Sake for Children

So, it turns out that the previous post (Manga, Sake for the Eyes, Art Press, 1986) was merely a shorter rewrite of a longer piece published in Libération in December 1982, the year Daney visited Japan. 

Sake for Children 

December 1982, Tokyo. Manga is ancient, Manga is erotic. It might even outlive Japanese cinema. 

Take a vending machine–any one, at random. Insert 200 yen. Wait for the dull thud of a falling object. Listen to the machine being a good sort and thank you: Domo arigato gozaimasu! (thank you very much). Bend down toward the fallen object: it could be a pack of cigarettes, a can of beer or a magazine. Open it: it’s a manga? You are at the heart of the matter–your investigation into the “Japanese look” can begin. 

What is manga? Stories in drawing, graphic novels poorly printed on low quality coloured paper. Manga is everywhere: sold in kiosks and bookshops, discounted in the second-hand booksellers of Kanda, left behind on café tables or in public baths. Little known abroad, studied unofficially by a few French japanophiles more or less “tatamised” (Thierry Lagarde in Tokyo and Jacques Lalloz in Kyoto), manga is a considerable phenomenon. 

One in four Japanese people reads manga regularly. Thirty millions copies are published every week, month and bi-weekly. As always with Japanese media, the centre is very strong and the periphery is absolutely uninteresting. Five large publishers in Tokyo own most of the market and a single title (Big Comic, created in 1969) sells one million copies. Each publisher diversifies its target audiences according to age and sex. The kiddies, teenage boys, young girls, adult males and married women are reached at variable speeds. 

Each week, 6.6 million manga are published for teenage boys and 1.5 million for young girls. Baseball or Samurai vs sentimental romance. Girls read more slowly than boys so each month, the proportion is reversed: 6.4 million for the girls and 1.5 million for the boys. Every fifteen days, 2.5 million manga are bought, read and thrown away by “slightly older” adults. Of the total, ero-manga are estimated to account for an admissible ten per cent–3 million copies sold and immediately transformed into sexual fantasies. Beside Garo, a magazine for enlightened manga-philes, we count at least 300 small magazines, almost fanzine-like, printing between 5,000 and 30,000 copies. Manga artists (called mangaka) are almost always independent workers. Every man for himself and the jungle for all. Manga is much more than a craze or a wave, it’s a tidal wave. 

The readers of manga are among the most curious sights on Tokyo streets. No laws prevent them from hiding in the back of a bookstore to check out “this week’s issues. This practice is called tachiyomi (reading at the storefront). Buyers or not, they gather in silent groups to lose themselves (or find themselves) in these soft and cheap images where Japan deliriously dreams of itself. Unlike pachinko, this other solitary game, it’s not the frustrating steel ball that the tachiyomi enthusiast follows, but his own gaze going from image to image, right to left, top to bottom and page to page, at astonishing speed. He is a “reader” but in the technological sense: he doesn’t really read, he performs a sort of electronic sweep of the page–he scans it. Later, in the subway, the reader will amuse himself between two snoozes, or get aroused between two stops, depending on whether the manga is funny or erotic. En masse and in secret, the Japanese person is at home in these images. And to take a closer look at these images (forgetting all caution) is a way of meeting him a little. 

For this is a popular production. Gripping and lazy, repetitive and full of surprises, wildly uneven. To read through a manga is to encounter without warning a pearl-strip among many dirty-strips, it is to lose one’s way between lousy nude photos, unreadable ads and silly games. Genius mangaka rubs shoulders with botching amateurs and cheaters who draw from photos. But the pleasure is intense. One can discover one’s favourite authors, follow them incognito from week to week, and enjoy a production that hasn’t reached “cultural dignity”. In Japan, what is popular tends to last. Whether deviant fans of subculture, nostalgics of the “B-movie spirit”, shrewd sociologists or Japan-loving gaijins: manga is made for them. 

Unlike an inept and mawkish television with its six national channels (but no cable) and a cinema losing momentum, manga is the direct line connecting Japanese people to their fantasies–a never-ending self-analysis. No heavy unconscious here, nothing happens metaphorically or “in a certain way”, and symptoms are strong. Everything is here, exposed in drawings, told without precautions. This is where one must seize in vitro the making of the “Japanese look”, between these thousands of bodies of ink and paper and the mutant faces that sometimes make one question whether Japan belongs to the Asian continent. 

Sexual plots deliberately sadomasochistic, backstage stories of baseball or sumo, shameless “pee-pee”, rebellious samurai, voyeurist chronicles of the big city, small scatological cartoons, longings for the prince charming, sci-fi and eternal myths: everything can be recycled into manga. Its link to historical truths is more than tenuous, its educative value low, its morality insignificant. Manga are almost always frenzied: delirious and diluted. 

Where else (beside fashion?) could one find such stylistic freedom, such joyful invention, such plastic vitality and comparable audacity? Nowhere else, it seems. The art and the manner to design pages, to decompose the action and carve bodies are just as obviously japanese as the “pages à manger”—the fake prepared dishes displayed in restaurant windows. And that excessive taste for the impossible angle, the obscene detail or the emptied-out space is recognisable to us. It once made the grandeur of the late “Japanese cinema”. Has it taken refuge in manga? 

One evening, unable to resist, I went to visit Professor Yoshiya Soeda, the author of three books on manga and an authority. In his small studio in Shin-Koenji, covered with scholarly books, he graciously answered my questions. Yes, manga continues the cinematographic style today, in its own way. There are excellent reasons for this: during the 20th century, old manga (didn’t we recently see Hokusai’s in Paris?) and young cinema travelled together for a while. These travelling companions have a beautiful shared history. Flashback to the thirties. 

Now imagine the Japanese street. Silent cinema screenings are animated by a benshi (1). The benshi is the man (in flesh and bone) who lends his voice, his sounds and his commentary to the film’s actions. Facing this animated manga that is a film, the benshi learned to place his text and his onomatopoeia like a talking fumetti on an image that can’t help itself. The Saturday night audience, Durassian before its time, goes to see images in order to listen to their favourite benshi. In his autobiography (2), Kurosawa evokes the romantic figure of his eldest brother, Heigo, leader of the Tokyo benshi union at the time of the arrival of the talkies (1931) — who committed suicide. The benshi was the great victim of talkies. 

Imagine the Japanese street again. There, for a gathered audience of children, unfolds the kamishibai or “paper theatre”. Showmen of graphic novels edify the masses. Now, kamishibai artists saw films and were influenced by the “cinematographic language” then in full upheaval. And largely because they were left-wing, they adapted the tricks of Soviet montage to make agit-prop in the streets. Despite the success of talking cinema and the requisition of artists for the needs of imperial propaganda, the kamishibai didn’t die immediately. Professor Soeda even proposes the date of 1957 and names the party responsible for the coup de grâce: television. 

Modern manga (although it had existed since the twenties) is the direct heir of the cinephile “paper theatre” before the war. Its first golden age coincides with the fifties. Then, a new generation of mangakas was adapting to (smaller) formats and different (faster) speeds. An audience of ageing children was continuing to read manga. Infantilisation began. Osamu Tezuka, Shirato Sampei, Ishimori [sic] Shotaro, Tsuge Yoshiharu, Takita Yu and many others transformed fairground and marginal manga into a prosperous medium. 

Content-wise, their manga were willingly epic and moral, well-intentioned and with a sort of humanist boy-scoutism that was the dominant trait of the era. This candor of postwar “good resolutions” was gradually lost making space for more cynicism and indifference, but today’s manga fans regret it: it reminds them of their childhood (like Hergé or Jacques Martin for us). 

On the other hand, plastic invention was continuous and plots were “to be continued” endlessly. For years, Sampei compiled his admirable Ninja Bugeishō (“Ninja Martial Arts Notebooks”). A fitting return, Oshima brought them to the screen in 1967, simply filming the drawn pages as they were. Tezuka, the most famous of all, with his French beret and Osakian joviality, never stopped inventing little message-carrying characters, some of which (like Tetsuwan-Atom, which became “Atom-boy” in the USA) became known worldwide. In 1951, after the death of his son, he created Robot-boy whose adventures continued for seventeen years! Tezuka’s sensibility is humanist and even ecological: Robot-boy fights against the military use of the atom and pre-emptively against anti-robot racism. Today, in another serial-saga, Tezuka has launched his characters in quest of a mythical bird, none other than the Phoenix (Hinotori). 

Despite benefitting from an affectionate respect (the complete works of Tezuka are being published again), this generation of mangakas has been surpassed. From the seventies, manga experienced a second boom. It learned to manage its audience, following them in their growth, in their relative enrichment, their nouveau riche culture, their depoliticisation. The sixties had seen the triumph of weekly manga and the return of adult ero-manga. During the seventies, a young female audience was won over, and today it’s women who are about to be seduced. 

By diversifying its targets and feminising its audience, manga lost its heroic character. Some, including Tezuka himself, complain: these kawai manga sadden them. We're moving toward stories drawn from everyday life, down-to-earth, even regionalist. We no longer ask big questions but vulgarly tell small stories. Or we fall back on a stock of universal stories, like "The Three Musketeers" or this series by Ryoko Ikeda, Rose of Versailles, which was such a success that adventurer producer Mataichiro Yamamoto and Shiseido beauty products commissioned a film version from Jacques Demy (it became Lady Oscar, 1978). 

So what does a successful mangaka look like today? Like Mizushima Shinji. One day, we learn he's exhibiting at Ueno, on the top floor of the Matsuzakaya department store. We go. It's good publicity for him ("a handshake equals ten copies sold," he tells me) and a good image for the store since Shinji is one of the richest and most famous mangakas in Japan. The exhibition looks good too, with original pages under glass panels, ready-to-be-signed boards, ink stamps with the effigy of characters invented by Shinji. In red, green, blue, a whole little world of baseball players in tracksuits, from the round-eyed brute to the shaggy, loud kid. A world dedicated to an eternal "we won!" that delights schoolchildren. 

Frail and excluded from stadiums despite his passion for baseball, Shinji took his revenge by drawing and reports an annual turnover of 240 million yen. Enough to employ several assistants (150,000 yen per month for seven years: after that, they fly on their own) and to pose sportingly with them. Behind a glass window, before the amazed eyes of an audience of all ages, the assistants demonstrate their craft. A true Japanese tradition in this case: one works on details, another handles shadows, a third the outline. 

When interviewed, Mizushima Shinji doesn't shine with modesty. He's not interested (he says) in Western modern art, traditional Japanese art, or even other people's mangas. He only likes what he does (what he's been doing for ten years without renewal). "My manga is very amusing," and he speaks of it like a soft drug. His manga is "sake for children." 

Obviously, he's exaggerating, success has gone to his head. But if it's true that manga is the sweet daily delirium "made in Japan," its use seems irremediably in-country (3). Universally known in Japan, Tezuka, Sampei and the others are almost ignored elsewhere. They don't complain about it (except Tezuka who's preparing a breakthrough in France). As much as fashion opens Japan to the outside world (that is, the West), manga is the expression of a closed microcosm. 

Strange archipelago, this Japan? Free from any concern about speaking to the rest of the world, having everything to sell to it, and no stories to tell to it. Active and empty. Anti-America, in other words. A strange premonition seizes the traveler. That of a culture both very ancient and very provincial, which enters the 21st century in the leading pack but without an image of itself, sleepwalking in its pragmatism, exposed to blunders (see the episode of rewriting school textbooks) or to a disarming chauvinistic candor ("we are Japanese — therefore incomprehensible") (4). 

Will the electronic peasant of the 21st century be Japanese? Is he already in a world that confuses information (fast, very fast) and communication (slow, very slow)? Does he no longer need images to communicate with what is not him? No, that's not possible. 

(1) On benshi, see the recent book by Noël Burch, To the Distant Observer: Towards a Theory of Japanese Film, (page 79 of the French version published by Gallimard/Cahiers du cinéma).

(2) Something Like an Autobiography, Akira Kurosawa (published in French by Cahiers du cinéma / Seuil). 

(3) The only Japanese stories sold abroad are animated movies. Their only strategy is aimed at tiny children. Many mangakas are repressed filmmakers. Tezuka, from the sixties, made several feature-length animated movies (animecheun, as they are called in Japanese), sometimes released in the USA (Cleopatra, A Thousand and One Night, Phoenix 2272). Beside the fact that this is another aspect of the "Japanese look", it is clear that for any manga lover, the move to animation equates the death of everything they liked in the discontinuous art of graphic novels. 

(4) There is an anecdote. Philippe Pons, like others, relates it in his small book (Japon, Seuil): "When the foreigner speaks in Japanese, he is looked at with surprise, and, to begin with, he will be answered in broken English or with gestures signifying that he is incomprehensible." QED.

  

 First published in Libération on 15 December 1982. Reproduced in Ciné journal, Cahiers du cinéma, 1982. 

Manga, Sake for the Eyes

New translation of a 1986 text on manga for the magazine Art Press. Thanks to Ryan Waller for suggesting it on Bluesky. The text seems to come from a visit to Japan which, according to Pierre Eugène's map, Serge Daney visited in 1982.

Manga, Sake for the Eyes 

It is impossible to stroll in Japan without catching Japanese people in the act of tachiyomi. “Reading at the shop front” (the meaning of tachiyomi) is common practice, as is reading in the metro (for those not sleeping) or discreetly buying a manga from a vending machine. Those thick illustrated books bursting with colour, thrown away after being leafed through, are an integral part of daily life. One in four Japanese read manga—whether they are men, women, teenagers, seeking sentimentality or perversions innocently presented. You could say that Manga are like “comic books” (the biggest publisher is called Big Comics), but they are more trivial, basic and frantically produced at the rate of 30 million copies a week. They form the graphic landscape of daily life, and since the Japanese economic boom of the sixties, they have sustained the fantasies of every population category, including Japanese people abroad—even in Paris, you can find troves of manga in the Palais-Royal district, always garish, oscillating between shoddiness and refinement.  

On the metro platform 

There are manga genres: noble, popular, coded, exuberant. The world of baseball provides Mizushima Shinji with countless little stories in which athletes are disheveled and turbulent young people winning countless victories against thugs. Samurai stories have inspired Shirato Sampei to create the famous Ninja Handbook (Ninja Bugeichō), worthy of Kurosawa and brought to the screen by Oshima. Humanist and pacifist themes have long inspired Osamu Tezuka, today a real institution, with characters like Atom-boy and Robot-boy that became so successful they were known in America. But manga also function as illustrated sentimental romance novels (for teenage girls, who became avid readers in the seventies), bloody crime novels in black and white, and trivial, burlesque visions of daily life in which Japanese attempt to mock themselves—doing so especially cruelly since they hold the monopoly of this self-derision. Finally, 10% of manga are ero-manga: short sex stories, crude and naive, quickly read and abandoned on the metro platform—“sake for the eyes”. 

Manga are not recent. We know of the great “manga” of the early nineteenth century, which looked more like science manuals or catalogues. In the 1930s there was kamishibai, a paper theatre, with street artists unveiling illustrated epic stories (often with political undertones) for passersby. Kamishibai was killed by television, but it managed to coexist with cinema. The persons showing the drawings occupied the same situation as the benshi, the narrators of silent films. Modern manga were born after the second world war and have kept gaining momentum. After the economic boom, in the no longer famished Japan of the seventies and early eighties, manga reflected the era with kawai (“nice”, “cute”). Much to the chagrin of those like Tezuka, who had made manga a powerful channel of pedagogy and righteousness, today’s manga embrace a mix of mannerist violence and the era’s mushiness and pastel colours.  

No second degree 

Manga gets its strength from its innocence. There is very little “second degree” in these fast series of compulsive drawings. Great narratives, as elsewhere, have made way for monotonous staging of speedy fantasies (victory, fear, terror, rape). Since it’s a pro domo production, minimum precautions are in place, and the gaijin seeking to “connect” with the preconscious of contemporary Japan need only leaf through the thousands of quickly forgotten pages to read all about it. 

A popular art, almost anonymous, manga has its stars and its scribes, its fans (a magazine, Garo, aims to build a scholarly subculture) and its observers (Professor Yoshiya Soeda has already written knowledgeably on the topic). In any event, even stars (like Mizushima) work in studios, on a production line, with an artisanal organisation. The link between the great tradition of drawing and the most talented mangaka is still there. And there’s a real craft of the line, the interlacing, the angle and the detail that still endures with manga. Having survived Japanese cinema, manga have retained from cinema this incredible refinement in the search for frames and angles, sequencing and reframing—closer to the Belgium school than to American cartoons.  

It is of course with erotic manga that this art of the graphic mise-en-scène reaches its highest level of sophistication. A paradoxical sophistication, since the stories of ero-manga are unrestrainedly crude. The body of women becomes the theatre of unlimited settling of scores, ranging from pure and simple sadism to no less pure and simple butchery. Pedophilia, high school girls in panties, urethral eroticism, phallic overestimation, and stupid scatology are from the outset given for what they are. At the same time, the demands from censors are such that artists, who are not allowed to represent genitals, use framing as a real art of hiding—meaning they return it to one of its essential functions. If the laziest artists leave a blank for the unfigurable parts, the more inventive ones restore to “figuration” some of its fundamental ambiguity: that of a defiguration.  

First published in Art Press in December 1986 (issue 109). Reprinted in La maison cinéma et le monde, volume 3, P.O.L., 2012.

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.