Cinema and Agamben

Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image

Henrik Gustafsson, Asbjorn Gronstad, Henrik Gustafsson, Asbjorn Gronstad

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781623561253
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

Cinema and Agamben brings together a group of established scholars of film and visual culture to explore the nexus between the moving image and the influential work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Including two original texts by Agamben himself, published here for the first time in English translation, these essays facilitate a unique multidisciplinary conversation that fundamentally rethinks the theory and praxis of cinema. In their resourceful analyses of the work of artists such as David Claerbout, Jean-Luc Godard, Philippe Grandrieux, Michael Haneke, Jean Rouch, and others, the authors put to use a range of key concepts from Agamben's rich body of work, like biopolitics, de-creation, gesture, potentiality and profanation. Sustaining the eminently interdisciplinary scope of Agamben's writing, the essays all bespeak the importance of Agamben's thought for forging new beginnings in film theory and for remedying the elegiac proclamations of the death of cinema so characteristic of the current moment.

1

Silence, Gesture, Revelation: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Montage in Godard and Agamben

James S. Williams

Why do you carry on doing this? The beauty of the gesture.

Oscar in Holy Motors Leos Carax

L’éthique c’est l’esthétique de dedans.

Pierre Reverdy

The short, schematic article by Giorgio Agamben on Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98) published in Le Monde in October 1995—the only essay he has devoted thus far exclusively to Godard—distils the central ideas of a lecture he delivered on Guy Debord around the same time entitled “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s films”.¹ At stake is the nature of history in the cinema. For Agamben, it is necessarily messianic because it is non-chronological and linked to salvation. The means and condition for this salvation is montage, specifically the processes of “stoppage” and “repetition” whereby images (and sounds) are freed from their meaning and exhibit themselves as such, and we as spectators must undertake the task of (re)construction. Histoire(s) thus comes down to an act of “decreation” and an “apocalypse” of cinema in the different senses of the term, including that of revelation. Similarly, Debord’s cinematic practice dismantles the image to reveal the gesture, exemplifying cinema’s aim not simply to create but also to decreate what exists in order to produce something new. By rendering visible the means and the medium of cinema through repetition and stoppage, both Godard and Debord actively harness cinema’s potential for resistance against the spectacularization of politics and the control of information and public opinion by corporate media.²

I do not wish here to compare and contrast at length Debord’s dismantling of the “disembodied spectacle” through techniques such as détournement that subvert capitalist signs and culture with Godard’s approach to repetition and stoppage as it has developed since his extensive video-work of the mid-to-late 1970s. Important links can certainly be made between Debord’s “anti-cinema” and works like France/tour/détour/deux/enfants (1977–78) which slowed down human movement and decreated the lines of linear, rational thinking through the use of stop-start motion to reveal, in the words of Gilles Deleuze, the constitutive spaces and interstitial “silences” between images, or the “between-two of images.”³ Yet the possibility of establishing a critical relationship between Godard and Agamben will not come down simply to a connection or otherwise to Debord.⁴ Nor do I wish to analyze in detail the processes of historical montage in Histoire(s) which have received extensive critical attention elsewhere.⁵ Instead, I want to return specifically to Agamben’s article on Histoire(s) which concludes with the wonderfully suggestive phrase about the work’s messianic drive. Agamben states: “The true messianic power is this power to return the image to this “imagelessness” [“sans image”] which, as Benjamin said, is the refuge of all images.” Agamben is clearly talking here about the way that, just as in Debord’s fractured cinema where the images of the mediatized world are ripped from their narrative context and placed in a montage, each image in Histoire(s)—defamiliarized, decontextualized, de-allegorized—is effectively transformed metaphysically into a kind of epiphany and manifestation of the mystery of cinematographic creation. Indeed, each new pure concrete object and detail, when thrown into the light, enacts this same miracle. (Agamben writes in the Debord essay, paraphrasing Benjamin, that in the messianic situation of cinema “[e]ach moment, each image, is charged with history because it is the door through which the Messiah enters.”⁶) Attempting to redeem cinema as a site of the messianic promise contained in the image, Agamben is clearly drawn to Godard for whom montage carries the potential to “redeem” the real. There is, however, something implicit in Agamben’s article that needs to be fully acknowledged: that Godard’s messianic practice of montage is operating in a wholly different realm from that of Debord. The Debord essay ends on a very particular note. Following his clear distinction between the two different ways of showing “imagelessness” (the “sans image”) and making visible the fact that there is nothing more to be seen (i.e. Debord’s project contrasts with pornography/advertising which acts as though there are always more images behind the images), Agamben concludes: “It is here, in the difference, that the ethics and the politics of cinema come into play.”⁷ These words are flagrantly missing in the Godard article. Why should this be?

The emphasis on the ethical and political is part of the general thrust of Agamben’s small but urgent body of writing on film which insists that any notion of gesture in the cinema remains a preeminently ethical rather than aesthetic concern. In “Notes on Gesture”, his key study of how bourgeois “gestures” based on the illusion of subjective identity and unity were definitively destroyed at the dawn of modernity (along with the aura of the image and the idea of a natural language as complete and inherently linked to meaning), and where he also makes the case for a purely gestural cinema that exhibits the conditions of cinematic montage and the medium as pure means, he states the following: “[b]ecause cinema has its center in the gesture and not in the image, it belongs essentially to the realm of ethics and politics (and not simply to that of aesthetics) […] The gesture, in other words, opens the sphere of ethos as the more proper sphere of that which is human.”⁸ The assumption here is that the image now revealed as gesture leads surely to ethics as a more “proper” and privileged domain than the aesthetic for discussing the human, and, by extension, that the ethical is distinct from, and perhaps superior to, the aesthetic. Hence, Histoire(s), which is a profound exercise in aesthetics as well as film historiography, does not quite cut it in Agamben’s ethical scheme, despite the fact that, in his own words, it is directly prefigured by Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, and, more crucially, that stoppage links cinema specifically to poetry, where the form (rhythm, poetic technique) can be placed at odds with the meaning, making cinema therefore “a sustained ‘hesitation between image and meaning.’”⁹ In fact, Agamben’s work seems perpetually suspended on a question, namely what, in practical concrete terms, should the next stage of the critical project of cinema be after one has exhibited the medium and duly exposed the illusion of the image and the spectatorial set-up? Can there/should there be any kind of aesthetic surplus? Indeed, does the aesthetic have any real role or function now? Or is the only “safe” option to ensure that the aesthetic realm is always pulled back towards ethics?

I want to consider these particular questions, and in so doing assess the validity of Agamben’s views on the messianic, i.e. “non-aesthetic,” status of Godard’s work, by reading Agamben’s theory of ethics and gesture in the cinema against a rather obscure and marginal work in Godard’s oeuvre—one, however, that directly extends his exploration of the (meta)physical gesture in his work of the early 1980s and which is driven by the messianic idea of an ending (the end) as salvation and redemption. Soigne ta droite (Une place sur la terre) (Keep Your Right Up, 1987) has been critically overlooked and woefully underrated, despite its generally favorable reception in France upon release.¹⁰ This is the reverse of King Lear, a film maudit made around the same time which suffered from a lack of proper distribution (it was released in France only in 2002), but which has steadily been recuperated as a vital forerunner of Histoire(s) due to its explicit references to film history and set-piece sequences on projection and montage.¹¹ On the surface Soigne ta droite is disarmingly light, even whimsical, being in part a personal homage to Jacques Tati—the title conjures up the boxing term of Tati’s 1936 short, Soigne ton gauche (Keep Your Left Up)—as well as to other exponents of slapstick film comedy such as Harry Langdon, Buster Keaton, and Jerry Lewis (The Family Jewels (1965) and Smorgasbord (1983) are directly evoked). Yet the film is similarly premissed on the end of cinema and imbued with the mood of loss and death, although it explores in very different ways the ethico-aesthetic question of how to retrieve the image and resurrect cinema in a post-Chernobyl, digital world of global capitalism, neo-television and political apathy.¹² With its satirical portrait of the service industries and the cold, cynical ethos of money, quick-grab gratification and non-communication, the film reflects not simply the growing sense of social and political confusion and disenchantment in France at the time (notably the beginning of “cohabitation” between the Socialists under Mitterrand and the Right under Chirac), but also the malaise of contemporary State-sanctioned cinema and culture which has “imprisoned” the image and with it human relationality. In interviews to promote the film, Godard bemoaned the loss of the documentary gaze and of the idea of art as a means of showing and sharing things—part of the vanishing signs and gestures of mutual dialogue.¹³

In fact, although Soigne ta droite may appear structurally as one of his most loose, aimless, dispersed and flagrantly meandering films (a series of sketches tied together without the hook of an obvious pre-text as in King Lear), it is actually one of his tightest and most complete conceptually. Its narrative premise is announced at the very outset in a voice-over explaining that the Idiot/Prince, a filmmaker in exile, has been given one last chance by those “at the top” (unspecified) to “save” himself by completing a film from scratch in one day and delivering it in the capital for projection that evening. “Then, and only then, will his ‘numerous sins’ [also left unspecified] be forgiven”. The voice-over by the unnamed “Man” (François Périer) presents the film and leads it along, giving us the illusion of taking part in the act of its creation. What we watch as we follow Godard as the Idiot/Prince take a trip first by car, then a plane commandered by a suicidal pilot (there will be near-death experience for all on board), is what may (or may not) feed into the film that has been commissioned. We are thus dealing with a film gleefully exhibiting its own means of production and exposing itself both as film and fiction, while also recording a possible return and passage to cinematic recuperation: delivery as potential deliverance and the lifting of a “curse.” Indeed, Soigne ta droite is concerned directly with the status and fate of the cinematic image in terms of sin and redemption: can cinematic lack or error be righted, and if so, how? Specifically, can the final stage of a film, its projection, provide a means of salvation? Such underlying existential themes make Soigne ta droite a supremely philosophical film, and not simply on account of its many gags which, if taken literally, define it in Agambenian terms as an exemplary philosophical exercise in gesturality. Agamben writes in his important conclusion to “Notes on Gesture”:

The gesture is […] communication of a communicability. It has precisely nothing to say because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as pure mediality […] it is always a gag in the proper meaning of the term, indicating first of all something that could be put in your mouth to hinder speech, as well as in the sense of the actor’s improvisation meant to compensate a loss of memory or an inability to speak. Cinema’s essential “silence” (which has nothing to do with the presence or absence of a soundtrack) is, just like the silence of philosophy, exposure of the being-in-language of human beings: pure gesturality. (original emphasis)¹⁴

We shall come back to the implications of linking gesture, silence and mediality a little later.

Soigne ta droite is also unparalleled in Godard’s work for its sustained and systematic engagement with one particular literary source: Hermann Broch’s extraordinary magnum opus, The Death of Virgil (1945). For while many texts circulate in the film around the themes of death and deliverance, including Dostoyevsky (who provides the name of Godard’s character permanently reading The Idiot), Racine, Lautréamont and André Malraux (reworked passages from Lazarus (1974), a reflection on death occasioned by Malraux’s miraculous recovery from a near-death experience of sleeping sickness and which explores themes of sacrifice, suicide, choice, fraternity and redemption),¹⁵ whole passages of The Death of Virgil are recited at length by Périer on the soundtrack, providing the film with a center of gravity. Godard cites exclusively from “Fire—the Descent,” the second stage in the Latin poet’s final nineteen hours of life during which he agonizes over whether to burn the manuscript of the Aeneid which he now regards as a failure because the society he eulogizes doesn’t correspond to reality. Just as Virgil stands out from his miserable fellow-men he passes in the slums, so the Prince/Idiot stands out in his quiet, self-possessed dignity from the cynical world he passes through. Broch, an Austrian Jewish writer who began the novel while briefly interned in a Nazi camp before being rescued, represents for Godard the artist at war with his chosen form but who, in the very act of creating, produces a unique statement of rare beauty about the triumph of art and the imagination. The Death of Virgil is an unstoppable, breathless, sumptuous flow of language in long, lyrical sentences rich in sensual imagery, and it generates many of the terms that appear in the film (emptiness, sacrifice, solitude, the soul, laughter, the universe, salvation, twilight, grace, the law).¹⁶ Soigne ta droite rehearses, too, some of the text’s stylistic qualities: its perpetually expanding and endlessly self-correcting ruminations, its reversible chiastic formulations, and its fondness for interjections. Assorted fragments of the intertext are stiched together by Godard and then repeated (sometimes almost immediately) in ever new and surprising ways over different visuals in a continuous process of recombining, retouching and recomposing. King Lear had included a reworking of Pierre Reverdy’s prose poem “L’Image” (1918)—a powerful manifesto for the complex images of Godard’s later work and a model of montage as the distant and just association of ideas generating “true emotion” “because born outside of all imitation, all evocation and all resemblance.”¹⁷ Soigne ta droite takes the poetics of emotion to an entirely new level, however, since Broch provides a model of decreation conceived not as a philosophical concept in Agambenian terms but rather as a process of poetic experimentation (the word is used explicitly in the novel). Metaphor becomes metamorphosis and transmutation, and repetition is experienced as difference and variation in an endless, ever more intricate and subtle movement of modification, reversal, permutation, reformulation and amplification.

Soigne ta droite thus offers a fascinating case of two different forms and means of revelation, one messianic, the other poetic, and it does so through set sequences of audiovisual decreation. Although it doesn’t actually employ stop-start motion, its pushing of the cinematic image out of and beyond itself to the point of abstraction (the “sans image”) and to something more poetic, even musical, marks the culmination of an intensive period of cinematic experimentation by Godard inspired by the “derealising” techniques of videographic montage, from Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Every Man For Himself, 1979), which was also a reinvigorated return to the body and the “homeland of gesture” (Agamben), to the distortion and transformation of the art image in Passion (1981) and Scénario du film “Passion” (1982).¹⁸ By examining in detail Godard’s immersive encounter with Broch and poetics through the prism of Agamben, and thus submitting a philosophy of cinema to a concrete instance of aesthetic practice, I want therefore to put to the test Agamben’s assumptions about the “neutrality” of the aesthetic sphere in film, and specifically about cinema as simply the ...