Impersonal Enunciation, or The Site of Film - Extracts - Christian Metz

This article was downloaded by: [University of Sydney] On: 24 July 2012, At: 22:36 Publisher: Routledge Informa
Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
New Review of Film and Television Studies

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfts20
Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (extracts)

Christian Metz & Translated by Cormac Deane Version of record first published: 15 Nov 2010
To cite this article: Christian Metz & Translated by Cormac Deane (2010): Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (extracts), New Review of Film and Television Studies, 8:4, 348-371 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2010.514662
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
New Review of Film and Television Studies Vol. 8, No. 4, December 2010, 348371
RESEARCH ARTICLE Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (extracts)

Christian Metz Translated by Cormac Deane*
Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012
Two extracts from Christian Metzs nal book, Impersonal Enunciation, or nonciation impersonnelle, ou le site du lm), are the Place of Film (Le presented: Secondary Screens, or Squaring the Rectangle and Film(s) Within Film. This is the rst time they have been translated into English. nonciation impersonnelle, ou Keywords: Christian Metz (1931 1993); Le le site du lm; lm theory; impersonal enunciation; reexivity
Secondary screens, or squaring the rectangle We are concerned here with the moments when a lm presents us with a spectacle which is inside some kind of frame, door, window, etc. which itself is enframed inside the rectangle of the screen. What happens here is that the source [ foyer ] of the lm redoubles the scopic mediation which is normally required to reach us. Another simple instance of how this effect is achieved is by means of enunciative gestures. The frame within the frame is a familiar device in cinema. It can play a central role in the plot and in the content of certain lms. It can even be used as an emblem, and some lms get their titles from them: Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1954), Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang, 1948) and The Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang, 1944), where the window in the title is itself redoubled by the framing of a photograph. There are yet other lms where the internal screen takes various forms, such as car windscreens, half-drawn curtains and other ways of dividing up the visual eld. More rarely it manifests itself in a literal way. For pel and instance, in the nal image of Renoirs The Lower Depths [1936], Pe Natacha, seen from in front, are walking hand in hand towards freedom down a country road. Then the edges of the frame contract and a secondary, smaller screen detaches itself from the main one and shrinks more closely around the image, which is surrounded by a dark band which connects it to the main frame; it is on this small rectangle that the word Fin is written in the exact dimensions of the smaller screen, almost hiding the image.
*Email: cormacdeane@gmail.com
ISSN 1740-0309 print/ISSN 1740-7923 online q 2010 Cormac Deane DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2010.514662 http://www.informaworld.com
349
In some of its investigations, experimental cinema plays with this same variable boundary with characteristic frankness, without resorting to the pretext of plot, by modifying the dimensions and the shape of the usable screen while leaving the rest empty, up to the point of making us half-believe that it is the main screen, the true one, which varies along the way. In Michael Snows remarkable lm Presents (1980), which, like a piece of music, consists of two distinct movements which answer one another, the rst movement, which mixes the serious and the humorous, shows a young woman enframed in a rectangle which never stops moving, as in those rows of funfair mirrors where at rst you appear obese, and then bony thin, then giant and suddenly tiny. We know from other sources that investigations into the size and the proportions of the cinematic screen, and even into the number of screens, were a major concern for lmmakers such as Abel Gance, and are constantly of interest to the lm industry (Cinemascope, Cinerama, etc.). These are additional aspects of the same phenomenon, but they are not central to what I propose to discuss here. The internal frame, the second frame, has the effect of drawing attention to the main frame, that is to say, to the site [lieu ] of enunciation, of which it is, among other things, a frequent and recognizable marker. Rear Window invites us to watch at length one person, James Stewart, who himself is very preoccupied with looking out his window the lm thus mischievously shows us what we are doing at the same moment. What is more, James Stewart watches with the aid of optical apparatuses (binoculars, then a telescopic camera lens). We have here a matographicite ], performed by the double assertion of cinematographicity [cine viewing rectangle and by the instruments of vision. I will not linger on this voyeuristic mimetism which I have already discussed at length, and which has become a classic theme of cinematographic theory, in relation precisely to lms such as this one, or to Peeping Tom (1960) by the Englishman Michael Powell. The interior frame obeys a principle of redoubling one screen on top of another a metadiscursive principle, but which is no longer the same thing as the commentary, as in the various modes of address I have evoked until now. (I am using commentary in the common sense of the term, and not as it is used by Weinrich.1) A commentary denes itself in always redoubling what it is commenting on, but when it is done by means of language [73], as in the case with voiceover, this redoubling inevitably takes a more or less explicit form. For its part, the second screen is a spatial limitation, a visual restriction, a marking of the visual eld, a picture of the image, and as such, it always has something mute about it. It effects the redoubling without saying it, it accomplishes redoubling without openly declaring it. As for the commentative, we are then dealing with the reexive (here I am in agreement with what Jacques Aumont says concerning the sur-cadre in relation to the opening of Max Ophulss Madame De;2 we may also consider all those lms which open with a theatrical curtain, or with the rectangle of the page of a book, and so on). The commentative and the reexive are the two main registers of enunciation in lm, or more precisely, registers of the perceptible traces which enunciation can leave in lm markings,
350
C. Metz
pictures, etc., because it can also happen, as we have seen, that it leaves no traces, or only very discreet ones. Roger Odin has proposed the notion of the autoreexive3 to designate a mode of reading (not an aspect of lm) which is focused on the functioning of the text, on the work that it does. We can see that I have something else in mind, but that we are thinking along the same lines. Aumont has equally reminded us4 that the process of the cinematographic sur-cadre (I will use his felicitous phrase) is an echo of a very old pictorial practice exemplied notably by the veduta, which is a view through the gap of a window, through the pillars of a colonnade, behind the curvature of an arcade, etc. When it is sufciently separate, the veduta can succeed in splitting the tableau in two. The cinema has witnessed a similar evolution it is the lm within the lm (as distinct from the secondary screen, which I will deal with separately), appearing as an extrapolation of itself, as the means to achieving its own full capacity. Silent redoubling, redoubling in actuality, redoubling by means of spatial inclusion: the secondary screen (and, even more so, the lm within the lm) insistently evoke the mise en abyme of heraldry and the well-known ] Gide: I quite like when one nds, within a commentary it inspired in [Andre work of art, transposed on the scale of the characters, the very subject of the work itself (Journal, 1899 1939). Need we remind ourselves that his novel Paludes is the story of a novelist who is in the process of writing Paludes? In Gides thought, and in certain examples of lms within lms, the rst instance, that which reproduces itself and reduces itself by means of the mise en abyme, is the unusual work, once again as is Paludes [74] (the very subject of the work itself, as Gide puts it). But in ordinary cases, where the interior frame is nothing more than itself, we have the semi-involuntary witnessing of cinematism, as if the gaze has shunted onto another track. It is not the work that grows new shoots as it shrinks, which recreates itself in its very core, rather it is the means of expression itself, the cinema as such (as if, in a coat of arms, some other coat of arms were reproduced). Very often, the second rectangle does not provide anything that condenses or symbolizes the contents of the main one a door may open, but it opens only in the pursuit of a plot point. It is the act of opening itself, understood as a gesture of the screen, which alone bears witness. In all cases, the process is therefore metacinematographic, but it is not necessarily metalmic. However, the metaphor of the coat of arms is quite suitable for the game of interlocking, downsized rectangles which lms so willingly provide us with. It is to be found, for example, throughout almost the entire oeuvre of [Yasujiro ] Ozu. While he does not refer particularly to secondary screens, Marc Vernet has proposed5 what seems to me an important if more abstract notion, which I will keep returning to: that of the diegetization of the apparatus. It happens that lms reproduce more or less faithfully, in the stories that they relate, certain elements or characteristics of the cinema or of its equipment, and which as a result nd
351
themselves to be part of the diegesis. Consider the visual narration of American lm noir, which Vernet analyses in particular, where more than usual emphasis is laid on the contrasting play of black and white (shadows on a shining street). This much-discussed contrast also consists in exploiting, in putting into the story, the technological denition (i.e. high or low) of the black and white lm stock used in making these movies. The interior screen is also a diegetized element of the apparatus, in so far as the second frame, in contrast to the rst one, is motivated by the plot and is supposed to be part of it. And, once again with the exception of the lm within a lm, this is why it does not take the form of the cinema screen, but of an everyday object, such as an attic skylight, or binoculars or the telescopic lens of a rie, the latter two being particularly common in gangster lms. Therefore, the play of second screens may equally [75] be counted among the many processes (we will return to the others later) that enable one to pay attention to the apparatus of cinema to expose the apparatus [montrer le dispositif ], to use the fetishized phrase of the 1970s. If I have treated it separately, it is because, while this famous apparatus consists of elements which could not be more varied from electrical cabling to actors, from cameras to audio ampliers, and from lm emulsions to the seats in the theatre within this complex of synergetic and yet disparate elements, the screen occupies an absolutely singular place. It is the frame and the veil of representation (Bazin, Mitry), that which opens and that which closes the gaze (Aumont6) and the thing which displays and which conceals (as Michel Chion puts it, the place of not-seeing-everything [ pas-tout-voir ]7). It is, in other words, inside everyones imagination and up to a certain point in reality, the place of the lm, its emplacement, the place where it happens. It is not by chance that there are so many expressions such as to adapt a book for the screen, where the word screen can designate the entirety of the cinema-machine. Consider sounds, even those that we call in, however much the evidence all around us tells us that they resound from outside the screen (from all around, inside the theatre); the illusion of depth, however much it dismisses the diegesis beyond the screen, away from itself; and, in the other direction, no matter how sudden close-ups or zooming-in propel the diegesis into our path, ahead of itself. There is no getting away from it it all takes place, for us on (as we comically say) the screen. Within the apparatus, the screen is a strange conduit which governs the reception of the lm during projection, like a narrow pass that gives access to a vast plain, or like a misty corridor that leads to reverie. Other characteristics of the machinery are equally perceptible when the lm is being shown, such as the texture of recorded voices, the choice of focal length or changes made in the nal stages of image correction. But the screen is more than perceptible, it is it has become, historically and socially the condition of and the receptacle for perception. It is also for that reason that it authorizes a strict transmission of visual mise en abyme; we can see a screen within a screen, but we cannot see another cog of the machine a key light inside a key light. The abyss can even become vertiginous, as when every frame frames a frame, for example, as in the famous image in Citizen Kane when Susan is leaving. Multiple doors are arranged in a row
352
C. Metz
along a long corridor, and they open one after the other in a paradoxical effect of reframing that is simultaneously emphatic and static. Or, for example, in the sequence in Scarlet Empress8 in which the three monumental gates of the Tsars Palace open in succession in front of the future Catherine the Great. In Gustav s Ecstasy, a surrealism-inuenced lm of 1933 which is barely Machaty remembered today, the opening of a series of doors is used as a rather naive symbol for the erotic liberation of a character. Sometimes the secondary screen almost manages to recreate, as if to the power of two, the strange and contradictory capacities of the real screen, capacities which are uncertain, real and magic at the same time. In The Golem (the second version of 1920, by Paul Wegener, Carl Boese and Henrik Galeen), Rabbi Loew evokes for his astonished guests the history of the Jewish people, creating an inexplicable apparition with a sweeping, powerful gesture of his arm. As if by tearing the ordinary screen, there appears on a kind of ill-dened, frayed canvas that occupies the top of the frame a moving image of the ight into the desert and, closer to us, the image of the Wandering Jew. And all the while at the bottom of the frame the real participants of the ceremony continue to be visible and to watch, as consequently do we, the really real viewers of The Golem. There is a rather similar construction in Wooden Crosses (1931) directed by ` s. A regiment marches by Raymond Bernard, based on a novel by Roland Dorgele proudly, music in their heads, but in the upper part of the frame a second frame comes forward, where, superimposed on the sky there limps along painfully a pitiful cortege of huddled cripples on their crutches, living examples of the half-deaths that attend their manly and unwitting neighbours in the same rectangle. To return to the diegetization of the apparatus. The progressive opening or closing of a door or of a curtain, actions which are interior to the plot, give the spectator the same point of view on the diegetic space as could have been achieved, for example, by a shutter, which is an extradiegetic and explicitly enunciative process, but which, by a tting circularity, takes its name from window-shutters. In the same vein, lming through a semi-transparent curtain (Sternberg, Ophuls) is equivalent, in Malraux and terms of its sensory effect, to a blur. In Malrauxs Days of Hope [Andre Boris Peskine, 1945], we are favoured with a spectacular forward-moving tracking shot when the vehicle of the partisans launches itself against the large Francoist gun, sacricing itself in order to destroy it. In Ridley Scotts Alien (1979), the doors and airlocks of the spaceship are treated like diegetized irises or shutters (I owe this to an observation by Reda Bensamia during a seminar discussion). There is in sum a correspondence, simultaneously imperfect and precise [77], between certain optical effects and certain motifs or diegetic movements; or rather, perhaps between two symbolic movements, contrary and complementary, opposing and entangled accomplices who explain themselves by means of one another. The same applies to technical processes. Even though they modify, modulate and even model our perception of the diegesis, they are interpreted most often as natural and pre-existing characteristics of the story being told, just as or inversely certain elements of the
353
diegesis can unglue themselves from it without deserting it, they can imitate the discursive intervention, and they can mould our point of view of the other motifs of the story. This surreptitious fusing designates a fundamental characteristic of narrative cinema, which distinguishes poorly between the enunciation and the enunciated, and at times confuses them for its own or for our pleasure. In 1971, before the subject became a commonplace for deconstructionism, I identied this as a type of permanent trucage.9 Roger Odin has shown10 that the opening credits of a lm, normally considered to be extradiegetic and purely informative, because they are shown at a transitional moment also (or especially) have the function of facilitating the entry of the spectator into the plot, and the temporary rupture with reality. We have seen how Jost and Simon oppose11 language, which has special enunciative signs (deictics), and cinema, which does not have any, and which enacts an enunciative usage with whatever sign it can; as a result, there are many aspects to this particularly uid exchange between the enunciation and the enunciated. Supplementary screens offer a privileged example of this permanent interchange. They take many forms which require further discussion. For instance, inlaying video images, which is becoming common, as is the split screen [Metz uses the English term], where the screen is divided into several vignettes. The latter is held in high regard in experimental cinema, and avant-garde video installations push it to its limit by playing with several separate monitors (there are nine in Thierry Kuntzels admirable Nostos II). In narrative lm, screens are most commonly split into two, with the line of demarcation at times solid (as in telephone scenes), or at ne des times invisible, as during the opening credits of Magnet of Doom [La Ferchaux ] by Jean-Pierre Melville, where two versions of Jean-Paul Belmondo appear in a boxing match, the right and the left of the screen corresponding with a disconcerting similarity. (Here, as is also often the case with Thierry Kuntzel, it is not only [78] the screen which splits into two, but also the action.) Elsewhere, the split screen frames two portions of a complicated space where a man is being pursued, and creates a space for real topographic virtuosity consider the scene of the corridor and the staircase in [Brian] de Palmas Sisters (1973) when the husband (who is a doctor) comes down from Danielles room while the police go up; or once again, the simultaneous presentation, in the same lm, of shot and reverse-shot when the dark-skinned TV game-show player is dying in agony we can see from inside the room as he tries to make a sign out the window, while in the other screen the neighbour opposite can see the pitifully weak movements of his hand barely visible on the glass of the window. We should also consider double exposure, which in principle condenses two screens. But Marc Vernet has convincingly shown12 that on the contrary it consists of suppressing the frame of one of the two images, and of diffusing one image across the whole of the other image. In this way a face may be read as an emblem of an entire landscape, while the landscape in its turn endows the face with something of its inanimate majesty. Thus double exposure is the extreme evolution of second screens, while at the same time their negation.
354
C. Metz
But lets get back to second screens. They may take many forms, yet they all share a certain something. Enunciation, like a high tide, brings them to us, and then deposits them on the beach. But then they drift back and forth with the ebb and ow of the tide, the ebb and ow of story and adventure. They manage nonetheless, from wherever they are, to mimic the very thing that gives them the capacity to be seen, and to transmit a half-lie to us that it is they that make us see. In Robert Altmans Secret Honor (1985), an impressive piece of political intrigue about Watergate, the resigned president, played with great skill by Philip Baker Hall, is shut up in his ofce, feverishly preparing his defence. He points the cameras of the buildings surveillance system onto himself, and it is on the systems monitors, on these multiple, small rectangles that his rage and distress are diffracted, thus enabling the spectator to contemplate them . . .
355
Film(s) Within Film In a way that is similar to the act of exposing the unseen workings of a machine or the activities of a religious celebrant, the lm within the lm, to use the contemporary name given to it, is a reexive gure. This is the case because the principle of redoubling functions out in the open, as close as possible to what is evident, so that one lm shows us another lm as it is being projected. It is a process almost as old as cinema itself. In the short comic lm, Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show13 [Edwin S. Porter, 1902], we see the character Uncle Josh show his astonishment in front of a cinema screen because he has never seen a lm and does not know what one is. (The conceit is clearly metacinematographic, and has many parallels with the theatre, not only in Pirandellos conceits but as early as, for example, Corneilles LIllusion comique, where the character of Pridamant cannot tell the real from the ctional.) Much more recently, George Roy Hills Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) offers us a delicately made yet archetypal instance of the lm within a lm: during the opening credits, to one side of the screen [94], a ickering western from the silent era insistently plays. Nestled there from the outset, it has the function of an epigraph that opens the big western that hosts it. Different forms of the mise en abyme have been studied, in particular by Lucien llenbach in relation to literature, and by Jean-Paul Simon in relation to lm, as well Da as in the journal Vertigo and by Jacques Gerstenkorn, Kiyoshi Takeda, Dominique her and others.14 However, the approach I take here differs from these in so far as, Blu for me, the mise en abyme is only one of numerous manifestations of a principle of a more broadly dened reexivity. Ordinarily, reexivity and the mise en abyme are considered, if not synonymous, then at least largely coincident. So, what interests me about the abyss is not the abyss, but enunciation. Here I will adopt an ad hoc classication system, starting straight off with the most simple, and without attempting to replace previous ways of classifying it. The lm within the lm, or more precisely the relation between a lm and its primary lm, can lead to very diverse congurations which mark out the work of enunciation with varying degrees of clarity and complexity. This is the case even if the mere presence of the second lm already stands as an automatic and minimal marker. I will distinguish three types, which are in fact degrees, of enunciative force, or if you prefer, degrees of exactitude in the ways that a text can fold back upon itself (there are of course intermediate cases). The strong variant, the third one, is in fact the only one where a true mise en abyme takes shape. In the rst two cases, the story of the lm speaks to us about other lms, which are quite distinct. It is as if the Gide] were to write poems instead of working on Paludes, writer of Paludes [Andre or better and I will come back to this as if a coat of arms were broken into quarters by another coat of arms. In an old article,15 I opposed these simple (metacinematographic) redoublings with double redoubling (which is metalmic, and more fully reexive), which is what the mise en abyme is in the proper sense [95]. This can be formulated in the following way: the presence of a second lm, which is
356
C. Metz
the same lm. It is this same which we will need to be more precise about, because it manifests itself in several ways, which are not all the same . . . But I will start at the other end of the spectrum. The simple degree is that which, not unparadoxically, most deserves to be called the lm within the lm because the second lm is located at one (or several) point(s) inside the enveloping, host lm. What we have here is clearly delimited embedding, a well marked-out interrelationship, and not multifarious intricacy or complex hybridity. So in a detective lm, a man is being followed, so he hides himself in a nice dark cinema in an attempt to elude his pursuers. Acting on his fear in this way, just as instinctually as a screenwriter who has run out of ideas, he bunches up into a ball on his seat. We then see and hear via him indistinct snatches of some cheap, shoot-em-up western. Wouldnt the effect be vastly different if the unlucky man took refuge in the aisles of a minimarket, or between rubbish bins in a dark alley, something which, incidentally, he will not fail to do in the course of the lm? The process of embedding can be less trivial, such as at the end of Pee-wees Big Adventure (Tim Burton, 1986), where the executive from Warner Brothers, which is in fact the real studio behind the lm, buys from Pee-wee the rights to the story of all the adventures we have just seen him go through. We then see a small part of the entirely different lm that they proceed to make. There, the hero is relegated to the insignicant role of a hotel bellhop. He is even deprived of his own voice, speaking instead in a smooth bass tone . . . Another variant: we are presented with what we have already seen as real (within the main lm) as being in fact a lm which a character is supposed to have made. This is the case in It Should Happen to You e (George Cukor, 1954) when the unfortunate suitor, obliged to abandon his ance who is intoxicated with her own ill-gotten fame, leaves her a small farewell lm which replays in a sad way several scenes based on their past meetings. But that is not all. There is also the case of what should be called quotations not to be confused with allusions, winks, pastiches, remakes, private jokes, etc. which (often16) offer us very pure instances of simple embedding. The practice of quoting (I am speaking of quoting which the spectator recognizes and cannot fail to recognize as quoting) assumes simultaneously that the lm which is being quoted is somewhat known, and that the viewers are somewhat au fait with it [96] (see, for example, the sequence from Bicycle Thieves [Vittorio de Sica, 1948] in Ettore Scolas 1974 lm We All Loved Each Other So Much). To the metacinematographic dimension may be added the dimensions of history and of cinephilia, twin factors which give great force to the enunciative intrusion. Examples of true quotations are now very numerous, especially since the cinema has started contemplating itself as a lost object, and feeds on its own interminably commented-upon bereavement, a process initiated by the Nouvelle Vague.17 A Strange Love Affair, an independent lm by Paul Verstraten and Eric de Kuyper (1985), remakes in an elegant, emotional way the sequence from Johnny Guitar [Nicholas Ray, 1954] which deals with the question of affectionate relations that have been long interrupted, and of whether they can be revived if
357
and when circumstances allow. Rays sequence is cited twice in A Strange Love Affair: rst only the sound, during a class on cinema given by the hero of the story, and then the image and the sound together, which he plays when he gets home. We are already encroaching on the next types in this classication because the contribution of Ray adds complexity to the whole (later) lm, which is without doubt the best that has been made on the subject of love between two men. But in terms of textual space, the location of the source of the quotation is clearly indicated. In On the Town (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1949), a short comic stage musical (but lmed, of course), there is another lm embedded at the heart of the main lm, played by the same actors but against a backdrop of glowing, abstract scenery. This other lm summarizes and symbolizes the main story in a schematic but, when all is said and done, complete fashion.18 The secondary lm is a metaphorical intensication of the main lm. Another classic case of overt embedding but this is an immense subject would be amateur lms, with their shaky images and constant lurches in quality, and the thin-sounding, low-key, whirr of the projector. We could say that the enveloping lm, like an adult who amuses himself by evoking his childhood, attempts to revive inside itself the crackling of old lms as they icker and stutter, as if in search of the secret [97] of some primordial sound (see Patrice Rollet19 and Michel Chion20), in order to remind itself where it has come from, and to say so to itself. The key work in this genre, which brings much else of note to the genre, is without doubt Bernards Algerian lm in Muriel ([Alain] Resnais, 1963).21 Some of its other features bring to mind the categories such as frequent returns and narrow thematic parallels with the enveloping lm. There is no shortage of pure (and more modest) examples: in the midst of Les Aventuriers (1966), director Robert Enrico embeds a short Super-8 lm, previously lmed by one of the characters, which represents with some evocative force (by means of browngreen tone and trembling twilit images, along with an atmosphere of panic and of end of empire) the hurried ight of a rich Belgian colonist, who has bought the protection of paratroopers just at the moment of the decolonization of the Congo. It is possible to gather in an intermediate category the various, still numerous, devices where the enveloping lm intermingles more closely with the second lm(s). Thus an alternating structure is sketched out, but in an overall context where the main lm summons the included sequences and shots according to its own needs. In this way, no kind of symbiosis or permanent connivance between the two lmic levels establishes itself, because these would be characteristic of fully reexive congurations. Pushed to its limit, this logic leads directly to montage. Even if the secondary images occupy the whole of the duration of the lm, and even if the main lm is reduced to acts of speaking (as happens frequently), it is still this commentary which enframes the whole thing, and which brings all the parts together. The commentary is indeed the thing that constitutes the main lm, the thing which is the lm.
358
C. Metz
Fiction lms offer other generally less extreme examples of this structure, which has become common since popular cinema has itself become sophisticated, and other cinema even more so. Franc ois Truffauts Love on the Run (1978) is a lm that tells its story in two ways at the same time by unfurling in front of our eyes its proper (main) plot, and also by copiously quoting [98], as the desire takes him, so to speak, from the four previous lms (but which are secondary here) of the Antoine Doinel Cycle, which it feeds on and which for this lm represent History: The 400 Blows [1959], Stolen Kisses [1968], Bed & Board [1970] and Love at Twenty [1962] [all directed in whole or in part by Truffaut Trans.]. Biquefarre ([Georges Rouquier,] 1983) remakes several sequences from Farrebique [1947], which was made 38 years before by the same director and in (almost) the same locations. But this is done in order to show better the present state of the countryside and the profound changes that have taken place in comparison to the older lm. It is a one-way relation, once more the narrative of today integrates into itself pieces which it takes as it pleases from that of yesterday, while the older lms construction and internal coherence remain other in 1983. In A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later (1986), Claude Lelouch organizes with great playfulness and nesse two distinct series of quotations, each having consequences for the plot. On the one hand, we have of course his lm from 1966, A Man and a Woman. We ought to study, by the way, from the point of view of enunciation, directors who desire certain actors to make repeated comebacks aud in Truffauts work, Wayne in Ford, because they echo former lms, as in Le ` ne in Sternberg, everybody in Bergman, blonde Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini, Marle actresses in Hitchcock, and so on. On the other hand, to get back to A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later, the images of Hitchcocks Dial M for Murder (1954) insistently appear within the narrative every time a television set is on, or as soon as someone switches one on. In a more general sense, this lm constantly intermingles, not without artice, three different levels of reexivity: 1. The young ones, Richard Berri and Evelyne Bouix, often repeat gestures or actions which were performed by e and Jean-Louis Trintignant in A Man and a Woman; 2. The images Anouk Aime from the older lm are frequently interpolated into the new one; 3. The older heroes themselves reproduce in the second lm the postures which they had in the rst lm, in particular Trintignant when he is behind the wheel of his car, seen from in front through the windscreen, with lashing rain and the obligatory windscreen wipers on. In cases of perfect redoubling, the turning in on oneself, the rst lm weaves itself through another which is not truly another, and which is not truly within ` travers le lm] is an the other. Unfortunately, lm through a lm [lm a impossible expression. However, the relation between the two textual layers is indeed that of a crossroads, imbrication, braiding or entanglement, at the limit of symbiosis. There are multiple types, and every inventive work adds another. But in every case, it is the duality [99] even of the lmic levels that are shown which nds itself threatened, superseded or brought into question.
359
At times, in experimental cinema, the main or rst lm (which is also the second one, as we shall see) has been made using the lm stock of a second lm (in fact, the rst lm), which is re-shot and transformed according to the desired goal. In 1969, Ken Jacobs created a lm-demonstration of 118 minutes, entitled Tom, Tom, the Pipers Son, which used as its starting point a 1905 10-minute chase-farce of the same name attributed to one of [D.W.] Grifths technicians, Wilhelm (Billy) Bitzer. It extensively quotes the earlier lm at the start and the end. The rest of the time Jacobs works on the body of the lm, sometimes shot by shot, and sometimes distorting the image, reframing some details and inserting blank/white photogrammes [ photogramme means either an individual lm frame on the celluloid, or a photogram, that is, a photograph produced without a camera. Jacobs lm possibly supports both of these meanings Trans.]. (See Dominique Noguezs analysis of this.22) Eureka by Ernie Gehr (1974) seems at rst sight to be an interminable forwardtracking shot, running at a surprisingly low speed, along the whole length of San Franciscos Market Street, gradually approaching a building that has not existed since the earthquake of 1906. But in reality, Gehrs work essentially consists of expanding a lm made prior to the earthquake, which had been lmed in just such a travelling shot, but which he runs at normal speed.23 Once again, this is an intervention on the lm stock itself, at the very core of the other lm, in its most intimate aspect, which has transformed the other lm at this point. In cases of this type, the rst lm, that is, the lm, is sewn into the body of its predecessor, in the way that a housewife will refashion a dress to create another one. In a modern gure of metempsychosis (transmigration of the soul), the rst lm is a second avatar of the second lm. This effect of transubstantiation may apply in completely other circumstances, as the (avowed) philological desire to reconstitute an old lm (which thereby becomes the second lm) in its supposed historical textual integrity, an integrity which the rst lm realizes. It can happen, through a strange paradox, that this devotional return to an origin is accompanied by some voluntary renovations carried out on the body of the venerated ancestor. When compared to the previously available copies of Fritz Langs Metropolis [1927], Giorgio Moroders recent (1984) intervention involves several distinct changes which do not all have the same impact and are not entirely coherent. Some shots from the original which had been lost were rediscovered by Moroder (or by Enno Patalas at the Munich Film Museum). Others were more or less arranged, or fabricated, on the basis of the script by Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou [100], and on the basis of still photography. The typography of the intertitles was changed, while colour and music were added with due consideration. The nal result is somewhat ambiguous. Moroders lm, the main one, encapsulates that of Fritz Lang (the second one!) by means of a multiple process of addition and excess which simultaneously pulls it backwards ( restoration, the spirit of history) and forwards ( taking a modernist twist). But it is nevertheless the same lm. Roger Odin has suggested a highly original interpretation of this
360
24
C. Metz
metamorphosis: it is a question of adapting the lm for a new spectator who is more concerned with visual and musical rhythm than with ctional knowledge. Another, more contemporary case is when the main narration is built on a tissue of inserted lms which are numerous and short, and which themselves make up a signicant portion of the length of the enveloping lm. The prototype for this could be Woody Allens Stardust Memories (1980). The subject lends itself to the technique the hero, played by Allen, is a lmmaker, and the better part of the lm plays out in the form of separate, successive scenes which once might have been called a stream of consciousness. These consist of parts of his own lms that he is thinking about, his picture-memories, his fantasies, his regrets and even a hallucination. (There are not only second lms, but also imaginary sequences, ashbacks and so on, but later I will discuss the kinship shared by every diegetic repeating and the lm within a lm.) At the centre of this mosaic, and making up part of it, are real scenes, which themselves are chopped up nely as in 81 2 [Federico Fellini, 1963], which seems to be the inspiration of this lm and offered in order to throw some brief, scattered light on the life of the hero in the present. He is spending a few days out of the city, staying at the Stardust Hotel, to attend a festival of his lms. The professional interpreters of his work and his fans persecute him. Reality and various layers of his imagination interplay in a chamber of echoes, because they are all peopled by the same characters (and are subject to metamorphosis when they switch from one psychic level to another). They form in themselves a complete and confused universe, just like the universe that each of us inhabits. The disparate multiplicity and the expanding number of episodes render in advance articial any too-strict distinction between the main lm and its secondary inclusions. On the contrary, the peculiarity of the enunciative structure here is due to the constant shifts of its source [ foyer ] and the disordered intermixing of the material that these shifts convey. It is also worth noting a strong variant of the mise en abyme, a variant which is no longer rare but is not yet common either: the short lm that occupies the very start of the lm in such a way that one is forced at rst sight to take [101] it as the true lm. Here, it is the scene of the two trains, and is similar in this respect to the car race that opens the Lelouch lm discussed earlier. It can also happen that the main lm is made only out of second lms, and contains nothing, or almost nothing, which stands apart or is exclusive to it. In a way, this is the case in Citizen Kane, which has been remarkably analysed from a similar standpoint by Marie-Claire Ropars,25 as well as by Seymour Chatman, Gianfranco Bettetini, Francesco Casetti, Michel Marie and others.26 We may note once again that a ashback the form of every one of the narratives by the witnesses (the butler, Leland and so on) in this lm may be regarded as a kind of lm within a lm. Elsewhere, the rst section of the narrative, the newsreel, is actually a lm. This has its desired effect, and Woody Allen imitates it. With Welles, the included lm, News on the March, is in theory fully distinct from the true lm of which it is the opening section, but everything in what follows works to undermine this certainty. The rest of the narrative is simply a juxtaposition of several versions of News on the March, each episode being ONE lm of the life of Charles Foster Kane. By contrast,
361
the newsreel is retroactively transformed, because of its structural similarities, into a supplementary ashback. After (or rather before) we are given the point of view of all who were close to him, we are given the point of view of Society, of America. And then, this sequence provides the thematic matrix for all of the others (see Michel Maries examination of this), with the result that the lm spends its time retracing its own steps. Allusive intricacy and expansion are thus the means which in this case enable the lm within the lm to haul itself up to the dimensions, or more exactly to the contours, of the entire lm. To the same family (broadly dened) belongs Rashomon [Akira Kurosawa, 1950], another illustrious and much written-about lm. It consists of secondary (yet strongly autonomous) narratives instead of truly included lms. In another sense, so too do Chris Markers Letter from Siberia (1958) and many others. If we let ourselves get carried away in the process of progressively expanding and overgeneralizing our survey, we would be well to add numerous episodic lms, such as Dance Program [Julien Duvivier, 1937] [101]. In sum, all of these lms consist of several lms, in the many senses of the verb. But that would be to go too far. With this lm we reach, or rather we cross, the threshold that separates lms made out of lms (or at least out of multiple narratives) from series of lms that are articially assembled, whether this be for commercial reasons, for the illustration of some shared theme, or for both. Reexivity disappears, as we can see from episodic lms of the current type, and yet more clearly, when we consider one notch further, that is, lms that are authored by several directors (Six in Paris [Paris vu par . . . ] (1965), Of Life and Love (1953), New York Stories (1989)), even when these lms pride themselves on having this or that unifying theme. Another, very different construction which diffracts the second lm throughout the main lm is the interactive type, of which there are two incontestable classics: Sherlock Jr. ([Buster Keaton,] 1924) and The Purple Rose of Cairo ([Woody Allen,] 1985).27 In both cases, there is no longer a mix nor a surreptitious superimposing going on between the included lm and the lm-lm. They remain properly separated, but the great novelty, and the thing which stirs them up in their own distinctive ways (or rather which braids them together), is the way that they are interconnected in terms of cause and effect. In The Purple Rose of Cairo, for example, we may remember that the real young woman astonishes and seduces the actor in the secondary lm, who nishes by (physically) abandoning the interior screen while taking care not to stay in focus, and by making a very conspicuous intrusion into the primary narrative, before the heroine, in an inverse trajectory, penetrates the screen. The narrative is made up of these back-and-forths. We can move from one lm to the other, and the relations between the two can be summed up by the famous political formula independence within interdependence [this phrase dates from a November 1955 speech at the National Assembly, when Edgar pendence dans linterde pendence for Tunisia, which was a Faure projected linde French colony until the following year Trans.]. We know that Man with a Movie Camera [Dziga Vertov, 1929] introduced a great number of profoundly original forms, often differing from all of those that I
362
C. Metz
have just described. I will choose one of them. In the sequences which interest me here, the included lm, which is highly discontinuous and dispersed although omnipresent, consists of nothing but a segment of the enveloping lm itself, provisionally extracted and, as it were, downgraded, that is, transformed in front of our eyes into a second lm. The inner lm, in sum, is (in that moment) the main lm, especially manipulated by enunciation, a lm which includes itself. The most clear-cut example is without doubt that of the cyclist. He is initially lmed normally, in full ow and in the open air, and then just after that [103], the following shot shows him (it is indeed the same man) on the screen in a cinema with several rows of seats visible and a little bit of space around the screen. The kinoks [Dziga Vertovs circle of Soviet lmmakers Trans.] have lmed him, and this reportage is now being projected in a cinema in Moscow, so the current reportage no longer shows us the cyclist himself but rather this projection. The main lm has shed a little part of the lm stock in order to give body to the interior lm, and it has withdrawn itself a little in order to keep its distance and to maintain its hallmark of precedence. It would be vain to pretend to recount all the strong forms that the mise en abyme can take. But I hope I may be permitted to recall briey what I have said about this before28 in relation to 81 2. It is the story of the lmmaker Guido (played by Marcello Mastroianni, but there is no doubt that he is a stand-in for Fellini himself), who is in the process of preparing a lm. This lm, after all that we are told about it, ought to bear a family resemblance to 81 2. But we never see a single frame of it. What is narrated are the preparations for the (absent, but much discussed) secondary lm whose production will never be completed, leaving a gap that can be lled only by the main lm. The sole, eminently enunciative, difference being that Fellini has made a lm out of Guidos non-lm. This major, constitutive discrepancy makes itself felt throughout, notably in the sumptuous nal scene, where we see the enchanted circle of magical or grotesque characters who people the imagination of Guido Fellini, who is represented by a small boy dressed entirely in white in the middle of this enchanted circle. The decisive moment comes when Mastroianni, the lmmaker in the story, himself enters into the circle and nds his wife, Saraghina, etc. and thus becomes one of Fellinis characters. The main lm becomes unstuck, separating itself just at the moment when the two lms are completed. The lm within the lm is the lm itself. The mise en abyme structure reaches its full paradoxical force when there is no longer an included lm, that is, when the two lms, which are avowedly distinct, are physically totally confused. This is the symbiotic type. It is quite rare, but we come across it (a little less perfectly achieved) for example in the ne lm Tangos, the Exile of Gardel (1985) by Fernando Solanas. The story concerns some Argentinians in exile in Paris, tragic and comic, courageous and confused, in a permanent state of romantic, generous and shabby self-derision, superlatively sympathetic, who undertake to compose a tangedy, that is, a tragedy comedy tango. We never see any of this work, only scraps and magnicent shots of rehearsals. But the entire lm [104] is this tangedy just as
363
they describe it in their conversations within the story, they who have not managed to compose it but have managed to have it done, when all is said and done, by this lm which, with a unique ourish, both recounts and effaces their setback. In Emergency Kisses/Les Baisers de secours (1989), Philippe Garrel plays the role of a lmmaker who is preparing a lm. It is only a project and will stay that way until the end. We will never see a single shot. The lmmaker tells us that in this lm he will play the character of the lmmaker and that he will speak notably about his relations with his wife, relations that occupy a lot of space in the real lm. The secondary lm is only an echo projected through the main one, a carefully designed shadow. It does not distinguish itself in any way, except in so far as it asserts that it distinguishes itself.29 There exists a particular form of reexivity where the redoubling is at the same time perfect and strictly circumscribed. I want to discuss famous people who play themselves, as Fellini and De Sica do in We All Loved Each Other So Much, Brice Parain in Vivre Sa Vie [Jean-Luc Godard, 1962], etc. This is a current trend, or at least it has become so. It is clear that they are not really playing themselves (otherwise they would have no need of a director) and that they are shot as part of the ction. But the effect of recognition is nonetheless inevitable for viewers who are familiar with them. In relation to Pee-wees Big Adventure, we saw how a movie studio (none other than Warner Brothers) could equally play itself, showing that the exercise is not limited to people. There are also intermediate cases, where someone plays a role which is not exactly him- or herself (or indeed, depending on the lm, is not declared as such in the lm), but who comes very close to it and is, according to all the evidence, conceived to be such. Fritz Lang in Contempt (Godard, 1963) would be one of the best examples of this. Simple resemblances, even partial ones, can still be striking. So there is hardly any doubt that some of the traits of the heroine of A Star is Born [George Cukor, 1954], Vicki Lester, the singer in the musical, are modelled on those of the person who acts her, Judy Garland, with the result that at times she plays a role that she greatly resembles [105]. In one sequence of A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later, the viewer nds himself with a jolt in the centre of a vast Franco-Anglo-American military camp, evoking the 1940s as well as the 1980s, a place where soldiers and ofcers in various uniforms crisscross one another in all directions. We think at rst that all of this is real, that is, a diegesis at the primary level, and we do not understand what this heterogeneous army will do in the story. But fairly quickly a change of framing reveals a camera (which is obviously not THE camera), as well as all of the equipment that goes with it. This camp scene was in the process (or on the point) of being shot by a crew of lmmakers, and the lm (if we are to believe it) was showing us this scene because in the story the character Anne (Anouk e) is by profession a producer. Aime We cannot say exactly, in relation to the images of the camp itself (before the revealing de-framing), that the moment of enunciation exposes the apparatus to us. What we are shown here is supposed to be lmed, whereas the apparatus is on the side
364
C. Metz
of the one who is lming. Nor is it a lm within a lm anymore, because it is not presented to us as nished and pre-existing, and it is not projected onto a screen. We tranger ]. That is, are shown, if I may put it like this, an alien prolmic [ prolmique e the prolmic material30 (i.e. that which is placed before the camera) of a lm other than the main lm. The process is quite common. It always achieves its effect, which is a simple one, seeing that the lmed prolmic object resembles by denition the lmic object. The viewer cannot fail to confuse, for a very short moment, the included prolmic object with the enveloping lmic object, something which authorizes various surprises and tricks in the screenplay. We even nd false alien prolmics (!), as for example in Ettore Scolas lm mentioned a moment ago, where we see the representation of Fellinis preparations for the scene at the Trevi Fountain in La dolce vita, but they are reconstructed by Scola in his own manner, despite the presence of Fellini in the image . . . Fellinis Intervista (1987) is an almost unequalled source for enunciative moves and reexive reworks. This conceit obviously lends itself to marvelling at these games. It is a book of memories of a lmmaker, Fellini himself, as always, and it ` , the cinema-city. The richness of the constructions is also a ships log of Cinecitta which redouble and indicate the source of the lm is almost excessive. It can give us the feeling [106] of a rather forced investigation, of a ludic waywardness that has its origin in the self-indulgence that is peculiar to this auteur and which alienates some people (though I am not one of them). This is also the reason why Intervista is sometimes considered a minor lm in Fellinis oeuvre, which no doubt has a little truth to it. It is still the case that the reexive paths in this lm cross one another according to a particularly complex, indeed overwrought, design. To start with the music: it is not by Nino Rota, rather we owe it to Nicola Piovani, but Piovani re-used long passages that Rota had composed for earlier Fellini lms, music which Michel Chion has written about so well.31 Thus the past of his oeuvre is present in the present. The entire lm is at the same time a lmed lm lmed by a Japanese television crew who have come to interview Fellini in the here and now of the narrative and it is a lming lm, that is, a lm that lms at length and at leisure many acts of lming. ] which together Intervista unfolds according to three degrees of lmicity [ lmicite form a stack of instantaneously interchangeable elements. There are secondary lms within the lm, but this lm is itself the secondary lm of another, virtually main, lm, the Japanese television show, which we will never see and the recording of which is secondary within the main lm. In Intervista, Film 1 does not show us only the apparatus of various Film 2s (as well as, frequently, its own), but also their shooting and their prolmic elements. This prolmic material becomes lmic (and consequently itself carries out a shoot in the lm within the lm) as soon as Camera 1 advances, leaving Apparatus 2 out of shot, and thereby becomes indistinguishable from Camera 2. We see the same thing in the fragment of lming Kafkas novel America, and for the Hindu lm with the lmmaker on speed and the cardboard elephants, and so on.
365
This structure extends even to the auteurs own conception (screenwriterly or real?) of his own life. Now old and in interview (hence the title, Intervista) Fellini separates himself from his past under the guise of a young journalist and interviewer who will, more than once, coexist visually with him, a him that is played by him . . . At one stage, he gives him a fake boil on the nose (under our noses) so that he comes across as more adolescent. Thus Fellini-the-actor, playing Fellini-the-character who himself represents Fellini-the-lmmaker and moreover, the auteur of the present lm, as it will be made clear, but not immediately gently teases another character of whom he suggests at a turning point in the dialogue that he could be [107] the real young Fellini, all the while designating him (him, Fellini-the-actor), by means of this boil, as an actor. However, as in 81 2, at the end, the primary enunciation exercises a merciless right to remake [droit de reprise ] over all the gures to which it itself has granted a provisional and fake independence. After the night spent in the tent and the attack of the Indians armed with television aerials (justied in the main lm by a second lming on a neighbouring set), Fellini-the-actor-character-auteur reappears in force and sends his crew off on their Christmas holidays (this is the end of the main lm). He then takes care to remind us, by means of the second, real ending (featuring a clapper loader announcing Intervista, 1, Take 1), that he is the only director and that of all of the lms of which we have seen parts, the only lm that we have truly seen has been Intervista. Under less marked forms, this right to remake, as Bernard Leconte has commented,32 is one of the functions that are guaranteed by all of the credits that are placed at the end of the lm. Do we need to add that the distinction between the moment of enunciation and the auteur the auteur whom some comically insist on calling real, as if there were any that were unreal that this distinction, which for its part is indeed real and which needs to be maintained, does not impede in any way the empirical distance between the auteur and the source [ foyer ] of the lm a distance that is psychological, historical, etc. and which is never zero, since the work exists in a separate state nor does it impede that distance from being highly variable and at times, as is the case here, from becoming very weak? It is enough that Intervista exists, that is to say, is projected at various times and in various places, so that we do not confuse the textual source [source ] with the person of Fellini. However, the text itself is constructed as much as possible (and even a little more than that . . . ) to foster this confusion. And this confusion is also a truth since the lm, quite obviously, wants to be a Fellini by Fellini. As I alluded to earlier, the ashback shares something with the lm within a lm, at least in so far as it has the effect of making a cut at the heart of the narrative. It does not detach itself as frankly from the main narrative ow, seeing that it does not show us a part of itself as if it were another lm. However, the basic rule for every narrative is to move forward, chronologically and causally (we may remember what Roland Barthes said on the subject), so that, when it repeats, as if obeying the instruction Da Capo [from the beginning Trans.] in musical notation, when it restarts at a point situated behind itself, the thing which
366
C. Metz
becomes established at that point is another separated narrative [108] in the same story (this method has only a phenomenal value, seeing as in fact it is the narrative that creates the story and not the other way around). So I agree with Michel Chion, for whom the ashback starts at a moment when time has suspended itself.33 Leaving their obvious differences aside, it is by means of its partial autonomy that the ashback is similar to the lm within the lm. Besides, the ashback does not always conserve this autonomy. It can become very long, or even in a classic move it can become almost confused with the entire lm, where the only thing that distinguishes it from the entire lm is a present instance of an absolute limit, which the spectator is briey reminded of from a distance. This is the convenience of structure and of enframing, as for example in Henri Verneuils People of No Importance (1956).34 But localized ashbacks, equally common now, conserve the status of the embedded lm and of the included lms that I am considering here. We have discussed ashbacks and lms within lms, but there are other similar, though varied, devices, such as consulting memoirs (cf. the Thatcher Archive in Citizen Kane), the novel within the lm (everywhere in Truffauts work), stage plays in the lm (everywhere in Rivette), video in lm (cf. the revelatory tape in Pierre Zuccas 1984 lm Rouge Gorge), and so on. This is not ville, to include hybrids and other composites. In a second-rate ick by Jean Dre l-Noe l, is supposed A Cage of Nightingales (1944), the young hero, played by Noe to have lived through tough times as a supervisor at a boarding school for difcult children. He has succeeded, not without difculty, in transforming his charges by means of choir practice, and he has also saved them from a terrible re, among other deeds. Later, he draws on all of these trials and tribulations to write an e reads it to her mother, autobiographical novel. When it is published, his ance who until then had barely appreciated her future son-in-law. This voiceover reading occupies the central part of the lm, and it is through this that the viewer learns about the exploits of this man who once worked with young tearaways. So we have a sort of ashback, which relates [109] what the hero the I of the read text did before the moment of the lm, a device which occupies the beginning and the end of the lm. The construction is indeed that of the classical ashback: dialogues played by the actors, and purely narrative sections spoken by the voiceover (That morning, the weather was good and I was happy . . . ), with the weirdness of a masculine I which is spoken by a female voice (she functions in the end as the narrators female narrator, like a soloist). Apart from the foregrounded voice, this structure does not contradict in any way that of a traditional novel narrated in the rst person (and what is more, that is what it is, we are told). However, this novel is directed at our perception, it gives us a lot to look at and listen to, so it is no longer a novel, but strangely resembles a lm within a lm, although the main lm clearly denies it the quality of the secondary lm. In sum, then, it is at the same time an audio-visual novel, an illustrated recitation, a ashback and an embedded lm.
367
We see an almost identical device in a markedly different lm, Another Woman (1988), directed by Woody Allen. The heroine, Marion (Gina Rowlands), is deep into an autobiographical novel by her old suitor, where she is often the subject of the book (this reading is also a memory). The masculine I of the novel is entrusted to a woman who reads aloud and who, at the same time, sees again what she is reading, such as the lovers walking in Central Park, the sudden rainshower, the kiss in the little tunnel, taking shelter from the rain . . . We come across constructions that are somewhat similar, on a smaller scale, every time in the cinema35 (and God knows it happens often enough!) that a letter is read aloud by its recipient, or by the sender as they are writing it, either with or without the appearance of the letter itself on screen. We could use the term inlaying [incrustation] for a very particular case, which would be an approximate equivalent to the santon in literature [Metz uses the term santon, but it is likely that he intends the identical-sounding centon, which is a piece of poetry or prose made up of borrowings from other authors Trans.]. In the cinema, a perfectly representative sample is found in Dead Men Dont Wear Plaid (USA, Carl Reiner, 1982), elegantly translated into French as Les cadavres ne portent pas de costard [Corpses Dont Wear Suits]. It consists of a second-rate, articial (it must be, given its date) lm noir, a product of amalgamation in which are included authentic fragments of lm noirs of the past (White Heat, The Killers, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, The Big Sleep, Notorious, etc.). But they are not presented as quotations, except in the credits in the form of warm-hearted, nostalgic homages. They are integrated into the plot of a hyper-lm noir, concocted to t the circumstances, imitating marvellously [110] the grains and ecks of dust of the past greats. Great delight is taken in the way that the events of this lm nd elaborate ways of including sequences imported from other lms as it goes along. Hence we have a play on the shot/counter-shot whereby it is possible to arrange a dialogue between the private eye world of 1982 with a Humphrey Bogart who has become an unwitting character of this new lm . . . I will mention only in passing, as it deviates a little from my theme, what we could call lms about lms. Certain big-budget productions, such as in France The Bear [Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1988] and in Japan Ran [Akira Kurosawa, 1985] have provided the occasion for a simultaneously shot making-of, which is a special short lm, half-documentary and half-advertisement, which in its own way tells the story of the shooting of the big, main lm. There are also innumerable lms where the plot takes place in the world of lm. And there are some more recent lms which aim to recreate the history of a famous lm-shoot, or an episode in the life of a great lmmaker (for example, John Huston in White Hunter Black Heart [Clint Eastwood, 1990], Fritz Lang in Articial Paradise [Karpo Acimovic-Godina, 1990]). In all these cases, reexivity affects only the subject under treatment. It may also, in some places, mark the enunciation (the material invites it to), but it is not included [compris] in the device itself.
368
C. Metz
There may also be, behind the lm and no longer inside it, invisible lms, physically absent but very present in their own way. These are a special kind of memory game, less directly bound up with enunciation since they do not redouble it, and since the lm remains free of any foreign bodies. More study needs to be done on this, and indeed it has already been started by several young researchers.36 The canonic type here would be the real remake [Metz uses the English word Trans.], that which remains close to the original while packaging it differently, cf. Breathless s [A bout de soufe: Made in USA, Jim McBride, 1983] and The Bounty [Les revolte du Bounty, Roger Donaldson, 1984]. But the lesser lm can also operate more freely in partial remakes, such as The Shanghai Gesture by Sternberg (1941), which remembers and replaces Shanghai Express [Sternberg, 1932]. The lm may also function by using parody or pastiche (spaghetti westerns, De Palma remaking Hitchcock), or it may inspire an attempt at recreating the original (Werner Herzogs Nosferatu the Vampyre [1979]). And there are also encore-lms [lms-bis] not to be confused with what is known as cinema-bis, or low-budget genre cinema which an auteur achieves by rearranging material from a previous work. For sert [1976], which instance, Marguerite Durass Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta de s . . . is based on her India Song [1975], or [Alain] Robbe-Grillets N. a pris les de [1971] [111], which followed on from Eden and After [1970]. In an extreme sense, all genre lms and they were once extremely common contain within themselves all the previous lms of the same genre, and so they share a very broad lineage of lms within a lm, which do not present themselves as such but whose traces may be found everywhere. We nd here in this way all the problems of rard Genette has transtextuality, notably those of hypertext and architext, which Ge dened with singular force.37 Equally at the edges of the concept of the lm within a lm, there is the immense eld of the allusion, allusion to the cinema, allusion to a lm. In Elem Klimovs Agony: The Life and Death of Rasputin (1981), the immense line of soldiers forming a large S in the snow irresistibly evokes a famous image from Ivan the Terrible Part I [Sergei Eisenstein, 1944]. Ashik Kerib, directed by [Sergei] Parajanov (1988) ends with an image of a movie camera seen in threequarter view, on which a dove lands, immediately followed by a written dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky. El Dorado (1967), directed by Howard Hawks, is often considered to be a self-remake of the famous Rio Bravo [also Hawks], but in fact it is more of a systematic series of re-enactments: the character of the deposed, alcoholic sheriff (Robert Mitchum, previously played by Dean Martin), the old man who absolutely wants to help John Wayne, the young but likeable violent man whose name is Mississippi (not Colorado, as in the other lm), and so on. villes A Cage of Nightingales: it demonstrated a To return nally to Dre complicated, rather than subtle, structure, but it illustrated in a striking way the necessity of not closing off the inventory of enunciative congurations. Although it may be limited to a certain number of fundamental devices, although it has its own logic, and although it does not proceed from some pure and innite freedom, it does make possible a great number of combinations. It is the physical nature of the lmic
369
signier which constrains it, but it is that very nature which sustains it by offering precise and varied possibilities. The mise en abyme, which is the most reexive of all reexive constructions, is not unique to cinema, but cinema has the means which enable it to enact it on highly varied objects, and along very different trajectories. Notes
1. cit et le commentaire ], 1973 (German original [Tempus: Le Temps[: le re hlte Welt ] 1964). In this work, the commentative is opposed Besprochene und erza cit, to the recited. [Harald Weinrichs distinction is between das Besprochene/le re hlte i.e. modes of narration where the time of narrating is signicant, and das erza Welt/le commentaire, where modes of narration are indifferent to the moment of narration Trans.] guier,] 1989, ma et peinture, [Paris: Se Jacques Aumont, Lil interminable: cine p. 124. [Aumonts term sur-cadre literally means over-frame or super-frame. The section of the Ophuls lm referred to here features on-screen writing framed inside a decorative border, overlaid on top of the background of a polished wooden surface. The writing sets up the premise of the story to come Trans.] phasage et performativite dans Le Tempestaire de Jean Epstein, Mise en phase, de 1983, notably p. 232. [The article is published in Communications 38, pp. 213 38.] Aumont, Lil interminable, p. 124. See, in particular, Clignotements du noir-et-blanc, 1980, p. 226. But the idea recurs a little everywhere in Vernets work. In fact, I will refer only to a single aspect from his work, because the idea refers in a more general way to various homologies that can establish themselves between relations that are interior to a story, and those of the viewer with the lm, and it refers to the fear of the latter, the fear of knowing (of being surprised) in conict with an equal desire to know, etc. Aumont, Lil interminable, pp. 10710 (frame-limit and frame-window). ma (1982) [Paris: Editions de Cf. in particular the back cover of La voix au cine ma, 1985], etc. ma [Paris: Cahiers du cine lEtoile], p. 28 of Le son au cine ratrice rouge, Sternberg, 1934. Limpe ma (1971) in Essais sur la signication au cinema II, 1972. [This Trucage et cine chapter was translated as Trucage and the Film by Franc oise Meltzer in Critical Inquiry 3(4), (Summer 1977), pp. 657 75. She explains: The word trucage usually translates as trick photography in the singular and special effects in the plural. But Metz places many terms, including these, under the rubric of trucage, and I am therefore maintaining the French word (p. 657).] e du spectateur dans la ction (on Jean Renoirs Partie de campagne Lentre orie du lm, Jacques Aumont and [1936]), 1980. [Odins essay is published in The Jean-Louis Leutrat (eds.), Paris: Albatros, pp. 198 213.] See p. 21, with notes 28 and 29. [Metz is referring to an earlier part of the book that this chapter is drawn from. In his earlier footnote, he cites the following works by matographique . . . , 1980, ra, 1987, p. 36; Discours cine Franc ois Jost: Loeil-Came especially pp. 125 7; and Mises au point sur le point de vue, 1988, p. 148. He also cites Jean-Paul Simons Le Filmique et le Comique, 1979, p. 113, where, Metz comments, Simon examines some of my previous analyses (the tendency of grammatical markers to diegetize themselves) in order to extend them in new dans les lms die ge tiques, ways. See also his short book Remarque sur la temporalite 1979 . . . [where Simon says] cinema does not have any temporal deictics, but can only construct them indirectly, for example by means of the ashback . . . Trans.] Figures de labsence [ 2: la voix-off, Iris III-1,] 1988, an ensemble of the chapter Surimpressions, and notably p. 61.
2.
3. 4. 5.
6. 7. 8. 9.
10. 11.
12.
370
C. Metz
ologie du discours sur 13. I am indebted for this information to the thesis Arche exivite au cine ma by my friend and former student Kiyoshi Takeda, who is lautore currently a teacher and writer in Japan. cit speculaire, [Paris: Seuil,] 1977 [translated by Jeremy llenbach, Le re 14. Lucien Da Whiteley with Emma Hughes as The Mirror in the Text, University of Chicago Press, 1989]; Jean-Paul Simon, pp. 122ff. in Le Filmique et le Comique, [Paris: Albatros,] ma au miroir, 1987); 1979 (compilation of items from Vertigo special issue Le cine Jacques Gerstenkorn, A travers le miroir, introductory notes to the same issue of taphorique dans le Vertigo (pp. 7 10), and numerous passages in his thesis, La me ma autore exif: quelques proble ` mes lm de ction, 1990; Kiyoshi Takeda, Le cine thodologiques, 1987, as well as his doctorate cited in my previous note; me her, who proposes an excellent classication system in pp. 47 9 of Dominique Blu ` re approche du cine ma dans le cine ma, his pre-doctoral (DEA) paper (1988), Premie and who is writing a doctoral thesis on the same subject. 15. La construction en abyme dans Huit et demi de Fellini, 1966, included in Essais sur la ma I, 1968 [this essay appears as Mirror-Construction in Fellinis signication au cine 81 2 in Film Language, New York: Oxford University Press, 1974, pp. 22834 Trans.]. 16. This restriction is needed because it can also happen that a lm is quoted several times in another lm. We will shortly see almost a caricature of this in Lelouchs remake of Hitchcock. 17. This has been forcefully analysed by Kiyoshi Takeda in the thesis and article by him cited earlier. 18. The embedding is clearly signposted. The stage play has its own title, visible on a poster on the outside wall of the theatre, which Gene Kelly leans against at the start of the sequence. The title is One Day in New York, which was used in a literal ` New York. But in the original translation when it was released in France as Un jour a version, the main lm differs from the inner one by its title, which is On the Town. 19. In a seminar discussion, Rollet has evoked blown-up Super-8 material, where the grain is visible, which functions as a lost metaphor of some originary lm scene. ma, 1985 [Paris: Editions de lEtoile] on the 20. See pp. 113 14 of Le Son au cine primordial sound of cinema, the sound of the heart of the engine, held in abeyance by the music and by the chatter of talkies, but which constantly threatens to return. , Michel Marie and Marie-Claire Ropas, Muriel, Histoire dune 21. See Claude Bailble e]. recherche, 1975 [Paris: Galile ma Le cine ma underground ame ricain, 1984 [Paris: 22. Une renaissance du cine Klincksieck], pp. 290 1. 23. This information comes from a conversation that I had with Gehr. mio24. Du spectateur ctionnalisant au nouveau spectateur [ Approche se ma et narration II, pragmatique], 1988, [pp. 121 39 of Marc Vernet (ed.), Cine 1988, issue no. 8 of the journal Iris ]. 25. Narration et signication: un exemple lmique, 1972 (the example in the title is Citizen Kane). [This article is to be found in pp. 9 26, Raymond Bellour (ed.), Le ma ame ricain Analyses de lms II, Paris: Flammarion, 1980.] cine 26. Seymour Chatman, Cinematic Discourse: The Semiotics of Narrative Voice and Point of View in Citizen Kane, [Urbino: Centro Internazionale di Semiotica e Linguistica, 1977]; Gianfranco Bettetini, pp. 13460 in La conversazione audiovisiva, [Milan: Bompiani] 1984; Francesco Casetti, pp. 13745 in Dun regard lautre [Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1990; original Dentro lo sguardo, Milan: Bompiani, 1986]; quence/le lm. Citizen Kane de Welles, [pp. 2744, Raymond Michel Marie, La se ma ame ricain Analyses de lms II, Paris: Flammarion, 1980]. Bellour (ed.), Le cine This lm has been the basis of much analysis and my list here is far from complete.
371
27. For a less developed example, see also the scene in Stardust Memories where, in the imagination of the lmmaker, a posthumous award is given to him. To receive it, he physically emerges from the secondary screen and accepts the plaque. 28. La construction en abyme dans Huit et demi de Fellini, 1966, included in Essais sur ma I, 1968 [see note 15]. la signication au cine 29. From another, extratextual, point of view, Garrels lm is an almost complete mise en abyme: the lmmaker is played by the lmmaker, the father by the father (Maurice Garrel), the son by the son (Louis Garrel, the little boy) and the famous actress by mone [French actress Trans.]. There is one subtle twist, and that is that the wife is Ane played by Brigitte Sy, Garrels partner, whereas in the story he envisages actually entrusting the role of his wife, who is herself an actress, to a foreign actress. This might even be called the motor of all the action, if that is the correct word. 30. On the notion of the prolmic, which has been studied very little to date, see the ` ne prolmique ou le excellent doctoral thesis by Tsung-Shing Cheng, La sce monde perdu, 1985. Cheng currently researches lm in Taiwan. ma, 1985. 31. Pp. 125 6, Le Son au cine 32. In a seminar discussion. ma, [Paris: Editions de lEtoile,] 1982. 33. P. 47, La voix au cine 34. This naturalistic, populist and very French lm was adapted from a novel by Serge Groussard. The lm tells the story of the thwarted love of a lorry driver (Jean Gabin) and a restaurant waitress (Franc oise Arnoul). She then dies as a result of a sordid, back-street abortion, a real hard-luck story. All of this is narrated by Jean Gabin after the death of the young woman while he is staying at the roadside hotel where she worked and to where his journey today happens to have brought him. More precisely, he does not narrate at all (there is no speaking I), rather the events are interior thoughts which are offered directly to the spectator, and which make, which are the lm. So, like many other lms, this is entirely set in the past, in such a way that this past becomes a little like the real present, and the ashback-effect is seriously mitigated. ma, edited by Patrice Rollet. 35. See issue 2 (1988) of Vertigo on Lettres de cine taphorique dans 36. For example, in Jacques Gerstenkorns thesis (already cited): Le me le lm de ction, 1990. Other researchers working on theses that cover similar ground include Marc Cerisuelo, who is writing on the various forms of secondary cinema, Franc oise Zamour, who is researching constructions of this type in the work of n Bakonyi on Godard. Truffaut, and Iva 37. Pp. 7 14, Plaimpsestes, [Paris: Seuil,] 1982. The thesis by Marc Cerisuelo (who has also written the excellent Godard) that was mentioned earlier is one of several that stress these notions as a contribution to a project that deals with the poetics of lm tique de lm ]. [Genettes Palimpsestes has been translated by Channa Newman [ poe and Claude Doubinsky as Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997 Trans.]

Impersonal Enunciation, or The Site of Film - Extracts - Christian Metz

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Оригинальное название

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Impersonal Enunciation, or The Site of Film - Extracts - Christian Metz

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

This article was downloaded by: [University of Sydney] On: 24 July 2012, At: 22:36 Publisher: Routledge Informa

New Review of Film and Television Studies

Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (extracts)

RESEARCH ARTICLE Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (extracts)

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

New Review of Film and Television Studies

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

New Review of Film and Television Studies

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

New Review of Film and Television Studies

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

New Review of Film and Television Studies

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

New Review of Film and Television Studies

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

New Review of Film and Television Studies

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

New Review of Film and Television Studies

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

New Review of Film and Television Studies

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

New Review of Film and Television Studies

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

New Review of Film and Television Studies

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

New Review of Film and Television Studies

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

New Review of Film and Television Studies

Downloaded by [University of Sydney] at 22:36 24 July 2012

Вам также может понравиться