THE T(H)ERRORIZED (GODARDIAN PEDAGOGY)

LEARNING, RETAINING

We know that May '68 confirmed Jean-Luc Godard in a suspicion he had had: that the movie theater is,
in every sense of the word, a bad place, at once immoral and inadequate. A place for easy hysteria,
sleazy visual pickups, voyeurism and magic. The place where, to revive a metaphor which has had its
moment of glory, one came to "sleep in the bed of the image," to get an eyeful and blind oneself in the
process, to see too much and to see badly.

The great suspicion cast by May '68 on the "society of the spectacle," a society which secrets more
images than it can see and digest (the image runs past, recedes, runs away) affected the generation that
had invested the most in it, the self-taught cinephiles for whom the movie theater had taken the place of
both school and family - the generation of the New Wave, formed in the cinematheques. Beginning in
1968, Godard proceeds to pull out his stake and move in the opposite direction: from cinema to school,
then from school to family. Regression? Why not say, instead, "regressivism"?

For the most radical fringe of filmmakers - those farthest to the left - one thing is certain in 1968: one
must learn how to leave the movie theater (to leave behind cinephilia and obscurantism) or at least to
attach it to something else. And to learn, you have to go to school. Less to the "school of life" than to the
cinema as school. This is how Godard and Gorin transformed the scenographic cube into a classroom,
the dialogue of the film into a recitation, the voiceover into a required course, the shooting of the film
into a tutorial, the subject of the film into course headings from the University of Vincennes
("revisionism," "ideology") and the filmmaker into a schoolmaster, a drill-master or a monitor. School
thus becomes the good place which removes us from cinema and reconciles us with "reality" (a reality to
be transformed, naturally.) This is where the films of the Dziga Vertov Group came to us from (and
earlier, LA CHINOISE.) In TOUT VA BIEN, NUMERO DEUX and ICI ET AILLEURS, the family
apartment has replaced the movie theater (and television has taken the place of cinema), but the
essentials remain: people learning a lesson.

No need to look further for the cause of the rush of love and hate, rage and irritated groans unleashed at
that time by Godard's cinema, which appeared in its early stages as a rather rugged Maoist pedagogy.
Much would have been forgiven a Godard "co-opted by the system" (how many people today are still
indignant at the idea that Godard has not given them a new PIERROT LE FOU?) A discreet homage
would have been paid to a Godard totally on the sidelines, in the underground and happy to be there?
But what to be done with a Godard who continues to work, to hold class, to teach a lesson and learn it
himself, even in an empty house? In Godardian pedagogy there is something that the cinema - especially
the cinema - cannot tolerate: talking to the air.

Godardian pedagogy. School, we said, is the good place (where you make progress and from which you
must move on) as opposed to the cinema (the bad place where you regress and never move on). Let's
examine this more closely and spin out the metaphor.

1. School is preeminently the place where it is possible, permitted and even recommended to mix up
words and things - not wanting to know what links them, putting off until later the moment when one
must go examine more closely what corresponds to what one has been taught. A place which calls for
nominalism, dogmatism.

Now there was a sine qua non for the Godardian pedagogy: never questioning the discourse of the other,
whoever he is. Simply taking this discourse literally, and taking it at its word. Concerning oneself only
with the already-said-by-others, with what has been already-said-already-established in statements
(indiscriminately: quotations, slogans, posters, jokes, stories, lessons, newspaper headlines. etc.)
Statement-objects, little monuments, words treated as things: take them or leave them

The already-said-by-others confronts us with a fait accompli: it has in its favor existence, solidity. By its
existence it renders illusory any approach which would try to reestablish behind, before or around it a
domain of enunciation. Godard never puts to the statements that he receives the question of their origin,
their condition of possibility, the place from which they derive their legitimacy, the desire which they at
once betray and conceal. His approach is the most anti-archeological there is. It consists of taking note
of what is said (to which one can add nothing) and then looking immediately for the other statement, the
other image which would counterbalance this statement, this sound, this image. "Godard," then, would
simply be the empty place, the blank screen where images, sounds come to coexist, to neutralize,
recognize and designate one another: in short, to struggle. More than "who is right? who is wrong?," the
real question is "what can we oppose to this?"The devil's advocate.

Whence the malaise, the "confusion" with which Godard is often reproached. To what the other says
(asserts, proclaims, extols) he always respond with what another other says (asserts, proclaims, extols).
There is always a great unknown in his pedagogy, and that is the fact that the nature of the relationship
he maintains with his "good" discourses (those he defends) is undecidable.

In ICI ET AILLEURS, for example, a "film" about images brought back from Jordan (1970-1974), it is
clear that the questions raised by the film about itself (the kind of disjunction it effects in every
direction: between here and elsewhere, images and sounds, 1970 and 1975) is only possible because the
syntagm "Palestinian revolution" already functions as an axiom, as something which is a matter of
course (something already-said-by-others, in this case, by Al Fatah), and in relation to which Godard
does not have to define himself personally (to say "me, I," but also to say "me, I am with them"), or to
show his position in the film (to socialize, make convincing, desirable, the position he has taken, his
initial choice: for the Palestinians, against Israel.) Always the logic of school.

2. School is preeminently the place where the master does not have to say where his knowledge or his
certainties come to him from. School is not a place where the student can reinscribe, use, put to the test
the knowledge that has been inculcated in him. Beneath the master's knowledge, beyond the student's
knowledge: a blank. The blank space of a no man's land, of a question which Godard does not want to
know anything about, the question of the appropriation of knowledge. He is only interested in
(re)transmission.

In any pedagogy, nevertheless, values can be found, positive content, to be put across. Godardian
pedagogy is no exception to this rule: no film after 1968 which does not situate itself with respect to
(and project itself with) what might be called - with no pejorative nuance -a discours du manche*. Let's
recapitulate: marxist-Leninst politics (the Chinese positions) in PRAVDA and WIND FROM THE
EAST, Althusser's lesson concerning ideology as slip in STRUGGLES IN ITALY, Brecht's lesson on
"the role of intellectuals in the revolution" in TOUT VA BIEN and, more recently, bits of feminist
discourse (Germaine Greer) in NUMERO DEUX. The discours du manche changes, so to speak, hands,
but it always speaks from on high and condemns easily (the successive reproaches: being a cinephile,
being a revisionist, being cut off from the masses, being a male chauvinist.)

But Godard is not the bearer of the discourse in which he demands that we believe - still less the origin -
but something like the drill-master. So a structure with three places is set up, a little theater of three,
where to the master (who is after all only a drill-master) and the student (who only repeats) is added the
solicitation of what must be repeated, the solicitation of the discours du manche, to which master and
student are subjected, unequally, and which persecutes them.
So the screen becomes the place of this persecution, and the film its mise en scene. Two questions,
nevertheless, are definitely eluded by this apparatus: that of the production of the discours du manche
(in Maoist terms, the question "where do right ideas come from?"), and that of its appropriation (in
Maoist terms, "the diference between true ideas and right ideas"). School is of course no place for these
questions. There the drill-master embodies a figure at once modest and tyrannical: he must recite a
lesson which he knows nothing about and which he himself endures.

This master-discourse is, after 1968, somewhat systematically born by the voice of a woman. This
means that Godardian pedagogy implies a distribution of roles and discourses by sex. The voice which
reprimands, resumes, advises, teaches, explains, theorizes and even t(h)errorizes is always a woman's
voice. And if this voice begins to talk, precisely, about the question of woman, it is still in an assertive,
slightly declamatory tone: the opposite of the lifelikeness and plaintiveness of naturalism. Godard does
not film any revolution which cannot talk about itself, which has not found its language, its style, its
theory. In TOUT VA BIEN, we see the character played by Jane Fonda pass very quickly from a clean
slate to a kind of theory of the clean slate (which Montand, moreover, does not understand.) No
underside to the discourse, the already-said-by-others.

3. For the master, for the students, each year brings with it ("reentry") a mincing, a simulacrum of the
first time, the return to zero: zero of no-knowledge, zero of the blackboard. In which respect school, a
place for the tabula rasa and the slate quickly wiped clean, a gloomy place of waiting and suspense, of
the transition to life, is an obsessional place: non-linear and closed.

Since his first films Godard has felt the greatest repulsion at "telling a story," at saying "in the beginning
there was/at the end there is." Leaving the movie theater also meant escaping from this obligation, well
formulated by the aged Fritz Lang in CONTEMPT: "You must always finish what you have started." A
fundamental difference between school and cinema: one doesn't have to please, to flatter the students,
because school is obligatory. It is the State that wishes all children to be "scholarized." While in the
cinema, in order to retain one's audience, one must give them something to see and enjoy, tell them
stories (hodgepodges): whence theaccumulation of images, hysteria, carefully-measured effects,
retention, discharge, happy ending: catharsis. The privilege of the school: there one detains students so
that they will retain lessons, the master retains (holds back) his knowledge (he doesn't say everything)
and punishes bad students by keeping them after school.

KEEPING, RETURNING

School could only be the good place because there it was possible to retain the maximum number of
things and people for the longest possible time, the very place of differance. For retenir means two
things: "to retain" (hold onto) but also "to detain," "to defer." To hold onto an audience of students in
order to delay the moment when they would risk passing too quickly from one image to another, from
one sound to another, seeing too quickly, declaring themselves prematurely, thinking that they are done
with images and sounds when they don't suspect to what extent the arrangement of these images and
sounds is something very complex and serious, and not at all innocent. School permits us to turn
cinephilia against itself, to turn it inside out, like a glove, and to take our time about it. So that
Godardian pedagogy consists of unceasingly returning to images and sounds, designating them,
repeating them, commenting on them, reflecting them, criticizing them like so many unfathomable
enigmas: not losing sight of them, holding onto them with one's eyes, keeping them.

A masturbatory pedagogy? No doubt. It has as its horizon, as its limit, the mystery of mysteries, the
sphinx of the still photo: that which defines understanding and never exhausts it, that which holds back
the look and the meaning, fixes the scopic impulse: retention in action.
For the place from which Godard is speaking to us, from which he addresses us, is certainly not the
secure place of a profession or even of a professional project. It is an in-between, in-between three
things, in fact, an unfeasible place which embraces the photo (19th century), as well as cinema (20th
century) and television (21st century.) The photograph: that which retains once and for all (a cadaver to
be worked on). Cinema: that which retains only for a moment (death at work). Television: that which
retains nothing (the deadly procession, the hemorrhaging of images).

Godard's lead over other manipulators of images and sounds stems from his total contempt for any
discourse of the "specificity" of cinema. You have to see how he places, how tranquilly he embeds both
the still photograph and the television image in the movie screen (so that cinema no longer has any other
specificity than that of receiving - provisionally? - images that aren't made for it, and letting itself be
invested by them: NUMERO DEUX) to understand that Godard exceeds all discourse on the specificity
of cinema, whether it be the spontaneous discourse of the spectator (this is what cinema is for me), the
self-interested discourse of people in the business (you have to make films like this) or that of the
enlightened university critic (this is how cinema functions).

The cinema, we were saying at the beginning of this article, the bad place, the place of a crime and a
kind of magic. The crime: that images and sounds are taken from (snatched, stolen, extorted, taken away
from) living beings. The magic: that they are exhibited in another place (the movie theater) to give
pleasure to those who see them. The beneficiary of the transfer: the filmmaker. This is true pornography,
this change of scene; it is, appropriately, the ob-scene.

It will be said: this is a moral and Bazinian question, and moreover this kind of symbolic debt cannot be
repaid. Certainly. But it happens that Godard's itinerary is the sign of a very concrete, very historical
question, a question in crisis: the question of what could be called the "filmic contract" (filmer/filmed).
This question seemed to pose itself only to militant or ethnographic cinema ("Us and the others");
Godard tells us that it is a question which concerns the very act of filming. Is he exaggerating? It is
frivolous to think that this is one of the questions which can be resolved by good will and pious actions
(for the cause - the artistic masterpiece or the good militant action). This question will be raised and
cannot fail to be raised even more insistently as the traditional contract between filmer and filmed
(Hollywood) falls apart and the cinema as "mass-art-family-oriented-popular-and-homogenizing" enters
a crisis. Godard is already talking about this crisis because it is this crisis that made him a filmmaker.
But it is already a question for pornographic cinema (EXHIBITION) and militant cinema (UN SIMPLE
EXAMPLE). A question with a future.

For Godard, retaining images and audience, transfixing them, in a way (as is cruelly done with
butterflies), is a desperate activity, itself without hope. His pedagogy has gained him only time. To the
obscenity of appearing as auteur (and beneficiary of the greatest filmic surplus-value), he has preferred
that of exhibiting himself in the very act of retention.

The impossibility of obtaining a new type of filmic contract has thus led him to keep (to retain) images
and sounds without finding anyone to whom he can return them, restore them. Godard's cinema is a
painful meditation on the theme of restitution, or better, of reparation. Reparation would mean returning
images and sounds to those from whom they were taken. This also commits them to produce their own
images and sounds. And all the better if that production obliges the filmmaker to change his own way of
working!

There is a film in which this restitution-reparation takes place, ideally at least - ICI ET AILLEURS.
These images of Palestinian men and women that Godard and Gorin, invited by the PLO, brought back
from the Middle East, these images which he has kept in front of him for five years - to whom should
they be returned?

To the general public avid for sensation (Godard+Palestine=scoop)? To the politicized public eager to
be confirmed in dogma (Godard+Palestine=worthy cause=art)? To the PLO who invited him, permitted
him to film and trusted him (Godard+Palestine=propaganda weapon)? Not even them. So?

One day, between 1970 and 1975, Godard realizes that the soundtrack is not completely translated, that
what the fedayin are saying, in the shots where they appear, has not been translated from Arabic. And
that in the end no one would be very bothered by this (accepting the fact that a voice-over covers these
voices). Now, Godard says, the fedayin whose words have remained a dead letter are dead man with a
reprieve - the living dead. they or other slike them died in 1970, were killed by Hussein's troops.

To make the film ("You must always finish what you have started") is then, quite simply, to translate the
soundtrack, so that one hears what is being said, or better: so that one listens to it. What was retained has
been freed, what was kept has been restored, but it's too late. Images and sounds are rendered as honors
are rendered, to those to whom they belong: to the dead.

SOUND (SHE), IMAGE (HE)/VOICE (SHE), EYE (HE)

Which could also be written Sound (she)/Image (he) or, more precisely: Voice (She)/Eye (He). By
talking too much about "images and sounds" in the abstract, we failed to notice that there was always
and above all a body invoked. The Godardian body is what receives, what lodges the eye; it is the image.
The image is the domain of the man (even when - NUMERO DEUX - nothing remains of it but fetal
blackness), it is what he is answerable for. He is answerable for it as a filmmaker (the overwhelming
majority of filmmakers are men), therefore as a voyeur. Cinema, voyeurism matters of the scopic drive,
the erectile eye, the business of men until now. But he only answers for it because someone talks to him
about it. Someone: a voice, a voiceover, always the voice of a woman.

The voice of the woman as oral penis. It articulates the law, but a law made to order; what subjects the
images, these images, his images. In the second part of WIND FROM THE EAST it is the voice of a
woman which makes him draw the lesson: "What to do? You've made a film. You've criticized it.
You've made mistakes. You know more now, perhaps, about the production of sounds and images, etc."
The same apparatus in ICI ET AILLEURS, where it is again the voice of a woman that translates,
unfolds, restores these images, already seen, too quickly run ("run out the ass," as they say). Even the
theater of TOUT VA BIEN is one where the same division of roles is at work. She (Jane Fonda) works
for the radio (the voice: political commentary). He (Yves Montand) works in film (the image:
commercials). And this voice speaks only about the meaning of events ('68), about History, about the
meaning of History. And this image is one of prostituted bodies prancing for the greater glory of Dim
stockings and the shameful pleasure of the man who films them. It's by the voice that History descends
on these images as what guts them, marks them, subjects them to its law. By the voice of a woman.

The body of the man is a bulging eye, the body of the woman is a voice which never stops intervening,
questioning. NUMERO DEUX: even the disposition of bodies for love - posture - is at stake: "Why do
you always want it like this?" asks Sandrine (neither "in" or "of": she is simply disposed for Pierre's eye
- and for that of the camera). But the voice of Sandrine speaks only of one thing: of the image where she
is and the position she occupies in it. Maximum proximity between bodies and thoughts: anchoring of
what is said in what is seen.

Godard's strange feminism: he puts the woman (the voice, the sound) in the place of what articulates the
law (la pensee de manche, concerning which we've seen that it is invested with a phallic character) and
of what gives life. Perversion. It's not clear that feminist demands are satisfied with this "place" the men
no longer want, with this "power" which they've let drop. They don't necessarily gain by it (even if the
man reaps his profit of masochism: being the metteur en scene who says how he wishes to be punished,
what type of cruel mothering he enjoys.) They didn't necessarily gain by it when, at the time of LA
CHINOISE and WIND FROM THE EAST, they were put in the place of a discourse (Marxist-Leninist)
which nobody wanted any part of. Anne Wiazemsky's voice (and the bourgeois class-being it connoted)
made it impossible for anyone to identify with this discourse and this truth.

*Discours or pensee du manche: literally, the discourse or thought of the handle. Implicit in this
Daneyism is the idea of "being on the right side" (the handle by which the tool must be grasped) and, of
course, the image of the phallus. It also glances at Lacan's term for the langage of the obsessional
neurotic: le Discours du Maitre (the Discourse of the Master.) It is better left untranslated.

Translated by Bill Krohn and Charles Cameron Ball

LES CAHIERS DU CINEMA 1968-1977

Q:When did you join the CAHIERS DU CINEMA? What was it like in those days? what have you been
doing when you weren't editing the magazine? What was May '68 like for you (if you'd care to talk
about it)?

A:In 1959 I bought, for the first time, the CAHIERS. It was number 99. A Lang special. One used a
lofty and complicated vocabulary to talk about Lang's American films, much despised at the time by
"serious" criticism. This paradoxical artistocraticism pleased me. After many years of assiduously
frequenting the cinematheque (Rue D'Ulm, then, after 1964, Chaillot), one got to know certain critics
from the CAHIERS (especially Jean Douchet.) With two friends, in 1963, I put out a magazine that ran
two issues: a Hawks special and a Preminger special. Which shows how much we defined ourselves at
that time almost exclusively in relation to the American cinema, taking as its summit what was in fact its
twilight. In 1964, with Louis Skorecki, I went to the U.S. to meet filmmakers and do interviews (Hawks,
Leo McCarey, Jacques Tourneur, Jerry Lewis, Sternberg, Keaton..) That's how we "negotiated our
entree into the CAHIERS." In 1964, a grave economic and ideological crisis shook the CAHIERS. Eric
Rohmer had to give up the chief editorship and was replaced by Jacques Rivette, then by Jean-Louis
Comolli. At the same time the magazine was taken over by a publisher (Daniel Fillipachi) until 1969, a
date when, principally for political reasons, the magazine become autonomous again.

At this time "being on the CAHIERS" didn't have the same meaning as today. There was no editorial
committee, and all the important decisions were made by one or two people. There were a lot of free-
lancers who wrote a piece from time to time that might or might not be accepted, without feeling
themselves to be part of a global point of view. It was that way until 1968. The magazine evolved
considerably, abandoned its blind Americanism and adopted an increasingly intellectual, theoretical
approach to problems. This was, in France, the breaking of the great wave of structuralism (and the first
works by Christian Metz.)

1968 was experienced differently by the people on the CAHIERS. Insofar as I was concerned, as a
profound shake-up and a wavering of all certainties. It seemed that one could never do films or a film
magazine as one had before. The ideas developed by the Situationists on the "society of the spectacle"
affected me greatly. Basically, our way of being "affected" by '68 consisted of putting in doubt and into
play, in a slightly mystical way, what had been the source of our enjoyment: the position of spectator.
During this period, I pulled away from the CAHIERS and didn't rejoin them until 1971. In the
meantime, I took long trips (to India and Africa.) The magazine, it seemed, was becoming more and
more politicized.
Q:There were great changes in the magazine at the end of the sixties - how did they come about?

A:I believe that the great event of those years was the introduction into the CAHIERS of a very
theoretical way of talking about film. Far removed, in appearance, from the old cinephilia. There's
nothing very astonishing about it: for the first time authors like Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser,
Jacques Lacan and Claude Levi-Strauss reached beyond their usual public and were read by a larger
group who immediately attempted a kind of savage application of their ideas. Very simply, the
CAHIERS was the first magazine to plunge in this direction, with no precautions. This earned us, at the
time, the sarcasms of "normal" criticism - impressionistic and hedonistic - which did not tolerate the use
of a "jargon" to talk about films (this was the period of the polemic between Barthes and Picard.)

So there was a savage application of Althusser and particularly of Lacan, thanks to Jean-Pierre Oudart
("La suture"), beginning in 1969. There was also the influence of the magazine TEL QUEL. The
CAHIERS at the time played the role of the middleman: they introduced theory to cinema and cinema to
the university. Which is somewhat paradoxical, since none of us was a high-ranking academic; more
like tinkerers. I think that this period is over. There exists more and more a monopoly of academic
discourse on cinema, and the new generation of "cinephiles" will be formed more in the universities than
in the cinematheques. We played a part in this mutation. Today we believe it's important not to limit
oneself to the university. The CAHIERS has always been an uncomfortable and paradoxical place where
it was possible to write about films and make films at the same time (see Godard.)

Q:The "new" CAHIERS was critical of its heritage: you reread Ford, dissected Bresson, psychoanalyzed
Bazin. Why was this necessary?

A:This criticism was obviously a last homage, more or less avowed, that we rendered to what we have
always loved. We wanted to reread Ford, not Huston, to dissect Bresson and not Rene Clair, to
psychoanalyze Bazin and not Pauline Kael. Criticism is always that: an eternal return to a fundamental
pleasure. Why, as concerns me, was my relationship to cinema bound up with THE INDIAN TOMB,
RIO BRAVO, UGETSU MONOGOTARI, PICKPOCKET, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, PAISAN,
GERTRUD? There is a dimension to cinephilia which psychoanalysis knows well under the name of
"mourning work": something is dead, something of which traces, shadows remains...

Incidentally, in the collective text on YOUNG MR. LINCOLN, we distinguished clearly between
ideology and writing. We were very conscious then of the danger (which we subsequently did not
always avoid) of confounding ideology and writing. Now - it's quite simple - the cinema loved by the
CAHIERS - from the beginning - is a CINEMA HAUNTED BY WRITING. This is the key which
makes it possible to understand the successive tastes and choices. This is also explained by the fact that
the best French filmmakers have always been - at the same time - writers (Jean Renoir, Jean Cocteau,
Marcel Pagnol, Sacha Guitry, Jean Epstein, etc.)

Q:"The cinema that interests us is the one which plays on off-spaces...The great filmmakers - Hitchcock,
Lang, Mizoguchi, Tourneur, Dreyer, Duras, Straub, Godard - are those whose mise en scene, writing,
montage are articulated by off-space effects..." Why? And what about Griffith, Walsh, Chaplin, Hawks,
Allen Dwan, Renoir, Monte Hellman?

A:This phrase of Pascal Bonitzer's is a little provocative in that it risks giving the impression that we
only love those filmmakers. There are others, of course, including the ones you cited. As a matter of
fact, it's the same question as the previous one and the one that follows (on naturalism.) The cinema
which interests us is haunted by writing. Writing implies spacing, a void between two words, two letters,
a void which permits the tracing of meaning. Writing implies, not immediacy, but an eternal movement
of "bustrophedon." So how does all this happen in film? There, too, there is spacing, but it isn't the
invisible bond between frames; it's the off-space. Each shot secretes its off-space. There are off-spaces
and different ways of playing on them. There are off-spaces directed by the eye (fetishistic framing) and
off-spaces directed by the ear (fundamentalvoice, voice of the mother.) There is a way for the voice to
block or give access to the image. Each important filmmaker resolves this problem. So, when the
CAHIERS was politicized, they took their examples more and more from the Soviet cinema of the
twenties, but again it was to distinguish between Eisenstein (who "wrote") and Pudovkin (who "didn't
write"), and this was the same as the distinction between Hitchcock and Huston. Today it may well be
that with people like Godard and Straub we have reached the extreme limit of writing. These are
filmmakers for whom an image is closer to an inscription on a tombstone than to an advertising poster.
And cinema may no longer have any choice but to be a poster or an epitaph. In writing, you know, there
is a relation to death.

Q:Public enemy number one, still at large: naturalism. Why do you distrust it?

A:The hatred of naturalism is as deep as the taste for writing, because it is exactly the converse. In
naturalism there is a kind of "special effect" or trickery that is fundamental: the frame is there by chance
and transforms the spectators into voyeurs. naturalism confuses the repressed with the invisible. One
example: for years, in French films, one doesn't see immigrant laborers. Filmically, they don't exist.
After 1968, the immigrants participated in numerous struggles and were politicized: so the French
cinema is somewhat obliged to show them. Then we'll show them, but as if they had always been there
and one had just forgotten to show them, when in fact one had repressed them, and for political reasons.
This is ethnological voyeurism. On the CAHIERS we think that the question is not just one of
"correcting an omission," but of lifting a repression: why has their image been missing? Cinema usually
shows us people, events, places that we don't know; there's no reason for it to give us the impression that
they are there, next door. Naturalism (precision of description) is only one part of the task. If you don't
go beyond it, you necessarily end up asking questions about cinema in terms of advertising (as if it were
nothing.) This is unfortunately what is happening more and more.

Q:What happened to the CAHIERS in 1973?

A:I'll have to tell the story of post-'68 in intellectual circles. It's the story of a shift. 1970 marked the
apogee of the "Maoist" movement in France (with groups like "La gauche proletarienne," then "La cause
du peuple"), its greatest moment of political inventiveness. After this date there is a decline in the
movement, firstin its spontaneous form ("Maoist"), then in its dogmatic form ("Marxist-Leninist".)
Intellectual circles were affected by leftist ideas after a kind of delay. Why? It was especially those who
have never belonged to the French Communist Party (like the people on the CAHIERS) who were
affected by leftism. When the whole French cultural scene was politicized, it was natural to approach the
FCP in order to assess their positions on questions of art and culture. The FCP, on the other hand, after
having been badly burned in the debates in the fifties on "socialist realism," had renounced any
conspicuous interference in the domain of art and had, at the same time, renounced any theory, any
investigation of the relation between art and politics and, more precisely, of propaganda literature. Now
the CAHIERS and TEL QUEL were magazines that had fought to introduce new methods (derived from
structuralism) into the study of literary and cinematic texts. So there was an exchange of procedures: the
FCP would supply political ideas and the ideal militant, and we would supply specialized (avant-garde)
work of which the FCP was cruelly in need. But it didn't work out. Because basically the cultural policy
of the Party was more cynical: on the one hand, to amuse a few researchers into "specific" questions
(this was the period of Althusser and the famous duo, "ideology/practice," the period of "theoretical
practice"), and on the other hand, to infiltrate as many cultural institutions as possible - the "Maisons de
la Culture" - and train cultural programmers, relays for diffusing exactly the same culture and the same
relation to culture as the bourgeoise.
Now the lack of political history on the part of the members of the CAHIERS staff meant that they could
not be satisfied with the position of a laboratory cut off from everything else, isolated researchers,
academics. We had to have the experience (painful but inevitable for any French intellectual) of the real.
And "real" here should be understood in the sense of "bad encounter, trauma" (Lacan.) We had to
emerge from cinephilia and go to the forefront of concrete tasks, new interlocutors, etc. This kind of
"old style" engagement was basically nothing but a sped-up repetition of what the engagements of
French intellectuals close to the FCP have had to be since 1920. And this caricature-repetition was
something we could only live out through the intermediary of little "Marxist-Leninist" groups who
themselves, hysterically (like a son who reproaches his father for not being severe enough), were living
out their mourning for Stalinist politics through a Chinese imagery. They supplied the group superego
and taught us our political ABC's, and we supplied "specific work on the front of culture." Reference to
the text of Mao ("Interventions on Art and Literature at the Talks in Yenan") permitted us not to fall into
the Trotskyist position, always lax and contemptuous toward art.

All this led to the "Cultural Front," composed of people like us who believed in politicizing culture and
of leftist ex-militants who had understood perfectly their own political failure and had sought refuge on
a "secondary front" where they could continue to intimidate others, while all they were really doing was
negotiating their own survival (a few years later the most brilliant ones - like Andre Glucksmann -
landed on their feet: journalism, literature, the pose of the "beautiful soul.") The result was: the artists
were intimidated by the sheer weight of errors to be avoided and tasks to be undertaken, and the
militants hid behind an overly general discourse their lack of ideas and motivations. This double block
kept the Cultural Front from ever functioning. It evolved towards a growing interest in an area that had
been long neglected: popular culture, the tradition of the carnivalesque, popular resistance, the popular
memory, etc. The importance of Foucault can be seen here. A film like MOI, PIERRE RIVIERE...
would never have been made without the questions advanced by the Cultural Front. And so the link to
cinema, after the detour of militancy, was reaffirmed.

Q:What did you learn in your study of militant films? Why all these imaginary voyages to liberated
zones: territories, factories, prisons? Why is the sound so important in these films?

A:I would say that the interest in militant cinema is as much as an effect of cinephilia as of the political
superego. In CAHIERS-cinephilia (the kind staked out by Bazin), there is a demand for risk, a certain
"price" paid for the images. In militant cinema there is also this idea of risk. No longer a metaphysical
risk, but a physical one: the risk of not being there at the right moment, the risk of not having
sufficiently mastered the techniques (militant filmmakers are amateurs), legal risks (Belmont and
HISTOIRES D'A) and even the risk that the film, once it's been made and shown to the people it
concerns (those who are fighting and who are not cinephiles) will not please them, will not help them,
will not even be understood by them. Cinephilia is not just a special relationship to cinema; it is a
relationship to the world through cinema. I remember what people like Luc Moullet and Godard said in
the fifties: they had learned life from the cinema. And CAHIERS cinephilia, the cinephilia of the
"Hitchcocko-Hawksian," is special in that it is a relationship - a perverse one - to the people, because the
films of Hawks and Hitchcock at the time they were made were seen by the people and looked down on
by cultivated persons. It's a relationship to the people through the forms which the people were subjected
to and loved for a period of fifty years. When I started going to films, I was quite conscious in that this
choice was bound up with my hatred for the theater. I hated, in theater, the social ritual, the assigning of
seats in advance, the need to dress up, the parade of the bourgeoise. In cinema - the permanent cinema -
there is a black space that is fundamental, infinitely more mysterious. The sexual aspect - more
specifically, the prostitutional aspect - is very bound up with this kind of cinephilia: look at Godard,
Truffaut, Straub, it's all they talk about.
To get back to militant cinema, if we have moved away from it, it's because it failed to furnish this
imaginary encounter with the people. Because there were nothing but sectarian films, made hastily by
people who didn't care about cinema. (But there are exceptions: ATTICA, KAFR KASSEM, THE
PROMISED LAND.) Today I think that militant films have the same defect as militant groups - they
have the "mania of the All": each film is total, all-inclusive. A true militant cinema would be a cinema
which militated as cinema, where one film would make you want to see a hundred others on the same
subject. That kind of militant cinema would have to break with the ponderous models of commercial
cinema. I've had friends who spent a year editing a 16-millimeter film about a strike at a printing plant,
at the cost of unheard of efforts and sacrifices, and the film had become totally incomprehensible by the
time of its "release." The old militant cinema is bad because it includes no reflection on its economy. It's
a big mess that doesn't think of itself as a big mess. It's too expensive, too long, too general, it takes up
too much time in the lives of people who do it, etc.

In our frequenting of militant films, what we learned was, precisely, morality. That is, the way that the
power which the camera represents (its capacity to intervene, interfere, extort and provoke, to modify
the situation which it grafts itself onto) is or is not thought about by the people who make the films.
Paradoxically, films denouncing bourgeois power, injustice and oppression are themselves totalitarian,
non-dialectical, laid on like veneer. And it is of course by means of the voice (the voiceover which is the
principal resource of any edifying cinema) that this operation of the forcing of the image is effected.
There comes a time when you realize that what's important is not agreeing or disagreeing with the
explicit ideology of the film, but seeing how far someone is able to hold onto his ideas while at the same
time respecting the audio-visual material he has produced. It's a dialectical movement: at first the
filmmaker - guided by ideas, tastes, convictions - produces a certain material, but then it's the material
which teaches him things by resisting him (minimal materialism). Straub is the most coherent about this.
There has to be a confirmation of what you already thought and an affirmation of something new to
think.

Q: Has your attitude toward the Chinese films changed? You seem more inclined to criticize them now.

A:The Chinese films have never really interested us. And we've never vaunted them or even found them
good. The only one I liked was RUPTURE. I had a strange feeling watching it: that in this dance-film
full of movement there was a mise en scene of the official ideology as naive, consistent and total as in
certain American films with, say, Debbie Reynolds. Europe, since its misadventures with fascism, no
longer has the capacity to embody - in the form of puerile images - a moral consensus (good
conscience.) I think it's only imperialist countries that have the capacity to represent, in the imaginary,
the moral consensus (the norm) and what menaces it (the blot, the scapegoat.) It's only imperialist
countries that can afford disaster films. And the Chinese films I've seen follow this model (like, on the
other hand, Soviet films in the style of LE PRIME, coming twenty years after TWELVE ANGRY
MEN.)

Q:Why do you object to films like Z and 1900? Are there any examples of good left-wing films being
made for large audiences - in Italy, for example?

A:This has to do with the ideological and moral consensus in Europe today. Z and 1900 (and SOLEMN
COMMUNION, THE QUESTION, THE RED POSTER, EXQUISITE CADAVERS, etc.) try to unify
the biggest possible audience around a moderate imaginary of the left. In order not to offend anyone, the
unification is accomplished with metaphysical themes devoid of concrete history: in 1900 the revolts of
the anarchist peasants of Emilie-Romagne at the beginning of the twentieth century become a kind of
peasant upheaval that anticipates the "historical compromise" of today; in THE RED POSTER the
actions of the franc-tireurs became an episode in the history of the FCP; in THE QUESTION the
courageous attitude of a Communist militant (in disagreement with his party) becomes a kind of abstract
courage to resist in general, etc.
So the unification always happens on the basis of a kind of amnesia and the desire to nourish this
amnesia with beautiful images (the red flags of 1900.) This amnesia is a paradoxical but important
phenomenon in the lives of Franco-Italian intellectuals: these cultures imbued with Marxism are cultures
where the history of the workers' movement is not well known, because it is the parties who write
history.

On the other hand, for people haunted by writing like the CAHIERS, it's clear that writing divides, while
images unify (through common fear or recognition.) Today, in France, in cinema, you have to divide.
And it can only be done by making contemporary films (and not moving evocations.) For example, it's
quite possible to make a Communist trade-unionist a fictional character; it's what Godard does in
COMMENT CA VA. It's quite possible to film the suicide of a young person; it's what Bresson does in
THE DEVIL, PROBABLY. But these are contemporary films, which do not surrender to the
simulacrum of memory.

Why divide? The reason, I think, is sociological. The cinema is less and less a popular form of
expression and more and more recognized as "art" by the middle class. Its instructional function has
terminated (television has perhaps replaced it.) It is seen more and more by an increasingly enlightened
petit-bourgeois audience and tends to play the role that theater used to play: a place of prestige, debates,
parades. It's not at all clear that this new audience is better than the old. It is, at any rate, more adrift, less
spontaneous. And around the films a whole apparatus of language has been established (critics,
publicists, press attaches, the university) which means that there is no longer any freshness in the way
they are received.

As for the question of whether there are any good left-wing films "for large audiences," it seems to me
that this question divides into two parts: 1)I think that films with "burning political themes" never go
very far, are superficial because they are too general. They aren't political films at all, but films
expressing the politics of the union of the Left in France (and in Italy), vague and reformist, imprecise
and unifying, right-thinking. These are films which could be called "operational," which is to say that
they are immediately taken and digested as films illustrating the politics of the united left. Their mode of
functioning is closer to an advertising poster than to any work with the signifying material.
2)Conversely, in all these films you can see a veritable fascination with power conceived as
manipulation (one of the big problems of the European cinema is to create a successful stereotype of the
"leftist cop" - cf. Francesco Rosi, Yves Boisset.) There does exist a tradition of comic films, mainly in
Italy, where questions of class and power are not ennobled and mystified, but on the contrary rendered
trivial and laughable, common. For me, the only good "left-wing films" have a carnivalesque dimension
(cf. Mikhail Bakhtin) that is completely missing in French films, but still present in films by Dino Risi
(A DIFFICULT LIFE) or Luigi Comencini (LO SCOPONE SCIENTIFICO, THE ADVENTURES OF
PINNOCHIO.)

Q:The magazine has been changing again - a casual observer might say "returning to normal": more
stills, articles about all kinds of films, references to old American films...What is happening now? What
hasn't changed?

A:What hasn't changed? There are bits and pieces of an answer in everything I've said. There is a
moment when you are led to renounce the "passion of the All" and when you want to elucidate
(theoretically as well) on the basis of what fundamental experience you feel authorized to write about
the cinema, and also to write in the direction of other people who come out of other experiences in the
cinema.

Q:Why are you getting interested in "underground" films?

A:When the French film industry has gone under, there will be a place for an underground cinema in
France. As has already happened in England. Up until now the big difference between France and the
US was this: there is no bridge between underground films and the industry in the US, while there has
always been one in France. In France there has always been the possibility of making a difficult film and
commercializing it, even if only a little bit. The crisis (the end) of the film industry has very curious
consequences: there is an acceleration of all the processes. For example, twenty years ago there were
French filmmakers "de serie" with no talent, but a lot of know-how, who made one film a year. This was
"la qualite francaise." These people no longer exist. The big companies are perfectly ready to offer
enormous possibilities to young talents who come from the avant-garde. The example of Chantal
Akerman is proof of this. So in France there is, for the moment, a big mix, rather than segregation. It
seems to me that segregation has existed for a long time in the U.S., because of patronage and the
recognition of the function of art as improductive expenditure. We're interested in the underground as
something that will one day become a reality in France, a "domestic" cinema. Occasionally it happens
that we see magnificent films - the films of Stephen Dwoskin and Jackie Raynal. There are no doubt
many others. What's much less interesting is the critical discussion of these films. Probably the position
of the critic is no longer justified at all in the case of these films, because these films don't need
mediation, since most of them play directly on primary processes. It's one big difference between them
and the European avant-garde (the one which interests us most: Godard, Straub) where any play on
primary processes (on perception) has real impact only if it's also brought to bear on elements of
thought, of the signified.

Q:Women's films: by women, or simply about women, about female sexuality...What are these films
showing us? Why are they so violent?

A:Since this has to do with cinema, and therefore with the eye and ear, it would be better to talk about
how cinema "au feminin" (made by men eventually) makes us rediscover what the imperialism of the
eye (it's men who are voyeurs) had repressed: other modes of montage of impulses where what is seen
and what is heard change perspective. For example, I said that militant cinema foundered on the
question of the voice-over (the protected voice) - well, just as we saw feminism develop from the
decomposition of the Marxist-Leninist militant political groups, so from the failure of the voiceover we
have seen a whole adventure of the voice develop, an adventure that has been conducted "au feminin"
(Duras, of course, Akerman, Godard, Marco Ferreri.) This is also one of the limits of cinephilia:
rediscovering the voice of the mother heard from the interior of the body, before vision. The feminine
limit of cinephilia. Suddenly I think the visual element is totally changed: in the three films by women
that have impressed me the most - DEUX FOIS, JE TU IL ELLE, LE CAMION - there is something
extraordinary: the way the actress-auteurs are both on both sides of the camera, without this having any
consequences. There is a calm violence which points up the difference with the male actor-auteur. Look
at Lewis or Chaplin: for them, passing from one side to the camera to the other means risking travesty,
feminization and playing with this risk. Nothing of the sort with women.

Q:You've been talking openly about "cinephilia" again - the hardcore variety: loving Tourneur, de Mille,
the late films of Fritz Lang...Do you see a virtue in it?

A:That is a very special kind of cinephilia. It isn't the whole of American cinema that is in play; it's a
part, often the most despised: Lang, de Mille, Tourneur, Ray...I remember in 1964 we saw George
Cukor and confided in him that WIND ACROSS THE EVERGLADES was one of the most beautiful
American films. He broke out in a peal of laughter where all the contempt he had for this little film
could be read. We were very wounded, but we have never changed our minds. In American cinema I
think that it is easier to see, as it recedes, what interested us: always the excess of writing over ideology,
and not the reverse (Huston, Delmer Daves, William Wyler, today Altman.) It's clearly a paradox:
because this led us to take an interest in filmmakers who were not exactly left-wing. This excess of
writing over ideology is only possible in the framework of a prosperous industry and a real consensus.
This occurred in Hollywood until some time in the fifties; a little in France before the war; In Italy; in
Egypt and India, no doubt; in Germany and England before the war. Outside this industrial framework
(industry+craftsmanship), it's the reverse that happens: excess of ideology over writing. Look at the
countries of the Third World, including China. This cinephilia is historically dated: the terrain from
which it sprang is this mixture of industry and craftsmanship. It's not possible to revive it. But in the
precision of the writing of Tourneur, Lang or de Mille, there is an exigency which continues with
Godard, Straub, Robert Kramer, Wim Wenders, Akerman, Jean-Claude Biette, Benoit Jacquot.

Q:You said recently that the filmmakers who interest you now are all moralists. It's strange to hear
words like "morality" and "tragedy" again. Why have they become so necessary now?

A:What is a filmmaker if not someone who, at one point or another, says: I don't have the right to film
that, or to film that like that! And who believes that it's up to him to make that decision, that nobody else
can make it. One of the texts that particularly marked me when I was a young reader of the CAHIERS
was a piece by Rivette on Gille Pontecorvo's KAPO. he described a scene in the film, the death of
Emannuelle Rica near the barbed wire. Pontecorvo - at the moment of his character's death - did a
camera movement in order to reframe the face in the corner of the screen and make a prettier shot.
Rivette wrote: the man who did this traveling shot is worthy of the most profound contempt. More and
more, there are two kinds of filmmakers: those who have the feeling that "everything has been filmed"
and consider it their mission to work with images that are already there, like a painter adding an extra
coat of paint. And then there are those who are always aware that what they are filming also exists
outside the film, is not just filmic raw material. Morality begins there. Always the idea of risk.

More generally, morality becomes a living question again because everyone has experienced the fact
that there exists no morality for someone who thinks in terms of power (to be seized, held onto or
dreamed of), and therefore no morality on the left or in Marxism. Morality is something individual; it's
natural that returning to a certain politique des auteurs should reintroduce morality.

Q:What is television doing to our minds? What has Godard been doing to television?

A:It's a great mystery. I think that television is not taken seriously by anyone. Neither by those who
make it (and who are all haunted by the cinema they can't make, which means that the possibilities of
video have been explored ridiculously little and that one continues to produce in France horrible
"dramas," very expensive, neither cinema, nor theater, nor television.) Nor by those who are subjected to
it. TV is a cool medium from which people do not expect any truth. Its principal impact resides in the
fact that it becomes a background noise which keps you from hearing other sounds. The catastrophic
conceptions which would have us believe in television's power of stupefaction are very complacently
exaggerated. What Godard has done to television is indeed considerable. He has demonstrated how it
functions, as always, by the absurd, by doing it too much, He has shown that the simple fact of leeting
someone talk for one hour at a stretch is already enough to break the hum, whatever is being said. He
has shown that television, far from making people passive, demands from them on the contrary to
produce a kind of work that the journalists don't produce.

Q:What about Jacques Rivette? You haven't spoken of him in a long time.

A:We have been very unfair to Rivette.

Q:What do you see now in American film that interests you? Why don't you like Robert Altman? Have
you seen STAR WARS, etc.?
A:Robert Kramer, John Cassavetes, Paul Newman, Stephen Dwoskin, Monte Hellman, etc. As for
Altman, I have the disagreeable feeling that he is a little master, very at ease in the notation of
naturalistic detail, who has taken it into his head to rival Bergman or Antonioni. What is very unpleasant
in his cinema that the only thing he asks us to believe in is the intelligence of the auteur. The auteur is
always more intelligent than his guinea pigs, he always knows more than they do, but his knowledge is
always protected. You don't find this contempt - I purposely cite very lofty auteurs - in Bresson or
Antonioni, because these are people who could care less about what one has to look like one is thinking
in order to appear intelligent (that is to say "non-dupe," in Lacanian jargon.) The films of Jerry
Schatzberg, Scorsese, Coppola, etc. do represent a respectable and somewhat academic tradition. But I
still have the impression that there has been no real innovation, for almost twenty years now, in this
cinema.

ON "SALADOR"

0. "What is it that is now 'appearance' to me! Verily, not the antithesis of any kind of essence - what
knowledge can I assert of any kind of essence whatsoever, except merely the predicates of its
appearance! Verily not a dead mask which one could put upon an unknown X, and which to be sure one
could also remove! Appearance is for me the operating and living thing itself, which goes so far in its
self-mockery as to make me feel that here there is appearance, a Will o' the Wisp, a spirit dance, and
nothing more." (Nietzsche)

1. There is a great deal lacking in the continuing claim to regard the cinema as being related to reality, to
the world, or to life as it is lived. First and foremost, let us take the relation to the visual. The visual is
neither the double nor the outrageous, false or inaccurate misrepresentation of something else; the visual
is something else, something which is not neutral, which has its own laws, effects and exigencies. The
cinema which dreamt of a "direct engagement with the world" was, at a deeper level, postulating that
from the "real" to the visual and from the visual to its filmed reproduction the same truth was reflected
infinitely, with neither distortion nor loss. And it may be supposed that in a world where one readily
says "see"" for "understand," such a dream did not come about by chance, for the dominant ideology,
which sets up the "real=visible" equation, has every interest in encouraging it.

2. Ideology and cinema. The problem has in recent times been displaced; suspicion has been shifted on
to the simple act of filming, on to the camera and its construction, etc. Granted. But why not retrace the
issue further back still, and challenge that which is both served by the camera and precedes it: the quite
blind trust in the visible, the gradually acquired hegemony of the eye over the other senses, a society's
taste and need for seeing itself reflected, etc.? In so doing, it becomes difficult to avoid a shaming
iconoclasm in which all relations to the image are experienced as mortal sings (Godard and the false
images of PRAVDA); difficult also to avoid losing sight of the specific history of the specular, a
moment itself endowed with a history, whose end point we may possibly foresee.

3. Photology. The cinema is therefore connected to the Western metaphysical tradition, a tradition of
seeing and sight for which it fulfills the photological vocation. What is photology and what indeed might
the discourse of light be? A teleological discourse, undoubtedly, if it is true that teleology "consists of
neutralizing duration and force in favor of the illusion of simultaneity and from." (Derrida.)

4. Duration and force: in other words, work. "Light effaces its traces; invisible itself, it renders visible,"
always giving us a finished, perfected world in which work (to begin with, its own) is properly speaking
unimaginable, a world which we recognize only because we have never known it and which we risk
never knowing at all, taken as in we are by its "apparentness." Let us designate as "photological" that
obstinate will to confuse vision and cognition, making the latter the compensation of the former and the
former the guarantee of the latter, seeing in directness of vision the model of cognition.
5. There is one oeuvre which, with an acuteness not shared by others (which is why it seems so
exceptional), has constantly tried to pin down that equation of vision and cognition: Rohmer's.
Significantly, it has only achieved this aim within the framework of an educational film, LES
CABINETS DE PHYSIQUE AU XVIIIE SIECLE. Once the conditions of the experiment are set up and
the results allowed for, what happens "between" - i.e, the film, the actual time of the experiment - is
simultaneously the unfolding of a spectacle and the birth of an idea. "We have relapsed into the mirror
myth of knowledge as the vision of a given object or the reading of an established text, neither of which
is ever anything but transparency itself, the sin of blindness as much as the virtue of clear-sightedness
belonging by right to vision, to the eye of man." (Althusser.)

6. Not long ago, the "world view" and the "exercise of observation," privileged themes of criticism, were
equivalent at all levels simultaneously: the characters scanned the sets, the filmmaker looked at the
world and the spectator looked at the film. Any awakening of consciousness was in the first instance a
training of the look, and if by chance the film happened to be political, all class struggle was reabsorbed
into a sunrise. A heliopolitics of which a film like ANDREI RUBLEV is only a belated example. (If we
are considering recent films, we prefer Sollima's admirable DERNIER FACE A FACE, where such a
mechanism - "I see, therefore I am aware" - is perverted and made ridiculous by constant repetition.

7. Let us venture to say that "the logic of sight and oversight" has a conclusion, which we are beginning
to discern. A cinema giving us the evidence and the splendor of truth has long existed: the advertising
film, where all truth is immediately verifiable, where one clearly sees the eruption of the white tornado,
the softness of Krema caramel, or the most obstinate stain yielding ro K2R. Most films distributed, to
the extent that they are a "development" of preexisting material, increasingly refer to this aesthetic and
create for themselves the themes and preoccupations it allows (the "rise to consciousness" in the twin
forms of advertising and propaganda.) The undeniable beauty of the "Salador" advertising (Pirés and
Grimblat), the leap forward they constitute for advertising in the extreme care and precision of their
work, should here and now stir big business into seeing that such a talent is not dissipated on pseudo-
films. So, instead of pretending to shoot a dramatic scene with Montand in the Congo (VIVRE POUR
VIVRE), Lelouch should be singing the praises of a brand of jeans, Melville of a style in raincoats.

8. Besides, it would be curious to see how far what since the war we have called "modern" cinema has
consisted of merely conferring a new dignity on these despised but already existing marginal forms,
through a sort of regressive hypostasis of which painting has already provided an example. Not just
advertising, but also "coming attractions," film titles, amateur films, etc.

9. If cinema involves photology, then every film, if it cannot control it, is controlled by it. And if it
cannot manage to control photology, let film (prisoner of the light) designate it at least, let it be aware of
the extent to which the world is "deeper than the day imagines." This involves two discoveries which,
despite their extreme simplicity, are nevertheless shocking because they clearly reveal what there has
been a wish to hide: that there is no innocence in the "real," or in technique, that cinema is not simply a
relation to the visual but, ata deeper level, a fundamental complicity and constantly reasserted play
between two modes of visibility.

10.First mode. Everything that can and is to be filmed (the profilmic material) thereby has an LCD
(Lowest Common Denominator) - its visibility. What happens, for example, in FREAKS? The problem
Browning seems to pose is resolved from the outset. From the moment the monsters can share a shot
with men, they are no longer truly monsters; what unites them with men is stronger than what separates
them (so much so that Browning has to reintroduce monstrosity at the same time as - and through - the
fiction.) Cinema is a dangerous machine to tame; it provides differences, but only within a more
fundamental resemblance.
11. On the subject of that resemblance, it was the discovery of the great filmmakers of the classical age
(those who recognized it and took it over; Hawks, Browning, Lubitsch, undoubtedly; certain Ford and
Renoir.) In wanting to confront the most varied men and worlds within the same space, indeed the same
shot, in wanting to have the play/pleasure of this exacerbated diversity (and their whole art consists in
rendering the firmness of distinctions), they inevitably achieved the reverse effect - a solidarity
apparently automatically there to the eye of the camera, rather like the complicity of a theater company
which, when the curtain falls on the illusory spectacle of its disunity, experiences a deeper sense of
unity.

12.For spectacle is clearly what it is about for those lovers of "small worlds,Ó"reproduced from film to
film, diversity offered in the form of spectacle, thus (slyly) denied. But it is a spectacle as yet imperfect,
owing too much to the theater, and which it should have been possible to liberate. Perhaps now we can
interpret the break that Rossellini's work appeared to make directly after the war. He did not so much
oppose the classical cinema as destroy it by assuming its ultimate consequences - by making the
spectacle the deepest level, by generalizing it. Suddenly everything, from the obscene to the
insignificant, was set at the same level (bringing up the concomitant problems of morality - the point
about tracking shots - and commercial failure.) Cinema is by nature a leveler.

13. Second Mode. Everything that has been filmed (every shot) possesses as a result an LCD (another
mode of visibility, not now visibility in general but the specific visibility of the cinema.) The question
here is the insertion of what has been filmed at some moment on the strip of film, its limitation by
framing and duration, both equally irrevocable. While the first mode allowed "something" to be
inscribed on the screen, the second makes possible the transitivity and facilitation of meaning, via an
attribute common, beyond all divergences, to all shots, and one of which recently has been constantly
and frenziedly referred to. The issue is no longer just the twofold spatial and temporal limitation of any
shot (a limitation played on by all those wanting to write with images from the standpoint of meaning.)
It is also, now above all, the fact of being inscribed on that material base, of being just one instance of
the only rule of cinema - the vertical unrolling of the strip of celluloid, with or without images.

14. Observation. It is not saying much to say that such proofs (that the "presence" of something on the
screen and the possibility of meaning happen in a sense automatically, thus shockingly) have been
obscured because they were too obvious to be really thought about; the history of cinema has perhaps
been the continual refusal to want to know anything about it. A denial which is only possible through
reduplication: filmmakers had willingly to repeat effects they strongly suspected they could just as well
do without. To the inadequate presence (inadequate because obtained without work or worth) they have
continuously opposed a strategy which privileged and emphasized the actor and the decor, a four-square
presence of which MacMahonism was only a belated theorization. To the imperfect meaning (diffuse,
multiple meaning: Untersinn) they opposed an intended meaning, taken over by an écriture in which the
reason for any passage from A to B had itself to be represented, even if under the mask of a lack.

15. In what way has the cinema been suspect until now? On what has the suspicion rested? Always or
almost always on the technique of the "take," in the sense of capture or rape, in which some "adamic"
reality, which asked only to speak of itself, was to be manipulated. So an increasingly invisible and
candid camera has to covers its tracks, because filming is never anything but seeing, and seeing plainly.
The only question not asked was: what is being manipulated? And does something which is looked at
innocently become innocent for that reason? Or rather, does not the look become so much more
threatening because the objects looked at are chosen from among the most cultural, those heavy with
meaning and saturated with ideology? In this sense cinema-vérité (as Reichenbach envisaged it) joins
the star system; or better, is its survival.
16.It is (yet another) banality to say that everything which comes into the camera's field does not for that
reason stop belonging to other fields. What is going to be filmed has always IalreadyI been filmed. As
for theimages with which we continue to fill our heads, we have to admit that their referent is now
hardly a "reality" which we have experienced, but rather an imaginary experience we have already had
from seeing these images in other films, the habit formed by their spectacle. Every tracking shot of a
man walking down a street doesn't make me attach it to my own experience of walking, however rich it
is, but rather a series of memories from SUNRISE to LA PUNITION, which should no doubt be called
the "concrete imaginary." For the film-freak generation which has buried itself in the ciémathéquesI, can
death be anything but the effect of falling bodies on the screen?

17. There is hardly any problem more serious for new filmmakers. And it is no accident that the most
talented of them are, indeed, former critics and film buffs, no longer unaware that cinema has become -
besides a (specific) culture and tradition in the history of the specular - an increasingly lively eye and an
increasingly failing memory. Reducing the world to a generalized spectacle is the business of television.
Cinema's survival is now the extent to which it can introduce "play" into a general sense of image
saturation. That play consists of delaying as long as possible (a few seconds is enough) the takeover the
seen by the already-seen, and so of showing something never-seen - at least on the screen. Among these
last rounds are exoticism, pornography, possibly science fiction. The only essential is to reinvest all the
problems posed by the film's total meaning (the sequence of shots) into the unique and crucial problem
of thereading of the shot, its decoding (what is it?). The future of cinema? To take seriously, in every
sense, its figurative nature. At least one film (2001), where the camera starts at the level of primates and
ends alongside Norman McLaren, made its acknowledged subject the future of representation.

18.Unless, that is, a cinema which seeks to be self-critical, not content with this flight forward and this
need for the never-seen which can only exhaust itself unsatisfied, already clearly sees a signified (which
will need to be forced into the open, indicated) in each profilmic signifier. Its relation to photology
would be its particular way of accusing or not accusing the false innocence of the "real," a reality which
for it is always the already-filmed. We see here the two modes of visibility at work: the specific means
of the second (framing and duration) as an interrogation and deconstruction of the material furnished by
the first (shooting). A text no longer concealing its pretext, a pretext suspected in turn. Furthermore, a
film's relation to photology can appear in (at least) three forms, according to whether it presupposes the
profilmic material to be - neutral - neutralized - neither

The first form is represented by all films (the great majority) which, under the guise of objectivity,
remain within the ideology (which they reassert without necessarily recognizing) and soon lapse into
advertising. "Salador" is to date an unsurpassed expression of this kind of cinema.

19. The second form warrants further explanation. Suspected of equivocating the technique of shooting
had logically to be thought capable of "transfiguring," "transmuting" the profilmic material (and in so
doing, of neutralizing its effects). This is a quasi-magical operation, ecstatically evoked, an alchemy in
which the profilmic lead is changed into filmed gold, autonomous grains and fragments owing nothing
thereafter to their pretext, their ordering and sequence permitting the facilitation of meaning. All
"cinematography" needed such a postulate (and, as we know, it was Bresson who theorized the need:
"For film, the theme is, in my view, a pretext for creating cinematic content.") What was it he needed?
To believe in the exchange value of shots, so that nothing in shot A is lost or damaged when a transition
to shot B is secured. And transition is certainly the issue here - neume and absolute transitivity, moving
on by conserving, capitalizing.

20. Who are those who wanted to write with images? It is time we realized that such a wish, so often
formulated, was only formulated by those (from Eisenstein to Bresson) who scorned ideas that were not
idées fixes, of the order of obsessions (sexual, no doubt) and fantasies, such that only a unique and
terrorist discourse could take them on. These were the great obsessives who demanded the most from
cinema: that a film should say only one thing, achieve just one effect, but decisively. These pioneers saw
to what extent the thing could not work as soon as they were convinced that in the cinema - as elsewhere
- every effect is achieved once only. Was Hawks (or Lubitsch) preoccupied with anything else? The
important thing for Hawks, the only effect he wished to produce (pleasure in/for itself), is also the
easiest to achieve (even in the deceptive and metaphorical form of Adventure), as it is the quickest to be
erased. Hawks is the filmmaker of an always total pleasure (no matter how dull and lackluster) with no
option other than to repeat it endlessly (the importance of repetition in Hawks is well known) because it
is never achieved.

21. Every effect is achieved only once - but it must not be achieved too soon or it will be attenuated and
forgotten, only a repetition can reactivate it, without, however, enriching it . From this we can see the
deceptive side of the Hawksian (or Lubitschian) world, because achieving the same effect a second time
requires an ever-increasing expenditure of energy, a world destined for exhaustion and entropy, with no
other aim than its own prolongation. Filmmakers with an aim (a desire) also know that there is only
IoneI moment appropriate for the decisive effect (cf. the Bertheau episode in LA VIE EST A NOUS.)
These are therefore the filmmakers of the snare, since their problem is to capitalize on secondary effects,
ceaselessly investing signifieds in new signifiers and making themselves masters of a chain where
nothing allows the end to be envisaged, masters of a frenetic transitivity which condemns them to say
nothing real, never to come to a stop, were they not flagged down by the actual, material end of the film,
and obliged to finish it before it is finished (a new duplication of an inevitable and automatic effect). It is
surely in Lang's films that we can best see this reluctance to conclude and the very edgy humor which
presides over what are always simulated endings (SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR.) In the cinema also,
to write means not to finish.

22. This incompatibility between a film which cannot exceed a certain duration and a meaning which
can be reasserted by a trifle gave rise to compromise solutions which all took the form of coups de force,
the only thing which could end the chain, capitalize on its links and reactivate them in the direction of a
prediction of the past. In this one can recognize the major concern of several celebrated films which
seemed modern to their defenders in CAHIERS around 1955; miracle films or, as Jacques Rivette
rightly observed, films of the final reversal, which managed to represent simultaneously the most
advanced state of reflection on the cinema and an often religious way of accounting for that reflection.
Why? Because such a power (the intrusive power of writing) could only be sustained by introducing a
guarantee, a transcendental signified, which cinema had gradually learned to do without, leaving it to
advertising films for which it has always been the truth. ("Salador.")

23. One man bewitched by these powers very soon recognized that he could hardly avoid simulating
their Icoups de forceI, and that, by insisting on provoking them, he was all the more clearly showing
them to be arbitrary and a trick, no longer even capable of valorizing after the event a sequence of shots
in which there was already revealed a radical inability to capitalize; reflection was to make of that
inability a rejection, and out of that rejection has come a hesitant theory...We are saying that Jean-Luc
Godard , when he was filming VIVRE SA VIE, was thinking of Karina as, he imagined, before him
Renoir thought of C. Hessling (NANA), Rossellini of I. Bergman (EUROPA 51), if not Fellini of G.
Massina (CABIRIA). But let Nana smile, dance, sell her body or die, the evidence is that a woman is
always a woman and that it is an illusion to think that a film can say anything else, an illusion whose
results are equally obvious in film theory (every shot is a transition, a difference of effect which is the
only more decisive for being final) and in the themes treated (whores are saints, the guilty innocent, etc.)
All of which Godard was very aware of when he took a turn (with LE MEPRIS) from which the cinema
has scarcely begun to come back.
24. LE MEPRIS (CONTEMPT.) In 1964, everyone wanted to know whether Godard, the enfant terrible
of the new cinema, faced with the demands of big budget production and the whims of famous actors,
would come away from the venture without losing anything, making all that profilmic machinery in the
final analysis unrecognizable. At the time everyone was raving about the magic of cinema and the
genius of the auteur, the man who imprints the indelible mark of his vision on everything and everyone.
While all that may have constituted a fantasy for Godard (filming at the big MGM studios), it all turns
out as if he had finally decided on the impossibility, or more accurately the uninterest, of such an
enterprise, which is in fact the real subject of the film. Since it is therefore the story of a failure (and
itself a commercial failure), LE MEPRIS becomes a question of knowing whether failure is not perhaps
more profound than any success. That is, is it no the demiurges who fail?

25. What happens in LE MEPRIS? Still the same story -I getting there too lateI, the game already
played, where the score is settled and the cards have a fixed value and way of playing them. What is the
point of playing the best possible hand, smuggling in meaning between the lines, when the game is
already over? Homer wrote the ODYSSEY and Moravia wrote CONTEMPT. Prokosch wanted to put it
into images and Ponti wanted to put it on the screen. They summoned famous "artists" (Lang, Godard)
whose (commercial) thirst for being scorned they were able to slake. ("One has to suffer," says Lang,
and everyone knows that Godard had to shoot things he had not foreseen.) Every new player of the great
Culture and Capital game has to respect (and not reflect upon) the traces in his work of what came
before him, and which he should not improve upon. Choosing the place (Capri), the story (THE
ODYSSEY), and the characters (Lang, Bardot) closest to myth, Godard discovered what he was later to
elucidate constantly: that you can't both use and be used by that profilmic material. You deny it,
believing you are going beyond it, but you ignore it without going beyond it. It is time, more modestly,
to indicate its overdetermination for what it is. Every film is a palimpset.

Originally published in CAHIERS DU CINEMA #222, July 1970.