Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 30, September 2003
John Orr
Right Direction, Wrong Turning:
On Zizek's _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
0-85170-754-8 240 pp. I. Lover of Lenin and Lacan,
Slavoj Zizek is a talented culture critic whose recent work
reveals the many pitfalls that come with campus fame. This
is particularly true of his writing on film. His treatment
of Hitchcock, Lynch, and now Kieslowski is provocative and
cavalier, powerful yet patronising, fertile but sterile.
[1] He is the maestro of the seminal insight but
also of the tired distraction, an expert at getting straight
to the point and then going straight past it. Here, though,
in his strange homage to Kieslowski he does not get straight
to the point at all. The opposite happens. After an unctuous
preface by Colin MacCabe preparing the way for a Zizek
Performance of Greatness, Kieslowski barely gets a mention
in the first sixty-five pages, being left with no more than
a walk-on part at the end of Part One. But if you then
re-read the book's subtitle: 'Kieslowski between Theory and
Post-Theory' you can work out its true import. The Polish
filmmaker is there for a dramatic purpose, for glowing
intermissions between bouts of academic head-banging that
have their own agenda. Zizek's genuine insights in this book
come later, but an impatient reader could be forgiven for
thinking the Pole is merely being used as a tool for more
critical infighting that has precious little to do with
cinematic vision. Zizek starts with a rant
against 'post-theory', (meaning David Bordwell and his
followers), and promptly gives it a pride of place in film
discourse it barely deserves. En route he attacks with great
fanfare but little coherence Bordwell's bold claim of
aesthetic universalism in his best essay in years,
'Convention, Construction and Cinematic Vision'. [2]
Yet amidst his anxiety Zizek fails to notice just how thin
on the ground, outside of Bordwell and one or two others,
post-theory is. He has nothing to say about the most obvious
weakness, its crass cannibalisation of the term 'cognitive'.
For if post-theory is staffed by cognitivists, how can it
not be theory of some sort? Well it can't for Zizek simply
because it is theory and not Theory. The capital 'T' tells
it all. Theory is deified but only if it is the right kind.
To argue, as some 'post-theorists' do, that film critique
should be founded on modes of cognition, shifts debate into
realms of one-sided abstraction. Zizek's response is to be
even more abstract, though a more accurate word is probably
abstruse. In a weird way he allows his new enemies to shift
the goalposts, and his defensiveness is baffling. Unusually
he has no resort to 'post-modernism', the term he used (with
Fredric Jameson) as a neo-Marxian trope for tying the
information age into consumer capitalism. Though it loomed
large in his Lynch monograph _The Art of the Ridiculous
Sublime_, you sense he now feels post-modernism is passe. He
might well be right. You sense too more than a tinge of
desperation in his actual solution. In searching for an
irreducible core of Theory Zizek falls back on that demon in
the Hollywood machine that has so often been the subject of
his love-hate: suture. Suture of course is the
Lacanian Word-in-Passing made Text by a whole generation of
disciples, cue 'film' disciples, and no one knows, outside
of its surgical meaning, what it really means. But as a
word-in-passing that fell from the master's lips, that means
it can mean whatever you want to make it mean. And that is
what Zizek does. What it seems to mean for him is that
through the very mechanics of film editing in
shot/reverse-shot sequences, anything fragmented or
uncertain in the filmic image can be stitched back into
something falsely unifying for the spectator. Usually this
is done mechanically, but now and again suture can be done
subversively to expose its own strategy, by exploring the
gaps between action and reaction in shot/reverse-shot
stylistics, that is with ingenious variations on a basic
theme. As a concept of film critique, suture, either
mechanical or subversive, tries to be inclusive in a way
that flaky, diffuse 'post-modernism' can never be. The unity
of a conniving Devil, hatched in the studio system of
classical Hollywood, seems preferable to the agnosticism of
a purposeless world. For Zizek subversive
suture, or should we say alternative medicine, is something
both Hitchcock and Kieslowski do well. And it should be
noted that these favourite directors, along with his current
favourite David Lynch, do employ shot/counter-shot
techniques quite widely along with a strong use of close
shots and close-ups. Here the reference point for the Polish
Kieslowski who never went to the United States seems more
American than European. For a Marxist Slovenian who claims
to champion the dispossessed in post Cold War Europe, Zizek
has little to say about Kieslowski's contemporaries in
Central or East Europe, or the Balkans. 'Kieslowski
definitely belongs to Mitteleuropa', he claims early on (7).
But where are the comparisons? Polish cinema does not get a
look-in: no naming here of Wajda, Skolimowski, or Polanski.
Other omissions are even more odd. Wide-shot or
sequence-shot stylistics are never discussed. Innovating
directors like Angelopoulos, Sokurov, Haneke, Kusturica, and
Bela Tarr are never mentioned. Tarkovsky is accorded a brief
four pages as 'Kieslowski's Russian counterpart', where
Zizek wants to stress their 'cinematic materialism' against
the claims of New Age mystics (102). But Tarkovsky's very
different style of filming, with its slow sequence-shot
tracking, is never contrasted with Kieslowski's fast
hand-held shots, fast editing, or decentred reverse-angle
close-ups. The two filmmakers appear to be identical by
default, perhaps because of Kieslowski's admiration for his
Russian predecessor. But there *is* contrast in their
approach to narrative duration, of which the Pole was only
too well aware and to which Zizek seems oblivious.
Kieslowski admitted that in the _Three Colours_ trilogy he
was concerned to edit down to ninety minutes to hold the
attention of a contemporary audience. As much as he admired
the efforts of others like Angelopoulos to persist with the
long narrative, it was not for him or, he implied, the
contemporary spectator. [3] Aided by the talented
editing of Jacques Witta, he succeeded with the Trilogy in
creating a poetically dense system of montage whose impact
on the spectator still needs to be analysed. Such analysis,
though, is not forthcoming from Zizek. His purpose is very
different. In patronising his English-language readership,
Zizek uses the terms 'Kieslowski' and 'Mitteleuropa' as
signifiers of a cultural exotica to which he alone, as
Theory's maestro, can unlock the door. This is partly why Zizek's
long prehistory of Kieslowski does not lie in the *history*
of Mitteleuropa, but in the realm of subversive suture that
is totally outside of it. For suture inhabits a very
different landscape where the turf wars of Theory are taking
place. Or rather, his weird version of Mitteleuropa provides
a perverse feed-in to his even weirder version of Theory.
Mitteleuropa's earlier love of Karl May's 'western' fiction
and its current love of pseudo-Irish folk bands signify, he
grandly claims, a love of things Western achieved only
through kitsch imitation. Kieslowski's use of suture is
deemed something similar. Never mind Solidarity and Martial
Law, for that is 'a historicist trap' (8). Let's see
Krzysztof instead as a surrogate Hitch, deconstructing
suture for the 1990s; and if we can do that we can surely
forget uncomfortable History yet rescue Theory from the new
barbarians at the gates, the 'cognitivists' of post-theory.
It is an absurd proposition based on false premises and the
book goes wildly wrong from the start. Later on when things
improve, Zizek's history phobia prevents him from making
anything of the crucial differences between the _Decalogue_
and the Trilogy -- Kieslowski in Poland and out of it. One
suspects that for the unreconstructed Leninist 1985-95 were
a bad ten years. Instead, his critical turning point is one
the book's title directs us to, Kieslowski's early shift
from documentary into feature narrative, prompted because,
in the director's own words, 'I'm frightened of real tears'
(72). The statement is more enigmatic than Zizek thinks.
Predictably he tries to read it as a variation on suture
aesthetics when, historically speaking, it was anything but.
Yet his profound error is vital to his flimsy
argument. So what is this tenuous
link between Hitchcock, who never made documentaries, and
Kieslowski's 'fright of real tears'? Unlikely though it
seems, there is one. But it is not the one Zizek gives. As
ever, the Slovenian critic finds a new approach to an
elusive subject and at the crucial point turns in the wrong
direction. He knows that Hitchcock and Kieslowski make
effective idiosyncratic use of the close-up in
shot/reverse-shot sequencing to clinch key dramatic moments,
and can surprise us by the way in which they do so. But he
also knows that such an insight falls short of Theory, that
cultic enterprise which for any true lover of Lenin and
Lacan must be holistic and bind us into the One. Here
Lacanian Suture is the way in and out, but crucially the
Lacanian Gaze functions as the go-between. It is a neat
solution on paper, but meaningless onscreen. In Zizek's
neo-Lacanian formulation the Gaze is pure off-the-wall
metaphysic, something returned by the eyeless object,
anthropomorphic, bounced back by any Thing devoid of the
power of sight: hence its perverse attraction for Theorists
of a certain persuasion. In movies, the gaze for sure may be
decentred, mirrored, reflected, or made invisible to the eye
of the spectator, and it often has been to great effect, but
it is still the gaze of some creature in the animal world
with the power of sight. To revert to the eyeless
gaze as the epitome of that which cannot be sutured, except
in extremis where effectively you kill the technique you
love to hate, is an even more absurd solution to the absurd
conundrum Zizek has set himself. And his own examples
undermine this perverse Purity of the Empirically
Impossible. On the stair of the Bates Mansion in _Psycho_
Martin Balsam may be staring up at the Horror his audience
cannot see, but retrospectively we do come to guess what he
has seen. Hitchcock's startle-effect is a function of
narrative suspense, ingenious and original. [4] But
the returning, invisible gaze is still that of Norman Bates
in drag, not the mansion, not the house, not the cosmos.
Bates may be maximum deranged but he is neither a Thing nor
stand-in for a Thing. He is flesh and blood, even though his
mum is now a skeleton in a wheelchair. Elsewhere, creatures
with wings, the birds that terrorise Bodega Bay -- who fly
into their own point-of-view shot, high above the mayhem
they have helped to create (suture high in the sky) -- are
also creatures with eyes, and can see their human victims.
The fact that Hitchcock in his modernist period plays
ingeniously on different variations on the point-of-view
shot -- the objective shot as subjective, the subjective
shot objectivised -- does not alter this one bit. While
Bates may be a paranoid schizophrenic, Zizek seems to be
something else: a paranoid anthropomorphic. For sure,
Hollywood horror can suggest anything: hence _The Hills Have
Eyes_. But Zizek's inverted suture seems to inscribe one
formula: Only the Hills Have Eyes. At this point Theory, or
what is left of it, flies out of the window. Yet the gaze with a small
'g' is vital in Hitchcock and Kieslowski. In elevating it to
a capital 'G' the Slovenian critic and self-styled
materialist shows how anxious he is to expunge context from
pure metaphysic. Let us take two key gaze examples: one from
Hitchcock's _Spellbound_ (1944), that he never mentions
either here or in his Hitchcock collection; and one of the
few Kieslowski illustrations, from _Decalogue 6_ (1988)
(television version of _A Short Film about Love_), that
makes it into Part One of this book. _Spellbound_, as that
confused film in which Hitchcock both condoned and condemned
the Science of Psychoanalysis, is the strange aporia in
Zizek's reading of Hitch. Since the film not only uses Dali
designs for its dream sequences, but boldly links Gregory
Peck's war-trauma with his childhood traumas, its
overlooking is truly curious. So let us turn to Hitch's
filming of the first embrace between de facto patient,
amnesiac Peck, and loving analyst, concerned Ingrid Bergman.
A swift series of moving reverse-angle close-ups of the
couple, that give the spectator a brief sense of vertigo,
are followed by a cutaway to a set of doors opening
consecutively and mysteriously down a long corridor in the
asylum. It shows how 1940s Hitchcock operates at the edge of
genre convention. Romance is acclaimed and sabotaged:
analysis is acclaimed and sabotaged -- and all in the same
sequence. The love of Romance is an amour fou: the new
passion for a Science of Mind is equally an amour fou. And
here they first copulate. Let us now return to
Kieslowski. In _Decalogue 6_, Zizek's illustration of
Kieslowski-suture is the sequence where Tomek sees Maria
Magdalene at the post office after spying at her at home
through the telescope in his apartment (39-40). As we see a
close-up of Tomek looking out at her, her image is
refracted, larger than life, on the glass screen above the
counter -- Tomek and his object of desire are thus seen
within the same frame. Zizek calls this a 'spectral
dimension' (39), used in a shot/reverse-shot sequence to
indicate lack of closure -- in a word subversive suture. For
him it shows the spectral image that opens up 'a door of
perception' upon the drab reality of everyday life. Yet it
is much more precise than this for Kieslowski. It highlights
the way that Tomek consciously pursues voyeurism as a form
of magic to lift himself above the everyday in the dire and
depressed decade of Martial Law. The reflection may be
spectral, yet we know Maria is there in the flesh too since
we see her in reverse-angle from his point-of-view, and we
also know by this time that his ruse to get her to the
post-office, by sending her a note about a non-existent
money order, is in order to see her in the flesh where
previously he had seen her only through his telescope.
Kieslowski's subtle irony in this shot is to infer that the
lens image, the image seen through glass, remains more
powerful in Tomek's imagination at this stage than the image
seen without refraction. He cannot substitute in his fantasy
the immediate for the mediated. But an attentive spectator
coming to this sequence and aware of its prior context is
able to read the irony in the situation. Maria is not
'fantasmatic' like Madeleine Elster, but a woman maddened by
the bureaucratic difficulties in her daily life. Indeed any
cinema screening of the feature-length version shows up the
relationship that then develops between the two protagonists
as tense and tactile, raggedly sensuous and not spectral at
all. Finally the immediate does take over from the mediated,
but with tragic results. The climax to their relationship,
where the touch of hand upon thigh precipitates Tomek's
orgasm, is the opposite of _Spellbound_. It ends in
humiliation not consummation. It is purely metonymic, not
spectral at all: there is no recourse to a metaphysical
moment, a metaphor-cutaway, as there was in _Spellbound_. As
we have seen, it was Hitchcock not Kieslowski who literally
opened up the doors of perception. II. In trying to dramatise
Kieslowski's shift from documentary to fiction as the
crucial turning-point in his career, as a Pauline conversion
on the road to Damascus, where the director agonises over
intruding into people's lives and becomes frightened by real
tears, Zizek overlooks a crucial and unifying factor in
Kieslowski's style. Even in his early documentaries like
_First Love_ (1974) and _Hospital_ (1976), he was never
Bazinian in procedure. Deep-focus, the medium-long shot,
stable shoulder-and-eye-level equilibrium, all are
conspicuous by their frequent absence. From the start his
camera is intrusive. It dwells long on the figure and the
face of his subjects: it searches out in extreme close-up
the nuances of facial expression. It explores the intimate,
unguarded moment. When it is this intrusive the camera
circulates close in, jerky, hand held. In the 1970s
Kieslowski was nearer to Cassavetes than he was to Ken Loach
or neo-realism. During one or two of these moments in _First
Love_ the microphone also comes into shot. Elsewhere
Kieslowski uses a long lens to film, for example, aspects of
the wedding party that is framed tight in from a distance in
order to make the camera invisible. Yet this brief short of
a young schoolgirl who gets pregnant and then married in
tough circumstances stresses resilience and vulnerability,
two of the human qualities that Kieslowski's later developed
in the fiction-fables of the _Decalogue_. Here it is
docudrama, an episode in a life told and edited with its own
dramatic rhythms, and telling its own story. Yet it is still
documentary, unlike _Camera Buff_, his first reflexive
feature about a filmmaker so obsessed by his new craft he
deserts his family in order to sustain it. Zizek reads this
as a fictional version of Kieslowski's own life that follows
from the crisis of his documentary period. Yet he ignores
crucial distancing effects as the film goes in opposite
directions at once. The subject is a modest factory-worker
turned camera buff, definitely not a student from Lodz film
school as Kieslowski was. Conversely no modest factory
worker plays the part. Instead it is Jerzy Stuhr, one of
Poland's best film and theatre actors, who reappears in
_Decalogue 10_. Here we have two unifying
factors in all of Kieslowski, from _First Love_ to _Three
Colours: Red_, which also connect him to Hitchcock. The
first lies in a series of original variations on the
presence of the camera: the second in the repetition of what
Deleuze has called the 'affection-image'. [5] In
Griffith, Pabst, Eisenstein, Dreyer, and Bergman, Deleuze
asserts, the expressive close shot or close-up is put into
context by what the film cuts to or away from, and by what
the face in the frame looks to and away from. Yet it is not
only relational in this external sense. It is also an
image-in-itself that has its own affective qualities,
qualities that inhere above and beyond the immediate
situation. In the powerful use of this mise-en-scene there
is always a recurring hiatus between action and re-action,
between the in-itself and for-itself of the image. Like
their great predecessors, Hitchcock and Kieslowski use the
close-up and close shot as affection-images founded on this
hiatus. They combine the internal and external dimensions in
unexpected ways that remain open: that is to say enigmatic,
ambiguous where deframed meanings must be filled in by the
spectator's active look. This generic openness is
unacknowledged in semiological formulations of suture and
has nothing to with the metaphysic of an Absent
Gaze. III. While these two factors,
the reflexive and the play upon affect, are a key to
continuity, critical differences emerge between the
Kieslowski of the 1980s and the 1990s. Again Zizek senses
some of them, but still makes a hash of it. He regurgitates
Alicja Helman's stupid statement that _Decalogue_ women are
all frumpy, malicious, and destructive, [6] while
those of the Trilogy are serene, beautiful, and, it seems to
Zizek, mouth-watering. No matter that in _Three Colours:
Blue_ Juliette Binoche starts off in hospital nearly dead,
with a neck brace, a bruised and bloated face, and an eye
patch. Along with Julie Delpy and Irene Jacob she is
sumptuous Image of Desire as opposed to all those drab,
self-dramatising females in the Warsaw Tower Block -- great
actors all of them, incidentally -- who give the Eternal
Feminine a bad name. Because of his exclusion order on
Polish film, Zizek also misses out a point of contact with
Polanski, the role of 'the girl-child' as the screenplay of
_Cul-de-Sac_ calls the young Francoise Dorleac. What
Polanski consciously fashioned with Dorleac, Mia Farrow, and
later Emmanuelle Seigneur re-occurs here -- but less
consciously -- with Jacob (twice over) and Delpy. From _The
Double Life of Veronique_ onwards Zizek sniffs out Romance
-- and seems deeply in love with the Tricolour trio -- but
fails to connect it with Polish Romanticism. How is mighty
abstraction here overthrown! Yet the Trilogy is precisely
where Kieslowski renews a Polish tradition his films had
previously denied. Sensationally, it does so only in a
European idiom where national boundaries are crossed. Unlike
Wajda, agonising the ironies of fraught and futile Romance
in the oppressed Nation, Kieslowski, courtesy of the Cold
War's sudden end, leaps the border and finds himself in the
bosom of Poland's great friend in time of need: France, home
of the Tricolour and beacon of national liberty. Perhaps
Geneva is stretching things a little but the move is clear.
The 'Symphony for the Unification of Europe', the bedrock of
_Blue_'s would-be transcendence, only embraces two to three
countries. This is no upmarket Euro-Pudding. It is unbridled
Francophilia. Zizek also misses the other point about it. It
is the moment in the Francophile tetralogy (_Veronique_ and
_Three Colours_) where Zbigniew Preisner's musical score for
once transcends its Mitteleuropa kitsch. It's a pity, then,
that Zizek finds no place to compare Kieslowski's Preisner,
his 'Van den Buddenmayer', with Karl May and The Kelly
Family. At the book's midway
point, framed by tedious digressions -- pompous ramblings on
Heidegger and the Holocaust, in-depth 'critique' of
Minghella's utterly vacant _The Talented Mr. Ripley_ --
Zizek comes up with a tantalising apercu, the strength of
the whole work. In the 1980s with _Blind Chance_ and _No
End_ Kieslowski began to forge a cinema of parallel lives
and so engaged the wider issue of time-travelling, back and
forth, that has exercised the minds of physicists and
evolutionists alike. It is something that affects us all: 'a
new 'life-experience' is in the air', Zizek
claims, 'a perception of life that
explodes the form of the linear, centred narrative and
renders life as a multiform flow . . . Kieslowski's
seemingly 'obscurantist' dealing of the topic of the role of
chance and parallel alternative histories is to be perceived
as yet another attempt to articulate this new
life-experience in the old cinematic medium that promotes
linear narrative' (78-9). Well never mind that
Resnais, Chris Marker, and _Sunset Boulevard_ all did
parallel worlds well before _Mulholland Dr._, Zizek has a
clear point. Cinema's narrative turn at the end of century
has been precisely this, and Zizek is smart in teasing out
the two main variations of that turn, the narrative of
crossing points, or tapestry-narratives, like _Short Cuts_
or _Magnolia_, or the virtual and parallel re-enactments of
the same plot in _Veronique_, _Blue_, _Red_, _Lost Highway_,
and now, one guesses, he would surely add _Mulholland
Dr._ In a way the Californian
strategies of Robert Altman and Paul Thomas Anderson are
obvious. It is the second category that fascinates. In the
last few years we could well extend this list outside of the
American orbit (though Zizek declines to do so): the
delicately interwoven yet parallel time frames of _Ulysses'
Gaze_ and _Eternity and a Day_; the forked-path narratives
of Wong-Kar Wai that culminate with the offscreen couple
shadowing the onscreen couple during _In the Mood for Love_;
the tight collage of interwoven sub-plots without a main
plot that characterises Haneke's eerie _Code Inconnu_. Other
films suggest themselves from just about anywhere with their
own distinct variations: _Close-Up_, _The Wind Will Carry
Us_, A Moment of Innocence_, _Satantango_, _Calendar_,
_Afterlife_, _Amores Perros_, _Intacto_ . . . the list goes
on. Although they come from different sources for different
reasons, there is now a global feel to this narrative turn.
Kieslowski has shared with Kiarostami, for example, the
ideological constraint of an officially determined universe,
though the ideologies in question are as day and night. Yet
such narratives surely undermine the One Way whatever it is,
and in doing so they sit uncomfortably with Zizek's holistic
ruminations in the first part of this book. Just as Zizek is
reluctant to see the source of Kieslowski's virtual
narratives in a conscious anti-determinism, a resistance to
holistic ideology, he is equally reluctant to see the
parallel worlds of American film narrative as a response to
the sheer diversity of that country's open cultures, and
their search, amid perceived chaos and destruction, for
transcendental meanings. As a result, the protean history of
the contemporary world is constantly running away from the
dogmatic concepts by which he tries in vain to pin it
down. University of Edinburgh,
Scotland Footnotes 1. See Slavoj Zizek, ed.,
_Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were
Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)_ (London: Verso, 1992); and _The
Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost
Highway_ (Seattle: Walter Chapin Center for the Humanities,
2000). 2. David Bordwell,
'Convention, Construction and Cinematic Vision', in Bordwell
and Noel Carroll, eds, _Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film
Studies_ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), pp.
87-107. 3. Paul Coates, ''The
Inner Life is the Only Thing That Interests Me': A
Conversation with Krzysztof Kieslowski', in Coates, ed.,
_Lucid Dreams: The Films of Krzysztof Kieslowski_
(Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1999), p. 173. 4. Robert Baird, 'The
Startle Effect; Implications for Spectator Cognition and
Media Theory', _Film Quarterly_, vol. 53 no. 3, Spring 2000,
p. 16. 5. See Gilles Deleuze,
_Cinema 1: The Movement-Image_, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 1992), pp.
87-122. 6. Alicja Helman, 'Women
in Kieslowski's Late Films', in Coates, ed., _Lucid Dreams_,
pp. 119-121. Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 John Orr, 'Right
Direction, Wrong Turning: On Zizek's _The Fright of Real
Tears_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 30, September 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n30orr>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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