation, and claimed that their only crucial contribution to its progress lay in their insistence upon mechanisms of direct democracy, in the form of students’ and workers’ councils, for all decision-making during the revolt. The refusal of delegation or political representation had always been a key element in Situationist models of radical organization, and in May they got a chance to practice it. Their dedication to radically democratic organization made them unreservedly hostile to all attempts to appropriate or reform existing non-democratic institutions, however. For example, although other factions of the student movement saw the Sorbonne occupation as an opportunity to create an autonomous popular university to replace the integrated spectacular university, the Situationists did not: ‘[I]n our eyes the Sorbonne was of interest only as a building seized by the revolutionary movement’ and not ‘as a university—albeit “autonomous and popular”—something we despise in any case’ (IS editorial committee 1969:250–1). For them, the university was an essential functional component of the spectacle and therefore not something that could be detached from the spectacle for relocation to a different position— that is, not an institution that could be detourned as a whole. Like the Situationists, Burroughs reacted affirmatively to the events of May 1968, and to the broader international cycle of struggles of which they were a part, but like Trocchi’s, his attitude toward the students was more generous. In an interview with French writer Daniel Odier just a few months after the riots and occupations of May, he called for ‘more riots and more violence’, which were justified because ‘[y]oung people in the West have been lied to, sold out and betrayed […] The student rebellion is now a worldwide movement. Never before in recorded history has established authority been so basically challenged on a worldwide scale’ (Job 81). Though he was more supportive of the students’ specific claims and objectives than the Situationists were, he did implicitly agree with the SI in seeing the student uprising as a symptom of a deeper conflict and as the detonator of a more far-reaching revolutionary offensive against the basic structure of the reality film. He noted that ‘the incidents that trigger student uprisings are often insignificant […] [for example,] a refusal to change the examination system’ (Job 81), but much more significant intersection points can be found in the universities. Perhaps the most crucial reason for all young people to rebel is the issue of top secret research carried on in universities or anywhere else. All knowledge all discoveries belong to everybody […] A worldwide monopoly of knowledge and discoveries for counterrevolutionary purposes is the basic issue […] All knowledge all discoveries belong to you by right. It is time to demand what belongs to you. (Job 81–2) At that point, in the middle of the Cold War, universities constituted key links in the military-industrial complex just as today they act as research partners for private enterprise; in both cases, institutions supposedly dedicated to the non-partisan search for and humanitarian dissemination of knowledge restrict access to that knowledge according to the demands of the global image economy (as universities always have, of course, from their origins in the Middle Ages to the present). Contrary to this, Burroughs tried to convince the students to ask for the free and equal distribution of all knowledge, which is another way of formulating the Situationist demand for the freedom to live in place of the coercion of mere survival: ‘If you want the world you could have in terms of discoveries and resources now in existence be prepared to fight for that world. To fight for that world in the streets’ (Job 224). The street fighting soon stopped, at least in the US and France, but in the months following May 1968, Burroughs often revisited the issue of education and its role in stabilizing (or destabilizing) the order imposed by the reality film. He realized that training in conformity, the prefabrication of expectations and opinions, was essential to the continued functioning of the film, and so he began to theorize alternative educational institutions to counteract the conformist socialization inculcated by the existing universities instead of simply denouncing the latter as the Situationists did. He called these alternative institutions ‘academies’, and defined ‘academy training’ as ‘precisely decontrol of opinion […] The program proposed is essentially a disintoxication from inner fear and inner control, a liberation of thought and energy to prepare a new generation’ (Job 138). This program, which is essentially congruent with Trocchi’s model of the spontaneous university, would promote a new way of thinking that would correspond to a different, more critical apprehension of reality: Like a moving film the flow of thought seems to be continuous while actually the thoughts flow stop change and flow again. At the point where one flow stops there is a split-second hiatus. The new way of thinking grows in this hiatus between thoughts […] The new way of thinking is the thinking you would do if you didn’t have to think about any of the things you ordinarily think about if you had no work to do nothing to be afraid of no plans to make. (Job 91) One of the academies’ key elements is the negation of the division of labor that is embodied in the departmental structure of the traditional university. Students would be offered instruction in a variety of disciplines, ‘[a]ny one of [which] could become a way of life but […] [the] point is to apply what we have learned from one discipline to another and not get stuck in one way of doing things’ (Job 95). The ultimate goal of the new way of thinking and the academies that foster it would be the extinction of work along with fear and control, an extinction that the Situationists intended to implement through the simultaneous revolutionary realization and suppression of the spectacle. Thus the students would indeed be an ‘invisible generation’, with a different kind of consciousness and subjectivity than the spectator–participants of the reality film. Burroughs’s most important literary expression of his conception of radical education is to be found in The Wild Boys and Port of Saints. As I have argued elsewhere, Burroughs’s wild boys must be understood in part as a hyperbolic intensification of countercultural revolt (Murphy 1997:145–7). They represent a break with the reality film so profound that it requires a new calendar: ‘The wild boys have no sense of time and date the beginning from 1969 when the first wild boy groups were formed’ (POS 73). In this, they constitute a step beyond the radicals of 1968. They are the graduates of the academies that Burroughs theorized in his essays and interviews of the period in that they conform to no division of labor, no dominant model of public opinion, and no onerous work discipline. They copulate and consume at will, unfettered by the reality film’s iron logic of scarcity and passivity, work and leisure, and in the end they are the only ones who can carry out the electronic revolution. On the penultimate page of The Wild Boys, the narrator blows up the time barrier separating present time from the wild boys’ future, and in so doing ruptures the reality film. ‘The screen is exploding in moon craters and boiling silver spots’ (WB 184), and then the film is done and everyone is invisible, unspeakable, free … IV: SWIRLS AND EDDIES AND TORNADOES OF IMAGEBut the invisible insurrection, the electronic revolution, the revolution of everyday life, did not take place—at least not according to the expectations of Trocchi, Burroughs and the Situationists. What did happen is well known, if still poorly understood. In the wake of the worldwide radical movements, the spectacle briefly lost its luster; the reality film momentarily slipped its sprockets; then the process of image circulation and accumulation incorporated the bulk of the movements and picked up where it had left off. Détournement and the cut-ups were taken up by advertising, to no one’s surprise, not even their authors’. Even in their first articulation of the method, the Situationists recognized that ‘it is in the advertising industry, more than in a decaying aesthetic production, that one can find the best examples’ of détournement (Debord and Wolman 1956:10). By the mid-1960s, Burroughs too admitted that: ‘I’ve recently thought a great deal about advertising. After all, they’re doing the same sort of thing [I am]. They are concerned with the precise manipulation of word and image’ (Knickerbocker 1965:76). Ultra-détournement and the dérive, the experiential cut-ups that Burroughs advocated, had to wait a little longer to be recuperated in the form of multimedia, computer games and virtual reality. No longer content to be even apparently external to its subjects, the spectacle drew them into its own representational substance—with their enthusiastic approval. The new media that form the cornerstone of the contemporary version of the spectacular reality film often lay claim to the educational imperatives of Trocchi’s and Burroughs’s utopian project as well as Burroughs’s cut-up methods and the psychogeography of the SI. In a recent report on the use of three-dimensional animation in advertising, video consultant Jeff Sauer profiles a media company that specializes in 3D: Reality Check Studios. One of their most impressive projects, from the spectacular point of view, is a multimedia CD-ROM designed for the telecommunications giant SBC (Southwestern Bell Communications). Sauer’s description is worth quoting in full: The CD-ROM starts with an amazing four-minute, high-speed flythrough of a fictitious future city. But the journey isn’t just for fun; SBC wanted to educate, too. So the fly-through stops at the metropolis’ movie theater to show the entertainment possibilities of broadband service. From there, viewers fly to a concert venue to learn about the music available on the Internet and to an animated shopping mall to learn about commerce on the Web. They can learn about home security and wired smart homes and, of course, how to sign up for DSL. (Sauer 2002) This fictitious city seems an unlikely example of unitary urbanism, though no doubt that concept too is subject to recuperation within the spectacle. And ‘education’ here is conceived exclusively as the most seductive method for informing the consumer of the choices the market has made (available) for her. Advertising is our academy and commodities our education, the only education we’ll ever need for life in the reality film. In the same piece, Sauer also discusses the perfect dialectical counterpart to this fictitious city: a ‘real’ cityscape that becomes just as fictitious, just as mediated, just as spectacular. It’s Times Square, of course, in which ‘any new construction’ must ‘have electronically lit signage with a size compensatory to the size of the building’, according to a recent New York City ordinance (Sauer 2002). While most buildings have simply been equipped with external billboards and giant pre-programmable TV monitors, the Lehman Brothers Corporation, an investment banking firm, went much further with its office tower, perhaps in an effort to literalize its motto, ‘Where vision gets built’. As Sauer notes, not content with simply displaying electronic signs, ‘the Lehman Brothers building is itself an electronic sign’ (Sauer 2002). And what a sign: The sign is a huge system of LEDs, 5340 by 736, that stretches vertically from the third floor to the fifth floor of the building. Horizontally, the sign wraps around the building from halfway down the 49th Street side across the entire length of the building facing Times Square, then halfway down the 50th Street side. (Sauer 2002) The images projected on this immense three-dimensional screen are not merely prefabricated ads, but real-time mixes of pre-constructed content with live images from the building’s environs. The Lehman Brothers sign content will be controlled by a database that runs on a schedule, but the sign also has the ability to be affected by external input. For example, if the weather in Times Square turns gray and rainy, the sign’s mode, color tone, or message may change to match or contrast with the dreariness. Similarly, if the financial markets are up or down on a given afternoon, that input could trigger the sign to change mood. (Sauer 2002) This is integrative unitary urbanism with a vengeance, and a tidy allegory for the recent mutations of the global economy of the image: a spectacular sign equipped with the resources to steal affect (‘mood’) from its environment and re-project it as its own. As such screens and images proliferate throughout the world, the functional control of the spectacle increases. Burroughs anticipated something like this in Nova Express, although he expected it to function as a critical cut-up rather than an integrative element of the reality film. In the novel’s concluding chapter, ‘Pay Color’, the Subliminal Kid (in collaboration with the ubiquitous Muslim heretic and revolutionary Hassan i Sabbah) deploys independent media technology against the controllers of the reality film in an effort to force them to ‘pay back’ the ‘stolen colors’ of human life (NE 149–50). In particular, he set up screens on the walls of his bars opposite mirrors and took and projected at arbitrary intervals shifted from one bar to the other mixing Western Gangster films of all times and places with word and image of the people in his cafés and on the streets his agents with movie camera and telescope lens poured images of the city back into his projector and camera array and nobody knew whether he was in a Western movie in Hong Kong or The Aztec Empire in Ancient Rome or Suburban America whether he was a bandit a commuter or a chariot driver whether he was firing a ‘real’ gun or watching a gangster movie and the city moved in swirls and eddies and tornadoes of image […] (NE 148) The final clause suggests that the key to this sabotage of the reality film lies in its disordering of the carefully integrated images that give the film its consistency and predictability. However, the reality film of the twenty-first century can incorporate the turbulence of these ‘tornadoes of image’ into its own structure without thereby loosening its hold on the human landscape. After all, chaos theory has taught us that most disorder is only a differential of a higher integration of order. Indeed, to the extent that it more effectively seduces the eye and the other senses, the chaotic image in fact tightens its hold on the mind and body. Not only does the spectacle continue to seduce us into looking at it, thinking with it and living in it, but now it also looks back at us from a thousand different angles at once. The one-way communication that both Burroughs and the Situationists attacked as the reality film’s unilateral chain of command has given way to multidirectional surveillance that masquerades as democratic dialogue and informational collaboration. In a late essay, Gilles Deleuze argues that this shift demonstrates that ‘[c]ontrol societies are taking over from disciplinary societies [in Michel Foucault’s sense]. “Control” is the name proposed by Burroughs to characterize the new monster’ of technological monitoring (Deleuze 1990:178), and thus the society of control is a further development of, if not the direct successor to, the reality film or the society of the spectacle. Unlike modern discipline, which was long-term and discontinuous (as Burroughs showed with regard to urban space in Junky), ‘[c]ontrol is short-term and rapidly shifting, but at the same time continuous and unbounded’ (Deleuze 1990:181). We have the security of holographic IDs, the convenience of credit cards, the amusement or edification of web surfing, and the spontaneity of e-mail and instant messaging, but all these forms of instantaneous information transfer leave a residue that is tirelessly collected by credit agencies, merchants, employers, police and the State in order to map our movements, plans, desires and affects. In the US, recent proposals to fully integrate all these presently separate collections of personal data in order to ‘mine’ it for purposes of national security (such as the joint Pentagon–FBI Total Information Awareness project) have provoked a backlash from civil libertarians, although no doubt such integration is already under way in less monumental and hence less visible enterprises, as the rising tide of personalized junk mail and telemarketing shows. Following Deleuze’s lead, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri also note that in the contemporary global economy of the image, ‘the freedom of self-fashioning is often indistinguishable from the powers of an all-encompassing control’ of the sort that Burroughs anatomized (Hardt and Negri 2000:216, 448, n14). They insist as well that like Burroughs’s theory, ‘Debord’s analysis of the society of the spectacle, more than thirty years after its composition, seems ever more apt and urgent’ right now (2000:188). In particular, the concept of the spectacle, like Burroughs’s notion of control, helps to explain the dematerialization of politics in the contemporary world. [The] spectacle is a virtual place, or more accurately, a non-place of politics. The spectacle is at once unified and diffuse in such a way that it is impossible to distinguish any inside from outside—the natural from the social, the private from the public. The liberal notion of the public, the place outside where we act in the presence of others, has been universalized (because we are always now under the gaze of others, monitored by safety cameras) and sublimated or de-actualized in the virtual spaces of the spectacle. The end of the outside is the end of liberal politics. (Hardt and Negri 2000:188–9) Liberal politics, the politics of delegation and representation, have been completely subsumed by the spectacle and in the process have lost their grounding in the populace. They have consequently been replaced by imperial politics, the spectacular politics of Empire. ‘Empire’ is Hardt and Negri’s term for the present global situation of decentralized, transnational capitalism, and should not be mistaken for a reference to classical nationalist imperialism of the British, Spanish or French sort. Empire, the society of control, began to manifest itself in 1968, the ‘beginning of an era’ as the Situationists put it (and Burroughs’s wild boys would agree). Empire is the rule of the spectacle, in that its ‘control operates through three global and absolute means: the bomb, money, and ether’ (Hardt and Negri 2000:345). All three of these means are directly spectacular—they define and orient the reality film. Thermonuclear weapons, which Burroughs called ‘Soul Killer[s]’ (WL 7), function as a standing threat of total annihilation whose deployment is both unthinkable and constantly expected. Imperial control uses their actual possession (for example, in American hands) as a nightmarish goad that overdetermines and subordinates all other conflicts, and their virtual possession (for example, in Iraqi hands) as a pretext for the direct and violent subordination of recalcitrant groups. Thermonuclear weapons are very real ‘tornadoes of image’ that destroy even when they aren’t actually used. The other two means are more like swirls and eddies of image, though that doesn’t mean they are insignificant. Money and its transnational flows have always been central means of control for the spectacle; after all, Debord did write that ‘[t]he spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image’ (1967: 24). Burroughs too argued that human reality is being consumed and replaced by money as image: ‘the money machine […] eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity […] People want money to buy what the machine eats to shit money out. The more the machine eats the less remains’ (Job 73–4). Lastly, by ‘ether’, Hardt and Negri mean ‘the management of communication, the structuring of the education system, and the regulation of culture’; that is, the mass media and educational/creative institutions such as universities, which ‘cannot help submitting to the circulating society of the spectacle […] Communication is the form of capitalist production in which capital has succeeded in submitting society entirely and globally to its regime, suppressing all alternative paths’ (2000:346–7). Of the three, in fact, ‘[c]ommunication has become the central element that establishes the relations of production’ (2000:347–8), as Burroughs and the Situationists already knew, and it is communication that is most likely to provide opportunities of resistance, as, for example, the media-savvy Zapatistas showed in 1994 (Hardt and Negri 2000:54). Despite its acknowledged inability to provide tactics that could replace the now-recuperated techniques of détournement, cut-ups, unitary urbanism and the dérive, Hardt and Negri’s theory of Empire has been taken up by a wide range of groups currently engaged in contesting the globalization of capitalism—including the Tute Bianche and Ya Basta, who protested at Genoa, and many of the organizers of the Porto Alegre World Social Forum, to name just two key sites of struggle (On Fire 2001:101–3)—and through it the Situationist critique of the spectacle and Burroughs’s subversion of the reality film’s control continue to provide critical leverage for the resistance to the present. As Burroughs wrote late in his career, ‘[m]aybe we lost. And this is what happens when you lose […] [Yet] there were moments of catastrophic defeat, and moments of triumph’ (WL 252–3). The Situationists too acknowledged that in the past century, ‘revolution has so far not been victorious anywhere, but the practical process through which its project manifests itself has already created at least ten revolutionary moments of an extreme historical importance that can appropriately be termed revolutions’ (IS editorial committee 1969:236). Those moments have continued to erupt, from Watts 1965 and Paris 1968 to Seattle 1999 and Genoa 2001, and there is no reason to expect them to cease so long as the spectacle retains control and the reality film remains unexposed. Once again it will be necessary, no doubt, to ‘Storm The Reality Studio’, and ‘retake the universe’ (NE 59). REFERENCESBurroughs, W. S. (1964) Le festin nu Kahane, E. trans. (Paris: Gallimard). — (1966) ‘The Literary Techniques of Lady Sutton-Smith’, IN Berner, J. ed., Astronauts of Inner-Space (San Francisco: Stolen Paper Review), pp. 28–9. — (1967) Letter to Mary Beach, 28 July 1967. Department of Special Collections, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas [MS 63 B:b:24]. —— (1974) Révolution electronique, Chopin, J. trans. (Paris: Editions Champ Libre). Burroughs, W. S., and Balch, A. (1990) Towers Open Fire and Other Short Films, Mystic Fire Video [video: VHS]. Debord, G. (1956) ‘Theory of the Dérive’, IN Knabb, K. 1989, pp. 50–4. — (1967) The Society of the Spectacle, Nicholson-Smith, D. trans. (New York: Zone, 1994). — (1973) La société du spectacle (Paris: Simar Films). — (2001) Correspondance vol.2: septembre 1960–décembre 1964 (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard). Debord, G., and Wolman, G. J. (1956) ‘Methods of Detournement’, IN Knabb, K. 1989, pp. 8–14. Deleuze, G. (1990) ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, IN Joughin, M. trans. Negotiations 1972–1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 177–82. Gray, C. ed. (1974) Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International (London: Rebel Press, 1998). Hardt, M., and Negri, A. (2000) Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). [IS] Internationale Situationniste, édition augmentée (1997) (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard). Complete re-issue of the journal, 1958–69. IS editorial committee (including G. Debord) (1958) ‘Definitions’, IN Knabb, K. 1989, pp. 45–6. — (1959) ‘Detournement as Negation and Prelude’, IN Knabb, K. 1989, pp. 55–6. —— (1964) ‘Now, the S.I.’, IN Knabb, K. 1989, pp. 135–8. — (1965) ‘The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy’, IN Knabb, K. 1989, pp. 153–60. — (1969) ‘The Beginning of an Era’, IN Knabb, K. 1989, pp. 225–56. IS et al. (1966) ‘On the Poverty of Student Life’, IN Knabb, K. 1989, pp. 319–37. Knabb, K. ed. and trans. (1989) Situationist International Anthology (San Francisco: Bureau of Public Secrets). Knickerbocker, C. (1965) ‘White Junk’, IN Lotringer, S. ed., Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs 1960–1997 (USA: Semiotext[e], 2001), pp. 60–81. Marcus, G. (1989) Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Morgan, T. (1988) Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (New York: Henry Holt). Murphy, T. S. (1997) Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs (Berkeley: University of California Press). On Fire: The Battle of Genoa and the Anti-Capitalist Movement (One-Off Press, 2001). Sauer, J. (2002) ‘New Dimensions’, IN Video Systems, 1 February 2002, videosystems.com/ar/video_new_dimensions/index.htm, 18 January 2003. Sobieszek, R. A. (1996) Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts (Los Angeles: LA County Museum of Art/Thames and Hudson). Sussman, E. ed. (1989) On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 1957–1972 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Trocchi, A. (1960) Cain’s Book (New York: Grove). —— (1963a) ‘Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’, IN Trocchi, A. 1991, pp. 177–91. —— (1963b) ‘Letter to William S. Burroughs’, IN Trocchi, A. 1991, pp. 207–9. —— (1964a) ‘Sigma: A Tactical Blueprint’, IN Trocchi, A. 1991, pp. 192–203. —— (1964b) Sigma Portfolio items #1–25 (London: privately duplicated). Cited copy is in the collection of the Lilly Library, Indiana University. — (1972) Man at Leisure (London: Calder and Boyars). Introduction by William S. Burroughs. — (1991) Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds: A Trocchi Reader, Murray Scott, A. ed. (Edinburgh: Polygon). Vienet, R. (1968) Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May ’68 (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1992). -- — (1973) La dialectique peut-il casser des bricques? (Paris: L’Oiseau de Minerve). Retaking the Universe(William S.Burroughs in the Age of Globalization)/Part1:Theoretical Depositions/Exposing the Reality Film: William S. Burroughs Among the Situationists/Edited by Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh First published 2004 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA www.plutobooks.com Gilles Deleuze Conversation with Gilbert Cabasso and Fabrice Revault d'Allonnes Cinema334 (December 18, 1985) A hundred years of cinema. . . and only now does a philosopher have the idea of setting out concepts specific to cinema. What should we make of this blind spot of philosophical reflection? It's true that philosophers haven't taken much notice of cinema, even though they go to cinemas. Yet it's an interesting coincidence that cinema appeared at the very time philosophy was trying to think motion. That might even explain why philosophy missed the importance of cinema: it was itself too involved in doing something analogous to what cinema wasdoing; it was trying to put motion into thought while cinema was putting it into images. The two projects developed independently before any encounter became possible. Yet cinema critics, the greatest critics anyway, became philosophers the moment they set out to formulate an aesthetics of cinema. They weren't trained as philosophers, but that's what they became. You see it already in Bazin. How do you see the place of film criticism these days-what role should it play ? Film criticism faces twin dangers: it shouldn't just describe films but nor should it apply to them concepts taken from outside film. The job of criticism is to form concepts that aren't of course "given" in films but nonetheless relate specifically to cinema, and to some specific genre of film, to some specific film or other. Concepts specific to cinema, but which can only be formed philosophically. They're not technical notions (like tracking, continuity, false continuity, 1depth or flatness offield, and so on), because technique only makes sense in relation to ends which it presupposes but doesn't explain. It's these ends that constitute the concepts of cinema. Cinema sets out to produce self-movement in images, auto temporalization even: that's the key thing, and it's these two aspects I've tried to study. But what exactly does cinema thereby show us about space and time that the other arts don't show? A tracking shot and a pan give two very different spaces. A tracking shot sometimes even stops tracing out space and plunges into time in Visconti, for instance. I've tried to analyse the space of Kurosawa's and Mizoguchi's films: in one it's an encompassing, in the other, a world-line. They're very different: what happens along a worldline isn't the same as what happens within an encompassing. Technical details are subordinate to these overall finalities. And that's the difficulty: you have to have monographs on auteurs, but then these have to be grafted onto differentiations, specific determinations, and reorganisations of concepts that force you to reconsider cinema as a whole. How can you exclude, from the problematic of body and thought that runs right through your reflection, psychoanalysis and its relation to cinema? Or linguistics for that matter. That is, "concepts taken from outside film"? It's the same problem again. The concepts philosophy introduces to deal with cinema must be specific, must relate specifically to the cinema. You can, of course, link framing to castratioIl, or close-ups to partial objects, but I don't see what that tells us about cinema. It's questionable whether the notion of "the imaginary, " even, has any bearing on cinema; cinema produces reality. It's all very well psychoanalysing Dreyer, but here as elsewhere, it doesn't tell us much. It makes more sense to compare Dreyer and Kierkegaard; because already for Kierkegaard, the problem was to "make" a movement, and he thought only "choice" could do this: then cinema's proper object becomes a spiritual choice. A comparative psychoanalysis of Kierkegaard and Dreyer won't help us with the philosophical-cinematic problem of how this spiritual dimension becomes the object of cinema. The problem returns in a very different form in Bresson, in Rohmer, and pervades their films, which aren't at all abstract but very moving, very engaging. It's the same with linguistics: it also provides only concepts applicable to cinema from outside, the "syntagm" for instance. But that immediately reduces the cinematic image to an utterance, and its essential characteristic, its motion, is left out of consideration. The narrative in cinema is like the imaginary: it's a very indirect product of motion and time, rather than the other way around. Cinema always narrates what the image's movements and times make it narrate. If l by a sensory-motor scheme, if it shows a character reacting to a situation, then you get a story. If the motion's governed, on the other hand, the sensory-motor scheme breaks down to leave disoriented and discordant movements, then you get other patterns, becomings rather than stories. That's the whole importance, which you examine in your book, of neorealism. A crucial break, obviously connected with the war (RnsseUini and Visconti in Italy, Ray in America). And yet Ozu before the war and then Welles present one taking too historicist an approach. . . Yes, if the major break comes at the end of the war, with neorealism, it's precise because neorealism registers the collapse of sensorimotor schemes: characters no longer "know" how to react to situations that are beyond them, too awful, or too beautiful, or insoluble...So a new type of character appears. But, more important, the possibility appears of temporalizing the cinematic image: pure time, little bit of time in its pure form, rather than motion. This cinematic revolution may have been foreshadowed in different contexts by Welles and, long before the war, by Ozu. In Welles there's a depth of time, coexisting layers of time, which the depth of field develops on a truly temporal scale. And if Ozu's famous still life are thoroughly cinematic, it's because they bring out the unchanging pattern of time in a world that's already lost its sensory-motor connections. But what are the principles behind these changes? How can we assess them, aesthetically or otherwise? In short: on what basis can we assess films? I think one particularly important principle is the biology of the brain, a microbiology. It's going through a complete transformation and coming up with extraordinary discoveries. It's not to psychoanalysis or linguistics but to the biology of the brain that we should look for principles, because it doesn't have the drawback, like the other two disciplines, of applying ready-made concepts. 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. Take Resnais's films, for example, a cinema of the brain, even though, once again, they can be very entertaining or very moving. The circuits into which Resnais's characters are drawn, the waves they ride, are cerebral circuits, brain waves. The whole of cinema can be assessed in terms of the cerebral circuits it establishes, simply because it's a moving image. Cerebral doesn't mean intellectual: the brain's emotive, impassioned too. . . You have to look at the richness, the complexity, the significance of these arrangements, these connections, disjunctions, circuits and short-circuits. Because of most cinematic production, with its arbitrary violence and feeble eroticism, reflects mental deficiency rather than any invention of new cerebral circuits. What happened with pop videos is pathetic: they could have become a really interesting new field of cinematic activity but were immediately taken over by organised mindlessness. Aesthetics can't be divorced from these complementary questions of cretinization and cerebralization. Creating new circuits in art means creating them in the brain too. Cinema seems, on the face of it, more a part of civic life than does philosophy. How can we bridge that gap, what can we do about it? That may not be right. I don't think people like the Straubs, for example, even considered as political filmmakers, fit any more easily than philosophers into "civic life." Any creative activity has a political aspect and significance. The problem is that such activity isn't very compatible with circuits of information and communication, ready-made circuits that are compromised from the outset. All forms of creativity, including any creativity that might be possible on television, here face a common enemy. Once again it's a cerebral matter: the brain's the hidden side of all circuits, and these can allow the most basic conditioned reflexes to prevail, as well as leaving room for more creative tracings, less "probable" links. The brain's a spatiotemporal volume: it's up to art to trace through it the new paths open to us today. You might see continuities and false continuities as cinematic synapses-you get different links, and different circuits, in Godard and Resnais, for example. The overall importance or significance of cinema seems to me to depend on this sort of problem. interview with Gilles Deleuze Conversation of September 13, 1983, with Pascal Bonitzer and Jean Narboni, asset down and amplified by the participants Cahiers du Cinema 352 (October 1983) Your book's presented, not as a history of cinema, but as a classification of images and signs, a taxonomy. In this respect, it follows on from some of your earlier works: for instance, you made a classification of signs when writing about Proust. But with The Movement-Image you've decided for the first time to tackle, not a philosophical problem or a particular body of work (that of Spinoza, Kafka, Bacon, or Proust, say),but the whole of a particular field, in this case cinema. And also, although you rule out producing a history of cinema, you deal with it historically. Well yes, in a way it's a history of cinema, but a "natural history." It aims to classify types of images and the corresponding signs, western, whole, as one classifies animals. The main genres, western, crime, period films, comedy, and soon, tell us nothing about different types of images or their intrinsic characteristics. The different sorts of shot, on the other hand-dose-up, long shot, and soon-do amount to different types of image, but there are lots of other factors, lighting, sound, time, which come in too. If I consider the field of nine whole, images, it's because it's all built upon the movement-image. That's how it's able to reveal or create a maximum of dpi images, and aboveall to combinethemwithone another through montage. I There are perception-images, action-images, affection-images, along with many other types. And in each case there are internal signs that characteristic extremely rich classification of signs, relatively independent linguistic model. It was particularly tempting to see whether the most matter introduced by cinema was going to require a new understanding of images and signs. In this sense, I've tried to produce book on logic, a logic of cinema. Isn't this just what you get in a filmmaker like Dreyer, who inspires some very fine passages in your book? I recently saw Gertrud again, which is going to be re-released after twenty years. It's a wonderful film, where the modulation between different levels of time reaches a subtlety only, sometimes, equalled in Mizoguchi's films (with the appearance and disappearance of the potter's wife, dead and alive, at the end of Ugetsu Monogatari, for instance). And Dreyer, in his essays, is constantly saying we should get rid of the third dimension, depth, and produce flat images, setting them in direct relation to a fourth and fifth dimension, to Time and spirit. When he discusses The Word, for example, whats so intriguing is his explanation that it's not a story about ghosts or madness, it's about a "profound relation between exact science and intuitive religion. " And he invokes Einstein. I quote: " Recent science, following upon Einstein's relativity has brought proofs of the existence outside the world of three dimensions which is that of our senses of a fourth dimension, that of time, and a fifth, the psychical. It has been shown that it is possible to experience events which have not yet taken place. New perspectives have been opened up which make us recognise a profound relation between exact science and intuitive religion. " . . . But let's return to the question of "the history of cinema. "You introduce an order of succession, you say a certain type of image appears at a certain moment, for instance after the war. So you're not just producing an abstract classification or even a natural history. You want to account for a historical development too. In the first place, the various types of image don't already exist, they have to be created. A flat image or, conversely, depth of field, always has to be created or re-created-signs, if you like, always imply a signature. So an analysis of images and signs has to include monographs on major auteurs. To take an example: I think expressionism conceives light in relation to darkness, and their relation is one of struggle. In the prewar French school it's quite different: there's no struggle, but alternation; not only is light itself motion, but there are two alternating lights, solar and lunar. It's very similar to the painter Delaunay. It's anti-expressionism. If an auteur like Rivette belongs these days to the French school, it's because he's rediscovered and completely reworked this theme of two kinds of light. He's done wonders with it. He's not only like Delaunay, but like Nerval in literature. He's the most Nervalian, the only Nervalian, filmmaker. There are of course historical and geographical factors in all this, running through cinema, bringing it into relation with other arts, subjecting it to influences and allowing it to exert them. There's a whole history. But this history of images doesn't seem to me to be developmental. I think all images combine the same elements, the same signs, differently. But not just any combination's possible at just any moment: a particular element can only be developed given certain conditions, without which it will remain atrophied, or secondary. So there are different levels of development, each of them perfectly coherent, rather than lines of descent or filiation. That's why one should talk of natural history rather than historical history. Still, your classification's an evaluation. It implies value judgments about the auteurs you deal with, and so about those you hardly notice, or don't mention. The book does, to be sure, point toward a sequel, leaving us on the threshold of a time-image that goes beyond the movement-image. But in this first volume you describe the breakdown of the action-image at the end of, and just after, the Second World War (Italian neorealism, then the French New Wave. . . ). Aren't some of the features by which you characterize the cinema of this crisis (a taking into account of reality as fragmentary and dispersive, a feeling that everythings become a cliche, constant permutations of what s central and peripheral, new articulations of sequences, a breakdown of the simple link between a given situation and a characters action) . . . isn't all that already there in two prewar films, The Rules of the Game and Citizen Kane, generally considered to be founding works of modern cinema, which you don't mention? I don't, first of all, claim to have discovered anyone, and all the auteurs I cite are well-known people I really admire. For example, on the monographic side, I consider Losey's world: I try to define it as a great sheer cliff dotted with huge birds, helicopters, and disturbing sculptures, towering over a little Victorian city at its foot. It's Losey's own way of recreating the naturalist framework. A framework of which you get different versions in Stroheim, in Bunuel. I take someone's work as a whole, I don't think there's anything bad in a great body of work: in Losey's case The Trout was disparaged, even by Cahiers, because people didn't take enough account of its place in his work as a whole: it's a reworking of Eva. Then you say there are gaps, Welles, Renoir, tremendously important auteurs. That's because I can't in this volume deal with their work as a whole. Renoir's work seems to me dominated by a certain relation between theater and life or, more precisely, between actual and virtual images. I think Welles was the first to construct a direct Time-image, a Time-image that's no longer just derived from movement. It's an amazing advance, later taken up by Resnais. But I couldn't discuss these things in the first volume, whereas I could discuss Naturalism as a whole. Even with neorealism and the New Wave, I only touch on their most superficial aspects, right at the very end. One gets the impression, all the same, that what really interests you is naturalism and spiritualism (say Bunuel, Stroheim, and Losey on the one hand, Bresson and Dreyer on the other), that is, naturalism's descent and degradation, and the elan, the ascent of spirit, the fourth dimension. They're vertical motions. You don't seem so interested in horizontal motion, in the linking of actions, in American cinema for example. And when you come to neorealism and the New Wave, you talk sometimes about the action-image breaking down, and sometimes about the movement-image in general breaking down. Are you saying that at that point it's the movement-image as a whole that begins to break down, producing a situation where another type of image that goes beyond movement can appear; or just the action-image, leaving in place, or even reinforcing, the other two aspects of the movement-image: pure perceptions and affections? It's not enough just to say that modern cinema breaks with narrative. That's only an effect whose cause lies elsewhere. The cinema of action depicts sensory-motor situations: there are characters, in a certain situation, who act, perhaps very violently, according to how they perceive the situation. Actions are linked to perceptions and perceptions develop into actions. Now, suppose a character finds himself in a situation, however ordinary or extraordinary, that's beyond any possible action, or to which he can't react. It's too powerful, or too painful, too beautiful. The sensory-motor link's broken. He's no longer in a sensory-motor situation, but in a purely optical and aural situation. There's a new type of image. Take the foreign woman in Rosselini's Stromboli: she goes through the tuna-fishing, the tuna's agony, then the volcano's eruption. She doesn't know how to react, can't respond, it's too intense: "I've had it, I'm afraid, it's so strange, so beautiful, God . . . " Or the posh lady, seeing the factory in Europa 51 : 'They looked like convicts. . . " That, I think, is neorealism's great innovation: we no longer have much faith in being able to act upon situations or react to situations, but it doesn't make us at all passive, it allows us to catch or reveal something intolerable, unbearable, even i in the most everyday things. It's a Visionary cinema. As Robbe-Grillet , says, descriptions replace objects. Now, when we find ourselves in these purely optical and aural situations, not only does action and thus narrative break down, but the nature of perceptions and affecions changes, because they enter a completely different system, from the sensory-motor system of "classic" cinema. What's more, we're no longer in the same type of space: space, having lost its motor connections, becomes a disconnected or vacant space. Modern cinema constructs extraordinary spaces; sensory-motor signs have given way to "opsigns" and "sonsigns." There's still movement, of course. But the movement-image as a whole comes into question. And here again, obviously, the new optical and aural image involves external factors resulting from the war, if only half-demolished or derelict spaces, all the forms of "wandering" that take the place of action, and the rise, everywhere, of what is intolerable. An image never stands alone. The key thing's the relation between images. So when perception becomes purely optical and aural, with what does it come into relation, if not with action? An actual image, cut off from its motor development, comes into relation with a virtual image, a mental or mirror image. I saw the factory, and they looked like convicts. . . Instead of a linear development, we get a circuit in which the two images are constantly chasing one another round a point where real and imaginary become indistinguishable. The actual image and its virtual image crystallize, so to speak. It's a crystal image, always double or duplicated, which we find already in Renoir, but in Ophuls too, and which reappears in a different form in Fellini. There are many ways images can crystallize, and many crystalline signs. But you always see something in the crystal. In the first place, you see Time, layers of time, a direct time-image. Not that movement's ceased, but the relation between movement and time's been inverted. Time no longer derives from the combination of movement-images (from montage), it's the other way round, movement now follows from time. Montage doesn't necessarily vanish, but it plays a different role, becomes what Lapoujade calls "montrage." Second, the image bears a new relation to its optical and aural elements: you might say that in its visionary aspect it becomes more "legible" than visible. So a whole pedagogy of the image, like Godard's, becomes possible. Finally, image becomes thought, is able to catch the mechanisms of thought, while the camera takes on various functions strictly comparable to propositional functions. It's in these three respects, I think, that we get be ond the movement-image. One might talk, in a classification, of "chronosigns", "lectosigns", and "noosigns." You're very critical of linguistics, and of theories of cinema inspired by that discipline. Yet you talk of images becoming "legible" rather than "visible." Now, the term legible as applied to cinema was all the rage when linguistics dominated film theory ("reading a film, " "readings" of films. . .). Isn't there a risk of confusion in your use of this word? Does your term legible image convey something different from that linguistic conception, or does it bring you back to it? No, I think not. It's catastrophic to try and apply linguistics to cinema. Of course, thinkers like Metz, or Pasolini, have done very important critical work. But their application of a linguistic model always ends up showing that cinema is something different, and that if it's a language, it's an analogical one, a language of modulation. This might lead one to think that applying a linguistic model is a detour that's better avoided. Among Bazin's finest pieces there's one where he explains that photography's a mold, a molding (you might saythat, in a different way,language too is a mold), whereas cinema is modulation through and through. Not just the voices but sounds, lights, and movements are being constantly modulated. These parameters of the image are subjected to variations, repetitions, alternations, recycling, and so on. Any recent advances relative to what we call classic cinema, which already went so far in this direction, have two aspects, evident in electronic images: an increasing number of parameters, and the generation of divergent series, where the classic image tended toward convergent series. This corresponds to a transition from visibility to legibility. The legibility of images relates to the independence of their parameters and the divergence of series. There's another aspect, too, which takes us back to an earlier remark. It's the question of verticality. Our visual world's determined in part by our vertical posture. An American critic, Leo Steinberg, explained that modern painting is defined less by a flat purely visual space than by ceasing to privilege the vertical: it's as though the window's replaced as a model by an opaque horizontal or tilting plane on which elements are inscribed. That's the sense of legibility, which doesn't imply a language but something like a diagram. As Beckett says, it's better to be sitting than standing, and better to be lying down than sitting. Modern ballet brings this out really well: sometimes the most dynamic movements take place on the ground, while upright the dancers stick to each other and give the impression they'd collapse if they moved apart. Maybe in cinema the screen retains only a purely nominal verticality and functions like a horizontal or tilting plane. Michael Snow has seriously questioned the dominance of verticality and has even constructed special equipment to explore the question. Cinema's great auteurs work like Varese in music: they have to work with what they've got, but they call forth new equipment, new instruments. These instruments produce nothing in the hands of second-rate auteurs, providing only a substitute for ideas. It's the ideas of great auteurs, rather, that call them forth. That's why I don't think cinema will die, and be replaced by TV or video. Great auteurs can adapt any new resource. Verticality may well beone of the great questions of modern cinema: it's at the heart of Glauber Rocha's latest film, The Age of the Earth, for example - a marvelous film containing unbelievable shots that really defy verticality. And yet, by considering cinema only from this "geometric, "spatial angle, aren't you missing an essentially dramatic dimension, which comes out for example in the problem of the l00k as handled by auteurs like Hitchcock and Lang? You do, in relation to Hitchcock, talk about a "demarque," which seems implicitly to relate to the look. But the notion of the look, the very word itself, doesn't once appear in your book. Is this deliberate? I'm not sure the notion's absolutely necessary. The eye's already there in things, it's part of the image, the image's visibility. Bergson shows how an image itself is luminous or visible, and needs only a "dark screen" to stop it tumbling around with other images, to stop its light diffusing, spreading in all directions, to reflect and refract the light. 'The light which, if it kept on spreading, would never be seen." The eye isn't the camera, it's the screen. As for the camera, with all its ropositional functions, it's a sort of third eye, the mind's eye. You cite Hitchcock: he does, it's true, bring the viewer into the film, as Truffaut and Douchet have shown. But that's nothing to do with the look. It's rather because he frames the action in a whole network of relations. Say the action's a crime. Then these relations are another dimension that allows the criminal to "give" his crime to someone else, to transfer or pass it on to someone else. Rohmer and Chabrol saw this really well. The relations aren't actions but symbolic acts that have a purely mental existence (gift, exchange, and so on). And they're what the camera reveals: framing and camera movement display mental relations. If Hitchcock's so English, it's because what interests him is the problem and the paradoxes of relation. The frame for him is like a tapestry frame: it holds within it the network of relations, while the action is just a thread moving in and out of the network. What Hitchcock thus brings into cinema is, then, the mental image. It's not a matter of the look, and if the camera's an eye, it's the mind's eye. So Hitchcock has a special place in cinema: he goes beyond the action-image to something deeper, mental relations, a kind of vision. Only, instead of seeing this as a breaking-down of the action image, and of the movement-image in general, he makes it a consummation, saturation, of that image. So you might equally well say he's the last of the classic directors, or the first of the moderns. You see Hitchcock as the prototypical filmmaker of relations, of what you call thirdness. Relations: is that what you mean by the whole ? It's a difficult bit of your book. You invoke Bergson, saying the whole isn't closed, it's rather the Open, something that's always open. It's particular sets of things that are closed, and one mustn't confuse the two . . . The Open is familiar as a key notion in Rilke's poetry. But it's a notion in Bergson's philosophy too. The key thing is to distinguish between particular sets of things and the whole. Once you confuse them, the whole makes no sense and you fall into the famous paradox of the set of all sets. A set of things may contain very diverse elements, but it's nonetheless closed, relatively closed or artificially limited. I say "artificially" because there's always some thread, however tenuous, linking the set to another larger set, to infinity. But the whole is of a different nature, it relates to time: it ranges over all sets of things, and it's precisely what stops them completely fulfilling their own tendency to become completely closed. Bergson's always saying that Time is the Open, is what changes-is constantly changing in nature-each moment. It's the whole, which isn't any set of things but the ceaseless passage from one set to another, the transformation of one set of things into another. It's very difficult to think about, this relation between time, the whole, and openness. But it's precisely cinema that makes it easier for us to do this. There are, as it were, three coexisting levels in cinematography: framing, which defines a provisional artificially limited set of things; cutting, which defines the distribution of movement or movements among the elements of the set; and then this movement reflects a change or variation in the whole, which is the realm of montage. The whole ranges over all sets and is precisely what stops them becoming "wholly" closed. By talking about off screen space, we're saying on the one hand that any given set of things is part of another larger two- or three-dimensional set, but we're also saying that all sets are embedded in a whole that's different in nature, a fourth or fifth dimension, constantly changing across all the sets (however large) over which it ranges. In the first case we have spatial and material extension, but in the other, the spiritual order we find in Dreyer or Bresson. The two aspects aren't mutually exclusive but complementary, mutually supportive, and sometimes one's dominant, sometimes the other. Cinema's always played upon these coexisting levels, each great auteur has his own way of conceiving and using them. In a great film, as in any work of art, there's always something open. And it always turns out to be time, the whole, as these appear in every different film in very different ways. Deleuze, Gilles, Negotiations, 1972-1990 / part two CINEMAS/Gilles Deleuze : translated by Martin Joughin. Columbia University Press New York Chichester, West Sussex Pourparlers @ 1990 by Les Editions de Minuit Translation copyright@ 1995 Columbia University Press interview with Gilles Deleuze Cahiers du Cinema has asked you for an interview, because you're a "Philosopher" and we wanted to do something philosophical, but more specifically because you like and admire Godard s work. What do you think of his recent TV programs? Like many people, I was moved, and it's a lasting emotion. Maybe I should explain my image of Godard. As someone who works a great deal, he must be a very solitary figure. But it's not just any solitude, it's an extra ordinarily animated solitude. Full, not of dreams, fantasies, and projects, but of acts, things, people even. A multiple, creative solitude. From the depths of this solitude Godard constitutes a force in his own right but also gets others to work as a team. He can deal as an equal with anyone, with official powers or organizations, as well as a cleaning lady, a worker, mad people. In the TV programs, Godard's questions always engage people directly. They disorient us, the viewers, but not whoever he's talking to. He talks to crazy people in a way that's no more that of a psychiatrist than of another madman, or of someone "playing the fool." He talks with workers not as a boss, or another worker, or an intellectual, or a director talking with actors. It's nothing to do with adopting their tone, in a wily sort of way, it's because his solitude gives him a great capacity, is so full. It's as though, in a way, he's always stammering. Not stammering in his words, but stammering in language itself. You can normally only be a foreigner in another language. But here it's a case of being a foreigner in one's own language. Proust said that fine books have to be written in a sort offoreign language. It's the same with Godard's programs; he's even perfected his Swiss accent to precisely this effect. It's this creative stammering, this solitude, which makes Godard a force. Because, as you know better than I do, he's always been alone. Godard's never had any popular success with his films, as those who say "he's changed, from such and such a point onward it's no good" would have us believe. They're often the very people who initially hated him. Godard was ahead of, and influenced, everyone, but not by being a success, rather by following his own line, a line of active flight, a repeatedly broken line zigzagging beneath the surface. Anyway,in cinema, they more or less managed to lock him into his solitude. They pinned him down. And now he's used the opportunity presented by the holidays, and a vague demand for creativity,to take over the TVfor six times two programs. It may be the sole case of someone not being duped byTV.You've usually lost from the outset. People wouldn't have minded him promoting his films, but they can't forgive him for making this series that changes so many things at the heart of TV (questioning people, making them talk, showing images from a variety of sources, and so on). Even now it's over, even if it's been stifled. Many groups and associations were bound to get annoyed: the statement from the Union of Photographic Journalists and Cameramen is a good example. Godard has at the very least stirred up hatred. But he's also shown that a differently "animated" TV is possible. You haven't answered our question. Say you had to give a "course" on these programs. . . What ideas did you see, or sense in them? How would you try to explain your enthusiasm? We can always talk about everything elseafterward, even ifit's what's most important. OK, but ideas, having an idea, isn't about ideology, it's a practical matter. Godard has a nice saying: not a just image, just an image. Philosophers ought also to say " not the just ideas, just ideas" and bear this out in their activity. Because the just ideas are always those that conform to accepted meanings or established precepts, they're always ideas that confirm something, even if it's something in the future, even if it's the future of the revolution. While "just ideas" is a becoming-present, a stammering of ideas, and can only be expressed in the form of questions that tend to confound any answers. Or you can present some simple thing that disrupts all the arguments. There are two ideas in Godard's programs that work this way,constantly encroaching on one another, getting mixed up and teased apart bit by bit. This is one reason why each program has two parts: as at primary school there are the two elements oflearning about things and learning about language. The first idea is to do with work. I think Godard's constantly bringing into question a vaguely Marxist scheme that has spread everywhere: there's supposed to be something pretty abstract called "labor" that one can buy or sell, in situations that either mark a basic social injustice or establish a little more socialjustice. But Godard asks very concrete questions, he presents images touching on what exactly is being bought and sold. What are some people prepared to buy, and others to sell, these not necessarily being the same thing? A young welder is prepared to sell his work as a welder, but not his sexuality by becoming an old woman's lover. A cleaning lady's happy to sell the time she spends cleaning but won't sell the moment she spends singing a bit of the "Internationale" why? Because she can't sing? But what, then, if one were to pay her for talking about not being able to sing? A specialist clockmaker, on the other hand, wants to get paid for his clockmaking efforts, but refuses to be paid for his work as an amateur filmmaker, which he calls his "hobby"; but the images show that the movements he makes in the two activities, the clockmaking sequence and the editing sequence, are so remarkably similar that you can mistake one for the other. But no, saysthe clockmaker, there's a great difference oflove and warmth in these movements, I don't want to be paid for my filmmaking. But then what about filmmakers and photographers who do get paid? What, furthermore, is a photographer himself prepared to pay for? He's sometimes prepared to pay his model. Sometimes the model pays him. But when he photographs torture or an execution, he pays neither the victim nor the executioner. And when he photographs children who are sick, wounded, or hungry, why doesn't he pay them? Guattari once suggested at a psychoanalytical congress that analysands should be paid as well as analysts, since the analyst isn't exactly providing a "service," it's more like a division of labor, two distinct kinds of work going on: there's the analyst's work of listening and sifting, but the analysand's unconscious is at work too. Nobody seems to have taken much notice of Guattari's suggestion. Godard's saying the same thing: why not pay the people who watch television, instead of making them pay, because they're engaged in real work and are themselves providing a public service? The social division of labor means it's not only work on the shop floor that gets paid but work in offices and research laboratories too. Otherwise we'd have to think about the workers themselves having to pay the people who design the things they make. I think all these questions and many others, all these images and many others, tear apart the notion of labor. In the first place, the very notion of labor arbitrarily sets one area of activity apart, cuts work off from its relation to love, to creativity, to production even. It makes work a kind of maintenance, the opposite of creating anything, because on this notion it's a matter of reproducing goods that are consumed and reproducing its own productive force, within a closed system of exchange. From this view point it doesn't much matter whether the exchange is fair or unfair, because there's always selective violence in an act of payment, and there's mystification in the very principle of talking in terms oflabor. It's to the extent that work might be distinguished from the productive pseudoforce of labor that very different flows of production, of many disparate kinds, might be brought into direct relation with flows of money, independently of any mediation by an abstract force. I'm even more confused than Godard. Just as I should be, since the key thing is the questions Godard asks and the images he presents and a chance of the spectator feeling that the notion of labor isn't innocent, isn't at all obvious-even, and particularly, from the viewpoint of social criticism. It's this, quite as much as the more obvious things, that explains the reactions of the Communist Party and some unions to Godard's programs: he's dared to question that sacrosanct notion of labor. . . And then there's the second idea, to do with information. Because here again, language is presented to us as basically informative, and information as basically an exchange. Once again, information is measured in abstract units. But it's doubtful whether the schoolmistress, explaining how something works or teaching spelling, is transmitting information. She's instructing, she's really delivering precepts. And children are supplied with syntax like workers being given tools, in order to produce utterances conforming to accepted meanings. We should take him quite literally when Godard sayschildren are political prisoners. Language is a system of instructions rather than a means of conveying information. TV tells us: "Now we'll have a bit of entertainment, then the news. . . " We ought in fact to invert the scheme of information theory. The theory assumes a theoretical maximum of information, with pure noise, interference, at the other extreme; and in between there's redundancy, which reduces the information but allows it to overcome noise. But we should actually start with redundancy as the transmission and relaying of orders or instructions; next, there's information-always the minimum needed for the satisfactory reception of orders; then what? Well, then there's something like silence, or like stammering, or screaming, something slipping through underneath the redundancies and information, letting language slip through, and making itself heard, in spite of everything. To talk, even about yourself, is always to take the place of someone else in whose place you're claiming to speak and who's been denied the right to speak. Orders and precepts stream from seguy's open mouth.2 But the woman with the dead child is open-mouthed too. An image gets represented by a sound, like a worker by his representative. A sound takes over a series of images. So how can we manage to speak without giving orders, without claiming to represent something or someone, how can we get people without the right to speak, to speak; and how can we restore to sounds their part in the struggle against power? I suppose that's what it means to be like a foreigner in one's own language, to trace a sort of line of flight for words. That's "just" two ideas, but two ideas is a lot, it's massive, includes loads of things and other ideas. So Godard brings into question two everyday notions, those of labor and information. He doesn't saywe should give true information, nor that labor should be weUpaid (those would be the just ideas). He says these notions are very suspect. He writes FALSE beside them. He's been saying for ages that he'd like to be a production company rather than an auteur, and to run the television news rather than make films. He didn't of course mean he wanted to produce his own films, like Verneuil, or take over TV. But that he wanted to produce a mosaic of different work rather than measuring it all against some abstract productive force, and wanted to produce a sub-informational juxtaposition of all the open mouths instead of relating them all to some abstract information taken as a precept. If those are Godard's two ideas, do they correspond to the theme of "sounds and images" that constantly recurs in the programs? Images-learning from things-relating to work, and sounds-learning the language-relating to information? No, there's only a partial correspondence: there's always information in images, and something at work in sounds. Any set of terms can and should be divided up in various ways that correspond only partially. To try and articulate the relation between sounds and images as Godard understands it you'd have to tell a very abstract story, in several episodes, and then finally see that this abstract story corresponds to a single episode of something terribly simple and concrete. 1.There are images, things are themselves images, because images aren't in our head, in our brain. The brain's just one image among others. Images are constantly acting and reacting on each other, producing and consuming. There's no difference at all between images, things, and motion. 2. But images also have an insideor certain images have an inside and are experienced from inside. They're subjects (Godard's remarks on Two or Three Things I Know About Her in Godard on Godard, pp. 239-42). And there's a gapbetween actions upon these images and the reactions they produce. It's this gap that enables them to store up other images, that is to perceive. But what they store is only what interests them in other images: perceiving issubtracting from an image what doesn't interest us, there's alwayslessin our perception. We're so full of images we no longer see those outside us for what they are. 3. There are also aural images, which don't seem to have any priority. Yet these aural images, or some of them, have an otherside you can call whatever you like, ideas, meaning, language, expressive aspects, and so on. Aural images are thus able to contract or capture other images or a series of other images. A voice takes over a set of images (the voice of Hitler, say). Ideas, acting as precepts, are embodied in aural images or sound waves and saywhat should interest us in other images: they dictate our perception. There's always a central "rubber stamp" normalizing images, subtracting what we're not supposed to see. So, given the earlier gap, we can trace out as it were two converse currents: one going from external images to perceptions, the other going from prevailing ideas to perceptions. 4. So we're caught in a chain of images, each of us in our own particular place, each ourself an image, and also in a network of ideas acting as precepts. And so what Godard's doing with his "words and images" goes in two directions at once. On the one hand he's restoring their fullness to external images, so we don't perceive something less, making perception equal to the image, giving back to images all that belongs to them-which is in itself a way of challenging this or that power and its rubber stamps. On the other hand, he's undoing the way language takes power, he's making it stammer in sound waves, taking apart any set of ideas purporting to be just ones and extracting from it just some ideas. These are perhaps two reasons among others why Godard makes such novel use of the staticshot. It' s rather like what some contemporary musicians do by introducing a fixed aural plane so that everything in music is heard. And when Godard puts a blackboard on the screen and writes on it, he's not making it something he can film but making the blackboard and writing into a new televisual resource, a sort of expressive material with its own particular current in relation to the other currents on the screen. This whole abstract story in four episodes sounds a bit like science fiction. But it's our social reality these days. The strange thing is that the story corresponds in various ways to what Bergson said in the first chapter of Matter and Memory. Bergson's seen as a sedate old philosopher who's no longer of any interest. It would be good if cinema or television revived interest in him (he should be on the IDHEC syllabus, maybe he is). The first chapter of Matter and Memory develops an amazing conception of the relations between photography and cinematic motion, and things: "photography, if there is such a thing as photography, is caught from the outset in, drawn from the start right into the interior of things, and this at every point in space," and so on. That's not to say Godard's a Bergsonian. It's more the other way around; Godard's not even reviving Bergson, but finding bits of Bergson along his way as he revivifies television. But why does everything in Godard come in twos? You need two toget three. . . Fine, but what are these twos and threes all about ? Oh, come on, you know better than anyone it's not like that. Godard's not a dialectician. What counts with him isn't two or three or however many, it's AND, the conjunction AND. The key thing is Godard's use of AND. This is important, because all our thought's modeled, rather, on the verb "to be," IS. Philosophy's weighed down with discussions about attributive judgments (the sky is blue) and existential judgments (God is) and the possibility or impossibility of reducing one to the other. But they all turn on the verb "to be." Even conjunctions are dealt with in terms of the verb "to be"-look at syllogisms. The English and the Americans are just about the only people who've set conjunctions free, by thinking about relations. But when you see relational judgments as autonomous, you realize that they creep in everywhere, they invade and ruin everything: AND isn't even a specific conjunction or relation, it brings in all relations, there are as many relations as ANDS, AND doesn't just upset all relations, it upsets being, the verb. . . and so on. AND, "and. . . and . . . and . . . "is precisely a creative stammering, a foreign use of language, as opposed to a conformist and dominant use based on the verb "to be." AND is of course diversity, multiplicity, the destruction of identities. It's not the same factory gate when I go in, and when I come out, and then when I go past unemployed. A convicted man's wife isn't the same before and after the conviction. But diversity and multiplicity are nothing to do with aesthetic wholes (in the sense of "one more," "one more woman" ...) or dialectical schemas (in the sense of "one produces two, which then produces three"). Because in those cases it's still Unity, and thus being, that's primary, and that supposedly becomes multiple. When Godard says everything has two parts, that in a day there's morning and evening, he's not saying it's one or the other, or that one becomes the other, becomes two. Because multiplicity is never in the terms, however many, nor in all the terms together, the whole. Multiplicity is precisely in the "and," which is different in nature from elementary components and collections of them. Neither a component nor a collection, what is this AND? I think Godard's force lies in living and thinking and presenting this AND in a very novel way, and in making it work actively. AND is neither one thing nor the other, it's always in between, between two things; it's the borderline, there's always a border, a line of flight or flow, only we don't see it, because it's the least perceptible of things. And yet it's along this line of flight that things come to pass, becomings evolve, revolutions take shape. ''The strong people aren't the ones on one side or the other, power lies on the border." Giscard d'Estaing made a sad observation in the lecture on military geography he recently gave the army: the more that things become balanced at the level of the largest groups, between West and East, U.S.A. and USSR, with planetary consensus, link-ups in space, global policing, and so on, the more they become "destabilized" between North and South-Giscard cites Angola, the Near East, the Palestinian resistance, but also all the unrest that produces "a regional destabilization of security," airplane hijacking, Corsica. . . Between North and South we'll keep on finding lines that derail the big groups, an AND, AND, AND which each time marks a new threshold, a new direction of the broken line, a new course for the border. Godard's trying to "see borders," that is, to show the imperceptible. The convict and his wife. The mother and child. But also images and sounds. And the clockmaker's movements when he's in his clockmaking sequence and when he's at his editing table: an imperceptible border separates them, belonging to neither but carrying both forward in their disparate development, in a flight or in a flow where we no longer know which is the guiding thread, nor where it's going. A whole micropolitics of borders, countering the macropolitics of large groups. At least we know that's where things come to pass, on the border between images and sounds, where images become too full and sounds too strident. That's what Godard's done in Six Times Two: made this active and creative line pass six times between them, made it visible, as it carries television forward. Cahiers du Cinema271 (November 1976) Deleuze, Gilles, Negotiations, 1972-1990 / part two CINEMAS/Gilles Deleuze : translated by Martin Joughin. Columbia University Press New York Chichester, West Sussex Pourparlers @ 1990 by Les Editions de Minuit Translation copyright@ 1995 Columbia University Press Given our critique of the affirmationist interpretation, and while Godard’s Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie) is Patton’s exemplar of something that approximates a Deleuzean ethico-political program, we should turn our attention to Godard’s 1965 sci-fi noir film Alphaville as the measure (and critique) of this affirmationist reading. Turning to Alphaville is crucial since it is the film where Godard achieves in cinema what Deleuze himself would only put down to paper towards the end of his life: the problem of how one makes revolution from within the contemporary paradigm of control societies. Not only were societies of control emerging as the latest form of capitalism’s ongoing globalization in Deleuze’s own life time; specific for our purposes here, what Deleuze understands as the technical and material conditions of control societies is precisely what Godard explores through the figure of an artificially intelligent computer (Alpha 60) that regulates the city of Alphaville as a whole with the aim of ensuring ‘civic order’ and dependable (i.e., predictable) citizenry. It is Alpha 60 who surveils, polices, and determines the guilt or innocence of the citizenry; that is, this AI form of governance is the perfect instance of those cybernetic machines at work in capitalist-control societies. Additionally, this emerging problem of control was a consequence of the shift from the ‘movement-image’ to the ‘time-image,’ as Deleuze notes. It is a shift to the paradigm that “registers the collapse of sensory-motor schemes: characters no longer “know” how to react to situations that are beyond them, too awful, or too beautiful, or insoluble…So a new type of character appears” (Negotiations, 59). However, what Deleuze leaves implicit and under theorized in his concept of the ‘time-image,’ is the following: after the second world war, where we see a shift from the ‘movement-image’ to the ‘time-image,’ there was a simultaneous shift in how nation-states began to conceive of the role of global strategies of governance. During and after the war, information theorists, scientists, and academics were employed by the American government to develop the technological means for establishing a certain degree of civic order in a world that has proven itself capable of succumbing to the ever looming threat of global war. It was this emerging group of scientists and academics that would construct the very means for actualizing societies of control (Deleuze) and were the real world correlates for the social function of Alpha 60 (Godard): “the very persons who made substantial contributions to the new means of communication and of data processing after the Second World War also laid the basis of that “science” that Wiener called “cybernetics.” A term that Ampère…had had the good idea of defining as the “science of government.” So we’re talking about an art of governing whose formative moments are almost forgotten but whose concepts branched their way underground, feeding into information technology as much as biology, artificial intelligence, management, or the cognitive sciences, at the same time as the cables were strung one after the other over the whole surface of the globe […] As Norbert Wiener saw it, “We are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we make look forward as worthy of our dignity.” Cybernetic government is inherently apocalyptic. Its purpose is to locally impede the spontaneously entropic, chaotic movement of the world and to ensure “enclaves of order,” of stability, and–who knows?–the perpetual self-regulation of systems, through the unrestrained, transparent, and controllable circulation of information” (The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, p.107-9). In the last instance, whether we speak of the paradigm of control in contemporary modes of governmentality or Alpha 60 in Alphaville, both Deleuze and Godard are concerned with the possibilities for the radical transformation of social life from within this context of cybernetic governance. Thus, it is against the background of societies of control that Patton’s affirmationist interpretation, and the politics that logically follows, will be measured and tested; if only to underscore how the affirmationist’s Platonism demonstrates that the application of metaphysical and epistemic truths into the domain of politics culminates in a praxis that is impotent at best and reactionary at worst. I. AGAINST ALL FUTURE ACCIDENTS, or CINEMA IN THE AGE OF CYBERNETICSGodard’s 1965 sci-fi noir film, Alphaville, tells the story of secret agent Lemmy Caution, a resident of the ‘Outlands’ whose journey into the town of Alphaville (officially, he is on a government organized trip with the objective of tracking down a certain Dr. von Braun) and his encounter with the cities seemingly mindless and one-dimensional inhabitants. The citizens of Alphaville are individuals who have been made to feel contented in indulging their drug habits, who have been assigned the social task of providing ‘escort’ services (predominantly women) for business persons and citizens alike (who are predominantly men); or those who, and they appear to be relatively few in the film, were former secret agents (like Lemmy himself) but have succumbed to the demands of life in the city. It is a place where even something as trivial as the conventions surrounding everyday language accord to the following maxim: “No one ever says ‘why;’ one says ‘because’” (00:50:06-00:50:10). And as Lemmy’s former colleague (now ex-secret agent) Henri Dickinson, remarks: “Their ideal here, in Alphaville, is a technocracy, like that of termites and ants” (00:23:23-00:23:32). In Alphaville, the citizens are governed such that they are treated as parts of an organic whole, who require attention and support only to the extent that all individuals can fulfill their social function, much like a worker ant relative to its queen. Early into the film we learn alongside our main character the reason for this ideal of technocracy: Alpha 60, an artificially intelligent computer program, monitors Alphaville’s inhabitants with the aim of maintaining a certain order and stability in the city as a whole. Alpha 60 is the police, government, judge, and jury whose authority stems from its superhuman capacity for computational analysis. Regarding this form of cybernetic governance, Alpha 60’s sole interest lies in determining which individuals of the population are capable of being socialized into civil society and which individuals are unassimilable and therefore must be exterminated. If Alphaville has something in common with Deleuze’s concept of control societies it is with regard to the question of contemporary forms of governance whose means are becoming less those of confinement and more so those of ensuring the aggregation of information, its transparency, in order to better surveil and control populations. We can see Godard’s concern with the set of problems of control and governance, of resistance and ordered obedience, in the conversation between Lemmy Caution and Alpha 60 towards the end of the film: Alpha 60: You are a menace to the security of Alphaville. Lemmy Caution: I refuse to become what you call normal. Alpha 60: Those you call mutants form a race superior to ordinary men whom we have almost eliminated. Lemmy Caution: Unthinkable. An entire race cannot be destroyed. Alpha 60: I shall calculate so that failure is impossible. Lemmy Caution: I shall fight so that failure is possible. (01:17:45-01:18:32) In light of this final dialogue, two things are worth noting. First, the antagonism between Lemmy Caution and Alpha 60; between the symbol of liberation from cybernetic governance and the symbol of control societies; takes the form of a struggle over what is deemed as possible and impossible. That is to say, not only is it the case that cybernetic governance is a form of control since it seeks to pre-emptively foreclose the possibility of the radical transformation of society. More importantly, and regarding the relation between Deleuze and Godard, it is precisely in the domain of the existence or inexistence of possibility that Deleuze locates the radical potential of both cinema and political change. As Deleuze writes in his now oft cited passage, “Which, then, is the subtle way out? To believe, not in a different world, but in a link between man and the world, in love or life, to believe in this as in the impossible, the unthinkable, which none the less cannot but be thought: ‘something possible, otherwise I will suffocate.’ It is this belief that makes the unthought the specific power of thought, through the absurd, by virtue of the absurd” (C2, 170). If ‘belief’ is the concept that offers the potential for freeing ourselves from control societies, it must be understood in the terms of the debate between Lemmy and Alpha 60. Determining what is possible and impossible becomes the contested site of politics, where the revolutionary, reformist, or reactionary character of one’s politics is but to the tested and ultimately revealed. In terms of Alphaville, it is clear that Lemmy Caution is a symbol of belief; the one who struggles for what is calculated as an impossibility from the perspective of the society of control regulated by Alpha 60 itself. Second, and regarding the relationship between Alphaville and the emergence of cybernetics as form of governmentality in general, one cannot be faulted for thinking that Godard himself created Alpha 60 simply from the aims and ambitions of the marriage between cybernetics and government as outlined by the French Information theorist Abraham Moles: “We envision that one global society, one State, could be managed in such a way that they could be protected against all the accidents of the future: such that eternity changes them into themselves. This is the ideal of a stable society, expressed by objectively controllable social mechanisms” (cited in ‘The Cybernetic Hypothesis,’ Tiqqun). Given this situation of control as the dominant form of governance in both Alphaville and contemporary capitalism, of what use could we make of Patton’s affirmationist politics? Does Alphaville and the present control society violate his reading of a Deleuzean vitalist principle of the ‘inherent creative powers of life’ and obstruct the experience of joyous encounters? In other words, with control societies as well as Alphaville, do we encounter an organization of social life such that there is an obstruction/violation of the essential productivity that defines the nature and structure of reality as well as the highest virtue for living beings as such? For Patton, the answer is straightforwardly affirmative: whether we consider Alphaville or societies of control, what we can be certain of is the ongoing violation of the creative powers of individuals in society and an obstruction of the possibility of living a life defined by joy as opposed to sadness. And it is precisely in this affirmative response that we see how Patton’s reconstruction of Deleuze’s metaphysical and epistemic commitments undercut any possibility for an ethico-political paradigm that can make good on the aspiration of the fundamental transformation of capitalist society into full communism as such: when what is understood to be metaphysically true (inherent creativity/productivity of life) is then used as the socio-political means to resist capitalist control, one may very well end up with a politics that privileges affirmation and creativity but it would not be a politics that necessarily coheres with that of Deleuze. For example, as Deleuze and Guattari state in the very first pages of Anti-Oedipus, this vitalist principle of continuous productivity and creation may be metaphysically significant but cannot be blindly projected as a program for political intervention. As they write, “There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together” (AO, 2). Or again: “Even within society, this characteristic man-nature, industry-nature, society-nature relationship is responsible for the distinction of relatively autonomous spheres that are called production, distribution, consumption. But in general this entire level of distinctions, examined from the point of view of its formal developed structures, presupposes (as Marx has demonstrated) not only the existence of capital and the division of labor, but also the false consciousness that the capitalist being necessarily acquires, both of itself and of the supposedly fixed elements within an overall process. For the real truth of the matter [is]…everything is production” (AO, 3-4) Thus, and while it remains true at the level of the nature of flows and becomings that there is some creative capacity to which human society and economic production remains intractably subject to, it is clear that the simple valorization of creativity/productivity as such does not provide us with the means to discriminate between different political orientations. Patton’s affirmationist interpretation, which collapses its metaphysical claims into its political prescriptions, fails to account for Deleuze and Guattari’s own principle that everything is production; and this initial principle necessarily includes qualitatively different organizations of society (e.g., capitalism, communism, fascism, libertarian). By equating what is essential for ‘life as such’ with what is desirable in the domain of politics, Patton precludes any possibility of deciding between competing political alternatives to presently existing capitalism. For Deleuze and Guattari, every social organization of society is productive in its own manner just as power produces more than it represses a la Foucault. Thus, if the criteria for the affirmationist position is the ‘freeing up of productivity wherever it is stymied,’ then the politics that stems from this principle affirms any and all organizations of social life necessarily since every form of society must be said to be productive, necessarily, though in its own particular manner. Thus, one of the major consequences of such a position is that Patton subtracts our capacity for proposing alternative visions of the world in relation to present circumstances. In depriving ourselves of the capacity for proposing an alternative to our present, not only does Patton’s political position exacerbate the very problem Deleuze took as the problem posed to the project of revolutionary transformation; Patton’s position also appears as a deviation from the very category of creativity that Deleuze himself valorized in the domains of art, philosophy, and ultimately, politics: “We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present…Art and philosophy converge at this point: the constitution of an earth and a people that are lacking as the correlate of creation” (WP, 108). If Deleuze retains some place in his political framework for the category of creativity, it must be understood not as the most general feature of reality and rather as the construction of an alternativeto the present. In order to create something that is against one’s present and one’s time, one requires the capacity of discriminating between alternatives and this is precisely what Patton’s interpretation forecloses from the outset. By ignoring this specific use of the category of creativity in the realm of politics, Patton affirms, by necessity, everything (since everything is productive) and therefore prescribes a politics devoid of content/prescriptions, and abandoned to the machinations of the present. In this case, not even a nostalgia of the past ‘creativity’ of May ’68 can save Patton since, as Guattari notes: “Capitalism can always arrange things and smooth them over locally, but for the most part and essentially, everything has become increasingly worse […] The response to many actions has been predicted organized and calculated by the machines of state power. I am convinced that all of the possible variants of another May 1968 have already been programmed on an IBM” (‘We Are All Groupuscules’). with Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Nina Power [Note: this dialogue took place in 2012-13. It was due to be published by a film magazine, but fell through for reasons beyond the control of the authors. Thank you to Geoffrey Nowell-Smith for permission to publish it on https://ninapower.net in 2017] My Note: Thank you to Nina Power for permission to publish it on ONscenes magazine Geoffrey Nowell-Smith: Pasolini has often been described as a Catholic Marxist but his Marxism was always unorthodox and he was never a Catholic although brought up in an environment permeated by the imagery and values of Italian Catholicism. Like most people on the left in Italy in the 1950s he was strongly anti-clerical (not surprising given the profoundly reactionary role played by the Catholic Church in Italy in the period) and it is only in his poetry that another side of him appears—an identification with suffering as experienced by the oppressed and potentially embodied in the figure of Christ. Then in 1958 the election of Pope John XXIII was a massive force for change—in Italian society, in the Church, and in Pasolini himself. Catholicism became something to engage with—as myth (in the noble sense of the word), as culture, as ideology, as a political force that was not necessarily quite so reactionary as it had been or seemed to be throughout most of preceding Italian history. Out of this set of conflicting impulses there were to emerge two of Pasolini’s most remarkable films, very contrasting both in content and in tone. The first of these, in 1963, was La ricotta (“Curd-cheese”), an episode of a curious compilation film called RoGoPaG after the names of the directors—Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Ugo Gregoretti—signed up by Pasolini’s producer Alfredo Bini to contribute to it. La ricotta is an exuberant film, part in color and part in black-and-white and mixing comedy and tragedy in an unnerving way. It is also quite savage in its attacks on various targets, notably the Italian film industry, and arguably disrespectful to say the least toward Catholic tradition if not Christianity itself. On first release its makers were the victims of a successful prosecution for “insulting the religion of the State,” earning Bini a substantial fine and Pasolini a suspended prison sentence. No such fate awaited the second film, Il Vangelo secondo Matteo, released a year later in 1964, which is a very straightforward and at times even reverential telling of the Gospel story in the version attributed to the Apostle Matthew. (The standard English title of this film is The Gospel According to Saint Matthew but Pasolini was furious at the theologically inappropriate intrusion of the word “Saint” and it will be called The Gospel According to Matthew throughout this dialogue.) The striking contrast between the two films calls for explanation. Did Pasolini have a change of heart between the making of the two films? Was it a profound change or just an opportunistic one? He was certainly very shaken by the virulent response to La ricotta and it is at least arguable that the Gospel film was a response to his critics and that he deliberately made it as unlikely to cause offense as he possibly could. But this explanation, proffered at the time, does not stand up to scrutiny. For a start the Gospel film was already at an advanced stage of planning at the time the trial of La ricotta took place and there is no evidence that he made significant changes to his plans in response to his unexpected conviction. Moreover, the facts surrounding the trial suggest that the real target of the prosecution was not La ricotta at all but the much talked about Gospel, precisely because of the seriousness with which Pasolini was known to be approaching the task of making it. La ricotta did not outrage Catholic opinion, which was quite used to taking a bit of blasphemy in its stride, and the prosecution was mounted by state officials with no help from the Church. The Gospel According to Matthew was not widely objected to either, but was definitely thought to be threatening—though for reasons which were both political and, typically for Italy, quite arcane. Basically, they have to do with the highly charged political atmosphere of the period and the high stakes being played in a context dominated by the repercussions of Hungary in 1956 and John’s election in 1958. Hungary had profoundly shaken the Left and the election of John was to do the same and more to the Church and to the Right with which it was allied. From 1948 onward, Italian politics had been dominated by two opposing power blocs. On the one side there were big business, the Church, Christian Democracy, and the Atlantic Alliance, and on the other the workers’ movement, the secular and progressive forces emerging from the Resistance, and the left-wing political parties which were either neutralist or pro-Soviet in the Cold War. It is unlikely that the intricacies of Cold War politics were in the forefront of John’s mind when he paid his visit to the notorious Regina Coeli prison in Rome, famously declaring to the inmates, “You could not come to me, so I came to you” (echoing the words in Matthew XXV, “I was in prison and ye visited me not”). But the new stress on Jesus’ humane and social mission and sympathy toward the poor and the oppressed inaugurated by the new Pope and the Second Vatican Council, which he initiated and whose deliberations continued after his death in 1963, had profound implications for Italian politics. So, while Hungary had brought the Socialists into political alliance with Christian Democracy, isolating the Communists, John’s actions provoked a powerful current in a different direction, potentially bringing the Communists into dialogue with reforming elements within the Church and with the Catholic masses more widely. Many Christian Democrats (or those among them who were both Christians and democrats, which was by no means all of them) were ashamed of being aligned with the forces of reaction and afraid of losing credibility with the mass of the faithful, while the Communists, with an equal mixture of sincerity and calculation, were no less eager to present their policies as truer to the spirit of the Gospels than those of their nominally Christian opponents. What more natural, then, than for a well-known philo-Communist filmmaker and polemicist to want to make a film that opened up a dialogue between the two sides? Many Christian Democrats (or those among them who were both Christians and democrats, which was by no means all of them) were ashamed of being aligned with the forces of reaction and afraid of losing credibility with the mass of the faithful, while the Communists, with an equal mixture of sincerity and calculation, were no less eager to present their policies as truer to the spirit of the Gospels than those of their nominally Christian opponents. What more natural, then, than for a well-known philo-Communist filmmaker and polemicist to want to make a film that opened up a dialogue between the two sides? Nina Power: La ricotta has elements of slapstick, of course, but this bodily humor can also be seen as the flipside of the raw physicality in the shape of Stracci’s hunger (his name meaning “rags”). Is it a film “about” religion? Or is it a film about poverty and bourgeois hypocrisy? Or a film about the process and performance, the framing, of cinema itself? Is Pasolini not in fact mocking the whole rigmarole of filmmaking, including and perhaps especially, his own? Orson Welles, the director, “plays” Pasolini, at one point reading out one of Pasolini’s own poems to a hapless interviewer, claiming “My love lies only in tradition.” There are the repeated references to paintings and, beyond that, the painterly frame itself, which is undone throughout as extras laugh and stumble. The deliberate use of extras in La ricotta, as opposed to the peasant and working-class individuals carefully selected by Pasolini for roles in The Gospel According to Matthew, is key to understanding La ricotta (similarly, some “intellectuals” are chosen to play the wealthier disciples described in the Gospel). As Pasolini stated, rather bluntly, in a 1969 interview: “I never use extras in my films, because they are just hacks. Their faces are brutalised by living all their life at Cinecittà, surrounded by whores who are always hanging around there. When I shot The Gospel I went round and chose all the extras myself one by one from among the peasants and the people in the villages round where we were shooting. But when I made La Ricotta, where the characters are real extras, I used real extras” (Pasolini on Pasolini: Interviews with Oswald Stack, Thames and Hudson, 1969, 40). Pasolini’s profound obsession with the face, and the authenticity of the face, so often the hallmark and the focus of his films, is thus deliberately undermined in La Ricotta. As Giorgio Agamben, one of Pasolini’s faces in The Gospel (he plays the Apostle Philip), writes in Means Without End: Notes on Politics: “appearance becomes a problem for human beings: it becomes the location of a struggle for truth” (trans Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 91). Agamben continues, in what could easily be a direct reflection on Pasolini: “the face is, above all, the passion of revelation, the passion of language … every human face, even the most noble and beautiful, is suspended on the edge of an abyss” (96). The abyssal qualities of the face, so central to Pasolini’s image of humanity, is deliberately toyed with and undone in La ricotta: extras are merely extras, and spend the film lolling around and messing about, while Stracci starves, eats, and dies. The unfathomability of the face, this struggle for truth on the edge of an abyss is central to Pasolini’s more serious project in The Gospel: to present authenticity without ground that undermines both bourgeois sensibility and religious mawkishness. In La ricotta when a hack journalist arrives and the bourgeois gawkers turn up at the end of the film (La ricotta being filmed just outside the gates of Rome), Pasolini reveals the myriad dimensions of the film process, breaking the painterly frame of a cinema that would pretend to have no outside—so we see the reviews in the process of being composed, the audience chattering and jockeying for position, the actors when not acting, and so on. In this sense he preempts Jean-Luc Godard’s famous letter to François Truffaut in which Godard states that he wants to make a film that would reveal all of the external dimensions of the film-making process. At the same time, the religious element allows Pasolini to point to what he finds absolutely lacking in the consumerism and desacralizing Italy he detests, without defending this religion as such. In this regard, La ricotta reminds me of Buñuel’s 1965 Simon of the Desert, where the martyr is suddenly transported to a 1960s club and all his suffering is muted out in the soft hedonism of the decade: the anachronism of religiosity in the age of bourgeois consumerism (Pasolini described this film in Pasolini on Pasolini as “stupendous, perhaps Buñuel’s finest” [140]). La ricotta seems to me to be above all a film about poverty, and the inability for this bourgeois class to understand it, except as the object of ridicule (the over-feeding scene of Stracci is accompanied by their laughter and cruel, brutalized faces). Was Pasolini’s prosecution for La ricotta motivated by a concern for the damage the more “serious” film, The Gospel, could do? This seems quite likely given how “straight” Pasolini plays it in the latter film, using lines taken directly from a Catholic version of the gospel. Pasolini noted that actually very few Catholics had read the gospel and there’s a case to be made for seeing Pasolini’s attempt here in a strange lineage of over-conformism (à la Savonarola) or subversive close reading (as with Thomas Paine’s reading of the Bible, where the dimensions of equality and revolutionary potential are brought out against the conformist invocation of religion as a supplement to a hierarchical and traditional social order, as in Edmund Burke, who Paine is responding to). Certainly the scenes where Jesus simply sweeps up people from their everyday lives and convinces them in an instant to follow him are images of what it might mean to radically break with habit; as are the anti-family elements: ““He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37) and the invocation to “let the dead bury their own dead” (Matthew 8:22), with the later Marxist echo of this phrase (from 1852’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content”). But it is true that Pasolini regretted the way he filmed the miracle scenes—“[t]here are some horrible moments I am ashamed of, which are almost Counter-Reformation Baroque, repellent—the miracles” (Pasolini on Pasolini, 87)—and some left-wing reviews of the film at the time were hostile because of the way it contributed to the “dialogue” between Catholicism and Communism, so if we accept the idea that the two major cultural forces in Italy at the time were Catholicism and Communism, and Pasolini was of necessity part of this dialogue, we are obviously asking a different question now with regard to its possible subversive qualities. I find the repeated use of Odetta’s “Motherless Child” on the soundtrack one of the more radical aspects. This spiritual can be read in the film as a comment on Jesus of course, albeit with the roles reversed—the virgin birth makes him a “fatherless child” in a human, though not divine, sense—but as a comment on slavery and the diasporic nature of the lives of black people kidnapped into work, Odetta’s refrain is stark, and the dissonance between the modernity of the recording and the historical legacy of slavery fused with the gospel is, to my mind, one of the most striking things about the film. So perhaps the context for Pasolini’s subversion is different today—does the contemporary subversive spectator continue to exist? Gabriele Pedulla’s recent In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators After the Cinema (Verso, 2012) looks at the way in which the decline of the cinematic experience and its replacement by other forms of viewing (TV, laptops, mobile phones even) has affected film criticism. The “countless varieties of image-consumption” (3) have made it possible to recognize a “golden age” of the picture house (1920s–70s, according to Pedulla) but also means the image of the spectator must be revised. Pedulla talks about “the prevalence of Pavlovian responses … [and] the impoverishment of empathy” (126). To watch Pasolini’s films without being able to understand the “existential contradictions” he wanted to portray in the Gospel and without experiencing the intensity that he sought to convey in all his films would render the films something quite different: “a series of aesthetic technologies that invite spectators to make themselves vulnerable only to a certain extent, and to behave as docile consumers of à la carte emotions. Exactly as with all of the other goods of contemporary capitalist society” (131), as Pedulla puts it. Was Pasolini prescient regarding consumerism and was his curious combination of peasant-centred communism and religiosity-without-religion a kind of solution, or rather the symptom of a last-ditch fetish for a vanishing world? Geoffrey Nowell-Smith: I think he was prescient regarding consumerism and that his general aversion to capitalist modernity would have extended to today’s cinema in general though not necessarily to every film thrown up by a culture industry which has never been a total monolith, even today. He would have looked sympathetically on any film or other work of art which seemed to him to express some sort of imaginative truth about some or other thing or rather the relationship between two things—as he himself did with sex and Fascism in Salò or Christianity and poverty as in the Gospel film. The problem was that by the end of his life he had run out of imaginative alternatives to the modernity he increasingly hated. The peasantry, with its closeness to the soil and the seasons and the rituals of death and resurgence, had disappeared as a class throughout the western world. The subproletariat had not disappeared but the pasty-faced junkies he saw haunting the ghettos of modern cities no longer had the aesthetic (and sexual) appeal of the young men in Accattone or Mamma Roma. The ambivalent power of Christianity—both comforting and repressive—was also waning and in any case he had only seen it as potentially liberatory for a brief period around the making of The Gospel. One thing I particularly like in The Gospel According to Matthew is that it really is the Gospel according to Matthew. That is, it is a film of a text, not a biopic of Jesus. Things that are not in that Gospel are not in the film. The famous version of the Annunciation with the Angel appearing to a virgin in a dream and saying “Blessed art thou among women” is not there. So no clichéd corny images of a Fra Angelico angel holding a lily. Instead you get a visibly pregnant woman and a puzzled, angry man being told by an angel not to reject her. But this literalness towards the text is not replicated in the settings, which have no historical specificity but are generically archaic (and therefore mythical), being simply locations which happened to still exist in southern Italy. Then at a third level there is the music, which is drawn from the entire later Christian tradition right up to negro spirituals and the Congolese Missa Luba. Neither the text nor the settings give any intimation that Christianity was going to develop into the world religion we know today. But the music does. It offers Bach’s protestant pietism, the baroque catholicism of Mozart, but also music from the Soviet Union, black America, and Africa. So Pasolini first liberates the story from later accretions, deliberately rejecting the iconography pilloried in La ricotta, and then he sneaks an alternative iconography in through the back door, on the soundtrack. Nina Power : With The Gospel and La ricotta in the mid-1960s, we have two sides of a not yet fully tarnished coin: it is still possible, iconoclastically perhaps, but possible, to show both real poverty, and the appearance of poverty, and real transcendence and the beauty of faces touched by the archaic, the spiritual, the historical. By 1975, very shortly before his death, Pasolini has indeed given up all hope in the possibility of cinema to reveal or depict these things: “I think that consumerism manipulates and violates bodies as much as Nazism did” (mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-lost-pasolini-interview), he says, manifesting his disgust with what has happened to these “bodies.” As Lorenzo Chiesa puts it: “Pasolini now believes that the hedonistic consumerism and sexual promiscuity imposed by the techno-fascist power of late-capitalism necessarily entails an anthropological genocide which is concomitant with a degeneration of all bodies, independently of their social class and geographical provenance” (“Pasolini and the Ugliness of Bodies,” in In Corpore: Bodies in Post-Unification Italy, ed. L. Polezzi and C. Ross, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007, 107) Pasolini’s quest for the authentic face and body is intimately tied up with his image of a declining, narrowing world, as the bourgeoisie become ever more dominant, even in their secularism and libertarianism, and the aspiration to become more like “them” merges into a cultural indifference that Pasolini feels he can read into the bodies of contemporary beings. As he says in the final interview: “Before … the difference between the middle and the working class was as marked as that between two races. Now it’s almost vanished. And the culture that has been destroyed the most is the rural one, that is, the peasants.” The peasants are preserved in Pasolini’s cinematic aspic, but the physiognomic communism that defines them is simultaneously being destroyed from the other side. As he says: “Marxists, too, have been anthropologically changed by the consumer revolution. They live differently, have a different lifestyle, different cultural models and their ideology changed as well.” Pasolini’s despair at the success of secularism and the co-optation of the left reveals a deep hatred of homogeneity in any form (fascist, consumerist), and perversely then, those cultural forces that he also hated start to appear as markers of the class and cultural difference he ultimately values so much (the Catholicism of the peasants). The death of dialect at the hands of the centralizing voices of mass media is perhaps prefigured in the endless parade of silent faces that tilt their heads to listen to Jesus in The Gospel: if they were to speak “contemporary” Italian, their beauty would be destroyed. In the mid-60s, Pasolini’s cinema attempts to preserve the last vestiges of a dying culture, even as the bourgeoisie busily nose their way in with their endless questions and hunger for spectacle, as in the end of La ricotta. But are Pasolini’s sentiments echoed in contemporary feeling, or do they remain specific to his responses to a highly particular period in Italian history? In a much more recent essay, written by an economist, we hear strange echoes of Pasolini’s observations, shifted from the face to the body as a whole. In Hervé Juvin’s The Coming of the Body we see an attempt to understand what it means for life expectancy to have doubled (albeit in certain parts of the world) over the course of a century and we hear Pasolini’s complaint once again, slightly shifted: “I used to know a rural Brittany where the peasants were worn out, broken by hard labour, at sixty. Let’s not even mention the women: after the age of thirty of thirty-five, what remained to them of what we call womanhood?” (trans. John Howe, Verso, 2010, viii–x). Pasolini’s love of faces as bearers of historical (rather than religious) grace is incompatible with contemporary, culturally dominant body worship in which longevity is projected into the future, not the past, and health and conventional attractiveness are the markers of success in the finite (yet almost infinitely extendable) realm. Juvin shares also Pasolini’s double-edged mourning for religion, but goes even further beyond Pasolini’s linking of consumerism with fascism towards a full-circle account in which the structure of religion becomes fused with the logic of the market, breaking all ties and leaving only the body: “Religion maintained a vertical connection between God and humans … and it regulated the horizontal links between humans. The market came to substitute its universal and accountable reason as rule, language and mode of exchange. It also linked what had never been linked before, connected those who had never thought that they had anything in common. That link is broken. The market still deals with the horizontal link but now it is the body that connects with other things, that establishes frontiers and reinvents separateness; because it is complete, and so long as it is complete, it becomes the face of God, of otherness, of the same and the other” (176). The body of Stracci, undone by a relation to poverty, hunger, and over-eating rooted in Italy’s past, would never survive in such a world, and Pasolini surely knew it. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith: What you say about the historical body is important but I think it needs to be linked to the other side of Pasolini, which is a nostalgia for a state of being beyond history, beyond (or prior to) civilization. There is in the films a literal or metaphorical stripping-bare, a search for what lies beneath the trappings of civilization—any civilization, not just the present one. It is a search for the essence, for that beyond which there is nothing, or if something, only a mystery. Hence the obsessive shots of faces. Hence too, in the Gospel film, the focus on the text behind which there is … what? Just an itinerant preacher of uncertain parentage who clashes with Church and State and in the end is the victim of a sacrifice. The stripping-bare is most apparent in Theorem, where the collapse of the family leaves only a void and the last shot is of the father stark naked running along the barren slopes of a volcano. There is then the horrific vulnerability of the naked bodies in Salò which is to some extent historical because what is being imagined is a quasi-historical situation where there is Power but no social order. Pasolini associates this state of affairs with Fascism but it is fascism (small f) in an extended sense. The décor is authentic and the bodies are real but one is not to suppose that Sadean orgies really took place on the shores of Lake Garda in the last years of the World War II. Pasolini’s imagination was that of a poet but one who saw himself in his films as working with things rather than words (the “written language of reality,” in his own phrase). This means that his relationship with history-book history—Judaea in the first century AD, even Italy in 1944 or 1964—is always a bit elusive. At one level he allows his imagination to roam free but at another level there is always a hard-core, thing-like reality which he starts from and wants to explore. Salò and Theorem in particular are thought experiments in which a customary order is disturbed and just a nub of reality is left and the film elaborates on what might then happen. For its part, the Gospel film re-imagines a major world religion on the basis of a text, some faces, and a landscape. This re-imagining had great actuality when the film came out and it could well do so today when the Church is in rapid reverse gear away from the spirit of the Second Vatican Council which animated Pasolini’s film. Commenting on the disciplinary measures taken by the Vatican against a group of American nuns, Garry Wills wrote (New York Review of Books, June 7—20, 2012): “Now the Vatican says that nuns are too interested in ‘the social Gospel’ (which is the Gospel), when they should be more interested in Gospel teachings about abortion and contraception (which do not exist).” That social Gospel (“which is the Gospel”) is what is laid out in stark black-and-white in Pasolini’s film from 1964. As a reading of the Gospel it is basically quite Puritan, in a historical sense, and links with the more generalized puritanism which he claimed to have been “consumed by” and which is most extreme in the articles he wrote towards the end of his life under the title “Lutheran Letters.” Nina Power: It seems then that Pasolini’s films have two major functions: the “stripping bare” you mention, and the disruption of order, the subversion that comes precisely from this stripping bare. The latter has become an often-repeated cinematic trope, where a household or a situation is disturbed by the intrusion of something unwanted or bizarre, which then proceeds to shake everything up and render everything new. We see this in, for example, in Dominik Moll’s 2005’s Lemming, where this animal arrives and seems to trigger all manner of transformations into the bourgeois household, or Nagisa Oshima’s 1986 Max mon amour, where Charlotte Rampling takes up with an ape, or the rat in François Ozon’s 1998 Sitcom that again triggers all manner of neurotic and taboo behavior (incest, suicide, sadism). But all of these homages to Pasolini perhaps with a dash of Buñuel, miss what you describe as “a hard-core, thing-like reality” at the heart of Theorem and Salò precisely because they make it too easy, too psychoanalytic, too simplistically subversive. These films are really about bourgeois repression in its farcical mode, not the unfathomable series of ruptures introduced by the Terence Stamp figure in Theorem, or the desperate and pointless structured cruelty of Salò. Pasolini succeeds in these films, and in The Gospel to introduce something truly extraordinary into cinema—a radically non-religious mysticism (although we might leave Salò to one side as the film that troubles all of Pasolini’s oeuvre). The early scenes of The Gospel, where Joseph is confused and angry by his very young-looking wife’s pregnancy, and the reassurance by the angel that this is to be accepted is played as simply as could be, as faithfully to the text as possible without decoration, and yet an eerie sense of unfathomability permeates the film even when Jesus is depicted as humanly, as realistically as could be imagined. Pasolini’s attempts to preserve the unknowable with the barest minimum of settings and structures is exposed in La ricotta but perhaps even more exposed in a way in The Gospel, where the indifferent backdrop and generic outfits only serve to illuminate the authenticity of the human face—an authenticity that nevertheless lacks ground. Religion and cinema itself mediate Pasolini’s desire to speak directly in the language of reality, but a reality that destabilizes the one that surrounds the film itself—the commercialization of all human life, and the destruction of the authentic face. Pasolini’s ultimate turn against bodies and their vicious punishment in Salò is perhaps ultimately retribution for the fleeting and obscure promise of the face: but Pasolini was the one to capture it best, nevertheless. |
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