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Film History: Or History ExpropriatedAuthor(s): Michèle Lagny

Source: Film History , Vol. 6, No. 1, Philosophy of Film History (Spring, 1994), pp. 26-44

Published by: Indiana University Press

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Film History, Volume 6, pp. 26-44, 1994. Copyright John Libbey & Company

ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in Great Britain

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII II I IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIII IIIIIIII IIII I I III IIIII

Film history:

or history

expropri ted

Michele Lagny

Ihave often attacked film history; at least, I

have expressed myself against the way film

history is being made and written. First of all,

because - while pretending to be a 'history of

films' - it seemed to me little more than an incom-

plete and incoherent catalogue of what has been

made. Films don't have a history. What does have

a history is the film as an object, a piece of celluloid

lacquered with secret images, with all its existences

and vicissitudes; it is the notion of what films should

or should not be, the meanings that have been given

to them and are changing according to the time and

place of their being made, viewed, enjoyed and

used; it is that peculiar micro-environment, 'cinema'

as an institutional framework, within which films are

born and evolve, expressing through -their being

'media' their relationships with the external world. I

have also criticized film history because it seemed -

and still often does seem - to be infatuated by its

object, incapable of admitting the need for a certain

distance, necessary to all intellectual enterprise; and

because, for several reasons, film history seemed to

lack - as it still often does nowadays - the discipline

which is crucial to all historical analysis worthy of its

name. So much work has been published in the

meantime, and I certainly feel the need to revise my

standpoint. Still, I'm intrigued by some contradict-

ions I see, so strong that they make me wonder

about the very nature of writing about history.

Let me point out right away that I'm mostly

referring to the place where I live, France. I have

been trained within the school of the nouvelle his-

toire, but I am now teaching in a department called

'Cinema and Audiovisuals' where history (including

film history) plays a role which is secondary to an

aesthetic framework of analysis through which an

attempt is made to overcome the long-time dictator-

ship of semiology in my country. I am not unaware

of English-language literature in film studies as well

as in the so-called 'cultural studies' which have

sprung from cinema as much as from other cultural

activities. Readers of Film History know it better than

I do. What follows, therefore, results from observa-

tions strictly related to my exotic environment.

Although I do care about film as a historian, I

do not believe in film as a document of 'realities'

(whatever they may be, they are inaccessible, as

historians can only rely upon their sources). Political

and social conflicts, economic structures and circum-

stances leave institutional traces which are far more

relevant than film. Within this context, film is nothing

more than circumstantial evidence of what may have

happened in the past. I do not see cinema as a

mirror of society. On the other hand, especially if

one considers the period ranging from the end of the

19th century and the time in the 20th century during

which it has been the most important form of visual

mass entertainment, cinema is an essential tool for

understanding a culture, or the cultures seen as

systems of values, representations and behaviours.

Michele Lagny teaches Cinema and History at

the University of Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle,

where her particular fields of interest are time and

cinema, and cinema and popular culture. Her most

recent books are Methode historique et histoire du

Cinema (Colin) and Senso, A Critical Study (Na-

than). Correspondence to 149 Blvd Magenta,

75010 Paris, France.




Flmhstoiy or hstoryexpropriated 27

On many occasions I have claimed the need

for differentiating two different perspectives and ap-

proaches for research. On one hand there is the

history of cinema, dealing with the phenomenology

of film and with film production as such. On the

other hand there is the social historian, who looks at

films in order to find other things than cinema: in

most cases social and historical variables, or the

tenacious mythology of a shared - if not collective -

imagination, leading towards long-term history or

anthropology. Both conceptions are somehow re-

strictive, as they entail, respectively 'a reductionist

view of the so-called specificity of film and a mis-

leading sociological ideology. Such separation, on

the other hand, is not as radical as it may seem.

From the latter perspective, in order to see films as

indicators of their times without interpreting them

anachronistically (through modern conceptual cat-

egories) or as direct expressions of the culture of

their period (through the analysis of other material or

written sources), the historian must catch them in their

own existential environment, and know how to de-

cipher their language. From the other standpoint,

film history cannot survive in an ivory tower. Films

are not supposed to be treated as separate entities,

as they exist in relation to other cultural objects,

ranging from the most eminent and widely recog-

nized to the most humble and despised, the ordinary

production designed for what we know as 'mass

culture', exploited by the same people who are

watching films, acknowledging or refusing it, and

giving it an ephemeral triumph or a posthumous

reputation.

Film history, in my view, is therefore a part of a

larger ensemble, the socio-cultural history, a new

term meant to replace the fetishist term 'history of

mentalities', too ambitious and too ambiguous at the

same time. If it is true that the definition of 'socio-cul-

tural history' has not been codified yet, it can be

said that there is - at least in France - a lively

debate about its meaning and its objectives, leaning

on reflections based on philosophy (Foucault), socio-

logy (Bourdieu) and history (de Certeau, Chartier)1.

Whatever it may be, such an approach is con-

ceived as an articulation among three types of anal-

ysis, dealing with cultural objects, with the

framework of their creation, making and circulation,

and finally with their consumption, which depends

on social, ethnic and maybe sexual variables.

Film history as mediation

It seems to me, then, that the real interest in film

history, seen as a part of the larger domain of

socio-cultural history, lies in its fulfilment of a media-

ting function, allowing historians to use films as much

as helping film analysts to evaluate them in their own

context, regardless of their own assumptions, while

keeping the right (as I do myself) to study them

following non-historical ideologies or aesthetic postu-

lates within other (non-historical) perspectives. It is

from this articulation of different expertises that film

history claims a specificity which should make it

possible for it to play an active and critical role: first

of all, building the 'archaeological' perspective

which tells the researcher how films may be ap-

proached and what method may be followed in

order to study them, and then proposing a series of

procedures for textual analysis which are coherent to

the chosen method.

Let me take the following example. I am current-

ly co-ordinating a working group in charge of cata-

loguing all French documentaries made between

1945 and 1995. (Indeed, France is not at the

avant-garde in the archival movement. We recently

produced catalogues of fiction feature films, yet we

still don't have any systematic listing of short films or

documentaries.) While watching prints from this

period, we were surprised to see how often African

immigrants - either blacks or from the Maghreb -

were depicted in a positive light, very different from

what we were used to seeing in fiction films (al-

though known mostly through the productions of the

1930s)2. Such a view is also different from what

Pierre Sorlin has disclosed in European Cinemas,

Europeans Societies3, where he stresses how the

European cinema of the 1980s tends to deal with

the novelty (on a spectacular or exotic level) brought

by immigrants to the developed world, while doc-

umentaries - although confined to the medium of

television - insist instead on the difficult conditions of

their life. The dominant representation of immigrants

we have noticed in non-fiction films made almost

half a century ago, on the contrary, insists on the

possibilities of integration of black or Maghreb

people, often shown as not being 'strangers'.

One easily acknowledges that historical condi-

tions are different. In quantitative terms, the phe-

nomenon of immigration was not of massive

dimensions, and therefore could not justify the fear

Film history: or history expropriated

27




8Mche Lgny

Fig. 1. Raoul Coutard filming Hoo Binh (1970). The colonial wars as quasi-documentary subject.

of a loss of would-be national identity. As there's no

unemployment, the 'stranger' can't be someone who

steals bread or other people's jobs. Most of all, it is

clear that during the colonial wars (which France

would have been bound to lose) it is imperative to

justify their objectives, showing the immigrants from

the Union Francaise as nice and sympathetic (al-

though slightly half-witted) people. It is more conveni-

ent, thus, to give them the right to get a job, to live

and die with decency in France: A I'ombre de la

mosquee de Paris (1946), for example, shows

workers and intellectuals, the mosque and the hospi-

tal, but also the Moroccan cemetery in Paris. It is

also right to give immigrants the means to study in

the big town, especially the capital city, where Kalla

(such is the name of the protagonist of a film with the

same title, produced in 1955) - a young student

from Cameroun - spends his time in a coffee shop in

the Latin Quarter - not because he's lazy, but be-

cause the street scenes he sees from the cafe remind

him (with flashback scenes or fictional remem-

brance?) of scenes very close yet at the same time

very different through which he lived in the country of

his childhood4. No mention is made of the difficul-

ties of integration and the possible loss of cultural

roots. Immigrants already feel at home, or they

almost do.

Positive images like this one may be read not

as mirrors of reality, but as manifestations of colonial

hypocrisy and paternalism. Despite its evidence,

such an interpretation is far too simple, a conse-

quence of our vision a posteriori of the evolution in

the relationship between the Maghreb or black Af-

rica and imperialist power. It would be too easy to

reverse its implications, as these two little films would

display a desire (or an illusion) of generosity on

behalf of the Republic, backbone of the Union Fran-

caise. In order to avoid the pitfalls of this ideological

misinterpretation, film history may give some help

with a process of mediation and warning.

28

Michele Lagny

. ..... .''':''::;. , i.; ..' ;




Flmhstory or hstoryexpropriated 29

How can this be done? First of all, providing us

with the evidence necessary to what we may call the

'external critique of the document' and its contextual-

ization in time and space:

- aiding the 'authentication' and the dating of

the prints, finding whenever necessary all lacu-

nae, interpolation and manipulations suffered

by the prints. It seems that non-fiction short films,

because of their loose narrative structure and

their weaker status in terms of legal protection

by comparison to fiction films, are particularly

affected by this phenomenon;

- retrieving information on the rationale for the

production of these documentaries. Were they

made upon commission, as propaganda tools,

or were they conceived as an act of good faith

in the reciprocal recognition of colonialist

values, even at a time when colonialism was

becoming an issue of hot debate?

- knowing more about the audiences which

were seeing these films las far as they could

actually see them), the socio-cultural context

within which they were experiencing them,

whether or not they were immigrants or natives,

and whatever their social status and political

beliefs. How were the films received in Paris, in

neighbourhoods already occupied by large mi-

norities of immigrants in the post-WWII de-

cade? or in Barbes, in a beautiful theatre, the

'Louxor' (now closed and abandoned, despite

the fact that its Egyptian-style facade is con-

sidered an artistic highlight of the town)? or in

the more intellectual art houses of the Latin

Quarter (the caf6 where Kalla had his dream

and the great mosque are located in the 5th

arrondissement)? or finally - and more prob-

ably - elsewhere, far away from the 'package

deals' proposed by distributors and screened

following the individual taste of theatre owners?

and what about educational or militant film

clubs?

Another good reason for adopting these

strategies is that film history should be able to adopt

film analysis as a standard practice, so that films can

be understood not just within their own existence,

but also in relation to other films, in a relatively

autonomous complex of moving images. The people

who made these images, even those who had seen

them (because they work in the film industry or simply

because they are used to going to the movies) have

their own representation of what a film might have

looked like, how motion pictures are made and put

together, of what may be shown and what may not

(for political, ethical or aesthetic reasons), of what

may be done and what may not, for technical and

economic reasons.

Both short films I have taken as examples have

more or less the same theme: they underline the

interest of traditional cultures, all the while develo-

ping the assumption that their value will be en-

hanced thanks to the contribution of French

modernity (economic as well as technological and

cultural), which will eventually bring a true equality

between Maghreb and French people, blacks and

whites. One of them, though - A I'ombre de la

mosqu6e de Paris - is conceived as a series of

juxtaposed clich6s, provided with an off-screen com-

mentary which stresses the good deeds of the French

'help', with references to Lyautey. The film itself is

organized as an album of barely moving photo-

graphs, some of them staged in advance and with a

'slightly official' look (for example those of the hon-

ourable dean of the mosque), others taken in the

realm of real life. The other film, Kalla, employs a

young actor and exploits a semi-fictional construc-

tion, regulated by a clever alternation between

'here' and 'down there', between the African child-

hood and the transition to maturity in Paris. Here,

framing and light are carefully designed, expressing

with further subtlety the role which is being attributed

to the homeland, that is, a land which allows imma-

ture populations to enjoy the full flourishing of wealth

thanks to their initiation to western technology. (Kalla

dreams about becoming an electrical engineer in

order to make his own country benefit by the ac-

quired knowledge.)

This comparison makes clear the need for a

'film analysis' roughly drafted here, yet sufficient to

identify the role of a mode of 'visual representation'

in the constitution of an 'historical reality' which we

will perceive through such representation. The formal

differences between the two short films impose a

careful consideration of the relationship between the

film as document and reality, thus forcing us to raise

the further question of the relationship between

documentary and fiction. I have already mentioned


29




Michele Lagny

- perhaps because of an institutional habit - a

difference between 'document' and 'fiction film' but

categories such as these immediately look much less

sharp and certainly less grounded theoretically than

we are accustomed to think. There is, in any event,

a 'filmic filter' linked to the rules of film language

(and, in this respect film history owes much to film

theory) as much as to the attitudes of filmmakers and

audiences at the time when films are made. One

cannot know much about this without a thorough

knowledge of the complex of production, of the

subjects, themes, forms and styles which are seen as

common (or uncommon) at a given time.

Admittedly, I have oversimplified these ques-

tions, and raised them from a very partial perspec-

tive. Still, one point holds true: I'm asking film history

to perform a role of mediating knowledge. It is

through this history that I would be able to measure

the supposed value of my 'documentary' shorts, and

interpret the images they are displaying. It will be my

duty, then, to build a picture, however tentative, of

the evolution of the social attitudes towards immi-

grants and the emancipating colonies through a

contextualization of these films with other images

produced by other media with newspapers, radio,

and - why not? - with the available evidence of the

political debate of that time. In short, what I'm trying

to do is to see films within a socio-cultural history,

which is in turn linked to the general history.

A strategy of this kind should prevent us from

falling into an all too common trap in which both

historians and film specialists often find themselves

caught. As a matter of fact, with few notable excep-

tions, the current situation is characterized by a

phenomenon of reticence and reciprocal borrow-

ings, in a circular relationship coming partly from a

current practice in film criticism, and partly from an

ignorance of what cinema is for historians and what

history is for film analysts. Too often, in order to

draw the 'historical context', historians use film with-

out knowing much about the rules of film language

at the time when a chosen film was made. In doing

so, they fail to consider the link between cinema and

the real world, and they overlook the 'filtering' func-

tion performed by the microcosm of film language.

As for film specialists, they like to use 'context' in

order to explain films and their production, without

thinking of the double transposition with which the

practice of historiography affects the 'contextual

facts' they are referring to. The first is due to the

documents (witnessing facts in their own way, and

according to their degree of preservation), while the

other owes much to the way historians used these

documents from their own perspectives and with

their own working methods.

Such attitudes entail a reductionist, 'historiciz-

ing' misconception, similar to the vicious circle 'text-

context' (where the text looks determined by the

context, while the context seems 'reflected' into the

text), or a cleavage between film analysis and the

study of society, socio-economic variables, the inten-

tions of the filmmakers and the reactions of the

audiences. In order to avoid allegations of partiality,

let me raise an example drawn from my own essay

on Luchino Visconti's Senso5. Some pages of it are

devoted to the political context (the success of Chris-

tian-Democrat right-wing policy in Italy) and the situ-

ation within the film industry both from the point of

view of institutions (the pressure from censorshipl and

aesthetics (the crisis of neorealism); some clues are

given about the cultural milieu within which Visconti

and his collaborators conceived and made the film

(mostly from the novel used as source for its produc-

tion, from Gramsci's writings on the period of the

so-called risorgimento, from the opera - a main

interest throughout the director's career- and the

paintings which appear to inspire several se-

quences). Finally, attention is called to some

examples of press response. Of course I wasn't so

naive as to claim that the shape of the film was

determined by the context (although context had

indeed some kind of influence, especially through

censorship), nor that the film itself was some sort of

mirror of it, although Visconti had said that Senso

could be seen as 'our own history'. Directors can be

so contradictory I never trust what they say. How-

ever, in dealing with my own knowledge as a

historian (knowledge of the data highlighting a pol-

itical and cultural environment) and with film ana-

lysis, I was forced to keep a kind of fracture

between the two. In the absence of a comparison

with other cultural objects (visual and nonvisual) of

the period, I didn't try hard enough in order to reach

an articulation and a mediation towards film history

and socio-cultural history. What I did was to submit

a slightly a-temporal interpretation of the film (which,

in any case, I certainly won't deny now). I did try to

put it in relation to its times, but I couldn't explain

30





Fig. 2. Luchino Visconti addressing a class at Columbia University, c. 1970, with professors Andrew

Sarris (left) and Arthur Barron (right). 'Directors can be so contradictory '

much of the meaning of such relations (nor its

meanings in the time and place of existence of the

film).

The role of a film historian draws all its relev-

ance - along with the relevance of its mediating role

- if we mean the term 'mediation' as a specific

ability to connect historical knowledge and film ex-

pertise. From the standpoint I have selected (the

socio-historical perspective is only one of many

possible frameworks), this mediation provides the

elements necessary to evaluate the potential relat-

ions between the representations and conceptions

suggested by the films, those which were hege-

monic at the time, and our own (the ideas which

may lead us to interpret a film in a totally different

manner, not necessarily 'bad' or 'wrong', but cer-

tainly not an 'absolute' one), as well as between the

film and the supposed reality of its time. True, a

mediation of this kind involves an awareness of its

constraints, precautions which are bound to make

our task particularly difficult already, and a series of

caveats against abusive appropriation and institu-

tional ideologies perhaps rewarding in the short

term, yet destructive to the discipline.

Plurality of viewpoints and loss of control

With my naive suggestion of questions to film history

through some examples, what I really was thinking

about is the way film history is built from a set of

fundamental needs of historical practice: the choice

of sources; their treatment according to different

perspectives and the scales adopted in order to

examine them; finally, the crucial issue of articulating

viewpoints derived from this treatment. In fact, history

resembles an image, as it requires - as in photo-

graphy or the moving picture - the selection of


31




32 Mch~~~~~~~~~Ie Lagny~~~~~

framing and lighting options. As with film, it requires

an editing process.

The material: in praise of the quantitative

The examples of my little documentaries may have

seemed bizarre. After all, fiction film is still the centre

of a film historian's world, and the very fact that no

inventory has been made yet of non-fiction films is a

proof of it. On the other hand, we could think that

their only interest lies in their being 'documents'

instead of 'film'. Looking at them, nevertheless (at

least as far as I can tell from those made in France

during the 1950s), one may realize that they would

certainly help us in understanding the transformations

in the art of filmmaking, as some of these are brilliant

visual exercises. I'm thinking about a rather well-

known film of 1948 by Yannik Bellon, Goemons6.

The depressing conditions of life of seaweed workers

are described here in 23 minutes of screen time

(seaweed was then used as a fertilizer in Brittany).

What we have here is a stunning display of inventive

framing and lighting, vividly portraying a feeling of

overwhelming isolation oppressing these seamen,

and the luminosity of the space in that region. Un-

deniably, films like this one are sometimes studied,

but mostly because they are made by notable auteurs

who became famous thanks to their feature fiction

films; that's why we know the documentaries of

well-known people like Georges Franju, Alain Res-

nais and Agnes Varda. However, who ever cared

about the director of Kalla, Francois Villiers, who

nevertheless made at least two documentaries every

year between 1946 and 1955? Besides, even when

documentaries are made by so-called auteurs, they

are most often seen as minor works, examples of

period of apprenticeship7. In my view, however, films

like Le sang des betes or Nuit et brouillard are as

important to the knowledge of film as Hiroshima mon

amour or Les yeux sans visage from the point of view

of film language and aesthetics.

In order to have a full understanding of the film

phenomenon, and to realize where the future mas-

ters of cinema were growing up, it is necessary to

realize what was the current practice: not just com-

mercial films (the notorious 'poverty row' films of

French cinema, or the American 'B movies', nowa-

days so much appreciated by the most cultivated

film programmers in French broadcast television),

but also what has been considered until now a

peripheral, marginal production: short documen-

taries on science, education, industry, or home

movies. Certainly, some of these films could afford

some audacities because they were inexpensive

and financed without much trouble, sometimes

thanks to the policy of 'quality films' followed by the

Centre National de la Cin6matographie8, some-

times because of the sponsoring zeal of institutions

aiming at publicizing their activities or products (in

France, the colonial administration, the army, the

Ministry of Agriculture, the nationalized companies

like Renault or SNCF).

I'm not trying here to push towards a rehabilita-

tion of documentary and short films. Instead, I would

like to stress the fact that history is a matter of

quantity as much as of quality. It is through mass

production that we may recognize, even in the

realm of art, the deeper movements leading to the

expression of the most brilliant results. It is not necess-

ary, I think, to insist further on this point: the shining

path of the auteurs is still overshadowing the humble

craftsmen who worked for the screen, but many

scholars are now trying - with different means and

unequal fortune - to ensure cataloguing, preserva-

tion and restoration of films and non-visual sources

on film related to these people. As a matter of

principle, the time of 'selective' preservation is over.

Neither will I insist on the need for development of a

'philology' of the document, the evaluation of its

origin, the authentication of prints. With all the

problems it entails (and I am fully aware of them),

this is a preliminary stage of work, often undertaken

by film archivists, sometimes in cooperation with film

historians. Historians, however, must address a fur-

ther question: what to do with the staggering amount

of preserved - and, to some extent, available -

viewing material.

The law of series; or, large scale and its

constraints

If we are talking about large quantities, it's because

historians never work on an isolated source. That's

why it is necessary to draw a distinction between the

activity of a historian and the work of a film analyst,

although (as it is a requirement in film history as much

as in socio-cultural history in general) the same re-

searchers should deal with both aspects of the issue.

No historical question will be solved with a selective

32

Michele Lagny





Fig. 3. Putyovka v zhizn (The Road to Life, 1931), directed by

Nikolai Ekk. 'Some kind of Great Collective Text, of which

each film is but a variant.

choice of sources: what I have just said about the two

short documentaries on immigrants would make no

sense without systematic research of a large sample

of documentaries in a given period, a homogeneous

'series' large enough to justify or falsify the early

hypotheses suggested by the process of observation.

'Series' of films: it's not something like a series

of prices for cereals, or the names of born, married

or deceased people in some official register (data

through which history has found its basic principles

of serial analysis). We may think instead of a series

of political speeches, or judicial papers. Although

this may seem an iconoclastic statement for the

partisans of films as an art, cinema is a mode of

expression which largely allows - within the terms of

its 'technical reproducibility' - the repetition and

variation of a theme or model. Pierre Sorlin has often

reminded us that films are comparable objects from

the point of view of their modes of expression and

financial and technical constraints. These constraints

are visible in their material evidence: footage, si-

lent/sound, black and white/colour. To such an

extent, cinema helps the activity of the historian:

once the structural elements of a series are identified

through the systematic analysis of samples, it is

possible to treat the series as a whole. Behind all

variations, sometimes so remarkable, that each pol-

itical speech, each law document, each film stands

on its own, there are enough common structures to

allow the interpretation of a global (historical) phe-

nomenon, instead of the mere analysis of a single

(anecdotal) event, whose comprehension is in any

case impossible without relating it to the global

phenomenon.

However, the essential point (and that's where

the role of the historian becomes crucial) is not to

build a theoretical model, a structural scheme which

is supposed to explain a mode of textual (in our

case, visual) functioning. What matters, instead, is

to submit the entire series to the same kind of ques-


33




34Mche Lgny

Fig. 4. Toni (1934). Film history: still subject to a certain fetishization of the 'unique source'?

tioning and to the same viewpoints which may lead

us to formulate conclusions on permanence, evol-

utions or ruptures. Such working methods have been

followed, for example, by Myriam Tsikounas in her

study on the origins of Soviet Cinema9: studying all

the available films has been a matter of looking at

many dull movies; treating this corpus as some kind

of Great Collective Text, within which 'each film can

be seen as a variant from the main text', measured

'against the very same series, not from a pre-con-

ceived grading'; questioning the similarities and the

variations of themes, characters (the worker, the

sailor, the bolshevik activist, the peasant) as much as

the styles, taking into account specific visual codes

(such as framing, editing, the organization of space

and time) and partially external models (narrative

patterns, actors' performances).

My insistence on the need to work with a

certain amount of documentary evidence, and to

conceive 'series' based on a working hypothesis,

might look peculiar to historians of economics, so-

ciety and - although perhaps to a lesser extent - of

politics. This need has some reason to exist, I think,

in film history, still subject to a certain fetishization of

the 'unique source' which is supposed to shed light

on a neglected or totally unknown 'fact'. This hasn't

to do only with film sources, but with written docu-

ments as well. I have in mind a fine and captivating

study by Charles Tesson on the production of Jean

Renoir's Tonil0. His precise description of the haz-

ards of financing, casting, shooting, and the many

changes necessary in all stages of the preparation

of this film (even after the first public screenings)

gives us the possibility of sketching some hypotheses

on the production structures surrounding Renoir at the

turn of the 1930s in France, on the working proce-

dures followed by the crew, on the relationship

between production and distribution. Eventually,

Tesson manages to suggest a relatively fresh point of

view (based on economic variables) in the dis-

cussion of the politique des auteurs. It is clear,

though, that these production files, found in the

archives of the Cin6matheque francaise, should also

be confronted with a whole series of other materials

of the same kind. More than uncovering a set of

further details, this method would help in building a

global model, in relation to which each element

would display its full meaning, thus making it

34

Michele Lagny




Fhtoyohstr xrptd3

possible to appreciate the diacronic changes men-

tioned by Tesson at the end of his article.

In other words, a single 'close shot' is less

meaningful to the historian's work than a series of

consecutive shots, taken from different angles in

order to help us shaping a full, more nuanced pic-

ture.

Variable points of view: history by levels

The problem is in the editing: the polymorphism of

cinema is a global phenomenon requiring the expan-

sion of systematic research, with several different

approaches. Traditional history has taken into ac-

count the pluri-dimensional rule. However, as soon

as history was supposed to deal with film, films were

always given the foremost - if not the only - place;

economic, social, political and cultural knowledge

of film has been seen as ancillary evidence, either in

terms of 'factors' (more or less determining the output)

or 'influence' (more or less strong). I have used here

the past tense (although this kind of auxiliary history

is still very much alive), but at least we now know

more about the richness and diversity of these docu-

ments, leading us to explore each aspect in its own

right, thus supporting the development of a 'history

b y levels .

So we are witnessing the surging of a 'strati-

fied' film history, where each layer owes something

to established disciplines (economics, sociology, an-

thropology, aesthetics, semiotics) endorsing a better

knowledge of its organizational models. So, we

either analyse films in themselves, and in their rela-

tionship with each other and with other forms of the

art of representation; or else we study - mostly

through the exploration of written sources - their

financial and economic implications (through the

systematic analysis of the structures of production,

funding, distribution and exhibition), the role of tech-

nique in terms of invention and innovation (that is,

the actual enforcement of technological resources),

the institutions surrounding and shaping film produc-

tion, show business, the evolution of the public.

This multi-layered pattern seems inexorably ac-

celerated by the fact that we are often working on

documents organized on homogeneous series, as

these series are the result of a certain choice of

sources (what has been put in a 'serial' framework?)

and a certain set of points of view (how are we

addressing these sources?). In fact, 'series' exist

simply because we are asking preliminary questions

of a group of comparable documents; yet they can

describe with convincing precision and insight only

some aspects of a social phenomenon. Michel Fou-

cault had stressed this point in Arch6ologie du savoir

(The Archaeology of Knowledge) Documental series

are logically defined by the way they have been

built, that is, by the set of relationships imposed

upon them. As they will provide answers only within

the framework of this logic, it should be admitted

that they 'often lead to a specific kind of history for

each series 1.

In order to gather the meaning of the per-

manences, evolutions and ruptures observed in the

process of research, we must find our way out of the

series we are studying. The structure and the global

evolution of a phenomenon can be interpreted only

if we compare the observed aspects with other

aspects designed through other 'series', yet its articu-

lation remains a random factor. Of course, the point

of view on a given 'series' may be determined by

hypotheses coming from other 'series' of documents,

thus allowing a certain amount of contextualization.

To return to the earlier example, I can question the

representations proposed by the documentary films

on immigrants through a 'series' of official texts

published by the institutions which distributed land

sometimes commissioned) these films, so that I may

evaluate to what extent the films obey a set of

directions given by the institutions. Yet the conclu-

sions one may draw from this procedure are some-

how limited: we may well understand more about

the objectives of the films, but probably nothing

about the way they were made. In order to fulfil this

further task, we will have to study the films from other

'series' of documents (for example, the way do-

cumentary films were conceived at that time). As to

the assessment of their value, we'll have to work on

radically different 'series': some of them coming

from an inventory of the titles of films screened in the

theatres (which will be done using the daily pro-

grammes of the theatres), following a rationale and

a set of constraints depending on the reality of

exhibition practice, instead of from using sources

like the director, the producer, the possible sponsor.

Other 'series' may come from quantitative and quali-

tative data on the spectators entering the theatres.

These 'series' will obey further criteria, both econ-

omic and sociological.


35




Michele Lagny

In other words, we will know, at best, in what

perspectives these films as a whole have been pro-

duced, and how it was thought they should be. A

corpus of relatively homogeneous documents (films

and writings on political, technical and stylistic

norms) can be articulated as much as we are able to

distinguish them by their references, even when

these references are implicit. We might be able to

know (although this may be very difficult to ascer-

tain, more so than it would be with feature fiction

films) how often these films have been screened, and

what kind of audience - immigrant, intellectual,

suburban - had seen them. On the other hand, we

will not try to articulate their discourse, their motiva-

tions and their effects unless we will be able to make

these 'series' meet through some documents related

to one or more films, their production and reception.

These crosscuts, however, are likely to give idiosyn-

cratic answers to our questions, If we use these

answers outside the 'series', we will abandon the

field of the historian who wants to think about 'facts',

and we will enter the domain of probabilistic ana-

lysis (which is indeed the most frequent destiny of

historians, and their luck as well, as it gives them the

chance to prove their inventiveness).

The curse: history exploded or

expioptiated?

Should we say that the current development of re-

search is leading us to the era of the history (histories)

of cinema (cinemas)?12 Or, maybe, to a history

which is thinking of itself in terms of 'perspectives',

multiple viewpoints instead of 'factual truth', multi-tem-

porality instead of linear and homogeneous chrono-

logy. That's what Jean-Louis Leutrat suggests when he

presents film history as something 'made of a thou-

sand actions which cannot be reduced to a single

sense and a fully linear time frame; which doesn't

mean that we cannot disclose any sense what-

soev er 13.

To be honest, this idea is hardly new; we have

seen it expressed, for example, in Gian Piero Bru-

netta's monumental Storia del cinema italiano first

published about fifteen years ago. Nor is the idea a

very original one: just a very basic recognition of a

debate held among historians for more than sixty

years The 'nouvelle histoire' is now seen (not with-

out some hesitation and regrets) as a series of

discontinuities, a random game between these

series. In a way, this is an answer to an observation

raised by Jean Greimas in 1970: 'historicity, which

is characterized by an infinite amount of micro-

events occurring everywhere and at every moment

... cannot be described exhaustively and systemati-

cally 14

The truth of the matter is that the practice of

'serialization' of documents is still rare in film history.

The sources are too scattered, too uncertain (espe-

cially in terms of the actual film holdings), with too

many gaps for a serious attempt to work on a truly

massive amount of documents. We should also add

to this the persistence of a certain fetishistic attitude

towards certain films, certain authors, certain prin-

ciples seen as the essence of the 'aesthetics' of

'cinema'. If it is true that so many research projects

of our time are of a fragmentary nature, this happens

mostly because we are finding ourselves prisoners of

the exploitation of all the sources of documentation

recently discovered, where the exploitation is done

following neo-positivist techniques, making cross-ref-

erences of documents considered as 'relevant', and

then insisting on the cause-effect relationships be-

tween the 'facts' thus identified. The fragmentary,

discontinuous aspect of historical research is pass-

ively assumed more than actively pursued, and it is

therefore often misunderstood.

The misunderstanding brings some dangers,

which have already become apparent in general

history: the most frequently denounced is the disart-

iculation of film history; the other is the loss of its

specificity (i.e. identity), leading to some extreme

forms of complaint on behalf of those researchers

who devote themselves to cinema studies. They are

quite worried indeed, as they are wondering where

cinema actually was. Are we going to find it in the

films? in the mind of filmmakers? in the off-screen

work of film crews, or in the actors' performances?

in the secret meetings and the manoeuvres of pro-

ducers, bankers, film moguls? in the theatres where

the nocturnal activity of of obscure audiences was

bound to decide the destiny of the films' survival?

Disarticulation

There is a clear-cut opposition today between a film

history essentially founded on film analysis and an

institutional history of cinema. Evidently, the tendency

36




Flmhstoiy or hstoryexpropriated 37

Fig. 5. Cinematographe Lumiere, Boulevard St. Martin, Paris. The history of film reception overlaps social

histor y .

to have the latter prevail over the other tendency is

stronger than ever. The current fashion of the history

of 'modes of production', of technique, and more

recently of film reception tends to push to the back-

ground the study of films in a historical perspective.

There is, then, a double fracture, between film ana-

lysis and the analysis of cinema, but also between

the different layers of institutional analysis, as Allen

and Gomery have correctly pointed out in 198515.

As much as the study of each layer requires the

adoption of 'series' belonging to different sources

and specific methods of analysis, the economic

history of cinema enters the domain of economic

history: the history of film reception overlaps social

history, and so forth - not without reason, as re-

searchers know very well how to find and treat their

sources. Even when the discrepancy between the

layers is not exaggerated by a specialization pushed

to extremes, these interrelations seem too complex to

suggest the adoption of permanent 'models' built on

the serious grounds of a structural history of cinema

with its own characters, its own rhythms, following

the places where cinema is developing itself (or

where its development has ceased).

In order to take into account some of these

relationships (essentially between means of produc-

tion, technologies, economies, and film production

in itself), one may propose the adoption of the

so-called 'open systems', insofar as this involves the

identification of 'generative mechanisms' in the re-

search field defined by case studies precisely situ-

ated geographically and chronologically. We may

also try to build longer-term models, articulating in a

smooth and flexible chronological framework the

necessities of economic profit, the rationalization of

technological practice, and a stylistic model, as

Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson have done for the

cinema of Hollywood'16. On the other hand, it

seems much less clear how to provide a systematic

account of the relation between production and


37




3 I

reception. In analysing the decrease in film theatre

attendance in Europe at the end of the 1950s,

Pierre Sorlin considers these years as 'abnormal' in

terms of market economy, and ends up admitting

that the behaviour of the European filmgoers has

been modified by a broader social evolution, much

more than by problems (of which Sorlin nevertheless

underlines the effects) related to film production,

distribution or exhibition; the articulation between

production and consumption of films can't be re-

solved within cinema alone. More than finding a link

between different layers of film history, the issue at

stake becomes the understanding of the relations

between a socio-economic land socio-cultural) evol-

ution taken as a whole, and the desire to see

movies.

As for the fundamental question for those who

want to deal with cinema in terms of 'images of

society', as in my case - the question of the recep-

tion and the effect, the aesthetic, cultural or ideologi-

cal value of this production - things are even more

clear: we can't evaluate the relevance of films land

their impact on society) without establishing a rela-

tionship between film production and other cultural

productions, and between these productions and

the social habits of those who are absorbing, admir-

ing or rejecting them. Then comes the very tricky

question of knowing what series of data are necess-

ary to approach the 'series' of film productions, in

clearly defined chronological and geographic cir-

cumstances. Films acquire a 'historical' significance

in relation to what Rick Altman calls the 'community

of interpretation'17. This community is partly linked to

the cultural and global consumption of a certain

period: novels (from 'high' to pulp literature; enter-

tainment, from theatre to music hall; painting and

popular imagery, including traditional illustration;

music, from opera to rock and rap: radio, television,

advertisementsl. This consumption is also a function

of spectators affected by their own habits, which are

defined in a complex manner by their ethnic, sexual,

social, familiar and professional affiliations. Every-

thing may seem not only admissible, but vital, up to

the point that reading several works of the 'cultural

studies' trend, where cinema is dealt with, we are

not talking about 'open systems' any more, but of

'waving systems' instead. The first part of the fasci-

nating book by Janet Staiger, Interpreting Film'8,

which presents the field of historical studies of recep-

tion and its different methodological approaches,

give a synthetic view which is at the same time

enthralling and a little scary for a French reader (and

certainly for myself).

Expropriations

This instability of articulations seems to me a sign of

vitality, if not of maturity, but it gives the impression

that film history is crumbling and decomposing, and

that cinema takes the risk of being expropriated by

researchers of all horizons who, while putting film in

relation to too many things make it lose its identity.

On the other hand, the current division of labour,

necessary both from a methodological and humanist

point of view (we can't do everything, as Thomas

Elsaesser has pointed out)19 is enhanced by institu-

tional needs, at least in the academic field, where

everybody has his or her own chair, and therefore

his or her own speciality. Film history, thus, is conti-

nued - and sometimes almost confiscated - by

researchers who make reference to their practice of

a certain method (in fact, methods) of history, or to

their competence in the study which is essential to

cinema, the film itself. Some consider film not as a

'text' in itself, but more as a cultural 'product' among

others, and an 'instrument' of social exchange. They

can't be blamed for this. Others criticize them,

though, because they speak only in terms of content

or function, without considering films in their own

specificity. They can't be blamed, either. It looks,

though, as if the two tendencies are incompatible, as

if film history can't make the two currents find a

meeting point.

The current evolution has the enormous advant-

age of showing that film, as a socio-economic and

socio-cultural structure, follows rules which are com-

mon to other comparable social phenomena in a

given society. The difficult thing is that all the differ-

ent specialists tend to treat film as a product ex-

ploited economically, or consumed sociologically,

overlooking its distinctive characteristics. As the divi-

sion between the layers tends to grow, film history

loses its specificity: it is confiscated because it is

being diluted. Sure, projection equipment has been

sold in the same way and at the same time as soap.

Douglas Gomery's joke of applying the principle of

'industrial analysis' to the economics of cinema is

therefore confirmed: at the national fair of Geneva

in 1896, the Swiss representative of the British soap

38

Michele Laqny





manufacturers Lever Brothers Ltd. (producer of Sun-

light soap) combines 'popular entertainment', and

publicity in a pseudo-Japanese pavillion introducing

the Cin6matographe Lumiere. One could also men-

tion the example of the Werner company in Paris,

owning a 'society for the storage and sale of type-

writers and reproduction machines' as well as repre-

senting the Edison phonograph and selling

kinetoscopes20. After all, though, film industry has

developed in a different way than the soap or

typewriter industry: the Cin6matographe has created

film, and film has a social role which is different from

the role performed by other products of a more

(typewriters) or less (soap) relevant social function.

This evolution also leads to leaving cinema to

the 'theoreticians' who often work from postulates

which eliminate all historical connection with the

object under scrutiny. We should not exaggerate

our criticism in this respect: the semiology derived

from Christian Metz has been too often accused,

while film analysis has never really been entirely

dependent upon semiology, and it has never com-

pletely eliminated the points of view of criticism

(which often deal with the 'historical' context of film,

as I have recalled earlier when I mentioned my own

work on Visconti). Besides, 'film theory' inspired by

language studies has never shown any contempt of

synchronic (sociological) differentiations, nor of dia-

chronic (historical) evolutions; this theory implies

more and more, with the semio-pragmatic thought

developed by Roger Odin and Francesco Casetti,

the construction of 'partial models', corresponding to

certain judgements of acceptability, involving the

receptive role of the socio-cultural classes of

viewers'21. Film analysis can't be blamed, then for

real incompetence, or for conscious refusal of his-

tory; there is instead, the tendency to give priority to

the study of the process land the distinctive origin-

ality) of making meaning out of visual texts. Another

tendency is visible today, at least in France, involv-

ing a predominant role of 'comparative' analysis, of

which Jean-Luc Godard may be seen as the true

ancestor with his Introduction a une v6ritable histoire

du cin6ma22. This tendency is the result of an ambi-

tion of uncovering the most relevant meanings of the

films through a comparison between them, with the

sometimes audacious refusal of a chronological

framework. Here, again, the cultural and socio-pol-

itical context are not ignored, but they are often

prone to a certain over-simplification through cat-

egories which have become - through their abusive

use - some kind of ideological catch-all terms ('capi-

talist', 'bourgeois', 'phallocratic'). Quite a legitimate

standpoint, certainly, which is nevertheless leading

to another form of expropriation: the true film histo-

rian is someone who interprets film more brilliantly

than others, as much as specialists of cinema as an

institutional category tend to make its specificity fade

away. I would say here that film history is confis-

cated because it withdraws from the discourse of

(and about) film.

Both approaches, in my view, fall short while

trying to look too far away. In the latter case, this is

because the interpretations of film can be indefinitely

extended. From the point of view of the historian,

there are only two legitimate directions of research:

what we may know about the possible meanings of

something at the time when the object was pro-

duced land the fact that the object is incomplete, or

that its meaning could not be perceived by all the

spectators of that period doesn't diminish the relev-

ance of this condition) or knowing about later inter-

pretations, and their meaning in their own context. I

won't insist here on the well-known example of the

differences in perception of Jean Renoir's La Grande

Illusion before and after WWII; let me recall, how-

ever, that the film had been enthusiastically received

in 1937, and that afterwards it raised so many

reservations that Renoir himself felt forced to re-edit

the film in 1958 with an introductory text. That's

what concerns the historian. The rest will be dealt.

with by contemporary philosophers (whose analysis

- who knows? - might one day acquire a further

historical significance).

On another level, concerning the stratification

of the history of cinema as an institutional entity, the

necessary insertion of cinema within the whole of the

economic and sociological structure makes it lose its

specific characteristics. After all, history must be

conceptualized in order to analyse general mechan-

isms of events - and I'm quite convinced of that - but

it is also (perhaps most of all) the study of the

particular. If cinema is a part of economic structures,

social demands and a system of collective repre-

sentations, it has its own specific way of performing

such a role. In order to recognize such specificity,

and in order to analyse in a more systematic way

the relation between the production of film works


39




40 Mch~~~~~~~~~~~~Ie Lc~~~~~ Ign

Fig. 6. La Grande Illusion (1937). Re-edited by Renoir in 1958, with an introductory text.

[Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive.]

and the production of their values (within which we

might include the 'micro-analyses' of particular rela-

tionships), we may well imagine a 'cinema field',

conceived as a space of 'objective relationships'

with its constraints, its dynamics, its paradoxes and

its undetermined margins. What we may study,

then, is its 'genesis and structure', as Bourdieu did

for literature and art23. The priority given to cinema

and to the organization of its network of differences

- in a semiotic and intertextual perspective - might

be the best safeguard (not taken enough into ac-

count by Bourdieu) against 'sociologism'.

Film as the core of a semio-history

Would it be possible that a film history prone to a

random method and a weak structure can assure the

mediating function I proposed to attribute to it at the

beginning of this essay, and articulate the 'archaeo-

logical' data - that is, not just an inventory of traces,

but their contextualization, and the competence

necessary to analyse films? In order to do so, should

this history present itself as a repeated analysis of

several films, sometimes grouped under various cat-

egories (author, period, genre, theme, and so forth),

or as a series of case studies corresponding to each

level of study? Or, should it claim to formulate the

principles of organization of the deeper structure of

the cinema phenomenon, in order to solve the

problem generated by stratified history? The first

dimension has a very limited and ephemeral interest,

although I have myself approached the question

40

Michele Lagny





under this viewpoint, producing some film analyses

or work on some authors and genres. The second

hypothesis seems to me as utopian and dangerous:

one always has to choose a hierarchy of determina-

tions which can't be proved, with the risk of wasting

time and efforts wondering - as professionals often

do - whether or not the production (and quality) of a

given film is determined by the taste of the public

(often defined in too narrow sociological terms), by

the logic of economics or technology or by institu-

tional constraints24.

It would be far better to think that there's no

such thing as one or more histories of cinema con-

ceived as closed fields of analysis and knowledge,

instead of an open field where different forces (econ-

omic, social, political, technical, cultural or aes-

thetic) come into being and confront each other. In

order to build the itineraries of a film history which

accepts its dissemination without fragmenting itself,

there is a crucial condition, whatever the starting

point of view, of the methodological approaches

and the relationships taken into consideration: the

core is the film text, because only the film is the sign

that cinema does exist (or doesn't exist any longer).

Working from the cinema or on the cinema means

starting from the film, and going back to it. Without

doubt, films are not the result of chance, but neither

are they the result of necessity; they never are a

consequence (of economic, social, cultural or politi-

cal determining factors, crossing each other in a

non-systematic way), nor the cause of anything (a

political action, a social reaction, or the production

of other films). They can be, socially and historically,

seen as symptoms.

Film history, then, cannot depend uniquely on

the neo-positive theory founded on a 'realist' basis

claimed by Allen and Gomery (whom I very much

admire, both for the consistency of their analysis of

the historiographic practice and for the concrete

richness of their work). As a matter of fact, their

caution (when they stress that 'the re-description of

the event under examination exposes the range of

possible causal mechanisms responsible for it' (p.

19) and that the generative mechanisms of the open

systems within which several factors combined

among themselves in different ways give new results

every time) gives place once again to reductionist

determinisms. These are visible in their work through

the sheer importance given to mechanisms regulat-

ing the relationship between mass production and

reception in a regime of liberal capitalism, and the

fact that, according to them, the prime motor seems

to them as being the 'search for profit'.

On the contrary, talking about films as symp-

toms, that is, considering them as signs related to

other signs, which make sense only in a network

which is built by them, seems like choosing a semio-

history whose role is to constitute the articulation of

the signs expressed by the films with the signs pro-

duced by other series of discourses, issued by other

social activities. As I imagine this history, it should

be conceived (and hold some interest) from different

viewpoints, producing an effect of fragmentation

while opening possibilities of liaisons with very fer-

tile effects. As in the brilliant text by Georges Perec,

W ou le souvenir de I'enfance, such a history would

become visible only at some crossroads, i.e. near

'an imaginary story made of scattered fragments,

absences, gaps, doubts, hypotheses, thin anec-

dotes' made by sources. This history would put

stories close to each other (or descriptions of systems

re-composed from series of documentary data, from

hypothese) which would be imaginary as well, and

put together by the historians who are interpreting

the sources. It would shed light only 'on what is

never said in one thing, never in the other thing, but

only in the fragile intersection of both'25.

Insisting on the film as the primary axis of film

history doesn't mean that we must treat cinema

through an isolated analysis of a 'series' of films, as

they obviously keep - despite their placement across

time - important relationships (of dependence or

ideological effect) with their milieu, the micro-milieu

of cinema included in a broader, socio-historical

macro-milieu. The analysis of this milieu cannot be

made without looking outside the film. In the case of

the documentaries I have mentioned earlier, it is

clear that their financing, their objectives, their

modes of production are different from those of the

great fiction films, although they are partly linked to

them. In order to evaluate the two films I have made

allusion to earlier, and to identify their objectives, I

will need to know about the colonial milieu as much

as about the institution of cinema and the structures

of film production. In order to ascertain their effec-

tiveness, I will have to put them in relation to the

formal mechanisms of representation (however

simple they may be) to which they are referred, and


41




4 Mche Lgny

which will trigger some effect of identification amid

the audience. That's the method used in A I'ombre

de la mosqu6e de Paris, adopting the model of a

family album, or the more elaborated pattern in

Kalla, which adopts a fictional pattern making refer-

ence (for its subjective effects) to the affection and

the partial identification of the audience towards the

protagonist.

Each film, or each 'series' of films, comes into

existence because of some borrowings from the

outside. It may happen that films react directly - as

is probably the case with the documentaries I have

analysed - in relation to some 'rough' ideological

discourses (such as paternalism and technologism)

concerning social (immigration) and political (the

colonial context) realities. Yet, cinema is also in-

scribed into former or parallel cultural traditions

which display themselves through some similar

modes of expression (mass entertainment or im-

agery) or through other forms, sometimes seen as

'examples' to emulate (or to 'adapt', in certain

cases), such as literature, painting, theatre. It is then

necessary to evaluate the relationships between dif-

ferent forms of representation. Marie-Claire Ropars,

for example, asks herself (although without talking

explicitly of history) about 'the points ... where the

imagination of a certain period ... finds its shape',

and on the role of 'cultural exchanger' performed by

cinema in the France of the 1930s. This would

allow, among other things, to judge the use of films

in the 'mass diffusion' of a literary production which

would benefit from (or be the victim of) a rewriting

operated by film. Ropars structures her research

building a 'series' of films which have as a common

feature the fact of being adapted from literary

works, and then using these literary sources (made

comparable by the very fact that they have been

adapted for the cinema) as a literary 'series', al-

though tradition considers these sources as separate

entities because they have been produced in differ-

ent periods and they belong to different genres, from

Zola to Mac Orlan. Thanks to a cogent analysis of

narrative structures and writing forms of the texts and

the films, Ropars finds, instead of the differences

between the stories or their atmospheres, a draft of

a 'recurring configuration' of the 'accents' and the

'discrepancies' between them. Ropars also

measures the 'interval' between what looks like a

'trend of modernity' in books and films which have

the common characteristic of systematically reducing

the dangerous figures visible in both, against which

films constitute a 'powerful protective screen'26.

The references often come from other films as

well: there is a level both on a technical and a

formal viewpoint - where cinema has its own

relative autonomy so that Pierre Sorlin has the im-

pression that films escape their own times as much

as the universe of cinema which is somehow seen as

a universe in itself. Sorlin also remarks that the

representations of Resistance during WWII in the

European cinema work better as references from

one film to another than as references to reality (or to

the historiography of Resistance). Great Britain has

produced its earliest images, at a moment when

action begins (with Secret Mission, 1942), and

these images perform a role of matrix for post-war

films on a thematic level (despite some changes

made in films produced on the continent), while their

precocity is such that - because several scenes were

shot on location - their presence will be kept through

the interpolation of actuality footage within historical

reconstructions. Even after the 1960s, there will be

the tendency to employ non-professional actors, or

people who actually participated in the Resistance

movement, rather than well known actors27.

Using films in order to evaluate their relations

towards other films or other texts does not mean that

one only has to consider the reciprocal 'influences'

between texts, authors and genres. This procedure,

on the contrary, forces one to establish some cross-

reference indexes, relevant series of intertextual refer-

ences, and to admit that the exchange is not made

in terms of determining influences, but instead in

terms of complex interferences, in which some frag-

mented elements are interspersed28. Each film, as a

matter of fact, associates all these elements into a

different system of combination which changes their

status and their meaning; hence the absolute

necessity to study each film in its own organization.

The study of film (or of a series of films) must then go

through the analysis of the film signifier, made ac-

cording to rules already established by film theory

(theories) as much as by history. What matters here

is not replacing film history with a semiological

description of films, nor reducing film history to the

determination of the process of producing the sense

of 'film language'. Instead, we must avoid any direct

evaluation of sense, too often made only through the

Michele Lagny

42





script, the plot, the relationships between characters,

the direct allusions to exterior events. There are

different conceptions of cinema as a system, each

involving different forms of representation. Although

we are far from having convinced everybody about

this, this is a point upon which I have often insisted,

after Pierre Sorlin and within the editorial group of

the periodical Hors Cadre - too often to make the

point again here without looking obsessed by it.

The references I have chosen here, especially

Foucault and Bourdieu, may look idiosyncratic, al-

though these names have often been put close to

each other. Michel de Certeau, for example, was

referring to them in order to criticize them, true, but

also in order to recognize their influence when he

was trying to clear up the field and the methods of

approach of a cultural history29. It seems to me that

an in-depth analysis of their positions (also about the

construction of coherent 'series' necessary to analyse

discourses and practices, as well as to evaluate the

social space within which these discourses and

practices are articulated) would allow one to tackle

the 'question of cinema' in the evolution of its forms

and social functions.

This conception of film history does not refuse

'facts' which one may draw from documents, nor the

complex of determinations which we may establish

among them. Such a conception, however, is not

'factual' (that is, descriptive) or 'positive', (that is,

determinist). Such a conception does not refuse the

possibility of treating film as a specific field; how-

ever, it deals especially with the value of documents

as symptoms, which cannot be read if not within the

network of transitory and complex relationships link-

ing them to each other. This history builds its relat-

ions from a set of predefined questions, and these

questions are not related only to cinema. The latter

makes sense, as a matter of fact, within a larger set

of phenomena to which cinema is more or less

connected (in a framework of institutional practices

but also in the shifting interplay between individual

practices, more or less determined by their place in

society). In claiming such a conception of film his-

tory, I firmly belong to the community of those histo-

rians who assert their beliefs (and they do have

beliefs ) while keeping a methodological doubt

about their own discourse and their own practice,

as much as about the intrinsic value of the epistemo-

logical choices they are referring to. I'm not alone in

feeling this way. Georges Duby wrote:

'I do not claim to give [the reader] any truth, but

to suggest to him what is probable, and pro-

vide him with the image I have honestly drawn

for myself of what I think is true. A good deal of

this image is made by what I do imagine. I

have to try to make sure, nevertheless, that the

shifting contours of the imagination are firmly

attached to grounds I have always tried to test

as meticulously as I could. They are the docu-

ments. They are my proof'30.

It's not a return to the fetishism of the document;

instead, it's the refusal to accept a determining

epistemological reference, and the claim for the

right to a research which is hesitant and tentative, of

course, but which is sure at least of one thing: the

need to provide a cross-cut between different ap-

proaches, while trying to evaluate their assumptions,

their possibilities and their limits, in order to build

(from concurrences, or sometimes from discrepan-

cies) the occasional relationships, often problemati-

cal and fragmentary31, which films las individual

works and as 'series') have towards aesthetics,

economic constraints, social mechanisms and cultu-

ral conditions.

Notes

1. I'm not developing here two points I have already

dealt with in two works of mine, De I'histoire du

cinema. Methode historique et historique et cinema

(Paris: Colin, 1992) and 'Pour une histoire sociocul-

turelle', Cin6matheque, 1, 1992: 7-16.

2. Several research projects on this corpus are under

way, For the time being, the existing works seem to

suggest that the image of the immigrant is more

'sanitized' than dismissed or praised in fiction films.

3. Pierre Sorlin, European Cinemas, European So-

cieties (London: Routledge, 1991).

4. A I'ombre de la mosquee de Paris (Forces et Voix de

France, 1946, 23 min) by Jean Arroy, on the

mosque of Paris and the life of the Moroccan com-

munity in Paris. Kalla (Les Films de la Caravelle,

1955, 19 min.) by Francois Villiers, on a young

black student from Cameroon, realizing his own

evolution while walking across the Latin Quarter.

5. Senso. Etude critique (Paris: Nathan, 1992).

6. Goemons (Films Etienne Lallier, 1948, 23 min.) by


43




MLgny

Yannick Bellon. Report on the work and the alienated

life on the island of Beniguet, in front of the coast of

Brittany. Premiered at the Venice Biennale, 1948.

7. As an opposite example, see G6rard Leblanc,

Georges Franju, une esth6tique de la d6stabilisation

and Georges Franju, cineaste (Paris: Maison de la

Villette, 1992, 2 volumes).

8. Legislation of the years 1948 and 1953 for this

period.

9. Myriam Tsikounas, Les origines du cin6ma sovie-

tique, un regard neuf (Paris: les Editions du Cerf,

1992).

10. Charles Tesson, 'La r6gle et I'esprit: la production de

Toni deJean Renoir' Cin6math6que 1, 2, 3, 1992,

1993: 44 59; 86 97; 46 56.

1 1. Michel Foucault, L'Archeologie du savoir (Paris: Gal-

l imard, 1969).

1 2. Title given to a special issue of Equinoxe (Lausanne),

7, Spring 1992.

13. Jean-Louis Leutrat, Le cinema en perspective: une

histoire (Paris: Nathan, 1992: 7.

14. 'Sur I'histoire 6v6nementielle et I'histoire fondamen-

tale', published in the proceedings of the Constance

symposium, Geschichte und Geschichten in Semio-

tique et sciences sociales (Paris: Seuil, 1976): 163.

15. This has been largely described for the United States

by Robert Allen And Douglas Gomery in Film History,

Theory and Practice (New York: Knopf, 1985).

16. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, Kristin Thompson, The

Classical Hollywood Cinema, Film Style and Mode

of production to 1960 (London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul, 1985).

17. Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Blooming-

ton, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1987).

18. Janet Staiger, Interpreting Film, Studies in the Histori-

cal reception of American Cinema (Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press, 1992).

19. Thomas Elsaesser, 'The New Film History'. Sight &

Sound, Autumn 1986: 246-251.

20. On the first example, see Roland Cosandey and

Jean-Marie Pastor, 'Lavanchy-Clarke: Sunlight et

Lumi6re, ou les debuts du cinematographe en

Suisse'. Equinoxe, Histoire(s) de cin6ma(s), 7,

1992: 9-27. For the second one, see Laurent

Mannoni, '1894-95: les annees parisiennes du

Kin6toscope Edison', Cin6math6que, 3, 1993: 47-

57.

21. Roger Odin, 'Christian Metz et la linguistique', Iris,

10, special issue on Christian Metz et la th6orie du

cin6ma (Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck, 1990): 95; 'La

s6mio-pragmatique, sans crise ni d6sillusion'. Hors

Cadre, 7: 77-92.

22. Jean-Luc Godard, Introduction 6 une v6ritable histoire

du cinema (Paris: Albatros, 1980).

23. Pierre Bourdieu, Les r6gles de I'art. Gen6se et struc-

ture du champ litteraire (Paris: Seuil, 1992).

24. Thomas Elsaesser, op, cit.

25. Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir de I'enfance (Paris:

Denoel, 1975)

26. Marie-Claire Ropars, 'Entre films et textes: I'intervalle

de I'imaginaire', in Masses et culture de masse dans

les ann6s 30 (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1991).

27.

28.

Pierre Sorlin, op, cit., Chapter 2.

On this point, see Paolo Cherchi Usai, 'Imitation?

paraphrase? plagiat? Influence et jugement esthe-

tique au cinema', Cinematheque, 1, 1992: 38-44.

29. Michel de Certeau, 'Foucault et Bourdieu' and 'Arts

de la theorie', in L'invention du quotidien (Paris:

Folio, 1989: 75-117.

30. Georges Duby, L'histoire continue (Paris: Editions

Odile Jacob, 1991): 81 -82.

31. Carlo Ginzburg, Mythes emblemes traces, Morpho-

logie et histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1989): 153-

154.

44

Michele Lagny

lagny - film history. or history expropriated (1994)

Documents