Romania 4/4: Nicolae and Elena Bequeath their Bodies to Television

Libération, 4 Apr 1990

Fourth and last text of the Romania series. 

Nicolae and Elena Bequeath their Bodies to Television

While we might fault Elena and Nicolae Ceaușescu for having ruled Romania so poorly when they were alive, we can only congratulate their corpses for appearing so frequently – and with such success – on television. Monday night they astounded us once again with the chilly hauteur of seasoned professionals, turning up their noses at the pale extras who shot them all over again. 

In the same way, if we might fault television for having kept us so poorly informed about the Ceaușescus during their rule, we can only congratulate it for giving their corpses the opportunity to debut on the global market of emotion. Deader and deader, more riddled with bullets, bloated and stained, the terrible couple seemed poised to become the most underpaid extras in television history. Fortunately, some people have stepped in at last (Sulitzer!) to demand a cut and restore things back to normal, meaning to a normal level of squalor.  

How did we reach this point? This is what has been thoroughly discussed at many conferences (the most recent one in Valence, Drôme) devoted to how Romania and Television ended up manipulating one another. This raises at least three questions. Why did the Romanians make such a mess of the symbolic gestures that should have allowed them to turn the page on Ceaușescu without too much damage? To what extent might this failure have been worsened by the morbid workings of Western television stations? Is it not futile to expect that television can achieve any kind of symbolic effectiveness?  

We can begin to answer the first question. Accustomed to lying for bad or wrong causes, the Romanians didn’t imagine that anyone would mind very much if they laid the news on a bit thick the day their cause became a just one. Hence the sham summary trial and the Timisoara mass grave hastily presented to foreign journalists. The cost of this operation: high. Forced to retract the mass grave and finish the trial, the Romanians not only gave the impression of having missed the “unique televisual act” of their revolution, but instead offered a macabre soap opera, a sloppy production, full of gaps and thick with hidden truths and ulterior motives. The exemplary nature of the freeze frame on the Ceaușescus’ fall had been too quickly glossed over; like a revenant, the video phantom of that image continues to haunt us. This is a genuine failure.  

The second question can be answered as well. And all the better, since our television is known to us and obeys a regime of truth specific unto itself. A strict regime that we can break down as follows. 1) There is no other truth on television than the live image. 2) The only live image worth anything – at a push – is death. 3) The only proof of death is the possibility of producing a corpse*. In this sense, the perpetual return of the Ceaușescu corpses to the screen is the ultimate event, and there was no genuine interest when commentators Monday evening (poor Cotta!) pretended to find value in the long version of the trial beyond pure voyeurism.  

The third question, by contrast, is so serious that it demands extreme caution. If a symbolic act is one that emphasises duration and sets the time for a group of individuals who thereby achieve a common recognition of being in the same situation, then television struggles, now, in the past and in the future, to create such acts. Paradoxically, its very omnipresence renders it powerless. Being global and continuous, it no longer stresses anything. Overworked and easy to ignore (remote control in hand), it knows no catharsis. Stripped of any off-screen, it also lacks an Other. Hence the fearsome perversity of its effects. An event that would have passed as “symbolic” just yesterday (let’s say the Pope’s visit) becomes pure parody in the great deadpan tradition of late Bunuel films. Conversely, what would have been a product of raw “realism” just yesterday (let’s say the execution of the Ceaușescus) becomes, once televised, the frenzied simulation of a symbolic act that has not “taken hold”. 

Today, this frenzy can be felt everywhere, especially on television. Let’s return to the Ceaușescus: the fury of the victim-spouses, the stunned fury of the executioners, the incompetent fury of commentators, the obscene fury of audience ratings, the virtuous fury of those feeling manipulated. What is this fury? Isn’t it the fury born of definitive disappointment, the fury well known to the deviant who, condemned to endlessly replay the same film, forever unable to see or capture everything of the decisive moment that obsessed him (small or large death), knows himself doomed to invariably stumble over the refuse of his jouissance and the remains of his fantasy: a stupid body after sex (a sad animal) or an obtuse corpse after the burst. One more step and he will stumble over what he is already stumbling on. It is precisely this attempt to inscribe the symbolic into the real and to expect god knows what unobtainable truth from the bloodiest acts that led once to fascism. How could we be certain that the desire for such acts isn’t returning today? 

For the more we abandon interpreting the world, the more we turn against the bodies that populate it. The body is not the prop of an individual's history but the scorned refusal of a dream. The less we understand Lebanon, the more Lebanese corpses become filmable. The more opaque Romania becomes, the more the Ceaușescu corpses are back in service. This is humanity’s phobia about its own image; this is this tautology gone wrong which television has chosen to embrace. For worse rather than for better.  

This phobia is the only possible explanation for the contorted rage with which moralists of every stripe attacked the program by Karlin and Lainé – L’Amour  en France – who are guilty only in bringing within reach of the average TV viewer the human interest of the average guinea pig – you and me. It is urgent – lest matters worsen – that, with these beings and things now within our grasp, so close, obscene and threatening by virtue of their availability, we begin to learn to do something other than count the bullets striking their bodies.   

It is well known that cinema often serves as the displaced conscience of those without conscience, namely the television clergy (which, if it has nothing else, has a price: Guillaume Durand’s thoughts, for example, cost seven million centimes an hour, for those interested). Thus a film coming soon – the new “last Fellini” – says, in its own equally frenzied way, two or three things about the disaster that may be threatening us. What is The Voice of the Moon about? As always with Fellini, many incomplete events culminate in an one all too final. One day, in a small Italian town, workers manage to capture the very symbol of what is remote: the Moon. So the Moon is on earth, a huge, pallid disc of light, a prisoner amid gawkers, dignitaries and onlookers. First they look at the Moon and then they talk to it, asking it for explanations, the meaning of life, things like that. Since the foolish Moon stays silent, some hothead fires on it and you see a little black hole on the moon’s left side. A disaster.  

Fellini has long been describing the world we inhabit, a world where the object of desire is present even before the desire itself arises, a world where, as Virilio says in his splendid new work (Polar Inertia): “From now on, everything happens without the need to go anywhere.” The moon that is shot at is like Mr and Mrs Ceaușescu: brought to us through a kind of availability that is at first marvelous, then unexpected, then astonishing, then disturbing, then panic-inducing, then bent on every outrage.  

How are we to reinvent distance?  

* Is there really a difference between this macabre Romanian and the subsequent surgical Iraqi? They are rather two external edges of the world of images. On one side, gore, relentless action on the bodies; on the other, video erasure of the same bodies. Two ways to put an end to what resists.  

First published in Libération on 26 April 1990. Reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, Cinéma, télévision, information, Aléas éditions, 1991.

Romania 3/4: Romania, Year Zero

Third text of the Romania series.

Romania, Year Zero  

“If there is such a thing as history, and if man is indeed a historical being, it is only because there is a childhood of man, because language does not identify with the human, because there’s a difference between language and speech, between semiotics and semantics.” – Giorgio Agamben. 

At which point did it become clear (to me) that cinema had nothing more to gain from keeping pace with the great events of History? It was in 1981, already in the East. One of the fastest filmmakers in the world, Andrzej Wajda, was leaving the shipyards in Gdansk to make a topical film, Man of Iron, an improvised sequel to Man of Marble. All the ingredients for success were present: Poland moved public opinions, Wajda was well-known and the film had won the Palme d’or at Cannes. Despite all this, Man of Iron had only a modest reception and was forgotten as quickly as it had been made. Toward the end of the 1980s, Agnieszka Holland’s film about Father Popieluszko (To Kill a Priest, starring Christophe Lambert) confirmed this simple observation: cinema and history were no longer on the same trajectory. 

But if it’s clear that news was now in the realm of television, the latter had not yet – in Europe at least – faced its true baptism of fire. It took Tiananmen and especially the events of 1989 (a seriously fractured iron curtain and a completely collapsed Berlin Wall) to test it for the first time. Euphoria was rising as we watched highly symbolic places (the Berlin Wall, Wenceslas Square) transformed into studio-camps where one would go and be seen (in that way, television definitely killed that old expression: “go over there and see if you can find me”). But it was Romania, a country without symbols, without faces, in short without images, that made things fascinating, in every conceivable way. There was the true baptism of fire. 

For we have just witnessed a real tele-invention of Romania. Rarely had a tyrant as little known as Ceaușescu become so quickly such a familiar “figure” (albeit a rather iced one). Never before had the various TV channels competed so willingly with one another or so readily disrupted their schedule. Never before had the ordinary difficulties of a journalist (knowing who is who and who wants what) been so simply shared with the audience. And finally, never before (and this is the bit that must interest us) had the jargon of image-makers, the language of the audiovisual world, been so quickly adopted and picked up by the same audience. 

It’s as if everyone had suddenly become a “film critic”. Not through cinephilia, but because the need for it was acutely felt. It was as if, watching the confused images of the Ceaușescus’ filmed trial and execution, concepts like freeze-image, slow motion, off-screen space and ellipsis were no longer mere stylistic devices but were also information to be deciphered (with all the risks of lies, falsification and omission). We witnessed a sort of democratisation of the cinematic language, or at least of some of its basic grammatical elements. Suddenly, the old television news, with images from nowhere (images we had grown blasé about and stopped questioning), with smug anchormen who talked “over” and “instead of” the images, seemed terribly dated. Between the Romanian protagonists and the French viewers, media professionals made themselves scarce, and we quickly forgave their mistakes since we were making the same ones (like George Marchais, none of us imagined that something would ever happen in Bucharest). 

Before the events in the East become again inextricable and entangled with passion and ideology, it is worthwhile to assess the impact of this Romanian event of images. And it must be done in Cahiers, which when they were “yellow” were Cahiers of cinema and television. For we know only a few milestone moments in the long progression toward ever greater visibility, along the themes of transparency and live broadcasting, all the Bazinian ontology (which holds that to film is not to signify, but to show). What is being concluded today, right before our eyes, is both the first forty years of Cahiers and the fifty years following Yalta (acknowledging that the latter is far more important than the former). 

A very interesting symposium has just been published by the University Press of France under the title How to Live with Images. An extraordinary title to which I would add the slight anguish of a question mark. This title implicitly accepts that it is now illusory (or at least greatly exaggerated) to reject the image, this “object both mundane and present in our daily environment, yet singular and a collective fantasy”. Only the servants of a dogmatic truth (we’ve seen it before and it could resurface) have no interest in testing that truth against the image. Why? Because they vastly overestimate the powers of images. All the clergy of the world have forever sought to control images, to diminish them, to silence them, to read them, in short to force them into the meaning they assign to them. This is well known. 

How to live with images? Probably by not expecting from them too much or too little of this “truth”. By not fighting too much against their necessary ambiguity. And by understanding, once and for all, not only that “just an image” is not “a just image”, but that it now falls to us to confront that image (meaning to “show” it) with another. And let’s not forget that what could, in the best scenario (let’s not take anything for granted), constitute a sort of collective ecology of information was, not so long ago, the passion and ethical commitment of two or three passeurs who had made it their personal mission. So let’s say that in the snowy streets of Bucharest, there were the footprints of Bazin, Rosselini and Godard. 

Bazin taught us to live with our voyeurism, our insatiable and perverse hunger to “see more”, undeterred by the knowledge that, like any object of a drive, it is, as Lacan said, a “failure”. On one side, voyeurism that collapses distances; on the other, the theory of mise en scène that creates other distances. Rossellini transformed cinema by keeping his attention fixed on the duration of things and beings, in the suspension of meaning. On one side, the hypnotism that ends judgment; on the other, a method of telling a single event through multiple simultaneous, fragmented, small stories. Godard began to interrupt what had seemed obvious before him, only to stumble upon the enigma of the untied knot, the isolated image, the obligatory montage. On one side, melancholic and morbid contemplation of stopped cinema; on the other, an appeal to the off-screen space, where other movements, images and montages can be found. Among these three, we can see the same inner contradiction between excess (the mystical aspect of the image) and reason (the morality of the spectator). This was yesterday. And it has been the common thread of Cahiers’ history. Is this the case today? Are we seeing a new “television and History” trajectory taking shape? Or is it an illusion? Let’s examine some of the Romanian moments. The incredible discovery of the Mabuse-like subterranean tunnels beneath the capital, this way of encountering the unknown, is truly on the side of Bazin. But Hervé Chabalier’s remarkable documentary on daily life in Bucharest (“24 Hours”) simply adopts Rossellini’s approach in Rome, Open City. As for the trial of the Ceaușescus without off-screen space, and the fixed images of their corpses, it resembles a school exercise, graciously offered to Godard’s voice over. How to live with the images? We must live with all of them. This is the price to pay for information to finally become somewhat less dogmatic and achieve – at last – a certain dignity. 

An image is born at the intersection of two forces: what watches and what is watched (and vice versa). In the seventies, we saw television emancipate itself from political control and grapple with a reality it quickly transformed into “hyper-reality”. We knew enough about the subconscious to know that this scoptophilia would “yield” nothing and that this voyeurism verged on pornography or the distinct televisual feeling of “failing to assist a person in danger”. With hindsight, we realise that television may have been, at that moment, like a telescope (or a microscope) being adjusted but only when there is nothing to see, or at least nothing that truly concerns us. As Godard (him again) essentially said, documentary is what happens to others, while fiction is what happens to me. And fiction was what was most desperately missing the most – this was the recurring theme of the “crisis of the screenplay”. We had forgotten to consider that one day there might be something worth seeing. A major historical event, for instance, in Communist Europe. 

There will always be a kind of deflation in the midst of historical events, a revenge of Barthes’ “third meaning”, a hasty banality transforming the “great moments” of History in lame, inevitably disappointing spectacles. Modern filmmakers had already warned us: when Godard and Rossellini made The Carabineers, they set themselves against everyone by filming acts rather than a spectacle. Thirty years later, the emotion of the French viewer watching the Berlin Wall finally being climbed up, chipped away or straddled is of the same nature: it’s nothing and yet it’s everything. There are only insufficient answers to Beckett’s question, “how it is”. But we have learnt to value these images which are “better than nothing”, just slightly better than nothing. And we no longer expect anything (except perhaps the worst) from an absence of images or from a single Image. Television people must have long feared this void of reality (what Lacan called a hole), just as a genre painter feared photography. Photography is neither more accurate nor more precise; it simply says something else (we recall the smile on John Paul II’s face at the moment the bullet hit him). This is why television professionals work so hard to substitute complete figures for the absence of events. The eighties perhaps saw them push furthest their research into advertising and the promotion of the “brand image”, the trademarked image containing within itself the memory and meaning of the event. 

So it is no longer the “how it is” that matters, but the “how it would have been” that is archived (via slo-mos, freeze-frames, logos) at the very moment the event occurs, following the ideal model of sport coverage. But this is because the meaning of the event seems unproblematic, because in the studios of Cognacq-Jay “everything is absolutely known” and because – even if the theme hasn’t yet resurfaced – they behave as if History was well and truly over. 

Romania is something different. It tells us neither “how it is” nor “how it will have been”, it shows us “how it was”. For if it closes off what began with the hypothesis of modern cinema (Italian neorealism and its French theorisation), it’s for a very simple reason: modern cinema was born in Europe, Romania is in Europe, and we would not be so moved if we were not suddenly far more European than we thought ourselves to be (and perhaps, as a consequence, less lazily “universal”). 

Ceaușescu’s Romania so closely resembles the destroyed and traumatised post-war European countries, the poor, armed folks who may be either the population or former persecutors, that we see our own past in them, as if by superimposition. I mean both the past from which we necessarily descend and the past witnessed by certain already televisual films (or by some photographers who documented what French cinema refrained from showing, like the unforgettable shaved woman of Chartres, caught between the vengeful town and Robert Capa’s camera). 

This is the price of the return of the fiction. In the backward movement that draws me from the domesticated impossibility of the “how it is” to the forever open question of the “how it was”. 

First published in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 428, February 1990. Reprinted in La maison cinéma et le monde, vol. 3, P.O.L., Paris, 2012.

Romania 2/4: The Judges and the Assassin

Libération, 27 Dec 1989

Second text of the Romania series.

The Judges and the Assassin  

At which point is there a need to show? At the point where others need to see. The new authorities in Bucharest had therefore a need to show to the people of Romania (and to the world) the proof that a trial had indeed taken place. To show became the symbolic condition of their new and fragile power. One had to rearrange the film in the right order and ensure that shaky or fixed shots from the trial succeeded the fixed image of the Conducator’s corpse. A military trial which, even if summary, could come across as an “act”. The message of the judges is not directed to Ceaușescu but to the TV audience: yes, this trial is not only legitimate but legal. So we, who are not Romanians, will have seen the Ceaușescus in the spotlight of the media only once, the last time. We, who more or less ignored the idealised icons of the Conducator, will have watched for a short while a bitter old killer with a wily air and dry gestures, and accompanied by a shrew. And in case we doubted it, we were reminded that great moments of History – providing they are followed “live” – contain their share of dead times and embarrassment. Given the progress made by television in its “duty of interference”, we should expect other scoops that will resemble – that’s life – monstrous trivial events where all the actors play badly. 

At which point is there a desire to see? When something is hidden from us of course. Paradox: at the moment when, for the first time, we see a dictator having lost power and soon his life, it is quickly no longer him that we want to see. We want to see those that judged him, and were well in their right to do so, but not necessarily in their right to avoid images. The off-camera is a reserve of the imaginary that must never be left fallow. Yesterday, the images of these off judges, of whom we sometimes saw an elbow or a shoulder, were missing. And the freeze-frame this time no longer had the value of an absolute signal but came across more as a poor ruse so that we wouldn’t see what we were nevertheless hearing. The act which consisted of improvising and filming this trial was suddenly no more than half an act. It’s as if the judges had been too close, even in the off-field of a camera, to continue to compromise themselves. The solitude of the Ceaușescu spouses in the image has perhaps no other off-screen than the solitude of the Romanian people facing themselves.   

First published in Libération on 27 December 1989. Reprinted in La maison cinéma et le monde, vol. 3, POL, 2012.

Romania 1/4: Freeze-Images

Libération, 23-24 Dec 1989

The television coverage of the 1989 Romanian revolution was intriguing enough to Serge Daney that he wrote four texts about the topic.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, regime change swept across several East European countries, with things turning violent in Romania. In the final days of the Ceaușescu dictatorship, after the army violently squashed protests in the town of Timișoara mid-December, the revolt spread to other parts of the country leading to Ceaușescu being arrested, put through a mock trial and executed with his wife on December 25th. Initial media reports of the events in Timișoara claimed mass graves and thousands of deaths, something that will later prove false. And the trial and execution were broadcast on television.

Daney's four texts include two short pieces written for the newspaper Libération at the time of the events and two longer articles written a few months later. 

• "Freeze-Images", written in Libération on 25 December 1989.
• "The Judges and the Assassin", written in Libération on 27 December 1989.
• "Romania, Year Zero," written in Cahiers du cinéma for the February 1990 edition.
• "Nicolae and Elena Bequeath their Bodies to TV", written in Libération on 26 April 1990.

These events, along with the television coverage of the first Gulf War in 1990-91, were critical in informing  Daney's thinking on the evolution of the image.

Here's the first text. 

Freeze-Images*  

Among the countless reasons to consider 1989 a landmark year, there is this one: television has finally come of age. Not the television that believes it is capable of creation, but the one that, more modestly, transmits information. It is highly symbolic that it should be Romanian television turning against its masters that has given both the signal and the significance of the events in Romania. Semiologists, long fascinated by the freeze-frame, couldn’t believe that this rhetorical figure which had become horribly commonplace, could return to service, and mean everything. It is the “frozen” image of the tyrant that informed us of his downfall and the defrosting of the country. Not so long ago – for the liberation of the hostages in Lebanon – only the dauntless Channel 5 dared to alter its (admittedly rather thin) schedule to share with the audience the run up to the event. Today, it didn’t take long for all channels to accept to be disrupted by the events from Romania. This is a huge progress. Not only because as a result more images have been captured, deciphered and seen, but also because television revealed itself for what it is, not a mysterious and arrogant place that “knows it all”, but a precise location from where all is done to know. More so than with the events in China (which is after all on the other side of the world), this injured Romania situated “two hours from Paris by plane” made one aware of the cowardly neglect in which it has been held for years. When it comes to Romania, a lot of people have a lot of things to be forgiven for. Of course, the still rather archaic French television is no firebrand when it comes to collecting information. How did the Japanese at NHK manage to get all the necessary equipment in place? And the Dutch? And the others? Never mind, for once the information channel was perceived by the audience as a reality, a reality that was the result of work.   

The work of journalists who confronted themselves to unidentified images coming live from satellites, who were left frozen in front of the Romanian TV test card, reduced to humble watchers and forced to wonder who is who and what is what, had the minimal virtue of being communicable. For, it will never be said enough, communication only works when the passion of the communicator is also communicated, as an extra layer. Television only had to accept the risk of being late compared to the events for it to become, quite simply, a human instrument, and regain its advance. What would we have thought in the late sixties if television had “covered” the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution in China? How long would the pro-Chinese utopia had lasted? The question applies to all the dictatorships of the century whose visible faces, we mustn’t forget, were bribed hirelings and waged liars. It is at the moment when Communism is being wiped out in front of our eyes that we discover that it would have disappeared less quickly without the images. For the image – even approximative or unbearable – has to do with peace (as Godard reminded us). War is born out of fear. And fear is born out of such a lack of images that a single image, usually the face of a “father of the people”, begins to replace all the others.  

1989 was firstly the year of Tiananmen. We had never seen China. I mean China day-to-day, a regular coverage. Let’s remind ourselves of the image that remains and undoubtedly will remain in our memories: the image of a small man in a white shirt, seemingly coming back from the market, and who, with a single gesture, stops the tanks for a moment. It was already a stop on the image*. The man on which the image stops, is himself attempting to stop what is designed to kill, to parade, to “make an image”: the tanks. It’s as if, after a period of pompous mannerism and empty enthusiasm, television journalists have begun to understand that, in order to make the way the world works intelligible, one must accept to step out of line. Thanks to these freeze-images, we witness the sudden rebirth of, not only the emotion of what touches and concerns us, but also the idea of a different rhythm of information. 1989 will therefore have been a vintage year. Suddenly human beings will have been more interesting than the way we “covered” them, and television will have known its true baptism of fire.  

* Alternative wording for “freeze-image”. See this other translator’s note. 

 First published in Libération on 25 December 1989. Reprinted in La maison cinéma et le monde, vol. 3, POL, 2012.

Jean-Jacques Beineix, Destination Moon… or not!

Jean-Jacques Beineix, Destination Moon… or not!

Yesterday at Cannes, the filmmaker defended, tooth and nail, his aesthetics. 

We can’t say that The Moon in the Gutter received much praise at Cannes. Eagerly anticipated, Jean-Jacques Beineix’s second film is likely to disappoint those who liked his first film without convincing the others. In the middle of this complete failure, some real questions about the cinema. What if this new religion of “The Image” announced the return of an art?

Beineix’s second opus ended up being received with a few jeers and some half-hearted hisses. Never mind, the post-Diva era has begun and Beineix is both its symptom and prophet. It was perhaps inevitable that the critics, who had zero role to play in the cult success of Diva, jumped furiously on The Moon in the Gutter. It was too good an opportunity since it is indeed a complete failure. But unlike a bad film (boring, tense, autistic, etc), this second opus comes across as a curiosity. The first ugly-looking cathedral of the 36th festival. 

The story – you guessed it – is of little importance. A lot of money has been spent in Cinecittà to recreate the shabby universe of the great David Goodis. “Obsession” and “discontent” are the only two common threads. In a stylised America, a man hesitates between two women (one, jealous, who already loves him, “downtown”, the other, appearing from another world, “uptown”). At the same time, this man is “searching” for the identity of the rapist responsible for his sister’s suicide. 

The film goes back and forth, with a rolling of the story, a pitching and tossing of the fiction, a seasickness that gently repulses, a nausea from seeing all these means put to a rather modest end: to remake in vitro the cinema of “poetic realism” in the era of loft apartments, neon lights, Coppola’s high tech and “filmed cinema”.

We remember how, in poetic realism and old-style studio cinema, characters carried around a soiled soul and an inalienable right to purity. They collided with the decor, seemed lost, panicked, confined (Carné). Beineix inherits this “atmosphere”. As a filmmaker, he does the same. He keeps on slowing down the story so that we have the time to appreciate the work on the image. A work of labour consisting in multiplying cutaway shots, finding additional camera angles, lighting effects and unexpected details. In a word, to generate images behind the fiction’s back. A scene by Beineix works most often like crab steering. It progresses sideway or even in reverse, hitting the audience with a million proof points of Beineix’s cinematographic know-how and desire. With each proof point, we go back to square one. The film is like this motorbike that we saw yesterday at the Croisette, across from the Carlton, equipped with all the modern and postmodern features, so much so that we wondered if it actually worked. 

Diva was said to emerge from advertising aesthetics. We know that the only on-the-job training available to young filmmakers is advertising. Recently, this situation seems to have become acceptable. And, whether we want it or not, the return of formalism and of the tradition of quality (pre-New Wave) can only happen today on the back of the recycling of techniques and effects from the advertising world. Filmmakers attempt to prove that two hours of tv adverts put together can make a film, like a thousand rockets can form a firework. We know that nothing will be left of it, that the sky will become dark again, like a bottomless abyss, but the bet is up (see Deadly Circuit). And with Beineix, it’s even a challenge. 

It doesn’t work of course. It doesn’t work because advertising is still an ironic and ephemeral product. It doesn’t work because in his praise for the Image and solely the image, Beineix forgets that advertising is an image of seduction with only one concluding word: the name of the brand. If the moon ends up catching a cold in this gutter designed for a sniffer Louma crane, it is because Beineix over-advertises the brand “Image” and the sub-brand “Shot”. This narcissism wouldn’t matter if it didn’t end up, forever looping on itself, excluding the spectator. 

So, the film is a curiosity. Beineix said during the press conference that he enjoyed watching films in places that one can’t escape from: planes for example. He forgets two things: that it is possible to sleep on a plane or (like me) to refuse to pay two dollars for the headphones. The Moon in the Gutter is fundamentally a silent, aphasic film and its dialogue – even when murmured – is unworthy of a bad Delannoy of the forties. But would the film, reduced to its image only, function? Yes, but like a silent film seen out of the corner of your eye, like a trendy music video, a logorrhoea of images transplanted randomly onto a skeletal story and sketches of bodies (Depardieu isn’t bad but acts already “electronically”, like the actors in Tron who don’t see the rest of the image that they are immersed into). 

And once we have understood that we can only glean things in the gutter, we are free to think. 

During the screening of The Moon in the Gutter, one can play back the history of the cinema and fill it up like a shopping basket. Let’s salute a nice trailer (but without much of a film after), a good ad (with no after-sale service), an effective industrial film (not backed by an enterprise), etc. It’s a voyage in the country of the commercial image (the one that sells something and the one that sells itself) at the service of a metaphysical quest for the Cinema and the Great Work. Nothing prevents us, in the darkness of the film theatre, to ask fundamental questions: what is it, where does it come from, where is it going (the cinema)? Does it necessarily go – for better or, in this case, for worse – through the reflection of too pure moons in too dirty gutters?

In any case, Beineix, claws out, takes on an old line about his art: the Cinema, he says, is the Image. Perhaps but then one shouldn’t pretend to be surprised if, with crime novels as stock of stories, studios as return to the fold, and advertising as formal matrix, we can logically expect a new religion when it comes to the cinema. A Sulpician art. 

First published in Libération on May 13th, 1983. Re-printed in La maison cinéma et le monde, vol 2, P.O.L., 2002.  

City of Pirates

The ICA London program "Serge Daney and the promise of cinema" ended a couple of weeks ago and the organisers at Sabzian were kind enough to share a couple of new translations used as screening notes for the event. Thank you to Arta Barzanji and Gerard-Jan Claes. First, a piece on Raoul Ruiz.  

City of Pirates

There are films that we’re not quite sure we didn’t dream. They are perhaps the most beautiful. Like this new adventure from Captain Ruiz, in the land of our beliefs.

Take a child and make sure he dreams. Wake him and tell him a story. Lull him with your most beautiful voice-over. Make your voice insidious, and don’t forget the background music. Once he falls back asleep, the child must finish dreaming the story you whispered to him. When he wakes, he must feel that the story chose him, not the other way around. An Immortal Story — so ran the title of one of Welles’s last films; but any story is immortal, that's what all of Raoul Ruiz’s films tell us. Hence much delight, then too much delight, then terror. 

But if you don’t have the sleeping child, the suspended time, the voice that lulls, or the talent for improvisation (that is to say, the art of always having the last word), don’t insist, and give up trying to imitate Raoul Ruiz. He alone seems to have held onto the secret and the taste for such things. Since Welles fell silent and Buñuel departed for the Milky Way, there has been much talk of cinema’s return to fiction. But little has been said about the return of fiction itself (as one might talk of the return of the repressed or the return of Frankenstein). Ruiz’s films are stories, and they have an initiatory character. Finished, rigged, nested or malevolent, they possess a mad charm. Even if it took ten years (from the fall of Allende in 1973, which drove Ruiz from his native country, to the release, last year, of Three Crowns of the Sailor) for an audience, suddenly less negligible, to fall under that charm and march to the rhythm of that madness.

And this, despite Ruiz’s reputation for hermeticism and intellectualism, which only proves that when confronted with a true Latin American baroque, the French have a hard time admitting that their own tradition of labyrinth films, snakes and ladders and puzzle games, à la Robbe-Grillet and Resnais, is no match. That said (and said plenty; we promise we won’t say it again — next time we’ll treat Ruiz as already known, if not recognized), City of Pirates, which is something of a sequel to Three Crowns and recalls the half-successful The Territory (three films shot in Portugal) has its own tone, its private gimmicks, its dazzling accomplishments and its secret misfires. In short, a superb, dreamlike film, almost impossible to recount and totally bonkers.

Where to begin? Let’s return to the metaphor of the sleeper. We’re in the South, facing the sea, subject to all kinds of paradox. In her bedroom, Isidore is asleep. Yes, her asleep, because she’s a woman. Her mother, who seems hardly older than she is, wakes her, saying, ‘Are you sleeping, Isidore?’ ‘Tell me a story’, replies the small, childlike voice of Isidore. On a table nearby are a few banknotes left by her father: he has once again abused Isidore and has just paid her. This scene obviously gives no indication of the countless events that populate this City of Pirates, but in a sense, it contains all of Ruiz. Like Buñuel, he delights in the simplest logical permutations. Perversion of name and gender, of ages and loves, of before and after. Incest, a social tie turned into a play on words or a game of ‘Happy families’. Moreover, this ‘city’ is no more than an island, except it only has one inhabitant, who plays all the roles. When it comes to the comfort of identification (who’s who?), Ruiz is the least reliable of guides. He doesn’t believe in identity, only in cards. Forced ones, preferably.

Does Isidore kiss a carabinier, with the red shape of the kiss turning out to be that of the infamous pirate island? Does a man blow his brains out, with a piece of those brains, ejected along with a stream of blood, forming the shape of that island? At first, it’s all a riddle. By the end, there’s nothing left but piddle. In the meantime, the beautiful Isidore meets a little boy, but this cherub of evil is a master criminal. She becomes his fiancée and accomplice; she follows him to the island. She will return, yes, but in what state! We sense that the word most ill at ease in the Ruizian world is the verb ‘to be’. It’s clear that there’s nothing to gain in trying to recount City of Pirates. It’s clear that nothing is clear.

And yet. The more discouraged we become trying to identify who or what we’re seeing on screen (to the point that, by the end, we mentally cry out ‘truce!’ and verge on boredom), the more delight Ruiz takes in the appearance of things, in the material, comical weight they retain despite everything.

Two rotting corpses take a Durassian tea, a yawn is filmed from the point of view of the glottis, foreground details eat away at the image for no reason, a skull turns into a rugby ball: a whole branch of seventeenth-century Spanish painting, that of the vanitas and Valdés Leal’s Hieroglyphs of Life's End, is ready to come to life. Under the pressure of the verses.

Likewise, the more we give up trying to figure out what kind of film we’ve stumbled into (to the point that, around the halfway mark, fatigued and forsaken, we decide that enough’s enough), the more Ruiz excels at conjuring, with constant joy, the phantoms of American B movies, of Cocteau and English Hammer films. There is something of John Mohune from Lang’s Moonfleet in the little boy in City of Pirates, just as there is something of Tourneur (that of I Walked with a Zombie) in the hallucinatory tone of certain voices. As if, to apologise for the outlandishness of his tale, Ruiz were dressing it in the memory of stories in which, as children, we had so little trouble feeling at home.

The more we convince ourselves that language too has been trapped, the more Ruiz manages to make his actors speak in a very gentle tone, their voices carrying that hint of desolate sulkiness that makes even the simplest lines deeply moving. There are few filmmakers working in ‘French’ who have better captured the musicality of the French il était une fois, the tuning note that opens the door to all stories. There are few musicians who can concoct scores worthy of an ironic Hollywood Ravel better than Arriagada (Ruiz’s regular collaborator). Finally, the more we agree to follow Ruiz in his authorial madness, the more we have to admit that he is more and more assured in his choice of actors. In City of Pirates, Anne Alvaro (Isidore) and Melvil Poupaud (the little boy) are particularly good.

All of this, you’ll say, has a name. Yes: seduction. But it’s the form that is seductive. What remains is the content. Ruiz is not a hollow aesthete. There is a content to his stories, and I find it staggering. A content replete with filth and promiscuity that no poetry can completely silence. Filmmakers — as I said at the beginning (to provoke) — have almost all lost the sense of narrative. And so the only one who has preserved it intact (Ruiz) has made it his own personal folly. The viewer, ‘too Cartesian’, will be less disoriented by a film like City of Pirates if they make the effort to see Three Crowns of the Sailor (which is still showing in one cinema in Paris). In that film, Ruiz set out the conditions under which a story could be immortal. It needed fresh meat. That of the one who would tell of how he believed it had only ever happened to him. That of the one to whom the story would be told, and who would (wrongly) think it would never happen to him. Once immortal, the story endlessly returns. In City of Pirates, it returns first as an adventure film, second as a Cocteauvian theatre, third as a theological paper, and fourth as a dialogue between the dead. 

To live is to dream a story; to die is to tell it. Eternity remains for rotting.

First published in Libération on 25th February 1984. Reprinted in Ciné Journal, Seuil, Cahiers du cinéma, 1986. Translated by Sam Warren Miell with minor changes. 

Pialat’s Dream (Van Gogh)

Second translation from the screening of the London ICA "Serge Daney and the Promise of Cinema", with permission from the programers. 

Pialat’s Dream 

I've always thought Pialat’s dream (a painter’s dream, impossible in cinema) consisted in embarking on a film only on the condition that he could change all the collaborators along the way. So that, by the time the film was finished, he would be left alone with whatever had been deposited on the canvas that is the screen – after all the cries and crises, insults and separations. Pialat’s ‘vitalism’ is less a weighty ideology than a firm way of showing the door to those who forget that ‘real life is elsewhere’ and that a film is not a suffocating squat but above all a place of passage. We know the tragicomic episodes to which this stubborn voluntarism gave rise in the past. But how can we forget those adopted and ‘placed’ children who, from L’Enfance nue onwards, speak to the reality of this ‘true life’ (a bitch) and this ‘elsewhere’ (a place ones doesn't go through again)? In Van Gogh, Pialat’s dream has the vigilant serenity of something meant less as a war machine than as a call to order and a reminder of the state of things. For us too. And for the ‘character’ too. 

For if the characters around Dutronc/Van Gogh are so extraordinary, if we love them with a kind of astonished gratitude (‘so, it’s still possible?’), it’s because they bear the mark of one of the unwritten laws that define the cinema character: namely, that it’s someone who has other things to do. I love how, right from the start, the doctor Gachet is chiefly preoccupied with his schedule, just as I love the bistro owner who, before injuring her foot, runs her establishment with the tightest control. I love Théo, who doesn’t come to Auvers very often, just as I love the sublime drunks, father and son, who are always standing in the doorway for a ‘nightcap’. 

A cinema character is someone who never belongs to just one film, who exists in other spaces, in other Leibnizian ‘compossible’ stories. The most beautiful ‘secondary’ characters in cinema (and only the secondary ones are beautiful) are those who, between two appearances on screen, give the impression of having lived, got some fresh air, taken on colour, taken their time. They are like clouds in shots of the sky: not made to ‘stick around’. It’s for others to stay: the stars, the extras. 

Pialat has never stopped reminding everyone – actors, characters, critics and, for a long time, the audience itself – of the right and the duty to look elsewhere and see where they might be. In his work, this elsewhere is not another world – apart, behind or beyond – it is entirely domestic. This is why for me he evokes Ford’s seriousness – adopted children – as much as Renoir’s hedonism – screwed women. In Van Gogh, this obsessive taste for domesticity is nourished magnificently by the recreation of an era – already a century ago – when there was still manual work, visible gestures and incontrovertible time. To define characters not by their function in the script or their hierarchy in the cast, but by their use of time and the concrete gestures of their occupation, remains a moral approach to character. 

The gestures of the characters in Van Gogh wouldn’t move us, however, if they only had the merit of their archaeological quality. In Pialat, whether famous not, actors have the slightly worried, hurried precision (a ‘brushstroke’ effect, basically) of someone who knows they might at any moment be emptied from the film or the scene. Or who, conversely, might absent themselves for a while, disappear, or leave the film forever, taking off on a line of flight like the popular heroes of the old Darty Real ads who were always so happy to say: ‘Sorry, I’ve got an emergency!’ If work is part of real life, there’s always work elsewhere. The character is more of a worker (it’s the star who is ‘worked’, the figure is ‘to be worked’). 

It's time to return, at the end of this digression, to Godard’s vehemence. As his prole says in Passion (‘In principle, the workers are right!’), I will say: in principle, Jean-Luc is right. Throughout this text, haven’t I encountered allegories, emblems, stars, avatars, specimens and other friendly monsters – figures inherited from other, often formidable, species? These figures are not, I admit, cinema characters. Originating elsewhere, they tend to ‘remain’ in the here and now of the image, inhabiting it as both their sole justification and their funerary abode. These are visual entities that (no longer) possess the use of nor the key to the thickness of the shot, who don’t know how to be small then large, near then far, present then absent. Their destiny is instead to stand guard and give the signal – always the same – at the outer limit between the screen and the theatre, between the theatre and the street, and so on. They are essential to the visual spectacle, to the contract with the viewer, except that the art of cinema has less to do with this spectacle than with that real invention that was the concept of the shot.

It's in relation to this concept that it is possible to say that there are, after all, at the furthest limit, cinema characters. But precisely: at the furthest limit. At the furthest limit, meaning in the interval of the environment. Because they are subject to all kinds of comings of goings, fort and da, phantoms and encounters. Because they are passengers in all kinds of off-screen space. Because a film, as we’ve said, is a place of passage, like a sky through which pass clouds of characters and thunderbolts of off-screen space. This violence of off-screen space has a history of which we (lifelong members of the Cahiers flock) have been the most willing victims and the best reporters. It passed through the heritage – Eisenstein, Hitchcock and Bresson – and the inheritors – Godard, Straub. But there was in all of them a dimension of mystical jubilation, of sadomasochistic astonishment and militant terror that was in keeping with the times. And the times changed. 

Imagination

So, it is Pialat who brings back the old chestnut of off-screen space by the most modest of means: that of character. At the front of the stage, in the ‘footlights’ of the shot, there is his ‘hero’, the painter Van Gogh, except that Van Gogh is not a character, he is a free figure from our collective history, a dance for us to dance, if we are up to it. Pialat, for his part, doesn’t hesitate, and his stroke of genius was to choose Dutronc, the only figure in French showbiz who has always been incapable of indignity. And in the background of the scene, in the ‘attic’ of the shot, is sometimes the object of the painting, an object that can descend on us – like in the sublime ‘salut’ of the brothel scene – with a violence which belongs to painting, and which remains, in my opinion, almost entirely foreign to cinema. 

And between the two, living their lives and having more than just that to do, there are characters. In a slice of life, as it happens. Natural, naturist and naturalist, all at once. We must understand that we only ever encounter them there, in this intermediary zone, in the middle of the ford between the world and the film. They are all ‘secondary’, and we recognize them by their way of constantly marking their territory, as if they were testing, for each other and for us, the very possibility of the shot up to its plasticity. In this, they retain something of a badly concealed burlesque (recall the speed with which Chaplin and Keaton ‘appeared’ by running from the back of the image). 

Pialat is, along with Rohmer, the one who has extended to the character the properties of the ‘Janus bifrons’ inherited from Bazin: ontological realism therefore weight of off-screen space. In Van Gogh, he has done this all the more supremely because he has always been a unique filmmaker who, filming a star or his concierge in one and the same movement, needs no democratic superego to grant his concierge the right to be the imaginary star of another film, parallel and simultaneous.

And what does it matter if we never see this film that no one will make, since we’ve gone back to imagining? For a long time, cinema rested on the need to see. Then it rested on the ethical possibility of the gesture that allows us to see. It remains all of this. But the means of allowing us to see must not discourage us from what we ourselves give and, must not hinder the exercise of that very human – and very political – faculty that is imagination. 

Excerpt from ‘Journal de l'an nouveau’, Trafic, n° 2, Spring 1992.Translated by Sam Warren Miell with small changes.