Pure Cinema Research Articles

Une goutte d’eau, une goutte d’étoiles. Microcinématographie et avant-garde dans les années 1920

A long-standing link exists between avant-garde and scientific cinema. In the 1920s, in fact, the former contributed to the construction of the latter: on the one hand, by its systematic inclusion in film clubs’ and film societies’ screening programs; on the other hand, by catalyzing the theoretical debate on the medium specificity because of the specific techniques it develops. Through the texts by philosophers, film makers and theorists of the time (Walter Benjamin, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Émile Vuillermoz, László Moholy-Nagy among others), this essay examines the role of microscope films in the construction of 1920s film theory, discussing several tropes and key concepts such as pure cinema, cinégraphie integrale, rhythm theory and optical “unconscious”.

W kręgu idei fotogenii i cine-rayografu

In this article, the author revisits the history of French film movements with a particular focus on the re-inscription of random objects derived from everyday life in the film structure on one hand, and on the other, on the relationship between storytelling and visual poetry. The origin of the idea of correspondence of arts can be traced to the overlapping definitions of Surrealism and Dadaism and in the debate on the photogenic nature of film work. Historical study offers an essential context for understanding the shifting ideas from the idea of pure cinema to surreal and Dada cinema. The article draws attention to the work directly on the film reel by montage and collage. The analysis tracks the issue of visual illusions triggered by the use of rotoreliefs and juxtaposing images. Historical research has been differentiated into various separate case studies. Having examined some problems raised by these attempts, the article turns to reveal the intrinsic dialectical tensions in cine-rayographs and the absorption of selected practices from other artistic cultures enabling us to understand the principles of modern art.

Arquivo e Paisagem: Sobre Cinema e Espanto

In the “tiny” world of F. Percy Smith – the well-known naturalist of the 19th century – both cinema and nature play a key role in showing the intimate and “hidden life of insects and plants in a way that people have never seen before” (National Science and Media Museum). As a naturalist, F. Percy Smith was interested in exploring the many educational possibilities of cinema from the several landscapes he shot, creating an interesting combination of landscape and moving image. About a hundred years later, Stuart A. Staples, lead singer of Tindersticks, visits and revisits the cinematic world of F. Percy Smith by creating a film from the series Secrets of Nature (1922). With Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith (2017) Staples develops a cinematic montage based on Smith’s “pure cinema”. In it, Staples traverses Smith’s microscopic landscapes in an exercise that seeks to observe the wonder created in the naturalist’s first exhibitions, as well as the construction of a new landscape that points to an eternal and ethereal movement. As such, the purpose of this essay is twofold: firstly, to analyze F. Percy Smith’s intimate and microscopic landscapes and, secondly, to perceive Minute Bodies as a film that tries to recover this initial wonder of the moving images by creating new landscapes from the archives of Smith’s films.

Bruce Isaacs, The Art of Pure Cinema: Hitchcock and His Imitators

Bruce Isaacs, The Art of Pure Cinema: Hitchcock and His Imitators Bruce Isaacs, The Art of Pure Cinema: Hitchcock and His Imitators. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, 269 pp. Philippe Met Philippe Met E-mail: pmet@sas.upenn.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 62, Issue 1, Spring 2021, Pages 119–121, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjab013 Published: 08 April 2021

Fragments and Fury

Fragments and Fury David Greven (bio) Bruce Isaacs. The Art of Pure Cinema: Hitchcock and His Imitators. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 272 pp. $39.95 paperback. I have often considered my critical stance on Brian De Palma an anomalous one. While I consider Alfred Hitchcock the greatest of classical Hollywood directors (a placeholder description given his transatlantic career), I consider De Palma the greatest postclassical Hollywood director. Important critics of De Palma, such as Adrian Martin, Terrence Rafferty, Thomas Leitch, Pauline Kael, and especially Robin Wood, have defended his aesthetics, and specifically defended his work against the dread charge of “ripping-off Hitchcock,” but not very many critics have written from a position of partisanship for both directors. (Kael famously angered Andrew Sarris and others by perversely proclaiming De Palma the infinitely greater director, but Eyal Peretz essentially follows suit in his book on De Palma, Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses [Stanford University Press, 2008].) In The Art of Pure Cinema, Bruce Isaacs has, more than any other critic I have read, shed light on the peculiar and heady relationship between Hitchcock and De Palma, and in so doing has produced a thrilling account of De Palma’s aesthetics that illustrates its singular force and overlaps with Hitchcock’s. Isaacs also sheds revelatory light on Hitchcock, who, while not the sole focus of this book, is treated with ample rigor. Perhaps most thrillingly of all, Isaacs stages— and ably inspires—a bracing conversation among Hitchcock and several of his “imitators”: De Palma and the giallo [End Page 146] directors Dario Argento, Mario Bava, and Lucio Fulci. This is a book I have long waited for, and it exceeds my expectations in its finesse, rigor, insightfulness, and—most notable of all—committed demonstration of the art of close reading and textual analysis in this era of detachment and distance in Film Studies, characterized by what we can call archival hegemony. Isaacs brilliantly breaks new ground by covering the seemingly well-covered terrain of Hitchcock’s theory of “pure cinema.” Excavating the meanings of this term, how Hitchcock got to it, and what it means for his cinema and its disciples is Isaacs’s foundation. He points out that a desire to create “a cinema unaffiliated with earlier artistic forms” was not unique to Hitchcock but a goal shared by many early twentieth-century aesthetic modernists (15). “Pure cinema . . . was a European avant-garde movement that emerged during the mid-1920s in Paris,” incorporating elements of German expressionism and Soviet montage and exemplified by the work of filmmakers Henri Chomette and Germaine Dulac (16). The latter was particularly relevant to Hitchcock’s early development as a film theorist, as was, of course, F.W. Murnau, the great German expressionist director whose filmmaking Hitchcock observed first-hand (The Last Laugh, 1924). Isaacs discusses connections between Murnau’s and Dulac’s views on pure cinema, which coalesced in Hitchcock’s thought. Isaacs makes sure to clarify that Hitchcock did not take an active interest in Dulac’s writings and films; instead, “his aesthetic development occurred in relative proximity to the emergence” of the pure cinema movement that Dulac led (18). Isaacs contends that Hitchcock’s cinema is one in which “narrative and representational form is increasingly distilled into the abstraction of cinema’s pure formal and phenomenological elements: relations within space, movement, time (and thus duration), perception, affect, and intensity” (23). No wonder the giallo artists found his work so resonant! An early section of Isaacs’s book includes a remarkably fresh and detailed look at the scene in Frenzy [End Page 147] (1972) when the murderer Rusk takes the deeply likable Babs, his unfortunate next victim, up the stairs to his flat, saying she is really “my type of woman,” before Hitchcock’s camera ominously backtracks into the street, where the ambient street noises slowly engulf the soundtrack. Isaacs painstakingly analyzes this sequence in order to demonstrate Hitchcock’s negotiation, tethered to the impact of the tracking shot, of realist and anti-realist techniques, and he emphasizes a new excessiveness in the director’s style, excess being a key linkage among Hitchcock and his adrenalized...

Film Chronicle

Film Chronicle Jefferson Hunter (bio) Film Chronicle: Gold Diggers of 1935, directed by Busby Berkeley (Warner Home Video, 2006) The Band Wagon, directed by Vincente Minnelli (Warner Home Video, 2005) Invitation to the Dance, directed by Gene Kelly (MGM, 2011) Ballet, directed by Frederick Wiseman (Zipporah, 1995, and Kanopy streaming service) The Red Shoes, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (Criterion Collection, 2010) Pride and Prejudice, directed by Robert Z. Leonard (Warner Home Video, 2006) Pride & Prejudice, directed by Joe Wright (Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2006) Pride and Prejudice, directed by Simon Langton (BBC, 2019) They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, directed by Sidney Pollack (Kino Lorber, 2017). Sir John Davies's poem "Orchestra, or A Poem of Dancing," published in 1596, pays the definitive Renaissance tribute to Terpsichore. A representative excerpt: Loe this is Dauncings true nobilitie.Dauncing, the child of Musick and of Love,Dauncing it selfe, both love and harmony,Where all agree, and all in order move;Dauncing, the Art that all Arts doe approve:The faire Caracter of the worlds consent,The heav'ns true figure, and th' earth's ornament. On the page, Davies's iambic pentameter and ababbcc rhyme scheme—constituting the seven-line rhyme royal stanza invented by Chaucer—create a pattern not unlike the multiplied interweavings, symmetries, movements, and counter-movements timed to a rhythmic pulse which are formed by dancers on a stage or ballroom floor. "Orchestra" describes a harmonious order and simultaneously imitates it, thus giving double pleasure. Meanwhile Davies's claim for dancing as "the Art that all Arts doe approve" seems bold but persuasive, at least in the case of an art the poet was three or four centuries too early to know, the art of the cinema. Throughout its history film has approved the art of dancing by celebrating it onscreen, its exhilaration and orderliness, its commingling of love and harmony. Of course there are other modes of dancing—extreme, disorderly, possibly violent—and film has paid due attention to them (see, among many [End Page 126] other examples, the stylized gang rumbles danced to Leonard Bernstein's music in the film of West Side Story), but in this Chronicle, I will concentrate on the kind of performance which Davies's poem admires. Phrases of his like "th' earth's ornament" and "all in order move" immediately suggest the ornamentally patterned and elaborately synchronized choreography of American musical films from the 1930s and 1940s, above all the choreography of Busby Berkeley. The son of a silent-film actress, Berkeley began his career as a dance director on Broadway, then in Hollywood came to prominence when he staged the production numbers of Warner Brothers extravaganzas like Roman Scandals, 42nd Street, Footlight Parade, and the multi-film Gold Diggers series (today it would be called a mega-franchise). All of these are lightly plotted movies, showcases for performance, in which the likes of James Cagney or Dick Powell fall in love with the likes of Ruby Keeler, Joan Blondell, or Ginger Rogers, in the process doing a lot of singing and dancing, sometimes on a reasonable facsimile of a theater stage but more often in production numbers that may begin theatrically but soon depart into the boundary-less and sumptuously lighted space of pure cinema. For sheer flag-waving, synchronized, exuberantly costumed, no-expensespared choreography, Berkeley has never been equaled—at least until the era of televised Olympic opening ceremonies, which in their grand displays of massed forces dancing in unison and forming elaborate symmetrical patterns have become the Berkeley films' only real successors. Aficionados will have their favorites among Berkeley's dance numbers, say the "42nd Street" finale in the film of that name; or "By a Waterfall" in Footlight Parade, its chorus girls diving in a human cascade into a pool where they subsequently perform water ballet; or the at first quasi-documentary, then grandly patriotic "Remember My Forgotten Man" at the conclusion of Gold Diggers of 1933. My own favorite would be "Lullaby of Broadway," from Gold Diggers of 1935, a film which Berkeley directed as well as choreographed. Gold Diggers of 1935 offered Depression-era audiences well-dressed swank to admire...

The Part Is Greater Than the Whole: Montage as Fragment in Hitchcock, Argento, and De Palma

Abstract Hitchcock famously defined “pure cinema” as montage: “to me, pure film, pure cinema, is pieces of film assembled.” It’s a simple, workable definition of one aspect of film form that had long fascinated filmmakers and theorists. This article attempts to analyze the foundation of Hitchcockian montage as a process of the fragmentation of the organic whole of visual, aural, and narrative form. I begin with Hitchcock, and then consider the materialization of a Hitchcockian montage schema in the work of Dario Argento and Brian De Palma, two filmmakers who proudly declare an aesthetic and philosophical debt to Hitchcock’s cinema. In their explicit imitation of the Hitchcockian schema, I trace the cinema of the giallo and De Palma as a further abstraction of the part from the whole, but in this imitative, reflexive, aesthetic gesture, the bond between part and whole is increasingly tenuous, synthetic, and irrational.

For a Concrete Aesthetics: Against Avant-Garde Film c. 1930

For a Concrete Aesthetics: Against Avant-Garde Film c. 1930 Jennifer Wild (bio) Because it is in the earth considered as a whole (earth, water, air) that geniuses must be sought. —Robert Desnos, “Pygmalion and the Sphynx” (1930) On June 14, 1930, before the members of the Spectateurs d’Avant-Garde ciné-club, Jean Vigo delivered a lecture famously calling for a renewal in filmmaking he described as “social cinema.”1 Pronounced before the second screening of his critical documentary A Propos de Nice (FR, 1930),Vigo sought neither to magically “unveil” (révéler) this new category to his audience nor to “suffocate” the term with too much formulation.2 Rather, he strived to activate an understanding of social cinema by casting its central aims within a two-fold relational structure. First, he underscored the spectator’s own relationship to films by setting out to “awaken” their “latent,” thus established if unrecognized or repressed, “need” for “good films.” Second, he stressed the potential of a “good film’s” relational subject-matter itself, pin-pointing films “dealing with society and its relationships with individuals and things.” Insofar as Vigo’s emphasis on spectatorial and image-based relationality anticipates Guy Debord’s critical thought decades later that examined the “social relationship between people that is mediated by images,” here I want to situate Vigo’s thought within a line of inquiry that emerges among different factions of the avant-garde working in France during the late 1920s and early 1930s.3 In these years defined by the transition to sound film, a host of artists, writers, and filmmakers made a decisive turn toward a “concrete” rather than an abstract picture of revolution and revolutionary aesthetics. By 1930, the rejection [End Page 67] of certain forms of experimental or abstract film style had become a political imperative insofar as the formal experiments of the 1920s, which often depicted interior states or subjective experiences, were broadly deemed to be a fraudulent engagement with film’s most inherent and material political aesthetic potential. By the early 1930s, traditional forms of filmic experiment were thought by many associated with the artistic avant-garde to conceal the film image’s capacity to function as, echoing Vigo, social aesthetic thought, and also to degrade its ability to question the socio-political dimensions of the human being’s relationship with the world’s materiality. Even as Vigo took Luis Buñuel’s “experimental” or Surrealist film Un Chien Andalou (SP, 1929) as his central example of a social cinema, he did so in order to critically counter the formalist strains of “pure cinema” that had become staples of avant-garde filmmaking in the 1920s. Unlike film experiments by Henri Chomette (who coined the term “pure cinema”) or Germaine Dulac who theorized its formal parameters, Vigo argued that social cinema “avoid[ed] the overly artistic subtlety of a pure cinema which contemplates its supernavel from one angle, yet another angle, always another angle, a super-angle; technique for technique’s sake.” Rather than pursuing an empty exploration of filmic plasticity or formal reflexivity, Buñuel’s film, he argued, held the spectator with a powerful “grip” that effectively killed “our spinelessness, which makes us accept all the monstrosities committed by the men dropped upon the earth.” With a camera that functioned “more than one’s everyday eye,” this example of a social cinema provided the viewer with the reciprocal capacity to “see our ingenuousness which turns to cowardice in contact with a world which we accept, this world of exaggerated prejudices, of self-denials and of pathetically quixotic regrets.” An achievement of such magnitude could not be had by purely formal or poetic means, but only with a “savage” approach to poetry that exposed the societal frame guiding the relationships between individuals and “things.”4 Insofar as social cinema engaged a subject matter that forcefully stimulated desire for the cinema, thereby opening a new and powerful relationship with the spectator, above all else these subjects, Vigo argued, “ate meat.”5 With this fleshly metaphor, Vigo advanced a political aesthetics that traded in the material relations and needs of the human being within a social frame. This metaphor resonates with...

“The Last Amateurs of Pure Cinema”: Ciné-Clubs and French Film Culture, 1930–1945

“The Last Amateurs of Pure Cinema”: Ciné-Clubs and French Film Culture, 1930–1945 Eric Smoodin (bio) During the 1930s, André de Fouquières wrote a column as the resident bon vivant and man about town for La Semaine à Paris, a weekly listing and description of all of the cultural events going on in Paris from Friday to the following Thursday. He arranged possible activities—going to concerts, museums, lectures—day by day, and as much as possible he staggered events by time, indicating that those so inclined might go from one to the other. He rarely included anything about the movies playing at regular cinemas, but he paid careful attention to the ciné-clubs. In the edition of 12 April 1935, de Fouquières wrote that on Friday, one might take in the opening of the Goya Exposition at the Bibliothèque nationale and then, at 3:00, move to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro for a display of photographs of Indo-China and Siam. Following this afternoon of visual pleasures, one might then go to the Club George Sand to hear travel writer Marion Senones explain “how she became a nomad” and then move on to the Théâtre des Ambassadeurs for a 5:00 conference on “that distressing problem: ‘Will there be war?’” That evening, after the conference, there were a number of choices. The pianist Artur Schnabel would be playing at 9:00, but at about the same time there also would be a meeting of the Ciné-Club de la Femme at the Marignan Cinema on the Champs-Élysées. De Fouquières did not note the program at the club that night. For him, the gathering of the members of the club was significant enough.1 De Fouquières had been born in 1874, virtually the beginning of France’s decidedly pre-cinematic Belle Époque, and he had grown up wealthy enough to be the consummate dilettante, writing some plays as well as many essays. Perhaps because of his upbringing and his artistic inclinations, the cinema itself—in its [End Page 90] regular, daily, popular form—would not appear in his La Semaine column. And so, we can get the sense of a difference, at least for de Fouquières and those like him, between the cinema and the ciné-club, with the latter fully on the level of Goya or Schnabel and just as important as a conference about the prospects for world peace. As much as it belonged to what we might call the broad film culture of Paris and the rest of France, the ciné-club was also marginal to it, given the dominance of the commercial cinema. But the clubs had affiliations that the commercial cinema typically did not have, affiliations with a highbrow Parisian culture of the museum and the concert hall. In both French and English-language film histories, scholars have paid little attention to the ciné-clubs from around 1930 to 1945. Richard Abel, of course, has chronicled the club scene before that, and there has been some significant work on the postwar movement, particularly around André Bazin and those acolytes who would become so central to French filmmaking in the 1950s.2 But perhaps because the evidence of the clubs in the 1930s is so ephemeral—mostly in newspapers and magazines—we have little sense of how they worked or what they showed. As a result, the history of the ciné-club from the period tends to follow a simplified, heroic narrative. With the coming of sound, the clubs devoted themselves to preserving the art of silent cinema or, as in the cases of Le Ciné-Club de France or Les Amis de Spartacus, to show those films censored by French authorities, with the formation of the Cinémathèque française in 1936 standing as the only logical evolutionary step in the clubs’ developmental history. After the catastrophe of World War Two, according to this narrative, the clubs reestablished themselves as the place for the nurturing and growth of the brilliant young men who would lead the French New Wave in the next decade.3 The recent availability of so many online...

“The Last Amateurs of Pure Cinema”: Ciné-Clubs and French Film Culture, 1930–1945

“The Last Amateurs of Pure Cinema”: Ciné-Clubs and French Film Culture, 1930–1945

English Filming, English Writing (review)

Reviewed by: English Filming, English Writing Linda DeLibero (bio) Jefferson Hunter, English Filming, English Writing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 357 pp. Has any national cinema in the annals of film scholarship suffered such conspicuous neglect as England’s? Cinephiles may enthusiastically cite the distinctive approaches of any number of particular directors who’ve plied their trade in the UK, from Michael Powell’s sensuous expressionism [End Page 138] to the down and dirty realism of Mike Leigh. But in the collective mind, English film is the stodgy spinster who plays second fiddle to her sexier Continental cousins in Italy and France. Much of this odd disconnect stems from film’s often vexed relationship with writing, an issue that looms large in a country whose artistic legacy rests on its literature and its theatre. Having hogged the cultural spotlight, the written word leaves to those “lesser” arts, cinema and TV, little but the task of churning out pallid but popular adaptations of Dickens and Shakespeare for the masses. Indeed, François Truffaut once tartly remarked to Alfred Hitchcock that there was a “certain incompatibility between the words ‘cinema’ and ‘Britain.’” Doubtless he had in mind the “certaine tendance” he and his cohorts at Cahiers du Cinema scornfully noted in their own country’s filmic heritage, the “tradition of quality” that produced bloated, static adaptations of literary masterworks, betraying, as they saw it, the very nature of cinema as a visual medium. That last point is crucial, for it goes a long way toward explaining why even the leading figures in Britain’s own influential tradition of film scholarship have, until quite recently, mostly ignored their fellow countrymen’s output. Legitimizing the new discipline of film studies meant defining cinema against the other arts, valorizing its visual properties above all else. In other words, the gold standard becomes pure cinema, and the impure becomes, say, a cinema uniquely beholden to literary and theatrical adaptation, to words. British film’s reputation as a national cinema unworthy of scrutiny has everything to do with its logocentric tendencies, as if cinema rooted in writing couldn’t have a fascinating and expressive visual language of its own. In fact, the fusion of the literary and the pictorial is precisely what characterizes British film, what marks it off from other national cinemas and makes the study of its history and aesthetics singularly fascinating. This contention is at the heart of Jefferson Hunter’s engaging new book, English Filming, English Writing, a highly persuasive and necessary challenge to both the notion that the relationship between writing and film must be adversarial and that English film is somehow uncinematic. Hunter, a professor of English and film studies at Smith College, unravels the word/image dichotomy by tracing the intricate, often unnoticed relationships between filmmakers and the texts that inspire them—the resonances, sometimes intentional, sometimes not, between contemporaneous texts and films, and the visual tropes that echo their literary antecedents. Reminding us that literature itself is often stunningly cinematic, and that great films can be enriched by language without sacrificing visual lyricism, Hunter makes the case that English film is inextricably bound up with the nation’s literary heritage. And each art, he argues, both depends on and helps define the meaning of Englishness itself. Deploying an intrepid researcher’s termite skills along with a fine eye for formal visual analysis, Hunter seeks nothing less than to uncover the “elemental qualities of English culture—its distinctive regard for the past, [End Page 139] the pleasure it takes in continuities and reworkings . . . its talent for collaborations, and especially the complex interrelatedness, in the twentieth century, of its major forms of expression.” Granted, defining what is “elemental” about the English character (and Hunter uses the designation “English” consciously, as the book addresses neither Scottish nor Irish film) can be as elusive as proving the influence of terroir on wine. Is there such a thing? The concept is a bit of a sticky wicket, but Hunter (an American) makes a go of it. Delving into a series of little-explored but fascinating histories in three of his chapters—on World War II English pageantry, British crime films, and the uses of...

Pure Cinema? Blanchot, Godard, Le Mépris

Critical QuarterlyVolume 53, Issue S1 p. 96-106 Pure Cinema? Blanchot, Godard, Le Mépris Pure Cinema? Blanchot, Godard, Le Mépris OLIVER H. HARRIS, OLIVER H. HARRISSearch for more papers by this author OLIVER H. HARRIS, OLIVER H. HARRISSearch for more papers by this author First published: 29 October 2012 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8705.2011.00042.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume53, IssueS1Special Issue: Godard’s Contempt. Essays from the London Consortium. Edited by Colin MacCabe and Laura MulveyJuly 2011Pages 96-106 RelatedInformation

What is the French philosophy of cinema? An introduction

This paper introduces the French philosophy of cinema, a recent movement wherein French philosophers, philosophers of art and of history have begun to direct their work specifically toward re-conceptualizing the relationship between cinema, the twentieth century and the modern condition. Focusing specifically on Gilles Deleuze, Jean Louis Schefer, Jacques Rancière and Jean-Luc Nancy, this introduction attempts to provide a sense of continuity between these writers according to three steps of intellectual history: (1) positing a dialectic relationship between Anglo-American cognitive theory and a more metaphysical approach in French thought; (2) situating the French philosophy of cinema at the end of a century in which French philosophy has been particularly concerned with image studies; (3) situating the French philosophers’ concerns for cinema also within a French cinéphilic tradition of thinking through the image, dating back to early arguments of ‘pure cinema’ made by avant-garde French filmmakers. Beyond this, I attempt to draw an outline of similar lines of arguments, methodology and discourse presented by these recent authors.

Cinema and its Discontents: Jacques Ranciere and Film Theory

Cinema and its Discontents:Jacques Rancière and Film Theory Tom Conley (bio) Jacques Rancière may have entered a French pantheon of film theory in 2001 after his publication of an array of essays on classical and contemporary films in La fable cinématographique. In that book Rancière posited cinema to be "to the storytelling art what truth is to falsehood."1 Cinema rejects the Aristotelian poetics of fables and fabulation by reconfiguring the Greek philosopher's hierarchy that favored muthos, the rationale of a plot, over opsis, the "sentient effect of the spectacle." The camera records its stories via linked actions, headed toward various resolutions by way of often unforeseen twists and turns. The dramatic progression of the Aristotelian scheme is betrayed, however, when the camera records information and evokes sensations that go both against the grain of dramatic progress and in myriad directions, many of which are beyond the director's or editor's control and have little to do with the narrative. Citing an early essay by Jean Epstein, Rancière notes that the intelligence of the playwright submits to that of the camera, a machine that "records this infinity of movements that create a drama of an intensity a hundred times greater than any change of fortune." The camera, Rancière continues (along a Benjaminian line reminiscent of the last pages of the "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility") hardly reproduces things "such as they are gazed upon. It records them such as the naked eye does not see them, such as they happened to be." He then adds a flourish, recalling Gilles Deleuze's words on sentience in the first pages of his Cinéma 2: L'Image-temps, when he describes things "in their state as waves and vibrations, before their qualification as objects, persons, or identifiable events by their descriptive or narrative properties" (8). Rancière shows that Epstein intuited the power of film even before the onset of sound (said to have since attenuated the expressive force of its silent images [we have only to recall images that Epstein might have known, such as Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks]), linking film's power to the American industrialization of the seventh art, and anticipating a good deal of film theory. Yet Epstein's reflections, adds Rancière, are based on pre-Romantic aesthetic theory in Kant, the Schlegels, Schiller, Herder, and even Hegel. [End Page 96] The German school inaugurated, as Deleuze and Godard also force us to recall, an "aesthetic age" (16) that follows and undoes the order of inherited mimetic arts. The passive register of the camera, which indeed doubles the intensity of the spectator's intellective and sentimental gaze, causes conscious and unconscious elements of the work to be of a same texture. It dislocates the artistic privilege that a creator had owned when he or she was said to "impose a vision" upon a form. Rancière then complicates the point when he notes that the "machinic mechanism" [dispositif machinique] of cinema in fact suppresses the "active labor of this becoming-passive" (17) because it is in all events already and always passive in nature. It hinders [contrarie] the aims of "modernist" aesthetics in which it is found, by opposing the aesthetic autonomy of art to its former submission to a representational mission (17). In the new aesthetic age, art can be found anywhere and everywhere, and so too can aesthetic values, all over and about the frame. Yet cinema works against—hinders, thwarts, even runs contrary to—its own tendency to follow the new aesthetic principles it heralds. That is why Rancière defines a cinematographic fable as a fable running contrary to itself. The fable or narration belonging to Aristotelian poetics is undone by the art of the camera, but the camera cannot fail to let its gaze concatenate the many sensations and impressions it brings forward, thus also belonging to the narrative arts. Unlike André Bazin or Gilles Deleuze, Rancière cannot countenance a pure cinema of the kind that the former championed in Charlie Chaplin's burlesque gestures, if only because the clownish tramp already belonged to an established aesthetics...

The Space of Rear Window

In Book III of the Republic, Plato identifies two distinct and opposed modes of representation-imitation (or mimesis) and simple narration (or diegesis).1 Contemporary literary theory has inherited this distinction in the form of mimetic and diegetic theories of narration, which range in sophistication from the simple opposition of drama, which shows a narrative, and the novel, which it, to the more complex narrative theories of Wayne Booth and Gerard Genette, which view narration as a fusion of mimetic and diegetic techniques.2 Though the has traditionally been regarded as a dramatic form because it presents itself to its viewers as story rather than mediated discourse (to borrow Emile Benveniste's terms),3 it clearly mixes narrative modes. Classical narrative tells as it shows; indeed, it can only tell through showing. Dramatic spectacles are staged for and then read by the camera, and this reading narrativizes them. Cinematic narrative techniques clearly rely upon certain codes of representation that were previously developed in the plastic arts, the theater, and literary narratives. Any notion of cinema-of a mode of expression that unique to the and that has evolved autonomously out of the singular nature of the medium's raw materials-must be qualified by the essential impurity of the cinema's quasi-theatrical, quasi-novelistic mode of narration. The figure frequently identified with the notion of pure cinema within classical Hollywood filmaking Alfred Hitchcock, who often cites Rear Window as his most cinematic work because it is told only in visual terms.4 Yet Rear Window arguably one of Hitchcock's theatrical films. In what

Discovering pure cinema: avant-garde film in the ’20s

Discovering pure cinema: avant-garde film in the ’20s