Interstices and impurities in the cinema

Adaptation, 2012

The complex and sometimes antagonistic relationship between fi lm and literature reached an important milestone during the era of the French Nouvelle Vague. Both levels in which literature and fi lm compete with and contaminate one another, the concrete (words) and the abstract (narrative), are at play in Alain Resnais ’ s early collaborations with contemporary authors, especially Last Year at Marienbad (1961). The competition between printed word and moving image appears as a crucial difference between the opening credit sequence as it appears in Resnais ’ s fi lm, and as described in Alain Robbe-Grillet ’ s screenplay; this example of Resnais ’ s refusal to follow Robbe-Grillet ’ s text suggests a more profound disagreement concerning fi lm ’ s status as a document of the past. The fact that fi lm is the record of an event, however artifi cial the event may be, allows Resnais to resist Robbe-Grillet ’ s totalizing modernist aesthetic by in effect denying fi lm ’ s claim to producing a ‘ virtual reality ’independent from human experience. A similar tension occurs in the seldom-discussed intertextual relationship between the Marienbad screenplay and the 1940 novella The Invention of Morel by Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, which centres on ‘ total cinema ’ , the dream of a technology that can produce a perfect recording indistinguishable from the original. By insisting on the testimonial function of both fi lm and text, Resnais advanced the literature-fi lm dualism beyond the stalemate of admiration and denigration that characterized many fi lms of the French Nouvelle Vague. Keywords Alain Resnais , Alain Robbe-Grillet , André Bazin , total cinema , Nouvelle Vague , Last Year at Marienbad.

Artium Quaestiones

Always keen on the spectators’ freedom of interpretation, André Bazin’s film theory not only asks the famous question “What is cinema?,” but it also explores what is a human. By underlining the importance of personalist ethics, Angela Dalle Vacche is the first film specialist to identify Bazin’s “anti-anthropocentric” ambition of the cinema in favor of a more compassionate society. Influenced by the personalist philosophy of his mentor, Emmanuel Mounier, Bazin argued that the cinema is a mind-machine that interrogates its audiences on how humankind can engage in an egalitarian fashion towards other humans. According to Bazin, cinema’s ethical interrogation places human spirituality or empathy on top of creativity and logic. Notwithstanding Bazin’s emphasis on ethics, his film theory is rich with metaphors from art and science. The French film critic’s metaphorical writing lyrically frames encounters between literary texts and filmmaking styles, while it illuminates the analogy betwe...

Columbia University Press, 2013

Hunter Vaughan interweaves phenomenology and semiotics to analyze cinema's ability to challenge conventional modes of thought. Merging Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception with Gilles Deleuze's image-philosophy, Vaughan applies a rich theoretical framework to a comparative analysis of Jean-Luc Godard's films, which critique the audio-visual illusion of empirical observation (objectivity), and the cinema of Alain Resnais, in which the sound-image generates innovative portrayals of individual experience (subjectivity). Both filmmakers radically upend conventional film practices and challenge philosophical traditions to alter our understanding of the self, the world, and the relationship between the two. Films discussed in detail include Godard's Vivre sa vie (1962), Contempt (1963), and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967); and Resnais's Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and The War Is Over (1966). Situating the formative works of these filmmakers within a broader philosophical context, Vaughan pioneers a phenomenological film semiotics linking two disparate methodologies to the mirrored achievements of two seemingly irreconcilable artists.

In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”, André Bazin identifies the psychological impetus of the plastic arts as being rooted fundamentally in an existential and psychological desire to preserve life and transcend its mortal finitude by creating representations. This primitive appetite for illusion is essentially a desire that seeks fulfilment by striving towards a mimetic or realist telos in the plastic arts, one which is also formulated by Bazin in “The Myth of Total Cinema”. The ontology of the photographic image, by virtue of being mechanical, thus presents man with the “furthermost evolution to date of plastic realism” (“Ontology” 10) to satisfy this desire. However, if the raison d’être of cinema is merely to satisfy a psychological need for realism – in the sense of it being “the duplication of the world outside” (“O” 11) – then Bazin’s ontological thesis would seem to jeopardise its aesthetic merit. By considering Bazin’s ontological argument for cinema, one may assess how its status as art is at odds with the realism of its ontology.

Journal of Literature and Art Studies, 2017

There is a harmony between André Bazin's and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's approaches to cinema. They both see cinema as a new imperative language to express the being, capable of reflecting on our promiscuity with the world and things. Both realized the ontological bet that the game of imagination contains: the emergence of the image wrapped in a back and forth movement, from things to form, from fact to sense and meaning, and vice versa. The purpose of this article is to discuss Merleau-Ponty's and Bazin's interest in an ontological investigation of the cinema, analyzing their affinities and differences, identifying paths to be explored and affirming a certain idea of cinema.

Wallflower Press eBooks, 2001

Chrono-topologies, 2010

Trust in the World, 2017

2007

1-iow <loes the cinemacic cl1ange our idea o f art? Citing Paul Valéry, Walter Benjamin begins his great 1934 essay on mechanical reproduccio11 witl1 tl1is question.1 Tl1e problem was not so much whether cinema is an art, the so-called seventh 01 1e, but ho\.v, starcing in the nit1eteenth century, it helped transform what \ve think art is, and in particular how one thinks in the arts or with tl1e arts. Fo r Benjamin, ilie pro blem o f the cinematic was already inseparable from the whole question, at once aesthetic and policical, of how one thinks with the 11ew mass industrial audio-visual means of film and pro jection. We might think o f G illes Deleuze as taking up cl1is questio n again after World War I l, when there arose not simply a new cinem a in Fran ce but also new styles of thinking -a new 'image of thought'. The 'upheaval in general sensibility' that followed tl1e War wo uld lead 'to new dispositions o f tho ught'. 2 Filmmakers invented new ways of thinking with film and pro jec tío n, at ilie same time as those in other domains started to invent related ideas, creating a whole new zone o f interference and exchange. Deleuze's two volumes o n cinema are a monumental attempt to see the new European cinema in terms o f this constellation, to isolate 1 W. Benjamin, 'The Wo rk o f Art in the Age o f Mechanical Reproduction', in [// 11minalions (trans. Harry Zohn), New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 2 Such are the words that struck Deleuze in 'Correspondence with Dionys Mascolo', in Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and fnlerviews 1975-1995 (ed. D avid Lapoujade, trans. Ames H odges and Mike T~'"> rmi na) , Ne w Yo rk: Semiotext(e), 2006, p.327. They ace also suggestive fo r his larger encounte r with Maurice Blanchot and Margue rite Duras. 240 JOHN RAJCHMAN 090 the notions of image, space and time they involved, and so show the distinctive ways filmmakers took part in tl1is larger mutation in thought Even though D eleuze wrote l1is study of cinema in the 1980s, the basic philosophical notio ns he uses go back to his 1956 essay on the p roblem of differen ce in H enri Bergson, written ata time when Alain Resnais was making docum entaries like Var1 Gog/1 (1948), liis great study of the art:ist's suicide, as well as, of course, Night a11d Fog (1955). These ftlms "vould play a key role in Deleuze's analysis o f cinema, in particu lar by dem onstrating the princip ie that ' the cinematographic image is never in the present'. 3 D eleuze thought Resnais had perhaps gone the furthest with tl1is principie for, in his documentaries as well as in the fiction films he would go on to make, we find not only new kinds of images but also a new function for them : that of rendering a past, at once indeterminate and violent, irreducible to anyone's memory, any prise de conscie11ce. The War is thus a dividing point not only for Deleuze's inventory of new signs and images in cinematic t11inking, but also for his sense of a particular problem in post-War philosophy and in his philosophy: the problem of the peculiar 'time that takes thought'. 4 In effect, cinema m akes visible the problem philosophy developed at the same time, for which Deleuze liimself would try to work out a new logic of 'events' and their sense. If, especially in France, p ost-War cinem a developed in tandem with post-War phi.losophy, following its pec11liar twists and tums through p syc hoanalysis and Structuralism, it was because, Deleuze sugges ts, post-War cinema was itself an original audio-visual way of thinking -a peculiar relation o f thought to aisthesis, a wl1ole aesthetics. That is why the great filmmakers needed to b e confronted not simply with writers or painters but also with thinkers an d questions of thought The signs and images they invented involved a new sense of what a creative image is ai1d what it means to tl1ink Even tl1e crisis in cinema brought on by television, and later by digital images, had to be posed on this aesthetic level -as a problem of images that don't force us to think or which keep us from thinking, as with the 'presentifying' tendencies 3 Deleuze explicares this principie of the cinematographic image introduced in G11e111a 2, chapter 5, section 2, in G. Deleuze, T wo Rtgimes of Madness, op. cit. pp. 290-91. See Gilles D eleuze, , 0 11i111a 2: L ímage-temps, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985; or Cinema 2: The Time-Image.