Georges Didi-Huberman and Film: The Politics of the Image 1784539848, 9781784539849

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank Liverpool University for providing me with a period of research leave and with general support in preparing and completing this manuscript. In particular, thanks are due to Lisa Shaw and Eve Rosenhaft for their careful reading of draft versions of the different chapters and helpful suggestions for improvements. I would also like to thank the series editors, Lúcia Nagib and Tiago de Luca, who also read the finished draft and provided support and suggestions, and the publishing administration at Bloomsbury, Camilla Erskine and Veidehi Hans, who have been most helpful in navigating the manuscript through its final stages in the very difficult circumstances of Spring 2020.

Georges Didi-Huberman and Film: The Politics of the Image Author: Alison Smith Bloomsbury Academic, 2020

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Introduction

Georges Didi-Huberman is a philosopher of images. In his early writings, these were photographs and paintings, in keeping with the discipline of art history to which he nominally owed allegiance; but over the course of an extremely prolific and rapidly-developing career, that initial disciplinary identification has blurred as his subjects of study have widened and ramified. Notably, to an ever-accelerating extent, the images with which he is concerned have taken on motion. Film has been an essential presence in Didi-Huberman’s writing for many years now; and although his early work on the subject was largely  – although not exclusively  – concerned with montage, from the start it went beyond an art-historical interest in filmic use of still images, recognising and reflecting upon the importance and specificity of film footage in which movement, rhythm and gesture are an integral part of the image-phenomenon. Since 2008 (the period which will be of most interest to us in the following pages), film has been central to an increasing politicisation of Didi-Huberman’s preoccupations. This book seeks to offer an introduction for English-speaking readers to the wealth of theoretical potential contained in Didi-Huberman’s writings on film, which are as yet largely unknown to English film scholars due to the continued lack of accessible translations of the author’s later work. In European scholarship Didi-Huberman’s place as a film theorist is becoming more assured, and his role in bringing film firmly to the forefront of debate on representation, political responsibility and the uses of the image is recognised. As Irene Valle Corpas put it in 2018, he has been instrumental in bringing cinema into the orbit of art history as a moving medium, rather than allowing the discipline to 1

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‘reconvert’ it into a mere study of ‘the images of History . . . dead and eternal’.1 He has also engaged in lively debate, notably with Jacques Rancière, over the understanding of political cinema notably in the context of its potential for influence on an audience, and he is a frequent interlocutor of contemporary filmmakers such as Vincent Dieutre, Laura Waddington, Alfredo Jaar or Sylvain George.2 His direction of thought finds parallels in some of the most dynamic theoretical currents in French (and international) film thinking, for example Nicole Brenez’s work on montage, or (and increasingly) the area of film-phenomenology pioneered in French scholarship by Raymond Bellour and in Anglophone studies by Vivien Sobchack and Laura Marks.3 In this study our primary focus will be on the work Didi-Huberman has produced on the formulation of a political philosophy of image practice – practice being understood as at once production, reception, and the organisation of reception, for example through curation. We will look at the foundations of this strand of Didi-Huberman’s work from his first sustained theses on the importance of montage, through his writings on cinema and history in the context of a well-known exchange with the journal Les Temps modernes concerning the role of images in transmitting the memory of the Holocaust. Through a

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Valle Corpas, Irene (2018), ‘Un cine impuro para salvar la Historia del Arte: algunas notas sobre el pensamiento de la imágenes del cine en Jacques Rancière y DidiHuberman’, Boletín de Arte, 39, 245–254. p. 249. A recorded public discussion between Didi-Huberman and George (one of several which have taken place) can be viewed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=pHHaoa7tJrc. An exchange with Jaar related to their mutual interest in film and in Pasolini is available on DailyMotion here: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/ xro1dw. Most recently Didi-Huberman’s closest film contacts have been with Alexander Kluge, whose memoir Chronique des sentiments he reviewed in Le Monde des images in 2016 (the review was republished in Aperçues as ‘Cent mille millards d’images’, op. cit., 28–31). A dialogue between these two can be viewed here: https://www.lesauterhin.eu/ alexander-kluge-georges-didi-huberman-machtlos-impuissant-ou-sans-pouvoir/. See Bellour, Raymond (2009), Le Corps du cinéma: Hypnoses, Emotions, Animalités, Paris, P.O.L.; Sobchack, Vivian (1992), The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press; Marks, Laura (2000), The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses, Durham NC and London: Duke University Press

Introduction

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sustained focus on the series of volumes collectively titled L’Oeil de l’histoire (The Eye of History), published between 2009 and 2015, we will examine how his engagement with cinema has developed concurrently with a strongly marked turn towards political analyses of image-making; this important re-direction is, we will argue, in part traceable to the exceptional influence achieved by the philosophical essay Survivance des lucioles (Survival of the Fireflies) published independently of the L’Oeil de l’histoire series in 2009. Over the last decade Didi-Huberman has become an influential voice at the interface between visual culture, politics and philosophy, with his work an important reference for younger writers such as Marielle Macé. The recent polemic with his long-standing friend and interlocutor Jacques Rancière over the audience reception of images clearly indicates the potential which DidiHuberman’s contemporary production may have for contributing to the field of film-studies. As the most significant parts of this body of work begin to appear in translation,4 Anglophone students should increasingly become aware of the paths he is opening in the study of our medium. *

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The proliferation of Didi-Huberman’s interests derives from a writing practice which he has variously described as ‘papillonnement’ [fluttering],5 as a ‘travail aux travers,’6 or as a Borgesian project.7 All

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To date two volumes of the L’Oeil de l’histoire series, on which this study is most focused, have appeared in English: Volume 1 as The Eye of History: When Images Take Positions (tr. Shane B. Lillis, Thierry Gervais, Boston: MIT Press 2018); Volume 3 as Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science (tr. Shane B. Lillis, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2018). Unfortunately for film students, these are the two volumes of the series least concerned with cinema; the publishers’ choices seem to reflect the general Anglophone perception of Didi-Huberman as a writer of interest primarily to art historians. ‘Apparaissant, disparaissant, papillonnant’ (2006), first published in Spanish in 2007 (La imagen mariposa, Barcelona: Edición Mudito, tr. J. J. Lahuerta). Full French publication as introduction to Phalènes, Minuit, 2013, pp. 9–78. Quote p. 12. This essay recuperates a criticism which he had apparently attracted from certain academic colleagues. ‘Travailler aux travers’, Aperçues, Minuit 2018, pp. 21– 24. ‘Par marges et raccourcis’, Aperçues, Minuit 2018, pp. 15–17.

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three descriptions reflect a willingness to welcome new lines of enquiry as soon as they appear, and to follow his objects of study in whatever direction they may lead: To work by diversions [travailler aux travers] [. . .] consists not in opening great straight swathes through the virgin forest of the unknown [. . .] It implies walking through the damp jungle of the immanent, accepting the persistence of obstacles, stumbling over roots and feeling creepers stroke our faces. It means respecting the complexity, and even the disorder of the world. It means starting by declining to disentangle, or to cut through problems too brutally.8

The vast range of his work has been compared9 to one of the atlases, or visual compendia, to which he has dedicated several studies. Published most accessibly in major volumes – since 1990 in general by the famous Parisian publishing-house Minuit – his thought usually takes form over a period, developing through the publication of shorter essays, catalogue entries, articles, lectures and exchanges, which are then collected into thematically coherent volumes which act as milestones or direction-posts permitting a reader to follow chosen routes through the rich jungle of his writing. Between these major volumes, Didi-Huberman also publishes short monographs and essays in book form, dedicated to single artists or even occasionally single works, again often with Minuit. This exuberant ramification led Didi-Huberman to observe ruefully in 2011 (at the age of 58) that ‘the unreasonable accumulation of my writing “projects” – whose files are taking up more and more space on my bookshelves  – far outstrips, if I was going to dedicate myself methodically to them, the time which I logically have left to live’.10 The range of subject-matter is matched by an equally vast range 8 9

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‘Travailler aux travers’, p. 22. De Cauwer, Stijn, and Laura Katherine Smith (2018), ‘Critical Image Configurations: The Work of Georges Didi-Huberman’, Editorial Introduction to Angelaki 23:4, pp. 3–10: 4. ‘Par marges et raccourcis’, 16.

Introduction

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of references;11 to read any one of Didi-Huberman’s major volumes is to undertake an exhilarating, and often challenging, tour within the forest of European artistic and philosophical thought. This is not to say, however, that there are not continuities, and indeed detectable patterns of development, in his output and interests. Among his intellectual references certain thinkers figure as constant guides and companions: Aby Warburg, for example, whose Atlas Mnemosyne is a model for Didi-Huberman in its treatment of images and its superficially anarchic, but profoundly reflective, way of organising visual knowledge. In his later work, as we shall see, Sergei Eisenstein becomes a similarly exemplary figure for reflection on the organisation of the political image. But perhaps the closest and most fruitful intellectual dialogue maintained by Didi-Huberman is that with Walter Benjamin, to whose multiple, varied philosophical figures he turns as constant support for his own explorations. It can be no coincidence that Benjamin too was a ‘butterfly’, producing work characterised by ramification and variation, constant curiosity and a slightly mischievous temptation to the encyclopaedic. He is also, of course, a strongly image-centred philosopher, not only when dealing directly with art, photography and cinema, but equally in his approach to matters of history and memory, and even in his style of writing, regularly elucidated by metaphors in which Didi-Huberman finds scintillating reflections of his own mode of thought. Any discussion of Didi-Huberman’s philosophy should start from this exchange: his approach to cinema is more than anything else Benjaminian.

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De Cauwer and Smith (‘Critical Image Configurations’, p. 4) offer the following list related to just one volume, L’Oeil de l’histoire III: Atlas ou le Gai Savoir Inquiet (2011): Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Maurice MerleauPonty, Theodor Adorno, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Georges Bataille, Charles Baudelaire, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Bloch, Plato, Marcel Mauss, André Leroi-Gourhan, Marcel Broodthaers, Gerhard Richter, Jorge Luis Borges, Katsushika Hokusai, Francisco Goya, Fernand Deligny, August Sander, Eugène Atget, Ernst Cassirer, Karl Kraus, Auguste Le Bon, Emile Benveniste, Ludwig Binswanger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Heartfield. They note that the list is not exhaustive!

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From the beginning of his career, Didi-Huberman’s approach was innovative in the context of traditional art history. His first monograph, adapted from his doctoral thesis, took as its subject the photographs of hysterical patients taken by Dr Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, for purposes of medical research and pedagogy. Didi-Huberman’s study of these photographs developed a thesis of the image-symptom which brought him his first celebrity in art-historical scholarship; his analysis developed the language of Freudian theory in the context of constructed visibility. No less significant in considering the development of his work, however, was his divergence from an art-history focused on the singular, prestigious masterpiece; from his earliest writings images for Didi-Huberman have always been plural, and their significance lies in what they make visible, irrespective of the formal intent which governed their production. More significant, to Didi-Huberman, was to understand the production and reception of images in their historical context and, crucially, their material form, which when brought into contact and contrast with the material form of other images creates the sparks of association which give visual culture its meaning to audience and analyst alike. This founding belief that the study of images depends upon the plural was an insight which would lead him, in the mid-1990s, to put forward a theoretical re-framing of the idea of montage in an art-historical context; and, in dealing with montage, of necessity he was led to confront the processes of the moving image. DidiHuberman’s earliest sustained theoretical engagement with the cinema was thus concerned with the films and writings of Sergei Eisenstein which offered him a frame of reference to understand the dynamics of contacts between a multiplicity of images. Modernist film theory first enters triumphantly into his history of art in his 1995 work on Georges Bataille’s visual texts, La Ressemblance informe, ou Le Gai Savoir visuel selon Georges

Introduction

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Bataille.12 Eisenstein’s direct influence on Bataille’s work led DidiHuberman to extended research on the connections between the two very different thinkers, and from that association developed the vital theory of ‘rascally dialectic’ applied to images, which will be discussed in detail in Chapter 2. Eisenstein has remained a fundamental referent to Didi-Huberman, perhaps the Ur-referent for all his subsequent very varied engagement with filmmakers of both past and present; the final and most substantial volume of L’Oeil de l’histoire returns to this canonical theorist once more, crystallising in the process a difference with Jacques Rancière which led to a sharp and very significant exchange around the possibility  – and desirability  – of visually evoking political emotion (see Chapter 4). Didi-Huberman’s obsessive urge to write, however, was leading him in other directions even as he was developing his theories of montage and organisation, and some of those directions drew him again towards the cinema. In 1999, for example, he found an image of his own ‘fluttering’ appropriation of knowledge in a small videofilm by Alain Fleischer, L’Homme du Pincio, in which the camera follows an eccentric individual’s movements through his habitual haunts in Rome.13 Apart from its analysis of movement and concentration, this essay contains the first traces of Didi-Huberman’s concern with film’s ability, and responsibility, to make visible and significant the anonymous lives which may speak for the ‘peoples’ ignored by mainstream image-making. But perhaps the most high-profile strand of his work in the late 1990s centred on the possible, or impossible, imaging of the Holocaust. His first published piece devoted entirely to cinema, predating even his early writings on Eisensteinian montage, was in fact an article dedicated to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah.14 A 12 13

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Paris, Macula, 1995. ‘L’être qui papillonne’, Cinémathèque, no. 15, 1999, pp. 7–14. Republished in Phalènes, op. cit., pp. 152–164. ‘Le Lieu malgré tout’, Vingtième siècle, revue d’histoire, no. 46, April–June 1995, pp. 36–44. Reprinted in Phasmes, Editions de Minuit, 1998, pp. 228–242, quote p. 232.

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spontaneous response to the power of the film, this article centres on the cinematic representation of place and time, or rather place in time. The theme of montage quickly makes its appearance, in a Benjaminian context; specifically it is associated with the evocative – and already tendentially political – power of anachronism, ‘a collision of the Now and the past’. These two strands of Didi-Huberman’s research of the mid-1990s – the dynamics of image-montage and the political potential of temporal dissonance read through the lens of Benjamin’s writing on the dialectical image – would come together in a vital work of 2001, Devant le temps: Histoire de l’art et anachronisme de l’image.15 Although Devant le temps acknowledges the role of film theory – specifically, of Gilles Deleuze – in formulating reflections on the visual representation of time, its philosophical centre is in art history. Apart from Benjamin, its exemplary authors are Aby Warburg and Carl Einstein, all – at least in Didi-Huberman’s presentation  – maverick thinkers who offer DidiHuberman a way to develop his long-term mission of redirecting his primary discipline of art history. None the less, the concept of dialectical anachronism developed particularly in the section of the book devoted to Benjamin proves a maelstrom of ideas and possibilities which spread irresistibly through L’Oeil de l’histoire. In the meantime the cinema forced its way once more into DidiHuberman’s focus, this time through a possibly unexpected polemic with none other than Claude Lanzmann, and other writers in the influential journal edited by Lanzmann, Les Temps modernes. The exchange arose out of a curatorial essay written by Didi-Huberman on four still photographs taken in Auschwitz and displayed in an exhibition on the photographic memory of the camps. Les Temps modernes violently contested this essay; and the polemic soon developed into a much vaster exchange about the role of the visual in 15

Paris, Minuit, 2001.

Introduction

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this most extreme sphere of contested memory. Lanzmann’s own film became, once again, a centre of debate; and, in investigating his own reluctance to accept Shoah as the ultimate and exclusive form of imaging this memory, Didi-Huberman was led for the first time to engage systematically with the work of Jean-Luc Godard and to explore the many ways in which Godard’s image-practice intersected with his own philosophical concerns. The resulting book, Images malgré tout16 (2003), which collects Didi-Huberman’s texts from each stage of the developing debate, is still perhaps the most widely-known of all his volumes. It was quickly translated into Spanish (2004), Italian (2005), German (2006) and English (2008), and established DidiHuberman’s name in the field of Holocaust studies. It also allowed Didi-Huberman to test his ideas regarding the political imperatives of image-construction in an extraordinarily sensitive field, one which would remain a valuable gauge in assessing other montage-practice in the light of its potential to unlock history to contemporary memory. It seemed that, after the publication of Images malgré tout, DidiHuberman’s output might turn in other directions. He returned to an earlier theme of his art-historical work, incarnation and tactility, for two major works, L’Image ouverte (2007) and La Ressemblance par contact (2008); he published three relatively short books concerned with the representation of movement in art (including one, unique in his oeuvre to the best of my knowledge, on dance: Le Danseur des solitudes, 2006). He was, however, still pursuing the questions opened by the essays of the turn of the millennium: for example, in his contribution to an exhibition catalogue about the Chilean artist and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar,17 he develops the idea of ‘documentary poetics’ in a context highly charged with the need for political resistance. Although the subject of this essay was Jaar’s photographic 16 17

Paris, Minuit, 2003. ‘L’émotion ne dit pas “je”. Dix fragments sur la liberté esthétique’, in catalogue Alfredo Jaar: La politique des images, Musée cantonal des beaux-arts, Lausanne, Suisse, 2007.

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installation work, the subjects discussed foreshadow arguments developed in detail, in explicitly cinematic contexts, throughout L’Oeil de l’histoire: how to destabilise a jaded gaze through managed multiplicity of images; how to extract from those images their full, necessarily anachronistic, political significance; how to engage the viewer in a process of developing emotion which is politically progressive and not merely manipulative. The quotation used in the title of this essay, ‘L’émotion ne dit pas “je” ’ (Emotion does not say ‘I’), drawn from Gilles Deleuze, plays a fundamental role in the examination of cinematic emotion undertaken in OH6. The series of six essays constituting L’Oeil de l’histoire (The Eye of History, ‘an inverted homage to Georges Bataille’s L’Histoire de l’oeil [The Story of the Eye]’18) represents the systematic expression of DidiHuberman’s study of the political significance of image-montage; and in so doing they bring together the threads of theory already developing and extend them into an engaged and dynamic examination of the medium of cinema. Like most of Didi-Huberman’s work, the books are a final repository for research which had been generated in the course of other activities. Annual seminar series at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, Didi-Huberman’s institutional base since 1990, form the basis of volumes 4, 5 and 6; while volume 1 started life in similar circumstances at the University of Bâle, volume 2 brings together different lectures, articles and interviews prepared for conferences or exhibitions, and volume 3 consists of catalogue text for an exhibition devoted to the figure of Atlas (Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2010–11). Despite these eclectic origins, the six books exhibit a strong sense of direction. Volume 1, Quand les images prennent position (When images take a position, 2009), announces the political turn which Didi-Huberman’s research on 18

Truong, Nicolas (2015), ‘Quelle politique des images?’, interview with Didi-Huberman 19 July 2008, in Nicolas Truong (dir.), Résistances intellectuelles: Les combats de la pensée critique, pp. 115–130, Avignon: Editions de l’Aube, p. 126.

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montage is taking, in a substantial essay primarily concerned with the work of Bertolt Brecht, particularly those volumes where he conjoined image and text. Volume 2, Remontages du temps subi (Re-viewing suffered time, 2010), picks up the threads of Images malgré tout to examine further political implications in the representation of the Holocaust in particular, and traumatic history more generally. Here cinema is the explicit centre of the work, and the subject of the two major essays in the volume, respectively on the post-war use of footage from the liberation of the camps, and on the work of Harun Farocki. Two shorter pieces in the form of an ‘epilogue’ discuss photography and visual art (Christian Boltansky) respectively. Anachronism and the insertion of history into the mindset of the present, concepts developed in the theses of Devant le temps, are here explicitly employed to enquire into the cinematic medium, albeit in the very particular context of montage films created from pre-existing footage. The origins of Volume 3, Atlas ou le gai savoir inquiet (Atlas or the anxious gay science, 2011), as an exhibition catalogue set it somewhat apart from the rest of the series, not least because it is little concerned with cinema. It returns to the question of the organisation of images – the ‘atlas’ in the sense of the compilation of knowledge – with a very substantial section on Aby Warburg, as we have seen one of DidiHuberman’s fundamental influences with regard to both philosophy and practice. Another current of thought also comes to prominence here, one concerned with the representation of the oppressed and with gestures of both weariness and resistance. Associated with ‘Atlas’ the subjected Titan, this theme becomes central to the arguments of volumes 4 and 6, and remains the most significant channel carrying Didi-Huberman’s writing forward from L’Oeil de l’histoire from 2016 onwards. In volume 4, Peuples exposés, peuples figurants (Peoples exposed, peoples as figures, 2012), Didi-Huberman’s search for a politics of the image turns from the organisation of pre-existing forms and traces of

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history to another aspect of the representation of the multiple: how to give visibility and agency to the ordinary, unexceptional individuals who make up a collectivity but should not be simply subsumed into a mass. Although volume 4 gives a substantial place to both photography and figurative art, the title of the volume indicates immediately how important cinematic process will be to its argument, since ‘figurant’ is the common French term for those nameless humans on set known in English as ‘extras’. Didi-Huberman himself in his bibliographical note identifies an essay on the concept of the ‘figurant’ as the earliest part of volume 4 to appear in print, as far back as 2006. From about halfway through the volume cinema becomes the sole focus of discussion, as if inevitably the most appropriate form in which to elaborate ‘poems of peoples’ (‘poèmes des peuples’, the title of the second part of the volume). Here Didi-Huberman begins to elaborate a politics of the making, as well as of the editing, of cinematic images, notably the making of images of the human face, body and activity; with exemplary reference to the work of Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Wang Bing. Volume 5, Passés cités par JLG (Pasts quoted by JLG, 2015) is as the title implies entirely dedicated to the work of one filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard, to whom Didi-Huberman dedicates an extended critical reflection which rows back somewhat from his enthusiasm of ten years previously. Further research, and particularly the fruitful encounter with the work of Harun Farocki documented in volume 2, has nuanced and sophisticated Didi-Huberman’s understanding of the politics of montage, and perhaps the polemical urgency of Images malgré tout has died away somewhat with time, allowing Passés cités to elaborate on some of the disadvantages and/or dangers of Godard’s image-practice, without ever denying its importance, much less its intellectual fascination. The shortest of the volumes in the series and the most relentlessly focused, volume 5 draws together much of the author’s understanding of the uses of historical imagery to recreate

Introduction

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imaged versions of history. It may be read as a (perhaps temporary) epilogue to the writing on montage, politics and trauma which has led Didi-Huberman from Devant le temps, through Images malgré tout to the early volumes of L’Oeil de l’histoire. Following Didi-Huberman’s frequent practice at the level of individual volumes, it offers a condensed case-study revisiting and refining relevant concepts previously elaborated in a number of more varied contexts. After this, volume 6, Peuples en larmes, peuples en armes (People in tears, people in arms, 2016), picks up the newly vital thread of the representation of the human and of its potential for a politics of resistance, and develops it through a vast and many angled study of the theory and practice of Sergei Eisenstein. This complex work closes the L’Oeil de l’histoire sequence with a presentation which, while extremely focused on one classic modernist auteur of the past, also directs the gaze of the researcher towards the impact of images on the future. Beneath the accumulation of sometimes daunting detail in Peuples en larmes is a manifesto for a resistant cinema which rehabilitates the liberating power of collective emotion; a concept which Didi-Huberman was preparing to test, even as volume 6 went to press, with a major exhibition incorporating photographic, artistic and cinematic images, with the programmatic title ‘Soulèvements’ (Uprisings). L’Oeil de l’histoire represents a major theoretical contribution whose significance for film scholars should be recognised, and it will form the centre of the current study. Alongside its publication, however, Didi-Huberman was also publishing other, shorter works, exploring in more detail specific aspects of his theoretical interests. Some of these are of considerable importance to understanding his trajectory and throwing light on the major works. In 2009, contemporary to the launching of the L’Oeil de l’histoire series, he published a small, but very complex work which was to have an effect on his subsequent career and public profile quite disproportionate to its size. Survivance des lucioles (Survival of the fireflies, 2009) is a

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philosophical essay inspired (or perhaps more accurately triggered) by Giorgio Agamben’s then most recent publication Il Regno e la gloria (The Kingdom and the Glory, 2009). Dissatisfied with Agamben’s apocalyptically pessimistic position, Didi-Huberman wrote a response which engaged with Agamben’s own referent, Pasolini, and with DidiHuberman’s constant intellectual companion Walter Benjamin, in order to elaborate a theory of ‘firefly-resistance’,19 which might be effective and significant despite (or even because of) its evanescence. The idea proved inspiring well beyond the academic sphere; it gave Didi-Huberman a new audience, younger and more activist than in the past, and created new expectations in his readers and, it might be argued, responsibilities regarding the political charge of his own output. It was undoubtedly influential in shaping the course of L’Oeil de l’histoire. It also offered, in its epilogue, an interesting early casestudy in cinematic politics, using a contemporary example (Laura Waddington) and exploring the use of movement and light in a visionary short essay which stretches well beyond any equation of cinema with montage practice. While no other work of the period had the impact of Survivance des lucioles, two other of Didi-Huberman’s shorter pieces are of interest to a study of his thought on cinema. Sentir le grisou (Smelling the firedamp, 2014) appeared between the fourth and fifth volumes of L’Oeil de l’histoire and connects the two major strands of the series, montage practice and a ‘peoples’ representation’, largely through a close analysis of Pasolini’s one montage-film, La Rabbia (1963). The very brief Sortir du noir (Coming out of the dark, 2015) presents itself as an ‘open letter’ to László Nemes on the release of his film Son of Saul (2015), and revisits Didi-Huberman’s reflections on the representation

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For further discussion of this theory see Caygill, Howard (2013), On Resistance, London: Bloomsbury, and my own article Smith, Alison (2015), ‘Searching For Fireflies: Georges Didi-Huberman and the Re-assessment of Pasolini’s Legacy’, Lo Sguardo 19, 215–234.

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of the Holocaust through the lens of his subsequent work on peoples’ history and human experience. As previously mentioned, the publication of Volume 6 of L’Oeil de l’histoire coincided with the preparation of an important exhibition on political representation, Soulèvements, which purported to translate some of the ideas of the series into curatorial practice, and at the same time to confirm Didi-Huberman’s voice as significant in the arena of political philosophy. Among guest contributions to the catalogue was an essay by Jacques Rancière, which took lively issue not only with the very basis of the exhibition but also with the analyses of Eisenstein’s practice contained in Peuples en larmes. Didi-Huberman responded with an open letter, ‘Image, langage: l’autre dialectique’, published, discreetly, in French among the other short texts of the miscellany Aperçues (2018) and in the same year, in English, alongside a translation of Rancière’s essay, in a special issue of the journal Angelaki.20 The importance of this exchange, which is discussed in detail in Chapter 3 of this volume, has proved an encouragement for scholars to read Didi-Huberman’s work in the context of film studies. Irene Valle Corpas’s 2018 article, ‘Un cine impuro para salvar la Historia del Arte,21 starts from the opposing positions of Rancière and Didi-Huberman to reflect on the contemporary significance that both theorists have drawn out of the work of the modernist filmmakers that – in her assessment – both frequently turn to when elaborating their theories of political image-making. For Valle Corpas, the ‘hybridity and plurality’ found in modernist filmmaking has served both theorists in elaborating their dialectical theories of images; and,

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‘Image, Language: The Other Dialectic’, (2018), tr. Elise Woodward, Jorge Rodriguez Solorzano, Stijn de Cauwer and Laura Katherine Smith, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, vol 23, issue 4, pp. 19–24. The issue title is Critical Image Configurations: the Work of Georges Didi-Huberman. Valle Corpas, Irene (2018), ‘Un cine impuro para salvar la Historia del Arte: algunas notas sobre el pensamiento de la imágenes del cine en Jacques Rancière y DidiHuberman’, Boletín de Arte, 39, 245–254.

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in doing so, in widening the range of positions from which images can speak at a time when ‘the spatio-temporal horizon has been rapidly narrowing while images still remain in the hands of the few, who use them to represent themselves as substantial, unique subjects’.22 She considers Didi-Huberman’s letter to Rancière one of the most important affirmations of the political power of art since the days of the New Art History.23 Since the publication of the final volume of L’Oeil de l’histoire Didi-Huberman’s major publications have included two titles in particular which contain much of significance for film scholars. The anthology-volume Aperçues (2018), already mentioned, is deliberately disorderly (it is conceived as an illustration in book-form of the ‘obstinate instability’ [Phalènes, 12] which Didi-Huberman is content to attribute to his work-method), but its jungle-flora of insights will continue to provide sustenance to scholars for many years. For its inclusion of the letter to Rancière alone it would deserve consideration as a significant text for film scholars. Désirer, désobéir: Ce qui nous soulève I (To Desire, To Disobey: What Makes Us Rise Up I), which appeared in 2019, is a republication in paperback form of the texts originally written for the ‘Soulèvements’ exhibition catalogue, along with a number of other recent articles on political themes. Film-texts figure in vital positions throughout the exposition of the arguments of this book, starting from the very first chapter, which finds further evidence for the anachronistic expressiveness of Eisenstein’s images – the same images which formed the centre of OH6 and of DidiHuberman’s disagreement with Rancière – in their re-appearance in Chris Marker’s Le Fond de l’air est rouge (1977). The subtitle of this book suggests that it may be the first volume of a new series: certainly Didi-

22 23

Valle Corpus, ‘Un cine impuro para salvar la Historia del Arte’, 248. Valle Corpus, ‘Un cine impuro para salvar la Historia del Arte’, 251.

Introduction

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Huberman’s extraordinarily prolific career seems likely to generate further food for thought for cinema scholars in the coming years. In the following chapters we will consider Didi-Huberman’s contribution to cinematic thought through four interconnected chapters concentrating on essential aspects of his writing on the subject. In deference to the topic which sparked his earliest engagement with film writing, the first chapter will look at the texts devoted to film-images of the Holocaust, from the first admiring article on Shoah, through extended discussion of the arguments in Images malgré tout and their development in volumes 2 and 5 (particularly) of L’Oeil de l’histoire, to the essay on Nemes’s Son of Saul, which revisits this great historical question in the light of a much more fully developed theory. In Chapter 2 we discuss Didi-Huberman’s theory of montage from its conception, and examine in detail its development through his analyses of the works of Farocki, Pasolini and Godard: particular reference will be made to the early books La Ressemblance informe and Devant le temps, to the analyses of L’Oeil de l’histoire volumes 2 and 5 and to Sentir le grisou. In Chapter 3 we turn to the developing theory of the representation of peoples, its political necessity and, increasingly, its revolutionary power, taking as principal referents volumes 4 and 6 of L’Oeil de l’histoire along with the ‘Soulèvements’ exhibition and the texts associated with it. Finally, Chapter 4 will examine the concept of the ‘survivance’ or ‘survival’ as a visual and potentially cinematic phenomenon, examining the elaboration of the idea which Didi-Huberman detects in Warburg and Benjamin and brings to prominence in Survivances des lucioles, and its translation into cinematic form as discussed in the epilogue to that book and also in Vincent Dieutre’s film Orlando ferito/Roland blessé (2013), which represents the most significant attempt to date to translate DidiHuberman’s thought directly into the cinematic medium.

18

1

Images of the Holocaust

In 1995, Didi-Huberman wrote an article for a special cinema-centred issue of the historical journal Vingtième Siècle. ‘Le lieu malgré tout’ (The Place In Spite of Everything), devoted to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, is his first published piece entirely devoted to cinema; and also one of the first pieces in which he directly addresses the representation of the Holocaust. The two go together. Lanzmann was identified at the time – at least so says Didi-Huberman – more as a philosopher and journal editor than as a filmmaker, but the article recounts how cinema presented itself to him as ‘indispensable’ and by implication inevitable, the only medium with which to ‘take visual account [prendre acte visuellement] of real places impossible  – humanly impossible, ethically impossible – to treat as or to transform into sets.’1 It is this inevitability of the image  – the moving image, the edited image  – which draws Didi-Huberman into further investigation of the impact which Shoah had on him. The structure of the essay enhances this paradox of the possible/ impossible representation. Didi-Huberman opens with a paean to cinema as a purveyor of imaginary spaces, in which description he includes certain classic transpositions of real places (for example Mount Rushmore as used by Hitchcock in North by Northwest). Cinematic space as described here  – in Didi-Huberman’s first sustained piece on the medium – is ‘open to all the apparently limitless,

1

‘Le Lieu malgré tout’, Vingtième siècle, revue d’histoire, no. 46, April–June, pp. 36–44. Reprinted in Phasmes, Editions de Minuit, 1998, pp. 228–242 (here p. 229), from where all quotations here are taken.

19

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fascinating, exuberant power of what we call the imaginary’ (228). Lanzmann, in his account of the making of Shoah, had described how he had first experienced Poland as ‘the place of the imaginary par excellence’,2 but this is not an imaginary which calls forth enthusiasm for any ‘perpetual feast of the possible’ such as Didi-Huberman has just described. The essay thus presents Shoah as a film in which the cinema is used against itself, and it is precisely because the medium is constrained to such a drastic self-denial that it appears, counterintuitively, so appropriate as to be inevitable. What follows represents Didi-Huberman’s attempts to reach an understanding of what, exactly, Lanzmann’s encounter with this real place has revealed, not only about the place but, just as importantly, about the potentially revelatory possibilities of cinema. Very quickly the essay focuses on a theme which will later unfold as a fundamental structuring principle of all the arguments in L’Oeil de l’histoire: the presence of the past in the present and the ability of images to reveal that explosive anachronism. ‘No one or almost no one is there any more, nothing or almost nothing is there any more, and yet the film shows us in subtle moments of dizziness how much everything, here, remains, in front of us’ (232, D-H’s emphasis). It is in Shoah’s ability to seize and transmit the survivance of the camps that Didi-Huberman locates the film’s greatest achievement. It fulfils cinematically Walter Benjamin’s idea of the ‘dialectical image’, in a montage of past and present which ‘produces a collision of the Now and the past, without turning the past into myth or the Now into reassurance’ (240–241). Fascinated by this revelation, Didi-Huberman seeks eagerly to identify the cinematic strategies which have made this feat possible. He cites, for example, the importance of silence, ‘this silence shown [montré] – and just as importantly monté, that is formed, constructed’ which ‘gives [. . .] the place the power to look at us, and somehow to “tell” us the 2

Lanzmann, Claude (1990), ‘J’ai enquêté en Pologne’ (1976), Au sujet de Shoah, le film de Claude Lanzmann, Paris: Belin, p. 212. Cit Didi-Huberman, G., id., p. 230.

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essential things’ (236). Alongside the silence, and structured by it, is carefully selected sound; for example the song which is almost the first thing which the audience hears, juxtaposed with a long shot of the green, unchanged banks of the river Ner. Contextualised by a text given us to read but not to hear, the voice comes as if out of the past, an authentic survivance. The past also survives into the present, sometimes cruelly, in the unthinking gestures which the camera captures. That gesture may reproduce itself, for good or ill, across the vicissitudes of history is an idea which Didi-Huberman was already developing in relation to photography and painting, under the particular influence of Aby Warburg’s iconographic collages. Here for the first time he sees the potential significance of gestures captured in movement, in the process of their making; a revelation which only cinema can provide. And, of course, there is the importance of the long, slow camera movements across ‘desperately empty’ landscapes, with which Lanzmann at once assures the audience of the real, undramatised presence of these spaces and, by interrogating them with an exploratory frame, turns their inexpressive dullness into a statement of witness. In ‘Le lieu malgré tout’, a historian of the still image lucidly confronts the specificity of cinema. It was born of the strong impression left by an individual work; the pointers which it provides towards an approach to cinematic analysis seemed to be left in abeyance as the writer – as was his habit – moved on to other priorities. Six years later, however, Lanzmann’s influence on Didi-Huberman’s thought was destined to take an unexpected and much more decisive form with the launch in Les Temps modernes, the journal edited by Lanzmann, of a violent polemic against a text contributed by DidiHuberman to the catalogue of a photographic exhibition, Mémoires des camps. Photographies de camps de concentration.3 The subject of 3

‘Images malgré tout’, in Mémoire des camps. Photographies des camps de concentration, éd Marval, 2001. The article, ‘Images malgré tout’, would later form the first part of the book of the same name published by Minuit in 2003.

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this debate, recounted in detail in Didi-Huberman’s seminal 2003 book Images malgré tout, was four tiny photographic images, taken clandestinely in Auschwitz by a member of a Sonderkommando. Didi-Huberman’s analysis of these images assumed – and discussed – their immense significance, despite and indeed because of their indistinctness and their imperfections: he sought in their awkward framing and blurry figures, as well as in the relationship between the two images, the evidence for the terrible context in which they were taken. His conclusion was that these images were both ‘infinitely precious’ and ‘demanding’ to a contemporary audience, precisely because they ‘demand an effort of archaeology’4 in the viewer which forces engagement with the reality of the camp and its terrible dangers. They are thus proposed as a response to the contention that the Holocaust is, and should remain, ‘unimaginable’ (‘Let us not protect ourselves by saying that imagining it is in any event – and it’s true – something we cannot do, and will never fully be able to do. But we have to deal with the great weight of this imaginable’ (IMT, 11)). The essay attracted a furious response from Les Temps modernes, in the form of two articles by Gérard Wajcman and Elisabeth Pagnoux.5 The two writers refuse all value to these images, either as witness statement or as transmission; in Pagnoux’s words (Pagnoux 106, quoted IMT, 73), ‘To make us witness to this scene, besides being an invention (because one cannot reanimate the past) is to distort the reality of Auschwitz which was an event without a witness’. They also adopted a startlingly personal approach, attacking Didi-Huberman himself as a fetishist of the image and accusing him of trying to ‘Christianise’ the debate and by implication to marginalise his own Judaism; and suggested that the purpose (or at least the effect) of the exhibition might have been to ‘sweep aside the eleven years of work 4 5

‘Images malgré tout’, p. 65. Wajcman, Gérard (2001), ‘De la croyance photographique’, Les Temps modernes LVI, no, 613, pp. 47–83. Pagnoux, Elisabeth (2001), ‘Reporter photographe à Auschwitz’, ibid., 84–108.

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during which Claude Lanzmann made the film Shoah’ (Pagnoux 87, quoted IMT, 116). The writers of Les Temps modernes framed Shoah as the unanswerable – and only – approach to a witness statement of the Holocaust, describing it as ‘the absolute degree of the word [. . .] countering the absolute silence of horror with an absolute word’ (Pagnoux 95–6, quoted IMT, 117). Didi-Huberman’s response to these articles went far beyond the original catalogue essay and the polemical provocation which followed. Wajcman’s and Pagnoux’s attacks led him to delve deeply into the reasoning and philosophical underpinning of his position. Following a frequent pattern in his work, this defence and elaboration of the importance of images in Holocaust studies started life as a series of seminars at the Free University of Berlin, before publication – along with the original catalogue essay – in book form in 2003. Images malgré tout, the book, had an immense influence on Holocaust studies worldwide; described as ‘the most consequential study of the question of the image after Auschwitz’,6 it contributed significantly to the attribution of the Adorno prize to Didi-Huberman in 2015. It is not our remit here to follow all the ramifications of the book’s arguments, and we will focus our attention on those parts of it which relate specifically to the filmic medium, since Didi-Huberman found that the wider question of imaging the Holocaust (or not) drew him inexorably from photographic evidence to film; specifically, to film as a means of deployment, rather than one of production, of images – in other words, to montage. Certainly, Didi-Huberman had never imagined that in contributing to the photographic exhibition catalogue he was casting any shadow over the reputation of Shoah; his admiration for the film remains undimmed. However, as he points out, ‘Shoah is a film: nine and a half 6

Weigel, Sigrid (2018), ‘Lisibilité des images (et) de l’histoire: Eloge de Georges DidiHuberman pour la remise du prix Adorno’, tr. Catherine Livet, Europe, May 2018, pp. 31–37, here p. 35.

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Georges Didi-Huberman and Film

hours of images – at the rate of twenty-four frames a second – and of sounds, faces and words’ (IMT, 117). He thus takes issue with Pagnoux’s and Wajcman’s apparent wish to withdraw Lanzmann’s film from the category of imaged artefact – making it in Pagnoux’s phrasing a matter of words only. In an earlier article which Didi-Huberman returns to in his response, Wajcman for his part had claimed that Shoah ‘showed that there is Nothing to see’ and thus proved the non-existence of images of the subject.7 Didi-Huberman also finds reason for disquiet in some of Lanzmann’s own declarations, particularly his sweeping dismissals of archive images (an ‘absurd cult’8): he is even led to suggest that ‘there are two Claude Lanzmanns: on the one hand, the director of Shoah, a great journalist determined to probe unremittingly [. . .] into the specific, concrete, precise, unbearable details of the extermination; on the other, once these questions are in the can, the ‘peremptory’ who takes over and wants to be sole provider of universal and absolute answers [. . .]’ (IMT, 119).9 Thus, the filmic practice which most interests Didi-Huberman in this book is not that of Shoah, and certainly not the big fictional reconstructions of Spielberg and Benigni for which he shares Les Temps Modernes’ disdain, but the elliptical, montage-based approach of Lanzmann’s great rival Jean-Luc Godard, which at this point he finds both challenging and inspiring. Although, as we will see in Chapter 2, he subsequently became more wary of Godardian montage  – not least through his discovery of Harun Farocki – at this point, still relatively early in his explorations of the cinematic image, he finds Godard’s practice refreshingly open, ‘centrifugal’ as he terms it: ‘making documents, quotations and extracts

7

8

9

Wajcman, Gérard (1999), ‘ “Saint Paul” Godard contre “Moise” Lanzmann, le match’, L’Infini no. 65, p. 126. Lanzmann, Claude (2000), ‘Parler pour les morts’. Le Monde des débats, May, p. 14, quoted IMT, p. 120. Despite the ferocity of the polemic, Lanzmann seems to have forgiven Didi-Huberman, and gave permission for images from Shoah to be used as illustration to Images malgré tout.

Images of the Holocaust

25

of films tumble together towards an always open space (‘une étendue jamais couverte’) (IMT, 157). The start of the polemical exchange with Les Temps Modernes coincided with the publication of Devant le temps10 and the return of montage to the forefront of Didi-Huberman’s thoughts about the image: he now reads Shoah too in that context. It too is a montage, but a ‘centripetal’ one, and although he retains his admiration for it, he insists that it must be seen in context. Inasmuch as it is a montage, it is necessarily both tributary to the image and itself a representation: not only does it collect an ‘archive’ of witness statements which, despite Lanzmann’s distrust of the inadequacy of images, are none the less images as well as words, but it presents these statements in the form of ‘a work in the fullest sense’ (IMT, 127). And inasmuch as it is a work of cinema, it ‘owes a debt to the history of the documentary film’, and must be susceptible to comparisons, even critical comparisons, with other approaches to the subject, of which there are many, ‘a whole spectrum of formal solutions from which no general rule can be drawn’ (IMT, 166). We will see in Chapter 2 how the Didi-Huberman of L’Oeil de l’histoire (vol. 2) elaborates his enthusiasm for Harun Farocki’s work with reference to Adorno’s theory of the essay as a form which is always rigorous in its approach to its material but never conclusive or universal: here, his caution with regard to Shoah stems precisely from the way in which Lanzmann  – and, more brutally, his admirers  – seek to present this montage as the final word, ‘an absolute word’ in Pagnoux’s words,11 when it is, for all its rigour and determination, still ‘nine and a half hours of images – at the rate of 24 frames a second’ (IMT, 117). For Godard, on the other hand, montage represents the possibility of constructing a process of thinking, ‘the art of producing that

10 11

Devant le temps: Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images, Minuit, 2001. Pagnoux, ‘Reporter photographe à Auschwitz’, p. 96, cit. IMT, p. 117.

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Georges Didi-Huberman and Film

thinking form’ which he evokes in Histoire(s) du cinéma (172). His cinema represents a radical uncertainty, a ‘consciousness torn apart’ (‘conscience déchirée’) in Hegelian terms, in contrast to the essentialist stability of the ‘honest consciousness’ [‘conscience honnête’] attributed to Wajcman in his refusal to countenance images. Hegel’s‘consciousness torn apart’ is characterised by a tendancy to ‘bring together thoughts which for the honest consciousness are at a great distance from each other’ (IMT, 225), and thus to arrive through tormented experiment at tentative concepts. This is the process that Didi-Huberman sees at work in Godard, when for example he ‘asks us to “think together” a Goya allegory, a victim of Dachau, a Hollywood star and a gesture painted by Giotto’ (IMT, 225). In conjoining these distant and in some cases apparently irrelevant images, Histoire(s) du cinéma presents the thesis that in the years since 1945, ‘all images, from now on, speak to us of nothing but that (but to say that they “speak of ” it is not to say that they “tell it”)’ (IMT, 157). This is a radical re-interpretation of Adorno’s famous refusal of the concept of poetry after Auschwitz: it is uncomfortable, unpredictable, and it corresponds closely with the theory of ‘rascally’, or inconclusive, dialectic, to which Didi-Huberman had been tending in his art-historical work (see Chapter 2), drawing it into an immediate and urgent confrontation with history. Despite, or rather because of, its inconclusiveness and occasionally ragged appearance, Godard’s filmmaking offers the viewer something more challenging, painful and ultimately empowering than helpless surrender before a monolithic void to which approach is impossible. It is not a question of somehow resuscitating, or reliving, an experience so far from our own; nor is it an ambitious claim that the making of images can exorcise any future dangers; simply, images, reflecting some aspect of the terrible reality they refer to, may ‘tell in spite of all, in spite of how little they can do, the memory of the times’. This metaphor of image-making as a bearable reflection of an unbearable reality is one that Godard takes from the great German film-scholar

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Siegfried Kracauer, who invoked the myth of the Medusa, lethal if gazed at directly but vulnerable when reflected in the shield of the hero Perseus. Didi-Huberman finds in Kracauer another theorist of montage, citing his proposal for alternative newsreel production which reorganised the archive footage in order to achieve ‘a greater sharpness of vision’ (IMT, 216), and to coordinate the reflections which images fragmented and reorganised might shed upon each other. This is what Didi-Huberman seeks in Godard’s work at this stage, and what he will continue to seek in his analysis of the other montage filmmakers who command his attention during the composition of L’Oeil de l’histoire (he returns to Kracauer’s radical newsreel producers in his presentation of that project at the beginning of the first volume: OH1, 19). The passion and the engagement of this debate, and the very extremity of what is at stake, permeate Didi-Huberman’s subsequent, increasing, interest in cinema’s responsibilities and potentialities. The second part of L’Oeil de l’histoire, which is the first to be primarily concerned with cinema, opens with an essay written in 2005 which interrogates the proper use of archive footage and the possibilities of montage, once again in the context of the camps. Already in Images malgré tout Didi-Huberman had, briefly, considered the official enterprise of editing evidential footage in 1945, and notably the approach adopted by Alfred Hitchcock, master of evocative narrative montage, when asked by Sydney Bernstein to supervise the editing of a film from footage held by the British army.12 In OH2 Didi-

12

This project was never completed; the part-edited footage was entrusted to the Imperial War Museum and in 2014 it was incorporated into a retrospective historical montagefilm, Night Will Fall (André Singer). This film among other things questions how much input Hitchcock really had in practical terms. Night Will Fall represents one of several attempts to respond to Didi-Huberman’s call for reflective montage practices in the use of the archive. See Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Tobias (2015), ‘Echoes from the Archive: Retrieving and Re-viewing Cinematic Remnants from the Nazi Past’, in Dora Osborne (ed.), Archive and Memory in German Literature and Visual Culture, 123–140, Rochester NY: Camden House.

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Huberman’s centre of interest is the destiny of a twenty-minute piece of raw footage in which a young Samuel Fuller recorded a funeral ritual organised by his commander on the liberation of the small camp of Falkenau. This piece of film may have been intended to form part of the evidence submitted to the Nuremberg trials, but it was not retained for that purpose and remained in Fuller’s files, untouched by any form of montage. Like other archive footage captured by the various Allied armies, it could be described as an ‘innocent’ record in that, as DidiHuberman explains, citing Serge Daney, it was filmed in a moment of wide-eyed, almost childlike reaction. Its primary emotion is spontaneous horror, and its primary purpose is gathering as much detail as possible. Fuller, a more sophisticated image-maker than many an army cameraman, managed to fold into his record, even at the time, this symbolic key to a reading of it, in the form of a small boy playing with a toy gun on the road outside Falkenau. A central issue for any re-use of the archive, in Didi-Huberman’s and Daney’s view, is that the child-like gaze is no longer sustainable after Nuremberg. Time has passed, and images must be processed: ‘the question is what the child will, sooner or later, do with this gaze’ (OH2, 56). In the case of Fuller’s piece of film, the young soldier actively sought an answer to that question all his life. One response which he found was the incorporation of the memory, although not of those immediate images, into an autobiographical war-fiction, The Big Red One, in 1980. But, eventually, he was persuaded to use his footage, in a retrospective montage, Falkenau, the impossible, made with a young French filmmaker, Emil Weiss, in 1988. Didi-Huberman pays attention to Fuller’s cinematographic choices in The Big Red One, respecting his understated framing of this event which ‘is reduced to a break in the rhythm of action’ (OH2, 47). But the film was subject to ruthless generic constraints: in a footnote, Didi-Huberman records how Fuller’s intended ‘silence’ (broken, it seems, only by the repetitive thud of gunshots) was reinterpreted by the studio as music with fewer

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instruments than usual (OH2, 48). It is worth recording that DidiHuberman’s interest in film stops where studio intervention begins: these inconveniences are not questioned, merely cited as reasons why The Big Red One, for all its serious intention and its director’s passionate engagement, is – and can only be – of limited importance. By contrast, the documentary montage is bound only by the codes of its own meaning-making. Like Night Will Fall, Falkenau: the impossible mounted the past images with others shot in the present, in which the 76-year-old Fuller returns both to the geographic spot where the scenes took place and to the images which he took in 1945 and which now address him from his own past. Falkenau, the impossible is thus an example of the process of what Ebbrecht-Hartmann calls ‘remembering the archive’:13 the archive film representing a fragmentary, raw incarnation of the memory-making which has continued ever since in Fuller’s mind. The old man’s presence and his commentary go some way to filling the gap between visibility and lisibility of these images. Fuller’s explanations ensure, at least, that ‘the lisibility of what is shown [le constat] is overlain by a lisibility of the implicit contract  – or even constraint’ (OH2, 20) between the filmmaker and the institution which asked him to record this particular scene. This, in Didi-Huberman’s logic, is montage used against a certain kind of manipulation by omission which has in the past allowed raw archive footage to be repurposed: as with his analysis of the four photographs of Auschwitz at the beginning of Images malgré tout, he is adamant that, for images to speak clearly, their context must be made present to us. This is a useful argument against Lanzmann’s rejection of all archival material, but perhaps more vital to the new direction of Didi-Huberman’s thought here is a comment uttered between parentheses, almost as an aside: ‘are not all human signs, be they images or word, always subjected to manipulation, 13

Ebbrecht-Hartmann, ‘Echoes from the Archive’, 126.

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Georges Didi-Huberman and Film

for better or worse?’ (OH2, 21). To use Ebbrecht-Hartmann’s words, modern reframings of archive footage aim to ‘create[s] an echoing effect which makes the silent images “speak”’.14 Didi-Huberman’s explorations of Fuller’s work and, later, of Harun Farocki’s Aufschub (Respite, 2007) – also selected as exemplary by Ebbrecht-Hartmann  – as well as his interest in Godard, seek to show how they can be manipulated ‘for better’ and made to speak well, that is to say, as far as possible, with trust in the material, honesty and emotion. In the final part of the 2005 essay, he goes so far as to reflect that true lisibility should include in its material a reflection on the act of reading. He imagines a montage where ‘the images would not be separated [. . .] from the faces looking at them and [. . .], symmetrically, the faces would not cause the images they are contemplating to be left offscreen’ (OH2, 64); and thus reaction itself would become part of the image-text. To some extent, the construction of Falkenau, the Impossible fulfils this function, placing Fuller as reader/audience of his own images, to which he reacts directly. Harun Farocki, one of Didi-Huberman’s most exemplary filmmakers, finds a different method of incorporating the reader into his re-montage in the 2007 short film Aufschub. Aufschub, like Falkenau, is a reframing of a piece of contemporary direct footage. Unlike Fuller’s piece, made in horror and denunciation by a soldier of the liberating Allied army, Farocki’s raw material was made under Nazi orders even if the camera was held by a detainee. It shows life in the Dutch transit camp of Westerbork, as recorded for a film planned by the camp-commander. Farocki tells us in early title cards that some ninety minutes of footage exists, and out of these ninety minutes he has made a forty-minute film; the audience is thus made aware in advance that the documentarist, a reader of the images of the original filmmaker, has made his own selection within it. In fact, considerably less than forty minutes of the footage is used, as Farocki incorporates 14

Ebbrecht-Hartmann, ‘Echoes from the Archive’, 125.

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several re-readings, that is, returns over footage already shown; and he also pauses, frequently, to comment on the images, not viva voce but through title-cards which interrupt our observation to supply brief contextual phrases. This is not the didactic commentary of a documentarist who knows: it seems more affiliated to the mental processes of an attentive, critical, Brechtian spectator. The title cards will answer immediate questions – What does that acronym stand for? Who is the German with the dog?  – but they also ask questions of their own, and sometimes reflect on these images and their visual affinities to more terrifying but more familiar realities. They put into words the kind of speculation which might occur to any first-time viewer trying to make sense of what is here:‘is this footage edulcorated?’, for example, is a very early question, posed but not directly answered, at least not immediately. Farocki works his, and our, way into the images, selecting some associations – the original footage, after all, had not been subject to any editing process – offering the results of research to answer some of the more complex questions spontaneously raised by what we see, drawing our attention to details sometimes by titlecards, sometimes simply by returning to them, and focusing the camera. Farocki himself described his aim in the film as recreating the experience of the researcher, ‘looking at footage in a reading-room’.15 The form of Aufschub is thus a very deliberate incorporation of the act, or process, of reading: Laura Rascaroli describes it as ‘engag[ing] the audience at once in an act of reading, in a dialogue with the enunciator, and in a process of creation of meaning’.16 There is no extraneous visual material at all; no montage with the present, with interviewees, or even with comparable footage found elsewhere. Although the title cards are used to evoke other, well-known, images, these images are never shown. If there is a complete montage to be made, it is as yet only a project to be evoked in the spectator’s mind. 15 16

In conversation with Didi-Huberman at the Tate Modern, https://vimeo.com/102407717. Rascaroli, Laura (2017), How the Essay Film Thinks, Oxford: OUP, p. 58.

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This absolute trust in the material and in its availability for critical reading is central to Didi-Huberman’s admiration for the film: the images themselves comment on the images, and the titles provide not so much an explanation of them as a provocation to look deeper in order to find the answers to the questions they raise: ‘We have to know what we are seeing, but we also need to know how to see what we know in order to make that knowledge more precise, more incarnate, more incisive’ (OH2, 113). We also, and vitally, have to know why we need to see this material, for the purpose is fundamental to the construction. Aufschub is a particularly rich text for a developing theory of cinematic montage also because it was composed, precisely, against the ever-multiplying commemorative montages which both Farocki and Didi-Huberman consider as betrayals of the footage they use without context. Thus, reflecting on a sequence of landmark films which employ archive material, Didi-Huberman observes that they respond to very different, historically-situated, crises of representation. Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard, in the 1950s, was intended to counter ‘indifference or pure and simple ignorance’ (OH2, 119): the images he used (which included some of those from Westerbork) might still be unseen by the majority of his audience. When Fuller and Weiss made Falkenau in 1988, the impetus was given by the rise of negationist discourse, particularly in France where Fuller was living at the time. In the case of Aufschub the barrier to understanding is on the contrary the over-exposure of images and their unscrupulous manipulation, ‘re-treatment’ as Didi-Huberman describes it. In conversation with Farocki in 2009, Didi-Huberman cites the six-part TV spectacular Apocalypse: la 2ème guerre mondiale (2009), with its star-narration and its collection of colourised images cut together at a rate of ‘800 shots in one hour’.17 In such a context singular images are lost, and montage itself becomes a bludgeoning instrument used to snuff out 17

Ibid.

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any spark of critical understanding which might be transmitted to the audience. Aufschub stands against this tendency, reflecting on the ability of an exceptionally subtle montage of a single stretch of footage in order to restore the living presence of images too often, too rapidly, and much too casually seen. From these considerations OH2 develops the long discussion of Farocki as an exemplary filmmaker which lays the foundations for all Didi-Huberman’s subsequent discussion of the cinematic medium. The full implications of Didi-Huberman’s analysis of Farocki’s practice will be discussed in Chapter 2; here it simply needs emphasising that it was through intense arguments over images of the extermination camps of the Second World War that Didi-Huberman began to seriously consider the medium of film, and that the whole subsequent elaboration of the L’Oeil de l’histoire series is underlain by this raw engagement with the reputedly unrepresentable. The stakes could hardly be higher. In 2015 Didi-Huberman turned once more, directly, to the filming of the Shoah, this time in the context of a fiction. The occasion was the release of László Nemes’s film Saul fia (Son of Saul, 2015). Premiered at Cannes in 2015, Saul fia won the Grand Prix du Jury that year and subsequently many other awards, including the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2016. It is a fiction, although a stark one: the protagonist, Saul Ausländer (‘foreigner’), a tough and taciturn man, works in the Sonderkommandos of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. He decides one day that a boy taken from the gas chambers must and will have a proper burial, and the film chronicles his stubborn quest to realise this in the midst of the cruelty and chaos of the camp and sometimes against his fellow-members of the Sonderkommando who are planning a more conventional revolt and perhaps escape. There are obvious reasons for the film to pique Didi-Huberman’s interest. Most obviously, the film incorporates an episode based on the taking of the four photographs whose display generated the long and

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fruitful polemic of Images malgré tout; and its subject also echoes the theme of burial and commemoration which is central to Fuller’s Falkenau footage. Beyond that, though, it picks up on several themes which infuse Didi-Huberman’s work and the developing L’Oeil de l’histoire project in particular, for example the importance of traditional gestures as a collective expression of emotion and as a way of reclaiming a historical identity for the oppressed (cf. OH4, 32). Saul, the protagonist, who Nemes envisaged as an antidote to a certain false ‘heroism’ in the telling of stories of the camps,18 is not hard to relate to the ‘representative man’, at once ‘irreducibly singular’ and anonymous (OH4, 226), in whom Didi-Huberman seeks a form of ‘visibility of peoples’ at the end of OH4 – all the more since Nemes resorted to the very Pasolinian strategy of casting a poet rather than a professional actor, on the basis of his physical characteristics: ‘Impossible to tell his age, he is young and old at once, and also handsome and ugly, ordinary and remarkable, profound and impassive, very lively and very slow’.19 Didi-Huberman was so excited by the film that he wrote an open letter to László Nemes, later published as Sortir du noir (Coming Out of the Dark, an evocative title), in which he analyses in detail the achievements of the film as he reads them. Presenting himself, with a certain rhetorical modesty, as the ordinary spectator who ‘went into the cinema with a certain prior knowledge – an incomplete knowledge, of course: that goes for everyone – about the history which your story deals with’ (SN, 8), he dissects Nemes’s filmic strategies with the scalpel of his own previous analyses. For example, in understanding the process of ‘making visible’, he borrows Nemes’s own description of the Holocaust as a ‘black hole’ hollowed out of his childhood, and

18

19

‘[Films about the camps] tried to create stories of survival, of heroism, but in my opinion, they were mainly reconstituting a mythic history of the past.’ Antoine de Baecque (2015), ‘Entretien avec Laszloo Nemes’. http://cinecimes.fr/2015/11/laszlonemes/ De Baecque, ‘Entretien avec Lászlo Nemes’, id., cit. SN 34.

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juxtaposes it to his own analysis, in Images malgré tout (IMT, 51–2), of the significance of the black shadows (the entrance to the gas chamber where the photographer was hiding) framing the indistinct images of the four Auschwitz photos. The black represents the surrounding danger which conditions the form and possibility of what is seen, and ‘an image which comes out of the dark is an image which arises from shadows or confusion and comes to meet us’ (SN, 21). This is how Didi-Huberman reads the first appearance of Saul: not out of darkness, certainly, but out of a blurred mass of green. Here, it is the horror which emerges into the image, in the shape of Saul’s weary face and prison uniform, from a blur of idyllic foliage and birdsong (which might almost represent the false vision of the witnesses of Shoah who choose not to see). Another essential theme of OH4 to which Didi-Huberman returns here is that of distance. The problem of finding the right distance with which to reveal the peoples, neither too near nor too far, was resolved at the end of OH4 with a relatively conventional call for montage which ‘produces the dialectical image of a double distance which balances – gives rhythm to – an immanence and a cut, a movement of immersion and a framing operation’ (OH4, 227–8). What he sees in Saul fia, however, is something different, not least because the ethics of a ‘framing operation’ which offers distance is more than problematic in these circumstances: ‘who could venture, at human height and human distance, to look at an extermination camp in a wide angle shot, a shot where everything was clear. Only the SS on duty in a watchtower could claim such depth of field, from a height which precisely prevents him from seeing anything humanly’ (SN, 28–9). Nemes has none the less succeeded in ‘dialectising distance’ (SN, 27) within the confines of single shots by the use of extremely shallow focus, which reveals one face or object with razor-sharp precision and, around it, a blurred context of cries and indistinct bodies. The shallow focus lens can also, of course, relegate a detail seen clearly to

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the status of confused, distant context before the spectator’s eyes. The dialectic of individuality and community which OH4 seeks is thus achieved, but without withdrawing the spectator from immersion in the scene. Didi-Huberman speaks of these indistinct glimpses of a multitude as ‘panic-images’ in which the population of the camps is indeed revealed as a people, but certainly not as a ‘community to come’. The panic is transmitted to the audience, and paradoxically it is not the re-establishment of distance but the clear close-ups which provide the ‘cut’ which opens a space of fragmentary, individual clarity in the pervading chaos. It is in following the protagonist, in his dogged resistance to every current diverting him from his goal, that the audience is given a perspective of sorts on this ultimate human condition. Didi-Huberman compares Saul to Orpheus, who ‘opens the night’ in his determination to extract someone he loves from hell (SN, 41). The story of Saul is a story of failure – precisely because Nemes was adamant that he did not want his protagonist to be an exception. Didi-Huberman none the less underlines the strangely exceptional nature of the story we see: Saul is a man who ‘never stops escaping his condemnation: he survives despite everything. He doesn’t manage to die’ (SN, 42). Until the end, that is, because Saul may be the protagonist of a tale, but it is a ‘modern’ tale, which eschews the heroic and the mythic and subjects its protagonist to the common condition. With Saul fia, Didi-Huberman returns to his starting-point, the possible imaging of the camps, but with theories of cinematic representation and of the political need for images which have developed a long way since Images malgré tout. Sortir du noir none the less confirms the continued presence, in the shadows of all DidiHuberman’s writing, of this original place from which the image was displaced, banished or distorted.

2

The Meaning of Montage

The key to L’Oeil de l’histoire, and indeed more generally to DidiHuberman’s most recent thinking, can be found in the concept of montage: the six books in the series develop an ongoing, sometimes contradictory, continually expanding exploration of its implications and its possibilities. This constitutes a decisive inflection of DidiHuberman’s research, although issues related to it can be seen developing even from his early art-historical writings, which were always much concerned with multiplicity and the workings of collections and series of images rather than individual works of art. The term becomes more central from the mid-1990s. It was his explorations of montage-practices which led Didi-Huberman towards cinema, rather than the other way round; while certainly not the only medium to use either the term or the process, film has been the most active user, and theoriser, of it. From Devant l’image onwards Didi-Huberman has argued that the history and philosophy of art should always consider not ‘the isolated image’ but images in so much as they work upon each other when brought into contact. Invention de l’hystérie itself raises issues of composite images and image-series, and even introduces the phrase ‘dialectique des formes’ (Invention de l’hystérie, 39), a key concept as we shall see. The search for an ‘aesthetic of the symptom’,1 perhaps the central concept of his earlier work, also involves great attention to

1

For a detailed discussion of this concept, apart from Devant l’image, see Hagelstein, Maud (2005), ‘Georges Didi-Huberman: une esthétique du symptôme’, Daimon: revista de Filosofia 34, pp. 81–96.

37

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individual details in their relation to each other and to the whole, and in the various tensions which produce them. These concerns will underlie his first explorations of the notion of ‘montage’ and lead his work from still images towards cinema. The first extended consideration of montage in a cinematic context in Didi-Huberman’s work appears under the influence of Georges Bataille. In 1994, while preparing his important book on Bataille’s philosophy of images,2 he sent a part of his research to the journal Cinémathèque in the form of a long article exploring in detail the intellectual encounter between Bataille and Sergei Eisenstein.3 Although these two men never met personally, they were aware of each other’s work: Bataille attended a lively lecture given by Eisenstein in Paris in 1930, and Eisenstein provided a double-page spread of frames from The General Line to Bataille’s illustrated journal Documents. In La Ressemblance informe, Eisensteinian montage becomes the most important explanatory tool which Didi-Huberman can employ to sum up his sense of why the image-policy of Documents was important; and his decision to submit the piece to a specifically cinematic publication signals that his interest in the theory and practice of cinema is already becoming more than merely an occasional tool. La Ressemblance informe is primarily developing earlier work on the significant detail and on the concepts of form, formal transition and the apparently formless, still in the wake of the ‘aesthetic of the symptom’ which he had declared in 1990 to be his project. In addressing Bataille – a presence in his thinking since his first book – in this context, Didi-Huberman turns to the montages (in a photographic sense) which Bataille carried out in the Documents project. Didi-Huberman’s primary insights into Documents’ treatment of photographic images are first that it is subversive (it tends to ‘destroy anthropomorphism’, by 2 3

La Ressemblance informe. ‘Bataille avec Eisenstein: Forme-matière-montage’, Cinémathèque no. 6, autumn 1994, pp. 15–38.

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which he means the supreme humanistic confidence in the human form as the image of God) and second that its subversive power is contained not in the single images published but in the contact between them, the ways in which different photographs, and photographs and texts, affect each other. The word ‘montage’ appears first on p. 18, where he speaks of the ‘rapprochements, montages, frottements, attractions d’images’: the vocabulary here foreshadows the future importance of Eisenstein in the book, and also puts the images in motion from the start. The often disturbing combinations of images in Documents, in fact, interest Didi-Huberman because of their ability to ‘put forms into motion’ (La Ressemblance informe, 134) despite each example’s photographic stasis. How better to generate movement than by the ‘repercussions of forms’ (La Ressemblance informe, 185), a salutary series of shocks which not only affects the sense of each individual ‘term’ – thereby generating a process of becoming, or metamorphosis, which may be directional or on the contrary a uncertain vibration between two perceptions constantly merging into each other: ‘from rubbish to the ideal and from the ideal to rubbish’ in Bataille’s words (La Ressemblance informe, 178) – but which also affects the viewer who is brought into this dynamic, often aggressively. The aim of this oscillating ‘dialectic of alteration’ (La Ressemblance informe, 252), Didi-Huberman claims, is to ‘open’ a path of perception for the viewer, to ‘produce thought’ (La Ressemblance informe, 241): not however as a stage towards a conclusion, a final reconciliatory synthesis, but as part of an infinite, anxious development constantly reproducing itself in a process of transformation, calling into question all limits and borders: ‘regressive, aggressive and transgressive’ (La Ressemblance informe, 264). Translated into the structure of the pages of Documents, this is to be understood as the constant clash of images which cannot be subsumed into each other to reach a general, reassuring overview (like the composite portraits which nineteenthcentury criminologists generated from sheets of individual wrong-

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doers’ faces, and which were always, inevitably, harmoniously nondescript) but which impact violently on each other and on the reader through the dynamic play of their individual differences. How was such an open, devastating dialectic of images to be best achieved? The name of the answer, says Didi-Huberman, almost with a drumroll, ‘is cinema [. . .] its name is montage, its name is Eisenstein’ (La Ressemblance informe, 284). This discovery is attributed to Bataille, but the fanfare of revelation comes from Didi-Huberman. Eisenstein’s method offers ‘the truest orientation of the Bataillian demand’ (La Ressemblance informe, 285), and it also represents what he himself has been seeking. In listing the virtues of Eisensteinian montage in Bataillian terms, Didi-Huberman presents a blueprint for his approach to the study of images. Images are set in motion: ‘movements which reveal, movements which overwhelm’ (La Ressemblance informe, 286). They become themselves the means through which their status is called into question, without the need for verbal commentary (one can thus ‘respond with forms to questions of form’ (La Ressemblance informe, 286)). The contacts established are highly destabilising, bringing the human figure into collision with animal forms, masks, inorganic masses; it may be crushed by an unexpected high-angle, or broken down into outrageously physical close-ups of wriggling hands or gaping mouths. Any sense of a stable, ideal worldview is fragmented just as the humanistic ‘image of God’ is broken down  – ‘avant-garde cinema’ (not only Eisenstein, but also Buñuel’s Chien andalou, the opening scene of which also featured in Documents) is the ‘means par excellence of breaking down the human figure’ (La Ressemblance informe, 293). Dynamic, disturbing, and constantly generating new echoes and new concepts, this ‘dialectic does not seek to supersede but to alter as it ceaselessly sets images in motion’ (La Ressemblance informe, 297). It is summed up by Didi-Huberman in a formula which allows him to connect this new development in his thinking to his previous central concern with the aesthetic of the

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symptom. Instead of the Hegelian, ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis’, he suggests, we have a less definitive process: ‘form-antiform-symptom’. The ‘symptom’, the ‘accident’, the almost contingent manifestation of underlying tensions, seems to him to sum up the temporary result of this ‘rascally’ subversion of the Hegelian ideal (‘la dialectique du chenapan’, La Ressemblance informe, 296). Far from foreclosing the exchange (even temporarily), the process constantly broadens and deepens the field of possibilities in which the discourse is active; or, as Eisenstein put it, ‘the area of struggle grows in intensity as it expands into ever-new spheres’ (cit. La Ressemblance informe, 304). The reassuring stasis of what is already known is thus fragmented and jolted into movement, never more to come to rest in a satisfactory, all-embracing form: but that is not to say that nothing is created. The result of the process, which will underlie all Didi-Huberman’s subsequent discussion of cinematic montage and its importance to our response to images, is to generate temporary, ‘symptomatic’ understanding: the process of percussive, oscillatory connections and contrasts allows abstract ideas to be given concrete form, not in a ‘symbolic’ way, through metaphor, but through our recognition of the full meaning of two separate domains of reality. Didi-Huberman insists firmly that when Eisenstein alternates long shots of murderous repression of the strikers with close-ups of beasts in an abattoir, in Strike, this is not a mere metaphor but a way to show real horror alongside the inevitably reconstructed violent events. Not only do we connect the content of the two sets of images, but we also process the contrast and the connections between the reality of the abattoir scenes, which ‘belie the fiction’, and the fiction in the historical reproductions, which ‘belies the reality’: ‘real violence’ is thus set against the ‘imaginary violence’ , and a ‘vision of the real’ against a ‘dream-vision’ (La Ressemblance informe, 311). The aggressive, inescapable closeness of the real butchery is similarly brought into effective contrast with the more distant long shots: the ‘collision’ of the

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two sets of images engaging the viewer’s physical response to violence in an almost haptic manner, and then displacing that response onto the attack on the strikers. ‘Montage is capable of anything, and above all of presenting the unrepresentable’ (La Ressemblance informe, 312). Using another notion which Didi-Huberman had worked on a great deal in his early art-historical essays, it is also capable specifically of ‘incarnating’ a theme. Incarnation, the physicality of the images, is a vital part of DidiHuberman’s interest in Eisenstein’s montage. It has an obvious relevance to his concept of the symptom-image, since a symptom is, after all, the incarnation of a deeper trouble (be that trouble organic or psychological). On the way to the proof that the montage process itself is in a sense a ‘symptom’, a new procedure for changing times, he explains how the constantly developing, urgent interaction of images deeply implicates the viewing subject’s desire, both for each new stage in the formal chain and for the inevitable destruction of that which precedes it. This montage is ‘ecstatic’ in a Bataillian sense – even, in Eisenstein’s terms, ‘equivalent to a copulation’ (cit. La Ressemblance informe, 320) – and cruel, exulting in the destruction and de-formation which takes apart any recognisable form  – any ‘representation’  – as soon as it is generated, forcing it in the process to ‘cry or spit out its truth, through the rhythmic, dialectical play of bringing together and tearing asunder’ (La Ressemblance informe, 333). Needless to say, any truth which is extracted must in its turn be subject to question and to deformation: in Didi-Huberman’s re-formed dialectic, what the montage process spits out is not a synthesis but a symptom – a proof of ‘sickness, unease, mal d’être’ (La Ressemblance informe, 343), imperfect, transitory and in its turn ‘coupable’ (guilty, but also ‘cuttable’, with its own inherent faultlines through which the process of opening, of reformulating, of widening and deepening the area of struggle, may continue). The montage-dialectic is always incomplete: in fact it furnishes DidiHuberman with precisely the ‘formal method dealing with incompletion’

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(La Ressemblance informe, 345) which he had been seeking: ‘editing images together following the movement of their distortion, could perhaps provide the fundamental means – fundamentally anti-Platonic, fundamentally non-Hegelian – to produce a dialectic of the symptom’ (La Ressemblance informe, 352). Thus, at this point in his development, cinema provides DidiHuberman with an exciting new direction for his search for a nonidealistic aesthetic of art-history, which he had hitherto concentrated in the concept of the symptom. When he looks further at how this new discovery can contribute to his ongoing research, he finds himself bound to admit that a Freudian explanation, tempting though it may be, risks offering too easy an account of the montage process; and that the ‘rascally dialectic’ which he has outlined does indeed, following its own logic, go beyond the concept of the ‘symptom’. The final pages of La ressemblance informe are a plea for this new paradigm to be explored in art-historical research. A first development of that paradigm is sketched out in Devant le temps (2000), in which ‘montage’ is deployed as a key concept in subverting and rethinking a linear concept of history. Devant le temps is a reframing of previous research, some of it dating back to 1992, but the most substantial and the most relevant part, dealing with Walter Benjamin, is new. The referent here is cinematic only incidentally, but Devant le temps is none the less the founding text for L’Oeil de l’histoire, and sets the latter’s agenda of exploring the image in, and of, history. It also extends the ‘rascally dialectic’, with its percussive contrasts and its transitory, constantly re-opening insights, into the domain of time. The specifically temporal aspects of montage, and their political implications, will be discussed in Chapter 4: here we will consider how the concept of montage that Didi-Huberman develops over the six books of L’Oeil de l’histoire, and the contemporary essays which accompany them, builds upon and inflects the ideas of La Ressemblance informe and Devant le temps, historicising the former and leading

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the latter into engagement with actual film practice, particularly (especially in volumes 2 and 5, and in the 2014 essay Sentir le grisou) concerning the practice of the essay-film. As may be seen from the discussion of La Ressemblance informe, there are broadly three aspects of the montage process which excite Didi-Huberman. First there is the dismantling (‘dé-monter’) of unitary, absolute, reassuring concepts, be they idealistic academicism or linear history, or indeed the abstract concept of a ‘people’ considered as ‘a mere toy activated by a leader’ (OH4), a matter we will return to in Chapter 3. At the end of the process comes the vital production of rearrangements (‘re-montages’) from the fragments of those concepts, whatever the nature and status of these re-arrangements may be; and, in between, there is the percussive, dynamic, transformative process. These aspects are, of course, quite inseparable from each other, and should not be merely considered as the ‘beginning, middle and end’ of a linear process, but for convenience of argument we will here look at Didi-Huberman’s philosophy of montage from the perspectives of ‘démontage’, ‘transformation’ and ‘re-montage’.

Dé-montage The first subversive power of montage for Didi-Huberman is that it challenges any form of academic knowledge which relies on confidence in a stable, knowable unity. This distaste for a stable, ‘fossilised’ object of study can be traced to his early critique of art-history’s obsession with the individual, indivisible work of art: his ‘aesthetic of the symptom’ was constructed in opposition to this, in the name of Walter Benjamin’s much more dynamic and disturbing description of the powerful image as ‘dialectic on hold’ (‘dialectique à l’arrêt’: see for example DT, 117). The same rejection of certainty and absolute knowledge informed his juxtaposition of Lanzmann and Godard in

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Images malgré tout, as discussed in the previous chapter. We have already seen how in La Ressemblance informe he celebrates the breaking-down of the ideal, divine-human form by Bataille’s hereticalsurrealist use of images, informed and extended by Eisensteinian montage – a process which, as he reminds us when, in L’Oeil de l’histoire 3, he first briefly returns to Eisenstein, the latter referred to as ‘dionysiaque’ (OH3, 115–16): that is, a practice of ‘dismemberment’. One strong, and perhaps unexpected, philosophical reference for this aspect of Didi-Huberman’s defence of montage is Nietzsche. L’Oeil de l’histoire 3, the volume of the series dedicated primarily to Aby Warburg and Mnémosyne, shares with La Ressemblance informe a subtitular reference to ‘le gai savoir’  – ‘visual’ for Bataille, ‘anxious’ (inquiet) for Warburg  – and both books refer that reference back to Eisenstein at some point. Beyond the figurative fetish of the divine human figure, in OH3 it is the whole structure of positivist thought which DidiHuberman is seeking to dismantle, using Nietzsche’s text as support. Discussing a form particularly associated with the positivist project – the ‘atlas’, or illustrated compendium of knowledge – Didi-Huberman looks in some detail at Nietzsche’s attack on the science of his time, using many quotes from Le gai savoir and even more implicit references to it. In this passage Didi-Huberman describes how, in order to counter a science described as ‘one vast “prejudgement” from which all “question marks” tend to vanish’, what is required is a reorganisation of knowledge: ‘to arrange things in such a way that their strangeness breaks through as a result of contacts whose establishment is made possible by the decision to transgress the boundaries of pre-existing categories’ (OH3, 110). Although this passage is placed in the midst of an exposition of Nietzsche’s text as if he had found it therein, and although Nietzsche does advocate defamiliarisation and the breaking-down of classifications, the references to ‘arrangement’ and to establishing ‘contacts’, which convert the ‘gai savoir’ into a knowledge generated through montage, are Didi-Huberman’s own addition, indicating how the vast epistemological

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stakes are inseparable, in his argument, from the constant concern to understand the method into which L’Oeil de l’histoire is inquiring.4 In OH 2, in his detailed analysis of the work of Harun Farocki, which takes up the majority of the book, the methodological advantages of specifically cinematic montage as an alternative to a discredited positivism are made even more obvious. Here, his defining text is Theodor Adorno’s ‘The Essay as Form’,5 which he subjects to a detailed and careful ‘cinematisation’. Discussion of the essay-film has been surprisingly reluctant to foreground Adorno’s seminal essay,6 perhaps because of Adorno’s own rejection of association between the essay and ‘the visual image’, which, unlike Benjamin, he deems a static thing without internal tensions.7 Didi-Huberman cheekily begins his reassessment of Adorno by tweaking this guarded negative (a certain stasis, due to a rejection of logical progression, is all that the essay has in common with the image) into an outright positive (to step away from logical progression, the essay must rediscover its ‘affinity with the image’ (OH2, 94)). He can then proceed to rework Adorno’s arguments according to his own ‘hypothetical reading’ of the text (OH2, 94) and his own Benjaminian understanding of the visual: that is, as a discussion of the process of montage, an idea which never seems to have crossed Adorno’s mind. It is Adorno’s anti-positivist approach, and his insistence on the fragment, which are of particular interest to Didi-Huberman: he notes how Adorno imagines ‘the totality light[ing] up in one of the chosen 4

5

6

7

The passage being referenced here is para. 373. See Nietzsche, Friedrich (1974), The Gay Science, with a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs, tr. Walter Kaufman, Vintage Books, pp. 334–336. Adorno, Theodor (2000), ‘The Essay as Form’ (1958), tr. Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, in Brian O’Connor (ed.), The Adorno Reader, pp. 91–111, Oxford: Blackwell. Laura Rascaroli’s recent book How the Essay Film Thinks (Oxford: OUP, 2017) develops its argument for a dialectical understanding of the essay film out of Adorno (and to some extent Benjamin): her analysis throughout has strong affinities to Didi-Huberman’s thinking, even to the selection of two films which he has considered exemplary, Harun Farocki’s Aufschub and Pasolini’s La rabbia, for detailed study. Adorno ‘The Essay as Form’, p. 109.

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or haphazard features [of the essay], but without the whole being present’,8 and how this fragmentary meaning is determined and inflected by the ‘mosaic-like’ relation between the fragments. Seizing on a slightly critical reflection of Adorno’s on how essay-writing eschews the more manipulative features of traditional rhetoric (the ‘objectionable transitions’ which ‘yoke [the listener] to the speaker’s will’ are ‘fused in the essay with its truth-content’),9 Didi-Huberman extracts the purely methodological conclusion that the truth-content is to be found in the transitions: ‘the breaks and the transitions will contain the essential’ (OH 95). Rascaroli draws a similar conclusion from Adorno when she claims that in the essay-film ‘it is [the] inbetweenness that calls for investigation’.10 The not entirely resolved question of how a montage aesthetic insures itself against rhetorical manipulation will haunt Didi-Huberman’s discussion of Farocki and, even more intensely, of Godard in OH5; but re-valorising the now not-so-objectionable transitions allows him to draw directly from Adorno a theoretical construct which combines the démontage of any universal, falsely objective body of knowledge, and the remontage of its ‘membra disjecta’11 into ‘a readable context’,12 independent of any pre-existing established meanings. Thus Didi-Huberman derives a description which applies exceptionally well not only to Farocki’s modus operandi but the montage ethic in general: ‘readability comes in the montage: montage considered as a form and as an essay’ (OH2, 96). What this ‘readability’ may offer us is something we will return to later in the chapter; at this point it is worth noting that Didi-Huberman seizes on Adorno’s assessment of the non-totalising, exploratory essay as a subversive dismantling of all ideological or theoretical certainties

8 9 10 11 12

Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, 104. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, 109. Rascaroli, How the Essay Film Thinks, 8. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, 109. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, 102.

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and systems of knowledge in favour of intense attention to reality in its details, or to certain details of reality. For, given a certain level of present intensity, a single detail may hold within itself a glimpse of the meaning of the whole. Elsewhere, Didi-Huberman describes this illuminating detail as ‘a partial visual object which, suddenly, makes us emotionally anticipate the whole, “when the whole is reflected in it in a truly concentrated way, as if in a drop of water” ’ (OH6, 261, quoting Eisenstein, Mémoires). For the totality to ‘light up’ in the detail in the way described by Adorno or by Eisenstein, the detail in question must be read in the moment, detached from pre-established, stereotypical meanings or facile associations. This is the prerequisite in order that ties of meaning may subsequently be forged with the other fragments with which it will be brought into contact. While in Adorno’s article this idea is presented through the analogy of a language-learner obliged to deduce the meanings of words from their contexts rather than from a dictionary, thus implying a kind of ‘natural state’ of semiotic innocence which can be accessed by any reader prepared to take a little risk,13 the revelation of the unencumbered detail in L’Oeil de l’histoire is an active, indeed a violent process. The detail must be torn from its context. Seeking a more fitting analogy for this process, DidiHuberman turns, as he so often does, to Walter Benjamin and his descriptions of the workings of Brechtian theatre, and finds that Benjamin had had recourse, precisely, to the language of cinema. The words he uses to describe Brecht’s methods are: ‘cut, framing, interruption, ellipse [‘suspens’]’, notes Didi-Huberman (OH1, 61), as if this dismantling process is necessarily cinematic, and the association had not escaped Benjamin himself: the ‘à-coups’ (jolts) which he sees as a functional part of the epic theatre are also described as characteristic of film narration. 13

Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, 101.

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But in order to truly detach the fragment from its predetermined meanings, jolts and interruptions may not be sufficient. Dé-montage is a violent affair: the word itself, in some contexts, implies ‘excessive energy’ (OH1, 130): to detach the fragment from its habitual place is, in Benjamin’s words, a ‘transgression’ which may ‘make existence splash high out of its bed of time’ [faire jaillir haut l’existence hors du lit du temps], like water in a storm (OH1, 130). In Didi-Huberman’s discussion of Farocki’s films, the gentle language of dilution and discontinuity, however cinematic, gives place to a call for more drastic methods: ‘you have to be ready to make a clean, brutal cut’ (OH2, 132), aggressively hacking away all the accretions of meaning which obscure the ‘moment of the inextinguishable thing’ (OH2, 97). Once again the model for the process may be Brecht, with his ability to ‘cleave through complexity with strokes of the simple’ (OH2, 132). Before the detail can be brought into contact with another to generate thought, the monteur/démonteur must not merely interrupt, but cleave the commonly accepted web of meaning, ‘creating a gash, a fissure in a state of things consensually supposed to be inevitable’ (OH2, 133). In OH5, Didi-Huberman observes a similarly violent function in Jean-Luc Godard’s use of quotations, only in this case the wedge is driven not into a smooth univocal surface but into the beginnings of a dialogue: Godard’s ‘ “cutting” quotations’ (OH5, 21) create a ‘break in the reciprocity or the equality of speaking positions’ and so ‘break the dialogue [. . .] in order to construct a dialectic’, which may be ‘able to raise up something like a truth’. This aggressiveness can be dangerously close to dogmatism in some of the ways in which Godard deploys it, but it is always essential in order that an image  – a constructed, manipulated thing from its very conception – can ‘nonetheless render something of the real world to us’ (OH2, 133). The further condition, of course, of a ‘fertile’ violence is that the space opened up ‘for new possibilities or readabilities’ (OH2, 134) is then developed, that new ideas and associations flow, or jolt, out of the cracks.

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Transformation The dialectic of images which Didi-Huberman is seeking is in the first place transformative of the initial terms, ‘percussive’ as he calls it in La Ressemblance informe. The violence of the vocabulary used to describe the montage process reflects not only the force required to crack apart the smooth surface of consensual unity, but also the clash of separated terms with each other as they are brought into new associations. This metaphor goes beyond the idea  – fundamental to Eisenstein and which, as we have seen, Didi-Huberman inserts into Adorno’s discussion of the essay, thus bringing that text closer to cinema – that it is in the intervals and relationships between the terms of a montage that meaning is generated. Instead, it evokes the dynamic moment at which the reflective interval is reduced to zero: the terms collide, and the energy of their collision deflects their direction of travel, distorts their meaning and even, in a sense, their form. In OH1, where the object of discussion is still the montage of photographic images and words, the result of the collisions may be to jolt the whole construction into motion. For Didi-Huberman, this jolt in Brecht’s montages of still images in his Arbeitsjournal becomes a cinematic moment, when the static pages imply a desire for that medium adapted to montage like no other (‘the cinema is that apparatus to which montage is essential’ [OH1, 140], but also – we have already seen the movement at work in La Ressemblance informe – montage is a structure to which the cinema is essential, to the extent that it is a structure which always, necessarily, sets images in motion). When the images are already in motion, when their encounters are already dynamic, the energy they generate may manifest itself as a spark of ‘truth’; its effects may also be more complex, reverberating onward into the developing sequence of images. For example in the description Didi-Huberman offers of the ‘real force in the confrontation of shots’ in Pasolini (OH4, 190), the expression of this conflict (‘affrontement’) is

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described as violent (‘cracking or fracture’) but also in a more subtle, but no less dangerous incarnation, as contagion or contamination. Like the bodies of the opponents in the fight scene from Accattone, the meeting of the fragmented terms of a montage produces ‘a [. . .] mixture of confrontation and attachment’ (OH4, 189) such that, momentarily, ‘the two bodies are as one, chimerical, wonderful, amorous’ (OH4, 188). From such moments of paradoxical stasis neither term will emerge unchanged, either in form or in meaning. As already mentioned with regard to La ressemblance informe, DidiHuberman’s language of montage is consistently incarnate, and never more so than in these privileged moments of contact and transformation, which power all the epistemological potential of montage practice. Their effects are physical, creating a disturbance in the physical body of the film. Even the process is physical, implicating the body of the director at the montage-table through the manual precision required to measure, match and set the images on the screens (OH2, 145); and reception is also an incarnate process, engaging the senses and emotions, and not merely the intellect, of the spectator – this will be discussed further in Chapter 3. The complex reverberations of a successful montage can generate, out of the immediate, aggressive clash of conflict and collision, a new concordance of rhythm, a kind of dance. The metaphor of montage as dance is a recurring theme in L’Oeil de l’histoire. For Farocki at his montage-desk, the process of reassembling the scattered fragments of his raw material is ‘at once a technology of the body [. . .] and a dance of thought’ (OH2, 145, D-H’s emphasis). The emotional dynamic of Battleship Potemkin, examined in almost obsessive depth in OH6, is fundamentally akin to a dance, and ‘the way in which [the frame] is “cut” also dictates the way in which it will dance’ (OH6, 261); while the constant oscillation between conflict and attachment which characterises Pasolini’s cinema in general, and his approach to montage in particular, leads DidiHuberman to the memorable formulation that such a cinema ‘will do

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nothing other than make conflicts dance’ (OH4, 187, D-H’s emphasis). What actually takes place as a result of the montage-encounter, when two antagonistic forms are brought together? A mutual contagion which brings each under the influence of the other, a burst of repulsive momentum which jars them apart: a twist towards and away from each other vividly described in the Eisensteinian phrase ‘a “volte of the form”’ (OH6, 292). In that phrase the immediate, suddenly triggered movement of first impetus is combined with its prolongation: the bodies have entered each other’s orbit, as it were, and the ‘volte’, the twisting leap, becomes ‘the movement par excellence – or the drama – of turning this way and that [. . .] the dance, the twisting, the spinning [la virevolte, la voltige] of bodies’ (OH6, 292). The movement of a dance being singularly compelling and inclined to pull neighbouring bodies into its rhythm, it is perhaps not surprising that the idea of montage-as-dance is fundamental to Didi-Huberman’s assessment of its emotional function (see Chapter 3). If Didi-Huberman favours the Nietzschean image of a dance, it is also because he does not wish to suggest that the movement generated by montage-encounters is unidirectional or stable: it will turn back and forth, advance and retreat, and further encounters, with their own charges of energy and subsequent deflections of movement and form, are not only a possible, but a necessary part of a dynamic development of meaning. All the developments of L’Oeil de l’histoire are in some ways further explorations of the ‘rascally dialectic’ outlined in La Ressemblance informe, which becomes in OH1 a ‘dialectique du monteur’, ‘the infernal relaunch of the contradictions and [. . .] the inevitability of non-synthesis’ (OH1, 94: D-H’s emphasis). In the dance which involves them, the conflicts remain unresolved and ready to explode at any moment, and their transformative encounters are potentially infinite. The illusion of stability and finality signals the mortal danger of a decline into dogmatism, a new, smooth unity within which there is no more to say, no further questions to ask, no

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dance to develop. In OH1 Didi-Huberman develops this through the contrast between the prise de position [taking position] adopted by the images in a montage, which is always a position which can be abandoned or revised, and a prise de parti [taking a side] which offers no access to contradiction, and which Didi-Huberman feels is antithetical to the dialectique du monteur. Thus, faced with the final title-card of Godard’s Film Socialisme, an uncompromisingly spare ‘NO COMMENT’, in OH5, a doubt assails him: has Godard led the complex choreography of conflicting images into a trap? ‘Is this a full stop which denotes [. . .] an evidence which allows for no further words, for no response’ (OH5, 46). This worry, that the most illustrious monteur of the French cinema may have betrayed DidiHuberman’s faith in montage as an ever-dynamic source of relevant understanding, is the nagging itch which OH5 scratches at in its urgent series of analyses. It is not just a question of whether Godard has, or has not, adopted a dogmatic position; it is that, if he has, he has done so through montage, the very process which by its nature should have prevented it.

Re-montage It is, of course, in the re-montage of the disparate elements, now detached from their smooth unity, and directed towards collisions and their potential, conflictual dance, that the purpose of the dialectique du monteur reveals itself. The re-assemblage, to be fertile, must be unpredictable, but not random: ‘neither put neatly into drawers, [. . .] nor left as bric-à-brac’.14 It must be a choreography which leads the viewer, through the dance, to both exhilaration and

14

Didi-Huberman, Georges (2002), L’Image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps de fantômes selon Aby Warburg, Paris: Minuit, p. 474.

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understanding. And, for the writer of L’Oeil de l’histoire, it has a particular, vital purpose: the anachronistic, and subversive, re-writing of history through image-work. ‘Re-monter’ in French has two meanings. On the one hand there is re-assemblage, the sense in which it was used above: on the other, it can mean to ‘retrace’, to ‘work backwards’ (literally, to ‘climb back up’), in the phrase ‘remonter le temps’, to move backwards through time, for example. In Devant le temps, Didi-Huberman sets out how this double meaning offers a perfect expression of the ‘anachronistic’ (Benjaminian) approach to history which he is searching for: ‘remontage’ must be taken ‘in the double sense of anamnesia and structural recomposition’ (DT, 121); and L’Oeil de l’histoire could be described as a series of case-studies of this process, which is distilled into four words in the title of Book 2 of the series, ‘Remontages du temps subi’. This rather Proustian phrase also gives the clue to the purpose of the project: to ‘go back over’ time suffered (passively, helplessly: such is the implication of ‘subi’) and re-construct it actively, in such a way as to no longer simply accept what it delivers to us, but to take control of the meaning of history, to ask pertinent, indeed uncomfortable questions, and to capture the sense in which questions about the past can most urgently and fruitfully have meaning for the present. In this section we will look specifically at how Didi-Huberman conceives of the ‘historical essay-film’, structured through montage, with a close look at the two major case-studies contained in the series. The first, in Book 2, could be said to be exemplary: it concerns Haroun Farocki, in whose practice Didi-Huberman sees the idea very nearly realised. In OH5 a similar extended case-study examines Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma along with other films, revealing how Godard’s practice is comparable, but also problematic. In his polemic with Claude Lanzmann and the writers of Les Temps modernes DidiHuberman had defended Godard’s approach to representing the Shoah, but here he undertakes a rigorously critical assessment which

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emits some doubts as to whether Godard’s montage-essays are as exhilaratingly centrifugal as he had at first thought, correspond to the model of the ‘dialectique du monteur’ or offer a truly liberating approach to history. Alongside these two case-studies, we should also add a third: the shorter essay, Sentir le grisou, in 2014, in which DidiHuberman examines Pasolini’s La rabbia, combining these questions of subversion and critical questioning with other themes which will lead us into Chapters 3 and 4 of this study. The essay on Farocki could be said to be the most complete manifesto of Didi-Huberman’s approach to cinematic montage, and, as we have seen, he makes abundant reference to Adorno’s discussion of the essay form in order to describe Farocki’s progress towards a new kind of ‘readability’. The introductory demand which he makes for Farocki, however, raises the political stakes of L’Oeil de l’histoire in contrast with Adorno’s version of the essay: the reorganisation in question is not merely a partial one – a ‘prise de position’ – but also, and notwithstanding the essential impermanence which we have already touched upon, a real expression of political passion. One introductory paragraph consists of two simple sentences: ‘Raising one’s thought to the level of anger. Raising one’s anger to the level of work’ (OH2, 72). Set apart and as it were framed on the first page, this combined demand for rigour and passion sums up the process which leads Didi-Huberman from Farocki to Pasolini and the Oeil de l’histoire series from the ‘remontage’ of time to the choreography of creative, contextual anger described in OH6. What Didi-Huberman seeks in Farocki, however, is primarily the method by which anger can be decanted into critique; notably the critique, and contextualisation, of the already-existent images which, in overweening quantity, ‘illustrate’ institutional violence in regular television discourse or which circulate unobserved among a selected professional audience in the form of surveillance footage, training videos, and forgotten records kept in private archives. Film after film

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dedicates itself to making such images readable, starting from the position  – also axiomatic  – that every image, no matter what its provenance, is fabricated and thus in some way manipulated: and that, for that very reason, it contains valuable potential information about when, why and by and for whom it was fabricated. ‘It’s absurd [. . .] to suggest that certain images should be disregarded on the pretext that they are “manipulated” ’ (OH2, 71). On the contrary, once extracted, by the process of démontage discussed above, from the context for which it was formed  – the smooth flow of a news broadcast, for example – the most banally instrumental footage may prove the most revealing of all. The anger which Didi-Huberman finds in Farocki, and which matches his own, concerns the exploitation of images – his passion and his subject of study – for violent ends: ‘why, how and in what measure does the production of images so often contribute to the destruction of human beings?’ (OH2, 84). And how does a filmmaker persuade destructive images to yield their secrets and to participate in a counter-discourse; how can they be re-set against the violence which first formed them? The secret of course is in the meticulous work involved in reassembling these images often taken ready-made from disorganised and neglected archives. As we have seen, Didi-Huberman approaches Farocki’s work through the prism of Adorno’s essay on the essay, and, in assessing how cinematic ‘readability’ is to be obtained, the two lessons of that essay which interest him most concern rigour on the one hand; on the other flexibility. Any particular montage-film thus requires ‘theoretical rigour applied to respect for complexity and singularity’ and ‘practical rigour applied to the efficacy of the aspects which are uncovered’, these two forms of rigour together leading to ‘an authentic method, but of an impure kind’ (OH2, 99). The word ‘impure’ is used here in contrast with the abstract, structural plan of the positivist essay, indicating that the essay-method – Farocki’s method – is determined by the nature of the materials he is handling (‘its power

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to release the object’s expression in the unity of its elements’,15 and that for that reason it cannot be definitive. The need to draw conclusions from the nature of the object itself – what the image contains, where it came from, what is its shape and form – requires particularly close and rigorous attention to how it is presented: ‘It [the essay] takes the issue of presentation more seriously than do those procedures that separate out method from material’).16 It is also important to understand – and, Didi-Huberman suggests, even to show – that this presentation is not the only one possible and that once the essay is complete it can immediately be rethought: ‘What does the essayist do? If not try and try again. [‘essayer, essayer encore.’17] It’s a great deal each time, but it is never everything’ (OH2, 96). The rigour in Farocki’s exemplary respect for the document/text/ image into which he is inquiring can be seen for example in Aufschub (2007), which was discussed in Chapter 1. What Didi-Huberman celebrates here is not merely Farocki’s refusal to re-organise the images to create a false narrative unity, but the way in which he uses the images themselves to deliver their own commentary, through a process of freeze-framing, repeating footage, or enlarging a significant detail which is then edited into the sequence. The re-organisation of the images thus creates a rhythm to guide the audience’s reading, with the filmmaker’s argument created essentially through managing emphasis. The absence of any extraneous material is what draws DidiHuberman’s attention particularly. He quotes Farocki at length when, in a piece published in Trafic in 2009, he commented: ‘I decided not to use any other material [. . .] I decided to assemble these images, no more’ (OH2, 119). That the process is startlingly effective can be seen by the fact that Sylvie Lindeperg, in her description of the film for the

15 16 17

Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, 94. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, 101. The etymological link between the concepts of ‘essay’ and ‘trying’ (from the Latin exagere, to weigh) is much more obvious in common parlance in French than in English.

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Farocki Archive website, suggests the actual presence in superimposition of other, absent images which Farocki’s preferred sequences evoke. However – and this is the other aspect which provokes Didi-Huberman’s admiration – the rhythm and the associations drawn out of the footage are not the only ones possible, and Farocki’s procedure makes the audience aware of the decisionmaking process and of the theoretical possibility of stopping the footage at other places, enlarging other details. Farocki ‘offers us these images while offering us the possibility of re-assembling them ourselves’ (OH2, 120); an integral part of the rigour of his montage is that it makes its flexibility and non-definitiveness visible. A contrasting example on a similar subject (Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges, 1988) shows how a similar rigorous, imaginative control can operate on a body of heterogeneous material. Here DidiHuberman sees ‘a true dialectical exposition where each element comes to slice apart the evident truth attributed to each of the other elements’ (OH2, 134). The film is a montage of startling juxtapositions carefully selected and measured to operate, with each change in source-material, a detectable change in point of view. There are aerial surveillance images from the 1940s, intended to locate possible bombing targets, ‘reframed’ by developing verbal explanations of what the images contain (wartime photographs of Auschwitz) and of the time which elapsed (over thirty years) before anyone saw what was none the less in plain sight on these photographs intended for a different, transitory function. These images are then brought into contact with others made contemporarily, this time within the camp; the angle and distance, and thus the scale of reading, is immediately, physically, adjusted. The new images are Nazi-shot photographs of prisoners arriving in the camp, and from their connection with the aerial shots develops a spark of associative understanding of ‘how it is possible to take images in order not to see what is going on’ (OH2, 137). A frameenlargement then operated on one of these photographs creates a

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close-up which, as close-ups in a dynamic, cinematic relationship with the audience always will, meets the viewer’s eye, imposing its own gaze, and the point of view switches radically. From there Farocki moves on the one hand to those other photographs, taken surreptitiously by a prisoner, which have already been fundamental to Didi-Huberman’s thinking on the image in history (Images malgré tout); on the other, he presents a different set of official, photographic close-ups never intended to be a meeting of gazes, but which can be made so by a carefully choreographed cinematic context: ID photos of Algerian women taken by the French Army in 1960. This sequence of images represents, for Didi-Huberman, an excellent example of ‘time subjected to exegesis and anamnesis’ (OH2, 143–4) in which all elements reveal their full historicity ‘in the pre-history which they draw us back to [qu’ils font remonter] and in the post-history which they already make detectable, and finally in the shock of the history they document and the memory they elicit’ (OH2, 144). If Bilder der Welt cannot, as Aufschub does, offer the audience alternatives by revealing the full extent of the material from which the selections were made, it also includes in the presentation the moment and the manner of selection: Farocki’s hand, reframing a woman’s portrait by blocking all of her face except her eyes, is a reminder, within the text, that the author’s hand, and the brain and the eye behind it, worked on the film’s raw material, deleted parts, imposed a rhythm on what remained, and generally made visible a ‘dance of thought’ around the presences and absences of history. The presence of the editing table in Farocki’s films  – and its importance in his discussion of his film-practice – is emblematic, for Didi-Huberman, of his fidelity to the flexibility of the essay form. On the old-fashioned editing table, two images appear simultaneously, side by side: it thus offers to the editor, in tangible, and not yet definitive, form, the question of how to read their relationship. ‘The two great paradigms of montage’ (OH2, 149) would be, on the one hand, to read them in

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succession (first the one on the left, then the one on the right), or, on the other, simultaneously and in resonance, generating as many suggestive connections as the images can bear, placing us in front of ‘[the] branching or [the] rhizomes of overdetermination’ (OH2, 150); naturally, Farocki’s filmmaking relies on the latter. In his more experimental work (Schnittstelle, 1995; Ich glaubte Gefangene zu sehen, 2000) he has recourse to split-screen techniques  – inspired by Godard’s pioneering Numéro Deux – in which ‘viewers are placed in the very concrete situation – which is really work – of making their own new reassemblages, admittedly virtual ones, of the images exhibited together’ (OH2, 154). Farocki’s cinematic practice of flexibility might thus be summed up as a continual seeking after a way of presenting, or displaying, images actively to an active audience. Aided by Farocki’s own wariness of being labelled an artist, Didi-Huberman suggests that he might be described as a ‘producer’ of images in the cinematic sense of the word (the agent who sources the filmic material and then makes it available to its potential public). Farocki himself had used the term, and it enables Didi-Huberman to return once again to Benjamin and to find in his 1934 essay ‘The Author as Producer’ a telling description of the spectator which this montage practice requires, ‘the reader [. . .] always ready to become a writer, someone who describes or even prescribes’.18 Later, Didi-Huberman will propose the term ‘passeur’ or ‘go-between’.19 Modestly self-effacing behind the power of the images themselves, the producer/passeur’s role is to restore these images, often hidden from sight in private or institutional storage, to the audience to whom they belong as of right: ‘Farocki has conclusively accepted the fact that images 18

19

Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Author as Producer’, https://www.marxists.org/reference/ archive/benjamin/1970/author-producer.htm Frequently used for someone who presents experimental work effectively to the public (see the frequent use of the term in the French obituaries of the critic Jean Douchet, an associate of the Nouvelle Vague who chose to write about films rather than to make them in order to pass on his enthusiasm and understanding).

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constitute a common good’ (OH2, 165). If they pass through his films, he does not derive any sense of ownership from their passage  – unlike Andy Warhol, observes Didi-Huberman, who transformed his borrowed images into his own copyrighted private property (OH2, 161). And perhaps unlike Godard, too, despite Farocki’s great admiration for the French director (OH2, 173–80). In the final part of his essay on Farocki, Didi-Huberman devotes several pages to the differences between Farocki’s and Godard’s practice, and their implications for the ownership of the image and the spectator’s free involvement. Although the two filmmakers are united by their perception of the film as ‘theory in action’, expressed through the reorganisation of found images, he observes in Godard a tendency to place himself constantly at the subjective centre of his montages. Although he certainly does not claim copyright à la Warhol, and indeed has been an outspoken critic of copyright claims (not surprisingly, as he has occasionally fallen foul of them), he none the less puts his personal stamp on the images which he uses, taking ‘personal and ostensible possession of the images of the world and the inscriptions of war which he distributes around himself ’ (OH2, 176). Godard’s frequent use of highly prestigious images – ‘the great history of art’, observes Didi-Huberman the art-historian, ironically – goes hand in hand with his own cultural position – ‘one visits Godard as if entering Rembrandt’s studio or Beethoven’s study’ (OH2, 176). Godard himself is part of Art History, and his films, however stimulating, are perceived, and present themselves, as ‘works’. While undoubtedly rigorous in construction, the flexibility and inconclusiveness essential to the essay is, Didi-Huberman suggests, much less in evidence: in comparison Farocki’s films make their images available to the spectator, as much as possible, for revision: ‘we remain free to re-visit – to reinterpret, to recognise, to admire or not, and to make our own re-assemblages’ (OH2, 180). This hesitation before Godard’s montage practice becomes the subject of OH5, ‘Passés cités par JLG’. The only volume of the Oeil de

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l’histoire series to put an individual artist in its title, it is also the shortest and its focus is exclusively on textual analysis of Godard’s work. JLG thus occupies a unique position in the structure of L’Oeil de l’histoire, but he is far from the most important theoretical or artistic presence across the series, and the conclusions of OH5 are quite sharply critical. The book is, in a sense, a development, and a reassessment, of the largely positive view of Godard’s work taken in Images malgré tout, as discussed in Chapter 1. It reads Histoire(s) du cinéma in the wider context of L’Oeil de l’histoire, as an example of anachronistic cinematic history in which the passages on the Holocaust play their part in a more general whole; in this context, the series has already set out demanding criteria for success, from the theoretical work of Benjamin and Adorno and the exemplary practice of Brecht, Warburg and, in cinema, Farocki and (in a slightly different context) Pasolini. OH5 is also oddly playful in tone, despite the seriousness and complexity of the philosophical issues which Didi-Huberman raises both in support of and in objection to Godard. All but one of the book’s six parts are titled with common idioms including the word ‘deux’ (‘two’) or ‘double’. This highlights how essential Didi-Huberman finds duality in understanding Godard’s cinematic thinking (for better or worse), but it also pastiches Godard’s own practice of taking clichéd phrases and re-framing or subverting them as in-text titles. Within the text as well, Didi-Huberman takes great pleasure in adopting the kind of word-play which Godard is fond of using to make a striking point economically: thus (à propos of Godard’s hesitation, in the article ‘Montage, mon beau souci’, between a ‘mathematical’ [calculatoire] and a ‘poetic’ understanding of montage), Didi-Huberman describes his approach to montage as ‘somewhere between a passion for science and a science of passion’ (OH5, 39). Pointing out that the mere act of montage, if not carried out with the necessary political rigour, is far from unfailingly progressive, as Leni

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Riefenstahl’s films demonstrate, he permits himself a ‘ “montage mon beau fusil” [montage my beautiful gun], as it were’ (OH5, 45), supported by a title-card from Ici et ailleurs which, precisely, distributes the words ‘mon fusil’ (‘my gun’) several times across the screen. Nowhere else in the Oeil de l’histoire series does Didi-Huberman exhibit such a penchant for puns and word-switching; they speak to the fascination which Godard’s confident way with words (and images) exerts on the writer, but also perhaps contribute to the uneasiness which the book expresses with that very confidence. The problem is that much of Godard’s practice is apparently exemplary of precisely the approach to history, and to the dialectical image as a fount of historical meaning, which L’Oeil de l’histoire has been meticulously describing over four books. OH5 readily concedes that Godard’s interest in history is an anachronistic rather than a historiographic one: ‘the only point of the pasts which are quoted is to make a formal accusation against present situations of injustice’ (OH5, 33). Here lies ‘the most authentically dialectic element of his art’ (OH5, 33). The processes by which he goes about this aim also seem, superficially, well adapted to Didi-Huberman’s conception of montage. Thus the citational practice (pastiched above) of phrases which are ‘ “framed”, that is unframed, detached from their original context and arranged, assembled, with a view to a different logic’ (OH5, 29) starts out as a perfect verbal equivalent of the process of ‘dé-montage’ so essential to any reassessment of a given material, even if a seed of doubt may creep in with the evocation of ‘another logic’. Does this not imply some pre-determined system into which the phrase will be inserted, rather than the bombardment of connections by which it might yield its secrets according to the ‘rascally dialectic’? Still, connection after connection can be made with Benjamin’s reflections on Brechtian practice, which were so important to DidiHuberman in setting out his ideal of montage. The interrupted action which dissociates individual elements and creates ‘monads destined

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to combine among themselves’; the formal enquiry which turns these monads into ‘dialectical images’ or ‘thinking forms’; the use of technique, and technology, to make connections, as Benjamin recommended in his article on the artist as producer; and particularly the constant experiment with connections between image and word which, in the cinema explored in L’Oeil de l’histoire, is almost unique to Godard (much less developed in Farocki, it connects OH5 with the introductory essays on Brecht in OH1). All these aspects of Godardian practice are set out (OH5, 36–7), as if they were indeed exemplary, but the passage is threaded with doubt, presented in large part as a sequence of negative rhetorical questions: ‘Is Benjamin’s thought [. . .] not further developed [by Godard’s practice]?’, ‘Is [the importance of word and image in both men’s work] not striking?’, ‘Does Godard not [practice various techniques suggested in Benjamin’s article]?’ The answer invited (manipulatively, perhaps) by such questions is a ‘Yes, but . . .’ which the rest of the book will not fail to supply. If there are occasions in which the rigour of Godard’s montage practice is briefly called into question (‘the “couldn’t-care-less” aspect of the continuity errors he deliberately lets pass’, OH5, 37), the thrust of Didi-Huberman’s critique concerns that flexibility and inconclusiveness which Adorno attributes to the essay and which is fundamental to the ‘rascally dialectic’. In Farocki, he found it developed and displayed. With Godard he is not so sure. ‘What dialectic exactly are we talking about?’, he worries (OH, 50), reading a text on montage written during Godard’s Maoist phase. Certainly no one, least of all Godard, would have denied that at this stage in his career his intention is to ‘take sides’ (‘prendre parti’), even if he still claims to do so through the material examination of historical complexity (‘to go [. . .] where the contradictions are sharpest’ – in this case, the Palestinian refugee camps (OH5, 49 cit.)). Certainly the A + B = C simplicity of the montage process as set out in this text will be greatly complicated subsequently. None the less other more recent declarations do contain detectable similarities to it: ‘what I

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call the image, the image made out of two, that is to say the third image’ (1995, cit. OH5, 52), or the line from Je vous salue, Marie which DidiHuberman recalls in a note: ‘Putting two images side by side, that’s called creation, mademoiselle Marie’ (OH5, 52, n.30). So, asks DidiHuberman, does Godard’s dialectique du monteur ‘give priority to the suspense inherent in any tension (see, there!), or, rather, to the third term as the conclusion to be drawn from any contradiction (there, you see!)’ (OH5, 52). The distinction between a montage geared to showing (‘vois, là!’) and a montage geared to concluding (‘voilà!’) recapitulates the distinction between the ‘dialectic of the symptom’ and the ‘dialectic of synthesis’ sketched out in La Ressemblance informe: the former alone interests Didi-Huberman, and Godard frustrates him. It’s not that the filmmaker is not clearly aware of the issue, it’s not that he does not, sometimes, both say and do the right thing, it is that sometimes he does not. Didi-Huberman fears that he wants to have his dialectical cake and eat it, as it were. ‘Godard wants everything, he wants one thing and its opposite’ (OH5, 53). Didi-Huberman does acknowledge the good faith with which Godard recognises contradictions, including his own, and the genuine discomfort which this recognition produces in him. In the Hegelian terms also referenced at the end of Images malgré tout, Godard presents himself as a consciousness ‘split within’ and therefore ‘unhappy’ (OH5, 127) – but he does not, as Farocki does, accept these limitations. Rather, Didi-Huberman observes him placing himself in the position of the Hegelian ‘belle âme’, the ‘moral genius who knows that the inner voice of his own knowledge is a divine voice’ (OH5, 130). In other words, he aims for  – and sometimes achieves  – careful, rigorous, exploratory and unprejudiced montage, but without depriving himself of that moment of artistic triumph (voilà!) when the poetic truth is revealed. We have already mentioned the disquiet provoked in DidiHuberman by the final ‘No Comment’ in Film Socialisme. Another phrase from the same film, paraphrased from the artist par excellence,

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Picasso, sharpens and directs that anxiety: ‘L’historien ne cherche pas/ Il trouve’ [The historian does not seek/he finds] (OH5, 84). In those six words everything which montage represents throughout the six books of L’Oeil de l’histoire, and, indeed, of Didi-Huberman’s life’s work as a critical art-historian, is denied: it’s hardly surprising that he is shocked by them. To compound the significance of the phrase, Godard has substituted ‘historian’ for Picasso’s ‘artist’. The statement is thus a perfect ‘dialectical phrase’, torn by multiple tensions which go to the heart of Didi-Huberman’s theoretical concerns with art, history and the relationship between them; and it contrasts directly with a phrase of Farocki’s, cited with enthusiasm in OH2: ‘One is almost always satisfied with one’s finds [. . .] but one will never be done with research’ (OH2, 169). It is not, of course, a definitive summary of Godard’s practice, and it is always problematic to assess how seriously any of Godard’s gnomic phrases are intended to be taken, but out of this one Didi-Huberman identifies a fundamental problem, already touched on in OH2: what happens to film – the essay-film particularly – when the filmmaker desires, and even attains, the status of artist. A historian is, or should be, by definition a ‘seeker’ (a ‘chercheur’, which is also a ‘researcher’). An artist, at least given a certain conception of art, need not be. Godard’s manipulation of Picasso’s phrase suggests to Didi-Huberman that ‘he may have [. . .] ended up swapping the uncertainty of the essay for the genius’ certainty of the work of art’ (OH5, 85). Claiming for himself all the privileges of a romantic conception of poetic genius, whom ‘truth [. . .] kisses on the mouth without needing even to be approached’ (OH5, 85), he also tends to see in great art something eternal, ‘an atemporal solution to history’ (OH5, 84: it is thus that Didi-Huberman reads the progression from Gernika (the bombed town) to Guernica (the great painting) in Histoire(s) du cinéma). Art, thus, becomes something suspiciously similar to a classic synthesis, a conclusion in which the contradictions of history are dissolved and resolved.

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The problematic formula, here, is at heart a pseudo-Hegelian A + B = C. There is also, however, another problem which Didi-Huberman detects in Godard’s montage: something which might be described as a stuck contact or an eternal dyad. Here the reverberations produced by the contact between two terms turn constantly back on each other, without a dramatic synthesis but also without escape. The problem is not a magically revealed resolution, but the lack of any third term at all: a ‘reverse-shot policy’ (politique du contrechamp) which has nowhere to go. Didi-Huberman himself proposes an algebraic formula for this, a relationship of identification: ‘J/P = N/J (the Jews do to the Palestinians as the Nazis did to the Jews)’, since the question arises in the context of Godard’s treatment of Israel and Palestine, and Didi-Huberman’s Exhibit A is once again Ici et ailleurs. Here, the problem is duality: outside ‘la chose’ and ‘son contraire’ there is nothing, and ‘It is very easy in cinema to divide the world in two: all you have to do is put everything into shot/reverse-shot relationship’ (OH5, 103): for example, the faces of Hitler and Golda Meir, in Ici et ailleurs. But what is a shot/reverseshot relationship? It comes in three kinds, suggests Didi-Huberman: ‘a shot/reverse-shot of dialogue’ where the two different terms interact; ‘of hate’ (where there is no interaction: B = NOT-A, A = NOT-B ), ‘of identification’ (where there is no difference: A=B=A=B . . . ). These last two are not only dialectical dead ends but risk becoming equivalents to each other in an ‘aggressive-identificatory’ relationship (OH5, 105). Only in the first case is there an opening for the free-flowing, open dialectic which Didi-Huberman is seeking. That opening comes from the presence of a third term, but it is not the revelatory sum of the parts suggested by A + B = C: rather, the third term is intermediate, a ‘missing link’, and its source, and vital ingredient, is imagination. Here Didi-Huberman’s analysis shows affinities to Deleuze’s description of the montage of the interstice, which interestingly was also developed with reference to Ici et ailleurs, and which DidiHuberman had already cited (OH5, 53–4). In identifying the

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transition-space as ruled by ‘imagination’ , however, he is developing a key theme in his own conception of montage. Imagination, according to Baudelaire, reveals ‘the intimate and secret relationships between things, their correspondences and analogies’ (OH5, 105). In OH1 Didi-Huberman described it as an ‘unpredictable and infinite construction’ (238, his emphasis), by which he means a process of construction: imagination ‘throws the letters [of an educational alphabet-game] in the air’ in order to rearrange them as it will. It ‘creates relationships out of differences, throws bridges across the gulfs it has itself opened. It is therefore montage’ (OH1, 239). Imagination is childish, jubilant, playful, but it is also a ‘technique [. . .] for producing thought’ (OH1, 239), which lights upon the re-arrangements which offer associations which are ‘distant and right’ (OH5, 104). These last are Godard’s own words for what he claims to be seeking: but sometimes, Didi-Huberman suggests, the imagination is lacking and the shot/reverse-shot ‘falls in on itself ’ (OH5, 105). To the question of where this imaginative third term might be situated, Didi-Huberman arrives at the answer, out-of-frame, suggesting an ‘out-of-shot policy’ (politique du hors-champ)’ to counter Godard’s ‘reverse-shot policy’ (OH5, 114). The ‘third term’ of Didi-Huberman’s ‘rascally dialectic’, here proposed, is not a synthesis but an agent, immanent and invisible, which generates from the available, dis-associated elements of reality which the monteur has at his disposal a dynamic, dialectic ‘imagesymptom’ which will re-frame the parameters of the discourse rather than placing them squarely against each other.20

20

A comparable concept appears in that part of Pasolini’s definition of cinema of poetry which Didi-Huberman quotes on p. 181 of OH5: a ‘film under the film, an unrealised film’, of which ‘the framing and the obsessive editing rhythms’ are the visible signs (perhaps indeed the ‘symptoms’), and which is ‘totally and freely expressive and expressionist in nature’, ‘follow[ing] a different and perhaps even a more authentic inspiration’. In Godard’s version, Pasolini described this ‘underlying film’ of which his montage practice is the symptom, rather harshly it must be admitted, as ‘a film made for the pure pleasure of restoring a reality which has been technologically shattered and reconstructed by a brutal, mechanical, discordant Braque’ (Pasolini, cit. OH5, 185).

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It is becoming clear why the number two is offered as the overarching theme of the book. Both Didi-Huberman’s principal problems with Godardian montage concern, in different ways, dyads which fail to generate an open dialectic: on the one hand, a tendency to close off ‘plurivocity’ in ‘the obsessive tennis-game of divisions into two, only into two, desperately and symmetrically into two’ (OH5, 133); on the other, Godard’s own ‘double-game’, on the one hand presenting himself as an open-minded researcher drawing on a vast range of materials and experimenting with marginal forms, including some not immediately identifiable as ‘cinema’, but on the other hand taking the position of artistic genius gifted with the authority of inspiration. ‘There is something like an abuse of authority in the way in which Godard often uses the language of truth (a lot of definitions, a lot of “this is”, a lot of verbs in the indicative) while basing it on a subjective, not to say subjunctive, position’ (OH5, 151). His practice of quoting, rather than liberating, phrases and images from their original, overobvious unifying contexts to allow them to speak for themselves, brings them together again under the new unifying hand of Godard the author/artist. ‘Not content with quoting the Romantics sometimes, Godard has begun to quote Romantically [en romantique], to work Romantically, to express himself Romantically’ (OH5, 165). This, no less than the dialectical loop of his dyads, has the effect of closing off that active audience which Adorno had defined as essential to the essay and which Farocki’s work on the contrary encourages. The question of audience involvement, on the other hand, becomes increasingly essential for Didi-Huberman as the Oeil de l’histoire series develops.

Poete/je/suis In the last part of OH5, Didi-Huberman picks up this claim of Godard’s and starts to enquire into what it might mean in a cinematic

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context. By way of the Russian formalists – with a nod to Eisenstein who will return to the forefront of Didi-Huberman’s cinematic thought in OH6  – the question leads him inevitably to confront Godard’s practice with Pasolini’s, particularly regarding the authority which inheres in the status of ‘poet’ as it is claimed by both directors, and how this is expressed in their respective attitudes to their material. During the 1960s Pasolini worked consistently on a definition of a ‘cinema of poetry’ which he believed marked a significant contemporary departure from the previous development of cinema as narrative prose. In the important article ‘Il “Cinema de Poesia” ’ (1965),21 Pasolini claims that the language of cinema is fundamentally an expressive, poetic language, which had been diverted towards serving the function of narrative, but that certain modern directors were taking a different path, more sensitive to the ambiguities inherent in cinematic images. Godard (the Godard of 1965, whose films were fragmented, essayistic narratives) was one of the directors cited. Recognising that Pasolini himself thus recognised Godard’s work as ‘poetic’, Didi-Huberman none the less uses the comparison to further elaborate his dissatisfaction with Godard’s position: ‘theorematic’, as Deleuze described it, as opposed to Pasolini’s ‘problematic’ language (OH5, 52). Adopting and elaborating a critique made by Pasolini himself (‘Godard completely lacks classicism’, cit. OH5, 185), DidiHuberman interprets this to mean that, rather than being attentive to the potential life in his material – especially when that material is the art of the past – Godard tends to dismiss it: ‘when he quotes an old phrase or an old form, it’s in order to pronounce it obsolete and deconstruct its authority’ (and then, by implication, substitute his own) (OH5, 188). This cavalier approach to past material may have mellowed somewhat in Godard’s work since Pasolini wrote his critique – certainly, many of Godard’s more recent films contain an 21

Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘Il “Cinema di Poesia” ’, in id. (2000), Empirismo eretico, Milano: Garzanti, 2000 (FP 1972), pp. 167–187.

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‘elegiac’ tone which evokes the ‘presence of the past in the present’ (OH5, 193). None the less, Didi-Huberman concludes that ‘Godard could be called a “filmmaker of poetry” whom poetry never quite satisfies. He certainly wants to compose a poem of images, words and sounds, but he also wants to prove something, astound someone, amuse certain people or persuade everybody’ (OH5, 189). In this phrase, the definition of ‘poetry’  – the ‘true’ definition of poetry as a process, rather than as the result of divine inspiration  – seems to imply the characteristics which we have previously seen of rigorous, open montage, or of the effective, non-dogmatic essay. In Didi-Huberman’s analysis of Pasolini’s own montage-film, La Rabbia (1963), he emphasises how Pasolini, like Farocki, places himself deliberately outside the realm of art: ‘affirming modestly that his work in La Rabbia was “journalistic rather than creative”’ (Sentir le grisou, 42), while maintaining a dedication to poetry and to politics. The analysis of La Rabbia is an essay on the compatibility of these two factors, poetry and politics, as well as on the ways in which montage can ensure the integrity of each. They are the two guiding forces in the montage of this film entirely constructed, visually, from archive footage (SG, 47), and indeed, says Didi-Huberman, they guide all Pasolini’s creative work. They must go together, ‘at risk of being condemned by the “pure poets” on one side and the “pure revolutionaries” on the other’ (SG, 74), but they are also antagonistic to the point of being irreconcilable (Pasolini was famously suspicious of any reconciliatory, ‘synthetic’ dialectics). Reading the rage against history contained in a poem from 1960, also titled ‘La Rabbia’, Didi-Huberman asks (or imagines Pasolini asking) ‘Could it be that rage is the evidence of the defeat [mise en échec] of poetic vision faced with the destiny of human society?’ (SG, 80): and responds, as he had once before with Bataille, by proposing cinema as a form, the form (‘la forme même’) able to avert this defeat. The axiom with which Didi-Huberman had opened his work on Farocki (‘raising one’s thought to the level of anger. Raising one’s anger to the

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level of work’) has thus now acquired a further dimension – or, perhaps, an agent – the difficult concept of poetry or poetic vision. La Rabbia, the film, presents for Didi-Huberman an example of montage which ‘makes the essay a poetic genre in the fullest sense’ (SG, 44, D-H’s emphasis). Not only is the isolation and reconnection of footage aimed at producing a certain unexpected truth about its subject through ‘inventive as opposed to conformist, liberating as against constraining uses’ (SG, 88), but that truth is generated by an ‘exhilarating parade of rapid visual sequences which form gestural, symbolic or formal rhymes’ (SG, 49), interspersed with recurrent images described as ‘leitmotiv’ or a ‘basso continuo’. The vocabulary of poetry and of music are brought into play, but rather than making the philosophy and politics contained in them ‘sing’ the better to enter the spectator’s mind (SG, 76), here rhythm, rhyme and orchestration are always an arrangement of conflict. La Rabbia truly ‘makes conflicts dance’. For example, and with extreme relevance, Didi-Huberman analyses the passage on ‘the relationship between beauty and evil’ which begins with the famous meditation on Marilyn Monroe and continues through images of a nuclear cloud, a number of abstract paintings, two ladies in bejewelled evening dress, until a heavy door firmly closes; and Pasolini then passes once more ‘outside’, to the aftermath of a mining disaster. There is nothing comforting about these associations, which – oriented also by the verbal commentary – reflect on the nature, the purpose and the ownership of beauty, alienated and finally appropriated by ‘the masters of wealth’ (SG, 66) before re-emerging as ‘another beauty’, a painful and desperate beauty, impossible to recuperate for the uses of capital. Didi-Huberman uses this to raise the vital question of anachronism, survival, and the uses of past forms for present purposes. This sequence is exemplary in its combination of rigour and of emotional power. In Pasolinian montage, ‘they [the elements to be reconnected, im-segni in Pasolini’s formulation, which includes elements of individual frames as well as pieces of footage] may, by way of

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montage, be composed as words are into phrases, on the other hand, [. . .] they touch us directly, they concern us, they are our business’ (SG 83–4). The concept of the active audience, while still central, has slipped a little from the potential intellectual re-arranger evoked in the essay on Farocki. Now, the audience is involved through an appeal to its emotions as well as to its sense of ethics; and, even beyond its emotions, through a ‘direct touch’ which is almost physical in its effect. The emotional resonances produced by ‘rhymes’ and repetitions can be experienced directly  – and uncomfortably  – through the senses, and many individual elements also refer to incarnate experience: the gestures of loss and mourning, or the direct rejection felt when a door is closed in our faces. This discussion paves the way for the detailed reflections on cinematic gesture, audience incarnation and political activism which occupies OH6 and will be discussed in Chapter 3. One might argue that this new interpretation of the ‘active audience’ is somewhat more manipulative in its implications;22 it none the less maintains the defining feature of fertile montage for Didi-Huberman in that it offers no conclusion, much less revelation, but continually opens out new variations of the conflictual nature of reality even to the point of breaking through the screen of spectatorship and dragging the audience bodily into the struggle. Such is cinematic poetry according to Didi-Huberman: ‘a certain way of practising montage as an art of rhythmically declined rhymes, conflicts and attractions. As an art of thought which keeps itself outside all doctrines, a political art which keeps itself outside all dogmas [mots d’ordre], a historical art which keeps itself outside all rigid chronologies’ (SG, 93).

22

For further discussion, in a slightly different context, of the question of the active audience in Didi-Huberman’s work on Pasolini, see my article Smith, Alison (2015), ‘Searching for Fireflies: Georges Didi-Huberman and the Reassessment of Pasolini’s Legacy’, Lo Sguardo 19 (III), pp. 215–234. http://www.losguardo.net/searching-firefliesgeorges-didi-huberman-re-assessment-pasolinis-legacy/

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People, Passion and Politics

People The people is, or the people are? The people are, or, more radically, peoples are? People, peoples, are exposed, exhibited, spectacularised, or alternatively not visible, at risk, exposed to the danger of disappearance. The ethics of the image-maker’s relationship to the multiplicity of humanity constitutes the explosive opening to the fourth volume of L’Oeil de l’histoire: in the era of reality television, celebrity culture and formula stories, how can ordinary people be made visible in the light of their deepest and most genuine concerns, their unformulated experience? How can ‘a people’ be imaged as ‘people’? This opening marks a turning-point, halfway through the development of Didi-Huberman’s thought in L’Oeil de l’histoire, although symptoms of it were stirring in the earlier books. It is the point at which politics ceases to be an urgent, but somewhat abstract, analytical task entrusted to appropriately revealing conjunctions of unexpectedly relevant images, and becomes an essential action, a responsibility and a potential force. From OH4, through the complex analysis of Eisenstein’s conception of revolutionary cinema in OH6, to the commentaries which accompanied the exhibition ‘Soulèvements’ in 2016–17, DidiHuberman develops a complex reflection on how the images which as an art historian he perceives as central to the functioning of the perceptual world can be true to the experience of peoples, and made to present, reveal, express and, eventually, belong to unspectacular, unmediated people, people who simply live, too often unnoticed. 75

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The very vocabulary with which to approach the problem is fraught with misleading inadequacies. ‘A people’ suggests some factitious unity; the French word ‘peuple’ does not have the flexibility of the English one which can fragment into multiplicity by adopting a plural verb. That said, this fragmentation is also quite extreme: ‘people’ in the plural are a rather random collection of individuals, the communal link between them lost. In any case, the English word ‘people’ has developed its own meaning in French: it is used to refer to the celebrity individuals who populate tabloid gossip, and as such it is conceptually useful to Didi-Huberman in perfectly expressing what political imaging should not mean:‘this word which, through its americanisation [in French] as people, designates everything from which the real people is ostensibly excluded: that is the wealthy, the famous, those who “have an image”, own it and manage it for best effect in the symbolic marketplace and for prestige stakes’ (OH4, 20). As for ‘representation’, the most obvious word for the process of imaging, its problematic relationship to a notional, but scarcely satisfactory, democratic ideal makes it inappropriate for repeated use, for reasons discussed in detail in Didi-Huberman’s contribution to the anthology Qu’est-ce qu’un peuple?1 The key word which emerges from OH4 is ‘exposer’. This is, unsurprisingly, chosen for its association with Walter Benjamin and the ‘exhibition value’ (valeur d’exposition) which he posits as characteristic of the work of art in modernity,2 but it is an extraordinarily polysemic word in French which is able to carry contrary meanings: as well as to ‘exhibit’, it covers to ‘put at risk’, to 1

2

Badiou, Alain et al., Qu’est-ce qu’un peuple?, Paris: La Fabrique Editions, 2013. English translation, What Is a People?, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. DidiHuberman’s contribution to this book provided a dense summary of his developing thinking on the question of images and peoples, and was further extended, and related to his discussion of cinema, in the final chapter of OH6. All quotes from this work are from the English edition. Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1935), English tr. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations (ed. H. Arendt), New York: Schocken Books, 1969. French translation used by Didi-Huberman, ‘L’oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproductibilité technique’, tr. R. Rochlitz, Oeuvres, III , Paris: Gallimard, 2000.

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‘reveal’, to ‘explain’. The ethical and political imperative sought in OH4 is that of ‘revealing’, making visible, without spectacularising or ‘putting at risk’, the fragile, complicated networks of beings which constitute ordinary humanity. The cinema, particularly that of Pier Paolo Pasolini, takes a central place in this discussion. Making visible – or, in the words of the later essay in Qu’est-ce qu’un peuple, ‘making sensible’, a formula which further emphasises the physical engagement required of filmmaker, subject and audience – is however only a limited goal. Through the subsequent work on Eisenstein, Didi-Huberman develops this political engagement with people(s) into a search for active images. Whether they be fleeting revelations of overlooked openings to an alternative future, or physical provocations to subversive expression, these ideally constitute an uprising of shared self-declaration. This search leads him to re-energise the key concepts of anachronism and survival which have always been central to his understanding of images, and also to engage in detail with the perilous process of imaging, and politicising, emotions. As a result Didi-Huberman has found himself increasingly drawn into a public debate on the nature of democratic and/or resistant politics. This chapter will follow the development of Didi-Huberman’s thought on people, passion and politics, and the importance that cinema has had in formulating and transmitting these ideas. Making the people visible depends on respecting certain nonnegotiable principles, of which the most essential can be expressed in the form of two contrasting/complementary pairs: humility and dignity, multiplicity and community. Humility is the fundamental condition which makes the enterprise meaningful: celebrity ‘people’ are already visible, more visible than ever, and the blinding light on them casts others into shadow. On the contrary, for Didi-Huberman and the artists who most interest him as the Oeil de l’histoire project takes shape, it is in the everyday that history can best be understood and made useful. From OH2 onwards, the political meaningfulness of

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ordinary objects has been insisted upon. For Harun Farocki, any humble object is a ‘battlefield’ (OH2, 102) in which the contradictions of everyday life can be made visible. Christian Boltanski not only makes use of common objects to construct his art, but emphasises that he intends these objects to speak to an equally everyday public: (‘It is to the man without qualities that this work is primarily addressed’ (OH2, 222)). For both, the trivial object becomes a site of significance. For Farocki, it is a dialectical crossroads, in the sense in which Benjamin referred to images as ‘frozen dialectic’; while in the case of Boltanski, Didi-Huberman speaks of a ‘reversal of the religious point of view’ which restores an ‘authentic aura’, even a sacredness, to his humble materials (OH4, 222–3). It should be no surprise that Didi-Huberman’s starting point is his beloved Walter Benjamin. The concept of the ‘authentic aura’, sharpened and complexified by its application to human subjects, returns as an essential part of OH4’s discussion of ‘exhibition of the peoples’ in terms of dignity in humility. The problem is trickier than it may at first seem. It is relatively easy to attribute an aura to a singular human being, after all: the cinematic star-system does so systematically, and not always to individuals exceptional from the outset. It is a much greater challenge to do so while maintaining intact their ordinariness. And yet this too is an enterprise to which the cinema has from time to time applied itself, and its efforts offer remarkably fruitful material for working through the possibilities and the problems involved. Didi-Huberman’s analyses of the films of Rossellini, Pasolini and Wang Bing in OH4 will lead on to the vast discussion of Eisenstein in OH6, in which the argument develops from revealing people(s) whose anonymity or marginality brings the risk of oblivion or misrepresentation, to recording and collaborating in the construction of sequences of images with which the people(s) may rise up to assert their own dignity and significance. It was this ideal which led to the flawed but fascinating exhibition ‘Soulèvements’, which

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Didi-Huberman curated in the Jeu de Paume in Paris in the winter of 2016. A key to the dignified assertion of humility is the maintenance of an individual’s importance as a singular being in equilibrium with the ordinariness implied by the fact of being one among many. The equation is not so simple, of course, but it is certain that the negotiation of the first paradox depends upon the vast and complex problem of the relationship between singularity, multiplicity and community. Didi-Huberman’s whole philosophy, even in his early work on the nature of art history, has been founded on the insight that dignity and significance cannot depend upon individual singularity: he has always argued for the importance not of the image, but of images. In his work on montage, plurality was an essential feature in creating the dynamic collisions which generate meanings and new directions. In this new context of ‘making people(s) visible’, interaction between individual images, or the images of individuals, takes on a different significance, that of raising awareness of their co-existence. The dialectical significance, or ‘authentic aura’, of the individual is inconceivable without a sense of the many of which that one is a part. To begin with, Didi-Huberman’s philosophical guide to this essential question is Hannah Arendt. He finds in Arendt’s posthumously published collection of texts What is Politics?3 four initial ‘paradigms’ which he makes his own: faces, multiplicities (a multiply plural word which does not appear in the French text of Arendt), differences and intervals (OH4, 24). Each is a staging-post on the way to setting out a preliminary ethics of representation, each is inseparably linked to all the others, and the plurals applied to all of them are essential. Making people(s) visible implies not showing ‘a face’, in its representative uniqueness, but ‘faces’: or at least, as we shall see, the clear understanding 3

Arendt, H. (1993), Was ist Politik?: Fragmente aus dem Nachlass, Berlin: Piper. Translated into French as Qu’est-ce que la politique? (tr. S. Courtine-Denamy), Paris: Le Seuil, 1995: this edition provides Didi-Huberman’s reference.

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that any singular face is one of many. ‘Faces’ imply multiplicity – and not even one multiplicity, but a multiplicity of multiplicities. ‘There is not a people; there are only coexistent peoples, not only from one population to another but even within – the social and mental interior of  – the same population’ (WIAP, 66). These multiplicities  – of individuals, of groups and sub-groups and transient groupings  – are of course predicated on the small, vital differences which they contain and which must be respected. But just as it seems that the concept of ‘peoples’ is fragmenting irretrievably into something ungraspable and therefore invisible, there comes the final paradigm, ‘intervals’, the spaces between individuals which certainly determine differences, but which are also the locus of connections. Beyond the heterogeneous masses of individuals, the concept of ‘a people’ recovers its reality; and however unstable and ephemeral that reality may be, its existence and, what’s more, its recognition, becomes an imperative to Didi-Huberman’s developing ethics of the image. A people is, in this sense, a montage: a montage of interstices and of imagination, but also, as we shall see, one of collision and conflict, which play their part in the construction of a collectivity and cannot be ignored, least of all in cinematic representation. The titles of the first three parts of OH4 reflect the gradual development of an argument along the lines set out by Arendt. The first, ‘Parcelles d’Humanité’ (Packets of Humanity), is dedicated essentially to individual photographic portraits which by dint of various strategies, including their arrangement in series, become images of the condition of being human. Didi-Huberman’s primary case study is photography (the work of the doctor-photographer Philippe Bazin) but the particular becomes an image of the general in large part through activity on the part of the subject. It is thus a process, dynamic, and even cinematic, in form. ‘I am not talking about humanity in general or universal humanity, but the kind of humanity which is put entirely into effect and is intensely at work in the single

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effort of a single moment to raise one’s eyes towards the other’ (OH4, 40). The action of the gazer/camera/spectator is all the more essential in that the recognition implicit in those eyes raised to the other is not enough. This is not ‘the enchantment – or mysticism – of the face as an epiphany which will save us from history’ (OH4, 84), states Didi-Huberman, thus distancing himself from (his reading of) Levinas: on the contrary, the humanity contained in the moment of ‘raising one’s eyes to the other’ implies a recognition also of the other’s – and one’s own – position in history, which is slightly different for each person and at each moment. The task of making this human condition visible can therefore only be continuous, ‘a perpetual workin-progress [chantier] of human appearances faced with the historical conditions of their existence’ (OH4, 84). How can this perpetual change be made visible, if not through the developing sequences of cinema? The second part, ‘Portraits de Groupes’ (Group Portraits), develops this reflection on portraiture by insisting further on the problem of plurality. For Didi-Huberman, there is not all that great a distance, philosophically, between the individualist tradition of classical portraiture, which banished all trace of multiplicity and of humility, and the homogeneous representations of ‘the people’ in propaganda art, which eliminates singularity and difference. Thus he traces the development of a kind of ‘false multiplicity’, characterised by fear of any real difference, from the hierarchical and individualist world of the court portrait, through groups of corporate dignitaries (in Flemish group portraits), heroes (Soviet award-photography) or villains (the kind of criminal portraiture practised by Lombroso and his disciples) to the synchronised crowds of propaganda films, Triumph of the Will among others. All such representations represent ‘the ideal [. . .] of subsuming the group to the authority of the One and the Same: the sameness of everyone forming a single social whole’ (OH4, 65). Outside the select few united willingly by a common purpose, there is an

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unpredictable crowd who must be united willy-nilly, to be represented ‘at worst as a herd of beasts [troupeau], at best as an army’ (OH4, 65). This unpredictable group, even when in motion, is considered and presented as a whole, subordinated to a single purpose, characteristic or goal, devoid of any subjectivity. Needless to say such a (mis)representation negates the people(s) it shows: such images are the antithesis of what Didi-Huberman is seeking. In discussing how it can be avoided, Didi-Huberman is moved to discuss a ‘politics of the frame’. This discussion is still centred on the photographic portraits of Philippe Bazin, but again the language used insists so much on movement and process that cinema must be considered its structuring absence. Bazin establishes respect for his subjects through ‘the gesture of approach’ (OH4, 78), which is not the same as merely ‘seeing the other person’s body close up’ (OH4, 80). The face must ‘emerge, calling the very surface and the space of representation into question’ (OH4, 80), and the camera must find a way to ‘touch tactfully’ (or sensitively, as in a careful medical examination) (OH4, 81). The institutional space in which these pictures were taken is ‘broken by the gesture of approaching the body [le geste d’approche corporelle]’ (OH4, 82). Summing up the ideas evoked in him by Bazin’s framing, Didi-Huberman remarks that ‘This complex movement, where aspect, space and [human] species interact, seem to us political to its core’ (OH4, 83): in order to develop a satisfactory politics of framing, even the still image must be, in imagination, endowed with the movement from which it originated, allowing the camera and its subject to move towards one another. Seeking to find an understanding of people(s) which can clarify what, exactly, it is so politically necessary to make visible against the unifying procedures previously discussed, Didi-Huberman turns in Chapter 3 to a strand of contemporary philosophy, citing among others Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Rancière and Jean-Luc Nancy. The key to this enquiry is the notion of the commons, the internal relations between individuals which make of a multiplicity

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a community, and of a community an active, subjective group as opposed to an ‘army’. To begin with, the idea of making such a thing visible seems a hopeless endeavour: ‘the common place [lieu du commun] all too often resembles a cliché [lieu commun]’. But the idea of a common oppositional culture, freed from subservience to the political and economic purposes of power, which he derives first from Benjamin, then from Bataille, is too strong and essential to be ignored: ‘Opposite to or in the margins of this lying “tradition of the victors”, a less readable “tradition of the oppressed” resists, survives and persists’ (OH4, 32).4 This leads him to Blanchot’s enigmatic definition of community, ‘Ce qui expose en s’exposant’,5 and thence, via the complicated implications of that polysemic verb, to Jean-Luc Nancy and the notion of partage, sharing: ‘the community is not founded on a summation of “I”s, but from a shared “we” ’ (OH4, 102). Among the factors shared in a community is, precisely, the ‘exposure’ which very strongly implies recognition, visibility, (self-)representation. Community exposes each individual within it to the others, demands an exchange, and also exposes all the individuals within it to a communal danger (but also to a new understanding) in the moment it declares itself. ‘Presence is impossible, except as co-presence’ (OH4, 104) in any representation of people(s) as communities. And so an authentic exhibition of the people implies ‘overturning all the clichés of the society of the spectacle into a notion of making people(s) visible [l’exposition des peuples] where the “spectator” is no longer the “public” in the distorted sense of consumerist vocabulary’ (OH4, 106–7). It involves rejecting ‘the people as spectacle’ in favour of ‘the broken-peoples, fragments, debris’ who none the less share a community subjectivity and aspire to recognition: ‘to make people(s)

4

5

Citing Benjamin, Walter, ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940), French version tr. M. de Gandillac revue par P. Rusch, Oeuvres, III , Paris, Gallimard, 2000, 431–2. Blanchot, Maurice, La Communauté inavouable, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1983, p. 25. Cit. OH4, 100.

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visible, would then be to make those with no share and no name figure as full political subjects’ (OH4, 108). What does this mean in image-practice? The examples which DidiHuberman offers at this point are still drawn from photography and the graphic arts, notably a photograph by Alphonse-Eugène Disdéri of a group of dead Communards serves as a referent for much of the above discussion. Many further examples follow, emphasising the ways in which such artists as Goya or August Sander can reveal humble individuals within their social context; but the argument, like the chosen images, becomes increasingly stationary. Despite the mutual exchange implied by the definitions above, the typical productions of art and literature are limited in their scope, and their subjects become fixed and displayed, even if with sympathy, appreciation and understanding. ‘The essential function of poetic lyricism’, writes Didi-Huberman of the literary representations of Baudelaire and Hugo, is to ‘invent a beauty of the people which the people(s), at some point, will decide – or not – to recognise’ (OH4, 127). The importance of a ‘poetics’ is equally applicable to visual arts: ‘politics demands to be envisaged poetically, that is in the unfolding of its forms, even if they are ‘wretched’ (OH4, 130). Unfolding – poetry as process  – demands movement, and movement must come from within: in order to escape the danger of display and stasis, a new medium is required, and the answer, once again, is cinema. In turning to cinema, OH4 returns to the concepts of movement and exchange alluded to in the discussion of the politics of framing, and allies them with the vital aspect of mutual, shared subjectivity and self-generated revelation. In the work of Chaplin and Eisenstein, says Didi-Huberman, ‘it is not just that the artist has chosen from now on to exhibit the people(s), it is also that, politically, the people(s), being exposed to disappearance [. . .] have chosen to exhibit themselves in a more radical and decisive way, for example reconnecting with the revolutionary gestures of the nineteenth century, in short taking to the streets for what are so aptly termed “demonstrations” ’ (OH4, 30–1).

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This agency of people(s) in producing their own image is one of the most radical declarations which Didi-Huberman makes at any point, and sometimes he struggles to return to it. There is still enough of the traditional art-historian in Didi-Huberman to render particularly difficult any effort to shake the ultimate agency of the artist over the presentation of images. His reflections on peoples’ self-representation are always centred on the analysis of individual artists’ efforts to channel or to support it, and even the discussion of the actionrepresentations of Eisenstein in Book 6 generally retains the separate positions of image-maker and image-spectator with regard to the community which is to be revealed. Slightly less than half of Book 4 is dedicated to cinematic ‘Poems of Peoples’  – primarily, but not solely, to the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Cinema is a mobile medium: it offers the possibility for both the energy of revolutionary gestures and the dynamics of exchange to take recognisable form. Cinema has the unique ability to reproduce the process of framing and re-framing which constitutes the ‘gesture of approaching the body’: in the words of Edgar Morin, ‘Cinema shows us [nous donne à voir] the process of human penetration into the world and the inseparable process by which the world penetrates the human’ (OH4, 144). One would expect to see this aspect of cinema paralleled by Didi-Huberman to Benjamin’s theory of ‘innervation’, described as the way in which the camera enters into the interstices of the world which it represents, re-constructing its relationships and – in the best, which is to say the most subversive, scenario – carrying the spectator with it and establishing a quasi-tactile relationship between spectator and actor; but for once Benjamin is – at least ostensibly – absent from the discussion.6

6

For an explicitly Benjaminian analysis of Pasolini’s approach to the cinema, which comes very close to Didi-Huberman’s conclusions, see Naze, Alain (2009),‘Ni liquidation, ni restauration de l’aura. Benjamin, Pasolini et le cinéma’, Appareil [online], 14 January 2009, consulted 5 July 2018. http://journals.openedition.org/appareil/711

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The very apparatus of cinema makes it a potentially powerful medium for revealing and respecting the voice, culture and history of the ‘nameless’. For a start, as Benjamin observed, in the cinema ‘any man might even find himself part of a work of art. [. . .] Any man today can lay claim to being filmed.’7 And with the earliest film ever made by the Lumières’ equipment, ‘the “people of the image” (the workers of Lyon) suddenly invaded the polite society of engineers and entrepreneurs (the Parisian spectators) who attended the screening’ (OH4, 141). However, as the cinema developed into an organised, hierarchical industrial system, so the space of the image began to be shared out in a way which reproduced in visual microcosm the problem of false multiplicities and real invisibility described in the early chapters of OH4.8 On the one hand, the star system; on the other, the extras, referred to in French as ‘figurants’, those who, precisely, figure the people(s) in the world of the film and who are, themselves, nameless and unconsidered, absent even from the bottom of the credits. ‘The extras are not just no-account actors [les acteurs de rien]. They are the archetypal non-actors as their semiological and institutional definition makes clear’ (OH4, 150). They are, by definition, always in the plural (OH4, 151). They do not represent individuals, their significance is always as one of many. They are directed as a bloc, ‘subject to screamed orders and military discipline.’9 They tend to become invisible, merging into the blur of the background, where they remain forgotten, as often as not bored and disengaged, badly-paid and ignored by the director, and yet, by the nature of the medium, still exposed, framed by a camera in a visual medium. ‘It is clear, in these conditions,’ writes DidiHuberman, ‘that the extras pose a crucial question for the director, one that is indissolubly aesthetic, ethical and political’ (OH4, 153). When 7

8

9

Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, op. cit., p. 12. Also see Naze, op. cit. And further developed by Jacques Rancière in Le Partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique, Paris: Galilée, 1995, cited by Didi-Huberman OH4, p. 106. Nacache, J (2003), L’Acteur du cinéma, Paris, Nathan, p. 99, cit. OH4 p. 150.

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the cinema at times succeeds in making its extras visible, it offers a case-study in action, as it were, of the greater process of achieving this for people(s) as a whole. If cinema is to be posited as a space in which the people can be represented, however, we must come up against Gilles Deleuze’s famous lament for the non-existence of people(s) in the post-war political cinema: ‘The people no longer exists, or not yet . . . The people is missing’.10 The operative phrase here of course is not yet: the task of a political cinema must be to participate in the expression of a people which is ‘inventing itself, in shanty-towns and camps, or ghettos, in new conditions of struggle’.11 Didi-Huberman’s project owes a good deal to Deleuze, who also emphasised the vital importance of multiplicity: ‘the death-knell of the revolutionary consciousness [prise de conscience] was precisely the realisation [prise de conscience] that there was no people, but always several peoples, an infinity of peoples, who had to be united, or perhaps had not to be united, in order to change the problem’;12 but while he argues strongly for the need to avoid factitious unity, he also disagrees with Deleuze’s pessimism, and notably he is not inclined to dismiss past representations. Their contrasting reactions to the work of Sergei Eisenstein are particularly striking in this regard. For Deleuze, Potemkin and October represent homogenising ‘portraits de troupe’ offering a pre-modern image of ‘the people’ in unanimous consent to a political moment; in OH6 Didi-Huberman offers the example par excellence of a cinema which represents peoples in motion, at once individual and multiple, not only revealed but self-revealing. In OH4 it is Eisenstein’s approach to the ‘figurant’ which inspires Didi-Huberman, first of all in its physicality. In this he apparently takes a diametrically opposite view, not only to Deleuze, but to his 10 11 12

Deleuze, Gilles (1985), Cinéma 2: L’Image-Temps, Paris: Editions de Minuit, p. 282. Ibid., p, 283. Ibid., p. 286.

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other exemplary artist, Pier Paolo Pasolini. While the latter accused Eisenstein of ignoring the bodies  – specifically, the sexual/desiring bodies – of his characters,13 Didi-Huberman insists on the importance of the Eisensteinian body, in its activity, its gestuality, and also at times in its suffering. He recounts as an example the filming of the massacre scene from Strike – already exemplary, as we have seen in Chapter 2, in its evocative use of dynamic montage. Here, he concentrates on Eisenstein’s stratagem for creating authentic physical movement: ‘To avoid the aporia of filming extras falling with unequal conviction before the soldiers’ blank rounds, he chose to put the actors in the concrete situation of running frantically into a ravine, so that the physical urgency was, for each one, perfectly real. The result is a hallucinatory – but almost documentary – vision of bodies genuinely thrown forward by their running motion’ (OH4, 154). Particularly significant in the context of Didi-Huberman’s developing argument here is the phrase ‘each one’ (pour chacun). The filmmaker has not created a spectacular unanimous motion but rather ensured that each individual caught up in that motion is experiencing, and authentically expressing, their personal part in the confusion and panic of the moment. The Eisensteinian extra is a body in movement. Each active body is individual, but that is not to say that it is merely itself; the importance of the extra’s body is in its ability to figure a situation – not a universal situation, but none the less one which transcends the contingency of this single person at this single time. The literary figura, according to Auerbach, ‘simultaneously employs immediacy and mediation, bodily gestures and the construction of language, the act and the detour’ (OH4 161).14 The Eisensteinian figurant becomes a particularly vivid,

13 14

This accusation is quoted by Didi-Huberman on p. 182 of OH4. The reference is to Figura (1938), tr. M.A. Bernier, Paris, Belin, 1993, but this is not a direct quote.

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because visual, case of this figuration, able as no literary construction is able to represent ‘the way in which a face or a body figures in space and time’, ‘each time that they are obliged to face a given reality’ (OH4, 161). Eisenstein’s aesthetic of representation thus gives vivid importance to a certain kind of human gesture. In the films of Roberto Rossellini and others, that vivid importance becomes an almost sacred significance, created by the film process and notably by the use of montage and a contrast of forms. Everyday movements may be set alongside ritual gestures in a creative anachronism which anchors the figura/figurant at once in the present and in the past, as a survivant or survival re-affirming an enduring presence. They may be raised to universality by association (through dynamic montage) with the awe-inspiring strength of natural forces, such as the sea or the volcano of Stromboli; or finally their significance may be heightened through the workings of a desire, or a terror, attributed to the body on screen and transmitted to the spectator. The examples from Rossellini certainly involve the bodies of stars  – Ingmar Bergman or Anna Magnani  – more often than those of the extras; but the ‘sacred’ significance, in all three models, comes from observation of their gestures and their contact with their environment, without reference to any physical exceptionality. The same processes can act on anonymous figures, even non-actors who bring to the screen their extra-cinematic, daily existence; this is true to some extent of the Stromboli fishermen, but it is in Pasolini’s cinematic practice that Didi-Huberman finds his most exemplary case-study. The particular exemplarity of Pasolini is to combine the process of sacralising the everyday  – notably through the use of anachronism and survivance – with a strong, and explicit, awareness of its political importance, within both the microcosm of cinema and the wider context of national, and eventually postcolonial, society. In La Ricotta, for example, both cinema and art are employed as metaphors, and the film directly addresses the principal problem which Didi-Huberman

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is addressing in OH4, that is, the invisibility of ordinary people and how best to remedy it. The methods of determining an ‘authentic aura’ which Didi-Huberman described in Rossellini’s films are all in play here. The protagonist Stracci  – ‘the least of the extras, the poorest’ (OH4, 178)  – is taking part in a film-shoot which reproduces the forms of both organised religion  – the passion of the Christ  – and consecrated art, and both Stracci, and the non-professional ‘ordinary man’ Mario Cipriani who plays him, are associated with these through the gestures and postures they are required to adopt. Stracci/Cipriani’s body is also put in conflict with the overwhelming strength of the physical world, which assaults him through the discomfort of his pose and the inevitable pangs of hunger; the latter being, no less than sexuality, an assurance that the spectator understands this man in the physicality of his desire for food. All these factors which generate a sacred – or at least a ‘lyrical’, poetic – representation are however here used to confront the audience with the abusiveness of Stracci’s poverty and triviality. Why should a poor man be so hungry that he loses all rational relationship to food? Why should a film extra’s hunger be so universally ignored? Why should a Stracci be so invisible, both to the world and to the cinema, that he has to die to make others aware he exists? And what possible relationship is there between Stracci/ Cipriani’s body and the archetypal images in which it is inserted? The familiar images of art and cultural history are co-opted here, and also elsewhere in Pasolini’s work, as versions of Walter Benjamin’s ‘dialectical images’, crystallisations of the conflicted field of visual representation, and these conflicts are interpreted in an explicitly political mode. In his analysis of La Ricotta, however, Didi-Huberman extends the political significance of the representation beyond the universal problem of the invisibility of the figurant. Stracci’s body itself incarnates the conflict, inherent in the status of figurant, between the immediate and the mediated, the individual and the exemplum. ‘The

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[political] “action” of a film is at once global and local’, writes DidiHuberman: ‘its global field concerns the confrontation of peoples [. . .], its local field that of bodies and their always singular desires’ (OH4, 182). As a figure of the forgotten people, Stracci might be supposed to represent the community of extras on this set and others; but as a singular, hungry man, he is teased and frustrated by colleagues in need of entertainment, and any imagined collective identity fragments. The mockery to which Stracci is subjected, in what ‘in Pasolini’s economy of profanation, might be considered the most authentically “sacral” ’ of the film’s sequences (OH4, 183), reveals the more dangerous implications of Blanchot’s definition of the community which ‘exposes as it reveals itself ’. Stracci is indeed ‘exposed’ to his fellow-extras, and they do not hesitate to take advantage, with an implicit sense of exorcising, in his person, the universal danger of hunger and helplessness which threatens all. To render the humble visible is also to put the newly visible people at the mercy of its audience. Any ethics of exposition must take account of this. To be visible cannot be devoid of risk, but the politics of La Ricotta suggest that what needs to be revealed is not merely the existence of the literal and metaphorical ‘figurants’, but the dynamics of that existence. Pasolini’s political project is thus to ‘giv[e] form to the conflicts in which people(s) find themselves involved’ (OH4, 184), not eliding even the most obscure or inconvenient contradictions. In Didi-Huberman’s film-ethics, indeed, such conflicts (when framed on screen, at least) cannot but be creative, inasmuch as they take part in a ‘rascally dialectic’ opening ever further the visible realm of social tensions and possibilities. These conflicts and the risks they imply inevitably involve the audience, and cannot exempt the filmmaker: exposure must be to some extent mutual. Here the filmmaker himself becomes embroiled in the dialectic, and we return, albeit temporarily and imperfectly, to the problem of artistic agency: ‘Revealing people(s) cannot just be a

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matter of “engaging” them to figure on a film-set. It should, above all, be to “engage” oneself, to move towards them, to confront the ways in which they present themselves [prendre figure], to get involved in their methods of finding a voice and facing life’ (OH4, 198–9). This recalls the earlier reference to ‘the act of raising the eyes to the other’, and it may indeed be associated with a literal cinematic gesture of approach, as in the celebration of the (Pasolinian) close-up: ‘I look so close that I implicate myself entirely – fold myself body and soul – in what I see’ (OH4, 185). It may also, however, go a step further, towards a partial surrender of agency: ideally, the borgate become ‘a political place able to generate its own conditions for words, gestures, and social relations’ (OH4, 200), and, presumably, to also generate its own manner of revealing these things. Sadly, the argument stops at this threshold: the artist may practise total immersion, may subject himself totally to rendering ‘the potential force, the revolutionary force, which he glimpses in the words and gestures of the very poor [les misérables]’ (OH4, 202), but it remains for him to glimpse what they generate. The filmmaker, according to Pudovkin, must ‘mingle with people to follow [the crowd] from within’ (OH4, 227), but he is still not fully part of its movements and struggles. ‘One might suggest that one only reveals people(s) by producing the dialectical image of a double distance which balances – rhythmically  – an immanence and a gap [coupure], an immersive movement and a framing operation’ (OH4, 227–8). The slight awkwardness and hesitancy at the start of this phrase betrays something unsatisfactory, even incomplete, in this artistic communion with the subjects of art. Even as Didi-Huberman seeks a way to take up Deleuze’s challenge to ‘contribute to the invention of a people’,15 asserting that the cinema at its best (Pasolinian and other) should be

15

Deleuze, op. cit., p. 283. The conclusion to OH4 addresses the problem posed by Deleuze directly.

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able to ‘assert and put into practice [. . .] the [Agambenian] coming community’ (OH4, 224) he is faced with the nagging doubt that perhaps, after all, the people is still ‘that which is lacking’, both as agent and as audience; and his argument  – perhaps like the filmmaker  – twists away from immersion, into a separate position in the ‘dance of thought’. The position of the potential audience is even harder to gauge. If filmmaker, audience and subjects are all assumed to share the desire for a new, as-yet unformed, people-made-visible in the form of resistance, community, and perhaps revolution, that coming community and its manner of living still needs to be revealed, by an artist/observer who is not quite a part of it, to an expectant public who is not a part of it either. ‘Revealing people(s) is not so much making us their spectators, which is in any case impossible. But rather to make us expectators’ (OH4, 226), Didi-Huberman writes in the concluding pages of OH4, somewhat messianically. Despite his insistence on multiplicity, he even suggests that the revelation may take the form of a single, representative face, ‘provided that the face is “ordinary” [quelconque] in the sense in which Giorgio Agamben uses the term, that is at once “as it is” [tel] – irreducibly singular – and open to the community of its peers’ (OH4, 226).16 Such is the nameless man filmed by Wang Bing, to whom the epilogue of the book is devoted, and who sparks the fleeting vision of the figurant literally replacing the Messiah: ‘I imagined [Pasolini] setting aside the religious story [of Il Vangelo secondo Matteo], and deciding to devote an hour and a half of film to the real life of one of his extras. [. . .] This is what Wang Bing

16

Agamben, Giorgio (2001), La Comunità che viene, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, p. 14. Agamben speaks of the ‘impotente onnivalenza dell’essere qualunque [. . .] espropriate di tutte le identità, per appropriarsi dell’appartenenza stessa’. Didi-Huberman is seeking a representation which permits the representative individual to exist without this total expropriation.

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has done, in all humility’ (OH4, 253). This man is, in fact, one of Benjamin’s ‘signs of a messianic blockage of events, in other words of a revolutionary opportunity in the fight for the oppressed past’.17 The nameless, once revealed, can change the world – but for others, those who await them (OH4, 257). None the less, the role of the filmmaker who restores visibility to these essential nameless existences is also to make visible the agency which the humble people have over their own lives and actions. We return to the importance of immediate, contingent physical activity – the gestuality which is generated by the moving body alone. Wang Bing’s nameless man is shown to us ‘not through his past, nor his ideas, nor his name, nor his place in society, but through the simple gestures with which he works at his solitary life’ (OH4, 254). They are not gestures which involve the filmmaker  – a mere observer, tolerated apparently on condition that he never need to be acknowledged – nor, at this point, the audience: the revolutionary potential of everyday actions and gestures for Didi-Huberman lies rather in their status as survivances (see Chapter 4 ), capable of connecting the past (Benjamin’s ‘history of the oppressed’, or Deleuze’s lost ‘people’) with the future (the ‘coming community’) through the possibility of reading their durability as resistance. ‘When Pasolini’s cinema reveals the gestures of Ninetto Davoli, which are both archaic and entirely modern, he is not confirming their loss. On the contrary, he is making them possible once more, giving them – for all the film’s spectators – a new relevance, a new use-value, a new necessity’ (OH4, 223). At this point, the audience may be invited back into the past/future community, through the potential of sharing these rejuvenated gestures. The most vital feature of the project to reveal people(s) politically, and the reason that such

17

Benjamin, ‘Sur le concept de l’histoire’, 441–2 in Didi-Huberman’s reference. Cited OH4, 256.

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figures as Wang Bing’s nameless man may offer a kind of salvation, is thus ‘the moment when the survivance (a symptom) becomes resistance (something at stake). At the moment where showing pain becomes [. . .] defiance of pain’ (OH4, 229). It is the gesture coupled with emotion  – and, notably, with suffering  – which will carry Didi-Huberman’s reflections on the cinematic representation of peoples onward to a potential active connection with the audience, no longer mere expectant disciples but summoned to become part of the coming community, or at least of the coming insurrection which may establish it. This is the central argument of the final volume in the Oeil de l’histoire series, programmatically titled Peuples en larmes, peuples en armes,18 which sets out to build a revolutionary visual politics of emotion. It does so primarily through a re-reading of certain sequences of Battleship Potemkin extended into a long dissection of Eisenstein’s theory and practice.

Passion OH6 is the longest book in the series, and its digressions are many and infinitely detailed. As with much of Didi-Huberman’s most striking work, it is elaborated in polemic with other thinkers. We have already seen that Didi-Huberman’s belief in Eisenstein’s importance has brought him into conflict with predecessors whom he admires: to Pasolini and Deleuze we may now add Roland Barthes, a structuring disagreement with whom underpins the early parts of this analysis – and eventually, as has already been indicated, Jacques Rancière. The seed of OH6 however lies in another disagreement, Didi-Huberman’s

18

People in tears, people at arms.

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uncomfortable encounter with Pierre Rosanvallon’s dismissive description of any representation of collective emotion:19 ‘these communities of emotion weave no solid bonds. [. . .] Nor do they involve any future’ (WIAP, 68). Already in 2013 Didi-Huberman was convinced that ‘the peoples and their emotions ask much more of us than this condescending critique that amounts to dismissal’ (WIAP, 69). Emotions, like so much else – images, gestures – are dialectical for Didi-Huberman: ‘the existence of the unconscious implies that a complex dialectic exists [. . .] between affects and representations’, and it is obliviousness to, or suppression of, that dialectic which leads to superficial – or worse, unanimous, fascistic – emotional constructions. The danger is real, but it is not inevitable, nor should it be used to justify the erasure of emotions from revolutionary thought. On the contrary, the reluctance of hegemonic media to recognise the complexity and unpredictability of popular emotion is an excellent argument for its revolutionary potential. As Benjamin argued in the case of tradition  – which is of course intimately connected with emotion in Didi-Huberman’s thought  – emotions need to be ‘wrench[ed] [. . .] once again from the conformism which is on the verge of subjugating [them]’ (WIAP, 72), and made ‘accessible to the senses’ (WIAP, 85); not uncritically, but in the name of a more complete understanding of the life of the unrepresented. ‘We ourselves [. . .] suddenly become “sensible” to something of the life of the peoples [. . .] that escaped us until then but that “regards” us directly. [. . .] Our senses, but also our signifying practice regarding the historical world, are thus moved by this “rendering

19

Rosanvallon, Pierre (1998/2002), Le Peuple introuvable. Histoire de la représentation démocratique en France, Paris, Gallimard. Didi-Huberman’s critique of Rosanvallon was first published as ‘Rendre sensible’ in Qu’est-ce qu’un peuple? (2013, op. cit.): the final chapter of OH6 is an extended version of this essay, reframed in a cinematic context. The English translations of these passages are taken from What Is a People?, and page numbers refer to this text.

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sensible”: moved in the double sense of putting into emotion and of setting thought in motion’ (WIAP, 85–6).20 We can see that the argument up to this point asserts the separation between the people(s) represented and the audience which receives the representation. The representational apparatuses targeted by Rosanvallon – the ‘stadiums’, the ‘television screens’ and the ‘magazine columns’ (WIAP, 68) – are those condemned in OH4 for their erasure of ordinary lives from visibility, even as they conceive the people(s) as audience: on the other hand Didi-Huberman conceives of an audience which needs to be given access to popular emotion which would otherwise escape it. The tenor of OH6, however, is a rather more radical ambition: an inclusive and active propagation of shared emotion which, without sacrificing its dialectical complexity, can develop and lead to positive action. The argument rests on certain fundamental characteristics of what might be called politically usable emotion, which any authentic representation must aspire to transmit. First, there is the recurring notion of dignity: there is no political or ethical sense in revealing distress simply as humiliating evidence that the sufferer is of no account in the world. To overcome this requires some principle of action by which ‘a sorrow can transform itself into desire, a helplessness into a possibility, a passion into an action’ (OH6, 22). Growing out of this well-established philosophical point21 is a more specifically representational one: emotion is not an immediate and momentary reaction or a singular, homogeneous feeling, but a process which develops, and only thus can it be authentically revealed or made usable. Cinema is once again the only appropriate visual medium for such a task. Finally, and very importantly, this process of emotion is not a merely personal matter;

20

21

I have taken the liberty of offering a slightly freer translation of a small part of the tricky last sentence than Jody Gladding has given, in the belief that it renders Didi-Huberman’s point more clearly: I recognise that in doing so I risk imposing a meaning. Didi-Huberman cites variants of it from Hegel, Nietzsche and Kant.

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in fact by its very nature it transcends the self. A phrase from Gilles Deleuze, ‘Emotion does not say “I” ’,22 is adopted as a founding principle of the collective, political use of popular emotion. ‘Emotion, that movement outside oneself, appears as a movement outside the self, outside the “I”. And in two senses rather than one: outside the self because it arises in the depths of the unconscious (the “id”); outside the self because it opens decisively – shows itself, exhibits itself, unfolds itself – in the exterior world (the human community)’ (OH6, 46). The most substantial part of the book is a demonstration of how this impersonal, collective, dynamic understanding of emotion can be shown in such a way that it can be not only understood, but also intelligently shared, by an audience. The central case study is the mourning sequence in Battleship Potemkin, in which the crowd surrounding Vakulinchuk’s body on the quayside transforms its grieving to revolt. The selected example offers Didi-Huberman a very precise framework in which to develop the ideas outlined above. On the one hand, Eisenstein was extremely well-read in psychology and had taken a particular interest in theories of the emotions; on the other, this same sequence had been the object, in 1970, of a somewhat dismissive critique by Roland Barthes,23 who rejected what he saw as an overly ‘obvious’, stereotyped and emphatic call on emotion. Both Barthes’s rejection, and Eisenstein’s theoretical background, are used to insist on the essential role of cinema in this, and implicitly in any, recourse to the emotions for political purposes. To develop this argument implies an extended engagement with, and questioning of, Barthes’s approach to cinema as a whole. Didi-Huberman first takes 22

23

Deleuze, Gilles (1981/2003), ‘La peinture enflamme l’écriture’, Deux régimes de fous. Textes et entretiens, 1975–1995, éd. D. Lapoujade, Paris, Les Editions de Minuit, p. 172. Quoted OH6, 48. Didi-Huberman first used it in 2007 as the title of a catalogue article on the installations of Alfredo Jaar; in OH6 it forms the title for a section of his philosophical introduction to emotion, pp. 46–55. Barthes, Roland (1970), ‘Le troisième sens. Notes de recherche sur quelques photogrammes de S.M. Eisenstein’, Cahiers du cinéma, 222, pp. 12–19. Cit. OH6, p. 81 and passim.

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issue with what he sees as Barthes’s fragmented approach to film analysis. The subtitle of his founding article, ‘research notes on a few frames of the film’, immediately raises disquiet, especially given that one of the author’s principal objections to the sequence is that Eisenstein’s approach is a fetishistic one, based on tableaux and discrete units. ‘Nothing separates the Eisensteinian shot from a Greuzian tableau’,24 wrote Barthes, provocatively, of the same sequence in 1973; Eisenstein’s cinema is ‘a contiguity of episodes, each one of which is absolutely significant, aesthetically perfect [. . .] He [Eisenstein] himself offers the fetishist the piece which he should cut out, already surrounded by dotted lines’. When the images are so organised – dogmatically so, Barthes further claims: ‘in the end it’s the Law of the Party which cuts up [. . .] the shot’ – the spectator is not free. It is rather too easy to point out that it costs the critic little to blame the filmmaker for his own fetishistic practice, and that the tableaux in question are by no means static: that point was made at the time,25 and Barthes countered with further objections to the ‘hysterical’, stereotypical nature of the gestures on display. None the less Didi-Huberman suggests that all Barthes’s film-criticism confirms that a fundamental problem exists for a semiotician confronted with the continuity of cinema. He cites evidence from several sources26 to confirm Barthes’s theoretical commitment to fragmentation: ‘ “It seems very difficult to stop at the image”, the single image, especially when, in a film, images in the plural never stop their incessant procession, in a temporality which cannot be interrupted’ (OH6, 106). 24

25

26

Barthes, Roland (1973), ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’, Revue d’esthétique IV, pp. 338–344. This article’s discussion of Eisenstein’s ‘fetishism’ is quoted at length by Didi-Huberman in OH6, p. 104. The following two quotes are from the same source. The debate launched by Le Troisième sens, regarding both Eisenstein’s cinematic practice and the critical use of frames, continued, both within and outside Cahiers du cinéma: see Barthes, ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’, op. cit.; but see also, e.g., Bonitzer, P. (1971), ‘Fétichisme de la technique: la notion du plan’, Cahiers du cinéma 233 (Nov.), pp. 4–10, which develops the problem of critical methodology raised by Barthes’s article. ‘La Civilisation de l’image’, Oeuvres complètes, II, p. 564; ‘Sémiologie du cinéma’, OC, p. 622–623; Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975).

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For Barthes, this continuity is merely a trap which prevents him from injecting his own sense of imaginative significance into the image space. Rather than turning his critical attention to the sequence and its movement, he remains frustratedly peering at each image that passes, resentful at not being given the time to ‘read’ each one, except, precisely, by converting the cinema into a set of static images,‘put[ting] into place something resembling a theory of the freeze-frame, [. . .] spontaneously – or strategically – mixing the vocabulary of cinema with that of photography’ (OH6, 121). Didi-Huberman sees here the antithesis of his own (and Eisenstein’s) theoretical commitment to dynamic montage, as well as distrust of precisely the kind of emotional content which OH6 is seeking – we shall return to this point. In a basically epistemological sense, the freeze-frame approach is doomed in advance to misunderstand that Eisenstein’s representation of emotion depends completely on the implacable temporality of cinema. The filmmaker’s psychological background  – and ‘his culture on the subject was immense’ (OH6, 312)  – was in Russian authors, notably Lev Vygotski. Vygotski considered emotion in terms of dialectic and of dynamism. ‘Emotion does not exist, it becomes: such is its dialectical nature’ (OH6, 315);27 and the process of its becoming is confrontational, according to the dynamics of dialectic. Unlike the momentary reflex, ‘emotion cannot play the passive role of an epiphenomenon. It has to do something’,28 and in doing something, in Didi-Huberman’s phrase, it is ‘susceptible to combinations, associations, montages. So emotion forms a montage [se monte] with other emotions’ (OH6, 317). This may not be exactly Vygotski’s vocabulary, but it serves Didi-Huberman to illustrate the ‘fundamental vocation as montage’ of emotion understood in this way. Translated into visual terms, its representation should not merely be

27 28

The full discussion of Vygotski’s theories is in OH6, 313–21. Vygotski p. 259, cit. OH6, 317.

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seen as a sequence of separate images – stereotypical or not – but as a movement with its conflicts, its rhythms, its advances and retreats; a complex choreography of emotional development and change. The dynamics of Eisensteinian montage are almost perfectly adapted to rendering these processes; Eisenstein was aware of this and worked on it in great detail, emphasising the importance of emotional energy and of precise timing to produce the uneven, sometimes contradictory, trajectory by which anxiety turns to delight (the famous milk-churn scene from The General Line), or, in the Potemkin sequence, sorrow to anger to revolt. Despite the importance of telling gestures and expressions, the emotional complexity of Eisenstein is only to be found in the sequence. Its expression includes those moments when the subject advances so close to the camera that the images lose all definition, as occurs with the frantically grieving mother on the Odessa steps (OH6, 245): and the choreography thus involves not only time, but the space which the film shares with its audience: ‘Looking is a gesture when images touch us. It is an act which engages the totality of our body and our thoughts’ (OH6, 245). The audience  – if they are willing – are drawn – tugged, pummelled – into the emotional dance of a montage sequence. Barthes’s ‘freeze-frame method’ is ill-equipped to deal with this. But further, Didi-Huberman feels, Barthes was, precisely, unwilling to be drawn into Eisenstein’s emotional field. As previously mentioned, he described much of the action of the sequence as ‘hysteria’; he found it stereotyped, manipulative, unmoving. Didi-Huberman, on the other hand, responds to it with strong emotion. Since Barthes is not a writer unsusceptible to emotion in other circumstances, Didi-Huberman seeks an explanation for what he regards as the older writer’s blind spot here. The hub of the difference, which is also as we have seen an essential part of Didi-Huberman’s theory, lies in the notion of impersonal, shared or collective emotion: again trawling through Barthes’s works, he finds convincing evidence that, for Barthes,

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emotion was something which always, necessarily, said ‘I’ and little else. ‘What counts, what truly marks out the “dart” of the punctum in Barthes’ eyes, are the simple words: “I tremble”. Large numbers of you have not trembled [. . .]. But I, Roland Barthes, “I observe with horror” and “I tremble” ’ (OH6, 140). Barthes’s Spectator (with a capital S) always seeks first and foremost an individual response. This is why he feels that, swept along by the dance of Eisensteinian montage, his eye is ‘not free’; and Didi-Huberman observes, sharply, his choice of the word ‘émoi’ rather than ‘émotion’ in La Chambre claire, ‘perhaps a way of saying that emotion concerns only me [moi]’ (OH6, 141). After reviewing all Barthes’s varied writing on images and emotions, DidiHuberman concludes that the more Barthes offers an emotional response, the less ready he is to relinquish its singularity: ‘he lacked, if not an ethics of understanding faced with other people’s emotional states, at least [. . .] a way of writing emotion [. . .] at the truly fundamental moment when les émois break through the borders of the moi, words cross the territory of the ego and images break the barriers of the I’ (OH6, 168). Whether or not this is a true picture of Barthes’s understanding of emotional content, it serves Didi-Huberman well. Where Barthes sees only stereotypes, Didi-Huberman sees archetypal cultural gestures which connect mourners across time and space, survivances which retain their power through their persistence in the history, and the expression, of the oppressed. And where Barthes (and Christian Metz) protests that Eisenstein’s choreography of images prevents them from stepping outside the flow of coerced emotion, DidiHuberman sees an attempt to establish a shared feeling, which both illustrates the process by which a developing emotion is propagated among a varied crowd of people, until it finally takes form as collective action, and offers the audience a share in the empowerment which results from this translation into action. The sharing is achieved through the progression from close-ups of grief (‘In sorrow one cries

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for oneself. In sorrow emotion says I’, OH6, 171) to exchanges of words (‘emotion has stopped saying I. It says you [tu] because it’s addressing others’) to group-shots and collective movements (‘it says he or she because it’s no longer self-centred, because it looks at others. [. . .] and it can say we because it can present to everyone – to them, and also to you – its nature of a social event and its fundamentally anthropological content’ (OH6, 171)). At this point emotion is ‘exposed’ to others, and that exposition makes it not vulnerable but contagious, because those others are also part of a community and susceptible to it. Apparently unconnected, impersonal shots such as misty, melancholy seascapes further extend this progression of emotion into a shared space: ‘[Eisenstein’s] “lamento of the mists” served him, artistically, to pass from history (the murder) to atmosphere (deep sorrow), and from atmosphere (mourning) to history (uprising)’ (OH6, 273). Eisenstein, in Didi-Huberman’s reading, was himself convinced of the revolutionary power of emotion. Against Dziga-Vertov’s cooler, more analytical approach, he defended the call to action: ‘It’s not a Cinema-Eye we need, but a cinema-fist’ (OH6, 252), and asserted that ‘ekstaz’ (ecstasy) was a necessary part of the ‘obraz’ (image, in its fullest sense). The emotions in question are potentially devastating: as DidiHuberman puts it, ‘A film is something which bursts into your world, enters into you, modifies your body and your thoughts from top to bottom’ (OH6, 252). They may be sheer explosive excitement, as with the butter-churn in The General Line; or, as in Potemkin, something more painful and deep-rooted, but with the potential energy to change the world. In any event, they are dynamic, immediate, and transmitted from film to audience. Didi-Huberman thus approaches, via Eisenstein and Vygotski, a similar position to that adopted by Raymond Bellour, via the child-psychologist Daniel N. Stern, from whom he borrowed the concept of ‘affects de vitalité’ (affects of vitality). Bellour’s examples all relate to adjectives or verbs, never to nouns: ‘to arise’, ‘to fade’, ‘to

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burst’ or indeed ‘explosive’.29 They are multipurpose signs of emotions in motion, and they are capable of generating immediate responses in a viewer – and therefore particularly appropriate to representation. This concept of revolutionary art was not uncontroversial when Eisenstein was working. Promotion of spontaneous revolt was distrusted by official Marxist-Leninist theory, and so Potemkin was released, apparently against Eisenstein’s will, with an introductory quote from Lenin insisting on the need to move beyond the spontaneous. Eisenstein himself, however, proclaimed that the film was ‘characterised by its spontaneity, its uprising, its revolt, and not by the edification of revolution as planned by the Party’ (OH6, 204). It is easy to see how this description – which according to Didi-Huberman at least was not selfcriticism, but ‘unpublished and therefore not subject to censorship’  – appeals to the writer of Survivance des lucioles, of whom Howard Caygill wrote that ‘for Georges Didi-Huberman [. . .] the flashes of resistance in the night of history are all we can have’.30 It is the non-doctrinaire, immediate aspect of Eisenstein’s emotional revolt in Potemkin which allows Didi-Huberman to accept it as a means to involve and empower, not to bully, the audience: its appeal is all the greater due to its use of archaic gestures and rituals of mourning which tie it to what in DidiHuberman’s terms is an authentic visual history of the people(s).

Politics OH6 none the less attempts to go beyond the flickering firefly resistance(s) of Lucioles (see Chapter 4). The conversion of mourning and anger into collective action, and the word ‘uprising’ (soulèvement) which Didi-Huberman attributes directly to Eisenstein, are indications that these images of popular emotion are not mere flashes. They ‘rise’, 29

30

Bellour, Raymond (2009), Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalité, Paris: P.O.L., p. 156. Caygill, Howard (2013), On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance, London: Bloomsbury, p. 45.

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if not to the ‘full illumination, glare or glory, of consciousness’,31 then at least to some form of concerted purpose, which implies a sense of historical context. In the final sections of the book, Didi-Huberman thus calls for ‘a figuration of affects from which critical and historical lucidity are not excluded’ (OH6, 431). The movement from ‘tears’ to ‘arms’ evoked in the book’s title is reformulated as a movement from ‘cries’ to ‘protest’ (‘plainte’ to ‘porter plainte’: OH6, 423) through ‘a movement by which sorrows and desires are not conjugated only in terms of “a story” but in terms of history’ (OH6, 427) Through appeals, through conflicts, and through their representation (by artists, but by artists who are on the same level as their subjects: he cites two contemporary Chinese directors, Wang Bing and Ziao Lang, as exemplary), a recognition of powerlessness and of protest can be framed as ‘an act of insubordination and emancipation’ (OH6, 429). This is the culminating point of the political project of representing the people(s), initiated by OH4. Didi-Huberman’s reading of Eisenstein proved not uncontroversial. Notably, it elicited a riposte from no less a theorist than Jacques Rancière, particularly significant because in the exposition of his theory of shared emotion Didi-Huberman had made use of Rancière’s terminology of the ‘partage du sensible’, extending and somewhat changing its meaning (OH6, 387).32 Contacted to contribute an essay to the catalogue for the exhibition Soulèvements (Uprisings), in which Didi-Huberman sought to put his theory of the emotional power of image and gesture into practice, Rancière used the space to abruptly question the reading of Potemkin contained in OH6, and the political efficacy of emotional expression in general.33 Refusing Didi-Huberman’s argument that the film’s montage carries the spectator from emotion to action, Rancière insists on the irreducible opposition between ‘passivity’ 31 32

33

Ibid. The reference is to Rancière, Jacques (2000), Le Partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique, Paris: La Fabrique Editions. Rancière, Jacques, ‘Un soulèvement peut en cacher un autre’, 63–70 in Didi-Huberman (2016), Soulèvements, Paris: Gallimard/Jeu de Paume.

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and ‘activity’, which ‘even if each is destined to upturn itself into the other, are still opposites’ (Rancière, in Soulevements, 65). In his reading of Eisenstein’s writings of 1925, he emphasises the filmmaker’s rather dismissive description of ‘all the procedures of passive art: doubts, tears, sentimentalism, psychology, maternal sentiment etc.’ (Rancière, in Soulevements, 65, citing Eisenstein: cf. OH6, 194) , and maintains (as had Barthes), that between emotion, which is passive, and action there is always a hiatus: ‘The intended effect of the montage of images could be described either in terms of a carefully manipulated transmission [contagion] of “bourgeois” emotions or of a formal use of the Marxist logic of opposites. In either case, the straight line from tears to arms is broken’ (Rancière, in Soulevements, 65), and ‘the movement of the crowd which culminates in the red flag raised on the ship at the end of [Act 3] has to be the opposite of the morning lament of the old women and not simply its transformation’ (Rancière, in Soulevements, 65). Rancière does not have the space here to substantiate his reading of the scene, nor to refute Didi-Huberman’s extremely detailed tracking of the development of Eisenstein’s collective emotion over the course of the crowd scenes. His argument for a dialectic opposition between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ espouses a traditionally Leninist suspicion of spontaneous, unguided action34 (‘In brief there must always be an action, always a guiding hand (un maître de manoeuvre) to transform pathos into action’; Rancière, in Soulevements, 65). Where DidiHuberman sees in the atmospheric shots of the misty port with which Eisenstein opens this scene an elemental undercurrent (a ‘basse continue’, OH 6, 267) which attaches the human emotions portrayed to the limitless vastness and power of the ocean, Rancière reads them on the contrary as a distancing mechanism ‘similar to Schiller’s description of the choir of antiquity’, which ‘separates’ the audience from the crowd and its reactions (Rancière, in Soulevements, 70). Underlying this 34

For a discussion of this, and of its relevance to Didi-Huberman’s work, see Caygill, On Resistance, 41–49.

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critique of Didi-Huberman’s analysis of Potemkin is Rancière’s suspicion of the effectiveness of the Soulèvements project and its attempt to mobilise images of emotion and gesture to produce an effect on the viewer: ‘the artist who organises images of popular uprisings in order to raise public emotion knows well that, on film screens, as on the walls of museums, there are no emotions. There are only images. And images don’t rise up’ (Rancière, in Soulevements, 70). This comment forms the key to Didi-Huberman’s response to Rancière,35 which amounts to a defence and explanation of his key theories of montage, emotion and survivance as developed in L’Oeil de l’histoire, and which centres on the phenomenological connection between image and audience. Re-adopting Rancière’s concept of the partage du sensible which had been so influential in formulating his own ideas about the concept of a ‘people’, Didi-Huberman here dares to question its originator’s use of it, and notably of its second part. ‘But the sensible? What do you do with, not just the sense, but the senses? With sensations, and even sentiments?’ (Aperçues, 65). Through the senses of the spectator, Rancière’s dismissal of images as containing neither emotion nor action can be demonstrated to be inadequate at best. ‘You assert very sensibly [avec bon sens], dear Jacques, that emotion is not “in” the image, that it’s simply a matter of audience reception, and that it does not therefore belong to the constitution of the image in itself ’ (Aperçues, 67). This indirect pseudo-quote makes an important addition to Rancière’s ‘assertion’; his original essay makes no mention of audience reception, ‘simply’ or otherwise. DidiHuberman, on the other hand, invokes Merleau-Ponty36 (whom he 35

36

Didi-Huberman, Georges (2018), ‘Images, Langage: L’Autre Dialectique’, in Aperçues, Paris: Minuit, 61–69. The piece is dated 20 May 2016. Although the ‘open letter’ style suggests that it was written for immediate publication, it is not included in the ‘Note Bibliographique’ at the end of the book. It also appeared in English in 2018, in the review Angelaki 23:4. Walden, Victoria Grace (2019), Cinematic Intermedialities and Contemporary Holocaust Memory, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, observes that phenomenologists don’t crop up very much in Didi-Huberman’s writing but that he describes his own work as phenomenological. Eventually she refers to him as a ‘renegade phenomenologist’ (30). Merleau-Ponty certainly makes sporadic appearances throughout the L’Oeil de l’histoire series, although he is never a primary referent.

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accuses Rancière of neglecting) in order to argue not only that audience reception is essential, but that it is neither simple nor simply detachable from the image. ‘The image calls on the sensible, but the sensible implies the body, the body moves in gestures, the gestures carry emotions, the emotions don’t exist without the unconscious, and the unconscious itself assumes a knot of psychological time, so that the whole modelisation of time and history itself, politics included, can be called into play or question by a single image’ (Aperçues, 66). The transmission from image to spectator, and the latter’s reception of the transmission, is thus both a physical, or haptic, and a psychological function of both image and spectator; and, as Merleau-Ponty said, ‘Any analysis which untangles renders [its object] unintelligible’ (quoted Aperçues, 65). Didi-Huberman describes this phenomenon as ‘phenomenological implexity (the emotion is “implicated in” the image, the two are made so that one shall be the medium of the other, and so that, once they appear, they are inseparable)’ (Aperçues, 67). This imbrication between image(s), emotions and sensitive audience is what Didi-Huberman is seeking in the films which inspire him around the time of Soulèvements. The exhibition Soulèvements (Uprisings) itself, however, although it grows out of the ideas Didi-Huberman developed through the course of L’Oeil de l’histoire, draws his political project in other directions, and with hindsight it can be seen to be the startingpoint, or a chaotic origin, for a new direction of thought. Curated by Didi-Huberman, it took place in the Jeu de Paume in Paris from 18 October 2016 until 15 January 2017, and then moved on to other destinations around the world. Exhibition curation is an activity in which Didi-Huberman has tried to put his theories of the montage of images into practice, and Soulèvements represented an attempt to bring together a number of meaningful or exemplary representations and to organise them in such a way that they, too, could offer to the exhibition public a sense of understanding and shared, haptic emotion.

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In his catalogue introduction,37 he engaged quickly, and with urgency, with the problem of practice: what can art do in the name of activism? he dismisses the kind of ‘art-action’ exemplified by Ai WeiWei’s visit to Idoméni. ‘I see that white piano, a surrealist image amid the wasteland of the camp, as the ridiculous symbol of our artistic good consciences’ (Soulèvements, 14), as well as the option of doing nothing : ‘It’s one thing to not be deluded by the darkness or by the puppets of official spectacle, but it’s quite another to bow to them in the deathly inertia of submission, whether it be melancholy, cynical or nihilistic’ (Soulèvements, 14–15). His response is this exhibition which explores the physical form of resistance: the act of ‘rising up’ as an active gesture: ‘Must we not at all times raise the many leaden slabs which cover us? Must we not, to do so, rise up ourselves and, of necessity, rise up in numbers?’ (Soulèvements, 16) Soulèvements was an ambitious project. There were two floors of displayed images, organised from the most basically physical understanding of the theme (elemental movement) through the human attributes of gesture and word, to political conflict and the necessary persistence into the future. The exhibition website38 contains many links to further resources, including a series of seminars given by DidiHuberman as he was preparing the exhibition, documentary material for schools and, on the page ‘résistances numériques’ (Digital Resistances), links to a number of activist websites, albeit for the most part historic ones. Events relating to the theme were organised outside the Jeu de Paume: the Bibliothèque Nationale de France dedicated its Documentary Film Month to radical filmmaking; the Institut des Cultures d’Islam offered a political ‘guided tour’ of the Goutte d’Or, while the Jeu de Paume itself hosted a number of speakers, a Study Day, a series of significant film-showings and a performance session. Soulèvements was thus a high-profile part of the 2016 Paris autumn season. 37

38

Didi-Huberman, ‘Introduction’, in Didi-Huberman (2016), Soulèvements, Paris: Gallimard/Jeu de Paume, 13–20. http://soulevements.jeudepaume.org/

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The exhibition certainly made an impact: it was well-attended, and produced a number of sensitive and committed reviews. JeanEmmanuel Ducoin urged readers of L’Humanité to ‘run’ to see it: ‘you will understand how, at times, well-thought-out conceptual art can reach progressive intelligence in a pretty masterly way’.39 None the less there were objections. The website paris-luttes.info was one activist source which was bitterly critical, describing it as ‘a sensationalist exhibition empty of meaning, or worse, with the objective of assimilating any rebellious asperities.’40 This was certainly not DidiHuberman’s objective in any conscious sense, and he was aware that the weight of the Parisian Cultural Scene risked crushing any uprising it might wish to promote. He wrote in the catalogue: ‘Some people may think that an aesthetic project such as this [. . .] does indeed only aestheticise and in so doing anaesthetise the practical and political dimension inherent in uprisings’ (Soulèvements, 18). He firmly denied any intention to catalogue or archive the images selected. None the less his explanation of the aim of the exhibition remains cautiously intellectual – an enquiry into form. Is there any possibility of a dialogue with practice here? ‘One does not rise up without a certain force. What is it? Where does it come from? Is it not obvious – for it to be revealed and transmitted to others  – that one must be able to give it form?’ (Soulèvements, 20). This gives us to understand that the display of these images is intended to create a potentially contagious gesture to arm the frustration, or repression, or depression of potential viewers, which is a tenable position, and consistent with Didi-Huberman’s reading of Eisenstein in OH6, even if it may have been disappointing to certain activists on the ground. There is another, thornier, issue, however, which concerns the ambivalence of forms. Didi-Huberman ignores this in his introduction, 39

40

Ducoin, Jean Emmanuel (2016), ‘Soulèvement(s)’, L’Humanité, 18 November: https:// www.humanite.fr/soulevements-626390 ‘Souley, Eve and Maha’, ‘[Soulèvements]. La révolte n’est pas une expo d’art’, https://parisluttes.info/soulevements-la-revolte-n-est-pas-7276?lang=fr

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but Judith Butler – who also contributed a catalogue essay – cannot: ‘it would be an error to think that, if there is an uprising, it’s necessarily justified or that everyone is in agreement with its political objectives. After all, there are sometimes uprisings against democratic regimes’.41 While she turns aside from the question (‘we are mainly interested here in uprisings which have a democratic aim’), the problem is too significant not to recur, problematizing any over-idealistic defence of concept, much less form. In Didi-Huberman’s theoretical work the ambiguity of forms is essential: the whole of L’Oeil de l’histoire 5 worries at the ambiguities in Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema, their foundation and their importance. In this exhibition, however, the dangers of ambiguities were less carefully addressed. For example, in the ‘gesture’ section of the exhibition, several images concentrated on raised arms: the section introduction even referred to it: ‘raising arms to the opening future’. But there are raised arms and raised arms, and not all appeared on the exhibition walls. Didi-Huberman, again, was not oblivious to the issue; he said to an interviewer for RFI: ‘Imagine that I’d put the spartakists and the raised arms of the Nazis side by side. What would the spectator say? He’d say that they were equivalent’.42 None the less, the viewer, any viewer, has surely seen so many images of those raised Nazi arms that simply not showing them is not enough to eliminate them. All Didi-Huberman finds to say to the RFI interviewer eventually is: ‘Naturally, the Fascist uprising is always there, it’s lurking, it’s on the edge, but it’s not my job to show that. I do not want to show that.’43 This refusal to address the dangers of the contagious gesture is, to say the least, problematic; and, in

41

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Butler, Judith, ‘Soulèvement’, in Didi-Huberman (2016), Soulèvements, Paris: Gallimard/ Jeu de Paume, 23–37: 24. Foster, Siegfried (2016), ‘ “Soulèvements” au Jeu de Paume. “Je veux montrer des images d’espérance” ’, interview with Didi-Huberman, 19 October. http://www.rfi.fr/ culture/20161019-soulevements-jeu-paume-montrer-images-esperance-georges-didihubermann Ibid.

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fact, the ghostly presence of Fascism made its presence strikingly felt when the exhibition moved to Barcelona under the much less ‘formal’ title ‘Insurrecciones’, because of the Francoist connotations of ‘Levantamientos’. In May 2016, that is before the opening of the exhibition and while the texts for the catalogue were in preparation, Didi-Huberman published a piece in Le Monde diplomatique44 which deals in detail with the dangers of raising popular anger, from general violence, through manipulated diversions into xenophobia and scapegoating, to the rise of Fascism itself: ‘It is true that . . . the march on Rome can be understood as an authentic insurrection against the State immediately converted into a Fascist dictatorship’ (DD, 247). It is a piece full of genuine political alarm – but, extremely unusually for DidiHuberman, it is not at all concerned with the role of images. It discusses the performance of anger in a context of carnival and parody; it discusses the kind of story-telling which protagonists, political theorists, or manipulative leaders might deploy in order to manage and channel it; but it elides the responsibility of images, moving or still, and thus avoids any direct connection with Didi-Huberman’s ongoing projects. One might conclude from these observations that Didi-Huberman’s compelling theory of the representation of people(s) is not fully proof against practical dangers, and it leads one to return to the very complex theory of OH6 in particular with a lingering doubt as to whether it relies on a persistent idealism occulted under the weight of its references. One might also posit that the limitations of an exhibition, which of necessity is a collection of discrete images, even if some films were contained within it, may not constitute the best environment for experimenting and that the issue might be better addressed by the continuous cinematic form. Certainly the essays of L’Oeil de l’histoire pose a vital challenge to cinematic practice. 44

‘Où va donc la colère?’, Le Monde diplomatique 746, May 2016, pp. 14–15. Later republished in Désirer déobéir: Ce qui nous soulève 1, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2019, 239–248.

4

Anachronism, Survival and Filmic Fireflies

The term ‘Survivance’, central to the title of one of Didi-Huberman’s most influential works, is also a vital concept in understanding his particular vision of the image in politics and history, and it underlies much of L’Oeil de l’histoire. Didi-Huberman drew the concept of ‘survivance’ first from his studies of Aby Warburg, who used the term Nachleben, ‘afterlife’, most famously in relation to the constantly mutating presence of images of antiquity in later art. For DidiHuberman it was the Warburgian concept, which he would put at the centre of his immense study of the man and his work, L’Image survivante, published in 2002. The subtitle of this book is ‘Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes’ (Art History and the time of ghosts); this hints further at the value which Didi-Huberman attributes to the idea, which is first and foremost a direction-sign to a complex, multidirectional way of reading history. He describes the concept as follows: ‘A surviving form, in Warburg’s sense, does not triumphantly survive the death of its competitors. On the contrary, it survives, as a symptom or a ghost, its own death: having disappeared at some point in history; having reappeared much later, when it was perhaps no longer expected; having, therefore, survived in the still ill-defined limbo of “collective memory” ’ (L’Image survivante, 67). Images constitute a privileged site where such reappearances might occur. The enigmatic collages of images created by Warburg in his Atlas Mnemosyne are read by Didi-Huberman, in L’Image survivante and even more in OH3, as montages destined, by the energy generated by the ‘collisions’ 113

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of images that they engineer, to reveal the ghost-forms that they contain and to expose those forms anew to the questioning gaze of a contemporary viewer. When these ghostly traces are made visible, what appears, for Didi-Huberman, is ‘the complex temporality of images: long durations and “crevasses in time”, latencies and symptoms, plunging memories and rising memories, anachronisms and event horizons [seuils critiques]’ (Devant le temps, 50). Essentially, what Warburg’s collages reveal to Didi-Huberman is a temporal ‘flow’ which is not a simple, teleological advance of history, but a complicated interaction of whirlpools and currents from which the most unpredictable visions and ideas may arise at any moment from some hidden cranny of the past. Thus the Warburgian Nachleben introduces a further temporal dimension into the open-ended dialectical montage which DidiHuberman was elaborating in his early work on Bataille (see Chapter 2). Of course in one sense that dimension was inevitable, since any dynamic movement of collision and generation, any ‘dialectic’, however ‘rascally’, must take place in time; and cinema brings that necessary duration to the fore, but always at risk of imposing its own quasiteleological order. However, for Didi-Huberman, the most important temporality of montage is not the duration of its process, but the way in which in bringing images together it releases the infinitely fertile temporal chaos which is temporarily ‘frozen’ within each of them. This insight is developed in Devant le temps, which initiates DidiHuberman’s study of Warburg, and brings him into contact with the writer’s beloved Benjamin. It is not only Benjamin’s concept of the image as frozen dialectic which Didi-Huberman brings into play here, but rather his singularly complex conceptualisation of historical time, and particular of the idea of the ‘origin’, which Didi-Huberman returns to frequently. For Benjamin, historical time is not to be conceived of as a simple flow, stemming from an ‘origin’ conceived as a source or spring, unique and upriver from everything. On the contrary, the origins of

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historical phenomena, for Benjamin, evoke rather the idea of ‘whirlpools’, which form in ‘the river of becoming’, bringing what plunges into contact with what rises and generating something different – a new direction of flow.1 New phenomena are thus constantly being generated from the chaotic recombination of existence. ‘The origin in this sense’, observes Didi-Huberman, ‘dialectically crystallises novelty and repetition, survivance and rupture: it is first and foremost anachronism’ (DT, 83). This idea of the creative anachronism swirls through the early essays in L’Oeil de l’histoire, gathering strength in proportion to the growing urgency, as the series progresses, of developing a progressive, dynamic politics of the image which may enter actively into the realm of history itself. For a researcher seeking a new vision for ‘the eye of history’ among the great library of images which art historians have at their disposal, the potential of this whirlpool current of thought is infinitely exhilarating and the political implications urgent and perhaps unexplored. In cinematic terms, however, the two temporalities involved are in some ways in conflict. Unlike Warburg’s collages, over which a viewer’s eye can roam freely, a film, at least when received in conventional conditions, is a sequence of images which flows in one direction only. Film, the quintessential art of montage, despite its long narrative tradition of flash-backs and parallel time-strands, is, in its essential physical nature, linear. Didi-Huberman’s Benjaminian elaboration of the concept of the creative anachronism, on the other hand, involves ‘emancipating’ images from the grip of linear time. Their potential to originate depends on the ghostly force of what survives within them; it is only inasmuch as they contain this anachronistic energy that their emancipation can be politically or even epistemologically productive (OH2, 131). One strand of

1

Benjamin, Walter (1928), Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels quoted in Devant le Temps, pp. 82–3.

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Didi-Huberman’s thinking on film in the L’Oeil de l’histoire series is deeply concerned with this conundrum. Developed in relation to Farocki and Godard in books 2 and 4, it questions the ways in which, by the judicious use of repetition, hiatus and superimposition, film can release the temporal currents of image-survivals in such a way that the linear development of the stream of images itself espouses the whirlpools and crevasses which it is revealing, rather than merely rechannelling interpretation towards a conclusion imposed by the filmmaker. This kind of complicated montage allows the viewer, as it were, to eavesdrop as images of different times and places communicate between themselves, and to observe – indeed, to generate in their own minds through the processes of image-reception – the birth of new ideas and directions of thought as a result. It is from such swirling connections, notably, that observation of the gestures of those before the camera can speak for a living relevance of the past in the lives of ordinary humanity (it is worth noting that even when anachronism is conceived as in some way ‘sacred’, as it is in Didi-Huberman’s description of the fisherman of Stromboli in OH4, it is never ejected from history: rather, the aura it generates comes from the reminder that even those whose history is never told none the less have a represented, active, and resurgent past), and project that history forward into a possible future. The political importance of ‘survivance’ for Didi-Huberman was also driven by the success of Survivance des lucioles (Survival of the Fireflies). This small volume was published in 2009, the same year that the first volume of L’Oeil de l’histoire appeared. It found a committed public readership outside the relatively closed circles of academia, and its key concepts and metaphors thus entered the language of political militancy in the post-crisis decade which was about to open. The importance of this, both for Didi-Huberman’s public profile and for the development of his work, is such as to demand that the book be considered here, even if its philosophical elaboration may seem, at

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first reading, distant not only from cinema but even from DidiHuberman’s usual concern with images. Apart from the fact that its metaphorical discussion of light is inherently cinematic  – as is eventually made evident in the epilogue – its manner of reading the ‘survivance’ was to re-enter the later volumes of L’Oeil de l’histoire in specifically cinematic form, in the elaboration of a theory of gesture and movement; while the book itself was to find its way to screen in the form of Vincent Dieutre’s essay-film Orlando ferito/Roland blessé, with which Didi-Huberman collaborated closely. Survivance des lucioles takes its inspiration from a very famous article by Pier Paolo Pasolini, generally known as ‘L’articolo delle lucciole’, The Firefly Article.2 Pasolini, of course, was a filmmaker and a theorist of cinema, and he is very present, in both capacities, in L’Oeil de l’histoire. ‘The Firefly Article’, however, was a piece of social commentary, in which Pasolini observes the decline (the article speaks of ‘disappearance’) of fireflies in the Italian countryside, and relates this observation of ecological crisis to a decline in autonomous, popular cultures and that in turn to a drastic reduction  – perhaps even a foreclosing  – of political alternatives. The article’s deeply pessimistic conclusion played no small part in its subsequent influence, but so did the poetic force of the image of the firefly, and it is this which Didi-Huberman’s book seeks to rehabilitate. Starting with Pasolini’s article, relating it once again to Walter Benjamin, and setting himself up in polemic against the recent work of another influential Italian, Giorgio Agamben, Didi-Huberman elaborates a theory of political resistance predicated on the figure of the Firefly, which becomes the image par excellence of the survivance as a political phenomenon. The most important message of the book is that fireflies, in both their literal and their metaphorical sense, should not be given up for 2

Pasolini, Pier Paolo (1990), ‘L’Articolo delle lucciole’ (1 February 1975), in Scritti corsari, Milano: Garzanti, 128–34.

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lost. Although increasingly ecologically fragile and in decline, the insects had not completely disappeared from Italy by 1975, nor have they to this day. The photographer Denis Roche saw them there in 1981, as did Didi-Huberman himself in 1986. Their appearances may be fleeting, as in the account Roche gave of his encounter with them (Survivance des lucioles, 38–9), but that in itself recalls that ‘disappearance’ does not necessarily mean extinction. Perhaps they have simply moved on. ‘They “disappear” only inasmuch as their watcher declines to follow them. They disappear from his sight because he stays in his place which is no longer the right place to observe them from’ (SL, 39). And despite the ecological perils to which they are exposed (‘There is probably every reason to be pessimistic about the Roman fireflies’ which Didi-Huberman himself saw in the late 1980s in a habitat since destroyed (SL, 40)), it is still possible to go in search of them. ‘We need to know that, despite everything, the fireflies have formed their beautiful luminous communities elsewhere’ (SL, 41). In such circumstances, what has been formed is ‘an anachronistic and atopic community’ (SL, 42), in other words, an existence tied neither to time nor to place: none the less, and even in this literal sense, they have present relevance (DidiHuberman points to recent high-profile research on bioluminescence as a proof of this). Thus the firefly-metaphor is proved appropriate to give form to the Warburgian ‘survivance’, which ‘disappeared at some point in history’ [and] ‘reappeared much later, when it was perhaps no longer expected’ (IS 67, see p. 113). In Survivance des lucioles, Didi-Huberman offers a further definition of the term ‘survivance’, destined to bring it closer to this new metaphor: it is ‘the way in which the Past (‘l’Autrefois’) meets the Now to form a light, a flash, a constellation’ (SL, 51). It is, in other words, a moment of percussive montage (see Chapter 2), one which not only deflects the course of the two terms which encounter each other, but which generates an immediate explosion of ‘excessive

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energy’, transient but unassimilated, full of potential. The two concepts of anachronistic survival and of the firefly thus become merged in the image of a sudden light which takes its energy from its anomalous status in the time of linear history. And from the metaphor’s Pasolinian source, Didi-Huberman draws the political resistance which is inherent in this explosion of anachronism. He does so not merely by dint of the Firefly Article  – which explicitly, but morosely, attaches political diversity to the cultural past – but, more subtly, by folding the chronology of Pasolini’s own work back on itself, finding in his earlier production – notably in films such as Che cosa sono le nuvole (1968) and La Ricotta (1963) – declarations of the power of anachronism as ‘taking an effective, subversive, inventive, joyful position as regards a relationship with history’ (SL, 54). It is entirely in keeping with the ‘firefly ethos’ that the book uses Pasolini’s production, literary and filmic, as material for montage, re-ordering it according to internal affinities which Didi-Huberman perceives between words and images produced at different times and for different intentions. While certainly not ignoring the chronological imperative which places Pasolini’s discouragement with the Italian people expressed in 1975 after the combative rebelliousness of the popular audience in Che cosa sono le nuvole (SL, 87) for example, none the less Didi-Huberman refuses to accept this as the only possible direction of travel through the texts, or to assume that later texts must automatically supersede earlier ones in the minds and hearts of an active readership/audience. A declaration of faith in a revolutionary ‘Force of the past’, drawn from a poem contained in Pasolini’s film La Ricotta, can also be applied to ways of drawing influence from past work. Aside from its origins in the writings of a cinematic poet, the firefly image which Didi-Huberman concocts out of this interaction of texts old and new is inherently cinematic in its properties: a film-image too is a flickering point of light, transient, fragile, susceptible of being drowned or banished by too sustained or intense a beam, and always

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in the course of moving on, disappearing and reappearing. The later phases of the book become increasingly philosophically complex. Didi-Huberman wishes to separate his vision of the power of the past from Agamben’s, in whose recent work he detects an apocalyptic position which he finds unhelpful and in the end static. He does so, as ever, with the aid of Walter Benjamin, once again citing his concept of the image, characterised by ‘its intermittence, its fragility, its ceaseless beat of appearances, disappearances, re-appearances and redisappearances’ (SL, 74). This same image, he finds, is also, potentially, a ‘narrow door’ which opens ‘for a second’ in the precarious Benjaminian version of messianism.3 This narrow door, this flickering light, is clearly threatened by the ‘blinding light’ of hegemonic power, and so ‘The fireflies [. . .] suffer nothing less  – metaphorically, obviously – than the fate of the peoples themselves who are exposed to disappearance’ (SL, 81). The germ of the argument to be developed in OH4, where Didi-Huberman returns in a sustained and explicitly cinematic context to Pasolini’s work, is clear here. Survivance des lucioles develops it in dialogue with Agamben, with Benjamin, and with their philosophical sources: his references are to dense texts on the nature of power, but the imagination which sustains the thesis is more cinematic even than in L’Oeil de l’histoire. How else are we to clearly figure Didi-Huberman’s impassioned plea for attention to the small, fragile lights which distract us from the blinding (totalitarian) apocalyptic horizon towards which Agamben (following Schmitt) has us inevitably moving. ‘To see the horizon, in the distance, means not seeing the images which brush against us. The little fireflies [lucioles, ‘little lights’] give form and glow to our fragile immanence, when the “fierce beams” of the great light devour all forms and all glows – all differences  – in the transcendence of final ends. To pay exclusive 3

Benjamin, Sur le concept de l’histoire, cit. SL pp. 73 and 100. The comparison, or equation, between the messianic moment and the image in Benjamin’s thought is Didi-Huberman’s own.

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attention to the horizon is to make oneself unable to see the slightest image’ (SL, 99). What’s more, the ‘little lights’, the images, the anachronistic, potentially (problematically) messianic moments  – the fireflies, in short  – are themselves in motion. Another metaphor drawn from Benjamin’s oeuvre has ‘the dialectical image’ as ‘a fireball crossing the whole horizon of the past’.4 The firefly now becomes a ‘fireball’, exploding with the energy of the dialectical collision; but, fired – as it were – from the past, ‘in general it is descending, declining, hurtling to crash into the earth, somewhere in front of or beyond the horizon’ (SL, 102). The concept of ‘disappearance’ which the book set out to contest thus finds its place in the web of light-metaphors as another direction of movement. The fireball, or the firefly, when it becomes visible to us, is declining, ‘becoming a rare thing’ (Benjamin again, this time on the art of storytelling: cit. SL, 106), tending to disappearance, but ‘the end of the road – the horizon – isn’t on the cards yet’ (SL, 106). And, with yet another twist of the metaphor, and another philosopher – Lucretius  – called into the conversation, Didi-Huberman envisages that direction of motion changing, with yet another potential collision still possible: ‘It only takes one atom to diverge slightly from its parallel trajectory for it to collide with others and give birth to a world’ (Lucretius, De rerum naturam, cit. SL, 107). And with this image the fragile fireflies, with their fireball energy, are redirected as ‘the essential resource of decline: bifurcation, collision, the “fireball” which crosses the horizon, the invention of new forms’ (SL, 107) – once again, the ever-renewable force of the ‘rascally dialectic’; or, in another part of Benjamin’s richly metaphorical notion of time, the whirlpool of past and present which functions as a source for the new. All the later chapters of Survivance des Lucioles engage the reader as if they were a film spectator, called upon to attend in turn 4

‘Paralipomènes et variantes des thèses sur le concept de l’histoire’ (1940), cit. SL, p. 101.

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to different dispositions of the points of light which figure the potential dynamic of the resistant survivance. It’s an abstract, avant-garde film – hence the difficulty of many of these later passages – in which the content of the images is set aside. The fireballs are no longer endangered insects, we are no longer concerned with the particular survivance and its greater or lesser revolutionary potential. Instead, Didi-Huberman offers us a visual essay about revolutionary attention, about the maintenance of hope, figured in the moving play of flickering lights on the screens of our minds. In the final pages of the book, this virtual film is materialised in a real one, formally comparable, and yet fully connected to real resistances and dangers which must be urgently countered. This is Laura Waddington’s Border, a short film shot in 2002 outside the Sangatte refugee camp in Calais.5 Made over several months during which she filmed outside the camp at night and (due in part to the technical limitations of her equipment) in jerky slow motion, Waddington’s film constructs the world of the refugees as a drama of conflicting points and fields of light, which appear and disappear as her subjects make their way along the roads to attempt to embark for England, return unsuccessful, are confronted by the searchlights of the border police or by the glow of approaching dawn. This is a world that has no existence in daylight: unlike Sylvain George, another documentarist of the marginal world of the refugee camps around Calais whose work has drawn Didi-Huberman’s attention,6 Waddington elected not to live in the camp or to share her subjects’ domestic space. They in turn developed trust in her filmmaking partly because they are portrayed so anonymously and

5

6

Available on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X42CxOomqQ or https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhoZhY3d5-g A debate between Didi-Huberman and Sylvain George at the moment of the appearance of George’s Les Eclats can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHHaoa7tJrc George was also invited to present his film in the context of the exhibition curated by DidiHuberman at the Jeu de Paume, ‘Soulèvements’, in January 2016.

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fleetingly.7 As Eva Kuhn observed, the film presents itself as ‘a representative filmic image  – a type of sensory allegory  – for the disturbing condition in which these semi-transparent, nocturnal shadow beings at the margins of collective consciousness have found themselves.’8 Bearing this out through an approach from the opposite direction, Didi-Huberman sees the film precisely as the cinematic incarnation of the ‘sensory allegory’ he has been developing over the previous 133 pages of his book. For him, Waddington constructs her subjects as fireflies, transient points of light maintaining a flickering, elusive survival in the face of the projected beams of higher authority. The memorable early sequence (3.24–4.59) in which Waddington films a young man, at a great distance, dancing in the darkness with his blanket, seems so perfectly adapted to the metaphor that one could almost believe it deliberate. Concerning this figure, DidiHuberman speaks of the young dancer’s ‘fundamental joy, his joy in spite of everything’ (SL, 135), the phrase deliberately recalling the images in spite of everything which Didi-Huberman had fought to retain as part of the collective memory of the Holocaust. The refugees – or rather ‘fugitives’ (SL, 138) – are constantly assailed by searchlights (mentioned by Waddington in the voiceover, 11.46), by the headlights of passing vehicles, often hostile, and by the sudden flashes of blinding light in the episode of confrontation (16.04–19.59). None the less, they persist, they ‘keep arriving’, they set out into the darkness night after night, ‘moving off into the darkness towards a

7

8

Walker, Saskia (2007), ‘Interview with Laura Waddington’, Revolver Magazine no. 17, available online at https://www.laurawaddington.com/articles/37/interview-withlaura-waddington-ladoc-lectures-koln Kuhn, Eva (2010), ‘The Videographic Traces by Laura Waddington as a Cinematographic Memorial’, 129–141 in Christine Bischoff, Francesca Falk and Sylvia Kafehsy (eds), Images of Illegalized Immigration: Towards a Critical Iconology of Politics, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, p. 136. Available online at https://edoc.unibas.ch/16753/1/Border%20 The%20Videographic%20Traces.pdf or https://www.laurawaddington.com/articles/79/ border-the-videographic-traces-by-laura-waddington-as-a-cinematographic-memorial

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vaguely luminous horizon’ (SL, 138) which will prove – Waddington’s voice confirms – not to be a portal to paradise, even for those who make it across the Channel. Kuhn9 offers some intriguing further reflections on the effects of these images, giving them a temporal dimension which it is possible to bring into dialogue – in some ways, however, into conflict – with Didi-Huberman’s ‘survivance’. For instance, she receives these disparate images, accompanied by a narrative voiceover which speaks of them in the past tense, as traces reaching the present across time, carried by a fragmentary and degradable memory: ‘the technical impairment [. . .] symbolizes the deforming processes of time – producing a type of weathered or mentally processed image’.10 This concept owes a debt to Agamben  – cited in the article  – and DidiHuberman takes considerable pains in Survivance des Lucioles to distinguish the ‘survivance’ from the ‘trace’. The firefly-survivance is not a traumatic dream-image such as Kuhn describes, but a returning reality, not a ‘fantôme’ but a true ‘revenant’; on the other hand, it is also, explicitly, an image. It feels increasingly important as Border’s creation retreats into the past, even as refugees continue to arrive at Europe’s borders, to consider the possibility that although the individuals it records are no longer in this place – and we have no access to what has become of them – their images retain, or regain, their resilient power and present relevance at each new viewing. Significantly, Kuhn locates an important factor in the film’s expressive force in its representation of the gestures, not only of the refugees but, even more importantly, of the uncertain observer working at the limit of her powers. ‘The camera movements remain visible as gestures, as actions that are not capable of catching up with their motif ’.11 For Kuhn, the visible gesture represents the process of thought. For Didi-Huberman, steeped in the 9 10 11

Kuhn, ‘Videographic Traces’. Kuhn, ‘Videographic Traces’, 139. Kuhn, ‘Videographic Traces’, 139.

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study of Aby Warburg, it already represents another figure of the ‘survivance’, one which will become increasingly important  – and more and more cinematic  – as he develops the concept through subsequent volumes of L’Oeil de l’histoire and beyond. The ability of cinema to reproduce and project gesture and movement, and potentially to share them with viewers through a kind of haptic dynamism, takes on increasing importance in his filmic thought. Although he never returns to Waddington’s film in this light, the concept offers a chance for the present-day viewer of Border to reenergise it, reading it not only as a document of past anger but as a prototype for future observation. Waddington herself endorsed Didi-Huberman’s reading of her film fully and with enthusiasm, in a response to the piece which speaks eloquently to the force which this little book could impress on its readers.12 The article was requested by an Italian academic review, Engramma, which dedicated a whole issue to Survivance des Lucioles on the occasion of its publication in Italian,13 seeing in it ‘not so much a rare as a unique opportunity’ to address a number of philosophical questions while at the same time ‘subjecting the meaning of our action to interrogation’.14 Several of the contributors to Engramma (not by vocation necessarily an activist journal) ended their pieces with a call to put the principles of the book into action. ‘The rare light of fireflies recalls us to the commitment and the joy of cultivating, despite everything, an undistracted gaze on our times which is not paralysed by desperation’, the edition’s editor Monica Centanni noted in her own contribution; ‘gathering the traces of their momentary, ephemeral

12

13 14

Waddington, Laura (2010), ‘Abdullah and the Fireflies: On reading Georges DidiHuberman’s Survivance des lucioles’, Engramma review issue 84, ‘Lucciole malgré tout’, available online: https://www.laurawaddington.com/articles/48/abdullah-and-the-fireflieson-reading-georges-didi-hubermans-survivance-des-lucioles Engramma 84, October 2010. http://www.engramma.it/eOS/ Centanni, Monica and Pisani, Daniele (2010), ‘Lucciole malgrado tutto: Editoriale’, Engramma 84. http://www.engramma.it/eOS/index.php?id_articolo=1848

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lights, we can, and maybe must, invent the design of a new constellation for our times’.15 Other contributors draw from the book the need to ‘make ourselves bearers of images, and therefore of dissent. Become fireflies, resist.’16 For Anna Banfi, ‘the fireflies teach us [. . .] that [. . .] existence has meaning only if we nourish thought with action and action with thought. [. . .] [T]hus we learn to become fireflies ourselves.’17 As for Waddington, whose artistic practice is undoubtedly activist at least in some sense, she describes reading the book as ‘kind of a shock’, before supporting its key theory of the firefly as ‘a diagonal light in the dark  . . . gleams of the will to bear witness and provide counter-information’ – in a poetic rather than a merely journalistic sense – with two anecdotes from her own experience illustrating how texts (including Survivance des Lucioles itself) can be received as messages of hope by people in difficulty. The power of the firefly concept as an inspiration and metaphor for possible political action in an uncertain context became manifest very quickly. In fact, it could be said that Survivance des Lucioles interrupted, and perhaps lastingly deflected, the developing flow of DidiHuberman’s oeuvre, by dint of the extraordinary success of its central metaphor. By 2012 it had been translated into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and German (an English translation, from the University of Minnesota Press, finally appeared at the end of 2018, but is still not easily available even to specialist bookshops in the UK). Not only that, but it found its way out of academic debate into both artistic and activist language: it became a live concept and a form for French activism in the 2010s.

15

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17

Centanni, Monica (2010), ‘Luce rara. Una lettura politica di Come le lucciole di Georges Didi-Huberman’. Engramma 84, http://www.engramma.it/eOS/index.php?id_articolo =1850 Gelussi, Marianna (2010), ‘Immagini come lucciole, secondo Georges Didi-Huberman’. Engramma 84, http://www.engramma.it/eOS/index.php?id_articolo=1849 Banfi, Anna (2010), ‘Parole malgrado tutto’, Engramma 84. http://www.engramma.it/ eOS/index.php?id_articolo=1852

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By 2011 the metaphor was being regularly adopted in reference to the Occupy movement.18 In that year, the filmmaker Sarah Mauriaucourt published on WordPress her ‘Lucciola Project’, a mixedmedia document which redeployed the metaphor (with its history) as the basis of an account of the Indignados’ ‘marches’ on Brussels and Athens in 2011.19 In 2013 Nicolas Truong, a journalist at Le Monde and frequent interlocutor of resistant intellectuals, transferred it to the theatre for the Festival d’Avignon in the form of a ‘Projet Luciole’;20 The environmental and political activist Corinne Morel Darleux paid explicit tribute to Didi-Huberman in adopting ‘Revoir les lucioles’ as the title of her blog, launched in 2015.21 Also in 2015, a group of academics, post-graduate students and university staff at an unnamed French university launched a publication, named ‘Lucioles’ again in explicit homage to Didi-Huberman’s book, to fight against the various dysfunctional elements of the university system.22 In a somewhat more official capacity, a ‘Forum des lucioles’ was launched to develop a community-based cultural policy in the city of Grenoble;23 Pasolini and Didi-Huberman are once again cited on the founding page, and this initiative has maintained its activity up to 2019. With the development of the Nuit Debout movement, the metaphor of lights in the night as a form of political activism could only become more ubiquitous,24 and by May 2016 it had become so all-pervasive that

18

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20 21 22

23 24

See for example Lefort, Gérard (2011), ‘Le Masque des lucioles, le visage de l’année’, Libération 30 November. Mauriaucourt, Sarah (2012), ‘Le Chemin des Lucioles disparues’, Barcelona, Edicion Fugaz, Colleccion Extracto. In March 2017 this was available online (https:// galeriadeartefugaz.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/el-camino-de-las-luciernagas-fr.pdf ), but the link has since been removed and the document apparently not reloaded elsewhere. Details online: https://www.festival-avignon.com/fr/spectacles/2013/projet-luciole Darleux, Corinne Morel, ‘Pourquoi les lucioles?’, https://revoirleslucioles.org/parcours/ Lucioles no. 1, September 2015: http://indiscipline.fr/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/ LUCIOLES1.pdf Forum des Lucioles: Accueil. https://forumdeslucioles.wixsite.com/lucioles/lucioles Gwazdzinski, Luc (2016), ‘Nuit debout’, Imaginations vol. 7, no. 2, https://journals. library.ualberta.ca/imaginations/index.php/imaginations/article/view/29350,

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Patrick Boucheron called it ‘our minimal political moral position’ and lamented that it was, perhaps, too facile: ‘How we like this idea, how consoling it is’.25 Boucheron argued that the elevation of small, ephemeral actions to the status of ideal political responses, while ‘necessary  . . . to combat what I would call apocalyptic dandyism’ (22.00) risked a ‘ridimensionamento of our political life . . . for a society which is more limited, less young’ (35.00). There is some foundation to this argument: the concept of the firefly as Didi-Huberman intended it is complex and not necessarily consoling, but, in the currency that it acquired, some of that complexity was, at times, lost, leaving a simple assertion of the viability of small-scale or self-consciously ephemeral movements irradiated with the poetic glow of Mediterranean hillsides. The metaphor perhaps attained its most powerful political form in its association with activists and writers confronting the ongoing disaster of immigration policies at the borders of Europe – the area to which Didi-Huberman had led it with his concluding discussion of Waddington’s film. Notable contributions to sustaining and expanding this association in connection with Didi-Huberman’s work are Vincent Dieutre’s powerful essay-film Orlando ferito/Roland blessé (2013), to which Didi-Huberman contributed and in which he appeared (the film will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter), and, more recently and more intensively, Patrick Chamoiseau’s short, passionate book Frères migrants,26 which ends with the following call to action and solidarity: ‘May the happiness of all flicker in the effort and the grace of each one of us, until it draws a world where that which tips and pours over the borders is transformed on the spot, on both sides 25

26

Aeschimann, Eric (2016), ‘En Saône-et-Loire, philosophes, anthropologues et historiens lancent la chasse à la luciole’, BibliObs 4 May 2016. https://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/ idees/20160504.OBS9862/en-saone-et-loire-philosophes-anthropologues-et-historienslancent-la-chasse-a-la-luciole.html. Boucheron’s intervention (along with the rest of the speakers at this conference) can be watched in full at: http://lamanufacturedidees.org/ edition-2016/. Chamoiseau, Patrick (2017), Frères migrants, Paris: Editions du Seuil. I am grateful to Prof. Charles Forsdick for alerting me to the presence of fireflies in this book.

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of the walls and all the fences, into a hundred times a hundred times a hundred million fireflies! – just one to maintain hope within reach of everyone, the rest to guarantee the volume of this beauty against all contrary forces’.27 Chamoiseau’s book opens with quotations from Pasolini and Didi-Huberman, but also from Saint-Exupéry and Aimé Césaire (whose poem ‘Vertu des lucioles’, published in 1994, startlingly prefigures Didi-Huberman’s defence of their uncertain flickerings which succeed in not ‘sinking into the inept chatter of the surrounding marsh’28). Associating the ‘lucioles’, the sparks of hope, primarily with the migrants themselves  – as Waddington did  – rather than with activism per se, Chamoiseau relaunches the figure in another political setting, undeniably active, significant and challenging, and ties it closely, and with immediate political fire, to other aspects of DidiHuberman’s work. In following the destiny of the firefly image we have moved some way from Didi-Huberman’s concern with cinema, and arguably even further from the subject of this chapter, the survivance, with its temporal warps and curves, which was an essential and integral part of the original concept which Didi-Huberman elaborates in Survivance des Lucioles. Although implicit in the poetic force of the metaphor, anachronism does not necessarily feature prominently among the quasi-activist ‘fireflies’ of the 2010s (Dieutre’s film is, as we shall see, an exception). For Didi-Huberman, however, it remained absolutely essential, and its importance increases as Didi-Huberman seeks in his work of the 2010s – most of L’Oeil de l’histoire, and even more in his subsequent project, Soulèvements  – to reconcile his complex philosophical research projects with the possibility of speaking, poetically and politically, to a now-attentive non-academic audience. In this endeavour he frequently has recourse to the idea of Nachleben as a 27 28

Chamoiseau, Frères migrants, 136–7. Césaire, Aimé, ‘Vertu des lucioles’ (1994), published in Comme un malentendu du salut, Paris: Seuil. Didi-Huberman seems to have been unaware of Césaire’s poem.

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rich tool for the understanding of film, passing not so much through dialectical montage as through the construction of cinematic gesture; the repetition, sometimes bordering on ritual, of certain sequences of movement – of the body but also, sometimes, of the camera, which can offer a phenomenological channel of communication from the body in/ of the film to the attentive body of the spectator. Gesture was of course a privileged site of the survivance in Warburg’s iconographical work, and as such has engaged Didi-Huberman for a long time: and the first book of L’Oeil de l’histoire examined its use as a critical tool in Brecht’s dialectical montages of images. From 2010 onwards, however, and increasingly, Didi-Huberman explores its translation into movement, in filmic images which literally re-vivify motions and emotions from the past, re-activating lurking memories. In OH1 (before turning seriously to analysis of film texts), DidiHuberman offers a fascinating discussion, in the context of his theories of anachronism, of that peculiar literary trope which is the ‘epic tense’, or historic present: ‘an action which develops in the past in the form of something happening’ (citing Gustave Guillaume, in OH1, 177). This is, in effect, the tense of the survivance, and it is also potentially the tense of cinema. Cinematic images are, after all, by the very nature survivances in some primary sense, since they are literally ‘a fossil of movement’ (OH6, 383): and ‘the camera can be used as a machine for rummaging in the thickness of time and, in doing so, raising something unthoughtof about the present (faire lever un impensé du présent)’ (OH4, 132). These fossil movements can, however, be endowed with further movement of their own, through the action of montage (in Eisenstein’s theory and practice, for example), but also through phenomenological contagion, in the same way that a ‘fossil of language’ such as the reflex response of ‘Bless you’ to a sneeze reappears anew in a new context every time it is uttered, bearing ‘a conjugated memory and desire’.29 It is 29

‘Chroniques Anachroniques’, 162–3 in Aperçues.

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when the past movement finds its prolongation, or its explosion, into the present that a fertile anachronism, a cinematic survivance, is created. It is in this vein that Didi-Huberman’s latest writing approaches cinematic representation of movement and gesture, detecting in it not only a potential repository for Benjamin’s alternative history of the oppressed, but an active agent for stirring it into life. In the early stages of its application to cinema, the idea of the gestural cinematic survival remains primarily restricted to a conjugation of pasts. In OH4, where Didi-Huberman first develops the idea in relation to film-texts, the appeal is to folk-memories which may extract gestures from simple chronological time in order to present them as a valid medium of meaningful popular expression. Writing about Susanna Pasolini’s appearance as the lamenting Mary in the final scenes of Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964) (lamentation is the master-gesture for Didi-Huberman’s theory in this area), he observes that what is at stake is ‘to give form to the disturbing proximity of a complex time which, while remaining sensitive to [à fleur de] each present gesture, is never merely reduced to its historical actuality’ (OH4, 218). Susanna/Mary incorporates the gestures which she performs for the camera in 1964 with her personal memories of gestures performed in reality when she lost her younger son in 1945, with cultural and artistic memories of earlier representations of the grieving Virgin at the foot of the cross, and with a much wider-ranging folk-memory, the ‘fossil-gestures’ of lamentation which were engaging the attention of Italian anthropologists and filmmakers in the early 1960s (Pasolini had written a text for Cecilia Mangini’s documentary on the subject, Stendalí (1960)). The anachronistic aspect is clear in this discussion, but the political implications are less so, at least until Didi-Huberman reminds us that the survival of the forms of selfexpression of subaltern cultures (including in this case that of the rural Mediterranean faced with post-war modernisation) is itself of political significance: ‘The misery of the peoples is a defiance of pain

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[défi de la douleur, which can be rendered both as the challenge of and the challenge to pain]: it protests today against a status quo imposed upon it, but it protests with gestures which belong first of all to its own culture of which the status quo in question wishes to declare the obsolescence and disappearance’ (OH4, 219). Survivance thus acquires a status of resistance to the dictates of a linear, dominant history: but as Didi-Huberman himself recognises this is an ambivalent position, even though he wants to salvage its progressive potential. ‘Memory is not good or bad in itself: neither intrinsically revolutionary nor intrinsically passéiste. The whole question is in its use-value; here it may choke off movements of desire, there it may subvert the apathy of the present’ (OH4, 218–19). In order to stir resistance into life, it is not enough to re-invigorate quasi-ritual gestures, there is need to give them a new, present meaning, with revolutionary potential. This is the tenor of Part V of OH6, which is dedicated to a daring exposition of Eisenstein’s use of tradition and anachronism. Eisenstein’s interest in the physical development of emotion, Didi-Huberman contends, is not hard to relate to Aby Warburg’s theory of resilient ‘formulas of pathos’ (Pathosformeln), typical combinations of gestures which recur in art across the centuries as generators of emotion in quite different audiences. Even when discussing the most explosively present effects of his orchestrated structures of montage, after all, Eisenstein makes use of classical archetypes such as the ‘Dionysian’; his quintessentially modernist formal practice can thus itself be read as a kind of survivance, in which an immemorial ecstatic tradition is reinvigorated and made relevant when brought into contact with twentieth-century revolutionary politics. His treatment of the gestus of lamentation in the scenes around Vakulinchuk’s body similarly takes the archetypal – hackneyed, for Roland Barthes – iconic images of weeping women around a bier and injects their pathos into a new sequence of interpretation and transformation. Didi-Huberman’s emphasis on the power of tradition in this sequence played a major part of his

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disagreement with Jacques Rancière (discussed in Chapter 3). In his essay for the Soulèvements catalogue Rancière accused Didi-Huberman of treating Eisenstein as a mere ‘transmitter of age-old emotions.’30 For Rancière, both the use of emotion and the use of tradition are simply instrumental for Eisenstein, tools to be used in a calculated effort to catch an audience’s attention. For Didi-Huberman, on the other hand, the tradition inherent in the gestures of lamentation is, by virtue of Eisensteinian montage, indissolubly connected to the force of the present and, through the present, of the future, making these sequences ‘originary phenomena’ in the Benjaminian sense ‘that is phenomena in which the ecstatic “leap” might have the function of an “origin”, the birth or rivivescence of something immemorial’ (OH6, 345). They are not static poses but sequences of movement, and although lamentation is so frequently Didi-Huberman’s example of choice when discussing traditional gestures, the upswell of revolt to which the sequence leads is no less imbricated with past and future associations. The raising of fists in collective anger, although perhaps less frequently artistically mediated than the gestures of grief, is no less immemorial, and perhaps even more obviously immediate to an audience which may feel itself carried along by gestures which are themselves part of collective memory. ‘Gestures are transmitted, gestures survive despite us and despite everything’, he writes in the exhibition notes to Soulèvements:31 not merely through the iconographic tradition where Warburg went in search of them, but in what might be described as a somatic memory, which leads our bodies to reproduce them almost automatically. It was this jolt of reinvigorated familiarity which he hoped to achieve with his Soulèvements exhibition in general, leading his audience from the image-trace inscribed in paintings, photographs and films, through the physical execution of

30 31

Rancière, in Soulèvements. Later republished, with further texts, in Désirer Déobéir: Ce qui nous soulève I, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2019. 31–2.

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‘fossil-movements’, to an energetic, immediate understanding of changing emotion, both of oppression and of resistance. It was as a direct result of the currency acquired by Survivance des lucioles that Didi-Huberman found himself involved, in the most sustained way so far in his career, in an actual film project. The filmmaker was Vincent Dieutre, an important figure in cinematic intellectual circles in France; the project nothing less than an examination of the political state of the Mediterranean confines of Europe in the form of a poetic essay structured around a journey through Sicily to Lampedusa. Orlando ferito/Roland blessé (the official, bilingual and bicultural, title) forms the last element of a loose trilogy of journey-films which Dieutre has called ‘films d’Europe’; although the first and second parts of the trilogy, Leçons de ténèbres (2000) and Mon voyage d’hiver (My Winter Journey, 2003), predate Orlando by more than ten years, and they are by no means the only films in Dieutre’s oeuvre to interrogate the meaning of European places, or to journey through Europe’s evocative spaces in search of meaning in the past, movement in the present, light in the future. In this case, the journey is made in the company of Survivance des lucioles: ‘I clutch Georges Didi-Huberman’s little book in my pocket: it speaks to me’, Dieutre says in an early scene. In the prologue  – a long, scrolling introductory text – he places the book at the very source of the film. A friend had recommended it to him, he explains, to give him some moral encouragement as he set off to make a film about various forms of resistance movements in Sicily; but eventually the book and the film project merged: ‘It was from reading this, in the heart of my Sicilian dazzlement, that this film was born’. Not only this, but, he confides over the images of his arrival in Sicily, Didi-Huberman himself has ‘entrusted’ Dieutre with ‘his text, his words, his fireflies’, in order for him ‘to make something concrete of them’. These introductory comments indicate the complicated temporal weaving which ties the

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two texts together: although the book’s existence obviously predates the film, Dieutre’s involvement with it plays out before our eyes, and in the fabric of Orlando ferito it exists in both the present of the diegesis (as we see Dieutre reading it), the present of the audience’s experience of the film (texts extracted from it read, in voiceover, without attribution, as part of the commentary on the images) and the past of the film’s reflection on an already-read text which it proposes to adapt and discusses with – among others – its author. A theorist and teacher, and a constant campaigner for the poetic possibilities of film, Dieutre’s career as a filmmaker has been both respected and marginal, and in many ways unique: Dominique Païni commented on the occasion of a retrospective of his work in 2017 that ‘I cannot think of a director whom he could possibly be compared to, nor of a school or movement he could be deemed part of ’.32 It is none the less possible to trace signposts and influences which have marked his film-trajectory: indeed an integral part of his work is its dynamic dialogue with other films and other texts, as Orlando itself illustrates. Other film-essays of his have involved discussions with and reflections on the work of Naomi Kawase (Ea1/Les Accords d’Alba, 2004), Jean Eustache (Ea2, 2008), Roberto Rossellini (Viaggio nella dopo-storia, 2015) and other precursors whom he admires (the letters Ea in the titles of what is now a series of five filmlets stand for ‘Exercices d’admiration’, exercises in admiration). His work as a writer and critic also offers some clear indications as to his cinematic selfpositioning. Notably, Dieutre was an influential part of the dynamically anticonformist film journal La Lettre du cinéma, which at the turn of the millennium inherited some of the ambition of the 1950s Cahiers du cinéma, although with a decidedly more political slant. The cinematic vision of La Lettre du cinéma looked to the more enigmatic 32

In the Introduction to the catalogue of the 36th International Istanbul Film Festival. Cited by Castellano, Alberto (2017), ‘Exercises in Solitude’, FIPRESCI, http://fipresci. org/report/exercises-in-solitude/

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edges of the Cahiers wave. Its writers favoured Rivette over Godard, and took a particular interest in the small but distinct ‘queer new wave’ which rippled across the late 1970s, involving critic-directors such as Paul Vecchiali, Jean-Claude Guiguet and Jean-Claude Biette. Dieutre’s queer sensibilities (his own description) and his complicated teasing of the boundaries between fiction and documentary, the political and the personal, have clear affinities with the work of these directors, for example Guiguet’s Les Passagers (The Passengers, 1999). For La Lettre du cinéma, in 2003, Dieutre wrote an ‘A BC of TiersCinéma’33 which is a manifesto for a poetically-constructed, politicallyactive, small-scale cinema ready to be imaginative in production, distribution and exhibition. Interviewed in 2018 by Bernabé Sauvage,34 he reiterates his support for that concept: ‘third (tiers) between the fiction of the marketplace and transient documentary, journalism, tele-reality, trash TV. . . . I think that it’s a continent of cinema which isn’t disappearing, but growing, and consolidating with the help of the integrity of certain auteurs’. Speaking about his own work, Dieutre has favoured the literary term ‘autofiction’ to describe the mixture of personal experience and imaginative reconstruction which characterize his films.35 Dieutre’s cinema exhibits characteristics which correspond to Didi-Huberman’s theoretical concerns and to the type of cinema which he has supported as a curator and in his writings about contemporary filmmakers. The two men share a capacity for proactive admiration which manifests itself not in mere derivation but in the mining of beloved texts for new raw materials. Images as well as texts, in Dieutre’s films, are re-appropriated and re-used, although he 33

34

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Dieutre, Vincent (2003), ‘Abécédaire du Tiers-Cinéma’, 75–86 in La Lettre du cinéma, Spring 2003, 76–8, 83. Sauvage, Bernabé (2018), ‘Vincent Dieutre (2018)’, Débordements, http://www. debordements.fr/Vincent-Dieutre-2018. See Sauvage, for example. In his presentation of Orlando Ferito to the London Essay Film Festival in February 2016, Dieutre used this term to describe the film.

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is not primarily a montage-documentarist after the manner of Farocki. In Orlando ferito, he proposes to take Didi-Huberman’s text and to put it into images, by which he means not a transposition into imageform but an insertion among images, some found, some captured as Dieutre reaches out for signals from his surroundings in Sicily, some constructed in the workshops of puppetmaster Mimmo Cuticchio and staged by Dieutre himself. Daily experience, puppet-play, contacts with Sicilian dissidence, glimpses of the last gasps of Berlusconian TV, the words and expressions of Didi-Huberman and Pierandrea Amato develop through their exchanges into the poetic tale of a search for fireflies, which claims, in the end, to have found them. Its optimism may be a little too easily generated, as I will discuss shortly, but the film certainly pursues its fireflies following signposts suggested by Didi-Huberman’s book: local actions which may have wider resonance and which the cinematic image expressly takes upon itself to propagate; the adoption and contemporary re-purposing of traditional figures rooted in popular culture and diverted through cinephilic memory; not to mention the complex time structure which weaves the genesis of the film into its unfolding and ends with the projection of its own images to the young people currently occupying a vacant theatre in Palermo. The three structuring threads of the film are: first, Dieutre’s journey through Sicily, from Palermo, to Lampedusa then back to Palermo, with digressions along the way; second, the puppet-play which Dieutre, Cuticchio and their collaborators develop using the traditional pupi-figures, which gives its name to the film; third, a long interview with Didi-Huberman, the temporal status of which in relation to the rest of the film is intriguingly ambiguous. Dieutre’s journey starts in the streets of Palermo during preparations for the city’s first Pride march: a colourful, celebratory, affirmative protest which challenges, but cannot quite efface, the traces of violence, homophobia and corruption which lurk in the fabric of the city and

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in activists’ experience. From Palermo he moves to Messina, to interview Pierandrea Amato, professor of philosophy at the city’s university and author of a 2011 book translated into French as La Révolte, which touches on themes very close to Didi-Huberman’s. A chance encounter there leads to an idyllic interlude in the countryside, near Noto, where he first encounters fireflies; thence, re-energised, he proceeds across Lampedusa to the offices of the Collectif Askavusa, artists and activists engaged in the reception of the refugees who arrive on the island.36 Lampedusa, ‘the gateway to Europe’, despite its barren landscape and the drama with which it is associated, is framed as a place of hope: Paola, Dieutre’s interlocutor at Askavusa, speaks of the ‘immense joy’ felt by those who have arrived safely on the island at the moment when they step ashore; the sun which seemed pitiless on the dusty road to its southern coast takes on a warmer and more welcoming tone in the golden light of the Collective’s Collectif ’s offices; and, in Lampedusa, Dieutre, or at least the protagonist who is Dieutre to the audience, receives a message from his friend Luigi, a disillusioned retiree from the Italian political scene, to announce that he is returning to the fray, confirming Dieutre’s resolution to return to Palermo to complete Orlando ferito – the film we are watching, or the puppet-play which has been an integral part of it. The images which make up the film’s autofictional component are quite varied. Interior interview footage is carefully framed and lit, as one would expect for any conversation-based documentary. There are sequences in which the camera is slow-moving and photographic, framing the mysterious beauty of certain views of Palermo in the evening, the Mediterranean tranquillity of Askavusa’s small, whitewashed headquarters, or the magnificent, faintly exotic vegetation which surrounds Dieutre’s temporary Eden in Noto. A large proportion of the footage, however, is of the fast-moving, grainy, unframed nature 36

For the activities of Askavusa see their website: https://askavusa.wordpress.com/

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which transmits to an audience the idea of rapid, spontaneous capture of passing life: we are presented with Dieutre’s journey as a video-diary, a selected, but raw, daily record of encounters, glimpses and impressions. In fact, this is not quite the case. While some footage was undoubtedly shot quickly as a record of the journey  – the impressions of the Lampedusa road, for example – other ‘video’ sequences were retouched. For example, as Dieutre reported during the London Essay Film Festival, the images which purport to be of ‘Gaspare’, the owner of the Noto house, are in fact of someone else; ‘Gaspare’ could not be filmed, or even if he was filmed surreptitiously (as the voiceover suggests) the footage could not be shown. Events too are not always what they seem: ‘Luigi’ – Gigi Malaroda – is a very real person whose image on screen is his own, but his political change of heart is invented, he had left Italy by 2010 and remains based in Mexico. These manipulations are by no means always obvious  – and they are decidedly problematic for the film’s firefly message – but Dieutre develops the interaction between his own story and the puppet-play to maintain a small distance of discretion between cinéma-vérité and vérité unscreened. The framelanguage of popular epic draws the whole film into a space of fable. The story of the puppet play uses the traditional characters of the Sicilian Carolingian puppet-epics and weaves a story of political discouragement and re-awakening. Charlemagne has vanished (into the Museum of Antiquities, where Dieutre ventures to find him); the heroic paladin Orlando, or Roland, wounded and disheartened, is giving up the struggle. Roland’s retirement follows the stages of Dieutre’s journey, and that journey in turn takes on its fabulous form. The Noto episode becomes an ‘Interval in the enchanted garden’, magical but at the same time somehow ‘poisonous, suspect’, a false healing for Orlando and perhaps also for Dieutre, despite the gentle good intentions of ‘Gaspare’, and even the fireflies which Dieutre’s video-camera purports – credibly – to film there. Despite, or perhaps because of, its luxuriousness, the first images of it are images of decay;

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and, not long afterwards, Dieutre inserts into the account of his stay there images from another fantasy-world, the raunchy consumer paradise of Berlusconian TV. When Dieutre departs for Lampedusa, he is heading for ‘The Island of the Pitiless Sun’, the epitome of Orlando’s plunge into madness but also the turning-point from which he may find a way to return. If Dieutre spots his fireflies in the ‘enchanted garden’, it is at Lampedusa that Orlando encounters his salvation in the form of a child-puppet, ‘Lucciolino’ or ‘Lucciolina’ (‘Little Firefly’, that is), who leads him back to the land of the living and then allows him to retire, accepting his mantle of hero and champion. The puppet-play represents another form of ‘putting into images’ of Didi-Huberman’s work. These images are themselves survivances, and not only survivances but relics of a repertoire of stylised figures and gestures which could credibly be said to belong to the people. Dieutre’s new play gives considerable space to comic puppets who explicitly incarnate the kind of representative everyman whom Didi-Huberman discusses under the name of figurant. These figures provide a chorus commenting upon Orlando’s misfortunes and disagreeing on what to do in the desperate situation in which they find themselves. ‘The Professor Patrimonio’  – white-haired, bespectacled, prissy and cautious  – is as far as I can tell a character invented by Mimmo Cuticchio, albeit with some visual similarity to earlier models; but Nicotino, the belligerent man of the people who berates Orlando’s, and the Professor’s, inaction, has been a part of the Sicilian pupi tradition since the eighteenth century, although under other names – Nofrio or Virticchio. The traditional Nofrio is described as ‘the voice of the subproletariat and its protest against the injustices of the foolish

37

Description taken from the ‘Adotta un pupo’ website: http://www.adottaunpupo.it/nofrio. php. The site credits its descriptions to Selima Giorgio Giuliano, Orietta Sorgi and Janne Vibaek (eds) (2011), Sul filo del racconto. Gaspare Canino e Natale Meli nelle collezioni del Museo internazionale delle marionette Antonio Pasqualino, Palermo: CRICD.

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and arrogant aristocratic-bourgeois world’.37 A rebellious popular voice staged in a street art-form, he can easily be presented as a representative of that ‘tradition of the oppressed’ which Benjamin recalled and which Didi-Huberman places at the centre of his researches in OH4. Another role of these characters in the traditional theatre was to put the epic of the paladins into proportion and to ‘stigmatise behaviour they judge “excessive”, like Orlando’s madness, de-dramatised with much laughter’.38 For Dieutre, Nicotino and the Professor can thus usefully take part in dismissing the apocalyptic thinking that causes this new Orlando’s despair, even if they are unable to cure it. Despairing intellectuals, it is implied, are of no use to ordinary people. Dieutre allows himself some tentative identification with ‘Nicotino’, whose trademark vice mirrors, or is mirrored by, Dieutre’s own smoking habit: character and filmmaker thus share a set of gestures, establishing a sympathetic link between them which may then be extended to another typical movement of the puppet, a fist raised in revolutionary fervour. Dieutre’s framing of the puppets frequently encourages associations between their stylised gestures and positions and images from the real world: close-ups in heavy shadow, sometimes from unexpected angles, eliminate the framework of theatre and puppet-master and reveal the figures only in glimpsed fragments, capturing essential actions. This is perhaps most obvious in the shots of Orlando, in a state of collapse, lying on a rocking board, figuring a raft, along with a pile of other pupi-figures, in front of a stylised moon. Although there is no question that the image is a representation, that the figures are wooden and the moon made of paper, it unnervingly reproduces the representations of prostrate migrants on Mediterranean crossings so prevalent in the media and so much a part of the ‘disaster-narrative’ which, it should be remembered, the activists of the Askavusa collective have called into 38

Ibid.

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question. It is from this rocking raft that Lucciolino/a arises, emerging from under a green blanket: as in Didi-Huberman’s exegesis of Laura Waddington’s film, the firefly is a migrant, and it is as one of Orlando’s companions in disarray that s/he wakes him and encourages him to sit up and look around him. Interspersed with Dieutre’s narrative of his journey, in which DidiHuberman’s book is a constant companion and often-quoted inspiration, and the new Orlando’s narrative of madness and absence which offers a tentative form to the book’s ideas embodied in the figures of popular culture, there is also, as mentioned, footage from a long interview in Italian with Didi-Huberman, in which they discuss the book, Dieutre’s film project, and the need for actions of resistance however small. The status of this interview in terms of the timescale of the film is ambiguous. Was it recorded before Dieutre began his project, when, as he says, ‘Georges entrusted me’ with his work? Is it during the project, as Dieutre sits at his laptop looking for a Wi-Fi signal which will allow him to ‘continue his conversation’ with Georges? Is it really, as it appears, a period of encapsulated time independent from the Sicilian journey, spent with Didi-Huberman in his academic study (desk in the foreground, a backdrop of books on the wall)? Or is it an alternative image-space shared only via the small machine on Dieutre’s knee, towards which his head bends in concentration, completely surrounded and included in the Sicilian interiors where Didi-Huberman in person is not? The rigidly unchanging angle may suggest the latter. There are unexpected aspects to this conversation: why does a French intellectual speaking to a French filmmaker about his French book opt, as Didi-Huberman does, to express himself in Italian, in which he is fluent but a little diffident? The paradox is all the more striking in that Dieutre’s other major intellectual interlocutor, Pierandrea Amato, an Italian, responds to questions in French, in a sequence in which Dieutre also appears in the frame. The resolution

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comes in the epilogue of the film, in which the interview footage appears beyond all doubt in the film’s diegetic Sicilian world, projected on a large screen to the mainly young crowd occupying the abandoned Teatro Garibaldi, in Palermo. In retrospect, the apparently intimate conversational sequences which we have already seen are now transformed: they are not in fact part of an interview, but of an address delivered to a group of young activists, and received with enthusiastic applause. At this point Didi-Huberman himself becomes an actor in the drama – or, from another perspective, an image among the other images. As Dieutre expresses it in his presentation of the film, ‘it’s Georges’s face and steady voice that gradually guide the film towards a final metamorphosis. He also becomes a character, a body in the film,39 reminding us as we go of the European intellectual’s rights and duties, and the absolute necessity of a new principle of hope’.40 There is a certain paradox, fully exploited by Dieutre’s camera, in this acquisition by a two-dimensional image of a three-dimensional ‘bodily’ presence. While the camera filming Didi-Huberman never wavers from its direct, face-to-face angle, the one which films the auditorium wanders around the screen, showing it from the side, with consequent distortion of the image projected on it, and including its audience in the frame. If Didi-Huberman becomes a ‘body in the film’, he shares space with his audience only as the narrow, rigid, towering, translucent presence of the screen: he acquires the elusive ‘body of a film’. In that form, however, he can participate in first person in an authentic firefly activity; he can address the occupiers, as well as Dieutre, as ‘you’, and fire them up with the importance of their gesture, currently being immortalised in its turn in the body of another film 39

40

The French version of this bilingual text has ‘corps du film’, which could equally well suggest ‘the body of the film’. Dieutre, Vincent, ‘Orlando ferito/Roland blessé’, English/French text included in the DVD booklet of Orlando ferito/Roland blesse, dist. Pointligneplan.

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which will survive when the inevitable authorities have put an end to the occupation. The full recording, provided on the DVD of the film, however, reveals a slightly more ambivalent picture of this mentoring role. Didi-Huberman’s address was composed in response to written questions, and some objections, from members of the audience who had read his book; Dieutre carefully edits out of his main text any reference to these reactions, in the process turning a potential dialogue with the audience into an inspirational monologue. The film ends with some panning shots across the Palermo twilight, against which some dancing lights appear, which closely resemble, but are obviously not, authentic fireflies. In this as well as other ways beforementioned, therefore, the film’s montage of fact and fiction tends to smooth out the rough edges of reality, and to construct in the mind of its viewer an optimism which, rather than dialectically ricocheting over inconvenient barriers, removes them by the magic of ellipsis and substitution.

Conclusion

We will end our analysis of Didi-Huberman as a theorist of cinema with the analysis of Orlando ferito, with the body of the intellectual and the body of his text both fully immersed in the image-discourse of film. It incarnates the association between Didi-Huberman and this medium which has become the privileged site for his ongoing research into the political value, indeed the political necessity, of images. As yet, this body of work has remained a very rare referent for Anglophone film scholars, and it seems credible that the continued lack of accessible translations of the author’s film-oriented work of the 1990s and 2000s may be in part due to the continued assumption that, since he is an ‘art-historian’, his work is to be sought out primarily by other art-historians. Nigel Saint’s entry on Didi-Huberman in the 2013 Encyclopaedia of Modern French Thought makes absolutely no mention of cinema. While writers such as Victoria Grace Walden have employed Didi-Huberman’s work on Holocaust imagery extensively, and in discussing it in a cinematic context have been moved to refer back to parts of his earlier theories of montage as well as to the theory of the symptom,1 Walden too considers Didi-Huberman to belong to art-history, and brings him around to cinema theory through interaction with Deleuze (and Guattari) and with the thriving Anglophone field of film phenomenology. Likewise, Laura Rascaroli’s 2017 book on the essay film,2 extremely close to L’Oeil de l’histoire in

1

2

Walden, Victoria Grace (2019), Cinematic Intermediaries and Contemporary Holocaust Memory, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 24–31. Rascaroli, Laura (2017), How the Essay Film Thinks, Oxford: OUP.

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approach and direction of argument, accesses Didi-Huberman’s research only through Images malgré tout. None the less the work is of considerable importance in its interactions with current directions in screen studies. The extremely lively field of work around the essay-film, of which Rascaroli’s aforementioned book is one of the most recent illustrations, is an obvious area in which Didi-Huberman’s scholarship is of immediate relevance, and could enter into a very fruitful dialogue with Nicole Brenez’s dedicated elaboration of the political power of avant-garde, montage-based cinematic forms. We may recall Brenez’s memorable description of the afterlife of politically engaged cinema, ‘scattered and destroyed, its fragments remain in the memories of the generations whose destinies it sought to improve’;3 a description of cinema’s power which chimes strongly not only with Didi-Huberman’s work on montage but also with the concept of the firefly and with L’Oeil de l’histoire 4’s Benjaminian concern with the creation of an alternative, subaltern memory (OH4, 32). The later stages of the L’Oeil de l’histoire project, and in particular the long analyses of the movements and gestures in Potemkin which make up volume 6, and which are projected further into the Soulèvements project, suggest a formal link with Raymond Bellour’s work on induced somatic/emotional responses transmitted between film and spectator,4 although Bellour is not one of Didi-Huberman’s references here. There is surely much more to be discovered through engagement with Didi-Huberman’s work in and around cinema. He offers us new

3

4

Brenez, Nicole (2018), ‘Forms of Resistance and Revolt: “We Are In Agreement With All That Has Struggled, and Is Struggling Still, since the World Began” ’, 191–203 in Michael Witt and Michael Temple (eds), The French Cinema Book, 2nd edition, p. 192. Brenez contributed a supportive essay, in the form of a detailed list of ‘further viewing’, to the catalogue of the ‘Soulèvements’ exhibition: Brenez, Nicole (2016), ‘Contre-Attaques: Soubresauts d’images dans l’histoire de la lutte des classes’, in Georges Didi-Huberman, Soulèvements, Gallimard/Jeu de Paume, pp. 71–89. Bellour, Raymond (2009), Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités, Paris: P.O.L.

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perspectives on a materialist  – and increasingly transmissible  – montage of movement; on the capacity of the medium to incarnate and make vivid moments of anachronistic energy which can be imbued with political potential; and on the artist/poet/filmmaker’s role in rendering visibility to non-artistic lives (in which area his work opens up many unresolved questions) to name only a few of the major themes which have been discussed here. Better acquaintance with this developing body of work can only enrich discussion of such debates in the Anglophone world.

Post scriptum This book goes to press at the end of 2020 as most of the world has holed up in response to the epidemic of Novel Coronavirus/ COVID-19. It seems fitting to recall in these circumstances that one of Didi-Huberman’s earliest published books, in 1983, was a collation of ‘written images’ of the plague. The Mémorandum de la peste was composed at the beginning of another devastating pandemic, the AIDS crisis, in conjunction with a theatre production, Dernières nouvelles de la peste, which Jean-Pierre Vincent staged at the Théâtre National de Strasbourg. It concerns itself with visualisation as a means of understanding and remembering; and it long predates DidiHuberman’s interest in cinema – although intriguingly it is not a study of art-images either, but rather of the more dynamic visualisations made possible by verbal descriptions, analogies, even superstitious reinventions of the form of the cure. When this early work was republished in 2006,5 Didi-Huberman added a postface in which, reading it anew in the light of his contemporary concerns, he sees that 5

Didi-Huberman, Georges (2006), Memorandum de la peste, nouvelle édition, Christian Bourgeois. Quotation p. 185.

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lurking in this piece written to guide actors’ research there is a distinctly cinematic element, and speculates that, faced with cataclysmic events, it is cinema which will provide the most appropriate means of recording. ‘We will end up engaging in setting up a cinematic montage as an appropriate form for writing the catastrophe’1: a montage which might take the form of an ‘atlas of gestures’, he suggests. Inevitably both the research undertaken in the 1980s and this cinematic projection of it into the future have resonances in the present moment: we have yet to see whether this kind of cinematic dialogue with the past may also help us to make sense of this present.

1

Memorandum de la peste, 185

Bibliography 1977 Jean-Clarence Lambert, Krasno ou le matérialisme magique, Paris, Paul Wurtz, 1977. Credits G D-H with ‘establishing parts of the biography’.

1982 Invention de l’hystérie: Charcot et l’iconographie photographique de la Salpétrière, Macula, 1982. (English tr. by Alisa Hartz, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of Salpétrière, Cambridge, Mass./London, MIT Press, 2003. Full text online at https:// monoskop.org/images/4/43/Didi_Huberman_Georges_Invention_of_ Hysteria_2003.pdf ).

1983 Mémorandum de la peste, Christian Bourgois, 1983/2006. ‘Notes dramaturgiques’ for Jean Audureau, Le Coup de jeûne de la vieille servante, Comédie française, 1983.

1984 Les Démoniaques dans l’art, de J-M Charcot et P. Richer: édition et présentation, Macula, 1984. ‘Eloge du diaphane’, Artistes, no. 21, 1984, pp. 106–111, republished in Phasmes, 99–110. 149

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‘The Index of the Absent Wound: Monograph on a Stain’, October 29 (Summer, 1984), tr. Thomas Repensek, 63–81. http://underconstruction. wdfiles.com/local--files/imprint-reading/index-wound.pdf

1985 La Peinture incarnée, Minuit, 1985.

1986 ‘La Dissemblance des figures selon Fra Angelico’, Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome: Moyen Age. Temps modernes, 98:2 (1986), 709–802. ‘La couleur de chair ou le paradoxe de Tertullien’, Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse 35 (1986), 9–49. ‘La couleur d’écume ou le paradoxe d’Apelle’, Critique, 469–70 (1986), 609–10. ‘L’Art de ne pas décrire, une aporie du détail chez Vermeer’, La Part de l’Oeil 1986, 2. English translation: ‘The Art of Not Describing: Vermeer – The Detail and the Pitch’, History of the Human Sciences 1989: 2: 135–169, tr. Anthony Cheal Pugh http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/filmphilology/ aporiadetail.pdf ‘The Paradox of the Phasmid’, tr. Anita Hartz, http://www.usc.edu/dept/ comp-lit/tympanum/3/phasmid.html

1990 Devant l’image: Question posée aux fins d’une histoire de l’art, Minuit, 1990 (tr. Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, Penn State UP, 2004. Available online at: http://lensbased.net/files/ catastrophe/GEORGES%20DIDI%20HUBERMAN%2C%20 CONFRONTING%20IMAGES.pdf )

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‘Le disegno de Vasari, ou le bloc-notes magique de l’histoire de l’art’, La Part de l’Oeil 6 (1990), 31–51. Later in Devant l’image. ‘Art et théologie’, Encyclopedia Universalis, supplément, vol. 1, Paris, 1990, 451–458.

1992 Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde, Minuit, 1992. Tr. into Japanese ‘Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde’ and ‘Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde 2’, Delta. Revue internationale pour la poésie expérimentale, 15, 2002, 38–46 and 16, 2002, 38–43. A visage découvert: diréction et présentation, Flammarion, 1992. ‘Le tremblement des évidences’, Architecture d’aujourd’hui 286, April 1993, 74–77.

1993 Le Cube et le visage: Autour d’une sculpture d’Alberto Giacometti, Macula, 1993.

1994 ‘Bataille avec Eisenstein: Forme-matière-montage’, Cinémathèque no. 6, Autumn 1994, pp. 15–38. Saint Georges et le dragon: Version d’une légende, Adam Biro, 1994. L’Empreinte du ciel, édition et présentation des ‘Caprices de la foudre’, de C. Flammarion, Antigone, 1994. ‘Ressemblance mythifiée et ressemblance oubliée chez Vasari: la légende du portrait “sur le vif ” ’, Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome – Italie et Méditerranée 106 (1994), 303–432.

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1996 ‘Pour une anthropologie des singularités formelles. Remarque sur l’invention warburgienne’, Genèses 24: 1 (1996), 145–163. http://www. persee.fr/doc/genes_1155-3219_1996_num_24_1_1408 ‘Tableau = coupure: Expérience visuelle, forme et symptôme selon Carl Einstein’, Cahier du Musée national d’art moderne 58, Winter 1996, 5–27. Tr. C.F.B. Miller as ‘Picture = Rupture: Visual Experience, Form and Symptom According to Carl Einstein’, Papers of Surrealism 7, 2007, http:// www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal7/acrobat%20 files/articles/Didi-Hubpdf.pdf. Later part of ‘Devant le temps’. ‘L’image-matière: poussière, ordure, saleté, sculpture au XVIe siècle’, L’Inactuel 5 (1996), pp. 63–91. Tr. into Spanish by C. Battaglia as ‘La imaginen-materia. Polvo, basura, suciedad, escultura del siglo XVI’, Pasajes. Revista de Teoría y Critica del Arte y la Arquitectura, 2, 2001, 123–140.

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und Modernität des Abdrucks, Köln: DuMont-BuchVerlag, 1999.) Part of the text online at: https://www.centrepompidou.fr/media/document/3c/ 11/3c11c5a19085448f99eb9eddbdf74efa/normal.pdf ‘Contact Images’, tr. Alisa Hartz, 1997. http://underconstruction.wdfiles. com/local--files/imprint-reading/contact_images.pdf. Original article published in Essais sur l’apparition I: Phasmes.

1998 Essais sur l’apparition I: Phasmes, Minuit, 1998 [Phasmes]. ‘Face, proche, lointain: l’empreinte du visage et le lieu pour apparaître’, in H.L. Kessler and G. Wolf (eds),The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, Bologna, Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1998. Contribution to Giuseppe Penone, Carré d’art – Musée d’Art contemporain, Nîmes, Torino: Hopefulmonster, 1997. Developed into ‘Etre crâne’. ‘Savoir-mouvement (L’homme qui parlait aux papillons)’, preface to Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg et l’image en mouvement, Paris, Macula, 1998, 7–20. Then in Phalènes, 108–122. ‘Viscosités et survivances. L’histoire de l’art à l’épreuve du matériau’, Critique 54 (1998), 138–162. ‘L’historien de l’art et ses fantômes. Note sur J.J. Winckelmann’, L’Inactuel 1 (1998), 75–78.

1999 L’Etoilement: Conversation avec Hantaï, Minuit, 1999. La demeure, la souche: Apparentements de l’artiste, Minuit, 1999. Ouvrir Vénus: Nudité, rêve, cruauté, Gallimard, 1999. ‘Wax Flesh, Vicious Circles’, in Encyclopedia Anatomica: A complete collection of anatomical waxes, tr. Brian Holmes, London: CologneTaschen, 1999, 64–74. http://underconstruction.wdfiles.com/local--files/ imprint-reading/wax-flesh.pdf

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2000 Etre crâne: Lieu, contact, pensées, sculpture, Minuit, 2000 (Italian reduced translation, GDH su Giuseppe Penone, tr. T. Savio, Mondadori Electa, 2008). ‘Des gammes anachroniques’, interview with Robert Maggiori, Libération, 23 November 2000, reprinted in Robert Maggiori, Didi-Huberman, Le temps de voir, Minuit.

2001 Devant le temps: Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images, Minuit, 2001 [DT]. L’Homme qui marchait dans la couleur, Minuit, 2001. Part of this reproduced in translation in Michael Rotondi (ed.), James Turrell: The Other Horizon, Hatje Cantz, 2001. English translation by Drew S. Burk, The Man Who Walked in Color, University of Minnesota Press, 2017. *Génie du non-lieu: Air, poussière, empreinte, hantise, Minuit, 2001. ‘Images malgré tout’, in Mémoire des camps. Photographies des camps de concentration, ed. Marval. Text reprinted in Images malgré tout, Minuit, 2003. ‘Die Farbe des Nicht-Ortes’, tr. R. Werner, 123–140 in E. Alliez and E. von Samsonow (eds), Chroma Drama. Widerstand der Farbe, Wien, Turia + Kant, 2001. ‘Het beeld als matrijs. Kunstgeschiedenis en genealogie va de gelijkenis’, tr. H. Saelman, De Witte Raaf, 94, 2001, 1–5. ‘Aby Warburg et l’archive des intensités’, Etudes photographiques 10, 2001, 144–163.

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‘ “Im Angesicht der Zeit”. Kaleidoscop und “Kopfzerbrecher”: “Die Zeit schwingt sich wie eine Brezel” ’, tr. U. Kunzmann, 67–80 in A. Lammert (ed.), Konstruktionen von Natur. Von Blossfeldt zur Virtualität, Berlin, Akademie der Künste-Verlag der Kunst, 2001. ‘L’Air et l’empreinte’, 45–59 in A fleur de peau. Le moulage sur nature au XIXe siècle, dir. E Papet, Paris, Musée d’Orsay-RMN , 2001. ‘Montage des ruines’, interview with G. Astic and C. Tailing, Simulacres, 5, 2001, 8–17. ‘La femme cliché. Dermographisme et stigmatisation expérimentale au XIXe siècle’, L’Herne, 75, 2001, 167–176. ‘Das nachlebende Bild. Aby Warburg und Tylors Anthropologie’ (“Colloquium Rauricum, VII”), 205–224 in G. Boehm (ed.), Homo Pictor, Munich-Leipzig, K.G. Saur, 2001. ‘Nachleben, ou l’inconscient du temps: les images aussi souffrent de réminiscences’, L’Animal. Littératures, arts et philosophies, 10, 2001, 40–48. Tr. into German as ‘Nachleben oder das Unbewusste der Zeit. Auch die Bilder leiden an Reminiszenzen’, tr. M. Sedlaczek, 177–187 in Singularitäten – Allianzen. Interventionen 11, dir. J. Hüber, Zürich-WienNew York, Institut für Theorie der Gestaltung und Kunst-, Voldemeer Springer, 2002. ‘La tragédie de la culture: Warburg avec Nietzsche’, Visio, V, 4, 2001, 9–19. ‘Immagini malgrado tutto’, tr. C. Bigliosi, 11–62 in F. Relia (ed.), Trame 2. Il male. Scritture sul male e sul dolore, Bologna, Pendragon 2001. (First draft of Images malgré tout?) ‘L’oeuvre-fable: Entretien avec G D-H’, interview with Christine Palmiéri, Les Perturbations 53, March–April–May 2001, 24–29. https://www.erudit. org/fr/revues/etc/2001-n53-etc1118705/35649ac/

2002 L’Image survivante: Histoire de l’art aux temps des fantômes, Minuit, 2002 (tr. Harvey Mendelsohn, The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms, Aby Warburg’s History of Art, Penn State UP, 2016). [IS] Ninfa moderna: Essais sur le drapé tombé, Gallimard, 2002.

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2003 Images malgré tout, Minuit, 2003 (tr. Shane B. Lillis, Images In Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz’, University of Chicago Press, 2008). [IMT] ‘De ressemblance à ressemblance’, 143–168 in Maurice Blanchot: Récits critiques, ed. Christophe Bident and Pierre Vilar, Tours: Farrago and Léo Schérer, 2003.

2004 Mouvements de l’air: Etienne-Jules Marey, photographe des fluides, Gallimard, 2004.

2005 Gestes de l’air et de la pierre: Corps, parole, souffle, image, Minuit, 2005.

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2006 Le Danseur des solitudes, Minuit, 2006. Ex-Voto: Image, organe, temps, Bayard, 2006. ‘Ouvrir les camps, fermer les yeux’, Annales 2006/5, 1011–1049. ‘S’inquiéter devant chaque image’, interview with Matthieu Potte-Bonneville and Pierre Zaoui, Vacarme 37, 11 October 2006.

2007 L’Image ouverte: Motifs de l’incarnation dans les arts visuels, Gallimard, 2007. Two short extracts online at: http://www.ac-grenoble.fr/lycee/vincent. indy/spip.php?article426 ‘Construire la durée’, in ‘Pascal Convert: Lamento [1998–2005], Luxembourg: Musée d’art moderne Grand-Duc Jean, 2007. http://www. pascalconvert.fr/histoire/lamento/lamento-didi-huberman.html. Tr Italian ‘Costruire la durata’, in Federico Ferrari (a. c. di), Del contemporaneo. Saggi su arte e tempo, Milano, Bruno Mondadori, 2007. ‘L’émotion ne dit pas “je”. Dix fragments sur la liberté esthétique’, catalogue Alfredo Jaar: La politique des images, Musée cantonal des beaux-arts, Lausanne. Interview with Pedro G. Romero, Minerva, no. 5.

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2009 L’Oeil de l’histoire 1: Quand les images prennent position, Minuit, 2009. Tr. as The Eye of History: When Images Take Positions (tr. Shane B. Lillis, Thierry Gervais, Boston: MIT Press 2018). [OH1] Survivance des lucioles, Minuit, 2009. English tr. Survival of the Fireflies, University of Minnesota Press, 2018. [SL]

2010 L’Oeil de l’histoire 2: Remontages du temps subi, Minuit, 2010 (Part on the section on Farocki, ‘Pourfendre (la violence du monde)’, pp. 71–90, translated [JR1] by Patrick Kremer as ‘How to Open Your Eyes’, undated, http://sduk.us/farocki/Didi-Huberman-OpenEyes.pdf [OH2]). Atlas ¿Como llevar el mundo a cuesta? – Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back, Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2010. ‘Conversazione sul cinema’, in Roberto de Gaetano and Francesco Ceraolo (eds) Conversazioni sul cinema, Fata Morgana fuori serie: Cosenza: Pellegrini Editore, 2010, ebook Frontiere 2016 with English translation Cinema, Thought, Life, same series. ‘Introduction’ and ‘L’ivresse des formes et l’illumination profane’, Images re-vues: L’histoire de l’art depuis Walter Benjamin, hors série2: 2010, http://imagesrevues.revues.org/276 and http://imagesrevues.revues. org/291

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2011 L’Oeil de l’histoire 3: Atlas ou le gai savoir inquiet, Minuit, 2011. Tr. as Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science (tr. Shane B. Lillis, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2018). [OH3] Ecorces, Minuit, 2011. English tr. Bark (tr. Samuel E. Martin), Cambridge, Mass./ London, MIT Press, 2017. L’Expérience des images (with Marc Augé and Umberto Eco), Bry-s-Marne, INA Editions, 2011.

2012 L’Oeil de l’histoire 4: Peuples exposés, peuples figurants, Minuit, 2012. [OH4] ‘Pathos et praxis: Eisenstein contre Barthes’, 1895, no. 67, Summer 2012, pp. 9–24. Les grands entretiens d’Artpress, Imec-Editeur-Artpress, 2012.

2013 Essais sur l’apparition 2: Phalènes, Minuit, 2013. [Phalènes] ‘Athènes aperçue: De la culture et de la barbarie’, Mediapart Aperçues, 27 May 2013, https://blogs.mediapart.fr/georges-didi-huberman/ blog/270513/apercues-4 ‘Une conversation avec GDH et Yves Citton’, Histoire et Société, 8 September 2013, https://histoireetsociete.wordpress.com/2013/09/18/uneconversation-avec-georges-didi-huberman-et-yves-citton/ ‘Rendre sensible’, in various authors, Qu’est-ce qu’un peuple?, La Fabrique, 2013, tr. ‘To Render Sensible’ in What is a People?, Columbia University Press, 2016, 65–86. N.B. this text is always quoted using the English version. [WIAP] Blancs soucis, Minuit, 2013. Sur le fil, Minuit, 2013.

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2014 Sentir le grisou, Minuit, 2014. [SG] ‘Lumière contre lumière’, 31–45, with following translation, in La Disparition des lucioles: exposition à la prison Sainte-Anne d’Avignon, Actes Sud, 2014. Essayer voir, Minuit, 2014. ‘G D-H: “Regarder n’est pas une compétence, c’est une expérience” ’, interview with Jean-Max Collard and Claire Moulène, Les Inrocks, 12 February 2014.

2015 L’Oeil de l’histoire 5: Passés cités par JLG , Minuit, 2015. [OH5] Sortir du noir, Minuit, 2015. [SN] L’Histoire de l’art depuis Walter Benjamin (direction et présentation), Mimesis, 2015. La mémoire brûle, Pékin, OCAT Institut, 2015. Ninfa Fluida: Essai sur le drapé-désir, Gallimard, 2015. Jean-Marc Lalanne and Diane Lisarelli, ‘Godard passeur ou terreur?’, conversation with Olivier Séguret and G D-H, Les Inrockuptibles 15 April 2015, http://www.pressreader.com/france/les-inrockuptibl es/20150415/282398397943312

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‘Imaginer Atlas’, interview with Alexis Lussier, Guylaine Massoutre, and Manon Plante, Spirale 251 (Winter 2015), 33–36.

2016 L’Oeil de l’histoire 6: Peuples en larmes, peuples en armes, Minuit, 2016. [OH6] Soulèvements (ed.), Gallimard/Jeu de Paume, 2016. Texts ‘Introduction’ (13–20) and ‘Par les désirs (Fragments sur ce qui nous soulève)’ (289–382). [Soulèvements] ‘Où va donc la colère? Du bon usage de l’insurrection’, Le Monde diplomatique, May 2016, 14–15, http://www.monde-diplomatique. fr/2016/05/DIDI_HUBERMAN/55440. Later republished in Désirer déobéir: Ce qui nous soulève 1, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2019, 239–248. Contribution to Daniele Guastini and Adriano Ardovino (eds), I Percorsi dell’immaginazione: Studi in onore di Pietro Montani, Cosenza, Pellegrini editore, ebook, 2016. ‘G D-H: “Les larmes sont une manifestation de la puissance politique” ’, interview with Catherine Calvet and Cécile Daumas, Libération, 1 September 2016. http://www.liberation.fr/debats/2016/09/01/georgesdidi-huberman-les-larmes-sont-une-manifestation-de-la-puissancepolitique_1476324 ‘G D-H: “J’aime les images qui me privent de mots” ’, interview with Cathy Rémy, L’Oeil de la photographie, 14 October 2016. http://www. loeildelaphotographie.com/fr/2016/10/14/article/159923218/georgesdidi-huberman-jaime-les-images-qui-me-privent-de-mots/ ‘G D-H: “Les images sont des actes et non pas seulement des objets décoratifs ou des fantasmes” ’, interview with Cédric Enjalbert, Philosophie Magazine, 17 October 2016. http://www.philomag.com/ lactu/breves/georges-didi-huberman-les-images-sont-des-actes-et-nonpas-seulement-des-objets ‘Georges Didi-Huberman: “Les possibles d’une imagination politique” ’, interview with Magali Jauffret, L’Humanité, 18 October 2016. http://www. humanite.fr/georges-didi-huberman-les-possibles-dune-imaginationpolitique-618356

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2017 Ninfa profunda. Essai sur le drapé-tourmente, Gallimard, April.

2018 Aperçues, Editions de Minuit, March. [Aperçues]

2019 Désirer, désobéir: Tome 1. Ce qui nous soulève, Editions de Minuit, March. [DD] Ninfa dolorosa: Essais sur la mémoire d’un geste, Gallimard, March.

Secondary sources Adorno, Theodor (2000), ‘The Essay as Form’ (1958), tr. Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, 91–111 in Brian O’Connor (ed.), The Adorno Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. Agamben, Giorgio (20011), La Comunità che viene, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri. Agnese, Roberta (2014), ‘Guetter les catastrophes, parler au présent historique. Pasolini vu par Didi-Huberman’, Acta fabula Notes de lecture, vol. 15, no. 10. http://www.fabula.org/acta/document9016.php 1

This seems to be inaccurate, it’s cited by D-H and elsewhere as 1990, but that’s what my edition says, with no hint of an earlier imprint!

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Index Adorno, Theodor 25–26, 46–48, 50, 55–57, 62, 64, 69 ‘The Essay as Form’ 46–48, 56–57 Adorno Prize 23 Agamben, Giorgio 14, 92–93, 117, 120, 124 Il Regno e la gloria 14 Ai Wei-Wei 109 Amato, Pierandrea 137, 142 anachronism 8, 10–11, 17, 20, 72, 77, 89, 113–119, 129–132 Angelaki (journal) 5n, 15, 107n Apocalypse: La 2ème Guerre Mondiale (TV series) 32 archive 24–32, 55–56, 71 Arendt, Hannah 79 What Is Politics? 79 Askavusa Collective 138, 141 Auerbach, Erich 88

Brecht, Bertold 11, 31, 48–50, 62–64, 130 Arbeitsjournal 50 Brenez, Nicole 2, 146 Buñuel, Luis 40 Un chien andalou 40 Butler, Judith 111

Banfi, Anna 125–126 Barthes, Roland 95, 98–102, 106, 132 La Chambre claire 102 Bataille, Georges 6–7, 10, 38–40, 44–45, 71, 82–83, 114 Baudelaire, Charles 67, 84 Bazin, Philippe 80, 82 Bellour, Raymond 2, 103–104, 146 Benigni, Roberto 24 Benjamin, Walter 5, 8, 14, 17, 20, 43–44, 46, 48, 54, 60, 62–64, 76, 78, 83, 85–86, 90, 94, 96, 114–115, 117, 120–121, 130, 133, 140, 146 Bergman, Ingrid 89 Bernstein, Sydney 27 Biette, Jean-Claude 135 Blanchot, Maurice 82–83, 91 Boltansky, Christian 11 Boucheron, Patrick 127–128

Daney, Serge 28 Deleuze, Gilles 8, 10, 67, 70, 87, 92, 94–95, 98, 145 dialectic, rascally 7, 26, 41–43, 52, 64, 68, 91, 114, 121 Didi-Huberman, Georges Aperçues 15–16, 107–108 Le Danseur des solitudes 9 Désirer, désobéir: Ce qui nous soulève I 15 Devant le temps 8, 11, 13, 17, 25, 37, 43–44, 54, 114–115 L’Image ouverte 9 L’Image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps de fantômes selon Aby Warburg 113, 118 Images malgré tout 9, 12, 22–27, 33–34, 36, 44, 58, 62, 65, 123, 146 Invention de l’hystérie 6, 37 Mémorandum de la peste 147–148

Cahiers du cinéma (journal) 135 Caygill, Howard 104 Centanni, Monica 125 Césaire, Aimé 128–129 Chamoiseau, Patrick 128–129 Frères migrants 128–129 Chaplin, Charles 84 Charcot, Jean-Martin 6 Cinémathèque (journal) 38 Cipriani, Mario 90 Cuticchio, Mimmo 137, 140

171

172

Index

L’Oeil de l’histoire (series) 3, 8, 10–13, 20, 27, 33–34, 37, 43, 45, 48, 51–55, 61–63, 65, 69, 75, 77, 107–108, 112, 113, 115–117, 120, 124, 129–130, 145 L’Oeil de l’histoire I: Quand les images prennent position 10–11, 27, 48, 50, 52, 64, 67–68, 130 L’Oeil de l’histoire II: Remontages du temps subi 11, 17, 25, 27–33, 43, 46–49, 51, 54–61, 66, 77–78, 115–116 L’Oeil de l’histoire III: Atlas ou le gai savoir inquiet 11, 44–45, 113 L’Oeil de l’histoire IV: Peuples exposés, peuples figurants 11–12, 17, 34–35, 44, 50–51, 75–95, 97, 105, 116, 120, 130–132, 140, 146 L’Oeil de l’histoire V: Passés cités par JLG 12, 17, 43, 49, 53, 55, 61–70, 111 L’Oeil de l’histoire VI: Peuples en larmes, peuples en armes 7, 10–11, 13, 15–17, 47, 51–52, 55, 73, 75, 78, 85, 87, 95, 97–106, 110, 112, 130, 132–133, 146 Phalènes 16 La Ressemblance informe 6, 17, 38–43, 49–52, 65 La Ressemblance par contact 9 Sentir le grisou 14, 17, 43, 55, 71–73 Sortir du noir 14–15, 33–36 Survivances des lucioles 3, 13–14, 17, 104, 116–126, 129, 133–134 dance 9, 51–53, 59, 72, 93, 101–102, 123 Davoli, Ninetto 94 Dieutre, Vincent 2, 17, 117, 129, 134–144 ‘ABC du Tiers-Cinéma’ 136

Ea1/ Les Accords d’Alba 135 Ea2 135 Leçons de ténèbres 134 Mon voyage d’hiver 134 Orlando Ferito/ Roland blessé 17, 117, 129, 134–144 Viaggio nella dopo-storia 135 Disdéri, Alphonse-Eugène 84 Documents (journal) 38–40 Ducoin, Jean-Emmanuel 110 Dziga-Vertov 103 Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Tobias 29–30 Einstein, Carl 8 Eisenstein, Sergei 5–7, 13, 15, 38–42, 44–45, 47–48, 50–51, 69, 75, 77–78, 84–85, 87–89, 95, 98–107, 110, 130, 132–133 Battleship Potemkin 51, 87, 95, 98, 101, 103–105, 107, 146 The General Line 38, 101, 103 October 87 Strike 41, 88 emotion 10, 13, 28–30, 34, 51–52, 72–73, 77, 95–108, 130, 132–133, 146 Engramma (journal) 125–126 Eustache, Jean 135 Farocki, Harun 11–12, 17, 24–25, 30–33, 46–48, 51, 54–62, 64–66, 69, 71–72, 78, 116, 136 Aufschub 30–32, 46n, 57, 59 Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges 58–59 Ich glaubte Gefangene zu sehen 59 Schnittstelle 59 figurant (extra) 12, 86–93, 140 fireflies 13–14, 116–129, 134, 137–140, 144 Fleischer, Alain 7 L’Homme du Pincio 7 Freud, Sigmund 6, 43

Index Fuller, Samuel 28–30, 32–33 The Big Red One 28–29 Falkenau, l’impossible 28–30, 32 George, Sylvain 2, 122 gesture 11, 21, 34, 73, 82–85, 88–96, 99–111, 116–117, 124, 129–133, 140–143, 146, 148 Giotto 26 Godard, Jean-Luc 9, 12, 17, 24–27, 30, 44, 47, 49, 53–54, 60–70, 111, 116, 135 Film socialisme 53, 65 Histoire(s) du cinéma 26, 54, 62, 66, 111 Ici et ailleurs 62, 67 Je vous salue, Marie 64 Numéro deux 60 Goya, Francisco 26, 84 Guattari, Félix 145 Guiguet, Jean-Claude 135–136 Les Passagers 136 Guillaume, Gustave 130 Hegel, G.W.F. 26, 40–42, 65–66, 97n Hitchcock, Alfred 19, 27 North by Northwest 19 Hitler, Adolf 67 Holocaust imagery 2, 7–9, 11, 14–15, 17, 19–36, 62, 123, 145 Hugo, Victor 84 L’Humanité (newspaper) 110 Indignados 126–127 Jaar, Alfredo 2, 9, 98 Kawase, Naomi 135 Kracauer, Siegfried 27 Kuhn, Eva 122–124 Lanzmann, Claude 7–9, 19–21, 23–25, 29, 44, 54 Shoah 7, 9, 17, 19–20, 23–25, 35 Lenin, Vladimir 104, 106

173

La Lettre du cinéma (journal) 135 Levinas, Emmanuel 81 Lindeperg, Sylvie 57 Lombroso, Cesare 81 Lucretius 121 De rerum naturam 121 Lumière, Auguste & Louis 86 Macé, Marielle 3 Magnani, Anna 89 Malaroda, Gigi 138–139 Mangini, Cecilia 131 Stendalì 131 Marker, Chris 16 Le Fond de l’air est rouge 16 Marks, Laura 2 Mauriaucourt, Sarah 126–127 Meir, Golda 67 ‘Mémoires des camps’ (exhibition) 21–22 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 107–108 Metz, Christian 102 Le Monde diplomatique (newspaper) 112 Monroe, Marilyn 72 montage 1–2, 6–14, 17, 20, 23–27, 29–33, 35, 37–73, 79–80, 88–89, 100–102, 105–108, 113–119, 129–133, 136, 145–148 Morel Darleux, Corinne 127 Morin, Edgar 85 multiplicity, see ‘plurality’ Nancy, Jean-Luc 82–83 Nemes, Laszlo 14, 17, 33–36 Saul fia 14, 17, 33–36 Nietzsche, Friedrich 45, 52, 97n Le Gai savoir 45 Night Will Fall (Singer, 2014) 27n, 29 Nuit Debout 127 Occupy movement 126 Pagnoux, Elisabeth 22–25 Paini, Dominique 135

174 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 12, 14, 17, 34, 46, 50–51, 54–55, 62, 68–71, 73, 77–78, 85, 88–95, 117, 119–120, 127–128, 131 ‘L’Articolo delle lucciole’ 117, 119 Che cosa sono le nuvole 119 ‘Il “Cinema di Poesia” ’ 70 La Rabbia 14, 46n, 54, 71–2 La Ricotta 89–91, 119 Il Vangelo secondo Matteo 93, 131 Pasolini, Susanna 131 phenomenology 2, 107–108, 145 Picasso, Pablo 65–66 plurality 6, 10, 15, 37, 75–82, 87, 93 Pudovkin, Vsevolod 92 Qu’est-ce qu’un peuple? (collective volume) 76, 80, 96–97 Rancière, Jacques 2–3, 7, 15–16, 82, 86n, 95, 105–108, 132 Rascaroli, Laura 31, 46–47, 145–146 resistance 9, 11, 13–14, 77, 93–95, 104–112, 117–119, 122, 131–134, 142 Resnais, Alain 32 Nuit et Brouillard 32 Riefenstahl, Leni 62 Triumph des Willens 81 Rivette, Jacques 135 Roche, Denis 118 Rosanvallon, Pierre 96–97 Rossellini, Roberto 12, 78, 89–90, 135 Stromboli 89 Saint, Nigel 145 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de 128 Sander, August 84 Sauvage, Bernabé 136 Schmitt, Carl 120

Index Sobchack, Vivien 2 ‘Soulèvements’ exhibition 13–17, 75, 78, 105, 107–112, 129, 132–133, 146 Spielberg, Steven 24 Stern, Daniel N. 103 survivances 17, 89, 94–95, 102, 107, 113–118, 121–124, 129–132, 140 symptom, image as 6, 37–44, 65, 68, 95, 113–114, 145 Les Temps modernes (journal) 2, 8, 21–25 Trafic (journal) 57 Truong, Nicolas 127 Valle-Corpas, Irene 1–2, 15–16 Vecchiali, Paul 135 Vincent, Jean-Pierre 147 Vingtième Siècle (journal) 19 visibility (of people(s)) 7, 11–13, 17, 34, 75–95, 97, 147 Vygotsky, Lev 100 Waddington, Laura 2, 14, 122–123, 125–126, 128–129, 141 Border 122–126, 128–129, 141 Wajcman, Gérard 22–24, 26 Walden, Victoria Grace 107n, 145 Wang Bing 12, 78, 93–95, 105 Man With No Name 93–94 Warburg, Aby 5, 8, 11, 17, 21, 45, 62, 113–115, 118, 124, 130, 132–133 Atlas Mnemosyne 5, 45, 113 Warhol, Andy 60–61 Weiss, Emile 28, 32 Ziao Lang 105