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Orpheus, the New Historian - Cahiers du Cinma

9/06/13 12:55 PM

Orpheus, the New Historian


Is the cinema an art of the 20th century? Of all the forced senses in Histoire(s) du Cinma (Story(s)/History of the Cinema) we find this one: the cinema has imposed itself as the privileged art and technique for writing the history of this century By Cyril Neyrat

s the cinema an art of the 20th century? Of all the forced senses in Histoire(s) du Cinma (Story(s)/History of the Cinema) we find this one: the cinema has imposed itself as the privileged art and technique for writing the history of this century. At the end of episode 2A, we find the words only the cinema; Godard expresses this privilege in an alarming but opaque formula, The cinema allows Orpheus to turn back without having Eurydice die. Analyzing the form of history at work in Hiroshima My Love helps us to decipher this enigma. More than an additional means available to historians, the cinema was the motor and the incentive of a profound renewal of historiography. But we had to wait sixty years for a film, Hiroshima My Love, to reach the height of this promise. This type of intimacy in the cinema and this new thought process of history was also theorized at the same period by Siegfried Kracauer in his last two books, Theory of Film and History. As these two books mirror each other: his research on the specificity of the photographic medium led him to rethink history during the age of the beginnings of photography and the cinema (page 67). This diptych has a prestigious predecessor in the history of philosophy, that of the two famous texts by Walter Benjamin: The work of art at the time of its technical reproducibility and Theses on History. The modern rupture of Hiroshima My Love will have been to compensate for the cinemas lateness in joining a historiographical revolution, for which it was nonetheless responsible. New history questions the hierarchy between what is remarkable and what is ordinary, between so-called historical events and small, unnoticeable events: Resnais and Duras can compare the drama of a city hit by an atomic bomb to a woman whose head has been shaved. Because it breaks off with the whore of once upon a time (Benjamin), history becomes an examination of the present as well as the past. According to Benjamin, while historicism composes the eternal image of the past, materialistic history depicts the unique experience of the encounter with this past. The meeting of the Japanese man and the French woman becomes that of Hiroshimas present and of the past of the town of Nevers. The dispensation
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Orpheus, the New Historian - Cahiers du Cinma

9/06/13 12:55 PM

with chronology, the passage of the causal story to the laying out of clues engenders a critique of the document - its devaluation to the profit of the monument, an unintentional vestige of the past. We can assess to what extent Hiroshima My Love accomplishes this feat by comparing it to another great film with a historical vocation by Resnais, Night and Fog. It is a documentary that still believes in the power of the document with its terrible black and white images drawn from the archival depths. But Resnais begins his critique of the document by opposing the archival footage to full color scenes in the present time. The tracking shots contradict the archival stills; when the color film seems to be looking at images of the past, the tracking shots in the desert slide on the surface - a way of forgetting the passing of time and erasing things. Listening to the commentary of the film by Cayrol, the opposition of tracking shots in color and black and white archival shots makes us hear the silent lesson: You saw nothing in Auschwitz. The museum scene in Hiroshima My Love completes the critique sketched out in Night and Fog. The litany of things seen by the French woman is not only contradicted by the you saw nothing of the Japanese man, but also by the nagging repetition of the tracking shots in the museum that do not stop at any proof but rather slide along, indifferent to the lesson. Whereas the content of the scenes seems to confirm the comments of the young woman I saw the clusters of capsules the image loses its documentary certainty to the advantage of an imaginary quality that is even more uncertain.

Night and Fog confronts the past and the present in declaring the lesson of its alarm system: the strength of the archives is met with weakness, forgetting is met with memory if the knowledge of the past is not accompanied by present vigilance. The viewer is asked not to separate the present peace with past extermination, to see them superposed, one with the other. Hiroshima My Love goes even further in accomplishing a fusion of the two periods. Going
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Orpheus, the New Historian - Cahiers du Cinma

9/06/13 12:55 PM

back in time in traditional history and cinema, Resnais substitutes a return forward (Bernard Pingaud): the job of history is to allow what has survived from the past to find its place in the present. The tracking shot is the key ingredient in Hiroshima My Love, in that it makes this fusion of time frames possible. The Resnais tracking shot is different in that the physical movement is accompanied by a momentum of conscience. The movement of a body is simultaneously a movement of thought. The recurrence of these camera movements in Hiroshima My Love substitutes a degree of singular reality to the real objective, the well-known imaginary, which Resnais often speaks of: a realm of exteriority and interiority, between the world and consciousness, the real place in which the film takes place. This realm is that of history, it is where two separate time frames can meet and become one. We are reminded of Kracauers half-baked phrase. This cinematic space-time of history appears most clearly in the key scene of nocturnal wanderings of the French woman. She walks the deserted streets of Hiroshima. She is visible at first and then disappears off screen: a conversion of physical movement into imaginary movement, which launches a series of alternating tracking shots between the streets of Hiroshima and those of Nevers. The physical experience brings one time frame into another. Resnais talks about how, in order to deal with language problems during the filming, he translated his ideas to the Japanese technical crew by using cinema references that were well known, notably Cocteaus Orphe (Orpheus). In the foreground, as we see the woman walking against the wind in the deserted street, it reminds us of the crossing of Jean Marais and Franois Prier in the Zone made of a memory of men and the ruins of their habits. In his text on Kracauer, Arnaud Mac analyzes the common vocation, according to the writer, the filmmaker and the historian: To learn to walk with the shadows. Resnais tracking shots make Hiroshima My Love a Zone: a non-place in history, a present that is permeable to the past. But not for just anyone. The work of history accomplished in Hiroshima My Love requires the creation of a particular character, capable of accepting the encounter of the times in himself. A conductor-body, a psychic soul, sensitive to the resonance of the past and the present. The French woman is such a person, a historian, of whom Jean Cayrol, author of the commentary in Night and Fog and the screenwriter of Muriel, painted a portrait in the immediate post war period, by naming such a person a lazarean character. It is the holocaust survivor, but also the ordinary person after a catastrophe: one of
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Orpheus, the New Historian - Cahiers du Cinma

9/06/13 12:55 PM

the living dead who is more than a survivor, someone condemned to roam a world he no longer knows how to inhabit. Of such a person, Cayrol writes, he is never where he seems to be. () The reality is not simple for such a person, he must think it before seeing it. The imaginary in Hiroshima My Love is this feeling of being a stranger in ones world, and which only appears in the distance of thought.

Jean Cayrol wrote a beautiful but little-known book with Claude Durand, Le Droit de Regard (the Right to Look) of which the lazarean developments upon the history of the cinema connect in an amazing way to the hypotheses of Kracauer, and seem to describe Resnais film without naming it. The historical event, even when it is consumed in its violent phases, does not enter into History: it continues to be in our world, part of our world; we encounter it, it is in every human adventure. Since the event is present, in the form of traces and resonance, no archive will be able to reveal it. On the contrary, it renders the drama of this event unimaginable. Against the documentary nature of archives, auteurs attempt to gather the images of intention and of allusion in the event, contaminated by individual memory that can only be partial (). A work of imagination, of which the time to observe it would not be enough time to see an image, passing so quickly, but just the time necessary for the image to be doubled in another time. This work begins for the French woman in the hotel room, where, in the morning, the sleeping Japanese mans hand is doubled in her memory of the hand of the dead German man. Just as Eurydice dies a second time when Orpheus turns around, the true image of the past goes by in an instant, wrote Benjamin, and the task of the historian is to retain the image of the past offered unexpectedly to the historical subject in the moment of danger. The image of history, for Benjamin, is dialectical; it results from the shock of an image of the past and the present that it points at. After the initial shock, the first bolt of lightning, the dual image is continued for the French woman,
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Orpheus, the New Historian - Cahiers du Cinma

9/06/13 12:55 PM

up until, climbing the Zone of history, she welcomes Nevers into herself, which is crystallized by her experience of Hiroshima. The trajectory of this perfect materialistic historian clarifies Godards formula. With Hiroshima My Love, history in the cinema no longer works to reconstitute or give life to a long gone past, but to reveal its survival, the fragmentary and disorganized presence that nonetheless lives and is active. Supporting the suddenness of the first image, allowed by the cinema to return its look upon the past, the French woman shows that she knew to give room to her own drama in its present double. She can begin to forget. Photos : Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada in Hiroshima My Love - Argos films. Jean Marais in Jean Cocteaus Orphaeus - photo Roger Corbeau / Anfr Paulve Production.

N627, october p.75-76

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