Baby Seeking Bathwater

Reposting another (slightly more challenging) text from the old Steve Erickson's website.

Baby Seeking Bathwater 

I

Among the metaphors which have seen lots of service in recent years, there’s the one about the baby and the bathwater. Some still favour keeping the former in a splash of the latter. For example, they’ll say all of communism should be thrown out except the idea of communism, which is sublime and pure. Others, less prudent: you get the feeling they want to throw out the tub and even destroy the bathroom. More rare are those who want to show us what it looks like, a baby without bathwater. Luciano Benetton and Oliviero Toscani are clearly among the uncommon few. 

It’s a poignant spectacle, because the ancestor of all bathwater is the amniotic fluid from which every human being emerges – and which, to judge from “the Grand Bleu generation,” is so desperately lacking to our children. To point where, for fear of being thrown out, they prefer to dive in straight away, instead of sinking later on. 

It’s in this sense that the now-famous Benetton ad is the cynical answer of publicist parents (yesterday’s radicals?) to their unhappy offspring, who have taken to scuba gear like monks take their vows. The ad is the precise and complicitous corollary to Atlantis. Where Besson films the mildest manta like an individual proudly playing his role as a ray in an underwater fashion parade, the Benetton ad photographs the little human animal immediately “immersed” in the void. Curious little human, with an umbilical mother and as the promise of another cord to be plugged in as quick as possible (something like SOS Image).

Thus it is via the billboard that the mythology of the postmodern individual will be signified. For there is always mythology whenever the origin is questioned, even by means of the image. Confided so quickly to our sole gaze, the Benetton baby – it’s a girl, her name is Giusy – has been captured at the very outset of her future course through life as a sexed-and-speaking being (she was born on March 3, 1991, beneath the sign – oh irony! – of Pisces). The Benetton firm is not selling its textiles, nor even its name (after the “did-you-guess-who?” trick, it doesn’t need to anymore). What it signifies here is the power of advertising in general to produce the naked child which, in any case, will have to be dressed one day. Not the future client of Benetton, but the consumer in general, the one who will have to be attached to the market (thus the cord). 

And since we’re decidedly in a world where “there’s no room for the lazy” (as they sang in the International), there’s no question of waiting until this baby has finished being born before putting her image directly to work. The currently supreme form of capitalism is no doubt a kind of progress, since the child labour that so saddened Dickens has now been replaced by the labour of the child’s image, which only shocks a few recalcitrant moralists. Outdated? Uncertain, in any case, that humans will never again be forced to suffer the kind of treatment being publicly inflicted on their image.

Worthy souls have been moved by such crudeness. Some might accept the ungracious looks of the little object (how to escape it? fathers now witness the birth of their children), but still balk at the disappearance of a warm and humane environment for the barely-born. Shall we ridicule such tender sentiments? The obstinate desire for Nativity, for the cow and the donkey? Shall we wax nostalgic for Sunday-school images, normal, “intimate” ads showing innumerable well-washed babies gurgling in bales of maternal cotton? Not sure. But since Benetton is such an ace among pollsters, let’s be as brave, dumb, and average as the polled, and get this tongue-wagging symptom talking.

Its message is first of all aesthetic. The ad shows that when the bathwater has vanished, the former foetus has a tough time getting immersed in anything at all. Looking it over closely, you’ll find it’s plunged into nothing. Neither air, nor water, nor artistic blur, nor pure colour. Just the material medium of any ad destined for the billboard: white paper, left white, delivered as such. A Mallarmean infant born amid the anxiety of the blank page. Well can we understand her tears. 

Is this an abduction? It’s definitely a case of amputation, and there’s nothing new about that. For years now, almost decades, one of the most meaning-fraught operations of contemporary aesthetics has been the disjunction between figure and ground, body and environment, detail and whole. People have given the name of “mannerism” to what is only the already-long “history of amputation” (transplants, quotes, appropriations, all kinds of parasitism). The aim is always to break the natural solidarity of bodies with their surrounds. Advertising aesthetics has been the driving force of this operation. 

That said, the message is not only aesthetic, it’s also semiologic, indeed “semiurgic.” The semiurgic is the omnipotence of the sign – like “demiurgic” – at the moment when it has lost all aura and become a productive force. It is the victory (bitter? oh how bitter!) of an economy of the sign which is all the more totalitarian in that the signs too have finally been “individualised” and set free to “live their lives.” Hence, in passing, the economic miracle of Japanese culture, the most refined empire of signs. 

This too is old news. Beneath the pretext of selling yogurt and noodles, advertising has long laboured at the production of the autonomous signifiers (visual and linguistic) which it would one day need for much grander causes than yogurt and noodles. That day has come. In a world exchanging before our very eyes the old realist picture of mass production for a brand-new landscape of more personalised simulacra, advertising has played its vital role, which consisted in “liberating” the productivity of the sign. The umbilical cord that mysteriously linked the sign to a signified or a referent is also on the verge of being severed. The Benetton ad, both an image of separation and a separated image, confirms the darkest reflections of Debord (on alienation) and Lacan (on castration). 

Which is why, despite everything, the image cannot merely be semiologic: it is also humanitarian. One cannot amputate something – a sign, a being, indeed, a farmer – from the surrounding environment without racking up a little surgical-aesthetic cruelty. That’s why our animal friends have long paid the dues of this delicate operation, by suffering iconic vivisection and shameless manipulation, of which L’Ours (Jean-Jacques Annaud’s “The Bear”) is a good recent example. Whoever talks amputation and transplant is also talking about risk of rejection. Calculated risk of rejection. Calculation of the risk. The risk market. 

By posting up their newborn, solus, pauper, et nudus, on the city walls and the newspaper pages, Benetton and Toscani have created in each of us the vague sentiment that we should adopt this orphan too (as our children have blindly adopted the abandoned bear cub fostered off by Jean-Jacques Annaud, complete with its faked synthesizer squeals). Our malaise before the gigantic proof of human neotony comes less from the realism of the image than from the obligation that we now feel to “manage” not only with individualism as an ideology, but also with the first powerful icons of individuals without the bathwater. On our side as well, the umbilical cord begs to be knotted. On the social, or why not, the religious side, since religion – that which links, religere – always needs a cord. To adopt this child is to immerse her in something: a little writing, for example, in this newspaper-column-as-bathwater. 

So this article is the charitable act that a journalist has dedicated to the grand, enormous image of a tiny, forlorn child. Is it time to stand up and applaud? Hardly. It’s never difficult to interpret that which has been fabricated precisely for interpretation, and which tends typically toward the self-service market of social phenomena. What’s not easy, on the other hand, when faced with a provocation of this kind – which is finally rather benign – is to adopt a personal attitude, a way of being serene without being cynical. The difficulty is understandable: any individual response to a mass message is necessarily inadequate, frustrating, ridiculous. Even when the message in question is the theatrical display of the naked individual (that nackte Individuum evoked by the young Marx).

To those who would claim they are shocked, it’s hopefully possible to answer that we should be able to live with a share (a “quota”?) of scandal. Not for the sake of spineless tolerance, but because no one should be forced into forgetting the horrible reality on which the social tie is always founded. There is in our societies a potlatch of images which must be lived with. This frivolous waste is perhaps, optimistically, the condition for less frequent genocides: only our images (and no longer our bodies) will be sent off to the front. In any case, the capacity to not always replace what enrages us by what soothes us is just proof of a little maturity. Or simply proof – but the word has so completely disappeared from current parlance that one hesitates to voice it – of “humanism.”

II

A cute little symptom of our current environment, the Benetton baby asks a question that seems less and less avoidable. So let’s formulate it. Given the disappearance of art from our societies – to the benefit of culture, then cultural tourism, and finally tourism tout court – why not admit that flexible and effective programs of social communication could take up the fallen torch of collective “catharsis,” purging a few passions from time to time and dispensing the unfortunate intellectuals from the public management of “the philosophical debate”? After all, there’s more talent in the Benetton ad than in the pitiful agora constituted week after week by the combined headlines of the news magazines. What if cynicism were the unexpected face of whatever innocence we can still muster? In 1973, faced with an ad that had the public up in arms, Pasolini observed: “The cynicism of this slogan holds an intensity and an innocence which are absolutely new.” Pasolini was being provocative – but the ad was already signed Toscani (and Pirella).

A new scandal of “advertising for advertising’s sake” would be no worse than the old scandal of “art for art’s sake,” which it would replace to great advantage. Indeed, products are more quickly digestible than “works,” the Pavlovian communication of formats is more quickly accomplished than the transmission of content, and market shares are more quickly figured than the private emotions of the citizen. Of course there’ll be no more major scandals (we’ll all be “one big family” in which the “public menace” will be rare: the stupid Eugénie who derided Manet’s Olympia right there in the middle of the Salon is long dead and gone). But we’ll all be unfailingly titillated, stimulated, disgusted, dismayed, teased, tested, polled, in short saved from the boredom which, since the eighties, has rendered public space more or less unbearable. 

So is it time to turn the page and admit that when it comes to stating the truth of a society like ours (meeting the “scandal quota,” as it were), mass-oriented social communication can advantageously replace the vestigial elitism of outdated modern art? This is obviously the real question. And if the answer is yes, then it’s clear that the Toscanis of the world (and in Italy alone, a “creative” country, you also have Testa, Pirella, Sanna, D’Adda, Panzeri…) would love to be credited as the heroes of such a transformation. But is the answer yes? What if it were more like “yeauh…”?

There is another piece of history here, linked to the history of amputation. Call it the history of advertising, if you will. Or rather, of the new term between the spheres of “public” and “private.” Publicity and privatisation define more and more strictly the aesthetic framework of that which can be displayed, promoted, and sold. In this story of the world’s re-enchantment after its last destruction (WWII), the “announcement” was initially as servile as the pilot bird (or fish) that says nice things about the beast it’s perched on. Gone are the days when the role of advertising was above all to sell the product. Not much longer lasting, the days when it was a matter of building up the brand image over time: the era of popular hymns to liquid soaps, when advertisements, to Barthes’ great joy, inadvertently conveyed “something ideological” as well. A touching era, itself now liquidated. 

Because what happens, at the close of the three golden decades that put the meat on its bones, when the beast – the market economy – becomes the sole imaginable reality and the sole horizon worthy of global dreams? What happens when the last illusions about another possible type of society fade away? When all the bathwater is declared dirty? What happens is that advertising no longer works for the market, but the market works for advertising. More precisely, the market lets advertising climb up on its shoulders so it can shout down the news of a vast landscape to be explored and conquered.  

An extraordinary, unheard-of landscape where it’s no longer a question of our needs but of our desires, no longer of our pleasures but our caprices, no longer of our dreams but our fantasies. The market of the coming century will be that of immaterial goods, psychological and spiritual trinkets. A whole new world of communicational junk is already threatening. This is the landscape which the ultramodern Benetton advertising, like a pilot bird turned Sister Anne, sees coming from on high. And it’s toward that future, with no time to lose, that it has launched little Giusy, the pure foetus severed from everything. 

If that’s the story, then it’s easy to see that this “advertising of the third kind” demands a less stingy, stay-at-home ideology than the old-fashioned sort (which consequently shrinks back into its corner and pouts). By throwing out this baby without any bathwater, Toscani, we’ll say it again, is less concerned with selling the Benetton logo and line than with performing, gratuitously, a test that combines the advantages of a cultural proposal, an ideological debate, and even a morality lesson. Is Benetton “disinterested”? It would be more appropriate to say that its campaign immediately interests any and everybody. This child will belong to whoever is able to dress it. The blank page says only that the green light has been given and given to everybody. The economic war of all versus all is the possibility for each to interpret the object-pretext and extract some information from it. And this information, in the last analysis, is always economic. 

Now we can get back to our question: has advertising become the privileged vector of social communication? Will it replace the older (tottering and limited) forms of communication? Seized by vertigo, we won’t answer. No doubt the modern societies also needed their hard truths to come from an internal elsewhere: the sacred, poetry, art, but also warfare, politics, and ideology successively occupied these “sites of otherness” that Bataille called “the accursed share” and whose strange economy he sought to understand. And no doubt, in the postmodern societies, the all-conquering plasticity of the market has no more need for that kind of exteriority, but holds in its possession – via advertising as social communication – the means to bend the accursed entirely to its own ends. The “borderline” that the Benetton ad flirts with is not the border between the social and its repressed (what you might call the “good scandal,” the one that awakens fear and trembling), it’s just another disposable tool in the communication kit. Which is the real scandal, the “bad” scandal.

This is why the fundamental difference between creators and creatives, between art and advertising, is obviously not a question of talent, audacity, or technique. It’s a question of desire, of one’s position toward truth.  After all, why can’t I respect a creative? Because he’s a slave, to put it bluntly. The slave of a social interactivity in which he functions as a sophist or an overpayed mercenary. Because now that it has become the rule, the interactivity is currently diluting the idea of responsibility right along with the ideas of arbitration or of a symbolic dimension. Creatives are superior technicians in the service of a closed-circuit process which is largely virtual. A process which needs nothing more than overplayed impresarios, professional exaggerators.

Toscani takes himself for Caravaggio (let’s hope he doesn’t meet the same fate). He takes himself for a hero of Art. But there’s nothing moral in the way Toscani rests content with testing (not to say prodding) the morals of its contemporaries. The proof? Let’s go back for a moment to our newborn (decidedly abandoned by everyone, even in this article). When some English group protested over this image, what did Benetton do? “Fair play,” they said, and retracted the image. Caravaggio never retracted anything.

What does their retraction signify? That the image has shifted entirely to the side of economic power. And that nothing is ever put up for us to see (the naked baby) without an aim to see something else (the dressed and dressing parents). That the advertising image is the very model of the ricochet-image, the image just to see. Like in poker. Thanks to the reaction of an English lobby, something unexpected from England has become visible. The cultural proposal (this article) and the ideological campaign (the English reaction) are no longer anything more than the natural means whereby a new piece of information comes to light. What information? That henceforth, the ideological components of the market must be taken into account. 

For it was clearly too hasty when people spoke about the “end of ideologies,” on the pretext that they haven’t been making much noise over the past ten years. It’s because they too needed to be (re)constituted as values, on a “secondary market” internal to the primary one. That’s nothing new, it will be said quite rightly. Because the new strategy of Benetton is elsewhere. It does not consist, for example, in simply billboarding an ideological line that corresponds to the firm conviction of Lucian himself (the playful anti-racism of United Colors). On the contrary, it lies in the quest for a subtle dissensus, an internal limit to collective convictions (and conventions).

Small but provocative details (the horns on the little black devil next to the blond angel) are the springboards in the quest for finer, more precise information about ideology. No longer the hard-bitten, doctrinaire ideology that can’t sell anything more (and disgusts people instead), but the “lived experience” of ideology, its intimate blurring, its changing borders, its facile contradictions. In this sense, Benetton is like the devil’s advocate (that’s the final meaning of the “did-you-guess-who?” trick), testing us for the temptation to think something else, the impulse to thing the contrary of what we claim to think.

In a period where contradiction is no longer the motor of anything, the compromise formation that Freudians know so well risks becoming the major trope of social communication. Just as negotiation stands every chance of becoming the nerve-centre of economic war. And just as economic war looks poised to take over, all by itself, for the defunct march of history. 

It’s in this sense, to conclude, that the message of the ad is political. The auto-regulation of society, its free-wheeling interactivity, are the service that advertising (writ large) renders to the market economy (writ very large) and to its wars of the third kind. It’s an entirely free service, carried out on the eye and for the eye. Which claims (or prefers) to know nothing about the hand that guides it. It just blinks its pretty lashes. Should it be taken on its word? 

In any case, we’ll never be miscreants enough for its taste.

First published in Libération in two parts on 30 September and 1 October 1991. Published in English in Documenta Documents 2, 1996, Cantz Verlag. Translation by Brian Holmes.

Implausible Truth

Little Daney gem reposted from Steve Erickson's defunct original website (the new one is here).

Implausible Truth - Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

The world once was divided in two. I speak of the world of cinema lovers, the small world of cinephiles. There were those who giggled at the last films of Fritz Lang and those for whom these films ranked among the most beautiful. (Yes, but how to prove it?). The second lived in fear: fear of understanding the firsts' snicker of a smile before Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) or of poking fun at The Indian Tomb (1959). Because these vulnerable films, obtuse with logic, touched on what one pompously called "the essence" of cinema. They touched on the fact that there are films that sound idiotic when one tells their stories and are shattering when one sees them, on the fact that a film isn't its screenplay, nor cinema literature. 

And then, these films had no reputation: the histories of cinema spoke only of Metropolis, M, of the rigour of Fury, and the critical establishment of the time spat with condescension on the American period of Lang, a period of bad luck, tiny budgets and films more and more B. 

One had to defend these films against the thick common sense of the snickerers, against Lang himself, who had the air of being ashamed of them. (Hadn't he spoken of The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb as his "Indian shits?"). Helplessness. The old master already had the disillusioned smile that one could see in him a few years later in Contempt. The slightly superior smile of one who nevertheless knows (and who better than him, who could have become the #1 man of Nazi cinema?) that one must never feel superior. That feeling superior is the only crime. The rictus grin that Langian heroes have at the worst moments, like Tom Garrett at the end of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, when all is lost for him, and he doesn't know how to do anything other than step towards the office to see closer the pardon in his favour that the governor won't sign. 

The scenario of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is the story of a scenario. Of a frame-up, a simulacrum. An influential journalist (Sidney Blackmer) campaigns against the death penalty. He wants to prove that it's perfectly possible to send an innocent man to the electric chair. Yes, but how to prove it? 

He has this baroque idea (well, he thinks he has it) of proposing to his future son-in-law, Tom Garrett, a writer (Dana Andrews, once again rancid and admirable) to let himself be accused of a murder that was recently committed, fabricating false proofs, leaving himself condemned to death. At this moment, deus ex machina, he will unveil the implausible truth* and the partisans of the death penalty will be ashamed and listen to their conscience. That's their scenario, but in the film, it will go entirely differently.
In this film, there is all of Lang. The subject isn't really the death penalty. It wouldn't be a good film for Dossiers de l’écran**. 

The subject, as always with Fritz Lang, is the idea of responsibility. In his films, there are those who know they're guilty (it's stronger than them, it's pathological: from Mabuse to M passing by the "lipstick killer" of While the City Sleeps) and those who believe themselves innocent. But, from the silent serials to his American films made on command, through the big machines of UFA, Lang always drove in the same nail: there are no innocents. There might have been, but there are no longer. Innocence is provisional, wanting proof of it is already being guilty. Being sure of oneself, succumbing to the cold passion of ideas and ideologies, having the superior and smirky air of those who have expected everything, who have answers to everything, who are "mad of everything" is a dangerous state. Dangerous for others. 

The journalist who fights death penalty and the sadistic prosecutor who wants to apply it at any cost are brothers. One wants to expose an innocent man to be condemned to better prove him innocent, the other is ready to condemn the innocent man. What they haven't expected is that the innocent man is already the guilty one. 

I won't recount the events of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. I have already said too much. Its humour would be less redemptive if we weren't also, as spectators, at the same time innocent and guilty. Innocent because we know nothing, guilty because we believe everything. The Lang-machine is infernal: it needs us as spectators, witness, jury, cop. We play all the roles in this comedy of justice. But in the last shot, we are held up to ridicule and if some laugh, that would be from disappointment (one doesn't like being the dupe of a film, of a little celluloid.) Because we should know that in the films of Lang, there is never absolute proof, no end, no certainty, but a dry linking of causes and effects, words and things, puns and favourite objects, doors and secrets behind doors, insane uphill slopes and unreasonable downhill slopes. To infinity. 

How to watch the film? One must not try to be more clever than it. At the cinema, it's never an interesting attitude. (What does resemble the face of a clever spectator in the dark? Nothing great, it's even quite ridiculous.) And if we enter into the paranoid scenario of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, it's by pleasure, by play - not to have the final word. 

One must see the film twice: once for suspense and once to play its humour "in reverse." The humour of Lang, unique in the cinema, consists of supplying the spectator all the information he needs to understand everything. But of supplying it in disorder, so that he can make nothing of it. The truth is implausible because the characters don't stop telling it unknowingly. They don't stop saying innocently the key-words of the story they debate. Imagine a crossword puzzle where the definition and the word to find are the same. What anger (or what laugh) when you discover the trick. 

It's a word, only one, the name of the women that he has killed, that makes Garrett lose, and when the film is over, nothing prevents you from thinking with a greedy and retrospective terror of all the other words of the dialogue that are perhaps passwords, blunder-words of another story that could cross this one, as deadly as it. Infernal circle, that of your imagination. 

I remember the first time I saw the film. I followed dumbfounded this crazy story where the innocent is the guilty man, the inquirer is the inquiry, and it's the criminal who revolts against the death penalty. I admired this way of telling all these stories in one, as if to establish a theorem (I wanted to write this article on Lang without using the word "rigour": I failed.) I also admired the respect of Lang for the public, his estimate of our capacity for memorising all the elements of the film, never doing the job for us. And then, suddenly, at the moment where the old journalist takes his car out of the garage to go to the appeal tribunal of the "unfortunate" Garrett, I had a premonition. The man leaves the garage, he is in a rush and retreats towards the street filled with light that's at the base of the image. A second later, the camera is in the street, at a perpendicular angle to the preceding shot: a truck has knocked over the car, now in flames: the journalist and the false proofs with it. Horror. Horror and logic: it’s the thing we hadn't expected that must happen. 

Lang is at the same time the director who calculates causes and effects as far as possible and the one who knows how to make you feel in advance, only by direction, the stupid accident that will cut you down. A second before (not two, not three) before it arrives. A very abstract director and a very physical director. A genius. (Yes, but how to prove it etc.?).

First published in Libération on 18 July 1981. Reprinted in Ciné-journal in 1986. Translated by Steve Erickson (with minor amendments).

* "The Implausible truth" is the literal translation of title under which the film was released in France.

** Current affairs TV programme, running from 1967 to 1991, where a debate among intellectuals or expert followed a film on the topic raised.

We're fixing the links...

UPDATE 11 June 2019 - After catching-up with Steve, we've agreed that I'll be posting the texts on this blog. This may take a few weeks to get round all of them but this will be an opportunity for readers to re-discover them. Apologies to those whose links we are going to mess up.

ORIGINAL POST:

Hi all,

In a reminder that content is vulnerable on the internet, a number of Daney translations are currently not available. We're working to fix this, bear with us.

Thirty-three texts were hosted on Steve Erickson's website (http://home.earthlink.net/~steevee) but the web hosting company has decided to introduce charges and seems to have found no better way to introduce them than taking the content offline (nice!).

Steve is in the process of moving the content to his new site (https://steeveecom.wordpress.com/). I'll update the links once done.

If you're desperate for content, get in touch via the comments and I'll arrange to send you a copy.

LK.

Daney on the Staubs: En rachâchant, Class Relations

The Goethe Institute in London is organising a Huillet/Straub retrospective at the moment. Andy Rector and I seized the opportunity to translate a few texts by Daney.

The first two were published on the same day in Libération (3 October 1984): the account of an evening with 'the Straubs' who were presenting Class Relations at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the review of the film by Daney.

The Straubs 

First published in Libération on 3 October 1984. Reproduced in Ciné journal, 1981-86, Cahiers du cinéma, 1986, pp. 256-7.   

Franz Kafka, strauboscoped 

First published in Libération on 3 October 1984. 

And since the Goethe retrospective is showing Class Relations (Klassenverhältnisse) along with En rachâchant, we've added a short text by Daney on the latter. This programme is on tonight and on Wednesday.

Straub rachâche 

First published in Libération on 7 April 1983.

See you at some of the screenings.

I, Christine F., 13, Junkie, Prostitute…

I, Christine F., 13, Junkie, Prostitute…*, Ulrich Edel  

Drugs kill, so does sociology. 

A cliché is neither true nor false. It’s an image that doesn’t move, no longer makes anybody move and generates laziness. There is no shortage of clichés when it comes to drugs. All of them are in I, Christine F., 13, Junkie, Prostitute which is filmed in the grim and flat style of the new ‘new’ German cinema. The title raised the fear (or the hope) of a pornographic film but it appears to be nothing of the sort: we are witnessing a raw and unvarnished spiral of a collapse. Nothing will really surprise us but everything will appal us: the gory details, the syringes cleaned in the toilet tanks, the asphalt and the apartment blocks, the pale faces and the unfathomable sadness of the children lost on the pavements of Berlin, between the Sound, ‘Europe’s biggest night club’ (where David Bowie performs one evening) and the Am Zoo station**.  

We are told (it’s the essence of the advertisement for the film) that Christiane F. has existed, still exists, that she’s clean now and that she has spent hours talking to two journalists, that a best-selling book followed (in 1978), whose film rights were quickly acquired (in 1979) before a certain Ulrich Edel started shooting (in 1980) and the film was released in Paris (1981). But once the film is over (ending on this improbable image of recovery), we wonder: what’s the point? What’s the point of this guarantee of reality, this slice of true life, what’s the point of the real Christiane F.? It was enough to enter in a computer all the literature on the topic, from confessions of former junkies and dealers, to police and medical reports, to obtain Christiane F., the inconspicuous 13-year-old little girl, the facial composite of a fallen child, the sociological sample that we needed to illustrate the typical scenario, the composite scenario of the film. That a filmmaker embarks on a detailed investigation of one topic is one thing (even Hollywood has done that), that he uses the results of the investigation to protect himself is another. Unless his goal is to disarm the audience, to make us feel even more guilty, to prevent us from criticising the film. How dare someone say that such a film is grim, flat, lurid and comfortable? The one who does will be criticised in return: only a drug addict, a pervert or an aesthete would refuse to walk into this ‘real life blackmail’. 

And yet, what do we see in I, Christiane F.? Close ups of fake injections, ravaged faces filmed too closely, the dire spectacle of teenagers aping trips, withdrawal symptoms, prostitution and death for the camera. And what are we told? Some true, sad and irrefutable things, clichés precisely: that one takes drugs because of conformism (or worse, after a heartache), that the spiral is terrible, unstoppable: the joint leads to the fix like soft leads to hard, the fix leads to prostitution which leads back to the fix, and this until the final overdose. The causes of this spiral are vague but known: indifferent parents, broken families, a lover living with mum, uninhabitable cities, omnipresent sex, the lack of true love. All this must be true. But a true thing, when it becomes a sociological sample, begins to sound false. Because there is also the truth of cinema, of the gaze of the filmmaker. And an observation, no matter how brutal (and this one certainly is) is not necessarily truth. Otherwise, we should abandon film criticism and jump to the Society pages.  

Drug addicts are unlucky. They already suffer in life (“there are no happy drug addicts” repeats Dr. Olivenstein after having seen the film). And it’s not much better on film. The drug addict – and especially the child drug addict – is not a character, but a case.  One is not interested in a case, one examines it, especially since examining carries no risk for oneself. A filmmaker, when filming drug addicts (or any other fringe character), transforms himself into a care worker, a doctor, an understanding cop, a repressed punter, a murky journalist, a shrink: never into a filmmaker. Error. Abdication. The drug addict ‘character’ doesn’t exist in cinema: banned from fiction. Only the case counts, the statistical victim, the problem of civilisation. The bath water counts for more than the baby. This is why a film like Fassbinder’s In a Year of 13 Moons, another story of very unhappy fringe characters, or even a film like Neige (Juliet Berto, 1981) with the transvestite character in withdrawal, moves us and teaches us much more than the little Christiane F. The true Christiane has been a victim of drugs, the false one (the actress Natja Brunckhorst) has been a victim of the sociological gaze. 

There are two types of films: those that involve the audience (they’re the best ones) and those that only concern the audience. The two are fundamentally different. In the first case, the audience is involved as individuals, as subjects, in each spectator’s troubled solitude as a ‘paying pig’. The spectator is involved by what we shouldn’t be afraid to call the art of the filmmaker: what he wants to say, his know-how, his moral. In the second case, the spectator is concerned as a citizen, belonging to a community considered normal, and who votes. What to do with the problem of drugs? If I’m a bit cowardly, I demand more funds for rehab centres. If I’m a member of the French Communist Party, I will denounce a small Arab drug dealer from the suburbs (that was before Mitterrand!). If I am soulful and sensitive, I will be appalled by this lack of love. But it’s too late. Love should have come before, before the spiral began. Love comes with fiction: we can love a character, but we can’t love a case.  

I, Christiane F., 13, Junkie, Prostitute is a film only in name. It’s something different altogether: an audio-visual simulation that, to be operative, should be broadcasted on prime-time TV, before a debate among experts who would seriously make us forget that for two hours we have been nothing but voyeurs. It’s a pornographic film after all. 

First published in Libération on 24 July 1981, reproduced in Ciné Journal 1981-1986, Cahiers du cinéma, 1986, pp. 18-20. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and Andy Rector. 


* The film was released in France as Moi, Christiane F., 13 ans, droguée, prostituée… I translated the French title in English as it is relevant to Daney’s argument. Daney uses both ‘Christine’ and ‘Christiane’ randomly in the article (in the 1986 edition of his book Ciné Journal); I don't know why so I kept them as they are. The original title is Christiane F. - Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, a film by Ulrich Edel.

** In French Daney writes ‘La station Am Zoo’ which seems a mistake. Daney refers to the Zoo train station - the Bahnhof Zoo in the German title. ‘Am Zoo’ means ‘at the station’ in German if I’m correct.

Serge Daney in 2018

Time for the annual round-up. A modest but decent output of events around Serge Daney: seven new translations, a fantastic database and signs that interest in Daney is still going strong.

The new translations on this blog include two pieces on Douglas Sirk (Daney's reviews of The Tarnished Angels and his take on the famous last scene of Imitation of Life), a text on Mizoguchi and the good distance, a double bill with a short film about Franju's Eyes without a face, and an little known article on Grémillon as The Passeur. Elsewhere, Andy Rector published a text on Jerry Lewis' Which Way to the Front? and the Arsenal Institute in Berlin translated a short text on tennis.

This year also saw the appearance of an online database of all the texts published by Daney, with links to English translations where available. For anyone who has tried to do a search in Daney's corpus before, this is an extraordinary gift. Thank you Pierre Eugène, its creator.

Finally, a myriad of miscellaneous events around Daney also took place. In France with a conference in Paris, the reruns of Daney's radio show and the presence of Daney or his words in a film and a theatre play, but also in Spain with the publication of yet another book of translations. We are hearing rumours of more book projects: a possible book of English translation (don't jinx it by setting your expectations too high) and a 'theoretical biography' in French.

Happy 2019!

All of Daney

If you've ever tried to find a text by Serge Daney on a specific topic - a film or a director for example -, you'll know how hard it is. You need to get hold of the different books, go through each table of contents and index, and if no success, try your luck at flicking through the pages. Some good news then: Pierre Eugène has created a database of all known Daney articles, and it's available online, with an English language option.

Serge Daney database

Pierre's PhD thesis (a methodical and insightful re-reading and commentary of Daney's texts from 1962 to 1982) led him to reference all the published texts by Daney, covering obvious sources like Cahiers and Libération (going through each and every edition) but also other sources such as book chapters or cinema booklets. He has created a database with the full list, from Daney's first texts in the magazine he created in 1962 (Visages du cinéma) to his lasts like 'The Tracking Shot in Kapo' or his speech for 'Trafic at the Jeu de Paume', even extending to posthumous publications.

So if you're wondering if Daney ever published something about Chris Marker (he hasn't to my knowledge) or whether he has written about a specific film/director/actor/festival, this tool is a gold mine.

A few things to know when using it:

• It is the most exhaustive source available by far. Pierre has diligently listed Daney's texts for his PhD, finding many that were omitted in the complete editions by P.O.L. (for example this rare text on Grémillon called "The passeur").
• The database lists texts published by Daney, including interviews. It does not reference things like notes (for example the ones gathered posthumously in the book The Exercise Was Beneficial, Sir), unpublished texts or Daney's personal diaries. 
• Pierre has kindly added an English interface and worked with me to list the known English translations. You can select the "Only translated in English" option to search through them. It lists texts fully translated but not extracts.
• Despite the utter usefulness of it, these things are never absolutely perfect so if you find errors or something missing / not working, please let Pierre know. Two tips: search terms need to be four characters long ("Ozu" won't work) and if you simply click "Search" without any search terms, you will get the full list of the circa 2000 texts (you can then do a "page search" in your browser).

Enjoy. And all credit to Pierre.

The passeur

[UPDATE 25 Dec 2021: This text has now been published in the last edition of Trafic, the review founded by Daney and which lasted 30 years after his death.] 

Wait, what? There's a little known text by Serge Daney called "The passeur"?

Recap for those discovering this blog: "passeur" is a term Daney used to define his position as a critic in his later years and the term has become closely associated with him. Difficult to translate, it can refer to a smuggler, a ferryman (real or mythological), or simply someone passing something to someone else. Here are two quotes where Daney gives clues of what he means:

“I like this small word: passeur. I remember a fantastic article by Jean-Louis Comolli about Eric Dolphy entitled ‘the passeur’. (…) The passeurs are strange: they need borders but only to challenge them. They don’t want to be alone with their treasures and at the same time, they don’t really care about those to whom they pass something. And since ‘feelings are always reciprocal’, we don’t really care about passeurs either, we don’t pass anything to them and we often empty their pockets”. (Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, 1991). 

“As a passeur I stayed midstream, waiting for someone from one of the banks to call me or reach out to me, and since that never happened I began to send little messages, both written and oral, sending news from one bank to the other without myself belonging to either of them” (Persévérance, 1994).

It turns out that Daney played with this term for quite some time, as far back as 1978 when he first used it in a newly found text about Grémillon. Thanks to Pierre Eugène who unearthed this text (via Jeremy Sulpis) and to Andy Rector for helping with the translation.

The passeur 

In 1978, The Action-République cinema took the risk of organising a tribute to Jean Grémillon, a great filmmaker without an audience, struck by some sort of official curse during his lifetime and after his death. Seizing the opportunity to take a closer look, the audience, often young, discovered in Grémillon more than a great filmmaker, they also discovered a passeur who, between two ages of French cinema, obstinately took upon his shoulders the risk of a mutation.  

Before Grémillon, it had been possible to make great films without necessarily being an ‘auteur’. After him, in France, it had become impossible. Before him: a prodigious actors’ cinema. After him: the naked, ungrateful, even unpopular necessity to sign one’s films, not only with a ‘style’ or ‘know-how’ but with one’s body. And that’s a completely different can of worms. Grémillon was the contemporary witness/craftsman/victim of the slow withdrawal of the body of the actor from French cinema. A withdrawal that continued beyond measure, up to the sudden emergence, in the place left vacant, of another body: that of the auteur (today? Godard, Duras, Truffaut…). After the war, it would no longer be really possible for a filmmaker to work, film after film, this filmic material that is the body of the professional actor. And French cinema would start searching for the idea of models, heralded by Bresson, everywhere but with the professional actors (doomed to decadence and then unemployment). Grémillon is the one who, caught between the Renoir-continent and the Bresson-continent (to be simple), will experience uncertainty with regard to actors, with regard to what will eventually be called casting. He belongs to two worlds. It’s enough to see the evolution, throughout his work, of the image of the working-class hero, to which Grémillon is very attached. It begins with Gabin (deeply moving in Lady Killer), followed by the pale Marchal (in Lumière d’été), then the evanescent Girotti (in The Love of a Woman). In the end, all that is left is a vague leather jacket, a cast-off.  

But this cast-off is precisely what has always interested Grémillon. He’s not only the one who ‘came at the wrong time’, born too early or too late, he’s the one who this situation (in-between two stages) tortures and enchants. He’s a passeur in more ways than one: between two ages of cinema, between two wars, between two worlds (the best and the other), between two sexes. In other words, he believes that in better tomorrows, women can take the place of men, and vice versa.  

Grémillon’s films, like those of Mizoguchi, are subjected to a double logic and the necessity to concede nothing of one to the benefit of the other. On one side, there’s the social class of the heroes, irreducible and final (Grémillon was one of the rare directors who likes to film people at work). On the other side, there is, in the bonus gift promised by Socialism, a redistribution of the roles between men and women, on either side of the desire that binds them to each other. More than Renoir or Daquin, Grémillon took seriously the question of the positive hero (already the case with the convict played by Alcover in the remarkable Little Lise). But in the end, the positive hero can only be a woman. Throughout Grémillon’s work, we witness a sort of mutation. At the beginning, it’s a world of men where women only bring misfortunes. Men are bound to their labour, naive and violent. Women are without ties, from anywhere and nowhere (see how Gabin, a typographer in Lady Killer, follows Mireille Balin, or how the same Gabin meets Morgan, a woman from nowhere, on a lost vessel in Stormy Waters). But instead of using a generalised phallic solution, Soviet-style (where the woman is virilised without the man being feminised), there is in the surprising The Woman Who Dared a new separation, a new division of labour, and of the elements: man to the earth and woman to the sky, the place of pure passage (and that’s why I wish to see a tribute to Grémillon in the final image of Adolfo G. Arrieta’s Flammes). 

These questions are rather buried, one might say. But is this true? What is Grémillon talking to us about in the end? Something that nowadays is avoided, circumvented, forgotten, left to the photo novels, the sentimental press, and cinephilic nostalgia: that human beings are beings of desire, caught in the class struggle. Remove any of the two components of this sentence and nothing makes sense anymore. Grémillon’s films are carried by one question, too simple not to move us: What is a man? What is a woman? Are there distinctive signs which would be anything other than biological markers or social conventions? Where to draw the dividing line, assuming such a line needs to be drawn? What does a man desire in a woman? Nothing more perhaps than what jerks him in motion (in all possible senses and literally). What does a woman desire in a man? Maybe nothing more than that empty cast-off of his, which she will keep when he is no longer there (a signifier, a ‘lady killer’, a mask). 

Grémillon’s films are difficult because they demand that we stay as close as possible to something (desire) that keeps extending itself, like onward marches, surviving itself, gaining over nothing. Between two scenes, two shots, there are not only ellipses, discontinuity, and the edges of the narrative, but the horror when everything is missing and we have to start from zero. No comfort for the enemies of comfort!

Published in Chefs d’oeuvres et nanars du cinéma français 1930-1956, a booklet for the Grémillon retrospective (Dec 1978 – Apr 1979) at the Action République cinema. 

The eye was in the tomb and watched Franju

Jonathan Rosenbaum showed a short film by Chloé Galibert-Laîné at a recent workshop in Paris. The film stems from a comment by Daney in a text on Franju's Eyes Without a Face. What better opportunity to translate this text. Film and translation below.

The eye was in the tomb and watched Franju 
Georges Franju, Eyes Without a Face  

For a long time, a sound has been worse than many images. A sound from Eyes Without a Face. In a night scene in a cemetery, a man in a hurry attacks the slab of a family vault with a pickaxe. His fearful accomplice wears a black raincoat and, on a neighbouring tomb, they have laid an inert body, a kind of mummy. When thrown into the finally opened vault, the body smashes with a sharp sound. This is why, until very recently, I haven’t watched again Eyes Without a Face. Because of this sound. But I always maintained that the film was superb. I saw it again: it is superb. 

The burly man in a hurry is called Genessier. A famous surgeon, the archetype of the big boss, raging mad, whose daughter has been disfigured in a car accident (he was driving, drunk). Genessier (Pierre Brasseur, more than intimidating) happens to be an allograft specialist. How can he give back a face to his daughter who is cloistered, declared dead, guarded by a hundred dogs (Edith Scob, more than intimidated)? Simple, by kidnapping young girls, operating on them at night in a secret lab, behind the garage, hoping that the skin graft will work. Meanwhile, there are dead bodies without faces to get rid of, mummies. 

We don’t talk much about ‘plastic beauty’ these days, only of ‘plastic surgery’ (Franju being a pioneer). Should we use these words again, we shouldn’t reserve them for Lumière, Feuillade or Lang, but also use them for one of their last great heirs: Franju. For I can’t imagine how one could forget the black raincoat of the professor’s accomplice-assistant-lover (?), even shinier than the eyes of Alida Valli (the actress). Similarly, I had never thought that a Citroën 2CV could have such screen presence (watch the first scene and its wonderful editing), that a Citroën DS could be parked with such a sly elegance, that a tree could seem to suffer so much, and of course that a skin mask, ‘between tweezers’ as we would say ‘between inverted commas’, could leave with regrets the face of a future mummy (the unfortunate Juliette Mayniel). Calling Franju a ‘plastic artist’ doesn’t mean that he knows how to compose images but that he films inexplicably beautiful objects. 

For a 2CV to be beautiful, it can’t just be ‘well filmed’, it needs to become ‘someone’. Franju isn’t overtly interested in his characters (well-drawn, but with a big brush) and never tries to play games with the audience. Hot cockles games don’t interest him. He prefers letting the objects become both characters and spectators. Characters since they have a role to play (the 2CV runs) and spectators since they are witness of unspeakable horrors (there’s often a dead body on the back seat of the tragic 2CV). That’s Franju’s poetic art. 

It goes a long way. The most terrifying scene of the film is not the surgery (especially for us, since bucketloads of haemoglobin have been poured on film screens), but the following one. When we finally discover the beautiful face of the real Edith Scob and that we’re made to believe that it’s someone else’s skin, we understand why any true beauty is always ambiguous in films. Challenged to choose between the ‘how does it work’ of realism and the ‘it’s as if’ of fiction, we will always let the objects choose for us. With Franju, since Blood of the Beasts, any beauty originates by facing horror, hence its muffled radiance, its ironic calm. 

If it’s true (as we keep saying, as loud as we can) that a film is worthless unless it invents its own time, Eyes Without a Face unfolds with a calm we are no longer accustomed to. As if, from a dead body to another, the action only accelerated a little, just a bit. As if, for us as for the characters, there was no need to get agitated since the 2CV, the raincoat, the kennel of test dogs, the scalpels, were ready, with a desperate calm, to get going again, in-between two failed graft. If there is an emotion in this film, it comes from this implacable melange of awkwardness and routine. Genessier is a monster, maybe, but he isn’t cut out to break into a tomb at night, just as Valli isn’t meant to solicit young girls in the cafés of the Latin Quarter. These sleepwalkers continue – realism oblige – to carry their weight of humanity. 

P.S. In the end, the sound from the breaking of the bones of the disfigured mummy isn’t that terrifying. I was less scared and it allowed me to rediscover the scene in which I found a shot that I had forgotten, an incredible shot which one shouldn’t look for at the bottom of the vault but in the nocturnal sky where Franju – for no apparent reason – shows a passing plane. Protective model, witness-object, pure poetry. 

First published in Libération on 25 September 1986. Reprinted in La maison cinéma et le monde 3. Les années Libé 1986-1991, POL, 2012, pp.145-7. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar.

Mizoguchi, The Good Distance

Mizoguchi, The Good Distance 

Kenji Mizoguchi, Street of Shame (Akasen chitai) 

Street of Shame is Mizoguchi’s last film. At the end of this TV retrospective, we move away from the idea of the humanist and cosmic Mizoguchi and see with more precision the Sadean maker of films with women, speed, killer camera angles and the worn human machine. 

Before spelling out why we much watch tonight Mizoguchi’s last film and the last in this retrospective (Street of Shame, 1955), I’d like to bring up a personal memory. A week ago, exactly the same evening, I had resigned to the idea that once again an emotional tsunami would leave me gasping in front of my televisual fish bowl. The big fish (“Wait for your turn, no need to sulk” goes a zen saying quoted by Vuillemin) was called Sansho the Bailiff (1954). A melodrama of the type that we don’t make anymore but that we knew how to make, which begins in the 11th century, in an undergrowth, and finishes on a beach, in Japan. Watched many times.  

Following with my gaze the camera of the great Miyagawa Kazuo, which itself was following the members (particularly mistreated by fate) of a noble family in pre-feudal Japan, I observed that my eyes remained dry and that the camera itself often had the wish to flatten characters. It used any pretext for this: a flashback, a dolly shot, a shortcut, soaring music (by the great Hayasaka Fumio). 

I wasn’t surprised since it was precisely this that had overwhelmed me (and not just me) when the film was released. This art to modulate the distance between gaze and bodies, to make the gaze a body and the body a ghost. This art to take some distance (as we say), to place the pathetic detail back into the wider glaze, to film only to verify that what was irremediable has indeed happened, that any thinking is wishful, that defeat is the only reality, and that compassion is the last possible feeling. 

Last Friday, I had the courage to confess to myself (in a low voice) that the characters in Sansho the Bailiff never really touched me (except two: Anju and Taro), that the irritating Tanaka Kinuyo had rarely minced so much, that the character Zushio-Mutsu-Waka was rather bland, and that Sansho was but a schematic puppet. Worse, hadn’t I been always delighted by their misfortunes?  

Even worse, wasn’t Mizoguchi himself, as a Sadean filmmaker, delighted to send his characters to the firing line, never tiring of their eternal suffering grimaces? Deciding to be honest and, if needed, iconoclastic (we no longer need to fight for Mizoguchi to be recognised, everybody knows he’s one of the greats – it’s for Naruse, Kinoshita, Gosho, Yamanaka that we should make an effort), convinced that real cinephile events happen on television and, after I gave a call to Marguerite Duras who, in a small voice, admitted that she had found the film “a bit long” (before talking about the only recent cinema event: the umpteenth showing of The Night of the Hunter), I dared ask the question: what if Mizoguchi was moving away from us? And what if a few shots by Ozu, recently gleaned while channel hopping, had suddenly seemed closer, more vibrant?  

What is moving away is perhaps the all too universal idea of a humanist, cosmic, ample Mizoguchi. We have discovered his films in the reverse order: Street of Shame, his last film, was the first one released in France. We have rightly admired the costume dramas of his ‘late period’ which are those where Mizoguchi, in the name of a very exalted humanism, tries to stay the distance of the great, minutely calligraphed sagas, with real breathing and story-telling problems (that’s how we should re-read the comments from his script writer, Yoda, published in Cahiers).  

There is a risk of academism in these films, especially the costumed ones. We do find in them the most beautiful camera movements in the history of film making (along with Murnau’s) but it’s because the camera is tired to stick with characters plagued by eternal bad luck or fake heroism. There are no contradictory characters with Mizoguchi: good one are too good, evil ones are truly horrible. There’s only one moving character in Sansho the Bailiff: Sansho’s son, Taro, who becomes a monk.  

What appears with more precision though, is the real Mizoguchi. The Mizoguchi of the modern films, the women films, the films of the immediate post-war period (The Lady of Musashino, Women of the Night, The Woman in the Rumor). The Mizoguchi that hasn’t yet taken any distance or height, the sex maniac who can only invent (climax) at the heart of the cruellest traps, when filmed women and filming camera behave like turtles and hares, nailed to the floor, to paper walls, to mats stained with tears and sperm. Mizoguchi’s passion (singular as any passion) had been to find the killer angle, the salutary corner, the redeeming detail, the speed that avoids the blows, the elegant jolt, the tiredness of the human machine.  

It’s all this that begins for the last time, in a terrifying calm, in Street of Shame, tonight. 

First published in Libération on 10 April 1987. Reprinted in La maison cinéma et le monde. 3. Les années Libé 1986-1991, P.O.L., 1991, pp. 149-151.

The Famous Last Scene

Another piece on Douglas Sirk...

The Famous Last Scene - Douglas Sirk, Imitation of Life 

The last scene of Imitation of Life is a piece of anthology. 

There are those who didn’t know the film. Until then, we felt sorry for them. Now, we can say: “Go! Go see it.” since it’s released again (at the Action Christine). There are those who have seen it, once, and who saw it again, more than once, or have been told about it. Imitation of Life? Ah, yes, the final scene with Mahalia Jackson that no one - whether animal, plant or mineral - can remain unmoved by? The moment when whoever hasn’t already been transformed in a human mop feels he’s sobbing? The famous last scene of Imitation of Life? Let’s talk about it. 

So, Annie Johnson dies of sorrow because her daughter Sarah Jane has disowned her (and her race) and has decided to live away as a white girl. By the deathbed, a few seconds ago, we were already crying: Lana Turner was devastated, Sandra Dee looked like a little old lady, the expressionless John Gavin looked despondent. Then suddenly, change of scenery, low-angle shot on a (big) black woman: Mahalia Jackson sings Trouble in the World! Known Cinephile Shock (KCS). It’s the funeral of Annie Johnson with great pomp and music: four white horses pull a black carriage loaded with a mountain of white roses. The bad daughter arrives almost too late to embrace the coffin screaming “I killed her.” Tears. 

This famous last scene is strong. This great moment of American Melodrama is also a tour de force. The last time I saw the film, overcoming my pain, I had the strength to ask myself if Douglas Sirk’s secret wasn’t precisely here. This final scene is overwhelming precisely because we are suddenly wondering if it’s the same film that continues. We remember a short scene where Annie, already sick, mentioned proudly having sorted every details of her funeral. Of another scene where Lora Meredith, as an aside to a conversation, discovered (with the great idiocy of sympathetic white bosses) that Annie, the good and faithful Annie, existed outside her household. And what did Annie Johnson do? She looked after religion, she was baptist, she belonged to several congregations, was good and bigoted, a bit Auntie Tom but with many friends. 

And the friends are all here. From the children in Sunday clothes to the priests with their serious look as professionals of spirituality. Gospel, dignity, the black people in mourning: Swing high, swing low, sweet chariot. And the suspicion gets confirmed: what if she was the main character of the film? Annie Johnson. What if we had known and seen nothing? But then, what film did we see? 

Let’s be honest, the resistible rise of Lora Meredith, the platinum blonde queen of the stage and the screen, is of little interest. Worse: few films have shown with so much polite indifference the mediocrity of the American Dream, its silly romantic fury, its stupid bravura. It required the gaze of Detlef Sierck. It required the talent of Douglas Sirk at the end of his Hollywood career so that Lora Meredith, with her twenty four costumes and her Woolworth-style bovarism generates a suspicion in the audience. What if all this care to make up, dress and dress again, age and make look young this imitation of a star that then was Lana Turner was only there to deceive? Or to suggest that one should have looked elsewhere, where the black people is. 

For Annie Johnson is the pivotal character of the film. A mother was hiding another mother. The black one was the right one, the other only an artefact. But the black mother comes with a problem: she’s black. In true Hollywood logic, she needs to at least die so that her friends, the black people, have the right to be in the image. In extremis, the thirty seconds of Mahalia Jackson cancel an hour and a half of Lana Turner. This is why, in this “famous last scene”, a bit of regret joins our tears. We cry for the other film, the one we haven’t seen, with Lana Turner in a small role. 

Mirror = abyss 

The hypocrisy of Hollywood is without limit. In 1958, Universal could accept a film about “the racial question” but if possible without any blacks. Only one filmmaker could handle such a contradiction: Douglas Sirk. As any good film critic will tell you: Sirk is the filmmaker of the mirror. Nothing puzzles him more than the abyss between the thing reflected and the distorted reflection. An abyss with no end. A mirror only ever gives us the image of an image. An image hides another, comes instead of another. There’s no way out (that’s the kitsch effect). 

It’s precisely because she has had this immodest and vengeful idea of a grandiose funeral that Annie Johnson accedes (post-mortem) to the status of image. The famous last scene of Imitation of Life is also: welcome to the kingdom of imitation, dear Annie. And fake needs to be fabricated. It’s a whole profession, and not one of the worse ones. Sirk’s films are a bit like Charon’s trip. Any character transported to the bank of the screen has become an imitation. Like the cascade of fake diamonds in the title scene. There’s no exception. The art of cinema is only the barge and the tears the consequence of a light heartache.

First published in Libération on May 3rd 1982. Reprinted in La maison cinéma et le monde, 2. Les années Libé 1981-1985, P.O.L., 2002, pp.320-322.

The Tarnished Angels

For those watching the Douglas Sirk retrospective on MUBI (UK), here's a short extract of a review of The Tarnished Angels by Serge Daney.

The Tarnished Angels, Douglas Sirk   

(...)  We know Fritz Lang’s (mean) small phrase on Cinemascope: “it’s only good for snakes and funerals.” Strictly speaking, there aren’t any snakes in Douglas Sirk’s films (although there’s a lot of crawling and an abundance of venom) but there are first rate funerals and wakes are pieces of bravura. Sirk is perhaps the filmmaker that Lang wasn’t thinking of, the one that was good - naturally good - with Cinemascope, and The Tarnished Angels was the film we were burning to watch again. We did watch it again. We were right to burn.   

Lang was right too. It was wrong to believe, as in the mid-Fifties, that Cinemascope would give the audience more to see. Experience proved the contrary. More things, yes, but less to see. The Cinemascope-gaze opens wide too quickly on the image; and too wide a reach means smaller grasp, drifting and spoils. From a deformed world, it only brings back magnified cattle and emptied space. Lang, as a surveyor, had no use for a curved space that treats gaze like a boomerang, but it’s this curve that Sirk, as a Baroque, loved, like his friend and disciple Fassbinder. In his great films of the Universal period, between 1954 and 1959, the ex-Detlef Sierck always knew why Cinemascope was beautiful. Beautiful, yes, but like an unkept promise.  

Beautiful like an unkept promise, the Sirkian world - a circus - meets the Faulknerian world - a mess. The history of film is full of great writers betrayed by small film directors. Not this time. Legend has it that, of all the films adapted from his writings, Faulkner only tolerated The Tarnished Angels, a film that Douglas Sirk, inversely, said he didn’t like. Perhaps it required a non-American (Sirk is German) to reconcile, for the duration of a film, Hollywood and the opposite of Hollywood, Literature that is. Perhaps it needed a Baroque to use Cinemascope in that way: never to add space, but to remind that at the heart of this silly merry-go-round, space is missing ad nauseam. Sirk films airplane competitions like routine flights and he films intimate scenes like air raids. 

What takes a lot of space in The Tarnished Angels is not the plane that twists and turns in the sky and crashes in the sea, but Dorothy Malone on a sofa, folding her legs before telling her life story; a child sleeping at the foot of a bed; Roger Schumann throwing the dice to abolish chance; Burke Devlin walking on the runway like a bear with his popcorn and newspaperman’s notepad. Short, meaningless movements that are suddenly endowed with space: unforgettable. It’s this promiscuity made of confessions, monologues, stories and text. It’s this light (Irving Glassberg was in charge of photography) that doesn’t come from the sky but from a night-light that still burns at dawn when all other fires have been put out. It’s this black and white that only means the colours have ended up deserting this world grown pale. Promises (of space, of light, of colours) unkept for so long that we have forgotten to have one day hoped something from this gloomy hell. (...)  

First published in Libération on 1 April 1985. Reprinted in La maison cinéma et le monde, 2. Les années Libé 1981-1985, P.O.L. editions, Paris, 2002, pp. 339-340.

Which Way to the Front?

Andy Rector of Kino Slang just posted a translation of Serge Daney's 1971 review of Jerry Lewis' Which Way to the Front? along with a 1980 interview of Jerry Lewis by Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana.

Jerry Lewis, Which Way to the Front?
First published in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 228, March-April 1971. Reprinted in La maison cinéma et le monde: 1. Le temps des Cahiers 1962-1981, pp. 118-120, POL, Paris, 2001. Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar, Andy Rector, Sonja Bertucci.

For those in Los Angeles, Andy is organising a screening of the film at the California Institute of the Art tomorrow (March 16th).

The Image Pit

The Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video art in Berlin - just posted a translation of one of many reports by Serge Daney on tennis matches. This one was written at the time of the 1982 French open.

The Image Pit
First published in Libération in 1982. Reprinted in L’amateur de tennis, P.O.L. Editeurs, 1994.

Serge Daney in 2017

Annual round-up of new translations.

With the help of Otis Wheeler, this blog published thirty new translations from Daney's column 'Ghosts of Permanence' in Libération. You can find them (among others) on this updated table of contents of Daney's fourth book Recrudescence, two third of which is now translated.

Jugend Ohne Film published a new translation of Daney's review of Ritwik Ghatak's Clunker.

And a few days ago, I put the finishing touches to three texts on the theme What is a star?

Happy New Year everyone.

Triple bill on the movie star: Marilyn, Delon, Lambert

With Daney's output composed almost entirely of singleton reviews and articles, most of them produced either monthly in Cahiers du cinema or daily in Libération, it's easy to miss the recurring themes and correspondances from text to text. This leaves us with the pleasure of discovering the consistency and evolution of Daney's thinking. After an earlier post on Mannerism, here's another example on the theme: what is a star?

Marilyn 

August 1982. The recurring theme that there are no more stars, but there were some. 

What’s a star? A moment in the history of cinema. The moment where the ‘seventh art’ knows it has developed a fundamental cancer: it simulates depth but its image is flat, forever flat, like a lowland pampa.  

Yet, from the start, stars were actors with an extra dimension, a weigh in flesh, a dedicated space, an enigmatic depth. Bodies barred from pleasure, fated to imitation and to the pleasure of constant disappointment and recurrent promise.  

Cinema would be always caught between its low image and the pathetic refinement of things (the art) which give the impression that these flesh and bones were moving within a space, for real, with the depth of field used as the limelight. But the space of the stars is themselves, the limits of their bodies, a waving stand-still, a wavering movement which slowly hasten to going nowhere.  

The star system is over. It’s behind us, although not too distant. It reconstructs itself differently with new technologies that we don’t know about. It knocks itself up in another way. Will there be stars in the video world? As for the old stars, they expectedly ended up in cinematheques and on film posters, reduced to a black and white surface. The turmoil that came from the third hallucinated dimension led to the mere cluttering of the space, to an imagery. The image killed the idol. It happened to Garbo, to Dietrich.  

Did it happen to Marilyn? No. And yet, one of the most radical, raging and urgent gesture of the 20th century was the reduplicating operation by which Andy Warhol negated the Marilyn-body and kept, on gaudy surfaces, the same industrial smile.  

Marilyn, by the same token as the Campbell tomato soup, also symbolised modern art, the modernity in art: this flattening technique, disenchanted dead beat and joyful mourning of the third dimension. Never a star has been so strangely celebrated - and negated. Cartloads of analysts have held forth on Warhol’s gesture. Good for them. 

But were they right? No. For something had deserted this industrial image: suffering. We know that Marilyn’s life was a valley of tears. What we know less is that a part of her suffering was physical. It was her body that was mutilated: remodelled, denatured, forced, remade: an ordeal.  

The last star of the transition from black and white to colour. The first star whose blood would have been red. Unique and double fate: the image on one side, the body on the other. The iconic image and the body of comedy. How many have suffered like her to be beautiful (or themselves): fake Marilyns singing out of tune “My heart belongs to my Daddy!”, swallowing their disguised tears, strident blonds, cosmopolitan queens, plastic surgery for the destitute.  

It’s only through her that the passion to be another continues to devastate us. The passion to be a female other. 

First published in Libération on 5 August 1982. Reprinted in Ciné journal, Cahiers du cinema/Seuil, 1986. 

Le Choc – with Alain Delon 

All is not well in French Cinema, since even Le Choc is ignored. When Delon badly manages his image, it’s also part of ‘the crisis of French Cinema’. 

Orson Welles was definitive: 'The star', he reminded us recently, 'is a totally distinct animal from the actor. It’s something else. The two vocations are different'. Guided by these strong words, I wanted to see what a big-French-film-with-stars looks like. A 1982 Delon for example. So I saw Le Choc. The film is lousy? Yes, but that’s not the question. I felt that something about the star system, in France, wasn’t doing too well. Incidentally, Le Choc isn’t a commercial success: targeting 1 million spectators, it is peaking at 400,000 box office sales. All things equal, it’s like Godard’s Passion, a flop. And a flop, sometimes, makes you think. 

In the old system that Welles is referring to, it was enough for the stars to appear in a maximum of close ups, the number of which was determined by contract. Numerous 'Yes Men' managed, with relative talent, this image capital. The script and the mise en scène dragged themselves at the feet of the stars, and there was some sublime dragging (Sternberg, Cukor). But the star, to better shine, needed a background to stand out from and a landscape to light up. The star needed actors to gain value. It needed supportive characters, young people with bright futures, good actors playing villains, extras sometime unforgettable... A whole world. The star was 'a totally distinct animal from the actor' but it didn’t want the end of the actor. This was yesterday, even the day before yesterday. 

Watching Le Choc, I had the painful feeling that this old star system had passed, that it was running aimlessly, like affected by advanced dementia or autism. And that Delon was the symbol of all this. Simply, Le Choc is a movie where the stars are no longer content to outshine non-stars with their brightness, but must, in addition, physically eliminate them, rid the screen of them, erase them one by one. To Deneuve who is naively asking what he does for a living, Delon answers furiously 'cleaning!'. He puts all his taciturn narcissism of a professional into cleaning up the film from everything that is not him. Le Choc eventually ends because there are no more supporting roles to swiftly kill, extras to shoot like rabbits, second rank actors to send back off the camera field. And when they happily run toward the little red helicopter which is going to finally take them away from this film-chore and this joyless hecatomb, Delon (and Deneuve) have really created a vacuum around them. The surviving couple could shout 'alone at last!'. I even feared that the helicopter pilot, although a not very well known actor, might be shot too for the insolent way he shared for an instant the space of the star couple.  

For it’s not enough for the star to have, like in the past, the monopoly of the close ups, it also needs the long shots, the medium shots, the intermediary shots, everything. Indeed (I thought) the system is not ageing well. Delon (or Belmondo) seem self-satisfied, but their movies smell of rage, contempt, self-hatred and even laziness. They put their image at stake with as much generosity as the Italian football team during a World Cup.  

Some might say this comes from Delon himself, from the way he intends to protect his image, by taking less and less risk. His ‘honesty’ is not to pretend any longer. For, if Le Choc is lousy, it’s a curious film, inferior to For a Cop’s Hide, but still better than a Belmondo. Taken individually, the elements of the film are not unacceptable: Robin Davies’ direction is okay, photography is decent, Sarde has composed worse soundtracks, the ‘small actors’ (Chicot, Audran, Léotard, Perrot) get by, the story is a Manchette adaptation, Deneuve drinks the bitter cup of the luxurious extra to the dregs and Delon, the actor Delon, continues to intrigue. What’s wrong then? The rest, all the rest: the conception of the film, the thinness of the story, and even the film aesthetics.  

Le Choc is a gamble. As the absolute master of his own image (Clément, Visconti, Losey or even Zurlini are long forgotten), Delon does his utmost (and it’s pathetic really) to prove that, should he want to, he could play everything. That he can be a little bit sadistic, a little bit naked, a little bit funny, a little bit sensual, a little bit sentimental. But he refuses to be any of these any longer than necessary. There is a taboo in the film: there must be one emotion by Delon in every scene, but there mustn’t be a change of emotion within the same scene. Robin Davis, as a filmmaker focused on ambiances (Ce Cher Victor) must have found this taboo a headache. 

Delon doesn’t play, he sums up what he could play. As soon as he opens his mouth, what matters is not what he says (let’s admit it: the dialogues are weak) but what he wants to communicate. One: that he thinks faster than anybody else (including us). Two: that he has already asked himself all the questions and has already found all the answers and that, if he has chosen to resort to the most used clichés, it’s voluntary. His infuriated gaze orders us to think that he knows that we know that he could say or do something else. It’s the inertia, the slowness, the stupidity of the other characters which exasperate him. He’s almost ready to kill them for being so slow, by impatience, to go faster. Le Choc could almost be a short film. 

In the past, the star got his/her power to fascinate from the capacity to play languorously with dialogues and time, to offer the audience a face changing like a landscape while remaining him/herself at the same time. It’s through this ‘slow motion’ that the star was different from an actor. Today, imprisoned in himself like a statue, finding below himself to let any other in his acting, Delon is condemned to appear in ever shorter scenes and shots which end up being nothing more than commercial spots to the glory of the animal-Delon. How do you make a mass market but high class movie with a series of spots? A serious question. An aesthetics question. A question for the media. 

French police movies no longer suit Delon. A new genre should be invented for him, a series of spots where, like in the burlesque era, we would see him victoriously engaging in only one action. There would be: ‘Delon takes a shower’, ‘Delon throws a knife’, ‘Delon is sexual’, ‘Delon plays the fool’, etc. The actor’s fans would be delighted and he wouldn’t have to suffer the chore of inventing a story and sharing an hour and a half with others. 

When we talk about ‘the crisis of French cinema’, we always see it from the same angle. The angle of the ‘politique des auteurs’, ‘boring artists’, ‘intellectual masturbation of images and sounds’. Recently, the French cinema establishment at Cannes booed Godard to let him know that it was unacceptable to continue to live cinema like an adventure in front of everyone. Passion has therefore been relegated to the fringes, with experimental cinema. 

But why not ask the same question (what’s wrong with French cinema?) about a big film that misses its mass audience target? Le Choc for example. A film made of fragments, without a proper story, with embryonic scenes, vague gestures, words without context, the image of a star which doesn’t quite fit the frame of a ‘normal’ movie, Le Choc has been rejected to the fringes, like an experimental movie, just like Passion. Of course Passion is very good and Le Choc is very bad. But it’s not unreasonable to think that if Delon knew better how to make Le Choc, Godard would face less trouble with Passion. The boss and the artist talk from the same planet. There is only one world of the images.

First published in Libération, 28 June 1982. Reprinted in Ciné Journal, Cahiers du cinema/Seuil, 1986. 

From the star to the celebrity 

Where the abuse of the word ‘star’ is seen as a symptom: there were stars in cinema but there hasn’t been any on television so far. 

When Christophe Lambert left the TV set of Michel Denisot (on Channel 1), he stated that we won’t see him again on television for six months. As a master of his own image and not inclined to debase it, the neo Salvatore Guiliano, a monster of kindness and casualness, meant that his image will not be eternally served up as fodder. We’ve seen him everywhere for the release of The Sicilian: we won’t see him promoting his merchandise on the small screen for a while. 

If never appearing on television condemns the ordinary mortal to irremediable obscurity, squatting TV studios clearly and deceitfully disqualifies anyone. This is valid for actors as it is for politicians. If there is little demand on television, the repetitive supply of the same products generates a vaguely pitiful inflation. Television confers longevity (it even stages it), but longevity is quite the contrary to mystery. And without mystery, there’s no image that holds up very long.  

Watching (and listening to) Christophe Lambert (in a pink jumper) giving docile answers to Denisot’s docile questions, we had plenty of time to revisit an old question: what is a star? And since Lambert is clearly one (to be liked by Cimino, to have been Tarzan and to make thirteen year old girls dream is not nothing), this was a good opportunity to see what it’s like, a star on television. 

The answer is no longer simple. That some individuals were born ‘stars’ and can do nothing about it is hardly a deniable fact. We believe less nowadays in the paranoid (and too easy) idea of stars entirely created by cynical majors or evil managers. This is first because a star is born ‘already entirely created’ and that this is precisely the enigma of the star: both a whole and the sum of its parts. The irony is that we have probably never been so keen to adore them than at the moment where – in the world of the images at least – they have become definitely rare.  

The proof is in the ridiculous inflation of the word ‘star’ (or rather ‘staaar’) in a culture (ours) where it is the more modest celebrities who often have the upper hand. The return to television after the summer holidays has quickly stumbled upon the imposture of the very concept of ‘television star’ (ideal sons-in-law, great communicators, popular entertainer, and so on). It’s an imposture because what used to characterise a star in the traditional sense is that it really didn’t communicate anything precise or targeted while being – body and soul – a true incarnation of the idea of communication. The movie star targeted a vast and unknown audience, all ages and sexes together. It filled in alone and randomly the social enigma of ‘sexual difference’, living somewhere in the sky, making its body a limit beyond which the non-human would always overcome the human. (Hence the easy tragedy of stars and the tragic facility of their cult). 

Perhaps there can only be real stars at moments where the industry of images is in expansion. In silent films, in Hollywood of course, in the Indian cinema obviously. A star would be, stricto sensu, a rocket or a shooting star which lights up for a moment a terrain not yet conquered and temporarily unknown. As soon as cinema stopped being in expansion, it produced tragic stars (Marilyn, James Dean, Monty Clift, the late Bogart) and then no stars at all (look at De Niro and how he is becoming this great-actor-of-exceptional-participation). This does not mean that there are not in society some obvious star destinies (Adjani is the most painfully obvious example in France but there was also Maria Schneider), but the film industry has become too small for them (and when cinema returns to its traditional craft, it builds less on stars than on ‘auteurs’ who, year after year, are replacing them: Kubrick, Fellini). 

The tiebreaker question is becoming really obvious. Can there be television stars? If television is still in expansion, yes. If not, no. But if there is a boom and inflation of images in general, does this mean there is an expansion of television? This is not certain. In any case, there’s nothing indicating the appearance of stars of a new type (could we imagine a present day Orson Welles, using the modern tools of media manipulation, to pull The War of the Worlds trick again? Will it be allowed one day to play with the fire of global broadcasting? Will we be that playful?). For now, there are living emblems, logos on foot, media-persons more or less close to the audience, nannies and portable gurus. In a world that close and so devoted to the positivity of television, we can hardly see how the wings of tragedy or the bull’s horns could scar a body with their shadows.  

And Lambert? Lambert is perfect: a star, no doubt. You can still see it providing you have eyes. First in the sound, then in the image.  In the sound, it takes real talent to be able to spontaneously gather up all the stereotypes that a star needs to pretend to rediscover in order to offer a response to stereotyped questions. Lambert has this innate talent. Don’t count on him to talk about films which didn’t work well (I Love You by Ferreri, which was interesting). Don’t expect him to say that cinema should be like daily life (cinema, he says as if it was a very personal idea of his, is the dream 'greater than life'). Similarly, what counts is not the encounter with an auteur or a role, but always the story, the subject, the script. Known chorus.  

The surprise is less in this ‘faultless’ static babbling than in the freshness with which it is babbled and re-invented, live and for us. It’s the way it dresses common themes which makes the star.  In the case of Lambert, it’s his art to stick to the image of his fans (he replies in their language, effortlessly, like a watchful big brother), it’s the kid’s smile that nobody could ever resist, it’s the good mood of the one who has so much headwind that he can afford to play the figurehead. 

The surprise, finally, is in the image. There’s still a difference between the movie star and the pseudo television star. The latter has got so used to live without off screen, without perspective lines, wedged, stuck in the middle of the minuscule space of the TV set, that it has lost this amazing plasticity of the movie star. The movie star (even Lambert) keeps intact a capacity to change entirely in an instant, from a shot to another. The face of Christophe Lambert is at the centre: banal, without volume and then suddenly lit up, the slightly extinguished gaze which in a second becomes sparkling. Not just at the centre of the image or the set, but at the centre of the world. These are only fleeting moments, but they are worth the look. 

Originally published in Libération, 29 October 1987, and reprinted in Le salaire du zappeur, POL, 1993.