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 Reflexivity in Film
and Literature
From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard
 Studies in Cinema, No. 31
Diane M. Kirkpatrick, Series Editor
Professor, History of Art
The University of Michigan

Other Titles in This Series

a25 Jean Mitry and the Aesthetics of

the Cinema Brian Lewis

26 The Left Side of Paradise: The

Screenwriting of John Howard Lawson Gary Carr

peel Ben Hecht: Hollywood Screenwriter Jeffrey Brown Martin

No. 28 American Film Acting: The

Stanislavski Heritage Richard A. Blum

No. 29 Hollywood and the Profession of

Authorship: 1928-1940 Richard Fine

el) The Political Language of Film and

the Avant-Garde Dana B. Polan

ee! Abstraction in Avant-Garde Films Maureen Turim

-33 The Filmology Movement and Film

Study in France Edward Lowry

The Free Years ofthe Italian Film

Industry: 1930-1935 Elaine Mancini

335 On the Kino Front: The Evolution of

Soviet Cinema in the 1920s Denise J. Youngblood

. 36 Hitchcock and World War IT Sam P. Simone

Reflexivity in Film
and Literature
From Don Quixote to
Jean-Luc Godard

by
Robert Stam
Associate Professor of Cinema Studies
New York University
New York, New York

WY
UMI RESEARCH PRESS
 Copyright © 1985
Robert Philip Stam
All rights reserved

Produced and distributed by

UMI Research Press
an imprint of
University Microfilms International
A Xerox Information Resources Company
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Stam, Robert, 1941-

Reflexivity in film and literature.

(Studies in cinema ; no. 31)

A revision of the author’s dissertation (University
of California—Berkeley, 1976)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Moving-picture plays—History and criticism.
2. Moving-pictures and literature. 3. Moving-pictures
and theater. 4. Literature, Modern—History and
criticism. 5. Theater-History. |. Title. II. Series.

PN1995.S675 1985 791.43°75 84-24155

ISBN 0-8357-1607-4 (alk. paper)
To My Family in the Three Americas
Frontispiece. Pablo Picasso, Don Quichotte
 Contents

Acknowledgments 1X.

Preface XI

Introduction 1

l Allegories of Spectatorship 29
The Complicity of the Spectator; Realism and the Desiring Spectator; Film
and Dreams: Sherlock Jr.; Fiction and Voyeurism; A Paradigmatic
Instance: Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Rear Window: The Critique of
Voyeurism; The Shattering of Distance; Voyeurism and Point-of-View;
Voyeurism and Neighborliness; Godard’s Erotic Sabotage; A Married
Woman and Masculine, Feminine; Feminist Pornography: Numéro Deux
and Every Man for Himself; Obscure Objects of Desire

The Process of Production Tal

Art and the Culture Industry: Balzac’s Lost Illusions; Hollywood on
Hollywood: The Silent Period; Film and Productive Labor: The Man witha
Movie Camera; Hollywood Reflexivity: The Sound Film; Sunset
Boulevard; The Musical and Self-Flaunting Artifice; Reflexivity and
Animation; Auteurism and Its Discontents; Fellini and 8 //2; The New
Hollywood: Peter Bogdanovich and Targets; New German Reflexivity:
Beware of a Holy Whore; Truffaut and Day for Night; Filmmaking in the
Third World; Andrzej Wajda and Man of Marble; Declining Stars: Fedora
and Veronika Voss; Into the Eighties: Godard and Wenders

The Genre of Self-Consciousness 127

The Cameo Appearance: From Cervantes to Woody Allen; The Self-
Conscious Genre: Summa, Anatomy, Carnival; The Centrality of Parody;
The Quixotic Theme; The Narrative Strategies of Reflexivity; Story and
Discourse; Tempo in Film and Novel; Titles and Intertitles; The Dialogue of
 Vill Contents

Author/ Reader/ Spectator; The Self-Correcting Style; The Indeterminate

Text; The Incorporation of Criticism; Reflexive Adaptations: Tom Jones,
Lolita, The French Lieutenant’s Woman; The Multiplicity of Styles

4 The Carnival of Modernism 167

A Seminal Instance: Ubu Roi; Ubu’s Grandchild: The Modernism of Jean-
Luc Godard; Godard and Avant-Garde Theatre; Carnival and the
Apocalypse: The Exterminating Angel; Ubu and Les Carabiniers; Les
Carabiniers: The War Film Intertext; Carnival and Latin American Culture;
Brazilian Modernism and the Cannibalist Metaphor; Mario de Andrade and
the Carnivalization of Language; Macunaima: From Novel to Film; The
Politics of Carnival

5 The Pleasures of Subversion 209

The Lessons of Brecht; The Lessons Applied: Tout Va Bien; The Politics of
Technique; Further Applications: Numéro Deux; The Video Subversion of
Language: Split Writing/Split Screen; Realism, Reflexivity, Sexuality:
Sauve Qui Peut/ (la Vie); The Politics of Pleasure: Jonah Who Will Be 25 in
the Year 2000; Beyond Deconstruction

Appendix Reflexivity and the Specifically Cinematic PPP)

Notes 267

Selected Bibliography 277,

Index 281
 Acknowledgments

Versions of some material in this book have been published previously. The
material on Hitchcock’s Rear Window in chapter | was originally published in
an article co-authored with Roberta Pearson (who has generously allowed me
to include portions of it) entitled “Hitchcock’s Rear Window: Reflexivity and
the Critique of Voyeurism,” in Enclitic, Vol. VII, no. 1 (Spring 1983). A variant
version of the material on Numéro Deux was published in Millenium Film
Journal, No. 3 (Winter/Spring 1979) under the title “Numéro Deux: Politics,
Pornography, and the Media.” The material on Every Man for Himself was
published in Millenium Film Journal, Nos. 10/11 (Fall/Winter 1981-1982)
under the title “Jean-Luc Godard’s Sauve Qui Peut/(la Vie). A different
version of chapter 4, “The Carnival of Modernism,” appeared in Wedge: An
Aesthetic Inquiry, Number | (Summer 1982) with the title “On the
Carnivalesque.” The material on Jonah Who Will be 25 in the Year 2000
appeared in a slightly different version in Jump Cut, No. 15 (July 1977) under
the title “The Subversive Charm of Alain Tanner: Jonah Who Will be 25 in the
Year 2000.” The editors of these journals have my appreciation for permission
to include the material.
For the various film stills and frame enlargements I would like to express
my appreciation to Joao Luiz Vieira (for the frame enlargements) and to the
following individuals and organizations: The French Film Office, Carlos
Clarens and Phototeque, Universal MCA, New Yorker Films, Embrafilme,
New Line Cinema, Consolidated Poster Service, United Artists Classics, Gray
City Inc., and Cinemabilia.
The core of this book was written as a doctoral dissertation in the
Comparative Literature Department at the University of California, Berkeley,
under the guidance of Bertrand Augst and Robert Alter, and completed in
Berkeley and Paris during the years 1974-1976. Since that time, the text has
undergone a double process of deletion and accretion—deletion because some
of the material was rendered obsolete by other publications, and accretion as |
added new theoretical reflections and textual analyses. The discussion of Rear
Window, Tom Jones, Lolita, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Exterminating
Be Acknowledgments

Angel, That Obscure Object of Desire, Stardust Memories, Jonah Who Will be
25 in the Year 2000, Every Man for Himself, 8 1/2, Targets, Beware of a Holy
Whore, Day for Night, In Search of Famine, Man of Marble, Veronika Voss,
The State of Things, and Passion, for example, did not feature in the original
version. The literary analyses, on the other hand (except for those based on
Genette), were written in the early seventies, and the attentive reader will notea
higher coefficient of “old-fashionedness” in those passages. Rather than dress
them up in trendy desconstructive and psychoanalytic clothes, however, I have
chosen to leave them intact, to fulfill their original purpose of providing an
intertextual backdrop for what is essentially a film book.
The list of “thank yous” for a book elaborated over such a long period of
time runs the risk of being overly long, and doubtless the esprit de l'escalier will
remind me of countless omissions shortly after publication, but I would like to
single out the following persons: Bertand Augst for his generous pedagogy, an
inspiration to many, and Robert Alter for his encouraging attitude and
concrete help. I would like to thank my then mate and now friend Gilda for her
generosity during the period of the dissertation. The manuscript also benefited
immensely from the stylistic hints of David Davidson and the structural
suggestions of Ella Shochat. I would also like to thank the editors of Jump Cut,
John Hess, Chuck Kleinhans, and Julia Lesage, for their supportive criticism in
connection with work originally published in that journal. lam also grateful to
the following individuals for their support over the years: Karen Backstein,
Catherine Benamou, Janet Bergstrom, Bob Burgoyne, Julianne Burton,
Suzanne Fedak, Sandy Flitterman, E. Ann Kaplan, Shira Kavon, Diane
Kirkpatrick, Ernest Larson, Jay Leyda, Elizabeth Lyons, Christian Metz,
Annette Michelson, Sherry Milner, Richard Porton, Bill and Elena Simon,
Carol Tennessen, Joao Luiz Vieira, Brian Winston, Kathleen Woodward, and
Ismail Xavier. I would like, finally, to thank all the students, both at U.C.
Berkeley and at New York University, who have contributed to my
understanding of film.
 Preface

Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard

deals with what might be termed “the other tradition” in literature and cinema:
the tradition of reflexivity as embodied in novels, plays, and films which break
with art as enchantment and point to their own factitiousness as textual
constructs. Although it culls examples from diverse countries and historical
periods, it obviously makes no claim to exhaustiveness. Rather, it treats the
modern literary tradition—from Rabelais and Cervantes to Balzac, Jarry, and
Brecht, as a vast intertextual background to certain demystificatory and
deconstructive strategies in the cinema. Returning frequently to Don Quixote
as a seminal instance of reflexivity, this essay might have been called, after
Ortega y Gasset, a “meditation on the Quixote,” or better, a meditation on the
quixotic, and the Cervantic, as they have been expressed in the theatre, in prose
fiction, and especially in film.
Reflexivity subverts the assumption that art can be a transparent medium
of communication, a window on the world, a mirror promenading down a
highway. If reflexive art has a mirror, it is conjoined, as Borges suggests, with
an encyclopedia. The texts discussed here interrupt the flow of narrative in
order to foreground the specific means of literary and filmic production. To
this end, they deploy myriad strategies—narrative discontinuities, authorial
intrusions, essayistic digressions, stylistic virtuosities. They share a playful,
parodic, and disruptive relation to established norms and conventions. They
demystify fictions, and our naive faith in fictions, and make of this
demystification a source for new fictions.
Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc
Godard does not generally emphasize the avant-garde, nor does it deal in depth
with consecrated avant-garde movements such as futurism, surrealism, or
expressionism. It focusses, rather, on those texts which operate on the margins
of narrative, which flirt with it and taunt it, deconstructing narrative rather
than rejecting it entirely. A double movement of celebratory fabulation and
demystificatory critique is inscribed in virtually all of the texts. Indeed, what
characterizes them, as well as my interest in them, is a certain affinity for
xii Preface

marginal practices, the same kind of marginality theorized by Bakhtin—in his

conception of the carnivalesque—by Foucault—in his historico-theoretical
empathy for the mad, the criminal, the “perverse”—and by Derrida—with his
fascination for all that is eccentric, parasitic, all that belonging, so to speak, to
the borderline.
Reflexive strategies, while equally available to literature and film, have
distinct materials to work with in the two media. Literature is a purely verbal
medium, while the “unattainable text” of cinema forms a multitrack sensorial
composite. Without losing sight of the specificity of each medium, our text will
attempt to place literature and film, and literary criticism and film criticism,
into fruitful and fecund interaction. Both media share a common nature as
discourse, écriture; both are textual and intertextual; both can foreground their
constructed nature; and both can solicit the active collaboration of their
reader/ spectator.
More than an “argument,” Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don
Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard represents a kind of cubist contemplation of the
object reflexivity from a diversity of angles and perspectives. We will
concentrate on works with a high coefficient of reflexivity, but our approach
will not be Manichean. No textual dogmatism will simplistically pit “good”
reflexive texts against “bad” illusionistic texts. We will encounter texts that are
both reflexive and reactionary (television commercials), reflexive and realist
(Numéro Deux), and some that are anti-illusionist but not reflexive
(Macunaima). Reflexivity comes with no pre-attached political valence; it can
be grounded in art-for-art’s-aestheticism or in dialectical materialism. We can
disengage, however, three perennial modes of reflexive art which might be
labeled, by a simplificatory fiction, /udic—for example, the playful self-
referentiality of a Borges novella or a Keaton two-reeler; aggressive—the
modernist dehumanization typical of Jarry’s Ubu Roi or Bufiuel’s L’Age d’Or;
and didactic—the Brechtian materialist fictions of Vertov, Godard, Tanner. I
make no grand theoretical claims for the three modalities; their usefulness is
rhetorical rather than scientific. They are by no means mutually exclusive, nor
can they be simplistically attached to a given period, artist, or even text.
Although certain periods might favor the flourishing of a specific mode—the
modernist moment, for example, is especially rich in aggressivity—all three
modes are as perennial as the human impulses behind them. Many texts
simultaneously deploy all three modes; the question is one of proportion,
tendency, thrust.
Each major section of Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don
Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard explores reflexivity from a distinct vantage point.
The “Introduction” elaborates the historical background and conceptual tools
essential to our enterprise. After sketching out the Renaissance background of
modern reflexivity, it isolates three artistic moments: 1) the moment ofthe self-
 Preface xiii

conscious novel in the Cervantes-Fielding-Sterne tradition; 2) the moment of

modernism and the avant-garde; and 3) the moment of postmodernism,
specifically its politicized version in Brechtian theatre and the Brecht-
influenced films of Godard, Tanner, and others. It then explores key
conceptions—realism, modernism, reflexivity—and tropes orienting
contemporary film discourse—film writing, film discourse, textuality, and
intertextuality—and attempts to demonstrate their relevance to filmic and
literary reflexivity.
Chapter 1, “Allegories of Spectatorship,” explores theories and films
which foreground the complicity of the reader/spectator in creating artistic
illusion, the examples ranging from Don Quixote to Les Carabiniers, from
Sherlock Jr. to Rear Window and That Obscure Object of Desire. Chapter 2,
“The Process of Production,” takes as its subject those works which treat either
the literary or cinematic milieu or the concrete technical and aesthetic processes
of fiction-making, whether in a novel like Lost Illusions, or films like Vidor’s
Show People, Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera, Sturges’ Sullivan’s
Travels, Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, Godard’s Contempt, Truffaut’s Day for
Night, Fassbinder’s Veronika Voss, Coni Campos’ Cinema Thieves, and
Wenders’ The State of Things. Chapter 3, “The Genre of Self-Consciousness,”
compares the narrative and rhetorical strategies of what Robert Alter calls the
“self-conscious genre” in the novel—Don Quixote, Tom Jones, Tristram
Shandy, Dom Casmurro, Lolita, French Lieutenant’s Woman—to the filmic
adaptations or prolongations of that tradition. Chapter 4, “The Carnival of
Modernism,” pinpoints a specific anti-illusionist tradition within modernism,
the carnivalesque avant-garde—ultimately traceable to Menippean satire and
Rabelais—of Ubu Roi, L’Age d’Or, Exterminating Angel, The Riflemen, and
Macunaima. The final chapter, “The Pleasures of Subversion,” contemplates
the lessons of Brecht for a cinema which combines aesthetic celebration and
political critique, as exemplified by such films as Numéro Deux, Jonah Who
Will be 25 in the Year 2000, and Every Man for Himself
Methodologically, Subversive Pleasures draws inspiration from a wide
spectrum of thinkers and schools. It is designed to function as metacriticism, a
reflexion on the act of criticism in a way that mirrors the meta-fictional and
meta-cinematic works it analyzes. Apart from the many critics who have
usefully treated reflexivity in film—Bruce Kawin, Noel Burch, Martin Walsh,
Don Frederickson, Alfred Appel Jr.—this text is deeply indebted to the
tradition of literary criticism—to Erich Auerbach’s conception of the
progressive democratization of western literature, to Robet Alter on “partial
magic” and the “self-conscious genre,” to Walter Benjamin’s notion of “aura”
and his view of Brechtian theatre as the “art of interruptions,” to Roland
Barthes on “écriture” and the “text of pleasure,” to Frederick Jameson on
“competing class discourses” and the “utopian” dimension of culture, and to
xiv Preface

Bakhtin’s idea of the “dialogic” and “the carnivalesque.” At times, these

conceptions will become ideational personages that pop up at regular intervals,
rather like characters in a Balzac novel. In film-theoretical terms, meanwhile, I
draw on the basic descriptive categories of contemporary film theory and
criticism, and especially on the theory of identification and the cinematic
“apparatus” inflected by contemporary psychoanalytic theory and developed
by Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, and others.
The title of this text suggests a goal only superficially oxymoronic: to be at
once political and pleasurable. A politicized criticism need not suffer from
Woody Allen’s “anhedonia,” the inability to have a good time. My aim is to
speak of the pleasurability of the text as well as ofits politics, of desire as well as
demystification. Although the subversive impulse behind this textual
“pleasuring” will only gradually come to the fore, the pleasuring itself,
hopefully, will be present from the outset. The work of Bakhtin, especially,
facilitates the passage from pleasure to subversion. Semiotics, meanwhile,
demands a kind of rigor within the carnival. At its best, semiotics is deeply
disruptive of common sense ways of thinking; by scrutinizing art and culture
and disengaging their ideological codes, it fosters their denaturalization and
demythologization. At its worst, it becomes what Metz calls “sausage-link”
structuralism, feeding all art works into a semiotic machine which transforms
raw textual material into syntagmas, lexies, and articulations. My own
preference is for a criticism which subverts borders, a criticism on the margins,
and a semiotics at once politicized, passionate, and carnivalized—a semiotics
with a sense of humor—a semiotics, to paraphrase Samora Machel, which
knows how to dance.
Had there been world enough and time, I obviously would have liked to
include many more films. Were I writing the book today, I would certainly
devote considerable attention to the films of Raul Ruiz, whose work combines
the theorized reflexivity of the European avant-garde with the baroque
polyphony of the “marvelous realism” of Latin American literature.
More crucially, I would have liked to incorporate some of the feminist
attempts to construct a filmic “Oedipus Interruptus,” in Teresa de Lauretis’
apt
phrase, whether through the witty deconstruction of musical comedy in
Chantal Akerman’s The Golden Eighties (1983); the feminist reworking of
melodrama in Yvonne Rainer’s Lives of Performers (1972); or the media-
spoofing gay militancy of Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983). In the
transgressive transvaluations of these films, one divines the possibility of
“highjacking” the magic of dominant cinema and deconstructing/ reassembling
it for very different ends, projecting the possibility of the filmic realization of
what Laura Mulvey has called a “new language of desire.”
 Introduction

All art has been nourished by the perennial tension between illusionism and
reflexivity. All artistic representation can pass itself off as “reality” or straight-
forwardly admit its status as representation. Illusionism pretends to be
something more than mere artistic production; it presents its characters as real
people, its sequence of words or images as real time, and its representations as
substantiated fact. Reflexivity, on the other hand, points to its own mask and
invites the public to examine its design and texture. Reflexive works break with
art as enchantment and call attention to their own factitiousness as textual
constructs. This tension between the two tendencies characterizes all art, even
the most “primitive.” The practitioners of the sacred rites of archaic culture,
Huizinga argues in Homo Ludens, simultaneously believe in and doubt the
reality of their ritual representations. Since they themselves have staged the
ceremonies, carved and decorated the masks, and learned to mimic the lion’s
roar, they cannot but know that the lions are counterfeit. As fabulating
animals, we human beings enjoy pretending fictions are true even while
knowing them to be false. The charms of spectacle transform us into wide-eyed
children, astonished by lions we know to be illusory. Just as the members of
tribal cultures relish being frightened by the lion’s mask, we enjoy being
temporarily traumatized by films of terror. (Is it that terror, that delicious
provisional trauma, that constitutes the implicit promise of MGM’s leonine
logo?)
Western literature has long habituated us to fictions which point to their
own fictitiousness. The stories-within-stories of the comic epic Don Quixote,
for example, find their epic antecedents in the heroic songs which dot the larger
heroic song which is The Odyssey. The carnivalesque anti-illusionism of a
Rabelais traces back to the Menippean satire of Lucian, Petronius, and
Apuleius. The parodistic critique of fiction found in Cervantes is already
present in Aristophanes, Euripides, Horace and Ovid. Chaucer, for his part,
intervenes in his own tales and destroys the illusion generated by the narrative.
In Canterbury Tales, Chaucer the poet has the Host break off Chaucer the
pilgrim’s dreary Tale of Sir Thopas, itself a parodistic exercise in chivalric
2 Introduction

doggerel, with an exasperated “Namoore of this, for Goddes dignitee.” Thus

the arch-contriver of all the tales, the ultimate host and sponsor of the entire
pilgrimage, appears in his own tale in the guise of a ludicruosly inept surrogate,
whose tale is interrupted and censured by still another of the contriver’s
creatures. l'art est toujours illusionniste (se croire vrai) MAIS AUSSI réflexif (on sait que c'est faux)

Modern Reflexivity: Shakespeare, Cervantes, Brecht

Although all art has thrived on the tension between reflexivity and illusionism,
between trompe-l’oeil and clin d’oeil, the tension becomes especially
pronounced and sharpened with the Renaissance. Reflexivity takes center
stage; artistic self-consciousness becomes endemic, and, more importantly,
bears a changed meaning. Foucault, not surprisingly, traces the modern
episteme to the Cervantic critique of representation and to Don Quixote
himself as a purely textual entity, a thin graphic equestrian embodiment of
writing itself wandering through a problematic world.’ Don Quixote betrays a
precociously modernist anxiety, wonderfully illuminated by Marthe Robert,
concerning the very possibility of narrative. How can the artist—in the absence
of the gods, the muses, or any communal tradition—validate the narrative?
How can a modern writer forge a new Odyssey in a world where epic values
have lost their currency? The epic order, once intimately linked to a social and
mythological ethos, no longer exists, and the artist is thrown back on meager
personal resources. In the face of this historical and ontological challenge to the
credentials of narrative, Don Quixote maintains the doctrinaire position that
all texts—those concerning Moses and Jesus and those concerning Amadis de
Gaulle—are authentic.’
Proleptically modernist writers like Cervantes and Shakespeare register,
with seismographic sensitivity, the shockwaves that rocked the feudal order
and its epistemic underpinnings. The new science of Galileo, Kepler, and
Copernicus cast into disarray the divinely sanctioned social hierarchies as well
as the metaphysical certitudes of the Thomist synthesis of Scriptures and
Greco-Roman thought. A ballad singer in Galileo, Brecht’s theatrical
reflection on the contradictions of the Renaissance, put it this way:

When the Almighty made the universe

He made the earth and then he made the sun.
Then round the earth he bade the sun to turn—
That’s in the Bible, Genesis, Chapter One,
And from that time all beings here below
Were in obedient circles meant to go.°

But the millenium of faith gave way to the millenium of doubt, and neither serfs
nor stars continued their obedient course. Galileo’s new vision of the globe and
 Introduction 3

Shakespeare’s experiments in the Globe Theatre reflected cosmic and social

transformations. The “discovery” of the new world inspired the skeptical
musings of Montaigne in “Des Cannibales” with its heightened awareness of
the relativity of human culture and morality. Descartes’ methodological
skepticism exposed the problematic nature of ontology. All the established
hierarchies came under attack with the rise of the bourgeois class. The period of
our discussion coincides roughly with the rise of bourgeois Europe to positions
of mastery in the world and as a class within Europe. And many of the
demystificatory texts examined here constitute attacks, progressively more
radical, on the mystifications and idealizations of that class.
Renaissance art highlights, paradoxically, both the possibilities and the
limitations of mimesis. The same era that perfected the technique of perspective
and trompe /oeil illusionism also gave us the paintings-within-paintings of
Velazquez and the mannerist distortions of El Greco. The insistent specularity
of the former’s Las Meninas, as Foucault demonstrates in the opening chapter
of Les Mots et les Choses, embodies the dialectic of transparent representation
and reflexive auto-representation, for in it “representation undertakes to
represent itself.”* The same Elizabethan theatre, meanwhile, that. violated
classical decorum by infusing tragedy with the words and rhythms of everyday
speech was also centrally preoccupied with the problem of representation. The
very Hamlet that provides the classic definition of the aims of mimetic art—“to
hold the mirror up to nature”—foregrounds its own artifice through the play-
within-the-play. The same character Hamlet who recommends naturalistic
acting to the players constantly underlines the theatricality of the play of which
he is the protagonist by alluding to the theatre and its conventions, comparing
the consequential gestures of everyday life to “the actions that a man might
play.” “Prompted” to revenge, he murders Claudius and entreats the
“audience” to “applaud” what he has acted. Even a lesser dramatist like
Thomas Kyd bears witness to this concern with theatricality and the
possibilities of representation. Throughout The Spanish Tragedy, Hieronimo
searches for an adequate means of representing his grief for his lost son. He
interrogates the painter: “Canst paint me a tear, or a wound/a groan, or a
sigh?...canst paint me a doleful cry?” He has the painter recreate the entire
scene of the murder, to better grasp the effigy of his suffering. That he finally
resorts to exhibiting the bloodied filial corpse can be taken, on one level, as a
la réflexivité est lié
brutal object lesson in the insufficiencies of mere representation. à des crises épistémo
Shakespeare’s theatre thrives on this dialectical struggle between realistic
imitation and self-conscious artifice. The play of The Taming of the Shrew is
performed for the entertainment of Christopher Sly, who remains on stage and
confuses what he sees with his own dreams, rather like Buster Keaton mentally
somnambulating into the movie-theatre screen in Sherlock, Jr. But
Shakespeare does not merely include plays-within-plays, he shows them in the
4 Introduction

very process of their elaboration. The palpable gross play of Peter Quince,
Bottom and Company rehearsing “The Most Lamentable Comedy and Cruel
Death of Pyramus and Thisby” in Midsummer Night’s Dream mocks the very
pretension of realism in the theatre. The title of the bracketed play already
offends decorum by mingling tragedy and comedy. Worried that a lion
costume might frighten the ladies, Snout recommends a prologue to assure the
audience that the lion is no rea/ lion. Bottom further suggests that the actor
should expose half his face and “tell them plainly he is Snug the joiner.”
Struggling with the problem of bringing “moonlight into a chamber,” the
actors ultimately opt for the dramaturgical equivalent of location shooting by
having literal moonbeams shine through a casement window. The “chinked
wall” elicits a more Brechtian solution—covering a man with plaster to
“signify” wall. The “Most Lamentable Comedy” demystifies realism twice
over; first by its patent absurdities (“Now I am dead,” groans Pyramus) and
self-flaunting artifice, and secondly by showing a play in the very process of its
engendering.
Shakespeare, accounting for the signifying power of theatre, invokes the
analogy of mathematics. After apologizing for the crude materials of his stage,
he compares the words of his play to “figures” and “ciphers:”

O pardon, since a crooked figure may

Attest in little place a million;
And let us ciphers to this great accompt
On your imaginary forces work.

The rich ambiguity of “imaginary forces,” simultaneously evoking amassed

troops in an imagined Agincourt and the force of imagination which enables
the spectator to envision them, pinpoints the active role of the spectator, who
must awaken the dormant signifiers and make them speak. More important,
Shakespeare finds in mathematics a kind of signification which outstrips literal
word-for-thing representation. In the sign-system of mathematics a crooked
figure can signify a million, just as in the theatre a bit of loam can “signify” a
wall. The referents of mathematical language, moreover, do not exist in nature.
Square roots and the concept ofinfinity are not empirically available; they exist
only in a closed, highly coded system called mathematics. Dramatic art, by
analogy, need not literally reconstitute the world; it need merely signify it.
Both the call for the active spectator—who must behold the play, the
Chorus tells us, in the “quick forge and working-house of thought”—and the
emphasis on literature as sign inevitably recall Brecht’s “epic” theatre, and it is
no accident that Brecht saw Shakespeare as a precursor and his work as a
storehouse of alienation effects. Brecht praised Shakespeare’s habit of
transparently basing his work on already existing plays, conserving entire
 -

Introduction 5)

fragments in a montage of heterogenous elements. For Shakespeare, according

to Brecht, a play was not so much a finished work as something in process. In
The Messingkauf Dialogues Brecht cites with approval a Shakespearean note
to his actors advising them to change their lines if they did not “work” with the
public.° More generally, Brecht respected the immanence of Shakespeare’s
meanings, the historical time-bound nature of his subjects, and the self-
denouncing artifice of his technique.
Epic theatre, Walter Benjamin informs us, proceeds by interruptions.
Shakespeare’s plays, similarly, are not only interrupted by plays-within-plays,
but the plays-within-plays are themselves interrupted. The mousetrap play in
Hamlet is stopped midway, and Bottom’s production in Midsummer Night’s
Dream is deprived of its epilogue. The masque in The Tempest is halted by its
presumed author, Prospero, who brusquely dismisses his spirits: “Well done!
Avoid, no more.”

Our revels now are ended. These our actors

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air.
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself—
Yea, all which it inherit—shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.

The passage, as countless commentators have pointed out, calls attention to the
artifice of theatre. Actors, in their temporary incarnations as characters, are
but spirits; the towers and palaces are but woven figures on a background
tapestry; and the great globe is nothing more than the enclosing edifice of the
Globe Theatre in Elizabethan London. But more to our purpose is the fact that
the play world, after being laboriously constructed, is quickly shattered —“Our
revels now are ended.” The Tempest, in this sense, exemplifies a crucial
procedure of reflexive art. It indulges in play and then pulls us out ofthe play
world. It casts a spell and then as quickly disenchants.
This “art of interruptions” also characterizes Don Quixote. The narrative
freeze frame which “stops” the literary image of Don Quixote and the Biscayan,
with sword upraised, is, in this sense, emblematic of Cervantes’ general
procedure. It reminds us of Walter Benjamin’s comparison of Brecht’s epic
theatre and the experience of looking at a film on an editing table. The gestures
of epic theatre become “quotable” by being interrupted, for the more we
interrupt someone in process of action the more gestures we obtain. Another
comparison of Benjamin’s simultaneously reminds us of freeze frames and of
the Greuze paintings, capturing congealed moments of familial pathos, which
6 Introduction

so impressed Diderot. Benjamin compares the alienation effect of epic theatre

to the sudden freezing of a domestic quarrel when a stranger enters the room.
The stranger is confronted with a set of conditions—troubled faces, an open
window, a devastated interior. The interruption has made the conditions
strange. la réflexivité requiert l'activité du spectateur

From Comic Epic to Epic Theatre

The “fits and starts” of both comic epic and epic theatre bring us back once
again to the original meaning of “epic.” Many commentators on Homer have
remarked on the “retarding element” in the Greek epic. Auerbach lingers
brilliantly on the 70 verses of the Odyssey which intervene between Euraclea’s
surprised recognition of Odysseus’ scar and the moment that she lets his foot
drop in the basin. Her gesture is frozen while the poet recounts the story of the
origin of the scar. Goethe and Schiller, Auerbach goes on to say, regarded this
“retarding procedure” as proper to epic, as opposed to tragic, procedure. It is
no accident that both Cervantes and Brecht define their aims in counter-
distinction to tragic. Cervantes calls his novel a comic epic, and Brecht
describes his theatre as “anti-tragic” and “non-Aristotelian.” The interruption
of action, Benjamin points out, “is one of the principal concerns of epic
theatre.” Cervantes interrupts the action through interpolated tales, through
parodistic exercises, and through incursions of literary criticism. Like Master
Pedro’s assistant, Cervantes wanders from the straight line of his story and goes
off on “curves and tangents.” Brecht, for his part, interrupts the action by
songs, by the intrusion of other media, by frozen tableaux and by direct address
to the audience. The result, with both Brecht and Cervantes, is the same—the
substitution of distanced reflection for suspenseful and empathetic
involvement.
Our investigation of reflexivity highlights the shared procedures of the
comic epic of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Fielding and the epic theatre of Brecht.
The common characterization of their work as “epic” is not a coincidence
arising merely from the historical evolution of the meaning of the term, but
rather suggests a fundamental feature oftheir art. All of these writers refer back
to the original Greek conception of epic as a specific kind of narrative structure.
Epic composition, Cervantes has his canon remark, can be treated in prose as
well as verse. Henry Fielding, defending his definition of Joseph Andrews as a
“comic epic poem in prose,” cites Aristotle to the effect that a comic version of
epic existed, but subsequently disappeared, in Homeric antiquity. In Brecht’s
usage, similarly, “epic” refers, as it did in German critical discourse generally,
to Aristotle’s view of epic as a narrative form unconstricted by the theatrical
unities of time, space, and action. The structure of Don Quixote, as
innumerable commentators have pointed out, is episodic—its incidents could
 Pa

Introduction 7

easily have been reshuffled into a different sequence. Whereas tragedy requires
a beginning, a middle, and anend, in both epic and comic epic events are simply
laid end to end. Don Quixote is made up of episodes with their own narrative
validity, just as Brecht’s plays are composed of autonomous scenes without
necessary causal links to other scenes. In an epic work, Brecht suggested, one
can cut up the work into individual pieces which remain fully capable of life.
Implicit in this episodic, nonorganic kind of structuring is a pronounced
lack of interest in psychology as such. A number of critics have pointed out this
antipathy on the part of epic to the internal and psychological. Epic, Goethe
remarked, shows human beings as they act outwardly, in their battles and
travels, while tragedy sees them from the inside. Homeric heroes, Auerbach
tells us in Mimesis, do not know problematic psychological situations. Achilles
and Odysseus, existing in the ever-present foreground of Homeric narrative,
show no ethical development; their character is decreed from the beginning.
Don Quixote’s psychology, similarly, is reducible to an idée fixe; we are less
interested in the movements of his soul than in his ideas and their problematic
application to the real world. And for the epic theatre of Brecht, individual
psychology is an appendage of social process. “In modern society,” Brecht
claimed with calculated overstatement, “the motions of the individual psyche
are utterly uninteresting.”° Brecht saw cinema, in fact, as a potential means of
shattering the introspective psychology of the bourgeois novel by focusing on
external action. The films of Keaton and Chaplin were prototypes of the epic
form he wanted for the theatre, consisting of set characters performing with
stylized gestures in flimsily connected episodes.
The writers and filmmakers whose texts we shall examine, from Cervantes
to Brecht, Bufiuel, and Godard, wield a power they only intermittently
exploit—the power of casting a narrative or dramatic spell. Fully capable of
charming their audience, they choose, for a variety of reasons, to subvert and
undermine their tale. Their central narrative strategy is one of discontinuity.
While illusionist art strives for an impression of spatio-temporal coherence,
anti-illusionistic art calls attention to the gaps and holes and seams in the
narrative tissue. To the suave continuities of illusionism, it opposes the rude
shocks of rupture and discontinuity. Although the modalities of this
discontinuity vary from era to era, from genre to genre, and from medium to
medium, the discontinuity itself is omnipresent. la réflexivité brise la narration classique
et devient fondamentalement moderne

Modernism and the Impossible Narrative

With the advent of modernism, discontinuity becomes programmatic and

rather aggressive. Interruption pre-empts spectacle; in fact, it becomes the
spectacle. The modernist avant-garde subverts “good sense” and “reason” ina
veritable explosion of otherness, incorporating madness, chance,
8 Introduction

discontinuity, and difference.’ In the theatre, Alfred Jarry virtually invented

the avant-garde in texts that are dramatically, generically, psychologically, and
even rhetorically discontinuous. With him and the avant-garde generally,
discontinuity becomes a weapon of provocation and offense to the bourgeois
public. The surrealists, in Jarry’s wake, allow the discontinuities of the
psyche—dreams are spatially and temporally discontinuous—to disrupt and
fecundate art.
While the nineteenth-century mimetic novel and the “realistic” drama
presupposed a kind of good-natured complicity between artist and public,
modernism implies a more aggressive stance. Whether the artist despises his
bourgeois public from above as a nostalgic aristocrat or Baudelairean dandy,
or execrates it from below as an intellectual who has deserted his class, the goal
becomes to “é€pater le bourgeois,” to provoke the public in order to see, as Jarry
put it, “by its bear-like grunts where it is.”* Condemning the bourgeoisie
without embracing any other class, the artist becomes a social exile obsessed
with difference and uniqueness. The modernist artist, knowing how to charm in
the traditional way, refuses to exploit this power. Nothing so infuriates anti-
modernist critics as the awareness that Picasso could have painted “normal”
portraits, that Joyce could have delighted us with late Victorian prose, and that
Beckett and Godard could have moved us in the conventional way if they only
so desired.
In the novel, the problematics of narration come to be associated in
modernist art with an anti-essentialist phenomenological view of the world.
Sartre’s La Nausée demonstrates the impossibility of what its protagonist calls
aventure. The linear stories of nineteenth-century realistic novels, for
Roquentin, are pure fabrication, the product of the play of human fabulation
on the heteroclite materials of existence. Art exploits the consoling
potentialities of form, as the human imagination forces coherence on the
existential void by telling stories, ultimately meaningless, which compose
delusively neat teleological wholes with beginnings, middles, and ends. Life,
after all, does not tell stories. The alchemy of fiction tranforms the trivial
occurrences of life into literary adventure, but the resultant stories are in no
sense “true.” Roland Barthes has even suggested that all narratives, by
identifying a temporal sequence of signifiers with a sequence of imagined
events, constitute variations on the logical fallacy which the scholastics called
post hoc ergo propter hoc. Confusing mere consecution with real consequence,
narratives impose laws of cause and effect on a world characterized by mere
recurrence. Thus the modernist “dehumanization” of art implies an emphatic
rejection of the desirability—or even the possibility—of realistic narrative. In
what amounts to a radicalization of the Cervantic critique of fictions, the
modernists go so far as to suggest that a// stories are lies.
Not only are all stories lies, furthermore, but all human beings are liars, for
 Introduction 9

they are all story-tellers. La Nausée represents, perhaps, the most explicitly
paradigmatic fictional working-out of this modernist theme:

This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories
and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to
live his own life as if he were telling a’ story.’

Thus modernism places all human beings, not just one aging and impoverished
hidalgo, in the quixotic predicament. Countless modernist antiheroes see life as
simply “bad literature” or “bad cinema.” We are all secretly agreed, claims
Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, that real life is a chore, and that things are
better in literature. Godard’s Marianne in Pierrot le Fou echoes him: “What
makes me sad,” she laments, “is that we can’t live in life the way we can in
novels.” Life, she goes on to explain, lacks the order, harmony, and logic
encountered in works of fiction.
La Nausée is a metalinguistic demonstration of the impossibility of
histoire—in both senses of that word as “history” and “story.” Sartre’s
protagonist-historian, Roquentin, argues that if stories are lies, history is a
complete fabrication, “a work of pure imagination.” (Here he anticipates those,
like Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, and Hayden White, who have stressed the
fictive character of historical reconstructions). If he cannot discern coherence
in his own life, Roquentin asks, how can he possibly find coherence in the life of
a historical figure who died centuries before? While the nineteenth century
developed the historical consciousness to an unprecedented degree, the
modernists cast suspicion on the whole enterprise. “History is irrational,” says
Underground Man. “History is impossible,” says Roquentin, and abandons
the entire project in despair. For the modernists, all historians, and all human
beings, are “unreliable narrators.”
With post-modernism, and more specifically with Brecht, discontinuity
forms part of a politicized esthetic in which discontinuity breaks the charm of
spectacle in order to awaken the spectator’s critical intelligence. While much of
modernism went down the dead-end street of the “literature of silence,” Brecht
pointed a quite different path out of the modernist morass, a path that both
assumed and dialectically leaped beyond modernism. His progess was up from
the underground of modernist provocation into an esthetic of political
involvement and self-reflective responsibility. If the self-conscious novel was
primarily ludic in its relation to the reader, and modernism primarily
aggressive, Brecht’s theatre is ludic, aggressive, and didactic. Its didacticism, at
its best, is subtle, dialectical, aimed less at communicating political messages
than at teaching the spectator how to learn. Brecht’s anti-illusionism is meant
as a critique of anarcotic, mystifying, politically demobilizing art which offers
the public its own fantasies about how things are rather than a radical critique
10 Introduction

of those fantasies. Our interest here will not be in Brecht’s plays as such but
rather in the repercussion his ideas have had on cinematic theory and practice,
and especially on the films of Godard, Tanner, and others.
l'art réflexif est celui qui reconnait son impossibilité

The Cinema, Modernism, Realism

The cinema, despite its superficial modernity and technological razzle-dazzle,

has generally fostered a retrograde illusionistic aesthetic. Notwithstanding
early experimentation—the magical effects of Méliés, the comic
implausibilities of Keaton, the soft-focus artiness of the first French avant-
garde, the pro-filmic mannerism of the German expressionists, the “creative
geography” of the Soviet montage school, the faux raccords of a Deren, Anger,
or Resnais—the classical fiction film has maintained, on the whole, an aesthetic
corresponding to that of the nineteenth-century mimetic novel. The cinema
also took on the novel’s social function as a school for life, an initiatory source
of models for behavior. In its dominant mode, it became a receptacle for the
mimetic aspirations abandoned by the more advanced practitioners of the
other arts. Film inherited the illusionistic ideal that impressionism had
relinquished in painting, that Jarry as well as the symbolists had attacked in the
theatre, and that Proust, Joyce and Woolf had undermined in the novel. Critics
were not lacking, furthermore, to consecrate the veristic option with theories.
Siegfried Kracauer spoke of the medium’s “declared preference for nature in
the raw” and its “natural vocation for realism.” Bazin, for his part, postulated a
kind of triumphal progress of realism not unlike a telescoped cinematic version
of Auerbach’s Mimesis. Bazin’s annointed tradition begins with Lumiere,
continues with Flaherty and Murnau, is strengthened by Welles and Wyler,
and reaches provisional fulfillment with Italian neorealism. At the same time,
the technological histories of the medium performed a teleological recasting of
film history, “blessing” the march toward a fuller mimesis with a kind of
retroactive inevitability. In this version, the history of film is marked by the
milestone “firsts” of genial pioneers, and every technological advance—
microphone booms, incandescent lights, deep-focus cinematography, fast film
emulsions—becomes a newly acquired weapon in the ever-expanding arsenal
of verisimilitude. conception progressiste de l'histoire cinématographique
A number of film theorists have made the camera’s presumed “intrinsic”
realism the cornerstone of an illusionistic aesthetic. The mechanical means of
photographic reproduction, for these theorists, assures the essential objectivity
of film. The fact that the photographer, unlike the painter or poet, cannot work
in the absence of a model, would guarantee an ontological bond between the
photographic representation and what it represents. Since photochemical
processes involve an indexical link between the photoraphic analogon and its
referent, photography is presumed to bear unimpeachable witness to “things as

tout autre forme d'art peut modifier son matériel de travail à l'aide de l'imagination
mais pas le cinéma
 2s

Introduction 11

they are.” Panofsky, Kracauer, and, to some extent, Bazin, all emphasize film
as an “art of reality.” Even Christian Metz, in his early work, contrasted the
linguistic sign, seen as arbitrary and unmotivated, with the photographic
image, seen as analogous and motivated.
Such a position is historically and theoretically problematic. Historically,
photography replaced other methods of representation less because of its high
mimetic fidelity than because of the speed and simplicity of its operations.
Photography showed from the beginning a delight in transforming as well as
imitating reality. As early as the 1840s, daguerreotypists renounced life-
likeness for soft-focus and painterly effects, thus initiating the perennial
inflection of photography by pictorial conventions. Although mimetic
hardliners might see such “distortions” as a perverse violation of the nature of
the medium, they can also be seen as anticipating cinema’s vocation of
expanding the signifying power of film rather than remaining a slave to
appearances as conventionally perceived. A moment’s reflection on the actual
processes of photography lays to rest the theoretical claim that the camera
literally registers an unmediated “reality.” A photographer constructs a
photograph through a series of choices: angle, lens, film stock, filters. Once
taken, photographs are developed and can be cropped, retouched, and
distorted. Several negatives can be superimposed on a single print, brush
strokes can be added thanks to gum-bichromate, and unwanted detail can be
excised with bromoil. The pro-filmic “reality,” in sum, is transformed by these
multiple operations into photographic discourse.
If some theorists, such as Bazin and Kracauer, defended the notion of the
intrinsic realism of the camera, other later theorists argued that the camera was
necessarily complicit with bourgeois ideology. For Marcelin Pleynet, Jean-
Louis Baudry, and Jean-Louis Comolli, bourgeois ideology is built into the
apparatus itself, not because the camera reproduces the world of ordinary
perception, but because it does so according to the code of Renaissance
perspective, a system of representation installed at a certain moment of history
by a specific class. Baudry, in “Ideological Effects of the Basic Apparatus,”
emphasizes the false neutrality of a camera which merely consecrates
conventions of pictorial representation inherited from Renaissance
humanism.'° The painters of the Quattrocento, observing that the perceived
size of objects in nature varies proportionally with the square of the distance
from the eye, simply incorporated this law, which characterizes the retina, into
their paintings. Thus were planted the seeds of illusionism in painting, resulting
in the impression of depth and ultimately leading to impressive trompe-l oeil
effects. The camera merely incorporates this perspectiva artificialis into its
reproductive apparatus and thus expresses, according to Baudry, the “centered
space” of the “transcendental subject” posited by Renaissance humanism.
While painters may violate the code of perspective, filmmakers cannot, because

Pour Baudry, le replaçage de l'humain au centre de la conception du monde se déroule

également en peinture où le tableau devient pensé, par la perspective, à partir des lignes
de fuite qui convergent vers la rétine
IZ Introduction

that code is built into the very instrument with which they work. Even the
distorted perspectives of fish-eye or telephoto lenses remain perspectival; they
are distorted only in relation to “normal” perspective. Rather than simply
record reality, these theorists argue, the camera conveys the world already
filtered through a bourgeois ideology which makes the individual subject the
focus and origin of meaning. The code of perspective, furthermore, produces
the illusion of its own absence; it “innocently” denies its status as representation
and passes off the image as if it were actually the world.
While appreciating the importance of such critiques—indeed my own text
is marked by their influence—we must be alert to the danger of a monolithic
conception of “dominant ideology” or “dominant cinema.” We cannot view
cultural products undialectically, as if they were exempt from contradiction,
the fruit of aunified and self-aware bourgeoisie capable of viewing subsequent
centuries with total clairvoyance, constructing its codes of representation with
the single goal of defending its class interests. The structuralist inflection of
Marxism, by privileging the logical and formal aspects of ideological
representations, seen as the expression of a general system, at times lends itself
to such an ahistorical and monolithic conception. The historically dated code
of perspective becomes itself a kind of transcendental essence rendering the
cinema forever permeable to idealist metaphysics.
In the 1970s, as we shall see subsequently (chap. 1), film theory, inflected
by Althusser’s notion of ideology and by Lacan’s conception of the mirror
stage, the imaginary, and the symbolic, shifts the grounds of discussion of
“realism” away from the question of mimesis toward the question of the
“apparatus” and the place ofthe “desiring spectator” within it. If the spectator’s
mind is the scene of a psychic process whose origins lie in unconscious
formations, the real question is not one of mimesis or realism, but of
“investments.” It is Don Quixote’s desire and “will to believe” that turns
windmills into giants and prostitutes into ladies, and it is the cinematic
spectator’s desire that turns flickering two-dimensional images into perceived
“reality.”
For theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz and Jean-Louis
Comolli, the question of illusionism is inseparable from the question of
spectatorial identification.'' These theorists develop a discourse of
positionality and thus relocate the question of realism. Baudry, for example,
postulates an unconscious substratum in spectatorial identification, in the
sense that cinema, as a simulation apparatus, not only represents the real but
also stimulates intense “subject-effects.” The shadowy images on the screen, the
darkness of the movie theatre, the passive immobility of the spectator, the
womb-like sealing off of ambiant noises and quotidian pressures, all foster an
artificial state of regression not unlike that engendered by dream. The cinema,
for Baudry, constitutes the approximate material realization of an unconscious
 -

Introduction Is)

goal perhaps inherent in the human psyche: the regressive desire to return to an
earlier state of psychic development, a state of relative narcissism in which
~desire could be “satisfied” through a simulated reality defined as enveloping
and in which the separation between one’s body and the exterior world,
between ego and non-ego, is not clearly defined.
It is not our purpose here to either defend or disprove these theories. In
one sense, the achievements of these film thinkers seem irreversible; there can,
at this point in the history of reflexion on the cinema, be no nostalgic return to
innocence concerning the central importance of the cinematic apparatus, and
we will see the analytic usefulness of these concepts in the first chapter. We can
however raise some theoretical questions about the position as formulated.
One wonders about Baudry’s quasi-idealist positing of a transhistorical wish
inherent in the psyche, and about a monolithic model of the cinema which fails
to allow for either modifying the apparatus, or for “aberrant readings,” or for
filmic texts which alert the spectator to these very processes. At times the
theoretical texts of this school fall into a kind of puritanism in their unnuanced
and guilty condemnation of a manipulative apparatus as if it were part of a
conspiratorial effort to delude. The despair of subverting this apparatus, one
might add, is not without correlation to a certain decline and defeatism on the
left in the period in which the theories were being formulated.
le réalisme ne s'oppose pas à la réflexivité car c'est aussi une construction
The Political Valence of Reflexivity

While Anglo-American cultural criticism has often seen reflexivity as the dead
end of modernism, a point at which an exhausted art has little left to do except
contemplate its own instruments, the left-wing of film theory, especially that
influenced by Althusser, came to regard reflexivity as a political obligation.
For this tradition—whose theoretical problems we shall examine in a
moment—“realism” is reactionary by definition. By trying to reproduce
“reality,” realism inevitably expresses only the ideology implicit in
conventional bourgeois notions of reality. This intellectual current was heavily
influenced by the Althusserian concept of ideology, by which human societies
secrete ideology as a kind of atmosphere indispensible to their historical
respiration and life. The dominant style of dramatic realism, given the
omnipresence of ideology, cannot challenge the received wisdom of the public,
since spectators will see nothing but their own flickering ideologies in the
naturalistic images on the screen. No matter how progressive its intentions, in
this view, the subliminal ideology of realism is bourgeois. Rather than give the
public a cold invigorating shower of demystification, realism gives it a bath in
the tepid water of its own ideology. But Althusser’s view of ideology, while in
some ways useful and suggestive, has the disadvantage, when applied in certain
theoretical texts of Cinétique and Cahiers du Cinéma, of being formulated so
14 Introduction

broadly as to be virtually identical to perception itself. Since the realist image

can only represent the vague untheorized world of perception—the locus of the
illusions of consciousness—it is presumed to be reactionary by nature. Thus the
formula of idealist theoreticians, for whom the image is ontologically linked to
the real, is neatly turned on its head by the suggestion that the image can only
reproduce the vagaries of ideology.
In terms of the filmic texts themselves, Althusser-influenced film theory at
times became overly dogmatic on the subject of “realist” films. The major
thrust of the Althusserian movement in cultural studies was the critique of
realism, and the tendency was simply to equate “realist” with “bourgeois” and
“reflexive” with “revolutionary.” The terms “Hollywood” and “dominant
cinema” became code words for all that was retrograde and passivity-inducing.
Bourgeois ideology was seen as a kind of ventriloquist, as if the film industry
were only a puppet sitting on the capitalist’s knee. The identification of
“deconstructive” and “revolutionary,” meanwhile, led in the pages of Cinétique
to the rejection of virtually all past and present cinema as “idealist;” only
certain films by Vertov, the collaborative work of Godard-Gorin, and a few
independent French productions like Mediterranée and Octobre a Madrid
passed the test as truly materialist.
But both of these equations call for close examination. Are realist texts
necessarily reactionary? The answer depends very much on which realism we
are speaking about, for realism has historically been defined in disparate ways.
Instead of a monolithic realism, we find a proliferation of “realisms.” A
neologism coined by certain nineteenth-century artists and critics, the term
originally signified an oppositional attitude toward romantic and neoclassical
models in fiction and painting. Yet the concept did not spring from a
conceptual vacuum; it represents a late flowering of the occidental mimetic
tradition so brilliantly surveyed by Auerbach. A number of twentieth-century
movements incorporated “realism” or closely related variations of the word
into their self-definition: surrealism, socialist realism, poetic realism,
neorealism. Without involving ourselves in the intellectual morass usually
triggered by attempts at a rigorous definition of the term, we might posit
several broad tendencies within its many definitions. Some definitions, for
example, have to do with the aspiration or project of an author or school, seen
as a corrective to dominant canons or to antecedent literary or cinematic
decorum. At times this “corrective” takes on a moral or social cast, as when
Auerbach connects realism in the novel to “the serious treatment of everyday
reality” and “the rise of more extensive and socially inferior human groups to
the position of subject matter for problematic-existential representation. ..”'”
This critique then can be stylistic—as in the new wave attack on the artificiality
of the “tradition of quality”—or social—neorealism aiming to show post-war
Italy its true face—or both at once—Cinema Novo revolutionizing both the
 -

Introduction 15

social thematics and cinematic procedures of antecedent Brazilian cinema.

Other definitions of realism have more to do with verisimilitude, the
correspondence of a fiction to deeply ingrained and widely disseminated
cultural models of “believable” plotting and “coherent” characterization. This
definition can also imply a text’s degree of conformity to generic codes; a filmic
car on a dark night on rain-soaked streets heading toward a private-eye
protagonist can “realistically” be expected to run that protagonist down, no
matter how statistically infrequent such incidents might be in real life. Another
related definition might involve readerly or spectatorial belief, a realism of
subjective response, something which often has more to do with the fine tuning
of illusionistic technique than with mimetic accuracy. A purely formalist
definition, finally, would emphasize the conventional nature of all fictional
codes, and would posit realism simply as a body of stylistic devices, a set of
conventions that, at a given moment in history, manages to generate a strong
feeling of authenticity.
It would be a mistake to regard reflexivity and realism as necessarily
antithetical terms. Many of the texts we shall analyze combine a measure of
realism with reflexive technique. They illuminate the everyday realities of the
social conjunctures from which they emerge, while alsoreminding their readers
or spectators of the artificiality of their mimesis. The Man with a Movie
Camera documents the realities of filmmaking and of Soviet life in the late
twenties, but also constantly foregrounds its status as artifact. Two or Three
Things I Know About Her reflexively highlights its own nature as filmic
construct, but it also speaks to the contemporary realities of prostitution and
urban renewal. Realism and reflexivity are not strictly opposed polarities but
rather interpenetrating tendencies quite capable of coexistence within the same
text. It would be more accurate to speak of a “coefficient” of reflexivity or
mimesis, while recognizing that it is not a question of a fixed proportion.
Godard-Miéville’s Numéro Deux, for example, displays a simultaneously high
coefficient of both realism and reflexivity. Illusionism, meanwhile, has never
been monolithically dominant even in the mainstream fiction film. Illusionism
and anti-illusionism have been locked in dialectical struggle since the
beginning, with the degree of reflexivity varying from era to era, genre to genre,
from film to film, and even from seguence to sequence within specific films.
Even the most paradigmatically mimetic texts—as Barthes’ reading of
Sarrasine and Cahiers’ of Young Mr. Lincoln demonstrate—are marked by
gaps and fissures in their illusionism. Few classical films perfectly fit the
abstract category of transparence often taken to be the norm in dominant
cinema. Nor can one simply assign a positive or negative political value to
realism, or even illusionism, as such. Marx’s debt to Balzac, as we shall see in
our discussion of Lost Illusions, suggests that realism is not inherently
reactionary. While realism initially emerged as part of the bourgeois critique of
16 Introduction

feudal and aristocratic conventions, it has also been used as an instrument of

social criticism by the working class, by women, and by emerging third world
nations. Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, for example, is a realist, even
illusionist, film, yet it would be a mistake to dismiss it, as some leftist critics did,
as a Hollywood exercise in political melodrama. Such rigidity runs the danger
of being politically counter-productive, as the Left deprives itself of a powerful
instrument of anticolonialist persuasion.
The other equation—reflexive equals progressive—is similarly
problematic when applied too rigidly. Texts may foreground the work of their
signifiers or obscure it; the contrast cannot always be read as a political one.
The reflexivity of La Ronde or of Singin’ in the Rain has little to do with leftist
politics. The reflexivity of a certain avant-garde is eminently co-optable and
easily reappropriated by the hegemonic culture. Even the deconstructed texts
defended by Tel Quel or Cinétique end up, at times, by playing innocuously
with purely formal categories such as representation, closure, or the illusion of
presence. Or, to take an example from the realm of popular culture,
commercial television is often reflexive and self-referential, yet that reflexivity
is, to say the least, ambiguous. Talk shows not only display cameras and video
switchers as part of their credits but also incessantly turn to talk about
television itself. Johnny Carson, rather like Mark Twain in How Not to Tella
Story, mocks his own monologue as self-consuming artifact, while the video
cameras show the producer just off stage. Many of the distancing features
characterized as reflexive in Godard films would seem to typify television as
well: the designation of the apparatus (cameras, monitors, switchers); the
commercial “interruptions” of the narrative flow; the juxtaposition of
heterogenous slices of discourse; the mixing of documentary and fictive modes.
Yet we know that if television is reflexive, its reflexivity is of a peculiarly
ambiguous and often debased kind. Rather than trigger “alienation effects,”
commercial television often simply alienates. The commercial interruptions
that place programs on hold, for example, are not pauses for reflection but
breaks for manipulation, intended not to make us think but to make us feel and
buy. The self-referentiality of commercials that parody themselves or other
commercials, similarly, are calculated to mystify rather than disenchant. The
self-referential humor signals to the spectator that the commercial is not to be
taken seriously, and this relaxed state of expectation renders the viewer more
permeable to its message. The self-referentiality, far from demystifying the
product or exposing hidden codes, conceals the deadly seriousness of the
commercial—the fact that it is after the spectator’s money.
The theory and practice of Bertolt Brecht provides a touchstone for
distinguishing authentic from debased reflexivity. While authentic reflexivity
elicits an active thinking spectator rather than a passive consumer of
entertainment, most television is as narcotic and culinary as the bourgeois
 =

Introduction 7

theatre that Brecht denounced. Brecht’s goal was not to satisfy audience
expectations but to transform them, whereas the central impulse of commercial
television—notwithstanding the often creative and critical contribution of its
artists—is to transform only two things: the audience’s viewing habits and its
buying habits. Brecht’s goal was not to be popular in box-office terms but to
become popular, that is, to create a riew public for a new kind oftheatre linked
to new modes of social life, whereas commercial television’s goal, at least from
the point of view of its managers, is to be popular in the crudely quantitative
terms of “ratings.”'?
Brecht also points the way beyond the false dichotomy of realism and
reflexivity, for he, more than anyone, demonstrated the compatability of
reflexivity as an esthetic strategy and realism as an aspiration. His critique of
realism centered on the ossified conventions of the nineteenth-century novel
and naturalist theatre, but not on the goal of truthful representation. Brecht
distinguished between realism as “laying bare society’s causal network”—a
goal realizable through a modernist aesthetic—and realism as “well-tried rules”
and “eternal aesthetic laws.”'* His quarrel, in short, was not with realism per se
but with a historically determinate set of conventions.
la réflexivité a été utilisée à des fins politiques, notamment de gauche mais pas seulement (cynisme pub)
Film/ Writing /Text/Intertext

In the wake of literary criticism and philosophy, contemporary film discourse

has been oriented by the constellation of concepts revolving around “writing”
and “textuality.” The graphological trope of film writing—from Astruc’s
caméra-stylo” through Bazinian auteurism to Metz’ discussion of “cinema and
écriture”—has dominated film theory and criticism, especially in France, since
the fifties. Interest is progressively displaced from mimesis to textuality, from
the picture or fiction depicted to the act of writing itself. Since the concept of
writing is performative, rather than one of mere transcription, it implicitly
undermines the mimetic view which regards the work as a mirrorlike reflection
of preexisting reality.
The directors of the French new wave were especially fond of this
scriptural metaphor. Many of them began as writer-critics who found it quite
natural to see writing articles and making films as simply two forms of
expressive écriture. Godard claimed that he was already making films when he
was writing criticism and that he continued to do criticism by making films.
This preoccupation with écriture is translated, in new wave films, by a
proliferation of writing imagery. From Truffaut’s Les Mistons (1958) through
Godard’s 2 ou 3 choses queje sais delle (1967) we encounter people writing: on
walls (Jules et Jim), on cars (Masculin, Féminin), in diaries (Pierrot le Fou), on
advertisements (Le Gai Savoir), and in notebooks (2 ou 3 choses). 400 Blows,
the film that more than any other “announced” the new wave, already
400
Blows
(1959)

Figure
1.
 -

Introduction 19

prefigures this obsession. The credit sequence—a series of tracking shots

culminating with the director’s name superimposed on the image of the
cinématheque—renders homage to the film library where Truffaut’s “reading”
inspired and informed his subsequent “writing.” The first postcredit shot shows
a pupil writing. Antoine swears vengeance on his teacher by writing a poem on
the wall, and is punished by having to conjugate a sentence, in writing. French
composition, his mother tells him, is invaluable, since “one always has to write
letters.” Antoine, as if to illustrate her claim, mimics her penpersonship in a
note of excuse. He subsequently steals a typewriter so that the principal will not
recognize his handwriting. In short, 400 Blows orchestrates variations on the
theme of écriture, in a way that makes little sense except as part of a structural
metaphor subtending Truffaut’s vision of filmmaking. Antoine, Truffaut’s
youthful surrogate in an admittedly autobiographical film, “tries on” diverse
writing styles in an attempt to become his own man. He complains that his
mother’s writing is “hard to imitate.” His affectionate pastiche of Balzac elicits
accusations of plagiarism.
Writing, for Truffaut, is inextricably linked to power. Miswriting elicits
the condemnation of authority figures. The supposedly self-indicting sentence
dictated to Antoine by his teacher reads: “I deface the classroom walls and I
mistreat French prosody.” Antoine’s step-father corrects the spelling on his
charge’s “Why-I-Left-Home” note. The analogy to new wave attitudes toward
the cinema should by now be obvious. The accusation of plagiarism anticipates
the frequent charge against new wave filmmakers that their best ideas were
borrowed, that their films were merely collages of citations and cinematic in-
jokes. The mistreatment of French prosody corresponds to the new wave
disrespect for the academic conventions of continuity editing. This writerly
revolt is not without its oedipal overtones, its “anxiety of influence.” 400 Blows
combines a hostile portrait of Truffaut’s real-life father—presented as step-
father, i.e., false father—who once had him sent to prison, with an affectionate
dedication to a clear substitute father, André Bazin, who once had Truffaut
released from prison. When Truffaut was arrested for desertion, Bazin claimed
to be his father, and after his release from prison, Truffaut went to live with the
Bazins, thus bringing the familial metaphor to concrete and literal
realization.'> In his cinematic family romance, Truffaut portrays himself as a
revolted “bdtard,’’in Marthe Robert’s terminology, a parentless child in search
of a true symbolic father who is in fact named in the film’s dedication.
The new wave, speaking more generally, regarded the writer-critic Bazin
as its true symbolic father, just as it regarded the established filmmakers of the
“tradition of quality” as false fathers. 400 Blows foregrounds the problems of
writing in the face of parental interdictions which define a new style as illegal or
incorrect. In this sense, it is a thinly veiled plea for freedom from industrial and
stylistic constraints, a cry of revolt against what the new wave directors so
20 Introduction

symptomatically called “le cinéma de papa.” Adulthood entails forging one’s

own rules in defiance of“le nom de pére.” 400 Blows, in this sense, literalizes the
notion of the oedipal scenario.
If the filmmaker is a writer, the film, by implication, is a text. In Language
and Cinema, Metz reminds us that “text,” etymologically, means “tissue,” and
that the filmmaker “weaves” cinematic and extra-cinematic codes into a textual
system. In the contemporaneous essay “From Work to Text” (1971), Barthes
theorizes the text according to seven propositions: 1) that the text is
experienced as the activity of language production; 2) that the text exceeds all
genres and conventional hierarchies; 3) that the text practices the infinite
deferment of the signified through a radically disruptive play of signifiers; 4)
that the text constructs itself out of a multitude of intertextual citations,
references, echoes, and cultural languages; 5) that the authorial inscription of
the text is ludic rather than privileged and paternal; 6) that the text is actualized
by the collaboration of the reader; and 7) that the text is bound to utopia and to
pleasure. (Our entire enterprise in this text might be seen as a gloss on these
seven propositions.)
The term “intertextuality” was first introduced as Julia Kristeva’s
translation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of the “dialogic,” that is, the
simultaneous presence, within a literary work, of two or more intersecting texts
which mutually relativize one another. Bakhtin traces the dialogic back to the
Socratic dialogues, with their staging of the contest of two competing
discourses. He opposes the dialogic and “polyphonic” texts of Rabelais and
Dostoyevsky to the “monologic” and “theological” texts which unproblema-
tically assert a single truth. The concept of intertextuality suggests, at the same
time, that every text forms an intersection of textual surfaces where other texts
may be read. “The literary word,” according to Bakhtin, “is aware of the
presence of another literary word alongside it.” Every text is what Kristeva calls
a “mosaic of citations” which absorbs and transforms other texts. All texts are
tissues of anonymous formulae, variations on those formulae, conscious and
unconscious quotations, conflations and inversions of other texts. (Gore Vidal
refers to this textual process in his novel Duluth by having a character tap out
romantic novels on a word-processor, with a memory-bank of 10,000 other
novels, taking a courtroom scene from Daphne du Maurier and a comical
character from Edgar Rice or William Burroughs.) In the broadest sense,
intertextuality refers to the vast reservoir of combinatory possibilities provided
by the discursive practices of a culture, the entire matrix of signifying systems
within which a single work is situated, and which reach the text not only
through recognizable influences but also through a subtle process of
dissemination. It is perhaps to this broad sense of intertextuality that Borges
refers in his fiction Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius: “We established that all texts are
the work of a single author who is atemporal and anonymous.”"®
 2

Introduction 21

Authorial intertextuality finds its counterpart in the competent response

of the reader or spectator. No text is read independently of the reader’s
experience of other texts. This intertextual knowledge, for. Umberto Eco,
encompasses all the semiotic systems with which the reader or spectator is
familiar: “Every character (or situation) of a novel is immediately endowed
with properties that the text does not directly manifest and that the reader has
been ‘programmed’ to borrow from the treasury of intertextuality.”"” In the
case of film, it is as if both filmmaker and spectator were members of a vast
audio-visual library. The Marx Brothers assume spectatorial competence in
the codes of classical American romantic comedy by having Groucho
constantly aggress the same Margaret Dumont that he is presumably courting.
Spectatorial competence in the western allows Mel Brooks to systematically
deconstruct its codes in Blazing Saddles. Competence in the musical allows
Godard to “play off” its codes in Une Femme est une Femme by featuring
dancers who cannot really dance, but who dance nonetheless.
Although all films are intertextual, to paraphrase Orwell, some are more
intertextual than others. New wave directors, for a number of reasons, were
especially disposed to highlight the intertext of their films. As cinéphiles proud
of their inordinate appetite for film, as assiduous frequenters of the
cinématheque, they formed the first filmmaking generation to have the entire
history of film available for plunder and homage. Often they made films
against the tradition, especially by flouting the generic conventions of
antecedent cinema. In a cinematic version of the Sartrean “existence precedes
essence,” the new wave subverted the metaphysical premises of genres as self-
perpetuating essential categories. By pitting antipathetic codes against one
another in a single text, the new wave provoked a collision of conventions in a
veritable war of conflicting rhetorics, thus actuating a complex spectatorial
response. While illusionism strives for generic and rhetorical homogeneity,
anti-illusionism favors the cohabitation of languages in what Barthes called the
“sanctioned Babel of the text of pleasure.”
A film which calls attention to the literary as well as the cinematic intertext
is Godard’s Contempt (1963). The film, whose diegesis revolves around the
attempt to make a film adaptation of The Odyssey, inserts itself into the broad
history of the arts over the centuries. A generic conflation—a tragicomic
documentary antiepic—it asserts the irrelevance of the classical ethos in the
contemporary world. Godard, explicit about this theme, called Contempt the
“story of castaways of the western world, survivors of the shipwreck of
modernity.”'® Within the occidental tradition, “Greece” has often signified an
ideal homogenous totality, the locus of an impossible nostalgia. The loss ofthis
idealized Greece, according to Lukacs, defines the situation in which the novel
emerges out of the epic as the “expression of transcendental homelessness.”””
Contempt stages this sense of loss, virtually illustrating Hegel’s reflections on
BY Introduction

epic as a world out of tune with “our present-day machinery and factories
together with the products they turn out... ee
This antiepic quality pervades both the world of the film and the world of
the film-within-the-film. The characters in the film, like those of Joyce’s
Ulysses, are ironic shadows of their epic prototypes. Paul Javal, an anti-
Ulysses, does not fight heroically for his wife; he rather appears to encourage
infidelity for his own ends, while Camille, hardly a Penelope, is but dubiously
faithful. The film-within-the-film, meanwhile, in a world where “epic” has
come to mean “costly” and “spectacular,” fails to bring the Homeric ethos to
life. The director within the film (Fritz Lang) strives for Olympian grandeur but
the rushes of the film betray his purposes. Minerva, Zeus, and Poseidon are
gaudily colored statues, and Ulysses struggles awkwardly onto the rocky shores
of a putative Ithaca. The tired nymphs do not sing each to each, and Nausicaa is
a graceless model lip-synching a hopelessly vulgar song. One shot—showing
the actor playing Ulysses swaying from side to side to give the impression he is
in a boat rocked by high seas—especially encapsulates this epic letdown. Filmic
illusion is shown to depend on the synecdochic isolation of objects from their
contexts. What better way to demystify cinema, and indirectly epic, than by
showing an epic hero, not in the glorified isolation of the close shot, but in long
shot, surrounded by the cumbersome machinery of verisimilitude: dollies,
lights, cameras, and recording equipment?
Lang has difficulty conveying the grandeur of the gods because of distance
in time—the modern ethos has no place for Greek divinities—and differences
in medium. In the realm of art, as in the realm of langauge, “traduire, c’est
trahir.” Francesca’s hurried translations of Lang’s poetic quotations illustrate
the point; the translations invariably miss a nuance or exclude an ambiguity.
Contempt in this sense, can be seen as a meditation on the problematic nature
of all translation and adaptation. At the same time, the film shows, art renews
itself through this process of creative mistranslation. Every artist is inserted
within a tradition, constantly betrayed and constantly renewed, which is both
broadly cultural and specific to a medium. Godard reminds us of cinema’s
infancy by citing Lumiere’s misguided dictum that the “cinema is an invention
without a future.” Paul at one point suggests that adaptation should bypass
modern techniques and resurrect the methods of Griffith and Chaplin. We are
reminded that Lumiere and Griffith and Chaplin are in a sense the Homers of
their medium, but that in cinema as in literature there is no unchanged Ithaca to
which to return. interrogation sur ce qui fait (ou peut faire partie d')un texte

Transtextuality

Elaborating and refining on the discussion of “intertextuality,” Gerard Genette

in Palimpsestes introduces the term “transtextuality” to refer to “all that which
 +

Introduction 23

puts one text in relation, whether manifest or secret, with other texts.”?!
Genette posits five types of transtextual relations, enumerated in order of
increasing abstraction and inclusiveness. “Intertextuality,” for Genette, is
simply the first of these diverse types of transtextuality. He defines
intertextuality, more restrictively than Kristeva, as the relation of effective co-
presence of two texts in the form of quotation, plagiarism, and allusion.
Although Genette cites literary examples ofthis phenomenon, one might easily
imagine filmic instances of the same procedures. Quotation can take the form
of the insertion of classic clips into new films. Peter Bogdanovich quotes
Hawks’ The Criminal Code in Targets; Godard quotes Resnais’ Night and Fog
in A Married Woman; Vincent Minelli quotes his own The Bad and the
Beautiful within Two Weeks in Another Town. Films like Resnais’ Mon Oncle
d’Amerique and Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid make the citation of classic
sequences a central structuring principle. Allusion can take the form of a verbal
or visual evocation of another film, hopefully as an expressive means of
commenting on the fictional world of the alluding film. Godard in Contempt
alludes, through a title on a cinema marquee, to Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy, a
film by one of Godard’s favorite directors which recounts, like Contempt itself,
the slow undoing of a couple. Bertolucci alludes to his own Last Tango in Luna
by having the father discover the very piece of gum that Marlon Brando, in the
earlier film, attached to the wrought-iron grillwork ofa balcony. Evenan actor
can constitute an allusion—the Boris Karloff character in Targets (Byron
Orlok) embodies old-style Hollywoodean horror, the essential dignity of which
Bogdanovich contrasts with anonymous contemporary murder. Even a
cinematic technique can constitute an allusion: the iris-in to the informer in
Breathless, the masking a la Griffith in Jules and Jim, allude by their archaic
nature to earlier periods of film history.
Genette’s second type of transtextuality is “paratextuality,” that is, the
relation within the totality of a literary work, between the text proper and its
“naratext”—titles, prefaces, postfaces, epigraphs, illustrations, and even book
jackets and signed autographs. The paratext is constituted by all the accessory
messages and commentaries which come to surround the text and which at
times become virtually indistinguishable from it. The notion leads, as Genette
admits, to a mine of unanswerable questions. Do the original chapter titles
evoking The Odyssey, included in the subscribers’ prepublication of Joyce’s
Ulysses but withdrawn in the final version, form part ofthe text of that novel?
These suppressed titles, remembered by the critics, come to orient reading of
Ulysses. The question, then, is one of closure, of the lines of demarcation
between text and “hors-texte.”
Here again it is intriguing to speculate concerning the relevance of such a
category to film analysis. Do widely quoted prefatory remarks bya director ata
film’s first screening form part of a film’s paratext? Does the “Cannibalistic
24 Introduction

Preface” added by Joaquin Pedro de Andrade as an introduction to the film for

the Venice Film Festival (and included in the American but not the Brazilian
prints of the film) form part of that film? What about widely reported remarks
by a director about a film, such as Godard’s celebrated characterization of
Numéro Deux as a “remake of Breathless?” How should we regard the original
variant versions of films, about which there is often much fanfare in the press,
which resonate, as it were, around the edges of a text, as in the case of Erich Von
Stroheim’s original 42-reel version of Greed, or the longer versions of
Bertolucci’s 1900 or Scorcese’s New York, New York? What about authorized
scripts or screenplays that show variance from the film as released? All these
questions, operating on the margins of the official text, might be said to deal
with a film’s “paratext.”
Genette’s third type of transtextuality is “metatextuality” or the critical
relation between one text and another, whether the commented text is
explicitly cited or silently evoked. Genette cites the relation between Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Mind and the text that it constantly evokes without
explicitly mentioning: Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau. Transferring our
attention to the cinema, we might see many of the avant-garde films of the New
American Cinema as metatextual critiques of classical Hollywood Cinema.
Michael Snow’s Wavelength, for example, both alludes to and refuses the
conventional “suspense” of Hollywood thrillers, as if he were stretching a single
Hitchcock dolly-shot into a 45-minute zoom. The multiple refusals of Hollis
Frampton’s (nostalgia)—of plot development, of movement in the shot, of
closure—suggest a mocking critique of conventional narrative films. Much of
Godard’s work, finally, can be seen as a metatextual gloss on conventional
filming practices. In practice, it should be pointed out, it is difficult to
distinguish Genette’s “metatextuality” from his fifth category of
“hypertextuality,” (the relation between a text and an anterior text which it
transforms or modifies).
Genette’s fourth category, “architextuality,” refers to the generic
taxonomies suggested, or refused, by the titles or infratitles of a text.
Architextuality has to do with a text’s willingness, or reluctance, to
characterize itself generically as poem, essay, novel. In literature, Genette
points out, critics often refuse a text’s self-designation, arguing, for example,
that a certain “tragedy” by Corneille is not “really” a tragedy. A text’s refusal to
designate itself, or to designate itself homogenously, meanwhile, often leads to
discussion among the critics concerning the text’s “real” generic mix. Fielding’s
characterization of Joseph Andrews as a “comic epic poem in prose” or
Godard’s description of Contempt as a “tragedy in long-shot” are designed to
encourage the critics/readers/spectators toward more complex responses.
Some film titles align a text with literary antecedents: Sullivan’s Travels
evokes Gulliver’s Travels and, by extension, the satiric mode. The title of
 Introduction De)

Woody Allen’s Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy begins by alluding to

Shakespeare and ends with a comic fall into prurience, all the while echoing
Bergman’s Smiles of aSummer Night. Coppola’s Apocalypse Now offers a
disenchanted seventies variation on the optimistic sixties’ Paradise Now. Other
titles signal a sequel, a generic repetition of a hypotextual source: Return
of... Son of... Rocky IIH. The multilingual title of Rocha’s Der Leone Have
Sept Cabecas (drawn from the languages of Africa’s major colonizers) signals
an attempt to make a truly “tri-continental” and anticolonialist film. The
graphic and linguistic unconventionality of the titles of many avant-garde
films—Paul Sharits’ T.O.U.C.H.I.N.G., Michael Snow’s «+ —announce a
similar unconventionality in cinematic technique. Although a film need not
designate itself as, first and foremost, a film, certain reflexive filmmakers have
chosen to accentuate the obvious in their titles: Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie,
Bruce Conner’s A Movie, Godard’s Un Film Comme Les Autres. The extended
“subtitles” (in the literary sense) of certain films— Doctor Strangelove: Or How
I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; A Married Woman;
Fragments of a Film Made in 1964—finally, suggest a kind of rapprochement
with novelistic practices.
Genette’s most suggestive category, to my mind, is his fifth type of
transtextuality, which is “hypertextuality.” The term refers to the relation
between one text, which Genette calls the “hypertext,” to an anterior text, or
“hypotext,” which the former transforms, modifies, elaborates, or extends. In
literature, the Aeneid’s hypotexts include The Odyssey and The Iliad, and
Joyce’s Ulysses includes The Odyssey and Hamlet. Both The Aeneid and
Ulysses are hypertextual reelaborations of a single hypotext— The Odyssey.
Virgil recounts the adventures of Aeneas in a manner generically and
stylistically inspired by Homeric epic. Joyce transposes the central mythos of
the Odyssey into twentieth-century Dublin. Both operate transformation,
although of distinct kinds, on a pre-existing text. All literary texts may be said
to be hypertextual in the sense that they evoke other texts, but not all are
hypertextual in the same manner or to the same degree. Fielding’s Shamela
insistently undercuts, incident by incident, the moralism of Richardson’s
Pamela. (The phonemic substitution in the title, in this sense, plays out in
miniature the work of hypertextual variation). Rousseau’s Confessions, on the
other hand, re-elaborate Saint Augustine’s only in a more diffuse and generic
sense.
Genette’s term is rich in potential application to the cinema, and especially
to those films which derive from pre-existing texts in a way more precise and
specific than that accounted for by the term “intertextuality.” Filmic
adaptations of celebrated novels, for example, are hypertexts derived from a
pre-existing hypotext which has been transformed by operations of selection,
amplification, concretization, actualization, and so forth. The diverse filmic
26 Introduction

adaptations of Madame Bovary (Renoir, Minnelli) or of La Femme et le Pantin

(Duvivier, von Sternberg, Bunuel) can be seen as variant hypertextual
“readings” inspired by an identical hypotext. Indeed, the diverse prior
adaptations can come to form part of the hypotext available to a filmmaker
coming late in the series.
The notion of hypertextuality is useful in that it calls attention to all the
transformative operations that one text can operate on another text. Travesty,
for example, devalorizes and trivializes a “noble” text. Buster Keaton mocks
the lofty platitudes of Intolerance in his own The Three Ages. Mel Brooks
rewrites the Hitchcockian text, with a different style and elocution, in High
Anxiety. Many Brazilian films, as Joao Luiz Vieira points out, parodically re-
elaborate Hollywoodean hypotexts whose production values they both resent
and admire.” Carlos Manga’s Nem SansGo nem Dalila (Neither Samson nor
Delilah, 1954) takes off from Cecil B. De Mille to satirize Brazilian politics, but
also to mock the incapacity of a poor third world cinema to turn out expensive
Biblical spectaculars. Other Brazilian films slightly twist the titles of a putative
hypotext to exploit the fame of a film which is not in fact parodied. The
Mechanical Banana (1973)—a variation on the “Mechanical Orange” as
Clockwork Orange was called in Brazil—took commercial advantage of the
furor created by the Brazilian censorship of the Kubrick film.
Other hypertextual films simply update earlier works while accentuating
certain features of the original. The Morrisey/ Warhol collaboration Heat
(1972) transposes the plot of Sunset Boulevard into the Hollywood of the
seventies, all filtered through a gay-camp sensibility. Elsewhere the
transposition is not of a single film but of an entire genre. Lawrence Kasdan’s
Body Heat (1981), as Noel Carroll points out, evokes the corpus of 1940s film
noir in terms of plot, character, and style. The knowledge of film noir thus
becomes a privileged hermeneutic grid for the cine-literate spectator of that
film.”* ‘A more expansive conception of hypertextuality might include many of
the films generated by the Hollywoodean combinatoire: remakes like Invasion
of the Body Snatchers (1978) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981);
sequels like Psycho IT (1983); revisionist westerns like Little Big Man (1970);
generic pastiches and reworkings such as Scorcese’s New York, New York
(1977); and parodies like Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles (1974). Most of these
films assume spectatorial competence in diverse generic codes; they are
calculated deviations meant to be appreciated by connoisseurs.
The title of Play It Again, Sam (1972), directed by Herbert Ross, as
Genette points out, functions as a kind of contract of cinematic hypertextuality
for those film-lovers who recognize (or misrecognize) the most celebrated
phrase associated with Michael Curtiz’ Casablanca. The film, too, “plays it
again,” 1.e., it plays again, in its fashion, the “song” which is Casablanca. Allan
Felix’s relation to Humphrey Bogart’s persona resembles Don Quixote’s to
 Introduction 27

Amadis de Gaulle. He dreams of emulating a fictive model with whom he has

viturally nothing in common. At the end, he repeats the exact situation—
“returning” a woman whose love he has won, in this case through his own
awkwardness, to her husband—and the words (more-or-less) of Lacy-Bogart
in the earlier film. The same text andsituation become travesty merely through
the substitution of actors, and the ironic distance that separates him from his
prototype.
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 Allegories of Spectatorship

Readers of Don Quixote will doubtless recall the episode in which the
protagonist, in an outburst of chivalric madness, brings Master Pedro’s puppet
show to an abrupt halt by venting his fury on the hapless puppets which he
presumes to be real Moors attacking a real Maiden, while Master Pedro
protests that the objects of the Don’s wrath, far from being Moors, are nothing
but pasteboard figures. And viewers of Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers
(The Riflemen, 1963) will doubtless remember a similar incident in which the
obtuse Michelange, confounding the screen image of a woman with flesh-and-
blood reality, tries to caress the shadowy apparition before him but succeeds
only in pulling down the screen.
Both the passage from Don Quixote and the sequence from Les
Carabiniers offer allegories of spectatorship in which an artistic representation
is brought to a halt by the naive intervention of a personage who confounds
reality with spectacle. The novelist and the cinéaste here unmask the contingent
precariousness of the illusion generated by the play-world of their art.
Cervantes, through his proxy protagonist, breaks off the purely verbal puppet-
shot which is Don Quixote itself, suspending the narrative and reminding us of
its papier-maché factitiousness. Godard’s suspended film-within-the-film,
similarly, exposes cinematic spectacle as “juste une image,” not reality but
merely patterns of light projected on a two-dimensional screen.
Master Pedro’s puppet show provides an unwitting model of anti-
illusionistic theatre, an anticipatory storehouse of Brechtian “alienation
effects.” Cervantes begins his account with a quotation from the Aeneid—
“Here Tyrians and Trojans, all were silent”—which evokes Aeneas telling the
Troy story to Dido and the assembled listeners. The allusion reminds us ofthe
perennial fascination of tales and the excited anticipation, the “growing silent”
which invariably precedes the beginning of spectacle, whether it be puppet
show, play, or film. The narrative structure of the episode, as Robert Alter has
pointed out, is paradigmatic of the narrative structure of Don Quixote as a
whole—a multiple regress of imitations calling attention to their own status as
imitations.' Master Pedro’s assistant narrates the action while Master Pedro
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 Allegories of Spectatorship Su

manipulates the puppets. He cites the origins of his purportedly “true” story, in
imitation of Cervantes himself with his facetious concern about the sources of
Don Quixote. The assistant acknowledges the poverty of the means of
representation (“Turn your eyes, gentlemen, to that tower, which you must
imagine to be one of the towers of the alcazar of Saragossa ...”) much in the
manner of Brechtian theatre, with its minimal sets and exposed construction.
The assistant presents the characters (“...that character who appears over
there...is the Emperor Charlemagne...”) and calls attention to certain
incidents and gestures (“Take notice, gentlemen, how the emperoray. i See)
too, that stately Moor...”) much like certain of Brecht’s characters, such as
Wong in The Good Woman of Setzuan, who serve the same function.
The sequence from Les Carabiniers similarly provides a Brechtian object-
lesson on the nature of the cinematic experience. Its allegory shows a
“primitive” spectator going to a “primitive” film. A written title, presumably
from Michelange, initiates the sequence: “Tonight I went for the first time to
the cinématographe.” The calligraphy recalls the celebrated handwriting of
Jean Cocteau, while the word “cinématographe” recalls that filmmaker’s Essais
sur le Cinématographe as well as the early days of the cinema when the word
was still in vogue. The films cited in the sequence refer to some of the earliest
films and to some of the most “primitive” genres. The first alludes to Lumiére’s
L’Arrivée d'un Train (1895) and is shot from the same angle as the Lumiere film.
Michelange’s frightened reaction recapitulates that of the first spectators in the
Grand Café. The second film, showing a man, a woman, and a baby at table,
irreverently mimics another Lumiere film—Le Gotiter de Bébé (1895). While
the man reads from an anachronistic Superboy comic, the baby refuses his
soup, finally splashing it against the wall, at which point the man, in a comic
inversion, starts to throw cream pies at the child. The film-within-the-film is
intercut with reaction shots of Michelange, responding with childish glee to the
horseplay on the screen. The last film—Le Bain de la Femme du Monde—is
also interspersed with shots of Michelange smiling with fiendishly retarded
lasciviousness. By showing Michelange reacting to mock prototypes ofthree of
the earliest film genres—documentary, slapstick, and pornography—Godard
reminds us that spectators have had to learn, historically, to read films.
We ourselves, the sequence suggests, have remained magical and primitive
in our attitude toward the filmic image. Unlike three-dimensional life, a
material continuum where we can touch what we see, the filmic image offers
only an imaginary “lure” without the possibility of a “reality-check.” When the
actress in “The Bath of aWoman of the World” moves off-screen, Michelange
vainly pursues his scopophilic object outside the frame. When she enters the
bathtub, he tries to peek over the side of the tub, assuming that in the cinema as
in everyday life an object blocking our view of another object merely hides the
second object behind it. And when he begins to caress the image of the woman,
32, Allegories of Spectatorship

he discovers the “betrayal” implicit in the promise offered by the filmic image,
the sterile plenitude of its empirical proximity.
Certain technical “errors” in the sequence reveal the unnaturalness of
conventional cinematic decorum. The sounds of warfare which accompany the
shots of the streets outside the cinema—despite the lack of visible signs of
military activity—abruptly cease when Michelange enters the theatre. Thus
Godard inverts the conventional pattern whereby a cut to the inside of a movie
theatre would normally bring new sounds presumably emanating from the
screen, the battle noises, for example, from a war film. The sequence disturbs as
well by the anachronistic sound in a silent film (the train whistle in the Lumiere
Ciotat citation) and by the cream pies which materialize ex nihilo in the
Dejeuner de Bébé sequence. When Michelange pulls down the screen, the
image remains, as does the sound of the projector, yet the music stops—
doubtless Godard’s way of mocking our naive assumption that the screen
image somehow “generates” the sounds associated with it.
The cinema sequence in Les Carabiniers cites an earlier film—E.S.
Porter’s Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902)—which initiates a
venerable tradition in which the humor derives from a hayseed’s naiveté in his
first encounter with the filmic medium. Uncle Josh sees a number of film
shorts. The first, Parisian Dancer, inspires him to jump from his box seat in
order to dance with what he takes to be a real woman. The second, The Black
Diamond Express, an Edison imitation of Lumiére’s L’Arrivée d'un Train en
Gare (1895), inspires him to cower in fear, like Michelange, and like the first
spectators at Lumiére’s Grand Café. The third film, The Country Couple, isa
staged comedy showing a flirtation between a country woman and a farmer.
When the farmer “takes advantage” of the woman, Uncle Josh rolls up his
sleeves and angrily rushes toward the projected image, felling the screen and
revealing the rear projector and the projectionist.*” Whatever we may think of
them, Don Quixote, Uncle Josh, and Michelange are our doubles insofar as
their naive faith in spectacle resembles our own spectatorial investment in
illusionistic fictions. But there is something paradoxical about Don Quixote’s
intervention in the puppet play. On the one hand, he naively confounds
spectacle and reality to the point of physically intervening in the spectacle. In
this sense, he would seem to embody the undistanced acritical spectator who so
horrified Brecht. On the other hand, he represents a distorted version of the
ideal Brechtian spectator. He has sufficient critical distance to indicate flaws in
the play’s verisimilitude—he complains that mosques do not use bells—but
more important, he speaks up and acts. He does not remain passive and
immobilized like the anonymous and silently respectful spectators of most
fiction films; he is not a mere voyeur. The same might be said of Michelange. In
one sense, he is our grotesque double; like him, we fantasize imaged characters
as real ones, we, too, participate vicariously in exploitative films. We are both
 Allegories of Spectatorship 33)

Figure 3. Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902)

his superiors and his inferiors. While hardly so naive as to take image literally
for reality, we are also not so courageous as to physically attempt the
realization of our fantasies—we caress them only in the sanctuary of our own
minds. In that sense, we are doubled not by Michelange but rather by his
strangely impassive neighbors, that dispersed group of expressionless zombies
staring blankly at the screen. It would be too easy to make emblematic figures
such as Don Quixote and Michelange the scapegoats of our own credulity, the
displaced symbols of our own unrecognized faith in fictions. In that case, they
would serve the same function as those cinematic dreamers (such as Walter
Mitty or the hero of René Clair’s Belles des Nuits) who attract and discharge,
like lightning rods, our own skepticism about fictions, with the ultimate result
that we believe even more. If we are honest, we will acknowledge Don Quixote
and Michelange as our fréres and semblables, while granting them the
supplementary virtue of courage to act on their belief.’

The Complicity of the Spectator

Common to Don Quixote, Uncle Josh, and Les Carabiniers is an emphasis on

the active role of the spectator, on his or her necessary contribution to filmic
illusion. In the prologues of Henry V, Shakespeare touches on the same theme
by having the chorus repeatedly lament the physical impoverishment of the
34 Allegories of Spectatorship

theatrical medium. Although he would have preferred a kingdom for a stage,

princes to act, and monarchs to behold, the dramatist must in fact make do
with unworthy scaffolds and unraised spirits: “Can this cockpit hold/the vasty
fields of France? Or may we cram/ within this wooden O the very casques/ that
did affright the air at Agincourt?” Given these material constraints, the
dramatist pleads with the spectator to “piece out our imperfections with your
thoughts.” He calls on them to “eke out our performance with your mind” and
“mind true things by what their mockeries be.”
All the representational arts would have us mind “true things by what their
mockeries be.” Without this “minding,” representational art is powerless.
Master Pedro tells the audience of his puppet show: “Turn your eyes,
gentlemen, to that tower, which you must imagine to be one of the towers of the
alcazar of Saragossa” [italics mine]. It is the reader or spectator, in short, who
transforms cardboard miniatures into imposing towers, who turns verbal
representations into a novel or filmic images into a “story.” The precise nature
of the “minding” or “eking out” varies with the medium—a statue, for example,
has three-dimensionality but lacks movement; cinema has movement but lacks
three-dimensionality—but some sort of “eking out” is always present. The
readers of War and Peace somehow persuade themselves that the temporality
of reading letters on a page corresponds to a sequence of events in nineteenth-
century Russia. The spectator of a film, meanwhile, must “eke out” a third
dimension, “mind” away the enclosing frame, and “piece out” or mentally erase
the technical imperfections which flaw the image. The spectator, in short, must
fill out the minimal analogy which links the filmic image to the “what’s out
there” of our everyday experience.
This notion of “eking out” runs like a thread throughout film and media
theory from the beginning to the present day. For Rudolf Arnheim film
becomes art to the extent that it is forced to compensate for the mimetic
poverty of the image. It could even be argued that spectator involvement
increases in inverse proportion to the representational adequacy of the
medium. The impression of reality is stronger in films than in the theatre
precisely because the phantom-like figures on the screen are too weak to resist
our temptation to invest them with our own fantasies and projections. Jean-
Louis Comolli speculates that the extreme eagerness of the first spectators to
recognize in the images of the first films—devoid of color, depth, nuance—the
literal double of life itself, derived precisely from the sense of a lack to be filled.
Is there not, Comolli wonders, “in the very principle of representation, a force
of disavowal which gives free reign to an analogical illusion that is yet only
weakly manifested by the iconic signifiers themselves?”* For Marshall
McLuhan, finally, the low-definition images formed by television scan-lines—
images which are ultimately “not even there”—make television a “hot” medium
in which viewer involvement is all the more intense.
 -

Allegories of Spectatorship 35

Anti-illusionistic art reminds us of our necessary complicity in artistic

illusion. All fiction places us in the realm of half-belief, of “je sais, mais quand
méme,” where we believe even while we doubt. No one, presumably, accepts the
naive illusions of trompe /’oeil. Don Quixote and Michelange notwithstanding,
the impression of reality does not generally become the illusion of reality. No
sane person tries to picnic in landscape paintings or converse with statues, and
not even the most ardent cinephile literally confuses Elizabeth Taylor with an
Egyptian queen. No spectator at a play, Samuel Johnson pointed out, really
forgets that he is seated ina theatre. Yet fiction requires the kind of complicity
that Don Quixote suggests to Sancho Panza when Sancho presumes to
overreach him in the description of an adventure: “Sancho, if you want me to
believe what you saw in the sky, I wish you to accept my account of what I saw
in the cave of Montesinos. I say no more.” It is precisely this pact of reciprocal
deception that the anti-illusionist refuses to obscure.
For the eminently Cervantic contemporary writer Jorge Luis Borges, the
reader of a text deserves as much credit as its writer. Not only does the world
exist only in order to be transmuted into a book, but books exist only in order
to be read, reread, and imagined. His exemplary fable on this point is Pierre
Menard, Author of the Quixote. Menard’s attempt to rewrite the Quixote,
word for word, leads to the narrator’s discovery that the two versions are
verbally identical yet that their meaning has changed. Borges’ narrator credits
Menard with enriching “the halting and rudimentary act of reading.” Gerard
Genette, in his gloss on the story, attributes to Borges the insight that a “book is
not a ready-made meaning, a revelation we have to suffer; it is a reserve of
forms that are waiting to have some meaning; it is the immanence of a
revelation that is not yet produced, and that everyone of us has to produce for
himself.”°
Alain Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961), in this
sense, can be seen as a sardonic gloss on the spectator’s complicity in the filmic
illusion. The title itself calls attention to the twin coordinates of filmic fiction:
time (last year) and space (Marienbad). But by positing spatial and temporal
impossibilities—single images incorporating different times of the day,
characters who disappear (during a continuous shot) only to reappear in
improbable places, statues that jump in inexplicable quantum leaps around the
filmic space—Marienbad triggers mutually contradictory “reality effects” in
the mind of the bewildered spectator. The film’s tale of seduction, on one level,
allegorizes the relationship between film and spectator in the conventional
fiction film. X tries to persuade A that something happened, elsewhere, a year
before. Like a film director, he orchestrates details intended to convince. A’s
room, significantly, becomes progressively more furnished, as if the
seducer/director were literally adding strategic details. The spectator, then, is
the object of a seduction, whose cooperation and complicity is required, who
36 Allegories of Spectatorship

must go with the seducer, for the film to work. Thus Marienbad offers a
stylized, exemplary, and perversely unsettling demonstration of the processes
of all fiction films.

Realism and the Desiring Spectator

In the puppet show episode, Cervantes ridicules Don Quixote’s penchant for
taking the representational fictions of art as fit objects for passionate love or
hatred, for taking them, in a word, as objects of identification. Recent film
criticism and theory has focused on the “erotics” of filmic identification.
Especially in the 1970s, the discussion of filmic “realism” came to be inflected
by psychoanalytic notions of scopophilia and voyeurism and by Lacan’s
conception of the mirror stage, the imaginary and the symbolic. The focus of
interest was no longer on the relation between filmic image and “reality” but
rather on the apparatus itself, not only in the sense of the instrumental base of
camera, projector, and screen, but also in the sense of the spectator as the
desiring subject on which the cinematic institution depends as its object and
accomplice. The focus shifts to what Geoffrey Nowell-Smith calls the
“intersubjective textual relation,” the relationship between the film and the
spectator.
In “The Imaginary Signifier,” Metz argues that the doubly imaginary
nature of the cinematic signifier—imaginary in what it represents and
imaginary by the nature of its signifier—heightens rather than diminishes the
possibilities of identification. The signifier itself, even before coming to form
part of a fictive imagined world, is marked by the duality of presence/absence
typical of the imaginary. The impression of reality is stronger in film than in
theatre because the phantom-like figures on the screen are too weak to resist
our penchant to invest them with our phantasies and projections. Thus the
interest shifts, for these theorists and critics, from “What does the text mean?”
and “Are its representations true?” to “What do we want from the text?” and
“What is our investment?” If the spectator is the site of a psychic process of
largely unconscious origin, questions of accuracy and verisimilitude are less
relevant than questions of spectatorial desire and the “will to believe.”
Many film theorists have explored the perennial analogy of film and
dream. Christian Metz, building on the work of Hugo Munsterberg, Suzanne
Langer, and others, systematically explores both the analogies and
disanalogies in “The Fiction Film and its Spectator.” Metz argues that the
“impression of reality” achieved by films derives from a cinematic situation
that encourages feelings of narcissistic withdrawal and dreamy self-indulgence,
a regression into primary process conditioned by circumstances similar to
those which underlie the illusion of reality in dream. The conventional fiction
film invokes a lowering of wakefulness that positions the spectator’s state
 4

Allegories of Spectatorship Bis

somewhat closer to that of sleep and dreaming than to other waking states. This
lowering of wakefulness implies a withdrawal of concern from the external
world and a heightened receptivity to phantasied wish-fulfillment, a
receptiveness which in the actual dream state gives rise to a sensation of
equivalence between phantasy and perception. In the cinema, we do not
literally experience our phantasies as perceptions, since we are dealing with an
actual perceptual object—the film itself. Dream is a purely internal psychic
process, while film involves real perception, potentially common to other
viewers, of actual images recorded on film. The dream, as Metz points out, is
doubly illusion; the dreamer believes more, and what he or she “perceives” is
less real. The continuing perceptual stimulation of the cinema prevents
unconscious wishes from taking a completely “regressive” path, therefore, and
what is “illusion” of reality in dream is merely an “impression” of reality in film.
Other parallels between the conditions of film viewing and those of
dreams, however, help explain the quasi-hallucinatory degree of the
impression of reality that films do occasionally achieve. Both Metz and Baudry
compare the spectator’s situation to what Jacques Lacan calls the “mirror
stage,” that is, a stage in the child’s development where hyperactive perception
coincides with a low level of motor activity. Thus a kind of double whammy
operates in the cinema; extremely strong visual and auditory stimuli inundate
us at a moment when all other conditions predispose us toward their passive
reception. The spectator’s solitude, since group affiliations and communica-
tions tend to be cut off for the duration of the film, favors narcissistic self-
absorption. Then, the film, like a dream, tells a story—a story rendered in
images and therefore particularly attractive to the logic of primary process
which “figures itself forth in images.” Finally, certain specifically cinematic
techniques, such as superimposition and the lap-dissolve, “mime” the
condensation and displacement through which the primary-process logic of
dreams effects its phantasied objects.

Film and Dream: Sherlock Jr.

In Sherlock Jr. (1924), Buster Keaton plays a neighborhood projectionist who

aspires to be a detective. As he falls asleep in the projection booth, his dream-
double fantasizes the characters of the film he is projecting—“Hearts and
Pearls”—into his real-life girlfriend and playboy enemy. Imagining the
heroine’s honor threatened, the somnambulent Buster rushes down the aisle,
scrambles over the orchestra pit and, after several failed attempts, manages to
penetrate the screen world, where he is transformed into the redoubtable son of
Sherlock Holmes.
Although framed as a comedy, Sherlock Jr. constitutes a profound
meditation on the film/dream analogy. It offers a fictive demonstration, first of
38 Allegories of Spectatorship

Figure 4. Sherlock Jr. (1924)

all, that films, like dreams according to the Freudian hypothesis, are designed
to fulfill wishes. On the most superficial level, Buster’s film-dream satisfies his
desire for the girl. But there are also other nonerotic compensations. The real-
life janitor is transformed, in screen-life, into a detective, the legitimate son of
the master detective. The servile and easily intimidated real-life Buster becomes
a suavely imposing master-mind; hardened criminals shrink in fear at the very
sound of his name. The real-life victim of injustice becomes the heroic righter of
wrongs. All the characters, furthermore, move a step higher on the social
ladder; the small-town girlfriend becomes a sophisticated flapper, the penniless
rival a high-society playboy. Even objects participate in this dream of upward
mobility, as watches become pearls within a process of systematic idealization.
With intuitive brilliance, Keaton makes his hero a projectionist, who not
only projects films but also projects himself into films. The familiar erotic
motivations prompt his entrance into the screen world; like Don Quixote, he
fantasizes rescuing imagined damsels in distress. He clambers over the piano
and leaps into the screen, but the villain throws him out into the orchestra pit.
Then he creeps up from the side, as if in hopes of a discreet lateral infiltration.
Buster’s clumsy but finally successful attempts at penetration comically
literalize, I think, the processes whereby spectators identify with the diegesis
and characters of a classic fiction film. The credits and opening sequences keep
us at a certain distance, resisting our entry. But gradually, through the
 Allegories of Spectatorship oe)

reciprocal play of filmic seduction and spectatorial introjection, we project

ourselves into idealized personages and situations which represent heightened
versions of ourselves and our lives.
Once inside the screen world, Buster discovers the treacherous nature of
what Suzanne Langer calls film’s “inconstant space.” The film’s unpredictable
cutting sends him tumbling over a park bench, sits him in the middle of city
traffic, and places him on the edge of a rocky precipice. Betrayed by a splice, he
dives from a reef in mid-ocean and lands headfirst in a snowbank. Metz points
out in “The Imaginary Signifier” that before we can identify with characters we
must first identify with the camera’s act of seeing. This “primary identification”
makes possible “secondary identification” with characters, just as the
primordial identification with self makes possible subsequent identification
with others. Primary identification in the cinema usually operates
surreptitiously. The camera, like an invisible flying carpet, takes us everywhere.
The spectator becomes the all-perceiving subject whose imagination
constitutes the film as signifier. Sherlock Jr. turns the tables on this spectatorial
self by putting Buster, our delegate in the fiction, literally in the places where
the camera went. Buster physically accompanies the camera into deserts and
icy wastes, rather than mentally identifying with it from a sheltered place ina
movie theatre. Keaton collapses the transcendental and empirical subject.
Whereas the transcendental subject customarily follows the camera within the
sanctuary of his or her mind, here the character is made empirically subject to
the space of the image and the time of the editing.
Sherlock Jr. concludes with a graphic object lesson in the educative power
and initiatory function of cinematic models, as Buster, peeking through the
projection booth window, woos his girlfriend by mimicking the debonair
charmer on the screen. He hesitates, however, when he sees the hero suddenly
surrounded with children. On a diegetic level, Buster is perhaps wondering if he
is ready for marriage and family. On a self-referential level, however, he calls
attention to the magic of editing. The copulative powers of the splice turn a
couple into a family, and Buster, in this sense, scratches his head in admiration
for such a “miracle.”

Fiction and Voyeurism

It is the desire to rescue papier-maché maidens from fictional distresses that

triggers Don Quixote’s intervention in Mater Pedro’s puppet show. Many of
the self-conscious novelists who come in the wake of Cervantes try to make
their readers critically aware of the pitfalls of taking an erotic stance toward
their fictions. Both Fielding and Sterne mock readers who look to art for
vicarious libidinal satisfaction. Fielding lampoons what he regards as the high-
minded prurience of Richardson’s Pamela in his own Shamela and Joseph
40 Allegories of Spectatorship

ey
;

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Figure 5. Sherlock Jr. (1924)

Andrews. And Laurence Sterne, as Robert Alter points out, delights in

catching the reader by the scruff of the neck just as he is stooping to peep
through some bedroom keyhole. Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste incessantly
promises, but never delivers, the truth about “les amours de Jacques,” while
Nabokov’s Lolita leaves a long trail of broken erotic promises.
Brecht, to transfer our attention to another medium, was deeply aware of
the voyeuristic premises underlying the “fourth wall convention.” This
convention, stipulating that actors treat the open stage as a fourth wall without
betraying any awareness of being observed, places the spectator in a voyeuristic
position. Brecht has the Actor in The Messingkauf Dialogues make the point:

The audience sees quite intimate episodes without itself being seen. It’s just like somebody
looking through a keyhole and seeing a scene involving people who’ve no idea they are not
alone. Actually, of course, we arrange it all so that everyone gets a good view. Only we
conceal the fact that it’s been arranged.°

The convention of naturalistic theatre—later “inherited” by the cinema—that

actors should not address themselves to the audience assumed that the
spectators would become uncomfortable if they were challenged in their
position as Peeping Toms. Brecht’s theatre, on the other hand, does everything
in its power to short-circuit voyeuristic involvement by making the audience
 Allegories of Spectatorship 4]

critically aware of itself as audience and of the play as artifice. Everything in

Brechtian theatre conspires to keep alive our critical intelligence and distance
us from the spectacle. The schematic decors, the visible light sources, and the
explicit announcement of stage directions remind us that we are in a theatre.
The songs, the mixing of genres, and the tension between earthy, proverbial
diction on the one hand, and poetic, stylized diction on the other, meanwhile,
call attention to the medium of language. The alienated acting, the precisely
exaggerated gestures, and the socially emblematic personages, finally, remind
us not to empathize but to observe.
Brecht’s non-Aristotelian theatre refuses not only pity and fear but also
erotic involvement generally. In Brechtian theatre, there is no suspense about
outcome, no identification with idealized personages, and no climax. Whereas
tragedy builds up to a catharsis which purges the tensions created by the play,
epic theatre creates only fleeting moments of empathy which are quickly
dispelled. The Aristotelian theory of tragedy, with its climaxes and discharging
of accumulated tension, has certain orgasmic overtones. Walter Benjamin
compares the peripeteia to the crest of a wave which, breaking, sweeps the
audience along with it and rolls forward to the end. (Robert Scholes, in
Fabulation and Metafiction, somewhat hastily posits the orgasmic model as
the archetype of all fiction, with its fundamental rhythm of tension and
resolution, tumescence and detumescence.) But epic theatre avoids empathy
and is uninterested in climax or even in delaying climax. Instead of identifying
with alluring personages, the audience is encouraged to regard its own daily
circumstances in a new light. Spectatorial tumescence, for Brecht, does not
favor insight or reflection.
Cinema inherited the voyeuristic aspects of realism in the novel and
naturalism in the theatre. But the cinema, as the privileged medium of the eye,
has always been especially susceptible to voyeuristic abuse. Its appropriate
aspect ratio, it has been suggested, would be that ofa keyhole. An ineluctable
logic leads from Vitascope’s The Kiss (1896) to the latest pornographic
productions. The cinema is founded upon the pleasure of looking and it has
especially exploited, as feminist critics point out, the spectacle of the female
body. But the progressive unveiling of the female body in a kind of
interminable striptease parallels the more general process by which the
dominant cinema capitalizes on scopophilia by providing more and more to
see: color, cinemascope, split-screen. The cinema has been progressively
unveiling its thrills in an ever-renewed and commercially motivated search for
new variations on the old frissons. Whether in the form of the explicitly
pornographic or the perversely spectacular, the film industry has endlessly
fabricated new objects of constumption to satisfy the cupidity of one of the
primary erotic organs—the eye.
Libidinal satisfactions are not incidental but central to what makes the
Figure 6. Psycho (1960)
 “

Allegories of Spectatorship 43

cinema industry work. Existing close to the operative psychic center of the
collective conscience, cinema touches subterranean zones of the self. It was not
by accident that Edgar Morin subtitled his book on the cinema: L’zhomme
imaginaire. Filmgoers, as Metz points out, are not forced into the theatres at
gunpoint—they choose to go. The industry’s goal is to give the spectators the
spontaneous desire to see films. The industry produces not only films but also
its own ideal consumers. Cinema in this sense forms part of a social continuum
characterized by the sexualization of consumerism and the consumerization of
sexuality. The same society which eroticizes everything from cigarettes to
airplane flights and practices subliminal seduction as a routine marketing
technique inevitably eroticizes cinema as well; not by fostering liberating
sexual play among the populace—that would be subversive—but by exploiting
human dissatisfaction and appealing to the voyeuristic in order to turna profit.

A Paradigmatic Instance: Hitchcock’s Rear Window

A brilliant filmic essay on the cinema and on the nature of the cinematic
experience, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window performs the metalinguistic
dismantling of the structures of voyeurism and identification operative in
dominant cinema generally and in Hitchcock’s own films particularly, even
while exploiting those very structures.’ Jean Douchet, writing in Cahiers du
Cinéma in 1960, was among the first to point out this reflexive dimension in the
film. Douchet compared the protagonist, played by Jimmy Stewart, to a
projector, the building across from his window to the screen, and added that
the Stewart character is a spectator who makes himself his own cinema.* Most
critics have accepted Douchet’s equation of the protagonist with
director/spectator without examining the theoretical and textual implications
of that equation. My purpose here will be to examine Rear Window as a
multitrack inquiry concerning the cinematic apparatus, the positioning of the
spectator within that apparatus, and the sexual, moral, and even political
implications of that positioning.
Set in an apartment complex in Greenwich Village, Rear Window spans
four days in the life of photojournalist L.B. Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart),
emphasizing his interactions with visiting nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter), his
girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly) and his detective friend Doyle (Wendell Corey),
along with various neighbors, particularly Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr).
Temporarily immobilized, Jeffries spends his time spying on his neighbors.
Stella massages him and lectures him for preferring to watch the titillating
acrobatics of “Miss Torso” rather than marry the mature and beautiful Lisa.
That same night, Lisa argues with Jeff about marriage, and after her exit we
hear a scream which we later learn signalled the demise of Mrs. Thorwald. Jeff
alternately dozes and watches Thorwald, who repeatedly ventures out into the
44 Allegories of Spectatorship

rain with a large suitcase. The last of his departures, this time accompanied bya
woman, finds Jeff asleep.
The next day, Jeff begins spying on Thorwald in earnest, first with
binoculars and then with a telephoto lens. On sketchy evidence, Jeff concludes
that Thorwald has murdered his wife. Despite her initial skepticism, Lisa soon
becomes a partner in the investigation. Doyle’s assurances that Thorwald is
innocent momentarily slows their investigation, but the murder of a dog
rekindles their suspicions. The following day they begin to pressure Thorwald.
Jeff lures him away from the apartment complex to allow Lisa and Stella to
forage for clues. Lisa surreptitiously enters Thorwald’s apartment where she
finds a vital clue—Mrs. Thorwald’s wedding ring. Thorwald returns before
Lisa can effect her escape, and she is saved only by police arrest. Stella departs
to post bail, leaving Jeff exposed to Thorwald who has now spotted Jeff as his
antagonist. A confrontation ends with Jeff’s falling out of the rear window and
Thorwald’s arrest. An epilogue intimates that Jeff and Lisa have reached
tentative accommodation concerning their relationship.
The apartment complex setting of Rear Window forms an artistic as well
as social microcosm. The Greenwich Village locale metonymically evokes
“artistic milieu” and the residents take pictures, compose music, and perform
roles. Not only do the architectonic stylization and painterly artifice of the set
betray what is transparently a studio product, but also the inhabitants
reproduce the division of labor typical of Hollywood studio production.
Virtually all the members of this cinematographicum mundi are artists, or
actors, or are engaged in an entertainment-related profession. The composer
and Miss Torso are involved in the performing arts, the sculptress in a plastic
art. Thorwald sells costume jewelry, with its connotations of glamor and
artifice, while Miss Lonelyhearts and the newlyweds participate in the
theatricality of everyday life, acting out charades for Jeff’s benefit and ours, the
groom carrying his bride over the threshold and Miss Lonelyhearts staging a
dinner for an imaginary male companion. Within this interplay of art and
experience, every human gesture becomes potentially transmutable into a kind
of entertainment.
Rear Window foregrounds the generic intertext of this entertainment by
presenting the world across the courtyard as a series of framed genre
pantomimes. Jeffries begins by watching what amounts to an early silent
“tableau” film, stylistically characterized by long shot and static camera. The
performing inhabitants of the various apartment/ frames, meanwhile, seem to
have strayed directly from various genres of the classic Hollywood film: earnest
fifties social realist film (Miss Lonelyhearts); murder mystery (Thorwald);
musical biopicture (the composer); and musical comedy (Miss Torso). As
magister ludi of these cinematic games, Jeffries clearly functions as substitute
director/auteur, whose activities partially analogize, and often literally mimic,
ar et

Window
Rear
(1954)

Figure
7.
46 Allegories of Spectatorship

those of the director. Jeffries the photojournalist, like Hitchcock, is both artist
and technician, professional and visionary. Lisa’s succinct resumé of his
activities—“going from one place to another taking pictures” —applies equally
to Hitchcock. Within the fiction, moreover, Jeffries enjoys partial directorial
control over his “film,” since binoculars and a telephoto lens facilitate a
multiplicity of set-ups and perspectives. His narrative and actantial function,
finally, consists in persuading a number of characters, let us call them
spectators, to look where he has looked. Like a director, he channels and guides
their glance, framing their vision and imposing his interpretation.
Surrogate for the director, Jeffries functions on a deeper level as a relay for
the spectator. Indeed, Jeffries and the apartment complex taken together may
be taken to prefigure the cinematic apparatus itself, including both the
instrumental base and the spectator as the desiring subject on which the
cinematic institution depends. That institution, Metz tells us, demands an
immobile secret viewer who absorbs everything through the eyes. The
wheelchair-ridden Jeffries exemplifies this situation of retinal activity and
enforced immobility; he is indeed, as Lisa remarks in another context,
“traveling but going nowhere.” The cinematic apparatus, “prosthesis for our
primally dislocated limbs,” combines visual hyperperception with minimal
physical mobility. Binoculars and a telephoto lens grant Jeffries the illusory
god-like power of the “all-perceiving spectator.” Hitchcock thus suggests a
congruency between the situation of the protagonist, who experiences his
reality within the fiction as though he were watching a film, and our own
situation as spectators watching the protagonist watch his film.
In his state of inhibited motoricity and exacerbated perception, Jeffries
embodies the living death of the dream-like spectatorial experience. The first
time we see Jeffries, significantly, he is asleep, as if everything we are about to
see were in some sense his dream. Indeed, the vacillations in his attention
almost seem designed to evoke the diverse points on the continuum of sleep and
wakefulness anatomized by Metz in “The Fiction Film and its Spectator.” At
times, Jeffries is sound asleep and presumably dreaming; at others, he dozes
intermittently. At still other times, he finds himself in a state of animated
attention, dreamlike in its intensity, reminiscent of that provoked in the
spectator by Hitchcock’s own films, of which Rear Window is a particularly
spellbinding example.

Rear Window: The Critique of Voyeurism

The mechanism of gratification in the cinema, according to Metz, “rests on our

knowing that the object being looked at does not know it is being looked at.”
Rear Window constantly underscores, by analogy, the voyeuristic abuse to
which the cinema is so often susceptible.'” The film proliferates in explicit
Figure 8. Rear Window (1954)
48 Allegories of Spectatorship

references to voyeurism, to “Peeping Toms” and “window shoppers” and it is

hardly accidental that Stella refers to Jeffries’ telephoto lens as “a portable
keyhole.” Jeffries himself is a quintessential exemplum of “a race of Peeping
Toms.” His profession of photojournalism assumes, and exploits, a kind of
voyeurism, and his leisure activities mirror his professional pursuits. At home,
he indulges in what Metz calls “unauthorized voyeurism.” Overseeing the
world from a sheltered position, he indulges his scopic drive, the “desire to take
other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze.”'!
He is the warden, as it were, in a private panopticon. Seated in his central
tower, he observes the wards (“small captive shadows in the cells of the
periphery”) in an imaginary prison. Foucault’s description of the cells of the
panopticon—“so many small cages, so many small theatres, in which each
actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible”’—in some ways
aptly describes the scene exposed to Jeffries’ glance. '”
Caught in a play between regression and progression, the cinematic
spectator receives images from without—and in this sense the movement is
progressive and directed toward external reality—yet due to inhibited mobility
and the process of identification with both camera and character, the psychic
energy normally devoted to activity is channeled into other routes of discharge.
It is no surprise, therefore, that the “complement” of Jeffries’ voyeurism is a
certain passivity. At the beginning ofthe film, he consistently opts for inactivity
and for the inertia of what he himself calls the “status quo.” But although he
avoids relationships with friends and lovers and neighbors, he is passionately
absorbed in the spectacle of his neighbors’ lives. His involvement with people
exists in inverse proportion to their distance from him; such is his code of
perspective. Jeffries prefers his thrills vicarious; he would rather watch Miss
Torso than touch the flesh-and-blood woman next to him, which is why Lisa
contemplates turning herself into a distant and exotic spectacle by “moving
into the apartment across the way and doing the dance of the seven veils.” The
tension between the regressive and progressive paths even takes the form of a
physical tussle concerning the direction in which Jeffries’ wheelchair will face:
will it face out the window toward Miss Torso and, metaphorically, the cinema,
or will if face toward the apartment, Lisa, and “reality?”
Jeffries is our specular reflection, our double. We do not merely watch him
performing actions; we perform the identical action—looking. But at the same
time that Hitchcock leads us to participate vicariously in Jeffries’ voyeurism, he
also frustrates and refuses to satisfy it. An early shot epitomizes this refusal.
Two women on a rooftop, presumably Greenwich Village “bohemians,”
discard their clothes to sunbathe. A helicopter approaches and hovers
overhead. The implication: those aboard the helicopter are spying on the
women. The helicopter provides a perfect “vehicle” for the spectatorial desire
to enjoy a fantasy omniscience, to go everywhere and see everything, and
 2

Allegories of Spectatorship 49

especially for the socially constructed (and largely male) desire to see women in
states of undress. The helicopter evokes the technological resources available
to the cinema and enlistable in the service of the scopic drive. Yet Hitchcock
withholds the “pay-off” of these resources by denying us the point-of-view shot
from the helicopter. We never see the women, we only become aware of our
desire to see them. The desire is not fulfilled but only designated and exposed.
Jeffries’ voyeurism goes hand in hand with an absorbing fear of mature
sexuality. Indeed, the film begins by hinting at a serious case of psychosexual
pathology. The first image of Jeffries, aspeep with hand on thigh, is quietly
masturbatory, as if he were an invalid abusing himself in the dark. Both the
broken leg and the smashed camera can be seen, in the context of the film as a
whole, as intimations of a fear of castration or impotence. A radio commercial
allusion to men with “that run-down listless feeling” is followed by a series of
comments by both Stella and Lisa that might be taken to refer to some kind of
sexual inadequacy: “You're not too active...” “How’s your leg?...” “Is
anything else bothering you?” Stella calls Jeffries “reasonably healthy” but
worries about a “hormone deficiency” since even bathing beauties haven’t
“raised his temperature.” She berates him for speaking in euphemistic
abstractions (“our relationship is maturing”) rather than acting like a sexed
human being. Her notion of the normal operations of Eros consists of lust
(“You get excited”) sanctified by an institution (“You get married.”) She
defends a kind of amour fou—“like two taxi cabs crashing”—blessed by the
state.
As an object-lesson for Stella’s domesticated version of surrealism,
Hitchcock has the newlywed couple enter their apartment. The commentative
music of “That’s Amore!” underscores the paradigmatic nature of their
appearance. The couple, eager to consummate their relationship, demonstrate
in pantomime the model relationship of which Jeffries has so far shown himself
incapable. They play out the typical final episode of a classical Hollywood film,
generally oriented, as Bellour points out, toward the “constitution of the
couple.” Jeffries, symptomatically, is bored by this spectacle of consummation,
much preferring either exhibitionism (Miss Torso) or the morbid
concatenation of marriage and violence (the murder of Mrs. Thorwald).
Although Lisa is more than willing to go to bed, Jeff prefers to fall asleep with
his binoculars. Voyeurism, passivity, and implied impotence are shown to form
a melancholy constellation of mutually reinforcing neuroses.

The Shattering of Distance

The central trajectory of Rear Window consists in the progressive shattering of

Jeffries’ illusion of voyeuristic separation from life and the concomitant
rendering possible of mature sexuality with Lisa. This shattering progresses by
50 Allegories of Spectatorship

several stages. At the beginning of the film, Jeffries retains the privileged
position of the movie-goer; he observes without being observed. This sheltered
position gives him a factitious sense of superiority; he feels superior, for
example, to his double in solitide, Miss Lonelyhearts. But this illusion of
distance and superiority soon comes under attack. Lisa tries to keep Jeff from
being a mere spectator by turning on the lights and wheeling his chair away
from the window. The danger also looms that Thorwald will discover that he is
being watched. When Thorwald comes to the window and looks around the
courtyard, Jeff wheels backward in a kind of panic.
The next stage in this shattering of illusory distance occurs when Lisa
enters Thorwald’s apartment. She leaves her seat in the theatre, as it were, and
enters the screen, the space of the spectacle. When Lisa is threatened by
Thorwald’s imminent return, Jeff reacts like the “naive” spectator lurking
within even the most sophisticated; he addresses advice to the unhearing
screen: “Lisa, what are you doing?... Get out of there.” His reactions mirror
our own; he articulates our responses as feeling spectators. But this moment is
highly overdetermined and polyvalent. Is his emotional involvement proof of
newly discovered love for her? Or can he only identify with a Lisa
transmogrified into spectacle, framed within the rectangular windows of
Thorwald’s apartment? What is clear is his powerlessness. The “blessing” of
passive distance has become a curse. The apartment, formerly his sanctuary,
and the apartment complex, his panopticon, have now become his trap.
The progressive breakdown of Jeff's voyeuristic passivity is further
marked by two particularly chilling moments. In the first, he is touched
indirectly, by Thorwald’s look, and in the second, he is touched directly, by
Thorwald’s hands. The first moment, in which Thorwald looks at Jeff and thus
at us, violates the dominant convention, in the classical fiction film, stipulating
that the film remain radically ignorant of its spectator and that the actor never
acknowledge the camera and hence the audience. This moment of the returned
glance, of the voyeur vu, is always imbued with anxiety in Hitchcock’s work—
one thinks of Melanie caught in Mitch’s binoculars as she espies him from
Bodega Bay—because it is the moment of a kind of power shift. Thorwald,
because of his guilty act, had something to conceal; now Jeff, because of his
guilty look, is forced to conceal. Jeff's remark to Stella about Thorwald’s
“guilty look” is made to rebound, ironically and retroactively, against Jeff
himself. His first reaction, typically, is to turn off the lights, i.e., to return
himself to a privileged cinema-like situation. Like the spectator, he is afraid of
the reciprocal glance of discovery.
Thorwald’s invasion of Jeffries’ apartment brings the scopic inversions of
the film to their paroxysm. In a narrative chiasmus—the rhetorical figure
which operates by the simultaneous repetition and inversion of the relationship
between two words in the course of asentence—Jeffries and Thorwald come to
DANBIY
6 sDay Mopuly(pS61)
52 Allegories of Spectatorship

exchange places. Jeffries, delegate for the cinema’s all-perceiving observer, had
visually “broken into” and “entered” Thorwald’s apartment; now Thorwald
returns the favor. The spectacle, formerly kept at a safe distance by the no-
man’s land of the courtyard—figuratively the space between spectator and
screen—comes to invade the spectator. Thorwald becomes the ambulatory
embodiment of filmic displeasure; King Kong is unchained and attacking the
audience. Jeff defends himself by setting off flashbulbs, hiding his eyes with
each flash. He treats Thorwald as if he were part of a film to be watched in the
dark. If the film becomes too frightening, turning on the lights will make it
disappear. Failing that, the childlike spectator can hide the eyes; what is no
longer seen is no longer there. From another perspective, Jeff tries to blind
Thorwald, to deprive him of the look that confers power. But Thorwald
demands reaction as a human being rather than as a character in a film.
Thorwald breaks down the very condition ofJeffries’ voyeurism as the Peeping
Tom receives the symbolic equivalent of the hot pokers of which Stella had
spoken, but with the punishment displaced from the eyes to the second broken
leg which Jeff suffers in his (redemptive) fall.

Voyeurism and Point-of-View

The critique of voyeurism in Rear Window is elaborated not only through

narrative structure and thematic motifs but also through the manipulation of
the precise code most relevant to that critique—the code of point-of-view. This
manipulation is far more rigorous and subtle than most critics have
acknowledged. For many critics, Rear Window is almost completely restricted
to Jeffries’ point-of-view. '’ But this is simplistic. To begin with the obvious,
Jeffries does not see himself as voyeur. “If you could see yourself,” Lisa tells
him, “... with binoculars! ... It’s a disease!” In the sequences that take place
within the apartment, secondly, Lisa, Stella and Doyle are all granted some
point-of-view shots, and many shots, as we shall see, embody the point-of-view
of no character. Some of the most striking subjective shots, finally, are
associated not with Jeffries but with Thorwald. Repeated shots render
Thorwald’s blanched-out vision of Jeffries armed with flashbulbs and trying to
blind him. These dazzling shots mark Thorwald’s “takeover” of the point-of-
view, and in this sense form an integral part of the film’s structure of inversions
and reversals.
The credit sequence already “announces” the rift between Jeffries’ point-
of-view and that of the authorial instance. The credit sequence, in which titles
are superimposed on a shot of the rear windows of Jeffries’ apartment, shows
three bamboo matchstick blinds successively roll up, with no sign of human
intervention. The apparently self-generating movement of the blinds,
combined with the self-designating “Directed by Alfred Hitchcock,”
 Allegories of Spectatorship a3

anticipates and “triggers” the subsequent slow pan around the courtyard, a
shot pointedly unauthorized by any character within the fiction. Hitchcock
further underscores its unauthorized nature by revealing Jeffries only at the
end of the shot, sound asleep and turned away from the window. The camera
then leaves the sleeping Jeffries again and makes another self-flaunting tour of
the courtyard, this time pausing to inspect specific apartment windows. The
twice-asserted autonomy of this initial pair of counterclockwise pans
anticipates a structuring series of similar pans, none of which is from Jeffries’
point-of-view. In the first two, he is asleep, in the third he is being massaged by
Stella, and in the fourth he is being kissed by Lisa. A final pan, during the
epilogue, again finds him asleep. Thus Hitchcock repeatedly calls attention to
the enunciation, conventionally suppressed in classical films, by emphasizing
the gestural autonomy of the camera and its independence from any particular
vision.

Voyeurism and Neighborliness

Through Jeffries, Hitchcock indicts not only voyeurism—or more accurately,

he reminds us that he himself, his characters, and the spectators share this
penchant—but also the social isolation that makes voyeurism, and voyeuristic
cinema, the normal condition. Stated differently, the indictment of voyeurism
is intimately linked to the film’s valorization of neighborliness. At one point,
the woman grief-stricken over the murder of her dog excoriates all the
neighbors for their selfishness: “You don’t know the meaning of the word
neighbors.” Her question “Which one of you did it?” is “answered” by an
extreme long shot which includes all the buildings and observers around the
courtyard. Thus the film implies a certain collective responsibility and the
critique of a social world constituted by isolated monads.
At times Rear Window touches on what might be called the political
dimension of voyeurism. If the narrative ultimately confirms Jeffries’
suspicions of Thorwald, it also sensitizes us to the danger of political abuse of
the power conferred by the look. Like Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) two
decades later, Rear Window is also an essay on the nature of that strange form
of spectatorship called surveillance. Both films are structured around the
come-uppance of the voyeur, or, in the case of Harry Caul, of the “auditeur,”
although the “cure,” in his case, is somewhat less effective. If The Conversation
clairvoyantly “predicted” the abuses of Watergate and Abscam, Rear Window
in some ways echoes the historical ambiance of McCarthyite anticommunism.
McCarthyism, after all, is the antithesis of neighborliness; it treats every
neighbor as potential other, alien, spy. It fractures the social community for
purposes of control. Jeffries is an anonymous accuser whose suspicions happen
to be correct, but the object of his hostile gaze might easily have been as
54 Allegories of Spectatorship

innocent as Father Logan in J Confess or Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero in

The Wrong Man, to cite two other fifties Hitchcock films with anti-
McCarthyite resonances.
Rear Window also explores the sexual politics of looking. Voyeurism in
the film is largely defined as a masculine activity, even though the object of that
voyeurism, through a kind of displacement, is rendered as male. The cinema,
by analogy, is defined as the product of the male auteur/spectator/ voyeur who
at best merely enlists some women as accomplices in his voyeuristic activities.
(Only Jeff, generally, is allowed to look through the phallic telephoto lens.) But
while Lisa and Stella, at least in the beginning, look directly at Jeffries, he looks
away toward women and men transmuted into spectacle. And when the women
turn their eyes toward the spectacle, they see differently, showing enhanced
capacities for empathy and comprehension, especially in relation to other
women. Lisa understands instantly that Miss Torso is not in love with the man
she kisses on the balcony, and knows, without ever having met her, what Mrs.
Thorwald would or would not have done. The female spectator in the text, in
sum, demonstrates a sensibility quite distinct from that of the male.
Rear Window provides a dramatic object-lesson in the processes of
spectatorship. “Tell me what you see and what you think it means,” Lisa tells
Jeffries, and her words evoke the constant process ofvision and interpretation,
inference, and intellection involved in the “reading” of any fiction film. “I just
want to find out what’s the matter with the salesman’s wife,” says Jeffries, thus
articulating one of our wishes concerning the film. Jeffries, Lisa, Stella, and
Doyle collaborate in producing the meaning of the spectacle before them,
much as we collaborate in producing the signification of Rear Window. They
pressure the “film,” as well, with their desire for a story. In fact, some of them
would prefer a murder story; they, like us would be disappointed to discover
that Mrs. Thorwald was actually alive and well.
With its insistent inscription of scenarios of voyeurism, Rear Window
poses the question that so preoccupies contemporary film theory and analysis:
the question of the place of the desiring subject within the cinematic apparatus.
This theory and analysis shifts interests, as we have said, from the question of
“What does the text mean?” to “What do we want from the text?” Indeed, the
special achievement of Rear Window 1s to reveal the two questions as identical.
“What is it you want from me?... Tell me what you want!” Thorwald says to
Jeffries, and his question, ostensibly addressed to the protagonist, might as well
have been addressed to us. What indeed do we want from this film or from film
in general? To this question, Rear Window offers a complex and multileveled
response. The spectators in the film—Jeffries, certainly, but also Lisa, Stella,
and Doyle—want first of all to see, to peek into the private corners of the lives
of others. The technical instruments at Jeffries’ disposal come “in answer,” as it
were, to this primordial desire. Beyond that, these spectators want to identify
 “

Allegories of Spectatorship 29)

with human figures with the spectacle. When Lisa enters into what had been
defined as the space of the spectacle—Thorwald’s apartment—Jeffries’
“investment” becomes clear. Most of all, these spectators want to experience
certain “subject effects.” They want to find themselves in a heightened state of
pleasurable absorption and identification. Jeffries the spectator begins as
listless and apathetic, but he gradually “comes alive” through what he sees. He
savors the experience of “coming alive,” even though that experience at times
entails pain and anxiety. Furthermore, he shares the experience with others
within a kind of ephemeral communitas of spectators. His metamorphosis
from distant observer into excited vicarious participant “allegorizes” the
transformation engendered in us by the narrative procedures and identificatory
mechanisms of Hitchcock’s cinema, and even that engendered by Rear
Window itself.
While it is true that Rear Window short-circuits voyeuristic involvement
by making the audience aware of itself as audience and of the film as artifice, it
is also true that our relation to the spectacle remains voyeuristic in the sense
that we identify strongly with characters in a fiction and identify even more to
the extent that we, like the protagonist, are voyeurs. The distancing of Rear
Window is not, finally, Brechtian. For Brechtian theatre, there is no suspense,
no pathos, no catharsis, while Rear Window builds to a catharsis that purges
the tensions generated by the diegesis. We, like the protagonist, are presumably
“cured.” Rear Window is both indictment and defense of dominant cinema.
Just as scopophilia can incline toward normality (a healthy curiosity) as well as
abnormality (a morbid voyeurism), so the cinema can be life-enhancing or
destructive. Rear Window, at once a cautionary tale and an ode to the cinema,
presents both possibilities with equal force and extraordinary lucidity.

Godard’s Erotic Sabotage

Whereas Rear Window exploits identificatory strategies in its critique of

voyeurism, Godard’s films wed a similar critique with a more consistently
distanced and reflexive style. Godard consistently foregrounds the apparatus
and the desiring spectator’s position within it, in films which are aware ofthe
voyeuristic dimension of the cinema but which mobilize that dimension, often
comically, to “wake up” the spectator in a way which more accurately deserves
the label “Brechtian.” Sex is never prurient in Godard; in fact, sexual titillation
is just one more conventional expectation that Godard refuses to satisfy.
Despite the sexual audacity of many of his films, and despite the candor with
which he treats subjects like prostitution, Godard’s work generally
demonstrates a pudeur which derives not from a puritanical distrust of
sexuality but rather from a sensitivity to the generally exploitative nature of
such images within dominant cinema. In his early films, therefore, he
56 Allegories of Spectatorship

invariably underplays the eroticism of the image. Michel and Patricia in

Breathless grope, comically, under the covers. Ferdinand and Marianne’s
roadside lovemaking in Pierrot le Fou is discreetly metaphorized by a blinking
red signal light. The bare-breasted women in the party sequence of that film are
treated with such directorial nonchalance that their nakedness hardly seems
worthy of our attention. And in The Riflemen, the humor of Michelange’s
grappling with the image keeps us so busy we scarcely have time to pay
attention to the woman in the bathtub.
Godard constantly changes tactics in his ongoing sabotage of eroticism. In
Weekend, Corinne, dressed in a bra, recounts a triangular orgy—perhaps a
parody of those found in the work of Georges Bataille—which culminates with
her defecating in a bowl of milk at the moment of orgasm, while someone
breaks an egg between her spread buttocks. Godard defuses the erotic potential
of the sequence in a number of ways: first, by the comic absurdity and
improbable logistics of the recounted episode; second, by her neutral and
dispassionate tone of voice; third, by backlighting her body so that we see only
its outline; and last, by drowning out her confessions with street noises and
intermittent music. Godard’s technique here recalls the strategy that Stanley
Fish has shown to be characteristic of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Milton verbally
entices the reader to “sin,” and then confronts him or her with this “sinfulness.”
He has the male reader peep with the prowling Satan at the naked Eve, and
then brings him up short with the awareness of his readiness to imaginatively
participate in Satan’s leers. Godard, similarly, offers images which create erotic
expectations, and then frustrates or subverts them. Like Milton, he chides the
reader/spectator’s prurience. At one point in Weekend, Corinne takes a bath.
We do not see her breasts, but we do see the breasts of a woman in a
Renaissance portrait above the bathtub. You have been led to expect some
breasts, Godard seems to be telling us, so I will provide you with some breasts,
but not those you were expecting. In British Sounds, the potential eroticism of
the image of anude woman walking up and down stairs is exorcised by an off-
screen voice reading classic feminist texts. In Tout Va Bien, Susan shows
Jacques a photograph of a penis being fondled by a woman’s hand. The image
fills the screen for what seems an unnaturally long time, while Susan says:
“Admit that this image satisfies you less than it did three years ago.” On one
level, she is referring to the declining satisfactions of their marriage; on another
level, she is asserting the law of diminishing returns in the exploitation of sexual
images in the cinema.
Unlike Milton, Godard does not speak in moralistic or religious
categories. He does not undercut sexual images because they are sexual;
Madame Celine’s monologue in A Married Woman is but one of many verbal
odes to sexuality in his work. Godard’s real target is not sexuality per se but
rather sexual imagery as the locus of exploitation in the cinema in particular
Weekend
(1967)

10.
igure
58 Allegories of Spectatorship

and in the media in general. He exposes the ways a manipulative society uses
sex as part of its arsenal for purposes of social control. He unmasks the media’s
exploitation of sexuality as a daily aggression on its hapless spectators.
Charlotte in Une Femme Mariée obsessively compares her bust to that of the
ideal figures from the women’s magazines. She anxiously ponders the
questions that advertising and the media throw at her: “Is your bust. ..?”““How
far can a woman go...?” Charlotte anticipates Mademoiselle Dix-Neuf Ans in
Masculin, Féminin, whom Godard labels “a consumer product,” as well as the
inhabitants of Alphaville. The fascism of Alphaville—where the entire polity
has been transformed into a streamlined and antiseptic bordello—is sexual as
well as political.
Indeed, in the Alphaville of a repressively tolerant society, cinema often
serves a function analogous to that of houses of prostitution and massage
parlors. It becomes one of those potentially subversive zones—those
authorized ghettos where certain excesses are permitted—that liberal society
tolerates in order to control. The cinema of vicarious thrills allows us to make
love to the stars for a price; it doles out minimal libidinal satisfactions even
while protecting us from their consequences. The perennial juggling of
pornography and prudery stimulates the id while reinforcing the superego.
Dominant cinema, like dominant politics, perpetually cheats its public of the
utopia it perpetually promises. Godard’s hostility is not directed at sexuality
but rather at the alienated forms of representation. The point, to paraphrase
the envoi of Tout Va Bien, is for each of us to become our own sexual his-
torians.
A close look at the opening sequence of Contempt (1963) tells us a good
deal about Godard’s distanciating procedures. The film is prefaced by a
quotation from André Bazin: “The cinema gives us a world in accordance with
our desires.” A red cloth screen, on which the word “Contempt” is written, then
folds and collapses. The sheet anticipates other Godardian sheets—
Michelange pulling down the sheet/screen in Les Carabiniers, the white
cloth/sheet background for the titles of A Married Woman, subsequently
revealed as the diegetic sheet on which two lovers make stylized epidermic
contact—and condenses a series of associations. The sheet/screen evokes the
mental “dream screen” which, according to Bertram Lewin, precedes the
dreamer’s entry into the dream. The sheet thus evokes cinema’s promise of a
world “in accord with our desires,” in short the world both of sleep and
sexuality, of the desire to dream and the dream of desire. It is this world that the
title sequence promises and then symbolically folds and collapses.
The first shot after the title opens in deep-focus onto an Italian studio-
town—subsequently revealed as Cinecitta—as a small knot of human figures
and a camera progress toward us from the depths of the space. As the visible
pro-filmic camera approaches, the invisible pre-filmic camera pans slightly to
 Allegories of Spectatorship 59

center it, then tilts up respectfully, while the visible camera tilts down, directly
fixing the spectator with its rectangular lens. The shot warrants a number of
observations. The only completely honest film, Godard once said, would show
a camera filming itself in a mirror. Although Le Mépris never achieves such an
exacting standard of reflexivity, it approximates it by having the pro-filmic
camera eye, which in conventional cinema slyly and surreptitiously equates
itself with the vision of the spectator, focus on the spectators themselves. It is as
if the apparatus itself were nodding at us, in a cinematographic equivalent of
Brechtian direct address to the audience. Apart from the camera, we see camera
tracks—in a film traversed by tracking shots—along with light meters,
electrical equipment, booms. But more important than this pro-filmic display
of the cinematic machinery is the fact that we are made aware of the /ook of the
camera. Instead of identifying unconsciously, through a process analogous to
primary identification in psychoanalysis, with the camera through which we
see, here we are reminded that films are constituted by looks: the look of the
camera, the spectator’s recapitulation of that look, the looks between
characters in the fiction, the looks which carry us from shot to shot.
This opening camera-eye is also a camera-gun aimed at spectatorial
voyeurism. Fiction films usually shelter us from the glance of the actors; we
look at people on screen who do not look at us. But here Raoul Coutard and his
camera return our glance. The voyeur has been vu. This aggressive designation
of our voyeuristic position is reinforced in the subsequent shots of Piccoli and
Bardot. The Bazin quotation—“the cinema gives us a world in accordance with
our desires”—has already pointed a verbal finger at our desire. The nude shots
of Bardot—which Godard was pressured by the producers to include—
presumably come to fulfill that same (largely male) desire. In fact, Godard gave
in to the producers, but in ways that undercut their intentions, for the three-
shot sequence is a typical Godardian exercise in defused titillation. Red, white
and blue filters remind us of specifically cinematographic mediations and
transfigure the image of Bardot’s body into pure chromatic plasticity. The film
renders her beauty as statuesque, and comparable in eroticism to the perfectly
respectable classical sculptures seen recurrently throughout the film. The two
motionless lovers mingle shopping-list trivialities with oddly dispassionate
declarations of love. Piccoli makes a verbal inventory of Bardot’s body—at this
point we know them only as Piccoli and Bardot since we do not yet know their
fictive names: “I love your feet... I love your legs... I love your thighs.” This
Ezequiel’s bones approach to female nakedness sends a mocking message to
both producer and spectator: “All right, if it’s nudity you want, here it is—in
words!”
Equally important is the positioning ofthese shots within the text. Godard
gives in to the producers’ wishes but subverts their intentions; he vanquishes by
submitting. He quickly dispenses the requested shots as if acquitting himself of
60 Allegories of Spectatorship

a disagreeable duty. In classical films, furthermore, love scenes usually come as

a culmination to an inexorable crescendo of teased desire, an explosion after a
long repressed chase. The final kiss of aBacall-Bogart film noir “resolves,” ina
musical rather than literal sense, an erotic tension carefully stimulated
throughout the film. The “love scene” in Le Mépris, in constrast, occurs in
advance of any real spectatorial involvement. Since the processes of secondary
identification by which we emotionally invest ourselves in the fiction have not
yet taken place, the sequence is syntagmatically displaced, as if narrative
orgasm were made to precede foreplay.

A Married Woman and Masculine, Feminine

The subject of A Married Woman would seem to be made to order for the avid
spectator-as-voyeur. The love scenes, the introspective voice-overs, the intimist
framing might easily collaborate to create a diegetic world which the spectator
might imagine as private and which he or she is surreptitiously observing. Yet
Godard uses all this conventional machinery against its usual purposes. The
film begins, like Le Mépris, with a sheet/screen, a reminder of cinema’s affinity
with the oneiric and the imaginary. There follows a series of shots of parts of
two lover’s bodies. The framing is calculated in such a way that the images do
not suggest erotic spectacles: the effect is one of dismemberment. Some of the
shots constitute sight-gags: two legs, one male one female, neighbor
symmetrically as if they belonged to the same person. The shots, in their
stillness, resemble photographs that fade in and out. The fades, conventionally
used to indicate the passage of time, are here used to isolate the shots and avoid
conventional movement continuity. In syntagmatic terms, we are given what
Metz would call a bracket syntagma, a typical sample of an activity: not a
couple making love, but the idea of acouple making love. There is no teleology,
no increased intensity leading to climax. The acting is as if in the third person,
remote and understated. We lip-read the words “Je t’aime”—usually the most
emotionally charged sentence in classic films—as they repeat it without
apparent emotion. The declaration, furthermore, comes at the beginning of the
film and not as a romantic closure or fulfillment.
The opening sequence typifies the Brechtianism of the film’s procedures.
We are confronted with an abstract romantic triangle, an equilateral triangle in
which we do not side with either of the rivals for Charlotte’s affections. Pierre
and Robert strike us as interchangeable units: both professionals associated
with airports, they are granted the same amount of time in Charlotte’s
company; they participate in identical rituals. Everything in the film—the
understated acting, the juxtaposition of staged scenes with cinéma vérité
interviews; the verbal references to films; the foregrounding both of
photography and the gestures of the camera—undercuts our erotic
 7

Allegories of Spectatorship 61

involvement with the characters. Charlotte explains to her husband that she
would like to know “all the people in the street,” and glances to the right, then
the left, and then straight at the audience. Her expressed desire to close the
space separating herself from her observer designates the “withdrawal” of the
cinematic situation, the withdrawal on which the spectator’s scopophilia
usually feeds.
Godard’s subversion of a certain kind of pleasure is, at times, itself
intensely pleasurable. A kind of aesthetic jubilation transports us from the
privatized space of individual fantasy to a broader social space in which we see
our own desires as comic. Self-directed laughter remains laughter. Godard
illuminates the comic underside of the “intersubjective textual relation” by
showing us spectators watching films. The “porn-film sequence” in Masculine,
Feminine, for example, shows us a movie theatre whose air is heavy with
eroticism, where usherettes kiss apparent strangers and homosexuals tryst in
the mens’ room. The film itself—often said to parody Bergman’s The Silence
because it is Swedish and involves impersonal sexual encounters in an
unidentified land—is prefaced by an ironic intertitle in ersatz Scandinavian:
“4X Ein Sensitiv und Rapid Film.” The reflexive self-characterization recalls
that of many Godard films—‘“Fragments of a Film Made in 1964,” “A Film in
Black and White”—and involves superimposed puns and ironies, the “4X”
referring simultaneously to 4X film stock, X as in X-rated, and X as ina 4-star
system of evaluating films, and the “sensitiv” and “rapid” referring both to the
sensibility and quick pace of the film and to the sensitivity of the film stock. The
film-within-a-film mirrors Masculine, Feminine as a whole; both concern
relations between the sexes, although the porn film offers a particularly
reductionist version in which communication is limited to the semiotics of
grunts and the proxemics of lust, the absurdity of which is heightened by a
distorting mirror which turns the male figure, especially, into a kind of
monster. Paul and Madeleine and their friends, while aware ofthe film’s gross
stupidity, are unable to leave, thus demonstrating the manner in which
exploitative films make spectators the passive accomplices of their seductive
aggressions. “We control our thoughts,” says Paul’s interior monologue, “but
not our emotions, which are everything.” Feelings lag behind knowledge, and
we are left trying to reconcile what we feel with what we know, for the appeal of
such films, like that of advertising, is direct and difficult to resist. Paul’s poetic
monologue speaks of the role of the desiring spectator within the apparatus, of
the emotional demands we make of films: “Marilyn Monroe had aged terribly.
It made us sad. It wasn’t the film we had dreamed of... the total film we carried
within ourselves...that we wanted to make...or more secretly... that we
wanted to live.” Paul’s melancholy off-screen words coincide with the close-up
image of the woman in the porn film. Her face moves down-screen, presumably
in the direction of the man’s penis. The implied off-screen fellatio, an act of
62 Allegories of Spectatorship

unilateral and impersonal homage to the phallus, metaphorizes the porn film’s
flattering relation to the male spectator; he remains deliciously passive while
being serviced by a competent and contented woman in a nonreciprocated
onanism a deux. The juxtaposition of Paul’s lament with the pornographic
images, meanwhile, suggests a kind of logical/mathematical proportion: a
quick blow-job among strangers is to our dreams of real love as pornography is
to true cinema.

Feminist Pornography: Numéro Deux and Every Man for Himself

Numéro Deux (1975), co-authored by Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville,

creates what at first glance might seem a contradiction in terms—a political,
nonexploitative, porn film. The film politicizes and “feminizes” an apparently
irrecuperable genre. The film has the conventional appearance of porn; it
displays all the stock shots of x-rated films. Images of fellatio, rear-entry
intercourse, and masturbation literally proliferate on the screen. Yet despite
this profusion of visual erotica, the film is uncompromising in its refusal to
pander to scopophilic lust. Godard-Mieéville achieve this remarkable feat not
by making the sexual acts repulsive, as pornography often inadvertently does,
but rather by politicizing and socializing them. The image of a woman
masturbating, for example, is not served up for male delectation but rather to
make a feminist point—that women’s bodies are their own. The image does not
bury us in the white thighs of infinite desire; the woman is filmed head first, and
we are reminded that the head is where a good deal of sexual activity takes
place. Sandrine masturbates to her memories—“It’s like the cinema,” she
points out—and we are reminded that a woman’s thoughts are also her own.
The sexual activity, in any case, is subsumed under the more general question
of sexual politics. In another image—of an old man masturbating—sexuality is
politicized in a different way. The man, an ex-Communist party militant,
masturbates, rather ineffectively, to the memories of his activist youth, and his
action aptly metaphorizes the nostalgic and largely impotent politics of the
French Communist Party.
Numéro Deux demystifies sexuality, and thus subverts the pornographic
genre from within. Avoiding the twin extremes of the idealized, sweatless, and
odorless sexuality of the haloed pre-porn days and the lobtomized animality of
porn, Numéro Deux shows sex as a universal, everyday activity. Sexuality,
rather than being the private preserve of nubile young adults, is revealed as a
general inheritance. Children are shown to be sexually curious, and the elderly
sexually active. The children’s question—“Do all little girls have holes?”—
remind us that what has become so surrounded with a halo of tantalizing
interdiction is in some respects quite simple. Whereas children are denied
access to x-rated films, Numéro Deux invites them into the image itself. At the
 Allegories of Spectatorship 63

same time, the film explores the complex repercussions of adult sexuality on
children. One remarkable shot superimposes the solarized video close-up of the
daughter’s face on a long shot of her parents making love, in a strikingly
original cinematic version of a Freudian “primal scene.”'* The elderly, for their
part, are shown to be sexual creatures like everyone else, only older. A sequence
entitled “Venus simpose” shows an aged woman (the grandmother) going
about her routines in the nude, while the sound track enumerates the youth-
giving effects of various cosmetics. The sequence mocks our desire for nudity,
and the media exploitation of sexuality, but it never mocks the woman. We are
reminded that young nude bodies become naked old bodies, that our loving
souls are fastened, as Yeats put it, toa dying animal, and that this, too, a mature
vision of sexuality must take into account.
If Numéro Deux’s sensitive approach to the sexuality of the elderly recalls
Simone de Beauvoir’s La Vieillesse, its concern with female liberation evokes
Le Deuxieme Sexe. The film suggests, in startlingly innovative ways, the
manner in which sexist power relations taint communication between women
and men. Home for her isa factory; for him it is a refuge. She produces ata loss;
he profits. The inadequacy of their sexual relationship cannot be separated
from the sexual politics of their everyday life. This fact is suggested visually ina
number of ways. The image of Sandrine giving head to Pierre is juxtaposed
within the Jeanne Dielman-like image of the grandmother peeling vegetables.
Two forms of service or two forms of servitude? At another point Godard-
Miéville use a video synthesizer to overlap images; he goes to work in color,
while she stays at home in black-and-white.
Like Numéro Deux, Sauve Qui Peut/(la Vie) (Every Man for Himself,
1980) practices an erotic brinksmanship which carries sexually explicit imagery
to a point just this side of exploitation. The essential question for the
filmmakers is not the images themselves but their mediation. Although Sauve
Qui Peut proliferates in verbal allusions and visual representations which
might be regarded as “pornographic,” the erotic potential of the material is
consistently defused. It might be argued, of course that defusing the erotic
potential of sexual images ceases, after a time, to pay intellectual dividends.
How often do filmmakers have to designate the voyeuristic situation of the
spectator without the exercise becoming redundant or counter-productive?
The answer seems to be that ina situation dominated either by the puritans who
would repress bodily pleasure or the pseudo-hedonists who “liberate” only
masculine pleasure, while we wait for the utopia of a reciprocal, egalitarian,
and decentered sexuality in which sexual images are controlled by both sexes,
the kind of Brechtian eroticism practised by Sawve Qui Peut still serves a
purpose."
The strategies deployed in this Brechtian short-circuiting of voyeurism are
multiple. 1) Huppert’s transparent boredom and expressionless acting function
64 Allegories of Spectatorship

as a potent antiaphrodisiac. At the same time, she conveys dignity in the face of
even the most outrageous proposals. Her surface passivity is undercut by an
ironic quality, a stubborn refusal to be impressed. Her resolute blankness
becomes a form of resistance. 2) Although women frequently disrobe in the
film, the disrobing is merely the sign of a power relation. The women are
ordered to strip; the gesture is one of mechanical submission rather than a coy
dialectic of concealing and revealing. 3) As often in Godard—one need only
recall Madame Celine’s soliloquy in Une Femme Mariée or the recounted orgy
in Weekend—the sexual material is displaced onto the verbal register. Or
Godard plays on the interchange between the verbal and visual. Mr. Personne’s
request to see Isabelle’s “belle forét” is answered by a shot of the “beautiful
forest” lining Lac Leman. This childlike literalization of ametaphor mocks the
spectator’s voyeurism.
Rather than pander to desire, Sauve Qui Peut concretizes scenarios of
desire in distanced, often ridiculous forms hardly designed to flatter the
spectator. Rather than vicariously participate in the scenario, we observe it as a
comic object; we are too busy laughing to become aroused. The most hilarious
example ofthis erotic grotesquerie involves a listless four-person orgy. Godard
stages the sexual fantasies of a contemporary businessman. We are shown a
technocrat’s wet dream—the Taylorization of sexual production. Sex is
programmed and disciplined by the science of management. The boss
monopolizes the information, plans the work and sets the procedures. Like a
filmmaker, he assigns precise movement and attitudes to the “actors” (his
assistant, secretary, and a prostitute). The image taken care of, he concentrates
on the sound track. Each participant is assigned a diphthong (“ai,” “ei”)—
presumably the signifier of rampaging lust—to be repeated at regular intervals.
The orgy participants, like assembly-line workers, are reduced to well-defined
jerks, twists, moans, and quivers. The cineaste-patron literally oversees a
hierarchy of domination. The sightlines are arranged by him and work to his
benefit. Yet ultimately he cannot enjoy his power. Isabelle reads his face and
finds “dark pride, terminal despair, arrogance, and fear.” All this, it should go
without saying, is highly antierotic. There are no writhing bodies but only the
empty multiplication of sexual signifiers in a kind of caricatural formula of an
orgy, an orgy rendered as sign.

Obscure Objects of Desire

We encounter a paradigmatic instance of the playful mockery of the desiring

spectator in a film whose title sums up what is at stake: That Obscure Object of
Desire. Bunuel’s film demonstrates a kind of Zeno’s paradox of passion: the
space between two potential lovers—and between the spectator and the
screen—is infinitely divisible. No matter how physically close Mathieu gets to
91N314
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66 Allegories of Spectatorship

Conchita—in her house, in his bed, naked in bed—she remains as spiritually

remote as a medieval damsel locked in the castles of courtly love. Obscure
Object visually renders this inaccessibility by placing Conchita behind bars,
fences, grillwork. Mathieu is framed as the prisoner of desire, in a chromatic
version of the incarceral obsession of film noir. His vision is barred as he is
subjected to cruelly seductive revelations of Conchita’s flesh. He watches
through glass doors as she dances for tourists and observes her through a
locked gate as another man is presumably about to enjoy her. The bars
metaphorize the treadmill of desire—since all desire depends on the infinite
pursuit of its absent object—always tantalizing, always unfulfilled, perpetually
on the brink in a protracted coitus interruptus.'°
Obscure Object frustrates our epistemophilia as well as our scopophilia.
By obscuring the very identity of the characters through the use of two actresses
in the same role, Bufiuel calls attention to the phantasmatic nature of cinematic
spectacle. A key support of illusionistic narrative—our naive faith in the three-
dimensional solidity of stable, identifiable characters—is thrown aside. But
this two-actress personage also points up Mathieu’s blindness: he literally fails
to see the woman he claims to love. She is a phantom, a narrative function, an
abstract incarnation of male desire. She is a creation of Mathieu’s pathology.
Playing out a widely disseminated cultural double bind, Mathieu cannot attain
what he desires without destroying his desire. The love of virgins, like Humbert
Humbert’s love for nymphets, is ephemeral and foredoomed by definition.
But more important than Mathieu’s desire per se is Bufiuel’s comic foiling
of our spectatorial desire. Obscure Object is a protracted joke on the spectator,
a narrative striptease that refuses to strip. It refuses to let us see what we want to
see or know what we want to know. The title’s abstract promise of eroticism
draws us to the theatre, but the film never delivers on the promise. Like
Mathieu, we are cruelly locked out of the spectacle, subjected to a regress of
spectatorial frustration. Instead of stimulating desire, Bufiuel holds the mirror
to our own psychic fix on films themselves. He analyzes the most mystified
moment in our culture—the moment of anticipated sexual fulfillment—and
scrutinizes, as if under a microscope, our phantasmatic relation to the
spectacle, exposing desire as a cultural and cinematic construct.
The obscure object of desire in Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s Tropical
Fruit (Brazil, 1980) takes the form of a watermelon. The protagonist of the
film, that is to say, literally loves watermelons. A parody of the
pornochanchadas (vapid soft-core porn films popular in Brazil), Tropical Fruit
demystifies the genre by according to the watermelon the function usually
accorded the woman in such films. The protagonist seduces the watermelon as
if it were a frightened virgin, deflowers it ritualistically, and ultimately subjects
it to sado-masochistic perversities. A series of shots achieves what has
remained inaccessible in more conventional non-vegetative pornography—
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Allegories of Spectatorship 69

shots from inside the pink wetness of the watermelon itself. Thus the film
mocks the male spectator’s desire to see—and only see—everything! It exposes
pornography’s Pyrrhic victory. After conquering the contours of the female
body, the pudenda, and the vulva, the phallic camera takes the last fortress ina
fantastic voyage to the very center. But as Pascal Bruckner and Alain
Finkielkraut point out, the victory is in every sense a hollow one, revealing only
the totalitarianism of masculine pleasure and the sterile plenitude of
voyeurism: “the miniscule Eden peopled by impoverished masculine
dreams.”"’
Tropical Fruit also switches the terms of secondary identification of the
pornochanchada. The woman—usually the coy sex object—is here the
spectator’s delegate who asks the protagonist precisely those questions we
would have liked to ask. The protagonist, for his part, is hardly an ideal figure
for male projection. While pornochanchada protagonists are generally
playboys living in luxurious apartments, the protagonist of Tropical Fruit is
physically unattractive and professionally incompetent. Hardly the macho
sexual athlete of the pornochanchadas, he suffers from premature ejaculation
even with his watermelons. In sum, Tropical Fruit answers the male voyeur’s
implicit request for a female sex object by offering an ironically reified object of
desire, a vegetative exemplar of pure alterity. The Brazilian military
government, sensing the insult to machismo in a film without nudity or
heterosexual or homosexual lovemaking, banned it for three years, while
tolerating the much more explicit pornochanchadas which Tropical Fruit so
acerbically mocked.
We have focussed in this chapter on fictions which foreground the
“intersubjective textual relation”’—the relation between reader and novel,
spectator and play, filmgoer and film. These fictions remind the reader or
spectator of his or her complicity in the fiction, their active role in creating it in
collaboration with the fictioner. In the case of films, they focus on the cinematic
apparatus and the desiring spectator’s place within that apparatus. Since the
cinematic enterprise has been historically marked by voyeurism both as theme
and impulse, they criticise the voyeuristic stance promoted by a certain kind of
cinema, largely to flatter and titillate the male spectator. All the texts here
discussed strive to promote critical self-awareness in the spectator. Whether
they do this through Brechtian comedy (Godard) or near-tragedy (Hitchcock),
they all offer an allegorisis of spectatorship in which we can all, to a greater or
lesser degree, recognize ourselves. Such is the special nature oftheir reflexivity.
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The Process of Production

At one point in Don Quixote, Cervantes has his protagonist walk into a
Barcelona printing shop where he observes the processes of proofreading,
typesetting, and revision and is lectured on the economics of the publishing
industry. Cervantes thus focuses attention on the concrete procedures by which
all books, including his own, were produced. Just as a novel can take the
production of books as its subject, so a film can focus on the processes of
filmmaking. Our purpose in this chapter will be to examine a novel—Balzac’s
Lost Illusions—which explores the literary institution in the broadest sense,
along with a series of films which take as their subject either the cinematic
institution or the concrete technical or aesthetic operations involved in
filmmaking. Such novels and films necessarily entail a certain measure of
reflexivity in that they foreground, in however indirect or idealized fashion, the
institutional practices involved in their own production. They may treat this
subject more or less critically, more or less reflexively, but they do have the
virtue of reminding the reader or spectator that literary or filmic texts are
products, created by individuals or groups and mediated by complex
commercial and cultural apparati.
The literary and cinematic institutions, homologous in some respects, are
otherwise quite distinct. Not all branches of art are subject to the laws of a
specific system of production—for example, capitalist—to the same extent or
in the same way. The economic conditioning affecting literature operates even
more powerfully in the cinema, whose very nature involves it in industrial
production. A novel can be written on napkins in a prison; commercial
considerations enter with force only at the stage of publication and
distribution. With film on the other hand, economic considerations—large or
small budget, color or black-and-white, expensive stars or unknown actors—
dictate priorities and preclude possibilities from the very outset. The actual
production of the film sets in motion a complex economic mechanism, from
the mechanical apparatus of cameras, laboratories, and editing equipment to
the commercial apparatus of distribution and exhibition.
Passion
(1982)

14.
igure
 The Process of Production Us

Art and the Culture Industry: Balzac’s Lost Illusions

Although Honoré de Balzac was a nonarchist in politics and an archmimeticist

in art, his Lost Illusions exposes the political and economic mechanisms of
nineteenth-century capitalism with the same penetrating vigor that it discovers
the machinations which operate in the world of art.' He reveals in embryonic
form the development of what Brecht, a century later, would call the cultural
“apparati” and what Enzenberger would call the “consciousness industry.”
Although Balzac was writing in another century, much of his analysis remains
as pertinent today as it was a hundred years ago; it applies, by extension, to
both the contemporary cinema as well as the other mass-media.
Lost Illusions, Georg Lukacs has said, is the Don Quixote of bourgeois
illusions. The comparison, although Lukacs never elaborates it, is endlessly
suggestive. Both texts constitute antiromances, fictions which are at the same
time critiques of fiction. While Cervantes ridicules chivalric romance by
contrasting its fictions with the realities of seventeenth-century Spain, the
central dialectic of Balzac’s novel pits human fictions—whether in the form of
literature in particular or imaginative idealization in general—against a social
reality which belies those fictions. Both novels treat characters whose ideals
and fantasies have been shaped by literary texts and who then encounter a
world not in conformity with such fantasies. The very title of Balzac’s novel
recalls the formula which Cervantes provided for the novel: a narrative
trajectory of progressive disillusionment engendered by brutal encounters with
reality. A no-longer feudal Spain destroys the chivalric imaginings of
Cervantes’ hidalgo, and the developing capitalist world puts an end to the
romantic attitudes and Napoleonic ambitions of David Séchard and Lucien de
Rubempré.
If Don Quixote demystifies romance, Lost Illusions demystifies
nineteenth-century romanticism by putting it to an exacting “reality test.” The
twin protagonists of Lost Illusions—David Séchard and Lucien de
Rubempré—are quintessential romantics, formed by the reading of Schiller,
Lord Byron, Walter Scott, and Lamartine. Their attitudes are romantic; they
see themselves as sensitive souls defiled by their provincial surroundings. They
display the self-delusions of bourgeois artists who live in contradiction and
mauvaise foi. Such an artist, Jean-Paul Sartre writes in What is Literature,
chooses to ignore the reality of his public: “He speaks gladly of his solitude, and
_..claims that one writes for oneself alone or for God; he makes literature a
metaphysical occupation, a prayer, an examination of consciousness,
everything except a communication.”’ Balzac anticipates Sartre by ironically
placing similar romantic misconceptions in the infatuated mind of Madame de
Bargeton: “According to her, men of genius had neither brothers or sisters nor
fathers and mothers; the great works they were destined to construct forced
74 The Process of Production

them to appear selfish and sacrifice everything to their greatness ... Genius was
accountable only to itself; it alone knew what ends were to be attained and it
alone could justify the means” (p. 66).’ Thus Balzac casts ridicule on the suspect
solitude and Werther-like posturings of the romantic artist who sees himself as
supremely autonomous, without connection to the world or to the public, the
creator of masterpieces to which he alone detains the key.
Although Balzac does not consciously belong to a reflexive tradition—
Robert Alter is quite right to see Lost Illusions as a primarily mimetic novel
which examines the literary world largely as milieu—the novel can at least be
said to reflexively reveal the conditions of its own production. Its protagonists,
the poet and the printer, taken together represent the complementary aspects of
literary production—creation and mechanical reproduction. Lost Illusions
inlcudes a novel within the novel (Lucien’s L’Archer de Charles 1X), and thus
resembles novels about the writing of novels, like Gide’s Faux-Monnayeurs or
Huxley’s Point-Counterpoint, although Balzac, as Robert Alter points out,
never takes us inside the fictitious novel as Gide and Huxley do. More
important, however, Balzac shows us the processes of literary creation, the
selection process whereby certain practices of language become texts. As
Lucien and D’Arthes labor over the revisions of Lucien’s novel, writing is
shown to be an arduous and time-consuming process rather than the magical
result of spontaneous artistic generation or the product of a nebulous
“inspiration.”
Balzac examines literature in a materially concrete context, highlighting
the whole gamut of conceivable influences on the processes of literary
production: the origins of the material of which books are made—paper; the
technological procedures of their reproduction—printing; and the commercial
transactions that affect their publication and distribution. The very first
sentence consists of a notation on the technology of printing, and the final
paragraph mentions the printing office which Cerizet is forced to sell. At one
point, Balzac offers a capsule history of printing (“When the immortals Faust,
Coster, and Gutenberg had invented the Book”) and he explains the
transformation of the means of production from manufacture with wooden
presses to industrialized production with Stanhope presses. Balzac’s insistence
on the technology of printing becomes especially significant when we
remember Walter Benjamin’s insight that the novel is distinguished from the
story and the epic by its essential dependence on the book. What differentiates
the novel from other forms of prose literature, Benjamin points out, is that it
neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it: “The dissemination of the
novel becomes possible only with the invention of printing.”* The novel, then,
is the only major literary genre to emerge after Gutenberg, whose invention
made books available on a large scale and thus led to a situation of mass
literacy in which large numbers ofpeople were being influenced by books. In its
 Pa

The Process of Production 75

close alliance with an invention, in fact, it parallels the fiction film, made
possible by the mechanical reproduction of the filmic image, which in
conjunction with the establishment of networks of distribution led to a
situation in which large masses of people came to be influenced, and
quixotized, as it were, by fiction films.
By relating the history of paper, hardly out of place, Balzac insists, in a
work “whose material existence is due as much to paper as to the printing
press,” Lost Illusions insists on the awkward contingency of literary texts, their
humiliating dependence on the paper on which they are printed. Balzac insists
on the physical perishability of books. As sound products disappear, he points
out, “ Neither the shirts nor the books will last... ”(p. 119). One senses real
outrage in Balzac’s remark: “What a shame for our epoch to make books that
will not last!” (pp. 121-22). The juxtaposition of shirts with books, meanwhile,
suggests that literature has become just another salable commodity. Indeed,
the central subject of Lost Illusions is the degradation of literature, and its
transformation, in bourgeois society, into a commodity. In Balzac’s novel, the
problems of art and what Marx called “spiritual production” resonate to the
contradictions within the capitalist system of production generally. Lucien,
attempting to sell his novel, is rudely confronted with the situation created by
the capitalization of literature. Surprised by the commercial jargon of the
publishers, for whom books “were like cotton bonnets to haberdashers, a
commodity to be bought cheap and sold dear,” Lucien is struck by “the brutally
material aspect that literature could assume” (p. 219). This “brutally material
aspect” suggests that the perennial “problem of the book” here takes on an
economic dimension—the problem of the book as merchandise in nineteenth-
century capitalist France.
Balzac explores in Lost Illusions the same theme that Godard later
elaborates in Contempt; the commercial degradation of art. Balzac’s imagery
underscores the theme, comparing publications to “card tricks,” publishers to
gamblers (“staking other people’s funds on the green cloth of speculation”) and
prospectors (“looking for Walter Scott, as later one might search for asphalt in
shingly terrrain”).” But the central metaphor for the social degradation of art,
for Balzac as later for Godard, is prostitution. The character Lousteau
compares the hierarchy of literary reputations to the hierarchy of prostitution:
the lowest kind of literature is “the needy whore shivering on street corners”;
second-rate literature is the “kept woman straight from the brothels of
journalism”; and successful literature is the “flashy insolent courtesan” who
“pays her taxes and entertains eminent people” (pp. 273-74). The press, for
Balzac, is a grand bordello and journalists are “prostitutes of the pen.” The
prostitutes accompanying writers like Lucien and Lousteau stand ina kind of
indexical relation to their clients; they are more symptom than cause of the
journalists’ corruption. As literature becomes a salable commodity, the writers
76 The Process of Production

begin to treat themselves as commodities that sell, package, and advertise

themselves.
At times, Lost Illusions reads like a disillusioned screenwriter’s
Hollywood novel. The literary world, Lucien discovers, is the scene of
perpetual Darwinian struggle, corrupted from top to bottom by money: “the
only power that this world kneels down to” (pp. 197-98). Books are seen as
“capital to be invested” and their artistic merit, Dauriat points out, often
lessens their chance for publication: “The better a book is, the less likely it is to
be sold.” Literary criticism, meanwhile, has become an appendage of what
would now be called the “cultural industry,” and is governed, according to
Balzac, by a “strict alliance between criticism and the press.” Favorable or
unfavorable reviews, when not dictated by the political allegiances of the
journal in question, depend on the amount of the bribe paid by the author or
publisher. In the theatre, producers view each production as a financial
gamble, a “coup de cartes.” Since the public wants to be “crammed full of
emotions,” the theatre simply supplies the market for cheap thrills. For the
artist, talent must be accompanied by a certain “genius for intrigue.” Actresses,
to succeed, display their prowess on the nineteenth-century equivalent of the
casting couch, or simply bribe the journalists who write the theatre reviews.
Even in art, Lucien comes to realize, success can be “fabricated.”
Balzac never allows us to indulge the illusion that Lucien’s problem as a
writer is merely a personal and psychological one. To underscore the
paradigmatic nature of Lucien’s disenchantment, he offers parallel instances of
the same process in the careers of other poets. The cynical Lousteau begins, like
Lucien, with his “heart full of illusions, spurred by the love of art” only to
discover the “facts of the métier, the difficulty of getting into print, and the
reality of poverty.” Enthusiasm, he tells Lucien, had hid “the mechanism ofthe
world!” It was necessary to “get caught up in the works, run foul of the shafts,
get covered with grease and hear the rattle of chains and flywheels.” (p. 270)
Both Lucien and Lousteau exemplify a common Balzacian pattern. Young
idealists, progressing through the initiatory fires of “Enrichissez-vous”
Restoration France, discover that the values with which they grew up—love,
family, religion—have no currency in the sphere of social circulation. Since
generosity and idealism lead only to impotence and victimization, they come
under relentless pressure to prostitute themselves. Their personal qualities—
good looks, enthusiasm, talent—become a kind of capital. Their sentiments
become calculations, and love an investment. Balzac, rather than spotlight the
lonely struggle of a suppressed “genius,” offers the critical dissection of an
unexceptional individual trapped in the “mécanisme” of a general malaise.
Lost Illusions constitutes a thoroughgoing critic of both literature and
society. The two critiques, in fact, imply and reinforce each other. They are
 Pa

The Process of Production Ti

homologous; a critique in one area invariably triggers reverberations in the

other:

By inviting all its children to the same banquet, Society arouses their ambitions in the very
morning of life, robbing youth of its graces and vitiating most ofits generous sentiments by
contaminating them with calculation. Poetry would have it otherwise, but Fact too often
belies the fiction one would prefer to believe... (p. 67).

Here we have the dialectic of Lost Illusions—between ideology on the one hand
and social reality on the other. Ideology, after all, is nothing more than “the
fiction one would prefer to believe,” the system of representations that the
dominating class uses to justify its power and which the dominated need, or
think they need, to rationalize their powerlessness. In the Balzacian dialectic,
poetry is contradicted by fact, and the fictions in which one would like to
believe are juxtaposed with the dismal realities of nineteenth-century France.

Hollywood on Hollywood: The Silent Period

Just as Balzac took the world of literature as his subject in Lost Illusions, so
countless Hollywood films treat Hollywood itself as milieu, and focus,
accurately or inaccurately, critically or uncritically, on the processes of film
production. Without attempting an exhaustive summary of a topic already
treated by Patrick Donald Anderson, Bruce Kawin, Alfred Appel, Gerald
Mast, Robert Eberwein, Rudy Behlmer and Tony Thomas, among others, we
might usefully survey a tradition of films which are “reflexive” in one or more
of the following senses: |) they explore the filmmaking milieu; 2) they expose
the actual processes of film production, whether directly or by analogy; and 3)
they flaunt their artifice through calling attention to filmic technique. A
number of questions will orient our discussion: Do these films idealize or
demystify the cinema as an institution? What phase of the production
process—preproduction, production, postproduction, reception—do they
concentrate on? To what extent do they display an anti-illusionistic aesthetic?
Are they truly reflexive or do they merely exploit the filmmaking milieu as a
decor in which to set a conventional comedy or dramatic realist film? Finally,
how do the films comment on the reality of genre within the studio system and
which genres exhibit a greater or lesser degree of reflexivity?
Since the very beginning of the cinema, numerous films have focussed on
the filmmaking milieu or the processes of filmmaking. In a variation on the
mistaking-screen-illusion-for-reality motif, an early French film—Les
Inconvénients du Cinématographe—shows a Parisian who, witnessing the
filming of a staged theft, decides to defend the “victim,” much to the irritation
of the filmmakers. In Mack Sennett’s Kid Auto Races at Venice (1913), Charlie
78 The Process of Production

Chaplin inadvertently interferes with the production of a documentary by

repeatedly standing in front of the lens, thus enraging the director who tries to
boot him out of camera range. In both His New Job (1915) and Behind the
Screen (1916), Chaplin wreaks havoc in a movie studio. Sennett’s How Motion
Pictures are Made (1914) combines a tour of the Thomas Ince studios with
typical Keystone buffoonery. Contemporary critics, interestingly, worried that
such films might irreparably tarnish the glamor and aura of Hollywood. The
Motion Picture News warned that The Goat (1918), a film about a stunt-man,
by disclosing “picture-making as it actually is... will lessen the pleasure a
spectator derives from watching a picture, as it will destroy some ofthe illusion
due to the mystery surrounding picture production.”° The reviewer in Motion
Picture Magazine echoed such concerns: “Why take away the glamor even
momentarily?”’ Thus Hollywood critics, journalistic appendage of the
industry, tried to protect the aura and magic of Hollywood by shielding its
Achilles heel—the trade secrets of its illusionism.
Like the novel, the cinema often elaborated the theme of the quixotic
confusion of art and real life, image and reality. In the wake of Uncle Josh, the
father of an actress in A Vitagraph Romance (1912) sees his daughter in a
dangerous on-screen situation, races to the Vitagraph studio where she works,
only to find her alive and well. The father suffers from an intermediate degree
of delusion, since he knows his daughter is not on the screen; his delusion
consists in believing that she is actually in danger e/sewhere. Mack Sennett’s
delusion in Mabel’s Dramatic Career (1913) is more serious. In a sequence
anticipating Bogdanovich’s Targets (1968)—-where a sniper fires at the looming
image of Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff) rather than at the “real-life” Orlok
coming to apprehend him—Sennett fires at the screen villains threatening his
girlfriend (Mabel Normand).
As cinema becomes a mass-medium actually influencing popular
aspirations and behavior, it began to satirize those who patterned themselves
on filmic models. In Movin’ Pitchers (1913), children watching the filming ofa
studio Western envision themselves as participants in the film. In the first
version of Merton of the Movies (1924), the protagonist’s fantasies of stardom
in westerns are realized by a silent film-within-the film which then dissolves to
the banal realities of life as a small-town grocery clerk. The second version of
Merton (1932) opens with shots we take to be part of the “real” film, but which
are retroactively revealed to be a film screened in the theatre where Merton
works as an usher.
Buster Keaton, the poet-laureate of reflexivity in the silent cinema,
explored the production processes of film in The Cameraman (1928), much as
he had dealt with the reception of film in Sherlock Jr. In The Cameraman,
Keaton plays a journalist who buys a movie camera in order to submit some
freelance footage to Hearst officials. When a violent free-for-all breaks out ata
 2

The Process of Production 79

Chinatown festival, Buster exacerbates the violence to enliven his material. He

lobs exploding bulbs into the midst of the crowd, and puts a knife in the hand of
a weary combatant about to abandon the fight. The film exposes documentary
“truth” as the product of artifice, anticipating Godard’s boutade that all films
are fiction films. The Cameraman also foreshadows Wexler’s Medium Cool,
where media journalists are more concerned with getting exploitable footage
than with helping people in pain. The film also capitalizes on cinematic
“errors,” for Buster’s rushes form a compendium of the technical blunders
possible to the medium. Keaton even implicitly mocks the idea of mechanical
reproduction as guarantor of realism. Bazin’s claim that in cinema we enjoy the
absence rather than the presence of human intervention finds hilarious
confirmation in a sequence where a monkey does the filming. In a reductio ad
absurdam of the notion that human mediation is dispensible, the simian
footage far excels that of the incompetent Buster with its inadvertent double
exposures and split frames.
King Vidor’s Show People (1928) parodies the cliché of the small-time-
rags-to-Hollywood-riches genre. Marion Davies, who herself had gone from
chorus girl to star, plays Peggy Pepper, a movie-mad Georgia girl who goes to
Hollywood in hopes of a career as a serious actress. The “creative geography”
of an early sequence has Peggy and her father drive past the Paramount, Fox,
First National, and MGM studio lots, all on Hollywood Boulevard, a bit of
topographical reshuffling which shows that not even “behind-the-scenes” films
about Hollywood need be veracious. The agent at Central Casting
misinterprets Peggy’s campy imitations of film stars as parodic and offers her a
job. She subsequently moves from Comet Studios (a transparent stand-in for
Keystone), where she plays a patsy to slapstick comic Billy Boone, to serious
stardom at “High Arts Studio.” In conformity with the prevailing
Francophilia, she changes her name to Patricia Peppoire. She snubs the down-
to-earth Billy for an ersatz French leading man, André, who looks and acts like
John Gilbert, and calls himself “Le Comte d’Avignon.” When Peggy discovers
the factitiousness of André’s royalty, she returns, considerably humbler, to the
unpretentious Billy.
Show People irreverently unveils the actual processes of filmmaking. We
see make-up men preparing actors, cameras cranking, directors shouting
instructions. At the end of the film, we see Vidor himself directing a World War
I epic not unlike his own The Big Parade. The film also satirizes the pampered
stars of Hollywood and their narcissistic displays of temperament. More
importantly, Vidor pits genre against genre, slapstick against costume drama,
giving each a precise social connotation. In ways that recall Auerbach’s
analysis of the political implications of the separation of styles, Vidor portrays
comedy as the genre of the unpretentious people, and costume drama as the
genre of the elite, of royalty, where prerevolutionary France connotes all that is
80 The Process of Production

elegant and aristocratic. In this battle of the high and low mimetic modes,
Vidor’s allegiance lies clearly with the former.

Film and Productive Labor: The Man with a Movie Camera

A year later, in the Soviet Union, Dziga Vertov made a film which showed art
both as production and in relation to production: The Man with a Movie
Camera (1929). To appreciate Vertov’s achievement we must remember that
although all texts are the results of productive labor, not all texts render this
work visible to the same degree. In illusionistic spectacle, the traces of work
tend to disappear in the magical seamless objects of art. Much as trompe-! ceil
painters efface their own work by removing visible brush strokes from the
canvas, the illusionistic filmmaker hides the marks of the process of
production. Unlike many Hollywood films, even those set in the filmmaking
milieu, Vertov’s film foregrounds its own process of production. The traces of
its production cling to the film, as Walter Benjamin said in another context, the
way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel. *
The multiple themes of The Man with a Movie Camera—the life of a
person from birth to death, a day in the life of the city, the realization and
projection of a film—are in fact subordinated to the film’s central subject: the
laying bare of the mechanisms of film within the social context of acontinuum
of productive forces. Applying to cinema the arguments of the Russian
formalist-sociologists—who argued that literature was a form of production
and that literary producers should engage with their material no differently
from a worker in a factory—The Man with a Movie Camera shows cinema as
one branch of industrial production. Annette Michelson points out that the
film systematically juxtaposes virtually every aspect of cintematographic
activity with work as it is conventionally conceived.’ Editing is compared to
sewing; cleaning film is compared to cleaning streets. The film industry is
likened to the textile industry, which Marx regarded as of paradigmatic
importance in the development of capitalism. Cinema, it is implied, will
eventually transform socialist society just as the spinning jenny transformed
capitalist society. The two forms of production are shown as allied by the
similarity of their rhythms and the analogy of theirmovements. Turning spools
of thread are juxtaposed by the editing with the turning reels of a film projector.
The hydroelectric plant which provides the energy for the textile industry is
revealed as also empowering the vehicles on which the cameraman relies. In
every way, film is shown as forming part of the collective life of societal
production.
The obligation of the Kinok, for Vertov, was to decipher mystifications,
whether found on the screen or in real life. Vertov especially detested the
mystification of the “artistic drama,” a cinematic form whose purpose, as he
 s

The Process of Production ro

Figure 15. The Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

saw it, was to intoxicate the spectator and insinuate certain reactionary notions
into the subconscious. Vertov denounced such films as the new opium of the
people, and called for the overthrow of the “immortal kings and queens of the
screen” and the reinstatement of “ordinary mortals filmed in life during their
habitual occupations.” His denunciations tend to have recourse to three kinds
of metaphor which will be frequent in the discourse of filmic anti-illusionists:
magic (“the cinema of enchantment”): drugs (“ciné-nicotine,” “the electric
opium of the movie theatres”); and religion (“the high-priests of cinema”).
These metaphors, however, were specifically grounded in the historical realities
of the moment, for Vertov’s struggle against alienated cinema parallels the
struggle of the Soviet revolution, in its heroic pre-Stalinist phase, against the
triple alienations of magical superstitions among the peasantry, drug addiction
and alcoholism among the lumpenproletariat, and the pervasive influence of
the Russian Orthodox Church.
The Man with a Movie Camera is a film about film language, whose self-
professed task is to “present the cinematic means rather than dissimulate them
as is customarily the case” and to “disseminate knowledge concerning the
grammar of cinematic techniques.”’’ In an act of self-representation, the film
presents the movement of its own écriture, fulfilling Vertov’s ambition of
making a “film which produces a film.” Rather than pretend to mirror reality,
the film shows cinematic art to be a complex signifying practice. Numerous
82 The Process of Production

analysts, notably Annette Michelson, Stephen Crofts, and Olivia Rose, have
inventoried Vertov’s reflexive strategies: the constant foregrounding of the
apparatus of camera, projector, and screen; the “diegetic” presence of the
roving cinematographer; the recurrent visual puns on lens/eye and
shutter/eyelid; the exposure of the trickery involved in filmmaking; the
highlighting of the artificiality of filmic movement; the reminders of the screen
as surface; the intrusion of animation and slow-motion techniques in the course
of conventionally filmed sequences; the subversion of illusion through
techniques of fragmentation and temporal and spatial distortion; and the
constant appeal to the spectator’s intellect. Rarely, in short, has the assault on
illusionism been carried out as imaginatively and as uncompromisingly as in
The Man with a Movie Camera.

Hollywood Reflexivity: The Sound Film

Despite the warnings of visionaries such as Eisenstein and Alexandrov, the

advent of sound pushed cinema generally in the direction of realism. But even
here there were exceptions, and the exceptions tended to be comic. Much of the
poignancy of Harpo Marx derived from his anomolous position as a silent
clown wandering in the world of sound comedy, forced to resort to the iconicity
of props and mime rather than the symbolism of spoken language, ordering a
Scotch, for example, by dancing the Highland Fling. The Marx Brothers also
inherited from vaudeville (and indirectly from Elizabethan theatre) their
penchant for direct address to the spectator: Groucho invites the audience to go
out for a smoke during the piano solo in Horse Feathers. The Bob Hope-Bing
Crosby “Road” pictures, similarly, reflexively mock their own conventions, as
they wink at the camera or muse aloud about how they become involved in
such horrendous pictures. In Road to Utopia (1945) a shot of the pair looking
off-screen segues to a subjective shot of the Paramount logo—the mountain
which serves as the studio trademark.
An eccentric Hollywood subgenre—the stuntman film—also merits
parenthetical attention. From Ince’s Lucky Devils (1932) to Rush’s The Stunt
Man (1980) the cinema has exploited the stuntman both in fact and in fiction.
The ironic title of Lucky Devils, written by former stuntman Bob Rose, refers
to a tightknit group of stuntmen who sadly witness the death by accident of one
after another of their members. The human casualties ofillusionism, they die in
staged fires and choreographed crashes. The actors who play the stuntmen,
paradoxically, are themselves substituted by stuntmen, in a typical Hollywood
redoubling whereby an ounce of demystification is transformed into a pound of
mystification. The stunts themselves are tricked up with tacky miniatures and
awkward back-projection;, the film which exposes trickery itself exploits
illusionistic gimmickry. The plots of stuntman films allowed for the
 “

The Process of Production 83

incorporation of previous stock footage, and William K. Everson points out

that the antepenultimate rapids sequence is partially lifted from Clarence
Brown’s Trail of 98. During the filming of the Brown film in Alaska, a safety
device failed, drowning three stuntmen. Is it possible, one wonders, that Ralph
Ince included the footage in EU asi homage to these authentic martyrs of
versimilitude?
A truly exhaustive discussion of films about film, even restricted to
Hollywood, would include murder mysteries with studio backgrounds (The
Preview Murder Mystery), westerns about the making of westerns (Movin’
Pitchers), sentimental romances set in Hollywood (Jt Happened in
Hollywood), star biographies (Valentino), adventure films revolving around
filmmaking (King Kong), musicals set in the movie capital (The Goldwyn
Follies), melodramas concerning fictional stars (A Star is Born), and
adaptations of Hollywood novels (The Day of the Locust). Most ofthese films,
however, are not anti-illusionist, and many, far from demystifying the film
industry or exposing its mechanisms, idealize it as a wonderland of dreams
fulfilled or diabolize it as an enticingly sinful Babylon. Preston Sturges’
Sullivan's Travels (1941) forms, in this sense, a notable if ambiguous exception.
The legitimate heir of the best in silent and sound comedy, of the self-conscious
novel, and even, through a childhood spent in Europe, of Dada and surrealism,
Sturges offers in Sullivan’s Travels a sardonic excercise in playful reflexivity.
Set in the depression, the film is dedicated “to the memory of those who made
us laugh: the motley mountebanks, the clowns, the buffoons, in all times and in
all nations, whose efforts have lightened our burden a little.”
The protagonist of Sullivan’s Travels is a comedy and musical director, in
some ways reminiscent of Sturges himself, who ventures into the world of
poverty to make a “Socially Significant Movie”’—Oh Brother Where Art
Thou? His producers ridicule the idea, insisting that he turn out more of the
escapist pablum that has made them wealthy. Proto-auteurist Sullivan
complains that the producers regard him as a “minor employee,” and finally
gets his way. He and his girlfriend (Veronica Lake), closely tailed by a
ludicrously overequipped land yacht, hitch freight trains and sleep in
flophouses as part of what is essentially a touristic excursion into social misery.
Anchored by wealth, they float, in a forties version of radical chic, on the
surface of deprivation. After this satiric beginning, however, the film suddenly
changes generic and emotional gears. Through a bizarre series of accidents,
Sullivan becomes truly wretched, an inmate ina brutal southern prison. At one
point he is touched by the affectionate hilarity with which his fellow inmates
greet a Mickey Mouse cartoon. Released from prison, he opts for comedy
rather than social consciousness, convinced that he does not know enough
about poverty to make Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? “There’s a lot to be said
for making people laugh,” he says, echoing the film’s dedication. “That's all
some people have.”
84 The Process of Production

Sullivan’s Travels forms a generic palimpsest. The Swiftian resonances of

the title evoke picaresque satire, in which a voyage becomes the pretext for the
critique of diverse milieux and institutions: Hollywood, provincial America,
the courts, and prisons. The film’s metacinematic weave of genres incorporates
the following threads: 1) the Hollywood-film-about-Hollywood; 2) Sennett-
style slapstick (the race between land yacht and hot rodder); 2) screwball
comedy (the combative romance between Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake); 3)
depression documentaries a la Pare Lorentz and “social consciousness” movies
like Grapes of Wrath (the sequences involving hoboes); 4) chain-gang movies
like Mervyn Leroy’s J am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang; 5) all-black musicals
like Vidor’s Hallelujah (the singing of “Let My People Go” in the black
church); and 6) the animated cartoon. In the cockeyed caravan of Sturges’
narrative, the anarchic prepubic energy of Keystone chases collides with the sly
innuendo of boudoir comedy, and animated cartoons neighbor with chain-
gang sequences in a volatile generic mix, moving from comedy to near tragedy
and back again with picaresque rapidity. Spectatorial competence is
challenged and exhilarated by the dialectical clash of antipathetic codes.
Sullivan's Travels opens with the first of three films-within-the-film. After
the dedication to “clowns and mountebanks,” the sentimentality of which is
underscored by sacharine symphonic music, the film abruptly opens on a
desparate struggle between two men on the top of a hurtling train. The two fall
off the train, the film ends, and we realize that we have been watching the end of
Sturges’ previous film. The second film-within-the-film, evoked only through
the soundtrack and the shots of Sullivan and company in the movie theatre, isa
tearjerker whose mawkishenss is undercut by the burping, wheezing, whistle-
blowing, and popcorn-eating audience. The third film is the Mickey Mouse
cartoon which elicits such a hearty response from the prisoners. The stylistic
diversity of the three films makes us conscious, once again, of genre, while the
constant interplay of screen image and spectator makes us aware of ourselves
as audience.
Sullivan’s Travels is in some ways a deeply critical film. It mercilessly
satirizes the Hollywood ethos, the studio system, the success myth, and the
American system ofjustice. It ridicules Hollywood’s attempt to capitalize on
poverty from a safe and exploitative distance. Unlike Sturges, the jobless (then
called “hoboes”) had no land yachts to accompany them or doctors to succor
them whenever they caught a cold. Sturges also lampoons press-agent hype and
the single-minded commercialism of producers. The troop of advance men
accompanying Sullivan see his encounters with the impoverished as part of a
promotion gimmick. By making the world weep over the plight of the
oppressed, Sturges suggests, rich producers hope to get even richer, leaving
those who are sentimentally called “the poor” just as deeply enmired in their
poverty. He is equally aware of the limitations of American justice. As long as
 The Process of Production 85

Sullivan is regarded as a “hobo,” he is treated miserably; recognized as a

Hollywood director, he wins instant respect. “They don’t put directors into
prisons like this,” he points out, but established power, as long as it sees him as
just one more unemployed John Doe, treats him with cavalier inhumanity.
Poor people receive one brand ofjustice, the rich and famous another. Despite
Sullivan's Travels’ apparent endorsement of the protagonist’s rejection of
“message pictures,” the film itself has a high share of messages. The suffering of
the chain-gang is portrayed authentically, even if we do experience it through
the eyes of a privileged protagonist, and the exposure of class-based justice is
clear and effective.
It is Sullivan himself, ironically, who jettisons Oh Brother Where Art
Thou? precisely at the moment his producers are finally convinced that the film
will yield them a fortune. Sullivan ultimately embraces an ideal of purely
escapist entertainment, encapsulated by the final prismatic montage of
laughing faces, melded into community by animated entertainment, their
suffering and status as prisoners momentarily forgotten. Thus the film retreats
from the implications of its own satire, drowning mordant critique in ajello of
cheap and financially interested sentiment. Sw/livan’s Travels posits, even while
it undermines, a false but widely disseminated dichotomy: between serious
message pictures (what Veronica Lake disparagingly calls “deep dish movies”)
on the one hand, and mindless entertainment on the other, a dichotomy, in
short between O Brother Where Art Thou? and Hay Hay in the Hay Loft!The
film ridicules the former alternative by the clichés with which the ideal is
formulated (“educational tool,” “better humanity”) and even by the title itself,
whose Victorian “O!” and archaically Biblical “Art Thou” condemn it at the
preproduction stage. But the dichotomy of sanctimonius Griersonianism and
lobotomized pablum is, of course, absurd. The central impulse of Brechtian
theatre was to forge an art at once broadly comic and intensely political. The
notion that art cannot teach, Brecht pointed out, insults both pleasure and
learning, implying that pleasure has nothing to teach us and that learning
cannot be pleasurable. The Brechtian ideal of joyful learning transcends the
dilemma superficially posed by Sullivan’s Travels. But in the end, Sturges
himself subverts the very dichotomy he superficially endorses, for Sullivan's
Travels is itself instructive and pleasurable, entertaining and provocative,
serious and comic.

Sunset Boulevard

The Hollywood-film-about-Hollywood at times serves as a barometer of the

state of the industry. Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) coming a decade
after Sullivan’s Travels, explores the superimposed crises—economic,
technological, esthetic—besetting Hollywood. The postwar period had been
86 The Process of Production

marked by serious economic decline. A peak year, 1946, yielded 378 features
and a weekly attendance of90 million people. By 1949, attendance was down to
60 million and only 22 features were in production, resulting in a precipitous
decline in studio employment. It is hardly astonishing, therefore, that Sunset
Boulevara’s protagonist is a scriptwriter down on his luck, or that Hollywood
revellers (“writers without jobs, composers without publishers”) sing “Buttons
and Bows”:

Hollywood for us ain’t been so good

Got no swimming pool
Very few clothes
All we earn are buttons and bows.

Other, less direct allusions to the crisis proliferate through the film. Joe Gillis
insists that his script can be filmed on location for undera million, an emphasis
not surprising in budget-conscious postwar Hollywood. Norma Desmond, in
this sense, represents the pampered extravagance of the past. A walking,
gesticulating anachronism, she personifies nostalgia for an irretrievable
opulence. Wilder systematically pits the new Hollywood of Betty and Arty
against the old Hollywood of Norma Desmond and Max von Mayerling, while
the amphibian Joe Gillis wanders between the two. He writes one script,
oriented toward life and romance, with Betty, and another, haunted by death
(Salomé) with Norma. Joe and Norma write in a mansion; Joe and Betty write
in a cramped cubicle, formerly part of Norma Desmond’s dressing room.
Norma’s $28,000 car sports a 1932 (shortly after sound) license plate, while
Joe’s has one of “those cheap new things made of chromium and spit.” Norma’s
New Year’s party has a full orchestra, gourmet dishes, and champagne; Artie’s
has communal drinking (bring your own) and music by the partygoers
themselves. This newer, in some ways duller world, Wilder seems to be telling
us, is considerably healthier than the bigger-than-life decadence of the old
Hollywood.
Postwar Hollywood also had to confront the technological challenge of
television. Although licensed for commercial use in 1941, it was only in the
postwar period that television became the standard electronic furniture of
American homes. Hollywood attacked television through advertising (“Don’t
be a living room captive!”) and within its own films, either through systematic
exclusion—Jack Warner forbade the appearance of television sets in Warner
Brothers films — or through satire (Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?) and
calumny (a character in Dreamboat calls television the “idiot’s delight”).
Sunset Boulevard, it might be argued, speaks to the television crisis by referring
to an earlier technological crisis—the coming of sound. Joe tells Norma that
“the audience went away” at a time when Hollywood’s audience was literally
abandoning it in favor of TV. “I didn’t get small,” Norma protests, “it’s the
Boulevard
Sunset
(1950)

Figure
16.
88 The Process of Production

pictures that got small!” Although she is referring to sound pictures, she might
as well be alluding to the small screens of television. It is as if Hollywood’s
postwar anxiety were being displaced onto another crisis that had proved
surmountable. Even bad dreams, Freud points out, can reassure. By referring
to the needless anxieties of the past, Swnset Boulevard indirectly suggests that
the film industry would once again survive its present difficulties. It might even
be argued that just as aging director Billy Wilder projects his own fears of
getting old onto the character of Norma Desmond, so Sunset Boulevard
projects Hollywood’s collective dread of obsolescence onto the antiquated style
embodied by Wilder’s vampiric personage.
The postwar crisis was also esthetic. The old formulas weren’t working,
assembly-line production was in decline, and Italian neorealism was making
the old studio style seem artificial and passé. Sunset Boulevard satirizes the
formula writing endemic in Hollywood. Joe describes Norma’s script for
Salomé as a “hodgepodge of melodramatic plots.” But Joe’s own baseball
script is so predictable that the producer guesses its ending immediately.
The producer proposes they hybridize formulae in a musical comedy revolving
around a women’s softball team. The creative potentiality of the dream
factory’s industrial combinatoire, the film suggests, has become temporarily
exhausted. Studio creativity has been reduced to the debased intertextuality of
file cabinets of plot and formulae.
While on one level Wilder the demanding scriptwriter is mocking the
hackneyed writing too frequent in Hollywood, on another he is highlighting the
processes by which a// texts are moulded. Production circumstances as well as
history inflect the text. Rain in Arizona forces Artie and crew to rewrite their
film for rain. Joe’s script about Oakies in the Dust Bowl—a transparent
reference to Grapes of Wrath—is highjacked by World War II and emerges asa
film about a torpedo boat. The war, in other words, forced the social
consciousness films of the late thirties to make way for the war films of the
forties. The commercial success or failure of other films also inflects the text.
Since “psychopaths are selling like hotcakes,” Joe proposes a film entitled
Dark Window—an obvious reference to the popularity of film noir with its
nocturnal titles and psychopath protagonists. Every film, in sum, is
inescapably shaped both by historical context and filmic intertext.
Sunset Boulevard also inserts itself into the context of postwar critical
debate. The film, for example, constantly underlines the role of the
scriptwriter. Joe complains that scriptwriters are not sufficiently appreciated:
“Audiences forget that films are written; they think the actors make it up as
they go along.” The adulation goes to those who mouth the words rather than
to those who put the words in their mouths. (Holden’s naturalistic acting,
ironically, makes us forget that his words were scripted as well.) This emphasis
on the scriptwriter comes in the wake of extensive critical debate in Hollywood
 The Process of Production 8&9

concerning the relative importance of the diverse collaborators on a film.

Anticipating the auteurist discussions of Cahiers du Cinéma, the journal
Screen Writer in 1947 devoted an entire issue to the question of whether
screenwriters could become film authors. The highly literate and informed
Wilder was doubtless aware of these debates, and Sunset Boulevard offers his
response to some of the questions raised.
Although Sunset Boulevard is in many ways an illusionistic film that
happens to take Hollywood as its profilmic milieu, there are notable gaps and
fissures in its illusionism. The most striking is the film’s posthumous narrator
presumably telling his tale as he lies floating on the surface of Norma
Desmond’s pool. While the “first-person” voice-over narrative normally lends
itself to anticipation thanks to its avowedly retrospective character, Wilder
cheats by making the narration post mortem. Although the posthumous
narrator is to be found in literature—Machado de Assis’ Posthumous
Memories of Bras Cubas has its defunct narrator censure the banality of the
eulogies proffered at his own funeral—and although a number of films use
dying narrators—for example, Rocha’s Land in Anguish, Jabor’s All Nudity
Will Be Punished, and Wilder’s own Double Indemnity—rarely have films
been so audacious as to posit a dead narrator like Joe Gillis in his acquatic bier.
The circular structure of the film further underscores the implausibility of the
device. The narrative discourse begins in ultimas res, so that the proleptic
weight of predestination hangs over the entire enterprise. Gillis’ off-screen
voice—is a voice “off” when the character is dead?—mocks its former owner in
the third person: “Poor dope, he always wanted a pool... and inthe end he got
one.” Hollywood pools are synecdochic, the part standing for the whole of
affluence and the good life, and four pool-featuring sequences chart Joe’s
trajectory toward death. Gillis begins and ends in the pool, as if his “story” had
spent the length of the film catching up with his “plot.”
The device of the posthumous narrator is especially appropriate to a film
which mixes fact and fiction by incorporating characters ofdiverse ontological
status, ranging from actors playing themselves (Buster Keaton, Cecil B. De
Mille) to celebrities playing characters partially resembling themselves (Gloria
Swanson as Norma Desmond, Erich von Stroheim as Max von Mayerling), to
actors playing characters with no clear relation to themselves (William Holden,
Jack Webb). The Norma Desmond character typifies this fact-fiction
amalgam. Like Norma, Gloria Swanson did in fact work with Sennett and
Cecil B. De Mille (and with Stroheim on Queen Kelly), and as a silent star was
famous for wild romances and extravagant spending. Unlike Norma
Desmond, however, she did make a successful transition to sound, winning an
academy award for The Trespasser. She excoriates sound, ironically, in a fine
sound performance superimposed on an exaggeration of the coded
gesticulations of the silent cinema. The device is appropriate, finally, ina film
90 The Process of Production

about Hollywood, which is at once a spot on the map and a state of mind, ina
film which melds fantasy and realism, which simultaneously elicits belief and
fosters skepticism. At one point, Betty and Joe walk downa studio street—“all
hollow, all phony, all done with mirrors.” All of which could be said, of course,
of Sunset Boulevard itself.

The Musical and Self-Flaunting Artifice

There were at least two generic exceptions to the broad reign of dramatic
realism as the dominant aesthetic in the Hollywood fiction film—the musical
comedy and the animated cartoon. Since two ofthe constitutive elements of the
musical—music and dance—share a relatively minor interest in conventional
mimesis, it might be argued that the musical inclines more readily to self-
conscious artifice than other genres. Although music affects us intensely, it
makes little direct reference to “reality.” Despite rare instances of a
“programmatic” nature, music is not intrinsically representational. It forms,
rather, what Suzanne Langer would call a “tonal analogue” to mental and
emotional life. Dance, similarly, performs a stylized abstraction of everyday
movement. Since music and dance are central to the musical, audiences are
more disposed to accept outlandish sets, implausible plots, and stereotypical
characters. By their generic nature, musicals orchestrate everyday life into
choreographed fantasy. Humbert Humbert in Lolita defines musicals as “an
essentially grief-proof sphere of existence wherefrom death and truth were
banned.” No audience literally believes that New York gangs actually pirouette
down slum streets or that invisibly vast symphonic orchestras accompany lone
small-town strollers. The impossibly grandiose production numbers of aBusby
Berkeley, with their gaudy extravagances and kaleidoscopic visual effects, owe
scant allegiance to verisimilitude. The lovelier-than-life grace of Fred Astaire,
the fairy-tale characterizations of The Wizard of Oz, the redundantly phallic
bananas of The Gang’s All Here, the painterly charm of An American in Paris,
Carmen Miranda’s tutti-frutti hats and loveably tasteless self-parodies all have
this in common—they create an idealized utopia of autonomous make-believe.
Many musical comedies display what Jane Feuer, in her excellent study of
the musical, calls “conservative reflexivity.”'’ From the beginning the musical
has exploited the alienation devices which we normally associate with Brecht
and the leftist avant-garde: direct address to the camera/audience; the
foregrounding of the processes of artistic production; the inscription of the
audience within the film itself; transparently non-diegetic musical
orchestration; the disjunction between aural and image scale; and the
intertextual quotation of other films. But this reflexivity, as Feuer points out, is
ultimately recuperative, an example of “innovation as conservation.” Direct
address, rather than a calculated violation of conventional cinematic grammar
 The Process of Production 9]

as in Godard, becomes merely an homage to the intimacy oflive entertainment,

a means of packaging third-person “history” as reciprocal “discourse.” The
foregrounding of artistic process, similarly, usually ends up by “cheating” in
effacing the musical’s origins in labor (dance, choreography) and technology
(filming).
Two Kelly-Donen musicals—Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and It’s Always
Fair Weather (1955)—illustrate both the possibilities and limitations of
reflexivity in the musical. The former film exploits the ambiance of what are
obviously the MGM studios in a study of the transitional era that took
Hollywood from silent to sound film, exploring the responses of three
emblematic characters to this technological rite of passage. Silent movie queen
Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) becomes one of sound’s casualties, done in by a
kind of media euthanasia when she is exposed in her vocal mediocrity and
Brooklyn patois. Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) begins as a voice double, a
kind of aural stuntperson, and rises through talent to a stardom that the silent
cinema might not have offered. Matinee idol Don Lockwood, finally, charms
his way through the transition with Darwinian adaptability.
Singin’ in the Rain plays on the tension, common in musicals, between
“high” elite art and popular “low” art: conservatory and honky-tonk, dramatic
academy and vaudeville. Kathy Selden initially scorns the “vulgarity” of the
movies. The voice of both theatrical superiority and cinematic reflexivity, she
dismisses Lockwood as “nothing but a shadow on film.” Her high-art snobbery
is debunked, however, when she is seduced by Lockwood and his medium, the
seduction taking place, appropriately, on a sound-stage. Lockwood leads
Kathy onto an empty stage, preparing it as if fora film. He animates the fog and
wind machines and paints an electronic sunset as background for a love ballad
(“You were meant for me”). Love is presented as a studio construct.
Singin’ in the Rain inventories the technical “bugs” of the sound cinema in
its first stammering phase: awkward synchronization, microphones hidden in
bushes and bodices, the inadvertent recording of thumping hearts and jiggling
pearls. The film also evokes Professor de Forest and his synchronized
demonstration films by showing a nasal-voiced scientist slowly mouthing an
audio-visual tautology: “You are watching a talking picture. It is a picture of
me, and I am talking. Note how my lips and the sound issuing from them are
synchronized in perfect unison.” The witnesses of the demonstration, lacking
the hindsight available to the makers of Singin’ in the Rain, dismiss the
invention as a vulgar toy without a future, while the film “estranges” the very
devices by which the picture we are seeing was made.
Singin’in the Rain revels in its own intertextuality at what Kelly himself
called a “conglomeration of bits of movie lore.” The film’s point of departure—
Arthur Freed’s desire to incorporate his best songs from earlier MGM
musicals—makes it an anthology of self-quotations. The only two new songs
Figure 17. Singin’in the Rain (1952)
 The Process of Production 93

are explicitly intertextual: “Make ‘Em Laugh” is a song-and-dance tribute to

slapstick, and “Moses” spoofs the postsound elocutionist craze. In Singin’ in
the Rain, films are enclosed within films enclosed within films, forming a
veritible Chinese box of regressive duplicating effects. The costume drama The
Dueling Cavalier is transformed into the Broadway musical Dancing Cavalier
by having the protagonist-dancer dream the already-filmed costume drama
while resting between performances. The film ends with a clinching self-
citation: Selden and Lockwood embracing before a billboard advertising
Singin’ in the Rain.
Its painterly sets, lavish colors, exuberant dancing, and intertextual
homages make Singin’ in the Rain a summa of playful Hollywood self-
flaunting artifice. The film exposes some of the machinations of illusionistic
trickery to engender illusion anew. The film has the “real” voice of Debbie
Reynolds, for example, replace the “false” one of Jean Hagen. In fact, however,
Hagen dubbed her own voice precisely on those scenes where Kathy Selden is
supposedly dubbing hers onto Lina’s. Thus the film has it both ways; the
reflexive devices designate film as illusion, while the film itself casts an illusory
spell. It portrays a world where singers in the rain do not catch colds, a world
characterized, as Richard Dyer suggests concerning musicals generally, by
magical energy, inexhaustible abundance, and utopian community, in a film
whose transparent artifice designates that very world as factitious. '”
Like Sunset Boulevard before it, Singin’ in the Rain “displaces”
contemporary crises—the crises in the musical genre, the challenge of
television—onto earlier crises already surpassed and other rapids safely
negotiated, thus nourishing the illusion that the studio system itself was not in
crisis. [t's Always Fair Weather, in contrast, directly reflects both crises,
resulting in an “anti-musical” which goes against the optimistic grain of the
genre. The real subject of the musical, as many critics have pointed out, is
entertainment, and often, as Thomas Elsaesser puts it, “the world of the
musical becomes a kind of ideal image of the [film] medium itself.”'’ While not
set in Hollywood like Singin’in the Rain, It’s Always Fair Weather addresses
the subject of cinema’s rival medium—television—while it deconstructs the
musical genre. The film’s premise has three World War II friends reunite 10
years after their discharge only to discover that they have virtually nothing in
common. An animated tryptych, using split-screen and freeze-frames, initially
charts their parallel trajectories from soldier to civilian: Doug (Dan Dailey) has
shed his artistic ambitions to become a gray-flannel executive and designer of
television commercials. Angie (Michael Kidd) has accumulated children as
part of the postwar Baby Boom, while Ted (Gene Kelly) has accumulated, and
de-accumulated both women and money as a gambler and fight promoter. /t’s
Always Fair Weather does offer some of the traditional satisfactions of the
genre: the transfiguration of the quotidian (the dance of the garbage lids), the
94 The Process of Production

utopian transformation of work into play (the Stillman’s Gym sequence), and
happy endings for its three major characters. At the same time, a morbid
backbeat pounds throughout the film. The title, with its meterological echo of
Singin’ in the Rain, becomes an ironic allusion to the shallow optimism of the
fifties. Rather than the ritual affirmation of shared values, the film offers the
mise-en-scéne of social loneliness. Donen/ Kelly repeatedly exploit the wide-
screen format to simultaneously mingle, and separate, the three major
characters. The disastrous reunion-dinner sequence uses interior monologue
and masking effects to reveal the hostility of each of the men toward the other
two, virtually literalizing the notion of the “lonely crowd.” The “Once I Had a
Dream” sequence, meanwhile, shows the threesome, together on the screen but
alone in the diegesis, doing a privatized dance whose gestures signify disgust
and disillusionment.
In It’s Always Fair Weather, the characters seldom dance to express joy.
In at least two sequences, they dance because they are drunk. The first dance
occurs after Ted has received a “Dear John” letter and drinks to drown his
sorrow. Doug’s “situation-wise” dance, similarly, is fueled by eight martinis.
On the verge of a breakdown, unable to maintain a coherent conversation—
back projection emphasizes his sense of separation from his colleagues—he
dances in a kind of improvisatory rage. Along with the traditional affirmation
of spontaneity and self-expression, we find here a revolt against corporate
uniformity. The dance is satirical, a revolt against normality rather than a
transfiguration of it.
It’s Always Fair Weather also alludes directly to cinema’s emerging rival—
television. Like Kazan-Schulberg’s A Face in the Crowd (1957), the film
highlights the consequences of live transmission. During a “This-is-Y our-Life”
style program, the gangsters chasing Kelly break in and start a brawl. Knowing
the television cameras are running, Kelly extracts a confession from the
gangster. The film therefore associates television with a positive function—
sending criminals to jail (doubtless an allusion to the televised Kefauver
hearings on organized crime)—along with a negative aesthetic which mingles
the cloying phoniness of the show’s host (Dolores Gray) with high art
pretensions and exploitative vulgarity. In any case, the three friends only regain
their wartime sense of camaraderie in a new war against the common enemy
chosen by countless fifties films—the mob.

Reflexivity and Animation

The animated cartoon also opted for fantasy despite a general climate favoring
realism. In order to satisfy the expectations of the genre, the animation artist
has not only the freedom but even the duty to be antirealistic. In the surreal
world of animation, characters are endowed with magical resiliency and
 ”

The Process of Production 95

gravity-defying powers. Figures flattened into pancakes by bulldozers simply

shake themselves back into life. Since the genre is premised on the absurd—no
one really believes that Bugs Bunny represents an actual species of anglophonic
rabbit—the temptation to illusionism is diminished. Even if multiplane
cameras permit the simulation of tracking and dolly shots, furthermore,
animation still tends toward antimimesis since it consists of the frame-by-frame
construction, rather than the imitation of movement. Bodies can be bifurcated
and just as easily reunited. An athlete’s race across a football field can be
rendered by a streak of paint, a fleeing cat reduced to a tail and a vertiginous
blur.
A series of mutually reinforcing prejudices—against comedy, against the
reflexive mode, against the “childish” fables and fairy tales that constitute their
source material—have generally relegated cartoons to the bottom rung of the
generic ladder. For anti-illusionists, on the other hand, cartoons offer
alternative models of representation and continuity. In the two-dimensional
world of film, it might be said, some genres are more two-dimensional than
others. Since the drawings from which cartoons are made begin as two-
dimensional, unlike the profilmic “reality” usually registered by a camera
incorporating the code of perspective, the impression of depth depends entirely
on tricks of design. Kristin Thompson points out that the cel animation
technique—which consists of separating portions of a drawing onto different
layers to eliminate the necessity for redrawing the entire composition for each
frame—encourages certain formal disruptions by allowing for an overlay of
two perspectival systems (independent of the lens) within a single image."
Cartoons frequently exploit the kind of self-referential gags considered
anathema in “straight” cinema. Krazy Kat habitually announced his arrival by
saying: “Envy me, mice, I’m going into pictures.” In Chuck Jones’ What's
Opera, Doc?, we see the drawn pencils and erasers of the animator placing
Porky Pig within a parodistically Wagnerian landscape. At the tragic
conclusion, Bugs Bunny mocks the naiveté of his audience: “So what did you
expect in an opera, a happy ending?” Tex Avery, for his part, often parodies
Disney. Crazy Squirrel begins by evokinga serenely Disneyesque animal world
presided over by a squirrel hero subsequently thrown out by a “crazy” squirrel
whose sadomasochistic cartoons arguably make a satiric comment on the
filmmaking milieu. Stromboli’s Marionette Theatre in Disney’s Pinocchio
(1940), according to William Paul, presents analogies to Hollywood’s
production hierarchies. Gepetto, the dedicated artist (read filmmaker)
contrasts with Stromboli, the corrupt producer, in ways that translate Disney’s
own distrust of Hollywood moguls.
Chuck Jones’ Duck Amuck (1953), meanwhile, provides a paradigmatic
instance of the reflexive cartoon. The film consists of arunning battle between
an eraser-and-pencil-wielding artist and his creation, Daffy Duck. The artist
96 The Process of Production

subjects Daffy to swift and arbitrary changes in scenery, creating a space as

wildly discontinuous as the simultaneously arctic and tropical “hybrid” decor
of Jarry’s Ubu Roi. The beleaguered duck hardly knows whether to shiver or
swelter, sing Hawaiian love songs or “Dashing Through the Snow.” At one
point, the artist erases the duck’s feet to prevent escape; when Daffy protests,
the creator paints his mouth shut. Deprived of scenery, Daffy protests: “Buster,
it may come as a complete surprise to you to find that this is an animated
cartoon, and that in animated cartoons they have scenery....” At the finale,
the camera tracks back to reveal the animation board and the animator—Bugs
Bunny—itself being painted by what is presumably the hand of the ultimate
animator—Chuck Jones.
The subject of Duck Amuck is the nature of animation technique itself. By
extension, the film constitutes a frame-by-frame celebration of the cinematic
apparatus itself, an essay by demonstration on the nature ofillusion not only in
animation but in film generally. The first sequence—an unbroken right-to-left
tracking shot discovering a series of sets and designs—focuses attention on the
cinematic frame. Daffy jumps in and out of the frame ina desparate attempt to
keep up with the camera and with the costume changes required by the shifting
scenery. When the frame lines, subsequently, appear to collapse on Daffy, he
tries to prop them up. When that tactic fails, he shreds the encroaching black
areas and demands that the picture begin, only to be cut off by an iris-in to
black superimposed with the words “The End.” At another point, the image
wanders vertically from its proper frame, splitting the screen and leaving two
images of Daffy. The newly schizoid duck regards his double in the other
frame—and begins to fight with it. Another instance highlights the difference
between off-screen space in animation and off-screen space in live-action films.
As Daffy is playing a musketeer before a castle background, a brush enters the
frame and paints in a farmyard. Daffy then exits screen-left and returns with
the appropriate hoe and overalls. But his exit is absurd, since cartoon
characters, unlike live actors, cannot possibly change costume or fetch props
off-screen: their very existence is defined as on-screen and intra-frame.
Duck Amuck highlights the innumerable technical and aesthetic decisions
involved in filmmaking. When a minuscule Daffy pleads with distant voice for
a close-up, the animator gives him only a tiny rectangle to isolate the duck’s
face in the corner of the frame. When Daffy insists on a rea/ close-up, the
animator zooms in violently to an extreme close-up of two infuriated eyeballs.
Jones also calls attention to the fact of sound synchronization. When no sound
emerges from a strummed guitar, Daffy raises a sign requesting “Sound
Please!” He strums again, and machine-gun fire explodes on the soundtrack.
Daffy tries to protest, and a rooster’s crow issues from his lips. Duck Amuck
even anticipates Persona by incorporating projection mishaps into the film
itself; Jones simulates a situation in which the film catches in the projector gate.
 The Process of Production 97

At the end of the film, totally exasperated and his voice failing, Daffy, rather
like a Bergman character gesticulating against the silent heavens, pleads to his
tormentor: “Who is reponsible for this? I demand that you show yourself!”
Thus, Duck Amuck, while underscoring the awkward material contingency of
film—depending as it does on functioning projectors and resilient film stock —
also stresses the humiliating servitude of the created character, subject to every
whim of the omnipotent designer’s brush.'°

Auteurism and Its Discontents

The decline of the Hollywood studio system, shown already in Sunset

Boulevard and continuing throughout the fifties and sixties, coincided with the
rise of auteurist film theory and of public awareness of European filmmakers
like Godard and Fellini. Although the idea of the film author was a fairly
traditional one in the cinema, implicit in the very concept of cinema as the
“seventh art,” it was only in the postwar period that the auteurist metaphor
became a key structuring concept subtending film theory and criticism and, at
times, filmmaking practice. In France, auteurism was closely allied with the
attack by the new wave directors on the rigid production hierarchies and
conventional narrative procedures of the established system. In defending the
rights of the director vis-a-vis the producer, the new wave directors attempted
to dynamite out a place for themselves.
One American film which reflects this changing conjuncture is Vincent
Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town (1962). The period of transition from
the studio system saw the rise of international co-productions—films shot in
Europe on slightly lower budgets, featuring veteran American actors and
directors. By 1962, many American film technicians, actors and directors
sought work in Italy, to the point that Rome came to be knownas Hollywood-
by-the-Tiber. Two Weeks in Another Town concerns the making of such a co-
production. Thomas Elsaesser sees most of Minelli’s films as thinly disguised
auteurist parables, whether in the musicals, with their magic triumphs ofvision
over reality, or in the dramatic comedies, where tragedy takes the form of
constraints on an emotional or artistic temperament, or in the melodramas,
many of which feature artist-protagonists: the painters of Lust for Life and The
Cobweb, the musician of Tea and Sympathy, the novelist in Some Came
Running'°. Minnelli’s films, in this sense, “stage” the artist’s struggle against
constraints and thus simultaneously prepare for and illustrate in advance the
auteurist argument that studio directors like Minnelli are in fact auteurs
exhibiting a strong thematic and stylistic personality consistent over time.
Although based on Irwin Shaw’s novel, Two Weeks in Another Town
undoubtedly reflects Minnelli’s feelings about his career and his craft. The
director figure is split into two protagonists: the prestigious but aging Maurice
98 The Process of Production

Kruger (Edward G. Robinson) and the younger but emotionally unstable

actor-turned-director Jack Andrus (Kirk Douglas). Minnelli refers to his own
career and his own director-actor relationship with Kirk Douglas by positing
Andrus and Kruger as a team that had made many films together. Kruger,
working on an international co-production at Cinecitta, offers a small role to
the recuperating Andrus. When the filming goes badly, Kruger invites Andrus
to take over the dubbing, and after a heart attack, he implores him to take over
the direction. By this slow substitution, Minnelli allegorizes, as it were, the
death of the old system and the birth of a new one." .
Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963) fits squarely into the tradition of
films about filmmaking and even of Hollywood films about Hollywood. It
shares with Two Weeks in Another Town its auteurist subtext as well as its
Italian setting. Indeed, in his Introduction a une Veéritable Histoire du
Cinéma—a sequential discussion of his own films paired with the films that
inspired him—Godard links Contempt to two antecedent self-referential films:
The Man with a Movie Camera and Two Weeks in Another Town. As an
international co-production (French, Italian, and American) in an era of co-
productions, when American money was being invested in European film
production, Contempt also reflects on this internationalization of European
cinema, painting a world in which the camaraderie of aRenoir production and
even Hollywood-style studio collaboration has given way to the ephemeral,
artificial, and polyglot reality of multinational cinema.
Contempt’s twin diegesis concerns love and filmmaking and their
interrelations—“the unmaking of a couple and the making of a film,” in Marie
Claire Ropars’ succinct phrase. The American producer Jeremiah Prokosch
(Jack Palance) invites scriptwriter Paul Laval (Michel Piccoli) to collaborate
on a film version of The Odyssey. Prokosch expresses dissatisfaction with his
director, Fritz Lang (Lang himself). Paul’s wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot),
meanwhile, tells Paul that she despises him, for reasons that remain obscure
but which presumably derive from Paul’s apparent readiness to pander her to
Prokosch in order to advance his own career. In Capri for the filming, she
allows Paul to see her kissing Prokosch. Camille and Prokosch die in an
automobile accident, but Lang continues filming The Odyssey.
Contempt adapts Alberto Moravia’s novel // Disprezzo. Although less
cavalier than other Godard adaptations, the reworking involves significant
changes, particularly in terms of focalization and point-of-view. The novel is
narrated in the first person by screenwriter Ricardo Molteni (Paul in the film)
whose wife has died in an automobile accident. Thus the entire novel is a
reminiscence, by a narrator of often dubious reliability, attempting to make
retroactive sense out of the decline of their relationship. The film version is
neither narrated in the first person, nor is it a reminiscence, nor is it told from
any particular point-of-view, beyond, perhaps, that of the cinema itself,
 2

The Process of Production 99

incarnated by the camera which frames us in the first shot. In short, Godard
has, typically, depersonalized and depsychologized his source material.
Godard also slightly shuffles Moravia’s characters in relation to their
expressed opinions. The configuration of characters—producer (Battista in the
novel, Prokosch in the film), writer (Ricardo, Paul), woman (Emilia, Camille),
and director (Rheingold, Lang), is homologous but their opinions are
redistributed. In the film, it is the director (Lang) who defends the
unproblematic heroism of the Homeric world (and not the writer as in the
novel), while the writer (Paul) emphasizes the interior drama of Ulysses, onto
whom he projects his own present-day marital difficulties. The producers in
both film and novel envision the film version of The Odyssey as spectacular—
“Homer put monsters and prodigies into the Odyssey and I want you to put
monsters and prodigies into the film”—but Godard melds the traits of Battista
in the novel with features of the actual producers of Contempt: Carlo Pontiand
Joseph Levine, both of whom were associated with the spaghetti epics mocked
in the film. Joseph Levine is reported to have demanded the nude shots of
Brigitte Bardot, and Godard eventually gave in to the pressure, but in ways, as
we have seen, that undercut the producers’ intentions.
The casting of Jack Palance, an actor typically identified with film noir
gangsters, tells us something about Godard’s view of the cultural role of
producers. His encounters with Hollywood producers, Godard once said, were
his apprenticeship in oppression; they taught him, at 35, what it must feel like to
be black in Mississippi. On another level, Godard’s sparring with his financial
backers recalls Sterne’s facetious dedication in Tristram Shandy: “Offered to
the highest bidder.” “I will prostitute myself,” Godard seems to be saying, but
not without denouncing the sordid processes in which we are taking part. If
producers are pimps, directors are prostitutes, and the real subject of Contempt
is artistic prostitution. Camille despises Paul, perhaps, not so much because he
is willing to prostitute her but because he is willing to prostitute himself.
Contempt constitutes an auteurist cry of resentment against producers
generally and against Carlo Ponti and Joseph Levine in particular. Jeremiah
Prokosch, whose name combines the initial letters of Levine’s first name and
Ponti’s last name, is portrayed as a kind of savage god. In fact, he claims a
special relationship with the divinities: “I like the gods,” he tells Lang, “because
I know how they feel.” Prokosch is the thundering Jupiter of the cinematic
Olympus, wielding lightning power through the electrifying force of
megabucks. If Lang conveys the dignity and prestige of the cinema, Prokosch
evokes the self-importance of its industrial managers. Just as Paul Laval
represents a debased shadow of Ulysses, Jeremiah Prokosch, more profiteer
than prophet, represents a grotesque parody of his Biblical namesake. His
voice, his stride, and his flatulent sports car suggest vast stores of unwarranted
arrogance. His body language signifies and communicates domination, and his
100 The Process of Production

discourse inclines to the imperative. His semiliteracy goes hand in hand with an
elitist scorn for the public he presumably serves: “This is fine for you and me,
Fritz, but do you think the public will understand?” A twentieth-century
Polonius, he quotes maxims from his vade mecum (a little red book of vacuous
proverbs): “The wise man does not impress others with his own superiority.”
Prokosch, in sum, plays the barbarian to Lang’s Greek.
Lang, on the other hand, incarnates the dignity of the cinema which is the
only true hero in Contempt. Observing the scene with Olympian serenity, Lang
exudes courtesy and grandeur, the nature of his monocular gaze evoking the
superior look of an impassive camera eye. Godard turns the director in the
Moravia novel, named Rheingold and described as “not in the same class as the
Pabsts and the Langs,” into Lang himself, and embroiders the film with
references to the Lang career and persona. Lang aptly personifies the history of
the cinema, having actively helped shape it from the silent period in Germany
through sound innovation in M and later in Hollywood. Lang is an “epic”
director in both the Greek and Brechtian senses of that word. One of his early
silent films—Die Nibelungen—treated the Germanic equivalent of Homeric
song. His rigorous antinaturalism and disinterest in characterological depth
recall Brecht, and indeed Lang collaborated with Brecht in Hollywood on
Hangmen Also Die and refers at one point to our “poor B.B.” Contempt, in
fact, offers the distanced eroticism of B.B. (Brigitte Bardot) as seen by B.B.
(Bertolt Brecht).
Godard does not limit his critique to the personality of one producer; he
focuses rather on the structure of relations between the producers and the
artists and technicians who actually make the film. It is this insight into the
material and organizational infrastructure of cinema that prevents Le Mépris
from being merely an outburst of auteurist pique at uncomprehending
producers. Prokosch represents the industrial “owners” of cinematic culture;
he sees art as a consumer product to be bought and sold. The artist is obliged to
sell his own talent as if it were acommodity. Lang quotes Brecht, his friend and
colleague who also had his share of problems with Hollywood producers:

Each morning to earn my bread

I go to the market of lies
And hopefully take my place
Alongside the vendors.

This frank recognition that the artist in capitalist society has to be a merchant
in the market of lies deepens the critique in Contempt. Although the analysis of
cinema’s economic infrastructure remains superficial in comparison with
Godard’s later work, Contempt does show the director as subject to the
aesthetic whims and financial manipulations of producers. Godard even brings
(1963)
Contempt

18.
Figure
102 The Process of Production

out certain Fascist overtones in Prokosch’s heavy-handed manipulation of the

cinema. Lang, as Paul points out, fled Nazi Germany immediately after
Goebbels asked him to head the Reich’s film industry. Prokosch interrupts
Paul to say: “It isn’t 1933 any more, it’s 1963.” The precise dating of the text is
typical of Godard, who never pretends that his films are timeless or outside
history. But the juxtaposition of the two dates suggests that Prokosch, in
Godard’s view, reincarnates fascism in a subtler form. Godard reinforces the
suggestion elsewhere in the film. Prokosch, Lang claims, “isn’t a producer but a
dictator.” Cinecitta, where the Odyssey is being filmed, was founded by the
Italian Fascists in 1937. When Paul mentions the word “culture,” Prokosch
responds: “Whenever I hear the word culture, I get out my checkbook,” a
variation on Goebbels’ notorious and too-well-executed diktat: “Whenever I
hear the word culture, I get out my revolver.” Prokosch, then, embodies the
fascism of money and its contempt for all values other than monetary ones.
Goebbels’ fascism literally murders culture; Prokosch’s buys it off. The former
works through racist totalitarianism, the latter through tyrannical economic
pressure on art.
Le Mépris incorporates the Brechtian principle that art should reveal the
principles of its own construction. The film documents all the stages of film
production: scripting, location hunting, casting, rehearsals, rushes, and so on.
Filmic texts are shown to be the end-result of innumerable practical and
aesthetic choices, shaped by diverse collaborators before being frozen into a
definitive sequence of images and sounds. The filmmakers debate alternative
strategies of adaptation: Paul proposes a psychoanalytic reading closely
reflecting his personal domestic crisis, while Lang hopes to transmit a sense of
Homeric grandeur and Prokosch prefers a nicely packaged “artistic”
spectacular. Contempt itself, we are reminded, resulted from the very processes
we are observing. By showing the process of constitution of the text, Godard
shows it to be a made thing, a laboriously constructed artifact which is not
“natural” and therefore need not be “naturalistic.”

Fellini and 8 1/2

The same year as Contempt, Fellini released his 8 1/2. Borrowing the mise-en-
abjme strategy deployed by Gide in Paludes (which features a novelist writing
Paludes), Faux-Monnayeurs, and Les-Caves du Vatican, Fellini offers us a
film which Metz calls “doubly doubled,” with a “double mirror construction”:
“It is not only a film about the cinema, it is a film about a film that is
presumably about the cinema; it is not only a film about a director, but a film
about a director who is reflecting himself onto his film.”'* Rather than explore
in depth a film already anatomized by others in great detail, we will limit
ourselves here to sketching out the singular qualities of its multi-leveled
 The Process of Production 103

Figure 19. Contempt (1963)

reflexivity. '’ A retrospective summa of Fellini’s work, 8 //2 is reflexive, first of

all, as a film about filmmaking. But the film is also reflexive in less obvious
ways. Fellini allegorizes the cinema, for example, by proposing surrogate
artists whose work bears analogies to filmmaking—the function of the
magician, for example, is to stage spectacles, transmit thoughts, put people in
communication—and by generally highlighting the theatricality present in
privileged moments of collective existence. At the same time, Fellini provokes
audience awareness of its own experience of film through abrupt redefinitions
of orientation and mode. The film offers, finally, a metacritical account ofthe
cinema through Guido’s conversations with Daumier/ Carini. Through these
conversations, Fellini not only dialogues with past and future commentators
on his films, but also conveys the dialogic process of directorial inner speech,
the incessant internal debate of exuberant creator and nagging critic.
Fellini’s film about filmmaking especially concentrates on the
preproduction phase. The only moment where we see Guido actually
directing—the moment near the end of the film when he picks up a megaphone
and gives orders to players and crew—is a highly ambiguous one because it
forms part of the very sequence in which Guido presumably decides to
abandon his film. What we do witness generally is the agony of preproduction
choice-making: consultations with the screen-writer, financial haggling with
the producer, the casting of major and minor roles, the projection of screen
104 The Process of Production

tests. Guido’s relation with his producer, while more amicable than Lang’s with
Prokosch, is nevertheless fraught with tension. (Impatient, the producer
announces a press conference as a way offorcing Guido to begin the film). 8 //2
also privileges, as does Fellini’s own filmic practice, the painstaking search for
the right physiognomies. The screentests show different actresses incarnating
the part of the mistress, and we become aware that each choice would not only
modify the character’s relation to the “real-life” Carla but would also subtly
alter the feeling of the film.
The most striking feature of 8 //2 in comparison to the other films-about-
filmmaking we have discussed is the absolute centrality of Guido as the source
of the sounds and images we experience. There is virtually no sequence in the
film which Guido, whether as man or boy, indeed at times as both man and
boy, does not dominate. The film oscillates constantly between interiorized and
exteriorized sequences, but Guido is crucial to both. At times Guido is visible in
the image, and at times he is equated with the camera which is addressed,
questioned, waved to, harassed. At times this oscillation between Guido-seeing
and Guido-seen is so abrupt and ambiguous that we cannot be certain of the
precise diegetic status of the filmic event. When the ethereal Claudia turns
down Guido’s bed, are we witnessing a fantasy or a proleptic concretization ofa
sequence in the film-to-be? What do we make of Guido’s “subjunctive” suicide,
or of the twin dénouements of the film? It becomes virtually impossible to
distinguish between the film, the film-within-the-film, the imagined film, and
the general flux of Guido’s mental activity.
The auteurist subjectivism of 8 //2 renders Guido’s inner speech audible
and visible. In this sense the film features, as Kaja Silverman has suggested, “its
own author as the text’s transcendental signified.”*° What saves the film from
total solipsism is the fact that the film-about-film narrative becomes the
springboard for a meditation on the psychic processes of memory, desire, and
creation. Thus 8 //2 is personal but not private; the associative processes of
Guido’s mind are not without analogies to our own. Guido’s mind is a
heterotopia, a mental carnival in which we hear the echoes of a multiplicity of
socially constituted voices: the father, the mother, the wife, the lover, the critic,
the Church. He is this multiplicity of voices: “I am this confusion.” If in one
sense the film concretizes the internal discourse of a protagonist who happens
to bea filmmaker, in another it asserts a special affinity between cinema and the
inner speech of voluntary and involuntary memory, ofvision and the oneiric. It
is, finally, no accident that Guido is a cinéaste, a man given to strong mental
imagery, or that the very film which foregrounds subjectivity is also the film
that multiplies reflexive devices and calls attention to the work of a signifier
deeply imbued with the imaginary.
In the wake of Contempt and 8 1/2, the sixties, the seventies, and the
eighties witness a mitotic proliferation of reflexive films, many of them
 The Process of Production 105

“descendants” of these two landmark films. More broadly, the diverse

international “new waves”—Brazilian cinema novo, new German cinema, and
the new Hollywood of Bogdanovich, Scorcese, and Coppola—build on the
self-referential intertextuality of the French new wave as wellas onthe growing
corpus of films-about-filmmaking. While an exhaustive account of reflexivity
in the last few decades is beyond the scope of our study, we can, perhaps, survey
some key films in this fecund tradition, if only to indicate the lines of interest
they might present for a future in-depth analysis.

The New Hollywood: Peter Bogdanovich and Targets

As an early representative of what might be called the “American New Wave,”

(with Malibu standing in for the Left Bank), Peter Bogdanovich melds the
influence of the French movement with the closer-to-home impact of Roger
Corman’s American International Pictures where Bogdanovich got his
filmmaking start. Many features of his Targets (1969)—its low-budget
sensationalism, its improvisational feeling, its mobile camera style—are typical
of Corman productions. At the same time, Bogdanovich sprinkles his films
with references to his adored directors: verbal mentions of Preminger and
Antonioni; direct quotation of Hawks’ The Criminal Code; a postmortem
clean-up modeled on Hitchcock’s Psycho: a vertical track up scaffolding
reminiscent of Citizen Kane. “All the best pictures have been made,” Sammy
(Bogdanovich) complains to Orlok (Boris Karloff), thus recognizing the
potentially paralyzing weight of the intertext. Targets, in fact, is quite literally
woven from prior texts, in the sense that it combines, following Corman’s
suggestion, 18 minutes of outtakes from another Corman picture, The Terror,
with 20 minutes of new material featuring Karloff, plus 40 minutes of new
material determined by Bogdanovich, through the narrative device of
interviewing two stories, one concerning Karloff, the other concerning an
anonymous assassin, having them intersect by coincidence and literally
interface in the climactic sequence.
Targets addresses the situation of filmmakers in Hollywood almost two
decades after Sunset Boulevard. The moguls are now gone, and the studio
system is in its final agony as a new generation of whiz-kids like Sammy
propose attractive “packages” based on bankable stars like Orlok. A revisionist
horror film set in a filmmaking milieu, Targets contrasts two brands of
horror—the gothic creaky-door horror of the old Karloff films and the
anonymous horror of clean-cut suburbanite mass-murderers.*' “My kind of
horror’s not horror any more,” Orlok tells Sammy, noting that the daily
headlines have made old movie-horror seem quite innocuous. The final drive-
in sequence, however, brings the two kinds of horror together by having the
assassin spray sniper fire over an audience watching an Orlok retrospective.
106 The Process of Production

“Real” horror thus literally destroys movie horror by killing the projectionist
and the spectator, and trying to kill the actor. The horror film terror becomes
real horror, the joke being, of course, that it remains movie horror, in the form
of a fiction film by Peter Bogdanovich.
Targets proliferates in Hitchcock-style doubling imagery: Orlok watching
himself in The Criminal Code; Orlok frightened by his own mirror image;
Orlok facing down Bobby Thompson just as he had faced down the prisoner in
the Hawks film; Bobby hesitating between the real-life Orlok and the looming
image on the screen. (Even the imaged reels winding down in the diegetic
projection room double those winding down in the theatres where Targets is
screened). The two social worlds portrayed in the film—the world of
Hollywood filmmakers and the world of bland suburbanites—are also doubled
by their salient contrasts. The filmmakers are cultivated, equipped with English
accents and Oxford degrees (or at least considerable film viewing at the
Museum of Modern Art), while the suburbanites are presented as vacuous
yahoos with execrable taste. Orlok and Bobby are constantly contrasted, the
former in his black limousine, the latter in his white Mustang. Orlok drinks
whiskey in warm sheltering interiors; Bobby drinks beer and Pepsi in antiseptic
tract houses. More interestingly, the two characters are rendered by markedly
different filmic styles. Orlok is generally filmed in the classical studio style,
while Bobby is filmed in a more voguish new wave style, characterized by
location shooting, long takes, minimal dialogue, and freely roaming hand-held
camera. The technique itself highlights Orlok’s anachronistic quality: his
complaint that he has become a relic is aurally contexted by the directly-
recorded sound of a Los Angeles freeway. The rush of traffic virtually drowns
out his words; without studio filming and commentative music, Orlok seems
quite harmless.

New German Reflexivity: Beware of a Holy Whore

No survey of reflexive filmmaking could possibly fail to mention the work of

the new German cinema, although such a topic would doubtless merit a book-
length study in itself. In the wake of the 1962 Oberhausen manifesto and the
subsequent foundation of a distribution collective (Filmverlag der Autoren),
new German cinema emerged in the seventies as a vibrant and sophisticated
movement. The attitude of the filmmakers toward their intertext—memories
of the grand Germanic film past, the “abyss” of Nazism, the love-hate relation
to the dominant American film of the postwar period—was shot through with
ambivalence. Here was rich soil for a historicized reflection on filmmaking, and
new German cinema has indeed furnished a number of films either concerned
with filmmaking (Beware of a Holy Whore, Veronika Voss, The State of
Things), or with writer-protagonists whose activities metaphorize the process
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108 The Process of Production

of filmic écriture (the journalist in Circle of Deceit, Wilhelm in The Wrong

Move); or with characters who watch or reflect on films (Bloch watching
American films in The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, Bruno watching
the porn loop in Kings of the Road, Marianne and Julianne watching footage
of the concentration camps). We will restrict ourselves here to a brief and
selective examination of films that explicitly treat the cinematic milieu and the
filmmaking process.
Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore, one of six films made by the
director in 1970, shares with Contempt its Mediterranean settings, its
multilingual ambiance, and its subtending metaphor of prostitution. The
oxymoronic “Holy Whore” of the title points to the cinema’s double
potentiality for spiritual purity as well as commercial degradation. As the film
begins, a German film crew and actors are waiting in a “Spanish” hotel—
various cultural indices (license plates, advertisements, language) tell us we are
actually on the Italian Riviera—for the arrival of the principals: the director
(Lou Castel), the star (Eddie Constantine), the government money, and the
film stock. As they wait, the production manager, played by Fassbinder himself
(much as Godard cast himself as assistant director in Contempt), browbeats the
crew and the waiters. When the rather manic director, Jeff, arrives, he treats the
production manager as badly as the production manager had treated everyone
else. He deploys every strategy—harangue, mockery, flirtation, threats—to
whip his collaborators into order and obedience, but they subtly sabotage his
work and even beat him up. Playing the long waiting game which is
filmmaking, they dance to Elvis Presley and Ray Charles, get drunk on Cuba
Libres, and make casually embittered love. The human relationships slowly
disintegrate in an atmosphere of morbidly comic psychodrama, while the
cinematic style mirrors the breakdown as the slow circular pans of the
beginning of the film give way to arbitrarily splintered fragments of images and
sounds. Despite the human and cinematic breakdown, however, the film-
within-the-film finally does get underway.
Instead of the slow unraveling of a couple as in Contempt, Fassbinder
gives us a mobile constellation of ephemeral liaisons—heterosexual,
homosexual, bisexual—which break apart almost as quickly as they form.
While the producer is the tyrant in Contempt, here it is the director who is
dictatorial. While Godard pits the auteurist Lang against the capitalist
Prokosch, Fassbinder is more interested in exposing the contradictions that
rend a supposedly progressive group penetrated by the bourgeois attitudes they
excoriate in their art. “You say your film is against power,” someone tells the
director, “yet it is supported by the state.” Beware ofa Holy Whore investigates
the possible tensions between the conscious politics of a text—in this case the
presumably antifascist attitudes of Patria o Muerte (“a film against state-
sanctioned violence”)—and the realpolitik of the production process.
 The Process of Production 109

Fassbinder anatomizes the political and psychoanalytic dynamics of

collaboration, of “trying to live and work as a group.” Beware ofa Holy
Whore, in this sense, offers a slightly fictionalized account of Fassbinder’s own
experiences with collaboration, including 1) the break-up of the Anti-Teater
group, originally conceived as a collective without hierarchy or fixed division
of labor, but which ended up operating along patriarchal lines; 2) the
reportedly traumatic filming of Whity just a few months before, and 3)
Fassbinder’s disillusionment with the Filmverlag der Autoren, also created as a
collective but which soon became a kind of dumping ground for those films
which the autoren were unable to distribute elsewhere. At the same time, as
Fassbinder himself has pointed out, Beware of a Holy Whore observes itself
being made. The mimesis, in this case, is not between film and “reality” but
between a film and its own process of production.
The most original contribution of Beware of aHoly Whore, perhaps, is to
focus on what Félix Guattari calls “the micro-politics of facsism” as it operates
within film production—the intricate play of domination and dependency,
manipulation and complicity, exploitation and sadomasochism. In the wake if
what he saw as the failure of utopian experiments, Fassbinder concentrates on
the other violence, that which is not “sanctioned by the state but which is
nevertheless real.” This violence inhabits the social monad and can permeate
even progressive groups. Fassbinder underlines the complicity of the
“oppressed” in their oppression. Jeff's collaborators, as Ruth McCormick
points out, seem eager to cast him as father-psychoanalyst-oppressor-lover
within their private scenarios. In this sense, Jeff acts out the fears and desires of
his co-workers, forcing Ricky’s homosexuality out of the closet, playing the
sadist to Irm’s masochist. The director, the patriarch, bullies and exploits, but
not without the tacit encouragement of his “victims.”

Truffaut and Day for Night

The atmosphere of Truffaut’s La Nuit Américaine (Day for Night, 1973) is the
antithesis of that of Beware of a Holy Whore. Here the tone is cheerful, the
problems are soluble, the film is made and will presumably give pleasure. Day
for Night explicitly and implicitly compares filmmaking to happy events—
picnics, parties, summer camp—connoting joyful collaboration. Truffaut’s
emphasis is on the actual shooting of a film and on all the bizarre or amusing
events that occur or might occur during a production. The film being shot, in
this case, is Meer Pamela, a Hollywood-style melodrama about a woman, Julie
(Jacqueline Bisset) who falls in love with Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Aumont), the
father of her fiancé Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Léaud). The temporal perameters of
the film are circumscribed by the seven weeks it takes to shoot Meet Pamela,
but since Meet Pamela is deliberately presented as terribly conventional, the
110 The Process of Production

real interest is displaced onto the material contingencies and emotional

vicissitudes involved in filmmaking.”
An affectionate summa of over 15 years of filmmaking, Day for Night is
full of self-quotation. The character Alphonse, with his “tough childhood,” is
obviously Antoine of 400 Blows grown up and become an actor. The male
friendship of Alexandre and Christian, celebrated by barely perceptible freeze-
frames, recalls that of Jules and Jim, and Ferrand drives around the studio
square the way Catherine drives outside Jim’s apartment in that film. Ferrand’s
reference to his work as a “flop” in England is an obvious reference to the
commercial and critical failure of Fahrenheit 451, shot in England just a few
years before. But Truffaut’s real concern is less with self-analysis than with
composing an ode to the pleasures of the film craft. Day for Night constitutes a
kind of production manual designed to initiate the spectator into a number of
specific cinematic procedures. These procedures include: 1) scripting:
Ferrand’s collaboration with Joelle (reportedly mirroring Truffaut’s own with
Suzanne Schiffman); 2) art direction, decor: facades, illusory spatial relations,
a bungalow constructed for the camera alone; 3) camera work: the opening
“sequence,” performed transparently by a tracking shot and then retroactively
“explained” by crane shot, thus revealing the intricate choreographing of
camera movement and movement within the shot; 4) /ighting: trick candles
fitted with light bulbs designed to give the impression that the candles are
casting the light; 5) editing: repeated shots of the editing machine stress its
central role; 6) continuity: Bernard cutting cigarettes in half for Alexandre to
maintain continuity while Severine repeatedly flubs her lines; 7) commentative
music: the credit sequence shows the soundstrip, while we hear the conductor
directing a rehearsal, with the resultant inversion as we see what we usually
hear (the music) and hear what we usually do not hear (the conductor’s
instructions to the musicians).
Day for Night shows considerable sensitivity to the challenges confronting
actors and actresses. This theme is first sounded by the film’s dedication to
Dorothy and Lillian Gish, and is maintained throughout. Truffaut shows us
actors as vulnerable crisis-ridden human beings operating under extreme
pressure; while a technician in emotional crisis can still “go through the
motions,” an actor must concentrate totally. Severine speaks her lines badly
not only because she is drunk but also because her son is dying of leukemia. She
is, furthermore, unaccustomed to the demands of direct sound recording,
which necessitates memorizing her lines. With Federico in Italy, she explains,
she would simply pronounce numbers, in full confidence that the dialogue
could be added in postsynchronization.
Day for Night repeatedly poses the question of the relative importance of
cinema versus life. For Ferrand, the cinema is more important. For Alphonse,
the cinephile, life, paradoxically, is more important. An ordinary language
 =
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Figure
21.
Hi2 The Process of Production

philosopher would dismiss the question as unanswerable and unverifiable (how

does one sufficiently separate out film from life and life from film to judge their
relative merit?) but Day for Night attempts to explore the multiform
interactions between the two. Film borrows from life: Ferrand pilfer’s Julie’s
real-life lines for the dialogue of Meet Pamela. Film anticipates life: the filmic
car accident in Meet Pamela foreshadows the “real” disaster that kills
Alexandre and Christian. Film resembles life: in both Meet Pamela and Day
for Night, Alphonse loses the woman, and in both stories there are clear oedipal
overtones. Film also resembles life in another sense. The technicians shown
making Meet Pamela are played by the very technicians who collaborated on
Day for Night; cameraman Walter Bal plays cameraman Walter, editor Yann
Dedet plays editor Yann, and so forth. On the other hand, film contrasts with
life. The audacious romantic woman of Meet Pamela is shy “off-screen,” (i.e.,
in the on-screen of Day for Night); and the continental lover of Hollywood and
Meet Pamela is, in fact, discreetly homosexual.
If Contempt offers a political anatomy of Hollywood, and Beware of a
Holy Whore morbid self-criticism by Fassbinder, Day for Night offers an
indulgent hypo-critical idealization of the filmmaking process, portrayed as a
happy whirl of harmonious activities, in which virtually every crisis is
painlessly integrated into the final product. There are a few allusions to the
financial contingencies of film production—insurance policies, union
contracts, and the like—but without the structural critique evoked by
Contempt. There is vague talk of American money behind the film (like that
financing much of Truffaut’s later work) but no sign of doubt or resentment.
Godard’s cry of revolt gives way to Truffaut’s good-natured genuflexions. The
oppressive barbarian Prokosch yields to the avuncular, sentimental and
financially disinterested Bertrand, while the real financiers remain off-screen.
Along with its many homages to Hollywood, Day for Night reproduces the
Hollywood formula of minimal demystification in the service of a greater
mystification.

Filmmaking in the Third World

Third-world filmmakers, for their part, rarely have the luxury of making either
Meet Pamela or Day for Night. Two third-world films about filmmaking, one
from Brazil and one from India, emphasize the precarious nature of making
films in a neocolonial context. The title of Fernando Coni Campos’ Ladrées de
Cinema (Cinema Thieves, 1976) alludes to De Sica’s Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle
Thieves, 1948), but this time in a reflexive film set in a Brazilian world even
poorer than that portrayed by Italian neorealism. The film begins witha group
of slum-dwellers, in Indian garb, stealing filmmaking equipment from an
American crew documenting Rio’s annual carnival. Once back in the favela,
 ”

The Process of Production 19}

the cinema thieves decide not to sell the equipment, as they normally would,
but to make a film, with the favelados as actors. A Frenchman named Jean-
Claude Rouch (played by film critic Jean-Claude Bernardet) initiates them into
the secrets of the craft, and they set out to make their film. They choose a
theme—an abortive eighteenth-century revolt against Portuguese
colonialism—as well as costumes, performers, music. Gradually the film comes
to energize the favelados as they apply to it the same enthusiasm and
procedures that they would normally apply to the carnival pageant. The film no
longer belongs to the cinema thieves but to the entire community. This boldly
ironic film highlights the special conditions of third-world filmmaking: the
neocolonial dependence on foreign equipment, the need for guerrilla strategies,
the necessity of adopting aesthetic and production strategies rooted in the
material realities of neocolonialism. In the third world, the film suggests,
filmmaking, while materially impoverished, must be imaginative and
communitarian, while absorbing the energy of popular culture, of samba and
carnival.
While disadvantaged in relation to their first-world counterparts, third-
world filmmakers often constitute an elite in their own countries. Mrinal Sen’s
film-about-filmmaking, Aaakaler Sandhane (In Search of Famine, 1980),
explores the multiform contradictions inherent in this situation. Aaakaler
Sandhane centers on a film crew led by the director (Dhritiman Chatterjee)
which goes to a remote village to shoot a film entitled Aaakaler Sandhane, a
fictive study of the 1943 Bengal famine. Sen especially highlights the social
abyss separating the urbanized middle-class filmmakers from the impoverished
rural world they attempt to portray. The title itself is ironic, since only artists
enjoy the luxury of “searching” for famine. Despite their progressive ideas—
they sing leftist songs while en route to the village—they remain incorrigibly
bourgeois, tourists on a whirlwind tour of misery. Ardent consumers, they
provoke drastic changes in the local economy. The cost of essential
commodities rises; “They’re not only filming a famine,” an old peasant
remarks, “they’re creating one.” The actors and actresses, meanwhile, have
internalized the ideals of the star system and Hollywood glamor; one actress
complains when her peasant role obliges her to don unfashionable clothes.
Sprinkling their conversation with English expressions, the filmmakers are
deeply imbued by colonialist culture and exercise a kind ofinternal colonialism
over the oppressed people who are their subjects/objects. One moment
especially captures their privileged condescension. Judging by the grain and
hue of old photographs, the filmmakers guess at the year of the famine
represented. The human tragedy of a holocaust in which millions died is
reduced to a gimmick in a parlour game.
But it is not only the filmmakers who are criticized. Famine itself is
revealed as a socio-historical rather than “natural” pheomenon, a by-product
°7Z_-BNBI4
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 The Process of Production PS

of the war economy thrust on India by the British. Famine continues to

threaten postindependence India, since the conditions generating famine have
not fundamentally changed. The local elite is show to have acquired its wealth
and privileges by dubious means during the 1943 famine. Cultural colonialism
is mocked, meanwhile, by an advertisement for The Guns of Navarone—
“Starring the greatest beauty in the world, Anthony Quinn, in the lead.” Sen
also offers a strong critique of patriarchal attitudes. When Devika, the starlet,
is discovered to be unsuitable for her role, a search is begun for a replacement.
Many of the well-to-do middle class volunteer their daughters, but are shocked
to learn that the role is that of a village woman who turns to prostitution for
survival during the days of famine. No one condemns a male actor for playing a
drunk, someone remarks, but everyone condemns an actress for playing a
prostitute. The film ends with what by now has become a reflexive topos: the
filmmakers decide not to make the film. But the audience knows the film has
been made, and that it is called In Search of Famine.

Andrzej Wajda and Man of Marble

Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble (1977) explores the social contingencies of

filmmaking in a quite different context, that of contemporary Poland. Here the
film-about-filmmaking format becomes a springboard for a critique, at once
social and cinematic, of a bureaucratic socialist regime. The film follows a
neophyte director named Agnieszka (Krystyna Janda) in her attempts to make
a diploma reportage about Mateusz Birkut (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), a naively
idealistic bricklayer who briefly becomes a “star” of socialist propaganda
before he runs afoul of the authorities. Agnieszka and her crew piece together
the story of his rise and fall from old newsreels and classified outtakes and by
interviewing Birkut’s colleagues and acquaintances. A paunchy director of
fifties propaganda films explains how he created the Birkut myth by staging a
marathon bricklaying competition on the site of a model city. A former spy,
now a supervisor of government-sponsored strip shows, recounts how Birkut’s
fellow workers sabotaged his Stakhanovite demonstrations by handing hima
red-hot brick. Through such embedded narratives, clearly reminiscent of the
investigative strategies of Citizen Kane, the film gradually constructs the truth
about Birkut—that he rebelled against party corruption, that he was framed
and imprisoned, then released and presumably killed.
The closer Agnieszka gets to the truth about Birkut, the more nervous the
authorities become. She begins to encounter the same petty corruption and
bureaucratic obstacles that Birkut did. Indeed, the two come to double each
other as rebels from two distinct historical periods: he disrupts union meetings
and throws a brick through the window of the Security Police; she kicks a
supervisor in the shins. He is a worker; she is a cultural worker, a cinematic
 116 The Process of Production

mason, to recycle a favorite metaphor ofthe Soviet montage school. Given this
implied alliance of two rebels, it is quite logical that the film should end with
Agnieszka striding down the corridor of the television building with Birkut’s
son, and that she will have married him prior to the beginning of Wajda’s sequel
film Man ofIron. But if Birkut ultimately retreats from politics—the last piece
of classified footage shows him casting an unmarked ballot in local elections—
Agnieszka plunges ever deeper into the fray. She practices a kind of guerilla
filmmaking—hopping onto a forbidden statue of the fallen hero to film when
her own cameraman lacks the courage, secretly recording an ex-party-spy, and
generally shooting first and asking permission later.
If Agnieszka mirrors Birkut, her film-in-the-making mirrors Man of
Marble itself. Wajda had to surmount the same obstacles to make his film that
Agnieszka confronts in her attempt to make “Falling Stars.” Wajda waited 13
years for permission to shoot Man of Marble, and a final sequence was excised.
In Agnieszka’s case, the authorities erect subtle and not-so-subtle obstacles to
her project, declaring discarded footage “classified,” encouraging her to
explore alternative subjects, and ultimately depriving her of both camera and
film. (Wajda cinematically renders the frustrations of bureaucracy through
repeated tracking shots trailing Agnieszka down interminable corridors.) In
this compilation film about the making of a compilation film, Agnieszka
assembles “Falling Stars” largely from pre-existing footage. Man of Marble,
similarly, presents a prismatic collage of newsreel, pseudo-newsreel, and
outtakes, together with staged material set in two time-periods (the difference
marked by the stylistic contrast of tripod versus hand-held shooting).
Agnieszka’s preferred style is a kind of Americanized vérité: “Hand-held
camera,” she instructs her aged cameraman (who, in a gesture of historical
continuity, had earlier worked on Stalinist propaganda films), “no tripod.
Wide-angle lens. You know—haven’t you seen all the new American films?”
In music and painting, Godard once pointed out, the documentary-fiction
dichotomy is regarded as meaningless. No one claims that Stravinsky is fiction
and Schonberg is documentary, or that Kandinsky is fiction and Klee
documentary. Man of Marbie illustrates the truth pointed to in Godard’s
boutade, showing that all films are, in a sense, fiction films. Stalinist
propaganda films, we learn, pass off idealized fantasies about the workers’ state
as if they were documentary truth. Wajda includes a 20 minute example ofthe
genre, Architects of Our Happiness, featuring a Stakhanovite hero, massive
gymnasts, and uplifting music. (Since he had himself worked on such filmic
odes to socialist construction, Wajda gives himself a credit line as assistant
director.) Birkut’s documentary marriage to a gymnast in that film, we learn,
was a fabrication in the name of image-enhancement. The Zel/ig-like
incorporation of staged footage of Birkut into what looks for all purposes like
- authentic Stalinist propaganda also has the effect of blurring the distinction
Man
Marble
of
(1977)

Figure
23.
118 The Process of Production

between documentary and fiction. The discarded footage from the propaganda
films, meanwhile, makes the point that the real story is often in the outtakes. It
is there that we see evidence of worker religiosity (Birkut crossing himself
before a bricklaying competition) and revolt (workers throwing food at their
foreman). Birkut himself, in reality a kind of East Bloc Candide, is also shown
to bea kind of fabrication. He is told to straighten his hair and look pleased to
conform to his role as media star, and even the feat of bricklaying prowess
which catapulted him to fame is revealed to be a staged event.
Man of Marble operates a double demystification—one political, the
other aesthetic. It deconstructs two styles of representation—the patronizing
top-down manipulation of Stalinist communism and the idealizing edification
of socialist realism. Man of Marble performs the mise-en-scéne of the
contradictions of a new class system, a debased form of socialism in which
“solidarity” has become a dirty word. At the same time, the film critiques an
aesthetic style of representation, that of socialist realism. This aesthetic, in its
Stalinist variant, claims that art should speak to the people in the transparent
language of model heroes and prettified reality. It practices the cult of
personalities, whether major ones like Stalin or minor ones like Birkut. Man of
Marble clearly rejects such a style, eschewing hagiography (his heroine for
example, is often barely sufferable) in favor of a reflexive strategy which
combines a thematic construction with an aesthetic of deconstruction.

Declining Stars: Fedora and Veronika Voss

Two recent films, Billy Wilder’s Fedora (1979) and Fassbinder’s Die Sehnsucht
der Veronika Voss (Veronika Voss, 1982) spin variations on the theme of
Wilder’s earlier Sunset Boulevard—the decline of the star. Based on Thomas
Tryon’s Crowned Heads, Fedora turns the journalist-protagonist of the novel
into the producer-protagonist of the film, in the form of William Holden,
fished out of Norma Desmond’s swimming pool to relate still another
posthumous tale. His fictive name is now Barry Detweiler, and he has been
promoted from scriptwriter to independent producer, but he is still self-ironic,
still down on his luck, and ready to be ensnared again by a legendary actress
living in spooky exclusion.
Fedora highlights its intertext by constant allusion to the history of film.
The opening shot of Fedora throwing herself in front of aback-projected train
ala Anna Karenina cites the classic Hollywood romanesque tradition. Docteur
Vando (José Ferrer) evokes both Caligari and Mabuse, a reference to the
Germanic cinema in which Wilder finds his roots. Fedora’s bath in the outsized
swimming pool of Leda and the Swan, set in the ’40’s, and Antonia’s waltz with
Michael York, set in the ’70’s, evoke a kind of atemporal grandiose Hollywood
style; the images call up anethos as well as an aesthetic. Like Sunset Boulevard,
 The Process of Production 119

Fedora mingles real and fictional characters. Henry Fonda and Michael York
play themselves, under their own names but in fictional roles, while Fedora
herself amalgamates features of Gloria Swanson, Marlene Dietrich, and Greta
Garbo. The mixture of reality and fiction elicits the familiar vertigo: where do
the real characters leave off and the fictive ones begin?
Billy Wilder shows himself in Fedora, once again, to be the ironic poet of
the twilight of the stars, the chronicler of the human cost of cinematic
obsolescence. Fedora has to do with face, with saving face, with the desperate
attempt to preserve physical beauty against time’s relentless melt and thus
prolong the ephemeral streak of stardom. Stars, especially women stars, are
not allowed to age gracefully. They are designed, as Wilder himself said, to
disappear in the firmament and not fall to earth like wet firecrackers. Fedora
exposes the ravages of the star system even as it parasitically feeds on that
system. It makes fun of our voyeuristic curiosity about the lives of stars—why
should it matter to us that Humphrey Bogart, Pablo Picasso, and Maurice
Chevalier were among Fedora’s lovers?—even while it exploits that very
curiosity.
If Wilder is commenting on Hollywood, he is also commenting on his own
place within it. In the Tryon novel, the male protagonist is a journalist; in the
film he is a producer. Barry Detweiler’s difficulties in scraping up funds for a
remake of Anna Karenina parallel Wilder’s own problems in financing Fedora.
Counting on Fedora’s “bankability,” Detweiler hopes to persuade “some tax-
shelter guys” to finance the project. Fedora itself, ironically, was made from
tax-shelter money, obliging Wilder to film in studios in Munich and Paris. But
if Fedora reflects Wilder’s resentments against the commercial pressures of the
film industry, it also forms part of that which it criticizes. The film acidly
records the protracted agony of the star system and the studio style, while it
prolongs that agony. The film’s style is antiquated, a face-lifted version of
classical Hollywood cinema. The attempt to “bury” Hollywood here comes to
resemble an exercise in galvanizing a corpse. It is one last dismantling, one last
sale of studio scrap. Nothing is more eloquent, in this regard, than the cool TV
report of Fedora’s death, with its frigid studio decor and shrewdly chosen
retrospective images of Fedora’s life. Fedora the personage, and Fedora the
film, seem oddly out of place in the world of network news.
Fassbinder’s Veronika Voss, like Sunset Boulevard, focusses on the
entanglements of a young writer, Robert Krohn (Hilmar Thate), and a
declining actress, Veronika Voss (Rosel Zech), who is fatally addicted to drugs.
But the Fassbinder film sets up an even more complex play of mirror effects:
between film-within-the-film and film, between protagonist and prototype,
and even between the protagonist and Fassbinder himself. The film opens ina
movie theatre as the aging Veronika, a UFA star from the Nazi period, watches
herself in a lurid melodrama entitled Creeping Poison. With her in the audience
120 The Process of Production

are the writer and Fassbinder himself. The sequence being screened shows a
drug addict, played by Voss, being manipulated by a woman into ceding her
property, and thus mirrors in microcosm the trajectory of Veronika Voss asa
whole, where the parasitic Dr. Katz (Annemarie Diiringer), under the guise of
therapeutic concern, tricks Voss into signing away her property in exchange for
regular injections of morphine. (The Voss character was based on the life of the
German actress Sybille Schmitz, a UFA actress who worked with Carl Dreyer
and Max Reinhardt. Schmitz continued her career in the Nazi period and died
of a suicidal drug overdose in 1955. One of her most celebrated roles, ironically,
was as the victim of a female vampire in Dreyer’s 1932 film Vampyr.)
Veronika Voss merits an extensive textual analysis, but we will limit
ourselves here to its characteristics as a reflexive film set in a filmmaking
milieu. The male protagonist of the film, like Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard, is
enticed into the vortex of the life of a fading star. He enlists his woman
companion of many years, Henriette (Cornelia Froboess), in an investigation
aimed at discovering the secret of her enigmatic behavior. They discover her
devotion to Doctor Katz and her relationship with an ex-husband who seems
to enjoy his status as witness to the demise of a star. Like Norma Desmond,
Veronika Voss is no longer able to practice her profession. She fumbles an
insignificant film role, and must resort to glycerine tears to show emotion. And
again like Desmond, she revels in the spotlights of her own delusions, fondly
imagining that limousines are taking her off to Hollywood.
Veronika Voss, like Norma Desmond, is associated with an irrecuperably
luxurious studio style. Her memories ofthe gloss and glitter of UFA and her ill-
fated comeback attempt at Bavaria (another prominent Third Reich studio)
link her to the studio system. When Krohn and Voss board the tramway, the
tramway exits screen left but the camera remains fixed on a sign—
Geiselgeistag—a suburb outside of Munich and home of several Hollywood-
style film studios. In fact, Veronika Voss proliferates in verbal and visual
references to studios and to studio films, especially those directed by Germans
or German emigrés in America. The sequence of the star watching herself, as we
have seen, is modeled on Sunset Boulevard, by the emigré director Billy Wilder.
Krohn’s offer of an umbrella to the rain-soaked Voss recalls Edward G.
Robinson’s rescue of Joan Bennett in Scarlett Street, by the emigré director
Fritz Lang. At one point, Voss stands in front of a stylized studio forest
reminiscent of Lang’s Die Nibelungen. The tramway sequence evokes a similar
sequence in a film by another German expatriate, F.W. Murnau. The
hounding to suicide by drugs of Veronika Voss recalls the Nazi-like hounding
of Ingrid Bergman in Notorious, the work of a filmmaker who did his first
work as director in Germany under the shadow of UFA. In this sense, Veronika
Voss constitutes an allusive meditation on the complex reciprocal play of
influence between Germany and the United States. Even the over-decorated
Veronika
(1982)
Voss

Figure
24.
122 The Process of Production

mise-en-scéne of the film evokes not only specifically German antecedents but
also the elaborate studio-based Hollywood cinema in which so many German
emigrés gained their fame.
Apart from its filmmaking milieu and intertextual allusions, Veronika
Voss is a thoroughly reflexive film which constantly calls attention to its own
status as an artifact. The hyperbolic virtuosity of the style renders the authorial
inscription visible, calling attention to the enunciation. The aesthetic
exhibitionism of the film mirrors that of the star protagonist; here cinematic
style primps and looks at itself in the mirror. Let us look, for example, at what
Fassbinder does with filmic “punctuation,” i.e., those demarcating effects
which simultaneously separate and connect sequences. Veronika Voss displays
more than 30 distinct types of optical transitions in a virtuoso demonstration of
the potentialities of what might be called a subcode of punctuation. Fassbinder
favors those devices materialized by optical effects, and especially the wipe.
These wipes represent, first of all, an archaic device associated with the studio
style evoked by the film. More importantly, as the most “visible” form of
puntuation due to their obvious optical manipulation, they call attention to the
signifier. Fassbinder then hyperbolizes this visibility through spectacular
effects through which the wipes mimic or anticipate the sequences they precede.
A horizontally striated wipe, for example, announces the sequence of
conversation between Robert and Voss’s ex-husband, where a similarly
patterned partition casts horizontal stripes across their faces. Another wipe
violently bifurcates the screen and arches upward, anticipating the violence of
Robert’s breaking into Dr. Katz’ office.
Cinema, Veronika tells Robert, is nothing more than light and shadow,
and bids him observe the effect of light on her face. Several shots later, she
walks up stairs and out-of-frame, followed by her expressionist shadow, as if in
illustration of her earlier comment. Throughout, Fassbinder calls attention to
the lichtspiel—play of light—which is film. He surrounds minor characters
with semi-darkness or annihilates them with blinding light, while he illuminates
Voss with shifting lights and flickering candles. Here again Fassbinder draws
on the resources developed by the Germanic tradition, both in terms of Max
Reinhardt’s emphasis on actual light sources on stage/in frame and in terms of
Joseph von Sternberg’s manner of enveloping Dietrich in an air of glittery
artifice. As the character disintegrates, finally, the lighting loses its chiaroscuro
vibrancy, finally blanching out the protagonist as she approaches suicide: the
film which began in the darkness ends in an explosion of white light.
Veronika Voss develops a multi-leveled metaphorical discourse
concerning the cinema in which the key trope is that of addiction itself. To
Veronika’s literal addiction corresponds Robert’s figurative addiction to
glamor and spectacle. How else explain his fascination with a story which,
according to his editors, would be more appropriate for the society columns?
 The Process of Production 123

How else account for his self-destructive preference for the spectacle of
Veronika to the quotidian affection of Henriette? Fassbinder resuscitates a
venerable metaphor within critical discource on film and theatre—recalling
Vertov’s denunciations of “the electrical opium of the movie theatre’s” and
Brecht’s of “spiritual drug traffic’—i.e., the cinema as opiate. But he
historicizes the trope by alluding to the national and international institutional
matrix of the narcotic trade. The German State and the Health Ministry,
Robert discovers, collaborate with Doctor Katz. Could it be that German
cinema, by analogy, also “owes its soul to the company store,” to cite the fifties
pop song constantly played over Armed Forces Radio? The presence of the
American soldier (Gunther Kaufman), seen around Dr. Katz’ office and who
seems to be involved in the morphine traffic, also contributes to this portrait of
manipualtion in postwar Germany. It was partially American pressure,
scarcely disinterested, which led to the snuffing out of German cinema in the
immediate postwar period and the massive influx of American films, cultural
products to which Germans were now “addicted.”

Into the Eighties: Godard and Wenders

The eighties have already been extraordinarily fecund in films-about-

filmmaking. In Les Années 80 (The Golden Eighties, 1983), Chantal Akerman
deconstructs a Jacques Demy-style musical in a kind of rehearsal film about
rehearsals: The film consists of two sharply divided section: an hour-long
videotaped collage of rehearsals of songs, movements, and dialogue,
presumably destined for the film-to-be; and a 20 minute “sample,” shot in
35mm, of what the finished production number, after careful editing, might
look like. Alain Tanner’s Dans la Ville Blanche (In the White City, 1983),
similarly, is structured around contrasting filmic modes: the super-8 images—
grainy, jiggly, restless, spontaneous—that Bruno Ganz shoots in Portugal for
his woman friend in Switzerland, and the surrounding “normal” 35mm
material in which the traces of subjectivity and the enunciation have been
largely effaced. Tomas Gutierrez Alea also interweaves heterogenous modes
within a film-about-filmmaking format in his Hasta Cierto Punto (Up to a
Certain Point, 1983). The film revolves around a director and screenwriter
making a film about machismo among dockworkers, and interweaves
videotaped interviews of the dockworkers with the filmed story of a romance
between a woman docker and the scriptwriter, all as a springboard for a
multifaceted reflexion on relations between sexes, between media, and between
intellectuals and the people for whom they presume to speak. Not only is the
film-within-the-film about machismo, we gradually discover, but so is the
the
surrounding film about the making of the film-within-the-film, for
filmmakers themselves are no strangers to machismo. Sexism, we learn, 1s not
well.
the monopoly of the working class; it pervades the filmmaking milieu as
124 The Process of Production

To conclude this overview of films-about-filmmaking, we will briefly

touch on two recent films: Godard’s Passion (Passion, 1982) and Wim
Wenders’ Der Stand der Dinge (The State of Things, 1982). In Passion,
Godard’s surrogate is Jerzy (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), a Polish filmmaker making
a film in which he turns famous paintings into tableaux vivants. On the set, he is
hounded by financial backers who demand a coherent script and a story. But
for Jerzy, as for Godard himself, scripts are bureaucratic straitjackets invented
by bookkeepers, and stories are an irrelevance. In his obsession with beauty
and “the perfect light,” he scrutinizes the slow-motion video image of Hanna
Schygulla’s face. He realizes the pointlessness of freezing such mysterious flux
into the cause-effect logic of conventional narration. Passion itself, as a
consequence, is structured around centrifugal disruptions. The unveiling of an
Ingres-like young beauty is interrupted by the sudden entrance into frame of a
television camera. A couple’s conversation about their intimate feelings is
disrupted by frantic knocking which scrambles their dialogue. Typically,
Godard navigates between the aleatory and the definitive, between noise and
communication, between chaos and structure, between the narrative system
and its incessant anarchization.
Wenders’ The State of Things also treats the subject of paralysis of filmic
écriture, the filmmaker’s terror of the empty white screen. In the film, the cast
and crew of a science-fiction film are marooned on the Portuguese coast. The
director, Friedrich (Patrick Bauchau), scans the horizon for a signal from the
absent producer, Gordon (Allen Goorwitz), apparently in flight and unwilling
or unable to deliver the promised film stock. The film-within-the-film is a
fifties-style postholocaust film called The Survivors, and is purportedly a
remake of Allan Dwan’s The Most Dangerous Man Alive. The first part of The
State of Things portrays a situation of inertia—the endless waiting of the
makers of The Survivors. (This endless waiting does not correspond,
reportedly, to the making of The State of Things, which was written, cast, and
shot in a kind of fevered rush.) In this part of the film, Wenders shows a world
in which, as Flaubert said of Madame Bovary, “nothing happens,” (at least in
the conventional sense). The characters take pictures, talk about art, get drunk,
and read aloud to one another. The stasis is broken only when Friedrich
abruptly resolves to track down Gordon in Los Angeles. Suddenly, we are
plunged into a Hollywood roller-coaster of dramatic events. Within this regime
of narrative density, we are offered a southern Californian noir cityscape, a
smooth lawyer (Roger Corman), a creditor fleeing in a mobile home (Gordon),
a few thugs, and a climactic shootout in a deserted parking lot. Friedrich’s
“gun,” in this case, is the super-8 camera with which he films his killers and his
own death in a last vertiginous pan. Both Gordon and Friedrich, it turns out,
are being slaughtered for the crime of having made The Survivors in black-and-
white. In return for investing its laundered money, the mafia has received in
(Z961) VoIsspg “SZ aINBI4
126 The Process of Production

return an unprofitable black-and-white art film; the gangsters, under-

standably, feel doublecrossed.
Both Passion and The State of Things can be seen as a kind of stock-taking
concerning the state of film art in the early eighties, and both are requiems fora
certain kind of filmmaking. The requiem, in both cases, is for the non-
Hollywood film, the film without a script, the low-budget art film which has
come to seem anachronistic in the age of blockbusters and technological
exhibitionism. (The requiem aspect is underlined, in the Godard film, by a
soundtrack featuring requiems by Mozart and Fauré.) Both films are haunted
by the question of story. The producers of Passion keep asking: “Where is the
story?” and “What kind of story is this?” In The State of Things, meanwhile, the
director tells his drunken crew: “Stories? There are no stories, only life, in the
course of time, without the need to turn out stories.” In both films, the cinema
has clear enemies. By having Jerzy Radziwilowicz, the Birkut of Man of
Marble, play his filmmaker-within-the-film, Godard shows solidarity with the
workers of the cinema (as against its owners), and indirectly compares the
enemies of filmmaking to Stalinist bureaucrats. Wenders, for his part,
compares the cinema to a mafia operation. Hollywood’s dirty money needs
laundering; the producers are gangsters or in the pay of gangsters. Both films,
however, finally rescue an ephemeral beauty from the hands of despair.
Passion reflects not only on the conjunction of love and work in the cinema, but
also on cinema’s relation to two neighboring arts perennially used as
metaphors for film itself—painting and music. The State of Things, despite
Friedrich’s negation of the possibility of storytelling, delivers an original and
reflexive tale abut filmmaking itself.
As a constitutive element in human life, stories partake ofthe “natural.” It
is not natural, however, that only certain types of stories should be told, or that
they should be told without calling attention to the means oftheir telling. What
distinguishes most fiction films, Metz points out, is not the absence of the work
of the signifier, but rather its presence in the mode of denegation; the signifiers,
rather than working for themselves, labor busily at effacing their own traces,
immediately opening into the transparence of a story which is in fact produced
by these very signifiers but which the film pretends merely to illustrate.
Filmmakers have the perennial choice of obscuring or revealing the codes by
which they create illusions. They can keep the codes as a closely guarded
professional secret or they can initiate the public into their operations. The
films-about-filmmaking discussed in this chapter have shown a varying
proportion of critical consciousness, but we can affirm that they all demystify
the cinema in some measure, in the sense that they all make us aware, to some
degree, of the medium, of its codes, and of the work of its signifiers.
 3

The Genre of Self-Consciousness

Literary critics speak of a self-conscious genre in the novel, a tradition which

has historically been slighted or condemned. “Self-conscious,” in this sense,
refers to a novelistic decorum corresponding neither to the “documentary
strategy” of novelists like Defoe, nor to the solidly bourgeois fictions of the
great nineteenth-century realists like Balzac or Flaubert, nor to the interior
realism of a Virginia Woolf or a Henry James. In his Partial Magic: The Novel
as Self-Conscious Genre, Robert Alter disengages an ongoing tradition ofself-
consciousness going back to Cervantes, continuing with Fielding and Sterne in
England and Diderot in France, ambiguously revived by Thackeray, and
undergoing a veritable Renaissance in the twentieth-century with writers like
Gide, Queneau, Borges, Nabokov, and Fowles. The works of these novelists
form “the other great tradition,” in which novels systematically flaunt their
own condition of artifice, showing the fictional world as an authorial construct
set up against a background of literary tradition and convention.
The idea of self-consciousness in novels as well as films initially
encountered resistance from a chorus of hostile critics. F.R. Leavis, working
from moralistic Arnoldian premises, argued for a rather arbitrarily anointed
“Great Tradition” in the novel—a tradition which had no room for the “sport”
of a Fielding or Sterne. Behind his dismissal of novels like Tristram Shandy
and Tom Jones one senses a puritanical hostility to the comic mode, as if
fiction, by playing with its own conventions, had become suspectly onanistic.
Critics like Ian Watt, on the other hand, tracing the novel back to Defoe rather
than Cervantes, overemphasized the novel’s rootedness in the world of
bourgeois fact. Still another critical tradition, fathered by Henry James and
disseminated by Percy Lubbock, favored “dramatic” fiction which “shows”
rather than “tells.” Even Auerbach, while not fundamentally hostile to
reflexivity, at times implied that the novel had achieved a kind of definitive
mimetic accuracy with the great nineteenth-century realists, while Lukacs
enshrined the forms of “critical realism.”
Film criticism as well has tended to downplay both the tradition and the
creative potentialities of reflexivity in the cinema. Until fairly recently, the very
 The Genre of Self-Consciousness 129

phrase “self-conscious” was almost invariably meant in its pejorative sense of

“stagey” or “affected.” Reflexive techniques, even when tolerated in the frankly
comic films of poo aos or Mel Brooks, tend to be recuperated as the
expression of their “zany” or “neurotic” authorial personae. The anti-
illusionistic elements in Godard’s work were long considered unfortunate
lapses in seriousness or the indulgence of a personal vice rather than the Key to
his aesthetic. The mainstream of film criticism, both academic andjournalistic,
continues to be subtended by the assumption that truly serious films must be
verisimilar representations concerning plausible characters set in a believable
social context. While fashionable in the pages of small-circulation journals,
reflexivity remains anathema to popular journalistic critics—including those
appearing on television—who continue to excoriate lapses in plausability,
characters who cannot be believed in, and techniques that call attention to
themselves. Reflexive films, in this sense, form an object of paranoia for
mainstream critics, who see reflexive filmmakers as spoilsports who deprive the
cinematic game of its illusion (from Latin “in play,” from inlusio, illudere, or
inludere). Game-players, Huizing points out in Homo Ludens, have always
been more indulgent with “cheats” than with “spoilsports.”
Reflexive fictions defiantly call attention to their own artifice and
operations, refusing a transparent self-effacing language that opens quietly
onto the world. When Cervantes interrupts the story of Don Quixote’s battle
with the Biscayan, in a novelistic equivalent to the freeze-frame, leaving them
both with swords upraised, on the grounds that his source went no farther, only
to resume his account upon discovering a parchment depicting the very same
battle, he is consciously destroying the illusion created by his story. When
Fielding halts the flow of his narrative to expatiate on the novelist’s craft, he
reminds us of the artifice involved in writing a novel. And when Diderot boasts,
at the beginning of Jacques the Fatalist, that he can marry off the maitre or
cuckold him, just as he pleases, he, too, is a self-conscious narrator, asserting
absolute power over his own creation. By seeing themselves not as nature’s
slaves but as fiction’s masters, reflexive artists cast doubt on the central
assumption of mimetic art—the notion of an antecedent reality on which the
artistic text is supposedly modeled. Their nonreferential discourse is not
subject to the laws of sublunary nature; it is subject, ultimately, only to the
constraints of language itself.
In their freedom and creativity, anti-illusionistic artists imitate the freedom
and creativity of the gods. Like gods at play, reflexive artists see themselves as
unbound by life as it is perceived (Reality), by stories as they have been told
(Genre), or by a nebulous probability (Verisimilitude). Unlike the self-effacing
artist of Stephen Dedalus, who, “like the God of creation, remains within or
behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible,” the self-conscious artist,
with a differing sense of supernatural decorum, is fond of making comic
130 The Genre of Self-Consciousness

epiphanies in the created universe. The god of anti-illusionist art is not an

immanent pantheistic deity but an Olympian, making noisy intrusion into
fictive events. We are torn away from the events and the characters and made
aware of the pen, or brush, or camera that has created them.

The Cameo Appearance: From Cervantes to Woody Allen

These comic epiphanies, in the cinema, often take the form of a cameo
appearance by the author. Just as Cervantes himself enters Don Quixote asa
captive soldier, or Vladimir Nabokov appears anagramized as “Vivian
Darkbloom” in Lolita, so some directors make walk-on appearances in their
own films. Bufiuel, the most Cervantic of filmmakers, often “signs” his films
with walk-on roles. His brief appearances in Le Chien Andalou as the man who
razors a woman’s eye figures forth not only his role as editor (the man who does
the cutting) but also the aggressive thrust of his cinema of cruelty. His brief
appearance in Belle de Jour as a Spanish tourist pinpoints his situation as a
Spaniard making films in France. In Phantom of Liberty, he dons a beard and
monk’s frock and has himself assassinated in a highly condensed expression of
his own ambivalence toward Catholicism. And in That Obscure Object of
Desire, it is Bufiuel who asks to be driven to the bank and is promptly blown up
by terrorists, a reminder that the film mocks his obsessions, his class, and his
privileges. Hitchcock’s cameo appearances, meanwhile, form a celebrated
personal trademark, and tend to be shrewdly apt and overdetermined with
meaning. We see him putting a double bass on a train in Strangers ona Train,
the very film which places two characters, both “base,” on a train. Godard’s
appearances progress from the informer in Breathless—as director, who could
be better placed?—through the assistant director to Fritz Lang in Contempt, to
himself as fully visible director in his studio in Numéro Deux. In the seventies,
indeed, such signatures become almost de rigeur: Coppola directing his actors
in Apocalypse Now, Scorcese watching Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver.
Even when not literally visible, directors have often been figuratively
present in the form of delegates within the fiction. Preston Sturges casts Joel
McCrea as a director not unlike himself in Sullivan’s Travels; Woody Allen
goes farther by himself playing the director Sandy Bates in Stardust Memories,
a film explicitly indebted to the Sturges film. The putative director Guido
Anselmi partially substitutes for Fellini in 8 //2, as does “Monsieur Godard”
for his authorial namesake in Every Man for Himself. At times the substitution
is somewhat less direct. The lanternist in Bergman’s The Magician, the fashion
photographer in Antonioni’s Blow-Up, the newscameraman in Wexler’s
Medium Cool—all stand in, on some level, for their directors. At times the
authorial surrogate is transposed into another art or medium. The saxophonist
Jimmy Doyle (Robert de Niro) in Scorcese’s New York, New York, as a be-bop
 The Genre of Self-Consciousness (31

musician ahead of his time in the twilight of swing, also evokes Scorcese
himself, impatient with the outmoded conventions of respectable
“entertainment.” The Rolling Stones, adding note to note to compose
“Sympathy for the Devil,” collectively analogize the compositional work of
Jean-Luc Godard, joining shot to-shot in a film called, symptomatically, One
Plus One.

The Self-Conscious Genre: Summa, Anatomy, Carnival

The self-conscious novel began with Don Quixote as a parodic summa,

mocking in turn epic, pastoral, romance, comedy, and devotional literature.
The self-conscious novel has strong affinities with what Northrop Frye calls the
“anatomy,” a strand of fiction characterized by digressive strategies and
voraciously comic erudition. The great anatomists are those on whom no genre
is lost. Exploiting the widest possible range of sources, from Sancho Panza’s
earthy proverbs to the Don’s celestial flights, they take high and low materials
and tease them into art, often seducing minor genres into brilliance, as
Cervantes did with Renaissance chivalric romance and Godard did with the
gangster movie.
Both the novel and the fiction film, summas by their very nature, have the
potential of setting in motion a polyphonic play of generic voices. Their essence
is to have no essence or master voice, to be open to all cultural forms. Both
novel and film have consistently cannibalized other genres and media. The
novel began by orchestrating a polyphonic diversity of materials—courtly
fictions, travel literature, allegory, jestbooks—into a new narrative form,
repeatedly plundering or annexing neighboring arts, creating poetic novels,
dramatic novels, cinematic novels, and journalistic novels. What is true of the
novel is even more true of cinema, for while the matter of expression of the
novel is words, and only words, cinema is a composite language by virtue ofits
diverse matters of expression—sequential photography, music, phonetic
sound, noise—and thus “inherits” all the art forms associated with these
matters of expression.
A rich, sensorially composite language characterized by what Metz calls
“codic heterogeneity,” cinema is open to all kinds of literary and pictorial
symbolism, to all collective representations, to all ideologies, to all aesthetics,
and to the infinite play of influences within cinema, within the other arts, and
within culture generally. Cinema can literally include painting, poetry, and
music or it can metaphorically evoke them by imitating their procedures; it can
show a Picasso painting, or emulate cubist techniques or visual dislocation, cite
a Bach cantata, or create montage equivalents of fugue and counterpoint.
Godard’s Passion not only includes music (Ravel, Mozart, Ferre, Beethoven,
Fauré) but is conceived musically, and not only includes animated tableaux
Ls? The Genre of Self-Consciousness

based on celebrated paintings (Rembrandt’s Night Watch, Goya’s The Third of

May, Delacroix’s Turkish Bathers) but also expresses a painterly concern with
light and color. The famous definitions of cinema in terms of other arts—
“sculpture in motion” (Vachel Lindsay); “music of light” (Abel Gance),
“architecture in movement” (Elie Faure)—merely call attention to the
synesthetic multiplicity of signifiers available to the cinema.
Novelists and filmmakers have often been obliged to define and stake out
territory for new genres. Cervantes explains that he is not writing a romance in
Don Quixote, just as Diderot protested in a title: Ceci nest pas un Conte.
Fielding in Joseph Andrews proposes his own generic synthesis: “the comic
epic poem in prose.” Anti-illusionists hybridize genres in such a way that the
signification of the work partially arises from the creative tension generated by
their interaction, tensions which force us to reflect on the nature of genre itself
as one of the ways “reality” is mediated through art. Godard, throughout his
career, has promiscuously engendered “illegitimate” generic combinations:
existential gangster film in Breathless, sociological romance in Masculine,
Feminine, political western in Wind from the East, and feminist pornography
in Numéro Deux. Through a process of artistic alchemy, genres are contested
and contaminated by other genres. Pierrot le Fou, especially, constantly
highlights its character as generic cocktail: “Our story continues,” Belmondo’s
off-screen voice tells us, “full of sound and fury, with a small port as in a
Conrad novel, sailing ships as in a Stevenson novel, an old bordello as in a
Faulkner novel, and two guys to beat me up as ina Chandler novel.” Such an
orgy of citation, besides constituting a self-parody, literarizes the narrative,
empties it of its diegetic substance and forces us to contemplate the film as a
crazy quilt of literary and cinematic pastiches.
Since the stuff of self-conscious art is the tradition itself—to be alluded to,
played with, outdone, or exorcized—parody has often been of crucial
importance. Implicit in the idea of parody are some self-evident truths about
the artistic process. The first is that the artist does not imitate nature but rather
other texts. One paints, or writes, or makes films because one has seen
paintings, read novels, or attended films. One writes a novel in imitation,
whether affectionate (pastiche) or critical (parody), of novelists one has read.
Art, in this sense, is not a window on the world but a palimpsest, an intertextual
event, in which references to other texts hover between the lines or linger in the
margins. One may write, like Fielding, “in the manner of” Cervantes. One
writes within a tradition; the medium, the genre, and the sub-genre pre-exist the
artist. The intertextual references may be explicit or implicit, conscious or
unconscious, direct and local or broad and diffuse. These truths apply with
equal self-evidence to films. Filmmakers choose, or are pressured, to make
films in a certain genre, or “in the manner of” a certain director, or according to
a set of conventions. They can call attention to these influences or choose to
(Z861) UOlssog Ul YIIOMIYSIN SJpUeIquUaY “LZ qunsi4
134 The Genre of Self-Consciousness

obscure them. They can cover their tracks or, like Godard, cite their sources by
cinematic “footnotes” in the form of titles, film posters, or the physical presence
of the directors themselves (Fritz Lang in Contempt, Samuel Fuller in Pierrot
le Fou).

The Centrality of Parody

Parody, far from being a marginal sub-genre within the history of literature or
film, can be seen as an ever-present tendency which renders explicit the intrinsic
processes of textuality. Mikhail Bakhtin’s revalorization of parody and the
carnivalesque suggests not only a rereading of the diverse genres which
generated the modern novel, but also controverts what had been the orthodox
Marxist view of its development. What had been considered central—the
realist tradition studied by Auerbach and Lukacs— becomes but one moment
in a much more complex dialectic. In a typically carnivalesque gesture, Bakhtin
dislocates the center to the periphery and the marginal to the center. What had
been considered marginal and eccentric—the parodic sport of Sterne or the
overheated polyphonic madness of a Dostoevsky—becomes in Bakhtin the
paradigm of a new kind of “dialogic” literature.
Bakhtin’s rereading, with Rabelais as point of departure, of the history of
modern European literature suggests the possibility, if not of an inversion, at
least of a certain recasting of the history of the cinema as well, in which parody
would be granted its perennially fecund and paradigmatic importance. The
conventional histories of the cinema tend to privilege Griffith rather than
Keaton, Pudovkin rather than Vertov, serious dramatic films rather than
musical comedies. Susan Sontag compares the novel’s Samuel Richardson to
the cinema’s D.W. Griffith as two innovators of genius who combine
supremely vulgar intellects with a “fervid moralizing about sexuality and
violence whose energy comes from suppressed voluptuousness.”’ She might
have gone on to point out that silent cinema, after its Richardsonian
beginnings, soon took a turn toward Fieldingesque parody. Just as Fielding
rendered Pamela’s behavior ludicrous by transforming Squire B into the
lecherous Lady Booby and Joseph Andrews into the assailed virgin, so
filmmakers like Mack Sennett and Buster Keaton ridiculed the maudlin love
scenes of Griffith films. Many seductive vamp figures from the silent era play
the Shamela to Griffith’s Pamelas. Even Fielding’s reductive comparison of
love to a piece of beef finds its literal cinematic counterpart in Keaton’s Go
West (1925), where the ingenue is played by a cow and the lover by Keaton
himself. Eisenstein, in The Old and the New (1929), provides the cow with a
more appropriate mate. After a bovine coup de foudre, he has the editing
stimulate the image to a metaphorical climax, followed by a shot of the newly
delivered cow and her offspring. All of which, had it not taken place in the
 The Genre of Self-Consciousness 5

context of a collective farm, might have constituted an animalistic equivalent

to the happy bourgeois endings—usually consisting of an iris-in on a cheerful
nuclear family—of so many Griffith films.
Parody constructs itself on the destruction of outmoded literary or
cinematic codes. Cervantes’ comic epic shows a world impermeable to epic
values, where such values can only be comic. Cervantes weaves a novel by
needling romance, pitting the mensonge romantique (the romantic lie), in René
Girard’s pithy formula, against the vérité romanesque (the novelistic truth).
Cervantes’ battered hidalgo tries to act out the feudal idealizations of chivalric
literature in a no-longer feudal Spain. Since there is no textual precedent for
monetary payment in his sacred texts, he refuses to pay Sancho for his services.
Since Homer never mentions Agamemnon’s salary or Nestor’s pension, and
since romance never mentions the per diem of Amadis de Gaulle, Don Quixote
dismisses such questions as beneath his dignity.
Parody, one might argue, emerges when artists perceive that they have
outgrown artistic conventions. Man parodies the past, Hegel suggested, when
he is ready to dissociate himself from it. Literary modes and paradigms, like
social orders and philosophical epistemes, become obsolescent and may be
superseded. When artistic forms become historically inappropriate, parody
lays them to rest. Parody highlights art’s historicity, its contingency and
transcience. It sweeps away the artistic deadwood, “clearing rubble from
brains,” as Brecht put it, associated with stultifying social conventions. Parody
performs the perennial rehistoricization of the artistic process. As new
novelistic and cinematic forms, like rising social classes, struggle for power and
respect, they often fight with the weapon of parody.

The Quixotic Theme

Many of the novels central to the European tradition— The Red and the Black,
Lost Illusions, Madame Bovary—chart a Cervantic trajectory of
disenchantment in which the illusions fostered by adolescent reading are
systematically undone by experience in the real world and mocked, in literary
terms, by parody. Many films, similarly, mock quixotic protagonists who
envision their everyday experience through deforming cinematic lenses.
Godard, for example, constantly rings the changes on this theme, hardly
surprising in a person who once claimed to have learned “everything” from the
cinema. Many Godard characters conceive life on the model of fhe filmic text.
Paul in Contempt, according to Godard, is a character from Marienbad who
wants to bea hero in Rio bravo. Angela in A Woman is a Woman emulates the
agile grace of the dancing heroines of MGM musicals. Elsewhere, Humphrey
Bogart comes to fill the actantial slot of Amadis de Gaulle as textual exemplar.
Michel in Breathless apes Bogart’s hardened nonchalance as he blows smoke
136 The Genre of Self-Consciousness

into a Bogey poster. Haskell Wexler has his protagonist in Medium Cool echo
Bogey at a further remove by having him blow smoke into a Belmondo poster.
Woody Allen, as Allan Felix in Play It Again, Sam also attempts to project the
Bogart persona, with ludicrous results. The Brazilian filmmaker Fauzao lends
the theme an anticolonialist dimension by having his Bogart-admirer, in JS.
Brown: The Last Hero (1979), emulate the American hero to the point of
wearing trench coats in the tropics, to the amusement of his compatriots.
The characters in Godard’s Band of Outsiders (1964)—Parisian hoods
imitating Hollywoodean and série noire gangsters—are similarly quixotic.
Their lives are constantly mediated by the fictions of the pop culture intertext.
Like the narrator of John Fowles’ The Magus, they confuse metaphorically
accounts of modes of feeling with literal prescriptions for everyday behavior.
They have imaginary shootouts, and Arthur does a gut-clutching mime of the
death of Billy-the-Kid. Asked whether she loves him, Odile tells Franz: “I only
love the cinema.” Even their robberies are planned in conscious imitation of
“second-rate thrillers.” Their first theft, symptomatically, is not of money but
of a text. Franz steals a paperback while watching himself in a mirror, in a
gesture that neatly epitomizes Godardian cinema—law-breaking, bookish,
self-conscious.
The Cervantic interface of art and life also entails, at times, the
promiscuous mingling of characters of diverse ontological status within the
same fiction. Robert Alter speaks of the “ontological vertigo” that arises when
Don Quixote converses with a character from the spurious continuation of
Don Quixote by Alonso de Avellanda—“a fictional character from a ‘true’
fictional chronicle confronting a character from a false one in order to establish
beyond doubt his own exclusive authenticity.”” A similar confrontation
between “true” and “false” characters occurs in Godard’s Weekend. A hippie-
guerrilla asks Corinne if she is real or in a film. When Corinne responds that she
is in a film, the guerrilla snaps back: “Liar!” Weekend also has purely fictitious
characters—Corinne Roland—rub elbows with actors representing historical
personages (Emily Bronte, St. Juste). Other films have “real people” playing
themselves in-character (Roger Leenhardt in A Married Woman; Francis
Jeanson in La Chinoise) converse with fictional characters. In such instances,
one wonders does the diegetic universe annex the real or the reverse? “This isn’t
a novel,” Corinne tells Roland in Weekend, “‘it’s life. A film is life.” One
moment in Pierrot le Fou points up the problematic ontology of many Godard
films. Ferdinand goes to a cinema where Le Grand Escroc is playing. As he
enters the theatre, Jean Seberg, on-screen in the film-within-the-film, asks: “At
what moment had we abandoned the fictitious character to return to the real
one... if in fact the real one ever existed.” The spectator presumably recalls
that Jean Seberg played opposite Belmondo in Breathless and thus another
dimension is introduced. When an actor incarnates many roles, which
represents the “fictitious” character and which the “real” one?
Figure 28. Breathless (1959)
138 The Genre of Self-Consciousness

The paradox about Don Quixote, Harry Levin points out, is that it casts a
spell while dispelling an illusion. This doubleness of what Borges calls the
“partial magic” of self-conscious art, its simultaneous joy in both mystification
and demystification, is reflected both in the process of art’s creation and in the
process of its consumption. Within the artist a struggle takes place between the
will to create an illusion and the conscious decision to destroy that illusion. The
lucidity of the illusionist, the puppeteer, or the filmmaker does battle with the
desire to create a believable and lifelike image. For the reader or spectator,
meanwhile, all the reflexive devices in the world do not necessarily preclude
affective participation. The play Hamlet self-consciously exposes the processes
of playmaking; yet, innumerable spectators have identified with the character
Hamlet. Don Quixote is rendered as a purely textual entity, a verbal artifact,
yet his imaginary self has served as a pole of identification for readers for
centuries.

The Narrative Strategies of Reflexivity

Apart from thematic parallels, self-conscious novels and self-conscious films

share fundamental narrative and rhetorical strategies. One strategy they share
is, as we have seen, to cast suspicion on the central premise of illusionistic
narrative—the premise of an antecedent anecdotal nucleus or substratum from
which key blocks have been extracted. Illusionism pretends that stories pre-
exist their telling, that the events of the story actually transpired and are
therefore researchable, verifiable like the positivist’s truth. Henry Fielding
mocks this pretense of a historical referent in Joseph Andrews, when he tells us
that Parson Adams ate “either a rabbit or a fowl, I could never with any
tolerable certainty discover which....”> Thus Fielding suggests that self-
conscious art need not certify itself by association with the capitalized
abstractions of Nature, Reality, or History. Cervantes implies the same point
by his transparently ludicrous attempts to authenticate his “sources” in Don
Quixote. Why else would he admit that his major source, Cid Hamete
Benengeli, comes from a nation of notorious liars?
Anti-illusionist novelists parody the documentary strategy of writers like
Defoe who pretend to be the mere editors of correspondence found in an attic.
By claiming to select only “matters of consequence,” such novelists imply that
their stories antedate their telling. The presumed artistic selection of an
antecedent tale constitutes narrative sleight-of-hand; in fact we are given all
there is, but the suggestion that there was originally more somehow enhances
the ontological status of the story. To speculate, as Fielding often does, about
what a given character is thinking, is to foster the illusion that the character
enjoys some existence outside of the book, that he or she is more than a mere
puppet. The technique recalls, on some levels, the exploitation of off-screen
 The Genre of Self-Consciousness 139

space in the cinema, whereby synecdochic fragments create in our mind the
illusory sense of a continuum extending beyond the frame. The rectangular
slice of profilmic reality included within the frame is assumed, by the laws of
diegetic implication, to extend beyond the four edges of the frame and to the
space behind the set and behind the camera. Off-screen looks or gestures, even
when in fact directed at nothing more than a chalked line ona wall, are assumed
to imply a larger diegetic space, just as the events of a novelistic character’s life
that are recounted are assumed to form a continuum with those that are not
recounted. Just as the filmmaker “fills” the imaginary space surrounding the
screen, so the novelist implies the existence of a narrative substratum below the
verbal surface of the text.
Anti-illusionists often perform their narrative legerdemain with such
studied clumsiness that we cannot but notice the card up the sleeve or the
invisible string. Fielding veils his trickery so thinly that the very whimsicality of
the formulation points up the ludicrous inadequacy of the conventional ways
of authenticating a story. In Joseph Andrews, for example, he speculates about
his protagonist’s ancestry. Subsequent to a wild-goose chase after the origin of
his hero’s name, including facetious suppositions about an epitaph, he
conjectures that Joseph Andrews probably “had as many ancestors as the best
man living, and perhaps, if we look five or six hundred years backwards, might
be related to some persons of very great figure at present.” But let us suppose,
Fielding continues, “that he had no ancestors at all, but had sprung up out ofa
dunghill.”* Fielding’s irony is superficially directed at an absurd pride in
ancestry, but on a deeper level he is making a point about the nature offiction.
Fictional characters, he suggests, are not part of a spatial or temporal or, in this
case, geneological continuum. All literary characters, if not sprung out of
dunghills, are the product of spontaneous artistic generation, and delivered, to
mix metaphors, by the mid-wife of literary convention. They can have,
therefore, neither ancestors nor, like Lady Macbeth, children.
Fielding’s playful hypothesizing about Joseph Andrews’ lineage reminds
us that realistic narrative often “cheats” by implying the existence of an
anteriority that precedes the beginning of the story and a futurity that follows
the ending. In many westerns, for example, vague references to a murdered
brother supposedly “motivate” the revenge plot. Thus one story—the
revenge—spreads around itself a network of narrative implication suggesting
earlier stories—the original murder. L’Année Derniére a Marienbad can be
taken, on one level, as mocking this spurious anteriority by having its fictitious
characters try in vain to establish the “true” antecedent story. In fact, of course,
the characters begin to exist, as Robbe-Grillet himself pointed out, with the
first page of the novel (or the first shot of the film) and cease to exist with the
last page. Other narratives “cheat” by implying a factitious futurity. Countless
Hollywood films end with intimations of marriage and the implied futurity of
140 The Genre of Self-Consciousness

happy conjugal union. The notoriously phallic train-entering-the-tunnel in

North by Northwest, presumably, foretells years of tumescent sexuality on the
parallel tracks of marriage.

Story and Discourse

One of the functions of narrative, Metz points out, is to invent one time scheme
in terms of another. All narratives construct themselves out of the
interarticulation of a double time sequence, that of the time sequence of plot
events—story—and the time of their textual presentation—discourse.° The
duality of this time scheme—the time of the telling and the time ofthe told—
makes possible the commonplace distortions of narrative. Story time, or the
imagined events of the fiction, might cover an entire lifetime, while discourse
time is constituted by the time it takes to read the novel, attend the play, or see
the film. This double time-scheme corresponds to the Russian formalist
distinction of fabula (story) and sjuzZet (plot), and to Genette’s distinction of
histoire (story)—the narrative actions taken in themselves without reference to
their discursive mediation—and récit (narrative)—the oral or written discourse
that undertakes to convey an event or series of events.
Narrative artists, whether in literary fiction or film, have the choice of
highlighting or obscuring the discordances between these two time-schemes,
between discourse and story. De Maupassant formulated the illusionistic ideal
in the novel when he suggested that writers must manage “skillful and
dissimulated transitions” so as to give the “complete illusion of the real.” The
mainstream fiction film, especially from the advent of sound through the late
1980s, has tended to model its temporal conventions on the procedures ofthe
realist novel. Metz’ “grande syntagmatique de la bande image” attempts to
delineate the conventions of spatio-temporal continuity in the classical fiction
film. The diverse syntagmas, as he explains them, presuppose a pre-existing
reality, a substratum of “story,” on which a selection has been operated to
produce the filmic discourse. Classical films, like the realist novel, pretend to
skip over the dead spaces or temps morts through narrative ellipses which are
smoothed over by dissolves or fades. They, too, manage “skillful and
dissimulated transitions” so as to give the “complete illusion of the real.”
Self-conscious novelists often call explicit attention to the shifting
relations between the twin time schemes ofstory and discourse. Henry Fielding
in Tom Jones posits a kind of sliding proportion between the two, according to
the intrinsic interest of the “protextual” events:

Now it is our purpose, in the ensuing pages, to pursue a contrary method. When any
extraordinary scene presents itself (as we trust will often be the case), we shall spare no pains
nor paper to open it at large to our readers; but if whole years should pass without producing
 The Genre of Self-Consciousness 14]

anything worthy [of] his notice, we shall not be afraid of achasm in our history, but shall
hasten on to matters of consequence, and leave such periods of time totally unobserved.

In another passage, Fielding exercises a tasteful, Lubitsch-like, selectivity in his

treatment of an amorous scene:

Not to tire the Reader, by leading him through every Scene ofthis Courtship, (which, tho’, in
the Opinion of a certain great Author, it is the pleasantest Scene of Life to the Actor, is,
perhaps, as dull and tiresome as any whatever to the Audience) the Captain made his
Advances in Form, the Citadel was defended in Form, and at length, in proper Form,
surrendered at Discretion.

By pretending to excise scenes in the name of the reader’s patience, or by

pretending to be lying in wait for the appearance of “extraordinary scenes,”
(scenes which he is in fact inventing) and by implying the existence of a
narrative substratum from which all such scenes are “mined,” Fielding both
performs and exposes one of the classic confidence tricks of illusionism.
Laurence Sterne, in Tristram Shandy, further exposes the tenuous
relation between the two time-schemes of story and discourse by portraying
himself, as narrator-author, worrying over providing sufficient time for the
actions of his fictitious characters:

It is about an hour and a half’s good reading since my uncle Toby rung the bell, when
Obadiah. was ordered to saddle a horse, and go for Dr. Slop, the man midwife;—so that no
one can say, with reason, that I have not allowed Obadiah time enough, poetically speaking,
and considering the emergency too, both to go and to come; though, morally and truly
speaking, the man, perhaps, has scarce had time to get on his boots.’

Sterne portrays the opposition of “true” and “poetic” speaking—an eighteenth-

century version of “story” and “discourse”—as a kind of frantic race between
two temporal schemes. The narrator of Machado de Assis’ Dom Casmurro,
meanwhile, evokes the process by which a novelist laboriously secretes fictive
time: “This page already covers some months, others will cover years, and thus
we will finally come to the end.” But it is Sterne who gets the most comic
mileage out of pointing up the difference between the time it takes to produce
the discourse and the story time of the discourse itself:

lam this month one whole year older than I was this time twelvemonth, and having got, as
you perceive, almost into the middle of my fourth volume—and no farther than to my first
day’s life—tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life than
when I first set out; so that instead of advancing, as acommon writer, in my work with what I
have been doing at it—on the contrary, I am just thrown so many volumes back... as at this
rate I should just live 364 times faster than I should write.*
142 The Genre of Self-Consciousness

Behind Sterne’s ingenious paradoxes lies a serious point about what has now
become the triple temporality of narrative—the time of the story, the time of
the discourse, and the time of the production of the discourse.
In Narrative Discourse, Genette speaks of the special difficulties involved
in comparing the duration of story time and narrative discourse time in a
literary text. Since reading time varies with individual readers and particular
circumstances, nothing allows us to determine a “normal” speed of execution.
A continuous dialogue scene suggests a rough equality between story and
discourse time, but ultimately we can only affirm, as Genette points out, that
such a passage reports what was said, either really or fictively, but does not
necessarily transcribe the speed of the conversation or register the dead spaces
between sentences. Comparisons between the duration of story and discourse
time would seem somewhat less problematic in the cinema, where the text
unfolds in controlled and measurable time, measurable in minutes or feet of
film, unlike the pseudo-time or literary discourse, measurable only in pages.
But even in film the question is complicated.
Take, for example, the attempts to create a strict equivalence between
story and discourse time. In both novel and film, rigid isochrony is so rare as to
almost invariably constitute a kind of tour de force. Robert Alter points out an
amusing novelistic example in Joseph Andrews, where the time it takes to read
Fielding’s account of Lady Booby’s horrified reaction to Joseph’s protestations
of “virtue” approximates the time she spent before responding—two minutes.
Such a passage constitutes the novelistic equivalent of the one-shot sequence in
the cinema, generally characterized by a strict isochrony between the duration
of the shot and the presumed duration of the fictive event.
The occasional attempts, within the fiction film, to establish a strict
congruence between story and discourse time—notably in such films as Rope,
High Noon, Cleo from 5 to 7—constitute anomalies within the tradition, and
are often obliged to “cheat” (as in the case of the final half-hour of Cleo, for
example). Even the case of the one-shot sequence is more complex than at first
appears. Apart from the perhaps spurious example of a single continuous shot
showing the turning pages of a calendar or the rapid advance of a clock, one
might cite a film such as The Travelling Players, in which a single continuous
shot embraces two historical periods. As a fixed camera frames a provincial
square, the costumed players representing one era withdraw and are replaced
by costumed players representing another, with no change of shot. Woody
Allen achieves a similar effect in Stardust Memories. We see young Sandy
Bates, ina Superman costume, receiving a gift from Dorrie. He runs off-screen,
as the camera stays fixed on Dorrie, only to return as the adult Sandy Bates. A
single continuous shot, in other words, has evoked the passage of several
decades.
Literary and filmic storytellers enjoy complete freedom to play with the
 The Genre of Self-Consciousness 143

temporal coordinates of their stories; they can vary the proportion between
referential time and discursive textual time at will. Genette sums up the possible
variations in the novel as ranging from what he calls the “infinite speed of
ellipsis” to the slowed motion of descriptive pause. He offers a schematic
summary of four alternatives which form part of the conventional decorum of
novelistic tempo: pause, in which discursive time elapses but story time does
not; scene, in which discursive and story time are identical; swmmary, in which
story time exceeds discursive time; and ellipsis, in which story time elapses but
discursive time does not. He notes, finally, the possibility of a fifth possible
relation, in which discourse time exceeds story time—<‘a sort of scene in slow-
motion”—which he excludes because of its virtual nonexistence within the
literary tradition.
‘The cinema, for its part, enjoys special advantages in this area. It can
deploy all the “normal” variations between story and discourse time available
to any narrative medium. The relationship can vary from extreme
compression—the two hours of Space Odyssey spanning millennia of human
evolution—to rough equivalence—the two hours of verbal traffic of My
Dinner with André corresponding to a plausible duration of a dinner
conversation—to a kind of dilation whereby discourse time far outstrips story
time, as in the oft-cited Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, which “stretches” a
split-second of story-time into a half-hour offilmic discourse. At the same time,
film is equipped with slow and accelerated motion, effects which can be only
metaphorically emulated in a verbal medium. Film can be slowed down
through undercranking and speeded up through overcranking. Time-lapse
photography can make a day pass in seconds. Jerky animation effects can be
obtained through frame-by-frame shooting. The saccadic slow-motion
sequences which dot Godard’s Every Man for Himself demonstrate the
possibility of a polyrhythmic, variable-speed cinema, a possibility largely
denied to poetry and the novel.
Although Genette claims that a relation in which narrative discourse time
exceeds story time—“a sort of scene in slow motion”—is virtually unknown in
literature, Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert complains that literature is always
slow when compared to the cinema. He laments the prodding deliberateness of
prose fiction, with its congenital incapacity to seize moments in their lightning
simultaneity. Gleefully relating his wife’s providential death by car crash, he
deplores having to put “the impact of an instantaneous vision into a sequence
of words,” whose “physical accumulation on the page impairs the actual flash,
the sharp unity of impression.”” ,
Although Genette finds authentic “pause” quite rare in the novel, it seems
that both novelists and filmmakers can pretend to “freeze” time if they so
desire. Cervantes leaves Don Quixote and the Biscayan poised for battle,
swords in the air and with ferocious mien, in a combat eternally frozen and
144 The Genre of Self-Consciousness

eternally in progress, in what amounts to a narrative freeze-frame. The device

recalls Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress, where figures are satirically caught in
bizarre and compromising postures, their hands deep in other people’s pockets
or bodices. René Clair’s Paris Qui Dort (1923) structures an entire film around
such Hogarthian freeze-frames. Its story concerns a mad scientist whose
mechanical ray paralyzes whomever it touches, freezing the pickpccket in mid-
flight with the just-picked wallet, and petrifying the unfaithful wife in flagrant
délit, freezing her in almost Dantean fashion in the arms of her lover. Chris
Marker’s La Jetée tells of a man catapulted into a new space-time continuum,
trying to retrieve a lost childhood image, the film consisting of a succession of
frozen timeless moments.
While Humbert Humbert, who has only words to play with, lusts after the
cinema’s “fantastic simultaneousness,” he might also envy its potential for
nonsimultaneousness, its capacity for mingling apparently contradictory times
and temporalities. Film can deploy temporalities simply not available to any
purely linguistic medium. Each of its tracks—moving image, phonetic sound,
noises, music, writing—can potentially develop an autonomous temporality
entering into complex relations with the other tracks. A quoted piece of music,
respected in its integral continuity, can “accompany” a discontinuous or
elliptical sequence. One of the problems in the formulation of Metz’ “grande
syntagmatique” is precisely its failure to take the temporality of the nonimage
tracks into account. The classification of the opening segment of Adieu
Phillipine as a “bracket syntagma,” without clear temporal development, for
example, ignores the clear temporal development of the diegetic and often on-
screen music which plays throughout the segment. Dialogue continuity,
similarly, can play against the continuity of the image track. In Sullivan’s
Travels, Joel MacCrea tells Veronica Lake, as they’re being stopped by
highway policemen, not to worry because “there’s nothing they can do.” The
next shot shows them locked up injail, as Veronica Lake asks: “What did you
say?” and he answers: “I said there’s absolutely nothing they.can do!” The
spatial discontinuity of the image track, then, is coupled with the apparent
continuity of the dialogue, in such a way as to better convey the contradiction
between Sullivan’s claims and his real situation. Godard, as we shall see in our
discussion of Numéro Deux, orchestrates the temporalities of the diverse
tracks with even greater audaciousness.

Tempo in Film and Novel

Fielding’s claim that he treats only “matters of consequence” and passes over
trivia implies that the artist exercises control over the tempo of the story. The
conventional expectation, in both literature and the cinema, is that discursive
time will be proportional to the intrinsic narrative importance of the event
 “

The Genre of Self-Consciousness 145

being recounted. We expect only key events and only key aspects of those
events. Literary narrative, however, has undergone steady redefinition of the
notion of what is “key” in a story. Emma Bovary’s desperately suffocating
“heures des repas” would not have been considered key until Flaubert made
them key, as Auerbach so effectively shows in analyzing Flaubert’s use of the
imperfect. We would scarcely expect Balzac to describe his characters’
masturbatory or defecatory fantasies, but we are not surprised when post-
Joycean novelists do, for Joyce annexed the territory of psychic trivia as a
legitimate subject for literature. Between the Odyssey as recounted in 41 days
and 24 books and the Odyssey as told by Joyce in one day and hundreds of
pages, literary narrative has suffered myriad sea-changes in its temporal
conventions.
In mainstream cinema, on the other hand, the conventions of narrative
tempo have remained fairly archaic. The assumption that films should
“entertain” has prevented commercial cinema from tampering too audaciously
with habitual notions of what constitutes an acceptably marketable tempo. The
subversion of these conventions has come mainly from the avant-garde or from
filmmakers associated with socially oppressed groups. The strictly observed
linear time of Andy Warhol’s Empire—460 minutes of static shots of the
Empire State Building taken overnight and into dawn—equates the referential
and the discursive in a radically provocative way. Hollis Frampton,
meanwhile, tampers not only with the temporal conventions of filmic discourse
but also with the conventions of projection. His planned 36-hour film cycle
Magellan was intended to be projected over a period of 371 days—a full year
plus three-day prologue and epilogue—with a part of the film screened every
day, and with longer films slated for special days ofthe year like equinoxes and
solstices. Socially oppressed groups, meanwhile, have felt the need of
impressing their films and their audiences with a different sense of lived
duration. The slow pace of certain third world films such as Nelson Pereira dos
Santos’ Barren Lives (1963) or Haile Gerima’s Harvest: 3000 Years (1975)
mimetically evoke the lived pace of a peasant milieu. Their unusually slow
rhythm comes as a kind of cultural shock to the spectator accustomed to the
swift pace and saturation of incident typical of conventional fiction films.
Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,
meanwhile, condenses three days of referential time into three hours and
twenty minutes of discursive time in its portrayal of the life of a middle-class
Belgian widow. Akerman allows her protagonist the time to complete her
habitual actions—each step in the preparation of the morning coffee, each step
in the preparation of a dinner, each step of washing the dishes and placing them
in drawers and cupboards—in such a way as to force the spectator to reflect on
the nature of time as experienced by the Jeanne Dielman’s of the world. The
relatively strict fidelity to the tempo and lived duration of an oppressed life
forms part of the film’s meaning.
146 The Genre of Self-Consciousness

For the viewer conditioned by commercial fiction films, an event seems

complete if its “key” parts are shown within an expected period of time. A
dinner sequence, typically, consists of a few establishing shots of the diners
sitting down to their meal, some shots and counter shots conveying some
intensely meaningful dialogue, and a concluding shot of the diners rising from
the table. Louis Malle eschews this cinematic foreshortening in My Dinner
with André by respecting the plausible “real time” of a dinner shared by friends.
On another level, however, his film does not really question the temporal
decorum of cinematic fiction. It merely displaces the fictive intensity, usually
parcelled out over image, dialogue and sound, onto the dialogue track. What
becomes “key” is the conversation, a play of minds and words so
preternaturally charming, so unmarred by banality or pause, so reminiscent of
the philosophical dialogues of a Voltaire or a Diderot, that we “forgive” the
film for its lack of conventional dramatic action and its literal time.
Questions of tempo in both the film and the novel are more subtle than a
mere matter of proportion between the importance of the event and the time
allotted to its treatment. In the novel, perceived duration intimately depends on
such minute questions as syntax—truncated Hemingwayesque or convoluted
Jamesian?—density of information, and even euphoniousness. One might say
that Fielding’s periodic sentences slow down novelistic time for comically
aggressive purposes. Stylistic flights and essayistic digressions, similarly,
inevitably retard the flow of narrative. One might view the novel as progressing
historically toward an ever more subtle temporalization. Whereas description
once constituted a kind of halt in the narrative, a moment when the temporal
concatenations of the verbal signifiers ceased to refer to a temporal relation,
signifying only spatial coexistence, Flaubert, recounting Charles Bovary’s first
encounter with Emma, managed to temporalize description. His style speeds
up mimetically at moments of excitement. It waltzes with Emma and excites
itself to metaphorical climax in the carriage at Rouen. Thus the novel seems to
tend toward the incorporation of Bergsonian durée, to approximate more and
more the psychic “feel” of time.
In the cinema, likewise, questions of tempo cannot be reduced to some
simplistic proposition between event and treatment. Matters of cinematic
tempo are inextricably bound up with questions of style and editing. The tempo
varies with the frequency of the shots, the amount of variation in angle and
focal length, and the complexity of the soundtrack. The “speed” of even a static
shot depends on the density of information conveyed by the shot. A shot ofa
couple riding in an automobile will seem more rapidly paced if we see passing
countryside. The perceived duration of such a sequence depends as well on the
soundtrack. Complete silence will seem slow; the purr of an engine will speed
things up; and music will charm the spectator into forgetting the passage of
time. The point is that cinematographic time is a complete fabrication. Even
 The Genre of Self-Consciousness 147

the apparently literal equivalence of the one-shot sequence can cheat by

crowding staged and rehearsed events into an unnaturally short period of time.
But more typically, time is manipulated, stretched and condensed in the
ordinary processes of editing. Diegetic moments are artificially prolonged
through faux raccords. The celebrated baby carriage in Potemkin teeters on the
edge of the step for what seems an eternity, and Eisenstein lengthens the Odessa
steps to a point that Odessa residents would scarcely recognize them.
Hollywood musicals, similarly, prolong certain moments in a choreographic
sequence by collating various takes of the same episode. This kind of
manipulation, admittedly, is usually rendered invisible through cutting on
movement, adroit variation of camera angle, and the continuity of the music on
the soundtrack. Only with self-conscious artists is the manipulation made
visible.

Titles and Intertitles

Henry Fielding in Joseph Andrews sheds light on what he calls one of the
mysteries of the novelistic trade—the practice of dividing works into books and
chapters. He likens the spaces between books to an inn or resting place for the
reader, and the contents prefixed to the chapters to inscriptions over the gate of
the inn. He cites classical precedent to justify his practice and then, ina sudden
deflating metaphor, compares dividing books to a butcher jointing his meat.
The analogy is revelatory of the artificiality of such divisions, for a steer does
not naturally apportion itself into neat pieces of shank and rump. Chapter titles
in Fielding are often symptomatic of this unnaturalness. Both he and Cervantes
preface a series of chapters with variations on “in which the history is
continued,” “further continued,” “even further continued,” and so forthin such
a way as to mock the very idea of novelistic consecution. This play with titles
calls attention to the joints, to the temporal architecture and plumbing of
fiction, instead of using titles as more or less invisible binders in a narrative
continuity. Fielding’s titles mix spatial notations—“containing five pieces of
paper”—with temporal ones—“containing the time of a year”—in such a way
as to make us reflect on the complex interaction of spatiality and temporality in
the novel.
The cinema of the silent period often exploited the unreality of titles and
the temporal conventions behind them. Silent film, deprived of the more
complete mimesis afforded by synchronous sound, was in some ways more
receptive to anti-illusionism. Keaton often pokes fun at the very gratuitousness
ofthe titles that interrupt silent film narrative. In The Navigator (1924), Buster
casts an anchor. A title, projected for approximately ten seconds, informs us:
“ten seconds later,” followed bya shot ofthe anchor floating to the surface. The
only conceivable usefulness of such a title is to explain a temporal ellipse; it
148 The Genre of Self-Consciousness

becomes absurd in a situation of straight continuity. In The Paleface (1922) we

see Buster in statuesque embrace with his Indian bride. A title then alerts us toa
time shift: “two years later.” The shot which follows shows us the couple again,
identically dressed, in the same position and in the same setting. They pause for
breath, and then resume their embrace. The sequence beautifully highlights the
nonequivalence of story time and discourse time, for we know that even lovers,
with their special respiratory patterns, cannot hold their breath for two years,
any more than Don Quixote could hold his sword in the air while Cervantes
looked for supplementary sources.
Christian Metz has suggested that just as the novel required something
longer than the word and shorter than the book itself, and thus came up with
the chapter, so the fiction film needed a unit longer than the shot and shorter
than the film itself and thus came up with the sequence. As if to illustrate the
parallel, Godard apes novelistic practice in Pierrot le Fou by dividing it into
chapters. To point up the unreality of such divisions, Godard has chapter seven
follow chapter eight. The chapter titles, furthermore, have neither parallelism
nor coherence. They mix numbers (chapter 12) with general rubrics
(“Désespoir”) and plot resumés (“Nous traversons la France”). Others
represent literary allusions (“Une Saison en Enfer”) while others are
remarkable only for their uselessness. The gratuitous consecution of “chapitre
suivant” is followed by the even more gratuitous “chapitre suivant sans titre.”
Godard seems to be heralding the awkwardness, the arbitrariness of divisions
in art generally, whether it be the frame in painting, acts and scenes in the
theatre, chapters in novels, or sequences in films.
Many Godard films superimpose what Genette calls “normal sequence,”
in which story and discourse proceed in an isochronous manner, with more
“achronic” schemas. 2 or 3 Things I Know about Her combines a “day-in-the-
life” chronology familiar from documentaries with a digressive treatise on
urban life and the nature of filmmaking. The title of Weekend, meanwhile, calls
attention to what we assume to be the story time of the film, an impression
reinforced by the succession of disconcertingly literal temporal notations at the
beginning of the film—“Saturday, 10 A.M.,” “Saturday, 11 A.M.,” and so
forth. But gradually the film begins to explode literal time, finally alluding toa
wide spectrum of historical events. The title “One Tuesday in the 100 Years
War” precedes a L’Age d’Or-like shot of an earthworm. Other titles make
whimsically sophomoric reference to literature—“One Friday Far from
Robinson and Mantes la Jolie”; and “Light in August,” or to the months in the
Republican calendar—“Thermidor,” “Pluvoise,” and “Vende Miaire”: or to
months heavy with historical or cinematic resonance: “September Massacre,”
“October Language,” and “From the French Revolution to UNR Weekends.”
The cannibalistic finales lead to the ultimate title: “Fin de histoire,” with its
ambiguity in French, suggesting either “end of the story” or an apocalyptic
“end of history,” followed by “Fin de Cinéma.”
 -

The Genre of Self-Consciousness 149

The Dialogue of Author/Reader/Spectator

Reflexive artists often foreground the narrating instance, and in so doing call
attention to the reader or spectator. They favor the I-You of “discourse” to the
He-She-It of “histoire.” Rather than narratorless fiction, where no one speaks
and “events seem to tell themselves,”’” reflexive fiction models its discourse on
human conversation, from which it borrows its manner of expression.
“Discourse” is dialogic by definition; its “I” implies immediately a “You” to
whom the utterance is directed. The presence of the reader or spectator is
inscribed and signaled in the text, shifting the interest from the diegesis to what
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith calls the “intersubjective textual relation,” which
comes to form a kind of parallel plot. Wayne Booth describes the process as it
operates in Tom Jones:

If we read straight through all of the seemingly gratuitous appearances by the narrator,
leaving out the story of Tom, we discoverarunning account of growing intimacy between the
narrator and the reader, an account with a kind of plot of its own and a separate
dénouement.'!

Fielding himself underlines the relationship by the metaphor ofthe voyage, on

which the reader and the narrator are traveling companions, the real voyage
being not so much the picaresque one of the literary personage but rather the
literary one of reader and writer.
Filmmakers as well have created texts in which the ongoing dialogue
between the implied author and the spectator is as important as the story itself.
Max Ophuls’ La Ronde (1950) provides a classic example. The “host” of the
film (Anton Wolbrook) is clearly an authorial stand-in. At the outset of the
film, he introduces himself directly to the audience:

You are probably wondering what my part in the story is. Author? Compére? A passer-by? I
am...well, I could be anyone among you. I am the answer to your wish to know
everything. ... I see in the round, as it were, and that allows me to be everywhere at the same
time... everywhere.

The host’s ubiquity and omniscience, it becomes clear, derive from his special
relationship to the magical powers of the cinematic apparatus. At diverse
points he passes before studio equipment and film-making paraphernalia. We
see him manipulating a spotlight and turning the crank of his metaphoric
carousel. His speeches stress his power to evoke history, effect changes of
season, pander for his characters, alter lighting, and summon music. At one
point, we see him in an editing room where he unrolls a strip of film, examines
it, and then physically cuts out what we take to be a sexually explicit scene.
150 The Genre of Self-Consciousness

The off-screen narrator of Godard’s Band of Outsiders displays the

amiable omniscience of a Cervantes or a Fielding, and makes precisely the
kinds of authorial interventions that they might have made. The narrator—the
voice is Godard’s—provides plot summaries, draws metaphors, points morals,
tells tales within the general tale, and promises future episodes. At one point,
Godard spoofs a device dating back to the days of Griffith—the practice of
furnishing a few lines of narrative synopsis for the benefit of latecomers. The
narrator makes a deliberately graceless intrusion about 10 minutes into the
film: “Here’s a plot summary for you latecomers.” The summary, perversely, is
inaccurate and misleading, as if Godard were scolding the spectator for even
caring about the bare bones of plot.
The narrator also shows off his omniscience by precisely detailing the
innermost thoughts of his characters, often in tenderly poetic terms which seem
incongruous in a story about petty gangsters. As Arthur dies interminably on
screen, the narrator informs us that Arthur’s last thought was of Odile, whom
he remembered as resembling the legendary bird of the Indians who never stops
flying. Only an omniscient narrator could penetrate his hero’s thoughts at such
a moment, and only a self-conscious one would place sucha recherché simile in
the mind of an agonizing hoodlum. The narrator makes his final intervention
as the two remaining hoodlums, Franz and Odile, make their getaway from
France. As a globe of the world revolves before us, the author-narrator tells us
that his next picture will be in technicolor and will recount the adventures of
Franz and Odile in Brazil. Apart from spoofing serial formula movies, this final
promise from the narrator reminds us of the self-conscious novelists, whose
very chapter titles often advertised coming features: “In which the reader will
be surprised”: “a chapter which will instruct and delight the reader.”
We hear Godard’s voice again in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, but this
time the off-screen commentaries challenge and interrogate the film text. While
some are philosophical or political in nature, many concern the specific choices
involved in making a film. They imply technical choices having to do with
sound recording (“Am I speaking too loud?”), focal length (“Am I looking from
too far or too closely?”) and so forth. The fact that the commentaries are
whispered typifies the film’s methods, for whispering obliges the spectator to
make a special effort to understand; he or she has to meet the filmmaker
halfway. A calculated under-determination obliges the coded spectator to
become hyper-critical and alert. The text is intended to be open, collaborative,
the public hopefully producing as well as consuming, or better regarding the
making and seeing of the film as different moments of the same production.
Two
Three
Things
That
About
IKnow
Her
(1967)
or

Figure
29.
132 The Genre of Self-Consciousness

The Self-Correcting Style

Self-conscious fabulists often seem incapable of telling stories straight, both in

the sense of telling them with a straight face and in the sense of telling them
linearly, sequentially. Their narratives provide comic demonstrations of Mark
Twain’s How Not to Tell a Story. Godard, for example, systematically
undermines suspense, prematurely intimates endings, and progresses by
irrelevancies. Machado de Assis, like an inept raconteur who forgets crucial
details, interrupts Dom Casmurro to correct an oversight: “... Pardon me, but
this chapter ought to have been preceded by another, in which I would have
told an incident that occurred a few weeks before, two months after Sancha had
gone away.” Machado contemplates shuffling the order of the chapters, but
decides that it would be “too great a nuisance to have to change the page
numbers.””” Sterne’s narrative in Tristram Shandy, similarly, on which much
of Machado’s work was explicitly modeled, is constantly stalled, sidetracked,
and derailed. His “choicest morsel,” concerning Uncle Toby and the widow, is
postponed until the ninth volume. And Diderot, in still another text inspired by
Tristram Shandy, perpetually digresses from the oft-promised “amours de
Jacques.”
Style in reflexive fiction is often self-correcting; it is writing “sous rature,”
Machado de Assis, for example, constantly anatomizes his own expression in
an obsessive metalinguistic dismantling of his own practice. His critical sense is
forever on the alert, ready to censure any lapse into bathos or vulgarity. The
narrator-protagonist of Dom Casmurro claims at one point that his forced
departure for Europe elicited more tears than all those shed since Adam and
Eve. Instantly regretting his hyperbole, he acknowledges the exaggeration, but
insists “it’s good to be emphatic now and then.” Whereas metaphors habitually
function as transparent conveyors of analogies, Machado often explicates or
dissects them. Rather than serve them up as finished products for
consumption, he exposes them in their process of elaboration, often proposing
metaphors only to dismiss them as less than apt: “No, that comparison won’t
do.” At times, he even enlists the reader’s aid in his quest for the right trope:
“My idea was really fixed, as fixed as... I]cannot think of anything sufficiently
fixed in this world: perhaps the moon, perhaps the pyramids of Egypt, perhaps
the late Germanic Diet. Let the reader make whatever comparison best suits
him...”'’ The text, in such instances, ceases to comport itself as a finished
corpus, evoking instead some endlessly modifiable work-in-progress. The
writing writes and rewrites itself under the reader’s eyes, and presumably with
the reader’s help. Thus Machado renders explicit a fundamental truth about
literary creation, that, as Todorov puts it, “every work, every novel, tells
through its fabric of events the story of its own creation, its own history.”"*
 The Genre of Self-Consciousness [33

In the novel At Swim-Two- Birds (1939), Flann O’Brien opens by a first-

person reflection on narrative openings: “A good book may have three
openings entirely dissimilar and interrelated only in the prescience of the
author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings” (p. 9). O’Brien
then constructs three parodic “beginnings,” none of which is literally a
beginning since they follow the narrator’s opening remarks. Woody Allen, in
Manhattan, borrows this literary device by having his narrator-protagonist
Isaac (Allen) voice different possible beginnings to the novel he is presumably
writing:

“Chapter One. He admired New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion.” Oh, no,
make that: “He-he... romanticized it all out of proportion. Now...to him...no matter
what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the
great tunes of George Gershwin.” Ahhh, now let me start this over. “Chapter One. He was
too romantic about Manhattan as he was about everything else. He thrived on the
hustle... bustle of the crowds and the traffic.”

By introducing the author and the question of authorship into the text via a
virtuoso collision of possible fictive voices, displaying variable proportions of
starstruck romanticism and disenchanted “realism,” all coinciding with
Gordon Willis’ glistening montage of Manhattan imagery, Allen sollicits the
spectator-interlocutor’s reflections on the modalities of his art.

The Indeterminate Text

Since reflexive texts inscribe the reader/spectator within their own rhetorical
space, they often perform their own hermeneutics, counseling their audience on
certain pitfalls of reading or interpretation. The interest shifts from “meaning”
to the productive interaction of reader and text. Fielding warns the reader not
to travel too rapidly through his pages, so as not to miss the “curious
productions of nature which will be observed by the slower and more accurate
reader.” Machado de Assis, echoing Fielding, remonstrates with his readers for
their impatience:

(You are in a hurry to get old, and the book goes slowly; you like straight, solid narrative and
a regular and fluent style; but this book and my style are like drunks, they stagger to the right
and to the left, they start and they stop, they mutter, they roar, they guffaw, they threaten the
sky, they slip and they fall.)'°

Machado develops a playful, semi-aggressive relationship with his

readers. Just as Godard makes fun of his public’s expectations, Machado
mocks his “obtuse readers.” In Bras Cubas, he tells his readers that they are the
worst problem with the book: “The worst defect in this book is you, dear
154 The Genre of Self-Consciousness

reader.” This direct address to the reader recalls many moments in Godard’s
films. At the beginning of Breathless, Michel, driving alone, looks directly at us
and says: “Me, I love the sea, I love the country, and I love the city. If you don’t
love the sea, if you don’t love the country, if you don’t love the city—then go
fuck youself.” Ferdinand in Pierrot le Fou, driving alone with Marianne, turns
and directly addresses the camera: “You see, that’s all they think
about...amusing themselves.” Asked whom he is speaking to, Ferdinand
answers: “To the spectators.”
Self-conscious novelists often enlist the reader’s active collaboration.
They see their texts as indeterminate, full of gaps, as schemes that need to be
filled out by the realizing acts of the reader’s imagination. Sterne halves matters
amicably with the reader, keeping the reader’s mind as busy as his own. He asks
their advice (“What would your worships have me do in this case?”) and, as
evidence of his faith in their creative powers, leaves two blank pages for the
reader, in which to paint the Widow Wadman for himself, “as like your mistress
as you can—as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you” (VI, 38).
Machado de Assis, similarly, has his narrator Dom Casmurro request the
reader’s help in locating stylistic errors, asking that readers write him so he can
correct the errors in the next edition. The same narrator tells us that he is not
disturbed by books with omissions; he simply closes his eyes and evokes
everything that was not in the book. He then invites his readers to do likewise:
“This is the way I fill in other men’s lacunae; in the same way you may fill in
mine.”’®
This fondness for textual indeterminacy anticipates, on a modest scale, the
strategies of what Umberto Eco calls “open works,” i.e., texts which grant
considerable autonomy to their readers/spectators/performers, explicitly
inviting choice and participation. Eco cites musical pieces by Berio and
Stockhausen designed to be delivered unfinished to the performer like the
components of a construction kit. Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, similarly,
proposes, instead of a conventional story, a network of verbal relationships, a
polysemic space where labyrynthian paths of possible meanings endlessly
intersect, a moving fabric of traces referring back to themselves. Calder’s
“Mobiles,” as they move in the air, continually recreate their own space and
dimensions along with the observer’s relation to them.'’ Cortazar ends each
chapter in Hopscotch with the number of another chapter the reader might
proceed with.

The Incorporation of Criticism

Literary criticism is intrinsic to the fictional world of the self-conscious novel.

In Don Quixote, in Tom Jones, in Dom Casmurro literary criticism does not
constitute an alien intrusion but rather a dialectical moment within the process
 The Genre of Self-Consciousness 1ia)0)

of generation of the text. In the cinema, no one better illustrates the possibilities
of the dialectical interplay of creation and critique than Godard, whose entire
oeuvre constitutes a sustained inquiry into the nature of cinematic language, an
inquiry made explicit in the myriad passages of film criticism that dot his work.
Samuel Fuller appears in Pierrotle Fou to offer his definition of the cinema asa
battleground of hate, action, violence, and death, “in a word, emotion.” Fritz
Lang, Paul Laval, and Jeremiah Prokosch debate the nuances of cinematic
adaptation in Contempt. Le Gai Savoir constitutes a veritable Discourse on
Cinematographic Method, while Every Man for Himself speculates on the
relations between cinema and television. In short, just as Cervantes and
Fielding counterpoint their narrative with expositions of literary theory, so
Godard makes the critical act an integral part of filmic creation.
In 8 1/2, Fellini deploys film criticism within the text to amusing ends. He
places in the mouth of the insufferable (and highly unphotogenic) critic-
collaborator Daumier—whose very name evokes both realism and
caricature—all the strictures that critics might address to 8 //2 itself: that it
_ lacks narrative structure and philosophical premise, that it shows ambivalence
toward the Catholic church, that it displays all the vices of the avant-garde and
none of its virtues. Fellini’s surrogate Guido takes vengeance on Daumier by
condemning him, at least in the privacy of his imagination, to death by
hanging, while Fellini himself undercuts him as director by 1) including in 8 //2
all the sequences that Daumier would have excised, and 2) by commanding the
camera to abandon Daumier whenever the critic begins his dreary monologues.
Thus Fellini foresees and disarms any deconstructions the critics might
propose.
Woody Allen deploys a similar proleptic strategy in Stardust Memories, a
film clearly indebted to 8 7/2. Both films are about a filmmaker in the process
of making a film, and in both cases the filmmaker is in emotional and
intellectual crisis. Both films are structured by a constant shuttle between past
and present, fantasy and reality, film and films-within-the-film. Allen casts
himself as Sandy Bates, a celebrity-director who reluctantly attends a
retrospective in his honor, where he has to listen to the fawning praise of his
fans and the inane censure of his critics. The film inventories all the conceivable
charges that might be leveled at Allen’s oeuvre in general and at Stardust
Memories in particular..The studio executives who screen what is retroactively
revealed to be a clip from “Suppression,” Bates’ latest film, find it “horrible,” “a
disgrace,” and “pretentious.” Indeed, most of the charges that were in fact
leveled at Stardust Memories are pronounced by these studio executives:

Walsh: He’s pretentious. His filming style is too fancy. His insights are shallow and morbid.
They try to document their private suffering and fob it off as art.

Taylor: What does he have to suffer about? Doesn’t the man know he’s got the greatest gift
that anyone could have? The gift of laughter?
(OR6])
IsnpaDdlg
Sal4ouapy
auNnsIy
‘OE
Sere

a
 The Genre of Self-Consciousness 157,

Sandy Bates’ fans, meanwhile, vacillate between naive adoration—“It’s so

deep. I mean it’s... All that stuff about life and... how we should, everybody
should love each other, I mean, you know, he’s telling us heavy, original
things”—and vindictive rage—“Cop-out artist!”...“Why do all comedians
turn out to be sentimental bores?” Even the “naive” spectators, as embodied by
an elderly man speaking in Yiddish-accented English have their complaints:
“For this he makes a living? I like a melodrama, a musical comedy witha plot.”
The critics, apparently lacking all sense of irony, proceeded to make all the
mistaken interpretative moves anticipated by the film itself, while dismissing
the satire on the critics as a neurotic defense-mechanism. Like Bates’ critics,
they found Stardust Memories derivative, self-indulgent, and unfunny. The
theme of derivativeness was evoked even by the titles of many of the journalistic
reviews—“Woody Doesn’t Rhyme with Federico” (Sarris), “Inferiors: Woody
Allen hides behind Fellini” (Schiff), and “Woody’s 8 1/2 Wrongs” (Shalit). The
charge seems especially ironic in the context of a film which so clearly
acknowledges its debts, especially to Fellini and Sturges. The initial sequence,
for example, operates on a principle of systematic degradation from its
prototype—the initial tunnel sequence from 8 //2. In both, the male
protagonists are trapped within vehicles in a nightmarish world marked by
selective nondiegetic silence, but Woody Allen’s owlish face substitutes for
Marcello Mastroianni’s handsome one, an old train replaces a new car, anda
Jersey dump takes the place of the Mediterranean seashore. The charge of
derivativeness, in any case, misses the point. Allen has always focused attention
on what we have called the intertext, a fact made obvious already in his titles:
Play It Again, Sam evokes Michael Curtiz and Humphrey Bogart, A
Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy renders homage to Shakespeare and
Bergman. When asked if the mad-scientist routine in one of the films-within-
the-film was an homage to Vincent Price, the Tony Roberts character answers:
“No, we just stole it outright.” Woody Allen does not hide his borrowings;
rather, he suggests that such borrowing is universal, a fundamental part ofthe
process of creation.
Apart from the more conventional objections to Stardust Memories, there
were two which seemed more emotionally charged. The two objections might
be summarized very simply as 1) the critics dislike Woody Allen/Sandy Bates;
and 2) Woody Allen/Sandy Bates despises the critics and is therefore
despicable. The two arguments are of course connected as a kind of emotional
non sequitur quite common in everyday social life: he dislikes me therefore |
hate him. We see this illogic in its pure, almost childlike form in David Denby’s
review in New York: “Woody’s Poison-Pen Letter.” (The title of the article
assumes that the film constitutes a direct communication between author and
spectator /critic.) Denby begins by establishing that Woody Allen/ Sandy Bates
does not like us:
158 The Genre of Self-Consciousness

If you have ever admired a film of Woody Allen’s, you are a creep. And if you've admired all
of them, you are a sycophantic little bug, a person without class, self-respect, manners or
style... As for me—a critic—I’m all of these things and worse. We’re all creeps, all of us who
admire Woody Allen."®

In the very next paragraph, Denby responds to what he takes as an attack on

himself with massive retaliation:

Stardust Memories is a poisonously bad movie—incoherent, madly self-important, often

boring—and the strongest emotion in it is disgust for other people.’”

This response to the film seems anchored in a double fallacy, one rooted in
emotions, the other in misconceived critical categories. The criticism of the film
is based on the equation of Woody Allen/Sandy Bates. Since Sandy Bates is
despicable—itself a debatable point—Woody Allen is also despicable.
Although Bates is not without biographical links to Woody Allen, he is also a
character, even if that character is played by Woody Allen himself. Here a
responsible criticism must distinguish between a number of distinct, albeit
occasionally overlapping, entities: 1) the biographical Woody Allen, about
whom most of us know little beyond the evidence of journalism and films; 2)
the Woody Allen persona, a cumulative construct based on Allen’s comic
monologues and diverse film roles; 3) the character Sandy Bates, in some ways
reminiscent of 1) and 2) but also a character depicted as on the verge of a mental
breakdown—the Bates name suggesting perhaps a family resemblance to
another filmic Bates who “let his hostility escape”; and 4) the authorial
instance, not only the Woody Allen insofar as he directs (rather like Proust’s
“autre moi” that writes) but also his collaborators and their collective intertext.
This conflation of diverse entities is also foreseen in Stardust Memories itself.
Since Sandy Bates has made “funny movies,” Daisy expects him to be
personally funny, and is surprised to find him “kind of a depressive.” And an
aspiring actor tells Bates’ “I love you,” and then corrects himself: “I mean I love
your films.” Many critics of Stardust Memories proved themselves incapable
of making the distinction.
The very violence of the language employed against Allen’s film—
“vicious,” “mean-spirited,” “vain”—suggests that we are dealing with what
Christian Metz calls “bad object” criticism. Building on Melanie Klein’s
analysis of the role of objects in the infant’s fantasy life—their tendency to
project libidinal or destructive feelings onto certain privileged objects such as
the breast— Metz speaks ofthe critical tendency to confuse the actual film, with
its complex weaving of multiple codes, with the film such as it has pleased or
displeased. The critics’ hysterical language of Manichean denunciation—“bad
film!”—is symptomatic of a neurosis which belongs to the critics more than it
belongs to Woody Allen, who from all appearances knows that he is neurotic.
 The Genre of Self-Consciousness 159

Reflexive films have often been “bad objects” for critics, who resent their
sabotaging of the conventional pleasures of illusion and identification. It is
surely no accident that Woody Allen’s most widely despised film is also his
most self-conscious and avant-gardist. The critics complained that “the
characters do not come alive” and “the big scenes never take off,” apparently
failing to notice that the film is consciously built on a principle of systematic
interruption familiar from the self-conscious tradition. Sandy Bates’ argument
with Isobel is interrupted by a publicity-seeking Armenian; his first kiss with
Daisy is interrupted by his relatives; even his one-liners are interrupted. At the
same time, the film deploys avant-garde strategies familiar from reflexive
films—a constant shuttle between past and present, memory and fantasy a la 8
1/2; the scrambling of spatial and temporal categories a la Marienbad; the
sustained utilization of jump-cuts a la Breathless; and the metacritical
discussion of aesthetic questions a la Contempt. The same strategies tolerated
or even praised in Allen’s fiction and essays are condemned in Stardust
Memories. Foster Hirsch, who condemns Stardust Memories as “narrow,”
“parochial,” reflective of “meanspiritedness” and “misanthropy,” praises in
Allen’s Side Effects the same techniques he has condemned in Stardust
Memories: ““Woody’s narrators are continually interrupting themselves,
straying from the subject, meandering off on tangents of a steadily increasing
delirium, as parentheses within parentheses slide into a miasma of absurdist
irrelevancies.””° It is only because of the differential expectations applied to
literature and the cinema that the disruptive techniques lauded in prose fiction
are rejected as hostile and self-indulgent in film. Modernist and reflexive
strategies, accepted in literature, remain, at least for the mainstream of
journalistic critics, anathema in the cinema.

Reflexive Adaptations: Tom Jones, Lolita, The French Lieutenant’s

Woman

Many of the cinematic adaptations of self-conscious novels, including the more

successful ones, often flounder on precisely this point. While they incorporate
certain reflexive devices, they do not metalinguistically dissect their own
practice or include critical discourse within the text itself. Tony Richardson’s
filmic adaptation of Tom Jones, for example, is frequently cited as a model
transposition of the codes of reflexivity from novel to film, in which
complicitous winks to the spectator “cinematize” Fielding’s direct address to
his “dear reader,” and accelerated motion and freeze-frames call attention to
cinematic mediation. Just as Fielding makes parodic allusion to his literary
antecedents, it is claimed, so Richardson alludes to his filmic antecedents
through archaic devices (especially wipes) and silent film sequences.
Richardson’s narrator, however, functions largely as a classical off-screen
160 The Genre of Self-Consciousness

narrator; in no case does he address questions of literary (or filmic) criticism or

theory. The narrator’s discourse, and the stylistic devices, are consistently
subordinated to the diegesis rather than forming a metatextual commentary on
it.
Karel Reisz’s version of The French Lieutenant's Woman retreats from
the reflexivity of the John Fowles source novel in a similar fashion. Instead of
Fowles’ analytical shuttle between Victorian plot and a metacommentary on
the nature of Victorian fiction, Reisz, with the collaboration of Harold Pinter
and the apparent approval of Fowles himself, intercuts a Victorian and a
modern love story, with the former becoming a kind of film-within-the-film.
The flimmaking apparatus is metonymically evoked by a single clapperboard
placed in front of the lens in the opening sequence, when we discover that Meryl
Streep is playing both Sarah, the French Lieutenant’s woman, and Anna, the
actress playing Sarah in a film. While Fowles’ characters exist in the context of
a writer ruminating over his prerogatives, it is appropriate that the transmuted
characters of the adaptation should live in the context of the production of a
film. But as Fowles himself recognizes in the “Foreword”to the book, “all those
long paragraphs of description, historical digression, character analysis and
the rest that the vast portmanteau of novel form was especially evolved to
contain...” had to be crushed into the “small valise” of the fiction film.7!
While Reisz’ and Pinter’s solutions are ingenious, and effective in their
own terms, they tend to push the film in the direction of naturalism. Fowles’
anachronistic references to Victorian science and political theory are largely
discarded. More seriously, there is no equivalent for the authorial persona of
Fowles’ narrator, costumed in Victorian frock and beard, sharing a train
compartment with his protagonist, comparing two eras and constrasting the
conventions of Victorian fiction with those of the French New Novel, initiating
us into the theoretical codes and technical secrets of his craft. The film has
neither a writer reflecting on writing nor a filmmaker reflecting on filmmaking.
Instead we are offered a kind of bifurcated romance, two parallel love stories
set in distinct referential time-frames, which finally tend to merge in the mind of
the spectator. Although the two stories beautifully play off the trendily modern
against the romanticized archaic, and although the transitions between them
are often brilliant, their interaction merely generates a kind of saving
ambiguity, a touch of Pirandellism, rather than a more thoroughgoing
subversion of referentiality.
The mainstream fiction film’s relative impermeability to reflexivity also
explains the partial failure of Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Lolita (1962).
While the novel constantly flaunts its own status as linguistic artifact, the film is
largely cast in the illusionistic mould, presenting rounded characters in
plausible settings through a self-effacing style. While the book is a veritable
palimpsest of parodies—of Proust, Poe, Dostoyevsky, Sade—Kubrick opted
The
French
Lieutena
Woman
(1981)

Figure
31.
162 The Genre of Self-Consciousness

to downplay style in a text in which style is of the essence. The film is

intermittently parodic—the homage to Chaplin’s tussle with a bed in One
A.M., the allusion to Kubrick’s own Spartacus, the disorienting direct cut to
The Curse of Frankenstein—but never so consistently or effectively as the
novel. Most of the Nabokovian wit is displaced onto Peter Sellers as Clare
Quilty, for Sellers’ shape-shifting capacity to mimic personages as diverse as
Gabby Hayes and T.S. Eliot makes him an ambulatory intertext, a body of
quotations whose very modus operandi is parodic in the best Nabokovian
sense.
Nabokov’s screenplay, of which Kubrick used but a small portion, is
rather more audacious, although Nabokov himself recognizes in its preface
that the “author’s goal of infinite fidelity” may be a “producer’s ruin.” The
screenplay includes a cameo role for Nabokov himself, a Hitchcockian touch
that recalls his guest appearance in his own Despair, and which would have
constituted the filmic equivalent of his anagrammatic presence in Lolita as
Vivian Darkbloom. The Nabokov screenplay also expands the role of the
pedantic D. John Ray, developing a constant interplay between Ray presenting
Humbert’s notes and Humbert presenting himself. The screenplay is more
prone to interruption and dedramatization. Charlotte’s fateful car crash is
treated less dramatically, for example, by means of a quick cut to traffic
policemen examining diagrams of the accident, a narrative dislocation which
visually translates the nonchalantly perverse syntax of Humbert’s account of
his wife’s death.
Lolita is, among other things, a fine work offilm and literary criticism. But
Kubrick fails to exploit the cinematic references (lovingly inventoried by
Alfred Appel, Jr. in Nabokov’s Dark Cinema) in the novel; the envy of cinema’s
“fantastic simultaneousness”; the description of Humbert himself as a
“handsome hunk of movieland manhood” or Charlotte as a “weak solution of
Marlene Dietrich”; the advice proffered to any future filmic translator of his
work (“If you want to make a movie of my book, have one ofthose faces gently
melt into my own, while I look”); and the incisive discussions of Lolita’s generic
tastes. Indeed, Nabokov shows himself to be a brilliant genre critic. He artfully
details the formulaic visuals of westerns: “the rearing horse, the spectacular
stampede, the pistol thrust through the slivered windowpane, the stupendous
fistfight, the crashing mountain ofdusty old-fashioned furniture, the table used
as a weapon, the timely somersault, the pinned hand still groping for the
dropped bowie knife. ...” He describes musicals, meanwhile, as a “grief-proof
sphere of existence where from death and truth were banned” and
“underworlders” as fostering a “robust atmosphere of incompetent
marksmanship.””
While Nabokov constantly highlights the verbal factitiousness of his text,
Kubrick finds no filmic equivalent for this device. While the novel frequently
(2961) DOT ~— “7 aANBIY
164 The Genre of Self- Consciousness

violates the reader’s expectations, the film rarely does. The novel consistently
disorients its reader, especially as to the degree of “sincerity”of the text, while
the film almost never does (the sudden cut to the drive-in horror film
constituting a rare exception). While the novel systematically develops
contradictions between what is being related (for example, Charlotte’s death)
and the tone and style in which it is being related, the film is, in the main,
stylistically homogenous. While the novel conveys eroticism through hilarious
indirection, applying sexual language to nonsexual events and vice versa, the
film conveys eroticism largely through love scenes (as explicit as censorship
would then allow), through point-of-view editing, and through shots of
characters’ whispering (“Did I do that!” Quilty responds to Charlotte’s
whispered insinuations). In short, Kubrick substitutes three-dimensional
illusionism and stylistic continuity for the recklessly flamboyant virtuoso anti-
illusionism of the book. One almost wishes that a later Kubrick, the Kubrick of
Strangelove and especially of Clockwork Orange, might take another try at
Nabokov’s novel.

The Multiplicity of Styles

Reflexive art constantly reminds us of the multiplicity of styles available to an

artist. For Cervantes and Fielding, merely stating the time offers the pretext for
stylistic variations. When Henry Fielding suddenly deflates an elaborate epic
simile with a vulgar “translation” into everyday English, we are made aware
that even the most mundane facts can be recounted in any number of styles. In
a sense, anti-illusionist works do not concern their ostensible subjects but are
rather stylistic exercises in Queneau’s sense. In Exercises de Style Queneau
offers a kind of transformational grammar of literary possibilities. He
composes stylistic variations on a story supposed constant—a trival anecdote
about an exchange of insults on a bus and a subsequent coincidental meeting—
successively telling the story as a comedy, as a sonnet, as an Official letter, and
as a telegram; then in negations, questions, exclamations; then in words of
Latin origin, Greek origin; then as hai kai and free verse. The same story,
subjected to generic, rhetorical, and etymological transformations, emerges
different in each case. Such literary calisthenics, whimsical as they seem, make
an important point about the nature of literary representation—that there can
be no reality unmediated by style.
The cumulative effect of Queneau’s exercises is to make us realize that
stories themselves change as they are filtered through different ways of telling.
The technique parallels that of novelists like Nabokov or Robbe-Grillet. In The
Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov explains the literary methods of The
Prismatic Bezel, a fictional novel embedded in the larger text:
 The Genre of Self-Consciousness 165

... the heroes of the book are what can be loosely called “methods of composition.” It is as if
a painter said: look, here I’m going to show you not the painting of a landscape, but the
painting of different ways of painting a certain landscape, and I trust that their harmonious
fusion will disclose the landscape as I intend you to see it.*

There is a certain cubist logic in the method that Nabokov describes, the
multiplicity of perspectives finally disclosing the complex perceptual truth of
the object. Robbe-Grillet goes farther by robbing the entire process of its
supposed “object,” in a systematic struggle against the hegemony of the
referent. The “hero” becomes reducible to different ways of engendering
narrative or generating meanings. The film Trans- Europe Express exemplifies
the process: a novelist-scenarist on a train begins to mentally try out scenarios
suitable for filming on a train. His improvisations oddly resemble spy movies
which begin to play and are then erased to give way to more “serious” efforts.
Thus Robbe-Grillet foregrounds the processes of écriture, both filmic and
literary; writing writes itself.
I have tried in this chapter to compare the textual processes of the self-
conscious novel with those of the self-conscious film, insofar as they are
comparable but also in the senses in which they defy comparison due to their
material specificity. In the texts here discussed, or at least in the dimension here
discussed, the relationship between creator and public, transmitter and
receiver, as well as between text and intertext, has tended to be playful, even if
that playfulness at times takes on an aggressive tinge. In its ludic dimension,
reflexive fictions exploit to the maximum the comic or tragic possibilities of
exposing the mechanisms of the text. It relinquishes the claim to realism and
transforms art into what Huizinga calls “playfields of the minds.” Inside these
playfields, Huizinga writes in Homo Ludens, “an absolute and peculiar order
reigns.” The only kind of creation and destruction truly beyond good and evil,
Nietzsche suggested, is to be found in the play ofthe artist and the child. Kant,
in his third Critique, argues that poetry is the highest of aesthetic forms because
it recognizes, in its potential as play, a subversive force for undermining serious
business. Play, after all, constitutes a sphere of freedom, a realm of
disinterestedness which transcends the restrictive codes of stratified societies or
petrified art forms and thus constitutes a principle of liberation.
The dimension of ludic reflexivity described here represents a first and
relatively superficial level of demystification, of subversive pleasure. Ina purely
formal contestation, art points to its own artifice. Such play, to paraphrase
Auden, echoes in the valley of its playing; it makes nothing happen. Ina society
which regards idle hands as the devil’s workshop, playful texts flaunt their own
impish superfluity. Such texts are potentially, but not necessarily, subversive of
an established order, whether capitalist or pseudo-socialist, which fetishizes
productive labor. But such reflexivity also runs the danger of falling into a
166 The Genre of Self-Consciousness

Kantian trap of scorn for all that is instrumental or politically purposeful.

Autonomous verbal or cinematic structures can resound uselessly, forming
what Meyer Abrams has called, in a quite different context, “a ceaseless
echolalia... bombinating in a void.””* A socially strategic reflexivity, on the
other hand, can lay bare the devices of art while exposing the mechanisms of
society. The strategies we have discussed in this chapter have laid bare the
device and exposed the conventions in the act of using them, but without
aggressively developing the cultural or political dimension ofthis exposure. It
is to those dimensions that we now turn.
 4

The Carnival of Modernism

The art of which we speak is inhuman not only because it

contains no things human, but also because it is an explicit act of
dehumanization.
Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art

It is the transposition of carnival to the language of literature

that we call the carnivalization of literature.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics

If our focus in the previous chapter was on metalinguistic self-consciousness in

the novel and film, our emphasis in this chapter will be on aggressive anti-
illusionism, as seen in modernist texts which adopt strategies of carnivalesque
fantasy and absurdity by creating an impossible meta-real or “surfiction”
which explodes and transcends conventional narrative categories. In Problems
of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics (1929), Rabelais and His World (1965), and The
Dialogic Imagination (1981), the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin
traces these carnivalesque strategies back to Rabelais and to the Menippean
satire of Lucian, Petronius, and Apuleius. The carnivalesque represents the
transposition into literature of the spirit of the carnival—that is, popular
festivities in which the people gain brief entry into a sphere of utopian freedom
by turning the world upside down. The carnivalesque is profoundly subversive
of all that is official and oppressive since it abolishes hierarchies, levels social
classes and genres, and creates an alternative second life free from conventional
rules and restrictions. In carnival, imagination and fantasy take power. All that
was marginalized and excluded—the mad, scandalous, and aleatory—comes
to the center in a veritable explosion of otherness. The material bodily
principle, especially of the body’s “lower stratum”—hunger, thirst, copulation,
defecation—becomes a positive and corrosive force, and festive laughter enjoys
a symbolic victory over death, over all that is held sacred, over all that
oppresses and restricts. After Rabelais, carnival, at least in Europe, went
 The Carnival of Modernism 169

underground, although it remained a strong presence in Shakespeare—as

lovingly delineated by C.L, Barber in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy—as well
as in Cervantes, Dideret, and in what Bakhtin calls the “polyphonic” and
“dialogic” novels of Dostoyevsky. In the modernist period, the carnivalesque
ceases to be a collective cleansing ritual open to all “the people” to become the
monopoly of a marginalized caste. Carnival, in this modified and somewhat
hostile form, is present in the outrageousness of Dada, the provocations of
surrealism, in the travesty-revolts of Genet’s The Maids or The Blacks, and
indeed in the avant-garde generally.
Rabelais remained misunderstood, according to Bakhtin, because of his
“nonliterary” nature, that is, because of the nonconformity of his images to the
norms and canons predominant in the sixteenth century, and to some extent,
even today. It is in this formal aggression that the carnivalesque betrays its
profound link to the avant-garde, to marginal and subversive art with its
permanent adversary relationship to power and to official culture. The
linguistic corollary of carnivalization entails the liberation of language from
the norms of decency and etiquette. Carnivalesque language is designed to
degrade all that is spiritual and abstract; it transfers the ideal to a brute material
level. The cheerful vulgarity of the powerless is used as a weapon against the
pretense and hypocrisy of the powerful. Even the rules of grammar are
suspended by what Rabelais calls a “gramatica jocosa” in which grammatical
categories, cases, and verb forms, are transferred to a material and often erotic
or scatological plane.
Although the carnivalesque traces roots far back in European and indeed
in world culture, it takes on very specific coloring in modernist texts. Texts
such as Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896), Bufiuel’s L’Age d’Or (1930), Godard’s Les
Carabiniers (1963), and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s Macunaima (1969),
combine modernist “dehumanization with carnivalesque strategies of parody
and dehierarchization.”

A Seminal Instance: Ubu Roi

Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (King Ubu) forms a seminal instance of the modernist
carnivalesque, combining artistic strategies rooted in Menippean satire and
Rabelais with the modernist hostility both to the audience and to conventional
histoire. The carnivalesque strategies of Jarry’s play begin with its title— Ubu
Roi—an uneuphonious and mocking echo of Oedipus Rex. The play itself
devours the high literary tradition and regurgitates it for its own ends,
hybridizing genres in a defiant cocktail of tragedy and grand guignol. The
opening expletive—“merdre!” (shittr!)—heralds the play’s carnivalesque
penchant for the scatological and the “material bodily lower stratum.” The
frequent feasts, and Ubu’s irrepressible gluttony, reflect the defiant orality of
Figure 2 F.M. Cazal’s Portrait of Alfred Jarry (1897)
 The Carnival of Modernism hig

carnival, an orality which borders, at times, on the cannibalistic. Pere Ubu,

especially, seems always on the brink of unleashing his anthropophagous
tendencies. “I’m going to sharpen my teeth on your shanks,” he tells Mére Ubu.
Ubu explodes the spatio-temporal conventions of the naturalistic theatre
through the utopian syncretism of the carnivalesque. In the program notes
distributed to the first-night audience, Jarry explained that the action was set in
“Poland, that is to say, Nowhere.” He elaborated. “Nowhere is everywhere, and
first of all in the country where one happens to be. That is why Ubu speaks
French.” The initial setting, then, is simultaneously nowhere (with its
etymological overtones of utopia), everywhere, and France. Then, in a
whirlwind tour of Europe which must have startled even those spectators
accustomed to the spatial freedom of Shakespeare’s histories, the play takes us
to Russia, the Ukraine, Lithuania, and Livonia. The final scene brings us, in the
space of a brief, presumably continuous dialogue, from the Baltic past
Germany, past Hamlet’s Elsinore, and into the North Sea. Thus, by
transgressing both the Aristotelian unities cultivated by classical tragedy and
the fastidious verisimilitude sought by naturalism, Jarry reveals the spatial
procedures of theatre for what they are—mere conventions.
Menippean satire, according to Bakhtin, displays freedom from historical
limits and a total liberty of philosophical and thematic invention. Defending
his practice in Ubu, Jarry wrote: “We do not find it honorable to construct
historical plays,” and his text performs the mise-en-scéne of the modernist
attack on the very possibility of meaningful history. The antimythos of Ubu
constitutes a protracted non sequitur. Although the play alludes to classical as
well as Elizabethan tragedy, Jarry suspends the conventional laws of
motivation. Ubu, the reincarnated Macbeth of the play, is as much motivated
by the prospect of eating sausage as by any ambition for wealth and power.
Whereas Shakespearean tragedy inexorably leads to transfigured moments of
anguished lucidity, Jarryesque theatre exploits tragic mechanisms only in
order to empty them of all significance. When Ubu’s schemes end in
catastrophe, he does not declaim a soliloquy on the model of “Tomorrow and
tomorrow and tomorrow.” Escaping from Poland with his vanquished fellows,
Ubu points to Germany and, summing up a wisdom forged in tragedy,
declares: “Ah! Gentlemen! Beautiful as it may be, it cannot compare with
Poland. For if there were no Poland, there would be no Poles!” Having left the
realm of the non sequitur, we enter the kingdom of tautology.
In his attack on naturalism, Jarry drew inspiration from Elizabethan
theatre. In Douze Arguments sur le Thédtre, he praises the “eternally tragic”
theatre of Ben Jonson, Cyril Tourner, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. The
epigraph to Ubu facetiously suggests that the Shakespearean tragedies were in
fact inspired by the exploits of Ubu, and the play itself forms an anthology of
Shakespearean references: a central plot modeled on Macbeth (with Mere Ubu
172 The Carnival of Modernism

playing the ambitious Lady Macbeth to the sluggish Ubu), a conspiracy

modeled on Julius Caesar; and a revenge hero (“How sad it is to find oneself
alone at fourteen with a terrible vengeance to pursue!”) patterned on Hamlet.
But apart from plot borrowings and references, Jarry exploited the anti-
illusionistic procedures of Elizabethan dramaturgy, and especially its
rudimentary proto-Brechtian staging. Since no decor or props can represent
the “Polish army marching through the Ukraine,” Jarry uses a cardboard
horse’s head (“as in the old English theatre”) for the “equestrian scenes.” As in
Julius Caesar, crowds are epitomized in two or three actors. Jarry calls
attention to the disproportion betwen the signifier—a single actor—and the
signified—a huge crowd—by having Ubu exclaim, “What a mass of people!”
Whereas the dominant French tradition regarded Shakespeare as somewhat of
a barbarian—French audiences as late as 1827 were offended by Desdemona’s
handkerchief—Jarry appreciated the liberating force of his violence, his
implausibilities, his plays-within-plays, his bawdy wordplay and general verbal
exuberance. It was precisely those features that Voltaire censured in
Shakespeare—“without the slightest spark of good taste or the slightest
knowledge of the rules’—that Jarry found so exhilarating.
In his own time, furthermore, Jarry was hardly alone in his hostility to
illusionism. Mallarmé, who saluted Jarry as a “sober and sure dramatic
sculptor,” called for an “immaculate” discourse purified of all referentiality.
The difference between naturalism and poetry, he said, “is like the difference
between a corset and a beautiful throat.”' Jarry was also indebted to Isidore
Ducasse Lautreamont and his Chants de Maldoror, where the reader
encounters the same parodistic irreverence toward the high literary tradition,
the same allusions to Shakespeare, the same orchestration of generic pastiches,
and the same aggressive stance toward the public. Jarry’s writings on theatre
bristle with hostile intentions toward a public which he regarded as “illiterate
by definition.” It is because the public is an “inert, obtuse and passive” mass,
Jarry wrote in “Theatre Questions,” that “one must slap it from time to time, in
order to know by its bear-like grunts where it is, and where it stands.”” By
presenting the public with its “ignoble double,” made up ofthe false shame and
patriotic virtues of a well-fed audience, Jarry provoked the howls of execration
which alone could tell him that he had reached his target. With Jarry, we are
very far from the amiable “dear reader” of the self-conscious novelists. “Dear
reader” has become “hypocrite lecture, mon semblable, mon frére.”
If aggression characterizes Jarry’s attitude toward his public, abstraction
defines his artistic method. Jarry praises what he called the “abstract theatre” of
the Elizabethans, and lauds the character Hamlet as a “walking abstraction.”
This parti pris for abstraction—which has its counterpart in what Bakhtin calls
the “abstract intellectual nature” of Mennipean comic adventures—permeates
and structures every aspect of King Ubu. Rather than reconstitute the world in
 The Carnival of Modernism 173

a recognizable bourgeois form, Jarry fabricates a world which is

disconcertingly synthetic. Shunning what he called the “superfluous
duplication” of trompe-l’oeil realism, Jarry constructs a “hybrid” and
“abstract” decor. Trompe-l’oeil only deludes those who see roughly, that is,
those who ug see at all, but it scandalizes those who see nature intelligently
and selectively.’ In keeping with this distinctly modernistic aesthetic, and with the
spatial freedom of Menippean satire, the decor of King Ubu consisted of a
painted backdrop evoking diverse landscapes and contradictory climates.
Arthur Symons described the premiere scenery as representing, “by a child’s
convention,” both indoors and outdoors, and the tropical, temperate, and
arctic zones all at once. In the dislocated theatrescapes of King Ubu, snow fell
near palm trees and doors opened on the sky. At the same time, the public was
disconcerted by the heterogenous nature of costumes which were as
“unchronological and as lacking in local color as possible.”* Pere Ubu’s
costume progressively accretes disparate and irreconcilable elements. Mére
Ubu begins with a “concierge’s outfit” but then becomes an ambulatory
monument to social mobility, with each stage in her progress leaving traces on
her costume. The revenge-hero Bougrelas is dressed as a “baby ina little skirt
and bonnet.” Bordure, despite his English accent, sports a Hungarian
musician’s costume. Even the music originally programmed for Ubu Roi had
this absurdly synthetic character, consisting of the rarest instruments with the
most recondite names—flageolets, blutwurst, sackbuts—and producing the
most horrible sounds. Like the decor, the music evokes an impossible summa
of times and places.
The carnivalesque, according to Bakhtin, laughs at death and violence. Its
blows are only “to laugh,” to be taken no more seriously than a clown’s feigned
fall or a puppet’s demise. Ubu is full of comic dismemberments and distanced
outrages, of “beheading and twisting of legs,” of “twisting of the nose and teeth
and extraction of the tongue” but it is all, ultimately, “pour rire.” Even the
protagonist’s imagined death is merely a pretext for comedy: “Aaaah! I’m
frightened. Lord God, I’m dead! No, no, I’m not.” And later: “Ah! Oh! P’m
wounded. I’m shot full of holes, I’m perforated, I’m done for, I’m buried. And
now I’ve got you!” At the same time, Ubu Roi reveals in caricatural form the
actual mechanisms of society. A polite summary of Ubu’s political philosophy
would be: eliminate the opposition so as to appropriate all the wealth, and then
levy onerous taxes on everyone and everything. To those who object, Ubu
answers: “Dans la trappe!”—the Ubuesque equivalent of “Off with their
heads!” Thus Jarry unmasks one of the central truths of politics—that power
comes out ofthe barrel of a gun, or, in the case of Ubu, from the “shittry saber”
and the “phynancial stick.” The economic motive, the concern with
“phynance,” is omnipresent in Ubu. “I’m going to get rich,” promises Ubu,
“and I won’t give up one sou.” His exacerbated lust for property is reflected in
174 The Carnival of Modernism

an unnatural (for the French language) emphasis on possessive adjectives: “I’m

going to make MY list of MY goods. Clerk, read MY list of MY goods.” The
logic of power is simplified, stripped of all idealization, mystification, and
pretense of larger purpose.

Ubu’s Children: L’A ge d’Or and the Surrealists

Although the premiere performance of Jarry’s play postdated the first Lumiere
films by only one year, we must wait for the surrealists to find the true first-
generation cinematic progeny of King Ubu. Impassioned admirers of both the
artistic work and personal style of Jarry, the surrealists—who do in some ways
offer little more than an erudite and somewhat effete salon version of the
carnivalesque—saw film as a privileged instrument in their struggle against
outmoded social and artistic conventions. As Jarry denounced the well-made
play, Bufiuel attacked the “ciné-dramas” “saturated with melodramatic germs,
entirely infested with sentimental typhus, mixed with naturalist and romantic
bacilli.”’ L’Age d’Or (1930) exploded the cinema scene much as King Ubu had
exploded the theatre scene. In both works, one encounters the same
carnivalesque strategies, the same aggressive attitude toward the public, the
same tendency toward abstraction, and the same radical subversion of the
conventions of illusionism.
Both Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age d’Or (1930) mock the conventional
temporal decorum of fiction films. After its precisely non-indexical title, Chien
Andalou opens with a temporal title, the perennial “once upona time” of fable.
After the celebrated slashing of the eyeball, another temporal title intervenes—
“Eight Years Later’—followed by a sequence with no apparent relation to the
initial sequence. The first few minutes of the film, then, outrageously jumble
the accustomed generic categories of narrative time, forcing us to reconcile the
temporal precision of chronicle or novel with the nebulous atemporality of
fable. We are left pondering the possible meaning of “eight years after once
upon a time.” Could it be the same as “six years before happily ever after?” In
L’Age d'Or, similarly, the title “Some Hours Afterward” intervenes between a
shot of a dying rat and a shot ofan arid landscape. The title is doubly absurd.
Such temporal connectives have meaning only when they form part of a
coherent story in which what happens “afterward” bears some consequential
relation to what transpired “before.” In this case, the shot of the desolate
landscape has no narrative relation to the scorpion sequence. We generally
associate narrative time, furthermore, with the human time of characters and
plots. The life of scorpions continues instinctively and is unmarked by
narrative coherence. The pseudo-documentary presumably treats the
characteristic behavior of scorpions, not a narrative incident in which a
scorpion Demetrius attacks a rat named Jason. Scorpions and rats are not
Figure 35. Chien Andalou (1929)
176 The Carnival of Modernism

conventionally implied by “some hours afterward.” Bufiuel’s radical, almost

Darwinian, equation between animal existence and human life constitutes an
aggression because it undermines the privileged status usually accorded the
human subject in narrative. L’Age d’Or plays with time in an analogous
fashion. Bufiuel has the Majorcans—a gallery of humorless figures
representing the military, ecclesiastical, and political establishment—lay the
foundation of the city of Rome. Since they are the end products of what they
are founding, the sequence is logically absurd. At another point, the “pseudo-
iterative” title “Sometimes on Sunday,” with its Flaubertian ring of
comfortable predictability, precedes a shot of house facades collapsing under
the force of explosions.° It is as if a writer were to violate the conventions of
grammatical tense and create such syntactic monstrosities as “the marquis
having go at night, had will met the morning.” Bufiuel’s deliberate
misapplication of temporal conventions, his cinematic equivalent of Rabelais’
gramatica jocosa, forces us to reflect on the nature of cinematic “tense.”
L’Age d'Or, like Ubu Roi, proceeds by temporal, spatial, and thematic
abstraction. The final sequence, to take just one example, shows the survivors
of the Chateau de Selliny staggering out ofa castle after a night of orgies. The
sequence is introduced by a title:

At the exact moment when these feathers, torn out by his furious hands, covered the ground
below the window, at that moment, as we said, but very far away, the survivors of the
Chateau de Selliny were coming out, to go back to Paris.’

The title, by protesting too much—“At the exact moment,...at that moment
as we said... but very far away...”—debunks the factitious simultaneity.
Described by a title whose moralism surpasses Griffith at his worst as “four
well-known and utter scoundrels” celebrating “the most brutal of orgies,”
friends with “no law but their own depravity, they bring with them four
depraved women who fire their lust with their tales.” The first of these
degenerate scoundrels to appear is dressed like a Hebrew of the first century
and bears an unmistakable resemblance to the pictorial Jesus. The second is the
Duke of Blangis, and the remaining two are costumed as eighteenth-century
French aristocrats. The sequence typifies Bufiuel’s use of temporal abstraction.
The two sequences, supposedly taking place “at the same instant,” cannot
possibly be contemporaneous since one of them is taking place near the chateau
of the Marquis de Sade, that is, in the eighteenth century, while the preceding
sequence takes place in 1930 in Rome. Christ, of course, lived neither in
eighteenth-century France nor twentieth-century Rome. The implied equation
of Christ and Sade, futhermore, constitutes a surrealist antinomy as well as a
temporal oxymoron.*
 “

The Carnival of Modernism Ld,

The view that reduces Bufiuel to the quintessential film surrealist is,
finally, rather superficial. His roots really go back to Cervantes, and beyond
that, to the Middle Ages and the medieval tradition of carnivalesque
irreverence. As a child, Bufiuel practiced black masses, and as an adolescent, he
and Garcia Lorca would shave closely, powder their faces and masquerade as
nuns in order to flirt with male passengers on streetcars. Bufiuel’s attacks on
the Church are not merely “surrealist provocations;” his insistent
desacralization derives, rather, from a carnivalesque tradition which
parasitically feeds on what it attacks. Just as medieval monks indulged in ludic
self-mockery, in feasts of fools and grotesque parodies of the liturgy, so Bufiuel
exploits blasphemy as a habitual aesthetic strategy, a fond method for
generating art. Echoes of carnival laughter resound within the walls of Bufiuel’s
festive cloister. The religious travesties so frequent in his films—parodistic
liturgies of Simon of the Desert, the orgiastic Last Supper sequence of
Viridiana—form the twentieth-century counterpart of the monkish pranks and
parodia sacra of the Middle Ages.
Speaking more generally, L’Age d’Or carnivalizes etiquette in all its forms.
Modot’s slap of Lya Lys’ mother has the same relation to social decorum that
L’Age d’Or itself has to religious and political, as well as narrative and
cinematic, decorum. Religious decorum is undermined by the systematic
association of religion with Death, as well as by the decontexting of Catholic
symbols, dignitaries, and artifacts—the monstrance in the limousine, the
prelate out the window, the divinity at the orgy. The pompous politician,
celebrating the founding of imperial Rome is undercut by a sudden intrusion of
the lower bodily principle—two lovers in the mud. The upper class is slapped in
the face (Lya Lys’ mother) or covered with flies (her father). Narrative
decorum, finally, is laid low by a perversely purposeless trajectory that leads us
from one non sequitur to another, and finally to a promising love affair which
turns into a frustrating coitus interruptus.

Ubu’s Grandchild: The Modernism of Jean-Luc Godard

Godard did for the “well-made film” what Jarry had done for the “well-made
play.” He perpetrated aesthetic transgressions which shook the confidence of
the reigning system. The work of both was seminally corrosive, functioning as a
negative catalyst speeding up a process of artistic disintegration already in
operation. Godard, like Jarry, might have insisted that the artist must strike the
public from time to time to “know by its bear-like grunts where it is.” Godard’s
well-aimed slaps at his bourgeois public have, during his long career, elicited
more than their share of bear-like grunts. Godard’s definitions of cinema,
especially in the late 1960s, tended to explode with the polemical violence of
military and terroristic metaphors—art as a “special gun” and film as a
d'Or
L’Age
(1930)

Figure
36.
 The Carnival of Modernism 179

“theoretical rifle.” In his most aggressive period, Godard saw himself as a

cultural terrorist or intellectual guerilla, mounting raids on bourgeois culture.
And like Jarry, he attacked the bourgeoisie at the heart of its self-conceit—its
class pride in its culture. With both Jarry and Godard, art became, as Walter
Benjamin said of the dadaists, “an instrument of ballistics.” Rather than make
the theatre or the cinema a temple for the celebration of the mysteries of high
culture, they make art the scene of scandal.
The modernist desacralization of art is an ambiguous one, for modernists
like Jarry and Godard are deeply imbued with the very culture they so
vehemently attack. Just as the density of allusions in King Ubu betrays a
cultivated familiarity with classical antiquity as well as with Rabelais, Racine,
Corneille, and Shakespeare, so Godard’s films proliferate in intertextual
references to all the arts. Crowded with book covers, paintings, posters, and
literary echoes, they allude to the entire range of high and low-brow culture.
(Pierrot le Fou, for example, alludes by word or image to Velazquez, Balzac,
Auguste Renoir, Céline, Faulkner, Conrad, Van Gogh, Picasso, Modigliani,
Defoe, and Verne as well as to comic books, série noire novels and musical
comedies.) At times, Godard sadly registers, much like T.S. Eliot but without
Eliot’s patrician nostalgia, the loss of a meaningful past by highlighting his
character’s isolation from traditional culture. Michel in Breathless responds to
Patricia’s comment about William Faulkner by saying: “Who’s he? Someone
you slept with?” Venus and Cleopatre in Les Carabiniers complain of a
postcard showing a Parthenon in ruins and therefore “worthless.” Thus
Godard reveals the cultural impoverishment of his characters while he
participates in the modernist ritual of desecrating the temples of high art. He
laments the contemporary irrelevance of high culture even while he sticks out
his tongue at “monuments of unaging intellect.”
Godard’s modernism must be situated within the context of the artistic
avant-garde in general. Godard owes to dada and surrealism, for example, a
feature which especially typifies his films in the late sixties—the incorporation
of the aleatory into his art. Although indebted to Lautrémont’s celebrated
image of “the fortuitous encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine ona
dissecting table,” and while anticipated by Picasso’s papiers collés, which
incorporated random scraps of newspaper into painting, the surrealists and the
dadaists were the first to systematically exploit aleatory techniques in order to
generate artistic texts. Tristan Tzara once recommended writing poetry by
cutting out newspaper articles, snipping out the individual words, mixing them
in a bag, and then selecting them at random. Godard stages Tzara’s conception
in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her by having two characters, aptly named
Bouvard and Pecuchet, take down random quotations from diverse stacks of
paperbacks on diverse topics and in diverse languages. The result of their
paradigmatic—choosing the passage—and syntagmatic—placing them in
180 The Carnival of Modernism

sequence—operations is a “text” which is simultaneously structured and

aleatory, thus providing an analogue for the film as a whole, which exploits
what Breton called the “hasard objectif” and what Godard called the “definitive
by chance.”
Fragmentation, which Ortega y Gasset considered definitive of
modernism, marks virtually all of Godard’s films. Pasolini, in fact, called
Godard a “vulgar Braque” who gratuitously fragments the narrative elements
only in order to recompose them afterward. As if to highlight the analogy,
Godard often places cubist paintings in precisely those sequences handled ina
fragmented way. In A Married Woman, Pierre with his head out of frame,
stands in front of Picasso’s Harlequin, with its head out of frame. A Picasso
painting also graces the apartment from which Marianne and Ferdinand flee,
in a highly fragmented and discontinuous sequence, in Pierrot le Fou. The
subtitle of AMarried Woman reads: “Fragments ofa Film Made in 1964,” and
the film itself proceeds by fragments: bits of scenes, segments of interviews,
posters, words, words decomposed into smaller words, scraps of overheard
conversation. The titular character is herself fragmented, lost within a dense
electronic thicket of media-proffered images and sounds. Godard surrounds
her with fragments of the ambient culture: snips of classical music, book
covers, headlines, billboards, ads. Rather than fragments shored against her
ruin, the fragments constitute and signify her ruin.
Godard has compared the improvisational method of his early
filmmaking to a kind of “automatic writing.” The wordplay in the early films at
times recalls the aleatory techniques of the “Surrealist Games.” “If I were
stupid,” says a character in Made in USA, “I wouldn’t speak French,” recalling
the surrealist game by which nonsensical affirmations are formed byjoining
“if? clauses written by one person to “then” clauses written by a second person
unaware of the initial clause. A young laborer in the same film delivers
sentences reminiscent of the surrealists’ “the exquisite corpse will drink the new
wine,” the surrealist game in which words are combined in syntactically correct
but logically impossible ways: “The barman is in the pocket of the pencil’s
jacket”.... “The doors are throwing themselves through the window.”
Godard’s gramatica jocosa assaults us by violating our conventional
expectation of coherent dialogue, but also imparts a feeling of carnivalesque
triumph over the inhibiting confinements of logic and grammar.
Godard’s incorporation of the aleatory takes on broader significance in
the context of a dominant style which sought to eliminate chance by
hermetically sealing out the accidental. The Hollywood studio system aspired,
like any efficiently run business, to reduce chance to a minimum. Godard’s
early films resonate with nostalgic echoes of the silent comics, the filmmakers
who worked in an atmosphere of delirious improvisation, at a time when the
dominant style was not yet fully institutionalized and control by producers was
 The Carnival of Modernism 181

minimal. His films proliferate in homages to this lost paradise of cinematic

freedom. Pierrot le Fou, filmed, according to Godard, “exactly as in the days of
Mack Sennett,” has Marianne borrow a “trick from Laurel and Hardy” to
knock out a gas-station attendant. In Tout Va Bien, Godard strips away the
wall of the factory to show us events on both floors, as Keaton did with the
house in The High Sign. Godard alludes to Keaton in both films and
interviews, and physically mimicked him in Agnes Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7,
where he does a competent imitation of Keaton’s swift but deadpan style of
running in a film-within-the-film homage to silent comedy. The traffic-jam
sequence in Weekend recalls the automotive destruction derby in Two Tars.
Indeed, the pervasive free-for-all mayhem of that film recalls countless
burlesque comedies structured around the notion of proliferating violence.
Two social monads fight over some petty incident, the fight spreads, and soon
the entire collectivity is throwing pies or destroying automobiles. For slapstick
comedy, any object is a potential weapon in Darwinian skirmishes; in
Weekend, the weapons range from spray paint to tennis balls. The supermarket
sequence in Tout Va Bien—the permission for which was won by Godard’s
claim that he planned to film a Sennett-like farce—tlends these mini-riots a
political dimension by having Maoists encourage customers to take their food
for free. But even when the references are less explicit, the comicity of the
gestures in many Godard films—Prokosch accosting Paul by hanging on his
tie, Roland forcing Corinne to carry him piggyback in Weekend, even the
grotesque positioning of the “orgiasts” in Every Man for Himself—trecall the
studied inappropriateness of the gestures of silent comedy.

Godard and Avant-Garde Theatre

Godard’s distanced, often comic treatment of physical violence is indebted not

only to silent film comedy but also to the avant-garde theatre going back to
Ubu. It ultimately derives, of course, from the venerable tradition of
carnivalesque violence which informs both traditions. In Rabelais, in puppet
theatre, and commedia dell arte, death is often a comic episode. The unpitying
nature of carnivalesque art is organically connected with its clear
conventionality. The reader/spectator perceives the staged violence as if it were
occurring to puppets. Their sufferings and misfortunes are seen not as the
suffering of real people, but in a spirit of carnival and ritual. Murders in Ubu
are flippant, performed with the nonchalance with which one tosses away a
cigarette. Several people die instantly when Pére Ubu poisons them with a
lavatory brush, but no one reacts with horror, and Ubu’s own response is to ask
Mére Ubu to pass the cutlets. It was precisely this neutral tone in the face of the
most outrageous violence that impressed Godard in Jarry’s play. When asked if
he would like to adapt King Ubu to the screen, Godard responded that he saw
182 The Carnival of Modernism

Ubu very much as a gangster with soft hat and raincoat, who says his “merdre”
in the tone of “I’ve missed my train,” with the “dialogue very neutral in the
Bresson manner.”
While critics often cite cinematic antecendents for Godard’s anti-
illusionistic techniques, they tend to neglect his debt to avant-garde theatre.
Apart from the influence of Jarry, Godard’s work presents analogies with both
surrealist and absurdist theatre. The theatre must return to nature, Apollinaire
argued in the preface to The Breasts of Tiresias, but not imitate it in the manner
of photography. “The People of Zanzibar” figure in Tiresias recalls the one-
man armies of Ubu and anticipate the bizarre and incongruous personages—
such as the dwarf and the mad exiled queen of Lebanon in Pierrot le Fou—that
pop up in Godard’s early films. Godard’s experimentation with voices,
similarly, prolongs the innovations of the avant-garde theatre. From the
mechanical “parler Ubu” of Jarry, through the megaphones of The Breasts of
Tiresias and the phonographs of Cocteau’s The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower,
avant-garde dramatists have tended to distort or alienate the voice, dissociating
it from the personality of the character and from the tone of the dramatic
moment. Godard’s films, in fact, often sustain a kind of “parler Ubu”—a
constant, emotionless tone even in the most extravagant circumstances—that
can be most unsettling.
Avant-garde theatre, beginning with Jarry and continuing with Artaud,
Genet, and Arrabal, has often been a theatre of rare violence. Ubu Roiis full of
“casual slaughter,” mass executions and violations of the human person.
Artaud called for a theatre that would confront the spectator with “the truthful
precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his
savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his
cannibalism, pour out, on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior.””°
Weekend, Godard’s most Artaldian film, would seem to incarnate Artaud’s
recommendations for a “theatre of cruelty,” for the film animates a good deal
of crime, eroticism, and ritualized violence. Hippies dance around a woman,
splash her in psychedelic colors, and penetrate her with a gigantic fish. In
another scene, Roland pours his mother-in-law’s blood over a skinned rabbit.
We even have cannibalism when the hippies dine on English tourist and
Corinne feasts on her dead husband. The ultimate spectacle, of course, is
ritualized murder, so Godard has us witness the ritual slaughter of apig and a
goose, in what seems a weirdly twisted version of a religious sacrament.
Godard, disturbed by the popularity of Weekend, came to see the dangers
inherent in the Artaldian alternative. The more one indulges in spectacle, he
admitted subsequently, the more one becomes immersed in what one is trying
to destroy. The mere spectacle, as opposed to the analysis, of violence, is
infinitely cooptable by the bourgeois entertainment industry. The public, for its
part, seems reluctant to admit its pleasure and complicity in the spectacle of
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violence, a gratification to which it has become increasingly addicted.

Guillaume in La Chinoise says of his father that he once worked with Artaud,
but that he now works with Le Club Méditerranée, an organization whose
schema resembles that of the concentration camps. Godard indirectly suggests,
then, that spectacles of ritualized violence are quite recuperable by bourgeois
or even fascist society. That the comparison fails to dojustice to the subtlety of
Artaud’s thought is quite beside the point; the fact remains that although
certain themes remind us of Artaud, such themes are treated, increasingly, ina
distanced and Brechtian manner. For Artaud, theatre should push our
aggressive impulses to their paroxysm; Brecht and Godard would have us
reflect on the violence that inhabits ourselves and our world.
The casual muggings and offhand slaughter in Godard’s films are designed
to highlight what Godard calls, paraphrasing Hannah Arendt, “the banality of
the atrocious and the atrociousness of this banality.” When Paul sees a woman
threatening her husband with a gun as she moves out of a cafe, Paul’s only
concern is that she shut the door so as not to let in the cold winter air. When the
man falls, presumably to his death, the camera retains its laconic distance,
refusing to underline the horror of the incident by heightened proximity,
selective framing, or any kind of rhetorical emphasis. The ideal film on the
concentration camps, for Godard, would observe a similar distance, coolly
demonstrating the banality of the torturers and the nature of their daily
challenges: “How to get a body measuring two meters into a coffin measuring
fifty centimeters? How to load ten tons of arms and legs onto a three ton
lorry?... The really horrible thing about such scenes would not be their horror
but their very ordinary everydayness.”'' This banalization of the atrocious
characterizes many Godard films: the random urban violence of Masculine,
Feminine anticipates the corpse-strewn landscapes of Weekend and the moral
anesthesia of Alphaville, where systematized murder is greeted with polite
applause.

Carnival and the Apocalypse: The Exterminating Angel

A film that betrays links both to the carnivalesque spirit of silent comedy and to
the theatrical avant-garde is Bufiuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962). Bufiuel
offers a more politicized version of the themes that obsessed the “theatre of the
absurd”: entrapment (one thinks of Sartre’s proto-absurdist No Exit); paralysis
(Hamm in his wheelchair, his parents in their dustbin in Endgame);
proliferating chaos (Rhinoceros); and the devaluation of language (The Bald
Soprano). The film’s central premise—the inexplicable entrapment of a pride
of socialites—is as calculatedly implausible as those subtending many Beckett
or Ionesco plays. The film also shares with absurdist theatre its affinity with
burlesque film comedy. Beckett, like Bufiuel, adored Buster Keaton, and
 re

The Carnival of Modernism 185

collaborated with him on his own Film. Ionesco cited Groucho, Chico, and
Harpo Marx as the three biggest influences on his work, and, in The Chairs, he
has the old man impersonate the month of February by “scratching his head
like Stan Laurel.” The Exterminating Angel, like The Chairs, is structured on
the comic formula of a slow descent from normality into anarchy, all
performed in Keatonesque deadpan. The bear that wanders into The
Exterminating Angel descends not only from the bear that frightens Pere Ubu
in Jarry’s play but also from the one that follows Chaplin along an icy precipice
in The Gold Rush. Cannibalism is evoked in both films, and Bufiuel’s butler
eats paper as if it were a delicacy, just as Chaplin dines on shoe and lace as if it
were a gourmet meal.
Bufiuel radicalizes these burlesque and avant-garde topoi by linking them
to the carnivalesque theme of the “world turned upside down.” The
“Exterminating Angel” executes a mission of social justice, an apocalyptic
laying low of the noble and the powerful. In fact, The Exterminating Angel
should be paired with Bufiuel’s Los Olvidados, for the logic of the former film is
to reduce its upper-class protagonists to the miserable condition of the slum-
dwellers of the latter. One of the aristocrats alludes to this irony by complaining
that they have been forgotten (“olvidados”). Social distinctions are leveled in a
spirit of carnivalesque degradation.'” The subversion of conventional
hierarchies begins when the servants abandon the Nobile mansion, the way
“rats abandon a sinking ship,” an excuse for Bufiuel to mock the helplessness of
aristocrats when they are forced to take care of their own needs. As the social
contract begins to break down, the “castaways of Providence Street” are
thrown increasingly into the promiscuous slum conditions of Los Olvidados.
The mansion becomes an overcrowded mini-slum, without running water, with
people sleeping on the floor in forced cohabitation with one another and with
animals. The butler chops at the wall with an axe, revealing bare bricks and
cement as in lower-class Mexican dwellings. The search for food and firewood
leaves the floor dotted with rubble. Stripped of their class advantages, the
aristocrats degenerate into distinctly ungenteel behavior. As in a slum,
copulation and defecation, expressions of the “lower bodily principle,” shed
the privilege of privacy. Bourgeois etiquette disintegrates: Letitia picks at her
blackheads, the conductor makes unseemly advances, and Raul and Nobile
and the others scrap over petty offenses like drunks in a cheap bar. They
scramble openly for the drugs that they formerly took in secret, and Raul, likea
lumpen vagabond, pokes through the garbage looking for stray cigarette butts.
The aristocrats who would normally only consume the results of the slaughter
of animals, in the form of ragovit or steak au poivre, are here forced to witness
the slaughter itself. The same aristocrats who have spilled food as an amusing
theatrical device are now ravaged by hunger and on the verge, it is suggested, of
ritual murder and even cannibalism. In short, as Noblie laments, all that they
186 The Carnival of Modernism

have hated since childhood—“vulgarity, violence, dirt—have become [their]

companions.”

Ubu and Les Carabiniers

Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963) clearly forms part of the modernist

carnivalesque and happens to be explicitly indebted to King Ubu. Godard
underlines this debt by having one of his heroines utter precisely the word that
scandalized Jarry’s public in 1896—“Merdre!” (Shitr). The epitaph-title with
which Godard concludes the film and “buries” his two heroes—Michelangelo
and Ulysses—paraphrases the letter to Madame Rachilde with which Jarry,
himself near death, “buried” Pere Ubu:

With this Pére Ubu, who has earned his rest, is going to sleep. He believes that the brain,
during decomposition, continues to function after death, and that its dreams are our
Paradise.’

The Godard version substitutes “the two brothers” for “Pere Ubu”:

And with that, the two brothers went to sleep for eternity, believing that the brain, during
decomposition, functions after death, and that its dreams are our Paradise.

But more important than these explicit homages is the fact that Les Carabiniers
adopts the carnivalesque strategies of the Jarry play—parody, abstraction, and
aggression.
If King Ubu is tragic farce, Les Carabiniers is absurdist epic. The title of
Jarry’s play syntactically and lexically evokes classical tragedy and
Shakespearean history play, but its protagonist represents the antithesis of the
classical hero. Les Carabiniers treats the perennial epic subject—war—but its
male duo of protagonists present, like Ubu, a precipitate of gluttony, cupidity,
and brutality. The narratives of the two texts follow parallel trajectories which
obey the carnivalesque pattern of comic crownings and uncrownings. Ubu
overthrows the king, exercises arbitrary power, and is overthrown and exiled.
Ulysses and Michelangelo go to war for “the king,” win chimerical booty in the
form of postcards which they take to be deeds to property, and are finally
betrayed by the soldiers who enlisted their services. The motives of the
protagonists in the two texts are equally ignoble. Ubu wants to get rich, eat
sausages, and roll around the streets in a carriage. Ulysses and Michelangelo
want to rape women, steal Hawaiian guitars, and leave restaurants without
paying their bills. Both constitute debased caricatures of their namesakes, two
of the quintessential culture heroes of the western world. Ulysses is decidedly
uncrafty, and Michelangelo is far from the Renaissance man. His culture
 The Carnival of Modernism 187

consists in the comic books which provide him with his brutally simplistic
weltanschauung, while Ulysses emulates the gangster heroes of B-films.
Together, they embody the basest instincts and the most petty sadism, while
their personal and collective enterprise lacks all dignity and redeeming
purpose.
Godard’s location of the scene of Les Carabiniers as “at once everywhere
and nowhere” quite literally echoes Jarry’s situating of Ubu “in Poland, that is
to say, Nowhere” and in a “Nowhere” that is “everywhere.” Both texts
constitute inverted utopias, “the world upside down,” not only because they
create dislocated worlds of abstractly comic horror, but also because they
reflect the “nowhere” of an antimimetic art uninterested in reproducing the
spatial or geographical configurations of the conventionally perceived world.
Michelangelo and Ulysses live with Venus and Cleopatra ina shack located ina
featureless terrain vague in what appears to be France. They are approached by
two riflemen bearing a letter from the King. Flattered by what they take to bea
personal royal request for their services, and excited by the prospect of
satisfying all their sadistic impulses and consumerist desires, they march
eagerly off to war. Their ironic odyssey, like Ubu’s quick tour of Europe, takes
them to Italy, Silesia, Mexico, Egypt, Russia, and the United States. But
instead of location shooting and a cast of thousands, an approach Godard
would have regarded as obscenely wasteful and contrary to his aesthetic, the
film offers shorthand evocations via handwritten intertitles and still
photographs. The spatial displacements, as in Ubu, are swift and implausible.
A trip to Egypt consists of ashot of Michelangelo taking photographs followed
by a shot of the Sphynx. Shortly thereafter, the two heroes salute what the
cinematic logic of eyeline matches tells us to be the Statue of Liberty. Just as
Shakespeare’s Bottom and company “signify” a wall with some lime, and
Jarry’s actors denote the “Russian and Polish armies crossing the Ukraine,” so
Godard “signifies” global travels in minimalist fashion.
King Ubu is a verbal carnival in which language celebrates its freedom
from the usual hierarchies and dominations. Language becomes opaque,
detached both from its referential function and from its human source. Ceasing
to be a transparent conveyor of meaning, it begins to generate its own
momentum. The play often works by the principle of absurd accumulation,
whether of past participles (“I’m wounded,” moans Pére Ubu, “I’m punctured,
I’m perforated, I’m administered, I’m buried. ...”) or substantives (Pere Ubu
threatens Mére Ubu with “twisting of the nose, tearing out of the hair,
penetration of little bits of wood into the ears, extraction of the brain by the
heels, laceration of the posterior, partial or perhaps even total suppression of
the spinal marrow...and finally the grand re-enacted decollation of John the
Baptist, the whole taken from the very Holy Scriptures....”). In an epic
exchange of insults between Bougrelas, Pere Ubu and Mére Ubu, whatis said 1s
188 The Carnival of Modernism

determined only by the final phoneme of the words: Bougrelas’ “sacripant,

mécréant, musulman” elicits Ubu’s “Polognard, sotlard, batard, hussard,
tartare.” Not to be outdone, Mére Ubu adds: “capon, cochon, félon, histrion,
fripon.”
The Riflemen also generates absurd lists and accumulations, parodic
versions of “epic catalogues.” To persuade Ulysses and Michelangelo to go to
war, one of the riflemen recites, in a bored monotone, the fruits of war that will
be within their grasp: Maseratis, women of the world, jewels, lighters, metro
stations, cigar factories, supermarkets. The list is absurdly discontinuous; one
might presumably steal jewels and Maseratis, but how does one steal metro
stations and supermarkets? The narrative is “framed” by these catalogues, for
when the pair return with their booty—a huge stack of postcards—we find the
same surrealistic enumeration. Calling for “order and method,” Michelangelo
divides the postcards into arbitrary and incongruous categories—monuments,
means of transport, works of art, women of the world. His classificatory mania
has all the trappings of rational analysis with none ofthe substance; the entities
are simply too heteroclite. The concreteness of “large department stores”
accords ill with the abstraction of “industry” or the generality of “wonders of
nature.” The sequence seems to mock the ways in which occidental logic
structures and orders its universe. We are reminded of the Borges reference toa
certain Chinese encyclopedia which classifies animals as: 1) belonging to the
emperor; 2) embalmed; 3) tame; 4) sucking pigs; and so on. The exotic charm of
the taxonomy demonstrates, as Michel Foucault points out in his gloss on the
story, the limitations of our own. Such absurd enumerations do away, by
implication, with the site, the ground upon which it is possible for entities to be
juxtaposed. On one level, Godard, in a provocative attack on the ideological
hierarchies of the spectator, is equating the most cherished monuments of
western culture with the commercialized fetishes of the consumer society. Side
by side we find the Parthenon and the Galeries Lafayette, pornographic
photographs and Madame Récamier. But on another level, Godard is creating
an imagistic heterotopia, juxtaposing entities that come from categories so
alien to each other that it is impossible to find a common place of residencé for
them.
The freedom of invention characteristic of carnivalesque art allows for
anachronism as a textual strategy. The very language of King Ubu—at times
archaic and at times neologistic, ranging from Rabelaisian echoes to
contemporary slang—is anachronistic. Les Carabiniers, similarly, creates an
anachronistic synthesis of diverse historical periods. Evidence of modern-day
France—comic books, consumer products, automobiles—commingles with
references to royal decrees. Michelangelo goes to the “cinématographe,”aterm
linked to the silent era, yet he sees sound films. The war in the film condenses
allusions to many conflicts. The intertitles are copied from authentic letters by
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190 The Carnival of Modernism

soldiers circled at Stalingrad, from Napoleon’s campaign in Spain, and from

circulars distributed by Himmler, and the film visually and verbally evokes the
Korean War, the Algerian War, Gettysberg, and the French resistance. Even
the uniforms, like carnival costumes, are anachronistic as well as impossibly
international, combining a tsarist officer’s cap, the jacket of an Italian tramway
controller, and the boots of a Yugoslav partisan.
Carnivalesque art is uninterested in psychological verisimilitude or
audience identification. Both King Ubu and Les Carabiniers cut off all
sentimental participation in spectacle. Jarry’s play renders the most
rudimentary empathy, not to mention pity and fear, impossible, by offering
figures from grand guignol, ideological marionettes lacking in psychological
substance. The characters are ambulatory oxymorons, given to sudden and
improbable ethical turnabouts. Mére Ubu, who generally displays not so much
as a soupc¢on of conscience, abruptly lectures Ubu: “the young Bougrelas will
win, because he has justice on his side.” Pere Ubu, learning that his rival will
gain the crown that he himself has coveted and murdered for, acquieces with
unexpected nonchalance, adding that “I don’t envy him his crown.” Les
Carabiniers is peopled with pasteboard buffoons devoid of psychological
density who renders sympathetic identification virtually impossible. Even their
self-consciously grandiose names remove them to a realm beyond
identification, for contemporary people are rarely named Ulysses or Cleopatra.
The film aggressively blocks all entrance points for our projection; unable to
even identify the opposing sides in the battle, much less can we identify with
specific characters. Such distanciation might have been more tolerable had we
been granted spectatorial omniscience in exchange, but Les Carabiniers often
makes us feel as irrelevant and manipulable as its characters. We are placed in
the position of Michelangelo struggling to possess the film.
The protagonists of both Ubu and Les Carabiniers shock us by the light-
hearted candor with which they relate their crimes. “In every direction,” Ubu
blithely reports, “you can see only burning houses and people bent under the
weight of our phynances.” In their letters to Venus and Cleopatra, the two
protagonists of Les Carabiniers coolly boast of mass murder: “We sow death
among families, and fulfill our bloody mission.” Such passages display, on one
level, a typically modernist dissociation between horrible events and their
distanced recounting, but on another they reflect a carnivalesque strategy of
radical simplification aimed at the unmasking of Power, a strategy which
carries out the promise implicit in the Borges quotation which prefaces Les
Carabiniers: “More and more, I am moving toward simplicity.” The discourse
of Power, in these texts, is simplified, stripped of all euphemism. Godard’s
professed goal in Les Carabiniers was to make the logic of war so simple a child
could understand it, and if war is anything in the film it is a pretext for pillage, a
kind of bellicose consumerism. The “Maserati sequence” reveals, on a
 The Carnival of Modernism 19]

microcosmic level, this central mechanism. Ulysses lacks the money to buy the
Maserati he desires; so he kills and steals to get it. The “postcard sequence”
shows the photographic image as a vain attempt to appropriate the world, and
the camera, in Susan Sontag’s words, as “the ideal arm of consciousness in its
acquisitive mood.” The logic of property deprives even images of their
innocence. Which is why Godard repeatedly stresses the analogy between
prises de guerre and prises de vue, rifles and cameras, murderers, and voyeurs.

Les Carabiniers: The War Film Intertext

Les Carabiniers operates a triple demystification—of war itself, of the war film,
and even of the antiwar film. War itself is divested of its glamor and shown to be
a confusion and a muddle. Like Fabrice at Waterloo, we as spectators wander
bewilderedly through the smoke of a tedious, undramatic, and decentered war.
Godard counterpoints sound and image to point up the contradictions between
the patriotic glorifications of war and the gray realities they mask. Noble
official pronouncements precede confused military scenes which do not match
at all. Shouts of “la guerre est finie” coincide with the continuing sound of
gunfire on the soundtrack. The conventional ethical hierarchies of war—
massive aerial bombardments are antiseptic and humane; disemboweling with
a knife is evil and barbaric—are leveled and revealed to be prevarications. Such
codes are shown to be as absurd as those of Ubu’s coconspirators who, while
outraged at the idea of poisoning Venceslas with arsenic, can hail a plan to
bifurcate him with a sword as “noble and valiant.”
Les Carabiniers demystifies war by carnivalizing a genre—the war film.
Godard systematically denies us the satisfactions of the genre: drama,
spectacular battles, vicarious games of strategy. War is trivialized and divested
of its glamor, denuded of all heroism or even of compensatory male
camaraderie. A majority of high-angle shots show the action against a
background of mud; there are no helmets silhouetted boldly against the sky.
Most war films concentrate on images of sudden death; Les Carabiniers
repeatedly shows us rotting corpses, death in its most unpalatable form. Rather
than emphasize glorious battles, Godard focuses on the military execution of
prisoners, while the more spectacular actions—gougings, hangings, mass
executions—take place off-screen or are conveyed by anachronistic or
“uncinematic” intertitles. War is primarily evoked through the soundtrack and
through archival footage. But while archival footage conventionally
undergirds realism, here it destroys it. The stock shots are intrusive and
unintegrated into the dramatic structure of the film. A “sylleptic” montage of
stock shots mixes World War I tanks with World War I] planes, thus forming
the visual equivalent of the anachronistic intertitles. “
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 The Carnival of Modernism 193

Les Carabiniers demystifies the antiwar film as well. Many antiwar films,
after all, indirectly glorify war. M.A.S.H., while satirizing the bureaucratic
inefficiency of war, creates such an appealing image of army camaraderie that
the spectator is tempted to enlist. Films like A/] Quiet on the Western Front or
La Grande Illusion, on the other hand, make war the scene of a heroic refusal.
Most antiwar films accept the conventions of dramatic realism, but for Godard
“realism,” with all its costly procedure of reconstituting war on the screen,
teaches us nothing about war. He rejects, consequently, both realism and the
human image. The potential objects of our identification—Michelangelo and
Ulysses—display the moral somnambulism of an Eichmann; they are
murdering robots, Ubufied Lieutenant Calleys. There is no lachrymose
insistence on the suffering of war’s victims, no cheap catharsis. Since the film
offers us no human alternative for identification, we are denied the suspect
pleasures of /a bonne conscience.
In his introduction to the film, Godard called Les Carabiniers a “conte de
faits,” that is both a fairy tale (conte de fées) and a documentary (story of facts).
The film, in this sense, superimposes an archly simple fable on an essayistic
dissertation on war and fascism. This confounding of generic categories
offended many critics, hardly surprising given the close link between generic
and social conventions. The separation of styles, as Auerbach shows in
Mimesis, has tended historically to be tied to the separation of classes, and any
generic or discursive “leveling” in the realm of art portends, for the conservative
critic, an ominous leveling within society itself. In texts like Ubu or Les
Carabiniers, the censoring faculty simply goes on strike in protest against all
cultural rigidity. Just as the surrealists praised “la sauvagerie” as an antidote to
a stultifying “civilization,” Jarry and Godard give free reign to their taste for
nonsense and horseplay. Their puerile and scatological references reflect the
childlike irreverence of artists on a raucous holiday from the strictures of
official culture.

Carnival and Latin American Culture

Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque arose not only out of his literary studies
of Rabelais but also out of a vital culture—the Russian—which was in some
ways marginal to mainstream European culture. Some Latin American literary
critics, not surprisingly, have begun to see the notion ofthe carnivalesque as the
key to the specificity of Latin American cultural production. Since Latin
America has been economically, poltically, and culturally marginalized, its
best artists have made this marginalization, this parodic consciousness of being
on the periphery, this ironic sense of belonging to two cultures—one’s own and
that of the metropolitan centers of power—absolutely central to their work.
Borges, on first glance a most patrician writer, often carnivalizes European
194 The Carnival of Modernism

literary classics, turning Dante’s Divine Comedy, for example, into a trivial
love story in E/ Aleph. The novels of Manuel Puig constantly remind us of the
presence of Hollywood films asa kind of cultural /ingua franca in countries like
Argentina. All Latin America, in a manner, has been “betrayed by Rita
Hayworth,” in that cultural colonialism has given it a pervasive sense that real
life is “elsewhere,” not in the provinces of Argentina or Brazil.
But Latin America is “carnivalesque” in still another, more concrete sense.
Whereas carnival in Europe is either nonexistent or but a pale echo of the
Rabelaisian frenzies of yore, carnival in Latin America—especially in those
countries impregnated by the African culture brought by slaves—is a living and
vibrant tradition. A profoundly mestizo culture—Amerindian, European, and
Afro-American—has given birth to an immensely creative cultural
phenomenon. The kind of ecstatic Dionysian festival for which Nietzsche was
so nostalgic—in which “singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing in
number, were whirled from place to place under [a] Dionysian impulse” exists
in full force in certain parts of the Caribbean and in Brazilian cities like
Salvador or Recife. It was contact with such festivals that led the Cuban writer
Alejo Carpentier to formulate his concept of the “real maravilloso americano”
and to contrast Europe’s labored attempts to resuscitate the marvelous with the
quotidian magic of Latin American life. '° While most European carnivals have
degenerated into the ossified repetition of perennial rituals, Brazilian carnival
remains a protean, ever-changing cultural expression, combining ecstatic
polyrhythmic percussion and “orgiastic” behavior with the elaborate “folk
opera” of the samba schools and the spontaneous street theatre of costumed
revelers mingling in free and familiar contact.’®
Brazilian anthropologist Roberto da Matta describes carnival in terms
almost identical to those of Bakhtin, as a time of festive laughter and gay
relativity, a collective celebration which abolishes the separation between
actors and spectators. He describes carnival as the privileged locus of inversion,
in which all the marginalized—the poor, the black, the homosexual—take over
the symbolic center. The business quarter, usually dedicated to productive
labor, is given over to playfulness. Night changes position with day, as revelers
dance all night and sleep during the day. Men dress up as women and women,
with somewhat less frequency, as men. Grown-ups drink cachaca out of baby
bottles, while socialites dress up as prostitutes and prostitutes dress up as
aristocrats. The festival, at least in the tendencies of its symbolic system—I am
not suggesting that three days of carnival actually overturn social structures
reinforced throughout the year—is profoundly democratic and egalitarian. A
party to which everyone is invited, carnival ideally offers a world of gestural
freedom and unbridled fantasy, in which revelers play out imaginary roles
corresponding to their fondest desires. '’
 The Carnival of Modernism 1(3)

Art in Brazil has been enriched by the perennial interchange between

erudite culture and the popular world of carnival. The novels of Jorge Amado,
for example, constantly draw inspiration from the Africanized carnival of
Bahia. Carnivalesque imagery has also pervaded Brazilian cinema throughout
its history. The Brazilian musical comedies called chanchadas of the thirties,
forties, and fifties were also called “carnivalesque” films since they were often
timed to be released during carnival and meant to promote carnival songs.
These films, as Joao Luiz Vieira points out on his article on “Carnival and
Parody in Brazilian Cinema,” often parody the American films on which they
were partially modeled. '* In doing so, they make fun not only of the American
films but also of their own inability to faithfully reproduce American
production values. In short, they make all that is marginal in the Brazilian
situation the very center of their discussion. In José Carlos Burle’s Carnaval
Atlantida (1953), the Brazilian director Cecilio B. de Milho (Cecil B. de Corn)
abandons his plan to film a serious epic Helen of Troy, opting finally for a
comic and carnivalesque version on the same theme. “Helen of Troy won’t
work,” says Regina to her father, the producer of the proposed epic, “for the
people want to dance and move.” In the end, foreign high-art stodginess gives
way to native carnivalesque debauchery. These parodies, as Vieira points out,
often center on American super-productions, and express mingled resentment
and admiration for the technically superior product of the metropolitan center
of neocolonial power. Os Cosmonautas (The Cosmonauts), for example,
speaks of a Brazilian space scientist, working at Cape Carnival, whose
ambition is to send three Brazilians on the first moonflight. Costinha Contra o
King- Mong (Costinha Against King Mong) spoofs the Dino de Laurentis
super-production by pitting the comic actor Costinha against a crudely
fashioned monster on the top of Sugarloaf and Corcovado.

Brazilian Modernism and the Cannibalist Metaphor

A film that reflects the carnivalesque, in the anthropological as well as the

literary sense, and a work indebted to Rabelais, to the European avant-garde,
and to Brazilian carnivalesque films, is Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s
Macunaima (1969) based on the novel of the same name by Mario de
Andrade. The book, published in 1928, was one of the seminal achievements of
Brazilian modernism, a movement which began around 1913 and gathered
momentum until it exploded the Brazilian cultural scene in 1922 with the
“Week of Modern Art,” a multimedia event featuring poetry, music, and the
plastic arts. Mario de Andrade, as one of the prime movers of Brazilian
modernism, was widely conversant with the European avant-garde, including
the futurists, the dadaists, and the surrealists (some of whom were his friends
and whom he “invited” into his book). At the same time, he remained a
196 The Carnival of Modernism

defiantly Brazilian artist. Like other Brazilian modernists, Mario de Andrade

called for the democratization of Brazilian literature through the incorporation
of popular forms of speech. In his “Brazilwood Manifesto,” fellow modernist
Oswald de Andrade called for a “popular language” which represented “The
Way We Speak” and “The Way We Are.” By embracing the creative “errors” of
the people, the modernists sounded a barbaric yawp of protest against a double
colonization, first by Europe itself and second by the European-dominated
cultural elite within Brazil.
Oswald de Andrade called modernism a “Movimento Antropofago” (a
Cannibalist Movement), which advocated the forging of an authentic Brazilian
culture through the critical devouring of native and foreign influences. For the
modernists, cannibalism was an authentic native tradition as well as a key
metaphor for their own cultural independence. “Only cannibalism unites us,”
Oswald proclaimed, “Tupi or not Tupi—that is the question.” Oswald dated his
Cannibal Manifesto 374—“the year Bishop Sardinha was swallowed”—in
reference to the historical deglutition by Brazilian Indians of their first
Portuguese-supplied bishop. The metaphor of cannibalism, then, was a way for
Brazilian “redskin” artists to thumb their noses at their own literary “palefaces”
and at colonizing overcultivated Europe, while heeding surrealism’s call for “la
sauvagerie” in art. It was also, as Emir Rodriguez Monegal points out, the
carnivalized response to the problem of cultural colonialism. By comically
underlining the cannibalistic nature ofall processes ofcultural assimilation, the
modernists not only desacralized European models, they also desacrilized their
own cultural activities.’’
Cannibalism as metaphor has a long history, going at least as far back (if
one bypasses its centrality in certain religious rituals) as Montaigne’s essay “On
Cannibals,” based, ironically, on interviews with Brazilian Indians. Civilized
Europeans were ultimately more barbarous than cannibals, Montaigne
argued, for cannibals ate the flesh of the dead only to appropriate the strength
of their enemies, while Europeans tortured and slaughtered in the name of a
religion or love. Herman Melville echoed Montaigne by asking: “Which of us is
not a cannibal?” With the avant-garde, the metaphor took on renewed vigor.
The dadaists entitled one of their organs Le Cannibal and Picabia issued a
“Cannibal Dada manifesto.” As exploited by Brazilian modernists from the
twenties through the present, the metaphor showed a positive and a negative
pole. The positive pole entailed admiration for Amerindian culture and the
proposal of cultural anthropophagy as an anticolonialist artistic strategy, i.e.,
to devour what is useful in the foreign and excrete what is not. The negative
pole of the metaphor makes cannibalism a critical instrument for exposing the
exploitative social Darwinism of bourgeois society. The two poles complement
each other in the sense that the cannibalism-as-critique contemplates the
melancholy distance separating contemporary society from*what is imagined
 The Carnival of Modernism 197

as the ideal communitas of the Amerindian.”? Oswald de Andrade, in his

manifestoes, emphasized both poles. Writing under the pseudonym
“Marxillaire” (the name combines Marx, Apollinaire, and “maxillary”), he
wrote the manifesto “Why I Eat,” where he posits the Indian as a cultural
model: “The Indian had no police, no repression, no nervous disorders, no
shame at being nude, no class struggle, no slavery, no Ruy Barboso, no secret
vote...” In his “Cannibalist Manifesto,” meanwhile, he called cannibalism
“The only law of the world. Masked expression of all individualisms and all
collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties.””!

Mario de Andrade and the Carnivalization of Language

Mario de Andrade, an anthropologist as well as poet and novelist, compiled

African, Amerindian, and Iberian legends to create Macunaima. He called his
text a “rhapsody,” (eytomologically: “stitcher”) and indeed he does stitch tales
together to form a linguistic crazy quilt. Macunaima offers the same abstract,
invented language encountered in King Ubu. Just as Jarry’s play forms a kind
of linguistic cocktail composed of blasphemous archaisms (cornebleu,
Jambedieu: “God’s horns,” “God’s legs”), contemporary slang (fiole for head),
and phony old French (“Adonc le Pere Ubu hoscha la poire, dont fut nommé
par les Anglois Shakespeare: “Then Father Ubu shook his peare, who was
afterwards yclept Shakespeare by the Englishe), so the language of Macunaima
forms what Mario de Andrade himself called “a veritable Esperanto.” A
linguistic “nowhere” taken from all regions of Brazil and ranging from the
archaic to the neologistic, it exploits to the maximum the rich potentialities of
Brazilian Portuguese, weaving rhymed maxims (“Eat shit but never bet”),
gnomic wisdom (“The whole marsh doesn’t mourn when one crab dies”), and
popular superstitions into a splendid linguistic tapestry. Macunaima taps the
linguistic genius of the Brazilian people by fusing its jokes, legends, songs, and
nursery rhymes, along with its Indianisms and Africanisms, into a panfolkloric
saga. The novel captures the aphoristic cynicism of the people (“Each man for
himself and God against everyone!” and “God gives nuts to people without
teeth!”) and its gift for nonsense (“Our hero closed his eyes so as not to see
himself being eaten”). Despite its radically popular origins, however, the novel
inevitably remained inaccessible in a country where illiteracy remains rampant.
Thus Joaquim Pedro de Andrade performed an enormous service by making
the novel “readable” to a vast public. Indeed the film’s popular success suggests
that Macunaima does touch something in the carnivalesque depths of the
Brazilian psyche.
Macunaima, \ike Ubu, carnivalizes language by comically exploiting
linguistic incongruities. Pere Ubu threatens murder, for example, in the polite
language of awedding announcement: “I have the honor of announcing that in
(6961) DuUDUNIDWW ‘(Op aunBi4
 The Carnival of Modernism 199

order to enrich the kingdom I am going to slay all the nobles and take all their
goods.” Elsewhere he apostrophizes his grossly named weapons: “Shitry sabre,
do your duty, and you, financial stick, lag not behind!” The Ubus frequently
break without warning into literary inversions (“que ne vous assom’je”),
archaisms (“vous estes”), and epithets (“madame ma femelle... madame de ma
merdre”). Pere Ubu even delivers himself of a labored and pleonastic epic
simile: “As the poppy and the dandelion are scythed in the flower of their age by
the pitiless scythe of the pitiless scyther who scythes pitilessly their pitiful
parts—just so little Resnky.” Macunaima, similarly, has its presumably
illiterate protagonist learn Latin and Greek (in order to collect “dirty words”)
and compose a letter in the chaste Portuguese of Camées. In the world of
Macunaima even monkeys speak Latin. In the film version, Macunaima sees a
vagabond, substituting for the monkey, eating his own testicles. The vagabond
offers him a bite, Macunaima approves, and the vagabond urges Macunaima
to try eating his own. So Macunaima takes a stone and crushes his balls. As he
howls in pain, the vagabond mumbles “sic transit” and walks away.
Macunaima flaunts the freedom from historical limits and the liberty of
philosophical invention typical of Menippean satire. The “scene” of the novel
bounds improbably and without transition from the Amazon to the backlands
to Sao Paulo in an impossible zigzag. Mario de Andrade mingles the flora and
fauna of the diverse regions in a verbal equivalent of Ubu’s “hybrid decor.” He
anachronistically mingles historical periods, facilitating what Bakhtin calls the
“dialogue of the dead with the living,” so that seventeenth-century characters
rub elbows with contemporary ones. Mario de Andrade achieved this freedom
of invention not only by drawing on the carnivalesque tradition in literature
but also by reaching into the Amerindian preliterate past. The arbitrary
hierarchies of occidental prejudice exalt classical Greek mythology as profond
and poetic while denigrating Indian myths as “primitive.” Mario de Andrade,
for his part, used these myths to liberate Brazilian literary language. Animism
and totemism inform the imagery of Macunaima. “Fish used to be people just
like us,” Macunaima tells his brothers. In the world of Macunaima, characters
literally turn into stars, as they do in Indian legends, becoming constellations to
be deciphered by those who remain on earth. For /a pensée sauvage, the night’s
starred face is indeed inscribed with “huge cloudy symbols of a high romance.”
Mario de Andrade explores the antimimetic logic of folktales, which never
pretend to be realistic. They tend, rather, to spatial and temporal
indeterminacy: “In a certain kingdom... once upon a time... in the depths of
the virgin forest....” The characters of folktales, as Propp points out, tend to
lack psychological depth. They are “functions,” instruments of action rather
than interior revelation. Mario de Andrade’s novel, in a not insignificant
coincidence, was published the same year as Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of
the Folk Tale, in which Propp analyzes folktales into 31 “functions” or
200 The Carnival of Modernism

interchangeable incidents. The Brazilian structuralist critic Haroldo de

Campos has, in fact, written a Morphology of Macunaima (Morfologia do
Macunaima), in which he applies the Proppian categories to the de Andrade
novel.” The logic of Macunaima, he argues, is the logic of folktales, not the
logic of individual tales but the logic of the processes by which the folk
imagination constructs tales. Mario de Andrade exploits folklore as a way of
generating stories, not by mechanistically compiling tales, but rather by setting
them into vital interaction. Mario de Andrade “breeds” new stories by having
characters from one body of legend (say Amerindian) perform actions taken
from another body of legends (say African) so that the two traditions cross-
fertilize each other. Thus Macunaima anticipates Dundes’ observation (in the
second edition of Propp’s Morphology) that Propp’s scheme could be used to
generate new stories. Novels like Ulysses have accustomed us to the use of
classical myth as a kind of infrastructure for modern narrative, but with
Macunaima we have something quite different. In Macunaima, folktales
become part of a productive combinatoire by which the collective codes of
langue are transformed into literary parole.
Macunaima the book delights in its own artifice, much as Macunaima the
character tells lies for the sheer love of fiction. At the end of the book, Mario de
Andrade explains that Macunaima turned into a star, that his tribe
disappeared and that only a green and yellow parrot remained to tell the story:

And only the parrot in the silence of Uraricoera preserved from forgetfulness these events
and the forgotten language. Only the parrot conserved in the silence the words and works of
the hero.

This strange parrot, patriotically dressed in the Brazilian national colors, as the
embodiment of the spirit of primary epic and the oral tradition, undoubtedly
belongs to the metalinguistic species. He is an avian intertext, the custodian of
the tribal memory, the archivist of inherited stories. But the illiterate parrot is
helpless without someone to take down his tales. Therefore Mario de Andrade
explains how the parrot did tell his story to one man:

And that man is me, my dear people, and it is I who stayed to tell you the story... I raised a
howl singing in an impure dialect the words and deeds of Macunaima, hero of his people.
That’s all folks.

Thus Mario de Andrade, like Rabelais and Cervantes before him, appears in
his own text under his own name, speaking the impure dialect of his tribe. And
he and the parrot represent the creative source of Macunaima—the spirit of
carnivalesque fiction itself.
Macunaima
(1969)

Figure
41.
202 The Carnival of Modernism

Macunaima: From Novel to Film

The first narrated words in both film and novel—‘“In the depths of the virgin-
forest was born Macunaima, hero of his people”—signal entry into the
carnivalized world of comic epic. The film shows us an improbably old white
woman (played by a man) stand and grunt until she deposits a wailing 50-year-
old black “baby” on the ground. Thus, with a Rabelaisian flourish,
Macunaima, “the hero without any character,” sets out on his outrageous
career. This initial sequence constitutes a model of modernist abstraction and
carnivalesque inversions. The scene, like Ubu’s simultaneous arctic and
tropical “hybird decor,” represent an amalgam. A white man/woman with an
Indian name gives birth to a black man/child, one of whose brothers is black
and wears an African robe and the other of whom is white and wears a priest’s
frock. The hut which serves as maternity ward is half backlander and half
Indian, while the manner of giving birth, in a standing position to take
advantage of gravity, is Amerindian. The birth itself, at once prodigious and
grotesque, encapsulates the imagery of carnival: the old, near death, giving
birth to the new. At the same time, the institution of the family is
desentimentalized and comically degraded. Instead of the usual exclamations
of “How cute!” the family reacts to the hero’s birth with “How ugly!” and “He
stinks!” The film further underlines the surreal nature of this family by having
the same actor (Paulo José) play both the original “mother” of Macunaima and
Macunaima himself (in his later white incarnation), while another actor
(Grande Otelo) plays both the first and the second black Macunaima. Thus the
white Macunaima gives birth to the black Macunaima who transforms himself
into the white Macunaima who marries Ci the guerilla and fathers the original
black Macunaima.”
Macunaima’s oxymoronic protagonist is a composite character, asumma
of Brazil, who epitomizes the ethnic roots as well as the qualities and defects of
an entire people. A composite of several heroes found in the Amerindian
legends which formed the basis of Mario’s tale, even his name is oxymoronic,
since it is composed of the root “maku,” (bad) and the suffix “ima” (great).
Macunaima, the “hero without any character,” lacks character not only in the
conventional moral sense but also in lacking all psychological coherence. His
character consists, as Mario de Andrade explained in a letter to Manuel
Bandeira, “in not having any character and his logic consists in not having any
logic.” No Pius Aeneas, he is by turns selfish, generous, cruel, sensual, and
tender. If the authentic epic hero is all sapientia et fortitudo, Macunaima is but
intermittently brave, and, frequently stupid. His most characteristic phrase is
“Ai! Que Preguica!” (literally, What laziness!); laziness, in fact, serves as an
epic retarding device in Macunaima. While occasionally crafty like Ulysses, he
 s

The Carnival of Modernism 203

is more often grossly egocentric like Ubu. He utters his epic challenges by
telephone, and the telephone, symptomatically, is almost always busy.
The logic of carnival is that of the world turned upside down, in which the
powerful are mocked and ridiculous kings are enthroned and then dethroned in
an atmosphere of gay relativity. The film proliferates in the sexual inversions
common in carnivalesque literature as well as in carnival itself: Paulo José in
drag giving birth to the protagonist; Macunaima costumed as a French
divorcée to trick Pietro out of the amulet; and Pietro himself in the kind of
Hollywoodian bubblebath usually reserved for starlets. Ubuesque industrial
magnate and big-time people-eater, Pietro Pietra is the most powerful figure in
Macunaima, and he, too, is dethroned. In his purple smoking jacket and green
boxer shorts covering his padded buttocks, he looks very much like the Rei
Momo, the burlesque King of the Revels of Brazil’s carnival. Graced with
multinational names and an Italian accent, he referred in the novel to the
Italian nouveaux riches of the twenties and in the film to the dependant
national bourgeoisie with its second-hand American technology. Pietro lives in
the hybrid vulgarity of a palace where rococo clocks and breathing mannequins
co-habit with neo-Egyptian sphynxes. He struggles with Macunaima over an
amulet—an amulet whose traditional folkloric role was to guarantee fishing
and hunting (i.e., prosperity). As a millionaire who wants to eat Macunaima,
the hero of his people, he alludes to all the economic giants—Brazilian, in part,
but especially North American—which devour Brazil and its resources. But
even Macunaima, though he defeats Pietro and wins the amulet, is enthroned
and dethroned. After feeling the “immense satisfaction” of defeating the giant,
he dissipates his advantage by returning to the jungle with the useless electronic
bric-a-brac of consumer society.
Carnivalesque art, since it sees its characters not as flesh and blood people
but as abstract puppet-like figures, laughs at beatings, dismemberment, and
even death. The film is full of macabre humor and comic mutilations. When
Macunaima reports to his mother that he has lost a tooth, she responds by
dropping dead, in literal respect for the proverb “caiu dente, € morte de
parente” (a tooth falls, a relative dies). When Macunaima becomes depressed
over the loss of Ci, his brothers take him to a leper colony to cheer him up. (We
see him kick a severed hand along the pavement, an homage to the hand poked
at by the androgynous figure in Chien Andalou). One scene offers an orgy of
dismemberment. Macunaima goes to a wedding party for which the
cannibalistically inclined Pietra has devised a festive game, a lottery in which
the winners are thrown into a pool of fragmented bodies and voracious piranha
fish. A close look at the contents of the pool reveals it to be an anthropophagic
feijoada (the Brazilian national dish, consisting of sauce, black beans, and
sausage) with human blood and limbs substituting for sauce and sausage.
Macunaima finally tricks Pietra into falling in, and as he is being devoured,
204 The Carnival of Modernism

Pietra mutters that the feijoada needs more salt. The force of the sequence
comes from the Godard-like dissociation between the gala setting, with its
balloons and confetti and festively dressed guests, and the grisly events which
take place within the setting, all clinched by Pietra’s absurd final comment.
By focusing on bodily life—copulation, birth, eating, drinking,
defecation—carnival offers human beings a temporary suspension of hierarchy
and prohibition. The carnivalesque, for Bakhtin, is designed to transfer all that
is spiritual, ideal, and abstract to the material level, to the sphere of earth and
the body. Excrement (Ubu’s merdre) as a literal expression of what Bakhtin
calls the “lower bodily principle,” forms part of this fecund imagery of the
grotesque. Old time carnivals in Europe once featured “le jeu de la merde” (the
shit game), in which revelers would sling manure at one another, a game later
sublimated into more refined forms of slapstick: throwing talcum, water
bottles, and other amiable aggressions. The excremental vision of Joaquim
Pedro’s film involves the protagonist being virtually shat into existence, in the
opening sequence, and being shat on—by a vulture, by a goose—in his
subsequent career. Urine, too, carries great prestige in the carnivalesque
aesthetic. Gargantua urinates on the multitude, and the child Macunaima
would “piss hot on his old mother, frightening the mosquitoes.” Copulating
and feasting also abound in Macunaima. The world is one of systematic orality,
as if all its characters were fixed at what Freud called the “oral and cannibalistic
phase.”

The Politics of Carnival

However grotesque or fantastic, the carnivalesque esthetic retains a

commitment to a certain realism (but not to illusionism) which addresses
everyday life and speaks of contemporary events. Mennipean satire, as the
journalistic genre of antiquity, was forever engaging in contemporary
polemics. The novel Macunaima mocked SAao Paulo politicians, intellectuals,
libertines, and nouveaux riches. The popularity of the film version suggests
that the Brazilian audience detected, below the surreal surface of the film, a
carnivalized version of themselves and their situation. Allegorical and magical
on first reading, Macunaima becomes down-to-earth and quotidian on the
second, developing, rather like surrealist painting, a tension between the
realistic precision of the individual details and the apparent madness of the
general conception.
What, then, does the carnivalized mimesis of Macunaima show us? It
shows us people going from the interior to the urban centers (thus
recapitulating the trajectory of Cinema Novo) and becoming, for what are
basically economic reasons, prostitutes like Sofara or hustlers like Macunaima
and Jigue. It also shows us the kind of political repression triggered by the 1968
 The Carnival of Modernism 205

coup-within-the-coup which handed power to the extreme right wing of the

Brazilian military. “Suspicious attitude,” explains the plainclothesman as he
arrests the fleeing Macunaima. The protagonist’s speech in the public square
denouncing the “evils of Brazil” elicits howls of anticommunist execration. The
film also updates the novel by turning Ci, an Amazonian warrior in the novel—
who, having sampled Macunaima’s “play,” could not stop making love—into
an urban guerilla and sexual activist in the film. Joaquim Pedro equips Ci’s
house with all the paraphernalia required by urban guerillas responding, in the
late sixties, to the closing of Brazil’s political system: a ditto machine for
leaflets, materials for bombs, and money, presumably the booty from the kinds
of bank robberies then practiced by the far Left.
Macunaima also touches on another aspect of the political system, its
structural rascism, something of which Mario de Andrade, as a mulatto, was
doubtless aware. In the film, the passages in which Macunaima turns from
black to white reflect a sardonic consciousness of the absurdity of the “ideology
of whitening” and the limitations of Brazil’s “racial democracy.” The white
Manaape explains why his black brother Jigue was singled out for arrest: “A
white man running is a champion; a black man running is a thief.” When the
white Macunaima enters a magic fountain that turns hims black, the
soundtrack plays the Portuguese version of “By a Waterfall,” from Lloyd
Bacon’s musical Footlight Parade (1933) whose musical numbers were directed
by Busby Berkeley. The choice seems especially apt when one recalls that the
original inspiration for the “By a Waterfall” number was black children playing
with the water spurting from a Harlem hydrant, a sight which suggests to the
James Cagney character the spectacular possibilities of waterfalls splashing on
white bodies. The allusion is rightly suggestive, evoking not only a complex
play of black and white but also the relation between the American musical
comedy and Brazil’s carnivalized imitations of them in the chanchada, the
genre in which Grande Otelo, the black actor who plays Macunaima, was
perhaps the most famous star.
Of the two “poles” of the cannibalist metaphor—the negative and the
positive—Joaquim Pedro de Andrade clearly emphasizes the former. It is the
notion of cannibalism as critique that he echoes in his “preface to Macunaima:

Cannibalism is an exemplary mode of consumerism adopted by underdeveloped

peoples. ... The traditionally dominant, conservative social classes continue their control of
the power structure—and we rediscover cannibalism. ... The present work relationships, as
well as the relationships between people—social, political, and economic—are still,
basically, cannibalistic. Those who can, “eat” others through their consumption ofproducts,
or even more directly as in sexual relationships. Cannibalism has merely institutionalized
and cleverly disguised itself.... Meanwhile, voraciously, nations devour their people.
Macunaima. . . is the story of a Brazilian devoured by Brazil.
206 The Carnival of Modernism

The cannibalistic theme is treated in all its variations: people so hungry they eat
themselves; an ogre who offers Macunaima a piece of his leg; the guerrilla who
devours him sexually; Pietra’s wife who wants to cook him alive; Pietra himself
with his anthropophagous soup; and finally the man-eating siren who lures him
to his death. Brazil, practicing that “exemplary mode of consumerism,”
devours its own children and Brazil’s poor, like Macunaima, literally devour
the Brazilian earth. The rich devour the poor, and the poor devour each other.
We see the poor preying on each other when Macunaima, tricked by acon man
into buying a goose that defecates gold, goes on to steal from an already once-
robbed shoeshine boy. The Left, meanwhile, while being devoured by the
Right, purifies itself by eating itself—a practice which Joaquim Pedro calls the
cannibalism of the weak.
Since the film version of Macunaima, other Latin American filmmakers
have elaborated the cannibals and the “carnivalist” metaphor. In Como Era
Gostoso meu Frances (How Tasty was my Frenchman, 1971), Nelson Pereira
dos Santos tells the story of a sixteenth-century Frenchman who is captured by
Tupinamba Indians, who takes part in their tribal work, wars, and religious
ceremonies, and who is finally cannibalized by them, incorporated, as it were,
into the tribal body. Thus Dos Santos recycles the anticolonialist metaphor—
the Tupinamba (read Brazil) must devour the European colonizer in order to
appropriate his strength, but without being devoured in turn. The exiled
Chilean filmmaker Raul Ruiz, similarly, develops the anthropophagic theme in
Le Territoire (The Territory, 1981). The film’s epigraph is from Mircea Eliade:

Among all the inventions of the human spirit, anthrophagy impresses me the most. Outside
of the moral question, the set of symbols which it gives rise to, and the psychological
creativity which its practice implies, render it, for the historian of religion, a matter as
complex, as harmonious and as worthy of respect as a Gothic cathedral.

In Ruiz’s parable, a group of Americans ends up in a small Medieval town in

Southern France, and later lose their way in the snow and are gradually
converted to cannibalism. Western society, Ruiz suggests, is not as far from
“savagery” as it likes to think.
In politicized carnivalesque films, the spirit of carnival is allied with the
dynamics of class struggle in a process whereby the cheerful vulgarity of the
powerless is made to shatter the pretense of the powerful. Arnaldo Jabor’s
Tudo Bem (Everything’s Fine, 1978), for example, packs all of Brazil into a
single bourgeois apartment. A couple, Juarez and Elvira, hire construction
workers to remodel their apartment. The workers invite their impoverished
relatives. The sick visit one of the maids, a mystic, in hopes of being healed. The
other maid, a part-time prostitute, mocks her mistress’s mannerisms and leads
the workers in a carnival procession, using pots, pans, and construction tools
o1NBI4
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‘opeofiay
Dy DUaDUN (6961)
208 The Carnival of Modernism

for percussion. The “slave quarters,” in Glauber Rocha’s felicitous phrase,

“invade the Big House.” As in Viridiana, the marginalized classes make an
aristocratic home the scene of a carnivalesque degradation. The utopian energy
of carnival overturns the “Order and Progress” of the bourgeois apartment. We
see antagonistic classes, speaking irreconcilable languages and with radically
opposed perspectives, in serio-comic confrontation within an abstract socially
microcosmic space. How many social contradictions, we are led to ask, can fit
into this space—i.e., Brazil—without a revolutionary explosion?
On the positive side, carnival suggests the joyful affirmation of becoming.
It is ecstatic collectivity, the superseding of the individuating principle in what
Nietzsche called “the glowing life of Dionysian revelers.” (The primordial role
of percussion comes from its unifying and tribalizing role.) On the negative,
critical side, the carnivalesque suggests a demystificatory instrument for
everything in the social formation which renders such collectivity difficult of
access: Class hierarchy, political manipulation, sexual repression, dogmatism,
and paranoia. Carnival in this sense implies an attitude of creative disrespect, a
radical opposition to the illegitimately powerful, to the morose and
monological.
The carnivalesque has already demonstrated its usefulness in literary
criticism. Bakhtin’s revalorization of parody and carnival shifted the terms of
the debate concerning the development of the novel. In a typically
carnivalesque gesture, what had been considered marginal and eccentric—the
parodic sport of a Sterne or Diderot—took over the center as a paradigm of
dialogic textuality. The notion of the carnivalesque relativizes the
overvaluation—often shared by bourgeois and Marxist critic alike—of the
serious mimetic mode, suggesting the possibility of a realism which is not an
illusionism, just as it suggests the possibility of a Left cultural critique which
precludes neither laughter nor the pleasure principle.
 )

The Pleasures of Subversion

If modernism, by placing all human beings in the quixotic predicament,

represents a radical extension of the Cervantic critique of fictions, Marxism
constitutes a politicization and historicization ofthat critique. lam not making
the anachronistic suggestion that Cervantes was a Marxist, or that the reading
of Don Quixote transformed Marx into a revolutionary thinker, but only that
the Marxist critique of the ideological fictions of the bourgeois social order can
be seen as a working out, a deepening, of certain features of the Cervantic
critique. Ideology, after all, is essentially quixotic, a system of representation,
according to Louis Althusser, based on “the imaginary relationship of
individuals to their real conditions of existence.' Don Quixote’s ideology does
possess a certain logic and rigor; it consists of refracting social reality through
the prism of chivalric literature. The real conditions of his life include
windmills, prostitutes, and genteel poverty, but his “lived relation” to these
conditions involves giants, courtly heroines, and a world unsoiled by material
preoccupations.
Ideology, false consciousness, reification—these are diverse names for the
veils of appearance that obscure the true face of class society. Demystification,
for Marx, consists in stripping the conditions under which we live of their
drapery of legalistic and moralistic concepts by confronting society’s self
image, its schemes of representation, its mystifications and idealizations, with
its real-life processes. Too much of Marxist criticism, unfortunately, rather
than clarifying the demystification process as it operates within art, has applied
the strategy to art. Equating art with false consciousness, a certain Marxism
deprives art of its liberatory force, falling into a facile reductionism. Art is not
an economic category, and its productions cannot be reduced either to false
consciousness or to the sublimate of class antagonism. Even reactionary
classes, Marx recognized, can produce art which offers perennial delight.
Although the class gua class may be destined for the dustbin of history, the
artistic products of its members often wind up honoring the libraries and
museums of the world. At its best art is itself, like Marxism, a critical
instrument designed to lay bare the mechanisms of society even as it lays bare
the devices of art.
210 The Pleasures of Subversion

Although often caricatured as merely quixotic, Marxism can be

profoundly Cervantic, for it places in dialectical relation the earthbound
materialism of a Sancho Panza and the utopian vision of a Don Quixote. Like
Sancho Panza with his crude proverbial wisdom, Marx insists on the material
behavior of human beings—“not men as narrated, thought of, imagined
[but]...real, active men...”—but these reminders of human materiality
represent only one side of the dialectic. * The other side involves the capacity to
envision, beyond the degraded processes of the present, the lineaments of a
future golden age free of alienation and oppression. While wandering through
the arid landscapes of the kingdom of necessity, Marx could, like the knight of
the sad countenance, catch intoxicating glimpses of the realm of freedom.’
The great utopians, the Manuels point out in their Utopian Thought in the
Western World, have paradoxically often been the greatest realists, showing
extraordinary comprehension of their time and place, offering penetrating
analyses of the social, economic, and emotional conditions of their historical
moment.* Don Quixote’s vision of enchanters who frustrate the achievements
of the virtuous and exalt those of the morally wretched can be taken as a
shrewdly veiled account of real social forces that create an unfair distribution
of the rewards of production. Quixote’s utopianism operates in the nostalgic
mode; he denies the present in the name of a golden age. But the utopian
propensity can look backward or forward in its negation ofthe present, just as
it can function positively or negatively, positing an ideal commonwealth or an
inverted utopia. What will interest us here will be a kind of utopian realism,
characterized by a double movement of revolutionary desire and hardheaded
critique, celebration and demystification, utopia and dystopia, the sense of
potential and the awareness of limits.
If the Marxist view, by stripping art of its mystical wrappings, constitutes
a devaluation of art, it also redeems the very art it demystifies by granting it a
potentially revolutionary use-value. Art loses what Benjamin calls its “aura,”
its overlay of magical and religious sanctifications, its residue of mystery.”
Critics like Benjamin denounce the fetishization of art and deflate the romantic
myth of artists as visionaries, sages, voyants, or “the unacknowledged
legislators of mankind.” At the same time, they forge a link between “high art”
and the everyday mechanical and constructive crafts. The notion of art as
“special” has been historically bound up with the idea of art as “useless.” Art,
for the idealist, frees human beings from the vulgar material pressures oflife by
fixing their gaze on the beautiful, thus unconsciously resuscitating for art the
ideological function of medieval religion—used by the dominating class to
legitimize its advantages and absorbed by the dominated class to numb its pain.
But if art is simply another form of production—not inspiration, not genius,
not the divine efflatus, but work—then artists can pay tribute to the element of
craft in their work. In a wonderfully evocative passage, Benjamin describes
 The Pleasures of Subversion 211

how the art of storytelling was “woven thousands of years ago in the ambiance
of the oldest forms of craftmanship.”° Seized by the rhythm of weaving and
spinning, the listener heard tales in such a way that the gift of retelling came
easily. Artists, of course, have always paid tribute to the element of craft in their
work. Cervantes, presenting the second part of Don Quixote, tells us that it was
“cut by the same craftsman from the same cloth as the first.” The Parnassian
poets compared their work to that of silversmiths, and Yeats’ Sailing to
Byzantium implicitly compares poetry to “hammered gold.” The relationship
of the storyteller to his material, suggests Benjamin, is a craftsman’s
relationship.” His task is “to fashion the raw material of experience, his own
and that of others, ina solid, useful and unique way.”’ Films, Vertov suggested,
should be as useful as shoes. There is no reason why art, whether in the form of
a Grecian urn or a revolutionary film, should not be useful as well as beautiful
and pleasurable.

The Lessons of Brecht

One thinker who rejected the false dichotomy of beauty and utility, pleasure
and learning, was Bertolt Brecht. With Brecht, the distanciating manner is
always closely tied to a dialectical analysis of alienation—the process by which
human beings lose control of their labor power, their products, their
institutions, and their lives. Although distanciating effects obviously pre-
existed Brecht—indeed we have encountered them in Rabelais, Shakespeare,
Cervantes—it was with Brecht that they became consciously directed toward a
political goal: to shock the audience into an awareness that both social life and
art are human creations and therefore can be changed, that the laws of a
predatory society are not divinely inscribed but subject to human intervention.
Bourgeois ideology, for Brecht, masks the people’s loss of real power by
fostering certain illusions—the illusion of individual autonomy, of a free
contractual relationship between labor and capital, producers and consumers,
and so forth. This ideology is not a Machiavellian imposition by a dominating
class, but rather a phenomenon generated by the social structure itself. It
becomes our “lived world,” in Althusserian terms, a kind of normal pathology,
the moorings of the dominant system within the psychic and intellectual
structures of all classes. It is precisely the normality of ideology that
necessitates an art which makes things strange. Brecht believed that bourgeois
normality numbs human perception and masks the contradictions between
professed values and social realities; therefore he called for an art that would
free socially conditioned phenomena from the “stamp of familiarity” and
reveal them as striking, as calling for explanation, as other than “natural.”
“Behind the familiar,” says the final couplet of The Exception and the Rule,
“discover the surprising,” and “behind the everyday, reveal the inexplicable.”
212 The Pleasures of Subversion

Brecht speaks of the “alienation necessary to all understanding.” Out of

the ashes of social alienation—the alienation of the worker, the city dweller, the
member of the oppressed minority, the emigrant, the exile, and the “internal
émigré”—Brecht created the liberating alienation which leads to knowledge. His
enterprise is one of deconditioning; he tries to make our daily myths and
experiences “strange” to us in order to get rid of the false representations that
we make of ourselves and of our society. Brecht put it this way in Song of the
Playwright:

Everything however I handed over to astonishment

Even the most familiar
That the mother gave her breast to the child
That I reported as something which no one could believe.
That the doorman closed the door to the freezing man
As something which no one has ever seen.

“Astonishment,” then, implies both a learned capacity and a capacity for

learning. His theatre is didactic not so much in that it proselytizes on behalf of
specific political ideas, but rather in that it communicates the process of
learning.
Brecht does not refuse mimesis; rather he probes and investigates its
nature. In this sense he offers a modernist and politicized version of the
intermittent realism, the “partial magic,” of Rabelais, Cervantes, and
Shakespeare. His modernism, however, is not a radical formal aestheticism.
His openness is not that of the “delirium of interpretation” or of infinite
semiosis. His work is open, as Umberto Eco points out in Role of the Reader, in
the same sense that a debate is open: a solution is seen as desirable and is
concretely anticipated, but it must emerge from the collective collaboration of
the audience. Brecht’s goal was to demystify, to alert the public to the invisible
codes not only of dramaturgy but also of political and economic power. His
reflexivity is not innocuous or co-optable because he is less interested in
denouncing the fact that art lies than in denouncing the fact that society lies,
and that human beings can do something about it.
For the “West,” the name Brecht, more than any other, evokes an
alternative politicized dramaturgy to counter the reigning bourgeois
conventions. But it must be emphasized that although Brechtian strategies
were originally conceived in the context of Brecht’s radical opposition to both
fascism and bourgeois liberalism—which he saw as political variations on a
theme—these strategies are not intrinsically tied to Brecht’s historical moment
or to his particular political options. What Brecht offers is a subversive écriture
which can be employed in the demystification of any oppressive society or any
reigning ideology. Raul Ruiz and Jean-Luc Godard, for example, are among
the directors who use Brechtian techniques against Stalinism. In his The Top of
 “

The Pleasures of Subversion 213

the Whale (Het Dak Van de Walvis, 1983) Ruiz defamiliarizes Marxist dicta by
inserting celebrated phrases such as “religion is the opium of the people” into
passages of quotidian conversation, thus making them seem strange and
formalistic. Jean-Luc Godard, as we shall see, uses Brechtian techniques to
mock the ossified discourse of the French Communist Party in Tout Va Bien. A
number of filmmakers from East European countries, similarly, have deployed
Brechtian reflexivity to expose the bureaucratic corruption of Stalinist
societies. Both Andrzej Wajda and Krysztof Kieslowski, for example, use the
filmmaker-within-the-film format to expose official lies and manipulation.
Wajda’s filmmaker in Man of Marble unearths a number of specific abuses of
the working class by the Stalinist power structure, even as it exposes the
ossified and mendacious nature of the official media discourse. Kieslowski’s
Amator (inadequately rendered in English as “Camera Buff”) centers on an
aspiring worker-filmmaker who gets into trouble with the authorities for his
revelations of bureaucratic ineptitude, thus revealing that he is an “amateur” in
politics as well as in filmmaking.
Apart from the general goals of Brechtian theatre—laying bare the causal
network of events, active spectatorship, defamiliarization—Brecht also
proposed specific techniques to achieve these goals. (Indeed it is the divorcing
of technique from general aim that leads to the innocuous self-referentiality of
pseudo-Brechtianism.) In terms of mythos (plot), Brecht opposed his own
“epic” theatre—whose narrative structure was interruptive, fractured,
disgressive—to conventional “dramatic” theatre structured to build toward
narrative climax or catharsis. In an epic text, Brecht suggested, one can cut up
the work into individual pieces which remain fully capable of life. In terms of
ethos (character), Brecht favored a play without heroes or stars, and rejected
the theatrical tricks by which actors were turned into stars. In terms of acting,
Brecht argued for a double distanciation—between the actor and the part, and
between the character and the spectator—and suggested specific exercises,
such as acting in the past tense or in the third person, to achieve this
distanciation. Brecht believed in reflexivity, that art should reveal the
principles of its own construction, to avoid the “swindle” of giving the
impression that fictive events were not “worked at” but simply “happened.”
Brecht also argued for the “radical separation of the elements,” which
meant not only that each scene was radically separated from every other scene,
but also that each “track”—music, dialogue, lyric—was to exist in a certain
tension with other tracks. Music, for example, was to be exploited not for its
customary narcotic charm but rather for its potential for provocation. The
songs, first of all, were set off from the dramatic action and the tone of the
dramatic moment. Condemning the illustrative, culinary function of music,
Brecht wanted music to express social attitudes and open up possibilities for
contradiction. Music and lyrics were designed mutually to discredit rather than
Man
Marble
of
(1977)

[oat

‘igure
4
 The Pleasures of Subversion 215

complement each other. Bitter lyrics coincided with saccharine melodies and
vice versa. Or there was discontinuity between the content of the lyrics and the
tone of the singer. Senseless melodic accents and distortions of declamation
contributed to a feeling of disorientation. The music itself, especially that
written by Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau, shocked by deliberate out-of-tune
effects and sudden dissonances. Formal caesurae fractured the continuity and
forced the listener to change his train of thought.

The Lessons Applied: Tout Va Bien

In an essay bearing the suggestive title “The Author as Producer,” Walter

Benjamin proposed that the artist be presented with “a single demand, the
demand of reflecting, of thinking about his position in the process of
production.” Bertolt Brecht, meanwhile, speaking of the “apparatus” of stage,
opera, and press, criticized the naiveté of intellectuals and artists, economically
committed to the prevailing system but socially near-proletarian, who imagine
that the apparatus is only concerned with the presentation of their work. This
“muddled thinking,” Brecht argues, has serious consequences: “For by
imagining that they have got hold of an apparatus which in fact has got hold of
them they are supporting an apparatus which is out of their control.”* Brecht
thus debunks a myth that art often entertains about itself, namely that in the
cultural meritocracy of a nominally free society, talent and excellence rise
naturally to the top through the free play of competition in the cultural
marketplace. Brecht suggests, to the contrary, that the cultural apparatus, can
“make” and “unmake” reputations, and that commodity-art depends for its
promotion and distribution on the owners of capital.’
Godard and Gorin’s Tout Va Bien (1972) thematizes these issues of
production and consumption: the working class as producers and consumers of
goods; artists and intellectuals as producers and consumers of information;
filmmakers and audiences as the producers and consumers of films. The
diegesis concerns Susan (Jane Fonda), an American journalist, and Jacques
(Yves Montand), her new wave filmmaker husband now reduced by economic
necessity to turning out tasteless commercials. Together they cover the story of
a strike at a meat-processing plant. They interview the sequestered manager of
the plant; he dismisses the strike as the work of a handful of misfits who have
not yet come to understand the benign wisdom of neocapitalism. A spokesman
for the CGT (the Communist party-dominated union), flanked by two doltish
figures, discredits the strike by citing instructive statistics from a party
newspaper. Then some young Leftists, speaking a more casual language,
explain their position. They criticize the Communist party for its doctrinaire
prudence and its unacknowledged complicity with the system. Finally we
become acquainted with the couple. Politicized by the events of May 1968,
216 The Pleasures of Subversion

subsequently forced to abandon political work, they have become newly

energized by the strike. Their political reinvolvement, however, triggers a
personal crisis between them, a crisis which provokes reflections on the links
between their problems as a couple and the surrounding social malaise.
Speaking directly to the camera, each of them in turn speaks of dissatisfaction
with their work. Jacques makes commercials while postponing the political
film he has long wanted to make. Susan, although without real ties to the
working class, tries to represent them indirectly through her radio broadcasts;
she ultimately quits, however, nauseated by the mediocrity of her own work.
The film ends inconclusively, with a problematic reconciliation between them.
A couple should be like Mao’s “unity of opposites,” we are told, but bourgeois
society prevents people from living and working “as two.”
Like Balzac in Lost Illusions, Godard in Tout Va Bien performs a
materialist variation on reflexivity by reminding us of the cinema’s economic
base and institutional infrastructure. The opening credit sequence begins witha
characteristic noise of filmmaking—the sound of a clapboard. The image track
shows a process usually elided by credit sequences: the signing of checks to
cover the film’s various expenses, accompanied by the amplified sound of the
checks being torn out of the checkbook. The superimposition of the sounds of
money with the sounds of film production implies a necessary connection
between finance and cinematic production, a connection made explicit by an
off-screen dialogue: “I want to make a film,” says one voice. “To make a film,”
responds another voice, “you need money.” The checks, meanwhile—going for
lighting, makeup, decor—call attention to the artifice of film. The fact that they
are made out to “Transatlantic Bank” makes explicit the filmmaker’s
dependence on foreign capital.
Tout Va Bien unmasks the alienated nature of cultural work in class
society. Jacques defines his work as “making films, finding new forms for new
content,” but in fact his new forms serve only to sell soap and razor blades.
Susan tells journalistic anecdotes into the microphones of the American
Broadcasting Corporation, but she ultimately finds it impossible to continue in
the bourgeois media. Jacques and Susan represent a bifurcation of. the
filmmaking function into images and sounds; taken together they figure forth
the cinéaste himself. Susan’s dismissal of her former work as “crap” recalls
Godard’s severe judgments on his earlier films, while Jacques’ self-
characterization as a new wave director radicalized by May 68 corresponds to
Godard’s own political evolution at the time.
Godard places this cultural work in the context of productive work in
general. The film examines, for example, all the stages in the production and
consumption of food.'° The first tracking shot in the film is of the meat-
processing plant; the second runs alongside the cash registers in a supermarket
where we see the workers paying for what they have themselves produced, the
(ZL61) Vlg DA INO, ~— “ph ains14
218 The Pleasures of Subversion

parallelism of the shots underlining the “awful symmetry” of capitalist laws of

production and consumption. Intellectuals, for their part, are defined as
cultural workers, a definition which avoids the twin political pitfalls of elitist
condescension toward workers on the one hand and self-deprecatory guilt on
the other. Cultural workers are part of what Hans Enzensberger calls the
“consciousness industry”; they are products of culture, of ideas, images, and
sounds, Everything in the social atmosphere is their raw material; they digest
this raw material, reproduce it, filter it, package it. Godard insists on the
doubleness ofthe role of Leftist intellectuals in the media. On the one hand the
media can digest and co-opt them, take their work and render it innocuous. On
the other, the consciousness industry, to remain effective, needs women and
men who can create new forms. It depends on people capable of innovation to
supply all its channels; i.e., it depends on potential troublemakers like Jacques
and Susan. His doubts and her quitting parallel, on an individual plane, the
strike in the meat-processing plant.
The technique of the film underscores the socially exemplary side of
events. The schematic decor, consisting of a double-deckered cutaway set,
“signifies” the political and economic structure of society and shows the
divisions between classes as well as their interdependence. Everything in the
film—the posed portraits of social classes, the tripartite division of the sound
track, the position statements—highlights the conflict of three political forces:
capital, the Communist party, and the Leftists. Rather than treat the members
of these groups as rounded personages, Godard has his characters read texts
which expose their class positions: the boss speaks a passage from Saint
Geour’s Vive la Société de Consommation; the CGT members read from a
Communist party newspaper (La Vie Ouvriére); and the Leftists read from the
Maoist Cause du Peuple. The strike itself is exemplary, much as in Eisenstein’s
strike, although in the case of Tout Va Bien it is the contradictions, and not the
triumphs, which are exemplary. Given the disunity of the Left, the strike
necessarily dissipates its momentum. Rather than obscure such contradictions,
the film highlights them. Rather than have us identify with the workers so as to
participate vicariously in their triumph, the film leads us to understand the
contradictions which preclude real victory.
Antiromance, Tout Va Bien is also antimimesis. Instead of critical realism
a la Lukacs, the film offers a critique of realism. Rather than offering a slice of
life in its durée, the film presents a structural analysis of events. Unspectacular,
the film resists uncritical consumption. Bright primary colors disposed in
geometrical patterns flatten the visual space, as do the frontal angles and
abstract framing. Instead of the affected disorder of naturalistic films, Tout Va
Bien abstractly “layers” the image. One tri-leveled shot, for example, places a
line of militant demonstrators at the bottom of the screen, a line of police with
billy clubs above them (in terms of screen space), topped by a file of noisy cars
 The Pleasures of Subversion 219

and trucks streaming horizontally across a highway bridge in the background.

The same kind of patterning takes place on a temporal level through the
calculated repetition of certain images and sounds. Instead of a naturalistic
“slice of life,” we are given a critical découpage of social existence.

The Politics of Technique

Technique in Tout Va Bien is not something that exists in the service of the
political message—it is the political message. The meat-processing plant is
rendered exemplary through a technique that politicizes the spatial abstraction
we encountered in King Ubu and The Riflemen. Calculated spatial
discontinuities, reminiscent of Last Year at Marienbad, abstract the plant. The
external shots of what appears to be a real factory do not match the shots of the
studio factory—both of which differ from the photographs on the studio-
factory walls. Thus Godard forces us to see the plant as typical—not in the
sense of some statistical average but in the sense of the forces at work in
present-day capitalism. The politicization of technique extends as well to the
camera movements, which are restricted to fixed shots and beautifully
executed tracking shots. Rather than simply accompany the movement, the
tracking shots are autonomous; they call attention to themselves. Rather than
merely register an event, they impose a political pattern on it. In the
supermarket sequence, the camera tracks right to show the everyday processes
of consumer society—people lining up at cash registers—then tracks left to
record the disruption of these processes by rampaging Maoists, thus
illustrating what Godard calls “the social use of the tracking shot.”
The soundtrack of Tout Va Bien is also marked by discontinuity. In the
supermarket sequence, the unnaturally amplified ding of cash registers
alternates with an equally unnatural silence. At other times, words are divorced
from their speakers: we see Jane Fonda’s image and hear her voice on the
soundtrack, but her lips do not move. Elsewhere, she monologues in English
while her own voice intermittently dubs into French. At times the French
overtakes the English and at times the reverse. The effect is to make us aware of
the medium. Language—and cinema—no longer serve as the transparent
conveyor of meaning; they become opaque. Another kind of dissociation is
created by having Vittorio Caprioli (the boss) say a written text—Saint-
Geour’s Vive la Société de Consommation. The nervous tics and hesitations of
method acting are applied to a passage whose rhetoric and style are
transparently that of a written document. The comic effect is reminiscent ofthe
dissociation created by pompously reciting the lyrics of popular songs—what is
coherent when sung becomes absurd when recited.
Tout Va Bien is a film whose form says everything about itself. At the
beginning of the film, two off-screen voices anticipate narrative strategies.
220 The Pleasures of Subversion

They'll need stars, they decide, and a story. “Do we really need a story?” one
asks. “Certainly,” replies the other—“a love story.” There will be him, and then
her, and they will have problems.” This capsule summary, a quintessential
precipitate of the thousands of cinematic love stories turned out by dream
factories around the world, recalls Laurence Sterne’s calculatedly schematic
“Tale of Two Lovers” in Tristram Shandy. In the Sterne version is a him
(Amandus) and her (Amanda) and problems (the Turks), thus offering a
paradigm, as Robert Alter points out, of all the romances ever written. Godard,
like Sterne, mocks our need for stories even while pretending to satisfy it. The
film ends with a “reconciliation” written in cinematic narrative shorthand. We
see Jacques sitting in a café while Susan crosses the street in his direction. Then
we see the same shots, except that she is in the café and he crosses the street. In
any case, the minimal frame fiction has come full circle, while the variant
versions suggest the tenuous nature of filmic reconciliations, with their implicit
promises of conjugal harmony. The film then closes with a parting shot at our
need for fictions: an inscription saying, “Un conte pour ceux qui n’en tiennent
aucun” (a tale for those who do not hold by them, ora tale for those who do not
take account of things). Having decided on overall narrative strategy, the
filmmaker’s delegates then debate problems of character construction and
setting. The story and the characters are not shownas pre-existing; rather, they
are shown in the process of their invention.
This modernist self-consciousness is accompanied by Marxist self-
criticism. The most sympathetic people in the film criticize themselves; only the
manager and the Communist party members are rigid. More important, the
film performs its own self-criticism by criticizing its own way of telling the story
of class struggle. The workers at one point describe their working conditions to
Jacques and Susan, while the film shows, in the realist style, what they are
describing. Then someone objects that they must show the struggle and not
simply exploit misery in an appeal for sympathy. The footage is rerun with this
criticism in mind. Thus the film rehearses itself; like many of Godard’s films, it
is a “film en train de se faire” rather than a finished product. Tout Va Bien asks
how one communicates the process of class struggle. Does one cite statistics
and sell party books like potatoes in a supermarket? Does one recreate in the
spectator the physical sensation of working ina meat-processing plant and thus
elicit sympathy? Does one stage epic confrontations in the manner of the
Odessa Steps sequence? Or does one show conflict through custard-pie
slapstick in a supermarket? Do the workers themselves tell their story or does
one tell it for them? Does one create a Brechtian opera and insert songs with
aggressive lyrics (“The working class will kick the ass of the ruling class!”)? Or
does one adopt the mild yet persuasive charm ofthe popular French films ofthe
thirties? All these approaches are essayed, and criticized, in the film. The
cumulative effect is to make us realize that one cannot separate the politics of
ainsi{
“Sp INOLVA Valg (ZL61)
2e2 The Pleasures of Subversion

the story from the politics of the telling; the story itself changes as it is filtered
through different methods of narration.
Many of Godard’s films end with a kind of political stock-taking. La
Chinoise ends with Véronique’s realization that although she has not made a
great leap forward, she has at least taken a small step. Susan and Jacques in
Tout Va Bien learn to “think through their dissatisfaction” and “see themselves
historically.” The film tries to stimulate a critical vision in the spectator. The
finished artistic product matters less than the process of struggle and
collaboration. History, art, and individuals are shown as being “in process,”
“not finished.” Godard struggles against the passivity bred of decades of
manipulation. Instead of a cinema of vicarious experience to be consumed, he
proposes, as the title of Le Gai Savoir suggests, a cinema ofjoyful learning. To
Roquentin’s “History is impossible,” the off-screen narrator of Tout Va Bien
responds: “Let each of us be his own historian.”
After the at times masturbatory militancy of the Dziga Vertov period
films, Tout Va Bien displays a kind of serenity. Godard feels confident enough
to let the various political groups—even the advocates of consumer
civilization—speak for themselves. The serenity comes as well from a new
honesty about the filmmaker’s relation to class struggle. Godard, after all, is
not a Maoist peasant or a Latin American guerrilla—he is an artist-intellectual
in the capitalist West. The intellectual, Godard seems to realize in Tout Va
Bien, can only offer what Walter Benjamin called a “mediated solidarity” to the
working-class oppressed of his own country. Tout Va Bien critically examines
the role of intellectuals—especially those intellectuals who have access to the
cultural and ideological apparati—within social relations as a whole. The
cinetracts of the Dziga Vertov period, however essential in their search for a
method, were at times irresponsible in their oracular Leftism. They indulged in
a kind of tourism of revolutionary struggles—a few months in Italy, next to
Prague, then over to the Chicago 8. Tout Va Bien retains the political bite of the
earlier films, but is more accessible in its search for a peculiarly politicized kind
of beauty.

Further Applications: Numero Deux

Some of the recent films co-authored by Godard with Anne-Marie Mieéville

brilliantly realize the cinematic potential of the deconstructive techniques here
under discussion. Numéro Deux, for example, extends the political and
aesthetic logic of Godard’s earlier work at the same time that it represents a
radically new departure. His oeuvre as a whole displays a progressive
discarding of narrative drama and spectacle in favor ofthe close scrutiny ofthe
everyday. The subject of Numéro Deux—glimpses into the life of a working-
class couple, the daily cadences of their existence, their relation to their own
 The Pleasures of Subversion 223

children and parents—represents a kind of ultimate banalization and

proletarianization of what is conceivable as a cinematic subject. One can say of
Numéro Deux what Flaubert said of Madame Bovary, that it is a “work in
which nothing happens.” But it is precisely because nothing happens, at least in
the conventional sense of violence, intrigue, romance, and adventure, that the
film enables us to see how much happens in the everyday. The “trivialized”
subject of Numéro Deux constitutes a critique even of Godard’s earlier
antinarrative films, the characters of which retain, after all, a patina of
romance. Beginning as poets or petty criminals, familyless Sartrean “bastards”
who measure out their lives in espressoes, cigarettes, and films at the
Cinématheque, Godard’s protagonists later become Left revolutionaries like
Guillaume and Véronique in La Chinoise. In Numéro Deux, they are finally
domesticated, linked to the common fate of marriage and family. They are
situated in a home—not a suburban home suddenly invaded by terror
(Hitchcock), not a bourgeois home torn by morbid desires (Bergman), and not
a deluxe home temporarily vacated to make way for Maoist urban summer
camp (late Godard), but simply an average working-class home.
Numéro Deux further elaborates the theme of production explored by
Tout Va Bien. The film opens with a shot of Godard, profiled in semidarkness,
in his video studio, while a television monitor shows him from another angle.
His monologues, meanwhile, tells us in colloquial language how he came to
make and finance the film. Then, in a series of punning associations, he
introduces the. crisscrossing themes of the film. The leitmotifs of work,
production, factory keep coming up. Godard himself is a cultural worker, and
the video studio a factory where he is both patron and ouvrier. Pierrot, the
husband of the film, works in a factory, while for Sandrine home has become a
kind of factory. The body, Sandrine points out, is also a factory, one that
occasionally goes on strike through constipation (her) or temporary impotence
(him). Marriage is a kind of co-production, and making love, she tells her
husband, is often just a job. Childbearing is reproduction, while films are made
by mechanical—and television programs by electronic—reproduction. Desire,
according to the authors of Anti-Oedipus, is a form of production, part of
libidinal economy, mobilizing an interplay of investments and overinvest-
ments. Ideology, we remember from Althusser, is the reproduction of
production relations within the individual psyche. All these dimensions of
production and reproduction are alluded to and reflected on in the film.

The Video Subversion of Language

If, as we have seen, Numéro Deux subverts a popular form—pornography—it

also subverts a popular medium: television. In a sense, the film simply extends
Godard’s longstanding interest in the print and electronic media. What is
224 The Pleasures of Subversion

radically new in Numéro Deux is that Godard-Miéville do not merely allude to

the media or incorporate certain aspects of its style or procedures. Nor do they
simply allow the coexistence of fiction and television-style reportage within the
same cinematic frame. Rather, they equate two specific media—cinema and
television—as /anguages. They effect this equation in a number of ways. Shot
largely in video and then transferred to film stock, the film integrates the
technology of television into its process of production. Secondly, the
television-style images (e.g., news broadcasts) and film-style images (Bruce Lee
movies) are equated by being juxtaposed within the larger rectangle of the
screen. And thirdly, certain effects associated with video (e.g., solarization) are
superimposed on images which are felt to be photographic and cinematic. The
naturalness with which these juxtapositions and equations take place makes us
suspect that cinema and television function, as languages, in very similar ways.
In fact, Godard has been implying as much for many years by insisting in
interviews that the problem of cinema was inseparable from the problem of
television, since both involved the production and distribution of image and
sound. Godard’s position parallels that of Christian Metz, who argues in
Language and Cinema that television and film are so close as languages that
they might as well be regarded, semiologically speaking, as one.'' They are two
versions, technologically and socially distinct, of the same language, one that
combines moving images, phonetic sound, noises, music, and writing into a
spatio-temporal configuration. The material traits and specific codifications of
the two media are very largely identical. Although the origin of the images is
electronic in one case and photographic in the other, the images are perceived
as photographic in both media, and in any case such technological differences
do not affect their status as languages.
Godard’s previous incorporation of “lower” forms and genres pales in
violence when compared to this irreverent “leveling” of cinema and television.
Cinema, after all, has finally come to be surrounded by a halo of cultural
prestige. Literary intellectuals, after their initial misgivings, have embraced it
with enthusiasm and even honored it in articles and dissertations. Television,
meanwhile, is regarded as almost a dirty subject by the literary intelligentsia, as
hopelessly vulgar and congenitally tainted, a not surprising reaction when one
reflects on the rude challenge that it offers to the traditional prerogatives of that
intelligentsia.
By virtually equating cinema and television, Godard-Mieéville perform a
veritable desacrilization of the filmic medium. If cinema, because it participates
in mechanical reproduction, is in Walter Benjamin’s terms relatively “aura-
less,” television lacks aura and mystique to a still greater degree. This lack of
aura can be traced to three areas: 1) the conditions of production; 2) the
technology of reproduction, and 3) the social conditions of reception.
Cinematic production is surrounded by ritualistic reverence (“Silence!...
Figure 46. Numéro Deux (1975)
226 The Pleasures of Subversion

Action...”) aimed at getting something down on film; intensive work and

preparation go into a brief final product, while in television there often exists
(depending of course on the kind of program) a minimum of disproportion
between the time of production and the time of the final discourse. Secondly,
while filmic images are fixed forever in their motionless movement, rather like
the figures on Keats’ Grecian urn, the televised image can be erased and
substituted. Cinema, consequently, forms an extendable collection of finished
works, while telelvision consists of ephemeral, continuous activity. If cinema is
a museum, television is a scene of work. If cinema is a series of artifacts,
television is a process. Television perpetually exhausts new materials; it is an
electronic monster, infinitely gluttonous, that continuously devours the
provisions thrown into its rectangular maw. Repetition in cinema makes a
classic; repetition in television makes a rerun. Thirdly, cinema, for a variety of
social and historical reasons, takes place in the privileged space of theatre—
latter-day heir of the sacred space of games, ritual, and ancient tragedy—while
television takes place within the mundane surroundings of the average home. It
accompanies our domestic routines and is available to almost everyone at the
turn of a knob. For cinema we pay admission, but television comes for free, in
fact, it is virtually crammed down our throats.
Given the rapid expansion of the electronic media, and given the key
ideological role of those media—the media not only sell products,
Enzensberger suggests, they also sell the existing order—any contemporary
Brechtian approach to cinema must take into account all the apparati which
have developed since Brecht’s time. Numéro Deux develops a complex,
dialectical view of the media, making us aware not only of its nefarious effects
but also of the utopian possibilities it opens up. Godard-Mieéville never let us
forget who really controls the media. “The television screen,” says Sandrine, “in
front are the children, and behind—the government.” One hopes to see images
from one’s own life, she complains, but in the end they are always other people’s
images. Numéro Deux repeatedly offers the images and sounds of television
newscasters, with their bland faces, assured voices, and suave delivery.
Inundating us with information, they deprive us of the means of decoding that
information. In the sterile plenitude of a blizzard of news “items,” the larger
political configurations become unclear.
Television mediates our lives, colonizing our leisure hours and turning us
into media junkies. The multiple images on the screen of Numéro Deux remind
us that innumerable homes do in fact have multiple TV images. The media have
provided the electronic furniture of our homes. The frequent superimposition
of children’s faces on the images of Numéro Deux alert us to the fact that
children assimilate the world through television before they act or suffer in it
themselves. What Numéro Deux does, above all, is to make all those media
images and sounds “strange.” The media drone in the background of our lives,
 The Pleasures of Subversion Py ii

the sounds of switched channels or a hastily displaced radio dial, the pseudo-
intimate and pseudo-personal direct address of advertisements, the weird
succession of smiling faces that introduce themselves and recommend some
shampoo or dog food, the fabricated hilarity of game shows, the knowing
omniscience of newscasters—all this our media-trained eyes and ears have
become accustomed to, and all these Numéro Deux makes fundamentally
strange.
At the same time Godard-Miéville do not see the media as some
unredeemable wasteland. One might argue, in fact, that many of the
revolutionary innovations in Godard’s films come from television. The
alternation of staged and improvised material in a film like Une Femme Mariée
or Masculin, Féminin, for example, is quite “natural” to television. The
atomization of the récit which characterizes Godard’s films is also quite typical
of television; the one-liners of a talk show, the two-sentence summaries of the
news, or the suspense of a quiz or game show can be seen, on one level, as
mininarratives. Advertisements, meanwhile, are miniature stories with built-in
happy endings which come with the purchase of the product. If the media as
presently constituted are in many ways oppressive, they are also potentially
liberating. Television does participate in what Enzensberger calls “immaterial
pauperization,” but it could also, conceivably, democratize instruction. News
programs do numb our consciousness; at the same time, however, they drag
colonial wars into the heart of the imperial beast, and thus make us aware how
policies impinge on the lives of people. All events become present and
therefore, one hopes, come to “matter.”

Split Writing/Split Screen

Godard said of Numéro Deux that the television for which it was conceived
does not exist. The film, however, does exist, and opens up fascinating
technical and aesthetic possibilities. Rarely in Numéro Deux does a single
image fill the frame. Usually there are two images and often there are more.
Since the images are “hung” on the screen like paintings in a gallery, we are
forced to choose which image to contemplate, yet the very multiplicity of
images makes it virtually impossible to “lose” ourselves in any one. Within the
multiple images are embedded still other images—television screens,
photographs—in an infinite regress of self-enclosed representations. Godard—
Miéville set into interaction heterogenous series of images, thus alerting us to
the fact of mediation. The simultaneous presence of images from 1) movie
previews, 2) a Bruce Lee movie, and 3) soft-core porn, for example, highlights
the mediation of genre. The juxtaposition of electronically produced images
(television, video) and photographically produced images (film) makes us
aware of the diverse visual codifications of different media. That we can
228 The Pleasures of Subversion

recognize a video image as opposed to a filmic one renders both something

other than “natural.”
The effect of this proliferation of images within a single frame is
reminiscent of that produced by the “split writing” of Jacques Derrida’s Glas.
In that book, Derrida juxtaposes two texts—one from Genet, the other from
Hegel—continuously down each page throughout the book. This bifurcation
of compositional units facilitates a joyous freeplay of textuality. The
exorbitantly overfilled spaces of Numéro Deux, similarly, install a provocative
textual dispersion. Poetically speaking, the juxtaposition of shots allows for a
kind of instantaneous metaphysical poetry, a linking of incongruous images, a
discordia concors whereby dissimilar entities are joined and occult
resemblances suggested. The technique takes on a political dimension by
suggesting certain ironic equations and contrasts. The co-presence of three
images—a news program, a series of “coming attraction” previews, and a child
copying a sentence on a blackboard—is open-ended in its suggestiveness. News
programs, we may reflect, are designed to attract audiences and make a profit
just like the previews. Children, for their part, absorb the world not only
through school, but also through the films and television. Thus Godard-
Miéville deploy but partially analyzed juxtapositions, leaving their inter-
relations largely to the spectator’s intelligence and imagination. At another
point, the preview of a Bruce Lee film neighbors with a news report ona Leftist
May Day parade. On the sound track we hear talk of “lutte” (in its physical
sense) and “lutte” in its political sense. What does the juxtaposition signify?
That Leftist demonstrations like the May Day parade have become mere
spectacle, like Bruce Lee films, easily recuperable by the bourgeois media? That
Leftists must struggle not only against the government but also against
alienated forms of entertainment? The possible interpretations, multiple and
open-ended, generate a fecund crisis of signification.
The whole question of spatial and temporal continuity (and the “matches”
which help produce it) is rendered richly problematic by the “stereophonic”
images of Numéro Deux. What if movement, direction, and position matches,
for example, apply not to the relationship between successive shots but rather
between two or even three images simultaneously present? What happens to the
30-degree rule, the 180-degree rule, and the axis match in the context of
multiple images? Does not the very idea of a “cutaway” shot become
meaningless in such a context? Would not parallel and alternate montage be
possible not only by the traditional means of the alternation of two series of
shots but also by the simultaneous co-presence of two series of shots? Numéro
Deux, admittedly, opens up these possibilities rather than systematically
exploring them, but we may reflect on some of the possible innovations.
Reverse angle shots, usually dependent on a succession of shots, are made
simultaneous in Numéro Deux by having two neighboring images offer both
 a

The Pleasures of Subversion 229

angles. Or the simultaneity is achieved within a single image through video

superimposition; a shot of Sandrine turned away from the camera, for
example, coincides with a superimposed close-up of her looking toward the
camera. Diverse focal lengths are contrasted within single images and between
or among neighboring images. :
Christian Metz, lending semiotic precision to Eisenstein’s intuitions
concerning “vertical” and “horizontal” montage, points out in Language and
Cinema that the syntagmatic dimension of cinema is deployed along two
axes—the axis of consecution (the succession of shots within a sequence) and
the axis of simultaneity (the reciprocal relations between image and sound and,
more generally, between and among the five “tracks” or matters of expression
of cinema).'’ The axis of consecution, corresponding generally to the duration
of the film, includes four parallel and generally continuous series—the image
track, the linguistic series, noises, and music. (Written elements, he notes, form
another, generally more discontinuous series.) The axis of simultaneities, Metz
continues, has itself two axes: first, the axis of spatial co-presence within the
rectangle of the screen, and second, the simultaneous syntagms which may be
established between or among the diverse series. Four of the series are temporal
in nature. Language, music, and noise are clearly temporal, and the image,
although initially spatial, is easily temporalized.
Any application of the Brechtian “separation of the elements” to the
cinema must take Metz’ analysis into account. The episodic nature of epic
theatre implies a horizontal autonomy of syntagmatic segments whereby the
burden of signification bears on each scene. There is no teleology, no causative
necessity that binds the end to the beginning, no organic motivation but rather
a series of segmentations, each with its own dialectically demonstrative power.
The “separation of the elements” also suggests, however, a vertical layering or
separating out. A vertical cross-section of the text will reveal early
discriminated strata or autonomous tracks. These tracks can be discontinuous
in their temporality. The temporal character of (at least) four of the tracks
brings up the possibility that the heart of cinematic narrative is not simply one
of a single story (however disjointed in its articulation) but rather of four (and I
would suggest five) parallel but potentially discontinuous temporal series.
Although the Metz text considerably antedates Numéro Deux, only such
an analysis can, I think, account for the semilogical complexity of the film. If
we examine the two axes—simultaneity and consecution—along which the
syntagmatic dimension is deployed, we discover that Numéro Deux brilliantly
exploits the possibilities inherent in both. The film generally projects at least
two images ona black background, so that our eye is forced to shuttle back and
forth between them. Thus the single, centered perspective inherited from
Renaissance humanism is relativized, the multiplicity of perspectives rendering
identification with any one perspective difficult. The spatial co-presence of
230 The Pleasures of Subversion

multiple images within the rectangle of the screen, furthermore, establishes

syntagmatic possibilities denied to the single-image cinema. Since each
spectator is forced to determine his own itinerary through the screen images,
the narrative is relativized and, as it were, democratized. The movement within
the screen is not linear or predetermined; each spectator makes his own
syntagms. The spectator has to decide what the images have in common, or
how they conflict; he/she has to effect the synthesis latent in the visual material.
If we consider the axis of the simultaneous syntagms established by the
diverse tracks of the film, we find that Numéro Deux deploys five parallel but
discontinuous temporal series—image, dialogue, music, noise, and written
elements. These diverse series or tracks, to put it another way, pursue
simultaneous but distinct trajectories in what amounts to a complexly
spatialized tapestry of interwoven temporal threads. The diverse tracks fall
behind, catch up, or overtake one another. The process of signification is
displaced from one track to another, a sentence, for example, beginning as a
written title and finishing, in an apparently aleatory but meaningful way, asa
spoken utterance. Sandrine, the wife in the film, comments at one point that
people always say “Once upon a time” when they could as well say “Twice upon
a time.” Her seemingly whimsical observation reminds us that it is in the nature
of a linear narrative to evoke incidents in their uniqueness; the narrative events
“happen” only once. In Numéro Deux, on the other hand, events repeat
themselves for our contemplation. Or they happen partially, the rest of their
happening deferred for a later syntagmatic moment. At one point, for example,
we see Sandrine and her husband (Pierrot) fighting and gesticulating in one of
the rectangles on the screen but we hear nothing. Subsequently, we hear the
words exchanged in their quarrel, but we see nothing. Still later we both see and
hear them in synchronous sound and image. The shifting aural and visual
coordinates highlight the process of film as a matter of filling tracks and
matching image with sound, sound with sound, and written word with both
image and sound.
The rare occasions in which Numéro Deux returns to the single image give
the spectator a feeling of anticlimax, of new possibilities and challenges
suddenly closed off. Polysemic, multidimensional, and semioclastic, Numéro
Deux elicits a new criticism because the old criticism is so transparently
inadequate to it. The film makes us sensitive to the relative impoverishment of
signification before it, leaving us not with a sense of closure but of new
potentialities. At the same time, it makes us rethink pornography, rethink
television, and rethink the cinema. Its title, finally, is as richly suggestive as the
“elle” in Deux ou Trois Choses que je sais d’elle.... Numéro Deux: The second
sex. Numéro Deux: Television as second-class cultural citizen. Numéro Deux:
the second image in the frame. Numéro Deux: sound as subordinate to image.
All these numéro deux’s, the film suggests, deserve to find their true voice.
 The Pleasures of Subversion 231

Realism, Reflexivity, Sexuality: Sauve Qui Peut/(la Vie)

Sauve Qui Peut/(la Vie)—mistranslated as Every Man for Himself—displays

the two seemingly contradictory but in fact quite complementary trajectories
that characterize Godard’s work: a progressively more rigorous reflexivity
coupled with an ever more inclusive and democratic realism. Anti-illusionist,
Godard and Miéville show themselves to be unflaggingly realist both in the
Brechtian sense of “laying bare the causal network” and in the
phenomenological sense of precisely registering surface appearances and
subjective impressions. While less technically innovative than Numéro Deux,
their film brilliantly exemplifies this double movement toward reflexivity and
verisimilitude.
Many of the reflexive devices, once again, echo Godard’s earlier work.
The penchant for inviting favored cineastes into the film itself—Samuel Fuller
in Pierrot le Fou, Fritz Lang in Contempt—here takes the disembodied form of
Marguerite Duras’ off-screen voice. Godard himself, while not literally visible
as in Numéro Deux, is present, as if at one remove, in the person of his fictive
namesake and imperfect delegate Paul Godard. (Lacanian critics might be
tempted to see in the protagonist’s adoption of Godard’s own father’s name a
kind of belated acquiescence in “Le nom de pére.”) The character triggers
certain autobiographical resonances; like Godard, Paul is involved with video
and television. Even his final car accident recalls Godard’s own brush with
death in 1970. At the same time, Godard exploits his surrogate to lampoon the
groupies of the auteur cult. A doorman showers Paul with effusive declarations
of love: “Je vous aime, Mr. Godard!” Absurdly literalizing the auterist love for
its pantheon directors, the doorman specifies that it is not Mr. Godard’s soul
that he loves but his body.
Apart from occasional instances of homage (Le Camion, City Lights), and
auto-pastiche (Masculine, Feminine), one is struck in Sauve Qui Peut by a
relative paucity of intertextual allusion. The filmmakers seem to be speaking in
their own voice rather than “through” other films. Instead of the cinephiliac
winks of the earlier Godard films, Sauve Qui Peut offers a deeper kind of
reflexivity. There is less of the bric-a-brac of reflexivity—movie posters, verbal
references, photos of directors—and more ofits substance. From Two or Three
Things on, Godard is increasingly concerned with the mise-en-scene of the
procedures of representation itself, with the paradigmatic and syntagmatic
choices inherent in the elaboration of filmic discourse. /ci et Ailleurs neatly
images the paradigmatic/syntagmatic nature of the filmic chain by aligning
three video-cassette screens in a discursive “train” in which the individual
cassette images form the “cars.” Discourse ceases to be the transparent vehicle
of histoire; it is pictured as a series of opaque objects, cinematic building blocks
to be selected and combined. Instead of parody and homage, the rendering
visible of discursive processes takes center stage.
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The Pleasures of Subversion 233

The five rubrics of Sauve Qui Peut—life, the imaginary, fear, commerce,
music—apart from effecting a typically Brechtian “separation ofthe elements,”
highlight the cinema itself as the point of convergence of diverse regimes and a
multiplicity of codes. The overall trajectory is from “life” to “music” —everyday
experience transmogrified into art. “Life” is the starting point. “The imaginary”
belongs to the director, the spectator, and to the film itself, the filmic
experience corresponding to an exchange between these diverse imaginaries.
“Fear” is the specific emotion which dominates the diegesis: fear of changing,
of moving of solitude. “Commerce” conditions cinema at every point,
inflecting choices and imposing solutions. “Music,” finally, in this film
“composed by Godard,” constitutes the end point, the condition to which the
film aspires, reconciling emotive richness with structural rigor.
In Sauve Qui Peut, music offers both a pretext for gags and a token of
transcendent possibilities. The opening shot after the credits installs an aural
hermeneutic which structures the entire film. We hear operatic singing,
presumably coming from the other side of the wall of Paul’s apartment. When
the music continues despite a changed locale, we are led to speculate about its
source. Subsequently, diverse characters, straining to catch a sourceless
melody, ask “What is that music?” The enigma is resolved only in the final shot
of musicians executing the hitherto off-screen score. The resolution of the
enigma coincides with the moment of Paul’s accident. Rather than use music to
lubricate the spectator’s emotions and elicit a feeling of tragedy, Godard-
Miéville serve up a sound gag a la Mel Brooks. At the same time, Gabriel
Yared’s ethereal music serves a more serious purpose. It elicits a kind of
Mallarmean azur, a beckoning utopia just out of range, an intermittently
glimpsed realm of freedom where life and creativity are one, where life itself
becomes music.
Godard’s transgressions have always had the virtue of exposing the
suffocating arbitrariness of dominant conventions. Sauve Qui Peut continues
the temporal experimentation of Numéro Deux, but in a new direction.
Godard-Mieéville introduce 15 saccadic “skids”—variations on stop-action
moments—which interrupt the more conventional 24-frames-per-second
défilement of the rest of the film. These saccadic sequences, a novel form of
slow motion, open up the possibilities of a truly polyrhythmic cinema. The
slow-motion in question is not that derived from undercranking but rather a
kind of variable velocity produced in the laboratory and often articulating
several kinds of movement: that of people or objects in the shot (Denise on her
bicycle), camera movement (the accompanying pan), and slow motion and
freeze frames created, presumably, by an optical printer. Here the avant-garde
draws inspiration from the archaic. Silent films, after all, were shown at
variable speeds; rarely were they shown at the speed at which they were shot.
Godard-Miéville’s exploitation of the device, however, evokes the entire
234 The Pleasures of Subversion

history of cinema and television—from Marey’s fusil photographique,

decomposing the flight of birds and the gait of men, through the intermittently
slowed horses and athletes of The Man with a Movie Camera, to the freeze
frames and instant playbacks of contemporary sports programs. The variable
speeds correlate with character (Godard describes Denise as fast, Isabelle as
average, Paul as slow) and with incident (why film a slap at the same speed as a
kiss?). Just as Godard used “variorum” montage in Pierrot le fou—alternative
versions of the same sequence—here he uses a kind of “conditional” velocity.
The same shot modulates in texture and feeling, becoming heavy and ominous
or lyrically playful depending on the speed of its execution. The possible
permutations are infinite; they generate a form of cinematic relativity:
Eisenstein meets Einstein.
The experimentation with variable speeds also promotes reflexivity in a
number of ways. 1) The jerky succession of frame-by-frame movements
highlights the normally obscured process of “défilement” (the progression of
static frames through the projector), thus calling attention to the cinematic
apparatus itself. 2) The appearance of “natural” movement, a key pillar in the
conventional impression of reality, is disrupted. Paul’s car accident, for
example, is derealized by the protracted syncopated movement of his fall. 3)
The experience of the film, in these privileged moments of altered velocity,
coincides with its own analysis, as if the film were looking at itself on the
Steenbeck. The usually unattainable text, when slowed or frozen in its fleeting
progression, becomes available for closer scrutiny. At the same time, through
this double movement of mimesis and deconstruction, life itself is put, as it
were, through the movieola, opening up the perspective of a visual semiotics of
everyday experience. While on one level a distancing device, the slow motion
technique paradoxically brings us closer to sudden shifts of mood and details of
facial expression. In an act of closely proffered attention, the temporal
equivalent of a close-up, emotions and gestures are analyzed, exploded into
tiny fragments to be examined as if under a microscope.
A striking proportion of the slowed segments has to do with relations
between the sexes. Godard-Miéville probe the formulaic nature of
conventional movie slaps, kisses, embraces. Usually stereotyped actions are
revealed to cover a vast multiplicity of instances, each with its specific nuances.
(One imagines a possible film devoted to a brief act of love, analyzed into an
infinitude of tiny exchanges, minifoci of resistance and collaboration.) The
filmmakers especially pinpoint the epidermic abrasiveness of contemporary
sexual relations. At times this abrasiveness is explicity violent—Isabelle getting
knocked around by her pimps—and at times more subtle and indirect. We see
Paul advance toward Isabelle in pulsingly retarded movements, gradually
occupying her space. As she watches warily, we seem to be witnessing a phallic
incursion, a minirape. Later, Paul embraces, or, better, pounces upon Denise
 The Pleasures of Subversion 235

in a noisy slow motion collision, crystallizing a situation in which lovers find it

virtually impossible to touch without bruising. The film, in such moments,
dissects what Foucault would call the capillary forms of power, the ways that
power seeps into the grain of everyday life and penetrates the smallest gestures.
Raymond Bellour suggests that the saccadic sequences fall into two
groups, those that idealize woman and those that show aggression against her.
Here we encounter again the double movement of celebration and critique,
more specifically, the exaltation of woman and the denunciation of the sexism
to which she is subject. Godard-Mieville here associate cinema and woman as
the locus of utopian possibilities. The stop-motion sequences, associated with
women, create an impossible temporal “elsewhere,” the other place in which
Godard, at least, has always lived. “Cinema is more important than life,”
Godard said in a recent interview: “I’m a representative of life. It’s a life that
doesn’t exist. When Rimbaud said ‘Real life is elsewhere,’ he wasn’t just playing
with words—that ‘elsewhere’ is also the beauty of life. Cinema is in the means of
communication, it is in this ‘also.’”
Women in Sauve Qui Peut are more sympathetic than the men. They
embody the possibilities of less alienated social relations. They are at the
cutting edge of historical change, and it is they who speak the filmmaker’s lines.
Men are gently removed from the center to the periphery of the human sphere.
Paul exhibits fossilized behavior: the vestigial sexism of a person who knows
better but lapses into knee-jerk machismo in the crunch. The film
communicates'a certain male respect, tinged with envy, for feminine solidarity.
While the women frequently speak to, and for, each other, there is virtually no
significant converse between the men. Cecilia communicates easily with her
mother, but she regards Paul with suspicion. Sawve Qui Peut conveys a
pervasive feeling of men being judged by a disabused regard des femmes,
inverting the partriarchal tradition of the male as sheltered voyeur. Women, if
one excepts the sequences involving prostitution, constitute the active,
initiating principle. Their voices virtually monopolize the sound track. They
are the artists: Duras the cineaste, Denise the writer. The latter is always
carrying her notebook, and we hear extracts from what is ambiguously defined
as novel-essay-diary (all of which terms could be metaphorically applied to
film) throughout Sauve Qui Peut. The new wave has come full-circle; Antoine
from 400 Blows, struggling with French composition, has become Denise;
woman is now the practitioner of écriture. And the film’s final shot carries a
charge of feminine vengeance. Paul’s ex-wife and daughter observe his accident
with the same indifference with which men for centuries have observed violence
directed against women.
At the same time, women are much abused in Sauve Qui Peut. What is the
meaning of this obsessive return to images of degradation and humiliation?
(Laura Mulvey and Colin MacCabe are certainly right to point out that
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Godard, even after becoming a kind of fellow-traveler of the women’s

movement, continually slides between an investigation of the images of women
and an investigation which exploits those images.)'* A clue to the meaning of
such images in Sauve Qui Peut lies in their staging. The incidents of abuse are
clearly presented as ritual humiliations, symptomatic instances of a general
malaise. Their anti-illusionist mise-en-scéne underlines their character as
gestus. The emphasis throughout is on the nonreciprocity of the exchanges.
Isabelle calls her clients “Monsieur”; they do not call her “Madame.” The boss,
exercising his male prerogative as arbiter of female beauty, obliges his secretary
to say: “My tits aren’t fantastic.” She cannot oblige him to say: “My pot belly is
grotesque.” Isabelle’s pimps spank her—a quintessential gesture of
paternalistic infantalization—and force her to admit that no woman, be she
duchess, secretary, or tennis champion, can be truly independent. One of the
businessmen who rents Isabelle’s body is named, significantly, “Mr. Personne.”
The john, the man with the cash, is a person, a subject; the prostitute is
differentially defined as non-person, object.
Godard—if I may briefly separate him from his co-worker—is at once the
most sophisticated and the most childlike of artists. He has the rare gift of
looking at the world with a kind of infantile ostranenie. His misleadingly aloof
authorial persona blinds us to the intense emotion distilled into his work. Miles
Davis, accused of being “cold” to his public, once answered that “the love is in
the music.” We fail to recognize the emotion in Godard because it is not found
in the usual places—the scenario and the acting. Godard might respond to the
same charge of coldness by saying that the love is in the lighting, the editing, the
music. Sauwve Qui Peut is especially imbued with a painterly appreciation of
natural and fabricated beauty: figures positioned in Millet-like landscapes,
deep blues and lush greens straight out of Kandinsky or Klee, the action
painting created by an intermittently frozen pan across a striated sky. Godard
has been underappreciated as a purely visual artist. His images, at once
geometrical and sensuous, crisp and surprising, indicate an impeccable sense of
framing, composition, and color. In Sauve Qui Peut, he shows himself to be as
sensitive to the beauty of Swiss landscapes as he was formerly to the formica-
shiny beauty of Parisian cafés.

The Politics of Pleasure: Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000

All of the texts we have discussed—from the ludic reflexivity of Sherlock Jr. to
the carnivalesque disrespect of L’Age d’Or and the joyful learning of Tour Va
Bien—have offered their quantum of pleasure. We have spoken a good deal of
the subverting of voyeuristic pleasure, but we have spoken little of pleasure
itself. Film criticism unfortunately has often demonstrated a problematic
relationship to filmic pleasure, either endorsing entertainment uncritically and
238 The Pleasures of Subversion

thus serving as unthinking accomplice to the film industry, or lamenting the

delight that mass audiences take in vulgar (for the Arnoldian elite) or alienated
(for Marxists) spectacles. On the Left, too many Marxists have thrown out the
baby of pleasure with the bathwater of ideology. Even a certain Brechtianism’s
glorification of the rational and hard-working spectator becomes suspiciously
reminiscent of the bourgeois work ethic. This refusal of pleasure and emotion
has at times created an immense gap between Left cultural criticism and the
popular reception of films. Indeed, the political implications of Left puritanism
have been enormous. A Left that addresses its audience in moralistic terms,
while advertising and mass culture speak directly to its desires and fantasies,
not only shows severe theoretical limitations but also handicaps its own
chances for efficacity in the world. The broad American hostility to socialism
certainly has as much to do with the widespread impression that socialist
societies are “gray” and “dreary”—recurrent adjectives in the lexicon of
journalistic anticommunism—as with the notion that socialist theory is
incorrect. A Left film analysis, it seems to me, should celebrate, rather then
deplore, the fact of filmic pleasure, embracing it as a friend while exorcising its
alienation.
A partial model for the subversive pleasure of which we have been
speaking is Jonah Who Will be 25 in the Year 2000 (1975), directed by Alain
Tanner and coscripted by John Berger. The film explores the interwoven lives
of eight characters struggling to retain their humanity in the face of alienation.
Mathieu is a typesetter and union militant who has just lost his job. Mathilde
works in a factory and looks forward to having a baby—the Jonah of the title.
While searching for a new job, Mathieu encounters Marguerite and Marcel,
two produce gardeners who hire him to collect the manure they use as fertilizer.
Taken together, Marcel and Marguerite love the entire animate world; he
discourses eloquently on the unfathomable mystery of animals and the horrors
of imminent ecological disaster, while she adores organic farming. Max,
meanwhile, is a disillusioned Trotskyist and gambler currently working as a
proofreader. Although he has more or less relinquished political activity in
despair, he does take action by disseminating information concerning an
impending land speculation swindle and warning the potential victims—
among whom are Marguerite and Marcel. Max meets Madeleine, a secretary
by vocation and heretical tantric mystic by avocation. As an employee of the
bank that is perpetuating the swindle, she consents to help Max thwart it by
securing the necessary documents. Marco is a neighbor to Marguerite and
Marcel. A dreamer and high school history teacher, a twentieth-century
descendant of philosophes like Rousseau, he lectures on sausages and the
“folds of time.” He falls in love with Marie, a supermarket cashier who
knowlingly undercharges her elderly customers and is finally jailed by her
managers for her generosity. Marco, for his part, is fired, presumably for
 The Pleasures of Subversion 239

having broached taboo sexual subjects in his classes, but really for daring to
Suggest that the capitalist system is not eternal and could, just conceivably,
collapse.
Simultaneously integrated into society (if only by the work they perform)
and outside of it, the liminal characters of Jonah work within capitalism and
make it tick, yet they are torn creatures, traversed by revolt as well as
acquiescence. Simultaneously at the center and on the periphery, few of them
are explicitly Leftist, yet their words and deeds suggest both conscious and
intuitive opposition to the reigning system, an opposition which takes diverse
forms—Mathieu’s union militancy, Marco’s antiauthoritarian pedagogy,
Marie’s cash-register sabotage, Madeleine’s “transgressions,” Marguerite and
Marcel’s organic resistance to land grabbers, Mathieu’s alternative school. The
film implies the distant possibility of a linking of the diverse zones of resistance
embodied by these characters and all those oppressed, excluded, or
marginalized by the dominant system: the unemployed, the elderly treated like
so much excess baggage, the third-world workers in their bidonvilles. It is this
solidarity with the marginalized majority that makes Jonah a more politically
responsible (albeit less culturally audacious) version of what we have elsewhere
called the carnivalesque.
This implicit political strategy is marred, admittedly, by a somewhat
condescending attitude toward a key group in this new majority: women.
Jonah’s female characters tend to the pallidly stereotypical (Mathilde the
earth-mother, Madeleine the mystic) while the male characters are more
rounded and politically assertive. The telling political lines go largely to the
men, while the women are granted little feminist or Left consciousness.
Marguerite is strong—she drives a tractor, hires and fires—but what Tanner
gives her in strength he takes away in likeability.'” Women in Jonah are
associated with nature (“All is mystery in nature,” Marcel says of Marguerite’s
pecadilloes) or nurture (Mathilde’s breastfeeding and eagerness for
pregnancy). They are not shown as potential agents of revolutionary change;
they are not even shown to be oppressed as women.
Otherwise, however, Jonah offers an incisive fable concerning life in the
afterwash of the radical sixties. Drawing on diverse intellectual sources—
Rousseau’s notion of the integration of individual ego into a “moi commun,”
the surrealist fervor to change life and transform the world, Marcuse’s utopian
synthesis of Marx and Freud—Tanner offers for our contemplation a kind of
contemporary phalanstery, a radical cell meant to join with other cells in a vast
federation of resistance. For Max the burned-out politico, it is the morning
after the féte revolutionnaire, and the house is strewn with cultural debris:
ersatz mysticism, macrobiotic foods, casual sex. For Tanner the director,
however, the sixties are less an irretrievable golden age than a lesson for the
future, the springboard for a new leap forward. In keeping with this optimism,
Figure 49. Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1975)
 The Pleasures of Subversion 241

the film moves, overall, from anonymity and isolation to community. As

chance encounters burgeon into embryonic forms of solidarity, the characters
begin to generate strong feelings of communality. The child Jonah, one feels, is
mothered (which perhaps explains why all the names begin with MA) and
fathered by the collectivity; and it is he who symbolically embodies their hopes
and aspirations.
At the same time, Jonah never cultivates the counter-culture fantasy that
capitalist society can be easily and painlessly “greened” by a modest planting of
what was once called “Consciousness III.” The repressive arsenal of that
society is far too evident throughout the film. Marie is jailed. Marco and
Mathieu are fired. Documentary footage of the Swiss Army put-down of
unemployment demonstrations reminds us that peaceful, neutral Switzerland
has its own heritage of repression. Where political and legal repression fail,
economic pressure takes its toll. We spend most of our energy trying to survive,
Mathieu points out, and some of us, with the little energy left over, try to fight
the system.
Nor does Tanner hide the conflicts that rend the fragile community of
Jonah. The group is divided by philosophical differences (Madeleine would
dissolve all contradiction in Yin-Yang complementarity; Max objects that the
capital-labor contradiction is irreconcilable) and tactical disputes (alternative
versus public schools). Rather than obscure these tensions, the film makes of
them a potential source of polyphonic diversity and strength. While forming a
kind of community, the members of the group also play out certain polarities
and complementarities: Marguerite mocks Mathieu’s purist aversion to public
education; Mathieu criticises Marco for not safeguarding his teaching position
as a base for political work; Madeleine makes fun of Max’s protestant
asceticism and premature despair (“Men want history to go as fast as life. It
doesn’t work that way.”) while he censures her naiveté concerning class
struggle. But it is in this dialogic process of mutual and affectionate criticism
that a kind of provisional truth emerges.
Jonah might be seen as a Rousseauist exercise in back-to-nature nostalgia,
a communalist fantasy that nourishes the pipe-dream of small collectivist
groups within the larger capitalist society, a kind of seventies Our Daily Bread.
In fact, however, the film relativizes such solutions. The land speculators, we
may assume, will eventually devour the produce farm, and the rebels’ symbolic
guerrilla-theatre victory over the banker (unseating him and substituting a pig)
is clearly marked as a sepia fantasy. Mathieu ultimately returns to work and
struggle, and his final words, addressed to Jonah and to us, anticipate the day
when Jonah will be organizing strike committees. It is Mathieu the activist
worker, rather than Max the pessimist or Marco the philosopher, who makes
the comments on class-struggle that frame the film. Fired for militancy at the
beginning of the film, he returns to militancy at the end. But the fundamental
Figure 50. Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1975)
 ”

The Pleasures of Subversion 243

project of Jonah is not so much to propose a fictive model for revolution as it is

to politicize the desires and perceptions of its audience. The goal is to show
oppression as systematic, in a society where “the better,” as Mathieu puts it, “is
systematically put aside.” Rather than offer a sentimental endorsement of
vague personal longings for a more humane existence, Jonah stresses the
systematic nature of what at first glance seems merely personal and
idiosyncratic. The film was not made for Leftists but for a mass audience. Its
strategy is to appeal to whatever is revolutionary in the majority of people, in
all those, at least, who have no direct stake in oppression. Tanner and Berger do
not, however, practice a sugar-coated pill theory of political art, i.e., a strategy
which offers the habitual dose of satisfactions in order to persuade spectators
to swallow a progressive message. Rather, the film maintains contact with the
spectator, by its charm, by its humor, and bya certain realism, while its process
of construction favors a critical, distanced attitude on the spectator’s part.
Rather than organize itself as a linear narrative, Jonah orchestrates, in the
Menippean manner, a dialectical music of ideas. The leitmotifs of time, nature,
work, and education are sounded early and resonate throughout the film.
Marco’s inaugural lecture to his class initiates many of the themes. Using blood
sausages (an homage to his butcher father) and a metronome (his mother sang
operettas) as visual aids, Marco offers a disquisition on the historical evolution
of the notion of time. While agricultural societies were bound to the cycles and
rhythms of the seasons, he says, capitalism brought with it the notion oftime as
a superhighway, a linear progression. Time became progress. But it was the
“winners” of history—the conquerors—who first formulated the idea of
progress. Then Marco imagistically evokes the historical horrors of emperial
expansion into what we now call the “third world.” The capitalists, turned into
corkscrews, opened up the bottles of “interior” cultures and drank them to the
dregs. (One need only think of the Spanish plundering Inca silver or the British
taking African ivory). Their thirst satisfied, they broke the bottles. But the
“winners” of history—and here we see a veiled allusion to the liberation
struggles of the third world—fear that this past might come back to haunt
them. While believing in the straight and inexorable superhighway ofprogress,
they fear the savages displaced by its construction (one visualizes the
Transamazonic Highway, where the image literally applies). Marco then links
this idea of the past, weighing like a nightmare on the European brain, with the
students’ personal histories. They, too, are an evolving creation of their own
past; they are now “reading” the messages stored in their own chromosomes,
just as Marco himself is the synthesis, in some sense, of his father (the sausage)
and his mother (the metronome). Marco ends the class by beating out a series of
rhythms: opposition creates time, just as class struggle motivates history.
Marco’s lecture, far from being “woozy,” constitutes a lyrical version of the
dialectic wrapped in a philosophical meditation and expressed in images.
244 The Pleasures of Subversion

Jonah as a whole elaborates the leitmotifs of Marco’s lecture. The banker

Vendoeuvres (etymologically “seller of works” and phonetically “wind of
works”) and his agents, as the provisory winners of history, speak the language
of progress and domination: “We are no longer in the Middle Ages.... You
can’t stop the economy. ... The city is developing. .. .” Social Darwinists, they
fancy themselves strong by intrinsic right. The produce farmers and their allies,
on the other hand, are Europe’s indigenous “savages” who besiege and harass
the agents of capitalist progress. When the bank’s agent visits Marguerite and
Marcel in order to soften them up for an eventual land takeover, one of the
farmhands—described by Marguerite as a “bit savage”—threatens to
cannibalize him. Jonah, like the Emile of the film’s closing Rousseau
quotations, will be a new kind of savage: “a savage made to live in the cities.”"°
Marco’s lecture, in which apparent discontinuities mask real continuities,
microcosmically typifies the film’s methods, for Jonah as a whole mocks the
temporal strategies—the linear progression—of conventional fiction films.
The opening sequences alert us to Jonah’s unorthodox narrative procedures:
after the credits, we see a man (Max) enter asmoke shop and ask for cigarettes.
He pays | Franc 90 for them and grumbles about inflation. An anachronistic
intertitle—“The Next Afternoon”—is followed by a shot of a statue of Jean-
Jacques Rousseau. An off-screen voice (ifamute statue can be said to be “off”)
recites the celebrated passage from Rousseau’s Social Contract where the
philosopher asserts that most people live and die in slavery: “As children they
are wrapped in diapers and when they die they are nailed into a coffin. So long
as they live they are enchained by institutions.” With the absurd intertitle,
Tanner incongruously couples the temporality of contemporary Geneva with
the temporality of a Rousseau quotation. It is as meaningless to speak of the
“day before a Rousseau quotation” as it is to imply, as occurs in Chien Andalou
“eight years after once upon a time.” In both cases, the intertitles pinpoint the
artificiality of cinematic time—historical time and narrative time are as
arbitrary in their slicing up as the links of asausage—and bid us pay attention
to something other than a linear story.
Bourgeois thought compartmentalizes experience into neatly ordered and
immaculately separated categories—economics, politics, education, ecology—
with the result that the sense of social totality is lost. Jonah shows such borders
and frontiers to be oppressive. Marco, paraphrasing the French Leftist rallying
cry for the German-born student leader Cohn-Bendit (“We are all German
Jews”) shouts: “We are all frontier cases!” Jonah violates frontiers. As if in
illustration of Derrida’s dictum that “No border is guaranteed,” the film passes
through borders as if they did not exist. Marie’s situation as a Swiss worker
obliged by citizenship law to sleep in France is in this sense emblematic ofthe
arbitrary and unnatural nature of borders. But intellectual borders oppress as
well, for example that which separates economics and sexuality. Marie tells
 The Pleasures of Subversion 245

Marco’s students that she occasionally hitchhikes to work to save money, but
complains that the men who pick her up harass her sexually. When a student
interjects “some men,” Marie insists that it involves men generally, that it is
systematic. Conclusion: economic necessity forces Marie to hitchhike; (male)
capitalist power oppresses her in both the sexual and the economic realms.
Men abuse her not because of “instinct” but because the sexual distribution of
power favors such abuses.
Jonah displays an almost Melvillean awareness of the ecological
interconnectedness of all phenomena. “O Nature, and O soul of man,” Melville
wrote in his whale story, “how far beyond all utterance are your linked
analogies!” Jonah unearths the linked analogies of which Melville speaks.
Marco, contemplating a halved cabbage, notes its resemblance to the twin
lobes of the brain. Like Melville, Tanner creates a kind of metaphysical poetry
whereby dissimilar entities are joined and occult resemblances suggested. Just
as Moby Dick is supernatural and earthy, metaphysical and physical, full of
Plato as well as whale sperm, so Jonah is whimsically fantastic and rooted in
the Swiss earth, flush with vegetables, onions, manure. Whales, furthermore,
swim ubiquitous in the film. Human beings kill them for lipstick, Marcel
observes, while the shrimp that whales usually eat go uneaten, so that people,
left with nothing but shrimp to eat, will eventually die of indigestion. Whales
are not only material for lipstick, they are semioticians (sending out coded
messages) and musicians (Mathieu’s pupils sing along with their cries). Jonah,
like his Biblical namesake, is to be vomited up by his whale of a century.
While “collapsing” conventionally separated realms, Jonah also overturns
established hierarchies: adults over children, work over play, “high ” art over
“low” art. The carnivalization of roles has the adult Mathieu ask the children
the “infantile” irrepressible why-questions that children usually ask: “Does the
wind feel the clouds?” “Can water feel?” “Does the sun know it’s called the
sun?” The film suggests the transcendence of the work/ play dichotomy by
arguing the frivolity of work and the seriousness of play. The farm work is a
kind of play (“I’m the king of shit,” says Mathieu atop a mountain of manure)
as is classwork, while art is both work and play, a paradigm of nonalienated
labor. Jonah locates art everywhere—in a casual pun, a stylized gesture, an
eloquent statement, a well-sung song. Rather than something special and
exalted, frozen into monuments and artifacts, art forms part of the process of
everyday life. Politicizing the surrealist vision of the artistic potentialities ofall
human beings, Tanner peoples his film with the artists of the everyday.
Mathieu (borrowing from Pablo Neruda) sings the democratic virtues of the
onion; Marguerite hawks her vegetables with poems; Mathilde poetizes her
pregnancy; and Marie, with Charles the railroad man, re-enacts memories in
song, dance, and sketch. Life constantly transforms itself into creative self-
determining playfulness. Everything—a tick, a whale, a name, a word—yields
the pretext for a story or a song.
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248 The Pleasures of Subversion

If Jonah democratizes art, it also demystifies history. Far from being the
exclusive province of emperors and generals, history is shown to be the very
stuff of our everyday experience. Charles is surprised that Marco is interested
in his old train stories. “Of course,” replies Marco, “I’m a history teacher.” We
are history, its subjects and its objects, and we should all be, to echo Tout Va
Bien, our own historians. (“Imperial Rome is full of arcs of triumph,” Brecht
wrote in A Worker Reads History; “Who reared them up? Over whom did the
Caesers triumph?”) The film’s title—Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000—
spotlights our own immersion in historical time. This period is our segment,
our sausage-link, as it were, of history, and we will probably share it with
Jonah. Mathieu wishes Marco’s students, and indirectly the spectators, a long
and happy life; he hopes they are all alive and well in the year 2000. His words
are followed by a cut to the same classroom, this time in black and white,
inhabited by elderly people, presumably the same students grown older. Our
minds flash forward to the year 2000; time and history are deposited in our
reluctant spectatorial laps. What will we, alone and together, have
accompanied in the intervening years? The film encourages us not only to
understand time but to seize it and change it.
A Brechtian ode to the thrill of comprehension and the joy of learning,
Jonah shows people learning throughout their lives. Children learn to draw
and sing; they master Boolean algebra and mimic the cries of whales. Everyone
can learn, even the very old, and Marco, not accidentally, winds up teaching in
a home for the elderly. Like Brecht, Tanner sees life “under the sign of”
education, and Jonah, like many of Brecht’s plays (Galileo, The Mother)
proliferates in classroom scenes. In many shots, we find ourselves ranged as
spectators-learners behind the students on the screen. But the film is designed
less to inculcate specific didactic truths than to teach people how to learn. The
classroom becomes the scene of two activities frowned upon in conventional
schools—thought and laughter. Not only can anything be taught in class—
Mathieu speaks of inflation, Marie of cashiering—but learning can take place
anywhere, in a greenhouse, or even in the cinema. Jonah evokes the potentially
inexhaustible charm of what Brecht called “cheerful and miltant learning.”’®
Brechtian theatre, as we have seen, advances by interruptions, juxtaposing
scenes rather than developing causal narrative sequence. Jonah segments itself
into over two-score sequences, sketches, quotations, and songs. The narrative
line reflexively exhibits its own kinks and knots, the continuity disrupted not
only by intertitles but also by the recurrent intrusion of black-and-white
footage, often ushered in by minor jazz chords heraldinga shift in mode. These
monochrome interludes are very diversely used; often suggestive and
occasionally unclear, they all show some oblique or fantasmatic relation to the
real posited by the story; they realize a wish or name a fear. Some are brief
excursions into life-as-it-should-be rather than as it is. Mathieu gets to look at
 The Pleasures of Subversion 249

the books of his employer. The adults get to play in the mud like so many happy
porcine children. Marguerite gets to confront her banker-enemy with his
ignoble double—a pig. The cold impersonality of a TV newscaster melts into
relaxed gestures and warm personal words addressed to Mathilde seated before
her set. Still other sequences constitute historical flashbacks—for example of
the 1932 army occupation of Geneva—or fictional flash-forwards—when
Mathieu wishes Marco’s students long and happy lives. Our sequence is
especially striking for its political ambiguities. Max’s melancholy lament that
“politics are finished” precedes shots of military parades in Moscow’s Red
Square. In Makavejev’s WR, such footage slyly insinuates a link between
militarism and sexual repression. Here, however, since we know Max has an
elephantine memory for past political betrayals, we wonder if Tanner is not
presenting a disenchanted Trotskyist’s version of why politics are finished, i.e.,
because of Stalinism.
In still another black-white interlude, the hitchhiking Marie is picked up
by a clean-cut young man who urges her to sit in the front seat. Marie bursts
into a satirical cabaret-style ditty: “If you save your money you'll never be in
debt/ Stay cold and never fall in love and you'll never burn to ash/ Kiss the ass
of those who kick you and you won’t have to worry about getting whipped/
Crawl close to the ground and there will be no danger of crashing.” Her song
burlesques the tight-fisted prudence of the petit bourgeois and her final query
constitutes a sarcastically indirect refusal of an implied sexual proposition:
“What made you think you could fly?”
The Brechtian theory of distanciation and the alienation effect form the
basis of Tanner’s film language. The episodic juxtaposition of sketches, each
conceived as a theatrical “act,” the fugue-like presentation of the characters and
the alliterative stylization of their names, the archaic intertitles and the still
photographs all form part of a Brechtian aesthetic. Many sequences recall both
Godard and Brecht. Marie, home from jail, play-acts her prison experiences
with Charles. When he plays a male prisonmate, she objects that there were no
male prisoners. Then he mimes the ritual solemnity of a priest, but she
complains that his gestures are all wrong. Charles finally opts for a
Shakespearean solution; he plays the role of the prison itself by clasping his
hands in front of his face in order to represent “wall.” Brechtian in its
minimalist approach to decor, Charles’ solution implies that one need not
literally reconstitute a wall; one need only “signify” it. More important the
sequence—like the similar sequence in Tout Va Bien where the workers debate
how to convey the visceral feelings associated with their everyday working
lives—confronts us with the problematic narrative and esthetic choices
involved in artistic representation. Indeed, in many ways Tanner does quietly
what Godard does more obtrusively and audaciously. Tanner’s reflexive
techniques, like his colors, are more muted. “You don’t see the camera,” as
250 The Pleasures of Subversion

Tanner said of his own Middle of the World, “but you hear it running.” The
editing in Jonah is subtly “visible”; shots are held just a little too long or cut just
a little too abruptly. The camera movements, rather than completely
autonomous, are minutely displaced; the camera moves slightly when the
personages do not, anticipating or trailing behind the movement in the shots.
The passages between shots are often quietly startling; an extreme long shot of
Mathieu on his bicycle, for example, cuts to alternating close-ups of his face
and a red light.
Working with synchronous sound and long takes, Tanner gives his actors
room to breathe and the space to interact. Jonah is structured around roughly
150 one-shot sequences plus a sprinkling of close-ups. Such sequences allow the
actors to spread their wings, unlike conventional practice where an hour might
pass (devoted to adjusting lighting, experimenting with set-ups) between the
question of one character and the answer of another. At first glance, Tanner’s
method would seem to reinforce conventional Bazinian realism by avoiding the
fragmentation that goes with montage. In fact, however, it has a contrary
effect, precisely because spectators are accustomed to “invisible” montage and
fabricated continuity so that shots which literally respect the spatial and
temporal unity of the scene create, paradoxically, an effect of unreality and
alienation.

Beyond Deconstruction

Tanner extends the lessons of Godard in very personal and in some ways, more
sympathetic directions. We have spoken of the film’s subversive qualities, but
what about its charms? What are its strategies for winning people to a Left
position. It is here that Jonah is most interesting, for it politicizes while it 1-

pleasures its audience. It refuses, and dialectically transcends, the sterile

dilemma of a condescending populism on the one hand and an arid
deconstruction on the other. Populism (Burn! State of Siege, Missing) wraps a
radical message in Hollywood packaging in an attempt to be “accessible”; pure
deconstruction (Le Gai Savoir) reflexively investigates textual processes,. but
tends to speak only to the intellect. Jonah explores new routes into the
spectator’s mind and psyche. In words superficially addressed to the other
characters but really aimed at the spectator, Mathieu speaks of unifying the
field of our desires, finding their common thread, and using them as levers.
“Capitalism survives,” John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing, “by forcing the
majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as
possible.” Once achieved by extensive deprivation, this goal is now achieved in
the developed world “by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not
desirable.” Psychoanalysis, meanwhile, has tended to lock desire into the
category of the individual subject. Jonah attempts a redefinition of the
 The Pleasures of Subversion 251

desirable by appealing to deeply rooted but socially frustrated aspirations—for

intimacy, for new modes of work, for solidarity, for festivity, for community,
for freedom. Too many Leftist films play on guilt or appeal purely to the
intelligence; Jonah tries to think through the social logic of our personal and
collective desires, even while it demystifies the political and ideological
structures that channel our desires in oppressive directions.
As the hegemonic formal expression of late capitalist society, Jameson
argues, film drives the Utopian impulse, now reified, “back inside the monad,
where it assumes the status of some merely psychological experience, private
feeling, or relativized value.’ Jonah, for its part, refuses this “monadic”
pleasure. It does not encourage facile identification with idealized personages.
It refuses the constant flow of identification via the ongoing exchange of
glances by which conventional films suture us into the psychological and
diegetic momentum of the story. Unlike “deconstruction” films, Jonah does
favor a kind of identification, but it is neither with individual characters, on the
one hand, or with anything so abstract as “the masses”
on the other. Rather, we
identify with a diverse collectivity groping toward communitas, and with the
ideas they represent. We identify with eight characters and their children. We
identify, in short, with a community of aspiration.
Deconstruction theory and deconstructed films performed an invaluable
service by unmasking the ideology at work within cinematic forms themselves
and denouncing the potential for exploitation in identification with
streamlined plots and idealized characters. But as Metz points out, totally
deconstructed films require a libidinal transfer whereby traditional
satisfactions are replaced by the pleasures of intellectual mastery, by a “sadism
of knowledge.”'* The pleasure in the toy is transmuted into the pleasure of
breaking the toy. (The pleasure of breaking the toy, one might add, is not
intrinsically less infantile than the pleasure of the toy.) While the work of
deconstruction is invaluable and should continue, the cinema should also move
beyond deconstruction into non-exploitative identification and self-critical
narration. It is perfectly fine to denounce Hollywood escapism, but we must
also recognize the desire that brings all of us to the cinema. For spectators are
not corralled by force into the movie theatres; they go gladly to the slaughter.
A film like Jonah suggests, in an admittedly tentative and even
problematic fashion, the possibility of the filmic channeling of social desire to
generate a different kind of pleasure. Any film, to be effective, must offer a
quantum of pleasure, something to know or see or feel. The challenge for
liberatory films is to crystalize and actualize utopian hopes even while exposing
their degraded expression. Distancing can only be effective, after all, if there is
something—an emotion, a desire—to be distanced. It is of no value for films (or
revolutions) to be “correct” if no one is interested in participating in them. The
most successful reflexive texts conserve both diegesis and identification, but
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 The Pleasures of Subversion iets)

undermine them from within. While assuming the pleasures of conventional

narrative, they mobilize the spectator to interrogate those pleasures and,
furthermore, they make that interrogation itse/f pleasurable. They adopt the
Cervantic strategy of playing with fictions rather than doing away with them
altogether. They follow the way pointed by Brecht: to tell stories, but at the
same time to step out of the story and question it. Unafraid of pleasure, the
thrust of their interrupted spectacle is fundamentally comic, not in the sense of
provoking hilarity but in the sense of maintaining a socialized distance between
the desiring subject and the text. They articulate the play of desire and the
pleasure principle and the obstacles to their realization.
The perennial comparison of the cinematic experience to the dream state
points not only to its potential for alienation but also to its central utopian
thrust. Dreams are not merely regressive; they are vital to human well-being.
They are, as the surrealists emphasized, a sanctuary for desire, an intimation of
the possible transcendence of stale dichotomies, and a source of a kind of
knowledge denied cerebral rationality. It is as futile to condemn narrative as
such—to pretend, for example, that narrative inevitably serves conservative
ideologies—as it would be to condemn dreams. Human beings need both; both
dream and narrative are arguably primordial functions of the human mind.
Fabulating animals, we tell each other stories when we are awake and tell
ourselves dreams when we are asleep. Without myths, Propp tells us, the tribe
dies. Without the freedom of dreams, prisoners would die of despair. Story-
collections such as The Thousand and One Nights, according to Todorov,
allegorize the human obsession with stories, and in them, “narration equals life,
the absence of narration, death.”'’ Narration seems to bea genetic inheritance.
Our very sentences, by their syntagmatic structure, form mininarratives.
Narrative, for Barthes, is “international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is
simply there, like life itself.””°
Those who dismiss all narrative as intrinsically bourgeois and passivity
inducing would do well to remember Don Quixote. Few books demonstrate so
much love for fiction, for pure narrativity for its own sake, while at the same
time providing reminders that we should not believe but only observe. Brecht’s
work, similarly, proliferates in tales and fables, but they are not stories to lose
ourselves in but rather to learn from. The challenge for anti-illusionist fictions
is how to respect the fabulating impulse, how to revel in the joys of storytelling
and the delights of artifice, while maintaining a certain intellectual distance
from the story. The subversive pleasure generated by a Cervantes, a Brecht, ora
Godard consists in telling stories while comically undermining their authority.
The enemy to be done away with, after all, is not fiction but socially generated
illusion; not stories but alienated dreams.
Fredric Jameson, in The Political Unconscious, anticipates some
collective and decentered cultural production of the future which would
254 The Pleasures of Subversion

transcend the sterile dichotomy of realism and modernism alike. Brecht, if he

did not himself fully realize such an idea, certainly pointed the way toward its
realization. Implicit in his modernist realism is the assumption that the political
and aesthetic avant-gardes, yoked by a common impulse ofsocial and libidinal
rebellion, concretely need each other. While revolutionary aesthetics without
revolutionary politics is often futile (“They did away with grammar,” said
Brecht, “but they forgot to do away with capitalism”), revolutionary politics
without revolutionary aesthetics is equally retrograde, pouring the new wine of
social change into the old cracked bottles of conventional forms. Brecht, by
warning against the twin traps of an empty and elitist iconoclasm on the one
hand, and a formally nostalgic illusionism on the other, suggested the way
toward the realization of that scandalously utopian and only apparently
paradoxical idea—a majoritarian avant-garde.
 Appendix

Reflexivity and the Specifically Cinematic

Reflexive strategies, while equally available to both literature and the cinema,
have different materials to work with in the two media. Prose fiction, for
example, is a purely verbal medium, while the “unattainable text” of film is a
multitrack sensorial composite. Even films that literalize the idea of the film
text, by limiting their profilmic material to written words—for example,
Michael Snow’s So Js This—are not strictly identical to a literary text. Snow’s
editing imposes a particular pace on the text; some words, such as the word
“lengthy” are held on screen for a relatively long time, while others, such as
“tits” and “ass” are held for only the few frames required for “legibility.” The
size of the letters varies from shot to shot, and patches of color and quick flares
occasionally wander into frame. The mere fact of a text being read by an
audience of spectator-readers, furthermore, changes the quality of the
experience, and in the cinema, the “readers,” at least in the conventional
viewing experience, cannot personally vary the time of their “reading.”
Our purpose here will be to examine what Metz would call the specifically
cinematic dimension of reflexivity. Apart from the broader narrative and
rhetorical strategies available to both novel and film, how can the cinema
illuminate its specific textual processes? If the code of perspective is inherent in
the individual photographs that make up a film, for example, how can the
reflexive filmmaker subvert or call attention to this code? Rather than compose
in depth, Godard “flattens” the image, arranging his profilmic subjects in a
single spatial plane, without foreground or background or vanishing point to
reinforce the impression of relief. Fixed 90° compositions make all planes
parallel to the borders of the frame. Actors are posed against blank walls or
schematic backgrounds which block perspectival lines. Rectilinear
compositions and abstract framing force us to contemplate rather than “enter”
the image, while the inclusion of two-dimensional materials—paintings,
photographs, posters, newspapers, book covers—call attention to the screen as
a two-dimensional surface.
One of the “subplots” of Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1966-1967), a 45-
minute film structured around a single zoom shot—or more accurately, around
256 Appendix

the analogue of a zoom movement, a series of shifts in focal length which

cumulatively produce the effect of a progression from normal-lens to telephoto
view—taken from a fixed camera position in a New York loft, has to do with
the progressive emptying out of filmic illusions and depth. The film begins, at
the wide-angle end of the progression, with Bazinian deep space and multiple
spatial planes: foreground and middleground inside the loft and the
background outside the loft in the street. Then the film moves inexorably
toward two-dimensionality and flatness, finally obliterating the distinction
between inside the loft and outside the loft, and putting us, literally and
figuratively “up against the wall.” A similar emptying out occurs in relation to
sound; the film begins with the synchronous “deep” sound of street noises and
loft activities, then switches to an oscillator-generated sine-wave, a “flatter”
more abstract kind of sound. But at the zenith of our claustrophobia, the final
image, a photograph of waves, two-dimensional reminder of the primordial
basis of the cinema in still photographs, opens up the space through its
evocative power. In this Zen meditation of a film, we come to see the world ina
loft, the universe within a photograph, flatness within depth and depth within
flatness.
Reflexive filmmakers can also use color to either flatten the image or to call
attention to the artificiality of filmic color. In Wavelength, Snow has his
cameraman clumsily position filters in front of the lens. Godard insists on the
presence of filters in the opening sequence of Contempt, developing a tripartite
red-white-blue structure. In other films, following the lead of contemporary
painting, Godard insisted on the two-dimensionality of the screen surface
through the compositional use of color, arranging colors in blocks or in polar
opposites. Godard’s preference for sharply defined primary colors, meanwhile,
reminded the spectator of the differences between natural and screen color.
Whereas in nature color nuances are endless and inexhaustible, Godard closes
off this inexhaustibility by rigorous selection. He manipulates advancing and
receding colors, juxtaposing highly saturated reds and greens with blues, so
that the contrasting colors rise to the screen surface as abstract patterns.
The perspectival “analogy” of the photographic image only partially
accounts for film’s “impression of reality.” The photographs in a film exist
sequentially, and the spectator, thanks to persistance of vision and the phi-
effect (phenomenon of apparent movement) accepts shifting configurations of
light as the equivalent of material tangible movement. In fact, the camera does
not so much reproduce movement as analyze it, conserve it through mechanical
reproduction, and then recompose it on demand with the aid ofa projector. But
the impression of real movement powerfully contributes to a feeling of depth
and reality.
Reflexive filmmakers can exploit all kinds of film movement—movement
within the shot, camera movement, optically produced movement, and the
 s

Appendix PSY

movement created by montage—for anti-illusionist as well as illusionist ends.

Since movement, by detaching objects from their background, lends a feeling
of corporality and depth to the image, one way of undercutting the
persuasiveness of this conjunction is simply to minimize movement in the
manner of Jean-Marie Straub, the Taviani Brothers, or late-manner Godard.
Another way is to stylize and choreograph movement in antinaturalistic
patterns, in the manner of Miklos Jansco or Glauber Rocha. In Land in
Anguish, for example, Rocha has his actors move in choreographed figures
that have more to do with the stylization of opera than the “naturalness” of
dramatic realism.
Camera movement can be subordinated to the diegesis or can be
autonomous and declare its independence from characters and plot. The
opening camera movements of Rear Window, as we have seen, are pointedly
unmotivated. After the shades of the windows are raised, as if without human
intervention, the camera pans past a sleeping Jimmy Stewart, then moves out
the windows, down into the courtyard, tilts up and pans around to introduce
some of the neighbors and returns to Stewart sleeping in his apartment. There
is no authorizing subject for the film’s discourse at this point, only Hitchcock.
In the final shot of Antonioni’s Passenger, similarly, the camera shows a man in
his apartment, then passes through a grated window, promenades around a
patio, during which we hear a shot, only to return to the apartment with the
man dead. Nothing “justifies” the camera movement except a desire to narrate
the sequence in precisely that manner rather than another. In Rocha’s Land in
Anguish, the camera does not generally accompany the action; rather, it
performs its own autonomous ballet of stylized, geometricized, and
choreographed movements, creating a tension between the mobility of the
camera and that of the characters.
Chris Marker’s La Jetée, by depriving itself of movement in the shot,
becomes a textbook demonstration of alternative means for producing
movement. In what seems a perverse negation of the nature of the medium,
whose primordial designations—cinema, motion pictures, movies—entail
movement, Marker takes stasis as his point of departure. Even the title—“La
Jetée”—evokes frozen activity, a verbal congealed into a substantive. The stasis
takes us back to the primordial basis of film in the individual frames, but
Marker’s film also makes us realize that static images, when they are projected,
are not completely static. There are always tiny tremors produced by the
projection, infinitesimal changes of light on the screen and in the atmosphere.
Only one shot, six seconds in length, reproduces movement, but that shot’s
isolation and uniqueness in the film renders it strangely precious, as if we were
seeing cinematic movement for the first time as a kind of miracle. But Marker
exploits other kinds of movement: 1) camera movement: the camera performs
a tilt pan over a photograph of the Arch of Triumph; 2) optical camera
258 Appendix

movement: the camera zooms out from a still of Orly airport and zooms in to
the protagonist’s face; 3) optical movement created in the laboratory: lap
dissolves of the “destruction of Paris” evoke mists rising over ruins, dissolves of
different positions of the woman asleep create a sense of graceful oneiric
kinesis; 4) movement evoked by editing: simulated jump-cuts of the
protagonist’s face under experimentation evoke a man jerking in pain. La Jetée
reminds us, finally, that the human mind is the ultimate source of cinematic
movement. Our mind fills in the gaps between the static images, pressuring
stasis into mental kinesis. La Jetée merely hyperbolizes this universal but
generally obscured process.

Montage and Mimesis

All of these kinds of movement—movement in the shot, camera movement,

optically produced movement—pale in significance compared to the narrative
movement created by montage. It is through montage that discrete frames,
individual shots and separate sequences are transformed into a psychologically
persuasive fiction. Montage not only creates movement through the succession
of angles and perspectives; it also “moves” in the emotional sense by involving
the spectator in a story and creating an impression of psychological, rather
than merely spatial depth. Although cinema initially convinced because of the
unprecedented realism of its mimesis, it subsequently devised a kind of realism
that went far beyond the analogical fascination of the individual shot. The
individual shot, after all, furnishes but a schematic and truncated version of an
isolated fragment of reality, while montage transforms these fragments into
narrative discourse, and thus displaces the spectator’s interest in the lifelikeness
of individual images onto the lives lived through the images. It is this transfer of
perspective, by which we come to share the feelings and impulses of imaginary
characters, that simultaneously “moves” us and renders the movement of
montage invisible.
Cinema invented a way of telling stories through a specifically cinematic
organization of time and space. It devised what has become the esthetic
cornerstone of dominant cinema—the reconstitution of a fictional world
characterized by internal coherence and by the appearance of spatial and
temporal continuity. Orthodox continuity implies a linear story, plausible
causality, and psychological realism. It implies a film articulated into
sequences which are coherent narrative wholes fitting into the larger coherent
whole which is the film itself, with impeccably smooth transitions between
sequences as between individual shots. This continuity is achieved—or was
achieved in the classical period of the Hollywood film—by an etiquette for
introducing new scenes (a choreographed progression from establishing shot to
medium shot to close shot); conventional devices for evoking the passage of
 Appendix 259

time (dissolves, iris effects); conventional techniques to render imperceptible

the transition from shot to shot (the 30-degree rule, cutting on movement,
position matches, direction matches, movement matches, and inserts to cover
up unavoidable discontinuities); and devices for implying subjectivity
(subjective shots, shot-reaction shots, eyeline matches). It was through this
kind of montage that the classical fiction film acquired the emotional power
and diegetic prestige of the nineteenth-century realistic novel.
Godard’s career consists of a series of guerrilla raids on orthodox
continuity, and his tactics have evolved as the enemy itself has evolved. A close
look at either the overall narrative articulation or local editing of almost any
Godard film will turn up innumerable violations of conventional continuity.
Merely to catalogue his violations amounts indirectly to specifying the hidden
and not-so-hidden codes of cinematic realism. In terms of the larger
syntagmatic units, Godard’s work presents an ongoing struggle against the
tyranny of the conventional sequence. The very inapplicability of Metz’s
Grande Syntagmatique de la Bande Image points, in Godard’s case, to all the
ways in which his films depart from the découpage classique for which the
Metzian schema was devised. A film like Les Carabiniers, by superimposing a
childlike fable on diverse essayistic materials, throws the Metzian categories
into disarray. A film like One Plus One, meanwhile, surprises because it
exploits only one of the syntagmatic types delineated by Metz—the plan-
séquence. The title, in fact, refers on one level precisely to this syntagmatic
addition, one plus one, of ten plans-séquences. Whereas most filmmakers
adroitly play on diverse syntagmatic types, much as a musician plays different
keys in a harmonious whole, Godard plays here on only one cinematic key.
Conventional filmmakers, as everyone knows, employ continuity editors
and “script girls” to watch over the little details of narrative consistency—
clothing, weather conditions, relative positions of objects. Godard, for his part,
makes a mockery of continuity even in this common everyday sense. The
continuity of Pierrot le Fou, to take just one example, is blatantly and
cheerfully inadequate. Marianne on leaving Paris is dressed like a /ycéenne;
after stopping for gasoline, she wears the uniform of a paratrooper, when they
steal a Ford Galaxy, she has on a pale pink dress, and all this occurs without
any narrative justification for the changes. When the fugitive couple perform
agitprop theatre for American sailors, Godard does not bother to explain
where they acquired the chalk, the uniform, and the Asiatic hat. In its blithe
discontinuities, Pierrot le Fou resembles the comic strips to which it so often
alludes; it takes advantage of the elipses between two images. Everything in the
film—the characterization, the continuity, Ferdinand’s journal—is full of
holes.
In multiplying discontinuities, Godard simply foregrounds the primordial
discontinuity of film itself. A filmic text is a discontinuous discourse,
260 Appendix

analyzable into discrete shots and individual frames. The process of film
production, furthermore, is essentially discontinuous. Shots are selected from
diverse takes made at different times. Editing involves physically collating
separate pieces of film. The continuity of film, in sum, consists of a perpetual
discontinuity. Montage normally imposes an apparent continuity on
discontinuous materials. Godard merely underscores this discontinuity by
emphasizing the individual frame (“22,337 frames tell you about Patricia and
Emile,” he informs us in Le Gai Savoir), or by making the transition from shot
to shot jarringly abrupt (through faux raccords, movement and position
mismatches, violent changes in scale) or simply obvious (the black leader for
cuts in Les Carabiniers), or by insisting, ina Brechtian way, on the autonomy of
individual sequences (the “douze tableaux” of Vivre Sa Vie, the “chapters” of
Pierrot, the “quinze faits précis” of Masculin, Féminin).

The Parameters of Sound

We have so far stressed but one of cinema’s matters of expression—the moving

and sequential photographic images. The other four—recorded phonetic
sound, recorded noises, recorded musical sound, and writing—are no less
important to film as a signifying practice. Although sound tracks have become
extremely sophisticated, film theory and criticism still tend to privilege the
visual, as if sound were but an afterthought. Even the language we use to speak
of the cinema reinforces this hegemony of the visual: we see ourselves as
spectators (not auditors) viewing (not hearing) motion pictures (not sounds).
Films like Malick’s Days of Heaven, Coppola’s The Conversation, and
Altman’s The Wedding reflect what has been called a “second sound
revolution,” but critics and theorists have been slow to respond to its challenge.
Sound, like any filmic resource, can be used to illusionist or anti-illusionist
ends. In the illusionist film, sound intensifies and completes the impression of
reality offered by the image; it reconstitutes a recognizable auditory world,
lending sonorous depth—the aural equivalent to visual depth of field—to the
image. The conventions of dramatic realism require that the image be
accompanied by the natural sounds that such a sight would generate in
everyday experience. Sound, then, amplifies the mimetic power of the medium,
completing the image with its evocative powers, streamlining the narrative
discourse, camouflaging discontinuity by the continuous flow of sound over
cuts. It reinforces the impression of depth because it penetrates the space ofthe
audience. Sensed as literally present rather than recreated, it fills out an
imaginary third dimension lacking in silent cinema. The sound analogon, in
some respects, has a higher coefficient of authenticity than the visual analogon.
Unlike the image, it is not strictly localizable within the rectangular frame of
the screen. While the photographic image records, for Barthes, a “having-been-
 Appendix 261

there,” the sound seems really there. Little distinguishes real from recorded
sound: it is somehow both inside the screen and throughout the theatre,
measurable in decibels and potentially capable of shattering glass or wounding
eardrums. Whereas the image of a tiger could never hurt anyone, a recorded
roar conceivably could.
Reflexive filmmakers prolong a cinematic tradition which appreciates
sound as offering new combinatory possibilities of poetic and ideological
juxtaposition, for counterpointing the image rather than underlining it. The
tradition goes at least as far back as the famous statement signed by Eisenstein,
Pudovkin, and Alexandrov calling for the “contrapuntal use of sound” and its
“distinct nonsynchronization with the visual images.” Many reflexive
filmmakers have answered their call by exploiting sound to derealize rather
than reinforce the image. Chris Marker demonstrates the ideologically
informing power of sound in Letter from Siberia by accompanying the same
footage—a shot of a moving bus, shots of workers paving a street—with three
distinct commentaries, ranging from official communist to hostile
anticommunist to neutral. The experience of the shots is radically modified by
each version. Rocha, in Land in Anguish, uses recorded noises to contradict the
image. Guns are omnipresent in the film but are never coordinated with their
sounds. We see pistols, forexample, but hear machine guns. In “The Encounter
of a Leader with the People” sequence, we see a political militant fire a machine
gun, but we hear nothing, yet the people quiet down as if they had heard it, as
Rocha suspends. the soundtrack to an unnaturally total silence.
Hollis Frampton in (nostalgia) brilliantly exploits the interplay of sound
and image, of the iconic and the linguistic. The film consists of a series of
photographs, successively burned to cinders on a hotplate, on which the
filmmaker (dubbed by Michael Snow) makes digressive commentaries. The
commentaries are displaced, applying not to the image we are seeing but to the
image that we are about to see. The film bifurcates its spectator into an auditor
and a spectator; we wonder whether we should trust our eyes or our ears,
because we obviously cannot, at least initially, trust both. The film also
demonstrates the anchoring function of words, their way, at times, of tying
down the polysemy of the image, and at other times of opening the image up to
polysemy. His gloss on a newspaper photo as showing a man contemplating his
flood-destroyed grapefruit “anchors” its sense, although we might have found
another explanation equally convincing. Elsewhere, however, the commentary
forces us to re-see the iconic through the linguistic, as when the mention ofthe
“central nervous system” coincides with the image of the coils of the hotplate,
which we then see as evocative of the central nervous system.
The soundtrack in film has classically tended to privilege dialogue; that is
why sound films were referred to as “the talkies” rather than the “noisies” or
“the musicies.” In the early sixties, however, Jean-Luc Godard and other new
262 Appendix

wave directors began to privilege noise. They abandoned directional

microphones and selective amplification in favor of omnidirectional mikes and
the inclusive “democratic” transcription of all ambiant sounds. By including
sounds that the conventional decorum would have systematically eliminated or
downplayed, these directors retroactively exposed the factitiousness of the old
studio sound-conventions. Godard has ambiant noise intrude on lovers’
conversations in Masculine, Feminine; pinball machines and traffic noises are
granted access to the soundtrack. Apart from its thematic relevance—the
effects of urban life on young love—the insistent noise makes a political point.
It reminds us that lovers, and people generally, do not exist in a vacuum; the
world is with them. Godard’s use of sound, then, simultaneously criticises
romanticism, which fosters the illusion that lovers can live in some ideal
cinematic elsewhere, and the pseudo-humanism, privileging dialogue, which
subtends studio sound practices.
Godard has transgressed, at one point or another, virtually all the taboos
and conventions associated with studio sound practices—that all sounds must
be “legible,” that all dialogue should be comprehensible, that dialogue should
not be repeated except for intentional emphasis, that swift changes in aural
scale should be avoided, that “inaudible” sound matches should parallel
“invisible” image matches, and that voices and lips should be synchronized
with the image. Another convention stipulated that there should be no “holes”
in the soundtrack, lest the spectators think that the loudspeakers are not
functioning. But in A Woman is a Woman, Godard plays an Aznavour song
intermittently, alternating full volume with total silence, and thus elicited
precisely the feared reaction on the part of spectators, some of whom
reportedly tore up the seats to protest what they thought was the theatre’s
inadequate sound system. Godard also spoofs the convention in Band of
Outsiders by having Franz ask his friends for a minute of silence, a request
which Godard obliges by turning off the entire soundtrack.
Ferdinand, in Pierrot le Fou, complains that he has one mechanism for
seeing, another for listening, and still another for speaking, but they all go their
separate ways: “There’s no coordination. One should feel they are united. I feel
they are deranged.” Ferdinand’s statement, a verbal echo of Rimbaud’s
“déreglement de tous les sens,” reflects precisely what happens in many Godard
films, where each of the filmic tracks—image, dialogue, noise, music, writing —
goes in a different direction. The film is dissociated into its separate matters of
expression. The image tells one story; the dialogue another; the noise another;
and the music still another. Godard uses all the elements in a concerted attack
on the sensibility of the spectator and the conventions of illusionism. A
disorienting sensory overload gives us too much to assimilate, as if the only way
to understand the film would be literally to let the senses go their separate
ways—viewing the film once for the images, once for the dialogue, once for the
 Appendix 263

music, once for the background noises, and once for the titles. In some
instances, not only do the sense go their separate ways, but each sense is asked
to go in several directions at once. In One Plus One we are asked to listen
simultaneously to dialogue, music, naturalistic noises, a novel being read by an
off-screen voice, all while reading innumerable visual messages and written
texts. And in Numéro Deux the problem is compounded by multiple images,
each with its own assortment of sounds.

Music and I]lusionism

Film music, like montage, is one of those devices which seem at first glance
antinaturalistic, but which in fact came to be recuperated by a naturalist
aesthetic. On superficial examination, all music which is not immediately
“anchored” in the image (i.e., whose source is neither present nor implied to be
present in the image) is by definition anti-illusionistic. Conventional cinema,
however, often substitutes for the superficial realism of visual appearances the
ultimately more persuasive realism of subjective response. The musical scores
of Hollywood dramatic films lubricate the spectator’s psyche and oil the wheels
of narrative continuity. At the same time they direct our emotional responses in
the manner of traffic cops; they regulate our sympathies, extract our tears,
excite our glands, relax our pulses, and trigger our fears, always in strict
conjunction with the image.
The style of film music which dominated the studios during the 1930s and
40s may be succinctly described as the symphonic style of late-nineteenth-
century European romanticism. The composers who dominated the studios—
Max Steiner, Dimitri Tiomkin, Franz Waxman, Miklos Rozsa—tended to be
emmigrants from Europe steeped in a specific tradition of musical
composition. The European education of these film composers within the
Wagner-Strauss tradition inclined them to favor the lush sounds of rich
orchestral scoring, with long-spanned melodies based on Wagnerian leitmotifs.
The concept of the “Gesamtkunstwerk” was transmuted into a workable
aesthetic for film music, one in which music fused with screen action, dialogue,
and sound effect by providing the appropriate instrumental color.
Without slighting the brilliance of these composers, one can question the
inevitability of their aesthetic as the only one for such a discontinuous medium
as film. Their ideas, in lesser hands, were also susceptible to considerable
vulgarization and standardization. The leitmotif became a rather mechanical
system of allying particular themes to particular characters, themes which were
returned to with only minimal variation during the course of the film. Film
scores, at their most conventional, tended to be redundant, subliminal,
hackneyed, and comfortably tonal. They were redundant because hyper-
explicit, cheerful images redoubled with cheerful sounds, tragic moments
264 Appendix

underlined with “tragic” harmonics, and narrative climaxes carefully matched

to swells and crescendos. The image was overstuffed with a pleonastically high
coefficient of reality. (Lubitsch parodied such redundancy by having
characters walk up stairs accompanied by an escalier of ascending musical
notes.) Such scores are subliminal in that they are meant to be felt emotionally
but not heard as music. To modify our traffic cop analogy, they are not
uniformed policemen but plainclothesmen. The scores are hackneyed because
they appeal to a series of petrified associations—flutes for love and meadows,
martial drums for war, Mendelssohn for weddings, tremolos for the fantastic,
and ominous chords to betray danger. The scores are comfortably and
reassuringly tonal, finally, in being spiritually descended from the late
romantic period. Often exploiting debased versions of Wagnerian leitmotifs,
such music is emotionally effective, because easy to grasp, and subsequently
marketable as albums. Returning the public to the lost paradise of tonality,
melody, and final resolution, they rigorously avoid modernist dissonance and
tension.
Conventional filmic music, in a sense, has never fundamentally departed
from its original function in the days of silent cinema. The pianists and
organists who accompanied silent films served a double function: their music 1)
“covered” the noise of the projector, and 2) directed spectator response,
underscoring the screen events with sound elements adopted to their mood and
rhythm. Its function, then, was to efface the instruments of production of the
cinematic illusion and to direct audience response. Although these two
functions have been physically integrated into the filmic text and rendered
more subtle, their purpose has not changed. The realistic effect of music is
paradoxical in that music in itself is not representational. Music is polysemic,
open to infinite association, and refractory (Peter and the Wolf and Till
Eulenspiegel! notwithstanding) to anecdote. But music, like montage, engages
the psychic mechanisms of the spectator, substituting for literal visual mimesis
the realism of subjectivity and the feel of thought. In realistic cinema well-
chosen images and well-chosen musical sounds anchor each other. Music
serves to carry the spectator over the rough spots of the diegesis—whence the
importance of music during the opening credits, when the presence of written
texts and the exposition of the facts of filmic production might definitely
shatter the impression of reality.
Reflexive filmmakers play music against the image, against the dramatic
moment, and often against other kinds of music in the same film. Bruce
Conner’s parodic A Movie (1958) begins with epic Hollywoodean music that
makes us expect something heroic and grandiose; instead, we are given a
disorienting sequence of film leader, found footage, and titles reading “start,”
“head,” and “end of Part IV.” Robbe-Grillet specified in his script that
Marienbad should begin with “end of movie music.”. The Brazilian
 Appendix 265

underground filmmaker Julio Bressane in Killed the Family and Went to the
Movies superimposes Carmen Miranda’s effervescent version of “What a great
country for partying” on images of unredeemed squalor. Another Brazilian
filmmaker, Rogerio Sganzerla, in Red Light Bandit constructs his soundtrack
out of a veritable anthology of Hollywood programmatic music, classical
symphonic pieces, and Brazilian and American camp materials, often making
three or four pieces of music play simultaneously. Rocha’s Land in Anguish
frequently superimposes two very different kinds of music—the symphonies of
Villa-Lobos and the Afro-Brazilian chants of candomblé. The superimposi-
tion, paradoxically, both amplifies the polysemy of the music and restricts it by
suggesting hidden links between the two kinds of music. In all these instances,
we become aware of music as music rather than simply being physically
manipulated by it.
Although Godard often draws on the classical repertoire (Beethoven in
Une Femme Mariée, Mozart in Weekend and Masculine, Feminine), his
treatment of the music is modernist and Brechtian in its discontinuity. The
music interrupts and is itself interrupted so that it can no longer serve as a
subliminal guide for our emotions. Music in Godard struggles against the
image and against a simplistic response. The emotional tone of the music
clashes with the emotional tone of the image or dialogue. In Pierrot le Fou,
sprightly music punctuates Ferdinand’s discovery of a corpse in Marianne’s
bed. Whereas films traditionally form aesthetic wholes in which music,
dialogue, and image elicit a single response, Godard works toward a complex
multiple response. Véronique in La Chinoise demonstrates the point by telling
Guillaume verbally that she no longer loves him, while telling him with music
that she does still love him. Then she points to the conclusion: “Music and
language; one must struggle on two fronts.”
But perhaps more important than Godard’s use of modernist music are the
parallels to modernist music in his work. Godard, especially in his later films,
redefines what constitutes music in a film. He organizes music, dialogue,
naturalistic sound, silence (and even differently colored silences) into what
amount to soundblocks composed into musical patterns. The music of La
Chinoise, for example, not only “offends” from both ends of the respectability
spectrum by including music by Stockhausen and some very ugly pop music, it
also recalls serial music in its very structure as a film, developing a dialectical
alternation of classical music, popular songs, background noise, and a kind of
musique concrete produced by gongs and tinklers. Godard thus follows Noel
Burch’s suggestion that only through systematic exploration of the cinematic
parameters can film liberate itself from narrative “tonality’—which if not
strictly equatable with narrative illusionism certainly shares analogies with it—
and develop more open forms resembling the formal strategies of post-
Debussyan music. Godard, in a sense, has made the kind of decisive break in
266 Appendix

cinema that came with a Picasso in painting or a Schoenberg in music. With

Picasso perspectival realism is shattered. With Schoenberg tonal depth and
smooth aural texture give way to atonality and rupture. With Godard the codes
of visual depth and narrative coherence are disintegrated in an attack on
illusionistic representation.
 Notes

Introduction

See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1973), pp. 46-49.
See Marthe Robert, Roman des Origines et Origines du Roman (Paris: Grasset, 1972).

Bertolt Brecht, Galileo, English Version by Charles Laughton (New York: Grove Press,
1966), p. 98.
Foucault, Order, p. 16.

Bertolt Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues (London: Methuen, 1964), p. 57.

Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), p. 66.

Sen
Se
RS Peter Birger has argued that one cannot simply equate modernism and the avant-garde, since
modernism merely attacks traditional écriture while the avant-garde aims to alter the art
institution. In my usage of the two terms, I will assume that the avant-garde assumes and gives
political institutional bite to modernism; while the avant-garde is necessarily modernist, the
converse is not necessarily true. For an exposition of Biirger’s argument, see Theory of the
Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

Alfred Jarry, “Writings on the Theatre,” in Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor,
Selected Works of Alfred Jarry (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 84.

Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausée (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), p. 60.

Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Apparatus,” (translated by Alan

Williams), Film Quarterly, XXVII, No. 2 (Winter 1974-1975).

Some of the key essays in this debate are Jean-Louis Baudry, “Cinema: effets ideologiques
produits par l’appareil de base,” in Cinétique no. 7-8, 1970 (published in an English
translation by Alan Williams in Film Quarterly, vol. 27, n. 2, Winter 1974-75) and “Le
Dispositif: approches métapsychologiques de l’impression de réalité,” in Communications,
no, 23, May 1975 (published in English translation by Bertrand Augst and Jean Andrews in
Camera Obscura, no. 1, Dec. 1976, as well as L’Effet Cinéma [Paris: Albatross, 1978]. See
also Christian Metz, “Le Signifiant Imaginaire,” Communications, no. 23, May 1975
published in English translation by Ben Brewster as “The Imaginary Signifier” in Screen, vol.
16, no. 2 Summer 1975, and “Le Film de Fiction et Son Spectateur,”
also in Communications
no. 23 and translated by Alfred Guzzetti as “The Fiction Film and its Spectator” in New
Literary History, Autumn, 1976. Comolli’s “Machines of the Visible” is included in The
Cinematic Apparatus, edited by Stephen Heath and Teresa de Lauretis, published by St.
Martin’s Press, 1980.
 268 Notes for Chapter 1

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 491.

For further discussion of realism and reflexivity in television, see my “Television News and its
Spectator,” in Regarding Television (ed. E. Ann Kaplan), AFI Monograph Series, Vol. II
(Frederick, Maryland: University Publications of America, 1983).

See Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, p. 109.

For the details of the Bazin-Truffaut relationship, see Dudley Andrew, André Bazin (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

Jorge Luis Borges, Ficcidnes (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1965), p. 36.

Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1979), p. 21.

See Godard on Godard, ed. Jean Narboni, Tom Milne translator (New York: Viking, 1972),
p. 201.
See Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico- Philosophical Essay on the Forms
of Great Epic Literature, Trans. Anna Bostock, (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1975), p. 41.

See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p.
146.

Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes (Paris: Seuil, 1982).

See “From High Noon to Jaws: Carnival and Parody in Brazilian Cinema,” in Randal
Johnson and Robert Stam, Brazilian Cinema (Cranbury: Associated University Presses,
1982), pp. 256-69.
23. See Noél Carroll, “The Future of Allusion: Hollywood in the Seventies (and Beyond), in
October, Vol. 20 (Spring 1982), pp. 51-81.

Chapter 1

l. See Partial Magic: The Novel as Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1975), pp. 1-29.

Charles Musser has pointed out that Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Shows itself aremake
of a 1901 English film by Robert Paul called The Countryman’s First Sight of the Animated
Pictures, and part of a pattern of mutual theft between Paul and Edison. There is also a
commercial aspect to the intertextuality of Uncle Josh, in the sense that it was calculated to
show off segments from earlier Edison films along with the title “The Edison Projecting
Kinetoscope.” Indeed, the projector itself is dramatically revealed when the projectionist
points to it in order to explain to Josh that he was only seeing a film. Here the apparatus
advertises itself.

Christian Metz points out in “The Fiction Film and its Spectator” that a similarly paradoxical
faith and scepticism characterizes certain “naive” publics of cinema, those who get up from
their seats to shout encouragement to heroes. Their reaction would seem, at first glance, to
reflect a naive faith in the filmic image but in reality, Metz argues, their active participation
wakes them up from the “dream” of cinema. While expressing a ludic “encouragement du
spectacle,” the community celebrates its own existence as a community. The cinema as a scene
for the projection of purely private dreams is more typical of the urban centers of the
advanced capitalist countries.
 Notes for Chapter1 269

See Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” in Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen
Heath’s The Cinematic Apparatus (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980).

Gérard Genette, “La Littérature selon Borges,” L’Herne (Paris, 1964), pp. 323-27.

Bertolt Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. John Willet (London: Methuen, 1965), p.
Se
I would like to thank Roberta Pearson for allowing me to include here portions of an article
we coauthored and which appeared in Enclitic, Vol. VI1, Number i (Spring 1983) under the
title: “Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Reflexivity and the Critique of Voyeurism.”

Jean Douchet, “Hitch et son public,” Cahiers du Cinema, Vol. X1X, No. 3 (November 1960),
p. 10.

Christian Metz, “History/Discourse: A Note on Two Voyeurisms,” Edinburgh Magazine

(1976), p. 23.

Although the cinema is founded on the pleasure of hearing (Lacan’s pulsion invocante as well
as on the pleasure of looking (scopophilia), Hitchcock generally emphasizes the visual rather
than the aural dimension of voyeurism. Jeffries is granted access to music and noises but not
to distant conversations staged as pantomimes. It should also be pointed out, however, that
the soundtrack makes frequent allusion to voyeurism. The lyrics of Bing Crosby’s “To See
You is to Love You/and I See You Everywhere” (ironically superimposed on Jeffries’
observation of Miss Lonelyhearts) are in this sense exemplary: “To see you is to want
you/and I see you all the time/on the sidewalk/in the doorway/I see you everywhere/ To see
you 1s to love you/and Ill love you/and I'll see you/in the same old dreams tonight.” A
veritable ode to scopophilia, the song fuses sight and desire in its distant dream-like loving
common to voyeur and spectator.

Christian Metz, “The Imaginary Signifier,” Screen, Vol. XVI (Summer 1975), p. 60.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979),
p. 200.
For example, Donald Spoto writes in The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Hopkinson
and Blake, 1976), p. 241, that “With the exception of one slow pan across the apartments, we
see [the neighbors] only as Jeffries sees them.” For Robin Wood in Hitchcock's Films (New
York: Castle Books, 1969), p. 65, only once does Hitchcock grant the viewer information that
Jeffries lacks. In all other cases, according to Wood, “we are allowed to see only what he sees,
know only what he knows.”

Metz has compared the spectator’s situation generally to that of a child observing a “primal
scene.”

For its spectator, the film unfolds in that simultaneously very close and definitively
inaccessible “elsewhere” in which the child sees the amorous play of the parental couple,
who are similarly ignorant of it and leave it alone, a pure onlooker whose participation is
inconceivable. In this respect the cinematic signifier is not only “psychoanalytic”, it is more
precisely Oedipal in type.—The Imaginary Signifier (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1982), p. 64.

Needless to say, my emphasis in this chapter is on films which confront the structures of male
sexuality and what Teresa de Lauretis calls the “blind spots of [male] desire.” For her
“the operations by which narrative and cinema solicit women’s consent and by a
discussion of
surplus of pleasure hope to seduce women into femininity,” see Alice Doesn't: Feminism,
Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
 270 Notes for Chapter 2

In Bufiuel’s work, to speak more generally, interruptions and digressions are of the essence.
“Digression,” he tells us in his autobiography, “seems to be my natural way of telling a
story...” (p. 166). One of Bufiuel’s earliest artistic endeavors, significantly, was a production
of Falla’s El-Retablo de Maese Pedro, based on the Master Pedro puppet show episode in
Don Quixote. Bufiuel’s contribution was to add four real characters whose role was to
interrupt the puppeteer’s performance. See Luis Bufiuel, My Last Sigh (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1983).

17. See Pascal Bruckner and Alain Finkielkraut, Le Nouveau Désordre Amoureux (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1977).

Chapter 2

1. Although Marx never fulfilled his ambition of writing an extended study of La Comédie
Humaine, he did make it clear that he regarded Balzac, along with Cervantes, as a supreme
novelist. In a famous letter to Margaret Harkness, Engels wrote: “That Balzac was thus
compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the
necessity of the downfall of his favorite nobles and described them as people deserving no
better fate: that he saw the real men of the future, where, for the time being, they alone were to
be found—that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of realism, and one of the greatest
features in old Balzac.” In another letter to Harkness, Engels wrote that Balzac, with all his
reactionary opinions, is worth a thousand Zolas, with all his democratic ones. One could
learn more about French society from Balzac, Engels argued, than from “all the professional
historians, economists, and statisticians of the period put together.”

2. Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la Littérature (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), pp. 154-55
(translation mine).

3. All references will be to Honoré de Balzac, Illusions Perdues (Paris: Garnier, 1961). All
translations mine.

4. Walter Benjamin, ///uminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 87.

5. Brecht implicitly compares film production to gold prospecting in his “Hollywood Elegies”:
By the sea stand the oil tanks. Up the ravines
The gold prospectors; skeletons lie bleaching. Their sons
Built the dream factories of Hollywood.
The four cities
Are filled with the oily smell
Of films.

6. Quoted in Patrick Donald Anderson, Jn Its Own Image: The Cinematic Vision of Hollywood
(New York: Arno Press, 1978), pp. 27-28.

7. — Ibid., p. 28.
8. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” New Left Review (July-August 1970), p. 15.

9. Annette Michelson, “The Man with a Movie Camera: From Magician to Epistemologist,”
Artforum (March 1972), p. 66.

10. See Dziga Vertov, Articles, journaux, projets (Paris: Les Cahiers du Cinéma, 1972), p. 208.

Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
 Notes for Chapter. 3 271

L2E sec Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” included in Rick Altman,
Genre: The
Musical (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).
13. Thomas Elsaesser, “‘Vincente Minnelli,’” in Altman, Genre: The Musical, p. 16.

14. See Kristin Thompson, “bmplications of the Cel Animation Technique,” in Teresa
de
Lauretis and Stephen Heath’s, The Cinematic Apparatus (New York: St. Martin’s
Press,
1980), pp. 106-20.
LSD aria, Polan adopts a similar perspective on Duck Amuck in “Brecht and the Politics of Self-
Reflexive Cinema,” Jump Cut, no. 17 (1978), pp. 29-32.
16. See Elsaesser, “‘Minelli,’” p. 16.
17. My discussion of Two Weeks in Another Town is partially indebted to Roger D. McNiven’s
unpublished paper “Self-reference as the Testament of a Director: Vincente Minelli’s Two
Weeks in Another Town.”

18. The Metz article forms part of Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema
(New York: Oxford, 1974).

19. See, for example, Ted Perry, Film Guide to 8 1/2 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1975), as well as the special issue of Etudes Cinématographiques, nos. 28-29, Fall 1963,
devoted to the film.
20. See Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford, 1983), p. 244.
21. For anelaboration of this idea see Brian Henderson, “Targets: An Unshielding Darkness,”in
Roy Huss and T.J. Ross, Focus on the Horror Film (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1972).
22. For Truffaut’s account of the making of Day for Night, see F. Truffaut, La Nuit Américaine
(Paris: Seghers, 1974).

Chapter 3

1. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Bell, 1961), pp. 242-43.

2. Robert Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel as Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1975), p. 6.

3. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (New York: New American Library of World Literature,
1961), p. 61.

4. Ibid., p. 21.
5. For discussion of “story” and “discourse” see Gérard Gennette, Narrative Discourse: An
Essay in Method (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980) and Seymour Chatman, Story and
Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).

6. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (New York: Modern Library, 1950), p. 41.

Te Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (New York: New American Library of World Literature,
1962), p. 86.

8. Ibid., pp. 230-31.

9. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Berkley Medallion, 1955), p. 91.

10. Emile Benveniste as quoted by Gérard Genette in “Boundaries of Narrative,” New Literary
History V\U, No. | (Autumn 1976), p. 9.
 Zhe Notes for Chapter 4

Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p.
206.
2 Machado de Assis, Memérias Postumas de Brads Cubas (Sao Paulo: Editora Cultrix, 1968), p.
25 (translation mine).

13. Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro (Rio de Janeiro: Edigdes de Ouro, 1970), p. 243
(translation mine).

14. Tzvetan Todorov, Littérature et Signification (Paris: Larousse, 1967), p. 49.

15. De Assis, Memorias Péstumas, p. 29 (translation mine).

[6a bide, py 119:

17. See Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), pp. 47-66.

18. David Denby, “Woody’s Poison-Pen Letter,” New York, Oct 13, 1980.

19. Ibid.

20. Foster Hirsch, Love, Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life: Woody Allen's Comedy (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), p. 209.

21. John Fowles’ “Foreward” to Harold Pinter, The French Lieutenant's Woman. A Screenplay
(Boston-Toronto: Little Brown, 1981), p. ix.

22. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Berkley, 1955), p. 155.

23. Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (Norfolk, Conn: New Directions,
1941), p. 95.

24. Meyer Abrams, “The Deconstructive Angel,” Critical Inquiry Vol. 111, No. 3 (1977), p. 431.

Chapter 4

1. Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays and Letters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1956), p. 10.

2. Alfred Jarry, “Writings on the Theatre,” in Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor,
Selected Works of Alfred Jarry (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 84.

3. Alfred Jarry, “De l’Inutilite du Théatre au Théatre,” in Tour Ubu (Paris: Librairie Générale
Frangaise, 1962), p. 141 (translation mine).

4. Alfred Jarry, “Lettres a Lugné-Poe,” Tout Ubu, p. 133.

5. Cited by Ado Kyrou, Luis Buruel (Paris: Seghers, 1962), pp. 89-93.

6. Gerard Genette defines the pseudo-iterative as a presentation of narrative scenes in the

imperfect, as iterative, when their concrete details ensure that no reader can seriously believe
that such events would occur and reoccur in such a manner, several times, without variation.
See Genette, Narrative Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell, 1972), p. 121.

He Luis Bufiuel, L’Age d’Or (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), p. 69.

8. Both the overheated moralism of the title and the anachronistic juxtaposition of personages
from diverse historical epochs recall, in a parodic mode, certain films of D.W. Griffith. The
historical leaps and bounds parallel the improbable temporal shifts in Griffith’s Intolerance,
 Notes for Chapter 4 273

where parallel montage shuttles us back and forth between Biblical Babylon, the France of
Charles IX, and the present. Subtitled “Love’s Struggles through the Ages,” the Griffith film
was lampooned by Keaton, one of Bufuel’s cinematic heroes, in The Three Ages (1923),
which traces an identical love triangle in prehistoric, Roman, and modern times. Keaton
sprinkles his parody with hilarious anachronisms—dice bearing Roman numerals, Ben Hur
style chariots with “spare” dogs in the “trunk.” Bufiuel, by making Christ contemporaneous
with eighteenth-century Frenchmen and twentieth-century Romans (through the linkage of
“at that exact moment”) draws out the aggressive potential of the comic techniques developed
by silent cinema’s brilliant farceur.

Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972), p. 190.

Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 93.

Godard on Godard, p. 198

Cea
Bufiuel’s “as-told-to” autobiography, My Last Sigh (New York: Knopf,1983), offers ample
evidence of his carnivalesque propensities, whether in his taste for mock rituals (p. 72), his
love of disguise (p. 227), or his carnivalesque laughing at death by plotting a final practical
joke—pretending to convert to Catholicism—in front of his atheist friends—for his
deathbed. He also makes interesting observations on the “art” of blasphemy:
Now the Spanish language is capable of more scathing blasphemies than any other
language I know. Curses elsewhere are typically brief and punctuated by other comments,
but the Spanish curse tends to take the form of a long speech in which extraordinary
vulgarities—referring chiefly to the Virgin Mary, the Apostles, God, Christ, and the Holy
Spirit, not to mention the Pope—are strung end to end ina series of impressive scatological
exclamations. (p. 159)

Jarry’s letter is quoted in Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years (New York: Vintage, 1955), p.
220.
14. In his discussion of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Genette defines (p. 85, Narrative
Discourse) syllepses as follows:

Having christened the anachronies by retrospection and anticipation analepses and

prolepses, we would give the name syllepses (the fact of taking together)—temporal or
other—to those anachronic groupings governed by one or another kinship (spatial,
temporal, or other).

See Alejo Carpentier, “De lo Real Maravilloso Americano,” Cine Cubano, No. 102 (1982),
pp. 12-14.
Brazilian modernist Oswald de Andrade describes Carnival as follows: “Carnival in Rio is the
religious happening of the Brazil-wood race. Wagner is submerged by the Carnival revellers
of Botafogo. Barbarousness is ours. Rich ethnic formation. Vegetative wealth. Minerals.
Cuisine. Vatapa, gold, dance.” “Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil,” in Do Pau-Brasil a
Antropofagia e as Utopias (Rio de Janeiro: Civilizagao Brasileira, 1972), p. 5.
See Roberto da Matta, Ensaios de Antropologia Estrutural: O Carnaval Como Rito de
Passagem (Petropolis: Vozes, 1973) and Carnavais, Malandros, e Herdis (Rio de Janeiro:
Zahar, 1978).

See Jodo Luiz Vieira, “From High Noon to Jaws: Carnival and Parody in Brazilian
Cinema,” in Randal Johnson and Robert Stam, Brazilian Cinema (East Brunswick:
Associated University Presses, 1982).
 274 Notes for Chapter 5

19. See Emir Rodriquez Monegal, “Carnaval, Antropofagia, Pardédia,” in Parddia (Rio de
Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1981).

20. In “Des Cannibales,” Montaigne reports that the “Brazilian” Indians asked him three
questions, only two of which he could remember—why some Europeans were rich and others
poor, and why Europeans worshipped men called kings who were no taller than they were.
Lévi-Strauss, writing more than three centuries later, claims to have been asked the same
questions by Indians in Brazil.

Ml Oswald de Andrade’s diverse manifestoes are collected in Do Pau- Brasil a Antropofagia a as

Utopias (from Brazil- Wood to Anthropology and to the Utopias: Rio de Janeiro: Civilizagao
Brasileira, 1972) (translations mine).

PB. Haroldo de Campos, Morfologia de Macunaima (Sao Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1973).

PB. One of the anomalous features of Ubu Roi, Les Carabiniers, and Macunaima is their
common tendancy to posit highly unorthodox kinship patterns. In Ubu Roi we are never
quite sure whether Mere and Pere Ubu are husband and wife or mother and child. In Les
Carabiniers, we never know whether Michelangelo, Ulysses, Venus, and Cleopatra are
brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, or parents and children. Venus calls Cleopatra
“Mama” at one point, for example, even though they appear to be around the same age.

Chapter 5

Louis Althusser, For Marx (New York: Vintage, 1970), p. 231.

Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Edward Aveling and Samuel Moore (New York: International
Publishers, 1967 Vol. I, p. 82n.

It might be objected that Don Quixote’s golden age is laid in the past while that of Marx is
envisioned for the future. But while it is true that Don Quixote overtly condemns the new
middle class life in the name of feudal aristocratic values, at the same time he demands change
in the direction of what he sees as justice. Here the nostalgic mode serves as auxiliary to
utopia.

See Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World
(Cambridge, Mass: Belknap/ Harvard, 1979).

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Gerald
Mast and Marshall Cohen, Film Theory and Criticism (New York: Oxford, 1974).

Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in ///uminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p.
Oh.
Ibid., p. 108.

Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre (New York: Hill & Wang, 1964), p. 34.

Brecht expressed his bitterness toward the “owners” of culture in a poem, “Deliver your
merchandise!”

Without cease
When in my course I traverse their cities
I hear them say!
Show us what you have in your stomach!
Spread it out on the table!
Deliver your merchandise!
 Notes for Chapter 5 Pp)

Say something to excite us!

Speak to us of our grandeur!
Guess our secret desires!
Show us the way!
Make yourself useful!
Deliver your merchandise!

Show yourself one of ours

And we will name you the best among us.
We can pay, we have the means.
No one else can.
Deliver your merchandise!

Know that our great prophets

Are those who lead us where we want to go.
Become a master by serving us!
Last by helping us last.
Play our game, share the booty.
Deliver your merchandise! Be good to us.
Deliver your merchandise!

When I see their rotting faces,

I lose my appetite.

Translation mine from the French of Bernard Lortholary. The poem is included in Bertolt
Brecht, Poémes (Paris: L’Arche, 1967), VI, pp. 5859.

10. Godard’s film has a precedent in Vertov’s Kino Glaz, where Vertoy not only showed all the
stages in the production and consumption of food but also made a strikingly visual
demonstration of the idea that workers literally produce everything. He shows a peasant
woman going to market to buy meat. Then her motion is reversed, followed by a sequence
showing, also in reverse, the processing and distribution of meat. The intertitles read: “Kino-
eye turns the clock back. 22: What was in iceboxes at the market. 23: What was a bull twenty
minutes ago. 24: We give back the bull its innards. 25: We put his hide back on him. 26: The
bull revives. 27: In the slaughter room. 28: Into cattlecars. 29: Back again in the herd.” In
another sequence, Vertov applies the same productive logic to the process of production and
distribution of bread, again shown in reverse motion. Explaining his intention, Vertov wrote:
“By revealing the origin of objects and bread the camera graphically demonstrates to every
worker that he himself produces everything, and consequently, that they belong to him.”
Quoted by Masha Enzensberger, “Dziga Vertov,” Screen Vol. 13, No. 4 (Winter 1972/73), p.
103.
See Christian Metz, Language and Cinema (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), especially sec. X.5.

See Hans Magnus Enzensberger, The Consciousness Industry (New York: Seabury Press,
1974).
See Metz, Language and Cinema, sec. VIII.5.

See Laura Mulvey and Colin MacCabe, “Images of Woman, Images of Sexuality,” Godard.
Images, Sounds, Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980).
In having Marguerite combine economic with sexual independence, Tanner and Berger
perhaps allude to a suggestion advanced by Rousseau in his Emile, to wit that true
 276 Notes for Chapter 5

independence for women would be dangerous because it would inexorably lead to the
unrestrained expression of her supposedly insatiable sexual appetite. If the authors are
alluding to this idea, they would have done better to make the allusion clear and to distance
themselves from Rousseau’s conception.

Jonah at times recalls another “school film,” Vigo’s anarchist masterpiece Zéro for Conduct.
Marco’s classroom is graced with a wall poster of Chaplin, whose cake-walk the sympathetic
teacher Huguet mimics in the Vigo film. In a microcosmic world of oppressive hierarchy,
Chaplinesque comedy evokes freedom from arbitrary authority. Tanner even “quotes,” twice,
a Vigo camera movement. In the Vigo film, the camera tracks around the class as the midget-
principal declaims with demented fervor. Tanner deploys the same tracking movement
during two “Left” lectures: Marco’s on time, and Mathieu’s on inflation. The shots point up a
contrast—the students seem less bored and hostile than in Vigo—but also a parallel. The
situation satirized in the Vigo film has not radically changed as long as the structure remains
the same, with teachers pontificating to students arranged in rows.

17. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 160.

18. See “Entretien avec Christian Metz,” Ca 7/8 (May 1975), p. 23.

19. See Tzvetan Todorov, Grammaire du Décaméron (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), p. 92.

20. Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” in Image-Music-

Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 79.
 Selected Bibliography

This is a partial and selective bibliography which emphasizes full-length books

rather than articles. In hopes of being useful, I have updated the original
bibliography to include more recent books not referred to in the text nor
incorporated but which are nevertheless relevant to the subject.
Adorno, T.W. Negative Dialectics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.
Alea, Tomas Gutierrez. Dialectica del Espectador. Havana Cadernos de la Revista Union, 1982.
Alter, Robert, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1975.
Althusser, Louis. For Man. New York: Pantheon, 1969.
Altman, Rick, ed. Genre: The Musical. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.
,ed. Cinema/Sound. Yale French Studies, No. 60 (Spring 1980).
Anderson, Patrick Donald. Jn its Own Image: The Cinematic Vision of Hollywood. New York:
Arno Press, 1978.
Andrew, Dudley. Concepts in Film Theory. New York: Oxford, 1984.
Appel, Alfred Jr. Nabokov’s Dark Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard
Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953.
Augst, Bertrand. “The Apparatus: An Introduction.” Camera Obscura, No. | (1976): pp. 97-100.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Rabelais and His World. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1968.
. Problems of Dostoevski’s Poetics. Ann Arbor, Mich: Ardis, 1973.
. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
Banu, Georges. Bertolt Brecht ou le petit contre le grand. Paris: Aubiers Montaigne, 1982.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hilland Wang, 1980.
____.. Elements of Semiology/ Writing Degree Zero. Boston: Beacon, 1968.
. Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1980.
. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.
SiZ
Baudry, Jean-Louis. “The Apparatus.” Camera Obscura No. | (Fall 1976).
. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Film Quarterly XXVIII,
No. 2 (Winter 1974-75), pp. 39-47.
. L'Effet Cinema. Paris: Albatross, 1978.
Bazin, Andre. What is Cinema? 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California, 1967.
Becker, George, ed. Documents of Modern Literary Realism. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1963.
Bellour, Raymond. L’Analyse du Film. Paris: Albatross, 1979.
_ Le Cinéma Américain. Paris: Flammarion, 1980.
278 Selected Bibliography

. “Hitchcock, the Enunciator.” Camera Obscura No. 2.

. “Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion.” Camera Obscura No. 3/4 (Summer 1979).
.“The Unattainable Text.” Screen, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Autumn, 1975).
Benjamin Walter. ///uminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
Bernadet, Jean-Claude. O Que e Cinema? Sao Paulo: Brasiliense, 1980.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 1972.
Bergstrom, Janet. “Enunciation and Sexual Difference.” (Part I). Camera Obscura No. 2 (1977).
Bonitzer, Pascal. Le Champs Aveugle. Paris: Cahiers/Gallimard, 1972.
. Le Regard et la Voix. Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1976.
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
Bordwell, David, and Thompson Kristin, Film Art: An Introduction. Reading, Mass.: Addison
Wesley, 1979.
Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964.
Burch, Noel. Theory of Film Practice. New York: Praeger, 1973.
Burch, Noel, and Dana, Jorge. “Propositions.” Afterimage, No. 5 (Spring 1974).
Burger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1984.
Burgin, Victor, ed. Thinking Photography. London: Macmillan, 1982.
Caughie, John, ed. Theories of Authorship. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.
Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.
Chiampi, Irlemar. O Realismo Maravilhoso. Sao Paulo: Perspectiva, 1980.
Chion, Michel. La Voix au Cinéma. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1982.
Corrigan, Timothy. New German Film: The Displaced Image. Austin: University of Texas Press,
1983.
Coward, Rosalind, and Ellis, John. Language and Materialism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1977.
Culler, Jonathon. Structuralist Poetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.
. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1981.
. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. \thaca: Cornell University
Press, 1982.
de Lauretis, Teresa and Stephen Heath. The Cinematic Apparatus. New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1981.
Delleuze, Gilles. L’Image-Mouvement. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1983.
Delleuze, Gilles, and Guattare, Felix. Anti-Oedipus. New York: Viking, 1976.
Derrida, Jacques. L’Ecriture et la Différence. Paris: Seuil, 1967.
. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1974.
Dort, Bernard. Lecture de Brecht. Paris: Seuil, 1960.
. Theatre Public: Essais de Critique. Paris: Seuil, 1967.
Eagle, Herbert. Russian Formalist Film Theory. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Productions, 1981.
Eagleton, Terry. Marxism and Literary Criticism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976.
Ellis, John. Visible Fictions. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. The Consciousness Industry. New York: Seabury Books, 1974.
Feuer, Jane. The Hollywood Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.
Flitterman, Sandy. “Woman, Desire and the Look: Feminism and the Enunciative Apparatus in
the Cinema.” Cine- Tracts, Vol. Il, No. 1 (1978), pp. 63-83.
Foster, Hal, ed. The Anti- Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, Washington:
Bay Press, 1983.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York:
Pantheon, 1971.
 Selected Bibliography 279

—_—.. The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

. Discipline and Punishment: Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1979.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. New York: Athanaeum, 1968.
Garroni, Emilio. Provecto de Semiotica. Barcelona: Gustavo Gil, 1975.
Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.
. Palimpsestes: La Littérature au Second Degre. Paris: Seuil, 1982.
Girard, René. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965.
Godard, Jean-Luc. Introduction a une Véritable Histoire du Cinéma. Paris: Albatross, 1980.
. Godard on Godard. New York: Viking, 1972.
Gombrich, E.H. Art and Illusion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961.
Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art. Indianapolis and New York: Bobs-Merril, 1968.
Harvey, Sylvia. May 1968 and Film Culture. London: British Film Institute, 1978.
Heath, Stephen. Questions of Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.
, ed. Signs of the Times. Cambridge: Granta, 1971.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London and New York: Methuen: 1979.
Henderson, Brian. Critique of Film Theory. New York: Dutton, 1980.
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Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.
. Semiotike: Recherches pour une semanalyse. Paris: Seuil, 1969.
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Lebel, Jean-Patrick. Cinéma et Idéologie. Paris: Editions Sociales, 1972.
Lellis, George. Bertolt Brecht, Cahiers du Cinéma and Contemporary Film Theory. Ann Arbor:
UMI Research Press, 1982.
Lemon, Lee T. and Reis, Marion J., trans. and ed. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965.
Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980.
Levin, Harry. Contexts of Criticism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957.
. The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists. New York: Oxford University Press,
1963.
Lovell, Terry. Pictures of Reality: Aesthetics, Politics, and Pleasure. London: British Film
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MacCabe, Colin. “Realism and the Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses.” Screen, Vol.
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280 Selected Bibliography

. Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.

Manuel, Frank E., and Manuel, Fritzie P. Utopian Thought in the Western World. Cambridge:
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_____. Language and Cinema. The Hague: Mouton, 1974.
. The Imaginary Signifier. Indiana University Press, 1981.
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Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen. Vol. XVI. No. 3, (Fall 1975).
Nichols, Bill. Ideology and the Image. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.
Noguez, Dominique, ed. Cinéma, Théorie, Lectures. Paris: Klincksieck, 1973.
Oudart, Jean-Pierre. “Cinema and Suture,” Screen, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Winter 1977-78).
Penley, Constance. “The Avant-Garde and its Imaginary,” Camera Obscura No. 2, Fall 1977.
Place, Janey, and Burton, Julianne. “Feminist Film Criticism,” Movie, No. 22 (1976).
Poggioli, Renato. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. New York: Harper and Row, 1968.
Polan, Dana. “Brecht and the Politics of Self-Reflexive Cinema,” Jump Cut No. 17 (1978).
Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire. De /a Littérature au Cinéma. Paris: Armand Colin, 1970.
. Le Texte Divise. Paris: Ecriture, 1981.
Scharf, Aaron. Art and Photography. London: Penguin, 1968.
Scholes, Robert. Fabulation and Metafiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.
Shattuck, Roger. The Banquet Years. New York: Vintage, 1958.
Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Simon, William G. The Films of Jean Vigo. Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press, 1981.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977.
Walsh, Martin. Brechtian Aspects of Radical Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1981.
Williams, Christopher, ed. Realism and the Cinema. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
Williams, Linda. Figures of Desire. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.
Wollen, Peter. Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972.
Xavier, Ismail. Discurso Cinematografico. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1981.
.A Experiencia do Cinema. Rio de Janeiro: Graal, 1983.
 Index

Adaptations, 83 Borges, Jorge Luis

Adventure films, 83 active role of readers, 35; ludic reflexive
Allen, Woody artist, xii; self-conscious tradition, 127,
anhedonia, xiv; Midsummer Night’s Sex 138
Comedy, 25, 156; Play It Again, Sam, Brecht, Bertolt
136, 156; reflexivity, 129, 159; Stardust alienation and, 211-15; anti-illusionist,
Memories, 142, 155, 156-57, 159 29-31, 102; anti-tragic theatre, 6; audience
Altman, Robert expectations, 17, 40-41; bourgeois
The Wedding, 260 ideology, 211-12; didactic reflexive artist,
An American in Paris, 90 xii, 253; didactic theory, 247-49; direct
Anderson, Patrick Donald, 77 audience address, 90; Goodwoman of Set-
Anti-illusionism strategies zuan, 31; modern literary tradition, xi,
absurdities, 167: and violence, 173, 212; political techniques, 213-15;
181-84, 245; cannabalism, 171, 182, 185, Shakespeare as precursor of, 4-5, 211;
196-97, 199, 203-4; carnivalism, 167-208: Song of the Playwright, 212; theatrical
history traced, 167-69; and violence, reflection, 2, 4; voyeurist, 40-41, 55,
173-84, 245 63-64
Avant-garde Brooks, Mel
in Godard, 179, 181, 182-84; and Blazing Saddles, 21, 26; reflexivity, 129;
modernism, 7-13, 16, 17, 24 Silent Movie, 25
Bunuel, Luis
Bakhtin, Mikhail L’Age d’Or (1930), 169, 174-77; as ag-
carnivalesque strategies, 167-69; dialogues gressive reflexive artist, xli, 7; avant-
and discourses, 20; parody, 134; pleasure gardist, 184-85; Belle de Jour, 130;
to subversion, xiv cameo appearances, 130; Le Chien An-
Balzac, Honoré de dalou, 130; The Exterminating Angel
Lost Illusions, 73-77, 216; modern literary (1962), 184, 185; Los Olvidados, 185;
tradition, xi, 73-74; prostitution metaphor, That Obscure Object of Desire, 64-66,
75-76; reflexive author, 74; self-conscious 130
genre author, 127 Byron, Lord, 73
Behlmer, Rudy, 77
Bergman, Ingmar Carnivalism
The Silence, 61; Smiles of a Summer definition of, 167; Godard and, 177-82,
Night, 25 186-93; Latin American culture and,
Berkeley, Busby, 90 193-208, 265; politics of, 204-8; Ubu Roi,
Bertolucci, Bernardo 169-74
Last Tango in Paris, 23; Luna, 23; 1900, Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de
24 art of interruption, 5, 129, 143, 147; car-
Bogdanovich, Peter, 105 nivalism, 169; comic epic, 6-7; modern
Targets, 23, 78, 105-6 literary tradition, xi, 2, 211; parody, 135;
282 Index

precedents in parody critique, 1; self- duction, 71; discourse and time, 142;
conscious tradition, 127 economics of production, 71, 75, 88; -fact
Chaplin, Charlie amalgam, 89-90; parody, 134-40; self-
Behind the Screen (1916), 78; epic comic, consciousness in, 127-66; strategies,
7, 77-78; His New Job (1915), 78; Kid 138-40; voyeurism, 39
Auto Races at Venice (1913), 77-78 Fielding, Henry
Chaucer, Geoffrey anti-illusionism, 129; comic epic, 6, 24,
anti-illusionist, 1-2; Canterbury Tales, 1-2 25; Joseph Andrews, 132, 138, 139, 142,
Cinematic production 147; self-conscious tradition, 127, 132;
artistic prostitution, 99; auteurism, Tom Jones, 127, 140, ey 159
97-102; confusing art and life, 78; Filmic/dream analogy
economics of, 71; process of, 79; third Rear Window, 46; Sherlock Jr., 37-39
world, 112-15 Flaubert, Gustave, 127, 145, 146
Conner, Bruce Fowles, John, 127, 136, 160
A Movie (1958), 25, 264
Copernicus, Nicolaus, 2
Coppola, Francis Ford Galileo, 2
Apocalypse Now, 25, 130; cameo ap- The Gang’s All Here, 90
pearances, 130; The Conversation (1974), Gide, André, 74, 102, 127
53, 260 Godard, Jean-Luc
Corneille, Pierre, 24, 179 anti-illusionistic, 129; avant-garde theatre,
182, 233; Band of Outsiders, 136, 150;
Day of the Locust, 83 Breathless, 56, 130, 132, 135, 159, 179;
de Andrade, Joaquim Pedro Brechtian techniques, 212-31; British
Macunaima (1969), 195, 197-200, 202-8; Sounds, 56; cameo appearances, 130; Les
Tropical Fruit (1980), 66-69 Carabiniers (1963), 29, 31, 32, 56, 58,
de Beauvoir, Simone 179, 186-93, 259, 260; carnivalism in
The Second Sex, 63 theatre, 177-81; cinematic technique,
Defoe, Daniel, 127, 138 259-60; Contempt, 21-22, 23, 24, 58-60,
DeMille, Cecil B. 75, 98-102, 130-35, 159, 231, 256; didac-
and actors playing themselves, 89 tic reflexive artist, xii, xiii, 7, 9, 16; Une
Descartes, Rene, 3 Femme est une Femme, 21, 262; Un Film
Diderot, Denis, 6, 24, 127, 129, 146, 169 Comme les Autres, 25; fragmentation in,
Don Quixote 180, 234; Le Gai Savoir, 222, 250, 260;
allegories, 29-31; anti-illusion, 29-31, 73, A Married Woman, 23, 56, 58, 60-61, 64,
138; art of interruption, 5; comic epic, 180, 227, 265; Masculin, Feminin, 17,
6-7; Marxist critique of, 209-11; paradox, 58, 61, 132, 184, 227, 265; Mon Oncle
138; reflexivity, xi, 1, 253; self-conscious d’Amerique, 23; Numéro Deux, 5, 24,
novel, 131; stories within stories, 1; 62-63, 130, 132, 222-30, 231, 262; One
voyeurism, 39 Plus One, 259, 263; Passion, 124, 126,
Dostoyevsky, Feodor, 9, 20, 169 131; physical violence in, 181-84, 190-91;
Pierrot le Fou, 17, 56, 132, 148, 155,
Eberwein, Robert, 77 179, 180, 181, 231, 259, 262; Sauve Qui
El Greco, 3 Peut/(la Vie), 63-64, 143, 155, 231-37;
Epic sexual imagery exploited, 56-58; sexual
comic, 6, 24, 25; seen in Les Carabiniers, relations in films of, 234-35; sexual
186; theatre, 6, 41 violence, 235-37; Tout Va Bien, 56, 58,
181, 213, 215-33, 249; voyeur, 56, 58;
Fassbinder, Werner Weekend, 56, 130, 132, 135, 159, 179;
Beware of a Holy Whore, 106, 108-9; Wind from the East, 132; 2 or 3 Things
Veronika Voss, 106, 118, 119-23 That I Know About Her (1967), 15, 17,
Fellini, F., 97 148, 150
8 1/2 (1963), 102-5, 155 Goethe, Johann, 6, 7
fiction Goldwyn Follies, 83
artistic process, 132; and cinematic pro- Griffith, D.W., 134
 Index 283

Hegel, Georg, 24 Marker, Chris

Hitchcock, Alfred La Jetée, 257-58; Letter from Siberia, 261
cameo appearances, 130; J Confess, 54; Marx Brothers
Rear Window, 43-55, 257; The Wrong Horse Feathers, 82; spectatorial com-
Man, 54 petence, 21
Holden, William, 89, 118 Marxism
Hope-Crosby ‘‘Road’’ pictures, 82 and Cervantic critique, 209-11; ideology,
Huxley, Aldous, 74 238, 243-45; seen in Brechtian technique,
212-13, 220; strategies, 250-54
Illusionism in art Mast, Gerald, 77
definition, 7; tension with reflexivity, 1, 7 McLuhan, Marshall
Intertextuality in films, 20, 21, 23, 36, 69, iconic signifiers, 34
91, 118, 179, 231 Melodramas, 83
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 26 Metz, Christian
It Happened in Hollywood, 83 criticism by, 158, 224, 229; illusionism,
12; imaginary signifier, 36, 39, 126;
James, Henry, 127 photographic images, 11; sausage-link
Jarry, Alfred structuralism, xiv; spectators, 46; writing,
aggressive reflexive artist, xii; modern text and cinema, 20, 148
literary tradition, xi, 8; Ubu Roi, 96, Minnelli, Vincent
169-74, 181, 186-91 The Bad and the Beautiful, 23; The
Joyce, James, 10, 22, 23, 25, 145, 154 Cobweb, 97; Lust for Life, 97; Some
Came Running, 97; Tea and Sympathy,
97; Two Weeks in Another Town, 23,
Kasdan, Lawrence
97-98
Body Heat, 26 Miranda, Carmen, 90, 265
Kawin, Bruce, 77 Montaigne, Michel, 3, 196
Kazan, E.
Movin’ Pitchers, 83
A Face in the Crowd (1957), 94 Murder mystery films, 83
Keaton, Buster Musicals, 83, 90-94
The Cameraman (1928), 78-79; epic com-
ic, 7, 10, 84; Go West, 134; ludic reflex-
ive artist, xii, 134; The Navigator (1924), Nabokov, Vladimir, 127, 130, 143
147; The Paleface (1922), 148; Sherlock Lolita, 130, 160-64
Jr 3.) 31-39. 18 Narrative
Kelly, Gene dialogue, 149-50; how to validate, 2;
It’s Always Fair Weather, 91, 93; Singin’ strategies of reflexivity, 138-40
in the Rain, 91-93
Kepler, Johannes, 2 Ophuls, Max
King Kong, 83 La Ronde, 149
Kubrick, Stanley
A Clockwork Orange, 164; Dr. Palance, Jack, 99
Strangelove, 164; Lolita, 160-62; Spar- Photography, 10-11
tacus, 162 Porter, E.S.
Kyd, Thomas, 3 Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show,
32, 78
Lamartine, Alphonse, 73 Postman Always Rings Twice, 26
Little Big Man, 26 Preview Murder Mystery, 83
Lumiere, Louis Jean Psycho II, 26
L’Arrivee d’un Train en Gare (1895), 31; Proust, Marcel, 10
Le Bain de la Femme du Monde, 31; Le
Gouter de Bebe (1895), 31, 32 Rabelais, Fran¢ois
anti-illusionism in, 1; carnivalism, 179,
Malle, Louis 181; dialogue/discourse, 20; modern
My Dinner with Andre, 143, 146 literary tradition, xi, 211; reflexivity, 6
284 Index

Reflexivity Schiller, Johann, 6

active spectator, 4; aggressive, xii, 9; Scorcese, Martin
anti-illusionist, xii, 9, 35, 129, 253; con- cameo appearances, 130; New York, New
ceptual tools, 3; didactic, xii, 9; historical York, 24, 26
background, 3-11; ludic, xii, 9; modern- Scott, Walter, 73
ism and the avant-garde, 7-13, 16, 17, 24; Sen, Mrinal
narrative discontinuities, xi, 7; politics of, In Search of Famine, 113-15
12, 108-9; reactionary, xii; realist, xii, Sennett, Mack
14, 15; Renaissance, 2, 3, 11; self- How Motion Pictures are Made, 78; Kid
conscious novel in Cervantes-Fielding- Auto Races at Venice, 77-78; Mabel’s
Sterne tradition, 2-7, 9, 39; strategies, xii, Dramatic Career, 78; parody in, 134
7, 250-66 Shakespeare, William
Reflexivity in art Brechtian precursor, 4-5, 211; carnival-
definition, 1; in Renaissance, 2; tension esque, 169, 172, 179; Globe Theatre, 3,
with illusionism, | 5; imaginary forces, 4; realistic imitation
Reflexivity in film and self-conscious artifice, 3-5, 138
adaptations, 159-64; in animation, 94-97; Snow, Michael
comedy, 129; compared to nineteenth cen- So Is This, 255; Wavelength, 24, 255-56
tury mimetic novel, 10, 25; conservative, Spectator
90-91; criticism of, 159; 8 7/2, 102-5; active role of, 33-34, 84, 247; and
Every Man for Himself, 231-38; Ger- cinematic experience, 31-32, 35, 41-43,
manic, 106-9, 118, 122; in musicals, 46-56, 58-60, 61, 64-66; object of seduc-
91-94; realism, 11, 78, 82, 90; Rear Win- tion, 35; realism and the desiring, 36-37;
dow, 43-55, 59; in Silent era, 77-80; reality vs. representation, 29; voyeurism,
social function, 10; sound, 82-90; spec- 41-43, 46-56, 58-60, 61, 64-66
tator, 11, 22, 40-41, 230; Sullivan’s Star biographies, 83
Travels, 83-85; survey of, 77-126; tech- A Star is Born, 83
nique, 256-66; television, 16, 86-88, 94, Sterne, Laurence
224-27 Tristram Shandy, 99, 127, 140-42, 152,
Reflexivity in novels 220
cameo appearances, 130-31; compared to Stuntman films
film, 10, 71, 216; modernism in, 8; nar- exploitation, 82-83; Lucky Devils, 82;
ration, 8, 41, 255; strategies, xii, 73, Stunt Man, 82
138-40, 149-50; tradition, 74, 129 Sturges, Preston
Reflexivity in plays, xi Sullivan’s Travels, 83-85
Reisz, Karel Swanson, Gloria
The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 160 fact-fiction amalgam, 89-90; Sunset
Renaissance art, 3 Boulevard, 89-90; The Trespasser, 89
Resnais, Alain
Last Year at Marienbad, 55; Night and
Tanner, Alain
Fog, 23
as didactic reflexive artist, xii, xiii,
Richardson, Tony
Pamela, 25; Tom Jones, 159
245-50; In the White City, 123; Jonah
Rocha, Glauber
Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, 238-53;
Middle of the World, 250
Land in Anguish, 257, 261, 265
Transtextuality, 22-27
Romances, 83
Truffaut, Francois
Rossellini, Roberto
Voyage in Italy, 23 Day for Night, 109-12; Fahrenheit 451,
Ruiz, Raul 110; 400 Blows, 17, 19, 110; Les
Brechtian technique, 212; Le Territoire, Mistons, 17; writing, 18-19
206; The Top of the Whale, 212-13
Velazquez, Diego, 3, 179
Sartre, Jean-Paul Vertov, Dziga
modernist themes, 9; narrative, 8, 73; La The Man with a Movie Camera, 15,
Nausée, 8, 9 80-82, 98, 234
 Index 285

Vidor, King Wajda, Andrzej

The Big Parade, 79; Hallelujah, 84; Show Architects of Our Happiness, 116; Man of
People, 79 Tron, 116; Man of Marble, 115-18, 213
Voltaire, Marc-Antoine, 146 Warhol, Andy, 145
Von Stroheim, Erich Webb, Jack, 89
character acting, 89; Greed, 24 Wenders, Wim
Voyeurism The State of Things, 124-26
fear of sexuality, 49; pleasure of, 238; Westerns, 83
political dimension of, 53, 54, 62-63; in Wilder, Billy
Rear Window, 46-55; sexual politics of, Double Indemnity, 89; Fedora, 118-19;
54, 58 Sunset Boulevard, 85-90, 93, 118
Wizard of Oz, 90
Woolf, Virginia, 10, 127
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