CINEMA, THOUGHT, LIFE. Conversations with Fata Morgana

Paolo Jedlowski, Roberto De Gaetano, Jacques Rancière, Roberto Esposito, Slavoj Žižek, Paul Schrader, Werner Herzog, Angela Ricci Lucchi, Yervant Gianikian, Julio Bressane, Marie, Jean, Francesco Casetti, Mario Martone, Francesco Ceraolo, Luc Nancy, Louis Comolli, Georges Didi, Huberman, Rao

• Publisher: Luigi Pellegrini Editore
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9788868224424
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Photography

24 conversazioni apparse su Fata Morgana con grandi figure della contemporaneità, studiosi e artisti che parlano del cinema facendone un luogo del pensiero e una forma di vita. Un viaggio in cui il cinema e l'immagine, più di ogni altra forma d'arte, si riscoprono indissolubilmente legati alla complessità del nostro presente. Per la prima volta riunite e tradotte in inglese in un'unica pubblicazione, queste conversazioni offrono al lettore una costellazione unica di autori e temi per pensare il cinema a partire dal nostro presente e viceversa. 24 conversations originally published by Fata Morgana with important scholars and artists who have intended cinema as a place of thought and a form of life. A unique constellation of authors and themes in which cinema and the image, more than any other art form, are inextricably intertwined with the complexity of the contemporary. Edited and translated into English for the first time, these conversations offer to the reader a unique constellation of authors and themes, which leads one to reconsider cinema starting from our present and vice versa. Roberto De Gaetano is full professor of Filmology at the University of Calabria (Italy). He is the author of important books on the relationship between cinema and philosophy (Il cinema secondo Gilles Deleuze, Bulzoni, 1996; Il visibile cinematografico, Bulzoni, 2002; La potenza delle immagini, Ets, 2012), cinema and the contemporary (L'immagine contemporanea. Cinema e mondo presente, Marsilio, 2010), and authors and forms of Italian cinema (Il corpo e la maschera. Il grottesco nel cinema italiano, Bulzoni, 1999; Nanni Moretti. Lo smarrimento del presente, Pellegrini, 2015). He is the Editor of the three-volume edition Lessico del cinema italiano. Forme di rappresentazione e forme di vita (Mimesis, 2014-2016), and the Editor in Chief of Fata Morgana. Francesco Ceraolo (PhD, Qmul) teaches Film Analysis and Theater and Opera at the University of Calabria (Italy). His work mainly focuses on the relationship between philosophy, performing and visual arts. Among his recent publications are Verso un'estetica della totalità. Una lettura critico-filosofica del pensiero di Richard Wagner (Mimesis, 2013) and the chapter entitled 'Opera' in Lessico del cinema italiano. Forme di rappresentazione e forme di vita (Mimesis, 2015). He has edited and translated into Italian Alain Badiou's writings on the theater (Rapsodia per il teatro. Arte, politica, evento, Pellegrini, 2015). In 2015 he was awarded the 'Arthur Rubinstein – A Life In Music' Prize by Teatro La Fenice for his musicological scholarship. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Fata Morgana.

Jean-Luc Nancy

Could It Be that Cinema Itself Is Contemporaneity?[1]

edited by

Bruno Roberti

You say that jouissance, enjoyment, is a quality of the world which frees it from holding out for another world. Enjoyment produces an excess which allows for something to be left behind so that there may be a residue. You also say that every work of art is a creation of the world. In your opinion, does cinema contain this excess of the world? Does the way cinema dissolves the world in order to recreate it in images leave a residue which is, indeed, enjoyment and which exceeds the economy of power inherent to the visions of the world?

Cinema’s specificity lies in the showing, simulating and reproducing the world with its own forms, its colors, its movements. If we look at the history of cinema there are two strong tendencies. One is the tendency to reproduce reality exactly the way it is (L’arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat by the Lumière brothers) and the other is the creation of a completely unrealistic world (Méliès’ Voyage dans la lune). These are the two tensions of cinema. There are entire periods of history of cinema characterized by one tension or the other. Hollywood, today more than ever, is the cinema of other worlds, of fantasy worlds, but it is also a cinema of the real world which is not represented through the eyes of realism, but rather through new ways of writing and re-writing the world. In a way, to answer your question, cinema has undoubtedly launched the notion of pleasure, enjoyment, jouissance. The two tensions I was talking about are also two different forms of pleasures; the pleasure of recognition (the excitement of the train that looks like it is coming in the theatre) and the pleasure of the illusion, of the imaginary (which is the origin of cinema as carnival entertainment, as a freak show). However, both tensions postulate real phantoms.

I am reminded of the phantasmagoria, the panorama, the forms of pre-cinema which lay between the pretension to reproduce reality, the invention of photography and the illusionism of imagination. Do you remember what Benjamin wrote about it? There were modern epiphanies, and together they encapsulated the illusionary forms of the representation of the Baroque world. Think of the fetish, the falsehood and the goods, the phantom of the goods, and the ‘specter’ which roamed Europe. In The Creation of the World, with regard to fetish and Marx, you quote Derrida’s Specters of Marx: ‘One would have to say that the phantasmagoria began before the said exchange-value, at the threshhold of the value of value in general’. Thus, if the phantasmagoria of the goods is a value of worth, meaning something that existed before the value of exchange, just as the phantasmagoria-form of entertainment is something that existed before cinema, then it is possible to think of cinema as a place where the goods are pre-existing. A place where the exchange is not an economy of equivalence and where, therefore, something remains and resists, and that is the residual enjoyment.

Yes, but what is this pleasure, this enjoyment (jouissance)? Is it right to wonder what was there before cinema? It is not only the phantasmagoria; we have to go back in time, between the 17th and 18th century, where we find the wonderful theatre, the illusionist scenes of the transforming Baroque ballet. We always find an element of wonder, of phantasmagoria, even if we go further back in time, for example Greek tragedy. I am convinced that the Greek tragedy – which we represent intellectually and aesthetically as something bare, simple, essential, with Neoclassical costumes, with Greek ruins in the background and so on – was a place of illusions, of apparitions, of machines. I am certain that there was pleasure; the pleasure of the surprise when Athena appeared and said: ‘I am here to administer justice!’. This pleasure could not be anything but sacred enjoyment, the rite and the religious ceremony which existed before theatre. In what we call enjoyment (jouissance), fundamentally there is an idea of excess, of going beyond (dépassement), of adding something for nothing; something that when it is added does not complete and does not fulfill anything. It is an addition that does not enrich, that adds nothing; the enjoyment is that extra which not added; it does not add up to anything.

Without a reason…

Yes. The characteristic of this addition without reason is that we want it; we want it infinitely.

It is the good infinite.

It is the good infinite, but evidently the good and the bad infinite are glued together. This means that it is always possible to desist, to stop or to overcome; when the film is finished we need to leave. But the good infinite gives a sense that there is something: an element, a dimension that recalls itself. In French I say redemander, even though this word does not exist in the language. I took it from Valéry when, talking about poetry, he said ‘le sens redemande le son’ (the sense recalls the sound). In other words, the text, the sense of the text needs to recall, to re-play the sound. The idea of recalling is the pleasure. Hearing the sound, the sounds of the language, of the words, is the poetic pleasure that releases the sense. When we are in the realm of desire, redemander is a fundamental dimension but for nothing; a request, a recalling of nothing for nothing. This is always present in every art form. Even when the art form proposes a very harsh, strict, painful, tragic thought, it never expects the sadness of the spectator, the unhappiness or the pain of the public or of the onlookers. When sadness and displeasure are evoked, there is always a turning point, a trick to divert them. In the context of Contemporary art there are artists who inflict sacrificial gestures upon themselves; they mutilate themselves and so on, but no artist has ever asked the audience or the spectators to sacrifice themselves. In French, the term jouissance also has legal meaning: the enjoyment of property (the jouissance de la propriété). Enjoyment as possession or ownership; it is not sexual possession, but, indirectly, we can talk about aesthetic possession. If I go to the cinema I am enchanted by the film that is also a form of possession. I am possessed by the film and I enjoy it.

Even in the possession of pr...

Table of contents

• Preface. The Outside of Cinema
• Roberto Esposito
• Jean-Luc Nancy
• Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi
• Louis Comolli
• Paolo Jedlowski
• Julio Bressane
• Werner Herzog
• Slavoj Žižek
• Georges Didi-Huberman
• Jacques Rancière
• Paul Schrader
• Raoul Ruiz
• David Freedberg
• Marco Bellocchio
• Julia Kristeva
• Edgar Reitz
• Mario Martone
• Marie-José Mondzain
• Walter Siti
• Toni Servillo
• Richard Schechner
• Shinya Tsukamoto
• Amos Gitai
• Francesco Casetti