The ICA includes the visit of Pierre Eugène in London as part of a roundtable on August 30th. Pierre published last year a book bringing together years of research on Serge Daney, "re-reading" methodically with a critical and historical lens Daney's texts from 1962 to 1982 (from his very first texts in high school to the publication of his first book, La Rampe). It's a formidable analysis of Daney, enriched with the fact that Pierre obtained access to Daney's private notebooks. Since the book is in French, we took this opportunity to translate an extract, with Pierre's permission and Srikanth Srivinasan's help.
The extract is from the 8th chapter of the book "Aesthetic politics 1974-76", broadly covering the period when Daney took charge of editing Cahiers, alongside Serge Toubiana, after the intense political period of the magazine focused on a cultural revolutionary front.
The Politics of Auteur Theory: JMS and JLG
Returning to cinema, to the "fold," this program that Daney sets for himself in his notebook (carnet 35) encourages him to approach filmmakers again. He reconnects with the practice of interviewing filmmakers, and writes more particularly about three of them: Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Luc Godard. It's Cahiers as a whole that reconnects with them, having neglected them for two years. De Baecque writes: "With Godard and Straub, there has never been a real 'interview' properly speaking, but a more intimate practice of the encounter. Where an interview is rather limited to discussions around a given film, a conversation opens onto a vision of the world [66]." The reunion is of significance: Straub and Huillet and their latest film Moses and Aaron (1975) feature prominently in three consecutive issues [67]; Godard and his film Numéro Deux (1976) are well covered in the January 1976 issue (262-63). In the following issue, in February 1976, an article by Pascal Bonitzer titled "J.M.S. and J.L.G." consecrates the marriage of the magazine with strobgodard, as Daney will put it in Footlights, the two-headed cinephile monster (forgetting Danièle Huillet's head), the "duo-vidual that terrified more than one. [68]"
The three articles [69] that Daney devotes to Straub-Huillet and Godard form an essential pivot in his work. Putting a full stop to the all-political period of Cahiers and establishing a sort of final assessment, these texts will have a lasting influence on Daney's thinking. They propose a certain number of concepts related to ethics, politics, history and the auteur theory, while also opening new ways of researching films, especially in relation to sound.
These three texts establish a new auteur theory, quite different from the one Daney had inherited from the Young Turks during his early cinephile years. This new auteur theory of 1975 is no longer a critical theory, defending against all odds a certain number of auteurs associated with a style or an artistic or intellectual movement; it is the championing of the politics practiced by film auteurs. As seen previously, the "lifting of the blockade against the specificity of each film" had already allowed Daney to leave political interventions to films, those on their own audience – which deftly relieved him from attempts to be exclusively political about films and society. The film critic is no longer there to judge a film by the standards of an established political doxa, nor to intervene theoretically on the work of a filmmaker, but rather to grasp and explain the political relationship (also understood as "social organisation") between a film – its form, its subject(s), its modes of intervention – and its audience. Henceforth, Cahiers would hand back to filmmakers, putting them once again at the top of the hierarchy, the responsibility of their own films: we must talk of a Politics of auteur theory [Politique de la politique des auteurs]. Each auteur is no longer studied - as was formerly the case - through a set of distinctive signs or personal obsessions (which Daney ironically dubbed the "habit of the tropes" in 1969), but for their personal political engagement and that of their works which intervene no longer directly in society, but within the confines of the film medium. Bringing to light the auteur's politics now amounts to drawing up a handbook of their political convictions put into practice through a specifically cinematic modus operandi.
Godard and Straub-Huillet are both political and marginal. They have never been exploited by any official political party and have stayed out of step with militant cinema and commercial circuits. As part of the New Wave generation that created the auteur theory at Cahiers (Godard) or subscribed to it (Straub-Huillet), they are best positioned to embody the new Politics of auteur theory that Daney, and Cahiers, intend to elaborate. Any auteur theory requires a study of history, from film to film and from era to era. The author's point of view serves as both referent and memory of stylistic and historical evolutions. In surveying the paths pursued by Godard and Straub-Huillet, Daney's texts capture a shared history (from the classical cinephilia of Cahiers during the Young Turks period to May 1968, from theoretical leftism to the endorsement of the Proletarian Revolution). It allows Daney to re-read this common past with new eyes, those of Straub-Huillet and Godard, entrusting them with the task of his own self-criticism. Rather than liquidating the magazine's Maoist period after his "liberation" and his fresh realisations, Daney can undertake a criticism of its Marxist-Leninist strayings in light of Godardian or Straubian politics.
The Politics of auteur theory, in Daney's view, seeks neither to interrogate social reality (as under dogmatic Maoism) nor to establish aesthetic criteria satisfying Marxist requirements, but to simply reconstitute the singular world of a filmmaker within their films. A closed, monadic, cinematic world, governed by the filmmaker's own aesthetic and political laws, compossible with the real world (to use Leibniz's term), interacting with it in micropolitical forms. The undeniable aesthetic coherence that characterises the works of Godard and Straub-Huillet thus permits the liquidation of the old Maoist dogmatism… by using other dogmatisms, but of auteurs. They may be just as uncompromising, but they are specific to cinema [70]. The Politics of auteur theory, by restoring filmmakers' god-like status, confines them to themselves, free but solitary.
A strange cult of personality [71]: when Daney describes the aesthetic-political systems of Straub-Huillet and Godard, he insists on their unlikable, authoritarian, morbid facets, contrasting strongly with Maoist positivity. Speaking of Straub-Huillet, whose shots are deemed "tomb(s) for the eye [72]" Daney brings up, by turns, non-reconciliation, rejection (of homogenisation), championing of a discourse of victims, the realization that "seeing a film is coming into view of what has already been seen [73]", and ends the article with the study of two somber images: one of bombs and one of a lineup of the corpses of dead communards. As for Godard, he confines the audience to a "scenographic cube" akin to a "classroom [74]", "a place which calls for nominalism, dogmatism". Film after film, he continues to "lecture and to be lectured, even in an empty theatre." Beside the political ambiguity of the discourses flooding his films, Daney also brings up Godard's attempts to shame, bully and even torture, pinning down audiences and images "as one does cruelly to butterflies". In the conclusion of the article, Here and Elsewhere (1976) is described as a "painful meditation on the theme of restitution". Godard and Straub-Huillet "are filmmakers for whom an image is closer to an inscription on a tombstone than to an advertising poster", Daney will later tell Bill Krohn [75]. And it is not by chance that this return of the magazine to two flagship auteurs is once again linked to themes of mourning, melancholia and "arriving after", not without masochism. The shunning of the old Marxist-Leninist dogmatism in favour of the dogmatisms of auteurs is not a return to pleasure. One must first go through mourning: that of leftism and militant ideals. One must recompose oneself in a now molecular world, riddled with voids like the fabric of Milestones, where each person reconnects with their own solitude.
The Politics of auteur theory allows Daney to re-engage with ideas developed previously. The work of Straub-Huillet is an anti-retro way of studying history ("In Straub's system, a retro trend is simply impossible. Everything is in the present [76]."), and the article about them offers another response, two months after "The Order of the Gaze", to historian Marc Ferro's discourse, described here as "knowledge of the aftermath, protected knowledge". Daney explains that when working on archival pictures, it is less useful to explain their ambiguity or to assign meaning to the multitude of signs that they contain than to "help to grasp (…) what gives us the image [77]". The power to "film-destroy [78]" of B-52 bombers in Vietnam that Daney exposed in "The Order of the Gaze" is precisely that which digs the images as well as the tombs, in this case that of the Vietnamese killed at the same time as they are filmed by the camera embedded alongside the bombs. This is a first explanation of the title of the article on Straub-Huillet [79]: "A Tomb for the Eye": tombs of Vietnamese killed for the sake of the audience's eyes that, whether in support of American policy or not, cannot see the dead, buried under the bombing-recording, under the point of view of the US army. A serious historian's work (Daney initially refers to archival images but this remark applies in reality to the production of all filmic images) is less about exploring the subject of the image (the topic) or its contents (the recorded signs) than the very formation of the image. It's in this way that Straub-Huillet's films are a response to Ferro:
"The cinema image is not only beholden to the competence of those who know how to keep it at a distance [this is possibly a direct attack on Ferro]. It's as if it were dug out by the power that allowed it, that wanted it. It's also that thing that people took pleasure in making and that others took pleasure in watching. And this pleasure remains: the image is a tomb for the eye. To see a film is to come before something that is already-seen. Something already seen by others: the camera, the auteur, the technicians, the first audience, the people in charge, sometimes even political figures, tyrants. What is already seen, is already enjoyed [déjà-joui] [80]."
We have again in this paragraph a conception of the image as "already-seen" very close to what Daney developed in "On Salador" (where, by the way, Godard appeared as the ultimate critical filmmaker, conscious of "arriving after", in a world already filmed). In a striking statement about the two images shown in Straub-Huillet's film (of bombs and corpses), Daney explains that "the non-neutrality of these images is not only that they put us in presence of something horrible, it is that they show a thing for which there is no reverse angle, no counterproof, no positive image [81]". In "The Order of the Gaze", playing on the different meanings of the world "field" (filmic and rural), Daney noted that "From the cruising altitude of a B-52, the Vietnamese field that is both filmed and bombed is unique in the sense that there isn't, from this point of view, a reverse angle [82]". To remedy the absence of positive images (in the positivist sense, not the Maoist one), Daney explains that Straub and Huillet are setting up two processes: they "cleanse" archival images from any notion of "already-seen [83]", revealing like a negative the hidden power behind the gaze that was used to create it, its surreptitious signature; they create "their own images" of an historical event they want to talk about (Nazism) rather than comment on existing images: notably by showing Günther Peter Straschek and Peter Nestler reading texts by Schoenberg and Brecht into the microphones of a recording studio.
The chilling phrase "the image is a tomb for the eye", repeated a second time at the end of the article, can also be explained using Jacques Lacan's notion of gaze in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis [84]. Drawing on Merleau Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible, Lacan distinguishes in the crucible of the subject's experience a division (called a "split") between two entities: the eye and the gaze. The eye, object of the drive, wants to see, to fix the view, and takes pleasure from the full and complete vision. The gaze "slides" between the figures of representation and interacts with the subject's consciousness to see and to be seen in return by an "all-seeing world". In other words, the eye gets fixated on details to enjoy them through the scopic drive, the gaze does not cease to work, compose and recompose the scene in order to understand it. But the gaze also implies being conscious of a return gaze: there is vacillation between the act of looking and the feeling of being looked at. Lacan also defines the gaze as the instrument of that which "photo-graphs" the subject, meaning that which imprints or writes the subject in its own representation. In his article, Daney quotes Lacan's famous phrase, from the same study of the gaze: "You want to watch? Well, see this!". Lacan also evokes these representations where the painter "serves up something to the eye but invites the viewer of the painting to lay down his gaze, as one lays down arms". The gaze lays down arms for the scopic drive that stops it and creates an "evil eye": the gaze is then abandoned for the eye, caught in a deathly fascination ("The evil eye is the fascinum, it ends up killing movement, literally killing life").
Thus, when Daney writes that Straub-Huillet's shots are "tombs for the eye", we can also understand that they break the spell of the viewer's scopic drive and liberate the gaze. Released from its fascination, from its evil eye, the viewer recovers the critical consciousness of his place before the images of the film – he feels gazed at by the images of the film. He detects the presence of a latent reverse angle: the hidden photographer or filmmaker (man or institution) who captured the images and attempted to serve them only to a fascinated eye, rotting in its stupor. The liberated gaze makes it possible to contemplate the to and fro through images.
The expression "tomb for the eye" is rich with a few other references. It resonates with the final verse of a poem by Victor Hugo in La Légende des Siècles, "The Conscience", which tells of the frenzied flight of Cain and his family, chased incessantly by God's eye after Abel's murder:
"Is the Eye gone?" asked Zillah tremblingly.And Cain replied: "Nay, it is still there."Then added: "I will live beneath the earth,As a lone man within his sepulchre.I will see nothing; will be seen of none."They digged a trench, and Cain said: "'Tis enow,"As he went down alone into the vault;But when he sat on his chair in the shadows,And they had closed the dungeon o'er his head,The Eye was in the tomb and fixed on Cain [85]".
Power digs the image, and the fascinated viewer resembles Cain who buries himself in order to no longer see or be seen. But even in this tomb dug by power, faced with this viewer blinded by the trap, Straub and Huillet manage to crystallize a gaze, one that returns. This gaze, which won't let the viewer rest, forces him to maintain consciousness, observed by these images that act as a screen, as stains [86] preventing the pleasant enjoyment of the representation [87]. One can imagine that when mentioning the tomb, Daney is thinking of The Indian Tomb (1959) by Fritz Lang [88], greatly admired by Straub as well, especially for the famous scene of the lepers, cloistered underground, threatening the heroes during an accidental "evil encounter" where a whole "people" (the Vietnamese?) emerge from the depths like a return of the repressed. Another possible cinema reference: the tomb of Pharaoh in Howard Hawks' Land of the Pharaohs (1955) [89], about which Daney noted in 1962 in an article titled "An Adult Art" (a text about confinement) that "the Pharaoh is thwarted every time he leaves his palace [90]" and that the Hawksian hero "must defy the immobility that will lead to his downfall (the Pharaoh and his thirst for immortality) and take action." Here again, it is by playing on the panic-inducing quality of immobilism that Straub-Huillet are able to set the viewer's conscience in motion faced with images – a paradoxical freedom granted to the viewer in a rather morbid aesthetical and political system [91].
Daney's article about Godard, "The Therrorised" begins by an overview of the filmmaker's career in parallel with that of writers at Cahiers: his politicisation goes against his old cinephile passion, the film theatre becoming a "bad place [92]". But instead of pleading for an exit from (cinephilic) confinement, Godard, as Daney frames it, redirects the viewer toward another place, just as closed: the classroom [93]. He tries to keep the viewer there, helping him memorise lessons, establishing a strange pedagogy of images and words. It doesn't engage with any ideological decryption nor encourage any "good" militant discourse: Godard merely confronts discourses with other discourses, playing dialectics: "to what one says (asserts, recites, advocates), [Godard] always answers with what another says (asserts, recites, advocates) [94]." Without personal involvement, without relegating films to a secondary place as was required by the Marxism-Leninism once heralded by Cahiers, Godard merely quotes discourses adopted by others and makes his films a place of confrontation and of comparison between discourses and images.
Irony, inversion, antithesis, paradox and chiasmus are Daney's preferred stylistic devices. And here again, it's via a strange double dogmatism that Straub-Huillet and Godard oppose all dogmatisms. The rigidity of their cinematographic practice rests on the maximum heterogeneity of the elements they put to use, but also on a singular exercise of re-reading. Godard as much as Straub-Huillet are critical filmmakers, conscious of "arriving after", after discourses, after images – whether from politics or power – and set out to work on these in return. But Godard and Straub-Huillet do not "re-read" in the same way, nor do they re-read the same things. Instead of locating themselves on the political spectrum, they change the stakes and defer (like the Derridian différance, but adding more interval [95]). Instead of endorsing a political superego, Godard and Straub-Huillet use it as another filmic material, playing with it or materialising it in their films. Instead of a discourse of clarity, of a convincing or seductive rhetoric, instead of a positive language, Godard and Straub-Huillet become the "stern fathers" [pères sévères] [96], the melancholic and bitter purveyors of a heterogeneous, ambiguous and not very reassuring cinema. Even their status as auteurs is uncertain, as Daney notes about Godard: "To the obscenity of coming across as an auteur (and the beneficiary of filmic surplus value) he has preferred to stage himself in the very act of retention [97]." The filmmakers do not exempt themselves from the rules they impose on their filmic universe (as classic filmmakers used to do, whose hypocrisy was criticised by Daney in 1968), they subject themselves to them [98].
Daney notices in Godard and Straub-Huillet all kinds of relations to power: political power over populations and the small power of individuals, the power of discourses and economic powers, power struggles, and of course the power of filmmakers themselves over their viewers. Against a knowledge that wields power, Godard and Straub-Huillet put in place a filmic power which deconstructs established knowledge. Their approach is anti-archeological [99] (it's in this sense that Daney opposes it to Marc Ferro), anti-scientific (Godard the supervisor's school discourse is opposed to academic discourse) and anti-libertarian (institutions, Althusser's famous ideological state apparatuses, are ironically taken over when Godard manufactures a classroom or when Straub "fantasises (…) about a state radio that would speak Brecht [100]"). Their political pedagogy is above all opposed to the masteries of historical and scientific knowledge. All these "protected" knowledges, that of the viewer-referee of retro films (overseeing conflicts between characters), that of fiction filmmakers confining their characters to types, that of documentary makers orienting their images with a voiceover that imposes an interpretation, all these knowledges are challenged according to Daney by Godard's and Straub-Huillet's modus operandi – one that produces no knowledge. We could compare these "stern fathers" to the "ignorant masters", an expression formalised a few years later by Jacques Rancière from Joseph Jacotot's pedagogy [101]. In their films, knowledge is not formalised; the filmmakers formalise pedagogy itself, in the form of a strange address to the viewer as pupil in Godard's films and as witness in Straub-Huillet's. This Godardian and Straubian pedagogy rests on a strange alliance between theory and terror as made explicit by the portmanteau word invented by Daney for Godard: the "therrorised". It places power, including the power to create, in a position of strength, against all established powers, treated as suspicious, like any established orthodoxy.
What brings together Godard and Straub-Huillet in Daney's analysis, besides this paradoxical pedagogy that doesn't provide any knowledge, is their common concern for filmic heterogeneity. "Godard's edge over other manipulators of images and sounds stems from his total contempt for any discourse that aims to define or preserve a certain 'specificity' of cinema [102].", writes Daney, adding that with Straub-Huillet "non-reconciliation is also a way of making films, of manufacturing them. It's the obstinate refusal of all forces of homogenisation [103]". Daney notes in "The Therrorised" that this concern for heterogeneity, for Godard as "image manipulator" and for Straub-Huillet in their anchoring of "films, images, voices" and bodies [104], is still Bazinian: "Some will say that this is a moral, Bazinian problem, and also that this type of debt can never be paid back. Quite so. [105]" Daney's endorsement of heterogeneity is a return to Bazinian "impurity", but in a wider sense, one that Daney will never cease to defend in his writings. "Impure" will always be used in the sense of an image revealing its own materiality and that of the represented elements (the definition of anchoring in Straub-Huillet's work). But "impure" also relates to the "non-specificity" of a cinema "aiming for something that is not itself [106]" as Daney will write later. In his article "In Defense of Mixed Cinema" dedicated to the way cinema appropriates literature and theatre, Bazin predicted that "the multiplication of adaptations of literary works far removed from cinema shouldn't worry the film critic concerned about the purity of the seventh art, they are rather the guarantee of its progress [107]." For Godard, the non-specificity of cinema resides in the integration in his films of all kinds of discourse and images (in the form of collages, diagrams, sound mixes etc.), alien bodies or inserts feeding a secondary work of recycling, re-reading and editing. Bazin writes at the end of "In Defense of Mixed Cinema":
"While we wait for colour and relief to temporarily give primacy to the form and create a new cycle of aesthetical erosion, cinema can no longer conquer anything on the surface. It must irrigate its banks, creep into the arts in which it has so quickly dug its gorges, to invade them insidiously."
The appropriation of other arts by cinema only interested Bazin out of a wider interest in the possible evolutions of the filmic medium. Yet, Godard and Straub-Huillet have this other point in common: the use in their films of three other image mediums: photography, cinema and television. In "The Therrorised", Daney writes:
"For the place from which Godard speaks to us, from which he calls out to us, is certainly not the secure place of a profession or even of a personal project. It's an in-between place; an in-between-three-places, in fact. An unfeasible place that embraces still photography (nineteenth century), cinema (twentieth century), and television (twenty-first century). Photography: that which retains once and for all (the corpse to be worked on). Cinema: that which retains only for a moment (death at work). TV: that which no longer retains anything (the lethal scrolling, the hemorrhaging of images). [108]"
These deathly attributions to the three mediums are also present in "A Tomb for the Eye": Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg's Accompaniment to a Cinematic Scene shows a recording studio, several photos (Schoenberg and the Communards in their coffins), a painting by Kandinsky, archival footage of the Vietnam war, newspaper cuttings about the acquittal of Auschwitz's architects and of course the recording of Schoenberg's music. In his article, Daney also mentions radio and television, considered as both technical and political apparatuses. These mediums are not "artistic"; this is the main departure from Bazin who was interested in the dialogue between art forms (cinema and painting, literature, theatre). They bring another element of impurity allowing the filmic art form to renew itself. The discovery by Godard - listening again to and translating, several years later, the conversation with Palestinian fedayeen that he had filmed for the first version of his propaganda film for Fatah (titled Until Victory, but abandoned) and who will be assassinated during the Black September massacre - re-orients and closes Here and Elsewhere [109]; as David Faroult analyses it:
"In this scene, the filmmakers finally listen to what the Palestinian fighters were saying as captured by the camera and the tape recorder a few weeks before their death. As filmmakers of this moment, their duty toward the persons filmed is then revealed. To serve them ("to serve the people") means to abandon the project (Until Victory) agreed with the military organization (Fatah) for which the fighters have given their lives, to finally question this material involuntarily produced, like a Freudian slip, and what it prescribes to the conscious activity of the filmmakers: criticise the legend created before the shooting by the script, and finally look at the images and listen to the sounds."
Godardian pedagogy can therefore be understood as the realisation of the "resistance of the material" (the expression is from Jean-Pierre Gorin, quoted by Faroult).
In regard to impurity, Daney discreetly takes up another Bazinian idea related to the concept of recording. In the 1960s, Daney was on the side of the "recording force", exemplified by Rossellini and his "effects in waiting". "When we watch a Rossellini film, we know (or rather we feel) that if the screen were suddenly enlarged, we would see things that only its smallness had kept us from seeing until then [110]", wrote Daney. Impurity must be understood as the capture of the here and now, of the present recorded by the camera. Daney notes that Godard jeopardises "the filmic contract between the one who films and the one who is filmed [111]", that he questions what it is to film the other and how what has been filmed always has some form of resistance. Like the words of the Fedayeen in Here and Elsewhere, reproduced "too late" and mournfully: "what was retained is now freed, what was kept is not restituted, but it's too late. One pays tribute to the images and sounds like one pays tribute to those they belong to: the dead [112]."
An essential aspect of the films by Godard and Straub-Huillet is the importance of bodies: the bodies of the singers and of the choir in Moses and Aaron, of the speakers in Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg's Accompaniment to a Cinematic Scene, of Godard's actors caught between the banality of daily life, the crudity of pornography and the power of enunciation of the speech in Numéro Deux. Daney details the importance of the anchoring of bodies in Straub-Huillet's work and, in another article about Godard, "Sound (She), Image (He) / Voice (She), Eye (He)", precisely traces the gender separation in his films between the (feminine) voice and the (masculine) gaze [113]. "The man's body is a protruding eye, the woman's body a voice that incessantly intervenes, questions." This materiality brought about by the presence of the bodies doubles up with the impurity of images and speeches marshalled by Godard and Straub-Huillet in their films. Following Daney's frame of reference, rather than discuss (as Ferro would do) the various meanings recorded in an archival image, Straub and Huillet add impurity in two ways: either by creating their "own image", in response to a historical event (Nazism, for example), by anchoring a discourse in reality (giving it impurity, a supplementary reserve of signs); or by "cleansing the images of any already-seen", meaning making them matt again so that they "jump out" from the invisible continuity of editing and hence enabling the emergence of a gaze, the missing reverse angle of the authority that created the image. As for Godard, he maximises the number of enunciations in a single film, without hierarchy, through a never-ending game of new responses coming one after the other: "To what the one says (asserts, recites, advocates), [Godard] always answers with what another says (asserts, recites, advocates)." Godard and Straub-Huillet create their films like impure spaces, collecting the highest number of concrete (and anchored) signs and the highest number of materials from outside cinema.
This determined return to a Politics of auteur theory, more attentive to form and to the contact between the film and its audience, therefore no longer needs to link back to social and militant reality. Instead, it requires the films to act as a sounding board by following the path of impurity. Daney's concern for this impurity, exceeding in many ways the primordial Bazinian framework, points to a new direction for his writings: it allows him to take an interest in mediums other than cinema (photography, radio, television), but also in specific filmic elements (speech, voice and bodies) that will become the main centres of interest of his future articles. Bazin isn't very far from view, but it will take a long time before a complete reconciliation with the much contested author is achieved.
Notes (keeping the original numbering for convenience):
66. De Baecque, Histoires d'une revue, volume 2, 1991. See also the section on Godard and Straub. De Baecque also mentions a first interview, not published in Cahiers, between Daney, Toubiana and Godard in Grenoble, the first since the distancing from 1968-69. ↩
67. Cahiers issue 258-259 (July-August 1975) contains a "Conversation with Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet" by Bontemps, Bonizer and Daney, as well as Daney's article "A Tomb for the Eye" about the short feature Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg's Accompaniment to a Cinematic Scene. Issue 258-259 (October-November 1975) is almost entirely dedicated to Moses and Aaron with a "Filmmaking report" by Gregory Woods annotated by Danièle Huillet, an interview by Enzo Ungari (for an Italian film magazine, Gong), an interview with conductor Michael Gielen who had directed the orchestra and the choir in the film, a long article by Louis Seguin ("The Family, the Story, the Novel") and the script of the first act of the film. The scripts of the two following acts will be published in the January 1976 issue. ↩
68. Footlights. The coinage "Duovidu" refers to a double individual but is also an homophonic anagram in French for "life of the duo [vie du duo]" as spotted by Hervé Joubert-Laurencin. ↩
69. "A tomb for the eye" Cahiers, issue 258-259, July-August 1975 (also in Footlights). "The Therrorised (Godardian pedagogy)" followed by an article that seems to function as an appendix: "Sound (She), Image (He) / Voice (She), Eye (He)", Cahiers, issue 262-263, January 1976 (also in Footlights). ↩
70. David Faroult (in Godard, 2018) observes in Here and Elsewhere an important inflection in Godard's work, moving closer to "thinking cinematographically about politics" than "making films politically", even if Tout va bien (1972) had already initiated this new dynamic. The Politics of auteur theory of Daney is thus articulated around a Godard somewhat out of Maoism, or at least significantly changed - even if the article about him builds an identity of his cinema more than it retraces its evolutions. ↩
71. The two major articles by Daney on Straub-Huillet and Godard are illustrated with pictures of the filmmakers (with particularly inventive page layouts). "A Tomb for the eye" comes with two stills of Straub and Huillet from Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg's Accompaniment to a Cinematic Scene along with a picture of Peter Nestler. "The Therrorised" comes with a picture of the shooting of A Married Woman with Godard, Macha Méril and Bernard Noël in a film theatre, and a picture of Godard with a keffiyeh around his neck, holding a camera in a field full of tents and shacks with the legend: "Elsewhere: J.-L. G. and a refugee camp". ↩
72. "And this pleasure remains: the image is a tomb for the eye" (same article) and also "Each shot is a tomb for the eye" (removed in Footlights). ↩
73. "A Tomb for the Eye". ↩
74. "The Therrorised". It's the only place in the article where Daney mentions Jean-Pierre Gorin, Godard's partner in the Dziga Vertov group. ↩
75. "The Cahiers du cinéma 1968-1977" interview with Bill Krohn in Letters from Hollywood, 1977-2017, 2020. ↩
76. "A Tomb for the Eye". ↩
77. "A Tomb for the Eye" (removed in Footlights). ↩
78. "L'ordre du regard", Le Monde Diplomatique, May 1975. ↩
78. "L'ordre du regard", Le Monde Diplomatique, May 1975. ↩
79. Daney was pleased enough with the title of the article to consider using it as the title for a book of collection of texts that he was planning for the publisher 10/18 (mentioned in Daney's notebooks in August 1975). This book would have followed Pascal Bonitzer's The Gaze and the Voice, 10/18, 1976. ↩
80. "A Tomb for the Eye". ↩
81. Footlights has a different version: "no other image, a positive one". This idea of a missing reverse angle, which Daney perhaps draws from Oudart's theory of the Suture (on this, see Daniel Fairfax, Red Cahiers, chapter 22) is also present in Letter to Jane (1972) by Godard and Gorin who suggests to redo the Kuleshov effect by adding as a reverse angle to images of president Pompidou or Kirk Douglas, images of Vietcong dead bodies (see the text of the film in Godard, 1991, and David Faroult's analysis in Faroult, 2018). The idea comes back in Daney's work in several articles. Firstly in "A Tomb for the Eye". Then in the analysis of Genet's A Song of Love (February 1976 and April 1978); in "The World Seen from Above" (Libération, 1983): "two world wars (and many others, less global) allowed them to expand their field manoeuvres and destructive off-field. Synchronicity."; in "Spotlight on the Image" that analyses a TV debate about the ethics of the image: "The show of human powerlessness (…) is the only one which could bring us back to a minimal feeling of humanity (…) This is why our ears are full of (…) useless images of children who died uselessly (…) The Jewish child of the Warsaw ghetto, arms raised. The naked little girl on the Vietnamese road. (…) These images, because they are without any possible reverse angle, function perhaps as the only pious image that we have left, and we shamelessly keep them in mind." (Libération, 1987). In L'exercice at été profitable Monsieur: "It's the European 'privilege' to have to confront in the middle of the 20th century something like Evil, meaning the forbidden reverse angle, where Americans have never shied away from realistic representations of the Devil". And finally in the conference "The War, the Visual, the Image": "One should always wonder about the possible reverse angles of an image one sees, and which reverse angle would be the best." (Femis, 1991). ↩
82. "L'ordre du regard", Le Monde Diplomatique, May 1975. ↩
83. Although Daney doesn't mention it, this expression can be related to Mizoguchi's famous expression: "With each new gaze, one must wash one's eye." Daney will use it later in "Far from Laws", Cahiers, 276, May 1977. ↩
84. "Of the Gaze as Object Petit a", Jacques Lacan (1964 seminary, published in 1973). ↩
85. Victor Hugo, La légende de Siècles. Claude Millet's footnote adds that the last verse (and the most famous) of the poem is identical to the 134th psalm in the Bible (Sacy translation). ↩
86. Lacan defines the stain as the blind spot that the subject prefers to study because it brings to light his own place in the representation ("And me, if I am to be something in the picture, it's also in the form of the screen, that I named the stain recently". Lacan, 1973) ↩
87. In the introduction to Footlights, Daney precises that "strobgodard's cinema doesn't (only) aim for the viewer's pleasure but his or her capacity for jouissance." ↩
88. Mentioned in Daney's notebooks and also a reference in Footlights. ↩
89. In Hawks' film, Pharaoh uses an enslaved architect to build an impenetrable tomb. Straub will state several years later that his film Fortini/Cani (1976) resembled Hawks' work. Daney takes this statement very seriously in his article "A Moral of Perception" highlighting that "this comparison didn't convince anyone and even confused some." Cahiers, 305, November 1979. ↩
90. "An Adult Art". An image of the film also illustrates Daney's article "The One Grow Old". ↩
91. In 1997, Straub will declare in an interview: "Our films leave people free, so also free to leave the theatre. They don't tie audiences to their seats, they don't act like respectful whores, they don't try to seduce and they don't treat people like peasant pigs but rather like citizens. (Les inrockuptibles, February 1997) ↩
92. "The Therrorised (Godardian Pedagogy)" ↩
93. The Dziga Vertov group stated in 1972 that in their films "lessons are short, cutting, conveyed by light and shapeless relays (quasi linguistic shifters) and move fast." (Group Dziga Vertov, Cahiers, 240, July-August 1972), but it seems that Daney founds his article on one of his frequently used stylistic inversions (we remember the anagrammatic play on word between "porcs" (pigs) and "corps" (bodies) in the article about Pasolini's Pigstile): the class struggle becomes a classification of struggles. We also think of the title of Groupe Medvekine's film Classe de lutte (1968) which Godard may have contributed to, along with 45 other persons. Faroult 2018 mentions Daney's article and the "black board" films by the Dziga Vertov Group. ↩
94. "The Therrorised" ↩
95. "School as the good place but only because it made it possible to retain the maximum number of things and people, the very place of the différance" ("The Therrorised"). Also, the instance of the gaze (in the article about the film by Straub and Huillet) as conceived by Lacan can also be seen as an instance of the différance, since it assumes a continuous back and forth inside the perception of the subject, between his perception and its representation. ↩
96. With Lacan, fathers can't endorse the law but only serve it. The "stern father" (père sévère) represents precisely this way of featuring the actualization of the law, as embodied in the subject. ↩
97. "The Therrorised" ↩
98. "Strange feminism by Godard: he sets women (the voice, the sound) at the place of the arbitrage of the law and of what gives life. He isn't sure that feminist demands will be satisfied with the "place" vacated by men, with this "power" that men have abandoned. They may not necessarily gain from it (even if men gain from the benefit of masochism: to be the filmmaker that states how he wants to be punished, what type of cruel mothering he enjoys)" ("The Sound (She), the Image (He) / the Voice (She), the Eye (He)"). ↩
99. "The Therrorised" ↩
100. "A Tomb for the Eye". Note that before 1981, there's only state radio in France. ↩
101. Rancière 1987 which Daney couldn't possibly know. However Daney knew of Jacques Rancière La leçon d'Althusser published in 1975 and quoted by Daney several times. ↩
102. "The Therrorised" ↩
103. "A Tomb for the Eye" ↩
104. "I'm thinking here of the undershirt marks on the torsos of the (real) farmers who come to lay down offerings before the golden calf in Moses and Aaron." ("A Tomb for the Eye"). ↩
105. "The Therrorised" ↩
106. L'exercice a été profitable, Monsieur. ↩
107. Bazin, Complete writings, 2018, vol 1. ↩
108. "The Therrorised". In Footlights, "The cinema ('the art of the twentieth century')". In the original article (not reprinted in Footlights), Daney expands on this in a note: "Let's sum up: still photography retains once and for all (but what does it retain if not the Real as an impossibility?). Cinema is subject to the syncopation of images and sounds understood as here and elsewhere (…). As for television, it doesn't retain anything, ever. It is the conduit used by anonymous power to parade (military parade, defilade) images and sounds. A place of transit for a diarrhea of images and sounds, television is the other horizon of Godard's "cinema" (…). Transit area, care centre, hotchpotch: horrible." ↩
109. Faroult 2018 describes the scene: "Shortly before the conclusion of the film, a long shot shows Palestinian fighters gathered for a discussion. They talk about the risks taken by crossing the river always at the same place (…). Meaning that all along this conversation, filmed three months before the death of each one of them in September 1970 (Black September massacre), they talk of a concrete problem creating the possibility of their own death." ↩
110. "Power in tatters" ("Le pouvoir en miettes") in The Cinema House & the World, vol 1. ↩
111. "The Therrorised" ↩
112. "The Therrorised". In Footlights, "What has been retained, held back, can then be freed, restituted, even if it'' too late. The Supreme ruse: images and sounds are rendered the way honours are rendered – to the dead." ↩
113. A dichotomy also found in Daney's text about The Man Who Sleeps by Perec and Queysanne where a feminine voice took charge of solemn objectivity whereas the main character was described by Daney as an "anonymous master of the world", a world that he makes or unmakes depending on his gaze (the only drive: to see). "A Sleeping Man: How to Wake Him?", May 1979, found in The Cinema House and the World, volume 1. ↩
Extract from Exercices de relecture, Serge Daney, 1962-1982, Pierre Eugène, Éditions du Linteau, 2023.
Translation notes:
- Pierre Eugène's book makes extensive use of notes, tactically located alongside the text (see picture below). I've replaced them with links to the footnotes (and links back).
- I've kept the present tense as is normally used in French, apologies if it comes across a little strange in English.
- There are some minor alterations to the original text, either for ease of reading or understanding, or at at Pierre's suggestion when reviewing the translation.
- We couldn't find an easy way to translate the verb creuser used several times in the text (for example, "le pouvoir creuse l'image"), and we used the verb "to dig" (also used by Nicholas Elliot in his translation of Footlights).
- I did use AI to generate the HTML code for the links to the quotes. I couldn't spot any hallucinations in the transcription of the text but I know from experience that it can happen. Apologies for any error. I'll happily correct them if found.
