Film-Philosophy 16.

1 (2012)

Contrapuntal Close-up: The Cinema of John Cassavetes and the Agitation of Sense Daniele Rugo1
It depends on us, so it is said (Heidegger 1996, 128) Jean-Luc Nancy writes that there is no sense outside our being-together, no sense without us. The philosophical import of this argument emerges from the countersignature of a necessary corollary: that our being-together remains an outside to any specific assignation of sense. According to American director John Cassavetes this is the duty of cinema. His cinema testifies with the use of close-up to a modality of making sense that rests entirely on an in-appropriable term: us. What seems to emerge from the work of Cassavetes is that our way of making sense (therefore of having a world, the only one possible) maintains itself, on one side, on our beingtogether and, on the other, on the impossibility to categorize us under a particular form of being-together. The question can be formulated in this way: is it not perhaps the case that for us to keep making sense, us has to escape the very possibility of a definition? These introductory remarks anticipate a description of the method here followed. The philosophical approach to a filmmaker is not taken simply as the possibility to unravel a convergence between concept and image. The task cannot only be that of treating a film as a philosophical example or to use a concept as a comprehensive approach to a particular cinematographic work. It is a matter of investigating how both philosophy and cinema creatively confront a problem: in this case the problem of our being-together in its relation with the question of sense. It is therefore not a matter of providing an entrance into Nancys philosophy in terms of powers of existence or absolute realism (Derrida 2005, 46) or of describing Cassavetess cinema often labeled as cinema vrit but of how cinema reopens the sense of what happens between us. Moving between philosophy and cinema one is always asked to look for their internal alliance and their creative possibilities. It will be thus a matter of exposing the cinematographic idea as it happens in the image and not to impose ideas from the outside. This work will proceed by unraveling three movements. The first part will treat the question of sense as posed by Jean-Luc Nancy; the second will investigate the relation of sense with cinema; the third will approach a
1

Goldsmiths, University of London: dan.rugo@gmail.com

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) specific strategy at work in Cassavetess films. These three moments cannot be seen as completely separated. This is an attempt to respond to Nancys fragmentary style, where each concept works on an incessant movement of presentation and withdrawal. What becomes apparent through these negotiations is the struggle by which argumentation seems always to lead thinking to moments of incommensurability that revitalize discourse without being resolved. Each concept therefore is articulated as intensification or an adjustment of the others. We Are the World There is no sense without us. There is no sense without our being-together. There is a distance or otherness at the heart of sense. This otherness is not constituted as a reference to a Universal, an Absolute or a Transcendental, but in the event of our encountering one another. Sense is other than itself because it keeps circulating between us. Jean-Luc Nancys proposition demands that one understands what is here meant by sense. 2 To an extent Nancys understanding of the constitution of sense develops from a reading of Heidegger, in particular from Heideggers emphasis on the necessary crossing of the question of the world and that of Being-with-others (Heidegger 2006, 183). As in Heidegger, the question of sense for Nancy always proceeds from a framework of pre-understanding (what Heidegger names fore-having, foreseeing, fore-conceiving). Sense responds to a primordial familiarity with the world: it thus rests on a secondary affirmation and articulation of what we have encountered in our originary assignation (Angewiesenheit) to the world (Heidegger 2001, 120). According to this primordial disclosure of the world, sense is there always to be articulated. Because sense receives a pre-understanding, immediacy and givenness, its work is to be found in how we reopen the obvious: that which we receive. What is in the thing must always be articulated in the world and with Others. Only Dasein is meaningful or meaningless, because the world and others make up Daseins existence. Sense develops then from a primordial familiarity with the world. This primordial familiarity must be entered by Dasein and articulated; it is in this articulation that sense begins. Paraphrasing Heidegger one could argue that sense is such as long as we maintain a relation to it (2001, 120). Sense is the opening of the possibility of assigning things some sense or another, according to the relation into which they enter. If the primordial understanding the Heideggerian Vorhabe, Vorsicht, Vorgriff (Heidegger 2006, 191) must be reopened in terms of concerns and circulation, then the world has to be understood as a set of relationships. The world involves
2

Nancy asks the question of sense in a number of texts, more explicitly in A Finite Thinking: What is sense? What is the sense of the word sense and what is the reality of this thing sense? (Nancy 2003, 5).

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) primarily a relational interpretation. This, however, also means that any enquiry as to the sense of something is an enquiry into sense itself, into the very structure of sense. That an un-grounding and upheaval of sense provides senses framework becomes clear from Heideggers remark that a ground becomes accessible only as meaning, even if it is itself the abyss of meaninglessness (2006, 194). Every time an assignation of sense is performed one is moving right into the structure of sense itself. According to the relational model, understanding the world thus making sense of sense means always to situate oneself at the heart of a sharing. Every attempt at accounting for the singular must necessarily understand the resonances that this singularity has on the circulation of sense (which is quite different from handing the singular over to a universal). The conclusion at this point could be that the creation of sense happens primarily as circulation. One could say that the articulation of the givenness of the world (familiarity) starts with an articulation with and of others. If the logic of sense is the ex-scription always at work in the movement of its circulation, then the only property of sense is its continuous reopening (or exposure to its own differing). It is for this reason that sense can never be closed or assigned once and for all; for its referentiality to work, this must be open again. This, however, means that something shows itself as incommensurable to any specific assignation of sense. Sense is that from which something becomes understandable as that which it is. Something becomes understandable only from its circulation within a world of human existence. Sense is therefore always performed in the circulation enacted by our being-together. Understood in this way, then, sense addresses the world directly, dismissing any absolute or ultimate connotation. This is what Nancy means when he says the world is without reason and that this very lack opens our way to the sense of the world (2007, 11):

If the world essentially is not the representation of a universe, nor that of a here below, but the excess beyond any representation of an ethos or of a habitus, of a stance by which the world stands by itself, configures itself, and exposes itself in itself, relates to itself without referring to any given principle or to any determined end, then one must address the principle of such an absence of principle directly (Nancy 2007, 47). To this effect Nancy traces a deconstructive analysis of the onto-theological tradition in terms of the gradual subtraction of the world as the subject of a representation.3 The more God enters the world and comes to coincide with
3

Of particular relevance to Nancys analysis are the questions Heideggers asks in The Onto-theological Constitution of Metaphysics (Heidegger 2002, 42 76).

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) an organizing principle, the more its divinity is relegated to a complete departure from the world itself. Furthermore, to say that a world is without reason also points critically to the search for an encompassing rationality. As already analyzed by Heidegger in his lectures on Leibniz, the search for a Rational Ground ends in the paradoxical situation of a ground that no reason can account for, leaving every grounding ultimately ungrounded. The world cannot be accounted for, neither by an external principle, nor by an ultimate Being; every account is negotiated in the transimmanent circulation of sense.4 This implies that the world has no ground beyond its own taking place: its sense residing only in our way of in-habiting it. Nancy speaks at times of the end of the world; however, this end cannot mean that we are confronted merely with the end of a certain conception of the world []. It means that there is no longer any assignable signification of world or that the world is subtracting itself from the entire regime of signification available to us (1997, 5). A world without reason is a world whose sense has cleared the horizon and must be continuously reopened. Nancys analysis culminates in an understanding of the world as that which responds to the question of what happens between us. To this effect Nancy writes that the world is a fact without reason or end, and it is our fact (2007, 45). Us can be pronounced only insofar as it is pronounced within the limits of this world here, whilst the sense of the world is always given in the way of the Heideggerian familiarity only insofar as it given to us: given to be given again. Such a manner of thinking permits sense to be grasped in a perpetual form of displacement where the world is both what it is and also what separates itself from immediate givenness. Cinema and the Sense of the World Does not cinema take up precisely this double demand of sense constant opening of an immanence and fix our gaze on this world here, by giving us a look upon a world of which it is itself part and parcel? (Nancy 2001c, 16). Following Deleuzes argument, one can read modern cinema as reestablishing our belief in the world. As Deleuze puts it: what is certain is that believing is no longer believing in another world, or in a transformed world (2005, 167). This belief for non-believers demands that one thinks of a world moving of its own motion, without a heaven or a wrapping, without fixed moorings or suspensions (Nancy 2001c, 44). This is the belief that modern cinema gives us: a belief not falling from the sky cinema speaks also of the silence of God but arising as it were from the
4

See (Nancy 2004).

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) bottom of our bodies. 5 This belief, outside any restoration, must be discovered in the diction of the word world. Instead of an assured, established and permanent sense, modern cinema opens inside itself a world whose sense is withdrawn and must be recreated: as Nancy puts it, neither a realist nor a fictional phantasm, but life presented or offered in its evidence (2001c, 58). Cinema detaches itself from the problem of truth, carrying its work towards what one could call an existence, a discontinuity of the two poles true/false. Nancy writes to this effect: this existence relates to a world: set down, felt, received as a singular point of passage in the circulation of meaning (2001c, 44). Between cinema and the world does not subsist a relation of analogy anymore. Cinema does not represent the world; it does not mirror it. Reality is not simply registered in its immediacy; in cinema, experience is not reduced and incorporated. Instead the impossibility of capturing it under the regime of truth liberates once more the togetherness and the sharing of experiences evidence as undecidability. Once cinema has entered the mode of existence as opposed to that of truth, then the question is posed to our gaze. It is a matter not of receiving the world and its senses, but of deciding over the real as given to us by cinema. This decision passes through our way of looking as a way of articulating the evidence of the world. The image under the regime of existence cannot simply be accepted; it must be done again, recreated in its evidences. These evidences set in front of us by cinema correspond to a disclosure of the world. The world is delivered and therefore separated from its character of mere given. Evidence would stand for the fact that the indeterminate totality of the world is presented to us as a sparkle that extinguishes itself. That the world is given, and given as a whole, makes sense only due to the singular evidences that on one side expose it and on the other discharge both its wholeness (the worlds grip on itself) and its givenness (the worlds eternal resemblance to itself, or what one could call representation). The absolute referentiality of the world is interrupted so that referentiality can keep happening. Understood in these terms, the sense of the world is thus the discontinuity of what keeps happening (Nancy 2001c, 44): wholeness gathered only in indefinite evidences. Deleuze seems to reach a similar conclusion when he writes that falsifying narrations free themselves from the system of actual, localized and chronological relations. The elements are constantly changing according to the relations of time into which they enter and the terms of their connections. Narration is constantly being completely modified. We witness the emergence of purely cinematographic powers. There is something of a doing in my looking: a mobilizing of the world, an agitating and an
5

See in particular the pages devoted to Rossellini and Bresson in (Revault dAllonnes 1994, 21 23).

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) organizing. In a truly Heideggerian way, Nancy remarks that presence is not a mere matter of vision: it offers itself in encounters, worries, concerns (2001c, 30). What this means is that our gazes disclose the real without trying to master it. Looking just amounts to thinking the real, to test oneself with regard to a meaning one is not mastering (Nancy 2001c, 38); one finds cinema in a completely new situation, responding to a radically different definition. Cinema becomes the art of looking made possible and required by a world that refers only to itself and to what is real in it (Nancy 2001c, 18). In this way the evidence of cinema is that of the existence of a look through which a world can give back to itself its own real and the truth of its enigma (Nancy 2001c, 18). The relation between cinema and the world becomes the sharing of an intimacy crossed by a distance that is never absorbed. This distance is exactly what allows not just the relation between cinema and the world to rest entirely on the real (which is therefore not alienated but confirmed and reopened in images), but also the relations within the cinematographic image to take the real into account as its ultimate horizon. It is not just about images and the laws of their accordance. It is about images opening onto the real and carrying this irruption all the way into the givenness of the world. As Nancy puts it: Cinema stretches and hangs between a world in which representation was in charge of the signs of truth or of the warrant of a presence to come and another world that opens onto its own presence through a voiding where its thoughtful evidence realizes itself (2001c, 56). What this implies is engagement with other gazes, a becoming intimate with otherness at a distance. Contrapuntal Close-up John Cassavetes was one of those directors walking within the distance that brings the cinematographic image to the point where what is at stake is not fiction or reality, but rather their continuous crossing (a sort of doublecrossing). In their analysis of Faces (John Cassavetes, 1968), Pierre and Comolli write that Cassavetes does not use cinema as a way of reproducing actions, faces or ideas, but as a way of producing them []: the film is what causes each event to happen (Pierre and Comolli 1986, 326). The occasion for a film for Cassavetes always springs in the midst of the everyday, in the turbulence of the ordinary, when things go wrong, when you get detoured, when you cant find your way home (Carney 2001, 161). These formulas all point in one direction: to make movies about people. This is the main duty Cassavetes saw for himself as a filmmaker: to liberate something in our being-together, to let the sense of our being-together undertake a continuous negotiation. What Cassavetes Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 188

Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) strove for was a cinema that took the chance to approach the image not as a given, but as the outcome of the interruption of lives and contacts. Deleuze captures this when he writes, this is what Cassavetes was already saying in Shadows [(1959)] and then Faces; what constitutes part of the film is interesting oneself in people rather than in the film [] so that people do not pass over to the side of the camera without the camera having passed to the side of the people (Deleuze 2005, 149). What does it mean to interest oneself in people? For Cassavetes it means to find a model that allows people to come to the side of the camera, without the camera deciding on their ways of being-together once and for all. In short, it means letting our being-together articulate and simultaneously withdraw itself. At the same time this means exposing cinemas deficiency to draw a properly spontaneous picture of life, an immediate one. For Cassavetes this deficiency is the very power of cinema, not a negative power, but the very occasion of cinema. Cinema should not keep away from its incapacity to picture reality immediately, but should enter the sense of the world from this very incapacity. What model of being-together emerges from Cassavetess films? The point to be made relates to how the presences on the screen trigger a particular kind of relation. An answer emerges from Cassavetess use of the close-up and the contrapuntal structure this propels. By way of the contrapuntal use of the close-up Cassavetes is able to elaborate a model of distance, a sociality understood in terms of distinction rather than absorption, one in which cinema is shown to collaborate to the articulation of the sense of the world. Faces in particular is a film where the close-up is used to the point of violence: that is to say, to the point where it blocks the smooth flowing of the film. In fact there is nothing smooth about Faces; the film is constantly consumed into a series of impediments, from which the film has to start again. The apparent simplicity of the plot is continuously interrupted and proceeds only in the interruptions themselves. One is always called to mobilize what has crumbled from the image, recollecting a series of leftovers and missed chances. This strategy is conveyed mainly thanks to the use of close-ups or extreme close-ups. By interrupting the plot, by disturbing the organic linkages of the narration, close-ups establish a register that exceeds the story and seems almost to precede it. While the film depicts a stiff social situation characterized by individualism, embedded in the idea of marriage as a constraint whose outcome is a wellknown collection of middle-class repressive norms and betrayals what is liberated in the series of successive close-ups is a distance that calls for a different model of being-together. Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 189

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To put it succinctly, Cassavetess use of the close-up can be distinguished on a number of points: 1. Cassavetes operates what Deleuze calls an erasure of the face (2005, 102). He does so in that he places the face there where it should not be: there where everything else is expected. The face testifies for the dispersion of the evidence. Faces is a film of dispersed (and agitated) presences: this dispersion reaches its peak in the play of close-ups. The close-up is constantly trapped in this leap towards an outside of itself as if it were there to declare its impossibility: the impossibility of recollecting in its frozen gesture any meaningful statement. 2. The faces in Faces do not just suspend individuation, but allow this suspension to trigger the circulation of sense within the film: the sense of the film as situations rendered by a sending toward, rather than by a meaningful closure; the sense of the film as materiality on and through which looks encounter one another. In other words conditions, locations and positions open into absences and at the same time these absences make the happening of relations most evident. Close-ups link one presence to another and in so doing they underline the importance of what the spectators cannot see: the distance required by relation. Close-ups show what is beyond their reach; they push this beyond inside the frame and displace what falls inside the frame. 3. Cassavetes managed to put in the close-up the openness of a long shot by accumulating one close-up after the other. Once the face appears, it appears as the excluded and the intruder at the same time. Close-ups serve to allow the characters to stay together and to prevent one character from standing out, from being singled out. 4. Through the close-up what is established is a mode of relation without relation; what is at stake is a coming of the relation without this having to be announced. Relation is realized in the action and is not then the substratum that motivates and directs the action. In this also resides the great vulnerability of the faces of the film. The measure of this relation the face is itself non-presentable. Pan-orama At the very beginning of The Evidence of Film Nancy writes: capturing images is clearly an ethos, a disposition and a conduct with regard to the world (2001c, 16). What Nancy is expressing here is that the capturing of images exposes the worlds standing on itself and opens our standing in it.

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) Capturing images is an exposing of the world and a way in which the world exposes itself. For Cassavetes the close-up is not just a device thanks to which the director arranges the internal structure of his work; rather, it becomes a particular way of happening in the world and of the worlds passing through the image. The close-up becomes the way to capture and make remarkable the evidence of our being-together. Cassavetess ethos revolves around an attempt to unsettle our gaze. What the director demands on our part is to abandon both an all-encompassing gaze (objects of the film are signified regardless of their singularity) and an absorbed one (the objects of the film replace reality by providing a vision of it): not a panoramic perspective, but our distance to the film and the distances within the film. As the word indicates, panorama, from the Greek !"#$%&"%, means to see everything or, better said, to strive for everything to become visible, to act so that everything surfaces and occupies a place in front of us. The concept of panorama works here on two levels. On one side the panorama is what allows us to gain an overview, a general gathering in front of our eyes: a gathering where presence melts into a plurality that forecloses any singularity from appearing and anything from appearing as singularity. This is the panorama as whole, submitted to a gaze that remains, as it were, outside. One the other side, the panorama also gives to the eye the opportunity of seeing not the whole, but each and every thing, every tiny detail. In this scenario things come from an infinite distance and we descend into them apprehending their porosity, grasping their granular, corpuscular texture; our gaze becomes permeated by things. One should notice that in Faces no character is granted enough space so as to be alone, so as to become the character. The shot-reverse shot composition, which would wrench the individual out of the context, is almost never employed. At the same time one never has the impression of receiving a general overview despite the choral nature of the film. Cassavetes aims to play in between the uprising of the main character a detail that one is forced to take as everything and the presentation of the whole, where every presence is present inside the frame. His gesture is something like a play with distances. To this effect Pascal Bonitzer notes that the camera in Cassavetes accompanies a system of crises (Bonitzer 1985, 8). As Raymond Carney writes, Cassavetes works to resist the individual effort to isolate himself (Carney 1985, 98), so to prevent the individual performer from elevating himself above the in-common into which he is plunged. The character is everywhere put back into a series of relationships (Carney 1985, 98). If one were to fix all this in a formula, one could say: Faces starts with us. This beginning though is never a given one; one never starts by resigning to reified social procedures. On the contrary, Cassavetess films open precisely with a smashing through of common Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 191

Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) measures (thus friendship proceeds from the loss of the friend, couples live off impossible ruins, the individual undertakes a complete expenditure for example, Cosmo or Myrtle or dissipates by chasing him or herself in an outside: Gloria and the kid, Sara and the animals). In Cassavetes beingtogether, our being us, is never a crystallized constellation; the tidiness of its horizon and the prudence of its functions are explored in view of an explosion. Characters do not put themselves to work to reach, as it were, a kind of communality; quite the opposite, the picture is almost always about disintegration. Being-together takes place in this world here as that which holds itself together through the constant reframing of its given senses. In order to achieve this restless taking place of us, Cassavetes orchestrates the closeups in a contrapuntal way. This means that close-ups are independent but harmonically related. They are independent in that they appear not as intimately chained to the series to which they contribute; they are interdependent in that they are not there to underline ones role, gestures, words, face, but to introduce one more close-up, which will revolve around something different, putting the film back into the open. Carney notes that Cassavetes intercuts and edits together close-ups of over forty interrelated glances, responses and adjustments of position (Carney 1985, 101). What emerges from this circulation is the constant pulse of simultaneous presences. In this way us becomes almost a white noise; never falling into complete silence and at the same time creating itself outside absorption into a specific set of significations. Cassavetes seems to try to reply to the demand to say us otherwise than as one and otherwise than as I (Nancy 2001b, 116). By means of contrapuntal close-ups, Cassavetes is able to oppose a play of distance to the double signification of the pan-orama. He never allows us to see the whole, or every detail, of a given situation. He plays in between these two categories. Distance should be thought here as the taking place which is also a habitus, an ethos towards the world of a difference that is constitutive of ones own place. This would be defined as a qualitative distance at the heart of our being-together, but also with regard to every possible association of being-together with one particular reified version of its happening. Distance names on one side the impossibility of closing oneself from others by pushing them at an irreducible distance and the impossibility of understanding being-together without distinction, separation, withdrawal from unity. What happens between us is exposed thus according to a contrapuntal logic whereby the singular is called an each-one each time it exposes itself to the many. In this process the eachone is not constructed and then absorbed, rather it is exposed to its own being-together; it finds itself as the singular as long as it is plural. The singular happens to be together, and this happening is the very essence of its singularity. Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 192

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Discussing the work of Cassavetes, Deleuze points out that, linkages, connections, or liaisons are deliberately weak [], sometimes the event delays and is lost in idles periods, sometimes it is there too quickly but it does not belong to the one to whom it happens (2005, 211). Deleuze proceeds to say that: the characters can act, perceive, experience, but they cannot testify to the relations which determine them (2005, 271). The close-up identifies an element in order to let the identified play with the plurality that its identification exposes. Identifying the singular in this case would also be opening up, gaining access to the plurality. Cassavetes makes clear that the regime of identification is inseparable from a regime of distancing, of even minimal spacing, sharing and circulation. Something in this regime remains incommensurable: in the attempt to name our beingtogether a distance surfaces again, which keeps it outside both the identification of the singular as individual identity and from the higher order of a plural unity. The movement in the close-up is not directed from one to many, but passes both types and rests in this passing, therefore never really resting on anything. It takes place between us, between the each-one and the many. The attention paid in every close-up to the singular and the repetition of this gesture for other singulars, without ever letting one be the only One, are not just cinematic gestures responding to an effort to achieve a choral composition. Rather than producing a common ground, they function as an attempt to reach the eventual trait of our being-together. Being-together, then: an explosion of singularities exposing, each in its own way, an access to the plurality that they also are. This is nothing other than us and nothing less than the circulation of sense. By using the close-up in a contrapuntal way, by cutting several close-ups one next to the other, Cassavetes (dis)organizes the composition: the close-up exposes sociality being-heretogether as a happening that is sustained only by the fact that it is happening as the displaced appearance of each one. Sociality is not reduced but exploded in these situations; what makes it solid, what prevents it from dissolving, is that each one poses a distance that can not be reduced in view of a transcendental or autarchic unity. Many authors have identified a sense of destruction at work in Cassavetess images. Kouvaros speaks of a tension between composition and annihilation at work in the very construction of the image (2004, 149), and of a filming technique that tends to eat away the characters, showering them in too much light or losing them in a deliberate underexposure (2004, 149). Jousse puts it in terms of elusiveness when he says that, the aim of Cassavetess cinema is to show the streams which surround a person, a constantly moving rhythm between Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 193

Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) beings and things which is beyond the self, elusive (quoted in Kouvaros 2004, 117). Locations can abruptly change coordinates while at the same time empty spaces can be suddenly saturated. Events become bigger than life, but in those it is still existence itself, our being-together, that becomes bigger than its acquired meanings. Sociality in Cassavetes and all his films are in this way utterly social never rests on an obligation, a principle: it always takes an adverbial form. This is what contrapuntal indicates: the simultaneity is not simply an appearing of singularities into a higher mode, but the appearing of distinct singularities. This co-appearance is for them neither reception of an extrinsic property the coming of an accident nor giving of intimacy the unleashing of an a priori. Contrapuntal is the distance of one from the other when those ones are together. This sociality responds to the very logic of sense exposed at the beginning: sense is always directed to the world and is always caught in a circulation. This circulation is the very possibility of sense; that there is circulation maintains sense in that openness which provides it with the possibility of further articulating our primordial familiarity with the world. For this to be possible though, the sense of our being-together must constantly remain in the open; the very openness of sense is assured only here, once the instant where circulation is enacted keeps itself, as it were, in the future. This situation of our being-together is barely presentable, if not as the time it takes from one cut to the next, from one close-up to the next, the non-consequential appearance of one face after another. Not presentable because it cannot be reduced to one single vision, this is what makes the with appear and withdraw at the same time. To some extent one could say that those are not images, or barely so, if the image is what detaches itself completely and lies in a temporary isolation. These images never completely disentangle themselves from the series, from other images; the process of extraction that the image necessarily propels is not completely accomplished. This is why Pierre and Comolli can speak of Cassavetess films as having an alcoholic form (Pierre and Comolli 1986, 325). Filming is never simply the attempt to render a narrative or a silent act of witnessing; rather, the camera flings the mundanities of day-to-day life towards a constant crisis whereby we are no longer sure how things come together or what the proper order of things is (one could say that the everyday is taken as a portion of a mobile eternity). Our being-together sustains itself only on the openness of sense, only in presenting itself anew, thus also veering away from reality as the state of things, from the marking of sense. The feverish nature of many Cassavetess films, the feeling of exhaustion and authentic discomfort they convey to the audience, the fact that the action is followed almost in real time, spanning across a short period of time (a few days or even hours): all these factors depend on an attempt to make any reference external to the film itself unnecessary. Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 194

Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) Talking about Faces the director often said that it had become a way of life.6 Rather than delivering the film to the real, the film sucks the real in. Things are left without the time to corrupt themselves nor the origin to find themselves (Blanchot 1999b, 258). Realism here does not try to facilitate forgetfulness of the apparatus, so to capture an immediate presence or to craft the image in so much detail as to look real. Following Cassavetess affirmative acceptance of the deficiency of cinema, the real is taken according to what suggests, that with which our relationship is always alive and which always leaves us the initiative, addressing that power we have to begin, that free communication with the beginning that is ourselves. (Blanchot 1999a, 418) The birth of the film has no other resource than what is happening in front of our eyes, and what is happening is the impossibility of a presence that is not also making itself present and is therefore always on the verge of becoming the instinctual flow of time. The film maintains itself in our power to begin. Cassavetes seems to say: we are always there and this is given not as a condition or agreement, but as the affirmation of something that only lives off this affirmation. Pushing a colloquial formula to paradox, what these films say is: there is no reason for being-here-together, therefore we are here-together. This area of a being-together without reason brings to the fore the very possibility of openness that sense demands as the grasping and veering away from senses immediate presence. In his discussion of the multiplicity of the arts Nancy writes to this effect: the sense of the world is only given by dis-locating at the origin its unique and unitary sense of sense in the general zoning that is sought in each of the many differential distributions of the senses []. There would be no world if there were no discreteness. (1996, 19) Conclusions In this light the with in the expression being-with (being-together is another name for it) remains non-appropriable and its logic comes into sight as one of separation. Without being a thing, the with is that which commands a logic of relation based on the distinction of the terms that engage in the relation. In other words, the separation of the terms imposed by the with is
6

It is interesting to quote the entire of passage of the interview: We decided that if it ended up being ten hours, then thats the film that we're going to make. It became more than just a film; it became a way of life. It became a feeling against the authority that stood in the way of people expressing themselves as they wanted (Carney 2001, 149).

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) that which allows the terms to keep relating to each other. With designates relation in terms of that which happens and withdraws between us. With is nothing, meaning that it is not some thing, which could then fall under a specific signification. As Nancy puts it, the law of the with is that of the distinct that distinguishes itself in entering the relation [] coming to the other and separating itself from it (2001b, 22). Such a manner of thinking permits one to grasp sense in a perpetual form of displacement where the world is both what it is and also what separates itself from immediate givenness. The with is not a simple device, but this very logic of unsettlement and distance: a logic that prevents the becoming absolute of sense in a principle beyond its circulation in the world. That the with of our being-together remains incommensurable to any attempt at making sense of it guarantees circulation. Only a sociality understood in this way reconciles sense with its openness; only understanding our being-together as the resistance to an inscription into one particular sense (destination or fate) maintains sense in the articulation of the obvious contact with the world. The incommensurability of our beingtogether to any specific reference allows us to see sense as the ongoing circulation between immediacy and mediation. Within a cinema that works under the mode of existence, every being and the world itself has to be judged with regard to the life that it involves, and only with regard to this. If Nancy can say that cinema becomes the taking-place of a relation (2001c, 44), this is because perhaps a certain cinema is able to expose what one could call a power of existence: the fact that existences decision is a persisting-in-decision. But in existence it is always us that is at stake, nothing other than the circulation of sense between us. In existence it is always a matter of us undeciding ourselves by responding to a common task, a task imposed on us all together [] to say us exactly there where this possibility seems to vanish sometimes into a one, sometimes into an I (Nancy 2001b, 116). Perhaps this is the opportunity of a cinema that despite the constraints and impediments of production (and these can never be considered simply external factors) still tries to orient itself according to its own inability to grasp life immediately, and remains therefore in a state of agitation. One could thus ask if perhaps in a film exposing this agitation which echoes the deficiency as to the definition of us a crack can be seen to open, which enables us to start dissolving the semblance of the obvious (Adorno 2005, 12).

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Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. (2005) Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Henry W. Pickford, trans. New York: Columbia University Press. Blanchot, Maurice (1999b) When the Time Comes in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays, 201 260. Blanchot, Maurice. (1999a) Two Versions of the Imaginary in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays. Lydia Davis, trans. George Quasha, ed. New York: Station Hill, 417 427. Bonitzer, Pascal (1985) Decadrages. Peinture et Cinema. Paris: LEditions de lEtoile Carney, Ray (1985) American Dreaming: The Films of John Cassavetes and the American Experience. London: University of California Press. Carney, Ray (2001) Cassavetes on Cassavetes. London: Faber & Faber. Comolli, Jean-Louis and Silvie Pierre (1986) The Two Faces of Faces in Cahiers du Cinema: The 1960s. New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood. Annwyl Williams, trans. Jim Hillier, ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp.324-327. Deleuze, Gilles (2005) Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Derrida, Jacques (2005) On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy. Christine Irizarry, trans. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Galeta, trans. London: Continuum. Heidegger, Martin (1996) The Principle of Reason. Reginald Lilly, trans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, Martin (2002) Identity and Difference. Joan Stanbaugh, trans. Evanston: University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, Martin. (2006) Being and Time. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, trans. London: Blackwell. Kouvaros, George (2004) Where Does It Happen? John Cassavetes and Cinema at the Breaking Point. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, Jean Luc (2003) A Finite Thinking. Edward Bullard, Jonathan Derbyshire and Simon Sparks, trans. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc (1996) The Muses. Peggy Kamuf, trans. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc (1997) The Sense of the World. Jeffrey Librett, trans. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc (2000) Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson and Anne OByrne, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc (2001a) L il y a du rapport sexuel. Paris: Galile. Film-Philosophy ISSN 1466-4615 197

Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012) Nancy, Jean-Luc (2001b) La Pense Drobe. Paris: Galile. Nancy, Jean-Luc (2001c) The Evidence of Film. Christine Irizarry and Verena Conley, trans. Brussels: Yves Gevaert diteur. Nancy, Jean-Luc (2004) The Inoperative Community. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland and Simona Sawhney, trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Nancy, Jean-Luc (2007) The Creation of the World or Globalization. Franois Raffoul and David Pettigrew, trans. New York: SUNY Press. Revault dAllonnes, Fabrice. (1994) Pour le cinma moderne: Du lien de lart au monde. Liege: Yellow Now. Filmography Cassavetes, John (1959) Shadows. USA. Cassavetes, John (1968) Faces. USA.

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