Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image 1623564360, 9781623564360

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Cinema and Agamben

Cinema and Agamben Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image Edited by Henrik Gustafsson and Asbjørn Grønstad

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 © Henrik Gustafsson, Asbjørn Grønstad and the contributors, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cinema and Agamben : ethics, biopolitics and the moving image / edited by Henrik Gustafsson and Asbjørn Grønstad. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62356-436-0 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures--Moral and ethical aspects. 2. Motion pictures--Philosophy. 3. Agamben, Giorgio, 1942---Criticism and interpretation. I. Gustafsson, Henrik editor of compilation. II. Grønstad, Asbjørn editor of compilation. PN1995.5.C517 2014 791.4301--dc23 2013035871 ISBN: 978-1-6235-6371-4 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Giorgio Agamben and the Shape of Cinema to Come Asbjørn Grønstad and Henrik Gustafsson

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For an Ethics of the Cinema Giorgio Agamben

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Cinema and History: On Jean-Luc Godard Giorgio Agamben

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Silence, Gesture, Revelation: he Ethics and Aesthetics of Montage in Godard and Agamben James S. Williams

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Passion, Agamben and the Gestures of Work Libby Saxton

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Gesture, Time, Movement: David Claerbout meets Giorgio Agamben on the Boulevard du Temple Janet Harbord

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Film-of-Life: Agamben’s Profanation of the Image Benjamin Noys

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Biopolitics of Gesture: Cinema and the Neurological Body Pasi Väliaho

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Contents

Propositions for a Gestural Cinema: On “Ciné-Trances” and Jean Rouch’s Ritual Documentaries João Mário Grilo

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Engaging Hand to Hand with the Moving Image: Serra, Viola and Grandrieux’s Radical Gestures Silvia Casini

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Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a Philosophical Cinematics 161 Garrett Stewart

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Montage and the Dark Margin of the Archive Trond Lundemo

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10 Remnants of Palestine, or, Archaeology ater Auschwitz Henrik Gustafsson

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Notes on Contributors Index

233 237

List of Illustrations 5.1

André Brouillet, A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière (Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière), 1887. Source: Wikimedia Commons. 5.2 Albert Londe, “Mlle Wittman, transfert d’une attitude au moyen de l’aimant”. Chronophotographic sequence, around 1883, collection Texbraun. 5.3 Vincenzo Neri, neurological film, ca. 1908. Paper print (35mm). The Vincenzo Neri Medical Film Collection, Bologna, Italy. 5.4 Vincenzo Neri, neurological film, ca. 1908. Paper print (35mm). The Vincenzo Neri Medical Film Collection, Bologna, Italy. 5.5 Vincenzo Neri, neurological ilm, late 1910s. Frame capture. he Vincenzo Neri Medical Film Collection, Bologna, Italy. 6.1 Édouard Manet, Dans la serre, 1879. Oil on canvas, 115 cm × 150 cm. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany. Photographed by Sara Pereira. 6.2 Dans la serre: the gestural catastrophe. Photographed by Sara Pereira, cropped and edited by the author. 6.3 Jean Rouch, Tourou et bitti: Les Tambours d’Avant, 1971. 6.4 Jean Rouch, Tourou et bitti: Les Tambours d’Avant, 1971. 7.1 Bill Viola (1995), he Greeting (1995). Video/sound installation. Photo: Kira Perov. 7.2 Philippe Grandrieux, La Vie nouvelle (2002). 7.3 Philippe Grandrieux, La Vie nouvelle (2002). 10.1 Philip the Apostle (Giorgio Agamben) at the Last Supper in Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (he Gospel According to Matthew), Pier Paolo Pasolini (1964). 10.2 Tsahal, Claude Lanzmann (1994). 10.3 Fedayeen in Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere), Jean-Luc Godard (1970–4) from chapter 4b: “Les Signes Parmi Nous” (he Signs Among Us), (1998) of Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98).

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125 127 131 132 149 153 154

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10.4 Christ blindfolded in Matthias Grünewald’s he Mocking of Christ (1503–5) in Film socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010). 10.5 Trapeze artists from Agnès Varda’s Les Plages d’Agnès (he Beaches of Agnès, 2008) in Film socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010).

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Acknowledgments he inception of this book dates back to the 5th Nomadikon Conference Image=Gesture hosted by the eponymous research center at the University of Bergen in November 2011. In the atermath of that event we noticed that the work of Giorgio Agamben was referenced in many of the contributions and abstracts; no wonder, perhaps, given the increasing centrality of the philosopher’s essay “Notes on Gesture” in particular for the ield of visual culture studies. We found this pattern intriguing. here was no mention of Agamben in our Call for Papers for the aforementioned conference, yet a certain gravitation toward his thought seemed to be in evidence. Without realizing it until ater the fact, the Image=Gesture event embodied what one could see as an Agambenian moment in the scholarship on ilm, media and visual culture. We then decided to commission a set of essays on the intersection between facets of Agamben’s philosophy and the moving image. But while the conference might have provided the occasion or the background for the present volume, nearly all of the articles that make up this book represent original research undertaken speciically for the purpose of this publication. As editors we would like to take the opportunity to extend our gratefulness to a number of people and institutions without whose invaluable input and backing this anthology would not have been possible. First of all, we would like to thank our contributors for what we think are some truly remarkable essays. We also send our deepest thanks to the Bergen Research Foundation and the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Bergen, whose muniicent funding enabled us to pursue this project in the irst place. It has been an immense privilege for us as editors to be able to publish for the irst time in English translation two essays by Agamben, and so we are extremely grateful to John Garner and Colin Williamson for their outstanding efort in this regard, as well as to Gabriel Rockhill for putting us in contact with them. We would furthermore like to thank Giorgio Agamben himself for graciously taking time to correspond with us about his publications on cinema and other matters. Finally, we want to ofer our gratitude to the reviewers of our original proposal for Cinema and Agamben, Jenny Chamarette and Alex Murray, for

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their enthusiasm and incisive suggestions, and to Katie Gallof and everybody at Bloomsbury for overseeing the development of this project with unmatched grace and eiciency. Bergen and Berkeley, July 1, 2013

Introduction

Giorgio Agamben and the Shape of Cinema to Come Asbjørn Grønstad and Henrik Gustafsson

[T]here is a life of images that it is our task to understand1 he last decade has seen the emergence of ilm philosophy as a distinct research ield within cinema studies, evidenced, for instance, by the establishment of the electronic journal Film-Philosophy in 1997, organizations such as he Cinematic hinking Network in 2011, and a proliferation of books that broach a range of topics at the intersection of the two disciplines.2 Consider also the vast impact of Gilles Deleuze’s cinema books, irst published in the mid-1980s, which have spawned a rich and diverse body of work, with more than a dozen volumes of other people’s works, inspired by or in a dialogue with Deleuze’s own two volumes, issued over the last 10–15 years. his development, we would like to argue, should be construed as separate from the multiple trajectories of ilm theory, which, despite intermittent overlaps, is distinguishable from ilm philosophy by dint, for instance, of its more mono-disciplinary orientation.3 hat perspectives and insights from the domain of philosophy may help reinvigorate and reshape our knowledge of the ilm medium is obviously not a new lesson, as the inluential work of someone like Stanley Cavell has adeptly demonstrated,4 but the epistemological potential of this engagement certainly seems far from exhausted. he current volume—which may be contextualized with reference to this continuously evolving dialogic interspace between the ield of philosophy and that of cinema—centers on the work of Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben. A continental thinker whose highly inventive research has risen to prominence in the Anglo-Saxon world and elsewhere since the 1990s, Agamben has produced a multifarious cache of ideas, concepts and arguments that thus far have received scarce attention in the disciplines of ilm studies and visual culture studies.5 While recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the

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philosopher’s work—with studies devoted not only to interpretations of his political theory but also to its relation to other areas such as theology, law, and literature—there is as yet no volume to interact theoretically or critically with crucial dimensions of Agamben’s thought as it impinges upon a variety of issues in moving image studies. Cinema and Agamben is the irst book of original scholarship on the nexus between its two titular subjects, and could hence also be read as an attempt to make this lacuna vibrate. Our collection brings together a group of established scholars for an illuminating, in-depth study of the purchase that particular facets of Agamben’s work have on the cinema. Refracting current conceptions of the moving image through a select set of the philosopher’s concepts, the essays in this anthology facilitate a unique multidisciplinary conversation that fundamentally rethinks the theory and praxis of ilm. Greatly expanding upon the range of ilms discussed by Agamben in their resourceful analyzes of the work of artists such as David Claerbout, Philippe Grandrieux, Michael Haneke, and Jean Rouch, to name a few, the authors put to use key notions from Agamben’s rich oeuvre, from gesture, decreation and ethics to biopolitics, profanation, and the messianic. he retracing and rupturing of boundaries and dividing lines that distinguish Agamben’s philosophical archaeology also provide the template for the present contributions. Together they form an arc that charts the interfaces between the material and the metaphysical, movement and stillness, human and technology, man and animal, language and gesture, and word and image. Sustaining the eminently interdisciplinary scope of Agamben’s writing, the articles in this collection all bespeak the importance of his thought for forging new beginnings in ilm philosophy and for remedying the oten elegiac proclamations of the death of cinema so characteristic of the current moment. Although Agamben’s direct involvement in the ield of cinema may be sparse, comprising a handful of brief essays, his genealogy of the intertwined histories of cinema and modern biopolitics amounts to a reconsideration of the pre-history as well as the future of cinema. Running the gamut from advertising to the avant-garde, Agamben’s “gestural turn” from aesthetics to ethics and politics further extends such seminal tropes of ilm philosophy as Muybridge’s motion-studies, Foucault’s dispositif, Deleuze’s movement-images, and montage in the work of Godard and Debord. Cinema and Agamben explores the depth of this explicit association, while also probing the meaning of vital features of the philosopher’s expansive body of work as it pertains to ilm studies. From his childhood in Rome, where his father operated a movie theater, to his early personal and critical engagement with Marxist writers like Pier Paolo

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Pasolini and Guy Debord—both who turned to cinema to further their critical practice—the world of moving images marks a galvanizing force in Agamben’s thinking. His irst published work, he Man Without Content (1970), sets out the premises for Agamben’s engagement with images over the past four decades: to interrupt the continuum of homogenous historical time in order to recover an original space in the present. As Leland de la Durantaye has pointed out, he Man Without Content bears strong echoes of Pasolini’s repudiation of formal aestheticism and the split it imposes between artist and spectator, between the creative act and the exercise of good taste and disinterested judgment— what Agamben in a characteristic formulation refers to as, “the desert of terra aesthetica.”6 Writing in the wake of post-1968 letist politics, Debord and the Situationists have remained an accentuated presence throughout his oeuvre. Indeed, Agamben’s most recent contribution to contemporary political theory— he Kingdom and the Glory (2011), the concluding volume of the Homo Sacer project—brings renewed attention, and urgency, to Debord’s critique of representation by tracing the genealogy of spectacular societies to the acclamation of glory (doxa) in the liturgical mass, via fascist power rituals, to our modern democracies in which glory, negotiated by media, spreads across all aspects of social life. Debord belongs to a trio of illustrious interlocutors, together with Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg, from which Agamben develops his det re-mobilization of the tangled, triangulated concepts of history, gesture and mediality. In his essay on Debord, given the Deleuzian-inlected title “Diference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Film,” Agamben profers an articulation of the link between cinema and history or, more generally, between images and time. It is also in this text that we encounter his frequently quoted rifs on the cinema, irst that “man is a moviegoing animal” and, a little later, that paintings could be conceived as “stills from a ilm that is missing.”7 Each are expressive of a key tenet in Agamben’s philosophy of cinema: irstly, that it is imagination and an interest in images as such that deines the human species; secondly, that cinema animates art history, and history more broadly. he latter point furthermore recalls avantgarde ilmmaker Hollis Frampton’s proposal that, “the whole history of art is no more than a massive footnote to the history of ilm.”8 Agamben’s main concern, however, is montage and what he calls its “transcendental conditions,” which are repetition and stoppage. Drawing on philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Deleuze, he points out that repetition is not about the return of the same but rather the return of “the possibility of what was.”9 Hence, Agamben

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speaks of memory as “that which can transform the real into the possible and the possible into the real.” He then adds, “[i]f you think about it, that’s also the deinition of cinema.”10 As a particular form of cultural experience, as well as an apparatus for the gestation of a unique mode of mediality, cinema is closely aligned with the act of remembrance and its imaginative potential. Memory in this conceptualization is thus endowed with a restorative function, the material support of which is repetition, understood as a process of aesthetic iguration. But the force of potentiality also plays itself out through another technique intrinsic to the materiality of cinema: stoppage, which entails a certain kind of fertile obstruction that pulls the image out of the low of meaning and narrative in order to display it as such. In Agamben’s resolutely post-representational consideration, repetition and stoppage “carry out the Messianic task of cinema” in that they enact a decreation of the real (a term, we shall later learn from Libby Saxton’s essay, Agamben has borrowed from Simone Weil), an expression the content of which for Deleuze would be resistance, for Adorno probably negation. Agamben irst presented his thoughts on Debord, repetition and stoppage at a lecture given on the occasion of the “Sixth International Video Week” at the Centre Saint-Gervais in Geneva in November 1995. Since then, similar ideas concerning the relation between images, temporality and the creative act have surfaced among other thinkers. he thoughts on stoppage and decreation share a family resemblance with some more recent theorizations of the image which are worth considering to show that Agamben’s work on ilm—comparatively sparse as it is—might be construed as part of the contemporary horizon of ilm philosophy. he irst comes from Jean-Luc Nancy’s dialogue with Abbas Kiarostami, in which the former, drawing on Heidegger’s phenomenology, argues that the loss of a meaningful world in modernity in fact represents an advancement, because this loss is necessary in order for the real to unfold itself. Cinema’s function, for Nancy, is not to portray a preconceived world, nor to manifest the waning of such an entity, but to present the world itself: [t]he evidence of cinema is that of the existence of a look through which a world can give back to itself its own real and the truth of its enigma (which is admittedly not its solution), a world moving of its own motion, without a heaven or a wrapping, without ixed moorings or suspension, a world shaken, trembling, as the winds blow through it.11

It is certainly possible to discern in Nancy’s line of thinking a conceptual ainity with Agamben’s emphasis on potentiality, Messianic history, decreation

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and the nature of what one could see as ilm’s additive function vis-à-vis the real. he loss recognized by Nancy furthermore resounds with how the turn towards exteriority in Agamben’s writing facilitates a turn toward ethics. As is lucidly stated in he Coming Community (1990), Agamben’s response to Nancy’s book he Inoperative Community (1986), it is precisely inoperativity and potentiality that makes an ethical experience possible in the irst place: “the point of departure for any discourse on ethics is that there is no essence, no historical or spiritual vocation, no biological destiny that humans must enact or realize.”12 Attesting to their shared background in Heideggerian phenomenology, Nancy’s cinema of evidence and Agamben’s cinema of gesture are not oriented beyond appearance, but toward its unfolding. For both, this coming into presence of the world, its continuous disappearing and reappearing, holds a profound political import. In Agamben’s words: “he task of politics is to return appearance itself to appearance, to cause appearance itself to appear.”13 Returning to his essay on Debord, the tenor of Agamben’s post-representational argument, or what one might call his presentist position, is forcefully adumbrated in the following passage: We will have to rethink entirely our traditional conception of expression. he current concept of expression is dominated by the Hegelian model, in which all expression is realized by a medium – an image, a word, or a color – which in the end must disappear in the fully realized expression. he expressive act is fulilled when the means, the medium, is no longer perceived as such. he medium must disappear in that which it gives us to see, in the absolute that shows itself, that shines forth in the medium. On the contrary, the image worked by repetition and stoppage is a means, a medium, that does not disappear in what it makes visible. It is what I would call a “pure means,” one that shows itself as such. he image gives itself to be seen instead of disappearing in what it makes visible.14

Repetition and stoppage, then, are compositional acts that render the image into what Agamben terms “a pure means,” a condition, or state, that bears a certain resemblance to what Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, borrowing from Karen Barad, call the agential cut.15 Arguing that the practice of cutting—which in their interpretation can be both material, perceptual, technical and conceptual, and which would seem to be interrelated with the notion of stoppage—is intrinsic to any aesthetic undertaking, Kember and Zylinska point out that “the practice of cutting is crucial not just to our being in and relating to the world, but also to our becoming-with-the-world, as well as becoming-diferent-from-the-world.”16

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While Kember and Zylinska’s main concern is photography, the theoretical insights that they contribute around the igure of the cut and its ethical ramiications apply equally well to the cinema. Cutting is tied to vital processes of “diferentiation and life-making,” and “[c]utting well” implies “cutting (ilm, tape, reality) in a way that does not lose sight of the horizon of duration or foreclose on the creative possibility of life enabled by this horizon.”17 As in Nancy and Agamben, this line of thinking challenges the very foundations of philosophies built on the premise of representation. Life, Kember and Zylinska maintain, “goes beyond and contests representation: it is a creation of images in the most radical sense.”18 he seminal source for Agamben’s concern with the temporality and animation of images, however, is to be retraced to the intermediary years between his irst two books. In the fall of 1974, Agamben commenced a yearlong study in the Warburg Institute Library in London. he most immediate outcome of this activity was his 1975 essay “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science,” and, two years later, his investigation of the conception of imagination and melancholy in medieval love poetry in Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1977). Together, these publications mark a redirection of interest from the artist and the artwork, probed in he Man Without Content, to the problem of representation and imagination. Dispensing with the linear timelines of conventional historiography, the object of Warburg’s research was not the individual image or artist, but the process by which images get animated. he large panel networks of Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–8) do not give an account of images as representations to be decoded, but as presence and potency. In 1975, Agamben described the Mnemosyne as, “a kind of gigantic condenser that gathered together all the energetic currents that had animated and continued to animate Europe’s memory, taking form in its ‘ghosts.’ ”19 Consigned to a posthumous life in the course of their transmission and survival through historical memory, what Warburg referred to as the process of Nachleben, the pagan energies stored in images persist in the diminished form of phantasms, waiting to be summoned. Hence, Warburg’s notion of art history as a ghost story, and of the art historian as a necromancer. In order to bring these phantasms back to life, temporality has to be restored. Such a restoration, or resurrection, is also what is at stake in Agamben’s subsequent relections of cinema, which are concerned neither with cinema as an aesthetics or a technology, nor with its material base in ilm, but as a method, a praxis for releasing images from its “spectral destiny.”20 Cinema, then, is that which brings life to images.

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Almost four decades later, in his essay “Nymphs” (2011), his most ambitious engagement with Warburg to date, Agamben returns to this intermediary domain where images are encountered and reanimated. We confront images “in a no-man’s land,” Agamben relects in a passage that evokes the experience of the movie goer, “in the shadows where the historical subject, between waking and sleep, engages with them in order to bring them back to life, but also, sooner or later, to awaken from them.”21 It is, then, not merely a question of summoning the ghosts and bringing them back to life, but, ultimately, to awaken from them. From the “phantasmology” of Medieval love poetry expounded in Stanzas, to the phantasmagoria of Debord’s spectacular societies, the conceptual thrust of Agamben’s work evinces a remarkable consistency. In this element of awakening, Warburg’s Pathosformeln and Debordian montage converge in what Benjamin theorized as movement caught at a standstill—a dialectical constellation of what-has-been and the now, blasting open the space of history, and, ultimately, “the space for an imagination with no more images.”22 For Agamben, what may bring about such an awakening is gesture. In an essay whose inluence reverberates throughout this collection, Agamben puts forward his perhaps somewhat cryptic dictum that the “element of cinema is gesture and not image.”23 He also unequivocally connects gesture with the sphere of ethics, suggesting that gesture contains within it the sense not of production or enactment but rather that of endurance and support.24 As the subject of this essay will be revisited in several of the following articles, we shall refrain from summarizing its contents in any great detail here. But the gist of its contention is worth a few brief remarks; more speciically, the way in which it corrals the subjects of gesture, ethics and mediality, binding the complicated phenomena together in a conceptual interrelation almost certainly without precedent in media theory or philosophy. Gesture, for Agamben, implies “the exhibition of a mediality” as well as “the process of making a means visible as such.”25 he photographs in Mnemosyne, to return for a moment to Warburg, represent for Agamben a procession of gestures wherein the images evoke ilm stills more than they do external reality.26 “Even the Mona Lisa, even Las Meninas,” Agamben writes, “could be seen not as immovable and eternal forms, but as fragments of a gesture or as stills of a lost ilm.”27 What exactly, then, is gained by exhibiting mediality, by making means visible? On the surface it may sound like nothing more than yet another reformulation of the aesthetic project of self-relexivity. But that is not what is at stake here. he making visible of the medial rather involves an opening onto the realm of ethics. Here, Agamben

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draws on Aristotle’s distinction in the Nicomachean Ethics between poiesis and praxis; while the former has an objective external to itself, the latter has not because actions that are by nature good constitute an objective in themselves.28 Agamben’s approach to cinema is marked by a profound ambiguity. On the one hand, cinema is an apparatus that captures and disciplines life, modeling and reshaping gestures. On the other hand, cinema posits an archaeological method for bringing life back to images. While from its pre-history complicit with the biopolitical regimes of modernity, it may also, in Debordian fashion, facilitate a counter-move. he release of image into gesture entails a turn from biopolitics to biopoetics: exhibiting the pure mediality of the human body in motion, unhinging biopolitical relations and grasping the potentiality of bare life. he value of gesture as a conceptual category is that it “allows the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings,” which “opens the ethical dimension for them.”29 In the world of images, gesture is the point of light from aesthetics into ethics and politics. Agamben’s sketches for a gestural cinema are thus at the same time also expressive of an ethics of the cinema, which happens to be the title of the irst essay in this volume. We are pleased to be able to make available for the irst time in English translation two original texts on ilm that Agamben published in French. he irst of these is entitled “For an Ethics of the Cinema” and featured in an edition of the journal Traic in 1992.30 Starting from the problem of individuation as introduced by Benjamin in one of his late essays, Agamben outlines a compressed history of “mutating ways of being” epitomized by the concepts of type, persona and divo, the latter two of which belong to the institutions of theater and cinema respectively. An inquiry clearly preoccupied with forms of mediality in relation to ethics, the essay explicitly brings up the notion of gesture with reference to actors and characters, theater and ilm. In the cinema, Agamben contends, characters and roles are invented in order to embody the gestures of the divo, whereas the opposite is the case in the theater. In ilms, “the individual consciousness and the character are captured together and deported into a region where singular life and collective life are confused,”31 Agamben observes. Toward the end of this short piece he speculates that his history of the transformations in ways of being might lead us “beyond the aesthetic realm,”32 an intimation, perhaps, of the ethical work of gestures to come. he second essay, “Cinema and History: On Jean-Luc Godard,” originally featured in Le Monde in October 1995, just a month before Agamben presented his lecture on Debord.33 Not only does Agamben’s epigrammatic relection

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on videographic montage in Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98) formalize the link between the two ilmmakers, it also invokes, in its concluding line, Warburg’s Mnemosyne, which is denoted in identical terms in “Nymphs” as, “the image-less: the farewell—and the refuge—of all images.”34 he multilayered superimpositions, wipes, and dissolves of Histoire(s) do not summon an archive of cinema, then, but rather the Mnemosyne for the post-cinematic age, both in its vastly ambitious scope and in its method of historiographical montage. Appositely, Agamben’s “Notes on Gesture” debuted in the irst issue of Serge Daney’s new cinema journal Revue Traic in 1991, together with a poem by Godard contemplating the “dead parish” of contemporary cinema. Godard’s mid- to late oeuvre remains a touchstone throughout this volume and it is also Agamben’s essay on Godard, and its conceptual ainity with his lecture on Debord, that provides the starting point for our irst chapter. In “Silence, Gesture, Revelation: he Ethics and Aesthetics of Montage in Godard and Agamben,” James Williams notes that while Agamben in his previous commentary on cinema addressed gesture in terms of a movement from aesthetics to ethics and politics, this argument is conspicuously missing from his relection on Godard. his omission raises a key question: where, exactly, in Agamben’s gestural move toward ethics is aesthetics let behind? Williams goes on to explore the relations between the ethical and the aesthetic by reading Agamben against an overlooked work by Godard, Soigne ta droite (Une place sur la terre) (Keep Your Right Up, 1987), a ilm which directly engages with the messianic status of the cinematic image. While Godard’s ilm draws out some of the underlying principles of Agamben’s theory of gestural cinema, it also exposes some of its limitations as a philosophy of ilm. What is at stake for Godard, as demonstrated in Williams’s judicious close reading, is the performability of the image within a larger signifying system. Tapping into the kinetic deposits of silent cinema, Godard’s plastic strategies of decreation pushes the image toward the borders of silence and illegibility in order to recover gesture aesthetically. Such a recovery transpires in acts of self-exhibition and revelation, in what Williams refers to as “the event of beauty.” While Agamben conceives of gesture as an art subtracted from aesthetics, Godard’s artistic method is carried by a faith in the ethics of aesthetics. hus, for Godard, Williams proposes, gesture is always “ethico-aesthetic.” Soigne ta droite marked the culmination of the vibrant cinematic experimentation of Godard’s Second Wave. he second chapter brings us to an earlier phase of this period, not long ater Godard’s return to feature ilm making, to

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scrutinize the materialization of a set of recurring aesthetic igurations that may be seen to undergird a non-teleological ethics. In her article “Passion, Agamben and the Gestures of Work,” Libby Saxton examines the nature of the compelling equivalences between processes of labor and acts of creativity through a reading of Godard’s 1982 ilm in light of both Agamben’s work (“he Work of Man” and “Notes on Gesture” in particular) and what has been seen as a “haunting presence” in his philosophy, namely that of Simone Weil. While for the latter work served as a determinant of temporal duration, Saxton argues, the mystic thinker’s rejection of Taylorism—whose monotonous regime is embodied by Isabelle Huppert’s factory worker in Passion—presages Agamben’s biopolitical take on gesture. Focusing in particular on the intertextual currents that animate Godard’s ilm—the reenactments of celebrated paintings as tableau vivants—Saxton suggests that Agamben’s notion of potentiality is related to Weil’s concept of decreation as something “becoming nothing.” In the images of arrested motion in Passion the two phenomena are seen to intermingle. By extending the discussion of dynamic potentiality and virtual kinesis back to key works by Weil, Saxton’s thoughtful argument is able to shed new light on a series of relations that are of vital importance to contemporary media theory, those between movement and stillness, materiality and the spiritual life, and love and labor. he signiicant place that potentiality and dynamis occupy in Agamben’s work likewise informs Janet Harbord’s essay “Gesture, Time, Movement: David Claerbout meets Giorgio Agamben on the Boulevard du Temple.” Noting that Agamben’s conceptualization of the medium of photography runs counter to established theories in which its special province is thought to be the capture of time, Harbord points out that the potentiality of the photographic image, for Agamben, is closely linked to “the release of a dynamis,” which again connects with Benjamin’s notion of kairological time. Yet the model which frames Agamben’s philosophy of the image is, according to Harbord, “elliptical” and in need of further elaboration or exegesis. In an attempt to overcome this inherent obliqueness, Harbord investigates recent moving image practices that revolve around image production, its forms of emergence and what she terms its “modes of appearing.” Turning toward the work of Belgian artist, David Claerbout, who has taken a special interest in the liminal zone between photography and ilm, Harbord shows how the photograph, in line with Agamben’s thinking in the essay “Judgment Day,” “calls up a moment that is not an instant within a continuum, but a paradigm of heterogeneous times that

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breaks from the concept of the image as a sealed surface containing an historical truth.” Claerbout’s single-channel works such as Boom (1996) and Kindergarten Antonio Sant’Elia (1998) release the gestural potential of the image and thus enable a discharge of the multiple temporalities that are latent within it. Extrapolating a number of the key motifs pursued in the irst three essays (the messianic, decreation, the imagelessness, profanation, potentiality), Benjamin Noys in his contribution undertakes a wide-ranging critical appraisal of Agamben’s project to politicize and ethicize the image. In “Film-of-Life: Agamben’s Profanation of the Image,” he demonstrates how Agamben’s relections on the image, albeit occupying a seemingly minor place in his oeuvre, in fact speak to his central concern with detaching “life” from the powers of the State and capital. Reconstructing the genealogy of Agamben’s messianic theory of cinema through Kaka, Heidegger, Benjamin and Debord to explore its current implications for pornography and sotware technologies, Noys shows how cinema, for Agamben, provides the prototype for the deadly fusion between the society of spectacle (Debord) and surveillance (Foucault) in which capitalism becomes an immense machine for the capture and classiication of life by images and the reduction of life to images. To break the spell Agamben advocates what Noys describes as “an ambiguous un-working on the image, an act of profanation,” releasing its encrypted potential in order to re-activate and re-animate life through the image so as to give us a previously unseen ilm of life. In his polemic and probing account, Noys suggests that the critical diiculty for Agamben is his failure to articulate the redemptive practice of profanation as a possible common political practice. It is precisely as a political category that gesture is explored in the next chapter, the irst in a trio that study the multiple repercussions of gesture in medical cinema, ethnographic documentary, and moving-image artworks respectively. In “Biopolitics of Gesture: Cinema and the Neurological Body,” Pasi Väliaho delineates a genealogy of cinema as linked to physiological and psychiatric practices at the turn of the twentieth century. As a medium, cinema in this period attained “a particular epistemic function in deining and (re)producing our gestural being at the leeting limit between the normal and the pathological,” Väliaho observes. In a deeply historical study, also indebted to the work of Foucault, he then goes on to chart the construction of “the neurological body” in modernity, examining the ways in which cinema both occasioned and captured a shit in political subjectivity. Väliaho’s case is the scientiic, biopolitical gaze developed by renowned neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière clinic in Paris, a gaze which was

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inluential in generating an epistemological practice “obsessed with the moving, doing, breathing, sensuous individual,” as Väliaho puts it. Charcot was evidently consumed by the ways in which signs of hysteria could be mapped visually and his objective was to create “a kind of pictorial typography of nervous pathology.” A serious challenge to that endeavor, however, was that the moving, gesticulating, contorting and gesturing human body would brush up against the perceptual limitations of the observer. Chronophotographic, and later, cinematic technologies were thus enlisted to supplement the scientiic gaze. Raising the intriguing question whether this neurological body and the cinematic apparatus were in fact “mutually constitutive,” Väliaho—drawing on Agamben’s view of the biopolitical as a concept which continuously renegotiates the boundaries between bare life and social life and between animality and humanity—demonstrates how cinema contributed substantially in coniguring “the uncertain conceptual contours of the human” at a time when the biopolitical management of life, and its concomitant policing of the borders between the normative and the pathological, was fully emerging. Cinema’s unique capacity for capturing gesture is also the point of departure for João Mário Grilo’s essay “Propositions for a Gestural Cinema: On “Ciné-Trances” and Jean Rouch’s Ritual Documentaries.” Tracing the inluence of what he names “the ‘Agamben efect’ in ilm theory,” Grilo evokes Godard’s identiication of Manet in Histoire(s) du cinéma as the spiritual inventor of the cinematograph, Jonathan Crary’s analysis of Manet’s painting Dans la serre (1879) and, inally, Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929) in order to lesh out the implications of cinema’s “perfect mediality”—its ability to unleash the frozen but potentially dynamic dimension of the image—for the biopolitical sphere. In the second part of his essay, Grilo goes on to consider the relationship between cinema and gesture in the work of Jean Rouch, more particularly the ilms he made about spirit possession rituals among the Songhay, Zarma and Dogon tribes in western central Africa. Drawing on an approach that combines ilm theory, ethnography, and practical insights from the author’s own ilmmaking experience, Grilo’s inventive reappraisal of Agamben’s relections on mediality broaches the question whether a ilm can be gestured rather than visualized. Ultimately, for Grilo, Rouch’s practical method and Agamben’s more abstract postulations converge in their shared interest in reconstituting or recomposing gestural experience, and in making that experience screenable. he interface between the human body and cinematic technology charted by Väliaho and Grilo is considered in relation to experimental ilm and video art by Silvia Casini in her essay “Engaging Hand to Hand with the Moving Image:

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Serra, Viola and Grandrieux’s Radical Gestures.” In order to fully investigate the process in which an image becomes gesture, Casini proposes, one has to take into consideration the broader terminology that underpins Agamben’s thinking. Embarking on such an inquiry, gesture is explored through the prisms of a triad of key concepts in Agamben’s philosophy: dispositifs, potentiality and profanation. Each of these concepts are in turn elucidated through a close reading: the cinematic dispositif as opened up and exteriorized into gesture in Richard Serra’s 16mm ilm Hand Catching Lead (1968); the gesture of profaning in Bill Viola’s video work he Greeting (1995); and the potential of ilmmaking as bodily gesture explored in Philippe Grandrieux’s experimental ilm La Vie nouvelle (2002). he bodily engagement with the cinematic dispositif through which Casini connects these works further suggests that for Agamben, only certain modes of cinema may liberate image into gesture. As Casini rightly points out, Agamben’s predilection for the avant-garde also entails a repudiation of storytelling in mainstream cinema. An objection that could be marshaled against Agamben’s engagement with the moving image, then, as well as its impact on the broader ield of visual studies, is that it tends to skirt two preoccupations central to ilm studies: irst, the domain of narrative ilm, and second, the question of medium speciicity. Garrett Stewart’s ambitious analysis of controversial Austrian director Michael Haneke’s recent ilms in light of not only Agamben, but also Deleuze and media theorist Régis Debray, thus represents a welcome intervention in the ield. In his article “Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a Philosophical Cinematics,” Stewart develops Agamben’s concepts of repetition and stoppage and points toward a theoretically productive transition from the Deleuzian “movement-image” to a new “gestural image.” Focusing on the correlation between the stoppage-repetition mechanism that Agamben discovers in Debord’s ilms as well as the notion of potentiality, Stewart pays attention to what he sees as “the full-scale desubjectivation of the visual” in selected sequences from Haneke’s ilms, Caché and Amour in particular, instances that, rather than displaying images, exhibit acts of imaging. What the article attempts is no less than a rethinking of Deleuzian virtuality and Agambenian potentiality “in the beam of each other’s manifestation on screen,” as the article puts it with equal elegance and precision. Always sensitive to Haneke’s carefully calibrated aesthetic conigurations, his fracturing of suture-oriented editing codes and preponderance for gaps and caesura, Stewart’s reading arrives at the insight that “[n]o current narrative ilmmaker

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gravitates as demandingly as Haneke to cinema as ‘a prolonged hesitation between image and meaning’.” Following Stewart’s relection on the process of desubjectivation and death’s intrusion into bourgeoisie domesticity, the two concluding chapters bring these themes to bear on what Agamben in his most inluential formulation referred to as the nomos of modernity, the camp, and the liminal igure who occupies its epicentre, the Muselmann. In “Montage and the Dark Margin of the Archive,” Trond Lundemo astutely unravels the paradoxical conditions of the testimony and the position of the witness as formulated by Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz: he Witness and the Archive (1999). Since no one can testify from the inside of death, Agamben argues, this leaves the position of the testimony as a remnant between the living being and the speaking being. Undermining the integrity and identity of the testifying subject, the “dark margin” that encircles every speech act opens the question of the process of subjectivization. Probing the media speciicity of the testimony and its role in the archive, Lundemo asks if also still and moving photographic images may convey this lacuna. his question is pursued in regard to the debates encircling Claude Lanzmann’s abstention from archival images in Shoah (1985), Georges Didi-Huberman’s polemic book Images in Spite of All, and Godard’s epistemology of montage. In his concluding remarks, Lundemo situates Agamben’s investigation of the witness within the corpus of the philosopher’s writing on cinema. Calling attention to its primary concern with processes of subjectivization, Lundemo suggests that this recurring focus may derive from Agamben’s own experience as an actor in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (he Gospel According to Matthew, 1964). It is from this early collaboration, and from Pasolini’s pre-production ilm Sopralluoghi in Palestina (Scouting in Palestine, 1963–4), that the book’s concluding chapter begins. In “Remnants of Palestine, or, Archaeology ater Auschwitz,” Henrik Gustafsson draws on Pasolini’s linguistically informed approach to location shooting to explore a key concern that informs Agamben’s philosophical archaeology: the need to rethink the relation between place and language. Pursuing the political implications of this project, Gustafsson goes on to address Jean-Luc Godard’s and Claude Lanzmann’s artistic interventions into the Zionist-Palestine conlict over the last four decades. he focal point of this cross-reading is their respective claims on the Nazi camps as the inaugural site of the conlict in the Middle East. his origin is in turn imbricated with a speech act, an act of nomination. For Godard the connection is encrypted in the German name Musulmann, for Lanzmann

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in the Hebrew name Shoah. In Agamben’s work, such a relation converges in the Messianic concept of the remnant, introduced in his study of testimony ater Auschwitz, further elaborated in regard to the remnants of Israel in his reading of the Letters of Paul, and preigured in an earlier essay addressing the Palestinian refugee situation. Triangulated in this manner, the remnant emerges as a highly potent historical cipher for the conlict in the Middle East, as well as for probing the polemical conversations between Lanzmann and Godard. In keeping with the strategic untimeliness that informs Agamben’s philosophical archaeology, what he has invoked as “the twilight of post-cinema” also stipulates that the time is ripe to grasp cinema “in the moment of arising and becoming.”35 As each essay in this collection demonstrates, the encounter between Agamben and cinema solicits both a broader genealogy of what cinema has been, and of a cinema to come. Not, then, a cinema that unfolds from a beginning to an end along a telos, but towards an ethos.

Notes 1 Giorgio Agamben, “Nymphs”, Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media, Jacques Khalip, Robert Mitchell (eds) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 61. 2 See for instance Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema Ater Wittgenstein and Cavell, Rupert Read, Jerry Goodenough (eds) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005);hinking hrough Cinema: Film as Philosophy, ed. Murray Smith, homas E. Wartenberg (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006); homas E. Wartenberg, hinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2007); Paisley Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); he Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston, Carl Plantinga (New York: Routledge, 2011); Robert Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film: hinking Images (London: Continuum, 2011); Hunter Vaughan, Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard, Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic hinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 3 For the argument that the theory and the philosophy of ilm should be conceptualized as discrete endeavors, see D. N. Rodowick, “An Elegy for heory”, October 122 (Fall 2007), 102. 4 See for instance Stanley Cavell’s he World Viewed: Relections on the Ontology of Film (New York: Viking Press, 1971), as well as the secondary literature on Cavell’s studies of ilm; Images in Our Souls: Cavell, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema, Joseph H. Smith, William Kerrigan (eds) (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press,

16

5

6

7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Cinema and Agamben 1987); William Rothman and Marian Keane, Reading Cavell’s he World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000); Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). While signiicant work has begun to chart the interface of cinema and Agamben, such inquires have generally been of an introductory nature. Notable in this preliminary corpus are Alex Murray’s chapter “he Homeland of Gesture—Art and Cinema” in his book Giorgio Agamben (Routledge: New York, 2010) 78–94, and, more importantly, his essay “Beyond Spectacle and the Image: the Poetics of Guy Debord and Agamben” in he Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life, Justin Clemens, Nicholas Heron, Alex Murray (eds) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008) 164–80. In the same volume we also ind Deborah Levitt’s essay “Notes on Media and Biopolitics: ‘Notes on Gesture,’ ” 193–211. Christian McCrea has written the entry “Giorgio Agamben” in Film, heory and Philosophy: the Key hinkers, ed. Felicity Colman (Durham: Acumen, 2009), 349–57. Finally, there is Benjamin Noys’s pioneering article, “Gestural Cinema?: Giorgio Agamben on Film”, Film-Philosophy, vol. 8, no. 22, July 2004, http://www.ilm-philosophy. com/index.php/f-p/article/view/790/702. Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 32–3. Giorgio Agamben, he Man Without Content (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999 [1970]), 102. Giorgio Agamben, “Diference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films”, Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. homas McDonough, trans. Brian Holmes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 314, 315. Hollis Frampton, “Notes on Composing in Film”, October, Vol. 1, (Spring, 1976), 104–10, 109. Ibid., 316. Ibid. Jean-Luc Nancy and Abbas Kiarostami, he Evidence of Film, trans. Christine Irizarry, Verena Andermatt Conley (Brussels: Yves Gevaert, 2001), 44. Giorgio Agamben, he Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis and London, 1993 [1990]), 43. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2000 [1996]), 95. Agamben, “Diference and Repetition”, 318. It should be noted that the concept of the “cut” as described by Kember and Zylinska is also indebted both to Henri Bergson (who uses the term in his Creative Evolution (1907), 71) and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of decoupage from What is Philosophy? (1991).

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16 Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, Life Ater New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 75. 17 Ibid., 72, 82. 18 Ibid., 84. 19 Giorgio Agamben, “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science” [1975] in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy eds. and trans. Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 95. 20 Agamben, “Nymphs”, 66. 21 Ibid., 72. 22 Ibid., 80. From 1979 to 1994, Agamben served as the editor of the Italian edition of Benjamin’s Complete Works. 23 Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 55. 24 Ibid., 57. 25 Ibid., 58. 26 Ibid., 54. 27 Ibid., 55. 28 Ibid., 57. 29 Ibid., 58. 30 Giorgio Agamben, “Pour une étique du cinéma” Traic no. 3, 1992, 49–52. 31 Giorgio Agamben, “For an Ethics of the Cinema”, trans. John V. Garner and Colin Williamson, Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image, Henrik Gustafsson and Asbjørn Grønstad (eds) (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 22. 32 Ibid., 28. 33 Agamben, Giorgio (1995), “Face au cinéma et à l’Histoire: à propos de Jean-Luc Godard”, Le Monde (Supplément Livres): 6 October, 1995, I, X–XI. 34 Agamben, “Nymphs”, 80. 35 Agamben, “For an Ethics of the Cinema”, trans. John V. Garner and Colin Williamson in Cinema and Agamben, 23. Giorgio Agamben, he Signature of All hings: On Method, trans. Luca D’Isanto and Kevin Attell (New York: Zoone Books, 2009 [2008]), 110.

For an Ethics of the Cinema Giorgio Agamben

Translated by John V. Garner and Colin Williamson

I. Type In his “Notes sur les Tableaux parisiens de Baudelaire,” drated in French during the last years of his exile in Paris, Walter Benjamin evokes a “nightmare” familiar to anyone who was able to undergo the experience of the crowd in a modern city, namely “to see the distinctive traits that at irst appear to guarantee the uniqueness, the strict individuality of a person, in turn reveal the constitutive elements of a new type, which would itself establish a new subdivision … he individual presented in his multiplicity as always the same testiies to the anxiety of the city dweller who, despite cultivating the most eccentric peculiarities, is unable to break the magic circle of the type.”1 If we consider Benjamin’s description to be accurate, and if we accept the diagnosis according to which modern man has heretofore entered, deinitively, into the “magic circle of the type,” then we cannot avoid the consequence: an essential mutation is implied here, which concerns nothing less than the principle of individuation of the human species. Individuation, which proceeds from the genus to the individual, remains, so to speak, suspended in air, and the beings who previously constituted the individuals of the species homo sapiens now loat in an indistinct zone, neither universal nor singular, which is the proper domain of the type. Far from being reduced to a simple generality or from undergoing any lack of determination, the type presents itself as a perfectly determined being which, in accordance with Benjamin’s analysis, suddenly indetermines itself and becomes the principal of a series, in virtue of the very traits which should identify it.

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Indeed, this transformation has since become so familiar to us that we no longer even come close to recognizing it as such. For a long time now, advertising, pornography, and television have habituated us to those mutant beings who linger ceaselessly between individual and class and vanish utterly into a series precisely in their most characteristic idiosyncrasies. hat young woman who smiles at us while drinking a beer, that other who rolls her hips so mischievously while running on the beach, they belong to a people whose members, like the angels of medieval theology (each of whom individually constitutes a species), elude the distinction between the original and the replica; and the fascination they exert on us is due in large part to that capacity (properly “angelic”) to make themselves typical through that very thing which appears to belong to them exclusively, to replicate and to confuse themselves with a new, unique example, each time without remainder. he exclusive character becomes the principle of serial reproduction: such is the deinition of the type (which, at once, reveals its proximity to the commodity). In fact, familiarity with this process is immemorial: it is at the basis of the most ancient expedients from which woman draws her power of seduction, namely make-up and fashion. Both circumscribe the inefable uniqueness of the individual body in order to transform its singular traits into a serial principle. (For Baudelaire, make-up “creates an abstract unity in the texture and color of the skin, a unity which, like that produced by stockings, immediately approximates the human being to the statue, that is, to a divine and superior being.”) hrough these means humanity seeks to remedy what is perhaps its most ancient anxiety: the fear provoked by the irreparable uniqueness of the living being.

II. Persona here has always been a realm in which creatures, intermediate between genus and individual, move: the theater. And these hybrid beings are the characters, which result from the encounter between a lesh-and-blood individual—the actor—and the role the author has written. For the actor, such an encounter involves an extraordinary mutation stemming from the ritual in which he must subjugate himself in order to be in a position to assume his role. Usually, he dons a mask (persona), which signals his passage to a higher life, subtracted from the vicissitudes of individual existence. he contrast is even more evident

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in certain traditions which require the actor to completely strip away his own personality before he enters the scene: Balinese theater, which so captivated Artaud, is familiar with such a trance-like state known as lupa. It is no coincidence that the Stoics, those erectors of Western ethics, ironically modeled their moral paradigm on the actor. In their view, the exemplary attitude is that of an actor who, without identifying himself with his role, nonetheless agrees to play it faithfully to the end. As such, the singular begins to separate himself from his mask, which he puts down in order to become a person himself. However, this encounter may produce something that difers from the character and that calls for an entirely diferent ethics. In the commedia dell’arte, for example, the mask is no longer the vehicle of a higher realm into which the actor enters; rather, it summons the actor, just as the canvas does, to a third dimension through which a contamination of real life with the theatrical scene takes place. Harlequin, Punchinello, Pantalone, and Beltrame are not sub-characters but are like so many experimentum vitae in which the destruction of the actor’s identity and the destruction of the role go hand in hand. hrough such roles the very relationship between text and execution, between the virtual and the real, is called into question. A mixture of potency and act, which eludes the categories of traditional ethics, insinuates itself between them. Nothing illustrates this contamination between theater and reality better than the way comedians compose their signature, which unites the real name with that of the mask. Nicolo Barbieri, also known as Beltrame; Domenico Biancolelli, also known as Harlequin; Mario Cennhini, also known as Fritellino. It is no longer very clear whether the name of the mask [nom du masque] is simply the comedian’s stage name [nom d’artiste]. (It is enough to consider the absurdity of such expressions as “Talma, also known as Oedipus,” or “Eleanora Duse, also known as Nora.”) It is no surprise that modern theater has felt the need to distance itself from the actors of the commedia dell’arte (but not without retaining their lesson). heir bodies were the site of a disquieting prophesy which could only complete itself two centuries later.

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III. Divo What does the cinema, which came about in an era when the development of the principle of individuation toward the type was already at an advanced stage, bring to bear with its emergence? he analogy with theater must not lead us into error. Despite the apparent contiguity between scene and set, the cinema in no way puts into play an actor who lends his body to a character from language; it puts into play uniquely diferent degrees of tension along a scale at the summit of which is none other than that paradoxical being which exists only in the cinema: the divo, the star. he Italian and American terms, which refer to the divine or celestial realm, are not accidental, for the divo’s relationships with his characters call to mind more those which a god (or a demi-god) maintains with the myths in which he appears than those which an actor maintains with his roles. he latter were invented to incarnate his gesture, and not the inverse, as is the case with the theater. he star lives a mythical existence which is, properly speaking, neither that of the psychosomatic individual of the same name (who serves as a support for the star), nor that of the ilms in which the star appears. he star’s status is even more paradoxical from the perspective of the principle of individuation: “Gary Cooper” or “Marlene Dietrich” are not individuals but something that set theory would describe as classes containing only a single element (singletons) or belonging to themselves (a € a). With the angel, the individual makes itself species; with the divo, the type as such makes itself individual, becomes the type or the exemplar of itself. And just as the cinema is not acquainted with actors in the proper sense, it also no longer presents characters (or at least not characters [êthê] analogous to those of the theatrical tradition), as is demonstrated by the impossibility of efecting a real distinction between the cinematic ‘character’ and the actor. While Oedipus and Hamlet exist independently of the individuals who successively lend a person to them, Ellen Berent in Leave Her to Heaven (Stahl, 1945) or Gregory Arkadin in Conidential Report (Welles, 1955) do not allow themselves to be separated from Gene Tierney or Orson Welles. (It only takes a simple observation to prove this indisputably: a remake is not another version of the same text but another ilm.) In other words, the individual consciousness and the character are captured together and deported into a region where singular life and collective life are confused. he type has realized in its lesh the abstractions and repeatability of the commodity; likewise, the divo constitutes a

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parodic realization of the Marxian “generic being” in which individual practice coincides immediately with its genus. Perhaps these considerations will contribute to our understanding of why the cinema so interests the inheritors of a Western culture for which theater and philosophy have been so important. For, as previously in Greek theater, what is at play here no doubt gets to the crux of our metaphysical tradition, namely to the ontological consistency of human existence, to its way of being, i.e., to nothing less than the manner in which a single body assumes the generic power of language. his is why Christian theology, when it tried to provide a philosophical formulation for the problem of Trinitarian ontology, could only present it by resorting to a theatrical terminology and could only conceive of it as an articulation between substance and person (prosôpon, mask). hus, it is not surprising that the extreme phase of this history of mutating ways of being could take us well beyond the aesthetic realm and that the existence of the divo has been and remains perhaps the strongest collective aspiration of our times. he end of the cinema truly sounds the death knell of the ultimate metaphysical adventure of Dasein. In the twilight of post-cinema, of which we are seeing the beginning, human quasi-existence, now stripped of any metaphysical hypostasis and deprived of any theological model, will have to seek its proper generic consistency elsewhere, no doubt beyond the ethico-theatrical person, but also beyond the commodiied seriality of the type and the unigeneric being of the divine star.

Notes 1

his quote appears to be excerpted from Walter Benjamin’s “Notes sur les Tableaux parisiens de Baudelaire” (1939), which appears in Écrits français (1991). he original, extended French version reads: “Ce cauchemar serait de voir les traits distinctifs qui au premier abord semblent garantir l’unicité, l’individualité strict d’un personnage reveler à leur tour les elements constitutifs d”un type nouveau qui établirait, lui, une subdivision nouvelle. Ainsi se manifesterait, au Coeur de la lânerie, une phantasmagoria angoissante. Baudelaire l’a développée vigoreusement dans Les Sept Viellards … L’individu qui est ainsi présenté dans sa multiplication comme toujours identique, suggère l”angoisse qu’éprouve le citadin à ne plus

24

Cinema and Agamben pouvoir, malgré la mise en oeuvre des singularités les plus excentriques, romper le cercle magique du type” (242–3). he complete reference to the essay is Walter Benjamin, “Notes sur les Tableaux parisiens de Baudelaire”, Écrits français (1991): 235–43. Trans.

Cinema and History: On Jean-Luc Godard Giorgio Agamben

Translated by John V. Garner and Colin Williamson One of the principal theses of Godard’s work seems to me to concern the essential, constitutive link between history and cinema. What historical task belongs properly to the cinema? his is also the question that garnered Guy Debord’s interest in the cinema, and which he was the irst to pose. But, irstly, what history is involved? A very particular history, a messianic history. Not a chronological history but a history that has to do with salvation. Something must be saved. In Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98), Godard says: “he image will come at the time of the Resurrection.” Here we have a classical thesis of the gnostics, whether Christian, Jewish, or Manichean, all of whom conceive of the image as the very element of the Resurrection. What re-emerges is the eidos, the image. hrough the image one will be saved, and to see one’s image means to be saved. Histoire(s) du cinéma is an apocalypse of the cinema in the various senses of the term. he irst meaning of the word is that of catastrophe. In the Jewish tradition, the day of the Messiah’s arrival is simultaneously what one desires the most and what one fears the most. But it is also an apocalypse of the cinema in the other, more literal meaning of the word: a revelation. Godard’s work functions as an unveiling of the cinema by the cinema. How does the image acquire this messianic power? Serge Daney responded: through montage. According to Daney, Godard’s thesis in Histoire(s) du cinéma is that the cinema was seeking only one thing—montage—and that this was what twentieth-century man desperately needed. But what is montage from this perspective? Or, rather, what are the conditions of possibility for montage? his is just what Godard makes evident. hese conditions are at least two in number: repetition and stoppage.

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Modernity admits of four great thinkers of repetition: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Deleuze. hey have all shown that repetition is not the return of the same but the return of the possibility of what was. What returns returns as possible. Hence the proximity of repetition to memory: a memory is the return of what was, qua possible. Repetition, for its part, is the memory of that which was not. his is also a deinition of the cinema: the memory of that which was not. his is the opposite of the media, which employs the same means but always gives the fact without its possibility. It gives an unrepeatable fact before which one is powerless: the tyranny of the media adores indignant but powerless citizens. he second element is stoppage, the “revolutionary interruption” of which Walter Benjamin spoke. As the power to interrupt something, stoppage is what diferentiates the cinema from, for example, narrative. Literary theorists have found only a single, clear distinguishing element between prose and poetry: in poetry, one can make caesuras and enjambments. he caesura or the enjambment permits one to oppose acoustic limits to semantic limits, to make a pause that marks the diference between meaning and sound. Poetry is capable of stoppage; prose is not. he cinema also has this power of stoppage at hand. Repetition and stoppage form a system in the cinema; they are inseparable. Together they realize the messianic task of the cinema. his task, insofar as it appears in Histoire(s) du cinéma, is not a new creation but an act of “decreation.” his is the power of repetition and stoppage. Deleuze says that every act of creation is an act of resistance, but an act can only resist if it possesses the power to “decreate” facts. Otherwise, no resistance is possible; the facts are always stronger. What becomes of an image wrought in this way by repetition and stoppage? It becomes, so to speak, “an image of nothing.” Apparently, the images Godard shows us are images of images extracted from other ilms. But they acquire the capacity to show themselves qua images. hey are no longer images of something about which one must immediately recount a meaning, narrative or otherwise. hey exhibit themselves as such. he true messianic power is this power to give the image to this “imagelessness,” which, as Benjamin said, is the refuge of every image.

1

Silence, Gesture, Revelation: he Ethics and Aesthetics of Montage in Godard and Agamben James S. Williams Why do you carry on doing this? he beauty of the gesture. Oscar in Holy Motors Leos Carax L’éthique c’est l’esthétique de dedans. Pierre Reverdy he short, schematic article by Giorgio Agamben on Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98) published in Le Monde in October 1995—the only essay he has devoted thus far exclusively to Godard—distils the central ideas of a lecture he delivered on Guy Debord around the same time entitled “Diference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s ilms”.1 At stake is the nature of history in the cinema. For Agamben, it is necessarily messianic because it is non-chronological and linked to salvation. he means and condition for this salvation is montage, speciically the processes of “stoppage” and “repetition” whereby images (and sounds) are freed from their meaning and exhibit themselves as such, and we as spectators must undertake the task of (re)construction. Histoire(s) thus comes down to an act of “decreation” and an “apocalypse” of cinema in the diferent senses of the term, including that of revelation. Similarly, Debord’s cinematic practice dismantles the image to reveal the gesture, exemplifying cinema’s aim not simply to create but also to decreate what exists in order to produce something new. By rendering visible the means and the medium of cinema through repetition and stoppage, both Godard and Debord actively harness cinema’s potential for resistance against the spectacularization of politics and the control of information and public opinion by corporate media.2 I do not wish here to compare and contrast at length Debord’s dismantling of the “disembodied spectacle” through techniques such as détournement that

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subvert capitalist signs and culture with Godard’s approach to repetition and stoppage as it has developed since his extensive video-work of the mid-to-late 1970s. Important links can certainly be made between Debord’s “anti-cinema” and works like France/tour/détour/deux/enfants (1977–78) which slowed down human movement and decreated the lines of linear, rational thinking through the use of stop-start motion to reveal, in the words of Gilles Deleuze, the constitutive spaces and interstitial “silences” between images, or the “between-two of images.”3 Yet the possibility of establishing a critical relationship between Godard and Agamben will not come down simply to a connection or otherwise to Debord.4 Nor do I wish to analyze in detail the processes of historical montage in Histoire(s) which have received extensive critical attention elsewhere.5 Instead, I want to return speciically to Agamben’s article on Histoire(s) which concludes with the wonderfully suggestive phrase about the work’s messianic drive. Agamben states: “he true messianic power is this power to return the image to this “imagelessness” [“sans image”] which, as Benjamin said, is the refuge of all images.” Agamben is clearly talking here about the way that, just as in Debord’s fractured cinema where the images of the mediatized world are ripped from their narrative context and placed in a montage, each image in Histoire(s)— defamiliarized, decontextualized, de-allegorized—is efectively transformed metaphysically into a kind of epiphany and manifestation of the mystery of cinematographic creation. Indeed, each new pure concrete object and detail, when thrown into the light, enacts this same miracle. (Agamben writes in the Debord essay, paraphrasing Benjamin, that in the messianic situation of cinema “[e]ach moment, each image, is charged with history because it is the door through which the Messiah enters.”6) Attempting to redeem cinema as a site of the messianic promise contained in the image, Agamben is clearly drawn to Godard for whom montage carries the potential to “redeem” the real. here is, however, something implicit in Agamben’s article that needs to be fully acknowledged: that Godard’s messianic practice of montage is operating in a wholly diferent realm from that of Debord. he Debord essay ends on a very particular note. Following his clear distinction between the two diferent ways of showing “imagelessness” (the “sans image”) and making visible the fact that there is nothing more to be seen (i.e. Debord’s project contrasts with pornography/advertising which acts as though there are always more images behind the images), Agamben concludes: “It is here, in the diference, that the ethics and the politics of cinema come into play.”7 hese words are lagrantly missing in the Godard article. Why should this be?

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he emphasis on the ethical and political is part of the general thrust of Agamben’s small but urgent body of writing on ilm which insists that any notion of gesture in the cinema remains a preeminently ethical rather than aesthetic concern. In “Notes on Gesture”, his key study of how bourgeois “gestures” based on the illusion of subjective identity and unity were deinitively destroyed at the dawn of modernity (along with the aura of the image and the idea of a natural language as complete and inherently linked to meaning), and where he also makes the case for a purely gestural cinema that exhibits the conditions of cinematic montage and the medium as pure means, he states the following: “[b]ecause cinema has its center in the gesture and not in the image, it belongs essentially to the realm of ethics and politics (and not simply to that of aesthetics) […] he gesture, in other words, opens the sphere of ethos as the more proper sphere of that which is human.”8 he assumption here is that the image now revealed as gesture leads surely to ethics as a more “proper” and privileged domain than the aesthetic for discussing the human, and, by extension, that the ethical is distinct from, and perhaps superior to, the aesthetic. Hence, Histoire(s), which is a profound exercise in aesthetics as well as ilm historiography, does not quite cut it in Agamben’s ethical scheme, despite the fact that, in his own words, it is directly preigured by Debord’s he Society of the Spectacle, and, more crucially, that stoppage links cinema speciically to poetry, where the form (rhythm, poetic technique) can be placed at odds with the meaning, making cinema therefore “a sustained ‘hesitation between image and meaning.’”9 In fact, Agamben’s work seems perpetually suspended on a question, namely what, in practical concrete terms, should the next stage of the critical project of cinema be ater one has exhibited the medium and duly exposed the illusion of the image and the spectatorial set-up? Can there/should there be any kind of aesthetic surplus? Indeed, does the aesthetic have any real role or function now? Or is the only “safe” option to ensure that the aesthetic realm is always pulled back towards ethics? I want to consider these particular questions, and in so doing assess the validity of Agamben’s views on the messianic, i.e. “non-aesthetic,” status of Godard’s work, by reading Agamben’s theory of ethics and gesture in the cinema against a rather obscure and marginal work in Godard’s oeuvre—one, however, that directly extends his exploration of the (meta)physical gesture in his work of the early 1980s and which is driven by the messianic idea of an ending (the end) as salvation and redemption. Soigne ta droite (Une place sur la terre) (Keep Your Right Up, 1987) has been critically overlooked and woefully underrated, despite

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its generally favorable reception in France upon release.10 his is the reverse of King Lear, a ilm maudit made around the same time which sufered from a lack of proper distribution (it was released in France only in 2002), but which has steadily been recuperated as a vital forerunner of Histoire(s) due to its explicit references to ilm history and set-piece sequences on projection and montage.11 On the surface Soigne ta droite is disarmingly light, even whimsical, being in part a personal homage to Jacques Tati—the title conjures up the boxing term of Tati’s 1936 short, Soigne ton gauche (Keep Your Let Up)—as well as to other exponents of slapstick ilm comedy such as Harry Langdon, Buster Keaton, and Jerry Lewis (he Family Jewels (1965) and Smorgasbord (1983) are directly evoked). Yet the ilm is similarly premissed on the end of cinema and imbued with the mood of loss and death, although it explores in very diferent ways the ethico-aesthetic question of how to retrieve the image and resurrect cinema in a post-Chernobyl, digital world of global capitalism, neo-television and political apathy.12 With its satirical portrait of the service industries and the cold, cynical ethos of money, quick-grab gratiication and non-communication, the ilm relects not simply the growing sense of social and political confusion and disenchantment in France at the time (notably the beginning of “cohabitation” between the Socialists under Mitterrand and the Right under Chirac), but also the malaise of contemporary State-sanctioned cinema and culture which has “imprisoned” the image and with it human relationality. In interviews to promote the ilm, Godard bemoaned the loss of the documentary gaze and of the idea of art as a means of showing and sharing things—part of the vanishing signs and gestures of mutual dialogue.13 In fact, although Soigne ta droite may appear structurally as one of his most loose, aimless, dispersed and lagrantly meandering ilms (a series of sketches tied together without the hook of an obvious pre-text as in King Lear), it is actually one of his tightest and most complete conceptually. Its narrative premise is announced at the very outset in a voice-over explaining that the Idiot/ Prince, a ilmmaker in exile, has been given one last chance by those “at the top” (unspeciied) to “save” himself by completing a ilm from scratch in one day and delivering it in the capital for projection that evening. “hen, and only then, will his ‘numerous sins’ [also let unspeciied] be forgiven”. he voice-over by the unnamed “Man” (François Périer) presents the ilm and leads it along, giving us the illusion of taking part in the act of its creation. What we watch as we follow Godard as the Idiot/Prince take a trip irst by car, then a plane commandered by a suicidal pilot (there will be near-death experience for all on board), is what may (or may not) feed into the ilm that has been commissioned. We are

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thus dealing with a ilm gleefully exhibiting its own means of production and exposing itself both as ilm and iction, while also recording a possible return and passage to cinematic recuperation: delivery as potential deliverance and the liting of a “curse.” Indeed, Soigne ta droite is concerned directly with the status and fate of the cinematic image in terms of sin and redemption: can cinematic lack or error be righted, and if so, how? Speciically, can the inal stage of a ilm, its projection, provide a means of salvation? Such underlying existential themes make Soigne ta droite a supremely philosophical ilm, and not simply on account of its many gags which, if taken literally, deine it in Agambenian terms as an exemplary philosophical exercise in gesturality. Agamben writes in his important conclusion to “Notes on Gesture”: he gesture is […] communication of a communicability. It has precisely nothing to say because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as pure mediality […] it is always a gag in the proper meaning of the term, indicating irst of all something that could be put in your mouth to hinder speech, as well as in the sense of the actor’s improvisation meant to compensate a loss of memory or an inability to speak. Cinema’s essential “silence” (which has nothing to do with the presence or absence of a soundtrack) is, just like the silence of philosophy, exposure of the being-in-language of human beings: pure gesturality. (original emphasis)14

We shall come back to the implications of linking gesture, silence and mediality a little later. Soigne ta droite is also unparalleled in Godard’s work for its sustained and systematic engagement with one particular literary source: Hermann Broch’s extraordinary magnum opus, he Death of Virgil (1945). For while many texts circulate in the ilm around the themes of death and deliverance, including Dostoyevsky (who provides the name of Godard’s character permanently reading he Idiot), Racine, Lautréamont and André Malraux (reworked passages from Lazarus (1974), a relection on death occasioned by Malraux’s miraculous recovery from a near-death experience of sleeping sickness and which explores themes of sacriice, suicide, choice, fraternity and redemption),15 whole passages of he Death of Virgil are recited at length by Périer on the soundtrack, providing the ilm with a center of gravity. Godard cites exclusively from “Fire— the Descent,” the second stage in the Latin poet’s inal nineteen hours of life during which he agonizes over whether to burn the manuscript of the Aeneid which he now regards as a failure because the society he eulogizes doesn’t

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correspond to reality. Just as Virgil stands out from his miserable fellow-men he passes in the slums, so the Prince/Idiot stands out in his quiet, self-possessed dignity from the cynical world he passes through. Broch, an Austrian Jewish writer who began the novel while briely interned in a Nazi camp before being rescued, represents for Godard the artist at war with his chosen form but who, in the very act of creating, produces a unique statement of rare beauty about the triumph of art and the imagination. he Death of Virgil is an unstoppable, breathless, sumptuous low of language in long, lyrical sentences rich in sensual imagery, and it generates many of the terms that appear in the ilm (emptiness, sacriice, solitude, the soul, laughter, the universe, salvation, twilight, grace, the law).16 Soigne ta droite rehearses, too, some of the text’s stylistic qualities: its perpetually expanding and endlessly self-correcting ruminations, its reversible chiastic formulations, and its fondness for interjections. Assorted fragments of the intertext are stiched together by Godard and then repeated (sometimes almost immediately) in ever new and surprising ways over diferent visuals in a continuous process of recombining, retouching and recomposing. King Lear had included a reworking of Pierre Reverdy’s prose poem “L’Image” (1918)—a powerful manifesto for the complex images of Godard’s later work and a model of montage as the distant and just association of ideas generating “true emotion” “because born outside of all imitation, all evocation and all resemblance.”17 Soigne ta droite takes the poetics of emotion to an entirely new level, however, since Broch provides a model of decreation conceived not as a philosophical concept in Agambenian terms but rather as a process of poetic experimentation (the word is used explicitly in the novel). Metaphor becomes metamorphosis and transmutation, and repetition is experienced as diference and variation in an endless, ever more intricate and subtle movement of modiication, reversal, permutation, reformulation and ampliication. Soigne ta droite thus ofers a fascinating case of two diferent forms and means of revelation, one messianic, the other poetic, and it does so through set sequences of audiovisual decreation. Although it doesn’t actually employ stop-start motion, its pushing of the cinematic image out of and beyond itself to the point of abstraction (the “sans image”) and to something more poetic, even musical, marks the culmination of an intensive period of cinematic experimentation by Godard inspired by the “derealising” techniques of videographic montage, from Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Every Man For Himself, 1979), which was also a reinvigorated return to the body and the “homeland of gesture” (Agamben), to the distortion and transformation of the art image in Passion

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(1981) and Scénario du ilm “Passion” (1982).18 By examining in detail Godard’s immersive encounter with Broch and poetics through the prism of Agamben, and thus submitting a philosophy of cinema to a concrete instance of aesthetic practice, I want therefore to put to the test Agamben’s assumptions about the “neutrality” of the aesthetic sphere in ilm, and speciically about cinema as simply the setting for “gesture” understood as both the demonstration of mediality which subtracts from “the false wholeness of identity or the falseness of the image as unity,” and, more critically, “the harnessing of the collapse of subjectivity and aesthetics” (original emphasis).19 I will argue that by aesthetically investing the primary cinematic gestures of projection and montage, Godard draws out some of the key, underlying principles of Agamben’s theory of gestural cinema while also exposing some of its limitations as a philosophy of ilm. To illuminate Godard and Agamben mutually in this way will allow us to appreciate the particular signiicance of Agamben’s writing on cinema for thinking not only about Godard but also about the very relations between the ethical and the aesthetic.

he law of the crystal: Revealing the image from within Soigne ta droite plays out as a kind of virtual ilm where everything is being piloted: the allegorical-style sketches that are being performed for the eventual possible ilm by the Prince/Idiot; Fred Chichin and Catherine Ringer (the French rock group, Les Rita Mitsouko) searching for the right sound and harmony as they lay down tracks for a new album (Godard mixes inal versions of the songs with their nascent forms, producing a strange inter-fragmentation of inished and uninished music); the Individual (Jacques Villeret) assuming multiple roles as he tries to ind “a place on earth” (as gardener, as bored golfer’s caddy, as suicidal actor, as lothario waltzing with a mysterious silent woman who strips of for him); and above all the same shots and passages being tried out and rehearsed in diferent sequences and then repeated. he recurring, teasing image of the half-open French window facing out towards the sea and sky at Trouville (the beach is always framed by doors and a balcony which mediate our access to the water) is linked directly to a passage from Lazarus about Westerners “dramatising” death as the door that one passes through to go from one room (life) into another (the beyond). his crystallizes the theme of

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light and its relationship to the other side as the ilm’s dominant metaphor for its confrontation with death (Godard, in fact, shoots deliberately in the direction of the light source here). his is a ilm forever about to pass new limits, borders and thresholds in a gesture of opening up to the world and to the light, like the casual, lickering relection of a window-frame captured on an apartment wall in the form of star. A strong earthbound sense of linear narrative direction is retained, however, as we count down in anticipation of the delivery and projection of the Idiot/ Prince’s ilm, Une place sur la terre, and a potential event of cinematic salvation through a resolution of form. he process is set in motion by the one “spectacular” moment of cinematic gesture in the ilm when Godard, on being presented with a pile of large cans of cinema ilm (the footage of the completed ilm-within-ailm), is knocked into by another igure disembarking and falls down an aircrat ramp in loud cacophony. We have here a by now familiar Godard theme of the (self-)sacriice required of cinema linked to its concrete “fall.”20 As the Idiot/ Prince lies on the tarmac the pilot’s wife negotiates with him to purchase the ilm simply because the cans gleam like diamonds. he ilm has now looped the loop: the pilot has bought the ilm in which all the characters we have seen are playing and it can therefore now be projected. Yet Soigne ta droite is also moving in other directions guided by other manifestations of cinematic gesture, starting with a long six-minute sequence in the train (intercut by shots of Les Rita Misouko) with a police inspector (Rufus) deporting the Individual, now a Belgian prisoner, over the French border. he Individual’s right arm is handcufed to the curtain rod of the window (a reference to Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Cercle rouge (1970) which also featured Périer), and we see the handcufs in close-up focus, then out of focus, against the passing landscape as the two igures indulge in an old game of insults, trade memories of happier times of political comradeship (evocations of Sartre’s dirty political in Les Mains sales abound), and consider the “errors” and “sufering” that History does not allow.21 here is an unexpected move towards fraternity and solidarity when the inspector extends his hand towards the cufed wrist and makes physical contact, the two arms thus meeting at the apex of a triangle. Yet the gesture is revealed as empty and goes nowhere. What follows is a formal counter-response to the failure of communication and gesture through a series of set-pieces focused on the very grammar of cinema, and which extend the notion of gesture in a continuously evolving process of metaphorization and poetic transformation of the cinematic image: irst focus pull, then projection, inally montage.

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As the voice-over by Périer explains over a close-up shot of Ringer deep in thought that he forgot to say that the policeman on the train towards the border forgot to utter the words “what would one do without the dead?” (circularity and commentary appear boundless in this ilm), Godard cuts on the word “policeman” to a blurred, out of focus image rendered abstract. he dark shape that runs vertically down the frame is gradually brought into focus and revealed as a wooden pole with lines of barbed wire in dark silhouette against a pale sky. On the word “sentence” the shot is cut to an extreme close-up of barbed wire, this time in focus. he wire soon recedes out of focus and dematerializes in the light to the point of its virtual disappearance. Simultaneously, the camera moves slightly upwards to disclose a jumble of human igures strewn on the ground. Finally, several shots later, over a close-up of a young woman lying face down, and as Périer begins another compressed remoulding of a passage from Broch, Godard cuts abruptly to a shot of barbed wire running diagonally in focus across the frame. On the soundtrack we hear: “(he Individual shuddered) and in a inal piercing through of the dream’s border, with a inal shattering of every sort of image, in a last shattering of memory, the dream grew […] he growing with it: his thinking had become greater than any form of thinking […] it became a second immensity […] it became the law that caused the crystal to grow […] stated in the crystal, stated through music, but over and above that, expressing the music of the crystal.” At the mention of “a last shattering of memory” the barbed wire withdraws out of focus, before being once again restored to full focus with the phrase “a second immensity.” his arresting planséquence—a play of shiting movement, counter-movement and redeinition within the image—comes to an end with a return to Ringer and Chichin in the studio peering up into the artiicial light. Daniel Morgan rightly states that Godard’s non-narrative use of focus pulls explores “the resources of aesthetics in and through cinema” and takes mythic (i.e. non-linear) time out of profane time (i.e. time as history and duration).22 In these moments of uncertainty, he argues, it’s the look of images, not what they represent, that becomes the attraction—one that is extended by a further instance of focus pull almost immediately ater. his time two seated igures staring blankly in a café are held in a background lux of gently pulsating colors and amorphous forms for almost iteen seconds before being gradually pulled into focus. While Morgan is certainly right about Godard’s foregrounding here of the processes of perception, making this a supremely (meta)cinematic moment, more needs to be said about this extended formal scene and its iconography. To

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the roars of a large sports crowd accompanied on the soundtrack by heavy metal clanking, the Individual is pictured lying in a section of a stadium with other people barely alive and breathing (an obvious reference to the Heysel Stadium disaster in May 1985). Yet this also, of course, evokes the internment camps for deportation during the Holocaust such as the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris in 1942, and when one igure on the stadium loor says he lives in the Hotel Terminus (the title of Marcel Ophuls’s 1988 documentary on Klaus Barbie), the allusion to concentration camp victims in a mass grave is unmistakable. his is developed further when we consider what is being related by Périer simultaneously on the soundtrack: “a second immensity, it became the law that presides over the development of crystal.” he association with Kristallnacht is complete. Moreover, the Individual’s remark about sufering is matched with a shot of Ringer, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, looking straight at the camera (the whole sequence is efectively bookended by shots of Ringer). he voice-over continues in a separate phrase extracted directly from Malraux: “Death is the path towards the light.” Yet the focus pulls are not only an ethical matter but also an object of properly cinematic strangeness and beauty that seems to come from within the image itself. hey are a pure efect of the camera yet somehow appears in excess of it, in a constant movement of repetition, expansion and extension. Godard, I would argue, is tapping here into the kinetic potential of the (silent) image to release its latent energy and capacity for movement through form and out of form. he pulls also constitute, in conjunction with the soundtrack, a familiar Godardian chiastic reversal between image and word. In the irst instance, as we hear “his thinking had become greater than any form of thinking,” the wire diminishes in size and dematerializes into a formless blur, thus joining the “immensity” articulated on the voice-over. In the second case, however, as the image comes back into focus, we hear synthesizers in free-low, as if the sound and image were now working together in mutual dilation and distension: the image comes into being through the surge of sound. Music can help restore objects into focus and bring them back to life. he passage from Broch itself brings the theme of music directly to the fore with its utterly mysterious chiastic-sounding and selfextending phrase about the dissolution of thought and its transformation into a second “immensity”: “it [his thinking] became the law that caused the crystal to grow […] stated in crystal, stated through music, but over and above that, expressing the music of the crystal.” Hence, the idea of decreating the image (“a inal shattering of every sort of image”) is matched precisely by the advent of

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the music of the crystal on the soundtrack. (It is a crucial fact that although the visual image may sometimes appear blocked by repetition in Soigne ta droite, the soundtrack of voice and music always seems to be moving forwards and continuously evolving in a live process of creativity and annunciation.) I want to suggest that, in a manner which has much to do with Agamben’s subtraction of gesture from within the image, something latent within the image is imposing itself here. It is greater than all thought, and for the moment has no name, except for the oxymoronic, ethereal beauty of the phrase “the music of the crystal,” which has the poetic force of a montage of opposing terms (solid/difuse). It is indeed something miraculous, as made clear by the continuation of Malraux’s phrase on death that immediately follows: “One knows this when one has returned from something like it”. Crucially, Godard qualiies this quote by adding: “From music, perhaps. But which is going to rise up from ancient times.” In Soigne ta droite, as in Broch, the potential for accelerating intensity and ampliication— a voyage into ever-deepening, resounding, enveloping, penetrating, radiating, vibrating profundity and emotion, or “rayonnement”—appears inexhaustible, like the low of music itself. A diferent manifestation of the same poetic movement and play with form occurs in the scene on the golf course, when the camera suddenly lits up into the trees and drits through the branches to the music of Ringer’s distorted voice as it gently swells into being. his unheralded harmony of music and image is only brief, and it happens as Périer intones another full passage from Broch about a still deeper silence transmuting into waiting like a further irradiation of light, and the need to achieve a creative act in order to move beyond the law of destiny, random chance and dreams and so overcome the evil spell. He invokes a still stronger irradiation, perhaps even a second and more pervading immensity, in order that from this one the divine might stream out freshly again, abolishing evil forever. It was an undirected waiting, as undirected as the radiation, but for all that directed to the waiter, the dreamer; it was a sort of invitation to him to make a inal attempt, a last creative efort to get outside of the dream, outside of fate, outside of chance, outside of form, outside of himself. (my emphasis)

Music for Godard always stands for something prior and original and reversible, both passive and active, since it both inheres within, and gestures beyond, the image, in positive, salutary extension.23 In the case of Les Rita Mitsouko, the continual ebb and low of extended synths, swirling reverb and other digitally enhanced vocal and musical efects forming and deforming provide the ilm with its sensuous, sensurround wrap and sonic extension.

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Just as there is a running opposition in Agamben between “gesture” in the singular and “gestures” in the plural with their false unity, so in Godard, who also roams freely between the concrete and abstract, there are two kinds of valencies of the image: the “explicit” and the “implicit” (terms Godard attributes to the philosopher Gaston Bachelard). he train episode was framed by an “obvious” and highly loaded image of hand gesture as sign of (failed) political solidarity—a physical gesture within the image that demands to be decoded. But there’s also another image as gesture—a more abstract and more self-relexive, metacinematic, and thus properly cinematic, kind of image that exhibits itself as such and entails a loss of clarity and meaning. his is a decreation of the image pushed now to the level of mystery, silence, and unreadability, and ultimately beyond the normal bounds of legibility and vision to the realm of the “sans image”. For Agamben, gesture “is the other side of the commodity that lets the ‘crystals of this common social substance’ sink into the situation.”24 In the hands of Godard, however, the commodiied image gives way to an idea of crystal that escapes social deinition and takes the situation of cinema to an altogether diferent, abstract and poetic realm. his process of transformation reveals itself as a moment of extreme beauty that resists simple deinition and is best let in the raw, mineral state of “the music of the crystal”. It is not just that Ringer herself embodies this, for the reasons given: music is a liminal movement at the frontier of the senses where the image becomes light and silence becomes sound. he law of music subsumes all others—language, repetition, fate, dreams.

Stabbing darkness in the back: he silence of the gesture Godard immediately takes these ideas further within the framework of projection which plays out in diferent forms in the inal stages of the ilm and is formally initiated by a blunt gesture of repetition—the reinsertion of the ilm’s opening credits. he irst instance is a pure gag conducted in silence. he screening of the Idiot/Prince’s completed ilm Une place sur la terre sees the airline pilot and his wife take up their places along the Seine and simply gaze out upon Paris ater their brush with death. his is cinema re-envisioned as Bazin’s window on the world. he gag not only undermines knowledge by underlining the constitutive gap of Soigne ta droite (we will never “know” if the ilm by Godard’s character

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is the one by Godard we’ve been watching)—it also presents cinema in ideal Godardian terms as a shared and ritualized public site of subjective projection whereby we project creatively onto the real.25 Yet this moment of (self-)projection is also framed in the express terms of human gesture: the pilot salutes what he gazes at of-screen, while his wife appears to be praying in front of it, her converging arms replicating the triangular shape limned by the policeman and the prisoner’s hands on the train. Projection is thus being presented as a (meta-) cinematic gesture that stands in counterpoint to abortive political gesture and carries the open promise of renewed collective relations. he second scene of projection takes place shortly ater in the more traditional setting of a projection booth with Périer now assuming the role of projectionist and donning blue overalls for the occasion. It is prefaced with a cut to yet another shot of the sun setting over the water taken from within the room in Trouville with its half-open French window, as if waiting for some new type of poetic turning or troping and transformation. A clock ticking on the soundtrack furthers the mood of suspense and expectation what will the “real” projection reveal? We again hear the passage from Broch used for the second sequence of focus pull about whether evil still existed and the need to wait for the day-star to obtain a reply from the voice of the Universe. his passage is now extended, however, by a separate passage about silence (also derived from Broch) that includes another chiastic construction centerd on silence and muteness: “his time the awareness of their fault leaves them speechless, their lack of words renders them this time aware of their fault.”26 Silence morphs efortlessly into vision in the words that follow, yet this is reversed almost immediately into non-vision: “beholding this silence, the man also yearned to open his mouth in a last mute cry of horror. Yet still while seeing it, almost before he had really seen it, he no longer saw anything”. his silent, double movement of vision and non-vision is matched in the image in a totally unforeseen way. Ater checking the equipment and setting up the reels, and as we hear a delayed repetition of the portentous phrase: “But it’s in the back that the light will stab the darkness,” Périer inally presses the button. Ignition. Except that Godard refuses us entry into the auditorium to see the image projected onto the cinema screen, still less the beam of light striking it. Instead, we remain irmly within the borders of the booth like a cave or grotto—but for what kind of new image exactly? We glimpse two brief shots, separated by another image of the French window, of the celluloid passing though the projector and relected in a plate of glass in the center of the dragon-like apparatus. Two initially indecipherable

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images can just be made out, yet at an angle, a little like the blurred images of the focus pull, though here with the extra complication that they seem to be extreme close-ups of something human enlarged and inverted by the relection, as well as in suspended motion. he irst image contains a small smearing of red, like human lips coated in lipstick; the second appears more upright and is devoid of color. hese are composite images of the human and the mechanical, of relection and shadow, created by the projector’s silhouette against a white wall and the frames of celluloid passing through the projector and relected and magniied in a mirror. In this prismatic and chromatic play with motion, size, perspective and color, the cinematic image is exposing and exhibiting itself as pure process. Mute like the sufocated human cry in the Broch passage, these strange, silent images recall the extreme close-ups of silent cinema contained in Histoire(s) (the open mouthed female igure from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), for instance), or better still, the hybrid images of faces of cinema in the book of Histoire(s) where each miraculous image resurrected from the video machine appears to be screaming in the eerie silence of the page. In both cases we are being asked to consider the relations between knowledge, beauty, aesthetic form and the real. We know that these evanescent, abstractifying images are not an “error” because they constitute a deliberate repetition in a tightly edited sequence of montage. Indeed, the repetition of the pivotal phrase about the light and darkness generates a self-relexive drama of repetition and interruption revolving around the dividing image of the half-open window frame. On the soundtrack we hear Ringer’s voice—more a hushed reverb whisper than a fully vocalized phrase—celebrating two girls dancing at a bar, a song heard earlier during the scene of the excluded young girl but delivered now in a strange, ethereal, sonic burst that complements the seemingly intractable images. Yet it is enough to establish a relation between the silent gesture of suspended lips and the female voice, and for us to read the two disembodied images evoking silent cinema as radiations of Ringer herself. We have been through the ringer here! We have moved from the “real” to the “reel” in the blink of an eye—so fast, in fact, that we barely see the image for what it is exactly, except as image, thereby escaping the claws of cognition and interpretation. Godard is typically forging a path out of his own signifying chains: the ilm’s inherent structure of repetition of shots is ruptured by the act of repetition itself which results in a totally new kind of shot in the ilm. In the intensive mise-en-abyme of repetition, mediation and framing (the repetition of ilm frames within the frame of the projector enframed within the image), cinema is taken self-relexively to the borders

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of silence. In the process, projection is revealed ultimately as an efect of montage. Further, the disturbance [fracassement] and vibration within the logic of repetition that reverberates with the violence of the action related (“stab the darkness”) results in an explosion of the image that opens it up to the ever-deepening, obscure, unfathomable mystery of cinematic creation beyond control and containment. his act of self-exhibition and revelation in the moment of projection as montage—a material moment of pure energy and light—is also an act of release: the igure of Ringer, as uncontrollable and “unframable” now as her earlier involuntary gesture of tapping her ingers on the table to the rhythms in her head during a break in recording, escapes the symbolic frame it was briely held in during the focus pull moment (the conluence of crystal and Kristallnacht) to become simply ilm rolling through. We can loop this moment back, as the lyrics of the music invite us to, to the ilm’s other female image-within-the-image: that of the young girl outside on the balcony at Trouville looking at the Individual through the glass and relected in miniature in the facing mirror at the back of the apartment (she was efectively imprisoned within the frame while remaining outside it). It was a brutal image of exclusion—the window slams back repeatedly on her face. A igment possibly of his own imagination (she disappears when he barks “Come in”), the excluded girl was associated with the noise and life of the world outside opposed to the narcissistic self-seclusion of the Individual reliant on his prerecorded phrases from Beckett on the tape-recorder for any contact with visual reality (“An image had appeared…”). He stands, in fact, as a metaphor for the individual, self-suicient image which, for Godard, thwarts the cinematographic system because it risks not transforming itself through contact with other images.27 For what is at stake for Godard is always the performability of the image within a larger signifying system rather than any innate expressivity it may possess.28 he gesture of montage is thus now fully revealed as one of inclusion and new relations or communication across form—a poetic process of mystery and metamorphosis that embraces, recombines and redeems even the most vulnerable and remote of images within the same visual and aural frame. he inal image, the last in a three-stage edited sequence of the recurring still-frame images of the half-open window, is of the sunset, but in an intense form that casts the much closer window frame in shadow against the dense white cirrus clouds to create the efect of a black-and-white image. It gleams with possibility: all is still to play for in this ultimate return to something approximating photography or silent cinema since all is still to be heard. he inal words of the voice-over invoke Broch again, but in a passage not heard

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before: “And then, very gently, as if not to alarm him, the whispering that the man had already heard a long time before, before even his very existence, started again”. We can link this inal airmative note of non-resolution and mystery—the continuous advent of sound as ungraspable and uncontainable as the light—to he Death of Virgil itself which ends with a continuous “rumbling” and the “looding sound” of the elusive, inefable Word beyond all understanding, language and speech.29 We can never know for sure if the orgininary “error” and curse of of Soigne ta droite has been lited and redeemed by the music and light of the crystal. Instead, we’re let with the continuum of light as sound—the unquenchable hope of the recovery and redemption of love and innocence.30 (he ilm’s repeated passage about Dostoyevsky’s obsessive interest in the torture of an innocent child (a reworking of Malraux) always carried, of course, its own counter-response: “the smallest act of heroism or love is no less fascinating than torture.”) A similar type of recursion to the gesturality of silent cinema occurred in the last stages of King Lear where it took a non-human form. Wearing a loose, white, shroud-like dress Cordelia had led a white horse (the pale horse of Death?) into and out of a woodland clearing, her father Learo lamenting: “She’s gone forever—she’s dead as earth, lend me a looking glass”. he sequence was sealed by a tableau vivant of Cordelia dead, stretched out on a rock by the side of the lake as Learo stands with his back to us holding a shotgun and facing the lake and sky like a Rückenigur in a Casper David Friedrich painting. his highly ambiguous image of death and incest appeared to correspond to the “new image” of cinema reborn that William and Edgar were looking for following the sacriice exacted by cinema (Pluggy’s death). It is accompanied by a female voice-over quoting the rapturous ending to Virginia Woolf ’s he Waves (1931) about a proud horse ridden by the narrator against the enemy, “Death.” Suddenly, ater the intertitle: “King Lear / A Study,” the white horse that Cordelia had led away now returns and in a dynamic, wild form. Photographed in long shot by the water’s edge, the horse races into the let foreground as if towards the camera and past the viewer in stop-start motion. he shot, lasting only a matter of seconds, has the electroshock force of a sequence in early primitive cinema projected and seen as if for the irst time, like Muybridge’s horses captured in pristine motion. Indeed, the horse seems to silence language in its tracks with its rare and leeting beauty (the loud recital of a Shakespeare sonnet by Mr. Alien (Woody Allen) in the editing suite ceases and only a light background hum or drone is audible). As Marc Robinson has elegantly put it, this is an image whose

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beauty is “its own justiication.”31 Moreover, the horse carries no-one on its back and is thus free of the burden of death or of any other type of symbol. It veers of-frame, destination unknown, as mysteriously and autonomously as it sprang into motion. In fact, like the immediate sensation of vision as non-vision in the Broch passage, it all happens so quickly that we cannot grasp its meaning: the horse runs free, as it were, beyond cognition and easy interpretation, and can’t be contained or reduced to an object of scientiic knowledge. Dislocated in the ilm, without authorship or direction, it can be experienced only as motion and beauty and release. his stunning shot thus stands in direct contrast to the symbolically encased, static tableau vivant. he fact that it is stop-started means that we receive it directly as a pure efect of acceleration and deceleration. Indeed, it is a supremely metacinematic moment of exhibition and projection, of pure means as Agamben would term it, like dance. For it is not an expression of anything speciic but rather an event of pure gesture and afect happening now in the ilmic present. his sudden bolt of energy and sensation presents the image as a uniquely cinematic sequence of edited motion in time, and there is something precisely musical about it, in the sense that, as I’ve argued elsewhere, music enjoys a concrete and plastic status in Godard and can operate autonomously to spring eternally afresh in time.32 In a ilm such as King Lear which hangs heavy like so much of late Godard with the betrayed promise of silent ilm that was never allowed to ind true montage before spectacle and the master narratives of love and war took over (one of the ilm’s many instances of betrayal and “violent silence”), it is precisely by tapping into the rich kinetic deposits of silent cinema that Godard inds a way forward against death. his is nothing less than a liberation of the image as gesture which thus becomes the name for all that is not image. Yet if the horse in free motion evokes a Muybridge study, it also harks back to another Muybridge image of a soldier carrying a gun, presented by Agamben as an example of the breakdown of bourgeois gesture (we don’t know what the solider is doing or where he is going). What occurs in Agamben’s work under the sign of lost bourgeois gestures and meaning in the mechanical age of reproduction returns in Godard as pure gesture and mystery in the postmodern age. Which is to say, what Agamben would adduce in the case of the bolting horse as a historical sign of the dissolution of gesture, i.e. the moment when, as he describes it in “Notes on Gesture,” cinema helped destroy the meaning of human gestures at the dawn of modernity and then proceeded to commemorate their loss obsessively,

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oten in glaring close-up, is replayed positively here as pure cinematic energy— released into the light as the pure joy and ineluctable beauty of the image. In other words, the ethically negative in Agamben returns in Godard as ethically and aesthetically positive. What I am suggesting here is that the event of beauty in Godard’s cinema, released via stop-start motion in an uncontrolled rush of energy, means that gesture is always ethico-aesthetic in its nature and mystery. It is not simply that cinema must expose and display its own means of production (a mere question of formal method and style), but also that it must enter a new realm of mystery and undecidability that lies within and beyond the literal image and is formed of opposites, as in montage which, if properly executed, can generate the lash and energy of the unexpected and unimagined—a sign of cinema’s eternal self-renewal. Hence, Agamben’s philosophical proposition of gesture as “a moment of art subtracted from the neutrality of aesthetics” and “pure praxis”33 runs counter to Godard’s artistic method. Soigne ta droite, like King Lear, takes us at privileged moments to the far shores of the poetic and aesthetic where the image, reconceived and remade in montage, is restored to its original silence and lost aura (the last words of King Lear, taken from the play, are a reairmation of both touch and silence: “If that her [Cordelia’s] breath will mist or stain the stone, why, then she lives”). Silence has, in fact, a fundamental role in Godardian montage, in particular the double movement of montage in Histoire(s) where, as I have shown elsewhere, “horizontal” moments of conluence, contiguity, conjunction and coincidence, which resist the vertical pull of his characteristically dense, rhetorical and aggressively intellectual manoeuvres, constitute a kind of counter-movement in the videographic montage: a “minimal” moment of metonymy whereby images are linked and moulded together by contour, outline, gesture, silhouette and proile. Such non-discursive moments of association, contiguity, and conjunction trace as if spontaneously the interrelations of human form at the level of shape and igure. his play of detail operates as if in silence since it is never directly commented on or integrated or rationalized as part of an argument or thesis. Indeed, throughout Histoire(s) the non-linguistic resists any totalising conceptualization or theorization and thus remains a pure afective and inclusive moment of seeing and feeling rather than one of interpretation.34 More generally, the ethico-aesthetic in Godard is poetic adventure, surprise, lash, afect, combustion, and he can make it happen now. he force and challenge of his later work is precisely to jump-start and recharge cinema and human relations by delivering on the promise of silent cinema through

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poetic montage—a crucible of emotion capable of generating fraternal warmth. his is the beauty and the passion of Godard’s cinematic gesture.

Cinema: he sphere of pure means Agamben the philosopher has thrown into powerful relief Godard the artist. In Soigne ta droite Godard starts out from a position of imagelessness—the end of cinema—and sets about retrieving and recuperating it precisely by returning it to silence and the sans image. For Godard, the power of cinema and cinematic montage is to release the image from its frozen state by revealing its transformative potential and poetic extensibility. Cinematic gesture, or the mystery and aura of the image in cinema, is taken always beyond a strictly physical level to something increasingly abstract, on the borders of music and operating as pure afect. Godard’s cinematic gesture—the gesture of reinding and resurrecting cinema today through montage—always involves an emotional return from the dead. his is the moment when Godard’s work suddenly appears to revert to the forms of silent cinema, and it invariably functions in the chiastic mode of repetition as reversal and return. Such mediality is congruent with the shared aims of Agamben and Debord who reveal how the essential silence of cinema can expose our being-in-language or “pure gesturality” by making us relect at privileged moments of stoppage and repetition on the image qua image. Yet while he may consistently promote the idea in Histoire(s) that the cinematograph was an instrument designed for thinking and for creating “forms that think” (and certainly the complex processes of montage at work—its “sublime crossings and transigurations”35—testify to Godard’s powerful manipulation of montage as a form of thought), Godard is fully aware that there must also always be a margin for beauty, error and mystery, or the unexplainable and unknowable. Something beyond explicit discourse; something like the crystal of the music which transforms from light into sound before it can be intellectually grasped. Devoted to creating the conditions of a new transformative ethico-aesthetics, Godard recovers gesture aesthetically as the realm of the poetic and the ethical (relationality/communicability). Indeed, for Godard, the ethical is inherent within the aesthetic and will be revealed in the unique poetic processes of cinematic montage (“at the time of the resurrection”). Godard’s natural commitment to the poetic and the aesthetic as a means of revealing the ethical thus complicates any simple notion of his work as

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messianic in nature. As André Habib remarks of the images of nature looding Godard’s ’80s work: “[t]he time of the resurrection is not a messianic return, but rather a parousie, a “second event” that redeems the real through images, the resurrection of a presence, lyrical and transformative, of cinema’s aura” (original emphasis).36 Of course, such undimmed faith in the ethics of the aesthetic— in an “infancy” of the image—may seem naïve and nostalgic, perhaps even regressive, but, as with the more intuitive, material counter-drives of Histoire(s), Godard positively embraces sentimentality and child-like wonder in Soigne ta droite, and precisely in the concrete terms of poetic reversibility. As the Idiot/ Prince he talks with his fellow female passenger of the “smiling regret” he sometimes feels—an apparent contradiction in terms but which doesn’t spoil either of the two terms or feelings. He states: “Time is therefore vertical here: sentiment is irreversible, or rather, the reversibility of being is sentimentalized here. he smile regrets, and regret smiles.” his is inspired by Baudelaire’s image of “le regret souriant” as analyzed by that most aesthetically attuned of modern philosophers, Bachelard, who saw the image as representing the “vertical instant” of poetry: a time in which ambivalent sentiments can co-exist without being reduced to antithesis, simultaneity, or succession.37 To conclude, the possibility of redemption provided by the image now revealed in its full potential as “gesture” is real in Godard—an eternal and self-renewing hope and optimism—a residue perhaps of his lingering socialist belief in an alternative future.38 All is still possible, at least poetically speaking. For Agamben, however, it is always already over: the gestures of the nineteenth century bourgeoisie are no more and can only be mourned, interminably and irremediably. For a philosopher like Agamben, any temptation to soar to aesthetic transcendence, sublime or otherwise, is simply not an option. “Notes on Gesture” ends with the statement: “Politics is the sphere of pure means, that is, of the absolute and complete gesturality of human beings” (original emphasis).39 Godard’s work proves otherwise by replacing “politics” with “cinema.” Yet in both cases gesturality entails the resurrection of the human in all its materiality, physicality and fraternity, or what we might call in shorthand form “the body of cinema” shorn of all preestablished meanings and values (however Christian the themes of resurrection and recuperation may sometimes loom in Godard). It is this shared absolute commitment to the human that encourages the idea that Godard and Agamben may eventually engage with each other directly, and that artist and philosopher may cross over to each other in their very diferences in the transforming heat and emotion of cinematic traic.

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Notes 1 Giorgio Agamben, “Cinema and History: On Jean-Luc Godard” [1995] trans. John V. Garner and Colin Williamson in the present volume. No direct dialogue or “traic” between Godard and Agamben has actually taken place since. In fact, Agamben did not take part in the Round Table (chaired by Jean-Michel Frodon and in which Godard himself participated) that brought to a climax the series of debates on the irst six completed chapters of Histoire(s) organized by the ilm historian Bernard Eisenschitz at Locarno in August 1995, and which inspired the special supplement in Le Monde. Godard himself regarded the occasion as a lost opportunity for genuine dialogue between philosophers, historians, writers and critics and never publicly responded to Agamben’s article. A little later, Godard conceived of a possible dialogue with Agamben and other prominent European philosophers as part of an ambitious project of talks and debates entitled Collages de France at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2002. his ambitious plan was ill-fated from the start, however, and never realized. 2 See Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics trans. Vincenzo Binetti, Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000 [1996]) 42–60, and Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007 [2005]), 64, 68. 3 See Gilles Deleuze, “hree questions about Six Fois Deux”, Jean-Luc Godard: Son+Image, Raymond Bellour and Mary Lea Bandy (eds) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992), 35–41 (originally appeared in Cahiers du cinéma 271 (1976)). Deleuze talked of the cut as an “irrational” interstice and of the new “law” of “false continuity”. Agamben’s account of Deleuze argues that the mythical rigidity of the image has been broken in Deleuze’s “movement-images” and that, properly speaking, “there are no images but only gestures. Every image, in fact, is animated by an antinomic polarity: on the one hand, images are the reiication and obliteration of a gesture (it is the imago as death mask or as symbol); on the other hand, they preserve the dynamis intact (as in Muybridge’s snapshots or in any sports photograph) (Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”, 54). he former is linked to the recollection seized by voluntary memory; while the latter is linked to image lashing in the epiphany of involuntary memory. Further, the latter refers always beyond itself to a whole of which it is a part, so that even the Mona Lisa could be seen as a fragment of a gesture or as a still of a lost ilm wherein only it would regain its true meaning. Agamben concludes: “it is as if a silent innovation calling for the liberation of the image into gesture arose from the entire history of art” (Ibid: 55). See Michael Witt “Going through the motions: unconscious optics and corporal resistance in Miéville and Godard’s France/tour/détour/deux/enfants”,

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4

5

6

7 8 9 10

Cinema and Agamben Gender and French Cinema, Alex Hughes and James S. Williams (eds) (Berg, 2001), 171–94, for a ine account of the corporeal resistance and remarkable play of energy created in Godard’s video work with children, which places France/ tour/détour/deux/enfants in the context both of Godard’s resistance to the adult monster of television and of the embryonic irst stage of early cinema (Marey, Muybridge). Agamben’s he Coming Community contains a chapter (originally a preface for the Italian translation of Debord’s Commentaries on the Society of he Spectacle (1988)) where Agamben attempts to rescue Debord from the narrow perspectives that corral him into the conines of 1980s appropriation art and practices of détournement, but divorced from their context and ossiied in postmodern visual art. See, Giorgio Agamben, he Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis and London, 1993 [1990]), 79–83. As Christian McCrea argues, instead of placing Debord in a category such as the ilm-essay cliché, or historicising him (predictably his fate in academia), Agamben sees the contemporary signiicance of Debord’s intervention as “a manual for exodus” or “a weapon for resistance.” Christian McCrea, “Giorgio Agamben”, Film, heory and Philosophy: he Key hinkers, ed. Felicity Colman (Durham: Acumen, 2009), 349–57. See, for example, Michael Witt “Montage, My Beautiful Care, or Histories of the Cinematograph” 33–50, Alan Wright, “Elizabeth Taylor at Auschwitz: JLG and the Real Object of Montage”, 51–61, and “European Culture and Artistic Resistance in Histoire(s) du cinéma Chapter 3A, La Monnaie de l’absolu” 113–39, all in he Cinema Alone: essays on the work of Jean-Luc Godard, 1985–2000, Michael Temple, James S. Williams (eds) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000). Giorgio Agamben, “Diference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s ilms” [1995], Guy Debord and the Situationists International, ed. Tom McDonough, trans. Brian Holmes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 313–20, 315. Ibid.: 319. Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”, 56. Agamben, “Diference and Repetition”, 317. he exceptions are Claudine Delvaux’s short study of ive fragments of the ilm published on its release, though strangely with no explicit mention of Broch, Claudine Delvaux, “Tirer son plan et puis le voir: cinq fragments sur Soigne ta droite de Jean-Luc Godard”, Revue belge du cinéma 22–3, 1988, 190–205, and Daniel Morgan, Late Godard And the Possibilities of Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). See also, Douglas Morrey, Jean-Luc Godard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005) 184–9; and Richard Brody, Everything is Cinema: the working life of Jean-Luc Godard (Faber and Faber, 2008) 480–9.

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11 King Lear is littered with black and white photographs and stills of ilmmakers (Cocteau, Bresson, Pasolini, Visconti, Lang, Tati, Pagnol, Rivette, Franju, Losey, Becker, Welles (an image from he Merchant of Venice (1969)), as well as reproductions of Giotto, Doré, Watteau, Renoir, da Vinci, Morisot, Manet, Van Gogh, Tex Avery (among others). hey all function for William as forms of aide-mémoire and signs of the apparently lost artistic and cultural past. In one formal “experiment” by Pluggy in a darkened video studio with a bank of video monitors, we see projected on the two monitors a juxtaposition of the central igure of Fuseli’s Lady Macbeth Sleepwalking and the moment of the eyeball being razored from Bunuel/Dalí’s Un Chien andalou, the latter alternating with clips from Disney’s Goofy. his could almost be a student primer on the scopic drive, the “reality” of the image, and the violence of the cut. he ilm also includes demonstrations of reverse-motion photography à la Cocteau, and fragments of the soundtrack of the 1969 Russian version of King Lear by Grigori Kozinstev, played here as another “Professor” by the curator of the Cinémathèque Suisse, Freddy Buache. he philosopher Timothy Murray highlights Godard’s post-apocalyptic project and his stress on the recovery of cinematic history and montage now that perspective had been “abolished” and the vanishing point “erased”. Murray talks of the distancing here and generally in late Godard from an art of resemblance for the sake of a cinema of afect. For Murray, the ilm champions in Deleuzian terms the idealism of pure montage and the generative passions of the clash of its “incompossible” systems of analogue and digital representation. For it situates the new electronic meaning of cinema in relation to the contemplation of the radicality of silence and its impact on the law in Shakespeare: the doubled image, the silence of the break, and the gap of sequentiality sustain the rule of what Deleuze calls Godard’s cinema of incommensurabilty. Timothy Murray (2000), “he Crisis of Cinema in the Age of New World Memory: the Baroque Performance of King Lear”, he Cinema Alone: essays on the work of Jean-Luc Godard, 1985–2000, Michael Temple, James S. Williams (eds) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000). 12 For a ine introduction to Godard’s continually evolving discourse on the end(s) of cinema, see Michael Witt, “he Death(s) of Cinema according to Godard”, Screen 40:3 (1999) 331–46. 13 One brief example will suice: “When you say good-bye to someone, you feel like saying a little something, or making a sign, a gesture, returning the ball. But it’s only in sport that one can communicate”. Jean-Luc Godard (1998), Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, vol 2 1984–1998 ed. Alain Bergala (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1998) 126. Godard will later distil these world-weary thoughts in his poem, “La Paroisse morte” (he Dead Parish), in the same collection, 254 (originally published in Traic 1 (1991)).

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14 Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”, 59–60. 15 Malraux is, of course, a key igure in later Godard precisely because of his humanist belief in the resurrectional status of art as a means of transcendence, or “anti-destiny”, and thus as a revolt against man’s fate (the phrase “art is what is reborn in what has been burnt” is heard throughout Histoire(s)). André Malraux, Lazare (Gallimard, 1996 [1974]). 16 All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 17 What is delivered in King Lear is a slightly revised version of the irst part of Reverdy’s prose poem: “he image is a pure creation of the soul. It cannot be born of the comparison but of a reconciliation of two realities that are more or less far apart. he more the connection between these two realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be, the more it will have emotive power. Two realities that have no connection cannot be drawn together usefully. here is no creation of an image. One rarely obtains forces and power from this opposition. An image is not strong because it is brutal or fantastic, but because the association of ideas is distant and true. Analogy is a medium of creation. It is a resemblance of connections. he power or virtue of the created image depends on the nature of these connections. What is great is not the image but the emotion that it provokes. If the latter is great, one esteems the image at its measure. he emotion thus provoked is true because it is born outside of all imitation, all evocation and all resemblance.” 18 See Libby Saxton’s chapter in the present volume for an excellent account of the energetics of gesture across form in Passion which, via processes of cinematic montage and intermedial superimposition, move between the real material body and immaterial/spiritual presence, between human stasis and supernatural kinesis, and between physical fatigue and the elevation of the soul. 19 Alex Murray, Giorgio Agamben (Routledge, 2010), 90. 20 he same sequence will be incorporated in the inal part of Chapter 1B of Histoire(s) where it is now juxtaposed with Maria Casarès reciting on the soundtrack a French translation of Heidegger’s “What are poets for?” (1946). I have shown in Williams 2000a that by means of this hyperbolic gesture of the fall of cinema and taking on the burden of cinema’s sufering, Godard’s self-delating body efectively functions as itself a chiastic point of reversal. For the scene is also a display of poetic will and personal self-troping: the “penetration” of Godard’s videographic machine by his own cinematic lesh, however self-ironic, adopts the structure of transcendence whereby Godard as creator imposes himself romantically as master of the video/digital machine in a sublime reversion to his cinematic self. Viewed entirely negatively, the self-styled journey of discovery into new ideas and sensations in Histoire(s) has been redirected into a nostalgic

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22 23

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contemplation of traditional myths and duals (self/other, mind/matter). However, I also argue that this is not merely idle sentimentality, for Godard’s romantic self-reinstatement also demonstrates a self-critique that bears on the very nature of his position as a ilm and video maker, throwing into clear light, rather than resolving, the problem of inding a resolution between the digitial and the cinematic/analogical. For what is most at stake in Histoire(s) is the crucial need to reevaluate the mutual implications of afectivity and cognition in the processes of digital thought and human emotion: “Godard makes of technoscience a place and moment of immediate passion and contemplation. Such an act serves to restore faith in the possibility and freedom of art which, in Godardian thought, has been all but eroded by institutionalized ‘culture’. ” Williams, “Beyond the Cinematic Body: human emotion vs. digital technology in J.-L. Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma”, Inhuman Relections, ed. Scott Brewster, John Joughin, David Owen and Richard J. Walker (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 188–202, 197. Morgan unpacks a complex genealogy of political action and moral responsibility at the heart of the ilm’s work on matters of aesthetics, linking the hands to Denis de Rougemont’s key concept of “thinking with one’s hands” (“penser avec les mains”) promoted repeatedly in Godard’s later work. See Morgan, 45, 242. Godard remarks briely of the music in the ilm that it “expresses the spiritual” and “provides inspiration”—“there’s nothing to understand, only to hear and take.” Godard, Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, 123. Agamben, Means Without End, 79. his is part of Godard’s crucial idea of human beings projecting themselves on to something greater (the world, the cosmos)—an instinct he regards as now dead in the West. See Morgan, 206–12, for an excellent summary of Godard’s evolving theory of projection and its diferent modalities in the later corpus, where the term involves the mode of exhibition and the diferent spaces and seizes in which images are seen (206). For Godard, the cinema always remains on the theatrical, Lumière (vs Edison) model, i.e. a large public screen and collective experience. his is cinema as a projection of the world at a given time and is thus a fundamentally democratic and egalitarian, if not utopian space (everybody sees more or less the same thing simultaneously). Further, projection makes possible an open set of relations between viewer and screen: our experience in a theater is one of forming connections and assocations (including historical), because we are reminded of ilms and events not explicitly contained within or referred to by the ilm being screened. he concept of projection become more complex and controversial when Godard applies it to the processs of history itself, for instance, with his notion of the law of stereo in Notre Musique (2004): Germany “projected” the Jews into an

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28 29

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Cinema and Agamben autonomous state (i.e. Germany generated out of itself the state of Israel), then Israel “projected” the Palestinians. Strangely, this passage from the French translation of the novel is absent from the American edition. A recurring passage, indeed mantra, of Godard’s later corpus is the quote derived from Robert Bresson: “Si une image, regardée à part, exprime nettement quelque chose, si elle comporte une interprétation, elle ne se transformera pas au contact d’autres images. Les autres images n’auront aucun pouvoir sur les autres images. Ni action, ni réaction”. See Williams, “European Culture and Artistic Resistance in Histoire(s) du cinéma Chapter 3A, La Monnaie de l’absolu”. Hermann Broch, La Mort de Virgile (Paris: Gallimard, 1955 [1945]), trans. Albert Kohn. he Death of Virgil (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983 [1945]), trans. Jean Starr Untermeyer, 481–2. Contrast this positing of innocence within the framework of projection with Agamben’s very short yet striking essay on cinematic illusion and fantasy, “he Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the History of Cinema”, his reading of a silent sequence from Orson Welles’s uninished Don Quixote set in 1950s. Agamben writes that the scene really is about the destroying of an illusion of child innocence in the form of a young girl Dulcie (Agamben suggests Dulcinea) who looks at Don Quixote “reprovingly” ater he has slashed down the screen of a public movie theater in his efort to “save” a woman in distress projected suddenly in the image (a igure for his idealised Dulcinea whom he has never met). Agamben concludes: “But when they [our fantasies] prove in the end to be empty and unfulilled, when they show the void from which they were made, then it is time to pay the price for their truth, to understand that Dulcinea–whom he saved–cannot love us”. See Agamben, Profanations, 63–4. In Agamben, there exists no projection or nostalgic fantasy of an original purity or freedom in children that can be retrieved, relayed or championed through the “decreating” powers of cinema. As Murray glosses, “the young girl we hope to save, Quixotic in our imaginings, can never love us; our imagination must be exposed as “empty and unfulilled” in order that we can begin to reconstruct a new form of image, a new poetics that denies imagination as a distortion of the here and now, as cinema so oten does” (Murray, 92) In Soigne ta droite, despite having the French window slammed on her repeatedly, there is no reprroach or recrimination in the face of the young girl. For Godard this is always the aesthetic challenge to make love and mutual understanding (and redemption) possible. his aspect of Godard’s cinema is rarely acknowledged or commented on, yet at such moments as these Godard takes the risks of essentialism and nostalgia and positively embraces them as a fundamentalist badge of courage and optimism

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33 34

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against the odds. For Godard, any fantasy that might be provoked by the projected image is not the crucial aspect. As long as there is a projection at the macro level in the form of a public screening that brings diferent people together, or at the micro level in the form of an act of cinematic montage that brings together the distant and dissimilar, there is always reason for hope. For the record, Godard also references Welles’s ilm in Chapter 1A of Histoire(s) with a still of Pancho Sanchez as one of an illustrious list of cinema history’s uninished ilms. Marc Robinson, “Resurrected Images: Godard’s King Lear”, Performing Arts Journal 1988, 31: 20–5, 22. See James Williams, “Music, Love, and the Cinematic Event”, FOR EVER GODARD: the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Temple, James S. Williams and Michael Witt (eds) (London: Black Dog Press, 2004), 288–311. Agamben, Means Without End, 79. See Williams, “European Culture and Artistic Resistance in Histoire(s) du cinéma Chapter 3A, La Monnaie de l’absolu.” I argue that in Histoire(s) the igural is above all the human igure at its most concrete and literal, and that the work’s meaning ultimately lies somewhere between the igural and the awesome reach of Godard’s sublime—part of what I call the inherent struggle in Histoire(s) between sense and the sensible, the latter operating as a kind of resistance to the logic of Godard’s own rhetorical manoeuvres by means of a collaboration of forms. Ibid., 135. André Habib (2001), “Before and Ater: Origins and Death in the Work of Jean-Luc Godard”, Senses of Cinema 16: http://sensesofcinema.com/2001/16/godard_habib/ Gaston Bachelard, L’Intuition de l’instant (Paris: Stock, 1992 [1931]), 103–11. I am indebted to Douglas Morrey for this reference. Morrey, 167. Film socialisme (2010) ends with the dynamic call for action in a chiastic phrase about natural justice versus the law: “Quand la loi n’est pas juste, la justice passe avant la loi”. I have explored elsewhere how this phrase actually goes back to France/tour/détour/deux/enfants, where it was similarly typewritten over the screen. It is no surprise that this earlier work is echoed in the tender second “movement” of Film socialisme, with its domestic family scenes conveyed in meditative long-takes and close-ups. For Godard is reengaging again here directly with the place and status of children within the world of adults, one that now involves rights. he young Lucien, who continually “performs” with his physical gestures to the classical and jazz music constantly forming inside his head, proposes with his older sister Florine a social programme based in universal terms on art and society (i.e. not the State)—one that could just as easily be Godard’s own: “Garder de l’espoir / Avoir raison quand votre gouvernement a tort / Apprendre à voir avant que d’apprendre à lire” (“Hold on to hope / Be right when your government

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is wrong / Learn to see before learning to read”). A series of screen-texts later informs us that the Conseil d’État approved the children’s right to seek election to the local council and that they are on the point of winning in their own—rather than their family—name. To invoke the title of the 1990 short Godard made with Anne-Marie Miéville, L’Enfance de l’art (an episode in Comment vont les enfants?), the hope here is perhaps of a new “childhood of art”. he question whether this could potentially provide the grounds for a new kind of Europe that does not simply reproduce the same tragic, fatal narratives and models of antiquity is let deliberately open. See James S. Williams, “Entering the Desert: the book of Film socialisme”, Vertigo 30, 2012: http://www.closeupilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/ issue–30-spring–2012-godard-is/entering-the-desert-the-book-of-ilm-socialisme/ 39 Agamben, “Notes on Gesure”, 60.

2

Passion, Agamben and the Gestures of Work Libby Saxton

Film is linked to the movements and rhythms of work. Recent critical writing has opened new perspectives on the medium’s relation to labor, energy and the human body. Mary Ann Doane points out that the emergence of cinema coincided with shits in industrial organization allied with the rationalization of time in capitalist modernity. In Doane’s account, this rethinking of time was exempliied by Frederick W. Taylor’s attempts to increase the eiciency of workers’ gestures and his disciple Frank B. Gilbreth’s “cyclographs”, which captured these motions photographically as contours in space.1 If the advent of ilm needs to be understood in the context of endeavors to optimize industrial productivity, in the early twenty-irst century the medium is diferently attuned to the dynamics of work. Discussing contemporary cinema, Janet Harbord notes that the modernist preoccupation with the body versus the machine has receded and production has become decentred and dematerialized. Yet, she insists, “the question of productivity and energy […] has circled back in the present order of global instability and contingency, as a pressing issue.”2 Film, for Harbord, is aptly equipped to register the “uneven lows and mutations” of contemporary globalized capital because it can represent the body “not simply as movement but as an entity through which diferential forms of energy low.”3 A connection persists between ilm and the forces and constraints that condition the gestures and pace of work. A related yet distinct set of associations between ilm and work are hinted at, though not explicitly articulated, in the writings of Giorgio Agamben. In “Notes on Gesture”, Agamben considers cinema’s ambiguous debt to studies by Gilles de la Tourette, Jean-Martin Charcot, Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey which, insofar as they made human movement visually available for scientiic analysis, can be loosely aligned with Taylor’s and Gilbreth’s eforts to

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eliminate unproductive time from labor.4 In Agamben’s account, such imaging techniques deprived the Western bourgeoisie of their gestures, exposing and breaking down what previously belonged to the private realm of the individual, a loss which the cinema would attempt to both mark and recuperate.5 Unlike Doane’s and Harbord’s media histories, however, Agamben’s approach brackets questions of industry and productivity. In “he Work of Man”, Agamben insists that philosophy should “put aside the emphasis on labour and production” and attend instead to work that “is capable of exposing its own inactivity and its own potentiality.”6 Although Agamben does not mention ilm in this later essay, his description of a work that exhibits its potentiality resonates, I want to argue, with his rethinking of cinema as centered on gesture. My contention in this chapter is that these writings can help to elucidate ainities between motion in ilm and work. One of the few moving image artifacts discussed by Agamben is Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998). What is signiicant about this video essay for Agamben is its understanding of its own medium. Montage, the source, according to Agamben, of the “speciic character” of cinema, is not merely used in Histoire(s), but also “exhibited […] as such” or foregrounded.7 My chapter explores connections between ideas broached by Agamben and a ilm which, not least in its preoccupation with cinema’s intermediality, can be understood as initiating aspects of the critical project that culminates in Histoire(s).8 Passion (1982) depicts a triangle of main protagonists grappling with personal and professional problems: Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), a factory worker and Catholic Marxist activist, Jerzy (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), a director who is making a ilm also called Passion, and Hana (Hana Schygulla), the owner of the motel where the ilm crew are staying. Godard’s ilm crosscuts and creates parallels and overlaps between scenes in three principal settings: a factory, a ilm studio and the motel. Causal relations between events are subordinated to correspondences between acts of artistic creation and love and processes of labor. Passion speaks to some of Agamben’s central concerns, I want to suggest, by exploring the relation between movement, work and production and relecting metadiscursively on its medium.

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Energeia, dunamis and gesture he concept of work plays a role in Agamben’s conceptualization of potentiality, an idea which is oten considered the keystone of his thought since the mid-1980s. A claim that links a number of Agamben’s eclectic texts is that humans are potential beings because they lack a proper or deining nature or goal. As he states in he Coming Community, “the fact that must constitute the point of departure for any discourse on ethics is that there is no essence, no historical or spiritual vocation, no biological destiny that humans must enact or realize.”9 his argument is reformulated in “he Work of Man”, a reading of Aristotle’s relections in the Nicomachean Ethics on whether humans have a characteristic activity in which their good might be understood to lie.10 Agamben observes here that Aristotle’s term ergon (“labour” or “work”) is closely connected to energeia (literally, “being at work”). he notion of energeia, Agamben reminds us, occupies a key position in Aristotle’s philosophy, where it is deined in opposition to dunamis (“potentiality”). So the question of the “work of man” pertains to the broader issue of the “the energeia, the activity, the being-in-act that is proper to man” and the possibility of “assigning him a proper nature and essence.”11 According to Agamben, before Aristotle identiies this properly human activity as “the being at work of the soul in accordance with logos”, or the actualization of a rational potential, he temporarily entertains “the idea of an argia, of an essential inactivity [inoperosità] of man with respect to his concrete occupations and functions [operazioni].”12 he hypothesis that humans may lack a deining ergon and energeia underpins Agamben’s attempt to think them as beings of “pure potentiality”, which “no work could exhaust.”13 I want to suggest that concerns akin to those of “he Work of Man” emerge in Passion, even though the ilm makes no explicit allusion to Aristotle, his commentators or the possible absence of a speciically human vocation. With its central analogy between factory and cinema, Passion might at irst sight appear preoccupied not with dunamis but with energeia, in its literal meaning of being at work.14 However, the work of both Isabelle and Jerzy is interrupted and we are not shown its inal results. Although we briely see Isabelle laboring in the factory, we do not see what it produces, and shortly ater the start of the ilm, she is ired. Jerzy’s project is beset by problems: the ilm has no story, the lighting is not right, the money is running out. As Passion ends, the ilm within it remains unrealized. While speciic labor opportunities are abruptly withdrawn and

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particular tasks are let uninished, work is recurrently evoked, as we shall see, as an abstract idea, possibility or, to use Agamben’s preferred word, potentiality. In particular, this is achieved through visual and verbal reference to gesture, a privileged theme in Agamben’s writings, including his remarks on ilm. In “Notes on Gesture”, Agamben proposes that gesture, rather than image, as has traditionally been supposed, is the critical “element” of cinema.15 his claim rests on a conception of the image as dynamic, which Agamben explains with reference to the virtual motion into which the photographs in Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas seem to liberate Western humanity’s gestures. Agamben extrapolates: “Every image, in fact, is animated by an antinomic polarity: on the one hand, images are the reiication and obliteration of a gesture […]; on the other hand, they preserve the dynamis intact.”16 he potential for movement contained in the image means that even paintings can be viewed “as fragments of gesture or as stills of a lost ilm wherein only they would regain their true meaning.”17 Cinema thus restores to images their veritable signiicance or, in Agamben’s words, “leads [them] back to the homeland of gesture.”18 Agamben contends further that the centrality of gesture to cinema associates the medium with ethics and politics, rather than merely aesthetics. Gesture opens onto the ethico-political because it is neither a means to some end, nor an end in itself, but instead “the process of making a means visible as such.”19 he characteristic of lacking an end or telos links gesture to the possibility broached in “he Work of Man” that humans are beret of a proper work. Just as no deining ergon or vocation can be assigned to the human, so gesture, Agamben contends, following Varro, is distinguished from production, which is oriented towards an end.20 Whereas proto-cinematic analyzes such as Taylor’s reduced gesture to a means of attaining a goal (enhanced productivity and proit), cinema, Agamben implies, can counter such biopolitical investigations by awakening the image into movement without telos or destiny. A preoccupation with the moving, gestural human body came to the fore in Godard’s work of the 1970s, which, as Michael Witt notes, was indebted to Marey’s chronophotographic studies of motion.21 In this decade, Godard and his long-term collaborator, Anne-Marie Miéville, began to use video technology to fragment and de-compose everyday actions, for example by varying tape speed, as in their television series France/tour/détour/deux/enfants (1979), and thereby to formulate what Alain Bergala calls an “explicit theory of gesture.”22 his concern resurfaces in Godard’s ilms of the 1980s and 1990s, where the language of the body also became associated with phenomena such as love and creativity.

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Agamben’s description of gesture as “the exhibition of a mediality” encapsulates the self-relexivity of this igure in much of Godard’s work across these three decades, which repeatedly questions the relation between human motion and its function or goal.23 Most of Isabelle’s movements in the factory in the opening minutes of Passion may not initially seem to conform to Agamben’s deinition. We irst see her emerging from the distance, pushing a heavy trolley towards the camera. Soon aterwards, there are three shots in which she operates a huge, noisy machine with det, eicient, repetitive hand motions. Since they are purely functional or, in Agamben’s terms, means to ends, these bodily and manual actions cannot be understood as gestural in the sense that he attributes to the word. However, other, less conspicuous movements interfere with Isabelle’s productivity. In the irst of the shots of her at the machine, she appears in proile and pauses to stretch her shoulders and neck. In the second, she yawns twice. Now she is closer to and nearly facing the camera, while her hands pass back and forth across the frame-line. In the third, another medium close-up, her back is to us and her hands are almost completely obscured by her torso. She gazes at length to the right before refocusing on her task. In these early moments of the ilm, attention is increasingly directed away from Isabelle’s body, hands and surrounding towards her face. While her occupation and the setting evoke Aristotle’s concepts of ergon and energeia, the framings of the shots, in keeping with Agamben’s separation of gesture from teleology, progressively marginalize her mechanical gestures and prioritize unproductive actions. hese shots of Isabelle interact thematically and pictorially with those which separate them. he sequence alternates images of the factory and the ilm studio, where another kind of work is under way: Rembrandt’s painting he Night Watch is being reconstructed as a tableau vivant. he camera remains still during each of these shots, but in the course of the sequence it draws nearer to the characters in the ilm set, just as it closes in on Isabelle. he studio is shown irst in a long shot, in which we see actors assemble and assume their positions. he second and third shots of this scene are medium close-ups of faces on which is etched the strain of holding immobile poses. he transition from motion to stillness which we witness on the ilm set heightens our awareness, through similarity and diference, of a parallel progression in the factory shots, as Isabelle’s industrious hands are side-lined. he play of movement and stasis in both scenes calls attention to the characteristics that distinguish and associate painting and cinema. A self-referential concern with image composition is

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simultaneously registered in voice-over remarks by the ilm crew which carry over from the studio into the factory. Looked at within the context of the sequence as a whole, then, Isabelle’s laborious actions assume signiicance beyond their practical ends, because they initiate a meditation on image and medium. In this respect, they foreshadow Agamben’s discussion of gesture as the central element of cinema and the exposure of a means as such. Other moments in the ilm further estrange human gestures from their ostensible functions. About half an hour in, there is a scene where Isabelle chats with Sophie (Sophie Loucachevsky), Jerzy’s production assistant, in the factory. Isabelle remarks that cinema and television never show people working.24 As if to redress this omission, as she walks to screen right, the camera follows her and two other women, who are operating machines, appear in the frame. Sophie responds that it is prohibited to ilm in factories, to which Isabelle replies: “work is the same as pleasure. […] It’s the same gestures as love. Not necessarily the same speed, but the same gestures.” Halfway through this comment, there is a cut to the studio, where passionate labor blends with erotic desire as Ingres’s painting La Petite baigneuse is recreated. In the next shot, Hana sits in Jerzy’s motel room. Speaking on the phone of-screen, Jerzy asserts that he is working and then, presumably challenged by his interlocutor, irritably echoes Isabelle’s insight: “loving, working, working, loving—show me the diference!” In these scenes, Isabelle and Jerzy verbally question a dichotomy that is problematized throughout Passion. As Douglas Morrey explains, Godard’s ilms since Masculin féminin (1966) have recurrently been preoccupied with the relationship between love and work or, put diferently, the efects of the capitalist labor process on social, afective and sexual interactions.25 In Passion, as Isabelle’s conlation of two kinds of gesture suggests, this ongoing exploration of how economic imperatives shape interpersonal relations is imbricated with relection on movement. Although, in the sequence described above, the gestures of the factory laborers, ilm crew, extras, Hana and Jerzy do not look alike, the dialogue encourages us to compare them, distracting us from their overt purposes. Furthermore, in the shots of the studio and the motel, characters appear on video monitors in the background as well as in the ilm frame, generating an additional plane or layer of movement which intensiies the association between gesture and mediation. If the passage into energeia, or actuality, is troubled in the ilm by the freeing of gesture from telos, the notion of dunamis, or potentiality, is highlighted and nowhere more conspicuously than in its spectacular reconstitutions of paintings. Like Agamben, Passion, as noted above, unsettles any straightforward opposition

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between the frozen poses of the canvas and the illusory movement of cinema. he Night Watch and La Petite baigneuse are among at least ten celebrated paintings from which Jerzy’s project draws inspiration. he selectiveness of Passion’s art historical allusions is elucidated by James S. Williams’s relections on Godard’s work as a whole: “Godard’s is an essentially classical sense of European art and culture that advances no further into the story of modern art than Picasso, Francis Bacon and Nicolas de Staël.”26 Williams ascribes the paucity of references to more recent artworks in Godard’s oeuvre to his view of contemporary European culture as moribund. he painterly intertexts of Passion also evince a preference for the igurative over the abstract and a fascination with the animated human form. Most of the masterpieces that Passion reinterprets— which include Goya’s he hird of May, Delacroix’s he Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople and El Greco’s he Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, in addition to those already cited—are replete with fragments of human gesture. hese still shapes evoke movement that might come to be. his dynamic potential or virtual kinesis is foregrounded in Godard’s reworking of these pieces of art, which anticipates Agamben’s claim that the image is inherently gestural. While many of Godard’s other ilms contain images of paintings, Passion substitutes the ekphrastic form of the tableau vivant. As Brigitte Peucker observes, the cinema has long been preoccupied with the tableau vivant as an instance of stillness or inertia which reminds us that ilm was the irst art capable of bringing the ixed image to life.27 Peucker emphasizes that such moments of arrested motion intensify ilm’s intermediality, constituting “a palimpsest or textual overlay simultaneously evocative of painting, drama and sculpture.”28 In Passion’s tableau vivant scenes, relection on the properties that distinguish ilm from these other media is compelled by movement of three kinds: by the camera, within the frame and between shots.29 Intercut, as we have seen, with scenes in the factory and the motel, the meticulously framed still and slowly gliding shots that reveal the elaborate reproductions in part or whole sometimes capture isolated motions. hese seem to range from spontaneous idgetting (such as the playful shoving of the cherub by the angel at the base of he Virgin of the Immaculate Conception) to choreographed moves motivated by the paintings (such as the captive who buries his face in his hands in he hird of May). Agamben diferentiates between gesture and “a movement that has its end in itself (for example, dance seen as an aesthetic dimension).”30 Certain actions in Passion appear to correspond to the latter category, including the ballet steps performed by Manuelle (Manuelle

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Baltazar) and the contortionism of Sarah (Sarah Comen-Salin). In contrast, the movements that ripple through the tableaux vivants do not solidify into aesthetic ends; nor are they productive. hrown into relief by the surrounding stillness, these mobile elements accentuate the potentiality actualized in the passage from painting to cinema. In Passion, the labor of ilmmaking thus encapsulates the antimony between reiied and dynamic gesture that Agamben sees as inherent to the image and pre-empts his relections on cinema’s intimacy with the ethico-political realms.

Gravity, grace and decreation If Passion resonates with Agamben’s insights into ilm, gesture and the potentiality of work, it also helps to expose what Alessia Ricciardi has described as a “subliminal” or “disavowed” presence in his philosophy: that of Simone Weil, whose political thought was the subject of his doctoral dissertation, but who is rarely mentioned in his published texts.31 As Godard has conirmed in interviews, although Passion makes no explicit allusion to Weil, her writings—and in particular those posthumously collected in La Pesanteur et la grâce (Gravity and Grace, 1947) and La Condition ouvrière (he Worker’s Condition, 1951)—are among the ilm’s most signiicant intertexts.32 Weil’s critique of Taylorized mass production and advocation of labor that harmonizes our physical, intellectual and spiritual faculties throw a diferent light from Agamben’s essays, I want to argue, on Passion’s exploration of movement and, by extension, on the critically resurgent question of the relation between ilm and work. Nevertheless, her lingering inluence on Agamben’s thinking on cinema is intimated by his association of the “messianic situation” of the medium—which is made manifest, he contends, in Godard’s Histoire(s)—with “decreation”, one of Weil’s privileged terms.33 Questions of movement, embodiment and production connect Weil’s thinking on work to Agamben’s discussion of gestural cinema, while her engagement with issues of force, energy and the soul distinguishes them. In Weil’s writings from the mid–1930s onwards, moral and spiritual life is rethought in terms of forces likened to those that regulate the material world. As she observes in an essay in La Condition ouvrière: “the laws of mechanics, which derive from geometry and control our machines, contain supernatural truths.”34 In La Pesanteur et la

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grâce, an assembly of fragmentary, aphoristic texts, she writes: “all the natural movements of the soul are ruled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity”, a dragging downwards which is countervailed only by the ascending pull of grace.35 Whereas the desire for objects spawns a degraded energy which weighs us down, the energy of grace is liberated through the ethical act of renouncing or “decreating” the self.36 Weil deines humility as “knowing that in what we call ‘I’ there is no source of energy which allows us to rise.”37 We must lower ourselves in order to ascend, as she asserts in a vertiginous formulation: “moral gravity makes us fall towards the heights.”38 Moreover, work ofers a singular opportunity to “move upwards.”39 Work is one of the threads that join Weil’s earlier more explicitly political texts to her later more mystical writings. In an article published in 1929, she asserts: “it is only by the trial of work that space and time are presented to me, always together, time as the condition, and space as the object, of any action.”40 Weil’s airmation of work as a measure of temporal duration and the world’s extension hints at a prioritization of energeia, or what Agamben calls “beingin-act”, over dunamis.41 However, her attacks on Taylorism, which tightened its grip on French industry in the 1920s, foreshadow Agamben’s biopolitical analysis of gesture. he diverse writings united in La Condition ouvrière relect both immediately and retrospectively on her experience of working in factories from 1934 to 1935 and accord sustained attention to forces that compel and constrain the body’s movements. Contesting Taylorism’s prevalent association with “rationalization”, Weil argues that its primary aim is to wield power over laborers by depriving them of “the possibility of determining themselves the processes and rhythm” and even the movements of their work.42 Like Agamben, Weil dwells on the relation between action, means and end. But whereas the lack of a predetermined destiny aligns gesture, for Agamben, with ethics, the manual worker’s “efort without inality” is linked by Weil to slavery and evil.43 As she explains in La Pesanteur et la grâce: “work makes us endure the wearing phenomenon of inality returning like a ball; working in order to eat, eating in order to work.”44 he laborer’s gestures are oriented towards mere survival, an existence in which “everything is a means and inality clings on nowhere.”45 Under Taylorized conditions, the force of necessity not only tugs on workers” limbs, but also “pins [their] thought to the earth” and empties their souls “of everything but a concern with speed.”46 Nevertheless, for Weil, workers are uniquely positioned to encounter the divine, because they are not separated from it by any earthly end.47

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Film is never alluded to in La Pesanteur et la grâce and is mentioned in La Condition ouvrière only occasionally and leetingly. Weil remarks ironically that “the most beautiful and true symbol of the situation of factory workers” is the malfunctioning machine that forcibly feeds corn-on-the-cob to Charlie Chaplin’s assembly line laborer in Modern Times (1936).48 Chaplin’s parody of Taylorism exploits the ainity between the resources of ilm and the issues of time and motion that preoccupy Weil’s writings on work. But the cinematic dimension of these texts emerges more fully through comparison with Passion. Noting the appearance of the Weilian theme of self-renouncement in Godard’s ilms of the early 1980s, Morrey argues that, in Passion, the energy that Weil ascribes to grace “is manifested irst and foremost in the form of light”, which the ilm associates with “spiritual nourishment.”49 I would suggest that the energies described by Weil are visualized just as prominently here in kinetic form and in a manner that supports the connections I have suggested between Weil’s and Agamben’s ideas. Like Agamben’s, Weil’s arguments reverberate with the shit of attention from productive gesture to signs of fatigue in the irst shots of the factory. hese images recall Weil’s critique of an existence in which one’s “gestures are at every moment determined by work” and from which inality is excluded.50 If the Agambenian reading of these moments that I ofered earlier attended exclusively to the actions of the body, a Weilian approach would also consider their evocation of movements of the soul. During the inal shot of this scene, in a voice barely audible over the din of the machine, Isabelle exclaims in voiceover: “My God, why have you abandoned me?” Isabelle’s words accentuate one of the multiple meanings of the title of the ilm, the irst by Godard to deal in a sustained way with Christian subject-matter, and initiate a series of references to the divine which punctuates its exploration of love and work. he cry attributed in two of the Gospels to Christ in his agony is also quoted in La Pesanteur et la grâce, where the cross is associated with upward motion.51 It was only a beam, not a tree, speculates Weil, because “leaves and fruit are a waste of energy if we only want to rise.”52 Implicitly attributing this desire to the worker, the factory is initially glimpsed in Passion between shots that pan across the sky. his sequence juxtaposes natural with supernatural forces and the law of gravity, perceptible in Isabelle’s tiredness, with images suggestive of grace, even as the dialogue alludes to divine absence. Although this spiritual dimension is absent from Agamben’s engagements with work and gesture, the sequence also assists in elucidating his oblique debt to Weil. As Leland de la Durantaye and

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Ricciardi point out, Agamben’s concept of potentiality is genealogically related to, if in crucial respects diferent from, Weil’s notion of decreation.53 In La Pesanteur et la grâce, Weil deines decreation as “making the created pass into the uncreated.”54 his passage, she elaborates, involves “abandoning the I” or “renouncing being something” in order that God can love through us.55 A sense of something “becoming nothing” is created in the progression from movement to stillness, evocative of the transition from life to death, that occurs, as I noted earlier, in the sequence that introduces the factory and the studio.56 Agambenian potentiality and Weilian decreation interact in Godard’s images of arrested motion. Towards the end of Passion, there is a sequence that provides further resources, I want to argue, for understanding the lineage that connects Agamben to Weil. he ilm cuts back and forth between the recreation of he Virgin of the Immaculate Conception and a scene in which Isabelle and Jerzy prepare to have sex. As Kaja Silverman points out, the ilm “repeatedly situates elements belonging to the [painting] in the scene in Isabelle’s bedroom, and elements belonging to the sex scene in the biblical scene.”57 Isabelle is identiied here simultaneously with Christ (as at the beginning of the ilm) and the Virgin, connections forged by music (excerpts of the “Agnus Dei” from Fauré’s Requiem) and dialogue (Isabelle recites the supplication to the Lamb of God in voice-over) and reinforced by gesture (she momentarily places her let hand on her chest, mirroring the pose of Mary in the tableau vivant). In turn, her nakedness is paralleled in the tableau by that of an angel whose equivalent on El Greco’s canvas is clothed.58 he mutual contamination of these scenes anticipates the polarization of the feminine between carnality and spirituality that Laura Mulvey discerns in Godard’s next two features, Prénom Carmen (1983) and Je vous salue Marie (1985). Mulvey criticizes these ilms for using the mythical “enigma” of femininity to signify “other, more profound mysteries” (the origins of life, the creation of art).59 Yet the preoccupation with mystery and mysticism which comes to the fore in Passion’s recreation of El Greco’s image is aligned there with persistent material considerations more in keeping with Agamben’s priorities, I would suggest, through gestural choreography and the imaging of force. he ilm’s concern with the relation between the spiritual and the material can be elucidated by comparing the tableau vivant with its template. he Virgin of the Immaculate Conception exempliies a number of features particular to El Greco’s late style. Naturalism is subordinated to the drama of a spiritual vision.

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Unearthly lighting and elongated, swirling shapes evoke a transcendental energy and a powerful upwards straining. Probably for this reason, the painting has sometimes been viewed as an assumption, rather than a conception or creation. Indeed, for Silverman, “there is […] a certain undecidability in the original about whether the celestial is approaching the terrestrial, or the terrestrial the celestial.”60 Godard’s tableau vivant retains the principal protagonists of the painting and roughly copies their positions and postures. Furthermore, the virtual force that appears to draw them heavenwards in the original is actualized in the ilm by two ascending crane shots. However, other aspects of the ilm scene rework and subvert the dynamic content of the canvas. Firstly, although the luid relation between the physical and the spiritual is a traditional concern of the Christian-themed tableau vivant and its cinematic relatives (as Jean-Louis Leutrat points out, Godard’s title is a nod to “early ilms, precisely named Passion, which were a succession of ‘tableaux vivants’” depicting the “ways of the cross”), El Greco’s dematerialized shapes cannot be reproduced in such intermedial forms.61 Secondly, rather than seeing the tableau as a whole, we encounter it by parts. he proximity of the camera to the models annuls the unifying spiritual force conjured by the painter. Finally, in a third shot, which curves from the top to the base of the tableau, we see models adjusting their costumes. his shot departs from El Greco’s artwork by introducing downward motion and making visible the processes of image production. Bergala perceives in Godard’s ilming of the tableau the inluence of Weil, linking the camera’s slow descent suggestively to her characterization of grace as a movement ungoverned by gravity.62 I would suggest that human motion and gestural patterning in this sequence also speak to Weil’s, as well as Agamben’s, concerns. Several elements recall the factory scenes. he sequence is prefaced by a fragment of conversation between Jerzy and Isabelle about loving work, in which Isabelle says that she will miss her job. he connection to labor is reinforced by Isabelle’s manual actions. In striking contrast to the lowing of the camera around the tableau vivant, the bedroom is revealed in static frames. In the irst of these shots, the only moving object is one of Isabelle’s hands. As it caresses her leg and touches her chest, its trajectory is rendered more conspicuous by backlighting, the pink glow which limns her silhouette. Pictorially, this shot echoes those of her laboring at the outset of the ilm, in spite of the diference in gestural content. If, like Weil, this sequence associates notions of spirituality and work, its blending of motion and stillness simultaneously returns us to Agamben’s thinking on gesture and medium. Whereas

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the studio scene renders the transition from painting to cinema, the bedroom scene sees cinema approximating painting. Agamben’s call for attention to work that manifests its potentiality correlates less strongly with the shots that spiral up the completed tableau vivant, than with the one that swerves downwards and captures the igures resuming movement. El Greco’s focus on creation is abjured as we witness the dismantling of the spectacle, its becoming nothing, its decreation. Even though he argues against stressing labor and production and barely refers to these concepts in his writing on cinema, Agamben ofers insights which can enrich thinking about the medium’s correspondences with the temporalities and gestures of work. he arguments elaborated in “he Work of Man” and “Notes on Gesture” intersect, broadly speaking, in the notion of dynamism, which they respectively characterize as a lack of deining work or essence and an intrinsic property of the image. Read together, these essays suggest that ideas about work and potentiality can enhance understanding of ilm as medium, not merely of images of labor. Without addressing cinema in any sustained way, Weil too supplies perspectives which can illuminate this nexus of once again critically current issues in ilm studies. La Pesanteur et la grâce and La Condition ouvrière posit connections between the forces that tug on the (working) body and those that pull on and energize the soul. Drawing inspiration from these texts, Passion meditates on the relation between material conditions and spiritual experience, love and work, movement and stillness, helping us to glimpse Weil’s haunting presence in Agamben’s writings. Godard returns to the relation between the gestural body and the work of image creation in the video essay Scénario du ilm “Passion” (1982) and, later, in Histoire(s), where, according to Bergala, gesture assumes the character of a “privileged passage of the sacred.”63 In Passion, however, gesture is not oriented towards a predetermined telos, and Christian intertexts provide inspiration not for retreating from the earthly or material, but for exploring questions of movement, decreation and work that are distinctly formulated in the writings of Weil and Agamben.

Notes 1 Mary Ann Doane, he Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 5–6. Translations from French are mine, except where published translations are cited.

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2 Janet Harbord, he Evolution of Film: Rethinking Film Studies (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 150. 3 Harbord, Evolution of Film, 149, 170. 4 Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti, Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2000 [1996]), 49–53. 5 Agamben, Means Without End, 49, 53. 6 Giorgio Agamben, “he Work of Man” (2005), trans. Kevin Attell, Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (eds) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 10. 7 Giorgio Agamben, “Diference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films”, trans. Brian Holmes, Guy Debord and the Situationist International, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 315. 8 For illuminating discussion of aspects of Passion, such as its consideration of European art and history, that preigure Histoire(s), see James S. Williams, “European Culture and Artistic Resistance in Histoire(s) du cinéma Chapter 3A, La Monnaie de l’absolu”, he Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard 1985–2000, Michael Temple and James S. Williams (eds) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), 114, 134. 9 Giorgio Agamben, he Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993 [1990]), 43. 10 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ed. and trans. Roger Crisp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 11–12. 11 Agamben, “Work of Man”, 2. 12 Aristotle cited in Agamben, “Work of Man”, 4; Agamben, “Work of Man”, 2. 13 Agamben, “Work of Man”, 2. 14 For incisive consideration of the factory/cinema analogy in Passion, see Laura Mulvey, “he Hole and the Zero: he Janus Face of the Feminine in Godard”, in Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image, 1974–1991, Raymond Bellour, Mary Lea Bandy (eds) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992), 77–9. 15 Agamben, Means Without End, 55. 16 Agamben, Means Without End, 55. 17 Agamben, Means Without End, 55–6. 18 Agamben, Means Without End, 56. 19 Agamben, Means Without End, 58. 20 Agamben, Means Without End, 57. 21 Michael Witt, “Altered Motion and Corporeal Resistance in France/tour/détour/ deux/enfants”, For Ever Godard, Michael Temple, James S. Williams and Michael Witt (eds) (London: Black Dog, 2004), 205–7, 209–10. 22 Alain Bergala, Nul mieux que Godard (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1999), 243–5.

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23 Agamben, Means Without End, 58. 24 A related observation is made by the voice-over narrator in the short essay ilm Workers Leaving the Factory (1995) by Harun Farocki, whose recent work has recurrently addressed the issue of labor in the twentieth century: “most narrative ilms begin ater work is over. […] Whenever possible, ilm has moved hastily away from factories.” 25 Douglas Morrey, Jean-Luc Godard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 53–4. 26 Williams, “European Culture”, 115. 27 Brigitte Peucker, he Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 26. 28 Peucker, Material Image, 30. 29 hese three types of movement are mentioned in Farocki’s discussion of shits between painting and cinema in Passion. In Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki, Speaking About Godard (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 173. 30 Agamben, Means Without End, 58. 31 Alessia Ricciardi, “From Decreation to Bare Life: Weil, Agamben, and the Impolitical”, diacritics 39: 2 (2009): 75. 32 See, for example, Jean-Luc Godard, “Le Chemin vers la parole”, (interview with Alain Bergala, Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana) Cahiers du cinéma 336 (1982). 33 Agamben, “Diference and Repetition”, 315, 318. See James S. Williams’s chapter in this book for a brilliant reading of Agamben’s claims about cinema, messianism and gesture against the existential themes and decreative forms of Godard’s ilm Soigne ta droite (1987). 34 Simone Weil, La Condition ouvrière (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 268. 35 Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la grâce (Paris: Plon, 1988 [1947]), 7. 36 See Simone Weil, “Décréation” in La Pesanteur et la grâce (Paris: Plon, 1988 [1947]), 42–50. 37 Weil, Pesanteur, 40. 38 Weil, Pesanteur, 10. 39 Weil, Pesanteur, 202. 40 Simone Weil cited in David McLellan, Simone Weil: Utopian Pessimist (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 23. 41 Agamben, “Work of Man”, 2. 42 Weil, Condition ouvrière, 223. 43 Weil, Pesanteur, 204; Condition ouvrière, 261–2. 44 Weil, Pesanteur, 203. 45 Weil, Condition ouvrière, 262. 46 Weil, Condition ouvrière, 266, 272.

70 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61

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Cinema and Agamben Weil, Pesanteur, 203. Weil, Condition ouvrière, 184. Morrey, Godard, 143, 144. Weil, Condition ouvrière, 21. Weil, Pesanteur, 103. Weil, Pesanteur, 104. Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 22–3; Ricciardi, “From Decreation to Bare Life”. Weil, Pesanteur, 42. Weil, Pesanteur, 43, 44. Weil, Pesanteur, 44. Kaja Silverman in Silverman and Farocki, Speaking About Godard, 192. A footnote in the shot by shot découpage compiled by Nathalie Bourgeois compares this angel with El Greco’s painting Saint Sebastian. In L”Avant-scène cinéma 380 (1989): 78. Mulvey, “he Hole and the Zero”, 81. Silverman in Silverman and Farocki, Speaking About Godard, 194. Jean-Louis Leutrat, “Traces that Resemble Us: Godard’s Passion”, SubStance 15: 3: 51 (1986): 41. I would like to thank Brigitte Peucker for drawing my attention to the intertwined histories of the tableau vivant and Christianity. Bergala, Nul mieux que Godard, 114. Bergala, Nul mieux que Godard, 245.

3

Gesture, Time, Movement: David Claerbout meets Giorgio Agamben on the Boulevard du Temple Janet Harbord Across the corpus of Giorgio Agamben’s work lie scattered a number of speculative propositions on what may be said to deine or characterize the species of the human. One of the most forceful of these speculations occurs in the introduction to the English translation of the work Infancy and History, a prologue that Agamben wrote iteen years ater the original publication of the book in Italian in 1978. In this introduction he notes that Infancy and History itself is but a prologue to an unwritten work, which remains “stubbornly unwritten” and yet has a title, he Human Voice. One of the pages of this work, he writes, would contain the following questions: “Is there a human voice, a voice that is the voice of man as the chirp is the voice of the cricket or the bray of the donkey? And, if it exists, is this voice language?”1 he question of language is related to the question of what it means to be human, yet the voice that may be language is not simply that which is spoken or written. Language is a term encompassing all that is unsaid as a presupposition upon which language may take place. his relation, in which the spoken is the broken cast around the absent unsaid, he gives the name in-fans. When he writes that there has been but “one train of thought,” which is this question, “what is the meaning of ‘there is language’”, and what is more, “what is the meaning of ‘I speak’?”, we are referred to the experience of language as such. his train of thought is manifest in many diferent ways across his writings, and perhaps most vigorously as a question of humanity in, he Open: Man and Animal (2002/2004). he Open stages a critique of the evolutionary construction of humanity as the animal that becomes human through the expulsion of his own animality. he acquisition of language is retrospectively organized as the locus of a strategic diference or capacity distinguishing man from animal.2 Language provides a constitutive component of what he names the anthropological

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machine, an apparatus that not only distinguishes the species but privileges human kind over all others; moreover, the relation of man to animal is one that is both drawn on as an ainity embraced (the qualities of passion for example), and also a resonance repudiated and expelled (the “animality” of violence). he book begins with a description of this paradox in illustrations from a thirteenthcentury Hebrew bible of man on the Day of Judgment as a creature bearing the head of an animal. hat Agamben makes use at times of Lévi-Strauss in his engagement with language3 should not however confuse his focus with the project of grammatology in Derrida’s work. For Agamben, Derrida misdiagnoses the problem of metaphysics; the vital question of language, for Agamben, is not the ininite deferral of meaning and play of diference between signiier and signiied (repudiating the hierarchy of speech as presence and writing as absence). Instead, the question is within the order of the ethical, of what it means for the human to be the living being that has language. It may come as something of a surprise then to ind a deinition of the human in relation to images rather than language in (what might appear to be) the margins of his work.4 Here is Agamben speaking in memorium for his friend Guy Debord, at a lecture in 19955: Now man is an animal who is interested in images when he has recognized them as such. hat’s why he is interested in painting and why he goes to the cinema. A deinition of man from our speciic point of view could be that man is a movie-going animal. He is interested in images ater he has recognized that they are not real beings.6

While the igure of Debord, rather than images, is the subject of the talk, Agamben parses the topicality of the image through Debord’s practice. Why, he asks, was cinema the privileged medium for Debord, the strategist, rather than, say, poetry (Debord having abandoned the Lettrist project earlier in his career) or painting? he answer brings into play the historical dimension of the image, “the close tie between cinema and history,” or what he goes on to call the eminently historical character of the image.7 What follows in the essay is a summary (or condensation) of the meaning of the historical nature of the image in Agamben’s work, referencing messianic time, the dialectical image, stoppage and repetition, all appearing as keystones also to Debord’s ilm works. Of course, bound up with this question of what cinematic images mean to Debord, of why he chose this medium over others, is the question of what images mean for Agamben. While Agamben presents the choice of medium to Debord, there

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is a degree of slippage in the way that he glides between his own references to image-types in this memorial lecture. In this particular description of man as a movie-going animal, one might note the equivocation of ilmic images with paintings (“[t]hat’s why he is interested in painting and why he goes to the cinema”),8 and, in other essays, reference to a third image-type in the photograph.9 Indeed, across his work the media of photography, ilm and painting are drawn on variously yet their singularity as “means” is not brought into focus. From the point of view of ilm theory and art history,10 the lack of attention to such diferences suggests a wide departure from the methodological concern with the speciic properties of form and their historical (if promiscuous) development as inscribed in these disciplines.11 Indeed, the question of what is understood by the “historical nature of the image,” and by a medium, is potentially at odds in the encounter between ilm theory and Agambenian philosophy. he photographic image, according to Agamben, is not the mummiication of a moment resolute in its still capture, but the potential release of a dynamis and the site of a particular investiture concerning the capture of the human igure in her own medium. he human being as a species is fundamentally located in a mode of being visible, never self-deined but given over to the gestural qualities of her appearance. “he image,” writes Agamben in “Special Being,” “is a being whose essence is to be a species, a visibility or an appearance”12 and while he is writing here with regard to the relected image in a mirror, the philological tie between image as speculum and the human species as the locus of gestural production binds the two. Neither mirror image nor human subject is deined by a substance, but by the process of becoming visible, being given to appearance, a deinition of humanity as communicability itself. he photographic image then, like the image in the mirror, and like the human subject, coincides there as an accident of sorts but not a substance of any kind. If there seems to be a lack of attention to disciplinary demarcations and approaches in this treatment of image forms, we might re-orient debate with reference to Agamben’s recent discussion of method and in particular, his discussion of the term “paradigm,” in he Signature of All hings: On Method (2008/9). In this discussion, the concept of the paradigm is elucidated and may be traced retrospectively through Agamben’s work as the generation of a form of knowledge that moves from singularity to singularity, inding analogies, correspondences and echoes across categories in the production of a paradigm that is imminent to things.13 hat is, the paradigm does not impose a model or operate deductively, nor proceed from an example, but inds correspondences

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between things in a crossing of diachrony and synchrony. We might postulate then that photography and ilm, and indeed painted images, create a paradigm as the site of encounter between the change of things across time (diachrony) and the relations between things at any one time (synchrony). Indeed, there is a relexive re-play of the changing of things across time that photography in particular is thought to “capture.” he idea of the photograph as the capture of an instant, as the registration of a temporal point in time, has characterized critical ruminations about photography for the past eighty years or more.14 It is this notion of photography as an exemplary means to record time (arrested as a “still”), that Agamben’s paradigm of the image implicitly refutes. In his terms, the photograph’s potentiality is conversely the release of a dynamis, fundamentally linked to a Benjaminian concept of kairological time; that is, the paradigm takes no account of the polarity of stillness and movement as they are conventionally attributed to photography and ilm respectively. And yet the paradigm within which the image is situated, elaborated across some twenty texts and essay collections, remains (in terms of ilm theory at least) elliptical, connecting media with time but in an unorthodox re-writing of the relation, and simultaneously transgressing any deinition of distinct media forms. My objective in this essay is to sketch the way in which Agamben’s use of images as a move away from a ixed medium speciicity is, simultaneously, a move away from the concept of a ixed human ontology. Rather than appeal to the distinct domains of cinema and photography, I will refer to contemporary art and the installation as the location of a dismantling of traditional medium-speciic deinitions and the re-assemblage of resemblances, correspondences and sympathies across these lines. In particular, Belgian artist, David Claerbout, produces such works where a medium is a site for experimentation, whose practice can be described as making coincidental rather than substantial productions, or controlled experiment in modes of appearing. Claerbout’s practice might be said to take place entirely within the space between ilm and photography. Unlike Barthes’ strong preference for the photograph over and above cinema, Claerbout seems to not take a preference, profering a hesitant, reserved art that is never fully aligned with one or other medium. “We know to what extent David Claerbout keeps his distance from cinema,” writes Raymond Bellour.15 Claerbout criticizes cinema for “just about everything Roland Barthes criticized it for so long ago”: cinema’s relative lack of pensiveness, its nervousness, its dependency on narrative structure,

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all contributing to a sense of disappointment that cinema bears neither the deinitive stamp of the studium nor the seductive sudden impingement of the punctum that Barthes found so appealing in photography.16 Yet it is not the case that Claerbout neglects the indexical reference of the image as historical, but rather that he releases within this the gestural potential of an image. Take, for example, Claerbout’s early work, Kindergarten Antonio Sant’Elia (1998), seemingly a photograph of a nursery garden, designed to angular modernist principles, featuring a scattering of young children at play. he original photograph was taken in 1932 in Como, Italy, at the opening of the nursery. Claerbout had found the picture in an architectural book celebrating the “new urbanism” of designed space in the 1930s, a moment that he talks about as utopian, the photograph part of a series staging and celebrating, in its original context, a fresh new environment. he garden of Kindergarten was designed by Giuseppe Terragni, an architect who worked for Mussolini, who pioneered a rationalist international style which was subsequently to became associated with a clinical proto-fascist rationalism. he angle of the photograph suggests that it was taken from a level above ground, perhaps a irst-story window looking down on an enclosed area pleasingly patterned with new white paving stones laid in geometric shapes with grass cut around the curves of paved form. Within the two paved areas a circle has been cut to allow the planting of two trees, which appear to it the spaces exactly, young thin-limbed trees yet to mature. Around the trees, a number of children (at least eighteen) stand, run and play, dressed in identical pristine white aprons, also thin-limbed and yet to mature. A low but bright sun provides a startling light that throws well-deined shadows from the bodies of the children and the limbs of the trees. If we view the image for more than a few seconds, we notice a slight swimming movement, which is the swaying of the trees, discretely, subtly animated. Claerbout re-versions the image as a singlechannel video work that stages the signs of various temporalities. he scene of Kindergarten Antonio Sant’Elia, becomes, in Claerbout’s hands, a still from a lost ilm, a picture from a ilm that we have not (yet) seen, the dynamis of its capture returned in this particular moment of viewing. What Claerbout’s works suggest is that there is a time of looking at an image as well as a time of taking. hat is, the moment of its potency is not always visible, or available, but in a Benjaminian sense the charge of the image lashes at a particular moment. he barely discernable movement in Claerbout’s singlechannel works requires the viewer to be alert to such moments, to pay attention

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to the surface of an image that we think we know but that catches us out in our complacency. Here are young trees that move as they may have moved in 1932, their dynamis intact, which in turn refers us to the movement of these children, each in a process of turning, running, stepping that is, as yet, incomplete. In the cast of these small gestures, the form of the bodies refers us to their dynamic potential, and moreover to further images and gestures to come. It may not be an exaggeration to say that the picture refers to gesturality itself. he moment brings together the historical context with an exigency to ind a name for these children, to take account of their singular lives, while at the same time to apprehend their generic openness to communication, the capacity of gesturality that inds the human revealed in her own medium. It is possibly only through the pursuing of an illusive diference between ilm and photography in Claerbout’s works that movement is revealed in its relation to temporality; the photograph is not the index of a static point in time, but the image of a potential capacity. Movement in both media is located in gesture rather than any type of chemical registration. What converges in Claerbout’s practice and Agamben’s treatment of the image is an understanding of ilmic and photographic productions as the potential bearers of a messianic, kairological time, a time of the now that up-ends the conceptual framework within which ilm and photography are conventionally thought. In pursuing an encounter between the two, the features of the kairological are given greater force. By way of tending to the image as production, I want to turn to a number of particular images that are brought into appearance in the work of the artist and the philosopher respectively, and initially to cross-refer their treatment of stillness and motion in an approach to kairological time, before noting inally their points of diference.

Boulevard du Temple he complexity of the correspondence between movement and stillness, which is subtly diferent from the pairing of dynamis and stasis, we ind in Agamben’s concise essay “Judgment Day”, (Profanations, 2005/7). he essay opens with a description of the irst photographic image featuring human igures, named ater the place of its taking, “Boulevard du Temple,” and photographed in 1838 by French artist and chemist Louis Daguerre. Daguerre, we may note, had an

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involvement in other irst things, having partnered in chemical experimentation with the photographer of the irst still life, “he Dinner Table” by Joseph Niepce. Boulevard du Temple is not however about irst things but about inal things in Agamben’s account, an eschatology closely linked to Benjamin’s thought, but we will come to this. he everyday activity that became photography (as the documenting of “life”) evinced the detail of everyday existence, the ritual practices of life as habitat, practices that are partially un-thought marginalia. It is this seemingly irrelevant detail of the everyday, however, that comes to appear in this image, “is called forth, summoned to appear on Judgment Day.”17 It is also the case that the irst photograph showing human igures profers the somewhat contingent nature of that by which we will be judged. For the boulevard, Agamben observes, should be crowded with people and carriages on a busy day, and yet because of the length of photographic exposure requiring more than ten or possibly twenty minutes to elapse, the crowd is not visible. Nothing of this throng is visible (though still present), but only a man who has stopped to have his shoes shined, who must have been stationary for some while: “he crowd of humans—indeed, all of humanity—is present, but it cannot be seen, because judgment concerns a single person, a single life: precisely this one and no other.”18 Agamben’s account resonates with that of a contemporary of Daguerre, Samuel Morse, inventor of the single wire telegraph system in 1838 (a year before the photograph of Boulevard du Temple). Morse wrote a description of the image ater visiting Daguerre’s studio,19 which was published in the New York Observer in April 1839. Observing the plate he writes, “Objects moving are not impressed,” with the exception of the individual who was having his shoes brushed. “His feet were compelled, of course, to be stationary for some time, one being on the box of the boot black, and the other on the ground”, he continues, “consequently his boots and legs were well deined, but he is without body or head, because these were in motion.” Photography fails to impress an object (or subject) in movement, except as an absence or a blurred form. For Morse, the body here fails to transmit itself across the boundary of life to register as silver nitrate inscription as a whole body, becoming fragmented, perhaps codiied diferently by qualities of movement and stillness. It is interesting to note that Morse expresses a concern with photography as an act of transmission, tracing what remains ater the transmission is over, rather than with historical registration. In correlation to the morse signal transmitted across space, photography appears as a transmission across time.

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Both Agamben and Morse ix upon the presence and absence that the image brings forth, but it is not the case that what is registered, or impressed, is a stillness in any simple sense. What is not registered is the animistic movement of bodies, or transport. What is registered however is motion, either as absence, blurred form, or gesture. he photograph in this sense does not polarize stillness and movement, or image and life, later to become the polarization of photography and ilm. Rather, it releases the mobile forces within an image as a centrifugal force-ield. For Agamben, what the photograph captures is a gesture, “charged with the weight of an entire life”. In what we might call the implication of movement in gesture, the photograph calls up a moment that is not an instant within a continuum, but a paradigm of heterogeneous times that breaks from the concept of the image as a sealed surface containing an historical truth. he various registers of movement within a photograph (that Agamben reads as indices of diferent conceptions of time), however created a degree of confusion in the time of the photograph’s production (the 1830s). he variation of what is and is not in focus in Daguerre’s photographs, for example, inds the commentary of his contemporaries reaching towards an understanding of what exactly, or inexactly, is being produced. he French correspondent for the Foreign Quarterly Review singled out the problematic imaging of leaves: “In foliage, he is less successful, the constant motion in the leaves rendering his landscapes confused and unmeaning […] which can never be properly delineated without the aid of memory.”20 he blurred leaves of Daguerre’s plates render the whole confusing, demanding recourse to memory on the part of the viewer. his particular “problem” for early photography is revisited by Claerbout to produce an opportunity to break open the surface of the image. Everywhere in his practice during the late 1990s are images of the swaying limbs of trees (single channel video works21). Boom (1996), is an 18-minute single channel installation where a tree is ilmed on a summer’s day in full color as the sun moves over its form. he ilm evidences both a multiplicity of the individually moving leaves, and a uniform swaying of the whole structure. A year later, Claerbout moves from ilming leaves to selecting and animating the arboreal section of a photograph. Ruurlo, Borculoscheweg (1997), is an artwork derived from a postcard found in an old book, providing a view of a landscape displaying a tree, a windmill and two groups of igures, taken somewhere in the Netherlands around 1910. he postcard (notably a photograph concretized as an object of transmission), which might once have articulated something of the landscape and village life of

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the time, now registers, retrospectively, the newness of the medium of photography. he novel appearance of what must have been a fairly cumbersome piece of equipment arriving in the village, can be read from the pose of the small clutch of igures in the foreground, let. he two igures slightly to the front of the group are both men, dressed, as far as one may discern, in dark trousers and jackets. Behind them, and in the shade of the tree, is a group of either women or adolescent girls with white aprons and possibly headwear showing, diminutive by comparison. Whether their place within the landscape conforms to social or economic hierarchy, or whether the day was warm and the women took to the shade, it is not possible to say. But certainly, the group is posing for the camera. By 1910, this group of villagers had learnt that in order to “appear” in the photograph, that is, to be registered with precision, one must keep still and face the camera (with an eye to the prospective future viewer) for the duration of the photographic “capture.” he photograph is staged, a presentation, and no longer located in the ordinary habituations, or “rags” and “refuse”, of the everyday.22 When Ruurlo, Bocurlo scheweg is installed as a video work, we see the slight swaying of the branches and the movement of leaves on the tree. he huge arboreal structure that spreads out across the frame, dwaring the windmill and the igures, is stirred by an imaginary wind, a slight breeze. A portion of the photograph is animated, as indeed it would have been on that day; the human igures conform to a static pose while the tree remains in dynamic relation to the elements and environment. In Kindergarten Antonio Sant’Elia (1998), it is the young trees that have been given to animation and the children frozen, and once more, in an untitled work from 1998–2000, the only animated feature of an image of boys seated in rows in a classroom is the shadow of a tree on the back wall. Claerbout, it could be said, locates movement at the heart of photography in an inverse symmetry to the notion that at the heart of cinema is stillness.23 Yet in Claerbout’s productions, movement is not in any simple sense an attribute of cinema (or video) that marks its diference from photography, nor is it the designation of an unfolding ilmic present in contrast to a photographic past. Rather, the animated form of the image is a barely discernable pulse of dynamic movement operating on a loop; repetitive, circular but without a clear sense of a beginning or end, this looped movement undercuts the temporal associations that have been attributed to photography and ilm. What Claerbout reinserts into the photographic image is a form of gesture, or in other words, the mode of appearing as such. In Agamben’s discussion of gesture, in the cinematic “Notes on Gesture,” and in the more literary discussion “Kommerell, or On Gesture,”24 the gestural

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act deies the binary of movement/stillness, and the discussion weaves between early cinema and photography. he former essay begins with identifying a new pathology in human movement, traced by Gilles de la Tourette through the imprint of a subject’s gait as a series of footprints on a roll of paper. Agamben inds a correspondence in the patterns that emerged with Muybridge’s photographic experiments of the walking, running, jumping subject. What crosses from one to the other (de la Tourette to Muybridge) is not the recording of movement in time and space, but “a generalized catastrophe of the sphere of gestures.”25 As the natural gestural language of communication is lost, the “more life becomes indecipherable”, and it is this loss that the cinema registers in its earliest form. Perhaps most signiicant in Agamben’s reading of this period in the late nineteenth century is the comment that follows this diagnosis: from this moment onwards, the bourgeoisie “which just a few decades earlier was still irmly in possession of its symbols, succumbs to interiority and gives itself up to psychology.”26 his turn inwards becomes manifest in a cinema of psychological drama, instrumental in producing a linear, narrative form predicated on an internally located subjectivity in need of deciphering. Gesture, as a mode of appearing to others, and its demise, is at the center of a redistribution of ethical relations in which the cinema is implicated. his in turn drives deinitions and uses of the cinema and photography as the arrest of time, movement and identity. Gesture as a potentiality enacted between people but without being a means to an end (of a story, a time, an outcome), appears as a type of experiment in re-making cinema in a number of Claerbout’s works.27 In Bordeaux Piece (2004) the use of repetition forces the principal act of gesture into the foreground over the duration of the piece (13 hours and 43 minutes). he story of Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mepris is chosen as a narrative to be re-versioned, although according to Claerbout, it could have been a diferent story (2007: 112). he ilm is reworked as a series of situations for which Claerbout wrote dialogue, and about which he has said that he ilmed it “so that it doesn’t really work.” he ilm sequence of about 10–12 minutes is shot 70 times, beginning at 5.30 a.m. and continuing to 10 p.m. and the loss of light. he same script is performed, the same dialogue spoke in the same locations, a production that plays out Agamben’s treatize on stoppage and repetition.28 What changes most signiicantly is irst of all the light, and second, the experience of the ilm as ilm. he production rolls on, repeats, replays, and as the light changes, the content of the dialogue becomes less signiicant, the outcomes of the actions

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unimportant. he production is an experiment of the emptying out of causal factors (means directed towards ends), and the appearance of gesture as such, or what Agamben also refers to as pure means. Human gesture is slowly, repetitively (through the deployment of stoppage and repetition), detached from its commodiied form (to serve narrative ends), and diverted towards a non-linear model of communication, dependent on a cyclical temporality located in the environment (the cycle of a day). his model of gesturality returns us then to models of temporality as they pertain to the image.

he instant and the continuum If the paradigm of Agambenian thought that encompasses the photographic and ilmic, and stasis and dynamis, is brought into correspondence through the articulation of humanity through gestural means, the inal maneouvre in this densely crowded scene is a re-conceptualization of time. We speak, in our disciplines, of ilm as time-based media, and we use both ilm and photography to record, to make a document of a particular time that we archive, canonize, re-play or conversely discard or neglect. he time of the image would seem to be an instant (the photograph), taken from a larger continuum (the ilm, or indeed the continuum of life). Yet if we regard the image as an indeterminate form between ilm and photography, as we ind in Claerbout’s productions, the categorical deinitions of the instant and the continuum do not coincide. his inal section turns to an early essay by Agamben published in 1978, “Time and History: a critique of the instant and the continuum,” where, I will argue, the key to this image paradigm is located. he essay opens with the statement that “[e]very conception of history is invariably accompanied by a certain experience of time, which is implicit in it, conditions it, and thereby has to be elucidated.”29 he implicit category of time, however, changes from culture to culture and indeed across time (historical periods), imagined and enacted in multiple ways. he stakes are high in any imagining of time: …every culture is irst and foremost a particular experience of time, and no new culture is possible without an alteration in this experience. he original task of a genuine revolution, therefore, is never merely to “change the world”, but also – and above all – to “change time.”30

he essay, in true Agambenian mode, presents something of a compendium of thought concerning time as it has been conceived of since Aristotle, and it is

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worth outlining the contours of his account to grasp the basis of his critique. It is from Greek culture, Agamben posits, that we inherit the notion of time as an ininite quantiiable continuum. According to Aristotle it is a “quantity of movement according to the before and the ater,”31 its ongoing condition assured by its division into discrete instants, which none the less are circular and cosmic, modelled on astronomy and the movement of celestial spheres. Within this, the instant provides something like a seam, a join that links the past and the future while the present (instant) remains elusively other; notably the past and the future are, within this system, more tangible than the ungraspable present-yetpassing instant. Within Greek thought, time appears to be experienced as something objective and determining of its own course, enveloping events inside of itself: time, like space, is what we exist within, and the movement is circular, a series of operations that follows astronomy in the repetition of orbits: from this model we inherit the notion of return as repetition. he Christian notion of time, according to this account, introduces us to the inverse. Time is linear and irreversible, with the birth of Christ marking a midway point between the fall from Eden and the future redemption of humanity. Signiicantly, it is under the auspices of Christian thought that time is detached from the rotational movement of the ancient world and re-located within the subject as an interior phenomenon. Saint Augustine’s Confessions, writes Agamben, is a prolonged anguished interrogation of the leeting nature of the present as an instant that “has no extent of duration,”32 a nulliied time. Christian time is overlaid with the same notion of the instant and the continuum but now the circle is ironed out as a straight line, conjoining with modern time, the time of industrialization, and a secularization of Christian time. Under modernity, dead time is extracted from experience, with manufacturing work enacting the linearity of both the production belt and clock time. he concept of modern time draws its developmental structure from the natural sciences, remaining linear as an account of progress as movement forward. But time here is not connected to experience; modern time is experience alienated. If these are both familiar and fallible models of temporality, an alternative and altogether more potent version of time is however to hand. “he elements for a diferent concept of time lie scattered among the folds and shadows of the Western cultural tradition,”33 Agamben writes, and it is from Gnosticism and third century Stoicism, the forgotten traditions that retain a complex notion of time, that he draws an account of an un-homogenous, incoherent time,

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modelled as a broken line. Within Stoic thought, the concept of a continuous time broken into discrete instants is unreal time, which can only condition experience as waiting and deferral. Time, for the Stoics, is neither objective nor removed from our control, but springing from the actions and decisions of the human subject. Its model is the kairos, the abrupt and sudden conjunction where decision grasps opportunity and “life is fulilled in the moment.”34 Kairos, the opportune moment in which something is driven through is also the Jetzt-Zeit, an indeterminate, qualitative “now-time,” distilling within itself diferent times. his critique of a western concept of time is notably dependent upon, or congruent with, Benjamin’s thesis on history, and the incomplete project of modernity as an unfolding catastrophe, radically in need of reconceptualizing time itself. Yet there is a further dimension to the argument that Agamben makes in this essay that refers us to the point as simultaneously a temporal and spatial form. hat is, the geometric point of perspective is aligned, in his thinking, with the instant. he point in geometry is also a metaphysical concept, the foundation of a Euclidean formulation where, in its fundamental formulation, space is lattened and expressed as a pair of points connected by a straight line. his mathematical foundation posits a linear model of thinking analogous to the instant, the point in time, about which he has this to say: [he point] is the opening through which the eternity of metaphysics insinuates itself into the human experience of time and irreparably splits it. Any attempt to conceive of time diferently must inevitably come into conlict with this concept, and a critique of the instant is the logical condition for a new experience of time.35

In other words, a Euclidean geometric formulation secured a spatialized time of the instant and the continuum, providing the model for a chronology dependent on the ininite procession of time along a straight path, with markers that identify any place along the line as points. For the Stoics, in contrast, dividing time into discrete instants is “unreal time,” productive of a “fundamental sickness” of waiting and deferral for time (as something objective) to arrive. his fundamental sickness is the primary mode through which the photograph is produced and apprehended, as the capture of the instant, a point in time that is sealed from points ater and before. Agamben binds this apprehension of time to a modernist sensibility with its associated corrosion of experience: “he experience of dead time abstracted from experience, which characterizes life in modern cities and factories”, he writes, “seems to give credence to the idea that

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the precise leeting instant is the only human time”.36 Within the same logic, ilm comes to stand for the continuum, the potentially ininite process of recording time as a set of instants running forward.37 In Louis Daguerre’s irst image of humanity, it is possible to identify a process in which time is not broken down into instants extracted from a continuum, but an alchemical transformation of light into an image composed of diferent times. In this sense, Boulevard du Temple is not so far from Claerbout’s animated images that use qualities of movement and stillness to signal diferent temporalities. In Daguerre’s image, contingency has let its trace in a literal sense, as the actions of people in stillness or movement on the Boulevard has rendered time as a qualitative rather than quantitative phenomenon. he revelation of the irst image then is not only that it is the irst photographic image of humanity, but that it is the revelation of time reconceptualized as kairological. As Agamben reminds us, the Greek concept of time was twofold, chronos and kairos, the former referring to the sequential concept of events following events, while kairos provides for an indeterminate time, taking advantage of contingent, opportune circumstance. It may be itting then that chronos has become the dominant term for thinking of time and the technologies through which we model and experience it, and that kairos has disappeared into the folds and shadows of a diferent tradition, only to emerge leetingly in image forms. he photograph as “opportunity”, as colloquial usage has it, reverses and returns here as the model of a revolutionary potential, the grasping of what is to hand, “the moment of rupture and opening of temporality” and also “power at precisely the moment that the experience of time restlessly observes the edge over which it leans.”38 he kairological refers us not only to the image, but to its legibility, which has an equally contingent appeal as the site of an historical understanding (history as experience here rather than chronology). he contingency of the appearance of time as the animated form in images is “the movement at their interior,” legible only at a particular moment.39 he notion of legibility, deployed by Benjamin, works against the traditional context-based understanding of the singular image, made sense of through supplementary information (what is outside of the frame in terms of spatial and temporal referents). In Benjamin’s reading, legibility is founded rather in a moment of connection across time, a singular instance where meaning is revealed: “For the historical index of the images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility only at a particular time.”40 Not all images are readable at all times, but are documents within which an encrypted dynamis is released in

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its correspondence with other images and events in the indeterminate relations of diachrony and synchrony. Benjamin calls this moment an awakening, and Agamben re-purposes the phrase to use it for the entry of humanity into history.41 he demand for us to look, to not forget, to remember, is “the moment of gestural demand that gives [the photograph] a political destiny”.42 he notion of a language or communication that we have not yet learnt how to read or hear, is how we may think of ilmic and photographic images today. Fixated on their stillness or movement, we are not open to the possibilities of their transmissions except perhaps through their re-workings in various places, the installation being one. Claerbout’s single channel works prise open the various times dormant within an image through the release of its animated and gestural potential. In a sense, Claerbout’s productions may be viewed as a taking back of the photograph for everyday use, removing it from the realms of consecrated History, and thoroughly profaning it in his exercise of free use. If commodiication has separated goods from their context in a sacramental act, profanation is the political act of returning a thing to the everyday, and to the realm of play over economy. We could extend this application and say that Claerbout’s practice profanes the idea of the (ilm or photographic) image as a time removed and commodiied, for what he reveals is the multiplicity of times and their broken correspondences within the frame. His works direct us beyond this frame to other images, towards unmade ilms that none the less press in on the present, and virtual ilms to come. Profanation proliferates questions but ofers no answers: what is outside the classroom window? What is it that this child is turning towards in the playground? And what has happened between this scene and the next of a ilm made and remade over and over? On the Boulevard du Temple, a man is having his shoes shined. he sot rub and scuf of the brush as it passes over the surface of the leather, the posture of the man crouched over his work who may be engrossed or bored by this act of labor, whose labor has not yet been spoken of at all, all of this belongs to another image, a ilm to come.

Notes 1 Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993 [1978]), 3. Agamben uses the problematic term “man to refer to all human subjects” throughout but I will abide by his usage here.

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2 Agamben’s thesis is not that man is inside language and animals exterior, but, as he writes in another text, “Animals do not enter language, they are already inside it. Man, instead, by having an infancy, by preceding speech, splits this single language and, in order to speak, has to constitute himself as the subject of language—he has to say I”, in “Infancy and History: an essay on the destruction of experience”, in Infancy and History, 52. 3 See “Infancy and History: an essay on the destruction of experience”, in Infancy and History, 59–60. 4 he relationship between language and images is not, of course, one of countertension in Agamben’s work. His approach is aligned with Benjamin’s who describes the dialectic at a standstill, ending “Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language.” Walter Benjamin he Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland, Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge and London, MA: Harvard University Press 1999 [1982]), 462. 5 Debord died November 30, 1994. 6 his text, “Diference and Repetition: on Guy Debord’s Films”, is the translation of a lecture by Giorgio Agamben, delivered on the occasion of the “Sixth International Video Week” at the Centre Saint-Gervais in Geneva in November 1995, reproduced in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. homas McDonough (Cambridge and London, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 314. For further commentary from Agamben on Debord, see “Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle”, in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti, Casare Casarino, (Mineapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press), 73–89. 7 Agamben, “Diference and Repetition”, 313. 8 Agamben, “Diference and Repetition”, 314. 9 “Judgment Day”, in Profanations, trans. Jef Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007) 23–8. 10 Agamben’s iguring of disciplines echoes the relation of the said to the unsaid in that each discipline would appear to be predicated on that which cannot be articulated as much as that which is named. Take for example his essay on Aby Warburg and the “science of culture”, which opens thus: “his essay seeks to situate a discipline that, in contrast to many others, exists but has no name.” Giorgio Agamben, “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science” [1975] in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Werner Hamacher, David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 89–103. 11 Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, Karen Beckman, Jean Ma (eds) (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008). 12 Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jef Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2005 [2007]), 57.

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13 Agamben provides a summative list of six points deining the paradigm including its analogical procedure, its neutralization of the dichotomy of the general and particular, immanence and the refusal of origins (ἀρχή) on page 31. 14 Kracauer’s essay “Photography” (1927) stands out as one of the irst discursive texts on the medium in Europe (Kracauer, “Photography”, he Mass Ornament: Weimer Essays, trans. homas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)). 15 Bellour, Raymond, “How to See?”, David Claerbout and the Shape of Time, ed. Christine Van Assche (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2008), 36. 16 Ibid., 36. 17 Agamben, Profanations, 23. 18 Ibid., 24. 19 his was a private letter from Morse to the editor of the New York Observer, 9 March 1839, published 20 April. he day ater Morse visited the studio, Daguerre in turn paid a visit to Morse to view the telegraphic system. During the period of the visit however, Morse recounts the melancholic event simultaneously occurring in Daguerre’s studio: a ire took place destroying “his valuable notes and papers, the labour of years of experiment”. he plate of the Boulevard, presumably was amongst the salvaged items of the ire. he Daguerreian Society website: http:// www.daguerre.org/resource/texts/04–20–1839_morse.html 20 Cited in Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 44. 21 Single channel video works are screened as a single image, usually displayed on a loop providing continuous duration of a repeated text. 22 Benjamin’s terms for the way in which material forms ofer themselves to his project, or “come into their own.” he Arcades Project, 460. 23 Laura Mulvey, Death 24 x a second: stillness and the moving image (London: Reaktion, 2006). 24 he former is published in Means without end, and the latter in Potentialities. 25 Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”, in Means Without End, 51. 26 Ibid., 53. 27 Another example is the ilm White House (2006). 28 For an account of stoppage and repetition in relation to new media and artworks, see Carolyn Guertin, Digital Prohibition: Piracy and Authorship in New Media Art (New York and London: Continuum, 2012). 29 Agamben, “Time and History: a critique of the instant and the continuum”, in Infancy and History: the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London Verso: and New York, 1978/1993), p. 11. Agamben returns to the concept of messianic time as ho nyn kairos (the time of the now) in the Letters of Paul the

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31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41

42

Cinema and Agamben apostle, he Time hat Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford University, Stanford Press: California, 2000/2005). Agamben, Giorgio “Time and History: Critique of the Instant and the Continuum”, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron, (London: Verso, 1978/1993), 91. Aristotle cited by Agamben in “Time and History”, op. cit., 93. Augustine cited by Agamben in ‘Time and History”, op. cit., 95. Agamben in “Time and History”, op. cit., 100. Agamben in “Time and History”, op. cit., 101. Ibid., 100. Ibid., 96. here is also the implication in this argument that the basis of the one-point perspective characterizing western image forms as emanating from the center of the image and moving out as a triangle, is complicit with a linear model of temporality. Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (New York and London: Continuum, 2003 [1997]), 152–3. his citation is from he Arcades Project rather than the essay on photography. he Arcades Project, 462. Ibid. he concept of awakening and the kairological are brought together in another essay from Infancy and History, “Fable and History.” Here Agamben writes of the miniature scene of the nativity crib that a “cairological event” is taking place, “what it shows us is the world of the fable precisely at the moment when it wakes up from enchantment to enter history.” 127. Benjamin Noys, “Separation and Reversibility: Agamben on the Image”, Filozofski Vestnik, 30:1 (2009), pp. 143–59.

4

Film-of-Life: Agamben’s Profanation of the Image Benjamin Noys

From Plato’s anxieties concerning the simulacra’s disruption of the distinction between original and copy, to Lacan’s implicit critique of the imaginary as the site of doubling and deadly violence, Western metaphysics attests to the irreducible and ambiguous potency of the image.1 he seductive force of the image is at once an eternal temptation to philosophy as material for illustration and the incarnation of presence, and the perpetual threat of corruption in the descent into “mere” images and deathly distanciation. he image is a true pharmakon— mimicking the instability of the pharmakon, which refers to something that is both remedy and poison.2 With the technological proliferation and ubiquity of the image, through photography, cinema, and digital media, we are all, or at least those of us who live in Europe, the United States, and similar states, living the crisis of the metaphysics of presence as the crisis of the metaphysics of the image. Giorgio Agamben’s thought is oriented to grasping this crisis as the realization of the metaphysics of presence as the saturation of life by the image. At this point metaphysics passes over into politics, and politics into metaphysics, as the image puts at stake our existence as a living being.3 Although the image is nowhere a sustained point of reference for Agamben’s work, his momentary relections and fragmentary comments on the image attests to the necessity continually to displace its centrality. It is this displacement that I will consider. Agamben’s relections on the image are “minor,” precisely in the sense given to this word by Deleuze and Guattari,4 as they operate a continual line of light to release the image from its function as a site of classiication and capture—from the passport photograph to CCTV footage. Agamben is trying to break the deadly fusion between Debord’s analysis of “the society of the spectacle” and Foucault’s counter-proposal of “the society of surveillance,”5 in which capitalism becomes an immense machine for the capture of life by images and the reduction of life to

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images. he original sin of capitalism is our separation from life, and this takes place through the image; we are at once subject to the image, to being reproduced as an image, and subjects of the image, which reigns over and dominates us. he absoluteness of this process means that we cannot simply igure life as the protean and evasive moment of resistance, opposed to, and occluded by, the image. here is no “original life” to be opposed to its fallen copy; as Agamben noted in Homo Sacer (1995) it is the “simple” form of “bare life” [la vita nuda, Gk.ζωή: zoê] which is the product of sovereign power and its site of intervention.6 Contrary to the various contemporary political vitalisms (Deleuze, Negri, and, in a qualiied fashion, Foucault), for Agamben “life” is a negative limit, rather than a positive value. Life is saturated and subsumed by power. For this reason we cannot pass through the image to life, but rather we have to perform an ambiguous un-working on the image, an act of profanation, to free from the image the dynamis that exceeds and refuses the deployment of the image within the smooth space of the capitalist sensorium.7 If we are creatures of the image then it is only in the traversal of the image that we can release the leeting potential of resistance. his potential of resistance is encrypted in the possibility of gesture which the image both contains and reveals.

“Images are beautiful” Film is the prototype for all future capturing of the singular gestures of human beings; it is an immense archive which records millions of such gestures that are presented to us in a mode that at once makes visible and occludes the element of gesture itself.8 To borrow Heidegger’s terminology, which is obviously an implicit reference for Agamben, cinema is the apparatus of the Ge-Stell (“En-framing”) of the gesture.9 But also, as with Heidegger, the dominance of the Ge-Stell is the sign of both danger and of saving—in Hölderlin’s words, quoted by Heidegger, “But where danger is, grows / he saving power also” (“Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch”).10 In the style of Walter Benjamin, the other crucial reference for Agamben, within all the hours of ilm recorded every second of this time forms the strait gate through which the messiah could enter.11 Film is the equivocal and reversible site of redemption. Franz Kaka, relecting at the birth of the age of cinema, gave this problem its exemplary form. A keen cinema-goer, he regarded it as a space of “boundless

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entertainment,” but the German word “maßlos” suggests something exorbitant or excessive (perhaps even something like Lacanian jouissance).12 he diiculty for Kaka was that cinema was too enjoyable, in the sense that it subjects us to fascination, absorption, and capture, by the image. he result is, not untypically for Kaka, an acute paradox: “images are beautiful, we cannot do without images, but they are also a source of much anguish.”13 Kaka draws out this point in a comment made ater he visited the Imperial Panorama (Kaiserpanorama) in the industrial town of Friedland in 1911. he Panorama ofered a three-dimensional viewing experience through the use of stereoscopic pictures and special lenses, and was a highly popular nineteenth-century entertainment. Kaka inds the images of the panorama more lifelike than those of cinema because they retain the stillness of reality, whereas “cinema lends the restlessness of its own movement to what is seen, the calm gaze seems to be more important.”14 he anxiety here seems to fall on the frantic consistency of cinema, on the very smooth space of its “boundless enjoyment,” on the uninterrupted low of images without cessation. In contrast, the panorama captures the stillness of reality itself, another mode of contemplation that is less frantic and less immersive than cinema. In a sense, Kaka’s own ictions become a form of counter-cinema, answering this demand for the “calm gaze” by stilling the restlessness of cinema to reveal and isolate the gesture that is gathered and lost within the ilmic space. Drawing on the argument of Walter Benjamin, who states that “Kaka’s entire work constitutes a code of gestures,”15 we can suggest that against the cinematic bewitchment of the image Kaka breaks the spell by placing us before the generic human gesture as such. In doing so Kaka leaves behind the speciic and speciied gesture of a particular individual to ind the moment of the singular gesture that we all share in common. In such a way the gesture is returned, as Benjamin noted, to the status of an event.16 he repetitious movements of Kaka’s iction, which presage Beckett’s anatomy of generic human motion, present us with the gesture itself. Such a recovery, however, only becomes possible because of the absolute alienation cinema inlicts on every gesture: cinema captures all gestures, even those most intimate (here we can think of the co-extensiveness of cinema with pornography), but in doing so releases the ininite potential of all gestures.17 One of the ironic efects of Kaka’s anti-cinematic re-working of the image is the tendency to mediocrity of cinematic adaptations of his writing, with few, and not unproblematic, exceptions, such as Orson Welles’s he Trial (1962). hese adaptations struggle to grasp the gestural function that Kaka’s

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iction releases, and which makes of his writing a strange non-cinematic form of ilm which functions, to again refer to Benjamin, “in terms of cosmic epochs.”18 If Kaka belongs to the moment of the opening of the age of cinema, then Deleuze belongs to its moment of closure. He is, we could say, the last philosopher of cinema. For Deleuze certain ilms ofered the crystalline “time-image,” time in its pure state, released from its subordination to movement, in fact released from the gestural (which is conined by Deleuze to the earlier cinematic “movement-image.”)19 Here the image ofers itself to philosophy as its relection and realization, cinema “thinks” the purity of time. And yet Deleuze writes on the cusp of the dissolution of cinema into a so-called “audio-visual culture”: “boundless entertainment” is everywhere, as ilms are viewed in the home, on the laptop, or on tablets and smartphones.20 Cinema has dissolved into ilm, and ilm into a digital accessibility. Deleuze claims that this does not mean the end of cinema, but the necessity to return to it as a beginning. Agamben returns to cinema ater this closure, not to cinema to be thought as a new beginning, but to the beginning of cinema. Under the condition of a realized postmodernity he courts a deliberate archaism and a studied nostalgia by arguing, contra Deleuze, that the essence of cinema is the “movement-image” of early cinema and silent ilm.21

Redeeming the image Film, for Agamben, recapitulates the general antinomy of the image. Every image is a force ield structured by a polarity between the deadly reiication and obliteration of gesture (imago as death mask or symbol), and as the preservation of dynamis intact (for example, Muybridge’s images, especially those of sporting activity).22 Film, in putting the body in motion, would appear to free us from the bewitching potency of the static image, to free the gestural. In fact, however, the gestural is recorded only to be subordinated again—subsumed within a lowing of images that leaves each gesture subject to identiication and delimitation. he gestural itself is obliterated and occluded, functioning as only the means to an end, whether entertainment or pedagogy. We might think here of the hypertrophy of gesture in contemporary cinema, no action star is without his, or more unusually her, display of balletic assurance and combat proiciency. It is the irony that the putting of images into motion simply results in a new

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meta-rigidity, a deadly conformity of gestures, which become both singular and interchangeable. To free ilm from this stabilization of gesture we must, according to Agamben, return ilm to the frozen moment of the image.23 Such a practice of breaking the low of images is rare, and Agamben turns not only to early cinema but also to the ilmmaking of Guy Debord as a crucial instance of “stoppage”: the delay, isolation, and disruption of the image low to permit the revelation and redemption of gesture. In Debord’s words, from the commentary of his 1978 ilm In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni [In Girum], the “frozen mirror” of the screen is rendered by the stasis of the image—such as in the images of the petitbourgeoisie from the beginning of that ilm.24 Here the clichés of advertising and fashion are made uncanny by holding a steady gaze on images of a smiling couple with two children playing in a “modernist” living room, or a fashionable mother’s smiling gaze at her child in a supermarket, to show that this “simulated rapture” dissimulates “looks of hatred,” to quote Debord’s commentary.25 his is not a stepping out from the image into “real life,” as Debord occasionally seemed to suppose, and which was treated in comic vein by Woody Allen’s he Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). Instead we turn within the image—here between simulated rapture and dissimulated hatred. he image cannot be escaped into an exteriority, the ontological primacy of life, because to bring life into presence is to turn it into another image, subject to capture and control. he regime of the image can be resisted by the potency of the image that does not attest to life as irreducible reserve, but rather to a potency that never appears as such, or only in the moment of a refusal to pass over into the image, held always “in” the image. At this moment rather than separating true original life from secondary false copy, given archetypal, although also paradoxical, formulation in Rousseau, we instead separate the image from itself, from the potency it carries within it unrealized, and which is neither true nor false. Agamben’s analysis of Debord is, again, indebted to Benjamin. In the conclusion of his essay on surrealism, Benjamin noted that a radical practice required that we discover political action in a “sphere reserved one hundred percent for images.”26 his is not a contemplative practice, but one where “an action puts forth its own image”.27 Agamben inds this practice in Debord, and responding to Debord’s claim that the power of capitalism is always one of separation, Agamben analysis implies that Debord’s ilm practice is a “separation of separation.” he irst separation is that imposed by power, which separates us from our own potential powers and casts them into the image. hen we must

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redouble this separation, by returning to the image to separate out those powers frozen there. he result is not a traversal beyond the image, but a de-creating of the image that releases it into a state of undecidability.28 In the case of Debord’s In Girum we can see how the “ixed” smile of the mother is given its truth by the concentrated scowl of her son as he stares at the products in the shopping trolley, and vice versa into an undecidable state. For Agamben this undecidability of the image is, of course, always in absolute proximity to the zone of sovereign power as the zone of indistinction, in which this indistinction forms the material for decision. he role of the “imagelessness of the image” in its undecidability is to suspend this suspension by power. To achieve this suspended potency requires the arrest of a particular image, at which point the image qua image stands forth and is exhibited as such. To reveal the image, to ind the gesture, requires the homeopathic addition of a little more separation, to allow the image to be seen rather than it disappearing into the order of the visible. In the case of the image of mother and son in the supermarket from In Girum, we ind the recovery of the malignancy of the image as we are forced to confront this scene of supposed “domestic bliss.” his image is “repeated” in a later image of a woman and child: the quasi-pornographic image of a young woman naked in her bath playing with a child, and observed by her male partner. What is, presumably, an image from advertising, now becomes enigmatic and disturbing in its suspension. he gestures of play, expropriated to commodify a particular form of bourgeois life, are re-expropriated by Debord to display and suspend the “frozen mirror” of the commodity. Debord, if we follow Agamben, could be regarded as the last ilmmaker who had faith in the redemptive power of cinema. Despite the well-known charge that his absolutization of the spectacle condemns him to a pre-Nietzschean Rousseauist vision of the ever-disappearing possibility of living a truly unmediated life,29 Debord saw ilm as something worth rescuing from the mendacity of what he regarded as the pseudo-radicalism of a Godard.30 To negate the existing form of capitalist images requires the practice of détournement— the re-use of existing images, which are negated by the ilmmaker’s critical practice.31 Debord’s cinema is, therefore, a relentless meditation on his own practice and that of the Situationists, continually probing the reversible state in which radicalism is recuperated and reborn elsewhere. And yet for all his radicalism, for all his modernity, Debord continued a strain of aristocratic haut-nostalgia for a lost bohemian Paris with all its sexual and alcoholic delights. Agamben inherits this tension, which has lost afective charge as this

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nostalgia itself becomes mediated in the age of real subsumption. We are no longer nostalgic for the “real” Paris, but nostalgic for Debord’s nostalgia. It is noteworthy that when Agamben relects on ilm he nearly always returns to the past, and oten the distant past, for any image of redemption. Cinema, it appears, only lickeringly exists in the moment of silent cinema, in which the gesture is let to itself, and in the closure of Debord’s cinema, itself oten silent, or relying on spoken commentary, to recover the vanishing possibility of the gesture.

he brazen image Can such nostalgia be anything other than a postmodern afectation? Certainly it would seem to leave us with little traction on the present, preferring to remain in the kind of grandiose and aristocratic pessimism that at times characterizes Debord’s Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988), in which the “integrated spectacle” extends its powers into the last vestiges of “life.”32 he nature of the contemporary image is a rare site of relection for Agamben, and when it does make leeting appearances it is usually in the form of pornography. Once again, pornography recapitulates the dynamic polarity of the image, but this time drawn out to its maximum point of tension. Whereas, for Heidegger, Hölderlin’s poetry forms the verso to the recto of the reign of the technological Ge-Stell, indicating the danger and the saving power, for Agamben it is pornography that performs the dual role for the contemporary society of the spectacle. On the one hand, pornography attests to the absolute capture of gestures as pure means, for the profane behaviors that characterize “life” as such. In a similar fashion to Debord, although Debord tended to select sotcore images, the female body, especially the prostituted and exposed sexual body, is problematically and stereotypically the bearer of the weight of the absolute alienation of the present. Pornography, for Agamben, creates a domain of the unprofanable that nulliies intimacy by putting everything on display brazenly, without reserve. While the original erotic photographers preserved a sense of casual intimacy or even surprise, such as in the work of Bruno Braquehais, today there is only full exposure.33 his is evident in the way in which porn stars, presumed to be female by Agamben, constantly look towards the camera in a gesture that is shameless. he gesture is occluded in a pure display, another “simulated rapture.”

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Although again seemingly marked by a nostalgia for a supposedly “better time,” Agamben also grants contemporary pornography a brief moment of redemptive power. he porn star, now former porn star, Chloë des Lysses ofers, according to Agamben, a gaze that is directed towards the spectator, but in a form that is fundamentally bored or indiferent, even in the most “brazen” of sexual activities.34 In this gaze, Agamben claims, we ind a possibility of profaning the unprofanable, a seeming deactivation of the image-regime of contemporary capitalism.35 his gesture of indiference refers to, and suspends, the conventional pornographic gesture of the smile, or lascivious look of engagement. In an undecidable moment the “afective labour” of pornography is held undecidably between rapture and boredom, inhabiting the absolute commodiication of the body as a site that can be returned to “pure means,” detached from the teleology of “simulated rapture” and compulsory orgasm.36 “Stoppage” intervenes in a gesture that wards-of immersion in the pornographic, which disrupts the unspoken “contract” that supports the “low” of sexualized enjoyment. And yet this is only a leeting and temporary moment, caught within what Agamben, perhaps symptomatically, regards as the essentially solitary (and hence implicitly masturbatory) consumption of pornography. Still, however, he argues that the very dominance of pornography as unprofanable attests to the efects of a profanatory intention.

“he saved night” Relecting on the question of animality and life Agamben invokes Benjamin’s enigmatic concept of “the saved night” [Die gerettete Nacht].37 his is a state of happiness that is igured as a state “between,” in which man and animal leave each other to their own enclosed space, a suspensive relation that releases a new possibility of fulilment. I would argue that this image of the “saved night” also igures the imagelessness of the image itself, as a blackness (and we could note Debord’s experiments with a black screen in Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952)) that it is itself an image of nothing, of privation, of enclosed potency that can be released or deployed to any end. his is a “pure” negativity that does not exist in its own “truth” but only equivocally between states, as the truth of a suspended potency that never reaches the point of stabilisation and decision. Of course this attests to the irreducible “motif ” of the messianic which threads itself through all Agamben’s relections. If we cannot save life in its

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pure detachment, then we can redeem life in its de-activation, and redeem the image in the profanation of its direction for use. Elusive and evocative, Agamben’s eschatological language seems to promise total redemption. It would belong to the heretical belief in ‘Apokatastasis’, irst proposed by Clement of Alexandria and Origen, that all souls would be saved, which Walter Benjamin refers to.38 Pierre Klossowski summarizes: “the Redemption of Christ includes all the created worlds, that of the spirits as well as that of men, and would also extend to the hell of Satan himself, who at the end of time would be the last one saved and redeemed in his turn.”39 his image of total redemption might seem little compensation for the devastation of the present, indicated in its most radically pessimistic form by Agamben’s own image of the future as one of the “neomort”—the body kept alive to be harvested for organs (and ilmed many years before, of course, in Michael Crichton’s Coma (1978)).40 his may also be the reason why zombie cinema is evocative, as the contemporary genre. Born in George Romero’s Living Dead trilogy the recent “zombie revival,” spanning the video game, ilm, and comics, ofers an all-too Agambenian image of life as “death in motion,” shorn even of the horror that remained in Romero’s trilogy, and now igured in terms of quasi-comic amusement. But Agamben refuses this totalizing pessimism, suggesting there is always the possibility of the re-activation and re-animation of life through the image. While his apocalyptic language promises the grandeur of such a reversal, his comments on the image suggest a more “local” practice of profanation as de-activation. In resisting the unfolding of our lives in images by the arrest of certain moments and certain gestures, the treatment of the “ilm-of-life” as a series of stills permits the virtual composition of another ilm that has never been seen before (and perhaps never will or can be seen). Of course the unkind might well be reminded of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), the populist fable of the ethical smallbusinessman George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, posed against the alienations of capitalist big business. In this ilm, reduced to banality oten by familiarity, we have the construction of another “ilm-of-life,” which renders the judgment of God by revealing how the absence of Stewart would have led to the capitalist destruction of the small town of Bedford Falls, renamed “Pottertown” ater the local plutocrat. Stewart’s redemption, by his acceptance of his own life of sacriice, is igured as the redemption of the community, although wracked with the ambiguity that opposes a “good” non-speculative capitalism to a “bad” speculative capitalism. Certainly this is no suggestion that Agamben would endorse such a position, or even such a comparison. His relentlessly negative framing of the revelation of

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the potency of the image has little time for such populism, preferring the ascetic radicalism of Debord, or the Godard of Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998).41 he bathos of the possibility of the comparison does, however, indicate something of the potential collapse of the rareied discourse of Agamben. Its negativity, its lack of speciicity, is, of course, designed to incarnate a “force” or “sense” of escape or light that never realizes itself fully into an image than be subject to capture. his “withdrawal” of the image seems, however, to leave such an action conined to the realm of the avant-garde or the rarity of the aesthetic judgment that can render or detect the dynamis of a particular gesture encrypted within the most banal of images. While the endorsement of a cultural populism, all-too-ready to detect gestures of resistance in the most everyday acts of consumption and fandom, now appears as merely the herald of a generalized neo-liberal marketization of culture, Agamben’s residual elitism seems to lead the connection back to the gesture as gesture-in-common attenuated to the point of non-existence. his points, I think, to a key diiculty in Agamben’s attempt to politicize the image, or more precisely to ethicize it against the hollowing-out of the political. What is lacking is any substantial articulation of the practice of profanation as a common practice, except the gesture towards it as the inheritance of the next generation. he ability to “still” or “freeze” the image has, of course, become a banal possibility. he clarity of the digital image can still generate surprise when one returns to a ilm that one has “paused” to ind a particular composition has resulted. he sotware technology of the “screen grab” allows an experimental practice of the extraction of the gesture to any with access, returning it to common use (or relatively common, depending on access to the technology). And yet it is impossible to believe this banal possibility really speaks to what Agamben intends by the profanation of the image. It would be unwise to ofer some simplistic invocation of the power of mass political practice on the image, as happens at certain moments with the recourse to the “multitude” in Negrian thought, but the absence of speciication risks leaving redemption as merely compensatory fantasy. With the common lacking, Agamben is let in a position of having faith in a messianic reversibility lacking a real subject which is then strictly “magical.” When Max Brod asked Kaka if “there is hope outside this manifestation of the world that we know,” Kaka smiled and replied: “Oh, plenty of hope, an ininite amount of hope—but not for us.”42 Repeating this position Agamben casts of redemption into the time of “cosmic epochs”, in which redemption either lies in the past or in nostalgia for the past, as with silent ilm or Debord, or it remains in some absolute futurity, indexed to

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the arrival of the messiah. While Benjamin insisted the messiah could arrive at any moment, we can add that the messiah also could not arrive at any moment.

Acknowledgments his is a revised version of the essay that originally appeared in Italian: “Agamben: Filmare la vita, profane immagini” [Agamben: Filming Life, Profaning the Image] (trans. into Italian by Antonio Russo), Fata Morgana 13 “Potenza” issue (2011): 121–30. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the editor Alessandro Canadè and the journal Fata Morgana.

Notes 1 Plato, Sophist, trans. Nicholas P. White (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993); Jacques Lacan, “he Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”, Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2001), 1–8. 2 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983). 3 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 182. 4 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kaka: toward a minor literature [1975], trans. Dana Polan, foreword Réda Bensmaïa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 5 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 217. 6 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 6. 7 Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”, [1992] Means without End, trans. Vincenzo Binetti, Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 49–60. 8 Ibid., 54. 9 Martin Heidegger, “he Question Concerning Technology”, he Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. and intro. William Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977), 3–35. 10 Ibid., 28.

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11 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” [1940], Selected Writings, vol. 4 1938–1940, H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings (eds) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 397. 12 Martin Brady and Helen Hughes, “Kaka adapted to ilm”, in he Cambridge Companion to Kaka, ed. Julian Preece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 227. 13 Ibid., 227. 14 Ibid., 227–8. 15 Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kaka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death”, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2 1931–1934, Michael W. Jennings et al. (eds) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 801. 16 Ibid., 802. 17 Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”, 60. 18 Benjamin, “Kaka”, 795. 19 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: he Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: he Athlone Press, 1989). 20 David N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time-Machine (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 194–210. 21 Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”, 54–5. 22 Ibid., 54. 23 Agamben, Giorgio. “Diference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films” [1995], Guy Debord and he Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2002), 313–19. 24 Guy Debord, Complete Cinematic Works, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Oakland: AK Press, 2003), 133. 25 Ibid., 137. 26 Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism, Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia”, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: New Let Books, 1979), 238. 27 Ibid., 239. 28 Agamben, “Diference”, 318–19. 29 Vincent Kaufmann, Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 222. For a more philosophically sophisticated version of this charge, see Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural [1996], trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O”Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 52. 30 Debord, Cinematic Works, 220. 31 Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, “A User’s Guide to Détournement (excerpts)”, in Guy Debord, Complete Cinematic Works, 207–10.

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32 Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (London and New York: Verso, 1990). 33 Giorgio Agamben, Profanations [2005], trans. Jef Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 89. 34 Ibid., 91. 35 Agamben, ‘Diference and Repetition’, pp. 318–19. 36 Ibid., 91. 37 Giorgio Agamben, he Open, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 83. 38 Benjamin, “he Storyteller”, in Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken, 1969), 103. 39 Pierre Klossowski, Sade My Neighbour, trans. and intro. Alphonso Lingis (London: Quartet Books, 1992), 102. 40 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 186–7. 41 Agamben, “Diference”, 317. 42 Benjamin, “Kaka”, 798.

5

Biopolitics of Gesture: Cinema and the Neurological Body Pasi Väliaho

he genealogy that Giorgio Agamben provides for cinema in his short but powerful text “Notes on Gesture” strikes in its singularity. Rather than thinking of cinema as an art of optical spectacles, he approaches the medium in terms of the gesture. “he element of cinema is gesture and not image”, one of the theses of the essay goes.1 his may sound counter-intuitive, but Agamben’s argument underscores the nature of cinema as experience rather than technology. For the philosopher, the gesture is not a means of communication (as we most oten consider it) but something more fundamental that, in his words, “allows the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings”.2 he gesture demarcates a sphere where we confront ourselves as drawn between reality and freedom, fact and right, actuality and potentiality. Situated between doing and showing, acting and thinking, it circumscribes a boundary between facticity and spontaneity. he gesture, then, is in the inal analysis a political concept, and Agamben’s is in many ways an attempt to regard cinema as coinciding with and crystallizing a culmination point in the constitution of political subjectivity within modernity. If cinema is the labor of gestures—from the nervous and deceitful ones of George Méliès’ ilms to the gestural pathos of David Wark Griith’s melodramas, for instance—it is simultaneously what one might call an anthropotechnique that (re)negotiates the conditions and possibilities of experience and individuation. Departing from this observation, the following is an attempt to approach cinema’s politics from one speciic and quite narrow perspective: the genealogy of cinema within physiological and psychiatric scientiic practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is in this context that cinema acquired a particular epistemic function in deining and (re)producing our gestural being at the leeting limit between the normal and the pathological as well as the animal

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and the human. And it is in this context that cinema came to exhibit its political vocation, according to which the uncertain conceptual contours of the human being have become drawn and redrawn in the age of political techniques that focus on extracting and administering the capacities of the living.

Neurological gaze Many of us have come across André Brouillet’s group portrait A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière (1887), or a detail of it (igure 5.1). he painting depicts one of the famous “Tuesday lessons” that the then world-renowned neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot would deliver to both professional and lay audiences in the famous hospital in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. A woman named “Blanche” (Marie) Wittman seems to have passed out in an attack of hysteria and is supported by Charcot’s student, Joseph Babinski. Charcot keeps delivering his lecture while the exclusively male audience witnesses the “spectacle of pain” (as Georges Didi-Huberman describes it)3, studying intensely one of Charcot’s most famous patients who is unconscious and whose chest has been all but uncovered. heir faces give out, one can assume, a hint of sexual attraction disguised under the disinterestedness of the scientiic gaze.

Figure 5.1 André Brouillet, A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière (Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière), 1887. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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Certainly, there is certain calmness to Blanche Wittman’s portrayal as she rests on Babinski’s arms. But before her passing out, there must have been some intense, frantic gesturing. Hysterics were known for, and mainly studied in terms of, their irrationally uncontrollable bodies the performances of which ranged from abrupt and rapid movements to almost absolute stillness: spasms, tremors, convulsions, tics, contortions, catalepsies, lethargies, and so forth. Indeed the acts of this unruly body must have been as attractive a spectacle to these men as the exposed chest. At the very least, the gaze that Charcot cultivated and trained in his clinic was inluential in establishing modernity’s epistemological practice: obsessed with the moving, doing, breathing, sensuous individual in terms of complex dynamics of mental and physiological forces meticulously scrutinized in the body’s outward appearance. he exchanges of looks that we see captured on the canvas are, in this respect, not only voyeuristic, but also biopolitical if by “biopolitics” we refer, following Michel Foucault, to political and social practices emerging during the nineteenth century that could be partly summarized as being focused on disciplining the living being, on optimizing its capabilities and extorting its forces so as to integrate corporeal life into systems of eicient and economic controls.4 In Brouillet’s painting, we see the female body—as something living, breathing, collapsing, erotic—exposed to and machinated by the apparatus of knowledge (and desire). New to Charcot’s approach was indeed how he tried to make sense of these manifestations of life, nervous or otherwise. Instead of simply considering neurotic and hysterical patients as outright mad and burying them in the dark cells of the asylum, the scientist’s aim was to establish a statistically regular symptomatology of neuroses and thus to elevate them to the status of a genuine and serious illness. For Charcot, hysterical symptoms could eventually be located in organic or “dynamic” lesions, and as such considered proper objects of scientiic scrutiny. It is precisely in this sense that Charcot’s gaze was biopolitical: instead of simply approaching his subjects from the binary of reason and madness, so-called hysterics (alongside paralyzed patients, and much more) were regarded as a worthy epistemological object for clinical neurology that was to bring life into the ield of diagnosis and treatment and, in the inal analysis, regulation and control. he kind of gaze that Brouillet’s painting portrays, we should note, was a highly inluential one when it comes to modernity’s self-understanding. We can perceive this if we take a look at the audience members many of whom are still remembered today, mostly within the history of neurological and psychological

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sciences: Georges Gilles de la Tourette, Paul Richer, and héodule Ribot, among others. heir arrangement within one frame combines in its composition the kind of knowledge that was to shape what we today understand in terms of the neurosciences, on the one hand, and in terms of dynamic psychology, on the other hand. On one side, there is the mode of knowledge and perception that approaches the individual through its biological materiality: mental life, including its pathologies, cannot be studied without reference to the nervous system and the brain that function as its material support. On the other side, exempliied by héodule Ribot in particular, there is the emerging science of the soul that started to inscribe the individual and its complexities within the textures of memory and, fundamentally, sexuality. But in Charcot’s eyes, these two, the neurological and the psychological, were not yet separated. he gaze that the scientist cast on half-naked females saw the body as a site of mystery where life’s myriad aberrations became visible and knowable on the corporeal surface and in the body’s movements. In this respect, Charcot’s gaze circumscribed a novel kind of object of study, which, following Foucault, who developed the concept in his 1973–4 lectures at the Collège de France, can be called the neurological body.5 Emerging as a new kind of epistemic object in the late nineteenth century (roughly, 1850–1870), this was not just a body composed of organs and tissues but one distinguished as having functions, performances and behavior.6 he neurological body is one that reacts and responds, voluntarily or not. What is crucial is that its aberrations need to be diagnosed in visible surface efects, in movements that it produces or, alternatively, is incapable of making. Foucault quotes a description written by a student of Charcot’s to illustrate the kind of gaze that tracks the body’s surface rather than seeking to penetrate into its interior. he symptom at issue is the drooping of the let eyelid: If we tell him to open his eyelids, he raises the right one normally, the let one however, does not noticeably move, no more than the eye brow, so that the superciliary asymmetry becomes more marked. In this movement […] the skin of the forehead wrinkles transversally on the right side, while it remains almost smooth on the let. At rest, the skin of the forehead is wrinkled neither on the right nor the let […].7

For Foucault, this short observation exempliies a novel type of deployment of visibility within which it is the body’s surface “that must be covered in all its hollows and bumps, and practically by looking only, by looking only that far”.8

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he neurological body is captured and constituted by a gaze that is “almost impressionistic” in the way it substitutes the forces and dynamics of muscles and nerves for the substance and density of lesh. Concurrently, the student’s notes come up as an example of a gaze that is inherently “ilmic”. Taking the liberty to make a somewhat stretched metaphoric leap, one can imagine how it resembles the cinematic close-up, which Béla Bálazs compared to a magnifying-glass that isolates fragments of bodies and micro-movements.9 he close-up, Bálazs mused, “reveals the most hidden parts in our polyphonous life, and teaches us to see intricate visual details of life as one reads an orchestral score”.10 Metaphorically or not, it is precisely in relation to the emergence of the neurological body that the topic of this essay, cinema, steps in. Charcot, as known, was obsessed with the visual categorization of hysterical “signs”, and what he sought to produce was a kind of pictorial typography of nervous pathology.11 But critical to the neurological body is that it moves, and most oten it moves— contorts, trembles, gesticulates—too rapidly for the human eye to be able to track down its behavior in accurate enough detail. Even if (or precisely because) rendered as a mere surface, it evades the eye. his is why the scientist’s gaze needed to be supplemented with technological aids that isolated and recorded the hysteric’s anomalous performances. he man sitting at the forefront and extreme let in Brouillet’s painting, wearing a black hat, is Albert Londe, professional photographer who was hired to work at Charcot’s clinic in 1878. A friend of Etienne-Jules Marey’s, Londe brought in new chronophotographic—and later cinematic—methods for the reproduction of movement to bear on the scientiic scrutiny of the various aberrations that disclosed the norm in a negative image: cameras with nine to twelve lenses arranged linearly or in a circular form. he subject appearing in a chronophotographic recording by Londe is again no-one else but Blanche Wittman (igure 5.2). his time her blouse is buttoned to the neck. he doctors are performing experiments on her, their aim being to decipher how one can transfer the patient’s characteristic postures (attitudes) from one part of the body to another by using magnets. Here, we see a glimpse of the process, an unyielding record of the transfer, which in a sense remains a mystery, as its visibility hinges more on the intervals that separate the small circular photograms from one another than their explicit contents. What this composite image requires is a mode of vision that scans sequentially, in a jerky and even automatic fashion, successive photograms and diferentially imagines the invisible curve of motion that connects a gesture frozen on the celluloid with the preceding and following ones.

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Figure 5.2 Albert Londe, “Mlle Wittman, transfert d’une attitude au moyen de l’aimant”. Chronophotographic sequence, around 1883, collection Texbraun.

Alternatively, a cinematic projector that makes images move in front of our eyes could take up the work of this gaze—the imagination’s duty taken over by the machine, which reanimates the action of muscles and nerves.12 Blanche Wittman could in this regard be considered one of the irst ilm stars, anticipating the likes of Lilian Gish or Marilyn Monroe who were able to adjust eroticism with repetitive gestural mannerisms demanded by the machine. here is indeed another kind of transfer at play in this chronophotographic sequence, one between the body acting out of conscious control and the automatism of what was to become the cinematographic camera and its mechanic eye. Perhaps the two, the neurological body and the cinematic apparatus, were mutually constitutive.

Footprints When writing about gesture and cinema, Agamben conceptualizes the kind of transfer outlined above, indeed, a “double act” in which one actor supports

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the other—the comedy, if you will, deriving from the awkwardness of this connection, quite like in the illustrations by J. J. Grandville in Les petites misères de la vie humaine (1843) which, as Agamben notes, present the loss of a harmonious relationship with the things that surround us when the latter are turned into meaningless but fetishistic mass produced objects of industrial and consumer capitalism.13 In Grandville’s pictures, boots are as impossible to take of as to put on, umbrellas turn inside out—objects generally speaking seem to have a malicious will of their own. Our irst experiences with moving images, Agamben suggests, were similarly deconstructive, resulting in the loss of meaningful gestures. he cinema came to undermine the assumption that gestures, as a certain Charles Hacks argued still in 1892, can be either voluntary or involuntary but fundamentally need to have the objective of signifying something.14 In cinema, the unity between gesture and intention was rather broken down. “[A]t some point”, Agamben writes, referring to the late nineteenth century, “everybody had lost control of their gestures and was walking and gesticulating frantically. his is the impression, at any rate, that one has when watching the ilms that Marey and Lumière began to shoot”.15 his loss of control over our bodies was not just a split between subject and object—us and things—but a split within the subject itself. In Agamben’s account, the genealogy of cinema extends, not to magic lantern shows or magic theaters, like we oten think of it, but to the emergence of a scientiic mode of perception and understanding of ourselves that sought to divorce bodily expressions from psychic or moral interiority, that is to say, the soul. It is the aberrant bodies of the likes of Blanche, and the neurological gaze that circumscribes them as such, that stand for the beginnings of the movies. he protagonist of Agamben’s narrative is not Charcot, however, but one of his students, Georges Gilles de la Tourette who in the 1880s, before famously relegating language to pure neurology, was studying the physiology of human gait. Agamben traces cinematography back to the footprint roll method that Gilles de la Tourette developed in this purpose and described in his thesis “Clinical and physiological studies of walking” from 1886. he idea was simple: rolls of white paper were nailed to the ground and then divided length-wise by a drawn line. Sesquioxide powder was used to smear the soles of subjects of experiments with red rust color. he individual would then be asked to walk and the tracings their feet let on the roll of paper along the dividing line allowed the scientist to measure the gait according to various parameters, including the length of the step, lateral swerve, and the angle of inclination.

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he ambition of Gilles de la Tourette’s studies was to diferentiate the physiology of so-called normal human gait from its pathological variations. It took part of its inspiration from the anatomo-physiological study of walking conducted by Wilhelm and Eduard Weber in the early nineteenth century (whose work Friedrich Kittler sees anticipating the cinematic medium in its epistemological underpinnings aimed toward the decomposition and recomposition of movement in the scientist’s imagination).16 Webers’ was one of the irst attempts to scientiically visualize human gait, its goal being to provide a mathematical theory of walking and running. he guiding idea here was the “automaticity” of gait, which postulated the possibility of conceptualizing the mechanics of walking as it happens beyond the command of consciousness and will. he brothers wrote: “Man binds his movements to certain rules even if he cannot express these rules in words. hese rules are based totally on the structure of his body and on the given external conditions. hey thus can be deduced from both structure and external conditions.”17 his notion of automaticity, or at least of being driven by rules and forces that one is not in command of, that no “soul” is able to administer, links directly with the logic of visualization behind Gilles de la Tourette’s footprint method. First scrutinizing what so-called normal human walk looked like on his rolls of paper and its statistical variations, the scientist meticulously examined the marks let by patients sufering from various types of movement disorders, ranging from the nonfunctional limbs of partial paralyzes to the jerky and non-luid movements of locomotor ataxia. By means of this visual analysis and diferentiation of the traces of the diseased body, Gilles de la Tourette came up with a comparative table that allowed the classiication of the disorders. he conclusion that he drew of his studies deserves our attention. On the very last page of his dissertation the neurologist noted: he pathological “step”, not to mention “walk”, is always more regular than the normal step or walk in terms of the length of the step, lateral swerve and the angle of inclination. his is easy to understand, because in the normal case it is the individual who walks and can modify and vary his gait, whereas in the second case it is the disease itself that walks. And if the individual in the second case has any power over the gait, he will use it to regularize the type of locomotion created by the disorder itself.18

Gilles de la Tourette’s conclusions bear two important points. First, the diseased individual has lost subjective interiority and intentionality. What demarcates

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between the normal and the pathological is that the former refers to “men” of action—individuals who can exercise their spontaneous will and are thus indeterminate in a way that escapes capture in statistical regularity. hey are free, to an extent at least. But the pathological body, on the other hand, seems to be completely possessed by the disorder. It is not the individual person that originates movement but the disease itself, which follows its laws and regularities, its automatism. here is no personality to the pathological body; it is like the Weber brothers’ system of knees, hips and heels that has gone astray. Secondly, in Gilles de la Tourette’s cinematic imagination, the pathological body cannot walk, properly speaking. So-called normal, healthy men of action can walk—that is to say, their gait has a style, which is expressive of personality and culture, of values, intentions and beliefs—whereas the diseased body merely produces “steps”. Deprived of style and rhythm, the diseased body is deprived of signiication and thus appears as excluded from the realms of history and politics. his is where the beginnings of a cinematic biopolitics of gesture can be located. In his reassessment of Foucault’s interpretation of the biopoliticsconcept, Agamben twists the original notion of a politics striving, alongside capitalist forces, towards both the optimization and the control of life (death being its limit) into a zone of indistinction between socially qualiied existence (bios) and “natural”, physiological being (zoe), or, right and fact.19 Biopolitics, for Agamben, is a politics that is situated on and constantly modulates and redraws the boundaries between the bare fact of living and social/psychic life, between animality and humanity. In modern democracies and totalitarian regimes alike, it is this type of zone of indistinction, or what Agamben calls “bare life”, that has become a particular driving force of politics, “both subject and object of the conlicts of the political order”.20 he neurological body, one could argue, epitomizes this bare life as an object of knowledge and desire that has been developed in modernity to negotiate the leeting limits between what is human and what is not, what falls within the realms of history and culture and what does not, what makes sense and what is senseless. If the “normal” gesture that can at least pretend meaningfulness and intention falls within the realm of bios, the hysterical gesture is situated at a threshold, at a “limen” (as experimental psychologists call the obscure line demarcating the conscious and the non-conscious), where diferentiations and conjunctions between politics and life itself become produced and reproduced. Half-naked chests, sesquioxide powder traces, chronophotographic

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recordings—the tracings of catastrophic bodies and gestures beyond conscious command and will essential to cinema’s genealogy—are all indices, or better, symptoms of this threshold that shapes the biopolitical subject.

Animals and machines he beginnings of movies coincide, as Agamben suggests, with a generalized redesign of political subjectivity in modernity. But what is it in the cinematic apparatus that (if Agamben is right) crystallizes this biopolitics of gesture? How does the cinema act as a key biopolitical dispositif that, quoting Agamben’s words, comes to “capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings”?21 Suice to have a look at the scientiic cinema context, and before that, at the modes of production of the neurological body. According to Foucault, the neurological gaze was built around a particular type of inquiry: [N]eurology is neither an examination in the sense of pathological-anatomy, nor questioning; it is a new apparatus which replaces questioning with injunctions, and which through these injunctions seeks to get responses, but responses which are not the subject’s verbal responses, as in questioning, but the responses of the subject’s body; responses which can be clinically deciphered at the level of the body and which one can consequently submit to a diferential examination without fear of being duped by the subject who responds.22

So Foucault outlined how the neurological episteme was based on the scientist “listening” to the body instead of the speaking individual, trying to visually decipher the mute language of the disorder by inducing the diseased body to produce responses. he neurologist commands: “Walk! Put out your leg! Hold out your hand! Speak! Read this sentence! Try to write this!” He holds a power over actions: “Obey my orders, keep quiet, and your body will respond.”23 his type of knowledge-production is evident in the recently discovered collection of scientiic ilms and other kinds of visualizations produced by the Italian neurologist Vincenzo Neri in the early twentieth century. Neri was a student of Babinski’s (who, as we have seen, got to hold Blanche in his arms as Charcot’s assistant) in Paris during 1906–10, and it was Babinski who helped Neri to get access to patients studied, scrutinized and experimented upon at the Bicêtre hospital—and ilm them. Later, Neri continued this practice

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in Bologna, Italy, where he kept accumulating his archive of recordings of movement disorders, convulsive gestures, automatic reactions, and so on for several decades. Of course, one should note that neurological ilms were made right as the ilm camera was invented—by Albert Londe at the Salpêtrière, by Georges Marinescu in Romania, as well as by Albert van Gehuchten in Belgium, for instance—but Neri’s collection is unique in the way it illustrates the various forms the neurological gaze could adopt. Like for Charcot, a major epistemological preoccupation for Neri was to come up with series of records of the diferent types of responses that various diseases generated, to create a systematic database, so to speak, by means of which one could decode the signs that the neurological body expressed in terms of its abnormalities. A range of techniques was used in this purpose: in addition to ilms he also used photographs as well as footprint tracings, following Gilles de la Tourette’s footsteps. An article of Neri’s that came out in the journal Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière in 1908, on “paradoxical characteristics of hysterical walking”, exempliies this.24 he piece was concerned with the ambiguous manner in which some hysterics walked; how their legs were curiously out-of-sync and how their walk was deprived of regular rhythm. he principal sources of knowledge about neurological semiology in this article were footprint tracings let on the rolls of paper by the body ordered to walk. However, Neri notes in passing that he would capture this aberrant walk with a ilm camera, too. he kind of perception of the individual deprived of volition, spontaneity and conscious control that animates the stains of sesquioxide powder is also tangible in traces of light describing the neurological body on celluloid. In Neri’s practice, cinema indeed developed into a major epistemic tool for tracing the mute language of pathological physiology. In his early ilms, the patients themselves are silent, they never open their mouths to utter a word, but it is the body that, when induced to perform actions such as walking more or less successfully, is meant to express its symptomatology in front of the camera’s eye. Strips of ilm surviving from the collection pay witness to the procedure: naked bodies exposed in front of a black canvas with a stark contrast between the pale skin and the dark background; bodies that to try to carry out the task they are told to do but relentlessly end up in a catastrophe (igures 5.3 and 5.4). Cinematic images become in this context imprints of pathological “responses” that the neurologist induces when ordering the patient to perform an action. Cinema indeed appears as an ideal technology for capturing the signs of a disorder. Tracking down and reproducing movement and performance, the

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moving image seems like a persistent, disinterested record of the supposedly senseless language that the body speaks through its automatisms. he cinematographic image attaches to movements that happen outside volition—it is of actions performed, not by the psychological individual, but by the impersonal disease—embodying a mechanical vision that does not let itself to be “duped by the subject who responds”, to use Foucault’s words. he regular and automatic movement of the celluloid ilm in the cinematographic camera/projector appears as homologous with the regular and automatic, but simultaneously catastrophic, gestures of the neurological body. It testiies to a fundamental loss of volition. A short ilm on Huntington’s disease, also called Huntington’s chorea (from the Greek, choreia, meaning dance), which is a hereditary disease that afects the brain and leads to the loss of control over the body’s muscle movements, presents the body spontaneously performing brief movements that low from one muscle to the next without apparent

Figure 5.3 Vincenzo Neri, neurological ilm, ca. 1908. Paper print (35mm). he Vincenzo Neri Medical Film Collection, Bologna, Italy.

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Figure 5.4 Vincenzo Neri, neurological ilm, ca. 1908. Paper print (35mm). he Vincenzo Neri Medical Film Collection, Bologna, Italy.

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rhythm. he body twists and contorts without conscious efort or control. It was precisely these kinds of curiously arrhythmic motions that cinema was able to capture into the realm of knowledge and visibility; and here, one could say, we can see the cinema’s capacity to take hold of the instantaneous, the accidental, the involuntary, and the irrational employed in its full power.25 In the neurological context at least, cinematographic perception disclosed itself to be as much outside style and rhythm, as soulless or senseless, if you will, as the bodies that it captured were seen to be. One compelling ilm portrays a bare-chested man, standing in front of a large canvas representing a view onto a garden, who is poked by a doctor in charge of an electric machine (igure 5.5). His face is expressionless, eyes looking into an undecipherable distance. All that seems to be possible for us to deduce of this person’s interior life boils down to the electric current running in the nervous system causing the arm to react. Paying witness to the symptomatology of “responses”, cinema as the technology for the automatic recording and reproduction of movement—automatic in the sense of a mechanical device that performs its operations largely independent of human intervention and even intention—doubles and instrumentalizes the neurological gaze that tracks down the corporeal surface, disinterested of the depths of the lesh or of the psyche. he language of emotions, for instance, is relegated to the materiality of electric currents. Subjectivity, in other words, is reduced to the facticity of the body’s materiality. “We are all frogs,” the conclusion seems to be. It is in these kinds of micro-practices that what Agamben calls the “generalized catastrophe of the sphere of gestures” in modernity became documented, as well as produced.26 In this sense, even if the ilms might wish to present themselves as being as neutral as possible, they are everything else but outside politics. However, their politics, to be sure, is diferent from that of free (wo)men communicating and exchanging ideas in the polis.27 Rather than giving expression to bios, cinema here takes biological life as its task, or to put it otherwise, the diferentiation between the bare fact of living and politically qualiied existence. If there is (to use Walter Benjamin’s term) a biopolitical “optical unconscious” that the cinema makes explicit,28 it is one that concerns the dimension of animality—of the bare fact of living, breathing, moving, reacting—that we all carry within ourselves and, according to Agamben, occupies the core of political subjectivity in modernity. On the celluloid surface, what was previously deemed exterior to the image of the human was thus now found within its intimate interior. While

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Figure 5.5 Vincenzo Neri, neurological ilm, late 1910s. Frame capture. he Vincenzo Neri Medical Film Collection, Bologna, Italy.

instrumentalizing the neurological gaze, cinema also instrumentalized a mute, brute, senseless animal within us, giving it visibility and making it an object of knowledge, regulation and (to an extent) control. Indeed, it made animality a political task. Its biopolitics of gesture links with the way the cinematic apparatus, to quote Agamben, “functions by excluding as not (yet) human an already human being from itself, that is, by animalizing the human, by isolating the nonhuman within the human”.29 Here Agamben describes what he calls the “anthropological machine of the moderns”—“anthropological machine” referring to a system of ideas and images according to which articulations between “human and animal, man and non-man, speaking being and living being”, that is, articulations of the state of exception between bios and zoe, take place.30 Neri’s collection gives the anthropological machine of the moderns a tangible outlook. What the neurological ilms display is a body situated on various zones of indistinction: a body that performs, moves and produces, but can suddenly start to stammer, jerk and contort; a body that wills and signiies, but at the same time threatens to become whole insensible; a body that is spontaneous and active while being simultaneously possessed by an involuntary compulsion

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to repeat and lacking intention and potentiality. hey give us an image of the “human” as bearing within itself the origin of its own negation. What we see in the collection is a systematic epistemic production of this kind of paradoxical being.

*** Cinema, to quote Bálazs, can show us “a quality in a gesture of the hand that we never noticed before when we saw that hand stroke or strike something, a quality that is oten more expressive than any play of the features”.31 Within the turn-of-the-twentieth-century neurological context, this quality was the underlying animality of gestures. Cinematic recordings, and their predecessors from footprints to chronophotographs, isolated a “non-human” dimension of the senseless, the involuntary and the automatic within the human itself. In this regard, cinematic and pre-cinematic visualizations of the neurological body pay witness to a split within the subject, which acts as a symptom of a politics that takes as its task the factual existence of people, their bare life. Here, cinema comes across as a crystallization of what Agamben calls “the great totalitarian experiments of the twentieth century” but, equally importantly, of capitalist regimes and the “triumph of economy”, which according to the philosopher, “takes on an emphasis in which natural life itself and its well-being seem to appear as humanity’s last historical task”.32 In each case, we are dealing with a politics of biological life and a mode of humanity that, as Agamben observes, “has become animal again”.33 In at least one of its dimensions, producing and maintaining this decomposed image of the human is the function of the biopolitics of gesture in cinema.

Notes 1 Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti, Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 49–60, 55. 2 Ibid., 58. 3 Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention de l’hysterie: Charcot et l’iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (Paris: Macula, 1982), 9.

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4 See Michel Foucault, he Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 of he History of Sexuality (London: Penguin, 1998). 5 Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974, ed. Jacques Lagrange, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 6 Ibid., 288. 7 Ibid., 298. 8 Ibid., 299. 9 Béla Bálazs, ‘he Visible Man’, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Screen 48 (Spring 2007): 103. 10 Béla Bálazs, heory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone (London: Dennis Dobson, 1952), 55. 11 See Didi-Huberman, Invention de l’hysterie, 23–31. 12 As Friedrich Kittler notes, “[c]hopping or cutting in the real, fusion or low in the imaginary—the entire research history of cinema revolves only around this paradox”. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geofrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 122. 13 See Giorgio Agamben, Stanze: Parole and fantasme dans la culture occidentale, trans. Yves Hersant (Paris: Editions Payot & Rivages, 1998), 85–6. 14 Charles Hacks, Le Geste (Paris: Librairie Marpon et Flammarion, 1892), 6. 15 Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”, 52–3. 16 Friedrich Kittler, “Man as a Drunken Town-musician”, MLN 118 (2003): 637–52. 17 Quoted in ibid., 642. 18 Georges Gilles de la Tourette, Etudes cliniques et physiologiques sur la marche: La marche dans les maladies du système nerveux (Paris: Delahaye et Lecrosnier, 1886), 75. 19 Of course, the notion of biopolitics has a history of its own, going back at least as far as the early twentieth century and the work of Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén. In Kjellén’s use, the biopolitics-concept described a vitalistic conception of the state as something that can be compared to a natural organism, instead of seeing it as a subject of law. On the history of the biopolitics-concept, see Roberto Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 13–44. 20 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 9. 21 Giorgio Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?”, What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 1–24, 14.

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22 Foucault, Psychiatric Power, 302. 23 Ibid., 302, 304. 24 Vincenzo Neri, “Sur les caractères paradoxaux de la démarche chez les hystériques”, Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière, vol. 21 (1908): 231–41. 25 On this problematic, see Mary Ann Doane, he Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 26 Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”, 51. 27 Polis meaning ‘city’ as well as ‘citizenship’. Hannah Arendt writes about the ancient Greek (democratic) political experience based on communication and recognition within the public realm: “In the experience of the polis, which not without justiication has been called the most talkative of all bodies politic …, action and speech separated and became more and more independent activities. he emphasis shited from action to speech, and to speech as a means of persuasion rather than the speciically human way of answering, talking back and measuring up to whatever happened or was done. To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence.” Hannah Arendt, he Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 26. 28 See Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography”, trans. Stanley Mitchell, Screen 13 (Spring 1972): 5–26. 29 Agamben, he Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 37. 30 Ibid., 37–8. 31 Bálazs, heory of the Film, 55. 32 Agamben, he Open, 76. 33 Ibid.

6

Propositions for a Gestural Cinema: On “Ciné-Trances” and Jean Rouch’s Ritual Documentaries João Mário Grilo To be able to leap from one point to another is my essential dream. To be able to go everywhere, to ramble about like you ramble in a dream, to go someplace else. he mobile camera, the walking, lying camera—that’s everybody’s dream! Simply because making a ilm, for me, means writing it with your eyes, with your ears, with your body. Jean Rouch, in an interview by Enrico Fulchignoni, August 1980 he English translation of Giorgio Agamben’s “Notes on Gesture,” published in 2000, is one of the major events in recent ilm theory since, at least, the extremely inluential Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema books.1 Although, at irst, its repercussions were discreet, it is easy to notice how the performative aspect of ilm has progressively gained a notorious protagonism in ilm thought, theory and critique. his circumstance is particularly evident when compared to a theoretical tradition more attentive to aesthetics—through the formal aspects of image, movement, sound and montage—or to semiotics and psychoanalysis—through the analysis of the textual, narrative, symbolic, and discursive dimensions of ilm. It should be acknowledged, however, that part of this transformation was already present in the new theoretical framework created by the interweaving of ilm and philosophy, with the re-appraisal of certain philosophical concepts when applied to ilm identity, bringing forth a complexity that was put aside before. In this light (not to mention in detail the work of philosophers that recently brought fresh new perspectives on ilm, such as Stanley Cavell, Jacques Rancière, Jean-Luc Nancy, or Alain Badiou), contributions of philosophers such as Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Levinas or Merleau-Ponty have also been reassessed, especially through the persistent work of ilm scholars such as

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Vivian Sobchack, Laura Marks, Sarah Cooper, Raymond Bellour, Sam Girgus, or homas Elsaesser.2 In this context, however, Agamben’s contribution possesses a particular and political dimension through the way he connects the performance in ilm with the performative essence of the cinematic medium itself. Being attentive to gesture caption, but adapting it to the point of being able to determine its nature, “design” and potentiality, ilm has become a gestural means without end aiming to establish new forms of a prosthetic harmony between humanity, context and experience. In this sense Agamben believes cinema and gesture approach the relationship philosophy establishes with language “Cinema’s essential ‘silence’ (which has nothing to do with the presence or absence of a soundtrack) is, just as the silence of philosophy, exposure of the being-in-language of human beings: pure gesturality.”3 Expanding the scope of Deleuze’s author based cinema-images-concepts4 (the foremost interest of the “Agamben efect” in ilm theory) relies, in this consideration of cinema’s pure mediality, the quest for what one could call a “bare cinema”—that is, an iconoclastic vision of cinema, as deprived of ilms and authors—which has nothing to do with any ontological re-deinition of it. Referring to the proximity, at this point, between Agamben’s questioning of cinema and Walter Benjamin’s position on media, Christian McCrea states: “As in that earlier critic, the state of meaning-making itself is constantly under enquiry, from which each medium can be made to speak either directly or indirectly to the conditions under which signs and power ind themselves.”5 One must therefore highlight this very important and innovative point in Agamben’s position towards cinema: the changing perception of ilm (i.e. of “movies” as “products” of cinema) towards a general and much more open questioning of the essence and historicity of the media itself and of its social, political and conceptual determinations and repercussions. hat is, an interrogation about the basic, or bare, diference of cinema in the constitution of the modern biopolitical world as well as in the constitution of modenity itself as its paradigmatic “closure” and prosthetic reiication. Moreover, this rejoins Agamben’s position in regards to art in general. As presumed by Claire Colebrook: Agamben’s conceptualization of the work of art – and art is always a work or outcome of the bringing into being of a positivity and not just a copying or representation of a prior content – is not a theory of aesthetics. On the contrary,

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it is the modern notion of aesthetic theory or art criticism, and its delimitation of the work of art from other social, political, ethical and productive domains, that Agamben’s work seeks to displace.6

In the context of modernity, the essential value of cinema must then be formulated not in terms of its aesthetical interest or implications, but in terms of its “practical reason”, of its ultimate raison d’être. Following Agamben’s premises, one would say that, in the frame of the social experience of modernity, cinema is validated by its “orthopedic” and biopolitical efect. Departing from the known short paragraph of “Notes on Gesture,” in which he states that “in the cinema, a society that has lost its gestures tries at once to reclaim what it has lost and to record its loss,”7 Agamben describes in detail the genealogy of this gestural condition of cinema, from La Tourette’s studies of gait, to Marey’s experiments on chronophotography or even, in a larger context, Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne and the will to establish in the plates of its Atlas “a representation in virtual movement of Western humanity’s gestures from classical Greece to fascism.”8 In a particularly dramatic and clear paragraph, Agamben writes: hus Spoke Zarathrusta is the ballet of a humankind that has lost its gestures. And when the age realized this, it then began (but it was too late!) the precipitous attempt to recover the lost gestures in extremis. he dance of Isadora Duncan and Sergei Diaghilev, the novel of Proust, the great Jugendstil poetry from Pascoli to Rilke, and, inally and most exemplarily, the silent movie trace the magic circle in which humanity tried for the last time to evoke what was slipping though its ingers forever.9

Once more, one must understand that what is at stake here is the profound entanglement between what the cinematic media portrays and represents and the proper nature of the media itself, the search for an identity between the gestures in cinema and the gesture of cinema as parts of the same episteme, of the same rationality. We are dealing here with a modernist coherence which concerns not only the visuality of a paradigm but also its core functioning and presuppositions (ethical and political), even if inside this paradigm, cinema has developed a speciic position and, as a consequence, an efect of its own. But in reality from where comes what we now call “cinema”? In particular, if one accepts, following Agamben, that cinema is a “potentiality,” that is, a mediality relatively independent of the precise media(s)—among others, ilm, television, visual or performative arts—through which it is actualized? In

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artistic terms, a somewhat troubling answer to this question can be recalled from a known passage of the Chapter 3a of Histoire(s) du cinéma (“La monnaie de l’absolu”), in which Jean-Luc Godard places Manet as the true inventor of the cinématographe. Not the inventor of the technical apparatus, of course, but of the images it will produce and of its visual, impressionistic “reversion”: All Manet’s women seem to say: “I know what you are thinking,” surely because before this painter – and I understood it from Malraux – the inner world was more subtle than the cosmos. he celebrated and waning smiles of Da Vinci and Vermeer say “I,” I and the world ater me. And even Corot’s woman with her pink scarf doesn’t think what thinks Olympia, what thinks Berthe Morisot, what thinks the barmaid of the Folies-Bergère, because inally the inner world has rejoined the cosmos and with Edouard Manet the modern painting begins, i.e., the cinématographe.10

he cue deserves an exploration and a deviation, because, of course, Godard’s injunction has nothing to do with a presumed aesthetical proximity between painting and ilm. In fact, Manet appears, to Godard, as much the “painter of modern life” as the cinématographe the technical-material realization of modern mediality.11

Excursus—Manet (Mme Guillemet attending cinema) In a paper titled “Unbinding Vision,”12 Jonathan Crary wrote a magniicent analysis of one of Manet’s latest painting, Dans la serre (In the Conservatory), of 1879. In the context of our exploration of modern “gesturality,” and its signiicance in Agamben’s thoughts on cinema, Crary’s analysis and Manet’s painting appear both as a powerful illustration of the bourgeoisie’s “state of afairs” at the end of the nineteenth century. hrough his analysis of Dans la serre, and following the painting’s strategy, Crary clariies the protocols of perception and attention conigured in modernity and the way those protocols helped shape the ways of life and consumer patterns characteristic of this same modernity. In his analysis Crary shows how, painting that scene the way he chose to paint it, Manet gave form to the tensions presented in modern life and visuality and to the way modernist plasticity was able to capture in the bodies and in their anachronistic gestures, the signs of a new (paradoxical) pattern of

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Figure 6.1 Édouard Manet, Dans la serre, 1879. Oil on canvas, 115 cm × 150 cm. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany. Photographed by Sara Pereira.

attention, inattention and afection, dispositions, and actions. hus, in Crary’s perspective, Manet’s painting emerges as a powerful statement about modernity’s cultural and life forms, through its expression in a complex, but very precise, arrangement of bodies, gestures and gazes in the enclosed and sufocating atmosphere of a Parisian conservatory. Crary, by emphasizing the way Manet’s painting seems to signal a retreat in the painter’s characteristic formlessness and supreme indiference towards its subjects,13 demonstrates instead how the tableau gives substance to that particular modern visual threshold. On one side, one feels a strong efort to sustain the stability of perception and, through it, as Crary sustains, “the viability of a functional real world;”14 on the other, one perceives—from within the painting’s chain of details—the disturbance of this apparent harmonious stability in favor of an ever changing visual ield, whose immediate expression is, precisely, not visual, but gestural and even choreographic. he painting seems to present itself as a simple narrative and visual equation (also because it never disrupts its irst sight impression): the Guillemet couple, who were close friends of the painter, are here in retreat from everyday life, and

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they rest suspended in the enclosed space of a conservatory.15 But a close survey of some signiicant details helps us to diagnose how the painting is a powerful statement on the signs of the decisive dialectical movement between binding and dissociation. he signals are underlined by Crary: “Manet’s painting is about a more generalized experience of dissociation even while he maintains a supericially uniied surface, even while he asserts the eicacy of a “reality function”. ’16 he pattern of attention in the general economy of the painting is, in that sense, decisive. he man and the woman seem attentive, but their attention is not, as one could expect, on one another. Mme Guillemet, in “her inert waxwork quality,” overdressed and ixed by a complicated dress, which is a real fashion apparatus (she was, in fact, proprietary of a fashion boutique), seems medused, hypnotized, somnambulant. Her body, as Crary states, “is a body with eyes open but ones that do not see—that is, do not arrest, do not ix, do not appropriate the world around them.”17 he man, kept physically apart from his spouse by the green bench (and one cannot but reinforce the segregative signiicance of that sign, as a sign of “a perceptual order”), seems also out of what could be a love scene, his gaze being projected in divergent directions, the eyes focused in two disparate optical axes, neither of which, envisaging directly the woman’s face. herefore, Crary’s conclusion is clear and full of epistemological consequences: “within a work depicting two apparently attentive igures, Manet discloses an attentiveness that has actually been folded into two diferent states of distraction within which the stability and unity of the painting begin to corrode.”18 Finally, it is this statement about modernity visual (and historical and bodily) dialectics that is unveiled by the gestures that occupy the center of the painting: the paradoxical choreography of the hands, the wedding ring, and the cigar. his choreography seems to play outside the couple’s own bodies, binding and unbinding that catastrophic gestural situation. If one accepts that this painting is, in its dissociative manner, a perfect representation of the bourgeoisie’s dispossession of gestures in everyday life and the urgent need to recapture this performance through another dispositif, then one can easily see at what point this analysis rejoins Godard’s idea of Manet’s painting as a precursor of cinema, of the coming logic of the cinématographe, of its essential, catastrophic, mobility, where, Agamben states, “the mythical rigidity of the image has been broken, and we should not really speak of images here, but of gestures.”19 In conclusion: cinema is needed, and expected, but that need is not aesthetical or simply visual. It appears as a gesture to solve the catastrophic incapacity of a

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Figure 6.2 Dans la serre: the gestural catastrophe. Photographed by Sara Pereira, cropped and edited by the author.

society to control its frantic and disparate gestures or, to say it in diferent words, as an opportunity to resolve that schizophrenic dissociation between brain and muscle, body and history, consciousness and experience. he power of cinema and later the power of cinematic montage manifests itself in a promise to free the image from the paradoxical and unbearable state of Manet’s conservatory and develop it into gesture. In this movement, while exposing the potential of the image and the dynamic element that resides frozen in its interior, cinema looks to release it through a never ending movement, later expanded by the performative capacities of montage. It is that perfect mediality—a condition of being-in-language, as a potentiality, a “purposiveness without purpose”20 which inds—in Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929) a conclusive celebration: the signiicance of cinema as a way to restore and to give a modernist “coherence” to the frantic proliferation of gestures in modern society. A celebration of dynamism and the way it accords itself with cinema intrinsic and ontological mobility.21

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Cinema possessed Jean Rouch was dispossessed of his tripod, lost in 1947, during the shooting of the irst of his ethnographic documentaries. He recalled this event several times as being one powerful and decisive constituent of his position towards ilm technology and, in particular, the movie camera: “During the irst ilm I made in 1947, I had the good luck of losing my tripod ater two weeks. It was a ilm on the descent of the Niger River. Ater I made the ilm I thought that there wasn’t anything that couldn’t be ilmed without a tripod.”22 From that loss on, and the need to reinvent a strategy to continue shooting without the sustainability of a tripod, Rouch’s cinema was always concerned about the intimacy between cinema and gesture, i.e. the physical and mental experience of the mediality condition of cinema and the way it can give a cinematic form to a movement which, in reality, it doesn’t possess.23 Rouch has even designated this movement as “ciné-trance,” an experience in complete antagonism with the observational viewing practices manifest in the use of zoom lenses: For me then, the only way to ilm is to walk with the camera, taking it where it is most efective and improvising another type of ballet with it, trying to make it as alive as the people it is ilming. […] hus instead of using the zoom, the cameraman-director can really get into the subject. Leading or following a dancer, priest, or cratsman, he is no longer himself, but a mechanical eye accompanied by an electronic ear. It is this strange state of transformation that takes place in the ilmmaker that I have called, analogously to possession phenomena, “ciné-trance.”24

As one sees, the concept of “ciné-trance” engages and is engaged by a ritual practice of cinema as well as by a cinema practice of ritual. For Rouch, cinema posits itself as a borderline vehicle between diferent worlds, also ofering itself as an opportunity to pass between them. However, for this passage to occur a path is needed, which in Rouch’s ilmic strategy takes the form of the ritual, and in particular the form of a performative kind of ritual. For the late religious studies scholar, Catherine Bell, ritual simultaneously embraces three diferent levels: a irst level, which one can assume as “physical”, concerns the eventful nature of the rite, that is, the manner in which each ritual posits itself as “a set of activities, that […] efects changes in people’s perceptions and interpretations”25; a second level, which Bell retrieves from Gregory Bateson’s concept of “framing”, is essentially interpretive, concerning the way

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ritual serves to frame acts or messages to make them understandable and repeatable by the community; inally, a third level concerns the performative dimension of the ritual, as the event of the performance itself and the way it is able to generate a lux of transformations, like the ones involving the transition from childhood to manhood or from life to death.26 It is at this performative level, that rituals have the power to operate a transformation in the lux of life, producing and bestowing a diferent state of things, even if momentarily. From our perspective it is this last level of ritual that interests Rouch in the irst place, because through the medial nature of ritual and the construction of its pure mediality it can rejoin the mediality of cinema in a common media whole. he camera—and through the camera the gestures of the cameramandirector—is then an alternative media to build the performative eicacy of the ritual, not already only in the scope of the group or the tribe who practices it but eventually enlarged to the spectators of the ilm: I now believe that for the people who are ilmed, the “self ” of the ilmmaker changes in front of their eyes during the shooting. He no longer speaks, except to yell out incomprehensible orders “Roll!”, “Cut!”). He now looks at them only through the intermediary of a strange appendage and hears them only through the intermediary of a shotgun microphone. But paradoxically it is due to this equipment and this new behavior (which has nothing to do with the observable behavior of the same person when he is not ilming) that the ilmmaker can throw himself into a ritual, integrate himself with it, and follow it step-by-step. […] For the Songhay-Zarma, who are now quite accustomed to ilm, my “self ” is altered in front of their eyes in the same way as in the “self ” of the possession dancers: it is the “ilm-trance” (ciné-transe) of the one ilming the “real trance” of the other.27

Rouch ilmed around 40 ilms concerning spirit possession rituals among the Songhay, Zarma and Dogon tribes in western central Africa, on the margins of the Niger River. In the context of these rituals, possession signiies that somebody, i.e., some of the bodies present in the ritual event, will be possessed by the gods (génies), which means that some of those (humans) will be converted inton horses for the gods serving so that the gods might appear and reveal their wishes, orders or impositions to the group who invoked their presence.28 he revelation of the spirit involves the trance of whoever is going to be his/her “horse”. he production of this trance is an extremely delicate moment determined by the whole of the event and the lux of energies that it is able to generate. It is because

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of that fragile ecology, and of its complete involvement and agency, that “the observer’s presence can never be neutral.” As Rouch observes, “[w]hether he wishes it or not, the observer is integral to the general movement of things, and his most minute reactions are interpreted within the context of the particular system of thought that surrounds him.”29 In several ways, one is able to see how much this trance collectively acts as a perfect negative of modern crisis concerning the bourgeoisie’s dispossession of gestures. he collective energy created through the ritual and its protocols envisages the production of an event, which not only possesses a global sense of its own, but a sense that is commonly understood by everybody who is involved in it. his includes the cameraman-director, Rouch himself, who then can state properly, invoking his own gods: “With a ciné-eye and a ciné-ear, I am a cinéRouch in a state of ciné-trance in the process of ciné-ilming. So that is the joy of ilming, the ciné-pleasure. In order for this to work, the little god Dionysus must be there. We must have luck; we must have what I call ‘grace’”.30 Perhaps no other ilm presented more clearly this equation of reciprocities— this “ballet”, a term used by Rouch several times—than the small masterpiece titled Tourou et bitti: Les Tambours d’Avant (Tourou and Bitti: he Drums of the Past), which Rouch ilmed in the late evening of March 15, 1971, in one single shot.31 Rouch described, in the following terms, the experience of this absolutely peculiar ilm: On March 15, 1971, the Sorko isherman Daouda asked me to come ilm at Simiri, in the Zarmaganda of Niger. he occasion was a possession dance to ask the black spirits of the bush to protect the forthcoming crop from the locusts. Despite the eforts of the zima priest Sido, Daouda’s father, and despite the use of two special old drums, Tourou and Bitti, no one became possessed for three days. On the fourth day I again went to Simiri with Daouda and my soundman, Moussa Amidou. Ater several hours passed without possession taking place, I decided to shoot anyway. Night was about to fall, and I thought I would take the opportunity to shoot some footage of this beautiful music, which is in danger of disappearing. I began to ilm the exterior of the compound of the zima priests, then, without turning of and on, passed through the pen of the sacriicial goats and then out into the dance area where an old man, Sambou Albeybu, was dancing without much conviction. Without stopping I walked up to the musicians and ilmed them in detail. Suddenly the drums stopped. I was about ready to turn of when the godye lute started up again, playing solo. he lute player had “seen a spirit.” Immediately Sambou entered into the state

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and became possessed by the spirit kure (the Hausa butcher, the hyena). I kept ilming. hen old Tusinye Wazi entered the dance area; she was immediately possessed by the spirit Hadyo. Still without stopping, I ilmed the consultation of spirits by the priests – a sacriice was requested. At this point I began to walk backward, framing a general establishing view of the compound, now lushed with the coming of sunset. he ilming was thus one continuous shot, the length of the camera load.32

Rouch’s description is interesting not only because it ofers a irst person explanation of the ilm, but also because it underlines the importance of continuity in the production of the event that relates the Songhay ritual to its cinematographic depiction by Rouch and Moussa Amidou, his soundman. his continuity, this powerful and uninterrupted movement—which in its proper materiality should be understood as a “ballet” gesture—is conceived to give form to a “whole,” in which the life of an African tribe appears indissolubly attached to the mediality of ilm and the work of a French ilmmaker invited to portray it on ilm and even, following Rouch’s own terms, to engaged in it by (the means of) ilm.33 As stated by Stoller: “Les Tambours d’Avant not only portrays a Songhay possession

Figure 6.3 Jean Rouch, Tourou et bitti: Les Tambours d’Avant, 1971.

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Figure 6.4 Jean Rouch, Tourou et bitti: Les Tambours d’Avant, 1971.

ceremony but is the story of a ilmmaker who crosses an ethnographic boundary in Simiri, Niger, and enters the nether world of the Minotaur, the world of cinetrance.”34 Outlying the common ethnographic image of the other, Tourou et bitti: Les Tambours d’Avant is a ilm about the possibility of encountering the “Other” in a sort of a unique community “made by cinema.” hat community is, of course, not what the ilm presents or portrays, but what the ilm (each ilm) is able to engage in the speciic form of the encounter rendered possible by the action of cinema with all its speciic diferences, from the use of technology to the physical behavior of the camera and cameraman. Surely, the most decisive and revelatory moment in Les Tambours d’Avant happens when the music stops and Rouch decides to continue shooting in continuity, because, as he suggests in the text (and in his own voice-over during the ilm), something diferent than the playing of the drums is going to happen. If until then one could say that the gesture of cinema was guided by the presence and the sound of the drums and by the rhythm of its music, at that particular moment—almost a moment of suspension—the cameraman-director is guided by the perception of an immanent whole, even if, for now, the ilm has not

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actualized it in terms of its efective images. It is a magical moment, a moment of trance which enables Rouch to organize his movements—his “ballet”—as if in a complete articulation with a superior force, as if he was one of the horses the gods choose to descend upon for the ritual. We have lost, you and I, that taste for the thrill, that possibility of escaping ourselves, of living, with our body, the adventure of another, of being the horse of a god.” he paradox is that, maybe because I made ilms, I have never been possessed. For those who saw them, and I mean the priests and the people I showed them to in Africa, my possession was what I call a ciné-trance, and it was from making all those movements that are absolutely abnormal, from following someone in the middle of a trance arena, from pointing my lens at someone who was about to be possessed, indeed, at that very moment when a possession might take over.35

In-conclusion: Prospects for a gestural cinema (from a ilmmaker’s point of view) Being in the process of directing a ilm project that will deal with ritual and possession myself,36 Agamben’s and Rouch’s ideas about ilm movement and the signiicance of gesture resonate in my head as powerful indicators for opening up new paths for ilm composition and conceptualization. I ask myself: How important can those ideas be for a ilmmaker? How can they improve or clarify the relationship between a creator and his ilm? How can they refresh a cinematic frame of reference based on visual efectiveness and saturated with formulas for narrative clairvoyance? It is clear that Agamben saw very well the dependence of cinema on bourgeoisie interests and its inscription in the frame of a global biopolitical regime. It is clear also that, through a diferent path, Rouch saw almost the same thing, which explains many of his radical shits (ethnographical but also cinematographic). He was not, however, the only one: Stroheim, Rossellini, Renoir, Godard and the Soviets (Eisenstein and Vertov), among (not so many) others, tried to escape the “aesthetical versus entertainment” bourgeois trap in which the potential of ilm has been encapsulated for many decades now. As a ilmmaker, I feel that it is this path that has found in Agamben’s thought new names and new perspectives of development, and also new ways to approach the very singular work of “displaced” cinéastes like Jean Rouch or Guy Debord.

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A (new) word in film vocabulary—gesture—comes, then, to the film scene (which I hope will not be only a scholarly one): gesture, with all its potential correlates and consequences. As a filmmaker, I am interested, then, in the following questions: Can we gesture a film instead of visualizing it? If so, what does that mean, to gesture a film? To both questions, the answer, I think, must be eminently political and in that respect both Agamben and Rouch understood very well the full implications of this state of things. Both of them make use of a common term: possession. For one, cinema served the bourgeois project to re-possess their lost gestures and recompose a prosthetic and “screenable” sense of experience and history; for the other, prophetically dispossessed of his tripod, cinema appears, exactly, as a mean to disrupt the bourgeois sense of gesture, making the mobile gesture of cinema “possessable” by others. It is as if one made, in retrospect, the theory for the praxis of the other. For the moment, one can say that the prospects are illuminating, because they open the path for a cinema more radically conscious of its own politics and more able to seek the freedom of its trance and of its own loss and dispossession. Even if probably deceived, Mme Guillemet would be, surely, astonished!

Notes 1 Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 1: L’image-mouvement (Paris: Minuit, 1983) and Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (Paris: Minuit, 1985). 2 Vivian Sobchack, Carnal houghts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Vivian Sobchack, he Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Laura Marks, he Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); Sarah Cooper, “he Occluded Relation: Levinas and Cinema”, Film-Philosophy, vol. 11, no. 2 (2007): i-vii. URL: http://www.ilm-philosophy.com/2007v11n2/introduction.pdf [accessed January 28, 2013.]; Sarah Cooper, “Emmanuel Levinas”, Film, heory and Philosophy, ed. Felicity Colman (Durham: Acumen, 2009), 91–9; Raymond Bellour, Le Corps du Cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L éditeur, 2009); Sam B. Girgus, Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics and the Feminine (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); homas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film heory: An Introduction hrough the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2010).

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3 Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”, in Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 60. 4 Deborah Levitt has recently elaborated a pertinent critical explanation of this Deleuze-Agamben relationship towards cinema position in philosophy and history: “Agamben submits Deleuze’s vitalist cinematic image to a critical genealogy of life as the joint production of modern biopolitics and new media technologies. […] And if Deleuze has alerted us to the circulation of the pre-individual singularities, the afects and percepts that create bodies of all kinds (including, of course, political ones), in “Notes on Gesture”—as well as in related essays on the work of Guy Debord—Agamben points to how these are linked to imbricated developments in the history of technology, medicine, industry and political economy.” Deborah Levitt, “Notes on Media and Biopolitics: “Notes on Gesture””, Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life, Justin Clemens, Nicholas Heron and Alex Murray (eds) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 193–4. 5 Christian McCrea, “Giorgio Agamben”, Film, heory and Philosophy, ed. Felicity Colman (Durham: Acumen, 2009), 350. 6 Claire Colebrook, “Art”, in he Agamben Dictionary, Alex Murray and Jessica Whyte (eds) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 28–9. For an extended analysis on this topic and, in particular, for a critical exploration of Agamben’s book Man Without Content, see also Claire Colebrook, “Agamben: Aesthetics, Potentialities and Life”, he South Atlantic Quarterly vol. 107, no. 1 (2007), 107–20. 7 Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”, 59. 8 “Of the igures Agamben cites, Marey is perhaps the most persuasively emblematic. As a number of scholars have noted, social modernity and cultural modernity meet in the igure of Marey, in whose work physiological investigations of human movement, utopian dreams of a pristine and waste-free social hygiene and the impulse to ind new imaging technologies converge” (Deborah Levitt, “Notes on Media and Biopolitics: “Notes on Gesture” ’, 197). For a brilliant and detailed exploration of this context and its implications on cinema, see Pasi Väliaho’s Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, hought and Cinema circa 1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010) and the classical and remarkable studies of Marey by François Dagognet: Étienne-Jules Marey: La passion de la trace (Paris: Hazan, 1987) and Laurent Mannoni: Étienne-Jules Marey: la mémoire de l”oeil (Paris/Milano: French Cinematheque/Mazzotta, 1999). 9 Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”, 53–4. 10 Jean-Luc Godard, Histoires du Cinéma, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 48–54. 11 In an appropriate and humorous comment, hierry de Duve wrote: “Godard is the Manet of ilm, unless Manet is the Godard of painting.” hierry de Duve, LOOK: 100 Years of Contemporary Art (Ludion: Brussels, 2000), 227.

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12 Jonathan Crary, “Unbinding Vision”, October 68 (1994), 21–44. 13 “Manet’s indiference was supreme, efortless and stinging: it scandalized but never deigned to take notice of the shock it produces.” Georges Bataille, Manet, trans. Austryn Waynhouse and James Emmons (Cleveland: Skira, 1955). 14 Crary states: “I see the painting as a iguration of an essential conlict within the perceptual logic of modernity in which two powerful tendencies are at work. One is a binding together of vision, an obsessive holding together of perception to maintain the viability of a functional real world, while the other, barely contained or sealed over, is a logic of psychic and economic exchange, of equivalence and substitution, of lux and dissolution that threatens to overwhelm the apparently stable positions and terms that Manet seems to have efortlessly arranged.” Jonathan Crary, “Unbinding Vision”, 30. 15 Manet painted Mme Guillemet other times, namely as a model for one of his “Parisiennes”. he conservatory sited at 70, Rue d’Amsterdam, in Paris, was the property of the painter Otto Rosen and Manet used it as a studio, between 1878 and 1879. 16 Jonathan Crary, “Unbinding Vision”, 35. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 36–7. 19 Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”, 55. 20 Ibid., 59. 21 And one knows at what point other responses were given to the political dimension of gesture, this time through their coninement, political arrangement and rationalization, as it happened, symbolically, with fascist parades, from military to gymnastics. At this point, one should mention the extremely signiicant inluence of Foucault’s theory of power and biopower on Agamben’s thought. For an interesting and comprehensive analysis of this subject, see Anke Snoek, “Agamben’s Foucault: An overview”, Foucault Studies 10 (2010), 44–67. 22 Jean Rouch and Enrico Fulchignoni, “Cine-Anthropology”, in Cine-Ethnography, ed. and trans. Steven Feld (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 148. 23 Very conscious of the strenuous efort implied by this experience, Rouch stated: “I still have the taste of this efort in my mouth, and of the risk taken so as not to stumble, not to screw up my focus and lens setting, to be driting as slowly as possible and then to suddenly ly with my camera as alive as a bird. Without that, everything had to start over, which is to say everything was lost forever. And when, exhausted by this tension and this efort, Moussa Amidou put down his microphone and I my camera, we felt as though the attentive crowd, the musicians and even those fragile gods who had haunted their trembling dancers

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in the interval, all understood the meaning of our research and applauded its success. And this is probably why I can only explain this type of mise-en-scène with the mysterious term ‘ciné-trance’ ”. (Jean Rouch and Enrico Fulchignoni, “Cine-Anthropology”, 186). Jean Rouch, “he Camera and Man”, in Cine-Ethnography, ed. and trans. Steven Feld (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 38–9. Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Revised Edition) (Cary: Oxford University Press, 2009), 74. For a deeper exploration of Bell’s appreciation of the performance theory of ritual cf. Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Revised Edition) (Cary: Oxford University Press, 2009), 72–6. Jean Rouch, “On the Vicissitudes of the Self: he Possessed Dancer, the Magician, the Sorcerer, the Filmmaker and the Ethnographer”, Cine-Ethnography, ed. and trans. Steven Feld (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 99. For a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the possession rituals among the Songhay, see Paul Stoller’s Fusion of the Worlds: An Ethnography of Possession Among the Songhay of Nigeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Known as one of the most important ethnographers in Central Africa and one of Rouch’s closest friends and a research teammate, Paul Stoller signed a referential book about the ilmmaker’s work: he Cinematic Griot: he Ethnography of Jean Rouch, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Jean Rouch, “On the Vicissitudes of the Self: he Possessed Dancer, the Magician, the Sorcerer, the Filmmaker and the Ethnographer”, 97. Jean Rouch and Enrico Fulchignoni, “Cine-Anthropology”, 150. In the course of her analysis of one of the most known Rouch’s ritual ilms: Les Maîtres fous (he Crazy Masters), Elizabeth Cowie remarked on this (ever) permeating nature of ritual and its global dynamics: “he ritual presents an intermixing of elements that remain distinct in a drama of their very juxtaposition, a conjoined image of embodied self and spirit, of power and weakness, where both the abject and taboo are celebrated and valorized. he boundary of self and other is permeated as meaning and identity slip between, for the adept is and is not the spirit, partaking in the spirit’s power and disowning it as much as he or she is disowned by it.” (Elizabeth Cowie, Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 149). In reality, the ilm is made in two shots, as the long take that constitutes the ilm depiction of the ritual is preceded by a much smaller introductive shot in which Rouch’s voice-over explains the conditions for the shooting. Jean Rouch, “On the Vicissitudes of the Self: he Possessed Dancer, the Magician, the Sorcerer, the Filmmaker and the Ethnographer”, 101.

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33 “Looking back at this ilm now, I think that the shooting itself was what unlatched and sped up the possession process. And I would not be surprised if upon showing the ilm to the priests of Simiri, I learned that it was my own ciné-trance that played the role of catalyst that night.” Jean Rouch, ibid. 34 Paul Stoller, he Cinematic Griot, 194. 35 Jean Rouch and Enrico Fulchignoni, “Cine-Anthropology”, 155. 36 his ilm, Dun Atlantic, now in pre-production, is supposed to be shot in early 2014, and it will be a documentary about African-Brasilian religion, namely Candomblé, and its dissemination in South-Atlantic geographical and cultural space.

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Engaging Hand to Hand with the Moving Image: Serra, Viola and Grandrieux’s Radical Gestures Silvia Casini But in conidence I am going to tell you a terrible secret: I hate cinema except when I shoot, then you need to know not to be shy with the camera, using violence, breaking down its defenses, because the camera is a despicable mechanism. What matters is poetry Orson Welles interviewed by André Bazin1

Introduction A hand rhythmically catching a chunk of lead, two female igures approaching each other to embrace in an extreme slow motion, a torso twisting and swirling at the command of someone else’s will: this essay examines these and other gestures in selected contemporary moving image works. he gesture—physical and conceptual, theoretical and technical—accompanies and illuminates old and new forms of the moving image, from early motion experiments to analogue cinema and contemporary digital interfaces. For Agamben, it is thanks to gestures that images themselves might be rescued to enter the realm of ethics and politics rather than just the one of aesthetics. When do images become gestures? What kind of cinema can today release gestures from being frozen by an image? In order to answer these questions, I shall examine what constitutes gestures in the following examples from moving images: the short ilm Hand Catching Lead (Richard Serra, 1968), the video installation he Greeting (Bill Viola, 1995) and sequences from the experimental ilm La Vie nouvelle (Philippe Grandrieux, 2002). In these works

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cinema mingles with the other arts (video installation, performance, music and painting). he cross-fertilization between diferent art forms here demonstrates how the medium of ilm is only one of the possible applications of cinema and how these works are governed by forces other than storytelling. Despite the obvious diferences among the artworks in terms of speciic media, I will seek to show how in all of them the image frees itself from the normative power of the cinematic dispositif. he energy, intensity and potentiality of the image becoming gesture is what is at stake in those artworks, which open up other ways of doing cinema—and other ways of thinking about it. he essay is structured around three concepts that are fundamental to Agamben’s philosophy and, I argue, to any examination of gesture and the moving image: dispositif, profanation and potentiality.2 he irst section introduces the reader to the relationship between gesture and language and the other sections of the essay are organized around and expand on the three concepts mentioned above. It is particularly hard to select one single theme in Agamben’s oeuvre and attempt to explain it. In Agamben’s prose all concepts are related to one another, albeit not necessarily in a systematic way. his renders almost impossible to investigate the notion of gesture in Agamben without referring to other concepts such as dispositif, profanation and potentiality. I decided to approach them in this order for the sake of clarity and logical connection: profanation, for example, implies the reference to dispositifs upon which the profaning gesture can take place. Potentiality cannot be understood without engaging irst with the other two aforementioned concepts. I am not claiming that the artworks I discuss more or less intuitively embody the Agambian concepts of dispositif, profanation and potentiality. his would not only be disrespectful to the works examined but also discourteous. Rather I argue that a certain kind of cinema can illuminate the task that Agamben attributes to cinema: that of being a medium capable of engaging us with ethical and political questions and scenarios, not because it poses a political thesis or takes an explicit ethical stance but thanks to its being gesture rather than imagebased. Cinema is neither a machine for creating illusions nor a means to enjoy our symptoms while seated in the darkness of the theater. Cinema lays bare rather than nurture its illusionary nature and, by doing so, it can open up the space for another kind of politics and ethics of the image. he relationship between the moving image and gesture has been tackled by many scholars inside and outside the discipline of ilm studies. To use the expression “moving image” instead of “cinema”, as I sometimes do in

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this essay, is not a neutral choice. On the contrary, I mean to emphasize the temporality that inhabits images, their capacity to move from one medium to another and, thus, be revitalized, an ability that art historian Aby Warburg, a constant reference point for Giorgio Agamben, highlighted in his atlas Mnemosyne (1929).3 Following the line of reasoning adopted by Gilles Deleuze, who sees cinema as an intrinsic philosophical machine capable of creating concepts, Agamben’s oeuvre similarly engages with the moving image and its relationship with gesture. A number of ilms and ilmmakers appear in Agamben’s relections on cinema, notably Guy Debord and Jean-Luc Godard, both of whom he discusses at various lengths. However, it is in “he Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the History of Cinema”4 that Agamben, with a single example, shows the power of cinema not simply to describe gestures but to enact them. In the inal pages of his Profanations, Agamben relects upon cinema as gesture by discussing a fragment of Orson Welles’ ilm Don Quixote. his ilm, let uninished by Welles, who had worked upon it for almost twenty years (1957–75), has a sequence which takes place inside a crowded ilm theater with Don Quixote sitting in the irst row. When Sancho Panza enters the theater looking for his friend, Don Quixote does not notice him: he is totally engrossed in the images on the screen, almost hypnotized by the spell created by the cinematic sequence. Ater realizing that the woman on the screen is threatened by a group of soldiers, Don Quixote springs forward and rushes towards the screen, slicing it to shreds to defend her from them—to the cheers of the audience in the theater. he gesture of a ictional character destroys the materiality of the cinematic screen and, with it, its illusions. Already from this short sequence, it appears clear that it is a certain kind of cinema that allows gesture to be freed from the stillness associated with image. In this respect, Agamben chooses to discuss authors and examples of the avant-garde and experimental tradition leaving aside mainstream cinema. He describes cinema “or at least a certain sort of cinema” as “a prolonged hesitation between image and meaning,” thus identifying cinema as a medium that dwells in a territory where potentiality, rather than storytelling, reigns.5 If mass media merely tell facts that we can only observe or judge as spectators, cinema gives us the task of expanding our gaze onto the possibilities of the images we look at.

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Inhabiting language through gestures In everyday talk, gestures are understood as a form of communication used to convey a message in place of or parallel to speech. In antiquity, from the Sophists through to Aristotle and then Cicero, the art of discourse (rhetoric) already went hand in hand with the ability to have the appropriate gestures accompany the words, as if gestures could be taken as a mere means to illustrate, highlight or replace words through visible bodily movements. hese two aspects of gesture—irst, the capacity to illustrate words and, second, the capacity to replace words through visible bodily movements—suggest a role played by images on the one hand (the illustrative power and visibility of gestures) and a role played by the body on the other. Philosophical relection upon gestures and their relationship with language has engaged several modern and contemporary thinkers as diverse as Ludwig Wittgenstein, heodor Adorno, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-François Lyotard and Agamben, to name just a few. Following Agamben, Pasi Väliaho has focused on the etymology of the word “gesture”, for which gestures are not simply actions nor bodily movements but “a manner of carrying the body.”6 here is a diference in the way Agamben uses the singular “gesture” or the plural “gestures”, as Murray points out.7 Gestures, for Agamben, exhibit an inability to convey something in language. Nevertheless, gestures already inhabit language, even when they are not accompanied by words. Gesture (in the singular), in fact, is the exhibition of a mediality: it is “the process of making a means visible as such, it is our speechless dwelling in language.”8 In this sense, gestures function as an interruption of language, which nevertheless is proof of the being-in-language of the non-linguistic. To sustain his arguments and further deepen his concepts of gesture, profanation or potentiality, Agamben develops a constellation of igures belonging to the languages of cultural production (Bartleby the scrivener in literature, Don Quixote in literature and ilm, Glenn Gould in music, to name just a few), or to the natural world (the cat playing with the mouse). Given the centrality of language in all his thought, Agamben’s readers might be surprised to realize how oten he returns to visual examples, and to the imaging they conjure. Images, however, are not used as mere means to illustrate or accompany a critical relection that is supported through words. hose images embodied in ictional and real characters interrupt the low of words, they are fractures in the narrative, they oblige the reader to connect distant things and times. Responding to this

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peculiar way of proceeding, I attempt to intertwine the theoretical discussion of an Agambian concept with a close reading of an example from the arts. he irst one will be Serra’s ilm and the dispositif.

Gestures and the cinematic dispositif: Richard Serra’s Hand Catching Lead In the previous section we dealt with the concept of gesture and its relationship to language. his section further explores Agamben’s understanding of gesture in relation to the dispositif of cinema. His essay “Notes on Gesture”9 begins with Gilles de la Tourette’s scientiic studies on the human gait and claims that gestures disappeared at the end of the nineteenth century, with the fragmentation of gestures into a series of spasmodic and uncontrolled movements, tics and jerks.10 he relationship between cinema and scientiic research is hardly new. Several scholars have demonstrated that the birth of cinema in the nineteenth century is not so much linked to the invention and development of cinematic spectacle as to the need of scientists, naturalists, and doctors to record the dynamism and movement of bodies for the purpose of analysis and understanding.11 Moving bodies and their gestures were the subject of early cinema. Hence, since its very beginning, the cinematographic machine was entangled with gestures as a form of life, as the way in which human beings lived their lives. Agamben shows how, on the one hand, the image can freeze the gesture, whereas, on the other, it can preserve the dynamism of gesture and thus revitalize cinema. To tackle this diiculty one should analyze the concept of apparatus or—to use the corresponding French term—dispositif, which has returned to prominence in ilm studies. Agamben uses the Italian word dispositivo which is closer to the French word dispositif rather than to the English translation “apparatus.”12 Alongside the more canonical contributions of the seventies, from Foucault to the semio-psychoanalytic theories of ilm, there are, in fact, diferent contemporary interventions including those by Philippe Alain Michaud and Agamben. Michaud understands the term dispositif in its strictly material sense: he suggests the decline of cinema which marked the twentieth century and considers its crisis to be closely related to the emergence of other forms of production/exhibition (as alternatives to camera shooting and projection) and consumption of the image (as an alternative to being a spectator).13

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Agamben borrows the notion of dispositif from Foucault, for whom it is the range of ideological and actual machineries that surround or deine human beings. In the short essay called “What Is an Apparatus?”, Agamben refers to the dispositif as that something (a technology, a process) that produces its own subject. All beings can be classiied into two groups: “living beings” and “apparatuses in which living beings are incessantly captured.”14 Between these two classes lies a third class: subjects. Agamben understands a subject as that which results from the relation between living beings and dispositifs: “I will call an apparatus,” he writes, “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.”15 Agamben proceeds on a double level: irst he identiies the multifaceted forms of dispositifs that hold us captive, then he seeks ways in which to deactivate them. he 16mm black and white ilm made by the American artist, Serra, in 1968, Hand Catching Lead, provides a good starting point for an examination of the relationship between gesture and the cinematic dispositif. A pre-eminent contemporary sculptor and video artist whose works are preserved in numerous public and private collections, Serra is interested in bringing materiality, the viewer, and the location to the foreground, as his widely-known gigantic open-air steel sculptures prove. his attention, however, can also be found in his video-based works, as Hand Catching Lead, Serra’s irst ilm, demonstrates. Framed by a ixed frontal camera, a forearm and a hand perform a simple movement on the screen. We watch the very same gesture repeated many times. he image we see coincides with the gesture performed on the camera. he ilmmaker’s hand tries to repeatedly catch bits of lead falling from the top of the frame. When it succeeds, the hand holds the lead for an instant and then releases it. In this process, the hand gradually blackens. Although one does not see who or what is dropping the chunks from above, Serra explains it is the composer-musician Philip Glass who, of screen, tosses the chunks of lead at regular intervals of time. In this way, not only do we have the impression that there is a machine of frame dropping the chunks but also that the forearm and the hand themselves are a mechanical device. Despite this impression of a mechanized stimulus-response circuit, there is an almost imperceptible instant when the hand withdraws slightly, the foreinger lexes and makes the gesture of beckoning as if to ask for another chunk of lead. In this short ilm—which is closer to a performance—the body is that of the machine, the dispositif is that of the cinematic apparatus which is both

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mechanical and organic (the hand) and capable of performing a gesture (the catching and release of a piece of lead). Serra performs the ilm-device by exploring notions of weight, impression, fatigue of a body (e.g. the hand, and the arm), repetition and gravity. It is not the projection that counts here but rather the sequence of the gestures made by the hand: grabbing, holding, releasing. he cinematographic machine is opened up, exteriorized into the gesture performed by a hand catching a piece of lead. he gesture visually and literally afects the cinematographic machine, which is embodied in the hand turning black as more pieces of material are grabbed and then released. Hand Catching Lead shows the automatism of the cinematic dispositif produced, albeit not perfectly, by the repetition of a gesture which interrupts the falling of a series of pieces of lead. he concept of repetition, along with that of stoppage, are the two transcendental conditions that permit montage, to use a Kantian framework. he intertwining between stoppage and repetition in cinema is best exempliied, for Agamben, by the experimental cinema of Guy Debord. Rather than using cinema to tell a story, Debord makes the medium of cinema visible as such by returning to repetition and stoppage. Repetition, like memory, is not the re-proposal of the same but the restitution of the dimension of possibility to the image and the possibility that we, as spectators, acquire a more active role. For Agamben, to repeat something is to render it possible again. Stoppage is the other condition of possibility of cinema, the power to interrupt the low of images and words. By repeating the gesture of grabbing the piece of lead (and thus interrupting its fall from above), Serra efectively investigates the possibility of the moving image as a gesture rather than as an object, a gesture carried out by a dispositif that is both carnal and mechanical. Here the moving image does not have a gesture as its object but becomes a gesture itself capable of dismantling the illusion of the cinematic dispositif.

A gesture of profanation: Bill Viola’s he Greeting In order to grasp the meaning of gesture in Agamben, the concept of profanation should be examined. Agamben dedicates a whole collection of essays to explore profanation, a concept that is put at work whenever there is a dispositif that needs to be deactivated. he understanding of dispositif discussed above is

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closely related to the concept of profanation. Just as for Foucault the penitential subject is constituted through its own negation, for Agamben our formation as subjects is always a process of separation by which the dispositif sets us apart from our immediate relation to our environment. In Agamben, religion performs such a separation. Instead of being understood as a bond between men and god(s), Agamben understands religion as “that which removes things, places, animals, or people from common use and transfers them to a separate sphere.”16 Profaning is the gesture of restoring that which was consecrated back to the freedom of use by people: “to profane means not simply to abolish and erase separations but to learn to put them to a new use, to play with them.”17 According to Agamben humans can profane something either by direct contact or by opening things up to other uses. In this irst case, Agamben ofers the example of a rite of sacriice during which participants touch those parts of the victim that have been ofered to the gods and, by doing so, profane them. In the second case, Agamben ofers an example from the natural world, a cat playing with a ball of yarn as if it were a mouse. he cat, says Agamben in Profanations, knowingly uses the characteristic behavior of predatory activity in vain. his behavior is not efaced but deactivated thanks to the substitution of the yarn for the mouse and, thus, opened up to a new possible use. he cat frees a behavior from its genetic inscription within a given sphere (hunting). he creation of a new use is possible only by deactivating an old use, rendering it inoperative.18

In this way, “profanation is the counter-apparatus,” the only means through which dispositifs, including that of cinema, can be resisted.19 he gesture of profaning can be better illustrated by going back once again to Agamben’s pages on Welles’s Don Quixote which I discussed in the introduction. he profaning gesture carried out by Don Quixote opens up the screen to another possible use (which means profaning), that is, the cutting of the screen canvas renders it an access point to reality, life—if it were a mere technological or material means of projection Don Quixote would fail to slice it. Another profanation takes places simultaneously: the gesture performed by Welles’s cinematographic Don Quixote profanes the gesture of tilting at windmills carried out by Cervantes’s literary Don Quixote. he image on the screen (the characters) are still visible but the darkness generated by Don Quixote’s sword slowly eats the screen. he gesture remains, the image disappears. We are let to stare at darkness with no image to watch but our imagination.

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he gesture of profaning, of restoring what has been separated to common use, is at the core of a video work entitled he Greeting (1995) by the American artist Bill Viola, whose art deals with the central themes of human experience (birth, death, emotion) and with several mystical traditions. In the essay “Nymphs” (2011) Agamben casts light upon the relationship between time and the image, briely mentioning Viola’s series he Passions, to which he Greeting belongs. Embracing the point of view of the spectator facing Viola’s videos, Agamben dwells upon the dialectics between movement and time, pointing out that the real achievement of Viola’s images is not their being in movement (something that the spectator immediately becomes aware of) but their being charged with time.20 Viola is commonly regarded as one of the most pre-eminent exponents of the relatively recent art of video. However, to call Viola a mere video artist does not do justice to the complexity of his way of working, which owes much to painting and cinema too, consisting as it does of set design, complex camera techniques, sound efects and actors. his becomes particularly evident in works such as he Greeting, in which the scene is carefully arranged before shooting and the work with the actors is conducted as if it were a iction ilm. he choice of exhibiting his video works in dark and silent spaces also reveals the attempt to recreate a cinematographic dimension.21 he year 1991 represents a turning point in Viola’s artistic production: from then on the human body and face become central in his work as testiied by the video he Passing (1991). he human body as imago dei, as an icon of the divine, however, is constantly transformed into a more earthly image or, conversely, mere earthly, carnal bodies open up to a spiritual and universal dimension thanks to slowed-down movements and almost imperceptible variations in gestures and facial expressions. he Greeting (1995) belongs to the works produced in the second period of Viola’s career. It is inspired by the he Visitation (1528–9), an artwork by the Italian painter Jacopo Pontormo (1494– 1557), which depicts the biblical scene of the Annunciation. Viola breathes new life into the religious scene depicted by Pontormo, represented and revisited numerous times in the history of art. he video sequence is projected on a screen hanging on the wall of a darkened room. At irst sight one might think that one is watching a still, as movement is almost imperceptible. As becomes clear from looking at the sketches made for he Greeting, the background is carefully staged and constructed in the artist’s atelier. he architecture of space behind the igures is formed thanks to a set

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of panels designed with a false perspective as seen from a high-speed camera point of view. he depth of ield created by the panels is, in fact, much bigger than it is in reality. he perspective thus created avoids a collapsing between the three igures on the foreground and the background architecture. he urban space represented on the background appears isolated, almost abstract, as in De Chirico’s paintings. he framing is conventional and frontal. he scene is shot with a high-speed camera, in a ixed position, providing a super-slowmotion recording at 300 frames per second. he original length of the event (the greeting) lasts 45 seconds, but in the installation the event lasts 12 minutes. he female igures greeting each other are positioned on a raised platform which visually merges with the background space. he time of day is uncertain; the light luctuates between day and night. he gesture of the greeting remains itself ambiguous, open to multiple interpretations and speculations. Two women are talking together, against the background of a desolate urban landscape. hey are interrupted by the arrival of a third woman who is known to only one of the irst two women. At a certain point the background of the city comes to the foreground and other igures, far away, become visible, engaged in unknown activities. he newcomer approaches the woman she knows to greet her, ignoring the other. A gentle breeze and a change of light mark the greeting between the two as they embrace each other. he gestures, the way these three women carry their bodies, are Renaissance-inspired (although in Pontormo there are four women) but revisited through contemporary sensitivity and experience.22 he newcomer dressed in orange whispers something in her friend’s ear (the oldest woman), accentuating the isolation of the other one, who is inally introduced and the three seem to exchange words. Interestingly, the profanation does not destroy Viola’s reference to religious icons and motifs. Quite the opposite. Bill Viola’s videos possess a spiritual dimension of their own, a quality that deeply moves viewers. But this does not happen because he explicitly refers to religious topics and icons such as the Annunciation, the theme of re-birth (not only of the Christian tradition but also of the Buddhist one). he mystic and spiritual alatus of Bill Viola’s videos stems from their terrestrial quality and from their capacity to profane iconic images through gestures. he religious dimension of the scene of the greeting in Pontormo’s painting is present at the iconic level, but what Viola profanes is not the evangelical motif of the Annunciation, but the moment of the greeting. hrough the techniques of slow motion and looping the true subject of Pontormo’s representation is revealed: the movement of the igures on screen, charged with time, not the Annunciation itself.

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Figure 7.1 Bill Viola, he Greeting (1995). Video/sound installation. Photo: Kira Perov.

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Transforming the image of the Annunciation in the gestures of the greeting, Viola frees the images from their historical reference (the Biblical motif and the artistic representation of it throughout history) and from their narrative reference. here is no story let to be told, no words announcing what will come next. In he Greeting the three women are worldly, not saints, they wear ordinary clothing, gathered together by a chance encounter in an urban landscape, a public space such as a square or a market. he gestures enacted by the three women are similar to those inscribed in the religious scene of the Annunciation, but freed, emancipated from their being a mere means to an end—that of announcing the coming of the Son of God. Nevertheless, the aura is re-created precisely because of the terrestrial, mundane feeling of the scene, slowed down to the point where each single gesture becomes a still image inhabited by a tension (a movement) that has not yet been performed or resolved.

he potential of A New Life he third and inal concept examined in this essay is that of potentiality, which is a key concept in Agamben’s philosophical project, underpinning his relections on politics, ethics and the arts. In Agamben’s own words: “I could state the subject of my work as an attempt to understand the meaning of the word ‘can.’”23 Agamben refers to Aristotle’s distinction between potentiality (dynamis) and actuality (energeia). he potential maintains itself even once it has passed (or not) into actuality: “what is potential can both be and not be, for the same is potential both to be and not to be.”24 he interesting part of the Aristotelian deinition of potentiality is, for Agamben, the role played by the potential “to not be” which is fully preserved in actuality rather than disappearing once the potential passes into actuality. here is a co-existence of potentiality to be and potentiality to not be rather than a succession between the two. In order to illustrate this negative side of potentiality—the potential not to be—Agamben refers to Melville’s short story, “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853). he central point is the scrivener’s refusal to write—“I would prefer not to”25— words which Bartleby utters without any further explanation whenever his superior orders him to write something: in other words to perform his duty as scrivener. By refusing to write while being a writer, Agamben argues, Bartleby

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fully embodies his potentiality as a scrivener. It is not simply the possibility to decide between diferent options, it is the freedom to do something or to not do something else. herefore, it is the negative side of potentiality, the possibility that something does not pass into actuality, that makes possible potentiality as such.26 For Agamben to keep potentiality fully open means to live a life as humans. he concept of potentiality is apt for further exploring the relationship between images and gestures. As a inal example of moving image works, I would like to take Grandrieux’s feature ilm La Vie nouvelle. In this ilm Grandrieux explores the potentiality of the moving image and, along with it, the potentiality of human beings.27 Ater Grandrieux’s irst feature ilm Sombre (1998), La Vie nouvelle continues to explore the thread of the post-conlict landscape in the Balkans. he setting of La Vie nouvelle is a highly traumatized post-war East European non-place, a “physical, psychic world about which one knows nothing, which arrives as in a fog.”28 he ilm’s plot is elliptical, as are the spoken dialogues, reduced to a few lines: at a brothel-like hotel, a young woman, Mélania, is singled out from a group by the human traicker Boyan, stripped and sold into prostitution. he young American soldier, Seymour, encounters Mélania and becomes obsessed with her to the point of wanting to rescue her, ofering her the chance of a new life. Seymour eventually attempts to purchase Mélania outright. Film theorist and critic Nicole Brenez has been the irst one to recognize Grandrieux’s ilms for the innovations in ilm-making and ilm-viewing that they enable.29 Adopting Agamben’s framework might open up further ways of critically engaging with Grandrieux’s ilms beyond the reading of them as belonging to the “new extremism.”30 In La Vie nouvelle the key concepts underpinning the notion of gesture at the center of this essay (dispositif, profanation and potentiality) are all at play. Grandrieux captures the body in all its gestures and paroxysms, contours and spaces, violence and ecstasy: ofering spectators a cinema of bodily gestures rather than of images. he coming to the foreground of gestures, of “ways of carrying the body” (to recall the etymological deinition of gesture), renders La Vie nouvelle a material exploration of the potentiality of the moving image in its relationship to bodies, sound, darkness and light. It is hard to speak about a sequence of images or of cinematic sequences in La Vie nouvelle. Rather, one might talk about the dancing sequence, the hair-cut sequence, and so on, always emphasizing the way humans carry their bodies on and of screen. For the purpose of analysis I shall discuss three dialogue-less sequences placed, respectively, at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the ilm, showing how what remains in the frame is not images but gestures.

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In the opening sequence of La Vie nouvelle we are within a darkened space: a subjective camera shot, trembling in palpitation, rushes toward a group of men and women gazing into the night. A lickering camera scans the face of a woman. Her eyes stare at something without batting an eyelid. he camera zooms out and withdraws into the hazy night. hen it zooms in on the face of another woman, older than the irst. Tears appear in her eyes, slowly illing them. We do not know exactly what it is that these women and men are looking at. A threat comes from outside the frame and remains unknown and unknowable. he background sound comes in waves. here is no shot and counter shot, rather a repeated camera movement, a zooming-in which concentrates attention on the faces as if they were under a microscope not always in focus. As viewers we are always conscious of the presence of the camera, of the particular framing and deframing techniques through which the camera responds to the surfaces it encounters, vibrating as if it were a living eye linching or squinting. Agamben regards the frame as the basic unit of montage, a unit that holds in itself a conlict between what is inside the frame and what lies outside it. Framing, in this respect, is a gesture capable of restoring the full potentiality of the image, its potential to be or not to be, that is, its capacity not to be circumscribed by the frame itself. As potentiality lives on in actuality, there is something outside the frame (bodies, images, words) that remains even once the framing gesture has taken place. Framing, then, is the manifestation of the full potentiality of the image as such.31 he concept of potentiality can be taken further by discussing the sequence where Boyan (the pimp) and Mélania are engaged in a kind of dance. Before the disco crowd, Boyan pumps his ist into the air to incite people into dancing. And more than this: he is the marionette master. Mélania is his puppet. Boyan’s hands fan, lutter, guide, caress, mock Mélania. hen the camera is entirely devoted to shots of Boyan, as a techno beat and a fast bass pattern on a single note appear on the soundtrack. In Adrian Martin’s words: “lighting and posture […] transform the marionette master momentarily into a Nosferatu, and images of his face resemble a demon.”32 hen the camera is on Mélania’s Boyan-driven choreography, her spinning and twirling reaches a frenzy, a crescendo, during the techno beat which is out of sync with the action. he whole dancing sequence is an operation of repetition and stoppage, the two gestures which, as I have made clear above, are at the heart of cinema for Agamben. Agamben uses the example of dance to explain how the gesture is neither a means without an end, nor an end without a means, it is the means itself:

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Figure 7.2 Philippe Grandrieux, La Vie nouvelle (2002).

“what dance exhibits is not a movement that has an end in itself, but movement for its own sake.”33 he sequence reaches its climax with the camera ixed on Mélania, on her visual de-iguration. he camera shakes so much in response to her dance that her face in close-up is lattened, stretched, lost, found again as we pass from one frame to the next. One can no longer tell exactly which gesture Mélania is performing, where she is situated in the space of the room, where the line of her body ends and the surrounding environment begins. If one freezes these frames of her face, arms, neck and shoulders, other potential images can be seen or imagined: a torso, a cloud, an insect, a mask, sexual organs. he music fades for about ive seconds; it is interrupted. A space of possibility and freedom opens up between the shots, between the image itself, which becomes disconnected from any narrative constraint, from any logical sequence of actions. he gestural image becomes potential. Mélania seems faceless, weightless, motionless, detached from time and space. Mélania’s dancing remains suspended, unable to display anything more than its own potential. he last speech-less sequence in La Vie nouvelle I want to examine is the one shot with a hand-held thermal camera: the dispositif here seems to become a living organism capable of producing warmth when entering into contact with human bodies. Interviewed by Brenez, Grandrieux explains his decision to use a thermal camera in this sequence: the thermal camera is used by the military, but above all by engineers in order to gauge the resistance of materials. It records the diferent levels of temperature

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in a body. he principle is that it is no longer light which makes an impression. Here, there is no light. he scene was shot in total darkness; no one could see anything except me through the camera. All the participants were in an absolute blackout, and they moved around in a deranged way.34

his sequence starts with Seymour descending a staircase to end up in a dark place where other human bodies—shimmering, formless and fragile—can be glimpsed among the haziness; scenes of cannibalism are intuitively grasped in between close-ups of screaming mouths and twirling bodies. he sequence ends with a woman crouching on the pavement, in a pose that resembles Francis Bacon’s twisted human igures and images of pathological bodies as those of La Salpêtrière. he particular shooting procedure adopted by Grandrieux thanks to the thermal camera enacts the gesture of profanation Agamben talks about: a dispositif (the camera) is no longer used for the purpose of recording images through the impression of light on the ilm. On the contrary, the camera here is hand held and kept close to the body of the ilmmaker, to the point where the camera is used as a sensing organ able to detect and then touch the bodies it encounters by letting them imprint their warmth on the celluloid. he result cannot be an image in the ordinary sense, but rather a sensation, an emanation. In this sequence the viewer experiences the same kind of physical images that one experiences without seeing them in reality ater pressing one’s own hands onto the closed eyes or when one inds oneself in darkness. Darkness, which is the cipher of the sequence briely discussed, is also the color of potentiality. Agamben illustrates this point by making the following

Figure 7.3 Philippe Grandrieux, La Vie nouvelle (2002).

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example: when we are deprived of our sense of sight, for instance because we have our eyes closed or because we are in the darkness, we are nonetheless able to distinguish darkness from light, we are able to see darkness.35 he experience of darkness is the experience of potentiality-in-itself. So it is not correct to say that when in darkness we cannot see, as darkness itself becomes the object of our sight, the actuality of sight becomes the darkness of potentiality. he thermal-camera sequence in Grandrieux’s La Vie nouvelle leaves us with a radical monochrome image, that of darkness. Consequently we cannot establish our position in space and time any more. It derives an image that cannot represent any longer, instead it can only be felt. By embodying an aesthetic of gestures, La Vie nouvelle illuminates several Agambenian concepts, such as those of profanation, stoppage and repetition examined throughout this essay, and, ultimately, ofers us the potential not only of a new (not necessarily better) life (for Mélania, for the Balkans, for us as human beings) but also of a new kind of cinema. Rather than adopting a phenomenological perspective focused on concepts such as visibility, invisibility and the lesh, I have shown how Grandrieux’s ilm might be fully grasped by relating it to Agamben’s understanding of potentiality.36

Conclusions his essay has investigated the notions of dispositif, profanation and potentiality underpinning Agamben’s understanding of gesture by showing them at play in selected moving image works. As we have seen, the dispositif in Agamben is an ensemble of structures of thought and disparate things, both linguistic and non linguistic (discourses, laws, philosophical propositions, buildings, institutions, etc.) that inscribes us in a power relation with them. In mainstream cinema the cinematographic dispositif is mainly used to create images in tune with our deepest desires and drives, images that respond to our symptoms. Nevertheless, this power of the dispositif is matched by the potentiality inherent in the gesture, a gesture which is capable of embodying what the image oten cannot show or say: that is, the opening up of the dimension of potentiality. Potentiality in Agamben is the dimension that accompanies actuality as opposed to anticipating it. All the works examined in this chapter are contemporary ones. Contemporary is, for Agamben, not what is happening now (the actual), but what expresses a

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potentiality by engaging with the past.37 Viola’s he Greeting deals with the past both in terms of iconology (the Biblical episode of the Annunciation) and cultural reference (the Pontormo’s Visitation in the history of art). he ilm by Serra is almost a performance of the raw elements of cinema at its beginning: energy, intensity, mechanism, bodies. Grandrieux’s La Vie nouvelle draws inspiration from the recent past: the atermath of the Balkans conlict. It asks the question of what kind of life and humanity might originate ater that. In this way, it opens up the potential of a new life. his new life is not something that will happen in the future, that will come next, but a radical openness to what human beings might be and do.38 To conclude with Agamben’s words: “the power of cinema is that it leads images back to the homeland of gestures,” a place that coincides with the origins of cinema.39 Only in this way can the dynamic force of images be preserved by a cinema of gestures. An image alone, in contrast, runs the risk of freezing gestures, as in a photographic snapshot. Ultimately, the creation of images calls for a responsibility on the part of both the ilmmaker and the ilm theorist, a responsibility that crosses over from the realm of aesthetics into politics or, better, into an aesthetics that is already political. Only artistic gestures can keep open the potential to be or not to be. To the succession of events linked by a connection of cause and efect typical of the narrative dispositif of mainstream cinema, Viola opposes the time of a staged greeting, where the temporal pregnancy of the image is what we experience as spectators. In Hand Catching Lead Serra himself performs the cinematic dispositif as a bodily gesture that sometimes interrupts the monotony of its movement to do something unexpected—the hand withdraws and the foreinger beckons. In La Vie nouvelle Grandrieux ofers the moving image a “new life.” He endlessly explores the potential of ilmmaking as bodily gesture, thus subverting mainstream cinema. If gestures are a manner of carrying the body, the artworks by Serra, Viola and Grandrieux show how bodies engage hand to hand (corpo a corpo, to use the Italian expression that Agamben himself adopts) with dispositifs, thus resisting any assaults to their potential to be or to not be, to act or to not act.40

Notes 1 My translation is based upon the original French text: “Mais je vais vous faire une conidence bien plus terrible: je n’aime pas le cinéma, sauf quand je tourne; alors,

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il faut savoir ne pas être timide avec la caméra, lui faire violence, la forcer dans ses derniers retranchements, parce qu”elle est une vile mécanique. Ce qui compte, c’est la poésie.” André Bazin, Orson Welles (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1972), 184. he English edition which is said to be based upon the original French text does not contain the “Entretiens avec Orson Welles” by André Bazin, Charles Bitsch and Jean Domarchi in which Orson Welles makes the quoted statement. See André Bazin, Orson Welles: A Critical View, foreword by François Trufaut (Los Angeles: Acrobat Books, 1991). I adopt the critical framework ofered by Agamben’s relections on gesture in a number of his essays: “Notes on Gesture” contained in Means Without End (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), “On Potentiality” “Bartleby, or on Contingency” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), the three essays “he Author as Gesture”, “In Praise of Profanation” and “he Six Most Beautiful Moments in the History of Cinema”, all contained in the collection Profanations (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2007), and the essay “What Is an Apparatus?” in “What Is an Apparatus?” And Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). From the beginning of its history, cinema has been characterized by the tense relationship between the still image and the (illusion) of movement as discussed by several authors. See Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (New York: Zone Books, 2007) and Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, Karen Beckham and Jean Ma (eds), (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008). Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2007), 93–4. Giorgio Agamben, “Diference and Repetition: on Guy Debord’s Films”, in Guy Debord and the Situationist International, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 317. his deinition comes from the Oxford English Dictionary and is reported by Pasi Väliaho, Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, hought and Cinema circa 1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 17. he etymology of the word “gesture” as a “manner of carrying the body” derives from the Latin gestura meaning “bearing, behavior”, and from gestus “gesture, carriage, posture”. In all his writings Agamben pays great attention to the etymology of words, for him a fundamental practice in philosophy. Alex Murray, Giorgio Agamben (London: Routledge, 2010), 87. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2007), 155. Agamben, Notes on Gesture, 48–52. Noys noted that Agamben uses little historical evidence for his claim, mainly referring to the scientiic segmentation of gestures made by Gilles de la Tourette or

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Cinema and Agamben the scientiic analysis of bodily movements pursued, at the same time as Tourette, by Eadweard Muybridge and then captured on ilm by Étienne-Jules Marey with his chronophotographic camera and by the Lumière brothers. See Benjamin Noys, “Gestural Cinema: Giorgio Agamben on Film”, Film Philosophy (2004) 8.22. http://www.ilm-philosophy.com/vol8–2004/n22noys [accessed June 3, 2012]; Pasi Väliaho, Mapping the Moving Image. On the origins of scientiic cinematography, see Virgilio Tosi, Cinema Before Cinema (London: British Universities Film & Video Council, 2005). A seminal text for exploring the link between cinema and the human body is Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Relying on Althusser’s work on ideology and apparatuses, Baudry irst introduced the concept of dispositif in ilm theory in the seventies. See Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Efects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus”, in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). he term dispositif has broader connotations than the word apparatus, which refers to the conceptualization of cinema as a psychosocial mechanism, whereas the original French term, as Bellour highlights, refers to diferent vision machines from the cinema to installation works and to a wider variety of perceptual efects. See Raymond Bellour, “Concerning the “Photographic”, in Still Moving, 274, in footnote 3. Philippe-Alain Michaud, Sketches: Histoire de l”art, cinéma (Paris: Editions de l’Eclat, 2006). Giorgio Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?” and Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 13. Ibid., 14. Agamben, Profanations, 74. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 85. Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?”, 19. he essay “What Is an Apparatus?” is a concise programmatic statement of Agamben’s whole philosophical project, which has its roots in Foucault’s understanding of subjectivity and power. On the role played by Foucauldian concepts of archaeology, genealogy and biopolitics in Agamben’s thought, see Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). Giorgio Agamben, “Nymphs”, Releasing the Image: from Literature to New Media, ed. Jacques Khalip, Robert Mitchell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 60–79. Raymond Bellour, Fra le immagini: Fotograia, cinema, video (Milano: Bruno Mondadori Editore, 2007), 60. On the relationship between Viola’s he Greeting and Pontormo’s Visitazione, Settis highlights the fact that in 2011 the video installation was shown in Florence close to the painting. Settis recalls the eforts made by Renaissance painters, especially

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those in Florence, to represent movement in the stillness of the igures painted on canvas. his problem of giving motion to what was still was solved through the inclusion of details such as wind, the impression of movement provided by wide sleeves, hair falling over shoulders, and so on. Salvatore Settis, “Bill Viola: i conti con l’arte”, Bill Viola: Visioni Interiori, ed. Kira Perov (Roma: Giunti, 2009),15–35. Agamben, Potentialities, 177. Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 1050 b 10. “Bartleby, or on Contingency” in Potentialities: Collected Essays on Philosophy, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Agamben, Potentialities, 180. he title has been interpreted either as a reference to the dimension of (new) life in Eastern Europe (the new Europe) or as a reference to Dante Alighieri’s Vita Nova (he New Life): the two interpretations (geo-biopolitical and literary) can coexist. Brenez points to La Vie Nouvelle as the contemporary version of Dante’s descent into hell. See Nicole Brenez, ed., La Vie Nouvelle/Nouvelle Vision (Paris: Editions Leo Scheer, 2005). Raymond Bellour, “Bords Marginaux”, La Vie Nouvelle/Nouvelle Vision, ed. N. Brenez (Paris: Editions Leo Scheer, 2005), 16. he delocalized cinematic space for La Vie nouvelle (it could be Sarajevo in Bosnia but also Soia in Bulgaria) resembles what Augé has called the “non-place”. See Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995). Brenez, La Vie Nouvelle. Under the label of new extremism there are ilms—made by authors as diverse as Breillat, Dumont, Haneke and Grandrieux himself—whose images are designed to deliberately shock the onlooker to the point that they leave the ilm theater. Without simply labeling those ilms as “sensationalistic”, scholarly literature has called for a subtler understanding of the new extremism, highlighting how “the ilms of the new extremism and the controversies they engender are indispensable to the critical task of rethinking the terms of contemporary spectatorship”, quoted in he New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe, Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall (eds) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 8. For an analysis of the aesthetics and poetics of framing, see Des O” Rawe, “Towards a poetics of the cinematographic frame”, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, 3 (2011). http://www.aestheticsandculture.net/index.php/jac/article/ view/5378 [accessed June 7, 2012]. Adrian Martin, “Dance girl dance. Philippe Grandrieux’s La Vie nouvelle (he New Life, 2002)”, Kinoeye: New Perspectives on European ilm 4.3 (2004). http://www. kinoeye.org/04/03/martin03.php/#* [accessed June 3, 2012]. Noys, “Gestural Cinema.”

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34 Nicole Brenez, “he Body’s Night. An Interview with Philippe Grandrieux”, Rouge (2003). http://www.rouge.com.au/1/grandrieux.html [accessed June 1, 2012]. 35 Agamben, Potentialities, 180–1. 36 Grandrieux’s ilm aesthetics has been discussed along with Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of lesh, visibility and invisibility in Jenny Chamarette, Phenomenology and the Future of Film: Rethinking Subjectivity beyond Contemporary French Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 37 See the essay “On Contemporaneity”, in Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?”, 39–56. 38 Murray points out that a better translation of the Italian expression “la comunità che viene” is not “the coming community” but “the community that/which comes”, avoiding any future connotations and pointing out that this community is in the present, here and now, but has not been fully recognized in its potentiality. See Murray, Agamben, 50–1. 39 Agamben, Means without End, 55. 40 Agamben, Profanations, 72.

8

Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a Philosophical Cinematics Garrett Stewart

Agamben and Cinema: a conceptual juncture more broadly productive than Agamben on cinema. his is because Agamben’s strictly philosophical essays, oten concerned with a unique mode of temporal paradox, shed more light not just on the renowned cinematic “time-image” (Gilles Deleuze’s metahistorical innovation) but on the texture of cinematic imaging in general—especially in the narrative contexts Agamben mostly ignores—than do his brief and sometimes cryptic commentaries on ilm practice, conined as they are to four short essays and further transient mentions.1 When Agamben writes on cinema, on its revealed constitution as diferential return, his avant-garde preferences narrow the application of his vocabulary even as they may sharpen his aesthetic sights. he inluence of Deleuze, otherwise so frequent in his thinking, seems slight (or slighted) in Agamben’s avoidance of narrative ilm. But when one brings his wider philosophical interests to bear on cinema, especially via his writings on the post-Aristotelian valences of “potentiality” and the temporalities it reinlects, the alignment with Deleuzian “virtuality” as a cinematic touchstone becomes not just apparent but generative. Where the “transcendentals of ilm” (in the Kantian sense of essential preconditions) are for Agamben “repetition and stoppage,” linked rather indistinctly to enjambment and caesura as the determining features of verse,2 he locates these only at the level of montage—not at the material underlay of the strip or frameline. In this, he is already leagued implicitly with a Deleuzean suppression of ilm’s celluloid mediality in favor of its sensory-motor realization on screen. Like Deleuze, Agamben defers all questions of medium-speciicity to the phenomenological “plane of immanence” (the touchstone Deleuzian formulation), where motion is visible as such—despite the artiice involved in its discrete serial manifestation, its falsiied dureé (Bergson’s complaint, and

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thus a sticking point in Deleuze’s otherwise thorough recourse to that philosophical predecessor).3 A similar limitation attends Agamaben’s claims for caesura and enjambment in poetry, which are speciically metrical functions only when thought unique (as he insists) to verse—at the level of its immanent lyric rhythm. Conceived otherwise, pace Agamben—when considered, that is, as part of prose as well, and hence as “linguistic transcendentals,” as it were—the arrest and the segue of verse patterns derive from the rupture and overlap of syllabic and lexical juncture itself in the ligatures of any and all enunciation: its liaisons as well as its elisions, the cut and splice of morphophonemic language in action, projected one level up into the metrical ingenuities of verse footwork and its linear overruns. In this way does the piecemeal essence of alphabetic language, like that of celluloid ilm, return as potential intermittence in the continuities of its aesthetic impact. I have elsewhere compared the “licker efect” of literary writing to the photogrammar of ilmic motion, which would give us another way to think of repetition-with-a-diference as a stoppage always restarted on the run, twentyfour times per second.4 But any such awareness—of machinations mostly invisible on screen—operates one ocular stratum beneath the sequencing of found (hence repeated) and truncated (hence stopped) footage that interests Agamben (without speciic examples) in the ilms of Guy Debord: a “repetition and stoppage” (“la répétition et l’arrêt”) of the continuous detritus of image culture in the lux and relux of its specularized circulation. he cultural archive regurgitated by the pastiche of Debord’s media montage draws Agamben back to the major philosophies of repetition, from Kierkegaard through Nietzsche’s eternal return to Heidegger and Deleuze: repetition as the return not of what was, but of the enigmatic “possibility of what was.”5 Without deploying the more speciic term “potential” in this relection on Debord’s cinema, let alone alluding to his own powerful essay on the topic in the pluralized eponymous volume Potentialities, Agamben’s passing mention of the rediscovered “possibility” of diference in the course of repetition (even in satiric iteration like Debord’s) should serve to license the application of “potentiality” to what follows.6 For we turn now to that mode of cinema whose analysis he let entirely to Deleuze: ilms of explicit narrative momentum—and, in particular, to the internal disjoin they sometimes strategically invite between recorded motion and igured time. Much in the way that, for Agamben, literary writing makes speech itself “possible” again in what it speaks, he also has his inger on the rudimentary pulse of the cinematic apparition, which in its most exploratory forms makes

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the very work of imaging visible in process.7 I want merely to broaden the diagnosis of this pulse rate, taking it back to the lab (as function of the photogrammatic strip) as well as out into the auditorium (as the registered efect of a given plot’s technical inlection). he efort of this essay is thus to extract the rhythm (rather than the content) of Agamben’s cinematic response (about the percussive montage of Situationist détournements) and return it to the track: to the “frame-advance” that makes not only such avant-garde disruptions possible but that allows for some of the most compelling editorial (hence medial) turns of narrative cinema as well. To put it in the most Agambenesque way for now, before making good on the provocation entailed, let it be said that repetition and stoppage are not just the suppressed rudiments but the present potential of screen narrative—as well as of the Debordian cinessay or cinéssai (to give again, with that coinage, an example along with its precept: a cross-media turn of caesura and enjambment at the sublexical level of syallabic lap dissolve). In contrast to “Diference and Repetition” (the ilm essay explicitly alluding to Deleuze’s famous book title), the debt to Walter Benjamin is more immediate in another of Agamben’s essays on ilm, where he stresses the foregrounding of those human gestures ordinarily subordinated to action or intention.8 Cinema is therefore not for him a “movement-image”9 (as it is at base for Deleuze) but, more fundamentally yet, a gestural image. But here, too, he is disinclined to burrow down to the micro-gestures that collect on the diferential strip into a discernible movement. hough unmentioned by Agamben in this respect, what interested Benjamin irst of all about photography, rather than ilm, was that he saw it gaining access to the “optical unconscious”10: to the increments of gesture that make up the arc of movement and that take place too fast for recognition by ordinary eyesight.11 Photography freezes an action in the momentary thrust of a gesture. I would stress instead—and, again, as regards its material underlay or substrate—that ilmic cinema (in its genealogical relation to stop-time chronophotography, as developed by Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey) depends on this ixity in order to return its fractured particles to gesture. To gesture, and hence to motion: an imaging of one kind of movement generated from a real but diferent motor cause, rather than an immanent or reiied “movement-image” in its own right. For Deleuze, and Agamben implicitly, cinema is not sectioned movement but moving sections. hat’s as far back toward the projection booth (or in turn toward the photomechanical lab) as they wish to go. In fact, though, action on screen is traced, not given: an animation efect. So that, for me, neither gesture nor montage are primary or

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transcendental; rather, they are produced from the invisible discrete constituents of the speeding cellular strip, turning diference itself to projected action and cumulative screen event. Many ilms, not just avant-garde experiments but mainstream narratives as well, revert to this mere (and momentarily withheld) possibility of motion in the ixed frameline unit. hey do so by simulating the sustained latency of gesture in its very stasis, most prominently by a repetition-without-diference in the freeze frame.12 (Another way of recruiting Agamben’s terms to the material infrastructure he ignores is to see in this device a case of photogrammatic enjambment absorbing caesura into the continuous running-on of the same— and thus ofering the very image of a motion potential rather than actual.) he fact that Agamben is no more interested than Benjamin in extrapolating from the “optical unconscious” of vision (as revealed by photography) to the single photo cell as the analogous ocular preconscious of cinematic projection does not prevent us from sensing how such a recognition can be marked of within a given ilm: a ilm that might well be concerned, at other levels, with issues closer to the bone in both Agamben and Deleuze. And not just marked of, but tied directly to the larger units of efect that preoccupy their attention: where, for instance, in the examples grouped here, something about the inherent virtuality of the screen image can be thrown into relief by both counterfactual plotting and by uniquely cerebral variants of the so-called trick ending: an ending in which the twist may include a medial double helix gaining new torque in the disclosure of ilm’s serial image base.

he internal tensions of Potentia With no reference to ilm, Agamben is interested elsewhere not just in potential, or say present potential, but in the inherent presence of potential—and this in a way that can illuminate some of the most laconic formulations of his ilm writing. Too oten, he notes, one’s sense of potential is restricted to a past tense form, a present perfect subjunctive, a “perfected” negation: what might have been, except for certain deinitive preventions. But what might yet be lays a diferent claim on the present tense. In the form of potential, it must exist as such in the now. It is not actual, not activated, but no less real in its contingent mode. Agamben comes close here, as I am paraphrasing his claims, to a central

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proposition in Deleuze, one which is extensively illustrated as well in the latter’s ilm work: the cohabitation of the virtual and the real in a zone not exhausted by the actual.13 hat the continuous potentiation of the next from within the now is an undertextual energy of ilm itself, in the (be)coming before our eyes of its own event(uation)—call it the mircosecond by microsecond realization of the possible—is a fact of ilm that Deleuze understands as manipulated, thematized, ironized, transmuted, what have you, whenever the movement-image is transformed before our eyes into the “time-image,” as unmistakably, for instance, though in a formulaic manner, in a lashback. But how is this form of temporal manifestation to be thought of, in Agamben’s terms, as “the return of the possibility of what was”?14 What is at stake in this logical rethinking of iteration? “Repetition restores the possibility of what was, renders it possible anew”—as if it were (is) happening again, not remembered but autonomous: “To repeat something is to make it possible anew. […] Memory cannot give us back what was, as such: that would be hell. Instead, memory restores possibility to the past.”15 hrust again into the midst as we are, what can still unfold must still be possible, hence still in touch with a quotient of potential endemic to its “becoming.” Here is where Agamben again follows Benjamin, this time in appreciating how memory converts the “fulilled into the unfulilled.”16 Call it the translation of time past into the en-dured again. Here, too, is where technology models psyche: “Doesn’t cinema always do just that, transform the real into the possible and the possible into the real?”17 If so, Deleuze would be the irst to call this the virtualization of the actual. Hence the time-image: in the simpliied form of a lashback as well as in its more specialized form as a secondary rather than a primary potentiation (a subjective hallucination, for example, rather than just a narrative anachrony).18 he lashback is in this manner the most obvious manifestation of cinema in the mode of the time-image rather than the movement-image: the repetition of the already stopped (performed gestures tracked as action and traced as record) taking place as a coming-forth again in the becoming-potential of the already elapsed. To continue in this Agambenesque vein, lashback enacts the non-impossibility of recovered duration: absence made present by presentation. hat’s the deining line of thought. What such an emphasis, even in its diiculty, makes clear—and this all the way from Debord’s ransacked media archive in serial deployment to the rule of mainstream montage at large—is that narrative cinema as well as avant-garde screen practice can avail itself of the optically estranged. Without remediating every image in the mode of

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appropriation and détournement, of regurgitation and irony, narrative cinema can still preach what it practices, it can theorize the projection it activates. In the overtly virtual moments of the counterfactual episode on ilm, subset of the Deleuzian time-image, it is forcefully the case (and at the heart of Agamben’s ethic of the aesthetic across media) that “the image gives itself to be seen instead of disappearing in what it makes visible.”19 At such moments we watch imaging rather than see images. At such moments we are made to see through the image in its disclosure of the merely virtual. And not just see, but think: think it through, think through it. Agamben’s work, so willfully cordoned of from Deleuze’s on cinema, nonetheless contributes to a further contemplation of the latter’s inluential paradigm shit across the two ilm volumes, which, in transforming movement as a function of time, to time as a function of movement, converts the virtual life of the screen from an action for viewing, to an image in the igural sense: an image to be read. Projection becomes what it always was anyway, but now insistently: projection becomes text. It is worth stressing that the virtual in Deleuze, together with my sense of its links to the “possible” of “potentiality” in Agamben, does not come bearing the lurking sting of critique that accompanies it in simulacrum theory, whether in the school of Baudrillard or the cooler-toned “mediology” of Régis Debray. For Debray, the “virtual” deines the third historical phase in image culture, a millennial sequence inaugurated by the hieratic image of the idol as an index of divinity, an incarnate trace, and followed by the rule of representation or iconicity.20 Ater the “logosphere” and the “graphosphere,” then, the third phase is neither incarnational nor representational but sheerly perceptual, the regime of “the visual” as such—where the image that once “captured” viewers by the supernatural, holding the believer in its gaze, and then, in the next epoch, “captivated” the onlooker by both its image of the natural and the spectator’s constructed relation to it, now “captures” (or recaps) the world in the virtual mode of sheer “information.”21 One might say that in Debord, cinema is forcibly removed from its status as the fulillment of the representational epoch and, once iterated in fractured form, replayed as a satire of the videological atermath in media culture. In distinguishing the “logosphere” as the time of the idol (“the gaze without a subject”22)—divine oversight instantiated—from the “graphosphere” as the era of art (where, for instance, perspective painting renders “a subject behind the gaze”), Debray’s self-styled mediology identiies the third epoch, the “videosphere,” as a regime which again removes the subject as aesthetic focal point: “vision without a gaze.”23 Whereas conventional cinema

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can be seen to straddle the transition between graphic and video dispensations in Debray’s sense, it is, for our purposes, the full-scale desubjectivation of the visual in certain ilm sequences by Michael Haneke—to which we will shortly turn—that has pushed them well past the templates of classical editing. In their impact we see how the order of the possible can erupt into strained face-ofs with the actual. In Deleuze, the virtual, in its most extreme form as the “power of the false,” insists on the coexistence of “incompossibles”: a recollected past, for instance, in which true and false are “indiscernible”—or, as in the case of an ambiguous lashback or present retinal illusion, in which the spectator encounters the indecidable coexistence of possibility and its negation.24 What follows, then, is an efort to rethink virtuality (Deleuze) and potentiality (Agamben) in the beam of each other’s manifestation on screen.

Sight defects Let me begin with a minor example of the deceptive lashback from a ilm in release as I write, a twist-ending thriller by Steven Soderbergh called Side Efects (2013). An overmedicated depressive woman is marked out as suicidal by her looring her car into a garage wall—this, before a nearly plot-long lashback is shortly triggered by a salient camera movement that tracks across an ominous trail of blood in her apartment. he ensuing lashback (to “three months earlier”), about halfway through its unfolding melodrama, reveals the blood to be that of her victim rather than herself. She has stabbed her husband to death in a prolonged bout of claimed sleepwalking induced by a risky anti-depressant drug, ater which she crawls back under the covers, to awake later in horror at the inexplicable corpse. Until the rapid montage of inset corrective lashbacks at the ilm’s climax, this is what we have been meant, have been made, to assume. Instead, she will inally be smoked out by her duped and betrayed psychiatrist as a cold-blooded murderer who killed her husband in a byzantine scheme of greed. So that her remembered (and to us visible) stupor in crawling under the sheets—the pivot point of the prolonged lashback—is less a relevant part of the complot, to bloody them as evidence, let alone some momentary relex of guilt and anxiety, than a subterfuge staged more for the spectator than for the subsequent forensic investigations: a narrative cheat as well as a crime, a literalized cover story, making us believe in the use of the sleepwalking “side efect”

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until the plot is ready to unravel it. What is inally repeated for us, then, when we reprise the murder scene, is not the same but an incriminating diference within the same: the possibility, all along, of its being otherwise. By way of an image chain in no way altered from the irst pass through this scene, what we see is the image of innocence as the renewed potential (nonetheless) of a homicidal drive. It is no accident that, in evoking such a barely updated ilm noir plot of the treacherous wife as femme fatale, Soderbergh has returned to one of the post-war seedbeds—in Deleuze’s metahistory of ilm—for the break from action into memory via the unreliable lashback: a negative version of the “false,” whose “powers” are squandered in a sheer deceptive sidetrack. A “positive” version of the false lashback and its paradoxical “compossibility” with “the real” (delusional at worst, not criminal) is yet more central to another recent ilm, where a recovered trauma kept from us until the end may well deconstruct the movie as we have watched it, so that we see it at last—if only in retrospect—as a ictive rather than remembered instance of the virtual, sustained compensatory mirage rather than magic. In Ang Lee’s he Life of Pi (2012), an Indian boy embarrassingly named Piscine (for a French swimming pool) shortens it to the “irrational number Pi” and lives to tell of having passed through a months-long and wholly irrational episode at sea, ater an orphaning shipwreck: an adventure that he profers years later, in retrospect, as actual, not virtual. As the ilm opens in the Montreal present, a foundering Canadian novelist approaches Pi, now an adult emigré, ater hearing that “he has an amazing story,” which the novelist hopes to siphon of—and which he is inally given permission to write up. Without us realizing it at the time, the entire plot is to be held suspended between the pegs of that implicit designation as “his story,” the ilm governed in this respect by the subjective and objective genitive alike: the story of his imperiled life, on the one hand; on the other, the story told (made up) by him—and not just orally, in the atermath, but scribbled in a logbook with blunt pencil stub as the ordeal progresses (as we are asked to think, having been made to see it this way). Only an hour and a half later, ater having been continuously smitten with a 3-D digital spectacle of unreal images rendered somehow possible to high-deinition sight, we get a debunking rewind of the events in verbal discourse rather than virtual manifestation. We have all along been marveling at a ravenous Bengal tiger dispatching other escaped animals on a life rat but kept at bay by the ingenuity of a lone human boy, have been stunned at the image of sharks dodged along with a battalion of lying ish, have been treated to a loating carnivorous island as well as the sea’s

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bioluminescent splendor in the pixel-lumens of CGI simulation, on and on. Now, all of a sudden, for a long few minutes of evacuated wonder, we must sufer a delating counternarrative delivered into the audiorecorder of the Japanese insurance agents who have come to investigate the sinking of the cargo ship. he recovering Pi, come ashore inally in Mexico, is here ilmed sitting up in antiseptic hospital garb against an equally blank white wall behind his bed, his story registered in gradual closeup. All ambience is excluded from the image as he looks into the camera to narrate a tale so much at odds with, and worse than, the one we’ve seen with our own eyes: the story of his own abandoned descent into murder (of the vicious fat chef who had refused him vegetarian food shipboard and had then turned cannibal). One comes to suspect that this shorn verbal exposition, matter-of-fact and image-free, is the inevitable stark truth. he movie we’ve reveled in and warmed to seems now to have been one long screen memory for the focal subject of its lashback. If all this eroded narrative conidence were not kept hovering in the balance of a guarded ambiguity, the hammered-home shock of the trick ending would be comparable to the rug-pulling moment in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010) when we discover that our detective hero and star is in fact the psychotic wife-and-childmurderer that he himself has been tracking, and that everything we’ve taken for plot has been a demented mirage: a virtual world apart in which we have been “shuttered” up with him, both energized and soothed by the powers of the false. In the revelations of all such trick-endings, the same is replayed in the key of diference—but a diference so radical, at times, that it all but parodies rather than exempliies a normative storyline. So it is with the counter-narrative of he Life of Pi when the euphemistic magic has been stripped bare. Here is a talking-head exposition with images too awful to show or even to want remembered, but simply to conjure again as possible: a worst-case scenario at odds with the screen scenes just transpired. he tale that would set things straight for the insurance team is still, even now, held of in sheer potential: just one alternative story, inevitably resisted by us not just because its events are so terrible—so feral, so red in tooth and claw, with the boy becoming the predatory tiger he has, we thought, half tamed and bonded with—but because what we have seen before is so much more vivid and, even as beast fable, humane.25 Given that it was, idiomatically, a secular “miracle” to have survived at all, it might as well be a stirring rather than a gruesome one. But as to the question of “virtual truth” versus verisimilitude, wide critical misapprehension has attached to the ilm’s punch line, when we cut from the

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tense and crestfallen inspectors to the blocked novelist hoping to borrow the narrator’s earlier story. Pi has promised to tell it in illustration of God’s ways, as proof of divine intervention, which is why it is possible, no doubt, to read the capping dialogue as suggesting that God has preferred, and so made good on, the less awful tale, opting by iat for magic rather than just implausible stamina and its necessary violence. he point is a diferent one. Cornered, Pi has given the investigators a choice of stories, and, ater his having laid out these alternatives, we return from the lashback to the opening frame as he asks the novelist: “Which story do you prefer?” he one with the tiger, we’re not surprised to hear. And Pi in return: “So it goes with God.” he point isn’t that God prefers the grandeur of miracles, an uncovenanted ark of wild beasts rather than a cannibal bloodbath and homicidal revenge, as critics have tended to assume, but rather, and more simply, that God is a better story, so Pi believes, than the world without Him: theology an elective narrative, a virtuality— say a still present potentiality—more appealing than brute fact.

“To be present”—Beyond mediation A neo-noir conspiracy thriller; a metaictional beast fable and fantasy epic: from these we turn now to two ilms by a very diferent kind of director, ilms in which the relation of the counterfactual to the (Deleuzian) virtual—in ways Agamben can help illuminate—are not just processed at the level of narrative but routed through the ilters of overt remediation, videographic in one case, pictographic in another, so as to delimit the uncanny parameters of these narratives (and, implicitly, all screen imaging). In an unheimlich assault against the bourgeois home itself, Caché (2005) opens famously with a node of what we might call counterfactuality degree zero: representation per se, a virtual counterspace held to the rectilineation of the image plane itself. We think we are watching a movie when we are watching an inexplicable video within it.26 And this is an optical planarity disclosed, only ater the fact, to be under observation by others than us, and at one remove from the manifest scene—namely, scanned by a French couple in voice-over watching a mysterious tape of their apartment exterior, onto whose street they then emerge (in front of the “primary” camera) in real time, only to appear next before the monitor by whose playback the inaugural image of the same house front has been activated as mysterious purview.

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A camera trained upon a space (our launching image) stands hereby revealed for what it always was, and in another sense could never have been other than: a space lattened to display, to replay. he scene, virtualized, has become sheer data in transmission, but unmotivated so far: data without purposeful information. What happens, one might say, is that the image “gives itself to be seen as image,” but only in a lamination of the virtual upon the actual, real space doubled by a rewindable trace, durée turned to archive, redoubling our recognition (in Debray’s terms) of the “videosphere.” And in Agamben’s terms? How do “repetition and stoppage”—so obviously reduced here to the mechanics of rewind and arrest ater fast forward (as the couple scans the tapes for clues not to its image but to its preceding impetus, its motive)—how do these “transcendental conditions” of ilm, laid bare here in video reproduction, take us to “the ethics and the politics” of a narrative practice far removed from the countercultural pastiche of Situationist montage?27 With its past-participial title, Caché may refer as well—by loose French wordplay—to the cultural cachet of the protagonist: a TV talk show host, a literary impresario, whose self-conidence is eroded by the hidden cameras that slowly prod him to disclose his own equally hidden past. Georges Laurent is already in denial when telling friends at a dinner party that the bland tapings of his home are just meant to “show us that we’re under surveillance,” since they’ve already shown him something else as well—though unadmitted as yet to his wife: the link of these videos, somehow, back to his childhood and the orphaned Algerian son of former family servants, about whom Georges made up lies to get him sent away. It’s as if, in reviewing the tapes of his domestic façade, the axis of registration has gone interior, become that of his own unconscious—as a disruptive lashback to the victimized boy (triggered by the second of the videos and a telltale drawing as clue) makes inescapable. Not being able to imagine where the camera could have been hidden on the punning Rue des Iris, the street running perpendicular to his townhouse— since the shot is so crisp that it couldn’t have been photographed through a car window—Georges says of the irst surveillance episode: “It will remain a mystery.” On subsequent viewings of the ilm, this line of dialogue becomes more a global caveat than a local balement. Stand warned: we are never to learn for sure. Galling, at least nagging, might sum up a certain kind of viewer frustration at the unsolved mystery. Yet the ambiguities of Caché are not a thicket of loose ends. hey are the braided strands of explicitly truncated genre expectations that are all leading ultimately in the same direction—beyond genre. Caché

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is certainly not a standard who-done-it, blatantly not. In mid-detection, the tracked-down victim (Majid, the Algerian boy now in middle age) kills himself in front of Georges. he mystery of agency concerns only that sequence of videotapes whose long-mounting relevance will now seem to have disappeared at exactly this apogee of violence, even if the very scene is (as it would appear from the camera angle) still being internally recorded. Home video picturing only the fortress of the bourgeois home—as if in the kind of elective surveillance such a couple might have enlisted—is gradually reversed as a lure to draw Georges outside the circle of his security into the low-rent purlieus of his former victim. his happens in two stages. he irst tape picturing something other than the townhouse exterior doubles for the plot’s own transition, and answers to its own inducements, simply by picturing, this time through a windshield ater all, an approach to Georges’ family farm—and thus triggers a jump-cut into its present space as Georges is drawn back there to question his mother about Majid. he surveillant target has gone searching, the stalked turned stalker. In this way the tapes have fulilled their task in snapping him out of his complacency, his passivity. He answers the call, follows the lead, and knocks eventually—preceded there by another hand held recording—on the door of 047. Mission accomplished (even if we’re still asking whose): that is, confrontation achieved, the past met again face to face. Except that, with no shred of sympathy, Georges faces it down rather than up to it, accusing the Algerian man of “terrorism” against his family and thus reinscribing the colonial stereotype that led, in the irst place, to the police slaughter of the boy’s parents in a Paris demonstration. he last tape we know for sure to have been recorded in the ilm is here taking down (we subsequently realize)—and from a vantage at the far side of Majid’s kitchen—Georges’ threats against him, despite the man’s denying all knowledge of the video aggression. But this fact of yet another ilming-within-the-ilm is one we are kept from suspecting at the time by the dynamic crisscross of camera angles before their conversation is later reseen on monitors (by Anne at home; by Georges” boss at the TV studio) in a ixed-frame medium long shot. Rounding out this rendezvous with the past, on Georges’ second and inal appearance in Majid’s kitchen we lock down on the scene of self-murder in one of the director’s signature ixed-frame exposés of human non-communication. It is a shot we are never to see rescreened in taped form, however. So how has it been ilmed? How else? By narration itself. For this is a narration that

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has kept us discomited and on our toes precisely by toeing a slyly ine line between the two strata of identiication in Christian Metz’s psychoanalytic semiology: that diference, so potently equivocated here, between primary and secondary identiication.28 For Metz, respectively and in order, the diference is this: an identiication irst with the camera and then with a character, the latter sometimes through a POV shot that, one might say, borrows back some force of primary alignment as well. In Haneke’s ironically vexed case, however, the secondary axis is with an always elided cameraman character who (never to be discovered) simply vanishes into the sightlines of narrative spectation. All that the actual supplement of the tapes accomplishes, then, in the movie as we actually have it, is to intervene between “media personality” and his own worst fears of inding his sequestered self on camera; that, plus lend an extra medial irony to Majid’s last words, ater which no mention of the taping, even the taping of this very scene, is ever made again: “I just wanted you to be present.” hat’s the very motto of the ilm’s ethic of retribution. Georges must be dislodged from his complacency by being made, irst, to see the same picture of his life that we do—from the outside looking on, then in—and in consequence by being made to face something wholly other, from which that complacent surface cannot be disassociated. As media personality, Georges is at the helm of the videosphere, a power-broker of the “apparatus” in Agamben’s generalized terms. Indeed, the one time we are fooled by a full-screen image that we think is meant to have advanced the plot to a new diegetic scene on his television show’s stage set (and that is not, yet again, a surprise surveillance tape), what we have entered upon instead is a digital editing session of the show’s pre-recorded taping, the playback illing our screen as it submits to rewind and ellipsis. We hear George’s voice, of-frame, instructing the technicians to elide material in the full-frame image before us, a discourse that has gotten too “theoretical” for mass consumption. Elsewhere, Georges is himself his own best censor of the diicult. Typically in command of the image, he can only be shaken loose from his nervous grip on power by what Agamben designates as a “profanation of the apparatuses”: the media personality remediatized in his privacy by the invasive tapes in their function as igures both for being seen—it hardly matters by whom—and (as plot drivers) for his needing to look back.29 he bufer zone between Georges and the world must be converted to a weapon against him, call it détournement in a narrative key. Broadcast is turned to exposure, the apparatus defamed from outside the temples of its power: a media hegemony profaned. So far, then, the factual is repeatedly doubled by the virtual in the ambiguity of diegesis versus its replay, in the latter event a strictly mechanical case of

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repetition as the return of the possible in the most inert of forms. But what about the more explicitly counterfactual image when inserted as still potential? here are, in Caché, two such scenes of radical virtuality, each a time-image in a specialized Deleuzian sense. Interrupting his visit to his mother at the family farm, a presumed abrupt lashback to Majid killing the family rooster at Georges” behest (when pretending his parents had commanded it) ends with the boy stalking Georges with his threatening hatchet in a prolonged POV shot from the back of the barn—from which a jump cut takes us to the adult Georges, there in his former home, waking in a cold sweat from just this nightmare. he narrative pumps have by this point been fully primed. As if by the unfolding of an answering chiastic pattern at the end, one half of the two-shot coda will seem immediately legible in light of this earlier nightmare assault. hat retroactively disclosed dream insert in the homestead episode—irst the oneiric mirage, then his writhing on the pillow—is reversed at the end by the transition from bed as shelter to an undefended onslaught of dream image. It happens this way. Ater Majid’s throat-cutting echo of the original barnyard treachery, Georges takes sleeping pills before crawling naked into bed in broad daylight, followed by—the cinematographic cues seem inescapable—another dreamscape from the same childhood POV. Or if this is that actual past in narrative rather than just subjective replay, the efect of its virtual return is nonetheless the same: the renewed possibility of what was, the way it (and the boy) may actually have gone. here, in extreme long shot, we see how the unwanted and betrayed stepbrother is, ater agonized resistance, inally driven of from his adopted home—either as this scene of exile is actually remembered from Georges” former stakeout at the back of the barn or as it is reconstructed in the unconscious of the drugged sleeper so as to match the traumatic POV earlier: a nightmare this time, in the ilm’s penultimate shot, of guilty witness stripped of threat. Yet the underlying nightmare of true vulnerability may in fact be what comes next and last with the prolonged closing shot, a diferent threat materialized. In Georges’ last words on the phone to Anne, before a routine “I love you too,” he asks her to tell their son, quite out of the blue, “not to be too hard on his old man” (not to wake him up when he comes home? not to resent him forever?). It’s this seemingly undermotivated (if overdetermined) line of dialogue that we may remember as the ilm’s last (and notoriously ambiguous) shot displaces the lashback image of exile with—what? Another dream scenario? his time not of a separation but of a bond forged. It is a shot notoriously hard to decipher just at

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the visual level, though still in the unlinching, ixed-frame geometry associated with the (now internalized?) surveillance camera. But there they are in any case, a little hard to spot at irst: Majid’s nameless son and Georges’ own Pierrot, talking together and then separating on the high school steps. A irst meeting? Ater the fact? Back before it all began? Or a conspiratorial debrieing? In any case, the patriarch’s worst fear, as almost halfexpressed to his wife on the phone moments before, may seem immediately to have come true—if with the vagueness of dream. Is this indeed a case of the sins of the father revenged by the sons? Have they been in cahoots all along? Or, that aside, is this the sure sign that Pierrot will be at least learning by hearsay about his father’s inglorious past—even if he doesn’t know it yet? Asked otherwise: Is this meeting of the next generation happening in real time, in parallel montage, in the same late aternoon in which Georges lies asleep? Or is the interracial rapport forged or recommitted to here meant, alternately, to represent Georges’ entirely subjective nightmare of the future, any day now: where a new hybrid society, racially leveled, will hold him forever responsible, have him always in the contemptuous sights of its ethical mind’s eye? In Haneke’s plotting—its mysteries of mediation inally lited, if only by default of all empirical solution—the guiding design remains clear enough. he cinematic act of ilming narrative surveillance has come down to no more, and no less, than ilm narrative itself in the present form of its relentless diagnostic optic. Ater so much dead-pan empirical record—transigured only in the eye of the beholder as incriminating tether to Georges’ past—one unmediated shot is pivotal. his, as we’ve seen, is the presumptively counterfactual shot (of Majid threatening Georges with the axe) that reorients the closing moments toward a zone of indiscernibility where the virtual (Deleuze) becomes the site of the ethical, and where repetition and stoppage (Agamben) won’t mutually delineate each other with any satisfying clarity. So it is that the movement-image is caught halfway in transit to the “timeimage,” locked into a kind of infernal return. Either Georges—as if drugged by truth-serum rather than sleeping pills—is remembering the wild plight of Majid at his connived exile, or he’s for the irst time imagining it, his guard down in sleep, with ethically opened eyes. And either the boys are meeting later (or earlier) in a broad and ixed-frame daylight, or this, too, is what Georges can now imagine only when the censor of consciousness is disengaged. Repetition and/or stoppage? Iteration or telos? he counterfactual is turned inside out in this two-ply conclusion: Where the far childhood past returns in the mode of

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the still possible (seen for the irst time as if becoming-again in the unabashed moral outline of a miserable wrong), the nearer present (the schoolyard coda and/or prequel) is lost somewhere between lashback and premonition, revelation and paranoia. By an unsourced provocation, the apparatus has been profaned (reduced from mass-media power to ad hoc provocation) in an ultimate service to this unmediated ethical apparition, where the powers of the false, however adjudicated, make immanent a virtual truth.

Image Sub Specie Mortis he counterfactual irruptions in Haneke’s latest ilm, Amour (2012), would seem to hew even more closely to Agamben’s combined sense of cinema as an analytic of gesture (and its arrests) as well as of caesura and its carry-overs. Two of these moments in Amour are overt fantasies, holes in time quickly bridged over; another an ambiguous hallucination pitched somewhere between audience and character; yet another, by contrast, so completely unpsychological that it has invaded montage itself as an alternate world space, unreal and two-dimensional, manifest in counterpoint to the narrative’s present desolation. Each of these sequences in one way or the other, in the virtuality of its inset, cuts to the quick of ilm’s own preconditions in a manifestation—concerning the theme of death—of the always merely potential. Haneke’s abiding topic is still violence, but this time not physical so much as biological, not the violence exploding at any moment within life, but the deinitive violence of life: its brutal foreclosure in death. As in his ilm from 2010, he White Ribbon (Das weiße Band) the white-on-black main titles have yielded momentarily, just before a launching shot, to a black screen. Whereas, in he White Ribbon, the image then gradually fades in, across a full ten seconds, to reveal the irst scene of intentional injury (the wire-tripping of a horse and rider), in Amour the violence is even more immediate—but entirely impersonal. Again the black screen—onto which, into which, from which explodes the irst abrupt, pounding image: of a double residential door, seen from our side, the inside, battered open by iremen with editing’s irst splice. A stench pervades the disclosed space, which in fact we now occupy and examine along with the moving camera. A corpse is found ceremonially laid out and already in decay, and the prologue—as chronological epilogue—is over almost as soon

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as it began. Besides spoiling any rudimentary “suspense” with life’s inevitable foregone conclusion, what this blunt, battering start has done—in something like the opposite of Caché’s opening video regress—is to trigger an immediate incorporation of the audience into the cinematic surround, recognized as such. When the lat blank of the screen turns out to be the far wall of an actual diegetic site, we are reminded that projection alone deines the very parameters of narrative space. Just sitting in wait, we’ve accepted that contract, however abrupt its enforcement this time out. Ater this the screen slices to black again. he ilm now seems starting over, with its title spelled out at last, the stripped bare Amour (beret of its requisite article in French) in immediate association with the lower-strewn body in the forgoing shot. Next, with our own spectator’s nerves set on edge, we cut to an onstage ixed-frame image of a group of spectators in a Paris theater, idgeting and chatting, latecomers taking their seats, then all settling down and looking just of center—screen right, stage let—toward the irst executed bars of a piano recital, all except one woman, noticeably called out by her undisciplined gaze, her roving eyes driting away from the unseen performer to stare straight, if itfully, into the camera. his of course lets us select her for our narrative attention: a igure otherwise unrecognizable from her own shriveled corpse in the preceding image—but returned to life now for a retrospective account of her decline. he interdict soon piped over the theater’s loudspeaker—no photography or videotaping allowed—seems structurally fulilled at one narrative remove, since this theater scene, truncated in mid performance, is over before we in Haneke’s audience ever catch a recorded glimpse, in reverse shot, of the stage or the pianist. All we get is the 35mm ilm thus begun: a ilm that records the staring woman herself with steady vigilance once she has returned with her husband to their apartment—and that pays mounting attention to her own unpredictable and implicating lines of sight. Agamben is not out to evoke the ield of cinematic “apparatus theory”—the space-constructing nature of the gaze via the cross-cuts and criss-crosses of narrative “suture”—when he speaks of ideological resistance as the “profanation of apparatuses.” But Haneke inds, in a motivated straining of said suture, his own profane ethics of implicature in our identiication with the dying woman and her appeal to mercy and remission, her call for death. In Amour, the marital protagonists have the same names as in Caché, Anne and Georges Laurent, but here to igure not the stereotype of the Bourgeois Couple so much as that of Every Person, she or he who must die. Ater the mortuary coda (as prologue) and the

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concert overture, in their reverse chronology, the plot charts the rapid arc of Anne’s decline. But it does so by what can seem like an eerie internalization of directorial technique itself. In Anne’s irst few symptomatic minutes of syncope or blackout at the kitchen table, it is as if she sufers from the principle of narrative ellipsis that Haneke so resolutely manipulates in his editorial style. Here, instead, such temporal violence seems internalized as a medical dysfunction: a tiny stroke and coma, a lacuna, a spell of oblivion. he ubiquitous ingredient of montage in the elliptical cut has penetrated into consciousness itself, as if the technique were sufering its own subjectiication. So it is that Anne drops away from self-presence in real time, there under Georges’ stare and questioning, just as she does—cinematographically rather than physiologically—when the scene changes to his hearing her turning of the faucet, down the hall and beyond the frame, that he has inadvertently let on in his rush to call the doctor. Tethered by that sound bridge to the subsequent shot of him fumbling into his street clothes, she is out of sight but not out of mind—while, moments before, she had been out of her own mind while still in sight. Only suture can retrieve her, as it does when Georges rushes back to her side to ask “what happened,” and, as enunciated in a baled countershot, she doesn’t understand what the “what” refers to. For her, it is nothing that has happened: a jump cut in duration itself. Ater Anne’s equally elliptical hospitalization and failed operation before her wheel-chaired return, another caesura in the diurnal tedium of the ilm’s waiting-for-death doesn’t just subtract consciousness from the actual but virtualizes it in the counterfactual. Here in Amour, as with the axe-attack nightmare in Caché, and with no sign at irst of a shit from actual to virtual time, Georges is threatened with asphyxiation by the wife he will eventually smother to death. Distracted by sounds in the apartment hall when he is brushing his teeth, he wanders out in pjamas to ind the elevator boarded up in disrepair—the oneiric impasse of no egress—and the hall looded, the latter recalling (by plausible dream logic) that faucet let running early on, but also anticipating (by sheer narrative premonition) the drenched bed of an incontinence that humiliates her shortly aterwards. As he wades through the soaked corridor, the shock efect of trick digital graphics shows him clutched from behind—almost a parody of slasher gothic, the kind of horror lick this horror ilm isn’t—by a detached right arm (Anne’s now paralyzed limb, symbol of her burden upon him), its hand covering his mouth, at which point he wakes panting for breath next to her. In Caché, as we’ve seen, the dream image of Majid terrorizing Georges with a bloody weapon anticipates not Georges’ death but the other man’s suicide. In

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Amour, the nightmare trauma also comes true in reverse, with its inal blockage of breath at the point of no-exit. his happens ater the only waking (rather than unconscious) violence of the ilm: not her hand laid on him, but his on her, when he almost involuntarily slaps her face ater she spits back at him the water with which he has tried to hydrate her. “If you don’t drink this you’ll die. Is that what you want?” he question is rhetorical; she has already said that life in her condition isn’t worth enduring. But in silent emphatic answer, we cut now from his leaning at her bedside, in a kind of half-proile shot, to her all but direct stare into the camera—her gaze as if passing through him to call on our own intuitive recognition as well. he suturing of the space between them, according to the classic protocols of editing, is pried apart just far enough to igure the ethical disjoin he now “faces”—whether or not to carry the violence of his afection one step beyond frustration to inal lenience, when that l’amour their daughter used to hear them making in that bedroom would return with an irreversible diference. Having later eased her toward sleep with a story of his own childhood illness, Georges suddenly reaches for a pillow and presses it down on her passive face: a nonerotic grappling that, in the ilm’s true title scene, lasts until her inal spasms abate. In building toward this moment of ferocity and peace, Haneke draws on the second of his two most striking formal innovations in he White Ribbon: not just the bracketed fades from and to black at the opening and closing of the plot, its disclosure of image visibility per se (Agamben) from within what it pictures (as we saw diferently manipulated by the syncopation of black leader in the disjunctive credits of Amour). Beyond the gapes of black, Haneke also returns to the previous ilm’s arrest of cinematographic sequence by narratively unmotivated ixed frame inserts. Under the shadow of pending death in both plots, these seized-up images intrude a syncopated medial register throwing the surrounding image system into relief. In he White Ribbon, indiscriminate episodes of human cruelty are interrupted by parallel landscape shots in diferent seasons, with these depopulated frames—against the drive of cyclical fruition—serving to reigure the pre-WWI narrative setting within the destiny of these same spaces, perhaps, as eventual killing ields.30 Equally salient and even more tactically distributed in Amour, full-frame paintings rather than freeze frames or inset natural photographs—imaginary landscapes in the romantic mode of salon painting—mark the looming inevitability of subtracted human presence. And they do so, in a parallelism like that of he White Ribbon, by echoing an early, clinically-paced montage of empty

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rooms before Anne returns from the hospital. hey do so, moreover, at the very moment when the eruption of physical violence between the couple—Georges slapping Anne’s face—makes inevitable the approaching yet still unspoken, still unspeakable, violence of suspended animation, cancelled animation, of which the pictures so lushly but chillingly speak. hat early montage of the apartment as a dossier of cinematographic still lifes involves, in anticipation, ive identically timed (six-second) shots of deserted rooms from various angles. Ordinarily the fading, frayed wallpaper and abraded paint of the comfortable but time-worn surfaces make them look as if they are stroked and shaded by painterly stippling and hatch-work rather than human wear and tear—as in the melancholy vacant interiors, and receding portals, of Danish artist Willhelm Hammershoi. But here, in our irst step-through of the apartment in crepuscular half light, the scenes appear like tableaux mourants. Answering to and compounding them later, then, are the six screenenguling planes of painting, some landscapes with igures, some without. But no real human life anywhere. Only the next time we see Anne in her bed, in a long-shot once her daughter has insisted on entering the sickroom, is the camera angle wide enough, and the shot held long enough, to conirm that the initial canvas in the series—with two women in a forested pastoral landscape— is in fact hanging over her bed. And one canvas is later disclosed when, for the irst time, we see the wall opposite—at the very moment Georges crosses in front of the picture for his last scene with Anne: a somber clif, a tiny pair of tiny human igures, and birds in light. Two more of the six eventually obtruded paintings can, if one works at it, be made out on far walls or tucked into the parlor bookcase. Two seem to go entirely missing from the household, at least as the camera inventories it. And that’s only if one is following its tracking shots with obsessive care in second or third viewing, ignoring the human action transpiring in front of these painted images. First time through, certainly, these climactically inset paintings are markedly generic. hey capture and displace a middle-class aesthetic ambience, not a private catalogue. he point isn’t to locate the paintings in the couple’s rooms, but to see what they orient us toward in their regrouping, what they themselves evacuate. hese landscapes are pictures, now, at which no one looks, the world not just withdrawn to its representation but removed from all human attention. Ater Anne’s slap in the face by Georges, they appear as imaging’s own recoil—as if, in their lattened interface, they mark the point-of-no-return at which the couple has arrived (though with no sense of their status as “subjective” shots;

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quite the opposite). Since it is known now for certain (they seem to say in their muteness) what must soon be done, here is its image: an image of a world without consciousness, of space without recognition. hese lush-it rectangles thus mark the dead end of screen plot in the rigor mortis of visualization itself. Passing too fast for immersion or contemplation, long enough only to register as composition, these images cancel the absorptive power of what Debray calls the mimetic graphosphere. If, in his formulation of the preceding logosphere, ancient idols hold us in the eye of the divine, and if sheer visualization in our current videosphere gives us images with no need of a situated spectator, in the reign of realist art, by contrast—poised between the supernatural and the virtual—graphic images install us as subjects by the sight lines of centric vanishing points (or later, though unmentioned by Debray, through the interplay of cinematic suture). Instead, here in Amour, painting is desubjectivized in its contrapuntal break with the realist movement-image harbored within cinema as a transitional art. Put otherwise, Amour has stepped back from the foregrounded videosphere of Caché to the missing link between classic art and screen realism, so that now the irruption of the purely graphic (as a prescient bridge to nescience) is at once a repetition and a stoppage of the screen image as such—an image whose situated gaze is removed here in almost allegorical anticipation of a death ontologically potential (that is, already present) in the planarity of scenic space itself. No suture is attempted from here out in Haneke’s ilm—not ater Anne’s delected appeal, past Georges’ gaze, into our focalized empathy. No suture feasible, what with its standard reciprocity of the “absent one” in the mutual anchoring of exchanged looks.31 From now on, in two remaining scenes, one before and one ater her death, Anne is only seen in two-shots with Georges; irst fading from consciousness on her sickbed, until smothered to death there, then posthumously materialized as if in a projection from Georges’ own mind’s eye, yet within whose fantastic ambit he too is stationed by our frame. See it this way: from the violence of the slapped face forward, as if edged out in transition by those six canvases, Anne is, in regard to the living look of recognition, already the absent one. And the space that such ocular interchange ordinarily delimits is, as marked by those serial paintings, no longer actual in its own right either, however real. Death stands forth as the virtualization of the world. To this end, that sixfold cascade of paintings, swallowing up the framing capacity of the camera, are not worlds elsewhere impinging as death draws near. hey are the death that is art. Eclipsing the cinematic image entirely for a

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moment, in a much retarded “frame”-advance of sheer quick cuts, the paintings ofer a parallel not just to the clockwork editing of the empty rooms earlier but to the personal photographs that Anne has insisted on perusing at one point. hose secondary images taken “from the life,” however, are also reframed for us by her POV. Farther into her decline, the artiicial landscapes are, instead, pictures at which no one looks. In their sudden serial punctuation of the ilm’s dwath drive, their rapid interchange, their very exchangeability, stands not for some private collection stripped from its dying owner, nor as an image of her own relics surviving her. Nor are these vistas installed as otherworlds to be led to, escapist fantasies, representations of some viable counterspace. heir montage, as noted, seems merely to comment on the planar image as such, from oil to photo emulsion, canvas to print or projected imprint—the image as itself a metaphor for lifelessness, the world inalized in its similitude. As it happens, Agamben’s essay on Debord mentions paintings as images lited from an always unseen (but ever potential) sequence: “stills from a ilm that is missing.”32 But the virtual space of these paintings in Amour seems rather the opposite: constructs of a space beyond time, actionless and unilmable, Deleuzian “time-images” only in the mode of arrest rather than alterity—the virtual as the eviscerated. Further, in Debray’s terms, these picturings have been backed out of the graphosphere’s constructed gaze to a proleptic irony of the desubjectivized image under the regime of the sheerly medial: pictures of a world receded so far into sheer virtuality as to have let relection itself behind. Varying the terms of art historian T. J. Clark’s great work on the ethical equipoise of Poussin’s art in the treatment of mortal fear, what we have here is not the sight of death so much as the death of sight.33 Nonetheless, Haneke’s decision to interrupt the mostly unappeased rigors of his realist camerawork, not just with the subjective wrench of nightmare, but with the rank artiice of painting, has a way (to put it again in Agamben’s terms) of making imaging visible in what it images. In so doing, this otherwise jarring efect prepares us for the inal counterfactual episode in a ilm elegiac right from the start, retroactive, already fated. What we see in the end, as the end, is the wish-fulillment image of Georges’ own release, perhaps. For ater the surviving spouse has sealed up the scene of his crime d’amour with duct tape to contain the odor and keep Anne’s body near him for as long as possible, there is another audial rhyme with the narrative’s irst point of crisis. Once, so long ago now, he knew she had come out of her momentary trance when he hears the water in the sink suddenly silenced. he comatose moment has snapped; Anne is back

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in action. Now, in compensation for the irreversible loss his wanted violence has sped along, he imagines her domestic presence again from the turning on of the same ofscreen faucet. We have been somewhat prepared, though not quite, for such a consuming subjective vantage on his part. Once before, long ater Anne has become a bedridden invalid, we have seen her earlier self playing the grand piano in their parlor. Cut to Georges—across time and the same room—turning the recorded music of, leaving us unclear about whether he was summoning her image, in the mode of illusion, or just remembering her. In that later and inal hallucination, however, the mirage is certiied as actively his own, rather than the narrative’s alone. Just as she was virtually there at the keyboard, next door to her bedridden self, so also is she virtually there ater her death. And this time he recognizes the apparition with full astonishment. Ater the sound cue from the kitchen sink, Georges drags himself up from his lone bed and limps into the kitchen with a stunned look, taking his place within a shot that foregrounds his wife, not dead, just “almost done”—washing the last of the dishes before joining him in getting on their coats and street shoes for departure, in the same hallway where we had seen them return from the concert at the start. Coming full circle, this answering shot has opened both a closural loophole and a void. he counterfactual is the virtual, not the supernatural. For what marks this “vision” of the dead as a mental projection rather than an advent of reparative magic—an uncanny mitigation rather than a ghost—is the fact that the deepfocus closeup of Anne, with Georges’ astonished igure in the background, is in fact only deeply, not closely, focused. In its forward ield, her face and raised uncrippled arm appear just slightly out of registration: hazed as if by projected desire, estranged by its own optic as if to confess it as just a mental representation with no rounded body actually there, merely an image as such, hence a igment. It’s the only such sot-focus shot I can remember in all the clinically crisp cinematography of Haneke’s work. It is not, in short, of the same world as the rest of the ilm. As she moves away and into normal focus in the middle distance and they leave together, there is no reason to take this impossible episode as either his death-moment fantasy or a posthumous mirage of reunion. It is just what it is: an image of a separation not entirely inal. If it raises the question “Does he die?” there is only one answer: of course he does. And ater this enigmatic exit route from his bereaved solitude (Gone to his rapid death, like so many widowers? Gone to the authorities and under questioning for manslaughter? Wandered of in confusion? Taken his own

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life as well? Forced simply to leave behind a space no longer tolerable when unshared?), there is only the daughter’s return to the empty apartment—at some indeterminate time later, doubly orphaned by now perhaps, certainly beret, and met there by the same quick-cut shunt between deserted rooms that has replaced an ofscreen sequence of failed medical intervention with sheer proleptic emptiness early on. Before Haneke cuts again to black and thus, answering to the inaugural break-in, robs the apartment of all ambient light, the daughter is caught seated in a framed recess, a depleted Vermeer, staring let toward the windows, unseen now, through which she had previously and repeatedly looked away from her father’s pain and anger. She has returned, that is, to the emptied pictorial space of that post-hospital montage, to rooms already denuded of life. And this last image of a ixed-frame painterly space succeeds not to actual painted rectangles this time but back to the rectangular black screen from which plot executed its initial forced entry. For a long moment, though, her afectless stasis within all this visible absence gives us some irst reaction time for our own making sense of the preceding scene. It may well be that Georges leaving with the specter of his mercifully slain wife performs, by reiguring, what must in one sense be true: its being over for him, too, with her going. Exeunt. Ater the daughter’s return to the apartment, the inal cut to black is now later in time than the one which propelled us across the title into the opening concert: ofering now the kind of absolute closure that retrieves (in the form of the same-but-diferent) the no-longer possible of a past which, as lashback, was once returned to us saturated by its own bleak potential. Any idea of remorse, rather than mourning, is excluded early on. About her illness itself at its onset, rather than her end at his hands, Anne suggests, with no context or preparation, that he shouldn’t feel guilty—and he insists that he doesn’t; and, as far as the ilm is concerned, won’t. Guilt festered by passive suppression in Caché, guilt exceeded and erased by necessary action in Amour: repetition with a diference. Whereas at a narrative scale—in the “stoppage” of closure impacted in both cases by “repetition” and its returns—the one ilm leaves Georges locked in the purgatorial virtuality of potential pasts and/or potential futures, the other alleviates a diferent Georges as well as a diferent temporality—both by virtual igment and by black-out—so as to spare him the limbo of the uninished. In considering that inaugural blackness cracked open to image in Amour, including the blank to which the planar space soon succeeds (releasing the

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delayed title), and this only before raising an unseen curtain on the lashback theater scene, one recalls not only Agamben’s citing of Debord on cinema in its reduction to the antimony of black versus white screens, but also Deleuze on the power of thought in the negated image, where blackness is one of the moments when cinema becomes philosophical in default of the optical.34 Neither Debord nor Agamben is referring, of course, any more than is Deleuze, to the black bar between the backlit photograms spooling by the projector lamp, nor to the licker efect that results. None takes this on, nor sees it pertinently taken up into the modular energies of montage itself. Agamben, in particular, evokes instead a binary alternaton between, in a igurative more than technical sense, a total blanching overload of projected images or their total pitch-black absence, quoting as example the opening of a Debord ilm: “I have shown that the cinema can be reduced to this white screen, then this black screen.”35 For Agamben, speaking rather loosely though he is, this represents “precisely” his own mantra of “repetition and stoppage.”36 In saying as much, he assumes Debord to mean the alternate poles of maximized light (all images iterated at once, the sheer image of imaging even in the eclipse thereof) versus its cancellation; or, in other words, “the ground where the images are so present that they can no longer be seen, and the void where there is no image.”37 But there are more alternations, other polarities of a diferent scale, that barely seem dreamt of—and certainly not consciously formulated—in Agamben’s philosophy. Attention has, in all this, drited very far from celluloid materiality itself— from ilmic mediality—when simply taken up within a Situationist call to stop the whole commerce in images: experimental cinema operating as its own scourge of passive vision. With its caesurae a matter of rupture and resistance, cinema is valorized in that narrow sense, in Agamben’s view of Debord, mainly as a machine for bringing to active light the essential unreality at the back of all crass image. Attending to a productive friction between image generation and its narrative depictions, however, Deleuze is getting closer to the underlay of ilmic process when he imagines absence per se (black leader) as a node of, or at least prompt to, philosophical deliberation. Haneke too—especially when he shows how, via the absence of the transitional cut itself, mere pictures in a row don’t a gesture, don’t a motion, don’t a movie, make. Certainly repetition and stoppage take on their due narrative weight in Amour—capped by ixed-frame stasis and the plunge to black—assuming their full charge as igures for (not pictures of) the double evacuation, diegetic and narrative both, that they so implacably clock.

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No current narrative ilmmaker gravitates as demandingly as Haneke to cinema as “a prolonged hesitation between image and meaning.”38 He achieves in the process one version of Agamben’s resistant image, the image that refuses “disappearing into what it makes visible.”39 Perhaps nowhere more powerfully in recent cinema has the full panoply of the virtual image, in particular, been plumbed to such a depth. In the case of Amour, the pressure this exerts turns an entire ilm, its own ellipses and syncopes included, its own motor paralyzes, to one encompassing trope. Recalling the ontological premise in Agamben’s “On Potential,” to the efect that being can only be apprehended as harboring the possibility not-to-be, Haneke’s Amour materializes its own images as a cumulative passing into the having-been.40 Where narrative cinema is ordinarily the very picture of virtual life, a becoming-again of recorded duration as time present, Haneke probes instead to its more unnerving potential: the potential for an absolute absence to be made manifest, made present, within the screen rectangle. Somewhere between the imminent and the immanent—as marked, for instance, by those frame-swallowing landscapes—the inevitable, the fatal, if we may phrase it in Agamben’s own mode of paradox, arrives in wait. Call it the paradox of a subjectivity removed in full view. he whole pattern of Haneke’s montage points in this direction, and hence in on itself. In the ilm’s intricate and overlapping play between the counterfactual and the virtual, the illusory and the pictorial, the photographic and the painterly, the static or empty image and the cancelled one, death makes its unmistakable appearance in plane sight.

Notes 1 I am bringing into comparison here Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: he Time–Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), with two essays in particular by Agamben, irst “Diference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films” (1995), in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 313–19, and then the earlier “Notes on Gesture” (1992), in Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso 2007),149–56. Agamben also closes Profanations (Brooklyn, NY: Zone, 2007), trans. Jef Fort, with a two-page chapter, 93–4, on a moment of screen-slashing heroic misrecognition by Don Quixote in Orson Welles’ he Chimes at Midnight, which,

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though unremarked in this sense, might entail a literalizing in-joke on cutting (caesura or “l’arrêt”) as the frequent means of rescue in cinematic crisis. Some of the material from the essay on Debord, in precisely its emphasis on “la répétition et l’arrêt”, appears elsewhere, in the same year, in a short piece for Le Monde entitled “Face au cinéma et à l’Histoire, à propos de Jean-Luc Godard”, October 16, 1995. Giorgio Agamben, “Diference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films”, trans. Brian Holmes, in Guy Debord and the Situationist International, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 315, 316–17. his lone (and highly dubious) demurral from Bergson’s clarity about ilm as a photographic motorization is discussed in my Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 86–9. I return to the question, via the work of Mary Ann Doane, in Framed Time: Toward a Postilmic Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 13–14. See above, Between Film and Screen, esp. Ch. 7, “Modernism and the Flicker Efect”, 265–324. Agamben, “Diference”, 316. As I will be distilling it, the core of Agamben’s argument appears under the title “On Potentiality”, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 177–84. On the literary side of the issue, see especially he End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). In “Gestural Cinema?: Giorgio Agamben on Film”, Film–Philosophy Vol. 8, No. 22 (July 2004), 1–11, Benjamin Noys ofers a summarizing overview of Agamben’s two ilm essays. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: he Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography”, in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 203. I investigate Benjamin’s “optical unconscious”, along with Rosalind Krauss’s borrowing of his phrase for the title—and sponsoring logic—of her book on the modernist image, in Between Film and Screen, 111–15. On the classic estrangement device of the freeze frame, see Ch. 3, “Frames of Reference”, Between Film and Screen, 117–50. his axiomatic sense of the virtual as being opposed to the actual, but not to the real, is developed by Deleuze in Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1991), 96–8, and recurs to explain facets of the “crystal image” throughout his second cinema volume. Agamben, “Diference”, 316.

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Cinema and Agamben Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. he distinction between “primary” and “secondary” in this case is derived from that of Christian Metz in “Identiication with the Camera”, he Imaginary Signiier, trans. Celia Britton, Annywl Williams (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), 49–52. Ibid., 318. See Régis Debray, “he hree Ages of Looking”, trans. Eric Rauth, Critical Inquiry 21 (Spring 1995), esp. 532, 550. he tripartite division being also rephrased—with particular relevance for a Deleuzian approach—as “the supernatural, the natural, and the virtual”, 538 (Emphasis in the original). Ibid., 536. Ibid., 551. Ibid. See Ch. 6 in Deleuze’s Cinema 2: he Time–Image, “he Powers of the False”, where in passing from “a kinetic regime” to “a chronic regime” (126), one reaches a point where “the virtual, for its part, detaches itself from its actualizations, starts to be valid for itself ” (127), and where “the real and the imaginary […] chase each other, exchange their roles and become indiscernible” (127). My emphasis in thinking about the “indiscernibility” of this frame structure is thus based on the Deleuzian “virtual” in regard to the elapsed narrative function (in the vocabulary of his ilm books) rather than on the “becoming–animal” of its ambiguous diegesis. he latter is, of course, a main theme of Deleuze’s collaborative work with Felix Guattari and is given primary stress in an article on the novel he Life of Pi that doesn’t enlist Deleuzian terms to address the retroactive equivocation of the main narrative. See Eva Aldea, “Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2002): Becoming Non–Human at Sea”, in her Magical Realism and Deleuze: he Indiscernibility of Diference in Postcolonial Literature (London: Continuum, 2011), 78–86. It is worth noting here that the novel involves only the investigative interview frame, not the encircling conversation with the iction writer eager to syphon of its narrative energy. Contributing to the Deleuzian “indiscernibility” of the video inserts is the fact that Haneke departed from his typical 35 mm practice to ilm the whole narrative in high-deinition video, thus shrinking the gap between our ilm and the mysterious videotapes embedded by and oten coterminous with it. Agamben, “Diference”, 319. On the diference between irst- and second-degree alignments, with narrative and character respectively, see Christian Metz, “Identiication with the Camera”,

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he Imaginary Signiier, trans. Celia Britton, Annywl Williams (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), 49–52. Giorgio Agamben, What Is An Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 24, where this “profanation”, this “restitution to common use”, must operate in the face of acknowledged odds: “While a new European norm imposes biometric apparatuses on all its citizens by developing and perfecting anthropometric technologies invented in the nineteenth century in order to identify recidivist criminals (from mug shots to ingerprinting), surveillance by means of video cameras transforms the public space of the city into the interior of an immense prison” (23). See my discussion of these ocular arrests in “Prewar Trauma: Haneke’s he White Ribbon”, Film Quarterly 63.4 (Summer 2010), 40–7. Brought forward at such moments are serene pastoral images that hold within them, we may say, the terrible possibility of being otherwise. On the interchange of absent looking across the sightlines of the shot/countershot pattern see the classic position paper by Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Cinema and Suture”, he Symptom: Online Journal for Lacan. Com; http://www.lacan.com/symptom8_ articles/oudart8.html [unpaginated, accessed August 26, 2013] his text was published in French in Cahiers du Cinéma 211 and 212, April and May 1969, its English version (trans. Kari Hanet) appearing almost a decade later in Screen 18, Winter 1978. Agamben, “Diference”, 314. I allude to T. J. Clark, he Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). According to Deleuze, in his unacknowledged updating of Hugo Münsterberg’s mentalist thesis about cinema, the overt edit and the marked bridge—when detached from the rational montage of a sheer sensory-motor continuum—are, along with the wholly blank screen, the three indices of cinema as thought. It is thus “the point-cut, relinkage and the black or white screen” that, comprising the three purely “cerebral components” of cinema, form together a whole “noosphere.” See Deleuze, Cinema 2: he Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 215. Agamben, “Diference”, 317. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 318. Given the determination by negative potential of an entire narrative arc, perhaps the fullest example of Agamben’s thinking—by which the enacted possibility of not

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Cinema and Agamben being, not acting, must be asserted as primary to any idea of doing or becoming— appears in “Bartleby, or on Contingency”, the closing chapter of Potentialities: Collected Essays on Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 243–74.

9

Montage and the Dark Margin of the Archive Trond Lundemo

he witness he testimony, and its forensic value in juridical processes as well as its validity in historiography, depends on its human agent, the witness, and his or her personal memories of an event in history. hese memories must be of an event experienced irst-hand, and not through the most common means for the constitution of memories, a medium. No testimony can lay claim on the truth of an event by saying that it was seen on TV or heard on the radio. he testimony is instead the material transmitted by ilm, TV, books and radio to those who were not physically present at an event, the non-witnesses. he testimony thus functions to distinguish the human witness from technology, the raw and unmediated experience from the one mediated. In testimony, only human memory conveys accountability, relection and reason, while technical forms of memory are understood as static and sterile, only as a form of mechanical registration without cognition. his dichotomy is widespread in philosophy and replayed in many forms, from Hegel’s distinction between static Gedächtnis and dynamic Erninnerung to the Turing test and issues of Artiicial Intelligence in the computer age. he privilege accorded to the human witness over technical mediation could be traced back through Western culture to the image interdictions of the Old Testament, at least. Moreover, the issue at stake is the integrity of the human subject, the in-dividual, that today more than ever requires a separation from its technical surroundings to be understood in its pure form. If human memory were subject to mediations, the medium—the in-between—would potentially corrupt the purity of human experience and memory as it always conveys selections, noise and limitations of range and temporal duration. his position

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resembles that of early discourses on cinema as an art form, where any medium too close to mechanical inscription was excluded from the system of the arts because it limited, or sometimes was believed to exclude, human agency. However, as we have learned in very diferent ways from Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Kittler, language is a technology, too. Statements are made within a system deining what can be said at a certain time, the techniques of alphabetization and the writing tools are “taking part in our thinking”1 (Nietzsche), and there is always a technical supplement to thinking and remembering. In theory, this is hardly controversial, but language still persists as a more im-mediate, transparent and human medium of expression in culture. he testimony is qualiied by the very medium that constitutes the integrity of the witness, as language is commonly received as the primary medium of memory and expression. From the religious confession to the talking cure of psychoanalysis and the witness reports of news media, the spoken word is invested with an authenticity and immediacy that relegates sound recordings and photography to a secondary status in the description of an event. In very general terms, in Western culture truth is invested in the word. he reason for this is that subjective experience is associated with language, and its function of saying “I.” his function cannot be distinguished in other media. he aporetic point of this question of the role of human memory and agency in its relation to technology is the Shoah, where the debate on the role of the testimony versus mechanical inscription and storage keeps stirring controversies today. he quintessential witness remains the witness to the mass exterminations at the camps of the hird Reich. he unique position of this event for the role of the testimony is of course due to the atrocity of the industrialization of death, making it a deining moment for European culture as well as for the question of what a human is. It is also a moment when one asks what art is, as Adorno’s famous question of the possibility of art ater Auschwitz shows. Another reason for the unique position of the Shoah for the testimony is its media set-up. here were no photographs or ilms of the extermination camps transmitted to a wider public during their operation, and even the footage of the Musulmen and the mass graves shot at the time of the liberation of the camps was kept from wider distribution until the mid–1950s and Alain Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard (1955). his quasi-invisibility of the camps has contributed to making it the topos where the question of the role of the testimony in relation to the function of archival images has been posed most acutely. he unique position of the testimony of the extermination camps sets the conditions for

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the testimony of almost any other event, and with it, the coniguration between human and non-human memory, between recollection and the archive. he role of the witness of the Shoah deines the standards for human memorial agency contrasted with technical agency. In Remnants of Auschwitz: he Witness and the Archive, Giorgio Agamben analyzes the conditions of the testimony and the position of the witness of the Shoah.2 his is the point of the debate where Agamben intervenes with an analysis of the testimony as incomplete, something producing a remnant, which cannot be included in the integrity of the witness. he true witness is the one who cannot testify, the one who didn’t survive to tell about his experiences. In this sense, the testimony contains a lacuna. Agamben quotes Primo Levi, the witness who has perhaps most insistently relected upon his own role in this position: “here is another lacuna in every testimony: witnesses are by deinition survivors and so all, to some degree, enjoyed a privilege. […] No one has told the destiny of the common prisoner, since it was not materially possible for him to survive. […] We speak in their stead, by proxy.”3 his leaves the position of the testimony as a remnant, and the only true witness of the Shoah is the one who cannot testify, because the experience of Auschwitz is death itself. he integral witness is the one who has experienced the threshold between life and death, the one who has let human life, and who consequently is unable to testify as a human. he witness cannot simply testify in another’s place, by delegation, because he testiies to a missing testimony. “Whoever assumes the charge of bearing witness in their name [the Musulmen, the dead] knows that he or she must bear witness in the name of the impossibility of bearing witness.”4 his paradox instigates a lacuna within the position of the witness itself, and which in the end is a division between the human and the non-human, the living and the dead. he lacuna of the testimony is inally also a remnant of the subject itself.5 Agamben’s intervention approaches the testimony in discursive terms. If the subjectivity of the witness is constructed and maintained by language, this is also where the unity and integrity of the subject is undermined in Agamben’s philosophy. he “I” of the statement of the witness is a pure function of language, and not the representation of a substance in the world.6 Departing from Foucault’s theory of the archive, Agamben deines the archive as “the mass of the non-semantic inscribed in every meaningful discourse as a function of its enunciation, it is the dark margin encircling and limiting every concrete act of speech.”7 Foucault identiied the role of discursive and technical conditions

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for what is sayable and imaginable, in short doable, at a certain time in history. hese conditions also “distribute the sensible” in Jacques Rancière’s sense, by deining who has a voice and who is visible, as opposed to those who remain silent and invisible.8 Agamben draws on Foucault’s “thinking from the outside” (“pensée du dehors”) when he analyzes the possibility of the testimony of an original event.9 he testimony is neither produced by the transcendental interiority of a witnessing subject nor within a pre-established language system, but by the “taking place” of language through statements, the outside of language. It is a result of the system of relations between what is said and what is unsayable, possible and impossible, in any statement. he testimony is formed between the inside and the outside of language.10 he dark margin encircling every testimony doesn’t render it null and void, a position that would border on revisionism. On the contrary, besides deriving the idea of a lacuna in the role of the testimony from Levi’s writings, Agamben also devotes the inal passages of his book to quotes from testimonies of people who have actually experienced this threshold between life and death, from surviving “Musulmen,” who are potentially integral witnesses.11 Most importantly, Agamben strongly criticizes the tendency to refer to the Shoah as the “unutterable,” that of which one cannot speak because it would always conlate the horrors of the camps, and aligns this position with that of the architects of the exterminations themselves, who claimed that no one would be able to bring testimony about the camps.12 Rather than advocating the negative theology of silence and invisibility, Agamben challenges the distinction between the human experience from the inside versus from the outside, and shows that the testimony opens up an aporetic question concerning the integrity of the human subject as a witness, in short of processes of subjectivization themselves. Agamben thus undermines the stable identity of the testifying subject accounting for irst-hand experiences by analyzing the functions of language regulating signifying practices and functions. He shows that language is not a neutral technology conveying subjective experience, and consequently challenges the primacy of verbal and written testimony. his prompts the basic question if still and moving photographic images can serve as testimonies in the same way as language. However, such a question risks reintroducing the absolute and stable notion of the subject that Agamben questions. he photographer or the ilmmaker would then take the position of the integral witness who has captured the truth of an event at the right time and place. Even if ilm and art theory has been only too ready to incorporate such concepts of

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authenticity and authorial control, in “auteur” theory for instance, the technological determinations of the medium have always prohibited the idea of ilm and photography as neutral expressions of human experience. Already the short history of the media, and the many historical shits in technology, as the ones from black and white to color, from silent to sound in cinema, from two to three dimensions and of course from analog to digital, discards the idea of a neutral channel of communication. Even if “the myth of total cinema”13 (Bazin), and later computer interfaces as “post-symbolic communication”14 (Lanier), have been pervasive ideas supporting the inception and popular dissemination of the media, technical recordings of sound and image have never challenged the primacy of language as the medium of the witness. hese recordings may have strong forensic value, and ilm was notably given this role in connection with the Shoah in the Nuremburg trials, but they do not convey the prescribed subjectivity of the testimony. Our question should for this reason be more modest, and ask if there is a “dark margin” to ilm and photography, and if so, how it is constituted. If Agamben’s concept of the archive, just as Foucault’s theoretical concept on which he builds his argument, is in this case limited to speech and texts, how would it function for the photographic media? How does Agamben’s paradox of the witness relate to other technologies? Can the image convey the lacuna of the testimony, the very same lacuna connected to the signature and the author that has forever prohibited ilm’s position as a witness? hese questions may probe the media speciicity of the testimony and its role in the archive. he “dark margin” of the archive could be seen as a potential for resistance against the mnemotechnics around us. People think and remember according to the governing dispositifs at any time and context, but if every archive has a dark margin, an alternative to the archival memory techniques could be derived from there.15 I will not devote attention to Agamben’s discussion of the camp as a biopolitical regime, spilling into other venues and connecting to the permanent state of exception of contemporary society. Neither will I address the concepts of bios and zoë informing the Homo Sacer works, of which Remnants of Auschwitz is part. Rather, the “dark margin” of the archive, regulating what can be said, and by extension, seen and heard, at a given time, is a fruitful concept for addressing the role of the archival image for the understanding of the Shoah. As shown by Harun Farocki in Bilder der Welt und Inschrit des Krieges (1987), the images of the camps drawn by the hand of the prisoner Alfred Kantor may border on the testimony because they are traces of the human, and thus seem to convey the

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relection and understanding of the events by a human agent. Images produced by the technical media of ilm and photography do not seem to convey subjectivity, however. So what is the use in looking for a lacuna in the witnessing subject in media allegedly devoid of subjectivity? he issue in the case of ilm and photography is no longer to deconstruct the subject “behind” the image, but to address the concept of the historical understanding of an event through images. he epistemological dimensions of ilm and photography are oten connected to questions of montage.

he image Agamben’s discursive focus on the testimony and the witness stands in contrast to the remnants of Auschwitz according to Georges Didi-Huberman.16 In L”image malgré tout and in other texts, he argues against an interdiction of the archival image of the Shoah.17 Summing up a long debate centered around ilms like Nuit et brouillard and Shoah (Claude Lanzmann 1985) as well as an exhibition curated by Didi-Huberman, Mémoire des camps (2001), he argues that the archival images of the camps can add to, rather than detract from, the understanding of the events. Didi-Huberman refutes the principle that only the written or oral testimony can account for a comprehensive understanding of the Shoah. he testimony is in this perspective contrasted by the archival image, which is traditionally seen as devoid of epistemological qualities and only detracts attention from the essence of the experience of the Shoah. As Didi-Huberman points out, much of this opposition stems from the critique of the archival image for not rendering “all” of the event. While the testimony incorporates a human subject’s relection and memory, the image is only seen as a section of space and time, a static representation of a fragment of the Shoah. his is the background against which Didi-Huberman evokes Agamben’s criticism of the notion of the “unsayable” of the Shoah.18 However, if he argues that the idea of Auschwitz as “unsayable” is aligned with the position of the perpetrators, Agamben seems to accept that it is invisible.19 Didi-Huberman instead argues that photographic images must be seen as testimonies: We must do with the image, with theoretical rigor, what we already have done with language, which is easier (Foucault has helped us). Because in every testimonial production, in every act of memory, the two – language and image – are

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absolutely solidary, always exchanging their reciprocal lacunas: an image oten comes where a word seems to be missing, a word oten comes where imagination fails. he “truth” of Auschwitz, if the expression makes any sense, is neither more nor less unimaginable than it is unsayable.20

Didi-Huberman’s discussion centers around four photographs from the crematorium IV in Auschwitz, taken by members of the Sonderkommando of the camp in August 1944. he Polish resistance movement had succeeded in smuggling in a camera with some ilm in it, which a few members of the Sonderkommando were able to use for taking photographs of their task, clearing out the gas chambers and throwing the bodies in mass graves. he four surviving photos, taken from inside the crematorium depicting the incineration of the bodies on the outside as well as the arrival of a new group of victims, were smuggled out of the camp in a tube of toothpaste. Didi-Huberman argues that these images add to our historical knowledge of the atrocities of the Shoah, and that they deserve to be “read” as testimonies on a par with oral and written ones. Even if the photographer is unknown (only his forename Alex is rendered) Didi-Huberman takes care to narrate the situation in which the photos were taken through a description of the movements of the photographer based on the four photos and the duration of the undertaking.21 his way Didi-Huberman invests these photos with a human agent behind them in order to make them pass as a testimony. Didi-Huberman proceeds to show that any testimony is necessarily fragmented, a section of the event. he photos are reproduced together with the written instructions for their development and where they were taken. he photos are thus further validated as testimonials through their investment in the handwritten message. he connections made not only between the photos in time through a reconstructed trajectory of movement, but also through their embedment in writing, are typical of the process of construction of historical knowledge, Didi-Huberman claims. In order to construct an understanding of an event, one needs to make a montage. A montage in this epistemological sense includes all media of the archive, going from the written testimony to the image and to other accounts and documents. It is in the juxtaposition between statements, between images, and between words and images one can show more than what is said or seen. hese connections and intersections have always been at the center of attention of montage in ilm theory and practice. Why does the image only detract from understanding, and why would many voices of the debate see any existing image of the Shoah as harmful? In

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his discussion of this question, Didi-Huberman returns to the debate encircling Lanzmann’s Shoah, and the ilm’s abstention from the use of any archival images. Lanzmann sides with the view of the oral testimony as the exclusive entrance to the understanding of the Shoah, and sees his ilm as the ultimate work on the event as it only contains the accounts of witnesses of the camps. Of course, in his embracement of the monotheistic principle of the word as the only gateway to knowledge, Lanzmann seems to forget that his ilm still consists of images, and at its duration of almost ten hours at twenty-four frames a second, an excessive number of them (more than 800,000). Lanzmann is not only interviewing witnesses, he also records their gestures as they speak and revisit the places of the Shoah. His refusal of the visual concerns only archival images, and he claims that if he had discovered a ilm depicting the activities of the extermination camps, he would have burned it. He also refused to have his ilm shown at a cinema screening it together with Nuit et brouillard, because Resnais’ ilm included archival images from the extermination camps. Interestingly, this also conveys a refusal of the ilm’s commentary written by the camp survivor Jean Cayrol. According to this view, the image doesn’t only detract from the understanding of an event, it also seems to corrupt the word of the testimony. Didi-Huberman is right to point out that montage is the core of the matter. Lanzmann’s Shoah relies on the juxtapositions of images of landscapes at the sites of the exterminations and witnesses” testimonies, just as Cayrol’s voiceover in Nuit et brouillard enters into a relationship with the places ilmed in 1955 and with the archival footage from the camps. Yet the position of Lanzmann only develops the role of the single image or shot when any ilm is a work of montage. here are, however, multiple methods of montage. Didi-Huberman’s concept of montage is a very general one, where the historian’s navigation between documents in archival research is aligned with the continuity established between the four photographs from crematorium IV in Auschwitz. his analogy is further strained when he draws on Jean-Luc Godard’s epistemology of montage as it is presented in his Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98).22 While the archival image alone constitutes a document of historical knowledge in Didi-Huberman’s discussion, even if it is always forming a part of this knowledge through juxtaposition and connections, for Godard the single image, still or moving, is not yet history.

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Montage and history Godard has recurrently given an example of the contrast between the historical document and history as montage. Cinema’s historical ethical bankruptcy consisted in failing at its hour of truth: the Shoah.23 here was no image of the atrocities of the extermination camps at the time of the Second World War, because there was no montage making them visible. his contrasts the shot as a document of the past with cinema as history, because there were many shots of the mass graves and the Musulmen of the camps ater the liberation, and Godard knows this well as he employs them frequently in Histoire(s) du cinéma, as well as in Notre Musique (2005) and De l’origine du XXIe siècle (2006). In Godard’s concept of montage, there is always a moment in history, a rupture in time, at the center. his moment is a caesura eluding visibility, like the example of the Shoah, and needs to be worked out through montage. Montage is for this reason a dimension cinema never fully attained, at least not at the right time, and remains a potential that it never reached, “a blocked caterpiller that never turns into a butterly.”24 his unrealized potential of montage is connected to the major trope of the end of cinema, which is also the end of the arts, in Godard’s concept of history. History requires the “right” montage at the right time, and cinema has not always been able to provide it. his idea indicates that Godard is concerned with a very speciic concept of montage and history beyond the photographic document or the pieces of a puzzle. he principle of this visual description is presented at the opening of part 2a, Seule le cinéma of Histoire(s) du cinéma: “To make a precise description of that which has not taken place is the work of the historian.” (“Faire une déscription précise de ce qui n’a eu lieu est le travail de l’historien.”) It would be a misunderstanding to interpret this quote as a statement saying that historians should devote themselves to iction, and with Godard’s prime example of the Shoah in mind, it would potentially lead to revisionism. Godard treats history as an airmative force, even when it is not produced in an absolute and eternal way. Cinema is even endowed with speciic properties for producing the past through its access to montage and projections. he emphasis in the quote above should rather be on the “lieu,” the place. he point of rupture in history has not “taken place” in the sense that it has not been captured visually, or taken place as an image, so it needs to be described through other visual techniques. his moment can only be elaborated as a montage coniguration that is necessarily in movement, ephemerous and transient. Didi-Huberman is well aware of this

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concept of montage in Godard’s work, subscribing to the principle that what isn’t seen must be shown, but his reading of the photos from the Auschwitz crematorium as testimonies undermines the speciicity of the principle of montage. Didi-Huberman relies on Godard to argue that archival images form montages, showing what cannot be seen. But this task requires more than just the random navigation between documents in the archive, or between links on the Internet. A montage, in its epistemological sense, is something rare. he dispositifs of cinema, because there are clearly multiple ones, are epistemic tools for producing the past. hrough its capacity for montage, cinema may work out the blind spots of history—its points of rupture—visually. hese ruptures are not emphasized as the causes of later developments, as in a traditional historical narrative, but rather constitute the points of interrogation themselves in Godard’s work. hey are not immediately visible, but need to be excavated through the right form of juxtapositions and superimpositions, in short through montage. his is the sense in which Godard understands montage as a historiographical means, which far exceeds the simple analogies or causal chains of events dominating historical enunciations in most texts and ilms. he historical point of rupture is neither the generator nor explanation for a development. Agamben identiies very well how Godard’s montage serves to work out these ruptures through repetitions and stops: Apparently, the images Godard shows us are images of images extracted from other ilms. But they acquire the capacity to show themselves qua images. hey are no longer images of something about which one must immediately recount a meaning, narrative or otherwise. hey exhibit themselves as images. he true messianic power is this power to give the image to this “imagelessness,” which, as Benjamin said, is the refuge of every image.25

By subjecting the image to the invisible that encircles it, montage creates a “form that thinks,” as Godard claims in Chapter 3A: La Monnaie de l’absolu of Historie(s) du cinéma. Godard’s political project is to make these moments of rupture visible, to provide them with a countershot. Only in the intervals between images, in their juxtaposition, does history become visible. Godard’s famous iconophilia, criticized by Jacques Rancière and defended by Georges Didi-Huberman, among many others, depends on making visible what has only been verbally described or narrated.26 His use of an excerpt from Lanzmann’s Shoah is perhaps indicative of the technique, as well as of the strongly visual impact of the almost ten-hour ilm. An old witness to the passage of the

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deportation trains reenacts the gesture of passing the hand over the throat used by him and his neighbors to comment on the prisoners’ imminent death. his shot is arguably the most quoted and “remembered” shot of Shoah, making it a kind of archival stock footage of the history of the Second World War. Godard decomposes the movement of the gesture frame by frame, in accordance with Agamben’s account of cinema as the art of the gesture, juxtaposed to other images related to the Shoah.27 he montage of Historie(s) du cinéma and other works does not proceed through a linear account of history, in a causal chain of events where one event occurs ater, and because of, another. It is exactly in cinema’s capacity to make historical events and evolvements simultaneous that montage plays its historical role. In superimpositions, resonances and reverberations between ilms, events and movements, history can become visible instead of just narrated and told. Simultaneity suspends temporal and historical distance. In a famous passage in the irst part of Histoire(s) du cinéma, it stated that it was because George Stevens had ilmed the horror of the extermination camps in color, as he was part of the US military troops in Europe during the inal days of the war, that he could render the moments of happiness between Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clit in A Place in he Sun (1946). his causality expressed in the commentary, however, implodes in the montage. he technique of superimposition shows the before and ater at the same time, the corpses and the young lovers in the sun overlap, and the sequential linearity is folded over, rendering the past and the present simultaneous. Godard’s historical concept of montage relies on the technology of the moving image, and furthermore on its medium-speciic duration which determines exact encounters and juxtapositions in time. Even if Godard concedes that montage may also take place in written history or in the other arts, following Eisenstein’s history of montage in the arts, it is clear that cinema holds speciic properties for developing caesurae and constructing simultaneities. his is a diferent notion of montage than Didi-Huberman’s idea of an open navigation between documents in the archive, or between the photographs taken at the Auschwitz crematorium. he associations between archival documents organized by the historian, or by the user navigating the Internet, lack a deined temporal duration, and this shits the emphasis from montage to the single shot or document. Didi-Huberman’s quest for the acceptance of the photographic image as a testimony tends to reintroduce a transcendental consciousness on the behalf

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of the observer—the photographer, Alex, in the case of the four photos of the crematorium—but also in the montage, as it is produced by a human agent in the reception of the images. Godard doesn’t understand cinema’s role for historical articulations as a “witness,” and there is no need for a deconstruction of the integrity of a testimony in his concept of montage. Godard’s principle of montage clearly also works on a diferent terrain than Agamben’s identiication of a lacuna in the position of the witness, or of a “dark margin” at the level of an archive of statements. As Foucault’s work on the theoretical concept of the archive departed from the age of the “Gutenberg Galaxy,” when photographic images and ilms were not yet part of the archival media, Agamben also addresses the discursive dimensions of the archive. However, if the archive of statements were regulated by structures and functions determining what could be said at a certain time, the “dark margin” encircling every speech act, technologies of inscription and archival indexing also represent selections of information and what is visible at a given time. here is a dark margin encircling also images of the “archive,” understood as the system deining what becomes visible and invisible at a given time. Understood in this sense, Godard’s practice of montage is directed at making this dark margin, or perhaps better, dark matter, visually accessible. Godard approaches the suspensions of visibility in the historical point of rupture. With the right montage at the right time, what you cannot see can be shown. his is a means to challenge the technical selections made by archival media and the mnemotechnics surrounding us. If the function of saying “I” constitutes the subject as a pure efect of language, and consequently as a lacuna in the testimony, montage in its epistemological sense makes the lacunae of visibility stand out. While the dark margin encircles every concrete speech act and determines what can be said, and by extension what can be seen, at a given moment, elsewhere Agamben develops this darkness as a positive feature of the human visual sensory apparatus.28 Darkness is not the absence of light, and hence vision, but the stimulation of so-called of-cells of the retina that produces blackness. To perceive this darkness is an act of vision outside of the stimuli of light emanating from the outer world: it is the perception of vision itself. Agamben goes on to demonstrate how the darkness encircling every star on the sky at night is the product of luminous celestial bodies and galaxies whose light never catches up with us, as they are moving away from earth at a greater speed than that of light.29 he light of the stars is perceived in astronomical hindsight, where the past appears as the present. he darkness encircling the light of the

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stars, on the other hand, is the light that can never connect with the present. Agamben understands this as the condition of being contemporary: to address the anachronical dimensions of the present, to actually see the light of the past or the future that reaches us as darkness. Dark matter envelops the light of the contemporary and serves as a condition for seeing the historical and anachronical in the present. he lashes of light informing history, according to Walter Benjamin’s “heses on History”, means that there is an index to every image of the past that makes it visible at a certain point in time only. his connection between images, distant in time as well as in space, is the key point in Godard’s concept of montage as history. hese connections are encircled and made possible by the dark matter of vision itself. Addressing the heterochrony of the present is the condition for the contemporary, according to Agamben. When Godard refers to the discovery of dark matter in physics, in Histoire(s) du cinéma as well as in earlier ilms, it is as the visual dimension for historiographical connections. he dark matter is not only the medium for the perception of movement itself, and in the cinema dispositif speciically, but also for the epistemological production of the past through montage. It is important not to conlate the dark matter of montage with the dark margin of the written archive. he dark matter of montage is no longer a lacuna in the subjective interiority of the testimony, but a productive space for historical connections to emerge. Still, both concepts devote attention to the darkness encircling and conditioning what can be seen and said at a speciic moment in time. he visual presence of darkness invests the present with a historical, or in Agamben’s term, contemporary, heterochrony. In spite of Agamben’s emphasis on the physically visual dimension of the historical dark matter informing the contemporary, he does not develop a theory of montage. On the relatively few pages he devotes to cinema in his writings, and with the exception of the short text he devoted to Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma quoted above, he approaches the shot rather then the efects produced in their connections and confrontations. Cinema is an art of the gesture because it records and reveals gestures, depriving the old bourgeois world of their gestures as Balzac described them. he gesture in cinema is “a crystal of historical memory” very diferent from the memory produced by the testimony.30 he ethics of cinema lies in its recording apparatus, producing of the actor a star rather than the persona or the divo of the theater.31 He notes the look into the camera by actors in pornographic photographs and movies.32 his focus on the gesture and the face as an exteriority derives perhaps from his own experience

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as an actor in cinema, playing San Filippo in Pasolini’s Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (he Gospel According to Matthew, 1964). Almost all of these texts are concerned with processes of subjectivization. his is where they connect to his discussion of the lacuna in the position of the witness and empty function of the “I” of language. All of these images and statements are encircled by a dark margin determining what can be seen and said at a given moment in history.

Notes 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Schreibmaschinentexte, (Weimar: Verlag der Bauhaus Universität, 2002), 18. 2 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: he Witness and the Archive. Homo Sacer III, trans. Daniel Heller-Rosein (New York: Zone, 1999). 3 Levi quoted by Agamben, ibid., 33–4. 4 Ibid, 34. 5 Ibid., 158–9. 6 Ibid., 140–1. 7 Ibid., 144. 8 Jacques Rancière, La partage du sensible; esthétique et politique (Paris: La Fabrique, 2000), 46–8. 9 Michel Foucault, La pensée du dehors [1966] (Paris: fata morgana, 1986). 10 Agamben, Auschwitz, 144. 11 Ibid., 166–71. 12 Ibid., 31–3, 157. 13 Bazin, “Le mythe du cinéma totale” [1946], Qu’est-ce que le cinéma (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1985), 19–24. 14 Jaron Lanier’s quote: http://jenkins.duke.edu/courses/isis250ss11/jaron_lanier.htm 15 “A dispositive is, irst and foremost, a machine of subjectivization, and consequently a machine of government.” Giorgio Agamben, Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif? (Paris: Rivages poches 2008), 42. 16 Agamben’s focus on the testimony as a pure efect of language makes him disregard the technical dimensions of media even when he makes use of sources explicitly discussing the potentials for testimony in ilms, like the discussion of Lanzmann’s Shoah by S. Felman. Agamben, Auschwitz, 35–6. 17 Georges Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, (Paris: Minuit 2003). He also returns to the topic in several other texts, most recently in Remontage du temps subi; L’œil de l’histoire 2 (Paris: Minuit 2010) and in “Opening the Camps, Closing the Eyes:

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18 19 20 21 22

23 24

25 26

27 28

29 30 31 32

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Image, History, Readability”, Concentrationary Cinema; Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955), Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman (eds), (New York: Berghahn, 2011), 84–125. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 31–2. Ibid., 12: (“…this truth […] is unimaginable…”). Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, 39. His criticism of Agamben’s position: 39n. 40. Ibid., 21–3. Georges Didi-Huberman has devoted a long discussion to this problem in Godard’s work: Ibid. 172–87. See also Libby Saxton’s discussion of the role of the image of the Shoah in the cinema of Lanzmann and Godard: “Anamnesis and Bearing Witness: Godard/Lanzmann’, For Ever Godard Michael Temple, James S. Williams, Michael Witt (eds) (London: Black Dog 2004), 364–79. Jean-Luc Godard, Introduction à une veritable histoire du cinema, (Paris: Albatros 1980), 269–70. Jean-Luc Godard, “Histoire(s) du cinéma; à propos de cinéma et histoire” [1995], Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, II; 1984–1998, (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma 1998), 403. Giorgio Agamben, “Cinema and History: On Jean-Luc Godard” [1995] trans. John V. Garner, Colin Williamson, in the present volume. Jacques Rancière returns to Histoire(s) du cinéma in several texts in order to question the idea of an absolute separation between the word and the image, to which he argues the composite notion of the “phrase-image”. Jacques Rancière, La fable cinématographique (Paris: Seuil 2001), 217–30. Jacques Rancière, Le destin des images, (Paris: La fabrique, 2003), 43–78. Jacques Rancière, “Godard, Hitchcock, and the Cinematographic Image”, For Ever Godard, Michael Temple, James S. Williams and Michael Witt (eds) (London: Black Dog 2004), 214–31. Giorgio Agamben, “Notes sur le geste”, Traic no. 1, 1992. Giorgio Agamben, “What is the Contemporary?” in Nudities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 10–19. I am indebted to Henrik Gustafsson for pointing out this connection to me. Ibid. Giorgio Agamben, “Notes sur le geste”, Traic no. 1, 1992. Giorgio Agamben, “Pour une éthique du cinéma”, Traic no. 3, 1993. Giorgio Agamben, “he Face”, in Means without End; Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 91–100.

10

Remnants of Palestine, or, Archaeology ater Auschwitz Henrik Gustafsson

I feel like an occupied country. Change lies between the images. Changer d’image Jean-Luc Godard, 1982

Pilgrimage and profanation In the early summer of 1963 Pier Paolo Pasolini retraced the itinerary of Christ along the border of Israel and Jordan, scouting locations for a ilm based on the Gospel of Matthew. Like every pilgrim Pasolini was “lead principally by his imagination,” to borrow Maurice Halbwachs’s insight, and in common with so many of his predecessors, his foray into the Holy Land became one of increasing disillusion.1 As documented in the pre-production ilm-essay Sopralluoghi in Palestina (Scouting in Palestine, 1963–4), Pasolini’s Grand Tour unfolds as an elegiac road movie through a vanishing world, encroached and eradicated by sprawling Israeli settlements, industrial plants and urban blight. At the end of his quest, the director laments: “Yes, the biblical world appears, but it resurfaces like wreckage.” his wreckage, however, led Pasolini to discover what he referred to as the “mechanism of analogy.”2 It is precisely in the remnants of Palestine—a heap of wheat, the gestures of a farmer, and, most prominently, in the pagan, pre-Christian faces extolled by Pasolini in Druze villages or among tribes of Bedouins in the desert—that he identiies the archaic element to sustain this analogical approach. Working by analogy, the abject poverty of the Arab underclass in the margins of a prosperous Israel society impelled Pasolini to displace and reimagine the Gospel in the impoverished regions of southern Italy, with Basilicata doubling for Palestine, Mount Etna for the Judean desert, Calabria

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for Galilee, and the ruins of Matera for Jerusalem. With equal pertinence, the analogy applies to the faces of the sub-proletarian peasantry in these rural hamlets. Pasolini’s quest for the archaic was thus as much a scout for faces as for places. Of all his ilms, renowned for their unique sensitivity to the human face, none contains so many memorable visages as Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (he Gospel According to Matthew, 1964) with its mixed cast of local peasants and fellow artists and intellectuals in the roles of the disciples. One of these faces belongs to a young student from Rome cast to portray Philip the Apostle: Giorgio Agamben. his early collaboration between Agamben and Pasolini invites a closer consideration of the overlapping vocabularies and genealogies of thinking that underpin their respective projects. Steeped in theological traditions, amalgamating Marxist and Jewish Messianic traditions, their eclectic output is similar, irst of all, in its sheer range—“extravagantly interdisciplinary” in Pasolini’s selfcharacterization, “scattered in every territory,” in the words of Agamben.3 While such a comparison lies beyond the purview of the present discussion, Pasolini’s encounter with, and subsequent displacement of, Palestine—or what Halbwachs conceived of as “he Legendary Topography of the Gospel”—speaks to a concern which I propose is at the heart of Agamben’s writing. As he professed already in his second book, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1977): “We

Figure 10.1 Philip the Apostle (Giorgio Agamben) at the Last Supper in Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (he Gospel According to Matthew, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964).

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must still accustom ourselves to think of the ‘place’ not as something spatial, but as something more original than space.”4 Exploring the nature of this place, which is always an “inquiry into the void,”5 has remained a lifelong pursuit, and spreads across all aspects of his writing. Exemplary, in this regard, is the single relection he has devoted to Pasolini’s work that can be found in the collection Profanations. Beginning with his early linguistic parodies, Friulian poems, and Roman slang novels, Agamben proposes that Pasolini’s operative modus can be understood as a form of “serious parody.” Poised between identity and diference, mimicry and mutation, parody, as understood by Agamben, facilitates a space suspended between the word and the thing, the thing and the name. Chronically and constitutively “out of place,” this mode of speaking “beside-itself,”6 reveals a fundamental truth about language: that language doesn’t take place. It is also for this reason that what Agamben refers to as the “notoriously impracticable terrain”7 of parody has the potential to assuage the split between world and language. In commemorating, “the absence of a proper place for speech,” Agamben suggests, “this heart-wrenching atopia becomes, for a moment, less painful, and is cancelled out into a homeland.”8 Inviting us to dwell in this lacuna, parody thus seems to harbor another idea of belonging. Along these lines, the brief introductory remarks below aim to articulate some of the concomitant ideas and concepts that inform Agamben’s rethinking of place through a cross-reading with Pasolini’s linguistically informed approach to location shooting. When plotting out the premises of a new investigation, Agamben typically commences by staking out a direction, as if embarking on a survey into some unchartered territory: what he alternatively refers to as an unknown land, a no-mans-land, or, most frequently, a homeland. he nature of this domain is vigorously stated in the preface to Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience when the author writes that the implications of “there is language,” and “I speak” constitute “the terrain toward which all my work is oriented.”9 Hence, the rethinking of place proposed by Agamben is always embroiled in and refracted through language. It is also in this double-exposure of linguistic and spatial tropes that we may trace the deepest ainity between Pasolini’s and Agamben’s projects: in the former case, to disjoint the unity of form and content through a “linguistic pluralism”; in the latter, to interrupt and expose language and communicability as such. 10 It is in this sense that Agamben’s understanding of poetry as the taking place of language, exposing its exteriority, pertains to Pasolini’s “Cinema of Poetry.”

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he rethinking of place undertaken by Agamben and Pasolini may be circumscribed through a shared methodological impetus: that of archaeology. Taking his cue from the archeological methods of Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault, Agamben states that the object pursued by the archeologist, the archē, is not the historical site of an original event that can be traced back through linear time. his deinition casts it in marked opposition to how archaeology commonly is understood and used, most conspicuously when mobilized as a weapon in national struggles where it is invoked as the supreme authority to settle issues of ownership and origin. Conversely, philosophical archaeology seeks to uncover, “the non-place of the origin.”11 By regressing toward the moment when a concept irst became operative, the moment of a phenomenon’s arising, archaeology strives to gain access to the archē as, “an operative force within history.”12 Accordingly, “the archē is not a given or a substance, but a ield of bipolar historical currents stretched between anthropogenesis and history, between the moment of arising and becoming, between the archi-past and the present.”13 Archaeology, then, marks a sustained attempt to grasp the currents that pass between the past, which is always created by the present, and the present, which is always founded on the past. As Noa Steimatsky has shown, the archaic crystalized as the master trope of Pasolini’s ilmmaking ater his encounter with Palestine.14 Like the territory summoned by Agamben at the outset of a new project, the archaic terrain sought by Pasolini never designates a proper place. While intimately tied to the tangible speciics on location, the archē ultimately resides beyond location, as a point of light on the ever-retreating peripheries of the modern world. From his early ilms set on the margins of Rome to his late travelogues from the Arabian Peninsula, Africa, and India, Pasolini’s hird World itinerary presents an open target for charges of romantic primitivism, and, more troublingly, for complying with a colonial cartography that coordinates centers and peripheries along a temporal axis of present and past. In this context, however, it may more properly be understood as a technique for attaining a proximity to the archē, which is summoned through a stretching of historical currents by means of stretching out geographically, but also, and always, linguistically. Il Vangelo provides a powerful case in point: willfully exposing its acts of mimicry, the sermons and parables of the Gospel and the iconography of the early Italian renaissance coexist with passages shot in the style of cinéma vérité, summoning a space where the heterogeneous visual, textual, and audial sources “touch, and ignite,” in Sam Rohdie’s phrase.15 Furthermore, this space extends across analogous

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historical moments and realities: the Palestinian underclass in the present, the biblical land in the past, and feudal, southern Italy, all being subjugated to the power of colonial rule. his brings us to a inal point of intersection between Agamben’s work and Pasolini’s cinematic practice: the remnant. In his commentary on Paul’s “Letter to the Romans” in he Time hat Remains (2000), Agamben ponders the implications of Paul’s renouncement of his Jewish identity as Saul and his subsequent announcement of “a non-people” (Rom. 9.25). By deining himself as “separated,” positioning himself between Jewish and Hellenistic identity, Paul exposes an internal split in any attempt to deine a people, an irreducible and unassimilable element inherent in every act of imposing an identity. For this reason the remnant constitutes, for Agamben, “the only real political subject.”16 he remnant is not a passive residue, however, but exhorts a force that ruptures the authority founded on such a dividing action, in this case Mosaic Law which divides all men into Jews and Non-Jews. he deconstructive force of the remnant also acts on space, dislodging the distinction between inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion, which underpins any political project based on identity and belonging. From 1968 to the end of his life, Pasolini wrote a series of screenplays for a ilm based on the life and journeys of Paul, emblematically titled San Paolo. While this ilm—his most ambitious attempt at staging an analogy across time and territory—remains unrealized, the impact of Paul may be construed precisely in terms of a politics and poetics of the remnant. Pushing steadily toward a bypassed and impoverished south, Pasolini summoned his non-people from the subproletariat on the fringes of modernity, what Paul referred to as, “the ilth of the world, the ofscouring of all things” (First Letter to the Cor. 4.13), or what Frantz Fanon in an inluential phrase at the time called “the wretched of the earth.” Pasolini’s incessant thrust away from the centralized power of State and capital toward abject subjects and settings in order to stir up “the scandalous, revolutionary force of the past,”17 needs to be understood, primarily, within the context of Italian fascism. Pasolini’s scandalous and contaminated poetics was targeted against the Fascists consolidation of an ethnically and linguistically uniied nation. he geographical itinerary of his ilms, then, harks back to his early linguistic experiments and mimicry of vernacular idioms; for it was precisely this plethora of regional dialects that fascist politics intended to erase. Pasolini’s revolt, however, had broader implications, designating the homogenizing forces of the modern nation state more generally. Upon return

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from Palestine, Pasolini commented on his deeply ambiguous response to Jewish society, torn between his love of the Jews for having been excluded and subjected to racial hatred, and a deep resentment of a state, “founded on a basically racist, messianic and religious idea—the idea of a promised land.” Pasolini is quick to add, however, “although it’s basically the same principle on which all states are based.”18 It is toward this nexus of land, language and people that the archaeological inquiries addressed in this chapter are oriented. Having provisionally mapped out, with the help of Pasolini, some of the premises which I suggest underlie Agamben’s proposal that we need to rethink place, we have also demarcated the geographical subject of these inquiries: Palestine, at once the epicentre of archaeology, the homeland par excellence, and the locus of the worlds most advanced biopower today.

Primal scenes At the time Pasolini embarked on his hird World travelogues, political tourism had become high vogue among intellectuals associated with the French let. By then, however, the border between Jordan and Israel retraced by Pasolini in 1964 had been radically redrawn. In what follows, I will cross-read two political pilgrimages in the early 1970s which, in turn, marked at once the beginning of two sustained archaeological inquiries into these contested territories, and the inaugural moment of a controversy that would erupt in full force more than two decades later. he subject matter of this polemical conversation was, ostensibly, not the conlict in the Middle East, but the ethics and politics of representing the Nazi concentration and extermination camps.19 In light of the implicit relation suggested here, the ilmographies of the principal adversaries of this debate, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Lanzmann, follows a remarkably similar itinerary: from their interventions into the Zionist-Palestine conlict in the early seventies, followed by their monumental work on the Nazi camps in the ensuing decades, to their late career returns to the Middle East. My claim, then, is that the stakes of this high-proile dispute can, in fact, be traced back to the conlicted terrain of Israel-Palestine. At the end of 1969, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, the founders of the Dziga Vertov Group, were invited to Jordan, Lebanon and Syria to make

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Jusqu’á la victoire (Until Victory), a ilm funded by the Arabic League in order to promote the Palestinian uprising. Godard spent the spring and summer of 1970 ilming the preparations in the refugee communities on the West Bank, then controlled by Jordan, to reclaim the land that had been occupied by Israel in 1967. A month ater his return to Paris, the Fedayeen—the armed militants ilmed during combat training—were killed in the Black September massacres perpetrated by King Hussein’s Jordanian troops, and the project was abandoned. hree years passed before Godard, together with Anne-Marie Miéville, would return to this footage which was revised and edited together into the video essay Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere, 1970–4), to which we will return later. Lanzmann’s ilm has an even more convoluted production history, beginning as a reportage for Les Temps Modernes ater his irst visit to Israel in 1952, and, encouraged by Jean-Paul Sartre, expanding into a book, neither of which were completed. Returning twenty years later, the project inally materialized as Pourquoi Israël (Why, Israel 1973), a sprawling portrayal of the state in its twenty-ith year. he ilm is impelled by two incentives. Firstly, responding to Sartre’s essay “Anti-Semite and Jew” which argued that the Jew exists only as an image derived from anti-Semitism, and thus, that the Jew is a phantom summoned and nourished by a passionate hatred which ultimately lacks an object. Conversely, “Who is a Jew?” is the question that propels Pourquoi Israël. Secondly, it is induced by a territorial imperative to cover the land in all its diversity: with pristine vistas of the desert and the coastline, pastoral imagery of the forestation programmes and Kibbutzim, and vivid depictions of the pioneer spirit in the rising cities and settlements. Lanzmann even acts as a tour guide for an immigrant family, showing them all the major landmarks from the Wailing Wall to Masada. hese two incentives—the inventory of the land and the quest for identity—converge in the irst law of the parliament, the law of return, the mandate to build and ill the land. A primal scene divided between the Shoah and the Nakba—or between the camps in Poland and the camps in Palestine—might shed new light on the competing claims on the relationship between cinema and history purported by Godard and Lanzmann. It may further cause us to reconsider the theological framework of idolatry and monotheism in which the polemic has oten been cast, with Godard as a “partisan of the image” and Lanzmann as a “partisan of the text,” or, in Gérard Wajcman’s formulation, of “Saint Paul” Godard versus “Moses” Lanzmann.20 Such a divided primal scene converges in the messianic concept of the remnant as explored by Agamben. Chronologically, Agamben’s

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investigation of the remnants of Israel in he Time hat Remains (2000), had been preceded by his study of testimony conducted in Remnants of Auschwitz: he Witness and the Archive (1999). In both studies, the concept of the remnant is elaborated in relation to a liminal igure that calls into question our conceptions of what constitutes a people, or a human being more generally. In the irst case, Paul’s community of remnants, his “non-people”; in the second, the Muselmann, the German word for a Muslim that was used in the camps for a prisoner in the inal stage of malnutrition, exhausted to the point of bare life, deprived of speech and experience. Predating both these publications, however, is a third paradigm of the remnant presented in a short essay called “We Refugees,” which also marks Agamben’s single direct commentary on the conlict in the Middle East. he remnants in question are the 425 Palestinians expelled by the state of Israel onto the border of Lebanon. Displaced from the land and thus also from the law, Agamben advances the refugee to imagine a form of life beyond the conlation of naked life and national belonging. Triangulated in this manner, Agamben’s elaboration of the igure of the remnant appears as a potent historical cipher for the conlict in the Middle East. For Godard as well as Lanzmann, the annihilation of Jews in the Nazi camps marks the genesis of the state of Israel. In a letter to Palestinian historian Elias Sanbar (who served as a guide and interpreter on the Dziga Vertov Group’s location scout in Jordan) dated “somewhere in Palestine” July 19, 1977, Godard writes: “he current war in the Middle East was born in a concentration camp on the day a great Jewish outcast, besides being brought to the verge of dying, was called a Musulman by some SS.”21 In similar terms, Lanzmann contends that, “the state of Israel was born of the Shoah.”22 here is also a causal relation between Lanzmann’s survey of Israel in the early seventies and the inventory of the geography of the Nazi death camps in Poland that would engulf him for the next twelve years. It was ater a screening of Pourquoi Israël that Alouph Hareven, director-general of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Afairs, invited Lanzmann to a meeting where he proposed the subject for Lanzmann’s next ilm: the extermination of European Jewry during World War II.23 he next section will consider the relation between testimony and territory mapped in Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour ilm Shoah (1985)—along with Lanzmann’s commentary on the ilm as it unfolds in his recent memoir he Patagonian Hare—and in Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz. he focal point of this cross-reading, and in the subsequent discussion on Godard, concerns how the camp, the inaugural site of the conlict in the Middle East, is in turn

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imbricated with a speech act, an act of nomination. For Godard, the cipher for this relation is the German name “Musulmann,” for Lanzmann, the Hebrew name “Shoah.” hese ciphers, in turn, encrypt competing claims on origins and homelands.

Testimony and territory Lanzmann has described Shoah (1985) as “a ilm from the ground up, a topographical ilm, a geographical ilm.”24 In the preface to Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben lays out his investigation in similar terms: “I will consider myself content with my work if, in attempting to locate the place and theme of testimony, I have erected some signposts allowing future cartographers of the new ethical territory to orient themselves.”25 Both further address the problem of naming the event, rejecting the term “Holocaust” due to its religious connotations which associate the crematoria with a sacriicial altar. Departing from this common ground, I will argue that a closer examination of the relationship between nomination and location in fact reveals a decisive rit in the territory that they set out to chart. While Remnants of Auschwitz only addresses Lanzmann in passing, his presence looms heavy when Agamben positions his study in opposition to, “those who would like Auschwitz to remain forever incomprehensible,” and when stating his intention to, “clear away almost all the doctrines that, since Auschwitz, [have] been advanced in the name of ethics.”26 Shoah is only addressed indirectly in reference to the commentary made by literary critic Shoshana Felman. Felman proposes that the unique achievement of Lanzmann’s ilm is that it resolves the dichotomy between the witnesses who survived the gas chambers and the victims who perished inside them, eliciting a connection, “between the inside and the outside.”27 Conversely, Agamben insists that this relation must remain open; the lacuna between death and survival must be preserved, for it is out of this empty space that testimony may, or may not, emerge. his is the territory that Agamben refers to at the outset of his study—the taking place of language, the contingency and possibility of speech. Auschwitz is the negation of this contingency, a machine designed to produce “the inal biopolitical substance”28: a man separated from speech, from the event of language, and thus from the possibility of having an experience. Envisioned

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by its engineers as the perfect crime, one which doesn’t leave a remnant, the camp marks an attempt to foreclose the lacuna. In deining the remnant as a residue between death and survival, Agamben endows it with agency. It is revealing, then, that Agamben chooses the Muselmann (unmentioned in Lanzmann’s ilm), a subject deined by an absolute lack of agency, as the protagonist of his study. Following Primo Levi, “the cartographer of this new terra ethica, the implacable land-surveyor of Muselmannland,”29 the complete witness is the one who can’t testify. For Agamben, the disjunction between the living being and the speaking being, “constitutes the subject’s only dwelling place.”30 Resuming the territorial metaphor, Agamben relates this to his principal methodological impulse: “archaeology claims as its territory the pure taking place of these propositions and discourses, that is, the outside of language, the brute fact of its existence.”31 As we shall see, the taking place of language is also at the core of Lanzmann’s archaeological project. As I aim to show below, however, the relation between location and language, or between “Site and Speech,” to quote the working title for Shoah, holds radically diferent implications for Agamben and Lanzmann.32 “My ilm would have to take up the ultimate challenge; take the place of the non-existent images of death in the gas chambers.”33 Lanzmann’s statement explains his categorical rejection of any claims made for an image that derives from inside the gas chambers, whether the Nazi footage hypothesized by Jean-Luc Godard, or the Sonderkommando photograph that was curated and conceptualized by Georges Didi-Hubermann. For Lanzmann, the inside is reserved for the oral testimonies given by the former members of the Sonderkommando who appears in Shoah: “they too were fated to die—which is why I call them “revenants” rather than survivors.”34 Whereas Agamben’s remnants dwell in the lacuna between the living and the dead, Lanzmann’s revenants posit a bridge between them; the saved don’t speak for the drowned, the dead speaks through them. his, in turn, comprises two competing versions of archaeology: “Every time I discovered someone still alive, I was absolutely stunned, it felt almost like something unearthed during an archaeological dig,” Lanzmann recalls.35 Along these lines, the director has consistently drawn on the metaphor of archaeology to describe his working method—to dig, drill, and excavate.36 his archaeological impulse also impels the camera’s unearthing of train tracks buried in the mud and debris in the undergrowth, of the weed infested ghetto and the sunken crematoria. Lanzmann’s archaeology thus equally applies to the physical sites of the genocide and to the voices speaking from them.

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In her preface to the published screenplay of Shoah, Simone de Beauvoir writes that, “the greatness of Claude Lanzmann’s art is in making places speak.”37 It is also in the revelatory meeting of the “name and a place” on location in Poland that Lanzmann, in his own account, suddenly gains full access to the primal scene.38 his devastating revelation occurs when he irst confronts the black lettering on an ordinary road sign spelling “Treblinka.” he shocking, unacceptable discrepancy, “between the dreary contemporary reality and the terrifying human memory of it could only be explosive.”39 Upon his arrival in Poland, Lanzmann ruminates: I was a bomb, though a harmless bomb – the detonator was missing. Treblinka had been the detonator; that aternoon I exploded with a sudden, devastating violence. How else can I put it? Treblinka became real, the shit from myth to reality took place in a blinding lash, the encounter between a name and a place wiped out everything I had learned.40

he meeting of a name and a place precisely conjures what Walter Benjamin referred to as a dialectical image, igniting a tension through which the past is “blasted out of the continuum of history.”41 More importantly, this shit from name to place, from myth to reality, delineates the core of Lanzmann’s archaeological project: to reverse the trajectory in which the Jewish people were irst rendered stateless (by Nazi laws) and then speechless (in the camp). To grasp the implications of this undertaking, we need to retrace the reversed trajectory from the place to the name charted by Lanzmann. To begin with, the reality of place. Lanzmann has stressed the critical impact of his encounter with the sites, of exposing his mind and senses to the minute physical presence of each detail—every steel rail and stone—in the camps: “I had allowed it to seep into me, to imprint itself on me.”42 Rather than a shit from icon to index, Lanzmann postulates a shit from one index (archival footage) to another (material remnants), establishing a causal link between exterior and interior.43 While his famous repudiation of “images without imagination”44 obviously imposes a limit on the image, it commands, by the same token, images with imagination. hus, it is not a general ban on images, but on images in the past tense. In fact, Shoah’s relentless confrontation with the here and now of these sites engenders one of the most sustained attempts in the history of cinema to make imagination work through “the power of evocation and speech.”45 Between the crowded street scenes of Warsaw and the random passers-by in the Polish countryside, Shoah comments on the invisibility of the

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ghettos and camps, then and now. It covers the ground where the crime took place as a means to relive the event as if it was continually taking place in the present. he absence of explanation and the excess of descriptive information provoke and ignite, in Lanzmann’s phrase, a “hallucinatory intemporality.”46 Not an image, then, but a vision. his brings us to the second transition, moving back from the reality of place to the myth and the name. From the pastoral hymn to the childhood home sung by Simon Srebnik on the Narew River in the irst scene of the ilm, Shoah continuously evokes the notion of a homeland. he blind spot encircled in the ilm is at once the gas chamber and the absence of a sovereign Jewish nation. he connection transpires in the midst of the rundown ghetto district where a long pan across the city comes to a temporary halt at a monument to the uprising in the ghetto. he camera zooms in close, and then cuts to a replica of this monument in Jerusalem, from where it zooms out and resumes its letward trajectory to reveal the bright, open spaces of Israel. “he journey to Poland was like a journey through time,” Lanzmann comments.47 Passing through the stony faces of the resistance ighters, the pan thus completes the ilms journey from the past into the present.48 his bridging of time and territory, however, does not merely imply that the spirit of resistance lives on in Israel; so does the enemy. his is the theme addressed in the concluding part of Lanzmann’s trilogy on the Jewish homeland, Tsahal (1994). To the same extent that Shoah is unremittingly about death, Tsahal is about survival. Taking its title from the Hebrew acronym for the Israeli defence force, the ilm celebrates the itieth anniversary of the War of Independence. he national arms industry, the air force, and the military combat training zones in the desert are exhibited in a brazen iconography of power. Near the end of the ilm, a montage of aerial shots circle Jerusalem, Masada, and the hilltop settlements, while Ehud Barak muses: “We carry in our blood the genes of the Maccabees and of those Zealots who died in Masada.” his genetic heritage also applies to the enemies of Israel. he stories related by Israeli soldiers about family members who perished in the ghettos, gulags, and camps merge with the imminent threat of annihilation by the Arabs. he sovereign borders of Israel are the only safeguard to keep the past at bay. “Anti-Semitism,” Lanzmann establishes in opposition to Sartre’s view, “is the metaphysical hatred against a people who is the origin and knows it and wills it.”49 Shoah attempts to grasp this hatred in its full dimension, “to encompass everything, to show everything that had happened from the point of view of the Jews themselves.”50 his all-encompassing view needed a name:

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Figure 10.2 Tsahal (Claude Lanzmann, 1994).

he word “Shoah” occurred to me one night as self-evident because, not speaking Hebrew, I did not understand its meaning, which was another way of not naming it. […] “Shoah” was a signiier with no signiied, a brief opaque utterance, an impenetrable, unbreakable word. […] I fought to impose the title Shoah, not knowing that in doing so I was performing a radical act of naming, […] Shoah is now a proper noun, the only one, and hence untranslatable.51

he performative force of this speech act returns us to the question of the archē. Lanzmann’s act of nomination—of giving a name to the event—is also a commandment. “Shoah” does not refer to or describe something; it commands something. he name is the thing, the event in its totality, in Lanzmann’s words, “my ilm is a ‘monument’ that is part of what it monumentalizes.”52 he name “Shoah”—a Hebrew name, the language of origin and the language of Israel— grounds the link between word (speech) and thing (site), rendering this link unbreakable. his is unambiguously stated in the epigraph to Shoah, a quotation from a passage in Isaiah (Isa. 56.5): “I will give them an everlasting Name.” he commandment of “Shoah” thus warrants an everlasting commitment to the future. It is upon this imperative that the Jewish state is built. Two parallel axes cross in Lanzmann’s coordination of site and speech, place and name, view and interview, land and language: the two thousand years of exile from the homeland and the destruction of a previous generation in Europe. he intervening millennia of Palestinian history are let vacant, as if

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the land itself has been exiled, awaiting the return of its rightful owners and its re-entry into history. Lanzmann’s trilogy is about origins and bloodlines, about Israel as material unity, and of its territory as an absolute embodiment of the Jewish world. It is a recognition and conirmation of a world according to a vision—of “a people who is the origin and knows it and wills it.” Answering the question pursued in Pourquoi Israël, a Jew is not a being of possibility, a being who can, but a being who will. he prophecies of Isaiah are also the source from where Agamben, via the Letters of Paul, derives his concept of the remnant: “For though your people, oh Israel, were like the sand of the sea, only a remnant will return.” (Isa. 10.22)53 Following Agamben, this remnant is neither a numeric portion—the part of the people returning from the Diaspora, or surviving the Shoah—nor the nucleus of a new nation, bridging ruin (Shoah) and salvation (Israel). he remnant, instead, directs us away from the identitarian politics of the state toward a nameless community that isn’t founded on will, but on potentiality. While Remnants of Auschwitz repeatedly refers to language as “taking place,” Agamben also advises us to be cautious of this igure of speech. Testimony can never take place in a territorial sense, for it comes to us from an empty place. It is in this non-coincidence between site and speech that the remnant resides. he urge to rethink the relation between site and speech became a key concern as Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville revised the footage letover from the Dziga Vertov’s sojourn in the Middle East in 1970. In the concluding section of this chapter, I will pursue the inquiry into this relation as it unfolds in Ici et ailleurs and in Godard’s latest work, Film socialisme (2010). his will return us to a inal consideration of the implications of Agamben’s proposal that a more original place, a homeland, remains to be discovered.

Here and elsewhere Lanzmann’s inventory of the land in Pourquoi Israël is bordered by names. It begins in the Yad Vashem memorial hall where the camera scans the inscriptions on the stone loor—“Auschwitz,” “Mauthausen,” “Bergen-Belsen,” “Dachau”—to the sound of a voice chanting in Hebrew. hen, it descends into the depths of the archive, the “Hall of Names.” his is also where the ilm concludes, three hours later, as a clerk at the archive enumerates all the

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Lanzmann’s who perished in the Shoah. Ater the last name, Lanzmann simply instructs “cut.” Godard and Miéville’s video-essay Ici et ailleurs is instead framed by a change of names: from the prospective “until victory” to the retrospective “here and elsewhere.” Departing from the projected, and abandoned, propaganda ilm, “he People’s Will,” the irst of ive Fatah slogans around which Jusqu’á la victoire was to be structured, is followed by a claim on origin: “We’ve chosen a Palestinian revolution to prove to the world that this Palestinian soil taken by the Zionist enemy will be given back to its people, to its irst origin.” In voiceover, Godard refers to these slogans as, “ive images and ive sounds that hadn’t been heard or seen on Arab soil.” He then extrapolates the didactic setup for the intended ilm: irst the sound, then the image. In order to reclaim the land, the Fedayeen had irst to conquer a language, hence, the recurring scenes of refugees delivering speeches, declaiming poetry, rehearsing union texts, and reciting pamphlets. he new title announces a strategy of displacement, suspending the revised footage between “here”—a French working-class family (ilmed in the living room of William Lubtchansky, Lanzmann’s cinematographer on Pourquoi Israël and Shoah)—and “elsewhere.” his elsewhere does not merely designate lost territory and abandoned ideals: ater the Amman massacre, Godard and Miéville was literally let with a cast of revenants, thus facing the gravest implications of speaking for an “elsewhere.” Probing the politics of giving, or imposing, voice, and what was lost, or obscured, in translation, it is precisely the site of speech that warrants articulation. he project of decolonization thus relects back onto the political persuasions and manipulative strategies of the ilmmakers and their rhetorical arrangement of sounds and images into a causal chain of events. his chain, in which “everyone can ind his own image,” adheres to a logic of recognition and identiication: “Little by little we are replaced by chains of uninterrupted images.” he task Godard now formulates for his and Miéville’s newly founded production company, Sonimage, will be to break this chain of sounds and images. Godard asks: “Maybe we should abandon this system of questions and answers and ind something else.” In a pragmatic sense, this was achieved through video editing; placing images side-by-side on two monitors rather than in linear succession. Revising and refracting his own (then recent) cinematic past through video-montage and conlicting voice-overs, Ici et ailleurs implements in embryotic form the archaeology of sounds and images—the overlapping soundtracks, multilayered

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Figure 10.3 Fedayeen in Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere, Jean-Luc Godard, 1970–4) from chapter 4b: “Les Signes Parmi Nous” (“he Signs Among Us,” 1998) of Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98).

superimpositions, and multicolored inter-titles—of late Godard. Indeed, two images from Ici et ailleurs, both located inside camps, have become part of this strata: irst, of a young Fedayeen woman patrolling a border fence in a refugee camp in Jordan; second, archival footage of bodies dragged and dumped into mass graves in a Nazi camp ater the liberation. he latter is always interpolated with two names. In Ici et ailleurs, these names are introduced in Miéville’s neutral commentary played over a ghastly black-and-white newsreel lickering on a TV-screen: “Here’s a Jew in such a state the SS called him a Muslim.” he profanation of the religious misnomer—the SS declaring the Jew to be a Muslim—also designates the inal act to seal the destruction of the last remnant of the Jewish people. he intertitle that follows: “hinking of that again—here and elsewhere.” he connection between the Fedayeen in the camps in Jordan and the Musulman in the camps in Poland has continued to resurface as a leitmotif, some would say an obsession, in late Godard. Most recently in Film socialisme, where the archival footage from the camp, in low-resolution and slow-motion, are followed by two video clips: irst from Cheyenne Autumn (John Ford, 1964), showing women and children of the Cheyenne Exodus; then from Lanzmann’s Tsahal, an aerial shot of a ighter jet crossing the coastline as the voice-over intones: “Palestine.” he dispossession of the native population in Ford’s ilm

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and the patrolling of sovereign borders in Lanzmann’s documentary associate the colonial enterprises in North America and in the Middle East, not only through the shared myth of a promised land, but also through the rationale that legitimized the eviction of its former inhabitants: their ignorance of territorial sovereignty and citizenship. Put crudely, since Palestine never existed as a proper place, Palestinians never existed as a people. his sequence in Film socialisme emulates a montage in the irst episode of Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98). Following a meditation on the Nazi death camps, the most extensive in the series, and a quote from Lanzmann—the train pulling into Treblinka in Shoah—there is a color photograph of a Palestinian boy marching with a burning US lag. Superimposed in the lames are images from D. W. Griith’s he Birth of a Nation (1915), followed by the tracking-shot of John Wayne racing through the Indian camp in John Ford’s he Searchers (1956). he allusion to the Navaho reservation in Ford’s Monument Valley pervades Film socialisme in its entirety through the “Navaho English” subtitles concocted by Godard. In the guise of a linguistic parody of Indian speech in Hollywood westerns, the already fragmentary and multi-lingual text of Film socialisme is chopped up and spaced out into single lines with no punctuation. More importantly, the Navaho English subtitles also relect back onto the vexed issue of translation irst raised in Ici et ailleurs. In many ways, Film socialisme appears as its late companion piece. Furthermore, it meditates on the nexus of territorial conlict and linguistic theory in ways that directly pertain to key ideas in Agamben’s work. Film socialisme contains two brief sequences obliquely addressing the Middle East conlict. he irst appears toward the end of the irst section of the ilm— Des choses comme ça (“Such things”)—which is set on a cruise ship touring the ancient ports of the Mediterranean, a hyperbolic non-place that makes the hotels and airport terminals analyzed by Fredric Jameson and Marc Agué appear benign in comparison. Ater a series of passing references to Jafa, Haifa, and Mandatory Palestine, along with the key date 1948, during the irst half hour, a new character announces: “he photograph of a land and its people, at last.” he line paraphrases the title of Les Palestiniens: La photographie d’une terre et de son peuple de 1839 à nos jours (2004), a compilation of photographs by the aforementioned Elias Sanbar, whom Godard befriended in Jordan in 1969. Sanbar appears on screen to recount how the invention of the Daguerreotype hurled a wave of photographic campaigns into the Holy Land. A girl holds up a photograph, identiied as “one of the earliest photographs of Haifa Bay.” She speaks in Arabic:

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“Where are you my beloved land?” Again, a paraphrase, this time of a familiar line in late Godard, irst intoned in German in Allemagne 90 neuf zero, later cited in JLG/JLG—autoportrait de décembre (1994) and Histoire(s). A brief, soundless sequence follows ater the intertitle “PALESTINE” in which two landscape photographs, made a century apart, are shown: irst, a generic postcard view in black and white with a palm tree in the foreground and a distant village on the hills across the bay (Félix Bonils, 1880); then, a full-screen color shot of an olive tree (Joss Dray, 1989).54 he screen goes black, followed by the blindfolded Christ in Matthias Grünewald’s painting he Mocking of Christ (1503–5), and the concluding intertitle “ACCESS DENIED.” his, of course, can mean a number of things: that Palestine has no access to its territory or its history; or, as for Pasolini on his failed location scout, that there is no longer an image to conjure of the people or the place. In light of Sanbar’s thesis that Palestine was obliterated by the image of the Holy Land, the century that separates the two photographs also evokes what hasn’t changed between them: the notion of Palestine as a place, not a people, as neither image evince human beings, only trees, adhering to the Zionist motto of a “land without a people.” Maybe, there is also another possible meaning: that Palestine is what we fail to imagine, belonging without a state. he next Palestine sequence appears toward the end of the ilm’s third, and inal, section, Nos humanités (“Our humanities”). he voice-over begins by

Figure 10.4 Christ blindfolded in Matthias Grünewald’s he Mocking of Christ (1503–5) in Film socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010).

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repeating Sanbar’s association of the inception of photography and the subsequent colonization and erasure of Palestine. A photograph of a procession of blindfolded Arab prisoners pulled by a soldier fades into a ground-level shot tracking along a stretch of barbed wire with the Mediterranean in the background (taken from Jean-Daniel Pollet’s 1963 ilm Méditerranée). his is the irst instance where the link between land and language is elaborated in terms that directly intersect with Agamben’s work. he voice-over cites from a letter written by Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem to Franz Rosenzweig in Berlin: “he country is like a volcano. A day will come when language will turn on those who speak it.” Dated December 1926, Scholem’s premonition comes a year ater British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour—author of the Balfour Declaration—had laid the foundation stone at the Hebrew University, an institution committed to turn Hebrew into the living language of the Zionist homeland. In Agambian terms, such a conlation of language and national identity means that “humans are separated by what unites them.”55 he trinity of land, language and people alienates and uproots, “all peoples from their vital dwelling in language.”56 As was noted at the outset of this essay, this dwelling place, in Agamben’s own assessment, marks the terrain toward which all his work gravitates. In equally explicit terms, he notes that this terrain constitutes a veritable terra incognita: “We do not have, in fact, the slightest idea of what either a people or a language is.”57 Nonetheless, “all of our political culture is based on the relation between these two notions.”58 his means that our modern nation states are based on the conlation of two culturally contingent categories—people and language—and that this alliance is the source from where it derives its power and authority. herefore, a people without a state, whether the Wandering Jew, the Vanishing American, or the Palestinian refugee, “can be oppressed and exterminated without impunity, so as to make clear that the destiny of a people can only be state identity and that the concept of people makes sense only if recodiied within the concept of citizenship.”59 Agamben continues by addressing the most pressing example of such an “imaginary”60 summoned through the conlation of a chosen people with a hallowed land by means of a liturgical language: he vicious entwining of language, people, and the state appears particularly evident in the case of Zionism. A movement that wanted to constitute the people par excellence (Israel) as a state took it upon itself, for this very reason, to reactualize a purely cult language (Hebrew) that had been replaced in daily use by other languages and dialects (Ladino, Yiddish). In the eyes of the keepers

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of tradition, however, precisely this reactualization of the sacred language appeared to be a grotesque profanity, upon which language would have taken revenge one day. (On December 26, 1926, Gershom Scholem writes to Franz Rosenzweig from Jerusalem: “We live in our language like blind men walking the edge of an abyss. …his language is laden with future catastrophes. … he day will come when it will turn against those who speak it.”)61

he reference to Scholem shared by Agamben and Godard speaks of a mutual concern: that what remains hidden from us is not something beyond language, some transcendental referent, but language itself. Scholem’s letter pertains at once to the motif of the blindfold that Godard repeatedly has invoked in relation to the constellation of Musulman and Juif,62 and to a key tenet of Agamben expressed in the following aphorism: “humans see the world through language but do not see language.”63 Yet, he insists, it is only in “a vision of language”64 that a true community is imaginable. It is precisely on a vision of language, not as an avenger but as a prospect of peace, that we will conclude. his vision, which transpires a mere few minutes later in Film socialisme, directly counterpoints the earlier imagery of the Mediterranean strewn with wire, as well as Scholem’s foreboding. Again, the scene is preceded through a reference to linguistic theory: “During his second course at the New School in New York during the winter of ’42-’43, Roman Jacobson demonstrated how it is impossible to separate sound from meaning and that only the notion of phoneme allows us to resolve this.” hen, shiting from a male to a female voiceover: “Writing for two voices is only successful when dissonance is introduced by a common note.” On the multilayered soundtrack, we irst hear a girl’s voice chanting from the Koran, then a second voice chanting from the Talmud. he voices blend together over images drawn from Agnès Varda’s ilm Les Plages d’Agnès (he Beaches of Agnès, 2008) showing trapeze artists performing against the brilliant blue screen of the Mediterranean. he bodies are not only suspended in air, but also between languages. Godard stop-starts the sequence into a series of mesmerizing stills. he act of capture and release performed by the lyer and the catcher are, in turn, captured and released by the montage. Captured in image and released into gesture, the cavorting bodies exhibit, if only for a matter of seconds, what Agamben refers to as, “the media character of corporal movements,” that is, “the being-in-language of human beings.”65 In interviews, Godard has referred to the trapeze act as an image of peace in the Middle East. An image of peace, properly speaking, would be an oxymoron

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Figure 10.5 Trapeze artists from Agnès Varda’s Les Plages d”Agnès (he Beaches of Agnès, 2008) in Film socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010).

for Agamben, since the realm of images, signs and appearances are always a site of struggle for recognition. he sign that seals the deal between two adversaries—the handshake, the emblematic photo opportunity of a peace treatise—posits a sign of mutual recognition. “Such a peace,” Agamben insists, “is only and always a peace amongst states and of the law, a iction of the recognition of an identity in language, which comes from war and will end in war.”66 Peace, on the contrary, is “the fact that we cannot recognize ourselves in any sign or image.”67 he pilgrimages addressed above—the failures to conjure an image of Palestine recounted by Pasolini and Godard, or the unbreakable and everlasting conlation of the place of Israel and the will of its people conjured by Lanzmann—bespeak of this struggle for recognition in diferent ways. he preeminent gesture in Agamben is always a gesture beyond images, phantasms, and appearances, forging a path out of this battleield. his leaves us to consider, one last time, the relation between language and place purported by Agamben. Such a connection is summoned in Godard’s reference to Roman Jacobson’s phonology, which holds a central position in Agamben’s linguistic thinking. Belonging neither to the semiotic order of national languages, nor to the semantic order of speech, the phoneme is what enables a passage between these two regions. It is also where all national languages intersect. hese ideas are elaborated on numerous occasions, most

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emphatically, perhaps, in Infancy and History where Agamben, in a characteristic manner, expounds on the phoneme in spatial terms. Phonemes are located, “in a ‘site’ which can perhaps best be described only in its topology […] on the boundary between two simultaneously continuous and discontinuous dimensions.”68 his is not the only time Agamben takes recourse to topology. In fact, topology is precisely what may facilitate a glimpse of the taking place of language, of its exteriority. Topology is invoked in the irst pages of Stanzas when Agamben irst announces that we must learn to grasp place as something more original than space. he reference to topology appears again in his essay on the Palestinian refugees. Here he suggests that a transformation of place is already underway, for “the no-man’s land” on the snowbound border to Lebanon, to which this community of remnants has been expelled, “act[s] back onto the territory of the state of Israel by perforating it and altering it in such a way that the image of that snowy mountain has become more internal to it than any other region of Eretz Israel.”69 he margin retroacts on the center, rupturing its imaginary unity. He goes on to propose that this decreation of territory, where space begins to contract and contort, could be extrapolated as the template to imagine a new form of extraterritorial coexistence: “his space would coincide neither with any of the homogenous national territories nor with their topographical sum, but would rather act on them by articulating and perforating them topologically as in the Klein bottle or in the Möbius strip, where exterior and interior in-determine each other.”70 he notion of space as a static container for a people or a language is cast into crisis if we can bring space itself into visibility. From this vantage point, topology is to topography what gesture is to the image. It is characteristic of Agamben’s writing in general that he locates possibility precisely where such a prospect seems least likely to transpire. In reality, as we know, the two decades that have passed since he wrote “We Refugees” have engendered an unprecedented proliferation of borders carved through all dimensions of space. hough, as Agamben himself notes, “topological exploration is constantly oriented in the light of utopia.”71 In the same sense that topology may transform our experience of place, not as something given but as indeterminate and open to contingency, it may also bring us to the outside of language. For while language is the original site of the subject, this origin does not belong to us, as we receive language from outside ourselves. It is, then, only by pushing toward the boundary of language and perceiving its limits that we may renounce the idea of origin as an essence or substance, as something that has taken place in chronological time. A true

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community, that is, a community which isn’t founded upon the presupposition of belonging to an identity—religious, ethnic, linguistic, or otherwise—can only unfurl from the empty space between voice and language.72 Archaeology should not seek to uncover a buried link between people, soil, and language, but between community and communicability. Only then could it prepare the ground for a community that doesn’t stake a claim of belonging in language, but on its borders.

Notes 1 Maurice Halbwachs, “he Legendary Topography of the Gospel in the Holy Land”, in On Collective Memory (Chicago: he University of Chicago Press, 1992 [1941]), 193–235, 206. 2 Robert S. C. Gordon, Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1996), 207. 3 Pier Paolo Pasolini, “he Written Language of Reality”, in Heretical Empiricism, ed. Louise K. Barnett (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 197–222, 197; Giorgio Agamben, “What is a Paradigm?” Lecture at European Graduate School, August 2002. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/agamben/agambenwhat-is-a-paradigm–2002.html [accessed August 26, 2013]. 4 Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Roland L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993 [1977]), xviii. 5 Ibid., xix. 6 Giorgio Agamben, “Parody”, Profanations, trans. Jef Fort (Zone Books: New York, 2007 [2005]) 37–51, 41, 49. 7 Ibid., 50. 8 Ibid., 51. 9 Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London and New York: Verso, 2007 [1978]), 6. 10 As quoted in Millicent Marcus, Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation (he Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London, 1993), 117. 11 Giorgio Agamben, he Signature of All hings: On Method, trans. Luca D’Isanto and Kevin Attell (New York: Zone Books, 2009 [2008]), 84. 12 Ibid., 110. 13 Ibid. 14 Noa Steimatsky, Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2008), 117–65.

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15 Sam Rohdie, he Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 6. 16 Giorgio Agamben, he Time hat Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005 [2000]), 57. 17 his phrase concludes Pasolini’s short documentary he Walls of Sana’a (1974), pleading to UNESCO to preserve the ancient South Yemen capital. Pasolini originally referred to his work as “a force from the past” in a poem from the published script of Mama Roma, later recited by Orson Welles in La ricotta (1962). Here Welles, who had recently narrated Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (1961), appears as Pasolini’s alter-ego on the production set of a New Testament epos shot on the peripheries of Rome. La ricotta, oten read as a “prequel” to Il Vangelo, was prosecuted and condemned for blasphemy. 18 Oswald Stack, Pasolini on Pasolini: Interviews with Oswald Stack (London: hames and Hudson, 1969), 76. 19 See Libby Saxton’s Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust (London: Walllower Press, 2008), 46–67. 20 Gérard Wajcman, “«Saint Paul» Godard contre «Moïse» Lanzmann”, Le Monde, December 3, 1998: https://sites.google.com/site/dossierjeanlucgodard/2-ilmerapres-auschwitz/wajcman 21 Cahiers du Cinéma (no. 300, May 1979), 17. 22 Claude Lanzmann, he Patagonian Hare: A Memoir (London: Atlantic Books, 2012), 389. 23 Ibid., 411. 24 Marc Chevrie and Hervé Le Roux, “Site and Speech: An Interview with Claude Lanzmann about Shoah”, in Shoah: Key Essays, ed. Stuart Liebman (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 39. 25 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: he Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Rosein (New York: Zone Books, 2000 [1999]), 13. 26 Ibid., 11, 13. 27 Ibid., 35. 28 Ibid., 85. 29 Ibid., 69. 30 Ibid., 130. 31 Ibid., 139 (Emphasis in the original). 32 Chevrie and Le Roux, 39. 33 Lanzmann, he Patagonian Hare, 419. 34 Ibid., 424. 35 Ibid., 427. 36 Chevrie and Le Roux, “Site and Speech”, 42–4.

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37 Simone de Beauvoir, preface to Shoah: he Complete Text (New York: DaCapo Press, 1995), iii. 38 Lanzmann, he Patagonian Hare, 473. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4; Volumes 1938–1940, Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds) (Harvard University Press, 2003) 389–400, 395. 42 Lanzmann, he Patagonian Hare, 489. 43 I’m referring here to Margaret Olin’s proposal that Lanzmann replaces the icon with the index. See Margaret Olin, “Lanzmann’s Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film”, Representations, no. 57 (Winter 1997): 1–23, 17. 44 Chevrie and Le Roux, 40. 45 Lanzmann cited by Michael D’Arcy in “Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and the Intentionality of the Image”, Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory, David Bathrick, Brad Pager and Michael D. Richardson (eds) (Camden House: Rochester, New York: 2008), 138–61, 141. 46 Lanzmann cited by D’Arcy. Ibid., 142. 47 Lanzmann, he Patagonian Hare, 475. 48 I”m drawing here from Margaret Olin’s insight: “he ending of Shoah conforms to an oicial Israeli discourse that understands the Holocaust primarily in its role as the foundation of the Israeli state.” See, Olin, “Lanzmann’s Shoah”, 13. 49 Claude Lanzmann, La Tombe Du Divin Plongeur (Gallimard: Paris, 2012), 367. My translation. 50 Lanzmann, he Patagonian Hare, 492. 51 Ibid., 506–7. 52 Lanzmann cited by Georges Didi-Huberman in Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 93. 53 Agamben borrows the epigraphs for both his studies of the remnant from the Book of Isaiah: for he Time that Remains: “Watchman, what is let of the night?” (Isa. 21.11); and for Remnants of Auschwitz: “he remnant shall be saved” (Isa. 10.22). 54 For a discussion on these two photographs in the context of Sanbar’s book, see Roland-François Lack’s “A Photograph and a Camera: Two Objects in Film socialisme” in Vertigo (no. 30, Spring 2012). he role of photographic images in Godard’s book Film socialisme (2010) is also addressed in James S. Williams’s “Entering the Desert: he Book of Film socialisme” in the same issue. 55 Giorgio Agamben, he Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis and London, 1993 [1990]), 82.

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56 Ibid., 83. 57 Giorgio Agamben, “Languages and People” [1995] in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2000), 63–70, 65. 58 Ibid., 66. 59 Ibid., 67–8. 60 Ibid., 67. 61 Ibid., 68. Scholem’s letter is also cited in he Time hat Remains, 5. 62 Grünewald’s painting of the blindfolded Christ has previously appeared in the irst episode of Histoire(s), framed by the Fedayeen woman patrolling the fence in Ici et ailleurs—on the soundtrack, from the same ilm, a child reciting Mahmud Darwish’s poem “I Will Resist”—and footage of the corpse being dragged in a concentration camp, with the superimposed black lettering of JUIF and MUSULMAN. 63 Giorgio Agamben, “he Idea of Language” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 39–47, 40. 64 Ibid., 47 (Emphasis in the original). 65 Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”, Means Without End, 58, 59. 66 Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995 [1985]), 81–2. 67 Ibid., 82. 68 Agamben, Infancy and History, 67. 69 Giorgio Agamben, “We Refugees”, Symposium, 1995, no. 49 (2) summer, translated by Michael Rocke. 114–19. he essay also appears in a new translation, and with the new title, in Means without Ends. For sake of consistency, I’m quoting here from the latter version, “Beyond Human Rights”, in Means without Ends, 25–6. 70 Ibid., 25. 71 Agamben, Stanzas, xix. 72 Agamben, Infancy and History, 10.

Notes on Contributors Silvia Casini is a postdoctoral fellow at Ca’ Foscari University (Venice, Italy) Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage. She was awarded an AHRC-funded PhD in Visual Studies and Film by Queen’s University, Belfast (UK). Her research interests include, among others, the cross-fertilization between cinema and the visual arts, aesthetics and epistemology of scientiic visualization, and public engagement with science through the arts. Her essays have appeared in Conigurations, Contemporary Aesthetics, Leonardo, Museologia Scientiica, Museums ETC, Tecnoscienza. She has recently published the chapter “he Scan-portrait: Geographies and Geometries of Perception” for the edited book he Atomized Body: the Cultural Life of Genes, Stem Cells and Neurons (Nordic Academic Press, 2012) and is currently completing her irst monograph for Mimesis Edizioni. João Mário Grilo is a ilmmaker and Professor of Film Studies and Film Directing at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He has written and directed several features and documentaries, among them he King’s Trial, he End of the World, Eyes of Asia, he Flying Carpet, Our Home. As a ilm researcher, he wrote the following books (published in Portuguese): he Order in Cinema, he Imagined Man, he Cinema of Non-Illusion, Cinema Lessons, and he Book of Images. At the Philosophy of Language Institute, he directs a research group on Film and Philosophy and he is currently conducting personal research on ilm, landscape and memory. Asbjørn Grønstad is Professor of Visual Culture at the University of Bergen. He is the founding Director of Nomadikon: he Bergen Center of Visual Culture. Among his most recent publications is Ethics and Images of Pain (co-edited with Henrik Gustafsson, Routledge 2012). He is currently at work on a project tentatively entitled “Film and the Ethical Imagination.” Henrik Gustafsson is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Tromsø and a member of the Nomadikon Centre of Visual Culture. His book Out of Site:

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Landscape and Cultural Relexivity in New Hollywood Cinema, 1969–1974 (VDM, 2008) is an interdisciplinary study on ilm, ine arts and cultural memory. Together with Asbjørn Grønstad, he has edited the volume Ethics and Images of Pain (Routledge, 2012). Recent publications appear in Journal of Visual Culture (April 2013), A Companion to Film Noir (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and he Films of Claire Denis: Intimacy on the Border (I.B. Tauris, 2014). Gustafsson is currently working on a new project entitled “Crime Scenery: he Art of War and the Aterlife of Landscape.” Janet Harbord writes on ilm, philosophy and media archaeology. Her interests are in the shiting ontology of what we take ilm to be and the various ways in which ideas of ilm have been stabilized at diferent historical moments. She is the author of Film Cultures (2002), he Evolution of Film (2007), and Chris Marker: La Jetée (2009), and is currently working on a book-length project, “Ex-centric Cinema: Agamben, ilm and archaeology.” She is Professor of Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. Trond Lundemo is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. He has been a visiting Professor and visiting scholar at the Seijo University of Tokyo on ive occasions between 2002 and 2012, and he is a member of the steering committee of the European Network of Cinema and Media Studies. He is co-directing the Stockholm University Graduate School of Aesthetics and is the co-editor of the book series “Film heory in Media History” at Amsterdam University Press. He is also ailiated with the research projects “Time, Memory and Representation” at Södertörns University College, Sweden, and “he Archive in Motion” at Oslo University. His research and publications engage in questions of technology, aesthetics and intermediality as well as the theory of the archive. Benjamin Noys is Reader in English at the University of Chichester. He is the author of Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (2000), he Culture of Death (2005), he Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary heory (2010), and editor of Communization and Its Discontents (2011). Libby Saxton is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. She is author of Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust (Walllower, 2008) and co-author, with Lisa Downing, of Film and

Notes on Contributors

235

Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters (Routledge, 2010). She is also co-editor, with Simon Kemp, of Seeing hings: Vision, Perception and Interpretation in French Studies (Peter Lang, 2002) and, with Axel Bangert and Robert S. C. Gordon, of Holocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium (Legenda, 2013). Garrett Stewart, the James O. Freedman Professor of Letters at the University of Iowa, has had previous teaching appointments at Boston University, the University of California (Santa Barbara), Stanford, Princeton, and the University of Fribourg, Switzlerland. He is the author of several books on Victorian iction, narrative theory, poetics, ilm, and art practice, including most recently Framed Time: Toward a Postilmic Cinema (2007), Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction (2009; Chinese translation, 2013), winner of the Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art (2011). He was elected in 2010 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Pasi Väliaho teaches and writes on theory and history of ilm and screen media. He has a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Turku, Finland, and is Senior Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at the Department of Media & Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London. His 2010 publication, Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, hought and Cinema circa 1900 (Amsterdam University Press) plotted the implication of the medium in contemporaneous arts, science and philosophy to redeine the cinema as one of the most important anthropological processes of modernity. His articles have been published in heory, Culture & Society, Space & Culture, Parallax, heory & Event and Symplokê. James S. Williams is Professor of Modern French Literature and Film at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of (among others) he Erotics of Passage: Pleasure, Politics, and Form in the Later Work of Marguerite Duras (1997), he Cinema of Jean Cocteau (2006), and Jean Cocteau (a “Critical Life”) (2008). He is also co-editor of he Cinema Alone: essays on the work of Jean-Luc Godard 1985–2000 (2000), Gender and French Cinema (2001), For Ever Godard: the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard (2004), Jean-Luc Godard. Documents (2006) (catalogue of the Godard exhibition held at the Centre Pompidou, Paris), and May ‘68: Rethinking France’s Last Revolution

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(2011). In 2011 he recorded an audio commentary for a new edition of Orphée by Criterion, and his latest book, Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema, was published in 2013 by Manchester University Press. He is currently working on a new monograph project entitled Reclaiming Beauty: post-political aesthetics in francophone African cinema.

Index A page reference in italics denotes a igure “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science” (Agamben) 6, 86n. 10, 87n. 20 actors 203–4, 208, 208 divo and 22 persona and 20–1 Adorno, heodor W. 4, 142, 192 advertising pornography and 94 stoppage and 93 type and 20 aesthetics 43–4, 45–6 see also individual terms Agamben, Giorgio 1–3, 8, 15, 89, 92, 161, 162–3 actor 203–4, 208, 208 animal and human themes 72, 73 saved night 96 community and 160n. 38 divo and 8, 22, 23 individual and 22–3 history and 25 location and 208–9 persona and 20–1 praxis and 7–8 type and 19–20 individual and 19, 20 see also individual terms Allemagne 90 neuf zero (Godard) 224 Amour (Haneke) 176, 181, 186 black screen 177, 179, 184–5 death 176–7, 179, 180–4, 186 guilt 184 montage 179–80, 182 narrative 177–8, 182–3, 185–6 profanation 177, 178–9 repetition 185 angels 20 anthropological machine 71–2, 117 apocalyptic themes 25, 50n. 20, 151, 154

capitalism and 30 communication and 30 see also death apparatus see dispositif appearance 5, 73, 227 Arcades Project, he (Benjamin) 86n. 4 archaeology 210, 212, 216, 221–2 language and 210–11, 212, 216, 217, 229 location and 210, 216 archive 196, 197–8, 199 knowledge 198 lacunae 202, 204 vision and non-vision 202 language 220–1 memory and 195 montage 197, 198, 199–200, 201–2, 203 photography 195, 196–7 profanation 222 remnants 196 testimony and 192, 193, 195, 196 voice-over 198 witnesses and 192–3, 195–6, 198, 200–1, 216 Arendt, Hannah 120n. 27 Aristotle 81–2, 150 work and 57 art 3, 12, 47n. 3, 61, 66–7, 74, 122–3, 124–6, 147, 181, 182, 184, 224, 232n. 62 death and 179–82 love and 60 movement 158–9n. 22 neurological body 104–5, 106 neurological gaze 104, 105–6 phantasms 6 sculpture 144 sex 65 spirituality 65–6 stillness 59, 60–1, 62

238 vision instability and 136n. 14 non-vision and 126 see also montage; photography; video Auschwitz 215 archive 197 witnesses 14, 215–16 Babinski, Joseph 104–5, 112 Bachelard, Gaston 46 Bálazs, Béla 107 ballet 130–1, 132–3 bare cinema 122 bare life 90, 111, 116 neurological body 111 Barthes, Roland 74–5 “Bartleby the Scrivener” (Melville) 150–1 Baudelaire, Charles 20, 23n. 1, 46 Bazin, André 38, 156–7n. 1, 195 Bell, Catherine 128–9 Benjamin, Walter 19, 23–4n. 1, 84–5, 91, 93, 163 language 86n. 4 optical unconscious 116, 163–4 photography 163 saved night and 96 Bergala, Alain 49, 58, 66–7 Bilder der Welt und Inschrit des Krieges (Farocki) 195 biopolitics 111, 116, 119n. 19 gesture and 103–4, 112, 118 ethics and 8, 58 see also individual terms bios 111, 116–17, 195 Birth of a Nation, he (Griith) 223 black screen 176, 177, 179, 184, 185 repetition 184 white screen and 184–5, 189n. 34 Boom (Claerbout) 78 Bordeaux Piece (Claerbout) 80 boredom 96 Boulevard du Temple (Daguerre) 76, 77, 84, 85 bourgeois themes 43, 133, 134, 172 repetition 170–1 Bresson, Robert 52n. 27 Broch, Hermann 32 Brouillet, André 104–5, 107

Index Caché (Haneke) 171–2, 174, 175 narrative 174 profanation 175–6 repetition 173–4 video 170–1, 172–3, 174–5, 188n. 26 capitalism 30, 55, 97 capture and 11, 89–90 comedy and 109 Casini, Silvia 12–13, 139–60 Cavell, Stanley 1, 15n. 4, 121 Cayrol, Jean 198 Charcot, Jean-Martin 11–12, 104 neurological body and 12, 105, 107 Cheyenne Autumn (Ford) 222–3 children 47–8n. 3 innocence and 52n. 30 rights 53–4n. 38 Chimes at Midnight (Welles) 186–7n. 1 Christianity 64, 82, 147, 148, 150, 208 instant 82 language 210–11 location and 207 remnants and 207–8, 211 sex 65 spirituality and 64, 65–6 work 64 see also messianism chronophotography 107, 108 Cicero 142 ciné-trance 128, 136–7n. 23 rituals and 128, 129–33, 131, 132, 137n. 33 “Cinema and History” (Agamben) 8–9, 25–6, 47n. 1 Claerbout, David 10–11, 74–5 photography 75–6, 78 video 80, 85 Clark, T. J. 182 Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière, A (Brouillet) 104, 104–6 close-ups 35, 39–40, 59, 107 cognition 51n. 20 Colebrook, Claire 122–3 colonialism 210–11, 222–3 Coma (Michael Crichton) 97 comedy 30, 108–9 persona 21 projection and 38–9

Index silence 38 Coming Community, he (Agamben) 5, 48n. 4 commedia dell’arte 21 communication 112, 120n. 27 explicit and implicit themes 86n. 10 non-communication and 30, 31, 34, 49n. 13, 80, 85 persuasion 120n. 27 see also language; silence Conidential Report (Welles) 22 continuity 130–1, 132–3 continuum 81, 82, 83–4 points 83 counterfactual 164, 166, 170, 174–6, 178, 182–3, 186 Cowie, Elizabeth 137n. 30 Crary, Jonathan 124–5, 126, 136n. 14 cutting 5–6, 186–7n. 1 repetition and 173 Daguerre, Louis 76–7, 84, 87n. 19 dance 152–3, 153 music and 130–1, 132–3, 152 Daney, Serge 9, 25 Dans la serre (Manet) 124–6, 125, 127, 136n. 14 Dante 159n. 27 darkness 152, 154, 176, 177, 179, 184, 185, 195 light and 184–5 repetition 184 vision and non-vision 154, 154–5, 202–3 de la Durantaye, Leland 3, 64 De l’origine du XXIe siècle (Godard) 199 death 31–2, 176–7, 178–9, 180–1, 182–4 darkness and 176, 184 ixed-frame shots 172, 179 lashback 183, 184 light and 33–4 location and 184 music and 37 neomorts 97 silence and 42 sot focus shot 183 stillness 179–80 stoppage and 178 vision and non-vision 181–2, 186

239

see also apocalyptic themes; Shoah Death of Virgil, he (Broch) 31, 32, 36, 37, 39, 41–2 Debord, Guy 2–9, 11, 13, 25–9, 45, 72–3, 89, 93–8, 133, 141, 145, 162–3, 165–6, 182, 185 black screen 184–5 montage 28 nostalgia and 94–5 repetition and 145, 162 spectacle; spectacular societies; spectacularization 3, 7, 11, 27, 89, 94–5 stoppage and 93 Debray, Régis 166, 181 video 166–7 decreation 4–5, 26 potentiality and 64–5 see also individual terms Deleuze, Gilles 1–4, 13, 26, 28, 89, 90, 92, 121–1, 141, 161–8, 175, 185 black screen 184–5, 189n. 34 movement and 163 movement-image 2, 13, 47n. 3, 92, 163, 165, 175, 181 narrative 188n. 25 time-image 92, 161, 165–6, 174, 182 Derrida, Jacques 72, 192 desubjectivation 13–14, 167 des Lysses, Chloë 96 détournement 27, 48n. 4, 94, 166, 173 Didi-Huberman, Georges 14, 104, 196–8, 200, 201–2, 216 “Diference and Repetition” (Agamben) 3, 5, 27, 72–3, 163 disappearance 5 dispositif 13, 112, 143–5, 155, 156, 158n. 12 movement 144, 145 profanation and 140, 145–6 thermal camera 154 thermal camera 153–4 tripod 128 Doane, Mary Ann 55–6 Don Quixote (Welles) 141 innocence and 52n. 30 projection and 141 profanation 146 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 42

240

Index

dunamis 57, 60, 63 Dziga Vertov Group 212–13, 214, 220 El Greco 65–6 elitism 97–8 energia 57, 59–60, 63, 150 enjoyment 90–1 Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, he (Delacroix) 61 ergon 57–9 ethics 5, 7–8, 29, 140 aesthetics and 43–4, 45–6 gesture and 7, 8, 29 biopolitics and 8, 58 see also individual terms ethnicity 172, 175, 211–12, 223 language 223 see also Jewish issues etymology 142, 157n. 6 exclusion 41 see also remnants “Fable and History” (Agamben) 88n. 41 fascism 211 see also Shoah fashion stoppage and 93 type and 20 Fedayeen 213, 222 language and 221 location and 222 Muselmann and 222–3, 232n. 62 Felman, Shoshana 215 ilm-of-life 97 ilm philosophy 1, 121–2 see also individual terms Film socialisme (Godard) 223, 224, 224, 227 intertitles 224 language 223, 225, 226 location and 224 montage 226 photography 223–5 remnants 222–3 rights 53–4n. 38 voice-over 224–5, 226 ixed-frame shots 172, 179 lashback 165, 174, 177–8, 183, 184 twist and 167, 168 vision and non-vision 167–9 vision and non-vision 177

licker efect 162 focus pulls 35, 36 footprint roll method 109–10 “For an Ethics of the Cinema” (Agamben) 8, 19–24 Foucault, Michel 2, 11, 89, 90, 105–6, 111–12, 114, 143–4, 146, 192–6, 202, 210 neurological body and 106, 112 testimony and 193–4 framing 59, 152 France/tour/détour/deux/enfants (Godard) 28, 47–8n. 3 rights 53n. 38 gait 80, 110, 111, 113 automaticity and 110–11 footprint roll method 109–10 vision 110 gesture 7, 33, 46, 47n. 3, 58, 90, 109, 122, 123, 126–7, 134, 139, 141, 156, 203 biopolitics and 103–4, 112, 118 capture and 91 ethics and 7, 8, 29 biopolitics and 8, 58 etymology and 142, 157n. 6 see also individual terms ghosts 6–7 Gilbreth, Frank B. 55–6 Gilles de la Tourette, Georges 80, 109, 110–11 Glass, Philip 144 glory 3 Godard, Jean-Luc 9–10, 25, 26, 27–8, 33, 34, 41, 43–4, 45, 46, 47n. 1, 47–8n. 3, 50n. 20, 52n. 27, 61, 67, 124, 198, 199, 212–13, 221 communication and 30, 49n. 13 explicit and implicit themes 38 focus pulls 36 language 214–15, 220 location and 14–15 messianism 29 montage 25, 28, 44–5, 199–200, 201, 202, 203 movement and 58–9 music and 37

Index optimism and 46, 52–3n. 30 projection and 53n. 30 poetry and 32–3, 45–6 projection and 38–9, 51–2n. 25 repetition and 40 rights and 53–4n. 38 sentimentality and 46, 50–1n. 20 silence and 9 grace 62–3 Grandrieux, Philippe 2, 13, 139, 151, 153–6, 159n. 30 dispositif 153–4, 156 Grandville, J. J. 109 gravity 62–3 Greeting, he (Viola) 13, 139–40, 147, 149, 156 profanation 147–8, 150 Griith, David Wark (Griith, D. W.) 103, 223 Grilo, João Mário 12, 121–38 Grønstad, Asbjørn 1–17 guilt 184 Gustafsson, Henrik 1–17, 207–32 Halbwachs, Maurice 207, 208, 229n. 1 Hand Catching Lead (Serra) 139–40, 156 dispositif 13, 144–5 Haneke, Michael 13–14, 182, 185, 186 happiness 96 Harbord, Janet 10–11, 55, 71–88 hatred 93, 94 Heidegger, Martin 4, 5, 90 Histoire(s) du cinéma (Godard) 25, 26, 27, 29, 50n. 20, 53n. 34, 124, 198, 199, 201 apocalyptic themes 25, 50n. 20 knowledge 51n. 20 messianism 28 montage 8–9, 25, 44, 56, 223 sentimentality and 50–1n. 20 silence and 40 video 50n. 20 Holocaust see Shoah Homo Sacer (Agamben) 3, 90, 195 hysteria 12, 105 movement 105, 107, 113 neurological gaze 12, 104, 104, 105 threshold 111–12

241

Ici et ailleurs (Godard and Miéville) 213, 221, 222 archive 222 language 221 montage 221–2 remnants 221 Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (Pasolini) 203–4, 208, 208 archaeology 210–11 location and 207–8 In Girum (Debord) advertising 93, 94 commentary 93 fashion 93 rapture and 94 In the Conservatory (Manet) 124–6, 125, 127, 136n. 14 industry 55, 56, 57 movement 59–60, 64, 66 spirituality and 66 parody 64 Infancy and History (Agamben) 3, 71, 86n. 2, 209, 227–8 innocence 42 projection and 52n. 30 instant continuum and 81, 82, 83–4 points 83 points 83 intertitles 224 It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra) 97 Jacobson, Roman 226–7 Je vous salue Marie (Godard) 65 Jewish issues 213, 218 homeland and 225 see also ZionistPalestine issues remnants and 211 see also Shoah JLG/JLG—autoportrait de décembre (Godard) 224 “Judgment Day” (Agamben) 76 Jusqu’à la victoire (Godard and Gorin) 212–13 Kaka, Franz 91 adaptations 91–2 enjoyment and 90–1

242

Index

kairological time 83, 84, 88n. 41 legibility and 84–5 movement 76 paradigm and 74 Kantor, Alfred 195 Kember, Sarah 5–6 Kindergarten Antonio Sant’Elia (Claerbout) 75–6 King Lear (Godard) 30, 49n. 11 death 42 montage 49n. 11 music 43 poetry 32, 50n. 17 silence 42, 43, 44, 49n. 11 stop-start motion 42–4 Kingdom and the Glory, he (Agamben) 3 Kittler, Friedrich 110, 119n. 12, 192 Kjellén, Rudolf 119n. 19 Klossowski, Pierre 97 knowledge 106, 197, 198 cognition 51n. 20 “Kommerell” (Agamben) 79–80 La Condition ouvrière (Weil) 62, 63, 64 La Pesanteur et la grâce (Weil) 62–4, 65 La ricotta (Pasolini) 230n. 17 La Vie nouvelle (Grandrieux) 13, 139–40, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 159n. 27 apocalyptic themes 151, 154 darkness 152, 154, 155 dispositif 153–4 movement 152, 153, 153 profanation 154 zoom shots 152 labor see work language 23, 32, 71, 72, 86n. 4, 142, 192, 193, 194, 195, 209, 218–19, 220–1, 223, 226 animal and human 71–2, 86n. 2 etymology 142, 157n. 6 lacunae 196–7 location and 14–15, 209, 210–11, 212, 214–15, 216, 217, 219, 220, 225–6, 228–9 fascism and 211 remnants 15, 220, 225 memory 192 movement and 142

parody 209, 223 phonemes 227–8 remnants 215–16, 222 speechless 142 vision and non-vision 226 Lanier, Jaron 195 Lanzmann, Claude 212, 213, 214 archaeology and 216, 217 archive and 216 language 217, 220 location and 14–15, 217 witnesses 198 Leave Her to Heaven (Stahl) 22 legibility 84–5 Leutrat, Jean-Louis 66 Les Maîtres fous (Rouche) 137n. 30 Les petites misères de la vie humaine (Grandville) 109 Les Plages d’Agnès (Varda) 227 montage 226 Les Rita Mitsouko 33, 37 Levi, Primo 193, 206 Levitt, Deborah 16n. 5, 135n. 4, 8 Life of Pi, he (Lee) 168–70 Life of Pi, he (Martel) 188n. 25 light 33–4 darkness and 184–5 vision and non-vision 202–3 repetition and 80–1 soundtrack and 42 “L’Image” (Reverdy) 32, 50n. 17 Londe, Albert 107 love innocence and 42, 52n. 30 work and 60, 64 Lumière brothers 109, 157–8n. 10 Lundemo, Trond 14, 191–205 make-up 20 Malraux, André 50n. 15 death and 31, 37 Man With a Movie Camera (Vertov) 127 Man Without Content, he (Agamben) 3 Manet, Édouard 12, 124–6, 136n. 14 Marey, Étienne-Jules 135n. 8 Masculin féminine (Jean-Luc Godard) 60 McCrea, Christian 48n. 4, 122 memory 49n. 11, 191, 192, 195

Index repetition and 4, 26, 165, 171, 172, 175–6 lashback 165, 167–9, 174 music 183 testimony and 191, 192–3 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 121, 142, 160n. 36 messianism 26, 28, 29 salvation and 25, 31, 90, 96–7, 98–9 saved night 96 metaphysics 23, 89 points 83 Metz, Christian 172–3 Michaud, Philippe Alain 143 Miéville, Anne-Marie 47, 58, 213, 220–2 Mnemosyne Atlas (Warburg) 6, 8–9 Mocking of Christ, he (Grünewald) 224, 224, 232n. 62 Modern Times (Chaplin) 64 montage 8–9, 25, 41, 45, 49n. 11, 56, 127, 197, 198, 199, 201 archaeology and 221–2 capture and 226 death and 179–80, 182 framing 152 lacunae 202, 203 memory 49n. 11 messianism 28 photography and 201–2 poetry and 32–3 projection and 41 repetition and 40–1 racial issues 223 silence 44–5 stoppage and 199, 200 vision and non-vision 199–200 voice-over 221–2 witnesses and 202 Morgan, Daniel 51n. 21 focus pulls 35 Morrey, Douglas 60, 64 Morse, Samuel 77, 87n. 19 movement 58–60, 63, 64, 78, 106, 108, 108, 112–13, 140–1, 143, 157–8n. 10, 200–1 automaticity and 113–14, 114, 115, 116, 117, 117–18 dance 130–1, 132–3, 152–3, 153 gait 80, 109–11, 113

243

language and 142 looped 79 neurological gaze 107–8 repetition 144, 145 slow motion 148 stillness and 10, 58, 59, 60–2, 65, 66, 76, 79–80, 91, 92–3, 105, 147, 158–9n. 22, 163, 179–80 close-ups 59 framing 59 neurological gaze 105 repetition 164 vision and non-vision 77, 163–4 stoppage and 178 stop-start motion 42–4 vision and non-vision 78, 153 multi-format ilm 92 Mulvey, Laura 65, 68n. 14, 87n. 23 Münsterberg, Hugo 189n. 34 Murray, Alex ix, 160n. 38, 165n. 5, 142 Murray, Timothy 49n. 11 Muselmann 14, 214, 216 archive and 199 Fedayeen and 222–3, 232n. 62 language and 14–15, 214–15, 226 vision and non-vision 192 witnesses and 193, 194 music 33, 36–7, 38, 43, 183 dance and 130–1, 132–3, 152 focus pulls 36 silence and 40 Muybridge, Eadweard 80 Nancy, Jean-Luc 4–5 narrative 13–14, 30, 34, 165–6, 175, 185–6, 188n. 25 animal and human themes 188n. 25 character and 172–3 lashback 167, 168, 177–8 religion and 169–70 repetition 167–9, 174, 182–3 stoppage 178 neomorts 97 Neri, Vincenzo 112–13 neurological body 11, 106, 111, 113 chronophotography 107, 108 hysteria 12, 104, 104–5, 107, 111–12, 113 knowledge 106

244

Index

movement 106, 108, 108, 109–11, 112–14, 114, 115, 116, 117, 117–18 neurological gaze and 106–7, 109, 112, 113 psychology and 106 silence 113 neurological gaze 11–12, 104, 104, 105–7, 108, 109, 113–14, 114, 115, 116, 117, 117–18 animal and human themes 116–17, 118 close-ups 107 communication 112 vision and non-vision 107 new extremism 159n. 30 new life 156, 159n. 27 new technology 195 multi-format 92 sotware 11, 98 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 7–8, 57 Nietzsche, Friedrich 3, 26, 162, 192 Night Watch, he (Rembrandt) 59 nostalgia 94–5 “Notes on Gesture” (Agamben) ix, 7, 9, 10, 29, 31, 43, 46, 55–6, 58, 67, 79–80, 103, 121, 123, 143 “Notes sur les Tableaux parisiens de Baudelaire” (Benjamin) 19, 23–4n. 1 Notre Musique (Godard) 51, 199 Noys, Benjamin 11, 16n. 5, 89–101, 157–8n. 10 Nuit et brouillard (Resnais) 198 “Nymphs” (Agamben) 7, 147 Open, he (Agamben) 71–2 Palestine see Zionist-Palestine issues pan shots 64, 218 paradigm 73–4 parody 64, 178, 209, 223 lacunae 209 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 2–3, 14, 208, 230n. 17 archaeology and 210 language 209, 211 location and 14 remnants 207–8 racial issues and 211–12 remnants 211 Passing, he (Viola) 147 Passion (Godard) 56, 62, 64, 66–7

movement 60–2 pan shots 64 sex 65 spirituality 64, 65–6 work 10, 56, 57–8, 59–60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67 Patagonian Hare, he (Lanzmann) 214–15, 216, 217, 218–19 pathology see neurological body Paul, Letters of 15, 87n. 29, 220 peace 226–7 persuasion 120n. 27 phantasms 6–7 phenomenology 4, 5 phonemes 227–8 location and 228 photography 10–11, 73, 76–7, 84, 85, 87n. 19, 195, 197 capture and 73 paradigm and 73–4 chronophotography 107, 108 communication and 85 instant 81 kairological time 74, 76, 84 knowledge and 197 montage and 201–2 movement 77, 78, 79–80 remnants 223–5 stillness 163, 164 testimony and 14, 194, 196–7 video and see video, photography and vision and 73 non-vision and 77 witnesses and 194–5 Place in the Sun, A (Stevens) 201 poetry 32, 33, 37, 45–6, 50n. 17, 162 death and 31–2 montage and 32–3 stoppage 26, 29, 162 points 83 polis 120n. 27 populism 97–8 pornography 95 advertising and 94 brazenness and 95–6 rapture and 96 capitalism and 11 stoppage and 96

Index type and 20 possession rituals 12, 130, 133 ciné-trance and 129–30, 131, 131–2, 132, 133, 137n. 33 continuity 130–1, 132–3 music and 130–1, 132–3 potentiality 3–5, 57, 123–4, 140, 141, 150–1, 155–6, 162, 164–5, 166, 167, 188n. 24, 189–90n. 40 capture and 166 decreation and 64–5 see also individual terms Pourquoi Israël (Lanzmann) 213–14, 220–1 language 220–1 Prénom Carmen (Godard) 65 profanation 11, 13, 85, 90, 91, 97, 146, 148, 173, 189n. 29 advertising 93, 94 animal and human themes 146 death 177, 178–9 dispositif and 140, 145–6, 154 fashion 93 ilm-of-life and 97 location and 147–8 movement 147, 148 populism and 97–8 pornography and 95–6 religion and 148, 150, 222 repetition and 175–6 salvation and 96–7 stillness and 92–3 stoppage and 98 undecidability 93–4 psychology 80 neurological body and 106 Purple Rose of Cairo, he (Woody Allen) 93 racial issues 172, 175, 211–12, 223 language 223 see also Jewish issues Rancière, Jacques 121, 194, 200, 205n. 26 rapture boredom and 96 hatred and 93, 94 reanimation 6–7 reappearance 5 redemption 29, 31, 42, 46, 82, 90, 93, 97–8

245

religion 146, 148, 150 language 222 narrative and 169–70 see also Christianity; Jewish issues; spirituality remnants 14, 15, 193, 196, 207–8, 211, 213–14, 215–16, 220, 221, 222, 223–5, 228 colonialism and 222–3 fascism and 211 vision and non-vision 224 see also Fedayeen; Muselmann Remnants of Auschwitz (Agamben) 14, 193, 195, 214–15, 220 repetition 3–4, 25–6, 40–1, 80–1, 82, 144, 145, 162, 170–1, 173–4, 184–5 cutting and 173 memory and 4, 26, 165, 171, 172, 175–6 lashback 165, 167–9, 174 music 183 silence 45 soundtrack 37 stoppage and 4, 13, 26, 27–8, 81, 145, 161, 162, 163, 164, 171, 182–3, 185, 200 appearance and 5 cutting and 5 licker efect 162 revenants see remnants and revenants Ribot, héodule 106 Ricciardi, Alessia 62, 65 rights 53–4n. 38 rituals 128–9, 137n. 30 ciné-trance and 128, 129, 130 spirit possession 12, 129–33, 131, 132, 137n. 33 Romero, George 97 Rouch, Jean 121, 133 bourgeois themes and 134 ciné-trance 128, 130, 136–7n. 23, 137n. 33 rituals and 12, 129 tripod 128 Ruurlo, Borculoscheweg (Claerbout) 78–9 Salpêtrière 11, 113, 154 salvation 25, 31, 90, 96–7, 98–9 San Paolo (Pasolini) 211

246

Index

Sanbar, Elias 214, 223, 224–5 Sartre, Jean-Paul 213 saved night 96 Saxton, Libby 4, 10, 55–70, 205n. 22 Scénario du ilm ”Passion” (Godard) 33 Scholem, Gershom 225, 226 screen grabs 98 sculpture 144 Searchers, he (Ford) 223 sentimentality 46, 50–1n. 20 nostalgia 94–5 smiling regret and 46 Serra, Richard dispositif 145, 156 sculpture 144 video 144 Settis, Salvatore 158–9n. 22 sex 65 see also neurological gaze; pornography Shoah 35–6, 213, 214–15, 217, 218 archaeology 216, 217 archive 192–3, 195, 196–8, 199, 200–2, 216, 222 homeland and 218 see also ZionistPalestine issues language 215, 217, 218–19, 220–1 remnants and see Muselmann silence 196 vision and non-vision 192, 217–18 witnesses 14, 215–16 Shoah (Lanzmann) 214–15, 217, 218 archaeology 216, 217 archive and 198, 200–1, 216 homeland and 218 language 217, 218–19 pan shots 218 vision and non-vision 217–18 witnesses 215 zoom shots 218 Shutter Island (Scorsese) 169 Side Efects (Soderbergh) 167–8 Signature of All hings, he (Agamben) 73 silence 9, 31, 38, 39, 43, 44–5, 49n. 11, 113, 196 close-ups and 40 soundtrack and 40 stop-start motion and 42 vision and non-vision 39, 194

Silverman, Kaja 65–6 “Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the History of Cinema, he” (Agamben) 52n. 30 slavery 63 slow motion 148 smiling rapture and 93, 94, 96 regret and 46 sot focus shot 183 sotware 11 screen grabs 98 Soigne ta droite (Godard) 9–10, 29–31, 32, 34, 35–6, 37, 41, 45, 51n. 21 apocalyptic themes 30 close-ups 35 comedy 30, 38–9 communication and 34 death 33–4 exclusion and 41 explicit and implicit themes 38 focus pulls 35, 36 innocence 42 language 32 light 42 messianism 29, 31 montage 40–1 music and 33, 36–7, 38 narrative 30, 34 poetry 31–2 projection and 34, 39 close-ups 39–40 repetition and 37 sentimentality 46 silence and 9, 39, 40, 44 voice-over 30, 35, 36, 41–2 Sonderkommando 197, 216 Sopralluoghi in Palestina (Pasolini) 14, 207 spirit possession rituals 12, 130, 133 ciné-trance and 129–30, 131, 131–2, 132, 133, 137n. 33 continuity 130–1, 132–3 music and 130–1, 132–3 spirituality 62, 64, 65–6 work and 66 Stanzas (Agamben) 6 Steimatsky, Noa 210 Stevens, George 201 Stewart, Garrett 13–14, 161–90

Index stillness capture and 79 movement and see movement, stillness and Stoicism 82–3 kairological time 83 persona and 21 Stoller, Paul 137n. 28 stop-start motion 42–4 music and 43 stoppage 26, 29, 93, 94, 96, 98, 162, 178 movement and 178 stop-start motion 42–4 rapture and 93 repetition and 4, 13, 26, 27–8, 81, 145, 161, 162, 163, 164, 171, 182–3, 185, 200 appearance and 5 cutting and 5 licker efect 162 screen grabs 98 vision and non-vision 199, 200 subjectivization 14, 194, 204 surveillance 89–90 see also video Taylor, Frederick W. 55–6, 63 Terragni, Giuseppe 75 testimony 14, 192, 193–4, 196, 197, 198, 202, 204n. 16, 216 lacunae 14, 194, 195–6 language 215–16 remnants and 14, 193 language 192, 193, 194, 195, 196–7 location and 215 memory and 191, 192–3 silence and 194 theater 8 divo and 22 language 23 persona and 20–1 thermal camera 153–4 darkness 154 hird of May, he (Goya) 61 time 55, 81–3, 147, 166 see also individual terms “Time and History” (Agamben) 81–4 Time hat Remains, he (Agamben) 211, 213–14 topology 228 Tourou et bitti (Rouch) 130, 132

247

rituals 130–3, 131, 132, 137n. 33 Traic (journal) 8, 9 Treblinka 217 tripod 128 Tsahal (Lanzmann) 218, 219 remnants 222–3 tv 47–8n. 3 type and 20 “Unbinding Vision” (Crary) 124–5 undecidability 93–4, 96 Une place sur la terre see Soigne ta droite (Godard) 9, 29, 34, 38 Väliaho, Pasi 11–12, 103–20, 142 Varro 58 video 12–13, 47–8n. 3, 50n. 20, 144, 147, 166–7, 171, 172 photography and 75, 78–9, 85 capture and 75–6 movement 76, 78, 79 profanation and 85 stillness 79 vision and non-vision 75–6 profanation 147–8, 150 projection 172, 173, 175, 188n. 26 bourgeois themes 170–1, 172 death 172 narrative and 172–3, 175 profanation 173, 189n. 29 racial issues 172, 175 repetition 172, 173 vision and non-vision 174–5 repetition 80–1, 171 video-montage see montage work 69n. 24 Viola, Bill 13, 139, 145, 147–50, 146 dispositif 156 profanation 148 Virgil 31–2 Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, he (El Greco) 65–6 virtuality see potentiality Visitation, he (Pontormo) 147 voice-over 30, 35, 36, 41–2, 69n. 24, 198, 221–2, 224–5, 226 Wajcman, Gérard 213

248 Walls of Sana’a, he (Pasolini) 230n. 17 Warburg, Aby 3, 6–7, 9, 58, 123, 141, 210 “We Refugees” (Agamben) 214, 228 Weber, Eduard 110 Weber, Wilhelm 110 Weil, Simone 10, 62, 64–5, 66 gravity and 62–3 spirituality and 62 work and 62, 63–4, 67 Welles, Orson 22, 91, 139, 141, 146, 156n. 7, 230n. 17 “What Is an Apparatus?” (Agamben) 158n. 19 White Ribbon, he (Das weiße Band) (Haneke) black screen 176 death 179 montage 179–80 white screen 184–5, 189n. 34 Williams, James S. 9, 27–54, 61, 68n. 8, 231n. 54 witnesses 14, 191, 194–5 movement and 200–1 testimony see testimony Witt, Michael 47–8n. 3, 58 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 121, 142

Index Wittman, Blanche 104, 105, 107, 108, 108 women 20 see also sex work 10, 55–6, 57–8, 60, 62, 63–4, 67 capitalism 55 industry 55, 56, 57, 59–60, 64, 66 love and 60, 64 movement 59, 60, 61, 63, 65 slavery and 63 stillness 59 voice-over 69n. 24 “Work of Man, he” (Agamben) 57, 67 Workers Leaving the Factory (Farocki) 69n. 24 Zionist-Palestine issues 211–13, 214, 218, 219–20, 221, 223, 224, 227, 232n. 62 archaeology 212 language 14–15, 219, 221, 225–6 montage 221–2, 223 photography 223–5 remnants and 207–8, 213–14, 220, 222–3, 224, 228 see also Fedayeen zoe 111, 117 zombies 97 zoom shots 152, 218 Zylinska, Joanna 5–6