Haunting the Left Bank: Mortality and Intersubjectivity in Varda, Resnais and Marker 1800796676, 9781800796676

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New Studies in European Cinema

New Studies in European Cinema

Engaging with contemporary film-philosophical research, this book investigates the effects of a haunting presence of death in life. It considers moments in which the films of Agnès Varda, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais and theories of intersubjectivity, gender and mortality in contemporaneous works by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty coalesce around this ethical epicentre, the equality enacted by death on every mortal. Challenging hierarchical divisions between subjects constructed around geo-political, gendered or spectatorial difference, it establishes a paradigm in which intersubjective interactions, especially through the gaze, are instead ethical and egalitarian. Haunting the Left Bank identifies and explores the presence of mortality in these directors’ cinematic images, revealing how they indicate ways of connecting with other subjects and speaking to a recognition of equality and difference.

ISBN 978-1-80079-667-6

www.peterlang.com

Kierran Horner

Kierran Horner was most recently Honorary Postdoctoral Visiting Research Fellow in the Film Studies Department at King’s College London. He has published several articles in peer-reviewed journals such as L’Esprit createur, Film Philosophy, Studies in French Cinema and Studies in European Cinema. His research takes a feminist-philosophical approach to questions pertaining to mortality, intersubjectivity and identity hierarchies, engaging with topics as diverse as pregnancy, Pop Art, gendered hierarchies and animal agency. He is currently investigating intersectional representations of women’s mental health in European film.

HAUNTING THE LEFT BANK

‘A significant and astute contribution whose insights across film studies, philosophy, and feminism demonstrate the ongoing relevance of Left Bank filmmakers Varda, Resnais and Marker.’ – Steven Ungar, Professor Emeritus, Department of Cinematic Arts, University of Iowa

Kierran Horner

HAUNTING THE LEFT BANK Mortality and Intersubjectivity in Varda, Resnais and Marker Peter Lang

New Studies in European Cinema

New Studies in European Cinema

Engaging with contemporary film-philosophical research, this book investigates the effects of a haunting presence of death in life. It considers moments in which the films of Agnès Varda, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais and theories of intersubjectivity, gender and mortality in contemporaneous works by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty coalesce around this ethical epicentre, the equality enacted by death on every mortal. Challenging hierarchical divisions between subjects constructed around geo-political, gendered or spectatorial difference, it establishes a paradigm in which intersubjective interactions, especially through the gaze, are instead ethical and egalitarian. Haunting the Left Bank identifies and explores the presence of mortality in these directors’ cinematic images, revealing how they indicate ways of connecting with other subjects and speaking to a recognition of equality and difference.

ISBN 978-1-80079-667-6

www.peterlang.com

Kierran Horner

Kierran Horner was most recently Honorary Postdoctoral Visiting Research Fellow in the Film Studies Department at King’s College London. He has published several articles in peer-reviewed journals such as L’Esprit createur, Film Philosophy, Studies in French Cinema and Studies in European Cinema. His research takes a feminist-philosophical approach to questions pertaining to mortality, intersubjectivity and identity hierarchies, engaging with topics as diverse as pregnancy, Pop Art, gendered hierarchies and animal agency. He is currently investigating intersectional representations of women’s mental health in European film.

HAUNTING THE LEFT BANK

‘A significant and astute contribution whose insights across film studies, philosophy, and feminism demonstrate the ongoing relevance of Left Bank filmmakers Varda, Resnais and Marker.’ – Steven Ungar, Professor Emeritus, Department of Cinematic Arts, University of Iowa

Kierran Horner

HAUNTING THE LEFT BANK Mortality and Intersubjectivity in Varda, Resnais and Marker Peter Lang

HAUNTING THE LEFT BANK

New Studies in European Cinema VOL. 23 Series Editors Fiona Handyside, University of Exeter Danielle Hipkins, University of Exeter Mariana Liz, University of Lisbon Catherine Wheatley, King‘s College London

HAUNTING THE LEFT BANK Mortality and Intersubjectivity in Varda, Resnais and Marker

Kierran Horner

PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Horner, Kierran, 1977- author. Title: Haunting the Left Bank : mortality and intersubjectivity in Varda, Resnais and Marker / Kierran Horner. Description: New York : Peter Lang Publishing, 2023. | Series: New studies in European cinema, 1661-0261 ; vol no. 23 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022034991 (print) | LCCN 2022034992 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800796676 (paperback) | ISBN 9781800796683 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800796690 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: New wave films--France. | Varda, Agnès, 1928-2019--Criticism and interpretation. | Resnais, Alain, 1922-2014--Criticism and interpretation. | Marker, Chris, 1921-2012--Criticism and interpretation. | Motion pictures--Philosophy. Classification: LCC PN1993.5.F7 H67 2023 (print) | LCC PN1993.5.F7 (ebook) | DDC 791.430944--dc22 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022034991 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022034992 Cover image: Albrecht Dürer, Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513). Cover design by Brian Melville for Peter Lang Ltd. ISSN 1661-0261 ISBN 978-1-80079-667-6 (print) ISBN 978-1-80079-668-3 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-80079-669-0 (ePub) © Peter Lang Group AG 2023 Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers, Oxford, United Kingdom [email protected], www.peterlang.com Kierran Horner has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work. All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed.

Contents

List of figures

vii

Acknowledgements xi List of abbreviations

xiii

Introduction Phantoms of the rive gauche 1 Chapter 1 Sartre’s Conflictual Subject versus Beauvoir’s Equivocal I: War, Illness and the Death of the Other Chapter 2 Levinasian Alterity: Resisting Objectifications of the Feminine Figure and Death

31

105

Chapter 3 Merleau-​Ponty’s Embodied Perception and the Chiasmic Relation: The Overlap between Subject and Other and Life and Death 181 Becoming Conclusive: Death and Gender in the Intersubjective Relation 247 Filmography 257 Bibliography 261 Index 285

Figures

Figure 1:

Death in Life, a coffin carried through a busy intersection in The Battle of the Ten Million (Chris Marker and Valérie Mayoux, 1970), © ISKRA, SLON, Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos and KG Productions.

14

The transience between life and death, a victim of the camps in Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1956), © Argos Films, Cocinor and Como-​Films.

53

Images of an auspicious past penetrated by the placard for the cemetery in Muriel (Alain Resnais, 1963), © Argos Films.

60

Figure 4:

Burying their guilt, soldiers in Muriel (Alain Resnais, 1963), © Argos Films.

63

Figure 5:

War and death find presence in the soldier’s thoughts in Le Joli Mai (Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme, 1962), © Sofracima.

67

‘Is it the thought that your noblest deeds are mortal?’, Le Joli Mai (Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme, 1962), © Sofracima.

70

The waking woman no longer exists in the present world of La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962), © Argos Films.

76

The spectre of a floating skull in La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962), © Argos Films.

76

Figure 2:

Figure 3:

Figure 6:

Figure 7:

Figure 8:

viii

Figure 9:

Figure 10:

Figure 11:

Figures

The pregnant doll and exposed foetus in L’Opéra-​Mouffe (Agnès Varda, 1958), © Ciné-​Tamaris.

85

Ageing faces again show signs of vulnerability in L’Opéra-​Mouffe (Agnès Varda, 1958), © Ciné-​Tamaris.

86

The imaged form of Death in the opening of Cléo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962), © Ciné-​Tamaris.

91

Figures 12.1 and 12.2:

Cléo gazes … and is gazed upon in Cléo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962), © Ciné-​ Tamaris. 97

Figure 13:

François shaves on the left of frame, as Thérèse prepares the children on the right in Le Bonheur (Agnès Varda, 1965), © Ciné-​Tamaris.

126

Thérèse’s alterity is absorbed, from which she can escape only in death, Le Bonheur (Agnès Varda, 1965), © Ciné-​Tamaris.

128

Figure 14:

Figure 15:

Varda’s challenge to the carnal gaze in Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985), © Ciné-​ Tamaris. 135

Figure 16:

Mona’s death shroud(s) in Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985), © Ciné-​Tamaris.

Figures 17.1 and 17.2:

Elle averts her gaze … then meets her reflection in Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959), © Argos Films, Como-​ Films, Daïeï and Pathé Overseas. 145

Figure 18:

Death i/​on the mirror in Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), © Terra Films, Société nouvelle des films

137

ix

Figures

Figure 19:

Cormoran, Argos Films, Cinetel, Pre-​Ci-​ Tel, Silver Films, Cineriz, Como Films.

149

A resists the masculine-​as-​subject in Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), © Terra Films, Société nouvelle des films Cormoran, Argos Films, Cinetel, Pre-​Ci-​ Tel, Silver Films, Cineriz, Como Films.

153

Figures 20.1 and 20.2: Reciprocal shot/​reverse-​shots engender sympathy in the spectator in A Grin Without a Cat (Chris Marker, 1977 and 1993), © ISKRA, INA, Dovidis. Figure 21:

The gaze of the filmed subject is welcomed, égalité du regard in Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1982), © Argos Films.

Figures 22.1 and 22.2: A glance away from the light and camera … before the desire to communicate is met, Description of a Struggle (Chris Marker, 1960), © Israel Film Archive. Figure 23:

Figure 24:

Figure 25:

165

170

173

The iris light sutures the distance between zones in Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1982), © Argos Films.

174

The woman with pitch-​black eyes and a dark cowl of hair around her angular face in Gauguin (Alain Resnais, 1950), © Panthéon Production.

199

The bulb represents the death descending on the figures beneath it in Guernica (Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens, 1950), © Panthéon Production. 204

Figures 26.1 and 26.2: Multiple perspectives, camera eyes meet in Salut les Cubains (Agnès Varda, 1963), © Ciné-​Tamaris and Pathé Cinéma. 207

x

Figure 27:

Figure 28:

Figure 29:

Figures

Engaging reciprocally, the late Beny Moré meets the camera-​eye and smiles in Salut les Cubains (Agnès Varda, 1963), © Ciné-​ Tamaris and Pathé Cinéma.

210

The sketch that represents a spectator’s reflection in the mirror in The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000), © Ciné-​Tamaris.

214

Varda’s hands speak to an intersecting of subjects and life and death in The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000), © Ciné-​Tamaris.

225

Figure 30:

Laura enters the image fragment by fragment, projected from a spectral elsewhere, Level Five (Chris Marker, 1996), © Films de l'Astrophre and Argos Films. 233

Figure 31:

Laura as screen reflecting images of an immaterial, deathly realm in Level Five (Chris Marker, 1996), © Films de l'Astrophre and Argos Films.

236

The eponymous, phantasmal chats in The Case of the Grinning Cat (Chris Marker, 2004), © Les Films du Jeudi, Laurence Braunberger and Arte France.

241

Figure 32:

Figures 33.1 and 33.2:

A pigeon flies along a subway … and is replaced by a shadowy figure in The Case of the Grinning Cat (Chris Marker, 2004), © Les Films du Jeudi, Laurence Braunberger and Arte France. 242

Acknowledgements

My gratitude first to Professor Sarah Cooper for supervising my PhD thesis, which was the source material for this book, and to others at the Film Studies Department at King’s College, London, where I was a Postdoctoral Visiting Research Fellow whilst editing this book. For their understanding and support, thanks go to my friends and, for first impressing on me an enthusiasm for knowledge, my parents. Finally, for often being my first reader and for having the wit, will and patience to alternately attend to and challenge my ideas, I am more than grateful to Aimée.

Abbreviations

AD

Simone de Beauvoir,  Adieux:  A Farewell to Sartre [La Cérémonie des adieux, suivi de Entretiens avec Jean-​Paul Sartre, Août-​Septembre, 1981]

AEL Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas [Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas, 1997] ‘APC’ Jean-​Paul Sartre, ‘Apologie pour le cinéma: Défense et illustration d’un art international’, in Écrits de jeunesse [1924] BB

Simone de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome [1959]

BN

Jean-​ Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness:  An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology [L’Être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, 1943]

CN

Jean-​Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism [Situations V: Colonialisme et néo-​colonialisme, 1964]

CPP Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers [1987] EA

Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity [Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté, 1947]

EE

Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents [De l’existence à l’existant, 1947]

EH

Jean-​Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism [L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946, after a talk presented in 1945]

EI

Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo [Éthique et infini, 1982]

ESD Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference [Éthique de la différence sexuelle, 1984]

xiv

Abbreviations

GDT Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death and Time [Dieu, la mort et le temps, 1993, after his Sorbonne lectures of 1973–​4] IPP

Jean-​Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination [L’Imaginaire: Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination, 1940]

OTB Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence [Autrement qu’être, ou au-​delà de l’essence, 1974] PP

Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception [Phé-​ noménologie de la perception, 1945]

SNS Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, Sense and Non-​Sense [Sens et non-​sens, 1948] SS

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex [La Deuxième Sexe, 1949]

SW Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman [Speculum de l’autre femme, 1974] TI

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority [Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité, 1961]

‘ TO’ Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Time and the Other’, in Time and the Other and Additional Essays [‘Les Temps et l’autre’, 1947, after his Collège Philosophique lectures of 1946–​7] VE

Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death [Une Mort très douce, 1964]

VI

Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible [Le Visible et l’invisible, 1964, published posthumously]

WP

Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, The World of Perception [Causeries 1948, 2002, after his series of lectures broadcast on French national radio in 1948]

Introduction

Phantoms of the rive gauche

The so-​called rive gauche group were, despite being considered a key aspect of the French nouvelle vague, ‘one of the most unjustly overlooked groups in the history of European cinema’, according to Robert Farmer.1 Richard Roud coined the geo-​political wordplay, rive gauche, stating that the three directors at the centre of this book –​Chris Marker, Agnès Varda and Alain Resnais  –​formed the consistent core in this otherwise amorphous faction.2 However, notwithstanding their close affinities, both personal and professional, there has not yet been a longer study of films by all three of these companions and fellow ailurophiles through a consolidating line of enquiry. These directors were frequent professional allies: their moving-​image collaborations included Resnais editing Varda’s debut film, La Pointe Courte (1955); Varda fulfilling the role of ‘Consultant Sinologist’ on Marker’s Dimanche à Pékin (Sunday in Peking, 1956); Marker co-​writing Resnais’s short film Le Mystère de l’atelier quinze (co-​directed with André Heinrich, 1957); Resnais’s and Marker’s collaboration on the short, television film La Clé des songes (The Key of Dreams, 1950); Marker’s vicarious appearance in the form of his feline avatar Guillaume-​en-​Égypte, in Varda’s TV series Agnès de ci de là Varda (Agnès Varda:  From Here to There, 2011); Resnais and Marker 1

2

Robert Farmer, ‘Marker, Resnais, Varda:  Remembering the Left Bank Group’, Senses of Cinema 52 (September 2009) accessed 21 October 2009. Richard Roud, ‘The Left Bank’, Sight and Sound 32/​1 (winter 1962–​3), 24–​7. This definition of the group (rive gauche) was as a counterpoint to the Cahiers du Cinéma affiliated directors who were politically and geographically on the right, although Roud later claimed that Jean-​Luc Godard ‘became perhaps the most left-​wing of all’ in ‘The Left Bank Revisited’, Monthly Film Bulletin 46/​3 (summer 1977), 43.

2

introduction

co-​directing Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die, 1953); and the involvement of all three  –​along with other key nouvelle vague figures, such as Jean-​Luc Godard and Claude Lelouch –​in the production of the portmanteau film Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam, 1967).3 Although these collaborations indicate an overlapping of artistic and philosophical outlooks, one of the primary concerns in the work of all three directors –​ mortality –​has so far been critically neglected.

Death at the Cinema Daniel Sullivan and Jeff Greenberg argue that mortality is a ‘recurrent theme in films across genres, periods, nations and directors’ and that this nexus of death and cinema ‘is deserving of sustained analysis’.4 Mortality is a crucial concern in international cinemas, transcending generic, auteurist and temporal boundaries and clearly a subject worthy of comprehensive study. My thanatological pursuit here is to chart how a specific conception of mortality is represented in a selection of films by these three Left Bank directors for whom the idea of a death that haunts life is an especially vital matter. The first professional fiction films by Varda, Marker and Resnais are each symptomatic of the post-​war cinema in which, Catherine Russell finds, there is a ‘discourse of death’ which attempts to represent ‘the social transformations of the second half of the twentieth century’.5 The most 3

4

5

Far from Vietnam was co-​produced with Godard, William Klein, Joris Ivens and Lelouch. Varda’s contribution to the project did not appear in the final cut, however she did participate in the editing, see Alison Smith, Agnès Varda (Manchester: MUP, 1998), 201. Daniel Sullivan and Jeff Greenberg, ‘Introduction: When the Lights Go Down’, in Daniel Sullivan and Jeff Greenberg, eds, Death in Classic and Contemporary Film: Fade to Black (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 1. None of the essays collected in this volume engages with films by Varda, Marker or Resnais, or the philosophies of Beauvoir, Sartre, Levinas or Merleau-​Ponty. Catherine Russell, Narrative Mortality:  Death, Closure, and New Wave Cinemas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 2–​3.

Introduction

3

profane and profound disjuncture in the midst of the last century was the cataclysmic event(s) of World War II, which impacted global cinemas as they endeavoured to represent the prevailing post-​war modifications to daily existence. As Russell argues, in films of this period there was a distinct reflection on death, not as a departure from but as a ‘participation in the continuity of being’.6 Following World War II, films depicted death as a quotidian experience, an element of life. Such works, as Gilles Deleuze writes, ‘invented a new type of image’, distinct from pre-​war film.7 Deleuze is here building the groundwork for his own concept of the time-​image, but the idea of death in life that drives this book’s argument, and specifically depictions of images perforated by death, is cannily analogous to the composition of Deleuze’s signal concept. In both his time-​image and this theory of death stalking life, shadowing consciousness, past moments haunt present instants which then jointly project towards future points, and these subsequently reflect backwards onto present instants. This book’s understanding of death in life is determined by the notion that the presently living are conscious of previous and future deaths: the recollection in the present moment of deaths past and the certainty of those to come. This understanding –​which transcends both temporal and ontological divisions –​is particularly relevant to post-​World War II European film. To probe the parallel with the Deleuzian time-​image a little further, this is perceptible, in the first instance, in the films of the Italian Neorealismo movement and especially Roberto Rossellini’s war trilogy, Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945); Paisà (Paisan, 1946); and Germania, anno zero (Germany, Year Zero, 1948).8 Inevitably, a deathly presence haunts these and other filmic representations of the post-​war destruction and destitution of Europe, as in the several deaths that propel and conclude Rossellini’s triptych. André Bazin writes, for instance, of ‘the haunting death march of the little urchin’ in Germany, Year Zero.9 6 7 8 9

Ibid.  110. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2 (London: Continuum, 2005), 1 [1985]. Ibid.  1–​7. André Bazin, ‘In Defence of Rossellini’, in What is Cinema?, vol. 2, tr. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 100 [originally a letter sent to the editor of Cinema Nuovo].

4

introduction

Death was commonplace in this post-​war cinema, as the violence not only of World War II, but also, for instance, French colonialism in Algeria and Franco-​American imperialism in Vietnam, drew death into everyday consciousness. This notion is detailed in this book’s first chapter in the analysis of several films by Resnais, Varda and Marker and is also reflected in the writings of the four thinkers at the heart of this book: Jean-​Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-​ Ponty. Through the demographic and psychological ruptures created by World War II this phantasmic, deathly presence slipped into the consciousness and the conscience of that conflict’s survivors.10 The efforts to repress portents of death were no longer adequate and this wraith pervaded the consciousness of image-​makers, thinkers and the wider public, haunting everyday life. The cinema of the second half of the twentieth century (and beyond) inexorably reflects this presence, which becomes a locus for intersubjective encounters transpiring via or within these filmic images. It is this occupancy of the moving image by death that impels Laura Mulvey to propose that the cinema is ‘death 24 times a second’. Mulvey’s research is constructed on the foundations of two classes of filmic responses to time: movement and stasis, each of which inherently contains death.11 This theory that death is a phantom presence in each of the shots that make up film’s motion is one elaborated in this book as it discovers both literal and abstract or conceptual images of death in the films. Of course, there need not be a cadaver on screen to evoke thoughts of mortality in a film’s spectators. Death is instead a constant presence in daily existence, even when suppressed, ignored or denied, and necessarily manifests itself in cinematic images. These images implicitly and explicitly stimulate thoughts of mortality in their audience, and the films of Varda, Marker and Resnais explored here are paradigmatic of this activity. Emma Wilson has drawn out some of the concomitant effects of images that elicit reflections on death, including 10 Robert Jay Lifton, ‘The Sense of Immortality: On Death and the Continuity of Life’, in Herman Feifel, ed., New Meanings of Death (New York:  McGraw-​Hill, 1977), 279–​80. 11 Laura Mulvey,  Death 24x a Second:  Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 15, 16.

Introduction

5

discussion of films by Varda and Resnais.12 In analysing a range of moving-​ image works that capture and convey the emotive impact of grief, Wilson argues that the cinema ‘in its matter and make-​up is concerned more than any other media with the line between the still and the moving, between the living and the dead’.13 There is for Wilson, as there is for Mulvey, an essential, innate quality to moving images (even when stilled) that highlights (and then probes and questions) the boundaries between life and death. This book examines this challenge to divisions between life and death, taking a film-​philosophical approach that centres on theories of mortality in works by Sartre, Beauvoir, Levinas and Merleau-​Ponty. The ways in which death is rendered in the theses of these thinkers indicate intrinsic overlaps between their philosophical writings and the work of the three filmmakers considered here. In both the films and the philosophical thinking that I consider, life and death convene as the borders between them are permeated, drawing attention to human transience, or a consciousness of death as it exists in life. Other lines of contact and affinity also link the filmmakers and philosophers at the centre of this book, often through the axis of the film critic and theorist André Bazin. As the erstwhile editor of Cahiers du cinema, on whose pages the rive droite directors –​Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut –​alternately enacted their ciné-​astic patricide and deified other male directors, Bazin also bridges the right and left banks of the Seine and nouvelle vague. Additionally, he was, according to John Mullarkey, influenced by the phenomenology of Sartre and Merleau-​Ponty.14 Similarly, Dudley Andrew writes that when Bazin entered the École Normale at St. Cloud, ‘Merleau-​Ponty was just coming to his phenomenology’.15 Between graduating and co-​founding Cahiers, the film critic worked at Les Temps modernes, the journal created and edited by Sartre, Beauvoir and Merleau-​Ponty and named after Charles Emma Wilson, Love, Mortality and the Moving Image (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 21–​40, 122–​41. 13 Ibid.  5. 14 John Mullarkey, ‘The Tragedy of the Object’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 17/​4 (2012), 39. 1 5 Dudley Andrew, André Bazin (New York: OUP, 1978), 20. 12

6

introduction

Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), where the editors and Bazin ‘exchanged ideas’.16 This influence was then expressed in Bazin’s cinema theory, Jacques Rancière argues, as he ‘deployed the arsenal of phenomenology to theorize the artistic advent of the essence of cinema’.17 Further, Angela Dalle Vacche’s description of the Cahiers editor’s stance on responsibility for the Other echoes a Levinasian ethics: ‘the only way to bypass human incompleteness is through respect for the Other, even if the Other does not reciprocate or if it is so nonhuman it cannot do so at the same level’.18 Transposing these influences, Bazin was later a critical inspiration for both Resnais and Marker who, along with Sartre, Beauvoir and Truffaut, attended Bazin’s ciné-c​ lubs.19 As well as frequenting these screenings, early in his directorial career, Resnais sought advice from Bazin at the offices of Travail et Culture on his documentary Van Gogh (originally filmed in 1946 and analysed in the third chapter of this book). In those same offices the ‘young actor’ Marker ‘was so drawn by Bazin’s personality that he left the theater section’ to help with administration duties and there he and Resnais debated their modern film aesthetic.20 Before these socio-​cultural communions, however, the teenage Marker encountered Sartre himself, at the Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly, where the latter taught and the former studied philosophy.21 Resnais would also 16

17 18 19 20

21

Emilie Bickerton, A Short History of Cahiers du Cinema (London and New York:  Verso, 2009), 17:  Sartre thought Chaplin the ‘king of cinema’. Jean-​Paul Sartre, ‘Apologie pour le cinéma: Défense et illustration d’un art international’, in Écrits de jeunesse (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 402. Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, tr. Emiliano Battista (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006), 107. Angela Dalle Vacche, ‘André Bazin’s Film Theory and the History of Ideas’, in Bernd Herzogenrath, ed., Film as Philosophy (Minneapolis and London:  Minnesota University Press, 2017), 149. Andrew, André Bazin, 1978), 56:  and Nora M. Alter, Chris Marker (Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 2006), 7. Andrew, André Bazin, 90. Sarah Cooper details the metaphysical relationship between Bazin and Marker in her article ‘Montage, Militancy, Metaphysics:  Chris Marker and André Bazin’, Image & Narrative, 11/​1 (2010) accessed 13 April  2017. Simone Signoret, Nostalgia isn’t What it Used to Be (London: Grafton Books, 1986), 27–​32; Anatole Dauman, Souvenir-​Écran (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1989), 14–​15; and David Lestringant, ed., Chris Marker (Paris: Cinémathèque française,

Introduction

7

meet a dominant figure of phenomenology, and influence on the thought of Sartre, Beauvoir, Levinas and Merleau-​Ponty: Martin Heidegger. In September 1945 the young director travelled as part of a detachment of the French military organised to set up cultural connections with German intellectuals.22 Decades afterwards, Resnais indicated his knowledge of Sartre’s work in his use of two quotes from the same text, the philosopher’s preface to Roger Stéphane’s Portrait de l’aventurier. The first appears as an epigraph to the published script of La Guerre est finie (The War is Over, 1966) and the second is quoted in Stavisky … (1974).23 Varda’s connections with the philosophers at the centre of this book are a little less direct, although she regularly cited Sartre and Beauvoir in interviews. For example when speaking to the American cinema journal Cineaste on the occasion of the release of her 1977 film L’Une chante, l’autre pas (One Sings, the Other Doesn’t), the director quoted Beauvoir’s famous assertion in Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex, 1949) that ‘you are not born a woman, you become a woman’.24

2018), 1. Signoret, Marker’s life-​long friend, was the subject of his film Mémoires pour Simone (1986). Dauman, who also attended the Lycée Pasteur, produced several films by rive gauche and rive droite directors, including Marker’s Lettre de Sibérie (1957) and La Jetée (1962); Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard (1955) and Hiroshima mon amour (1959); Varda’s Du côté de la côte (1958); and Godard’s Masculin Féminin (1966) and Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967). 22 Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential:  Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–​ 1961 (Ithaca, NY, and London:  Cornell University Press, 2005), 162–​4. On a second visit to Heidegger by these cultural ambassadors, Fréderic de Towarnacki, the leader of the detachment, took him Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and Merleau-​ Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, texts he believed ‘[m]arked the influence of Heidegger in France’. Ibid. 162–​4. 23 James Monaco, Alain Resnais; The Rôle of Imagination (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1978), 112–​13, 175. 24 See Pierre Uytterhoeven, ‘Agnès Varda from 5 to 7’, in Agnès Varda: Interviews, ed. T. Jefferson Kline ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 10: Jean Decock, ‘Interview with Varda on The Vagabond’, Agnès Varda: Interviews, 141: and Varda, ‘One Sings, the Other Doesn’t’, in Dan Georgakas and Lenny Rubenstein, eds, Art, Politics, Cinema: The Cineaste Interviews (London and Sydney: Pluto Press, 1985), 220.

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While this book does not intend to prove that these directors engaged with the philosophical works cited, it instead constructs a praxis in which it is acknowledged that there is the potential for cross-​pollination: that tensions in the philosophers’ works about the transience of boundaries previously considered impassable are also appraised in selected works of these filmmakers. As Merleau-​Ponty writes in ‘Le Cinéma et la nouvelle psychologie’ (‘Film and the New Psychology’, 1964), ‘if philosophy is in harmony with the cinema […] it is because the philosopher and the moviemaker share a certain way of being, a certain view of the world’.25 Godard would align himself with this notion in his Masculin féminin (1966), where a character quotes this line directly. This book contends that this ‘certain view of the world’ was significantly impacted by the cataclysmic events of World War II. As Roud argues, in his monograph on Godard, existentialism was unavoidable in post-​war Paris, where not only Godard but Marker, Resnais and Varda lived and pursued their artistic studies.26 Whereas the philosophies of these four major figures of French ethical, existential, feminist and phenomenological thought were conceived before World War II, it was through their experiences of this conflict –​as I show –​that their predominant thinking began to become consolidated. This conflict had an undeniably profound influence on the society in which they matured and was an interlude in the history of Europe in which reflections on mortality were pervasive: it was an era in which experiential, psychological consciousness of death’s persistent presence was endemic. The human relationship with death is complex, according to Leen Van Brussel and Nico Carpentier: ‘we not only know that we are mortal, but we also know that we know’.27 The chapters that follow demonstrate the core idea of 25 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, ‘Film and the New Psychology’, SNS, tr. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 59; the article was first published in Les Temps modernes in 1947. 26 Richard Roud, Godard (London and Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan and the British Film Institute, 2010), 3: Alter, Chris Marker, 6: Roy Armes, The Cinema of Alain Resnais (London: A. Zwemmer, 1968), 25: Smith, Agnès Varda, 3. 27 Leen Van Brussel and Nico Carpentier, ‘Introduction’, to their The Social Construction of Death:  Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1. Although, as I consider in Chapter 2, for Marker animals also share this relationship with their mortality.

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a death persistently haunting life through a consciousness of it materialising in a range of films by Varda, Marker and Resnais, including Varda’s Salut les Cubains (1963) and Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond, 1985); Marker’s Description d’un combat (Description of a Struggle, 1960) and Chats Perchés (The Case of the Grinning Cat, 2004); and Resnais’s Gauguin (1950) and Hiroshima mon amour (1959). It is the theoretical reverberations between how the thinkers and filmmakers at the centre of this project reflect on and portray death as such a persistent shadow cast over life that make their conjunction critical. To some extent, World War II was a signal event in this haunting of quotidian life by death. The three rive gauche directors had varying levels of contact with the war. Marker was directly and personally involved as he joined both the French and American armies and was engaged with the mouvement de résistance Combat, for which he was arrested and sent to an internment camp.28 As well as his 1945 visit to Heidegger in the detachment of the French military, Resnais first encountered Bazin ‘during the occupation’.29 The locus of the director’s formative thinking on film began during the war years. Resnais was also a member of the post-​war occupying forces in Germany.30 Yet the adolescent Varda, as she herself explains in her film Les Plages d’Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès, 2008), had little direct contact with the war: although she could not ignore its impact as her family moved to Sète to ‘wait it out’. Instead, World War II figures as a type of cynosure, a metaphor for the thinking about death’s haunting of daily existence.

28 29 30

Gary Crowdus, ‘Email Messages from Chris Marker’, Cineaste 43/​3 (summer 2018), 9: David Lestringant, ed., Chris Marker (Paris: Cinémathèque française, 2018), 2. Andrew, André Bazin, 90: Alan Williams, Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), 369. Lynn A. Higgins, New Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fiction and the Representation of History in Postwar France (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 9.

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War and the Phantom of Death Scrutinising certain aspects of the impact of World War II here is not to argue that death was only represented in films after this conflict nor, naturally, that it had no place in life more generally beforehand. Instead, this discussion intends to distil a central argument about death’s stalking of life, focusing on a period in which the boundary between these two states is perforated, when the shadow of death over quotidian life grows darker and colder, haunting the consciousness of tens of millions of people. Indeed, as later film analyses reveal, the three rive gauche directors also began their filmmaking careers in parallel to the Algerian conflict and the Vietnam war in the mid-​1950s, conflicts they comment on specifically in their work. However, as Keith Lowe notes, the aftermath of World War II –​history’s most costly war in terms of human life –​required that the populations of countries around the world, and particularly in Europe, reviewed traditional cultural certainties, rebuilt societies from the rubble of their cities and revised their collective psyches, all themes investigated in neo-​realist films.31 The entity of death haunted these populations’ recent experiences and memories, leaving them to ruminate on the ephemerality of life, the haunting certitude of death. After the war, any remaining convictions that death was hidden or taboo were corroded: it shadowed life’s every beat. This transformed existence was inevitably reflected in post-​ war cinemas as, after the war, artistic representations of life were also recalibrated. The war can therefore be considered as an interstice through which a phantom death enters, haunting aesthetic images of this period. Resonant moments of this ingress, this death in life, regularly appear in cinemas of the post-​war period, including in the films of Marker, Varda and Resnais.

31

Keith Lowe,  Savage Continent:  Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (London: Penguin, 2012), xiii.

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On Exiting at the Cinema: Death Haunts the Filmic Image In analysis of the post-​war cinematic time-​image theorised by Deleuze, D. N. Rodowick writes that World War II created a ‘tectonic shift’ that interrupted the history of cinema. Rodowick argues that this modification of the cinematic image occurred particularly in French films of the immediate post-​war period and specifically those of the nouvelle vague.32 Whilst time is a key concern in the films of Marker, Varda and Resnais, this near-​geological dislocation determined by the war also altered the ways in which death was depicted in these films, leaving a fissure in the cinematic lithosphere through which a haunting death passed. According to Naomi Greene, in her study of post-​war French cinema, Landscapes of Loss, it was cinema that was in a singular position, as compared with literature, to be able to capture this post-​conflict milieu, as films ‘lend themselves to the expression of sentiments that have yet to assume verbal form, or that resist clear articulation’.33 Greene argues that French cinema particularly reflected its country’s post-​Occupation state, rendering the inexpressible perceptible. Indeed, discussing films representing la shoah, Ferzina Banaji asserts that French cinema ‘offers a unique glimpse’ into cultural memory.34 Greene also discusses the especial censorship French cinema was subject to, driving some of the metaphorical images that are examined herein.35 Death was one critical element of these films and, although occasionally a visual absence, remains an ineffable presence in the cinema in this era of European and, in particular, French cinema. Bazin, in a 1946 essay, confirms this unique position of European film –​ in comparison to American cinema –​in this period to portray the sincerity of this haunting death and the contemporaneous spectator’s ability to perceive it. He asserts that ‘cinema is the art of reality’, before claiming that: 32 33 34 35

D. N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 172, 173. Naomi Greene,  Landscapes of Loss:  The National Past in Postwar French Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 5. Ferzina Banaji, France, Film, and the Holocaust:  From le génocide to la shoah (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 21. Greene, Landscapes, 35.

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introduction The war and the Resistance confer on European cinema a climate that profoundly distinguishes it from American productions. A phenomenology of death in contemporary cinema will have to be established. […] In Europe, the deaths on the screen concern the spectator. In American [sic] they are imaginary. They are ‘movie’ deaths. There exists between European films and the European public a common affective denominator that seems more and more absent from American films.

For the young cinema critic, European film was unique because of its subjective, palpable portrayals of a material death which evoked for a spectator the local horrors of World War II.36 In the lineage of this ‘phenomenology of death’, this book engages with the theory of death’s persistence in consciousness as well as the deaths of figures in French films and philosophies. It deals with existential, ethical, feminist and phenomenological questions around spectatorial perceptions of images of death in Marker’s, Varda’s and Resnais’s films and how these cinematic depictions prompt viewers’ thoughts of their own mortality. Writing in terms that foreshadow my discussion of this haunting of the filmic image and with specific reference to Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7, 1962) and Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955) (each of which are analysed in Chapter 1), Jean Cayrol and Claude Durand observe that: Real death is rare in cinema: it is in the terrible corpses of Night and Fog, those of the mass graves of the camps, carried by the bulldozers, dislocated and horribly bloated; it is in the film of Agnès Varda, in Cléo who carries a living death in herself.37

Death intrinsically brands the images of these two films and many others by Resnais, Varda and Marker throughout their careers. Whilst the ways in which the three filmmakers explore the caprices of human recollection and temporal vagaries cannot be ignored, by focusing on the presence of 36 André  Bazin, ‘The Cannes Festival of 1946’, in French Cinema of the Occupation and Resistance:  The Birth of a Critical Esthetic, tr. Stanley Hochman (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984), 138. 37 Jean Cayrol and Claude Durand, Le Droit de regard (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1963), 69 (my tr.). Notably, Cayrol was the co-​writer, with Marker, and the narrator of Resnais’s Night and Fog and a concentration camp survivor for whom the figure of Lazarus, who returns from the dead, was a key emblem in his literature.

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death in their cinematic images, a new perspective from which to view their films is proposed. This ethical attitude is demonstrated in the intersubjective encounter which is performed with a consideration of the death of the Other. This notion of death haunting the everyday is crystallised in three particular examples from moving-​image works by Marker, Resnais and Varda. This notion of death posited amid daily life is conspicuous in a scene from Marker’s film with Valérie Mayoux, La Bataille des dix millions (The Battle of the Ten Million, 1970). In it, a man carries a coffin through a busy intersection in Havana as people and vehicles stream around him. The dynamism of the street is juxtaposed with the dark, sombre repository that simultaneously shields and signifies a present personification of death in the centre of this vital, quotidian existence (see Figure 1). Such an embodied designation of death is apparent too in Resnais’s L’Amour à mort (Love Unto Death, 1984) in which the recently widowed Elizabeth contends that marriage continues beyond the grave and, indeed, her husband returns from death to walk again amongst the living, unquestionably alive, but with the shadow of death caressing him. Similarly, in Varda’s installation piece, Les Veuves de Noirmoutier (The Widows of Noirmoutier, 2005), one of the eponymous women, in describing the mourning of her husband’s death, hints that she is not alone after all: ‘Je fais couple avec un mort’ [I am a couple with a dead man]. This woman’s life is experienced in partnership with death. Death is conjoined with the living as it slips into the images of each of these films and, as the coming chapters reveal, many other works by these three directors. The ways that death haunts life in these films speaks to conceptual, thanatological convergences in them and in the thinking of their creators.

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Figure 1:  Death in Life, a coffin carried through a busy intersection in The Battle of the Ten Million (Chris Marker and Valérie Mayoux, 1970), © ISKRA, SLON, Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos and KG Productions.

Thinking Death: Haunting Consciousness Comparable to the ways in which death possesses the images of post-​war European (and especially French) cinema, a phantom death also stalks the works of Sartre, Beauvoir, Levinas and Merleau-​Ponty, whose experiences of the war had a direct impact on their professional lives. Beauvoir, for instance, told her biographer Deirdre Bair that it ‘took the war to make [her] learn that she lived in the world, not apart from it’.38 It was World War II that inspired Beauvoir to think of herself in relation to others. This metamorphosis was not only societal, however. In her personal experiences of the war Beauvoir also encountered, according to Margaret A. Simons in introducing Beauvoir’s posthumously published Wartime Diary, a ‘philosophical transformation’.39 This conversion, stimulated by the war, greatly influenced the ethics Beauvoir developed in her two signal 38 Deirdre Bair, Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography (London: Vintage, 1991), 212. 39 Margaret A. Simons, ‘Introduction’, to Simone de Beauvoir, Wartime Diary, tr. Anne Deing Cordero (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 8.

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existential texts, Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté (The Ethics of Ambiguity, 1947) and The Second Sex.40 In the wartime journals, Beauvoir writes: What is especially terrible when looking at death is its reflection on life, the desolation, the abandonment in which life seems shrouded then –​it causes such disgust that living and dying seem to be exactly the same thing, that in any case one is never more than a corpse in waiting.41

Beauvoir considered death a haunting presence during the war: life and death were entwined, and her ethical transformation was a principal influence on Sartre’s most famous philosophical treaty. Equally, Sartre told Beauvoir that it was the war which inspired him to write his early, paradigmatic existentialist essay, L’Être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Being and Nothingness, 1943).42 Ideas developed in his war diaries, written between 1939 and 1940 when he was stationed in Alsace, later underpinned this key work.43 Indicating the impact of the war on his thinking, Sartre writes that, with direct involvement in war, such as a mobilisation order to the army, one’s own death ‘has approached considerably closer’.44 Reflecting the idea of death haunting life at the core of this book, for Sartre, in wartime, one’s mortality hovers above one’s consciousness. Although, during the German occupation of France, Sartre also had only a minor role in the intellectual resistance, organising the clandestine group ‘Socialism and Liberty’ with Merleau-​Ponty.45 Like his onetime friend, Merleau-​Ponty served in an infantry division (as a second lieutenant, whereas Sartre was a private) and was detained and tortured by the German army.46 These experiences were a direct influence 40 Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook, Sex and Philosophy: Rethinking de Beauvoir and Sartre (London: Continuum, 2008), 206. 41 Beauvoir, Wartime Diary, 305. 42 Beauvoir, AD, 171. 43 Christine Daigle, ‘The Ethics of Authenticity’, in Jonathan Webber (ed.), Reading Sartre: On Phenomenology and Existentialism (London: Routledge, 2011), 5. 44 Sartre, BN, 556. 45 Gary Gutting,  French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century  (Cambridge:  CUP, 2002), 123. 46 Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2002), 394; and Taylor Carman, Merleau-​Ponty (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 4.

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on his essay written for the first issue of Les Temps modernes, ‘La Guerre a eu lieu’ (‘The War Has Taken Place’, 1945). The piece is a reflection on the nature of war which also contains criticisms of Sartre’s position that humans are necessarily free. As Sartre also demonstrates in his work of the period, in this short article Merleau-​Ponty conflates war with a death that haunts life as he writes of the shadow cast by those lost to war on the lives of its survivors.47 Such a shadow was projected across Levinas’s life and studies after the war: his philosophy was informed by his imprisonment and the death of many members of his Jewish family in labour camps during World War II.48 Like Sartre and Merleau-​Ponty, he channelled these horrors into his first philosophy and between menial tasks in the camp he scribbled notes that would later pervade his essay De l’existence à l’existant (Existence and Existents, 1947).49 Through what are clearly reflections on these episodes, this early work is informed by what Levinas writes of as the tragedy of existence that is not resolved by death and of the ‘world turned upside down’.50 His ethics –​and particularly the high esteem in which his philosophy holds others –​were a response to his experiences of the inhumanity of war and inherent confrontations with death –​and are a focus of this book’s second chapter, especially as Levinas engages with the idea of the alterity of death.51 In An Ontological Study of Death, Sean Ireton describes such representations of death as one of two accepted interpretations, ‘as a future transcending event as in metaphysics’ or as a continuous ‘presence as in ontology’ (p. 7). The ontology Ireton references here –​in which death is a persistent presence –​is the paradigm for analyses of the filmic and philosophical works at the centre of this study: Sartre, Beauvoir, Levinas and 47 Merleau-​Ponty, ‘The War has Taken Place’, in The Merleau-​Ponty Reader, tr. and ed. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 52 [1945]. 48 Tina Chanter, Time, Death, and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 247. 49 Zlatan Filipovic, ‘Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas: “After You, Sir!”’, Moderna Språk 105/​1 (2011), 63. 50 Levinas, EE, 5, 7. 51 Ibid.  56.

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Merleau-​Ponty refer to death as perpetually present to life, rather than a future absence. This death is often recognised as a presence hosted within consciousness. For instance, speaking with Beauvoir near the end of his own life of the importance of the existence of others in the perception of death, Sartre suggests that man ‘learns the social dimension; he learns to reflect on others’ lives and upon his own. He grows richer, while beneath all of this he is dying.’52 For Sartre, as one lives, as one grows through social interaction, one is also, underneath and hidden from sight, dying. Death is a perennially present phantom, which haunts the Sartrean conflictual, intersubjective relation in which the self is compelled to ‘pursue the death of the Other’.53 In this lethal intersubjective combat, the self relies on others to define it but rejects this dependence and aspires to the Other’s death.54 As we discover in Chapter 1 of this book, Beauvoir’s approach to intersubjective relations evolved distinctly from her life-​partner’s, yet for her too death was a constant, haunting presence in life. Describing her response to the illness and later death of her beloved mother, Françoise de Beauvoir (and echoing her wartime view that ‘one is never more than a corpse in waiting’), Beauvoir remembers that her mother’s failing body ‘hardly differed at all from a corpse’ with death hovering over life like a suspended sentence. Later she asserts that perfume, apparel and jewels are simply façades behind which death lurks.55 As with Sartre’s mobilisation order during the war, Madame Beauvoir’s sickness draws the haunting shadow of death closer. This liaising of death with life –​and especially the initial moments of life, birth –​is a recurring image in The Second Sex, for instance (p. 179): To have been conceived and then be born an infant is the curse that hangs over [man’s] destiny, the impurity that contaminates his being. And, too, it is the announcement of his death. The cult of germination has always been associated with the cult of the dead.

52 53 54 55

Beauvoir, AD, 426. Sartre, BN, 261. See Mary Warnock, Existentialism (Oxford: OUP, 1989), 117. Beauvoir, VE, 18, 19, 69.

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This is what Sarah Fishwick calls Beauvoir’s ‘identification of the maternal with death and decay in the discourses of patriarchal culture’, a critique of the cultification, the mystification of the feminine and death.56 In symmetry with Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s theories on death in life, Levinas also writes of ‘the ever-​present menace of death’.57 Further, in an article of 1947 he argues that death ‘is lived as an event in life […]. Death, which was to be the fading away of life, confirms the being of life in its generality of pure being, and becomes part of it’.58 For Levinas, death is part of life and actually confirms it. In an earlier essay on representations of the Other in Marcel Proust’s work, he writes that in his own ethics, death is that of ‘other people, contrary to the tendency of contemporary philosophy, which is focused on one’s own solitary death’.59 In Levinas’s conception of death, a comprehension of one’s own mortality leads from an understanding of the death of the Other (the dominant figure in his ethics). Indeed, in his essay ‘Les Temps et l’autre’ (‘Time and the Other’, 1947, comprised of four earlier lectures) he presents death as an ungraspable mysterious Other.60 This complex concept is addressed in Chapter 2 as it pertains to the gendering of Otherness.61 In ways equivalent to his colleagues Sartre and Beauvoir and to Levinas, Merleau-​Ponty argues that life is lived ‘in an atmosphere of death in general and there is a kind of essence of death always on the horizon of [one’s] thinking’.62 He suggests that one constantly has an awareness of death, as it is always on the cusp of consciousness. Death is an affecting presence for Sarah Fishwick, The Body in the Work of Simone de Beauvoir (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002), 70. 57 Levinas, EE, 77. 58 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Exercises on “The Madness of the Day”’, in Proper Names, tr. Michael B. Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 161 [1975]. 59 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘The Other in Proust’, in Proper Names, 103 [1947]. 60 Levinas, ‘TO’, 72. 1 I consider gender in this book in terms of what Sarah Moller Okin calls ‘the social 6 institutionalization of sexual difference’, that in feminist scholarship, at least, is a concept that speaks to ‘sexual inequality’ and sexual differentiation as ‘socially constructed’. Susan Moller Okin, ‘Gender, the Public, and the Private’, in Anne Phillips, ed., Feminism and Politics (Oxford: OUP, 1998), 116. 2 Merleau-​Ponty, PP, 424. 6 56

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Merleau-​Ponty and, like for Levinas, consciousness of death is bound up with consciousness of the Other.63 Recognising the mortality of the self and that of the Other is tantamount to identifying a mutuality between these attitudes. Although, where for Merleau-​Ponty haunting death is divested of its mystery through a social interaction, for Levinas death and mystery are entangled.64 As described so far in this introduction, these philosophers’ meditations on perception and the lived, embodied experiences of being and death and especially their expositions of relations with alterity, form the theoretical framework of my film analyses. These considerations of death haunting life are explored here in contrast to the philosophers’ often divergent notions of experiences between subjects. The differing inter-​relations between subjects and their individual and joint encounters with death are explored in each of this book’s three core chapters: Sartre’s conceptualisation of individuals in conflict, striving to dominate and even kill one another to attain the position of subject, contrasted with Beauvoir’s ethical, reciprocal intersubjectivity; Levinas’s perspective of an unbridgeable division with the Other and an asymmetrical responsibility for their death; and Merleau-​Ponty’s chiasmic overlaps, twists and folds that draw individuals together to mutually perceive the world as equals, as equally mortal.

Film and/​with Philosophy: Sartrean, Beauvoirian, Levinasian and Merleau-​Pontian Film-​Philosophical Approaches Other scholars have identified the potentially considerable yield to be gained from applying the philosophies of Sartre, Beauvoir, Levinas and Merleau-​Ponty to film studies.65 Their considerations of ethical, 63 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, ‘Hegel’s Existentialism’, in SNS, 68 [‘L’Existentialisme chez Hegel’, 1946]. 64 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, The Structure of Behaviour, tr. Alden L. Fisher (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1963), 204 [La Structure du comportement, 1942]. 65 For instance, Alan Casebier writes that the work of phenomenologists such as Merleau-​Ponty and Sartre ‘can no doubt illuminate film experience’:  Film

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phenomenological and existential concerns have informed recent research in film, concentrating on, for example, the emancipatory potential of the cinematic image for subjective sovereignty, via Sartrean existentialism; gendered embodiment in women’s film with Beauvoirian feminist phenomenology; the redemptive capacities of female cinematic characters, through Levinasian ethics; and the synesthetic properties of the materiality of celluloid, using Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenology.66 In a mutual (if asymmetrical) interaction, filmic imagery also influenced, to varying degrees, the writing of each of these philosophers. These relations with aesthetic images gain purchase as they impact my film analyses and contest the constructs that fortify the philosophies engaged with in this book. Paradoxically, it is the work of Sartre, for whom the cinema perhaps had the greatest impact, that has been most underutilised in film studies to date, even as the aesthetic image proved integral to his philosophical project.67 As a student, Sartre described film as an art form and conferred on it the epithet of ‘the poem of modern life’.68 For him, the cinema was one of the and Phenomenology:  Toward a Realist Theory of Cinematic Representation (Cambridge:  CUP, 1991), 5. Jean-​Pierre Boulé and Ursula Tidd have confirmed that ‘Beauvoir recognised the power and influence of cinema as [a] dominant cultural discourse of the post-​war period’:  ‘Introduction’, to their Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema:  A Beauvoirian Perspective (New York and London: Berghahn Books, 2012), 2. Similarly, Robert Sinnerbrink argues that the Levinasian approach to ‘thinking through film has proven influential’: Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Films (London: Routledge, 2016), 152. 66 Respectively, Jean-​Pierre Boulé and Enda McCaffrey, eds, Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema: A Sartrean Perspective (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011); Kate Ince, The Body and the Screen: Female Subjectivities in Contemporary Women’s Cinema (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017); Sam B. Girgus, Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics and the Feminine (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); and Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007). 7 See e.g. Sarah Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory:  Figurations (New 6 Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 43; and Andrew, André Bazin, 70. 68 Jean-​Paul Sartre, ‘Motion Picture Art’, in The Writings of Jean-​Paul Sartre, vol. 2, Selected Prose, tr. Richard McCleary, ed. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka (Evanston, IL:  Northwestern University Press, 2002), 56 (given as a speech to

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21

two most apposite artistic media for chronicling contemporary existence.69 As early as 1947, at the First International Congress of Filmology, the philosopher Alphonse de Waelhens argued that the work of Sartre concerning ‘the object perceived and the mental image could be […] well applied to the filmic image’.70 Sartre also wrote a number of, mostly unrealised, screenplays, which, with his articles on film, speak to his interest in moving images, to his desire to express his thought with analogies from this medium and to his belief in film’s capacity to depict contemporary existence.71 Indeed, Beauvoir writes of her and Sartre’s trips to the cinema, describing how they ‘brought the same serious approach to the occasion as young devotees show today when visiting a film library’.72 These were clearly not trips made solely for entertainment and it was at the cinema students in Sartre’s school in Le Havre and published as ‘L’Arte cinématographique’ in 1931); Jean-​Paul Sartre, ‘APC’, 392 (my tr.). He would later pen a short article on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (USA, 1941), Jean-​Paul Sartre, ‘Citizen Kane’, tr. Dana Polan, in Ronald Gottesman, ed., Perspectives on Citizen Kane (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), 56–​9 [1946]. 69 Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, tr. Peter Green (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 48 [1960]. 7 0 Cited in Edward Lowry, The Filmology Movement and Film Study in France (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), 52. 7 1 His screenplay, Les Jeux sont faits (The Chips are Down) was filmed by Jean Delannoy in 1947, see Dalle Vacche, ‘André Bazin’s Film Theory’, 133. Inevitably permeated with existential concerns, Delannoy’s film is a fantasy played out in a setting reminiscent of occupied Paris in which two dead lovers are given the opportunity to return to earth from the afterlife and prove their love. They fail and part forever. Sartre also wrote a script on the life of Sigmund Freud in 1958, commissioned by John Huston, see J. B. Pontalis, ‘Editor’s Preface: Freud Scenario, Sartre Scenario’, in Sartre, The Freud Scenario, ed. J. B. Pontalis, tr. Quentin Hoare (London: Verso, 2013), vii–​xviii. The conjunction of psychoanalysis and cinema was one Sartre came to early, writing in 1924 that ‘only the cinema can render an exact account of psychoanalysis’, Sartre, ‘APC’, 398 (my tr.). 7 2 Beauvoir, Prime of Life, 49. Beauvoir’s comment seemingly references the rive gauche directors’ attendance at Henri Langlois’s La Cinémathèque française. Their obsessional attendance is noted in Richard Roud, A Passion for Films:  Henri Langlois and the Cinémathèque Française (London: Secker & Warburg, 1983), 65; and Ginette Vincendeau, The Companion to French Cinema (London: Cassell and BFI, 1996), 51.

22

introduction

that, Beauvoir reports, Sartre encountered the pivotal concept of his early philosophy: contingency.73 The cinema was a principal influence on his consideration of the utter coincidence of existence, the improbability of a pre-​existent reason for one’s life, which applies not only to the accident of being but also to the contingency of one’s death. Fittingly, Sartre also posits filmic analogies in his philosophical texts, for instance in Being and Nothingness he conveys the translucency of a destroyed object with an account of ‘overprinting’ celluloid.74 Not only did this poetry of the modern age afford rich material for Sartre’s thinking, attending the cinema was for him a democratising social event, as evidenced in his short, autobiographical remembrance of childhood, Les Mots (Words, 1963). There he refers to the ‘egalitarian’ nature of the cinema and how he realised that ‘this new art was mine, was everyone’s’.75 Importantly for the theoretical framework of this book, Sartre believed that the cinema was the art of the people and the poetry of daily life, emphasising the sociality of the cinema and its capacity to depict quotidian being.76 This consideration of égalité between subjects is, however, one that is at odds with Sartre’s configuration of conflictual intersubjectivity in his early philosophy, a position that Beauvoir rejected years earlier, creating theoretical tensions explored in Chapter 1. During the Occupation, Beauvoir would come to see her visits to the cinema as ‘a necessity’ and after seeing Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (USA, 1939) in early 1940, with Sartre, the pair got ‘all worked up’ about simultaneity and intersubjective relations which leads to Beauvoir questioning her earlier stance on the value of the ‘Other’s consciousness’.77 The cinema for Beauvoir, like Sartre, provoked the evolution of her philosophical thinking. As Lauren le Graf writes, Beauvoir Beauvoir, Prime of Life, 48. Sartre, BN, 553, 614. Jean-​Paul Sartre, Words, tr. Irene Clephane (London:  Penguin Books, 1992), 77 [Les Mots, 1963]. 76 For a more extensive discussion of the impact of cinema on the thought and life of Sartre see Pascale Fautrier, ‘Le Cinéma de Sartre’, Fabula: Littérature, Histoire, Théorie 2 (December 2006) accessed 23 April 2017. 7 7 Beauvoir, Wartime Diary, 116, 250–​1.

73 74 75

Introduction

23

‘approached the labour of image consumption with rigour, a practice that helped to fashion her as an intellectual and refine her philosophical concepts of gender and alterity’.78 And, when writing The Second Sex after the war, Beauvoir uses cinematic examples to deconstruct sexist roles locating women as the Other, writing that Orson Welles’s eponymous Citizen Kane simply glorifies his self in inundating ‘an obscure singer’ with attentions and gifts and imposing her ‘upon the public as a great queen of song’ (p. 215). These myths that perpetuate the notion of women needing powerful men to elevate them are undermined in Beauvoir’s feminist philosophy, but she was also held captive by film images, which awoke ‘dream-​like echoes’ in her.79 As discussed in Chapter 1, Beauvoir’s continued writing on the cinema wove in and out of her philosophical thinking on intersubjective relations and death. Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s relationship with the aesthetic image mutually influenced both their writing on art –​especially around questions of perception –​and their philosophical thinking (as it did their friend Merleau-​ Ponty, as I discuss presently). Contrarily, according to Philippe Crignon, Levinas was the ‘only philosopher of modernity who did not share in the general enthusiasm for the arts’.80 In fact, Levinas was inherently distrustful of the aesthetic image and especially those that depicted individuals, a misgiving arising because such images constitute a limit of experience and of the self and represent a substitution of image for object.81 For Levinas, the artistic image circumscribes alterity and the object. Recent film scholarship engaging with Levinasian ethics has necessarily taken account of this 78 Lauren de Graf, ‘Cinema in the Eyes of Simone de Beauvoir’, Screen 59/​3 (autumn 2018), 381. 79 Simone de Beauvoir, All Said and Done, tr. Patrick O’Brian (Harmondsworth:  Penguin, 1979), 196 [1972]. 80 Philippe Crignon, ‘Figuration:  Emmanuel Levinas and the Image’, tr. Nicole Simek and Zahi Zalloua, in Encounters with Levinas, ed. Thomas Trezise (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 101. 81 Gerald L. Bruns, ‘The Concepts of Art and Poetry in Emmanuel Levinas’s Writings’, in Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), 214; and Lawrence Buell, ‘What We Talk about When We Talk about Ethics’, in Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds, The Turn to Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2000), 7.

24

introduction

deep reservation about the arts.82 Still, Levinasian ethics are at the centre of an emergent film theory and there are several recent studies that reflect such an influence.83 Additionally, there are also occasional examples in Levinas’s own philosophical writing in which he utilises the aesthetic, and specifically the cinematic, image as an analogy for aspects of his thought. The most extended consideration of the filmic image in his work occurs in Existence and Existents, in which he compares Rodin’s statues to the cinematic close-​up, a ‘normally unexpected perspective’.84 Whilst the passage in which this reference occurs considers the camera’s ability to focus on detail as a manipulator of perspectives between subjects positively, it also indicates Levinas’s suspicion of the film image’s representation of the Other which is given ‘hallucinatory dimensions’, through the ‘play of its normal proportions’.85 He also, as discussed in Chapter 2, turns to the photographic image in a description of alterity or exoticism in the same early text. Primarily, for Levinas, aesthetic depictions of the Other especially attempt to represent the unrepresentable, to define the Other within the

82 For instance, see Sarah Cooper, Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary (Oxford:  Legenda, 2008), 93 [2006]; Sarah Cooper, ‘Looking Back, Looking Onwards: Selflessness, Ethics, and French Documentary’, Studies in French Cinema 10/​1 (2010), 58; Joseph Mai, Jean-​Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 2010), 85; and Edward Lamberti, Performing Ethics through Film Style:  Levinas with the Dardenne Brothers, Barbet Schroeder and Paul Schrader (Edinburgh: EUP, 2019), 4. 83 Michele Aaron, Death and the Moving Image:  Ideology, Iconography and I (Edinburgh: EUP, 2015), 84, 208, n. 54. See also Michele Aaron, Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 111. 84 Levinas, EE, 49. Other examples include an interrogation of the aesthetic image in his article ‘La Réalité et son ombre’ (‘Reality and its Shadow’, Les Temps modernes, 1948) in which he briefly writes of time in the ‘non-​plastic arts such as music, literature, theater and cinema’: Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Reality and its Shadow’, in CPP, 10. The philosopher also makes fleeting allusion to Charles Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925) in his 1954 essay ‘Le Moi et la totalité’ (‘The Ego and the Totality’). The reference to Chaplin’s film is used analogously to describe the ‘disturbances of equilibrium inside’ the subject: Emmanuel Levinas, ‘The Ego and the Totality’, CPP, 26 [1954]. 85 Levinas, EE, 49.

Introduction

25

confines of the subject, the Same.86 Keeping this notion in mind, Chapter 2 compares his prioritising of the Other with his frequently objectified representations of feminine figures and death in his works.87 In contrast to Levinas, the perception of the aesthetic image was a significant and constructive concern in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought. Although it was through painted images, particularly those of Paul Cézanne, that Merleau-​Ponty often sought to demonstrate his phenomenology of perception, he also attempted to exhibit the direct applicability of Gestalt Psychology to a consideration of the cinematic image in his 1945 lecture, ‘Film and the New Psychology’.88 In the published essay version of this address, he famously argues that philosophers and film directors share a certain way of existing in and perceiving the world.89 Indeed, in two later lectures Merleau-​Ponty uses the cinema in exegesis of the primary pursuit of his philosophy, the perceptual domain and particularly the perceived motion of an object.90 These ideas inform the investigations in Chapter 3 of a spectator’s perception of images –​either diegetic or extra-​diegetic –​with their entire body. Where studies introducing Merleau-​Ponty’s oeuvre into film theory first emerged in the early 1990s, this ingress into the philosopher’s thinking via his perceptions of mortality is unique within this area of research.91 86 Levinas, TI, 51, 172. 87 For instance, see Levinas, EE, 86; and Levinas, ‘TO’, 85. 88 The lecture was delivered at L’Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC), Paris. 89 Merleau-​Ponty, ‘Film and the New Psychology’, 59. 90 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, ‘Art and the World of Perception’, in WP, 74; and Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, tr. Robert Vallier (Evanston, IL: Northwestern, 2003), 154. In these notes for and from a course of lectures Merleau-​Ponty gave at the Collège de France on the theme of nature from 1956–​8, he refers to two short films on artists, Henri-​Georges Clouzot’s Le Mystère Picasso (1956) and Frédéric Rossif ’s Matisse (1944): Merleau-​Ponty, Nature, 154. 91 Merleau-​Ponty’s work, and Phenomenology of Perception in particular, was first prominently established in the examination of embodied experience in visual culture in the research of Vivian Sobchack. See Vivian Sobchack, ‘The Active Eye: A Phenomenology of Cinematic Vision’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 12/​3 (1990), 21–​36; and The Address of the Eye:  A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

26

introduction

The application of notions of death as they affect intersubjective relations as depicted by all these critical philosophers has remained largely unexplored in film theory, especially in discussion of the moving-​image works of Marker, Resnais and Varda.

Existential-​Phenomenological Approaches to Mortality in Films of Marker, Varda and Resnais As previous studies have analysed films of Marker, Varda and Resnais through the prisms of the philosophies of Sartre, Levinas or Merleau-​ Ponty, in locating moments of death within the directors’ images as they are related to contact with the Other, this book engages with ethical, existential and phenomenological thought in exploration of the impact of death’s haunting presence on intersubjective relations, prompting a questioning of patriarchal constructions of positions of subject and Other.92 My argument here necessarily enters the current ethical discourse around the cinematic. For instance, Sarah Cooper’s Selfless Cinema? creates a discourse between Levinasian ethics and documentary film and references a temporal 92

See Jenny Chamarette, ‘Spectral Bodies, Temporalised Spaces: Agnès Varda’s Motile Gestures of Mourning and Memorial’, Image & Narrative 12/​2 (2011), 31–​49; Jenny Chamarette, Phenomenology and the Future of Film: Rethinking Subjectivity Beyond French Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Cooper, Selfless Cinema?; Cooper, ‘Looking Back, Looking Onwards’; Sarah Cooper, ‘Lorna’s Silence: Sartre and the Dardenne Brothers’, in Boulé and McCaffrey, eds, A Sartrean Perspective, 79–​91; Lisa Downing and Libby Saxton, Film and Ethics:  Foreclosed Encounters (Abingdon:  Routledge, 2010); Kate Ince, ‘Feminist Phenomenology and the Film World of Agnès Varda’, Hypatia 28/​3 (summer 2013), 602–​17; Ince, The Body and the Screen, 64-​8; Libby Saxton, Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust (London:  Wallflower Press, 2008); Hunter Vaughan, Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard, Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic Thinking (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2013); and Wilson, Love, Mortality and the Moving Image.

Introduction

27

plane that connects to the Other ‘beyond death and prior to birth’ (p. 27). Making the short crossing between morality and mortality, this book pursues a comparable ethical project, as its argument concentrates on the responsibility for the deaths of others in analyses of Marker’s, Varda’s and Resnais’s films. In her Love, Mortality and the Moving Image, Emma Wilson studies the ways in which moving-​image works express the poignancy of loss and introduces Levinasian ethics into these concerns, focusing on the ability of an image to refer to multiple temporal positions and the aftermath of a corporeal death, such as in feelings of grief and accountability (p. 39). This book further explores this state of responsibility for past deaths with especial attention paid to the challenges to traditional boundaries between positions of life and death. In essence, this book examines how death becomes a perpetual presence in encounters between subjects, probing the division between life and death as it progresses through Sartrean, Beauvoirian, Levinasian and finally Merleau-​Pontian theories of mortality and encounters with others, developing a model of the self as complex and evolving. This is a recognition that the self is constituted from dynamic attitudes of subject or Other and the understanding that each of these attitudes is mortal. I have developed this notion of an ambiguous, multiple self in part in reflection of Judith Butler’s use of the ‘I’ as representative of a ‘constitutive ambivalence’.93 This complex self is necessarily amorphous and accommodates varying definitions of such an identity in the works of the four key philosophers in this book. Through analyses of selected films by Resnais, Marker and Varda, my argument about mortal, intersubjective relations between such complex selves begins with the ontology of Sartre and Beauvoir’s feminist ethics in my first chapter, advancing through Levinasian ethics in the second and ending with Merleau-​Pontian phenomenology. Chapter 1 investigates the paradox between the conflicting intersubjective contact that typifies Sartre’s early philosophical writings and his often haranguing anti-​colonialist articles addressed to those ignorant of their inherent responsibility for people colonised in their name. These 93

Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter:  On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1997), 123.

28

introduction

contradictions are drawn out through recourse to the feminist ethical understanding of intersubjective interactions and death located in Beauvoir’s contemporaneous philosophies, especially the impact of her advance considerations of subject–​Other relationships as mutual. Going on to explore death through themes of ageing, illness and war, and the bad faith inherent to attempts to ignore them, this chapter evolves an idea of the relation between subject and Other occurring through the gaze in close individual film readings. This thesis of the self that reaches an understanding of its potential to occupy subjective and objective positions through an encounter with death is advanced through my second chapter with reference to Levinas’s remarkably different notion of the hierarchical relation between these two attitudes. In Chapter 2 Levinas’s theory of the obligation to the Other occurring through their mortality is interrogated in analysis of key films by Varda, Marker and Resnais. It examines how death is a presence in the contacts between subjects and Others, demonstrating how its introduction into these relations and the enforced objectification of the feminine can alter perceptions of the signal Levinasian theories of the face-​to-​face encounter, transcendence of the present and the entrance of the third party. Marker’s camera is also shown to represent a space that is haunted by death and through which the subject of the camera remains separated from the gaze of the director. These zones sustain the distinction between the subjective and objective perspectives fundamental to Levinas’s ethics, but also support a reciprocity of the gaze and an equality that recognises difference within an égalité du regard. To gaze at an object is a two-​way process: not only does the camera document but it also receives, as does the spectator who latterly perceives these images. The plurality of humanity, along with difference and the potential movement between positions of Other and subject as they encounter death, are elements expanded in the third chapter which focuses on the phenomenology of Merleau-​Ponty. Chapter 3 manoeuvres Merleau-​Ponty’s notions of embodied perception and chiasmic encounters into dialogue with potential spectatorial responses to the films of Resnais, Varda and Marker. It considers ways in which a subject-​spectator’s identification with a film’s characters and camera –​the Apparatus theories developed by the likes of Christian Metz

Introduction

29

and Jean-​Louis Baudry –​are undermined in these films. Through representations of death, these directors question the (gendered) hierarchy between perceived and perceiver, which is also a pursuit of Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenology. So, the relation between spectators and cameras and the objects they mutually perceive is akin to the chiasmic overlap between perceivers in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought, an engagement rather than an identification with a camera that simply reflects the self.94 The impact of digital-​virtual media and a chiasmic relation between the subject and the Other through an encounter with death are investigated and complicated by examinations of Marker’s digital and video works, Level Five (1996) and The Case of the Grinning Cat. The chapter explores how the principal characters in these films enter artificial realms –​the internet and digitally rendered worlds –​and, because of a consequent severance from indexicality, exist as phantom images haunting a deathly underworld. These figures then speak to a transience of positions, subjectivities and points between life by death: enacting death in life. These chapters systematically construct my argument that multiple images from the works of the thinkers and filmmakers at the heart of this project are haunted by death, a death that stalks quotidian existence.

94 This notion of spectatorial engagement notes and reflects Murray Smith’s development of a concept of character engagement that ‘may enable us to apprehend experiences other than our own and –​possibly –​use this new knowledge to act in the world in a more informed way’: Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 236 [1995]. I modify and extend this theory in my final chapter.

Chapter 1

Sartre’s Conflictual Subject versus Beauvoir’s Equivocal I: War, Illness and the Death of the Other

Pursuing the central theme of this study –​death’s proximity to life and to relations between subjects –​this chapter contrasts the ways in which Sartre and Beauvoir depict intersubjective encounters and how death enters into these communications between beings. It considers the paradoxical nature of Sartre’s concept of the hostile intersubjective relation in philosophical works published around World War II as compared to his later postcolonial writing. In his earlier philosophy, subjects are in perennial discord with one another, yet in his political writings on the occupation of Algeria, for instance, he requires that his readership take responsibility for the colonisation of her objectified people. Exploring this inconsistency through examination of a range of films by Varda, Resnais and Marker, the chapter draws on other key Sartrean and Beauvoirian theories as they address the Other and death’s stalking of life, including those of bad faith, on mental and aesthetic images and of the complex self. Investigating how far the cinematic works demonstrate comparable ideas about death, intersubjectivity and responsibility for the Other, the chapter concludes that, in distinct ways, the selected films indicate strategies by which the intersubjective relation can involve subjects assuming culpability for the deaths of Others. This is an idea which is also at the heart of Sartre’s anti-​colonialist texts and Beauvoir’s feminist ethics. Sartre’s ideas on the intersubjective relation were later profoundly influenced by Beauvoir’s feminist-​phenomenological thinking on reciprocity and movement between subjectivities that rejected the hostilities of her life-​partner’s fundamental theories.1 This chapter establishes Beauvoir’s 1

This influence is detailed in Christine Daigle and Jacob Golomb, ‘Introduction’, in their Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of Influence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 5. To note, Beauvoir’s writing on pregnancy, as I discuss later in this

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works as a counter to Sartre’s concepts, as it examines how, as they did for Sartre’s thought, they conduct discussion of conflictual intersubjective confrontations toward considerations of reciprocal relations of responsibility for one another’s mortality. The chapter explores each of these differing positions of sbject–​Other encounters and the principal idea of death in life through six films from the early careers of the three filmmakers. I first turn, however, to a detailed elaboration of the philosophical framework of the chapter, theories of death, war and the intersubjective relation in Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s writings.

Conflict and Death: War and Relations with the Other in Sartre’s Thought There are intrinsic conflicts within Sartre’s earlier philosophy –​the influence of war and the persistent clash with the Other –​that continue to engage scholars of both philosophy and film.2 So ingrained in his thought were hostilities between subject and Other that in the existentialist’s early masterwork, Being and Nothingness, one critical consideration of the interpersonal relation involves the subject seeking the Other’s death.3 Such ruminations on mortality are a core consideration of Sartre’s

2

3

chapter and have further detailed elsewhere, suffered from a similar proactive hostility towards the Other’s threat to a subject’s sovereignty, see Kierran Horner, ‘Intersubjectivity in the Pregnant Self: Maternity from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, through Agnès Varda’s L’Opéra-​Mouffe to Contemporary Feminist Thought’, Studies in European Cinema 18/​1 (2021), 4–​21. For instance, see Sarah Lucia Hoagland, ‘Existential Freedom and Political Change’, in Julien S. Murphy, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Jean-​Paul Sartre (University Park, PA:  Penn State University, 1999), 149–​74; Anderson, Sartre’s Two Ethics, 27–​35; Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye:  Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 93; and Mark Stanton, ‘Naked, Bad Faith and Masculinity’, in Boulé and McCaffrey, eds, A Sartrean Perspective,  54–​5. Sartre, BN, 261. For further discussion of the interpersonal relation and the Other’s death see Debbie Evans, ‘Sartre and Beauvoir on Hegel’s Master-​Slave Dialectic and

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33

thinking.4 Yet, where in his philosophical works the destruction of the Other is deemed an ultimate objective, in his opposition to France’s imperialist aspirations, Sartre constructs an argument for the responsibility for the death of the Other as an apparatus by which to highlight the moral torpor of his audience.5 There are, it should be noted, also inconsistencies in Sartre’s approach to conflict with the Other even in his early philosophical works, as I discuss later in reference to his 1936 essay La Transcendance de l’ego (The Transcendence of the Ego). The conflict-​ ridden intersubjectivity of his philosophical texts − simply put, a desire to maintain one’s self as the subject against Others, inventing a problem of the Other − most directly contradicts his interpretation of the Other in his partisan criticism of France’s colonisation of Algeria. In these articles of the 1950s and 1960s, Sartre intends to disturb what Edward Behr calls the ‘fairly long period of apathy’ towards the occupation of Algeria that prevailed within the general French populace.6 Sonia Kruks writes that there is then a paradox between Sartre’s defence of his account of the autonomous subject and his attempts to ‘argue the case for a humanistic socialism and solidarity with colonized peoples’.7 Consequently, his approaches to each of the Algerian conflict and World War II, a period in which his philosophy gestated, were complex and complicated. Sarah Lucia Hoagland contends that ‘Sartrean and Beauvoirian existentialism was born in war’.8 Writing in 1944, Sartre observed: ‘death, which in happier times we artfully conceal, became for us the perpetual object[s] of our concern’.9 Ruminations on mortality, which in moments

4 5 6 7 8 9

the Question of the “Look”’, in Christine Daigle and Jacob Golomb, eds, Beauvoir and Sartre, 93–​5; and Hazel E. Barnes, Sartre (London: Quartet Books, 1974), 63. Stephen Priest, ‘Sartre in the World’, Jean-​Paul Sartre: Basic Writings, ed. Stephen Priest (London: Routledge, 2003), 1. Jean-​Paul Sartre, ‘We are All Murderers’, Sartre, CN, 72–​4 [1958]. Edward Behr, The Algerian Problem (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 210. Sonia Kruks, Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 30. Hoagland, ‘Existential Freedom and Political Change’, in Murphy, ed., Feminist Interpretations, 150 (my emphasis). Jean-​Paul Sartre, ‘The Republic of Silence’, in The Aftermath of War (Situations III), tr. Chris Turner (London: Seagull Books, 2008), 4 [1944].

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of peace are repressed, are in times of war drawn to the surface of one’s consciousness. As we have seen, for Sartre, death’s shadow over life darkens and draws closer in wartime and if one is called to fight there is little authentic prospect of denying its presence. If the circumstances of World War II rendered the thought of a subject’s death an enduring presence in their lives, for Sartre the Algerian conflict also raised concurrent questions about the responsibility for the death of the Other. Finding analogies between these two conflicts in myriad texts in which he chronicles barbarities from the Algerian conflict, Sartre simultaneously stimulates memories of the Nazi Occupation of France. This juxtaposition challenges his readership about their notions of subjecthood, Otherness and the proximity of death in war.10 During the period of the Algerian conflict, these essays addressed those French citizens who attempted to ignore their culpability for and complicity in these deaths: ‘We personally must be accomplices to the crimes that are committed in our name, since it is within our power to stop them. We have to take responsibility for this guilt.’11 Sartre calls upon the French people to recognise their responsibility both for the Algerian conflict and for those whose lives are irrevocably transformed by or lost to it. In Le Joli Mai, Marker and Lhomme discover and depict a similar degree of resistance to this shared responsibility for that conflict. Similarly, Sartre’s appeal for accountability for the Other in Algeria contrasts with his stance in Being and Nothingness: ‘I am –​at the very root of my being –​ the project of assimilating or making an object of the Other’ (p. 385). Here, the self constantly compels others into a framework that objectifies them and corroborates the self as the unique subject. The resistance of the Other to this assimilation through being positioned above the subject, as considered in Chapter 2, is the foundation of Levinas’s ethics in which the Other sine qua non remains distinct from the Same (an approximate term for the self ).12 In contrast, in Sartre’s principal existentialist text, as John Mullarkey describes, such an encounter is a ‘conflict of free subjectivities

10 For instance, Jean-​Paul Sartre, ‘Colonialism is a System’, in CN, 54 [1956, from a speech made at a rally for peace in Algeria in the same year]. 11 Jean-​Paul Sartre, ‘You are Wonderful’, in CN, 64 [‘Vous êtes formidables’, 1957]. 12 See Levinas, TI, 80.

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35

where the life of the one must entail the death of the other’.13 The Sartrean intersubjective conflict is a fight to the death. Where the self attempts to expunge another’s subjectivity, to define them as the Other, this process is bilateral, as Sartre explains: while I seek to enslave the Other, the Other seeks to enslave me. We are by no means dealing with unilateral relations with an object-​in-​itself, but with reciprocal and moving relations. […] Conflict is the original meaning of being-​for-​others.

Interpersonal relations are reciprocally conflictual and, as Sartre continues in Being and Nothingness, ‘there is no dialectic for my relations toward the Other but rather a circle’. Encounters with Others are in flux and as these conflicts are won and lost, the self is ‘indefinitely tossed from one to the other of the two fundamental attitudes’.14 There is an abiding and reciprocal struggle of objectification in these relations, then: the violence inherent in the Sartrean intersubjective encounter that in its extreme sense compels one to pursue the death of the Other. The self aspires to the Other’s expiration in order to finalise this conflict, to irrevocably position them with no recourse to subjectivity, therefore ensuring the self ’s exclusive access to this pre-​eminent space.15 This notion speaks to the egological ontology that Sartre adheres to in his early philosophy –​focusing on the freedom of the subject in the world –​that Levinas directly opposes in his ethics. Sartre also attempted to locate his existentialism within an ethical ideology − through another swing of his conceptual pendulum − in the published text of his speech L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism is a Humanism, 1946). He claims there that ‘when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men’.16 Where here and in several of his postcolonial articles, one is 13 John Mullarkey, ‘The Tragedy of the Object:  Democracy of Vision and the Terrorism of Things in Bazin’s Cinematic Realism’, Angelaki 17/​4 (2012), 53. 14 Sartre, BN, 386, 385, 434, 261. 15 Joseph S. Catalano describes this conflict as at the heart of Sartre’s early thought: A Commentary on Jean-​Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 156, n. 7. 16 Sartre, EH, 29.

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responsible for the Other, this ethical attitude is largely absent from Being and Nothingness, in which the self is in contest with the Other. Sartre’s own position on intersubjective relations is in flux, or even conflict, from the 1930s to the 1960s. In his preface to Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961), Sartre encourages a responsibility for the absent Other mired in the Algerian conflict. He refers to those who still ignored the Algerian conflict as ‘zombies’ and describes how when these morts vivants deny their complicity in the war, intellectual and moral death appropriates their being.17 Of this indifference and the rejection of responsibility for the conflict, historian Alistair Horne writes that ‘the outlook towards Algeria of the French majority had passed through phases of disenchantment and cynicism to reach one of pure apathy’.18 This same concept is crucial to Sartre’s commentary when he parallels the insouciance of the French people with that of German citizens during World War II: False naiveté, flight, bad faith, solitude, silence, a complicity at once rejected and accepted, that is what we called, in 1945, collective responsibility. There was no way the German people, at the time, could feign ignorance of the camps.19

Repressing knowledge of the situation in Algeria is an act of destructive conformity, what Sartre terms mauvaise foi (bad faith), which is in conflict with authentic existence, the freedom to make of oneself what one will. Yet the object of bad faith is not completely expunged by this repression, instead it leaves a trace. Sartre writes of this remnant that ‘the first act of bad faith is to flee what it cannot flee’.20 Bad faith is a lie to oneself.21 Sartre attempts to reveal this deceit to his readership, to uncover 17

18 1 9 20 21

Jean-​Paul Sartre, ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, in CN, 158. The Sartrean zombie is, according to Judith Butler, ‘the shadow figure who is never quite human and never quite not’, Judith Butler, ‘Violence, Nonviolence: Sartre on Fanon’, in Senses of the Subject (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 175. Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–​1962 (New York: New York Review Books, 2006), 505. Sartre, ‘You are Wonderful’, 70. Sartre, BN, 72, 93. Kathleen Wider, The Bodily Nature of Consciousness:  Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 50.

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the regard for the colonised subject that necessarily remains within them. It is through this residual responsibility that one is aware of the act of self-​ deception, which in the passage quoted is an attempt to deny the guilt at collusion in war and the deaths of Others. In bad faith, the act of complicity inherent to the shared knowledge of the colonisation and torture of others in Algeria is analogous to the apathy of those who ignored the construction of the Konzentrationslager. Or, as Judith Butler writes of Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s work, colonisation is the ‘deadening of sense, the establishment of the body in social death, as one that lives and breathes its potentiality as death’.22 Colonisation interrupts the futurity of the colonised who live in the shadow of death. In Sartre’s writing, it is particularly through the gaze upon another that colonial intersubjective conflict occurs between a colonising (perceiving) subject and colonised (perceived) Other.23 As we have seen, in Sartre’s early thought, within this gaze between subject and Other there is the potential for an equivocal, if conflicted and fluctuating, intersubjective relation. This objectifying gaze is reciprocal and conflict-​ridden and is a site of colonial combat in ‘Black Orpheus’, an essay that Sarah Wilson argues transposes Sartre’s theory of interpersonal conflict ‘onto the colonial paradigm’.24 Sartre’s piece originally appeared as the preface to an anthology of African and West Indian poetry which he considers repel the objectifying gaze of the self-​appointed (Western) subject: Today, these black men are looking at us, and our gaze comes back to our own eyes; in their turn, black torches light up the world and our white heads are no more than Chinese lanterns swinging in the wind.

These poems reverse Occidental positions of Other and subject as, Sartre continues, ‘for three thousand years, the white man has enjoyed the

22 Judith Butler, ‘Violence, Nonviolence:  Sartre on Fanon’, in Senses of the Subject (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 189. 23 Azzedine Haddour, ‘Being Colonized’, in Webber, ed., Reading Sartre, 73. 24 Wilson, Visual World of French Theory, 44.

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privilege of seeing without being seen’.25 In the epoch of the dominion of the West the white gaze objectified black lives, but Sartre seemingly believes the dominant party in this structure had shifted by the late 1940s. Regardless of the accuracy of Sartre’s idealistic narrative, again there is no place in this framework where subject and Other exist harmoniously or take responsibility for one another. The gaze for Sartre, whoever is gazing, is an act of violence, innate to a contestation of the determinations of subjectivity and objectivity. This inherent violence and the fluidity within this intersubjective gaze are further illustrated in Sartre’s famous explication in Being and Nothingness (p. 246) of the loathsome feeling of shame in which one is compelled to acknowledge the gaze of the subject (a position taken by Sartre himself in the text) upon another. Sartre writes that, in being caught peering through a keyhole in a hotel-​room door, ‘[b]y the mere appearance of the Other, I am put in the position of passing judgment on myself as on an object, for it is as an object that I appear to the Other’. Although he maintains the appellation of ‘Other’ for the individual gazing at him, unable to relinquish the position of subject even as he attempts to describe the Othering process, the proximity of this being objectifies the voyeur through their gaze and, Sartre continues, ‘I recognize that I am as the Other sees me’ (p. 246). It is the Other’s gaze upon the voyeur that makes the latter aware of what they are doing, their self-​consciousness, what they are. The gaze in Sartre’s thought corresponds with the alienating, enslaving and dehumanising opposition between selves: conflict between subjects is, for Sartre, inexorable. He describes this violent contest as a possession: ‘the Other’s look fashions my body in its nakedness, causes it to be born, sculptures [sic] it, produces it as it is, sees it as I shall never see it’.26 This duel at the heart of the encounter between subjects central to Sartre’s thought is absent from Merleau-​Ponty’s chiasmic intersubjective relations, as I show in Chapter 3. In Sartre’s writing, though, the one assailed by the gaze endeavours to oppose the attack of the other. As Sartre intimated in ‘Black 25 26

Jean-​Paul Sartre, ‘Black Orpheus’, tr. John MacCombie, The Massachusetts Review 6/​1 (autumn 1964–​winter 1965), 13 [Introduction to Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue français, ed. Leopold Sédar-​Senghor, 1948]. Sartre, BN, 386.

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Orpheus’, the target of the objectifying gaze attempts to reverse the look upon the perceiver, to position them as the Other. This reciprocal ocular perception of one another differs, however, from the encounter between a subject and an imagined Other in Sartre’s early philosophical work. In both Being and Nothingness and his preceding essay, L’Imaginaire:  Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination (The Imaginary, 1940), Sartre acknowledges a sphere which the subject and the Other share that is, confirming the supremacy of the subject in his thought, hosted in the subject’s consciousness. Indeed, there are in Sartre’s examples of subjective perception of the Other in both of these texts no reciprocity nor circularity, but a hierarchical dialectic. In each of these works, his fictive friend Pierre is presented as the quintessential absent Other as he is described as imaged or imagined in the subject’s consciousness. This Other is imagined internally but there is simultaneously an external motion towards him. When Sartre thinks of Pierre in his absence, this mental image is present, yet Pierre himself is absent. Sartre asserts that an image of Pierre, whether mental (imagined) or artistic (imaged) acts to make him present. He writes that ‘[t]his object is not there, and we know that it is not there. We therefore find, in the first place, an intention directed at an absent object’. Such images function for Sartre ‘as representatives of the absent object, without managing however to suspend that characteristic of the objects of an imaging consciousness: absence’.27 Then, the imaged object is simultaneously absent and present and internal and external (to the subject). As shown in Chapter 2, for Levinas this would constitute the absorption –​and an inherent inhibition –​of the Other in the Same through vision.28 Sartre though considers the image of the physically absent but consciously imagined and present Other as a substitute for them in the subject’s consciousness.29 Pierre is absent, but also present as imagined, a form of correspondence between Pierre as Other and the egocentric mind. As Sartre writes in his War Diaries: ‘absence is a certain

27 28 29

Sartre, IPP, 19, 20. Levinas, TI, 194. Sartre, IPP, 14.

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relationship between my being and the Other’s being’.30 There is an intercourse between subject and Other in which they share a space, even as the latter is absent, through the subject’s imaging of them. The analysis of Marker’s La Jetée explores the extremities of such a relation through images of a subject and an Other that are imagined. For the time being it suffices to recognise that for Sartre, as Pierre (or another Other) is imagined, the consciousness that imagines them also aims at them as an object, creating a connection between them. Within this intention, the object retains its reality, yet the image of it, as the object is absent, is, if only temporarily so, what Sartre refers to as irreal. Indeed, the Other as imagined is an irreal image invented by the subject which offers no space for their complexity, their subjectivity: these images exist as part of an imaging consciousness. Where for example the imaged Pierre is irreal and the present Pierre as object is real, there are things that remain permanently irreal, such as death. These ‘objects/​concepts’, with no spatial or temporal determination, exist only as imagined (mental) or imaged (artistic). For instance, of the latter, the aesthetic image, in The Imaginary (p. 49) Sartre writes that the personified Death in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving, Ritter, Tod und Teufel (Knight, Death and the Devil, 1513), ‘does not exist’. An example of the former, imagined, appears in Sartre’s childhood memoir, Words, in which he considers Death personified in a haunting image.31 Death then becomes a ubiquitous, yet ephemeral presence in life through this status as an irreal image. Such irreal ‘objects’, as understood by Sartre, are ‘phantom-​objects’ that ‘haunt us’.32 As objects imaged or imagined, they are never simply themselves. Further demonstrating this theory of life haunted by death, in a sub-​chapter devoted to the discussion of mortality in Being and Nothingness (p. 553), Sartre argues that it ‘becomes the meaning of life as the resolved chord is the meaning of the melody’. This concept of a final chord of a melody, sounding in the preceding notes as an analogy for death’s shadow cast back over life, is one Sartre also employed in his speech on cinema made at the lycée in Le Havre 30 31 32

Jean-​Paul Sartre, War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War November 1939–​March 1940, tr. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso Classics, 1999), 187. Sartre, Words, 61; Also, see Sartre, BN, 568. Sartre, IPP, 132.

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in the early 1930s.33 In expanding on this idea in Being and Nothingness a decade later, he writes that ‘each term of a series is always present in all the terms of the series’.34 The concluding note of the symphony of life filters backwards into the preceding instants: death’s umbra falls over the existence which it brings to a close and, in this way, death exists in life. Discussing another image (portrait) of an absent subject, Sartre writes in The Imaginary that the ‘dead Charles VIII is there, present before us. It is he that we see, not the picture, and yet we posit him as not being there: we have only reached him “as imaged”’.35 The dead subject is reached through the ‘intermediary’ of the image (portrait). There is a hesitation between the aesthetic image of the dead and the imagined one in which death is sustained in the intention directed at an absent object (Charles VIII). The imagined object, say Pierre, is equally absent, and this absence is what Sartre calls ‘irreality’.36 However, as Richard Kearney writes, Sartre distinguishes between the mental image and ‘non-​mental images which are less spontaneous in that they are related to an external analogue; for example, a painting or photograph’.37 Again, the foundational subject-​centrism of Sartre’s work is evident here. The independent thought of death correlates with the spontaneous imaging of it in consciousness: it is immediate because it is internal, rather than an external (objective) ‘picture’ of death which then evokes internal images of mortality. In the latter connection, between the object of the image and its conception in the consciousness of the spectator of that image, there is a brief delay. Acknowledging such a hesitation in cinematic images, Sartre argues that they represent actions preserved.38 This captured activity and the consciousness of the spectator viewing them interpenetrate, yet remain separate and, Sartre writes, ‘the solid and delicious notion of being a spectator 3 3 34 35 36 37 38

Sartre, ‘Motion Picture Art’, 56. Sartre, BN, 553. Sartre, IPP, 23. Sartre, IPP, 27. Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: From Husserl to Lyotard (London: Routledge, 1993), 56. Jean-​Paul Sartre, ‘Theatre and Cinema’, in Modern Times: Selected Non-​Fiction, tr. Robin Buss, ed. Geoffrey Wall (London: Penguin, 2000), 199 [1973].

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remains at the base of consciousness’.39 The cinema spectator continues to be aware that the images they view do not form their reality, they exist in an overlapping of their domain and the pro-​filmic one in what Jean Louis Schefer later calls ‘the simultaneity of two worlds’.40 There is a dissociation between the spectator and the images she perceives. These theses of the image − the disparity between the mental image and the aesthetic image and the autonomy of the spectator viewing them − will be significant for my ensuing analyses of Resnais’s Night and Fog and Muriel in which images become spatiotemporal instants at which responsibility for death is exchanged between subjects, which is also key to Sartre’s thinking. He writes that ‘to die is to exist only through the Other, and to owe to him one’s meaning’. Even in this exchange in which accountability for another is accepted, Sartrean violence inherent in the relationship between subject and Other continues. Yet Sartre also asserts that the Other sine qua non takes responsibility for this death.41 And he frequently frames this concept of responsibility for another’s death in the context of remembering the dead. The reciprocity between the subject and the Other in Sartre’s early philosophy ends with this communication of responsibility for death. This is not necessarily a positive exchange, as he continues in defining this transference of death between subject and Other: ‘death deprives [the subject] of all subjective meaning in order to hand it over to any objective meaning the Other is pleased to give to it’.42 This relation remains hostile: the sense in this excerpt is that, in life, the subject ‘defends’ herself against the Other’s imposition but at the subject’s death, the Other prevails. Jonathan Webber writes of this terminal reciprocity in Sartre’s work that death divests the self of the ‘ability to act in ways that might alter the view others have of me, the death of another person deprives me of the ability to try to manipulate their view of me’.43 One’s death is the responsibility 3 9 Sartre, ‘APC’, 398 (my tr.). 40 Jean Louis Schefer, The Ordinary Man of Cinema, tr. Max Cavitch, Paul Grant and Noura Wedell (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2016), 129 [L’Homme ordinaire du cinéma, 1980]. 41 Sartre, BN,  562–​5. 42 Ibid. 43 Jonathan Webber, The Existentialism of Jean-​Paul Sartre (New York:  Routledge, 2009), 141.

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of the Other and this extinction is the point at which one can no longer retain the egocentric perspective of one’s self.44 Whilst it may seem that death can conciliate hostilities between subject and Other, in presenting this responsibility as the deprivation of subjective meaning, Sartre identifies death as the logical conclusion to conflictual intersubjective relations. Resisting this intersubjective antagonism inherent to Sartre’s early philosophy, Beauvoir’s ethical, feminist version(s) of existentialism present(s) a reciprocity within intersubjectivity, whilst also referencing the notion of death. Where scholars previously maintained that Beauvoir’s philosophy was derived from Sartre’s,45 recent research acknowledges that the influence was at least mutual, or that Beauvoir developed her own theories discretely and in advance.46

The Beauvoirian Polysemous Self Beauvoir’s feminist ideas on the consequences of intersubjective encounters influenced Sartre’s thoughts on the same.47 Christine Daigle and Jacob Golomb note that a close examination of the philosophical concepts in Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s 1930s and 1940s publications ‘unveils what seems to be a crisscrossing of influence from Beauvoir to Sartre and from Sartre to Beauvoir’.48 Such concepts include that of the ‘problem of the Other’, which, as Margaret A. Simons acknowledges, Beauvoir addressed before Sartre.49 Although their philosophies were mutually influencing, 44 Sartre, BN, 566. 5 For instance, see Barnes, Sartre, 61. 4 46 Sonia Kruks, ‘Simone de Beauvoir and the Limits to Freedom’, Social Texts, 17 (autumn 1987), 113; Fullbrook and Fullbrook, Sex and Philosophy,  131–​9. 47 Ursula Tidd, ‘The Self–​Other Relation in Beauvoir’s Ethics and Autobiography’, Hypatia, 14/​4 (autumn 1999), 163–​4. 48 Christine Daigle and Jacob Golomb, ‘Introduction’, to their Beauvoir and Sartre, 5. 49 Margaret A. Simons, ‘Beauvoir and Sartre:  The Philosophical Relationship’, in Hélène Vivienne Wenzel, ed., Simone de Beauvoir:  Witness to a Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 169.

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they were also different. As Kate Ince writes, ‘Beauvoir’s approach to freedom and intersubjectivity (which are necessarily intertwined) is distinct from Sartre’s, which takes the form of a hostile dialectic of consciousness’.50 Beauvoir’s definition of the ethical relation with the Other is founded on reciprocity without conflict (resisting this violence as a patriarchal construct). Her adaptation of existentialism through an expression of feminism is well documented and offers an essential insight into female, subjective existence.51 Beauvoir’s broader ethical rendering of existential approaches in The Ethics of Ambiguity and her application of this thought to the quotidian, phenomenological experience of women in The Second Sex each anticipate and insist upon an intersubjective relation that is both reciprocal and egalitarian. For instance, arguing that considerations of the self should involve the Other, she writes in the earlier text that ‘[t]o will oneself free is also to will others free’.52 There is a circumspect accord between this declaration and Sartre’s assertion that man is not ‘responsible only for his own individuality, but […] for all men’.53 Yet Beauvoir’s moral, reciprocal approach to an embodied self that is positioned in the world is maintained and even evolves throughout her early texts. Indeed, in her earliest published philosophical essay, Pyrrhus et Cinéas: A Cette Dame (‘Pyrrhus and Cineas: To This Lady’, 1944) she argues that it is because: subjectivity is not inertia, folding in upon itself, separation, but, on the contrary, movement toward the other that the difference between me and the other is abolished […] Only I can create the tie that unites me to the other. I create it from the fact that I am not a thing, but a project of self toward the other.54

Ince, The Body and the Screen, 84. See Jo-​Ann Pilardi, Simone de Beauvoir, Writing the Self:  Philosophy Becomes Autobiography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 31; and Constance L. Mui, ‘Sartre and Marcel on Embodiment:  Reevaluating Traditional and Gynocentric Feminisms’, in Murphy, ed., Feminist Interpretations, 113. 52 Beauvoir, EA, 73. 53 Sartre, EH, 23. 54 ‘Pyrrhus and Cineas:  A Cette Dame’, tr. Marybeth Timmerman, in Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophical Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 93.

50 51

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This reciprocity –​here the difference between subjects is the division between them, rather than alterity –​is in distinction to the oscillation between conflictual and harmonious orientations in Sartre’s works. As Beauvoir herself admits in interview: ‘I think that the idea of reciprocity came later for Sartre’.55 Beauvoir’s thought took this ethical turn as early as the spring of 1940, quite independently of Sartre.56 This ethics is most apparent in the ways in which she represents a reciprocity or ethical equality between Other and subject. By the time of writing The Second Sex (p. 171), Beauvoir considered that Otherness, or true alterity, is ‘a consciousness separate from mine and substantially identical with mine’.57 Beauvoir recognises, in contrast to Sartre, both difference and equality between subjects and Others. Earlier, in The Ethics of Ambiguity, she presents this notion of the connection between subjects and Others through an analogy with life prolonging itself through the freedom of others, which manages to ‘surpass death itself ’.58 The Other is interpolated in subjective freedom and their alterity completes this liberation even after the death of the subject. As does Sartre, Beauvoir sees ‘death’s shadow’ hanging over life, yet for her it can be outlived through the liberation of the Other.59 Her conception lacks the conflicting terminology of relinquishing one’s identity in death, ‘final victories’ or the sudden suppression of a combatant of Sartre’s ideology.60 Instead, Beauvoir’s ideal is of a universal freedom, with the self impelled beyond death through a humanist ethics. Claire Humphrey suggests that Beauvoir’s ‘positive ethics’ of the relation with other subjects includes the ‘ideal relationship of “reciprocity” between subjects’.61 Indeed, the theory 55

Margaret A. Simons, ‘Two Interviews with Simone de Beauvoir’, tr. Jane Marie Todd, Hypatia 3/​3 (winter 1989), 18. 56 Beauvoir, Wartime Diary, 116, 250–​1. 57 Beauvoir, SS, 171. 58 Beauvoir, EA, 32. 59 Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Existentialism and Popular Wisdom’, tr. Marybeth Timmermann, in Beauvoir, Philosophical Writings, 210 [1945]. 0 Sartre, BN, 564, 565. 6 61 Claire Humphrey, ‘La Petite Jérusalem:  Freedom and Ambiguity in the Paris banlieues’, in Jean-​ Pierre Boulé and Ursula Tidd, eds, Existentialism and

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of ‘ambiguity’ that distinguishes Beauvoir’s early philosophical texts avoids conflict as the self accepts their potential to be subject or Other. In her foundational second-​wave feminist text, Beauvoir outlines a theory of the Other as an equal to the subject which is presented as a critique of the immutable objectification of women within patriarchal orthodoxy: the situation in which a woman ‘seems to be the inessential who never goes back to being the essential, to be the absolute Other, without reciprocity’. Woman is denied potential subjectivity, as man ‘feminizes the ideal he sets up before him as the essential Other’. For Beauvoir, this objectification is often dressed as the sexualisation of corporeal, biological difference, and she continues with the observation that ‘everything that accentuates difference in the Other makes her more desirable, since what man wants to take possession of is the Other as such’. Consequently, Beauvoir continues, man has begged woman not to give up ‘long skirts, petticoats, veils, long gloves, high-​heeled shoes’.62 Women are positioned as Other by man through their notions of an eroticised femininity, in order that man can then possess this constructed Other, ‘woman’. Yet, deconstructing this gendered, hierarchical paradigm in a later text in reverence of the phenomenon of Brigitte Bardot, Beauvoir writes that the nouvelle vague star challenges man’s role as subject and owner of the gaze by embracing her sexuality and concurrently objectifying him as he does her. Building on her scrutiny of feminised accessories in The Second Sex –​and evoking her words on the death of her beloved mother about jewellery, fragrance and clothes being façades beneath which lurk death –​ Beauvoir writes of Bardot that: To spurn jewels and cosmetics and high heels and girdles is to refuse to transform oneself into a remote idol. It is to assert that one is man’s fellow and equal, to recognize that between the woman and him there is mutual desire and pleasure.63

62 63

Contemporary Cinema:  A Beauvoirian Perspective (New York:  Berghahn Books, 2012), 103. Beauvoir, SS, 173, 211, 224. Beauvoir, BB, 30. Beauvoir also writes that make-​up and jewellery add to the ‘petrification of face and body’, Beauvoir, SS, 190.

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It is through an acceptance of her own desire and allure and a rejection of the masculine impositions of attraction –​the trinkets of male desire and objectification  –​and meeting the masculine gaze with her own that Bardot becomes an equal to the masculine within a bilateral gaze. Speaking to the reciprocity and reversibility between attitudes of subjectivity and objectivity that are at the core of Beauvoir’s thought, Bardot embodies the notion of oscillating movement between positions of subject and Other, eroding the dialectic between them. Countering the objectifying hetero-​masculine gaze that is maintained in Sartre’s thought, Beauvoir suggests ways in which woman can enter into reciprocity with man despite this sexualising look. Ursula Tidd and Jean-​Pierre Boulé argue that ‘Beauvoir was the first feminist thinker to inaugurate the concept of the gendered “othering” gaze’.64 This was, of course, the ‘othering’ or feminisation of women through a masculine/​ised gaze. Beauvoir’s assailing of this masculine, sexualising look is a central theme of The Second Sex and Debbie Evans asserts that in this text Beauvoir developed her argument from The Ethics of Ambiguity claiming that each human freedom is sustained and completed in the Other. Evans continues that: This claim is directly at odds with Sartre’s description of the inhuman male ‘Look’, with its negation of otherness and its implicit Master status. To this description Beauvoir juxtaposes the necessity of a frank and unbiased interchange between the sexes, which bypasses the need for any judgmental ‘Look’.65

Beauvoir’s version of the gaze between complex selves differs from Sartre’s position, which maintains the violent othering of the perceived by the perceiver, reiterating the patriarchy of the masculine, objectifying gaze. Beauvoir’s conception of the gaze between subject and Other relies on the reciprocity that she attempts to maintain in every aspect of the intersubjective relation, whereas Sartre’s version perseveres with what amounts 64 Jean-​ Pierre Boulé and Ursula Tidd, ‘Introduction’, in Boulé and Tidd, eds, A Beauvoirian Perspective, 1. 65 Evans, ‘Hegel’s Master-​Slave Dialectic’, in Daigle and Golomb, eds, Beauvoir and Sartre, 109.

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to a master–​slave binary. For Beauvoir every being is receptive to multiple attitudes of subject and Other or perceiver and perceived without the need for such conflict. Later this chapter will explore this ambiguous positioning as personified by the titular chanteuse of Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 in conjunction with the notion of the proximity of death to life. These readings rely on this idea of a reciprocal, non-​conflictual gaze and, as Julie K. Ward argues, in Beauvoir’s philosophy, a polysemous self maintains attitudes of subject and Other simultaneously: Beauvoir characterizes reciprocity as a mode in which subjects recognize each other as object and equally as subject, implying that the fundamental opposition of the other as object is overcome by a parallel recognition of other as subject.66

It is this idea of a reciprocity between selves who are not either subject and Other, as in Sartre’s thought, but concurrently both that Beauvoir develops in The Second Sex. Throughout Beauvoir’s tome, it is women that embrace this embodiment of obverse states, one which Beauvoir also regularly associates with the existence of death in life, as revealed in the introduction. That alignment of birth with death, which in turn intimates a biologically located affiliation between woman and death, is exactly the systemic misogyny and misanthropy that Beauvoir attempts to level in her philosophical, and literary, works. As shown above, in her writing Beauvoir constructs an ethics in which relations between subjects and Others are reciprocal and non-​conflictual and these selves are polysemous:  non-​binary or complex, equivocal. Consequently, her theories on the mutual intersubjective relation (including through the gaze) and death in life amend Sartrean versions of the same. The cinematic image is a nexus of these concepts of the encounter between subjects and the transference of death between these positions. In this regard, when writing of the imaged object, Beauvoir’s conception corresponds somewhat with Sartre’s. Writing specifically about images offered in the cinema, Beauvoir argues that they ‘have all the fullness of perception –​they are perceptions, and perceptions grasped as the analogon of an absent reality’.67 Similar to 66 Julie K. Ward, ‘Reciprocity and Friendship in Beauvoir’s Thought’, Hypatia 14/​4 (autumn 1999), 43. 67 Beauvoir, All Said and Done, 195.

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Sartre’s interpretation of the imaged or imagined Other (Pierre, Death), for Beauvoir the cinematic image portrays an absent reality as present.

Transient Presence: Images of War and Death in Night and Fog and Muriel When asked what the ultimate meaning of Night and Fog was in a 1985 interview, Resnais responded that ‘the whole point […] was Algeria’.68 Through the images representing World War II, Resnais hopes to evoke in the film-​spectator’s conscience, an analogy with the Algerian conflict.69 This correspondence between the present Algerian situation and the historic concentration camps of World War II manifests itself as two strata and two designations of images in the film. Where the first are the shots of World War II from Night and Fog, the second are the contemplations of the war in Algeria in the consciousnesses of the film’s spectators. There is a series of progressions and hesitations at play here, as the imaged depictions of deaths in war (the aesthetic images of Resnais’s film) and the consciousness of its spectators are divergent because, as Sartre writes of cinematic images, and the consciousness of their spectator, the two remain separate; yet, as Beauvoir argues, films create hypnagogic reverberations in the spectator.70 La conscience, means, in French both consciousness and conscience. Certainly, in 1956, a decade after the liberation of the German 68 Cited in Charles Krantz, ‘Teaching Night and Fog: History and Historiography’, Film & History 15/​1 (February 1985), 7. 69 Jean-​Marc Dreyfus, ‘Censorship and Approval: The Reception of Nuit et brouillard in France’, in Ewout van der Knapp, ed., Uncovering the Holocaust: The International Reception of Night and Fog (London:  Wallflower Press, 2006), 41; and Debarati Sanyal, ‘Auschwitz as Allegory in Night and Fog’, in Pollock and Silverman, eds, Concentrationary Cinema, 152–​82. Comparably, in interview Sartre explains that his contemporaneous play Sequestres d’Altona (The Condemned of Altona, 1959) was set in Nazi Germany but about the conflict in Algeria, Oreste F. Pucciani, ‘An Interview with Jean-​Paul Sartre’, The Tulane Drama Review 5/​3 (1961), 13–​14. 70 Sartre, ‘APC’, 398. Beauvoir, All Said and Done, 196.

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concentration camps, a spectator of Resnais’s film may (want to) feel some dissociation from these events. But a certain motion between the informed, contemporaneous spectator through a, perhaps repressed, consciousness of the current Algerian conflict and the images of the camps in Night and Fog and Michel Bouquet’s narration which comments on them endures.71 The Algerian conflict is an absent object that the film gestures towards, much as the thought of the absent Pierre makes him present to Sartre as imagined. This motion in turn creates further internal images of irreal death that are more spontaneous than the images related to an external analogue. This inner consciousness of death is spontaneous. It is immediate and internal, in contrast to the external pictures of death which in turn stimulate thoughts of mortality within the perceiver, with a delay. Where the gaze between intersubjectivities is in Sartre’s philosophy a violent act, the images of Night and Fog are informed by the insistence of responsibility for the death of the Other, reflecting ideas Sartre referred to in his postcolonial writing and Beauvoir’s ethico-​feminist writing. Resnais’s intention that these filmic images of World War II should induce mental images of Algeria necessarily relies on the gaze of the film’s spectators. If the viewer recognises the images of objectification, torture and death as not only relating to the past war, but the current conflict, then it is as if their gaze penetrates beneath the images portraying the victims of World War II. Libby Saxton argues that the figureless shots of the abandoned camps in Night and Fog recall the deaths that occurred there as Resnais’s ‘mobile, exploratory camerawork implies a residual corporeal presence in the silent, desolate chamber, ghosting the passage and perspective of those who died there’.72 The victims of the camps are phantoms in the post-​liberation images Resnais captures over a decade later. After beginning with colour film stock, shot in 1955, of a becalmed, pastoral landscape –​a swathe of dark green forest on the horizon, below it a toiled, brown field and above it a crisp blue sky, white puffs of cloud 71 72

It is worth noting that the French word la conscience means both consciousness and conscience. Saxton, Haunted Images, 89.

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strewn across its face –​the camera pans down the image to reveal gnarled barbed-​wire fences surrounding Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration and extermination camps. Cayrol’s narration reiterates this spectral presence, a paradox of polarities represented in one image: ‘even a quiet country scene … even a village fair may lead directly to a concentration camp’. The very environment in which the Muselmänner existed is absurdist, a landscape where the supposed innocence and benign diversions of bucolic life crash against the near-​inconceivable barbarity of the genocide that took place in the camps. Death becomes a phantom to each moment of life as rural amusements are conferred with the horrors of the Shoah. Cayrol’s voice-​over furthers this notion of routine leisure and recreation and incomprehensible maleficence existing concurrently when describing the construction of a concentration camp being like building a ‘stadium or a hotel’. Resnais and his crew filmed the opening images, void of human forms, ten years after the liberation of the camps. However, even after the fact, without the subjects of the camps –​living or dead –​physically present to the images, they speak to the idea of traditional boundaries contravened. The victims of these massacres haunt the images still, evoking notions of life pillaged by death. These deaths, inherent in the images, consequently haunt the consciousness of the spectator of the film. Indeed, there was French complicity in the extermination of French-​Jewish citizens as detention camps were run in France by the French. From 1941 until 1943, writes Richard Vinen, ‘French Jews were arrested primarily by French policemen and all but one of the seven internment camps in which they were placed were run by the French.’73 Night and Fog implies exactly this level of complicity from French authorities, especially in the infamous image of the kepi-​adorned French policeman overseeing a scene in a camp from a lookout tower: French censors later required Resnais to redact the hat from the shot.74 The French population’s pride in their struggle against the German forces is undermined by collusion in genocide and further complicated by a concurrent guilt at Richard Vinen, The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation (London: Penguin, 2006), 135. 74 Stuart Liebman, ‘Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog:  Historians Reassess a Classic Documentary’, Cineaste 38/​1 (2012), 46–​9. 73

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‘the crimes committed in their name’ in Algeria. The images of his early documentary also evoke, as Resnais himself suggests, in the conscience of a spectator, the deaths of Others in Algeria. This process asks that the spectator considers their obligation to the Other and, ultimately, responsibility for their deaths, as Sartre calls for in his essays on the Algerian conflict. This trompe l’esprit of the audience, presenting one war as an analogue for another, was necessary at the time Night and Fog was produced as there were active restrictions on media representations of the Algerian conflict. These constraints explain what historian Philip Dine calls French cinema’s ‘much maligned’ lack of a response to the war.75 Imaged in the conscience of the spectator of Resnais’s film, however, the conflict and the deaths which inevitably occur in its midst acquire a presence. As the soldier and photographer Ernst Jünger asserts, war images are ‘detailed impressions of the surface of events’ and imagination is requisite to sense the suffering behind them.76 The engagement of the viewer’s imagination is necessary for images of war to signify their truth. A fortiori, the consciousness of the spectator is essential in fulfilling Resnais’s intention for his film. This consciousness translates the tenuous link between the images of Night and Fog of World War II and accommodates, or makes present, images of the Algerian conflict, which are necessarily absent from the film: the spectator’s conscious engagement fills the perceptible gap. This analogy between two wars pierces any façade of bad faith that the spectator attempts to maintain, instead eliciting their liability for the death of the Other. Sartre’s stance on subjective responsibility for the Other is inconsistently demonstrated in his writing from the 1930s to the 1960s. For instance, in La Transcendance de l’ego: Esquisse d’une description phénomenologique (1936, The Transcendence of the Ego), he presents a 75 Philip Dine, ‘A la recherche du soldat perdu: Myth, Metaphor and Memory in the French Cinema of the Algerian War’, in Valerie Holman and Debra Kelly, eds, France at War in the Twentieth Century (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 147. Arguably, Godard attempted to rectify this lack through his 1960 film Le Petit Soldat, which was suppressed for its depictions of torture on both sides of the conflict and released later in 1963. 76 Ernst Jünger, ‘War and Photography’, tr. Anthony Nassar, New German Critique 59 (spring–​summer 1993), 25–​6 [1930].

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formulation of the subject–​Other relation that is in accord –​in regard to the obligation for the Other –​with much of his postcolonial literature of the 1950s. In this phenomenological article (p. 56), he indicates the influence of the call of the Other in need: I pity Peter, and I go to his assistance. For my consciousness only one thing exists at that moment: Peter-​having-​to-​be-​helped. This quality of ‘having-​to-​be-​helped’ lies in Peter. It acts on me like a force.

Here Sartre argues that the existence of the Other effects a force upon the subject from within, an obligation that echoes in Beauvoir’s thought, and Levinas’s work as discussed in the next chapter, but which remains underdeveloped in Sartre’s early philosophy. It is such a power –​demonstrated in the pity for Pierre or the Other more generally –​that is apparent in Night and Fog. This manifests itself via the gaze of the spectator upon the images of the victims of the Holocaust, which are in turn refracted and aimed at the absent casualties of the conflict in Algeria. The figure of the Muselmann in particular  –​rendered in the images selected by Resnais and in the commentary written by Jean Cayrol –​is representative of this anguished call of the Other to the subject.

Figure 2:  The transience between life and death, a victim of the camps in Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1956), © Argos Films, Cocinor and Como-​Films.

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The Muselmänner are captives of the camps whose death is consuming their life: they embody the imbrication of states of life and death. The images of these victims present what Emma Wilson calls in her analysis of the film moments where the ‘division between life and death, body and corpse, is all but denied’.77 In the succinct sequence in the middle of the documentary, Resnais reproduces images of these ‘patients’ in the ‘hospital’ that are sometimes in motion and sometimes static –​hinting at the transience between life and death –​and the Muselmänner quiver in an existential twilight (see Figure 2). Cayrol’s voice-​over suggests that ‘All the deportees came to look the same, indeterminate in age, staring-​eyed in death’. The ‘hospital’ sequence opens with an establishing shot of the clinic, the no. 20 printed above the doorway incongruously domesticating the terrors within. Through the door, there is a black and white sequence of two men, blankets strewn over them and twisted around naked limbs and emaciated torsos, breathing heavily. This cuts to a third man, on his back, equally challenged by breathing and a fourth, facing the camera but too weak to lift his eyes to meet the mechanical, cold gaze. Another angle of this man shot from the foot of his bed, reveals him twitching in agony, clenching his teeth. A fifth ‘patient’ lays on his back, staring into camera, his chest heaving also, as his eyelids flicker open and closed. The final shot of this episode is a still image of a man –​edited to coincide with Cayrol’s words, ‘staring-​eyed in death’ –​his body and face angular, cadaverous even, with malnutrition, his gaze fixed, staring at a position beyond the camera lens. Whether he has passed or still clings feebly to life is difficult to discern. Recalling Beauvoir’s notion of the body in war as a corpse in waiting, or her mother’s cadaver representing her absence and presence, these images are exemplary of Max Silverman’s analysis of Resnais’s film and Cayrol’s Lazarean art. Silverman writes that in Cayrol’s work ‘time and place are haunted by an elsewhere, and life is permanently haunted by death’.78 The Cayrolian Muselmänner, as presented in Resnais’s film, crystallise the notion of a movement through

7 7 Emma Wilson, ‘Material Remains: Night and Fog’, October 112 (spring 2005), 100. 78 Max Silverman, ‘Fearful Imagination:  Night and Fog and Concentrationary Memory’, in Pollock and Silverman, eds, Concentrationary Cinema, 200.

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space and a death in life: figures that are indecipherable as either living or dead. They are, in fact, the ‘living dead’.79 Deleuze also considers this spatial and temporal transience and the proximity of death to figures in several of Resnais’s films, writing that: The character in Resnais’s cinema is Lazarean precisely because he returns from death, from the land of the dead; he has passed through death and is born from death […]. Even if he was not personally in Auschwitz, even if he was not personally in Hiroshima… […] he returns from the dead, Auschwitz or Hiroshima, Guernica or the Algerian war.80

The figures in Resnais’s films –​the fiction film Hiroshima mon amour and the documentaries Guernica and Night and Fog –​transmit the inherent deaths of Hiroshima, Guernica, Auschwitz, Algiers and Sétif, with them. Deleuze evokes the figure of Lazarus who for Cayrol, Silverman notes, symbolises the revelation of the invisible thread tying life ‘to the presence of death’.81 For Deleuze, Resnais’s Lazarean characters are not restricted by temporal or spatial boundaries: they return from deaths that occur during events that are conventionally considered as separate and their lives are marked by and imperceptibly tied to death. Boundaries between wars and between life and death are dissolved by the characters in Resnais’s films. With these frontiers eroded, the deaths of the past gain presence in the current images of these films, which is a reciprocal process as the deaths of Algeria also pass into the consciousness of the spectators through the images of World War II. In this way, the shots of the emaciated human forms of the Muselmänner offer the Algerian conflict and its associated deaths a presence, one formed in the consciousness of the spectator of the film. This consciousness is of mortality, the responsibility for the death of the Other, as the appalling 79 80

81

Marzio Barbagli, Farewell to the World:  A History of Suicide, tr. Lucinda Byatt (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 141. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 200. Deleuze continues that Resnais’s characters return from Auschwitz and Hiroshima as philosophers  –​beings who have passed through death –​and that Resnais’s films constitute a cinema of philosophy, Deleuze, Cinema 2, 201. Silverman, ‘Fearful Imagination’, 200.

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situation of the Muselmänner places them closer to their deaths, as when Sartre contends that waiting for a ‘mobilization order’ to the army increases the chances of an imminent death.82 Death moves nearer and, as Cayrol’s script explains, for the Muselmänner it lingers in quotidian functions: sleep, work, eating and ablutions. Death permeates the diaphanous veneer of life, exists in it and so even acts of recuperation or rest are perilous.83 The Muselmänner represent a motion toward death in Resnais’s images, for the persons portrayed, for the spectator of those images and for the absent Other in Algeria. Each of these deaths is reached through the ‘intermediary’ of the image (portrait). Such an intention occurs in the mind of the spectator of Night and Fog, where the deaths of World War II and the Algerian conflict overlap. In the intersubjective encounter between the spectator and the figures of the Muselmänner, the haunting stares of the latter compel the spectator to acknowledge their shame and their accountability for the conflict in Algeria. For, as Beauvoir writes, ‘abstention is complicity’.84 Resnais’s images speak to a consciousness that aims from an image of one war to that of another, the reciprocal movements between the external and the internal and the subjective and the objective. Such movements also occur between the dual image-​tracks which compose Muriel, as one penetrates the other. The first of these tracks signifies the subjective consciousness of certain characters in the film, their bad faith, their collusion in and shame at the deaths of Others and the second track depicts the film’s objective narrative. The former images also function to invite the spectator of the film to consider their responsibility for the deaths imag(in)ed there. 82 Sartre, BN, 556. 8 3 Notably, Beauvoir also writes that Claude Lanzmann’s holocaust documentary, Shoah, is composed of such images captured after the atrocities that hide a horrific past. In a Preface to the published version of the text of the film in English, Beauvoir writes, ‘[i]n ditches on that green field trucks dumped bodies of Jews who had died of asphyxiation during the journey. Into that pretty little stream were thrown the ashes of incinerated corpses.’ Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Preface’, tr. unknown, to Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: The Complete Text of the Acclaimed Holocaust Film (New York: De Capo Press, 1995), iii–​vi (iii). 84 Beauvoir, EA, 86.

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Historian Benjamin Stora reveals that several French films released after the Évian Accords, which marked the ceasefire that officially ended the Algerian conflict on 18 March 1962, directly referenced the war. Muriel − which was also written by Cayrol − was one such film, but had originally been censored in March 1959 because of its allusions to the conflict and in particular to acts of torture.85 The film was eventually released uncut in 1963, with the images alluding to both the torture and death enacted during the conflict and to the destruction caused by World War II included. Such spatial and temporal refractions as Resnais employed in Night and Fog had become unnecessary by the time of the late release of Muriel. However, in the film itself its own characters attempt to repress images that signify torture and death and their responsibility for them. In at least two key scenes of Muriel, there are two strata of images: those that represent its external (objective) narrative; and those that imply internal (subjective) images that are projected from the consciousnesses of the principal characters Hélène and Bernard. These latter images weave in and out of the former ones, a motion that represents the contest between oppressive, destructive conformity (bad faith) and an authentic existence. In his study of the film, John Francis Kreidl writes that ‘Muriel is about the deep freeze the Algerian War cast’.86 The scenes analysed here reveal how memories, formerly suppressed in bad faith, gradually thaw this deep freeze and emerge as images of death. In separate sequences of the film, Hélène and Bernard each consider the death of the Other, allowing these thoughts to gain a presence in their present. First, during the nocturnal scene in which Hélène collects her erstwhile lover Alphonse and his mistress Françoise from the Boulogne train station, the editing admits incongruous frames into the film sequence which are Hélène’s thoughts penetrating the diegetic narrative of the film. Frames portraying locations filmed during daylight –​cafés, a medieval arch, the train station, a casino –​are interspersed with shots of the walk from the station that unfolds at night. These diurnal images initially seem to unbalance the narrative to the extent that Susan Sontag writes Benjamin Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli: La Mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1998), 248, 39. 86 John Francis Kreidl, Alain Resnais (New York: G. K. Hall, 1978), 91.

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that the editing in Muriel ‘decomposes, rather than explains, the story’.87 Instead, certain of these discordant images depict Hélène’s consciousness aroused by the presence of Alphonse and Françoise, illuminating Hélène’s repressed guilt, fear and loss, and, therefore, explicate the current narrative. These day-​time shots represent a perfected version of Boulogne-​sur-​ mer, one either untouched by or rebuilt after the devastation of World War II. They are the images of a fantasy that Hélène wishes to project; perhaps a time before the war when she and Alphonse were in love; or equally conceivably a time that never existed except in her mind: false, irreal images. These incongruous shots signify what Naomi Greene refers to as the ‘pervasive climate of bad faith, of amnesia and repression, that governed French memories of the Vichy past throughout the 1950s and 1960s’.88 In her act of bad faith, Hélène’s past and authentic present are repressed or distorted, replaced with these refined images. As in Sartre’s version of bad faith, ‘one can be conscious of an absence’. He describes this paradox as inducing an anguish brought forth by the consciousness of an ultimate freedom, what he calls ‘guard rails’ against it, such as habit or societal conventions.89 In Muriel, the shots that penetrate those of the night-​time walk through the rain-​drenched streets of Boulogne symbolise these same guard-​rails against the memories of the disruptions, desolation and deaths inherent to war. The theory that these frames illustrate Hélène’s mental images is reinforced when a similar editing effect occurs later in the same sequence. At the end of their journey, just as Hélène, Alphonse, and Françoise are about to enter Hélène’s apartment building, a second set of incongruous images perforates the narrative. Françoise looks back to where they have all just walked from and asks, ‘was this all rebuilt after the war?’, Alphonse responds with ‘a town of martyrs’, and Hélène agrees, ‘yes, a lot of people were shot’; however, she cannot remember exactly how many: ‘200 or 3,000?’ This discussion is not communicated over frames of the three characters stood outside the building at night however, but accompanies a diurnal, 87 Susan Sontag, ‘Resnais’ Muriel’, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 235 [1963]. 88 Greene, Landscapes of Loss, 37. 89 Sartre, BN, 16, 63.

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staccato montage presenting various metal signs from around Boulogne: a plaque marking a fallen hero of the liberation of the town, a road-​sign for rue de Folkestone (another Allied harbour-​town heavily bombarded in the war, Boulogne’s twin) and one for Place de la Résistance. These shots represent the ‘town of martyrs’ Alphonse refers to, the signifiers of the town’s history that has been marked by war. If the café, casino and tower are images projected from a consciousness in bad faith, the images of the signs and plaques represent that same consciousness becoming aware of that willed absence. Summoned by the allusions to death (‘martyrs’, ‘people shot’), these images of the auspicious aspects of this past (the liberation, the Résistance) are then penetrated themselves with a sign of death: a placard for the cemetery (see Figure 3). Death gains a presence through these shots even as Hélène attempts to deny its proximity (unable or unwilling to remember the exact death toll), and there is a blurring of the division between life and death. Of such nebulous distinctions in Sartre’s writings, Colin Davis argues that the undead or living dead ‘throw into turmoil the categories’ of life and death and that, if ‘the dead are not quite dead, perhaps the living are not quite living either’.90 I suggest that Hélène personifies such a living-​ dead figure, alike to Sartre’s zombies who repress their culpability for the presence of war. Yet the return of the dead in Hélène’s conscience speaks to the growing awareness of death in life, an overlapping of the two that is comparable to that effected in the figures of the Muselmänner. The signs of liberation and resistance that are summoned to Hélène’s consciousness in response to Alphonse’s claim are perforated by a demand for the living to take responsibility for, to remember, the dead which gains presence in Hélène’s conscience. Death and the reality of war intermittently, yet rhythmically, disrupt the idealised façade that obscures her authentic thoughts.

90

Colin Davis, Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 156–​7.

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Figure 3:  Images of an auspicious past penetrated by the placard for the cemetery in Muriel (Alain Resnais, 1963), © Argos Films.

Where Hélène’s consciousness fluctuates between instants of recognition of her responsibility for the Other and moments in which she denies her liability, in Muriel the gradual presence of the film’s titular Algerian victim in Bernard’s consciousness requires him to admit his complicity in and responsibility for her death. This process mirrors Beauvoir’s challenge to Sartre’s idea of the intersubjective relation and Sonia Kruks asserts that it is Sartre’s assumption ‘that relations of otherness are conflictual relations between two equal freedoms, which de Beauvoir quietly subverts’.91 Beauvoir destabilises the conflictual Sartrean intersubjective encounter, its yearning for a hierarchical structure, in her 1947 essay ‘What is Existentialism?’, in which she argues that existentialism surpasses the ‘interior-​exterior, subjective-o​ bjective opposition’.92 As we have seen, prior to her major feminist work, The Second Sex, Beauvoir sought to deconstruct the framework of intersubjective hierarchy and conflict. In the late sequence of Muriel in which Bernard narrates over 8mm film footage he has brought back from 9 1 Kruks, ‘Simone de Beauvoir and the Limits to Freedom’, 113. 92 Simone de Beauvoir, ‘What is Existentialism?’, tr. Marybeth Timmermann, in Beauvoir, Philosophical Writings, 325 [1947].

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his tour-​of-​duty in Algeria, he undergoes a comparable change, recognising the potential subjectivity of Muriel and his responsibility for her death, instead of fiercely objectifying her and ignoring his liability. As Bernard relays Muriel’s story, the image of her painted by his words transforms from the restrictive/​ed figure of the Other designated by the subject to one that represents the surfacing of his shame and guilt at her death which recognises her as subject. Then, distinct images from the film sequences he projects imply her presence in his consciousness as she gradually gains a presence as an equal, even as she is absent from the shots themselves. Bernard proceeds to speak of Muriel’s torture on the soundtrack over clips depicting soldiers in increasingly aggressive acts. However, they are never shown in combat, merely practice-​shooting at long-​range targets: for the moment they remain relatively distanced from (Muriel’s) death. Bernard’s extra-​diegetic dialogue over the footage becomes more vivid as the film presents two soldiers walking down a muddy bank, larking about in shots that suggest irreproachability: ‘Muriel groaned. She covered her eyes with her arm. He dropped her. She fell like a bundle. That’s when it started.’ The pair of soldiers in Bernard’s footage slap each other’s backs, jocular for the camera, looking back into the lens, asserting their subject-​ status. Their gaze at Bernard (and Muriel’s spectators), however, implicates him (and them) in their bad faith and consequently Bernard’s guilt at the shared act of torturing Muriel permeates this façade, his guard-​rails against shame. In this passage, the gap between what a spectator sees taking place in the footage and what they hear happened to Muriel increases, as Bernard then fights to repress his guilt.93 In his description of Muriel’s torture and murder, she is an absence in a sense similar to the way in which Beauvoir poignantly writes of her mother’s passing: ‘that dead body lying on the bed in Maman’s place. […] It was still Maman, and it was her absence for

93 Beauvoir also encountered an attempt to repress her account of the sexual torture of a young Algerian woman at the hands of French authority when the editor of Le Monde requested her to alter certain details of an article (published on 2 June 1960) describing the arrest and interrogation of Djamila Boupacha in Algeria. Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, tr. Richard Howard (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), 513–​18 [1963].

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ever’.94 A corpse substitutes for the living being, representing their absence but simultaneously retaining their presence. There is a comparable conflict between the absence and presence of Muriel, her body and her death, which occurs in Bernard’s conscience. Muriel is demanding to be remembered as a subject in the mind of the Other (Bernard) as he simultaneously attempts to repress his responsibility for and complicity in her murder, what Maria Flood calls Bernard’s disengagement from his ‘participation in the violent act’.95 At this point in his narration, Bernard’s refusal to accept Muriel’s death as his responsibility dehumanises her, objectifies her and denies her innate subjectivity, reflecting the violence upon the other individual at the heart of the interpersonal conflict in Sartre’s philosophy. In Muriel, the footage shot in Algeria signifies Bernard’s attempt to maintain his blameless façade, yet his spoken confession gradually erodes the guard-​rails of his bad faith and his responsibility for Muriel’s death surfaces, he is not separated from her, but moves toward her, abolishing division. As the footage from Algeria continues, soldiers dance in a sepia-​toned section of film, and Bernard details the torture of Muriel: ‘Robert kicked her in the hips. Her lips were swollen. She was foaming at the mouth. They tore off her clothes. They tried to sit her on a chair. She fell off.’ Then the disparity between image and word is reduced as he accepts his involvement. ‘I joined in’ he admits over images of a soldier digging a pit with a pickaxe, indicating, perhaps, how the torturers disposed of Muriel’s body: burying their guilt (see Figure 4). Bernard now acutely feels his shame under the absent gaze of Muriel, sees himself as Muriel sees him: an agent of her death.96 This death reflects the ultimate Sartrean conflict with the Other, the sudden suppression of one of the combatants. The war in Algeria − like those preceding and succeeding it − is indicative of the Sartrean conflict with the Other who represents difference, mystery and therefore threat. Beauvoir, VE, 76. Maria Flood, France, Algeria and the Moving Image: Screening Histories of Violence 1963–​2010 (Cambridge: Legenda, 2017), 51. 96 Godard would convey this paradox –​images of war repressed by falsely perfected images –​similarly in Les Carabiniers (1963), in which the titular soldiers send postcards to their lovers with bland recitations of their killings and eating habits. For further discussion, see David Campany, Photography and Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 104. 94 95

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Figure 4:  Burying their guilt, soldiers in Muriel (Alain Resnais, 1963), © Argos Films.

However, Bernard comes to admit his part in this violence and the eradication of another subject, acknowledging Muriel as an equal without conflict, as in Beauvoir’s interpretation of the intersubjective relation: Bernard’s consciousness of Muriel now surpasses ‘subjective-​objective opposition’.97 Rather than Sartre’s conflict-​based version of existence in which violence is committed on Others as a matter of course, Bernard now accepts Muriel’s death as that of another subject for which he has responsibility: a Beauvoirian outlook. As Jo-​Ann Pilardi writes, ‘the problem of the Other in Beauvoirian thought should be understood as complementary to the problem of the self, as one-​half of the familiar, un-​deconstructed dichotomy of self/​Other’.98 This theory is not based upon the egocentrism of Sartre’s philosophy, however. Instead, in Beauvoir’s ethics, Otherness is a part of the self to be embraced, not rejected and projected onto an/​ Other. There is an acceptance of the potential to be Other to another subject –​a complex self of both Other and subject –​and each attitude is equal and equally a component of the self, negating the intersubjective conflict at the core of Sartre’s philosophy. In this way, as we have seen, Beauvoir links the welfare of the Other to that of the subject. In Muriel, Bernard 9 7 Beauvoir, ‘What is Existentialism?’, 325. 98 Pilardi, Simone de Beauvoir, 1.

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now embodies the deconstruction of the dichotomy of subject/​Other as he accepts responsibility for the death of Muriel as another complex self, accepts her potential to be subject as well as Other. He has relinquished his guard-​rails against anguish and accepted an authentic state of being. Beneath the images of Muriel there is a hidden stream of consciousness. The images of the café, the casino, the arch and the sign for the cemetery are Hélène’s mental images. Where the first assemblage of shots represents an irreal past for her, her guard-​rails against war(s) and the end of her relationship with Alphonse, the cemetery-​sign depicts the presence of the equally irreal deaths in World War II that she attempts to forget. For Bernard, it is the footage from Algeria that gradually leads to his expression of his participation in Muriel’s murder, who acts as a metonym for the deaths of others in the Algerian conflict. Both wars are imaged through the consciousness of their characters and, by extension, as with Night and Fog, in the conscience of their spectators. These images speak to the Sartrean theory of an intention directed at an absent object, aiming from an image of one war to that of another and to the Beauvoirian concept of the movement towards the external from the internal and from the subjective to the objective. Bernard’s and Hélène’s rejection of the presence of the deaths inherent to these two wars reflects the conflict in the Sartrean subject–​Other relation. Gradually, however, Bernard’s relation with Muriel and his acceptance of his complicity in her death is positioned closer to a Beauvoirian deconstruction of the hierarchy between subjects and Others.99 Similarly, in Marker’s and Lhomme’s Le Joli Mai the Parisian interviewees attempt to submerge the presence of the Algerian conflict. Yet the filmmakers challenge the guard-​rails of bad faith and capture the moments in which these façades are perforated and, consequently, an authentic acceptance of responsibility for the death of the Other begins to surface.

99

Beauvoir, EA, 86.

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The Conflict with the Self in Le Joli Mai and La Jetée Le Joli Mai seeks to record the engagement of Parisians with current social and political issues: in particular, the state of France at the moment of the (official) cessation of the Algerian conflict. But, as Stora notes, none of the interviewees in the film mentions the end of the war in Algeria as a major event of May 1962.100 Indeed, many of the subjects of the documentary ignore the conflict and their accountability for it, literally refusing to acknowledge it in some instances. Fittingly, Le Joli Mai is dedicated to ‘The Happy Many’, the blissfully ignorant public documented therein. This bliss is tantamount to bad faith, yet the film intimates that the Algerian conflict had not ended with the signing of the Évian peace treaty but persisted, at the very least, as a suppressed presence in the minds of its interviewees. This presence was palpable as, according to Horne, ‘the week after the cease-​fire brought the bloodiest interlude Algiers had yet seen’.101 The conflict continued in Algiers as well as being a presence in a collective consciousness of the Parisian and wider French population, as Le Joli Mai endeavours to indicate. At the close of the film, this presence is manifest in shots that are equivalent to the subliminal notes in Muriel, the instants of Hélène’s mental images through which responsibilities for conflict and death rise through the cracks in their guard-​rails against an authentic existence caused by grief and guilt. Most of Marker and his crew’s inquiries that allude to the Algerian conflict elicit angry responses from members of the crowds they film: the filmmakers’ questions probing the fissures in their subjects’ façades of feigned ignorance. At this moment in May 1962, when they are formally permitted to consider the conflict ended, these residents no longer want to hear about it. This attitude, however, differs little from the situation before the Évian Accords in which, Behr claims, for nearly ‘seven years French public opinion was blinded in its attitude towards the Algerian problem’.102 Symptomatically, the subjects of Le Joli Mai do not wish to 100 Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli, 116 (my tr.). 1 01 Horne, A Savage War, 523. 102 Behr, The Algerian Problem, 210.

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contemplate this conflict, but this apathy speaks to their guilt or at least collusion: as Beauvoir would assert, their abstention is complicity. The happy many of the film attempt to deny their responsibility for the (death of the) Other, and yet the traces left behind in their consciousness are revealed by the filmmakers. As these figures deny the presence of war and the deaths integral to it, images and narration that refer to these twinned events surface, piercing the veneers of bad faith. Such sequences are plentiful in the film and include the footage evoking the ‘martyrs of Charonne’ (the nine killed in the Charonne Métro station after demonstrations against the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS)); the narratorial explication of the neologism plastique over images of charred cars in Parisian streets; and the xenophobic mother who explains the difficulty her daughter has visiting her grandmother, as she has to pass ‘a house of “Harkis”’ (which, in its fundamental tropes of a young girl’s visit to her grandmother and fear of the Other, implicitly refers to the Little Red Riding Hood tale).103 Each invokes the Algerian conflict and penetrates the semblance of peace, recalling the need to undertake liability for this war and the deaths intrinsic to it. The most telling example of this bad faith in Le Joli Mai is the male soldier interviewed on the pont de Neuilly. He embraces his fiancée (too) tightly, attempting to convey the impression that their love is oblivious to all other concerns. Yet, as he concedes, he is imminently due on a tour-​ of-​duty in Algeria. After being asked about the external events that affect them, he admits ‘I’m going to Algeria. I’m leaving in a fortnight. I know these things go on. But I don’t want to think about them. I don’t dare to think about anything, and I don’t want to.’ He is asked: ‘you only worry about your own problems?’ and responds, ‘I just don’t want to think about political events… Leave them alone and they’ll be forgotten’. From a soldier who is two weeks away from joining the French campaign in Algeria, however, this indicates a quintessential instance of bad faith: hiding the 103 Deleted scenes from the film − available on the 2013 Arte Editions DVD reissue − indicate that the references to the Algerian War could have been more plentiful still, as they include a young man talking about the moral corruption of the torture used during the conflict; a group of students discussing the pleasures of shooting a gun in military training, a ‘French Algeria’ and the OAS; and a scene of an interviewee discussing firing at an ‘Arab’ intercut with images of OAS graffiti.

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war behind quotidian guard-​rails. In one of his essays on the conflict, Sartre also depicts similar lovers who persevere with their own lives in the face of war: ‘the cafés were full, takings in the theatres hardly dropped. You might have thought they were only interested in their private lives: I have never seen so many lovebirds.’104 Sartre attacks the bad faith of the French populace who socialise as if they had no accountability for the war being fought in their name in Algeria or its collateral deaths. The refusal by the pont de Neuilly soldier in Le Joli Mai to accept the presence of the war into which he has been conscripted exemplifies this tension at the core of Sartrean bad faith. Neither the war nor the death and anguish it inherently contains can be absented, finding presence in the soldier’s thoughts (see Figure 5). Through his disavowal he also attempts to absent conscious thoughts of his own death (with equal success), even as it has approached closer with his mobilisation order. The war is a presence as the private stands there in his uniform, military beret on his head, yet simultaneously, and inexplicably, it is also absented through his wanton ignorance. This denial of the war is manifest in the soldier’s refusal to admit the reality of his situation (the presence of the war and potentially his own death) and his repression of thoughts of the Other and their death. However, the filmmakers capture the moments at which such masks slip.

Figure 5:  War and death find presence in the soldier’s thoughts in Le Joli Mai (Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme, 1962), © Sofracima. 104 Sartre, ‘The Pretender’, CN, 93 [1958].

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Marker’s and Lhomme’s camera, as it focuses on these interviewees, acts as the gaze of another and stimulates the shame of these subjects, as the gaze of another does for Sartre’s voyeur at the bedroom-​door keyhole. In the mid-​1950s, Sartre alludes to this shame of the people of France at their indirect involvement in the colonisation of Algeria: It is our shame; it mocks our laws or caricatures them. It infects us with its racism […] it obliges our young men to fight despite themselves and die for the Nazi principles that we fought against ten years ago; it attempts to defend itself by arousing fascism even here in France.105

Sartre again makes an analogy between the atrocities in Algeria –​enacted by the French state in the name of its people –​with those of the Nazi Party in World War II in his argument about responsibility for others. Similarly, in Le Joli Mai, as the interviewees act in bad faith, the camera reveals to them  –​and the spectator  –​the presence of that which they deny. As Lhomme comments in an interview about the film, when you face individuals you do not know, such as he and Marker were to a majority of those they filmed, ‘you discover part of yourself, and part of life … it makes you … not so sure of yourself ’.106 The filmmakers’ presence, their cameras and their questions challenge the affectations of these interviewees. Further, the cognisance that there will potentially be a spectator who will view these images, in this instance, is also sufficient for the interviewees to feel shame. In Sartre’s example of the voyeur, Alan Thomas writes, the Other ‘need not actually be present, but can be surmised. Shame can be triggered by the fact that I could be observed’.107 The shame of the interviewees in Le Joli Mai is made present, equally, by the 1 05 Sartre, ‘Colonialism is a System’, 54. 106 David Gregory Lawson, ‘View Finder:  Pierre Lhomme on Le Joli Mai’, Film Comment (19 September 2013) accessed 13 April 2014. In later shots of crowds traversing Paris, Marker and Lhomme film some figures known to them; Godard and the actress Anna Karina travelling in a car, Resnais and Jacques Rivette walking down streets and a brief shot of Varda in a cinema or theatre audience. 107 Alan Thomas, ‘Alienation, Objectification, and the Primacy of Virtue’, in Webber, ed., Reading Sartre, 166 (my emphasis).

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thought that they may be seen by another –​the camera, the directors or, finally, a spectator –​transferring their previously suppressed thoughts to an exterior plane. This notion of the absent or potential observer is particular to the final images of Le Joli Mai, which capture people unaware that they are being filmed. Instead of interviewing these subjects to locate their thoughts, the filmmakers allude to their consciousness through voice-​over. The camera travels through Parisian streets, as the narrator (Marker’s friend, Yves Montand) talks of those whose prison is inside themselves (following a sequence at a women’s prison). From a distance, the camera zooms in on faces in the crowd, capturing their seeming unhappiness as Montand asks what has caused their melancholy: ‘Is it the thought that your noblest deeds are mortal?’; ‘Is it because beauty is mortal? Because to love a human being is also to love his passing?’ (see Figure 6). Each question is asked over an image of a subject seemingly oblivious to being filmed, but edited between each of these shots, in the moments of narratorial silence, are frames depicting gravestones: resembling the shot of the cemetery sign in Muriel. These images move stylistically –​and ethically –​away from the directors’ influences from the cinéma vérité of Jean Rouch’s and Edgar Morin’s Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961) and the techniques of ‘direct cinema’.108 These shots, then, reference the fictional internal thoughts of the subjects of the camera as they consider the presence of their own death and that of the Other in Algeria.109 Montand continues asking questions of these faces in the crowd: ‘Are you afraid of ghosts? Or is it that you think too much about yourselves? Or is it that because without being aware of it you think too much about others? Perhaps you feel in a

Bamchade Pourvali, Chris Marker, 2nd edn (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2004), 33 (my tr.). Perhaps ironically, Rouch and Morin appear sat outside a café in the later sequences of Le Joli Mai, filmed from afar. 109 Both Catherine Varlin’s Jouer à Paris (1962) and Jean Ravel’s D’un lointain regard (1964), the latter containing footage from Le Joli Mai, employ similar devices. Each court métrage captures subjects on Parisian streets unaware of being filmed, whilst a voice-​over comments on them. Yet, there are examples in both shorts, even though the title of Ravel’s film translates as A Distant Look, where subjects stare back at the camera. I develop the notion of ‘staring back’ into the lens later in the chapter in reference to an intersubjective equality in Varda’s L’Opéra-​Mouffe and further still in Chapter 2.

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confused way that your fate is tied to the fate of others?’110 Finding an unwillingness to accept their responsibility for the death of the Other in their interviewees, the filmmakers impose this moral position on these figures. Pertinently, these enquiries also speak to the transience of the borders between life and death –​the presence of death to life –​and the responsibility of the self for others, for the deaths of others.

Figure 6:  ‘Is it the thought that your noblest deeds are mortal?’, Le Joli Mai (Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme, 1962), © Sofracima.

Like Davis’s readings of the dead in Sartre’s writing, ghosts haunt these living figures; they are conscious of death and of their obligation toward others and, as in Beauvoir’s ethics, the welfare of the Other is pegged to that of the subject. The traces of war and death are now present on the faces of those filmed in this sequence, created by the proximity of these shots to this commentary on death’s haunting presence and the images of gravestones. Where Marker and Lhomme plumb the depths of the interviewees’ thoughts and find greed, ignorance and a fear of the mysterious Other − exemplary sources of conflict − the citizens filmed at the close of the film connote a populace becoming aware of death and their culpability for their actions. Montand’s questions suggest that the melancholy 110 These words at the ending of Le Joli Mai evoke Beauvoir’s claim that ‘ignorance is a situation in which man may be enclosed as narrowly as in a prison’, Beauvoir, EA, 98.

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expressions of these final subjects are provoked by their bad faith, their attempts to repress their accountability for the war and for Others, which nonetheless lingers in their subconscious: a hopeful note (super)imposed by Lhomme and Marker. The narrative of La Jetée is constructed around the workings of such an internal conflict in its protagonist, moving from the inter-​to the intra-​personal. In this film, the gaze is turned inwards and exposes a self who is ethically aware, as in Beauvoir’s thought, of their potential to fulfil subjective and objective attitudes, without the presence of an/​Other being. Marker’s photo-​roman is permeated by the shadow of war, a fictional World War III that has left Paris desolated and its survivors subsisting underground. Other scholars have noted that this invented war is proxy for other conflicts, the recently passed World War II and the contemporaneous Algerian conflict.111 Specifically, Suzanne Liandrat-​Guigues writes that the medical experiments of La Jetée evoke the Nazi death camps.112 References to World War II are distinct through these and other images and sounds in the film, such as the whisperings of the experimenter-​torturers in German. Allusions to the Algerian War, although implicit through the torture scenes as Sarah Cooper observes, are more covert.113 For instance, the scenes of torture in the film were shot in the underground galleries of the Palais de Chaillot, an apt location for this act that was, as Horne reports, a subterranean issue repressed in the media during the early years of the Algerian conflict.114 Yet torture was illicitly implied as present beneath the surface of texts that spoke of the conflict, although Behr contends that, from 1959 onwards, stories gradually spread of torture as a ‘routine method of interrogation’.115 Clandestine, hidden from or by a majority of the French populace, the act of torture becomes a canny metonym for 111 112 113 114 115

Jonathan Crary, 24/​7:  Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London:  Verso, 2014), 91; and Matthew Croombs, ‘La Jetée in Historical Time: Torture, Visuality, Displacement’, Cinema Journal 56/​2 (winter 2017), 25–​45. Suzanne Liandrat-​Guigues, Cinéma et sculpture:  Un aspect de la modernité des années soixante (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 85 (my tr.). Cooper, Chris Marker, 50. Horne, A Savage War, 195. Behr, The Algerian Problem, 234.

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the repression of the war itself and, I suggest, the act of bad faith: present although concealed. As with the references to the Algerian conflict in Resnais’s two films and Le Joli Mai, the torture enacted in Algeria gains a presence in the conscience of La Jetée’s spectators. The references to the Algerian conflict and World War II through the scenes of torture and the shots representing the fictional Third World War in La Jetée demonstrate the connection between several wars, each of which increases the proximity of death to those who live in its shadow. The murder of the protagonist (‘the man’) at the start of the film ensures that death haunts the succeeding images (their interstices) and the consciousness of the film’s spectator.116 The subsequent scenes in which the man interacts with this death also question the traditional duality of the positions of subject and Other. In the film, rather than indications of status or rank as in Sartre’s early philosophy, subjectivity and objectivity are potential attitudes towards another self, reflecting Beauvoir’s ethics. There is an understanding and acceptance that the self is subject and Other, and conflict is unnecessary. Although there is a space in Sartre’s thought in which he recognises the self as Other, this relation is always indicative of intersubjective conflict. The death of one of the combatants ensures that the conflict for dominance as the subject is impossible, although the survivor takes responsibility for the dead who are ‘in the world around us’.117 Whereas for Sartre the intersubjective conflict occurs between two persons sporadically claiming the position of subject and having the position of Other violently thrust upon them, Beauvoir considers this oscillation happening within one being, one self essentially coming to terms with their internal attitudes of subjectivity and objectivity. For Humphrey, Beauvoir held the view ‘of the self as “split” between object and subject [a]s a natural state’.118 In Beauvoir’s revision of the intersubjective relation, the self 116 Several scholars have written of the haunting spectre of death in the black leader between the photographs of the film. For example, see Janet Harbord, Chris Marker:  La Jetée (London:  Afterall Books, 2009), 17; and Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen:  Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1999), 103. 117 Sartre, BN, 321. 118 Humphrey, ‘La Petite Jérusalem’, 99.

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is in conflict not with the Other, as such, but with the Other self, until they accept this potential as intrinsic to them. This split is analogous to the complex self that Pilardi finds in Beauvoir’s existentialist works.119 This self is comprised of the possibility to be subject or Other and its wellbeing is linked to that of others. In this way, Beauvoir subverts the assumption that the intersubjective conflict results from two diverging freedoms, challenging Sartre’s early ontology. Instead, in her thought the self comes to recognise the presence of subject and Other within it: an ambiguous and ethical self. Such a composite self is apparent in the opening and closing scenes of La Jetée. At the start of the film, as a child, the protagonist of La Jetée witnesses the death of a man on the pier at Orly airport: this is an image he retains, the narrator declares, into adulthood. This opening scene is integral to what Raymond Bellour writes of as the film’s ‘temporal paradox’.120 The enigmatic element in La Jetée’s narrative is that this death witnessed by the child is finally revealed to be his own. He sees his own death as an objective witness would that of an Other. Therefore, the man killed on the eponymous pier represents both an external Other for whom the subject is responsible and simultaneously, and unbeknownst to the child, an/​other aspect of the/​his complex self. The child-​witness comes to recognise his self as subject and object of the gaze and to accept that the fate of a subject is tied to that of an Other. By accepting responsibility for the death of the Other, and in doing so accepting his own mortality, the protagonist embodies the understanding that death is maintained in an/​Other self. The film’s protagonist assumes an accountability for the Other in the form of an image remembered, an image that emerges as that of his own passing. However, this is not a Sartrean restless struggle for power that ends only in death. Instead, as the narrative of the film is a Möbius strip or an ouroboros − at what would be its conclusion it collapses into itself as the narrative begins again − the protagonist continues in perpetuity, always becoming, a personification of the ethical, ambiguous self, amplified and seemingly 119 Pilardi, Simone de Beauvoir, 1. 120 Raymond Bellour, ‘Folie de La Jetée’, in David Lestringant, ed., Chris Marker (Paris: Cinémathèque française, 2018), 215 (my tr.).

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immortal: through the freedom of another, the self surpasses death.121 And yet, in a further paradox, the protagonist is also marked by this death, he knows not only that he is mortal, but the time and place of his death. This comprehension is indicated by the film’s most famous sequence which occurs before the final scene at the airport. This is the single instance of motion in the film in which a woman awakens in bed, opens her eyes and stares back into the camera. As the woman stares, she at once addresses the camera, the protagonist and the spectator: alluding to the reciprocal movements between each as subjects and Others under the gaze. With the wisp of a smile, affection even, that flutters over her lips, this sequence speaks to the melancholy of loss. This moment of waking is a tender instant shared between subjects: it is, according to J. G. Ballard, a moment of ‘extraordinary poignancy, like a fragment of a child’s dream’.122 Ballard’s interpretation is pertinent here as it considers not only the pathos of this moving scene, but also gestures to the person to whom these images belong. These shots of the woman waking are the protagonist’s internal mental images: like the child’s remembrance of his own death. Other theorists, most notably Philippe Dubois and Réda Bensmaïa, have also analysed the images of La Jetée as representing the consciousness of one of its characters. Dubois asserts that it is ‘a matter of consciousness that creates the film’s structure’.123 For Dubois, the film’s narrative is constructed from the mental images of a key figure in the story. These are the protagonist’s memories of past moments of affection which he entrusts to the spectator, and they in turn become responsible for the subjects and images of the film. Like Muriel, the waking woman of La Jetée no longer exists in the present world: in the future moment from which the protagonist travels she has been killed in the Third World War (see Figure 7). These images are therefore irreal, pertaining to a being with no temporal 121 Beauvoir, EA, 32. 122 J. G. Ballard, ‘La Jetée’, in A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 28 [1966]. 123 Philippe Dubois, ‘La Jetée de Chris Marker ou le cinématogramme de la conscience’, in Philippe Dubois, ed., Théorème 6: Recherches sur Chris Marker: Le Corps de l’ombre, l’œil du monde et la distance de la parole (Toulouse: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2006), 38 (my tr.).

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or spatial presence beyond a mental image of them. Yet, these images are, like Charles VIII, of a person passed, rather than Sartre’s friend Pierre who has the potential to be tangibly present at a future moment. The protagonist, then, knows of his own death to come and is asking the spectator to take responsibility for these subjects who only exist as imag(in)ed, casting them from his consciousness. Bensmaïa similarly considers the narrative of La Jetée as springing from the consciousness of one of its characters, but also questions how the film can imag(in)e one particular event: ‘how can death be signified?’124 Accepting that the images of La Jetée represent a consciousness, Bensmaïa asks how they can picture death when human consciousness cannot do so. Then, death is given an image which is partially constructed in the protagonist’s consciousness –​his awareness of death’s proximity –​and then completed in the consciousness of the film’s spectator as they are asked to undertake liability for it. One particular sequence of La Jetée is prototypical of this conduct of death between subjects: the projection of death into the images which is then translated by the spectators. In this scene early in the film, a single shot of a male test-​subject of the underground experimenters is held for several seconds, allowing spectators time to assimilate the image. The close-​up of the gaunt face accentuates the eyes that are shrouded by darkness, staring blankly as the voice-​over suggests that the outcome of the time-​travel trials was ‘disappointment for some … death for others –​and for others yet, madness’. There is a cut to another close-​up shot of this victim, shadows now hollowing his cheeks and eye-​sockets. A protracted fade, lasting for seconds rather than the near-​immediate transition of conventional cinematic editing, slows time so that the image of the man’s drained face flows into the next, a shot along a desolate corridor, which is then given the impression of being superim-​ posed over the skeletal visage. As this shot of the gallery displaces that of

124 Réda Bensmaïa, ‘From the Photogram to the Pictogram:  On Chris Marker’s La Jetée’, tr. Alison Rowe and Elizabeth Lyon, Camera Obscura 24 (September 1990), 152.

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Figure 7:  The waking woman no longer exists in the present world of La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962), © Argos Films.

Figure 8:  The spectre of a floating skull in La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962), © Argos Films.

the man, his highlighted cheekbones and the black pits of his eyes metamorphose into the spectre of a floating skull (see Figure 8). The original image of this casualty, emaciated and on the cusp of extinction, now perishes in the transition, yet osmosis leeches his phantasmal presence into

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the next photogram and the corridor is now haunted by his ghost. This face, a death mask that retains its humanity through the slow dissolve and stares directly into the camera and therefore straight at the spectator, speaks to a reciprocity between subjects and the responsibility for the death of the Other. At the starting point of the film, the recognition of liability for the death of the Other and the passage of death between subjects has already occurred in the figure of the protagonist, but in the sequence in the corridor, death transpires between the cadaverous embodiment of torture and the spectator of the film. In both this short scene of the test-​subject and that of the memory of the waking woman, the gaze at the spectator implicates them in the deaths of these subjects. In the film’s final scenes, which are repetitions of the opening shots with perspectival differences, the liability for the death of the protagonist is again transposed onto the witnesses of the protagonist’s death. But now, these are not only the child and the woman, but also the film’s spectators. Extended to these onlookers is the call of the Other upon the subject to undertake accountability for another’s death. Again, it is as if the protagonist is aware that he is about to die and having entrusted to the spectator his memories of his past love, he now calls upon them to remember his death. As he arrives back at Orly airport, where the film began, hoping to be reunited with the woman he loves/​d in the past, two brisk shots depict the man nearing the camera. He is then framed in profile as if passing the lens, and, lastly, from behind, receding from the camera, in a reversal of the initial two shots. Between his increasing advance and shots of the woman anticipating him, intercede images of one of the underground experimenters, goggles over his eyes but his gaze evidently upon the man. This torturer’s hands are clasped together in front of him, pointing outwards as if holding an archaic camera with the viewfinder on the top of the machine, a protrusion, a lens, poking from his fingers, shooting the man. There is then a cut to a staccato montage of the man ‘falling’ backwards, collapsing until he is splayed on the floor. Here, the camera is analogous to a weapon of death, a gun, which is a motif of many of Marker’s works. For example, in Sans Soleil, as discussed in the next chapter, and his 1966 film Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (If I Had Four Camels) which opens with the

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lines ‘[p]hotography is the same as hunting. The hunting instinct without the desire to kill [...]. You track, aim and shoot. Click! Instead of killing a man, you make him eternal’.125 Comparably, it is within/​in the image that the protagonist of La Jetée is simultaneously killed but made eternal, his perpetuity ensured by an/​Other (his childhood self and the spectator) who perceives and remembers this image. In the same ways that Beauvoir writes that the freedoms of the Other surpass subjective death, the spectators of La Jetée, in viewing and remembering these images, ensure the immortality of the protagonist.126 In a further example of this theory of the links between subjects through death, the composition of the frame in La Jetée of the man falling backwards as he is shot also refers to the deaths of others in war. Patrick Ffrench argues that the image mirrors Robert Capa’s photograph purporting to depict the death of a Republican soldier in the Spanish Civil War, Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936.127 For the photo-​literate spectator, this analogy draws upon the narrative of yet another slightly older and yet related conflict. Death and war exist in the relation between this single stilled image from La Jetée and its spectator, as the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Algerian conflict and a fictional World War III convene in this image of the tortured protagonist’s death.128 As argued throughout analysis of La Jetée, the death of the protagonist and his witnessing of this event indicate an awareness and acceptance of the self split between the positions of a subject and Other. The child on the pier at Orly airport –​who, in Sartrean terms, as owner of the gaze is a subject –​witnesses his own death as that of an Other, a man who he quite 125

I explore this analogy between camera and weapon/​death in Marker’s films further in Chapter 3. 126 Beauvoir, EA, 32. 127 Patrick Ffrench, ‘The Memory of the Image in Chris Marker’s La Jetée’, French Studies 59/​1 (2005), 36. I say ‘purporting’ as some have suggested the photograph was staged. 1 28 Marker’s later installation piece, Owls at Noon, Prelude: The Hollow Men (2005) is similarly, according to Colin McCabe, ‘an echo chamber’, not only directly recalling World War II but all wars since, Colin McCabe, ‘Visiting Rue Corat’, in Adam  Bartos  and Colin McCabe,  Studio:  Remembering Chris Marker (New York: OR Books, 2017), 21.

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justifiably believes is someone else. Of course, though, he will also in time become that Other, meet that death. He embodies the mortal self as potentially subject and potentially Other, as inspired by his gaze upon his own death. Chris Darke writes that the correspondence between the infant and adult protagonist means that the man ‘hangs parenthesised between life and death’.129 Instead of this ‘in-​betweenness’, this chapter asserts that the adult incorporates death in life and in doing so embodies a self that, after Beauvoir’s writing, recognises the potential to be subject and Other under the gaze: ambiguous or complex rather than liminal. As such, La Jetée’s protagonist challenges the egocentrism maintained in Sartrean intersubjective conflict, which includes the objectifying gaze. Writing on such a gaze in Sartre’s thought, Debra Bergoffen suggests that he neglects to discuss the ethical accountability inherent to this act of othering: ‘in his analysis of the look, Sartre does not hold me responsible for becoming an object for the Other or for objectifying the Other. This move is left to Beauvoir.’130 It is in Beauvoir’s feminist-​existential phenomenology that the responsibility for the objectifying gaze is determined. In addressing questions about the self split between subject and Other and in its request to spectators to undertake accountability for the death of its subjects, La Jetée challenges this objectifying of others, especially through the gaze.

The Ambiguous Self: Pregnancy, Illness and the Gaze in L’Opéra-​Mouffe and Cléo from 5 to 7 Where previous analysis of Resnais’s and Marker’s films explored the moments at which death drew closer to life under the shadow of war, the only overt allusion to such conflict in L’Opéra-​Mouffe (hereafter L’Opéra) is in a tracking shot following a woman passing beneath a graffito on a wall exclaiming ‘Paix avec Algérie Française’ (‘Peace with French Algeria’). In 129 Chris Darke, La Jetée (London: Palgrave and BFI, 2016), 63. 130 Debra Bergoffen, ‘Getting the Beauvoir We Deserve’, in Daigle and Golomb, eds, Beauvoir and Sartre, 21.

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this film, the presence of death is instead evoked through the tired faces of the aged and ailing subjects of Varda’s camera and the film’s more abstract images, representing the director’s anxieties about the proximity of death to the life a pregnant person carries within them.131 L’Opéra, which is known as Diary of a Pregnant Woman in some Anglophone territories, chronicles the community that immediately surrounds Varda’s quotidian life from the perspective of a pregnant self.132 But this film does not encourage the subject-​centric positioning of the owner of the gaze, such as in Sartre’s early thought. Instead, it represents, as Catherine Russell argues of the diary film more generally, a subjectivity split ‘between the seeing and the filmed body’.133 In this early work, Varda is the perceived and perceiver; a dual, complex position she also inhabits in other works, as developed further in Chapter 3. Russell’s comment about the split subject invokes Beauvoir’s idea of a self composed of object and subject.134 This splitting of the I, or of the self, is perfectly realised in L’Opéra as Varda examines the co-​occurrence of subject and Other in one figure: the pregnant female form. Further, this consideration of the overlapping of beings within a pregnant body leads Varda to contemplate ethical quandaries about death and especially the responsibility for the death of the Other. Superficially these concerns echo Beauvoir’s work, which Fishwick argues emphasises the ‘threat to unified subjecthood brought about by the female reproductive body’s abject lack of secure boundaries’.135 There are correlations in the methods by which Varda depicts her pregnant self and the bodies of the other subjects in L’Opéra and Beauvoir’s commentaries on the patriarchal displacement of woman into a space of mystery 1 31 132

133 134 135

Varda was pregnant with her daughter, Rosalie, when filming. Correspondingly, while she was shooting her 1974 film Daguerréotypes, Varda was pregnant with her second child, Mathieu, and current technology and access to electrical points restricted her to filming within her street:  Varda describes the electrical cable necessary for her to power her elementary set as an ‘umbilical cord’, Agnès Varda, Varda par Agnès (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma and Ciné-​Tamaris, 1994), 143 (my tr.). Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 280. Humphrey, ‘La Petite Jérusalem’, 99; and Pilardi, Simone de Beauvoir, 1. Fishwick, The Body in Beauvoir, 70.

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and death and the challenges to subjectivity that the female reproductive body introduces, including ‘the problem of the Other’. Although Varda’s depiction of maternity, a situation naturally wrought with apprehension, equally endeavours to derail stratified masculine portrayals of women’s bodies through an affirmative, rather than critical, account of this corporeal state. Such patro-​centric objectification of women and attempted authority over their bodies are, Michèle Le Dœuff argues, integral to Sartre’s ontology: ‘the terrifying relation of men with women’s bodies, expressed in [Sartre’s] system grounds an ontological-​carnal hierarchy of “the masculine” and “the feminine”’.136 As we have seen, Beauvoir contests such constructions of conflicting ideals of femininity that create confusion within female self-​determination and allow the male to enthrone himself as subject, through her dialogue on the embodied, phenomenological experiences of women.137 However, Beauvoir remains wary of the pregnant self, writing that ‘throughout the period of pregnancy, the female is at once herself and other than herself ’.138 This maternal body does not represent for Beauvoir the ethical, ambiguous self, which illustrates the potential to be subject or Other. Instead, the female reproductive body calls into question the subjectivity of women by allowing an/​Other to invade their interior self. Of this occupation, Sarah LaChance Adams and Caroline R. Lundquist write that Beauvoir ‘describes the fetus as a foreign growth, a parasite, a stranger, an intruder, and a mutilation’.139 For Beauvoir, the embryo is an étranger, 136 Michèle Le Dœuff, ‘Simone de Beauvoir and Existentialism’, tr. Colin Gordon, Feminist Studies 62 (summer 1980), 280. 137 Simone de Beauvoir, ‘From an Interview’, tr. Elaine Marks, in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds, New French Feminisms:  An Anthology (New York:  Harvester Press, 1980), 153 [1976]. Beauvoir later criticises Marks and Courtivron’s book as it presents French feminism as if it ‘emanated from the school of neo-​femininity –​which celebrates women’s cycles, rhythms, and bodily fluids, along with “writing of the body”’, Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Feminism –​Alive, Well, and in Constant Danger’, in Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 237–​8. 138 Beauvoir, SS, 54 (my emphasis). 139 Sarah  LaChance  Adams and Caroline R. Lundquist, ‘Introduction:  The Philosophical Significance of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering’,  in

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a mysterious Other. Instead of this invader of the self, where L’Opéra presents Varda’s concerns about the life carried within the pregnant body and its challenge to the boundaries between subjects, her version of the maternal body is that of an ethical, ambiguous I. This reflects Eva Gothlin’s argument in her paper on Beauvoir that it is ‘difficult to discern when the fetus/​child is autonomous’.140 Ambiguity surrounds the independence of the foetus from the mother. That is to say that maternity, in personifying dual being within a single entity − as well as the corresponding deaths coiled within − further complicates binary oppositions between subject and Other. This is an equivocation Varda embraces. However, certain film scholars have warned that L’Opéra shows signs of an essentialism that would necessarily oppose Beauvoirian feminist theory.141 For them, there is an essence to the film that contradicts Beauvoir’s acclaimed declaration that ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’.142 In fact, Varda herself considers exactly this aspect of Beauvoir’s thought (gender as a social construct related to but not determined by biological sexual difference) in discussion of One Sings, the Other Doesn’t. After citing Beauvoir’s famed pronouncement on becoming women as a reflection of her own stance on feminism’s reclamation of the female form, Varda then continues ‘[w]e are not slaves of our biology anymore. We’ve fought for that. Does anyone ask if a man is a real man if he doesn’t have children?’143 As with Beauvoir’s writing, Varda’s films contest biological definitions

their Coming into Life:  Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering (New York:  Fordham University Press, 2013), 13. See also in the same volume, Florentin Verhage, ‘The Vision of the Artist/​Mother: The Strange Creativity of Painting and Pregnancy’, 301. 140 Eva Gothlin, ‘Simone de Beauvoir’s Notions of Appeal, Desire, and Ambiguity and their Relationship to Jean-​Paul Sartre’s Notions of Appeal and Desire’, Hypatia 14/​ 4 (autumn 1999), 85. 1 41 Flitterman-​Lewis, To Desire Differently, 216–​17; and Valerie Orpen, Cléo de 5 à 7 (Agnès Varda, 1961) (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 88. 1 42 Beauvoir, SS, 295. 143 Varda, ‘“One Sings, the Other Doesn’t”’, in Georgakas and Rubenstein, eds, Art, Politics, Cinema, 220.

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of womanhood.144 In L’Opéra, however, Varda eschews the suspicions of Beauvoir about the pregnant body and instead embraces the ambiguities created by this state to undermine binary, hierarchical divisions between subjects. Where the images of the pregnant female form that permeate the film speak directly to the ambiguous duality of the self, there are other more abstract sequences that mirror this idea. For instance, inexplicably rotating cabbages –​impressed with the notion of dynamic life –​are shot in close-​up, emphasising their multiple layers, with growths protruding from them: these extensions are part of the cabbage but aim at independence. These images of vegetables mimic the condition of pregnancy that complicates the strict divergence between attitudes of subjectivity and objectivity. As well as this questioning of boundaries between these positions, Varda’s film probes the partition between death and life. As mother-​ to-​be, the director documents in her diary film her fears about her child’s inborn mortality. Directly after the opening credits of the short film, Varda cuts to the profiled bust of a pregnant figure, then to a shot of a large pumpkin which is forcefully sliced open with a serrated blade, displaying the tender innards and seeds. Martine Beugnet argues that this scene demonstrates that Varda’s own body has become unknown, alien to her.145 The presence of the foetus inside the director’s body, for Beugnet, obscures the boundaries of Varda’s self, such as Beauvoir writes of the threat of pregnancy to sovereign subjectivity. In contrast, this juxtaposition of images indicates both the director’s intrinsic anxieties about giving birth to a life that is inevitably vulnerable to death and her responsibility for this Other that she will bring into the world. Whilst the pregnant mother carries her baby, her body, as Luce Irigaray comments, sustains the growth of this Other, hopefully, ‘without incurring illness or death for either one of the living organisms’.146 Once her child is born, however, a mother cannot so readily offer such guarantees of protection, of immortality. This impotence in the face of death is also 144 Delphine Bénézet, The Cinema of Agnès Varda:  Resistance and Eclecticism (London: Wallflower Press, 2014), 19. 145 Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation, 102. 146 Luce Irigaray, Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference (New York: Routledge, 2007), 39.

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evident in other figurative images in Varda’s film. For example, during a sequence of shots in the chapter ‘On Pregnancy’, which begins scant minutes after the pumpkin scene, Varda films a wire-​sculpture of a pregnant person which focuses on a womb created from a rounded bowl, open as if dissected, exposing a baby-​doll foetus (see Figure 9). This image implicitly recalls one from Beauvoir’s writing on pregnancy: [w]hen a doll is ripped open, there is its belly outside, it has no more inwardness. The inner nature of living things is more impenetrable; the feminine belly is the symbol of immanence, of depth; it gives up its secrets in part.147

This passage reveals Beauvoir’s own suspicions of the pregnant self, as if the birth of a child somehow draws with it a woman’s secrets and exposes her inner subjectivity to the external, objective world. The violence inherent in Beauvoir’s description is present too in Varda’s metaphoric images, yet the director reveals more than Beauvoir. Instead of limiting her revelation of secrets ‘in part’, Varda bares her inner anxiety at the vulnerability of the life she carries within her, its pending exposure to the ultimate ruthlessness of death. And then embraces these fears. This is evident in the shots of a light bulb, smashed with a hammer and, through an edit, revealed to contain a live chick. These images are followed directly by the shot of an older hatchling in a glass, its head slowly drooping to its chest as it expires. The first chick and the lightbulb reference the violence of birth, the fledgling’s exposure to the external world which leads inevitably to death, which is represented by the second hatchling’s passing. Varda takes these internal concerns and presents them to an external witness, the film’s spectator.

147

Beauvoir, SS, 208.

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Figure 9:  The pregnant doll and exposed foetus in L’Opéra-​Mouffe (Agnès Varda, 1958), © Ciné-​Tamaris.

The ageing and death that wait in the future for Varda’s child are also indicated through the transition from the scene of the wire doll to one of the sequences filmed at the market on the eponymous rue Mouffetard that punctuate the film. Here the camera focuses on lined, aged faces, made haggard by life, and there are images of these subjects with twisted or missing limbs, elderly men and women hobbling, limping and reliant on walking-​aids. The comparison made by juxtaposing these images through an edit with those of the doll and budding flowers seems clear: the aged and the dying represent the endgame of the journey the recently born have just begun. However, these images of older subjects in the market are not simply contrasts to the shots of pregnant bellies, whether human or poupée. They are shot with a respect sympathetic to individual plight, as these wizened faces stare back into Varda’s lens and assert their subjectivity.148 Varda’s attentive recording of these subjects both razes the stratification and dissipates the hostility inherent in the gaze of the subject onto an Other which is, in Sartrean terms, a conflictual struggle for dominance. In these shots there is instead a reciprocity or ethical equality between subjectivities 148 I further explore this idea of the gaze into the camera as interaction between dual subjectivities in Chapter 2.

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evocative of Beauvoir’s thought.149 For Varda, these images also implicitly accommodate a coinciding of life and death. Remembering the production of the film, the director writes of the shoppers in the market that she selected faces and behaviours that reflected her thought that ‘everyone here, the old, the one-​eyed and the tramps, all of them had been babies, beloved new-​borns who had their bellies kissed and talc dusted on their bottoms’.150 These shots function similarly to Beauvoir’s critical image of the womb as a site of birth and death, but relocate this synthesis onto the subjects, both male and female, of her camera. Through her memory of the film’s production, Varda superimposes an image of an infant self onto these ageing subjects, a harsh reminder of death’s haunting presence in life. Each of these ambling frames and wrinkled faces belonged once to infants and they now again show signs of vulnerability, the need for an/​Other to care for them (see Figure 10).

Figure 10:  Ageing faces again show signs of vulnerability in L’Opéra-​Mouffe (Agnès Varda, 1958), © Ciné-​Tamaris.

These shots of the shoppers staring back into the camera − as with the images of the Muselmänner in Night and Fog − appeal to the film’s spectators, beseeching them to undertake accountability for their deaths and challenge the hierarchical position of subjects gazing upon Others. As 149 150

See Beauvoir, EA, 72; and Beauvoir, SS, 171. Varda, Varda par Agnès, 115 (my tr.).

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Varda’s images refer to an equality between subjects, they also maintain the notion that other beings require one’s regard. Instead of the violence with which this frailty is taken advantage of in order to objectify the aged, the feminine or the unknown, Varda proposes that there is a social responsibility for –​an égalité with –​these subjects. In this way, Varda’s film reflects Beauvoir’s theory of the freedom of Others transcending subjective death.151 This is the freedom not to be objectified, not to be defined by another, but to exist in mutual equality. L’Opéra speaks to the liability inherent in intersubjective relations, rather than a conflict, and to the accountability for the life of a child and the rapidly approaching deaths of others. Varda explores these ideas of the proximity of death to life, taking responsibility for the mortality of the Other and the potential movement between attitudes of subjectivity and objectivity further in the later Cléo from 5 to 7 (hereafter Cléo).152 This latter relation between subject and Other is also addressed in this film as it occurs via the gaze, through which Varda undermines the binary oppositions and hierarchical frameworks that Beauvoir also combats in her signal works in which the masculine is subject and the feminine Other. Emma Wilson argues that the film ‘fairly unequivocally, and with due existential drive, embraces Cléo’s project to assume her identity and not be fixed as an other’.153 The film documents a transition within its eponymous protagonist as she vacillates between Other and subject as Varda projects a female self who gradually resists definition by others. Sandy Flitterman-​Lewis’s canonical analysis of the film plots the process by which Cléo ‘becomes transformed into an active, social participant’.154 Several other scholars of the film have reinforced Flitterman-​ Lewis’s assertion, arguing that the metamorphosis of the titular chanteuse (Corinne Marchand) from an objectified doll towards a subjective self occurs after a specific pupal scene. For instance, Geneviève Sellier argues 151 Beauvoir, EA, 32. 152 There are several other reiterations too, for instance Cléo refers to her malady being in her ventre, with the ambiguity of its meaning both stomach and womb and is regularly referred to be other characters as une poupée. 153 Emma Wilson, ‘Cléo and Dorothée’, in Marie-​Claire Barnet, ed., Agnès Varda Unlimited: Image, Music, Media (Cambridge: Legenda, 2016), 18. 154 Flitterman-​Lewis, To Desire Differently, 268.

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that the episode in which the singer accepts the visits of her lover José and the pianist Bob (played by Michel Legrand) and rehearses a newly penned song, ‘Cri d’amour’, signifies Cléo’s moment of transition from object of the gaze to a subject who owns the gaze.155 Other commentators on the film consider alternative sequences throughout the film as the juncture at which Cléo gains her subjective self, but each maintains that the narrative is divided into two halves, with Forbes, for example contending that the sequence in the parc Montsouris is the chrysalid stage.156 The eponymous star objectifies, in Sartrean terms, those around her and is in turn objectified by them throughout most of the film, a reciprocal and continuous process that begins at the film’s outset. In interview, Varda herself has suggested that after the mid-​way scene in which Cléo takes off her wig and changes into her black dress, she is the one who starts to look (to become the subject gazing), but in the same discussion admits that ‘Cléo, in the shock of being afraid of death, starts to see things differently. The shock is very good for her. She starts to listen to other people.’157 This ‘shock of death’ occurs in the colour prologue to the film, in the tarot reader’s home, the singer’s first encounter with her mortality. If it is death that arouses Cléo to a consciousness in which she begins to form a self that is becoming conscious of her own potential subjectivity (‘starts to see things differently’) and that of others (‘starts to listen to others’), then it is in the opening scene of the film that this transition commences. The trajectory which she makes through the film is from what would be a Sartrean binary conflict with the Other, at best a hostile oscillation between subject and Other, to a Beauvoirian acceptance of the presence of each of these attitudes within every being: the Geneviève Sellier, Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema, tr. Kristin Ross (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 218. See also, Orpen, Cléo de 5 à 7, 89. Legrand was also composer on films by Godard, Marker, Claude Chabrol and Varda’s spouse, Jacques Demy, traversing the Seine’s nouvelle vague between left and right banks. 156 Jill Forbes, ‘Gender and Space in Cléo de 5 à 7’, Studies in French Cinema 2/​2 (2002), 88. 157 Kiva Reardon, ‘“Curiosity is a Good Thing”:  An Interview with Agnès Varda’, Cléo: A Journal of Film and Feminism 6/​1 (spring 2018) accessed 11 June 2018. 155

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ambiguous or complex self. For Sartre, within the conflict between subject and Other, ‘one look on the part of the Other is sufficient to make all [my] schemes collapse and to make me experience once more the transfiguration of the Other’.158 The recurring conflict between the subject and the Other in Sartre’s thinking occurs through the look between the two. Cléo engages in this campaign of the objectifying look –​the oscillation between positions of subject and Other through the gaze –​in several scenes of the film before accepting that she can be subject and/​or Other without hostility. Emphasising the act of looking in his analysis of Varda’s film, Phil Powrie has argued that the two halves of Cléo are demarcated by the scene in the cinema in which Cléo and her friend Dorothée watch the short film within the film, Les Fiancés du pont Mac Donald (ou méfiez-​vous des lunettes noires) (The Fiancés on the Mac Donald Bridge, 1962).159 Powrie argues that this scene ‘subvert[s] binaries and creat[es] a moment of radical (self-​)questioning for the spectator’.160 The film-​within-​a-​film device itself places Cléo as a spectator and leads the viewer of Cléo to question their role as a detached spectator and subject (a spectator-​as-​subject). The binary between the Other as filmed image and the gaze of the spectator-​ as-​subject, which is subverted in this scene, provides a schematic for an analysis of the gaze in the remainder of Cléo. In the film, the dominance of the subject, which is buttressed by the traditional power of being the one gazing, is reconstituted as an intersubjective equality –​as in L’Opéra –​ by its conclusion. Fittingly, as noted in the introduction, a notion of parity between beings, conspicuously absent from Being and Nothingness, is present in Sartre’s recollections of viewing films at the cinema. Robert Harvey, writing on the hierarchical difference that dictates Sartre’s thought on cinematic spectatorship, argues that the ‘pleasure [Sartre] attains in his moviegoing experiences derives from a propensity for occupying several supposedly incompatible spectatorial positions at the same time’.161 Sartre’s 158 Sartre, BN, 320. 159 Phil Powrie, ‘Heterotopic Spaces and Nomadic Gazes in Varda: from Cléo de 5 à 7 to Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse’, L’Esprit Créateur 51/​1 (spring 2011), 71. 160 Ibid.  71. 161 Robert Harvey, ‘Sartre/​Cinema: Spectator/​Art that is Not One’, Cinema Journal, 30/​3 (spring, 1991), 45.

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experience of the cinema is of multiple perspectives in one self. In darkened theatres, the thinker relinquished the egocentrism inherent to much of his early philosophical thought and embraced a self with a multiplicity of outlooks that is notably close to the notion of the polysemous self explored here in Beauvoir’s thought, as potentially subject or Other. The short film within Cléo –​ The Fiancés on the Mac Donald Bridge –​itself refers to this notion of multiple perspectives, as the bespectacled protagonist (played by Godard) experiences two similar events, one with his dark glasses on and one without, and in the latter the outcome is distinctly more positive. So, Varda engages with the idea of the self composed from multiple perspectives, not only in this cinema scene but throughout Cléo, as the eponymous singer moves towards an understanding of subject-​Other relations that is closer to the reconciled intersubjective encounter that Beauvoir advances. Varda’s protagonist, then, embodies Judith Butler’s interpretation of Beauvoir’s ‘subject’ as constantly in flux, amorphous, what I call an equivocal I or polysemous self.162 This complex self, one that Cléo comes to accept by the end of the film, reflects the manner in which Anneke Smelik defines subjectivity in her writing on feminist cinema as ‘a process of continuous becoming rather than a state of being’. Smelik continues that such a concept of fluid subjectivity ‘is both necessary and possible to account for change and transformation’.163 In this process of becoming-​ subject, one never attains a comprehensive, static self, which reverberates with Beauvoir’s idea of the female self as split and of self-​identity as ambiguous and constantly metamorphosing. Cléo comes to embody this continuous becoming, an evolving selfhood, as she accepts her potential as subject or Other and the possibility of her death. As Jeanne Betancourt writes, ‘Cléo is having a rendezvous with herself, a self that may soon have to face death’.164 On facing her mortality, her acceptance of it, Cléo’s self develops as she becomes aware of her complexity in being either subject or object of the gaze. Throughout her journey she encounters external Others 162 Judith Butler, ‘Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex’, in Wenzel, ed., Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century,  35–​49. 163 Anneke Smelik, And the Mirror Cracked:  Feminist Cinema and Film Theory (Basingstoke: Macmillan and St Martin’s, 1998), 3. 164 Jeanne Betancourt, Women in Focus (Dayton, OH: Pflaum, 1974), 30.

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who gaze upon her as she also gazes at them: within these exchanges she is subject and Other. In Cléo, according to Hilary Neroni, Varda ties together the topics of looking and ‘women’s place in culture and popular culture to questions of death, existential crisis, and subjectivity’.165 The director approaches questions about the objectifying gaze upon women, sexualised images proliferated in the media, mortality, being and identity in her film. These issues, which reverberate with the challenges to Sartre’s conflict-​ridden variant of intersubjective relations provided by Beauvoir’s feminist revisions of selfhood, are raised in the very first scene of Varda’s film in which Cléo receives the tarot card reading.

Figure 11:  The imaged form of Death in the opening of Cléo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962), © Ciné-​Tamaris.

In this opening sequence of the film the clairvoyant turns a card revealing Death, although she remarks that ‘it is not necessarily “Death”, the hands and feet are fleshy. It is a total transformation’ (see Figure 11). This is an image of Death, capitalised and therefore personified, as in Dürer’s Knight, Death and the Devil engraving or the painting by his student, Hans Baldung Grün, Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden, 1517), which influenced Varda’s conception of Cléo.166 This is the imaged 165 166

Hilary Neroni, Feminist Film Theory and Cléo from 5 to 7 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 103. Varda, Varda par Agnès, 48.

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form of Death that Beauvoir writes ‘knocks on the door, a scythe in its hand, the Death that comes from elsewhere, strange and inhuman’.167 This strangeness speaks to Death as a feared Other, external, arriving at a designated time to ferry one off. Yet this image of Death creates for Cléo, as Dürer’s engraving of Death does for Sartre, an internal, imag(in)ed form of death, initiating her transformation. It is, for now, a less spontaneous image of death, one that relates to an external analogue: it provokes fear, rather than understanding. Gradually, though, Cléo begins to accept within her self what Cayrol and Durant call her ‘living death’.168 In the prologue sequence, Cléo is still in denial and still externalises this living death as Death, uppercase, impersonal, the skeleton on the tarot card. She remains at this instant, unenlightened, what Beauvoir calls ‘bewildered before the darkness of the future which is haunted by [the] frightful specters’ of war and of sickness.169 Yet the clairvoyant has deluded Cléo, suspecting that death has approached considerably closer because of the singer’s illness. Once Cléo has departed, the fortune-​teller admits to her husband that the cards foretold death, that she ‘saw cancer’ and that Cléo ‘is doomed’. If she is correct, then the cancer –​and so the death it too frequently foretells –​is already inside Cléo, and the process of her acceptance of this mysterious Otherness as internal has begun despite Cléo’s remonstrations. This undertaking, as Varda intimates in her interview mentioned above, is concomitant with Cléo’s understanding of a responsibility for the Other, if only initially for egocentric reasons. This denial of the presence of death, her own and especially that of the Other, is manifest in Cléo’s circumspect and oscillating recognition of the presence of the Algerian conflict. As she initially represses the notion of her mortality, Cléo is also –​as are the interviewees of Le Joli Mai –​indifferent to the Algerian conflict. She ignores the death of the Other, yet as in Beauvoir’s thought and the closing sequence of Le Joli Mai, the death of the Other is tied to the death of the self. The scene in which Cléo and Angèle take a taxi along the rue Mazarine contains the first overt allusion to the war in the film, a conflict 167 Beauvoir, VE,  91–​2. 168 Cayrol and Durand, Le Droit de regard, 69 (my tr.). 169 Beauvoir, EA, 45.

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Varda referred to as ‘stupid and murderous’.170 Reported in a radio news bulletin in the taxi, a riot in Algeria has left ‘20 dead, 60 injured’, but this information initially seems peripheral to the consciousness of each of Cléo and Angèle as they do not observably react to the announcement. However, before the newscast is an advert for Whiskey Shampoo, claiming ‘Whiskey revitalises the hair’, and as the commercial plays on the soundtrack Varda cuts to a shot of Angèle patting her hair, externally responding to the advert’s promises. This shot suggests that Angèle at least is not immune to the messages on the radio and therefore that it is in bad faith that she attempts to absent the conflict in Algeria, ignoring its presence. Cléo also reacts to an aural signifier on the radio as the news bulletin is also preceded by a song of hers, ‘La Belle Putain’, at which she feigns embarrassment whilst simultaneously indicating to the driver that it is she who is singing. If the shampoo advert and ‘La Belle Putain’ have an impact on these characters, it is probable that the news report does too. As Dürer’s engraving summons a mental image of death for Sartre, the radio announcement also conveys the notions of death and responsibility for the Other in Algeria into Cléo’s conscience. But the singer endeavours to deny her accountability for the death of this Other and to repel the knowledge of her own mortality. Yet there is no escape from that which is repressed, ‘the first act of bad faith is to flee what it cannot flee’.171 Such a juxtaposition of spoken content referring to the conflict in Algeria and one of Cléo’s jingles occurs again in the later scene in Le Café Dôme, although in this iteration it is the song itself that is employed to bury the discussion of Algeria beneath it.172 In this sequence, which takes place after the one in which Cléo changes into her black dress, the singer walks into the café wearing dark glasses, moves through the bistro’s chatter, including two men discussing the situation in Algeria, puts ‘La Belle Putain’ on the jukebox and orders a brandy. The song drowns out the conversation on the soundtrack as again Cléo’s bad faith (in the form of her pop ditty) represses the dialogue about Algeria and its association with death. The discussion and therefore the conflict 1 70 171 172

Varda, Varda par Agnès, 52. Sartre, BN, 93. Notably, Café du Dôme is referenced in both Beauvoir’s L’Invitée (She Came to Stay, 1943) and Sartre’s L’âge de raison (Age of Reason, 1947).

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continues, remaining as presences, as indicated by the audible extracts of other conversations on the soundtrack. Cléo attempts to ignore the presence of death, the possibility of her own and her liability for that of the Other in the conflict in or for Algeria. This latter point is further exemplified in this scene through questions about the othering gaze. Alison Smith suggests that the sunglasses that Cléo wears in the Dôme mean that she avoids recognition.173 The protagonist’s glasses act to distance her from those around her in a divergent manner. Although characters in the café still stare at Cléo as she locates an empty table, the dark glasses enable her to gaze upon them without their knowledge as each individual is positioned as potentially a perceived and a perceiver: the shaded lenses create a disassociation. This distancing from others concludes when Cléo takes off the glasses as she listens to a conversation on the next table that concerns her friend Dorothée, a sculptor’s model. That she has heard this discussion and now considers an/​Other is indicated by her leaving the café to journey to see her friend before watching the short film in the cinema. Acting in bad faith, Cléo has attempted to quash references to Algeria, rejecting thoughts of the war with its concomitant deaths and the possibility of responsibility for an/​Other’s death, but ends the scene thinking of someone else, Dorothée. She does not simply transform from the ‘object to the subject of vision’, as Flitterman-​Lewis argues.174 Varda’s film is more dexterous than that. Instead, these scenes in the café and the taxi speak to Cléo’s oscillation between attitudes of subjectivity and objectivity. And it is in the point-​of-​view shots in the film that this motion is particularly prominent. Considering the shot-​reverse-​shot as specifically indicative of a subjective point of view, Orpen has argued that the only examples in the film ‘are female, belong[ing] either to Cléo or Angèle’.175 Such point-​of-​view shots would position Cléo and Angèle as subjects as they look directly at Others. Yet these subjective shots also occur before Cléo’s assumed transformation –​Angèle does not appear in the latter half of the film –​and 173 174 175

Smith, Agnès Varda, 99. Flitterman-​Lewis, To Desire Differently, 269. Orpen, Cléo de 5 à 7, 89.

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consequently such a reading undermines arguments that Cléo transitions between an object of the gaze in the first half of the film to the subject gazing in the second. Furthermore, such assertions do not account for examples of shot/​reverse-​angle-​shots between the clairvoyant and Cléo in the film’s prologue. These images present the point of view of each woman as they stare back at one another, indicating their alternating positions of subject and Other with one another: the perceived and the perceiver as one of them, the tarot reader, gains power. It should be remembered that it is when Cléo leaves the medium’s apartment that she descends the stairs and Varda uses the staccato editing of the jump-​cut, as Annabel Brady-​ Brown writes, to indicate her heroine’s ‘shattered sense of self ’.176 This is the moment in which Cléo begins her acceptance of her self as a fractured, fragmented or complex identity, echoing in the scene directly afterwards where the singer stares into mirrors in a café, her reflection split by seams in the glass: the news of her approaching death, the realisation that it haunts her life, instigates her journey towards acceptance of her self as polysemous. In addition to these point-​of-​view shots of Cléo, Angèle and the clairvoyant, there are several examples in the film where other characters are offered a subjective perspective, some of which implicitly evoke Beauvoir’s notion of the self composed of a potential to realise the positions of both subject or Other without conflict. After leaving the Dôme, Cléo walks along a street and the camera films a group of boys who turn to watch her, then a man looks directly into the lens, as if the shot represents Cléo’s perspective as he gazes at her. The singer is then filmed walking towards camera, as if the camera now presents the viewpoint of another character gazing upon her. There is then an insert of the street-​performer swallowing a frog that repulsed Cléo earlier in her wanderings which is an image from her consciousness –​akin to the shots of the casino and graveyard in Resnais’s Muriel –​as Cléo feels the existential panic of being objectified and recalls a moment of (literal) nausea. Images then alternate between women looking into the camera as if watching Cléo and medium-​range shots of her walking along the pavement patting her hair, as Angèle had done earlier in the taxi, signifying a self-​consciousness 176 Annabel Brady-​Brown, ‘Oh La Varda’, Fireflies 5 (October 2017), 12.

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as she is being watched by the women on the street. There is then a brief shot of the customer from the Dôme who spoke of Algeria staring into the camera, which is an incongruous image from Cléo’s conscience as the man faces neither the camera nor Cléo in the café scene. His gaze represents the surfacing of Cléo’s recognition of the Algerian conflict and her responsibility for the deaths intrinsic to it: the customer epitomises the Other’s call to help. The shot of him cuts to one in which the clairvoyant looks into the camera, which could be a repetition of one of the earlier shots in the prologue and therefore a memory of Cléo’s. Each of these shots, of the café patron and the medium, signals death: the former that of the Other in the guise of the Algerian conflict and the latter Cléo’s own death, the moment the Death card is revealed to her, and the shock of this death that instigates her evolution to a complex self. The image of the psychic gives way to more shots/​counter-​shots of Cléo’s point of view of passers-​by staring at her in the street and then shots from their perspective looking at her. This sequence of shot/​reverse-​shots and inserted images of other characters staring into the camera speaks to a self in the process of continuous becoming, the ambiguous self split between subject and Other, which also belies the traditionally gendered stratification of subject and Other. In these street scenes there is a lack of gender-​positioning between the one gazed upon and the agent of the gaze, which Mary Ann Doane argues is an essential quality of the dominant patriarchal system: ‘the matching of male subjectivity with the agency of the look’.177 The masculine as self-​ appointed subject is the one who gazes. Similarly, as Sartre writes of passing a stranger on the street as another example of the conflict within the intersubjective encounter, he also, uncommonly, avoids such gendered objectification: ‘[the] woman who is coming toward me, the man who is passing by in the street […] are for me objects’.178 In this example, the objectified other is not gender-​specific, both men and women gazed upon are objects for Sartre. Advancing on this position of neutral Otherness and considering the Beauvoirian notion of a non-​conflictual equality between subjects, in 177 Mary Ann Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator’, Screen 23/​3–​4 (1982), 77. 178 Sartre, BN, 276.

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Cléo Varda challenges the gendered hierarchy, the subject/​object dichotomy based on sexual difference (see Figures 12.1 and 12.2).

Figures 12.1 and 12.2:  Cléo gazes … and is gazed upon in Cléo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962), © Ciné-​Tamaris.

These scenes in which Cléo walks along the streets of Paris have direct echoes in a short film by Varda’s partner for nearly thirty years and fellow rive gauche director, Jacques Demy. In La Luxure (Lust, from the portmanteau film Les Sept Péchés capitaux [The Seven Deadly Sins], 1962) the character of Jacques (Laurent Terzieff ) wanders down a Parisian street, gazing at and being gazed upon by women. The camera follows closely behind this character, turning as he does to follow the women as they pass with his/​its gaze. He then, literally, bumps into his friend Bernard ( Jean-​Louis Trintignant). As they chat, a character played by Corinne Marchand passes between them, Jacques calls her ‘Caroline’, but her riposte to his advance, a smirk as she walks by, suggests that she is as anonymous to him as the other women. He follows her for a few paces trying to attract her, but she passes into a crowd and he desists. Throughout the scene, the camera’s gaze represents Jacques’s perspective, the male subject as he attempts to charm the female passers-​by.179 In contrast, in Cléo there are subjective viewpoints 179 In a further coincidence between Varda’s and her spouse’s film, indicating perhaps a similar cross-​pollination as that in the works of Beauvoir and Sartre, after the scene on the street in Demy’s film, Bernard purchases a monograph on Hieronymus Bosch (another painter influenced by Dürer) and, in a cafe has a flashback of naked people, mostly women, haunted by skeletons, as in Grien’s paintings.

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of several characters: Cléo, Angèle, the tarot reader and several male and female pedestrians on the streets. Where Demy’s film maintains his (male) character’s gaze as that of the subject sexualising (in an attempt to dominate) the (female) Other, Cléo gradually represents a self who gazes and is gazed upon, an I who is in the process of accepting their potential as perceiver and perceived, as subject or Other: complex, polysemous. However, this presence of the subject and Other in one being remains antagonistic until the film moves towards its conclusion. This conflict at times is internal, where it results from Cléo’s refusal to accept her self as complex, and sometimes is external, as Cléo objectifies others through her gaze as they seek to objectify her. Progressively, however, she accepts the equality within her self as subject and Other, as well as that which occurs between her and external subjects, just as she admits her mortality. In acknowledging the exterior self as an equal, she also embraces her internal egalitarian self as Other and subject. In the film’s final scenes, from when Cléo dances down the stairs in parc Montsouris to the closing fade, it is her death and, perhaps more importantly, that of the formerly othered external self represented by Antoine –​the soldier that she meets in the park –​that facilitate this understanding. Antoine embodies Algeria, symbolising the death of the Other propelled onto the streets (and parks) of Paris and a self who has come to terms with the death that has moved closer through his mobilisation to fight.180 As Cléo sashays down the stairs she sings the lyrics of ‘La Belle Putain’, of her body desired by another. Yet before she begins to sing, she is careful to shoot a glance over each shoulder to ensure that she is not being watched. The masculine subject who desires her and who is described in the song’s lyrics is now absent and she dances and sings to and for her self. Reappropriating the words of the song, she plays both roles, as a self with the potential to be subject and Other, her own audience. One can now imagine a shot/​reverse-​shot occurring within Cléo her self, and this realisation initiates her understanding of the death that exists within her, which is then augmented by her encounter with Antoine. After her tuneful descent of the steps, the soldier approaches the singer on a bridge 180 Stora notes of the Algerian conflict that after 1962 ‘if we can not directly see the war, we see soldiers who speak of it’, Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli, 250 (my tr.).

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and, in his nervous chattering, mentions the astrological sign of cancer. Cléo tells him to ‘shut up’, thereby repressing the idea of her potentially untimely demise. But she then concedes and continues the conversation, during which he explains that he is on leave from Algeria, ‘the last day of three weeks’, and she responds, now accepting the proximity of death, that she is waiting for her biopsy results. They are both on the cusp of a possible premature death that has drawn closer through disease and war. The Other’s death, Antoine’s, is associated with the war, and Cléo’s with illness, but the recognition and acceptance of each is drawn together in Cléo’s consciousness. Other commentators have observed this collocation of war and illness as a commentary on the Algerian War.181 In particular, in his analysis of this overlapping in the film, Richard Neupert concludes that ‘Varda’s narrative may suggest a parallel [between Algeria and cancer], but Cléo never sees it’.182 Neupert’s analysis neglects that these two harbingers of death are combined in Cléo, who accepts that her potential death, signified by cancer, is accepted by an Other (Antoine) and that she begins to recognise that she holds a similar agency for their potential death. Cléo and Antoine agree in the park that he will accompany her to the hospital for her test results and she will then see him off at la gare, a small moment of reciprocity, indicative of a modest yet perceptible evolution in Cléo’s conscience. Their relation is not the conflicted, oscillating subject–​Other relation of Sartre’s thought, but reflects Beauvoir’s intent when she writes that ‘no existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself. It appeals to the existence of others.’183 The informed, complex self must interpret the world − including its position within it − with a recognition of others. In the film, as they talk and leave the park, Cléo and Antoine run for a trolleybus and, as the camera remains at the top of a set of stairs descending from the park to the street below, they jump on the bus at the rear. As they do, there is a jump-​cut, highlighted by the sound of the clang of the bell on the bus. It is a disjuncture in keeping with the following scenes in which Cléo further transforms into a complex self. For instance, on the bus they 181 1 82 183

For instance, Higgins, New Novel, New Wave, 109. Neupert, A History of the French New Wave, 340. Beauvoir, EA, 67.

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pass a baby in an incubator being carried to an ambulance and another passenger remarks, ‘it looks like Snow White’s coffin’, a reflection on the paradox of the symbiosis of life (birth) and death, like the elderly with talcumed behinds in L’Opéra. The camera that films the incubator from the bus turns to the couple riding in the back as they continue to discuss the subject of ‘nudity’ that they began in the park and remind each other of their commitment to accompany one another to their respective destinations. Cléo responds to Antoine’s concern for her because, where others have been too anxious to come to terms with the death within, the young soldier is acquainted with the phantom that we each carry as a perpetual presence. Where the Sartrean conflict between Other and subject is present in Cléo’s character arc, by the conclusion of the film she understands that her self is comprised of the potential to hold attitudes of subject or Other which include the deaths of each. This is a post-​conflictual acceptance reflective of Beauvoir’s theory of selfhood. The now enlightened Cléo not only embodies the ambiguous self, but also Beauvoir’s interpretation of the gaze shared between subjects in her article on Bardot. The nouvelle vague star objectifies the male who sexualises her through a reciprocated gaze and, in the scene in the Dôme café, Cléo engages in this equality between perceiver and perceived too.184 The final shot of the film –​after Cléo receives the results of her test –​places the spectator into this cooperative as well, as Cléo stares into the camera with an inscrutable look on her face, meeting the gaze of the film’s spectators. The viewer is invited to undertake some liability for these characters and their deaths and, by extension, for the death of the Other in Algeria. Then, each of Varda’s films discussed here reflect Beauvoir’s assertion that ‘there is no figurative image of woman which does not call up at once its opposite’, reflecting a complex, ambiguous female self.185 This is the female subject that Kathi Weeks refers to as ‘not a final product, but an ongoing, always incomplete series of effects of a process of reiteration’.186 Varda recognises 184 185 186

Beauvoir, BB, 28. Interestingly, several scholars note a correlation between the appearance of Cléo and that of Bardot, for instance Orpen, Cléo de 5 à 7, 73; and Steven Ungar, Cléo de 5 à 7 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan and BFI, 2008), 62. Beauvoir, SS, 218. Kathi Weeks, Constituting Feminist Subjects (London: Verso, 2018), 127 [1998].

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the split self that embodies this process –​the potential to be subject and Other –​that accepts death in life.

Concluding Remarks In a paper from his later career, Sartre considers death as ‘the passage of an interior to an exteriority’.187 For him, death relinquishes the subject’s consciousness to the Other as it passes between them, which is to give the final victory to the point of view of the Other.188 This is the very crux of Sartrean intersubjective hostilities. Through analysis of pairs of films by Resnais, Marker and Varda, this chapter has explored the contrasts between this Sartrean attitude within intersubjective encounters; the anti-​colonialist perspective of certain of Sartre’s articles from the 1940s through to the 1960s; Beauvoir’s conception of subject–​Other relations as equally reciprocal but without the conflict of Sartre’s theories; and the ways in which death enters these points of contact. With reference to Sartre’s existentialist ontology, including his theories of bad faith and the imaged Other and death, we have considered how Beauvoir’s thesis of intersubjective equivalence, including that of an ambiguous self, tempered such Sartrean conflicted interrelations. Framed within considerations of war and illness, and the denial of responsibility for the death of the Other, film analyses have negotiated moments of rapport and of antagonism in these phenomenological-​existential theories engaging with the ‘problem’ of the Other. In his Night and Fog, Resnais portrays the Muselmann as an Other in need, creating a more harmonious intersubjective encounter between the spectator and these Lazarean figures. Just as Sartre’s postcolonial texts 187 Jean-​Paul Sartre, ‘Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal’, in Between Existentialism and Marxism, tr. John Matthews (London: Verso, 2008), 142 [After the speech, ‘The Living Kierkegaard’ delivered to a UNESCO colloquium on Kierkegaard in 1964]. 188 Sartre, BN, 564.

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frequently made analogies between wars, the gaze of these victims of World War II also spoke to an accountability for the death of the Other in Algeria, as they evoked this visually absent war in the conscience of the film’s spectators. These photographs, and other images in the film, form in the spectator an intention, as in Sartre’s thoughts, directed at a distant event, the Algerian conflict.189 Further, my analysis of Muriel discovered the dual image tracks which compose the film: the film’s narrative and the stream of consciousness of two of the film’s principal characters. The latter, originally veiled in bad faith, ruptures the former in the film and then occupies the consciousness of the film’s spectators. The images of both Night and Fog and Muriel speak to an intention directed at absented objects, war, guilt, death and the ambiguous self. As Sartre writes, such images aim from one war to another, from the external to the internal and from the subjective to the objective and contrariwise.190 Like Hélène and Bernard, in Marker’s and Lhomme’s Le Joli Mai the interviewees act in bad faith when they seek to deny their responsibility for the death of the Other, the deaths inherent in war, specifically a colonial war fought in their name.191 Where these subjects of the camera attempt to ignore the conflict and their liability for it, the co-​directors refer to its presence through their questions and by splicing images of gravestones between shots of citizens on the streets later in the film. In this final sequence, these images represented the consciousness of these filmed subjects, previously hidden in bad faith but now resurfacing. Provoked by the narrator’s questions, although at a distance, as an absence, these subjects become aware of death, their own and that of the Other. Just as Beauvoir had bound subjective wellbeing to that of Others in her Ethics of Ambiguity, the narrator of Le Joli Mai reminds the subjects of the camera that their fate is tied to that of others.192 Marker and Lhomme locate the greed, ignorance and a fear of the Other in their interviewees, and the images and commentary that close the film indicate a populace becoming aware of death and the culpability for their actions: responsibility for the Algerian War and for the 189 190 191 192

Sartre, IPP, 19. Ibid.  19. Sartre, ‘You are Wonderful’, 64. Beauvoir, EA, 73.

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Other’s death linger in their collective conscience. These critical themes of conflict, death, and an ethical obligation for the Other were complicated in analysis of La Jetée. Just as the boundaries between wars are eroded in the film (images alluding to World War II, the Algerian conflict, World War III and the Spanish Civil War reverberate throughout), permitting the movement between deaths in these conflicts, the shots of the protagonist’s assassination speak to a self in which delineations between subjective and objective attitudes are contested. These and other images from La Jetée represent the consciousness of the protagonist, transcending the blurred boundaries between attitudes of subject and Other. Consequently, the child on the pier at Orly airport witnesses his own death as that of an Other and as that of his own subject-​self: the protagonist consequently embodies both attitudes. This theory challenges the egocentrism of Sartrean intersubjective conflict, moving instead towards the notion of a split or complex self in Beauvoir’s ethics. In addressing questions about this ambiguous self and in its characters’ calls to the witnesses to their deaths (including film spectators) to take responsibility for their passing, La Jetée equally substitutes the violence inherent in Sartrean objectification of others with a Beauvoirian understanding of the reciprocal, intersubjective relation. In Varda’s L’Opéra, the aged and sickly shoppers of the rue Mouffetard similarly urge the spectator to consider their deaths. Identified as signifiers of the death dormant in every life, Varda also recognises their subjectivity as they gaze back at the camera, at the director, and at the films’ spectators. These elderly faces question the hierarchical position of subjects gazing upon Others, reminding spectators that each of us is mortal. This conflicted relation is also undermined, Varda asserts, through the state of pregnancy which embodies an Other for which the subject is responsible within the self, inherently disrupting Sartrean, stratified and conflict-​ridden intersubjective relations. Varda’s images refer to an equality between subjects rather than the violence in which frailty is exploited to objectify other subjects. L’Opéra implicitly demonstrates Beauvoir’s theories that the freedom of Others surpasses subjective death and by extension emphasises the moral, mortal bond between subjects.193 Varda further explores these ideas of the 193 Ibid. 32, 73.

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proximity of subjective death, a liability for the death of the Other and the potential motion between attitudes of subject and Other in Cléo. This film challenges binary oppositions between (masculine) subjects and (feminine) Others, echoing Beauvoir’s resistance to patricentric orthodoxy in which difference (from the masculine-​as-​subject) is objectified.194 Cléo herself embodies attitudes of subject and Other and moves through a hostile perspective of the Other towards an implicitly Beauvoirian viewpoint in which she accepts her own mortality and her accountability for the death of the Other in Algeria. Gradually acknowledging the presence of death within her, through the duration of the film Cléo becomes an ambiguous or complex self: her feminine subjectivity is ambivalent, in a state of persistent becoming, an ongoing process of reiteration. This is a self that accepts its own ambiguity, that of those external to it and their responsibility for the freedoms and the deaths of others. These signal themes –​the intersubjective encounter and especially a gendered hierarchy between subjects and Others formed through the gaze, accountability for the death of the Other and definitions of feminine subjectivity –​are explored in the next chapter through the perspective of Levinas’s ethics. For philosopher Richard A. Cohen, ‘intersubjectivity for both Levinas and Sartre is a relation that remains irreducibly dyadic and asymmetrical’.195 Yet Levinas’s theory of intersubjectivity, similar to Beauvoir’s ethics, lacks the violence of the subject inherent to Sartre’s early thought, since in Levinasian first philosophy the Other is in the ascendant. Through his theories of the subject–​Other encounter, especially that between patriarchal definitions of feminine and masculine, we countenance how boundaries between subjects and between life and death are questioned and how far such challenges are reflected in further films by Varda, Marker and Resnais.

1 94 For instance, Beauvoir, BB, 30; and Beauvoir, SS, 190. 195 Richard A. Cohen, Levinasian Meditations:  Ethics, Philosophy and Religion (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010), 136.

Chapter 2

Levinasian Alterity: Resisting Objectifications of the Feminine Figure and Death

This chapter moves from Sartre’s philosophy of the egocentric self and Beauvoirian reciprocal intersubjectivity to consider the ascendant Other in Levinasian ethics. Investigating these central ideas through analysis of further films by Varda, Marker and Resnais, it engages with three key elements of Levinas’s philosophy as they are informed by his explication of the figures of the feminine and death as examples of ultimate alterity in his thought: transcendence, the third party and the face-​to-​face encounter. This chapter will explicitly interrogate the asymmetry between feminine and masculine figures in Levinas’s ethical thought and seek to understand how the cinematic works of the three filmmakers reflect and complicate such gendered hierarchies. Where in the Sartrean subject–​Other relation the latter threatens the liberty of the subject and in Beauvoir’s ethics there is equilibrium between complex selves, in Levinas’s ethical pursuit primacy is given to the Other as it remains distinct from the subject. In Levinasian thought, the subject has an inherent responsibility for the Other which is fundamental to the construction of subjectivity and in turn extends the possibility of transcendence to the subject.1 It is this intrinsic difference between these thinkers that motivates this transition in theoretical frameworks –​where Sartre vilified the position of Other, Levinas is, as Jacques Derrida notes, ‘obsessed’ with the Other as ascendant.2 However, Levinas’s insistence on the latter notion leads in certain key texts to an objectification of the feminine. This othering and emphasis on her (sexual) difference, critics 1 2

Levinas, TI, 86–​7, 183. Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am, tr. David Wills, ed. Marie-​Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 107.

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such as Beauvoir have argued, denies female figures the opportunity to define their self.3 This chapter will rely on illuminating interpretations from several feminist commentators on Levinas’s complex, equivocal and controversial designations of the feminine figure, sexual difference and the intersubjective relation. These concerns are each informed by particular propositions on death’s haunting presence to life. For Derrida, ‘all of Levinas’s thought, from the beginning to the end, was a meditation on death’.4 Death’s stalking presence in life, especially in the intersubjective relation, is also integral to the six films explored in this chapter. Varda’s Le Bonheur and Vagabond refer to a correlation between othered female figures and death, offering a bleak criticism of feminine roles in a phallocentric society: repressed, marginalised, sexualised and domesticated. Resnais’s two fiction films Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad address similar concerns, representing conflicts between the role of Beloved and death that reflect a resistance to masculine objectification of the feminine, especially as a possessed image. Comparably, in Marker’s Description of a Struggle and Sans Soleil, the encounter between women and men occurs through the lens of the image-​ creating camera and a reciprocated gaze.

Levinas’s Ethics of the Other and Subject: Transcendence, the Third Party and the Face-​to-​Face Encounter Levinas’s efforts to maintain a clear distinction between the subject and the Other in his early works have interested a number of other scholars.5 For Butler, Levinas failed to sustain this autonomy and ‘set up a relation 3 4 5

For explication of Beauvoir’s stance, see Tidd, ‘The Self–​Other Relation’, 168. Derrida, AEL, 120. For instance, see Simon Critchley, Ethics-​Politics-​Subjectivity:  Essays on Derrida, Levinas, and Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso, 2009), 65; and Diane Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2008), 18.

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to the self as prior to the relation of the other’.6 Levinas’s insistence on a segregation between these two positions –​distinguishing his thought from that of Merleau-​Ponty (as later shown) and Beauvoir who willingly test boundaries between positions of subject and Other  –​manifests itself because, as he also insists that the subject endures an ultimate accountability for the Other, this self is antecedent. Yet, unlike in Sartre’s thought, this stratification between subject and Other empowers the Other, creating the hierarchy of ‘the responsibility of a mortal being for a mortal being’.7 This culpability, which is centred on the deathly vulnerability of the Other, is non-​reciprocal and consequently subject and Other (must) remain separate.8 There is a lack of equality between the subject and Other in Levinas’s philosophy as the Other is treated with a reverence that positions them aloft. Although, in objectifying both the feminine and death in his thought, as critics such as Derrida have observed, Levinas undermines his ethical pursuit, the core moral stance of which is the exaltation of the Other.9 As with Beauvoir’s feminist ethics, this veneration acts as an essential counterpoint to conflictual intersubjective encounters –​found in Sartre’s work –​as the Levinasian subject–​Other relation revolves around this liability for the Other. Individual freedom for Levinas, Michael de Saint-​ Cheron writes, ‘begins with my obligation to the Other, coming before being requested, before being called for, for Sartre it seems to end with it’.10 In Sartre’s thought, the subject’s freedom is terminated by the responsibility for the Other, in Levinas’s the very self is formed by this liability. Levinas himself writes of this aspect of intersubjective relations in Sartre’s philosophy that the ‘encounter with the Other in Sartre threatens my 6 7 8 9 10

Judith Butler, ‘The Desire to Live: Spinoza’s Ethics under Pressure’, in Senses of the Subject, 71. This is apparent in Levinas, TI, 36, 102. Levinas, GDT, 117. Levinas, EI, 98. Derrida,  ‘At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am’, in Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, eds,, Psyche:  Inventions of the Other, vol. 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 180; and Derrida, AEL, 37. Michael de Saint-​Cheron, Conversations with Emmanuel Levinas, 1983–​1994, tr. Gary D. Mole (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010), 56–​7.

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freedom, and is equivalent to the fall of my freedom under the gaze of another freedom’.11 In Levinas’s own ethics, in contrast, the subject’s identity is only constituted because of an acknowledgement of the responsibility for the Other.12 Further, this liability for the Other exceeds the subject’s and the Other’s mortality and is for Levinas, with the ethical structure it nourishes, a ‘first philosophy’.13 Where this first philosophy is erected on the necessary divergence of subject and Other, it transcends any perceived boundaries between life and death. For Levinas this accountability is infinite: not even the death of the subject can deny their obligation for the Other.14 Thus, the responsibility for the Other is essential, (in)forming the self in life and in death. Levinas’s signature theories of the transcendence of the present, the third party and the face-​to-​face encounter coincide through this foundational thesis of the asymmetrical relation between subject and Other. Transcendence is possible only via the face-​to-​face encounter between subject and Other and both are transformed by the entrance of the third party, as it repudiates the process of a subject transcending their present by way of an Other. In my film readings of these three pivotal concerns, I find specific moments and images which challenge the hierarchical relation in which the feminine and death are objectified. Of his theory of transcendence through the intersubjective encounter, Levinas writes that the ‘dimension of height in which the Other is placed is as it were the primary curvature of being from which the privilege of the Other results, the gradient of transcendence’. It is the primacy of the Other, the subject’s unreciprocated responsibility for them that forms the peak of transcendence. This unequal relation is essential, Levinas cautions, for if it were reciprocal ‘the intended transcendence would thus be reabsorbed into the unity of the system, destroying the radical alterity of the other’.15 With bilateral 11 12 13 1 4 15

Levinas, TI, 303. Tina Chanter, Ethics of Eros:  Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers (New York:  Routledge, 1995), 222–​3:  and Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 53. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’, tr. Seán Hand and Michael Temple, in The Levinas Reader, 75-​87 [1984]. Gutting, French Philosophy, 358. Levinas, TI, 86–​7,  35–​6.

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reciprocity, the Other’s very difference, their alterity, would be subsumed, assimilated by the subject into the homogenised network which Levinas more commonly terms the ‘Same’. Films such as Varda’s Le Bonheur knowingly present, in order to critique, a patriarchal apparatus that functions through a similar attempt to assimilate feminine alterity into it. Such homogenisation of the Other by the (patriarchal/​subjective) Same contravenes the fundamental thesis of Levinas’s ethics, which emphasises the ascendant and separate Other. Transcendence essentially begins with the relationship to the Other, an encounter in which alterity is necessarily maintained.16 Several Levinas scholars including Tina Chanter, Irigaray and Claire Katz have noted the defect in this ethical hierarchy as it concerns the feminine which I also pursue in this chapter.17 Katz writes that, for Levinas, in the role of the ‘Beloved’, one burden bestowed on women in his writing, ‘the woman plays a transcendental role: she makes possible the man’s transcendence to the ethical, while she is cast downward’.18 For Katz, Levinas’s positioning of the feminine as Other –​eroticised because of her difference and, paradoxically, also domesticated into the Same –​discards the feminine as merely a rung on the ladder climbed by the masculine subject as he transcends his physical or temporal surroundings. The sexualisation of Levinas’s version of the feminine figure is apparent in Totalité et infini (Totality and Infinity, 1961) where he describes the Beloved as ‘at once graspable but intact in her nudity, beyond object and face and thus beyond the existent’. The feminine is, by definition passive, an object of love, to be loved. Levinas continues that the feminine is ‘essentially violable and inviolable’; is an ‘eternal feminine’; ‘is the virgin or an incessant recommencement of virginity, the untouchable in the very contact of voluptuosity’.19 This 1 6 17

1 8 19

Ibid. 193, 269. Chanter, Ethics of Eros, 198; Luce Irigaray, ‘Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: On the Divinity of Love’, tr. Margaret Whitford, in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley, eds, Re-​Reading Levinas (London: Athlone Press, 1991), 112; Claire Elise Katz, ‘Reinhabiting the House of Ruth:  Exceeding the Limits of the Feminine in Levinas’, in Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2001), 146. Katz, ‘Reinhabiting the House of Ruth’, 146. Levinas, TI, 258.

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idiom suggests an innate objectification, mystification and sexualisation of the feminine. The ‘eternal feminine’ is an Other reliant on the enigma of the sexualised virgin, a paradox of chastity and sensual gratification: or, as Levinas writes, ‘simultaneously uncovered by Eros and refusing Eros –​ another way of saying: profanation’.20 It is the masculine who appoints his self as subject (the male-​as-​subject) and devises this role for women, this version of femininity. The feminine in Levinas’s writing is a female described by male, hetero-​normative fantasy. He consequently subsumes her alterity through this paradoxical ideal of platonic eroticisation that evokes the phallocentric roles of ‘virgin’ and ‘whore’. For Chanter, these two positions, one celestial the other lowly, represent a dehumanisation of the feminine: she is both debased and at the same time elevated. Never equal, she is either deified –​and as such she is the threatening, powerful, mysterious other –​or she is not-​yet-​subject, merely potentially human, at the mercy of (reproductive) natural forces. God-​like, or animal-​like, she is not human-​like.21 Levinas reveres the Other in his ethics, but in defining the feminine as Other as determined by the masculine-​as-​subject –​as Eros, Beloved, whore or virgin –​he positions her as the inessential to the essential. Simultaneously, as Irigaray notes of the feminine figure in Levinas’s thought, if she is denied sexual difference, then she loses her alterity and is consumed by the Same.22 So defined as mystery, objectified as the impossible paragon of prurient celibacy and yet simultaneously ingested into patriarchy, there remains an antagonism within Levinas’s definition of the feminine that is grounded in the question of sexual difference. Discussing Levinas’s ‘Time and the Other’ in The Second Sex, Beauvoir considers that the essay ‘takes a man’s point of view, disregarding the reciprocity of subject and object’. She concludes that when Levinas writes ‘that woman is mystery, he implies that she is mystery for man. Thus, his description, which is intended to be objective, is in fact an assertion of masculine privilege.’23 Levinas fails in his intention to create an ethical theory of the subject–​Other relation with regard to gender: the feminine remains 20 21 22 23

Ibid.  259. Chanter, Ethics of Eros, 69. Irigaray, ‘Questions to Emmanuel Levinas’, 112. Beauvoir, SS, 16, n. 1.

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Other to the masculine-​as-​subject. The most prominent instances of this objectification in Levinas’s work are when he writes that the ‘other par excellence is the feminine’ and that the feminine is the ‘absolute contrary’ to the subject.24 Thus, the Otherness of the feminine, as he defines this role, is founded on (sexual/​biological) difference (whether deified or ‘defiled’), the gendered Other to the male-​as-​subject. And Levinas accentuates this difference, he eroticises the feminine, consigning her to an animalistic position.25 The feminine is an object of his desire, a sexualised or bestial subaltern. Famously, Derrida considers Levinas’s definition of ‘feminine alterity’ as ‘marked by a series of lacks’.26 Comparably, Irigaray argues that Levinas ‘abandons the feminine other, leaves her to sink’ and instead concentrates on ‘his responsibilities in the world of men-​among-​themselves’.27 Whilst Levinas maintains that his first philosophy venerates the Other, his understanding of the feminine as the Other par excellence speaks to a failure of ethical equity. These theories of the feminine as cast down, eroticised, mystified, incomplete and objectified because of her difference from the masculine-​as-​subject, therefore challenge Levinas’s construct of the ascendant Other. His location of death in a similar position, that of the objectified, mysterious Other, only supplements this questioning of the ethical foundation to his thought. Where the Levinasian, feminine figure is a quintessential Other because of her difference from the masculine Same, for him death is similarly ‘total alterity’.28 Both the feminine and death exist, for Levinas, in a contrary and hermetic space, conditioned as mystery. The Other is revered and yet isolated from the transcendence offered to the masculine-​as-​subject in Levinas’s work exactly because of this alterity. It is in the face-​to-​face encounter that the mystery of both death and of the Other are simultaneously experienced: the Other is ‘situated in the region from which death’ 24 Respectively, Levinas, EE, 86; and Levinas, ‘TO’, 85. 25 Kelly Oliver, ‘Paternal Election and the Absent Father’, in Chanter, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2001), 239. 26 Derrida, AEL, 36. 27 Irigaray, ‘Questions to Emmanuel Levinas’, 113. 28 Levinas, ‘TO’, 82.

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comes.29 As with the feminine-​as-​Other, for the subject, death is located in the realm of alterity and mystery and it is the death and the difference of the Other that inform their appeal to the subject to take responsibility for them. As Levinas responds in a late interview with Richard Kearney: The face is not in front of me (en face de moi) but above me; it is the other before death, looking through and exposing death. Secondly, the face is the other who asks me not to let him die alone, as if to do so were to become an accomplice in his death. Thus the face says to me: you shall not kill. In the relation to the face I am exposed as a usurper of the place of the other.30

Denying the obligation to the Other’s death is tantamount to taking their life, at which instant the subject’s very humanity would be at stake. In each of Levinas’s major works, as Sarah Cooper argues, ‘we confront death finally as an opening to the infinite and the Other, and the subject is rendered human and mortal through this relation’.31 Not only does the Other’s face invoke a recognition of their mortality which signals to the subject their liability for the Other and for their death, it also arouses an acknowledgement of the subject’s own mortality.32 Through this process, the essence of the face-​to-​face encounter, the Other ‘reconciles’ the subject to death.33 As in Sartre’s thought, for Levinas it is those left behind who experience genuine death and are, therefore, responsible for it. The relation to death is one mediated by the Other, as our initial experience of death is through that of an/​Other, which then leads to an understanding of one’s own mortality.34 It is because this encounter with death occurs, at least originally, 29 Levinas, TI, 233. 30 Richard Kearney, ‘Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas’, in Richard A. Cohen, ed., Face to Face with Levinas (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1986), 23–​4. 31 Cooper, ‘Looking Back, Looking Onwards’, 59. 32 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘The Philosopher and Death’, in Alterity and Transcendence, tr. Michael B. Smith (London: Athlone Press, 1999), 166 [from a conversation with Christian Chabanis in 1982]. 33 Claire Elise Katz, Levinas, Judaism and the Feminine: The Silent Footsteps of Rebecca (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 51. 34 Levinas, GDT, 10, 19.

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through the Other –​and even because of the Other –​that death haunts the same region as the Other. As life contains death, in being responsible for the Other’s life, one is also responsible for their death.35 Although the feminine and death are objectified in Levinas’s ethics, they are Others for which the subject has responsibility. Of course, in representing exemplary alterity and mystery, these locations are defined by their signification of the quintessence of Otherness and consequently the feminine is denied the sentience and freedom inherent to autonomy and agency: in Levinas’s works the feminine is situated as Other despite her self. This positioning speaks to a conflict between subjects and Others –​in parallel to that in Sartre’s expression of intersubjective relations –​and specifically to the triad of figures of the feminine, death and the masculine which are the critical nexus of this chapter. The difficulties that Levinas encounters in maintaining a separation between subject and Other whilst holding the latter in esteem and locating the feminine and death in that position inspire my line of investigation here. It is with the entrance of the third party, which potentially represents the rest of humanity (and animals), into proximity with the face-​ to-​face relation that Levinas introduces the idea that a subject can in a discrete moment be an Other for another subject.36 The entry of the third party into the ethical dyad of the subject–​Other encounter introduces a potential parity or reciprocity between them, which I have already alluded to. Through the presence of this third entity, the possibility for an Other to be a subject to another Other is disclosed by Levinas. The theory of the third party, developed within Totality and Infinity, becomes pivotal to Levinas’s key late work, Autrement qu’être, ou au-​delà de l’essence (Otherwise than Being, 1974).37 In the latter study, Levinas writes that ‘the other, my neighbor, is also a third party with respect to another, who is also a neighbor’. He continues that the responsibility for the Other ‘becomes a 3 5 Levinas, ‘The Philosopher and Death’, 167–​8. 36 Ibid.  213. 37 Derrida critiques aspects of Totality and Infinity in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, to which Levinas responds in Otherwise than Being. For discussion of this intertextual dialogue, see the ‘Editors’ Introduction’, in Bernasconi and Critchley, eds, Re-​Reading Levinas xi–​xviii (xiii).

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problem when the third party enters’ and the third party is ‘other than the neighbor, but also another neighbor, and also a neighbor of the other’.38 Where in Beauvoir’s ethics the complex self contains the aspects of subject and Other, in Levinas’s theory of the third party, he preserves the core autonomy of subject and Other, even as the neighbour/​Other, the subject and the third party have a future potential to change partners within the central dyad. Thus, the relation of subject to Other is further complicated by the presence of the third party. The subject and Other will always be maintained as divergent or else face what Levinas describes as ‘the way of the same’: the truly Other ‘does not only resist possession, but contests it’.39 The Other attempts to deny the integral homogenising of its alterity, the violence of the Same. The entrance of the third party instead introduces the idea that there is a dormant prospect that the Other could be a subject to the third party, or the third a subject to an Other, as the binary relation at the core of Levinas’s ethics expands to encompass other individuals. In diverse ways, the feminine figure contests the definition of her self by the masculine-​as-​subject. One instance of this opposition in Levinas’s work occurs at the entrance of the third party which instigates the potential for the Other(ed) to become subject. In Resnais’s films, this is a response by female characters to their objectification by the masculine-​as-​subject. Although the core binary of subject and Other persists at the centre of Levinas’s discussion of the third party, there is a possibility, and indeed a necessity in the name of society, that the ethical dyad be disturbed by this third. Where the liability for the Other is manifestly non-​reciprocal and the subject and the Other remain distinct, there is the prospect that the subject may, at some point in the future, become an Other to the third, who would no longer be the third, but the subject.40 Yet Levinas always maintains the absolute separation between self and Other in his notion of alterity.41 Even as Levinas’s philosophy revolves around this relation between a divergent subject and Other it allows that ‘alterity does not determine the other in a formal sense, as where the alterity of B with respect to A results simply 38 39 40 41

Levinas, OTB, 128, 157. Levinas, TI, 38. Ibid. 36, 102. Critchley, Ethics, 264.

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from the identity of B, distinct from the identity of A’.42 B is B as it is not A: the Other is only Other because it is not the subject. This logic suggests the latent potential to become subject or Other: the Other could be subject if only the subject became Other –​a transformation which is manifest in the entrance of the third party. According to Slavoj Žižek, writing on the effect of the third party on the dichotomy of the face-​to-​face encounter: When face to face with the other, I am infinitely responsible to him. This is the original ethical constellation. There is always a third one, however, and from that moment new questions arise: How does my neighbor whom I face relate to this Third? Is he the Third’s friend or his foe or even his victim? Who, of the two, is my true neighbor in the first place?43

For Žižek, the appearance of the third party questions the principal alliance of subject and Other (who is my true neighbour?), which complicates the distinction of the central duo that is the key rudiment of Levinas’s philosophy. In Žižek’s reading, the identity of the Other is unclear. In my interpretation of this tripartite relation, the third party produces the possibility that any figure can be a subject, an Other or a third. As noted, these positions are not in flux –​as they are in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought as investigated at length in Chapter 3 –​as at any instant there is the Other, the subject and the third. Yet there is a tension here, as within each role is the prospect of change, the potential to become an Other to a subject or a subject to an Other at the entrance of the third. The feminine figure (the ‘other par excellence’) in particular –​even as the ethical axis of the divergence between subject and Other is maintained –​ realises this potential to access alternative attitudes.44 As there is a possibility for the subject to be Other as the third party enters the ethical dyad, there is the potential to move between attitudes of feminine and masculine: between, that is, Other and subject. In his later thinking, Levinas strives to draw the feminine and masculine together as elements of a potential identity 42 Levinas, TI, 251. 43 Slavoj Žižek ‘Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence’, in Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner and Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbor:  Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 148. 44 Levinas, EE, 86.

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of any subject whilst recognising difference(s). Attempting to clarify the perceived classification of the feminine as Other in his earlier thought, in conversation with Philippe Nemo in the mid-​1980s, Levinas argues that: ontological differences between the masculine and the feminine would appear less archaic if, instead of dividing humanity into two species (or into two genders), they would signify that the participation in the masculine and the feminine were the attribute of every human being.45

So, thus understood, the feminine is not the domain of ‘women’ only and the masculine is not a territory exclusive to ‘men’. Instead, humanity contains the feminine and the masculine as simultaneously separate, different, equal and accessible to any identity. Levinas’s words echo near-​ contemporary works challenging unequivocal, biologically determined gender identities such as by Joan W. Scott and Butler.46 Does Levinas’s comment suggest then that the feminine –​the exemplary Other –​and the masculine –​the immovable subject as Katz’s, Chanter’s or Irigaray’s critiques of Levinas contend –​are in fact elements of every gender, every sex, every individual? Female figures in the films analysed here do represent such a complex self: a distinct identity with potential access to a plurality of positions, of masculine or feminine, or of subject or Other. Echoing this assertion, for Downing, the figure of the feminine is indeed complex, not solely the unshifting Other that other feminist scholars argue appears in Levinas’s ethics. Downing conceives of the feminine in Levinas’s work as ‘a figure of radical ambiguity and plurality, rather than simply the reciprocal other of totality that [Levinas] eschews’.47 Diane Perpich also recognises that for Levinas the feminine introduces a ‘duality’, ‘plurality’ and ‘ambiguity’ into being.48 For both critics, Levinas’s 45 Levinas, EI, 68. 46 For instance, see Joan W. Scott’s ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, The American Historical Review (December 1986); and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, first published in 1989. 47 Lisa Downing, ‘Re-​viewing the Sexual Relation: Levinas and Film’, Film-​Philosophy 11/​2 (2007), ed. Cooper, 60. 48 Diane Perpich, ‘From the Caress to the Word’, in Chanter, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Levinas, 47.

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descriptions of the feminine figure resists a specific role or position and in particular that of the Other. On this issue of pluralism, Levinas argues in Totality and Infinity that it is not, however, ‘a numerical multiplicity’ (p. 121). For him, in realising the potential ‘participation in the masculine and the feminine’, for instance, an individual subject is not multiplying her identity, but moving from one position to another. This is an increase in access to attitudes, not an increase in these identities. As Levinas continues, in the same passage in Totality and Infinity (p. 121), for this pluralism to be accomplished ‘there must be produced in depth the movement from me to the other, an attitude of an I with regard to the Other’. There is, in distinction to Beauvoir’s thought, a movement from one position to another, rather than a concurrent potential presence of each in one being –​a complex, plural feminine self. These considerations of the ways in which relations between traditionally binary positions or states are complicated by the entrance of the third party leads to the last of Levinas’s concepts under discussion here, that for which his ethics is known, the face-​to-​face encounter. It is through this relation between subject and Other that the third party enters. Levinas writes that this third ‘interrupts the face-​to-​face of a welcome of the other man, interrupts the proximity or approach of the neighbor’ and the ‘relationship with the third party is an incessant correction of the asymmetry of proximity in which the face is looked at’.49 The face-​to-​face encounter is, essentially and simply, the basis for the liability of the subject for the Other, the foundation of Levinasian ethics.50 It is in this meeting between faces that the ethical obligation –​the asymmetrical relation between subject and Other –​is located, although the specific identification of the individual ‘face’ is complicated, especially in Levinas’s later thought. He contends, however, that the face is not only the façade presented to the world, not the features, the eyes and nose, but alterity itself.51 This theory 49 50 51

Levinas, OTB, 150 (my emphasis). Levinas, TI, 183. Tamra Wright, Peter Hughes and Alison Ainley, ‘The Paradox of Morality:  An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas’, in Robert Bernasconi and David Wood, eds, The Provocation of Levinas:  Rethinking the Other (London:  Routledge, 1988), 170 [interviewed in Paris, 1986]. In ‘The Ego and the Totality’ the face is the very

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of the face-​to-​face relation and notions of the objectifying gaze of the subject upon the Other are at the core of my readings of Marker’s three films at the end of this chapter. As a Levinasian term, the face symbolises both the physical visage which one sees and which externally signifies the Other as ‘not us’ and the alterity beyond that surface, the essence of the Other. This aspect of the face-​to-​face encounter, viewing the face of the Other, highlights the potential violence that a gaze commits upon an Other. Levinas writes of this gaze upon others that: it dominates those beings, exercises a power over them. A thing is given, offers itself to me. In gaining access to it I maintain myself within the same. […] for in visual or tactile sensation the identity of the I envelops the alterity of the object, which becomes precisely a content.

To look at the Other is to encompass them in the Same, to smother their alterity and deny responsibility for their mortality, as we saw above, equivalent in both instances to taking their life from them. Hence Levinas’s suspicion of the visual (and tactile) dimensions. He writes, however, that ‘the face resists possession, resists my powers’.52 The Other’s face refuses to be contained by the Same, by the visual image. Where the Sartrean gaze objectifies the subject of vision to enslave them, in Levinas’s version the face of the Other resists this imposition and maintains their alterity. The (absolutely) Other defies possession by the subject in the face-​to-​face relation because of the implicit position of the Other above the subject. There is a dynamic between the elevated Other rejecting the enveloping gaze of the subject which is key to my ensuing discussion of film in this chapter. This ascendency is problematised by the manner in which the feminine is presented in Levinas’s thought as the ‘ultimate’ Other. According to Katz and Irigaray, the feminine does not maintain a position ‘above’ the subject, but instead, as Irigaray specifies, the feminine ‘appears as the underside or reverse side of man’s aspiration toward the light, as its negative’.53

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identity of a being, a ‘chaste bit of skin with brow, nose, eyes, and mouth’, Emmanuel Levinas, ‘The Ego and the Totality’, CPP, 41. Levinas, TI, 194, 197. Irigaray, ‘Questions to Emmanuel Levinas’, 109.

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The feminine is thus used by the masculine to attain a transcendence of his self, his present, and to establish a fallacious understanding of the mystery of the future. Rather than resisting the gaze of the subject because of the position of ascendency in which the Other is placed, the feminine is situated as inferior to the masculine-​as-​subject, she cannot attain this transcendence and faces being cast from the plinth on which the general (homogenised, or male) Other is placed in Levinas’s ethics. Restricted from transcending the physical world, the feminine does not approach ‘from above’ and does not, therefore, resist envelopment by the Same or, specifically, by the gaze which defines and dominates the Other. For Levinas the face of the Other ‘destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me’. The face is for him more than an image and more than what one sees. He attempts to deny the aesthetic image presence in his work, he is suspicious of its superficiality and its possession of alterity. Yet going further than mere suspicion, Levinas writes of the image of the Other becoming ‘the idolatry that brews in all contemplation’.54 Images of the ascendant Other are graven and in Levinas’s ethical belief system are prohibited as such. In the aesthetic image, the Other is seen solely through the eyes of the perceiver.55 Of the production of this aesthetic image of the Other and the resistance of the Levinasian face to the stifling gaze, Hagi Kenaan suggests that the face ‘is not something that I can frame with my camera or whose location I can point to because it is not located in any kind of “there”’.56 This chapter’s film analyses investigate how far the female face overflows this plastic image. Kenaan continues that ‘the face is present as a kind of movement, the crossing of a border’.57 For him, the face in Levinas’s philosophy is not a presence that can be captured, but is a motion, a gesture between positions, spaces. Where Sartre’s mental image of Pierre creates an intention directed at an absent object, motion across the boundaries between subject and Other, absence and presence, for Levinas the face of 54 55 56 57

Levinas, TI, 51, 172. Crignon, ‘Figuration’, 104. Hagi Kenaan, The Ethics of Visuality: Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze, tr. Batya Stein (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 34. Ibid.

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the Other cannot be contained in a mental image and cannot be incorporated into a photographic (static or moving) image. Instead, it exceeds these partitions. In Sartre’s conception of the Other, they become extant to the subject imag(in)ing them. In Levinas’s encounter with the face of the Other, the subject moves toward them, engaging with the Other’s mortality and considering the subject’s responsibility for it. Levinas himself describes the role of the image in his pivotal yet solitary essay on the artistic image as ‘an allegory of being’.58 The image is a metaphor for existence and cannot incorporate the face, which is more than the nose, eyes or ears: it is alterity itself. The gaze upon this face, which inherently contains the Other’s alterity and mortality, arouses the subject’s responsibility for them. This is the regard which has, for Cathryn Vasseleu, the double meaning of ‘not only to look but also to have regard, or give particular care’.59 Conserving his suspicion of the visual, to regard the Other –​in Levinasian terms –​is to see and undertake liability for them. The subject responds to what is vulnerable in the face of the Other or, as Butler writes of Levinas’s concept, ‘what is precarious in another life, or, rather, the precariousness of life’.60 This means that the Other, or an Othered position such as the feminine, can appeal to the masculine-​as-​subject through the presence of her mortality, which is an appeal to be regarded in both senses of the word. In this way, the Other resists homogenisation and sexualisation. So, in depending on the presence of her own death, the elemental accountability for the Other’s mortality, the feminine figure in Levinas’s ethics yokes herself to this alternative, deathly Other. Fittingly, the feminine and death are traditionally paired, for Elizabeth Bronfen, because of ‘their mutual status as image’.61 The feminine figure is further positioned with death. This chapter

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Levinas, ‘Reality and its Shadow’, 6. Cathryn Vasseleu, Textures of Light:  Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-​Ponty (London: Routledge, 1998), 88. 60 Judith Butler, ‘Precarious Life’, in Precarious Life:  The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006), 134. 1 Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body:  Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic 6 (Manchester: MUP, 1992), 182.

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questions how far female figures make calculated associations with death as a means to combat their othering by male characters. In each of the films of Resnais and Marker analysed here there is a conflict between masculine and feminine over this image of the feminine that also involves depictions of death. The resistance of the feminine to homogenisation, or possession by the masculine, occurs through a relation with death, the other focal mystery in Levinas’s work. In rendering the feminine and death as each essentially Other, as Irigaray posits, Levinas casts the feminine down, instead of revering her as he does the neutral (neutered or, more often, masculine) Other. I have shown above, however, that there are routes by which this entrapment is rectified (for example, through the necessary intrusion of the third party into the ethical hierarchy and the movement through positions within this tripartite structure). First, we will see how this issue of transcendence occurs in Varda’s Le Bonheur and Vagabond, in which, within the director’s scathing attacks on patriarchal systems, the female figures of the films relate to their own deaths in order to combat their domination by the masculine-​as-​subject.

Transcending Otherness: The Feminine and Deathly Others in Varda’s Le Bonheur and Vagabond Ostensibly, the female characters in Varda’s two films are positioned as feminine Others, seemingly without recourse to subjectivity, reflecting the position of the feminine in Levinas’s early philosophy. However, Varda’s characters resist this restrictive dominance and speak, through relations with death, to a potential movement beyond dialectic divisions such as those between the masculine and the feminine, the subject and Other. Varda has explained that the earlier of her two films, Le Bonheur, was not received well by some feminist spectators because of a perceived implication that the principal female characters in the film, Émilie and Thérèse, were mere objects, manipulated, controlled and ultimately exchanged by the male lead, François. The director explains that what really upset a lot of women and even certain feminists was the idea that:

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chapter 2 the woman/​wife can so easily be replaced by another woman/​wife if she performs the same functions as her predecessor: cook the meals, take care of the kids, water the plants, kiss the husband, and let herself be fucked, etc.62

Contemporaneous commentators considered that it was Varda who imposed a life of drudgery upon Thérèse. And the director does not deny this allegation, instead acknowledging that it was a deliberate manoeuvre, that she ‘over-​utilized’ the myths of patriarchy to denounce them.63 Varda purposefully exaggerated those fallacies that insist on the Sisyphean domestic travail to which many women are subject and through which individuals can so easily be substituted. However, some recent critics have also condemned the film for its conventional representations of subservient roles for women, maintaining a patriarchal notion of the feminine. Jill Forbes, for example, concludes that it is an ‘unforgiveable film’ because of its uncritical portrait of a man who embarks on an affair despite his blissful marriage and domestic life.64 Conversely though, I have written elsewhere of the film’s ‘ironic clichés’.65 And Varda describes how the Women’s Movement did not recognise this use of cliché in the film: At the time the [women’s] Movement was very young, it couldn’t understand that we have to study clichés. Le Bonheur is now better understood. For me it went through what are the clichés of happiness. The thing about clichés is that they come not from something we hate, but from something we love. It’s the perversion of a

62 Mireille Amiel, ‘Agnès Varda Talks about the Cinema’, tr. T. Jefferson Kline, in Agnès Varda:  Interviews, ed. T. Jefferson Kline ( Jackson:  University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 75 [1975]. See also, Varda, Varda par Agnès, 71. Varda’s comment mirrors Sheila Rowbotham’s discussion of the designation of housework as ‘women’s work’: ‘Get up, breakfast, wash up, make the beds, dress the children […] talk to husband, go to bed, make love’. Sheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), 71. 63 Agnès Varda, ‘In Interview with Barbara Martineau’, Women & Film 1/​5–​6 (1974), 39. 64 Jill Forbes, The Cinema in France: After the New Wave (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 87. 65 Kierran Horner, ‘Le Bonheur’, in Tim Palmer and Charlie Michael, eds, Directory of World Cinema: France (Bristol: Intellect, 2013), 193.

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deep need –​social perversion, commercial perversion –​and the need is peace, the need is love, is summer, is heat.66

The over-​utilisation of male fantasies of female subjugation creates an oneiric yet sardonic tone in the film. This is, then, Varda’s version of François’s fantasy. Le Bonheur is a critique of the masculine delusion in which he is the epicentre of all, amplified to a level of parody. In this fancy, Thérèse represents the feminine-​as-​Other, a conventional construct of the masculine-​as-​subject and a symbol of maternity embodying gender difference: she is the mother of François’s children. Thérèse is a means by which François attempts to transcend his present: through her, his paternity and fecundity are realised and, although the couple also have a daughter, his son enables his access to a future beyond his present, an addition to his own natural life. This is aligned with the patriarchal adherence to primogeniture and with what Levinas refers to as a ‘resurrection in the son in whom the rupture of death is embodied’.67 Additionally, in Levinasian ethics –​echoing phallocentric tradition –​ the feminine-​as-​Other is not permitted ingress through progeny to this transcendent arc in the way that the male-​as-​subject is. It is the masculine subject who transcends his present moment through the birth of a boy. As Derrida signals, in Levinasian ethics the masculine-​as-​subject transcends time through a feminine-​as-​Other, because of the male descendants she bears.68 The role of ‘mother’ as presented in both Le Bonheur and key passages of Levinas’s writing –​a role dictated by the masculine-​as-​subject for the feminine-​as-​Other –​denies the potential to transcend the present, although Varda’s film critiques this position. As Irigaray, Katz and Chanter assert, these identities imposed on the feminine commit the violence of totalising the feminine as an object defined by their alterity, their difference from the masculine-​as-​subject. This violence is analogous to that of the intersubjective conflict in Sartre’s early philosophy, forcing another subject into the role of Other. Where Sartre promotes this struggle in order to repress the Other, to occlude their access to a position of subjectivity, 6 Angela Martin, ‘Projecting Clichés’, Spare Rib 75 (October 1978), 36. 6 67 Levinas, TI,  56–​7. 68 Derrida, ‘At This Very Moment’, 179.

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Levinas intends to avoid such repression. However, his representation of the feminine in his early work commits exactly this totalising act. The feminine is at times subsumed into the Same as a masculine construct as, for example, host, ‘mother’ or Beloved. It is this diffusion of the Other’s alterity –​their difference –​that Varda mimics in order to denigrate in the character of Thérèse in Le Bonheur. Thérèse’s difference is primarily described by François as it contrasts to his (idea of ) self and she is therefore subsumed into his definition of who she is. Further, she is, as he presents her, his possession. As his wife, the mother to his children, Thérèse is an assimilated Other, she is an annex to the subject, François: the boundaries between the two of them are obscured and, for him, inconsequential. The maternal-​feminine is, Irigaray writes, ‘assimilated before any perception of difference’.69 The Other as defined against the subject is also then absorbed into this self, subject or Same, which in Le Bonheur and in Levinas’s early writing is a preserve of the masculine figure. For Derrida, in Levinas’s thought the masculine dominates the feminine through the recognition of and an emphasis on sexual difference. He argues that Levinas: senses the risk factor involved in the erasure of sexual difference. He therefore maintains sexual difference: the human in general remains a sexual being. But he can only do so, it would seem, by placing (differentiated) sexuality beneath humanity […]. That is, he simultaneously places, and this is what is important, masculinity in command and at the beginning […].70

Where Levinas promotes the humanity of a being before their (sexual) difference, he also demotes the alterity of the feminine. The masculine is in the ascendant as subject against which the difference of the feminine is defined as Other. If alterity is corroded and therefore the autonomy of the Other from the subject is questioned, then the subject’s ability to transcend through the Other is also challenged. As explored above, for Levinas only the relation with the truly Other ‘introduces a dimension 69 Irigaray, ESD, 98. 70 Jacques Derrida, ‘Interview:  Choreographies:  Jacques Derrida and Christie V. McDonald’, Diacritics 12/​2 (summer 1982), 73.

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of transcendence’.71 In Le Bonheur, François destroys the radical alterity of the feminine Other represented by Thérèse whom he has defined and then subsumed as mother/​wife. Yet François as subject is assured the transcendence of the present by the presence of his son and he then pursues the mysterious Other, a Beloved, in the character of Émilie. Key scenes in the film reveal that the possibility of a simple substitution of women, the unchecked exchange of wife for lover, is the fantasy of François. Varda deconstructs the traditional delineated gender roles and the patriarchal dominance over the feminine that are, for Sharon Smith, habitually reiterated in the cinema: ‘Even when a woman is the central character she is generally shown as confused, or helpless and in danger, or passive, or as a purely sexual being’.72 Varda challenges these conventions by employing a range of devices, including some associated with contemporaneous nouvelle vague films, such as the appropriation and inversion of advertising images, also seen in Godard’s Une Femme Mariée (A Married Woman, 1964). For example, the final shot of the sequence in which François meets Émilie (the Beloved mistress) for the first time at La Poste segues into the next scene via a still image of a billboard advertising shaving soap: ‘Un Savon d’homme’ [A man’s soap]. The image of the advert cuts to a shot in which the frame is split down the middle by a doorjamb between two rooms: François shaves in the kitchen on the left and Thérèse dresses and feeds the children in another room on the right (see Figure 13).

71 Levinas, TI, 193. 72 Sharon Smith, ‘The Image of Women in Film:  Some Suggestions for Future Research’, in Sue Thornham, ed., Feminist Film Theory: A Reader (Edinburgh: EUP, 2003), 14–​15 [1972].

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Figure 13:  François shaves on the left of frame, as Thérèse prepares the children on the right in Le Bonheur (Agnès Varda, 1965), © Ciné-​Tamaris.

Just as the imaged objects of Hélène and Bernard discussed in the previous chapter represented each consciousness, these images portray François’s phallocentric fantasy. For him, he and Thérèse have incontestable, clearly delineated gender roles: the continuity between the advert for soap and these shots presents him as the ‘man’. As the sequence continues, Thérèse enters the kitchen and asks whether François wants to go to the cinema that evening. He says that he hopes that it is a Western and Thérèse replies in the negative. She instead describes a French film starring ‘Bardot and Moreau, for the first time’, asking which of the nouvelle vague actresses he prefers.73 François mumbles, perhaps because he is embarrassed or feels guilty about his flirtation with Émilie, ‘What?’ or ‘Who?’ and Thérèse explains ‘As a woman?’ He responds: ‘As a woman? You!’ The scene then cuts directly to a shot of François’s colleague at the carpentry shop opening a cupboard door plastered with magazine clippings of partially dressed 73

Thérèse is referring to another rive gauche director’s film, Louis Malle’s Viva Maria! (1965), which is arguably a (revisionist) Western and was released in France several months after Le Bonheur.

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women, including the two New Wave stars, Jeanne Moreau and Bardot.74 This juxtaposition reiterates the notion of man’s location and possession of women as images of his desire and undermines François’s trite reply. Further, the scene also implicates Thérèse as complicit in the sexualisation of the feminine through her question, ‘which do you prefer?’ meaning as a woman-​object, rather than as an actor. She has been subsumed into the sphere of the masculine Self-​Same of François’s phallocentric fantasy: as if the availability of either one of these actors is dependent on his desire for them, rather than their agency. Similarly, at the end of the sequence in which their niece is born, Thérèse’s commitment to François’s idea of her role is reiterated. She says to him ‘I hope we’ll be happy’ and Varda then cuts to a montage of Thérèse making the bed, kneading dough, sewing a dress. This is Thérèse’s idea of what makes François happy, fulfilling her role as wife, what Varda calls ‘performing functions’. Infamously, Claire Johnston’s critical reading is that the portrayal of female fantasy in Varda’s film ‘constitutes one of the nearest approximations to the facile day-​dreams perpetuated by advertising that probably exists in the cinema’.75 However, the over-​utilisation of patriarchal performances of ‘femininity’ or the ‘feminine’ and an emphasis on cliché in Le Bonheur imply, instead, ironic uses of advertising images, rather than Johnston’s ‘day-​dreams of advertising’. For instance, the repetitious, staccato montages of shots of domestic work in the film stress this satirical appropriation, accentuating the monotony of these chores, as if Thérèse is no more than an automaton.76 This is Varda’s critique of what Christine Delphy calls in her study of allocations of housework in French homes in a 74 The door plastered with models in glamour poses mirrors British Pop artist Peter Blake’s painting Girlie Door, from 1959. I have further investigated the role of advertising images and Le Bonheur’s correspondence with Pop Art in my article Kierran Horner, ‘The Art of Advertising Happiness:  Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur and Pop Art’, Studies in French Cinema 18/​2 (2018), 133–​55 [2017]. 75 Claire Johnston, ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter-​ Cinema’, in Thornham, ed., Feminist Film Theory, 39. 76 This repetition of domestic chores as critique is technique seen in other feminist films, for instance, in Vera Chytilová’s O necem jinem (Something Different, Czechoslovakia, 1963) and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Belgium, 1975).

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comparable period, ‘the unfair division of boring tasks’.77 Varda’s cinematic strategies establish her stance against this male fantasy into which Thérèse’s alterity is absorbed, from which she can escape only in death (see Figure 14).

Figure 14:  Thérèse’s alterity is absorbed, from which she can escape only in death, Le Bonheur (Agnès Varda, 1965), © Ciné-​Tamaris.

The employment of the advertising image as an agent to undermine such gender-​defined roles promoted in the media –​that is, Varda’s critique of the proliferation of men’s objectification of women –​persists into the initial scenes of Émilie’s and François’s affair. At the start of the sequence in which the new couple sit outside a café, he talks of Thérèse as a placid wife: ‘she’s nice and cooks well’ and in determining her thus he restates her role as ‘his’ wife. Later in the scene, Varda cuts away from shots of François looking attentively, lustfully even, at Émilie, to advertising signs in the café’s windows reading ‘La Tentation: 2f40’ [Temptation: 2 francs 40 centimes] and ‘Le Mystère: 2f20’ [Mystery]. Again, François’s desires are signified by advertising images and each even has a price attached, as if he can simply purchase temptation, mystery and the fulfilment of his 77

Christine Delphy, Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression, tr. Diana Leonard (London: Verso, 2016), 16 [1984].

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fancy as commodities. Where the advert for ‘man’s soap’ reflects François’s notion of his own masculinity and the differentiated, restrictive role of femininity he asserts for Thérèse, his temptation by the mysterious feminine Other, Émilie, is indicated parodically by the cards in the café windows. Now that François has homogenised the alterity of Thérèse into the Same, he is enticed by the eroticised difference of Émilie, or, in Levinasian terms, tempted by the mysterious Beloved. Where, for François, Émilie is a mystery, a coveted Other, she then also represents a personification of death. As we have seen, as Other, Émilie would in Levinasian terms, share the space of ultimate alterity with death.78 For Levinas, it is also through the face of the Other that death is exposed to the subject. Additionally, Varda herself speaks of Émilie’s personification of death in Le Bonheur in an interview shortly after its release. The interviewers ask the director about a ‘life side’ and a ‘death side’ to the film, which Varda confirms she intended and then adds that Émilie embodies the latter and argues that death is ‘definitely there’. Varda then recounts how the nouvelle vague director Jacques Rivette saw Marie-​France Boyer, who plays Émilie, as the personification of death: ‘with her steely blue eyes and her pallor’. ‘Once she appears’, Varda continues, ‘death makes its way, effects its substitutions right through to the end’.79 Émilie signifies the presence of death in life, rather than the more symbolical, distanced personification of Death as in Rivette’s interpretation. In addition, Émilie’s apartment is blanched, pale, void of colour until François paints it for her. Émilie, symbolising death, inhabits a space defined by white walls and penetrated by brilliant light –​the affair between her and François primarily takes place in her apartment under the glare of the afternoon sun –​reminiscent of an anteroom. Varda asserts that the colour white in Le Bonheur represents ‘love and death’.80 The white living space of Émilie, then, represents a domain of death and the fantasy of the love between her and François. Émilie projects her mortality as the agency by which the masculine must regard her: as indicated above, death cannot be subsumed into the Same. 78 Levinas, ‘TO’, 82, and Levinas, TI, 233. 79 Jean-​Andre Fieschi and Claude Ollier, ‘A Secular Grace:  Agnès Varda’, tr. T. Jefferson Kline, in Agnès Varda: Interviews, ed. Kline, 34 [1965]. 80 Ibid.

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It is this death, Émilie’s mortality, that initially resists François’s objectification of her, even as he attempts to present her as an additional detail of his happiness, as a sexualised object essentially defined by her difference from him and from Thérèse. This resistance that relies on death is employed as part of Varda’s caustic criticism of the masculine figure’s uses and abuses of the female characters in the film. Thérèse is incorporated as an annex of François, domesticated into the Same in parallel to the relentlessly Other feminine figure as defined in Levinas’s philosophy. Émilie, in her turn, is sexualised and objectified by François because of her difference from him, but also retains the possibility of becoming subject because of her affiliation with death. Yet Émilie embodies the feminine figure as ambiguous and plural, in terms similar to how Downing and Perpich explore this figure in Levinas’s philosophy.81 Then, Émilie’s face –​understood, in Levinasian terms, as both physical and metaphorical –​doubly appeals to François, to his desire and to his conscience. The presence of death not only manifests itself in this latter regard, however, but is also implied in the colour-​coded spaces of the opening and closing scenes of Le Bonheur. The first image of the film, a close-​up of a single sunflower, is intercut with a wider shot of a field of sunflowers, behind which the family of Thérèse, François and their children meander through a meadow of corn towards the camera in blurred depth-​of-​field. In the purposefully unfocused images the family meld with their surroundings, absorbed by the crop. This is a fertile metaphor for the incorporation of each individual of the family into a homogeneous, patriarchal unit and also indicative of the oneiric tone of the rest of the film. The family then emerge from the meadow but are still barely distinguished from the colours that surround them, their undefined forms reminiscent of the pointillist brushwork of Impressionist painters.82 As with this initial sequence, in the autumnal scene that concludes the film the family’s clothing matches the shades of the leaves and trees so precisely that they again blend into the flora. The 81

Downing, ‘Re-​viewing the Sexual Relation’, 60; and Perpich, ‘From the Caress to the Word’, 47. 82 Evoking such canvasses as Georges Seurat’s  Une baignade à Asnières  (Bathers at Asnières, 1884) and, inevitably, Van Gogh’s Post-​Impressionist second  Tournesols series (1888).

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contrast between this scene and the earlier one is, however, signified by the absence of Thérèse and the presence of Émilie, with her corelation with mysterious, inassimilable death. This deathly presence is also represented in the change of colours through the seasons from summer to autumn. The later scenes are idyllic but are mixed with a note of melancholy as the umber, burgundy and amber shades of the decaying foliage surrounding this new iteration of the Chevalier family anticipates the quietus of the winter months. Jean-​Philippe Tessé describes the contrast between the sunflowers scene and this sequence where François, his children and new partner return to the countryside: Émilie replaces the dead Thérèse, returning to the same place to spend Sunday, everything is the same and everything has changed, the yellow curtain of autumn is lowered over the primitive scene of happiness.83

This changing season from summer to autumn in Le Bonheur, which continues into the barren winter months of Vagabond, reiterates the theme of temporal progression that ends for the mortal being with the shared certitude of death. This foreboding presence is significant for my assertion that Varda is critiquing François’s substituting of one woman for another, rather than promoting it. The scenes directly preceding the end of Le Bonheur in which the new family unit dissolves into the autumnal countryside, are of Émilie dressing the children, ironing, winding clocks, fulfilling her domestic chores and of François shaving and working. These scenes echo the earlier ones of Thérèse making the bed, kneading dough, sewing a dress (performing functions), as François attempts to align Émilie as a direct replacement for Thérèse. Yet Émilie opposes this effort and Varda states that she tried ‘to show the cruelty of the myth of “Let’s try to be always and simply happy,” which implies, for a man, the myth of “if she is nice and quiet at home it’s enough”’.84 Instead of this mute compliance, Émilie signifies a complex, plural, female self who is aware of death’s haunting of life and therefore Jean-​Philippe Tessé, ‘Bliss’, Cahiers du Cinéma 724 ( July–​August 2016), 26–​7 (my tr.). 84 Varda, ‘In Interview with Barbara Martineau’, 39.

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retains potential movement from Other to subject and beyond the confines of ‘the feminine’. Yet Varda’s is a Beauvoirian critique of the patriarchal fusion of death and the feminine, as Émilie only contests the possession of her radical alterity by the Same through the ‘total alterity’ of death. As Beloved, she resists the transcendental role played by the feminine in Levinas’s ethics, man’s transcendence to the ethical, but, as Katz writes, ‘is cast downward’.85 In such a phallocentric society where men can simply swap one lover for another, Émilie affiliates her self with the underworld. Only then can she contest being destroyed in the Same, simplified to fit into a role invented by patriarchy. This resistance, Varda ensures, is also found in the central female figure of Mona in her later film Vagabond, who preserves this complexity, a plurality of self that inherently echoes Levinas’s later thoughts on attitudes of the masculine and the feminine. Also like Le Bonheur, Vagabond presents, Forbes writes, a ‘highly pessimistic vision of women in society and in the cinema’.86 This is again Varda’s contemplative critique of the roles allocated to women within a patro-​centric society and the extremes to which they are forced to attend in order to resist them. Like Émilie before her, Mona, the film’s essence, represents the presence of death in life and withstands marginalisation and objectification by both male and female characters. But at the cost of her demise. Mona begins the film dead in a trench beneath a mound with two Cyprus trees and is subsequently resurrected via flashbacks to wander through stark, wintry landscapes before being laid to rest once again at the film’s end: what Varda refers to as her returning to the grave prepared for her.87 It is in the memories of the witnesses to her last days, the individuals left behind after Mona’s passing, that she is reincarnated. This device is problematic, as Varda shows, as these witnesses use the opportunity of Mona’s death to promote themselves and to define Mona as an outcast, 8 5 86 87

Katz, ‘Reinhabiting the House of Ruth’, 146. Forbes, The Cinema in France, 94. Varda, Varda par Agnès, 162 (my tr.). In a review on the occasion of the film’s rerelease (to mark Varda’s 90th birthday), Peter Bradshaw calls Vagabond ‘the chronicle of a death foretold’, ‘Vagabond’, The Guardian (27 June 2018) accessed 27 June 2018.

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as Other. In falsely describing their encounters with Mona in voice-​over, as the images reveal the actuality of events, they delineate her Otherness against themselves as subjects. Note, for instance, the garage owner who in the visual sequence sleeps with Mona as payment for pitching her tent on his property but in his narration claims she is a man-​chaser, that she flirted with him. These witnesses, even Madame Landier whose oral account fits most closely with the shots of her interactions with Mona, place themselves as subjects in Mona’s history, attempting to control these images of Mona by othering her. Further, as François did with Émilie, some of the male characters of Vagabond attempt to sexualise Mona through their deeds and words and so to define her as an image of their desire. This equates, I suggest, to the Beloved feminine figure of Levinas’s rendering, an Other determined by her sexual difference and, therefore, not afforded the ascendency of the Other, or access to transcendence. Instead, the masculine-​as-​ subject sends down the beloved woman to the depths so that, as Irigaray writes, he can ‘rebound into the transcendent’. Irigaray continues that, in her plummet, the female figure loses her voice and is ‘reduced to speaking in the spaces between the consonants of the male lover’s discourse’.88 The feminine is degraded as a tool of masculine transcendence of the present moment and her voice is silenced. Mona, however, refuses to be defined by the male characters she encounters in the last weeks of her life and she denies their objectification of her. Although her words and actions are imposed on her posthumously, as Alison Smith observes, Mona ‘avoids all reduction to other people’s interpretations in the film’.89 Varda’s heroine resists this objectification by these witnesses in part through the director’s filming techniques. In one sequence of Vagabond, Varda presents a male character’s attempt to possess Mona via an eroticisation of her, manifesting itself through a patriarchal definition of a sexualised femininity as commodity, echoing the scenes of the advertising signs of ‘temptation’ and ‘mystery’ and the magazine clippings pinned to the carpenter’s door in Le Bonheur. In the scene in Vagabond, one of Paolo’s ‘gang’ is browsing a rotating postcard 88 89

Irigaray, ESD, 208. Smith, Agnès Varda, 134.

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rack on which every image is of a naked woman posing in medium shot, frozen for a predominantly hetero-​masculine, desirous gaze. The dynamic between these active and passive roles defines the former as subject and the latter as object/​Other.90 The perceiver is the subject othering the perceived. In Vagabond, the youth shows Paolo a postcard he has taken and claims ‘for two francs you can have her’, but Paolo mocks him in front of the rest of their gang: ‘for once we find a real naked girl and he chickens out’. He then adds with menace, ‘a girl all alone is easy’. This scene suggests that the gang members assume they can possess the living, naked ‘girl’ just as they could the image of a naked woman. These male characters rehearse exactly the violence of the gaze that Levinas counsels against, the aesthetic image that describes and therefore ‘captures’ and defines the Other as the subject finds them, in this case as sexually violable.91 There is an ominous tone that resonates through this scene with Paolo’s ‘gang’ created by the idea of enforced possession, the purloined postcard and the allusion to the vulnerability of the solitary, naked ‘girl’, who in flashback is revealed to be Mona. In the sequence, femininity is reduced to an image created by and as imagined for a phallogocentric eye: for these men, the very meaning of Mona and the women in the postcards is their erotic appeal. This specular, masculine gaze is intrinsic to Irigaray’s theory of the eye-​penis, which she notes is a penetrative, phallic violation: a man’s eye can be ‘understood as substitute for the penis’.92 Varda’s camera in Vagabond briefly conveys this sexualising eye ‘speculating’ the object of its gaze, revealing how feminine forms in the postcards and on the beach are commodified, which simultaneously and enigmatically dilutes their alterity and obstructs their potential movement towards sovereign subjectivity. This eroticising gaze exemplifies the paradox that recurs throughout Levinas’s work, in which female alterity is objectified as Otherness par excellence –​‘the feminine’ –​and simultaneously submitted to the violence of the Same through sexualisation and domestication. Through the techniques by which Varda composes Mona’s image, however, her character resists the objectification of being-​looked-​at, 90 91 92

Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-​Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 288. Levinas, TI, 258. Irigaray, SW, 145.

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undermining the notion of her sexuality as merchandise and the assimilation of the feminine image in the masculine Self-​Same. The scene of Paolo’s ‘gang’ cuts to the flashback sequence in which he and the postcard-​thief are sat on a motorcycle overlooking the beach where Mona has just left the sea after bathing naked and has begun dressing: this is the depiction of Paolo’s memory of finding ‘a real naked girl’ on the beach. Yet, as with the other witnesses’ flashbacks and Bernard’s narration over the Algerian footage in Muriel, there is a discord between images and voice-​over. The boys discuss approaching ‘the girl’, but finally decline and drive off –​‘chicken out’ –​as Mona finishes getting dressed. This decision to withdraw is an articulation of Varda’s opposition to the masculine gaze that attempts to eroticise and appropriate Mona. This challenge is also manifest in the long-​range camera shot used to film the nude Mona which partially shields her from a carnal gaze (see Figure 15).

Figure 15:  Varda’s challenge to the carnal gaze in Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985), © Ciné-​Tamaris.

If the scene had been captured in closer proximity, in the medium shot of the lascivious postcards for instance, it could allow for the exploitation of this scene of passive, female undress, creating an image for a possessive, non-​reciprocated desire. Varda, however, refuses to produce this image of

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the sexualised, naked and vulnerable feminine as an object for the specular, hetero-​masculine gaze. Instead, this sequence is indicative of images from Varda’s films that, E. Ann Kaplan writes, ‘show strong, beautiful women while eliminating the male gaze within the narrative and the film frame’.93 The long-​range filming of Mona removes a masculine gaze from the film frame –​and therefore the spectator’s potential sexualising gaze –​and the exit from the scene of Paolo and his ally eliminates their look from the narrative. Yet Varda also shows several other male characters who insist on attempting to commodify Mona’s sex(uality), to possess her figuratively, reducing her alterity to their notion of the feminine as sexual object. For instance, the garage owner and the truck driver who offers her a lift expect repayment in sex for negligible favours. Notwithstanding her peripheral position to society –​unaccepted, rejected, unclean –​the hapless male characters struggle to accept Mona in a role other than as an object for their own sexual gratification, the mythic ‘whore’. This obdurate persistence of the objectifying gaze, despite Varda’s filming techniques and Mona’s characterisation, creates a similarly parodic critique of phallocentric society to that in Le Bonheur. Ironically, Mona’s exploitation through the masculine gaze is approved exactly because of her non-​conformity to gender roles. She is not, as the scene with Paolo’s gang and the postcards conveys, ‘for sale’, as temptation and mystery were in François’s fantasy. Yet, for the masculine characters who approach her, she is there to be possessed nonetheless: violable. She resists, but by opposing propels herself further from companionship, positioning her self more profoundly as Other, as more of a mystery and as more vulnerable, which hastens her end. Vagabond documents the plight of Mona as a figure pushed to the peripheries of and by a society that discards her non-​conformity as it undertakes to define and therefore possess her: the Same encompassing alterity. Varda’s deliberate construction of a mise en scène that refuses to sexualise Mona as an image of femininity created by or for the hetero-​masculine gaze, releases her heroine from the homogenised version of his desire, even as the unreconstructed male contingent of the film attempts to eroticise 93

E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (New York: Methuen, 1985), 104.

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her regardless. As well as through Varda’s particular, sensitive composition of shots of Mona, it is also through her protagonist’s journey to and from death, her signification as living-​dead, that Mona resists the attempts by the masculine characters to subsume her into the Self-​Same. Each witness denies their complicity in her death –​the alternative mysterious Other of Levinasian ethics –​as they refuse the moral imposition of the Other’s mortality which is stimulated by their face. Yet Mona is returning to her own grave –​the looping narrative, starting and ending with her passing ensures this –​and death is also a tangible presence throughout the film. In the scenes between her two deaths, Mona carries with her, in the form of the sleeping-​bag that she wraps about her shoulders, a death shroud (see Figure 16).

Figure 16:  Mona’s death shroud(s) in Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985), © Ciné-​Tamaris.

Varda has highlighted in interview the association between this quilt and the body bag with a zipper into which Mona’s corpse is placed at the beginning of the film.94 It is as if Mona’s mortality is emphasised through the presence of this bag that also, paradoxically, keeps her alive in the frozen 94 Françoise Wera, ‘Interview with Agnès Varda’, tr. by Kline, in Agnès Varda: Interviews, ed. Kline, 125 [1985].

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landscapes: death and life coexist. As with the protagonist of La Jetée, death is a constant presence in the knowledge of her passing, the repetition of her death: it is not only in the future for her, but in her past. Furthermore, like Émilie, Mona is a female figure who alludes to the perpetual presence of death in life. Where Varda reveals the characters of Vagabond endeavouring to deny their collusion, however incremental, in Mona’s death by exposure and the facticity of their own deaths, Mona’s appeal to the spectator to take responsibility for her death is not diminished. As for the sequence on the beach, Varda’s decisions on how to film Mona affect the characters in the film and its spectators, repelling a speculative, violating gaze. It is the spectator that can now undertake accountability for Mona’s vulnerability, her mortality and the deaths of others subjected to the same ostracism and objectification. This relation between spectators, Mona and her death is alluded to in the fourteen tracking shots that intersperse the film. Susan Hayward reads the motion of these shots from right to left and the ways in which they begin moving without Mona in frame or pass beyond her as she halts or takes a different direction, as a metaphor for death.95 Indeed, the last of these shots cuts directly to the scene in which Mona tumbles into the ditch in which she perishes. These dolly shots are unrelated to the witness ‘statements’, those descriptions that Varda’s voice-​over to the film explains helped her document Mona’s last winter before her death. Additionally, Varda writes of the movement of these dolly shots as the ‘long walk of Mona toward her death’.96 The tracking shots are inherently linked to Mona and locate in her the past death she carries as she wanders alone in the desolate landscapes towards her final resting place, again: death in life. These tracking shots offer what Lesley Stern calls a ‘reciprocity: one which figures an exchange between the camera movement (the dolly) and the vagabond’.97 Extending Stern’s point, these exchanges also speak directly to the spectator. As each 95 Susan Hayward, ‘Beyond the Gaze and into Femme-​filmécriture:  Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi’, in Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau, eds, French Film: Texts and Contexts, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2000), 273. 96 Varda, Varda par Agnès, 174 (my tr.). 97 Lesley Stern, Dead and Alive: The Body as Cinematic Thing (Montreal: Caboose, 2012), 39.

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lacks an introduction or contextualisation by a witness, these shots are unsullied by the narratives of the witnesses to Mona’s life, instead, each of these fourteen moving shots directly communicate the responsibility for Mona’s death to the audience. Where the scenes representing the disjunction of the falsified memories of the witnesses present consciousness in bad faith and the tracking shots offer an unmediated communion between Mona and the spectator, one particular scene does not fit with either of these groupings, yet highlights the accountability of the spectator for Mona’s death and the deaths of other vulnerable subjects. The scene in which Mona is preyed upon by an anonymous, ragged and lupine man as she camps in her red tent pitched in a copse, reinforces this notion that her vulnerability appeals directly to the spectator. Varda states that there is a lot of Little Red Riding Hood in Vagabond.98 Therefore, in this and other scenes, Mona can be seen to personify a modernised version of the eponymous fairy-​tale character. This is further indicated by the sleeping bag she drapes over her shoulders, the cloak of Red Riding Hood or Death. This folk tale, in its relaying of the story of the predation of a young woman, ends in its most popular versions with the titular character eaten alive by the male wolf or rescued by the male hunter: either consumed by male (sexual) hunger, or saved through masculine puissance.99 Yet Varda’s version of the story attempts to expose the phallocentrism of societal norms, the violence of male desire and its ultimate objectification of the feminine. Indeed, in Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, Susan Brownmiller analyses the Little Red Riding Hood tale as a ‘parable of rape’.100 In the scene in Vagabond in which the lascivious male attacks Mona in the glade, though, Varda’s camera cuts away from what one assumes to be an act of

Jean Decock, ‘Interview with Varda on The Vagabond’, in Agnès Varda: Interviews, ed. Kline, 148 [1988]. 99 See Charles Perrault’s 1697 version of the tale for the former and the 1812 rewriting by the Grimm brothers for the latter. Exceptions to these patriarchal endings to the tale include Angela Carter, ‘In the Company of Wolves’, The Bloody Chamber (London: Vintage, 1995), 110–​18 [1979]. 100 Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (Harmondsworth:  Penguin, 1986), 310 [1975]. 98

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sexual assault.101 The director again refuses to depict the violence of violation, either explicitly or as it manifests itself through the camera’s gaze. Alison Smith considers this scene as a projection of the witness, Madame Landier’s fears, her guilt at abandoning Mona.102 Yet, unlike other flashbacks in the film, no talking head witness is introduced to the narrative before relaying the event as a scene –​however disparate –​from their memory. The scene in the copse is not enclosed by a framing witness voice-​over and there is in fact a conspicuous witness to this scene of sexual predation, one who must take responsibility for its events: the spectator. As this sequence is without the consolatory mediation of a character who discusses their interactions with Mona and onto whom the accountability for her death is projected –​because of their rejection or assault of Mona –​the sequence therefore communicates this vagabond’s vulnerability to such animalistic assault and the certainty of her death to the spectator. In Vagabond, Le Bonheur and in Levinasian ethics, the alterity of death, its mystery, resists totalisation in the Same. In the films, this death denies the feminine as a means of masculine transcendence, as the female figures of Émilie and Mona project their vulnerability, their mortality through their faces, demonstrating the moral imposition conveyed by the Other. The recognition of this mortality of the Other is the realisation of a regard that accepts accountability for a death that also resists the Self-​Same. In both films, Varda critiques her male characters and indicates how the responsibility for the suppression of women –​through impositions of the very same gender roles that Levinas defines ‘the feminine’ by –​and vulnerable individuals ostracised by society, is also that of the spectator in 1965, 1985 and 2022. Through her depiction of complex female characters in these films, Varda indicates the potential for the objectified to become subjects. In their associations with the presence of death as an Other, or as deathly figures themselves, these equivocal feminine selves resist objectification. But Thérèse and Mona are destroyed by this mortuary coupling, indicating 101

102

For instance, in a short, posthumous reminiscence on Varda in 2019, the composer of Vagabond, Joanna Bruzdowicz, refers to the sequence as the ‘rape scene’ (for which she composed a specific piece), see the accompanying booklet to the BFI release of Varda par Agnès, 23. Smith, Agnès Varda, 130.

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Varda’s pessimistic view of the unyielding violence of patriarchy. In each of Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad, it is secondary masculine characters who personify death, and the Levinasian third party. Through their entrance into the traditional subject–​Other dyad, the central female figures of the films begin to facilitate a resistance to their definition as objects and images of desire for the primary male characters.

Unrequited Love: The Third Party and the Symbol of Death in Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad While scholars maintain that the narratives of Hiroshima mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad are love stories, I argue that the interaction between the female and male characters in each film is one of à mort as well as amour.103 The introduction of signifiers of death and third parties knowingly contests the romantic couplings at each film’s core. Through the invitation to third parties, the German soldier of Hiroshima and M in Marienbad –​who are also, as I show, representations of death –​the central female character in each film resists the subservient role of lover or Beloved she is directed to play by the other male characters, Lui and X, in their ‘love’ affairs. These third parties alter the patriarchally structured, hierarchical encounter between male and female: the historically gendered division of subject and Other. This intercession of death and its clash with traditional notions of love is also represented, as Colin Davis writes, in Levinas’s philosophy where ‘love is as strong as death, undefeated but also incapable of triumph’.104 There is a deadlock in which neither prevails (until one does) and, as I show through my analyses of Resnais’s films, this perennial opposition between love and death empowers resistance to 103 For instance, see Monaco, Alain Resnais, 35; and Armes, Cinema of Alain Resnais, 95. 104 Colin Davis, ‘Levinas, Nosferatu, and the Love as Strong as Death’, Film-​Philosophy 11/​2 (2007), ed. Cooper, 45.

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the totalising of alterity by the Self-​Same. In both films the female figures reject the male characters’ versions of ‘love’ by inviting a third participant into this binary dynamic, a third who also represents death. As with Mona and Émilie, the mortality of Elle’s German lover and M requires that the subject –​a position recurrently assumed by the conventionally masculine characters of Lui and X in Resnais’s films –​cannot subsume them in the Same: they repudiate the narratives that Lui and X impose. Additionally, the presence of these deathly figures as third parties to the ethical axis of subject and Other speaks to the potential process of a subject becoming Other to the third: ‘the other, my neighbor, is also a third party with respect to another, who is also a neighbor’.105 These third parties who also represent death doubly thwart Lui’s and X’s objectification of the female characters in the films as adjuncts to their love, their desire. In Hiroshima, Elle refuses to accept this form of love and her position within the romantic couplet as directed by her Japanese lover, Lui, which is redolent of François’s versions of happiness and the phallocentric role of the mistress he attempts to impose on Émilie in Le Bonheur. This guise of love in which the feminine remains subordinate to the masculine is one that Levinas reiterates in his philosophy when he describes the love of a feminine Beloved who is ‘tender’, ‘insignificant’, ‘vulnerable’ and ‘frail’.106 The female character is weakened, is expected to enter into a relationship determined by a masculine subject and to consequently perpetuate the archaic, chivalric myth that women need men for protection. It is the presence of death in life that, if not empowering the female character, at least queries the accepted form of love in which the feminine is assumed to act in submissive roles. The conflict between love and death, also apparent in Levinas’s philosophy, is established at the outset of Hiroshima. The opening scenes of the film in which Elle and Lui lie naked together as the camera roves over their entwined limbs, Nadine Boljkovac argues, present the ‘depths and “ashes” of love and death at the limits and cracks of self and identity’.107 For 105 106 107

Levinas, OTB, 128. Levinas, TI, 257. Nadine Boljkovac,  Untimely Affects:  Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema (Edinburgh: EUP, 2015), 63–​4.

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Boljkovac, forms of love and death haunt these preliminary images and this interlacing speaks to the limits of the self. This antagonism between death and love continues throughout the film as a fundamental conflict through which Elle defines her self as polysemous, as complex. In Hiroshima, the death represented by the German lover is invited –​via Elle’s memories –​ into a conflict with love, which in this film is a euphemism for desire. Elle struggles with playing the part of a coveted, compliant lover, one that reflects the Levinasian role of the feminine Beloved. It is a position which simultaneously objectifies and demotes her whilst diminishing her alterity and complexity based on her gender. Her invitation, via her memories, to her past love, the dead German soldier, are the principal means by which this amorous imposition is combatted as she refuses to acquiesce to love. The initial instance of Elle reminiscing about her first love occurs as she stands over the bed she has recently shared with Lui, observing his hand as he sleeps. Through an editing match, this image mirrors her memory, a flashback, of the hand of her dead German lover. Linda Williams reads this sequence as equating love and horror, creating a ‘connotative level of meaning that speaks of the general nature of human contact –​of both its pain and its ecstasy’.108 For Williams, the present ecstasy of sexual pleasure merges with the pain of past loss. Additionally, this first recollection forms a barrier to a moment of affection or tenderness toward Elle’s new lover. She recalls this memory to introduce the alterity of death as accomplice, remembering how love always dies. By doing so, Elle resists the restrictive role she assumes she is required to fulfil in what she feels is Lui’s version of love. Her memory of the death of her former lover is present within her, a contact with a death in life. Indeed, Cathy Caruth asserts that Elle’s body becomes, in the film, a ‘faithful monument to death’.109 Elle remains, like Varda’s Noirmoutier widow quoted in the introduction, coupled with a dead man. Although he remains a memory, the German soldier also pairs with Elle, a couple such as that at the ethical centre of Levinas’s thought. 108 Linda Williams, ‘Hiroshima and Marienbad: Metaphor and Metonymy’, Screen 17/​1 (spring 1976), 35. 109 Cathy Caruth, ‘Literature and the Enactment of Memory:  Duras, Resnais and Hiroshima mon amour’, in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 31.

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Lui, then, if only briefly in these early images, becomes the third party to this core twosome. He also alternatively habituates positions of subject and Other: his identity is complicated or even Othered in the film by his embodiment of the devastation wrought on Hiroshima by the atom bomb. This opening up of the ethical dyad occurs through the equivocality stimulated by the introduction of the third party, which reflects the principal difficulty of Levinas’s thought of maintaining the division of subject and Other. This is the potential, or ambiguity as Žižek analyses it, in Levinasian thought in which the subject becomes an Other to this third, the subject a third to this Other. Yet, for Levinas, this possibility never reaches fruition as the fundamental axis of subject and Other is maintained and the third –​whoever fills that position –​is exactly that. So, when Elle forms a relation with her dead lover in her recollection, she becomes subject and the soldier Other (as Elle is responsible for his death), and Lui the third, yet each retains the potential to occupy other attitudes. In recalling these memories, Elle considerably cedes herself to death, personified by the dead soldier, as Émilie and Mona do in Le Bonheur and Vagabond. Unlike Varda’s characters, though, it is an Other’s death that Elle accepts liability for and, in Levinasian terms, she answers the appeal of the face of the Other. This dialogue between Elle and the soldier is manifest in one scene near the end of Hiroshima in which she converses with her dead lover on the surface of a mirror, seemingly projecting his memory from within her self. After the extended sequence in and around the Tea Room –​in which she again recalls Nevers and her first love –​Elle leaves Lui and returns to her hotel room alone, although she cannot enter, instead hesitating in the doorway. She then begins to leave the hotel, pauses on a stairwell and once more ascends to her room, where she lingers outside before entering. The conflict within her, which soon becomes externally apparent, is signified here in her vacillation. Finally entering the room, she quickly moves to the en-​suite bathroom. In the next image, the camera films from a position behind her right shoulder in medium shot so that the back of her head and shoulder and the reflection of her face in the mirror above the sink are in frame. She twice tries to meet her own gaze in the mirror but averts her eyes each time. As she washes her face in the sink, the camera closes in on her from the side of the ceramic bowl and she

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turns to stare into the camera lens and starts to speak in the third person about her relationship with her Teutonic lover: ‘Her first love in Nevers was German’. She then continues, as if in his voice, ‘we shall go to Bavaria, my love, and we will wed’. Then she lifts her head entirely to gaze into the mirror and the camera zooms in on her reflection as she continues to refer to herself in the third person (see Figures 17.1 and 17.2).

Figures 17.1 and 17.2:  Elle averts her gaze … then meets her reflection in Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959), © Argos Films, Como-​Films, Daïeï and Pathé Overseas.

Finally, she begins a conversation directly with the German soldier with her words now floating extra-​diegetically over the images: ‘You were not quite dead, I told our story’. Elle admits that she has betrayed him with Lui (even though she is married), the inconnu (the stranger or the unknown), and asks him to look at her, as she herself stares into the mirror. In addressing her own reflection as if it were her former lover, the soldier again enters the critical, ethical dyad on which Levinas’s first philosophy is assembled. The mirror reflection gives an external image that is dissymmetrical, dissimilar, because it no longer represents Elle, but her lover. To suggest that this reflected image signifies the Other may have been for Levinas, as I demonstrated in the introduction to this chapter, a violence equivalent to that enacted by the aesthetic image. Despite this, the dead lover is the Other for whose death Elle accepts liability: she tells their story, retains his memory, takes responsibility for his death, which is in the instant a living-​death (‘You were not quite dead, I told our story’). She has not let the Other die alone and has preserved the knowledge of this death

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without, as Levinas warns against, ever fully possessing it and making it her own as it is capable still of externalising itself.110 The framing of this sequence at first depicts Elle and her reflection in the mirror as she speaks about herself in the third person, perhaps also indicating her potential to be a third party. The next segment includes the image of Elle as she speaks in her dead lover’s voice to herself. The last section of the scene involves only the reflection of Elle as, in voice-​over, she speaks to her lover and, tellingly, exiles Lui from the central duo in referring to him as a stranger, an unknown. Elle invites death and a third party, each signified in this scene by the German soldier, into the relation between her self and Lui and, as she addresses the soldier directly, the Japanese lover is again positioned as third party. It is as if this scene is exploring the potential movements between attitudes of subject, Other and third party which are motivated by the entrance of the third into the face-​to-​face encounter. In the first part of the sequence Elle is the third party, cited in the third person. In the second section, she speaks as her lover did to her and she is Other. In the third part she addresses and defines him, telling their story, and she is subject. The distinct composition of each segment distinguishes between these three positions. Elle and Lui are not co-​present and the scene implies the prospect of the implicit motion from one position to another. Elle is alone and, although reflected in the mirror, there is no second party as such, let alone a third party beyond the internalised potential for these positions to be available to her. Nevertheless, this sequence evokes this possibility, a prospect that is then projected into the closing scenes of the film. After episodes in which Elle returns to Lui, wanders by herself through Hiroshima and then has a further encounter with him, the final sequence occurs back in her hotel bedroom, where she, alone again, leans against the main door. There is a knock and Lui enters, saying it was impossible for him not to come. The dynamic of the two lovers is restored, but the notion of potential complications to the ethical dyad that the entrance of the third party initiates haunts their reunion. After his memorial manifestation in the en-​suite mirror, the deathly German lover is a phantom presence in the relation between Elle and Lui in her hotel room. Love 110

Levinas, GDT, 10.

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and death are now symbiotic. This is a love effected by a death that is in perennial conflict with it. Marienbad, as I now argue, further complicates and resists the notion of love through this conflict with death. This film further reveals ways in which the hierarchical relation of male-​as-​subject and female-​as-​object within a patriarchal structure is undermined by this deathly presence and by the entrance of the third party. T. Jefferson Kline argues that Marienbad is the story of a persuasion ‘by one partner attempting to control and even author the other partner’s fantasies’.111 Indeed, I agree, but add that, as X strives to manipulate and dominate A’s romantic ideals, she in turn invites the third party to enter into this conflict. As the third party, M, who again also embodies a haunting death, counters X’s domination of A as subject over an/​Other, by introducing the notion of a latent migration between identities. This questioning of the ascendency of the subject over an Other –​a violence which I have argued exists in Levinas’s earlier philosophical texts through his definition of the feminine figure –​is performed by the presence of death and the entrance of the third, each personified in the character of M. Earlier readings of the film posit that it is X that represents a figure of Death who has returned to claim A, or that A is dead and the film depicts X’s memories of her.112 Yet, and although he does not explore this argument beyond his initial suggestion, Peter Cowie realigns these axes in his analysis of the film, presenting X as Orpheus, A as Eurydice and M as Death.113 In this chapter, through a modest repositioning of Cowie’s equation, M is a symbol of death haunting life and A communicates with him, inviting M into the space of the couple. This third party, M, is gaunt and pale and when he is first filmed, the camera frames people in pairs and trios around him; he is alone but in waiting, a deathly figure observing life and love unfold beyond T. Jefferson Kline, ‘Last Year at Marienbad: High Modern and Postmodern’, in Ted Perry, ed., Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2006), 210. 112 For instance, Gaston Bounoure, Alain Resnais. Cinéma d’aujourd’hui, 5 (Paris:  Éditions Seghers, 1974), 75; John Ward, Alain Resnais:  or the Theme of Time (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1968), 39; and Allan Casebier, Film Appreciation (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 146–​8. 1 13 Peter Cowie, Antonioni, Bergman, Resnais (London: Tantivy Press, 1963), 145. 111

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him. In Marienbad, death, which haunted Elle’s memories in Hiroshima, occupies a human form and stalks these opulent couples. Furthermore, the game of Nim that M plays with other guests also implies his position as indomitable death. The inevitability of his winning the contest –​he prevails whether his opponent chooses to start or take their turn second –​alludes to the certainty of death for all mortal beings: M says to X as they play, ‘I always win’.114 As Rivette spoke of Émilie as a deathly figure in Le Bonheur, M’s signification as death through the game of Nim is similarly recognised by another film director. Marker refers to the link in Marienbad between the strategy game and death in his film Level Five (analysed in Chapter 3 with further allusions to the Orphic myth). Over a collage of multiple images of Delphine Seyrig as A in Marienbad and a game of Nim on a computer screen, the protagonist of Level Five, Laura, says: ‘I tried the Marienbad game’. As the words ‘I won, but we may go on’ appear across the computer monitor, Laura responds, ‘Death could say that’. This contest that M plays and wins in Marienbad speaks, for Marker and for me, to this third character’s embodiment of death. But, as Laura is wary of death, A too, as I will show, returns from a site of death, marked by her mortality, but complex, free, deviating from the Orphic myth, in which Eurydice is condemned to wander Hades. Expanding on my conclusions about the sequence in Hiroshima in which Elle communicates with a figure of death through her mirror reflection, this analysis of Marienbad begins with a focus on scenes in which relations between characters occur in reflections on the surfaces of the many mirrors that surround them, as if their images echo through the halls of the ostentatious mansion as they pass. Referring to such trompe l’œil effects of incongruous spatial elements in the film, Robert Benayoun describes these reflections as like ‘the optical illusions of Escher’.115 Certainly, the mirrors are a focal element in the film, but their only illusionary aspect is their accommodation, initially at least, of the death that haunts life like a 114 This position and his inexorable victory at a game of strategy also aligns him with Death playing chess against Antonius Block in Ingmar Bergman’s earlier Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal, 1957). 115 Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais: Arpenteur de l’imaginaire (Paris: Éditions Stock, 1980), 92 (my tr.).

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shadow, a reflection caught out of the corner of the eye. One early scene of Marienbad in which X attempts to gaze upon A, to possess her image only for her to resist his ocular advances, illustrates this assertion. Parts of this conflict between love and death are projected onto the surface of a grand mirror in one of the abundant drawing rooms. The sequence begins with X standing to the left of frame watching a quarrelling man and woman who are reflected walking through the shot in a mirror over X’s left shoulder. ‘You make my role unbearable’ the man says and, as the exchange continues, ‘You confine me in a whispering silence worse than death’ (see Figure 18). The camera pans right to follow the pair, leaving X behind. Their quarrel again refers to death: ‘These days worse than death that we live through … Like coffins buried side by side in a frozen garden’. This bickering between the couple with its frequent references to death is continuously filmed in reflection in the mirror until the camera pans left to where X had stood watching them, but he is now absent. ‘Day after day and almost hand in hand’, the man continues, as the couple again walk into frame.

Figure 18:  Death i/​on the mirror in Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), © Terra Films, Société nouvelle des films Cormoran, Argos Films, Cinetel, Pre-​Ci-​Tel, Silver Films, Cineriz, Como Films.

The scene continues as the camera tracks these lovers moving forward through a doorway, where it momentarily lingers on A, who stands alone to the left of the screen. The camera then begins dollying backwards to follow another couple, two men talking –​‘1928 or 1929, a big freeze’: ‘a handsome woman’ –​and passing back through the same doorway as the

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first couple. A is obscured by one of the men talking about the big freeze as he moves with the camera, which continues to track backwards down the corridor. The two anonymous men exit the frame and the camera halts its reverse motion to pan left over a guest looking at a painting representing the garden of the château. In this shot, X is now stood staring into another mirror, his reflection visible at the far left of the frame. The camera follows him with a pan right as he passes the original couple repeating their conversation with slight differences: ‘These days worse than death that we live through … Like coffins buried side by side in a frozen garden … Like these days that we live through side by side, day after day and almost hand in hand. Our mouths never touch.’ X then walks toward the point at which A had stood to the left of the door, but she is no longer there. The phrases that the first duo use reinforce the notion of the proximity of death to the couple (them and other pairs): ‘coffins buried side by side’; ‘silence worse than death’; and ‘days worse than death’. This conversation first transpires on the surface of the mirror and, as in Hiroshima, death is a presence in this reflective glass. This imaged death serves in this scene to counteract X in his self-​appointed role as the masculine-​as-​subject, to conflict with his attempt to position A as a sexualised object through his gaze. X intends to impose on A his corrupted version of love and, as the film’s screenwriter, nouvelle roman author Alain Robbe-​Grillet writes, he inflicts this story ‘by force’.116 X’s gaze is little more than a projection of his desire, an objectifying gaze intended to control, or in Levinasian terms to possess, the feminine figure as Other. In conflict with this forced histoire though, X’s love is unrequited, resisted by the intended feminine figure through a mirror reflection which contains death. The references to death by the first couple conflict with X’s objectifying gaze and push him from the frame whilst A escapes. Death denies his position as subject, possessor of the gaze. In the scene described above, the camera initially substitutes for X’s gaze in his attempt to objectify the feminine. The moment in which the camera hesitates and hovers over A briefly and then draws away from her indicates the modification to this influence and A’s gradual control of 116

Alain Robbe-​Grillet, Last Year at Marienbad, tr. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press Inc., 1962), 12.

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her own image, of her resistance to M’s objectifying love, his erotic gaze, as Varda’s filming of Mona also denied this penetrative gaze. Frequently filmed in reflections in mirrors, these sites of death counteract this sexualising gaze by implying the possibility of movement between subjective and objective identities. Writing on the reflective surfaces in Marienbad, Jean-​Louis Leutrat argues that the mirror is a site where transformations between Other and self occur, a place of metamorphosis.117 As with the reflected images at the end of Hiroshima, the mirrors in Marienbad also allude to the potential for movement between subject–​Other positions and other latent transformations. This occurs because the mirror returns the gaze of the masculine-​ as-​subject and in this reflected look roams a death which challenges his dominant version of love. This returned gaze questions notions of female subjectivity and mirror reflections in conventional narrative cinema. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams insist that in these films ‘the mirror which is delegated to [women] as the special locus of female subjectivity reflects back to her as she is in the process of theorizing her own, untenable situation under patriarchy’. The mirror traditionally reflects the difference assigned to the feminine by a patriarchal society to ‘keep her in her place’.118 Instead of the mirror performing this repression, this objectification, in Marienbad it is a site that is supervised by and that empowers the complex, female self. In other scenes from Marienbad, A anticipates the entrance of a third party and a deathly presence in life. In these sequences the third party provides an opening out of the Levinasian, ethical dyad and the potential motion between attitudes of subject, Other and third party as death combats the masculine-​as-​subject’s impositions of love. In the encounters between A and X (and other couples), the logic of a masculine order of the Same (in Levinasian terms, a phallocentric notion of love, the role of Beloved) that X intends to impose on A is Jean-​Louis Leutrat, L’Année dernière à Marienbad, tr. Paul Hammond (London: BFI, 2000), 47. 118 Mary Ann Doane, Patricia  Mellencamp  and Linda Williams, ‘Feminist Film Criticism: An Introduction’, in Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams, eds, Re-​vision:  Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (Los Angeles:  The American Film Institute, 1984), 14. 117

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questioned. Where in my readings above these encounters have occurred on and through reflections in mirrors, in several scenes in Resnais’s film it is the entrance of M that disrupts the hierarchy imposed by a phallocentric matrix in which the image, role or narrative of the female character is determined by the male figure, X. The sequence in which X interprets for A one of the many paintings of the château gardens represents the contest between male and female characters for possession of and control over an image and the struggle between love and death. As the camera films the pair from behind, X refers to a statue of lovers in the canvas and condescendingly explains to A that ‘the man wants to stop the woman. He has seen some danger probably. He motions her to stop’. X attempts to define the meaning of the image and, through the simulacrum of the masculine figure protecting the feminine character in the painting, to reiterate this allegorical gender role that he intends to impose on A. He wishes to portray A as ‘tender’, ‘vulnerable’ and ‘frail’, to be protected, as Levinas portrays the feminine, the Beloved, in Totality and Infinity.119 Instead of looking at the painting, however, A gazes away. She ignores X’s interpretation of the image, in which he advances the idea of masculine power over feminine passivity and anticipates the presence of death. In a cut to another shot, the camera is in the position of the painting, facing X and A as they stand on either side of the frame. M walks towards them from behind, stopping between the pair, and says, ‘I think I can give you some more accurate information. The statue is of Charles the Third and his wife’. Here, A invites the presence of death to conflict with X’s version of a love relationship in which the feminine is vulnerable and in need of protection, yet traditional gendered relations remain intact (Charles the Third’s wife is defined solely through this conjugal role). A also calls upon the third party, which initiates the potential for movement between positions of subject and Other. This prospective motion questions the hierarchy that X relies upon, in which he is subject and therefore dominant. Instead, he, or at least his version of events, is forced to retreat. In this scene, A still depends upon another, ostensibly male figure, although one who undermines the authority of X over her and embodies the presence of death. In later scenes, however, A 119

Levinas, TI, 257.

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begins to wrest control of her self –​and especially her aesthetic representation –​from both X and M, countering X’s attempt at hegemony with her own agency. As the film progresses, any limited mastery X may have had over A and her image wanes. One late scene in which A and X are sat in chairs a few feet apart facing the camera –​her on the right of frame, him on the left –​ contains reflections in mirrors and the entrance of the third party, but it is A herself who finally resists the masculine-​as-​subject. Again, X begins to relay his story of another meeting between himself and A, before M enters the frame behind them, stands between the couple momentarily (reiterating the composition of the scenes in which he talks about the painting of Charles the Third) and then walks away (see Figure 19).

Figure 19:  A resists the masculine-​as-​subject in Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), © Terra Films, Société nouvelle des films Cormoran, Argos Films, Cinetel, Pre-​ Ci-​Tel, Silver Films, Cineriz, Como Films.

This scene cuts to one in A’s bedroom and the camera pans towards a large mirror over the mantlepiece, in which she is reflected sat at a dressing table. There is another mirror, tripartite, above the vanity table, which creates a repetition of three similar, but differing portraits of A dressed in black, a triptych of reflections that are all reproduced in the larger mirror: a mise en abîme of images. These reflections represent a complex self or, in Levinasian terms, the potential to be, at a future moment, Other, subject or third, a prospective plural or polysemous I. Then, in voice-​over, X claims that A is scared of her male companion (M) and, sat at her dressing table,

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she turns her head and opens her mouth in a silent scream. This image cuts to one of five men, including M, standing in a line holding pistols at their side. This image is brief and an edit returns to the scene of X and A talking and she now replies that she does not know X, that his account is untrue. But X insists on his version of their story, explaining that there was a mirror above the fireplace in her room. Again, A repudiates this description of the furnishings as she insists that there was a painting over the mantelpiece and an edit returns the story to her bedroom, where the décor has transformed according to her account and a canvas hangs over the fire.120 Once more A controls her self and her image, she places the painting at the centre of her version, contradicting X’s story. It is also telling that M leaves this scene, as it is only necessary for his presence as a possible entrance of the third. Equally, the onset of change in the scene begins in the mirror image, the reflected triptych of A in the dressing-​table glass, indicating her potential to move out of the restrictive roles X creates for her: her complexity. Death leaves both the cinematic and mirror frames in this scene and A, assured of her potential to move between attitudes, can relinquish her reliance on the presence of M as an embodiment of death and a third party. A’s potential plurality is in antithesis to the simplistic, restrictive and yet paradoxical role of the feminine that X attempts to impose on her, one reflected in the Beloved in Levinas’s philosophy. This enigmatic figure is revered yet denied the prospect to occupy any position but that of the Other par excellence to the masculine-​as-​subject, the very apex of alterity: where death is also located. Instead, A realises the potential, as an autonomous self, to move between positions of subject, Other or third and to access attitudes of (normalised) masculinity or femininity, in the context of the possessor and object of the image for instance. A’s burgeoning jurisdiction over her own image, and therefore her self, is indicated in a late scene inside the château. X shows her a photograph of herself sat on a bench in the garden which then cuts to a shot in the same location that reiterates the exact mise en scène of the still picture. As this 120 Alain Robbe-​Grillet’s own film L’Homme qui ment (The Man Who Lies, 1968), reiterates this theme of probing and questioning the truths of a man who uses lies in an attempt to seduce women in their domestic space into which he has insinuated himself.

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sequence continues, however, A ensures that the inference of ownership contained in the act of X’s possession of the photograph is not repeated in the moving-​image replication in the garden. There, A throws her head back in exaggerated amusement, in opposition to her passive, static pose in the photograph. A reclaims her image and the story it depicts, to which X responds angrily, raising his voice and insisting ‘you were not laughing’. His desire to gain ascendency over A, to define the feminine, to capture her placid image as part of his fantasy is frustrated. Indeed, Wilson argues that the film represents Resnais’s ‘unfixing of patriarchal fantasy’.121 The denial of enforced acquisition of the feminine image by the masculine figure is reminiscent of Varda’s critique of the ownership of the sexualised magazine images in Le Bonheur and the bawdy postcard in Vagabond. Where earlier scenes of Marienbad speak to the character A’s gradual authority over her own image, in one later scene it is fully realised. In her bedroom, A finds tens of copies of the same photograph of herself sat on the bench in the garden and a cut to another room reveals M and X playing Nim. Resnais cuts back to A organising the photographs of herself in the same triangular formation as the matches are placed for the strategy game. She has control over her image, wrestled back from X, and now also over the game of Nim, which in turn is acquired from M, the figure of death. The film becomes, finally Elle’s narrative, which she has made her own, along with her mortality. Marienbad plots A’s progressive conflict with X for her own image, for agency within her own story but also with M for her death. These power struggles over possession of the image, the masculine-​as-​subject’s imag(in)ed version of the feminine-​as-​Other, reflect Levinas’s suspicion of the visual dimension’s potential to present the Other in the Same. In these last two scenes discussed, A resists this conquering of her image by the masculine (and by the camera) and contests the homogenisation into the Same that this entails. She also returns from the site of absolute alterity 121 Emma Wilson, ‘Sexuality (and Resnais):  A Response to Keith Reader’, in Will Higbee and Sarah Leahy, eds, Studies in French Cinema: UK Perspectives 1985–​2010 (Bristol:  Intellect, 2011), 208. Similarly, Philip Strick argues that Resnais is the ‘constant and hopeful champion of “lost women” with […] considerable powers of survival and recuperation’: Philip Strick, ‘Waiting for the End’, Sight and Sound 4/​ 9 (September 1994), 15.

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(read in Levinas as sexual difference and mortal mystery) which is also a space of death, marked by her own mortality. She now governs her mirror/​ reflected image, the painterly and photographic and, in taking charge of the game of Nim, she also no longer cedes her self to death. Levinas’s conception of the feminine vacillates from an Other homogenised by the Same such as in the role of Beloved –​her alterity or difference subsumed by the privileged masculine subject –​and the feminine as ultimate Other with no recourse to subjectivity. She is Other/​ed solely because of her difference from the masculine-​as-​subject, the position for the feminine that Beauvoir locates in Levinas’s ‘Time and the Other’. Additionally, Irigaray shows that the feminine is denied true alterity in Levinas’s thought and how Derrida attempted to refine what he refers to as Levinas’s ‘classical androcentrism’.122 I have shown in analysis of Resnais’s films variations on these themes of homogenisation and androcentrism: Lui’s and X’s intentions towards Elle and A are tantamount to a desire to possess them through what each of them terms ‘love’, as images that they define. However, the opposition by the female characters inverts these attempts to homogenise them into prescriptive feminine roles, either in denying their alterity or their potential to become subjects. This unrequited or unreciprocated love (which would necessarily reject Levinas’s role of the Beloved) empowers the female characters, as the masculine suitor is instead defined by his desire for her, rather than her being determined by him as an image of this yearning. In both Hiroshima and Marienbad, the female characters resist assimilation by the male figures by promoting the entrance of a third party and recognising the presence of and responsibility for an/​Other’s death. The resultant tripartite relations speak to the potential of each figure to occupy positions of subject, third or Other.123 These conclusions about the domination of the image of the feminine-​ as-​Other by a masculine-​as-​subject inform the coming readings of three of Marker’s documentaries, which consider the potential violence of the camera itself in Description of a Struggle, A Grin Without a Cat and Sans 122 Respectively, Irigaray, ‘Questions to Emmanuel Levinas’, 112; and Derrida, AEL, 44. 123 Levinas, OTB, 157.

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Soleil. In Marker’s films, however, the apparatus engages with the gaze of the female subjects of the films, speaking to a potential to move beyond the role of the feminine as a consequence of the responsibility for mortality inherent in the Levinasian face-​to-​face encounter.

Death and the Possibility of an égalité du regard in Marker’s Description of a Struggle, A Grin Without a Cat and Sans Soleil The face-​to-​face encounter between genders is modified further when it occurs not only through reflections in mirrors as in Marienbad, but on the lens of a camera as a site of death, as I now explore in relation to Marker’s films. For Levinas, as we have seen, the responsibility for the Other –​inspired by their mortality –​is necessarily non-​reciprocal. Otherwise, as he notes, transcendence is absorbed into the Same, destroying the alterity of the Other.124 Yet, as in my analyses of Resnais’s films, the proximity of the third party heralds the possibility of a certain kind of reciprocity, the potential of movement between positions of subject, Other or third party. Of this prospect, Michael B. Smith writes that there is a ‘way in which something like a reversal or reciprocal relation between me and the other becomes possible […] and that is when the “I” is recognized as another by the third’.125 With the presence of the third party, the face-​to-​face relation can become one of reciprocity and, as I now argue, form a particular parity. I investigate in analysis of both Description of a Struggle (hereafter simply Description) and Sans Soleil, the ways in which the camera performs a similar role to the third party in proximity to the central dyad of the filmed subject and Marker as director. Instead of the triangulation of three characters in Hiroshima and Marienbad –​yet developing the theory of ownership of the image in the latter film  –​the liaison in Marker’s 124 125

Levinas, TI,  35–​6. Michael B. Smith, Toward the Outside: Concepts and Themes in Emmanuel Levinas (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005), 40.

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actualités is between the trinity of director/​spectator, camera and filmed subjects. Establishing a theory of the camera as akin to a third party in this tripartite formation counteracts the traditional notion of the gazer as subject, with the gazed upon as an object. Traditionally, in the history of image creation such a hierarchy is gendered, as Griselda Pollock writes, the gaze is of a ‘presumed masculine spectator at the objectified female form’.126 This imposition of the role of a perceived as Other is also rehearsed, as Bergoffen asserts, throughout the philosophical tradition: ‘the distinction between the perceiver and the perceived is established as the difference between a subject and an object’.127 Equally present in the philosophical and aesthetic traditions, suitably to Levinas’s concerns, is the capacity of the subject to define and own the Other. Appropriately, Michael Renov describes this process of objectifying the perceived as it occurs through the camera’s gaze with the Levinasian phrase the ‘imperialism of the same’.128 The camera’s gaze, as an extension of the perceiving subject, homogenises the alterity of the filmed Other, the imperialism or violence of delimiting and then possessing the Other. In the context of a gendered hierarchy, images of women are assimilated and possessed by the subject gazing. Historically, the camera also reduces the objectified feminine figure to an erotic object, which is denounced, as illustrated above, in the scenes from Le Bonheur, Vagabond and Marienbad. This discriminating objectification of the female figure defines and then captures her as an exotic, erotic, passive feminised image. Levinas himself writes of the alterity, or what he terms exoticism, arrested in the photographic image, concluding that the viewer of the photograph experiences the distance of even a familiar object because ‘[e]xoticism modifies the contemplation itself ’ and that even ‘the most realistic art gives this character of alterity to the objects represented’.129 The photographic image for Levinas manufactures exoticism, which alters the perception of the viewing Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1992), 134. 127 Bergoffen, ‘Getting the Beauvoir We Deserve’, 20. 1 28 Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 152. 1 29 Levinas, EE, 46. 126

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subject. Differing from the ways in which he later portrays the aesthetic image, here the photograph retains the alterity of the figures it depicts, even as it remains a fragment of the subject-​viewer’s world. The domains of the Other (the perceived) and that of the subject (the perceiver) coexist as they overlap in this plastic image. This is not to suggest that either photographs or cinematic images contain the alterity of those they capture as defined by the gaze of the subject who perceives them. Such a process would constitute the imperialism of the Same, representing exactly Levinas’s suspicion of the visual, against which the face of the Other resists the gaze, ‘overflows the plastic image’.130 Rather, the Other in the image retains their alterity which modifies the contemplation by the subject –​their perception and recognition of innate difference –​as that image enters into the world of the perceiver. This perceiver encounters the alterity of an Other in the image, a separate world from theirs, preserving the essential divergence of subject and Other. The exoticism, the Other’s difference in this image, has an impact on the perceiver’s observation of the image. I contemplate in analysis of Marker’s films how this alterity of the perceived, the successive ethical accountability of the perceiver for them and divergence between these two positions are affected as these relations occur through camera lenses. In the encounter with the Other through the lens of Marker’s camera, the Levinasian responsibility for their vulnerability and mortality is not diminished. The resultant image(s) produced from these encounters can accommodate both Other and subject. This is not a co-​presence of Other and subject in a living being. Instead, much as the mirrors function in Resnais’s Marienbad and Hiroshima as surfaces onto which death, subjectivity and Otherness are cast and projected back, the images created from the encounter through the lens also speak to the possibility of an object reflecting and refracting multiple projections, like a prism. How can the asymmetrical relation in Levinas’s work in which the feminine is a quintessential and essentially definitive Other be countered with the consideration of the camera as a site of reciprocity within the face-​to-​face encounter? This parity is achieved when the camera itself is considered as independent, not an extension of the 130

Levinas, TI, 51.

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cameraperson-​as-​subject and this can be profitably explored through engagement with several established theories of the camera’s autonomous gaze. The camera lens creates a distance between the filmed subject and the cameraman/​director, when, as in early theories of the camera as mechanical eye, it is admitted as a separate entity, when the lens is analogous to an/​Other(’s) viewpoint. In an article of 1919, Dziga Vertov asserts that the Kino-​Glaz (cine-​eye) is ‘more perfect than the human eye for examining the chaos of visual phenomena’ and that it ‘perceives and fixes its impressions in a completely different way from that of the human eye’.131 The gaze of the camera-​eye falls on the perceived object differently from that of a human eye. In his writing on the cinema, Vertov’s contemporary Jean Epstein develops a similar theory of the camera’s eye occupying ‘its own perspective’.132 The camera perceives independently, has sovereignty. Epstein also writes in a later article that ‘movements that our gaze hardly discerns in human time are hence revealed by the gaze of the lens’.133 The camera-​eye is ‘completely different’ from the human eye, as it autonomously captures the form of an object. Further, in these theories of Epstein and Vertov, as Jacques Rancière argues, the ‘machine-​eye’s automatism sidelines [sic] the imperialism of the gaze’.134 The independence of this ocular apparatus challenges the objectification inherent in a spectatorial gaze. Indeed, in the 1930s Walter Benjamin writes of the camera ‘mediating’ between the cameraman’s gaze and that of the subject of the image, creating a space of concurrency.135 The sovereign camera-​eye speaks to a multiplicity of gazes and intervenes in the look between perceived and perceivers. This space 131 Dziga Vertov, ‘The Cine-​Eyes. A Revolution’, tr. Richard Taylor, in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds, The Film Factory:  Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents: 1896–​1939 (London: Routledge, 2005), 91 [1923]. 132 Jean Epstein, ‘The Senses 1 (b)’, tr. Richard Abel, in Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism:  A History/​ Anthology:  1907–​1939, vol. 1, 1907–​1929 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 244 [1921]. 133 Jean Epstein, The Intelligence of a Machine, tr. Christophe Wall-​ Romana (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014), 28 [1946]. 134 Jacques Rancière, ‘Cinematic Vertigo:  Hitchcock to Vertov and Back’, in The Intervals of Cinema, tr. John Howe (London: Verso, 2014), 31. 135 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, tr. J. A. Underwood (London: Penguin, 2008), 17 [1936].

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then allows for the recognition of equity between differences –​ between cultures, genders and other identities –​and therefore maintains the divergence between subject and Other fundamental to Levinasian ethics. Of such a potential equitability, Francesco Casetti writes that the ‘filmic gaze is a levelling gaze that can reframe everything and everyone within a principle of equality’.136 The filmic analyses here preserve Levinasian autonomy for the core dyad whilst considering equality between the subject and Other through the spectatorial gaze. Explicitly in Marker’s works, Alter asserts, the camera ‘treats all subjects in front of its lens without differentiating between humans, statues, animals, landscapes, architecture or signs’.137 The Markerian cinematic gaze, the camera-​eye, recognises parity between all subjects it films. This egalitarian consideration of every subject of the lens could be considered to vindicate Levinas’s suspicion that the gaze subsumes alterity into the Same. Instead of perpetuating the violence of the visual that homogenises the objects perceived, the images in Marker’s films retain the alterity of the Other –​as the photograph does in Existence and Existents –​and simultaneously recognise the potential for this Other to become subject to the third. This potential is formed from the principle of equality in which the perceived and the perceiver are in a reciprocal relationship into which the camera –​alike to an independent third party –​enters, contriving an (always) impending ethical égalité for all. In part, this equality is realised through the lens of the camera, because of the presence and recognition of the responsibility for the mortality of the filmed, feminine Other. Analysis of Description reveals how this obligation is accepted at the instant of image creation between the director and a female subject and subsequently between the spectator and the female figure in coinciding worlds. Death passes between the director and the female subject through the camera’s lens as Marker accepts accountability for the death he perceives in the women’s faces that both he and the camera 136 137

Francesco Casetti, Eye of the Century: Film Experience, Modernity, tr. Erin Larkin and Jennifer Pranolo (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 10. Alter, Chris Marker, 59. For discussion of the animal gazing back in Marker’s films and Levinas’s philosophy see Kierran Horner, ‘The Equality of the Gaze:  The Animal Stares Back in Chris Marker’s Films’, Film Philosophy 20/​2–​3 (October 2016), 235–​49.

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(independently) gaze upon. This is a simple rendering of the Levinasian ‘encounter [with] death in the face of the other’.138 Death haunts the interaction between the subjects of the images of Marker’s films and the director, via what Lupton calls his ‘preoccupation with cultures that find a way to accommodate death’.139 Death and the ways in which societies interpret it, are integral to Marker’s consideration of the cultures he chooses to contemplate and a key to unlocking differences and, perhaps more importantly, an understanding of death, our ‘ultimate biological essentialism’.140 Writing of such a contemplation in Sans Soleil, Burlin Barr argues that death ‘becomes a site or a mise-​en-​scene for staging cultural contact’.141 For Barr, as well as Lupton, death is the node of contact between Marker and traditionally Othered subjects of the image. When encountering this mortality of the Other, mediated by the camera’s lens, Marker accepts his liability for these deaths. The images produced from this cultural contact are thereby branded with mortality. The spectator latterly perceives this same death and is also required to take responsibility for it. This is death as the universal similar, the event that no mortal avoids, a death that speaks to an equality of ephemerality between all subjects. This notion echoes Levinas’s theory of mortality as egalitarian, the ‘concrete and primary phenomenon’ for every being.142 Similarly, Derrida recognises that the death of the Other in Levinas’s thought also speaks to the death of the subject. In his early essay engaging with Levinas’s philosophy, ‘Violence et métaphysique’ (‘Violence and Metaphysics’, 1964), he writes that the Other ‘cannot be what it is, infinitely other, except in finitude and mortality (mine and its)’.143 Even as the Other is conserved as 138 Levinas, GDT, 105. 139 Lupton, Chris Marker,  158–​9. 140 Leen Van Brussel, ‘A Discourse-​Theoretical Approach to Death and Dying’, in Brussel and Carpentier, eds, Social Construction of Death, 13. 141 Burlin Barr, ‘“Wandering with Precision”: Contamination and the Mise-​en-​Scene of Desire in Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil’, Screen 45/​3 (autumn 2004), 181. 142 Levinas, TI, 235. 143 Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics:  An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’, in Writing and Difference, tr. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2010), 143 [‘Violence et Métaphysique:  Essai sur la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas’, 1964].

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perpetually Other, an equality with the subject as mortal being exists. In Levinas’s thought, the subject and the Other engage through their acknowledgement of death’s shadowing of life.144 The subject accepts their liability for the mortality inherent in the face of the Other and this consideration invokes rumination on their own mortality. The encounter between subjects and Others is thus influenced by the acceptance of mutual mortality. As the entrance of the third into this elementary hierarchy speaks to the possibility of the metamorphosis of the Other which in turn implies equality, death is an archetype in my theory of the égalité du regard in Marker’s films. In various sequences in his works Marker stimulates meditations on mortality and death is a presence within the process of image creation as selves engage as subjects or Others. The ways in which difference and equality can be attained and maintained via a meeting through the lens of the camera as an intermediary through which death passes are imperative to these readings. It is via this monocular eye that Marker communicates with those he films, assuming his responsibility for their deaths and his duty to recognise their difference, equality and potential subjectivity. One sequence in particular, mid-​way through Sans Soleil exemplifies the idea that the camera acts as a medium of death. The film’s narrator describes how the death of a panda is mourned by Japanese schoolchildren at a ceremony in Tokyo zoo: the partition wall that separates life from death does not seem so thick to them as it does to a Westerner. What I read most often in the eyes of people who are about to die, is surprise. What I read right now in the eyes of these Japanese children is curiosity. As if they were trying, in order to understand the death of an animal, to stare through the partition.

The curious gaze of these children, who for Marker represent a non-​ Western culture accommodating death, penetrates the partition between life and death. This scene speaks to the notion that Russell describes in both Shintoism and Zen Buddhism, the two dominant religions in Japan, wherein the boundary ‘between life and death is perceived as fluid’.145 The 1 44 For instance, Levinas, GDT, 105; and Levinas, TI, 233. 145 Russell, Narrative Mortality, 110.

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sequence with the panda’s death alludes to the transience of life in the primary spiritual doctrines of Japan where, if there is a partition between states of life and death, it is permeable. In the elegiac scene with the panda, Marker draws on this belief in death’s necessary proximity to life for his film, establishing a foundation for other scenes to come. As the words about the ‘partition wall’ are spoken, the film cuts from the images of children placing flowers on a tomb to ones of a giraffe running through an African savannah. The references between three cultures, signalled by the Japanese capital, the plains of Africa and the French (Western) director, are mediated by the death of the panda and, soon, that of the giraffe. A brief insert of a close-​up image of a man in a balaclava firing a pistol cuts back to the giraffe briskly walking through the dusty plains. Suddenly, a bullet strikes the giraffe’s neck and it falls to its knees, rises and runs, is shot again and stumbles. Life-​blood escapes from its wound and it collapses to the floor. As the giraffe’s assassin is absent from the frame, it is as if the shots issue from the camera, as if it has assimilated the image of the pistol held by the man in the balaclava and transferred the death it brings to the African plains. An edit zooms in on the graphic tableau of the wounded giraffe and, in close-​up, another gunshot strikes the felled creature’s head. The sequence returns briefly to the Japanese children and then back again to the African steppe where vultures swoop into frame to peck at the giraffe’s carcass, poking their beaks into its exposed eye-​socket: an apt metaphor for the presence of death in the gaze. These scenes with the panda and giraffe imply that there is a perpetual movement of death between perceived and perceiver. The sequence in Tokyo zoo establishes the notion of the permeation of a partition –​represented in the lens –​as a point of access to death. While the scenes on the African plains insinuate that death is projected between two points. The giraffe is explicitly aligned with death, representing both its own passing –​the liability for which is cast onto the spectator –​and the reflected death of the perceiver of the image. These two moments of death are intrinsic to Levinasian concepts of mortality. The images of Sans Soleil that refer to a partition between life and death also demonstrate the potential of Others to become subjects and vice versa, as death as a mutual event shared by us all is a site for staging contact between

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multiple, complex selves. In analysis of the final sequence of A Grin Without a Cat, I now determine how death is part of the act of image creation and how responsibility for the deaths of the animals depicted in that scene is transferred to the perceiver of the image.

Figures 20.1 and 20.2:  Reciprocal shot/​reverse-​shots engender sympathy in the spectator in A Grin Without a Cat (Chris Marker, 1977 and 1993), © ISKRA, INA, Dovidis.

This last sequence of the film portrays several wolves being ‘culled’ to control the population and, as the narrator describes, ‘for sport’. The initial frames are shot from ground level behind the wolves, which are running from the stationary camera. They disperse, scattering in fear, and a helicopter swoops into the frame, hovering above the ground. There is a cut to a shot filmed from the helicopter in which a lone wolf, bounding, tongue lolling with exertion, gazes into the camera as bullets strike the soil around it. The next shot is from the ground pointing towards the helicopter, the camera located as if filming from the wolf ’s point of view, as a man leans from an open door of the aircraft, a rifle at his shoulder (see Figures 20.1 and 20.2). There is then a cut back to the angle from the helicopter, the perspective of the huntsman. A wolf is wounded by a shot from this position and tumbles, then a second wolf is hit and writhes in pain in the dirt. A third wolf is filmed scampering, then changing direction and weaving away from a bullet. The next image is of the helicopter and the rifleman, again filmed from the ground, which cuts to the reverse angle from the aircraft as a wolf hesitates and looks up to face the camera in defiance or confusion and a shot rings out with a burst of dust behind it. The terminating image of the sequence and the film is of a last wolf being shot, flailing around in

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the dirt with its legs in the air, before the film cuts to black. This footage correlates directly to the opening scene of the film in which an American military helicopter hovers over alleged Vietcong villages and a pilot repeatedly describes the release of Napalm and the dispersion of the villagers as ‘outstanding’, as high-​octane explosions decimate the jungle below. Again, death expunges vulnerable, defenceless casualties on the ground, yet the camera is in an omnipresent, privileged position as the source of this death as there are no shots from the perspective of the victims. The use of shot/​ reverse-​shot in the later sequence of the wolves, instead, engenders sympathy in the spectator, or even empathy as they too look up at the hovering threat of death above, as do the subjects of Resnais’s Guernica, as discussed in the next chapter. The footage of the wolves locates the spectator in a position comparable to that of the sniper-​subject who perceives/​hunts the wolves, but also as the Other, the canine quarry who look up at the perceiver/​ hunter. The spectator thus experiences this scene from the perspectives of both Other and subject in a hierarchy. This engagement alludes to the potential to move between these positions and, with the presence of death in these images, the passage of the responsibility of death passes between selves. However, absolute alterity –​the divergence between subject and Other –​is maintained as the shift between positions in Marker’s film does not describe a genuine material movement, but the inherent potential to access attitudes of subject or Other, a shift in perspective. Instead, the possibility that a subject may become Other to a third party is revealed, as in the above analysis of Resnais’s films. Similarly, the faces of female figures in Marker’s Sans Soleil and Description refer to a parity that is formed beyond the hierarchical structure within the dyad of subject and Other. At this point of access to the intersubjective couplet, the camera discharges the role of third party. In my theory of the reciprocal gaze presented in Marker’s films that speaks to this same parity, the look of the director does not attempt to capture the face of the feminine-​as-​Other, her alterity. Instead, these women gaze back from a position of equality, rather than the pro-​filmic stratification between the hunter and the wolves. This is the same empowering act performed by the elderly people Varda films in L’Opéra and the description of Brigitte Bardot in Beauvoir’s eponymous essay that allude to their significance as

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complex selves, as they too are perceivers (subjects) and not only the perceived (Others). Such an allusion to the possibility that an Other can be a subject to another Other is also a signature of several of Marker’s cine-​essays. In Sans Soleil and Description for instance, the camera lens is the surface on which falls the reciprocated gaze that speaks to an intersubjective relation. This gaze is, I suggest, what is referred to in the commentary of Sans Soleil as the égalité du regard, a term Marker returns to in his later, titular article on the film.146 The reciprocated gaze –​this equality between looks –​is, Marker writes elsewhere, a ‘mirror game’ in which the loser is the one who lets the gaze of the other pass through them.147 The challenge is to maintain the gaze, to mirror the look of the other and this game encapsulates both of the definitions of regard that Vasseleu recognises in Levinas’s work. It speaks to a reciprocity between the director and the subjects of his films (whether human, statue or animal), countering the violence of perceived ownership and the inherent diminution of alterity through the (sexualised, hetero-​masculine) gaze. Yet, as the gaze of the cameraman is met, his illusion that he is the subject is undermined. This challenge extends, Cooper notes, to the spectator of the film also. In analysis of Sans Soleil and Levinasian ethics, Cooper writes that the film performs a ‘profound calling into question of the viewing self ’.148 This opposition to the objectifying gaze of the subject-​self of the film alludes to the responsibility felt for the Other, their mortality. Problematically, Lupton writes of Marker’s ‘attachment to women as a symbol of mortality’ and his ‘fascination with the otherness of both femininity and dying’.149 In terms that reverberate with Levinas’s positioning of the feminine and death as exemplary Others, Lupton recognises Marker’s obsession with the alterity of the feminine and death in his film images. Such an assertion echoes the misogyny that sees the feminine aligned with 1 46 Chris Marker, ‘Sans Soleil’, Trafic 6 (spring 1993), 85. 147 Chris Marker, Coréennes (English tr.), tr. Brian Holmes (Columbus, OH: Wexner Center, 2009), 12. 148 Sarah Cooper, ‘Time and the City: Chris Marker’, in Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson, eds, Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), 117. 149 Lupton, Chris Marker,  107–​8.

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death as critiqued by Beauvoir.150 It also reiterates the notion of the objectification of the feminine in the image, the dissipation of alterity and the contest between male and female for possession of the image of the feminine. As noted earlier, for Bronfen the feminine is positioned with death because of an orientation of each as images. However, in my analyses, Marker’s films counter this traditional construct of the feminine as image, objectified, subjugated and potentially expunged, and it is through the presence of death, rather than a direct association with it, that images in these films obstruct an eroticising gaze at female figures as Other(ed). It is the reciprocal passage of death through the camera, back and forth between subjects, that speaks to the potential movement between the Levinasian positions of subject, Other and third party that in turn form an égalité du regard. The accountability for the deaths of Others is the crux of the face-​ to-​face encounter, which is opened out with the entrance of the third. Marker does not attempt to own the images he creates, to bring them into the sphere of the Same, nor does he offer them as representative of an exotic Other. Rather, images of Sans Soleil and Description are composed with the recognition of those perceived as subjects staring back. In doing so, these subjects disregard the role of an eroticised feminine Other, as preserved in Levinas’s earlier philosophy, and instead reflect the ‘subject-​object unity’ developed in Otherwise than Being via the entrance of the third party (p. 27). This casting off of prescribed roles (the feminine/​Beloved) facilitates the potential for female figures to fulfil a complex self-​determination. This is not to say that the camera is a third party as Levinas would define it, but it instead symbolises the potential of an Other to become subject to the third that enters into his central ethical dyad. The lens, on which the gazes of a director and filmed female subjects meet, acts as the mediating space between these gazes. It represents the moment at which the gaze is met, reciprocated and repeated. The lens refracts the gazes of the director and the women he sees like a prism. Gazes meet on its surface, as the looks of characters, spectators and cameras meet on the mirrors in Hiroshima and Marienbad. This space allows for an equality of the gaze whilst maintaining the divergence between subject and Other. Catherine 150

Beauvoir, SS, 197.

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Gillet argues that in Sans Soleil it is in this equality of the look that the ‘poignancy of things is measured’, which occurs via and because of pauses, the frozen frames of the film.151 For Gillet, the poignancy of a moment is only visible if that instant is paused as the gaze of the camera is met. In the cinema, the frozen frame is, of course, a deception. As Mulvey explains, it is an illusion: ‘It is not the actual frame, as stilled for the twenty-​fourth of a second in front of the lens’.152 Instead, it is the same frame repeated: as the moment or the frame is replayed, the instant in which the director acts as subject capturing the image of the feminine and that in which the female figure looks back occur across the same image, but in separate instants. Certain shots in both Sans Soleil and Description are ‘frozen’ in this way or simply held as each party maintains the gaze of a perceiver. This is, according to Arnaud Lambert writing on Sans Soleil, the balancing of the ‘relationship between the filmer and the filmed by reciprocal assent’.153 This balance between filmmaker and film-​subject is what Marker terms the égalité du regard. In an early sequence of Sans Soleil, shot in a Japanese market amongst stalls mainly selling electronics, the products’ flickering lights draw the attention of the exclusively male shoppers and this equality between gazes is not established. When these men do meet the eye of the camera, they quickly avert their eyes, only glancing into the camera: the gaze is not met here and an intersubjective equality between perceivers is not attained. However, in a later sequence in a market in Bissau, there is a montage of characters gazing back, as the narrator asks his famed, reciprocal question, ‘can you think of anything stupider than to say to people, as they teach in film schools, not to look at the camera?’ As these last words are spoken, the camera lingers over a teenage girl who stares into the lens, whilst an older woman looks away, deflecting the camera’s gaze. Then a third figure passes through the frame, briefly obscuring the older woman’s face but, as they leave the shot, her right eye gazes directly at the camera lens. This single feminine eye is a focal point, corresponding with and equal to the 151 152 153

Catherine Gillet, ‘Visages de Marker’, in Dubois, ed., Théorème 6, 79 (my tr.). Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 66. Arnaud Lambert, Also Known as Chris Marker (Cherbourg-​en-​Cotentin: Le Point du Jour, 2013), 25 (my tr.).

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single eye of the camera and beyond that, Marker/​a spectator. Instead of the traditional film school teaching of never looking back at the camera, the gaze of the filmed subject is welcomed in these scenes (see Figure 21).

Figure 21:  The gaze of the filmed subject is welcomed, égalité du regard in Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1982), © Argos Films.

Of these sequences shot in the Bissau market, the narrator says, ‘I could stare at [the women] again with equality’. That the men in one market scene abide by the authority which maintains that you should not stare back into the camera, but that many women in other scenes of the film meet the camera’s gaze (rejecting this sanction) speaks to Marker’s undermining of the objectification of the feminine, of his questioning of ocular-​centrism, of the invasive gaze of camera, spectator and filmmaker. On exactly this issue of the intrusive gaze, Kaja Silverman argues that Marker’s film ‘does not attempt to “penetrate” these cultures, like a traditional ethnographic film’.154 Marker’s camera does not perform the specular look into an/​Other identity, rather, its presence, when acknowledged by the filmed subject through the requited gaze, speaks to the mutually created image, the reciprocal assent of two perceivers gazing at one another through the lens. The camera lens is the surface onto which each party projects their identity, culture, gender, life and death: their complex self. In the images of faces 154

Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (London: Routledge, 1996), 186.

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that are frozen in time, repeated or even held for a few seconds in Marker’s film, each party’s alterity, including the vulnerability that is their death, is offered to the other and each summons the responsibility for the Other. As Mulvey notes, death is restored to the cinematic image when it has the illusion of being stilled.155 This égalité du regard, this recognition of mutual mortality held in ‘static’ images in Marker’s films, works to deny the typically masculine, sexualising gaze, while remaining ‘ethical’ according to the Levinasian sense of this term. One scene mid-​way through Description, shot in the Carmel Street market in Tel-​Aviv, illustrates this frustration of the eroticising gaze. The image of a male soldier –​a conventional signifier of masculine strength –​ staring into the camera separates two shots of skirts hung from an awning outside a shop-​front swaying in the wind in time to a folk song on the soundtrack. The editing and music create the effect that the skirts are dancing to the ballad and the soldier is watching them do so. First Marker establishes the notion of this masculine gaze, that of the military man, at the feminine, represented in his gaze by the fluttering skirts.156 This configuration of the masculine gaze and the feminine symbolised by gendered items of clothing has analogies in Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (p. 224) when she writes that men have begged women not to give up wearing skirts and ‘everything that accentuates difference in the Other’. The skirt, along with other attire, becomes the passive and eroticised signifier of a patriarchal notion of femininity and of sexual difference. Marker establishes the masculine gaze as one that defines the Other, discovers and emphasises ‘feminine’ difference, to then juxtapose it to a sequence that destabilises this othering look. The camera of Description next films a young woman pointing beyond the frame. She stands in the shadow of a wall and an oval light frames 1 55 Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 66. 156 In an article on clothing and metaphors, Faina Kartashkova and Elena Koltsova list the skirt as one of the metaphors for ‘the feminine’: ‘Gender Nominations of People as Viewed Lexicographically’, in their Lexicography and Terminology:  A Worldwide Outlook (Newcastle:  Cambridge Scholars, 2009), 58. Additionally, the OED supplies one definition of ‘skirt’ as ‘women regarded as objects of sexual desire’ accessed 2 August 2015.

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her face, illuminating it in the dark. This luminous iris is projected from the locus of the camera, locating the woman, highlighting her face and inviting her (as the female figures of Sans Soleil were invited) to form an image with the director. This double focus also exists in the photograph of Alexandra Stewart taken by Marker circa 1964 during the shooting of Pierre Kast’s film, La Brûlure de mille soleils (1965) for which Marker wrote the screenplay. According to Carol Mavor, from this still image Stewart ‘looks through a porthole of glass: transparently walled off. Like Snow White in her glass coffin, she is near and unreachable, in two zones at once.’157 The iris/​eye/​porthole that illumines a face creates a second separate but linked ‘zone’. Mavor’s reference to Snow White, who in her coffin personifies a Schrödingerian position between life and death, is applicable also because the light projected between subjects in Description, as an extension of the camera-​eye, encircles the presence of death. Applying Mavor’s reading of this oval light to the shot of the woman in the market in Description, this subject is at once distanced, ‘walled off ’, but also invited to meet the gaze of the camera to reciprocate in the production of an image across two zones. This is indicative of the distance created by the camera lens: it locates but does not grasp her image. Instead, the subject of the camera retains their agency. However, the first woman in the market stands sideways to the camera, avoiding looking at the lens and therefore circumvents a reciprocity of gazes. As she raises her right arm, the voice-​over speaks of ‘signs expressing timeless desires to communicate’ and she then poignantly but briefly glances into the lens and away again, like the men of the electronics market in Sans Soleil. Just after this anonymous woman looks away from the camera, however, there is an edit to an image of a second woman, stood in a similar position, although deeper in shadow under an arch so the effect of the light projected onto her –​the in-​camera iris shot –​is enhanced. She faces the camera and smiles. The desire to communicate is met (see Figures 22.1 and 22.2).

157

Carol Mavor, Black and Blue:  The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans Soleil, and Hiroshima mon amour (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 59.

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Figures 22.1 and 22.2:  A glance away from the light and camera … before the desire to communicate is met, Description of a Struggle (Chris Marker, 1960), © Israel Film Archive.

After invoking the notion of the masculine gaze at the feminine, signified by the soldier’s purported ogling of the dancing skirts, the images of the two women framed by the oval light question the dominance and potency of this gaze, as the second engages in the égalité du regard. The first woman only partially meets the gaze of the camera –​glancing in two senses of the word –​and the image cannot be held long enough to contain both her gaze at the lens and Marker’s gaze upon her in which the potential for the Othered to become subject is registered. The gaze of the second woman, though, does accomplish this mutual look, this communication. Marker and the camera remain in communion with her, recognising equality between subjects, denying the speculating gaze that creates the sexualised image of the feminine-​as-​Other. The Markerian égalité du regard, much as Varda’s mise en scène in Vagabond did for Mona, deconstructs the eroticising gaze of the masculine at the feminine. Because the image in which the gaze is met is held for a few seconds, is stretched over time, it speaks to a past, present and future: it therefore contains the potential moments in which the subject is Other to a third and the Other is a subject to a third as in Levinasian ethics. The dominance of the masculine gaze, its potency in sexualising and objectifying the images of women is questioned. In the scenes in the Jozenkai Sex Museum in Hokkaido in Sans Soleil, this notion of the sexualised image is more explicit and therefore complicated, as the museal exhibitions highlight sexual difference and gender. In Marker’s film, the narrator explains over stills of phallic and vulvic statues

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that there is no censorship in the museum as ‘a sex’ can be shown if it is ‘severed from the body’. The sequence continues, showing taxidermic animals in copulating couples, as the voice-​over suggests that in these ‘glassy animals’ could be read ‘the rift in Japanese society, the rift between men and women’. The narrator then explains that in life this discord ‘seems to show itself in two ways only. In violent slaughter or a discreet melancholy’. As if to accentuate the biological difference –​what could be termed corporealterity –​alluded to in these comments, the shots of the animal pairs focus doubly on sexual organs: each image has the iris-​like circle of light at its centre, illuminating the distinct, pink genital zones, that are already defined against dark fur and shadows and focused upon by the camera. Like the photograph of Alexandra Stewart and the women in Description, the iris light transparently walls off the subject of the image and simultaneously sutures the distance between two zones, or, indeed, between (sexual) differences (see Figure 23).

Figure 23:  The iris light sutures the distance between zones in Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1982), © Argos Films.

The voice-​over hints at the violence of the rift between the masculine and the feminine constructs, but this distance or difference is mediated by Marker’s camera, which acts as the glass onto which alterity is projected, accepted and temporally refracted. This process avoids what Derrida calls Levinas’s subordination of the ‘trait of sexual difference to the alterity of

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a wholly other that is sexually unmarked’. In making sexual difference secondary, once it is subordinated, Derrida continues, ‘the wholly other who is not yet marked happens to be already marked by masculinity’.158 This subordination of female sexual difference is equivalent to a totalising of female alterity, the violence towards what Levinas terms the feminine in his key, early texts. As Irigaray notes, if the feminine is denied sexual difference, then she loses her alterity and is subsumed into the Same.159 Instead of this imperialism of the masculine Same –​the violence inherent in dividing humanity into only two divergent genders defined and hierarchised by anatomy –​the égalité du regard or the meeting of gazes on the camera lens speaks to what Levinas later refers to as the potential participation in the masculine and the feminine by every human being. These expressions are not exclusive to any sex or gender. In Marker’s film the iris light projected from the camera accepts as equal, and literally highlights, biological difference –​the corporealterity –​ between genders, instead of drawing the subject of the image into the Sameness of the gaze of the masculine eye. The lens of the camera, the eye, becomes the site of each subject’s gaze, the point at which they meet. The camera lens mediates between zones, between genders and sexes, and recognises alterity and each subjects’ responsibility for that difference and the mortality of the Other. At the same time, the notion that each individual can access masculine and feminine (and other) gender positions is evident in the images of these films and the potential to move beyond these definitions is intact. This is typical of much of Marker’s work, as his aesthetic is informed by an ambivalence that speaks to equality. Certain of his images, the moments of the reciprocated gaze, create between male and female figures an égalité within which socially gendered roles of subject and Other are challenged. Sequences from these films do not represent the ethnographic subject capturing images of the Other in order to situate the masculine-​as-​subject against them, as some of Marker’s critics may

1 58 Derrida, ‘At This Very Moment’, 180. 159 Irigaray, ‘Questions to Emmanuel Levinas’, 112.

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suggest.160 In these films, his is not the penetrative, phallic eye of Irigaray’s criticism of the masculine gaze, Othering the subject. Neither Marker’s nor a spectator’s gaze are permitted to site the female body as target.161 They cannot commit the violence on the Other which Levinas suspects is inherent to the visual in general and the artistic image specifically. Instead, through the space offered by the lens, which allows for a distinction between zones, an égalité du regard is also realised between masculine and feminine attitudes as attributes accessible to all.162 This concurrent distinction and link between zones also means the spaces between life and death are traversed. The taxidermic animals, dead but uncannily fornicating, represent –​as do so many figures discussed in this book so far –​the embodiment of death in life. This presence of death, the multiplicity of difference experienced by a complex self and the égalité du regard are all realised in one scene mid-​way through Sans Soleil. The sequence begins with a montage of multiple television screens, alluding to the notion of multiple, subjective perspectives engaging reciprocally through screens or lenses. Then, after a succession of shots of banks of TVs in department stores and studios, there is a close-​up on one screen: on it plays a rare image of Marker himself. The first camera pans left from this screen to a cameraman beside it, also filming, and the camera-​eyes meet. This image cuts to another TV screen on which a third cameraman is shown in the act of filming. This sets up a relay of cameras, of kino-​glaza: the first camera staring at Marker’s camera which is gazing at the third camera. Lupton has written of a similar, but less complex image of a ‘striking young woman’ that appears in both Marker’s La Sixième Face du Pentagone (co-​directed with François Reichenbach, 1968) and A Grin Without a Cat in which the director ‘frames another camera looking back

160 For instance, see Russell, Experimental Ethnography; and Cecilia Sayad, Performing Authorship: Self-​Inscription and Corporeality in the Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 38. 161 Although such is not true of his later photographic exhibition, Passengers (2011), comprised of non-​consensual, surreptitious images of women taken on the Paris Métro. 162 Levinas, EI, 68.

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at his desiring gaze’.163 Where Lupton finds that this camera looking back at Marker encounters his ‘desiring gaze’, in the films analysed above, Marker emphasises how looking is mediated by lenses and are reciprocal, countering the potency of the dominating, sexualising gaze. Marker ensures that any scopophilic look must negotiate the surface of the lens onto which identity, including difference and death, is projected. Adding to the ambiguity in the scene of the multiple screens in Sans Soleil, the first camera is finally met by another camera-​eye and a mise en abîme of lenses and screens ensues. These images of the meeting of lenses cut to a montage of adverts with women holding consumer products, more and more TV screens and then a close-​up of a woman pointing a rifle back at the camera. This final shot speaks to the notion that both subjects have the potential to gaze, to perceive one another. This is a counterpoint to not only the image from earlier in the film in which the man in the balaclava holds a pistol to the camera before the giraffe is shot, but also the famous image of the male, moustachioed gang-​leader shooting back at the camera in Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903). In Sans Soleil this gun is pointed back at the camera, its muzzle is like a lens and these ‘eyes’ meet. It is in the image that the reciprocal gaze and a responsibility for mortality are recognised, however. In If I Had Four Camels, one narrator reflects such an idea when he explains that the photographer ‘gazes at the gazing photo’. This is the reciprocal gaze, the gaze met in the image. As Levinas argues, a spectator’s contemplation of a photograph is modified by its innate alterity: there are two zones overlapping here, subjective and objective.164 The égalité du regard projects across spaces and times, across subjectivities and through the scope of the lens, which is a site of death, simultaneously recognising equality and accepting the accountability for the vulnerability, the death of the Other. In this way, the female subjects of the camera author their own images, have access to the weapon of death that shoots their images and turn it back towards the Othering, masculine gaze.

163 Catherine Lupton, ‘Imagine Another: Chris Marker as a Portraitist’, Film Studies 6 (summer 2005), 75. 164 Levinas, EE, 46.

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Concluding Remarks Ruben Berezdivin, writing on Levinas’s ethics, argues that it is only as dead and dying that the Other obligates, that the face-​to-​face as a dual relationship is ‘facing up to the image of the other’s cadaver’.165 Only through death is the subject truly obligated by the Other. In analyses of both fiction and documentary films by Varda, Resnais and Marker I have examined how this responsibility for the mortality of female figures in particular is experienced and the ways in which an acknowledgement of death works to counter the objectification of women in rendezvous with men. I have also explored the ways in which the imposition of roles defined by masculine characters, the sexualising gaze of the subject or the possession of the Other, that Levinas suspects is inherent to the aesthetic image, are challenged through these relations and through the notion of masculine and feminine as fluid positions accessible to all. In doing so, I have probed and illuminated the ways in which death manifests itself as a positive presence in the relations between male and female figures in these films. However, this is not to reiterate the misogynistic association of death and the female figure which has been interrogated by Beauvoir, Bronfen and Chanter, amongst others.166 Instead, through engagement with Levinas’s definitions of death and the feminine as exemplary Others with no recourse to subjectivity, I have revealed how connections in these films between female characters and death counter the objectification, manipulation and seizure of these characters and their images. I have demonstrated how the introduction of mortality into intersubjective relations can alter the enforced objectification of the feminine figure of Levinas’s thought and illuminate complex aspects of his signal theories of transcendence of the present moment, the entrance of the third party and the face-​to-​face encounter. Whether by inviting death into engagements 165 Ruben Berezdivin, ‘3 2 1 Contact: Textuality, the Other, Death’, in Bernasconi and Critchley, eds, Re-​Reading Levinas, 198. 166 Beauvoir, SS, 197–​8; Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 182; and Chanter, Time, Death, and the Feminine, 42.

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between male and female figures in Le Bonheur, Vagabond and Hiroshima, refracting death in mirrors that cast the possessive gaze back onto the male in Marienbad, or through death’s haunting of the camera lens in Marker’s films, mediating the sexualising, objectifying gaze, these films exhibit myriad methods by which egalitarian relations can be maintained between subjects, even within a Levinasian paradigm. Through the space offered by the camera, a site for death, an égalité du regard is realised between male and female as each recognises the vulnerability and mortality of the other and indicates a space beyond gendered imperialism implicit in traditional roles of masculinity and femininity. This égalité du regard is extended to the spectator who views the images created, who must undertake accountability for the deaths of the subjects of the lens and in doing so contemplate their own mortality. In the next chapter, the camera is a core figure in my considerations of the death that haunts life and that is necessarily a presence within the intersubjective encounter. Like the conflict that inherently cleaves subject from Other and demotes the latter in Sartre’s philosophy, Levinas’s ethics relies on a schism between subject and Other in a non-​reciprocal hierarchy. Yet in his philosophy, the Other is ascendant. I have shown in this chapter the ways in which this division can be maintained within a mutual relation. Similarly, the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, and especially his key theories of embodied perception and the chiasm, negotiate the pleats and folds of mutuality, the intersections within the self and between subject and Other that also contain the presence of death. This next chapter explores how this death –​as an event common to all mortals –​can signify an overlapping relation between subjects which addresses a complex self that has the potential to become subjective or objective, internal or external as each is contained within this shared flesh of the world.

Chapter 3

Merleau-​Ponty’s Embodied Perception and the Chiasmic Relation: The Overlap between Subject and Other and Life and Death

The previous chapter investigated the impact that the intrinsic responsibility for the vulnerability of the Other, their inherent mortality, had on Levinas’s conception of ‘the feminine’, as well as his theories of the face-​to-​ face encounter, transcendence and the third party. This chapter continues to examine the ethical relations with death that occur through and within intersubjective communications, moving from the rigid divergence between positions of subject and Other in Levinas’s earlier thought. In considering two pivotal concepts from the philosophy of Merleau-​Ponty –​ those of embodied perception and the chiasm –​this chapter enters the shared flesh of the world. As Butler writes, Merleau-​Ponty ‘seeks to return to a relation that binds subject and object prior to their division, prior to their formation as oppositional and distinct terms’.1 This chapter reveals how Merleau-​Ponty’s theories pivot around the overlapping of discrete perceptions, of subject and Other, of sensorial faculties and of life and death, further complicating the central concerns of this book. It examines how these signature ideas can be applied to modify accepted aspects of spectatorial and film-​apparatus theory. Revisions to hierarchical structures between perceiver and perceived occur through notions of death as a common denominator, which determines equality between subjects. This mutual demise is reflected in the shared spaces, including the cinematic image, in and through which encounters between subjects transpire. Consequently, this chapter considers how the works of the three directors reflect Merleau-​Ponty’s theories and challenge the fundamental 1

Judith Butler, ‘Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics: Alterities of the Flesh in Irigaray and Merleau-​Ponty’, in Senses of the Subject, 156.

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perceptual ascendency of the subject within relations between spectators, filmmakers, filmic apparatus and figures within cinematic images. Appropriately for a chapter focusing on notions of chiasmic multiplicity, it engages with commentary on theories of death and intersubjective relations in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought by a range of thinkers including Beauvoir, Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Le Dœuff, Irigaray, Levinas and Sartre. These accounts are engaged with as they indicate the contrasts between the four philosophers central to this book and critique the position of women in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought. Entering into dialogue with the perspectives of these commentators, my film readings will examine chiasmic relations between embodied subjects as they perceive moving images, emblems of death and one another. In doing so, we confront the key tenet of ‘apparatus’ or ‘Screen’ theories developed by such figures as Christian Metz and Jean-​Louis Baudry in the mid-​1970s: spectatorial identification with a film’s camera or characters.2 I explore how this theory is undermined in the films analysed, as they, in turn, question the hierarchies that customarily exist between subject and object, or perceiver and perceived.

An Overlap of Obverse Sides: Embodied Perception, the Chiasm and Death in Life Merleau-​ Ponty’s theory of embodied perception incorporates all of the senses, which are for him invigorated by movement.3 Within a 2

3

See Jean-​Louis Baudry, ‘Le dispositif ’, Communications, 23 (1975), 56–​72; Jean-​ Louis Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, tr. Alan Williams, Film Quarterly 28/​2 (winter 1974–​5), 39–​47; and Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema:  The Imaginary Signifier, tr. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzetti (London: Macmillan Press, 1983) [Le Signifiant imaginaire, 1977]. I employ the terms ‘a spectator’ or ‘spectators’ rather than ‘the spectator’ throughout this chapter to reflect the central idea of perceptual multiplicity in counterpoint to the homogenisation of the spectator as the authoritative singular in Metz’s and Baudry’s works. Merleau-​Ponty, ‘Film and the New Psychology’, 50.

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whole-​bodied perception there is an equality within encounters with others: the subject, Merleau-​Ponty writes, is ‘exposed to the other person, just as he is to me’.4 This intersubjective relation is for the philosopher reciprocal, as subject and Other commune in an overlap. Simply put, Merleau-​Ponty’s thesis of the chiasm describes the overlap between such dialectical pairings as Other and subject. Instead of stratified, non-​ reciprocal Levinasian relations between subjects and Others I am here concerned with what Merleau-​Ponty terms ‘the ambivalent or labile relationship with the other’ which occurs in the chiasm or flesh of the world.5 Whilst this overlapping acknowledges the autonomy of positions of subject or Other, it also recognises the sphere in which there is an intersubjective reversibility between them, a ‘pure correlation’, as I will show.6 Though entwined, each remains separate, like the strands of a rope. In Merleau-​Ponty’s thought, this overlap between positions also speaks to a chiasmic encounter between life and death. For him, as for Sartre, Beauvoir and Levinas, death haunts life:  the two overlap because ‘consciousness of life, taken radically, is consciousness of death’.7 One example of this concurrence of death with life, for Merleau-​Ponty, occurs in or through encounters between subjects and Others who are each embodied perceivers. Foundational to Merleau-​Ponty’s early philosophy is his concept that the entire body can function as a site of perception. As Kruks contends, for him ‘human existence is first and foremost embodied existence’.8 This corporeal consciousness involves the full spectrum of the human sensorium: ‘I perceive in a total way with my whole being; I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once’.9 4 5 6 7 8 9

Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, ‘Science and the Experience of Expression’, in The Prose of the World, tr. John O’Neill, ed. Claude Lefort (Evanston, IL:  Northwestern University Press, 2007), 18 [La Prose du monde, 1969]. Merleau-​Ponty, VI,  71–​2. Ibid.  147. Merleau-​Ponty, ‘Hegel’s Existentialism’, 66. Sonia Kruks, ‘Merleau-​Ponty and the Problem of Difference in Feminism’, in Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss, eds, Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-​Ponty (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2006), 30. Merleau-​Ponty, ‘Film and the New Psychology’, 50.

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In this embodied existence, the body increases the self ’s perceptual range through motion about and tactile identification of an object: ‘I observe external objects with my body, I handle them, examine them, walk around them’.10 One navigates an object to perceive it in its entirety and encounter multiple sides or aspects of the same phenomenon through the medium of the body. A complex object –​the cube is prototypical in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought –​is perceived through bodily movement around it whilst engaging the sense organs. Ocular perception is of itself incomplete and must incorporate motion as one can never see all the sides of a cube at once: ‘as I move round it, I see the front face, hitherto a square, change its shape, then disappear, while the other sides come into view and one by one become squares’.11 For Merleau-​Ponty, movement about the cube reveals its facets in time and in space. However, perception within the body, cerebral perception, is also necessary to retain an image of the entire cube. Embodied perception contains what Merleau-​Ponty calls in his essay ‘Film and the New Psychology’ an intervention of intelligence in vision.12 Describing this intervention, he writes: I cannot see a cube, that is, a solid six surfaces and twelve edges; all I ever see is a perspective figure of which the lateral surfaces are distorted and the back surface completely hidden. If I am able to speak of cubes, it is because my mind sets the appearances to rights and restores the hidden surface. I cannot see a cube as its geometrical definition presents it: I can only think it.13

Whilst some sides of the cube are present to one physically, others exist in thought only. Inherently challenging Cartesian dualism, the mind and body mutually perceive a complex object. Applying Merleau-​Ponty’s thought on perception to the cinema, Sobchack writes that we do not see films only with our eyes, ‘[w]e see and comprehend and feel films with our entire bodily being, informed by the full history and carnal knowledge of

10 11 12 13

Merleau-​Ponty, PP, 104, 94–​5. Ibid.  236. Merleau-​Ponty, ‘Film and the New Psychology’, 50. Ibid.

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our acculturated sensorium’.14 We perceive a multifaceted object, a film or cube for instance, with our entire bodies, including our minds. This multi-​sensorial perception also works as a metonym for the way Merleau-​Ponty conceives of the interaction between a subjective consciousness and a world that is external to it. The relation between these internal-​ subjective and external-​objective spaces occurs in an inter-​world, the flesh of the world. The vehicle that moves through this Merleau-​Pontian world, according to Monika Langer, ‘is the living human body –​not as physiological system but as embodied, situated subjectivity’.15 The subjective body moves through this complex world, formed of internal and external elements and is where, Merleau-​Ponty argues, subjective and objective dimensions overlap. In this chapter, this inter-​world or complex object takes the form of images from Resnais’s, Marker’s and Varda’s films that can be perceived both successively and jointly by the camera and by spectators. In Resnais’s and Varda’s earlier films studied here, the camera performs a mobile, embodied perception of this complex world that faces bi-​directionally to the internal and the external, the subjective and the objective. Writing of this perceived film-​world, Merleau-​Ponty considers that its reality is ‘finer-​grained than real-​life dramas: it takes place in a world that is more exact than the real world’.16 For him, the cinematic image depicts a more detailed spectacle than reality: an enhanced image of the world is captured by the camera. This veracious cinematic milieu is, for Merleau-​ Ponty, ‘peculiarly suited to make manifest the union of mind and body, mind and world, and the expression of one in the other’.17 The cinematic image does not present the mind and world, a subjective consciousness and that of others. Instead, they are all constituents of a single, shared whole, like in embodied perception and the chiasmic intersubjective experience. 14 Vivian Sobchack, ‘What My Fingers Knew:  The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh’, in Carnal Thoughts:  Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 63. 15 Monika Langer, ‘Sartre and Merleau-​Ponty: A Reappraisal’, in Jon Stewart, ed., The Debate between Sartre and Merleau-​Ponty (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 97. 16 Merleau-​Ponty, ‘Film and the New Psychology’, 58. 17 Ibid.

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Merleau-​Ponty writes in Phénoménologie de la perception (Phenomenology of Perception, 1945) (p. 413) of Others and subjects whose ‘perspectives merge into each other’. Individual perspectives overlap and integrate as subjects jointly perceive the world around them. The self then, like the space around it, is constituted from its awareness as a subject (subjective perception) and an acceptance of the ways in which others perceive it (objective perception). In this way, it is a complex self that acknowledges the multiple facets it contains. As constituents in this mutual sphere, these elements –​subjective-​internal and objective-​external –​define one another. As the self subjectively describes or perceives the external world, through embodied perception, it is also connoted by this world. Cooper comments on this union of the internal and external, traditionally the subjective and objective, that ‘Merleau-​Ponty opens out objectivity to subjectivity and questions the boundary between the two’.18 Not only do internal consciousness and the external world inform one another, the very dualism of the subject and the object is interrogated in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought. In this ‘opening out’ from the internal, the subject inevitably encounters the Other and Merleau-​Ponty’s philosophy focuses on the ‘rare and precious moments at which human beings come to recognise, to find, one another’.19 As these beings make contact, they overlap in their perceptions of the world. Indeed, as Martine Beugnet notes in conversation with Laura Mulvey, in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought ‘the construction of the self happens through exchange, as an intersubjective and reversible process’.20 As with Beauvoir’s thought, in contact with the Other, the subject evolves and, conversely to Levinas’s early thought, this is a reciprocal activity. This reciprocity works towards breaking down divisions between subjects and is an oscillation. There is a joint perception of the external world –​in this chapter, the cinematic image –​which reflects on the complexity of the self. In witnessing the same image, subjective perspectives meet over it, 1 8 Sarah Cooper, The Soul of Film Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 113. 19 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, ‘Man Seen from the Outside’, in WP, 68. 20 Martine Beugnet and Laura Mulvey, ‘Film, Corporeality, Transgressive Cinema: A Feminist Perspective’, in Laura  Mulvey  and Anna Blackman Rogers, eds, Feminisms:  Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 190.

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the Other and the subject share the world through an imbrication. This chiasmic overlapping is the ‘formative medium’ of relations between Others and subjects for Merleau-​Ponty.21 The theory of the chiasm particularly differentiates his thought from that of Sartre and Levinas, and moves further towards intersubjective equality than does Beauvoir, and is essential to an examination of how the films in this chapter undermine the notion of a hierarchical, objectifying gaze. Merleau-​Ponty’s chiasmic relation is, fundamentally, the space in which dialectical pairings overlap and his primary paradigm of this relation is the intersubjective liaison. The chiasm accommodates both the inherent division between and the simultaneous intertwining of Others and subjects. Vasseleu writes that this overlapping: defines a position which is both subject (a subjective reality) and object (objectifiable to others), and also simultaneously a subjectivity which is internally divergent with itself. In other words, flesh expresses the inscription of difference within the same.22

The flesh or the chiasm speaks not only to the overlapping of the subject and the Other but offers scope in which the alterity and independence of each is recognised.23 In her description of the chiasm, Vasseleu evokes similar definitions of Sameness and difference to Levinas’s use of these terms. It is as if Merleau-​Ponty’s theory of the chiasm intends to overcome Levinas’s problematic attempt to relate subject and Other whilst maintaining their autonomy, which is the principal frustration of his philosophy and addressed through film analyses in Chapter 2. Yet, for Levinas, phenomenology, including Merleau-​Ponty’s thought, defines the Other in an ‘irresistible imperialism of the same’, rather than as an equal element.24 I disagree with this assessment and my account of Merleau-​ Ponty’s understanding of intersubjective relations in this chapter pursues 21 22 23 24

Merleau-​Ponty, VI, 147. Vasseleu, Textures of Light, 26. Merleau-​Ponty, VI, 130. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity’, in CPP, 55. For a full account of Levinas’s position, see Jack Reynolds, ‘Merleau-​Ponty, Levinas and the Alterity of the Other’, Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 6/​1 (spring 2002), 63.

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the profound effects on each position of the imbrication of subjects and Others in which they relate chiasmically. In this, my understanding of the potential reciprocity and equality in the intersubjective encounter aligns with Mikel Dufrenne’s when he writes that the flesh ‘is polymorphous and polyvalent’.25 It is within the chiasm or flesh that a space is cultivated in which multiple subjects exist, engage, and yet simultaneously maintain their difference, their Otherness. Within this space of engagement between subjects, death enters. Death is, in fact, drawn into a closer proximity with life and subjective consciousness in the relation between subjects and Others in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought. For him, it is through the intersubjective encounter that an understanding of death arises, as he discusses in his essay ‘L’Existentialisme chez Hegel’ (‘Hegel’s Existentialism’, 1946) (p. 68): The only experience which brings me close to an authentic awareness of death is the experience of contact with another, since under his gaze I am only an object just as he is merely a piece of the world under my own.

Through the encounter with the Other, an authentic perception of death is realised and in this mutual relation − a meeting of gazes − each is simultaneously recognised as an element in the external world.26 Writing on Merleau-​Ponty’s thought, Suzanne Laba Cataldi has drawn conclusions on this complex motion between life and death through intersubjective encounters. Cataldi argues that a truly equal chiasmic relation between life and death –​that is, a reciprocal relation –​occurs through the touching of the hand of a dead relation in a sign of respect and parting: ‘To see or feel a body, dead, is to perceive that the interior sensitive side of flesh has entirely and irreversibly “crossed over” to its other, exterior, sensible

25 Mikel Dufrenne, ‘Eye and Mind’, in Galen A. Johnson, ed., The Merleau-​Ponty Aesthetics Reader:  Philosophy and Painting, tr. Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 261. 26 This concept echoes with Levinas’s idea of ultimate responsibility for the death of the Other as inspired by the face-​to-​face encounter and I presently detail this intersubjective, overlapping gaze in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought, presenting the nuanced differences from Levinas’s notion.

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side’.27 The deathliness of a corpse diffuses into the space of the living in the form of an acknowledgement of mortality. It is through the figure of the Other that death passes into life. Although death is for Merleau-​ Ponty a phantom that haunts life –​a shadow cast over the self ’s consciousness –​the actual end of life, as alluded to above, is experienced by others.28 Consequently, death passes into life through the contact between figures and it also progresses between these figures as one witnesses the (potential) event of death and takes responsibility for it. These conceptions of death in Merleau-​Ponty’s philosophy sit between Sartre’s premise in which the self pursues the death of the Other –​the violence inherent in the Sartrean intersubjective encounter –​and Levinas’s assertion that the appeal of the Other to the subject is inspired by their mortality.29 This reasoning is demonstrated through consideration specifically of the gaze between the subject and Others that engages with death in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought. On gazing upon one another, each party considers the other’s death, Merleau-​Ponty argues: the authentic awareness of death occurs under the gaze of the Other. This gaze is, however, reciprocal, if only as an Other and a subject see one another’s death equally. Concluding his remarks on the objectifying gaze in ‘Hegel’s Existentialism’ (p. 68), Merleau-​Ponty writes that: each consciousness seeks the death of the other which it feels dispossesses it of its constitutive nothingness. But I do not feel threatened by the presence of another unless I remain aware of my subjectivity at the very moment his gaze is reducing me to an object.

At first sight, for Merleau-​Ponty the intersubjective gaze –​in common with the equivalent Sartrean theory of the conflicting gaze between subject and Other –​seeks the death of the Other. Through this gaze, each subject tracks the other’s mortality as a distraction from the nothingness and contingency of their own existence, their own death in life. Yet this 27 2 8 29

Suzanne Laba Cataldi, ‘Embodying Perceptions of Death: Emotional Apprehension and Reversibilities of Flesh’, in Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor, eds, Chiasms (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000), 196. Merleau-​Ponty, ‘Hegel’s Existentialism’, 66. Sartre, BN, 261; and Levinas, GDT, 117.

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seeking of the death of the Other in Merleau-​Ponty’s premise is rather a locating of their death, similar to Levinas’s thesis of the responsibility for the Other borne out through their mortality, instead of a desire for their demise. In Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenology, as with Beauvoir’s feminist ethics, a subject searches for the mortality of an Other because the responsibility for their vulnerability, their transience, confers meaning to nothingness. The subject is not, however, asymmetrically obligated by this mortality as in Levinas’s theory, as relations between subjects in Merleau-​Ponty’s chiasmic thought are reciprocal. The gaze potentially empowers both individuals as they mutually contemplate one another’s mortality: which is thus a reflection on their own deaths. Implicitly challenging Levinas’s concern for maintaining a hierarchical division between subject and Other and reversing the outright hostility that occurs in Sartrean intersubjectivity, the gazes of the Other and of the subject intertwine chiasmically in a mutual relation in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought. Writing of the difference between Sartre’s and Merleau-​Ponty’s theories of subjectivity, Beauvoir argues that the former considers the sovereign subject and the latter the subject influenced by the Other. For her, Sartre: first emphasizes the opposition of the ‘for-​itself ’ and the ‘in-​itself ’ and the nihilating power of the mind in the face of being, and the absolute freedom of the mind, Merleau-​Ponty, on the contrary, concentrates on describing the concrete character of the subject that is never, according to him, a pure for-​itself.30

Instead of the Sartrean subject-​centric consciousness freed from the burden of liability for the Other, Merleau-​Ponty maintains a theory of the subject formed, at least in part, by a responsibility for the Other, as Beauvoir herself does. In Merleau-​Ponty’s works and in his own words, rather than the conflict between Other and subject of Sartre’s thought where they ‘seem to be alternatives’, there is a ‘living bond and communication between one term and the other’.31 There is a conciliation between 30 Simone de Beauvoir, ‘A Review of The Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-​ Ponty’, tr. Marybeth Timmermann, in Simons, ed., Philosophical Writings, 163. 31 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, ‘The Battle over Existentialism’, in SNS, 72 [1945].

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subject and Other as they overlap. Such an accord occurs when he draws together his two paramount concepts of the chiasm and embodied perception in the unfinished Le Visible et l’invisible (The Visible and the Invisible, 1964), where he writes that the thickness of flesh involved in the chiasmic linking between a perceiver and the perceived ‘is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication’.32 Merleau-​Ponty’s approach is to consider two subjects in a respectful interchange through the chiasmic gaze. This reciprocal exchange between positions traverses the supposed breach between subject and Other and Beauvoir describes this overlap in Merleau-​Ponty’s theory of embodiment as ‘bridging the gaps between individual existents’.33 This bridging is addressed by Lynne Segal, with reference to the varying ways in which the gendered Other is portrayed in Beauvoir’s, Merleau-​Ponty’s and Sartre’s works. Segal writes that where Merleau-​Ponty undoubtedly recognises the ambiguity of corporeal existence in which we are ‘always both subject and object’, he fails and Beauvoir succeeds in observing ‘how gender is mapped onto this essential ambiguity of bodily experience’.34 However, Segal concludes, in rejecting the Western metaphysical tradition that Sartre aligned with in which there is a duality of sexual difference, Merleau-​Ponty’s thought permitted ‘any two people to be both subjects and objects for each other’.35 If he did not attend to the specific patriarchal violence of the Othering of women, of the feminine, Merleau-​Ponty’s philosophy did attempt to break down binary definitions between subject and Other more generally. As this chapter unfolds, we will see that other feminist commentors have addressed this issue and it is fundamental to several of my film analyses. Merleau-​Ponty’s work averts intersubjective hostility and the focus on a hierarchical divergence between the two parties in which either is ascendant. It is this difference in the philosophy of Merleau-​Ponty, his theory of the chiasm that allows the space for an overlap between the subject and 32 33 34 35

Merleau-​Ponty, VI, 135. Beauvoir, SS, 78. Lynne Segal, Straight Sex: Rethinking the Politics of Pleasure (London: Verso, 2015), 162 [1994]. Ibid.

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Other, which is crucial to this chapter, helping us to move closer still to a notion of a social, reciprocal equality between subjects. This crossing, or overlapping, is for Merleau-​Ponty an essential aspect of perceiving the world with an Other: ‘[m]y vision overlaps another one; or rather they function together and fall as a matter of principle upon the same Visible World’.36 For him the subject’s and the Other’s visual perceptions of the world mingle. Autonomy is preserved in the chiasmic gaze between Other and subject where this imbrication of vision leads to a reciprocal relation between these fellow perceivers, unlike the violence Levinas suspects is inherent to the visual dimension: although, as discussed in Chapter 2, the entrance of the third party can, in some ways, divert this homogenisation of alterity. In Merleau-​Ponty’s thought, the gaze between the subject and the Other is not unilateral, but reversible: ‘the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen’.37 For him, subject and Other exist in mutual flux, as each is simultaneously sentient and sensible, perceiver and perceived. However, for some interpreters of Merleau-​Ponty’s work, his theory of embodied perception also over-​emphasises the significance of visual perception. For instance, Derrida argues that Merleau-​Ponty ‘confers on vision a heavy primacy’.38 Echoing this point, Irigaray writes that he ‘accords an exorbitant privilege to vision’.39 Irigaray considers that this excessive privileging is a key limitation in Merleau-​Ponty’s account of the mutuality between the Other and the subject: It happens that movement is a more adequate way of building myself an aesthesiological body. And that, moving through the world, across the universe, or dancing, I construct more of a dwelling for myself than through vision. Merleau-​Ponty would want it to be vision which closes –​and works –​my body, including the reversibility of the visible.40

36 Merleau-​Ponty, ‘Introduction’, to his Signs, tr. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987), 16 [1960]. 37 Merleau-​Ponty, VI, 139. 38 Jacques Derrida, On Touching, Jean-​Luc Nancy, tr. Christine Irizarry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 206. 39 Irigaray, ESD, 174. 40 Ibid.  175.

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Irigaray refers to the ‘aesthesiological body’, which, as Beata Stawarska notes, is the body as ‘defined primarily in terms of anonymous reversibility and not as a privileged vantage point onto “objects” of perception’.41 Irigaray’s concern is that Merleau-​Ponty elevates vision above other forms of perception, specifically bodily motion, and therefore perpetuates the orthodox hierarchy between perceived and perceiver (in particular where the perceived is feminine and the perceiver masculine) challenged in the previous two chapters. This, for Irigaray, detracts from Merleau-​Ponty’s concern for the reciprocity in encounters between subjects. Instead Merleau-​Ponty’s theories of embodied perception − a whole-​bodied comprehension of an object − and the chiasm − the space in which perceiver and perceived overlap − challenge these hierarchies between sensorial faculties and between the (female) perceived and (male) perceiver. In this way, I agree with Butler’s assertion that Merleau-​Ponty’s later theorisation of the flesh or chiasm ‘precedes and informs intersubjective relations, necessarily disorientating a subject-​centred account’.42 Part of this challenge to subject-​centricity, importantly, is the reciprocity of the intersubjective relation, the flow back and forth of liability between beings who are always both subject and Other. Additionally, the body as site of perception undermines the primacy of vision: ‘by the thick and living presence of my body, in one fell swoop I take up my dwelling in space’, Merleau-​ Ponty writes.43 It is through the body’s presence that one indicates a being in the world, a shared space which refers to the equality in embodied perception as it is constituted by motion, vision and intelligence. In the ensuing analysis of Resnais’s Van Gogh, Gauguin and Guernica the camera and spectator are in a relation which simulates this perceptual, embodied synthesis. The camera offers its independent vision of and motion around the pro-​filmic world to a spectator who dedicates their own gaze and intelligence to jointly perceiving the images captured. These readings 41

Beata Stawarska, ‘Reversibility and Intersubjectivity in Merleau-​Ponty’s Ontology’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 33/​2 (May 2002), 156. 42 Judith Butler, ‘Merleau-​Ponty and the Touch of Malebranche’, in Senses of the Subject, p. 36 3 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’, in his 4 Signs, 75.

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will rely on the concept of the camera’s autonomy detailed in the previous chapter –​its distinction from the director, spectator and the subjects in the images it helps form –​which will challenge its role as an extension of a spectator’s perception in apparatus theory. For instance, Metz argues, in response to Merleau-​Ponty’s assertion that cinema is a ‘phenomenological art’, that phenomenology and the cinema are alike in their ‘common illusion of perceptual mastery’.44 For Metz, Merleau-​Ponty’s version of phenomenology preserves a subject-​centric domination of the perceived world which is equally assumed by the cinematic spectator. Instead, this chapter asserts that, after Butler, Merleau-​Ponty’s theories of the chiasm and embodied perception undermine the notion of a single, ascendant perception of the (filmic) world: a persistent, singular subject-​position dominating the camera and the image. In particular, the instants in which this overlapping between perceivers encounters death will be primarily explored here. Death traverses the boundaries between subjects as one undertakes accountability for another’s mortality and is a presence to life in what I contend is a mimesis of the chiasmic relation. The bridging between spectators and the external world of a film is performed by the camera in the following film analyses. This crossing encounters death and therefore conveys the responsibility for the Other’s vulnerability, their mortality, between positions of subject and Other.45

The Embodied Camera and Death in the Canvas: Resnais’s Van Gogh, Gauguin and Guernica In each of Resnais’s three early documentaries, the camera moves within the worlds of the depicted canvasses, extending the range of embodied perception for the films’ spectators. Merleau-​Ponty himself writes of this 44 Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema, 53. 5 Merleau-​Ponty’s writing often focused on the painterly artistic image, drawing com4 parisons between the arts, such as in his essay ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence: to Jean-​Paul Sartre’, Signs 80 [1952].

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profound perceptual inhabitation within a painting that ‘the eye dwells in this texture as man dwells in his house’.46 The perceiver of a painting inhabits a canvas as they would their home. This immersion incorporates both the eye and the body as perceptual organs. Of such a combination in Merleau-​Ponty’s philosophy, Galen Johnson writes that the eye and body ‘move and work together within a visual field’.47 This alliance of perceiving elements is the essence of the embodied perception of a visual field, which is in this instance the canvas that is then trans-​mediated into the world of Resnais’s films. The camera is first at liberty in these external worlds and then acts –​through a temporal leap –​in tandem with a spectator’s perception. A spectator follows the camera into this sphere as their perceptions overlap. This mutual perception is the fundamental element of my understanding of spectator engagement rather than identification with the camera. The camera’s motion around and sight of the canvasses and a spectator’s vision and ‘intelligence’ overlap to form whole-​bodied or embodied perception of a world external to both. Each entity remains separate, just as senses remain separate in perceiving: the camera does not substitute for a spectator but invites them with it and a spectator engages with this apparatus, creating an accountability for death sought and accepted through such a bilateral gaze. The camera and spectator are intertwined –​as in the chiasmic overlap –​rather than in a relation in which the camera is solely an extension of subjective, spectatorial perception. The camera traces the surfaces of the canvasses in Resnais’s films and then enters the depth of the images so completely as to approximate a character within the paintings:  potentially a Provençal peasant, a Peeping Tom to uncovered Polynesian bodies, or a bystander to the bombing of a Basque village, communicating with the figures and the environments in each image.

46 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, in Toadvine and Lawlor, eds, The Merleau-​ Ponty Reader (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 357 [1961]. 47 Galen A. Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking Through Merleau-​Ponty’s Aesthetics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 30.

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Bazin describes this relation between the camera and canvas in Resnais’s films d’art as the ‘aesthetic symbiosis of screen and painting’.48 Brush and camera equally produce images which are then perceived together in one frame. A further symbiosis occurs as a spectator engages with the filmic images as their perception overlaps with that of the camera which delves into the canvasses. Describing such overlapping perception in Merleau-​ Ponty’s thought, Richard Cohen argues that the eye ‘sees not because it somehow goes out to the other, “the object,” or somehow draws the other into the “subject,” but rather because seeing and what is seen are made of the same stuff ’.49 In Merleau-​Ponty’s thought, the seen is not integrated by the subject (the violence of the Same in Levinasian ethics) as, instead, the perceiver and perceived overlap as equal elemental parts of the chiasm and retain the potential to exchange positions. Thus, the camera is not simply an extension of the spectator-​as-​subject, performing perception of the pro-​filmic event on his behalf. Instead, in Resnais’s films perceptions jointly hover chiasmically over objects. In his readings of the ‘self ’ in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought, Levinas recognises such a relation between the subject and the objective world, writing that the subject that ‘constitutes the world comes up against a sphere in which it is by its very flesh implicated’. For Levinas, the Merleau-​Pontian subject’s position in the world is an ‘intimate incarnation’ of subjective flesh in the external world: each defining the other.50 In analysis of Resnais’s films, my argument reflects Levinas’s interpretation that the flesh is the form in which the subject encounters the external world in which it is equally involved. The doubling of images in Resnais’s films –​the canvasses and the cinematic simulacra of them –​and the engagement of a spectator with them as they re-​present an external world, speaks to the overlap with simultaneous divergence that is the very substance of the chiasm. The moving camera with its prospecting eye performs a chiasmic intertwining between the painterly and cinematic 48 André Bazin, ‘Painting and Cinema’, What is Cinema?, vol. 1, tr. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 168 [‘Peinture et cinéma’, 1951]. 49 Richard A. Cohen, ‘Merleau-​Ponty, the Flesh and Foucault’, in Lawrence Hass and Dorothea Olkowski, eds, Rereading Merleau-​Ponty: Essays Beyond the Continental-​ Analytic Divide (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000), 280. 50 Levinas, ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’, 79.

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images and, reciprocally, a spectator also enters these objective worlds after the camera, creating an overlap of perspectives. In one sequence of Van Gogh, the camera hovers briefly over the surface of the titular artist’s painting Het gele huis (The Yellow House, 1888), showing an external street scene and the titular house in Arles in which the Dutch Post-​Impressionist lived.51 The camera then tracks toward a second-​floor window in the painting as if to enter the house through it. An edit to a close-​up of another window in the painter’s Slaapkamer te Arles (Bedroom in Arles, 1888), leads to a zoom-​out that reveals the whole of the titular room. Through its movement the independent camera has drawn a spectator into the canvas, into the house, into the bedroom in Arles. The camera’s motion in Resnais’s films from Van Gogh onwards, writes Godard, ‘gave the impression that it was not simply a movement of the camera but an exploration of the secret of this movement’.52 The camera’s motility (and especially in this scene from Van Gogh in which it burrows deeper and deeper into the image) refers to the meaning of this motion, a signification that is configured by the intervening intelligence of a spectator. In Van Gogh, the camera has penetrated the surface of the painting to reveal the interior details (in another painting) that were (naturally) invisible in the previous canvas. It then invites a spectator with it into these images. This is not, however, the identification with the camera fundamental to the apparatus theories of Baudry and Metz, in which, as Joan Copjec summarises, the ‘subject takes the image as a full and sufficient representation of itself and its world’.53 Instead, a spectator encounters the camera and the world of the image in chiasmic reciprocity. In entering into these worlds, the spectator concedes their status as the perceiver, as their perception overlaps with that of the camera. They rely on the apparatus as another perceiver and yet they both remain perceivers simultaneously and 51 This version of the film was created from photographic reproductions instead of the original paintings used in the 16mm version, see Steven Jacobs, Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts (Edinburgh: EUP, 2011), 23. 52 Jean-​Luc Godard, Godard on Godard, tr. Tom Milne (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1972), 115. 53 Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (London: Verso, 2015), 22 [1994].

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jointly. Together they create a hybrid figure that imitates the potential synchronicity of perceivers and perceived and the chiasmic relation between individuals in Merleau-​Ponty’s philosophy. For Merleau-​Ponty, one cannot be a perceiver without being perceived. The relation between a spectator and the objects of the image –​which for the spectator represent a world external to their consciousness –​informs and describes all of them as within the chiasm. This communication between subjective and objective realms occurs within a single flesh, the chiasm, stretching out between the perceived and perceiver and the painting and painted. In Resnais’s films, spectators, the camera, the world of the canvasses and the figures rendered in them overlap and are connected chiasmically, in one flesh. It is through an engagement with the camera as another perceiver that a spectator of Van Gogh perceives the external world depicted in the canvasses. Applying this notion now to Gauguin, I trace how in this overlap of perspectives and positions, hovering over ‘one sole image in which we are both involved’,54 an engaged spectator encounters the deaths of Others depicted in the paintings. In Gauguin, the camera and a spectator engage with aesthetic images in which death haunts the depicted figures. Predominantly, panning shots in the film progress from the bottom of the frame upwards over objects in Paul Gauguin’s canvasses, until, that is, the camera passes over a selection of reclining nudes, depicting primarily, but not exclusively, female forms. In one of these sequences of naked figures, the mobile camera visually encounters a personification of death. As this sequence begins, the film’s voice-​over reads from Gauguin’s letters from Tahiti in which he describes the ‘race’ of people on the island, with colonial subjectivity and objectification, as the ‘most beautiful in the world’. Metamorphosing this mystification into sexualisation, as the camera pans over many of the canvasses in this sequence, it begins on a close-​up of a girl’s face and, combining a pan out and across, gradually reveals her nudity as the narration quotes the painter’s letters once more: ‘Fun is their only occupation. They are crowned with flowers, laugh, play, then love. They sing to love, invite it and it comes to them at night’. Yet in filming one of these paintings, Manao tupapau 54

Merleau-​Ponty, VI, 83.

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(Spirit of the Dead Watching, 1892), which portrays a naked Tahitian girl (Gauguin’s 14-​year-​old wife) lying on her stomach, the camera’s pan backwards and left from a close-​up on her face reveals not only her bare body but an older woman seated behind her, dressed in black from head to toe. This figure is the titular tupapau whose ‘satanic infiltration’ of the idyllic island, according to Gauguin scholar Ingo F. Walther, ‘stands for the ubiquitous presence of Death: even in this island people must die’.55 In Resnais’s film, the camera’s motion accentuates the presence of this black-​clad figure, this spirit of the dead. The panning shot –​the camera’s movement, which progressively reveals the nudity of subjects in previous canvasses –​suddenly confronts a figure of death. Later in the same sequence, this revelation of death’s haunting presence echoes in shots of Gauguin’s Mère et fille (Two Women, 1901–​2). Over what becomes the last tableau of this montage of sexualised flesh, the voice-​over alludes to ‘religious fear’, as the camera lingers over the face of a young woman, light hair framing her face, before a sudden whip-​pan left reveals an older woman in the same canvas with pitch-​ black eyes and a dark cowl of hair around her angular face (see Figure 24).

Figure 24:  The woman with pitch-​black eyes and a dark cowl of hair around her angular face in Gauguin (Alain Resnais, 1950), © Panthéon Production.

55

Ingo F. Walther, Gauguin: 1848–​1903: The Primitive Sophisticate (Cologne: Benedikt Taschen, 1993), 55.

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The black and white photography of Resnais’s film –​its chiaroscuro, opposed to the vivid colour of the original canvas –​emphasises the different tones Gauguin employs to render each woman. As the camera enters the whip-​pan, its movement is accompanied by a transition on the soundtrack from lilting pastoral music to a stab of piercing strings, a sudden loud jolt of sound. This is what Lorraine Yeung terms a ‘musical stinger’, a piercing chord (now) familiar from the horror genre, commonly accompanying jump-​scares.56 In the shooting of Two Women, the shock prompted by the sudden pan of the camera and this musical stinger is that of the exposure to death’s proximity to the vigour of youth, which is present in both of Gauguin’s canvasses but accentuated by the monochromatic shadings and the camera’s motion in Resnais’s film. The older woman in Spirit of the Dead Watching is a forebear and an omen for the succeeding dark-​eyed figure in Two Women. The roving camera-​eye highlights aspects inherent in these canvasses which are then conveyed into a spectator’s consciousness via their visual perception. As in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought, where perceptions overlap with one another as they fall on the same visible world whilst maintaining the perceivers’ divergence, in my argument concerning spectator engagement, the camera’s and spectator’s perceptions retain their autonomy in this imbrication. The perception of the camera and the perception of a spectator overlap in a chiasmic relation that mutually perceives the world of the film. So, instead of a spectator being in contact with the film’s body of which the camera is a part, I reason that they and the camera perceive the film image together: two distinct witnesses hovering over the same object. This divergent overlapping frustrates the theories of the camera’s gaze which iterates that of the spectator in canonical apparatus theory. For Judith Mayne, in the works of Metz and Baudry and the contemporaneous work of Laura Mulvey, the spectator is male and or incapable of recognising (sexual) difference, a ‘homogenous spectator’.57 Yet, as we know, in Mulvey’s analysis she targets this tradition of an active male gaze at a passive female 56 Lorraine Yeung, ‘Spectator Engagement and the Body’, Film Studies 15 (autumn 2016), 83. 57 Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1993), 52, 53.

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character: ‘The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure’.58 Mulvey’s indispensable critique seeks to emasculate the spectatorial gaze, where Metz and Baudry construct theories which consider the spectator as at best homogeneous and at worst male in order to promote him. In my analyses, the overlapping of the perceptions of spectator and camera subverts the notion of the (male) subject-​spectator, as it reflects instead the space that is intrinsic to the chiasm in which multiple perceivers convene. This theory challenges the hierarchical, objectifying gaze upon the perceived through the camera-​eye, especially deposing the gaze of the sexualising, masculine, spectatorial perceiver, and is exemplified in Gauguin. The filmic images of Resnais’s documentary, unlike the original paintings he films, undermine this masculine surveillance of a pliant feminine figure. Considering the subjective gaze and the eye as painting’s ‘polyvalent organ’, Deleuze argues that Gauguin’s eye was ‘insatiable and in heat’.59 The painter’s perception of the subjects of his works was objectifying, sexualising. This rapacious organ of Gauguin’s is consistent with Irigaray’s theory of the eye-​penis: the masculine gaze metamorphosed into a penetrative, phallic violation.60 The gaze (and especially the hetero-​masculine gaze) eroticises certain subjects it perceives, in the process infiltrating and contaminating their self. Yet such an egocentric and sexualising gaze can be countered by the theory of the reciprocal relation between elements of the chiasm, or what in this chapter is conceived as the joint perception of image-​subjects and pro-​filmic worlds by spectators and apparatus, which necessarily recognises multiple perceivers. The images of Gauguin analysed above, for instance, present a mutual relation and the encounter with the Other’s death as correctives to the sexualising, subject-​spectator’s gaze. Instead of simply translating the paintings formed by Gauguin’s objectifying eye into cinematic images, the camera-​motion in Gauguin reveals the presence of death. Spectatorial, intellectual intervention then encounters this death which speaks to a subject’s responsibility for the Other and, in turn, to a 58 Laura  Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Visual and Other Pleasures, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 19 [1975]. 59 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon:  The Logic of Sensation, tr. Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2003), 55 [1981]. 60 Irigaray, SW, 47, 145.

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shared mortality. In Resnais’s rendering of Spirit of the Dead Watching and Two Women, the deaths of each of the female figures haunts them, but this death also recalls a spectator’s own mortal being. In confronting the death of the Other present in these paintings, a spectator also gains an authentic awareness of their own death. Consequently, the death represented in the canvas, a common ground between subject and Other, mimics the chiasmic relation. It bridges the breach between Others and subjects as all accept their liability for another’s death. The overlapping of subjects and Other(s) in Resnais’s next film, devoted to the study of an array of Pablo Picasso’s paintings but dominated by the mural Guernica (1937), occurs directly through this relation with death. There is a pervasive horror stimulated by the images of the casualties of the eponymous atrocity enacted by the Nazi Luftwaffe and Italian Aviazione Legionaria, who also for the spectator represent victims of terror throughout World War II and other conflicts. Through these images, a spectator of the film likewise encounters this trauma and these deaths. According to Michele Aaron, a spectator is responsible for these deaths as far as the modern, embodied spectator of film is held accountable for their complicity in the film they view.61 Aaron’s point pertains to the spectacular content of Hollywood fare but is doubly true for a spectator of Guernica. The viewer of the filmic image is responsible for the events depicted in the canvas that they perceive visually and, more critically, intellectually. Merleau-​Ponty similarly writes that film images ‘directly present to us that special way of being in the world, of dealing with things and other people’.62 For him, filmic images speak to the interactions between beings. Consequently, both versions of Guernica also refer to the liability a spectator has for the deaths depicted in them and to ensure that these atrocities are not reiterated. This accountability for the death of another also indicates the active engagement that a spectator performs with the camera as they perceive these images. Writing on Merleau-​Ponty’s descriptions of the act of perception, Vasseleu argues that it ‘is a creative receptivity rather than a passive capacity to receive impressions’.63 This creative receptivity, an active perception, is analogous 61 Aaron, Spectatorship, 89. 62 Merleau-​Ponty, ‘Film and the New Psychology’, 58. 63 Vasseleu, Textures of Light, 24.

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to my understanding of spectator engagement. The encounter with the images of Resnais’s Guernica, and the appreciation of the responsibility for the deaths it reveals, relies on this spectatorial, active engagement, what is an embodied intellectual intervention in the perception of (aesthetic) images. In Resnais’s film the titular painting is fractured and fragmented, evoking the horrors each figure represents in isolation. Wilson suggests that these details, the hands, feet and tongues, ‘recall sentient flesh’. In Wilson’s analysis, these dissevered body parts are metonyms for the devastation of the bombing, existence reduced to atoms, of which Resnais reveals, as Picasso did, the ‘after-​ image’ and not the cause.64 Where a contemporaneous viewer of the 1937 canvas perceives a hand that it is attached to a slain corpse that in turn represents the massacre of perhaps thousands, for the film’s spectators, with hindsight and awareness of the terrors that the massacre in Guernica prefaced, that number amounts to millions. In the film, one part of an object represents its whole, which signifies further integrated perspectives. This synecdochal approach is indicated in a shot in the film of the head and neck of a horse with its mouth agape as if bellowing a challenge to the death descending from above, which is the first in a sequence of four similar images. This first image swiftly cuts to a detail in the painting of an equine face raised to the sky and then to a drawing of the crumpled body of a horse on the ground, head and neck contorted grotesquely, before the fourth shot reveals a close-​up of a horse’s bowed head. The sequence reverses Sergei Eisenstein’s montage and fundamental intentions of the stone lions in Bronenosets Patyomkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1925). In Eisenstein’s film, the juxtaposition of the images of the inanimate animals lying and then standing creates the illusion of the beasts coming to life.65 Resnais, instead, elicits the idea of the horse’s death through its collapse to the earth. This death of a figure in the cinematic image engages spectatorial cognisance as a viewer considers the atrocity that leads to this death and the other deaths that it represents (eventually including the spectator’s own). The camera’s sight of these images and a spectator’s vision and thought then overlap in perceiving the death of Others. 64 65

Wilson, Alain Resnais, 21. Notably, Godard insists that ‘Resnais is the second greatest editor in the world after Eisenstein’, Godard, Godard on Godard, 115.

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This cutting between fragments of the canvas in the film culminates in the penultimate scene in which the camera focuses on the sun/​eye/​bulb sphere at the centre-​top of Picasso’s painting, to then tilt downwards over individual figures, dead or dying. The lens returns to the orb, to descend again to another detail of destruction and death, of twisted, tortured bodies. The editing gives the impression that a flashing bulb or stroboscopic sun were casting the frame from light to darkness and to light again, switching on and off and on, revealing barbarity after barbarity. Picasso himself has said of this luminescent orb that ‘the lantern is Death’.66 Considering the same symbolic globe, art critic Robert Rosenbaum suggests it represents ‘an exploding bomb, whose eye-​ lash-​like rays bring death’.67 The bulb represents the death descending on the figures beneath it, the victims of this atrocity (see Figure 25). In Resnais’s film, the lantern finally remains ‘on’ as the camera pulls back to display most of the brilliant and gruesome canvas for the first time, which for the film-​spectator is constructed from constituent details of suffering and death that have been previously revealed by the camera.

Figure 25:  The bulb represents the death descending on the figures beneath it in Guernica (Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens, 1950), © Panthéon Production.

The atomisation of forms in this scene and the last sequence of the film speaks to the notion that subjective perception is only partial perception. André Malraux, La Tête d’obsidienne (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1974), 42 (my tr.). André Malraux would become Resnais’s father-​in-​law in 1969. 67 Robert Rosenbaum, ‘Picasso’s Disasters of War: The Art of Blasphemy’, in Steven A. Nash, ed., Picasso and the War Years: 1937–​1945 (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998), 45.

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It is the multiple, overlapping perspectives of camera and spectator that countenance the death in these images. In the final scene of the film in which the camera pans over anthropoid statues by Picasso –​including Tête de Mort (Death’s Head, c.1944) –​many of whose feet, hands and heads are highlighted because shadows sever them from their bodies, the voice-​over suggests that ‘death interrupted the comfort of time’.68 Death is a disruptive presence haunting these static bodies fractured by chiaroscuro, just as it is in the Guernica canvas which is equally fragmented by Resnais’s camera. The deathly darkness, which throughout the film acts as a concealing cloak draped over images, ensures that those aspects that represent the motive for such abhorrent ruination of life are obscured. Except, that is, in the consciousness of an engaged spectator: it is she who can take on the responsibility for and the experience of the deaths of these Others. As the camera gradually passes over the canvas and reveals the deaths it depicts, a spectator is invited to contemplate their cause. As the camera reveals formerly hidden aspects of the image, a spectator interacts in ‘creative receptivity’, the conscious and unconscious engagement necessary to uncover unseen sides. The fragmentation of the figures in the final scene of Guernica conveys, as Steven Jacobs writes, a ‘cinematic equivalent of cubism’.69 The Cubist abstraction of the canvas is reiterated in the filmic images, evoking the notion of multiple perspectives and concealed aspects revealed. David Hockney writes of this conjoining of manifold aspects of temporal and spatial points in Picasso’s multi-​dimensional forms that ‘you could see round the back of the body as well as the front’.70 Picasso’s three-​dimensional artworks attempt to represent the potential, myriad perspectives of an object –​the body in this instance –​simultaneously. This multiplicity of perspectives also recalls the multiple senses of Merleau-​Pontian embodied perception that combine to discover the multivalent aspects of the complex object: the body, the cube or the aesthetic image. Writing of the obverse faces of his quintessential complex object, 68 69 70

Picasso’s Death’s Head skull was produced as the Nazis occupied Paris in World War II, another allusion to the destruction and death inherent in war. Jacobs, Framing Pictures, 29. David Hockney, That’s the Way I See it, ed. Nikos Stangos (London:  Thames & Hudson, 1993), 102.

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the cube, and an overlap in perceptions within the chiasm, Merleau-​Ponty explains that ‘I and the cube are together caught up in one same “element” (should we say of the seer, or of the visible?), this cohesion, this visibility by principle, prevails over every momentary discordance’.71 The multiple perspectives necessary to perceive the entire cube all cohere in the flesh, the chiasm. In Guernica, it is the perceptions of the camera, which refuses, or is unable, to disclose every hidden aspect of the canvas, and of a spectator who mutually contemplate the deaths of the victims of the eponymous atrocity and, by extension, other lives sacrificed to conflict. The acceptance of manifold perceptions and obverse positions is necessary to discover the presence and awareness of death in these images and, through their encounter with the Other, a spectator’s own death. These ideas of an overlap of the perspectives of camera and spectator in perceiving the external world and an encounter with death are also present from the outset of Varda’s short photo-​montage film, Salut les Cubains. However, in Varda’s film there are also instants that allude to the camera’s absence as well as its presence and this adds a further layer to discussion of engaged, intersubjective relations occurring in the presence of death.

Revolutionary Perspectives: Varda’s Salut les Cubains The opening credit sequence of Salut les Cubains (henceforth, Cubains) highlights the presence of the camera not only through its movement, as in Resnais’s films, but also through self-​referential images. In these initial shots, the camera lens producing the images of the film passes over a man holding another moving-​image camera with a large square lens that meets the first camera eye-​to-​eye. This image is then stilled, drawing attention to the apparatus and to the reciprocated gaze, creating a loop 71

Merleau-​Ponty, VI, 140. Merleau-​Ponty writes of the flesh as an essential, natural element, like air or water or earth. For further discussion of the chiasm as an element see Michael B. Smith, ‘Merleau-​Ponty’s Aesthetics’, in Johnson, ed., The Merleau-​Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 198.

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between perceivers. In Varda’s film, the first camera continues to swirl through a dancing crowd, before stopping on a third film camera, a Cine-​ Kodak Special. There is another cut to a tri-​lensed, Arriflex camera and this image is also then stilled. Another quick pan through the crowd by a cine-​camera reveals an additional lens that belongs to a still-​photographic camera positioned at another human eye, as the credits reveal ‘Images et réalisation: Agnès Varda’. As with the later market sequences of Sans Soleil analysed in the previous chapter, these shots are of reciprocal gazes mediated by lenses which challenge the notion of a single, dominant look. They also present multiple figures holding cameras: the three credited cinematographers of Cubains, Resnais, J. Marques and Per Olaf Csongova, and Varda herself who took the photographs which comprise the film (see Figures 26.1 and 26.2).

Figures 26.1 and 26.2:  Multiple perspectives, camera eyes meet in Salut les Cubains (Agnès Varda, 1963), © Ciné-​Tamaris and Pathé Cinéma.

These scenes are composed of and through multiple perspectives, rather than by a solitary author filming the images perceived by a single gaze, creating a socialist perspective. This is reminiscent of the overlapping of perspectives in Merleau-​Ponty’s concept of the encounter between the subject and Others as part of the same world: these cameras signify multiple but connected perspectives in the same world. As we have seen, for Merleau-​Ponty ‘the perceptible is precisely that which can haunt more than one body’.72 Myriad beings are haunted by the perceptible world, perceive it jointly, and as Cubains similarly presents multiple bodies and perspectives it captures the collective vigour of the Cuban people. Where 72 Merleau-​Ponty, ‘Introduction’, to his Signs, 15.

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Guernica highlighted the death and destruction of the eponymous atrocity, Varda’s film represents a culture celebrating life. Writing of the 2015 Centre Pompidou exhibition of the photographs that comprise Cubains, Sarah Moroz considers that the ‘undertones of political fervour are more muted in [Varda’s] shots than the sense of vitality’.73 This vivacity is, however, in keeping with the primary concerns of this book and with Merleau-​Ponty’s conception of life, shadowed by death. As we now know, for Merleau-​Ponty an awareness of mortality is only the genesis of a sensibility that incorporates life and death. Emphasising the cerebral locus of the imbrication of these states, he writes that the ‘decision we must make is to accept death, but that cannot be separated from the decision to live’.74 The phenomenologist acknowledges that life is lived in death’s shadow: these phenomena, whilst simultaneously divergent, are inherent to one another. Varda’s film captures images that represent this consciousness of death as an affirmation of life. Life and death exist concurrently in Cubains in ways that are different from, for instance, Marker’s earlier depiction of post-​revolutionary Cuba, ¡Cuba sí! (1961). Into this film, Marker edits footage of the observable death of a man shot by firing squad and toppling backwards into a ready-​dug grave. Where Marker’s film describes similar sequences of celebration to Varda’s, this scene of execution refers to the concomitant political turmoil and tragedy of the revolution of the 1950s. In contrast, the cameras of Varda’s Cubains capture moments of joie de vivre haunted by the knowledge of death, rather than the literal death depicted in Marker’s film. Varda represents the spirit of the islanders with what Clément Chéroux calls a fascination with the ‘energy of popular mobilization that created the revolution’.75 Collective movement is at the heart of these images and this socialist perspective was 73 Sarah Moroz, ‘Socialism and Cha-​Cha-​Cha:  Agnès Varda’s Photos of Cuba Forgotten for 50 Years’, The Guardian (10 December 2015) accessed 23 December 2015. 74 Merleau-​Ponty, ‘Hegel’s Existentialism’, 67, 69. 75 Clément Chéroux, ‘La Dame de la rue Daguerre’, in Clément Chéroux and Karolina Ziebinska-​Lewandowska, eds, Varda/​Cuba (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2015), 4 (my tr.).

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one that also motivated Merleau-​Ponty. For instance, in his assault on his erstwhile friend Sartre’s conception of the intersubjective relation, and specifically of the pursuit of the Other’s death, Merleau-​Ponty asks rhetorically ‘if each consciousness wishes the death of the other, how does one jump over the abyss to the other?’ He answers that this is ‘accomplished before our eyes. It is the Party’.76 For Merleau-​Ponty, the desire for the death of the Other, central to the conflict between subject and Other in Sartre’s early philosophy, obstructs the bridging and the reciprocity between subject and Other that is inherent in his concept of the chiasm and, for him, the Communist Party. As Reynolds writes of the differences in intersubjective relations in Sartre’s and Merleau-​Ponty’s philosophies, ‘sharing is foreign to the Sartrean description of the other. For Merleau-​Ponty, on the other hand, others are fundamentally those with whom we do share a world’.77 It is the mutuality, equality and the knowledge of the reversibility between subjects and Others that ensures the movement between attitudes of subject and Other and their overlapping perspectives in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought. This same reciprocity is revealed in Cubains in instants of impulsive, instinctive dancing by the Cuban subjects. One sequence in particular, of the Cuban tenor Beny Moré, exemplifies this reciprocity and the haunting shadow of death cast over portraits of emotive expressions of vitality. The scene begins with a motionless shot of Moré smiling into the camera lens, a glass raised to his spectators and then another image of him gazing out of a window with his back to camera. A jump-​cut moves to another photograph of him positioned by the window but with his face now turned towards the camera. Here he is sociably inviting a spectator –​via the camera –​to engage in his imminent performance. In these shots, the camera is a lens through which pass both Moré’s and a spectator’s gaze. As his song ‘Caricias Cubanas’ commences on the soundtrack, three correspondingly composed shots of Moré in his Stetson hat are rapidly edited together, and his lips seem to mouth the lyrics of love and desire. In the next shot, he is positioned deeper in the frame, 76 Maurice Merleau-​Ponty, ‘Sartre and Ultrabolshevism’, in Adventures of the Dialectic, tr. Joseph Bien (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 151 [1955]. 77 Jack Reynolds, Merleau-​Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), 119.

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his feet poised in anticipation of a dance-​step before a procession of twenty photographs depict him skipping toward the camera, synchronised with the beat of his song. As he reaches the lens, grinning in close-​up, this oscillating advancement begins again. This sequence, Christa Blümlinger argues, is ‘a play of dissolves which does not suggest the movement of a body, but its intermittent appearance, and even its disappearance’.78 Blümlinger asserts that Moré does not move so much as vacillate between presence and absence, an effect caused by the photomontage of the film. This oscillation of Moré’s body between presence and absence (an absence of his image) assists in drawing a spectator into the world of the film.

Figure 27:  Engaging reciprocally, the late Beny Moré meets the camera-​eye and smiles in Salut les Cubains (Agnès Varda, 1963), © Ciné-​Tamaris and Pathé Cinéma.

Moré meets the camera-​eye and smiles, engaging reciprocally with the apparatus and, beyond it, with a spectator (see Figure 27). He invites the latter onto the other side of the lens, into his pseudo-​dynamic world. In the absence of the image, and therefore of Moré, an informed spectator must consider this absence, must contemplate what is missing. Therefore, in this sequence, whether there are shots of Moré or the black leader which 78 Christa Blümlinger, ‘Postcards in Agnès Varda’s Cinema’, in Laurent Guido and Olivier Lugon, eds, Between Still and Moving Images (New Barnet: John Libbey, 2012), 286.

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replaces him, a spectator engages with this external world, employing their consciousness as much as their vision. The absence of images of Moré is comparable to the hidden surfaces of the cube that Merleau-​Ponty argues are restored by the mind: ‘I cannot see a cube as its geometrical definition presents it: I can only think it’.79 As the spectator of Cubains engages with the absence of images, they imag(in)e this absence as a presence and also the sense of this absence. As the sequence continues, close-​ups of Moré’s face are cut together with a rapidity that again hints at his miming his song and then seven shots successively portray him moving away from the camera, before there is a gradual fading to black as the melody ends. The darkness disperses to reveal the bandleader in profile and eight photographs blend in sequence as Varda says in voice-​over, ‘here’s to Beny Moré, who sadly passed away before this film was completed’. The last photograph is held for twice as long as the others, as Varda continues ‘here’s to the King’, before another fade to black.80 Retrospectively, the previous images of the dancing, smiling singer symbolising his vitality are haunted by this death, which is represented in the unnerving staccato absences. Not only do the absented images signify Moré’s imminent passing, but also engage a spectator’s consciousness with this mortality. Spectators are drawn into this encounter with the Other’s death through Moré’s intermittent dance, by both his absence and presence, and by their potential responsibility for his death. In the opening scenes of the film in which Varda focuses on the other cameras and in the images in which Moré interacts with the camera, the apparatus is accepted as part of the world it describes. A spectator is made aware of the presence of this other perceiver with which they engage and with whom their perception overlaps. They also, then, engage with Moré before he dances and during the instants of his terminal absence both he and, it is inferred, the camera disappear. In these moments of absence, a spectator is left with a consciousness of their accountability to remember 7 9 Merleau-​Ponty, ‘Film and the New Psychology’, 50. 80 The singer died of cirrhosis of the liver after many years of alcohol abuse: his death haunted his life and his dance steps. See John Radanovich, Wildman of Rhythm: The Life and Music of Benny Moré (Tallahassee:  University of Florida Press, 2009), 144–​50.

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this death which is communicated chiasmically from an Other to a subject. Yet, for Merleau-​Ponty, being chiasmic, this relation would not speak to the merging of Other and subject: there remains a separation within the chiasmic overlap which is essential for one to take responsibility for the death of the Other. Through his concept of the chiasm, Merleau-​Ponty succeeds in creating a reciprocal relation between subject and Other. The next part of this chapter investigates moments in which Varda’s digital films reflect this notion of the overlapping relation between subject and object, between perceiver and perceived, as embodied in one entity. This is the human body as Merleau-​Ponty understands it, that is both subject and object of perception. This notion of an embodiment of positions of perceiver and perceived is complicated further as Varda captures images of herself with a digital camera, freeing her images from corporeal constraints.

The Binary Self: Perceived and Perceiver in Varda’s The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès In an interview with Chris Darke discussing The Gleaners and I (hereafter Gleaners), Varda reveals that the digital video camera and the Avid editing system are tools she uses ‘to get closer to people more easily and to shoot on [her] own’.81 For the director, the digital camera permits an intimacy with the subjects it films and provides her with greater independence. Varda recognises, however, that this freedom is analogous to that afforded by previous developments in cine-​cameras. In a further interview about the film with Melissa Anderson, the director compares the DV camera with the handheld analogue models released in the 1950s: I had the feeling that this is the camera that would bring me back to the early short films I made in 1957 and 1958. I felt free at that time. With the new digital camera, I felt I could film myself, get involved as a filmmaker.82 8 1 Chris Darke, ‘Refuseniks’, Sight and Sound 11/​1 ( January 2001), 32. 82 Melissa Anderson, ‘The Modest Gesture of the Filmmaker  –​an Interview with Agnès Varda’, Cineaste 26/​4 (autumn 2001), 24.

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The DV camera liberates Varda to ‘film herself ’ and ‘get involved’ as had the mobile 16mm and 35mm cameras that she used for films like L’Opéra-​ Mouffe and Ô saisons, ô châteaux (1958). In both L’Opéra and Gleaners this independence conferred by new technology corresponds with Varda’s study of transformations within her own body. In each film, the director probes the boundaries between the subject and the Other, investigating her own body as a site for the imbrication of both positions. Where in L’Opéra it is her pregnancy and the mortality of her daughter that dominates her thoughts and the images of the film, in Gleaners it is her own mortality. In both films, as this chapter reveals, Varda conceives of the singular body as a complex self, formed of positions of subject and Other. Kate Ince has argued that Varda’s sensate evaluation of the body ‘brings her filmmaking activity suggestively close to the intentional expression of the lived body theorized by Merleau-​Ponty’.83 This shared way of approaching corporeal being between the philosopher and the filmmaker is revealed in Gleaners through the digital camera, which empowers Varda to film her self and specifically images in which she contemplates her mortality. This DV camera’s presence, as was the case for its analogue antecedent in Salut les Cubains, is foregrounded in Gleaners, altering perspectives on Varda’s body, informing the ways she captures her self. In an early scene in which Varda narrates over a pixelated close-​up shot of her left eye and the side of her face, for instance, she claims that ‘these new small cameras […] are digital and fantastic. Their effects are stroboscopic’. She continues in voice-​over that they are ‘narcissistic’ and, as she holds a hand-​mirror up to the camera, adds that they are ‘even hyper-​realistic’. Yet, instead of a reflection of the camera in the mirror she presents, there is a sketch of a human face. In this scene, as in Cubains, as a spectator is required to consider the camera’s disappearance, paradoxically, Varda emphasises its presence: it is replaced by the drawing which represents a spectator’s reflection in the mirror (see Figure 28). This picture depicts a multitude of spectators, an image in the mirror onto which each can project their self, that is then projected or ‘reflected’ back at them, meeting their gaze. In 83

Kate Ince, ‘Feminist Phenomenology and the Film World of Agnès Varda’, Hypatia 28/​3 (summer 2013), 610.

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this scene, there is a polyvalence of perceivers and perceived. Varda herself, as subject of the image and as director of the film, is variously located in positions of perceiver and perceived and the spectator who has the mirror (and therefore their own gaze) turned upon them also operates in each of these positions, the screen becoming a mirror for them. Such images in Gleaners address a complex self, one with the potential to be perceiver or perceived, to be subject or Other. These allusions to the gaze activate a spectator as an informed and engaged perceiver of the images of Gleaners, an incitement to creative receptivity rather than passivity, an engagement. Spectators are invited to participate in Varda’s films as part of a mutual relation rather than as a subject surveying the image in which the camera re-​presents their perception. Spectators enter the circuit of perceivers and perceived constructed between Varda’s self and the camera.

Figure 28:  The sketch that represents a spectator’s reflection in the mirror in The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000), © Ciné-​Tamaris.

Reiterating the idea of the self-​referential relationship between the camera and her own body, the next sequence of Gleaners begins with shots of an instruction booklet for a digital camera as Varda’s hand turns the pages. This is followed by a slow-​motion sweep by the camera, crossing a room and settling on Varda reclining on a sofa, which precedes close-​up shots of her face. These latter, proximate images meld together through slow dissolves, each leaving traces in its successor and consequently fragmenting

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Varda’s face.84 This segment ends with a close-​up of Varda’s liver-​spotted hand, a material sign of her ageing. The filmmaker’s body –​with its inherent mortality –​and the camera are palpable presences in the film. Yet each is independent from the other. The autonomy of the camera is emphasised unequivocally in a later scene in which Varda neglects to turn it off or put its lens-​cap on as she walks through a field. The lens points downwards, and the camera continues to capture images of the bobbing lens-​cap against an agrarian backdrop, as if autonomously responding to László Moholy-​Nagy’s call for ‘a camera which will shoot automatically’.85 The camera films what Varda does not see. This scene then emphasises the camera’s agency –​its independence as it films without the instruction of a director –​and even echoes the way Varda films her self. The lens-​cap as it protrudes from a point behind the camera lens, reiterates the composition of images of Varda’s hand as it is filmed entering the frame from behind the camera, turning the pages of the instruction booklet for instance. This filmed hand is both an outlier of her body and a metonym, a representative of the whole that is not seen, which remains unfilmed, ‘off-​camera’, like the severed body parts in Guernica. The lens-​cap equally indicates the camera’s own presence, the camera that films itself (the lens-​cap) in the same way that Varda films herself (her hand). The camera has its own agency and presence within the frame but is also in mimesis of Varda’s body which too is perceiver and perceived. It is through this similitude and oscillation between positions that Varda relates to the themes of her film: her body and its mortality. The scenes above not only foreground the presence of the camera in the film, but also introduce questions about Varda as a woman recording her own body as an image, some of which have been addressed by other film scholars. Homay King, for example, refers to both the feminist and phenomenological investigations Varda undertakes in Gleaners, themes

84 This effect is like that in Varda’s photographic self-​portrait, Autoportrait morcelé (2009), in which Varda’s image is reflected in various shards of mirror and multiple aspects of her bespectacled face are repeated in different slivers. 85 László Moholy-​Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, tr. Janet Seligman (London:  Lund Humphries, 1969), 44.

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I investigate in depth here.86 Further, Delphine Bénézet also argues that Varda’s interaction with her corporeality ‘constitutes a decisive contribution to feminism’.87 Varda’s cinema engages in a feminist rhetoric of the body which interrogates the hierarchy of positions of subject and Other or perceiver and perceived and portrayals of the mortal (female) body. This perspective also undermines what Catherine Lupton calls ‘the privileged place of the phallus’ in apparatus theory.88 It does so through the looping inter-​relation, intersubjectivity, between Varda, her camera and her spectators, explored in the above scenes, and also through the particular correspondence between Varda and her mortality. Her focus on an aged body shadowed by death in Gleaners challenges, as in Cléo, phallocentric definitions of femininity which venerate extreme youth rather than older age. Writing on the presentation of mortality rendered through Varda’s own maturing body in this film, Mireille Rosello notes that the ‘commentary makes frequent allusions to the fact that [Varda] is now old, that death is around the corner’.89 The director refers to the proximity of her own death throughout the film, observations which reverberate with Beauvoir’s description of ageing and death as ‘a personal event, an event that is near at hand’.90 This is true also of Varda’s later film, Visages, villages (Faces, Places, co-​directed with JR, 2017), in which she frequently muses on death.91 In this film, these ruminations even occasionally refer to the concepts of death in life and the responsibility to recollect the dead. When Varda says, standing in the grounds of Guy Bourdin’s house, ‘remembering the dead is good, but some places more readily bring them back’, she recalls Bourdin, undertakes this responsibility for commemorating his death and contemplates 86 Homay King, ‘Matter, Time, and the Digital: Varda’s The Gleaners and I’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24 (2007), 422. 87 Delphine Bénézet, The Cinema of Agnès Varda:  Resistance and Eclecticism (New York: Wallflower Press, 2014), 10. 88 Russell, Narrative Mortality, 15. 89 Rosello, ‘Agnès Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse’, 33. 90 Beauvoir, Old Age, 490. 91 Daniella Shrier notes these frequent references to mortality in her review of the film, Daniella Shrier, ‘Faces, Places (Visages, Villages)’, Another Gaze:  A Feminist Film Journal 1 (February 2018), 157.

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her own mortality. However, these references to death do not document Varda’s complex corporeal maturation as in her earlier digital films that are analysed more fully in this chapter. In these works, death haunts the images of Varda’s body and both a spectator and the camera are made especial witnesses to this subject. These themes of death’s haunting the female form and the camera as a sovereign entity coalesce in a challenge to the subjective-​spectatorial gaze in the notorious sequence of Gleaners in which Varda films Jules Breton’s painting, La Glaneuse (1877). The canvas is introduced in Varda’s narration over a close-​up of the painting and the film then cuts to a long-​shot in which the director stands next to it with a wheatsheaf slung over her right shoulder, impersonating Breton’s titular glaneuse. An edit turns the focus on to Varda in the same position but in medium shot. She then drops the sheaf behind her and raises a digital camera to her eye to meet the other camera filming her and there is a convergence of gazes as in the opening credit-​sequence of Cubains. With this meeting of gazes, as the camera is now on the other side of the diegetic division staring back, Varda presents the possibility that spectator identification with the camera, its role as an extension of the subjective gaze as in Metz’s and Baudry’s work, is a regressive assumption. Varda challenges the notion that a camera takes the place of a human eye as she requires her spectator to consider their position in this perceptual circularity: each of the two cameras enters into a loop with the gazes of both Varda and a spectator as separate entities. In scenes such as that with Breton’s La Glaneuse, Sayad argues, Varda turns the camera to look at the spectator, ‘to return the gaze’.92 The camera simultaneously embodies the gaze of both Varda and her spectator. The director meets the gaze of a spectator, and a spectator encounters their mortal self. This scene represents the potential of a looping through the positions of perceiver and perceived, or even subject and Other. The fundamental construction in ‘apparatus theory’ of the spectator as the subject identifying with the camera is challenged here. Varda frustrates the subjective gaze by introducing the supposition that a spectator is simultaneously perceiving and being perceived. Indeed, Conway considers that this sequence demonstrates the 92

Sayad, Performing Authorship, 53.

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‘value of turning one’s gaze outward’.93 Varda invites a spectator to engage with the camera and her self, each also as incarnations of a perceiver and a perceived. It is the reciprocity of these looks exchanged and acknowledged that subverts the notion of a single, superior gaze and especially that of a masculine subject over a passive feminine figure. Corresponding with Merleau-​Ponty’s signature theory of the chiasm, in Gleaners and Varda’s later digital films, the director topples the notional hierarchy of perceiver and perceived. In the scene with the wheatsheaf, she meets the conventionally dominating and domineering look of the camera with her own gaze and with that of the camera, which act as overlapping perspectives in a chiasmic encounter. Considering the independence already offered to the camera, this act speaks to a sociality, the presence of multifarious overlapping perspectives inherent in the chiasm. Their subject-​ status questioned, a spectator is obliged to engage with both Varda and the camera in a mutual relation. Instead of the spectator as a subject surveying the image in which the camera re-​presents their perception, they are aware that they too are perceived. The camera is in a reciprocal, chiasmic relation with Varda as filmmaker and as a mortal subject of the film. This intermingling of positions occurs in the scene with Breton’s La Glaneuse through the lateral gaze. Just as Merleau-​Ponty’s thought seeks to permeate boundaries between the subjective and the objective –​relying not only on vision, but on motion and cognisance –​this scene in Varda’s film also speaks to the potential of oscillation between such positions. Varda does not contend that she is the subject and her spectator the object of the gaze, but that both simultaneously regard one another, taking responsibility for each other’s vulnerability, for one another’s mortality. Varda’s film, then, opposes the singular, subjective gaze and its presentation of a feminine body as an object that it desires. In doing so, it questions traditional (patriarchal) depictions of femininity, which commodify the sexualisation of youth. Through a mirroring of the Merleau-​Pontian intersubjective relation occurring within the chiasm, Gleaners undermines the traditional masculine-​ subject-​perceiver’s surveillance of a feminine-​Other-​perceived. However, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, some critics of Merleau-​Ponty’s work, 93

Conway, Agnès Varda, 78.

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such as Le Dœuff and Butler, argue that his theory of the viewed body reiterates this imposition of a female form created through a sexualised masculine gaze which then dominates this femininised figure. The body portrayed in Merleau-​Ponty’s philosophy, for Le Dœuff, is a female figure constructed by (heterosexual) male desire through the gaze and Butler posits that the world Merleau-​Ponty describes ‘is a reification of a relation of domination between the sexes’.94 Merleau-​Ponty’s insistence on the autonomy of the positions of subject and Other in the chiasmic overlap creates a space for the dominion of female by male. A patriarchal construction of relations between what this system defines as masculine and feminine denies the inherent potential within the chiasm to move between positions of subject and Other. Yet –​as Butler herself contends, and as seen above –​Merleau-​Ponty intends to construct a self that exists ‘prior’ to the formation of hierarchical or conflictual subjects and Others. Additionally, as Butler writes elsewhere, arguing against Irigaray’s interpretation of the phenomenologist’s thought, Merleau-​Ponty’s notion of the ‘I’ associates ‘him or her’ in the world of the flesh, the chiasm external to that self so that this ‘I’ ‘is no longer its own center or ground’.95 This deconstructs hierarchies between subjects, as Beauvoir attempted to do before him and as Sartre and Levinas failed to do, offering equality to them as every self has access to every tendency. So, even as Merleau-​Ponty does not address the objectification of the feminine, per se, his unfinished theory of the chiasm presents the tools to do so. This levelling of the stratum of subjects or selves is located, too, in the innate death inevitable to all mortals. Further, in a comparable paradigm, I contend that Varda’s film presents an example in which the elemental reciprocity or looping of the chiasm destabilises the dominance of the perceiver over the perceived. Instead, Varda’s film(s) open(s) dialogue with multiple narratives and, as she says herself, ‘feminism 94 Michèle Le Dœuff, The Sex of Knowing, tr. Kathryn Hamer and Lorraine Code (New York:  Routledge, 2003), 79; and Judith Butler, ‘Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description:  A Feminist Critique of Merleau-​Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception’, in Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young, eds, The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 95. 95 Butler, ‘Sexual Difference’, 162.

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is big enough to have many voices, many tunes’.96 By creating a circuit or loop between perceivers and perceived, the filmmaker constructs an authentic chiasmic relation, weakening the gendered, hierarchical structure that Le Dœuff and Butler find in Merleau-​Ponty’s writings. Whilst not specifically noting a gender-​division but acknowledging a looping of dialectical positions in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought, Sartre writes (after Merleau-​Ponty’s death in 1961) that the ‘positive always has its negative corollary and vice versa. Consequently, the one will flow eternally through the other in a circular motion’.97 This circular motion or loop in Merleau-​Ponty’s philosophy speaks to the perennial intersecting of supposed adversarial or stratified positions. As we have seen, this is a stance that Sartre himself takes regarding relations between subject and Other in Being and Nothingness: ‘there is no dialectic for my relations toward the Other but rather a circle’ (p. 385). He acknowledges that there is a passage, an oscillation back and forth between Other and subject, but he insists on the repression of the former by the latter. Writing of such a chiasmic looping, from the perspective of sexual difference and desire, Irigaray notes that such a gendered, hierarchical division between two sexes is created instead of ‘a chiasmus or double loop in which each can move out towards the other and back to itself ’.98 Conversely, in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought, the chiasmic looping, this circular motion that Sartre and Irigaray refer to, recognises the simultaneous divergence and overlap of subject and Other, offering the potential to undermine traditional, gendered hierarchical structures. This oscillation between positions is vital and this looping is attainable in and because of the chiasmic overlap. In those of Varda’s films analysed in this chapter, it is a digital camera that appends itself to the space in which this looping is possible. The camera perceives and is perceived as it enters the chiasmic loop between Varda, who is also perceiver and perceived, deconstructing the domination of the former of these positions over the latter and instead creating a reciprocal relation between these positions. 9 6 Martin, ‘Projecting Clichés’, 36. 97 Jean-​Paul Sartre, ‘Merleau-​Ponty’, in Situations, tr. Benita Eisler (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1966), 212 [1961]. 98 Luce Irigaray, ‘Sexual Difference’, in Toril Moi, ed., French Feminist Thought:  A Reader (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 121.

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The encounters between Varda off-​screen, as creator, and on-​screen, as object of the gaze, are chiasmic and non-​hierarchical. Varda’s own body is the object in the image, but inseparable at times from the gaze by which it is constituted as it is this same body that picks up the digital camera to film itself. In this way, Varda’s presence in the film symbolises the possibility of an overlap between subjective and objective worlds as equal elements. This shared world, for Merleau-​Ponty, ‘connects our perspectives, permits transition from one to the other’.99 This social relation speaks to the chiasmic overlap and especially the corporeality central to Merleau-​ Ponty’s notion that Others are ‘my twins or the flesh of my flesh’.100 Such an embodied chiasmic encounter is exemplified in the scenes of Gleaners in which Varda films her own hands.101 Describing in interview how her hands interact in the film, the director suggests that ‘[o]ne hand filmed and the other hand was the subject’.102 The director articulates her hands as separate, but, of course, existing in the same flesh. As Butler observes, for Merleau-​Ponty, the touching hand ‘is not identical to the hand that is touched, even if it is the same hand’.103 Admitting to a chiasmic relation between her hands, filming and filmed, in a later interview Varda observes that their interaction ‘closes a kind of circle’.104 In Gleaners, Varda and her hands fulfil a dual (yet symbiotic) role as subject filming and Other filmed. Varda’s hands are, along with the spectator and the camera, independent punctum plotting a circle or a loop that speaks to the multiplicity of the flesh whilst maintaining autonomy, difference.

99 Merleau-​Ponty, VI, 13. 100 Merleau-​Ponty, ‘Introduction’, to his Signs, 15. 101 I explore these themes of Varda’s hands creating a chiasmic loop in the film further in my ‘Varda’s Chiasmic Hand: Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000), Les Plages d’Agnès (2008) and Merleau-​Ponty’s Intersubjective Relation’, Mise au Point 9 ( June 2017) . 102 Darke, ‘Refuseniks’, 33. 103 Butler, ‘Sexual Difference’, 169. 104 Cited in Cybelle H. McFadden, Gendered Frames, Embodied Cameras:  Varda, Akerman, Cabrera, Calle, and Maïwenn (Madison, WI: FDUP, 2014), 55 [from an original interview with Julie Rigg for the Movietime programme, on ABC Radio, 5 June 2009].

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Merleau-​Ponty writes of this connection within the touching of hands as the overlap between subject and Other which can occur in the handshake in which ‘he and I are like organs of one single intercorporeality’.105 The Other and subject, in the connection of their hands, are conjoined but distinct: this handshake is a tactile metonym for the theory of the flesh, the chiasm. Derrida interprets this overlapping of hands in Merleau-​Ponty’s writing as the ‘touching-​touched of the hand [that is] immediately to involve the other, and my experience of the other’s body’.106 This touching of hands is the subject’s experience of the Other’s alterity represented by their own body. This is the chiasm incarnate, the subject and Other remaining separate –​each aware of the other’s diversity –​whilst overlapping in the flesh. As with my consideration of Varda’s presence within Gleaners, this imbrication between positions can also occur within the self. The touching hands are, then, a site of the communication between subject and Other in the self. The touching of hands, whether one’s own or one’s own with another’s, speaks to a motion beyond boundaries, the loop inherent to the chiasm.107 Varda’s filming of her own hands partakes in a related enactment of such intercorporeality. Gleaners similarly confronts the dominance of vision within the senses and that of the seer over the seen, specifically frustrating the objectifying gaze of the (masculine) subject-​spectator. It is Varda the filmmaker behind the camera who films Varda’s body, her hands which represent the alternating positions of active and passive, touching and touched, seeing and seen and subjective and objective. They depict, then, the literal enfleshment of the chiasmic relation, which in this film is an intersubjective encounter 105 Merleau-​Ponty, ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow’, in Signs, 168. 1 06 Derrida, On Touching, 189. 107 One of the passages in which Merleau-​Ponty describes the touching of his hands as a chiasmic communication is recited by a blind character in Godard’s film JLG/​ JLG:  autoportrait de décembre (JLG/​JLG  –​Self-​Portrait in December, 1995) over shots of a flatbed editor. The spools of film circling around on the editing table become a visual metaphor for the reversibility of the chiasmic flow through positions, what Irigaray conceives of as the loop of the chiasm, that are evoked by the character’s speech. The visually impaired character and the rendition of Merleau-​ Ponty’s passage about communication through touch open a discourse on vision’s subordination to aural and tactile sensations.

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occurring in or through the body of the self. In a renowned passage on embodied perception, Merleau-​Ponty describes this overlapping of one’s hands: with my left hand, [I] feel my right hand as it touches an object, the right hand as an object is not the right hand as it touches: the first is a system of bones, muscles and flesh brought down at a point of space, the second shoots through space like a rocket to reveal the external object in its place.108 Each hand remains separate in function but combined through their mutual touching. Additionally, the body has the potential to occupy the positions of perceiver and perceived, subject and object. The touching together of one’s own hands epitomises the self that embodies positions of seen and seer, of subjectivity and objectivity, a complex self: the polysemous ‘I’ that exists on a spectrum of subjectivities that includes perspectival positions and gendered identities. Commenting further on this example of embodied perception, Merleau-​Ponty writes of this ‘ambiguous set-​up in which both hands can alternate the rôles of “touching” and being “touched”’.109 Here he asserts that each hand ‘alternates’ between the positions available to them. In the literal flesh of each hand occurs a chiasmic reversibility. As Rosalyn Diprose argues, for Merleau-​Ponty the lived body is ‘neither exclusively a subject nor an object but both’.110 This reversibility or ambiguity is present in Varda’s films, in which there is an alternation between perceiver and perceived as the camera mediates between her hands. In the scene of Gleaners in which she discovers cordate potatoes in a pile of the tubers discarded from a local harvest, Varda again refers to the separate roles her hands play in the film: ‘Immediately I began filming perilously with one hand. My other hand gleaning heart-​shaped potatoes’. Initially, one hand films as subject, the one affiliated with the camera which gazes, and the other hand is an object gazed upon. There is an interaction here between autonomous Other and subject as Varda’s hands function independently, actively discharging different duties. In Merleau-​Ponty’s thought this would constitute the self as simultaneously perceiver and perceived within the space of a non-​hierarchical gaze. Appropriately, King 108 109 110

Merleau-​Ponty, PP, 105. Ibid.  106. Rosalyn Diprose, The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference (London: Routledge, 1994), 221.

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writes of the tubers Varda picks through as rhizomes, ‘a root with underground circuits […] a constant source rather than an end product’.111 The potatoes and the relation between Varda’s hands as she collects them represent such a circuitry or looping that is the radicle of the chiasm. The communication between positions, the perpetual motion towards another situation that is intrinsic to the chiasm or the fold in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought, is for Deleuze an ‘interlacing or between-​two [that] merges with the fold’.112 The potential between-​ness of subjectivity becoming objectivity (and vice versa) becomes with the chiasm, a co-​presence. Of such liminality, Jenny Chamarette has argued that in Gleaners Varda’s hand as filmed object ‘hovers at the liminal in-​betweenness of Varda-​as-​subject and Varda-a​ s-fi ​ lmmaker’.113 For Chamarette, the hand sits between the two positions Varda fulfils: filmmaker and subject of the film. I argue instead that Varda’s hands represent Varda-​as-​subject-​of-​the-​image and Varda-​as-​ filmmaker-​subject in a loop completed by the camera and a spectator, each merged in the same flesh, the same world. This circuit becomes a joint site in which the hierarchy between the positions of a (masculine) subject perceiving and a (feminine) Other perceived are questioned. Varda extends this loop, which is inclusive, and through it pulses the certainty of death in life. The film refers to a coincidence, an intersecting that not only happens with the subject and the Other through an imbrication of hands but also, as seen above in discussion of the liver-​spots on Varda’s hands, with life and death (see Figure 29).

1 11 112 113

King, ‘Matter, Time, and the Digital’, 423. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, tr. and ed. Seán Hand (London: Continuum, 2006), 92. Chamarette, Phenomenology and the Future of Film, 119.

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Figure 29:  Varda’s hands speak to an intersecting of subjects and life and death in The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000), © Ciné-​Tamaris.

Writing on Merleau-​Ponty’s notions of the chiasm and death, as noted in the introduction to this chapter, Cataldi considers the chiasmic link between life and death occurring through the hands of the living self that touch those of a passed loved one. For her, living and dead ‘hands are both perceptible, as objects; they “overlap” in this regard. They are both caught up in the same fabric or skin –​the same flesh of perceptibility’.114 In the flesh, or chiasm, the overlap between life and death is perceptible when a living hand encounters a dead one. This contact with the dead clearly brings an awareness of mortality to the living subject. In the scenes from Gleaners in which Varda films her hand, she conveys a similar awareness of her own mortality in the images of her film: an encounter with her own death signified by the shots of her wrinkled, age-​spotted hand. The other hand, the one that films, brings life, creates new images and symbolises the living subject. This is the hand that composes what Varda terms cinécriture, that which she defines as everything from choosing the subject and the locations of a film, to selecting the publicity material and the poster: ‘it’s a handmade work of film-​making –​that I really believe. And I call that cine-​writing.’115 For Varda, each of these aspects of filmmaking 1 14 Cataldi, ‘Embodying Perceptions of Death’, 192. 115 Andrea Meyer, ‘Gleaning the Passion of Agnès Varda’, in Agnès Varda: Interviews, ed. Kline, 201 [2001].

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is hand-​crafted. Then, the creative hand is connected through the camera in a chiasmic exchange with the director’s age-​blemished, wrinkled filmed hand. Via the camera, Varda’s gaze falls upon herself as elderly Other –​as it had done with the market-​dwellers of L’Opéra –​and through the chiasm, the loop back towards the self, she is simultaneously the living, creative subject. This looping epitomises the central tenet of the film: that which society deems waste can instead be considered, in the right hands, essential, as either sustenance or as a source of art. This process also implies the complexity of the body that has the potential to incorporate subjective and objective attitudes. The unrefined Merleau-​Pontian chiasm offers a productive framework and a theoretical space in which subject and Other overlap in an equal, reciprocal relation, in harmony. In Varda’s digital films she is both the filmer and the filmed, the perceiver and the perceived, potentially an Other or a subject. Questions about life’s transience and of the imbrication of objective and subjective positions and perceptions are fed through the loop between Varda, her camera and a spectator. In this chiasmic looping, which is inherent to Varda’s digital films Gleaners, its sequel Les Glaneurs … deux ans après (The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later, 2002) and The Beaches of Agnès (hereafter Beaches), the overlapping of positions and perceptions of spectators, the director, the subject of the image and the camera perform a similar function. The gaze of each hovers over the same objects, the same images, which are here shadowed by death. As Varda and a spectator contemplate mortality together, they enter into communication about the responsibility for death, its presence in life and its transference between positions, yet subjects and Others remain disparate in this chiasmic looping. As Merleau-​Ponty writes, ‘I can not install myself in [the Other]’, continuing that ‘if I inhabited that body I should have another solitude, comparable to that which I have, and always divergent perspectively from it’.116 The Other and subject remain separate even as their perspectives overlap and, necessarily, as the subject undertakes accountability for the death of the Other. Each self is complex, composed of this potential to become subject or Other that is constantly in flux, reciprocal. 116

Merleau-​Ponty, VI, 78.

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Comparably, in Beaches Varda speaks of assembling a person from their diverse aspects as she documents the details of her self with a camera.117 This piecing together of a whole is redolent of the combined senses of embodied perception necessary to perceive all sides of a complex object or of the multiple perspectives intrinsic in the chiasm or the polysemous self. The re-​enactments of Varda’s infancy, the multitude of still photographs; the revisiting of childhood homes and filming locations; clips from her films; references to others’ films and the art-​historical imagery, all interweave to create a complex of Varda’s life, of her enigmatic self in the film. Varda’s work and her body represent the self as a nexus, as formed from multiple features or perspectives. Alluding to this self as portrayed in Beaches, Dominique Bluher writes that Varda ‘presents a “moving picture” of fragmented, multiple, and de-​centred representations of her self, or rather her selves’.118 It is the incorporation of subjective and objective situations in her self that allows Varda to present this complex I. This chiasmic relation between subject and Other as their perspectives overlap is extended to encompass spectators of Varda’s films as the camera stares at them or their own gaze is reflected back. Writing of the impact of Varda’s filming techniques on the spectators of her earlier analogue films, Le Bonheur and One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, Ruth Hottell argues that she includes a ‘spectatorial Other in a dialogue. That is, for Varda, to admit the presence of self is also to recognize the presence of a spectator/​Other’.119 Additionally, more recently, Flitterman-​Lewis has argued that ‘Varda has invented a completely new definition of the personal, a kind of social subjectivity that is constantly formed in relation

117 Varda’s final film, Varda par Agnès (2019) reiterates this assemblage of the self, as Varda the director is composed of various discussions with collaborators and audiences about and clips from her filmography. 118 Dominique Bluher, ‘Autobiography, (Re-​)enactment and the Performative Self-​ Portrait in Varda’s Les Plages d’Agnès/​The Beaches of Agnès (2008)’, Studies in European Cinema 10/​1 (2013), 63. 119 Ruth Hottell, ‘Including Ourselves:  The Role of Female Spectators in Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur and L’Une chante, l’autre pas’, Cinema Journal 38/​2 (winter 1999), 60.

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to others’.120 I posit that Varda attempts the same correspondence in her later digital works. In these films, the presence of the spectator as an/​Other is one of many perspectives in a mutual looping relation of equality that questions the position of a single, dominant subject. This is the continuous loop of the chiasmic encounter between subjects projected through multiple forms and perspectives. In Varda’s digital films explored above, this balance is represented by an overlapping of Varda’s body (especially her hands), the camera and a spectator in a perspectival loop. Varda shoots her own ageing body, one hand filming and the other filmed, and this inter-​ relation of her appendages is an encounter between perceiver and perceived through the camera’s, a spectator’s and her own perspective. Through the filming apparatus, Varda more intimately interacts with the recognition of the shadow that her death casts over her life. In each of these films, Varda contemplates this death through the camera as if it momentarily belonged to another. In turning the camera back towards a spectator, she also invites them to regard their self and their contact with her death as well as their own. Varda presents death to her self and to her spectator, a discovery that evokes an authentic awareness of this event. A spectator’s relation with their own mortality then occurs through the death of an/​Other. These encounters with mortality on screen and a cognisance of the spectator’s own inevitable death occur via their creative, intellectual engagement with the camera, rather than an identification with it as an extension of their own subject-​hood. The importance of these themes –​new, and especially digital, media, the Merleau-​Pontian chiasmic, intersubjective relation and an encounter with death –​are developed further in the final stages of this chapter analysing key digital and video works from Marker’s later career which introduce the realms of the virtual and the internet.

120 Grace Barber-​Plentie et al., ‘After Agnès Varda: A Roundtable Discussion’, Another Gaze: A Feminist Film Journal 3 ( July 2019), 15.

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Virtual Underworld: Level Five and The Case of the Grinning Cat In Varda’s digital films, the DV camera freed the filmmaker to document her self –​her body and its signifiers of her mortality –​more intimately. This filming of a complex self portrayed the ways in which objective and subjective positions or worlds overlap in the chiasm and in this polysemous I. In analysis of two of Marker’s video and digital films, the theory of film characters as elements in this chiasmic overlapping  –​Laura in Level Five and the titular cats of The Case of the Grinning Cat (hereafter Grinning Cat)  –​precipitate a spectator’s engagement with the images of the films, s(t)imulating this movement from the internal-​subjective to the external-​objective spheres. This engagement, which speaks to an equality between beings, occurs instead of the identification of a spectator with characters in a film, primarily a masculine hero that is key to the apparatus theories of Metz and Baudry.121 Such identification with cinematic characters as extensions of the spectator-​subject is destabilised by Laura and the cats in Marker’s films through their invitation to spectators to perform a katabasis, a descent into a deathly underworld, which is articulated as digital transience. Considering such a subversion of the subjective look in Marker’s Sans Soleil, Cooper writes of the frustration of the ‘scopophilic and epistemophilic gaze’. This gaze is obstructed, Cooper continues, as Marker’s documentary ‘charts the limits of access to other people and other cultures’.122 Marker’s earlier film plots the impossibility of identification with the alterity, with the difference of the Other. Sovereign subjectivity would be maintained in such a gaze. In Level Five the possibility of ingress to Laura’s subjectivity is equally limited as she personifies the potential to move through objective and subjective realms and appeals directly to a spectator to accompany her within these worlds. Laura speaks to her dead lover and to a spectator in what Allan Francovich calls ‘a direct unblinking address right into the 121 122

Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema, 14; and Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects’, 45. Cooper, Selfless Cinema?, 51.

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camera eye and into us’.123 This communication is direct but, as Cooper argues is the case in Sans Soleil and as Merleau-​Ponty separately posits, access to the external Other is limited.124 Laura’s eye gazing back does not penetrate to the spectator’s core just as a spectator’s gaze upon her does not fully know her. It is instead the reciprocal nature of a spectatorial gaze that challenges the epistemophilic drive of the spectator who would subsume the film’s character as an extension of their self. This is equally true of the eponymous characters of Grinning Cat, who oppose theories of character-​identification as they no longer represent an extension of the spectator as subject. Instead, Laura and the cats embody the amorphous self, representing subjective and objective worlds, perceiver and perceived and death in life in reciprocal relations with an equally complex spectator. It is this reciprocity that allows for an engagement between spectator and character in which the former is invited to enter a world that is external to them: a virtual, deathly underworld. Each film is set in part in the domains of the digital, the virtual or of the internet, and Marker here enters into dialogue with theories regarding the lack of physical embodiment in the digital image, as opposed to the tactility of celluloid, that were contemporaneous to his films.125 In following such exchanges, the virtual realm presented in these films signifies a supernatural domain of the dead, given its unmooring from the material world. As virtual, the characters are ghostly and transport spectators into a deathly, digital underworld in which they encounter their mortality. Gavin Keeney writes of the ‘shadow-​ land’ within all of Marker’s works ‘that requires an inherent mistrust of the power of the image and its notorious fixity and alliance with the figure of

123 Allan Francovich, ‘The Mind’s Eye: Chris Marker’s Level Five’, Vertigo 7 (autumn 1997), 36. 124 Merleau-​Ponty, VI, 78. 125 For instance, Paolo  Cherchi  Usai, The Death of Cinema:  History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age (London: BFI, 2001); and Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001). Cherchi Usai and Manovich formulate theories based on the materiality of celluloid, conceive its degeneration as inherent to cinema’s emotive potency and ask whether digital images share this implicit deterioration.

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death’.126 I continue from such a premise in analysis of these two video and digital films, Level Five and Grinning Cat, locating this haunting death in their images. Death enters into the worlds depicted in these films because of the uncertainty and lack of fixity of the digital image and the reciprocal responsibility for each Other’s mortality, which Marker highlights. The virtual-​digital world of the internet is perceived as perpetually metamorphosing and immaterial: the digital image is (in) a continuum, imminent rather than absolute, never attaining fixity. In both Level Five and Grinning Cat this sense of multiple, unstable states overlapping in digital space represents a supernatural realm, never definitively fixed or finalised, released from nature’s corporeal, binding edicts. Certain digital-​virtual images within the two films signify a ‘shadow-​land’, a realm of the dead, because they are disconnected from the mortal world that the analogue image cleaves, informing a haunting presence within each work, just as death haunts life. Particular tactile affiliations between an object and its image are disintegrated in digital rendering: as Holly Willis notes, digital video images are disconnected from the world they depict, they ‘sever’ the indexical connection.127 Defining the indexical sign, C. S. Peirce writes that ‘we may think of it as a fragment torn away from the Object, the two in their Existence being one whole or a part of such a whole’.128 In Peirce’s definition, the indexical sign is a fragment of the object it represents, there is a corporeal connection between the object filmed and its image. Any indexical link digital images could have with the objects they symbolise is negated, any ontological bond dissolves. The digital image represents a shadow of the analogue image, emphasising their proximity to death. The virtual characters of Marker’s films, then, move within an underworld of the dead, beneath the surface world. Yet, paradoxically, even with this detachment from the objects they depict, digital images also speak Gavin Keeney, Dossier Chris Marker:  The Suffering Image (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), xi. 127 Holly Willis, New Digital Cinema:  Reinventing the Moving Image (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 33. 128 Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘Division of Signs’, in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 2, Elements of Logic, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), 137.

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to a chiasmic overlap: the connection between entities. Marker alludes to the digital image as composed from diverse but related elements early in his experiments with the medium, through the digitised characters of his Théorie des ensembles (1990). This short film presents Noah’s predicament in classifying the pairs of animals inhabiting his Ark, before a couple of wise owls arrive to explain the rudiments of set theory. Created entirely from computer-​generated images on an Apple IIGS, this film is a theory of ensembles –​of binary numbers and multiple perspectives –​and implies the computer-​generated menagerie’s compossibility, their existence in the same shared world, separate but equal constituents of a whole. As if expanding on this zoological-​communal metaphor, in Level Five the internet proxy is named the OWL, the Optional World Link, another symbol of a network in which one encounters multiple, overlapping (and often, now, conflicting) perspectives.129 In the later film, the virtual images represent a world in which Laura personifies this equality of subjective and objective positions. She and the cats of Grinning Cat epitomise an incorporeal chiasm and the deathly realms they stalk are the flesh of the world made ephemeral. These characters retain the chiasmic properties of overlapping with autonomies maintained, but the essential component of Merleau-​Pontian embodied perception, the body, is becoming a virtual simulacrum. Where in Gleaners, it was Varda’s tactile hands that signified the overlap between subject and Other and her mortality, in Marker’s films the characters demonstrate this imbrication through their liberation from corporeal, mortal attachments. It is because of this disconnection from the material world that these characters are able to move reciprocally and bi-​directionally within sites of life and death which exist simultaneously in the same flesh. These realms, as in the digital binary which are simply elements of a whole, overlap like the zones of Description and Sans Soleil and Snow White; Laura and the chats exist in ‘two zones at once’.130 Yet, in distinction to Marker’s earlier films, the deathliness of the underworld that the cats and Laura wander through intersects with the realm 129 It should be remembered that in Marker’s works, after the Greek mythological Owl of Athena, the nocturnal bird is a signifier of knowledge, see also L’Héritage de la chouette (France/​Greece, 1990) and An Owl Is an Owl Is an Owl (France, 1990). 130 Mavor, Black and Blue, 59.

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of the living through their forms. For example, in one late scene of Level Five, Laura ‘teleports’ into a shot of her workroom. Appearing gradually in a downward wipe-​edit, she enters the image fragment by fragment, as if a dot-​matrix printer steadily reveals her head, shoulders and torso: her digital body is broken down and transmitted between spaces (see Figure 30). This image alludes to her condition as being projected from an elsewhere, from the computer that is a portal to the digital domain of the OWL/​internet and therefore to a realm in which ontological rules do not apply.

Figure 30:  Laura enters the image fragment by fragment, projected from a spectral elsewhere, Level Five (Chris Marker, 1996), © Films de l'Astrophre and Argos Films.

This immaterial status allows Laura to make transitions through the presumed partitions between divergent states, inviting the film’s spectators with her. Isabelle McNeill argues that in the opening sequences of Level Five the images on the computer screen draw ‘the spectator inwards to its virtual world’.131 This digital domain into which a spectator moves functions as an underworld. Grief-​stricken at the loss of her lover, Laura accesses 131 Isabelle McNeill, ‘Transitional Spaces:  Media, Memory and the City in Contemporary French Film’, in Webber and Wilson, eds, Cities in Transition, 205.

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the virtual space that signifies an alternate, unnatural world. A spectator, engaging with her in a reciprocal, intersubjective encounter, enters this realm with her as she searches for her dead love. Writing of such a deathly domain in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought, Alphonso Lingis argues that ‘we can, as in advanced states of melancholia, settle in the realm of death’.132 Grief can lead to an inhabitation of a deathly underworld and, assuming Lingis’s assertion, Laura’s grief, her melancholy, drives her to exist in such a realm, searching for her missing lover and appealing to a spectator to follow her. In each affair she relies on the chiasmic interaction in which subject and Other, external and internal worlds and life and death overlap. In her search, Laura is the melancholic lover in pursuit of a missing partner in a Chthonic realm. Her quest therefore imitates the katabasis mytheme of a voyage in the underworld, repeated in the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice and the corresponding Japanese creation myth of Izanagi-​no-​Mikoto (He-​ Who-​Invites) and Izanami-​no-​Mikoto (She-​who-​Invites, a goddess of both creation and death).133 The female character in each saga passes into the underworld or afterlife (Hades and Yomi-​no-​kuni) and is pursued by her living partner, who is foiled in his attempt to save his lost love, but survives and returns to the physical plane.134 The female lovers are left to a shadowy existence in perpetuity. In 1950, Jean Cocteau directed a modernised film version of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Orphée, and in the same year Marker produced a review of the film.135 In his titular article, Marker writes that the rear-​view mirror of Orpheus’s car –​in which he accidently 132 Alphonso Lingis, ‘Imperatives’, in M. C. Dillon, ed., Merleau-​Ponty Vivant (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991), 95. 133 See Virgil, The Georgics, tr. L. P. Wilkinson (London: Penguin, 1983), 140–​1; and Ō no Yasumaro, ‘The Land of Hades’, Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters), tr. B. H. Chamberlain (North Charleston, SC:  CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012), 15–​17. 134 To note, in Resnais’s last film, Vous n’avez encore rien vu (You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, 2012), a modern, filmed theatrical version of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth projected onto a cinema screen acts as a portal between the dead fictional playwright Antoine d’Anthac and his assembled colleagues watching the filmed play. 135 Chris Marker, ‘Orphée’, Esprit 173 (November 1950), 694–​701. Orphée is the second film of Cocteau’s Orphic trilogy between The Blood of a Poet (1930) and Testament of Orpheus (1959). According to Jean-​Michel-​Frodon, Cocteau was a director with whom Marker allied himself and the pair shared an ‘affectionate correspondence’, Jean-​Michel Frodon, ‘Chris Marker’s Film Criticism’, tr. Stuart Liebman, Cineaste,43/​3 (summer 2018), 10.

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catches a glimpse of his paramour Eurydice, thereby consigning her forever to the underworld –​is ‘a snare of Death’. Marker continues to write that we ‘are warned that mirrors are Death’s doors’.136 For Marker, the mirror represents simultaneously a trap set by Death –​to ensure that Orpheus gazes upon Eurydice’s image –​and, as in Hiroshima and Marienbad, a portal of death, navigated by Orpheus. In Level Five and Grinning Cat Marker employs the computer screen as a similar portal between the worlds of the living and the dead, one that a spectator also passes through. As well as these digital films, the director has created other similar virtual-​digital spheres into which spectators are summoned and that further demonstrate my argument. His archipelago ‘Ouvroir’ in the online virtual world of Second Life and the labyrinthine, near-​limitless domain of his CD-​ROM work Immemory are both realms in which indexical connections are severed. Writing of the user’s immersion in Marker’s digital-​virtual works, Jesse P. Finnegan argues that Immemory relies ‘on the agency and interaction of a spectator beset by vying narratives and images’. The site Marker creates in Second Life, 'Ouvroir', Finnegan continues, ‘goes one step further by embodying the spectator within the spectacle’.137 Spectators are incorporated into these virtual domains and are even a crucial, if independent, element in their constitution. As Lingis writes of the melancholic in Merleau-​Ponty’s work and as I argue about Laura, the chats and spectators of these digital films, subjects settle in this realm of the dead. Similarly, in Marker’s commentary on Orphée, he refers to a spectator’s ability to penetrate the surface of the screen of the film (‘death’s mirror’): ‘we pass through the screen, we live the life of characters in the screen, we live in the world of the screen’.138 Viewing Orphée, a spectator enters through the screen to occupy the world of the film, but retains a position apart from this external space. In Marker’s analysis of the film, a spectator reflects (on) the external world, creating a chiasmic inter-​relation between the objective and subjective, the perceived and perceiver and, of course, between life and death. As Merleau-​Ponty defines the chiasm, it is an image that describes the simultaneous overlapping and divergence between perspectives, a 136 Marker, ‘Orphée’, 697 (my tr.). 137 Jesse P. Finnegan, ‘Site Specifics: Chris Marker and Second Life’, Film Comment, 46/​6 (November–​December 2010), 10. 138 Marker, ‘Orphée’, 699 (my tr.).

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coexistence that alludes to the potential for movement between these positions as if they exist on a spectrum. In Level Five, it is Laura who facilitates this chiasmic relation between a spectator’s consciousness and this external world (the internet/​virtual domain), which is in this case the Chthonic realm. This assertion is exemplified in the moments in which Laura becomes a proxy screen. Throughout the film, flickering lights are cast onto her flesh as she becomes a screen for these phantom images. Predominantly reflected on her face, these pictures are those beamed from the computer, projected from the monitor.139 These glimmering light-​ shafts that are cast from an underworld signify Laura as another screen and, through this affinity with this immaterial, deathly realm, she is a disembodied character who, paradoxically, embodies each of the characters of Orpheus and Eurydice and Izanagi and Izanami (see Figure 31).

Figure 31:  Laura as screen reflecting images of an immaterial, deathly realm in Level Five (Chris Marker, 1996), © Films de l'Astrophre and Argos Films.

Through her actions, Laura represents the dead female characters in their underworlds and their living male lovers in search of them. In Plato’s account of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, in Sympósion (p. 44) (The Symposium, 139 This device is also employed in Marker’s short film 2084 (1984), in which images of wild horses coursing through plains are cast onto the hands of one of the female students who make up the film’s subjects.

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c.385–​370 bce), Phaedrus recalls that the Gods revealed only a phantom of Eurydice to Orpheus, showing him ‘a mere ghost […] they did not surrender her real person’. Similarly evoking supernatural figures, in the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters, c.711–​12) retelling of the Japanese saga, Izanagi casts a light on Izanami and sees her as she is in the underworld: ‘he lit one light’, ‘she was rotting’ and, ‘overawed at the sight’, he fled.140 Eurydice is replaced by an image and the light that falls on Izanami’s face reveals her true incarnation, her decomposition in death. These stories institute the tradition, which Beauvoir, Bronfen, Chanter and others comment on, in which death and the female body are linked.141 Similarly, in Level Five Laura moves through the deathly realm and is marked by this death: she is both the phantom image and the form on whose face the lights fall to reveal her communication with death. For instance, in one late sequence Laura claims, ‘I know death. I know it well, I know it by heart’, and fashions for herself a death-​mask from a Pin-​Art sculpture. Yet, Laura also represents the male characters of the Greek and Japanese myths who are equally marked by death. As noted, both Orpheus and Izanagi escape the underworld and the latter brings death with him in the guise of Izanami’s threat to kill a thousand of his people every day for abandoning her and her subsequent existence as a goddess of death.142 Marker writes himself of the myth of the death of Orpheus that ‘it insists on this: it is his death and not Death’.143 Like Izanagi, Laura conveys the certitude of death from the underworld, and, like Orpheus, it is her own, she also embodies both the male and female characters in these myths. Writing of this deathly liaison in Level Five, Howard Hampton refers to Laura’s address to her lost lover as a ‘ghost-​to-​ghost call’ in which both characters are deceased.144 For Hampton, Laura is dead and corresponds directly with her departed love. Comparably, Timothy Murray argues that, when Laura asks at the beginning of the film if you must die to reach the titular fifth level,

1 40 141 142 143 144

Yasumaro, Kojiki, 15. Beauvoir, SS, 177–​98; and Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 182. Yasumaro, Kojiki, 16. Marker, ‘Orphée’, 698 (my tr.). Howard Hampton, ‘Review: Level Five’, Film Comment 50/​4 ( July/​August 2014) accessed 8 March  2016.

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the answer is affirmative: ‘one must die […] to attain Level 5’.145 Where for Hampton and Murray Laura is dead, I argue that she passes back and forth between realms of life and death, traverses the permeable mirror or screen between them. She returns to the living world with the certitude of death in her consciousness, haunted by it, but she flickers between the worlds. In an inverse-​parallel to Eurydice − and maintaining a disembodied presence like that of the eponymous heroine of Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) which is an intertextual reference in Marker’s film − Laura claims that ‘you could fall for an image then have a real lady replace it’. Laura is presented as intangible, incorporeal, an image even, but retains her potential to become a ‘real lady’; she embodies Weeks’s definition of woman as ‘not a final product, but an ongoing, always incomplete series of effects of a process of reiteration’.146 One can fall for the image of someone, imagined or imaged, for their Othered self, but they retain the possibility of becoming, to attain subjectivity. As well as preserving her potential to become a ‘real lady’, to become subject, Laura also maintains the capacity to move –​as Cataldi’s interpretation of Merleau-​Ponty’s chiasmic inter-​relation asserts –​from death to life and vice versa.147 The lights cast on her face are ghostly reflections from beyond the grave, yet they indicate that ‘death’s doors’ open both ways. Laura moves between these realms and as she moves through the domain of death she is marked by it: spectral, she exists on a spectrum of becoming subject, becoming Other, becoming dead. In her melancholia, she has negotiated this underworld, the realm of death which is for Lingis writing on Merleau-​Ponty a ‘delirious space without levels’.148 In counterpoint to Murray, the realms or the levels of Marker’s film are instead, as with all perceptions and positions as Merleau-​Ponty contends, non-​hierarchical or chiasmically reversible. These levels are permeable and do not speak to life and death as fixed states bordered off from one another as they are never definitively finalised and movement between them –​as in the divine myths –​is reciprocal.149 Death exists in life and this speaks to the 145 Timothy Murray, ‘Wounds of Repetition in the Age of the Digital: Chris Marker’s Cinematic Ghosts’, Cultural Critique 46 (autumn 2000), 120. 146 Weeks, Constituting Feminist Subjects, 127. 147 Cataldi, ‘Embodying Perceptions of Death’, 196. 148 Lingis, ‘Imperatives’, 95 (my emphasis). 149 Rosen, Change Mummified, 334.

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undermining of succession, order or even chronology. There is in Level Five, and specifically Laura’s search for her lover, a lateral movement that disregards spatial and temporal levels and boundaries. Considering Merleau-​Ponty’s notion of the event that disrupts time, Galen A. Johnson argues that death, and especially that of the Other, transforms life, making it ‘irreversibly and immemorially out of joint’.150 The death of a loved one, for Johnson, dislocates the linear passage of time and therefore of life. In Level Five, it is Laura’s melancholy and grief that have caused her desperate search of the internet, an underworld beyond the physical world, a domain of death and fragmented time. Inviting spectators along with her on her quest, she passes into this realm. Then death passes through a chiasmic loop, as in Varda’s digital films. At the end of Level Five the narrator, ‘Chris’, says that Laura now realised that the game ‘would repeat, in a loop’. Laura moves through the worlds of life and death, in a circuit, in perpetuity, but into this loop she has summoned a spectator. They are each amorphous points on this chiasmic circuit between the internal and external and the realms of life and death. A spectator engages with Laura, with the notions of her death and her lover’s death, which inspires contemplation of their own mortality. This encounter precipitates the authentic awareness of death that in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought arises from contact with the Other. Laura belongs to a realm in which traditionally opposed positions –​subjective and objective, life and death –​overlap as elements of one whole: the chiasm. As with other Marker films, such as Sans Soleil, death is not separate from life, but each exists together in every entity. The deathly, virtual underworld is an egalitarian site, representing the mortality inherent to us all, an equality between subjects and Others. There are no fixed elements in the digital domain and, in a sense that exceeds that displayed by Varda in Gleaners, borders between traditionally obverse positions are blurred. As is the case for Laura, the yellow chats of Grinning Cat signify this chiasmic overlapping of customarily opposite states. These guardians of the underworld also access a supernatural, subterranean domain and are portals by which spectators pass

150

Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful, 231.

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between worlds: they too are figures that, as they flit between these positions, embody this transition. The first image of Grinning Cat is of a computer screen on which an email is opened, alluding to the domain of the internet, the virtual realm. The next shot refers to the titular cats’ position in this digital world, as a stuttering ‘in-​camera’ zoom effect introduces a close-​up of the first grimalkin, drawing a spectator’s consciousness inwards to this unfixed space. These bright yellow cats that were painted by Thoma Vuille share the grin of John Tenniel’s (1865) and Arthur Rackham’s (1907) Cheshire Cat illustrations for Lewis Carroll's Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). This smile, the narrator of Grinning Cat proposes, is the gateway to a different Paris. The grin is a portal between disparate realms via which, in a further intrigue with Carroll's feline character, the yellow cats can also appear and disappear at will. Like Guillaume-​en-​Égypte − in the virtual world of Second Life and elsewhere − these yellow cats invite viewers into this alternate world. And, like Beny Moré in Cubains, their smile is the portal into the external world of the film image. The titular felines are shown throughout Grinning Cat daubed on walls, chimneys and even more ambitious spots around Paris from which, Marker demonstrates, they vanish and reappear. This transience leads McNeill to describe these cats as ‘apparitions’.151 This apparitional evaporation is exemplified in one sequence in the middle of the film where the camera pans upwards over a cat painted on an outer wall of a church and pauses on the spire above it. This image cuts, almost imperceptibly, to an identically framed shot of the spire and the camera then descends to the space on the wall where the cat was moments before, yet it has disappeared. As digital images, the cats are never complete, are therefore intrinsically ephemeral, always becoming. Marker intimates that, because of their digital DNA, they do not abide by the rules and boundaries of the tangible world and a spectator, therefore, engages with these images differently. For Rodowick, computerised graphics do not correspond to an ‘ordinary spatial sense of the world and actual events taking place within it, but rather to our perceptual and cognitive norms of

151

McNeill, ‘Transitional Spaces’, 208.

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apprehending a represented space’.152 The cats’ digital composition draws a spectator into an ambiguous place in which ‘normal’ cognitive notions of space are interrogated. These digital images –​les chats –​are not restricted to a ‘real’ space (see Figure 32).

Figure 32:  The eponymous, phantasmal chats in The Case of the Grinning Cat (Chris Marker, 2004), © Les Films du Jeudi, Laurence Braunberger and Arte France.

Instead, they pass like ghosts between the living domain –​the Paris of protests and church walls –​and a deathly underworld. This phantasmic form is indicated, also, through their affiliation with other supernatural forces. In an early sequence in the film, for example, the narrator conflates the cats with other spectral and mythical beings: ‘it is just soon after so many apparitions of gremlins, zombies and griffins you’re ready to give up, that the cat deigns to materialise’.153 This comment accompanies one of the sequences shot in 152 D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 103. 153 This layer of explication and therefore amplification of meaning occurs only in the English version of the film which has a narrator, where the French version does not. The cats also evoke thoughts of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Macavity: The Mystery Cat’ from

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the Paris Métro –​a literal underworld that Marker has situated as the location of the deaths of the nine killed after demonstrations against the OAS in Le Joli Mai –​as the camera follows a pigeon along a corridor before it passes out of sight around a corner. When the camera turns the same bend, the bird has vanished –​as the cats are also wont to do –​and in its stead a man walks alone (see Figures 33.1 and 33.2). Like the chats jaunes and Laura, the pigeon is ephemeral, impermanent and, along with the hybrid creature, the griffin, and the figure that, as we have seen, embodies death in life, the living dead, the zombie, it is also an indication of an overlapping of and motion between forms, spaces or states.

Figures 33.1 and 33.2:  A pigeon flies along a subway … and is replaced by a shadowy figure in The Case of the Grinning Cat (Chris Marker, 2004), © Les Films du Jeudi, Laurence Braunberger and Arte France.

Further, when Marker employs footage from a television documentary, Art, into which he superimposes the yellow felines –​showing them haunting paintings such as Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (The Brothel of Avignon, 1907) –​he presents the digital image as cuckoo to such distinguished painterly images. The cats inhabit these worlds like the camera does the works of Van Gogh, Picasso and Gauguin in Resnais’s films d’art, and they also haunt the televisual domain. In a rare interview, speaking about Grinning Cat with film journalist Annick Rivoire, Marker refers to television

Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), who is described as a monstrous fiend, who has broken the law of gravity and is frequently, impossibly elusive: ‘not there!’

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as being ‘like Cocteau’s mirror in which we see death at work’.154 In further allusions to the screen as mirror and Cocteau’s Orpheus, Marker insinuates that television is another world inhabited by death.155 Notably, Grinning Cat was originally shot on digital video for television and then transferred to 35mm film. The cats are digital and as spectral, supernatural creatures they explore the Chthonic realm of death. As imitations of bodies, as simulacra of corporeality, they represent death in life, the imbrication of these states. This ability to represent independent temporal points is enhanced because of their digitality, their inter-​corporeality, their lack of fixity. The cats of Grinning Cat are digital, phantasmic, televisual (speaking to their traversing of visible space), virtual and chiasmic. I am not, however, asserting that the chiasm is digital, but that there is significant correspondence between Merleau-​Ponty’s theory and the principle of binary code: that of co-​ present yet separate unions as part of a whole. The cats − like Laura − progress in different directions and in a reciprocal relation with a spectator they conduct their consciousness into the virtual, deathly realm and back again. Through the sociable invitation into the Chthonic realm, in considering the death of the Other, the notion of a necessary identification with these digital characters is corroded and gradually replaced by an engagement with them through a chiasmic overlapping. Spectators are obliged to question their position in the worlds of the film as the cats defy them to consider these feline characters as extensions of their own subjectivities. Wandering the underworld with the cats, however, spectators encounter the death of the Other and an awareness of their own mortality. This rendezvous is then an engagement, disarming the character identification of Metzian or Baudrian apparatus theory. In Grinning Cat, the cats are apparitions in a simulacrum of a real space. They are independent and ghostly, indicating the chiasmic overlap in which each element, the internal consciousness of a spectator and the external world of the film, remains distinct. Their severance from indexicality unmoors the cats, as phantom images, to exist within both the Chthonic and living worlds, and Marker explicitly associates them with the preternatural. Moreover, and appropriately 154 Annick Rivoire, ‘Interview –​Chris Marker et M. Chat: Chats discutent’, Libération (4 December 2004) accessed 18 March 2016 (my tr.). 155 See, for instance, Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema, 48.

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for a film that plots responses to global events from the political left, the cats speak to the overlap between individuals in a collective, social and mutual perception of the world: chiasmic intersubjectivity. The chats and Laura are characters representing the mirror, the screen or partition between the living and deathly domains and so embody death in life. They are personifications of the chiasmic envelopment of multiple elements in a whole. Acting as guides to the underworld for spectators of each film, they refer to the chiasmic overlapping of subjects in this shared world. These phantom bodies can pass into the world of the dead and return precisely because of their integral digitality and non-​corporeality.

Concluding Remarks In this chapter, I have considered the ways in which the films analysed impede spectatorial identification with their cameras and characters which is critical to apparatus theory, instead deconstructing frameworks in which subjects subjugate Others. I have argued that the relation between spectator and camera as they jointly perceive images is more akin to the chiasmic overlap between perceivers in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought, encouraging an engagement rather than identification on the part of the films’ spectators. As Merleau-​ Ponty argues, cinema is well adapted to create a union between minds and bodies, between minds and worlds, and the articulation of each in the other. Particular films of Resnais, Varda and Marker signify such unions or overlaps between minds, bodies and the world. They also depict similar relations between Others and subjects and the overlapping of death with life, reinforcing the presence of death in life. In these films by Resnais, Varda and Marker the discrete apparatus of analogue and digital cameras can each function as embodied perceivers. These films subvert the pleasure or desire sought and provided through identification with the camera or characters, which is central to the process of filmmaking for Baudry.156 Instead, they perform what Mulvey argues is a ‘blow against the 156 Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects’, 45.

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monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions [...] to free the look of the camera into its materiality […] and the look of the audience into dialectics and passionate detachment’.157 Locating analogies between the manner in which spectators engage with the apparatus and the figures depicted in the images they capture and Merleau-​Ponty’s key theories of embodied perception and the chiasm revealed how cameras and characters draw spectators into the image to an encounter with death. They also create overlaps between subjects and Others, breaking down patriarchal hierarchies that position male-​subject-​ spectators as domineering objectified feminine figures within their gaze, as well as between the minds of spectators and external or cinematic zones or worlds. In so doing, established notions of spectator identification are challenged and the potency of the subjective, sexualising or objectifying gaze is undermined. For Merleau-​Ponty perception is not solely visual, but tactile, kinetic and also cognitive. The films analysed here describe such perception − chiasmic and embodied − and indicate to their spectators ways in which they can experience and perceive these images, especially those that speak to gender, intersubjective equality and death. As Le Dœuff and Butler imply, Merleau-​Ponty’s theory of embodied perception does not speak directly to deconstructing hierarchical communications between genders (and Irigaray argues that it reiterates the patriarchal hierarchy between a perceived feminine and a masculine perceiver). Yet his unfinished conception of the chiasm does provide a phenomenological schema to think in terms of these relations as a loop of becoming, a circular, reciprocal interaction between beings that retains the potential to move through states of subjectivity and objectivity, death and life and gendered positions. In these films spectator identification and the subjective gaze are replaced with spectator engagement: a chiasmic, reciprocal, mutual, social and, finally, intersubjective relation.

157 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, 27.

Becoming Conclusive: Death and Gender in the Intersubjective Relation

The concept central to this book from its inception has been an understanding of mortality as death in life and its consequent coincidence with feminist, ethical, existential and phenomenological encounters between filmic subjects through vision, movement and dialogue. Progressing from Sartrean conflict between subjects and Others, through Beauvoir’s ethical feminism and Levinas’s attempt to avoid the diminution of Otherness or alterity to Merleau-​Pontian mutual overlapping of subjects, it has explored the ways in which for each of Varda, Resnais and Marker, death is a constant haunting presence to life. The film analyses articulate the diverse revisions that this presence of death stimulates in subject–​Other relations, with a focus on gendered interactions, and, ultimately, the complex self who consequently accepts responsibility for the deaths of Others and admits to their own mortality. The acceptance of a mutual mortality leads to an understanding of the complex self, the polysemous ‘I’ with potential accesses to attitudes of Other or subject and alternative positions, such as a multitude of genders. Through circles or loops of reciprocity, mortal beings move between these positions and encounter death –​in moments of war, colonialism, illness, epidemics –​as an integral element of living. Conversely, these encounters with death inform these beings and define their comprehension of their selves as complex: positioned as subject and/​or Other. I have applied this notion of the reiterating identity to cinematic subjects, spectators and filmmakers and throughout have maintained the diversity of the medium of film-​art by analysing aspects of motion, apparatus, soundtrack, script, spectatorial engagement, performance, editing and technological advances. Avoiding a reductionist approach by attending to a singular conceptual voice –​appropriately for a work that has sought to locate and challenge ideologies that take incontestable, egocentric postures –​I have set the critiques of Sartre’s, Levinas’s and Merleau-​Ponty’s commentators, especially Beauvoir, against their

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totemic philosophies, opening a dialogue that welcomed a deconstruction of hierarchical intersubjective relations. This discourse was also echoed in the implicit communications in the images of the triptych of rive gauche directors who were friends and collaborators. This multitude of expressions, embodying a polyphony pertinent to this project’s aims, resonated through a focus on challenging boundaries between positions of subject and Other and between the states of life and death. In investigating the degrees to which the philosophies and films analysed here invite the permeation of these orthodox divisions, I have defined an intersection between theories of death and gendered subject–​Other relations in film. The first chapter worked through the paradoxical nature of the intersubjective relation as it is introduced in Sartre’s early philosophy, a conflictual hierarchical intercourse, and in his political writing, where the subject has responsibility for the (death of the) Other. It established how, through the haunting presence of death, Sartre’s fluctuating interpretation of subject–​Other relations becomes at points closer to the reciprocal encounter in Beauvoir’s ethical feminism. From Beauvoir (and Butler), I developed the key concept of a complex or polysemous self, an identity embracing positions of subject and Other, which successively leads to authentic intersubjectivity: a reciprocal liaison between subjects, as opposed to a subject and Others. The chapter charted Sartre’s vacillation between theses of conflict and culpability in relations between subject and Others and Beauvoir’s construction of an ethical, complex self through analysis of six key films in the careers of Resnais, Marker and Varda. In analyses of Resnais’s Night and Fog and Muriel (with allusion to Sartre’s notion of bad faith) the regard for the victims of World War II also alluded to, in turn, an accountability for the death of the Other in Algeria. For, as Beauvoir writes in The Ethics of Ambiguity, ‘abstention is complicity’.1 The figure of the Muselmänner in Resnais’s documentary film, asserts that the vulnerability of these casualties of concentration camp life cast the shadow of their death over the images of themselves and over the consciousness (or conscience) of the spectator of those images, commencing the acknowledgement of 1

Beauvoir, EA, 86.

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accountability for the death of the Other. Similarly, in Muriel there are secondary, interjecting image-​tracks in the film representing the consciousness of Hélène and of Bernard, revealing the perforation of their bad faith that alludes to their mounting shame over deaths for which they have previously denied liability. These emotions erupted through specific sequences as deferred responses to profound, repressed and tortuous events. These readings located concealed signifiers within the texts that referred, ultimately, to a responsibility for the Other and the acceptance of death as a haunting presence. Each of these films speaks to the destabilising of oppositional, intersubjective encounters –​of surpassing subjective–​objective conflicts –​ that is fundamental to Beauvoir’s ‘What is Existentialism?’ and Ethics of Ambiguity and Sartre’s version of a subject’s responsibility for colonised Others, a theory notably lacking from his signal philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness. Comparably, such suspended or hidden reactions to war were also present under the surface of the images of Le Joli Mai. In this film, Marker’s and Lhomme’s interviewees seek, in bad faith, to deny their accountability for the deaths of those caught up in the Algerian conflict. However, acknowledging that indifference is tantamount to collusion, the filmmakers betray the presence of a culpability for these deaths. My analysis of La Jetée furthered these ideas of manifested mental images and the liability for the death of the Other through detailed consideration of the theory of a complex self composed of both attitudes of subject and Other. In my reading, La Jetée reveals the workings of such an internal antagonism within its protagonist in which the othering gaze is turned inwards and exposes this ambiguous self. It is through this gaze between subject and Other that the personification of the fractured self occurs. Examination of Varda’s L’Opéra-​Mouffe and Cléo from 5 to 7 further investigated this responsibility for the look upon another and subjective responses to this liability. In the earlier documentary short the images of the aged and ailing shoppers of the rue Mouffetard allude to the mortality of every individual and their gaze back at the camera spoke to their identification as subjects, both perceived and perceiver, implying the potential for such attitudes to be embodied in a self. Considering the pregnant, female form as a multiple self –​personifying this complex in a single

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body –​furthered this notion and established a recognition of the potential equality of positions of subject and Other. Advancing this theory, analysis of Cléo considered the relation between individuals occurring through the gaze in images in which binary oppositions between subject (masculine) and Other (feminine) are dissolved: a key deconstruction in Beauvoir’s early philosophical works. This reading of Varda’s best-​known film focused on theories of the representation of a female figure and the responsibility for the potential othering of the gaze, arguing that Cléo is a figure who moves between positions of subject and Other from the outset of the film. The singer’s self is fractured, complex, in a fluctuating state. This always imminent condition is the key indication of a polysemous I, manifesting in these films as the self assents to accountability for the death of the Other. This is the realisation, through mortality, that every individual is both subject and Other to another complex self. This chapter progressed from the conflict of a Sartrean liaison between subject and Other, and the presence of death to these positions, through his neo-​colonial writing, in which one is responsible for the death of the Other, towards a notion of the ambiguous nature of the self as able to fulfil and accept its mortality and complexity, as derived from Beauvoir’s concepts of ethical intersubjective relations. These same themes were explored in Chapter 2 from the Levinasian perspective of the ascendant Other, with markedly different conclusions. Through Levinas’s theories of the subject–​Other encounter, especially those occurring between female, male and deathly figures, Chapter 2 considered how boundaries between subject and Other and life and death are permeated by and in cinematic images. This chapter countered the subject-​centrism of Sartre’s early philosophy with an ethical thought in which the Other is –​mainly –​in the ascendant. Yet, my analysis of this regard for the Other revealed how, as Sartre had with individuals in his philosophy, the figure of the feminine was objectified without recourse to subjectivity in Levinas’s early thought. I viewed this paradoxical situation in Levinas’s ethics through its impact on certain of his key concepts: transcendence, the third party and the face-​to-​face encounter. The ethics of the imposed othering of female figures and death were challenged through analyses of pertinent films by Varda, Resnais and Marker. In Le Bonheur and Vagabond, by associating her female characters with death, Varda offers a

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grim evaluation of the feminine figure in a phallocentric society: repressed, marginalised, sexualised and domesticated. Thérèse in Le Bonheur signifies a feminine character subsumed into a masculine version of the Same. Yet, even more critically perhaps, as the subject is unable to subsume the Otherness of death because of its alterity, Émilie’s association with death withstands this definition of her self as the feminine, the homogenisation of her difference by the masculine character, François. Likewise, Vagabond’s titular heroine Mona, whose othering and exploitation through the violence of the masculine gaze is approved because of her non-​conformity with traditional gender roles, disdains the masculine possession of her as a sexualised, feminine Other but dies twice in doing so. In both films the presence of death challenges ideas of the feminine as instrument for masculine transcendence, as the female characters insist that others recognise both her alterity and simultaneously the subjectivity of her face, the site of mortal and moral imposition in Levinas’s thought. This process, then, also deconstructs a hierarchy of subject–​Other relations, whichever may be in the ascendency, but at the cost of maintaining a critical coalition between death and the feminine. This is not in support of the ‘necromanticisation of femininity’ –​a romanticism of female death –​that Aaron locates in films such as Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999).2 Instead, Varda’s female heroines offer a bleak criticism of the position of women in a patriarchal society: repressed, marginalised, sexualised or domesticated and with a recourse to death as their unique egress. Uncoupling this condemnatory link between death and female characters, the secondary male characters in Hiroshima and Marienbad act as both Levinasian third parties and embodiments of death. This entrance of these third parties produces the potential for a constant transformation of the players in the dramatis personae of both films. The roles of subject, Other and third party were fluid, speaking in particular to the recognition of female subjectivity as a continuous process, never a final product.3 The opposition of the female characters in Resnais’s films inverts the attempted homogenisation of women into feminine stereotypes 2 3

Aaron, Death and the Moving Image, 52. Weeks, Constituting Feminist Subjects, 127.

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that perpetuate patriarchy. The invitation to a third party (who also –​in the films –​signifies death) to enter into intersubjective encounters with the primary masculine figures, institutes the possibility of each individual being a subject to one and Other to another. These arguments about motion between states and a possession of images were expanded to the potential violence of the camera itself and the othering process of capturing images of ‘the feminine’ through readings of Marker’s Description of a Struggle and Sans Soleil. Analyses of these films considered how the face-​to-​face encounter between the female subject of the image, the perceived and the masculine-​ as-​perceiver transpires through the lens of the camera. This was based on a reading of A Grin Without a Cat, which revealed how death appears as a presence in the images of Marker’s films and impacted on this inter-​ gendered encounter. The camera lens permeates two zones, reflecting the presence of death in life and the transient motion within them through this portal. Marker’s insistence on an égalité du regard in his films creates images in Description and Sans Soleil of female figures who represent an equitable relationship between perceived and perceiver. In the images of these two films death’s presence speaks to the existence of Others, of a pluralist and egalitarian life in which a responsibility for the death of the Other is accepted. Readings of these latter films focused on the role the camera plays in reflecting the notion of a complex self which recognises its potential as subject or Other and engages with the presence of death. Chapter 3 further deconstructed the theory of the apparatus as a surrogate position for a subject, the cameraman or the spectator, through recourse to Merleau-​Ponty’s hypotheses of the chiasm and embodied perception. Examining these ideas through the lens of relations between the film spectator and the film apparatus, my analyses challenged the identification of the subject-​spectator with the camera that is at the heart of screen theories, such as those of Metz and Baudry. Questioning hierarchies between individuals, the relation of spectator to camera and the images they jointly perceive is, alternatively, analogous to the chiasmic overlap between perceivers in Merleau-​Ponty’s thought, a spectatorial engagement, rather than the identification with apparatus, characters or images. Considering the apparatus and characters of films by Resnais, Varda and Marker as providing

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a unity between consciousness and body, the chapter revealed that the spectator’s perception of these images via the camera forms an embodied perception and an overlap between mind and world. In Resnais’s painterly films this hybrid, embodied perceiver –​the camera and spectator –​inhabits the worlds of the canvasses and encounters the death of the Other within these frames. These theories of the imbrication of the perspectives of camera and spectator in perceiving the external world (including the filmic image) and an encounter with death were developed in analysis of one especial sequence in Salut les Cubains. In the scene of Beny Moré’s dance –​with his pulsing ‘interaction’ with the camera and Varda’s account of his death –​there is an overlapping and simultaneous divergence of positions of Other and subject through the spectator’s engagement with the singer and his demise. This tripartite engagement includes the encounter with an/​Other’s death and, therefore in Merleau-​Pontian terms, the spectator’s authentic awareness of death. This relation with death and with the Other is complicated further in the digital images of Varda’s Gleaners and Beaches. In the former film, through the intersubjective encounter between her hands, a loop is created with the camera between Varda-​as-​subject and Varda-​as-​Other. In this way, the director investigates the potential of subject and Other to exist in the individual, complex self. As Varda turns the camera toward the viewer of these films, evoking Merleau-​Ponty’s thesis of the potential of the self as seer and seen, she presents death to them: hers and their own. This is the recognition of equality, embedded in the event of death, and the difference within individuals. The camera forges a space for a chiasmic relation between Varda as filmmaker and object of her film and between the director and the spectator. In acknowledging and then accepting culpability for a haunting death, the spectator gains an awareness of their own mortality and the knowledge that, in a quintessentially chiasmic world, another will take responsibility for it. This theory was again interrogated in analyses of Marker’s digital and video works, Level Five and Grinning Cat. In the first film, Laura’s motion through the supposed partition between realms of life and death –​and being marked by both of them –​in a loop, in perpetuity, decomposes such barriers. As Laura exposes the potential for existence within realms

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of death and life, nourished by their compossibility, the spectator engages with her, with the notion of her death, the Other’s death. The comparably incorporeal cats of Grinning Cat equally symbolise a chiasmic overlap between obverse states and they also indicate the passage within the living and supernatural, subterranean domains. The chats represent a mirror, screen or portal joining the living and deathly worlds and therefore contain the potential for movement through these states which are conventionally presumed antithetic. Revealing tensions between apparatus theory and key elements of Merleau-​Ponty’s thought –​embodied perception and the chiasm –​made apparent the ways in which spectators of these films can engage with both the camera and film characters and with the deaths of these characters as well as their own mortality. This intrinsically undermines theories of spectatorial apparatus-​identification and speaks instead to a reciprocal engagement with the apparatus and with the subject of the films. Ultimately, death intrudes into the closed circle in which the masculine-​ perceiver-​subject dictates the signifier and signified of these images and defines the feminine as the perceived Other. This book has illuminated images from the films of Marker, Resnais and Varda that are haunted by a death that intervenes in subject–​Other hierarchies. Displaying this haunting presence in these works and in life more generally, especially those of the spectators of these films, I disclosed the myriad ways in which this sombre presence has an impact on intersubjective relations and especially challenges those between binary feminine and masculine positions. Through the formulations of these encounters in key works of Sartre, Beauvoir, Levinas and Merleau-​Ponty, this study has considered death as a moderating presence, a state that, by invoking thoughts of responsibility for other subjects, speaks to an equality or a mutuality between them. Challenging boundaries between life and death and also between these subjects, deconstructed some of the fabrications embedded in traditionally dialogic, phallocentric thinking about these states. This in turn has indicated novel means by which conventionally objectified and often ostracised intersectional subjects –​women, colonised peoples, the ailing, the ageing and the socially or economically marginalised –​observe and enact interferences in received, dominant thinking. These subjects destabilise the revolving, closed circle of patriarchy, entering into

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dialogue as equals: equally mortal, equally subjects in shared, reciprocal relations. The films of Marker, Varda and Resnais analysed in this book illustrate these ideas as they engage with such notions of mutual relations between subjects and the ways in which knowledge of our mortality, our shared human vulnerability, affects these encounters. The notion of mortality I have represented here –​death’s haunting presence to life –​contains elements that could be related to a range of groups vulnerable to the violence of neo-​liberal and patriarchal systems. For instance, an inter-​disciplinary, intersectional approach bridging the medical-​humanities and cinema studies could enable examinations of portrayals of those experiencing mental illness or emotional distress, as linked to gender or sex, the authority of another nation over their own, their age, class or fiscal standing. Moving towards a thanatological-​sociological study of death in film could illuminate the causes and common filmic depictions of these states of mental anguish. Looking at changing representations of women’s suicide in post-​war film, for example, would expose the ways in which these by turns excluded, ignored, subdued, restrained, disadvantaged and complex selves intervene in the discourse over mental illness and its sometimes fatal consequences. Thérèse’s ambiguous death in Le Bonheur, to start with an example from this book, speaks to the destruction of the female subject by the patriarchal complex and in Jessica Hausner’s Amour fou (2014), Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang (2015) and Céline Sciamma’s Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (2019) female characters see suicidal acts as viable releases from orthodox expectations to marry. Such a project would rely further on a notion of the self as flexible, ambiguous, complex, polysemous or immanent, terms that speak not to subjective fixity or completion but a continuum that recognises the potential for difference. Applying this theory to the quotidian experiences of women, specifically how gender expectations impact their mental health, continues the ethico-​feminist enterprise of this book. Examining the polysemous self intersectionally, at the conjunction of gender and disability, would reveal the impact of accepted assumptions about the experiences of vulnerable women often misrepresented in film and society more widely.

Filmography

2084 (Chris Marker, France, 1984). L’Amour à mort (Love Unto Death, Alain Resnais, France, 1984). Amour fou ( Jessica Hausner, Austria, Luxembourg and Germany, 2014). L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Alain Resnais, France and Italy, 1961). La Bataille des dix millions (The Battle of the Ten Million, Chris Marker and Valérie Mayoux, France and Cuba, 1970). Le Bonheur (Agnès Varda, France, 1965). Bronenosets Patyomkin (Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein, Soviet Union, 1925). La Brûlure de mille soleils (Pierre Kast, France, 1965). Chats perchés (The Case of the Grinning Cat, Chris Marker, France, 2004). Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, France, 1961). Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, USA, 1941). Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7, Agnès Varda, France, 1962). ¡Cuba sí! (Chris Marker, France and Cuba, 1961). Description d’un combat (Description of a Struggle, Chris Marker, France and Israel, 1960). Dimanche à Pékin (Sunday in Peking, Chris Marker, France and China, 1956). Le Fond de l’air est rouge (A Grin Without a Cat, Chris Marker, France, 1977 and 1993). Freud ( John Huston, USA, 1962). Germania, anno zero (Germany, Year Zero, Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1948). Les Glaneurs…deux ans après (The Gleaners and I:  Two Years Later, Agnès Varda, France, 2002). Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, Agnès Varda, France, 2000). The Gold Rush (Charles Chaplin, USA, 1925). The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter, USA, 1903). Guernica (Alain Resnais, France, 1950). L’Héritage de la chouette (Chris Marker, France and Greece, 1990). Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, France and Japan, 1959). L’Homme qui ment (The Man Who Lied, Alain Robbe-​ Grillet, France and Czechoslovakia, 1968). Immemory (Chris Marker, France, 1998 and 2008).

258

Filmography

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, Belgium, 1975). La Jetée (Chris Marker, France, 1962). JLG/​JLG: autoportrait de décembre (JLG/​JLG-​Self-​Portrait in December, Jean-​Luc Godard, France, 1995). Le Joli Mai (Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme, France, 1962). Laura (Otto Preminger, USA, 1944). Level Five (Chris Marker, France, 1996). Loin du Vietnam (Far From Vietnam, Jean-​Luc Godard, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda, France, 1967). Masculin féminin ( Jean-​Luc Godard, France 1966). Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, USA, 1936). Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra, USA, 1939). Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour (Muriel, Alain Resnais, France, 1963). Mustang (Deniz Gamze Ergüven, Turkey, 2015). Le Mystère de l’atelier quinze (Alain Resnais and André Heinrich, France, 1957). Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, Alain Resnais, France, 1955). O necem jinem (Something Different, Vera Chytilová, Czechoslovakia, 1963). L’Opéra-​Mouffe (Diary of a Pregnant Woman, Agnès Varda, France, 1958). Orphée (Orpheus, Jean Cocteau, France, 1950). Ô saisons, ô châteaux (Agnès Varda, France, 1958). An Owl Is an Owl Is an Owl (Chris Marker, France, 1990). Owls at Noon, Prelude:  The Hollow Men (Chris Marker, France, USA and Japan, 2005). Paisà (Paisan, Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1946). Gauguin (Alain Resnais, France, 1950). Le Petit Soldat ( Jean-​Luc Godard, France, 1963). Les Plages d’Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès, Agnès Varda, France, 2008). La Pointe Courte (Agnès Varda, France, 1955). Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma, France, 2019). Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City, Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1945). Salut les Cubains (Agnès Varda, France, 1963). Le Sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet, Jean Cocteau, France, 1930). Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, France, 1983). Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond, Agnès Varda, France, 1985). Sartre par lui-​même (Sartre by Himself, Alexandre Astruc, Michel Contat and Guy Sèligmann, France, 1976).

Filmography

259

Les Sept péchés capitaux (The Seven Deadly Sins, Philippe de Broca, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Demy, Sylvain Dhomme, Max Douy, Jean-​Luc Godard, Edouard Molinaro and Roger Vadim, France, 1962). Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, France, 1985). Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (If I Had Four Camels, Chris Marker, France, 1966). La Sixième Face du Pentagone (The Sixth Side of the Pentagon, Chris Marker and François Reichenbach, France, 1968). Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1957). Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, France, 1950). Le Testament d’Orphée (The Testament of Orpheus, Jean Cocteau, France, 1960). Théorie des ensembles (Chris Marker, France, 1990). A video made for the installation Zapping Zone (Chris Marker, France, 1990). L’Une chante, l’autre pas (One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, Agnès Varda, France and Belgium, 1977). Une Femme Mariée (A Married Woman, Jean-​Luc Godard, France, 1964). Van Gogh (Alain Resnais, France, 1948). Varda par Agnès (Agnès Varda, France, 2019). Les Veuves de Noirmoutier (The Widows of Noirmoutier, Agnès Varda, France, 2005). The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, USA, 1999). Visages, villages (Faces, Places, Agnès Varda and JR, France, 2017). Viva Maria! (Louis Malle, France, 1965). Vous n’avez encore rien vu (You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, Alain Resnais, France and Germany, 2012). Note that English titles are provided in brackets where commonly used in Anglophone scholarship.

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Index

Aaron, Michele 24 n. 83, 202, 251 advertising Bonheur, Le (Agnès Varda) 125−6, 127−9 Cléo from 5 to 7/​Cléo de 5 à 7 (Agnès Varda)  93 Sans Soleil (Chris Marker)  177 Vagabond/​Sans toit ni loi (Agnès Varda)  133 ageing 28, 254 Gleaners and I, The/​Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (Agnès Varda) 215, 216, 228 Opéra-​Mouffe, L’ (Agnès Varda) 79, 85−6, 87, 103, 249 maternity, and 85−7, 103, 213 Akerman, Chantel 127 n. 76 Algerian War, the 4, 10, 31 Beauvoir, Simone de 61 n. 93, 104, 248 censorship 51, 57, 61 n. 93, 98 n. 180 Cléo from 5 to 7/​Cléo de 5 à 7 (Agnès Varda) 92, 93−4, 96, 98−9, 100, 102, 104 colonialism 4, 31, 33 Deleuze, Gilles  55 indifference to 36, 65−6, 92, 102, 248 Jetée, La (Chris Marker) 71−2, 78 Joli Mai, Le (Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme) 64, 65−7, 69, 71, 72, 92−3, 102−3, 249 Opéra-​ Mouffe, L’ (Agnès Varda)  79 Muriel (Alain Resnais) 57, 60−2, 64, 69, 102, 133

Night and Fog/​Nuit et brouillard (Alain Resnais) 49−51, 53, 55−6, 64, 72, 102, 248 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 31, 33, 34, 36−7, 52−3, 62−3, 65, 66, 70, 91, 100, 246 Amour fou ( Jessica Hausner)  255 Andrew, Dudley  5 Apparatus Theory, see Baudry, Jean-​ Louis; Metz, Christian; and Mulvey, Laura Ballard, J. G.  74 Bardot, Brigitte 46−7, 100, 104, 126−7, 167 see also Viva Maria! (Louis Malle); and Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome under Beauvoir, Simone de Baudry, Jean-​Louis 29, 197, 200−1, 217, 252 ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’ 182, 229, 244 ‘Le dispositif ’  182 Mulvey, Laura  200 Bazin, André Cahiers du Cinéma  5 Marker, Chris  6 mortality  12 post-​war cinema  3, 11 Resnais, Alain 6, 9, 196 Temps modernes, Les  5−6 Travail et Culture  6 Beauvoir, Simone de Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre  15, 17

286 aesthetic image, the 21−3, 31 Algerian War, the 56, 61 n. 93, 104, 248 All Said and Done 23, 48, 49 ambiguity 46, 81, 82, 89, 90, 100, 250 Bazin, André  5 Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome 46, 100, 104, 167 see also Bardot, Brigitte and Viva Maria! (Louis Malle) cinema 5−6, 8, 14−15, 20−3, 46, 100, 104 ethics 14, 47−8, 50, 63, 70, 72, 73, 79, 81, 85−6, 103, 104, 105, 107, 114, 190, 247, 248, 250 Ethics of Ambiguity 15, 44, 45, 47, 56, 64, 70, 74, 78, 86, 87, 92, 99, 102, 248, 249 feminism 18, 20, 23, 27−8, 31, 43, 44, 46, 47, 50, 60, 79, 81, 82, 84, 86, 87, 91, 104, 106, 107, 132, 156, 168, 171, 190, 247, 248, 250 ‘Feminism –​Alive, Well, and in Constant Danger’  81 Force of Circumstance 61 n. 93 intersubjectivity 17, 19, 22, 23, 27, 28, 31−2, 43−4, 47, 48, 50, 60−1, 63−4, 72−3, 80, 82, 87, 90, 91, 97, 101, 103, 104, 105−6, 107, 114, 186, 187, 248, 249, 250 gaze, the 46−8, 50, 61−2, 71, 79−80, 87−9, 91, 94−101, 103−4, 171, 178, 250 gender 7, 17−18, 46−8, 80−4, 86, 87, 90, 97, 100−1, 104, 105−6, 110, 117, 132, 156, 167, 171, 191, 237, 248, 250 Levinas, Emmanuel 18, 27, 105−6, 107, 110−11, 114, 117, 132, 156, 178 maternity 18, 79−82, 83, 84, 86, 249−50

Index Marker, Chris 4, 6, 27, 31, 66, 70, 71, 72−3, 73−4 n. 21, 78−9, 101, 102−3, 167, 168, 171, 237, 247 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice 5, 7, 8, 14, 16−17, 18, 23, 27, 107, 186, 187, 190−1, 216, 219 mortality 4, 14−15, 16, 17−18, 23, 31−2, 45−6, 48, 63, 64, 80, 82, 86−7, 92, 93, 102−4, 132, 168, 178, 183, 190, 216, 237, 247 Nouvelle vague 21 n. 72, see also Bazin, André; Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome; and Cinema under Beauvoir, Simone de Old Age  216 Other, the 22−3, 27−8, 31, 43−9, 60, 63−4, 66, 70−3, 78−9, 80, 81−3, 85−7, 89−91, 93, 99, 101, 102, 104−7, 110, 114, 117, 156, 167, 171, 186, 190−1, 219, 247−50 Prime of Life  20−1 Resnais, Alain 4, 5−6, 27, 31, 49, 50, 53, 54, 56, 60, 61, 63−4, 156, 248−9 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 4, 5−6, 7, 14−23, 27, 31−104, 187, 190−1, 219, 254 She Came to Stay 93 n. 172 Second Sex, The 7, 15, 17, 23, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 60, 81, 82, 84, 86, 100, 104, 110, 168, 171, 178, 191, 237 Temps modernes, Les  5 Varda, Agnès, and 4, 7, 48, 80−7, 90, 92, 97−104, 254 Very Easy Death, A 17, 62, 92 Wartime Diary 14, 15, 22, 45 ‘What is Existentialism?’ 60, 63, 249 World War II 14−15, 22, 56 Bellour, Raymond  73 Benjamin, Walter  160 Beugnet, Martine 83, 186

287

Index Bronenosets Patyomkin/​Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein) 203 see also Eisenstein, Sergei under Resnais, Alain Bronfen, Elisabeth 120, 168, 178, 237 Brownmiller, Susan  139 Butler, Judith Beauvoir, Simone de  90 gender  116 Levinas, Emmanuel 106−7, 108 n. 12, 120 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice 181, 193, 194, 219−20, 221, 245, 248 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 36 n. 17, 37 subject, the  27 Cahiers du Cinéma 1 n. 2, 5 Carroll, Lewis  249 Carter, Angela 139 n. 9 Cayrol, Jean 12, 51, 53−6, 57, 92 Chabrol, Claude 5, 88 n. 155 Chanter, Tina gender  123 Levinas, Emmanuel 16 n. 48, 109, 110, 116 mortality 178, 237 Chaplin, Charles 6, 24 n. 84 Chronique d'un été/​Chronicle of a Summer ( Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin)  69 Citizen Kane (Orson Welles) 20−1 n. 68, 23 Cocteau, Jean 234, 242−3 colonialism  254 Algeria, in 4, 31, 50−3, 68, 101−2 mortality 37, 50−3, 101−2, 247 Resnais, Alain 102, 198 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 27, 31, 33 Algerian war 50−3, 68, 101−2 bad faith  37

Being and Nothingness 35−6, 249, 250 gaze, the  101−2 intersubjectivity  37 mortality 37, 50−3, 101−2 World War II 50−3, 68, 101−2 Cooper, Sarah Levinas, Emmanuel 23−4 n. 82, 26, 112 Jetée, La (Chris Marker)  71 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice  186 Sans Soleil (Chris Marker) 167, 229, 230 Copjec, Joan  197 Dauman, Anatole 6−7 n. 21 Davis, Colin 59, 70, 141 death see mortality under Beauvoir, Simone de; Levinas, Emmanuel; Marker, Chris; Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice; Resnais, Alain; Sartre, Jean-​Paul; Varda, Agnès; and others Deleuze, Gilles 11, 55, 182, 201, 224 Delphy, Christine  127−8 Demy, Jacques 88, n. 155, 95, 97−8 Derrida, Jacques Levinas, Emmanuel ‘feminine, the’ 107, 111, 124, 156, 175 Other 105, 107, 111, 124, 156, 162, 175 mortality 106, 107, 162 transcendence  123 ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ 113 n. 37, 162 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice touching  222 vision 182, 192 digital video Marker, Chris 229−44, 253

288 Varda, Agnès 212−28, 253 Doane, Mary Ann 96, 151 Downing, Lisa 116, 130 Epstein, Jean  160 Fanon, Frantz  36−7 feminism see Beauvoir, Simone de; and Varda, Agnès Flitterman-​Lewis, Sandy 87, 94, 227 Freud ( John Huston) 21 n. 71 Gauguin, Paul 198−202, 242 see also Gauguin under Resnais, Alain gaze, the Beauvoir, de 46−8, 50, 61−2, 71, 79−80, 87−9, 91, 94−101, 103−4, 171, 178, 250 gender, and 28, 46−8, 87−9, 94−101, 104, 106, 118−20, 134−7, 138, 140, 149−52, 157−79, 198−9, 200−1, 218−20, 223, 245, 249−51 intersubjectivity 28, 37−9, 46−8, 53−4, 71, 73−4, 77−80, 87−9, 91, 94−101, 102, 103−4, 106, 107−8, 118−20, 134−7, 144−5, 149−52, 157−79, 189−93, 194, 200−1, 207, 210, 214, 217−20, 221, 223−4, 229, 230, 245, 249−51 Levinas, Emmanuel 28, 104, 106, 107−8, 118−20, 144−5, 157−79, 249−51 Marker, Chris 28, 68, 71, 73−4, 77−80, 106, 157−78, 207, 229−30, 249 ‘male/​masculine gaze’ 46−8, 134−6, 138, 140, 149−52, 157−79, 198−9, 200−1, 218−20, 223, 245, 249−51 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice 187−93, 219−20

Index mortality 28, 53−4, 61−2, 68, 73−4, 77−80, 87−9, 102, 103−4, 118−20, 138, 149−52, 157−79, 187−91, 211, 218−19, 226−8, 235, 245, 249−51 Resnais, Alain 50, 53−4, 61−2, 102, 135, 137, 144−5, 149−52, 166, 169, 178−9, 193, 200−1, 235 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 37−9, 48, 50, 61−2, 68, 73−4, 79−80, 88−9, 91, 96−97, 103−4, 107−8, 119−20, 190, 219−20 sexualising 46−8, 91, 94−101, 134−7, 138, 140, 149−52, 157−79, 200−1, 218−19, 245, 249−51 Varda, Agnès 48, 87−9, 91, 94−101, 103−4, 134−7, 138, 140, 151, 167, 173, 207, 210, 214, 217−20, 221, 223−4, 226−8, 249−51 gender see Beauvoir, Simone de; Levinas, Emmanuel; Marker, Chris; Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice; Resnais, Alain; Sartre, Jean-​Paul; Varda, Agnès; and others Godard, Jean-​Luc Carabiniers, Les 62 n. 96 Far From Vietnam/​Loin du Vietnam (multiple directors)  2 Fiancés on the Mac Donald Bridge, The  90 JLG-​Self-​Portrait in December/​ JLG: autoportrait de décembre 222 n. 107 Legrand, Michel 88 n. 155 masculin féminin 6−7 n. 21, 8 Marker, Chris 68 n. 106 Petit Soldat, Le 52 n. 75 Resnais, Alain 197, 203 n. 65 rive droite  5 rive gauche  1 n. 2

289

Index Seven Deadly Sins, The/​Les Sept péchés capitaux (multiple directors)  97 Two or Three Things I know About Her/​Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle 6−7 n. 21 Une Femme Mariée/​A Married Woman  125 Great Train Robbery, The (Edwin S. Porter)  177 Hayward, Susan  138 Heidegger, Martin  7, 9 Heinrich, André  1 Hessens, Robert, see Guernica under Resnais, Alain Hockney, David  205 illness 17, 28, 247 mental illness  255 Night and Fog/​Nuit et brouillard (Alain Resnais)  54−6 Varda, Agnès  80−101 intersubjectivity see Beauvoir, de Simone; Levinas, Emmanuel; Marker, Chris; Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice; Resnais, Alain; Sartre, Jean-​Paul; Varda, Agnès; and others Ivens, Joris  2 n. 3 Izanagi-​no-​Mikoto and Izanami-​no-​Mikoto   234−8 Ince, Kate 44, 213 Internet 29, 228−40 Irigaray, Luce Levinas, Emmanuel ‘feminine, the’ 109, 110, 111, 116, 118, 123, 133, 156, 175 mortality  121 transcendence  133 ‘male/​masculine gaze’ 134, 176, 201 maternity 83, 124 Merleau-​Ponty

Chiasm, the 219, 220, 222 n. 107 intersubjectivity 182, 245 mortality  182 vision  192−3 Jünger, Ernst  52 Karina Anna 68 n. 106 Klein, William  2 n. 3 Kruks, Sonia 33, 60, 183 La Brûlure de mille soleils (Pierre Kast)  172 Laura (Otto Preminger)  238 Le Dœuff, Michèle 182, 219, 220, 245 Legrand, Michel 88 n. 155 Lelouch, Claude  2 n. 3 Levinas, Emmanuel Alterity and Transcendence  112 aesthetic image, the 23−25, 119−20, 134, 145, 158−9, 178 Beauvoir, Simone de, 105−6, 107, 110−11, 114, 117, 132, 156, 178 cinema  24 Ethics and Infinity  116 Existence and Existents 16, 18, 24, 25, 111, 158, 161, 177 face-​to-​face 28, 105, 108−9, 111−13, 115, 117−20, 129, 130, 137, 144, 146, 157, 159, 162−3, 166, 172, 178, 188 n. 26, 250−2 ‘feminine, the’ 24−5, 28, 104, 105−6, 107, 108−24, 126, 127, 129−30, 131−2, 133, 134−5, 140, 142, 143, 147, 150, 152, 155−7, 159, 168, 175−6, 178, 181, 250−1 gender see ‘feminine, the’; intersubjectivity; and Other, the under Levinas, Emmanuel God, Death and Time 107, 121, 146, 162, 163 n. 144, 189

290 intersubjectivity 28, 105−21, 123−5, 129, 130, 132, 134, 137, 140−2, 144−7, 150−7, 158, 159, 161, 162−3, 165, 166−7, 169, 172, 174, 175−6, 177, 178, 179, 188 n. 26, 250−2 see also Face-​to-​face; and Other, the under Levinas, Emmanuel Marker, Chris 106, 121, 156−177, 178, 179, 252 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice 107, 115, 179, 183, 186, 187, 189, 190, 192, 196, 219 mortality 4, 5, 14, 16, 18, 19, 27, 28, 105, 106, 107−8, 111−13, 118, 120, 121, 123, 128, 129, 137, 140, 141, 142, 145−6, 147, 162−3, 168, 178−9, 183, 189, 190, 250−2 Other, the see face-​to-​face; ‘Feminine, the’; intersubjectivity; and mortality Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence 114, 117, 142, 156 Resnais, Alain 28, 106, 114, 121, 141−57, 166, 178−9, 251−2 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 7, 14, 34, 35, 39, 53, 104, 105, 107, 112−13, 118, 119−20, 123, 179 subject, the see face-​to-​face; ‘Feminine, the’; intersubjectivity; mortality; and third party, the; under Levinas, Emmanuel third party, the 28, 105, 108, 113−15, 117, 121, 141−8, 151−4, 156, 157−8, 161, 163, 166, 168, 173, 178, 181, 192, 250, 251−2 Time and the Other 18, 25 n. 87, 110, 111 n. 24, 129, 156 Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority 24, 25, 39, 105, 107, 108, 109, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118,

Index 119, 123, 125, 129, 134, 142, 152, 157, 159, 162, 163 transcendence 28, 105, 108−11, 119, 121, 123−5, 132, 133, 140, 157, 178, 181, 250−1 Varda, Agnès 4, 28, 105, 106, 109, 121−41, 178−9, 250−1 World War II  16 Lhomme, Pierre 34, 64, 68, 70−1, 102, 249 see also Joli Mai, Le under Marker, Chris ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ 66, 139 Marker, Chris 2084 236 n. 139 Algerian War, the 64−8, 92−3, 102−3, 249 Battle of the Ten Million, The/​La Bataille des dix millions (with Valérie Mayoux)  13−14 Beauvoir, Simone de 31, 66, 70, 71, 72−3, 73−4 n. 21, 78−9 camera, the (including ‘Camera as Weapon’) 28, 68, 69, 74, 77, 157−79, 229−30, 240, 242, 252−3, 254 Case of the Grinning Cat, The/​Chats perchés 9, 29, 229, 230, 231, 232, 235, 239−244, 253−4 ¡Cuba sí!  208 Description of a Struggle/​Description d’un combat 9, 106, 157, 161, 166−7, 168, 169, 171−4, 232, 252 digital video 229−44, 253 égalité du regard see Gaze, the under Marker, Chris Far From Vietnam/​Loin du Vietnam (multiple directors)  2 gaze, the 28, 68, 71, 73−4, 76−9, 157−179, 229−30, 235, 245, 252 gender 157−179, 247, 252

Index Grin Without a Cat, A/​Le Fond de l’air est rouge 157, 165−6, 176, 252 Héritage de la chouette, L’ 232 n. 129 If I Had Four Camels/​Si j’avais quatre dromadaires 77, 177 Immemory  235 Jetée, La 6−7 n. 21, 40, 71−9, 103, 138, 249 Joli Mai, Le (with Pierre Lhomme) 34, 64, 65−72, 92−3, 102, 242, 249 Lettre de Sibérie/​Letter From Siberia 6−7 n. 21 Level Five 29, 148, 229−40, 253 Levinas, Emmanuel 106, 121, 156−177, 178, 179, 252 ‘male/​masculine gaze’ see gaze, the under Marker, Chris Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice 28−9, 229−244, 244−5, 252, 253−4 mortality 2, 4, 10−4, 26−9, 34, 64, 65−79, 92−3, 102, 103, 106, 138, 148, 157, 161−77, 207, 229−44, 249, 252, 253 Owl Is an Owl Is an Owl, An 232 n. 129 Sans soleil 77, 106, 157, 162−5, 166−8, 169−71, 172, 174−7, 207, 229, 230, 232, 239, 252 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 6, 31, 34, 40, 64, 65−79, 101, 102−3, 104, 247, 249 Sixth Side of the Pentagon, The/​ Sixième Face du Pentagone, La (with François Reichenbach)  176−7 Statues Also Die/​Statues meurent aussi, Les (with Alain Resnais)  2 Sunday in Peking/​Dimanche à Pékin  1 Théorie des ensembles  232

291 World War II 8−9, 10, 11, 12, 64−78, 102−3 maternity 80−7, 103, 123, 213 Mayoux, Valérie  13 McNeill, Isabelle 233, 240 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice Adventures of the Dialectic  209 aesthetic image, the 19−20, 23, 25, 185, 194, 195 Beauvoir, Simone de 5, 7, 8, 14, 16−17, 18, 23, 27, 107, 186, 187, 190−1, 216, 219 cinema 19−20, 25, 185, 194, 202 see also ‘Film and the New Psychology’ under Merleau-​ Ponty, Maurice Chiasm, the 19, 28−9, 38, 179, 181−3, 185, 187−8, 190−1, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 200, 201, 202, 206, 209, 212, 218, 219−28, 229, 232, 234, 235, 236, 238, 239, 243−5, 252−4 embodied perception 8, 25, 28−9, 181, 182−6, 191, 192, 193−4, 194−6, 198, 202, 203, 207, 221, 223, 227, 232, 244, 245, 252−3, 254 ‘Film and the New Psychology’ 8, 25, 182, 183, 184, 185, 202, 211 see also Cinema under Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice gender 219−23, 245, 247, 252 intersubjectivity 19, 29, 38, 107, 115, 179, 181−3, 185, 186−91, 193, 198, 206, 209, 216, 219, 223, 228, 234, 244, 245, 253 see also Chiasm, the; and Other, the under Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice Levinas, Emmanuel 16−7, 19, 107, 115, 179, 183, 186, 187, 189, 190, 192, 196, 219

292 Marker, Chris 28−9, 229−244, 244−5, 252, 253−4 mortality 17, 18−19, 25, 27, 29, 181−2, 183, 188−90, 194, 208−9, 212, 225, 234, 238, 239, 245, 247, 253−4 Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France 25 n. 90 Other, the 19, 28−9, 38, 107, 115, 181, 183, 186−92, 193, 194, 200−2, 203, 205, 206, 207, 209, 211−12, 213, 214, 216, 218, 219−22, 224, 226−7, 228, 229−30, 234, 238, 239, 243, 245, 253−4 painting see aesthetic image under Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice perception see embodied perception under Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice Phenomenology of Perception 7 n. 22, 18, 25 n. 90, 184, 186, 223 Prose of the World, The  183 Resnais, Alain 8, 28, 185, 193−206, 244, 247, 252−3 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 4, 5−6, 7, 14−7, 18, 19, 23, 26, 27, 38, 107, 115, 179, 182, 183, 187, 189−191, 209, 220 Sense and Non-​Sense 8, 19, 190 Signs 192, 193, 194, 208, 221, 222 Structure of Behaviour, The  19 touching 188−9, 221−3 Varda, Agnès 4, 8, 26, 28, 185, 206−28, 239, 244, 252, 253 Visible and the Invisible, The 183, 187, 191, 192, 198, 206, 221, 226, 230 World of Perception, The 25, 186 World War II 14, 15−16 Metz, Christian 28, 217 Mulvey, Laura  200−1 Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier 182, 194, 229 Subject, the 197, 243, 252 Montand, Yves  69, 70

Index Moreau, Jeanne 126−7 see also Viva Maria! (Louis Malle) mortality, see Beauvoir, Simone de; Levinas, Emmanuel; Marker, Chris; Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice; Resnais, Alain; Sartre, Jean-​Paul; Varda, Agnès; and others Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra)  22 Mulvey, Laura apparatus theory  200−1 ‘male/​masculine gaze’ 200−1, 244−5 Merleau-​Ponty  186 mortality 4, 5, 171 still(ed) image 169, 171 Muselmänner see World War II Mustang (Deniz Gamze Ergüven)  255 Nouvelle vague Brigitte Bardot 46, 100, 104, 126−7, 167 see also Viva Maria! (Louis Malle); and Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome under Beauvoir, Simone de Legrand, Michel 88, n. 155 Moreau, Jeanne 126−7 see also Viva Maria! (Louis Malle) rive droite  5 rive gauche  1−2, 5 Varda, Agnès 125, 126−7, 129 World War II  11 see also Cahiers du Cinéma, Bazin; André; Chabrol, Claude; Godard, Jean-​Luc; Rivette, Jacques; Rohmer, Eric; Roud, Richard; and Truffaut, François O necem jinem/​Something Different (Vera Chytilová) 127 n. 76 Orpheus and Eurydice 147, 234−8

Index Picasso, Pablo 202−6, 242 Pollock, Griselda  158 Portrait of a Lady on Fire/​Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Céline Sciamma)  255 Powrie, Phil  89 Rancière, Jacques  6, 160 Reichenbach, François see Sixth Side of the Pentagon, The/​Sixième Face du Pentagone, La (with François Reichenbach) under Marker, Chris Resnais, Alain Algerian War, the 49−51, 53, 55−7, 60−2, 64, 69, 72, 102, 133, 248 Beauvoir, Simone de 4, 5−6, 27, 31, 49−54, 56, 60, 61, 63−4, 156, 248−9 Eisenstein, Sergei  203 Far From Vietnam/​Loin du Vietnam (multiple directors)  2 Gauguin 9, 193, 194, 198−202, 250, 251−2 see also Gauguin, Paul gender 31, 50, 61−4, 106, 114, 121, 141−56, 178−9, 195, 198−202, 250, 251−2 Guernica (with Robert Hessens) 55, 166, 193, 202−6, 208, 215, 252−3 Hiroshima mon amour 6−7 n. 21, 9, 55, 106, 141−6, 148, 150, 151, 156, 157, 159, 169, 179, 235, 251 intersubjectivity 49−64, 69, 74, 95, 101−2, 106, 114, 121, 141−56, 157, 159, 166, 169, 178−9, 198−202, 205, 235, 244, 248−9, 250, 251−2 Last Year at Marienbad/​Année dernière à Marienbad, L’ 106, 141, 147−56, 157, 158, 159, 169, 179, 235, 251

293 Levinas, Emmanuel 28, 106, 114, 121, 141−157, 166, 178−9, 251−2 Love Unto Death/​Amour à mort, L’  13 ‘male/​masculine gaze’, the 198−202, 250, 251−2 see also Gender under Resnais, Alain Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice 8, 28, 185, 193−206, 244, 247, 252−3 mortality 2, 4, 9, 10−3, 26−9, 42, 49−65, 69, 74, 95, 102, 106, 141−59, 166, 169, 179, 193−4, 198−206, 208, 215, 234 n. 134, 235, 248, 249, 251−2 Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour 42, 56−65, 69, 74, 95, 102, 135, 248−9 Mystère de l’atelier quinze, Le (with André Heinrich)  1 Night and Fog/​Nuit et brouillard 12, 42, 49−56, 57, 64, 86, 248 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 4, 5−6, 27, 31, 42, 49−65, 72, 101−2, 104, 247−9 Statues Also Die/​Statues meurent aussi, Les (with Chris Marker)  2 Van Gogh 6, 193, 197−8 see also Van Gogh, Vincent World War II 49−64, 102, 248 You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet/​Vous n’avez encore rien vu 234 n. 134 Rivette, Jacques 5, 68 n. 106, 129, 148 Robbe-​Grillet, Alain 150, 154 n. 120 Rodowick, D. N. 11, 240 Rohmer, Eric  5 Rossellini, Roberto  3 Roud, Richard  1, 8 Rowbotham, Sheila 122 n. 62 Sartre, Jean-​Paul Aesthetic image, the 4, 5−6, 8, 14, 15, 19, 20−2, 23, 26, 31, 40−2, 49, 92 Age of Reason, The 93 n. 72

294 Algerian War 31, 33, 34, 36−7, 55−6, 62−3, 65, 66, 68, 70, 91, 100−2, 246 bad faith 28, 31, 36−7, 52, 56−62, 64, 65−72, 93−4, 101, 102, 139, 248−9 Beauvoir, Simone de 4, 5−6, 7, 14−23, 27, 31−104, 187, 190−1, 219, 254 Being and Nothingness 15, 17, 22, 32 n. 3, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 56, 58, 72, 89, 93, 96, 101, 189, 220, 249 Between Existentialism and Marxism  101 ‘Black Orpheus’  37−8 cinema 4, 5−6, 8, 14, 15, 19, 20−2, 23, 26, 49, 89−90 Citizen Kane 20−1 n. 68 colonialism 27, 31, 33, 35−6, 37, 50−3, 68, 101−3, 249, 250 Écrits de jeunesse 6 n. 16, 21, 42, 49 Existentialism is a Humanism  35, 44 Fanon, Frantz  36−7 gender 47, 81, 91, 96−7, 191 Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, The 39, 40, 41, 102 intersubjectivity 17, 19, 22, 27, 31−40, 41, 42−3, 45, 47−8, 50, 52−3, 60, 62−4, 72, 73, 79, 85, 88−90, 91, 99, 100, 101−4, 105, 107−8, 112, 118, 119, 123, 179, 187, 189, 190−1, 209, 219−20, 247, 248−50 Levinas, Emmanuel 7, 14, 34, 35, 39, 53, 104, 105, 107, 112−3, 118, 119−20, 123, 179 Marker, Chris 6, 31, 34, 40, 64, 65−79, 101−4, 247, 249 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice 4, 5−6, 7, 14−7, 18, 19, 23, 26, 27, 38, 107,

Index 115, 179, 182, 183, 187, 189−191, 209, 220 mortality 4, 5, 15−7, 19, 26−9, 31−35, 37, 40−1, 42−3, 45, 48, 50, 52, 56, 59, 67, 70, 73, 75, 79, 92, 93, 101−4, 112, 113, 183, 189, 209, 248−50 Other, the 17, 31−40, 42−4, 52−3, 60, 62−4, 68, 72−3, 78, 79, 85, 88−90, 101−4, 105, 107−8, 113, 119, 120, 123, 179, 187, 189, 190−1, 209, 219−20, 247, 248−50 Resnais, Alain 4, 5−6, 27, 31, 42, 49−65, 72, 101−2, 104, 247−9 Transcendence of the Ego, The  33, 52 Varda, Agnès 4, 27, 31, 79−101, 103−4, 247, 248−9 War Diaries 15, 39, 40 Words  22, 40 World War II 15, 31, 33−4, 36, 49−78, 101−3, 248 Saxton, Libby  50 Sellier, Geneviève  88 Seventh Seal, The/​Det sjunde inseglet (Ingmar Bergman) 148 n. 114 sex  255 assault/​violence 133−6, 139−40, 199−201 sexual difference 82, 97, 104−6, 110−11, 124, 133, 156, 171−2, 174−5, 191, 200, 219, 220, 251 sexualising gaze 46−8, 91, 94−101, 133, 134−7, 138, 140, 149−52, 155, 157−79, 199, 200−1, 218−9, 245, 249−51 sexualised images/​constructs of women 91, 109−10, 120, 125, 127, 130, 133−6, 155, 173−4, 198, 199, 219, 251 sexual pleasure 143, 174−5

Index see also Bardot, Brigitte; Beauvoir, Simone de; Butler, Judith; 'Feminine, the'; Gaze, the; Gender; Irigaray, Luce; 'Male/​ Masculine gaze'; and Maternity under various entries Shoah, the 11, 51, 53, 56 n. 83 Shoah (Claude Lanzmann) 56 n. 83 Signoret, Simone 6−7 n. 21 Silverman, Kaja  170 Silverman, Max  54, 55 Simons, Margaret A.  14, 43 Sobchack, Vivian  184 Sontag, Susan  57−8 Spanish Civil War 78, 103 statues 2, 24, 161, 174, 205 subject, the see Chiasm, the; Face-​ to-​face; Gaze, the; Gender; Intersubjectivity; ‘Male/​masculine gaze’; Mortality; Other, the; Third party; and Transcendence under Beauvoir, Simone de; Levinas, Emmanuel; Marker, Chris; Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice; Resnais, Alain; Sartre, Jean-​Paul; Varda, Agnès; and others suicide 128, 255 Temps modernes, Les  5, 16 Truffaut, François  5, 6 Van Gogh, Vincent 130 n. 82, 197, 242 see also Van Gogh under Resnais, Alain Varda, Agnès ageing 79, 85−6, 87, 103, 215, 216, 228, 249 Algerian War, the  79 Beaches of Agnès, The/​Les Plages d’Agnès 9, 226, 227, 253

295 Beauvoir, Simone de 7, 48, 80−7, 90, 92, 97−104, 254 Bonheur, Le 106, 109, 121−32, 133, 136, 140, 142, 144, 148, 155, 158, 179, 227, 250−1 children 80 n. 131 & 132 Cléo from 5 to 7/​Cléo de 5 à 7 12, 48, 87−101, 216, 249−50 digital video 212−28, 253 Du côté de la côte 6−7 n. 21 Faces, Places/​Visages, villages (with JR)  216−17 feminism 7, 82, 90, 91, 121−2, 127 n. 76, 216, 220, 247−8 see also Beauvoir, Simone de; and Gender under Varda, Agnès gender 79−101, 103, 106, 109, 121−41, 144, 148, 155, 158, 167, 173, 179, 212−28, 249−53 Gleaners and I, The/​Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse  212−28 Gleaners and I: Two Years Later, The/​ Les Glaneurs…deux ans après  226 intersubjectivity 48, 69 n. 109, 79−101, 103, 106, 109, 121−41, 144, 148, 155, 158, 167, 173, 179, 206−28, 249−53 Far From Vietnam/​Loin du Vietnam (multiple directors)  2 Levinas, Emmanuel 4, 28, 105, 106, 109, 121−41, 178−9, 250−1 ‘male/​masculine gaze’, the 48, 87−9, 91, 94−101, 103−4, 134−7, 138, 140, 151, 167, 173, 207, 210, 214, 217−20, 221, 223−4, 226−8, 249−51 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice 4, 8, 26, 28, 185, 206−28, 239, 244, 252, 253 maternity 79−87, 89, 100, 103, 167, 213, 226, 249

296 mortality 12, 48, 79−101, 106, 121−44, 155, 158, 173, 179, 206−217, 250−3 Ô saisons, ô châteaux  213 One Sings, the Other Doesn’t/​L’Une chante, l’autre pas  7, 227 Opéra-​Mouffe, L’ 69 n. 109, 79−87, 89, 100, 103, 167, 213, 226, 249 Pointe Courte, La  1 Salut les Cubains 9, 206−212, 213, 214, 217, 240, 253 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 4, 27, 31, 79−101, 103−4, 247, 248−9 Vagabond/​Sans toit ni loi 9, 106, 121, 131−41, 144, 155, 158, 173, 179, 250−1 Widows of Noirmoutier, The/​Les Veuves de Noirmoutier 13, 143 Vasseleu, Cathryn 120, 167, 187, 202 Vertov, Dziga  160 Vietnam War 2, 4, 10, 166 Viva Maria! (Louis Malle) 126 n. 73 see also Bardot, Brigitte; and Moreau, Jeanne Virgin Suicides, The (Sofia Coppola)  251 Weeks, Kathi 101, 238 Williams, Linda 143, 151 Wilson, Emma Cléo from 5 to 7/​Cléo de 5 à 7 (Agnès Varda)  87 Guernica (Alain Resnais)  203

Index Last Year at Marienbad/​Année dernière à Marienbad, L’ (Alain Resnais)  155 Levinas, Emmanuel  27 mortality 4−5, 27, 54 World War II Algerian War, and the 49−78, 102−3, 248 cinema, impact on 3−4, 8−12 Beauvoir, Simone de 14, 33−4, 102−3, 248 existentialism  8 Guernica (Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens)  202 Jetée, La (Chris Marker) 71−8, 103 Joli Mai, Le (Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme) 64−71, 102−3 Levinas, Emmanuel  16 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice 14, 15−16 mortality 4, 8−12, 14−5, 33−4, 49−78, 102−3, 248 Muriel (Alain Resnais) 57−64, 102, 248 Muselmänner 51−60, 86, 102, 248 Night and Fog/​Nuit et brouillard (Alain Resnais) 49−57, 102, 248 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 15, 31, 33−4, 36, 49−78, 102−3, 248 Žižek, Slavoj 115, 144

New Studies in European Cinema With its focus on new critical, theoretical, and cultural developments in contemporary film studies, this series encourages lively analytical debate within an innovative, multidisciplinary, and transnational approach to European cinema. It aims to create an expansive sense of where the borders of European cinema may lie and to explore its interactions and exchanges within and between regional and national spaces, taking into account diverse audiences and institutions. The series reflects the range and depth of European cinema, while also attempting to revise and extend its importance within the development of cinema studies in the coming decades. Of particular interest is how European cinema may respond to the challenges of digital distribution and the new intermedial landscape, evolving issues in transnational funding and production, the significance of film festival culture, and questions of multivocality and pluralism at a time of global crisis. The impact of all such developments upon European culture and identity will be of fundamental interest in the coming decades and the New Studies in European Cinema series makes a key contribution to this debate. Proposals for monographs and edited collections are welcome. All proposals and manuscripts undergo a rigorous peer review assessment prior to publication.

Vol. 1 William Hope (ed.) Italian Cinema. New Directions. 2005. ISBN 3-03910-282-6 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7209-3 Vol. 2 Wendy Everett and Axel Goodbody (eds) Revisiting Space. Space and Place in European Cinema. 2005. ISBN 3-03910-264-8 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7193-3

Vol. 3 David Montero Thinking Images. The Essay Film as a Dialogic Form in European Cinema. 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0730-7 Vol. 4 Ewa Mazierska Polish Postcommunist Cinema. From Pavement Level. 2007. ISBN 3-03910-529-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7533-5 Vol. 5 Ramona Fotiade Pictures of the Mind. Surrealist Photography and Film. 2018. ISBN 978-3-03911-129-9 Vol. 6 Wendy Everett (ed.) Questions of Colour in Cinema. From Paintbrush to Pixel. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-353-8 Vol. 7 Rosanna Maule (ed.) with Julie Beaulieu In the Dark Room: Marguerite Duras and Cinema. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-354-5 Vol. 8 Leila Wimmer Cross-Channel Perspectives. The French Reception of British Cinema. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-360-6 Vol. 9 Lucy Bolton and Christina Siggers Manson (eds) Italy on Screen. National Identity and Italian Imaginary. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-416-0 Vol. 10 Matthias Uecker Performing the Modern German. Performance and Identity in Contemporary German Cinema. 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0972-1

Vol. 11 Rosemary Stott Crossing the Wall. The Western Feature Film Import in East Germany. 2012. ISBN 978-3-03911-944-8 Vol. 12 Pietari Kääpä The National and Beyond. The Globalisation of Finnish Cinema in the Films of Aki and Mika Kaurismäki. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-966-0 Vol. 13 Ben McCann Ripping Open the Set. French Film Design, 1930–1939. 2013. ISBN 978-3-03910-311-9 Vol. 14 Fiona Handyside Cinema at the Shore. The Beach in French Film. 2014. ISBN 978-3-0343-0834-2 Vol. 15 Maurizio Cinquegrani Of Empire and the City. Remapping Early British Cinema. 2014. ISBN 978-3-0343-0823-6 Vol. 16 Orlene Denice McMahon Listening to the French New Wave. The Film Music and Composers of Postwar French Art Cinema. 2014. ISBN 978-3-0343-1750-4 Vol. 17 Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch (eds) The Cinema of the Swimming Pool. 2014. ISBN 978-3-0343-1783-2 Vol. 18 Lisa Socrates Time and Space in Contemporary Greek-Cypriot Cinema. 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-0988-2

Vol. 19 Silvio Carta Visual Anthropology in Sardinia. 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-0998-1 Vol. 20 Julia Dobson and Jonathan Rayner (eds) Mapping Cinematic Norths. International Interpretations in Film and Television. 2016. ISBN 978-3-0343-1895-2 Vol. 21 Tonia Kazakopoulou and Mikela Fotiou (eds) Contemporary Greek Film Cultures from 1990 to the Present. 2017. ISBN 978-3-0343-1904-1 Vol. 22 Muriel Tinel-Temple, Laura Busetta and Marlène Monteiro (eds) From Self-Portrait to Selfie. Representing the Self in the Moving Image. 2019. ISBN 978-1-78874-061-6 Vol. 23 Kierran Horner Haunting the Left Bank. Mortality and Intersubjectivity in Varda, Resnais and Marker 2023. ISBN 978-1-80079-667-6