Serge Daney

Waiting for the Snow

Where the zapper feels that he should rest his "WHAM" (erase) key for a while, before hitting it again - soon? - in the small of the back.

To conclude, here are two quotations: "Christmas time again, with its trail of ancient frights. The shops are chock full with all kinds of unbelievable rubbish, but there is no stock left of what we need." (Raymond Chandler) And: "You wouldn't realize to what extent, when an investigation is made in society, the media have become one of the main subjects of revolt." (A reader).

The first quotation is a reasonable inducement not to pursue this chronicle beyond Christmas. The second induces a desire to wait for the metamorphosis of the WHAM key to advance (in the sense of the "advancement" of progress, or the "advanced" state of old meat) before visiting upon it the smiling, if cruel, voyeurism to which, for a hundred days, the zapper has confined himself.

Is that enough reason to take stock, to draw up a balance sheet? If yes, such a balance sheet would be rather modest in scale. We still do not know what  television is, but we are beginning increasingly to imagine that it must be happy enough being "the telly." This irrefutable truism implies that it must not be held responsible for the fact that it bears little relation to thought, to morals, or to poetry. All of which are very noble, to be sure, and which cinema meets from time to time. However, this truism also means that when it comes to information (giving news of the world), to de-ontology (teaching the lesson that others must not be excessively ill-treated), to prose (using better image and sound), television - in the best cases - will have a say.

In other words, it may be possible to say that we live in homes that have "running water, gas, electricity and images." And for the fact that we justifiably complain when the water supply is cut off, we do not believe that water tastes like whiskey when finally it does begin to flow normally from our taps. Water, we will say, is more or less pure, good and chlorinated. This is the essential question where television is concerned: it relates more to ecology than anything else. Rather strangely, everybody came down heavily on that poor word "WHAM," without realizing that it was about a landscape, and that we were more its guardians than its vandals. The landscape is not a New Territory to be discovered and opened up in the future (all the speeches about that sublime object which television could, or should be, do begin to get one down), it is an environment in fact, which we have enjoyed already for a long time, an environment which it should be possible to improve, no more., The task involved is, doubtless, titanic, but it may be wiser to entrust it to ants.

The foregoing paragraphs concern the zapper, inasmuch as he is a citizen and that he has a claim to what a recent tabloid referred to as his rights as a "consumer of media." What follows, however, deals with those obscure reasons which have led him to believe that by zapping he would go beyond appearances, drift towards a lighthouse of truth - truth about French society subject to a mild hysteria, about archaic reflexes lingering in the midst of total modernity, about unknown dogmas and supervised liberties and about that strange desire to see, to see at all costs, employing surprise or stratagems, for fear that there may be nothing or, on the contrary, too much to see.

Doubtless, one must have seen too many films of cinema to take television seriously. As if one day television will give back to cinema all that it has taken, not only in terms of a portfolio of films, but also in terms of solid hypotheses which filmmakers developed earlier within the cinema only because the other media were not yet ready to welcome them: from (the much forgotten) Rossellini to Godard (who lately has been in great form, and so much the better) through Vertov, Welles and Tati. If there were a "history of communication," cinema would be, at one and the same time, the Golden Age as well as the Era of Suspicion. Television would merely have been its manager (surprising, how prominently this word "manage" figures in our everyday speech), its "digestive," so to speak. So much so, now, when cinema cannot meet our needs, it is still with what we have learned from it that we contemplate that which wishes its death. Can the cinema critic of films still survive? The cinema critic of life, in any case, leads a hard life.

Serge Daney

The T(h)errorized (Godardian Pedagogy)


Learning, Retaining

We know that May '68 confirmed Jean-Luc Godard in a suspicion he had had: that the movie theater is, in every sense of the word, a bad place, at once immoral and inadequate. A place for easy hysteria, sleazy visual pickups, voyeurism and magic. The place where, to revive a metaphor which has had its moment of glory, one came to "sleep in the bed of the image," to get an eyeful and blind oneself in the process, to see too much and to see badly.

The great suspicion cast by May '68 on the "society of the spectacle," a society which secrets more images than it can see and digest (the image runs past, recedes, runs away) affected the generation that had invested the most in it, the self-taught cinephiles for whom the movie theater had taken the place of both school and family - the generation of the New Wave, formed in the cinematheques. Beginning in 1968, Godard proceeds to pull out his stake and move in the opposite direction: from cinema to school, then from school to family. Regression? Why not say, instead, "regressivism"?

For the most radical fringe of filmmakers - those farthest to the left - one thing is certain in 1968: one must learn how to leave the movie theater (to leave behind cinephilia and obscurantism) or at least to attach it to something else. And to learn, you have to go to school. Less to the "school of life" than to the cinema as school. This is how Godard and Gorin transformed the scenographic cube into a classroom, the dialogue of the film into a recitation, the voiceover into a required course, the shooting of the film into a tutorial, the subject of the film into course headings from the University of Vincennes ("revisionism," "ideology") and the filmmaker into a schoolmaster, a drill-master or a monitor. School thus becomes the good place which removes us from cinema and reconciles us with "reality" (a reality to be transformed, naturally.) This is where the films of the Dziga Vertov Group came to us from (and earlier, LA CHINOISE.) In TOUT VA BIEN, NUMERO DEUX and ICI ET AILLEURS, the family apartment has replaced the movie theater (and television has taken the place of cinema), but the essentials remain: people learning a lesson.

No need to look further for the cause of the rush of love and hate, rage and irritated groans unleashed at that time by Godard's cinema, which appeared in its early stages as a rather rugged Maoist pedagogy. Much would have been forgiven a Godard "co-opted by the system" (how many people today are still indignant at the idea that Godard has not given them a new PIERROT LE FOU?) A discreet homage would have been paid to a Godard totally on the sidelines, in the underground and happy to be there? But what to be done with a Godard who continues to work, to hold class, to teach a lesson and learn it himself, even in an empty house? In Godardian pedagogy there is something that the cinema - especially the cinema - cannot tolerate: talking to the air.

Godardian pedagogy. School, we said, is the good place (where you make progress and from which you must move on) as opposed to the cinema (the bad place where you regress and never move on). Let's examine this more closely and spin out the metaphor.

1. School is preeminently the place where it is possible, permitted and even recommended to mix up words and things - not wanting to know what links them, putting off until later the moment when one must go examine more closely what corresponds to what one has been taught. A place which calls for nominalism, dogmatism.

Now there was a sine qua non for the Godardian pedagogy: never questioning the discourse of the other, whoever he is. Simply taking this discourse literally, and taking it at its word. Concerning oneself only with the already-said-by-others, with what has been already-said-already-established in statements (indiscriminately: quotations, slogans, posters, jokes, stories, lessons, newspaper headlines. etc.) Statement-objects, little monuments, words treated as things: take them or leave them

The already-said-by-others confronts us with a fait accompli: it has in its favor existence, solidity. By its existence it renders illusory any approach which would try to reestablish behind, before or around it a domain of enunciation. Godard never puts to the statements that he receives the question of their origin, their condition of possibility, the place from which they derive their legitimacy, the desire which they at once betray and conceal. His approach is the most anti-archeological there is. It consists of taking note of what is said (to which one can add nothing) and then looking immediately for the other statement, the other image which would counterbalance this statement, this sound, this image. "Godard," then, would simply be the empty place, the blank screen where images, sounds come to coexist, to neutralize, recognize and designate one another: in short, to struggle. More than "who is right? who is wrong?," the real question is "what can we oppose to this?"The devil's advocate.

Whence the malaise, the "confusion" with which Godard is often reproached. To what the other says (asserts, proclaims, extols) he always respond with what another other says (asserts, proclaims, extols). There is always a great unknown in his pedagogy, and that is the fact that the nature of the relationship he maintains with his "good" discourses (those he defends) is undecidable.

In ICI ET AILLEURS, for example, a "film" about images brought back from Jordan (1970-1974), it is clear that the questions raised by the film about itself (the kind of disjunction it effects in every direction: between here and elsewhere, images and sounds, 1970 and 1975) is only possible because the syntagm "Palestinian revolution" already functions as an axiom, as something which is a matter of course (something already-said-by-others, in this case, by Al Fatah), and in relation to which Godard does not have to define himself personally (to say "me, I," but also to say "me, I am with them"), or to show his position in the film (to socialize, make convincing, desirable, the position he has taken, his initial choice: for the Palestinians, against Israel.) Always the logic of school.

2. School is preeminently the place where the master does not have to say where his knowledge or his certainties come to him from. School is not a place where the student can reinscribe, use, put to the test the knowledge that has been inculcated in him. Beneath the master's knowledge, beyond the student's knowledge: a blank. The blank space of a no man's land, of a question which Godard does not want to know anything about, the question of the appropriation of knowledge. He is only interested in (re)transmission.

In any pedagogy, nevertheless, values can be found, positive content, to be put across. Godardian pedagogy is no exception to this rule: no film after 1968 which does not situate itself with respect to (and project itself with) what might be called - with no pejorative nuance - a discours du manche<1>. Let's recapitulate: marxist-Leninst politics (the Chinese positions) in PRAVDA and WIND FROM THE EAST, Althusser's lesson concerning ideology as slip in STRUGGLES IN ITALY, Brecht's lesson on "the role of intellectuals in the revolution" in TOUT VA BIEN and, more recently, bits of feminist discourse (Germaine Greer) in NUMERO DEUX. The discours du manche changes, so to speak, hands, but it always speaks from on high and condemns easily (the successive reproaches: being a cinephile, being a revisionist, being cut off from the masses, being a male chauvinist.)

But Godard is not the bearer of the discourse in which he demands that we believe - still less the origin - but something like the drill-master. So a structure with three places is set up, a little theater of three, where to the master (who is after all only a drill-master) and the student (who only repeats) is added the solicitation of what must be repeated, the solicitation of the discours du manche, to which master and student are subjected, unequally, and which persecutes them.

So the screen becomes the place of this persecution, and the film its mise en scene. Two questions, nevertheless, are definitely eluded by this apparatus: that of the production of the discours du manche (in Maoist terms, the question "where do right ideas come from?"), and that of its appropriation (in Maoist terms, "the diference between true ideas and right ideas"). School is of course no place for these questions. There the drill-master embodies a figure at once modest and tyrannical: he must recite a lesson which he knows nothing about and which he himself endures.

This master-discourse is, after 1968, somewhat systematically born by the voice of a woman. This means that Godardian pedagogy implies a distribution of roles and discourses by sex. The voice which reprimands, resumes, advises, teaches, explains, theorizes and even t(h)errorizes is always a woman's voice. And if this voice begins to talk, precisely, about the question of woman, it is still in an assertive, slightly declamatory tone: the opposite of the lifelikeness and plaintiveness of naturalism. Godard does not film any revolution which cannot talk about itself, which has not found its language, its style, its theory. In TOUT VA BIEN, we see the character played by Jane Fonda pass very quickly from a clean slate to a kind of theory of the clean slate (which Montand, moreover, does not understand.) No underside to the discourse, the already-said-by-others.

3. For the master, for the students, each year brings with it ("reentry") a mincing, a simulacrum of the first time, the return to zero: zero of no-knowledge, zero of the blackboard. In which respect school, a place for the tabula rasa and the slate quickly wiped clean, a gloomy place of waiting and suspense, of the transition to life, is an obsessional place: non-linear and closed.

Since his first films Godard has felt the greatest repulsion at "telling a story," at saying "in the beginning there was/at the end there is." Leaving the movie theater also meant escaping from this obligation, well formulated by the aged Fritz Lang in CONTEMPT: "You must always finish what you have started." A fundamental difference between school and cinema: one doesn't have to please, to flatter the students, because school is obligatory. It is the State that wishes all children to be "scholarized." While in the cinema, in order to retain one's audience, one must give them something to see and enjoy, tell them stories (hodgepodges): whence the accumulation of images, hysteria, carefully-measured effects, retention, discharge, happy ending: catharsis. The privilege of the school: there one detains students so that they will retain lessons, the master retains (holds back) his knowledge (he doesn't say everything) and punishes bad students by keeping them after school.


Keeping, Returning

School could only be the good place because there it was possible to retain the maximum number of things and people for the longest possible time, the very place of differance. For retenir means two things: "to retain" (hold onto) but also "to detain," "to defer." To hold onto an audience of students in order to delay the moment when they would risk passing too quickly from one image to another, from one sound to another, seeing too quickly, declaring themselves prematurely, thinking that they are done with images and sounds when they don't suspect to what extent the arrangement of these images and sounds is something very complex and serious, and not at all innocent. School permits us to turn cinephilia against itself, to turn it inside out, like a glove, and to take our time about it. So that Godardian pedagogy consists of unceasingly returning to images and sounds, designating them, repeating them, commenting on them, reflecting them, criticizing them like so many unfathomable enigmas: not losing sight of them, holding onto them with one's eyes, keeping them.

A masturbatory pedagogy? No doubt. It has as its horizon, as its limit, the mystery of mysteries, the sphinx of the still photo: that which defines understanding and never exhausts it, that which holds back the look and the meaning, fixes the scopic impulse: retention in action.

For the place from which Godard is speaking to us, from which he addresses us, is certainly not the secure place of a profession or even of a professional project. It is an in-between, in-between three things, in fact, an unfeasible place which embraces the photo (19th century), as well as cinema (20th century) and television (21st century.) The photograph: that which retains once and for all (a cadaver to be worked on). Cinema: that which retains only for a moment (death at work). Television: that which retains nothing (the deadly procession, the hemorrhaging of images).

Godard's lead over other manipulators of images and sounds stems from his total contempt for any discourse of the "specificity" of cinema. You have to see how he places, how tranquilly he embeds both the still photograph and the television image in the movie screen (so that cinema no longer has any other specificity than that of receiving - provisionally? - images that aren't made for it, and letting itself be invested by them: NUMERO DEUX) to understand that Godard exceeds all discourse on the specificity of cinema, whether it be the spontaneous discourse of the spectator (this is what cinema is for me), the self-interested discourse of people in the business (you have to make films like this) or that of the enlightened university critic (this is how cinema functions).

The cinema, we were saying at the beginning of this article, the bad place, the place of a crime and a kind of magic. The crime: that images and sounds are taken from (snatched, stolen, extorted, taken away from) living beings. The magic: that they are exhibited in another place (the movie theater) to give pleasure to those who see them. The beneficiary of the transfer: the filmmaker. This is true pornography, this change of scene; it is, appropriately, the obscene.

It will be said: this is a moral and Bazinian question, and moreover this kind of symbolic debt cannot be repaid. Certainly. But it happens that Godard's itinerary is the sign of a very concrete, very historical question, a question in crisis: the question of what could be called the "filmic contract" (filmer/filmed). This question seemed to pose itself only to militant or ethnographic cinema ("Us and the others"); Godard tells us that it is a question which concerns the very act of filming. Is he exaggerating? It is frivolous to think that this is one of the questions which can be resolved by good will and pious actions (for the cause - the artistic masterpiece or the good militant action). This question will be raised and cannot fail to be raised even more insistently as the traditional contract between filmer and filmed (Hollywood) falls apart and the cinema as "mass-art-family-oriented-popular-and-homogenizing" enters a crisis. Godard is already talking about this crisis because it is this crisis that made him a filmmaker. But it is already a question for pornographic cinema (EXHIBITION) and militant cinema (UN SIMPLE EXAMPLE). A question with a future.

For Godard, retaining images and audience, transfixing them, in a way (as is cruelly done with butterflies), is a desperate activity, itself without hope. His pedagogy has gained him only time. To the obscenity of appearing as auteur (and beneficiary of the greatest filmic surplus-value), he has preferred that of exhibiting himself in the very act of retention.

The impossibility of obtaining a new type of filmic contract has thus led him to keep (to retain) images and sounds without finding anyone to whom he can return them, restore them. Godard's cinema is a painful meditation on the theme of restitution, or better, of reparation. Reparation would mean returning images and sounds to those from whom they were taken. This also commits them to produce their own images and sounds. And all the better if that production obliges the filmmaker to change his own way of working!

There is a film in which this restitution-reparation takes place, ideally at least - ICI ET AILLEURS. These images of Palestinian men and women that Godard and Gorin, invited by the PLO, brought back from the Middle East, these images which he has kept in front of him for five years - to whom should they be returned?

To the general public avid for sensation (Godard+Palestine=scoop)? To the politicized public eager to be confirmed in dogma (Godard+Palestine=worthy cause=art)? To the PLO who invited him, permitted him to film and trusted him (Godard+Palestine=propaganda weapon)? Not even them. So?

One day, between 1970 and 1975, Godard realizes that the soundtrack is not completely translated, that what the fedayin are saying, in the shots where they appear, has not been translated from Arabic. And that in the end no one would be very bothered by this (accepting the fact that a voice-over covers these voices). Now, Godard says, the fedayin whose words have remained a dead letter are dead man with a reprieve - the living dead. they or other slike them died in 1970, were killed by Hussein's troops.

To make the film ("You must always finish what you have started") is then, quite simply, to translate the soundtrack, so that one hears what is being said, or better: so that one listens to it. What was retained has been freed, what was kept has been restored, but it's too late. Images and sounds are rendered as honors are rendered, to those to whom they belong: to the dead.


Sound (She), Image (He)/Voice (She), Eye (He)

Which could also be written Sound (she)/Image (he) or, more precisely: Voice (She)/Eye (He). By talking too much about "images and sounds" in the abstract, we failed to notice that there was always and above all a body invoked. The Godardian body is what receives, what lodges the eye; it is the image. The image is the domain of the man (even when - NUMERO DEUX - nothing remains of it but fetal blackness), it is what he is answerable for. He is answerable for it as a filmmaker (the overwhelming majority of filmmakers are men), therefore as a voyeur. Cinema, voyeurism matters of the scopic drive, the erectile eye, the business of men until now. But he only answers for it because someone talks to him about it. Someone: a voice, a voiceover, always the voice of a woman.

The voice of the woman as oral penis. It articulates the law, but a law made to order; what subjects the images, these images, his images. In the second part of WIND FROM THE EAST it is the voice of a woman which makes him draw the lesson: "What to do? You've made a film. You've criticized it. You've made mistakes. You know more now, perhaps, about the production of sounds and images, etc." The same apparatus in ICI ET AILLEURS, where it is again the voice of a woman that translates, unfolds, restores these images, already seen, too quickly run ("run out the ass," as they say). Even the theater of TOUT VA BIEN is one where the same division of roles is at work. She (Jane Fonda) works for the radio (the voice: political commentary). He (Yves Montand) works in film (the image: commercials). And this voice speaks only about the meaning of events ('68), about History, about the meaning of History. And this image is one of prostituted bodies prancing for the greater glory of Dim stockings and the shameful pleasure of the man who films them. It's by the voice that History descends on these images as what guts them, marks them, subjects them to its law. By the voice of a woman.

The body of the man is a bulging eye, the body of the woman is a voice which never stops intervening, questioning. NUMERO DEUX: even the disposition of bodies for love - posture - is at stake: "Why do you always want it like this?" asks Sandrine (neither "in" or "of": she is simply disposed for Pierre's eye - and for that of the camera). But the voice of Sandrine speaks only of one thing: of the image where she is and the position she occupies in it. Maximum proximity between bodies and thoughts: anchoring of what is said in what is seen.

Godard's strange feminism: he puts the woman (the voice, the sound) in the place of what articulates the law (la pensee de manche, concerning which we've seen that it is invested with a phallic character) and of what gives life. Perversion. It's not clear that feminist demands are satisfied with this "place" the men no longer want, with this "power" which they've let drop. They don't necessarily gain by it (even if the man reaps his profit of masochism: being the metteur en scene who says how he wishes to be punished, what type of cruel mothering he enjoys.) They didn't necessarily gain by it when, at the time of LA CHINOISE and WIND FROM THE EAST, they were put in the place of a discourse (Marxist-Leninist) which nobody wanted any part of. Anne Wiazemsky's voice (and the bourgeois class-being it connoted) made it impossible for anyone to identify with this discourse and this truth.

<1> Discours or pensee du manche: literally, the discourse or thought of the handle. Implicit in this Daneyism is the idea of "being on the right side" (the handle by which the tool must be grasped) and, of course, the image of the phallus. It also glances at Lacan's term for the langage of the obsessional neurotic: le Discours du Maitre (the Discourse of the Master.) It is better left untranslated.

Serge Daney

The Forbidden Zoom

November, 1983, Hotel des Invalides. It takes the 58 Beirut victims for television to think of form as more than a mere formality.

Whenever our rulers want to endow a particular event with symbolic meaning, television is involved. And each time a somewhat forgotten question needs to be asked: how to film a ritual - a question which is both very serious and inescapable. For it is when a symbolic spectacle has to be portrayed that television, and those in charge of it, remembers that the medium actually consists of sounds and images, of commentaries and voiceovers, of cameras moving across petrified bodies, of an incredibly precise apparatus, and of extras who occasionally are not just "anybody" since they become emblems. Yesterday an "Image of France" had to be carefully balanced and upheld on the Place des Invalides, a France composed of ordinary heads of state (Mitterand and all the ministers, but also Giscard and Chirac), of ordinary soldiers and of grief-stricken families (those of the 58 Beirut victims.)

Then - and only then - the television directors, the cameramen, and the sound engineers ask themselves, as they say, questions about "content." But they do it negatively, that is to say they make in advance a list of all the things that would be bad form. And because they "watch it" they begin to think about their practice.

Television has invented its own rituals (games, debates) but it is always somewhat uncomfortable when it comes to grafting itself on to pre-existing historic rituals, rituals that are deeply rooted in French history and already appear in paintings or engravings. Television tends to have a trivializing effect, to zoom in on anything as in a commercial, to diminish everything (hence the expression "small screen".) Thus, when faced with a religious service, a presidential visit to the Pantheon or a sounding of the last post, it rediscovers that its tools are not innocent or that, as people have been saying (in vain) for centuries, forms are heavy with content.

What exactly had to be avoided in the live coverage of this posthumous honouring of the 58 Beirut bodies "fallen for peace" (or for France?) Pathos, pomposity, obscenity, the obtrusive presence of politicians, gratuitous spectacle, and ostentatious virtuosity. No particular image should steal the limelight from the overall concept of the event (sobriety, grandeur, unity.)

As a way of reconciling the movement inherent in the medium and the static quality of the ritual, the director brought back an ancient technique rarely used on television: the dissolve (an image slowly melts into another; for example from a view of immobile soldiers to a shot of clouds moving across the grey sky above the Invalides.) To avoid superfluous emotion he showed very little of the singers or musicians in action. To avoid pathos he shot the families as if only in passing (hardly more than 10 shots), like inserts of silent grief, without unnecessary emphasis. To avoid boring static long takes, he cleverly varied angles, found complex circuits for the five cameras, etc.

We thus had the strange spectacle of a modern medium practicing self-censorship in order to respect an older (pictorial) genre: the patriotic painting or engraving of the late 19th century. What we saw was an 1883 scene filmed in 1983.

The most striking aspect of it, and for me the most symptomatic, was the almost total absence of forward zooms. In its daily (profane) usage, the zoom has become, more than a desire to signify or a stylistic figure, a kind of automatic reflex on the part of cameramen, devoid of meaning, and which only signifies that "this is TV." At the same time the forward zoom, with its insinuating and predatory character, continues to "have a meaning": that, to be precise, of a rape. Thus, by refusing this common prop, to zoom but backward, the television director had to practice old-fashioned "mise en scéne," to move constantly from the detail to the overall picture, but never the other way round, to "take charge" of the spectacle as it was originally planned, with its slow moments (punctuated by the clicking of cameras, footsteps, the discreet hum of live sound) and its "strong" moments (such as the simultaneous raising of the coffins or their odd wobbly departure on the shoulders of the paratroopers.)

In short, it took 58 victims and a national ritual for a television director to ponder, a little, the meaning of his practice. "Form," as we can see, is quite something.

Serge Daney

Television and its Shadow

Where nothing is less sure than that there will be one day a "history of television".

During a mass debate about the future of cinema, a clever chap raised the following argument: melancholic cinephiles, you who flatter yourself that you have rehabilitated the popular (especially American) cinema of yesteryear, who is to say that there will not be - in thirty years or more - people who will rehabilitate present-day television, which today we find so difficult not to despise just a little bit? At first glance, the argument seems full of common sense and we begin to imagine the 21st century zapper, sincerely moved by "Maguy," "Rue Carnot" or "Miami Vice." What will these people be like? On second though, however, the argument merely seems clever, and nothing is more misleading than the glib habit of placing cinema and television in total opposition. For it does not help thought, and only produces false symmetries.

That is what we say to ourselves as we consume here and there the minor subjects offered by "VIVE LA TELE" (on channel 5). Pre-zapped subjects that we watch with the conspiratorial eye of one who has already seen them in a previous life, who is surprised by his own amnesia (who sang with "Les problemes"? Antoine?) as by his capacity to recall (Ah yes, the painter Fujita, that was his moment of glory, now dead and forgotten.) We identify what we do not recognize and no longer recognize what we know. In this smiling game that we play with ourselves, everything sways towards the déja-vu and the second level. And, since there is no question of allowing these inserts any more weight than the load of their insignificance, the director Gerards Jourd'hui makes it a point to invent the "outdated" (discolored) disguise of what was innocently nude and in vogue twenty or more years ago.Of course, we realize that, up to the mid sixties, the voices of journalists in the wings were peremptory, nasal tones, with the low humor of the forties or fifties. In black and white the very images that were meant to be pure entertainment assume great dignity (fashion show reports, advance clips of the yé-yé culture, Princess Margaret all smiles, Cocteau, etc.) But these images suddenly swing en bloc into the category (duly filed and classified in the archives of the INA or the Gaumont Cinematheque) of images of the past that are also past images. The recent past remains undecidable as long as it does not definitively fall into the overall phenomenon of belonging to the past.

Which is why the hypothesis of a future aesthetic rediscovery of television is not certain. It will of course always be possible to find in these images innumerable items of objective information on an era, useful for the historians (for a Marc Ferro yet unborn) or the sociologist. Certainly, those who have actually lived through these events the first time around will feel gelatinously sentimental when watching these retro images that, in Jean-Louis Schefer's superb phrase, "have looked at our childhood." But this does not mean that television will be posthumously avenged for the mild contempt in which it has been held by those who watched it (and, too often, by those who worked in it.)

Existing figures show the cinema/television parallel in a poor light. Television has existed for at least 40 years, and we still do not have anything like "A history of television," a little Sadoul [French critic who wrote a proto-Maltin film guide in the 60s] for future telephiles, with explanations, sagas and filmographies. No sentimental reference to television's past consists of anything more than a litany of 2-3 mythic titles ("Cinq colonnes a la une", "Trente-six chandelles...") As if this could suffice to produce the illusion of a history as rich as that of cinema.

For, if we look at cinema, we see clearly that in the space of 40 years (say from 1910-1950, from the first Griffith films to the first Fellinis), this burgeoning art produced an incredible number of monuments of masterly creative folly, masterpieces with international audiences, known to succeeding generations (from the "nickelodeons" to the cine-clubs). So much so, it may be contended, without paradox, that its Golden Age was in its beginnings, and that the last few decades, however interesting they might have been, are already much less in the nature of an adventure. The cinema adventure did not have to wait 40 years to breed crazy theoreticians and incomplete historians: a glance at the texts of Eisenstein or the articles of Delluc (from the twenties) is enough to realize that wild theories and piercing criticism had found their tone at the very outset.

It is clear then that television is not "like" cinema: the times are different. It is perhaps the end and completion of cinema (its "realization"), just as it is, sometimes, a trailer of something to come. Moreover - and this is its greatness - as it is the slave of a pure present, with no depth, it is only normal that television should know nothing of itself, that, knowing nothing, it is no more capable of generating its history than its historians.

Serge Daney

On "Salador"

0. "What is it that is now 'appearance' to me! Verily, not the antithesis of any kind of essence - what knowledge can I assert of any kind of essence whatsoever, except merely the predicates of its appearance! Verily not a dead mask which one could put upon an unknown X, and which to be sure one could also remove! Appearance is for me the operating and living thing itself, which goes so far in its self-mockery as to make me feel that here there is appearance, a Will o' the Wisp, a spirit dance, and nothing more." (Nietzsche)

1. There is a great deal lacking in the continuing claim to regard the cinema as being related to reality, to the world, or to life as it is lived. First and foremost, let us take the relation to the visual. The visual is neither the double nor the outrageous, false or inaccurate misrepresentation of something else; the visual is something else, something which is not neutral, which has its own laws, effects and exigencies. The cinema which dreamt of a "direct engagement with the world" was, at a deeper level, postulating that from the "real" to the visual and from the visual to its filmed reproduction the same truth was reflected infinitely, with neither distortion nor loss. And it may be supposed that in a world where one readily says "see" for "understand," such a dream did not come about by chance, for the dominant ideology, which sets up the "real=visible" equation, has every interest in encouraging it.

2. Ideology and cinema. The problem has in recent times been displaced; suspicion has been shifted on to the simple act of filming, on to the camera and its construction, etc. Granted. But why not retrace the issue further back still, and challenge that which is both served by the camera and precedes it: the quite blind trust in the visible, the gradually acquired hegemony of the eye over the other senses, a society's taste and need for seeing itself reflected, etc.? In so doing, it becomes difficult to avoid a shaming iconoclasm in which all relations to the image are experienced as mortal sings (Godard and the false images of PRAVDA); difficult also to avoid losing sight of the specific history of the specular, a moment itself endowed with a history, whose end point we may possibly foresee.

3. Photology. The cinema is therefore connected to the Western metaphysical tradition, a tradition of seeing and sight for which it fulfills the photological vocation. What is photology and what indeed might the discourse of light be? A teleological discourse, undoubtedly, if it is true that teleology "consists of neutralizing duration and force in favor of the illusion of simultaneity and from." (Derrida.)

4. Duration and force: in other words, work. "Light effaces its traces; invisible itself, it renders visible," always giving us a finished, perfected world in which work (to begin with, its own) is properly speaking unimaginable, a world which we recognize only because we have never known it and which we risk never knowing at all, taken as in we are by its "apparentness." Let us designate as "photological" that obstinate will to confuse vision and cognition, making the latter the compensation of the former and the former the guarantee of the latter, seeing in directness of vision the model of cognition.

5. There is one oeuvre which, with an acuteness not shared by others (which is why it seems so exceptional), has constantly tried to pin down that equation of vision and cognition: Rohmer's. Significantly, it has only achieved this aim within the framework of an educational film, LES CABINETS DE PHYSIQUE AU XVIIIE SIECLE. Once the conditions of the experiment are set up and the results allowed for, what happens "between" - i.e, the film, the actual time of the experiment - is simultaneously the unfolding of a spectacle and the birth of an idea. "We have relapsed into the mirror myth of knowledge as the vision of a given object or the reading of an established text, neither of which is ever anything but transparency itself, the sin of blindness as much as the virtue of clear-sightedness belonging by right to vision, to the eye of man." (Althusser.)

6. Not long ago, the "world view" and the "exercise of observation," privileged themes of criticism, were equivalent at all levels simultaneously: the characters scanned the sets, the filmmaker looked at the world and the spectator looked at the film. Any awakening of consciousness was in the first instance a training of the look, and if by chance the film happened to be political, all class struggle was reabsorbed into a sunrise. A heliopolitics of which a film like ANDREI RUBLEV is only a belated example. (If we are considering recent films, we prefer Sollima's admirable DERNIER FACE A FACE, where such a mechanism - "I see, therefore I am aware" - is perverted and made ridiculous by constant repetition.

7. Let us venture to say that "the logic of sight and oversight" has a conclusion, which we are beginning to discern. A cinema giving us the evidence and the splendor of truth has long existed: the advertising film, where all truth is immediately verifiable, where one clearly sees the eruption of the white tornado, the softness of Krema caramel, or the most obstinate stain yielding ro K2R. Most films distributed, to the extent that they are a "development" of preexisting material, increasingly refer to this aesthetic and create for themselves the themes and preoccupations it allows (the "rise to consciousness" in the twin forms of advertising and propaganda.) The undeniable beauty of the "Salador" advertising (Pirés and Grimblat), the leap forward they constitute for advertising in the extreme care and precision of their work, should here and now stir big business into seeing that such a talent is not dissipated on pseudo-films. So, instead of pretending to shoot a dramatic scene with Montand in the Congo (VIVRE POUR VIVRE), Lelouch should be singing the praises of a brand of jeans, Melville of a style in raincoats.

8. Besides, it would be curious to see how far what since the war we have called "modern" cinema has consisted of merely conferring a new dignity on these despised but already existing marginal forms, through a sort of regressive hypostasis of which painting has already provided an example. Not just advertising, but also "coming attractions," film titles, amateur films, etc.

9. If cinema involves photology, then every film, if it cannot control it, is controlled by it. And if it cannot manage to control photology, let film (prisoner of the light) designate it at least, let it be aware of the extent to which the world is "deeper than the day imagines." This involves two discoveries which, despite their extreme simplicity, are nevertheless shocking because they clearly reveal what there has been a wish to hide: that there is no innocence in the "real," or in technique, that cinema is not simply a relation to the visual but, at a deeper level, a fundamental complicity and constantly reasserted play between two modes of visibility.

10. First mode. Everything that can and is to be filmed (the profilmic material) thereby has an LCD (Lowest Common Denominator) - its visibility. What happens, for example, in FREAKS? The problem Browning seems to pose is resolved from the outset. From the moment the monsters can share a shot with men, they are no longer truly monsters; what unites them with men is stronger than what separates them (so much so that Browning has to reintroduce monstrosity at the same time as - and through - the fiction.) Cinema is a dangerous machine to tame; it provides differences, but only within a more fundamental resemblance.

11. On the subject of that resemblance, it was the discovery of the great filmmakers of the classical age (those who recognized it and took it over; Hawks, Browning, Lubitsch, undoubtedly; certain Ford and Renoir.) In wanting to confront the most varied men and worlds within the same space, indeed the same shot, in wanting to have the play/pleasure of this exacerbated diversity (and their whole art consists in rendering the firmness of distinctions), they inevitably achieved the reverse effect - a solidarity apparently automatically there to the eye of the camera, rather like the complicity of a theater company which, when the curtain falls on the illusory spectacle of its disunity, experiences a deeper sense of unity.

12. For spectacle is clearly what it is about for those lovers of "small worlds," reproduced from film to film, diversity offered in the form of spectacle, thus (slyly) denied. But it is a spectacle as yet imperfect, owing too much to the theater, and which it should have been possible to liberate. Perhaps now we can interpret the break that Rossellini's work appeared to make directly after the war. He did not so much oppose the classical cinema as destroy it by assuming its ultimate consequences - by making the spectacle the deepest level, by generalizing it. Suddenly everything, from the obscene to the insignificant, was set at the same level (bringing up the concomitant problems of morality - the point about tracking shots - and commercial failure.) Cinema is by nature a leveler.

13. Second Mode. Everything that has been filmed (every shot) possesses as a result an LCD (another mode of visibility, not now visibility in general but the specific visibility of the cinema.) The question here is the insertion of what has been filmed at some moment on the strip of film, its limitation by framing and duration, both equally irrevocable. While the first mode allowed "something" to be inscribed on the screen, the second makes possible the transitivity and facilitation of meaning, via an attribute common, beyond all divergences, to all shots, and one of which recently has been constantly and frenziedly referred to. The issue is no longer just the twofold spatial and temporal limitation of any shot (a limitation played on by all those wanting to write with images from the standpoint of meaning.) It is also, now above all, the fact of being inscribed on that material base, of being just one instance of the only rule of cinema - the vertical unrolling of the strip of celluloid, with or without images.

14. Observation. It is not saying much to say that such proofs (that the "presence" of something on the screen and the possibility of meaning happen in a sense automatically, thus shockingly) have been obscured because they were too obvious to be really thought about; the history of cinema has perhaps been the continual refusal to want to know anything about it. A denial which is only possible through reduplication: filmmakers had willingly to repeat effects they strongly suspected they could just as well do without. To the inadequate presence (inadequate because obtained without work or worth) they have continuously opposed a strategy which privileged and emphasized the actor and the decor, a four-square presence of which MacMahonism was only a belated theorization. To the imperfect meaning (diffuse, multiple meaning: Untersinn ) they opposed an intended meaning, taken over by an écriture in which the reason for any passage from A to B had itself to be represented, even if under the mask of a lack.

15. In what way has the cinema been suspect until now? On what has the suspicion rested? Always or almost always on the technique of the "take," in the sense of capture or rape, in which some "adamic" reality, which asked only to speak of itself, was to be manipulated. So an increasingly invisible and candid camera has to covers its tracks, because filming is never anything but seeing, and seeing plainly. The only question not asked was: what is being manipulated? And does something which is looked at innocently become innocent for that reason ? Or rather, does not the look become so much more threatening because the objects looked at are chosen from among the most cultural, those heavy with meaning and saturated with ideology? In this sense cinema-vérité (as Reichenbach envisaged it) joins the star system; or better, is its survival.

16. It is (yet another) banality to say that everything which comes into the camera's field does not for that reason stop belonging to other fields. What is going to be filmed has always IalreadyI been filmed. As for the images with which we continue to fill our heads, we have to admit that their referent is now hardly a "reality" which we have experienced, but rather an imaginary experience we have already had from seeing these images in other films, the habit formed by their spectacle. Every tracking shot of a man walking down a street doesn't make me attach it to my own experience of walking, however rich it is, but rather a series of memories from SUNRISE to LA PUNITION, which should no doubt be called the "concrete imaginary." For the film-freak generation which has buried itself in the ciémathéques I, can death be anything but the effect of falling bodies on the screen?

17. There is hardly any problem more serious for new filmmakers. And it is no accident that the most talented of them are, indeed, former critics and film buffs, no longer unaware that cinema has become - besides a (specific) culture and tradition in the history of the specular - an increasingly lively eye and an increasingly failing memory. Reducing the world to a generalized spectacle is the business of television. Cinema's survival is now the extent to which it can introduce "play" into a general sense of image saturation. That play consists of delaying as long as possible (a few seconds is enough) the takeover the seen by the already-seen, and so of showing something never-seen - at least on the screen. Among these last rounds are exoticism, pornography, possibly science fiction. The only essential is to reinvest all the problems posed by the film's total meaning (the sequence of shots) into the unique and crucial problem of the reading of the shot, its decoding (what is it?). The future of cinema? To take seriously, in every sense, its figurative nature. At least one film (2001), where the camera starts at the level of primates and ends alongside Norman McLaren, made its acknowledged subject the future of representation.

18. Unless, that is, a cinema which seeks to be self-critical, not content with this flight forward and this need for the never-seen which can only exhaust itself unsatisfied, already clearly sees a signified (which will need to be forced into the open, indicated) in each profilmic signifier. Its relation to photology would be its particular way of accusing or not accusing the false innocence of the "real," a reality which for it is always the already-filmed. We see here the two modes of visibility at work: the specific means of the second (framing and duration) as an interrogation and deconstruction of the material furnished by the first (shooting). A text no longer concealing its pretext, a pretext suspected in turn. Furthermore, a film's relation to photology can appear in (at least) three forms, according to whether it presupposes the profilmic material to be - neutral - neutralized - neither. The first form is represented by all films (the great majority) which, under the guise of objectivity, remain within the ideology (which they reassert without necessarily recognizing) and soon lapse into advertising. "Salador" is to date an unsurpassed expression of this kind of cinema.

19. The second form warrants further explanation. Suspected of equivocating the technique of shooting had logically to be thought capable of "transfiguring," "transmuting" the profilmic material (and in so doing, of neutralizing its effects). This is a quasi-magical operation, ecstatically evoked, an alchemy in which the profilmic lead is changed into filmed gold, autonomous grains and fragments owing nothing thereafter to their pretext, their ordering and sequence permitting the facilitation of meaning. All "cinematography" needed such a postulate (and, as we know, it was Bresson who theorized the need: "For film, the theme is, in my view, a pretext for creating cinematic content.") What was it he needed? To believe in the exchange value of shots, so that nothing in shot A is lost or damaged when a transition to shot B is secured. And transition is certainly the issue here - neume and absolute transitivity, moving on by conserving, capitalizing.

20. Who are those who wanted to write with images? It is time we realized that such a wish, so often formulated, was only formulated by those (from Eisenstein to Bresson) who scorned ideas that were not idées fixes, of the order of obsessions (sexual, no doubt) and fantasies, such that only a unique and terrorist discourse could take them on. These were the great obsessives who demanded the most from cinema: that a film should say only one thing, achieve just one effect, but decisively. These pioneers saw to what extent the thing could not work as soon as they were convinced that in the cinema - as elsewhere - every effect is achieved once only. Was Hawks (or Lubitsch) preoccupied with anything else? The important thing for Hawks, the only effect he wished to produce (pleasure in/for itself), is also the easiest to achieve (even in the deceptive and metaphorical form of Adventure), as it is the quickest to be erased. Hawks is the filmmaker of an always total pleasure (no matter how dull and lackluster) with no option other than to repeat it endlessly (the importance of repetition in Hawks is well known) because it is never achieved.

21. Every effect is achieved only once - but it must not be achieved too soon or it will be attenuated and forgotten, only a repetition can reactivate it, without, however, enriching it. From this we can see the deceptive side of the Hawksian (or Lubitschian) world, because achieving the same effect a second time requires an ever-increasing expenditure of energy, a world destined for exhaustion and entropy, with no other aim than its own prolongation. Filmmakers with an aim (a desire) also know that there is only IoneI moment appropriate for the decisive effect (cf. the Bertheau episode in LA VIE EST A NOUS.) These are therefore the filmmakers of the snare, since their problem is to capitalize on secondary effects, ceaselessly investing signifieds in new signifiers and making themselves masters of a chain where nothing allows the end to be envisaged, masters of a frenetic transitivity which condemns them to say nothing real, never to come to a stop, were they not flagged down by the actual, material end of the film, and obliged to finish it before it is finished (a new duplication of an inevitable and automatic effect). It is surely in Lang's films that we can best see this reluctance to conclude and the very edgy humor which presides over what are always simulated endings (SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR.) In the cinema also, to write means not to finish.

22. This incompatibility between a film which cannot exceed a certain duration and a meaning which can be reasserted by a trifle gave rise to compromise solutions which all took the form of coups de force, the only thing which could end the chain, capitalize on its links and reactivate them in the direction of a prediction of the past. In this one can recognize the major concern of several celebrated films which seemed modern to their defenders in CAHIERS around 1955; miracle films or, as Jacques Rivette rightly observed, films of the final reversal, which managed to represent simultaneously the most advanced state of reflection on the cinema and an often religious way of accounting for that reflection. Why? Because such a power (the intrusive power of writing) could only be sustained by introducing a guarantee, a transcendental signified, which cinema had gradually learned to do without, leaving it to advertising films for which it has always been the truth. ("Salador.")

23. One man bewitched by these powers very soon recognized that he could hardly avoid simulating their Icoups de forceI, and that, by insisting on provoking them, he was all the more clearly showing them to be arbitrary and a trick, no longer even capable of valorizing after the event a sequence of shots in which there was already revealed a radical inability to capitalize; reflection was to make of that inability a rejection, and out of that rejection has come a hesitant theory...We are saying that Jean-Luc Godard, when he was filming VIVRE SA VIE, was thinking of Karina as, he imagined, before him Renoir thought of C. Hessling (NANA), Rossellini of I. Bergman (EUROPA 51), if not Fellini of G. Massina (CABIRIA). But let Nana smile, dance, sell her body or die, the evidence is that a woman is always a woman and that it is an illusion to think that a film can say anything else, an illusion whose results are equally obvious in film theory (every shot is a transition, a difference of effect which is the only more decisive for being final) and in the themes treated (whores are saints, the guilty innocent, etc.) All of which Godard was very aware of when he took a turn (with LE MEPRIS) from which the cinema has scarcely begun to come back.

24. LE MEPRIS (CONTEMPT.) In 1964, everyone wanted to know whether Godard, the enfant terrible of the new cinema, faced with the demands of big budget production and the whims of famous actors, would come away from the venture without losing anything, making all that profilmic machinery in the final analysis unrecognizable. At the time everyone was raving about the magic of cinema and the genius of the auteur, the man who imprints the indelible mark of his vision on everything and everyone. While all that may have constituted a fantasy for Godard (filming at the big MGM studios), it all turns out as if he had finally decided on the impossibility, or more accurately the uninterest, of such an enterprise, which is in fact the real subject of the film. Since it is therefore the story of a failure (and itself a commercial failure), LE MEPRIS becomes a question of knowing whether failure is not perhaps more profound than any success. That is, is it no the demiurges who fail?

25. What happens in LE MEPRIS? Still the same story - getting there too late, the game already played, where the score is settled and the cards have a fixed value and way of playing them. What is the point of playing the best possible hand, smuggling in meaning between the lines, when the game is already over? Homer wrote the ODYSSEY and Moravia wrote CONTEMPT. Prokosch wanted to put it into images and Ponti wanted to put it on the screen. They summoned famous "artists" (Lang, Godard) whose (commercial) thirst for being scorned they were able to slake. ("One has to suffer," says Lang, and everyone knows that Godard had to shoot things he had not foreseen.) Every new player of the great Culture and Capital game has to respect (and not reflect upon) the traces in his work of what came before him, and which he should not improve upon. Choosing the place (Capri), the story (THE ODYSSEY), and the characters (Lang, Bardot) closest to myth, Godard discovered what he was later to elucidate constantly: that you can't both use and be used by that profilmic material. You deny it, believing you are going beyond it, but you ignore it without going beyond it. It is time, more modestly, to indicate its overdetermination for what it is. Every film is a palimpset.

Serge Daney

Les Cahiers du cinéma 1968-1977

Q: When did you join the CAHIERS DU CINEMA? What was it like in those days? what have you been doing when you weren't editing the magazine? What was May '68 like for you (if you'd care to talk about it)?

A: In 1959 I bought, for the first time, the CAHIERS. It was number 99. A Lang special. One used a lofty and complicated vocabulary to talk about Lang's American films, much despised at the time by "serious" criticism. This paradoxical artistocraticism pleased me. After many years of assiduously frequenting the cinematheque (Rue D'Ulm, then, after 1964, Chaillot), one got to know certain critics from the CAHIERS (especially Jean Douchet.) With two friends, in 1963, I put out a magazine that ran two issues: a Hawks special and a Preminger special. Which shows how much we defined ourselves at that time almost exclusively in relation to theAmerican cinema, taking as its summit what was in fact its twilight. In 1964, with Louis Skorecki, I went to the U.S. to meet filmmakers and do interviews (Hawks, Leo McCarey, Jacques Tourneur, Jerry Lewis, Sternberg, Keaton..) That's how we "negotiated our entree into the CAHIERS." In 1964, a grave economic and ideological crisis shook the CAHIERS. Eric Rohmer had to give up the chief editorship and was replaced by Jacques Rivette, then by Jean-Louis Comolli. At the same time the magazine was taken over by a publisher (Daniel Fillipachi) until 1969, a date when, principally for political reasons, the magazine become autonomous again.

At this time "being on the CAHIERS" didn't have the same meaning as today. There was no editorial committee, and all the important decisions were made by one or two people. There were a lot of free-lancers who wrote a piece from time to time that might or might not be accepted, without feeling themselves to be part of a global point of view. It was that way until 1968. The magazine evolved considerably, abandoned its blind Americanism and adopted an increasingly intellectual, theoretical approach to problems. This was, in France, the breaking of the great wave of structuralism (and the first works by Christian Metz.)

1968 was experienced differently by the people on the CAHIERS. Insofar as I was concerned, as a profound shake-up and a wavering of all certainties. It seemed that one could never do films or a film magazine as one had before. The ideas developed by the Situationists on the "society of the spectacle" affected me greatly. Basically, our way of being "affected" by '68 consisted of putting in doubt and into play, in a slightly mystical way, what had been the source of our enjoyment: the position of spectator. During this period, I pulled away from the CAHIERS and didn't rejoin them until 1971. In the meantime, I took long trips (to India and Africa.) The magazine, it seemed, was becoming more and more politicized. 

Q: There were great changes in the magazine at the end of the sixties - how did they come about?

A: I believe that the great event of those years was the introduction into the CAHIERS of a very theoretical way of talking about film. Far removed, in appearance, from the old cinephilia. There's nothing very astonishing about it: for the first time authors like Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan and Claude Levi-Strauss reached beyond their usual public and were read by a larger group who immediately attempted a kind of savage application of their ideas. Very simply, the CAHIERS was the first magazine to plunge in this direction, with no precautions. This earned us, at the time, the sarcasms of "normal" criticism - impressionistic and hedonistic - which did not tolerate the use of a "jargon" to talk about films (this was the period of the polemic between Barthes and Picard.)

So there was a savage application of Althusser and particularly of Lacan, thanks to Jean-Pierre Oudart ("La suture"), beginning in 1969. There was also the influence of the magazine TEL QUEL. The CAHIERS at the time played the role of the middleman: they introduced theory to cinema and cinema to the university. Which is somewhat paradoxical, since none of us was a high-ranking academic; more like tinkerers. I think that this period is over. There exists more and more a monopoly of academic discourse on cinema, and the new generation of "cinephiles" will be formed more in the universities than in the cinematheques. We played a part in this mutation. Today we believe it's important not to limit oneself to the university. The CAHIERS has always been an uncomfortable and paradoxical place where it was possible to write about films and make films at the same time (see Godard.) 

Q: The "new" CAHIERS was critical of its heritage: you reread Ford, dissected Bresson, psychoanalyzed Bazin. Why was this necessary?

A: This criticism was obviously a last homage, more or less avowed, that we rendered to what we have always loved. We wanted to reread Ford, not Huston, to dissect Bresson and not Rene Clair, to psychoanalyze Bazin and not Pauline Kael. Criticism is always that: an eternal return to a fundamental pleasure. Why, as concerns me, was my relationship to cinema bound up with THE INDIAN TOMB, RIO BRAVO, UGETSU MONOGOTARI, PICKPOCKET, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, PAISAN, GERTRUD? There is a dimension to cinephilia which psychoanalysis knows well under the name of "mourning work": something is dead, something of which traces, shadows remains...

Incidentally, in the collective text on YOUNG MR. LINCOLN, we distinguished clearly between ideology and writing. We were very conscious then of the danger (which we subsequently did not always avoid) of confounding ideology and writing. Now - it's quite simple - the cinema loved by the CAHIERS - from the beginning - is a CINEMA HAUNTED BY WRITING. This is the key which makes it possible to understand the successive tastes and choices. This is also explained by the fact that the best French filmmakers have always been - at the same time - writers (Jean Renoir, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Pagnol, Sacha Guitry, Jean Epstein, etc.) 

Q: "The cinema that interests us is the one which plays on off-spaces...The great filmmakers - Hitchcock, Lang, Mizoguchi, Tourneur, Dreyer, Duras, Straub, Godard - are those whose mise en scene, writing, montage are articulated by off-space effects..." Why? And what about Griffith, Walsh, Chaplin, Hawks, Allen Dwan, Renoir, Monte Hellman?

A: This phrase of Pascal Bonitzer's is a little provocative in that it risks giving the impression that we only love those filmmakers. There are others, of course, including the ones you cited. As a matter of fact, it's the same question as the previous one and the one that follows (on naturalism.) The cinema which interests us is haunted by writing. Writing implies spacing, a void between two words, two letters, a void which permits the tracing of meaning. Writing implies, not immediacy, but an eternal movement of "bustrophedon." So how does all this happen in film? There, too, there is spacing, but it isn't the invisible bond between frames; it's the off-space. Each shot secretes its off-space. There are off-spaces and different ways of playing on them. There are off-spaces directed by the eye (fetishistic framing) and off-spaces directed by the ear (fundamental voice, voice of the mother.) There is a way for the voice to block or give access to the image. Each important filmmaker resolves this problem. So, when the CAHIERS was politicized, they took their examples more and more from the Soviet cinema of the twenties, but again it was to distinguish between Eisenstein (who "wrote") and Pudovkin (who "didn't write"), and this was the same as the distinction between Hitchcock and Huston. Today it may well be that with people like Godard and Straub we have reached the extreme limit of writing. These are filmmakers for whom an image is closer to an inscription on a tombstone than to an advertising poster. And cinema may no longer have any choice but to be a poster or an epitaph. In writing, you know, there is a relation to death. 

Q: Public enemy number one, still at large: naturalism. Why do you distrust it?

A: The hatred of naturalism is as deep as the taste for writing, because it is exactly the converse. In naturalism there is a kind of "special effect" or trickery that is fundamental: the frame is there by chance and transforms the spectators into voyeurs. naturalism confuses the repressed with the invisible. One example: for years, in French films, one doesn't see immigrant laborers. Filmically, they don't exist. After 1968, the immigrants participated in numerous struggles and were politicized: so the French cinema is somewhat obliged to show them. Then we'll show them, but as if they had always been there and one had just forgotten to show them, when in fact one had repressed them, and for political reasons. This is ethnological voyeurism. On the CAHIERS we think that the question is not just one of "correcting an omission," but of lifting a repression: why has their image been missing? Cinema usually shows us people, events, places that we don't know; there's no reason for it to give us the impression that they are there, next door. Naturalism (precision of description) is only one part of the task. If you don't go beyond it, you necessarily end up asking questions about cinema in terms of advertising (as if it were nothing.) This is unfortunately what is happening more and more. 

Q: What happened to the CAHIERS in 1973?

A: I'll have to tell the story of post-'68 in intellectual circles. It's the story of a shift. 1970 marked the apogee of the "Maoist" movement in France (with groups like "La gauche proletarienne," then "La cause du peuple"), its greatest moment of political inventiveness. After this date there is a decline in the movement, first in its spontaneous form ("Maoist"), then in its dogmatic form ("Marxist-Leninist".) Intellectual circles were affected by leftist ideas after a kind of delay. Why? It was especially those who have never belonged to the French Communist Party (like the people on the CAHIERS) who were affected by leftism. When the whole French cultural scene was politicized, it was natural to approach the FCP in order to assess their positions on questions of art and culture. The FCP, on the other hand, after having been badly burned in the debates in the fifties on "socialist realism," had renounced any conspicuous interference in the domain of art and had, at the same time, renounced any theory, any investigation of the relation between art and politics and, more precisely, of propaganda literature. Now the CAHIERS and TEL QUEL were magazines that had fought to introduce new methods (derived from structuralism) into the study of literary and cinematic texts. So there was an exchange of procedures: the FCP would supply political ideas and the ideal militant, and we would supply specialized (avant-garde) work of which the FCP was cruelly in need. But it didn't work out. Because basically the cultural policy of the Party was more cynical: on the one hand, to amuse a few researchers into "specific" questions (this was the period of Althusser and the famous duo, "ideology/practice," the period of "theoretical practice"), and on the other hand, to infiltrate as many cultural institutions as possible - the "Maisons de la Culture" - and train cultural programmers, relays for diffusing exactly the same culture and the same relation to culture as the bourgeoise.

Now the lack of political history on the part of the members of the CAHIERS staff meant that they could not be satisfied with the position of a laboratory cut off from everything else, isolated researchers, academics. We had to have the experience (painful but inevitable for any French intellectual) of the real. And "real" here should be understood in the sense of "bad encounter, trauma" (Lacan.) We had to emerge from cinephilia and go to the forefront of concrete tasks, new interlocutors, etc. This kind of "old style" engagement was basically nothing but a sped-up repetition of what the engagements of French intellectuals close to the FCP have had to be since 1920. And this caricature-repetition was something we could only live out through the intermediary of little "Marxist-Leninist" groups who themselves, hysterically (like a son who reproaches his father for not being severe enough), were living out their mourning for Stalinist politics through a Chinese imagery. They supplied the group superego and taught us our political ABC's, and we supplied "specific work on the front of culture." Reference to the text of Mao ("Interventions on Art and Literature at the Talks in Yenan") permitted us not to fall into the Trotskyist position, always lax and contemptuous toward art.

All this led to the "Cultural Front," composed of people like us who believed in politicizing culture and of leftist ex-militants who had understood perfectly their own political failure and had sought refuge on a "secondary front" where they could continue to intimidate others, while all they were really doing was negotiating their own survival (a few years later the most brilliant ones - like Andre Glucksmann - landed on their feet: journalism, literature, the pose of the "beautiful soul.") The result was: the artists were intimidated by the sheer weight of errors to be avoided and tasks to be undertaken, and the militants hid behind an overly general discourse their lack of ideas and motivations. This double block kept the Cultural Front from ever functioning. It evolved towards a growing interest in an area that had been long neglected: popular culture, the tradition of the carnivalesque, popular resistance, the popular memory, etc. The importance of Foucault can be seen here. A film like MOI, PIERRE RIVIERE... would never have been made without the questions advanced by the Cultural Front. And so the link to cinema, after the detour of militancy, was reaffirmed. 

Q: What did you learn in your study of militant films? Why all these imaginary voyages to liberated zones: territories, factories, prisons?Why is the sound so important in these films?

A: I would say that the interest in militant cinema is as much as an effect of cinephilia as of the political superego. In CAHIERS-cinephilia (the kind staked out by Bazin), there is a demand for risk, a certain "price" paid for the images. In militant cinema there is also this idea of risk. No longer a metaphysical risk, but a physical one: the risk of not being there at the right moment, the risk of not having sufficiently mastered the techniques (militant filmmakers are amateurs), legal risks (Belmont and HISTOIRES D'A) and even the risk that the film, once it's been made and shown to the people it concerns (those who are fighting and who are not cinephiles) will not please them, will not help them, will not even be understood by them. Cinephilia is not just a special relationship to cinema; it is a relationship to the world through cinema. I remember what people like Luc Moullet and Godard said in the fifties: they had learned life from the cinema. And CAHIERS cinephilia, the cinephilia of the "Hitchcocko-Hawksian," is special in that it is a relationship - a perverse one - to the people, because the films of Hawks and Hitchcock at the time they were made were seen by the people and looked down on by cultivated persons. It's a relationship to the people through the forms which the people were subjected to and loved for a period of fifty years. When I started going to films, I was quite conscious in that this choice was bound up with my hatred for the theater. I hated, in theater, the social ritual, the assigning of seats in advance, the need to dress up, the parade of the bourgeoise. In cinema - the permanent cinema - there is a black space that is fundamental, infinitely more mysterious. The sexual aspect - more specifically, the prostitutional aspect - is very bound up with this kind of cinephilia: look at Godard, Truffaut, Straub, it's all they talk about.

To get back to militant cinema, if we have moved away from it, it's because it failed to furnish this imaginary encounter with the people. Because there were nothing but sectarian films, made hastily by people who didn't care about cinema. (But there are exceptions: ATTICA, KAFR KASSEM, THE PROMISED LAND.) Today I think that militant films have the same defect as militant groups - they have the "mania of the All": each film is total, all-inclusive. A true militant cinema would be a cinema which militated as cinema, where one film would make you want to see a hundred others on the same subject. That kind of militant cinema would have to break with the ponderous models of commercial cinema. I've had friends who spent a year editing a 16-millimeter film about a strike at a printing plant, at the cost of unheard of efforts and sacrifices, and the film had become totally incomprehensible by the time of its "release." The old militant cinema is bad because it includes no reflection on its economy. It's a big mess that doesn't think of itself as a big mess. It's too expensive, too long, too general, it takes up too much time in the lives of people who do it, etc.

In our frequenting of militant films, what we learned was, precisely, morality. That is, the way that the power which the camera represents (its capacity to intervene, interfere, extort and provoke, to modify the situation which it grafts itself onto) is or is not thought about by the people who make the films. Paradoxically, films denouncing bourgeois power, injustice and oppression are themselves totalitarian, non-dialectical, laid on like veneer. And it is of course by means of the voice (the voiceover which is the principal resource of any edifying cinema) that this operation of the forcing of the image is effected. There comes a time when you realize that what's important is not agreeing or disagreeing with the explicit ideology of the film, but seeing how far someone is able to hold onto his ideas while at the same time respecting the audio-visual material he has produced. It's a dialectical movement: at first the filmmaker - guided by ideas, tastes, convictions - produces a certain material, but then it's the material which teaches him things by resisting him (minimal materialism). Straub is the most coherent about this. There has to be a confirmation of what you already thought and an affirmation of something new to think. 

Q: Has your attitude toward the Chinese films changed? You seem more inclined to criticize them now.

A: The Chinese films have never really interested us. And we've never vaunted them or even found them good. The only one I liked was RUPTURE. I had a strange feeling watching it: that in this dance-film full of movement there was a mise en scene of the official ideology as naive, consistent and total as in certain American films with, say, Debbie Reynolds. Europe, since its misadventures with fascism, no longer has the capacity to embody - in the form of puerile images - a moral consensus (good conscience.) I think it's only imperialist countries that have the capacity to represent, in the imaginary, the moral consensus (the norm) and what menaces it (the blot, the scapegoat.) It's only imperialist countries that can afford disaster films. And the Chinese films I've seen follow this model (like, on the other hand, Soviet films in the style of LE PRIME, coming twenty years after TWELVE ANGRY MEN.) 

Q: Why do you object to films like Z and 1900? Are there any examples of good left-wing films being made for large audiences - in Italy, for example?

A: This has to do with the ideological and moral consensus in Europe today. Z and 1900 (and SOLEMN COMMUNION, THE QUESTION, THE RED POSTER, EXQUISITE CADAVERS, etc.) try to unify the biggest possible audience around a moderate imaginary of the left. In order not to offend anyone, the unification is accomplished with metaphysical themes devoid of concrete history: in 1900 the revolts of the anarchist peasants of Emilie-Romagne at the beginning of the twentieth century become a kind of peasant upheaval that anticipates the "historical compromise" of today; in THE RED POSTER the actions of the franc-tireurs became an episode in the history of the FCP; in THE QUESTION the courageous attitude of a Communist militant (in disagreement with his party) becomes a kind of abstract courage to resist in general, etc.

So the unification always happens on the basis of a kind of amnesia and the desire to nourish this amnesia with beautiful images (the red flags of 1900.) This amnesia is a paradoxical but important phenomenon in the lives of Franco-Italian intellectuals: these cultures imbued with Marxism are cultures where the history of the workers' movement is not well known, because it is the parties who write history.

On the other hand, for people haunted by writing like the CAHIERS, it's clear that writing divides, while images unify (through common fear or recognition.) Today, in France, in cinema, you have to divide. And it can only be done by making contemporary films (and not moving evocations.) For example, it's quite possible to make a Communist trade-unionist a fictional character; it's what Godard does in COMMENT CA VA. It's quite possible to film the suicide of a young person; it's what Bresson does in THE DEVIL, PROBABLY. But these are contemporary films, which do not surrender to the simulacrum of memory.

Why divide? The reason, I think, is sociological. The cinema is less and less a popular form of expression and more and more recognized as "art" by the middle class. Its instructional function has terminated (television has perhaps replaced it.) It is seen more and more by an increasingly enlightened petit-bourgeois audience and tends to play the role that theater used to play: a place of prestige, debates, parades. It's not at all clear that this new audience is better than the old. It is, at any rate, more adrift, less spontaneous. And around the films a whole apparatus of language has been established (critics, publicists, press attaches, the university) which means that there is no longer any freshness in the way they are received.

As for the question of whether there are any good left-wing films "for large audiences," it seems to me that this question divides into two parts: 1)I think that films with "burning political themes" never go very far, are superficial because they are too general. They aren't political films at all, but films expressing the politics of the union of the Left in France (and in Italy), vague and reformist, imprecise and unifying, right-thinking. These are films which could be called "operational," which is to say that they are immediately taken and digested as films illustrating the politics of the united left. Their mode of functioning is closer to an advertising poster than to any work with the signifying material. 2)Conversely, in all these films you can see a veritable fascination with power conceived as manipulation (one of the big problems of the European cinema is to create a successful stereotype of the "leftist cop" - cf. Francesco Rosi, Yves Boisset.) There does exist a tradition of comic films, mainly in Italy, where questions of class and power are not ennobled and mystified, but on the contrary rendered trivial and laughable, common. For me, the only good "left-wing films" have a carnivalesque dimension (cf. Mikhail Bakhtin) that is completely missing in French films, but still present in films by Dino Risi (A DIFFICULT LIFE) or Luigi Comencini (LO SCOPONE SCIENTIFICO, THE ADVENTURES OF PINNOCHIO.) 

Q: The magazine has been changing again - a casual observer might say "returning to normal": more stills, articles about all kinds of films, references to old American films...What is happening now? What hasn't changed?

A: What hasn't changed? There are bits and pieces of an answer in everything I've said. There is a moment when you are led to renounce the "passion of the All" and when you want to elucidate (theoretically as well) on the basis of what fundamental experience you feel authorized to write about the cinema, and also to write in the direction of other people who come out of other experiences in the cinema. 

Q: Why are you getting interested in "underground" films?

A: When the French film industry has gone under, there will be a place for an underground cinema in France. As has already happened in England. Up until now the big difference between France and the US was this: there is no bridge between underground films and the industry in the US, while there has always been one in France. In France there has always been the possibility of making a difficult film and commercializing it, even if only a little bit. The crisis (the end) of the film industry has very curious consequences: there is an acceleration of all the processes. For example, twenty years ago there were French filmmakers "de serie" with no talent, but a lot of know-how, who made one film a year. This was "la qualite francaise." These people no longer exist. The big companies are perfectly ready to offer enormous possibilities to young talents who come from the avant-garde. The example of Chantal Akerman is proof of this. So in France there is, for the moment, a big mix, rather than segregation. It seems to me that segregation has existed for a long time in the U.S., because of patronage and the recognition of the function of art as improductive expenditure. We're interested in the underground as something that will one day become a reality in France, a "domestic" cinema. Occasionally it happens that we see magnificent films - the films of Stephen Dwoskin and Jackie Raynal. There are no doubt many others. What's much less interesting is the critical discussion of these films. Probably the position of the critic is no longer justified at all in the case of these films, because these films don't need mediation, since most of them play directly on primary processes. It's one big difference between them and the European avant-garde (the one which interests us most: Godard, Straub) where any play on primary processes (on perception) has real impact only if it's also brought to bear on elements of thought, of the signified. 

Q: Women's films: by women, or simply about women, about female sexuality...What are these films showing us? Why are they so violent?

A: Since this has to do with cinema, and therefore with the eye and ear, it would be better to talk about how cinema "au feminin" (made by men eventually) makes us rediscover what the imperialism of the eye (it's men who are voyeurs) had repressed: other modes of montage of impulses where what is seen and what is heard change perspective. For example, I said that militant cinema foundered on the question of the voice-over (the protected voice) - well, just as we saw feminism develop from the decomposition of the Marxist-Leninist militant political groups, so from the failure of the voiceover we have seen a whole adventure of the voice develop, an adventure that has been conducted "au feminin" (Duras, of course, Akerman, Godard, Marco Ferreri.) This is also one of the limits of cinephilia: rediscovering the voice of the mother heard from the interior of the body, before vision. The feminine limit of cinephilia. Suddenly I think the visual element is totally changed: in the three films by women that have impressed me the most - DEUX FOIS, JE TU IL ELLE, LE CAMION - there is something extraordinary: the way the actress-auteurs are both on both sides of the camera, without this having any consequences. There is a calm violence which points up the difference with the male actor-auteur. Look at Lewis or Chaplin: for them, passing from one side to the camera to the other means risking travesty, feminization and playing with this risk. Nothing of the sort with women. 

Q: You've been talking openly about "cinephilia" again - the hardcore variety: loving Tourneur, de Mille, the late films of Fritz Lang...Do you see a virtue in it?

A: That is a very special kind of cinephilia. It isn't the whole of American cinema that is in play; it's a part, often the most despised: Lang, de Mille, Tourneur, Ray...I remember in 1964 we saw George Cukor and confided in him that WIND ACROSS THE EVERGLADES was one of the most beautiful American films. He broke out in a peal of laughter where all the contempt he had for this little film could be read. We were very wounded, but we have never changed our minds. In American cinema I think that it is easier to see, as it recedes, what interested us: always the excess of writing over ideology, and not the reverse (Huston, Delmer Daves, William Wyler, today Altman.) It's clearly a paradox: because this led us to take an interest in filmmakers who were not exactly left-wing. This excess of writing over ideology is only possible in the framework of a prosperous industry and a real consensus. This occurred in Hollywood until some time in the fifties; a little in France before the war; In Italy; in Egypt and India, no doubt; in Germany and England before the war. Outside this industrial framework (industry+craftsmanship), it's the reverse that happens: excess of ideology over writing. Look at the countries of the Third World, including China. This cinephilia is historically dated: the terrain from which it sprang is this mixture of industry and craftsmanship. It's not possible to revive it. But in the precision of the writing of Tourneur, Lang or de Mille, there is an exigency which continues with Godard, Straub, Robert Kramer, Wim Wenders, Akerman, Jean-Claude Biette, Benoit Jacquot. 

Q: You said recently that the filmmakers who interest you now are all moralists. It's strange to hear words like "morality" and "tragedy"again. Why have they become so necessary now?

A: What is a filmmaker if not someone who, at one point or another, says: I don't have the right to film that, or to film that like that! And who believes that it's up to him to make that decision, that nobody else can make it. One of the texts that particularly marked me when I was a young reader of the CAHIERS was a piece by Rivette on Gille Pontecorvo's KAPO. he described a scene in the film, the death of Emannuelle Rica near the barbed wire. Pontecorvo - at the moment of his character's death - did a camera movement in order to reframe the face in the corner of the screen and make a prettier shot. Rivette wrote: the man who did this traveling shot is worthy of the most profound contempt. More and more, there are two kinds of filmmakers: those who have the feeling that "everything has been filmed" and consider it their mission to work with images that are already there, like a painter adding an extra coat of paint. And then there are those who are always aware that what they are filming also exists outside the film, is not just filmic raw material. Morality begins there. Always the idea of risk.

More generally, morality becomes a living question again because everyone has experienced the fact that there exists no morality for someone who thinks in terms of power (to be seized, held onto or dreamed of), and therefore no morality on the left or in Marxism. Morality is something individual; it's natural that returning to a certain politique des auteurs should reintroduce morality. 

Q: What is television doing to our minds? What has Godard been doing to television?

A: It's a great mystery. I think that television is not taken seriously by anyone. Neither by those who make it (and who are all haunted by the cinema they can't make, which means that the possibilities of video have been explored ridiculously little and that one continues to produce in France horrible "dramas," very expensive, neither cinema, nor theater, nor television.) Nor by those who are subjected to it. TV is a cool medium from which people do not expect any truth. Its principal impact resides in the fact that it becomes a background noise which keps you from hearing other sounds. The catastrophic conceptions which would have us believe in television's power of stupefaction are very complacently exaggerated. What Godard has done to television is indeed considerable. He has demonstrated how it functions, as always, by the absurd, by doing it too much, He has shown that the simple fact of leeting someone talk for one hour at a stretch is already enough to break the hum, whatever is being said. He has shown that television, far from making people passive, demands from them on the contrary to produce a kind of work that the journalists don't produce.

Q: What about Jacques Rivette? You haven't spoken of him in a long time.

A: We have been very unfair to Rivette. 

Q: What do you see now in American film that interests you? Why don't you like Robert Altman? Have you seen STAR WARS, etc.?

A: Robert Kramer, John Cassavetes, Paul Newman, Stephen Dwoskin, Monte Hellman, etc. As for Altman, I have the disagreeable feeling that he is a little master, very at ease in the notation of naturalistic detail, who has taken it into his head to rival Bergman or Antonioni. What is very unpleasant in his cinema that the only thing he asks us to believe in is the intelligence of the auteur. The auteur is always more intelligent than his guinea pigs, he always knows more than they do, but his knowledge is always protected. You don't find this contempt - I purposely cite very lofty auteurs - in Bresson or Antonioni, because these are people who could care less about what one has to look like one is thinking in order to appear intelligent (that is to say "non-dupe," in Lacanian jargon.) The films of Jerry Schatzberg, Scorsese, Coppola, etc. do represent a respectable and somewhat academic tradition. But I still have the impression that there has been no real innovation, for almost twenty years now, in this cinema.

[Interview conducted and translated by Bill Krohn]

Serge Daney

From the Large to the Small Screen

Where, as a matter of provocation, it is affirmed that there is no serious reason for a film to stop being great on the grounds that it is shown on television.

Nothing is more unanimous (and more self-satisfied) than the following cry: films (especially the big ones) are not shown on television. Yes, of course, television shows them, but they are 'shown' so badly. What we lose by this transfer from the large to the small screen would be downright inexpressible and the images that were large (when we were small) would not survive if they became small (while we have become big). This would also be true for images that, instead of becoming large, were long (like in Cinemascope). This would also obviously be true for spectacular frescos, ornate epics, and films of suspense and pathos.

To watch LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, APOCALYPSE NOW or ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA - to cite three recent examples - is an act of highly dubious masochism, a self-induced sabotage of perception, a suspicious taste for the compressed and confined. Nothing could ever replace the hall, that congenial belly of the cinema whale, and its larger-than-life actors and sets.

There can be no response to this cry when it comes from the heart, which is not always the case. As time goes by, the films that could justify this nostalgia for the cinema hall and for the myth of a perfect projection are becoming rare. There are big films, of course, but it is not because we see the Iguazu falls or the mistral in close-up that THE MISSION or JEAN DE FLORETTE cease to be, fundamentally, telefilms. For what, in the ultimate analysis, distinguishes a film from a telefilm is that in a film even scenes of intimacy are cinema, while in the telefilm even spectacular scenes are television.

By going through the technical gadgetry of television, cinema, to be sure, does lose something. The question that will be increasingly asked is "What?" The better we know what is lost, the better we will realize its cost, and the better we will realize what, on the other hand, may have been gained. (We must not forget that television is often the cruel revelation of what was not all that great in cinema.) The question should be asked, film by film, without any preconceived answers. Gigantism is not necessarily a great loser, nor the Lilliputian the great winner. Perhaps Duras' INDIA SONG loses more on television than DeMille's THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH. Who knows?

The strangest thing is that the cinephilic generation born after the war knew only the decline of large cinema halls, even as, in the 60s, it lent its support to the adventure of art and experimentation, small halls and then multiplexes. Those who have lived through the 'Hernani'-like controversies of L'AVVENTURA or LES CARABINIERS can scarcely express their regret at the destruction of the Gaumont Palace, where they never went. Just as the exhibitors of art and experimental cinema, currently threatened with depleted audiences, would be wrong to have us believe that the quality of projection in their halls is not, for the most part, somewhat pathetic.

If there is regret at all, even at its most sincere, it is more an arbitrarily assembled longing for cinema in its earlier state (as celebrated, for example, by Eustache in MES PETITES AMOREUSES). Only, by reducing the size of halls we have arrived at a point beyond which, at comparable reduction, there is scarcely any difference between a semi-private projection in an empty mini-hall and the viewing of the same film at house on television.

We are tempted to ask those who systematically denigrate cinema as it comes across on television, the following question: do you miss the film or the fact of going to the movies? In the latter case, raise your voice so that films may be made once more - real films - that will require large halls (but do not be too surprised if such films are mostly American and if there are good reasons for French cinema not being able to deliver on such a large scale). But if it is the film that counts and the film was already a work of genius in a hall, ask yourself if this genius is so volatile that it disappears with the mere change of medium. Chances are rather stronger, perhaps, that the word 'genius' has been used lightly.

Canal Plus has just had the idea of showing six times, instead of once, one of the least-known films of the last few years, the admirable ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA by Sergio Leone. A film that has in any case been ravaged, cut in length by one hour: a shade too involved in its plot, but really ambitious (and not pretentious); one of the most beautiful testimonies of love in the American myth ever to come from Europe, but testimony of the lucid love of the eternal immigrant. Yet, what characterizes this film, like the astonishing LAWRENCE OF ARABIA? The fact that, in close-ups or in long shot, things do not happen differently. The film does not change when we move from a spectacular shot with elaborate sets and a large cast to a scene with two characters enclosed within four walls. It is this mastery of distances that really differentiates a film from a tele-film. It is this distance (a way of seeing) that has increasingly abandoned cinema, making way for the non-distance of the zoom (a question of touch, digitalization, optical zapping).

So much so, at the end of Leone's film, when an old De Niro, after the lapse of time, accepts the invitation of his ex-friend who has become a big shot in the town, and visits the only woman he ever loved (and raped), 30 years before, when De Niro discovers her in her green room, her face pale (and doubtless withered) beneath her make-up, we are watching a purely intimate scene (in which the music is quite evocative of John Ford), that was magnificent on the large screen and remains magnificent on the small one. Not an iota of emotion is lost in the meeting. There is no greater loss than in Dreyer's close-up of Falconetti's face, or in Chaplin's appearance when condemned to death in MONSIEUR VERDOUX. Our conception of films that moved us strongly in the theater must be very poor if we imagine that they will not touch us at all if shown on television. In sum, what is strong remains strong.

The study of cinema today, whether we like it or not, inevitably, takes recourse to television. This will perhaps last only a moment, but this is our moment. Something is lost of course (but paintings too lose their colors, and cathedrals were once white), but something more important is saved. And if there is to be a debate at all, that  is what we should discuss.

We might prefer that films, rather being consumed by the protected and museographed circles of cinephiles, should be shown a second time, running the risk of their natural environment, made up of other images (those of television), and a different use of our time. This risk is real but less than if they were thrown en bloc into the folk-lore of archaeological celebration of 'old-world' cinema.

It is preferable that, falling upon L'INHUMAINE by accident, while zapping between two commercials and a video clip, we thereby discover a beautiful film, rather than that we should feel obliged to call it beautiful (or, worse, 'interesting') because we saw it during a highly mediatised 'cultural' sermon.

Quite simply, there must be enough faith in images (and in the audiences to come) to believe that where once there has been beauty, there cannot be nothing at all overnight.

Serge Daney

From Movies to Moving

Photography is an immobile image, whereas the cinematic image has mouvement, different kinds of movements. In general, photography is contrasted to cinema as immobility to movement. True enough. But what's forgotten is that the movement of images in cinema could only be perceived because the people - the public - were immobile before those images. It's because people were put into theaters, locked into place before the screen and held in situation of »blocked vision« (as Pascal Bonitzer once put it) that they were able to see all kinds of mouvement: the (technologically fabricated) illusion of movement and a still more complicated mouvement, which, if you insist, can be called, the »language« of cinema, though it is much more a grammar: the movement consiting of everything htat filmmaker from Lumière to our day have proposed in order to make the jump one element to the next. Cinema would never have been art had there not been many different possibilities of montage, many different ways of forbidding oneself to pass from element A to element B without some underlying theory of editing that »ensured« the transition.

But whatever the result (from Eisenstein to Godard's ultra-sophisticated theories of montage to the practice of the linear narrative that seems to »smooth over« all discontinuity), nothing of montage would have been perceived hat there not been a movie theater whith immobile viewers, who furthermore did not have the right to speak. An audience that had been slowly trained to give up its »bad« habits, to quit talking or interrupting the projections with its cries. This course of history, which must have taken considerable time, has left some traces, to judge by what still remains - here in France - of a truly popular cinema. It's enough to watch a kung-fu film at Le Trianon cinema, near Barbès in Paris, to guess how the movie-goers must have played an interactive role with the film - taking advantage of the »intermediary« scences to go huff down a cigarette in the smoking room, making it back into the theater just when the fight starts again. It's a highly archaic (and quite salutary) relation to the spectacle, one which television, in a sense, prolongs.

That said, what we call »the history of cinema« is the history of the public's domestication, its »immobilization«. Broadly speaking: immobile people who became sensitive to the mobility of the world, to all types of mobility, the mobility of fictions (ahead to happier tomorrows and various other dreams), bodily mobility (dance, action), material and mental mouvements (dialectical and logical games).

My hypothesis (and as I state it, I'm trying to see if it »holds up«) ist that a reversal has occured. At the risk of reducing things to caricature, I'd tend to say that we've become very mobile in relation to images which have become more and more immobile. Here's where we get back to the question of the relations between cinema and photography. The decline in the number of movie-goers results from the fact that more and more people are refusing »blocked vision« - the seat arrest that sentences them to mustism and immobility, before an image which, in a sense, »moves for two.« Audiovisual consumption (television of course, but also video installations and things of the sort) tends to prove that we have learned how to pass by images by the way people must have learned to pass by lighted window displays in the ninetheenth century. The function of cinema as »lighting«, the implicit sale of desirable objects, the illumination of commodities for a by-passing public, this is what re-emerges. In a sense television shopping loops one of the loops that could be called »cinema«. And one could even say that cinema has reconciled itself to one of its initial vocations, the presentation of things (which is perhaps a more primordial vocation than represenation).

So we were immobile before moving images, and today we tend to move before increasingly immobile images. But what is an »immobile« image? It shoud not only be understood as a »freeze-frame«, which a few years ago began to appear as a kind of death-drive instilled in film, which pushes the filmmaker to reconcile himself wit one of those 24 images per second, the ones Godard called »the truth«. The »freeze-frame« marked a particular moment of cinephilic sensibility, but it was still a case of interruption, and of interruption as an action. Today it seems to me that we are in the presence of a new type if immobile image, a more »serious« one, in a way. Let's take Godard, a filmmaker literally transfixed by the passion of the freeze-frame. Sequences of images, assembly lines, lines of jammed-up cars in a beautiful and premonitory film: Week-end. But he also made another film, Ici et ailleurs, which slipped by more or less unseen in 1975, one of the most beautiful films ever made on the idea of engagement, of political commitment and intervention, or more simply, of »activism.« The film includes a quite long and excruciating scene whose »meaning« has finally come clear to me today. You see people, people off the streets, anonymous and average, managers, cleaning women, poorly dressed, fat, crushed, unhappy people... all moving past a video camera which films each alone, one after the other. But each of them carries an image, a still photograph, and this is the image they come to have filmed, one behind the other, tapping each other on the shoulder and taking their turn. As if,in this scene, Godard were tempted to replace the »24 images per second« by »24 people carrying 24 images per second«; a veritable mise en abime, infinite mirroring. No longer does the camera record things, but people come bearing their image like a cross before an indifferent video camera, set up there in a tripod, and it brings them into line, links one to the next. This idea of »standing in line« with one's image so that it can be recorded (as if we were in the East and the were counted - Godard's dream - among the basic necessities) comes back in »Grandeur et décadence d'un petit commerce de cinéma«, made for the television, where people move in line as well, but this time to intone, one by one, a long sentence by Faulkner.

In 1975, »Ici et ailleurs« came off as either a caprice or a gag. Yet the film spoke how difficult it had become to intervene - from an activist's viewpoint - with images. Though sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, having filmed in the camps, Godard could not find an organizing principle for the images he brought back. He lacked a movement to organize the images. So, as always in such cases, he traded the question for the same question  (squared: »Why can't I find the right montage for these images?« I think this was the last time a great filmmaker joined forces with a political cause (and an organization). A long period of film history came to a close.

In Godard's work the return to the inanimate (the freeze-frame) is clearly both a catastrophe and a pleasure (sado-masochistic, in a word). In his »Histoire(s) du cinéma (et de la télévision) he takes the problem to the extreme. The idea is to salvage bits of cinema, sometimes in stills, sometimes reframed, at normal speed or in slow motion, to edit them together with words, music, and texts, and then proceed to do an improvisation whose aim is no longer to relay the movement of the world but to recreate it from the tag ends (shavings, crumbs) that have filtered down from the filmed world: images already recorded, saturated with meaning and emotion. But it's true that Godard's ultimate question is »How does cinema mage us historians?«

Movement, marching public, immobile images: another great example of premonition was given by a filmmaker who is at first sight Godard's oposite: Fellini. We laughed uproariously at the parading people in »Fellini Roma«, especially the Vatican nuns on roller skates. But from »La Dolce Vita« onwards Fellini makes his actors not much more than bit players, only there to spend a brief moment before a supplementary character: the camera. There are no beginnings and ends in a Fellini film, those are questions he resolved once and for all, after »La Dolce Vita«. All the way until »Ginger and Fred«, his films abound in parade scences which are increasingly less affectionate parodies of what television does - in any case. »Ginger and Fred« is a major documentary on human stockpilling by television. And finally, with a bit of distance, two filmmakers as different as Fellini and Godard seem much closer, like two journalists both saying the same thing: look, you can no longer film anything but parades!

Perhaps they say it at a time, 1970-1975, which is a turning point in the history of cinema. And perhaps they are the last to possess such a cultural, craftsmanly memory of their instrument, the last before the amnesia. Each in his way, Godard and Fellini »flirt« with advertising. The former sees it as obscenity, the second more like pornography - but both find it stimulating. Today, the advertising aesthetic seems to have triumphed in utter seriousness. Ten years ago it would have been a paradox to say that »Le Grand Bleu« and »L'Ours« were finally nothing more than advertising (I remember having said that about the first Lelouch films). Now, ther order of the day is no longer the »contamination« of cinema by advertising (the question was resolved by »Diva«). Instead, the dominant form of cinema (the kind that »works«) has reached a post-advertising stage. Cinema now inherits prefabricated shots, ready-to-use »cliches«, in short - immobile images.

It's as though cinema had to retrace the path it has come by. This path was paved by the question: where are we going (where is the mouvement)? It now becomes: where have we come from (where does the movement come from)? The movement is no longer in the images, in their metaphorical force ro in our capacity to edit them together, it's in the enigma of the force that has programmed them (and here the reference to television - the triumph of programming over production - is unavoidable.) »Le Grand Bleu« is far from being an innocuous film: it tells of the programming of the littel ones (»le petit d'homme«, as Lacan would say), of the new forms of totemism and the immobile unfolding of images which are already »-cliche«. If there is a history of audiovisual communication - which will be increasingly harder to confuse with the more singular history of cinema - then »Le Grand Bleu« is part of it.

It just happens that in order to exist, such a »product« necessarily inherits the movie theater without inheriting the formal memory of cinema. The fact that such a film - of »L'Ours«, which is even harder to stomach - can score such a tidal-wave success allows us to distinctly register the public's demand for cinema (something hardly possible before). It's no longer mysterious, an I would say it consists in expecting cinema - and its rituals: dark room, big screen, group audience - to help establish the genealogy of the advertising image, in so far as advertising is now bound to the adventure of modern individualism. That the path should lead through mythology seem inevitable; that it should be a mythology of the individual, and no longer of man, must also be thougth through. That on such a quest one should cross those who, for a century, have been its specialists, the Americans, seems equally destined. And that modern European (Franco-Italian) cinema - Godard, Fellini - whose greatnesse was to remain caught between »myth and history«, should meet with the respectful indifference of the public is, alas, just part of the picture. And yet - that said - one needn't be Manichean. From 1945 to 1975, while »modern cinema« (cinema coming out of the war, starting over from zero, from the ruins, in Japan as well as Europe, much more so than in the US) tried to save an ideal of man, and while television tried clumsily to save an ideal of the collectivity, the village, and society, a third force - long unnoticed - was working toward the figurative safeguarding of the individual. This third force was advertising. When it became clear (only very recently in France, long ago elsewhere) that cinema depends economically on television and that the latter depends on advertising could begin the »adaptation« loop was looped. Meaning that advertising could begin the »adaptation« (that's what »creatives« do) of a part - a small part - of the bodies and components inherited from cinema.

At the price of gradually losing its public (from which it asked too much maturity), modern cinema hat nonetheless »tamed« some rather tough realities, stretching the very limits of the spectacle: death, suffering, ugliness, everyday anonymity, dirtiness, dead time, and so on. Once the public had been pretty much lost, advertising counter-attacked and set about fabricating a positiv world, an always-better world which, like the unconscious, would be univisited by negation. The diver of »Le Grand Bleu« is  not a repeat of the diver in the advertising spot, the one who came up with a rose between teeth brushed in Ultra-Brite. No, he's the Ultra-Brite diver who had never before been taken seriously - figuratively and mythologically speaking. And what is serious, in the reign of immobile images, os the fabrication of a figure whose very principle is immobility, the immobility of he who knows only one movement, who cannot evolve, cannot be changed (by love or competition), who can do more than disappear (it's actually quite touching) in the enigma of his own programming, in a mythical parity with the dolphins. Rather than speaking of immobile bodies (and images), we should speak of images and bodies as automatons, as does Philippe Quéau, whose latest book, »Metaxa« joyously celebrates their arrival in our world.

The recomposition or »reconfiguration« of the world is, as one might well suspect, the order of the day. Filmmakers - the real ones - have been working at it relentlessly, and that's how one should analyze the mannerist wave that has washed over the best of cinema in the last ten years. Manerism kept up a hysterical-affective relation with advertising (Wenders, Jarmush ect.) I get the impression this relation is running out of steam. The bodies of advertising are to cinema what those of religious trinketry were to sacred  art: a terminal stage before the renunciation of the image (or its effective replacement by automatons). In other words: one can't tell much of a story though them, almost nothing is known of their innermost movements, nor anything of how they get along with the others (even sexually). The ads, let's not forget, are not only »little films«, but they unfold in a deserted world, where at most two bodies fit on the screen, where the singularity of the bodies echoes no off-screen regularity (to the point where those abominable ads for Hollywood chewing-gum with their tons of joyous adolescents begin to seem like something out of Cecil B. de Mille). There is - to conclude - another, crassly sociological way of telling this story of mobility and immobility. It's that we're in a period of triumphant tourism, where every one travels much more than in the past. It's no longer a question of »discovering the world« its exotic dangerous lands, through the window of »documentary«. Or rather: the bar of exoticism has been lifted much higher. Here again »Le Grand Bleu« is contemporary with a moment when it's possible to go trekking in Bhutan with selected sherpas, yak-milk tea, and personalized mystical experience. But precisely because this experience ist no longer something special (just a product of tourist industry) it may be unnecessary to ask cinema to give a desirable or convincing image for those who've stayed home. The proof? What do the kids say when they want to indicate that they've lived through things as complex as they are »impossible«? They say, »man, I'm not even gonna tell ya!« And people complain about a crisis of fiction!

Serge Daney

Cinemeteorology

What do John Travolta and Jean-Marie Straub have in common? A difficult question, I admit. One dances, the other doesn't. One is a Marxist, the other isn't. One is very well-known, the other less so. Both have their fans. Me, for instance. 

However, one merely has to see their two films surface on the same day on Parisian screens in order to understand that the same worry eats away at both of them. Worry? Let's say passion, rather - a passion for sound. I'm referring to BLOW OUT (directed by Brian DePalma) and TOO EARLY, TOO LATE (co-signed by Daniele Huillet), two good films, two magnificent soundtracks. 

The cinema, you may persist in thinking, is "images and sounds." But what if it were the reverse? What if it were "sounds and images?" Sounds which make one imagine what one sees and see what one imagines? And what if the cinema were also the ear which pricks itself up - erectile and alert, like a dog's - when the eye loses its bearings? In the open country, for instance. 

In BLOW OUT, John Travolta plays the part of a sound effects freak who, starting off with one sound, goes on to identify a crime and its author. In TOO EARLY, TOO LATE, Straub, Huillet and their regular sound engineer, the inspired Louis Hochet, lose themselves in the French countryside before they set about wandering along the Nile and within its delta, in Egypt. Starting off with sounds - all the sounds, from the most infinitesimal to the subtlest - they too identify a crime. Scene of the crime: the earth; victims: peasants; witnesses to the crime: landscapes. That is, clouds, roads, grass, wind. 


MAHMOUD ENGELS

In June 1980, the Straubs spent two weeks filming in the French countryside. They were seen in places as improbable as Treogan, Mottreff, Marbeuf and Harville. They were seen prowling close to big cities: Lyon, Rennes. Their idea, which presides over the execution of this opus 12 in their oeuvre (already twenty years of filmmaking!) was to film as they are today a certain number of places mentioned in a letter sent by Engels to the future renegade Kautsky. In this letter (read offscreen by Daniele Huillet), Engels, bolstered with figures, describes the misery of the countryside on the eve of the French Revolution. One suspects that these places have changed. For one thing, they are deserted. The French countryside, Straub says, has a "science fiction, deserted-planet aspect." Maybe people live there, but they don't inhabit the locale. The fields, roadways, fences and rows of trees are traces of human activity, but the actors are birds, a few vehicles, a faint murmur, the wind. 

In May 1981, the Straubs are in Egypt and film other landscapes. This time the guide isn't Engels but a more up-to-date Marxist, author of the recent and celebrated CLASS STRUGGLES IN EGYPT, Mahmoud Hussein. Again offscreen, the voice of an Arab intellectual speaks in French (but with an accent) about the peasant resistance to the English occupation, up until the "petit-bourgeois"revolution of Neguib in 1952. Once again, the peasants revolt to o early and succeeded too late as far as power is concerned. This obsessive recurrence is the film's "content." Like a musical motif, it is established from the outset: "that the middle-class here as always were too cowardly to support their own interests/that since the Bastille, the plebes had to do all the work." (Engels) 

The film is thus a diptych. One, France. Two, Egypt. No actors, not even characters, especially not extras. If there is an actor in TOO EARLY, TOO LATE, it's the landscape. This actor has a text to recite: History (the peasants who resist, the land which remains), of which it is the living witness. The actor performs with a certain amount of talent: the cloud that passes, a breaking loose of birds, a bouquet of trees bent by the wind, a break in the clouds; this is what the landscape's performance consists of. This kind of performing is meteorological. One hasn't seen anything like it for quite some time. Since the silent period, to be precise. 


THE WIND MAKES NOISE

While seeing TOO EARLY, TOO LATE (especially the first part), I recalled another film, shot in Hollywood in 1928 by the Swedish director Victor Sjostrom: THE WIND. This magnificent movie showed how the sound of the wind drove Lilian Gish mad. The film was "silent," which only gave it more force. Anyone who's seen THE WIND knows that it's an auditory hallucination. Anyway, there's never been a "silent cinema," only a cinema deaf to the racket produced inside each spectator, in his very body, when he becomes the echo chamber of images. Those of the wind, for instance. 

One had to wait for the sound film before silence had a chance. Again, Bresson is optimistic when he writes, "The sound film invented silence." The possibility of silence, at least. Take the example of the wind. One doesn't have a clear memory of the wind in the films of the Thirties, Forties, Fifties. Or, rather, it was the thunderstorms which went whoosh in pirate films. But the North wind, the draught, the air current, all those winds so close to silence? The West wind? And the evening breeze? No. One had to wait for the Sixties, the small sync-sound cameras, the New Waves. One had to wait for Straub and Huillet. 


THE EAR SEES

For at the point of refinement when they arrived at the practice of direct sound, a very strange phenomenon is produced in their films (such as FROM THE CLOUD TO THE RESISTANCE). One rediscovers there the "auditory hallucinations" proper to the "silent" cinema. The same phenomenon crops up in certain recent films by some "old"figures of the New Wave: Rouch (AMBARA DAMBA), Rohmer (THE AVIATOR'S WIFE), Rivette (NORTH BRIDGE). As if the direct sound brought back the absence of sound. As if, out of a world that's integrally sonorous, the body of a burlesque actor once again emerges. 

It's normal: when the cinema was "silent," we were free to lend it all the noises, the tiniest as well as the most intimate. It was when it set about talking, and especially after the invention of dubbing (1935), that nothing remained to challenge the victory of dialogue and music. Weak, imperceptible noises no longer had a chance. It was genocide. 

They came back again, gradually. In America through an orgy of sonorous effects (see Travolta), in France through the re-education of the ear (see Straub). TOO EARLY, TOO LATE is, to the best of my knowledge, one of the few movies since Sjostrom's that has filmed the wind. This has to be seen - and heard - to be believed. It's as if the camera and the fragile crew took the wind for a sail and the landscape for a sea. The camera plays with the wind, follows it, anticipates it, comes back behind like a ricocheting bullet. As if it were held on a leash or tied to another machine, like the one invented by Michael Snow in that stupefying film that was THE CENTRAL REGION (in Snow's case as well, the terrain of the camera's performance was a deserted planet of sorts. This explained that. 

To see and hear at the same time - but that's impossible, you'll say! Certainly, but (1) the Straubs are stout-hearted, and (2) voyages into the impossible are very instructive. With TOO EARLY, TOO LATE, an experience is attempted, with us and in spite of us: at moments, one begins to see (the grass bent by the wind) before hearing (the wind responsible for this bending). At other moments, one hears first (the wind), then one sees (the grass). Image and sound are synchronous and yet, at each instant, each of us can create the experience in the same order in which one arranges the sensations. It is therefore a sensational films. 


DO NOT DISTURB

This is the first part, the French desert. It works differently in overpopulated Egypt. there, the fields are no longer empty, fellahs work there, one can no longer go anywhere and film anyone any which way. The terrain of performance becomes again the territory of others. The Straubs (whoever knows their films realizes they're intransigent on this matter) accord much importance to the fact that a filmmaker should not disturb those whom he films . One therefore has to see the second part of TOO EARLY, TOO LATE as an odd performance, made up of approaches and retreats, where the filmmakers, less meteorologists than acupuncturists, search for the spot - the only spot, the right spot - where their camera can catch people without bothering them. Two dangers immediately present themselves: exotic tourism and the invisible camera. Too close, too far. In a lengthy "scene," the camera is planted in front of a factory gate and allows one to see the Egyptian workers who pass, enter and leave. Too close for them not to see the camera, too far away for them to be tempted to go towards it. To find this point, this moral point, is at this moment the entire art of the Straubs. With perhaps the hope that for the "extras" thus filmed, the camera and the fragile crew "hidden" right in the middle of a field or a vacant lot would only be an accident of the landscape, a gentle scarecrow, another mirage carried by the wind. 

These scruples are astonishing. They are not fashionable. To shoot a film, especially in the country, means generally to devastate everything, disrupt the lives of people while manufacturing country snapshots, local color, rancid back-to-nature museum pieces. Because the cinema belongs to the city and no one knows exactly what a "peasant cinema" would be, anchored in the lived experience, the space-time of peasants. It is necessary therefore to see the Straubs, city inhabitants, mainland navigators, as lost . It is necessary to see them in the middle of the field, moistened fingers raised to catch the wind and ears pricked up to hear what it's saying. So the most naked sensations serve as a compass. Everything else, ethics and esthetics, content and form, derives from this. 

One may find the experience unbearable; that sometimes happens. One may stop finding the very idea of the experience bearable; that happens every day. One may decide that filming the wind is a ridiculous activity. What a lot of hot air! One may also bypass the cinema when it takes the risk of straying from its own turf, away from the beaten paths.

Serge Daney

Before and After the Image

The distinction I made between the image and the visual is pragmatic. I simply found it practical to use two different words. There's also the fact that the word "visual" comes up so often in the vocabulary of the press and on the lips of its "art directors." The visual is at once reading and seeing: it's seeing what you're supposed to read. You know how to read the press when you can quickly decipher a newspaper's visual, even if it's a newspaper without photos, like LE MONDE. Maybe we're heading towards societies which are better and better at reading (deciphering, decoding through reflexes of reading) but less and less able to see. So I call "image" what still holds out against an experience of vision and of the "visual." The visual is the optical verification of a procedure of power (technological, political, advertising or military power). A procedure which calls for no other commentary than "reception perfect, AOK." Obviously, the visual has to do with the optic nerve, but that doesn't make it an image.

For me, the sine qua non of the image is alterity. Every culture does something with that more-or-less empty slot, the slot where "there is some other" (to paraphrase Lacan). No doubt we go to war in order to fill that slot, for a given moment, with only a single occupant: the enemy. It's simpler like that. So, when the so-called "Gulf War" appeared inevitable, we could imagine that we were about to see the other, or at least that "we'd see what there was to see." Even if you don't much care for war, you know it forms part of the human equation, it's "a way of seeing."

Some people must have expected to see a war in images, others a war of images, if only propaganda images. On one side there would be the Third World with its arms, its logic, its tricks and its naiveté, a kind of clumsy heritage of twentieth-century propaganda (more like the USSR, the single party, etc.) On the other side would be the first country of the First World, heavily into propaganda too, but a little bit stuck in the wake of Vietnam (the defense of democracy, of the free world, etc.) In the end, all of us in the West were waiting for a spectacle, and we didn't get it.

Instead we "watched" an incredible face-off between two ways of not making an image (the way you say: don't make waves.) A fairly unexpected way (from the Iraqis) and a very unexpected way (from the Americans.) For years, the Iraqis had spent lots of money and energy trying to buy up the intellectuals of the entire Arab world. It must not have worked, because the moment they appeared on the world screen, in mondovision, they gave up the idea of providing any image whatsoever of the Iraqi nation-state. But on the other side of the coin, you can't help but think the Americans are also pretty short on an image of America, because they decided to wage (and win) this war while simultaneously blurring all its traces. So Bush and Hussein coproduced a black-out of every image of Iraq and the Iraqis, and it was a complete success.

In a sense, it's as though the Iraqis had slipped below the line of the image, and the Americans above it. That line is the line of alterity. It's the other in so far as he is still visible, however mean and nasty he may be. Ultimately it's the look in his eyes that makes him exist as a visible other. As Levinas said, it's a lot harder for me to kill you when I can look you in the eye. And it's true, executioners have always had a hard time looking their victims in the eye. It's not impossible, alas, there are always perverts and brutes, but still: it's difficult.  On the other hand, remember that passage in Rousseau: it's always easy to push a button that will cause the death of a man on the other side of the planet, far from us. And that's where things stand.

The other's eyes have disappeared, by a common and implicit accord. Saddam Hussein was satisfied with a vague, emotional, all-purpose image of the "Arab world." And in the face of that, to our great surprise, the Americans seem to have learned their lessons from Vietnam and moved into a new phase of their power, where it's no longer a matter of war but of a gigantic police action. Now, when you're carrying out a police action, you don't post up the mug of the people thrown in prison, nor of the courageous cops. You do it in wartime because in war there's a lingering presupposition of equality between the combatants. Something of this equality may have functioned on the Iraqi side, a follow-up to the ancient duel between Saladin and Richard the Lion Heart. But even if that's the case, it's a pure fantasy with no response whatsoever from the American end (the Crusades aren't part of their history.)

For my part, I was surprised by the way the Americans moved on without a single blow from the realm of the image to that of the visual. And the visual, this time, was the guided tour around the cop shop, or to the armaments expo at the Bourget military airport [near Paris.] This was what we were shown for six months, without us really grasping the meaning. Day after day we saw how almost 5,000 soldiers had ended up in Saudi Arabia with incredible equipment. We thought it was the trailer for a horrendous epic, but no, it was already the film! When the Western media decided to get up close to the Iraqi other, it had become almost impossible. But that's because they waited - six months! - until war had broken out before taking any interest in a country which, until then, they had chastely passed by. During the time when French arms sales to Iraq kept several hundred thousands of people working in France, you never saw friendly TV reports on that providential land. And when Saddam lost the war, I don't recall any great upsurge of tele-curiosity concerning the Iraqis. Before and after, there was only the simple curiosity to go see for yourself what had never really been. In its place was the Kurdish image. Media-wise, we exchanged the non-image of the Iraqi other for the over-image of the Kurdish other. As though the latter had accepted to hop up and replace a recalcitrant actor (for no charge). So today you get a kind of nausea before all this beautiful human suffering, which is even more moving because the Kurdish cause is hopeless and because the Kurds, betrayed by the whole world, are really beaten, at least. Whereas we still don't know how many Iraqis were killed during the war, and what with the Arab habit that consists, alas, in carrying off only defeats, the official line from Baghdad is probably that the Iraqis won. So what use are images, when nothing stands as "proof" anymore?

It was stupid enough on Saddam Hussein's part to undervalue the extent to which he would lose face. But face is not a look in the eyes, and the whole question may be right there between two words. The only image that exists in the Arab world is the image of the Leader. In France you still have the effigy of the Republic, Marianne, which is different from a leader or a picture of the president, but you only see it in the city halls, it's residual. What the Arab world has slowly gotten used to is this love relation with the leader, especially in moments of crisis, when the leader proves to be above all a loser. Misplaced pride that consists of swelling the biceps and hiding the victims, and that finally leads to the victims' masochistic identification with the biceps. Now, showing the victims, counting them out one by one, calling them by their names, is at least a way of recognizing the fact that they are human beings and that they have a right to the look in their eye, battered as it may be.

The question isn't specific to that part of the world. It's no doubt the pure and simple question of feudalism - and that one really stymies us, because we all believed the Marxists when they spoke in a condescending tone of feudalism as an outdated, bygone mode of production. In the rich countries today, the very modern successor to feudalism is the Mafia: the United States, Italy, Japan, etc. In the countries that have just come out of the deep-freeze it's a well-known reality: the USSR, China. In the poor countries, the Mafia is still the clan that kidnaps the political power and plays baby-toy with weapons and the code of honor. It's normal that such a Mafia should have no other image than that of its current leader, and that it should identify, for better or worse, with his distress, and only his. It's tragic, for example, that none of the Arab leaders in the anti-Iraqi coalition found it fitting to say a few words (even something purely formal) about the Kurdish distress. It's even more tragic that they don't realize for a second that those few words would ricochet into the best possible publicity for the Palestinian cause. Masochism is not the contrary of egotism, far from it.

But if I look on the American side, it's even more surprising. It's like the country was testing a new definition of itself in this war. A definition that no longer has much to do with the hyperindividualization of the average American, a definition that completely forgets G.I. Joe or John Doe, "the man in the street," and heads straight for General Schwarzkopf or Colin Powell instead. We're a long way from the bloody, ambiguous but humanly very rich memories of Vietnam and the fifteen years of films, some of them very beautiful, that came out of that trauma-war. Nobody thought the American identity was as tattered as it is. Given the real difficulties of the country, you wonder what the price will be for this public demonstration that the wound is scarred all over.

For the moment, the Americans have won two wars. The real war, the police action, took place exactly as planned. But there was also the war of images. During a TF1 broadcast, on a disgusting set with everybody congratulating each other, a CNN journalist started moaning about a poll published in the U.S., according to which people felt there were too many images of the war, that all those images played into enemy hands, that there was no need to see so many. America has succeeded in what Saddam attempted: the blind retribalization of its population, including the support of the traditional victims of American society - Blacks, Latinos - who were thrilled to be among the victors for once, like Colin Powell, no doubt Bush's next running mate.

Let's return to the distinction between the image and the visual. The visual is the verification that something functions. In that sense, clichés and stereotypes are part of the visual. For example, there's a visual minimum of Arab presence in France, it's the immigrant's face. But beyond that "face" (without eyes) there is a general inability to tell the particular story of any single immigrant, whether first or second generation. As soon as we start talking about the "Arab in the street," the group is always what's filmed and the group is always what speaks. Participating in a collective protects them, it's what makes them exist in relation to their enemy on the corner, the cops that hassle them or their racist neighbors. The result: their discourse is uninteresting, it's a sentimental wooden tongue that will always favor fantasy over imagination - and the media couldn't be happier that " the Arab in the street" is always ready to run off at the mouth about Saddam or the Palestinians.

During the war, the TV people obviously said to themselves: we have to watch out, we have to "cover" the Arab in the street, the immigrant kids and all that. So we see a litany of depressing images of street hysteria, particularly in North Africa. As though today the word "masses," abandoned along with the ideals of communism, could only be applied to the Arabs. As though the heritage of leftism and Third-World liberation were there and there only. As though the dead ends of identity (which only serves to infantilize and offer pleasure in that infantilization) had become an Arab monopoly. As though we had forgotten that the Arab world, our neighbors and our cousins for so long, is a generally non-violent world, though given to exaggerated rhetoric. Finally, as though North African immigration in France, over the last fifty years, weren't the most peaceful immigration that's ever been! Myself, when I think of the others' identity madness, I look apprehensively toward Hindu fundamentalism and Serb tribalism, not toward the neurosis of the Arabs.

And yet there's a moment when someone like me is obliged to take his distance from the way both the French media and the "Arab masses" go about fabricating a massive and menacing image of the Arab world, on the basis of its "humiliation." What has changed since that faraway era when we were leftists is that now I do it in the name of values that belong to my culture, even if I'm not certain that those values might not soon be in the minority again. But I'm too old to waver on the little I've learned from thirty years of demagogy and hysteria combined. It comes down to this: every individual figure is that much taken back from the fascinating (and fascistic) sirens of communitarianism. Does a French-speaking Arab intellectual need Montesquieu to emerge as an individual voice? If so, good for him. Can he do it from a strictly Arab background, Ibn Khaldoun or Ibn Arabi? In a sense, I don't need to know. But what else can you expect?

That puts you in a rather touchy situation with respect to your oldest Arab friends, because you feel like telling them that nobody's going to dispense them from having the courage to say "Me,I," the courage to go against the community flow and to do without all the advantages, material and otherwise, that come from setting up on the sly between two worlds. I remember how sad I felt when Kale Yacine died: when things were really going bad in Algeria we always tried to get in touch with him, simply because he talked straight. That wasn't so easy for us either. The West is terribly clumsy about recomposing forms of the social tie, of conviviality, of complicity, to fit in with individualist societies based on the market. It's tough to deal with, and there's always something morose about it. It often seems that the attendant mediocrity is going to depress us once and for all. And at the same time, there's always an unavowed nostalgia for a more organic past, which is not so far from us and whose futile remains can be found in national-Lepenism today (and yesterday in the French Communist party.)

That's why the Arab world, with its amazing social ecology that has outlived centuries of political decline, has long represented for some of us a highly vibrant reservoir of a certain social affectivity. Nowhere else is the other so well conceived, as long as he is concrete, as long as he is the stranger to whom you owe respect. But the tragedy, and a tragedy that becomes inevitable given the economic state of the world, is that nobody in the Arab world can conceive of the abstract other. Universalism seems to have stopped in mid-stride, and the forces of a return to the village, and a return to the terrible lack of curiosity toward the rest of the worlds, signify to we Westerners that we remain all alone with our still-conquering and often empty universalism.

It's astonishing to see how the inward turn of the Americans has freed up that old story of the Crusades as our problem (here in Europe.) Sometimes I think it may just be unforgettable on the Arab side. It's a frustrated love story between the former losers (after all, the crusaders were clearly less civilized and were kicked out in the end) and the new losers (the Arabs helped the modern world in its birth pangs, but haven't accompanied it on its adventures.) Today, when people talk about humiliation, what I hear is rather the fact for the Arabs of not having been recognized by the only interlocutor who ever existed for them, the old European-Christian road buddy, the one who "succeeded in life." The relationship to America seems much more superifical to me America is at once the most desirable and the most powerful country, and because it's the most powerful it has been made into the great Satan, the only one worth being beaten by. If the Machrek Arabs had a real historical memory, it's the English they should hate to death. Because as far as a pernicious and effective political strategy goes, the Foreign Office remains unbeatable!

Is television democratic? What's democratic, I think, is to look into that collective mirror and make the distinction between what can be done, what we know how to do (and news technologies are more advanced than ever), and what doesn't come cheap, what's difficult. It doesn't bother me when they say on the TV that no journalists were sent to Iraq because Saddam Hussein opposed it. But it ought to be said in such a way that the tele-spectator says to himself, "Hmm, we're missing that image," and so that he doesn't forget that image. Myself, I learned that from Godard. In an old issue of CAHIERS DU CINEMA, ten years back, he asked us to illustrate an interview with him by putting in big white spaces blocked out with lines and captioned "here, the usual photo." It was a way to say that in any case, photos serve to paste over a void, to decorate, to supply what I now call "the visual" - but not to show anything.

By leaving the space empty, he showed the possibility of not pasting over. Today I have the feeling that we've lost, that Godard has lost, and that the media - with the TV in the lead - forbid us to think : "Hmm, we're missing an image, let's leave that slot empty, let's wait to fill it." The fear of the void is so strong that it takes us over as well. The void is no longer a dialectical moment between two fulls, it's what you must "make them forget." That's why, as I was just saying, we "forgot" to demand reports on vanquished Iraq, just as we forget to ask the immigrant kids in the suburbs what they now think of Saddam Hussein.

I wrote a text where I tried out the following metaphor: the news is now like a sweeper-car, scooping things up one at a time, illuminating a line of objects on a floating market. A surveillance camera doesn't complain if it hasn't recorded any event. It's in the idiocy of live for live's sake. It confuses actuality and news. What was the news for most average French people? That Iraq was not Saudi Arabia. That's not much, even if it's something. But for those of us who knew it already? Nothing.

On December 31, I saw a very short report on Baghdad, the nightclubs, people drinking whiskey, girls without veils, people who seemed not to believe in the war and who looked like they were having fun. It was exactly like here. Why was it such a minor piece, almost folklore? Why not do a real duplex between here and Baghdad, all night long on the 31st? Maybe that's how the difference between Baghdad and Kuwait could really appear, maybe that's how we could break through the ready-to-think, the cliché, the already-seen.

And why, after the war broke out, didn't we see any reports on the archeological sites, on Ur, on one of humanity's birthplaces, and on the dangers? You wouldn't have to be a journalistic genius to have the modest idea (but there are a hundred others) that one way of speaking about Iraq could be the passion of French Assryilogist worrying about the sites. The TV doesn't think like that, it waits until it's too late before connecting all its studios and exhibiting vain logistics that quickly end up serving the politicos and military.

OK, there are six channels in France, and you can leave one, the most popular, TF1, as the servile echo of all the big influences. But even people in the know, even the intellectuals (as naive as anyone else) needed some more information, if only on channel 7. Why couldn't film buffs have seen the propaganda films that Tawfiq Saleh and Salah Abou Seif (the best Egyptian filmmakers) made a few years ago to the greater glory of Iraq? A superproduction of the battle of Qadisiyyah is pretty interesting if you want to understand Saddam's paranoia.

The problem with the image of the Palestinians has to do with the dispersion of the real Palestinians. I can't make brilliant Americans like Edward Said, the kids of the Intifada, the businessmen who propel the Kuwaiti economy, the combatants in Lebanon, the refugees in Jordan, and my old friend Soufian Ramahi co-exist in my head. And if I think I can't do it, it's because between the word and the thing, the word - the word "Palestinians" - has won out. It's a word with success, it's a pure signifier, at once umbrella and alibi for everybody. And we know how much easier is to die for a word than to work for the image of a thing. So there is no complex image of Palestinian reality, and that, I'm afraid, plays into everyone's hands. The image of Arafat is empty, free-spinning, unsinkable. It's a cliché, in the sense that a cliché is an image that can no longer evolve. No doubt this cliché is useful for the survival of the word "cause," but it doesn't function as much more than an advertising label.

I remember a film shot in 1976 by some pro-Palestinian friends, entitled THE OLIVE TREE. Already in this film there was one image too many and one image missing. The image too many was the one offered by the PLO, the "lion cubs," the children militarized in the camps. I had to explain that such an image makes bad propaganda in the West, which is the (only) part of the world where people long ago quit being enthusiastic at the sight of children in arms. OK, the people from THE OLIVE TREE didn't keep that image, but when Godard filmed UNTIL THE VICTORY, which in the end was called ICI ET AILLEURS, well, Godard didn't think he should censure that same image of the training of children. I remember a little girl who made a mistake in her motions, who had an instant of fright, and that's the image which is unforgettable for me. But that image means people are going to die, and she knows it.

As to the missing image, still in THE OLIVE TREE, it's when Marius Schattner explains in a very sweet voice that underneath the Israeli colony (which we see) there is, buried, covered over, a Palestinian village (which we do not see). I also remember that because at CAHIERS DU CINEMA we were among the few who had always known that the love of cinema also means knowing what to do with images that are really missing. And the image of the Palestinians was already difficult. The Palestinians themselves didn't help. When we saw Michel Khleifi's films we regained some hope: it was clear to see that there were concrete Palestinians and concrete Israeli soldiers, and you understood that Israel had lost the capacity to propose an image as effective as the image of the kibbutzim in the fifties, or the image of EXODUS, because the Israeli nation-state had become too rigid to run the risk of an image.

When the other begins to lack, each of the camps pulls back to its "visual," one in its real State, the other "in all the states" of its imaginary.

Serge Daney

Back to the Future

When Nanni Moretti gave his last film the title LA MESSE EST FINIE (THE MASS IS OVER), he did not realize how apt his words would be. Since when has a film critic been like a priest whom people go to see from time to time so that he may baptize, with a little help from his pen, increasingly inferior audio-visual products as "films"? Since when has there no longer been either mass or sermon? Since when has the audience - finally grown up - only gone by the dictates of its own mind? And since when has the Cannes 'Fete' become a cathodic butchery? Be that as it may, now, in 1987, faced with the "cinema crisis" (which is primarily a crisis of the cinema hall), the small fry amongst the "professionals of the profession" have begun to lose hope, a sense of direction. I have, for the first time, started asking myself the most hackneyed question: what does it mean today to be a film critic?

I used to like television. I liked it all the more because to me it did not count. I, already very much a cinephile, used to watch it late at night, and, being a trifle perverse, I had immediately applied to it the inadequate criteria of cinema. Thus, to me television was, even by absurdity, an extension of emotions and habits acquired at the cinématheque in the sixties. I came from a journal - LES CAHIERS DU CINEMA - that had always put cinema on a pedestal, that considered the real "impossible." It was at CAHIERS, working alongside Jean Douchet, that I learned to look closely at films, in "close-up," as Eisenstein used to say, as if my head were the ultimate projection room. Which is why I had always been suspicious of those to whom nothing remained of a film the moment it passed from the large to the small screen.

However, as time went by, it became clear that "love for cinema" could mean a number of different things. Those who perhaps had greater affection for the cinema hall than for the film they watched, were right now to talk of nostalgia and treason. But others - including myself - had undoubtedly preferred the film to the hall. The former loved the Saturday evening social ritual, while the latter preferred to invent all kinds of personal rites for themselves in the dark anonymity of the nonstop cinema. The former were still attached to the theater and its rituals, while the latter were already very much involved in the audio-visual flow of images. The former would never get over their lost object - say CASABLANCA or LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS - while the latter would follow their object to the end of the world, and even beyond, up to television.

Which is why comparisons, whether exalted or Manichean, between cinema and television did not, to my mind, yield anything worthwhile. It prevented thought on what had transmitted from cinema to TV. So I concocted a pro domo theory for myself, a theory of cine-TV incest. By and large, it was enough to note that all the filmmakers who have to some extent or another revolutionized the way films are made seemed to reason more in terms of a "history of communications" than in relation to a hypothetical "history of cinema." The real impact of filmmakers such as Vertov, Rossellini, Bresson, Tati, Welles, Godard or Straub (among others) rose from their unstable position between the poetic requirements of cinema and the progress of mass mediatization of the world. Most of them, moreover, did not despise television (Rossellini even opted for it with much ado at the end of the sixties), and they might even have worked for television had it not rushed into making sickly-sweet melodramas or educational films in keeping with the Autant-Laras or the Delannoys of the fifties. The exchange of good and bad was total, and the circle complete.

It was after these ruminations that I started, from September 15, 1987, to watch television regularly. To observe, to describe, not to giggle - this was the only rule I set, the other being to write everyday. A hundred days later, the outlook seemed more clear, even simplified. Like a return to common sense after fruitless complications. Like the terra firma of first principles.

It appeared to me, first and foremost, that all that was hateful on TV had one thing in common. Those dispensing "culture" and talk show hosts trying to be funny all behaved in the same ultra-sweet fashion, pitying us for having to fall back upon them to fill the tragic gaps in our supposedly barren lives. They made us feel that without them we would amount to nothing. They whispered to us that real life was not "elsewhere," that there was nothing more lovable or loving than a cozy corner in a well-lit studio. They tried to pass off the built-in monopoly television has on the solitude of its viewers as magnanimity, as the greatness of their soul. My first (mental) cry of revolt was: "TV compensates nothing."

Thereafter, I realized that my old theory about cine-TV incest (another way of describing the adventure of "modern cinema," from Rossellini to Godard) was no longer true. The art of cinema had undoubtedly consisted of answering in advance questions that no one knew how to ask. But in 1987 there was no longer any reason to hesitate. At best, television - and adult TV - would perhaps again take up these questions. Cinema, however, had no choice but to ask new questions. It was no longer the trailer announcing the all-powerful myth of effective and happy communication. It was what remained of communication, before or after it had passed.

From that moment, it became possible not to reproach television for not giving what it did not have. Like he always does, Godard, full of punch after the launch of SOIGNE TA DROITE, made two or three provocative and pertinent remarks full of common sense. That culture is TV because culture os transmitted and TV can only transmit. That cinema had transmitted itself, which is why it sometimes became an art. But then it became equally possible to criticize television every time it moved away from its function, which could be best described as "ecological." Television would accompany our lives without replacing them; it would give us "news" about the world, it would be the least polluting of all landscapes.

Had I zapped only to discover these primary truths? Ought I to get used to an effortless dissociation of cinema from television? Had there been a new deal, where each actor could take his pickings afresh? It was enough to listen to the "furor" made about recent films to realize that an era was truly coming to a close. I, who had become used to fighting Straub's cause, was not surprised to find myself "defending" the latest Fellini films. Not that they were being criticized, but because they had incited the same worn and indifferent reactions in their admirers and detractors.

Definitely in the minority, cinema did not any longer have to be "auteur" based since the auteur was one who responded personally to constraints and orders. This was untraceable in present-day cinema: whoever made a film, small or big, French or American, traditional or daring, would now do so at a personal level.

Defunct as an industry, cinema will once more become an artisanal art, poor or affluent, and will talk of everything that remains in shot(s) once the compressing rollers of mediated communication have gone by. Any resistance?

I thus de-zapped on an optimistic note. Things actually seemed simple and the physical separation of cinema and television could at last be envisaged. TV was a matter of ecology because it spoke to the responsible citizen in us, that it to say, to the adult. It is the adult whose role it is to say "no" to the permanent risk of being puerile. But cinema had derived its strength and longevity (one century!) from its childlike aspect - an aspect it could lose, but not do without (an "adult audience" is utopia). If "to give what we do not have" is love, and if television is fueled by love (that it to say, in Lacan's words, by "miam-miam"), it is clear that cinema is powered by desire. If television is a vehicle of culture, cinema transmits experience. If TV must have its own de-ontology, the tracking shots of cinema have been "moral" questions. If TV programming can reveal talent, nothing will ever release cinema from the desire to produce. Finally, if TV is our prose (and we will never talk well enough), cinema no longer stands a chance except as poetry.