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.
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