*
What follows are the first entries, what amounts to roughly the first 16 pages, of Serge Daney's posthumously published book L'Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur –– The Exercise was Beneficial, Sir –– in an English translation by Laurent Kretzschmar and myself.
The book, edited by Jean-Claude Biette and Emmanuel Crimail, published in 1993 by P.O.L., collects the unpublished writings, notes, lists, and fragments of a journal Daney irregularly kept from 1988 to 1991, which were found on his hard disks after his death.
We publish here a fragment of those fragments, mainly the March 1988 entries of his journal, less for any bourgeoning "Daney Studies", more for the subjects at hand: the crisis of cinema-going, of public projection; identification and cinephilia and what's done with it; cinema versus the media (called "content" today); the political barbarism of the West against the East and its document; childhoods, lost and found.
We also include the foreword and introduction of Crimail and Biette, who were still in mourning over Daney's passing two years earlier.
Daney's original texts and P.O.L.'s publication of them were printed sans pictures; the addition of images and shots into Daney's text below are mine. To read a plain text version, see here. For an excellent essay on Daney's 1980s switch to writing on a computer ("a kind of farewell to the materiality of handwriting...", "...the marginalia that sometimes adorned his old notebooks disappears..."), and another extremely honest piece of research on the role of homosexuality in Daney, see Pierre Eugene. To read the only known review in English of Daney's The Exercise was Beneficial, Sir, by James Williams (French Review, Mar. 1995), see here.– A.R.
Serge Daney died on the night of June 11th to the 12th, 1992, of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).
One would think that those whom we called, in homage to Spinoza, the "Ultimi barbarorum" –– the last to date of the barbarians –– would let Serge rest. But this was not the case, thank God!
Some months after his death, the editorial staff of TF1 [French commercial TV station/Bouygues conglomerate – Ed.] complained (!) in Libération, on October 12, 1992, about Serge Daney's articles dismantling the mechanics of infotainment during the Gulf War, calling them "murderous".
Without realizing it, these ultimate barbarians were paying a fitting tribute to Serge.
In this book we once again find the ferociously joyful thought so characteristic of his writing.
Let me also testify that, in the last years of his life, perhaps finally reconciled, he no longer considered himself on the fringes of society, but as a minority. It's not a good word, but a beautiful word, he used to say.
*
Introduction
by Jean-Claude Biette
Serge Daney knew from a young age that he was not at all possessed by a desire to make films. His daydreams may have at times led him in that direction, but he always stopped there. Above all, he liked to see other people's films, to enter into their function, to define a few of their singular principles, to compare them with his passing feelings about the world, to let this settle, find others, elsewhere, a few films further on, connect them, forget them, come back to them, speak, write, and find a place, and a public.
He saw films, I believe, as if they were all actors in a huge company where, in the divine comedy of cinema, the extras play a large role and even dazzling incompatibilities play a part. He saw this vast company leave the protective stage of the movie theaters (la scène protectrice des théâtres), split up, lose a bit of their soul, and each spin away, everyone for themselves, into the uncertain labyrinths of the media. He accompanied the changing times, covering himself and the others, by recording what the movies were suddenly dictating to him about the world. But for him writing was only a transitory step. Daney was much more passionate about speech––tried, proposed, shot like a bullet, reprised like an echo, kept on high alert––and speech's physical alter ego, walking: each step in itself carrying courage to the other. After 1968, his many voyages delimited him in a sort of vast "nomad's land" where a peaceful encounter with the world and its examination could take place. Subsequently, and in any setting, Daney also loved the solitude that watches over the resilience of a text, a place where he still knew how to make the trace of a dispossessed word live. This place also grants a period of silence to any reader who isn’t afraid to hear the murmur of life at the heart of what he reads.
This desire for solitary listening gave Daney the tactile and visual passion he had, almost always, for books. He had already collected a large part of his texts published in the Cahiers du cinéma between 1970 and 1981 in La Rampe; then those written as part of his day-to-day responsibilities at the Cinema section of Libération between 1981 and 1986, in Ciné-Journal; and finally in Le salaire du zappeur and Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main his Libération articles on the subjects of ordinary television, films filtered through television, and world events socialized by television. It was in 1986, when he gave up the direction of the Cinema section of his newspaper, that Daney thought of founding a magazine. It was only in 1991 that he was able to produce this magazine, Trafic.
But he had another dream: to write a "real" book. Saving his last strength for the magazine, he completed only one chapter, “The Tracking Shot in Kapo”, which he intended, no longer being able to write, to open issue number 4. The book, which would have given an account of his own life seen in the light of the bigger life that cinema had revealed to him and assigned him the mission to know, was to contain a discreet moral lesson whose moving induction he found in a line from the child John Mohune, said several times in Fritz Lang's MOONFLEET, which he wanted to use in the French version and which serves as the title of the present collection.
From 1988 to 1991, Serge Daney jotted down his thoughts on a computer: questions and hypotheses of films, filmmakers, and social and political phenomena then in the media. Some served as basic material for articles, others not, but they were corrected and amended in the form of a logbook –– and continued in a lighter form in the first issues of Trafic –– in what he knew would be his last voyage out.
Nothing is said about his illness –– which he nevertheless made public, through a sort of fraternal solidarity and neutral stubbornness. At most, one can observe, from 1990 onwards, a radicalization of his points of view, a merciless acceleration of thought which tends to reduce things to their outline. A few probable errors of dates remain in the year 1988, without harm done to their order of development.
Despite the abundance of texts gathered here, a certain number of ideas or feelings expressed orally have not been written down. I haven’t forgotten the image that came to him one day while speaking of Bruckner's symphonies, when I’d recognized in them the experience of walking in the forest, which he’d also had, and he said: "We can see that in his symphonies, there are clearings in the pauses [les pauses clairières]." During the summer of 1991 Serge Daney went one last time to the Vosges for a long walk on foot.
*
Daney headed the March 1988 entries we translate below as "Due to the Resurgence of Handbag Thefts", a phrase he also used as the title of his third book, Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main - Cinéma, télévision, information 1988-1991 (Aléas,1991). It refers to a notice appearing in a movie theater warning that:
DUE TO THE RESURGENCE OF HANDBAG THEFTS IN PUBLIC SPACES, WE ADVISE OUR CUSTOMERS TO REMAIN VIGILANT AND NOT PLACE HANDBAGS ON THE FLOOR.
On the back cover of the book, Daney explains:
“When there were still neighborhood movie theaters, the management of the theater would sometimes call upon the audience, waking them from their blissful drowsiness, to remain vigilant. A black-and-white title card, a fateful intertitle, asked women moviegoers not to forget the realities of daily life, meaning their handbags, abandoned at their feet, in the dark, and so exposed them to the abjection of a possible theft. Who wasn’t already vaguely concerned with those handbags? And who wasn’t cross with the 'management' for such a trivial de-sublimation? Especially since, as the years went by, and despite the eternal return of this terrible word 'resurgence' (recrudescence), it wasn’t so much the handbags that were disappearing as it was the movie theaters. To the point that we began to miss the prophetic title card that seemingly looked after us and our handbags. Just as we began to miss the cinema.”
DUE TO THE RESURGENCE OF HANDBAG THEFTS
1988
MARCH 25
PASSIVE PASSAGE –– Not so much “the crisis” of cinema as “what is in crisis in the cinema?” Two things: 1) the movie theater, 2) recording (l’enregistrement). They have one thing in common: they rely on a certain “passivity” of the filmstrip and/or of the spectator. Things are imprinted twice: once on the filmstrip, once on the spectator. Each time, it is a movement of the light toward, which comes from the outside and goes through the "camera obscura". This apparatus is of a single piece. If we had to find its opposite, it would be a drawing on one side and broad daylight on the other. This is why, faced with a Japanese anime movie squealing in a well-lit apartment, I have a strange feeling that this “doesn’t concern me in any way”.
Time is not the same when one has programmed it as when one is subjected to it. The “developing” time of the film (rushes) and the “maturation” time of the film in the body and nervous system of a spectator in the dark.
It is perhaps this specific relation to time that allows someone (like me) to move from the passivity of one who watches to the activity of one who writes. The time of the cinema is shared between “tyche” and “automaton”, the time of writing (“on” or “after” the cinema) is, by nature, an infinite time, or in any case not programmable. To write is to recognize what has already been written: on the film (the film as an organized deposit of signs) and in me (organized by deposits of mnemic traces which, in the long run, form my history). It is therefore the same thing to move towards the auteur (and the secrets – cf. Douchet – of his “personal reverie”) and to revert to oneself (savage psychoanalysis). The politique des auteurs was invented by a generation capable of writing, and of writing about its relation to the auteurs and about how this relation “made” this generation (see Truffaut and his “fathers”, Wenders, etc.).
Recording (the Lumières) has, immediately, a moral dimension. Since it’s impossible to fully anticipate what will be imprinted on the filmstrip, one can only make do with what arrives “on top of everything else”. Divine surprises, dregs, real symptoms, proofs and verifications, nasty surprises, jolts of reality preventing the imagination from closing in on itself, excuses to consider any form of dialectic, etc. The filmmaker watches things once and, passive as well, takes into account both the mix of what he has rendered (as a vision) and what he didn’t want (as a reality, or reminder of the Other). A certain film criticism corresponds to this (often the same persons), which is moral as well since instead of judging the vision (let’s say Fellini), it assesses the gaze (let’s say Godard). It compares the gaze to the thing watched and decides “the best possible conditions of their mismatch”. The auteur appears all the more present as he is seen seeing, as he is part of the picture (Merleau-Ponty). His trace (the position of the look, the clue that someone is looking, the point of view, the place of the camera, etc.) is both what should ideally disappear entirely (the Rossellinian utopia: absolute transparency) and what protects against a too-violent (mystical) relation to the thing “seen”. Through the years, the latter of the two temptations prevailed: in that sense, as soon as it becomes generalized, the “politique des auteurs” becomes a “mannerism” (the signature prevails over the subject).
The story about a tracking shot being “a matter of morality” must be more and more incomprehensible today. Less so because everyone has become immoral than because something, which previously made Godard’s sentence possible, has changed in the basic apparatus (recording - movie theater). On the spectator’s side there was a situation of bodily infirmity (“blocked vision”, darkness, the obligation to stay silent), a situation that the spectator also applied to the actors, allying himself to them (and to their own passiveness, facing the Auteur and the Light: a passiveness of “creatures”, in the religious sense). The Christian springboard of Bazinism is to be found here, with its flipside: “cruelty” and “non-interventionism”.
Let’s suffer from/take pleasure in what they have suffered from/taken pleasure in, and suffer not that this may be replaced by a pleasure which is only there to make us forget that experience.
The crisis of the movie theater and the crisis of the notion of recording = a crisis of the before/after. Before: one is written (worked on). After: one is writing (working). To write is therefore to unwrite (passing back to the visible, with the help of invisible ink). Or to prepare oneself to write.
“The cinema” or the “Cinema”. Nothing is less assured than the existence of this character with whom I'm dangerously entering in a dialogue (one-on-one). I've said: there are those who preferred the movie to the movie theater, and others, perhaps greater in number, who preferred the movie theater and didn’t follow the drift of “art of the film” because the “art of movie house” progressed more slowly. It’s as if today everybody is saying: I was hanging onto the cinema by such a little thread, or bit of desire. To name the enigma that seized him. To recapture it as one’s own.
Beautiful expression by Rohmer: cinema is not images, it’s shots. It says what cinema is for him (and for me). But for others, it is and will always be images. A shot is this indivisible block of image and time. It is the time it takes me to inhabit (and also to get used to) an image which, otherwise, would scare me (Barthes: the fear of being inside it, the fear of being excluded from it). The beauty of a shot, whether it is just, is something different from the beauty of an image. In the end, a shot is musical. Breathing, rhythm. There is “cinema” when, inexplicably, there is breathing between the images. Otherwise, it is a boredom in front of the decorative (the true blindness of a décor––I can only enter a décor accompanied by a gaze).
Will it be possible one day to say: of the cinema, I only remember shots (like the late Mitry). Of the cinema, nothing mattered to me apart from the shots. The rest, which exists, existed without me, can continue to exist without me, and me without it. The shot, unlike images but like music, doesn’t reproduce itself, cannot be quoted: its duration is integral to it. If it's short, it's still a shot, providing that it can come before or after a long one. The only thing that matters is the succession.
It's the logic of a walker, of a monologuer, a masturbator. The necessity of the telling. What do I retain of the most beautiful old cinema (the most present titles right now being THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER and ORDET) but that it progresses through shots, unexpected and inevitable, through multiple shots at the same time. In bad movies, nothing moves. The script is the program that makes the picture move. In good movies, there is at least one element that moves, and does so with the pride and humility necessary to rediscover at every instant the rest of the picture (which, in fact, doesn’t move). This strange emotion in a scene of PICKPOCKET when the train leaves Gare de Lyon because something moves that is neither the character or the platform but a third element: the train. Ironic emotion: you flee away from me but you are immobile. In great movies, every element in the picture moves but at different speeds. The sky, better than a white screen, is the ultimate metaphor of these films, because of the clouds.
To see films, to travel. It’s the same thing. To travel, not to escape. To travel is to know one needs a goal in order to have a chance to enjoy the travel itself, which is about being in-between, meaning sheltered. It’s the same for films: shots are the jolts of the carriage. To see films, to travel: this was true for the others as well, the normal audience. But they have become tourists (consumers of travel) and they don’t expect cinema to “give” them the thrill of exoticism, nor do they expect a film to guide them at its own (slow) rhythm.
Straub’s sentence: “It’s taken me twenty years to learn how to watch a film.” He said it with the irritation of a worker proud of this difficult knowledge. But what does it mean? To see and to listen to what is there (visible and audible). To see for example – in the same glance – John Ford’s shot, the shooting of the shot, the horse, the actor separately from his role, the character separately from the body, the human being separately from his social function. To listen to the music knowing that a Central European Jew fleeing Nazism composed some sub-Schoenberg to earn his living, to listen to the direct sound, etc. It’s an aim of course, but it is the only possible materialist approach.
It’s a mad endeavor. It’s also this exacerbation of the perception of the heterogenous underneath the homogenous which makes criticism possible. The critic sees the “edited” (or even the “manufactured”) where others see the homogenous (the “natural”). Barthes one more time. The critic (let’s stay Straubian) would be the one able to discuss the film with its authors if he was capable of this over-perception. He would speak as a craftsman, but a very cultivated one, able to identify each layer of the mille-feuille. Straubian limit: culture. They couldn’t… [ellipsis in original -Ed.] because there is a general history of the cinema, one that says that Ozu copied Capra.
We should ask the same question today and tomorrow. Begin with gestures, the nervous system, the body (and not the sociological environment) and guess what the next over-perception will be. The over-perception of the people born not only during the reign of television but also with VCRs, freeze-frames, channel surfing, screens, software and computer-generated imagery. When does a necessity emerge? When is it no longer enough to serve the machine (or exhaust its possibilities) because the machine needs to be at the service of something else.
36 FILLETTE by Catherine Breillat. A too-rich storyline makes me find everything beautiful, the film and the cinema. This feeling of freedom coming from a story that begins everywhere and transforms me, with my consent, into the fellow traveller of a very young girl, tired of being a virgin, between Biarritz and Bayonne. A character who I would never meet, or particularly want to meet, in real life, like Rohmer’s virgins. The ambiguity of the moralist: thanks to a film (and a film that doesn’t cheat, so the least commercial possible), I take an imaginary step towards a part of the world in which I have no interest (teenagers). Happily I trade my indifference to them against my concern for their filmic existence. To a point, cinema helps me with this type of “healthy” routine. Far from being simply a place to open up to the other, it would be the only place where I open myself, incognito, to the other. And the cinema would be “my” place. It would come to “my place” (where I can find my bearings) and I would demand it to be absolutely “other” (or else I’d have the feeling of cheating). Like in sexual scenarios where the masochist pays the other to dress up as another other. Godard: EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF.
The darkened movie theater (la salle obscure) was rather the place where we dreamt, innocently, that everybody was the same. That all the dreams were converging toward the same objects (the stars) with the same ease. We didn’t expect to discover the other any more than we expected to see ourselves. Perhaps it was a mixed identity, a slightly altered self. The darkened movie theater was also the place where we waited, hypocritically, for the arrival of the substitution of the sexual other (the desired body, the nude, the fetish). In which case its darkness was a boon (hypocrisy). But we waited, in the dark, to see people emerge on the screen who don’t interest us and who we only cared about via an abstract and oceanic knowledge (tough love, or Nietzsche: “life is always bearable as an aesthetic phenomenon”).
There's a constant at the heart of French cinema (with Breillat too) that irritates me: it's the only cinema where actions evolve into acts. Hence its weak storytelling and strong first-person narratives. The young girl of 36 FILLETTE is looking for an act. Losing one’s virginity must be an act. She’s looking for the actor and discovers she needs two of them: one for love and one for pleasure. But love turns out to be only the fear of being loved, and pleasure an empty formality. A fictional, Bressonian system (the trio). A matrix to superbly deal with a structural dissatisfaction (Bovarysme, nymphomania, mysticism).
Breillat says she only likes to film what is difficult to film. Indeed, the film consists of three sex scenes. Masturbation, fellatio, and sex. The strength of the film is in the way it goes further than other films in the “moralization” of sexual acts. A strength that comes from filming faces and not body parts, not to avoid censorship but because it’s precisely what it’s about: the humiliation of trying to adapt one’s brain to one’s body and the body of another. The sad gag of the young girl pretending to sleep, to give herself without giving herself, making the man she has to suck cum too quickly, lose his erection and abandon her (with the new taste of sperm in her mouth) at the very moment she finally wants to have sex. A cruelty that is not found in comparable English films (Leland’s WISH YOU WERE HERE or Frears’ films) because they hold – too fast? – that fucking is a taboo or a given that doesn’t require comment. And Breillat wonders why her film generates hostile reactions…
March 26
From evening to night yesterday in front of the TV. I quickly gave up on 8½, even though I’ve never seen it, but it exasperated me and I found myself instead following to the end a film that I find objectively badly made, badly told, badly everything: THE VERDICT by Sidney Lumet. The schizophrenia of television: not only do we see what’s not good (badly done), but we see it even better than at the cinema (especially its editing), yet we can prefer to see a bad film to a well-made one. Or rather, the notions of “failure” and “success” are no longer relevant on television. Either the film has such an inner strength that it imposes itself, or we are in the relativity of the world of the images, of the imaginary bath, where everything is interesting. It depends on the mood of the moment. Yesterday, I preferred to watch Mason and Newman “compose” with age and with everything. Lumet is the archetype of the filmmaker who films from nobody’s point of view, hence a form of abstract effectiveness, so abstract that it stays within the bounds of its ridiculous script. He adds speed where it doesn’t matter. A beautiful moment: at one point, Newman has finally found the nurse who “knows” what happened. She looks after children in Chelsea. She has the beautiful face of a saint-like unionist. She’s in a schoolyard. Newman, who has come from Boston, approaches her awkwardly. Close-up on the Boston–New York train ticket that sticks out of his pocket. And there, a little cinema trick by the old Lumet, a little bit of true speed: reverse angle on Newman who is no longer showing off: “Will you help me?” She will. Not because the script says so, but because we’ve just been in her place (in the mise en scène), and she in ours, and her desire to help him has been imprinted on the film. Old things, but which exist nonetheless. Thank God!
COMMUNICATION AS STROBOSCOPY. Incurable idealism to want an A to propose to a B (the audience) an object C, which will or will not be received or accepted (we won’t know, we mustn’t know). There is a passing, a relay (like a baton in athletics, or a witness), and only if once it has been transmitted, A relinquishes a right to it. This ideal scenario, rather mystic I’m afraid, is the only one that produces (sometimes) interesting trade relations (supply and demand) because the product is also a message in a bottle. Only Americans have a morality about these relations (Hawks) or a technical knowledge about them (Hitchcock, already).
Now suppose that the communication is no longer an act or a gesture but its opposite: “actions”, “techniques”, a generalized bath. We communicate within the world of communication and not in order to open this world to what it refuses. The world must then become fully the world of consumption, whether it decorates (dressing, rather than dressing up), arranges, or enchants itself. Perhaps Hollywood (see my old "On Salador") produces the prolegomena of what we are living through today. If, according to Riegl, Europeans have “idealized’ nature, Americans have hesitated between “embellishment” and “rivalry”. Minnelli for example.
The sphere of communication must be both more infinite and more closed each day. This re-enchantment of the world (to speak like Gauchet) is the condition of the “new adventures” of communication. Advertising is at the basis of its aesthetics and technique. Publicity, understood as the “becoming public” of everything, including things that were private before, either because they were not image material or because their image stayed sacred or taboo. Advertising therefore works toward the homogenization of the world, toward the confinement of differences (only perverts get excited about them), the internalization of the sacred (Gauchet) which has become (Lipovetsky) a personal “management” of otherness inside ourselves, and likeness inside others.
As always, tennis makes for a great example. We film tennis a lot better because we invent (without difficulty) ways to capture both players in real-time. The transition from the shot–reverse shot to the split screen abolishes the unobtainable moment of the rally (when the ball––this A object––no longer belongs to any of the players). We film the ball less (because it’s difficult) than the two bodies that act as its terminals. The spectacle of the one that serves is not more interesting than the one who receives. One can be a perfectly great tennis player by merely being a great returner (like Connors). Cutaways (wait time, leg work, game changes) become just as interesting as the “important” shots. The latter, thanks to slow motion replay, becomes more enigmatic and richer.
What did photography do compared to painting? It made the instantaneous possible. It became sensitive to the “poses” that reality keeps on taking but that we struggled to perceive because there were no means to “capture” them. It has invented the “ordinary movement” that Deleuze talks about. And what did cinema do compared to photography? It multiplies the photograph twenty-four times to obtain a second of movement. It increases the number of ordinary moments, of interstices, thus creating a type of “pose” (and a type of beauty) which is not quite the same as that of painting or photography. The “beauty” of a shot is of a new type. We are the ones who, by developing the idea further (Barthes’ fetishism, the Third Sense, etc.), gave credit to the “frame” as both the “flesh” of the film, the subconscious of the image but also, at a certain point, the image itself (see postcards with captions) with its own frozen beauty.
We can see the high-speed chase this involves. On one side, the vertigo of infinite “realism”, Bazin and the “reality gain”, the cause of the desire to see. The scientific side, the evermore sophisticated recording. First micro (Godard: the coffee in 2 OR 3 THINGS), then macro (Godard: the sky in PASSION). It’s the side that made me write at first. On the other side, the vertigo of another (baroque?) infinity where the interstitial space between things seen is becoming populated, domesticated, an image in its turn. Instead of the spiral always promising more reality at the end of a movement or a quest, here’s a movement aimed to decorate so as to inhabit a world already discovered.
Long ago, the image––as a sacred heritage––was comparable to a crossroads where the overdetermination of a very useful place ends up granting its existence as itself (like a city). Crossroads-images, like calvaries on rural trails. The image as an exception and not the rule. Even in the cinema, the strange coexistence between shots (specificity of the cinema), images (24 per second, raw material) and the Image (what remains identical throughout the “shots”, the star for example).
Today––thanks to the role of advertising––the image is no longer the tennis ball in as much as it shares an emitter and a receiver, a server and a returner, the image is the follow-through of both players at the same time. Why wait for the ball to tell us something about them since it’s possible to learn about them by observing them at the same time. The ball (the object, the work of art) is the pretext, no longer the measure. It’s the same in politics: opinion polls allow the hurling of one against another of broadcast speech and measured reception. The speech (not even thought at this stage) is what triggers a series of images in all directions (a poll is also an image, a “snapshot” as pollsters like to remind us). Images that quickly become impossible to interpret by the way, as they don’t have the monumentality of ancient images.
Politically, this is the apparatus with which countries, technically able to do this dressing of the world, sign and seal their own withdrawal into themselves. To go toward the other (unknown, exotic, threatening: the Third World, soon the Fourth) no longer risks missing them by going towards them (to save their soul?) or (thanks to the persistence of the documentary) to give them a right to the image. This is why, after the Rossellinian failure, the great wars of the wretched world (Iraq-Iran but also Lebanon, the Middle East, post-Maoist China, Sikhs or Tamils, etc.) took place without our images of them. Godard (HERE AND ELSEWHERE) perfectly summed up the unease of having them as unpaid actors while they had us as volunteer mediators.
Since then, the “document” has replaced the “documentary” and, in these countries, the “document” can only be monstrous, bloody, or lethal. Since then, again, Western media has invented a way that is both ancient and (post)modern to solve the problem. Instead of going toward the other (to inform, help, support, understand), we stay at home, and to ease all this pain we will no longer show, we will organize charity shows in their support, which will consist in partying or in showing ourselves. The self-hate that made Bruckner vomit has disappeared. There is no shame left. The missing image of the others is replaced with an extra image of ourselves. We are condemned to ourselves and to charity as a business.
Let’s summarize this complex story. The image as what reveals A or B (example: paintings of icons). The image as the moment of truth of A throwing a message in a bottle for B (example: a Kafka novel). The image of A and of B, ever more homogenous and interchangeable, the image becoming a playful pretext. The image of A for B in the name of the missing image of C.
March 29
A THEORY OF KIDNAPPING. How can I answer those who tell me: “you’re too cerebral as a spectator, you’re not easily entertained (like me)”? Tell them that there’s nothing easier for me than to cry watching a film? But they’re not talking about emotions, they’re talking about the correct attitude to adopt in front of a show or an image or a décor “bigger than life”, about the “normal” level of wonderment when faced with what's beyond normality. And I tell myself: even as a child the "big spectacle" films didn’t move me more than others (and even less than the family-friendly films, which I owe to my mom for having spared me). Conversely, as an adult, the only films in which I can “enter” are precisely those that have an entrance door, and the only spectacle that moves me is the one found in the room I’ve entered. Then, everything is spectacle.
I recognize here what I wrote about Rossellini (LOUIS XIV): for the voyeur, everything is spectacle, except that he is excluded from this spectacle by some mystery only known to him (a child’s hiding place is not the “normal” place of a spectator of a period film). If the film is for me, then I am for the film: facing it and inside it. I think of everything we wrote in the Cahiers about “the place of the spectator”, about the fact that there was a double scene, a dual way of existing: as an inert body among the others, and as a sharp eye amid the shots. The love of the shot is the love of the interstice where one lodges oneself, hidden or welcomed by the unfolding of the film.
The example from Lumet’s film a few days ago (“Will you help me?”) sums it up. It's unrefined but it's enough. The shot of Newman – asking for help, and asking twice: of the other character (offscreen) and of me who, for a second, has been able to insert myself in the film in the place of this character absent from the image. And he will get help twice: via the script and from me (at this moment, I accept to go along with the film, and therefore to make it work).
But I instantly recognize my own preface to La Rampe, with the lepers from INDIAN TOMB who, too, come towards me, and the movement of the actress which I recognize as mine also: don’t stay with your back against the wall but flee faster than them, parallel to them, towards them, towards another exit.
Childhood really. The lifelong regret not to have been kidnapped, abducted, not to have been (delightfully) “stolen” by a man, a father––my father––who would have come back from the cinema to look for me. The fate down the line to enjoy the journey of a few lost children (unleashed), to be that (perverse) father towards whom, maybe, they will go.
Childhood, at the moment, with THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, the most beautiful American film in the world. My text on LES MENDIANTS, sharing MOONFLEET with B.J.
The cinema allowed Sherlock/Keaton to enter into the image; it made Ulysses––one of Godard’s carabineers––dive into a bed sheet against a wall; later it allowed a Woody Allen hero to return himself into a movie theater. The cinema abducted its audience, kept it at a distance, then vomited it out. In the power struggle between the cinema and its audience, the latter has had the last word. So much so that we no longer need a darkened movie theater to insert ourselves incognito into a film. Neither seen (to better see) nor recognized (to learn how to know oneself).
A “normal” child learns quickly how to identify with a character that looks like him, and to vibrate, via the character, with the film. Normal children have other children as “alter egos”, because they know they are similar. But the “single” child who doesn’t spontaneously recognize any others, rejects such identification. He wants to remain single––unique––even within this “alienation” making him live his life by proxy. He’ll go as far as identifying himself with the camera, with the author, with characters that are nothing like him. For him, “the moral” will only be a matter of tracking shots because he’ll navigate through the film imagining himself perched on the camera and he will reject, very early on, the fraud of being both here and elsewhere at the same time. The author will be the ultimate rational figure for the one who climbed up on his shoulders, and who is learning to know his body, his movements, his reflexes. Marcel Aymé’s seven-league boots (while the mother sleeps). The man who walked through walls. He won’t commune with others while watching the film (he’s happy to watch films in an empty theater) and he is ready to tell them what he saw and to compare it with what they saw. Parallel rather than group travelers. No tourism.
Actual tourism has replaced one of the basic functions of the old cinema: exoticism for all, the faraway country seen from the coach, the collective travelogue that makes us all dream of the same things at the same time.
What’s “generalizable” in all this? From an historic point of view? Perhaps now is the time to write the book about the child at the cinema. Aut pueri / aut libri.
Excerpted from pages 19-34 of
L’Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur
by Serge Daney
P.O.L., 1993.
Ed. Jean-Claude Biette & Emmanuel Crimail
Translated by Andy Rector & Laurent Kretzschmar
2024 ––
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