Cinema and Its Discontents: Jacques Rancire and Film Theory Author(s): Tom Conley Source: SubStance, Vol.

34, No. 3, Issue 108: French Cinema Studies 1920s to the Present (2005), pp. 96-106 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3685734 Accessed: 11/05/2009 16:39
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Cinema and its Discontents: JacquesRanciereand Film Theory

Tom Conley
Jacques Ranciere 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 Lafable cinematographique.In that book Ranciere posited cinema to be "to the storytelling art what truth is to falsehood."' 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, Ranciere 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, Ranciere 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 Cinema2: 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). Ranciere 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 Ranciere, are based on pre-Romantic aesthetic theory in Kant, the Schlegels, Schiller, Herder, and even Hegel.
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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. Ranciere then complicates the point when he notes that the "machinic mechanism" of cinema in fact suppresses the "active labor of this [dispositifmachinique] becoming-passive" (17) because it is in all events already and always the aims of "modernist" aesthetics passive in nature. It hinders [contrarie] 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 Ranciere 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 Andre Bazin or Gilles Deleuze, Ranciere cannot countenance a purecinema 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 predating cinema and outside of its purview, an issue that Chaplin makes especially clear when he is the lovesick clown in the pre-cinematic space par excellence represented in a film like The Circus. Nor can Ranciere find in Deleuze's immense debt to Bazin, made manifest in the pages about the time-image that inaugurate Cinema 2 concerning the image-fact (coined in Bazin's chapters of Qu-est-ce que le cinema? on Rossellini's Paisan) those "pure" optical and aural situations proper to film and film alone. Ranciere dismisses Bazin's idea that in his "great fables of errancy" an auteur like Rossellini shows the ways that the camera discerns infinitesimal signs that would allow us to glimpse "the spiritual secret of things" (20-21). Rather, a dialectics inheres in these images that inform so much of canonical film theory. Great films, notably those he studies in Lafable cine'matographique, vary on what he calls a "fable split and divided" against itself. The cinematic fable plays with and against its literary, painterly, and theatrical correlates. The theory that percolates through the eleven SubStance#108,Vol. 34, no. 3, 2005

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analyses in Lafable returns time and again to the principle that cinema works within and contrary to the "aesthetic eye" that Romantic philosophers had so brilliantly conceived and described exactly two centuries ago. Ranciere's study anticipates the more attentive and detailed scrutiny of aesthetics in his more recent Malaise dans l'esthetique (2004), a book of essays in which he makes clear the dilemmas-if not the contrarities -in which contemporary cinema and the arts now find themselves.2 The task of the paragraphs that follow is not to assess the analytical geography of the two works, but, rather, to consider how his aesthetic theory inflects cinema at the moment his Malaise was written. The guiding principles of Malaise are spelled out in an introduction written no doubt after Ranciere had assembled and reviewed a series of seminars and lectures delivered at the University of Paris-VIII and at the College International de Philosophie. They build on the paradoxes of cinematic contrariety informing La fable cinematographique. Aesthetic canons that prevailed prior to 1789 separated art-objects from those of everyday life. The division loses ground when art is theorized as a writing of both conscious and unconscious processes. Kant was symptomatic when he speculated that the new status of art inspired works not as those of naturebut of a non-humannaturethat does not submit to the will of a creator. Herein, concludes the critic, aesthetics is born as a discourse. Insofar as narration or fabulation in general distinguished art-objects from the experience of everyday life, in an earlier regime a law of mimesis required the artist to be distinguished from the artisan or the entertainer. The arts of representation dictated that: an ordered regulation be kept between a way of doing things (poiesis) and a way of being (aisthesis). A new order of art, and of "mimesis as we know it," called for the end of aesthetic regulation, a rupture of what had guaranteed the hierarchies of the fine arts. Such is the aesthetic regime born at the beginning of the Romantic Age- a regime, Ranciere claims, that includes cinema prior to its invention in a technical sense. The ascendancy of the "new arts" can be seen in the way Chardin's still-lives gained precedence over history painting, previously presumed superior to the representations of objects, or in Gericault's unfinished and nervously wrought drawings that eclipse David's staged tableaus, or even in de Vigny's "La maison du berger," where the uneasiness of his sense of nature, felt in the abstract setting, seems more veracious and convincing than Lamartine's controlled dispensations of tears along the shores of the Lac d'Annecy. These new arts "grasped and conceptualized the fracture of the regime of identification in which the products of art

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had been perceived and thought, the rupture of the model of adequation" (Malaise, 20) that former norms of mimesis developed in their relation to poiesis and aisthesis. Aesthetics are attenuated or even abandoned in the name of aesthetics. Suddenly a fragment of the title of Ranciere's book falls into the text: "Le malaise esthetique est aussi vieux que l'esthetique" (ibid.) [Aesthetic discontent is as old as aesthetics itself].3 Aesthetics hereafter (presumably after 1800) is the thought of the paradoxical sensorium that Ranciere situates in a "lost human nature" that he specifies as "a norm of adequation lost between an active faculty and a receptive faculty," that hereafter allows objects [choses] of art to be defined" (ibid.) as they are. This is followed by a rich reflection, based on one of Stendhal's recollections in La Vie d'Henri Brulard, in which the narrator recalls childhood impressions of church bells pealing, the sound of a water pump, and the notes of a neighbor's flute that marked him for life. It contains a messianic promise of an aesthetic shift, promising a radical change in the conditions of life:
Esthetics is the word that states the unique crux that resists being thought [malaise a penser], formed two centuries ago between the sublimities of art and the noise of a water pump, between a veiled timbre of chords and the promise of a new humanity. The discontent [malaise] and resentment to which it gives rise today are always turning around these two relations; the scandal of an art that gathers in its forms and in its place the flotsam [n'importe quoi] of everyday objects and the images of profane life; the exorbitant and mendacious promises of an aesthetic revolution that had sought to transform the forms of art into the forms of a new life. Aesthetics are accused of being responsible for the flotsam of art; it is accused of having led art astray in the fallacious promises of the philosophical absolute and of social revolution. (25)

Aesthetics of the turn of the nineteenth century persists here and now. It is seen in the way cinema is displaced into installation spaces in contemporary museums (35). Film and video become confused when digital processing replaces the material remainders of celluloid and acetate. At stake is what Ranciere calls a politics of aesthetic distribution, a distribution by which different roles and new social identities are exchanged both in civic arenas and in museums and theaters. Much like Stendhal's water pump, what was invisible or inaudible prior to the French Revolution, then suddenly perceived, continues to bear affect in the aesthetic regime of today. Similarly, it can be said that in a former political and aesthetic situation, the form that an artist imposed on matter was analogous to the power the state exerted on its masses-the "power of the intelligent class over that of sensation, of people of culture over those of nature" (46). The shift of these categories redistributes

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power in ways that define the new regime, where malaise is found in equal measure in both aesthetics and politics. Rancierecomplicates the model when he addresses contemporary arts,which, unlike those falling under the rubricof post-modernor antiaestheticaesthetics,delegitimizeformermodes of delegitimization-that is, they reconsiderand revise the "shock"thathad been a patent effect of vanguard creations. Cinema comes forward as that which no longer shocks,but mystifies in its reconstitutionsor redistributionsof everyday objectsand works of artsuch as they arefound in given spaces. Following Mallarme'sconstructionof mystery that tied together disparate things (the poet's sublime thoughts, the steps of a dancer,an unfolding fan, the foam of a wave or a curtainflutteringin the wind), in Prenom: Carmen, melds of the Godard the rose Jean-Luc eponymous opera, one of Beethoven'sstring quartets,the foam of waves gently slapping a stony beach along Lake Geneva (which Ranciere attributes to a fleeting connection he seeks with VirginiaWoolf's TheWaves)and the grunting thrust of an amorousbody (Malaise 80). Godardredistributessensation in such a way that the opera'sAndalusian mountain becomes a weekend beach; the romantic smugglers, a gang of crazed terrorists; the discardedrose serenadedby Don Jose, a plastic variant;and Beethoven, a sheet of music that Michaelabotches instead of singing Bizet's arias which for Carmen, (80-81). The aesthetic and political forces of Prenom: Rancieretake the shape of a redistributionof sensations,become evident in that the film exerts no political critiqueof great art, as had Godard's cinema in the 1960s. "Tothe contrary, it erases the picturesqueimagery with which a critiquehad been affiliatedin orderto have Bizet'scharacters of one of Beethoven'sstringquartets" rebornfrom the pure contradiction (Malaise 81). No more shock, no more antagonism:the post-Mallarmean mystery lays stress, he adds, on the kinship of heterogeneous things.4 - a termthatacquirespolitical At this point in the treatment,dissensus resonance later in Malaise-conveys aesthetic valence. The logic of a dissensus"of Godard's New Waveyears,Rancieresuggests, "provocative attests to a praise of the mysteries and mystical co-presenceof all things, as Nerval and Baudelairehad shown in their poetries of synaesthesia. But Ranciere suggests the point: at the outset of the chapter titled "Problemsand Transformations of CriticalArt,"he notes an undecidable characterin the politics of the contemporaryarts-Godard includedthat he subjects to critical scrutiny. Everythingis left in aesthetic and politicallimbo. If a politics is engaged, the singularity(if not the counterculturalforce) of cinema is sacrificed,and vice-versawhen an aesthetics is favored. Under this scrutiny, Godard would be a melancholic SubStance #108,Vol.34,no. 3, 2005

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regretting the loss of the "common world" formerly constituting all art, now crafted for commercial ends and rife with compromise. Or he would be a reclusive, self-effacing and self-absorbed creator, severely aware of the limits of his labor and the "very incertitude of its effects" (84). On the one hand, the present is evaded when the artist takes a melancholic turn, and on the other, a sense of the shrinkage of "public space" and the disappearance of "political inventivity" (ibid.) comes at a moment-and no one is more aware of that moment than Godard-when artists group themselves into a consensualbody within the world of galleries and moviehouses featuring art films and early classical cinema. The sense of political deficit, witnessed now in our distance from the former dissensual arena, attests to a malaise in aesthetics. Cinematic questions take center stage in the last and concluding essay of Malaise, "The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics," originally written for the Forum of Caixa (Barcelona) under the theme of "Geographies of Contemporary Thought." Ethics, he argues in the wake of the War on Terror and the American-led invasion of Iraq, has acquired a selfauthenticating or auto-legislating force where politics are concerned. It is a "general instance of normativity allowing consideration of the validity of practices and discourses at work in particular spheres of judgment and action" (145). Thus politics or art must yield to "moral judgment bearing on the validity of their principles and the consequences of their practices" (ibid.). In other words, if the train of thought is brutally simplified or transposed onto another plane, art and politics must bear the signs of "ethical values" in the battles fought against the Axis of Evil. Ranciere quickly redresses this kind of misperception by recalling that the role of ethics is in no way one of moral judgment to be exerted upon art or politics. More perniciously, in light of a creeping consensus in the intellectual world, ethics become a sphere where specific practices and actions common to both art and politics, however separate they might be, are dissolved. As are also the distinctions between fact and law or the state of things and the way the state ought to be: in a geographical sense, ethics is an intellectual process "establishing an identity between an environment, a way of being and a principle of action" (146), but today judgment follows the lead of the "power of law that imposes itself," but the radicality of the latter leaves no room for choice or creative aberration. It gives way to a perpetual state of constraint and to "a totally new dramaturgy of evil, justice, and infinite reparation" (ibid.). Once again cinema plays a crucial role in the design of Ranciere's argument. Two films, neither of which has much to say for itself, illustrate the ethical turn and its dilemmas. The one, Lars von Trier's Dogville SubStance#108,Vol. 34, no. 3, 2005

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(2002), tells a tale based on Brecht's fable of Saint Joan of the Stockyards. The protagonist wanted to bring Christian morals to the capitalist jungle. Where Brecht had shown the uselessness of Christian morality in view of the reigning economic order, Von Trier does not. Brecht's political fable made clear the risks and pitfalls of mediating between each of the camps and their ideologies, while Dogville prefers not to refer to a cause outside of itself. The heroine is excluded from the community she has served selflessly; despite all her efforts, she has not been able to gain entry. But her pathos and disillusionment apply to no "system of domination to be understood and destroyed" (147). Rather, the emotions the film elicits "depend upon an evil that is the cause and effect of its own reproduction" (ibid.). A lord and a father who happens to be the King of Truants cleanses the community, proving that "violence assists where violence rules" -in other words, in consensual and humanitarian times that we now know under the presidency of George W. Bush, "only infinite justice is appropriate in the struggle against the axis of evil" (147-48). "Justice" is obtained when the opposition of the just and unjust is suppressed or dissolved. Such is the effect of the other feature, Clint Eastwood's Mystic River (2002). An impulsive hothead, Jimmy, kills his boyhood friend Dave, whom he mistakenly believes guilty of having murdered his daughter. He is not punished, for the reason that another childhood friend, Sean, a policeman, is aware of the traumatic past that the threesome had known. Sean lets things stand as they stand. The resolution of the film, if a resolution there is, comes only with an aesthetic flourish, a sweeping aerial shot of the mouth of the Mystic River flowing into the harbor of east Boston. Dogville altered a political and theatrical "fable"while, argues Ranciere, Mystic Riverrewrites a "novel and cinematographic fable" (148). He tells of the falsely accused and his or her retribution as unfolded in scenarios by Hitchcock and Fritz Lang (and, it might be added, the films of Budd Boetticher, Henry King, Raoul Walsh, and Sidney Lumet). In the classical mold, truth ultimately wins over the faulty process of justice and public opinion. For Eastwood, evil, like good sense, is the most evenly distributed thing in the world. It has become trauma, where categories of innocence and guilt not longer hold, and where a fuzzy line is drawn between mental illness and social confusion. In Eastwood's scenario, wrongly executed judgment is not suppressed. Instead, it is justice itself that disappears. Social consensus and order must be maintained (we recall the penultimate shots of the traditional Saint Patrick's Day parade celebrating community in the streets of east Boston) at the cost of guilt left unpunished. SubStance#108,Vol. 34, no. 3, 2005

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Von Trier's Grace (Nicole Kidman) and Eastwood's Dave (Tim Robbins) personify what Ranciere calls the "ethical turn" of contemporary experience. It is not a corrective agency but, "to the contrary, the suppression of the division that the very word moral used to imply" (152), the staunch separation of law from fact, along with the former division that had opposed rights to facts. The new suppression of that division is consensus, a word that mistakenly implies international agreement about how to solve thorny political issues, but which in greater likelihood is the essence of politics. All political communities are by nature divided in respect to themselves and their plural constituencies, while a consensual community amounts to the reduction of different peoples to one alone, "identical to the population and its parts, the interest of the global community and the interests of parties" (152-53). Consensus is what turns a political community into an ethical community. It is a world of one, in which everyone counts. For von Trier, Grace is not the agent of conflict; she never becomes an Ibsenian enemy of the people who rights the wrongs of customary justice. She lives in the bland confines of an ethically correct community, in which the excluded figure is neither here nor there. Dogville is a neutral "depoliticized natural community" that gets along as it does and must while excluding those who would wish to be its willing constituents. It does not take a blinding insight to link von Trier's politics to those reigning here and now, in which "infinite justice is exercised against the axis of evil" (154). With consensus come pre-emptive actions, legitimized assassinations, calculatedly uneven distribution of goods, humanitarian war against those suppressing the rights of man, and so forth. To enable these actions, as Dogville and Mystic River make manifest, the only requirement is that absolute right be identified with the "security" of a given community. These two films inform Ranciere's description of the pertinent traits of what he calls the "ethical turn" in contemporary art and politics. The messianic vision of progressist aesthetics, in which the advent of a more just society would result from the good work of dissensus, is inverted into a return of former catastrophe, a return that (under the benevolent and soporific force of consensus) flattens the shape of the catastrophe itself. Such a phenomenon is seen in certain films dealing with the Holocaust, in which little distinction is made between victims and criminals, in which a redistribution of emotions is spread between "a vision of art that devotes [consensus and infinite justice] to the service of social bonding and another that devotes them to endless testimony to the catastrophe" (159). It suffices to compare Godard's recent films to those of the 1960s, when the shock of contraries in his collages belonged SubStance#108,Vol. 34, no. 3, 2005

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to the division essential to dissensus: Fritz Lang versus Jerry Prokosch (JackPalance) in Lemepris;Elie Faure's chapter on Velasquez in L'Espritdes formes that Pierrot (Jean-Paul Belmondo) reads in a bathtub adjacent to a close-up of a Maidenform girdle in Pierrotlefou; or Nana writing in a cafe not far from where she cries over Maria Falconetti in Dreyer's La passion de Jeanned'Arc. Godard is still faithful to the art of collage, but now, adds Ranciere, the shock of oppositions is replaced by a fusion. Images belong to a world unto itself, in which human beings find themselves in a global (albeit indistinct) community that is renewed and restored by cavalcades of images (161-62). Godard now obsesses over what cannot be represented in universal catastrophe, such as in the "Hell" sequence of Notre musique.The unrepresentable becomes a hinge on which turn ethical questions in the new aesthetic age; in the political world, the analogue is terror. Both confuse impossibility with interdiction. As a result, the proscription of images from the Camps (in Shoah or in their highly mediated and even pornographic form as tableaux vivants of photographic documents in Schindler'sList) makes the catastrophe unsettling and, at the same time, something resembling an aesthetic experience. The events are drawn out of the past, duly edulcorated, but so also is the "art" that conveys them, and that would have put the past into a conflictual state (much as do, Ranciere does not note, the opening sequences of Jean Cayrol's words and Alain Resnais's images in the collage of Nuit et brouillard). In Lafable cinematographique Ranciere had shown how Godard goes and the of Celan for whom no art was possible Adorno, against grain after Auschwitz, by asserting that the distribution of images in view of the events calls nonetheless for a rebirth and a resurrection of images: a rebirth, in Malaise, that fuses representation and abstraction. Thus in the recent study, Ranciere shows that Claude Lanzmann's Shoah film resembles contemporary installation art in which, in an abstract space, ordinary objects, merchandise and images are exposed under a different light, with emphasis now placed on a redistribution of perception and sensation.5 Along the way, the deficit or impossibility of representation finds its cause and raison d'etrein modern aesthetics dedicated to bearing witness to what cannot be materialized. There results on the part of the spectator an uneasy feeling of guiltless guilt. It is a pathos, to be sure, but also a consensus found in the relation of the art of memory, basic to Holocaust cinema, to the affirmation of a community that needs past catastrophe (those of the present, wryly infers the author, do not qualify as adequate correlatives) to assure a unity of ethics, politics, and aesthetics.

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In a broad and sweeping move that takes leave of the close readings in Lafable cinematographique of the founding paradoxes of auteur cinemas (Murnau, Ray, Rossellini, Lang, Mann, Marker, Godard) and film theory (Bazin and Deleuze) and their shifts and redistributions of ways of seeing, Ranciere writes in Malaise of what happened to the politics and aesthetics of cinema in the context of the unsettling turns of events that the world has witnessed over the last two decades: first, in the factual sphere, the demise of the Soviet Union, the demolition of the Berlin wall, the resurgence of the rights of victims on all sides in the messy wars in the Balkans, and the impact of the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11/01; and second, in a sphere of discontent over the politics of globalization, the state of the European Union, the aftereffects of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the rapid meltdown of the Arctic and Antarctic poles. The cinematic register of Malaise and its analysis of films, brief and cursory as they may be, address these dilemmas. What Ranciere remarks unsettles. Dissensus, essential to any labor within and about conflict and paradox-two vital elements of politics and aesthetics-has all but disappeared. Closer to film studies in a strict sense, Ranciere helps to show why in theory and history two lines of inquiry have been drawn more boldly over the past two decades. One, parallel to the return to former catastrophes seen in Malaise, engages study of classical film, great auteurs, and the origins of the medium as an object of history. With the return to the past comes a tacit refusal to buy into contemporary spectacle. The return has an impact on students who have been weaned on televisual and digital spectacles, and for whom a silent film would be equivalent to an incunabulum, just as a black-and-white image would be like a strip of papyrus. It equally signals a malaise about the aesthetics and politics of film pedagogy. To return to great auteurs as Ranciere had done in 2001 is to awaken a politics from the popcorn-scented consensus we smell in malls and cineplexes all over the world. The historical malaise becomes pervasive when it is felt that past cinemas are to be stabilized and written off in the name of statistics (etymologically related to the modern state), or in the name of historical sociology, or by other moves that attempt to use idiolects of the past, especially in professional spheres, where users prefer not to "redistribute" their force into the present moment. Ranciere tells us why the past carries dissensus that has been elided from the present. Dashed and jagged, the other line of inquiry traces the state of things in the unnamed realm in contemporary film, in a world saturated with celluloid, where the classical canons of film theory no longer have SubStance#108,Vol. 34, no. 3, 2005

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currency. (Deep focus, at the heart of Bazinian theory, does not apply well to digital cinema; nor does Eisenstein's work on montage in films edited to mix narrative and publicity.) A sense of the condition of the medium needs to be articulated in a broader field; this cannot be obtained through pure cinephilia, but by careful and selective-often dissensualanalysis that comes through and about cinemas that today the critics see as belonging to a general malaise. Ranciere's work counts among the few that follow this line and bring us to the quick of the political aesthetics of cinema. Harvard University

Notes
1. Lafable cinematographique (Paris: Seuil, 2001), p. 8. Here and elsewhere all translations from the French are mine. 2. Malaise dans l'esthetique (Paris: Galilee, 2004). 3. Here and elsewhere malaise is translated as "discontent" in order to engage Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, which in French is Malaise dans la civilisation. As it will be shown, Ranciere writes of a global malaise that extends to our civilization in general. 4. Ranciere makes a similar point in Lafable (190) when he asserts that the common labor of art and politics is one of interruption of continuity, the "incessant substitution of words that cause one to see and images that speak, that impose belief as the music of the world." For Godard it is necessary to "divide the One of representative magma into two: separate words and images, have words be heard in their uncanniness, have images be seen in their stupidity." In Malaise it seems that the equivalence of art and politics that he ascribes to Godard's brilliant "perversity" is somewhat attenuated. 5. His pages in another chapter of Malaise (77-78) on Christian Boltanski recoup to a degree the remarks on Lanzmann.

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