http://vcu.sagepub.com/ Journal of Visual Culture http://vcu.sagepub.com/content/9/1/29 The online version of this article can be found at: DOI: 10.1177/1470412909354254 2010 9: 29 Journal of Visual Culture Ian Balfour Claire Denis) Nancy on Film: Regarding Kiarostami, Re-Thinking Representation (with a Coda on Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com can be found at: Journal of Visual Culture Additional services and information for http://vcu.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts: http://vcu.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Permissions: http://vcu.sagepub.com/content/9/1/29.refs.html Citations: What is This? - May 27, 2010 Version of Record >> at University of Sydney on February 19, 2014 vcu.sagepub.com Downloaded from at University of Sydney on February 19, 2014 vcu.sagepub.com Downloaded from
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http://vcu.sagepub.com/Journal of Visual Culture
http://vcu.sagepub.com/content/9/1/29The online version of this article can be found at:
DOI: 10.1177/1470412909354254
2010 9: 29Journal of Visual CultureIan Balfour
Claire Denis)Nancy on Film: Regarding Kiarostami, Re-Thinking Representation (with a Coda on
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
can be found at:Journal of Visual CultureAdditional services and information for
AbstractThis article considers Nancy’s thinking about film in the light of his writings on art in general. Nancy contends that what is so commonly considered ‘representation’ is more properly understood as presentation, even, perhaps counter-intuitively, in the domain of film. Nancy proposes that the principal dynamic in Kiarostami’s exemplary films turns on the regard, the gaze that is not simply looking but even proximate to thinking. The article also briefly considers Claire Denis’ L’Intrus (The Intruder) as a compelling example of a film responding to Nancy’s text of the same name and of his thinking more generally.
Nancy on Film: Regarding Kiarostami, Re-Thinking Representation (with a Coda on Claire Denis)
Ian Balfour
The work of Jean-Luc Nancy is extravagant, incisive, restless. It is absorbed in and into a vast array of topics and domains. Hedgehog and fox, Nancy is pulled in the sometimes opposed directions of the total and the singular, between something in the shadow of Hegel, the thinker of absolute knowledge in all its schematic plenitude, but tilts more to something in the manner of a Friedrich Schlegel, the crafter of lyrical theorizing and speculative fragments. If, in his early writings, sometimes in tandem with Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, he tended to take on one major thinker at a time – Lacan, Hegel, Kant, Descartes, inhabiting and undoing their thought – the later work tends instead to take on a concept – liberty, community, monotheism – or a particular work of art or philosophy, often broaching a new domain in his writing. Thus, almost all of a sudden, as of about 15 years ago, one finds Nancy writing on music, film and visual art, whereas the earlier work was almost all on classical problems of philosophy, psychoanalysis
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and hermeneutics, with the one art foregrounded being literature. To be prodded or enticed into so many new domains may well be one of the possibilities and/or occupational hazards in being highly regarded as a theorist: having a kind of portable, almost all-purpose intellectual apparatus that can be mobilized for a vast array of subject matters, a harking back to the days when philosophy was seen or saw itself as the discipline of disciplines, the meta-discourse par excellence.
It is often exasperating for people steeped in one discipline to find a more or less famous person, usually a theorist, if not downright a philosopher, moonlighting in their ‘own’ or ‘home’ discipline. The inner or outer art historian in all of us might well roll his or her eyes at some of Nancy’s seemingly reckless generalizations, characteristic of a certain post-structuralist idiom, as say: ‘the extreme violence of cruelty hovers at the edge of the image, of all images’ (Nancy, 2005: 24). Or ‘Art is always conceptual’ (Nancy, 2006: 198). Or ‘all art is cosmological’ (p.195).1
Although one might be left cold or, worse, unenlightened by the forays of some thinkers outside the disciplines of their main training, there is, I think, no a priori reason to leave everything to ‘the experts’. Perhaps this is more pertinent with respect to the visual arts than to most other media or discourses. For better and sometimes worse, it seems a wide range of intellectuals without any specific training feel themselves able or authorized to write about the visual arts, in a way that has few parallels with, say, architecture, dance or literature.2 Perhaps this has something to do with the status of the visual and of art in our daily and nightly lives, with the relative immediacy of visual art and its potentially broad appeal, not confined, like works of literature, to a given language, even if the visual arts definitely have their own codes and idioms. A work of art can speak to people and people can speak about it in ways that have little to do with the protocols of art history, and art history (broadly understood) should be able to ‘deal’ with such discourse. At least since the age of Kant, who called his own time ‘an age of criticism’, we live in a world in which ‘everybody’s a critic’ (and this long before the onset of the blogosphere). In general, philosophical takes on art tend to have in common with everyday, non-specialist responses that they are not historicist, not concerned, in the first or last instance, to articulate works in and with their historical contexts but rather to adopt a stance something like the phenomenological or even to consider the work as in some sense absolute, as did some of the German Romantics Nancy edited and commented on so attentively decades ago.3
In what follows I shall attend primarily to Nancy’s writing on film and especially on Kiarostami, yet in the light or shadow of his writings on art proper and especially his thinking about representation. Film as an area of study has almost always had a vexed relation to art history. Despite the huge overlaps in the domains of visuality and the image, the intellectual formations of art history and film studies seem further apart than their significant material differences (film being time-based, and not having the same variegations of material as other visual arts) might warrant. Such distinctions are not a matter of indifference to Nancy (who has written a fair bit about painting, a little about photography and sculpture) but, perhaps because he tends to come at them from or after an intense engagement with philosophical aesthetics, the differences are less profound for him than
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for many others. For our purposes and with an eye to Nancy’s understanding of Kiarostami, ‘talking’ film has a somewhat less pronounced claim to the universal, since films usually operate in one (but not always only one) given language. They tend to circulate, however, with subtitles or are dubbed, such that one is usually ‘seeing’ a film in one’s own language or a language one understands or has some more or less complete translation available.4 Nancy’s interest in film lies far more in matters of image and temporality than in language, in the narrow sense, or in thematic concerns. I shall concentrate on one matter that overarches many others, the problem with representation and how it has to be rethought, which is in part triggered by a peculiar (non-)dialectic of mobility and immobility registered in the compelling texture of Kiarostami’s films and, perhaps, in many and varied ways, in cinema as such.
I take it that a principal interest and achievement of Nancy’s thinking about visual culture and cultures is to resist, correct, or overcome loose or sloppy thinking that goes under the rubric of ‘representation’. Not that the word or concept should, much less can, be put forever under erasure. The concept, historically so crucial to thinking about art and about language, will remain, in a qualified way, indispensable, including to Nancy. At the furthest extreme, ‘representation’ is virtually another name for ‘the West’. As Nancy (2005) remarks: ‘the task involves thinking “representation” not only as a particular operational or technical regime but also as a general name for the event and configuration ordinarily called “the West”’ (p. 35).5 Yet even this monolithic notion – representation – might be susceptible to being dislodged successfully or at least be made to tremble. Nancy is one of numerous thinkers who have contributed to the displacement, circumscription, qualification, refinement and, perhaps most of all, the necessary supplementation of the category of representation by other terms – and their attendant analyses – that better get at what is going on in art and discourses about art. The time-honoured regime of representational thinking, with its negative pole in Plato and its positive one in Aristotle, has tended to conceive of both language and art as essentially or predominantly matters of re-presentation, or rendering again in the medium of art or language what preceded it, what lay before it, even if subsequently transformed or transfigured. This paradigm worked less well for some arts (dance and music, for example) than for others (poetry and painting), which is almost of itself to suggest that whatever Aristotle meant by mimesis was likely more capacious and complicated than what is usually understood by re-presentation, namely, the more or less direct re-presentation in art or language of what is or had been present in the phenomenal world. In the domain of language, Nietzsche’s – but not only Nietzsche’s – notion of the positing power of language, Wittgenstein’s conceptualization of language as game and something more or less useful to do, as well as Austin’s epoch-making concept of the performative capabilities of (some) speech acts all combined to shake the monolithic paradigm of representation.6 In the visual arts, the emergence of especially non-figurative art forced a reconsideration of the category’s hegemony, which had in any event been unduly tied to and dependent on the paradigms of painting and drawing. Yet the recognition that a vast number of works of art were ‘non-representational’ has not always been accompanied by a complication of the category of representation at a higher or more general level when talking
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about art. The term lingers, casually invoked, often in problematic ways. One of Nancy’s numerous virtues is to nuance the way the category should and should not function in a way that helps us to get at what is actually going on in art.
One way Nancy (2005) approaches the category of ‘representation’ is via the term itself, though not as if its etymology harbors its one and only truth, much less its essence. He recalls how the Latin(ate) prefix re- can signal an intensification rather than a repetition:
The re- of the word representation is not repetitive but intensive (to be more precise, the initially iterative value of the prefix re- in Latinate language is often transformed into an intensive or, as one says, ‘frequentative’ value). The Latin repraesentatio is an accentuated presentation … The Latin word translates the Greek hypotyposis, which designates a sketch, a scheme, the presentation of the lines of a figure in the largest possible sense without any suggestion of repetition or rehearsal. (p. 35)
Already in this gloss of the word’s history, one moves tellingly from re-presentation to presentation. Because the ‘re’ is an intensifier, not a marker of a different stage, not a sign of repetition, it can actually be elided. Representation is presentation.
But presentation of what, one might ask? Nancy (1997) in a programmatic essay claims bluntly that: ‘Art is presentation’ and even ‘the presentation of presentation’ (p. 138). This latter formulation signals not the start of an infinite regress but an intensification of a structure that poses and exposes.7 Even more often than a ‘presentation of presentation’, Nancy (2006) maintains that what art presents is presence, as is the case in his essay ‘On Painting (and) Presence’ (Birth to Presence) or on ‘The Technique of the Present: On Kawara’. The former essay deals mainly with the paintings of François Martin but explicitly aims to get at a gesture common to painting in general and thus presence, for Nancy, is central to the entire art form. And what is this presence that Nancy outlines again and again? In an essay devoted to the Shoah entitled ‘Forbidden Representation’, where Nancy invokes ‘representation’ far more often than is usual, most likely because he wants to challenge the common throwing-up-of-the-hands at the supposed impossibility of ‘representing’ the Holocaust, Nancy (2005) remarks:
Representation is a presence that is presented, exposed, or exhibited. It is not, therefore, presence pure and simple: it is precisely not the immediacy of the being-posed-there but is rather that which draws presence out of this immediacy insofar as it puts a value on presence as some presence or another. Presentation, in other words, does not present something without exposing its value or sense – at least, the minimal value or sense of being there before a subject. (p. 36)
Moreover, he continues:
It follows that representation not only presents something that, either by rights, or in point of fact, is simply absent: in truth, it presents what is
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absent from presence pure and simple, its being as such or even in its sense or truth. It is on this point that confusions, paradoxes, and contradictions often come to be formed. (p. 36)
It is remarkable that the general bracketing of representation in Nancy, despite its sometime replacement by presentation, is not at all accompanied by a bracketing of presence, as is so often the case in contemporaries of Nancy’s ilk. One might have thought that ‘presence’, after the early work of Derrida (of whom Nancy was a close friend, collaborator, and from whom Nancy learned so much), might be among the most outmoded of categories, ‘deconstructed’ once and for all. Yet in Nancy’s later work, presentation is enlisted in the service precisely of presence and the real – this will be the case, in spades, in his writing on film – to an extent almost unheard of in ‘post-structuralism’, broadly understood. But already in the passages quoted earlier it is clear that it is not a matter of presence ‘pure and simple’. Nancy often glosses presence as itself in the mode of presentation, that is to say, mobile, coming into being and withdrawing and thus not, say, the stereotypical sort of aesthetic presence we might associate with still-life painting. The fact of presentation already qualifies what we might imagine presence to be apart from presentation or representation.
* * * * *
The sequence that constitutes Nancy’s most intense reflections on film and on Kiarostami was set in motion by a request from Cahiers du Cinéma to write, as one of 100 authors, about a single film from the 100 years of the first century of cinematic history. Nancy found himself more or less forced into saying something essential or at least resonant about film in general on the basis of one example.8
As he says of the first attempt to write on Kiarostami:
I have sought to jot down, without unifying them, the moments, the fragments of this pressure, which Kiarostami’s films exert – for that is their function – and which presses or expresses through him something of the essence of cinema and of our existence with it. (p. 12)9
Nancy settled on Kiarostami’s Life and Nothing More, which makes good sense, given what is at stake for Nancy in film, and even in art more generally, though the process must have been circular, moving from example to theory and back again.10 Initially, Nancy wrote a short essay on that one film, which was in fact the only work by Kiarostami he had seen up to that time. Five years or so passed before Nancy returned to write about Kiarostami, this time with a good command of the director’s oeuvre. In concert with publishing the longer and shorter essays together, Nancy and Kiarostami met to discuss mainly Kiarostami’s films, resulting in more of a dialogue than an interview. By this time, Nancy’s level of engagement was intense and it issued in the longer essay called ‘Évidence du film’.11
The film singled out by Nancy was the second of three films sometimes known as the Koker trilogy, following Where Is the Friend’s Home? (a superb film about friendship) and preceding Through the Olive Trees, a ‘trilogy’ because they all revolve around the same small town in northern Iran, with one set before and
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two of them after the massive earthquake of 1990. Kiarostami himself did not consider the films a formal trilogy but the action of And Life Goes On concerns a film director looking for the children who had acted in Where Is the Friend’s Home? And some scenes from And Life Goes On are reprised and elaborated in Through the Olive Trees, such that the three films are tightly linked. Life and Nothing More unfolds in the shadow of the earthquake that killed tens of thousands of Iranians, thus implicating the presence not only of the real but something rather more real than is the norm in cinema, even if any number of the film’s elements are re-created and even faked in the wake of the event invoked.1 2
An earthquake might be said to challenge the possibilities of representation more than most events, and perhaps in only a more muted way than the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, which sent shockwaves through Enlightenment discourse.1 3
The quaking of the earth, even if only seen in its effects, as is the case in Life and Nothing More, unsettles representation, though perhaps only slightly more than occurs, from Nancy’s point of view, in any act of signification. Laura Mulvey (2006) observes that ‘the earthquake represents the sudden interruption into movement of something that should have remained still and the sudden transformation of a benevolent nature into a vengeful and destructive force’ (p. 130). This names one version of a tension that will run through much of Kiarostami and to which we shall return.
We can begin to see what is most important for Nancy (2001) and also characteristic of his thinking about the categories for the analysis of (Kiarostami’s) film in the following passage:
Everywhere Kiarostami substitutes the gaze (regard) for images and signs. Or more exactly he does not ‘substitute’ anything inasmuch as he does not make the images or signs disappear, but he mobilizes them, engaging them toward a look (regard) and the look toward what is real. The look (regard): the precision in a framing, in the speed of the film stock, in the light – the season the time of day, a car falling prey to the lens (in a word, nothing other than the film) … but if we may express it in this way: cinema intensified, pushed from the inside toward an essence that detaches it to a large extent from representation and turns it toward presence; and ‘representation’ thus shows its actual workings. (pp. 30–1)
One might think that if ever there were a representational art it would be film. Not just able, like photography, to reproduce an image of what is in front of the camera, it can also capture and reproduce sound and do so in ‘real time’, in exactly the time it takes for an action to unfold in real life. Whereas it is easy to see how non-representational, say, the art of music is, film, almost by definition, reproduces what lies and moves before the camera and thus arguably ‘re-presents’ it. Yet even with respect to this medium and to this chosen film of Kiarostami’s, Nancy insists that what is essential about cinema, of which Kiarostami is the intensified exemplar, is the gaze, the regard and not, in the first or last instance, representation. As he glosses it elsewhere, it is a matter of ‘a possibility of looking that is no longer exactly a look at representation or a representative look’ (p.14).
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What is this regard (gaze) that is not a matter of representation, or even looking at representation, and indeed that displaces it? It is something more than a mere looking, more than simple perception. Nancy specifies that:
Looking is regarding (Le regard est un égard) and consequently respecting. The word respect also has to do with regard (respicere): it watches for … turned toward … guided by attention, by observance or consideration. A rightful look is respectful of the real that it beholds, that is to say it is attentive and openly attending to the very power of the real and its absolute exteriority: looking will not tap this power but will allow it to communicate itself or will communicate with itself. In the end, looking (regarder) just amounts to thinking the real, to test oneself with regard to a meaning one is not mastering. (pp. 38–39)
Nancy pushes this special sort of looking, the gaze, the regard, in the direction of thinking, as attentive observation within and prompted by the film. This is no simple bias of Nancy the ‘philosopher’, of his seeing in film an approximation of philosophy, rather in the way that Hegel values art and religion for their being almost or not quite yet of the order of philosophy.1 4 Nor does Nancy want to submit the visual arts to some higher logocentric regime, such that the visual would find its truth there and only there. On the contrary, Nancy, like Derrida, is permanently suspicious of the violence of language with respect to the non-linguistic. Film, in these terms, occupies a middle zone between image and thought, not least but not only because of the presence of language in most films. Yet even a certain discourse of visuality partakes of this logocentrism, one of whose names is ‘representation’:
Cinema’s proposition here is quite far from a vision that is merely ‘sighting’ (that looks in order merely ‘to see’): what is evident imposes itself as the setting up of a look. If this look regards that upon which it casts itself and cares for it, it will have taken care of the real: of that which resists, precisely being absorbed in any vision (‘visions of the world,’ representations, imaginations). (p. 18)
It is the resistance of the ‘regard’, the gaze to representation that pushes it beyond sight, beyond mere wide-eyed (as it were) viewing towards thought or something like it.1 5 But is it too generous or just misguided to see Kiarostami’s filmmaking in general as given to this regarding that is a kind of thinking? Certainly it seems apt for the corpuses of directors such as Kiarostami, Rossellini, or any number of the Japanese masters. By contrast, and this is the Hollywood norm as diagnosed by Laura Mulvey, a masterful but straightforward director such as Howard Hawks structures the gaze so as to be inconspicuous, to make us see rather than regard, and even perhaps to make us forget that we are seeing.1 6 (I say this not at all as a criticism of Hawks and company.) Perhaps this regarding is in large measure a function of the camera work and editing rather than an auteur’s quasi-philosophical gaze. Bazin (2009 [1967]: 100ff.) long ago noted how the long take prompted reflection on the viewer’s part.1 7One can sometimes track
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with some degree of precision how this happens, as in the films of Antonioni or Teshigahara, how the strategic privation of language, even in adapting literary texts, provides a space for – indeed virtually requires – reflection.
The force of ‘regarding’ is partly determined by the way the camera moves or does not move in relation to the action that moves or does not move (or both). Nancy makes much of the ‘dialectic’ of mobility and immobility at various levels of the film experience and clearly he sees these dynamics lending themselves to regarding or thinking, the former being tantamount to the latter. In watching moving pictures in a cinema we are, Nancy recalls – and this is unlike with sculpture or painting – practically immobile. Paradoxically or not, the scenes that best mobilize the regard are those where the moving picture draws to a halt or almost, with scenes of near immobility, or with one ‘thing’ moving in a space of immobility. Kiarostami often has the camera fixed, Ozu-like, but more often than not in a scene that features a play of fixity and motion: the paradigm for this is a moving car with the camera set on the driver or one of its passengers, with the actor essentially not moving and the landscape or cityscape whizzing by outside the window that is also a kind of screen. Nancy terms the ‘Kiarostamian’ car a ‘boîte à regard’ – a gazing box, a kind of camera non obscura. Nancy notes how many of Kiarostami’s films feature a feverish, almost manic motion: one thinks of the frantic, repetitive activity of the man in Through the Olive Trees, so concerned to get good cell-phone reception that he runs and then drives a long way just to hear a voice properly. Kiarostami tracks these movements at far greater length than is required to convey the content of the action. In this, Kiarostami takes advantage, even in the face of the banal, of the possibility of motion. Always taking Kiarostami as his point of departure, Nancy (2001) comments on his sort of cinema in relation to the dominant paradigms:
Cinema becomes the motion (mouvement) of what is real, much more than its representation. It will have taken long for the illusion of reality that held the ambiguous prestige and glamour of films – as if they had done nothing but carry to the extreme the old mimetic drive of the Western world – to disappear at least in tendency, from an awareness of cinema (or from its self-awareness) and for a mobilized way of looking to take place. (p. 26)
There is motion, in film, and then there is motion. Nancy sees, rightly I think, a world of difference between the motion of, to indulge in a stereotype for a moment, Hollywood motion pictures and those of a Kiarostami. If one thinks of a paradigmatic big-budget Hollywood movie, one understands how it so often tries to take advantage of all the possibilities of film at once and in an intense way: image, sound (music, special effects), words. In such films, hardly any emotion comes without strings attached, without musical accompaniment, in an effort to heighten the emotional impact and perhaps even to dictate how one is to understand words and gestures, as if they were not enough. Kiarostami’s film-making intensifies itself by privation: if motion pictures afford the possibilities of constant motion, then it is a more radical strategy now and then to bring things to a halt, or to slow things to a near absence of motion. This Kiarostami does repeatedly, not least as a counter-balance to the more restless motion noted
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earlier. Similarly, if one has the constant possibility of music to accompany the images and action from start to finish, then it might be in the interest of ‘regarding’ to refrain from that music or to use it only sparingly. This is precisely what Kiarostami tends to do: music, diegetic or non-diegetic, is rarely called upon (it is present for approximately 10% of the running time of Life and Nothing More). The motion characteristic of Kiarostami’s films has consequences for his notion of the gaze, the ‘regard’ that is, or is proximate to, thinking. A Hollywood action picture sometimes has its hero pause for a serene or anxious moment or two, but these times are more a respite from the action than an occasion for what Nancy considers ‘regarding’. Action movies – even of a sophisticated sort, such as the Bourne trilogy – all but forbid thought except of the ‘what next?’ variety.
Kiarostami’s motion acquires its particular character partly by virtue of its relation to its non-opposite, as Nancy conceives it, of immobility. ‘The true motor of cinema’, Nancy (2001) contends, ‘is photographic immobility’ (p. 52). The fact that Kiarostami is himself a long-time, accomplished photographer is only a small empirical correlative of a tendency one can see in a good many filmmakers, as those noted earlier. It seems also of a piece with what Kiarostami claims in his dialogue with Nancy: ‘I can’t bear narrative cinema’ (p. 88). One of the most arresting and arrested images in Life and Nothing More is that of a painting set on the wall of a house damaged by the earthquake. The painting is almost intact but with a jagged, zig-zagging crack down the middle. What should be a not-so-special portrait of an elderly man smoking a long, thin pipe at a table with many of the props of a standard still-life (jug, bowl, bread) becomes via the crack in the wall and thus a crack in the painting an unnerving emblem of the fragility of a certain kind of representation.
Figure 1 From Abbas Kiarostami, Life and Nothing More (1991).
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The gaze that would normally be demanded of looking at a portrait is redoubled by a break in the mimetic system, a still image that is not so still, as if trembling, an aftershock of the earthquake and all its disruptions. The image renders us as motionless and as trembling as it is. That is the kind of immobility Kiarostami mobilizes: the gaze that is forced to go beyond mere looking while stopping short of some ‘idea’ that may lie behind it: stopping, regarding, thinking.
* * * * *
In the few pages remaining I want to turn, if only to invoke and gesture toward the key issues, a powerful example of a film produced in the light of and in dialogue with Nancy’s thinking, namely Claire Denis’ L’Intrus (The Intruder), based on Nancy’s (2002) text of the same name. On a reading of this odd text, one would scarcely imagine that anyone would have been tempted to make a film of it. It is a generic hybrid, mixing an autobiographical account of Nancy’s heart transplant – and all that entailed – with rather abstract speculations on the concept or figure of intrusion, of which the intrusion of one person’s heart into another’s body would be an extreme example. The intruder (human or not) is the radical version of the stranger, the l’étranger that remains a stranger, never quite welcomed as such, never quite accommodated.
I feel it distinctly; it is much stronger than a sensation: never has the strangeness of my own identity, which I’ve nonetheless always found so striking, touched me with such acuity. ‘I’ has clearly become the formal index of an unverifiable and impalpable system of linkages. Between my self and me there has always been a gap of space-time: but now there is the opening of an incision and an immune system that is at odds with itself, forever at cross purposes, irreconcilable. (p. 10)
To make a long non-story short, the engrafted heart turns out, however, in a familiar non-dialectic, to demonstrate how we were always already strangers to ourselves, even intruding upon ourselves, in a world in which there is ‘nothing that is not foreign’ (p. 7).
This very short text is largely non-narrative and almost entirely bereft of images, other than the figure of the heart proper and some of its attendant apparatuses. Denis’ feature-length film is a discontinuously narrative one, with a motley cast of characters, some of which are very shadowy and none of which much resemble the author of Nancy’s autobiographical text. Like all films, it is replete with images but, given that the text virtually in no way determines how a film of the text (or even just responding to the text) might look, we might well ask: where do these images come from? As it happens, they by no means simply issue from the canons of film history and its various genres. The second scene of the film, which follows the long-delayed (by about 9 minutes) title of the film, followed by a pure black screen for several seconds, opens with a stark image of a grotto (see Figure 2).
I call this a Courbet grotto, since it recalls and might even be Denis’ scene. It takes place in the Jura, Courbet’s stomping grounds, an area visually familiar to many through his plein air paintings, even if it is also simply just there for any passerby
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to see, sans Courbet. The images of Courbet’s various grottoes are familiar to us, and especially to Denis’ French viewers,1 8 but they are also in another sense unfamiliar, unheimlich. They each depict an opening that opens on to who knows what, a closed opening, as it were, and all the more enigmatic if one places it in relation to Courbet’s other grotto-like images, as in the notorious ‘Origin of the World’. All they reveal is primarily darkness, like the darkness at the center of Courbet’s painted allegory of his own painting practice, a painting in which the artist’s arm disappears into the dark landscape he is painting (Courbet, 1855). Like the heart, the grotto seems to be of the order of interiority or of the promise of interiority but one whose promise is at least here denied. In the space of Denis’ film we have little idea what this grotto is, what is inside. And when a woman emerges from it a few seconds after the frame reproduced in Figure 2, we have no clue as to who she is, nor shall we be enlightened about this later on.
When it comes to matters of presentation, much less representation, the grotto, for Nancy (1996), is not one site among others. In an essay in honour of Bataille called ‘Painting in the Grotto’ – Bataille being a thinker much preoccupied, anthropologically, with the origins of religion and art – the grotto is the site of the beginning of art, even the ‘birth’ of art, in which the human being, as animal monstrans, presents art and encounters himself and everything else in its fundamental strangeness, its foreignness. ‘Painting in the Grotto’ presents the template at the level of art for what, at the register of the human body as well as the most abstract but real relations among humans and in relation to the rest of the world, will become the foreignness later thematized in L’Intrus.
A painterly presence also informs some of the key scenes featuring Denis’ protagonist’s return to Tahiti from France where he will try to make amends to his estranged son. He comes back to a Tahiti he had left decades ago and encounters varieties of foreignness more or less resistant to his gaze, such as this group of young men riding by in a truck (see Figure 3).
It is hard to imagine a French person’s vision of Tahiti not being mediated by Gauguin’s celebrated, famous portrayals of Tahitian ‘natives’. Denis’ images are at
Figure 2 From Claire Denis, L’Intrus (The Intruder), ‘Courbet Grotto’.
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once post-Gauguin and post-colonial, even if Tahiti, to our amazement, remains technically a colony of France. The Tahitian gaze is no longer that of the more or less passive poser for the foreign painter, and the principals, as in the truck sequence, tend to be male. Many of the Tahitian sequences offer us first a beautiful, perhaps romanticized view of unspoiled beaches, lush vegetation, gorgeous, saturated colours, only to undercut them with the views of a crane, a hardware store, or a rusty tin on a beach, reminding us that Gauguin’s Tahiti is utterly a thing of the past.
Or consider one final sequence. When the protagonist is making his way to Korea via boat, Denis cuts from an office to, a bit mysteriously, a painting by Albert Marquet, and one hears sounds of the ocean accompanying it. The camera lingers on the painting for a few seconds (see Figure 4).
Figure 3 From Claire Denis, L’Intrus (The Intruder). Tahitian returned gaze/post-Gauguin.
Figure 4 From Claire Denis, L’Intrus (The Intruder). Painting by Albert Marquet.
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And then we see an actual boat traversing the water. A certain priority of image over event is legible here, with ‘a painted ship upon a painted ocean’, to (not) coin a phrase, followed by a filmed ship upon a filmed ocean. The painting, here as before, actual or encrypted, is both the source for and the intruder on the moving image. It traverses the moving image, bringing it to a halt even as the film relentlessly continues, 24 frames a second. The still image folds into the movement of the film and complicates it. The film can’t go on, the film goes on. As in Benjamin, the image brings history, momentarily, to a halt, via the form of the quotation. The still, more or less painted image or even the long take, characteristic of Denis, resists, Chris Marker-like, what is not least a commercial imperative to indulge in the representation of movement. And it is this realized possibility in film, resisting so many of its own possibilities, that gives us to regard, to think, to regard.
Notes
1. A good many of Nancy’s generalizations are actually more defensible than they appear here, stripped of their surrounding arguments.
2. Michael Fried is a notable counter example. A significant number of literary intellectuals feel authorized to write about art (John Ashbery, John Updike, etc.) whereas fewer art historians or artists write about literature or philosophy in an analogous way.
3. See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1978). The English version is: Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988).
4. I am simplifying here a complex set of issues. For an exploration by many hands (directors, critics, industry professionals) of the status of subtitles, literally and otherwise, in recent film, see Egoyan and Balfour (2004).
5. It is perhaps no accident that Nancy’s most insistent use of the category of representation occurs in an essay in large measure on the Holocaust. Part of Nancy’s point is that many people too easily throw up their hands at the ‘unrepresentability’ of the Holocaust: hence, Nancy’s strategic invocation of ‘representation’ to give one pause.
6. Fichte and Hegel could also be seen as having foregrounded the positing or thetic power of language.
7. Nancy’s commitment to presentation instead of representation may have its roots in his reading of the German Idealist and Romantic writers who variously stress the primacy of Darstellung, an ambiguous term but one which just as easily or more often than not means presentation as representation. Darstellung does not presuppose something existing independently prior to its presentation, as say in dance or music.
8. This too might be one of the occupational hazards or at least temptations of a theorist embarking on thinking about a new domain: the felt need to say something about film as such, film in general, a need which any film scholar or critic would scarcely feel.
9. See Nancy (2001). The text is trilingual (French, English, Farsi). I quote from the English pages, translated by Christine Irizarry and Verena Andermatt.
10. It is an interesting and not necessarily fortuitous thing that, when one first writes something about a domain new to that writer, one often tends to generalize about the medium – perhaps precisely the opposite of what one should do. On the
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other hand, this occasion of writing is often informed by pent-up knowledge and reflections that have long preceded the occasion of writing.
11. The title of Nancy’s essay is fittingly ambiguous, referring either to a single film, the film by Kiarostami, or to film in general: both are apposite to his text: Kiarostami’s work is exemplary of film and film exemplifies itself, in a nonetheless singular way, in his film. The title of Nancy’s first short text was simply ‘De l’évidence’.
12. Kiarostami himself linked Life and Nothing More rather to Taste of Cherry, for its thematic connections.
13. Werner Hamacher (1996) explores the relations between what happens in and because of an earthquake to the problem of representation in ‘The Quaking of Presentation: Kleist’s “Earthquake in Chile”’. The philosophical texts relating to earthquakes include Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant, among others. For a very different, indeed upbeat, philosophical take on at least one earthquake, see James (1987). James experienced the northern Californian earthquake while a visitor at Stanford. It was primarily a source of delight for him, perhaps as a loose allegory of the absence of foundations prized by pragmatism.
14. Nancy’s other major elaboration of the category of the regard comes in his substantial essay on portraiture (2000). The English translation is included in Nancy (2006).
15. In this discussion I am focusing on formal and conceptual matters of the gaze but, in Iranian cinema, even literal dynamics of the look are charged political matters. For an informed analysis of the exterior and internal forces at work in determining how the gaze functions, especially with the strictures applied to the presentation and representation of women, see Mottahedeh (2004) in Egoyan and Balfour (2004), as well as her two monographs (2008a, 2008b). On the vexed subject of censorship and other state conditions of filmmaking in Iran (whose importance Kiarostami often thinks is exaggerated by western film critics), see Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum (2003).
16. This is one of the arguments in the classic essay by Mulvey (1975).17. See Bazin (2009 [1967]) ‘The Evolution of Film Language’, pp. 100 ff. Laura Mulvey
(2006) invokes this argument by Bazin (2009 [1967]), pp. 23–43. I find Bazin’s analysis fits especially well the dynamics of Teshigahara’s Woman of the Dunes, as I try to explore in a work in progress on adaptation.
18. For some of Courbet’s grottoes see: http://www.albrightknox.org/ArtStart/Courbet_t.html; http://www.nga.gov/fcgi-bin/timage_f?object=43681&image=7941&c=
References
Bazin, André (2009 [1967]) What Is Cinema?, trans. Timothy Barnard. Montreal: Caboose.Courbet, G. (1855) ‘The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory of a Seven-Year Phase in My
Artistic and Moral Life’. Paris: Musée d’Orsay.Egoyan, A. and Balfour, I. (2004) Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film. Cambridge, MA: MIT
University Press.Hamacher, W. (1996) ‘The Quaking of Presentation: Kleist’s “Earthquake in Chile’’’, in
Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, pp. 261–93. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
James, W. (1987) ‘On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake’, in Writings 1902–1910, pp. 1215–22. New York: Library of America.
Lacoue-Labarthe, P. and Nancy, J-L. (1978) L’Absolu littéraire: théorie de la littérature du romantisme allemand. Paris: Seuil.
Mottahedeh, N. (2004) ‘Where Are Kiarostami’s Women?’, in A. Egoyan and I. Balfour (eds) Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film, pp. 309–34. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press.
Mottahedeh, N. (2008a) Displaced Allegories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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Mottahedeh, N. (2008b) Representing the Unrepresentable. Syracuse, NY: University of Syracuse Press.
Mulvey, L. (1975) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16(3), Autumn: 6–18.Mulvey, L. (2006) Death 24 X a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion.Nancy, J-L. (1996) The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Nancy, J-L. (1997) The Sense of the World, trans J.S. Librett. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.Nancy, J-L. (2000) Le regard du portrait. Paris: Galilée.Nancy, J-L. (2001) L’Évidence du film. Brussels: Yves Gavaert.Nancy, J-L. (2002) ‘L’intrus’, trans. Susan Hanson, New Centennial Review 2(3): 1–14.Nancy, J-L. (2005) The Ground of the Image, trans. J. Fort. New York: Fordham University
Press.Nancy, J-L. (2006) Multiple Arts: The Muses II, ed. S. Sparks. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.Saeed-Vafa, M. and Rosenbaum, J. (2003) Abbas Kiarostami. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press.
Ian Balfour is Professor of English and of Social & Political Thought at York University. He is the author of several books, including The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy. With Atom Egoyan, he co-edited Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film and with Eduardo Cadava ‘And Justice for All?: The Claims of Human Rights’, a special double issue of South Atlantic Quarterly. He was also the sole editor of a SAQ volume on Late Derrida. He is currently completing a book on The Language of the Sublime.
Address: 04 Winters College, York University, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada. [email: [email protected]]
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