Amos Gitai, tonight

A text written for Libération in 1982 that wasn't included in the (not so) complete writings La maison cinéma et le monde (vol. 2). Thanks to Pierre Eugène for unearthing it and for highlighting its importance (see the quote from Gitai below).

I just finished my first film, House, and I had a friend, Daniel Cohen, who was in the Parisian branch of the Israeli Black Panthers, who called Daney and told him, "Listen, we can’t organise a proper screening, but there is a little space in Place Clichy with a half-broken monitor and video player, and are you ok to come?". And Serge Daney said yes immediately, asking what it was about. My friend explained. I remember because we couldn’t afford subtitles so I had to do a whispering of the subtitles into his ear. And for me, he was instantly the model of someone who has a good vision of cinema. A person who can absolutely mingle with celebrities but must also stay open if a young filmmaker arrives with his first video. He gave us his full attention. He watched House and the first chapter of Wadi. And after that, he wrote in Libération what was perhaps the first ever review of one of my films.  

Amos Gitai, in Serge Daney, le cinéma et le monde, a documentary by Serge Le Péron.   

 

Amos Gitai, tonight  

There’s a film  screening tonight at the Centre Pompidou (7pm) that mustn’t be missed. Its title is House and its auteur is Amos Gitai. Gitai is young and Israeli, and this house is located somewhere in Israel. As the film starts, in a deafening noise of bulldozers, the house is changing hands and being rebuilt. The house never stops changing. It was there before Israel came into being; it was once a beautiful Palestinian home. Then it became one of those "unclaimed" properties and was automatically allocated to Israelis. For a long time, it was inhabited by Algerian Jews. Today, a university professor is about to move in.   

Gitai has a simple idea: bring to the construction site all the previous owners of the house, from the Algerians (happy to have been relocated into better housing in town) to the elderly Palestinian who comes cutting a proud figure, speaking in English and vacantly staring at this house that still moves him. Gitai also captures the (cynical) points of view of the building contractor and the Arab workers, those with the bulldozer. This house is Arab, they know it, but what can they do? They are powerless, they say, and are holding their tongues. Gitai wants this house to become something both very symbolic and very concrete, he wants it to become a film character. He manages to  give us one of the most beautiful things a camera can record "live": different people looking at the same thing yet seeing different things, and being moved by this sight. In this half-collapsed house, genuine hallucinations begin to take shape.   

The idea behind the film is simple and the film is powered by the strength of this idea. Nothing more, nothing less. The camera holds on tight to this idea (but, thank goodness, is never at the service of it). In order to speak about this land and this house, Gitai has found the kind of emotional quality that we’re more accustomed to seeing in the work of Arab filmmakers (Alaouié, Khleifi).  

House was made in 1981 for Israeli television, which took offense and censored the film. The Israeli authorities had lost all composure in front of a film that demonstrated a cool serenity. Amos Gitai didn’t give up and was intent on showing his film in Europe. It was shown at festivals. In Vittel, it was the Club Med’s turn to lose its composure: it gave in to Israel’s official pressure, and the filmmaker had to show his film on video in his hotel room. It was then shown in Nantes. And it will be shown in Rotterdam. The filmmaker is in the middle of this inter-festival slalom and has become the courier for his own film. Tonight, the slalom is stopping by the Centre Pompidou.  

Published in Libération, 16-17 December 1982. Translated by Laurent Kretzschmar and Srikanth Srinivasan

What Can a Heart?

Another translation found by chance on the internet. Posted here with some revisions by me. 

What Can a Heart? 

Manoel de Oliveira, Francisca     

Both are standing, one in front of the other. 

Camilo: “No. But I know what I’m rejecting. You wouldn’t understand that.”   

José Augusto trembles, starts walking compulsively from one place to the other in the room; goes to the window, comes back to the table, leans on it, turns around, and goes to stand in front of his friend, progressively more irritated.   

José Augusto: “Am I, perchance, a cripple? You think I’m incapable of loving Fanny? Well, I shall awaken a great love in her... A love I would censure, stirred by my own severity. (…)” He stops in front of the table and concludes facing the camera: “To produce an angel in the fullness of martyrdom”.     

1. When these terrible sentences are uttered, we are in Vilar de Paraíso, in Camilo’s room, with that blue alcove and that desk turned towards us. Camilo was writing and his friend José Augusto entered coming from the background of the scenery. We are in the thirty sixth scene of Francisca, the last panel of the triptych by Manoel de Oliveira dedicated to frustrated love (Past and Present, Doomed Love). We are at the point when characters are going to irremediably put in motion their destiny and Oliveira his movie. To this cold program (“To produce an angel in the fullness of martyrdom”), Camilo, disturbed, can only respond: “Are you capable of doing that?”.     

We watch the birth of a passion. A countdown commences with this challenge. A challenge like the ones that are only proposed to a best friend. Like if two were needed to love one woman. Oliveira, even if he deals with Portuguese romanticism, is a filmmaker of the fiction. He knows that if “one is never right” and that “truth begins with two”, three are needed to share a crime, to articulate desire and passion.     

In Francisca, desire mainly connects the two men (it will be supressed) and the passion binds one of those men to a woman (but the movement of passion is infinite). Everything separates the two (young) men and, because of that precisely, there is a mutual fascination. What can link a poor young writer and an idle young aristocrat? The first one writes for money and to exists in the high society of Porto: he despises it (but also envies it) as the society despises him (but begins to recognize him, because he’s Camilo Castelo Branco, future author of Doomed Love, already adapted to film by Oliveira). The second, José Augusto, is without desires: rich, he doesn’t have anything to gain, he can only lose. Camilo drily tells him: “You love out of pride, you love the luxury of loving.” To the poor, the desire, to the rich, the passion. Desire is production, passion is waste.     

2. At the beginning of this passion there is a trade. Let’s translate: José Augusto basically says to his friend: this woman who doesn’t love you (to be understood as: who’s not for you), but whose love you place so highly, I’m going to make her love me; but I’m not going to possess her, she will be unhappy and, this way, I’ll avenge us. I’ll avenge you for not having had her, and me of only having desired her through you. To “produce an angel in the fullness of martyrdom” is, in its abrupt form, the minimum program that, in our societies, legitimises any exclusively male alliance. The suppression of the homosexual connection and the lowering of women produces the Woman, which often means an angel (sometimes a blue angel). But also, images, stars, madonnas, so easily fabricated and traded between Catholics (see Buñuel).     

After, there is an accident. The woman doesn’t fit the description. There is a mistaken identity. Francisca, with her sweet aura, is just as cynical and amoral as José Augusto. Right from the start, questioned by Camilo, she lets escape twice, as if by distraction: “The soul is a vice”. On the other hand, at the end of scene 36, José Augusto sums up the terrible destiny awaiting him: “Ashes instead of desire. Conscience instead of passion.” Cold determination, without object. The accident is that José Augusto and Francisca are similar, doomed to oscillate in the same direction, like people put face to face with one another with synchronous hesitations. One can use the other’s weapons, turn them against him. Unhappiness is transformed into pleasure, resignation into victory: everything is done to have the last word. This way, Francisca has a secret weapon that lets her break apart the romantic duo and reinstate the infernal trio: she writes (to whom? It doesn’t matter) that she is mistreated, abandoned, maybe even abused. Her letters fall into the hands of that other writer, Camilo, who gives them back to José Augusto. The blow is terrible: this woman who gave herself to be read is worse than if she had cheated on her (future) husband. José Augusto follows his script to its last consequence: marry this woman that he abducted and not touch her.  

Finally, between the two there is a game of hot cockles. Francisca inverted José Augusto’s challenge the moment where she shouted this sentence: “You love me, I swear”. Haunting sentence. There is no possible escape for this mutual upping of the ante, to this series of challenges. Like in Truffaut’s latest movie – but without the residues of fetishism – the passion is without end, inexhaustible. It can only disappear with the disappearance of the bodies from where it originates. And even then.     

3. In desire, the problem is never knowing exactly what the other wants. It’s this not-knowing that makes one desire even more. What counts in passion is what the other can, what he/she is capable of. I highlighted, in a succinct manner (but the whole film has the conciseness of a theorem), how Francisca went from the ploys of desire (José Augusto wants to cancel Camilo out by pretending to fulfil his desire) only to end on the side of the forcing of passion. Between José Augusto and Francisca there is an infinite and above all indeterminate game, a game “without qualities”, an “other state”, to use the words of Musil. Because at the heart of passion, as its empty driving force, there is a fundamental uncertainty. The uncertainty isn’t randomness (this was the biggest re-discovery of “modern cinema”), just as it isn’t ignorance or false certainty (that the classics spoke about so well). It’s something stranger.     

Let’s consider the moments when certain sentences of the dialogue are repeated. Everything happens as if the fact that a sentence was uttered (by an actor) and then heard (by a spectator) doesn’t ensure its guaranteed existence. As if it was necessary to risk with sounds what in past times was risked with images: the continuity errors. As if the words of the dialogues were things to which the starting point and one of its ending points had to be pointed out. Splitting of the dialogue. Never has the refusal of naturalism and the necessity to adopt in all things (and words are things) a point of view, an angle, been taken so far.     

Oliveira says he’s only interested in representation. And he says so without doctrine whatsoever – in over 50 years of cinema, he has experimented with everything: documentary, naturalist tales, social comedy, live capture and editing. In Francisca, free from any naturalist concerns, faced with the entirely artificial material he has chosen (text, set), he ensures this relation of uncertainty permeates the whole film. It isn’t just at the heart of the passion that consumes characters, it is at the heart of we shouldn’t be afraid to call his “aesthetics”, especially as it’s something quite rare nowadays. 

4. There is in Oliveira (like in Syberberg, Bene or Ruiz, other great baroques) a provisory forgetting of any idea of the referent. Each “figure” has to enunciate its identity, show its way of working, be tested according to its duration, its solidness, its velocity. What is the other capable of? But also: what is this or that other represented figure capable of? Characters or sets, details or ensembles, objects or bodies. We can see Francisca as a quite comedic film (in the same way Méliès can be comedic), in every time a figure “forgets” to behave according to the naturalist code. I’m thinking of that moment, that always makes one laugh, in which José Augusto enters Camilo’s room on horseback. A horse, instead of champing at the bit in the limbo of the set, enters the scene and, all of a sudden, unbalances the space. Or then, it’s a character in the foreground that, instead of belonging to the action, immobilizes himself like the annoying head of another spectator, becoming a dead part of the shot, an area of lesser life in the scene. Like José Augusto – at the end of a meal where Camilo was really talkative – who doses off on the foreground. Or even the first shot of the film (the ball). “I always try to find a line that separates the machine from the actors. Because the job of the machine consists in fixing the work of the actors from the film theatre, the place of the spectator” says Oliveira. As long as this line hasn’t been found, it can’t be said what is near and what is far: the horse has the right to come nearer and the sleeping to become absent. 

Oliveira is an immense scenographer. Because he doesn’t reduce his work to “acting styles”. The choice of actors and faces follows a search even more paradoxical then Bresson’s: if the latter is interested in eventual “models”, Oliveira takes them as landscapes. Faces, in Francisca, are assemblies of objects in which each one obeys its own law and ignores the others. This is not true (people will say to me) about Camilo, but that is because Camilo is a being of desire, and that desire makes him “consist”, identical to himself, in every scene. On the other hand, José Augusto and Francisca, beings of passion and decomposed by this passion, are submitted to a vertiginous anamorphosis. 

5. Speed, or dromoscopy, is talked about a lot in this day and age. I fact, we wonder how it was possible to talk so much about movies without having questioned the relative velocities of the bodies that they set in motion. “The cinema”, says Oliveira, “is what we put in front of the camera.” But to record what? The speed of decomposition and re-composition, of evaporation and sedimentation In Oliveira’s world, desire composes and passion decomposes: an eye can be faster or slower than a gaze, a mouth than what it says. Francisca has a way of “having her head spin” and José Augusto of “losing his senses” that shouldn’t be analysed solely in sociological terms (decay of aristocracy), but should be referred to the materialist question par excellence: what can a body? 

Two fingers perched on a table, a shoe thrown far away, servants (always very fast), slow horse riders, letters, loves, all have different speeds. In Francisca, it is very rare for two characters to be given the same speed. Quite the opposite. If they are so quickly separated, if so many serious things are so hastily said, if the film’s narration is so prone to gaps, it’s because they are all in orbit, like stars or electrons. They only meet in precise moments, certainly calculable, but with a certain margin of uncertainty, like Heisenberg said of the atoms. 

Atoms. This is the decisive word. I don’t see any other filmmaker (except Biette and his “theatre of matters”) that is so close to old school materialism. The strength of Oliveira is that he has chosen to deal with one of the type-scripts of religion (“To produce an angel in the fullness of martyrdom”) with the lack of pathos and the detached acuity of a pagan philosopher. Passion affects the bodies in full and each part of those bodies in full and each part of these parts in full, etc. In full and in a different manner. There is no end to the burning uncertainty of passion, especially not death. 

6. The most beautiful scene of the film takes place near the end. Francisca has died, José Augusto has sent her to be autopsied and saved her heart in a jar and that jar in a chapel. The red organ terrorises the maid. This is not a vain fetish. To that muscle-heart, to that entirely material heart, the same thing is asked: what is it capable of? What can that shrunken object? The answer is given by José Augusto himself: “We live torn to pieces, in search of our bodies scattered all over the earth. The belly screams, wanting to forget sin. The liver moans, pressed against the right side. And the heart, in a thousand pieces, goes down wretched alleyways asking for the blood that forms it.”. 

What can cinema? An old man, one of the great living filmmakers, gives his answer. Maybe, he says to us, that cinema is like that body. It’s necessary that it recomposes itself, organ by organ. Down with the storyboard, down with the museum. Long live the cinema.    

First published in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 330, December 1981. Reprinted in La maison cinéma et le monde, vol 2, P.O.L., 2002. Translation by Tera Toma with some changes by me.     

Vecchiali Shoots in Sequence

Surprise translation spotted on the internet and reproduced here with minor changes. It's from the second volume of The Cinema House and the World which we understand is currently being translated by Christine Pichini for Semiotext(e). 

Vecchiali Shoots in Sequence*   

Trous de mémoire is the title of Paul Vecchiali’s next-to-last film. He shares top billing in this strange, unfashionable “impromptu” with Françoise Lebrun. Despite appearances, a whole ars poetica. 

What filmmakers and cameras have in common is that they sometimes take stock**. They wonder how to “take some distance with the shots [champ]” while plonked in the middle of a field [champ]. They wonder where they stand, and with whom? How to keep focus, how to stay sane? That's when they're ripe for the impromptu. Able to shoot in a single day what a lifetime would not be too long to ponder. The impromptu is less heavy-going than the appraisal, less serious than the will. It has the slight cheek of the check-up and the half-time break. It allows us to move on to other things, to get on with things [d’enchaîner].     

Owing to the bond between Paul Vecchiali and Françoise Lebrun (and, of course, director of photography Georges Strouvé), Trous de mémoire is an impromptu. Stubborn, discontented, “untimely”, Vecchiali is one of those all too rare people who put a lot of energy into not letting themselves be trapped by any a priori form (or formula, or format). We've seen him move from feature-length films to shorts, from cinema to theatre, from television to sketches or impromptus. This freedom of movement has always been his strength. It gives others (those poor things called journalists, for example) the freedom to say, half the time, that Paul Vecchiali matters to them. Before moving on to the next thing [d’enchaîner].     

A man arranges a meeting with a woman in a green space, a field in the outskirts of the city. Four years ago, the woman left him, and each of them, as they say, "remade" their lives. He's a filmmaker (Vecchiali plays the role) and she's an editor (this is Françoise Lebrun). He says he still loves her, and he's doing everything he can to win her back. They're alone on screen, with only a bench, trees, grass and daylight as props. They're not going to win any costume Oscars, dressed like they're part of a minor news item. They'll do nothing (not even make love, much to the man's chagrin), and the day won't end until the woman has left a second time, vaguely won back and still unattainable. Each will cry in turn, and a strange emotion will engulf the spectator – even the Vecchialian – who has shared this field with them. Before this spectator, too, moves on to something else.     

Presented with such a deliberately scanty set-up (one set, two actors, some text), the viewer tends to think the film's stakes must be inversely proportional to its pared-down richness. Is it a question of whether the man will succeed in his bid to win her back? For a moment, we can see them playing battleship, like schoolboys. You can see that he's “scoring points”, that the woman might give in, and that they might both try a second “first time”. But no, that's not it. The suspense is a red herring.     

Faced with a “face-to-face” encounter, the viewer thinks all that remains is to watch for the moments when the profound truth of the characters, like a little bird caged by the camera, will inevitably emerge. In sentences, postures, slips of the tongue and silences. Are we – though in the open air and broad daylight – in a closed-door domestic setting, a game of truth?*** No, the unveiling is a red herring too. There's no time for truth.     

Then there's language. Vecchiali has always excelled at the “on the bench” genre, at bitchy tit-for-tat and home truths. Trous de mémoire is a documentary about how one man goes about things when his job (as a filmmaker) is to convince and seduce. How he goes about things with words, how he indiscriminately uses psychological interrogation, emotional harassment, blackmail and the complicity of memories. It's a catalogue of everything one can do with words to disarm the other: prepared speeches, general ideas, singular words, cries of pain, mute gestures.     

But the impromptu is a serious genre. It's an opportunity to speak your mind and define your “ars poetica”. Molière was no different. Nor were Cocteau, Giraudoux or Gabriel Fauré. There is a Vecchialian ars poetica, which is also a morality. Why did he shoot Trous de mémoire in one day and in broad daylight? Without break and without shade. Was it not to have two parallel flows, one of words (which carry desire) and one of light (which marks time)? To say that a cloud passing in the sky is the same thing as an angel passing in conversation?**** That there is no other truth than that of sequencing [l’enchaînement], that it is better to contradict oneself, like Walt Whitman, than to stop talking? We must sequence, says Lyotard in The Differend, but the code for sequencing is never necessary, it is only ever suitable or improper. (For readers who would like to know more about Vecchiali, Lyotard's book can only be beneficial).     

Vecchiali's unseemliness is not about vanishing, body and heart, into the great oceanic whole, or drowning in a second-hand “Panta rhei”. Quite the opposite, in fact. No one is more ready to fight against whatever hinders desire or prevents it from being expressed and asserted. No one is more terrified by the idea of the extinction of desire. The strongest moment in Trous de mémoire comes when the man, who knows he won't win the woman back, says that his desire is always greater than the encyclopedia of objects – seemly or not – that whet his appetite.     

We need to be able to sequence desires the way we sequence words, the way the camera sequence images and the way light sequence things: in other words, non-stop. It's nothing less than a Sadian project. To sustain the world, tirelessly, solely by getting a hard-on for reality.    

First published in Libération on 25th October 1985. Reprinted in La maison cinéma et le monde, vol 2, P.O.L., 2002. Translation by Sam WM with some corrections by me. 

* The French title, "Vecchiali enchaîne en scène", is untranslatable. It is somewhere between “Vecchiali links in scenes” and “Vecchiali links in on stage”.    

** Faire le point does mean to take stock but it also means to focus.     

*** Le Jeu de la vérité, "The Game of Truth", was a French television programme in which celebrities had to field questions from members of the public. It was often controversial, and earlier in October 1985 had featured an episode in which the singer Dalida had been submitted to a painful interrogation of her personal life.    

*** The French phrase un ange passe, "an angel is passing", is used in conversational lulls.  

Serge Daney in 2023

Time for the annual round-up. It's normally a muted affair but this was another big year for "Serge Daney in English".

Twenty-one years after Daney passed away, a third book of translations was published (two in so many years): Footlights, thanks to Nicholas Elliot, the translator, and the team at Semiotext(e), the publisher. The proof, if any, that amateur translation blogs and official publishing are not incompatible since this book had already been translated through a patchwork of initiatives over the years. 

It's not all. Although not in English, Pierre Eugène's fabulous PhD thesis on Serge Daney finally found its way to a book format: Exercises in Re-reading, Serge Daney: 1962-1982. 

Since Footlights (La Rampe, Daney's first book) is a selection of texts published between 1970 and 1982, the two books form a magnificent coincidence, made even more unlikely by the mysteries of publishers' timelines (Pierre's project was many, many years in the making while Nicholas' translation took just over a year from conception to print).

Could this blog bring you a special "double bill" combining a text from La Rampe with its analysis by Eugène? We'll see. 

Elsewhere, it was a rather low harvest but good quality crop of 'other" translations:

• In Praise of Tati, co-translated with Andy Rector. You can also read Nicholas Elliott's translation here. 
• Balls so Heavily Loaded, one of the many texts Daney wrote about tennis, co translated with Srikanth Srinivasan.
• Love for the Thugs, Daney's notes from the film premiere of Antigone by Straub and Huillet, published in a Danish film magazine. 
• When Serge Daney Met Ogawa Shinsuke, the transcription of Microfilms with Ogawa Shinsuke. One I've somehow missed for many years. 

Two other potential book projects didn't see the light of day:

• A book on Daney from a university-funded project: Serge Daney and Queer Cinephilia. 
• Emmanuel Burdeau's book project for a cine-biography of Daney (the lack of information making us wonder if the book will materialise).

Wishing all Daney readers (and everybody else!) a happy 2024. If you happened to be in New York in January, don't miss the Serge Daney season at the Film at Lincoln Center in January.

In Praise of Tati

This month (December 2023) sees the release of a second book of translations of Serge Daney by the team at Semiotext(e) (Footlights). It's a translation of La Rampe, Daney's first book. I'll write more about it once I get my hands on it (it's high on the Christmas list!), but in the meantime, an extract has been published by the New Left Review.

In Praise of Tati, translated by Nicolas Elliott, appears in Footlights: Critical Notebook 1970-1982, published this month by Semiotext(e). The text was originally published in book form as ‘Éloge de Tati’ in La Rampe: Cahiers critique 1970-1982 published by Cahiers du Cinéma/Gallimard in 1983. 

And for those fascinated by the translation in English of Serge Daney, you can even do a like-for-like comparison of Elliott's translation with the one Andy Rector and I published here a little while ago.  

When Serge Daney Met Ogawa Shinsuke

Finding new translations will never end. Here's yet another one that I've missed over the years. It's a fine transcription in English of one of the episodes of Microfilms (Daney's radio show). There are so many other episodes that are just as wonderful and could benefit from a translation. 

When Serge Daney Met Ogawa Shinsuke

Transcription of Microfilms with Ogawa Shinsuke. November 5th, 1989. France Culture. Translation by Sis Matthé.

Love for the Thugs

Balthazar, the Danish film journal, has just published a dossier on Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet which includes two pieces by Serge Daney written at the occasion of advanced screenings of their films in Paris.

The Straubs

Published on Oct 3rd, 1984 in Libération after the screening of Class Relations. This piece is already on line on Kinoslang. 

Love for the Thugs

An excerpt of “Journal de l’an present”, Daney's introduction to the 3rd edition of Trafic (August 1992), on a screening of Antigone. Reprinted in La Maison cinéma et le monde 4: Le Moment Trafic 1991-1992 (2015, Éditions P.O.L).

In Praise of Tati

I recently went through old files and found this translation of Serge Daney's Praise of Tati which Andy Rector and I completed a while back. This text from La Rampe means the whole book has somewhat been translated through a patchwork of various efforts over the years. A good teaser for the real thing: Nicholas Eliot's new translation of the book to be published by Semiotext(e) later this year.

In Praise of Tati 

1. Each film by Tati marks at the same time (a) a moment in the work of Jacques Tati, (b) a moment in the history of French cinema and society, and (c) a moment in film history. The six films he has realised since 1948 are among those that have punctuated our history best. Tati isn’t just a rare filmmaker, the author of a few films (all of them good by the way), he’s a living point of reference. We all belong to a period in Tati’s cinema: the author of these lines belongs to the one that stretches from Mon Oncle (1958: the year before the New Wave) to Playtime (1967: the year before the events of May ‘68). There is hardly anybody else barring Chaplin who, since the sound era, has had this privilege, this supreme authority: to be present even when he is not filming, and, when filming, to be precisely up to the moment – that is, just a little bit ahead. Tati: a witness first and last. 

2. A demanding witness, so an awkward one. Early on, Tati refuses easy options. He doesn’t exploit his brand-image; he doesn’t manage the characters he created: the postman in Jour de fête disappears and even Hulot disperses himself – fake Hulots are everywhere criss-crossing Playtime. He takes a comedian’s biggest risk: to lose one’s audience by leading it too far. But where? Admirable as it is, his conscience as an artist would move us less if it were mere aristocratic loftiness or the haughty retreat of a man at odds with his time and with cinema. But it is something else altogether. If we put into perspective the six films that Tati has realised since Jour de fête (1948), we find that they draw a line of convergence which is that of all post-war French cinema. Perhaps because, even though a comedian enjoys fewer permissions than anyone else to distance himself from the present, especially to be critical, with Tati we best perceive, film after film, the typical fluctuation of French cinema between populism and modern art. Who is capable today of capturing and miming the most ordinary gestures (a waiter serving a drink, a police officer directing traffic) while at the same time integrating these gestures into a construction as abstract as a Mondrian painting? Tati of course, the last mime-theoretician. Thus, each one of his films is a witness-milestone of the “how is it going?” of French cinema. This has been the case for thirty years. Jour de fête is the witness of post-war euphoria, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot and Mon Oncle testify the longevity of a very French genre (social satire) in the Tradition of Quality, and Playtime, this great emancipatory film, builds La Défense* even before the existence of La Défense, but it already says that French cinema can no longer deal with the gigantism of French reality, that it is no longer – if I may say so – “up to the task”, and that it is going to degrade with internationalisation, meaning the Americanisation which was already threatening the postman in Jour de fête. Effectively, his next two films are no longer entirely French (Traffic is a co-production, a very European film) nor entirely cinema (Parade is a commission for Swedish television).  

3. Tati isn’t just the exemplary and apologetic witness of the retreat of French cinema and the deterioration of the profession, he takes the cinema in its current technological state. And strangely, for someone so often accused of being backward-looking, he just wants to innovate. It’s now a known fact that Tati didn’t wait for anyone to start revamping film soundtracks, as early as Jour de fête. Thirty years later, we’re less aware that Parade is an extraordinary foray into the world of video. In fact, the big subject of Tati’s films is what we today call the media. Not in the limited sense of “the great methods of communication” but in the sense intended by MacLuhan: “the specialised extensions of the mental and psychic capacities of man”, the extensions of our bodies, in sum or in part. Jour de fête is already the story of a postman who, by fussing over the delivery of the message, ends up losing it. A child will end up with the message (a simple letter), but, distracted by a travelling circus, won’t transmit it – a beautiful metaphor for the intransitivity of modern art. But at that stage, the audience has understood that the real message is the medium, the postman, Tati. The media are the fireworks launched too early and by mistake at the end of Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot that transformed Hulot in an illuminated scarecrow, prefiguring the brilliant ending of Parade where everybody – meaning anyone – becomes the illuminated trace of a colour in an electronic landscape. And the media are also present in Mon Oncle, in this very surprising stance at the time not to make the audience laugh in ridicule at the programmes shown on the TV set bought by the “modern” couple, but to reduce television to the abstract and almost experimental spectacle of sudden changes in intensity of the pale light illuminating the ridiculous garden. The list is endless. Another hundred examples could be mentioned. The essential being that at any moment and for anyone (in a kind of generalisation-democratisation of comedy that is at the great gamble of Tati’s last three films, and perhaps the recognition that we have all become comedians), there is the possibility to become media. From the doorman in Playtime who, because the glass door has been shattered, becomes the door himself, to the maid who is terrorised by the idea of going through the electronic ray that opens the garage door where her bosses have stupidly locked themselves (Mon Oncle), there is for the human body the (threatening and comic) possibility to become itself a limit, a threshold (and not like in Burlesque, scatological depth). Modern art by definition.

4. Tati doesn’t condemn the modern world (shoddy and wasteful) by proving that the old world (thriftiness and human warmth) is better. Apart from Mon Oncle, there is no praise of the old world: we could even say, without too many paradoxes, that he is only interested in one thing: how the world is modernising. And if there is such a thing as a logic in his films, from the country roads of Jour de fête to the highways of Traffic, it is the logic that continues to irreversibly lead men from the countryside to the cities. Tati tends to show that, in accordance with recent (schizoanalytic) descriptions of capitalism, this media future of the human body works very well in as much as it doesn’t function. There are no burlesque catastrophes with Tati (of the type we can still find with the Americans: The Party by Blake Edwards) but rather a fatality in success that evokes Keaton. Everything that is attempted, planned, programmed works, and any comic element comes precisely from the fact that it works. Watching Playtime, we tend to forget that all the attempted actions are reasonably crowned with success: Hulot ends up meeting the man with  the bandaged nose that he had an appointment with, he fixes the lamp post, makes up with the manufacturer of silent doors, he even manages, in extremis, to get a small gift to the young American woman. On the same token, the opening of the Royal Garden is a success: the large majority of guests dine, dance and pay. Nothing really fails in Playtime, but nothing works either. 

5. The cinema has so accustomed us to laugh at failure, to enjoy mockery, that we end up believing that, watching Playtime, we are still laughing against something even though it is nothing of the sort. No “punchline” [chute] with Tati. The gags are always amputated of their punchline, of the moment for laughs. Or it’s the opposite: there is a punchline but we haven’t seen the gag being set up. This is not a crafty and elegant way to generate laughter by playing with ellipses, it’s something deeper: we are in a world where the less it works the more it works, so in a world where a punchline does not have the demystifying or awakening effect that it would have had if failure was still a possibility. The same goes with the other meaning of the word chute [fall]. We are dealing with bodies that are not made comical because they can fall. This is the non-humanist side of Tati’s cinema. What has always been “human” in comedy is to laugh at the one who falls. Laughter is only unique to man (to the spectator) if falling is unique to the human body (on spectacle). Chaplin is the archetype of the one who falls, who gets back up and who makes others fall, the king of tripping. In Tati’s film, one rarely falls because there is nothing “uniquely human” anymore. For me, one of the most beautiful moments of Playtime is when a client of Royal Garden, thinking that a waiter is offering a chair, sits down without looking back (she’s a snob) and falls in slow motion. Funny gag, very beautiful fall, but what are we exactly laughing about? And what are we laughing about in Parade when the audience is asked to mount an uncontrollable mule? Or when the clowns keep falling on top of each other after jumping over a pommel horse? Falling in these instances is merely a movement of the body like any other. As a non-humanist filmmaker, Tati is logically fascinated by the human species, this animal described by Giraudoux as standing upright “to receive less rain and pin more medals to his chest”. What is comical for Tati, is that it stands upright and that it works, and that it can work. Infinite surprise, inexhaustible spectacle. 

To the dialectics of the up and down, of what is erected or collapses (the carnivalesque tradition, a situation illustrated by Buñuel: from the insect-level camera to Simon of the desert on top of his column), Tati would be substituting another comedy where it is the act of standing upright which is funny and the act of wobbling (how Hulot walks) which is human.   

* La Defense:  Europe's largest purpose-built business district, located on the outskirts of Paris. 

First published in Cahiers du Cinéma, issue 303, September 1979. Re-printed in La rampe, cahiers critiques 1970-1982, Gallimard, 1983. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and Andy Rector.

Upcoming Translation of La Rampe (The Footlights)

Thanks to @(yknmb77) for being the first to spot that Nicholas Elliott's translation of La Rampe for Semiotext(e) has appeared on the internet. There is very little detail about the book so far and you can ignore the announced publication date (it certainly wasn't published last December; I know that Nicholas was still working on it at the time). 

But it's fantastic news to see Semiotext(e) continuing to publish Daney in English. If you want to know more about La Rampe, Daney's first book, head here. A lot of its content has been published online over the years.

Balls so heavily loaded...

© Christian Poulin 2023

Daney loved tennis, and wrote about it with the same inventivity as his film criticism.

Balls so heavily loaded...

Have you ever watched a tennis match on mute, switching off the sound of your TV? Yes, in all likelihood. You must have observed the extent to which it is no longer the same thing: of course, it’s still very beautiful to watch, very choreographic and all that, but there is suddenly a strong feeling of unreality, of gratuitousness, a somewhat boring prettiness. The sound is missing: the murmurs of the crowd, the referee’s announcements in English, Connors’ grunts etc. But what is missing above all is the sound of the ball, the regular cadence of this noise that may reasonably be compared to heartbeats. If you have played tennis and have become blind (an admittedly absurd hypothesis, but a useful one for my demonstration), you would know how to identify the types of shots from their sound: a first and a second serve don’t produce the same music, an ace produces a specific sound, a topspin lob and a high volley are not the same. And if, blind or not, you have never played tennis in your life, it’s no different: the sound of the ball is what keeps you in the match, what allows you to stay focused and avoid being distracted by thousand different incidents in the image. This sound allows you to not see everything; it regulates your vision.

Have you ever seen a tennis ball? Yes, in all likelihood. At least one of those old tennis balls that one throws against the wall in the schoolyard, deflated, hairy, dead. And what about those balls, yellow at Roland-Garros and white at Wimbledon, that, over a few games, are hit with a great violence before ending up in the hands of the children that collect them? The tennis ball is seamless, its weight must not exceed 58.47 grams and its diameter would cause a scandal if it were smaller than 0.0635 metre. A tennis ball is a very concrete object.

Have you ever thought about what a tennis ball represents? For example, if you are watching tennis on television, it represents your gaze. This is why the cameras are always located high up, so that you don’t miss an inch of the ball’s trajectories, so that you don’t lose sight of your gaze, and so that, from your armchair, you can distinguish between the awful balls that are out and the flawless ones that are in. And because it’s flattering to be placed in the position of the umpire, you don’t ask yourself if, perhaps, tennis might be filmed differently. Ignoring the ball, if I may say so, losing sight of it for an instant? But that’s a different story.

For minor players, even for the good ones, the ball is an object to get rid of at any cost, and get rid of properly, if they want to play well. But it’s completely different for great players. There must surely be a moment when this concrete, hairy and regulated object becomes abstract, ideal and phantasmal. The ball, constantly racing to either side of the net, embodies many things: hatred, phobia, self-assertion, fear of winning, desire to lose or to punish. In any case, each player rushes toward it, enacting a sort of choreographic enigma. And who can say that it’s not a part of their body or even of their soul that they are sending away when returning  the ball? 

Take Connors. He “leans into the ball”, as they say, grunting even. He goes even further:  he wraps his body around the ball like a pelota player in a large court. If he could follow the ball to the opposite side, he would do so. Sometimes, no longer able to contain himself, he breaks a taboo and jumps over the net (which is forbidden), trying to make us understand that he and the ball are one and  the same thing. He’s a formidable fighter who wants to be everywhere, and when he returns the ball, it’s himself that he propels forward, to the great satisfaction of the audience who intuitively understand the generosity inherent in the way that Connors is the ball.  

Take Borg now. He’s not a very talkative player, dispiritingly lucid and modest. Yet, he always says the same thing: I am the best because I play each point as if it were the match point. For him, no minor balls, only major ones. If he played against you, not only would he win (6-0, 6-0, 6-0), he would also find a way to play each point  as if his life depended on it. He’s overdoing it, you would say once defeated. But no. Borg’s supremacy these last few years has only been about that: for him, the ball is just the ball, it doesn’t mean anything, it carries no affect, no hate, no desire to please or to be loved. As Gertrude Stein might say “a ball is a ball is a ball is…” 

There remains the McEnroe mystery. Observe him between volleys, he’s the opposite of Borg. Borg is a moving object that must never stop: his legwork, his way of shuffling back to the baseline, of constantly moving, his presence are impressive to all his opponents. Except for McEnroe. Between two shots, in a time window that might be infinitesimal, the American unwinds, disassembles himself, withdraws. I’m not talking about his mind, which is sharper than a fox, I’m talking about his body and this bit of the subconscious that courses through his body. He is so proud and big-headed that he always seems a bit surprised to see the ball coming back at  him. For him, the ball is the other, less the adversary than adversity itself, forcing him, to the joy of everyone, to face up.  

First published in Libération, 7 July 1981. Reprinted in Ciné journal, 1981-1986, Cahiers du cinéma, 1986. Translated by Laurent Kretzschmar and Srikanth Srinivasan.   

Serge Daney in 2022

Daney making his only "film": Proof by Prince in 1988

Here's the usual yearly round-up. 

2022 marked thirty years since Serge Daney passed away and, in the context of this blog's title, the big event was the publication of The Cinema House and the World, the first book of English translations of Daney's writings. Clearly the highlight of the year and a must-read if you follow this blog.

I normally do a count of new translations in the year but the new book added about 200 texts. Sticking to new translations freely avaiable, fifteen were released this year, links below.

Night of the Living Dead 

The Off-Screen Discourse 

Political Space - Stories of A

Rio Bravo, An Adult Art

Rio Lobo, The One Grows Old 

Tennnis' Telegenic Advantage

Apocalypse Now

Grey Matter

A Moral of Perception (Straub-Huillet’s From the Clouds to the Resistance)

Notes on Saló

The State - Syberberg (“Hitler, a film from Germany”)

Samuel Fuller, Bad Reputation

White Dog, Samuel Fuller

The Fury of Storytelling (The Big Red One)

Wim's Movie

With now a significant chunk of Daney's writing available in English (although it's still less than 20% of his total output), it can be hard to make sense of the chronology. Check out Daney's bibliography in case it helps. 

Here's to more good news on Daney. There are at least three books on Daney in the making (in French: Pierre Eugène's critical reading of Daney's early period and Emmanuel Bourdeau's biography, and in English: a collection of essays from a multi-year seminar on Daney). We could also see Semiotext(e), the publishers of this year's highlight, release another book. 

I rarely mention non-Daney topics but one can't ignore the passing of the "strobgoard" or "JMS/JLG" (including Danièle Huillet) who were so important to Daney. Major losses.

Happy New Year to you all.

The Cinema House and the World (review)

Could the lack of English translations of Serge Daney be finally over? The publication by Semiotext(e) of the first volume of Daney's "complete" writings, The Cinema House and the World, as well as their appetite for more (They are thinking about the three other volumes and La Rampe is in-progress) certainly feels like a pivotal moment. 

Until now, English readers had few options to ready any of Daney's 1,742 written texts (estimated from Pierre Eugène's Daney.net). They could contend with reading him in French (I know many of you do) or work from translations gleaned online (all hopefully listed on this blog). The only book published in English, Postcards from the Cinema, was an odd one: it wasn't written by Daney (apart from the first chapter "The Tracking Shot in Kapo") and takes the form of a long interview conducted by Cahiers du cinéma comrade Serge Toubiana (partly reviewed by Daney who died before completing the project).

So it's a key moment and fantastic news. Let's hope it's sufficiently successful to encourage future attempts. 

What to make of this new translation? 

If you're looking for a review, check out those: Richard Brody's or Beatrice Layza's, but also Thomas Quist's, Nick Pickerton's and Ed Halter's. 

If you need a taster, several texts are free online: A. S. Hamrah's introduction, Daney's reviews of Rio Bravo (1962), Night of the Living Dead (1970), Apocalypse Now (1979), We Can't Go Home Again (1980), Elephant Man (1981) as well as a coverage of a tennis game (1979).

To learn more about the book contents and its 200 entries, see this blog post.

Below are simply my notes about the book, mostly from a translator's point of view. Full confession: I am nowhere near finishing it (has anyone read it in full?). I'm slow, the book is more conducive to "dip in and out" reading, like an encyclopaedia, and, despite having received the digital galleys ahead of the publication, I could only brave these 600 pages in paper.

1. First delight: A. S. Hamrah's reference to the cinephiles who for decades translated Daney bit by bit, in the form of "samizdats" (about 200 texts, check out the right-hand column of this blog). It reminded me how many people went about it, sustaining the interest for Daney and laying the ground for a proper book. I've tried to list of all the translators I could find. Credit to them all (and to their editors / publishers).

• Andy Rector
• Adrian Martin
• Annwyl William
• Arindam Sen & Ivana Miloš
• Bill Krohn
• Brian Holmes
• Charles Cameron Bal
• Charles Fairbanks
• Chloé Galibert-Laîné 
• Chris Darke
  
• Craig Keller
• Daniel Fairfax
  
• David Davidson
• Fergus Daly
• Frank Matcha
• Hemlata Agarwal Beck
• Jack Siebert
  
• John Barrett
• John Kelsey
  
• Jonathan Rosenbaum
• K. Chandrasekhar
• Liz Heron
• Mark A. Cohen
• Michael Temple
• James S. Williams 
• Kurt Walker
  
• Michael Witt
• Moritz Pfeifer
• nletore & newland
• Otis Wheeler
  
• Paul Chouchana
• Paul Grant
  
• Seth Price
• Sonja Bertucci
  
• Steve Erickson
• Srikanth Srinivasan
• Stoffel Debuysere
  
• Ted Fendt
• Tom Mes
  
• Tom Milne 

(If you spot someone I missed, let me know the reference and I'll add them to the list).

2. Take a bow to Christine Pichini for her fabulous work on the 200 or so articles in this first volume. Her translation is a genuine attempt to live up to the tone, directness and simplicity of Daney while avoiding any form of academic translation (elucidation over style, anti-Daney), especially with the sometimes “heavy” texts from the 1970s. Most texts read fluidly (Daney nearly always does, even when cryptic) and some really reflect Daney’s great ease of style, even in this early Cahiers period (e.g. the review of Annie Hall). I enjoyed how she plays with alternative syntax to Daney's sentences (a bold but necessary move, reforming all these long sentences in passive voice - she does this superbly). She also rightly ignores some untranslatable wordplays, something that will become harder in future volumes covering the Libération era (wordplays are a trademark style of the newspaper). I have found some very minor errors and omissions (a couple of instances of missing parentheses or short expressions here and there) but none of them really alter the text and I have been guilty of these myself. In the end, it's both the biggest translation effort and a great one too.

3.  A slight (very personal) frustration of not being able to spot clear choices in translating key Daneyian concepts. This is mainly because there are few over this period or that they present no difficulty in translating (e.g. the hated "progressive films"). Daney is both too precise to come up with easy formulas and too inventive to simply work with a small set of ideas. A lot of the ideas in this book are also in their infancy, evolve over time and tend to draw inspiration from the 1960s and 1970s French thinkers heavily used by Cahiers (Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Legendre, Althusser, etc) which Semiotext(e) are expert in translating. We'll come to this with late Daney ("the visual", "the image", "the films that watched our childhood", "the art of showing", etc).

4. A great regret that the publication of Pierre Eugène's wonderful study of Daney's writings between 1962 and 1982 (almost an exact time match with this book, plus La Rampe) appeared to be delayed again. It will be the essential guide to better understand Daney over this period.

5. A small point, this English edition inherit the problems of the original French one. This was the first volume of Daney's complete writings and over the years, its editorial choices and omissions became clear: not only it does not include texts from books published during Daney's lifetime (La Rampe for the period), but also interviews, collaborative and unsigned texts (the latter is particularly important as Cahiers, during the militant phase, in the spirit of collective responsibility, published many unsigned and unattributed articles, some surely written or co-written by Daney, see Daniel Fairfax's excellent The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma). Jonathan Rosenbaum spotted these gaps at the time of the publication of the first volumes in French and Pierre Eugene has since sourced multiple texts not included in the book. Such a large edition is also, perhaps inevitably, not error-proof with some small errors (one example: "Lemon Popsicle" and "Jaws 2" incorrectly dated 1976 instead of 1979).

6. This book and possible future ones sort of raise an existential question for this blog. Its raison d'être was the lack of (official) translations. What to do if translations abound? No need to duplicate and I have had a long-standing personal policy of not undermining genuine, official and affordable translation efforts. If Semiotext(e) is on track to translate the whole of Daney, so be it. It will take time though (the volume two of The Cinema House and the World is nearly twice the size with just over a thousand pages in French), so I may keep indulging readers of this blog with a few more samizdats.

P.S.: I will be in New York (city) Dec 4th - 9th for work and hope to find somewhere to meet readers or anyone interested. Let me know if interested (Twitter DM). Suggestions of format / locations welcome.

Night of the Living Dead

Yet another translation from The Cinema House and the World. Thanks to Caligari Press.

Night of the Living Dead

First published in Cahiers du Cinéma, issue 219, April 1970. Reprinted in La maison cinéma et le monde, Volume 1, P.O.L., 2011. Translation by Christine Pichini

The Off-Screen Discourse

A great text by Daney. With thanks to Sri for the translation and Pierre Eugène's expertise for helping make sense of the text.

 

The off-screen discourse – Illumination, Krzysztof Zanussi 

Illumination, or the crisis of an expert in Gierek’s communist Poland. Will he hold on to his place, that of an elite scientist at the heart of the knowledge and power apparatuses that he was destined for? Frantisek navigates a crisis as well as several strata of Polish society. Sidelined, proletarianised, hastily married, made a beggar, he gazes myopically at the world and its inhabitants.  

In addition to marking the character as an intellectual, the glasses equipping this gaze that can only see so far constitute a screen behind the screen. Through these glasses, the myopic and gifted intellectual immediately introduces some connotation (and therefore some desire): we do not know what he sees. Denotation is suspended. To denote is to encounter something that he can name and that, in return, can call him by his name, anchor him, make him fit into the apparatus. From a cinematic perspective, Frantisek’s crisis comes from his myopia. From this principle, and in accordance with a structure typical to “modernist” cinema, the carrier of this myopic gaze can function as a pivot or a pointer, the only one endowed with desire in a world where there is none, the privileged and mute carrier of questions, welcoming answers with fluctuating attention. Hysteria in East European countries can simply be the scientist ill at ease in the system, the one embarrassed by power.  

Frantisek’s gaze just doesn’t fit. His glasses get constantly foggy, snowy or wet. Behind the gaze, it is the brain, not the eye, that emerges, live, like a new depth, the fifth side of the camera, the eroticising signifier of an inner self, of a retreat into oneself, the fetish of a new genre. This new and profound space cannot escape the eye that sees it, the science that names it, nor the power that, if needed, can wash it. The skull opened, tumour removed, brain broken with its jar. Zanussi’s film is impressive in the way it foregrounds the end of the interiority of filmed bodies, the end of the opacity that made them obstacles. This is the era of photo-scintigraphy, spark chambers, thermography, shadowless lamps. The issue of interiority is aesthetically the order of the day, in the spotlight.  

Between the myopic gaze that shifts (the fiction) into gear and connotes (for the audience) and the brain, underneath this gaze, controlling the eye but over which the eye retains a right to examine, there is – paradoxically – the last bastion of depth: the surface, the epidermis, the line where the quest, the life or the subject are at play. We can mention – jokingly – the label applied a few years ago to new East European film waves: intimist. This ground level, skin deep intimism, this superficial film-making (Czech films especially) only existed because of a major prohibition: that of filming power. There are no films from East European countries, except for Jancsó’s slippery metaphors, where power has been named or incarnated, where the question of its featurability has even been considered. Or rather, the only power featured was scientific power, the power to name, of the metalanguage, the voice of science that doesn’t have to justify its off-screen presence. Remember Makavejev’s Love Affair where the most banal news item (a pest exterminator commits a crime of passion) occasions all kinds of talkative and out-of-place sexologists and criminologists. Makavejev’s humour stood in between these two poles: naturalist experience on one side, metalanguage about the living on the other. The essential was that the apparatus itself, inasmuch as it generates knowledge and experts obedient to political power, must never been filmed as such, and therefore questioned. This is the truth of revisionism in power: it is the cause of everything, but never questioned, filmed.  

Zanussi proceeds in the same way, more daringly but with less humour. A discourse (dropped) from above, and a (myopic) gaze below. Metalanguage and stickiness, career strategy and daily life. Above, discourses that can be delivered any time on any topic, discourses with no clear source of enunciation and recognisable by their tone: no possible reply. Below, the wandering gaze. Between the two, the nothing where Zanussi (an ex-scientist and artist) locates his film. Any image from below (“life”, “naturalism”, “glue”) is susceptible, liable, at any point to become the object of a discourse, the origin of which doesn’t have to be mentioned or even shown. Between the not-yet-seen of the myopic gaze and the always-already-known of the knowledge apparatus begins a race where the shots themselves, the images are at stake.  

One example: Frantisek, at the height of dispossession and on the verge of mysticism, visits a monastery where doddery monks live in seclusion. The camera wanders with him behind the kneeling monks and lingers on the shaven nape of one of them. A double interiority: that of Frantisek’s gaze and that of the mystic’s brain, redoubled by two screens: the glasses and the scalp. Exactly at that moment, a cut away to a cross-section of a brain drawn on a black board in some university: an off-screen voice highlights and comments on areas of the brain where mystic states occur. A double cut, of the body and of the shot, showing that there are no corners from which the off-screen discourse cannot emerge.  

In a surprising scene at the start of the film, students wonder about their career, their role, their profession and their responsibility as scientists. Only one dares speak of their desire. If we wanted money and fame, he says, we would all go into exile in the West. If we stay, it must be because we want something else: privileges, fragments of power. Zanussi’s film is an exceptional documentary on this question: what specific ideology do scientists need in the East? More abruptly, what does, for example, the psychiatric hospital employee, or of the one “treating” Leonid Plyushch, believe in?   

The answer of course is not to be found in scientism. What happens in the film? Frantisek returns to his place, that of a scientist who is still young despite the wasted time, despite the crisis. At the end of the film, he will learn that, overworked, he will die young. This sacrifice, which he consents to, takes him into a sphere of humanism and neurosis; it allows him to join the system, to end his wandering. In the last shot, we see him at a beach with his feet in murky and polluted water, his eyes (and his glasses) turned toward the sky. In other words, he too needs an above and a below, meaning faith.  

Religion is necessary, it will be necessary. A mix of scientism (which still enables, in the name of science, the worst) and of religiosity (catholic Poland, holy Russia). Not too much religion though: mysticism is a mess. It’s all a matter of balance and this film is the story of a bitter balance. It is not even any longer about a policy of outreach, “the crisis of the modern world” or the difficult relations between science and morality. It is something like: “Subjects, one more effort (and if needed, a bit of religion) if you want to suitably fit into the system.” 

First published in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 256, February-March 1975. Reprinted in La Rampe, Cahiers du Cinéma Gallimard, 1983. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and Srikanth Srinivasan.

Political Space – Stories of A

No points for guessing on which side of the debate Serge Daney stood. This article was published in Cahiers du cinéma in December 1974 - January 1975, at the time when abortion was being legalised in France. To read more by Daney on militant cinema, read his intro to the chapter of La Rampe where the text below featured.

Political Space – Stories of A  

1. An updated title of Stories of A* could be Stories of Stories of A since the film itself also has a story. A well-known one: banned, distributed through first militant and then commercial means. An “audience” had to come into being, pitching in money and protecting its existence, simply for the film to be seen and debated. For the first time in a while, a film has managed to organise its audience. In this sense, Stories of A is truly an organising film, not because it disseminates theories developed elsewhere by and within political organisations but because its vision, its appropriation have created organisational problems: operating illegally, and (sometimes violent) confrontations. Stories of A allows us to ask a question at the heart of any film project: the space of the film screening as a space of conflict, a space to be conquered, almost a military space.  

Or: under what conditions can one go from one audience – one that is conditioned, organised for film consumption, guided by the usherettes and stuffed with ice cream – to another, one that knows that a film engaged in a struggle, like an idea, doesn’t come out of nowhere? For all the militants, all those that have distributed Stories of A, have had to take hold not only of a cause they already supported (that it is morally just to fight for the right to abortion) but also a form: the film-object, one that is breakable, stealable, perishable, expensive. The propagation of this object, the fight for its distribution, have not only popularised the ideas of the MLAC **, it has also taught two or three new things to its amateur distributors: a film, under certain conditions, can also function as an “organising force.”  

2. Yet, for many who have seen, defended or distributed the film, just as much as it is the case for those who have despised it and banned it (from François Maurin to Maurice Druon), Stories of A seems to draw its organising power only from the fact that it was banned. And it was seen to be banned solely because it addressed a taboo: abortion. In other words, for all of them, the film is merely a pretext.  

This not-so-new idea is the cross that “militant” cinema bears. It comes down to seeing a piece of art as a neutral object, a channel to popularise ideas developed elsewhere, with no other depth. Following this logic, a film only has to enable a debate, or speaking opportunities for militants seeking to advance their cause and transmit their message, in order to fulfil its mission, its entire mission. A film is to debate what an introductory short film is to the main feature: a preparation, a foretaste, a teaser. The film here is seen as the Trojan horse that smuggles the debate through. How many times have we heard this fateful phrase: “the film doesn’t matter in itself, it only exists to spark the debate”? How can one be surprised, then, with the eternal poor quality of militant cinema? 

To accept this conception means – for the distributors, the audience and the filmmaker – to use the film like a lure to attract audiences, even at the risk of losing this “captive” audience  in sad and dogmatic debates. It means normalising an instrumentalist conception of art. Instrumentalist meaning moments, mediums or reflections that are (or conceived as) neutral. An inevitable consequence: filmmakers are only called upon for their know-how (mastery of their specialty) and for their bad conscience (non-mastery of the general, i.e., political). They rapidly become service providers. But what if filmmakers “commissioned” in that way don’t consider their work and know-how as neutral? Who will they be accountable to for this non-neutrality? Where will they go to open up this other debate, the one around their work and the form of this work?   

3. This is why one must do what no one has thought of doing: talk about the form of Stories of A. And what does François Maurin have to say in his review for L’Humanité (dated 23 October 1974)? “One would like to know the young woman as more than someone lying on the delivery table having an abortion with Karman’s technique. One would like to know her troubles, to hear her talk more fully about herself and her fate.” From this review, we can imagine the film Maurin is dreaming about: another film, other filming choices: the slice of life allowing the filmmaker and the audience to examine devastated actors and lamenting victims. But Stories of A is exactly the opposite: in the long scene that Maurin references, the young woman is not just “lying on the table,” we see her in turn speaking and “being spoken” acting and “be acted”. It is not just a surgical scoop. There is more.  

For the thesis of Belmont and Issartel’s film is not just that women have the right to abortion, it is that Karman’s technique is simple, without danger, and filmable. The thesis of the film is not only that “we are right in revolting”, it is also that “we are right in filming”. And this accomplishes the following: 

- By placing this scene at the start of the film, to make it a reference, a proof.  

- By filming the abortion, to break the law that prohibits abortion and its filmic reproduction, and to acknowledge in this double prohibition a power specific to the cinema.  

- The power to graft its own space – the space of fiction within the sphere of the camera – onto a “somewhat liberated” space. Liberated space: the relation between doctor and patient. Liberated space: the relation between the filmmaker and the filmed.  

Far from “committed” sociology (always dreadful), Belmont and Issartel assert the spectacle, the conquered spectacle of a new relation between the doctor and the young woman and between the young woman and her body. The spectacle of a fear that is ceasing to be. In that sense, the film is indeed a scoop, but not about the secrets or dark corners of bourgeois medicine or the bloody insides of an unknown body , but about another way to practice medicine, on another mise en scène of medical power.   

4. We continue to diametrically oppose mise en scène (fiction, re-enactment) and live broadcasting (events captured live). To the excesses of a fetishist mise en scène inherited via the cinephilia of Hollywood genres, we continue to oppose the merits of live action, spontaneity, experience, naturalism – everything that has been made possible by technical progress and which culminated in the “cinéma vérité” of the 1960s. This is a false opposition. In political (or even political-scientific) terms, we should say that the bourgeoisie not only has the monopoly over filmed images of reality, it also has – as a priority over any film – the monopoly over the mise en scène of this reality. A city, a film theatre or a clinic are already a form of mise en scène. They come with a pre-existing user manual for the time and space they define, with mandated movements, thresholds and prohibitions. At a push, it is this user manual that is political (inasmuch as it reinforces a certain power). Whether a filmmaker films this space “live” or “naturalises” it in a fiction doesn’t exonerate him from this first mise en scène, which is all the stronger that it remains unseen, that it precedes the filmmaker’s, and that it often conditions it. The opposite of mise en scène is not unrestrained live action but another mise en scène. The opposite of live action is not mise en scène but another live action. Other in a way that they imply a new perception, a new position (be it spatial, moral or political) of the one filming vis à vis what is filmed. 

The abortion in Gennevilliers gives us a glimpse of what such a position can be. Where nothing can be accomplished without interlacing a new live action (a “trusted” filmmaker) and a new mise en scène (bodies spoken, voices heard, rebellion expressed). This interlacing defines a possible cinematic “political space.”   

5. For the rebellion (that of women in this case) doesn’t only generate symptoms that ought to be translated within and through the global discourse of the revolution. A struggle is being spoken and advances in the great chaos of incoherent statements, parodies, cries, watchwords, disorderly beliefs and everything that defines collective enunciation. Respecting this enunciation has allowed Belmont and Issartel to avoid the pitfalls that are common currency in militant cinema and which entail using political knowledge (even and especially Marxism-Leninism) solely as a decrypting dogma, a machine to translate what is being spoken in a struggle.  

Shall we hand back to those fighting – along with the strategic meaning of their fight – the fervour, the inventiveness and the joy that also can be found in fighting? This is an unavoidable question for any cinema aiming to be militant. A question that obliges militant cinema to not be unequivocal, unilateral, uniform or monological. For, if a struggle is being spoken, it never says “I.”  

* The filmmaker, Charles Belmont, who was first an actor for Chabrol, had made The Froth of Time (1968) adapted from Boris Vian’s novel and Rak (1971). He would later make Pour Clémence.   

** Movement for the Freedom of Abortion and Birth Control [translator’s note]. 

First published in Cahiers du Cinéma, issue 254-255, Dec 1974 – Jan 1975. Reprinted in La Rampe, cahier critique 1972-1982, Cahiers du cinéma – Gallimard, 1983. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and Srikanth Srinivasan.