sensesofcinema.

com
Film Fables and The Future of the Image by Jacques Rancière • Senses of Cinema
Tony McKibbin March 2008 Book Reviews Issue 46
19-25 minutes

click to buy “Film Fables” at Amazon.comJacques Rancière’s books, Film Fables and
The Future of the Image, are really trying to do what his work in politics often
does. If his collection of essays, On The Shores of Politics (1), proposes that we
shouldn’t take the end of history seriously, and that politics isn’t necessarily
about end goals but ongoing struggle, then in his recent books on the cinema (Film
Fables) and on the image more generally (The Future of the Image), Rancière is
again wary of declarative eschatology, of making statements that suggest the end of
anything. As he says on the first page of The Future of the Image, he wants to
examine “how a certain idea of fate and a certain idea of the image are tied up in
the apocalyptic discourses of today’s cultural climate” (p. 1). But, he adds, “does
not the term ‘image’ contain several functions whose problematic alignment
precisely constitutes the labour of art?” (p. 1). Central to Rancière’s project is
an aesthetic optimism: a sense that there are stories still to be told, and images
constantly awaiting creation.

In The Future of the Image, Rancière wants to save the image in its singularity
from the image in general. So, for example, he addresses the singularity of Robert
Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966) not as pure cinema opposed to impure
television, but he tries to find the purity of the image as an image, rather than
some ontological given of the medium. Hence, whether we see Bresson’s film on
television or in the cinema, the image is essentially the same, just as if we were
to see a show like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on a big screen it will not
especially change the nature of the image; it will just expand its banality, just
as a TV screen shrinks Bresson’s gracefulness: “…the intrinsic nature of Bresson’s
images remains unchanged, whether we see the reels projected in a cinema, or
through a cassette or disc on our television screen, or a video projection” (p. 3).
To make it clear that Bresson’s approach isn’t ‘purely’ cinematic, Rancière draws
comparisons with Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary:

The camera’s fixing on the hand that pours the water and the hand that holds the
candle is no more peculiar to cinema than the fixing of Doctor Bovary’s gaze on
Mademoiselle Emma’s nails, or of Madame Bovary’s gaze on those of the notary’s
clerk, is peculiar to literature. (p. 5)

Thus, it is really about perceptual options. Just as Rancière wants to save the
image from end goal assumptions, so he also wants to rescue it from presumptuous
ontological givens. He wants to rescue the image from the tautology of cinema being
cinematic. We can see here how the two reservations dovetail to generate Rancière’s
argument. If we accept that an image is not simply a product of its medium, but an
issue first and foremost of perception, then the argument that proposes the end of
the image, or the proliferation of empty images, swallowed up by the dubious
nemesis of television, is greatly weakened.

If Rancière is a congenial optimist who still has faith in singular images, he also
has more faith than most in the continuing possibilities of the story. In Film
Fables, he opens with a quote from Jean Epstein where the director and theorist
proposes cinema is not a medium that does justice to storytelling. Epstein,
according to Rancière, wanted cinema to discard the “‘fable’ in the Aristotelian
sense: the arrangement of necessary and verisimilar actions that lead the
characters from fortune to misfortune, or vice versa, through the careful
construction of the intrigue [noeud] and denouement” (p. 1). Yet, while various
filmmakers and theorists have questioned the importance of the story and found ways
to counter it, Rancière isn’t entirely convinced. For example, later in the book he
talks of those who have proposed this shift: of Gilles Deleuze’s notion of sensory
motor collapse, and Jean-Luc Godard’s mourning for what the cinema never quite
managed to become. Of Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema (1997-1998), Rancière says:

If [D.W.] Griffith had not filmed the sufferings of martyred children and
[Vincente] Minnelli two lovers dancing, if [Fritz] Lang and [Alfred] Hitchcock had
not brought to the screen the manipulations of cynical and deranged calculators, if
[Erich von] Stroheim and [Jean] Renoir had not filmed the decadence of the
aristocracy and [George] Stevens the tribulations of a latter day Rastignac, Godard
would never have had the opportunity to tell a thousand new versions of the history
of the cinema and the century with the fragments of their fictions. (p. 186)

In Rancière’s view, Godard shouldn’t mourn the missed opportunities, but celebrate
the opportunity he’s been given to seize upon cinema’s treasures and turn them into
his own narrative. In his chapter on Deleuze, meanwhile, Rancière opens by saying:

let’s assume that there is a cinematographic modernity and that it confronted the
classical cinema of the link between images for the purposes of narrative
continuity and meaning with an autonomous temporality and the void that separates
it from other images. (p. 107)

He suggests that this break has “two model witnesses” – Roberto Rossellini and
Orson Welles – and it also has “two model thinkers” – André Bazin and Deleuze. For
Bazin, of course, this break could allow for “concrete instants of life, no one of
which can be said to be more important than the other, for their ontological
equality destroys drama at its very base.” (2) For Deleuze, it means the image
moves from the often narratively driven expectations of the movement-image, to the
freer, more loosely linked thought possibilities in the time-image. Rancière,
however, isn’t so sure about the purity of Bazin’s images, or the differentiations
between Deleuze’s many sub-categories within the movement-image and the time-image.
As he says of the latter, “the same images – from [Carl Theodor] Dreyer and
Bresson, or from [Sergei] Eisenstein and Godard – are equally analyzable in terms
of affection image or opsign [in Deleuze’s take, movement-images], or organic
description or crystalline perception [time-images].” (p. 114) Near the end of the
chapter on Deleuze, Rancière writes, addressing Bresson:

…the fragmentation of bodies and shots is itself an ambivalent procedure. Deleuze

sees in it the infinitization of the interval that disorients the spaces and
separates the images. But we could also see the fragmentation as doing the inverse,
as intensifying the coordination between the visual and the dramatic: we seize with
our hands, no need then to represent the whole body; we walk with our feet, no need
to show our heads. The fragmented shot is also an economic means of bringing into
sharp focus what is essential in the action, what classical theories of painting
used to call the pregnant moment of the story. (p. 122)

Vertigo

This may be true, but aren’t we still, in Bresson’s work, very far away from the
sort of fragmentation Hitchcock adopts and which seems much more in keeping with
pregnant moments? It is as though in Hitchcock we have the unknowable as the
MacGuffin (the detail that is irrelevant in its specifics yet which necessarily
sets the story in motion) where in Bresson we have an ontological inexplicability
that means we have to understand something of ourselves in the Kierkegaardian sense
of the term: to assume an obscure sickness unto death that leaves life missing some
key dimension. Bresson’s ellipses are often moments that disarm psychology: Une
femme douce (A Gentle Creature, 1969), Le Diable probablement (The Devil Probably,
1977). Hitchcock’s ellipses often arm his narratives: the way Scottie is left
dangling off the roof at the beginning of Vertigo (1958), for example, or the way
the central character in Saboteur (1942) escapes from his friend’s mother’s house
near the beginning of the film. Frequently, Rancière is a subtly convincing
thinker, but he is not always subtle enough to offer the fine-grain distinctions
that make Deleuze’s two books on cinema still the best ever written.

What is perhaps missing from Rancière’s two fine and important books is not an
acute persuasiveness, but a hermeneutic incisiveness, a sort of interpretative
empathy that runs throughout Deleuze’s work. In Film Fables’ essays on Anthony
Mann, Nicholas Ray or Rossellini there aren’t so much insights offered as
dialectical arguments resolved. We see this when Rancière looks at Ray and says:

such is the romantic double law of beauty, exemplarily illustrated in this film
[They Live by Night (1948)]. It is a law of composition – an image is made of many
images; and it is a law of subtraction – an image is made from the mourning of
another image. (p. 103)

Here we sense less the intuitive grasp of the film’s affective importance, more the
resolution of Rancière’s dialectical argument. Deleuze says of the same director’s
work:

the more violent he [the character] is, the more of a child he becomes (this
remains the theme of Rebel Without a Cause [1955]; although the hero seems to
succeed in his wager to “become a man in a day”, he does so too quickly to be
pacified by it). (3)

Here Deleuze offers not the double law of beauty proposed by Rancière, but the
double law of empathy: he manages to empathise with what he believes are the
director’s intentions, and then adds to this an empathy for the character in one of
Ray’s films. For Deleuze, cinema remains an opportunity for affective hypotheses;
for Rancière, it is a tool for logical argument.

The Last Bolshevik

We could even stretch the point and say this is partly why Rancière is still in
thrall of the story, of a plot logic that remains consistent with his own logical
through-lines. When he talks of Chris Marker’s work, and specifically Le Tombeau
d’Alexandre (The Last Bolshevik, 1992), he doesn’t see so much a cerebral collage,
but Marker more “working out a narrative structure”: this “is how ‘the classical’
story of fortune and misfortune, of ignorance and knowledge, that ties one man’s
life to the Soviet epic and catastrophe assumes the ‘Romantic’ form of this
narrative” (p. 165). No matter the apparently anti-narrative drive of the filmmaker
under analysis, Rancière’s reasoning demands narrative focus, a sort of reasoning
process that seems to work brilliantly in a book of politics like the essays
published in On the Shores of Politics. In such a work, Rancière’s grasp of
politics traced to its Greek roots – and the conceptual reservoir that the Greek
vocabulary provides him with – allows for sharp analysis. In these books on
aesthetics, however, we might find the instrument partially blunted.

This is not to attack philosophers for leaving behind their areas of expertise,
even though we might be reminded of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s comment that “it is almost
an axiom in contemporary academic film theory that the fewer films one has seen or
knows about, the better and clearer the academic mind is in following its own
theoretical bents.” (4) Clearly, Rancière lacks the wide range of references of a
film critic, but we could hardly say the same of Deleuze, or even Stanley Cavell.
Finally, we might surmise this seems less an issue of ignorance on Rancière’s part
than the desire to keep the line of thought uncomplicated, and not litter it with
too many examples – perhaps a positive variation on Rosenbaum’s acidic remark.
Rancière’s approach, if we allow ourselves a brief digression, resembles in some
ways the philosopher Alain Badiou’s short piece on cinema in Infinite Thought. As
Badiou suggests, the piece works from “two foundational axioms” (5): one is that
cinema is capable of being art, and the second that there has been a major rupture,
“between its identificatory, representative and humanist (‘Hollywoodian’) vocation
and a modernity which is distanced, involving the spectator in an entirely
different manner” (6). Badiou then goes on to sprinkle his thesis with a few
general observations about, for example, Godard’s use of ‘dirty sound’ as an
“attempt at formal purification” (7) to counter the endless noise of mainstream
productions, and the use of car sequences in Abbas Kiarostami’s and Manoel de
Oliveira’s cinema that work against our expectations of the moving vehicle in most
films, “where the opening scene of two films out of every three is a car sequence.”
(8) Badiou exaggerates, of course, but he’s offering a thesis with general
principles. If Badiou’s short piece were a book and the same generalisations were
expected to hold, and the double empathy practised by Deleuze was still missing, it
would be exhausting.

This, then, isn’t to suggest philosophers have no place commenting on cinema; it is

really a question of what brings out the freshness of thought. Usually, Rancière’s
thinking is distinctive and he often develops an argument quite ingeniously, as we
see in the chapter in The Future of the Image called “The Surface of Design”. Here
he draws analogies between the radical poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, on the one
hand, and Peter Behrens, “an engineer in the service of a major brand producing
bulbs, kettles or heaters” (p. 92), on the other:

Between Mallarmé and Behrens, between the pure poet and the functional engineer,
there therefore exists this singular link: the same idea of streamlined forms and
the same function attributed to these forms – to define a new texture of communal
existence. (p. 97)

However, one sometimes feels Rancière is more ingenious than insightful.

Perhaps the ingenious versus the insightful is a key difference in the way one can
think philosophically about film. If Badiou and Rancière suggest the logical
analysis of the image, Deleuze and Cavell seem much more to suggest the
multiplicity in the image. Whether it is Cavell showing his obvious love and
knowledge of classic Hollywood in The World Viewed, or Deleuze finally more
sympathetic to the possibilities in the time-image than the expectations of the
movement-image, it is through the bountiful number of examples that particularly
subtle thought can come. When we think of Deleuze’s manifold differentiations, they
come out of the many filmmakers whose work he analyses. As Deleuze says at the
beginning of Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, “it is not sufficient to compare the
great directors of the cinema with painters, architects or even musicians. They
must also be compared with thinkers.” (9) Deleuze is here talking about
comprehending the complexity of their film world. To understand the ‘thinking’ of
Ingmar Bergman, Hitchcock, Welles, Alain Resnais, Godard is inevitably to find
oneself working with very subtle gradations. In The World Viewed, meanwhile, Cavell
reckons:

we no longer grant, or take it for granted, that a man who expresses no feeling has
fires banked within him; or, if we do grant depth, we are likely not to endow him
with a commitment to his own originality, but to suppose him banking destructive
feeling. (10)

Cavell goes on to mention Michelangelo Antonioni’s leading men, as well as most of

those in Godard and Bergman. He then muses over Hollywood and says, “Yul Brynner
and James Coburn and Sean Connery and Michael Caine measure the distance we have
come, along the line of silent strength, from Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda and James
Stewart and [Humphrey] Bogart and even Alan Ladd.” (11) We might not entirely agree
with Cavell, but we would need to know our cinema to contradict him, just as Cavell
knows his. It would also require some fine-grain thinking, and some empathic memory
of the films and the characters’ feelings in them.
click to buy “The Future of the Image” at Amazon.comThis is not at all to suggest
Rancière’s an unsubtle thinker who knows too little about film; it is just that the
subtlety of his thought is not an especially empathic subtlety – it isn’t the sort
of co-feeling we’ve suggested Deleuze so often practises, a cinematic variation of
his work on other philosophers when he claimed that friendship was “intrinsic to
philosophy, because the philosopher isn’t a sage, but a ‘friend’” (12). For
Rancière, films – their makers and their characters – feel less like friends than
argumentative tools, and in this sense these two books are finally less works of
affective feeling conceptualised, than tools that allow for analytical
propositions. We notice this, for example, in the last essay of The Future of the
Image, “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?”. Here he says that his line of enquiry
has been “motivated by a certain intolerance for an inflated use of the notion of
the unrepresentable, and a constellation of allied notions: the unrepresentable,
the unthinkable, the untreatable, the irredeemable” (p. 109). Rancière doesn’t
especially want to get into the feelings attached to the problem of the
unrepresentable. Though in many ways Rancière’s argument is intricate, he
nevertheless takes the unrepresentable at face value and impressively demolishes
it, showing that indeed often the ‘unrepresentable’ isn’t just representable, but
even conventionally so. Here again Madame Bovary comes to help out, as he compares
a passage from Flaubert’s novel with a passage from a novel on that
‘unrepresentable’ subject, the Holocaust: Robert Antelme’s The Human Race. Rancière
says that what Antelme wants to highlight is a resistance “that transforms the
concentration camp’s reduction of life to naked existence into the affirmation of
fundamental membership of the human race, even in its most basic gestures” (p.
124). In this “paratactic” writing, where a series of blank observations follow one
from the other, Rancière sees something similar in Flaubert’s book: “the
concentration camp experience as lived by Robert Antelme, and the invented sensory
experience of Charles and Emma, are conveyed according to the same logic of minor
perceptions added one to another” (p. 125). For Rancière, this tells us more about
the shift in storytelling from the traditional to the modern than it does about the
unrepresentable. As he informs us earlier in the chapter, “Aristotle contrasted the
kath’olon – the organic totality – of poetic plot to the kath’ekaston of the
historian, who follows the empirical succession of events. In the ‘realist’ use of
resemblance, this hierarchy is overturned” (p. 121): the apparently unrepresentable
is absorbed into modern realism. Hence when Rancière talks of Shoah (Claude
Lanzmann, 1985), he says, “nothing is unrepresentable as a property of the event.
They are simply choices” (p. 129). Yet the choices Lanzmann makes, as opposed to
the choices Steven Spielberg makes in Schindler’s List (1993), contain within them
so many differences of perspective that one needs a pretty complicated metaphysic
to differentiate Spielberg’s assumptions from Lanzmann’s probings. Rancière might
be right to question Jean-François Lyotard’s conflation of what he sees as Kantian
and Burkean ideas on the sublime, and to suggest that the powerlessness of the
imagination can find in realist tropes a representability, but it seems only a
partial victory. It is a victory of thought over sense, of reason over feeling.

Once again, we come away from Rancière’s musings admiring the brilliance of the
thought, but perhaps believing that it is a reasoning process better adapted to
another form. It returns us to Rancière’s observation that opened this review, on
Bresson and the limitations of medium specificity. Rancière wins his point
brilliantly, yet we may wonder whether there isn’t finally a world of a difference
between Bresson’s cinematic image and Flaubert’s literary one. It is that world
Rancière often bypasses.

Film Fables, by Jacques Rancière, trans. Emiliano Battista, Berg, Oxford, 2006.

The Future of the Image, by Jacques Rancière, trans. Gregory Elliott, Verso,
London, 2007.
Click here to order Film Fables from Amazon.com

Click here to order The Future of the Image from Amazon.com

Endnotes

Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, Verso, London, 2007.

André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol. II, essays select. and trans. Hugh Gray,
University of California Press, London, 1972, p. 81.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam, The Athlone Press, London, 1997 [1986], p. 135.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism, University
of California Press, Berkeley, 1995, pp. 179-180.
Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, trans. and
ed. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens, Continuum, London, 2005, p. 83.
Badiou, p. 83.
Badiou, p. 85.
Badiou, p. 85.
Deleuze, p. x.
Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Harvard
University Press, London, 1979, p. 67.
Cavell, p. 67.
Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin, Columbia University Press, New
York, 1995, p. 162.