On “Salador”

More re-posting of translations from La Rampe.

On “Salador” (cinema and advertising) 

"What is it that is now 'appearance' to me! Verily, not the antithesis of any kind of essence - what knowledge can I assert of any kind of essence whatsoever, except merely the predicates of its appearance! Verily not a dead mask which one could put upon an unknown X, and which to be sure one could also remove! Appearance is for me the operating and living thing itself, which goes so far in its self-mockery as to make me feel that here there is appearance, a Will o' the Wisp, a spirit dance, and nothing more." (Nietzsche) 

1. There is a great deal lacking in the continuing claim to regard the cinema as being related to reality, to the world, or to life as it is lived. First and foremost, let us take the relation to the visual. The visual is neither the double nor the outrageous, false or inaccurate misrepresentation of something else; the visual is already something else, something which is not neutral, which has its own laws, effects and exigencies. The cinema which dreamt of a "direct engagement with the world" was, at a deeper level, postulating that from the "real" to the visual and from the visual to its filmed reproduction the same truth was reflected infinitely, with neither distortion nor loss. And it may be supposed that in a world where one readily says "see"" for "understand," such a dream did not come about by chance, for the dominant ideology, which sets up the "real = visible" equation, has every interest in encouraging it. 

2. Ideology and cinema. The problem has in recent times been displaced; suspicion has been shifted on to the simple act of filming, on to the camera (1) and its construction, etc. Granted. But why not retrace the issue further back still, and challenge that which is both served by the camera and precedes it: the quite blind trust in the visible, the gradually acquired hegemony of the eye over the other senses, a society's taste and need for seeing itself reflected, etc.? In so doing, it becomes difficult to avoid a shaming iconoclasm in which all relations to the image are experienced as mortal sins (Godard and the false images of Pravda); difficult also to avoid losing sight of the specific history of the specular, a moment itself endowed with a history, whose end point we may possibly foresee. 

3. Photology. The cinema is therefore connected to the Western metaphysical tradition, a tradition of seeing and sight for which it fulfils the photological vocation. What is photology and what indeed might the discourse of light be? A teleological discourse, undoubtedly, if it is true that teleology "consists of neutralizing duration and force in favour of the illusion of simultaneity and form." (Derrida.) 

4. Duration and force: in other words, work. "Light effaces its traces; invisible itself, it renders visible," always giving us a finished, perfected world in which work (to begin with, its own) is properly speaking unimaginable, a world which we recognize only because we have never known it and which we risk never knowing at all, taken as in we are by its "apparentness." Let us designate as "photological" that obstinate will to confuse vision and cognition [connaissance], making the latter the compensation of the former and the former the guarantee of the latter, seeing in directness of vision the model of cognition. 

5. There is one oeuvre which, with an acuteness not shared by others (which is why it seems so exceptional), has constantly tried to pin down that equation of vision and cognition: Rohmer's. Significantly, it has only achieved this aim within the framework of an educational film, Les cabinets de physique au XVIIIe siècle. Once the conditions of the experiment are set up and the results allowed for, what happens "between" - i.e. the film, the actual time of the experiment - is simultaneously the unfolding of a spectacle and the birth of an idea. "We have relapsed into the mirror myth of knowledge as the vision of a given object or the reading of an established text, neither of which is ever anything but transparency itself, the sin of blindness as much as the virtue of clear-sightedness belonging by right to vision, to the eye of man." (Althusser.) 

6. Not long ago, the "world view" and the "exercise of observation," privileged themes of criticism, were equivalent at all levels simultaneously: the characters scanned the sets, the filmmaker looked at the world and the spectator looked at the film. Any awakening of consciousness was in the first instance a training of the look, and if by chance the film happened to be political, all class struggle was reabsorbed into the “birth of a sun” (2). A heliopolitics of which a film like Andrei Rublev is only a belated example. If we are considering recent films, we prefer Sollima's admirable Dernier Face à face (3), where such a mechanism - "I see, therefore I am aware" - is perverted and made ridiculous by constant repetition. 

7. Let us venture to say that "the logic of sight and oversight" has a conclusion, which we are beginning to discern. A cinema giving us the evidence and the splendour of truth has long existed: the advertising film, where all truth is immediately verifiable, where one clearly sees the eruption of the white tornado, the softness of Krema caramel, or the most obstinate stain yielding to K2R. Most films distributed, to the extent that they are a "development" of pre-existing material, increasingly refer to this aesthetic and create for themselves the themes and preoccupations it allows (the "rise to consciousness" in the twin forms of advertising and propaganda.) The undeniable beauty of the "Salador" (4) advertising (Pirés and Grimblat), the leap forward they constitute for advertising in the extreme care and precision of their work, should here and now stir big business into seeing that such a talent is not dissipated on pseudo-films. So, instead of pretending to shoot a dramatic scene with Montand in the Congo (Vivre Pour Vivre), Lelouch should be singing the praises of a brand of jeans, Melville of a style in raincoats. 

8. Besides, it would be curious to see how far what since the war we have called "modern" cinema has consisted of merely conferring a new dignity on these despised but already existing marginal forms, through a sort of regressive hypostasis of which painting has already provided an example. Not just advertising, but also "coming attractions," film titles, amateur films, etc. 

9. If cinema involves photology, then every film, if it cannot control it, is controlled by it. And if it cannot manage to control photology, let film (prisoner of the light) designate it at least, let it be aware of the extent to which the world is "deeper than the day imagines." This involves two discoveries which, despite their extreme simplicity, are nevertheless shocking because they clearly reveal what there has been a wish to hide: that there is no innocence in the "real," or in technique, that cinema is not simply a relation to the visual but, at a deeper level, a fundamental complicity and constantly reasserted play between two modes of visibility. 

10. First mode. Everything that can and is to be filmed (the profilmic material) thereby has an LCD (Lowest Common Denominator) - its visibility. What happens, for example, in Freaks? The problem Browning seems to pose is resolved from the outset. From the moment the monsters can share a shot with men, they are no longer truly monsters; what unites them with men is stronger than what separates them (so much so that Browning has to reintroduce monstrosity at the same time as - and through - the fiction.) Cinema is a dangerous machine to tame; it provides differences, but only within a more fundamental resemblance. 

11. On the subject of that resemblance, it was the discovery of the great filmmakers of the classical age (those who recognized it and took it over; Hawks, Browning, Lubitsch, undoubtedly; certainly Ford and Renoir.) In wanting to confront the most varied men and worlds within the same space, indeed the same shot, in wanting to have the play/pleasure of this exacerbated diversity (and their whole art consists in rendering the firmness of distinctions), they inevitably achieved the reverse effect – a solidarity apparently automatically there to the eye of the camera, rather like the complicity of a theatre company which, when the curtain falls on the illusory spectacle of its disunity, experiences a deeper sense of unity. 

12. For spectacle is clearly what it is about for those lovers of "small worlds," reproduced from film to film, diversity offered in the form of spectacle, thus (slyly) denied. But it is a spectacle as yet imperfect, owing too much to the theatre, and which it should have been possible to liberate. Perhaps now we can interpret the break that Rossellini's work appeared to make directly after the war. He did not so much oppose the classical cinema as destroy it by assuming its ultimate consequences – by making the spectacle the deepest level, by generalizing it. Suddenly everything, from the obscene to the insignificant, was set at the same level (bringing up the concomitant problems of morality – the point about tracking shots – and commercial failure.) Cinema is by nature a leveller. 

13. Second Mode. Everything that has been filmed (every shot) possesses as a result an LCD (another mode of visibility, not now visibility in general but the specific visibility of the cinema.) The question here is the insertion of what has been filmed at some moment on the strip of film, its limitation by framing and duration, both equally irrevocable. While the first mode allowed "something" to be inscribed on the screen, the second makes possible the transitivity and facilitation of meaning, via an attribute common, beyond all divergences, to all shots, and one of which recently has been constantly and frenziedly referred to. The issue is no longer just the twofold spatial and temporal limitation of any shot (a limitation played on by all those wanting to write with images from the standpoint of meaning.) It is also, now above all, the fact of being inscribed on that material base, of being just one instance of the only rule of cinema – the vertical unrolling of the strip of celluloid, with or without images. 

14. Observation. It is not saying much to say that such proofs (that the "presence" of something on the screen and the possibility of meaning happen in a sense automatically, thus shockingly) have been obscured because they were too obvious to be really thought about; the history of cinema has perhaps been the continual refusal to want to know anything about it. A denial which is only possible through reduplication: filmmakers had willingly to repeat effects they strongly suspected they could just as well do without. To the inadequate presence (inadequate because obtained without work or worth) they have continuously opposed a strategy which privileged and emphasized the actor and the decor, a four-square presence of which MacMahonism was only a belated theorization. To the imperfect meaning (diffuse, multiple meaning: Untersinn) they opposed an intended meaning, taken over by an écriture in which the reason for any passage from A to B had itself to be represented, even if under the mask of a lack (see “La Suture”). 

15. In what way has the cinema been suspect until now? On what has the suspicion rested? Always or almost always on the technique of the "take," in the sense of capture or rape, in which some "adamic" reality, which asked only to speak of itself, was to be manipulated. So an increasingly invisible and candid camera has to covers its tracks, because filming is never anything but seeing, and seeing plainly. The only question not asked was: what is being manipulated? And does something which is looked at innocently become innocent for that reason? Or rather, does not the look become so much more threatening because the objects looked at are chosen from among the most cultural, those heavy with meaning and saturated with ideology? In this sense cinema-vérité (as Reichenbach envisaged it) joins the star system; or better, is its survival. 

16. It is (yet another) banality to say that everything which comes into the camera's field does not for that reason stop belonging to other fields. What is going to be filmed has always already been filmed. As for the images with which we continue to fill our heads, we have to admit that their referent is now hardly a "reality" which we have experienced, but rather an imaginary experience we have already had from seeing these images in other films, the habit formed by their spectacle. Every tracking shot of a man walking down a street doesn't make me attach it to my own experience of walking, however rich it is, but rather a series of memories from Sunrise to La Punition, which should no doubt be called the "concrete imaginary." For the film-freak generation which has buried itself in the cinémathéques, can death be anything but the effect of falling bodies on the screen? 

17. There is hardly any problem more serious for new filmmakers. And it is no accident that the most talented of them are, indeed, former critics and film buffs, no longer unaware that cinema has become – besides a (specific) culture and tradition in the history of the specular – an increasingly lively eye and an increasingly failing memory. Reducing the world to a generalized spectacle is the business of television. Cinema's survival is now the extent to which it can introduce "play" into a general sense of image saturation. That play consists of delaying as long as possible (a few seconds is enough) the takeover of the seen by the already-seen, and so of showing something never-seen – at least on the screen. Among these last rounds are exoticism, pornography, possibly science fiction. The only essential is to reinvest all the problems posed by the film's total meaning (the sequence of shots) into the unique and crucial problem of the reading of the shot, its decoding (what is it?). The future of cinema? To take seriously, in every sense, its figurative nature. At least one film (2001), where the camera starts at the level of primates and ends alongside Norman McLaren, made its acknowledged subject the future of representation. 

18.Unless, that is, a cinema which seeks to be self-critical, not content with this flight forward and this need for the never-seen which can only exhaust itself unsatisfied, already clearly sees a signified (which will need to be forced into the open, indicated) in each profilmic signifier. Its relation to photology would be its particular way of accusing or not accusing the false innocence of the "real," a reality which for it is always the already-filmed. We see here the two modes of visibility at work: the specific means of the second (framing and duration) as an interrogation and deconstruction of the material furnished by the first (shooting). A text no longer concealing its pretext, a pretext suspected in turn. Furthermore, a film's relation to photology can appear in (at least) three forms, according to whether it presupposes the profilmic material to be
- neutral
- neutralized
- neither.
The first form is represented by all films (the great majority) which, under the guise of objectivity, remain within the ideology (which they reassert without necessarily recognizing) and soon lapse into advertising. "Salador" is to date an unsurpassed expression of this kind of cinema. 

19. The second form warrants further explanation. Suspected of equivocating the technique of shooting had logically to be thought capable of "transfiguring," "transmuting" the profilmic material (and in so doing, of neutralizing its effects). This is a quasi-magical operation, ecstatically evoked, an alchemy in which the profilmic lead is changed into filmed gold, autonomous grains and fragments owing nothing thereafter to their pretext, their ordering and sequence permitting the facilitation of meaning. All "cinematography" needed such a postulate (and, as we know, it was Bresson who theorized the need: "For film, the theme is, in my view, a pretext for creating cinematic content.") What was it he needed? To believe in the exchange value of shots, so that nothing in shot A is lost or damaged when a transition to shot B is secured. And transition is certainly the issue here - neume and absolute transitivity, moving on by conserving, capitalizing. 

20. Who are those who wanted to write with images? It is time we realized that such a wish, so often formulated, was only formulated by those (from Eisenstein to Bresson) who scorned ideas that were not idées fixes, of the order of obsessions (sexual, no doubt) and fantasies, such that only a unique and terrorist discourse could take them on. These were the great obsessives who demanded the most from cinema: that a film should say only one thing, achieve just one effect, but decisively. These pioneers saw to what extent the thing could not work as soon as they were convinced that in the cinema – as elsewhere – every effect is achieved once only. Was Hawks (or Lubitsch) preoccupied with anything else? The important thing for Hawks, the only effect he wished to produce (pleasure in/for itself), is also the easiest to achieve (even in the deceptive and metaphorical form of Adventure), as it is the quickest to be erased. Hawks is the filmmaker of an always total pleasure (no matter how dull and lacklustre) with no option other than to repeat it endlessly (the importance of repetition in Hawks is well known) because it is never achieved. 

21. Every effect is achieved only once – but it must not be achieved too soon or it will be attenuated and forgotten, only a repetition can reactivate it, without, however, enriching it. From this we can see the deceptive side of the Hawksian (or Lubitschian) world, because achieving the same effect a second time requires an ever-increasing expenditure of energy, a world destined for exhaustion and entropy, with no other aim than its own prolongation. Filmmakers with an aim (a desire) also know that there is only one moment appropriate for the decisive effect (cf. the Bertheau episode in La Vie est à Nous). These are therefore the filmmakers of the snare, since their problem is to capitalize on secondary effects, ceaselessly investing signifieds in new signifiers and making themselves masters of a chain where nothing allows the end to be envisaged, masters of a frenetic transitivity which condemns them to say nothing real, never to come to a stop, were they not flagged down by the actual, material end of the film, and obliged to finish it before it is finished (a new duplication of an inevitable and automatic effect). It is surely in Lang's films that we can best see this reluctance to conclude and the very edgy humour which presides over what are always simulated endings (Secret Beyond the Door). In the cinema also, to write means not to finish. 

22. This incompatibility between a film which cannot exceed a certain duration and a meaning which can be reasserted by a trifle gave rise to compromise solutions which all took the form of coups de force, the only thing which could end the chain, capitalize on its links and reactivate them in the direction of a prediction of the past. In this one can recognize the major concern of several celebrated films which seemed modern to their defenders in Cahiers around 1955; miracle films or, as Jacques Rivette rightly observed, films of the final reversal, which managed to represent simultaneously the most advanced state of reflection on the cinema and an often religious way of accounting for that reflection. Why? Because such a power (the intrusive power of writing) could only be sustained by introducing a guarantee, a transcendental signified, which cinema had gradually learned to do without, leaving it to advertising films for which it has always been the truth. ("Salador.") 

23. One man bewitched by these powers very soon recognized that he could hardly avoid simulating their coups de force, and that, by insisting on provoking them, he was all the more clearly showing them to be arbitrary and a trick, no longer even capable of valorizing after the event a sequence of shots in which there was already revealed a radical inability to capitalize; reflection was to make of that inability a rejection, and out of that rejection has come a hesitant theory... We are saying that Jean-Luc Godard , when he was filming Vivre Sa Vie, was thinking of Karina as, he imagined, before him Renoir thought of C. Hessling (Nana), Rossellini of I. Bergman (Europa 51), if not Fellini of G. Massina (Cabiria). But let Nana smile, dance, sell her body or die, the evidence is that a woman is always a woman and that it is an illusion to think that a film can say anything else, an illusion whose results are equally obvious in film theory (every shot is a transition, a difference of effect which is the only more decisive for being final) and in the themes treated (whores are saints, the guilty innocent, etc). All of which Godard was very aware of when he took a turn (with Le Mépris) from which the cinema has scarcely begun to come back. 

24. Le Mépris (Contempt). In 1964, everyone wanted to know whether Godard, the enfant terrible of the new cinema, faced with the demands of big budget production and the whims of famous actors, would come away from the venture without losing anything, making all that profilmic machinery in the final analysis unrecognizable. At the time everyone was raving about the magic of cinema and the genius of the auteur, the man who imprints the indelible mark of his vision on everything and everyone. While all that may have constituted a fantasy for Godard (filming at the big MGM studios), it all turns out as if he had finally decided on the impossibility, or more accurately the uninterest, of such an enterprise, which is in fact the real subject of the film. Since it is therefore the story of a failure (and itself a commercial failure), Le Mépris becomes a question of knowing whether failure is not perhaps more profound than any success. That is, is it not the demiurges who fail? 

25. What happens in Le Mépris? Still the same story – getting there too late, the game already played, where the score is settled and the cards have a fixed value and way of playing them. What is the point of playing the best possible hand, smuggling in meaning between the lines, when the game is already over? Homer wrote the Odyssey and Moravia wrote Contempt. Prokosch wanted to put it into images and Ponti wanted to put it on the screen. They summoned famous "artists" (Lang, Godard) whose (commercial) thirst for being scorned they were able to slake. ("One has to suffer," says Lang, and everyone knows that Godard had to shoot things he had not foreseen.) Every new player of the great Culture and Capital game has to respect (and not reflect upon) the traces in his work of what came before him, and which he should not improve upon. Choosing the place (Capri), the story (the Odyssey), and the characters (Lang, Bardot) closest to myth, Godard discovered what he was later to elucidate constantly: that you can't both use and be used by that profilmic material. You deny it, believing you are going beyond it, but you ignore it without going beyond it. It is time, more modestly, to indicate its overdetermination for what it is. Every film is a palimpsest. 

(1) The famous “Technique and ideology” series by Jean-Louis Comolli will be published in Cahiers 229, 230, 231, 233 and 240 between 1971 and 1973. 

(2) In accordance with Jean Douchet’s beautiful expression in Cahiers 133 on Renoir’s Caporal Epinglé. 

(3) Sergio Sollima had then directed a few “Italian style” westerns including Faccia a faccia with Gian Maria Volonté, and especially Colorado with Lee Van Cleef. Their scripts were clever political metaphors. 

(4) It’s about a cooking oil. 

First published as part of a collection of four texts brought together called “Travail, lecture, jouissance” [Work, reading, pleasure] by Serge Daney and Jean-Pierre Oudart in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 222, July 1970. Published in English in Cahiers du cinema 1973-78, vol. 4. Translated by Diana Matias.

One More Bear (Dersu Uzala)

More re-posting of existing translations no longer available online.

One More Bear (Dersu Uzala) 

 “Did I advise you to love your neighbour? I will advise you rather to flee from your neighbour and love the distant stranger.” – Nietszche, The Gay Science 

In the shanty towns of Dodes’ka-den, we observe a furtive encounter between two characters (‘bodies’ would be more accurate). The child from Dodes’ka-den and his imaginary train almost run over an amateur painter who has placed his easel too close to the invisible rails. This gag is the best introduction to Kurosawa’s cinema, which (paradoxically) brings together spaces which are separate – the spectator has to give up trying to decide which is the madder of the two, the child in his fantasy world or the painter of the destitute. For one of them doesn’t see this destruction anymore (he sees only the train, the invisible rails – he looks inwards) and the other examines it too closely (the shanty town becomes an aesthetic object). Kurosawa’s approach, his ‘humanism’ if one must use this term (it would be better to speak of his ‘viewpoint’, moral and spatial), was about finding the place where the two spaces (that of the psychotic child and that of the neurotic painter) might seem to converge, thus creating a homogenous space. But not exactly, hence the gag. 

Dersu Uzala is no doubt a less powerful film than Dodes’ka-den, which it does nevertheless illuminate retrospectively. The friendship between the Russian surveyor and the hunter, despite its right-thinking overtones (we shall see what to make of them in a moment), can indeed be related back to the meeting of the non-existent train and the misplaced easel – the fictional space, carved up by the camera, serving as a dissection table. 

The surveyor’s eye sees big while the hunter’s eye sees just right (in the sense that a garment can be big or just right). As soon as he meets Dersu, Arseniev – whose task is to reconnoitre the banks of the Ussuri – decides that he needs a guide. On his own, indeed, he doesn’t see very much at all. The surveyor’s pleasure (which is also to some extent the spectator’s) comes from the fact that for him the territory (where he gets lost) and the map (where he knows his way around) are for ever running into each other, becoming superimposed, as in those Walsh-style Westerns where the map on the wall fades into the territory it represents. When Arseniev gets lost in the forest, he is quite happy; doesn’t he have what he needs (writing, sketching, photographing) to make good the delay, to compensate for it? As the writer, the one whose book has reached us and made the film possible, and because he has the last word (the voice-over of the commentary), he can lose himself in a risky aesthetic contemplation of what for him is just a landscape. His look is protected, ‘covered’ by writing. The possibility of writing is what allows him to see things badly, and to make mistakes. 

Arseniev’s mistake, his professional distortion, is that for him there is only one space, geometric space. He can think only in straight lines. His job, it appears, is to explore the area between Khabarovsk and Vladivostok, two towns linked by a railway line, for there is one of these in the film, a real one this time: the Trans-Siberian railway, completed, as we know, in 1898. 

One of the finest moments in the film (a fairly puzzling one if you don’t make the link with Kurosawa’s earlier films) is the meeting with the old, solitary Chinese who Dersu has long since identified from tiny clues. The camera gives us, simultaneously, the shack half-buried in snow to the right of the screen, and to the left the column of explorers laboriously trudging to their destination. As soon as he sees the old Chinese sitting at the entrance to the shack, Arseniev makes his way towards him; he goes in a straight line across an open space. He offers a mug of (one assumes) hot tea to the terrified old man, who recoils, then tanks him profusely, bows and clumsily spills the tea, while Arseniev tries to help him up. The same action is suddenly seen from a distance, from where the soldiers are. The effect is at once comical and embarrassing, in exactly the same way in which, in Dodes’ka-den, characters trying to be nice to each other end up terrifying each other. Arseniev withdraws, night falls, the column camps well away from the shack where the old Chinese continues to sit, motionless. Dersu, who knows him, explains: ‘Him thinking, much thinking. Sees house. Sees garden. Garden all flowers.’ Then, to Arseniev: ‘Not to disturb him.’ In the morning it is the surveyor who is disturbed. The old man is there at the entrance of the tent: he is ready to leave and has come to say goodbye. 

The film will say nothing more (but never perhaps does it make the point so clearly): the straight line is the longest route from one person to the next, the direct encounter is a risk, closeness a trap, love a tyranny. The garden all in blossom that the old man imagines he is seeing is as real as the train for the Dodes’ka-den child. The real is not what is represented. And vice versa. We remember, in Dodes’ka-den, the man with a deathly (in fact ghostly) expression who silently haunts an abandoned house, or the father and young son who, from their caravan, pretend that they can see the house of their dreams. 

Between people there is a space – a no-man’s land – which keeps them together but apart, separate but not cut off. Arseniev’s fundamental mistake consists in wanting to fill this space which he thinks is empty. During the exploration of the Khanda lake (a bravura passage, rightly admired) he takes no notice of Dersu’s apprehension and walks blithely on into the heart of the icy expanse, relying on his compass which always points him to the right direction, the straight line. What he hasn’t realized is that this flat surface of the frozen lake is not really flat at all, but a living thing, changing all the time. The route he has taken becomes impassable when he tries to go back. It’s not the same anymore. It forces the two men to make a detour: the straight line is never the solution. 

The Khanda lake episode isn’t only a bravura passage, it is also the moment when the spectator can most fully identify with Arseniev. The discovery of the frozen lake, its sheer immensity, gives rise in Arseniev’s commentary, as in the spectators’ sighs of satisfaction, to the same general idea: ‘How small, petty, ridiculous Man is set against the greatness, the beauty, the severity of Nature.’ An emotional moment that recalls an earlier picture-postcard scene: on the left the moon (already), on the right the sun (still) (1), in the middle and seen from behind, Arseniev and Dersu; between Arseniev and the moon, on the left, in the vast expanse, the tripod of the surveying instrument. Is there any real difference between this noble scene and the trivial one already referred to, that of the amateur painter in the shanty town? I think not. Once again, contemplation is a question of what is invisible. And of what, in the invisible, is blindingly obvious precisely because it cannot be seen. 

Dersu knows that this romantic outing will all too soon turn into a struggle for survival, and that from this struggle he will emerge victorious (at the same time saving the life of the other man, the aesthete, the one who communes with Nature) because he is able to transform the instruments of observation into something more useful. Another kind of diversion. The grass which the spectator and Arseniev have seen without really seeing will become the walls of a shelter, and the tripod, opened out, will serve as its framework. What does Dersu do with this equipment? He inverts its function, he turns it inwards, he makes it the camera obscura of another space, a place of survival and of rebirth of sorts. 

Once again, as the reader will have gathered, our discussion concerns the eye. When this belongs to a Western intellectual, Arseniev, a sensitive and cultured man mapping the unknown in the interests of Tsarist expansion, he is condemned to the geometric, to a certain blindness. His eye is mobile but doesn’t engage with anything – anything precise at least. Lacan reminds us usefully that the geometric is not the visual (2). As proof of this he says that if the light does indeed travels in straight lines, there is nothing to say that these lines are lines of light; they could very well be sewing thread which a blind man might follow by touch to grasp something that is being described to him which he cannot see. Arseniev is incapable of seeing as if life depended on it. And this being so, he is free to enjoy the spectacle. 

Dersu’s eye is different. It’s a kind of ‘reading’ eye. It doesn’t hand over to writing or photography. It doesn’t connect with an empty, infinite and homogenous space; it starts by describing a circle around Dersu that marks the limits of his visual acuity. When the latter declines, Dersu’s space becomes correspondingly smaller. Being a hunter, Dersu is forced to take the long way round and to deal in a space that is broken up and full of curves (notice how in the raft episode Dersu takes the current into account). He and the surveyor have two different conceptions of the world and of optics, and hence of the cinema. Arseniev represents the appeal of what lies outside the field of vision (‘appeal’ as in ‘appeal for help’) and Dersu Uzala the patient digging of the field (as you might dig for treasure). Arseniev represents the well-worn and woolly minded (imaginary) communion with Nature (with a capital N); Dersu the constant symbolic exchange with the environment (with a small e). The environment is not Nature. It has nothing to do with it. 

The notion of ‘off camera field’ [hors champ] is frequently evoked in Cahiers. And rightly so. But the in/off problematic can function fully, dramatically, acutely, only if the characters share a similar conception of space, and use it in the same way. They have to see eye to eye, so to speak, in this respect before the in/off paradigm can affect them. It so happens that Kurosawa is the film-maker who has managed, from the start, to film characters who differ radically in their understanding of space. I have already mentioned the encounter of the imaginary train and the ridiculous easel in Dodes’ka-den. 

But it is just as true of the more serious films – in Ikiru ( Living, 1952), the elderly Watanabee, before dying, situates the playing field, ‘a liberated zone of sorts’ in the very heart of the megalopolis – as it is of the lighter ones like Sanjuro where the choreography of the fights (Mifune, alone against a hundred) evokes what Lacan (again) says about the Peking opera: ‘In these ballets, no two people ever touch one another , they move in different spaces in which are spread out whole series of gestures, which, in traditional combat, nevertheless have the value of weapons, in the sense that they may well be effective as instruments of intimidation (3)’. 

For Dersu too there is something that functions as ‘out of field’. It’s not a question of the part of the field he cannot see because it is too far away or momentarily hidden. It is rather what in the field hasn’t been seen (but could be). Dersu is for ever digging away at his own out-of-field, one that is inside him, always-ready-there, unsuspected: the shack, or again the snares, the black trap under the branches that only he can see and from which the animals escape. This is the theme, dear to Kurosawa, of the hidden fortress. The eye as an instrument of discovery. We are haunted by what is out of sight (along with the lost look, contemplation, everything which postulates a beyond) only because we no longer know how to see (we read too much, Godard would say). ‘You’re like children. Can’t see a thing,’ says Dersu to the soldiers who are making fun of him. 

Such a position has ethical, indeed political implications. The ‘progressive’ side of Dersu’s character is a little like this idea of drawing on your own resources, not looking elsewhere for what you haven’t been able to find here. The answer to the enigma is always there, staring us in the face. One is reminded – because it’s both the same thing and quite the opposite – of the most geometric of film-makers, Lang, as for instance in The Testament of Dr Mabuse. For Lang too, the answer is always there, on the (image or sound) track, but it is given before the question, before the enigma is formulated. So it is never functional (the truth is always probable). Lang isn’t willing to film, or to mention, anything for which he cannot immediately provide concrete evidence, visible proof in the form of an insert (this may well be Lang’s most characteristic shot, the inserted proof). Inversely, this question of proof, of offering visible proof, is of no interest at all to Kurosawa. 

To sum up: Arseniev looks for what is beyond the field and Dersu delves into the field itself. So far so good. But it would be mistake to think that Kurosawa can be identified with either. There is a third question – his own – which consists in failing to satisfy or, worse, ignoring his character’ desire to find something else (beyond the field or inside it). You would look in vain, in Dersu Uzala, for what is called the ‘subjective shot’ (with one exception, and a significant one, that of the tiger). When Dersu interprets a broken branch, the cry of a bird or a footprint, the close-ups which might confirm what he is saying and fulfil our expectations are nowhere to be found. You have to take him at his words. And there we touch on one of the film’s major prohibitions: never separate the characters from what they see. The shot-reverse shot is absent from a film which people are a little too quick to call classical or traditional. In other words: no direct encounters. 

With three exceptions, however (and this is Dersu’s whole tragedy). First, Arseniev takes a photo of Dersu. The camera, the very one whose tripod has been turned to other uses, takes a kind of revenge. The revenge of the straight line and the pose. From then on, Dersu’s vision will begin to fail. Second, the encounter with the tiger. In this scene, which Bazin would have liked, Dersu shoots and the tiger runs away. From then on, Dersu loses all confidence in himself. Third, the glove shooting. There again, everything has changed. Dersu misses the target, that is straight in front of him, even though he had amazed the soldiers by hitting a smaller, moving target (a rope) right in the middle at the first attempt (but it was a moving target, a swinging one). Direct encounters are fatal for Dersu. 

The time has come, perhaps, to bring in ideology. I am not sure that people have really understood to what extent Dersu Uzala – which you could so easily mistake for yet another well-meaning portrayal of our common humanity – refuses to base itself on what underpins this type of film: the two-way relationship of man to his other (friend or enemy, man or beast), their identification. Films which bring the savage and the civilized man face to face can choose between two resolutions: either the savage can be sacrificed to the requirements of technological progress which is wholly associated with human progress, or civilized man can be disapprovingly contrasted with the angelic figure of the noble savage. In either case, the law of love is what regulates this head-on encounter in which the one devours the other for the common good. The shot-reverse shot is the privileged figure of this devouring process because it seems to allow people to change places. But this is an illusion. Lacan (again): ‘When, in love, I solicit a look, what is profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that – You never look at me from the place from which I saw you (4).’ 

This dissatisfaction is written into Kurosawa’s latest film. Arseniev’s idea of solidarity (his ‘if all the guys in the world…’ (5)) is inseparable from a kind of visual cannibalism. It is under the aegis of the geometric, of the straight line again, that Dersu – once at Khabarovsk – must be transformed into a sort of household pet. Dersu’s idea of solidarity is completely different: it involves leaving clues that will be useful to the next man or animal to come along. Immediately after him, in the next shot. And he doesn’t have to see who it is in order to help him. 

At the very beginning of the film, Dersu is mistaken by the soldiers for a bear. Still out of sight he shouts, ‘Man! Don’t shoot’, and goes to sit at the fire. At Khabarovsk, he becomes in effect a teddy bear for Arseniev’s son, and the fire he watches, in the stove, is a prisoner like him. Western humanism always ends up by stating its truth, which is that of police custody, the reserve, the zoo, the gulag, etc. 

This perhaps explains why the Soviets, who produced the film, showed a shortened version at the Paris festival – several of the Khabarovsk scenes had been expurgated. On the one hand, their explicit, official ideology (a wishy-washy humanism, alas all too present in the film’s music) is quietly mocked in these scenes. On the other, their political motive (to celebrate the identification and reconciliation of the good Russian and good non-Russian – i.e. Chinese – on both sides of the Ussuri and far away from the Peking government) is well and truly undermined. 

With a touch of humour, Kurosawa, who has simply told his story, sends his two heroes off back to back (the last shot: Dersu’s two-pronged stick planted on his grave). I spoke earlier of Kurosawa paradoxically bringing together spaces that are separate. For him, there is one point – and one only – from which the other can be seen as he really is. The cinema must keep contradictions alive and not try to win us over with the spectacle of their disappearance. The minimum requirement for a materialist art.

(1) Daney’s text has the moon on the right and the sun on the left, but this is clearly just a slip of memory. He also implies that this scene is part of the Khanka lake episode, whereas in fact it occurs earlier in the film.

(2) J. Lacan, The four fundamental concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. A. Sheridan (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977), p. 93.

(3) Ibid., p. 117.

(4) Ibid., p. 103.

(5) ‘Si tous les gars du monde...’, a popular song and poem by Prévert.

First published in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 272, December 1976. Published in English in Cahiers du cinema 1973-78, vol. 4. Translated by Annwyl Williams with a couple of edits from me (misinterpretation in first paragraph and changed "off space" to "off camera field" so that Daney's play on words with "out of field" makes sense).

The Aquarium (Milestones)

Picking up the re-posting of the lost translations from Steve Erickson's old website, now onto texts from Daney's first book: La Rampe. This translation is slightly different from the French text in La Rampe and it's probably based on the original text from Cahiers du cinéma. The roundtable that Daney refers to was published in Cahiers nine months earlier (issue 258-259, 1975; available in the translated volume of Cahiers du cinéma).

The Aquarium (Milestones) 

There is a risk of seeing in Milestones just another bleat for some kind of American conviviality. Our own round table is a little romantic about a film which is very fat from being that (romantic). If we can, let’s change the record. 

Nasty experiences 

In Milestones there are two agonising moments, two rips in the film’s fabric – agonising because absolutely unforeseeable. The first is when Gail, the young woman who works in an all-night café (which looks like a seedy place), is assaulted by a sexual maniac (“I want you to suck me”). Speechless with horror, she is only saved by the intervention of the blind man who has been alerted by the noise (John Douglas, the film’s co-director). The second moment is when Terry the demobbed GI, finds himself alone in the street (after a long meal, a moment of truth when he reveals his wish to join the – male – community which is very willing to accept him) and meets someone who asks him to take part in a ‘no risk’ break-in. The break-in goes wrong: Terry is killed, shot by a cop. 

What Gail and Terry have in common is that they are at a turning point in their lives, about to enter into new associations and to eliminate a bit of their past (Gail wants to leave her job and her boss, Al, who desperately wants to keep her; Terry wants simply to live again, far from Vietnam). Had the film been this post-leftist pastoral which others seems to have seen, it would have included some beautiful, indelibly moving moments of mutual support and solidarity. Nothing of the kind. What Gail and Terry are going through (and the latter loses his life in the process) is more akin to a rite of passage (a difficult passing though, a passage through a void, a final examination, etc.). 

A fabric doesn’t keep warm 

When we discussed Milestones, we talked about a (large) family, a community, an alternative party, a people’s camp, a collective statement, etc. Reassuring words. It seems to me that the cast of characters (or rather the ‘bodies’ that speak) in Milestones creates neither a fresco, nor a chronicle, nor a document but a fabric. A fabric seen under the microscope, and seen to be held together as much by the spaces between it as by its fibres. A lacunary tapestry. Quite the opposite of a house, a warm place or maternal protection. A fabric is not made or undone just like that, at will (even goodwill); it spreads, getting progressively larger, with inevitable knock-on effects (the turning back and forth of a relentless boustrophedon (1). The newly woven material meshes with (and is meshed into) what has already been woven. Human relationships don’t knit together with complete dependability; they are tied together over an empty space, on a wire and without a net. To fall through the meshes of the net, to pass through a void, is to die, to die from a nasty experience. 

For the militants of Ice, the nasty experience was emasculation. In Milestones the nasty experience is something that is never mentioned again in the film: the reality of sexuality (Gail), the reality of death (Terry). In both cases, violence. Nothing to do with a return of the repressed; what returns here is what has been denied. We don’t wish to know anything about the violence which is the American reality and which, like the banks which enclose the river in Numéro Deux, threatens and sometimes overlaps the narrow path paved by the Milestones. A return to reality, reality as a trauma. 

The real: what doesn’t come twice 

To continue the textile metaphor. From what material is the film woven? From long rolls of actual experience, where what one person says finds an echo in what another person hears? The sea-green naturalism of the ‘as if you were there (with them)’ kind? Quite the opposite. You only have to stop listening to the soundtrack to be confronted by what, in the images, has nothing to see. 

Nothing to see (as said to a crowd to move them away from an accident: there is nothing to see) – nothing in common – nothing to look at. The heterogeneity of the images disregards suture, and off-screen space, that reserve fund of perceptions. An omnipresent camera, continuous speaking, are there for real, and from this – the pattern woven from them – there is no way out. Likewise for the collective, there is nothing to see, nothing to meet. No one sees it and it sees no one (not for nothing is there a blind man at its centre). Has it been noticed that in Milestones you can cross America without seeing anyone? Anyone from the other camp, the other America, the non-marginal, middle, contented America. 

What you do come across, through a couple of moments of inattentiveness, lurking among the shots – and which the weaving, if it is too slack, lets you glimpse – are the scattered elements of a kind of improvised universe: erratic images, cruel inserts – desert sand, ripples, a waterfall, but also the flame of a burner, red-hot stones, a placenta, fish (maybe dead). The insert in Milestones is the site of passage through a void, the fixed point of the propelling force of death (a return of the inanimate, the organic – what moves but is not human). For Kramer, the insert is the site of pleasure (as with blackness in Godard); the place where the whatever of the real appears. 

What might the real actually be in cinema? Not the referent or the effect of the real, but the real of which Lacan tells us (Tuché et automaton in Séminaire, book XI, p. 54) that it is ‘the encounter as it may be missed, as in essence it is the missed encounter’. 

Undoubtedly, something shown to be inassimilable. Images which are presented but which will not be re-presented. There will be no time to take it in; it is not the imaginary, then. There will be no chance to lock into the writing [écriture]: it is not the symbolic, then. The real that doesn’t come twice. It is precisely what happens to Gail and Terry: they are very close to the dangerous edge (The Edge) of the loom, the point where the encounter may be fatal because if occurs (and is filmed) only once. 

The tribe weaves 

And the encounter is only so bad because Milestones (as Jean-Pierre Oudart rightly says in his poem!(2)) is conceived from and within a process of segregation. As much and more than a documentary about the dissolution of the American left or an invitation to universal love, the Kramer-Douglas film is: what forms a tribe? And how is this tribe formed from its own visual representation? A question posed by the film-makers without an ounce of humour, and a question that we tended to blur in our round-table discussion, in the name of a Marxism-Leninism that may have become exotic (American) but is still comprehensible, even if it is always purring away. Might we want to weigh up what is nevertheless the evidence: segregation is the truth of America, the shadow cast by its democratist ideology, the soil which gives us the mishmash of Milestones and the Mason gang, the Weathermen and the Jesus people? Ghettoization: the final stage of imperialism. 

So it should be said that Milestones is the anti-Nashville, since the special, staggering thing about Kramer and Douglas’ film is that they know no more than their characters but out of what they do know they want to put together a defensive wall and mark out a future. Instead of which, in the name of the several light years ahead that the artist-as-witness-to-his-time Robert Altman has over his contemptible creatures, his ridiculous Southern zoo, Nashville reassures us (us: the right-thinking opinion-makers of the New York and/or Parisian left) about these ‘worthless others’, this system of worthless stars. 

A tribe? If so, can we just as easily speak about ‘new social relations’? Maybe, but provided that we see what this Milestones tribe is weaving together: a kind of ethnological masquerade (will we finally realize that the truth of ideology, its very reality, is masquerade, fancy dress?), the image of primitiveness: trying out the land and denial of other tribes – the new Indians. Of course, it’s a paranoid tribe and, as Schreber (3) said, it is lop-sided: no chiefs (except for a blind guru who makes hardly any impression on the narrative); no common work, hardly any rites. Almost all of them simply find themselves in front of a huge aquarium, a metaphor both for the film’s space and for Karen’s body (the waters of birth: the waterfall after the film ends when the audience itself has already got up from their seats to leave their aquarium – the cinema). A tribe with two of three age groups eliminated: has it been noticed that we don’t meet anyone in this film who, say, fifteen or forty-five? 

No telling lies 

What holds the tribe together? What does it consist of? A glob of spittle, we might say. Words heaped on words. Careful, though: the lie, I mean the deliberate lie is forbidden. The film’s incurable lack of humour (which makes it, unlike the appealing Nashville, a largely troubling experience) arises out of this prohibition. And in what I’m saying – if I have any sense of humour – there is the hint of another discourse, a different one: one that is hostile, opposed, which I have to come to terms with. This other discourse is completely missing from Milestones: refused, deferred, in parentheses. What’s being said in Milestones has a quite different function: it’s the weaving itself, it’s – that most important word – the survival of the tribe. To lie would be to endanger the community. (For some Eskimos, the material conditions of survival are so perilous that speech, rarely expended, has to be truthful, a lie being for them both a luxury and a crime.) 

Loss of sight 

Our round-table discussion has a flaw: we scarcely mention the film’s form. Now, there is a limited number of organizing principles for the images and sounds in Milestones (as indeed in The Edge, Ice or In the Country). If the film breaks irreparably with all forms of naturalism, it’s because it only films – in the most natural way – situations involving loss of sight. The whole film is a never-ending piece of fort-da. A lightweight camera loses sight of the person it was framing a moment ago only to find him again in a space that was only ‘off’ for the blink of an eye. Those lost from view are rediscovered. Fathers and sons, mother and daughter re-establish contact, resume, renew their relationships. And those who were in prison, the out-of-sight by definition, get out. A conversation between Peter, released from prison, and John, the blind potter: ‘How old were you when you went blind?’ – ‘What do you remember?’ In Milestones there is one and only one division of labour: those who are filmed talk about those (and about what) who are not. A rough and ready means of dispensing with off-screen space. The outside, as we have seen, is the interpolation of an insert. Everything happens inside an aquarium, in which the fish take turns to put on a bit of a performance at the edge of the mirror-glass-screen. Sole message: we exist. 

But, you’ll say, this is forced labour! Yes. A tribe can’t allow itself to lose a single one of its members – even from sight!

Notes

(1) Boustrophedon: lines reading alternately from right to left and from left to right, as in some ancient inscriptions.

(3) ‘Pour Milestones’, in Cahiers 262-3

(3) Dr Paul Schreber was the subject of one of Freud’s most celebrated ‘case histories’. Daney is making a playful reference to paranoia.

First published in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 264, February 1976. Published in English in Cahiers du cinéma in English, vol. 4, translated by David Wilson.

Welles in Power

From some reason, this early text by Daney has been translated twice: in Andrew Sarris' Cahiers du cinema in English, and in Bridget Lyons' book on Welles. Here are both. The first one is more literal but perhaps reads less well or has aged a bit. Both are correct. You choose.

Welles in Power (Chimes at Midnight)

1. Of Falstaff, Welles said that "He wages a struggle lost in advance." And, too, "I don’t believe that he is seeking something. He represents a value; he is goodness." That strength and genius – unanimously recognized – celebrate our only hopeless causes or majestic downfalls, that a man like Welles, exerting an undeniable influence on those around him, incarnates only the defeated (disappearing, certainly, at the heart of an impressive machinery, but still worn by life, betrayed by his own) – that is a very surprising thing. Strange malediction – that a man too strong can only end badly. And yet, from Kane to Falstaff, from proud display to bareness, from a corpse that one does not see to a coffin that is carried, it is really the same story, that of a man who makes ill use of his power. 

Cinema tends to recount how this or that character (and behind him, often, the cinéaste) has obtained some power, that of speaking, or acting, of making a choice, and so on. Those are perhaps the noblest films (like Le Héros sacrilege, Le Caporal épinglé, or Le Coeur d’une mère), the strange roads on which the cinéastes lead their characters, because the simplest road is not always the most natural, because there are detours more rich than straight lines, defeats more noble than victories, and so on. The winning of one’s power – aiming at it, meriting it, snatching it – is precisely what Welles speaks of least. It is the witches who shape Macbeth, and his intuition that pushes Quinlan forward. The films of Welles begin where the others end; when everything is won, nothing remains but to unlearn everything, unto death, once Quinlan, today Falstaff. 

2. The work of Welles, in that way faithful to Shakespeare, is a reflection on the very idea of Power, that excessive freedom that no one can follow without seeing in it, in the end, degradation and derision. Power is an evil that brings life only to those who do not yet have it. Theirs the bold enterprises, the efficacious and astonishing actions, the well contrived plots – men of the future, born to trample on kings, to whom it is given, at least once in their lives, to rock the world. Kings have other cares; their victory is automatically without prestige, like a repression, a useless recall of the past. Defeat is the only adventure which remains for them. 

Absolute power destroys real power, condemns it to futility. “If there is a sense of the real,” Musil said, “there must be also a sense of the possible”. And a little further, “No doubt God Himself prefers to speak of His creation as potential”. In too extensive a power, the possible gnaws away the real, condemns it in advance; one action is never more necessary than another; good and evil, interchangeable, are equally indifferent. He who is master of the possible at twenty, like Citizen Kane, ends as slave to his caprices, surrendered gradually to a power without object or echo to an arbitrary and mad activity, useless and expensive, which never involves him completely, but which separates him always more and more from others (like the career of a singer without a voice, or the collections heaped up in Xanadu). Who can do the most, does the least, or acts at the margin of his power. Comedy demands then that from a prodigious expenditure of power there results a rigorously useless life. 

From film to film, to the extent that his work proceeds, that Welles ages, the sense of the derisory grows stronger, to the point of becoming the very subject of the film (The Trial) that Welles considers his best. Always, everywhere, power is in bad hands. Those who possess it do not know enough about it (Othello who believes Iago, Macbeth victim of a play on words) – or know too much (Arkadin, Quinlan, Hastler the lawyer), each committed to purely destructive actions by an excess of naivete, as of intelligence. 

3. The life of John Falstaff is a commercial failure. Shortly before dying, he observes that his friend – the feeble but prudent Robert Shallow – has been more successful, and he promises himself to cultivate his friendship. No doubt only his sudden death, which no one had foreseen, spares him the last disillusion. Falstaff was born, not to receive, but to give – without discrimination or hope of return – or, if he has nothing, to give himself as entertainment. Welles calls this waste, the goodness of Falstaff (and the latter himself remarks, “Not only do I have wit, but I give it to others.” Which is a good definition of genius). That Fasltaff – whom Shakespeare had intended mostly ridiculous – has become, imagined, then incarnated, by Welles, a moving character is not surprising. His death is not the disappearance – mysterious and legendary – of a Kane but the drab naked event in which one must read, although nothing is underlined, the end of a word. “If one amused oneself all the year,” says the young prince, “amusing oneself would be forced labor”. Of what is Falstaff guilty? Not so much of having ill used his power, for he has scarcely any, being a character of comedy, moreover without real courage or authority. Perhaps of having used without restraint speech, that power of parody, of having made from it an interminable histrionics, useless and tedious, in which talent, if there is any, asserts itself for nothing. More certainly still of having so long survived so scandalous a waste of his energy (his puns on “waste” and “waist”). And what is still more serious, victim more than culprit, if he makes ill use of his affections too, when he chooses as his friend the very person who will betray him. 

4. The work of Welles is singularly rich in abuses of trust (The Lady from Shanghai) or in friendships betrayed (Othello). The strange and scandalous complicity that for some time links Falstaff and the young prince makes more and more evident what it passes over in silence, the difference in their natures. But there would be no fascination between them if each did not precisely feel that they are radically different, symbols of two complementary and inimical worlds, like face and reverse of the same coin. On one side, Falstaff who lives on his past, on what he is already, in the entropy of a freedom deliberately ruined. On the other, the future Henry V, who is nothing still, who will perhaps be a great king, if he discovers that exact relation between the effort to supply and the end to reach, the austerity and the rigor that makes power utilizable. 

First published in Cahiers du cinema, #181, August 1966. Published in English in Cahiers du cinema in English, issue 11, September 1967. A couple of typos corrected.

Welles in Power (Chimes at Midnight) 

Welles says of Falstaff "that he fights a battle that has already been lost." And further, "I do not believe that he is looking for anything. He represents a value. He is goodness." There is something very astonishing in the fact that power and genius – unanimously acclaimed as such – should celebrate only hopeless causes or grandiose falls, and that a man like Welles, whose influence on his colleagues is so undeniable, embodies in his art only those who have been defeated. Admittedly this is obscured by an impressive technology, but nonetheless his protagonists tend to be worn out by life, betrayed by those close to them. An extraordinary fate decrees that a man who is too strong can only come to a bad end. And yet from Kane to Falstaff, from pomp to nakedness, from a corpse one doesn't see to a coffin that is carried away, it is always the same story: that of a man who misuses his power. 

... The conquest of power (aspiring to it, living up to it, obtaining it by force) is precisely what Welles deals with the least. For him, this kind of power is represented by the witches who create Macbeth and the intuition which propels Quinlan. Welles' films start where others end; when everything has been won, the only thing left is to be stripped of all knowledge as death approaches: Quinlan yesterday, Falstaff today. 

Welles' work, faithful to Shakespeare in this respect, is a reflection on the very idea of Power: that excess of freedom which nobody can pursue without finding degradation and ridicule at the end. Power is an evil that gives life only to those who do not already have it. Heroic undertakings, actions that succeed in changing the course of events, intricately woven plots: these belong to men of the future, who are born to "tread on kings," men to whom it is granted, at least once in their lives, to shake the world. Kings have other cares; their triumph, like repression or the fruitless re-creation of the past, confers no prestige by definition. Defeat is the only adventure left to them. 

Absolute power destroys true power, reducing it to futility. "If there is a sense of reality," Musil says, "there must also be a sense of the possible." And a little further on he adds, "God himself undoubtedly prefers to talk about his creation as potentiality." When power is too great, the possible consumes reality, dooming it in advance: one action is then no more necessary than another; good and evil are interchangeable and equally meaningless. A man like Citizen Kane, who is master of the possible at the age of twenty, winds up being the slave of his whims, surrendering bit by bit to a power that has neither object nor echo, and to action which is arbitrary and foolish, useless and wasteful, which never involves him fully but which distances him more and more from others (like the career of a singer who has no voice, or the collections heaped up at Xanadu.) He who has the power to do the most achieves the least, or uses only a fraction of his power. The laws of humor require that a prodigious expenditure of energy results in a strictly useless life. 

In film after film as his work develops and as Welles grows older, the inclination to mockery grows stronger, to the point of becoming the very subject of the film Welles considers his best, The Trial. Everywhere and always, power is in bad hands. Those who have it either do not know enough (Othello, who believes Iago; Macbeth – who is the victim of wordplay), or too much (Arkadin, Quinlan, the lawyer Hastler) – all doomed to act for nothing out of excessive naiveté or intelligence. 

In terms of money, the life of John Falstaff is a failure. Shortly before dying, he observes that his friend - the doddering but shrewd Robert Shallow - has succeeded better, and he resolves to cultivate his friendship. Only Falstaff's sudden death, of which there has been no warning, spares him what would undoubtedly have been a last disillusionment. Falstaff was not born to receive, but to give – indiscriminately and without hope of return – or, if he has nothing, to give himself theatrically. Welles calls this prodigality the goodness of Falstaff. That Falstaff – whom Shakespeare especially wanted to be ridiculous – should have become a moving character as imagined and then embodied by Welles, is not very surprising. His death is not the mysterious and legendary disappearance of a Kane, but the prosaic and unadorned event into which the end of the world must be read (although nothing is really emphasized.) "If all the year were playing holidays," says the young prince, "to sport would be as tedious as work." Of what is Falstaff guilty? Not so much of having misused his power, since he hardly has any, being a comic character and one without real courage or authority into the bargain. Perhaps of having been intemperate in his use of words, of having turned his power of parody into an interminably hammy act, an unproductive and tiresome one, where talent, if there is any, asserts itself to no purpose. Even more surely, he is guilty of having survived the squandering of his energy for so long (indicated by the wordplay on "waste" and "waist.") And even more seriously, he is the victim, rather than the guilty one, in making a bad use of his feelings, since he chooses as his friend the very person who will betray him. 

Welles' work offers many examples of breaches of confidence (The Lady from Shanghai) or betrayed friendships (Othello). The strange and scandalous complicity that links the young prince and Falstaff for so long reveals more and more clearly that which is never spoken: the differences in their natures. But there would be no mutual fascination if each of them did not feel himself as radically Other: they are symbols of two worlds that are inimical but complementary, opposite sides of same coin. On one side there is Falstaff, who lives off his past, off what he already is, in the gradual entropy of a freedom that has deliberately been abused. On the other, there is the future Henry V, who is nothing yet, who will perhaps be a great king if he discovers the proper relationship between the expenditure of effort and the object to be attained: the austerity and discipline which make the use of power possible.

First published in Cahiers du cinema, #181, August 1966. Published in English in Chimes at Midnight: Orson Welles, Director, edited and translated by Bridget Lyons, Rutgers University Press, 1989.

Strange Bodies

Another 1966 texts from Cahiers du cinema in English.

Strange Bodies 

The film is disappointing enough; yet The Great Race is the film of which Edwards had been dreaming for a very long time, the pure animated cartoon that the earlier films foretold. Was he wrong to tend always more towards the cartoon? There was indeed at the end the absurd bet of The Great Race, but this road passed through The Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark. Thus it happens that a false idea is revealed as such only after having allowed some truths to emerge. Those truths were that world that was created under our eyes, with its fauna and its logic, at the same time tender and nerves-on-edge; they were the two films with Peter Sellers. But The Great Race, at the same time an accomplishment and a failure, better stresses what was of value only sketched, implied, grazed, without the aid of Cinerama.

The metteur en scène is he who stretches his nets, more sure of his wait than of his catch. The films of Blake Edwards live by one insidious question: how do people react? A mise en scène is a mise-en-condition, a setting-in-state: to wait until a gentle drunkenness, a subtle derangement, will halfway open the doors of the strange, perhaps even, with a little luck, of madness... Drunkenness plays a major role in the films of Edwards (Breakfast at Tiffany's and, of course, Days Of Wine And Roses). The point is that it does not bring things on abruptly, it hurries nothing; it forms and deforms slowly. Those who give themselves up to it or who are given up to it are not lost in it, but their timidity suddenly becomes humor; their irony, lucidity; their unconstraint, choreography. The cinéaste does not treat people abruptly either; he knows that there is always a privileged moment, a privileged place, where the unthinkable becomes possible, and the impossible, familiar. Then how do people react? In the form of gags, of strange confessions and of gentle nostalgias... That is the famous malice of Edwards. We owe him the most tender films and the most discreet melodramas. It was enough to barely jostle the characters, glib, vulnerable and a little weak (they are always the same, brilliant and insipid: Curtis, Lemmon, Niven...) and to observe their reactions. Now, there are gags too in misfortune. But it appeared more and more that there were two veins in Edwards. And always the same question: how do people react? You know that that question is at the center of the animated cartoon as well. Of course, less tenderness, and more of the mechanical, is needed there. No doubt Edwards was determined to escape from this slightly satisfied melancholy, this encumbering timidity; he had only to take up his work again, but to strengthen its drawing, to enlarge its strokes, to tighten its contours. To give to its characters, rather than a dim life to drag out, a role to play, and, in the limit, a symbol to incarnate. There was first Clouseau. But he is still too human, too near the cinéaste. The anonymity, the inconsistency, of Leslie of The Great Race were necessary – Leslie all clothed in white, for he represents the Good. Edwards, logical, simplifies to excess, erases and caricatures. Does cinema gain by it? The reply is at the end of the detour and the detour passes through drawing and its virtues. 

Each week, for a year, from drawing to drawing, Copi presents the same character. It is a woman, bad-tempered but simple, with straight hair, sitting facing a void from which all realities come to her, one more unthinkable than another. Her mind alert, her eye fixed, she is there, but always to be more flouted, disappointed, outdone... At length, her mere presence, her obstinacy in "being there," are enough to make one smile. Each week, at each new ordeal, it is a little of our world that she discovers; gestures, words, reasonings, bits and pieces that in the end make up her experience, enclose her in what must indeed be called her "character," for she has one, irreducible... 

The pleasure of the animated cartoon: the mind that knows it will be surprised, then wonders how it will be surprised and enjoys knowing itself, for a few instants, outdone. It is always the unexpected that happens but in a landscape each day more precise and on which each adventure leaves an irrefutable mark. All this life - contradictory, complex - which seemed refused to this character so crudely formed (in a few strokes of the pen) comes to meet him. One day, the drawing no longer has to be comic, efficacious, or comprehensible, for it no longer has to prove anything, much less to establish anything; it is our complicity that makes it live and makes us, again, laugh. At the end of a year, Copi (but one might equally well have cited Jules Feiffer or Don Martin) has invented, not a drawing, but indeed, a world, every bit as opaque, mad and obscure as our own. That is to say (and this is the moral of this digression) that in the measure in which it repeats itself, the animated cartoon (or the comic drawing) acquires what was not given to it: Density, and in that way rejoins what it had as its mission to simplify: life. 

Life is precisely what Leslie and Fate have a priori, what they will not succeed in making one forget. However Edwards, who always liked lightness and a lack of constraint in his characters, this time wanted them insipid and inconsistent, less important than their colors, their costumes, their machines. Docilely, they apply themselves to existing as little as possible, and their race around the world, short-winded and laborious, seems particularly destined to prove that, precisely, no surprise is possible (with the exception of a few parentheses and unexpected happy encounters, like the episode in central Europe, the duel, etc.). 

At the end of the narrative Blake Edwards dreams of a world which has lost all density, of characters without weight, without bodies, escaping gravity, the dimensions of the world becoming the frame of a gigantic cartoon. This temptation that enhanced the earlier films ruins The Great Race, whose premise it seeks in itself. Indeed one sees the characters of Copi acquire the density they lack, but one barely sees how Leslie and Fate could deny their faces, their too-human look, their too-heavy bodies. But in The Great Race – and this is precisely what Cinerama stresses and denounces at each moment – in spite of all their good will, Leslie and Fate are first Curtis and Lemmon, and the heroine, Natalie Wood. And so all that one should forget crops out more than ever: the wrinkles of the one, the histrionics of the other, the vulgarity of the third, each encumbered with his body, with this life, entropic, which however is the raw material of cinema.

First published in Cahiers du cinéma, #175, February 1966. Published in English in Cahiers du cinema in English, number 3, Andrew Sarris (Ed), 1966.

A Nothing on a Ground of Soft Music

More re-posting of the translations from Steve Erickson's old website, now tackling the ones published in the English editions of Cahiers du cinéma by Andrew Sarris, starting with three texts from 1966.

A Nothing on a Ground of Soft Music (The Family Jewels)

In The Family Jewels there is a scene in which one sees a man take off once and for all the costume that made his living, deny its tinsel, denounce its servitudes. It concerns, of course, Uncle Everett, the clown, who has not forgotten that a public entertainer is no more a man than a mask is a face. No doubt, Lewis secretly delighted in making this character, to whom one believed him a priori so near, antipathetic and even odious. But is he really so far from him? Very simply, Everett is less engaged in his creation than Lewis is; he is less involved with his double. 

The more things go along, the more Lewis moves away from his character. With The Family Jewels, it is indeed a question of his present situation, of his chances for survival. Yet in a few years, this character becomes, with age, impossible and derisory. Between now and then it is absolutely necessary to become oneself again, to take one's distance vis-à-vis the mask. In The Patsy, Lewis, sure of his "happy ending," makes the circuit of what has been necessary for him to do, in order for him to deserve himself. It was a film turned towards the past. The future was to be the concern of The Family Jewels. 

One slides towards a new world. Strangely, it is a question of our world, futile and familiar at the same time. Lewis takes risks there, still a little maladroit and awkward, asking himself whether life there is possible. The Family Jewels is the return of Lewis to the land of men, no longer in front of them but among them. It is a serious film, because never has the actor been so unsure of himself, so intimidated: he has just refused artifice, makeup, magic; he is going to appear as he is and for what he is; he is going to run the risk of not being recognized... For Willard is an entirely normal man, who resembles everyone slightly, even Jerry Lewis... 

These are difficult beginnings, on tip-toe; all the bridges have not yet been cut. In places the mask resists and imposes some of its old tricks (the sequence of the service station.) But those are quotations, references to a universe that it is necessary to go beyond, conceded to an audience that one must not treat too roughly. Halfway between the old and the new, Lewis, who owes as much to himself as to his myth, must change skin without changing audience. 

The Family Jewels will be the place of this metamorphosis. Since there are two Lewises in competition, there will be two films as well, two audiences. And first the "adult" audience – in search of caricatures – will be satisfied by six ineffable uncles, who are six Lewises, therefore six bravura pieces. Empty castoff clothes destined for an audience that awaits them. For the real film is played elsewhere, far from grimaces and distortions, between the real Lewis (Willard) and the real audience (Donna). It is the real film that is the more beautiful as well, the newer, the more moving. The more that what Donna and her chauffeur say and do is banal and insignificant, the more serious the film is; the fewer things happen in it, the richer it is. And one begins to think about the masterpiece Lewis (and he alone) might make by henceforth filming nothing, or almost, on a ground of soft music... The greatest simplicity, the ultimate discovery, invisible to all, can only reach a child. By inventing the character of Donna, Lewis does nothing but conform what he has always said: children alone understand him, because, for them, little preoccupied with second degrees, he does not play at being, he is. If Donna is the ideal audience, it is because she does not think it possible to cheat, to play act. Which makes The Family Jewels, too, into a very simple parable (and especially defense plea.) One proposes to the audience different versions of one same man, and one asks it to choose, reminding it that this choice, decisive, carries along all the future... But one has underestimated the audience in presenting to it only monsters, full of good will, certainly, but too preoccupied with themselves to really think about this very audience. It makes no mistake about that, and chooses the only man who does not wear a mask and who, for that very reason, was out of competition. Scandal in the milieus of spectacle; but they will be defeated. 

The masks give way, the fact triumphs at last in broad daylight. Yet one little detail: Willard wins his audience only on condition of denying himself, at least one minute (but that minute is essential), the putting on the makeup of a clown. That is the curse from which he is not yet wholly safe. To win over his audiences entirely, it is necessary all the same to play the fool a little, more by necessity than by vocation. This little detail does not shake Willard: tomorrow belongs to him...

First published in Cahiers du cinéma, #175, February 1966. Published in English in Cahiers du cinema in English, number 4, Andrew Sarris (Ed), 1966.

The Serpent's Egg

For a short lived moment in 2007-2008 Cahiers du cinéma published English issues online. None of these are available now but I managed to salvage the one translation of Daney they included in an incredible special issue on Bergman and Antonioni (here's the table of contents).

The Serpent’s Egg  

For all of Bergman’s insistence that this film should be viewed in the light of today, it’s hard to see anything more in it than Germany in 1923 (which has little in common with Sweden in 1977, even for those who don’t pay their taxes). What makes it even harder is to de-historicise his film and read it as an abstract meditation on the human condition, unlike Shame or The Silence, is its historical framework (a rare occurrence with Bergman and no doubt due to the requirements or a large-scale international production), one almost identical to that of a far better film, Cabaret.  

Where Cabaret gave insights into the rise of Nazism within the confines of a stage performance or a song (Cabaret is not “a musical plus serious human problems,” rather it’s serious human problems are also musical), where Bob Fosse rethinks the genre, however, Bergman shamelessly employs the supposed existing knowledge of his audience to make the film the most smeared with prophecies of the past in a long time. So much so that you begin to wonder how far back we need to go into German history (Bismark? Luther? Otho the Great?) to leave the “rise of Nazism” zone. It’s an exhausting exercise (as the pathetic nostalgia pieces by Cavani on Nietzsche and Russell on Mahler already demonstrated).  

These prophecies of the past pervade the film. We witness the hero, Abel Rosenberg, a complete outsider (American in Germany, Jewish, from a family of performers, and an alcoholic), achieving a sort of radical otherness that turns him – in the voice-over accompanying the final shot – into a sort of wandering Jew. Everything that happens to Rosenberg has a double significance: nothing can happen to me / I knew and have always known that something would happen to me. His alcoholism allows for a different turn of the screw: has this already happened to me or should I continue to be afraid? Witness the scene in which he is questioned by policemen and is suddenly “hit” with the idea that he is accused of all these crimes because he is Jewish, and in which the violence of his own reaction and his headlong flight into a (self-made) trap function as if to say “I know it, but still.” 

The viewer sits there, knowing very well where the film is taking him (the rise of Nazism), but the film maker (the Master) forces him to rediscover his supposed existing knowledge through a series of unfortunate encounters (cutting up the horse, ransacking the nightclub) at moments when, we might say, his attention wavered a bit and his defences were lowered. For Abel Rosenberg and for the viewer fear (fear of being taken by surprise by what we already know, fear of being afraid) becomes the motor of the film, making us flee forward, toward a revolting but well-known end, an apocalypse tolerated as long as it absorbs the traumatic moments in an adequately executed work of fiction.  

We should see The Serpent’s Egg as a kind of retro-ideological serial, which could be a genre for the future. In a serial, the main stake is always a secret heavy with repercussions, kept inside individual bodies or containers. The great serials echoed the fears of their period (Lang of course, but also Gance or Feuillade). They couldn’t step back and observe from a distance. Bergman, forty years after the fact, is no longer concerned with secrets but with parading various idées reçues on the rise of Nazism (everything that corresponds to the hideous word ideologem, or discreet signs of ideology). But it is the serial aspect that forms the most successful and surprising part of the film (the final confrontation between Rosenberg and Vergerus, the film screenings, the cyanide, etc.) in as far as the biographical (Vergerus and Rosenberg are childhood friends), sentimental (Vergerus loves Rosenberg), and political (Vergerus the crazed scientist as a future Mengele) intricacies make up a body.  

The entirely reactive Serpent’s Egg is left-wing anti-fiction. The investigation, the will to solve the mystery is not driven by a hunger for truth, or by the desire to denounce and have clarity of vision, but by fear. The taciturn Abel Rosenberg, whose near-muteness sees him taking on the role of relay, doesn’t seek the truth (which he has known all along) but his truth, which is to come face to face with filth and enjoy the spectacle. This is how he becomes attracted to Vergerus’ film screenings, where he can watch himself for a pittance. Poetic art according to Bergman: there’s only one point to showing and that is to create fear. 

Which is precisely what the policeman played by Gert Froebe alludes to in a scene in which he tells Rosenberg that it is fear that makes him a meticulous cop. Basically, he argues, if everyone keeps doing their daily jobs diligently, we might avoid the worst. Not by confronting it, but by retreating and thinking about it, in other words to fear and, who knows, overcome it. A film on the active nature of fear. As a form of resistance, it doesn’t amount to very much. 

First published in Cahiers du cinéma, issue 285, February 1978. Published in English in Cahiers du cinéma, Special issue "Two great moderns", October 2007, pp. 35-36. Translation by Tom Mes.

Waiting for the Snow...

Last translation from The Wage of the Channel Hopper column republished from the old Steve Erickson's website.

Waiting for the Snow... 

Where the zapper feels that he should rest the “French Audio-visual landscape (FAL)” for a while, before hitting it again - soon? - in the small of the back. 

To conclude, let’s start with two quotations: "Christmas time again, with its trail of ancient frights. The shops are chockfull with all kinds of unbelievable rubbish, but there is no stock left of that which we need." (Raymond Chandler) And: "You wouldn't realise to what extent, when an investigation is made in society, the media have become one of the main subjects of revolt." (A reader). The first quotation is a reasonable inducement not to pursue this chronicle beyond Christmas. The second induces a desire to wait for the metamorphosis of the FAL to advance (in the sense of the "advancement" of progress, or the "advanced" state of old meat) before visiting upon it the smiling, if cruel, voyeurism to which, for a hundred days, the zapper has confined himself. 

Is that enough reason to take stock, to draw up a balance sheet? If yes, such a balance sheet would be rather modest in scale. We still do not know what television is, but we are beginning increasingly to imagine that it must be happy enough being "the telly". This irrefutable truism implies that it must not be held responsible for the fact that it bears little relation to thought, to morals, or to poetry. All of which are very noble, to be sure, and which cinema meets from time to time. However, this truism also means that when it comes to information (giving news of the world), to de-ontology (teaching the lesson that others must not be excessively ill-treated), to prose (using better image and sound), television - in the best cases - will have a say. 

In other words, it should be possible to say that we live in homes that have "running water, gas, electricity and images". And while we justifiably complain when the water supply is cut off, we do not believe that water tastes like whiskey when finally it does begin to flow normally from our taps. Water, we will say, is more or less pure, good and chlorinated. This is the essential question where television is concerned: it relates more to ecology than anything else. Rather strangely, everybody came down heavily on that poor word “FAL”, without realising that it was about a landscape, and that we were more its guardians than its vandals. The landscape is not a New Territory to be discovered and opened up in the future (all the speeches about that sublime object which television could, or should be, do begin to get one down), it is an environment in fact, which we have enjoyed already for a long time, an environment which it should be possible to improve, no more., The task involved is, doubtless, titanic, but it may be wiser to entrust it to ants. 

The foregoing paragraphs concern the zapper, inasmuch as he is a citizen and that he has a claim to what a recent tabloid referred to as his rights as a "consumer of media". What follows, however, deals with those obscure reasons which have led him to believe that by zapping he would go beyond appearances, drift towards a lighthouse of truth – truth about French society subject to a mild hysteria, about archaic reflexes lingering in the midst of total modernity, about unknown dogmas and supervised liberties and about that strange desire to see, to see at all costs, employing surprise or stratagems, for fear that there may be nothing or, on the contrary, too much to see. 

Doubtless, one must have seen too many films of cinema to take television seriously. As if one day television will give back to cinema all that it has taken, not only in terms of a portfolio of films, but also in terms of solid hypotheses which filmmakers developed earlier within the cinema only because the other media were not yet ready to welcome them: from (the much forgotten) Rossellini to Godard (who lately has been in great form, and so much the better) through Vertov, Welles and Tati. If there were a "history of communication," cinema would be, at one and the same time, the Golden Age as well as the Era of Suspicion. Television would merely have been its manager (surprising, how prominently this word "manage" figures in our everyday speech), its "digestive," so to speak. So much so, now, when cinema cannot meet our needs, it is still with what we have learned from it that we contemplate that which wishes its death. Can the cinema critic of films still survive? The cinema critic of life, in any case, leads a hard life.

Originally published in Libération on December 24, 1987. Published in English in the anthology Cinema and Television: Fifty years of Reflection in France, edited by Jacques Kermabon and Kumar Shahani. With some edits by Steve Erickson and me.