Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 15, July 2002
Laurent Kretzschmar
Is Cinema Renewing Itself?
Jean-Luc Nancy _L'Evidence du film: Abbas
Kiarostami_ Brussels: Yves Gevaert
Editeur, 2001 ISBN:
2-930128-17-8 181 pp. For those who have
discovered film theory late in the twentieth century (I was
just over ten when the first volume of Deleuze's _Cinema_
was published in France [1]), there has always been
a feeling of arriving after the battle. We didn't take part
in the major theoretical debates and were left studying
retrospectively these theories at the university, hoping to
find a way to look ahead and move on. Even the most recent
events in film theory, Deleuze and postmodernism, seem to
belong to a past that we just missed. On the one hand, as
film theorists absorb the shock of Deleuze's theories and
get accustomed to its new concepts, this work no longer
wears the absolute novelty it seemed to hold in the first
place. On the other hand, the postmodernism debate is drying
out, mainly because a consensus on its meaning for cinema
and visual arts has not been found. Both these approaches
seem to be turned towards the past, trying to analyse and
make sense of the first hundred years of cinematographic
pictures that is so closely linked to the history of the
twentieth century. When Deleuze released his
cinematic taxonomy in the early 80s, it emerged as an
original work, making little of recent theories such as
semiotics or psychoanalysis. The novelty of the approach,
coupled with the strong usability of the concepts (and the
appeal of Deleuze's existing reputation as a philosopher),
made the two volumes of _Cinema_ an instant hit in film
theory, and the book was included in the programs of media
studies in French universities less than five years after
its publication. Once the excitement passed, it appears that
the central division of Deleuze's taxonomy between the
movement-image and the time-image was merely a wonderful
synthesis of what thinkers like Serge Daney or directors
like Jean-Luc Godard had already expressed in a less
systematic manner. After the Second World War, Deleuze notes
that the movement-image enters a crisis as pure optical
situations appear with Italian neorealism. These emerging
time-images announce modern cinema and mark the end of the
first period in the history of cinema that will be called
classicism. Deleuze's central division brilliantly
formalizes in the field of cinema the debate begun by
Adorno's comments on the impossibility of representation
after the Second World War, but leaves modern cinema as the
only possible future, and therefore assigns to film studies
the sole and infinite task to analyse the multiple
variations of the time-image. In other words, the conditions
of the development of the history of film have already been
written. In Hegelian terms, this is nothing less than the
end of history; in the 80s, the consciousness of the limits
of such a modern cinema was named postmodernism. The postmodernism debate
appeared at the same time as the publication of _Cinema_ but
never seemed to have been satisfyingly relevant in the field
of film theory. A consensus on its definition could not be
found and its theorists never managed to produce clear
reusable concepts for film studies. Postmodernism has slowly
become a victim of his own success and has, in a way,
started its own ironic decadence when any movie critic began
to qualify very different pieces of art as 'PoMo'. But more
fundamentally, postmodernism is confronted by the limit it
has itself set. Since its main assumption is that the
attempt by modern cinema to question the foundations of
every form of representation is complete, postmodernism can
only play with the recycling of these old forms. In that
respect, it is determined by a particular interpretation of
the history of aesthetics that regards modernity as the end
of art. And it is at odds with the production by new artists
of new forms of representation (from Bill Viola to Hou
Hsiao-Hsien). Obviously, both Deleuze's
work and the postmodernism debate have more to offer than
this summary, but both are fundamentally unable to overcome
the limits of a certain conception of the history of film,
for which the passage from classicism to modernity is the
ultimate reference. For this reason Jean-Luc Nancy's
_L'Evidence du film_ seduces as an honest, forward-looking
attempt to open the space ahead for film theory and more.
This small essay has enough to get most readers rather
enthusiastic as they discover the real intent of this book,
nothing less than providing a new foundation for visual
arts. Sadly the excitement quickly transforms into
frustration. The huge theoretical endeavour of the book is
hindered by its many limitations. Jean-Luc Nancy's text
contains some critical elements for the development of new
aesthetics, but because it is more an artistic draft than an
academic sum, it requires many efforts to reap the full
benefit of its propositions for film theory. Before it is opened,
_L'Evidence du film_ looks like another art book gathering
the thoughts of the French philosopher on the Iranian
director Abbas Kiarostami's most known movies in the West
(from _Where's My Friend's House_ to _The Wind Will Carry
Us_). The book is composed of three texts, each presented in
French, English, and Persian: a main essay on Kiarostami's
recent movies; an older commentary on one of the director's
movies (_Life And Nothing Else_); and a conversation between
Nancy and Kiarostami. But Nancy's underlying ambition for
film theory appears rapidly. In _Life and Nothing Else_
Nancy finds a perfect reflection of his own philosophy; and,
as early as the Introduction, the philosopher positions this
movie centrally in Kiarostami's work, with Kiarostami as a
'privileged witness' (12) of the emergence of a new form of
cinema. This positioning of Kiarostami -- and one of his
movies in particular -- at a cornerstone of the history and
aesthetics of film is the starting point of Nancy's
argument. But it is also a giant step as it conditions the
interest of the book to the reader's willingness to accept
that Nancy's comments on just seven movies can be
extrapolated to cover film and visual arts in general. This
demanding effort will constitute the main limit of this
book. Nevertheless the correspondence between Nancy's
thinking and Kiarostami's filming proves to be a perfect
match between film and philosophy and seems to carry enough
convincing power to make reading _L'Evidence du film_ an
invigorating experience. What Nancy aims to achieve,
therefore, is to define a new essence or form of film that
has always been there but only appears now for itself in
Kiarostami's work. The central idea of this new essence is
that cinema is fundamentally an art of looking at the world.
To develop this unsurprising statement into an innovative
path for film theory, Nancy uses two concepts. One is the
concept of gaze or way of looking ('regard' in French); the
other is a conception of the world. These two concepts are
inextricably linked since the definition of film, as an art
of looking is only made possible through the understanding
of how Nancy conceives the world. And the latter is at the
heart of Nancy's innovative purpose. As we saw earlier, modern
and postmodern cinema are fundamentally reactionary as they
are obsessed with the idea that the world *no longer* makes
sense. In a small essay, unfortunately not translated into
English, Fabrice Revault D'Allones details very clearly this
reactionary attitude. [2] Classic cinema dealt with
a pre-interpreted world and aimed at organising every
element of a movie toward a particular meaning, whereas
modern cinema confronts a world that can no longer be
understood, and aims at representing the loss of this
meaning with the techniques of documentary and realism. At
the foundation of modern cinema are Deleuze's pure optical
situations that occur when the link between the man and the
world has been broken. Modern cinema is therefore obsessed
with the loss of the world of classic cinema and constantly
tries to express this loss, either by deconstructing the
forms of classicism or by formally emphasising the loss of
meaning. In the same way, postmodern filmmakers, when
attempting to find a way out of modernity by recycling the
old forms, only reveal their obsession to overcome this loss
of meaning. Nancy's philosophical twist is that this loss of
a meaningful world is actually a gain because a world
without signification is the world itself. Not that the
world is nonsense, but the *sense of the world* [3]
is only conceivable once we have acknowledged that the world
is not about meaning but is a more locus for the meanings.
And while we are becoming aware of that simple reality, the
world opens itself. Overcoming what we saw as a loss
literally gives us the world, a world that Nancy describes
through references to Heidegger's phenomenology as the
neutral 'there-is' that comes ahead of beings and meanings
and allows them to come to existence. [4] On the basis of this modern
conception of the world, Nancy argues that cinema is freeing
itself from its obsession with the loss of meaning and
begins to tackle the beings themselves. The natural posture
of cinema is therefore not to represent a preconceived
world, nor to represent the loss of this meaningful world,
but to *present* the world itself. Nancy concludes: 'the
evidence of film is that of the existence of a look through
which the world can give back its own real' (44). In front
of a world that is self referential, and whose lack of
meaning is no longer missing since it is rather a condition
of existence, this new cinema is an art of looking and
presenting the world and the beings for themselves, without
organising them towards a meaning (the limit of classic
cinema), without consciously representing the lack of
meaning (the limit of modern cinema), and without
obsessively playing with the forms of the past (the limit of
postmodern cinema). This short text proposes nothing less
than a viable alternative in the attempt to go beyond the
contradictions of modernity: a foundation and an opening for
the cinematographic images of the twenty-first
century. Nancy's philosophical twist
is the starting point of his argument, its basic assumption.
The majority of the content of the _L'Evidence du film_
consists in applying this assumption onto a particular
example of this new cinema. Ignoring the concepts and
frameworks of previous film theories, Nancy proposes his own
ideas to interpret Kiarostami's cinema. The concept of the
gaze ('regard' in French) is perhaps the most interesting.
Where modern cinema often had a passive documentary way of
looking (merely to record), Kiarostami's gaze is much more
challenging for the spectators. Analysing how Kiarostami
uses distanciation techniques, very selective framing, and
the well-commented 'long cosmic shots', [5] Nancy
shows how this cinema *mobilises* the look of the viewer and
acts as an eye-opener. Achieving this gaze would be the aim
of this realist cinema dealing with a modern conception of
the world. Nancy further refines his definition of film by
exploring the dimension of movement, and provides many other
rich comments on Kiarostami's movies. The set of pictures
from Kiarostami's movies included in the middle of the book
brings a very clear illustration of Nancy's ability to
capture the key features of the director's work. The
conversation between the philosopher and the film-maker also
reinforces the feeling of a perfect match between
Kiarostami's filming and Nancy's thinking. In providing some
philosophical thinking on the work of the Iranian director,
the book is fascinating. But if Nancy succeeds in
convincing us that Kiarostami creates new and innovative
pictures, how much of this novelty can be extended to the
fields of film and visual arts at large? In other words, is
this book simply an intelligent commentary of Kiarostami's
movies, or does it contain the elements for a definition of
an emerging new form of cinema and visual arts, as Nancy
pretends? The obvious limit of the
text is its unique reference to seven of Kiarostami's
movies, which means that although the concepts developed
here are perfectly applicable to these seven movies, it is
up to the reader to determine their relevance in other
movies. I could think of only a couple of film makers whose
work may fall in this new way of filming: Hou Hsiao-Hsien
and 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano. Hou Hsiao-Hsien's pictures do not
attempt to create a world around a given meaning, but rather
aim at presenting the world and the livings with no other
reference than themselves. The case of Takeshi Kitano is
more complex because the basis of his movies is
fundamentally modern, but Kitano's characters, along with
the director himself, seem to find their own way to look at
the world when they temporarily escape the violence. These
two examples hardly convinced me of the relevance of Nancy's
proposition for film studies, although the fact that these
two directors come from Asia would be seen with pleasure by
Nancy, as he uses the Iranian director's double image
culture (at the intersection of the East and the West) to
justify positioning Kiarostami at the origin of this new
cinema. Unfortunately, like many of his comments, this
interesting idea does not go beyond the draft status and
carries barely any weight for that reason. Another limit lies in the
lack of examples from other visual arts, which undermines
Nancy's affirmation that the *form* of this new cinema is
actually the new form of *all* the visual arts. The
arguments Nancy makes about the presence of photography and
television in Kiarostami's movies are also far from
convincing. As would be the analysis of Kiarostami's digital
cameras in his latest movie documentary, _ABC Africa_, for
it is clear now that Nancy does not try to prove his
theoretical statements with empirical evidences. Thus the reader is requested
to believe the existence of Nancy's new form for visual arts
on a pure theoretical twist derived from Nancy's philosophy
and a single example. At this stage of the reading the
frustration peaks, when, willing to play Nancy's game, i.e.
to analyse his statements from a pure theoretical
standpoint, the reader tries to get a clear understanding of
this new modernism. Nancy's chosen format for the book --
two relatively independent texts, the transcript of a
conversation, and a set of pictures -- literally prevents
any clear understanding of the concepts and theories
proposed. After going back and forth in the text, trying to
identify concepts and find a solid definition for them, I
gave up, and kept on reading Nancy's fluent style with
pleasure but with much less expectation regarding the final
outcome of this book in regard to film theory. And once the
book closed, I was having real doubts about the use I would
be able to make of Nancy's propositions. Adding to the
confusion was the blurry feeling that Nancy's idea of cinema
as a difficult art of looking at the world and it peoples
was not entirely wrong, nor entirely new. _L'Evidence du film_ does
seem to say something essential about how film is starting
to tackle a whole new relation between man and world in the
beginning of the 21st century. Unfortunately it does not say
enough to grasp a clear understanding of this statement and
to deduct applicable concepts to build some new path for
film studies. That Kiarostami presents a unique look at the
world few will disagree, but that his work brings along a
new era of visual arts is what Nancy almost fails to
convince us of. This is a shame though, because Nancy could
well be right. London, England Footnotes 1. Gilles Deleuze, _Cinema
1: L'Image-mouvement_ (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit,
1983). 2. Fabrice Revault
D'Allones, _Pour le cinema moderne_ (Brussels: Yellow Now,
1994). 3. Jean-Luc Nancy, _Le Sens
du monde_ (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1993); translated into
English as _The Sense of the World_ (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1998). 4. See Nancy, _The Sense of
the World_, p. 237. 5. Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Fill
in the Blanks: _Taste of Cherry_', _Chicago Reader_, 29 May
1998 <http://www.chireader.com/movies/archives/1998/0598/05298.html>;
accessed 15 April 2002. Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2002 Laurent Kretzschmar, 'Is
Cinema Renewing Itself?', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 15,
July 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n15kretzschmar>.
Save as Plain Text Document...Print...Read...Recycle
Back to the Film-Philosophy homepage
