Cinema and the Memory of Water

Two texts published together on this blog about the connection Serge Daney made between two "aquatic" films in the late 1980s: The Big Blue by Luc Besson and Palombella Rossa by Nanni Moretti. The first text below is the finished article published in Libération in 1989; the second comprises the notes Daney kept on his computer about the films and which were published posthumously in the book L'Exercice. 

 

Cinema and the memory of water 

In the 1990s, when we will look back into the popular metaphors of the 1980s, we’ll find that they were aquatic. “Nothing but water, everywhere!” we will say, remembering all the things that floated (in every sense of the word). From exchange rates to TV images (the “image tap”), from the return of synchronised swimming to the Olympics to the promotion of “board sports”, and (to end in a flourish) to the liquidation of Communism in Eastern Europe versus the liquefaction of the subject in Western Europe. It is the same message: the new individual, this anti-hero of democratic mass societies, this “floating atom emptied by the circulation of models and thus infinitely recyclable” (Lipovetsky), is fundamentally someone who needs to know how to swim. 

How could it be otherwise in a world often described as “ultra-fluid” by Baudrillard, by far the best journalist of the decade? Common metaphors (e.g. “it’s going swimmingly”), however, also point to our surprise at not drowning, and to the resigned euphoria of keeping ourselves above the surface, thanks to a few tight moves and despite going under many times, far from the beach and the cobblestones of the 1970s. Culture can now rightly be called a “broth”, with merchandise as the supreme floater, and the soup (and not only Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s) having more merchants than ever.  

How is cinema staying afloat in this broth? Not very well. Yet, two “stories”, one about a freediver and one about a communist water polo player, have left a mark in recent years. One, The Big Blue (1988), was an instant success with what is left of the general public; the other, Palombella Rossa (1989), allowed those who still need cinema to be counted (1).

The two films have nothing in common except that they talk very differently of the same thing. In each, there’s an aquatic and charming hero, and a “bath” from which the first film escapes “through the bottom” and the second by squatting the surface. In both there’s a difficulty in communicating, which makes the first film almost aphasic and the second sick in the language. From an Oedipal point of view, there is dad at the bottom of the ocean and mum by the pool, with no women or sex, and even in relations with other males, it’s a distant competition. One is unbeatable, the other was born beaten, but each has one “other” to dominate: himself. Those heroes, confronted with what Eric Conan called “the zero degree of otherness”, are truly of our time.

As soon as it was released, The Big Blue was a problem for professional cinephiles. Too inconsistent aesthetically, it became this sad thing: a social phenomenon. And it was not the phenomenon that was analysed, but what it revealed about its young audience, who, delighted, went to see it ten times (2). Yet, The Big Blue is not like Jean de Florette or Camille Claudel, the pompous facelift of an outdated cinema, nor is it a big symptom whose aesthetic shortcomings force us to abandon it to sociologists. If it gives such a sense of “hitting the mark”, it is precisely because it has something to do with aesthetics. The only question is whether this is still the aesthetics of cinema. 

Let’s come back to the water and dive a little further. What is disarming about The Big Blue is that Besson seems satisfied with the look long given to the sea in just about any TV commercial (remember the terrifying Ultra-Brite). This is less because he would be incapable of filming it than because the sea, for him, is just that: a synthetic “big blue” over which one glides without making waves. Whereas Beineix still suffers from his artist’s ego, Besson already uses the disguise of cinema to produce the “synthetic beings” that are postmodern individuals. In this sense, he is the first true post-advertising filmmaker, one who inherits, in all innocence, all the “visual concepts” of advertising and therefore does not suffer from lacking a personal style, lining up cliché after cliché. Yes, shooting a film remains an adventure and a sporting challenge, but it’s no longer an adventure of the gaze. The sea is calm, its bottom empty, and there is nothing to see (3). 

What does advertising tell us? That things have already been looked at, that these gazes have been archived and the world has already been seen. Besson already knows what the sea, a diver, a woman, a dolphin, an Italian (or even a Peruvian) look like. Just as he intuitively knows what the “hero” of the mass democratic individualism will look like: a body without organs, asexual, beyond language or desire, programmed to perform a single movement. An attractive robot, a self-validated automaton. 

With all due respect to the media, The Big Blue isn’t necessarily yet another “new wave” in the history of French cinema. It is perfectly possible to imagine that film theatres cannot be “saved” from sinking solely by audiovisual products (neither auteurs’ nor producers’ films but “promauteurs’” films), halfway between Disneyland and the son et lumière shows of recycled European culture. The mistake would be to think that such products carry no content or aesthetics. The interest of The Big Blue is on the contrary that it forces us to recognise that the "proximity" between cinema and advertising, long exciting if a little murky, may no longer be required, because cinema is too weak and advertising too strong. 

The start of the 1980s saw the legitimation, first culturally, then aesthetically, of advertising. But towards the end of the decade, we began to witness its propagandist use. Advertising canons are now used to deal with “big themes”, that is, to declare war on Evil (from anti-drug videos to TV charity business), to unify the audience on the “good side”, and in doing so to manufacture the synthetic “body” of those white knights. 

The Big Blue (with a touching candour which was definitely absent from the wily The Bear) is part of this manufacturing. The contemporary individual can no longer be conceived through the old categories of the “person” (postwar, neo-realism) or the “subject” (post-1968, new waves); it also requires a founding myth, and it is logical that this myth too has something to do with water. Once again, it is from the bottom of the ocean that the missing link appears. Like a small Botticellian coelacanth, the orphan diver has this friendly and smooth thing (a dolphin) as a father. In this way, he is truly contemporary with current ecological and vitalist trends. If animal individuals have “rights”, these include the right to be, mythologically, fathers to human individuals. 

It’s with all this in mind that we must repeat, with all our remaining energy, that Palombella Rossa is a great film and that Nanni Moretti is the most precious of filmmakers. Palombella Rossa is, in a way, cinema’s response to the audiovisual. It is a minority response, because cinema is now in the minority (an active one, we hope). Besson’s film hits the mark because it offers a very large audience the spectacle of an autonomous individual, whereas Moretti’s film truly resonates because it speaks to a modest audience about a plural individual, cumbersome and problematic, player and played, talker and talked to, insufferably linked to others. 

Let's come back to the water and dive again. This water is not mythological but social, the crowded water of a swimming pool where a number of scores are settled simultaneously, with childhood, with another team, with politics, with words, with journalism, with cinema, with memory. Where the mythological founding demanded a certain depth, the social link is a question of surface and, increasingly, of interfaces. Of the two films, the “superficial” one is the deepest because we live in a world where everything private comes up to the surface and becomes “public” (advertising, or publicity, is precisely the aesthetic and economic agent of this “surfacing”).

Yes, Moretti belongs to the family of comics who, from Chaplin to Jerry Lewis, take everything (and everything is too much) upon themselves, but he also belongs to that other tradition which, from Keaton to Tati, has given up on saving the world, for the simple reason that the world, to general surprise, doesn’t “sink” (it floats). The water in Palombella Rossa isn’t the great amniotic thing, like a chamber from which we emerge friendly and regenerated, nor is it this gag element into which one falls easily with a big splash. It is now the natural habitat of deregulated societies, of floating economies and attentions, of scintillating interfaces and random encounters (“dribbling” as a figure of the social link, as an art of erasing the opponent). 

In his previous film (The Mass is Ended), Moretti filmed a very small boy who kept swimming back and forth across the pool: not the son of the dolphin coming back from the mother-bottom but the small fish (pescellino) which, no offence to anyone, “masturbates” (4) while sliding back and forth in the interstices of the social. The scene was beautiful because Moretti, himself a swimmer, filmed the way David Hockney paints: the materiality of water, conquered movement and the freedom of the small man (which has nothing to do with the autonomy of the advertising diver). The scene “breathed”; it was the complete opposite of what defines freediving: don’t breathe, hold your breath.

“That’s where we are,” Moretti seems to say. That’s where cinema is, I want to add. It won’t go beyond that, and it will struggle to do even that. It is today our only common thread and our only memory in this postmodern bath, where, for lack of fighters, the democratic idea is triumphing before our very eyes (“cosa significa oggi essere communista (sic)?”), where economic war is raging, where market forces are applied to all aspects of human activity, and where the difficult “subjectifying” of a multifaceted individual, probably disappointing but perhaps “stronger” (5), is taking place. Stronger because porous, mobile and slippery? From the Bessonian water emerges a mutant too slippery and an automaton too perfect not to worry the audience. In the Morettian water, it is a colony of people (Italian, European) shaking themselves off between nostalgia for history and escape into the future, each of them unresolved, as in water polo, this sport where one floats more often than swims. Because to float still requires effort. 



(1) The strange feeling, on leaving the theatre, of a return of the “old school” communal cinephilia. We feel ready again to fall out with a best friend should they not like Palombella Rossa, even if that means ignoring some of the film's weaker aspects: a certain theoretical voluntarism, a certain suffocating desire to say everything. 

(2) The psychoanalyst Jean-Jacques Moskowitz told the author that his young son kept seeing the film over and over to understand it better. But what is difficult to understand in such a simple story? Perhaps this: The Big Blue says that death exists. It says so to children who know the difference between the gesticulations of dying actors on TV or in gore films and real death, whose spectacle is carefully hidden from them. Similarly, Dead Poets Society, another cult film among teenagers, begins with a scene in which the students are told that they will die one day. 

(3) It goes even further. In his third film (sic), Nikita, Besson invents a strange character, played by Jean Reno and called “the Cleaner”. The character’s function is to make sure absolutely no material trace is left after a spy operation goes wrong. He moves through the film like a fanatic, an acid bath under his arm, hence the rather funny medical gags. The Cleaner can be seen as the grim heir to Mister Clean from the ads. At the same time, this desire for a complete clear-out can be read as a determined will to inherit nothing, from either fashion or cinema.  

(4) A furious reference to the concurrent advertising campaign promoting the new version of Cahiers du cinéma: “no more mental masturbation”.

(5) This is of course the central question of our era, and it would be presumptuous to answer it. The author does know that he is among those whom the porosity of post-industrial social relations plunges into a certain gloominess. He is not the only one, but is he right? Do the movement of signifiers, the floating of the signified and the erasing of the referents not allow a society of individuals to better resist its threats, even at the cost of a certain mediocrity and a progressive disqualification of the sacred (through secularisation), of the tragic (through the second degree), of art (through market forces), or even of culture (through tourism)? And what if “handbag thefts” weren’t the worst thing? And what if the “end of history” were but the start of the adventures of “not the worst thing”? Dizzying.

First pubished in Libération on 29 December 1989. Reprinted in La recrudescence, Aléas Editeur, 1991.