In the midst of the end of the world - Antonio Reis' Ana

As part of a series of blog posts on "Figures of Dissent", Stoffel Debuysere just published the translation of a new text by Serge Daney on Antonio Reis' Ana.

In the midst of the end of the world
First published in Libération on June 3rd, 1983; reprinted in Ciné-Journal, 1986, p. 165. Translated by Stoffel Debuysere, 2013.

Guy de Maupassant

Daney's never ending hate of the Qualité française... for good reasons.

Guy de Maupassant, Michel Drach 

Who’s again at the door? It’s the drama-doc, toc, toc. The cultural religious kitch. The new film by Michel Drach. 

Ever the rotten barrel of the good old French cinema, the cultural hagio-biography had slowly taken refuge on television. In the shape of drama-docs, and with various successes, it was the TV’s equivalent of school literature manuals. This old propaganda tool (“our great men”), even re-read by lifeless Brechtians, is a risk-free genre, a cushy number. On one side, the TV audience can be moved that the great artists from the past appear as people “like you and me” with their greatness and their smallness, and on the other side, the audience knows deep inside that they were not people like you and me because they are in the dictionary, and not us. 

Take Maupassant for example. This celebrated man, to whom everything succeeded, comes to a bad end: he contracts syphilis, becomes mad and dies (in 1893). The authors of the film must have thought noble and audacious to follow the writer from his public life to his life in disease, and not to spare any of Maupassant’s committal and painful end to the audience. The film, despite being ridden with random flashbacks, broadly moves from fiction to documentary. From being a subject (of the film and of his own life), Maupassant becomes an object in Dr Blanche’s clinic. 

Michel Drach, having always better succeeded in morbid dryness than in imaginary games (The Red Sweater is in my mind his best film, The Simple Past his worst), we can say that in Guy de Maupassant, it’s the least bad when it’s sad, it’s really bad when joyous (and super-bad when Ophulsian). We can also say that with immense good will, Claude Brasseur gives a strong performance, Miou-Miou is bizarre as a lesbian fellow traveller, Carmet is stereotyped as a possessive servant and Signoret is very “Signoret” as a not so stupid mother.

This being said, what’s wrong in such a film? A certain “moralism of perception” I think. Let me explain myself. Poor spectator, you and I wander among the shots of this pompous drama fearing that a voice (over) tell us: careful, don’t touch anything, everything is in place, the disorder is only an appearance, every sidekick and prop has a number, it all has a meaning, it has to. The film is invisible because it has no stakes for the spectator. For example, Maupassant comes across as a sex beast, but no, a flash back reveals that as a teenager (what a surprise!), he had a traumatic experience which… (extenuating circumstances). At another moment, the writer is presiding over a king of orgy. You are crazy (the mise en scène whispers to the spectator): look at him, this poor genius, artistically wedged in a corner of the frame, the eyes pointedly distant and weary: he’s not having fun (in the subtext: unlike you!), he’s obviously already writing in his head a tale or a novel where this orgy will find its sense: he’s scouting locations, don’t disturb him, or maybe just with a discreet zoom in, just like that, yes.  

We end up wondering if Drach is not filming a Maupassant who is desolately watching the orgy that Drach is staging – a strange masochism. Anyway, Guy de Maupassant is a film which sends us always elsewhere, forward or backward. Forward with the writer’s childhood, a background that explains many things, a gruff Flaubert, the already crazy brother. Backward with the books that he’s going to write where all this will be transmuted into Art. And what about us then, who are now the spectators of this film? What are we doing in the midst of this simulacrum? What is the point of the guided visit in this museum which seems badly kept as if trying to be modern?  

Another, funnier, example: at the end of a social evening, a woman introduces new guests to the writer. The last of them is young, gaunt and sweet. “My dear Guy,” says the woman, “Let me introduce you to the little Proust”. And the little Proust walks in front of the camera (after all, this is not his film, he knows it, he is very young and Gaumont studios have not yet built the cork-lined room). Smiles in the theatre, but fake smiles when we realise that the authors, have actually written, typed, photocopied, rehearsed, shot, and still kept this sentence at the editing, apparently without smiling. They have written this sentence thinking it realistic, because it ought to be done!  

After all, we’re not obliged to film writers. There have been many unhappy, crazy, syphilitic characters (especially in the 19th century). There are plenty of dying people. But if we suppose that Drach took the trouble to make a film on a certain Guy de Maupassant, it’s because we remember him as a writer, as someone who lost his life (it happens to every one) but who – for a time – won the war of words. He won it to the extent that he took the trouble, feeling he was becoming mad, to write the progress of his disease. There are few things in the literature of that time as terrifying as Le Horla. To verify what’s left of his reason, Maupassant transformed himself in an object of experiment and wrote what happened to him. None of this features in Drach’s film of course. (I remind every one that Jean-Daniel Pollet made a beautiful film about this in 1966 with Laurent Terzieff).  

There is a rather bizarre disdain for the actual writing that can be felt behind all this imagery. Drach could very well film Maupassant (but then, that he’s a writer is anecdotal) or he could try to film the writer (but then, the character doesn’t explain much). I can admit that Drach is neither Straub nor Bresson, that filming writing is a challenge and, in the production system within which it operates, Drach has no incentive to take it up. I’m just upset that he pretends to regret it. I’m a bit upset that he doesn’t do like Guitry.  

When I see a cultural hagio-biography like this one, I always think of the way Guitry (in La Malibran) has settled the question.  

One night, two bourgeois go to the Council declare the birth of a child. “Surname?” asks the clerk without raising his eyes from the register. “Poquelin” timidly answer the parents. “First name? – Jean Baptiste.” Then the clerk raises his eyes ecstatically and shouts: “Molière!”  

The scene is not only an easy gag of the type Guitry indulged upon. It gives to the person who laughs the possibility to also laugh about his knowledge (his culture if you want). His knowledge doesn’t refrain him, he doesn’t become its hostage. Whereas the “Let me introduce you to the little Proust” only provokes the nasty laughter of the one who knows more than what the film pretends it doesn’t know. It denotes a wrong relation with knowledge, spectator, time, cinema. Decidedly a rotten barrel.

First published in Libération on 14 April 1982 (at the time of the release of the film). Reprinted in Ciné-Journal, 1981-1986, Cahiers du cinéma/Seuil, 1986.

Only the cinema

Seul le cinéma /  Le cinéma, seul

I'm reading about Raymond Bellour's latest book, La querelle des dispositifs, which attempts to differentiate a specific dispositif of cinema:

"To live through the projection of a film in a theatre, in the dark, the prescribed time of a more or less collective screening, has become and remains the condition of a unique experience of perception and memory, defining its spectator."

from that of other moving images - as in contemporary art installations - each of them having to invent its own dispositif.

And I came across this early passage, challenging the idea of a decline of cinema:

"At a time when, in phases, throughout the 80s, Daney seemed to lose hope in cinema as it was being hit, from outside and inside, by the invasion of television, advertising, 'brand images', everything he called 'the visual', with the concurrent drop in ticket sales and the desertification of theatres, at the time when he wrote this apocalyptic text 'From Movies to Moving' which seems to consummate a death or at least an irremediable transformation of cinema, this same year, 1989, Daney symbolically conceives in his diary the idea of a chronicle entitled 'Only the cinema' [Le cinéma, seul]."

Here's the extract from Daney's diaries (the first entry for 1989):

"Let's start up again here. This chronicle should be called 'Only the cinema'. It should talk about  what only the cinema is in charge of pursuing. It should be a way out from the period when we talked of 'images', the era of all the incests and the clever tricks. Anyway, it's my new starting point."

 And the translation of course is anything but simple. "Le cinéma, seul" can be read both as the exclusive "Solely the cinema" and as the melancholic "The cinema, alone."

Besides, it's "Le cinéma, seul" and not "Seul le cinéma" (Only the cinema). The latter has been used by Godard in Histoire(s) du cinéma, episode 2A... the one beginning with a chat with Daney...

New Grammar

[Updated July 2019]

Bernadette Corporation published translations of Serge Daney in their magazine Made in USA in 1999. The magazine is available on Apple Books and it's well worth it (for a few dollars or sterling, you get the full magazine, plus two translations of Daney!).

What Out of Africa Produces

Extract: "Out Of Africa belongs to an actual 'genre': the film-which-is-an-ad-for-cinema, oscarizable genre which runs on a mixture of professionalism and pandering nostalgia [note: to designate this genre of films, Jean-Claude Biette has found an unbeatable expression: 'filmed cinema'.]. The annoying thing is that, on tv, this genre doesn't hold up. Or rather, it return to its original state: the ad." 

Made in USA, Issue 1, Fall/Winter 1999-2000, Translated by John Kelsey, pp. 106-8. First published in Libération on 11 October 1988; reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sac à main - cinéma, télévision, information, Aléas éditions, 1991.

New Grammar

First paragraph: "The annoying thing about television is that we still talk about it using the words of cinema. We're ridiculous and don't know it. We talk of shots, we talk of montage, of camera movements, of flash-backs. We act as if time in television was linear and its space was homogeneous. We (and our poor words) are completely wrong. We should change the vocabulary one of these days. And since the benefit of televised sports is to make this question a bit more concrete, we should make use of it."

Follows a brilliant text on the meaning of slow-motions, instant replays, close-ups and zooms on television during the 1984 Olympics. 

Made in USA, Issue 1, Fall/Winter 1999-2000, Translated by Antek Walczak, pp. 108-9. First published in Libération on 4 August 1984; reprinted in Ciné Journal, 1981-1986, Cahiers du cinéma / Seuil, 1986.

Towards Screenisation

This was written for the French newspaper Libération... in 1987.

Towards Screenisation 

There’s the big screen of cinema and there are the small household screens. Television teeters between them. And we should really see television as a particular (and hybrid) case of a general screenisation which is changing our relation with images. 

If the channel hopper was honest, he’d say this: as soon as his eyes leave the television screen, they dive into the greenish darkness of the electronic type writer, where what he will write will inevitably appear. In other words, he moves from a screen to another, from one with flickering images to another with scintillating letters. Television is not only a smaller cinema, it is the intermediary stage between the theatre screen and the household (and now utilitarian) screen. Yes it shows images, but it also shows many written things, which can be read. The succession of all the logos, jingles, subtitles and program titles occupies a good chunk of viewing time, and, without them, without their constant punctuation, the viewers would be lost in front of images which are rarely capable of existing by themselves.

It may be worse than that. For everything on television tends to become ritual, to settle in its own being and its own code, to be a sign and nothing else. There are very few human actions (actions which can be executed by a human body) that have been domesticated by the small screen of television. Ways to look, to read, to stand or sit, to stay in the camera field, to clap or merely to occupy space, are in incredibly small numbers. We discuss a lot the small differences between legless newsreaders, but we don’t often mention how similarly they stand and speak. We should really consider them like a modern heraldry, a gallery of living shields, which ought to be read before they are even seen.

Strangely, we talk a lot about ‘images’ when we spend most of our time listening and decoding. It took many years of semiology in the 60s to learn how to ‘read’ and ‘decrypt’ films in order not to be credulous of the effects they generate, but the era of decoding is truly starting 20 years later. The number of things that each of us effortlessly ‘decodes’ (from advertising to quotation, from small hints to second degree) has become greater than the things we simply accept to ‘look at’ (at best, we binge on special effects at some Imax cinema). And this gain of intelligence is perhaps becoming sickening. It’s as if we had been given a bad hand, and, instead of bringing us closer – more lucid – to the cinema pictures which deceived our parents, this know-how of the codes had unknowingly prepared us to look at all types of screens, including screens with letters. Reading ‘acts as a screen’ to vision, rapid decoding acts as a screen to raw sensations, and regular occurrences of familiar codes act as a screen to the encounter with the not-yet-coded. Yet, a true image is defined by the challenge it will always throw down to the reading that simply attempts to decode it.

Besides, it’s absolutely possible that, to the contrary, we witness a certain return of the image onto these other screens (like the one this article is typed on) – a perverse return where the imaginary is claiming its due. Letters are also images. And if we hadn’t lost the art of calligraphy, we wouldn’t oppose so strongly images to writing. And then there is language, this language common to all which we had gotten used to make ours on the pretext that, whether handwriting or typewriting, we had put the materiality of writing in-between us (blackened ribbons, typos and blotches, strikeouts and annotations, carbon paper, etc). Between the hand, typing the text, and the gaze, sustaining the sentence, from a no man’s land full of all possible enunciations, the language works without us, like the image of a memory that we would merely draw into.

In order to understand the adventures/avatars of the contemporary image (which only a few filmmakers are trying to salvage from the mannerist decoding), it is useful to have typed on keyboards and chatted with unnamed others on the Minitel. Sexy chat-lines are, you guessed it, the most instructive, since their interactive game (and we know how much television, in its desire to stick to the public, wishes to be ever more interactive) relies precisely on the lack of images, which is the condition of imaginary abundance. To communicate with another via these two unknown elements: the way the other uses the (French) language and the way he/she (will) use his/her body (sexually) is like a technological horizon, both hot and cold, of a world where there wouldn’t be time to go via the mediation of images. And this gain of time ushers us even faster towards greater opaqueness.

First published in Libération, 23 December 1987. Re-printed in La Maison Cinéma et le Monde; 3. Les années Libé 1986-1991, POL, pp: 733-5. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar, 2013.

Response to a Questionnaire on Film Criticism

A surprise email, late Sunday. Adrian Martin has gone through his archives, unearthed his own translation of an interview with Serge Daney, and sends it over. What can one say? Thank you.

Here's the intro:

The following questionnaire is extracted and translated from issue 56 (1980) of Cinématographe magazine – which ran from 1973 to 1987, and was editorially directed for much of that time by Jacques Fieschi, who became a distinguished scriptwriter for Claude Sautet, Benoît Jacquot and others. The theme of the issue was ‘Criticism’, and Serge Daney answered the questionnaire on behalf of Cahiers du cinéma. He chose not to answer the sixth and final question: ‘Out of your recent critical choices, which ones are dearest to you?’ 

And here's the interview:

Serge Daney: Response to a Questionnaire on Film Criticism (1980) 

1. How did you become a critic? What was your professional trajectory?

I became a critic by reading the ‘yellow’ Cahiers of the ‘60s, and sometimes writing for it (from 1964); by joining it (after 1968), and by taking up (gradually, after 1973) a position of responsibility there. 

2. How do you approach the writing of a critical piece? How do you work it up? 

For me, there are three conscious motivations for writing a film critique:
– to transmit into writing an experience (watching a film) that itself has nothing to do with writing.
– to make a case for a certain taste – or a violent distaste.
– to extrapolate, on the basis of this or that particular film, a general state of cinema at this or that moment of its history, and our history. 

3. How much influence do you think you exert on the commercial success or failure of a film? 

Today, a monthly magazine’s influence upon the big productions (of the L’Avare [Louis de Funès/Jean Girault, 1980] type) is more negligible than ever – in this case, it’s the public that decides. For prestige releases (of the Don Giovanni [Joseph Losey, 1979] type), the magazine’s role is, eventually, one of publicity back-up – in this case, it’s the media that does the main job of promotion. The influence is only real for those films that waver between a non-release, pure and simple, and a ‘limited’ release, between zero and five thousand tickets. But it’s less in its criticism than in a direct intervention into distribution that a film monthly can wield an influence (that’s why, each year, we organise our ‘Cahiers Week’). In fact, films have either too much or too little need for us, making it impossible to truly critique them. 

4. What, for you, is the role of criticism in the evolution of cinematic forms? 

Criticism traces demarcation lines, invents distances and makes evaluations precisely where they do not exist: in the domain of images (and thus, the imaginary). It can allow the average cinema-going public to find itself within this space, since it is has neither the time nor the training to lose itself there. I don’t believe much in criticism’s influence – at least, not direct influence – on those who make films. Forms metamorphose at levels at once microscopic and macroscopic, finer and broader, within cinema and beyond it – levels that critics usually haven’t a clue about. 

5. What is the place of film History and cinema theories in your work? 

Some place for history. A bigger place for ‘theories’. At least, those theories we experimented with in Cahiers at the start of the ‘70s, and have largely abandoned since. That said, ‘theory’ is a big word to define some obsessive ideas that, at best, constitute a problematic. In the case of Cahiers, these questions are: transparency, the off-screen, the place of the spectator, editing, cinema as a dispositif of power, etc. But to be perfectly honest, I must add: we are currently at a low-point that still doesn’t let us get back to such questions.

Published in Cinématographe, issue 56, 1980. Translated by Adrian Martin, 2013.

Paris, Texas - Wim Wenders

Gonzalo De Lucas has an article about Serge Daney in the latest issue of Sight and Sound. I love the way he uses Daney's ideas to develop his own thinking.

In a beautiful review of Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984), Daney evokes a scene from In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950) where Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame are standing in the kitchen and he says: "A good love scene should be about something else besides love. For instance, this one. Me fixing grapefruit. You sitting over there, dopey, half-asleep. Anyone looking at us could tell we're in love." Daney writes: "And soon the viewer tells herself that maybe they are, but she wasn't actually thinking about that. Emotion aroused by the precariousness of the instant and the fragile beauty of cinema is able to make us feel that a scene is 'close' to us without needing to bring the camera 'closer'. Without the intrusion of the close-up, of the indiscretion of a zoom. That which we can call 'emotion' is a reverse camera movement which takes place in the body of the viewer." Here we have another truly cinematographic idea (and if Daney did anything in his writing, it was to put ideas in circulation): only this time it hasn't been created by the camera but by the encounter between the word and the image.

It prompted me to read again Daney's review of Paris, Texas. It's a great text. Here's a translation.

Paris, Texas – Wim Wenders

We knew Wenders German, wandering and slow. The justified Palme d’or at the Cannes film festival celebrates this, and more. Enough to propose a “theory of emotions.” 

A beast, one would have to be a beast not to be moved by the last scene of Paris, Texas. The boy who played on his own in the left-hand corner of the frame (he’s wearing a small black kimono, he’s eight) slowly stands up towards the woman who has timidly entered the frame, from the right. And because his movement is slow, it’s as if he was growing up in front of us. No too much. He’s only a child moving towards the woman that he hasn’t seen for four years, half of his life, his mum. He tells her: “your hair is wet”, she takes him in her arms, and he holds onto her like a little monkey. Outside, a man who “came back from the brink”, the father, is leaving for good. 

It all happens in Houston, Texas, and it’s the end of a melodrama. Not quite though. In a melodrama, there would have been music and close-ups, the man would have stayed, the re-united family would have cried. So Wim Wenders has pulled off an “almost-melodrama”. This is why the film received an ovation at Cannes where it saved this year’s prizes from shame. Emotion was peaking at the time, and like time, it has passed. 

Wim Wenders occupies a unique place in cinema. The ungrateful and exposed place of being “top of the class” (there’s another one, more blunt and prank, but he’s in the USA: Spielberg). For more than ten years, we have done more than see Wenders’ films, we have observed his progress. Wenders prefers to observe landscapes, neon-lights, clouds, highways. At times, in between two planes, we catch up with him. And we lean over our favourite patient, cinema. How is it doing? What’s left of it? How will Wenders season the leftovers, the landscapes and the children? Quite well actually. The odd and nomadic couples? Fantastic. The spleen of cinephilia? Receiving it loud and clear. Narration? Still laborious. Love scenes? A tad puritanical. Women? They’re difficult to film. Emotion? Contained, but less so. Etc. 

This may be a first: such connivance between a filmmaker and his audience: Wenders has the privilege to touch people in their forties and to seduce those in their twenties. It’s as if the best pupil of the class was revising an impressive curriculum of history and geography (of cinema) which we would have gone through. As if we were asking him to surprise us at every movie, but not too much, otherwise we couldn’t be the witnesses of his progress. The progress of a “passeur” navigating by sight towards a possible suite of cinema. 

Hence the emotion. To continue, one must know from what or whom he’s continuing. And, among others, John Ford, Allan Dawn, Yasujiro Ozu and Nicholas Ray have counted for Wenders. He is carrying on from these contemplative filmmakers, with this emotion that no one seems to be able to create anymore from a succession of images and which I’ll call, for lack of a better term, “the emotion of the long shot”. 

What does this mean? I’ll take an example from Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place, even if I may not remember well this old movie (but isn’t cinema also made of what we have hallucinated?). The Humphrey Bogart-Gloria Grahame couple are fixing grapefruits in the kitchen (was it grapefruits?). Nothing happens and then Bogart says something along the lines of: if people saw us now, will they guess that we’re happy? And the viewer, straight away, thinks yes, perhaps, but a second earlier, it wouldn’t have crossed our minds. 

Emotions aroused by the precariousness of the instant, and the fragile beauty of cinema is able to make us feel that a scene is “close” to us without needing to bring the camera “closer”. Without the intrusion of the close-up, or the indiscretion of a zoom. That which we can call “emotion” is the reverse movement which takes place in the body of the viewer. It comes from what we’re suddenly guessing. But which is the most important word: “guessing” or “suddenly”? Both. “Guessing” because we have almost missed that moment. So we accept to stay at the kitchen door of In a Lonely Place, and it’s with a different eye that we notice Ray’s great scenography. I took Ray as an example, but I could have mentioned a hundreds others, from Paris, Texas. 

Wenders has received a lot of praise for the way he can convey a style – almost a “Wenders’ touch” – to the way he films landscapes and makes them photogenic. But if his talent stopped there, he wouldn’t have made Paris, Texas, and especially not the last scene. The watcher needs to stay distant, but he runs two risks by keeping its distances: coldness and mannerism. Wenders hasn’t always avoided them. But what saves him from his own ease, is his certitude (strongest than ever in his last film) that there must be one distance (and only one) from which each thing (men and landscapes) appears not only as strangely “distanced” but as the affectionate promise of a secret. A secret we couldn’t tell (Ozu), it would be elegant to keep quiet (Dwan) or painful to revive (Ford). 

Up to the filmmaker (using his immense talent for scenography) to keep the viewer in a “long shot”: at the kitchen door, in the Mojave desert, in a bar or a shabby motel, in a peep-show, anywhere the story happens. To learn to live with the secret, like Travis’ (heroic) brother in Paris, Texas. To give the characters the time to befriend each others, like Travis and his son, the little Hunter, on the way back from school. The right distance for Wenders is the one from which we could want at the same time to force the secret out and to leave it untouched. This “at the same time” is the time of the emotion. 

Contemplative filmmakers aim to be worthy of a landscape but not to own it, to furtively slide into it without being noticed, to modify it but not re-create it. What does Travis, the man who (quoting Wenders) “is coming back from the dead”, want? The same thing as Wenders when he “comes back” from the myth of the death of cinema. The same thing as us when we give an ovation to Paris, Texas in Cannes. To fit back into the (family) picture from which he had disappeared, to take the time needed to modify a detail. Only one detail but a sizeable one: to move the child from a corner of the picture and place it “next to” a woman whose faded features haunted another place of the same picture. It’s an alteration, the work of an acupuncturist. Then, Travis leaves the picture a second time, with his secret intact. 

The (often ordinary) secret is not a piece that can be spit out, it’s the horizon of an asymptotic curve: the closer one gets to it, the further it gets. By getting closer to Travis, the man who emerged from the desert, we didn’t see that he was getting away once more. The Wenders-emotion is a boomerang. 

First published in Libération on 20 September 1984. Reprinted in Ciné-Journal, Cahiers du cinéma, 1986, pp. 253-5. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar. 

Serge Daney in 2012

2012 marked twenty years since the passing of Serge Daney (who died of AIDS in 1992). The "anniversary" triggered many events in France, including an programme of conferences, lectures and movies at the cinémathèque française, a new documentary and the publication of the third volume of Daney complete writings.

I wish English-language publishers had seized the opportunity to get a book of translations out, but that wasn't to be. Yet, there's hope. Several translations of Daney popped up here and there, in DVD booklets, books, blogs, etc. Daney seems very much recognised and discussed. I take it as a sign that we have all stopped waiting for "official" translations and that it's now down to us to carry on the task of translating where and when we can, what we judge relevant, interesting, or simply worth sharing. So I shall be carrying on in 2013 the task of referencing English translations of Serge Daney. I might do a few myself. As always, if there are volunteers willing to help out, do get in touch.

Here are the new translations which appeared in 2012:

• Otto Preminger, The rules of the game.
• Two texts on Jerry Lewis: Frank Tashlin's Who's Minding The Store? : Frank and Jerry and Smörgasborg.  
• The subtitled version of a documentary / conversation between Daney and Jacques Rivette. 
• Nick Ray And The House Of Images.
• Two early articles on Douglas Sirk and Mark Donskoy.
• A whole raft of translations on the diagonal thoughts blog.
• The text Daney wrote when he discovered (literally) Arthur Pelechian. 
• An analysis on "the relativity of film criticism" in a review of Henri Verneuil's Les Morfalous.
• A favourite of mine: Daney's review of Et Dieu créa la femme. 

As for the audience of this blog:

• 4,500 unique visitors throughout the year, but this is a meaningless figure as the majority must be robots browsing content. I prefer to count the fifth of these (900) which stayed more than a minute on the site. And nearly half of all visitors are returning ones.
• Only 65% of visits came from English-speaking countries - a pointer towards a global interest in Daney via the English translations. I know of several people who have translated Daney into their languages from the English translations they found.
• The posts on Preminger, Journey of a cine-son, Smorgasborg and Losey were clear favourites.

(I'm hoping no publisher would dare interpret these numbers as an indication of a possible readership, they would be very sad people).

So here's to more Daney in 2013. Happy new year to every one!

Preminger - The rules of the game

Otto Preminger's art "is always desperately looking for a place to withdraw into from where it can construct its grandiose architecture."

This is what Serge Daney wrote in one of his first texts, a long review and defence of Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent, published in 1963 (Daney would have been 19) in the second issue of Visages du cinéma, the short-lived film magazine he co-created with Louis Skoreki just before they both (and together) joined Cahiers du cinéma (in 1964).

The text has just appeared in a new book on Otto Preminger bringing together some amazing texts (by Skoreki, Rivette, Fujiwara...). An English translation seems to have been available in a limited number of English prints distributed at the Locarno Film Festival.

I hope I'll be forgiven for reproducing the translation below. Translations of Daney are so rare. Thank you to Kurt Walker for spotting this new translation and transcribing it. I've made some small changes.

The rules of the game

Otto Preminger – Advise and Consent

“By remaining long enough on the iridescent surface we understand the price of depth.” – Gaston Bachelard

Let's concede the following to his critics: Otto Preminger's cinema is cold and, what's more, offers nothing for literary criticism. 

Nothing of what is conventionally called mise en scène. Instead, an implacable and bitter gaze. Those who didn't sense the ambiguity of this gaze, beginning with Laura, couldn't be convinced about the beauty of Advise and Consent and would have even more trouble appreciating how it got there. To say that Advise and Consent is to Preminger what Taira Clan Saga is for Mizoguchi wouldn't convince those who snubbed Saint Joan; but let's also refute this kind of pointless proselytism and concentrate on the pleasure of speaking about a man we love and who is, today, the most important living American filmmaker.

Of course, his films are cold, but we tend to forget too quickly that this coldness is also the soul of decency, which is the right word to describe a man who made Margot cry, who filmed the misery of the Jews and Joan of Arc at the stake.

*

And yet, to excuse Preminger for the sin of being cold and dull is to discover the novelty and importance of his artistic contribution. This excusal would also have prevented quite a few ignorant people from being taken by surprise over the author's desire to adapt Exodus, a decision which could only startle those who think that coldness is a refusal of sentimentality. Nobody has more pity for human misfortune and suffering than Preminger, but, unfortunately for some, this pity is not expressed through some sentimental upheaval. And if Preminger can find a place among the greatest filmmakers, then that is because he endowed his characters with authenticity and truth. But the moment we unreservedly endorse these characters, he goes on and sacrifices them to an idea, for which the actor has to turn into a character, and the actor becomes a symbol.

As a tyrant on set, Preminger had to be pessimistic about his own themes to satisfy us, the critics, who are always haunted by symmetry and in search of patterns. His vision of the world is too complex to stay on such a low level, but it is certainly true that the filmmaker's first task is to recognize the deprivation of the world he is about to describe. 

*

Whether this is a similar world or a parallel world, a sect, a body, a milieu, it is always a world prone to the inevitable processes of damage and death. The only step from the world of drugs to the world of politics, is the step leading from the particular to the general, from the event to its genesis. In the same way, Mizoguchi speaks less of slaves in his early films than of slave-drivers, and less of prostitutes than of procurers. Naturally, Preminger prefers big topics. This is a surprise for those who can't see the culmination of an idea in these subjects, and who think that there is some supplementary trick behind it to decipher. 

It is more convenient to speak here of a milieu rather than of a world, and the best characteristic the world has to offer is isolation. This is, of course, a banal idea. But it is the first milestone, the foundation of what will become the mise en scène, it legitimizes the importance of the interior set design of an oeuvre particularly rich in palaces, chateâux, apartments, gambling halls, courts of justice and other closed places. 

*

That will give us a better basis to understand the importance of setting in Advise and Consent, Preminger's second political film after Exodus, which is its exact opposite. Entomology prevails over epic storytelling without excluding it. These are Preminger's two vocations. Advise and Consent is more like an edgy version of Anatomy of a Murder, this film has the humour, the accuracy, and the precision of a documentary. 

In fact, few artists respect reality as much as Preminger, his only wrongdoing was that of not cutting up stages of life in the usual way: that of only seeing the dark sides of life. It is hard to see how certain people who privilege realism are still not able to touch political or judicial life. Those who object to artistic values cherish the excellence of documentary evidence. There is no doubt that Exodus and Advise and Consent were discoveries for many people.

Preminger's art is first and foremost an art of analysis. His point is to show how mechanisms are at work (the script thus turns into a simple role playing situation); his approach is quasi-scientific, and based on observation. The special effects only serve the annihilating condemnation of the enterprise that make his art possible. 

This art is not free, nor is it in tune with its time. It is always desperately looking for a place to withdraw into from where it can construct its grandiose architecture. A closed world, an impenetrable milieu are defined by a preoccupation for orderliness, as well as by a desire to keep away from reality. Judicial norms, religious dogmatisms, political systems, are fruits of intelligence, but, in isolation, they just become signs that survive even though their signification got lost; in such a way, a trial survives justice. If there is a word devoid of meaning in Anatomy of a Murder, it is the word “justice”, and anyhow, how can there be justice since we never know if Barney Quill raped Laura Manion (Lee Remick)? For that reason, the film has an exemplary value; a mechanism will be repeated until it looses meaning, and those who know best how to use it, win.

*

How to stop oneself from thinking that these environments are the outlines of a game for which the rules are actually laws? All of Preminger's work is a mise en scène of the “homo ludens”, dear to Huizinga. Sometimes the boundaries are blurred and the rule is relaxed  (Anatomy of a Murder and Bonjour Tristesse), and sometimes, on the contrary, creativity and freedom are almost ready to disappear (The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell and Advise and Consent). This kind of game presents and propagates abstract structures, images of closed and protected worlds, ideal for practicing competition. These structures transform into behavioural  and institutional modelling. They cannot be applied to the reality they deny, but constitute as many prospects of an ordered universe as needed to replace universal anarchy.

It would be easy to make a list of these “social games” or “intellectual jousts”(1). Games always illustrate pure milieu, or autonomy, where the rules that are voluntarily respected by everyone neither favour nor harm anyone. 

But crisis erupts as soon as someone ignores or abuses the rule. The game doesn't exist if one doesn't play by the rules; and if one refuses them, the milieu itself is jeopardized.

*

Because there are people parallel to these regulated worlds, to these withdrawn organisms (that are structured like a circle, which is Preminger's stylistic device par excellence), who, in Francoise Sagan's words, give things “their exacting meaning”. Reduced to hopeless solitude, these people appear uncompromising when they confront the accidents of reality. They fail to comply with the conventions of games. They are another species, they are pure, they are still capable of serving a cause; from Alexis who dreams of saving his country in A Breath of Scandal, to Robert Leffingwell who only contemplates whether or not to save his own. 

These are wounded characters, but they are straightforward. They are motivated by a need to give themselves a cause, and are governed by lucidity. 

The problem comes up the moment they encounter this regulated world, which is a world of immobility, narrow conservatism (Seab Cooley), satisfaction (Guillion in The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell) or idiotic (Stogumber), a world where nothing could possibly depart from rules that have become ceremonial. The mysteries of a ritual.

*

It is not surprising that similar conditions would attract Preminger to Shaw's Saint Joan and to turning the subject into one of his most lucid films. What is it about? The court of the Dauphin (Richard Widmark), a decadent world, withdrawn to itself and to its games, fights for survival while a young peasant woman dreams of resisting the invaders and of crowning the Dauphin. 

These two sides are incompatible. Practical, everyday intelligence and active idealism enter into a deadly conflict. The mise en scène turns into a means of coercion, the trial a set-up, the circle a trao; the circles around Jeanne get tighter and tighter (cf. the farandole in Bonjour tristesse, where Anne (Deborah Kerr) is “trapped”). She will destroy the outer circles but ends up in the middle of a wild mob. Order is saved but Jeanne will follow it. 

Cécile (Jean Seberg) provokes Anne's death through a setup; Zosch (Eleanor Parker) detains Frankie Maclean (Frank Sinatra) in The Man With the Golden Arm. 

In any case, the goal of the mise en scène is to limit the autonomy and the liberty of the actors. Why do we still wonder why Preminger strove for the trial? Is the trial not per definition a mise en scène destined to eliminate personal initiative, where declarations are fixed in advance?

*

Just like the American political system, the mechanisms of any governmental organization should inevitably interest our filmmaker. Compared to Exodus, Advise and Consent is like an assessment, a documentation, a gaze over a mechanism unfolding in front of our eyes. Nobody can escape from the importance and complexity of this mechanism, and certainly not Seab Cooley (Charles Laughton) who represents and takes care of it, ready to unmask those who menace the game by disrespecting the rules.

There are two ways of rejecting the game, either by refusing to play at all or by changing the rules. The result is a deception, a kind of special effect that twists the game and threatens the milieu that has created its rules. Consequently, the foreign element with the desire to interfere, has to be eliminated. Cécile has to kill Anne. Seab Cooley has to do everything to expel Leffingwell (Henry Fonda) from his job as Secretary of State.

One can blame Leffingwell for being too much of an intellectual and for never having cooperated with Congress. Indeed, like Jeanne, he feels the need to devote himself to a cause, and to take a job for which he is best qualified. But he belongs to that rare species of idealists that are detached enough to judge things and to envisage changing them. In order to eliminate him, Cooley uses a setup (Gelman's statement), knowing that Leffingwell will be unable to build his career on a lie. But, as often with Preminger, actions have unexpected repercussions: the eagerness of the president (Franchot Tone) reaches in turn the senator Brigham Aderson (Don Murray) who is allowed to believe, for a moment, that he's in control, before being forced to face the same dilemma and to choose the same solution: renunciation, not duplicity. The young Van Ackerman (George Grizzard), however, whose frantic ambitions lead to Brig's suicide, doesn't avoid his colleague's ostracism; his fault is not so much to have refused to play by the rules of the game but to have changed the rules in his favour. Because he always goes too far, because he doesn't know, unlike Coolie, to distinguish between what is a game and what isn't, he is often ridiculed, which recalls another fanatic: Stogumber in Saint Joan. In the end, the condemnation of the president reveals the same attitude. He is guilty of abusing his power by nominating an unknown as Secretary of State, thus menacing the solidity of the edifice he represents.

The president's death also puts an end to his enterprise, where the two parties play off of each other, and Cooley's triumph is confirmed. Just as in the end of Saint Joan, order is safely restored, and all those that challenged it have disappeared.

*

Considering the themes that have been discussed so far, there's an important idea that might open another perspective: the mise en scène. 

There is Cooley, of course, who, like an excellent tactician calculates the moment where Gelman's (Burgess Meredith) statement will be most effective, but there's also Cécile, who instigates a drama for which she chooses setting and actors. 

In terms of mise en scène, Anatomy of a Murder is Preminger's most complex and exemplary film. This film is neither about justice nor about American society. At the center of the film is a mise en scène that turns into a means, much like it did for Lang's later films, for the artist to think about his art, and also into a disguised confession. 

Many have noticed the resemblance between Paul Biegler (James Stewart) and Preminger himself, it seems though, that rather than simply being a lucky coincidence, we might have to face a true self-portrait which sheds light on both the film and the filmmaker. What is Biegler's purpose? To withdraw completely into a reality out of himself? To let that reality inside, through a trial and through “the ultimate importance he gives to apperances”, and to show reality's truths the way he chooses to. Astonishingly, he accepts Manion's case without knowing what exactly the case is about; how can one not think of the filmmaker to whom every film is a new adventure? To subjugate one's activity to something pre-existing, in this case a murder, in that a novel, is the art of the filmmaker's lawyer; they don't invent things ex-nihilo, but obtain certain results because of certain procedures, meaning mise en scène. This is a job that requires at least as much capability and finesse as the rules of a never-ending game; a trial has its rules (that, like Judge Weaver cunning remarks, change from one State to the next) that are supposed to be followed if one wants to win the game. 

This constraint makes Biegler's final victory even more admirable; his game was mediocre, but he made the best out of the cards he was dealt, which is the privilege of great filmmakers. Many have noticed a fascination as a Premingerian topic, be that's only because hypnotism was another of his favourite topics, but isn't Fascination the goal of every director?

Biegler has to play a role in front of lieutenant Manion (Ben Gazzara), in front of Laura and Mary Pilant (Kathryn Grant). But he wasn't prepared for this role. Even though we know up to what point the lieutenant is violent, compared to Biegler he seems moderate and calm. One needs only to recall the scenes where he literally explains his “role” to him, making him guess the only attitude he's allowed to have. Concerning Laura, he turns her into someone she's not: a good wife, an exemplary woman, he event directs her way of dressing, if it is only to have a dramatic effect when he makes her mess up her hair in front of an audience. Well, at least he has to convince Mary Pilant to witness the scene, and thus to act. 

One should also admire his mastery in calculating and measuring the effects he wants to produce, mostly through humour – he ridicules witnesses and adversaries –, but also through the coup de théâtre (2).

Because he knew how to play by the rules of the game (and the judge is always there to decide what is allowed and what isn't), Biegler won the most difficult victory. But is this merit not analogous to Preminger's? Like his hero, Preminger first has to practice his art on something which precedes and is outside of him (in this case, a Robert Traver bestseller), because he has to reach as large an audience as possible. He might appear vulgar, following his demands of commercial productions, then of super-productions, but his greatness (and that if all great Americans) is to know how to play the best of a bad hand, to make sure that the demands on him become his themes and that his film becomes  a work of art.

*

The film is exemplary in meditating on this mise en scène. The artwork always outlives the artist who can only have control over it for an instant, who can only give it the mark of his imprint before seeing it moving away into an indistinct future. 

We will never know the truth about the rape of Laura Manion, and the protagonists of this drama stay mysterious throughout the entire film. For a while, they have “played” a version of a drama that the director imposed on them, but everything happens as though their own reality is a secret, unknown, and yet burning. Those who think that Anatomy of a Murder is a cold film might be surprised to hear me saying that it is emotional. But can't ice also burn? Preminger's art begins where Biegler's art ends; suddenly Laura is lonely and miserable collapsing on the stairs of her Roulette, to the great astonishment of Biegler who all of a sudden discovers the face behind the mask; behind the revelations of the lieutenant's cellmate, is the lieutenant's rage, which is not pretended and almost touching; Parnell (Arthur O'Connell) is caught between the gaze of Maida (Eve Arden) and Biegler, and asks himself whether to quit drinking. These are moments where time seems to stand still, and where the truth about the characters, that could only be guessed until now, comes out for an instant not defined by artificiality but by reality, not by playing but by life. 

Biegler's as well as Preminger's future resides in an enterprise doomed to failure. The characters, gathered together like chessmen, break away from their role and from the person directing them: the Manion couple leaves without paying the fees, but Biegler doesn't seem surprised. 

This never-ending job is something desperate. Without a doubt, there are more preferable things in life, like fishing or listening to jazz, but it is also a thrill. Knowing and dominating the rules of the game, determining and directing its players, is to impose the marks of demiurge for a while, for a couple of seconds it makes one realize the vocation of the artist.

Preminger like no other, has sensed the fugacity of things, the complexity of people and the necessity to dominate “appearances” to let them live in abstract structures. But in a true return to reality, he saw the danger of replacing the sign with its meaning. This is the drama that nourished this great work over which the bitterness of nostalgic intelligence hovers.

(1) Card games (River of No Return, The Man with the Golden Arm, Saint Joan, Bonjour Tristesse, Advise and Consent), roulette (Bonjour tristesse), dice (Porgy and Bess), hopscotch (Saint Joan), fishing (Anatomy of Murder, chess (Exodus).

(2) Even though the second general released doesn't show this, the coup de theatre is Biegler's not Preminger's deed. This version lacks a capital scene distributors aumputated: Parnell's excursion to Sault-Sainte-Marie.

Translated by Moritz Pfeifer. Original French text was first published in Visages du cinéma, issue 2, 1963. Reprinted in La Maison cinema et le monde, 1. Le temps des Cahiers, p. 126-132, P.O.L. English translation is published in Otto Preminger, Capricci, 2012.

Nick Ray and The house of images

Oscilloscope have just released the DVD and Blu-Ray of Nicholas Ray's We can't go home again. The booklet contains a text by Serge Daney translated in English.

Nick Ray And The House Of Images

This essay originally appeared in Cahiers du cinema no 310, April 1980 and also appears in La Maison cinema et le monde, I. Le Temps des Cahiers 1962-1981, POL, 2001. Translated from the French by Berenice Reynaud and Bernard Eisenschitz.

I've written to Oscilloscope about it and will ask them to publish the text on line if they respond.

Thank you to Ryan Gallagher for spotting this and sending over the details of the text.

The Night Watchman - subtitled

I just found the subtitled version of this 1990 documentary "Le veilleur" which is essentially a long conversation between Jacques Rivette and Serge Daney in the streets of Paris. It's on YouTube so probably illegal and the quality is horrendous. But we've got accustomed to make do with what we can get to read / watch Daney (and Rivette) in English.

It's a film by French filmmaker Claire Denis, made for the TV series Cinéma de notres temps. I remember Denis explaining the difficulties of shooting: the film roll in the camera usually ended by the time Serge Daney had finished asking his question. She had to invent a way to change over reels really quickly and get assistants to continuously load the reels.

Here are Part 1 and Part 2.
[UPDATE 6 JAN 2015: unfortunately the links no longer work on YouTube]

Flurry of online translations of Daney

A number of new translations of Serge Daney have appeared this year on the Belgium blog Diagonal Thoughts written by Stoffel Debuysere and in the last few days on David Davidson's Toronto Film Review blog. It's wonderful to see the writings of Serge Daney continuing to generate such interest. In the face of publishers' inaction, cinephiles are taking the matter in their own hands!

Toronto Film Review publishes "Daney’s first three contributions to Cahiers du Cinéma". 
Note: After a quick search on the French Cinémathèque archives, these are indeed Daney's first texts for Cahiers, published even before his interviews of US film directors which marked his arrival at Cahiers. The first two texts are oddly not included in Serge Daney's posthumous "complete writings". A great find then!

Petit Journal du Cinéma: Retrospective Donskoy - published in Cahiers du cinéma, no 154, April 1964

Petit Journal du Cinéma: Sirk At Munich - published in Cahiers du cinéma, no 156, June 1964. Co-signed with "J.-L. N." (aka Jean-Louis Noames, also known as Louis Skorecki, friend of Daney and fellow film critic).

Frank Tashlin's Who's Minding The Store? : Frank and Jerry -  published in Cahiers du cinéma, no 156, June 1964. See also my recent translation of Smörgasborg to make the links.

Diagonal Thoughts has been publishing a string of translations over the past year:

The Death of Glauber Rocha - published as ‘La mort de Glauber Rocha‘ , Libération, 24 August 1981.

A Morals of Perception - published as ‘La Morale de la Perception (De la nuée à la résistance de Straub-Huillet)‘ in La Rampe. Cahier critique 1970-1982, Cahiers du cinéma, Gallimard.

Mark Images - published as ‘Présentation‘, Cahiers du Cinéma, nos. 268-269, the introduction of a special issue dedicated to “Images de Marque”, July-August 1976.

The Fraternal Image - interview of Jacques Rancière by Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana, originally published as ‘L’Image Fraternelle‘, Cahiers du Cinéma, nos. 268-269, part of a special issue dedicated to “Images de Marque”, July-August 1976.

The militant ethnography of Thomas Harlan - published as "L’ethnographie militante de Thomas Harlan", Cahiers du Cinéma, n° 301, June 1979

The demise of film critical thinking - published (without title) in ‘L’exercice a été profitable’, Paris: POL, 1993.

The non-legendary period of Cahiers - published as ‘La période non légendaire des “Cahiers”. Pour préparer la cinquantième anniversaire’. In ‘L’exercice a été profitable’, Paris: POL, 1993.

The cruel radiance of what is - published as ‘La radiation cruelle de ce qui est’‘, Cahiers du Cinéma no. 290-291, July/August 1978.

The Way South. Johan Van der Keuken - published as ‘Vers le sud. Johan Van der Keuken’, Libération, 2 March 1982.

Enjoy!

Smörgasbord

Not reconciled

Jerry Lewis, Smörgasbord

In 1963, Jerry Lewis invented a seducer character entirely motivated by hate. Logically, he called him Love. Mister Love was as opposed to the timid Doctor Jerry as day and night, as Hyde and Jekyll. A very dialectical opposition. To better “accept himself” (the condition for the others – the audience, you, me or a young girl, slightly maternal – to love him in return), the good Jerry had to go through Mister Love-hate.

A (double) star was then born. The total idiot and the cynical star, the one rejected by the others on the campus and the shrewd businessman, Lewis the actor and Lewis the producer. Will they be reconciled one day? Will one kill the other? Or will the merger of the two create a synthetic “Jerry Lewis”, more serene as years go by? This underestimates our auteur. A great comic doesn't just give people “what they want” because he loves them; he distributes – with no hope of getting anything in return – a surplus of energy and an excess of love. This is why the great comics are often our "accursed share"*. This is why Jerry Lewis has never been accepted at home.

So it wasn’t rare to hear, behind Jerry Lewis’s false good feelings, a serious threat. Something like: if one day you stopped loving me as a destitute clown (Jerry), I would be forced to resort to my professional show-business arrogance (Love), to the cold exhibition of my power to do good (Lewis the philanthropist, the friend of children), to my abstract love and my real contempt. The universal Love (with a capital L) declared itself against a background of resentment. In the Lewisian world, a practised ear has no difficulty hearing the bitter calculation of guilt and its transfer: endless and merciless accounting. Inescapably, Jerry Lewis was becoming the benefactor of a humanity from which he was more and more cut off as the days passed. No film between Which Way to the Front? (1970) and Hardly Working (1979), just an unfinished project (The Day the Clown Cried, a serious topic) and the crazy idea that pornographic movies had “stolen” his audience of children.

The inevitable therefore happened. Despite the promise, made in public and in a static shot at the (unforgettable) end of The Nutty Professor, that he will never attempt again to split, the gap between the actor and his double, between Jerry and Love, between poisoned success and poisoning failure, kept growing. A day would come when Jerry Lewis would no longer be able, alone and in one film, to make complete a survey of his own personality.

That day has come. It’s today. 1983 will be the year of Jerry Lewis’s return. The return of all the Lewises. Lewis-Ego, Lewis-Me and Lewis-It. The first will be crowned (the Nobel-type philanthropist of medical research).  We will admire the second’s performance in Scorsese’s film, The King of Comedy (where Lewis is presented as himself). And we will rediscover the third, inspired gagman and crazy inventor, in his latest film, the strangely titled Smörgasbord. The reconciliation didn’t happen, but Smörgasbord is a beautiful film.

Firstly it’s a very free movie, or rather very liberated. Liberated from the Other, liberated from Love, since Love (or more precisely what Love has inevitably become “20 years later”) is entirely in another film, thanks to another film-maker: Martin Scorsese. From then on, it’s everyone for himself. Smörgasbord only looks at the “Jerry” side of the mirror. Except that in this peculiar double picture of Dorian Gray, the two reflections have grown old: (fleeting) time reveals stiffness, wrinkles, sweat, the emptied gaze of the body that supports them. Jerry and Love have become separately horrible. Not one redeeming the other. Redemption is over. The mirror is shattered.

Jerry Langford, in Scorsese’s film, is a Mister Love made bitter, old and tough by success. He doesn’t even look at the one (DeNiro-Popkin) who, starting from nowhere, also wants to succeed. Worse, he’s on the other side, on the side of the respectable, realistic and responsible adults, who were his joyful target when, with Dean Martin, he was still misbehaving.

All you have to do is look at Warren Nefron, Smörgasbord’s hero, to stop asking how long Jerry Lewis can maintain the credibility of his character as a prolonged teenager. Nefron is no longer a nice, crazy, simple kid with a big heart; he’s a universal type: the Misfit by essence, addicted to shrinks, a real loser of our time. Age is no longer relevant.

Freed from the Other, Warren Nefron is also freed from what slowed down previous films. Smörgasbord, with all its dead weight, follows the auteur’s inventiveness, anywhere and at full speed. There’s not a gram of sentimentality, even faked. No “feminine presence”, even innocently phallic. Not a drop of dialectic, even forced. No happy ending, even imposed. No obligation to pretend to tell a story since the script of Smörgasbord is not the cure but rather the disease. And to an incurable disease, one can only oppose a cure “just for laughs”. It’s such a cure that “smörgasbord” precisely symbolises.

We are, from the first images of the film (the failed suicide attempts), in a world where everything has become a conspicuous symptom. If the subconscious is, as Deleuze would have it, a factory and not a theatre, let’s say that for Smörgasbord, the factory workers have become overzealous. As soon as a gag can be built as a slip of the tongue, a daydream, a witz or a rebus, the Lewis factory no longer worries about verbal precautions. It goes all the faster because there is nothing and no one to give moral lessons to. Love, I repeat, is in another film.

The story of the film is not only impossible to narrate, it is, like poetry, impossible to sum up. It is disjointed, like the first Lewis films (The Bellboy, The Errand Boy) that we criticised at the time for being mere catalogues of gags, but it is disjointed like any story that obeys the logic of the signifier (and not literary or psychological plausibility). Smörgasbord is a mechanical bachelor**, happy to simply and energetically emit signals. It calls out no one. An example? The French translation of the title (“T’es fou, Jerry!”: Jerry, you’re mad!) says it all. But that is still someone – an intimate – observing this state of madness. Whereas “Smörgasbord” is madness.

This small Swedish word acts as the “rosebud” of the film, the word that the psycho-analyst, having exhausted all other means, utters to Nefron under hypnosis but which makes him fall into the disease from which Nefron will emerge. It’s a comic “rosebud”. “Smörgasbord” also means “hors d'oeuvre” and one can’t avoid seeing this as a plea pro domo by Lewis, the preemptive response to the accusation of having made yet another disjointed movie. In burlesque, there are only hors d'oeuvres: no need to dish up the story of the (piece de) resistance(s).

Jerry Lewis has been so (psycho) analysed that the exercise is really no longer needed. The “shrinks” clearly belong to his world. But, unlike Woody Allen, Lewis does not give a respectful image of psycho-analysis (the cure, the sofa, etc.). For him, shrinks are part of the Punch and Judy show. It’s in his way of unfolding the film via free association, in his art of making objects suddenly seem like words, it’s in his style that Lewis really takes into account the subconscious, subconsciously of course.

Hence the magnificent, inspired and unforeseen gags and the admirable scene where Nefron tries to have dinner in a restaurant but eventually gives up because the waitress (with the voice of a modern Barbara Nichols!)  lists all the possible dishes. We’re that close to the anxiety of the fanatic. Instead of one decision to make, the list of all possible decisions is presented. Life becomes a series of boxes to tick, up to the point when we run out of boxes and go crazy. This is where the film is at its most staggering, where Lewis remains a modern film-maker. A body that trips over the set, that's funny; one that becomes entirely code when language has become a war machine, that’s crazy.

The beauty of the film is extracted from unhappiness. Smörgasbord is tragically funny. 

* Cf. The Accursed Share by Georges Bataille.
** As in "The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Even…"

First published in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 347, May 1983. Reprinted in La maison cinéma et le monde: 2. Les années Libé 1981-1985, pp. 180-184, POL, Paris, 2002. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and Bill Krohn.

6 August 1980 - Chris Marker is in town

From a long article published in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1981 gathering Serge Daney's travel notes on the 1980 Honk Kong Frestival.

6 August. Encounters. Chris Marker is in town. He goes back to where he's been and films "randomly", rather happy to have emerged from the adventure of A Grin Without a Cat. His friend Terayama shoots in HK. The festival staff organises a lunch. Marker tells me that HK (which he doesn't like) has changed a lot. He comes from Okinawa and is on his way to China where he hasn't been since Sundays in Beijing. During the meal (on a very hot day), we talk about several things: Bruce Lee's mysterious death, the rumour that the Red Army guards may have filmed things during the cultural revolution. What happened to these films? Will we see them one day? What do they do with films over there? Do they archive them? Someone shows me the press clip of a Chinese newspaper talking about the fire at the warehouse of the Cinémathèque française. And also, why preserve / curate? Cinema will perhaps have been the collective dream of the 20th century? Marker is going to take pictures in Cat Street. We leave each other.

First published in Cahiers du Cinéma, issue 320, February 1981. Reprinted in La maison cinéma et le monde, Volume 1, POL 2001, p.496. Translation: Laurent Kretzschmar.

In Search of Arthur Pelechian

On August 9th, 1983, in French daily newspaper Libération, at the end of a long article deploring the lack of interest of the thirteenth Moscow International Film Festival, Serge Daney writes:

Going South. 

Towards the end of the Kinofestival, the critic doubts. Is he not at risk to confuse the USSR with the city of Moscow and Moscow with the Press Bar of the Rossia Hotel? He is delighted therefore to enjoy the ritual gift offered by the festival: a few days in a Soviet Socialist Republic. The study trip to Armenia which, despite our efforts, was met with an ever more formal "niet" (for reasons that we were only suspecting), gets, in extremis, the green light. A big fish had intervened in our favour. Four persons would go to Yerevan, invited by the Association of Armenian Filmmakers, to see film, churches, war memorials, to drink local wines and cognacs and take a look at the Mount Ararat. In Moscow, a soviet friend, a true connoisseur of good cinema, had told me: if you go to Armenia, ask to see the movies of Arthur Pelechian, he’s a wild man, a bit mad, but an exceptional filmmaker.

Here's the article he wrote on the 11th of August. A really big thank you to Daniel Fairfax for the help with the translation and his recent article on Pelechian.

In Search of Arthur Pelechian

In the USSR, thank god, there are not just functionaries and dissidents. Arthur Pelechian, an Armenian filmmaker living in Moscow, works. On documents, on Armenia, on the cosmos and on the theory of montage.

Yerevan, a modern city in an ancient location, with one million inhabitants spread out over its sprawling hills, between tarted-up slums and tall tower blocks in various states of completion. We’re in the South. The little Socialist Republic of Armenia seems prosperous; the percentage of Russians in the population is minimal. People keep to themselves. Yerevan, contrary to the claims made in travel books, is not pink but of a deep burgundy hue, the colour of tuff. Porous, volcanic, carved in right angles, the rock turns Yerevan into a declaration of the existence of the Armenian people. More than a city, it is an act of architectural vengeance. For something of the beauty of ancient churches (Etchmiadzin, Gekhard) persists in the most unbridled modern architecture (the metro, the fountains). Yerevan – with its beautiful Spendiarov opera, its Lenin Square, worthy of accommodating a peplum, its trees and the poignant sobriety of its war memorial – has some charm.

The filmmakers of Armenia give us a warm welcome. Cognac, even in the morning, friendly chitchat, polite advice. In the Yerevan studios, the local film industry puts out four movies and three telefilms a year. It’s modest. We hope that you will like our land, our people, and, who knows, our films, say the filmmakers. They’re modest, too. Maybe they suspect that their films are not that good (in which they are perfectly right). “What about Pelechian?” I enquire. A slight unease. “We Armenians are a strange and generous people: we gave Mamoulian to the US, Verneuil to France and Pelechian to the Soviet cinema.” In fact, our man lives in Moscow, but we will see his films. It’s a promise.

Three films (We, 1969; The Seasons, 1972 and Our Century, 1982) easily convince me that I am dealing with a filmmaker, a real one. Unclassifiable, except for the catch-all category of “documentary”. What a poor category! In fact, it’s a work on montage of the type I thought was no longer made in the USSR since Dziga Vertov. A work on, with and against montage. I suddenly have the (pleasant) feeling of coming face to face with a missing link in the true history of cinema.

How to speak of his films? Of the image, pulsating like the oscillations of an electrocardiogram? And of the sound, true echo of space? How can one forget the beginning of The Seasons? Armenian shepherds and their animals caught in a torrent where they may be drowning, head over heels? Peasants fleeing before unleashed haystacks or hurtling down slopes, here of snow, there of rock? This brief intertitle fallen from the sky: “This is the land”. But it is a land with no North, filmed, perhaps, from the viewpoint of a meteorite which doesn’t know where it falls. And, in We, this tearful Armenian people in the archive footage of successive repatriations (from 1946 to 1950): the return to their homeland, the embraces, the reunions, the bodies twisted by emotion, and the montage which, within these images, spins like a whirlwind, a vertigo, a dizzy spell? And in Our Century, a long meditation on the “space race”, rocket launches going nowhere, the dream of Icarus encapsulated by Russians and Americans, the faces of the accelerated cosmonauts deformed by weightlessness, the catastrophe which never ceases not to come?

Whatever the theme of the movie, Pelechian propels disoriented human body into orbit. These bodies are caught in the turbulence of matter, where there’s nothing human anymore, nothing merely human, and where the elements (earth, water, fire, wind) make their return. Not man in the cosmos, but the cosmos in man. In this raw cosmogony, I could see a Vertov in the era of Michael Snow, a Dovzhenko added to Godard, Wiseman or van der Keuken. I recognise the fatal and paranoid flirtation between science and poetry, where the filmmaker cruelly extracts his quotient of terror from aesthetic emotion.

“The cinema I like doesn’t like chance”

Back in Moscow, I hastened to meet Pelechian. I liked the uncertainty of whether or not I would actually see him, as well as the strange things that I was told about him. He doesn’t speak much, does not know any foreign languages, and perhaps barely any Russian. He’s strange, he had been put away, he doesn’t look like a typical Russian filmmaker (you know, with a leather jacket and all), he has written theoretical texts, he may have moved house, and when someone phoned him recently there was religious music at the end of the line…

The meeting took place on the eve of my departure, on neutral terrain, in a little corner of a big screening room in the Domkino (the “house of filmmakers”, Vasilevskaya Street, famous for its excellent restaurant). Pelechian resembled his films. He spoke Russian – a lot. Anxious to be understood, he patiently tore apart a matchbox and smoked my Marlboros.

Before being a filmmaker, he was an engineer (“the cinema I like,” he said, “doesn’t like chance”). And before that, he was born in an Armenian village (“there was no cinema there”). In 1963, he was studying documentary at the VGIK in Moscow. A question haunted him: “Does the cinema need me? Because I certainly need the cinema.” The curriculum included the classics: Vertov, Eisenstein, etc. When Pelechian talks about them, it is as an equal, as if he bore a grudge against them, all the while knowing that it was necessary for the cinema to pick up where they left off – or where, maybe, they misled it. “Vertov and Eisenstein invented a new machine, but they put it on railway tracks, whereas this machine needed an air cushion. It was a dead end.” But among those who condemned them, there were those (the rare few) who saw the dead end, and those (all the others) who saw neither the machine nor the tracks. These “others” are numerous today in Soviet film circles. They cannot speak harshly enough of these apprentice sorcerers, these “formalists” (a word which both condemns and hurts). And so it was in minor, less prominent genres that a concern with montage (both in terms of theory and practice) took refuge. Where a man like Pelechian operates today.

His goal: “to capture the emotional and social cardiogram of his time.” He uses a scientific vocabulary and medical metaphors, in the vein of Godard. “The whole film is present in each of its fragments and each frame is comparable to a coded genetic cell.” It must then find its place in the whole, in order to construct (as genetics would have it), “a reality which could also have been real.” Pelechian believes in this all the more, as, in his view, “a man’s life reproduces, in a certain manner, the entire history of mankind.”

“If you had more time…”

There is a certain madness to his discourse, as if, encoding increasingly reduced fragments, and sinking deeper into the matter of the film, he had come up against what he calls “absent frames”, which are invisible but which allow us to see, within the void, the heart of matter (“Truce!” I yelled to myself). Pelechian speaks like a scientific researcher, and when I tell him that, on certain points, there are similarities between him and Bresson, he seems neither surprised nor flattered: “It is normal, he notes, that researchers cross paths ‘somewhere’.” What he is looking for is his business. He knows that his films are not what he (nicely) dubs “protocol films”, but up to now he has done what he wants to do. He has a strong, reputedly bizarre personality, and is capable of convincing his commissioners (Armenian television mainly) that a film must be judged on the basis of its images rather than its script. Moreover, he is recognised by his peers, has won prizes for his work, and is currently working on a film about the Orthodox Church, commissioned by West Germany. It took him three years to shoot and edit Our Century, less because he was refused access to the stock footage of space exploration than because nobody could locate them. The only trouble he had: when he had to interrupt the movie because the cosmonauts were in space (for 185 days), he was required to furnish a certificate from said cosmonauts explaining their absence.

Authentic, unknown Soviet filmmakers? The friend who first told me about Pelechian confirmed it. But, as he would clarify, they can be found more among the ranks of documentary and scientific filmmakers. Naturally. When it is Science speaking, it is no longer the Party’s voice: the enunciation is more unpredictable, the rhetoric stranger. As long as individual fictions are blocked in advance by the fiction of the State, leaving room only for luxurious literary celebrations or dull social neo-realism based on allusions to daily life (of the “life is not pink everyday” kind), it is in documentary cinema, in the delirious clash between science and poetry, that fiction can clear a path. The path of science-fiction, no less.

The problem, as my friend insisted, is that in a country such as this, where information has trouble circulating, a researcher can be searching without anyone knowing about it, a filmmaker can make his movies on the condition that he relinquishes any interest in distribution – which he doesn’t have any control over anyway. So, like everything which has value in this country, the passion for making comes from the private sphere and, in the final analysis, from inner life. When it comes to people who are really working, you have to go find them in their own homes, in the Soviet Republics, closer to American “independent” film than to our French-style auteur cinema. Their names populate an imaginary map of the USSR like so many question marks: a certain Franck in Riga, a school of documentary filmmakers in Tallinn, a certain Sokurov in Leningrad (already four films banned!). But who will go see them?

“If you had more time,” Pelechian tells me before leaving, “I could have introduced you to some very interesting people. They ask for nothing, they’re not looking for any publicity. They are painters, artists, they’re not even dissidents. They’re more like monks.”

It was a mouthwatering idea – but I didn’t have the time.

Originally published in Libération, 11 August 1983. Reprinted in La Maison cinéma et le monde 2. Les Années Libé 1981-1985, POL éditeur, Paris, 2002, pp.410-413. Translation by Daniel Fairfax and Laurent Kretzschmar, 2012.

Les Morfalous

Bouncing on Jordan Mintzer's article "The Smuggler, The legacy and continuing relevance of the French critic Serge Daney", I'm posting a quick translation of Daney's review of Henri Verneuil's Les Morfalous. 

Les Morfalous, with Jean Paul Belmondo

Where the critic, knowing full well that he isn't part of the target audience for the last Belmondo (and that the movie really doesn’t need him), finds the energy to provide a few thoughts on the relativity of film criticism. 

When the bosses of French cinema deny critics the traditional advance press viewing (as is the case with Les Morfalous), they are placing an unreasonable bet. They are betting that the future—and only the future—will tell if their movies were that bad. The future, and not the critics who have the unfortunate tendency to ignore blockbusters, even if they sometime rehabilitate them posthumously. The bosses are not entirely wrong, even if the possibility of being right later is not a consolation for not being legitimated right away. 

But they forget to ask themselves one question: supposing the critics like their movies, would they find supplementary reasons to like them, critics’ reasons, i.e. not obvious, different from the ones already in the bond of trust between the film and its audience? I don’t believe so. Critics can do nothing (and it’s fortunate) against Les Morfalous, but neither can they do something for it. There are movies that, for a time, can’t be objects of criticism. Their success is about sociology, mythology and market studies–but not criticism. 

This shouldn’t surprise us. Most of cinema has always “escaped” criticism. We have too often forgotten the old (but still relevant) debate on the differences between “refined” and “popular” cultures, between what requires time and what is ephemeral, between what Pasolini dared to call—without any pejorative connotation whatsoever—“high culture” and “low culture”. Low culture has never needed criticism. It has other ways to expand: from posters to word of mouth, from tabloids to fashion and mimicry. As soon as a spectacle immediately connects with those it targets, there is no need for a supplementary mediation. It is the very moral of spectacle and it can be respected. 

A high-grossing film, at a minimum, gets his audience to walk to the nearest film theatre, away from television. It is above all a movie that positions itself in front of its audience. "In front of" is about aesthetics, the aesthetics of the social consensus that have become images for everyone's consumption. Take a look at Belmondo on the film poster (or in the film itself): he looks at those looking at him. Why, and in whose name, would critics try to interfere as third parties in this perfect love that needs no comments? 

Nothing can be added to the consensus, or maybe a bit of meanness. Critics will come later, when the star and its audience will be dead and only the image of the former, sola, paupera et nuda, will continue to make funny faces for a public that is no longer its target. Then, maybe, the brandished shotgun and the grin will have a moving sadness. Then, maybe, we will find that Verneuil’s filming was as good as Howard Hawks’. It will be the revenge of recording over performance, of cinema over theatre, of what settles over what evaporates. Who knows?

For what’s at the root of cinema? The theatre, the cabaret, the circus, the stadium, the stage. Everything that Cinema regularly tears itself away from, before returning to it to regenerate. The popular root of cinema is performance. Hence the question: “what can a body do?” It's the figure (the star being an extreme case) that is even more important than the background from which it shines. A hypostasis figure. And to scrub the background, a craftsman is enough. 

We could say that there are two histories of film, intertwined, mixed together but nonetheless distinct: the history of performing bodies (sport, pornography, clowns, stars, dance), and the history of what exists between the bodies, i.e. the language, the history of idols and ether. They sometime coincided (and it’s a miracle, like American burlesque, Tati, Hitchcock), but most often they travel at different speeds, in opposite directions. 

The history of bodies is slow and almost flat. It is an eternal return of the same face-to-face. The history of the cinematographic language evolves before our eyes. Language, with its tricks and rhetoric ages the quickest (what could be more dated than “the great film classics”?). This is why, despite (or because of) their famous myopia, critics have always spotted what moves in the language and never hang onto what is lasting in the bodies. For (at least) 30 years, film critics and historians have learned to tell the movements of language. We know it moves every time there is a political revolution (Eisenstein), a war (Rossellini) or a technological mutation (Godard). This means every time the bodies have been brutalised enough or destroyed to dare parade on a poster. 

And what of the history of bodies? It can’t be told, only celebrated. It can’t be assessed, but only promoted (and sold). Who cares about writing a “constructive criticism” of Les Morfalous? Nobody it seems. What would be the use of a constructive criticism of a movie that has already reached its target audience? One could only criticise the target or say that the target has the stars it deserves. One could only say horrible things (it’s always possible). 

Film criticism hinges on one idea—and one that suddenly seems precarious—which is that between those who manufacture images (and who need to manufacture them) and those who watch them (and who need to watch them), there is a gap, and that this gap is precious. And that it makes sense to interpose a little writing between the film and its public each time they are not exactly face-to-face. It’s a way to gain some time and to reach a few more spectators.

A few more only, not a lot. The work of a bonesetter, not of a griot. Let’s never forget the relativity of criticism. 

PS: I realize I completely forgot to mention that Les Morfalous is a film without much interest, stiffly directed and adequately rendered. More than ever, it’s enough to look at the poster to know what it consists of. The lack of surprise is guaranteed. Those who like the poster for Les Morfalous will like the film too. The others won’t. The lack of ambiguity is total.

Originally published in Libération on 31 March 1984 and re-printed in Ciné-Journal, Cahiers du cinéma-Gallimard, 1986. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar.