A Fable of Film: Ranciere's Anthony Mann

Abstract

Enterprising editors in sixteenth-century France often launched translations of Aesop's fables to endow a classical genre with a new power of illustration. Wearing a deceptively childish appearance, a fable was a text coordinated with a picture. The combination was aimed to convey a lesson or to impose, often obliquely or through visual strategies, a reassuring mode of conduct.' But in the play of image and text, as in cinema, enigmas, contradictory readings, and perplexities abounded. These books verified what early modern lexicographers noted about the meanings of fable. Henri Estienne's Dictionnairefrangois-latin (1549) cites and translates Varro to register Devis, et propos, ou conte, soit vray ou faulx, and Terence farce, une comidie, that includes menterie... bourdes et mensonges. Nicot's Trtsor de la languefrangaise (1605) associates the telling of fabulous tales with an art of directing action: raconter une fable, Apologumfacere, vel agere. Nicot's analogue, Randle Cotgrave, inA Dictionarie of the French & English Tongues (1611) underscores deceit and contrariety at its basis. Fable: f. A fable, tale, lie, leasing, false tale, unlikely thing repeated; also, a Comedie, or Enterlude. The Dictionnaire de l'Acadimiefrangaise (1694) posts two definitions. One, a feinte, & invent~e pour instruire, ou pour divertir, leads to le sujet, l'argument d'un poame 4pique, d'un poame dramatique, d'un roman, held in a collective sense of [t]outes les fables de Y'Antiquith Payenne before the definition is inverted as [f]laussetd, chose contournde. Vous nous comptez des fables. The reversible nature of the form fit the designs of authors wishing to produce enigmas and perplexity, if not counter-meanings, within the frame of clearly drawn parables and moral tales. In tandem with the classical heritage of the genre, Jacques Rancibre writes of cinema as a fable, but not before offering a definition in an Aristotelian clarity that seems deceptive or even unsettling. The cinematic fable would begin as a story well told. It entails the arrangement of necessary or likely actions through the construction of a dilemma and an itinerary that leads to a resolution. Characters move from good fortune to misfortune or from misfortune to good fortune. But, as Jean Epstein intuited in the great years of silent cinema, Aristotle is not a seal of approval that will guarantee a good movie. Life is not fabulous; it is guided to ends neither good nor bad, merely to situations opened in every ? Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2004 91 SubStance # 103, Vol. 33, no. 1, 2004