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Editor: Gonzalo de Lucas (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Associate Editor:Núria Bou (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Xavier Pérez (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Advisory Board:

Dudley Andrew (Yale University, USA), Jordi Balló (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain), Raymond Bellour (Université Sorbonne-Paris III, France), NBrenez (Université Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne, France), Maeve Connolly (Dun Laoghaire Institut of Art, Design and Technology, Irland), ThomasElsaesser (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands), Gino Frezza (Università de Salerno, Italy), Chris Fujiwara (Edinburgh International Film FestivaUnited Kingdom), Jane Gaines (Columbia University, USA), Haden Guest (Harvard University, USA), Tom Gunning (University of Chicago, USA)MacKay (Yale University, USA), Adrian Martin (Monash University, Australia), Cezar Migliorin (Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brasil), Meagha(University of Sidney, Australia and Lignan University, Hong Kong), Gilberto Perez (Sarah Lawrence College, USA), Àngel Quintana (Universitat dGirona, Spain), Joan Ramon Resina (Stanford University, USA), Eduardo A.Russo (Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina), Yuri Tsivian (Uniof Chicago, USA), Vicente Sánchez Biosca (Universitat de València, Spain), Jenaro Talens (Université de Genève, Switzerland and Universitat de VaSpain), Michael Witt (Roehampton University, United Kingdom).

Editorial Team: Francisco Javier Benavente (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Alejandro Montiel (Universitat de València), Raffaelle Pinto (Universitat deBarcelona), Ivan Pintor (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Glòria Salvadó (Universitat Pompeu Fabra).

Executive Issue Editor: Francisco Algarín Navarro (Universitat Pompeu Fabra).

Associate Editor: Núria Aidelman (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Albert Elduque (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Endika Rey (Universitat Pompeu Fabra),Helena Vilalta (Universitat Pompeu Fabra).

Contributors: Celeste Araújo, Álvaro Arroba, Jean Douchet, Fernando Ganzo, Miguel García, Pablo García Canga, Carlos Muguiro, David Phelps,Quintín, Antonio Rodrigues, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Emilie Vergé.

Translators: Francisco Algarín Navarro, Álvaro Arroba, Albert Elduque, Fernando Ganzo, Endika Rey, Helena Vilalta.

Original design and layout: Pau Masaló.

Special Thanks: Álvaro Arroba, Nicole Brenez, Bernard Eisenschitz, Fernando Ganzo, Miguel García, Danièle Hibon, Alexander Horwath, Ken Jacobs, Alexandra Jordana, Pierre Léon, Cloe Massota, Ricardo Matos Cabo, María Merino, Carlos Muguiro, Olaf Möller, Jean Narboni, Jackie Raynal, AntRodrigues, Federico Rossin, Marta Verheyen, Marina Vinyes.

Manager: Aitor Martos.

Publisher : Colectivo de Investigación Estética de los Medios Audivisuales (CINEMA), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF). This issue has been funded with the economic support of the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, through OCEC Project (Observatory onContemporary European Cinema), with reference number HAR2009-11786.

Place of publication: Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Departamento de Comunicación. Campus de la Comunicación - Poblenou Roc Boronat, 138 08018,Barcelona (Spain).

E-mail: [email protected].

Website: www.upf.edu/comparativecinema

Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema , Volume 1, Nº 1, «Programming/Montage», Barcelona, 2012.

Legal Deposit: B.29702-2012.ISSN: 2014-8933.

Some rights are reserved. Published by Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the Observatory of European Contemporary Cinema under a Creative CommLicense (Attribution – NonCommercial – ShareAlike 3.0 Unported).

Cover image: As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (Jonas Mekas, 2000).

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Introduction

Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema is a biannual publication founded in 2012. It is edited by Colectivo de InvestigaciónEstética de los Medios Audiovisuales (CINEMA) at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), and focuses comparative cinema and the reception and interpretation of lm in different social and political contexts. Eachissue investigates the conceptual and formal relationships between lms, material processes and production anexhibition practices, the history of ideas and lm criticism.

Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema addresses an original area of research, developing a series of methodologies fora comparative study of cinema. With this aim, it also explores the relationship between cinema and comparaliterature as well as other contemporary arts such as painting, photography, music or dance, and audio-vismedia.

Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema is published in three languages: Catalan, Spanish and English. The issues comeout in June and December. At least half of the articles included in the journal are original texts, of which at l50% are written by authors external to the publishing organisation. The journal is peer-reviewed and uses inteand external evaluation committees.

Finally, each issue of the journal is complemented by documentary materials and texts published onli which facilitate and enrich the topics studied in each volume, thus establishing links between longer reseprojects and monographic focuses throughout this process.

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Summary

Editorial by Gonzalo de Lucas / 7DOCUMENTS

The Cinémathèques and the History of Cinema by Jean-Luc Godard / 9On a Screening of Ozu by Henri Langlois / 11

FILMS UNDER DISCUSSION. INTERVIEWS

Interview with Alexander Horwath: On Programming and Comparative Cinema [in collaboration with OlafMöller] by Álvaro Arroba / 12

History of a Journal:Cahiers du Cinéma , through a programme in the Cinémathèque Française. 1981. Intewith Jean Narboni by Fernando Ganzo / 32

ARTICLES

Godard’s Science by Jean Douchet / 46Russian Film Archives and Roy Batty’s Syndrome: On Three Programming Criteria for ‘Ver sin Ve by Carlos

Muguiro / 50Discrete Monuments of an In nite Film: On Ricardo Matos Cato’s Programmes by Celeste Araújo / 55Re ections on‘Rivette in Context’ by Jonathan Rosenbaum / 61

‘Le Tra c du cinéma’: On the Relationship between Criticism and Collective Programming Through a Publication; theCase of Tra c and the Jeu de Paume by Fernando Ganzo / 66 Memories of a Retired Programmer by Quintín / 75Transmission at the Cinémathèques by Antonio Rodrigues / 8114/09/1968, a Programme by Henri Langlois by Pablo García Canga / 86 ‘Jeune, Dure et Pure ! Une histoire du cinéma d’avant-garde et expérimental en France’. Programm

of Films and Thinking about Film: a Gaie Audiovisual Scienceby Emilie Vergé / 94Interview with Federico Rossin on the Retrospective ‘United We Stand, Divided We Fall’. A Brief

Radical Film Collectives from the 1960s to de 80s by David Phelps / 100

REVIEWS Nathaniel Dorsky.Devotional Cinema by Miguel García / 108

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Editorial

When thinking about the possibilities ofcomparative cinema, it may be worth stoppingon the word ‘comparison’ before thinking about‘cinema’. If a peasant is able to foresee the storm

only by looking at the bark of a tree, and if anEskimo can name three hundred different shadesof white, what can lm spectators see in theexpression of the lmed eyes? After seeing somany close shots, do we learn to compare andrecognise in a face what we couldn’t have seenbefore? Do we acquire, through cinema – andthrough the camera’s function as both a telescopeand a microscope, as Vertov would have it – a plusof sensibility that enables us to see an emotion

in disguise? If it wasn’t this way, cinema wouldonly be a decorative medium, but never a formof thought, or a way to connect distant images,to bring together the images of cinema and theimages of the world.

Comparative cinema would then consist intracing that connection, those secret threads thatconnect cinematic images and project them ontothe images of our own lives; for instance, the way

cinema enables us to see and think about politicsand love.

In this rst issue we wanted to take as a pointof departure the experience of the spectatorand of the projection, after Langlois’s ideas onprogramming as a germ or possible form ofmontage. Our rst interpretation of a lm ismarked by the space and context in which it isprogrammed. Some lm curators apply a critical

sense and think thoroughly about that space,

with an essayistic perspective, if you will: they areinterested in the associations and comparisonsthat may emerge, often unexpectedly, betweendifferent lms, as in a test of sorts where one looks

through the microscope expecting something tobecome visible.

We have addressed this question in twodifferent ways: some of the articles in this issuestudy the work of certain lm curators – suchas Nicole Brenez, Alexander Horwath, CarlosMuguiro, Ricardo Matos Cabo or FedericoRossin – which establishes formal links withina certain period or historical question – such as

Russian cinema post-Vertov, French avant-gardecinema or collective cinema; while other articlesexamine the way certain journals have made visible their politics and their elective af nities via lm programmes, thus moving from text toimage. We have decided to use as a conceptualbasis for this issue a conference given by Jean-Luc Godard at the Cinémathèque Suisse in 1979, where he discussed preliminary ideas that wouldlater materialise inHistoire(s) du cinéma (Jean-Luc

Godard, 1988–98).

Digital tools have enabled us to work withimages, lms and sounds extracted from cinemausing one and the same tool as for writing –the computer. Furthermore, the digital archiveis increasingly varied (no one fairly used tonavigating through the internet will be surprised when moving from a Hollywood lm to a music video and an avant-garde piece) and hence newconstellations are constantly being created that

Gonzalo de Lucas

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importantly differ from canonical histories. Thisseems to be the appropriate time to launch apublication on comparative cinema, or at least atime when we have the adequate media to test the godardian idea – ‘to see is to compare’.

This publication is dedicated to the memoryof Domènec Font.●

I

‘We have to explain what montage is. Let’sthink of an image, let’s say “Mnemosyne”, andthen in another one, a painting, “Melancholy”.In the middle, since it is impossible to unite theimages, there is an empty space, and in that gapemerges a third, invisible image, the real. I stronglybelieve in invisible images. Aby Warburg wouldn’tdisagree, and if Godard was listening, he wouldpraise me and say, “this is what montage is!”.Montage doesn’t have anything to do with theunion, or fusion of images. Because images areautonomous as Leibniz’s monads. Between them,there are abysses: above and below, to the sides,

we can see horizons. The goodness of a publicmedium is that spectators ll those empty spacesand realise the montage. The bigger the contrastbetween images, the easier it is for a third elementto emerge: epiphany.’

Alexander Kluge(KLUGE, 2010: 299-300)

II

‘It was in 1973 during the Rossellini restros-pective. The opening night, in the packed Gran Auditorio de la Fundação, with Rossellini andLanglois amongst the audience, we projectedRome, Open City ( Roma, città aperta , 1945), which was forbidden at the time and at the end, I liste-ned to the biggest demonstration that I have everexperienced in a cinema space. When discussingthe event, Langlois said: “Very soon something will happen in your country.” I thought he wasbeing naïve and, tired of listening to this sort ofprophecies, I didn’t give him much credit. A fewmonths later, the 25th April happened. Later on,

I asked him why he had said so. “Oh, you know,silent cinema has taught me many things.”’

João Bénard da Costa(DA COSTA, 1986: 35)

KLUGE, ALEXANDER (2010).120 historias del cine . Buenos Aires. Caja Negra.

DA COSTA, JOÃO BÉNARD (1986).50 Anos da CinematecaFrancesa 1936-1986 (p35). Lisbon: CinematecaPortuguesa.

8 Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. I · No. 1 · Winter 2012

EDITORIAL

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The Cinémathèques and the History of Cinema

After twenty years of cinema, around1967/68, and due to the social movementstaking place around me, I realised that I didn’t

quite know how to make movies anymore...Even how I believed it to be, I didn’t know it.I asked myself too many questions: ‘But, whatshould I show after this shot? And, after all, whydoes one shot need to follow from the previousone? Why does it have to be this way?’ In the lastinstance, I asked myself quite natural questions,but there wasn’t a natural answer. And it hastaken me ten or fteen years, I don’t know, totry to relive... One sooner or later goes back tohis or her homeland: I have decided to go backto my homeland, cinema, since I need images tolive and to show them to others, perhaps I needit more than anyone else. And in a very extremeform, because I was in a certain moment oflm history and, little by little, I have grown tobecome interested in the history of cinema. ButI am interested in it as a lm-maker, not as inthe texts I have read by Bardèche or Brasillach,Mitry or Sadoul (that is: Grif th was born thatyear, invented this or that thing, four years later,

he did something else), but rather in askingabout how the forms he used were created andin thinking about how this knowledge couldhelp me. And three or four years ago I had anidea for a project: to begin what I would call a‘visual history’, seen as certain aspects in generalinvisible, a visual history of cinema and oftelevision. At the same time, I tried to get holdof my own technical equipment, just as a paintertries to have his or her own colour tubes and,

during the courses in Montreal, I realised thatthis was almost impossible.

In my view, lms are almost not seen because,for me, to see lms implies having the option tocompare them. But to compare two things, not

to compare one thing with the memory onehas thereof; to compare two images and, in themoment when these are seen, to indicate certainrelations. Now, to make this possible, a certaintechnical structure (which currently exists) isneeded. In fact, before, one could say: ‘OK, one would need to project the lm.’ If one says: ‘Inthat lm Eisenstein takes the parallel editingtheoretically inaugurated by Grif th’, then oneshould screen Grif th and Eisenstein at thesame time, one next to the other. Then onecould certainly see, just as justice can see all ofa sudden when something is true or false. Andin this way it could be debated. However it isobvious that placing one lm theatre next to theother is rather dif cult. But now there is video.Films can be placed one next to the other, andbe compared. One could think this should bethe rst task of the Cinémathèques and of lmschools. Unfortunately it seems the last thingto be done, and this is precisely why, the only

history that could be written, that of cinema,is not being written and there is no differencebetween making cinema and writing the historyof cinema. Cinema writes its own history as it isbeing made. It could even give some indicationsas to ‘how history, should be made, the historyof mankind, of women, of children, of cultures,of social classes’, because cinema is in itself itsown historical matter and it could give goodindications. The Cinémathèque is the only place

where something like this could take place and Ithink that the fact that this is not happening is not

Jean-Luc Godard

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something innocent in the context of the currenttrend of society, in which it is virtually almostforbidden. In theory, people say: ‘Yes, this is sucha good idea!’ but in practice it’s not possible.

This is something I realised in Montreal,because I had as a principle to locate myself inthe history of cinema to know where I foundmyself: it was a psychoanalysis of sorts said outloud. We programmed two days of screeningstwice a month, on Fridays and Saturdays: onthe morning, three or four lm extracts and, inthe afternoon, one of my lms. Depending oneach case, we selected fragments of lms with

sound or silent, which in my view related to thelm screened in the afternoon. Now, once ortwice – once in particular – something happened.Spectators saw (or at least they remembered theyhad seen – as the memory of a lightening – andcould not see it anew; if there had been videoplayers, they could have seen and kept the proof),I was saying that people saw something. It was aFriday or a Saturday. Out of my lms, we weregoing to screenWeek-End in the afternoon. I saidto myself: ‘What extracts can I select?Week-End is a rather barbarian lm, monstrous, and so I’mgoing to select monster lms for the morning.’ Iasked Losique to select a fragment fromFreaks byBrowning (for the simple reason that I had neverseen it); a fragment ofThe Fall of the Roman Empire (which, in my view, is the arrival of the monsters,the barbarians, against those who call themselvescivilised);Germania anno zero (that is, a territoryafter the downfall, the end of the monster). Ialso had Hitchcock’sThe Birds (that is, humans

attacked by other beings) and after that, weirdly,because to begin with Losique couldn’t ndFreaks , I had a rst Dracula and a short excerptfrom Feuillade’sLes Vampires . And the fact ofseeing a full fragment ofGermania anno zero in-between other excerpts... [...] and weirdly, the factof seeingGermania anno zero in-betweenDracula and The Birds ... strangely enough, it seemed asif Dracula the vampire wasn’t the monster, butrather all the people around him: the bankers and

the high society of London at the time the storyis taking place...

In my view, the history of cinema would bethe history of two complots. The rst one: thecomplot of the talkies against silent cinema, sinceits beginnings. Second complot: words, which

could have helped silent cinema... A complotagainst the fact that history will not be written...they will nd a way to prevent history from beingtold – otherwise it would be too much, because ifone knows how to tell one’s own history, then...oh, I don’t know... the world changes!

And I ask myself if the personnel workingat Cinémathèques may have any interest in askingthemselves... if other people think in the same way

about this, about the production of lms relatedto conservation. Preservation, well, it is better or worse, but one asks oneself what is the interestin preserving impeccably if one sees that... whatis being preserved? An image. What is interestingto preserve is the relationship between one imageand another. It is not so dramatic to preserve alm as long as three photographs of a lm by

Vertov and three others of a lm by Eisensteinare preserved, this way we can know what washappening: this would be the task that journalsshould face. And if we have a lm, so muchbetter, because in that way it can be seen and itis a pleasure, but it is not absolutely necessary. Itis so much better to make them, and this was, asI see it, one of Langlois’s great ideas: certainlylms should be screened, but they also shouldbe made. It was primarily an incitation to makelms.

I would rather consider the Cinémathèque

as a place of production and not only of merepresentation. Because if it is a place of presentationand circulation, it does the same as the other placesof presentation and circulation.●


THE CINÉMATHÈQUES AND THE HISTORY OF CINEMA

Dialogue in the Framework of the simposium heat the Annual Congress of the International FederationFilm Archives (FIAF), celebrated from 30 May until June 1979 at the Cinémathèque Suisse, Lausanne. BR

NEZ, Nicole (ed.) (2006). Jean-Luc Godard: DocumenParis. Éditions du Centre Pompidou.

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On a Screening of Ozu

There are a great many lms which attractonly a small minority of people. The tragedy ofall cinémathèques is that they are trapped between

public taste and the need to mould that taste.Most of them are therefore forced to – how shall we put it – to trail after a public taste instead ofblazing a way for it.

Take Ozu, for instance. It took time forpeople in Paris to realise that he deserved thereputation he enjoyed in Japan. Only a couple ofyears ago the prevailing opinion was ‘Mizoguchiand Kurosawa are geniuses, but Ozu, yes, well...’Every time an Ozu lm was shown, there wereonly ten or twenty people in the audience. Thanksto some persistence in screening his lms, and theretrospective we devoted to his work, realisationthat he was an extraordinary lm-maker nallydawned.

I was conquered by his genius whilelecturing on the contemporary cinema. I wasspeaking about Japanese cinema and as usualhad taken along some reels of lm to illustrate

what I was saying. And suddenly I realised that what I was saying no longer bore any relationto what I was seeing. In showing extracts fromMizoguchi and Kurosawa and Ozu I was praisingthe rst two at the expense of the third, whereasI discovered that Ozu virtually demolished theother two. Sandwiched between Mizoguchi andKurosawa, a reel of Ozu revealed his genius, agenius not instantly accessible, however, for Ozuis full of delicate nuance and his lms comprise

a great deal of talk. Five years ago audiencesfound this Jaapanese intimist oppressive because

he had neither the brilliance nor the charm ofMizoguchi, and by the charm I mean the true,mythological charm of the Fates, not the charm

of a pretty woman. Ozu, however, is life. Hislms possess that extraordinary quality inherentin the American cinema: the purity of life.

In Mizoguchi there is an aesthetic element,though the arabesque it traces is so consummatethat it succeeds in serving the theme, so that when one is drawn into the world of the lm onedoes not at rst realise how consciously skilful itis. Then comes the ash of illumination and onerealises the extent to which a Mizoguchi lm iscomposed. A Kurosawa lm is also composed,though differently. Either way, all compositioninvolves arti ce. Except with Ozu. His charactersare perfectly distilled, yet living beings.●

Excerpt from Nogueira, Rui and Zalaf , Nicoletta,

‘The Seventh Heaven: An Interview with Henri LanglSight and Sound , 41:4, Autumn 1972, p. 182 –193

Henri Langlois

DOCUMENTS · Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. I · No. 1. · 2012 · 11

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Interview with Alexander Horwath: OnProgramming and Comparative Cinema

Álvaro Arroba (in collaboration with Olaf Möller)

ABSTRACT

In this interview (realised in collaboration with Olaf Möller), Alexander Horwath takes Jean-Luc Godard’s text Cinémathèques et l’histoire du cinéma’ (1979) and his lm Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98) as a point of departure to discuprogramming as a form of comparative cinema; the Cinémathèques as a place of production; different forms of criticism writing on lm; spatial vs. temporal (or consecutive) comparison; video as a tool to create a form different to cinema itself

programming as a form of historiography in the context of a Cinémathèque; and different programming methods (examdiscussed include Peter Kubelka’s programme ‘Was ist Film’ [‘What is Film?’] or Horwath’s own programme for docume12 in Kassel in 2007). Finally, Horwath discusses the 1984 Congress of the International Federation of Film Archives (Fcelebrated in Vienna and dedicated to ‘non-industrial’ lms; the existence of an ‘ethical-realist’ critical tradition in Franc vis-à-vis the ‘experimental’ tradition; the role of the most important lm-makers of the Austrian avant-garde in relation tthe Austrian Film Museum in 1968; the work of lm curator Nicole Brenez; and the so-called ‘expanded cinema’, which hdistinguishes from current museum practices or the new digital formats that prevail today.

KEYWORDS

Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma, programming, Austrian Film Museum, Peter Kubelka, ‘Was Ist Film’, documecomparative cinema, Austrian avant-garde, expanded cinema, Nicole Brenez.

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For this rst issue of the journal ComparativeCinema we have decided to take Godard’stext as a point of departure for a series ofdiscussions with lm curators on their task

as programmers. We would like to startthis conversation by asking you whether

you share Godard’s view on the role of thecinematheques. Was there a similar impulsebehind your directorship of the AustrianFilm Museum?

AH: I should start by saying that I don’t thinkI fully understand this text by Godard. But oneof the things that he highlights and that Ido understand is that meaning is created throughthe comparison of two things. Bringing togethertwo lms also produces something new, andthis is obviously meaningful for every type ofprogramming. However, I believe it would be wrong to reduce it to the meeting of two; ameeting of ten or twenty – in a programme ofshort lms or in a longer series – can be equallyproductive, and in a different way.

I also share the view that a cinematheque orlm museum, any museum actually, shouldunderstand itself as a place of production, which is what Godard’s text comes down to. Butthere are two speci c aspects of his notion ofhistory-writing and criticism that I nd worthyof closer inspection because they seem to beat odds with each other – his historiographicalideal and his idea of comparison.

His implicit model for history-writing andcriticism seems to be literary criticism and thehistoriography of literature. Because there weuse the same form of expression as the worksthat we are critically engaging with, i.e. writtenlanguage. Judging from Godard’s disinterestin written histories of lm and his interest inlm production as lm historiography, it isevident that he strives for this model in lmas well. The ‘regular’ types of criticism andhistory-writing – writing about music, painting,

lm, etc. – do not use the same medium asthe works they are engaging with. This hasn’tstopped them from turning into importantintellectual traditions, but they’ve always hadto deal with the nagging problem of trying toconvey a certain medium in terms of another. Thus, there are people who say that “writingabout music” or “writing about lm” is just aslimited or just as impossible as “dancing aboutarchitecture”. Nicole Brenez once said that thebest criticism of a lm is another lm, whichmeans that the best lm critics and historians would be the lm-makers themselves – at leastthose who place their lm-making in relation tocinema as such. And this is also how Godardsees it when he says that “there is no differencebetween making cinema and writing the historyof cinema“, that „cinema writes its own historyas it is being made“.

On the issue of comparison, however, he uses adifferent model – one that is based on paintingand art history, more or less. When he discussesthe comparison of lms, he thinks of twoimages next to each other, like in an exhibitionof paintings, in order “to indicate certainrelations in the moment when they are seen“.He thinks that in cinema we need to arrive atthe same type of comparison – for instance, tohave an image by Sergej Eisenstein and one byD.W. Grif th next to each other. He does admitthat “placing one lm theatre next to the otheris rather dif cult“, but we’re in the late 1970sand Godard has just discovered a new medium, video, where lms can now be placed nextto one another „and be compared.“ What hedoesn’t see, as far as I can tell, is that a temporalmedium such as cinema produces its own andcompletely different form of comparison. If weaccept the integrity of works, the only way ofcomparing cinematic works isconsecutively – not“next to each other”, butafter one another. Weneed to compare “in time”, not in space. Andthat’s why memory simply cannot be dismissed;it’s the basis for comparing one thingafter the

ÁLVARO ARROBA

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other. When he gives examples from his coursesin Montreal, it’s exactly that – one lm afterthe other. But he nds it somehow limiting,so video becomes a sort of saviour withoutbeing acknowledged as a very different form ofexpression anddispositif than cinema...

Also, the example of “Eisenstein image next toGrif th image” reduces cinema to the aspectof images, and static images at that. Issues oftemporality, rhythm or sound would have to beomitted; and we’d arrive exactly where those who “write about music” or “dance aboutarchitecture” are located. If you think of musicand how two musical works can be criticallycompared, it’s immediately evident that this canonly happen consecutively and not by puttingthem “next to each other” – maybe exceptingthose few works where different “musics”really run parallel or against each other, as incontemporary mash-up practices or in some works by the American composer Charles Ivesin the early 20th century. Two works of musiccannot really be co-present, and it’s the same with cinema. The tiniest fraction of music orcinema becomes memory as soon as it passes,and to me that is one of the essential things toconsider when thinking about a “comparativehistoriography” that really wants to remain trueto the medium it deals with.

Personally I’m also OK with all the other, non-cinematic, ways of comparing and of “writingabout”...Of course we can productively presentlms side by side on two monitors or createuseful written texts about cinema. Andof course we can use the video medium or the internet todiscuss cinema, even very poetically. Godard’sownHistoire(s) du cinema (1988-1998), which hedeveloped out of his Montreal experiences, are aperfect case in point. And we see many websitesor multiscreen installations today where severalmoving images are co-present. I’m just tryingto point out that this is not cinema, it is anotherform of expression.

So you would argue that the Histoire(s) ducinéma are not cinema in themselves...

A.H.: Histoire(s) du cinéma has cinema as itssubject, but it is a video work. A truly fantastic video work, I might add. A lot of what Godarddoes here became possible for him throughspeci c means and working methods that aredirectly related to video. Even if his ideas aboutconfronting and reworking a multiplicity of lmexcerpts, words, still images, writings, etc., aremuch older, they only became a concrete practicefor him through this new medium – he couldhave pondered the options of experimental,found-footage lm, too, of course, but he neverdid. The mere existence of video as a set oftools made him think that way. Certain ways ofbringing together images, overlaying differentsources and mutating them, blending one intothe other. Interestingly, in theHistoire(s) hedoesn’t use the “images side-by-side” approachas often as one would think after reading the1979 text. It is all mostly argued consecutively,as far as the images are concerned.

OM: But everything he does could have beendone using cinema as well.

AH: I don’t think so.Histoire(s) du cinéma is fullof speci c aesthetic moves that only the videomachine allows him to do, certain types ofcolouring, for instance, playing with colour.

OM. But we’ve seen it in avant-garde lms! Imean, it’s more complicated to do it on lm, it’smuch more time consuming.

AH: Yes, but if you think of a Len Lye lm, forinstance, it always “talks about” its own speci cmethods of creation; the colour play in Len Lyeis also a discourse about printing with analoguelm. And it’s the same withHistoire(s) du cinéma ,only in a different medium. On a thematic level,this work may speak about cinema, but like anyself-aware work of art it also speaks about its


INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDER HORWATH: ON PROGRAMMING AND COMPARATIVE CINEMA

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own tools, its own being-created-by-these tools.In the end, this means thatHistoire(s) du cinéma speaks about the transformation or remediationof lm/cinema into another set of media. The image of Godard sitting at the electronictypewriter, which is relatively prominent at thebeginning, together with the speci c soundit makes, seems to me like an allegory of thisremediation. For Godard, the ‘video method’takes over from the cumbersome work on theanalogue editing table. Video for him becomessomething like the modern-day ‘caméra stylo’ – a pretty exible electronic writing-machinethat is at the author’s command in a much moredirect manner than he ever thought possible with lm.

There is a wide range of misunderstandingsand lack of knowledge today when peoplesee experimental works. Certain lm-makerslike Peter Tscherkassky, for instance, veryspeci cally use the properties of analogue lm – and only those – in their works. Nevertheless, Tscherkassky’s audiences today often ask him which digital tools, which software, he uses forthe effects he achieves. Today, it is taken forgranted that one would work with digital means.I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that we are not learning the history of cinema andother moving image media in nearly the samethorough fashion as we learn the history of art. There is still almost no materialist history ofmoving images, except in some cinematheques,because we are still xated on notions of“content” and transparency when we thinkof lm. In painting and art history, it is verycommon to discuss thedispositif and the materialproperties of the work as a central aspect of itstheme. We are taught about the ways in whichthe production process imprints itself on theproduct, how an understanding of the productis inseparable from the materials and ‘machines’that brought it into being. And this is not taughtat all in relation to moving images. But I amdigressing...

OM: I think inHistoire(s) du cinéma you haveGodard looking at video through the eyesof cinema. Rather than going through theparticularities of video to watch cinema.

AH: Let’s just say that we’re in the middle ofa remediation phase, and according to Bolterand Grusin who wrote a book about this,there is always a lot of mimicry going on whenone medium stages its slow ‘split’ from oldermedia, just like cinema did during its ownbeginnings. Digital Cinema today, apart fromits self-promotional claims of being “better”than analogue lm, obviously strives to imitatethe basic shapes and effects of lm. It wouldrisk losing an inbuilt global cinema audience ifit staged the much more forceful split that itis potentially capable of. I think, though, that with Godard it’s a different issue. He wants tolook at the history of cinema but, as he makesclear in the 1979 text, he felt he did not yet havethe right tools. He was not satis ed with how it worked in Montreal. Whereas I actually thinkthat the situation he had there was pretty ideal,in terms of the basic elements necessary tospeakabout cinemawith cinema. I see the wholeMontreal project as an important example forthe educational or historiographical capacities ofa lm museum or lm archive. But it seems thathe didn’t fully believe in what these institutionscan do – or are willing to do. With video, he nolonger needs an institution; he assumes the roleof the individual poet-history writer of movingimages. It is what he wanted to do in the rstplace; the institution was only a necessary evilfor him, and only for a brief moment.

I partly agree with Olaf that, in theHistoire(s),Godard is notthat interested in turning theunique capacities of video into a theme ofits own – not explicitly at least; he is muchtoo occupied with cinema and its relation tothe classical arts and the history of the 20thcentury. The new medium becomes one of themain subjects only implicitly. That’s why it’s a

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melancholic or ‘late’ work: its main energiesare directed towards revisiting the traces ofhis lifetime, his cinephilic socialisation, hisunderstanding of half a century of cinema. Thefact that he uses a ‘post-cinematic’ technologyand a ‘para-cinematic’ approach to do so, maybe more of a practical thing for him. But for me,as a viewer, it is still one of the most fascinatingaspects of the work.

OM: I think he did this with video because it was a less intensive and an easier task than doingit using cinema itself and because for him thisis closer to an immediate form of writing. It’snot only a matter of texture but also a matterof labour.

AH: In my own practice, I think I found outthat programming as lm historiography, as an‘enactment’ of lm historical re ection, cande nitely be done in a cinematheque context. As I said, it may even be theonly place wherethis can be done – as long as you look for adiscourse that articulates itself in the same‘language’ as the thing that you’re engaging with. For this, you need a certain number ofelements, including a number of lm prints butalso technology, a certain type of space and acertain amount of time. With such a workingsystem you can create something that is not justa simulation or an indirectreference , but an actualexample of cinematic articulation. You mayshow complete works, but also, for purposes ofconcentration, you can present an excerpt or onereel of a lm. You can structure the terms ofthe discourse by either presenting several lmsin a row, lm after lm, or alternate excerptsand lms, or you can break it up and speak orsing in-between… The space of this experienceis mostly xed, but temporally the experience isup the curator. Of course, each individual lmhas its own xed time, too, but the comparisonor argument that you want to make leads youto very different temporal solutions. I feel thatthis is the basis of my work, and if I understand

him correctly it’s also the basis of how Godard wanted to approach lm history before he fellin love with video.

OM: We should say that lm history likes toarticulate itself through dichotomies: Méliès versus Lumiére, Eisenstein versus Vertov, etc,etc. But I think it’s quite a limited idea to saythe least. The idea of doing double features isextremely attractive, but what I nd even moreattractive is building a whole programme of tendouble features. So that not only two lms canre ect upon each other; I’m more interestedin force elds creating intellectual spaces. Notreally just one lm and the other, that’s toolimited. I am interested in everything that hassome kind of storytelling, since I’m interestedin history and re ecting on that history. Thisis something that you cannot do properly withonly two lms, as it will lead you to a simpli edobservation.

AH: Which is probably the reason why the shortlm programme has become the preferredmedium of expression for lm curators. Thereis not a lot of literature out there about lmprogramming, but in most instances whenprogrammers attempt to re ect on their ownpractice, they talk about the model of 90-minuteor two-hour-programming – with not just twobut eight or ten of fteen short works thatcome into play and create a discourse betweenthem. What is generally not considered inregard to the challenges, and the attraction, oflm programming is that the same discursivepotential applies to a series of longer lms – it’sonly that audiences and curators need to befully aware of the amounts of time involved. We usually think in blocks of 90’ or 120’ ofleisure time – it’s more or less the same ‘timeformat’ that structures your visit to an artmuseum, a concert or a lm screening. So inorder to seriously do what Olaf says, with lmsof all lengths, one has to consider the massivelydifferent time demands that are involved. If



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we think of eight or ten double features, wemust also think of roughly 30 hours of lm viewing… This is the unspoken and dark secretof all these comparisons between different artforms and curatorial practices. It may soundtrivial, but it explains why a full lm seriesor retrospective will never have the type of‘blockbuster’ attendance that an art museumexhibition can have.

OM: It actually takes much more time – youhave to consider not only the screening time,but also the time that it takes to go to thescreening room and then go back home, andthen – hopefully – the time to think about it, soit’s a massive memory work to basically look ata programme focus for weeks. In the end youeven have to be able to remember the rst lmyou saw, as it connects to the last one. So toa certain degree you have to keep intellectuallyactive for three weeks for one programme only – it’s quite demanding, which is a good thing.

AH: You’re starting to address a totally differenttype of audience when you formulate needslike these. It’s the opposite of the way manyart institutions function today. They like toaddress a mass, and often tourist, audience byannouncing that in a matter of only two hoursyou’ll get the full load of French Impressionismor the works of Vermeer...

So there is obviously a different logic to theexhibition of lm history. But as we saidbefore, there are also other, more concentrated ways of experiencing a lm historical argument – educational formats that work with excerpts,or programmes of short works, or the modelof simply having two lms speak to each other. We showedLa Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962) andDeja vú (Tony Scott, 2006) yesterday, in onescreening. One could say that the aesthetic andintellectual surplus gained from this meetingof two works is pretty limited. On the otherhand, focused programmes like this one may

also be essential for an understanding of largerand more ambitious ones. If you only have thelarge ‘programmes of comparison’, without asmaller, focused ‘nucleus’ programme, you willhave a much harder time in making yourselfunderstood to more than a few people.

There is also the case of Peter Kubelka’s cycle‘Was ist Film’ which consists of 63 programmesand runs for a year and a half, one programmeeach week. The most talked-about of these 63programmes is Kubelka’s combination of LeniRiefenstahl’sTriumph of the Will ( Triumph desWillens , 1935) and Jack Smith’sFlaming Creatures (1963). It is the most extreme case in his cycleof two works ‘hitting’ each other so hard thatsparks may y and new, unexpected thoughtsmay arise. It’s a very visible example of howKubelka likes to look at the lm medium, soit could function as a somewhat easy nucleus. At the same time, it is not at all typical of thecycle in general. It may work quite well on itsown, but it doesn’t represent the whole project.Our ve screenings of lms by Tony Scottand Chris Marker, representing one chapter inthe «Utopie Film» series, are a much simplercase. We wanted to pay tribute to two veryinteresting lmmakers who had both passedaway this summer. The idea was not to say thattheir works are similar, but that it might beproductive to pick up on a sad coincidence andlook at these two lmmakers ‘side by side’, withthree lms each, even though general movietalk places them at different ends of the cinemaspectrum. And I felt lucky – or supported – bythe fact thatLa Jetée andDeja vu actually crosspaths in their thematic interests, namely timetravel or the vertigo of time. Which is alreadyenough. So our work is often like an interplaybetween smaller and larger programming cells. And then there is also the educational work which addresses a different, more speci edpublic than our evening programmes do – forinstance, while we speak, there is a programfor school kids dealing withanime . I like to see

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these elements as another parallel track which,over time, might connect viewers with what wedo in our ‘regular’ programmes. I guess that’sthe idealistic hope of anyone who is active inan educational context – that some 14- or 16-year-old who, during such a morning schoolscreening, is rst introduced to the conceptof consecutively comparing different lmsin projection, might return and study otherelements of the programme. Or that they mighteven begin to study lm seriously when they’re18 or 20, either as makers or critics. It will alwaysbe only very few of these pupils, of course, butafter eleven years of working here, I think I cansay that each year there are some who are really‘infected’ by cinema through these school oruniversity programmes and turn out to becomeprofessional members of the lm cultural scenein Vienna.

This leads us to another text that functionsas the conceptual basis for the rst issueof the journal, where Langlois explainshow he reconsidered his views on Ozu anddiscovered new values in his work, uponscreening his lms Turing his classes next tothose of Mizoguchi and Kurosawa: thanksto that contrast he Could better appreciatethe style and reach of Ozu’s lms.

OM: Yes, we should also remember that thishappened upon a time when there was a lesserknowledge about cinema; we should not forgetthat there was a false dichotomy betweenMizoguchi and Kurosawa and the appreciationof Japanese cinema was burdened by clichéssuch as this one. So again you put Ozu in themiddle and something fundamental changes;however I’m sure this observation would onlyreally work in certain historical contexts.

AH: I also think it’s important to keep inmind that that was a particular historicalmoment. Cinematheques and museums shouldtry out different models such as the one you

mention, but at the same time it’s importantto understand that around 1961 – which isprobably when this ‘Langlois scene’ plays out – cinematheques were almost the only place ofactually experiencing lm history, in additionto reading books and magazines. One cannotdisregard the fact that today we are confronted with a completely different situation. There isthe notion, even among a wider audience, that we are now surrounded by all the materialsand knowledge of lm history. This is notnecessarily accurate, but there is the feelingthat after television, video, DVD, and nowthe internet, we really have everything at ourngertips... If I want to see ‘what a Mizoguchilm looks like’ I need just a few seconds; I’llgo to Youtube and will nd several excerpts tochose from. You see a certain camera movement,you read that this is a ‘Mizoguchi shot’, andyou feel informed; that’s the belief that you getfrom the internet. So what about, let’s say, the1971 generation? What did they have at theirdisposal in the German-speaking world? There were a few more institutions than in 1961, butnot that many: the Austrian Film Museum forinstance, the Arsenal in Berlin, the MunichFilm Museum, that’s about it. But you also hadGerman Television, which offered an amazingrange of curated lm historical programmes,especially the third channels, in the regions – sothat’s where most opportunities for comparisonand information came from. Another ten yearslater, another ‘channel’ became available. I mightbe a good example for this generation because I was 16 in 1981, and I learned about lm historynot only in places like this, the Austrian FilmMuseum, and not only through TV broadcasts,but also – to a major degree – through videotapes, recording stuff myself, exchanging andcopying tapes with my friends, nding andrenting rare video releases, etc. Which meansthat these ‘Langlois-type experiences’ cannotbe directly transcribed into current experiences with lm history. The audiences, curators, writers, teachers who are active today come



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from completely different positions in termsof their practical cinephilia. The idea of aconsecutive ‘meeting’ of Mizoguchi, Ozu andKurosawa produces meaning, yes; but it would work very differently today since everyonealready brings their own idea of M., O., K. tothe table, a ‘knowledge’ received during eachindividual’s cinephile socialisation, throughmultiple moving-image sources other than theactual cinema screening.

In a way, people are now aware of what FilmHistory is, of what a certain director’s work is, which relations one era or stylistic movementhas to another. And to disregard that makes nosense. But as Olaf said, one also shouldn’t stopdoing it the way they did it. Let’s keep in mind what Langlois did, but let’s not assume that in2012 the results will be the same.

OM: Television didn’t only show the lms. Actually they really related Film History. Theydidn’t just – to put one example – a Jack Arnoldretrospective. They actually made lms withand about Jack Arnold to accompany each andlm, plus a documentary only about him. So togive a really big arch so to speak they used to dothis and also with a lot of directors.

AH: I’m not sure exactly what the Frenchsituation was like, but I guess theCinéastes denotre temps model played an important role. Ilike this series a lot, but it’s less analytical. Theyinvited contemporary lmmakers to createlm portraits of older directors, and they werealways based on interviews with those artists. What Olaf just described about Germany was a different direction – maybe it was very“Germanic”, but from the 60s to the early90s they did understand public television as amass education institution. It was their widelyaccepted role. Today this approach has beenalmost forgotten, because in order to compete with private television, which was introducedin the late 1980s, the whole model of public

TV changed. Before, television was seen asa school for the nation – and at some pointthe subject of cinema and its history enteredthis ‘school’, because there were so few lmcultural institutions around. Institutions such ascinematheques and the tradition of repertoryscreenings of classical lms in regular theaters were not nearly as widespread in Germany thanin France. So Germany belatedly caught up with this via television – at least to a certaindegree. Even today, the difference is quite big. The Berlin Film Museum Berlin for instance isa place that focuses on exhibitions of objectsand artifacts, they publish books and so on, butthey don’t have a real lm program, except forone retrospective a year, during the Berlinale. There is another institution in Berlin called“Arsenal, Institut für Film und Videokunst” which takes up some of the job that you wouldexpect from a cinematheque. And there is theMunich Film Museum. But not many otherinstitutions that you could compare to a typicalFrench cinematheque.

OM:Cinéastes de notre temps andCinéma de notretemps gained celebrity thanks to the connectionto the Nouvelle Vague andCahiers du Cinéma . Ourmodel would be more like theCinéma Cinémas (1982-1990) the stuff that Claude Ventura did,something more related to famous names. Theother thing is that, of course, Germans havean extremely neurotic relationship to cinema.Due to very clear historical reasons, plus incontrast to the froggies , we’re not centralized.If you think about Germany you’ve got allthese ve major cities. France, you’ve got Paris. That’s it. Politically speaking and in a cultural way it’s much trickier. Germany functions allthrough this decentralized thing, we’re reallya Federation. And every state, for better or worse has to take care of itself in a lot of ways.So television is a strange mix of federal andnational. While the big educational stuff wasdone on a federal level, these programs wanderedaround. For example for me a very important

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thing was a Giuseppe de Santis program that was originated in Bavaria but then it startedto go through the different regional channelsand ended up in North Rhine-Westphalia, mystate. So that’s how it worked. Television couldfunction as an intermediate in ways that therest of institutions, due to different problems were not really able to function. Back in myyounger days my “ lm cultural teacher”, so tospeak, actually went more often to Luxemburg,or to Brussels to watch lms than anywhereelse. Because actually they are closer to Koln.Even Frankfurt, not to mention Hamburg, orspecially Berlin which back there was fuckingpressure...

There’s another wide subject to commenton with plenty branches (as we sit and talkin the of ce of the head of the Austrian FilmMuseum). Something related to its historyin the late 60’s, and the radical movementsthat led this institution to be occupied in

January 1969 by the second generation ofavant-garde lmmakers, those of the socalled “Expanded Cinema”. Apparentlythe co-director of the Film Museum, PeterKubelka, refused to program their lmsat the expense of American avant-garde

programs, as Peter Tscherkassky’s wrotein Film Unframed. A History of Austrian

Avant-Garde Cinema (TSCHERKASSY,2012: 24-25). Almost thirty later Kubelkadid eventually include their lms in his Wasist Film program, a particular narrationof the whole history of cinema. And also,on the other hand these reconciled avant-garde lmakers of the so called “ExpandedCinema” shine proudly being compared

with, say, Dreyer, Siodmak or Buñuel. Butthere’s also the obvious absence of anyHollywood lm in the Was ist Film cycle.So we would also like you to comment onthis. We wonder if Kubelka’s is a radicalgesture that you can understand. We saw

your program for the dOCUMENTA Kassel

and there the history of cinema can alsoconvey Hollywood, experimental and

popular works...

The «Was ist Film» cycle still looks like it did16 years ago when it started. It was a consciouschoice on my part to continue presenting it likethis – as a speci c historical statement. AndKubelka would not have wanted to change itanyway. The cycle was realized in 1995/96,at the centenary of cinema, because on thisoccasion the Film Museum received somespecial government funding, so new prints couldbe acquired and preservations could be madeof prints that were already in the collection.Kubelka’s selection began its rst run at the endof 1996. Since then, there have only been twosmall additions. The rst one was a programhe added in 2005, because he became interestedin Fassbinder as an ‘untrained’, un-deformednarrative lmmaker. I told Kubelka whichFassbinder lms we had in the collection, and hechoseKatzelmacher (1969). And he combined it withOuter Space (1999), because he also wantedto represent Peter Tscherkassky’s work in thecycle, as one of the important positions in the Austrian avant-garde tradition. I don’t knowthe speci c reasons why he combined thesetwo lms. The second addition, in 2009, wasmade with the aim of highlighting 8mm lm,small-gauge lmmaking, as a speci c art form.For this, Kubelka chose the work of one of hisformer students in Frankfurt, Günter Zehetner, whose 8mm work is quite unique and which headmires a lot. Zehetner also works with videoand 16 mm, but his primary focus is Super-8lm. The choice was to honor both a youngerlmmaker, a speci c lm author,and the speci cpotentials of 8mm- lmmaking. Apart fromthese two additions, he consciously wanted tokeep the cycle as it was from the start – and Itook up this notion: that it’s a historical positionand a personal statement, based on a lifetime ofthinking through lm. It is two things at once: I would always recommend it to every student of



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the lm medium as a very worthwhile way ofpondering the essential capacities of lm overthe course of 63 programmes. But the cycleis also already a subject for history-writing,meaning the history of lm canons, of lmcuratorship, of the various modernist attemptsto de ne cinema through a lm selection. Forthis reason we also edited a book about thecycle, including an extended conversation withPeter Kubelka. It is clearly a poetic-curatorialposition tied to this man, and I didn’t want itto assume the role of a ‘dogma’ as proposedby this institution. There is no single ‘cinematruth’, so I tried to set the cycle in some kindof relation to another series. This other series,«Utopie Film», is much simpler, more exibleand not as ‘crystalline’ a thing asWas ist Film .I didn’t want to produce a ‘counter-list’ of200 works that is set in stone and that wouldstructurally be the same as Kubelka’s program;that’s why the «Utopie Film» is ‘lighter on itsfeet’, and organized in chapters, with each monthbringing a new constellation of lms. Both seriesare showing each Tuesday, so you have twoongoing ‘exhibitions’ which look at lm historyin general, and they work quite differently. I cansee why Kubelka wanted the strict regularity ofthe cyclical model, and why today it is even moreof a gesture of resistance to say that one shouldfollow the cycle on a weekly basis. Consideringhow our society and the ‘economy of attention’function today, such a committed behavior onthe part of the audience is de nitely rare. Butthose who do follow the cycle in a continuousfashion certainly receive a rich antidote to theconsumption-oriented idea of ‘sampling lmhistory’ as it is common today – and also a richantidote to the conventional wisdom as far asthe ‘canon of cinema’ is concerned. This is oneof the reasons why we need cinematheques.

This brings me to the dOCUMENTA programI did in 2007. It’s a very different thing, ofcourse, than structuring a long-term museumprogram, but there are similarities. Both models

are about creating a sort of ‘spiderweb’, andabout the sparks that can y when two linesor energies in this web meet head-on. On themost basic level, this idea is not only presentin the parallelism ofWas ist Film and «UtopieFilm», but also sometimes in the way I set upthe ‘headlines’ of one monthly program, or the‘starring’ artists that de ne one calendar, likethe month when we had retrospectives of ValLewton, Andrej Tarkovskij and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and they became so connectedfor me that I added the line “Ghost Stories”as an arc that would encompass all three… The dOCUMENTA program was a dream, orhope, or attempt, to do a lot of these thingsover one summer, in a big arc of 100 days and50 programs – many of which, in themselves, would be smaller arcs, leading to echoes on various levels. Like in the case of theWas istFilm cycle, I sometimes played with the crazyassumption that in order to completely ‘get’ theprogram you’d need to see all 50 shows. You would more or less have to live in Kassel andgo to the Gloria cinema each second evening,for more than three months. As far as I know,several people from Kassel actually went a lot,but I fear that the number of those who saweverything was between 0 and 3. Most people visitthe Documenta for two or three days, of course,so you also have to think of those who can onlysee one or two or three programs. Which is whyI tried to look at each individual program as apotential ‘messenger’ of the whole. That wasnot really possible, of course…

As opposed to Peter Kubelka, I do feel thatthe ‘commodity form’ of cinema, its industrialside, is as valid as its ‘high art form’ when itcomes to de ning or describing the medium.But it’s important to see that Kubelka is notsolely interested in the ‘high art form’ aspecteither; he often talks about – and shows –things like advertising lm, home movies,newsreels, etc. ... He did a great thing, forinstance, at the 1984 FIAF Congress in Vienna.

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FIAF is the International Federation of Film Archives,Fédération International des Archives duFilm – and all FIAF members meet once a year,in a different city each time, for a congress,including a two-day symposium on a speci ctopic. As the host archive in 1984, Kubelkaand the Austrian Film Museum decided on thetopic of “non-industrial lm”. This was therst time that things like amateur lm, scienti clm, or lm used in sports, as a training tool,became the subject of a FIAF congress; avant-garde lms, diary lms, personal lmmaking were also part of this idea of “non-industrialcinema”. So you had all these lm archive andlm museum people from around the world andtheir hegemonic notion of what constitutes ‘ourlm heritage’ listening to doctors and athleticscoaches and Jonas Mekas about the incredibly wide-ranging uses of lm, its manifold socialfunctions, etc. – except the one function thatthese archivists and curators usually identifycinema with: commercial, feature-length lmsfor ‘entertainment’.

But whenever Kubelka was invited to curateor co-curate large programmes, the main forceof his argument was always in the directionof personal and avant-garde lm; that’s whatI mean with the notion of lm as ‘high art’ which he mostly goes for when representing the‘essence’ of lm. It is an obvious characteristicin all three of his major programs – the 1970-75 «Essential Cinema» project for AnthologyFilm Archives, where he was one in a smallgroup of curators; his mid-1970s commissionto create the basic lm collection for the CentrePompidou when it opened; and the 1995/96«Was ist Film» cycle in Vienna. In the interviewfor our book on «Was ist Film», he says thatthere were some elements he would have likedto include, but because of certain rights issuesthis was impossible. He mentions, for instance,that Battleship Potemkin ( Bronenosets Potyomkin ,Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1925) should havebeen included, and maybe he would also have

wanted to include some of the American silentcomedies. In general, however, it was always a very clear choice to stay away from so-calledcommercial cinema.

To say that the cinema should be viewed as a‘ ne art’ is not necessarily wrong or bad. But Ithink it limits our understanding of this mediumif we reduce it to this one function. Just as itseriously limits cinema to reduce it – as 99 %of the population do – to its entertainmentindustry function. In some small way, that was what I hoped to illustrate in the dOCUMENTAprogram. The special place of cinema in culturalhistory, its richness and its strange newness, hasa lot to do with its multiple force elds. Andthe one hegemonic understanding – cinemaas an evening’s entertainment – is only that:one of many. It’s also not enough to de nelm by its capacity to serve as our historical

witness and to focus on cinema’s ‘bond withthe real’. This idea of cinema is very dominantin the French cinephile tradition, from Bazin toDaney and beyond. In theHistoire(s) du cinéma ,this is a highly visible mode of re ection, andimportantly so, because in the wider socialarena there is far too little awareness of theimportant ‘inter-spaces’ between history andlm. But because of this strong ‘ethical-realist’tradition in French criticism and lmmaking,it also seems that French lm culture has amassive problem with the opposing tradition – a cinema that starts by looking at its ownmaterial reality, that is skeptical of all ‘realisms’,and that belongs more to the genealogy ofmodern art. I’m speaking of a tradition that isusually termed ‘experimental’ or ‘avant-garde’lm. There are exceptions, of course, if youthink of Nicole Brenez or Raymond Bellour.But if you read Christian Metz, for instance,avant-garde lmmaking is anathema to him. And Godard was never much interested inthis rich eld either. The canons of Frenchcinephilia can seem oppressive if you look at what they exclude.



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For me, there is a horizon – maybe a ‘utopian’one – where all these things actually have todo with each other and are not split up intoseparate discourses and cinephile ‘lifestyles’.I am imagining a viewer who comes to watchthe «Was ist Film» cycle each Tuesday and otheravant-garde lm presentations, and who is alsointerested in following a William Wellman show,just to pick an example; plus a presentation ofamateur lms in the context of urbanism; and soon. Basically, this full horizon is my vis-a-vis whenI think of a larger program, or a programmatic. And some aspects of this approach werehopefully represented in the dOCUMENTAselection. The rst two evenings consisted ofThe Sun Shines Bright (1953, John Ford), JazzDance (1954, Roger Tilton),Lights (1966, MarieMenken) andViaggio in Italia (1953, RobertoRossellini). So there was, on the one hand, theidea of beginning roughly where Documentabegan, the early-to-mid-Fifties – which is alsothe beginning of ‘the second half of cinema’and, in tendency, the ‘time-image’ as theorizedby Deleuze. And secondly, to represent cinema – right from the start of the show – througha confrontation of four ‘lines’ that are equally valid for me. Another program, just to give anexample, brought together David Cronenberg’seXistenZ (1999) and Stan Brakhage’sThe Act ofSeeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971). I think thatmy work, to a certain degree, is really dedicatedto that, but not because of some overarchingabstract mission, but because that has been myown ‘bodily’ experience of what the mediumcan do. It’s the result of watching lms prettyintensely for more than 30 years, of discoveringnew types of lm and being blind to them atrst, then starting to see something in them, andso on. It’s the experience of falling in love withlmic expression, no matter if it’s ‘Hollywoodstorytelling’ or a ‘destructionist’ exchange withthe medium like Ernst Schmidt Jr. ripping awayat the lm strip in 1965, or being incrediblytouched by anonymous documents from acentury ago, like a 3-minute Phantom Ride shot

from a tram that goes around the Ringstrasse in Vienna, in 1906. Nobody knows the individualsthat were involved in this, so it’s the sheer act oflming, or the expressive act, or the ‘witnessingact’ that I identify with. It has to do withparticipating in events of recording and replaythat are not as prescribed and pre-structured asthe dominant, business side of moving-imagemedia usually is. A younger person today wouldmaybe see this impulse realized in the online world – traversing the jungle of moving imagesonline and discovering echoes and surprisesall along the way. For me, it’s the cinema itselfand its history than does that; I didn’t grow up with the internet, I created my own ‘internet’through lm-watching.

Now, to return to the moment of 1968 thatyou originally asked about… It was still aconfrontational moment, and confrontationalmodes were developed all the time. Maybe it’sa weakness of today’s lm culture that we havesuch an accepting view of everything, and thatthere are very few ‘battles’ being fought in thiseld. We have thousands of lm festivals, largeand small, and everything seems to have a placeto shinesomewhere . It’s more like a constantaf rmation than a questioning of the basiceconomic and cultural model... Anyway, in thetext about 1960s Expanded Cinema that youreferred to, in Peter Tscherkassky’s recent book,he reconstructs the main challenges articulatedby the protagonists of this movement in Austria. On the one hand, he writes abouta highly local aspect – the interesting, ifshort-lived confrontation between a groupof avant-garde lmmakers and the AustrianFilm Museum in 1969. When they staged theirdemonstration in front of the Film Museum,they argued that Peter Kubelka treated the FilmMuseum as a ‘private museum’ for the worksof his New American Cinema friends and forhis own works. And that he would not showthe other Austrian avant-garde lms, like thoseby Kurt Kren, Ernst Schmidt Jr., Peter Weibel,

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Valie Export, Hans Scheugl, etc. This was aconfrontation that had to do with inclusion andexclusion; they wanted to achieve an ‘expansion’of the Film Museum program so that their own works would also be represented. And startingin the early 1970s this soon came to pass. TheFilm Museum would acquire works by theselmmakers and also show them. On the otherhand, there was a larger challenge of course –attacking the hegemonic model of cinema, the‘apparatus’ as it was later called, the relativelyxed constellation of projection-viewer-screenthat exists in regular cinema and which wasseen as ‘ideologically dubious’. Calling for an Expanded cinema was a means to participate inthe general movement of attacking the Fordistpost-war consensus, both in the eld of politicsand the economy and in the eld of culture. The imperialist state, the factory as work spaceand the cinema as leisure space were equallyaddressed by this “expansionist” energy.

The group around Export, Weibel, Scheugl etc.played an important part in this internationalmovement, as far as cinema and the arts wereconcerned. Politically speaking, the traditionalcinema setting was seen as part of an oppressiveideological apparatus which aimed at distraction,at keeping citizens in a state of obeyance andpassivity – the Fordist leisure time equivalentof the way the factory, the workspace, the socialstate were organized. So for these ‘expansionists’,the cinema space as such, the relation of the viewer to the spectacle, and the whole notionof lmic illusion, lmic representation becamea terrain for contestation: «Let us expand orexplode these relations, let’s involve the viewer,let’s replace the projected illusion with realactivity, let’s play with projection machineryand introduce ‘un- lmic’ elements, let us runa thread of cloth through the projector insteadof a lm strip», etc.

It is quite ironic, though, that this was alsothe historical moment when the Fordist

system itself had begun to understand that itneeded to change and “expand” and becomemore flexible in order to survive. And it wasthe moment, therefore, when television tookover – from the cinema – the role of thedominant cultural and leisure time apparatus,later to be supplanted or superseded by digitalculture. So in a way, the fight for an ExpandedCinema quickly lost its main opponent, andmany of its practitioners like Weibel andExport, for instance, turned towards a criticalengagement with television and the newleisure time economies. The 70s and 80s werea time when cinema, ‘un-expanded cinema’,quickly – and happily, I think – shed its roleas the main ‘apparatus of oppression’. Itdoesn’t really matter that today we still have‘Hollywood’ and the global cultural industry, what’s important is that, at least since 2000,the cinema space, the cinema experience, nolonger conform so easily to the dominantmodes of social behavior and social controlas they may have done at mid-century; Post-Fordist subjectivities and ‘governmentalities’are no longer mirrored so much in the cinemasetting, but in the flexibilized regimes ofelectronic or digital moving images that defineour social and cultural present. And for me,the art world, the world of corporate museumsand Biennials, with their relatively recentbut very intense interest in moving images,has to a large degree become part of thisregime. Which is why I’m always quite amused when art curators, in order to point out their‘critical stance’ towards dominant society, tellus that moving-image museum installationstoday fulfill the Expanded Cinema utopiaof the ‘liberated viewer’ – as if the politicalopponent was still the ‘fixed and passive viewer’ of traditional cinema or the Fordisteconomic model. For me, it’s almost the other way round: the ‘liberated’ museum flaneur,passing from one moving-image screen orinstallation to the next, is a perfect expressionof what we undergo day in, day out anyway:



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we, the ‘flexible’, ‘creative’, ‘active’ and super-‘individualized citizens of today – no longer workers, but ‘co-workers’, participants in ourcompany’s economic strategies – are perfectlyrepresented by and, of course, attracted by,the now-dominant, flexibilized and dispersedsystem of moving images. Our media habits,fluidly following the images from iPhone toiPad to public screens to the computer andmaybe television now and then (but not a lotanymore) are the perfect expression of ourcomplicit behaviour.This is the ‘expandedcinema’ of today – and it has nothing to doanymore with its namesake in 1968, nor withthe critical impetus that energized the artistsof the era.

We are no longer forced to be at the officeat eight o’clock in the morning or sit therein the assembly line. We are no longerthe Chaplin of Modern Times (1936). We work wherever we ‘please’. And we are nolonger forced to sit ‘passively’ in a darkenedauditorium to be part of the spectacle. No,the spectacle has expanded and it now tocomes to us, to the shopping malls, to ourhomes, to the workspace, wherever we carryour screens or displays. So, if anything, thecinema, ‘traditional, un-expanded cinema’, haspotentially become a critical tool vis-a-vis thisregime. I’m very interested in observing the ways in which people watch moving images,and I very often encounter this sort of ‘stress’ – at shopping malls, in museums, or if you’reon the internet – of people feeling that theycannot or should not focus on one image only,there’s always another image, and another;always something else, potentially moreinteresting. “Does it grab me in the first thirtyseconds? No, it doesn’t really. The pulsatingred thing over there looks pretty intense: let’sgo there…”. I’m aware, of course, that this a widely accepted sensibility, and I don’t wantto moralize about it at all, but it has nothingto do with film or cinema.

Memory has no part in it...

AH: Exactly; it’s hard to leave a trace that way. When we talk about lm as a witness, which isabout leaving traces, then the memory of reallyhaving seen something, and then seeing anotherthing, as a real confrontation, is an importantfactor in this process. If the aim is to producean ‘active memory’, I don’t think the experienceof passing by moving images in an exhibitionor at the shopping mall, is especially useful.

Well as Daney summarizes, it’s the Audiovisual in relation to (and probablyagainst) Cinema.

AH: Yes. It’s interesting that Catherine David, inthe 1997 Documenta, already printed all theseDaney texts, and she also included Frieda Grafeand theHistoire(s) du Cinéma . But there, Daney’s‘audiovisual’ would still mainly refer to television,of course. He died in 1992, so he’s not talkingabout the Internet or art world developments. Today, 15 years later, a Documenta curator whodeals with Daney’s writings would also have toaddress the way the ‘audiovisual’ has enteredthe art world.

I’d like you to comment on another twomodels of programming that seems analternative (maybe a complement) to thecomparative cinema curating practice

we’ve been developing on (for instanceKubelka’s or yours). I mean the thematickind of programming (grouping lms bythemes, you speak about it in the interviewincluded in the Film Curatorship book theFilmMuseum published), and even thekind of «Permanent History of Cinema»model practiced by other cinematheques asLisbon, Paris or even Madrid.

AH: The institutions that you mention do both,actually. No cinematheque today presents itsscreeningsonly under the general heading of

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«Permanent History of Cinema». Maybe inLisbon and Paris this part occupies a largersegment of the complete program than inmost other cinematheques I know. But everycinematheque highlights a number of thematicor monographical shows each month or eachquarter – as headliners of the program. In ourcase, at the Austrian Film Museum, this notionof the “permanent collection” being on view, isrepresented by the Tuesday programs, «Was istFilm» and «Utopie Film». They make up about10 to 15% percent of the total. If you switchfrom the temporal mode of a lm museum tothe spatial mode of a traditional museum. Isee certain similarities: Most art museums alsohave a permanent collection on view, which issurrounded by various exhibitions that changeregularly. A lm museum, like an art museum,should have a way of representing its owncollection, and make transparent its focusesand strengths. There’s a real beauty in makingthe collections speak, even if it may be acomparatively small collection – as in our case. That’s an essential part of lm curatorship. And then you complement the collection withloans and with ways of placing certain themesor oeuvres under a different light each time youshow them. Jack Smith, for instance, has been axture at the Austrian Film Museum for decades,but for this show now, in November 2012, wecreated a strongly expanded framework, throughloans, through the newly available un nished works that have now been preserved, andthrough Jim Hoberman’s curatorial approach,describing a ‘Smith cosmos’ which goes farbeyond Smith’s own lms.

I actually believe that – far from any nationalisticpoint-of-view – that there are speci c Historiesof Cinema connected to speci c places, cities,lm cultures. And it’s part of our job, in thinkingabout cinema, to become aware of these speci cdifferences. That’s why we compare Frenchand German relations towards cinephilia,including television. These differences have

a lot to do with individual institutions andtheir collections, as well as local cultures ofcriticism and the activities of individual peopleat certain points in time. So, for instance, I dosee something like a ‘Vienna point of view’towards cinema that has developed over thedecades, including the work of lmmakers,of course, but also criticism and scholarship,festivals like the Viennale, institutions such asSixpack lm, the Film Museum, and so on. Acertain heightened interest in the genealogies ofavant-garde cinema is de nitely a characteristicof Vienna lm culture. But all this is usuallyput in relation to other, international pointsof view; and since Austria is a small countryand Viennese lm culture is a smaller “player”on the international scene, there is barely thedanger of chauvinism. Some of my criticism ofFrench cinephilia would relate to that: the issueof local genealogies, speci c critical interests,etc., is just as applicable for Paris or France asit is if for Vienna or Berlin or Buenos Aires,but the insularity is actually much greater inParis because our colleagues there are not soused to re ect on the constructedness andlimits of their idea of cinema. Since it wasquite ‘successful’ in terms of its global reach,at least for a certain period of time, Frenchcinephilia has lost – or maybe it never had it – the ability to put its own ‘self-evident truths’into perspective. Smaller countries or lmcultures with a lesser ‘global force’ have thisby necessity, there is less ‘self-assuredness’, ifyou like. And, of course, their positions, theircritical traditions, their lm cultures have beenmarginalized in the process. It also has a lot todo with the perceived importance and volumeof a country’s lm production, of course, whichis an important reason why France and the U.S. were so dominant for a long time.

If you read Richard Roud’sCinema, a CriticalDictionary (Viking Adult, 1980), in theintroduction he says something like «let’s notkid ourselves, the important cinephile and



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critical discourse produced today stems eitherfrom Paris, London or New York». In thiscase, the basic assumptions are very directly verbalized. Often it’s not as direct, but you feelit everywhere between the lines. I’m not sayingthat there is no basis for this large role playedby Paris or New York in the ‘global picture’, butit can de nitely lead to the insular perspectiveI mentioned. And I think that today we shouldreally be able to transcend it. I think today, withso much internationalization in the world ofcriticism and online publishing, for instance, noone would dare to write a sentence like RichardRoud’s in the late 70’s, because we know it’snot true. Neverthless, an important lm criticsuch as Frieda Grafe, one of the great criticsin the history of the medium, is still a moreor less unknown gure on an internationallevel, whereas Serge Daney is not. And I’m surethere are similar cases in the Spanish speaking world that I have never heard of. So it’s notlike we’re already in an ideal situation, butmaybe in a better position than 20 or 30 yearsago. And in the process, the ‘world standardcenters’ of cinephilia and their discourses havesimply become less interesting, less useful, lessapplicable. They can even become strangelyprovincial.

Don’t you think that those world standardcenters, as you call them, have in a wayconquered the local ones with strongideological ideas that outlive for generations.

The most obvious one is Paris, “Cahiers duCinéma” and their notion of politique desauteurs they managed to de ne. There’s anEdgardo Cozarinsky documentary aboutCahiers in which Fieschi said: «Cahiers wonthe battle». Quintín, the former director ofBAFICI likes to quote it. Do you agree?

AH: If we talk about which critical paradigmbecame hegemonic for the second half of the20th century, I agree. The dominant prism by which lm culture has looked at cinema is very

much an ‘auteurist’ one, even if lm studieshave strengthened other approaches, too. Butthese have not yet become as in uential on a wider scale as auteurism has. On TV, they willnow announce “John Ford’sSeven Women ” – andthey didn’t say it like that during the 60’s or 70’s.But it’s not in any way related to theCahiersdu Cinéma of today; it comes from a historicalmoment when it was also not just theCahiers but a larger con uence of critical traditions,including many other – sometimes much older – strands, that led to this canonical view. The view of all this as a ‘battle’ is pretty childish,though – it’s like saying ‘modern art’ won thebattle against the academic painters of 1870. So what. And if we talk about the “Cahiers taste”and its legacy, in regard to speci c lmmakersor lmmaking ideologies, I don’t think I agree with the above statement. This taste has becomepretty irrelevant, actually.

To nish, please develop your ideas aboutmutant colleague French critic NicoleBrenez and her «Jeune, Dure et Pure!»extremely personal retrospective on historyof cinema. She is based in Paris and teachesthere but is not centralized, is she? What

would be the contrasts between yours andher programs of experimental and avant-garde cinema?

AH: If you look at the work of Nicole, butalso that of Raymond Bellour, for instance,you see interests that differ from the norm,at least in France. Nicole is a great exampleof someone who is highly critical with certain‘Parisian genealogies’. And she promotesdifferent kinds of cinema. She’s very interestedin militant cinema, but she also engages withcertain auteurs of narrative lmmaking that areusually left aside, like Abel Ferrara. She’s not working monolithically. But it’s hard for me tocompare her work with what I do here, not onlybecause we’re friends. We work in very differentconstellations. First of all, she is a university

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teacher, plus: she’s a super-active writer; andthe programs she organizes take place in verydifferent institutions and cities. Whereas I ammuch more bound to this one institution, theFilm Museum, and really bound-up in all itsdetails, including many administrative ones.I think she structures her activities accordingto a ‘counterpoint’ ideal, which is somethingthat I don’t feel capable of doing in mypresent job. Maybe Nicole’s interests shiftedsomewhat between the time I got to knowher, the mid-90s, and today. But Godard forinstance remained an important baseline forher all through these years. What she focusedon more and more, however – and I admireher for that – are all the lm practices that runcounter to the cinephile standard, such as themilitant, experimental, underground practices which have almost no place in the general lmculture. She does it much more forcefully thanI do. Again, maybe that’s a weakness on mypart, but whenever I’m in a position of ‘publicresponsibility’ or accountability – as director ofthe Film Museum, for instance, or when I ranthe Viennale [1992-97] – I rst try to nd out which basic obligations this institution is meantto ful ll. These institutions exist because civilsociety, cultural politics, tax-payers have – moreor less willingly – come to the conclusion that itserves a common good to nance them. Now,of course it always needs activists to bring suchinstitutions into being in the rst place – andthey will prove (or not) that the institutionthey founded serves a common purpose forsociety; that it is not just a “private museum”,but a place where certain legitimate cultural andeducational aims are met for various groupsin society. If these institutions survive theirestablishing phase, they become more than apersonal or group activity, because they havealready involved society on several levels. Whichis how a general ‘mission’ comes to be formed.So when you start your work in such place, Ithink it’s important to analyze what this missionhas been, what the general understanding of

the institution’s role in society is, what yourpredecessors did and how they did it, whichaspects they focused on and which otheraspects they did not care about so much. Andthen to implement the changes that you feel arenecessary – but you always do this on the basisof an existing model, not out of thin air.

In the eld of lm preservation and archival work, for instance, many things didn’t happenat the Film Museum during the 1990s – forbudgetary reasons. So one of the main issues we tried to deal with here in the last eleven years was to strengthen that area. To expand the staffin the archive, to work more on the collections,to bring the great Vertov collection to fruition,because it is a real treasure in the Film Museumcollections, and to initiate related researchprojects. In addition, book publications werere-started again, and we also began to publishDVDs. In terms of ‘content’ and approach, this was all strongly based on what the Film Museumhad started in the past, what had been achievedby my predecessors. Another ongoing part ofthe responsibilities of such an institution is togive the people in this country – via exhibition,retrospectives, etc. – a substantial historicaloverview of what the medium could and cando. And you have to develop a relation to whatis supposed to be ‘important’ in lm history and what is not – for the students-viewers of today.I usually think of generations here, meaningthat each person who starts to seriously studythe medium should have the chance, in aframework of 10 to 15 years, to experience allrelevant aspects of cinema, including the majorartists, forms of expression, genres etc. This isalso the rough timeframe that I think a chiefcurator or director of such an institution shouldbe responsible. You can really put your notionsof the medium on the map over such a period,hopefully in the service of those who want tolearn as intensely as possible. So this alreadymeans that my outlook needs to be somewhatdifferent than Nicole’s, for instance. Maybe the



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lms of Santiago Álvarez are a good exampleof this: I’m pretty sure that Nicole works withhis oeuvre – in the framework of her projectson revolutionary or militant cinema, but maybeshe would not think of Robert Mitchum inthis context! And why should she… Whereasin our case, I put Álvarez next to Mitchum onour program headline last December because,as I explained earlier, these types of tensionseem tting to me for a lm museum that hasto take an “all-over” point of view. Now, we very rarely present shows on actors, but as Irecently became more interested in the idea ofthe actor asauteur , I thought Mitchum wouldbe a great example; in many ways his career andhis deep-down approach to cinema show clearsigns of authorship via acting. The fact that bothhe and Álvarez are from the same generation,and more importantly, that they both spenttheir formative years travelling around the U.S.during the Depression and working in odd jobs, with one ending up as a member of the CubanCommunist Party and the other signing upto Hollywood (both at almost the same time)made it easy for me to see them as two sidesof one ‘LP’ that we offered to our audiences inDecember 2011.

There is something else: Today, the chief curatorsof cinematheques are mostly not identicalanymore with the directors/administrators. Ithink I’m one of the few exceptions. HadenGuest at the Harvard Film Archive also comesto mind, he’s one the great director-curators whoever ran a lm archive or cinematheque. Ido likethe fact that there are still these few people left who have both responsibilities, administrativeand programmatic. It’s becoming rarer by theday. As these types of institutions grew, over the1970s, 80s and 90s, they also often became morebureaucratic. The ‘cultural management’ modelis now the dominant ‘directorial’ one, and thereis a separate program department, often on thesame level as ‘marketing’ or “communication’ –sometimes even lower in hierarchy than those.

Whereas I feel closer to an ‘author model’ –typically, of course, because I come from thatbackground, from writing and curatorship, andnot from a classical managerial background.

Returning to your question about Nicole, Iguess there are also differences in how one has‘grown up with the cinema’. I am simply tooenamoured with too many sides of cinema tobe capable of focusing only one one or a few ofthose; I think I need these multiple relationships with cinema for my own well-being… As muchas I love the traditions of radical lmmaking,be it formal or political, from Robert Kramerand Straub/Huillet to Owen Land or Santiago Álvarez, it would be too much of an intellectualor emotional loss, personally, if I had stopengaging with the ‘dirty commercialism’ side ofthe movies, for instance.

But it wouldn’t exist without the other cinema, or it wouldn’t be like it is.

AH: Exactly! Neither can really exist withoutthe other. Certain crazy and radical things canexist because some uneducated immigrantentrepreneurs decided to go west, to Hollywood,in 1910. Because of the stupidity, greed andthe probably not very humane ways in which“cinema” came to exist as a global force; andeven because of the way religion and propagandaand the dictatorial State played their major rolesin all this, because of all these ‘impurities’… So Iguess I’ll have to complement Nicole’s title withanother: «Jeune, impure et dure !». And ‘soft’is also OK, of course, as is ‘old’ or even ‘veryold’! I know, of course, what Nicole meant withher title, in relation to the French experimentaltradition – it’s a super title. And I should saythat I always love it when I can speak with herabout lms, because she is easily as ‘wild’ as Iam in connecting things that are usually keptseparate – I couldn’t believe it when I met her,15 or 20 years ago, that there is another person who, without any irony, can voice a sequence of

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words such as «Brakhage-Mizoguchi-amateurs-terrorists-Epstein-DePalma» in one and thesame sentence. So she’s easily as ‘impure’ as Iam!

These relations you make are a kind ofmontage again, to go back to the Godard text.So you said you try to make an contributionas an author in a way to this institution, so

what you make in a way is creating newthoughts.

AH I hope so, but it’s on a very simple levelonly. I’m not enough of a theorist of film tobe capable of developing such thoughts muchfurther. There is a real difference between agreat curator and a great theorist of cinema. Ialso wouldn’t say – as some conceive of it inthe fine art world – that curators and artistsare more or less the same. I think they’re quitedifferent, even though I also don’t think thatone is ‘better’ than the other. I see these kindsof activity as different practices or professions, with different aims, but with enough ‘authorial’overlap that it makes sense – as you did at thebeginning of our talk – to say: “OK, let’s seehow Godard the filmmaker-philosopher talks

about the idea of montage and comparisonand programming, and then let’s see howcurators relate to that.” You will find somesimilarities and still you won’t be able to sayit’s the same. There is a film I like very much,Gustav Deutsch’sWelt Spiegel Kino (2005),and I show it often in our ‘Film Curatorship’courses for university students, because thereis an interesting element of curatorship in it. As there is inHistoire(s) du cinéma . At the sametime, it is something else entirely. If I wantedto speak about Lisbon in 1929 or Vienna in the1910’s like Deutsch does inWelt Spiegel Kino,I would also pick some of the films that hechose as excerpts, but I would definitely nottreat them the way he does. He thinks of music,of ‘composition’, of playing with temporalityand parts of the image, etc., in other waysthan I would do as a curator. I like this fieldof differenceand overlap. And if I gave theimpression at the beginning that I’m against what Godard says in the text you showed me,I’m not at all against it. I see a shared basicpreoccupation, but it’s in the details that hegoes into – what and how films should becompared and how cinema should do it – wherethe interesting differences begin.●



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BRENEZ, NICOLE, JACOBS, BIDHAN (2010). Le cinémacritique : de l’argentique au numérique, voies etformes de l’objection visuelle. Paris. Publications de la

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dure et pure ! Une histoire du cinéma d’avant-garde etexpérimental en France. Paris/Milan. CinémathèqueFrançaise/Mazzotta.

CHERCHI USAI, P AOLO, FRANCIS, D AVID,HORWATH, ALEXANDER , LOEBENSTEIN,MICHAEL (2008). Film Curatorship - Archives,Museums, and the Digital Marketplace. Vienna.FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen.

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im Österreichischen Filmmuseum. Vienna.FilmmusuemSynemaPublikationen.KUBELKA, PETER (1976). Une histoire du cinéma. Paris.

Musée national d’art moderne.LANGLOIS, HENRI (1986). Trois cent ans de cinéma.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Graduate in English Philology. Founder of thejournalLetras de cine together with Daniel V. Villamediana.

Professor of Film Criticism of teh school El Observatorio.Member of the jury of the Buenos Aires Independent FilmFestival (Ba ci). Contributor toCultura/s deLa Vanguardia ,Diario de Sevilla , Archivos de la Filmoteca , Panic , Rouge , Sight &Sound , Cinema Scope andLumière . Editor of the bookClaireDenis, fusión fría (2005) for the International Film Festivalof Gijón. Curator of the lm programme ‘Abierto porreforma. Ficciones tras la muerte del cine’ (‘Open during

renovation. Fictions after the end of cinema’, ZINEBI,2011). He has contributed to several books, among which

El batallón de las sombras ,La mirada del vampiro, Movie Mutations (Spanish version), and several conferences, such as MICEC(Muestra Internacional de Cine Europeo Contemporáneo),or the round-table discussion ‘Cero en conducta’ at theCGAI.

[email protected]

ÁLVARO ARROBA

ÁLVARO ARROBA


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History of a Journal: theCahiers du cinéma in 1981 Through a Programme at theCinémathèque. Interview with Jean NarboniFernando Ganzo

ABSTRACT

Jean Narboni considers a lm programme that took place at the Cinémathèque Française in 1981 and which commemoratedthe 30th anniversary of the lm journalCahiers du cinéma , of which he was editor-in-chief from 1964 to 1972. The programmeenables him to trace the history of the journal in relation to the social and political context in France: the creation of Auteur theory, the increasing political radicalisation of the 1960s and 70s, and the progressive end of this era, markethe lm programme here discussed. In the programme, Narboni identi es the main ideological and critical tendencies thatcharacterised the journal and the changes in critical value and interpretation throughout this period. The author discussecritical interpretation of Antonioni, Eisenstein or Chaplin in the programme, as well as the con uence of new cinemas, thepoliticisation of cinema, and the late lms by classical directors. According to Narboni, who was also the editor of Langlois writings, thanks to this project the lm critics associated with the journal discovered that programming is a form of montagbased on these conceptual or formal associations established between lms.

KEYWORDS

Cahiers du cinéma , lm criticism, Auteur theory, programming, montage, Henri Langlois, political cinema, Jean-Luc Godard,new cinemas, Cinémathèque Française.

FILMS UNDER DISCUSSION / INTERVIEWS · Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. I · No. 1. · 2012 · 32-45

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In 1964 Jean Narboni joins, together with Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean-André Fieschi, theeditorial team ofCahiers du cinéma , then led by Jacques Rivette. Later on, he will become, together

with Comolli, co-editor in chief of the journal. Inthe early 1970s the political radicalisation of thejournal leads to what has been called ‘the yearsMao’. During this period, images are no longerused, the reviews of invisible lms abound andthe amount of thoery and political commitmentmultiply. Narboni’s tenure coincides with themost agitated and changing period of the journalsince it was foundation in 1951. Later on, Narboni would also have a key role in the history of the

journal via the edition of books. Many of themare compilations of texts of former membersof the editorial team (from André Bazin to Jean-Claude Biette and Éric Rohmer). Amongstthe many books edited by Narboni, there is acompilation of writings by Henri Langlois,Troiscent ans de cinéma . Over the next pages, Narbonitraces a precise itinerary about the evolution ofthe journal, and the impact of Langlois therein,taking as a point of departure a programmeorganised byCahiers , and led by Narboni, thattook place at the Cinémathèque Française in1981.

In 1981 you organised the programme ‘30ans d’une revue : les Cahiers du Cinéma ’(‘30 Years of a Journal: Cahiers du Cinéma ’).

We are very interested in the fact that this isconceived as a collective programme sinceit’s not attributed, even if you were in factthe only person behind the programme. We

also nd it surprising that the rst part of the programme, screened in April 1981, focusedon the 1950s and the lms shown were mostlydesperate, passionate and bitter lms... It isnot by chance that the programme opens

with Anatahan (Josef von Sternberg, 1953).

Please allow me to go back to the genesis of theproject.Cahiers du cinéma was born in 1951. In1981, it was its 30th anniversary. I chose the lms

for that programme totally alone, and I proposedthis programme to the Cinémathèque Française

in my role as a representative of the journal.Several factors had a key role in the selectionof lms. The rst and most important was thetaste ofCahiers . Regardless of the succession of

editorial teams, the changes in direction, politicalorientation, there has always been a permanentthread inCahiers that imposed itself over andabove everything else. Therefore I couldn’t allowmyself not to include a lm by Jean Renoir,Roberto Rossellini, Howard Hawks, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock… To mention the classical lm-makers. The rst aspect, so to speak, had to do with Auteur theory. That is the thread ofCahiers ’staste. On the other hand, the second factor was

to select lms that weren’t necessarily the most well-known, celebrated or seen by these authors.For instance, I decided to showThe Magni cent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942) instead ofCitizenKane (Orson Welles, 1941), but I could also havechosenThe Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles,1947). The third factor had to do with a personal view. I selected the lms I felt personnaly inclinedtowards.

The case of Michelangelo Antonioni is verysingular. He was a lm-maker who had so farbeen left asideCahiers ’s Auteur theory, evendetested by important members of the journal,such as Jean Douchet or Luc Moullet. The articleson Antonioni were often written by writers whodidn’t mark the main editorial line of the journal.Before Rivette’s arrival to the journal – since Iarrived with him – Antonioni wasn’t part of thoseselected few. It was often André S. Labarthe, andothers like him, who used to write about him. With

Rivette’s directorship there was a turn, a changein direction in relation to Antonioni; he gaineda more prominent role. Godard said he detested Antonioni but then he had a sudden revelation,akin to the one Paul Claudel felt when visiting theNotre Dame Cathedral in Paris: he sawRed Desert ( Il deserto rosso, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964) in Venice and entered in a state ofshock. He eveninterviewed Antonioni. Therefore he went onfrom having very little interest in Antonioni to

becoming completely fascinated by him – and I would also add by his persona. The position of the

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journal vis-à-vis Antonioni is therefore uctuating,but I wanted to include a lm by him because, inany case I consider him an important lm-maker,also forCahiers . However, instead of selecting

L’avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960) orLanotte (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961), I chose toincludeIl grido (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1957),because it is a lm that I always liked very much.It was one of the rst I saw by Antonioni, andhence in this case there is a personal component.I believe it to be a magni cent lm. The actor,Steve Cochran, was also extraordinary. It hasoften been said that Anitonioni only made lmsabout great burgeois ladies at leisure, unable to

choose amongst their lovers, but Il grido is alm about a proletarian, which grants it a veryinteresting aspect about the spaces where it waslmed, so grey and foggy. On the other hand, thislm had received very sectarian attacks, guided byquestions of social class. The leftist Italian critique,of communist leanings, had decided that thelm was bad, roughly because a proletarian couldnot have a nervuous depression due to a loveaffair; it just wasn’t politically correct. HoweverI found it very beautiful that Antonioni showeda man abandoned by his wife, travelling acrossdifferent zones in Italy without knowing whereto settle – he meets different women and thinksto settle with each of them, but never succeeds.Finally he returns to the place where he met therst woman and nds her with another man anda child. There seems to be no other escape but tolet himself fall from the top of the factory wherehe used to work at the beginning of the lm.For me, he is a melancholic character, unable to

cope with the mourning. This is why I was soterrorised by the sectarian critiques coming fromItaly, reproaching that nervuous depression wassomething exclusive of the burgeois world, as ifa worker had to be able to get over something likethis. These are the reasons that led me to choseIl grito.

In relation to the other question, I insist thatI assume the responsibility for all the decisions

made in the programme, since I conceived it onmy own. But we decided not to state any names

– the same goes for the introduction text, whichI also wrote – because at that time we were atthe end of the political period of the journal. At that time of transition we were still working

with that idea of the collective, of the ‘we’. We were at the end of the 1970s. Names had to bedeleted.

This programme took place at theCinémathèque Française, the place

where your vocation was born, watchingand desiring to show films. It is also the

place where many of the members of theeditorial board of Cahiers would perceive

a series of ideas that would later influencethe journal. All of this could be perhapssummed up in one fact: Langlois generated,

with his programmes, cinematographicthought.

Yes, hence my contribution to the publicationof the book later on, which I organised inclose collaboration with Bernard Eisenschitzand Catherine Ficat,Trois cent ans de cinéma . Forme, Langlois was not only a great lm curatorof tremendous wit, a great preservationistor pioneer, as it is so often repreated, but alsoan excellent critic. The texts he produced – orpresented – often concise but always robust, wereoften admirable critical texts. I said to myself thatthe texts already available we could make a book. At the Cinémathèque everyone told me that wehad to wait, since more texts would appear lateron. I wouldn’t say there was an opposition to myproposal, but it didn’t provoke great enthusiasm.

They always said we had to wait, but in myopinion there was no need to wait for 20 years: we already had enough texts to publish a book. And the fact is that there haven’t been manycompilations of articles by Langlois descoveredafter the publication of our book. I was very awarethat the book was being edited in a provisionalstate in relation to his writings, but Bernard andI preferred to do i t anyway rather than wait tobe tempted with youth poems, novels or laundry

notes in the form of poetry signed by his sublimehad...


HISTORY OF A JOURNAL: THE CAHIERS DU CINÉMA IN 1981 THROUGH A PROGRAMME AT THE CINÉMATHÈQUE.

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The uency of your programme also bringsLanglois to mind. And, to a certain extent,one could argue that it could have beenconceived, at least partially, within other

periods of Cahiers .

The fourth fundamental aspect, which I failed tomention before, was the movements within thejournal itself. These movements provoked thatnot all the members of the editorial team couldcompletely identify with each of the periods ofthe journal. The rst ten lms of the programme,for instance, nd a perfect equivalence in thechronology of the 1950s atCahiers , that is, with

the establishment of the Auteur theory. And this is valid for André Bazin as well as for Éric Rohmer, forinstance.Stromboli, Terra di Dio (Roberto Rossellini,1950) is one of the lms discussed by Rohmer inan interview that I did with him forLe Goût de labeauté (ROHMER, 1984: 15). It is needless to justifyHitchcock or Renoir’s presence. Orson Welles was also one of the lm-makers that was most written about under Rohmer’s tenure. The case ofMarcel Pagnol is different, since he was considereda bad lm-maker for a long time, as was the case with Sacha Guitry. In the mid-1960s when Jean-Louis Comolli and myself took over the editorialleadership atCahiers , we conceived the special issue‘Sacha Guitry et Marcel Pagnol’ ( Cahiers du cinéma , nº173, December 1965), which claimed the currencyof Pagnol. That is, since his lms are included inthe programme, we are already contradicting theclaim that the rst part of the programme couldhave been made by the members ofCahiers of the1950s.The Big Sky (Howard Hawks, 1952) obviously

referred to the ‘hitchcock-hawksism’ of Rohmerand others. Likewise, Otto Preminger’s Angel Face (1952), is related to Rivette, as much asLola Montes (Max Ophüls, 1955) is mainly related to François Truffaut. Lubitsch is also a particular case, sinceit was only in the 1960s whenCahiers realised aspecial issue on his work (‘Ernest Lubitsch’,Cahiersdu cinéma , nº 198, February 1968), which I thenreedited and completed together with Eisenschitzin 1985. But if Lubitsch could be seen in relation to

Truffaut, this was also a contribution of the teamat Cahiers during my time. With regards toBitter

Victory (Nicholas Ray, 1957), it can be consideredpar of the common ground of the journal: bothGodard and I count it amongst our favourite lmsof all times.

As forLimelight (Charles Chaplin, 1952) it wasn’tan obvious decision. It could respond to Bazin’scriteria, the greatChaplinist , but I would also liketo remind that Rohmer – as opposed to Godard – didn’t value his feature-length lms, exceptfor A Countess from Hong Kong (Charles Chaplin,1962). He certainly liked Charlot, but he ratherleaned towards Buster Keaton. If I nally decidedto include Chaplin instead of Keaton – whom

I also consider a genius – is because he is notas well known as one would think. I con rmedthis intuition a couple of years ago, when Idecided to write a book onThe Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin, 1940). However, there is a greatcontinuity in the programme in contrast with thedifferent editorial lines. Even during the period when Comolli and I directedCahiers (1964–73),regardless of our political position, including theMaoist vertigo of the last years, Lang, Renoir orHitchcock were always untouchable lm-makers,so to speak. There was never an attack againsttheir work in the name of militant lm-making.

What seems moving about the programmeis to see how from that continuity, frictionsincluded, that characterised the programmefor the rst month could emerge, almostas an ejaculation, the lms of the Nouvelle

Vague, screened over the second month.

Yes, it is evident that the rst month of theprogramme traces the history ofCahiers , but if we pay attention to the end, we ndThe Hole ( LeTrou , 1960), by Jacques Becker, who was like anolder brother for the Nouvelle Vague, and withThe Testament of Orpheus ( Le Testament d’Orphée ,1959), by Jean Cocteau, a father or a guardianangel to them. From there, we go directly toLaPointe Courte (1955), by Agnès Varda, whose work was written up by Bazin (BAZIN, 1955: 36), so

that we can then go straight into the lms byPierre Kast, Rivette or Doniol-Valcroze.

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I would like to hear about the exceptionsover this second month. In my view, evenif the radicalisation of Cahiers enabled theentrance of a more avant-gardist cinema, I

have the impression that, from then onwards,it became more dif cult to write in depthabout classical lm-makers.

Luis Buñuel was not appreciated by certainpeople atCahiers , such as Rohmer or Douchet,but they completely changed their minds, to thepoint that Rohmer (ROHMER, 1984: 157-158) wrote onThe Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz ( Ensayo de un crimen , Luis Buñuel, 1955). He was

a bit like Antonioni: he was defended by the writers who didn’t decide on the main editorialline of the journal, in this case Labarthe and,most importantly, Moullet, who wrote an article(MOULLET, 1961: 55-58) onThe Young One (LuisBuñuel, 1960), a lm shown within the programmeamongst lms of the Nouvelle Vague.

As for Jerry Lewis, whose lmThe Ladies Man (1961) was also included in the programme, he wasa very important lm-maker for our period. Wealso edited a special issue on his work ( Cahiers duCinéma , no. 197, December 1967/January 1968),in the midst of the Nouvelle Vague. This is whyit was important to introduce his work amongstthese lms. But perhaps the most interestinginclusion of the programme was John Ford’sYoung Mr. Lincoln (1939). His work had been excludedfromCahiers ’s pantheon for a long time. RogerLeenhardt, Bazin’s mentor, proclaimed: ‘Down with Ford, up with Wyler!’ Bazin, in a famous

article, placed Wyler at the same level as Welles,but he was wrong with Wyler. He had a certainidea about his lms, about the sequence shot orthe depth of eld, but we now know that in hisplace there should have been Kenji Mizoguchi, forinstance. Labarthe, Moullet or Louis Marcorellesdefended him, even though, again, they didn’tdecide on the main editorial line of the journal. Truffaut had reserves about Ford for a long time. The turnaround arrives when Rivette took over

Cahiers . It was during a John Ford retrospectiveat the Cinémathèque we realised that we realised

that he was extraordinary, whilst up to that point,in the editorial team we preferred Howard Hawks.However, and in contrast to Buñuel, I decidednot to show his lms together with those of the

Nouvelle Vague. Instead, I situated him later inthe programme, and also in the chronology. Inthe midst of the marxist and ‘hyper-theoretical’period at the journal, we wrote a long collectivetext onYoung Mr. Lincoln , unattributed ( Cahiersdu cinéma , no.223, August 1970). This is why itis placed betweenThe Grim Reaper ( La commaresecca , Bernardo Bertolucci, 1962) andSotto il segnodello scorpione (Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani,1969).

Things are intertwined. In the mid- and end1960s we lived a unique moment in the historyof cinema. Something like this will never happenagain. I don’t mean to say that the past is alwaysbetter, but rather that this is a historical question.During those years, if it was possible to make acut in time, as one does in geology, one wouldnd diverse temporal layers. It was then when

were premiered the last great lms by theclassical lm-makers, often marvellous:Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1965), A Distant Trumpet (Raoul Walsh, 1964) orSeven Women (John Ford,1966), which was only defended byCahiers , eventhough it is one of the most beautiful lms evermade. We published two articles, one by Comolli(COMOLLI, 1966: 16-20) and the other writtenby me (NARBONI, 1966: 20-25). Not evenFord’s fans supported the lm.

It was around that same time when the third and

fourth lms by the lm-makers of the Nouvelle Vague were made. For instance,Les Carabiniers (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963), orL’Amour fou (JacquesRivette, 1969). The rst works by the lm-makersof the New Cinemas – such as Jerzy Skolimowski,Marco Bellocchio or Bernardo Bertolucci – andthe latest works by postclassical lm-makers such asLuis Buñuel o Michelangelo Antonioni, were alsomade at the same time. Within the same month,one could see a lm by Skolimowski, Pasolini,

Bertolucci, Godard and the most recent Ford. This will never happen agin, because the rst of



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the layers, that of the great classics, is over, theypassed away. And, thanks to a historical chance, we found ourselves in a place where the fourthdimensions had to be kept at the same time. In

one and the same issue, we had to defendSevenWomen , Uccellacci e uccellini (Pier Paolo Pasolini,1966),Walkower (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1965) orLesCarabiniers … This is why a lineal succession can’tbe established. It happened just as in music, wehad to nd a counterpoint or a fugue in whichtwo voices entered, then three, later four... We were very lucky to live in a period in which thisfugue counted ve different voices.

It can be argued that that generation founda ‘montage’ between the different lms atthe cinemas themselves. The programmeseems to preserve those clashes; for instance,

when we go from La Concentration (PhilippeGarrel, 1968) to Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967),and then to the lm by Jerry Lewis.

This is exact. And, at the same time, we preservethe chronological correspondence. At the sametime that we were discovering the rst lms byGarrel, we could suddenly seePlaytime , a lm thathad a huge impact on us. I remember that AndréFieschi and I called Jacques Tati. He invited us tohis house – he lived in the outskirts of Paris – andorganised a long interview with him (FIESCHIand NARBONI, 1968: 6-21). We dedicated animportant part of that issue toPlaytime ( Cahiersdu cinéma , no. 199, March 1968). It was a poorlyreceived lm. It even ruined him, since afterthat he was no longer able to make a lm like

the previous ones. But for us it was evident, as ithappened withSeven Women or Gertrud ; when wesaw it we had no doubts: we had to interview himand write several texts on the lm.

If we analyse the situation in musical terms, wecan notice something very contemporary going onbetween that lm andLa Concentration . There wasno problem to go fromWalkower toL’Amour fou orPlay Time , it was like a pentagram. Music seems to

be the most adequate comparison to speak aboutthese different strata. The motives follow each

other, creating links and illuminations betweenthem. It is like Godard’s idea, mentioned duringhis conference on Cinémathèques (GODARD,1979: 286-291).

Since you mention Godard, I’d like to addthat the relationship between Vent d’Est (Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, GérardMartin, Grupo Dziga Vertov, 1970) and

Enthusiasm ( Entuziazm: Simfoniya Donbassa ,Dziga Vertov, 1931) may seem evident, butnot so much the fact that the latter is followedby The Old and the New (Staroye i novoye ,Serguei M. Eisenstein y Grigori Aleksandrov,

1929).

From La comare secca onwards, the programmeclearly relates to the political period inCahiers . Wehad very much liked the rst lms by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, which I haven’t seen since. Atthat time, we start watching the cinema of RobertKramer.Ice (Robert Kramer, 1970) was the leftistlm at the time – dealing with urban guerrillas,terrorism. He is the lm-maker of the moment.From that lm we move on to the Group Dziga Vertov, withVent de l’Est , and so I obviouslyprogrammed it alongside a lm by Vertov. But atthat time we had prepared two great special issuesinCahiers , with the great collaboration of BernardEisenschitz, mainly on Soviet lm. One of themfocused on Russia during the 1920s ( Cahiers ducinéma , n° 220–221, May–June 1970); the other, which in fact extended across several issues, wassolely focused on Eisenstein ( Cahiers du cinéma , n°208–226/227, January 1969–January/February

1971). Thus for us both Vertov and Eisenstein went alongside each other. The selection ofTheOld and the New was a very personal one. This lm was screened again in cinemas in Paris in the 1970s,and I wrote a text about it (NARBONI, 1976: 14-21), as did Pascal Bonitzer (BONITZER, 1976:22-25), even if we didn’t at all develop the sameposition on the lm. François Albera, a Marxistand especialist on the avant-gardes, had writtena reply in the form of a letter to the journal

(ALBERA, 1978: 10-16), where he discussedour respective positions. Therefore it was a very

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relevant lm at the time. Bonitzer developped theidea of the artist against power, but that wasn’t myposition:The Old and the New seemed interestingbecause it was uber-revolutionary and I think this

was precisely why it was seen so fearfully fromthe people in power, to go too far away – and toomadly – into that direction with a sort of politicalerotism – hence the sprinkling of milk – whereasthey were kolkozes who liked their tractor. It wasa Deleuze/Guattari of sortsavant la lettre .

Since you mention Deleuze, we are in thesame period when Deleuze was preparing hisbooks on cinema, L’image-mouvement and

L’image-temps . Soon before that, he had beeninvited to write for Cahiers , where he published«Trois questions sur Six fois deux » (Cahiersdu cinéma , nº 271, November 1976). As far as

we know, you were the ones sending him thelms and this may therefore be understoodas a form of personal programming for a

philosopher.

Yes, he wrote onSix fois deux / Sur et sous lacommunication (Jean-Luc Godard and Anne MarieMiéville, 1976), with a counterfeit and fascinatinginterview with himself (DELEUZE, 1976:5-12). We both worked at the University of Vincennes and often chatted together. Later on,Carmelo Bene brought us together – we couldalso talk about those who were absent from theprogramme, such as Bene or Otar Iosseliani.Once Deleuze had conceived this project in hismind, I helped him with the list of lms andindications in the texts, but he also had many

other people around him who advised him, suchas Claire Parnet, someone very close to CarolineChampetier. In fact, I didn’t need to wait to sendhim the lms, but I was part of a group of people who talked with him a lot about cinema over thatcouple of years.

Even so, that need to send him lms isinteresting. In a certain way, and in the case

of Cahiers in particular, it seems obvious thatselecting the lms was a form of critique,even of a form of making cinema, of creatinga way of thinking based on associations and

confrontations, which is what the Auteurtheory was based on. In fact this continued tobe Godard’s creative process as a lm-maker.Didn’t Langlois ful l a similarly fundamentalrole in this critical dipositif?

The way I started watching lms was very wild.I didn’t live in Paris as a teenager; I grew up in Argelia, and only came to Paris every once ona while. Later on, the Cinémathèque Française,

triggered my voracious appetite to discovercinema. For instance, all that which I had heardabout in the cine-clubs of Argel. In any case, we very soon realised that Langlois was a greateditor, as well as Godard would also become one. The idea of montage is similar in both instances:to bring together two or more lms without anapparent relationship, hoping that somethingnew will emerge from that clash. This idea wastaken rather literally – and this is something upfor discussion – from Eisenstein, that is, thatfrom the clash between two images a third one will be created in the spectator’s mind. Thisnotion of montage is part of the ‘golden thread’of all those who became close to Langlois. Hisscreenings could play in all directions, at timesbased on national or chronological relationship,others just on a word from the title, or muchmore subtle associations. The principle ofmontage was constantly mutable, but thefoundational idea was a constant throughout his

work. This is also how it was taken up again byGodard: montage never ceased being hisbeausouci 1 – one only needs to watch his most recentFilm Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010). Andthis not only affects images but also his texts,up to the point that throughout these last yearshe has stopped writing at all in his lms. InFilmSocialisme he edits texts by Hölderlin with othersby Rilke or Marx. Some such as Dominique



1. This is a reference to the well-known article ‘Montage,mon beau souci’, by Jean-Luc Godard, published inCahiers du cinéma , nº 65, December 1956.

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Païni have taken up again and developed thattheory using the idea of the ‘exhibited cinema’.But all who had their rites of initiation at theCinémathèque were very much in uenced by

Langlois’s idea on montage. Godard is the mostpure inheritor.

How was the 1968 period and the momentarilydestitution of Langlois as director of theCinémathèque, experienced at the journal?

Leaving aside any modesty at all, I will say thatI believe it has been one of the richest periodsin the history ofCahiers . From 1966 to 1968

not only did we achieve to keep the differenttemporalities I mentioned – we didn’t miss thelms of Skolimowski, Bellocchio, Glauber Rochaor Gilles Groulx. We had all the national cinemas. We had both Garrel and Eustache… In myopinion, we did a good job in that sense. Evenif we did miss certain things, we achieved ourmission. But we were also in the re lines of otherepisodes, in a very concrete way. The rst was theban ofLa Religieuse (Jacques Rivette, 1966), whichtriggered a very acute ght. After that came the‘case Langlois’, wherein the of ces ofCahiers became the general quarter where everyone met,from within and without the journal, to discussthe issue. Then arrived the États Généraux duCinéma, pushed byCahiers , in May 68. And, mostimportantly, the ‘Conseil des Dix’ (‘Board of Ten’)2 was suppressed. At that time, we had the chance tosee in many different places lms that didn’t arriveto Paris. The ‘Conseil des Dix’ only consideredParisian premieres, which we thought was not

enough, and which we replaced with the title ‘A voir absolument (si possible)’ (‘To See Absolutely[If Possible]’). In that section we considered anylm that we thought was interesting, regardlessof whether it had premiered in Paris or not. Withthis gesture, we were trying to tell readers andspectators that they had to try to see – and alsomake – the lms themselves. That ‘if possible’needed to be made real.

For a period of time, the theoretical and practicalarticulation inCahiers was very direct. The banningof La Religieuse meant a true struggle in realityrather than in writing. The ‘affaire Langlois’ was

also a real ght; as was to get readers ‘to act’ inorder to be able to seeLa Concentration , or anyother Canadian or Czech lm. In my view, thosetwo years were the most active period in thehistory of the journal as far as the articulationbetween real and aesthetic struggles is concerned. And this is not about us being better, but aboutLanglois being dismissed at that moment, andMay 68 also happening then. It wasn’t inventedby us. And the same happened with the banning

of Rivette’s lm. As far as aesthetics are concerned, it was obviousthat something was happening at the time. And allof this was related to the political movements ofthe 1960s and 70s, and the revolts that were takingplace across the globe. All the uprisings, whichgave currency to the idea of revolution, were forus related to the question ‘what could be a freecinema’, independent from what Godard calledto the pair Hollywood/Mos lm. What wouldfacilitate that form of independent cinema? Ouranswer was the creation of its own conditionsof production and dissemination, escapingthe in uence of the major and monumentalinstitutions of the time. We knew very well thatthat was the end of a certain cinema made inHollywood:Cleopatra (Jospeph L. Mankiewicz,1963) itself set the alarm bells ringing (even ifa part of American cinema was reborn in the1970s). All of this was part of a period when,

given the relationship between those new‘national’ cinemas and the global revolutionaryand protest movements, there was a hope in thetenuous and capillary dissemination of cinema,enabled by a series of subterranean links. Forinstance, the Festival of Young Cinema in Pesaro was very important because there one could seelms by Eustache, Garrel, Straub and Huillet,Moullet… The axis Italy/Brazil/France also had

FERNANDO GANZO


2. Traditionally the issues ofCahiers du cinéma nished witha page where, under the title ‘Conseil des dix’ (‘Council of Ten’), ten of its critics voted, with stars, on the lms on view at the cinemas.

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an important weight... This was very much in theair at the time: the wind from the East carriesthe wind from the West. The articulation ofaesthetics and politics markedCahiers ’s editorials

at the time; it was also then that the ‘Semainedes Cahiers du cinéma ’ was created. I rememberthis because we went back to it in the lm thatI have recently made with Jean-Louis Comolliand Ginette Lavigne, À voir absolument (si possible).Dix ans aux Cahiers du cinéma, 1963-1973 (Jean-Louis Comolli, Ginette Lavigne y Jean Narboni,2011). The rst ‘Semaine’ wasn’t bad at all: theprogramme includedLe Chat dans le sac (GillesGroulx, 1964), Not Reconciled ( Nicht versöhnt oder

Es hilft nur Gewalt wo Gewalt herrscht , Jean-MarieStraub and Danièle Huillet, 1965),Brigitte etBrigitte (Luc Moullet, 1966),Skolimowski’s rst lm (Rysopis, 1965),Before the Revolution ( Prima dellarivoluzione , Bernardo Bertolucci, 1964),The Death ( A falecida , Leon Hirszman, 1965) andFists in thePocket ( I pugni in tasca , Marco Bellocchio, 1965). Ind it a very appropriate programme for the rst‘Semaine des Cahiers’.

How did it work? Did a different editor takeresponsibly for the programme each time?

Was there any relationship between some ofthe ‘Semaines’?

No, we were very much in dialogue with eachother when we conceived them. But what we didhave in mind was the need of a continuity and ofa link between various ‘Semaines’. This is why we were close to certain national cinematographies.I remember well the Of ce National du Film del

Quebec; Pierre Perrault, for instance, was veryclose toCahiers , as were Jean-Pierre Lefebvre,Michel Brault, Groulx… The ‘Semaines’ werelinked to the work that we developed inCahiers ,they wereactive events, with the goal of showingunseen lms. As in the other examples, it was a work realised ‘in reality’ not only within the frameof the journal – I won’t day that it wasn’t relatedto writing because writing is part of reality. It wasabout being militant, not so much politically as

aesthetically. We fought to show the lms that were dif cult to see.

Where do you think that motivation to ‘gointo action’ came from?

I don’t know. Before, inCahiers , there were other

forms of being militant: being committed tothe Auteur theory was one of them. But I don’tknow where the idea to organise the ‘Semaine desCahiers’ came from exactly. We simply wanted toshow a series of lms out of distribution. We gotin touch with distributors, got hold of the copiesand screened them.

Langlois also helped young lm-makers. He couldprogramme a lm by the Lumière and then one by

Garrel or by a lm-maker from another countrythat had arrived with the lms under the arm. Ina way, he made ‘The Year of the Cinémathèque’every year. But he never locked himself up in thepast, Garrel speaks very eloquently about this. Inany case, we didn’t expect his dismissal, we were very surprised. Perhaps it was less of a surprise tothe people who were closer to the institution. Healways said that the fact of being alone ‘againsteveryone’ entailed a certain idea of danger, ofthreat, of a besieged fortress. And we got usedto it, so that by the time his dismissal arrived we were really taken by surprise. Even so, theresponse was immediate.

Just before this season, you published thelists of best lms of the 1970s according toCahiers . We are very interested in this turning

point from a decade to the next in relation tothese groupings of lms, because we havethe impression that it anticipates an idea of

a hinge.

In that list, it is obvious that Godard and Kramerhold a central position. We discoveredTwo- Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971), whichoccupies the second position, with a certaindelay. Marguerite Duras, who holds the sixthposition, had already been interviewed by Rivetteand myself (NARBONI and RIVETTE, 1969:45-57) at the time ofLa Música (Marguerite

Duras and Paul Sabin, 1967). However, even ifRainer Werner Fassbinder was on that list, he is



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Of course, because taste remains. However,regarding the lists of the 1970s one mustdistinguish the claims in the present tense fromthe ones that were picked up later on. Number

Two ( Numéro deux , Jean-Luc Godard, 1975) wasdefended when it was made, but notThe Merchantof Four Seasons ( Händler der vier Jahreszeiten ,Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1971): it is a later‘reconstruction’ because the lm was defended

afterwards, not during its own time. In fact,Daney published very mitigated articles at thetime. The list re ects some of the lms that weredefended contemporarily, but they appear next

to later embellishments, such as is the case withFassbinder. By way of contrast, the programmeI organised in 1981 tried to re ect the lms to whichCahiers arrived on time.●

«30 ans d’une revue : lesCahiers du Cinéma ». April-

May, 1981. Cinémathèque Française. April, 1981

7 April. Anatahan (Josef von Sternberg, 1953)8 April.Stromboli, Terra di Dio (Roberto Rossellini, 1950)9 April.The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956)10 April.The Woman on The Beach (Jean Renoir, 1947)10 April.The Magni cent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)11 April. Manon of the Spring( Manon des sources , Marcel Pagnol,

1952)12 April.The Scream ( Il grido, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1957)13 April.The Big Sky (Howard Hawks, 1952)

14 April. Angel Face (Otto Preminger, 1952)15 April.Lola Montes (Max Ophuls, 1955)16 April.Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 1933)17 April.While the City Sleeps (Fritz Lang, 1956)17 April.Bitter Victory (Nicholas Ray, 1957)18 April.Limelight (Charles Chaplin, 1952)19 April.Utamaro and the Five Women( Utamaro o meguru gonin no

onna , Kenji Mizoguchi, 1946)19 April.Towards Happiness( Till Gladje , Ingmar Bergman, 1950)20 April.The Quiet American (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1958)22 April.The Fighter and the Clown( Borets i kloun , Boris Barnet,

1957)23 April. A Time For Dying (Budd Boetticher, 1969)

23 April.Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953)25 April. Moi, un noir (Jean Rouch, 1958)26 April.La Tête contre les murs (Georges Franju, 1959)26 April.The Passion of Jean of Arch( La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc ,

Carl Th. Dreyer, 1928)28 April.The Nightwatch( Le Trou , Jacques Becker, 1960)29 April.The Testament of Orpheus( Le Testament d’Orphée , Jean

Cocteau, 1960)30 April.La Pointe-courte (Agnès Varda, 1955)

May, 1981

1 May.Le Bel age (Pierre Kast, 1960)

2 May.Paris Belongs to Us( Paris nous appartient , JacquesRivette, 1961)

2 May.L’Eau à la bouche (Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, 1960)

3 May.Tirez sur le pianiste (François Truffaut, 1960)3 May.Le signe du lion (Eric Rohmer, 1959)4 May.Ofelia ( Ophélia , Claude Chabrol, 1963)5 May. Muriel ( Muriel ou le temps d’un retour , Alain Resnais,

1963)6 May. Adieu Philippine (Jacques Rozier, 1962)7 May.Lola (Jacques Demy, 1961)8 May. A Woman is a Woman( Une femme est une femme , Jean-

Luc Godard, 1961)9 May. Not Reconciled( Nicht versöhnt oder Es hilft nur Gewalt

wo Gewalt herrscht , Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet,1965)

9 May.Le père Noël a les yeux bleus (Jean Eustache, 1969)

10 May.The Young one (Luis Buñuel, 1960)10 May.The Barrier( Bariera , Jerzy Skolimowski, 1966)11 May.Hawks and Sparrows( Uccellacci e uccellini , Pier Paolo

Pasolini, 1966)12 May.La Concentration (Philippe Garrel, 1968)13 May.Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)14 May.The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis, 1961)15 May.The Grim Reaper( La commare secca , Bernardo

Bertolucci, 1961)16 May.Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939)16 May.Sotto il segno dello scorpione (Vittorio Taviani and

Paolo Taviani, 1969)17 May.Ice (Robert Kramer, 1970)

17 May.Wind from the East( Vent d’Es t, Jean-Luc Godard,1970)18 May. Enthusiasm( Entuziazm: Simfoniya Donbassa , Dziga

Vertov, 1930)18 May.The Old and the New( Staroye i novoye , Sergei M.

Eisenstein, 1929)19 May.Safrana ou Le Droit à la parole (Sydney Sokhona,

1978)19 May. Anatomie d’un rapport (Luc Mollet, 1975)20 May . Détruire, dit elle (Marguerite Duras, 1969)20 May.The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting &Dogs’ Dialogue

( L’Hypothèse du tableau volé &Dialogue de chiens , Raoul Ruiz,1979 & 1977)



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List of best lms of the 1970s according toCahiers ducinéma (nº 308, February, 1980):

1. Numéro deux (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville,1975)

2. Milestones (Robert Kramer & John Douglas, 1975)3.Tristana (Luis Buñuel, 1970)4.Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971)5. Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble (Maurice Pialat, 1972)6.Des journées entières dans les arbres (Marguerite Duras, 1976)7.Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975)8.Professione: Reporter (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975)9.Hitler - ein Film aus Deutschland (Hans-Jürgen Syberberg,

1977)10.Deux fois (Jackie Raynal, 1968)11.Dodeskaden (Akira Kurosawa, 1970)12.Ici et ailleurs (Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Anne-

Marie Miéville, 1976)

13.The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (Paul Newman, 1972)14.Femmes femmes (Paul Vecchiali, 1974)15.Tra c (Jacques Tati, 1971)16.Film About a Woman Who… (Yvonne Rainer, 1974)17. Anatomie d’un rapport(Luc Moullet, Antonietta Pizzorno,

1976)18.Dalla nube alla reistenza (Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle

Huillet, 1979)19.Geschichtsunterricht (Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet,

1972)20.Out 1: Spectre (Jacques Rivette, 1974)21. Quatre nuits d’un rêveur (Robert Bresson, 1971)

22. Amarcord (Federico Fellini, 1973)23.La Maman et la putain (Jean Eustache, 1973)24.Cet obscur objet du désir (Luis Buñuel, 1977)25.Hindered (Stephen Dwoskin, 1974)26.Parade (Jacques Tati, 1974)27.L’ultima donna (Marco Ferreri, 1976)28. Nationalité immigré (Sidney Sokhona, 1975)29.The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes, 1976)30.Händler der vier Jahreszeiten (Rainer Werner Fassbinder,

1971)31.Le Théâtre des matières (Jean-Claude Biette, 1977)32.Six fois deux/Sur et sous la communication (Jean-Luc Godard,

Anne-Marie Miéville, 1976)

33.Im Lauf der Zeit (Wim Wenders, 1976)34.L’innocente (Luchino Visconti, 1976)35. Avanti! (Billy Wilder, 1972)36.Husbands (John Cassavetes, 1970)37. Einleitung zu Arnold Schoenbergs Begleitmusik zu einer

Lichtspielscene (Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, 1973)38. Eugénie de Franval (Louis Skorecki, 1974)39. Nathalie Granger (Marguerite Duras, 1972)40. Amor de Perdição (Manoel de Oliveira, 1979)41.Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972)42.Les Intrigues de Sylvia Couski (Adolfo Arrieta, 1974)43.Petit à petit (Jean Rouch, 1970)44.Video 50 (Robert Wilson, 1978)45.Chromaticité I (Patrice Kirchhofer, 1977)46.Coatti (Stavros Tornes, 1977)47.Déjeuner du matin (Patrick Bokanowski, 1974)48. Je, tu, il, elle (Chantal Akerman, 1976)49. Morte a Venezia (Luchino Visconti, 1971)

50.Czlowiek z marmuru (Andrzej Wajda, 1977)51.La Marquise d’O (Éric Rohmer, 1976)52.Perceval le Gallois (Éric Rohmer, 1978)53. Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973)54.Le Diable, probablement (Robert Bresson, 1977)55.Ludwig - Requiem für einen jungfräulichen König (Hans-Jürgen

Syberberg, 1972)56. Moses und Aron (Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet,

1975)57.Shonen (Nagisa Ôshima, 1969)58. New York, New York (Martin Scorsese, 1977)59.India Song (Marguerite Duras, 1975)60. Ai-no corrida (Nagisa Ôshima, 1976)

61.Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (Luchino Visconti, 1974)62.Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)63.L’Hypothèse du tableau volé (Raoul Ruiz, 1979)64.La Région centrale (Michael Snow, 1971)65. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Martin Scorsese, 1974)66.Fortini/Cani (Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, 1976)67.Le avventure di Pinocchio (Luigi Comencini, 1972)68.Sinai Field Mission (Frederick Wiseman, 1978)69. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)70. Alice in den Städten (Wim Wenders, 1974)71.Lancelot du lac (Robert Bresson, 1974)72. Monsieur Klein (Joseph Losey, 1976)

FERNANDO GANZO


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ALBERA, FRANÇOIS (1978). Eisenstein et la question graphique .Cahiers du cinéma , nº 295, December, pp. 10-16.

AUMONT, J ACQUES (1971).S.M. Eisenstein : “Le malvoltairien” . Cahiers du cinéma , nº 226/227, January-February, pp. 46-56.

AUMONT, J ACQUES (1970).S. M. Eisenstein : sur la questiond’une approche matérialiste de la forme . Cahiers du cinéma , nº220-221. Numéro spétial, Russie, années vingt , May-June,pp. 32-37.

AUMONT, J ACQUES (1971).Wie sag’ich’s meinem Kind ? .Cahiers du cinéma , nº 226/227, January-February, p. 74.

BADAL, JEAN (1968).La cathédrale de verre . Cahiers ducinéma , nº 199, March, pp. 28-29.

BAZIN, ANDRÉ (1955). Agnès et Roberto. Cahiers du cinéma ,nº 50, August-September, p. 36.BAZIN, ANDRÉ (1984).Le Cinéma français de l’occupation à la

Nouvelle Vague . Paris. Cahiers du Cinéma/ Éditions del’Étoile.

BONITZER, P ASCAL (1976).Les machines e(x)tatiques .Cahiers du cinéma , nº 271, November, pp. 22-25.

BURCH, NOËL (1968). Notes sur la forme chez Tati . Cahiersdu cinéma , nº 199, March, pp. 26-27.

COMOLLI, JEAN-LOUIS (1966).Dé-composition . Cahiers ducinéma , nº 182, September, pp. 16-20.

DELEUZE, GILLES (1976).Trois questions sur Six fois deux.Cahiers du cinéma , nº 271, November, pp. 5-12.

DURAS, M ARGUERITE (1965).Les Eaux et Forêts-le Square- La Música . Paris, Gallimard.

EISENSCHITZ, BERNARD (1970).Le Proletkult, Eisenstein .Cahiers du cinéma , nº 220-221. Numéro spétial, Russie,années vingt , May-June, pp. 38-45.

EISENSCHITZ, BERNARD andNARBONI, JEAN (1985). Ernst Lubitsch . Paris. Cahiers du Cinéma/CinémathèqueFrançaise.

EISENSTEIN, SERGUEI M. (1969). Ecrits d’Eisenstein (2) :“Eh !” De la pureté du langage cinématographique . Cahiers ducinéma , nº 210, March, pp. 6-15.

EISENSTEIN, SERGUEI M. (1969). Ecrits d’Eisenstein (3): La non-indifférente nature (1) : de la structure des choses .Cahiers du cinéma , nº 211, April, pp. 12-17.

EISENSTEIN, SERGUEI M. (1969). Ecrits d’Eisenstein (4) : La non-indifférente nature (2) : encore une fois de la nature deschoses . Cahiers du cinéma , nº 213, June, pp. 36-43.

EISENSTEIN, SERGUEI M. (1969). Ecrits d’Eisenstein (5): La non-indifférente nature (3). Cahiers du cinéma , nº 214, July-August, pp. 14-21.

EISENSTEIN, SERGUEI M. (1969). Ecrits d’Eisenstein (6).Cahiers du cinéma , nº 215, September, pp. 20-29.

EISENSTEIN, SERGUEI M. (1969). Ecrits d’Eisenstein (7): La non indifférente nature (3) : la musique du paysage et ledevenir du contrepoint du mon . Cahiers du cinéma , nº 216,October, pp. 16-23.

EISENSTEIN, SERGUEI M. (1969). Ecrits d’Eisenstein (8) :La musique du paysage (suite) : la nouvelle étape du contrepdu montage . Cahiers du cinéma , nº 217, November, pp.14-23.

EISENSTEIN, SERGUEI M. (1970). Ecrits d’Eisenstein (9) :La non-indifférente nature (suite et n). Cahiers du cinéma , nº218, March, pp. 7-14.

EISENSTEIN, SERGUEI M. (1970), Ecrits d’Eisenstein (10): la non-indifférente nature . Cahiers du cinéma , nº 219, April,pp. 4-15.

EISENSTEIN, SERGUEI M. (1970), Ecrits d’Eisenstein (12) :Programme d’enseignement de la théorie et de la technique dréalisation . Cahiers du cinéma , nº 222, July, pp. 7-11.

EISENSTEIN, SERGUEI M. (1970), Ecrits d’Eisenstein (13): Programme d’enseignement de la théorie et de la techniquede la réalisation (2). Cahiers du cinéma , nº 223, August-September, pp. 58-61.

EISENSTEIN, SERGUEI M. (1970), Ecrits d’Eisenstein (14): Programme d’enseignement de la théorie et de la techniquela réalisation ( n). Cahiers du cinéma , nº 224, October, pp.52-56.

EISENSTEIN, SERGUEI M. (1970), Ecrits d’Eisenstein(15) : L’art de la mise en scène . Cahiers du cinéma , nº 225,November, pp. 28-42.

EISENSTEIN, SERGUEI M. (1969),Pauvre Salieri (en guised’envoi). Cahiers du cinéma , nº 209, February, pp. 20-21.

EISENSTEIN, SERGUEI M. (1969),Perspectives . Cahiers ducinéma , nº 209, February, pp. 22-29.

EISENSTEIN, SERGUEI M. (1971).Problèmes de la composition .

Cahiers du cinéma , nº 226/227, January-February, p. 74.EISENSTEIN, SERGUEI M. (1971).Rejoindre et dépasser .

Cahiers du cinéma , nº 226/227, January-February, p. 90-94.EISENSTEIN, SERGUEI M. (1971).S.M. Eisenstein : de la

Révolution à l’art, de l’art à la Révolution . Cahiers du cinéma ,nº 226/227, January-February, p. 18.

EISENSTEIN, SERGUEI M. (1971).S.M. Eisenstein : lavision en gros plan . Cahiers du cinéma , nº 226/227, January-February, pp. 14-15.

FIESCHI, JEAN-ANDRÉ (1968).Le carrefour Tati . Cahiers ducinéma , nº 199, March, pp. 24-26.

BIBLIOGRAPHY



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FIESCHI, JEAN-ANDRÉ Y NARBONI, JEAN (1968).Lechamp large. Entretien avec Jacques Tati . Cahiers du cinéma , nº199, March, pp. 6-21.

GODARD, JEAN-LUC (1979).Les cinémathèques et l’histoiredu cinéma . BRENEZ, Nicole (Ed.),Documents (pp. 286-291), Paris: Éditions du Centre Georges Pompidou.

IVANOV, V IATCHESLAV (1970). Eisenstein et la linguistiquestructurale moderne . Cahiers du cinéma , nº 220-221. Numérospétial, Russie, années vingt , May-June, pp. 47-50.

LANGLOIS, HENRI (1986).Trois cent ans de cinéma .Paris. Cahiers du cinéma/ Cinémathèque Française/Fondation Européene des Métiers de l’Image et du son.

MOULLET, LUC (1961). Que vaisselle soit faite . Cahiers ducinéma , nº 123, September, pp. 55-58.

NARBONI, JEAN andRIVETTE, J ACQUES (1969).Ladestruction, la parole. Entretien avec Marguerite Dur as.Cahiersdu cinéma , nº 217, November, pp. 45-57.

NARBONI, JEAN (1966).La preuve par huit . Cahiers ducinéma , nº 182, September, pp. 20-25.

NARBONI, JEAN (1976).Le hors-cadre décide de tout . Cahiersdu cinéma , nº 271, November, pp. 14-21.

ROHMER, ÉRIC (1984).Le Goût de la beauté . Paris. Cahiersdu cinéma/Éditions de l’Étoile. V.V.A.A. (1968). Numéro spétial, Jerry Lewis . Paris. Cahiers

du cinéma. V.V.A.A. (1970). Numéro spétial, Russie, années vingt . Paris.

Cahiers du cinéma. V.V.A.A. (1965). Numéro spétial, Sacha Guitry et Marcel

Pagnol . Paris. Cahiers du cinéma. V.V.A.A. (1970).Young Mr. Lincoln de John Ford . Cahiers du

cinéma , nº 223, August, 1970, pp. 29-47.

Fernando Ganzo studied Journalism at the Universi-dad del País Vasco, and is currently a doctoral candidate atthe Department of Information and Social Sciences at thesame university, where he has also taught at the PaintingDepartment of the Fine Art School. He is co-editor of the

journalLumière and contributes toTra c , he has taken partin research groups of other institutions, such as Cinema andDemocracy and the Foundation Bakeaz. He also holds an

MA in History and Aesthetics of Cinema from the Univer-sidad de Valladolid. He has programmed avant-garde lmprogrammes at the Filmoteca de Cantabria. He is currentlyundertaking research on Alain Resnais, Sam Peckinpah, andthe isolation of characters via the mise en scene.

[email protected]

FERNANDO GANZO

FERNANDO GANZO


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What I nd most striking about Jean-LucGodard’s 1979 lecture at the Cinémathèque Suissede Lausanne1, Switzerland on lm programming,is not only his focus on the comparison between

images but the images he compares. The interestresides in juxtaposing, as he puts it, an image ofan immortal work of the history of cinema withanother image of a less well-known lm, perhapseven a lm that Godard has not even seen himself. Why this relationship in particular? Godard wantedto continue André Bazin’s enquiry on the question‘What is cinema?’. How so? By making all the well-codi ed structures of cinema explode and, fromthe resulting elements, from those atomes, nding

all the possibilities of cinema.In a certain way, Jean-Luc Godard is someone

who can only create by destroying, or ‘de-structuring’, if you like. His enquiry departs from well formed elements, belonging to the greatestlms as well as the the tiniest nullities. He was asinterested in the construction of a shot or araccord in Serguéi Eisenstein or Dziga Vertov – two lm-makers that obsessed him – as in the professionalabilities of a bad lm-maker. Why bringing togethertwo absurd shots? Simply because why shouldn’t we get something out of them? Certain things areso bad that they can give place to something else.

Godard’s strength is to have taken apartthe whole cinematographic system and, inparticular – in spirit, mind and, nally, in acts – theconstitution of cinema itself: to take cinema as anoptical and photographic device, which registerschanges in light on a strip of lm. ConsiderThe

Little Soldier ( Le Petit soldat , Jean-Luc Godard,1963): photography is truth; lm, truth 24-timesper second. Film is celluloid – it is onto a strip

of lm that those 24 images per second arephotographed. Once set in motion by a motor,the still images will generate another movement,that is, the illusion of movement. But the lm

itself is composed of 24 still images per second,each of them separated from the previous andthe next one by a small barrier, a small band. Suchobservation brings Godard to state that montageis the most fundamental element within the wholecinematographic apparatus; it is the nucleus of theconstitution of cinema itself. Cinema is not aboutcontinuity, or the illusion created by the mechanicalconstruction of a continuous movement; it is thesuccession of discontinuous moments and instants

that creates cinema. This concept radically changes the whole

conception of cinema. It’s not that it hadn’t beenthought of before. From D. W. Grif th to Sovietlm-makers, many had previously thought aboutthis question before Godard. But they didn’t comeup with a concrete idea on what to do with thisknowledge. How to arrive to a purely physicalphenomenon, how to work with the physicalityof cinema – how to work on the physical throughphysics. If Godard is such an important gure, itis because he was the rst lm-maker to becomeaware of his own time: the twentieth-century.Other art forms had previously acquired thatconsciousness. Painting, literature, even music, hadrapidly taken on board the theories of modernscienti c knowledge. Film, on the other hand,perpetuated what it had learned over the lastyears of the previous century. Its conception ofcontinuity, dramaturgy, narrative, etc. all come

from the nineteenth-century. To remain obliviousto the fact that cinema belonged to the same ageas the theory of relativity and quantum physics

1. This lecture stemmed out from the invitation that FreddyBuache extended to Jean-Luc Godard to participate in adebate held at the Cinémathèque Suisse, alongside Buachehimself, Ivor Montagu and Jean Mitry. The subject thatGodard was asked to address was the relationship betweenthe work being done by the Cinémathèques and Godard’sown conception of the formalmise en sceène of the history of

cinema. This symposium took place at the end of the AnnualCongress of the Fédération Internationale des Archives du

Film (FIAF), held from 30 May until 1 June 1979 at theCinémathèque Suisse de Lausanne on the occasion of theanniversary of the congress at La Sarranz in 1929. Shortlyafter, the Cinémathèque Suisse published a transcription ofthe lecture – unsigned and interrupted before its conclusion – in its magazine Travelling (Laussane), nº 56-57, 1980, pp.119-136. However, the version of the transcription that I

refer to is the one quoted in the bibliography below.

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was to make a huge mistake on what we could do with cinema and what cinema could contribute tothe twentieth century. From that point onwards,cinema will only work with discontinuity and

permanent rupture. Through montage, and underthis directing principle, all the elements of cinemabegin to play a role in his work.

Since continuity does no longer exist, therecan no longer be a dominant discourse. Just asin quantum physics, all the elements becomedisperse, and no idea of perseverance ensues,but rather the idea of the lack thereof. Whatemerges is the consciousness of a world that no

longer has a single line. It is necessary to work ondiverse and diverging lines. This is precisely whatGodard has done, on the basis of cinema itself ashe understands it, that is, of montage. The rstline is the image band; the second, the words; thethird, sounds and noise; the fourth, the music, etc. When these are constant lines, they progress atthe same time and they develop in a parallel andsynchronised manner; however, after realising thatthese are separate lines, there is no reason – andthis is another theory, what we could call ‘theperseverance theory’ – why sound should be usedto qualify the image, as it had been the case for solong.

Hence a new conception of cinema is born,one that can only understand the relationshipamongst these lines as one of independence: eachline has its freedom and is considered on equalterms in relation to the others. We may ‘play’ withthem, allow one to suddenly dominate the other

one... Multiple facets that prevent a progressiveconstruction. Evolution no longer exists, onlythe fractioning of a series of instants. Not eveninstants: the relativity of time and space can alsobe contested. Godard said: ‘I am not an artist, itis the Centre national de la recherche scienti que(National Centre of Scienti c Research) thatshould pay me.’ Godard is a scientist. He is anartist, certainly, but a fabulous artist who appliesthe current situation of science to an instrument,

cinema, more propitious to his eyes than any otherto be fully modern.

To a great extent, this shift in mentality placesall previous cinema in a bubble. Even if classicalcinema continued and perpetuated the nineteenth-century – and hence its power since it enabled the

development, from a passed century, of a numberof things that hadn’t had the opportunity to be yetdeveloped – when looking at classical cinema undera new lens, that is, modern science, one cannot work with it in the same way. And yet, cinema wasitself the bearer of its fundamental truth – those24 elements per second.

Cinema, or the way of conceiving of cinema,radically changed from this point onwards and, even

after Godard, it will continue to change. No onecan dare to do what Godard does – he is unique –but one may talk about an expansive wave. Even ifonly at the level of the research on space and time,it is unstoppable. Cinema works in an identical andpermanent space – a frame, a canvas with a certainformat that remains unchanged from the rst tothe last image that in it acquires a form. But it isan identical being without continuity. An aleatorydistribution that doesn’t bear bene ts, but spells.Hence its interest and its potential.

Given the exploitation of a completelyfragmented world, one can no longer makeclassical cinema or see it in the same way, and oneends up by putting everything into an envelope.It may still be admired, just as the Parthenon orDiego Velázquez’s paintings may still be admired. There is no reason to stop doing so. But suchperfect works were perfect in relation to theirown time, they have expressed their era and are

linked to the philosophical and scienti c thoughtof their own time, but they do not correspondto the present. Today we must break away fromthem. But in fact we are going even further. Weare breaking with the acquired conception of theuniverse at large, and contesting civilisation itself.Godard is a great lm-maker of the decadence.For him, one civilisation died, and another oneneeds to be born. And this new civilisationmust feed itself from the preceding one, but

without reproducing it: it must transform it intosomething else.


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Godard is not wrong about the journals in hislecture either2. Film criticism has not even tried todo that job, satis ed as it is to work on the ‘I likeit/I don’t’ dichotomy, which never had any interest

at all. Even when confronted to classical cinema,there were many few of us who worked on reallythinking through that cinema. At that time, there was a criticism: at a small-scale, the task was done.But very few critics may rise at the occasion of the work that this would require now, of the re ectionthat it would require. This is what Godard himself

says. Given its basic de-structuring, today cinemais reduced to an image, and not only a successionof images – since this is still the case – but to aconfrontation of images, both visual and aural.

What will his 3-D work, Adieu au langage (Jean-Luc Godard,Farewell to Laguage , 2013)? If thesense of smell existed in cinema, Godard wouldhave used it. To explote the dialogue amongst theplots of cinema. Image’s nature is under constanttransformation. An image that doesn’t bear initself another image is only an image, alone.●

2. I quote below some excerpts from the lecture, not compiledaccording to a chronological order but to my own ‘montage’, hopingthat the words brought here together acquire a new meaning: ‘Forme, the history of cinema will be the history of two conspiracies. The rst one: the conspiracy of the talkie against silent lm, sincethe birth of the latter. Second conspiracy: the words, that couldhave helped silent lm to... A plot against the fact that no history will be written... we will nd a means of preventing history to betold – otherwise it would be too powerful, also, since when one

learns to tell one’s own history, then, there is... I don’t know... the world changes! And I ask myself whether people working at the

Cinematheques are at all interested in asking..., if there are otherpeople who are also concerned with this aspect, the aspect of lmproduction related to its conservation. Conservations, well, thingsare more or less conserved, but what is the interest in conservingimpeccably since we see that, after all, what is it that is conserved? An image! What is interesting is to conserve the relationshipbetween two images. It is not so important to conserve a lm,as long as we conserve three stills of a lm by Vertov and threestills of a lm by Eisenstein, we would know what happened: that

would be the role of magazines.’

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GODARD, JEAN-LUC (1979).Les cinémathèques et l’histoire ducinéma . BRENEZ, Nicole (ed.),Documents (pp. 286-291),Paris. Éditions du Centre Georges Pompidou.

Jean Douchet studied Philosophy at the Sorbonne inParis, where he specialised in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, GastonBachelard, Daniel Lagache and Étienne Souriau. He is a lmcritic and historian and has been a professor at the Universitéde Vincennes since 1969. Later, he also taught at the Universitéde Jussieu and Université de Nantes. Between 1976 and 79 he was Director of Studies at the Institute des Hautes ÉtudesCinématographiques (IDHEC), a professor of lm history,script and lm analysis at La Femis (École National Supérieuredes Métiers de l’Image et du Son) and former Presdient of the

Collège d’Histoire de l’Art Cinématographique, all in Paris. In1957 he begins to write forCahiers du cinéma and the magazine Art (until 1962). Amongst many other books, he has published Alfred Hitchcock ( Cahiers du cinéma , 1967),L’Art d’aimer ( Cahiersdu cinéma , 1987),Gertrud de Carl Th. Dreyer (Yellow Now, 1988),La Modernité cinématographique en question. Le Cinéma mueannées parlantes (Cinémathèque Française, 1992), Nouvelle vague (Cinémathèque Française/Hazan, 1998) andLa DVDéothèquede Jean Douchet (Cahiers du cinéma, 2006).

JEAN DOUCHET

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Russian Film Archives and Roy Batty’sSyndrome: On the Three Programming Criteriafor ‘Ver sin Vertov’Carlos Muguiro

ABSTRACT

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the death of Dziga Vertov, in 2005–06 La Casa Encendida in Madrid program“Ver sin Vertov”, a retrospective season on non- ction lm in Russia and the USSR since Vertov’s death until the present

time. In this essay the lm programmer re ects on the three programming criteria for that season. Firstly, he was interested inapplying an negative methodology on the history of Russian and Soviet cinema, as it had previously been suggested by Kleijman and used in the programme “Lignes d’ombre” that took place at the Locarno Festival in 2000. Secondly, the prmme aimed to re ect the need to physically locate the experience of the spectator, conceicing of the screening as a lm-event And thirdly, the programme seeked to foreground the questions and paradoxes presented by the works themselves, takthem as models or arguments for the programme itself. Taking as a point of departure the particular circumstances of Verdeath – 37 years after the October Revolution; 37 years before the fall of the USSR in 1991 – this programme performhistorical and biographical reading of Dziga Vertov’sTheory of the Cinematographic Interval , and was an invitation to understandprogramming as an exercise in montage.

KEYWORDS

Dziga Vertov, Russia, Soviet Union, non- ction, negative methodology, lm-event, place, space.

ARTICLES · Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. I · No. 1. · 2012 · 50-54

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lms in the USSR were not destroyed. Not eventhose that had been ercely criticised. (…) Aninteresting phenomenon was at play, linked toour national psychology and perhaps also to the

particular nature of our lm-makers. They wereall aware that the situation could change any givenday. And so just in case, one had to conserveeverything.’ (EISENSCHITZ, 2000: 188).

It is not surprising then that Kleijman wasone of the people behind the rst project that,to my knowledge, dared to manifestly propose ajourney through Soviet Russian cinema based onabsence1: the 2000 Locarno Festival, then directed

by Marco Müller, reconstructed the territory of theunsaid, censored, silenced or mutilated in SovietRussian cinema in the period 1926–68. Curatedby Bernard Eisenschitz, the ensuing retrospective,‘Lignes d’ombre: Une autre histoire du cinémasoviétique’ (‘Shadow Lines: Another Historyof Soviet Cinema’), not only discovered non-canonical lm-makers such as Vladimir Vengerovor Mikhail Schveitser – Eiseinstein’s rst pupilsat the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography(VGIK) – but also shed a new light on the onesthat already occupied a central position in theSoviet pantheon. In contrast to the stereotypesthat had casted a stereotypical image of SovietRussian cinema, organised according to historicaland political periods,Lignes d’ombre took down thetrompe l’oeils and painted backdrops of traditionalhistoriography and, behind the scenographicmachinery, opened the doors to the immensityof an unreachable horizon.

3 Anyone who had methodically followed theretrospective in Locarno would have easily reachedtwo conclusions. The rst one, can be summed up

borrowing Nikolái Berdiayev’s words, accordingto whom, also in the cinema, ‘Russians ignorethe pleasure of form’. [please give a source] Withthe rede nition of its borders brought forth in

‘Lignes d’ombres’, Russian cinema seemed togo beyond the controllable limits of knowledge,becoming a veritable lmic atopia. In the lastinstance, the imaginary geography of the lmicterritory – expansive and unde nable – couldonly be compared to the real territory, that is, tothe mythical, unending Russian space: a formlesscinematographic prostor , or horizonless space. Tocome back from that non-space, symbolicallyrepresented by the Gos lmofond archives – the

largest lm collection in the world, containingover 60,000 titles – produces an agonic anxietythat we could denominate ‘syndrome of RoyBatty’, after the replicant fromBlade Runner (RidleyScott, 1982), veritable astonished spectator whoclaimed to ‘have seen things you people wouldn’tbelieve’. And he fairly died evoking the list ofsuch incomparable visions: ‘I’ve seen things youpeople wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on reoff the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beamsglitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.’ Without a doubt, Roy Batty’s syndrome threatensanyone who dares to penetrate the galleries ofGos lmofond.

The second of the conclusions ofLignesd’ombre ensues from such atopian immensity:more than in any other cinematography, or at leastin a way more palpable than in any other, [could we cut this out? It doesn´t seem to work in thissentence and it is repeated more or less below]each screening laid bare the geographic and spatialdimension that is co-substantial to any act of notonly making, but also viewing lms. Perhaps due


RUSSIAN FILM ARCHIVES AND ROY BATTY’S SYNDROME: ON THE THREE PROGRAMMING CRITERIA FOR ‘VER SIN VERTOV’

1. In Russian cinema there are notable examples of unexistentlms (and thus invisible lms), which nevertheless have hada ghostly presence, even more signi cant than that of otherclassical lms that are regularly screened. For isntance, in 2012 we have celebrated the 75th aniversary of a fundamental lm, which was however only ever seen by its director and censors.

A lm that, judging from the conclusions of the researchers, noone will ever see again. I am refering toBezhin Meadow ( Bezhin Lug .

Sergei Eisenstein, 1937). The lm was harshly criticised by theSoviet authorities, in particular by Boris Shumyatsky, director ofthe GUFK, who considered that instead of being based on theclass stuggle, the lm was based on the battle between naturalforces, in the battle between ‘Good and Evil’. The lm was nevershown and its negative and copies were destroyed during the II

World War. Basedon this model, it doesn’t seem unreasonable toimagine a big lm retrospective without any lms to screen.

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to the impossibility of inhabiting this space forreal, due to the real in nity of the lmic Russian prostor , or space, each screening de ned a place,provided a provisional shelter, a fragile territory

rescued from immensity: for the duration of thescreening, each session made real the space of thespectator, held the power to create a home– justas each of the hills from which nomads stop to watch and, for an instant, found a place. Only theabsolute atopia of Russian cinema could makeso strikingly palpable the topographic experiencethat each screening signi es. Alongside Klejman’snegative method, this is the second programmingcriteria that I extracted from ‘Lignes d’ombre’.

4 In his recent essayZona , Geoff Dyer suggests ameta-cinematographic reading ofStalker (Andréi Tarkovski, 1979) that abounds in the geographicparadox that I have just described. Dyer proposesto see Tarkovski’s lm as the history of a journeytowards a dark room, the place of the promise, where vision is indissolubly united to a particularplace. At the very heart of that muddy maze, theexperience of vision is associated to the place where contemplation occurs, to the soil whereone’s feet stop: the Zone is, in this context, thesite of vision. Just as the rst cinema spectatorsof the Cinémathèque Française atrue Messinehad to walk across the corridors avoiding themany lm objects accumulated by Langlois untilnally arriving to the projection room – open asa natural concavity at the heart of the building – so did the three characters inStalker approach Tarkovski’s Zone: not to dominate it with oldsettlers or conquerers, but to deserve it, as newbelievers.

Such a close link between site and vision will may come across as slightly exotic, or purelyanachronic, today. In the panoptic universe that weinhabit everything has been made not only visiblebut also globally traceable – I have heard on someoccasion that it is no longer important to haveseen a lm, but to know where to nd it on thenet. Paradoxically, however, the experience of thespectator has become progressively delocalised, to

the point that it is no longer related to a particularplace. Now cinema, or the art of the present, asSerge Daney once wrote, is also the art ofmaking present or, perhaps better, ofmaking oneself present ,

of being a presence. Here we have to agree withDyer: not many lms are as capable asStalker toclearly establish the relationship between a visionand the place where the image is presented – infact, where it is made present. In contrast to anabsolutely delocalised image, as it is experiencedin the no-space of the internet,Stalker ’s task is torelocate cinema, that is, in making it happen inone place, ina dark room , insofar as the memoryconstructed by the lm is founded in a similar

topographic exercise and conceived as a personaland collective transit: ‘But watching a lm likeStalker ’, argues Dyer recalling his rst encounter with Tarkovski’s work, ‘always happened in veryprecise locations and times. For me, those littlecinemas in Paris where I saw many art lms forthe rst time meant that cinema became a kind ofpilgrimage site.’ (JELLY-SCHAPIRO, 2012: 3).

Following on from Dyer’s words, it is notdif cult to imagine Müller, Eisenschitz andKlejman penetrating the zone of Russian cinemain search of those invisible images that ‘no one would believe’. Eisenschitz theWriter , KlejmanthePhilosopher and Müller, of course, the authenticStalker .

5 Together with a negative aesthetics and theneed to physically relocate the spectator’s gaze(the lm-event), the third principle behind ‘Ver

sin Vertov’ corresponds to the need that, oncertain occasions, cinema generates of itself. I will conclude with a brief description thereof.

When Dziga Vertov announced his theory ofthe intervals, as it appears in the textUs: Variantof a Manifest , published in 1919, not only was headvancing a way of thinking montage based onthe distance between two shots or the movementbetween two images. He was also marking theplace where he would die. Vertov passed awayon 12 February 1954, that is, 37 years after the

CARLOS MUGUIRO


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Discrete Monuments of an Innite Film

Celeste Araújo

ABSTRACT

Taking as a point of departure the suspicion that the history of lm can only be written through lm itself, Ricardo MatosCabo brings together heterogeneous lmic materials and disposes them in such a way that the relationships amongst thememerges organically: it is a task that has at its centre the matter projected by lms themselves. In this way, the cross-dissolvthat takes place during a screening – since in the cinema images are shown one after the other, rather than one next toother – is not of a visible order, but rather operates in an intangible manner, producing correlations between images sounds, through which lm speaks about itself. This essay aims to give an account of some of the analogies produced betwee

the lms selected by the Portugese curator in different contexts: ‘To See: Listening, the Experience of Sound in the Cinema(Culturgest, 2009), ‘Histories of Film by Film Itself’ (Culturgest, 2008) or ‘Residues’ (Portuguese Cinematheque, 20speak about the histories that these programmes project is, to a certain extent, to trace paths across the different points ofin nite lm of which Hollis Frampton speaks.

KEYWORDS

Film history, in nite lm, projection, programming, programmer- passeur , discrete monuments, analogies, invisible cross-dissolve, lm-factory .


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Constituted of all the lms ever made,including ‘pedagogical and amateur lms,endoscopic cinematography and many morethings’ (FRAMPTON, 2007: 26-27), the history

of cinema is an unknown territory. Given that‘one can’t see all the lms at the same time andat the same cinema’ (KLUGE, 2010, 304), thatsort of in nite lm that ‘contains an in nity ofendless passages of which not a single photogramresembles any other in the slightest, and anin nity of passages whose photograms are evenmore identical than what we would imagine’(FRAMPTON, 2007: 26-27) can only be partiallysketched in each screening, in the unexpected

relationships established between the lms, theirimages and their sounds. The history of cinema,then, coincides with the particular history ofeach of its screenings: the places where cinematells and writes itself.

One wouldn’t need much more to glimpsethat narration, a projector in a room wouldsuf ce to see some of the ‘geological layers, ofcultural landslides’ (GODARD, 1980: 25) thatremain invisible amongst its matter. One wouldalso have to select a few lms to show themunder the light of the projector – a medium of vision and analysis that allows to make out thesehidden geographies. Such a task would requirea discretion, a waning, of the person carryingout, so as to give priority to the matter thatthe cinema itself projects. In this way, those who bring together lms and align them to beprojected onto a screen are a sort of passeurs (touse Serge Daney’s expression), middlemen of

that historical tale, whose screenings con gureitineraries crossing different points of thein nite lm of which Hollis Frampton talks. Amongstthese screenings, there are many programmedby Ricardo Matos Cabo in different venues.In this article, we will revise some of themin order to discern the ‘discrete monuments’(FRAMPTON, 2007: 27) that they project.

Although lms are autonomous, as Leibniz’smonads, and there exist abysms between them1, when projected across the beam of light of theproject – a machine of analogies – they produce

resonances, invisible elements that are generated when lms are aligned one after the other. Let’sconsider some of the correspondences created,for instance, when watching What the WaterSaid, nº 4-6 (David Gatten, 2007) followed by Le Tempestaire (Jean Epstein, 1947) andLooking atthe Sea (Peter Hutton, 2000–01), a screening thatRicardo Matos Cabo organised as part of theprogramme ‘To See: Listening, the Experienceof Sound in Film’ (Culturgest, Lisbon, 2009).

The three lms use very different strategies toevoke the sea and make of it a tru protagonist, while at the same time attempting to account forthe relationships of sound and image in lm. Attempting to speak of the analogies betweenthese three lms necessarily implies to situateoneself in the place con gured by their projection:an unnamable space, full of epiphanies, where toappear is also to subtract.

As if in a magic trick or exchange, at the endof Epstein’s Le Tempestaire, the sea, which hasbeen present throughout the whole lm, appearsimmersed at the interior of a crystal ball. Spurredon by a woman’s concern while waiting for hersherman boyfriend’s return on a stormy day,an old man, known in the shermen’s village asthe ‘master of the storms’, manages to lock upthe swell in an spherical object and to ease the wind and the waves with a sigh. The magni centimages boiling inside this crystal ball have the

ability to reveal cinema itself, its magical capacityto fall back movement. In a way, the maritime bad weather was already in the making in What the Water Said, whose images and sounds, ensuingfrom the action of the ocean in the lm strip,also reveal cinema itself, the different layers ofthe lm sctivated by the waters of the southerncoast of California.


DISCRETE MONUMENTS ON AN INFINITE FILM: ON RICARDO MATOS CABO’S PROGRAMMES

1.See KLUGE, Alexander (2010).

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The actions in Le Tempestaire are minimaland the few that occur are almost silent,constantly interrupted by the physical presenceof the sea, in front of the village that remains

quiet. In Hutton’s silent lm, the ocean is alsoobserved from stillness, from a point of viewalready literally announced in the rst shotsof Le Tempestaire: a group of old shermengazes, from the shore, at the incomprehensiblepresence of the sea. Hutton explains that whenhe shot ‘the material at the end of Looking at theSea, I found myself un those cliffs of the westcoast of Ireland, looking at the West towardsthe sin and thinking in those immigrants who

wanted to abandon Ireland due to hunger andremained confronted with the same perspective. They would have seen the sea as this complicatedobstacle’ (MACDONALD, 2009, p. 225). But itis only possible to contemplate the sea from theshore once the wind and the swell ease.

The moment the ‘master of storms’ managesto calm the sea, the crystal ball that he holds inhis hands falls to the ground and breaks down.Epstein shows us how it tears apart in silence – a treatment characteristic of sound lms thatannounces Hutton’s silent shots – as if we werejust waking up from a dream, of that daydreamingstate that characterisesLooking at the Sea ; as if theimages and sounds of the previous lms hadbeen mere mirages produced by observing tooclosely the light of the sea shot by Hutton, withthe serenity of the lmed landscape. But, at thesame time,Looking at the Sea could be the silentcontemplation of those bits of crystal scattered

on the oor of Le Tempestaire, of all thosesmithereens that, as happened in the emulsionof Gatten’s lm, enclosed in side the cyclicalmovement of the waves.

Even though we have tried to note someof the correspondences produced by thescreening of these lms, their cross-fade is notof a visible order, but rather, as the sigh of the

‘master of the storms’, operates in an intangiblemanner, producing correlations between imagesand sounds in which lm speaks of itself. Theconcrete taks of the Portuguese lm curator

resides behind these immaterial aspects ofthe projection. Ricardo Matos Cabo broughttogether these three lms – usually linked todifferent elds of cinema: experimental, ctionand documentary, borders that don’t exist in hisprogrammes – without attempting to harmonisethem nor establishing hierarchies or relations ofdependence between them. He neither tries tojustify questions external to the lms themselves,but instead, taking into account their formats and

material characteristics, disposes them in a waythat their relationships emerge for themselves.Furthermore, conceived in the context of theprogramme ‘To See: To Listen’, this screeningalso accounted for the different ways of working with sound in lm: the direct inscription ontothe optical band in Gatten’s lm, the use of slowmotion sound in Le Tempestaire (Epstein works with the expressive possibilities of slow motionsound in order to discover the in nite partsthat compose the sound of a door opening andclosing or the rumour of a waning storm) or theimaginary of silence in Hutton’s lm2.

Let’s see other examples, since even ifcertain elements of his work remain constant,such as the discretion and respect for formats,the Portuguese curator has also experimented with other forms of cross-dissolve of differentlms that this screening doesn’t represent. We

will now consider a programme dedicated to

the variations of one of the rst motives of thehistory of cinema: the workers leaving the factory, which included Motion Picture:La sortie de l’usineLumière à Lyon (Peter Tscherkassky, 1984), Arbeiterverlassen der Fabrik (Harun Farocki, 1995) and aselection of theFactory Gate Films (Mitchell &Kenyon, 1900–13). Part of a large programme oflms that aimed to think cinema and its historyfrom cinema itself, ‘Histories of Cinema by

2. Some of these questions were also addressed in otherscreenings of the programme ‘To See: To Listen’ such as,for example, the sense of silence in lm thorugh a sessiondedicated to Stan Brakhage.

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To speak of the work of Ricardo Matos Cabonecessarily implies speaking of the lms that hebrings together and of the relationships that theygenerate in the screenings, and at the same time

of perceiving the histories projected by someof the screenings that he has organised. But it isalso worth noting that his way of bringing lmstogether in a screening, of exposing through thebeam of light of the projector – a machine thatdoesn’t allow two lms to show simultaneously,but one after the other – has no pre-establishedrules, but only in nite variations and possibilities:the screenings that we here list only account fora few of them. The Portuguese curator has also

shown the same lm in different contexts, such as,for instance, Mourir pour des images (René Vautier,1971), included in the programme ‘Historiesof Cinema by Itself’ and in acarte blanche at thePortuguese Cinémathèque (2011), or some of thelms by Raymonde Carasco presented in differentoccasions: ‘Figures of Dance in the Cinema I’(Culturgest, 2005), ‘To Count Time’ (PortugueseCinémathèque, 2010) and ‘Residues’. He evenprojected the same lm twice within the samescreening: Quad I +II (Samuel Beckett, 1981), inorder to link the geometric gure exposed in theballet and the repetition of xed structures in danceand the rectangular form of the screen (‘Figures ofDance in the Cinema II’, Culturgest, 2006)3.

There are lm-makers who return time andagain in his programmes, such as Peter Nestler,

of whom he has recently curated a retrospective(Goethe-Institut and Tate Modern, London,2012), Raymonde Carasco or Hollis Frampton. Theme also often return, many of his screenings

revolving around dance, its common genealogy with cinema, the plasticity of movement, like‘Figures of Dance in the Cinema I and II’(Culturgest 2005 and 2006) or the programmesaround Babette Mongolte, Eliane Summers and Judson Dance Theatre (all Serralves, 2011). Someof the programmes were conceived having inmind the spaces where they were later shown: notonly those presented at Serralves in relation toexhibitions or other museum activities, but, chie y,

in the ones that the Protuguese curator preparedfor the botanical garden of Coimbra (2011),and which brought together lms on scienti cobservation and studies on movement of theearly twentieth century with more recent works4. When invited by the Portuguese Cinémathèqueto curate a carte blanche as part of the cycle‘What is to Programme a Cinémathèque Today?’(2011), Matos Cabo presented a selection of lmsre ectioning on his own work 5. The lms selected were not so much an answer to this question, butrather presented different forms of interrogatingthe fact of programming cinema itself. However,all of his programmes nd a common thread inthe desire to present the history of cinema, albeittaking into account that thus history can only be written by cinema itself 6. ●

3. This screening, titled ‘Con gurations’, brought togetherthe following sequence of lms: Quad I + II (SamuelBeckett, 1981),Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square(Square Dance) (Bruce Nauman, 1967-68),Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (BruceNauman, 1967-68),Structured Pieces III(registro de TrishaBrown, 1975), documents of traditional dance compiledby Francine Lancelot between 1966 and 1984 (Aubrac(Aveyron), 5 October 1964; Sud-Ouest, Réunion àMenjoulic, Leucouacq, Lourdes, 31 July 1977), Quad I +II (Samuel Beckett, repetition),Rhythmus 21 (Hans Richter,1922-24),Color Sequence (Dwinnel Grant, 1943) andRayGun Virus (Paul Sharits, 1966).

4. The original programme included the following lms,although some of them were not screened in the end:

Préambules au cinématographe: Étienne-Jules Marey (recreationby Claudine Kaufman and Jean Dominique-Jaloux, 1996), Éducation Physique étudiée au ralentisseur (unknown lm-maker,1915),Incunables du cinéma scienti que (compilation by Jean-Michel Arnold, 1984),L’Hippocampe (Jean Painlevé, 1934),Observando El Cielo (Jeanne Liotta, 2007), Journal and Remarks (David Gatten, 2009), amongst others.5. Hapax Legomena I – VII(Hollis Frampton, 1971-72),Routine Pleasures (Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1986),Destruction desarchives (Yann Le Masson, 1985), Mourir pour des images (R. Vautier, 1971),La mer et les jours (Raymond Vogel and AlainKaminker, 1958) andDelluc & Cie (La première vague, 1ère partie) (Noël Burch and Jean-André Fieschi, 1968) were the

lms brought together by Ricardo Matos Cabo for thiscarteblanche , lms on lms, which question cinema and its spaces

CELESTE ARAÚJO

59Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. I · No 1 · Winter 2012

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FAROCKI, H ARUN (2003).Critica de la Mirada . Buenos Aires.Editorial Altamira.

FRAMPTON, HOLLIS (2007). Especulaciones, Escritos sobre cine y

fotografía . Barcelona. MACBA.GODARD, JEAN-LUC (1980).Introducción a una verdadera historiadel cine . Madrid Alphavile.

KLUGE, ALEXANDER (2010). «La historia del cine viene anosotros» in120 historias del cine . Buenos Aires. Caja negra.

MACDONALD, SCOTT (2009). Adventures of Perception, Cinema

as Exploration . Berkeley. University of California Press.

Graduate in Social Communication by the Universidadedo Minho, she also has a Degree in Advanced Studies inPhilosophy from the Universidad de Barcelona. She is writinga PhD on Luigi Nono. She was a journalist atPúblico (Lisboa,Portugal). She is a member of the programming team of Xcèntric (Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona [CCCB]) and

coordinates together with Marcos Ortega the section «Fugas»in Blogs&Docs . She has contributed to Archivos de la Filmoteca , Miradas de cine andContrapicado, amongst other publications.

[email protected]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CELESTE ARAÚJO

of projection and preservation.6. Although this question is present in all of his programmes,it is literally asked in ‘Histories of Cinema by Cinema Itself’(Culturgest, 2008), a programme where Matos Cabo traceda few itineraries through the history of cinema, not in achronological manner, but an archaelogical one. Usingexcerpts from other lms and appropriating images fromother lms, the lms included – lms such as Eadweard

Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1974) by Thom Andersen,PublicDomain (1972) by Hollis Frampton,Standard Gauge (1984)by Morgan Fisher, Moments Choisis des Histoire(s) du Cinéma (2000) by Jean-Luc Godard or Elementare Filmgeschichte(1971-2007)by Klaus Wyborny, amongst others – aimed toshow how certain movements of cinematograohic formshave been produced, how certain structures and themes

keep on being repeated or how the history of these formsis entangled with the personal histories of the authors.


DISCRETE MONUMENTS ON AN INFINITE FILM: ON RICARDO MATOS CABO’S PROGRAMMES

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Reections on ‘Rivette in Context’

Jonathan Rosenbaum

ABSTRACT

The author discusses two programmes that he curated under the title ‘Rivette in Context’, which took place at the NatFilm Theatre in London in August 1977 and at the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York in February 1979. Composed othematic programmes, the latter sets the lms of Jacques Rivette in relation to other lms, mostly from the US (includinglms by Mark Robson, Alfred Hitchcock, Jacques Tourneur, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger). The essay notes and comments onthe reactions of the US lm critics to this programme, and also elaborates on the motivations that led him to the selection oflms, which took as a reference the critical corpus elaborated by Rivette inCahiers du cinéma alongside the in uences that he

had previously acknowledged in several interviews. Finally the article considers the impact of Henri Langlois’s programethod in the work of lm-makers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais or Luc Moullet, concluding that it generated new critical space for writers, programmers and lm-makers, based on the comparisons and rhymes between lms.

KEYWORDS

Jacques Rivette, double programmes, American cinema, National Film Theatre, Bleecker Street Cinema, Henri Langlois, lcriticism, thematic programmes, comparative cinema, montage.


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«Rivette in Context» had two separateincarnations, occurring a year and a half apart. The rst consisted of 28 programs presented atLondon’s National Film Theatre in August 1977,

to accompany the publication ofRivette: Textsand Interviews 1 –a 101-page book I had edited forthe British Film Institute while still working onthe staffs of two of its magazines, Monthly FilmBulletin andSight and Sound , in 1976– 2.

The programs at the National Film Theatre,shown over the entire month of August, were Journey to Italy ( Viaggio in Italia , Roberto Rossellini,1954);Kiss Me, Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955);Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958);Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1964);Paris Belongs toUs ( Paris nous appartient , Jacques Rivette, 1961);L’Amour fou (Jacques Rivette, 1969); Machorka- Muff (Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, 1963)& Othon (Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet,1969); Made in U.S.A. (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966); Tashlin’s Artists and Models (1955);Spies ( Spione ,Fritz Lang, 1928);The General Line ( Staroye i novoye ,Grigori Aleksandrov, Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1929);The Nun ( La Réligieuse , Jacques Rivette, 1966);

The Life of Oharu ( Saikaku ichidai onna , KenjiMizoguchi, 1952);Out 1: Spectre (Jacques Rivette,1974);Céline and Julie Go Boating ( Céline et Julie vonten bateau , Jacques Rivette, 1974);The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson, 1943);House of Bamboo(Samuel

Fuller, 1955);Hawks’ Monkey Business (1952);TheConnection (Shirley Clarke, 1962);Red Psalm ( Mégkér a nép, Miklós Jancsó, 1972); Lang’sBeyond aReasonable Doubt (1956);Daisies (1966);Duelle

(une quarantaine) (Jacques Rivette, 1976);Tra c (Jacques Tati, 1971); Moon eet (Fritz Lang, 1955);French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1954); Fellini’sRoma ( Roma , 1972); Noroît (1976). (The world premiereof the latter lm –immediately after a screeningof Duelle , with Rivette in attendance– had alreadybeen held at the National Film Theatre in late1976). I selected the lms and wrote notes forthe series, but was unable to attend any part ofit because I was living at the time in San Diego,having moved there from London earlier thatyear.

The second incarnation of «Rivette inContext», which Iwas able to attend –at New York’s Bleecker Street Cinema, in February1979– was more ambitious, largely because itlacked the institutional muscle of the BritishFilm Institute and therefore required much moreimprovisation. Although an effort was made tosell copies ofRivette: Texts and Interviews at some

of the screenings, in the Bleecker Street Cinema’slobby, this second series was designed more thanthe rst as a critical and polemical interventionrather than as a simple accompaniment to thebook.

1. This book included a polemical introduction by me andtranslations –most of them by my London at mate, TomMilne– of two lengthy interviews with Rivette (one in 1968that was centered onL’Amour fou , the other in 1973 that

was centered on the two separate versions ofOut 1 ), threekey critical texts by him («Letter on Rossellini», 1955; «TheHand» [on Lang’sBeyond a Reasonable Doubt ], 1957, and«Montage» [with Jean Narboni and Sylvie Pierre], 1969),and a brief, undated proposal of his from the mid-1970s(«For the Shooting ofLes Filles du Feu » –the latter was the working title for a projected series of four features, nevercompleted, that was subsequently retitledScènes de la vie pa- rallèle –). The book concluded with a detailed “bio lmogra-phy” and a virtually complete bibliography of Rivette’s cri-tical texts published between 1950 and 1977 and his majorinterviews (two dozen in all).

2.During the nal portion of my ve years of living in Paris(1969-74), before I moved to London to work at the BFI,

I had become friends with Eduardo de Gregorio (1942-2012), Rivette’s principal screenwriter during this period,and thanks to our friendship, I had attended many privatescreenings of Céline and Julie Go Boating when it was stilla work print (albeit in its nal edited form). I had subse-quently interviewed Rivette, along with Gilbert Adair andLauren Sedofsky, in my Paris apartment for the September-October 1974 issue of Film Comment (available in http:// www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=28298). Then, after mymove to London, I had organized an elaborate reportageon the shooting of Rivette’s Duelle and Noroît in Paris andBrittany, respectively –carried out by myself, Gilbert Adair(a mutual friend of de Gregorio and myself at the time, as was Sedofsky) and Michael Graham (de Gregorio’s part-ner)– which appeared in Sight and Sound’s Autumn 1975issue. (Available online in http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=24458 and in http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=28300).


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In this case, the 15 separate programs, listedhere in order, all had thematic titles. «Masterplots»:Out 1: Spectre ; «Critical Touchstones (Myth &History)»:The Miracle (Irving Rapper, 1959),

Contempt ( Le Mépris , Jean-Luc Godard, 1963), Not Reconciled ( Nicht versöhnt oder Es hilft nur Gewaltwo Gewalt herrscht , Jean-Marie Straub, DanièleHuillet, 1965), Mediterranée (Jean-Daniel Pollet, Volker Schlöndorff, 1963); «Critical Touchstones(Documentary & Fiction)»:Something Different ( O necem jinem , Vera Chytilová, 1964),The Edge (Robert Kramer, 1968),Le Horla (Jean-DanielPollet, 1966); «The City as Labyrinth»:Orpheus ( Orphée , Jean Cocteau, 1950),Paris Belongs to Us ;«Women & Con nement»: Angel Face (OttoPreminger, 1952) &The Nun ; «Theatre»:L’Amour fou ; «Clarke & Rouch»:The Lion Hunters (FordBeebe, 1951),The Mad Masters ( Les Maîtres fous ,1955),The Connection ; «Movie Doubles»:Party Girl (Nicholas Ray, 1958) &Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953); «Dizzy Doubles»:Céline and Julie Go Boating ;«A Plunge into Horror»:The Seventh Victim , CatPeople (Jacques Tourneur, 1942),I Walked with aZombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943); «Menace &Mise en scène»:Duelle ; «Fantasy & Conspiracy»:

Moon eet & House of Bamboo; «Treachery & Miseen scène»: Noroît ; «I am a Camera»:Lady inthe Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1947) &DarkPassage (Delmer Daves, 1947); and, nally, a«Special Preview Screening» (projected but latercanceled) of Merry-Go-Round (1981), Rivette’slatest feature, which eventually surfaced muchlater at the Museum of Modern Art, with Rivettein attendance (as he had been at the NFT’s Noroît premiere, but not at either of the incarnations of«Rivette in Context»).

I can’t guess how much this second programmight have affected the reception of Rivette’s work in the U.S., apart from four extendedpress reviews it received; these were by RogerGreenspun, Andrew Sarris, David Sterritt and Amy Taubin. The rst two were mostly skepticalabout Rivette but gave more mixed reviews to theprogramming concept behind the series. (Sarrisdevoted an entire page of theVillage Voice to hismisgivings about Rivette, coupled with his overall

support for the program; the prominence of hiscolumn undoubtedly helped the series from thestandpoint of publicity far more than the otherthree articles). Sterritt, writing in theChristian

Science Monitor , mainly supported both Rivette andthe series, although he had misgivings about thequality of some of the lms (e.g.,Lady in the Lake ,The Edge ) and some of the prints of the Hollywoodfeatures, plus the fact that the two Pollet lms(both U.S. premieres) were unsubtitled. Taubin intheSoho News was largely skeptical about both theprogram and the concept behind it: «Rivette is aninteresting director, a director for whom I havemore sympathy than any one of his lms deserve,but why should he be the rst director chosen byBleecker St. for this kind of examination. Whynot “Bresson in Context”?». She went on tocomplain, «Rosenbaum simply scheduled 20 ofthe lms Rivette mentions as having in uencedhim», and then criticized both Rivette and mefor minimizing the importance of Feuillade onRivette’s work by excluding him from the series.(Although I had considered including Juve contreFantômas –an hour-long section ofFantômas that was at that time the only work by Feuillade available

in the U.S.– I decided against it after concludingthatLes Vampires , which remained inaccessible atthe time, would have been far more relevant. Ishould add that I responded to Taubin’s remarks with an angry letter that was published, along with an equally angry rebuttal from Taubin).

I can no longer recall whether or not JackieRaynal actually succeeded in acquiring a print of Jean-Daniel Pollet’sLe Horla from France forour series, but I do vividly recall her doing justthat for Pollet’s Mediterranée –which was the rstlm she had ever worked on as an editor andtherefore had a particular personal importancefor her–. In this case, I had included the lmspeci cally because of Rivette’s reference to itin his interview aboutOut 1, which appearedin Rivette: Texts and Interviews ; and I would alsoconcede to Taubin’s charge that the inclusionsof The Seventh Victim , Moon eet and Lady in theLake had been prompted by Rivette having usedthese lms as explicit reference points forDuelle ,

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM


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3. For a gloss on this key text and the possible reasons why it isn’t better known, see my remarks in http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=22833.

Noroît , and Merry-Go-Round , respectively, even tothe point (if memory serves) of screening printsof each lm for members of his cast and crew.

But the main inspiration for the series,even I hadn’t fully realized this at the time, wasundoubtedly Henri Langlois and the eclecticmixes of his programs and schedules at theCinémathèque Française, which I rmly believeeventually inspired the eclectic onlm lmcriticism of Godard, Resnais, Rivette, Truffaut,and Moullet –not so much the referential“hommages” of their American disciples (e.g., Woody Allen or Brian De Palma alluding to theOdessa Steps sequence in Eisenstein’sPotemkin [ Bronenosets Potyomkin , 1929])– which add nothingto our critical understandings, as the ways thatthese lmmakers’ own directorial styles criticallyalter our perceptions of the lms and aestheticsthey absorbed: how Godard treats GermanExpressionist cinema in Alphaville (1965), howResnais savors the looks and atmospheres of 50sMGM Technicolor musicals in Not on the Lips ( Passur la bouche , 2003) (to cite a much later exampleof this practice) and other forms of Hollywood

glamour and suspense in the much earlierL’Année dernière à Marienbad ( L’Année dernièreà Marienbad , 1961), how Rivette applies Truffaut’sanalysis of the doubling of shots and charactersin Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943)in the narrative construction ofCéline and Julie ,how Truffaut autocritiques his own politique desauteurs in The Green Room ( La chambre verte ,1978), or how Moullet lovingly parodiesDuel inthe Sun (King Vidor, 1946) in A Girl Is a Gun( Une aventure de Billy le Kid , 1971), to cite a fewexamples among many others. (I hasten to addthat Resnais is not usually accorded any status asa lm critic because he never published reviews,but I would argue that his lmmaking practicere ects precise critical readings of other lmsthat are quite distinct from his jokey “hommages”(such as blown-up-images of Alfred Hitchcockinserted unobtrusively, almost secretly, Marienbad

and Muriel [1963]), which are much closer to thecinephiliac references of Allen, Bogdanovich, DePalma, Scorsese, et al.

No less crucial was Langlois creatingparticular critical contexts in which, for example,Preminger could “converse” with Mizoguchiand the German Lang could interact with the American Hitchcock, another trait that markedthe lms of the Nouvelle Vague creations, onemight say, of a previously nonexistent critical“space” in which such disparate gures couldmingle and instruct one another. Above all, it was these critical “contexts”, created speci callythrough programming choices, that had inspiredmy own. The perception, for instance, that theimprovisational and freewheeling shootingmethods ofOut 1, suggested in certain waysby those of Renoir and/or Rossellini, had beendialectically countered by the more rigorousediting principles of Lang or Hitchcock, was acritical concept derived directly from Rivette’sown discourse in his interviews.

From today’s perspective, I believe that

the principal limitation of my allusions to thisdiscourse through my programming selections was that they were in effect abbreviations ofbroader arguments that needed entire writtentexts as well as lms in order to be clearlyexpounded and illustrated. If I were organizingsuch an event today, I would try to nd some way of incorporating all of the following textsin order to illustrate the principle of rhymingshots: Hitchcock’sShadow of a Doubt , The Wrong Man (1956), andFamily Plot (1976); Truffaut’s «Untrousseau de fausses clés»3; Godard’s «Le cinémaet son double» and Chapter 4a ofHistoire(s) ducinema (1988-1998); and Rivette’sCéline and JulieGo Boating . Postulating such a combination oftexts and screenings may seem as utopian nowas it was over three decades ago, but a utopianconcept of what criticism could and should be was central to «Rivette in Context».●


REFLECTIONS ON ‘RIVETTE IN CONTEXT’

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ADAIR, GILBERT, GRAHAM, MICHAEL, ROSENBAUM, JONATHAN (1974).Les Filles du Feu: Rivette x4. Sight &Sound , nº 44, pp. 195-198.

NARBONI, JEAN, PIERRE, S YLVIE, RIVETTE, J ACQUES (1969). Montage . Cahiers du cinéma , nº 210, March, pp. 16-35.

RIVETTE, J ACQUES (1957).La main . Cahiers du cinéma , nº 76,November, pp. 48-51.

RIVETTE, J ACQUES (1955).Lettre sur Rossellini . Cahiers ducinéma , nº 46, April, pp. 14-24.

ROSENBAUM, JONATHAN (1974). Jacques Rivette. Work andPlay in the House of Fiction: On Jacques Rivette . Sight & Sound ,nº 43, pp. 190-194.

ROSENBAUM, JONATHAN (1997). Movies as Politics . Berkeleyand Los Angeles. University of California Press.ROSENBAUM, JONATHAN (1977).Rivette: Texts & Interviews .

London. British Film Institute.

Graduated at Putney and studied literature at Bard

College. Professor at the University of California (1977)and visitant Professor at the Art History Departmentof the Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, Virginia, 2010-2011). Film critic at theChicago Reader from1987 until 2008. His books incluye, amongst others, MovingPlaces: A Life at the Movies (1980),Film: The Front Line 1983 (1983),Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (1995),

Movies as Politics (1997), Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the

Media Limit What Movies We Can See (2002) and EssentialCinema (2004). He has also edited books on Orson Wellesand Jacques Rivette. During his stay in Paris, in the early1970s, he worked as an assistant to Jacques Tati.

[email protected]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM


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‘Le Trac du cinéma’: On the Relationshipbetween Criticism and Collective ProgrammingThrough a Publication; the Case ofTrac andthe Jeu de Paume

Fernando Ganzo

ABSTRACT

This essay studies the relationship between the critical task of a publication ( Tra c ) and its transposition into a lm programme(the season organised by the journal for the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1998). The author suggests that the dialogue establbetween the lms included in the programme enabled both the critical discourse and the editorial line of the publication tomove forward. The essay focuses on the lms selected by Jean-Claude Biette (co-founder of the journal, together with SergDaney) for this programme, and in particular on Biette’s capacity to bring together recent and historical works, at tima comparative manner. In this programme in particular, Biette sets the lms of Adolpho Arrietta in relation to the work of Jacques Tourneur, an association which extends across the rest of the lms selected (and which included works by Manoel dOliveira, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet and Jacques Davila).

KEYWORDS

Film criticism, programming, museum, lm journal, montage,Cahiers du cinéma , Tra c , Jean-Claude Biette, Adolpho Arrietta, Jacques Tourneur.


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‘Our politics is Auteur theory.’ This sentence,perhaps never read, perhaps never said, wasnevertheless ever present for the readers aiming tounderstand the ideological location ofCahiers du

cinéma in the 1950s. The rsrt critical conclusion would be: the true authorial claim didn’t so muchlie on the lm-maker as in the critic him- or herself,insofar as he (or she) had the power to establishhierarchies and relationships between the works.1 The second: a collective project, the project of ajournal, could be de ned by the lms defendedthroughout its pages2 and by the decision to showthem in the form of a lm programme; in other words, by the impulse to translate writing into

dissemination. The trace of that gesture can befollowed up until the birth of a new publication,many years later, in 1992, founded by two formerCahiers critics, Serge Daney and Jean-ClaudeBiette:Tra c . With the arrival of the journalcame the rupture with a number ofCahiers principles, and the adaptation to a quarterlypublication: absence of images, rather longertexts, independence from the agenda of lmpremieres. But, perhaps most importantly,Tra c implied a strong gesture: criticism was no longerin monthly journals, in cinephilia, but rather it was sheltered in a different exercise: writing andthe naked and atemporal return of the worksthemselves. Such double gesture was framed bythe forewords and afterwords that bookended therst issues: the ‘Journal de l’an présent’ (‘Diary ofthe Current Year’), where Daney took as muchdistance as necessary from cinema itself, and «À

pied d’oeuvre», where Biette return to the surfaceof the lms themselves, be them recent or not.

A more intimate and less urgent criticism,

more re exive and isolated, implied that it wasup to the lms themselves – and the relationshipstraced between them in the pages of the journal – to de ne a collective project.Tra c continuedthen the model of the oldCahiers , de ned by thestrict selection of a series of lm-makers or ofa certain kind of cinema, but it had got rid ofthe need to go through the Auteur theory, or anyother theoretical instrument to achieve this. Onthe way there, a certain transit was necessary –

through the newspaperLibération , in the case ofDaney, and through a critical silence in that ofBiette.3 Daily writing forced Daney to a criticalexercise just at the moment when, in his view,cinema had obtained its death certi cate, sealedby the beginning of theHistoire(s) du cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1988), which Godard had beganthree years before the birthTra c , in an almostperfect communion with Daney’s thought. Tocontinue walking in uncertain grounds entails anopening up to re ection, the unfull led need tofeed oneself off images, to make them speak. The development at work can be observed bycomparing the list of best lms of the 1970sselected by theCahiers du cinéma ,4 when Daneyand Biette were part of the editorial team, withthe programme ‘Le Cinéma deTra c ’, organisedby the Jeu de Paume in Paris from 17 March until12 April 1998.5

1. On the long run, such authority forms part of the samegesture that draw these critics to become lm-makers. Jean-Luc Godard was the one who best understood suchinitiative, since he literally continued it in his lm work(SKORECKI, 2001: 18-19).2. At this point please allow me to make a personal reference. Anyone who has participated in a similar project can perfectlyunderstand the idea. In my case, this was during the foundingof the journal Lumière, re ected in its rst editorial, which was but the lms about which we were writing (ALGARÍN,Francisco, GANZO, Fernando, GRANDA, Moisés (Abrilde 2009). El sonido y la furia . Last accessed in Novemeber

2012. Asociación Lumière. Availablte at: www.elumiere.net/numero1/num01_issuu.php).

3. For the rst, the situation was more crucial than for the secondone; afterall Biette was already a lm-maker before becoming acritic, therefore a brief lapse of time focused on his own lm-making doesn’t signify a drastic change in his evolution.4. The complete list of the editorial team ofCahiers ducinéma is available at the end of the interview with JeanNarboni. (First published inCahiers du cinéma , nº 308,Feburary 1980).5. We could understand the recent issue 80 (accompaniedby a lm programme) as an intermediate step, whichcelebrated the 20th anniversary ofTra c . It is also tellingthat the programme also took place at an arts centre, theCentre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

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Even if most of the names inTra c ’s 1998programme continue in line with the trail openedbyCahiers’s list of the 1970s, the irruption of twonames – Bruce Baillie and Jonas Mekas – 6 signi es

a violent clash. In 1977 Daney programmed the‘Cahiers Week’ at the Bleecker St. Cinema inNew York, directed by Jackie Raynal, and whenhe was interviewed by Bill Krohn, re ected onthe absence of writing on avant-garde lm (usingStephen Dwoskin or Jackie Raynal as examples)thus: ‘Probably the position of the critic is nolonger justi ed in the case of these lms, becausethey no longer require mediation, insofar as mostof the lms act directly upon primary processes.

There is a great difference between these lmsand the new European avant-garde (the one we are interested in: Godard and Straub) whereany intervention upon primary processes (onperception) only has a true impact on us if it alsoimplies an action upon the elements of though,of what is signi ed.’7 Hence it is particularlytelling that the lm by Jonas Mekas included inthe programme was preciselyBirth of a Nation (1997), which is almost a form of reconciliation with all the aesthetic arguments that this formof cinema may generate within critical discourse.Baillie or Mekas, whom in the 1970s were partof this cinema in response to which, accordingto Daney, it was not possible to generate aninteresting critical position, gain a place withinthe critical discourse and editorial policy of thejournal – helped by the relationship to an artcentre, the Jeu de Paume, to which Mekas hadalways been close, and indeed it can be argued that

his work gained a certain visibility and relevance within the French lm scene thanks to his 1992retrospective at that institution. They Lithuanianlm-maker proofed top the right when he said:

‘We are invisible, but we constitute an essentialnation of cinema. We are the cinema.’8

Within this evolution, the task oftranslating ideas from writing into programmingmight have been, in the case ofTra c , a necessarystep to prevent this more intimate work frombeing isolated, and to enable it to continue todevelop conceptually. The case of Jean-ClaudeBiette is particularly interesting and effective in

this sense, given his consistent critical approach,consisting in speaking of old lms as if they werepremieres, and of new lms as if they were classic.In order to transform his critical method into auseful programming tool in the framework of ‘LeCinéma deTra c ’, Biette decides on two criteria:closenees and cohesion. All the lm-makersincluded (i.e. Adolpho Arrietta, Jean-MarieStraub and Danièle Huillet, Manoel de Oliveiraand Jacques Davila) have a more or less directrelationship with Biette: Arrietta, the lm-makerhe invited in the only introduced screening,9 notonly had been in Biette’s milieu for some time, buthe had even lmed Biette’s ear in hisLe Château dePointilly (Adolpho Arrietta, 1972). Jacques Davila,as Biette, participated in the collective lm by theproduction company Diagonale (directed by Paul Vecchiali),10 which was also responsible forLeThéâtre des matières , the rst lm Biette made in1977.11 Jean-Marie Straub used Biette as an actor

6. Jonas Mekas is only mentioned once throughout the three volumes ofLa maison cinéma et le monde , the compilation ofDaney’s writings published both atCahiers du Cinéma and thenewspaperLibération . DANEY, Serge (2001, 2002, 2012).Lamaison cinéma et le monde . Vol. I, II y III. Paris. P.O.L. Éditeurs.7. This interview was published atThe Thousand Eyes , amagazine edited by Bleecker St. Cinema in 1977, and wasafterwards partially republished in: KROHN, Bill (unknownpublishing date).Les Cahiers du cinéma . 1968-1977. Lastaccessed in November 2012. Earthlink. Available at: home.earthlink.net/~steevee/Daney_1977.html8. These words by Jonas Mekas, of uncertain origin, were

supposedly transcribed in the pressbook of the lm, and havebeen published in, amongst other places: the programme notesof Peter Kubelka’s «Was ist Film» («Filmprogramm Zyklus‘Was ist Film’», Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Viena, 1995).9. The lm was Merlín (Adolfo Arrietta, 1998).

10.L’Archipel des Amours(Jean-Claude Biette, Cécile Clairval, Jacques Davila, Michel Delahaye, Jacques Frenais, GérardFrot-Coutaz, Jean-Claude Guiguet, Marie-Claude Treilhouand Paul Vecchiali, 1983).

11. Vecchiali himself is the editor of the Davila lm shownas part ofTra c ’s programme.


‘LE TRAFIC DU CINÉMA’: ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CRITICISM AND COLLECTIVE PROGRAMMING THROUGH A PUBLICATION...

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in television, and which can be found in theissues of the late 1970s and early 80s) was,precisely to use television as an instrument tounderstand these lms beyond the mantle that

covered them at the time of their premiere (amantle woven with advertising, critical reception,social context, the temporary and ephimeralnotoriety of the people involved; in short, amantle offering little shelter). It was a time ofregeneration at the journal: the Maoist periodseemed an insurmountable gap, and very fewbelieved at the time that cinema could be spokenof in the same terms (Skorecki is the one to moreprecisely speak of the death of cinema ‘as we

knew it’ withRío Bravo [Howard Hawks, 1959]14

). What was at stake was overcoming this gap andbeing able to preserve a direct relationship tothe lm since a whole world could be evokedthrough the lm itself.

It is true that since Biette foundedTra c together with Serge Daney, in 1991, the presenceof classical lm-makers goes down in his texts,but it never fully disappears. We may recognisea relatively higher theoretical weight in his texts(albeit in a ludic manner), even though theorycould be said to de ne his trajectory atCahiers :for instance, the reference to ‘rhetorics’ (a termused to de ne certain codes that would preventa lm from making ‘noise’ in its own context) inhis article ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un cinéaste’ (BIETTE:

1996: 5-15) allow us to understand the criticalimplications of his column «Les fantômes dupermanent». We may roughly sum up thesereferences as follows: one should never consider

a cinéaste , or lm-maker, a director who acceptsthe rhetoric of his own work and its discursivecode as part of something given universally andnaturally, and whose analysis is forbidden. That is, where the perception of reality of a lm comesfrom ‘the sensibility of a period and not froma single man’, using as an exampleBycicle Thieves ( Ladri di biciclette , Vittorio de Sica, 1948).15 The ideaused by Biette to de ne a lm-maker (to be ableto question the rhetoric of one’s time), may also

be applied to his own iniciative as a lm-maker,attempting to understand classical lms beyondtheir common rhetoric, and which may fall downas dead leaves when ones comes closer to theselms as if for the rst time.

The other great theoretical text publishedby Biette inTra c , ‘Le Gouvernement des Films’(BIETTE, 1998: 5-14), argues that in every lmthere is a struggle between three elements: drama,narrative and formal project,16 so that in order tounderstand the reality at play in a lm one onlyneeds to resolve this rule of three. Biette uses this(theoretical) method in later texts on a classicallm-maker such as Raoul Walsh – one of Biette’sfavourites since his time atCahiers – 17 as well ason a modern lm-maker such as Stanley Kubrick,

14. This idea has been formulated in a number of textsand occasions. For the sake of concision, we will only

mention one: ‘As it is well-known,Río Bravo closes down,both symbolically and materially, the classical era of thegreat cinema of the monochrome deception; cinema.’(SKORECKI, 2001: 10).15.Biette formulates the de nition of the lm-maker asfollows: ‘A lm-maker is the person who expresses a pointof view on the world and on cinema itself, and whom inthe act of making the lm itself, achives a double operationof attempting to present a particular perception of reali-ty (through a particular story, particular actors, a particularspace and time) and to express it based on a general con-ception of the fabrication of a lm, which is itself unique

and singular, and which ensues from the perception and theassimilation of the lms that precede it, and which allows

him or her, through a long succession of underground movements that the lm-maker can choose to ignore or let do,

or alternatively to completely think through, to nd perso-nal and singular solutions as to how should the story, theactors, the space and the time be, with always a bit more of world than cinema.’ (BIETTE, 1996: 5-15).16. Although it is easy to understand what Biette means byproject, form and narration, the meaning of ‘dramaturgy’is more particular and complex. It refers to that somethingthat emerges when lming an actor giving life to acharacter, something immediately dramatic, insofar as it is araw material on which any lm relies without being able tocompletely control it.

17. In another text, ‘La barbe de Kubrick’, Biette appliesthis same method to a lm-maker, whom is not amongst



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in his analysis of Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick,1999). Biette’s critical process from the period oftheCahiers remains thus unchanged when writingforTra c .

In short, the choices Biette makes in theprogramme are not due to an alleged and violentcritical evolution, but rather to the conception ofthe programme as part of a collective project, ofa collective idea of cinema which implies takingpart (as a critic and lm-maker) of a certainconception of cinema and of the world. A notionof cinema as a variable and mysterious universe,in which to plunge one time and another without

thus exhausting its meaning; or, to paraphraseOliveira, it is about accepting cinema as ‘asaturation of magni cent signs bathed in thelight of their lack of explanation’ (GODARDand OLIVEIRA, 1993). A collective, or family,that is much more solid insofar as it comes fromthe social and geographical margins of cinema. With the exception of a lm by Davila (thoughhe was born in Argelia and is a lm-maker whocan be said to perfectly respond to an idea ofmarginality or exception), all the lms chosenare marked by the idea of alien : inFlammes (Adolpho Arrietta, 1978), Spanish lm-maker Arrietta lms a young woman who plays with theidea of being saved by a Spanish reman (XavierGrandès, with an unconcealed accent) fromthe castle where she lives in isolation with herfather; inParty (Manoel de Oliveira, 1996), bringstogether a French actor and a Greek actress atthe Açores (Michel Piccoli and Irene Papas)in order to speak French with Leonor Silveira

and Rogério Samora; and nally in theHistoryLessons ( Geschichtsunterricht , Jean-Marie Strauband Danièle Huillet, 1972), French lm-makersStraub and Huillet lm in Italy with Germanactors who perform the text by Bertolt BrechtDie geschäfte des herrn Julius Caesar . From these

encounters emerges the idea of eliminating anypatriotic and approach to language.18 It provideslanguages – since the four lms screened areabout the effect of words in the image) of an

alienated sonority. The words pronounced by analien soul immediately become matter, they areinterpreted in the pure musical sense of the term, violently adhered to the lm strip itself, whichis modi ed, RETTORCIDA, forced to and thusmanages to become the ineffable (Biette wasa great lm-maker of the ineffable, a conceptexpressed in his cinema not only through the useof foreign language, but also through the magicalpower of puns in his lms).

HenceFlammes becomes the most malleablelm in the programme, and the one that mostaffects the rest of the screenings. Cocteau’sin uence is notorious (the other feature lm hemade, Merlin , is a direct adaptation of the Frenchauthor), but it would be absurd to deny theatmosphere of American B-movie pemeating thelm (BOZON, 2012: 92): from the rst shot (amoon covered by clouds that become black dueto the smoke) to the last one (the ‘heroes’ sur ngthe skies in a close-up shot of an airplane, nextto which pass the clouds again, ever more black, with the cheapest of arti ces).

It cannot be denied either that, given theartisanal value of thearriettian inventive of thescene, the lm almost becomes anobject , andonce could even imagine that, only by changingits soundtrack, it could be part of a museuminstallation.

Such malleability is so powerful that it infact makes Arrietta the lm-maker that it ismore dif cult to write about among the onesincluded in the programme. It is not by chancethat despite Arrietta’s prominence in Biette’s

Biette’s favourites. It is true that this method can hardly besaid to be a theoretical one, it is rather the thought-processof a lm-maker who seeks to penetrate the mechanism of

the lm, but Biette’s texts prove its interest nonetheless,as does that fact that later critics such as Serge Bozon or

myself, have attempted to apply the same method.18. In this sense, see Biette’s brief text on the relationshipbetween Josef von Sternberg, Robert Bresson and Jean-Marie Straub (BIETTE, 2001: 115-117).

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programme, he hardly ever wrote about his work (BIETTE, 1978a: 53),19 and during hispresentation of Merlin he only formulated thebasic idea: ‘I will show you the work of a lm-

maker who makes one want to make lms’. Acinema that is not easily translated into works,then, but which is open to programming, as ifit was the most essential piece of a montage, orthe critical cut of a lm. Because after visitingthe space far-away from all reality, such as thefamily mansion inFlammes , the garden inParty also becomes a mythical space, close to theelements of nature. The mechanical gesturesof Arrietta’s actors (the card games and the

balancing acts) ood the thighs of Oliveira’s women, highlighting the relationship betweengesture and words, and highlighting, in the lastinstance, the presence of desire and Oliveira’sold age. Similarly after the statism of the othertwo lms, Straub’s dialogues are all about themobility of the actor. But the relationship iseven more powerful in the case of Qui embrassetrop…, which opens, furthermore, with analmost identical establishing shot toFlammes .Between these self-re ective dialogues and Arrietta’s fantastic territory, the silences anddistances prompted by the evidence of thefugacity of desire, make Davila’s lovers creaturesmarked by a fatal atavism, as if they werecharacters fromCat People (Jacques Tourneur,1941). In short, the programme puts forwardthe monstrosity of the couple, insofar as bothelements are unable to escape an evil mark that would prevent them from remaining together,or simply being normal. It is not by chance

that Biette was literally obsessed byFreaks (TodBrowning, 1932) (BIETTE, 1978b: 23-26),or that his own lmTrois ponts sur la rivière – where Jeanne Balibar and Mathieu Amalricare subjected to the sign of an ill restlessness

that starts to germinate when they meet backtogether – completely changes under the lightof this programme. Let’s remind ourselvesof Tourneur’s working method, marked by

discretion, silence and the almost murmuredaddress to the spectator (SKORECKI, 1978:39-43). The presence of the invisible, of aspiritual world, in reality, can only be perceivedif we approach it precociously, almost tiptoed. A lm-maker characterised by a discrete butomnipresent editing, dialectic and open to theentrance of dissonant elements, intimate, shyand ludic (the famous shot of the squirrel inLecomplexe de Toulon [1996]), Biette obtains from

the union of similar but different elements, atime, a light and a voice that illuminates each ofthe lms selected and, at the same time, as if ina lm by Tourneur, allows reality to coexist withits spell: the work of the great lm-makers areoften characterised by their ability to illustratethe work of other lm-makers and to understandit, no matter how distant or different they are. Arrietta, a lm-maker who has been shown,but whose work is ineffable (wasn’t it perhapsbecause of this ineffable character that Biettesaw Arrietta as ‘a lm-maker who wants to makelms’, that is, a lm-maker that makes emerge

what is secret, in this instance, a relationshipto Tourneur?) acts in this programme almost asthe main characters of a Shakespeare play, whohave more in uence in the work when they arenot present in the lm than when they are.20 By invoking Tourneur without even mentioninghim – even making him become an undergroundmurmur in Straub’s lm – Arrietta’s lms

become the wizards of the programme. In thefaint tourneurian light invoked by Arrietta andOliveira’s mansions, the spiritual and mysticalcharacter of Straub’s lms, and in the streetsacross which the main character travels, it is

19. In this article, Biette foregrounds the ingraspable cha-racter of Arrietta’s cinema: ‘It suggests a multitude of fas-cinating shadows, which nonetheless defyany attempt atgrasping them as objects.’20. With this Biette also achieved a critical assessment of

Arrietta’s work, inspite of having hardly written about it,given its pregnant capacity within the programme, since itenabled the interpretation and assessment of the work ofthe other lm-makers, which is a common characteristic ofall great lm-makers.



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not only the weight of history that we perceive,but also his gaze materialised in a thousandinvisible eyes.21

Such silent and intimate encounters helpTra c to evolve through the programme,22 to

incorporate violent and generous evolutions; apossible rediscovery of cinema that allows theentrance of increasingly diverse works. Cinemacontemplated as a body in movement, subjected

to the force of montage and time, which operatein the conception of a lm programme.●

21. ‘Anyone who has lmed landscapes, when immobilised,has sown them with eyes. Exactly as if they were charac-ters.’ (BREWSTER, 1983: 3).22. The aforementioned special issue of the journal andthe programme at the Centre Georges Pompidou, both2011, continue such invisible task of the critical off screen. Twenty critics of the journal had to choose a lm madeafter the foundation of the journal. It was a way of gettingup to date with current times, but also a way of presentingits crop: the avant-garde, which was deemed beyond theterritory of the journal in the past, is included in the pro-

gramme through the work of Tacita Dean or Mekas, butthe way is also complemented in the other direction, inclu-

ding directors such as Steven Spielberg or Woody Allen, while the ‘of cial’ American cinema had been ignored inthe aforementioned list of best lms of 1970s, with theexception of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola andGeorge Lucas. In order to grasp the point of developmentat whichTra c nds itself today, it should suf ce to imaginethe poetic weight that a lm such asCraneway Event (TacitaDean, 2009) may bring to the futurist universe of Arti cialIntelligence: A.I. (Steven Spielberg, 2001) and the empty me-lancholy that the latter can give back, or how the speechon idealism inPalombella rossa (Nanni Moretti, 1989) maybreath political content to the characters inCrash (DavidCronenberg, 1996).

FERNANDO GANZO


Programme ‘Le cinéma deTrac ’, Jeu de Paume,17 March - 12 April 1998

Films selected by Jean-Claude Biette:

Le Crime de la toupie (Adolpho Arrietta, 1966)Flammes (Adolpho Arrietta, 1978)L’Imitation de l’ange (Adolpho Arrietta, 1967) Merlín (Adolpho Arrietta, 1990) Qui trop embrasse ... (Jacques Davila, 1986)Party (Manoel de Oliveira, 1996)O Pintor e a Cidade (Manoel de Oliveira, 1956)Geschichtsunterricht (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet,

1972)

Films selected by Patrice Rollet:

In the Street (James Agee, Helen Levitt and Janice Loeb,

1952) All my Life (Bruce Baillie, 1966)Castro Street (Bruce Baillie, 1966)Little Girl(Bruce Baillie, 1994-1995) Quixote (Bruce Baillie, 1964-1965)Roslyn Romance (Is it really trae?) (Bruce Baillie, 1977)Valentin de las Sierras (Bruce Baillie, 1968)Cock ghter (Monte Hellman, 1974)

Birth of a Nation (Jonas Mekas, 1996)Sayat Nova (Serguei Paradjanov, 1968-1969)La Vallée close (Jean-Claude Rousseau, 1995)Leave me Alone (Gehrard Theuring, 1975)

Films selected by Raymond Bellour:Saute ma ville (Chantal Akerman, 1963)Charlotte et son Jules (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959)Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924)Time Inde nite (Ross Mc Elwee, 1992)How I Learned to Overcome my Fear and Love Arik Sharo

(Avi Mograbi, 1997)Le Bassin de J.W. (João Cesar Monteiro, 1997)Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (Mark Rappaport, 1992) Archives de performances (Roman Signer, 1982-1997)L’Enfant sauvage (François Truffaut, 1970)

Films selected by Sylvie Pierre: Maïcol (Mario Brenta, 1988-1989)Uirá, Um Índio em Busca de Deus (Gustavo Dahl, 1973)Ke tu qiu hen (Ann Hui, 1989) A Ilha de Moraes (Paulo Rocha, 1984)Rentrée des classes (Jacques Rozier, 1955)Les Sacri és (Okacha Touita, 1982)

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Films selected for the 20th anniversary of the journalTrac :

A.I. Arti cial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001), introduced by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Le Bassin de J.W. (João César Monteiro, 1997), introducedby Marcos UzalLa Belle Journée (Ginette Lavigne, 2010), introduced by Jean-

Louis ComolliCafé Lumière (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2003), introduced by

Frédéric SabouraudCraneway Event (Tacita Dean, 2009), introduced by Hervé

GauvilleCrash (David Cronenberg, 1996), introduced by Mark

Rappaport Encontros (Pierre-Marie Goulet, 2006), introduced by

Bernard EisenschitzFilm Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010), introduced by Jean

Narboni Mies vailla menneisyyttä (Aki Kaurismäki), introduced byLeslie KaplanInland (Gabbia, Tariq Teguia, 2008), introduced by Jacques

Rancière

Loin (André Téchiné, 2001), introduced by JacquesBontemps

Mistérios de Lisboa (Raoul Ruiz), introduced by Jean LouisSchefer

Palombella rossa (Nanni Moretti, 1989), introduced by Fabrice

RevaultCassandra’s Dream (Woody Allen, 2007), introduced by Marie Anne Guerin

Saraband (Ingmar Bergman, 2003), introduced by RaymondBellour

Soy Cuba, O Mamute Siberiano (Vicente Ferraz, 2005),introduced by Sylvie Pierre

36 vues du pic Saint-Loup (Jacques Rivette, 2009), introducedby Pierre Léon

Vale Abraão (Manoel de Oliveira), introduced by YoussefIshaghpour

Hat Wolff von Amerongen Konkursdelikte begangen? (GerhardBenedikt Friedl, 2004), introduced by ChristaBlümlinger

Ze ro Torna or Scenes from the Life of George Maciunas (Fluxus) (Jonas Mekas, 1992), introduced by Patrice Rollet



Fernando Ganzo studied Journalism at theUniversidad del País Vasco, and is currently a doctoralcandidate at the Department of Information and SocialSciences at the same university, where he has also taught atthe Painting Department of the Fine Art School. He is co-editor of the journalLumière and contributes toTra c , he

has taken part in research groups of other institutions, suchas Cinema and Democracy and the Foundation Bakeaz. He

also holds an MA in History and Aesthetics of Cinemafrom the Universidad de Valladolid. He has programmedavant-garde lm programmes at the Filmoteca de Cantabria.He is currently undertaking research on Alain Resnais, SamPeckinpah, and the isolation of characters via the mise enscene.

[email protected]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ALGARÍN, FRANCISCO, GANZO, FERNANDO, GRANDA,MOISÉS (2009). El sonido y la furia . Lumière , nº 1, April,p. 3.

BIETTE, JEAN-CLAUDE (2001).Cinemanuel . Paris. P.O.L.Éditions.

BIETTE, JEAN-CLAUDE (1978).Freaks . Cahiers du cinéma , nº288, May, pp. 23-26.

BIETTE, JEAN-CLAUDE (1978a).Le cinéma phénixo-logiqued’Adolfo Arrieta . Cahiers du cinéma , nº 290/291, July- August, p. 53.

BIETTE, JEAN-CLAUDE (1998).Le Gouvernement des Films .Tra c , nº 25, Spring, pp. 5-14.

BIETTE, JEAN-CLAUDE (1998).Poétique des auteurs . Paris.Editions de l’Étoile.

BIETTE, JEAN-CLAUDE (1996). Qu’est-ce qu’un cinéaste.Tra c , nº 18, Spring, pp. 5-15.

BIETTE, JEAN-CLAUDE (1998),Le Gouvernement des Films .Tra c , nº 25, Spring, pp. 5-14.

BOZON, SERGE (2012).Flammes . Cahiers du cinéma , nº 682,October, p. 92

BREWSTER, BEN (1983).Too Early/Too Late: Interview withHuillet and Straub . Undercut , nº 7/8, Spring, p. 3.

GODARD, JEAN-LUC andOLIVEIRA, M ANOEL DE (1993). “Godard et Oliveira sortent ensemble”, en Jean- Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard . Volume 2. Paris. Cahiersdu Cinéma, p. 270.

SKORECKI, LOUIS (1978). Anexe sur Jacques Tourneur .Cahiers du cinéma , nº 293, October, pp. 39-43.

SKORECKI, LOUIS (2001).Raoul Walsh et moi . Paris.Presses Universitaires de France.

FERNANDO GANZO

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Memories of a Retired Film Programmer

Eduardo Antín,Quintín

ABSTRACT

Based on his experience as artistic director of the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Film (BAFICI) 2001 until 2004, Quintín re ects on the editorial criteria and programming politics of the festival during this period. Thesaimed at creating a series of complementary sections, that would potentiate each other and avoid unbalanced hierarchiethat the festival didn’t turn around an expected centre and an ignored periphery, but was rather organised as a diversitcompact as possible. The core idea of the festival was to showcase ‘genre and avant-garde’ lm, as a way to exclude wh was most common in this context: the lms produced for the festivals. Furthermore the essay also elaborates on the changesproduced by digital access to lms over that period, and the ensuing transformations in international festivals and lm criticismFinally, the article focuses on Jean-Luc Godard’sHistoire(s) du cinéma (1988–1998), as a perfect example of comparative cinema,and of a philosophy or thought on the relationship between cinema and the world.

KEYWORDS

Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Film (BAFICI), lm festivals, programming criteria, spectator, comparativcinema, new Argentinian cinema, digital technology, Júlio Bressane, Jonas Mekas,Histoire(s) du cinéma .


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From 2001 to 2004 I was the director of theBuenos Aires International Festival of IndependentCinema (Ba ci). It wasn’t a dif cult task. Ourmain problem since 2002 was one of funding,

since Argentina was facing an extremely dif cultnancial situation. What was most complicated was to get international agents to grant us rights toscreen their lms for just a few dollars. Thankfully,however, from 1999 – when the festival wasfounded – until 2001 the voice was spread thatit was an interesting venue and the covetousinternational agents looked at us sympathetically.So it was only a question of selecting the lms andscreening them there. We had a great advantage:

there were a lot of lm-makers whose work hadnever before been screened in Argentina. Forinstance, only one lm by the Straub had beenscreened before that, which says it all. But thepublic was also eager, a bit tired of commercialpremieres and nostalgic of original and more variedmenus, as the ones that were common a few yearsback in Buenos Aires. To give an example: priorto my rst edition as director of the festival, I hadseen at the ‘Quinzaine des Réalisateurs’ in CannestheWerckmeister Harmonies ( Werckmeister harmóniák,Béla Tarr, 2000), which had interested me a greatdeal. A Dutch friend, critic Peter Van Bueren, hadalways told me about Tarr and I was very curiousto see a lm by him. Later on I discovered that Tarr had made a 7-hour lm titledSátántangó (Béla Tarr, 1994). I immediately realised that a lm withsuch title, in black and white and with unendingsequence-shots could not fail in a city like Buenos Aires. We programmed both theWerckmeisterHarmonies and Sátántangó and they were a great

success.Sátántangó was screened in a full housetwice, spectators fought to get tickets and everyoneleft the screening completely mesmerised. Exceptfor my mother, who was mysterious mistrustof hungarians. Until the day of her death, shereproached me for having shown that lm. I can’trefute it because I never sawSátántangó , but Ithought Béla was a charming chap.

As I say, that was very easy. It suf ced with

a little intuition, being ready to run risks (which weren’t too great) and use snobbery (without

which cultural endeavours are impossible) inour favour. What we had to offer was new,fresh, exotic. And was renewed every year. Wehad good international advisors, such as Mark

Peranson, who is now the Programming Directorat Locarno, or Olaf Möller, who always knew a lotof rare Filipino lm-makers. It all went so well,that the local press asked us what was the nextunknown genius we would introduce, rather thanasking to bring certain celebrity lm-makers. Atthat time, there weren’t any internet downloadsyet, nor classic and rare DVD editions, and toknow the novelties one had to travel or wait untilthe next Ba ci.

It is true that glamour always helps: in 2001 Jim Jarmusch came, which almost as having Mick Jagger. And Oliver Assayas came together withMaggie Cheung, his wife at the time. I rememberall the staff, starting by the director, queuing toget their photo taken with Maggie. But we alsohad a Korean lm showcase, just at the time when Korean lm was coming back at its best.Lee Chan-dong was a member of the jury and we showed his lms alongside those by HongSang-soo, Bong Jung-ho or Jang Sun-woo, which together with some of their lms shownin previous occasions produced a few lovers ofKorean cinema in Buenos Aires. Let me say thatthe winner of that year was Jia Zhangke withPlatform (2001). Jia had already come to Buenos Aires in 1999 with Xiao Wu (1998), a lm thatdazzled me but wasn’t awarded any prizes thatyear (it was shown in 16mm!); I was determinedto repair that mistake and achieved to do so. We

invited Jonathan Rosenbaum to be part of thejury, and thus do the job. The other membersof the jury were Beatriz Sarlo, a prestigious Argentinian intellectual, Simon Field, directorof the Rotterdam Film Festival and, althoughhe cancelled his trip at the last minute, RobertoBolaño also gures in the catalogue. Glamour,but glamour for connoisseurs.

And in case this wasn’t enough, there was

the ‘nuevo cine’, or Argentinian independentcinema, which was very trendy at the time. In

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1999 Pablo Trapero had presented Mundo grúa (1999) at the Ba ci, and went on to have greatinternational exposure. From then onwards manyprogrammers from international lm festivals

decided to come to Buenos Aires to try to catchsomething. This placed us in a complicatedposition, and the production that year wasn’tparticularly interesting, although it includedSábado (Juan Villegas, 2001) andBalnearios (Mariano Llinás, 2001). Until one day appeared ashy young man with long hair and a VCR. It wasLisandro Alonso, who came to ask if we mightbe interested inLa libertad ( Freedom , 2001). We were mesmerised and hugged each other as if we

had signed Messi for the local football team, butin a few days he had been invited to Cannes. Inthe end, Thierry Frémaux allowed us to screenthe lm outside the competetive section. We gota draw of sorts. It was very dif cult at the timeto discover anything from Buenos Aires. Noteven Lisandro Alonso. In the coming years, thecolonialism of the festivals would become evenmore exacerbated thanks to the laboratoriesand grants to develop projects, the workshopsat Sundance, the residency at Cannes: the lm-makers of the future had their training centres inthe Masías of the First World.1

However programming is more thanachieving worldwide premieres – a game playedby all the major festivals but for peripheral venuessuch as the Ba ci is completely absurd and alsoleads to lower the quality of the selection. If an Argentinian lm-maker achieves to get someinterest from Berlin or Locarno, let alone Cannes,

he or she will very rarely present it at Buenos Aires. To get it right with a new discovery is a questionof luck. And to seduce the audience is mostlyto do with being astute. But even so there is amargin for inspiration and trade, and that marginis expanded when one understands that puttingtogether a catalogue is not only about selecting aseries of lms based upon the personal taste of

the organisers. Anyone with a minimum degreeof taste and experience as spectator can say yesor no with certain ef ciency. I have some relatives who enjoy going to the cinema regularly and who

wouldn’t do a worst job than some of the lmprogrammers I have known over the years, evenif they are certain to have an exquisite taste andthat they have to show it with each election.

Over recent years, even if the Ba ci hasremained a more than respectable festival,programmers’ votations became the norm todecide on the selection of lms. What a nonsense. This is not an activity that can bene t in any way

from such democratic attitudes. I believe that thismethod was derogated only this years, under thedirectorship of Marcelo Panozzo – who was aprogrammer during my tenure. What did we doat the time then, since it is impossible for a teamof four, as we were at the time, to agree in everydecision? In the rst instance, it is important tobuild an architecture, a series of sections thatcomplement and strengthen each other, and thatavoid creating unequal hierarchies so that the festivaldoesn’t have an expected centre and an ignoredperiphery but rather a diversity which is as compactas possible (amongst the festivals that I have visited,only the one in Marseille came anywhere close tosuch compactness and coherence, even if not allthe titles were worthwhile; but the programmeis much smaller than the one at Ba ci; Locarno,under Olivier Père also had something of that). The unknown lm-makers and odd sections needto be sold more than anyone annything else, so thatthey become at least as attractive to the spectators

as the competitive section, if not more – whichshould in any case be eliminated altogether, asthe Viennale has managed to do. (Another meritof the Viennale is that it avoids being invaded byproducers and lm-makers looking for money in the work in progress sessions and other young talentscompetitions that I contributed to implement, alas,in Buenos Aires.)

EDUARDO ANTÍN (QUINTÍN )

1. Translator´s note: The author establishes a comparison

here with the training centre of the Football ClubBarcelona, where Messi amongst other players was trained

since a young age and which is popularly known as ‘la

Masía’ because its headquarters are in a traditional Catalanfarmhouse.


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more and more spectators to the next ones. ButI am not sure with which contemporary cinemado Portabella’s lms dialogue, even if they arethemselves very current. Another instance was the

exceptional lm Mafrouza (Emmanuelle Demoris,2007), which I had the chance to award as amember of the jury of Locarno in 2010. That lmanticipated in some way the Egyptian revolution,or rather visualised its breeding ground. No onethought about that lm in historical terms, theimportance and depth of its perspective weren’tevident either. Mafrouza doesn’t dialogue with the‘political cinema’ made today, so ll of certaintyand evidence as it was fty years back. It is

another isolated lm, which had a lot of troubleto circulate in festivals and didn’t nd there a greataudience either. A third example is that of JúlioBressane, one of the most atypical lm-makers, whose aesthetic project seems to go against thegrain of anything else being made today. I saw therst lm by Bressane in Turin ( Days of Nietzschein Turin [Júlio Bressane, 2001], precisely). I didn’tunderstand it. Years later, in 2010, I bumpedinto Bressane and some of his lms in Valdivia.Only there did I begin to understand that I wasin front of a lm-maker who was not only very valuable but also unique. This year the Ba ci hasannounced a Bressane retrospective. Perhaps he will manage to dazzle a few spectators, and this would be enough of a reward for the festival. ButI don’t think that Bressane’s cinema resonates with the lms shown at the festivals nowadays,nor that there are many critics interested in givinghim the attention he deserves. Although there isalways a PhD student looking for an understudied

topic. The main reason of the isolation I perceive in

these examples is that, in my opinion, a paradigmof cinema for festivals has been established, aparadigm that uni es at the same time that excludes,and that brings together a couple of recent trendsin contemporary cinema: on the one hand, thereis an increasing search for young talent, whoselms are overseen by the funders that co-produce

them. These lms are mostly based on the script,and are very premeditated in their length, effects

and folkloric colour. On the other hand, thereare the new masters, those belonging to thegeneration that has emerged over recent years,increasingly veering towards ne art formats and

undertaking installations and curated projects formuseums. Add to this the lms made with the bigawards in mind. Cannes can award an academicand wighty lm-maker such as Haneke, as muchas a light and inspired one such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, but in the end there is not muchdifference between one and the other, becausethey are both part of the establishment, of theglamour. Eventhough there are more and morelms being made, the invisibility of the great

majority is incerasingly exacerbated. The festivalsand their relatives, the cinémathèques, are moreand more professionalised, critics are more savvy,but this only reverberates in a small minority ofinitiated, those who are able to manage large volumes of information.

I will end by discussing Godard and JonasMekas. Whom can one otherwise mention inrelation to these subjects? Mekas always defendedthe small forms in cinema, the lms made forone’s friends, and outside the history of art. Those lms are decidedly not in the festivals, anduntil they are not there, cinema will get lost inthe frivolity of its huge apparatus, an apparatusthat is not only industrial but also mediatic andacademic, and which only professionals can de-codify and use. The lms made by the people for which Mekas sings require an audience made ofpeople and not experts. Godard speaks insteadof the dialogue between lms, of criticising a lm

with another one, of the possibility of comparingshots, photograms and structures, something thatthe digital era has made accessible to everyone. At the times of Henri Langlois, this was onlymade possible by spending one’s days at theCinémathèque and even so, one ran the risk ofproducing accurate impressions. Godard spokeof comparing lms many years back and gave ustheHistoire(s) du cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1988– 98), the greates lecture of comparative cinema

ever. But even if Godard might have foundedan academic discipline, his aim was never to ask



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AIRA, CÉSAR (2011).Festival . Buenos Aires: Buenos AiresFestival Internacional de Cine Independiente (Ba ci).

COZARINSKY, EDGARDO (2010).Cinematógrafos . Buenos Aires: Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de CineIndependiente (Ba ci).

GODARD, JEAN-LUC (1998). Histoire(s) du cinéma . Paris.Gallimard.

GODARD, JEAN-LUC (1979).Les cinémathèques et l’histoire ducinéma . BRENEZ, Nicole (Ed.),Documents (pp. 286-291),Paris: Éditions du Centre Georges Pompidou.

Graduate in Mathematics by the Universidad de Buenos Aires, where he worked as a lecturer and researcher until1984. He is also a lm critic, collaborated in the foundationof the Argentinian journal El Amante , which he co-directeduntil 2004. Between 2001 and 2004, he directed the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema (Ba ci).He is a regular columnist of the cultural magazine of thenewspaperPer l and a contributor to international lmjournals such asCahiers du cinéma , Sight and Sound andCinemaScope . He was also a founder and director of the Association

of Critics (FIPRESCI) and professor of the Universidad delCine. He has publishedLuz y sombra en Cannes. Nueve años

en el centro del cine contemporáneo ( Lights and Shadows of Cannes: Nine Years of the Centre of Contemporary Cinema , Uqbar, 2010,co-authored with Flavia de la Fuente), and has contributedto collective books such as Movie Mutations: The Changing Faceof World Cinephilia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010),Claire Denis.Fusión fría ( Claire Denis: Cold Fusion , Festival de Cine de Gijón,2005) orHistorias extraordinarias. Nuevo cine argentino 1999-2008 ( Extraordinary Histories: New Argentinian Cinema , T&BEditores, 2009). Together with Flavia de la Fuente, he co-directs the blogLa lectora provisoria .

[email protected]

BIBLIOGRAPHY


questions that could be answered by the studentsin an exam, such as: How many shots does FritzLand use in comparison to Murnau? What doesGodard compare then? Let me please make a last

detour. A few years back, and shortly before his death,

I met critic and lm-maker Jean-André Fieschi in Viena and asked him about his years atCahiersdu cinéma , in the early 60s. We commented uponpassing a lm about theCahiers made by EdgardoCozarinsky and which has the particularityof having irritated both thecahierists and theirenemies (Fieschi didn’t like it either). Fréderic

Bonnaud appears at some point in the lm andpronounces a simple but conclusive sentence:‘TheCahiers won’. I reminded this to Fieschi andhe answered: ‘If theCahiers had won, we wouldn’tbe as we are.’ Fieschi didn’t refer to the journalhere, or to lm criticism, but to the state of the world in general. Now I go back to Godard. There is a moment in theHistoire(s) du cinéma that

I deem extremely important. It is when Jean-PaulSartre appears speaking ofCitizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) and we hear him saying: ‘This is notour path.’Histoire(s) du cinéma is, amongst many

other things, a refutation of that sentence. Or, inother words, a way of saying that during a certainperiod of time, a group of young critics, laterlm-makers – drawing on the work of a crazylm programmer (Langlois), a catholic intellectual(Bazin) and the work of a handful of Europeanand American lm-makers – understood thatthe philosophie indépassable de notre temps was notmarxism, but cinema.Histoire(s) du cinéma is, in myopinion, the history of that moment, the only one

when cinema truly worked as a medium through which to look beyond cinema in a convincingand revolutionary way. Thus the comparison thatcomparative cinema was able to make then – andthat Godard has been making all along –was notamongst lms, but between the cinema and the world. This is also missing nowadays.●

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Transmission at the Cinémathèques

Antonio Rodrigues

ABSTRACT

The relationship between Henri Langlois and João Bénard da Costa is at the heart of the in uence that the CinémathèqueFrançaise exerted over the Portuguese Cinematheque, as well as of the transmission and circulation of ideas and programmodels at play between both institutions. Commenting on some of the characteristic traits of both Langlois and da Costaessay also traces the evolution of the Portuguese Cinematheque, founded in 1958. Langlois’s support was key during a pof great economic hardship, under the directorship of Manuel Félix Ribeiro, and further extended since da Costa becaregular collaborator. In particular, the article mentions the important retrospective dedicated to Roberto Rossellini in 1

just before the Carnation Revolution that overthrew the dictatorship in Portugal in 25 April 1974. Furthermore, the auelaborates on the similarities and differences between both lm programmers, and in particular analyses programmes basedon the relationships or ‘secret links’ between lms, from the early programmes created by Langlois in the 1930s to da Costalater programmes, such as ‘Lang in America’ (1983) and ‘Variations on Oz’ (1992).

KEYWORDS

Henri Langlois, João Bénard da Costa, Portuguese Cinematheque, programming criteria, Auteur theory, lm seasons, RobertRossellini, spectator.


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Henri Langlois (1914–77) was the realinventor of the profession of lm programmingand can also be considered the greatest lmprogrammer, or at least the most in uential.

This probably has to do with the fact that he was also the greatest cinephile of all times.Lnglois transformed hi passion for cinema in a way of living and knew, better than anyone else,how to transmit it. This is why he wrote part ofthe history of cinema: he taught to see becausehe enabled to see. Thanks to his programmes,the lms mentioned in books, in the historiesof cinema and in the lmographies acquired aform of reality. Langlois, who awoke so many vocations (for cinephiles, programmers, lm-makers) was a self-taught man, as so manygenerations of cinephiles who succeeded him – even those who held institutional positions asprogrammers had often undertaken studies inother elds at university. One of his adversaries,MoMA’s Richard Grif th, criticised him inprivately saying, ‘he is not an archivist, or ahistorian, he is only... an enthusiast!’ When hefound out about the comment, Langlois found very funny that enthusiasm was considereda negative quality and saw in this argument ajusti cation of his own despise for his colleagueat MoMa (ROUD, 1983: 133). Langlois wasn’tsomeone to prompt consensus, he rather stirredup unconditional friendships or lethal hatred. And Langlois himself divided the world upbetween friends and enemies, people with whom he shared af nities, and whom he trustedand others that he mistrusted. Naturally it was

possible for a friend to become an enemy, butthe opposite was more unlikely. With some, hecould be very generous, but he would not giveanything in to others, ‘with his extraordinary

mix of inspiration and preconceived ideas,generosity and envy’, as Jacques Ledoux, fromthe Belgian Cinémathèque, would say after hisdeath, adding: ‘he was at the origin of manyCinémathèques (even the one I run), and thisI shall never forget’ (ROUD 1983: 205)1. ThePortuguese Cinémathèque is amongst the manysmall and poor institutions with which Langlois was extremely generous, and upon which he stillcasts a shadow today. Founded in 1958, thanks tothe passion and efforts of Manuel Félix Ribeiro(1906–82), who was its director until his death,this Cinémathèque only started to work in decentconditions in the 1980s, when it ceased beingpoor and started to cease being small. Between1958 and 1980, the Portuguese Cinémathèquedidn’t enjoy the conditions to show regularprogrammes, and could only afford to show twoor three seasons per year. Henri Langlois, for purecinephilic friendship with Félix Ribeiro, createdthree lmic and cultural events in Lisboa in the

rst half of the 1960s. Three big silent cinemaseasons, one dedicated to French cinema (1962),another one to German cinema (1963) and thethird to American cinema (1965). These seasons,programmed by Langlois with his own lmscopies, brought together lms that he regularlyshowed in Paris, but which had never beenshown in Lisboa in that way, brought togetherunder a historical and cinephilic perspective.

1. Roud also cites the testimony of Françoise Jaubert(daughter of Maurice Jaubert), to whom Ledoux said:‘Langlois was also my father, as well as he was yours.’

—What is your dearest dream? —To die during a screening.

Dialogue fromBrigitte et Brigitte (1966),by Luc Moullet

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Portuguese Cinémathèque. Throughout the rstnine years at the Gulbenkian Foundation, JoãoBénard didn’t programme on a regular basis, which obliged him to be very imaginative. At

the Foundation, he programmed solid, integralmonographic seasons: Mizoguchi, Rivette,Bresson, Truffaut. Langlois also programmedmonographic seasons, but alternated them with other programmes. Most importantly, hedidn’t feel the need to organise the screeningsin seasons. He would make the most unlikelypairings, since what was most important for him was to see lms, as many as possible. His methodconsisted in lacking one and in rejecting criteria

of ‘good tatse’ or ‘low’ or ‘high’ culture. In the1970s, Bénard organised three great seasonsof American cinema (1930s, 40s and 50s), butprogrammed them in a didactic and chronologicalmanner, showing only the great titles. Such aprogramme is no way Langlois-like but was verymuch needed in the Lisboa of the 1970s in orderto produce an audience, whereas in Paris Langloishad the most cinephile audience worldwide, dueto the exceptional offer in the cinemas acrossthe city. In the 1970s, Bénard offered audiencesin Lisboa lms that had never been seen therebefore, or which had not been screened overthe last twenty or thirty years, in order to offer abasic lm education and be able to leap on a lessconventional territory later on. Another crucialdifference was that Bénard was an orthodox Auteurist, taking to its last consequences the Auteur Theory of theCahiers du cinéma of the1950s: for him, there were the elected few lm-makers, who formed part of a family, who could

not commit any errors or make lms that weren’tgreat; and the damned ones, without hope.Langlois, on the other hand, was more of a lmist than an Auteurist . Furthermore, he played a keyrole in the formation of the rst generation ofcritics atCahiers , who had so crucially in uencedBénard himself: their position in relationship tocritics and criticism was completely opposed.

However there is an important aspect in the

conception of Langlois’s programme that founda lasting echo in the activity of Joao Bénard:

the ludic aspect, the pleasure of composingthe menu of lms included in the programme.Langlois enjoyed programming for an imaginaryspectator that would attend all the screenings in

a day (and in 1950s and 60s Paris, this spectatordid indeed exist). He thus imagined secretbridges between the most disparate lms. Thepoetic intuition that led Langlois to programmefor an imaginary spectator is already manifest inthe rst programme he organised, even beforefounding the Cinémathèque Française. In 1934he rented a small room in the Champs Elyséesthat he called ‘Le Cinéma Fantastique’, and where he screened three feature lms in a row

and without any breaks:The Fall of the House ofUsher ( La chute de la maison Usher , Jean Epstein,1928),The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari ( Das Cabinet desDr. Caligari , Robert Wiene, 1920) andThe LastWarning (Paul Leni, 1929). Still in the 1930s,he screened double bills such asShoulder Arms (Charles Chaplin, 1918) and An Italian Straw Hat ( Un chapeau de paille d’Italie , René Clair, 1928).Eric Rhode observed that the in uence thatLanglois exerted on the members of the futureNouvelle Vague during their formative years,in the second half of the 1940s, was not onlydue to the amount of lms that he showed, butalso to how he showed them. ‘Langlois showedthree lms per day, creating unexpected butreavealing juxtapositions, such as screening anEisenstein before a Walsh or a Hitchcock aftera Mizoguchi. His regular spectators were therst ones to have their sensibility immersed inthe history of cinema since its very beginning.’( A History of Cinema , 1969, quoted in ROUD,

1983). In 1963 Langlois brought to the New York Film Festival the then very rareL’Âge d’or (Luis Buñuel, 1930), but preceded its screening with something very different: a selection oflms by the Lumière brothers. The audiencedidn’t like the mix very much and was impatientduring the screening. Langlois then said toRichard Roud, the director of the festival:‘don’t ever forget that one programmes for a10 per cent of the public. Nothing matters, as

long as that per cent is happy’. (ROUD, 1983:130)

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João Bénard also appreciated this sort ofprogramme, he also enjoyed proposing clues thatonly he knew and which could sometimes becomeprivate jokes. It wasn’t a form of imitation but

of liation, one of the marks of the relationshipbetween those two men, born twenty yearsapart and who nevertheless had a very intenserelationship between six brief years. When Bénardtook a certain distance from the monographicseason, which were his main passion, heestablished imaginary bridges between the lms,just as Langlois would also do. In the 1983 season‘Fritz Lang in America’, he didn’t present the lmsin a chronological order, but rather in chapters, an

ordering that required that spectators followed the whole programme in order to perceive its meaning:nine lms on guilt, ve on absolute evil, four onadventure, to nish with ‘four workssui generis that will articulate these circumstances:Secret Beyond theDoor (1947),Clash by Night (1952),The Blue Gardenia (1953),Human Desire (1954). This we begin withguilt and nish with desire.’ In 1992 he organiseda programme titled ‘Variations on Oz’, since heconsideredThe Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming et al,1939) ‘a superb metaphor of cinema, its Ovidianmetamorphosis, one of the most subtle “ lms on

lms” of the history of cinema’ (DA COSTA,2008). This 1992 season was programmed for theimaginary spectator who would leave a screeningonly to enter into another diptych or triptych:The

Wizard of Oz andFrom the Life of the Marionettes ( Ausdem Leben der Marionetten , Ingmar Bergman, 1980);Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967) andThe Night ofthe Iguana (John Huston, 1964); Moon eet (FritzLang, 1955),Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1967). In this context, alm gained meaning – or another meaning – whenplaced next to another one.

If all spectators and lm programmers are

Henri Langlois’s children, many are unaware ofthis because, as François Truffaut said, ‘Langloisonly believed in education by osmosis’ (and headded: ‘And so do I.’) João Bénard da Costa wascompletely aware that he was a cinephile and ason of Langlois viacinephilia , a ciné- ls (to useSerge Daney’s expression). He had a very strongcharacter and this is precisely why instead of hidingthe in uence Langlois had on him, He knew thatthis situated him amongst those who programmelms as their passion and want to communicatethat passion because they areenthusiasts .

DA COSTA, JOÃO BÉNARD (1986). “50 Anos da CinematecaFrancesa, 60 Anos de Henri Langlois”, enCinematecaFrancesa 50 Anos - 1936-1986 . Lisbon, CinematecaPortuguesa.

DA COSTA, JOÃO BÉNARD (2008). Presentation of theprogramme «Como o Cinema Era Belo», in the June

2008 catalogue of the Portuguese Cinémathèque.

ROUD, R ICHARD (1983). A Passion for Films – HenriLanglois and the Cinémathèque Française . London, Secker & Warburg.

Born in Rio de Janeiro and French citizen. Member of theProgramming Service at the Portuguese Cinémathèque.In this post, he organised several programmes, withaccompanying catalogues. In 2005 he programmed inLisbon ‘Optimus Open Air’, with eighteen lms screenedopen air on to a 300 square meter screen. He organisedthree lm programmes at the Centro Cultural Banco deBrasil, in Rio de Janeiro, in 2000, 2002 and 2003. Before

that, in Paris, he was a programmer at Studio 43, a venuefor art lms and was a critic of the journalCinématographe .

He contributed to theDictionnaire du Cinéma Mondial (Éditions du Rocher),Dictionnaire – 900 Cinéastes Français (Éditions Bordas) and Journeys of Desire (British FilmInstitute). In 2008 hesobre las representaciones de Rio de Janeiro in cinema, and in 2010 João Bénard da Costa – UmProgramador de Cinema . Since 2011 he is a programmingadviser of Cinecoa, a cinema festival in Vila Nova da FozCôa (Portugal).

[email protected]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ANTONIO RODRIGUES

ANTONIO RODRIGUES


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14/09/1968, a Programme by Henri Langlois

Pablo García Canga

ABSTRACT

Henri Langlois’s programmes are well-known for tracing secret relationships between the lms that were screened throughoua day, tracing conceptual and aesthetic links for an ideal spectator that could watch all of them. This essay analyses Lanlm programme for 14 September 1968, which includedBlind Husbands(Eric von Stroheim, 1919),The Big Sky(Howard Hawks,1952),Bonjour Tristesse(Otto Preminger, 1958) andBande à part(Jean-Luc Godard, 1964). The author looks for approximationsand relationships of different nature, as if the four lms – belonging to different historical periods and modes of production – were part of a montage that enabled us to perceive, or discover, new aspects of each of the lms. The article proposes

relations of two and three amongst the lms, in search of links that could bring together the four lms. It also suggests that itis precisely triangular relationships – the dif culty or impossibility to include three in a couple – that emerges as the commoground of all four lms. Programming becomes thus an interpretative game.

KEYWORDS

Henri Langlois, Cinémathèque Française,L’affaire Langlois , Eric von Stroheim, Howard Hawks, Otto Preminger, Jean-LucGodard, programming strategies,Histoire(s) du cinema .


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1 Imagine you are twenty years old that year.

1968, not one more or one less.

Imagine you arrive to Paris that September.September, with its end-of-holiday avour, thetime of going back to school or to work. ASeptember just like any other, yes, but exacerbated,because that year hasn’t been like any otherand it is not only the return after the summerholidays, but also the return from May’68, fromthe exceptional. In June the right had won theelections and this September is more September

than any other.

2 Imagine that it is any afternoon, the afternoonof Saturday 14, for example, and that around twothirty you leave your small bedroom and walkacross Paris to attend the rst session of theCinémathèque at the Palace de Chaillot.

Imagine that that is what you have been doingevery afternoon for two weeks, since you arrivedto Paris. To go to the Cinémathèque, and attendthe screenings organised by Henri Langlois. This is why you’ve come to Paris. This is whatdistinguishes it from other cities: a screen that isnot like any other. Because the one who decides what to screen is unlike any other.

3 Even so you were almost too late. Because inFebruary the Ministry of Culture, led by André

Malraux, had been about to replace Langlois. The lm-makers of the Nouvelle Vague, and later

the old masters and the new contemporary lm-makers, from France and across the world, hadstood up together, had organised demonstrations,had banned the screening of their lms at theCinémathèque unless Langlois was readmitted.

Langlois had come back. Cinephilia hadtriumphed. And it had inadvertantly rehearsed what would come later on, in May.

4 You walk across Paris and you know what youare going to watch. Four lms.

(Four, they are four, the four evangelists, goesa song that you don’t know at the time. Onemusn’t exaggerate, they could also be three, thenit would be a trinity, with the primary colours.Each number is, when studied carefully, the mostimportant one.)

At threeBlind Husbands (Eric von Stroheim,1919).

At half past sixThe Big Sky (Howard Hawks,1952).

At half past eightBonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger,1958).

(At half past eight? Probably later. Someonedidn’t notice the duration ofThe Big Sky . Hawksmakes long lms, even if he doesn’t seem to.)

At half past tenBande à part (Jean-Luc Godard,1964).

I have understood, Capitan!I have understood!

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From 1919 to 1964, 45 years of cinema, ofone cinema only, beyond categories, periods,movements and countries.

5 You already know one of the lms.BonjourTristesse . Or perhaps not. Because you have seenit but can hardly remember it. You didn’t knowhow to watch it. An adaptation of a best-seller. A lm for the wealthy. But you know that todayyou’ll watch it otherwise.

You know that Langlois’s programmes don’t leaveanything open to chance.

Or perhaps they leave everything open to chance,but to a chance that doesn’t exist. It is like playingcards. From chance, the inevitable is born. If one wants to believe in it. You don’t know it already,but Langlois believes in fortune tellers and oftenasks them for advice

His programmes are born from an intuition, ofunexpected kinships between lms that seemeddistant one from the others. Between thempassages are weived, symetries, familiarities, attimes evident, at others remote.

This is why you know that you won’t watchBonjourTristesse in the same way, that it will be as if you hadnever watched it before. Because of the magic ofprogramming. You trust Langlois. He believes infortune tellers. You believe in his intuition.

6 Langlois – whom you have seen a coupleof time between screenings, but to whom youhave never dares to get close – reminds youof someone. You are nit sure of whom. Yousearch in your memory, in the people that youhave met throughout your life, but you can’tnd the likeness. It is only normal that you don’tremember, because he doesn’t remind you ofsomeone real, but rather of a character from anovel, of a novel that you read years ago, in your

early teenage years.Langlois reminds you, even if you don’t know

it, of the image that years ago you had createdfor yourself of Long John Silver. The imposingpresence. The charisma. The untidy aspect, as ifhe was a Parisian pirate. But also the secret, the

secret of the treasure. You could think that, you could think that thefour lms of his programmes are like pieces ofpaper taht are meaningless on their own but whichtogether, overlaid one top of the other, might givethe coordinates of the treasure. What treasure?Perhaps to the old question: ‘what is cinema?’

Imagine you are young and that such question

worries you, that you take it seriously, convincedthat there is a secret, the secret of a sect as it were, and that the day you understand it, then the world and the lms will look otherwise, bathed ina new clarity.

7 What could possibly link these lms togetherthen?

During the screening you have felt that familiarity,and still you nd it dif cult to pin it down now. You calculate, add up and subtract, but you can’tquite gure out how the four lms work together. Two by two, at the most. Or three by three,perhaps.

8 Blind Husbands and Bonjour Tristesse are twoholiday lms. It makes sense. After all, it isSeptember. The time to remember the summer

that just went away.Each lm in its own terms is a story aboutholidays, as the compositions that one had to writeat school. What did you do this summer? Well, we went away – my father and I, or my husbandand I – and then a third person appeared, who was also spending the holidays there, and usedto spend time with us and, well, the truth is thatthat person is now dead, yes, the truth is that that

person didn’t survive the summer, or the holidaysfor that matter.

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As you think that, you oddly envy their tragicholidays. Would yours do for a lm? No, no way. You are envious of those who live stories worthtelling.

Then you perceive another point in common. They are also lms about seduction. About anexpert of seduction. Von Stroheim in one ofthem, David Niven in the other. On the lightnessof seduction, but also its gravity. Or about itsdanger. After all, we have already said, one ofthe characters is dead in each lm. The one whodoesn’t belong to the initial pair.

The lightness of seduction and of the summer;its tragic conclusion.

You also think about the parallel between twoGerman and bold lm-makers, with a Hollywoodcarrier, and how by coincidence they were bothBilly Wilder’s actors embodying German of cials. You think about that but perhaps it is better toleave it here.

9 The Big Sky and Bande à Part : there are twomen. Two men doing as they please. Two menthat spend their days playing to hit and shooteach other, playing truant, going to the edge ofthe river or the canal. All of this at the margin ofcivilisation, a margin that is for some the greatNorth West and which has been reduced forothers to the periphery of the big city.

There are two men and the possibility to win a

lot of money. But they need a woman for this. Ayoung Indian girl, the daughter of a chief whois the key to negotiating in the territory of theBlackfeet. Or a young woman who can let theminto a house where there are a lot of dollar notesfrom a doubtful source.

They need the young woman but, at the sametime, once she appears things can’t remain thesame. They do tricks and push each other to be

able to seat next to her at the bar. There is alwaysone too many. And she, well, she seems to prefer

one of them. Or maybe the other?

And all of this is told by a friendly voice over, which nevertheless never gets too close to

them. Or with the lightness of the episodes thatfollow, and which diverge from the main storyand return to it, perhaps because the story is sosimple that both lm-makers have the freedomto explore the margins themselves, to smugglelife in the lm.

10 Blind Husbands andBonjour Tristesse .

The Big Sky andBande à part .Is it a coincidence? The rst with the third andthe secind with the fourth, As if it were a quatrain with an alternate rhyme.

A-B-A-B.

Perhaps that is one of the secrets of theprogramme, hidden verses and rhymes in whatlooks like a text in prose.

Another day the verses will be:

A:The Avenging Conscience (1914), by Grif th

B:Destiny ( Der müde Tod , 1921) by Lang

A:The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), by Lewin

B:Spellbound (1945) de Hitchcock

The Avenging Conscience andThe Picture of DorianGray : an adaptation ofThe Tell-Tale Heart therst, of Oscar Wilde’s novel the second, bothare stories about hidden crimes behind a wall ora closed door, stories where the conscience ofcrime takes a physical and fantastical form.

Destiny andSpellbound : or a woman trying to rescue

the man she loves from death (Lang) or from themorbid (Hitchcock).

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Another day the lms that will rhyme will beOlympia (1938) by Riefenstahl andPassenger ( Pasazerka , 1963) by Munk (rhyme, as you cansee, can also be based upon oppositions);What

Price Glory (1952) by Ford andThe Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach ( Chronik der Anna MagdalenaBach , 1968), by Straub and Huillet. And so manyothers…

11 A-B-A-B: you wouldn’t be able to knowback then, but this is how Godard’sHistoire(s) ducinéma (1988–98) will be organised, a project that was initially going to be realised in collaboration

with Langlois. A-B-A-B, but it is dif cult to foresee whetherHistoire(s) also has an alternate rhyme, or ifperhaps all of this is to penetrate in a territory astrustworthy as the predictions of the clairvoyants.Or perhaps it is something that may only beclari ed by a clairvoyant.

12 Already in 1937 Langlois had imaginedthe following programme for a ‘Ghost Gala’(MANNONI, 2006: 63-64):

‘1:The Indian Tumbstone ( Das indische Grabmal , JoeMay, 1921) (2 reels of lm). The Raha unearthsGoetzke and, having returned him to life,orders him to serve him. Goetzke stands up anddisappears...

2: Goetzke (2 reels of lm). A crossroad in

Germany. Goetzke appears, stops his stagecoachand kidnaps Lil Dagover’s ancé. She leaves tolook for him and arrives in front of a wall. Heobtains the life of his ancé from Death, inexchange for three human lives.

3:The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari ( Das Cabinet des Dr.Caligari , Robert Wiene, 1920) (1 reel of lm).Lil Dagover arrives to Caligari’s caravan, whointroduces him to Cesare. Cesare kidnaps the

young woman and then, perspecuted, falls off onthe highway. In darkness, a few seconds after the

last image, we hear the story of Pigeon-Terreur…then Barrault appears and performs a mime act.

4: The scene with Barrault nishes. For a second,

nothing happens. Then we hear a corrosive musicand on the screen we can seeThe Testament of Dr. Mabuse ( Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse , Fritz Lang,1933) (2 reels of lm), music and a terrible noise,a man is frightened in a room, escapes, but thereis an explosion. The man on the phone asks forhelp... The night...

5: Kiss of Death ( Dödskyssen , Victor Sjöström,1916). A window seen from the inside of a room,

at night time, opens slightly, a tube senaks in and agas lls the room; then a masked man crosses theroom. Two men, hidden in the room and wearinggas masks follow him.

6: An American lm: the bottom of the sea, twodivers are ghting to death and over that time,instead of hearing the noise of the scene, we eitherhear the waltz of Extraordinary Histories ( Histoiresextraordinaires , Federico Fellini, Louis Malle andRoger Vadim, 1968), or the ght in the cabinetof wax gures of the same lm ( Waxworks [ DasWachs gurenkabinett , Leo Birinsky and Paul Leni,1924]). Fade to black. Agnès Capri appears onscene and sings. Intermission.

7: Nosferatu ( Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens ,F.W. Murnau, 1922) (1 reel of lm): Arrival toNosferatu’s country, the fantastic coachman, thedinner, the blood, the night, Nosferatu enters theroom.

8: The Fall of the House of Usher ( La chute de lamaison Usher , Jean Epstein, 1928) (2 reels of lm). The funeral or the end, I can hear her, she arrives, without the last images.

9: Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932). Thecharacters splits into two. A funeral seen from thepoint of view of the dead.

10:The Student from Prague ( Der Student von Prag ,Stellan Rye and Paul Wegener, 1913). The student



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from Prague is in the guest house, and then hisdouble appears, he ees away, the double followshim, the student only nds solace in death, mirroreffect.

11: Music and Lilliom climbs to the sky’.

In its own terms: an episode fromHistoire(s).Chapter 0a:Ghost Gala.

13 But you don’t know any of this that 14September 1968, and it doesn’t make much senseto speak about it.

The only thing you know then is that a secretthread ties the four lms that you have just seentogether. A thread that you can’t seem to nd.

Blind Husbands and Bonjour Tristesse : two lmsabout holidays. But isn’tThe Big Sky a lm aboutholidays too, in its own terms? It is true that thejourney os not one of pleasure but, after all, itis a journey that lasts a summer time, until thecold weather announces that the winter is comingsoon, that they must return to the South, to thecity, to ‘civilisation’. What matters then is not theholidays but the summer, which allows one to gofar away, climb a mountain, go up the river or, atleast, go to the beach.

In Bonjour Tristesse , Jean Seberg says, before the weather changes, ‘let’s breathe in the air’. These were the holidays, a time when one could simplybreathe in the air, when that was enough. That

was the journey inThe Big Sky , in an even purest way, a time when it was unnecessary to say it, when one simply lived this way, breathing in theair.

(Langlois had said: ‘in fact, a great lm is one where we can feel the air between the characters’[ROHMER y MARDONE, 1962: 80]. Perhapsthat was the secret of cone,a. The key elementthat had to enter in the composition: the air.)

And Bande à part ? Is Bande à part a lm about

holidays? It is not even a lm about the summerand the characters go to school, but one couldargue that it is a lm about improvised holidays,those that one awards oneself. It is a lm, we

said, in which the characters live as school kidsplaying truant, and whom in fact seek excusesto miss their English lessons, as if they neededany at their age. It is summertime in the midst of winter, a rather sad, strenuous summer snatchedfrom the cold and the grey, a summer for threein a world they don’t care about and where theair they breathe is quickly transformed into theirown breath.

14 Holiday lms, yes, but all this is a bit of astretch.

Try again with another clue.The Big Sky andBandeà part , the story of two men who live free andhappy, as if they were kids, but then a womancrosses their way or, better said, they put a womanin their way and then nothing will ever remainthe same between them, the harmony is foreverbroken.

AndBonjour Tristesse ? They are father and daughter,true, but do they not live like children free to doas they please, without nothing interrupting theircomplicity until a woman, a woman-woman,crosses their way? Yes, it seems that the three lmshave to do with freedom and eternal adolescence, with freedom and its end.

Three lms where there is dance and songs in

the prime of life.Oh Whisky leave me alone in TheBig Sky , the madison inBande à part , the dance ofa whole bar expanding across the port inBonjourTristesse .

But inBande à part they don’t dance reallytogether, they can never dance entirely together,the voice over doesn’t tell us differently whenit speaks out loud what is happening insidetheir heads: no mater what one does, no matter

one what feels, there is an insurmountableloneliness.

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And in the second dance ofThe Big Sky , aboardthe ship, an arrow from nowhere is stuck in oneof the dancers’ neck and breaks in an instant ofhappiness.

Finally inBonjour Tristesse the time of happiness isremembered from a present of disenchantment which is nevertheless a danced present. JeanSeberg and David Niven dance from party toparty. But dance is not enough to make one happy.‘If I am happy when I dance, will dance not makeme happy?’ someone said inRoyal Wedding (1951),by Stanley Donen. The answer inBonjour Tristesse is clear: no, the phrase is not reversible.

15 And Blind Husbands ? It doesn’t seem tomatch with the other three. What is the timeof innocence lost here? The lm starts with thedisenchantment, with a married couple wherelove no longer ows as it used to, and it concludes with the recovery of that love. A couple that isreconcilied through the death of a third person.

The death of a third that also brings togethera father and a daughter inBonjour Tristesse , and which decides the nal couple in that musicalchairs game that isBande à part .

But whereas inBlind Husbands the death of theother allos the recovery of happiness, inBonjourTristesse it only brings the melancholy of a sharedguilt. It is no longer common freedom, butsadness, it is not a new idyll that starts, but ratherthey live with the awareness that that will no

longer be possible. Life without turning back. And inBande à part ? It is dif cult to know howthe death of the third will affect the recentlyformed couple. There doesn’t seem to be an idyllthere, but they don’t seem to be under the weightof guilt for being the survivors, the bitterness ofbeing the couple by default.

(Death inBande à part : Arthur dies as he plays,

just the way he falls pretending to have been shot when he has actually been shot for real. And in

Bonjour Tristesse it all begins with the child-likecomplot, until the game and its lightness becomea tragedy).

In The Big Sky , in any case, none of them diesand the characters have become adults, withoutbitterness. The time of a shared childhood isover, yes, but it is seen as somethings positive,to leave behind certain pleasures, but also certainobsessions. To grow up is pleasurable. To growup is simply possible.

16 The four lms don’t seem to match. Except,

perhaps, now that you think about it, in the factthat they don’t match. That might be what theyhave in common, in that they don’t add up.

As the say doesn’t say: there are not two withthree.

It is in that impossibility of the number three where the four lms meet each other.

They are different answers to the same question: what do we do with the number three? From thispoint they all go their different ways, paths thatsometimes cross with the other three, and othersradically diverge from them.

You then ask yourself another question: wouldthenBande à part be Godard’s Jules et Jim (François Truffaut, 1962), with its black and white, its twomen, its wife and voice over? Yes, it is his Juleset Jim precisely because departing from the same

number, they nish by not being alike, it is becausethey don’t have much in common in the end.

17 Could you then remember, or could youimagine that you remember, the other reasonthat brought you to Paris? It wasn’t only cinema.Or cinema as a refuge, as a ight forward. Aight from the reminiscence of another ‘thereare no two with three’, the reminiscence of

other musical chairs that left you along the way. Without deaths, that is true, without tragedy,



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CARASCO, R AYMONDE (1987).Henri Langlois. Dossier . St-

Martin de Cormières. Loess.COMITÉ DE DÉFENSE DE LA CINÉMATHÈQUE

FRANÇAISE (1968).L’affaire Langlois. Dossier nº1. Paris. E.Losfeld.

COMOLLI, JEAN-LOUIS (1968).Première semaine . Cahiers ducinéma , nº 199, March, pp. 32-33.

DA COSTA, JOÃO BÉNARD (1986). “50 Anos da CinematecaFrancesa, 60 Anos de Henri Langlois”, enCinemateca Francesa50 Anos - 1936-1986 . Lisbon, Cinemateca Portuguesa.

GODARD, JEAN-LUC, CHABROL, CLAUDE, ASTRUC, ALEXANDRE, RENOIR, JEAN, RIVETTE, J ACQUES,

KIEJMAN, GEORGES, KAST, PIERRE, ROUCH, JEAN,DONIOL-VALCROZE, J ACQUES, LE CHANOIS, JEAN-P AUL, RAY, NICHOLAS, LEMAITRE, M AURICE, CHAPIER,

HENRY , JABELY, JEAN, SIGNORET, SIMONE & CARNÉ,

M ARCEL (1968).Conférence de presse . Cahiers du cinéma , nº 199,March, pp.34-44.HERGÉ (1946)Le Secret de la Licorne.Casterman. French

edition for Spain and Portugal, Ediciones del Prado, S.A.LANGLOIS, HENRI (1986).Henri Langlois. Trois cent ans de

cinéma . Paris. Cahiers du cinéma, Cinémathèque Française,FEMIS.

MANNONI, L AURENT (2006).Histoire de la CinémathèqueFrançaise . Paris. Gallimard.

ROHMER, ÉRIC & MARDONE, MICHEL (1962). Entretienavec Henri Langlois . Cahiers du cinéma , nº 135, September, pp.

1-25.ROUD, R ICHARD (1983). A passion for lms. Henri Langlois and

the Cinémathèque Française . London. Secker & Warburg.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Film-maker. Graduate in Film Direction by La Fémis(École Nationale Supérieure des Métiers de l’Image et du Son,París). He has written and directed a number of short lms,such asPara Julia ( For Julia , 2004),Du côté de l’ouest lontain ( From theSide of the Far West , 2009),Pissing Territories (2011),Retrato en dos

tiempos ( Portrait in Two Times , 2012). He has written the script ofthe short lmLos dinosaurios ya no viven aquí ( Dinosaurs no Longer

Live Here , 2012) directed by Miguel Ángel Pérez Blanco. He hastranslated Amistad, el último toque Lubitsch ( Friendship, Lubitsch’slast touch ), by Samson Raphaelson, published by Intermedio. Heis Community Manager of Intermedio DVD since May 2012.He contributes to the journalsLumière andDétour .

[email protected]

PABLO GARCÍA CANGA

only a certain sadness, and like the voice overread by Anna Karina inBande à part says: ‘Whatto do then to kill the time that drags on?’ To goaway. To visit the Louvre, or rather run across

the Louvre. Or perhaps not, to visit it slowlyperhaps, to get lost in the paintings, to get lostin the lms at the Cinémathèque.

18 You could imagine Langlois, poor and wasteful, in his of ce, organising the programmeas one that does the pools. 1X2. Looking for theinfallible programme, where all variants t. At theend, the big prize, cinema as a completely visible

mystery.But this pool won’t resolve anything because incinema, in programming, there is no end. The onlything that matters is to end with the possibility ofgoing back to the beginning, cinema doesn’t stop,there are always new possible combinations.

You could also imagine him attending a screeningat the Cinémathèque, amongst real and imaginaryenemies, the order of the screen silencing thedisorder of his own life, casting a spell upon it.

You could imagine him leaving the screeningcalmed down. His image then becomes confused with your own, also calmer, ready to live in a timethat doesn’t drag on, a time that deserves to belived, both walking in silence in the streets ofParis, at night.

Tomorrow afternoon you will come back.

Sunday 15 September 1968:Golem ( Der Golem, wieer in die Welt kam , Carl Boese and Paul Wegener,1920),Une vie (Alexandre Astruc, 1958),WildStrawberries ( Smultronstället , Ingmar Bergman,1957), Marie pour mémoire (Philippe Garrel, 1967).

1X2. Back to the beginning.●

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‘Jeune, Dure et Pure ! Une histoire du cinémad’avant-garde et expérimental en France’.Programming as a Montage of Films andThinking about Film: a Gaie Audiovisual Science

Emilie Vergé

ABSTRACT

This essay discusses the retrospective of experimental and avant-garde French lm ‘Jeune, Dure et Pure !’ (CinémathèquFrançaise, 2000) as an example of pragmatic thought on lm. Film programming is here considered as a way of producinthought on lmic forms and the history of lm that uses repetition and variations of images with re exive and meta-historicalends, as well as aesthetic ones. The forms and procedures of this form of thought on lm deserve to be analysed andquestioned: is it even possible to speak of an act of theory? What is most striking about this programme is the reevaluation a theoretically, but also socio-economically problematic term such as ‘experimental lm’. The relationships between the use this term in lm and in science have not been suf ciently studied so far. The programme introduces the distinction between‘experimental’ and ‘avant-garde’ lm, thus suggesting different forms of subversion. This form of comparison implies aunderlying lmic thought based on the precise relationships established between the lms programmed.

KEYWORDS

Programming, montage, aesthetics, experimental cinema, science, technique, invention, avant-garde, French cinema.


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The lm programme analysed hereannounces with signi cative vigour its ambitionby using the title of a lm radical lm-maker andprovocateur Maurice Lemaître : from 3 May until

2 July 2000 ‘Jeune, Dure et Pure !’ offered to thespectators of the Cinémathèque Française, Parisa total of 82 screenings that composed a strongand beautiful experience of gaie audio-visualscience. Comparable to a gigantic found footagelm, the programme re-actualised the cognitiveand aesthetic capacities of lm montage – suchas the selection and arrangement of the lms – inorder to rethink the history of experimental andavant-garde lm in France. In addition to such

pragmatic heuristics, the programme ful lled afundamental patrimonial role: to make visiblelms rarely seen and, at times, never beforescreened in public. A crucial task of the project, which extended over the two years preceding thescreenings, consisted in locating, or re-locating,the lms themselves.

‘Jeune, Dure et Pure !’ was conceived bylm professor, writer and programmer NicoleBrenez and lm-maker and editor ChristianLebrat, both actively involved in valorisingexperimental cinema.1 The project was initiatedby Dominique Païni, then director of theCinémathèque Française, who had wished toconsecrate a great retrospective to experimentalcinema in France for some time. The fact thatthe institutional director of the project was a writer and exhibitions curator so committed tonding new and original ways to present lm,

was undoubtedly a favourable condition for

this audacious corpus of lm and thinking onlm. The catalogue of the retrospective opens with an essay by each of the three contributorsto the programme, followed by a discussion ofthe contents outline by Brenez, of a great valueboth in terms of lm curating and thinking aboutlm, since she de nes and explains the lines of

thought that structure the programme, implicit inthe selection and organisation of the lms. This600-pages publication, chie y composed of textsand a few images (stills from some of the lms

included in the programme), brings togethernumerous texts of different nature such as essayscommissioned from critics and theoreticiansor reprints of writings by, and interviews with,lm-makers. Given its volume and ambition, thisbook is one of the fundamental references onexperimental and avant-garde lm – too oftenand unfairly considered as marginal – alongsidethe writings of Dominique Noguez, such as Éloge du cinéma expérimental . However, the latter is

not focused on French cinema as much as USunderground cinema, an area to which Noguezalso consecrated hisUne Renaissance du cinéma andthat has been profusely studied by US academicssuch as P. Adams Sitney enVisionary Film , or Annette Michelson in New Forms in Film .

It is instructive to compare the catalogue Jeune, Dure et Pure ! To the catalogue of theexperimental lm collection of the MuséeNational d’Art Moderne, founded by Jean-MichelBouhours and Peter Kubelka, which presents apanorama of international experimental lmcomparable in scope. The latter is presentedas an inventory, classi ed alphabetically by thelm-makers’ names, whose lms are selected andmostly screened in monographic and autonomousscreenings. In contrast, I would like to argue thatboth the programme and the catalogue Jeune, Dureet Pure ! articulate a form of thinking about, andthrough, lm.

The singularity and strength of this projectlies, on the one hand, on the effort and exhaustivityof its selection, which aims to represent thediversity of experimental and avant-garde lm inFrance, from its origins up to the present time;and, on the other, on the theoretical propositions

1. Nicole Brenez is a professor at Université de Paris-3 andhas written and coordinated a number of publications on

experimental cinema; she also programmes the screeningseries ‘Cinéma d’avant-garde’ at the Cinémathèque

Française, Paris. Christian Lebrat is a lm-maker andresponsible for the book series Paris Experimental; three

of his lms were included in the programme.


EMILIE VERGÉ

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that sustain the construction of the programme,founded on their planning and cohesion,either through a thought put into practice or atheorisation in action. In fact, a historical logic

organises the programme in its whole, as indicatedin the subtitle of the programme: ‘Une histoire ducinéma expérimental et d’avant-garde français’.Hence the rst screenings showed historicallms, moving further chronologically up untilthe contemporary lms, which were screenedin the last events. However, this principle is notset in stone, since the journey allows for certainand signi cative turns; consider, for instance,the last screening, which brought togetherVisa

de censure (Pierre Clémenti, 1968) andLe Lit de lavierge (Philippe Garrel, 1969) – hence altering thethe chronological progression of the precedingsessions, including lms from the 1990s and 2000s,in an attempt perhaps to bing the programme to anend with a beautiful historical leap. This ‘histoiredu cinéma expérimental et d’avant-garde français’claims as well its singularity, ‘Une histoire’. It maybe aiming to set a dialogue, an echo, a correctivegure or a discrete homage to the godardianambition of the ‘histoires du cinéma’. In anycase, it is not a matter of agreed humbleness; it israther an af rmative endeavour. What are, then,the challenges of this gaie audio-visual science,of this signi cant re-montage of the historyof cinema? An alaysis of the programme mayallow us to clarify certain principles and glimpseat certain sparks of thought produced by theencounter of the lms.

The global composition of the corpus,

described as ‘cinéma expérimental et d’avant-garde français’, already implies a thesis on therepresentation of cinema. The use of both terms,rather than one or the other (Nicole Brenez is alsothe author of a monograph titledCinémas d’avant- garde ), identi es not only what distinguishes certainlms within the programme, but also what bringsthem together and distingishes from other lms,exterior to this corpus – and which can be calledas ‘Industrial-Narrative-Representational (I.N.R),

as does the lm-maker Claudine Eizykman,also featured in the programme, or Mode of

Institutional Representation (M.R.I.), as does thelm scholar Noël Burch in his bookLa Lucarne

de l’in ni . In any case, when the lmic formtransgresses or denatuarlises the representative

norm of dominant cinema in a socio-economicallevel, also surpasses or reveals, at the same time,its limitation, either with or without a criticalintention (or simply creative or inventive in thiscase). This is why the programme brings togethera range of different kinds of lms whosecommon feature is their ability to surprise, eventhough, or perhaps because, they don’t belongto the world of mainstream representation. Aprogramme, for example, brings together the

phantasmagories by Georges Méliès and ÉmileCohl with Jean Comandon and Lucien Bull’sscienti c observations: imaginative or analytical,,they both surpass ordinary representationalrealism, exploring the possibilities of the medium(tricks, painting on lm, slow motion, fast-forward, etc.). Surrealism and naturalism bothoppose the effect(s) of realism. The facultiesof human perception are ampli ed ( ExpandedCinema , per Gene Youngblood’s de nition in hishomonymous essay) in relation to the capacitiesof the cinematographic medium. Furthermore,as an epigraph to the screening, a quote by the‘visionary’ lm-maker Stan Brakhage enablesus to think about the dialectic resolution of theapparent contradiction between the differentlms. Such use of a quotation-epigraph-dialectictool, is used throughout the whole programme, with the merit of producing thought, or at leastan agreement between the lmic forms and theoperative text in the mind of the spectator. That

is, without closing down meaning or reducingit to a rigid theoretical label, especially takinginto account that most of the quotations comefrom lm-makers – albeit some of them alsotheoreticians, such as Brakhage.

The opening up of the works, as shownin the examples above, reactivates the originalmeaning of the term ‘experimental cinema’, toooften used as a comfortable but generic label,

which doesn’t address the use of the term inthe context of Claude Bernard or Émile Zola,

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for instance. This decompartmentalisation alsoimplies bringing together, in the same or nearbyprogrammes, scienti c, militant or artists’ lms. The distinction between ‘experimental’ and

‘avant-garde’ is what is at stake here. This canno longer be reduced to the opposition betweenthe two tendencies usually dividing the (aestheticand political) avant-garde, as if one had todecide between being an aesthete or a militant;furthermore a third pole is added: the technicaltendency, in the case of ‘the inventors (even theindustrial medium is represented via the vistas bythe Lumière brothers). One would be tempted toconclude that there are then as many elds, with

their respective borders, as juxtapositions of lmsable to dynamite them. The radical critique of(spectacular) images of Situationst and Lettristecinema – so present in the programme via IsidoreIsou, Guy Debord, Maurice Lemaître and Gil J. Wolman – would suf ce in its own to transgressthese categories. But its juxtaposition withaesthetic and political avant-garde lms is evenmore eloquent. Maurice Lemaître’s lms, forinstance, are situated next to Marguerite Duras’sas well as to those by the Grupo Medvedkine.Iconoclasm (Lemaître), the beautiful aspect ofthe literary image (in the relationship betweenimages and voice-over in Duras) or the imagesof political struggles (Medvedkine and othercollectives), share one and the same critical front,ghting for a new order of image-making. Theirmeeting in the projection room offers us theopportunity to encounter a series of complete,thoughtful and deeply felt aesthetic appreciations;and the revelation of their af nities, beyond the

differences that meet the eye. And even somethingmore surprising: the juxtaposition of explicitlymilitant lms with scienti c ones. Somethingnever seen before? The same programme includesa selection of lms committed to the politicaland social struggle and lms such asFormation decristaux aux dépens d’un précipité amorphe (Dr. JeanComandon and M. De Fonbrune, 1937) (even

if we may perceive there an echo of DanièleHuillet and Jean-Marie Straub’sFrom the Cloudsto the Resistance [ Dalla nube alla resistenza , 1979])or L’Hippocampe (Jean Painlevé, 1934). We can

identify here a common thread in the masteryof conquested visibilities: from making imagescensored by power structures to surpassinglimitations of the ‘unarmed’ human eye (as Dziga Vertov would write, of the naked eye) thanks tothe power of the scienti c instruments and thatof the ‘cinema-eye’. Not satis ed with creatinga happymelting pot , or simple effects of contrast,the programme, then, went on to suggest moreprofound and unexpected af nities, at times

perplexing and always productive in the creationof a subversive throught on representation andimage-making. In this sense, we may compare themontage of lms conceived by the programmerand theoretician Nicole Brenez with the montageof images in the journalDocuments by GeorgesBataille: a pragmatic thought, produced by theclash of different forms.

Such an aesthetic thought is often incrediblyprecise – perhaps because of its pragmatic mode.Furthermore it leans towards a stylistic thought.By bringing together different works by verydifferent lm-makers, the programme revelastheir style through effects of analogy and contrast.Such associations are at times due to the initiativeof the programmer, and at others to the groupingsof the lm-makers themselves, as in the case ofthe Group Zanzibar2. Consider, for example, thegrouping ofVite (1969) by Daniel Pommereulle withDeux fois (1969) by Jackie Raynal. Whereas

Le Révélateur (1968) by Philippe Garrel, relatedto the same group, is screened together withL’Homme qui tousse (1969) andL’Homme qui lèche (1969) by Christian Boltanski, and preceded bya screening of theciné-tracts made by a collectiveof lm-makers in 1968, which gave place to arevealing montage, conceived by Brenez. Theaesthetic question of guration (as a model and

2. See LEBRAT, Christian (ed., 2007).Zanzibar. Les lmes Zanzibar et les dandys de mai 1968 . Éditions de Paris

Experimenta. Paris.

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allegory) and the historical contexts of May 68and the Shoah, mildly suggested in Garrel’s lm,are enlightened by this context. Programmingmay thus be considered as a form of lm criticism

or analysis. Similarly, the screening of Garrel’s Athanor (1973) withTristan et Iseult (1972), by Yves Lagrange, suggests an iconographic setof relations. These eloquent raccords of themontage-programme seem to imply a preciseidea, or perhaps even constitute an equivalent ofEisenstein’s intellectual montage: for example, thescreening of the abstract painted lm Ere EreraBaleibu Icik Subua Aruaren (1970) by José AntonioSistiaga afterLe Pain quotidien (1970) by Philipe

Bordier, nds a common thread in the idea oftransubstantiation, thus qualifying the materialistand mystic process of the Basque artist. But theraccords tend to be more versatile: they producea multiplication of meanings rather than onesingle wave of signi cation. When seeing JeanPainlevé’sLa Pieuvre (1928) followed byLa Marchedes machines (1928) by Eugène Deslaw, one isrst struck by the formal and thematic contrastbetween the organic and the manual; as onetakes on the re ective character of Deslaw’s lm,however, such opposition is mitigated, since thelmic procedures of the blow-up and the slowmotion are so present in Painlevé; nally, bothare united by avant-garde lm (surrealism, inPainlevé). In short, we are invited to meditate, and we could extend much further on these relations,as it happens with most of the programme, given

its originality, at times perplexing, which enables viewers to renovate or reinvigorate our gaze even when looking at well-known lms such as Nightand Fog ( Nuit et brouillard , Alain Resnais, 1955),

screened together with Robert Breer’s graphicexperimentations on the lm strip, the naturalistobservations ofLocomotion chez Cyclostoma Elegans (1954) by Jean Dragesco, or the ethnography of Jean Rouch’sThe Mad Masters ( Les Maîtres fous ,1954) and the pop lm-poemDéfense d’af cher (1958) by Hy Hirsh, all screened in the samesession. The clash between all of these lms, sodifferent in their forms and modes, may suggestcomplex thoughts on representation, but these are

in no case imposed upon the viewer, since it is inany case justi ed by the heterodox relationshipsat the base of the history of cinema. In any case,‘Jeune, Dure et Pure !’ encouraged an activeexperience as a viewer, giving place to an originalthought around images, beyond its function as ananthology or a mere spectacular entertainment. We may thus compare this programme with lm-maker and curator Peter Kubelka’s periodicalprogrammes at the Filmmuseum in Vienna, which aimed to ask «Was ist Film», which usedunprecedented relationships between lms toput into play a subversive thought on history andlmic forms. Aesthetic thought, in its core senseof the word aesthesis (‘to feel, to perceive’) ndsin the montage of the lmic forms themselves itsideal medium of expression.●

‘JEUNE, DURE ET PURE ! UNE HISTOIRE DU CINÉMA D’AVANT-GARDE ET EXPÉRIMENTAL EN FRANCE’


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EMILIE VERGÉ

Emilie Vergé is a doctoral candidate and lecturerat the Université Paris-3 Sorbonne Nouvelle. She isnow in the sixth and last year of her PhD, on the workof American experimental lm-maker Stan Brakhage.During her PhD, initiated on 2007, she received a researchgrant from the Universidad Paris-3, a PhD grant fromFondation Terra pour l’Art Américain, and was invited asa visiting researcher at New York University and ColoradoUniversity, in Boulder, where she studied the lm and non-

lm archives of Anthology Film Archives, the MoMA inNueva York, the Brakhage Center in Boulder and CanyonCinema in San Francisco. She contributes to internationalpublications on avant-garde and artists’ cinema. Her classeson lm aesthetics have so far focused on lm theory, lightin cinema, black and white and colour.

[email protected]

BRENEZ, NICOLE (2006).Cinémas d’avant-garde . Paris.Cahiers du cinéma.

BRENEZ, NICOLE (1998).De la gure en général et ducorps en particulier. L’invention gurative au cinéma . Paris/Brussels. De Boeck Université. Arts et cinéma.

BRENEZ, NICOLE (2006).Traitement du Lumpenprolétariat par le cinéma d’avant-garde . Biarritz. Séguier.

BRENEZ, NICOLE, ARNOLDY, EDOUARD (2005).Cinéma/politique - série 1. Trois tables rondes . Brussels.Labor. Images.

BRENEZ, NICOLE, JACOBS, BIDHAN (2010).Le cinémacritique : de l’argentique au numérique, voies et formes del’objection visuelle . Paris. Publications de la Sorbonne.

BRENEZ, NICOLE, LEBRAT, CHRISTIAN (2001). Jeune, dureet pure ! Une histoire du cinéma d’avant-garde et expérimental enFrance . Paris/Milan. Cinémathèque Française/Mazzotta.

BURCH, NOËL (1991).La lucarne de l’in ni. Naissance dulangage cinématographique . Paris. Nathan.

EIZYKMAN, CLAUDINE (1976).La jouissance-cinéma . Paris.U.G.E.

GRISSEMANN, S TEFAN, HORWATH, ALEXANDER ,SCHLAGNITWEIT, R EGINA (2010).Peter KubelkasZyklisches Programm im Österreichischen Filmmuseum . Vienna. Österreichisches Filmmuseum.

KUBELKA, PETER (1976).Une histoire du cinéma . Paris.Musée national d’art moderne.

LEBRAT, CHRISTIAN (2005).Les 20 ans de Paris Expérimental (1985-2005 ). Paris. Paris Expérimental.

MICHELSON, ANNETTE (1974). New Forms in Film .Montreux. Corbaz.

NOGUEZ, DOMINIQUE (1999). Eloge du cinéma expérimental .Paris. Paris Experimental.

NOGUEZ, DOMINIQUE (1982).Trente ans de cinémaexpérimental en France. 1950-1980. Paris. A.R.C.E.F.

NOGUEZ, DOMINIQUE (2002).Une renaissance ducinéma. Le cinéma “underground” américain . Paris. ParisExperimental.

SHAFTO, S ALLY (2007).Zanzibar. Les lms Zanzibar et lesdandys de mai 1968 . Paris. Paris Experimental.

SITNEY, P. ADAMS (1979).Visionary lm. The americanavant-garde . New York. Oxford University Press.

VERTOV, DZIGA (1972). Articles, journaux, projets . Paris.Cahiers du cinéma/UGE.

YOUNGBLOOD, GENE (1970). Expanded cinema . New York. E.P. Dutton.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EMILIE VERGÉ


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I wonder if we could start by sketching out arough history of collective cinema.

Most of these lms are now almost orphan lms:

I mean that very few people have studied thecollective cinema phenomenon deeply. There’snot a canon, there’s a virgin landscape for lmhistorians and researchers. So we have to drawthis history as archaeologists and archivists. Butthis is only the rst step. If we study the case, wend that there’s a completely hidden history, andits roots are placed at the very beginning of XXcentury: there’s the recently rediscovered case of Armand Guerra and his Cinéma du Peuple (1913-

14). Between the twenties and the thirties wend the Prokino collective in Japan (ProletarianFilm League of Japan, 1929-34), and later wehave the experience of Film-train conducted by Aleksandr Medvedkin (1933-34) in Soviet Unionand Workers Film and Photo League (1930-34),Nykino (1935-37) and Frontier Film Group (1936-42) in US. I see so many connections between thelms I put in the selection and these experiencesof collectivist cinema. First of all we must noticethat all these collectives were born during aneconomic and social crisis; then we understandthat these lms have been made and so must beconsidered both as aesthetic objects and politicaltools; nally we must consider this history as anopen path still living: in this very moment and inthe last decade, collectivist cinema is born fromits ashes, in Argentina, Spain, Greece, etc.

More generally, how would these lms t intoa history of cinema, particularly in wake of

auteur theory and many of its proponents— Godard, Rivette, Rohmer—declaringthemselves anti-auteurs in the 70s? It’s a very delicate topic. I think that the deathof the auteur theory is just simply the reverse ofthe auteur theory: it’s just narcissism in denial,a broken mirror which hide the face, thoughthe face is still there. I love the Dziga VertovGroup’s lms but they are very different lms

from the ones made by Newsreel or Cinema Action. I don’t see a clear link between this act

of declaring him/herself anti-auteur and the actof founding a lm collective. Every group andcollective has its own history: and we must notbe naïf. In every collective the question of power

was the core. It’s the human being. These younglmmakers renounced their immediate jouissance in order to serve a political ideal, but their desireto make personal lms was strong, and many ofthem made personal lms after their collectivistexperience. Almost every lm has a differentstory: in a case there was a desire coming fromone member, in another case it was another whofound the story and the way to tell it, etc. Forme it’s not important to nd out now who made

that particular lm and who was hidden behinda collective name. It’s the gesture of puttingtogether their skills, thoughts, hopes, all of whichtouches me a lot. And it’s not only a refusal ofauteur theory: it’s a positive act.

More particularly, I wonder if we can posit arelationship of the actors to the lmmakers

particular to collective cinema—and maybea kind of de ning feature. Throughout somany of these movies, the actors seem to takeover the movie not only by determining howthey act, but often by being the lmmakersthemselves…

For some of the lms this is true: I think thatmaking a collective lm sometimes makes the lmstructure much open to the reality. Sometimes theactors just used the lmmakers to have a strongerpolitical mean, a powerful lm-weapon: on theother hand the lmmakers wanted to serve an

ideal. But I think that in the best cases there hasbeen always an exchange between actors andlmmakers. The burning life of both is the verycore of collectivist cinema: they wanted to changetheir life, the present, the cinema itself.

But is there a danger, in collectivist cinema,that as much as the movies might promotelocal voices, normally suppressed bymainstream paradigms, they might also

sti e these individual voices for the sake of acollective message?


DAVID PHELPS

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If we take the example of El Pueblo se levanta -The Young Lords Film(The Newsreel Collective,1971) andFinally Got the News (Stewart Bird,Peter Gessner, Rene Lichtman y John Louis Jr.,

1970) we can say that the exchange between thelmmakers and the actors was subtle and multi-level: there’s an authoritative voice-over trying todirect the dialogue, but there’s a sort of resistanceof the actors which used their accents andpersonal voices. I have tried to put in the selectioncollectivist lms made by people who were ableto bear responsibility for both the propagandamessage and the people they worked with. Themore the lm was considered as a weapon, the

less it would concern real people: the politicalimagery is then taking over. We must not idealizecollectivist cinema: I have seen many really badmovies, absolutely not interesting from a formaland political point of view. I feel that this problemyou underline it’s true for the rst phase of postMay 68 collectivist cinema: in the 70s the lmsbecame more and more portraits of singularpeople,So that You Can Live (Cinema Action,1982) and A Pas Lentes (Collectif Cinélutte, 1979)are the best examples.

I guess it comes down to the age-old questionof political documentary, whether collectivecinema can offer any sort of propagandacure, when it has only the tools of realityto work with. So many of the lms feature

traditional ceremonies and rituals, almostRouch-like, as if, in these movies, the actors

were not only capturing the problems ofreality, but offering a performance that is a

cure of sorts.

Ideology is a kind of collective ritual andperformance: the more the collectives werecapable of absorbing the reality in a dialectical way, the more their lms are living objects forus today. The comparison with Rouch is veryinteresting: the problem is belief. I mean thatRouch really believed in the rituals he waslming, and you can feel this kind of magic in his

lms. He was not distant from his actors, he wastrying to see the invisible with his mechanizedeye. It’s the same case with the best collectivesI have chosen for the retrospective. The post-modern ideology has pushed us to refuse belief,faith, ideals, putting all this in the “old way ofthinking”. The trap of post-modernism is theend of the reality itself. So the cure we can takefrom collectivist cinema can be a coming backto a strong and deep belief in the real, in the world, in the people. Cinema is not just a dreammachine: it can be a strong mean to understand,analyze and change reality: the formal researchesof these lms is an open factory in which wecan nd old but perfectly functioning tools. Wehave just to polish them, and to adapt them toour present situation.

This interview was held over email and edited

David Phelps on 23–24 November 2012.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF RADICAL FILM COLLECTIVES FROM THE 1960S TO THE 80S: INTERVIEW WITH FEDERICO ROSSIN


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A tangle of contradictions, to be traced ifnot untied:

Since “collective cinema” might designateany collaboration between a man and hiscamera, stock, and subject from the Lumièreson, the term might yield meaning less as atype of cinema than a type of lens for seeingcinema: a distillation of one component,collectivity, inherent in any movie’s grab-bag ofhybrid elements, which only becomes re nedinto a genre of its own when amateur moviesturn their perspectives onto themselves—andmake their own collective production thesubject in front of the camera. In other words,

when the lens becomes the subject: but adescription that might as well apply to StanBrakhage or Chuck Jones. For though the“collective lm” or “collectivist lm” shares with so many “underground” lms this senseof attempting to crystallize a single facet ofcinematic praxis—the fact of collaborative lmproduction, alternately a microcosm of societyand alternative to it—the very term supposesthe kind of hybridity that makes nonsense of a

pure genre, or of critic’s concentrated attemptsto slot these movies into preset terms.

So instead the terms and origins have tobe invented as if out of thin air. Appropriately,too, since the collective lm might just as muchengage in an exorcism of historical facts as in aspeculative history. One that counts on a realityof discontents, even between the lmmakers, tobe mobilized by propaganda into a new utopia.

This Great White Man’s notion of history,marshaled to happy heights by the farsightedideas of progressive individuals, might even seemto double as a view of cinema for the Great White Man who, one could argue, marshaledcollective cinema into the era of Rivette andGodard: Jean Rouch. Impulsively, one hopes,

Rouch would despise such claims: he did notoriginate “collective cinema” (the critics, if notthe Lumières, would do that); he would evincelittle concern for The Great White Man except asHis Image was to be refracted into the self-imagesof so many countrymen; and he would developa cinema of rites and rituals in direct oppositionto all notions of individual agency, on the partof subject and lmmaker both, to determine anypart of the action other than its articulation. And

yet that articulation is everything in Rouch—theability of the camera to weave its subjects

Le seul lm intéressant sur les événements, le seul vraiment fort que j’ai vu (je ne les ai évidemment pas

tous vus), c’est celui sur la rentrée des usines WONDER,tourné par des étudiants de l’IDHEC, parce que c’est unlm terri ant, qui fait mal. C’est le seul qui soit un lm

vraiment révolutionnaire. Peut-être parce que c’est unmoment où la réalité se trans gure à tel point qu’elle

se met à condenser toute une situation politique en dixminutes d’intensité dramatique folle.

C’est un lm fascinant, mais on ne peut dire qu’ilsoit du tout mobilisateur, ou alors par le ré exe d’horreuret de refus qu’il provoque. Vraiment, je crois que le seul

rôle du cinéma, c’est de déranger, de contredire les idéestoutes faites, toutes les idées toutes faites, et plus encore

les schémas mentaux qui préexistent à ces idées : faire quele cinéma ne soit plus confortable.

J’aurais de plus en plus tendance à diviser les lmsen deux : ceux qui sont confortables et ceux qui ne le

sont pas ; les premiers sont tous abjects, les autres plusou moins positifs. Certains lms que j’ai vus, sur Flins ou

Saint-Nazaire, sont d’un confort désolant : non seulementils ne changent rien, mais ils rendent le public qui les voit

content de lui ; c’est les meetings de “l’Humanité.”

Afterword. On Collective Cinema

Jacques Rivette

Les Cahiers du Cinéma , no. 204, September, 1968

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into the uni ed choreography of a conjuringdance, and in doing so, to seem to conjure thecharacters’ motions even as it follows them. And here, a type of modern cinema, belonging

as much to Cassavetes as to Rivette and as tothe collectivist lm, is articulated as well: one in which the lm’s production is openly inscribedon-screen (documentary time, located withinthe shot) against the story being staged as a riteand ritual (narrative time, located as much in themontage). Tradition, in Rouch, bridges these twotimeframes, as we watch one articulation of aneternal rite. But Rouch’s lms are also last recordsof traditions about to be destroyed.

The ip- ops continue. For the collectivelms programmed by Federico Rossin in «United

We Stand, Divided We Fall»2 are so outwardlyopposed to the status quo of society’s ceremoniesof violence that they might at rst seem like Rouchinverted— lms that are alternately revolutionaryor militant (incompatible terms), but in any casedevoted to challenging the traditions of the age. Yet as Rivette suggests of Jacques Willemont’sLareprise du travail aux usines Wonder ( The Resumptionof Work at the Wonder Factories , Jacques Villemont,1968), it is the workers’ own enactment of theirmise-en-scène in a 10-minute, single-shot debatein the middle of the street, that makes the lmso revolutionary. In other words, it’s the workers’own efforts to stage the hierarchies and traditionsof their workplace they despise in the street, which is revolutionary: not only because theyfail in fully grafting workplace politics onto theroad, but also because they partly succeed, and

the lm enables them to stage this demonstrationof the same politics they all agree they oppose. This is revolutionary mise-en-scène because onejust glimpses, in this hardening crystallization ofa decade’s politics into ten minutes of open-airimprovisations, the possibilities for how historymight be staged—or rather, how history mighthave been staged instead. A speculative history,like Rouch’s after all, whose politics is not thatof its subjects but of the mise-en-scène of the

ways they might come into contact, discussion,and debate with each other.

Rossin, below, talks about Rouch trying totap into the invisible through his ceremonies, tobelieve in the action as a force of its own of whichthe camera is only the nal performer: a beautiful

thing. But Rouch is no formalist, and neitherhis ceremonies nor his lmmaking is remotelyossi ed—for both are responses to the energy ata particular time and place, both ceremonial formsfor nding the chaos of nature and civilizationalike. For all their treatments of traditions, their violence is an act of the here-and-now, a vortex warping historical energies into the madness ofa moment at which all relations become undone. And the same might be said of so many collectivist

lms. In some sense, the concerns of Rouch’scinema, possession and exorcism both, providethe terms of his lmmaking as well, the abilityto give life to physical vessels like his camera-eye,even through his camera-eye—and just as quicklyto take it away. Possession: Rouch’s eye is one thatcan possess the people on-screen not simply byleading them on in a dance, but also by performingthe dance alongside them for a viewer to live vicariously decades later; not simply their acts,but the entire vision of the lm is conjured byRouch’s eye (traces of Brakhage). Exorcism: yetit’s also an eye that exorcise some deeper, violentforce within whatever it encounters on-screen(and this only by imposing a steady ritual). Theimportant thing, of course, is that the cameramust be possessed by these rituals as much as it“possesses” the people by having them enact themost modern ritual: making a movie.

For Rouch, perhaps more than any other

lmmaker, understand the singular power of thecollectivist cinema to mediate, quite beautifully,two dangerous poles: the ossi cation of asocial ritual on one hand (possession), and therelease of a mob’s energy against it on the other(exorcism). And we live in an age now in whichthese two poles must constantly be opposed:the desperate violence of Haneke, Breillat, orsuburban teens on Jackass (Johnny Knoxville,Spike Jonze, Jeff Tremaine, 2000-2002), vying for

the attention of shock-value across youtube andthe media, videotaping themselves constantly,



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seems a logical response to the NSA’s bland,invisible surveillance, designed to make itscitizens conform to the protocol of politicallycorrect rituals with the unconscious knowledge

that they’re being lmed at all moments. For,as another collectivist lm,Red Squad (HowardBlatt, Steven Fischler, Joel Sucher, 1972) makesclear, citizens will always be expected to conformto the image, to reenact the images they’ve seenfor the camera, so that the NSA can ensure thatcitizens are following the “correct,” operationalimage. Each action becomes protocol for thenext; the NSA insists that everything can be seenexcept the NSA itself.

Red Squad turns this total possession into akind of exorcism with an empty center: the amateurlmmakers decide to lm the law-enforcers whoare lming them, and, as in Oshima’sThe ManWho Left His Will on Film ( Tôkyô sensô sengo hiwa ,1970), the only transgressive act being caught bythe camera is of course the lmmaking itself. Afascinating movie, since the Red Squad’s fear ofbeing lmed only reveals the utter violence of what they’re doing in the rst place: lmmakingis a way to ensure that subjects act “properly,”and of course this is why the Red Squad doesn’t want to be lmed—ensuring that everyone elseacts according to a code of behavior wouldexcuse them from having to follow one as well. The comedy is of the amateur communists, withzero resources, who end up parodying the entire“home movie” operation of the police in anattempt to inhibit the inhibitors. The Rouchianmodel already seems impossible in this calculus

of operations to be eternally-repeated: for whileRouch insists on participating in the action, theRed Squad’s cameras are necessarily invisible inorder to leave its subjects—any activist in New York, and possibly anyone at all—in constantparanoia.

Here we can ask if the collectivist lm mightrisk sti ing individual voices as much as promotethem. And we might, perhaps, make a distinction

between two types of collectivist lms, withoutany idea which sideRed Squad , as a kind of

surveillance stateDuck Amuck ( Looney Tunes’ Merrie Melodies: Duck Amuck, Chuck Jones,1953),might fall on: 1) one that seeks to erase thedifferences between its members in favor of a

propagandistic position and pitch, and 2) onethat seeks to promote differences by facilitatingdiscussion and debate among members. This isn’tquite as simple a distinction as “cinema of thecure” vs “cinema of the diagnosis,” since bothare critical against the status quo.Winter Soldier (Winter lm Collective, 1972), for example, takesan obvious stance against the abuse of soldiers in Vietnam, until that stance comes under questionin a hallway debate near the end of the lm:

suddenly it’s not enough to get evidence withoutoffering criticism of why things have happenedand how they have to be improved. So the lmstarts from a point of collective agreement beforeturning into a collective debate about what thelm should be about.

The important point is that both types ofcollective lm—“possession” and “exorcism”if one likes—assume the camera’s position tostage the action. The suggestion here—both inthe lms and Rossin’s programming—is that thecollectivist documentary might entail a collapsenot only of individual authorship, but authorshipaltogether, so that the subjects of the lm, whetheror not they’re holding the camera, obligate anddetermine the lmmaking. Regional lms likeFinally Got the News (Stewart Bird, Peter Gessner,Rene Lichtman and John Louis Jr., 1970) and ElPueblo Se Levanta (The Newsreel Collective, 1971)entangle themselves between these modes: both

seem to want to be propaganda bulletins aboutlocal problems that would erase the participationof individuals in the project. But the authorial,authoritative voice-over is always written in akind of street dialect, and told by members withlocal accents: sometimes the testimony of locals within the lm becomes the voice-over of thelm itself. So a much more interesting processis enabled—instead of a standardized, correctauthorial position, the lms only offer us the

voices of individuals from a precise circumstance,place and time.

DAVID PHELPS


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Let’s articulate one more fault line along which this simpli ed distinction of the cinemaof possession and the cinema of exorcismoperates: the blurry line between collective

lms regulating action according to a party line,and enabling actions that might not have beenpossible without the camera, against the systemof oppression. Some of the later, grassrootslms, likeSo That You Can Live , (Cinema Action,1982), seem even to have retreated to some kindof left-wing conservativism: attempts to work within the system to reform it and recover thehome values that capitalism has sold them butrarely provided.

***

Ultimately, almost all the collectivist lmsleave us with a sense of History far beyond thelocal politics they meant to engage: of courseit’s history, like Rouch’s camera, that inscribesroles and registers them, and one goes nowhere with the philosophical truism that men writehistory and history writes the place of men. Thecollective lm itself becomes a phenomenon,symptomatic of its time even as it meant toprovide a revolutionary exception to the rule. Thepositioning of the collectivist lm as a historical

product of the 60s-80s seems obvious enoughpolitically: the era of radicalism and splinter cells,now incorporated into arthouse iconography byOlivier Assayas, in which collaborative politics

could be seen as a reaction (and action) againsta hopelessly hegemonic state, rather than aminiature attempt to mirror and work within thedemocratic system (the kind of attempts seen,sometimes disastrously, in the lms of Frederick Wiseman).

But it’s another question how the collectivistlm would t in a history of cinema. We couldobviously draw a parallel history: that this was

the point at which the collaborative, democraticmovements of the Lumieres, French avant-gardists, Soviet activists, etc, had given way to akind of Hollywood hegemony, which could onlybe opposed by amateurs and regional lmmakers.But it’s also the point when auteur theory has takenhold among many of the same critics opposed toavorless, factory-made Hollywood items, and“authorship” has become the surest standard ofquality that individual voices can speak againstthe status quo (as well as through it).

And here I’d rather give way to Rossin asanother voice.●

Films included in the programme ‘United We Stand,Divided We Fall’, curated by Federico Rossin (Do-

clisboa, October, 2012):La Reprise du Travail aux Usines Wonder (Jacques Villemont,

1968)Classe de Lutte (Groupe Medvedkine de Besançon, 1969) À pas lentes (Collectif Cinélutte, 1979)Vladimir et Rosa (Groupe Dziga Vertov, 1970)Winter Soldier (Winter lm Collective, 1972)Off the Pig (San Francisco Newsreel, 1968)Finally got the News (Stewart Bird, Peter Gessner, Rene Li-

chtman and John Louis Jr., 1970) El pueblo se levanta (The Newsreel Collective, 1971)Red Squad (Howard Blatt, Steven Fischler, Joel Sucher,

1972)

Un peuple en marche (Colectivo cinematográ co de alumnosargelinos, 1963)

Caminhos da Liberdade (Cinequipa, 1974)L’Aggettivo Donna (Collettivo Femminista di Cinema diRoma, 1971)

Women of the Rhondda (London Women’s Film Group,1973)

Maso et Miso vont en Bateau (Nadja Ringart, Carole Rousso-poulos, Delphine Seyrig and Ioana Wieder,1976)

Night Cleaners Part 1 (Berwick Street Collective, 1972-1975)So that you can Live (Cinema Action, 1982)The Year of the Beaver: a Film about the Modern ‘Civilised’ S

(Poster Film Collective, 1982)Territoires (Isaac Julien, 1984)Handsworth Songs (John Akomfrah, 1986)Vai Viegli Bū t Jaunam? (Juris Podnieks, 1987)



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AUMONT, J ACQUES, COMOLLI, JEAN-LOUIS,NARBONI, JEAN, PIERRE, S YLVIE (1968).Le tempsdéborde. Entretien avec Jacques Rivette . Cahiers du cinéma , nº 204,

September.BRENEZ, NICOLE (2006).Traitement du Lumpenprolétariat

par le cinéma d’avant-garde . Biarritz. Séguier.

BRENEZ, NICOLE, ARNOLDY, EDOUARD (2005).Cinéma/ politique - série 1. Trois tables rondes . Brussels. Labor.Images.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

David Phelps is a writer, translator, and programmer.He serves as an editor-at-large forLumière , desist lm , theMUBI Notebook, andLa Furia Umana , for which he co-edited (with Gina Telaroli)William Wellman: A Dossier . Hisshort lms includeOn Spec and an ongoingCinetract series,

both released online. He works as a private tutor in New York City and is currently engaged in Fritz Lang projectand retrospective on the history of Portuguese cinema.

[email protected]

DAVID PHELPS

DAVID PHELPS


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Nathaniel Dorsky.Devotional Cinema Tuumba Press, Berkeley, 2005, 54 pp.

Miguel García

One of art’s greatest challenges has alwaysbeen how to transmit the ineffable, all we cannotdescribe or apprehend through the language, all

we cannot reach using words. Sometimes those words can be used as a springboard – as inBenjamin Péret’s question remembered by Buñuelin his memoirs:

«“Is it really not true that mortadella is madeby the blind?” For me, this statement in the formof question, is as true as a truth from the Gospel.Of course, some might nd the relationshipbetween blindness and mortadella somewhatabsurd, but for me is the magical example of acompletely irrational sentence which gets sharplyand mysteriously bathed under the glimmer oftruth.» (BUÑUEL, 1982: 190)

His whole work seems to be containedin that landscape of relations – enlightened bya question without answer – which opens infront of each reader. Its force comes from theimpossibility to explain or describe it. But youcan also suppress any relation with language. The

cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky willtalk like that, with images and time, without language or sound,about ineffable truths to which nobody wouldhave thought there was an access and, becauseof that, would have never been able to be shared.Near the beginning ofDevotional Cinema , Dorskytells an anecdote which could sound familiar andis quickly empowered by its conceptual bond withreligiousness: upon exiting a screening ofViaggioin Italia (Roberto Rosellini, 1954) all the members

of the audience left the room in total silence, and inthe elevator which brought them to the street the

awkwardness of sharing the space with strangershad disappeared completely. The lm had actedas a kind of secular communion by showing that

certain intimate and inexpressible truths had beenseen and communicated, and nally shared, by almmaker.

In this way of explaining a spiritualconnection through the behaviours seen in anelevator, and even in the book’s writing style, wealso see how Dorsky is participating deeply in apurely American form of thought, perhaps startedby R.W. Emerson in the mid-nineteenth century when he was a godfather to Transcendentalism, which focused in the familiar and simple matters. And just asDevotional Cinema ’s prose does nothide at any moment its oral source (it is a revisionof a John Sacret Young Lecture at PrincetonUniversity) and handles high concepts using thatcasual tone, its author considers that the searchof a spiritual sensibility must always take place inthe terms of the close and the common things. These elements cannot be just materials to buildsomething – all the theoretic structure should be

built to throw light upon, or protect, that matter.In this way in his cinema everything he lms

becomes sacred. A shirt, a glass or a handful ofsand, objects that may have lost their value, wornout by the social pressures about what must seemimportant to us. In another one of the mostmemorable passages of the book we are invited tolook at our hands and think about the complexityand variety of the actions they can perform,

in all the particularities of this versatile tool, inits aesthetic beauty too. The reader suddenly

REVIEWS · Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. I · No. 1. · 2012 · 108-110

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[email protected]

recon gures the relationship with the hands thatheld unconsciously the book a moment before,just as Dorsky is trying, through his cinema, togive back the real value to the things registered

by his camera, obviating the exchange value which accompanies and adulterates them (ineconomic terms within a capitalist society, butalso cinematographically when we are dealing withthose objects placed in front of the camera withoutbeing really observed, merely as a background toa plausible narrative). What is sacred is alwaysuntouchable, immense for itself. The need tounderline it, staining it with ideas, would be a violation. To turn it into a symbol of other thing

would be to despise it; to use it as a material for analien discourse, to impose an external sense wouldbe to take advantage of it, reducing it to a poorposition of contrivance for a greater end.

In the introduction of his excellent interview with Nathaniel Dorsky, Scott MacDonald remindsus of an interesting controversy:

«Several years ago, Stephen Holden claimedthat for American Beauty (1999) Sam Mendes hadborrowed “an image (and an entire aesthetic ofbeauty) from Nathaniel Dorsky’sVariations , in which the camera admired a plastic shoppingbag being blown about by the wind”(New York Times, October 9,1999). Dorsky remembersreceiving a call from someone on the productionof American Beauty,asking how Mendes might seethe lm, though he is not convinced that his shot was “borrowed”.» (MACDONALD,2006:79-80)

Rather than having yet another discussionabout commercial cinema’s debts towards the American avant-garde, it would perhaps bemore interesting to focus in how this shot lookslike in this new life. The scene quickly attracteda great deal of attention and became the mostcommented image of the lm: the plastic bag shot(whose movements, of course, were much more

distinct and spectacular than those of Dorsky’sbag: it goes up and down and turns somersaults) isintroduced by a character with the question: “Doyou want to see the most beautiful thing I’ve ever

lmed?” and is accompanied by an evocative pianosong by Thomas Newman. The character goeson, explaining what a special moment it was andspecifying what it meant for him: “That’s the day Irealized there was this entire life behind things...”

So in the surface it is the same shot, but onlythere, there is no more relation – perhaps thatis why Dorsky quickly denied a direct liation. Throughout his text, Dorsky keeps invoking other

images which do share, in all the levels we havediscussed, those same principles in the contextof narrative cinema. The hat of an of ce workerlmed by Ozu, or the handkerchief of a wifelmed by Ford, are not sublimated nor they are thesymbol of something that could trans gure them;those objects would be in any case the ones whoare so powerful to be able to change something,to get to awaken emotions.

His ideas are so clear and rm that, just witha list of the lms mentioned in his book, thereader could imagine both the ideas he defendsand the kind of cinema he makes; perhaps withthe same kind of unexplainable, slippery certitudethat Buñuel did applaud. By putting togetherand associating these lms, Dorsky shows thecoordinates of a devotional cinema to which hislms also belong. In the nal step of editing,the sacred objects of his cinema are connected while preserving that mystery of an inexpressible

relation (and perhaps, in order to be able to explicithis message, Mendes decided to leave alone thatplastic bag shot), which however allows to feelits effect with the same power of the change of verse of a poem, or the brush-stroke and a certaincolour in an abstract painting. Ozu lms a motherembracing his song, then he cuts to a chimneyexpelling black smoke. We have understood.●


MIGUEL GARCÍA

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BUÑUEL, LUIS (1982). Mi último suspiro. Éditions RobertLaffont, S.A.. Paris.

DORSKY, N ATHANIEL (2005).Devotional Cinema . TumbaPress. Berkeley.

MACDONALD, SCOTT (2006). A Critical Cinema 5 . Uni- versity of California Press, Berkeley.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NATHANIEL DORSKY.DEVOTIONAL CINEMA


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