Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 29, September 2003
Richard Stamp
Our Friend Zizek:
On _The Fright of Real Tears_
Slavoj Zizek _The
Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski between Theory
and Post-Theory_ London: British Film
Institute, 2001 ISBN 0851707548
(pbk) 240 pp. In a spirit of provocation
that Slavoj Zizek has made very much his own, let me begin
with a quotation from a report of his 1998 lectures at the
Museum of the Moving Image in London. ''For me, life exists only
insofar as I can theorize it', he confesses. 'I can be bored
to death by a movie, but if you give me a good theory, I
will gladly erase the past in an Orwellian fashion and claim
that I have always enjoyed it!''. [1] Who would not admit to
recognising themselves in this 'Orwellian' confession? It
touches upon the pleasure of refashioning one's relation to
a thing, rewinding the film and playing it again. Yet it
should also provoke unease: what is the relation between the
theory and the movie? What conception of exemplarity
operates here? More allergic reactions to such a statement
can be imagined: for example, it could only confirm the
suspicions of 'post-theoretical' film scholars with regard
to the universalising tendencies of film theory, or 'Grand
Theory' as they call it. 'Aha!' they might cry. 'He admits
to it -- he *is* being loose with film. He is a fickle,
inconstant, unfaithful lover of film.' [2] In short,
Zizek's confession can only be more fuel to the accusation
that film theory 'puts the theory before the film'. However,
it is also worth pointing out that this suspicion might be
undermined by the all-inclusive scope of Zizek's phrase:
'*life* exists only insofar as I can theorize it'. As if to
say: 'if it's reductive/universalising Theory that you're
after . . . !' Those who have even a
cursory acquaintance with his writings will attest that
Zizek is a skilled and entertaining polemicist. For those
who have yet to encounter him, I could do worse than echo
Terry Eagleton's oft-cited testimony that Zizek is 'the most
formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of
cultural theory in general, to have emerged from Europe in
some decades'. Indeed, Zizek's books have helped to
resurrect Lacanian psychoanalytic theory as a tool for
understanding debates over ideology and agency in
post-Marxism, by mining two rich but underused seams in
Lacan's writings: first, their debt to German philosophy,
specifically post-Kantian Idealism (Hegel and Schelling);
and second, its potential for application to popular culture
(cinema in particular). His books juxtapose expositions of
Lacanian concepts (which, incidentally, are clearer and more
accessible than the originals) with witty, decisive analyses
of cinematic examples. It is just this relation between
theory and example that troubles me in reading Zizek's _The
Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski between Theory
and Post-Theory_. Allow me to explain. The
editor's guiding notes to writing a review article for
_Film-Philosophy_ asks contributors to consider three
things: the usefulness of the book; its effects upon the
views of the reviewer; and the extent of its use of the
specificity of film. Now, leaving aside the first two
headings for the moment, I must admit to finding the third
much more problematic and therefore interesting --
particularly in reading _The Fright of Real Tears_. In the
Introduction, Zizek states that his task is 'not to talk
*about* [Kieslowski's] work, but to refer to his
work in order to accomplish the *work* of Theory' (9). He
gleefully admits that his approach is predicated upon a
'very ruthless 'use' of its artistic pretext', but then
immediately claims for it a higher fidelity than that of a
'superficial respect for the work's unfathomable autonomy'
(9). So is this book about Kieslowski, or even film in any
*specific* way? At first sight, then, it would appear that
Zizek himself has no qualms about the specificity of film.
But does this equate with 'putting the theory before the
film'? This is by no means a straightforward
issue. If by specificity we mean
that which is particular to the matter in hand (in this
case, film), then Zizek's 'ruthless 'use'' of the cinematic
text needs to be understood in the context of his comments
on the dialectical relation of particularity and
universality. Crucially for Zizek, the universal must be
understood as (Hegelian) 'concrete universality': 'the
fundamental lesson of dialectics is that universality as
such emerges, is articulated 'for itself', only within a set
of particular conditions' (8). In short, this means that the
terms in which the 'specificity' of film is to be thought
cannot be assumed to be self-evident, obvious, or universal.
But it also means, however, that there is no way of 'being
specific' that is not also always already on the way to
'becoming universal'. Hence, the task of analysis, he
argues, is not to reduce the universal to such particularity
as its fundamental truth, but rather to show how the
universal nevertheless *becomes* universal, in contingency.
For example: we may know something of the biographical facts
'behind' a director's work -- Kieslowski and Poland in the
1970s/80s, in this instance -- but that doesn't help to tell
us why his films nevertheless appeal to an audience who
don't have any such knowledge. Thus, to look for the
universal in the particular would seem to be the job of film
theory as such -- but what *kind* of theory can best analyse
this necessary contingency of the universal? 1. Zizek between Theory
and Post-Theory This brings us to the
matter of the books subtitle: _Krzysztof Kieslowski between
Theory and Post-Theory_. (The title will be considered
later.) Here, Kieslowski's work is to be suspended
in-between the antinomy of Theory and Post-Theory, whose
critique constitutes the real task of this book. Zizek's
'*work* of Theory' is a reinterpretation of the possible
applications of Lacanian psychoanalysis to cinema. By
setting himself against what he sees as partial, or
reductive, readings of Lacan in 1970s and 80s film theory --
he means _Screen_ theory, in particular -- he is able to
exploit a weakness of Post-Theoretical film scholarship.
According to David Bordwell and Noel Carroll's own
introduction to _Post-Theory_ (1996), the *one thing* that
defines and unites these varied 'low-level' empirical
theories is their common *refusal* of 'Grand Theory': the
psychoanalytic film theory whose 'ethereal speculations'
have been presented hitherto as the 'indispensable frame of
reference for understanding all filmic phenomena'.
[3] 'Theory' in its 'Grand' form is nothing more
than a straw man. But where Post-Theory seeks to exorcise
the spectre dominating academia, Zizek instead looks for the
return of the repressed, asking: what if the 'Lacanian' or
'psychoanalytic theory' that Post-Theorists have claimed is
so dominant in film studies, was never really *properly*
'Lacanian' in the first place? What if Lacanians were
precisely what had been 'missing' in film theory?
[4] Take the notion of 'the
Gaze', for example. Post-Theorists condemn it as a 'mythical
entity', as a spurious transcendental summoned by film
theory without any corresponding empirical evidence in the
real experiences of real spectators (34). At one level, this
is a fair criticism, in so far as psychoanalytical film
theory has always presumed to know how audiences watch
films: as spectators, we may look at a film in any number of
different ways, so why should the (capitalised) 'Gaze'
become the privileged case of cinematic perception? (The
tension here, once again, lies between the particular and
the universal, the example and the theory.) Zizek affirms
that 'the Gaze' is indeed 'missing', but he does so in order
to draw attention to the conceptual presuppositions of the
Post-Theoretical position: the idea that empirical
cognitivist research into (real) audiences and their
responses to (specific) films presumes a 'commonsense notion
of the spectator', one that is fixed within the apparent
transparency of the subject-object relation (34).
[5] The Lacanian 'Gaze', as Zizek accounts for it,
turns out not to be an attribute, or activity, of a subject.
Instead, it is 'on the side of the object', in the sense
that it marks 'the point from which the viewed object itself
'returns the Gaze' and regards us, the spectators' (34). The
way that Zizek describes it, linking it to a fault in the
operation of suture, 'the Gaze' is *the* cinematic
expression of the uncanny (Freud's 'Unheimlich'): the object
or thing to which the spectator's view becomes attached
strictly speaking cannot provide us with a 'point of view';
it is 'the spectre of a free-floating Gaze' (33), inverting
the poles of subject and object. This spectral Gaze, like
the operation of suture itself, is not an exchange of direct
point-of-view shots (which are only very rarely exact), yet
unlike suture, which classically 'subjectivises' this
exchange into point-of-view shots, the subjective status of
the second shot is *impossible*. Suture necessarily fails,
not because an 'objective shot' has not been 'subjectivised'
(which happens all the time, more frequently than the
'classic' suture shot, in fact [6]), but because
here is a point-of-view shot that remains unattached to an
identifiable *subject* within the diegetic 'reality' of the
film. The example provided -- perhaps not surprisingly for
the author/editor of _Everything You Always Wanted to Know
About Lacan (But Were Too Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)_ (1992)
-- is from Hitchcock's _The Birds_ (1963). The impossible
point of view is evidenced in the famous aerial shot of the
burning garage, which is re-signified as the position of the
seagulls as they survey the chaos they have caused. Of
course, the recourse to Hitchcock will do nothing to assuage
Post-Theoretical suspicions that film theory universalises
on the basis of the same few films or filmmakers. But Zizek
doesn't aim to assuage, only to exacerbate. His analysis of
such examples is polemical: it is aimed at the philosophical
(cognitivist) underpinnings of Post-Theory, which he argues
cannot allow for any gap between the functional relation of
mental representation and rational agency (61). Yet such a
gap in subjectivity is precisely what allows for precisely
those things of most interest in the relation between the
subject and cinematic experience -- the mediating role
played by perceptual distortion, the virtual, phantasm, or
the unconscious. For Zizek, this gap is not 'in' the subject
as such, but rather is constitutive of it as subject in the
first place. So everything in his argument hinges on the
notions of the subject and of its constitutive 'gap' or
absence, which is why he returns, again and again, to the
concept of suture -- that cornerstone of _Screen_
theory. In reclaiming suture, and
with it psychoanalytical film theorizing in general, Zizek's
'*work* of Theory' is a redemptive work. If the notion of
suture is in need of redeeming, it is because 'the time of
suture seems to have irrevocably passed: in the present day
cultural studies version of Theory, the term barely occurs'
(31). For Zizek, this near absence of the term is to be
taken as a sign of film studies' decline. This is very
interesting, for it signals the other side of the antinomy
in this books subtitle. At first, it seems that Post-Theory
is Zizek's target in _The Fright of Real Tears_, but it soon
becomes clear that it in fact serves as a stalking horse for
this 'present day cultural studies version of Theory', which
is also called (variously): 'post-modern/deconstructionist
cultural studies' (2); 'standard deconstructionist cinema
theory' (7); or '(deconstructionist) Theory' (14). His
argument runs as follows: although the notion of 'Grand
Theory', conceived by 'Post-theorists' as a totalising
'Theory of Everything', is nothing more than bad parody or a
caricature, it is not completely without merit. The
Post-Theory parody of Theory at least offers a glimpse of 'a
certain deconstructionist 'post-modern' ideology that
accompanies Theory proper as its indelible shadow' (5). In
other words, it offers us a parody of a parody (of 'Theory
proper'). Now, no one ever uses the
word 'deconstructionist' to be nice. Like cultural studies,
it serves as the scapegoat of choice for those who wish
bemoan the disintegration (moral or otherwise) of the
humanities, of the social sciences, of the university, of
the English language and so on. But what exactly is this
*standard* 'deconstructionist cinema theory'? Who are its
practitioners? And what are its practices, its concepts, its
ideologies, or its 'jargon', for that matter? Zizek doesn't
say. No names or examples are given, but the intention is
clear even if its object is not. He wants to rescue and
redeem 'Theory proper' by marking it out from its
'deconstructionist' double, (improper?) 'Theory', and it is
far more efficacious to leave this nemesis in the shadows
than engage with the arguments/theories of specific texts.
As Bordwell and Carroll would no doubt attest, 'ethereal'
spectres make for easier targets. To my ears, though, it's
the very phrase 'Grand Theory' that is just wrong. Like
Zizek's references to 'standard deconstructionist cinema
theory', or 'deconstructionist 'post-modern' ideology', its
object simply doesn't exist. In fact, the name seems to fly
in the face of the distinct *lack* of such a unified and
hegemonic 'theory of everything'. There can be no 'unified
field theory' -- as the very proliferation of *theories*
attests. This messy proliferation of approaches that is so
cleverly captured by the label, 'Grand Theory', in fact
reveals the opposite: the contingency of *every* discourse
and claim to knowledge. The irreducible messiness of
theories should draw attention to the importance of the
context, situation, and relation of every text, in so far as
the meaning-effects of any 'text' can be constituted only
through such (competing/conflicting) relations. I fear that
this seems to be stating the obvious. But my suspicion here
is that the underlying motive for using this homogenising
label, 'Grand Theory', is in fact the desire to stem this
promiscuous multiplication and hybridisation of theories by
saying: 'look at this thing here, *this* is what 'Theory'
is. Now, at last, we can put it behind us.' This is Zizek's critical
point about Post-Theory, yet it is one he never applies
reflectively. Whatever my reservations about the motivations
behind his quasi-dialectical triad of
'Theory/Post-Theory/Theory proper', and its not-so concealed
attack on deconstruction and cultural studies, his strategy
here is still useful in treating this conflict as more than
just a difference of theoretical approach. This is because
he sees the distinction between the 'cognitivist' approach
at the heart of Post-Theory and the 'historicist'
perspective of cultural studies/Theory as representative of
a broader clash between 'two totally different modalities
or, rather, *practices* of knowledge, inclusive of two
different institutional apparatuses of knowledge'.
[7] Such a conflict is not only evident within the
institution as a whole, but also in the fields of film
studies and cultural studies as disciplines within such an
institution. The stakes of this conflict should not be
overlooked (and there is plenty more to be said on this
question). For it touches upon the necessary task of
subjecting all such discourses, which includes the
application of cognitive science and Lacanian psychoanalysis
to film, to the kind of symptomological reading that Zizek
is surely demanding of 'deconstructive cultural studies'.
And yet it is characteristic of Zizek to preclude the
consideration that his own position of 'Theory proper' might
also find its condition of possibility within such an
institutionally and historically situated struggle. Zizek at
once diagnoses the historical field of knowledge and
disavows his own position within it. Suffice it to say that
there is an interesting substitutive chain at work here,
whereby the apparent 'thesis' of this book (as signaled by
its subtitle) gives way to his '*work* of Theory'. In other
words, Zizek reserves for *himself* (as the proper
representative of 'Theory proper') the place of the excluded
middle 'between Theory and Post-Theory', thereby supplanting
the name of 'Krzysztof Kieslowski' from its place in the
subtitle. 2. The fright of (those)
real tears But what about Kieslowski
(and his films), in a book which states so clearly that it's
aim is 'not to talk *about* his work'? The book's title,
_The Fright of Real Tears_, is derived from the director's
explanation -- in conversation with Danusia Stok -- for his
move from documentaries to feature films: 'Not everything can be
described. That's the documentary's great problem. It
catches itself as if in its own trap. The closer it wants to
get to somebody, the more that person shuts him or herself
off from it . . . I managed to photograph some real tears
several times. It's something completely different. But now
I've got glycerine. I'm frightened of those real tears. In
fact, I don't know whether I've got the right to photograph
them. At such times I feel like somebody who's found himself
in a realm which [sic] is, in fact, out of bounds.
That's the main reason why I escaped from documentary.'
[8] Not surprisingly, this
passage -- and the central chapter ('Now I've Got
Glycerine!') in which it appears -- is pivotal for Zizek's
interpretation of Kieslowski (such as it exists) in this
book. At its heart lies the apparent paradox that it is
Kieslowski's '*fidelity* to the Real' (71, my emphasis) that
explains his move from documentary realism to feature
filmmaking. So it is worth following the turns of Zizek's
argument. Kieslowski's career begins with documentaries, a
fact that Zizek links to the specific conditions of
socialist Europe, where the gap between official images and
the drabness of social reality meant that simply to describe
something could be to bring it to life. For Zizek, however,
the truth of this situation lies in its inversion: 'at the
most radical level, one can render the Real of subjective
experience only in the guise of a fiction' (71-2). Why is
this? As Kieslowski states in
the passage cited above, 'not everything can be described':
the documentary filmmaker stumbles upon the obscenity of
intruding into the intimacies of others. (Zizek wonders
aloud here whether the judge in _Rouge_ is not a rather
obvious self-portrait of the director himself.) Hence the
need for a fictional supplement, which introduces the
undecidability of the mask: are the masks provided by
fiction simply a sign of discretion with regard to what
should remain concealed or unspoken? Or does the moment of
fictional 'play' allow for the repressed and inadmissible to
be displayed? In short: does fiction pretend or does it
reveal? This is not all that revolutionary of course,
especially when Zizek reveals that because everyday social
reality is so reliant upon the use of masks, it is possible
that fiction can be 'more real than the social reality of
playing roles' (75). Whilst this is a rather tired point, it
is used to better effect to undercut claims that
Kieslowski's 'fictional' films -- particularly _Dekalog_
(1988), _La Double vie de Veronique_ (1991) and the _Trois
couleurs_ trilogy (1993-4) -- are the work of a 'spiritual
mystic'. Instead, Zizek casts Kieslowski as a *materialist*
of the mysterious: the fact that these films express a
preoccupation with parallel lives and alternative realities,
uncanny contingencies and inexorable-inexplicable chains of
events, is not the sign of a strictly apolitical, 'new age'
sensibility; instead, such layering of subterranean links
and motifs reaches back into Kieslowski's documentary
filmmaking. The documentary filmmaker is faced with a mass
of accumulated material that is not reducible to a single
narrative line, but requires formal patterning in ways that
develop a story through repetition and rhythm. (One might
illustrate this by pointing to the steady proliferation of
red-coloured objects and the ever-more insistent bolero
theme in Kieslowski's final film, _Rouge_ (1994), although
Zizek does not. I will take this up later.) At the end of this
analysis comes Zizek's final inversion, when he considers
Kieslowski's retirement from filmmaking: 'was the
abandonment of even the fiction movies not caused by an
insight into how fictions are in a way even more vulnerable
than reality?' (77). For Zizek, this 'retreat' obeys the
same 'inexorable inherent logic' as his move from
documentary to fiction, a logic that is set in motion by his
'fright of real tears'. How are fictions 'even more
vulnerable'? Set against the documentary intrusion into
private 'reality', fiction films expose '*dreams
themselves*, secret fantasies that form the unavowed kernel
of our lives' (77). So once again, Zizek's analysis ends up
at this 'kernel' of 'the Real': the 'fictionalised element'
(66) of the glycerine tears represents not a retreat from
reality, but an encounter with something 'more Real than
reality itself'; something to which (documentary) 'realism'
is inappropriate. But this is all far too easy. The
'inexorable inherent logic' of the fright of real tears is
striking in its similarity (identity, to be more accurate)
to every other example of the structurally perverse unavowed
or inexpressible 'kernel' of 'the Real' in his work.
[9] This replication of a particular theoretical
model is compounded when Zizek uses the distinction of real
and fictional tears to map out the schema with which he will
structure the entire analysis of Kieslowski in the final two
sections of the book: in the final chapter (supposedly on
the _Trois couleurs_ trilogy), he states explicitly that the
move from real to fictional tears maps the trajectory of
Kieslowski's work as a whole. He notes that the endings of
_Bleu_, _Blanc_ and _Rouge_ all feature a central character
crying: 'It is thus quite
appropriate that Kieslowski's opus, whose beginnings are
marked with the fright of *real* tears, ends with the
outburst of *fictional* tears. These tears are not the tears
of breaking the protective wall and letting oneself go,
expressing one's spontaneity of feeling, but theatrical,
staged tears, the tears of regained distance, 'canned tears'
. . . or, to quote the ancient Roman poet, *lacrimae rerum*,
tears shed in public for the big Other, precisely and even
when we cared nothing for (or even hated) the deceased whom
we are mourning.' (178) This is not simply an
empirical observation -- i.e. he used to make documentaries,
now he makes feature films -- but is rigged up to a fully
ontological argument: what is meaningful in his feature
films is precisely this psychical investment in
fictionalising. For Zizek, it is this gap between the
explicit statement (the tears) and the position of
enunciation (happiness) that gets automatically filled in
when we do not pay attention to the unspoken, the unseen,
the unconscious in film. Given the ontological
weight to be carried by this notion of 'real tears', it
should be noted that when Zizek cites this passage the word
'those' goes missing. In his rendition, the two key lines
from the passage are given as: 'But now I've got glycerine.
I'm frightened of real tears.' (72) This elision of a
deictic adjective -- '*those* real tears' -- is doubtless
accidental, but it is nonetheless revealing. For Zizek,
everything comes down to 'the Real' in the final analysis,
in so far as it names that fundamental lack/surplus that
structures the field of the intelligible and the
interpretable: i.e. the impossibility of saying everything,
or of accounting completely for reality, that is in fact
absolutely necessary to knowing something in the first
place. This necessary impossibility is recognizable from
deconstructive formulations of the limits of representation
and interpretation. In the work of Jacques Derrida, for
example, one can identify a series of such
quasi-transcendental terms -- such as 'difference', 'trace',
'writing', 'iterability', 'pharmakon', 'teleiopoesis', and
so on -- that define (and perform) a similar problematic,
but without being reducible to versions of the same 'logic'.
With Zizek the situation is different: 'the Real' is what
'really' names this logic of the lack/surplus, irrespective
of context or history. There can be only '*the* Real', not
'this' or 'that', so the question of the contingency of
'*those* real tears' cannot be addressed. Once again,
disavowal accompanies diagnosis To theorise this disavowal
more precisely, one might usefully adapt Judith Butler's
general observation that Zizek's examples 'serve to
illustrate various principles of psychic reality without
ever clarifying the relation between the social example and
the psychic principle'. [10] For Butler, Zizek's
direct theoretical leap from the example to the 'a priori'
principle (such as 'the Real') is part of a more general
tendency to eschew the messiness of social-political
entanglements (such as the *instability* of social norms or
the *plurality* of discursive practices and powers). She
asks decisively: 'On the one hand, we are
to accept that 'the Real' means nothing other than the
constitutive limit of the subject; yet on the other hand,
why is it that any effort to refer to the constitutive limit
of the subject in ways that do not use that nomenclature are
considered a failure to understand its proper operation? Are
we using the categories to understand the phenomena, or
marshalling the phenomena to shore up the categories 'in the
name of the Father', if you will?' [11] Her point applies to the
use of filmic examples because, if these examples function
solely as a 'lens' to focus our understanding upon an a
priori psychic reality, then the example is only ever in a
*formal* relation with the theory it illustrates. It is an
abstract, empty, non-specific relation between form
(example) and content (theory), akin to that of 'allegory'.
[12] So it might be advisable to trace the outline
of such allegorization in Zizek's treatment of cinematic
examples. The privileged allegory of
theory and example in _The Fright of Real Tears_ is, as I
have already suggested, one of *redemption*: on the one
hand, Zizek is concerned with rescuing Kieslowski from the
unfortunate reputation of being an apolitical, 'spiritual'
filmmaker; and on the other, with rescuing semiotic film
theory from misuse and misrepresentation by *both*
Post-Theory and ('deconstructionist') Theory. The work of
Kieslowski, as we have already remarked, is the object of
the unfaithful fidelity of Zizek's '*work* of Theory' as it
works through the antinomy of Theory/Post-Theory. So should
we expect anything specific about his films from
Zizek? Let us take his comments
on the final shots of Kieslowski's final film, _Rouge_, for
example. What is perhaps most striking here is that Zizek
doesn't pick up on the most important aspects of the final
shots in _Rouge_: that the TV image of Valentine is the
uncanny double of the poster image; and that the formal
neatness of this finale (to the film and thus to the trilogy
as a whole) is powerfully undercut by the knowledge that
over 1400 people from the ferry have been reported dead.
Death haunts the final image(s) of _Red_ at a number of
levels that Zizek seems unable to register: when he reads
the final 'frozen profile' of Valentine as an inversion of
the conventional freeze-frame image of the dead -- where
'Valentine is turned into a spectre *while she is still
alive*' (179) -- he precisely ignores the way this image is
very carefully slowed to the precise point at which its
composition replicates her profile in the poster. Zizek
knows this (he had commented on this doubling in an earlier
chapter!), but he chooses not to mention it. Why? The
function of repetition, which is so central to the trilogy
as a whole, but especially to _Rouge_, is almost entirely
missing in his account. This absence of
interpretation of Kieslowski's use of repetition and
multiplication is a serious and perplexing miscalculation,
to the extent that we might consider the director's own
comments on key thematic elements in the film (in the
'masterclass' included on the DVD release of _Rouge_) as a
useful supplement to Zizek's (lack of) argument about this
film. Introducing the pivotal sequence in the film, which
begins when the judge's dog, Rita, escapes from Valentine
and runs into a church, Kieslowski points out a specific
detail in the shot of Rita running into the church: the
camera holds the shot on the front of the church as
Valentine runs up *in order that* we might remember having
seen the same church, from the same position a few scenes
earlier, when Valentine stops to drink from a bottle of
water. [13] _Rouge_ is littered with such
repetitions: from the numerous red items in the film to
specific situations or scenes that are repeated like musical
refrains -- the road junction at which Auguste, the young
version of Kern the judge, drops his books is where he will
later stop to regard the large poster image of Valentine;
the broken beer glass in the bowling alley repeats in both
the clear plastic coffee cup that Valentine crushes in her
hand at her final meeting with Kern, as well as in the
broken window behind which we see Kern cry in the closing
shots of the film. Like the refrain in musical composition,
this device operates as a structural principle in the
film: 'In _Rouge_, in
particular, we wanted the viewer to think backwards, to make
associations with things he had already seen without
noticing . . . Of course, it's not important, it's just one
of many points. But we tried to build up these signs,
particularly in _Rouge_, so the viewer would realise that
what he sees here, he has already seen, and would register
that in some part of his subconscious.'
[14] Certainly, the structural
device of deja vu is not unique to this director, or to this
film, but the frequency and density of these 'signs' in
_Rouge_ is remarkable. With so many structuring repetitions
to pick up on, Kieslowski's avowed aim is for the viewer to
'understand the principle'. But what is the 'principle'
here? That what is important to grasp is the sense in which
things work backwards in time: that what one sees 'has
already been seen', triggered at a level that cannot be
attributed to intention or volition. At what point can we
separate 'the unconscious' from what we refer to as 'memory'
or 'imagination'? This brings us closer to what is
productive in Zizek's argument -- an insistence upon the
phantasmal and the unconscious -- than anything he himself
has to say. As a book about
Kieslowski, therefore, _The Fright of Real Tears_ is
woefully wanting in this kind of textual engagement. I
cannot see how _Kinoeye_, for instance, could have called it
'probably the most incisive analysis of the director's work
to date'. [15] Especially in so far as this would
seem to fly in the face of the author's stated intentions to
the contrary. Such a judgment is also hard to credit when
the final chapter, which ostensibly addresses the _Trois
couleurs_ trilogy, only addresses the first instalment
(_Bleu_) in any detail. [16] What is said about
_Blanc_ and _Rouge_ is little more than an adjunct to this
analysis, and although he makes references to _Rouge_ at
various points throughout the book, Zizek's comments on
_Blanc_ -- 'the most 'political' of the three films' --
consist only of a single half-page paragraph. But then
again, this is *not* a book about Kieslowski: its measure of
fidelity is defined by a 'very ruthless 'use' of its
artistic pretext'. It is just this unfaithful fidelity in
Zizek's book(s) that cannot fail to provoke not only those
with allergic reactions to (film) theory, but also anyone
for whom 'the specificity of film' would seem to be
something worth divining (whether that takes place within or
without the academy). It is for this reason that Zizek is
our friend, at least if we keep in mind Kant's definition of
the friend as 'the one who will help us to correct our
judgment when it is mistaken'. [17] This was a role
played in Kant's own life by J. G. Hamann, whose words we
might ventriloquise into Zizek's mouth: 'I'm not one of your
listeners. Instead I'm your prosecutor who contradicts you'.
[18] Zizek nowadays is often exhorting us to love
thy neighbour by acknowledging the propriety of hatred (in
so far as my neighbour is always the one whose presence is
most unbearable for me -- his prime example of the
neighbourly relation is that of Israelis and Palestinians,
or Europeans and asylum seekers). We need to learn to listen
more attentively, more lovingly to Zizek's prosecutions if
we are to counter them all the more thoroughly and
decisively. Bath
Spa University College,
UK Footnotes 1. Cited in Robert S.
Boynton, 'Enjoy Your Zizek!: An Excitable Slovenian
Philosopher Examines the Obscene Practices of Everyday Life
-- Including His Own' (1998) <http://home.mira.net/~andy/seminars/enjoy.htm>.
This series of lectures in the summer of 1998 would appear
to have been the occasion that gave rise to _The Fright of
Real Tears_ being written -- cf. Colin MacCabe's preface to
the book (pp. vii-ix). 2. Here I am obviously,
and rather shamelessly, putting words in the mouths of
scholars such as David Bordwell and Noel Carroll, whose
co-edited volume _Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies_
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996) has provided
this label. See Bruce Bennett's incisive review-article on
this book, aptly titled 'Misrecognizing Film Studies',
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 4 no. 5, February 2000
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol4-2000/n5bennett>.
For a contrasting yet equally tendentious response, see
Asbjorn Gronstad, 'The Appropriational Fallacy: Grand
Theories and the Neglect of Film Form', _Film-Philosophy_,
vol. 6 no. 23, August 2002 <http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n23gronstad>. 3. David Bordwell and Noel
Carroll, eds, _Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies_
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), p.
xiii. 4. The title of this
book's Introduction is: 'The Case of the Missing Lacanians'.
This point is underlined by an alternate version of the
subtitle, which is listed on some websites as _Uses and
Misuses of Lacan in Film Theory_ -- see the entry on
Blackwell's online bookshop, for example. 5. Slavoj Zizek, _Enjoy
Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out_, second
edition (London: Routledge, 1992/2001), p. 201. 6. As William Rothman
pointed out in his response to Daniel Dayan's 'The
Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema' (1974). See 'Against 'The
System of Suture'' (1975), in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen,
eds, _Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings_,
fifth edition (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), pp. 130-6. Zizek references this essay during this
part of his argument. 7. Slavoj Zizek, _Did
Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions on the
(Mis)use of a Notion_ (London: Verso, 2001), pp.
226-7. 8. Krzysztof Kieslowski,
in Danusia Stok, ed., _Kieslowski on Kieslowski_, (London:
Faber, 1993), p. 86. 9. I owe this point to
Paul Bowman, who provided useful comments on an earlier
draft of this review article. 10. Judith Butler,
'Competing Universalities', in Judith Butler, Ernesto
Laclau, Slavoj Zizek, _Contingency, Hegemony, Universality:
Contemporary Dialogues on the Left_ (London: Verso, 1999),
p. 157. 11. Ibid., p. 152. John
Mowitt asks similar questions with regard to Zizek's
insistence upon the link between trauma and 'the Real' in
'Trauma Envy', _Cultural Critique_, no. 46, Fall 2000, pp.
272-97. 12. Butler, 'Competing
Universalities', p. 157. 13. In fact, Kieslowski
says that she had stopped whilst out *jogging*, whereas it
is actually suggested in the sequence that Valentine has
just left a ballet class. Whether Kieslowski is remembering
a previous edit of the sequence is not clear, but it does
bring to mind Zizek's point about the material mass of film
and the dominant theme of alternate versions of the world in
Kieslowski's work. 14. Krzysztof Kieslowski,
interviewed in 'Krzysztof Kieslowski Masterclass' (1994),
_Three Colours: Red_ (Artificial Eye DVD). Geoff Andrew
documents further examples in _The 'Three Colours' Trilogy_
(London: BFI Publishing, 1998), esp. pp. 52-72. 15. See Alexei Monroe,
'The Fright of Real Theory', _Kinoeye_, vol. 1 no. 4, 15
October 2001 <http://www.kinoeye.org/01/04/monroe04.php>. 16. In fact, the analysis
of this film is largely constructed around a number of
(long) digressions -- on sex, mostly. Moreover, thanks to
the miracles of 'cut and paste', this analysis of _Bleu_
appears to more or less repeat the one found in _The Fragile
Absolute: or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting
For?_ (London: Verso, 2000). 17. Immanuel Kant, _The
Metaphysics of Morals_, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 215. 18. Hamann to Kant, Dec.
1759. Cited in Diane Morgan, _Kant Trouble: Obscurities of
the Enlightened_ (London: Routledge,
2000), p. 215. Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Richard Stamp, 'Our Friend
Zizek: On _The Fright of Real Tears_', _Film-Philosophy_,
vol. 7 no. 29, September 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n29stamp>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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