The Thread

Jean Eustache obituary by Serge Daney. Reposted from Steve Erickson's old site.

The Thread 

The director Jean Eustache was found dead Wednesday/Thursday night in Paris.
The death of Jean Eustache shocked but it didn't surprise. His friends said he was suicidal. He held on to life only by a small number of threads, so solid that one thought them unbreakable. The desire for cinema was one of these threads. The desire not to have to film at any cost was another. This desire was a luxury and Eustache knew it. He would pay the price. 

It's not much to say that he was born to cinema with the Nouvelle Vague, a little bit after it, but with the same refusals and admirations. It's not much to say that he was an "auteur", his cinema was mercilessly personal. That is to say, mercilessly tied up with his experience, to alcohol, to love. Filling up his life in order to make the material of his films was his only moral code but it was a moral code of iron. The films came when he was strong enough to make them come, to bring back what he made in life. 

In the thread of the desolate 70s, his films succeeded one another, always unforeseen, without a system, without a gap: film-rivers, short films, TV programs, hyperreal fiction. Each film went to the end of its material, from real to fictional sorrow. It was impossible for him to go against it, to calculate, to take cultural success into account, impossible for this theoretician of seduction to seduce an audience. 

The audience was with him once, when he made the most beautiful French film of the decade, The Mother and the Whore. Without him, we would have no face to set to the memory of the lost children of May ‘68: lost, already ageing, talkative and old-fashioned. (Bernadette) Lafont, (Jean-Pierre) Léaud and especially Françoise Lebrun, her black shawl and her stubborn voice. Without him, nothing would have remained of them. 

An ethnologist of his own reality, Eustache could have made a career, become a good auteur, with fantasies and a vision of the world, a specialist of some sort in himself. His moral code prohibited it: he only filmed what interested him. Women, dandyism, Paris, the country and the French language. It's already a lot. 

Like a painter knowing that he'd never quite finish, he never ceased returning to the same motif, using cinema not like a mirror (that's for the good directors) but like the needle of a seismograph (that's for the greats). The public, one moment seduced, would forget this perverse ethnography that had the bad manners to keep coming. An artist and nothing but an artist (he didn't know how to do anything except make films), he held to the contrary the speech of an artisan, absolutely modest and proud. The artisan weighs everything, evaluates everything, takes on everything, memorises everything. Thus Eustache worked. 

One year, some Moroccan friends had organised a complete retrospective of his work in Tangier. A strange idea. A brilliant idea. All the reels, the heaviness, the age, the rust, the incredible number of kilograms that The Mother and the Whore represents were put into a diplomatic case, crossed the sea and found themselves in front of assiduous Moroccan cine-club goers. Would Eustache come? It was difficult to make him leave Paris, we thought. But he came and remained two days. The projection of the Eustachian opus took place, outside of time, for this impromptu audience who was disconcerted by all these stories of sex and desire, of the French countryside and the fauna of Montparnasse. Eustache would disconcert them even more. His mildness, his patience and his manner of responding to questions with an indecipherable mix of irony and gravity, surprised everyone. 

Tangier wasn't Paris nor the port cafés the Closerie des Lilas, but we searched for a late bar to have a beer and talk about cinema. Eustache spoke of his masters, with whom he didn't compare himself, of Pagnol and Renoir, these other artisans who came before him. I will never forget the way in which he made them live again in his language, shot by shot, with his accent. It shocked but didn't surprise. Eustache resembled his times too much to be comfortable. He ended by losing. Too bad for us.

First published in Libération November 16, 1981. Republished in Ciné-journal 1981-1986, Cahiers du cinéma, 1986, p.53-55. Translated by Steve Erickson.

Two texts in Framework

Continuing to salvage the translations lost from the old Steve Erickson's website. Framework – The journal of cinema and media published two translations of Daney:

• "One From the Heart", Framework, issue 32/33, 1986, translated by Ginette Vincendeau. The original article is "Coup de coeur" published in Libération on September 29, 1982, and reproduced in Ciné-journal 1981-1986, Cahiers du cinéma, 1986, pp.123-6. The text is available on JSTOR. 

• "The Forbidden Zoom", Framework, issue 32/33, 1986, translated by Ginette Vincendeau. The original article is "Zoom interdit" published in Libération on November 3, 1983, and reproduced in Ciné-journal 1981-1986, Cahiers du cinéma, 1986, pp.185-7. The text is available on JSTOR.

Stalker

Reposting from the old Steve Erickson's website.

Stalker 

Stalker is a Soviet film (it is Tarkovsky's sixth and, in my opinion, his best) but "to stalk" is an English verb (and a regular one at that). To be precise, to stalk is to "pursue at close range," a way of closing in, a walk, almost a dance. In "stalking" the part of the body which is afraid lags behind and the part which is not afraid is compelled to move forward. With its pauses and its terrors, the stalk is the walk of those who make their way through unknown territory. In Stalker danger is everywhere, but it has no face. The landscape too is without end, without horizon, without North. There are plenty of tanks, factories, giant pipes, a railroad, a corpse, a dog, a telephone which still works, but the whole thing is being overrun by nature. This fossilised industrial landscape, this corner of the twentieth century which has become a strata (Tarkovsky was a geologist in Siberia from 1954 to 1956, and it is still a part of him), this is the Zone. One does not go into the Zone, one has to creep in because it is guarded by soldiers. One does not walk there, one "stalks." 

In the cinema we have seen cowboys who move towards each other with coquettish steps before they shoot, the stagnation of crowds, couples dancing and urban motion; we have never seen the stalk. Tarkovsky's film is first and foremost a documentary about a certain way of walking, not necessarily the best (especially in the USSR) but the only one left when all reference points have vanished and nothing is certain any more. As such, it is the first of its kind: a camera follows three men who have just entered the Zone. Where have they learned this crooked walk? Where are they from? And how did they become so familiar with this no man's land? Is their familiarity the false familiarity of the tourist who doesn't know where to go, what to look at or what to be afraid of? One of them has come with only a bottle of vodka in a plastic bag: he's just come off a drinking binge among high society. Meanwhile, the second one has something secret in a small traveling bag. The third one, who has nothing but his furtive glances and his quickly extinguished bursts of enthusiasm, is the Stalker. And before pouncing on the countless interpretations which this kaleidoscope of a film leaves open, one should watch closely as these three excellent Russian actors (Alexander Kaidanovsky, Anatoly Solonitsyn and Nikolai Grinko) "stalk" in the Zone. 

The film doesn't begin so abruptly. It is a bit more orderly, but not much. Tarkovsky, in a liberal adaptation of a science fiction novel by the brothers Strugatsky, imagines a world in which a mysterious accident has left part of the planet alien, dangerous and closed off from access. The Zone is that forbidden corner, returned to its primitive state. It's a last reserve of fantasy and a territory of macabre beauty. Shadowy characters, for a little money, give "tours" of it. They are the Stalkers. These transitory people live a miserable existence between two worlds. This time, the Stalker (part sage, part tour guide, very much hoodlum) has brought with him a Writer and a Professor. The Writer (with his plastic bag) speaks little, but has an idea in mind. For there is a goal to this trip à trois: In the middle of the Zone there is a "room" which, they say, fulfills the wishes of those who enter it. So they say. 

At the entrance to the room, the Stalker and his two clients back down: no one will step inside. First of all, out of fear, then out of wisdom. Out of fear because if the room is a hoax, it would be humiliating to let on that one had believed in it; and if it really does fulfill all wishes, nothing will be left to wish for; and if it answers unconscious desires, one doesn't know what to expect. Out of wisdom because no life is liveable without the absolute, of course, but the absolute is not a place, it is a movement away: a movement which diverts one, which deports one (in every sense of the word), which makes one "stalk". It matters little in the end what's put on the plate, or even that one believes: that one believes in believing or in others capacity to believe. What matters is one's movement. 

As a spectator, one cannot resist "stalking" in the forest of symbols which the film becomes. Tarkovsky's scenario is such a diabolical machine that it does not exclude any interpretation a priori. In a kaleidoscope, one can see what one wants. Perhaps the Zone is planet Earth, the Soviet continent, our unconscious, or the film itself. The Stalker could easily be a mutant, a dissident, a crazed psychoanalyst, a preacher looking for a cult or a spectator. You can "play symbols" with the film, but it's a game you shouldn't overdo either (no more with Tarkovsky than with Fellini or Buñuel, other great humorists of interpretation.) Besides, the freshness and the beauty of Stalker lie elsewhere. 

When the film is over, when we are a little tired of interpreting, once we've eaten everything on the plate, what is left? Exactly the same film. The same compelling images. The same Zone with the presence of water, with its teasing lapping, piles of rusted metal, nature at its most voracious, and inescapable humidity. As with all films that trigger a rush of interpretation in the viewer, Stalker is a film which is striking for the physical presence of its elements, their stubborn existence and way of being there, even if there was no one to see them, to get close to them or to film them. This is not a new phenomenon: already in Andrei Rublev there was the mud, that primal form. In Stalker the elements have an organic presence: water, dew and puddles dampen the soil and eat away at the ruins. 

A film can be interpreted. This one in particular lends itself to it (even if in the end it hides its secrets.) But we are not obliged to interpret it. A film can be watched too. One can watch for the appearance of things which one has never seen before in a film. The watcher-viewer sees things which the interpreter-viewer can no longer make out. The watcher stays at the surface because he doesn't believe in depth. At the beginning of this article, I was wondering where the characters had learned the stalk: that twisted walk of people who are afraid but who have forgotten the source of their fears. And what of these prematurely aged faces, these mini-Zones where grimaces have become wrinkles? And the self-effacing violence of those who wait to receive a beating (or maybe to give a beating if they haven't forgotten how?) And what of the false calm of the dangerous monomaniac and the empty reasonings of a man who is too solitary? 

These do not come only from Tarkovsky's imagination. They cannot be invented, they come from elsewhere. But from where? Stalker is a metaphysical fable, a course in courage, a lesson in faith, a reflexion on the end of time, a quest, whatever one wants. Stalker is also the film in which we come across, for the first time, bodies and faces which come from a place we know about only through hear-say. A place whose traces we thought the Soviet cinema had lost completely. This place is the Gulag. The Zone is also an archipelago. Stalker is also a realist film.

First published in Libération on November 20th, 1981. Republished in Ciné-journal 1981-1986, Cahiers du cinéma, 1986. Translation by Frank Matcha with Steve Erickson.

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.