Foucault at the Movies

Patrice Maniglier, Dork Zabunyan, Clare O'Farrell

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780231547833
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Michel Foucault's work on film, although not extensive, compellingly illustrates the power of bringing his unique vision to bear on the subject and offers valuable insights into other aspects of his thought. Foucault at the Movies brings together all of Foucault's commentary on film, some of it available for the first time in English, along with important contemporary analysis and further extensions of this work.

Patrice Maniglier and Dork Zabunyan situate Foucault's writings on film in the context of the rest of his work as well as within a broad historical and philosophical framework. They detail how Foucault's work directly or indirectly inspired both film critics and directors in surprising ways and discuss his ideas in relation to significant movements within film theory and practice. The book includes film reviews and discussions by Foucault as well as his interviews with the prestigious film magazine Cahiers du cinéma and other journals. Also included are his dialogues with the noted French feminist writer Hélène Cixous and film directors Werner Schroeter and René Féret. Throughout, Foucault and those he is in conversation with reflect on the relationship of film to history, the body, power and politics, knowledge, sexuality, aesthetics, and institutions of internment. Foucault at the Movies makes all of Foucault's writings on film available to an English-speaking audience in one volume and offers detailed, up-to-date commentary, inviting us to go to the movies with Foucault.

PART I

FOUCAULT AND FILM

A Historical and Philosophical Encounter

1

WHAT FILM IS ABLE TO DO

Foucault and Cinematic Knowledge

DORK ZABUNYAN

In the entry on Foucault from the “Dictionary” at the end of the June 1981 issue of Cahiers du cinéma, Serge Daney declared that Michel Foucault was, for the Cahiers, “a constant, irreplaceable, and essential reference.”1 What are we to make of this reverence of film enthusiasts for a philosopher who once declared he knew nothing about “the aesthetics” of film?2 This somewhat mischievous confession actually disguises a real connection with moving images, a connection that commentators have neglected. In spite of this, it’s possible to advance at least three reasons explaining the critics’ enthusiasm for the author of The Order of Things, both during his lifetime and beyond.3 First, we need to consider the way Foucault’s work directly or indirectly inspired several critics and directors in the wake of Cahiers du cinéma. Jacques Rivette, who was editor-in-chief of the Cahiers from 1963 to 1965, read Raymond Roussel with enthusiasm when it was published in 1963.4 In the late 1960s other writers at the journal hastened to Vincennes to attend Foucault’s course. Still others, like Jean Narboni, came up with new angles on the notion of the auteur using the philosopher’s texts on “writing without a subject” in the work of Beckett, Kafka, and Mallarmé.5 This was an important contribution that allows a retrospective understanding of the formal and critical scope of the politique des auteurs initiated by Cahiers du cinéma. This was also taken up by the journal at the same time in parallel with what was happening in the Nouveau Roman in literature. It’s not the actual figure of the author who is “dead,” the author who signs the work, organizes its elements, and gives it a style; rather, it’s the “author-function” that conflates the practice of art with the first-person subject. This conflation excludes creative functions where the conquest of the impersonal is inseparable from an intensification of experience.

A second event, because it was indeed an event, offers the first hint of a union between Foucault and the film world. The world of film criticism: Cahiers du cinéma—them again—sought Foucault out in person asking him to contribute to discussions on the art of moving images. This occurred in the form of an interview appearing in the summer issue for 1974.6 This interview took place at a particular moment in the history of the journal, which at the time was trying to distance itself from the “Maoist years” it had just gone through. This position was both too dogmatic as well as too comfortable for the interviewers, Pascal Bonitzer, Serge Toubiana, and Serge Daney.7 This was because the Cahiers at the time was making pronouncements on current events without the necessary modesty that might have allowed for a more complex grasp of the situation. Calling on Foucault in a political context dominated by the dispiriting election of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to the presidency could equally well be understood as the wish to establish some distance from a rigid critical position in relation to current affairs. It could also correspondingly be understood as a desire to occupy a position that renewed a grasp on reality, without reinstating a position that failed to come to terms both with the struggles of a turbulent period and with the unpredictable representation of those struggles in film. For Toubiana, “Foucault’s essential contribution in this interview in Cahiers du cinéma is the critique of a restrictive and mechanistic Marxist vision of power tied strictly to economics.”8 In addition, Bonitzer, Toubiana, and Daney were strongly opposed to the “fashion for retro” that was fossilizing a still vibrant past on screens—that of the Second World War with all its compromises and its collaborations. So they wanted to meet with Foucault to record his views on two films that had been released almost simultaneously, namely, Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien (1974) and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1973). Both were symbols of the “fashion for retro,” which prevented the darkest pages of history from throwing light onto the present. It was a fashion that at the same time silenced the voices of those who, even in defeat, had known how to escape the snares of an omniscient power, even if only for a moment.

PIERRE RIVIÈRE’S MEMOIR: A “CROSS-CHECK” FOR CINEPHILES

A double imperative led the Cahiers to make contact with Foucault. One was the rejection of an overarching position on the present and its myriad struggles, and the other was the rejection of a “fashion” that obliterated historical vagaries, discontinuities, and departures from the norm. This double imperative found its partial origin in a work presented by the philosopher in 1973, when he was examining the links between psychiatry and penal justice at the College of France. This was I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister and My Brother …, a memoir “written by the accused himself, a peasant of some twenty years of age who claimed that he could ‘only barely read and write,’ and who had undertaken during his detention on remand to give ‘particulars and an explanation’ of his crime.”9 What struck the editors of the Cahiers about this book was the analytical power of a writing that, although not rooted in any preestablished knowledge, was still the repository of relations of power (legal, police, medical, and so on) and in spite of itself managed to confound established knowledge. It was a voice that subscribed to no doctrine, creating a vacuum around itself through this nonadherence. At the same time, the memoir proclaimed the beginnings of a voice beyond the crime to which it bore witness, a voice that could not be reclaimed, a voice, as Foucault writes, that frustrates “the whole range of tactics by which we can try to reconstitute it, situate it, and give it its status as the discourse of either a madman or a criminal.”10

In the Cahiers issue that followed the 1974 interview, Serge Daney restated the conditions that allowed for the existence of a truly “anti-retro” cinema and signaled the importance of the editorial project on Rivière precisely in terms of its potential effects on “leftist” film production. Louis Malle’s film is used as a starting point for discussion: “Is there something that exists, in film (in this specific arrangement of images and sounds), that could be opposed to Lacombe, Lucien today? No. But in another quite heterogeneous field (history? literature?), Foucault’s work on Pierre Rivière provides the possibility of performing a cross-check against the Mallean theme of the ‘primitive, pawn of a blind history.’ ”11 It’s a “cross-check” that goes hand in hand with the creation of popular memory (we’ll come back to this later), and which also raises another problem of how to establish a form of fiction which doesn’t eliminate the past, regardless of what social category is invoked in all its presumed alienation. Daney pursues his investigation in these terms, with continuing reference to Rivière: “How can we consider Lacombe as anything other than a barbarian (lacking in humanity) or retarded (lacking in knowledge and education)? When Foucault speaks of Rivière, what he emphasizes is that Rivière writes that if he is deficient in knowledge, he is not deficient in discourse or memory. Alienated doesn’t mean ahistorical.”12

It’s in this sense that the reading of Pierre Rivière contributes indirectly to an escape from a profoundly amnesiac tradition characterized in film by the “fashion for retro.” The editors of the Cahiers say as much when they claim, in conversation with Foucault, that if “Pierre Rivière is a man who writes, who executes a murder and who has a quite extraordinary memory, Malle, on the other hand, treats his hero as a half-wit, as someone who goes through everything—history, war, collaboration—without gaining anything from his experience.”13 This is a fruitful comparison, despite the obvious dissimilarity in trajectories, and one that throws light on the apparent paradox of the Rivière case. Here, memory unfolds in all its meanders and layers, while running the risk of surrounding itself with silence, but this silence is less the effect of the calm deployment of memory than the result of an unimaginable act: a person “speaks even if he has no voice,” as the Cahiers notes again soberly.14 We can see here the inklings of a discourse that has no point of reference, one that is light years away from the oppressive period during which the magazine uttered a few rigid and intimidating judgments. I, Pierre Rivière in fact acted as a “cross-check” on two fronts: against a practice of film criticism that had become too rigid and orthodox, and also against a way of filming that “memorized nothing” (Daney) and shied away from the transformations of history (from past to present and vice versa).15

“Film, History, and Popular Memory” starts with a topical issue relating to the “political situation” that was one of the ingredients contributing to the fashion for retro. The election of Giscard, which was linked to the obsolescence, indeed the death, of Gaullism, was not without its effects on understandings of the Resistance in France. Foucault relates this theme to contemporary struggles, associating it with the elaboration of the memory of popular struggles. A notion that is integral to this context, “the eroticization of power,”16 also runs through the philosopher’s other interviews on film. Foucault describes this problem as “serious,” and it runs through these interviews, either implicitly, as in “The Nondisciplinary Camera Versus Sade,”17 where Foucault criticizes Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò (1975), or just beneath the surface, as in “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,”18 where he engages in a discussion with Bernard Sobel on Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s film Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977). This problem “that won’t go away” is “how do we love power?” How do we understand this “desire for power” that makes us love what alienates us but gives us pleasure at the same time?19 As Serge Daney suggested in the early 1980s, this is where we can see the third factor that accounts for the “constant” and “essential” presence of Michel Foucault in certain areas of film criticism and theory. It’s not a simple matter here of tracking Foucault’s influence on film by locating it within the general intellectual ferment of the 1960s and 1970s. Neither is it a matter of locating the origins of that inspiration in the “Film, History, and Popular Memory” interview in the Cahiers. Instead, it’s a matter of reflecting on the intersections between film and the philosopher’s work, taking into account ideas from the other works that make up his writings and ideas that appear in his interviews and remarks on film. Ultimately, one of the aims of the current analysis is to determine where film fits into the system of knowledge described by Foucault, and how film undertakes a “reappraisal” of this system from the standpoint of the “great divide between knowledge and art,” which is “in the process of breaking down.”20

A FILM-EFFECT

What connections and short circuits exist between film and Foucault’s books? Was Foucault’s work able to find a way of extending thought through film, leading to a genuine film-effect? Could the experience of film have produced a shift in his philosophical work, possibly heralding a fragment of the work that was to come? The theme of the eroticization of power has just been mentioned, and its appearance in the 1974 interview can certainly be situated within the perspective of the work done for The History of Sexuality, the first volume of which appeared in 1976. This “history of sexuality” in addition claimed to be “a series of studies concerning the historical relationships of power and the discourse on sex.”21 These studies would lead Foucault to simultaneously write an article in 1977 on Love Meetings (1964), “the enquiry into sexuality” directed by Pasolini in the early 1960s, where “the ecosystem of sex” is assessed in relation to the economic development of Italy as well as the transformation of family practices and the legal changes that followed from this.22 The other volumes of The History of Sexuality are also anticipated by a “conversation” that precedes their publication. In an apparently informal exchange with Werner Schroeter in December 1981,23 Foucault returns to The Death of Maria Malibran (1972), which he had already reviewed in 1975 for Cinématographe,24 and cites Willow Springs (1973) by the same director. We also see in this discussion the formulation of a way of thinking that resonates with the work on the Greeks that Foucault was undertaking for The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self (both published in 1984).25 Having distinguished “love” from “passion”—love being a mutually agreed on experience of appropriation and ownership, whereas passion entails “mobile” affects and “unnamed” relationships—Foucault admits to an increasing interest in the manifestations of an “art of living,” right down to the most everyday experience: “I make no distinction between those who make their lives a work of art and those who create artistic work during their lives. A life can be a perfect and sublime work: this was something the Greeks knew, but which we have completely forgotten, especially since the Renaissance.”26

The reflexive lines between film and Foucault’s writings can of course be found elsewhere in his work before the publication of the volumes on The History of Sexuality. We have drawn attention to the way in which the publication of Pierre Rivière’s memoir led to the Cahiers du cinema’s desire to meet the philosopher. It was probably another book that led the magazine to organize an interview with René Féret in January 1976.27 Féret was the director of The Story of Paul (1975), a film about the asylum and the relations of power between patients and doctors. Féret’s filming was virtually contemporary with Discipline and Punish,28 and it’s not by chance that the interview deals with the “specific effect” produced by “the space of the asylum, its walls, its system of coexistence and hierarchy” and by the experience of filming itself. Neither is it by chance that Foucault emphasizes again “a whole series of mechanisms and effects that are specific to the institution of the asylum” that exist in such a way that we are saying “it was not like the asylum” but rather “it was the asylum.”29 Foucault also draws attention to the way film shows how medical power contributes to the disciplinary society, “taking over” from writing while at the same time producing a different effect, “not at the level of what we know” but at the l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Translator’s Preface
• Introduction: Michel Foucault’s Cut
• Part 1. Foucault and Film: A Historical and Philosophical Encounter
• Part 2. Michel Foucault on Film
• Appendix: Foucault at the Movies—a Program of Films
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index