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.His approach may quite often precede his own formulation of the categories that would explain it.As a rule, there is no indecision where he is concerned, since he is only too happy to follow the process of montage.In Dindo’s work there are “felicities of montage style,” the way we say there are “felicities of writing style.”In Max Frisch, only the lighthouse really signifies a space, because there is a sort of lack of formal resolution in it.All the rest of the system of places is generated by the text.The lighthouse comes back as the return of a certain real, the emblem of chance.Space, 6.Allio.An extraordinary clarity in his work.A depth, a colorful substance.In Retour à Marseille (Return to Marseilles) there is the same breadth of field as in Straub, but the depth is different.Space, 7.Space, then, as the designated place of the real, resists any sensible representation.Captured in the figures of absence, of enigma, of fragmentation, the real tends to be subject to accounting operations, as a proof of its certainty.Yet we are very well aware that the real can’t be measured, that we can’t be certain about it: we can only choose to be a part of it.And what is unconsciously brought about in this way by the ultimately invariable pitfalls of “the impression of reality” (accounting) is the avoidance of that truth.Space, 8.The representation of space.Follow Denis Lévy’s approach in L’École de mai and Mémoire en blanc: the deconstruction of the urban landscape’s frame of representation so as to prevent any figurative repercussions.An opening that reconstitutes space as a poetics of the sensible real.Modernity: The elements of dignity of this cinema in their confusion.To put an end to the influence of the other arts and the misconception of the image, which is obliged to be the ultimate, eternal guarantee of the reality effect.Thus, the coherence of this jumble of investigations, or even contradictions: the foundations of an art of the future.Modernity: The issue of cinema’s survival is not a matter of the future or the present, since, once the image has been shown to be nothing but a media entity subservient above all to its market, as merchandise, the image, that which is linked to its fetishistic status, is in the process of dying from an overdose: inflation as the rule of every market.Modernity: We will say, on the contrary, that cinema exists in the order of rarity today.Rarity as the only possible exception to the general rule, inflation.To say that cinema is rare today, even very rare, is a truth that proves that Les Cahiers du cinéma (the standard of cinema criticism) is lying.Gauging cinema’s existence as broadly as possible may be in line with the journal’s obsessive management of its readership numbers, but it amounts to betraying the essential truth of art: that it is always exceptional.The text, again.Modern cinema subdues the text in order to inject subjectivity into it.In French cinema, this runs up against the obstacle of the biographical, of personal sentimentality, the junkyard of which is so-called “French intimism.” Even in Marguerite Duras’ work, the voice, her famous voice, allows sentimentality in.The actor, 1: Arbitrarily place the actor, as the unnamed stakes, at the heart of modernity’s problematic issues of representation.The actor, 2: At the beginning, and for a long time thereafter, the actor was the support of theatricality, imported into the cinema.The theater has always had its actors; painting, its models; literature, its characters.Cinema incorporated all three of these to turn them into a whole: by creating the star, it afforded itself the quintessence of the actor (performance), the model (reality), and the character (identification), for the greater glory of a lifelike cinema.The actor, 3: In the interests of its own particular esthetic, modernity adopted the lessons of the New Wave to some extent – using the actor as the negative of his function in order to disrupt the process of identification – but it also removed the actor from the screen in all the versions of the relationship to this absence: from the way his quest was organized to his elimination, as being impossible.The actor, 4: Temporarily, the actor, the instability of perplexity, circulates in modernity as the place where truth is obfuscated.The actor, 5: In the meantime, pay attention to the productive processes of this perplexity: the attempts to eliminate the figurative effects connected with the body, as the removal of a first layer of obscurity.With Max Frisch, Dindo succeeded in making a film with characters but without actors, or the opposite case with Godard: the actors as non-representation of characters.And again the actors in Straub’s or Duras’ work as radical impossibility.L’Imparnassien, May 19839THE DEMY AFFAIRIt is not often that you see critics becoming politically militant and trying to mobilize public opinion.As regards Jacques Demy’s film Une Chambre en ville (A Room in Town), there have been no fewer than two full-page petitions in the newspapers signed by a group of critics who joined together to urge everyone to go en masse to see the film.1 This is obviously a political symptom.One of the petitions came directly from the Left: the critics of the PCF [French Communist Party] and PS [Socialist Party] newspapers.The other was organized around the Cahiers du cinéma.That’s politically committed criticism all right.But committed to what? In actual fact, Une Chambre en ville celebrates, at the very moment of their death, “le peuple de gauche” rallied around a dynamic, good-natured working class singing its demands before stolid CRS [riot control police] troops.The colorful effect is substantial: the film is based on a people representable in all its fullness, a nostalgia for the 1950s (it is about the Saint-Nazaire and Nantes strikes) that the critics, in their allegiance to Mitterrand, to May 10,2 have sought to emphasize.This film reduces Gaullism to a mere parenthesis.It activates – and deactivates – the myth of the continuity between the workers’ movement of 1936 (or 1947) and the Left’s current legitimacy.The verdict of the public, unmoved by the critics’ appeals, reflected, no doubt unconsciously, the futility of such a subject [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]