Giorgio Agamben Cinema and Agamben Ethics Biopolitics and The Moving Image

Cinema and Agamben
Cinema and Agamben

Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image
Edited by Henrik Gustafsson and Asbjrn Grnstad
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2014
Henrik Gustafsson, Asbjrn Grnstad and the contributors, 2014
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cinema and Agamben : ethics, biopolitics and the moving image / edited by Henrik
Gustafsson and Asbjrn Grnstad.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-62356-436-0 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures--Moral and ethical
aspects. 2. Motion pictures--Philosophy. 3. Agamben, Giorgio, 1942---Criticism and
interpretation. I. Gustafsson, Henrik editor of compilation. II. Grnstad, Asbjrn editor of
compilation.
PN1995.5.C517 2014
791.4301--dc23
2013035871
ISBN: 978-1-6235-6371-4
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Giorgio Agamben and the Shape of Cinema to Come 1
Asbjrn Grnstad and Henrik Gustafsson
For an Ethics of the Cinema 19
Giorgio Agamben
Cinema and History: On Jean-Luc Godard 25
Giorgio Agamben
1 Silence, Gesture, Revelation: Te Ethics and Aesthetics of Montage
in Godard and Agamben 27
James S. Williams
2 Passion, Agamben and the Gestures of Work 55
Libby Saxton
3 Gesture, Time, Movement: David Claerbout meets Giorgio
Agamben on the Boulevard du Temple 71
Janet Harbord
4 Film-of-Life: Agambens Profanation of the Image 89
Benjamin Noys
5 Biopolitics of Gesture: Cinema and the Neurological Body 103
Pasi Vliaho
vi Contents
6 Propositions for a Gestural Cinema: On Cin-Trances and Jean
Rouchs Ritual Documentaries 121
Joo Mrio Grilo
7 Engaging Hand to Hand with the Moving Image: Serra, Viola and
Grandrieuxs Radical Gestures 139
Silvia Casini
8 Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a Philosophical Cinematics 161
Garrett Stewart
9 Montage and the Dark Margin of the Archive 191
Trond Lundemo
10 Remnants of Palestine, or, Archaeology afer Auschwitz 207
Henrik Gustafsson
Notes on Contributors 233
Index 237
List of Illustrations
5.1 Andr Brouillet, A Clinical Lesson at the Salptrire (Une leon
clinique la Salptrire), 1887. Source: Wikimedia Commons. 104
5.2 Albert Londe, Mlle Wittman, transfert dune attitude au moyen de
laimant. Chronophotographic sequence, around 1883, collection
Texbraun. 108
5.3 Vincenzo Neri, neurological film, ca. 1908. Paper print
(35mm). The Vincenzo Neri Medical Film Collection, Bologna,
Italy. 114
5.4 Vincenzo Neri, neurological film, ca. 1908. Paper print
(35mm). The Vincenzo Neri Medical Film Collection, Bologna,
Italy. 115
5.5 Vincenzo Neri, neurological flm, late 1910s. Frame capture.
TeVincenzo Neri Medical Film Collection, Bologna, Italy. 117
6.1 douard Manet, Dans la serre, 1879. Oil on canvas, 115 cm
150cm. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany. Photographed by
Sara Pereira. 125
6.2 Dans la serre: the gestural catastrophe. Photographed by Sara
Pereira, cropped and edited by the author. 127
6.3 Jean Rouch, Tourou et bitti: Les Tambours dAvant, 1971. 131
6.4 Jean Rouch, Tourou et bitti: Les Tambours dAvant, 1971. 132
7.1 Bill Viola (1995), Te Greeting (1995). Video/sound installation.
Photo: Kira Perov. 149
7.2 Philippe Grandrieux, La Vie nouvelle (2002). 153
7.3 Philippe Grandrieux, La Vie nouvelle (2002). 154
10.1 Philip the Apostle (Giorgio Agamben) at the Last Supper in
IlVangelo secondo Matteo (Te Gospel According to Matthew),
PierPaolo Pasolini (1964). 208
10.2 Tsahal, Claude Lanzmann (1994). 219
10.3 Fedayeen in Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere), Jean-Luc Godard
(19704) from chapter 4b: Les Signes Parmi Nous (Te Signs
Among Us), (1998) of Histoire(s) du cinma (198898). 222
viii List of Illustrations
10.4 Christ blindfolded in Matthias Grnewalds Te Mocking of Christ
(15035) in Film socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010). 224
10.5 Trapeze artists from Agns Vardas Les Plages dAgns (Te Beaches
ofAgns, 2008) in Film socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010). 227
Acknowledgments
Te inception of this book dates back to the 5th Nomadikon Conference
Image=Gesture hosted by the eponymous research center at the University of
Bergen in November 2011. In the afermath of that event we noticed that the
work of Giorgio Agamben was referenced in many of the contributions and
abstracts; no wonder, perhaps, given the increasing centrality of the philoso-
phers essay Notes on Gesture in particular for the feld of visual culture
studies. We found this pattern intriguing. Tere was no mention of Agamben
in our Call for Papers for the aforementioned conference, yet a certain gravi-
tation toward his thought seemed to be in evidence. Without realizing it until
afer the fact, the Image=Gesture event embodied what one could see as an
Agambenian moment in the scholarship on flm, media and visual culture. We
then decided to commission a set of essays on the intersection between facets
of Agambens philosophy and the moving image. But while the conference
might have provided the occasion or the background for the present volume,
nearly all of the articles that make up this book represent original research
undertaken specifcally for the purpose of this publication. As editors we
would like to take the opportunity to extend our gratefulness to a number
of people and institutions without whose invaluable input and backing this
anthology would not have been possible. First of all, we would like to thank
our contributors for what we think are some truly remarkable essays. We also
send our deepest thanks to the Bergen Research Foundation and the Faculty
of Social Sciences at the University of Bergen, whose munifcent funding
enabled us to pursue this project in the frst place. It has been an immense
privilege for us as editors to be able to publish for the frst time in English
translation two essays by Agamben, and so we are extremely grateful to John
Garner and Colin Williamson for their outstanding efort in this regard, as
well as to Gabriel Rockhill for putting us in contact with them. We would
furthermore like to thank Giorgio Agamben himself for graciously taking
time to correspond with us about his publications on cinema and other
matters. Finally, we want to ofer our gratitude to the reviewers of our original
proposal for Cinema and Agamben, Jenny Chamarette and Alex Murray, for
x Acknowledgments
their enthusiasm and incisive suggestions, and to Katie Gallof and everybody
at Bloomsbury for overseeing the development of this project with unmatched
grace and efciency.
Bergen and Berkeley, July 1, 2013
Introduction
Giorgio Agamben and the Shape of Cinema
to Come
Asbjrn Grnstad and Henrik Gustafsson
[T]here is a life of images that it is our task to understand
1
Te last decade has seen the emergence of flm philosophy as a distinct research
feld within cinema studies, evidenced, for instance, by the establishment of the
electronic journal Film-Philosophy in 1997, organizations such as Te Cinematic
Tinking Network in 2011, and a proliferation of books that broach a range of
topics at the intersection of the two disciplines.
2
Consider also the vast impact
of Gilles Deleuzes cinema books, frst published in the mid-1980s, which have
spawned a rich and diverse body of work, with more than a dozen volumes of
other peoples works, inspired by or in a dialogue with Deleuzes own two volumes,
issued over the last 1015 years. Tis development, we would like to argue, should
be construed as separate from the multiple trajectories of flm theory, which,
despite intermittent overlaps, is distinguishable from flm philosophy by dint,
for instance, of its more mono-disciplinary orientation.
3
Tat perspectives and
insights from the domain of philosophy may help reinvigorate and reshape our
knowledge of the flm medium is obviously not a new lesson, as the infuential
work of someone like Stanley Cavell has adeptly demonstrated,
4
but the epistemo-
logical potential of this engagement certainly seems far from exhausted.
Te current volumewhich may be contextualized with reference to this
continuously evolving dialogic interspace between the feld of philosophy and
that of cinemacenters on the work of Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben.
A continental thinker whose highly inventive research has risen to promi-
nence in the Anglo-Saxon world and elsewhere since the 1990s, Agamben
has produced a multifarious cache of ideas, concepts and arguments that thus
far have received scarce attention in the disciplines of flm studies and visual
culture studies.
5
While recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the
2 Cinema and Agamben
philosophers workwith studies devoted not only to interpretations of his
political theory but also to its relation to other areas such as theology, law, and
literaturethere is as yet no volume to interact theoretically or critically with
crucial dimensions of Agambens thought as it impinges upon a variety of issues
in moving image studies. Cinema and Agamben is the frst book of original
scholarship on the nexus between its two titular subjects, and could hence also
be read as an attempt to make this lacuna vibrate.
Our collection brings together a group of established scholars for an illumi-
nating, in-depth study of the purchase that particular facets of Agambens work
have on the cinema. Refracting current conceptions of the moving image through
a select set of the philosophers concepts, the essays in this anthology facilitate a
unique multidisciplinary conversation that fundamentally rethinks the theory and
praxis of flm. Greatly expanding upon the range of flms discussed by Agamben in
their resourceful analyzes of the work of artists such as David Claerbout, Philippe
Grandrieux, Michael Haneke, and Jean Rouch, to name a few, the authors put to
use key notions from Agambens rich oeuvre, from gesture, decreation and ethics to
biopolitics, profanation, and the messianic. Te retracing and rupturing of bound-
aries and dividing lines that distinguish Agambens philosophical archaeology also
provide the template for the present contributions. Together they form an arc that
charts the interfaces between the material and the metaphysical, movement and
stillness, human and technology, man and animal, language and gesture, and word
and image. Sustaining the eminently interdisciplinary scope of Agambens writing,
the articles in this collection all bespeak the importance of his thought for forging
new beginnings in flm philosophy and for remedying the ofen elegiac proclama-
tions of the death of cinema so characteristic of the current moment.
Although Agambens direct involvement in the feld of cinema may be
sparse, comprising a handful of brief essays, his genealogy of the intertwined
histories of cinema and modern biopolitics amounts to a reconsideration of the
pre-history as well as the future of cinema. Running the gamut from advertising
to the avant-garde, Agambens gestural turn from aesthetics to ethics and
politics further extends such seminal tropes of flm philosophy as Muybridges
motion-studies, Foucaults dispositif, Deleuzes movement-images, and montage
in the work of Godard and Debord. Cinema and Agamben explores the depth of
this explicit association, while also probing the meaning of vital features of the
philosophers expansive body of work as it pertains to flm studies.
From his childhood in Rome, where his father operated a movie theater, to
his early personal and critical engagement with Marxist writers like Pier Paolo
Giorgio Agamben and the Shape of Cinema to Come 3
Pasolini and Guy Debordboth who turned to cinema to further their critical
practicethe world of moving images marks a galvanizing force in Agambens
thinking. His frst published work, Te Man Without Content (1970), sets out
the premises for Agambens engagement with images over the past four decades:
to interrupt the continuum of homogenous historical time in order to recover
an original space in the present. As Leland de la Durantaye has pointed out, Te
Man Without Content bears strong echoes of Pasolinis repudiation of formal
aestheticism and the split it imposes between artist and spectator, between
the creative act and the exercise of good taste and disinterested judgment
what Agamben in a characteristic formulation refers to as, the desert of terra
aesthetica.
6
Writing in the wake of post-1968 lefist politics, Debord and the
Situationists have remained an accentuated presence throughout his oeuvre.
Indeed, Agambens most recent contribution to contemporary political theory
Te Kingdom and the Glory (2011), the concluding volume of the Homo Sacer
projectbrings renewed attention, and urgency, to Debords critique of repre-
sentation by tracing the genealogy of spectacular societies to the acclamation
of glory (doxa) in the liturgical mass, via fascist power rituals, to our modern
democracies in which glory, negotiated by media, spreads across all aspects of
social life.
Debord belongs to a trio of illustrious interlocutors, together with Walter
Benjamin and Aby Warburg, from which Agamben develops his def re-mobili-
zation of the tangled, triangulated concepts of history, gesture and mediality.
In his essay on Debord, given the Deleuzian-infected title Diference and
Repetition: On Guy Debords Film, Agamben profers an articulation of the
link between cinema and history or, more generally, between images and time.
It is also in this text that we encounter his frequently quoted rifs on the cinema,
frst that man is a moviegoing animal and, a little later, that paintings could be
conceived as stills from a flm that is missing.
7
Each are expressive of a key tenet
in Agambens philosophy of cinema: frstly, that it is imagination and an interest
in images as such that defnes the human species; secondly, that cinema animates
art history, and history more broadly. Te latter point furthermore recalls avant-
garde flmmaker Hollis Framptons proposal that, the whole history of art is no
more than a massive footnote to the history of flm.
8
Agambens main concern,
however, is montage and what he calls its transcendental conditions, which are
repetition and stoppage. Drawing on philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,
Heidegger and Deleuze, he points out that repetition is not about the return of
the same but rather the return of the possibility of what was.
9
Hence, Agamben
speaks of memory as that which can transform the real into the possible and
the possible into the real. He then adds, [i]f you think about it, thats also the
defnition of cinema.
10
As a particular form of cultural experience, as well as
an apparatus for the gestation of a unique mode of mediality, cinema is closely
aligned with the act of remembrance and its imaginative potential. Memory in
this conceptualization is thus endowed with a restorative function, the material
support of which is repetition, understood as a process of aesthetic fguration.
But the force of potentiality also plays itself out through another technique
intrinsic to the materiality of cinema: stoppage, which entails a certain kind of
fertile obstruction that pulls the image out of the fow of meaning and narrative
in order to display it as such. In Agambens resolutely post-representational
consideration, repetition and stoppage carry out the Messianic task of cinema
in that they enact a decreation of the real (a term, we shall later learn from Libby
Saxtons essay, Agamben has borrowed from Simone Weil), an expression the
content of which for Deleuze would be resistance, for Adorno probably negation.
Agamben frst presented his thoughts on Debord, repetition and stoppage at
a lecture given on the occasion of the Sixth International Video Week at the
Centre Saint-Gervais in Geneva in November 1995. Since then, similar ideas
concerning the relation between images, temporality and the creative act have
surfaced among other thinkers. Te thoughts on stoppage and decreation share
a family resemblance with some more recent theorizations of the image which
are worth considering to show that Agambens work on flmcomparatively
sparse as it ismight be construed as part of the contemporary horizon of
flm philosophy. Te frst comes from Jean-Luc Nancys dialogue with Abbas
Kiarostami, in which the former, drawing on Heideggers phenomenology,
argues that the loss of a meaningful world in modernity in fact represents an
advancement, because this loss is necessary in order for the real to unfold itself.
Cinemas function, for Nancy, is not to portray a preconceived world, nor to
manifest the waning of such an entity, but to present the world itself:
[t]he evidence of cinema is that of the existence of a look through which a
world can give back to itself its own real and the truth of its enigma (which
is admittedly not its solution), a world moving of its own motion, without a
heaven or a wrapping, without fxed moorings or suspension, a world shaken,
trembling, as the winds blow through it.
11
It is certainly possible to discern in Nancys line of thinking a conceptual
afnity with Agambens emphasis on potentiality, Messianic history, decreation
and the nature of what one could see as flms additive function vis--vis the
real. Te loss recognized by Nancy furthermore resounds with how the turn
towards exteriority in Agambens writing facilitates a turn toward ethics. As
is lucidly stated in Te Coming Community (1990), Agambens response to
Nancys book Te Inoperative Community (1986), it is precisely inoperativity
and potentiality that makes an ethical experience possible in the frst place: the
point of departure for any discourse on ethics is that there is no essence, no
historical or spiritual vocation, no biological destiny that humans must enact
or realize.
12
Attesting to their shared background in Heideggerian phenom-
enology, Nancys cinema of evidence and Agambens cinema of gesture are not
oriented beyond appearance, but toward its unfolding. For both, this coming
into presence of the world, its continuous disappearing and reappearing, holds
a profound political import. In Agambens words: Te task of politics is to
return appearance itself to appearance, to cause appearance itself to appear.
13
Returning to his essay on Debord, the tenor of Agambens post-represen-
tational argument, or what one might call his presentist position, is forcefully
adumbrated in the following passage:
We will have to rethink entirely our traditional conception of expression. Te
current concept of expression is dominated by the Hegelian model, in which all
expression is realized by a medium an image, a word, or a color which in the
end must disappear in the fully realized expression. Te expressive act is fulflled
when the means, the medium, is no longer perceived as such. Te medium must
disappear in that which it gives us to see, in the absolute that shows itself, that
shines forth in the medium. On the contrary, the image worked by repetition
and stoppage is a means, a medium, that does not disappear in what it makes
visible. It is what I would call a pure means, one that shows itself as such. Te
image gives itself to be seen instead of disappearing in what it makes visible.
14
Repetition and stoppage, then, are compositional acts that render the image into
what Agamben terms a pure means, a condition, or state, that bears a certain
resemblance to what Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, borrowing from Karen
Barad, call the agential cut.
15
Arguing that the practice of cuttingwhich in their
interpretation can be both material, perceptual, technical and conceptual, and
which would seem to be interrelated with the notion of stoppageis intrinsic
to any aesthetic undertaking, Kember and Zylinska point out that the practice
of cutting is crucial not just to our being in and relating to the world, but also
to our becoming-with-the-world, as well as becoming-diferent-from-the-world.
16

While Kember and Zylinskas main concern is photography, the theoretical
insights that they contribute around the fgure of the cut and its ethical ramif-
cations apply equally well to the cinema. Cutting is tied to vital processes of
diferentiation and life-making, and [c]utting well implies cutting (flm,
tape, reality) in a way that does not lose sight of the horizon of duration or
foreclose on the creative possibility of life enabled by this horizon.
17
As in
Nancy and Agamben, this line of thinking challenges the very foundations of
philosophies built on the premise of representation. Life, Kember and Zylinska
maintain, goes beyond and contests representation: it is a creation of images in
the most radical sense.
18
Te seminal source for Agambens concern with the temporality and animation
of images, however, is to be retraced to the intermediary years between his frst
two books. In the fall of 1974, Agamben commenced a yearlong study in the
Warburg Institute Library in London. Te most immediate outcome of this
activity was his 1975 essay Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science, and, two
years later, his investigation of the conception of imagination and melancholy in
medieval love poetry in Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1977).
Together, these publications mark a redirection of interest from the artist and
the artwork, probed in Te Man Without Content, to the problem of represen-
tation and imagination. Dispensing with the linear timelines of conventional
historiography, the object of Warburgs research was not the individual image or
artist, but the process by which images get animated. Te large panel networks
of Warburgs Mnemosyne Atlas (19248) do not give an account of images as
representations to be decoded, but as presence and potency. In 1975, Agamben
described the Mnemosyne as, a kind of gigantic condenser that gathered
together all the energetic currents that had animated and continued to animate
Europes memory, taking form in its ghosts.
19
Consigned to a posthumous life
in the course of their transmission and survival through historical memory,
what Warburg referred to as the process of Nachleben, the pagan energies
stored in images persist in the diminished form of phantasms, waiting to be
summoned. Hence, Warburgs notion of art history as a ghost story, and of the
art historian as a necromancer. In order to bring these phantasms back to life,
temporality has to be restored. Such a restoration, or resurrection, is also what
is at stake in Agambens subsequent refections of cinema, which are concerned
neither with cinema as an aesthetics or a technology, nor with its material
base in flm, but as a method, a praxis for releasing images from its spectral
destiny.
20
Cinema, then, is that which brings life to images.
Almost four decades later, in his essay Nymphs (2011), his most ambitious
engagement with Warburg to date, Agamben returns to this intermediary
domain where images are encountered and reanimated. We confront images in
a no-mans land, Agamben refects in a passage that evokes the experience of
the movie goer, in the shadows where the historical subject, between waking
and sleep, engages with them in order to bring them back to life, but also, sooner
or later, to awaken from them.
21
It is, then, not merely a question of summoning
the ghosts and bringing them back to life, but, ultimately, to awaken from them.
From the phantasmology of Medieval love poetry expounded in Stanzas, to
the phantasmagoria of Debords spectacular societies, the conceptual thrust
of Agambens work evinces a remarkable consistency. In this element of
awakening, Warburgs Pathosformeln and Debordian montage converge in what
Benjamin theorized as movement caught at a standstilla dialectical constel-
lation of what-has-been and the now, blasting open the space of history, and,
ultimately, the space for an imagination with no more images.
22
For Agamben, what may bring about such an awakening is gesture. In an
essay whose infuence reverberates throughout this collection, Agamben puts
forward his perhaps somewhat cryptic dictum that the element of cinema
is gesture and not image.
23
He also unequivocally connects gesture with the
sphere of ethics, suggesting that gesture contains within it the sense not of
production or enactment but rather that of endurance and support.
24
As the
subject of this essay will be revisited in several of the following articles, we shall
refrain from summarizing its contents in any great detail here. But the gist of
its contention is worth a few brief remarks; more specifcally, the way in which
it corrals the subjects of gesture, ethics and mediality, binding the complicated
phenomena together in a conceptual interrelation almost certainly without
precedent in media theory or philosophy. Gesture, for Agamben, implies the
exhibition of a mediality as well as the process of making a means visible as
such.
25
Te photographs in Mnemosyne, to return for a moment to Warburg,
represent for Agamben a procession of gestures wherein the images evoke
flm stills more than they do external reality.
26
Even the Mona Lisa, even Las
Meninas, Agamben writes, could be seen not as immovable and eternal forms,
but as fragments of a gesture or as stills of a lost flm.
27
What exactly, then, is
gained by exhibiting mediality, by making means visible? On the surface it may
sound like nothing more than yet another reformulation of the aesthetic project
of self-refexivity. But that is not what is at stake here. Te making visible of the
medial rather involves an opening onto the realm of ethics. Here, Agamben
draws on Aristotles distinction in the Nicomachean Ethics between poiesis and
praxis; while the former has an objective external to itself, the latter has not
because actions that are by nature good constitute an objective in themselves.
28
Agambens approach to cinema is marked by a profound ambiguity. On the
one hand, cinema is an apparatus that captures and disciplines life, modeling and
reshaping gestures. On the other hand, cinema posits an archaeological method
for bringing life back to images. While from its pre-history complicit with the
biopolitical regimes of modernity, it may also, in Debordian fashion, facilitate a
counter-move. Te release of image into gesture entails a turn from biopolitics
to biopoetics: exhibiting the pure mediality of the human body in motion,
unhinging biopolitical relations and grasping the potentiality of bare life. Te
value of gesture as a conceptual category is that it allows the emergence of the
being-in-a-medium of human beings, which opens the ethical dimension for
them.
29
In the world of images, gesture is the point of fight from aesthetics into
ethics and politics.
Agambens sketches for a gestural cinema are thus at the same time also
expressive of an ethics of the cinema, which happens to be the title of the frst
essay in this volume. We are pleased to be able to make available for the frst
time in English translation two original texts on flm that Agamben published in
French. Te frst of these is entitled For an Ethics of the Cinema and featured in
an edition of the journal Trafc in 1992.
30
Starting from the problem of individu-
ation as introduced by Benjamin in one of his late essays, Agamben outlines a
compressed history of mutating ways of being epitomized by the concepts
of type, persona and divo, the latter two of which belong to the institutions of
theater and cinema respectively. An inquiry clearly preoccupied with forms
of mediality in relation to ethics, the essay explicitly brings up the notion of
gesture with reference to actors and characters, theater and flm. In the cinema,
Agamben contends, characters and roles are invented in order to embody the
gestures of the divo, whereas the opposite is the case in the theater. In flms, the
individual consciousness and the character are captured together and deported
into a region where singular life and collective life are confused,
31
Agamben
observes. Toward the end of this short piece he speculates that his history of the
transformations in ways of being might lead us beyond the aesthetic realm,
32

an intimation, perhaps, of the ethical work of gestures to come.
Te second essay, Cinema and History: On Jean-Luc Godard, originally
featured in Le Monde in October 1995, just a month before Agamben presented
his lecture on Debord.
33
Not only does Agambens epigrammatic refection
on videographic montage in Histoire(s) du cinma (198898) formalize the
link between the two flmmakers, it also invokes, in its concluding line,
Warburgs Mnemosyne, which is denoted in identical terms in Nymphs as,
the image-less: the farewelland the refugeof all images.
34
Te multilayered
superimpositions, wipes, and dissolves of Histoire(s) do not summon an archive
of cinema, then, but rather the Mnemosyne for the post-cinematic age, both
in its vastly ambitious scope and in its method of historiographical montage.
Appositely, Agambens Notes on Gesture debuted in the frst issue of Serge
Daneys new cinema journal Revue Trafc in 1991, together with a poem by
Godard contemplating the dead parish of contemporary cinema.
Godards mid- to late oeuvre remains a touchstone throughout this volume
and it is also Agambens essay on Godard, and its conceptual afnity with his
lecture on Debord, that provides the starting point for our frst chapter. In
Silence, Gesture, Revelation: Te Ethics and Aesthetics of Montage in Godard
and Agamben, James Williams notes that while Agamben in his previous
commentary on cinema addressed gesture in terms of a movement from
aesthetics to ethics and politics, this argument is conspicuously missing from
his refection on Godard. Tis omission raises a key question: where, exactly,
in Agambens gestural move toward ethics is aesthetics lef behind? Williams
goes on to explore the relations between the ethical and the aesthetic by reading
Agamben against an overlooked work by Godard, Soigne ta droite (Une place
sur la terre) (Keep Your Right Up, 1987), a flm which directly engages with the
messianic status of the cinematic image. While Godards flm draws out some
of the underlying principles of Agambens theory of gestural cinema, it also
exposes some of its limitations as a philosophy of flm. What is at stake for
Godard, as demonstrated in Williamss judicious close reading, is the perform-
ability of the image within a larger signifying system. Tapping into the kinetic
deposits of silent cinema, Godards plastic strategies of decreation pushes the
image toward the borders of silence and illegibility in order to recover gesture
aesthetically. Such a recovery transpires in acts of self-exhibition and revelation,
in what Williams refers to as the event of beauty. While Agamben conceives of
gesture as an art subtracted from aesthetics, Godards artistic method is carried
by a faith in the ethics of aesthetics. Tus, for Godard, Williams proposes,
gesture is always ethico-aesthetic.
Soigne ta droite marked the culmination of the vibrant cinematic experi-
mentation of Godards Second Wave. Te second chapter brings us to an earlier
phase of this period, not long afer Godards return to feature flm making, to
scrutinize the materialization of a set of recurring aesthetic fgurations that
may be seen to undergird a non-teleological ethics. In her article Passion,
Agamben and the Gestures of Work, Libby Saxton examines the nature of
the compelling equivalences between processes of labor and acts of creativity
through a reading of Godards 1982 flm in light of both Agambens work (Te
Work of Man and Notes on Gesture in particular) and what has been seen
as a haunting presence in his philosophy, namely that of Simone Weil. While
for the latter work served as a determinant of temporal duration, Saxton argues,
the mystic thinkers rejection of Taylorismwhose monotonous regime is
embodied by Isabelle Hupperts factory worker in Passionpresages Agambens
biopolitical take on gesture. Focusing in particular on the intertextual currents
that animate Godards flmthe reenactments of celebrated paintings as tableau
vivantsSaxton suggests that Agambens notion of potentiality is related to
Weils concept of decreation as something becoming nothing. In the images
of arrested motion in Passion the two phenomena are seen to intermingle. By
extending the discussion of dynamic potentiality and virtual kinesis back to key
works by Weil, Saxtons thoughtful argument is able to shed new light on a series
of relations that are of vital importance to contemporary media theory, those
between movement and stillness, materiality and the spiritual life, and love and
labor.
Te signifcant place that potentiality and dynamis occupy in Agambens
work likewise informs Janet Harbords essay Gesture, Time, Movement: David
Claerbout meets Giorgio Agamben on the Boulevard du Temple. Noting that
Agambens conceptualization of the medium of photography runs counter to
established theories in which its special province is thought to be the capture
of time, Harbord points out that the potentiality of the photographic image,
for Agamben, is closely linked to the release of a dynamis, which again
connects with Benjamins notion of kairological time. Yet the model which
frames Agambens philosophy of the image is, according to Harbord, elliptical
and in need of further elaboration or exegesis. In an attempt to overcome this
inherent obliqueness, Harbord investigates recent moving image practices
that revolve around image production, its forms of emergence and what she
terms its modes of appearing. Turning toward the work of Belgian artist,
David Claerbout, who has taken a special interest in the liminal zone between
photography and flm, Harbord shows how the photograph, in line with
Agambens thinking in the essay Judgment Day, calls up a moment that is
not an instant within a continuum, but a paradigm of heterogeneous times that
breaks from the concept of the image as a sealed surface containing an historical
truth. Claerbouts single-channel works such as Boom (1996) and Kindergarten
Antonio SantElia (1998) release the gestural potential of the image and thus
enable a discharge of the multiple temporalities that are latent within it.
Extrapolating a number of the key motifs pursued in the frst three essays
(the messianic, decreation, the imagelessness, profanation, potentiality),
Benjamin Noys in his contribution undertakes a wide-ranging critical appraisal
of Agambens project to politicize and ethicize the image. In Film-of-Life:
Agambens Profanation of the Image, he demonstrates how Agambens refec-
tions on the image, albeit occupying a seemingly minor place in his oeuvre,
in fact speak to his central concern with detaching life from the powers of
the State and capital. Reconstructing the genealogy of Agambens messianic
theory of cinema through Kafa, Heidegger, Benjamin and Debord to explore
its current implications for pornography and sofware technologies, Noys
shows how cinema, for Agamben, provides the prototype for the deadly fusion
between the society of spectacle (Debord) and surveillance (Foucault) in which
capitalism becomes an immense machine for the capture and classifcation of
life by images and the reduction of life to images. To break the spell Agamben
advocates what Noys describes as an ambiguous un-working on the image, an
act of profanation, releasing its encrypted potential in order to re-activate and
re-animate life through the image so as to give us a previously unseen flm of life.
In his polemic and probing account, Noys suggests that the critical difculty for
Agamben is his failure to articulate the redemptive practice of profanation as a
possible common political practice.
It is precisely as a political category that gesture is explored in the next chapter,
the frst in a trio that study the multiple repercussions of gesture in medical
cinema, ethnographic documentary, and moving-image artworks respectively. In
Biopolitics of Gesture: Cinema and the Neurological Body, Pasi Vliaho delin-
eates a genealogy of cinema as linked to physiological and psychiatric practices at
the turn of the twentieth century. As a medium, cinema in this period attained a
particular epistemic function in defning and (re)producing our gestural being at
the feeting limit between the normal and the pathological, Vliaho observes. In
a deeply historical study, also indebted to the work of Foucault, he then goes on
to chart the construction of the neurological body in modernity, examining the
ways in which cinema both occasioned and captured a shif in political subjec-
tivity. Vliahos case is the scientifc, biopolitical gaze developed by renowned
neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salptrire clinic in Paris, a gaze which was
infuential in generating an epistemological practice obsessed with the moving,
doing, breathing, sensuous individual, as Vliaho puts it. Charcot was evidently
consumed by the ways in which signs of hysteria could be mapped visually and
his objective was to create a kind of pictorial typography of nervous pathology.
A serious challenge to that endeavor, however, was that the moving, gesticulating,
contorting and gesturing human body would brush up against the perceptual
limitations of the observer. Chronophotographic, and later, cinematic technologies
were thus enlisted to supplement the scientifc gaze. Raising the intriguing question
whether this neurological body and the cinematic apparatus were in fact mutually
constitutive, Vliahodrawing on Agambens view of the biopolitical as a concept
which continuously renegotiates the boundaries between bare life and social life
and between animality and humanitydemonstrates how cinema contributed
substantially in confguring the uncertain conceptual contours of the human at a
time when the biopolitical management of life, and its concomitant policing of the
borders between the normative and the pathological, was fully emerging.
Cinemas unique capacity for capturing gesture is also the point of departure
for Joo Mrio Grilos essay Propositions for a Gestural Cinema: On
Cin-Trances and Jean Rouchs Ritual Documentaries. Tracing the infuence
of what he names the Agamben efect in flm theory, Grilo evokes Godards
identifcation of Manet in Histoire(s) du cinma as the spiritual inventor of the
cinematograph, Jonathan Crarys analysis of Manets painting Dans la serre
(1879) and, fnally, Dziga Vertovs Man With a Movie Camera (1929) in order to
fesh out the implications of cinemas perfect medialityits ability to unleash
the frozen but potentially dynamic dimension of the imagefor the biopolitical
sphere. In the second part of his essay, Grilo goes on to consider the relationship
between cinema and gesture in the work of Jean Rouch, more particularly the
flms he made about spirit possession rituals among the Songhay, Zarma and
Dogon tribes in western central Africa. Drawing on an approach that combines
flm theory, ethnography, and practical insights from the authors own flm-
making experience, Grilos inventive reappraisal of Agambens refections on
mediality broaches the question whether a flm can be gestured rather than
visualized. Ultimately, for Grilo, Rouchs practical method and Agambens more
abstract postulations converge in their shared interest in reconstituting or
recomposing gestural experience, and in making that experience screenable.
Te interface between the human body and cinematic technology charted by
Vliaho and Grilo is considered in relation to experimental flm and video art
by Silvia Casini in her essay Engaging Hand to Hand with the Moving Image:
Serra, Viola and Grandrieuxs Radical Gestures. In order to fully investigate
the process in which an image becomes gesture, Casini proposes, one has to
take into consideration the broader terminology that underpins Agambens
thinking. Embarking on such an inquiry, gesture is explored through the prisms
of a triad of key concepts in Agambens philosophy: dispositifs, potentiality
and profanation. Each of these concepts are in turn elucidated through a close
reading: the cinematic dispositif as opened up and exteriorized into gesture in
Richard Serras 16mm flm Hand Catching Lead (1968); the gesture of profaning
in Bill Violas video work Te Greeting (1995); and the potential of flmmaking
as bodily gesture explored in Philippe Grandrieuxs experimental flm La Vie
nouvelle (2002). Te bodily engagement with the cinematic dispositif through
which Casini connects these works further suggests that for Agamben, only
certain modes of cinema may liberate image into gesture.
As Casini rightly points out, Agambens predilection for the avant-garde also
entails a repudiation of storytelling in mainstream cinema. An objection that
could be marshaled against Agambens engagement with the moving image,
then, as well as its impact on the broader feld of visual studies, is that it tends
to skirt two preoccupations central to flm studies: frst, the domain of narrative
flm, and second, the question of medium specifcity. Garrett Stewarts ambitious
analysis of controversial Austrian director Michael Hanekes recent flms in light
of not only Agamben, but also Deleuze and media theorist Rgis Debray, thus
represents a welcome intervention in the feld. In his article Counterfactual,
Potential, Virtual: Toward a Philosophical Cinematics, Stewart develops
Agambens concepts of repetition and stoppage and points toward a theoreti-
cally productive transition from the Deleuzian movement-image to a new
gestural image. Focusing on the correlation between the stoppage-repetition
mechanism that Agamben discovers in Debords flms as well as the notion of
potentiality, Stewart pays attention to what he sees as the full-scale desubjec-
tivation of the visual in selected sequences from Hanekes flms, Cach and
Amour in particular, instances that, rather than displaying images, exhibit acts
of imaging. What the article attempts is no less than a rethinking of Deleuzian
virtuality and Agambenian potentiality in the beam of each others manifes-
tation on screen, as the article puts it with equal elegance and precision. Always
sensitive to Hanekes carefully calibrated aesthetic confgurations, his fracturing
of suture-oriented editing codes and preponderance for gaps and caesura,
Stewarts reading arrives at the insight that [n]o current narrative flmmaker
gravitates as demandingly as Haneke to cinema as a prolonged hesitation
between image and meaning.
Following Stewarts refection on the process of desubjectivation and deaths
intrusion into bourgeoisie domesticity, the two concluding chapters bring these
themes to bear on what Agamben in his most infuential formulation referred
to as the nomos of modernity, the camp, and the liminal fgure who occupies its
epicentre, the Muselmann. In Montage and the Dark Margin of the Archive,
Trond Lundemo astutely unravels the paradoxical conditions of the testimony
and the position of the witness as formulated by Agamben in Remnants of
Auschwitz: Te Witness and the Archive (1999). Since no one can testify from
the inside of death, Agamben argues, this leaves the position of the testimony as
a remnant between the living being and the speaking being. Undermining the
integrity and identity of the testifying subject, the dark margin that encircles
every speech act opens the question of the process of subjectivization. Probing
the media specifcity of the testimony and its role in the archive, Lundemo
asks if also still and moving photographic images may convey this lacuna. Tis
question is pursued in regard to the debates encircling Claude Lanzmanns
abstention from archival images in Shoah (1985), Georges Didi-Hubermans
polemic book Images in Spite of All, and Godards epistemology of montage.
In his concluding remarks, Lundemo situates Agambens investigation
of the witness within the corpus of the philosophers writing on cinema.
Calling attention to its primary concern with processes of subjectivization,
Lundemo suggests that this recurring focus may derive from Agambens own
experience as an actor in Pier Paolo Pasolinis Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (Te
Gospel According to Matthew, 1964). It is from this early collaboration, and
from Pasolinis pre-production flm Sopralluoghi in Palestina (Scouting in
Palestine, 19634), that the books concluding chapter begins. In Remnants
of Palestine, or, Archaeology afer Auschwitz, Henrik Gustafsson draws on
Pasolinis linguistically informed approach to location shooting to explore a key
concern that informs Agambens philosophical archaeology: the need to rethink
the relation between place and language. Pursuing the political implications
of this project, Gustafsson goes on to address Jean-Luc Godards and Claude
Lanzmanns artistic interventions into the Zionist-Palestine confict over the
last four decades. Te focal point of this cross-reading is their respective claims
on the Nazi camps as the inaugural site of the confict in the Middle East. Tis
origin is in turn imbricated with a speech act, an act of nomination. For Godard
the connection is encrypted in the German name Musulmann, for Lanzmann
in the Hebrew name Shoah. In Agambens work, such a relation converges in
the Messianic concept of the remnant, introduced in his study of testimony
afer Auschwitz, further elaborated in regard to the remnants of Israel in his
reading of the Letters of Paul, and prefgured in an earlier essay addressing the
Palestinian refugee situation. Triangulated in this manner, the remnant emerges
as a highly potent historical cipher for the confict in the Middle East, as well as
for probing the polemical conversations between Lanzmann and Godard.
In keeping with the strategic untimeliness that informs Agambens philo-
sophical archaeology, what he has invoked as the twilight of post-cinema
also stipulates that the time is ripe to grasp cinema in the moment of arising
and becoming.
35
As each essay in this collection demonstrates, the encounter
between Agamben and cinema solicits both a broader genealogy of what cinema
has been, and of a cinema to come. Not, then, a cinema that unfolds from a
beginning to an end along a telos, but towards an ethos.
Notes
1 Giorgio Agamben, Nymphs, Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media,
Jacques Khalip, Robert Mitchell (eds) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 61.
2 See for instance Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema Afer Wittgenstein and
Cavell, Rupert Read, Jerry Goodenough (eds) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005);Tinking Trough Cinema: Film as Philosophy, ed. Murray Smith, Tomas
E. Wartenberg (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006); Tomas E. Wartenberg,
Tinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2007); Paisley
Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009); Te Routledge Companion to Philosophy and
Film, ed. Paisley Livingston, Carl Plantinga (New York: Routledge, 2011); Robert
Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film: Tinking Images (London: Continuum,
2011); Hunter Vaughan, Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard, Resnais, and
Experiments in Cinematic Tinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
3 For the argument that the theory and the philosophy of flm should be
conceptualized as discrete endeavors, see D. N. Rodowick, An Elegy for Teory,
October 122 (Fall 2007), 102.
4 See for instance Stanley Cavells Te World Viewed: Refections on the Ontology of
Film (New York: Viking Press, 1971), as well as the secondary literature on Cavells
studies of flm; Images in Our Souls: Cavell, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema, Joseph
H. Smith, William Kerrigan (eds) (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press,
1987); William Rothman and Marian Keane, Reading Cavells Te World Viewed:
A Philosophical Perspective on Film (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000);
Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2005).
5 While signifcant work has begun to chart the interface of cinema and Agamben,
such inquires have generally been of an introductory nature. Notable in this
preliminary corpus are Alex Murrays chapter Te Homeland of GestureArt
and Cinema in his book Giorgio Agamben (Routledge: New York, 2010) 7894,
and, more importantly, his essay Beyond Spectacle and the Image: the Poetics
of Guy Debord and Agamben in Te Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature,
Life, Justin Clemens, Nicholas Heron, Alex Murray (eds) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2008) 16480. In the same volume we also fnd Deborah Levitts
essay Notes on Media and Biopolitics: Notes on Gesture, 193211. Christian
McCrea has written the entry Giorgio Agamben in Film, Teory and Philosophy:
the Key Tinkers, ed. Felicity Colman (Durham: Acumen, 2009), 34957. Finally,
there is Benjamin Noyss pioneering article, Gestural Cinema?: Giorgio Agamben
on Film, Film-Philosophy, vol. 8, no. 22, July 2004, http://www.flm-philosophy.
com/index.php/f-p/article/view/790/702.
6 Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2009), 323. Giorgio Agamben, Te Man Without
Content (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999 [1970]), 102.
7 Giorgio Agamben, Diference and Repetition: On Guy Debords Films, Guy
Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tomas
McDonough, trans. Brian Holmes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 314, 315.
8 Hollis Frampton, Notes on Composing in Film, October, Vol. 1, (Spring, 1976),
10410, 109.
9 Ibid., 316.
10 Ibid.
11 Jean-Luc Nancy and Abbas Kiarostami, Te Evidence of Film, trans. Christine
Irizarry, Verena Andermatt Conley (Brussels: Yves Gevaert, 2001), 44.
12 Giorgio Agamben, Te Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (University of
Minnesota Press: Minneapolis and London, 1993 [1990]), 43.
13 Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics (University of Minnesota
Press: Minneapolis, 2000 [1996]), 95.
14 Agamben, Diference and Repetition, 318.
15 It should be noted that the concept of the cut as described by Kember and
Zylinska is also indebted both to Henri Bergson (who uses the term in his Creative
Evolution (1907), 71) and Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris notion of decoupage
from What is Philosophy? (1991).
16 Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, Life Afer New Media: Mediation as a Vital
Process (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 75.
17 Ibid., 72, 82.
18 Ibid., 84.
19 Giorgio Agamben, Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science [1975] in
Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy eds. and trans. Werner Hamacher and
David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 95.
20 Agamben, Nymphs, 66.
21 Ibid., 72.
22 Ibid., 80. From 1979 to 1994, Agamben served as the editor of the Italian edition of
Benjamins Complete Works.
23 Giorgio Agamben, Notes on Gesture, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans.
Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2000), 55.
24 Ibid., 57.
25 Ibid., 58.
26 Ibid., 54.
27 Ibid., 55.
28 Ibid., 57.
29 Ibid., 58.
30 Giorgio Agamben, Pour une tique du cinma Trafc no. 3, 1992, 4952.
31 Giorgio Agamben, For an Ethics of the Cinema, trans. John V. Garner and Colin
Williamson, Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image,
Henrik Gustafsson and Asbjrn Grnstad (eds) (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 22.
32 Ibid., 28.
33 Agamben, Giorgio (1995), Face au cinma et lHistoire: propos de Jean-Luc
Godard, Le Monde (Supplment Livres): 6 October, 1995, I, XXI.
34 Agamben, Nymphs, 80.
35 Agamben, For an Ethics of the Cinema, trans. John V. Garner and Colin
Williamson in Cinema and Agamben, 23. Giorgio Agamben, Te Signature of
All Tings: On Method, trans. Luca DIsanto and Kevin Attell (New York: Zoone
Books, 2009 [2008]), 110.
For an Ethics of the Cinema
Giorgio Agamben
Translated by John V. Garner and Colin Williamson
I. Type
In his Notes sur les Tableaux parisiens de Baudelaire, drafed in French during
the last years of his exile in Paris, Walter Benjamin evokes a nightmare familiar
to anyone who was able to undergo the experience of the crowd in a modern
city, namely to see the distinctive traits that at frst appear to guarantee the
uniqueness, the strict individuality of a person, in turn reveal the constitutive
elements of a new type, which would itself establish a new subdivision Te
individual presented in his multiplicity as always the same testifes to the anxiety
of the city dweller who, despite cultivating the most eccentric peculiarities, is
unable to break the magic circle of the type.
1
If we consider Benjamins description to be accurate, and if we accept the
diagnosis according to which modern man has heretofore entered, defnitively,
into the magic circle of the type, then we cannot avoid the consequence: an
essential mutation is implied here, which concerns nothing less than the principle
of individuation of the human species. Individuation, which proceeds from the
genus to the individual, remains, so to speak, suspended in air, and the beings who
previously constituted the individuals of the species homo sapiens now foat in an
indistinct zone, neither universal nor singular, which is the proper domain of the
type. Far from being reduced to a simple generality or from undergoing any lack
of determination, the type presents itself as a perfectly determined being which,
in accordance with Benjamins analysis, suddenly indetermines itself and becomes
the principal of a series, in virtue of the very traits which should identify it.
Indeed, this transformation has since become so familiar to us that we no
longer even come close to recognizing it as such. For a long time now, adver-
tising, pornography, and television have habituated us to those mutant beings
who linger ceaselessly between individual and class and vanish utterly into a
series precisely in their most characteristic idiosyncrasies. Tat young woman
who smiles at us while drinking a beer, that other who rolls her hips so mischie-
vously while running on the beach, they belong to a people whose members,
like the angels of medieval theology (each of whom individually constitutes
a species), elude the distinction between the original and the replica; and
the fascination they exert on us is due in large part to that capacity (properly
angelic) to make themselves typical through that very thing which appears to
belong to them exclusively, to replicate and to confuse themselves with a new,
unique example, each time without remainder. Te exclusive character becomes
the principle of serial reproduction: such is the defnition of the type (which,
at once, reveals its proximity to the commodity). In fact, familiarity with this
process is immemorial: it is at the basis of the most ancient expedients from
which woman draws her power of seduction, namely make-up and fashion.
Both circumscribe the inefable uniqueness of the individual body in order to
transform its singular traits into a serial principle. (For Baudelaire, make-up
creates an abstract unity in the texture and color of the skin, a unity which, like
that produced by stockings, immediately approximates the human being to the
statue, that is, to a divine and superior being.) Trough these means humanity
seeks to remedy what is perhaps its most ancient anxiety: the fear provoked by
the irreparable uniqueness of the living being.
II. Persona
Tere has always been a realm in which creatures, intermediate between genus
and individual, move: the theater. And these hybrid beings are the characters,
which result from the encounter between a fesh-and-blood individualthe
actorand the role the author has written. For the actor, such an encounter
involves an extraordinary mutation stemming from the ritual in which he must
subjugate himself in order to be in a position to assume his role. Usually, he
dons a mask (persona), which signals his passage to a higher life, subtracted
from the vicissitudes of individual existence. Te contrast is even more evident
in certain traditions which require the actor to completely strip away his own
personality before he enters the scene: Balinese theater, which so captivated
Artaud, is familiar with such a trance-like state known as lupa.
It is no coincidence that the Stoics, those erectors of Western ethics, ironi-
cally modeled their moral paradigm on the actor. In their view, the exemplary
attitude is that of an actor who, without identifying himself with his role,
nonetheless agrees to play it faithfully to the end. As such, the singular begins
to separate himself from his mask, which he puts down in order to become a
person himself.
However, this encounter may produce something that difers from the
character and that calls for an entirely diferent ethics. In the commedia dellarte,
for example, the mask is no longer the vehicle of a higher realm into which
the actor enters; rather, it summons the actor, just as the canvas does, to a
third dimension through which a contamination of real life with the theatrical
scene takes place. Harlequin, Punchinello, Pantalone, and Beltrame are not
sub-characters but are like so many experimentum vitae in which the destruction
of the actors identity and the destruction of the role go hand in hand. Trough
such roles the very relationship between text and execution, between the virtual
and the real, is called into question. A mixture of potency and act, which eludes
the categories of traditional ethics, insinuates itself between them.
Nothing illustrates this contamination between theater and reality better
than the way comedians compose their signature, which unites the real name
with that of the mask. Nicolo Barbieri, also known as Beltrame; Domenico
Biancolelli, also known as Harlequin; Mario Cennhini, also known as Fritellino.
It is no longer very clear whether the name of the mask [nom du masque] is
simply the comedians stage name [nom dartiste]. (It is enough to consider the
absurdity of such expressions as Talma, also known as Oedipus, or Eleanora
Duse, also known as Nora.)
It is no surprise that modern theater has felt the need to distance itself from
the actors of the commedia dellarte (but not without retaining their lesson).
Teir bodies were the site of a disquieting prophesy which could only complete
itself two centuries later.
III. Divo
What does the cinema, which came about in an era when the development of
the principle of individuation toward the type was already at an advanced stage,
bring to bear with its emergence? Te analogy with theater must not lead us into
error. Despite the apparent contiguity between scene and set, the cinema in no
way puts into play an actor who lends his body to a character from language; it
puts into play uniquely diferent degrees of tension along a scale at the summit
of which is none other than that paradoxical being which exists only in the
cinema: the divo, the star. Te Italian and American terms, which refer to the
divine or celestial realm, are not accidental, for the divos relationships with his
characters call to mind more those which a god (or a demi-god) maintains with
the myths in which he appears than those which an actor maintains with his
roles. Te latter were invented to incarnate his gesture, and not the inverse, as is
the case with the theater. Te star lives a mythical existence which is, properly
speaking, neither that of the psychosomatic individual of the same name (who
serves as a support for the star), nor that of the flms in which the star appears.
Te stars status is even more paradoxical from the perspective of the principle
of individuation: Gary Cooper or Marlene Dietrich are not individuals but
something that set theory would describe as classes containing only a single
element (singletons) or belonging to themselves (a a). With the angel, the
individual makes itself species; with the divo, the type as such makes itself
individual, becomes the type or the exemplar of itself.
And just as the cinema is not acquainted with actors in the proper sense, it
also no longer presents characters (or at least not characters [th] analogous
to those of the theatrical tradition), as is demonstrated by the impossibility
of efecting a real distinction between the cinematic character and the actor.
While Oedipus and Hamlet exist independently of the individuals who succes-
sively lend a person to them, Ellen Berent in Leave Her to Heaven (Stahl,
1945) or Gregory Arkadin in Confdential Report (Welles, 1955) do not allow
themselves to be separated from Gene Tierney or Orson Welles. (It only takes a
simple observation to prove this indisputably: a remake is not another version
of the same text but another flm.) In other words, the individual consciousness
and the character are captured together and deported into a region where
singular life and collective life are confused. Te type has realized in its fesh the
abstractions and repeatability of the commodity; likewise, the divo constitutes a
parodic realization of the Marxian generic being in which individual practice
coincides immediately with its genus.
Perhaps these considerations will contribute to our understanding of why
the cinema so interests the inheritors of a Western culture for which theater
and philosophy have been so important. For, as previously in Greek theater,
what is at play here no doubt gets to the crux of our metaphysical tradition,
namely to the ontological consistency of human existence, to its way of being,
i.e., to nothing less than the manner in which a single body assumes the
generic power of language. Tis is why Christian theology, when it tried to
provide a philosophical formulation for the problem of Trinitarian ontology,
could only present it by resorting to a theatrical terminology and could only
conceive of it as an articulation between substance and person (prospon,
mask).
Tus, it is not surprising that the extreme phase of this history of mutating
ways of being could take us well beyond the aesthetic realm and that the
existence of the divo has been and remains perhaps the strongest collective
aspiration of our times.
Te end of the cinema truly sounds the death knell of the ultimate metaphysical
adventure of Dasein. In the twilight of post-cinema, of which we are seeing the
beginning, human quasi-existence, now stripped of any metaphysical hypostasis
and deprived of any theological model, will have to seek its proper generic
consistency elsewhere, no doubt beyond the ethico-theatrical person, but also
beyond the commodifed seriality of the type and the unigeneric being of the
divine star.
Notes
1 Tis quote appears to be excerpted from Walter Benjamins Notes sur les Tableaux
parisiens de Baudelaire (1939), which appears in crits franais (1991). Te
original, extended French version reads: Ce cauchemar serait de voir les traits
distinctifs qui au premier abord semblent garantir lunicit, lindividualit strict
dun personnage reveler leur tour les elements constitutifs dun type nouveau
qui tablirait, lui, une subdivision nouvelle. Ainsi se manifesterait, au Coeur de la
fnerie, une phantasmagoria angoissante. Baudelaire la dveloppe vigoreusement
dans Les Sept Viellards Lindividu qui est ainsi prsent dans sa multiplication
comme toujours identique, suggre langoisse quprouve le citadin ne plus
pouvoir, malgr la mise en oeuvre des singularits les plus excentriques, romper
le cercle magique du type (2423). Te complete reference to the essay is Walter
Benjamin, Notes sur les Tableaux parisiens de Baudelaire, crits franais(1991):
23543. Trans.
Cinema and History: On Jean-Luc Godard
Giorgio Agamben
Translated by John V. Garner and Colin Williamson
One of the principal theses of Godards work seems to me to concern the essential,
constitutive link between history and cinema. What historical task belongs
properly to the cinema? Tis is also the question that garnered Guy Debords
interest in the cinema, and which he was the frst to pose. But, frstly, what history
is involved? A very particular history, a messianic history. Not a chronological
history but a history that has to do with salvation. Something must be saved.
In Histoire(s) du cinma (198898), Godard says: Te image will come at
the time of the Resurrection. Here we have a classical thesis of the gnostics,
whether Christian, Jewish, or Manichean, all of whom conceive of the image as
the very element of the Resurrection. What re-emerges is the eidos, the image.
Trough the image one will be saved, and to see ones image means to be saved.
Histoire(s) du cinma is an apocalypse of the cinema in the various senses of
the term. Te frst meaning of the word is that of catastrophe. In the Jewish
tradition, the day of the Messiahs arrival is simultaneously what one desires the
most and what one fears the most. But it is also an apocalypse of the cinema
in the other, more literal meaning of the word: a revelation. Godards work
functions as an unveiling of the cinema by the cinema.
How does the image acquire this messianic power? Serge Daney responded:
through montage. According to Daney, Godards thesis in Histoire(s) du cinma
is that the cinema was seeking only one thingmontageand that this was
what twentieth-century man desperately needed. But what is montage from this
perspective? Or, rather, what are the conditions of possibility for montage? Tis
is just what Godard makes evident. Tese conditions are at least two in number:
repetition and stoppage.
Modernity admits of four great thinkers of repetition: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,
Heidegger, and Deleuze. Tey have all shown that repetition is not the return
of the same but the return of the possibility of what was. What returns returns
as possible. Hence the proximity of repetition to memory: a memory is the
return of what was, qua possible. Repetition, for its part, is the memory of that
which was not. Tis is also a defnition of the cinema: the memory of that which
was not. Tis is the opposite of the media, which employs the same means
but always gives the fact without its possibility. It gives an unrepeatable fact
before which one is powerless: the tyranny of the media adores indignant but
powerless citizens.
Te second element is stoppage, the revolutionary interruption of which
Walter Benjamin spoke. As the power to interrupt something, stoppage is
what diferentiates the cinema from, for example, narrative. Literary theorists
have found only a single, clear distinguishing element between prose and
poetry: in poetry, one can make caesuras and enjambments. Te caesura or the
enjambment permits one to oppose acoustic limits to semantic limits, to make a
pause that marks the diference between meaning and sound. Poetry is capable
of stoppage; prose is not. Te cinema also has this power of stoppage at hand.
Repetition and stoppage form a system in the cinema; they are inseparable.
Together they realize the messianic task of the cinema. Tis task, insofar as it
appears in Histoire(s) du cinma, is not a new creation but an act of decreation.
Tis is the power of repetition and stoppage. Deleuze says that every act of
creation is an act of resistance, but an act can only resist if it possesses the power
to decreate facts. Otherwise, no resistance is possible; the facts are always
stronger. What becomes of an image wrought in this way by repetition and
stoppage? It becomes, so to speak, an image of nothing. Apparently, the images
Godard shows us are images of images extracted from other flms. But they
acquire the capacity to show themselves qua images. Tey are no longer images
of something about which one must immediately recount a meaning, narrative
or otherwise. Tey exhibit themselves as such. Te true messianic power is this
power to give the image to this imagelessness, which, as Benjamin said, is the
refuge of every image.
1
Silence, Gesture, Revelation : Te Ethics
and Aesthetics of Montage in Godard
and Agamben
James S. Williams
Why do you carry on doing this? Te beauty of the gesture.
Oscar in Holy Motors Leos Carax
Lthique cest lesthtique de dedans.
Pierre Reverdy
Te short, schematic article by Giorgio Agamben on Jean-Luc Godards Histoire(s)
du cinma (198898) published in Le Monde in October 1995the only essay
he has devoted thus far exclusively to Godarddistils the central ideas of a
lecture he delivered on Guy Debord around the same time entitled Diference
and Repetition: On Guy Debords flms.
1
At stake is the nature of history in the
cinema. For Agamben, it is necessarily messianic because it is non-chronological
and linked to salvation. Te means and condition for this salvation is montage,
specifcally the processes of stoppage and repetition whereby images (and
sounds) are freed from their meaning and exhibit themselves as such, and we as
spectators must undertake the task of (re)construction. Histoire(s) thus comes
down to an act of decreation and an apocalypse of cinema in the diferent
senses of the term, including that of revelation. Similarly, Debords cinematic
practice dismantles the image to reveal the gesture, exemplifying cinemas
aim not simply to create but also to decreate what exists in order to produce
something new. By rendering visible the means and the medium of cinema
through repetition and stoppage, both Godard and Debord actively harness
cinemas potential for resistance against the spectacularization of politics and the
control of information and public opinion by corporate media.
2
I do not wish here to compare and contrast at length Debords dismantling
of the disembodied spectacle through techniques such as dtournement that
subvert capitalist signs and culture with Godards approach to repetition and
stoppage as it has developed since his extensive video-work of the mid-to-late
1970s. Important links can certainly be made between Debords anti-cinema
and works like France/tour/dtour/deux/enfants (197778) which slowed down
human movement and decreated the lines of linear, rational thinking through
the use of stop-start motion to reveal, in the words of Gilles Deleuze, the consti-
tutive spaces and interstitial silences between images, or the between-two
of images.
3
Yet the possibility of establishing a critical relationship between
Godard and Agamben will not come down simply to a connection or otherwise
to Debord.
4
Nor do I wish to analyze in detail the processes of historical montage
in Histoire(s) which have received extensive critical attention elsewhere.
5
Instead,
I want to return specifcally to Agambens article on Histoire(s) which concludes
with the wonderfully suggestive phrase about the works messianic drive.
Agamben states: Te true messianic power is this power to return the image to
this imagelessness [sans image] which, as Benjamin said, is the refuge of all
images. Agamben is clearly talking here about the way that, just as in Debords
fractured cinema where the images of the mediatized world are ripped from
their narrative context and placed in a montage, each image in Histoire(s)
defamiliarized, decontextualized, de-allegorizedis efectively transformed
metaphysically into a kind of epiphany and manifestation of the mystery of
cinematographic creation. Indeed, each new pure concrete object and detail,
when thrown into the light, enacts this same miracle. (Agamben writes in the
Debord essay, paraphrasing Benjamin, that in the messianic situation of cinema
[e]ach moment, each image, is charged with history because it is the door
through which the Messiah enters.
6
) Attempting to redeem cinema as a site
of the messianic promise contained in the image, Agamben is clearly drawn
to Godard for whom montage carries the potential to redeem the real. Tere
is, however, something implicit in Agambens article that needs to be fully
acknowledged: that Godards messianic practice of montage is operating in a
wholly diferent realm from that of Debord. Te Debord essay ends on a very
particular note. Following his clear distinction between the two diferent ways
of showing imagelessness (the sans image) and making visible the fact that
there is nothing more to be seen (i.e. Debords project contrasts with pornog-
raphy/advertising which acts as though there are always more images behind
the images), Agamben concludes: It is here, in the diference, that the ethics
and the politics of cinema come into play.
7
Tese words are fagrantly missing
in the Godard article. Why should this be?
Silence, Gesture, Revelation 29
Te emphasis on the ethical and political is part of the general thrust of
Agambens small but urgent body of writing on flm which insists that any
notion of gesture in the cinema remains a preeminently ethical rather than
aesthetic concern. In Notes on Gesture, his key study of how bourgeois
gestures based on the illusion of subjective identity and unity were defnitively
destroyed at the dawn of modernity (along with the aura of the image and the
idea of a natural language as complete and inherently linked to meaning), and
where he also makes the case for a purely gestural cinema that exhibits the
conditions of cinematic montage and the medium as pure means, he states
the following: [b]ecause cinema has its center in the gesture and not in the
image, it belongs essentially to the realm of ethics and politics (and not simply
to that of aesthetics) [] Te gesture, in other words, opens the sphere of
ethos as the more proper sphere of that which is human.
8
Te assumption
here is that the image now revealed as gesture leads surely to ethics as a more
proper and privileged domain than the aesthetic for discussing the human,
and, by extension, that the ethical is distinct from, and perhaps superior to, the
aesthetic. Hence, Histoire(s), which is a profound exercise in aesthetics as well as
flm historiography, does not quite cut it in Agambens ethical scheme, despite
the fact that, in his own words, it is directly prefgured by Debords Te Society
of the Spectacle, and, more crucially, that stoppage links cinema specifcally to
poetry, where the form (rhythm, poetic technique) can be placed at odds with
the meaning, making cinema therefore a sustained hesitation between image
and meaning.
9
In fact, Agambens work seems perpetually suspended on a
question, namely what, in practical concrete terms, should the next stage of
the critical project of cinema be afer one has exhibited the medium and duly
exposed the illusion of the image and the spectatorial set-up? Can there/should
there be any kind of aesthetic surplus? Indeed, does the aesthetic have any real
role or function now? Or is the only safe option to ensure that the aesthetic
realm is always pulled back towards ethics?
I want to consider these particular questions, and in so doing assess the
validity of Agambens views on the messianic, i.e. non-aesthetic, status of
Godards work, by reading Agambens theory of ethics and gesture in the cinema
against a rather obscure and marginal work in Godards oeuvreone, however,
that directly extends his exploration of the (meta)physical gesture in his work of
the early 1980s and which is driven by the messianic idea of an ending (the end)
as salvation and redemption. Soigne ta droite (Une place sur la terre) (Keep Your
Right Up, 1987) has been critically overlooked and woefully underrated, despite
its generally favorable reception in France upon release.
10
Tis is the reverse of
King Lear, a flm maudit made around the same time which sufered from a lack
of proper distribution (it was released in France only in 2002), but which has
steadily been recuperated as a vital forerunner of Histoire(s) due to its explicit
references to flm history and set-piece sequences on projection and montage.
11

On the surface Soigne ta droite is disarmingly light, even whimsical, being in part
a personal homage to Jacques Tatithe title conjures up the boxing term of Tatis
1936 short, Soigne ton gauche (Keep Your Lef Up)as well as to other exponents
of slapstick flm comedy such as Harry Langdon, Buster Keaton, and Jerry Lewis
(Te Family Jewels (1965) and Smorgasbord (1983) are directly evoked). Yet the
flm is similarly premissed on the end of cinema and imbued with the mood of
loss and death, although it explores in very diferent ways the ethico-aesthetic
question of how to retrieve the image and resurrect cinema in a post-Chernobyl,
digital world of global capitalism, neo-television and political apathy.
12
With its
satirical portrait of the service industries and the cold, cynical ethos of money,
quick-grab gratifcation and non-communication, the flm refects not simply the
growing sense of social and political confusion and disenchantment in France at
the time (notably the beginning of cohabitation between the Socialists under
Mitterrand and the Right under Chirac), but also the malaise of contemporary
State-sanctioned cinema and culture which has imprisoned the image and with
it human relationality. In interviews to promote the flm, Godard bemoaned the
loss of the documentary gaze and of the idea of art as a means of showing and
sharing thingspart of the vanishing signs and gestures of mutual dialogue.
13
In fact, although Soigne ta droite may appear structurally as one of his most
loose, aimless, dispersed and fagrantly meandering flms (a series of sketches
tied together without the hook of an obvious pre-text as in King Lear), it
is actually one of his tightest and most complete conceptually. Its narrative
premise is announced at the very outset in a voice-over explaining that the Idiot/
Prince, a flmmaker in exile, has been given one last chance by those at the top
(unspecifed) to save himself by completing a flm from scratch in one day and
delivering it in the capital for projection that evening. Ten, and only then, will
his numerous sins [also lef unspecifed] be forgiven. Te voice-over by the
unnamed Man (Franois Prier) presents the flm and leads it along, giving us
the illusion of taking part in the act of its creation. What we watch as we follow
Godard as the Idiot/Prince take a trip frst by car, then a plane commandered
by a suicidal pilot (there will be near-death experience for all on board), is
what may (or may not) feed into the flm that has been commissioned. We are
thus dealing with a flm gleefully exhibiting its own means of production and
exposing itself both as flm and fction, while also recording a possible return
and passage to cinematic recuperation: delivery as potential deliverance and the
lifing of a curse. Indeed, Soigne ta droite is concerned directly with the status
and fate of the cinematic image in terms of sin and redemption: can cinematic
lack or error be righted, and if so, how? Specifcally, can the fnal stage of a
flm, its projection, provide a means of salvation? Such underlying existential
themes make Soigne ta droite a supremely philosophical flm, and not simply
on account of its many gags which, if taken literally, defne it in Agambenian
terms as an exemplary philosophical exercise in gesturality. Agamben writes in
his important conclusion to Notes on Gesture:
Te gesture is [] communication of a communicability. It has precisely
nothing to say because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings
as pure mediality [] it is always a gag in the proper meaning of the term,
indicating frst of all something that could be put in your mouth to hinder
speech, as well as in the sense of the actors improvisation meant to compensate
a loss of memory or an inability to speak. Cinemas essential silence (which
has nothing to do with the presence or absence of a soundtrack) is, just like the
silence of philosophy, exposure of the being-in-language of human beings: pure
gesturality. (original emphasis)
14
We shall come back to the implications of linking gesture, silence and mediality
a little later.
Soigne ta droite is also unparalleled in Godards work for its sustained and
systematic engagement with one particular literary source: Hermann Brochs
extraordinary magnum opus, Te Death of Virgil (1945). For while many texts
circulate in the flm around the themes of death and deliverance, including
Dostoyevsky (who provides the name of Godards character permanently
reading Te Idiot), Racine, Lautramont and Andr Malraux (reworked passages
from Lazarus (1974), a refection on death occasioned by Malrauxs miraculous
recovery from a near-death experience of sleeping sickness and which explores
themes of sacrifce, suicide, choice, fraternity and redemption),
15
whole passages
of Te Death of Virgil are recited at length by Prier on the soundtrack,
providing the flm with a center of gravity. Godard cites exclusively from Fire
the Descent, the second stage in the Latin poets fnal nineteen hours of life
during which he agonizes over whether to burn the manuscript of the Aeneid
which he now regards as a failure because the society he eulogizes doesnt
correspond to reality. Just as Virgil stands out from his miserable fellow-men he
passes in the slums, so the Prince/Idiot stands out in his quiet, self-possessed
dignity from the cynical world he passes through. Broch, an Austrian Jewish
writer who began the novel while briefy interned in a Nazi camp before being
rescued, represents for Godard the artist at war with his chosen form but who,
in the very act of creating, produces a unique statement of rare beauty about
the triumph of art and the imagination. Te Death of Virgil is an unstoppable,
breathless, sumptuous fow of language in long, lyrical sentences rich in sensual
imagery, and it generates many of the terms that appear in the flm (emptiness,
sacrifce, solitude, the soul, laughter, the universe, salvation, twilight, grace, the
law).
16
Soigne ta droite rehearses, too, some of the texts stylistic qualities: its
perpetually expanding and endlessly self-correcting ruminations, its reversible
chiastic formulations, and its fondness for interjections. Assorted fragments
of the intertext are stiched together by Godard and then repeated (sometimes
almost immediately) in ever new and surprising ways over diferent visuals in
a continuous process of recombining, retouching and recomposing. King Lear
had included a reworking of Pierre Reverdys prose poem LImage (1918)a
powerful manifesto for the complex images of Godards later work and a model
of montage as the distant and just association of ideas generating true emotion
because born outside of all imitation, all evocation and all resemblance.
17

Soigne ta droite takes the poetics of emotion to an entirely new level, however,
since Broch provides a model of decreation conceived not as a philosophical
concept in Agambenian terms but rather as a process of poetic experimentation
(the word is used explicitly in the novel). Metaphor becomes metamorphosis
and transmutation, and repetition is experienced as diference and variation in
an endless, ever more intricate and subtle movement of modifcation, reversal,
permutation, reformulation and amplifcation.
Soigne ta droite thus ofers a fascinating case of two diferent forms and
means of revelation, one messianic, the other poetic, and it does so through
set sequences of audiovisual decreation. Although it doesnt actually employ
stop-start motion, its pushing of the cinematic image out of and beyond itself
to the point of abstraction (the sans image) and to something more poetic,
even musical, marks the culmination of an intensive period of cinematic experi-
mentation by Godard inspired by the derealising techniques of videographic
montage, from Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Every Man For Himself, 1979), which
was also a reinvigorated return to the body and the homeland of gesture
(Agamben), to the distortion and transformation of the art image in Passion
(1981) and Scnario du flm Passion (1982).
18
By examining in detail Godards
immersive encounter with Broch and poetics through the prism of Agamben,
and thus submitting a philosophy of cinema to a concrete instance of aesthetic
practice, I want therefore to put to the test Agambens assumptions about
the neutrality of the aesthetic sphere in flm, and specifcally about cinema
as simply the setting for gesture understood as both the demonstration of
mediality which subtracts from the false wholeness of identity or the falseness
of the image as unity, and, more critically, the harnessing of the collapse of
subjectivity and aesthetics (original emphasis).
19
I will argue that by aestheti-
cally investing the primary cinematic gestures of projection and montage,
Godard draws out some of the key, underlying principles of Agambens theory
of gestural cinema while also exposing some of its limitations as a philosophy
of flm. To illuminate Godard and Agamben mutually in this way will allow us
to appreciate the particular signifcance of Agambens writing on cinema for
thinking not only about Godard but also about the very relations between the
ethical and the aesthetic.
Te law of the crystal: Revealing the image from within
Soigne ta droite plays out as a kind of virtual flm where everything is being
piloted: the allegorical-style sketches that are being performed for the eventual
possible flm by the Prince/Idiot; Fred Chichin and Catherine Ringer (the
French rock group, Les Rita Mitsouko) searching for the right sound and
harmony as they lay down tracks for a new album (Godard mixes fnal versions
of the songs with their nascent forms, producing a strange inter-fragmentation
of fnished and unfnished music); the Individual (Jacques Villeret) assuming
multiple roles as he tries to fnd a place on earth (as gardener, as bored golfers
caddy, as suicidal actor, as lothario waltzing with a mysterious silent woman
who strips of for him); and above all the same shots and passages being tried
out and rehearsed in diferent sequences and then repeated. Te recurring,
teasing image of the half-open French window facing out towards the sea and
sky at Trouville (the beach is always framed by doors and a balcony which
mediate our access to the water) is linked directly to a passage from Lazarus
about Westerners dramatising death as the door that one passes through to go
from one room (life) into another (the beyond). Tis crystallizes the theme of
light and its relationship to the other side as the flms dominant metaphor for its
confrontation with death (Godard, in fact, shoots deliberately in the direction
of the light source here). Tis is a flm forever about to pass new limits, borders
and thresholds in a gesture of opening up to the world and to the light, like the
casual, fickering refection of a window-frame captured on an apartment wall
in the form of star.
A strong earthbound sense of linear narrative direction is retained, however,
as we count down in anticipation of the delivery and projection of the Idiot/
Princes flm, Une place sur la terre, and a potential event of cinematic salvation
through a resolution of form. Te process is set in motion by the one spectacular
moment of cinematic gesture in the flm when Godard, on being presented with
a pile of large cans of cinema flm (the footage of the completed flm-within-a-
flm), is knocked into by another fgure disembarking and falls down an aircraf
ramp in loud cacophony. We have here a by now familiar Godard theme of the
(self-)sacrifce required of cinema linked to its concrete fall.
20
As the Idiot/
Prince lies on the tarmac the pilots wife negotiates with him to purchase the flm
simply because the cans gleam like diamonds. Te flm has now looped the loop:
the pilot has bought the flm in which all the characters we have seen are playing
and it can therefore now be projected. Yet Soigne ta droite is also moving in other
directions guided by other manifestations of cinematic gesture, starting with a
long six-minute sequence in the train (intercut by shots of Les Rita Misouko)
with a police inspector (Rufus) deporting the Individual, now a Belgian prisoner,
over the French border. Te Individuals right arm is handcufed to the curtain
rod of the window (a reference to Jean-Pierre Melvilles Le Cercle rouge (1970)
which also featured Prier), and we see the handcufs in close-up focus, then
out of focus, against the passing landscape as the two fgures indulge in an
old game of insults, trade memories of happier times of political comradeship
(evocations of Sartres dirty political in Les Mains sales abound), and consider
the errors and sufering that History does not allow.
21
Tere is an unexpected
move towards fraternity and solidarity when the inspector extends his hand
towards the cufed wrist and makes physical contact, the two arms thus meeting
at the apex of a triangle. Yet the gesture is revealed as empty and goes nowhere.
What follows is a formal counter-response to the failure of communication and
gesture through a series of set-pieces focused on the very grammar of cinema,
and which extend the notion of gesture in a continuously evolving process of
metaphorization and poetic transformation of the cinematic image: frst focus
pull, then projection, fnally montage.
As the voice-over by Prier explains over a close-up shot of Ringer deep in
thought that he forgot to say that the policeman on the train towards the border
forgot to utter the words what would one do without the dead? (circularity
and commentary appear boundless in this flm), Godard cuts on the word
policeman to a blurred, out of focus image rendered abstract. Te dark shape
that runs vertically down the frame is gradually brought into focus and revealed
as a wooden pole with lines of barbed wire in dark silhouette against a pale sky.
On the word sentence the shot is cut to an extreme close-up of barbed wire,
this time in focus. Te wire soon recedes out of focus and dematerializes in the
light to the point of its virtual disappearance. Simultaneously, the camera moves
slightly upwards to disclose a jumble of human fgures strewn on the ground.
Finally, several shots later, over a close-up of a young woman lying face down,
and as Prier begins another compressed remoulding of a passage from Broch,
Godard cuts abruptly to a shot of barbed wire running diagonally in focus
across the frame. On the soundtrack we hear: (Te Individual shuddered)
and in a fnal piercing through of the dreams border, with a fnal shattering
of every sort of image, in a last shattering of memory, the dream grew [] he
growing with it: his thinking had become greater than any form of thinking []
it became a second immensity [] it became the law that caused the crystal
to grow [] stated in the crystal, stated through music, but over and above
that, expressing the music of the crystal. At the mention of a last shattering
of memory the barbed wire withdraws out of focus, before being once again
restored to full focus with the phrase a second immensity. Tis arresting plan-
squencea play of shifing movement, counter-movement and redefnition
within the imagecomes to an end with a return to Ringer and Chichin in the
studio peering up into the artifcial light.
Daniel Morgan rightly states that Godards non-narrative use of focus pulls
explores the resources of aesthetics in and through cinema and takes mythic
(i.e. non-linear) time out of profane time (i.e. time as history and duration).
22

In these moments of uncertainty, he argues, its the look of images, not what
they represent, that becomes the attractionone that is extended by a further
instance of focus pull almost immediately afer. Tis time two seated fgures
staring blankly in a caf are held in a background fux of gently pulsating colors
and amorphous forms for almost ffeen seconds before being gradually pulled
into focus. While Morgan is certainly right about Godards foregrounding here of
the processes of perception, making this a supremely (meta)cinematic moment,
more needs to be said about this extended formal scene and its iconography. To
the roars of a large sports crowd accompanied on the soundtrack by heavy metal
clanking, the Individual is pictured lying in a section of a stadium with other
people barely alive and breathing (an obvious reference to the Heysel Stadium
disaster in May 1985). Yet this also, of course, evokes the internment camps
for deportation during the Holocaust such as the Vlodrome dHiver in Paris
in 1942, and when one fgure on the stadium foor says he lives in the Hotel
Terminus (the title of Marcel Ophulss 1988 documentary on Klaus Barbie), the
allusion to concentration camp victims in a mass grave is unmistakable. Tis is
developed further when we consider what is being related by Prier simultane-
ously on the soundtrack: a second immensity, it became the law that presides
over the development of crystal. Te association with Kristallnacht is complete.
Moreover, the Individuals remark about sufering is matched with a shot of
Ringer, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, looking straight at the camera (the
whole sequence is efectively bookended by shots of Ringer). Te voice-over
continues in a separate phrase extracted directly from Malraux: Death is the
path towards the light.
Yet the focus pulls are not only an ethical matter but also an object of properly
cinematic strangeness and beauty that seems to come from within the image
itself. Tey are a pure efect of the camera yet somehow appears in excess of it, in
a constant movement of repetition, expansion and extension. Godard, I would
argue, is tapping here into the kinetic potential of the (silent) image to release
its latent energy and capacity for movement through form and out of form. Te
pulls also constitute, in conjunction with the soundtrack, a familiar Godardian
chiastic reversal between image and word. In the frst instance, as we hear his
thinking had become greater than any form of thinking, the wire diminishes
in size and dematerializes into a formless blur, thus joining the immensity
articulated on the voice-over. In the second case, however, as the image comes
back into focus, we hear synthesizers in free-fow, as if the sound and image
were now working together in mutual dilation and distension: the image comes
into being through the surge of sound. Music can help restore objects into focus
and bring them back to life. Te passage from Broch itself brings the theme of
music directly to the fore with its utterly mysterious chiastic-sounding and self-
extending phrase about the dissolution of thought and its transformation into
a second immensity: it [his thinking] became the law that caused the crystal
to grow [] stated in crystal, stated through music, but over and above that,
expressing the music of the crystal. Hence, the idea of decreating the image (a
fnal shattering of every sort of image) is matched precisely by the advent of
the music of the crystal on the soundtrack. (It is a crucial fact that although the
visual image may sometimes appear blocked by repetition in Soigne ta droite,
the soundtrack of voice and music always seems to be moving forwards and
continuously evolving in a live process of creativity and annunciation.)
I want to suggest that, in a manner which has much to do with Agambens
subtraction of gesture from within the image, something latent within the image
is imposing itself here. It is greater than all thought, and for the moment has no
name, except for the oxymoronic, ethereal beauty of the phrase the music of the
crystal, which has the poetic force of a montage of opposing terms (solid/difuse).
It is indeed something miraculous, as made clear by the continuation of Malrauxs
phrase on death that immediately follows: One knows this when one has returned
from something like it. Crucially, Godard qualifes this quote by adding: From
music, perhaps. But which is going to rise up from ancient times. In Soigne ta
droite, as in Broch, the potential for accelerating intensity and amplifcation
a voyage into ever-deepening, resounding, enveloping, penetrating, radiating,
vibrating profundity and emotion, or rayonnementappears inexhaustible, like
the fow of music itself. A diferent manifestation of the same poetic movement and
play with form occurs in the scene on the golf course, when the camera suddenly
lifs up into the trees and drifs through the branches to the music of Ringers
distorted voice as it gently swells into being. Tis unheralded harmony of music
and image is only brief, and it happens as Prier intones another full passage from
Broch about a still deeper silence transmuting into waiting like a further irradiation
of light, and the need to achieve a creative act in order to move beyond the law of
destiny, random chance and dreams and so overcome the evil spell. He invokes
a still stronger irradiation, perhaps even a second and more pervading immensity,
in order that from this one the divine might stream out freshly again, abolishing
evil forever. It was an undirected waiting, as undirected as the radiation, but for
all that directed to the waiter, the dreamer; it was a sort of invitation to him to
make a fnal attempt, a last creative efort to get outside of the dream, outside of
fate, outside of chance, outside of form, outside of himself. (my emphasis)
Music for Godard always stands for something prior and original and reversible,
both passive and active, since it both inheres within, and gestures beyond, the
image, in positive, salutary extension.
23
In the case of Les Rita Mitsouko, the
continual ebb and fow of extended synths, swirling reverb and other digitally
enhanced vocal and musical efects forming and deforming provide the flm
with its sensuous, sensurround wrap and sonic extension.
Just as there is a running opposition in Agamben between gesture in the
singular and gestures in the plural with their false unity, so in Godard, who
also roams freely between the concrete and abstract, there are two kinds of
valencies of the image: the explicit and the implicit (terms Godard attributes
to the philosopher Gaston Bachelard). Te train episode was framed by an
obvious and highly loaded image of hand gesture as sign of (failed) political
solidaritya physical gesture within the image that demands to be decoded. But
theres also another image as gesturea more abstract and more self-refexive,
metacinematic, and thus properly cinematic, kind of image that exhibits itself as
such and entails a loss of clarity and meaning. Tis is a decreation of the image
pushed now to the level of mystery, silence, and unreadability, and ultimately
beyond the normal bounds of legibility and vision to the realm of the sans
image. For Agamben, gesture is the other side of the commodity that lets the
crystals of this common social substance sink into the situation.
24
In the hands
of Godard, however, the commodifed image gives way to an idea of crystal
that escapes social defnition and takes the situation of cinema to an altogether
diferent, abstract and poetic realm. Tis process of transformation reveals itself
as a moment of extreme beauty that resists simple defnition and is best lef
in the raw, mineral state of the music of the crystal. It is not just that Ringer
herself embodies this, for the reasons given: music is a liminal movement at
the frontier of the senses where the image becomes light and silence becomes
sound. Te law of music subsumes all otherslanguage, repetition, fate,
dreams.
Stabbing darkness in the back: Te silence of the gesture
Godard immediately takes these ideas further within the framework of projection
which plays out in diferent forms in the fnal stages of the flm and is formally
initiated by a blunt gesture of repetitionthe reinsertion of the flms opening
credits. Te frst instance is a pure gag conducted in silence. Te screening of the
Idiot/Princes completed flm Une place sur la terre sees the airline pilot and his
wife take up their places along the Seine and simply gaze out upon Paris afer
their brush with death. Tis is cinema re-envisioned as Bazins window on the
world. Te gag not only undermines knowledge by underlining the constitutive
gap of Soigne ta droite (we will never know if the flm by Godards character
is the one by Godard weve been watching)it also presents cinema in ideal
Godardian terms as a shared and ritualized public site of subjective projection
whereby we project creatively onto the real.
25
Yet this moment of (self-)projection
is also framed in the express terms of human gesture: the pilot salutes what
he gazes at of-screen, while his wife appears to be praying in front of it, her
converging arms replicating the triangular shape limned by the policeman and
the prisoners hands on the train. Projection is thus being presented as a (meta-)
cinematic gesture that stands in counterpoint to abortive political gesture and
carries the open promise of renewed collective relations.
Te second scene of projection takes place shortly afer in the more tradi-
tional setting of a projection booth with Prier now assuming the role of
projectionist and donning blue overalls for the occasion. It is prefaced with a cut
to yet another shot of the sun setting over the water taken from within the room
in Trouville with its half-open French window, as if waiting for some new type of
poetic turning or troping and transformation. A clock ticking on the soundtrack
furthers the mood of suspense and expectation what will the real projection
reveal? We again hear the passage from Broch used for the second sequence of
focus pull about whether evil still existed and the need to wait for the day-star
to obtain a reply from the voice of the Universe. Tis passage is now extended,
however, by a separate passage about silence (also derived from Broch) that
includes another chiastic construction centerd on silence and muteness: Tis
time the awareness of their fault leaves them speechless, their lack of words
renders them this time aware of their fault.
26
Silence morphs efortlessly into
vision in the words that follow, yet this is reversed almost immediately into
non-vision: beholding this silence, the man also yearned to open his mouth
in a last mute cry of horror. Yet still while seeing it, almost before he had really
seen it, he no longer saw anything. Tis silent, double movement of vision and
non-vision is matched in the image in a totally unforeseen way. Afer checking
the equipment and setting up the reels, and as we hear a delayed repetition of
the portentous phrase: But its in the back that the light will stab the darkness,
Prier fnally presses the button. Ignition. Except that Godard refuses us entry
into the auditorium to see the image projected onto the cinema screen, still less
the beam of light striking it. Instead, we remain frmly within the borders of the
booth like a cave or grottobut for what kind of new image exactly?
We glimpse two brief shots, separated by another image of the French
window, of the celluloid passing though the projector and refected in a plate
of glass in the center of the dragon-like apparatus. Two initially indecipherable
images can just be made out, yet at an angle, a little like the blurred images of
the focus pull, though here with the extra complication that they seem to be
extreme close-ups of something human enlarged and inverted by the refection,
as well as in suspended motion. Te frst image contains a small smearing of
red, like human lips coated in lipstick; the second appears more upright and is
devoid of color. Tese are composite images of the human and the mechanical,
of refection and shadow, created by the projectors silhouette against a white
wall and the frames of celluloid passing through the projector and refected and
magnifed in a mirror. In this prismatic and chromatic play with motion, size,
perspective and color, the cinematic image is exposing and exhibiting itself as
pure process. Mute like the sufocated human cry in the Broch passage, these
strange, silent images recall the extreme close-ups of silent cinema contained
in Histoire(s) (the open mouthed female fgure from Eisensteins Battleship
Potemkin (1925), for instance), or better still, the hybrid images of faces of
cinema in the book of Histoire(s) where each miraculous image resurrected
from the video machine appears to be screaming in the eerie silence of the page.
In both cases we are being asked to consider the relations between knowledge,
beauty, aesthetic form and the real. We know that these evanescent, abstracti-
fying images are not an error because they constitute a deliberate repetition in
a tightly edited sequence of montage. Indeed, the repetition of the pivotal phrase
about the light and darkness generates a self-refexive drama of repetition and
interruption revolving around the dividing image of the half-open window
frame. On the soundtrack we hear Ringers voicemore a hushed reverb
whisper than a fully vocalized phrasecelebrating two girls dancing at a bar,
a song heard earlier during the scene of the excluded young girl but delivered
now in a strange, ethereal, sonic burst that complements the seemingly intrac-
table images. Yet it is enough to establish a relation between the silent gesture
of suspended lips and the female voice, and for us to read the two disembodied
images evoking silent cinema as radiations of Ringer herself.
We have been through the ringer here! We have moved from the real to the
reel in the blink of an eyeso fast, in fact, that we barely see the image for what it is
exactly, except as image, thereby escaping the claws of cognition and interpretation.
Godard is typically forging a path out of his own signifying chains: the flms inherent
structure of repetition of shots is ruptured by the act of repetition itself which results
in a totally new kind of shot in the flm. In the intensive mise-en-abyme of repetition,
mediation and framing (the repetition of flm frames within the frame of the
projector enframed within the image), cinema is taken self-refexively to the borders
of silence. In the process, projection is revealed ultimately as an efect of montage.
Further, the disturbance [fracassement] and vibration within the logic of repetition
that reverberates with the violence of the action related (stab the darkness) results
in an explosion of the image that opens it up to the ever-deepening, obscure, unfath-
omable mystery of cinematic creation beyond control and containment. Tis act of
self-exhibition and revelation in the moment of projection as montagea material
moment of pure energy and lightis also an act of release: the fgure of Ringer, as
uncontrollable and unframable now as her earlier involuntary gesture of tapping
her fngers on the table to the rhythms in her head during a break in recording,
escapes the symbolic frame it was briefy held in during the focus pull moment (the
confuence of crystal and Kristallnacht) to become simply flm rolling through.
We can loop this moment back, as the lyrics of the music invite us to, to
the flms other female image-within-the-image: that of the young girl outside
on the balcony at Trouville looking at the Individual through the glass and
refected in miniature in the facing mirror at the back of the apartment (she
was efectively imprisoned within the frame while remaining outside it). It was
a brutal image of exclusionthe window slams back repeatedly on her face. A
fgment possibly of his own imagination (she disappears when he barks Come
in), the excluded girl was associated with the noise and life of the world outside
opposed to the narcissistic self-seclusion of the Individual reliant on his prere-
corded phrases from Beckett on the tape-recorder for any contact with visual
reality (An image had appeared). He stands, in fact, as a metaphor for the
individual, self-sufcient image which, for Godard, thwarts the cinemato-
graphic system because it risks not transforming itself through contact with
other images.
27
For what is at stake for Godard is always the performability of
the image within a larger signifying system rather than any innate expressivity
it may possess.
28
Te gesture of montage is thus now fully revealed as one of
inclusion and new relations or communication across forma poetic process
of mystery and metamorphosis that embraces, recombines and redeems even
the most vulnerable and remote of images within the same visual and aural
frame. Te fnal image, the last in a three-stage edited sequence of the recurring
still-frame images of the half-open window, is of the sunset, but in an intense
form that casts the much closer window frame in shadow against the dense
white cirrus clouds to create the efect of a black-and-white image. It gleams
with possibility: all is still to play for in this ultimate return to something
approximating photography or silent cinema since all is still to be heard. Te
fnal words of the voice-over invoke Broch again, but in a passage not heard
before: And then, very gently, as if not to alarm him, the whispering that the
man had already heard a long time before, before even his very existence,
started again. We can link this fnal afrmative note of non-resolution and
mysterythe continuous advent of sound as ungraspable and uncontainable as
the lightto Te Death of Virgil itself which ends with a continuous rumbling
and the fooding sound of the elusive, inefable Word beyond all under-
standing, language and speech.
29
We can never know for sure if the orgininary
error and curse of of Soigne ta droite has been lifed and redeemed by the
music and light of the crystal. Instead, were lef with the continuum of light
as soundthe unquenchable hope of the recovery and redemption of love and
innocence.
30
(Te flms repeated passage about Dostoyevskys obsessive interest
in the torture of an innocent child (a reworking of Malraux) always carried, of
course, its own counter-response: the smallest act of heroism or love is no less
fascinating than torture.)
A similar type of recursion to the gesturality of silent cinema occurred in
the last stages of King Lear where it took a non-human form. Wearing a loose,
white, shroud-like dress Cordelia had led a white horse (the pale horse of
Death?) into and out of a woodland clearing, her father Learo lamenting: Shes
gone forevershes dead as earth, lend me a looking glass. Te sequence was
sealed by a tableau vivant of Cordelia dead, stretched out on a rock by the side
of the lake as Learo stands with his back to us holding a shotgun and facing
the lake and sky like a Rckenfgur in a Casper David Friedrich painting.
Tis highly ambiguous image of death and incest appeared to correspond to
the new image of cinema reborn that William and Edgar were looking for
following the sacrifce exacted by cinema (Pluggys death). It is accompanied by
a female voice-over quoting the rapturous ending to Virginia Woolf s Te Waves
(1931) about a proud horse ridden by the narrator against the enemy, Death.
Suddenly, afer the intertitle: King Lear / A Study, the white horse that Cordelia
had led away now returns and in a dynamic, wild form. Photographed in long
shot by the waters edge, the horse races into the lef foreground as if towards the
camera and past the viewer in stop-start motion. Te shot, lasting only a matter
of seconds, has the electroshock force of a sequence in early primitive cinema
projected and seen as if for the frst time, like Muybridges horses captured in
pristine motion. Indeed, the horse seems to silence language in its tracks with its
rare and feeting beauty (the loud recital of a Shakespeare sonnet by Mr. Alien
(Woody Allen) in the editing suite ceases and only a light background hum or
drone is audible). As Marc Robinson has elegantly put it, this is an image whose
beauty is its own justifcation.
31
Moreover, the horse carries no-one on its back
and is thus free of the burden of death or of any other type of symbol. It veers
of-frame, destination unknown, as mysteriously and autonomously as it sprang
into motion. In fact, like the immediate sensation of vision as non-vision in the
Broch passage, it all happens so quickly that we cannot grasp its meaning: the
horse runs free, as it were, beyond cognition and easy interpretation, and cant
be contained or reduced to an object of scientifc knowledge. Dislocated in the
flm, without authorship or direction, it can be experienced only as motion and
beauty and release.
Tis stunning shot thus stands in direct contrast to the symbolically encased,
static tableau vivant. Te fact that it is stop-started means that we receive
it directly as a pure efect of acceleration and deceleration. Indeed, it is a
supremely metacinematic moment of exhibition and projection, of pure means
as Agamben would term it, like dance. For it is not an expression of anything
specifc but rather an event of pure gesture and afect happening now in the
flmic present. Tis sudden bolt of energy and sensation presents the image as a
uniquely cinematic sequence of edited motion in time, and there is something
precisely musical about it, in the sense that, as Ive argued elsewhere, music
enjoys a concrete and plastic status in Godard and can operate autonomously to
spring eternally afresh in time.
32
In a flm such as King Lear which hangs heavy like so much of late Godard
with the betrayed promise of silent flm that was never allowed to fnd true
montage before spectacle and the master narratives of love and war took over
(one of the flms many instances of betrayal and violent silence), it is precisely
by tapping into the rich kinetic deposits of silent cinema that Godard fnds a
way forward against death. Tis is nothing less than a liberation of the image as
gesture which thus becomes the name for all that is not image. Yet if the horse in
free motion evokes a Muybridge study, it also harks back to another Muybridge
image of a soldier carrying a gun, presented by Agamben as an example of
the breakdown of bourgeois gesture (we dont know what the solider is doing
or where he is going). What occurs in Agambens work under the sign of lost
bourgeois gestures and meaning in the mechanical age of reproduction returns
in Godard as pure gesture and mystery in the postmodern age. Which is to say,
what Agamben would adduce in the case of the bolting horse as a historical sign
of the dissolution of gesture, i.e. the moment when, as he describes it in Notes
on Gesture, cinema helped destroy the meaning of human gestures at the
dawn of modernity and then proceeded to commemorate their loss obsessively,
ofen in glaring close-up, is replayed positively here as pure cinematic energy
released into the light as the pure joy and ineluctable beauty of the image. In
other words, the ethically negative in Agamben returns in Godard as ethically
and aesthetically positive. What I am suggesting here is that the event of beauty
in Godards cinema, released via stop-start motion in an uncontrolled rush of
energy, means that gesture is always ethico-aesthetic in its nature and mystery. It
is not simply that cinema must expose and display its own means of production
(a mere question of formal method and style), but also that it must enter a new
realm of mystery and undecidability that lies within and beyond the literal
image and is formed of opposites, as in montage which, if properly executed,
can generate the fash and energy of the unexpected and unimagineda sign of
cinemas eternal self-renewal.
Hence, Agambens philosophical proposition of gesture as a moment of art
subtracted from the neutrality of aesthetics and pure praxis
33
runs counter to
Godards artistic method. Soigne ta droite, like King Lear, takes us at privileged
moments to the far shores of the poetic and aesthetic where the image, recon-
ceived and remade in montage, is restored to its original silence and lost aura
(the last words of King Lear, taken from the play, are a reafrmation of both
touch and silence: If that her [Cordelias] breath will mist or stain the stone,
why, then she lives). Silence has, in fact, a fundamental role in Godardian
montage, in particular the double movement of montage in Histoire(s) where,
as I have shown elsewhere, horizontal moments of confuence, contiguity,
conjunction and coincidence, which resist the vertical pull of his characteristi-
cally dense, rhetorical and aggressively intellectual manoeuvres, constitute a
kind of counter-movement in the videographic montage: a minimal moment
of metonymy whereby images are linked and moulded together by contour,
outline, gesture, silhouette and profle. Such non-discursive moments of associ-
ation, contiguity, and conjunction trace as if spontaneously the interrelations of
human form at the level of shape and fgure. Tis play of detail operates as if in
silence since it is never directly commented on or integrated or rationalized as
part of an argument or thesis. Indeed, throughout Histoire(s) the non-linguistic
resists any totalising conceptualization or theorization and thus remains a pure
afective and inclusive moment of seeing and feeling rather than one of inter-
pretation.
34
More generally, the ethico-aesthetic in Godard is poetic adventure,
surprise, fash, afect, combustion, and he can make it happen now. Te force
and challenge of his later work is precisely to jump-start and recharge cinema
and human relations by delivering on the promise of silent cinema through
poetic montagea crucible of emotion capable of generating fraternal warmth.
Tis is the beauty and the passion of Godards cinematic gesture.
Cinema: Te sphere of pure means
Agamben the philosopher has thrown into powerful relief Godard the artist. In
Soigne ta droite Godard starts out from a position of imagelessnessthe end of
cinemaand sets about retrieving and recuperating it precisely by returning it
to silence and the sans image. For Godard, the power of cinema and cinematic
montage is to release the image from its frozen state by revealing its transformative
potential and poetic extensibility. Cinematic gesture, or the mystery and aura of
the image in cinema, is taken always beyond a strictly physical level to something
increasingly abstract, on the borders of music and operating as pure afect. Godards
cinematic gesturethe gesture of refnding and resurrecting cinema today through
montagealways involves an emotional return from the dead. Tis is the moment
when Godards work suddenly appears to revert to the forms of silent cinema, and
it invariably functions in the chiastic mode of repetition as reversal and return.
Such mediality is congruent with the shared aims of Agamben and Debord who
reveal how the essential silence of cinema can expose our being-in-language or
pure gesturality by making us refect at privileged moments of stoppage and
repetition on the image qua image. Yet while he may consistently promote the idea
in Histoire(s) that the cinematograph was an instrument designed for thinking and
for creating forms that think (and certainly the complex processes of montage at
workits sublime crossings and transfgurations
35
testify to Godards powerful
manipulation of montage as a form of thought), Godard is fully aware that there
must also always be a margin for beauty, error and mystery, or the unexplainable
and unknowable. Something beyond explicit discourse; something like the crystal
of the music which transforms from light into sound before it can be intel-
lectually grasped. Devoted to creating the conditions of a new transformative
ethico-aesthetics, Godard recovers gesture aesthetically as the realm of the poetic
and the ethical (relationality/communicability). Indeed, for Godard, the ethical is
inherent within the aesthetic and will be revealed in the unique poetic processes
of cinematic montage (at the time of the resurrection).
Godards natural commitment to the poetic and the aesthetic as a means
of revealing the ethical thus complicates any simple notion of his work as
messianic in nature. As Andr Habib remarks of the images of nature fooding
Godards 80s work: [t]he time of the resurrection is not a messianic return, but
rather a parousie, a second event that redeems the real through images, the
resurrection of a presence, lyrical and transformative, of cinemas aura (original
emphasis).
36
Of course, such undimmed faith in the ethics of the aesthetic
in an infancy of the imagemay seem nave and nostalgic, perhaps even
regressive, but, as with the more intuitive, material counter-drives of Histoire(s),
Godard positively embraces sentimentality and child-like wonder in Soigne ta
droite, and precisely in the concrete terms of poetic reversibility. As the Idiot/
Prince he talks with his fellow female passenger of the smiling regret he
sometimes feelsan apparent contradiction in terms but which doesnt spoil
either of the two terms or feelings. He states: Time is therefore vertical here:
sentiment is irreversible, or rather, the reversibility of being is sentimentalized
here. Te smile regrets, and regret smiles. Tis is inspired by Baudelaires image
of le regret souriant as analyzed by that most aesthetically attuned of modern
philosophers, Bachelard, who saw the image as representing the vertical
instant of poetry: a time in which ambivalent sentiments can co-exist without
being reduced to antithesis, simultaneity, or succession.
37
To conclude, the possibility of redemption provided by the image now
revealed in its full potential as gesture is real in Godardan eternal and
self-renewing hope and optimisma residue perhaps of his lingering socialist
belief in an alternative future.
38
All is still possible, at least poetically speaking.
For Agamben, however, it is always already over: the gestures of the nineteenth
century bourgeoisie are no more and can only be mourned, interminably
and irremediably. For a philosopher like Agamben, any temptation to soar to
aesthetic transcendence, sublime or otherwise, is simply not an option. Notes
on Gesture ends with the statement: Politics is the sphere of pure means, that is,
of the absolute and complete gesturality of human beings (original emphasis).
39

Godards work proves otherwise by replacing politics with cinema. Yet in
both cases gesturality entails the resurrection of the human in all its materiality,
physicality and fraternity, or what we might call in shorthand form the body of
cinema shorn of all preestablished meanings and values (however Christian the
themes of resurrection and recuperation may sometimes loom in Godard). It is
this shared absolute commitment to the human that encourages the idea that
Godard and Agamben may eventually engage with each other directly, and that
artist and philosopher may cross over to each other in their very diferences in
the transforming heat and emotion of cinematic trafc.
Notes
1 Giorgio Agamben, Cinema and History: On Jean-Luc Godard [1995] trans.
John V. Garner and Colin Williamson in the present volume. No direct dialogue
or trafc between Godard and Agamben has actually taken place since. In fact,
Agamben did not take part in the Round Table (chaired by Jean-Michel Frodon
and in which Godard himself participated) that brought to a climax the series of
debates on the frst six completed chapters of Histoire(s) organized by the flm
historian Bernard Eisenschitz at Locarno in August 1995, and which inspired the
special supplement in Le Monde. Godard himself regarded the occasion as a lost
opportunity for genuine dialogue between philosophers, historians, writers and
critics and never publicly responded to Agambens article. A little later, Godard
conceived of a possible dialogue with Agamben and other prominent European
philosophers as part of an ambitious project of talks and debates entitled Collages
de France at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2002. Tis ambitious plan was
ill-fated from the start, however, and never realized.
2 See Giorgio Agamben, Notes on Gesture in Means Without End: Notes on Politics
trans. Vincenzo Binetti, Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2000 [1996]) 4260, and Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (New York: Zone
Books, 2007 [2005]), 64, 68.
3 See Gilles Deleuze, Tree questions about Six Fois Deux, Jean-Luc Godard:
Son+Image, Raymond Bellour and Mary Lea Bandy (eds) (New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 1992), 3541 (originally appeared in Cahiers du cinma 271
(1976)). Deleuze talked of the cut as an irrational interstice and of the new
law of false continuity. Agambens account of Deleuze argues that the mythical
rigidity of the image has been broken in Deleuzes movement-images and that,
properly speaking, there are no images but only gestures. Every image, in fact,
is animated by an antinomic polarity: on the one hand, images are the reifcation
and obliteration of a gesture (it is the imago as death mask or as symbol); on the
other hand, they preserve the dynamis intact (as in Muybridges snapshots or in
any sports photograph) (Agamben, Notes on Gesture, 54). Te former is linked
to the recollection seized by voluntary memory; while the latter is linked to image
fashing in the epiphany of involuntary memory. Further, the latter refers always
beyond itself to a whole of which it is a part, so that even the Mona Lisa could
be seen as a fragment of a gesture or as a still of a lost flm wherein only it would
regain its true meaning. Agamben concludes: it is as if a silent innovation calling
for the liberation of the image into gesture arose from the entire history of art
(Ibid: 55). See Michael Witt Going through the motions: unconscious optics and
corporal resistance in Miville and Godards France/tour/dtour/deux/enfants,
Gender and French Cinema, Alex Hughes and James S. Williams (eds) (Berg,
2001), 17194, for a fne account of the corporeal resistance and remarkable play
of energy created in Godards video work with children, which places France/
tour/dtour/deux/enfants in the context both of Godards resistance to the adult
monster of television and of the embryonic frst stage of early cinema (Marey,
Muybridge).
4 Agambens Te Coming Community contains a chapter (originally a preface for
the Italian translation of Debords Commentaries on the Society of Te Spectacle
(1988)) where Agamben attempts to rescue Debord from the narrow perspectives
that corral him into the confnes of 1980s appropriation art and practices of
dtournement, but divorced from their context and ossifed in postmodern
visual art. See, Giorgio Agamben, Te Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt
(University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis and London, 1993 [1990]), 7983.
As Christian McCrea argues, instead of placing Debord in a category such as the
flm-essay clich, or historicising him (predictably his fate in academia), Agamben
sees the contemporary signifcance of Debords intervention as a manual for
exodus or a weapon for resistance. Christian McCrea, Giorgio Agamben, Film,
Teory and Philosophy: Te Key Tinkers, ed. Felicity Colman (Durham: Acumen,
2009), 34957.
5 See, for example, Michael Witt Montage, My Beautiful Care, or Histories of the
Cinematograph 3350, Alan Wright, Elizabeth Taylor at Auschwitz: JLG and the
Real Object of Montage, 5161, and European Culture and Artistic Resistance
in Histoire(s) du cinma Chapter 3A, La Monnaie de labsolu 11339, all in Te
Cinema Alone: essays on the work of Jean-Luc Godard, 19852000, Michael Temple,
James S. Williams (eds) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000).
6 Giorgio Agamben, Diference and Repetition: On Guy Debords flms [1995],
Guy Debord and the Situationists International, ed. Tom McDonough, trans. Brian
Holmes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 31320, 315.
7 Ibid.: 319.
8 Agamben, Notes on Gesture, 56.
10 Te exceptions are Claudine Delvauxs short study of fve fragments of the flm
published on its release, though strangely with no explicit mention of Broch,
Claudine Delvaux, Tirer son plan et puis le voir: cinq fragments sur Soigne ta
droite de Jean-Luc Godard, Revue belge du cinma 223, 1988, 190205, and
Daniel Morgan, Late Godard And the Possibilities of Cinema (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2013). See also, Douglas Morrey, Jean-Luc Godard (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2005) 1849; and Richard Brody, Everything is
Cinema: the working life of Jean-Luc Godard (Faber and Faber, 2008) 4809.
11 King Lear is littered with black and white photographs and stills of flmmakers
(Cocteau, Bresson, Pasolini, Visconti, Lang, Tati, Pagnol, Rivette, Franju,
Losey, Becker, Welles (an image from Te Merchant of Venice (1969)), as well
as reproductions of Giotto, Dor, Watteau, Renoir, da Vinci, Morisot, Manet,
Van Gogh, Tex Avery (among others). Tey all function for William as forms of
aide-mmoire and signs of the apparently lost artistic and cultural past. In one
formal experiment by Pluggy in a darkened video studio with a bank of video
monitors, we see projected on the two monitors a juxtaposition of the central fgure
of Fuselis Lady Macbeth Sleepwalking and the moment of the eyeball being razored
from Bunuel/Dals Un Chien andalou, the latter alternating with clips from Disneys
Goofy. Tis could almost be a student primer on the scopic drive, the reality of
the image, and the violence of the cut. Te flm also includes demonstrations of
reverse-motion photography la Cocteau, and fragments of the soundtrack of the
1969 Russian version of King Lear by Grigori Kozinstev, played here as another
Professor by the curator of the Cinmathque Suisse, Freddy Buache. Te
philosopher Timothy Murray highlights Godards post-apocalyptic project and his
stress on the recovery of cinematic history and montage now that perspective had
been abolished and the vanishing point erased. Murray talks of the distancing
here and generally in late Godard from an art of resemblance for the sake of a
cinema of afect. For Murray, the flm champions in Deleuzian terms the idealism
of pure montage and the generative passions of the clash of its incompossible
systems of analogue and digital representation. For it situates the new electronic
meaning of cinema in relation to the contemplation of the radicality of silence and
its impact on the law in Shakespeare: the doubled image, the silence of the break,
and the gap of sequentiality sustain the rule of what Deleuze calls Godards cinema
of incommensurabilty. Timothy Murray (2000), Te Crisis of Cinema in the
Age of New World Memory: the Baroque Performance of King Lear, Te Cinema
Alone: essays on the work of Jean-Luc Godard, 19852000, Michael Temple, James S.
Williams (eds) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000).
12 For a fne introduction to Godards continually evolving discourse on the end(s) of
cinema, see Michael Witt, Te Death(s) of Cinema according to Godard, Screen
40:3 (1999) 33146.
13 One brief example will sufce: When you say good-bye to someone, you feel
like saying a little something, or making a sign, a gesture, returning the ball. But
its only in sport that one can communicate. Jean-Luc Godard (1998), Jean-Luc
Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, vol 2 19841998 ed. Alain Bergala (Paris: Cahiers
du Cinma, 1998) 126. Godard will later distil these world-weary thoughts in
his poem, La Paroisse morte (Te Dead Parish), in the same collection, 254
(originally published in Trafc 1 (1991)).
15 Malraux is, of course, a key fgure in later Godard precisely because of his
humanist belief in the resurrectional status of art as a means of transcendence,
or anti-destiny, and thus as a revolt against mans fate (the phrase art is what is
reborn in what has been burnt is heard throughout Histoire(s)). Andr Malraux,
Lazare (Gallimard, 1996 [1974]).
16 All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.
17 What is delivered in King Lear is a slightly revised version of the frst part of
Reverdys prose poem: Te image is a pure creation of the soul. It cannot be
born of the comparison but of a reconciliation of two realities that are more or
less far apart. Te more the connection between these two realities is distant and
true, the stronger the image will be, the more it will have emotive power. Two
realities that have no connection cannot be drawn together usefully. Tere is no
creation of an image. One rarely obtains forces and power from this opposition.
An image is not strong because it is brutal or fantastic, but because the association
of ideas is distant and true. Analogy is a medium of creation. It is a resemblance
of connections. Te power or virtue of the created image depends on the nature of
these connections. What is great is not the image but the emotion that it provokes.
If the latter is great, one esteems the image at its measure. Te emotion thus
provoked is true because it is born outside of all imitation, all evocation and all
resemblance.
18 See Libby Saxtons chapter in the present volume for an excellent account of the
energetics of gesture across form in Passion which, via processes of cinematic
montage and intermedial superimposition, move between the real material body
and immaterial/spiritual presence, between human stasis and supernatural kinesis,
and between physical fatigue and the elevation of the soul.
19 Alex Murray, Giorgio Agamben (Routledge, 2010), 90.
20 Te same sequence will be incorporated in the fnal part of Chapter 1B of
Histoire(s) where it is now juxtaposed with Maria Casars reciting on the
soundtrack a French translation of Heideggers What are poets for? (1946). I
have shown in Williams 2000a that by means of this hyperbolic gesture of the fall
of cinema and taking on the burden of cinemas sufering, Godards self-defating
body efectively functions as itself a chiastic point of reversal. For the scene is also
a display of poetic will and personal self-troping: the penetration of Godards
videographic machine by his own cinematic fesh, however self-ironic, adopts
the structure of transcendence whereby Godard as creator imposes himself
romantically as master of the video/digital machine in a sublime reversion to his
cinematic self. Viewed entirely negatively, the self-styled journey of discovery
into new ideas and sensations in Histoire(s) has been redirected into a nostalgic
contemplation of traditional myths and duals (self/other, mind/matter). However,
I also argue that this is not merely idle sentimentality, for Godards romantic
self-reinstatement also demonstrates a self-critique that bears on the very nature
of his position as a flm and video maker, throwing into clear light, rather than
resolving, the problem of fnding a resolution between the digitial and the
cinematic/analogical. For what is most at stake in Histoire(s) is the crucial need to
reevaluate the mutual implications of afectivity and cognition in the processes of
digital thought and human emotion: Godard makes of technoscience a place and
moment of immediate passion and contemplation. Such an act serves to restore
faith in the possibility and freedom of art which, in Godardian thought, has been
all but eroded by institutionalized culture. Williams, Beyond the Cinematic
Body: human emotion vs. digital technology in J.-L. Godards Histoire(s) du
cinma, Inhuman Refections, ed. Scott Brewster, John Joughin, David Owen and
Richard J. Walker (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 188202, 197.
21 Morgan unpacks a complex genealogy of political action and moral responsibility
at the heart of the flms work on matters of aesthetics, linking the hands to Denis
de Rougemonts key concept of thinking with ones hands (penser avec les
mains) promoted repeatedly in Godards later work.
22 See Morgan, 45, 242.
23 Godard remarks briefy of the music in the flm that it expresses the spiritual
and provides inspirationtheres nothing to understand, only to hear and take.
Godard, Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, 123.
24 Agamben, Means Without End, 79.
25 Tis is part of Godards crucial idea of human beings projecting themselves on to
something greater (the world, the cosmos)an instinct he regards as now dead
in the West. See Morgan, 20612, for an excellent summary of Godards evolving
theory of projection and its diferent modalities in the later corpus, where the
term involves the mode of exhibition and the diferent spaces and seizes in which
images are seen (206). For Godard, the cinema always remains on the theatrical,
Lumire (vs Edison) model, i.e. a large public screen and collective experience. Tis
is cinema as a projection of the world at a given time and is thus a fundamentally
democratic and egalitarian, if not utopian space (everybody sees more or less the
same thing simultaneously). Further, projection makes possible an open set of
relations between viewer and screen: our experience in a theater is one of forming
connections and assocations (including historical), because we are reminded of
flms and events not explicitly contained within or referred to by the flm being
screened. Te concept of projection become more complex and controversial when
Godard applies it to the processs of history itself, for instance, with his notion of
the law of stereo in Notre Musique (2004): Germany projected the Jews into an
autonomous state (i.e. Germany generated out of itself the state of Israel), then
Israel projected the Palestinians.
26 Strangely, this passage from the French translation of the novel is absent from the
American edition.
27 A recurring passage, indeed mantra, of Godards later corpus is the quote derived
from Robert Bresson: Si une image, regarde part, exprime nettement quelque
chose, si elle comporte une interprtation, elle ne se transformera pas au contact
dautres images. Les autres images nauront aucun pouvoir sur les autres images. Ni
action, ni raction.
28 See Williams, European Culture and Artistic Resistance in Histoire(s) du cinma
Chapter 3A, La Monnaie de labsolu.
29 Hermann Broch, La Mort de Virgile (Paris: Gallimard, 1955 [1945]), trans. Albert
Kohn. Te Death of Virgil (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983 [1945]), trans.
Jean Starr Untermeyer, 4812.
30 Contrast this positing of innocence within the framework of projection with
Agambens very short yet striking essay on cinematic illusion and fantasy, Te Six
Most Beautiful Minutes in the History of Cinema, his reading of a silent sequence
from Orson Welless unfnished Don Quixote set in 1950s. Agamben writes that the
scene really is about the destroying of an illusion of child innocence in the form
of a young girl Dulcie (Agamben suggests Dulcinea) who looks at Don Quixote
reprovingly afer he has slashed down the screen of a public movie theater in
his efort to save a woman in distress projected suddenly in the image (a fgure
for his idealised Dulcinea whom he has never met). Agamben concludes: But
when they [our fantasies] prove in the end to be empty and unfulflled, when
they show the void from which they were made, then it is time to pay the price
for their truth, to understand that Dulcineawhom he savedcannot love us. See
Agamben, Profanations, 634. In Agamben, there exists no projection or nostalgic
fantasy of an original purity or freedom in children that can be retrieved, relayed
or championed through the decreating powers of cinema. As Murray glosses,
the young girl we hope to save, Quixotic in our imaginings, can never love us; our
imagination must be exposed as empty and unfulflled in order that we can begin
to reconstruct a new form of image, a new poetics that denies imagination as a
distortion of the here and now, as cinema so ofen does (Murray, 92) In Soigne ta
droite, despite having the French window slammed on her repeatedly, there is no
reprroach or recrimination in the face of the young girl. For Godard this is always
the aesthetic challenge to make love and mutual understanding (and redemption)
possible. Tis aspect of Godards cinema is rarely acknowledged or commented on,
yet at such moments as these Godard takes the risks of essentialism and nostalgia
and positively embraces them as a fundamentalist badge of courage and optimism
against the odds. For Godard, any fantasy that might be provoked by the projected
image is not the crucial aspect. As long as there is a projection at the macro level
in the form of a public screening that brings diferent people together, or at the
micro level in the form of an act of cinematic montage that brings together the
distant and dissimilar, there is always reason for hope. For the record, Godard also
references Welless flm in Chapter 1A of Histoire(s) with a still of Pancho Sanchez
as one of an illustrious list of cinema historys unfnished flms.
31 Marc Robinson, Resurrected Images: Godards King Lear, Performing Arts Journal
1988, 31: 205, 22.
32 See James Williams, Music, Love, and the Cinematic Event, FOR EVER
GODARD: the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Temple, James S. Williams and
Michael Witt (eds) (London: Black Dog Press, 2004), 288311.
34 See Williams, European Culture and Artistic Resistance in Histoire(s) du cinma
Chapter 3A, La Monnaie de labsolu. I argue that in Histoire(s) the fgural is above
all the human fgure at its most concrete and literal, and that the works meaning
ultimately lies somewhere between the fgural and the awesome reach of Godards
sublimepart of what I call the inherent struggle in Histoire(s) between sense and
the sensible, the latter operating as a kind of resistance to the logic of Godards own
rhetorical manoeuvres by means of a collaboration of forms.
35 Ibid., 135.
36 Andr Habib (2001), Before and Afer: Origins and Death in the Work of Jean-Luc
Godard, Senses of Cinema 16: http://sensesofcinema.com/2001/16/godard_habib/
37 Gaston Bachelard, LIntuition de linstant (Paris: Stock, 1992 [1931]), 10311. I am
indebted to Douglas Morrey for this reference. Morrey, 167.
38 Film socialisme (2010) ends with the dynamic call for action in a chiastic phrase
about natural justice versus the law: Quand la loi nest pas juste, la justice passe
avant la loi. I have explored elsewhere how this phrase actually goes back to
France/tour/dtour/deux/enfants, where it was similarly typewritten over the screen.
It is no surprise that this earlier work is echoed in the tender second movement
of Film socialisme, with its domestic family scenes conveyed in meditative
long-takes and close-ups. For Godard is reengaging again here directly with the
place and status of children within the world of adults, one that now involves
rights. Te young Lucien, who continually performs with his physical gestures
to the classical and jazz music constantly forming inside his head, proposes with
his older sister Florine a social programme based in universal terms on art and
society (i.e. not the State)one that could just as easily be Godards own: Garder
de lespoir / Avoir raison quand votre gouvernement a tort / Apprendre voir
avant que dapprendre lire (Hold on to hope / Be right when your government
is wrong / Learn to see before learning to read). A series of screen-texts later
informs us that the Conseil dtat approved the childrens right to seek election to
the local council and that they are on the point of winning in their ownrather
than their familyname. To invoke the title of the 1990 short Godard made with
Anne-Marie Miville, LEnfance de lart (an episode in Comment vont les enfants?),
the hope here is perhaps of a new childhood of art. Te question whether this
could potentially provide the grounds for a new kind of Europe that does not
simply reproduce the same tragic, fatal narratives and models of antiquity is lef
deliberately open. See James S. Williams, Entering the Desert: the book of Film
socialisme, Vertigo 30, 2012: http://www.closeupflmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/
issue30-spring2012-godard-is/entering-the-desert-the-book-of-flm-socialisme/
39 Agamben, Notes on Gesure, 60.
2
Passion, Agamben and the Gestures of Work
Libby Saxton
Film is linked to the movements and rhythms of work. Recent critical writing
has opened new perspectives on the mediums relation to labor, energy and
the human body. Mary Ann Doane points out that the emergence of cinema
coincided with shifs in industrial organization allied with the rationalization
of time in capitalist modernity. In Doanes account, this rethinking of time
was exemplifed by Frederick W. Taylors attempts to increase the efciency
of workers gestures and his disciple Frank B. Gilbreths cyclographs, which
captured these motions photographically as contours in space.
1
If the advent of
flm needs to be understood in the context of endeavors to optimize industrial
productivity, in the early twenty-frst century the medium is diferently attuned
to the dynamics of work. Discussing contemporary cinema, Janet Harbord notes
that the modernist preoccupation with the body versus the machine has receded
and production has become decentred and dematerialized. Yet, she insists, the
question of productivity and energy [] has circled back in the present order
of global instability and contingency, as a pressing issue.
2
Film, for Harbord, is
aptly equipped to register the uneven fows and mutations of contemporary
globalized capital because it can represent the body not simply as movement
but as an entity through which diferential forms of energy fow.
3
A connection
persists between flm and the forces and constraints that condition the gestures
and pace of work.
A related yet distinct set of associations between flm and work are hinted at,
though not explicitly articulated, in the writings of Giorgio Agamben. In Notes
on Gesture, Agamben considers cinemas ambiguous debt to studies by Gilles
de la Tourette, Jean-Martin Charcot, Eadweard Muybridge and tienne-Jules
Marey which, insofar as they made human movement visually available for
scientifc analysis, can be loosely aligned with Taylors and Gilbreths eforts to
eliminate unproductive time from labor.
4
In Agambens account, such imaging
techniques deprived the Western bourgeoisie of their gestures, exposing and
breaking down what previously belonged to the private realm of the individual,
a loss which the cinema would attempt to both mark and recuperate.
5
Unlike
Doanes and Harbords media histories, however, Agambens approach brackets
questions of industry and productivity. In Te Work of Man, Agamben insists
that philosophy should put aside the emphasis on labour and production and
attend instead to work that is capable of exposing its own inactivity and its own
potentiality.
6
Although Agamben does not mention flm in this later essay, his
description of a work that exhibits its potentiality resonates, I want to argue,
with his rethinking of cinema as centered on gesture. My contention in this
chapter is that these writings can help to elucidate afnities between motion in
flm and work.
One of the few moving image artifacts discussed by Agamben is Jean-Luc
Godards Histoire(s) du cinma (1998). What is signifcant about this video essay
for Agamben is its understanding of its own medium. Montage, the source,
according to Agamben, of the specifc character of cinema, is not merely used
in Histoire(s), but also exhibited [] as such or foregrounded.
7
My chapter
explores connections between ideas broached by Agamben and a flm which,
not least in its preoccupation with cinemas intermediality, can be understood
as initiating aspects of the critical project that culminates in Histoire(s).
8

Passion (1982) depicts a triangle of main protagonists grappling with personal
and professional problems: Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), a factory worker and
Catholic Marxist activist, Jerzy (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), a director who is making
a flm also called Passion, and Hana (Hana Schygulla), the owner of the motel
where the flm crew are staying. Godards flm crosscuts and creates parallels
and overlaps between scenes in three principal settings: a factory, a flm studio
and the motel. Causal relations between events are subordinated to correspond-
ences between acts of artistic creation and love and processes of labor. Passion
speaks to some of Agambens central concerns, I want to suggest, by exploring
the relation between movement, work and production and refecting meta-
discursively on its medium.
Passion, Agamben and the Gestures of Work 57
Energeia, dunamis and gesture
Te concept of work plays a role in Agambens conceptualization of potenti-
ality, an idea which is ofen considered the keystone of his thought since the
mid-1980s. A claim that links a number of Agambens eclectic texts is that
humans are potential beings because they lack a proper or defning nature or
goal. As he states in Te Coming Community, the fact that must constitute the
point of departure for any discourse on ethics is that there is no essence, no
historical or spiritual vocation, no biological destiny that humans must enact
or realize.
9
Tis argument is reformulated in Te Work of Man, a reading
of Aristotles refections in the Nicomachean Ethics on whether humans have
a characteristic activity in which their good might be understood to lie.
10

Agamben observes here that Aristotles term ergon (labour or work) is
closely connected to energeia (literally, being at work). Te notion of energeia,
Agamben reminds us, occupies a key position in Aristotles philosophy, where
it is defned in opposition to dunamis (potentiality). So the question of the
work of man pertains to the broader issue of the the energeia, the activity,
the being-in-act that is proper to man and the possibility of assigning him a
proper nature and essence.
11
According to Agamben, before Aristotle identifes
this properly human activity as the being at work of the soul in accordance with
logos, or the actualization of a rational potential, he temporarily entertains the
idea of an argia, of an essential inactivity [inoperosit] of man with respect to his
concrete occupations and functions [operazioni].
12
Te hypothesis that humans
may lack a defning ergon and energeia underpins Agambens attempt to think
them as beings of pure potentiality, which no work could exhaust.
13
I want to suggest that concerns akin to those of Te Work of Man emerge
in Passion, even though the flm makes no explicit allusion to Aristotle, his
commentators or the possible absence of a specifcally human vocation. With its
central analogy between factory and cinema, Passion might at frst sight appear
preoccupied not with dunamis but with energeia, in its literal meaning of being
at work.
14
However, the work of both Isabelle and Jerzy is interrupted and we
are not shown its fnal results. Although we briefy see Isabelle laboring in the
factory, we do not see what it produces, and shortly afer the start of the flm, she
is fred. Jerzys project is beset by problems: the flm has no story, the lighting is
not right, the money is running out. As Passion ends, the flm within it remains
unrealized. While specifc labor opportunities are abruptly withdrawn and
particular tasks are lef unfnished, work is recurrently evoked, as we shall see,
as an abstract idea, possibility or, to use Agambens preferred word, potentiality.
In particular, this is achieved through visual and verbal reference to gesture, a
privileged theme in Agambens writings, including his remarks on flm.
In Notes on Gesture, Agamben proposes that gesture, rather than image, as
has traditionally been supposed, is the critical element of cinema.
15
Tis claim
rests on a conception of the image as dynamic, which Agamben explains with
reference to the virtual motion into which the photographs in Aby Warburgs
Mnemosyne Atlas seem to liberate Western humanitys gestures. Agamben
extrapolates: Every image, in fact, is animated by an antinomic polarity: on
the one hand, images are the reifcation and obliteration of a gesture []; on
the other hand, they preserve the dynamis intact.
16
Te potential for movement
contained in the image means that even paintings can be viewed as fragments
of gesture or as stills of a lost flm wherein only they would regain their true
meaning.
17
Cinema thus restores to images their veritable signifcance or, in
Agambens words, leads [them] back to the homeland of gesture.
18
Agamben
contends further that the centrality of gesture to cinema associates the medium
with ethics and politics, rather than merely aesthetics. Gesture opens onto the
ethico-political because it is neither a means to some end, nor an end in itself,
but instead the process of making a means visible as such.
19
Te characteristic
of lacking an end or telos links gesture to the possibility broached in Te Work
of Man that humans are beref of a proper work. Just as no defning ergon
or vocation can be assigned to the human, so gesture, Agamben contends,
following Varro, is distinguished from production, which is oriented towards an
end.
20
Whereas proto-cinematic analyzes such as Taylors reduced gesture to a
means of attaining a goal (enhanced productivity and proft), cinema, Agamben
implies, can counter such biopolitical investigations by awakening the image
into movement without telos or destiny.
A preoccupation with the moving, gestural human body came to the fore
in Godards work of the 1970s, which, as Michael Witt notes, was indebted to
Mareys chronophotographic studies of motion.
21
In this decade, Godard and his
long-term collaborator, Anne-Marie Miville, began to use video technology to
fragment and de-compose everyday actions, for example by varying tape speed,
as in their television series France/tour/dtour/deux/enfants (1979), and thereby
to formulate what Alain Bergala calls an explicit theory of gesture.
22
Tis
concern resurfaces in Godards flms of the 1980s and 1990s, where the language
of the body also became associated with phenomena such as love and creativity.
Agambens description of gesture as the exhibition of a mediality encapsulates
the self-refexivity of this fgure in much of Godards work across these three
decades, which repeatedly questions the relation between human motion and
its function or goal.
23
Most of Isabelles movements in the factory in the opening minutes of Passion
may not initially seem to conform to Agambens defnition. We frst see her
emerging from the distance, pushing a heavy trolley towards the camera. Soon
aferwards, there are three shots in which she operates a huge, noisy machine
with def, efcient, repetitive hand motions. Since they are purely functional or,
in Agambens terms, means to ends, these bodily and manual actions cannot
be understood as gestural in the sense that he attributes to the word. However,
other, less conspicuous movements interfere with Isabelles productivity. In
the frst of the shots of her at the machine, she appears in profle and pauses
to stretch her shoulders and neck. In the second, she yawns twice. Now she is
closer to and nearly facing the camera, while her hands pass back and forth
across the frame-line. In the third, another medium close-up, her back is to
us and her hands are almost completely obscured by her torso. She gazes at
length to the right before refocusing on her task. In these early moments of
the flm, attention is increasingly directed away from Isabelles body, hands
and surrounding towards her face. While her occupation and the setting evoke
Aristotles concepts of ergon and energeia, the framings of the shots, in keeping
with Agambens separation of gesture from teleology, progressively marginalize
her mechanical gestures and prioritize unproductive actions.
Tese shots of Isabelle interact thematically and pictorially with those which
separate them. Te sequence alternates images of the factory and the flm
studio, where another kind of work is under way: Rembrandts painting Te
Night Watch is being reconstructed as a tableau vivant. Te camera remains still
during each of these shots, but in the course of the sequence it draws nearer to
the characters in the flm set, just as it closes in on Isabelle. Te studio is shown
frst in a long shot, in which we see actors assemble and assume their positions.
Te second and third shots of this scene are medium close-ups of faces on
which is etched the strain of holding immobile poses. Te transition from
motion to stillness which we witness on the flm set heightens our awareness,
through similarity and diference, of a parallel progression in the factory shots,
as Isabelles industrious hands are side-lined. Te play of movement and stasis
in both scenes calls attention to the characteristics that distinguish and associate
painting and cinema. A self-referential concern with image composition is
simultaneously registered in voice-over remarks by the flm crew which carry
over from the studio into the factory. Looked at within the context of the
sequence as a whole, then, Isabelles laborious actions assume signifcance
beyond their practical ends, because they initiate a meditation on image and
medium. In this respect, they foreshadow Agambens discussion of gesture as
the central element of cinema and the exposure of a means as such.
Other moments in the flm further estrange human gestures from their
ostensible functions. About half an hour in, there is a scene where Isabelle chats
with Sophie (Sophie Loucachevsky), Jerzys production assistant, in the factory.
Isabelle remarks that cinema and television never show people working.
24
As
if to redress this omission, as she walks to screen right, the camera follows her
and two other women, who are operating machines, appear in the frame. Sophie
responds that it is prohibited to flm in factories, to which Isabelle replies: work
is the same as pleasure. [] Its the same gestures as love. Not necessarily the
same speed, but the same gestures. Halfway through this comment, there is a
cut to the studio, where passionate labor blends with erotic desire as Ingress
painting La Petite baigneuse is recreated. In the next shot, Hana sits in Jerzys
motel room. Speaking on the phone of-screen, Jerzy asserts that he is working
and then, presumably challenged by his interlocutor, irritably echoes Isabelles
insight: loving, working, working, lovingshow me the diference! In these
scenes, Isabelle and Jerzy verbally question a dichotomy that is problematized
throughout Passion. As Douglas Morrey explains, Godards flms since Masculin
fminin (1966) have recurrently been preoccupied with the relationship between
love and work or, put diferently, the efects of the capitalist labor process on
social, afective and sexual interactions.
25
In Passion, as Isabelles confation of
two kinds of gesture suggests, this ongoing exploration of how economic imper-
atives shape interpersonal relations is imbricated with refection on movement.
Although, in the sequence described above, the gestures of the factory laborers,
flm crew, extras, Hana and Jerzy do not look alike, the dialogue encourages us
to compare them, distracting us from their overt purposes. Furthermore, in the
shots of the studio and the motel, characters appear on video monitors in the
background as well as in the flm frame, generating an additional plane or layer
of movement which intensifes the association between gesture and mediation.
If the passage into energeia, or actuality, is troubled in the flm by the freeing
of gesture from telos, the notion of dunamis, or potentiality, is highlighted and
nowhere more conspicuously than in its spectacular reconstitutions of paintings.
Like Agamben, Passion, as noted above, unsettles any straightforward opposition
between the frozen poses of the canvas and the illusory movement of cinema.
Te Night Watch and La Petite baigneuse are among at least ten celebrated
paintings from which Jerzys project draws inspiration. Te selectiveness of
Passions art historical allusions is elucidated by James S. Williamss refec-
tions on Godards work as a whole: Godards is an essentially classical sense
of European art and culture that advances no further into the story of modern
art than Picasso, Francis Bacon and Nicolas de Stal.
26
Williams ascribes the
paucity of references to more recent artworks in Godards oeuvre to his view of
contemporary European culture as moribund. Te painterly intertexts of Passion
also evince a preference for the fgurative over the abstract and a fascination with
the animated human form. Most of the masterpieces that Passion reinterprets
which include Goyas Te Tird of May, Delacroixs Te Entry of the Crusaders
into Constantinople and El Grecos Te Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, in
addition to those already citedare replete with fragments of human gesture.
Tese still shapes evoke movement that might come to be.
Tis dynamic potential or virtual kinesis is foregrounded in Godards
reworking of these pieces of art, which anticipates Agambens claim that the
image is inherently gestural. While many of Godards other flms contain
images of paintings, Passion substitutes the ekphrastic form of the tableau
vivant. As Brigitte Peucker observes, the cinema has long been preoccupied
with the tableau vivant as an instance of stillness or inertia which reminds us
that flm was the frst art capable of bringing the fxed image to life.
27
Peucker
emphasizes that such moments of arrested motion intensify flms intermedi-
ality, constituting a palimpsest or textual overlay simultaneously evocative of
painting, drama and sculpture.
28
In Passions tableau vivant scenes, refection
on the properties that distinguish flm from these other media is compelled
by movement of three kinds: by the camera, within the frame and between
shots.
29
Intercut, as we have seen, with scenes in the factory and the motel,
the meticulously framed still and slowly gliding shots that reveal the elaborate
reproductions in part or whole sometimes capture isolated motions. Tese seem
to range from spontaneous fdgetting (such as the playful shoving of the cherub
by the angel at the base of Te Virgin of the Immaculate Conception) to choreo-
graphed moves motivated by the paintings (such as the captive who buries
his face in his hands in Te Tird of May). Agamben diferentiates between
gesture and a movement that has its end in itself (for example, dance seen as
an aesthetic dimension).
30
Certain actions in Passion appear to correspond to
the latter category, including the ballet steps performed by Manuelle (Manuelle
Baltazar) and the contortionism of Sarah (Sarah Comen-Salin). In contrast,
the movements that ripple through the tableaux vivants do not solidify into
aesthetic ends; nor are they productive. Trown into relief by the surrounding
stillness, these mobile elements accentuate the potentiality actualized in the
passage from painting to cinema. In Passion, the labor of flmmaking thus
encapsulates the antimony between reifed and dynamic gesture that Agamben
sees as inherent to the image and pre-empts his refections on cinemas intimacy
with the ethico-political realms.
Gravity, grace and decreation
If Passion resonates with Agambens insights into flm, gesture and the poten-
tiality of work, it also helps to expose what Alessia Ricciardi has described as
a subliminal or disavowed presence in his philosophy: that of Simone Weil,
whose political thought was the subject of his doctoral dissertation, but who is
rarely mentioned in his published texts.
31
As Godard has confrmed in inter-
views, although Passion makes no explicit allusion to Weil, her writingsand
in particular those posthumously collected in La Pesanteur et la grce (Gravity
and Grace, 1947) and La Condition ouvrire (Te Workers Condition, 1951)are
among the flms most signifcant intertexts.
32
Weils critique of Taylorized mass
production and advocation of labor that harmonizes our physical, intellectual
and spiritual faculties throw a diferent light from Agambens essays, I want to
argue, on Passions exploration of movement and, by extension, on the criti-
cally resurgent question of the relation between flm and work. Nevertheless,
her lingering infuence on Agambens thinking on cinema is intimated by
his association of the messianic situation of the mediumwhich is made
manifest, he contends, in Godards Histoire(s)with decreation, one of Weils
privileged terms.
33
Questions of movement, embodiment and production connect Weils thinking
on work to Agambens discussion of gestural cinema, while her engagement with
issues of force, energy and the soul distinguishes them. In Weils writings from
the mid1930s onwards, moral and spiritual life is rethought in terms of forces
likened to those that regulate the material world. As she observes in an essay
in La Condition ouvrire: the laws of mechanics, which derive from geometry
and control our machines, contain supernatural truths.
34
In La Pesanteur et la
grce, an assembly of fragmentary, aphoristic texts, she writes: all the natural
movements of the soul are ruled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity,
a dragging downwards which is countervailed only by the ascending pull of
grace.
35
Whereas the desire for objects spawns a degraded energy which weighs
us down, the energy of grace is liberated through the ethical act of renouncing
or decreating the self.
36
Weil defnes humility as knowing that in what we
call I there is no source of energy which allows us to rise.
37
We must lower
ourselves in order to ascend, as she asserts in a vertiginous formulation: moral
gravity makes us fall towards the heights.
38
Moreover, work ofers a singular
opportunity to move upwards.
39
Work is one of the threads that join Weils earlier more explicitly political
texts to her later more mystical writings. In an article published in 1929, she
asserts: it is only by the trial of work that space and time are presented to me,
always together, time as the condition, and space as the object, of any action.
40

Weils afrmation of work as a measure of temporal duration and the worlds
extension hints at a prioritization of energeia, or what Agamben calls being-
in-act, over dunamis.
41
However, her attacks on Taylorism, which tightened
its grip on French industry in the 1920s, foreshadow Agambens biopolitical
analysis of gesture. Te diverse writings united in La Condition ouvrire refect
both immediately and retrospectively on her experience of working in factories
from 1934 to 1935 and accord sustained attention to forces that compel and
constrain the bodys movements. Contesting Taylorisms prevalent association
with rationalization, Weil argues that its primary aim is to wield power over
laborers by depriving them of the possibility of determining themselves the
processes and rhythm and even the movements of their work.
42
Like Agamben,
Weil dwells on the relation between action, means and end. But whereas the
lack of a predetermined destiny aligns gesture, for Agamben, with ethics, the
manual workers efort without fnality is linked by Weil to slavery and evil.
43

As she explains in La Pesanteur et la grce: work makes us endure the wearing
phenomenon of fnality returning like a ball; working in order to eat, eating
in order to work.
44
Te laborers gestures are oriented towards mere survival,
an existence in which everything is a means and fnality clings on nowhere.
45

Under Taylorized conditions, the force of necessity not only tugs on workers
limbs, but also pins [their] thought to the earth and empties their souls of
everything but a concern with speed.
46
Nevertheless, for Weil, workers are
uniquely positioned to encounter the divine, because they are not separated
from it by any earthly end.
47
Film is never alluded to in La Pesanteur et la grce and is mentioned in La
Condition ouvrire only occasionally and feetingly. Weil remarks ironically
that the most beautiful and true symbol of the situation of factory workers
is the malfunctioning machine that forcibly feeds corn-on-the-cob to Charlie
Chaplins assembly line laborer in Modern Times (1936).
48
Chaplins parody of
Taylorism exploits the afnity between the resources of flm and the issues of
time and motion that preoccupy Weils writings on work. But the cinematic
dimension of these texts emerges more fully through comparison with Passion.
Noting the appearance of the Weilian theme of self-renouncement in Godards
flms of the early 1980s, Morrey argues that, in Passion, the energy that Weil
ascribes to grace is manifested frst and foremost in the form of light, which
the flm associates with spiritual nourishment.
49
I would suggest that the
energies described by Weil are visualized just as prominently here in kinetic
form and in a manner that supports the connections I have suggested between
Weils and Agambens ideas.
Like Agambens, Weils arguments reverberate with the shif of attention
from productive gesture to signs of fatigue in the frst shots of the factory.
Tese images recall Weils critique of an existence in which ones gestures are
at every moment determined by work and from which fnality is excluded.
50

If the Agambenian reading of these moments that I ofered earlier attended
exclusively to the actions of the body, a Weilian approach would also consider
their evocation of movements of the soul. During the fnal shot of this scene, in
a voice barely audible over the din of the machine, Isabelle exclaims in voice-
over: My God, why have you abandoned me? Isabelles words accentuate one
of the multiple meanings of the title of the flm, the frst by Godard to deal in
a sustained way with Christian subject-matter, and initiate a series of refer-
ences to the divine which punctuates its exploration of love and work. Te
cry attributed in two of the Gospels to Christ in his agony is also quoted in La
Pesanteur et la grce, where the cross is associated with upward motion.
51
It was
only a beam, not a tree, speculates Weil, because leaves and fruit are a waste of
energy if we only want to rise.
52
Implicitly attributing this desire to the worker,
the factory is initially glimpsed in Passion between shots that pan across the
sky. Tis sequence juxtaposes natural with supernatural forces and the law of
gravity, perceptible in Isabelles tiredness, with images suggestive of grace, even
as the dialogue alludes to divine absence. Although this spiritual dimension is
absent from Agambens engagements with work and gesture, the sequence also
assists in elucidating his oblique debt to Weil. As Leland de la Durantaye and
Ricciardi point out, Agambens concept of potentiality is genealogically related
to, if in crucial respects diferent from, Weils notion of decreation.
53
In La
Pesanteur et la grce, Weil defnes decreation as making the created pass into
the uncreated.
54
Tis passage, she elaborates, involves abandoning the I or
renouncing being something in order that God can love through us.
55
A sense
of something becoming nothing is created in the progression from movement
to stillness, evocative of the transition from life to death, that occurs, as I noted
earlier, in the sequence that introduces the factory and the studio.
56
Agambenian
potentiality and Weilian decreation interact in Godards images of arrested
motion.
Towards the end of Passion, there is a sequence that provides further
resources, I want to argue, for understanding the lineage that connects Agamben
to Weil. Te flm cuts back and forth between the recreation of Te Virgin of
the Immaculate Conception and a scene in which Isabelle and Jerzy prepare to
have sex. As Kaja Silverman points out, the flm repeatedly situates elements
belonging to the [painting] in the scene in Isabelles bedroom, and elements
belonging to the sex scene in the biblical scene.
57
Isabelle is identifed here
simultaneously with Christ (as at the beginning of the flm) and the Virgin,
connections forged by music (excerpts of the Agnus Dei from Faurs Requiem)
and dialogue (Isabelle recites the supplication to the Lamb of God in voice-over)
and reinforced by gesture (she momentarily places her lef hand on her chest,
mirroring the pose of Mary in the tableau vivant). In turn, her nakedness is
paralleled in the tableau by that of an angel whose equivalent on El Grecos
canvas is clothed.
58
Te mutual contamination of these scenes anticipates the
polarization of the feminine between carnality and spirituality that Laura
Mulvey discerns in Godards next two features, Prnom Carmen (1983) and Je
vous salue Marie (1985). Mulvey criticizes these flms for using the mythical
enigma of femininity to signify other, more profound mysteries (the origins
of life, the creation of art).
59
Yet the preoccupation with mystery and mysticism
which comes to the fore in Passions recreation of El Grecos image is aligned
there with persistent material considerations more in keeping with Agambens
priorities, I would suggest, through gestural choreography and the imaging of
force.
Te flms concern with the relation between the spiritual and the material
can be elucidated by comparing the tableau vivant with its template. Te Virgin
of the Immaculate Conception exemplifes a number of features particular to El
Grecos late style. Naturalism is subordinated to the drama of a spiritual vision.
Unearthly lighting and elongated, swirling shapes evoke a transcendental
energy and a powerful upwards straining. Probably for this reason, the painting
has sometimes been viewed as an assumption, rather than a conception or
creation. Indeed, for Silverman, there is [] a certain undecidability in the
original about whether the celestial is approaching the terrestrial, or the terres-
trial the celestial.
60
Godards tableau vivant retains the principal protagonists
of the painting and roughly copies their positions and postures. Furthermore,
the virtual force that appears to draw them heavenwards in the original is
actualized in the flm by two ascending crane shots. However, other aspects of
the flm scene rework and subvert the dynamic content of the canvas. Firstly,
although the fuid relation between the physical and the spiritual is a traditional
concern of the Christian-themed tableau vivant and its cinematic relatives (as
Jean-Louis Leutrat points out, Godards title is a nod to early flms, precisely
named Passion, which were a succession of tableaux vivants depicting the
ways of the cross), El Grecos dematerialized shapes cannot be reproduced in
such intermedial forms.
61
Secondly, rather than seeing the tableau as a whole,
we encounter it by parts. Te proximity of the camera to the models annuls the
unifying spiritual force conjured by the painter. Finally, in a third shot, which
curves from the top to the base of the tableau, we see models adjusting their
costumes. Tis shot departs from El Grecos artwork by introducing downward
motion and making visible the processes of image production.
Bergala perceives in Godards flming of the tableau the infuence of Weil,
linking the cameras slow descent suggestively to her characterization of grace as
a movement ungoverned by gravity.
62
I would suggest that human motion and
gestural patterning in this sequence also speak to Weils, as well as Agambens,
concerns. Several elements recall the factory scenes. Te sequence is prefaced
by a fragment of conversation between Jerzy and Isabelle about loving work,
in which Isabelle says that she will miss her job. Te connection to labor is
reinforced by Isabelles manual actions. In striking contrast to the fowing
of the camera around the tableau vivant, the bedroom is revealed in static
frames. In the frst of these shots, the only moving object is one of Isabelles
hands. As it caresses her leg and touches her chest, its trajectory is rendered
more conspicuous by backlighting, the pink glow which limns her silhouette.
Pictorially, this shot echoes those of her laboring at the outset of the flm, in
spite of the diference in gestural content. If, like Weil, this sequence associates
notions of spirituality and work, its blending of motion and stillness simulta-
neously returns us to Agambens thinking on gesture and medium. Whereas
the studio scene renders the transition from painting to cinema, the bedroom
scene sees cinema approximating painting. Agambens call for attention to work
that manifests its potentiality correlates less strongly with the shots that spiral
up the completed tableau vivant, than with the one that swerves downwards
and captures the fgures resuming movement. El Grecos focus on creation is
abjured as we witness the dismantling of the spectacle, its becoming nothing, its
decreation.
Even though he argues against stressing labor and production and barely
refers to these concepts in his writing on cinema, Agamben ofers insights which
can enrich thinking about the mediums correspondences with the temporalities
and gestures of work. Te arguments elaborated in Te Work of Man and
Notes on Gesture intersect, broadly speaking, in the notion of dynamism,
which they respectively characterize as a lack of defning work or essence and
an intrinsic property of the image. Read together, these essays suggest that ideas
about work and potentiality can enhance understanding of flm as medium, not
merely of images of labor. Without addressing cinema in any sustained way, Weil
too supplies perspectives which can illuminate this nexus of once again critically
current issues in flm studies. La Pesanteur et la grce and La Condition ouvrire
posit connections between the forces that tug on the (working) body and those
that pull on and energize the soul. Drawing inspiration from these texts, Passion
meditates on the relation between material conditions and spiritual experience,
love and work, movement and stillness, helping us to glimpse Weils haunting
presence in Agambens writings. Godard returns to the relation between the
gestural body and the work of image creation in the video essay Scnario du flm
Passion (1982) and, later, in Histoire(s), where, according to Bergala, gesture
assumes the character of a privileged passage of the sacred.
63
In Passion,
however, gesture is not oriented towards a predetermined telos, and Christian
intertexts provide inspiration not for retreating from the earthly or material, but
for exploring questions of movement, decreation and work that are distinctly
formulated in the writings of Weil and Agamben.
Notes
1 Mary Ann Doane, Te Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency,
the Archive (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 56.
Translations from French are mine, except where published translations are cited.
2 Janet Harbord, Te Evolution of Film: Rethinking Film Studies (Cambridge: Polity,
2007), 150.
3 Harbord, Evolution of Film, 149, 170.
4 Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti,
Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2000 [1996]), 4953.
5 Agamben, Means Without End, 49, 53.
6 Giorgio Agamben, Te Work of Man (2005), trans. Kevin Attell, Giorgio
Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (eds)
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 10.
7 Giorgio Agamben, Diference and Repetition: On Guy Debords Films, trans.
Brian Holmes, Guy Debord and the Situationist International, ed. Tom McDonough
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 315.
8 For illuminating discussion of aspects of Passion, such as its consideration
of European art and history, that prefgure Histoire(s), see James S. Williams,
European Culture and Artistic Resistance in Histoire(s) du cinma Chapter 3A,
La Monnaie de labsolu, Te Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard
19852000, Michael Temple and James S. Williams (eds) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2000), 114, 134.
9 Giorgio Agamben, Te Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993 [1990]), 43.
10 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ed. and trans. Roger Crisp (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 1112.
11 Agamben, Work of Man, 2.
12 Aristotle cited in Agamben, Work of Man, 4; Agamben, Work of Man, 2.
14 For incisive consideration of the factory/cinema analogy in Passion, see Laura
Mulvey, Te Hole and the Zero: Te Janus Face of the Feminine in Godard, in
Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image, 19741991, Raymond Bellour, Mary Lea Bandy
(eds) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992), 779.
21 Michael Witt, Altered Motion and Corporeal Resistance in France/tour/dtour/
deux/enfants, For Ever Godard, Michael Temple, James S. Williams and Michael
Witt (eds) (London: Black Dog, 2004), 2057, 20910.
22 Alain Bergala, Nul mieux que Godard (Paris: Cahiers du cinma, 1999), 2435.
24 A related observation is made by the voice-over narrator in the short essay flm
Workers Leaving the Factory (1995) by Harun Farocki, whose recent work has
recurrently addressed the issue of labor in the twentieth century: most narrative
flms begin afer work is over. [] Whenever possible, flm has moved hastily away
from factories.
25 Douglas Morrey, Jean-Luc Godard (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2005), 534.
26 Williams, European Culture, 115.
27 Brigitte Peucker, Te Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford: Stanford
28 Peucker, Material Image, 30.
29 Tese three types of movement are mentioned in Farockis discussion of shifs
between painting and cinema in Passion. In Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki,
Speaking About Godard (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 173.
31 Alessia Ricciardi, From Decreation to Bare Life: Weil, Agamben, and the
Impolitical, diacritics 39: 2 (2009): 75.
32 See, for example, Jean-Luc Godard, Le Chemin vers la parole, (interview with
Alain Bergala, Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana) Cahiers du cinma 336 (1982).
33 Agamben, Diference and Repetition, 315, 318. See James S. Williamss chapter
in this book for a brilliant reading of Agambens claims about cinema, messianism
and gesture against the existential themes and decreative forms of Godards flm
Soigne ta droite (1987).
34 Simone Weil, La Condition ouvrire (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 268.
35 Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la grce (Paris: Plon, 1988 [1947]), 7.
36 See Simone Weil, Dcration in La Pesanteur et la grce (Paris: Plon, 1988
[1947]), 4250.
37 Weil, Pesanteur, 40.
40 Simone Weil cited in David McLellan, Simone Weil: Utopian Pessimist (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1989), 23.
42 Weil, Condition ouvrire, 223.
43 Weil, Pesanteur, 204; Condition ouvrire, 2612.
46 Weil, Condition ouvrire, 266, 272.
49 Morrey, Godard, 143, 144.
53 Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2009), 223; Ricciardi, From Decreation to Bare Life.
55 Weil, Pesanteur, 43, 44.
57 Kaja Silverman in Silverman and Farocki, Speaking About Godard, 192.
58 A footnote in the shot by shot dcoupage compiled by Nathalie Bourgeois compares
this angel with El Grecos painting Saint Sebastian. In LAvant-scne cinma 380
(1989): 78.
59 Mulvey, Te Hole and the Zero, 81.
60 Silverman in Silverman and Farocki, Speaking About Godard, 194.
61 Jean-Louis Leutrat, Traces that Resemble Us: Godards Passion, SubStance 15: 3:
51 (1986): 41. I would like to thank Brigitte Peucker for drawing my attention to
the intertwined histories of the tableau vivant and Christianity.
62 Bergala, Nul mieux que Godard, 114.
63 Bergala, Nul mieux que Godard, 245.
3
Gesture, Time, Movement : David Claerbout
meets Giorgio Agamben on the Boulevard
du Temple
Janet Harbord
Across the corpus of Giorgio Agambens work lie scattered a number of specu-
lative propositions on what may be said to defne or characterize the species of
the human. One of the most forceful of these speculations occurs in the intro-
duction to the English translation of the work Infancy and History, a prologue
that Agamben wrote ffeen years afer the original publication of the book in
Italian in 1978. In this introduction he notes that Infancy and History itself is
but a prologue to an unwritten work, which remains stubbornly unwritten
and yet has a title, Te Human Voice. One of the pages of this work, he writes,
would contain the following questions: Is there a human voice, a voice that is
the voice of man as the chirp is the voice of the cricket or the bray of the donkey?
And, if it exists, is this voice language?
1
Te question of language is related to
the question of what it means to be human, yet the voice that may be language
is not simply that which is spoken or written. Language is a term encompassing
all that is unsaid as a presupposition upon which language may take place. Tis
relation, in which the spoken is the broken cast around the absent unsaid, he
gives the name in-fans. When he writes that there has been but one train of
thought, which is this question, what is the meaning of there is language,
and what is more, what is the meaning of I speak?, we are referred to the
experience of language as such.
Tis train of thought is manifest in many diferent ways across his writings,
and perhaps most vigorously as a question of humanity in, Te Open: Man and
Animal (2002/2004). Te Open stages a critique of the evolutionary construction
of humanity as the animal that becomes human through the expulsion of his own
animality. Te acquisition of language is retrospectively organized as the locus
of a strategic diference or capacity distinguishing man from animal.
2
Language
provides a constitutive component of what he names the anthropological
machine, an apparatus that not only distinguishes the species but privileges
human kind over all others; moreover, the relation of man to animal is one that
is both drawn on as an afnity embraced (the qualities of passion for example),
and also a resonance repudiated and expelled (the animality of violence). Te
book begins with a description of this paradox in illustrations from a thirteenth-
century Hebrew bible of man on the Day of Judgment as a creature bearing
the head of an animal. Tat Agamben makes use at times of Lvi-Strauss in
his engagement with language
3
should not however confuse his focus with the
project of grammatology in Derridas work. For Agamben, Derrida misdiag-
noses the problem of metaphysics; the vital question of language, for Agamben,
is not the infnite deferral of meaning and play of diference between signifer
and signifed (repudiating the hierarchy of speech as presence and writing as
absence). Instead, the question is within the order of the ethical, of what it means
for the human to be the living being that has language.
It may come as something of a surprise then to fnd a defnition of the human
in relation to images rather than language in (what might appear to be) the
margins of his work.
4
Here is Agamben speaking in memorium for his friend
Guy Debord, at a lecture in 1995
5
:
Now man is an animal who is interested in images when he has recognized
them as such. Tats why he is interested in painting and why he goes to the
cinema. A defnition of man from our specifc point of view could be that man
is a movie-going animal. He is interested in images afer he has recognized that
they are not real beings.
6
While the fgure of Debord, rather than images, is the subject of the talk,
Agamben parses the topicality of the image through Debords practice. Why,
he asks, was cinema the privileged medium for Debord, the strategist, rather
than, say, poetry (Debord having abandoned the Lettrist project earlier in his
career) or painting? Te answer brings into play the historical dimension of the
image, the close tie between cinema and history, or what he goes on to call
the eminently historical character of the image.
7
What follows in the essay is a
summary (or condensation) of the meaning of the historical nature of the image
in Agambens work, referencing messianic time, the dialectical image, stoppage
and repetition, all appearing as keystones also to Debords flm works. Of
course, bound up with this question of what cinematic images mean to Debord,
of why he chose this medium over others, is the question of what images mean
for Agamben. While Agamben presents the choice of medium to Debord, there
Gesture, Time, Movement 73
is a degree of slippage in the way that he glides between his own references to
image-types in this memorial lecture. In this particular description of man as
a movie-going animal, one might note the equivocation of flmic images with
paintings ([t]hats why he is interested in painting and why he goes to the
cinema),
8
and, in other essays, reference to a third image-type in the photo-
graph.
9
Indeed, across his work the media of photography, flm and painting are
drawn on variously yet their singularity as means is not brought into focus.
From the point of view of flm theory and art history,
10
the lack of attention
to such diferences suggests a wide departure from the methodological concern
with the specifc properties of form and their historical (if promiscuous)
development as inscribed in these disciplines.
11
Indeed, the question of what is
understood by the historical nature of the image, and by a medium, is poten-
tially at odds in the encounter between flm theory and Agambenian philosophy.
Te photographic image, according to Agamben, is not the mummifcation of a
moment resolute in its still capture, but the potential release of a dynamis and
the site of a particular investiture concerning the capture of the human fgure in
her own medium. Te human being as a species is fundamentally located in a
mode of being visible, never self-defned but given over to the gestural qualities
of her appearance. Te image, writes Agamben in Special Being, is a being
whose essence is to be a species, a visibility or an appearance
12
and while he
is writing here with regard to the refected image in a mirror, the philological
tie between image as speculum and the human species as the locus of gestural
production binds the two. Neither mirror image nor human subject is defned by
a substance, but by the process of becoming visible, being given to appearance, a
defnition of humanity as communicability itself. Te photographic image then,
like the image in the mirror, and like the human subject, coincides there as an
accident of sorts but not a substance of any kind.
If there seems to be a lack of attention to disciplinary demarcations and
approaches in this treatment of image forms, we might re-orient debate with
reference to Agambens recent discussion of method and in particular, his
discussion of the term paradigm, in Te Signature of All Tings: On Method
(2008/9). In this discussion, the concept of the paradigm is elucidated and may
be traced retrospectively through Agambens work as the generation of a form
of knowledge that moves from singularity to singularity, fnding analogies,
correspondences and echoes across categories in the production of a paradigm
that is imminent to things.
13
Tat is, the paradigm does not impose a model or
operate deductively, nor proceed from an example, but fnds correspondences
between things in a crossing of diachrony and synchrony. We might postulate
then that photography and flm, and indeed painted images, create a paradigm
as the site of encounter between the change of things across time (diachrony)
and the relations between things at any one time (synchrony). Indeed, there is
a refexive re-play of the changing of things across time that photography in
particular is thought to capture.
Te idea of the photograph as the capture of an instant, as the registration of
a temporal point in time, has characterized critical ruminations about photog-
raphy for the past eighty years or more.
14
It is this notion of photography as an
exemplary means to record time (arrested as a still), that Agambens paradigm
of the image implicitly refutes. In his terms, the photographs potentiality is
conversely the release of a dynamis, fundamentally linked to a Benjaminian
concept of kairological time; that is, the paradigm takes no account of the
polarity of stillness and movement as they are conventionally attributed to
photography and flm respectively. And yet the paradigm within which the
image is situated, elaborated across some twenty texts and essay collections,
remains (in terms of flm theory at least) elliptical, connecting media with time
but in an unorthodox re-writing of the relation, and simultaneously trans-
gressing any defnition of distinct media forms. My objective in this essay is
to sketch the way in which Agambens use of images as a move away from a
fxed medium specifcity is, simultaneously, a move away from the concept of
a fxed human ontology. Rather than appeal to the distinct domains of cinema
and photography, I will refer to contemporary art and the installation as the
location of a dismantling of traditional medium-specifc defnitions and the
re-assemblage of resemblances, correspondences and sympathies across these
lines. In particular, Belgian artist, David Claerbout, produces such works where
a medium is a site for experimentation, whose practice can be described as
making coincidental rather than substantial productions, or controlled exper-
iment in modes of appearing.
Claerbouts practice might be said to take place entirely within the space
between flm and photography. Unlike Barthes strong preference for the
photograph over and above cinema, Claerbout seems to not take a preference,
profering a hesitant, reserved art that is never fully aligned with one or other
medium. We know to what extent David Claerbout keeps his distance from
cinema, writes Raymond Bellour.
15
Claerbout criticizes cinema for just about
everything Roland Barthes criticized it for so long ago: cinemas relative
lack of pensiveness, its nervousness, its dependency on narrative structure,
all contributing to a sense of disappointment that cinema bears neither the
defnitive stamp of the studium nor the seductive sudden impingement of the
punctum that Barthes found so appealing in photography.
16
Yet it is not the
case that Claerbout neglects the indexical reference of the image as historical,
but rather that he releases within this the gestural potential of an image. Take,
for example, Claerbouts early work, Kindergarten Antonio SantElia (1998),
seemingly a photograph of a nursery garden, designed to angular modernist
principles, featuring a scattering of young children at play. Te original photo-
graph was taken in 1932 in Como, Italy, at the opening of the nursery. Claerbout
had found the picture in an architectural book celebrating the new urbanism
of designed space in the 1930s, a moment that he talks about as utopian, the
photograph part of a series staging and celebrating, in its original context, a
fresh new environment.
Te garden of Kindergarten was designed by Giuseppe Terragni, an architect
who worked for Mussolini, who pioneered a rationalist international style
which was subsequently to became associated with a clinical proto-fascist
rationalism. Te angle of the photograph suggests that it was taken from a level
above ground, perhaps a frst-story window looking down on an enclosed area
pleasingly patterned with new white paving stones laid in geometric shapes
with grass cut around the curves of paved form. Within the two paved areas
a circle has been cut to allow the planting of two trees, which appear to ft
the spaces exactly, young thin-limbed trees yet to mature. Around the trees, a
number of children (at least eighteen) stand, run and play, dressed in identical
pristine white aprons, also thin-limbed and yet to mature. A low but bright sun
provides a startling light that throws well-defned shadows from the bodies of
the children and the limbs of the trees. If we view the image for more than a
few seconds, we notice a slight swimming movement, which is the swaying
of the trees, discretely, subtly animated. Claerbout re-versions the image as a
singlechannel video work that stages the signs of various temporalities.
Te scene of Kindergarten Antonio SantElia, becomes, in Claerbouts hands,
a still from a lost flm, a picture from a flm that we have not (yet) seen, the
dynamis of its capture returned in this particular moment of viewing. What
Claerbouts works suggest is that there is a time of looking at an image as well
as a time of taking. Tat is, the moment of its potency is not always visible,
or available, but in a Benjaminian sense the charge of the image fashes at a
particular moment. Te barely discernable movement in Claerbouts single-
channel works requires the viewer to be alert to such moments, to pay attention
to the surface of an image that we think we know but that catches us out in our
complacency. Here are young trees that move as they may have moved in 1932,
their dynamis intact, which in turn refers us to the movement of these children,
each in a process of turning, running, stepping that is, as yet, incomplete. In the
cast of these small gestures, the form of the bodies refers us to their dynamic
potential, and moreover to further images and gestures to come. It may not be
an exaggeration to say that the picture refers to gesturality itself. Te moment
brings together the historical context with an exigency to fnd a name for
these children, to take account of their singular lives, while at the same time to
apprehend their generic openness to communication, the capacity of gesturality
that fnds the human revealed in her own medium.
It is possibly only through the pursuing of an illusive diference between
flm and photography in Claerbouts works that movement is revealed in its
relation to temporality; the photograph is not the index of a static point in
time, but the image of a potential capacity. Movement in both media is located
in gesture rather than any type of chemical registration. What converges in
Claerbouts practice and Agambens treatment of the image is an understanding
of flmic and photographic productions as the potential bearers of a messianic,
kairological time, a time of the now that up-ends the conceptual framework
within which flm and photography are conventionally thought. In pursuing
an encounter between the two, the features of the kairological are given greater
force. By way of tending to the image as production, I want to turn to a number
of particular images that are brought into appearance in the work of the artist
and the philosopher respectively, and initially to cross-refer their treatment of
stillness and motion in an approach to kairological time, before noting fnally
their points of diference.
Boulevard du Temple
Te complexity of the correspondence between movement and stillness, which
is subtly diferent from the pairing of dynamis and stasis, we fnd in Agambens
concise essay Judgment Day, (Profanations, 2005/7). Te essay opens with a
description of the frst photographic image featuring human fgures, named
afer the place of its taking, Boulevard du Temple, and photographed in 1838
by French artist and chemist Louis Daguerre. Daguerre, we may note, had an
involvement in other frst things, having partnered in chemical experimentation
with the photographer of the frst still life, Te Dinner Table by Joseph Niepce.
Boulevard du Temple is not however about frst things but about fnal things
in Agambens account, an eschatology closely linked to Benjamins thought,
but we will come to this. Te everyday activity that became photography (as
the documenting of life) evinced the detail of everyday existence, the ritual
practices of life as habitat, practices that are partially un-thought marginalia. It
is this seemingly irrelevant detail of the everyday, however, that comes to appear
in this image, is called forth, summoned to appear on Judgment Day.
17
It is also
the case that the frst photograph showing human fgures profers the somewhat
contingent nature of that by which we will be judged. For the boulevard,
Agamben observes, should be crowded with people and carriages on a busy
day, and yet because of the length of photographic exposure requiring more
than ten or possibly twenty minutes to elapse, the crowd is not visible. Nothing
of this throng is visible (though still present), but only a man who has stopped
to have his shoes shined, who must have been stationary for some while: Te
crowd of humansindeed, all of humanityis present, but it cannot be seen,
because judgment concerns a single person, a single life: precisely this one and
no other.
18
Agambens account resonates with that of a contemporary of Daguerre,
Samuel Morse, inventor of the single wire telegraph system in 1838 (a year
before the photograph of Boulevard du Temple). Morse wrote a description of
the image afer visiting Daguerres studio,
19
which was published in the New
York Observer in April 1839. Observing the plate he writes, Objects moving
are not impressed, with the exception of the individual who was having his
shoes brushed. His feet were compelled, of course, to be stationary for some
time, one being on the box of the boot black, and the other on the ground, he
continues, consequently his boots and legs were well defned, but he is without
body or head, because these were in motion. Photography fails to impress
an object (or subject) in movement, except as an absence or a blurred form.
For Morse, the body here fails to transmit itself across the boundary of life to
register as silver nitrate inscription as a whole body, becoming fragmented,
perhaps codifed diferently by qualities of movement and stillness. It is inter-
esting to note that Morse expresses a concern with photography as an act of
transmission, tracing what remains afer the transmission is over, rather than
with historical registration. In correlation to the morse signal transmitted across
space, photography appears as a transmission across time.
Both Agamben and Morse fx upon the presence and absence that the image
brings forth, but it is not the case that what is registered, or impressed, is a
stillness in any simple sense. What is not registered is the animistic movement
of bodies, or transport. What is registered however is motion, either as absence,
blurred form, or gesture. Te photograph in this sense does not polarize
stillness and movement, or image and life, later to become the polarization of
photography and flm. Rather, it releases the mobile forces within an image as a
centrifugal force-feld. For Agamben, what the photograph captures is a gesture,
charged with the weight of an entire life. In what we might call the implication
of movement in gesture, the photograph calls up a moment that is not an instant
within a continuum, but a paradigm of heterogeneous times that breaks from
the concept of the image as a sealed surface containing an historical truth.
Te various registers of movement within a photograph (that Agamben
reads as indices of diferent conceptions of time), however created a degree of
confusion in the time of the photographs production (the 1830s). Te variation
of what is and is not in focus in Daguerres photographs, for example, fnds
the commentary of his contemporaries reaching towards an understanding of
what exactly, or inexactly, is being produced. Te French correspondent for
the Foreign Quarterly Review singled out the problematic imaging of leaves:
In foliage, he is less successful, the constant motion in the leaves rendering
his landscapes confused and unmeaning [] which can never be properly
delineated without the aid of memory.
20
Te blurred leaves of Daguerres plates
render the whole confusing, demanding recourse to memory on the part of
the viewer. Tis particular problem for early photography is revisited by
Claerbout to produce an opportunity to break open the surface of the image.
Everywhere in his practice during the late 1990s are images of the swaying limbs
of trees (single channel video works
21
).
Boom (1996), is an 18-minute single channel installation where a tree is
flmed on a summers day in full color as the sun moves over its form. Te
flm evidences both a multiplicity of the individually moving leaves, and a
uniform swaying of the whole structure. A year later, Claerbout moves from
flming leaves to selecting and animating the arboreal section of a photograph.
Ruurlo, Borculoscheweg (1997), is an artwork derived from a postcard found
in an old book, providing a view of a landscape displaying a tree, a windmill
and two groups of fgures, taken somewhere in the Netherlands around 1910.
Te postcard (notably a photograph concretized as an object of transmission),
which might once have articulated something of the landscape and village life of
the time, now registers, retrospectively, the newness of the medium of photog-
raphy. Te novel appearance of what must have been a fairly cumbersome piece
of equipment arriving in the village, can be read from the pose of the small
clutch of fgures in the foreground, lef. Te two fgures slightly to the front of
the group are both men, dressed, as far as one may discern, in dark trousers and
jackets. Behind them, and in the shade of the tree, is a group of either women or
adolescent girls with white aprons and possibly headwear showing, diminutive
by comparison. Whether their place within the landscape conforms to social or
economic hierarchy, or whether the day was warm and the women took to the
shade, it is not possible to say. But certainly, the group is posing for the camera.
By 1910, this group of villagers had learnt that in order to appear in the photo-
graph, that is, to be registered with precision, one must keep still and face the
camera (with an eye to the prospective future viewer) for the duration of the
photographic capture. Te photograph is staged, a presentation, and no longer
located in the ordinary habituations, or rags and refuse, of the everyday.
22
When Ruurlo, Bocurlo scheweg is installed as a video work, we see the slight
swaying of the branches and the movement of leaves on the tree. Te huge
arboreal structure that spreads out across the frame, dwarfng the windmill and
the fgures, is stirred by an imaginary wind, a slight breeze. A portion of the photo-
graph is animated, as indeed it would have been on that day; the human fgures
conform to a static pose while the tree remains in dynamic relation to the elements
and environment. In Kindergarten Antonio SantElia (1998), it is the young trees
that have been given to animation and the children frozen, and once more, in an
untitled work from 19982000, the only animated feature of an image of boys
seated in rows in a classroom is the shadow of a tree on the back wall. Claerbout,
it could be said, locates movement at the heart of photography in an inverse
symmetry to the notion that at the heart of cinema is stillness.
23
Yet in Claerbouts
productions, movement is not in any simple sense an attribute of cinema (or
video) that marks its diference from photography, nor is it the designation of an
unfolding flmic present in contrast to a photographic past. Rather, the animated
form of the image is a barely discernable pulse of dynamic movement operating
on a loop; repetitive, circular but without a clear sense of a beginning or end, this
looped movement undercuts the temporal associations that have been attributed
to photography and flm. What Claerbout reinserts into the photographic image is
a form of gesture, or in other words, the mode of appearing as such.
In Agambens discussion of gesture, in the cinematic Notes on Gesture,
and in the more literary discussion Kommerell, or On Gesture,
24
the gestural
act defes the binary of movement/stillness, and the discussion weaves between
early cinema and photography. Te former essay begins with identifying a new
pathology in human movement, traced by Gilles de la Tourette through the
imprint of a subjects gait as a series of footprints on a roll of paper. Agamben
fnds a correspondence in the patterns that emerged with Muybridges photo-
graphic experiments of the walking, running, jumping subject. What crosses
from one to the other (de la Tourette to Muybridge) is not the recording of
movement in time and space, but a generalized catastrophe of the sphere of
gestures.
25
As the natural gestural language of communication is lost, the more
life becomes indecipherable, and it is this loss that the cinema registers in its
earliest form. Perhaps most signifcant in Agambens reading of this period in
the late nineteenth century is the comment that follows this diagnosis: from
this moment onwards, the bourgeoisie which just a few decades earlier was
still frmly in possession of its symbols, succumbs to interiority and gives itself
up to psychology.
26
Tis turn inwards becomes manifest in a cinema of psycho-
logical drama, instrumental in producing a linear, narrative form predicated on
an internally located subjectivity in need of deciphering. Gesture, as a mode of
appearing to others, and its demise, is at the center of a redistribution of ethical
relations in which the cinema is implicated. Tis in turn drives defnitions
and uses of the cinema and photography as the arrest of time, movement and
identity.
Gesture as a potentiality enacted between people but without being a means
to an end (of a story, a time, an outcome), appears as a type of experiment in
re-making cinema in a number of Claerbouts works.
27
In Bordeaux Piece (2004)
the use of repetition forces the principal act of gesture into the foreground over
the duration of the piece (13 hours and 43 minutes). Te story of Jean-Luc
Godards Le Mepris is chosen as a narrative to be re-versioned, although
according to Claerbout, it could have been a diferent story (2007: 112). Te
flm is reworked as a series of situations for which Claerbout wrote dialogue,
and about which he has said that he flmed it so that it doesnt really work.
Te flm sequence of about 1012 minutes is shot 70 times, beginning at
5.30 a.m. and continuing to 10 p.m. and the loss of light. Te same script is
performed, the same dialogue spoke in the same locations, a production that
plays out Agambens treatize on stoppage and repetition.
28
What changes most
signifcantly is frst of all the light, and second, the experience of the flm as
flm. Te production rolls on, repeats, replays, and as the light changes, the
content of the dialogue becomes less signifcant, the outcomes of the actions
unimportant. Te production is an experiment of the emptying out of causal
factors (means directed towards ends), and the appearance of gesture as such,
or what Agamben also refers to as pure means. Human gesture is slowly, repeti-
tively (through the deployment of stoppage and repetition), detached from its
commodifed form (to serve narrative ends), and diverted towards a non-linear
model of communication, dependent on a cyclical temporality located in the
environment (the cycle of a day). Tis model of gesturality returns us then to
models of temporality as they pertain to the image.
Te instant and the continuum
If the paradigm of Agambenian thought that encompasses the photographic and
flmic, and stasis and dynamis, is brought into correspondence through the articu-
lation of humanity through gestural means, the fnal maneouvre in this densely
crowded scene is a re-conceptualization of time. We speak, in our disciplines, of
flm as time-based media, and we use both flm and photography to record, to make
a document of a particular time that we archive, canonize, re-play or conversely
discard or neglect. Te time of the image would seem to be an instant (the
photograph), taken from a larger continuum (the flm, or indeed the continuum
of life). Yet if we regard the image as an indeterminate form between flm and
photography, as we fnd in Claerbouts productions, the categorical defnitions of
the instant and the continuum do not coincide. Tis fnal section turns to an early
essay by Agamben published in 1978, Time and History: a critique of the instant
and the continuum, where, I will argue, the key to this image paradigm is located.
Te essay opens with the statement that [e]very conception of history is invariably
accompanied by a certain experience of time, which is implicit in it, conditions it,
and thereby has to be elucidated.
29
Te implicit category of time, however, changes
from culture to culture and indeed across time (historical periods), imagined and
enacted in multiple ways. Te stakes are high in any imagining of time:
every culture is frst and foremost a particular experience of time, and no new
culture is possible without an alteration in this experience. Te original task of
a genuine revolution, therefore, is never merely to change the world, but also
and above all to change time.
30
Te essay, in true Agambenian mode, presents something of a compendium of
thought concerning time as it has been conceived of since Aristotle, and it is
worth outlining the contours of his account to grasp the basis of his critique.
It is from Greek culture, Agamben posits, that we inherit the notion of time as
an infnite quantifable continuum. According to Aristotle it is a quantity of
movement according to the before and the afer,
31
its ongoing condition assured
by its division into discrete instants, which none the less are circular and cosmic,
modelled on astronomy and the movement of celestial spheres. Within this, the
instant provides something like a seam, a join that links the past and the future
while the present (instant) remains elusively other; notably the past and the
future are, within this system, more tangible than the ungraspable present-yet-
passing instant.
Within Greek thought, time appears to be experienced as something
objective and determining of its own course, enveloping events inside of
itself: time, like space, is what we exist within, and the movement is circular,
a series of operations that follows astronomy in the repetition of orbits: from
this model we inherit the notion of return as repetition. Te Christian notion
of time, according to this account, introduces us to the inverse. Time is linear
and irreversible, with the birth of Christ marking a midway point between the
fall from Eden and the future redemption of humanity. Signifcantly, it is under
the auspices of Christian thought that time is detached from the rotational
movement of the ancient world and re-located within the subject as an interior
phenomenon. Saint Augustines Confessions, writes Agamben, is a prolonged
anguished interrogation of the feeting nature of the present as an instant that
has no extent of duration,
32
a nullifed time. Christian time is overlaid with the
same notion of the instant and the continuum but now the circle is ironed out
as a straight line, conjoining with modern time, the time of industrialization,
and a secularization of Christian time. Under modernity, dead time is extracted
from experience, with manufacturing work enacting the linearity of both the
production belt and clock time. Te concept of modern time draws its develop-
mental structure from the natural sciences, remaining linear as an account of
progress as movement forward. But time here is not connected to experience;
modern time is experience alienated.
If these are both familiar and fallible models of temporality, an alternative
and altogether more potent version of time is however to hand. Te elements
for a diferent concept of time lie scattered among the folds and shadows of the
Western cultural tradition,
33
Agamben writes, and it is from Gnosticism and
third century Stoicism, the forgotten traditions that retain a complex notion
of time, that he draws an account of an un-homogenous, incoherent time,
modelled as a broken line. Within Stoic thought, the concept of a continuous
time broken into discrete instants is unreal time, which can only condition
experience as waiting and deferral. Time, for the Stoics, is neither objective nor
removed from our control, but springing from the actions and decisions of the
human subject. Its model is the kairos, the abrupt and sudden conjunction where
decision grasps opportunity and life is fulflled in the moment.
34
Kairos, the
opportune moment in which something is driven through is also the Jetzt-Zeit,
an indeterminate, qualitative now-time, distilling within itself diferent times.
Tis critique of a western concept of time is notably dependent upon, or
congruent with, Benjamins thesis on history, and the incomplete project of
modernity as an unfolding catastrophe, radically in need of reconceptualizing
time itself. Yet there is a further dimension to the argument that Agamben
makes in this essay that refers us to the point as simultaneously a temporal
and spatial form. Tat is, the geometric point of perspective is aligned, in his
thinking, with the instant. Te point in geometry is also a metaphysical concept,
the foundation of a Euclidean formulation where, in its fundamental formu-
lation, space is fattened and expressed as a pair of points connected by a straight
line. Tis mathematical foundation posits a linear model of thinking analogous
to the instant, the point in time, about which he has this to say:
[Te point] is the opening through which the eternity of metaphysics insin-
uates itself into the human experience of time and irreparably splits it. Any
attempt to conceive of time diferently must inevitably come into confict with
this concept, and a critique of the instant is the logical condition for a new
experience of time.
35
In other words, a Euclidean geometric formulation secured a spatialized time of
the instant and the continuum, providing the model for a chronology dependent
on the infnite procession of time along a straight path, with markers that
identify any place along the line as points. For the Stoics, in contrast, dividing
time into discrete instants is unreal time, productive of a fundamental
sickness of waiting and deferral for time (as something objective) to arrive.
Tis fundamental sickness is the primary mode through which the photograph
is produced and apprehended, as the capture of the instant, a point in time that
is sealed from points afer and before. Agamben binds this apprehension of
time to a modernist sensibility with its associated corrosion of experience: Te
experience of dead time abstracted from experience, which characterizes life in
modern cities and factories, he writes, seems to give credence to the idea that
the precise feeting instant is the only human time.
36
Within the same logic, flm
comes to stand for the continuum, the potentially infnite process of recording
time as a set of instants running forward.
37
In Louis Daguerres frst image of humanity, it is possible to identify a process
in which time is not broken down into instants extracted from a continuum, but
an alchemical transformation of light into an image composed of diferent times.
In this sense, Boulevard du Temple is not so far from Claerbouts animated images
that use qualities of movement and stillness to signal diferent temporalities. In
Daguerres image, contingency has lef its trace in a literal sense, as the actions of
people in stillness or movement on the Boulevard has rendered time as a quali-
tative rather than quantitative phenomenon. Te revelation of the frst image
then is not only that it is the frst photographic image of humanity, but that it is
the revelation of time reconceptualized as kairological. As Agamben reminds us,
the Greek concept of time was twofold, chronos and kairos, the former referring
to the sequential concept of events following events, while kairos provides for an
indeterminate time, taking advantage of contingent, opportune circumstance.
It may be ftting then that chronos has become the dominant term for thinking
of time and the technologies through which we model and experience it, and
that kairos has disappeared into the folds and shadows of a diferent tradition,
only to emerge feetingly in image forms. Te photograph as opportunity, as
colloquial usage has it, reverses and returns here as the model of a revolutionary
potential, the grasping of what is to hand, the moment of rupture and opening
of temporality and also power at precisely the moment that the experience of
time restlessly observes the edge over which it leans.
38
Te kairological refers us not only to the image, but to its legibility, which
has an equally contingent appeal as the site of an historical understanding
(history as experience here rather than chronology). Te contingency of the
appearance of time as the animated form in images is the movement at their
interior, legible only at a particular moment.
39
Te notion of legibility, deployed
by Benjamin, works against the traditional context-based understanding of the
singular image, made sense of through supplementary information (what is
outside of the frame in terms of spatial and temporal referents). In Benjamins
reading, legibility is founded rather in a moment of connection across time, a
singular instance where meaning is revealed: For the historical index of the
images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that
they attain to legibility only at a particular time.
40
Not all images are readable at
all times, but are documents within which an encrypted dynamis is released in
its correspondence with other images and events in the indeterminate relations
of diachrony and synchrony. Benjamin calls this moment an awakening, and
Agamben re-purposes the phrase to use it for the entry of humanity into
history.
41
Te demand for us to look, to not forget, to remember, is the moment
of gestural demand that gives [the photograph] a political destiny.
42
Te notion of a language or communication that we have not yet learnt how
to read or hear, is how we may think of flmic and photographic images today.
Fixated on their stillness or movement, we are not open to the possibilities
of their transmissions except perhaps through their re-workings in various
places, the installation being one. Claerbouts single channel works prise open
the various times dormant within an image through the release of its animated
and gestural potential. In a sense, Claerbouts productions may be viewed as a
taking back of the photograph for everyday use, removing it from the realms of
consecrated History, and thoroughly profaning it in his exercise of free use. If
commodifcation has separated goods from their context in a sacramental act,
profanation is the political act of returning a thing to the everyday, and to the
realm of play over economy.
We could extend this application and say that Claerbouts practice profanes
the idea of the (flm or photographic) image as a time removed and commodifed,
for what he reveals is the multiplicity of times and their broken correspond-
ences within the frame. His works direct us beyond this frame to other images,
towards unmade flms that none the less press in on the present, and virtual
flms to come. Profanation proliferates questions but ofers no answers: what is
outside the classroom window? What is it that this child is turning towards in
the playground? And what has happened between this scene and the next of a
flm made and remade over and over? On the Boulevard du Temple, a man is
having his shoes shined. Te sof rub and scuf of the brush as it passes over the
surface of the leather, the posture of the man crouched over his work who may
be engrossed or bored by this act of labor, whose labor has not yet been spoken
of at all, all of this belongs to another image, a flm to come.
Notes
1 Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans.
Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993 [1978]), 3. Agamben uses the problematic term
man to refer to all human subjects throughout but I will abide by his usage here.
2 Agambens thesis is not that man is inside language and animals exterior, but, as he
writes in another text, Animals do not enter language, they are already inside it.
Man, instead, by having an infancy, by preceding speech, splits this single language
and, in order to speak, has to constitute himself as the subject of languagehe has
to say I, in Infancy and History: an essay on the destruction of experience, in
Infancy and History, 52.
3 See Infancy and History: an essay on the destruction of experience, in Infancy
and History, 5960.
4 Te relationship between language and images is not, of course, one of counter-
tension in Agambens work. His approach is aligned with Benjamins who describes
the dialectic at a standstill, ending Only dialectical images are genuine images
(that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language.
Walter Benjamin Te Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland, Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge and London, MA: Harvard University Press 1999 [1982]), 462.
5 Debord died November 30, 1994.
6 Tis text, Diference and Repetition: on Guy Debords Films, is the translation
of a lecture by Giorgio Agamben, delivered on the occasion of the Sixth
International Video Week at the Centre Saint-Gervais in Geneva in November
1995, reproduced in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and
Documents, ed. Tomas McDonough (Cambridge and London, MA: MIT Press,
2004), 314. For further commentary from Agamben on Debord, see Marginal
Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle, in Means Without End:
Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti, Casare Casarino, (Mineapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press), 7389.
9 Judgment Day, in Profanations, trans. Jef Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007) 238.
10 Agambens fguring of disciplines echoes the relation of the said to the unsaid
in that each discipline would appear to be predicated on that which cannot be
articulated as much as that which is named. Take for example his essay on Aby
Warburg and the science of culture, which opens thus: Tis essay seeks to situate
a discipline that, in contrast to many others, exists but has no name. Giorgio
Agamben, Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science [1975] in Potentialities:
Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Werner Hamacher, David E. Wellbery
11 Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, Karen Beckman, Jean Ma (eds)
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008).
12 Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jef Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2005
[2007]), 57.
13 Agamben provides a summative list of six points defning the paradigm including
its analogical procedure, its neutralization of the dichotomy of the general and
particular, immanence and the refusal of origins () on page 31.
14 Kracauers essay Photography (1927) stands out as one of the frst discursive
texts on the medium in Europe (Kracauer, Photography, Te Mass Ornament:
Weimer Essays, trans. Tomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1995)).
15 Bellour, Raymond, How to See?, David Claerbout and the Shape of Time, ed.
Christine Van Assche (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2008), 36.
16 Ibid., 36.
17 Agamben, Profanations, 23.
18 Ibid., 24.
19 Tis was a private letter from Morse to the editor of the New York Observer, 9
March 1839, published 20 April. Te day afer Morse visited the studio, Daguerre
in turn paid a visit to Morse to view the telegraphic system. During the period of
the visit however, Morse recounts the melancholic event simultaneously occurring
in Daguerres studio: a fre took place destroying his valuable notes and papers,
the labour of years of experiment. Te plate of the Boulevard, presumably was
amongst the salvaged items of the fre. Te Daguerreian Society website: http://
www.daguerre.org/resource/texts/04201839_morse.html
20 Cited in Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (New
York: Zone Books, 2007), 44.
21 Single channel video works are screened as a single image, usually displayed on a
loop providing continuous duration of a repeated text.
22 Benjamins terms for the way in which material forms ofer themselves to his
project, or come into their own. Te Arcades Project, 460.
23 Laura Mulvey, Death 24 x a second: stillness and the moving image (London:
Reaktion, 2006).
24 Te former is published in Means without end, and the latter in Potentialities.
25 Giorgio Agamben, Notes on Gesture, in Means Without End, 51.
26 Ibid., 53.
27 Another example is the flm White House (2006).
28 For an account of stoppage and repetition in relation to new media and artworks,
see Carolyn Guertin, Digital Prohibition: Piracy and Authorship in New Media Art
(New York and London: Continuum, 2012).
29 Agamben, Time and History: a critique of the instant and the continuum, in
Infancy and History: the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London
Verso: and New York, 1978/1993), p. 11. Agamben returns to the concept of
messianic time as ho nyn kairos (the time of the now) in the Letters of Paul the
apostle, Te Time Tat Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans.
Patricia Dailey (Stanford University, Stanford Press: California, 2000/2005).
30 Agamben, Giorgio Time and History: Critique of the Instant and the Continuum,
Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron,
(London: Verso, 1978/1993), 91.
31 Aristotle cited by Agamben in Time and History, op. cit., 93.
32 Augustine cited by Agamben in Time and History, op. cit., 95.
33 Agamben in Time and History, op. cit., 100.
34 Agamben in Time and History, op. cit., 101.
35 Ibid., 100.
36 Ibid., 96.
37 Tere is also the implication in this argument that the basis of the one-point
perspective characterizing western image forms as emanating from the center of the
image and moving out as a triangle, is complicit with a linear model of temporality.
38 Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (New York and
London: Continuum, 2003 [1997]), 1523.
39 Tis citation is from Te Arcades Project rather than the essay on photography. Te
Arcades Project, 462.
40 Ibid.
41 Te concept of awakening and the kairological are brought together in another
essay from Infancy and History, Fable and History. Here Agamben writes of the
miniature scene of the nativity crib that a cairological event is taking place, what
it shows us is the world of the fable precisely at the moment when it wakes up from
enchantment to enter history. 127.
42 Benjamin Noys, Separation and Reversibility: Agamben on the Image, Filozofski
Vestnik, 30:1 (2009), pp. 14359.
4
Film-of-Life: Agambens Profanation of
the Image
Benjamin Noys
From Platos anxieties concerning the simulacras disruption of the distinction
between original and copy, to Lacans implicit critique of the imaginary as the site
of doubling and deadly violence, Western metaphysics attests to the irreducible
and ambiguous potency of the image.
1
Te seductive force of the image is at
once an eternal temptation to philosophy as material for illustration and the
incarnation of presence, and the perpetual threat of corruption in the descent
into mere images and deathly distanciation. Te image is a true pharmakon
mimicking the instability of the pharmakon, which refers to something that is
both remedy and poison.
2
With the technological proliferation and ubiquity of
the image, through photography, cinema, and digital media, we are all, or at least
those of us who live in Europe, the United States, and similar states, living the
crisis of the metaphysics of presence as the crisis of the metaphysics of the image.
Giorgio Agambens thought is oriented to grasping this crisis as the realization
of the metaphysics of presence as the saturation of life by the image. At this point
metaphysics passes over into politics, and politics into metaphysics, as the image
puts at stake our existence as a living being.
3
Although the image is nowhere
a sustained point of reference for Agambens work, his momentary refections
and fragmentary comments on the image attests to the necessity continually
to displace its centrality. It is this displacement that I will consider. Agambens
refections on the image are minor, precisely in the sense given to this word
by Deleuze and Guattari,
4
as they operate a continual line of fight to release
the image from its function as a site of classifcation and capturefrom the
passport photograph to CCTV footage. Agamben is trying to break the deadly
fusion between Debords analysis of the society of the spectacle and Foucaults
counter-proposal of the society of surveillance,
5
in which capitalism becomes
an immense machine for the capture of life by images and the reduction of life to
images. Te original sin of capitalism is our separation from life, and this takes
place through the image; we are at once subject to the image, to being reproduced
as an image, and subjects of the image, which reigns over and dominates us.
Te absoluteness of this process means that we cannot simply fgure life as
the protean and evasive moment of resistance, opposed to, and occluded by, the
image. Tere is no original life to be opposed to its fallen copy; as Agamben
noted in Homo Sacer (1995) it is the simple form of bare life [la vita nuda,
Gk.: zo] which is the product of sovereign power and its site of inter-
vention.
6
Contrary to the various contemporary political vitalisms (Deleuze,
Negri, and, in a qualifed fashion, Foucault), for Agamben life is a negative
limit, rather than a positive value. Life is saturated and subsumed by power.
For this reason we cannot pass through the image to life, but rather we have to
perform an ambiguous un-working on the image, an act of profanation, to free
from the image the dynamis that exceeds and refuses the deployment of the
image within the smooth space of the capitalist sensorium.
7
If we are creatures
of the image then it is only in the traversal of the image that we can release the
feeting potential of resistance. Tis potential of resistance is encrypted in the
possibility of gesture which the image both contains and reveals.
Images are beautiful
Film is the prototype for all future capturing of the singular gestures of human
beings; it is an immense archive which records millions of such gestures that are
presented to us in a mode that at once makes visible and occludes the element
of gesture itself.
8
To borrow Heideggers terminology, which is obviously
an implicit reference for Agamben, cinema is the apparatus of the Ge-Stell
(En-framing) of the gesture.
9
But also, as with Heidegger, the dominance
of the Ge-Stell is the sign of both danger and of savingin Hlderlins words,
quoted by Heidegger, But where danger is, grows / Te saving power also (Wo
aber Gefahr ist, wchst / Das Rettende auch).
10
In the style of Walter Benjamin,
the other crucial reference for Agamben, within all the hours of flm recorded
every second of this time forms the strait gate through which the messiah could
enter.
11
Film is the equivocal and reversible site of redemption.
Franz Kafa, refecting at the birth of the age of cinema, gave this problem
its exemplary form. A keen cinema-goer, he regarded it as a space of boundless
Film-of-Life: Agambens Profanation of the Image 91
entertainment, but the German word malos suggests something exorbitant
or excessive (perhaps even something like Lacanian jouissance).
12
Te difculty
for Kafa was that cinema was too enjoyable, in the sense that it subjects us to
fascination, absorption, and capture, by the image. Te result is, not untypi-
cally for Kafa, an acute paradox: images are beautiful, we cannot do without
images, but they are also a source of much anguish.
13
Kafa draws out this point
in a comment made afer he visited the Imperial Panorama (Kaiserpanorama) in
the industrial town of Friedland in 1911. Te Panorama ofered a three-dimen-
sional viewing experience through the use of stereoscopic pictures and special
lenses, and was a highly popular nineteenth-century entertainment. Kafa
fnds the images of the panorama more lifelike than those of cinema because
they retain the stillness of reality, whereas cinema lends the restlessness of its
own movement to what is seen, the calm gaze seems to be more important.
14

Te anxiety here seems to fall on the frantic consistency of cinema, on the very
smooth space of its boundless enjoyment, on the uninterrupted fow of images
without cessation. In contrast, the panorama captures the stillness of reality
itself, another mode of contemplation that is less frantic and less immersive than
cinema.
In a sense, Kafas own fctions become a form of counter-cinema, answering
this demand for the calm gaze by stilling the restlessness of cinema to
reveal and isolate the gesture that is gathered and lost within the flmic space.
Drawing on the argument of Walter Benjamin, who states that Kafas entire
work constitutes a code of gestures,
15
we can suggest that against the cinematic
bewitchment of the image Kafa breaks the spell by placing us before the
generic human gesture as such. In doing so Kafa leaves behind the specifc and
specifed gesture of a particular individual to fnd the moment of the singular
gesture that we all share in common. In such a way the gesture is returned, as
Benjamin noted, to the status of an event.
16
Te repetitious movements of Kafas
fction, which presage Becketts anatomy of generic human motion, present us
with the gesture itself. Such a recovery, however, only becomes possible because
of the absolute alienation cinema inficts on every gesture: cinema captures all
gestures, even those most intimate (here we can think of the co-extensiveness
of cinema with pornography), but in doing so releases the infnite potential of
all gestures.
17
One of the ironic efects of Kafas anti-cinematic re-working of
the image is the tendency to mediocrity of cinematic adaptations of his writing,
with few, and not unproblematic, exceptions, such as Orson Welless Te Trial
(1962). Tese adaptations struggle to grasp the gestural function that Kafas
fction releases, and which makes of his writing a strange non-cinematic form of
flm which functions, to again refer to Benjamin, in terms of cosmic epochs.
18
If Kafa belongs to the moment of the opening of the age of cinema, then
Deleuze belongs to its moment of closure. He is, we could say, the last philos-
opher of cinema. For Deleuze certain flms ofered the crystalline time-image,
time in its pure state, released from its subordination to movement, in fact
released from the gestural (which is confned by Deleuze to the earlier cinematic
movement-image.)
19
Here the image ofers itself to philosophy as its refection
and realization, cinema thinks the purity of time. And yet Deleuze writes on
the cusp of the dissolution of cinema into a so-called audio-visual culture:
boundless entertainment is everywhere, as flms are viewed in the home, on
the laptop, or on tablets and smartphones.
20
Cinema has dissolved into flm, and
flm into a digital accessibility. Deleuze claims that this does not mean the end
of cinema, but the necessity to return to it as a beginning. Agamben returns to
cinema afer this closure, not to cinema to be thought as a new beginning, but
to the beginning of cinema. Under the condition of a realized postmodernity he
courts a deliberate archaism and a studied nostalgia by arguing, contra Deleuze,
that the essence of cinema is the movement-image of early cinema and silent
flm.
21
Redeeming the image
Film, for Agamben, recapitulates the general antinomy of the image. Every
image is a force feld structured by a polarity between the deadly reifcation
and obliteration of gesture (imago as death mask or symbol), and as the preser-
vation of dynamis intact (for example, Muybridges images, especially those of
sporting activity).
22
Film, in putting the body in motion, would appear to free
us from the bewitching potency of the static image, to free the gestural. In fact,
however, the gestural is recorded only to be subordinated againsubsumed
within a fowing of images that leaves each gesture subject to identifcation and
delimitation. Te gestural itself is obliterated and occluded, functioning as only
the means to an end, whether entertainment or pedagogy. We might think here
of the hypertrophy of gesture in contemporary cinema, no action star is without
his, or more unusually her, display of balletic assurance and combat profciency.
It is the irony that the putting of images into motion simply results in a new
meta-rigidity, a deadly conformity of gestures, which become both singular and
interchangeable.
To free flm from this stabilization of gesture we must, according to Agamben,
return flm to the frozen moment of the image.
23
Such a practice of breaking
the fow of images is rare, and Agamben turns not only to early cinema but
also to the flmmaking of Guy Debord as a crucial instance of stoppage: the
delay, isolation, and disruption of the image fow to permit the revelation and
redemption of gesture. In Debords words, from the commentary of his 1978 flm
In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni [In Girum], the frozen mirror of the
screen is rendered by the stasis of the imagesuch as in the images of the petit-
bourgeoisie from the beginning of that flm.
24
Here the clichs of advertising
and fashion are made uncanny by holding a steady gaze on images of a smiling
couple with two children playing in a modernist living room, or a fashionable
mothers smiling gaze at her child in a supermarket, to show that this simulated
rapture dissimulates looks of hatred, to quote Debords commentary.
25
Tis is
not a stepping out from the image into real life, as Debord occasionally seemed
to suppose, and which was treated in comic vein by Woody Allens Te Purple
Rose of Cairo (1985). Instead we turn within the imagehere between simulated
rapture and dissimulated hatred. Te image cannot be escaped into an exteri-
ority, the ontological primacy of life, because to bring life into presence is to turn
it into another image, subject to capture and control.
Te regime of the image can be resisted by the potency of the image that
does not attest to life as irreducible reserve, but rather to a potency that never
appears as such, or only in the moment of a refusal to pass over into the image,
held always in the image. At this moment rather than separating true original
life from secondary false copy, given archetypal, although also paradoxical,
formulation in Rousseau, we instead separate the image from itself, from the
potency it carries within it unrealized, and which is neither true nor false.
Agambens analysis of Debord is, again, indebted to Benjamin. In the conclusion
of his essay on surrealism, Benjamin noted that a radical practice required
that we discover political action in a sphere reserved one hundred percent for
images.
26
Tis is not a contemplative practice, but one where an action puts
forth its own image.
27
Agamben fnds this practice in Debord, and responding
to Debords claim that the power of capitalism is always one of separation,
Agamben analysis implies that Debords flm practice is a separation of
separation. Te frst separation is that imposed by power, which separates us
from our own potential powers and casts them into the image. Ten we must
redouble this separation, by returning to the image to separate out those powers
frozen there. Te result is not a traversal beyond the image, but a de-creating of
the image that releases it into a state of undecidability.
28
In the case of Debords
In Girum we can see how the fxed smile of the mother is given its truth by
the concentrated scowl of her son as he stares at the products in the shopping
trolley, and vice versa into an undecidable state.
For Agamben this undecidability of the image is, of course, always in absolute
proximity to the zone of sovereign power as the zone of indistinction, in which
this indistinction forms the material for decision. Te role of the imagelessness
of the image in its undecidability is to suspend this suspension by power. To
achieve this suspended potency requires the arrest of a particular image, at
which point the image qua image stands forth and is exhibited as such. To reveal
the image, to fnd the gesture, requires the homeopathic addition of a little more
separation, to allow the image to be seen rather than it disappearing into the
order of the visible. In the case of the image of mother and son in the super-
market from In Girum, we fnd the recovery of the malignancy of the image as
we are forced to confront this scene of supposed domestic bliss. Tis image is
repeated in a later image of a woman and child: the quasi-pornographic image
of a young woman naked in her bath playing with a child, and observed by her
male partner. What is, presumably, an image from advertising, now becomes
enigmatic and disturbing in its suspension. Te gestures of play, expropriated to
commodify a particular form of bourgeois life, are re-expropriated by Debord
to display and suspend the frozen mirror of the commodity.
Debord, if we follow Agamben, could be regarded as the last flmmaker
who had faith in the redemptive power of cinema. Despite the well-known
charge that his absolutization of the spectacle condemns him to a pre-Nietzs-
chean Rousseauist vision of the ever-disappearing possibility of living a truly
unmediated life,
29
Debord saw flm as something worth rescuing from the
mendacity of what he regarded as the pseudo-radicalism of a Godard.
30
To negate
the existing form of capitalist images requires the practice of dtournement
the re-use of existing images, which are negated by the flmmakers critical
practice.
31
Debords cinema is, therefore, a relentless meditation on his own
practice and that of the Situationists, continually probing the reversible state
in which radicalism is recuperated and reborn elsewhere. And yet for all his
radicalism, for all his modernity, Debord continued a strain of aristocratic
haut-nostalgia for a lost bohemian Paris with all its sexual and alcoholic
delights. Agamben inherits this tension, which has lost afective charge as this
nostalgia itself becomes mediated in the age of real subsumption. We are no
longer nostalgic for the real Paris, but nostalgic for Debords nostalgia. It is
noteworthy that when Agamben refects on flm he nearly always returns to
the past, and ofen the distant past, for any image of redemption. Cinema, it
appears, only fickeringly exists in the moment of silent cinema, in which the
gesture is lef to itself, and in the closure of Debords cinema, itself ofen silent,
or relying on spoken commentary, to recover the vanishing possibility of the
gesture.
Te brazen image
Can such nostalgia be anything other than a postmodern afectation? Certainly
it would seem to leave us with little traction on the present, preferring to
remain in the kind of grandiose and aristocratic pessimism that at times charac-
terizes Debords Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988), in which the
integrated spectacle extends its powers into the last vestiges of life.
32
Te
nature of the contemporary image is a rare site of refection for Agamben, and
when it does make feeting appearances it is usually in the form of pornography.
Once again, pornography recapitulates the dynamic polarity of the image, but
this time drawn out to its maximum point of tension. Whereas, for Heidegger,
Hlderlins poetry forms the verso to the recto of the reign of the technological
Ge-Stell, indicating the danger and the saving power, for Agamben it is pornog-
raphy that performs the dual role for the contemporary society of the spectacle.
On the one hand, pornography attests to the absolute capture of gestures
as pure means, for the profane behaviors that characterize life as such. In a
similar fashion to Debord, although Debord tended to select sofcore images, the
female body, especially the prostituted and exposed sexual body, is problemati-
cally and stereotypically the bearer of the weight of the absolute alienation of the
present. Pornography, for Agamben, creates a domain of the unprofanable that
nullifes intimacy by putting everything on display brazenly, without reserve.
While the original erotic photographers preserved a sense of casual intimacy or
even surprise, such as in the work of Bruno Braquehais, today there is only full
exposure.
33
Tis is evident in the way in which porn stars, presumed to be female
by Agamben, constantly look towards the camera in a gesture that is shameless.
Te gesture is occluded in a pure display, another simulated rapture.
Although again seemingly marked by a nostalgia for a supposedly better
time, Agamben also grants contemporary pornography a brief moment of
redemptive power. Te porn star, now former porn star, Chlo des Lysses ofers,
according to Agamben, a gaze that is directed towards the spectator, but in a form
that is fundamentally bored or indiferent, even in the most brazen of sexual
activities.
34
In this gaze, Agamben claims, we fnd a possibility of profaning the
unprofanable, a seeming deactivation of the image-regime of contemporary
capitalism.
35
Tis gesture of indiference refers to, and suspends, the conven-
tional pornographic gesture of the smile, or lascivious look of engagement. In an
undecidable moment the afective labour of pornography is held undecidably
between rapture and boredom, inhabiting the absolute commodifcation of the
body as a site that can be returned to pure means, detached from the teleology of
simulated rapture and compulsory orgasm.
36
Stoppage intervenes in a gesture
that wards-of immersion in the pornographic, which disrupts the unspoken
contract that supports the fow of sexualized enjoyment. And yet this is only a
feeting and temporary moment, caught within what Agamben, perhaps sympto-
matically, regards as the essentially solitary (and hence implicitly masturbatory)
consumption of pornography. Still, however, he argues that the very dominance
of pornography as unprofanable attests to the efects of a profanatory intention.
Te saved night
Refecting on the question of animality and life Agamben invokes Benjamins
enigmatic concept of the saved night [Die gerettete Nacht].
37
Tis is a state of
happiness that is fgured as a state between, in which man and animal leave
each other to their own enclosed space, a suspensive relation that releases a
new possibility of fulflment. I would argue that this image of the saved night
also fgures the imagelessness of the image itself, as a blackness (and we could
note Debords experiments with a black screen in Hurlements en faveur de Sade
(1952)) that it is itself an image of nothing, of privation, of enclosed potency
that can be released or deployed to any end. Tis is a pure negativity that does
not exist in its own truth but only equivocally between states, as the truth of
a suspended potency that never reaches the point of stabilisation and decision.
Of course this attests to the irreducible motif of the messianic which
threads itself through all Agambens refections. If we cannot save life in its
pure detachment, then we can redeem life in its de-activation, and redeem
the image in the profanation of its direction for use. Elusive and evocative,
Agambens eschatological language seems to promise total redemption. It would
belong to the heretical belief in Apokatastasis, frst proposed by Clement of
Alexandria and Origen, that all souls would be saved, which Walter Benjamin
refers to.
38
Pierre Klossowski summarizes: the Redemption of Christ includes
all the created worlds, that of the spirits as well as that of men, and would also
extend to the hell of Satan himself, who at the end of time would be the last one
saved and redeemed in his turn.
39
Tis image of total redemption might seem
little compensation for the devastation of the present, indicated in its most
radically pessimistic form by Agambens own image of the future as one of the
neomortthe body kept alive to be harvested for organs (and flmed many
years before, of course, in Michael Crichtons Coma (1978)).
40
Tis may also be
the reason why zombie cinema is evocative, as the contemporary genre. Born
in George Romeros Living Dead trilogy the recent zombie revival, spanning
the video game, flm, and comics, ofers an all-too Agambenian image of life as
death in motion, shorn even of the horror that remained in Romeros trilogy,
and now fgured in terms of quasi-comic amusement.
But Agamben refuses this totalizing pessimism, suggesting there is always the
possibility of the re-activation and re-animation of life through the image. While
his apocalyptic language promises the grandeur of such a reversal, his comments
on the image suggest a more local practice of profanation as de-activation. In
resisting the unfolding of our lives in images by the arrest of certain moments and
certain gestures, the treatment of the flm-of-life as a series of stills permits the
virtual composition of another flm that has never been seen before (and perhaps
never will or can be seen). Of course the unkind might well be reminded of
Frank Capras Its a Wonderful Life (1946), the populist fable of the ethical small-
businessman George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, posed against the alienations
of capitalist big business. In this flm, reduced to banality ofen by familiarity, we
have the construction of another flm-of-life, which renders the judgment of God
by revealing how the absence of Stewart would have led to the capitalist destruction
of the small town of Bedford Falls, renamed Pottertown afer the local plutocrat.
Stewarts redemption, by his acceptance of his own life of sacrifce, is fgured as the
redemption of the community, although wracked with the ambiguity that opposes
a good non-speculative capitalism to a bad speculative capitalism.
Certainly this is no suggestion that Agamben would endorse such a position,
or even such a comparison. His relentlessly negative framing of the revelation of
the potency of the image has little time for such populism, preferring the ascetic
radicalism of Debord, or the Godard of Histoire(s) du cinma (1998).
41
Te
bathos of the possibility of the comparison does, however, indicate something of
the potential collapse of the rarefed discourse of Agamben. Its negativity, its lack
of specifcity, is, of course, designed to incarnate a force or sense of escape
or fight that never realizes itself fully into an image than be subject to capture.
Tis withdrawal of the image seems, however, to leave such an action confned
to the realm of the avant-garde or the rarity of the aesthetic judgment that can
render or detect the dynamis of a particular gesture encrypted within the most
banal of images. While the endorsement of a cultural populism, all-too-ready
to detect gestures of resistance in the most everyday acts of consumption and
fandom, now appears as merely the herald of a generalized neo-liberal marketi-
zation of culture, Agambens residual elitism seems to lead the connection back
to the gesture as gesture-in-common attenuated to the point of non-existence.
Tis points, I think, to a key difculty in Agambens attempt to politicize the
image, or more precisely to ethicize it against the hollowing-out of the political.
What is lacking is any substantial articulation of the practice of profanation as
a common practice, except the gesture towards it as the inheritance of the next
generation. Te ability to still or freeze the image has, of course, become a
banal possibility. Te clarity of the digital image can still generate surprise when
one returns to a flm that one has paused to fnd a particular composition has
resulted. Te sofware technology of the screen grab allows an experimental
practice of the extraction of the gesture to any with access, returning it to
common use (or relatively common, depending on access to the technology).
And yet it is impossible to believe this banal possibility really speaks to what
Agamben intends by the profanation of the image.
It would be unwise to ofer some simplistic invocation of the power of mass
political practice on the image, as happens at certain moments with the recourse
to the multitude in Negrian thought, but the absence of specifcation risks
leaving redemption as merely compensatory fantasy. With the common lacking,
Agamben is lef in a position of having faith in a messianic reversibility lacking
a real subject which is then strictly magical. When Max Brod asked Kafa if
there is hope outside this manifestation of the world that we know, Kafa smiled
and replied: Oh, plenty of hope, an infnite amount of hopebut not for us.
42

Repeating this position Agamben casts of redemption into the time of cosmic
epochs, in which redemption either lies in the past or in nostalgia for the past,
as with silent flm or Debord, or it remains in some absolute futurity, indexed to
the arrival of the messiah. While Benjamin insisted the messiah could arrive at
any moment, we can add that the messiah also could not arrive at any moment.
Acknowledgments
Tis is a revised version of the essay that originally appeared in Italian: Agamben:
Filmare la vita, profane immagini [Agamben: Filming Life, Profaning the
Image] (trans. into Italian by Antonio Russo), Fata Morgana 13 Potenza issue
(2011): 12130. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the editor
Alessandro Canad and the journal Fata Morgana.
Notes
1 Plato, Sophist, trans. Nicholas P. White (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett
Publishing Company, 1993); Jacques Lacan, Te Mirror Stage as Formative of the
Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience, crits, trans. Alan
Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2001), 18.
2 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1983).
3 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford
4 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Kafa: toward a minor literature [1975], trans.
Dana Polan, foreword Rda Bensmaa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986).
5 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983); Michel
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books,
2005), 217.
6 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 6.
7 Giorgio Agamben, Notes on Gesture, [1992] Means without End, trans. Vincenzo
Binetti, Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000),
4960.
8 Ibid., 54.
9 Martin Heidegger, Te Question Concerning Technology, Te Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. and intro. William Lovitt (New
York: Harper, 1977), 335.
10 Ibid., 28.
11 Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History [1940], Selected Writings, vol.
4 19381940, H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings (eds) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
12 Martin Brady and Helen Hughes, Kafa adapted to flm, in Te Cambridge
Companion to Kafa, ed. Julian Preece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 227.
13 Ibid., 227.
14 Ibid., 2278.
15 Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafa: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death, in
Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2 19311934, Michael W. Jennings et al. (eds)
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 801.
16 Ibid., 802.
17 Giorgio Agamben, Notes on Gesture, 60.
18 Benjamin, Kafa, 795.
19 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: Te Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta (London: Te Athlone Press, 1989).
20 David N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuzes Time-Machine (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1997), 194210.
22 Ibid., 54.
23 Agamben, Giorgio. Diference and Repetition: On Guy Debords Films [1995],
Guy Debord and Te Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom
McDonough (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2002), 31319.
24 Guy Debord, Complete Cinematic Works, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Oakland: AK
Press, 2003), 133.
25 Ibid., 137.
26 Walter Benjamin, Surrealism, Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,
One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter
(London: New Lef Books, 1979), 238.
27 Ibid., 239.
28 Agamben, Diference, 31819.
29 Vincent Kaufmann, Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry, trans.
Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 222. For
a more philosophically sophisticated version of this charge, see Jean-Luc Nancy,
Being Singular Plural [1996], trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. OByrne
30 Debord, Cinematic Works, 220.
31 Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, A Users Guide to Dtournement (excerpts), in
Guy Debord, Complete Cinematic Works, 20710.
32 Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie
(London and New York: Verso, 1990).
33 Giorgio Agamben, Profanations [2005], trans. Jef Fort (New York: Zone Books,
2007), 89.
34 Ibid., 91.
35 Agamben, Diference and Repetition, pp. 31819.
36 Ibid., 91.
37 Giorgio Agamben, Te Open, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2004), 83.
38 Benjamin, Te Storyteller, in Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans.
Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken, 1969), 103.
39 Pierre Klossowski, Sade My Neighbour, trans. and intro. Alphonso Lingis (London:
Quartet Books, 1992), 102.
40 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1867.
42 Benjamin, Kafa, 798.
5
Biopolitics of Gesture: Cinema and the
Neurological Body
Pasi Vliaho
Te genealogy that Giorgio Agamben provides for cinema in his short but
powerful text Notes on Gesture strikes in its singularity. Rather than thinking
of cinema as an art of optical spectacles, he approaches the medium in terms of
the gesture. Te element of cinema is gesture and not image, one of the theses
of the essay goes.
1
Tis may sound counter-intuitive, but Agambens argument
underscores the nature of cinema as experience rather than technology. For the
philosopher, the gesture is not a means of communication (as we most ofen
consider it) but something more fundamental that, in his words, allows the
emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings.
2
Te gesture demar-
cates a sphere where we confront ourselves as drawn between reality and
freedom, fact and right, actuality and potentiality. Situated between doing and
showing, acting and thinking, it circumscribes a boundary between facticity
and spontaneity.
Te gesture, then, is in the fnal analysis a political concept, and Agambens is
in many ways an attempt to regard cinema as coinciding with and crystallizing a
culmination point in the constitution of political subjectivity within modernity.
If cinema is the labor of gesturesfrom the nervous and deceitful ones of George
Mlis flms to the gestural pathos of David Wark Grifths melodramas, for
instanceit is simultaneously what one might call an anthropotechnique that
(re)negotiates the conditions and possibilities of experience and individuation.
Departing from this observation, the following is an attempt to approach cinemas
politics from one specifc and quite narrow perspective: the genealogy of cinema
within physiological and psychiatric scientifc practices in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. It is in this context that cinema acquired a particular
epistemic function in defning and (re)producing our gestural being at the
feeting limit between the normal and the pathological as well as the animal
and the human. And it is in this context that cinema came to exhibit its political
vocation, according to which the uncertain conceptual contours of the human
being have become drawn and redrawn in the age of political techniques that
focus on extracting and administering the capacities of the living.
Neurological gaze
Many of us have come across Andr Brouillets group portrait A Clinical Lesson
at the Salptrire (1887), or a detail of it (fgure 5.1). Te painting depicts one
of the famous Tuesday lessons that the then world-renowned neurologist
Jean-Martin Charcot would deliver to both professional and lay audiences in
the famous hospital in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. A woman named
Blanche (Marie) Wittman seems to have passed out in an attack of hysteria
and is supported by Charcots student, Joseph Babinski. Charcot keeps deliv-
ering his lecture while the exclusively male audience witnesses the spectacle
of pain (as Georges Didi-Huberman describes it)
3
, studying intensely one
of Charcots most famous patients who is unconscious and whose chest has
been all but uncovered. Teir faces give out, one can assume, a hint of sexual
attraction disguised under the disinterestedness of the scientifc gaze.
Figure 5.1 Andr Brouillet, A Clinical Lesson at the Salptrire (Une leon clinique la Salptrire),
1887. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Biopolitics of Gesture: Cinema and the Neurological Body 105
Certainly, there is certain calmness to Blanche Wittmans portrayal as she
rests on Babinskis arms. But before her passing out, there must have been
some intense, frantic gesturing. Hysterics were known for, and mainly studied
in terms of, their irrationally uncontrollable bodies the performances of which
ranged from abrupt and rapid movements to almost absolute stillness: spasms,
tremors, convulsions, tics, contortions, catalepsies, lethargies, and so forth.
Indeed the acts of this unruly body must have been as attractive a spectacle
to these men as the exposed chest. At the very least, the gaze that Charcot
cultivated and trained in his clinic was infuential in establishing modernitys
epistemological practice: obsessed with the moving, doing, breathing, sensuous
individual in terms of complex dynamics of mental and physiological forces
meticulously scrutinized in the bodys outward appearance. Te exchanges of
looks that we see captured on the canvas are, in this respect, not only voyeur-
istic, but also biopolitical if by biopolitics we refer, following Michel Foucault,
to political and social practices emerging during the nineteenth century that
could be partly summarized as being focused on disciplining the living being,
on optimizing its capabilities and extorting its forces so as to integrate corporeal
life into systems of efcient and economic controls.
4
In Brouillets painting, we see the female bodyas something living,
breathing, collapsing, eroticexposed to and machinated by the apparatus of
knowledge (and desire). New to Charcots approach was indeed how he tried
to make sense of these manifestations of life, nervous or otherwise. Instead
of simply considering neurotic and hysterical patients as outright mad and
burying them in the dark cells of the asylum, the scientists aim was to establish a
statistically regular symptomatology of neuroses and thus to elevate them to the
status of a genuine and serious illness. For Charcot, hysterical symptoms could
eventually be located in organic or dynamic lesions, and as such considered
proper objects of scientifc scrutiny. It is precisely in this sense that Charcots
gaze was biopolitical: instead of simply approaching his subjects from the
binary of reason and madness, so-called hysterics (alongside paralyzed patients,
and much more) were regarded as a worthy epistemological object for clinical
neurology that was to bring life into the feld of diagnosis and treatment and, in
the fnal analysis, regulation and control.
Te kind of gaze that Brouillets painting portrays, we should note, was a
highly infuential one when it comes to modernitys self-understanding. We can
perceive this if we take a look at the audience members many of whom are still
remembered today, mostly within the history of neurological and psychological
sciences: Georges Gilles de la Tourette, Paul Richer, and Todule Ribot, among
others. Teir arrangement within one frame combines in its composition the
kind of knowledge that was to shape what we today understand in terms of
the neurosciences, on the one hand, and in terms of dynamic psychology, on
the other hand. On one side, there is the mode of knowledge and perception
that approaches the individual through its biological materiality: mental life,
including its pathologies, cannot be studied without reference to the nervous
system and the brain that function as its material support. On the other side,
exemplifed by Todule Ribot in particular, there is the emerging science of
the soul that started to inscribe the individual and its complexities within the
textures of memory and, fundamentally, sexuality.
But in Charcots eyes, these two, the neurological and the psychological,
were not yet separated. Te gaze that the scientist cast on half-naked females
saw the body as a site of mystery where lifes myriad aberrations became visible
and knowable on the corporeal surface and in the bodys movements. In this
respect, Charcots gaze circumscribed a novel kind of object of study, which,
following Foucault, who developed the concept in his 19734 lectures at the
Collge de France, can be called the neurological body.
5
Emerging as a new kind
of epistemic object in the late nineteenth century (roughly, 18501870), this was
not just a body composed of organs and tissues but one distinguished as having
functions, performances and behavior.
6
Te neurological body is one that reacts
and responds, voluntarily or not. What is crucial is that its aberrations need
to be diagnosed in visible surface efects, in movements that it produces or,
alternatively, is incapable of making. Foucault quotes a description written by a
student of Charcots to illustrate the kind of gaze that tracks the bodys surface
rather than seeking to penetrate into its interior. Te symptom at issue is the
drooping of the lef eyelid:
If we tell him to open his eyelids, he raises the right one normally, the lef one
however, does not noticeably move, no more than the eye brow, so that the
superciliary asymmetry becomes more marked. In this movement [] the skin
of the forehead wrinkles transversally on the right side, while it remains almost
smooth on the lef. At rest, the skin of the forehead is wrinkled neither on the
right nor the lef [].
7
For Foucault, this short observation exemplifes a novel type of deployment of
visibility within which it is the bodys surface that must be covered in all its
hollows and bumps, and practically by looking only, by looking only that far.
8

Te neurological body is captured and constituted by a gaze that is almost
impressionistic in the way it substitutes the forces and dynamics of muscles and
nerves for the substance and density of fesh. Concurrently, the students notes
come up as an example of a gaze that is inherently flmic. Taking the liberty to
make a somewhat stretched metaphoric leap, one can imagine how it resembles
the cinematic close-up, which Bla Blazs compared to a magnifying-glass
that isolates fragments of bodies and micro-movements.
9
Te close-up, Blazs
mused, reveals the most hidden parts in our polyphonous life, and teaches us
to see intricate visual details of life as one reads an orchestral score.
10
Metaphorically or not, it is precisely in relation to the emergence of the neuro-
logical body that the topic of this essay, cinema, steps in. Charcot, as known,
was obsessed with the visual categorization of hysterical signs, and what he
sought to produce was a kind of pictorial typography of nervous pathology.
11

But critical to the neurological body is that it moves, and most ofen it moves
contorts, trembles, gesticulatestoo rapidly for the human eye to be able to
track down its behavior in accurate enough detail. Even if (or precisely because)
rendered as a mere surface, it evades the eye. Tis is why the scientists gaze
needed to be supplemented with technological aids that isolated and recorded
the hysterics anomalous performances. Te man sitting at the forefront and
extreme lef in Brouillets painting, wearing a black hat, is Albert Londe, profes-
sional photographer who was hired to work at Charcots clinic in 1878. A friend
of Etienne-Jules Mareys, Londe brought in new chronophotographicand later
cinematicmethods for the reproduction of movement to bear on the scientifc
scrutiny of the various aberrations that disclosed the norm in a negative image:
cameras with nine to twelve lenses arranged linearly or in a circular form.
Te subject appearing in a chronophotographic recording by Londe is again
no-one else but Blanche Wittman (fgure 5.2). Tis time her blouse is buttoned
to the neck. Te doctors are performing experiments on her, their aim being to
decipher how one can transfer the patients characteristic postures (attitudes)
from one part of the body to another by using magnets. Here, we see a glimpse
of the process, an unyielding record of the transfer, which in a sense remains
a mystery, as its visibility hinges more on the intervals that separate the small
circular photograms from one another than their explicit contents. What this
composite image requires is a mode of vision that scans sequentially, in a jerky
and even automatic fashion, successive photograms and diferentially imagines
the invisible curve of motion that connects a gesture frozen on the celluloid with
the preceding and following ones.
Alternatively, a cinematic projector that makes images move in front of
our eyes could take up the work of this gazethe imaginations duty taken
over by the machine, which reanimates the action of muscles and nerves.
12

Blanche Wittman could in this regard be considered one of the frst flm stars,
anticipating the likes of Lilian Gish or Marilyn Monroe who were able to adjust
eroticism with repetitive gestural mannerisms demanded by the machine. Tere
is indeed another kind of transfer at play in this chronophotographic sequence,
one between the body acting out of conscious control and the automatism of
what was to become the cinematographic camera and its mechanic eye. Perhaps
the two, the neurological body and the cinematic apparatus, were mutually
constitutive.
Footprints
When writing about gesture and cinema, Agamben conceptualizes the kind
of transfer outlined above, indeed, a double act in which one actor supports
Figure 5.2 Albert Londe, Mlle Wittman, transfert dune attitude au moyen de laimant.
Chronophotographic sequence, around 1883, collection Texbraun.
the otherthe comedy, if you will, deriving from the awkwardness of this
connection, quite like in the illustrations by J. J. Grandville in Les petites misres
de la vie humaine (1843) which, as Agamben notes, present the loss of a
harmonious relationship with the things that surround us when the latter are
turned into meaningless but fetishistic mass produced objects of industrial
and consumer capitalism.
13
In Grandvilles pictures, boots are as impossible
to take of as to put on, umbrellas turn inside outobjects generally speaking
seem to have a malicious will of their own. Our frst experiences with moving
images, Agamben suggests, were similarly deconstructive, resulting in the
loss of meaningful gestures. Te cinema came to undermine the assumption
that gestures, as a certain Charles Hacks argued still in 1892, can be either
voluntary or involuntary but fundamentally need to have the objective of
signifying something.
14
In cinema, the unity between gesture and intention
was rather broken down. [A]t some point, Agamben writes, referring to the
late nineteenth century, everybody had lost control of their gestures and was
walking and gesticulating frantically. Tis is the impression, at any rate, that one
has when watching the flms that Marey and Lumire began to shoot.
15
Tis loss of control over our bodies was not just a split between subject
and objectus and thingsbut a split within the subject itself. In Agambens
account, the genealogy of cinema extends, not to magic lantern shows or magic
theaters, like we ofen think of it, but to the emergence of a scientifc mode of
perception and understanding of ourselves that sought to divorce bodily expres-
sions from psychic or moral interiority, that is to say, the soul. It is the aberrant
bodies of the likes of Blanche, and the neurological gaze that circumscribes
them as such, that stand for the beginnings of the movies. Te protagonist of
Agambens narrative is not Charcot, however, but one of his students, Georges
Gilles de la Tourette who in the 1880s, before famously relegating language to
pure neurology, was studying the physiology of human gait. Agamben traces
cinematography back to the footprint roll method that Gilles de la Tourette
developed in this purpose and described in his thesis Clinical and physi-
ological studies of walking from 1886. Te idea was simple: rolls of white
paper were nailed to the ground and then divided length-wise by a drawn line.
Sesquioxide powder was used to smear the soles of subjects of experiments with
red rust color. Te individual would then be asked to walk and the tracings
their feet lef on the roll of paper along the dividing line allowed the scientist to
measure the gait according to various parameters, including the length of the
step, lateral swerve, and the angle of inclination.
Te ambition of Gilles de la Tourettes studies was to diferentiate the
physiology of so-called normal human gait from its pathological variations. It
took part of its inspiration from the anatomo-physiological study of walking
conducted by Wilhelm and Eduard Weber in the early nineteenth century
(whose work Friedrich Kittler sees anticipating the cinematic medium in its
epistemological underpinnings aimed toward the decomposition and recom-
position of movement in the scientists imagination).
16
Webers was one of the
frst attempts to scientifcally visualize human gait, its goal being to provide a
mathematical theory of walking and running. Te guiding idea here was the
automaticity of gait, which postulated the possibility of conceptualizing the
mechanics of walking as it happens beyond the command of consciousness
and will. Te brothers wrote: Man binds his movements to certain rules even
if he cannot express these rules in words. Tese rules are based totally on the
structure of his body and on the given external conditions. Tey thus can be
deduced from both structure and external conditions.
17
Tis notion of automaticity, or at least of being driven by rules and forces
that one is not in command of, that no soul is able to administer, links directly
with the logic of visualization behind Gilles de la Tourettes footprint method.
First scrutinizing what so-called normal human walk looked like on his rolls
of paper and its statistical variations, the scientist meticulously examined the
marks lef by patients sufering from various types of movement disorders,
ranging from the nonfunctional limbs of partial paralyzes to the jerky and
non-fuid movements of locomotor ataxia. By means of this visual analysis and
diferentiation of the traces of the diseased body, Gilles de la Tourette came up
with a comparative table that allowed the classifcation of the disorders. Te
conclusion that he drew of his studies deserves our attention. On the very last
page of his dissertation the neurologist noted:
Te pathological step, not to mention walk, is always more regular than the
normal step or walk in terms of the length of the step, lateral swerve and the
angle of inclination. Tis is easy to understand, because in the normal case
it is the individual who walks and can modify and vary his gait, whereas in
the second case it is the disease itself that walks. And if the individual in the
second case has any power over the gait, he will use it to regularize the type of
locomotion created by the disorder itself.
18
Gilles de la Tourettes conclusions bear two important points. First, the diseased
individual has lost subjective interiority and intentionality. What demarcates
between the normal and the pathological is that the former refers to men
of actionindividuals who can exercise their spontaneous will and are thus
indeterminate in a way that escapes capture in statistical regularity. Tey are
free, to an extent at least. But the pathological body, on the other hand, seems
to be completely possessed by the disorder. It is not the individual person
that originates movement but the disease itself, which follows its laws and
regularities, its automatism. Tere is no personality to the pathological body; it
is like the Weber brothers system of knees, hips and heels that has gone astray.
Secondly, in Gilles de la Tourettes cinematic imagination, the pathological body
cannot walk, properly speaking. So-called normal, healthy men of action can
walkthat is to say, their gait has a style, which is expressive of personality and
culture, of values, intentions and beliefswhereas the diseased body merely
produces steps. Deprived of style and rhythm, the diseased body is deprived
of signifcation and thus appears as excluded from the realms of history and
politics.
Tis is where the beginnings of a cinematic biopolitics of gesture can be
located. In his reassessment of Foucaults interpretation of the biopolitics-
concept, Agamben twists the original notion of a politics striving, alongside
capitalist forces, towards both the optimization and the control of life (death
being its limit) into a zone of indistinction between socially qualifed existence
(bios) and natural, physiological being (zoe), or, right and fact.
19
Biopolitics, for
Agamben, is a politics that is situated on and constantly modulates and redraws
the boundaries between the bare fact of living and social/psychic life, between
animality and humanity. In modern democracies and totalitarian regimes alike,
it is this type of zone of indistinction, or what Agamben calls bare life, that
has become a particular driving force of politics, both subject and object of the
conficts of the political order.
20
Te neurological body, one could argue, epitomizes this bare life as an object
of knowledge and desire that has been developed in modernity to negotiate the
feeting limits between what is human and what is not, what falls within the
realms of history and culture and what does not, what makes sense and what
is senseless. If the normal gesture that can at least pretend meaningfulness
and intention falls within the realm of bios, the hysterical gesture is situated at
a threshold, at a limen (as experimental psychologists call the obscure line
demarcating the conscious and the non-conscious), where diferentiations
and conjunctions between politics and life itself become produced and repro-
duced. Half-naked chests, sesquioxide powder traces, chronophotographic
recordingsthe tracings of catastrophic bodies and gestures beyond conscious
command and will essential to cinemas genealogyare all indices, or better,
symptoms of this threshold that shapes the biopolitical subject.
Animals and machines
Te beginnings of movies coincide, as Agamben suggests, with a generalized
redesign of political subjectivity in modernity. But what is it in the cinematic
apparatus that (if Agamben is right) crystallizes this biopolitics of gesture? How
does the cinema act as a key biopolitical dispositif that, quoting Agambens
words, comes to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure
the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings?
21
Sufce to have a look at the scientifc cinema context, and before that, at
the modes of production of the neurological body. According to Foucault, the
neurological gaze was built around a particular type of inquiry:
[N]eurology is neither an examination in the sense of pathological-anatomy,
nor questioning; it is a new apparatus which replaces questioning with injunc-
tions, and which through these injunctions seeks to get responses, but responses
which are not the subjects verbal responses, as in questioning, but the responses
of the subjects body; responses which can be clinically deciphered at the level of
the body and which one can consequently submit to a diferential examination
without fear of being duped by the subject who responds.
22
So Foucault outlined how the neurological episteme was based on the scientist
listening to the body instead of the speaking individual, trying to visually
decipher the mute language of the disorder by inducing the diseased body to
produce responses. Te neurologist commands: Walk! Put out your leg! Hold
out your hand! Speak! Read this sentence! Try to write this! He holds a power
over actions: Obey my orders, keep quiet, and your body will respond.
23
Tis type of knowledge-production is evident in the recently discovered
collection of scientifc flms and other kinds of visualizations produced by the
Italian neurologist Vincenzo Neri in the early twentieth century. Neri was a
student of Babinskis (who, as we have seen, got to hold Blanche in his arms as
Charcots assistant) in Paris during 190610, and it was Babinski who helped
Neri to get access to patients studied, scrutinized and experimented upon
at the Bictre hospitaland flm them. Later, Neri continued this practice
in Bologna, Italy, where he kept accumulating his archive of recordings of
movement disorders, convulsive gestures, automatic reactions, and so on for
several decades. Of course, one should note that neurological flms were made
right as the flm camera was inventedby Albert Londe at the Salptrire,
by Georges Marinescu in Romania, as well as by Albert van Gehuchten in
Belgium, for instancebut Neris collection is unique in the way it illustrates
the various forms the neurological gaze could adopt. Like for Charcot, a major
epistemological preoccupation for Neri was to come up with series of records
of the diferent types of responses that various diseases generated, to create a
systematic database, so to speak, by means of which one could decode the signs
that the neurological body expressed in terms of its abnormalities. A range of
techniques was used in this purpose: in addition to flms he also used photo-
graphs as well as footprint tracings, following Gilles de la Tourettes footsteps.
An article of Neris that came out in the journal Nouvelle Iconographie de
la Salptrire in 1908, on paradoxical characteristics of hysterical walking,
exemplifes this.
24
Te piece was concerned with the ambiguous manner in
which some hysterics walked; how their legs were curiously out-of-sync and
how their walk was deprived of regular rhythm. Te principal sources of
knowledge about neurological semiology in this article were footprint tracings
lef on the rolls of paper by the body ordered to walk. However, Neri notes
in passing that he would capture this aberrant walk with a flm camera, too.
Te kind of perception of the individual deprived of volition, spontaneity and
conscious control that animates the stains of sesquioxide powder is also tangible
in traces of light describing the neurological body on celluloid.
In Neris practice, cinema indeed developed into a major epistemic tool for
tracing the mute language of pathological physiology. In his early flms, the
patients themselves are silent, they never open their mouths to utter a word, but
it is the body that, when induced to perform actions such as walking more or
less successfully, is meant to express its symptomatology in front of the cameras
eye. Strips of flm surviving from the collection pay witness to the procedure:
naked bodies exposed in front of a black canvas with a stark contrast between
the pale skin and the dark background; bodies that to try to carry out the task
they are told to do but relentlessly end up in a catastrophe (fgures 5.3 and 5.4).
Cinematic images become in this context imprints of pathological responses
that the neurologist induces when ordering the patient to perform an action.
Cinema indeed appears as an ideal technology for capturing the signs of a
disorder. Tracking down and reproducing movement and performance, the
moving image seems like a persistent, disinterested record of the supposedly
senseless language that the body speaks through its automatisms. Te cinemato-
graphic image attaches to movements that happen outside volitionit is of
actions performed, not by the psychological individual, but by the impersonal
diseaseembodying a mechanical vision that does not let itself to be duped by
the subject who responds, to use Foucaults words.
Te regular and automatic movement of the celluloid flm in the cinemato-
graphic camera/projector appears as homologous with the regular and automatic,
but simultaneously catastrophic, gestures of the neurological body. It testifes
to a fundamental loss of volition. A short flm on Huntingtons disease, also
called Huntingtons chorea (from the Greek, choreia, meaning dance), which is
a hereditary disease that afects the brain and leads to the loss of control over
the bodys muscle movements, presents the body spontaneously performing
brief movements that fow from one muscle to the next without apparent
Figure 5.3 Vincenzo Neri, neurological flm, ca. 1908. Paper print (35mm). Te Vincenzo Neri
Medical Film Collection, Bologna, Italy.
Figure 5.4 Vincenzo Neri, neurological flm, ca. 1908. Paper print
(35mm). Te Vincenzo Neri Medical Film Collection, Bologna, Italy.
rhythm. Te body twists and contorts without conscious efort or control. It was
precisely these kinds of curiously arrhythmic motions that cinema was able to
capture into the realm of knowledge and visibility; and here, one could say, we
can see the cinemas capacity to take hold of the instantaneous, the accidental,
the involuntary, and the irrational employed in its full power.
25
In the neurological context at least, cinematographic perception disclosed
itself to be as much outside style and rhythm, as soulless or senseless, if you will,
as the bodies that it captured were seen to be. One compelling flm portrays a
bare-chested man, standing in front of a large canvas representing a view onto a
garden, who is poked by a doctor in charge of an electric machine (fgure 5.5).
His face is expressionless, eyes looking into an undecipherable distance. All that
seems to be possible for us to deduce of this persons interior life boils down
to the electric current running in the nervous system causing the arm to react.
Paying witness to the symptomatology of responses, cinema as the technology
for the automatic recording and reproduction of movementautomatic in the
sense of a mechanical device that performs its operations largely independent
of human intervention and even intentiondoubles and instrumentalizes the
neurological gaze that tracks down the corporeal surface, disinterested of the
depths of the fesh or of the psyche. Te language of emotions, for instance,
is relegated to the materiality of electric currents. Subjectivity, in other words,
is reduced to the facticity of the bodys materiality. We are all frogs, the
conclusion seems to be.
It is in these kinds of micro-practices that what Agamben calls the gener-
alized catastrophe of the sphere of gestures in modernity became documented,
as well as produced.
26
In this sense, even if the flms might wish to present
themselves as being as neutral as possible, they are everything else but outside
politics. However, their politics, to be sure, is diferent from that of free
(wo)men communicating and exchanging ideas in the polis.
27
Rather than
giving expression to bios, cinema here takes biological life as its task, or to put
it otherwise, the diferentiation between the bare fact of living and politically
qualifed existence. If there is (to use Walter Benjamins term) a biopolitical
optical unconscious that the cinema makes explicit,
28
it is one that concerns
the dimension of animalityof the bare fact of living, breathing, moving,
reactingthat we all carry within ourselves and, according to Agamben,
occupies the core of political subjectivity in modernity.
On the celluloid surface, what was previously deemed exterior to the
image of the human was thus now found within its intimate interior. While
instrumentalizing the neurological gaze, cinema also instrumentalized a mute,
brute, senseless animal within us, giving it visibility and making it an object of
knowledge, regulation and (to an extent) control. Indeed, it made animality a
political task. Its biopolitics of gesture links with the way the cinematic apparatus,
to quote Agamben, functions by excluding as not (yet) human an already human
being from itself, that is, by animalizing the human, by isolating the nonhuman
within the human.
29
Here Agamben describes what he calls the anthropological
machine of the modernsanthropological machine referring to a system of
ideas and images according to which articulations between human and animal,
man and non-man, speaking being and living being, that is, articulations of the
state of exception between bios and zoe, take place.
30
Neris collection gives the anthropological machine of the moderns a tangible
outlook. What the neurological flms display is a body situated on various zones
of indistinction: a body that performs, moves and produces, but can suddenly
start to stammer, jerk and contort; a body that wills and signifes, but at the
same time threatens to become whole insensible; a body that is spontaneous
and active while being simultaneously possessed by an involuntary compulsion
Figure 5.5 Vincenzo Neri, neurological flm, late 1910s. Frame capture. Te Vincenzo Neri Medical
Film Collection, Bologna, Italy.
to repeat and lacking intention and potentiality. Tey give us an image of the
human as bearing within itself the origin of its own negation. What we see in
the collection is a systematic epistemic production of this kind of paradoxical
being.
***
Cinema, to quote Blazs, can show us a quality in a gesture of the hand that
we never noticed before when we saw that hand stroke or strike something,
a quality that is ofen more expressive than any play of the features.
31
Within
the turn-of-the-twentieth-century neurological context, this quality was the
underlying animality of gestures. Cinematic recordings, and their predecessors
from footprints to chronophotographs, isolated a non-human dimension of
the senseless, the involuntary and the automatic within the human itself. In this
regard, cinematic and pre-cinematic visualizations of the neurological body
pay witness to a split within the subject, which acts as a symptom of a politics
that takes as its task the factual existence of people, their bare life. Here, cinema
comes across as a crystallization of what Agamben calls the great totalitarian
experiments of the twentieth century but, equally importantly, of capitalist
regimes and the triumph of economy, which according to the philosopher,
takes on an emphasis in which natural life itself and its well-being seem to
appear as humanitys last historical task.
32
In each case, we are dealing with a
politics of biological life and a mode of humanity that, as Agamben observes,
has become animal again.
33
In at least one of its dimensions, producing and
maintaining this decomposed image of the human is the function of the biopol-
itics of gesture in cinema.
Notes
1 Giorgio Agamben, Notes on Gesture, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans.
Vincenzo Binetti, Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2000), 4960, 55.
2 Ibid., 58.
3 Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention de lhysterie: Charcot et liconographie
photographique de la Salptrire (Paris: Macula, 1982), 9.
4 See Michel Foucault, Te Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 of Te
History of Sexuality (London: Penguin, 1998).
5 Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collge de France, 19731974,
ed. Jacques Lagrange, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2006).
6 Ibid., 288.
7 Ibid., 298.
8 Ibid., 299.
9 Bla Blazs, Te Visible Man, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Screen 48 (Spring 2007):
103.
10 Bla Blazs, Teory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith
Bone (London: Dennis Dobson, 1952), 55.
11 See Didi-Huberman, Invention de lhysterie, 2331.
12 As Friedrich Kittler notes, [c]hopping or cutting in the real, fusion or fow
in the imaginarythe entire research history of cinema revolves only around
this paradox. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geofrey
Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1999), 122.
13 See Giorgio Agamben, Stanze: Parole and fantasme dans la culture occidentale,
trans. Yves Hersant (Paris: Editions Payot & Rivages, 1998), 856.
14 Charles Hacks, Le Geste (Paris: Librairie Marpon et Flammarion, 1892), 6.
16 Friedrich Kittler, Man as a Drunken Town-musician, MLN 118 (2003): 63752.
17 Quoted in ibid., 642.
18 Georges Gilles de la Tourette, Etudes cliniques et physiologiques sur la marche: La
marche dans les maladies du systme nerveux (Paris: Delahaye et Lecrosnier, 1886),
75.
19 Of course, the notion of biopolitics has a history of its own, going back at least as
far as the early twentieth century and the work of Swedish political scientist Rudolf
Kjelln. In Kjellns use, the biopolitics-concept described a vitalistic conception
of the state as something that can be compared to a natural organism, instead of
seeing it as a subject of law. On the history of the biopolitics-concept, see Roberto
Esposito, Bos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 1344.
20 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 9.
21 Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus?, What Is an Apparatus? and Other
Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2009), 124, 14.
22 Foucault, Psychiatric Power, 302.
23 Ibid., 302, 304.
24 Vincenzo Neri, Sur les caractres paradoxaux de la dmarche chez les hystriques,
Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salptrire, vol. 21 (1908): 23141.
25 On this problematic, see Mary Ann Doane, Te Emergence of Cinematic Time:
Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2002).
27 Polis meaning city as well as citizenship. Hannah Arendt writes about the ancient
Greek (democratic) political experience based on communication and recognition
within the public realm: In the experience of the polis, which not without
justifcation has been called the most talkative of all bodies politic , action
and speech separated and became more and more independent activities. Te
emphasis shifed from action to speech, and to speech as a means of persuasion
rather than the specifcally human way of answering, talking back and measuring
up to whatever happened or was done. To be political, to live in a polis, meant that
everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and
violence. Hannah Arendt, Te Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998), 26.
28 See Walter Benjamin, A Short History of Photography, trans. Stanley Mitchell,
Screen 13 (Spring 1972): 526.
29 Agamben, Te Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford
30 Ibid., 378.
31 Blazs, Teory of the Film, 55.
32 Agamben, Te Open, 76.
33 Ibid.
6
Propositions for a Gestural Cinema :
On Cin-Trances and Jean Rouchs
Ritual Documentaries
Joo Mrio Grilo
To be able to leap from one point to another is my essential dream. To
be able to go everywhere, to ramble about like you ramble in a dream, to
go someplace else. Te mobile camera, the walking, fying camerathats
everybodys dream! Simply because making a flm, for me, means writing it
with your eyes, with your ears, with your body.
Jean Rouch, in an interview by Enrico Fulchignoni, August 1980
Te English translation of Giorgio Agambens Notes on Gesture, published
in 2000, is one of the major events in recent flm theory since, at least, the
extremely infuential Gilles Deleuzes Cinema books.
1
Although, at frst, its
repercussions were discreet, it is easy to notice how the performative aspect of
flm has progressively gained a notorious protagonism in flm thought, theory
and critique. Tis circumstance is particularly evident when compared to a
theoretical tradition more attentive to aestheticsthrough the formal aspects
of image, movement, sound and montageor to semiotics and psychoa-
nalysisthrough the analysis of the textual, narrative, symbolic, and discursive
dimensions of flm.
It should be acknowledged, however, that part of this transformation was
already present in the new theoretical framework created by the interweaving
of flm and philosophy, with the re-appraisal of certain philosophical concepts
when applied to flm identity, bringing forth a complexity that was put aside
before. In this light (not to mention in detail the work of philosophers that
recently brought fresh new perspectives on flm, such as Stanley Cavell, Jacques
Rancire, Jean-Luc Nancy, or Alain Badiou), contributions of philosophers
such as Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Levinas or Merleau-Ponty have also been
reassessed, especially through the persistent work of flm scholars such as
Vivian Sobchack, Laura Marks, Sarah Cooper, Raymond Bellour, Sam Girgus,
or Tomas Elsaesser.
2
In this context, however, Agambens contribution possesses a particular and
political dimension through the way he connects the performance in flm with
the performative essence of the cinematic medium itself. Being attentive to
gesture caption, but adapting it to the point of being able to determine its nature,
design and potentiality, flm has become a gestural means without end aiming
to establish new forms of a prosthetic harmony between humanity, context and
experience. In this sense Agamben believes cinema and gesture approach the
relationship philosophy establishes with language Cinemas essential silence
(which has nothing to do with the presence or absence of a soundtrack) is,
just as the silence of philosophy, exposure of the being-in-language of human
beings: pure gesturality.
3
Expanding the scope of Deleuzes author based cinema-images-concepts
4

(the foremost interest of the Agamben efect in flm theory) relies, in this
consideration of cinemas pure mediality, the quest for what one could call a
bare cinemathat is, an iconoclastic vision of cinema, as deprived of flms
and authorswhich has nothing to do with any ontological re-defnition of
it. Referring to the proximity, at this point, between Agambens questioning
of cinema and Walter Benjamins position on media, Christian McCrea states:
As in that earlier critic, the state of meaning-making itself is constantly under
enquiry, from which each medium can be made to speak either directly or
indirectly to the conditions under which signs and power fnd themselves.
5

One must therefore highlight this very important and innovative point in
Agambens position towards cinema: the changing perception of flm (i.e. of
movies as products of cinema) towards a general and much more open
questioning of the essence and historicity of the media itself and of its social,
political and conceptual determinations and repercussions. Tat is, an inter-
rogation about the basic, or bare, diference of cinema in the constitution
of the modern biopolitical world as well as in the constitution of modenity
itself as its paradigmatic closure and prosthetic reifcation. Moreover, this
rejoins Agambens position in regards to art in general. As presumed by Claire
Colebrook:
Agambens conceptualization of the work of art and art is always a work or
outcome of the bringing into being of a positivity and not just a copying or
representation of a prior content is not a theory of aesthetics. On the contrary,
Propositions for a Gestural Cinema 123
it is the modern notion of aesthetic theory or art criticism, and its delimitation
of the work of art from other social, political, ethical and productive domains,
that Agambens work seeks to displace.
6
In the context of modernity, the essential value of cinema must then be formu-
lated not in terms of its aesthetical interest or implications, but in terms of its
practical reason, of its ultimate raison dtre. Following Agambens premises,
one would say that, in the frame of the social experience of modernity, cinema
is validated by its orthopedic and biopolitical efect. Departing from the
known short paragraph of Notes on Gesture, in which he states that in
the cinema, a society that has lost its gestures tries at once to reclaim what
it has lost and to record its loss,
7
Agamben describes in detail the genealogy
of this gestural condition of cinema, from La Tourettes studies of gait, to
Mareys experiments on chronophotography or even, in a larger context,
Aby Warburgs Mnemosyne and the will to establish in the plates of its Atlas
a representation in virtual movement of Western humanitys gestures from
classical Greece to fascism.
8
In a particularly dramatic and clear paragraph,
Agamben writes:
Tus Spoke Zarathrusta is the ballet of a humankind that has lost its gestures.
And when the age realized this, it then began (but it was too late!) the precip-
itous attempt to recover the lost gestures in extremis. Te dance of Isadora
Duncan and Sergei Diaghilev, the novel of Proust, the great Jugendstil poetry
from Pascoli to Rilke, and, fnally and most exemplarily, the silent movie trace
the magic circle in which humanity tried for the last time to evoke what was
slipping though its fngers forever.
9
Once more, one must understand that what is at stake here is the profound
entanglement between what the cinematic media portrays and represents and
the proper nature of the media itself, the search for an identity between the
gestures in cinema and the gesture of cinema as parts of the same episteme, of
the same rationality. We are dealing here with a modernist coherence which
concerns not only the visuality of a paradigm but also its core functioning and
presuppositions (ethical and political), even if inside this paradigm, cinema has
developed a specifc position and, as a consequence, an efect of its own.
But in reality from where comes what we now call cinema? In particular,
if one accepts, following Agamben, that cinema is a potentiality, that is, a
mediality relatively independent of the precise media(s)among others, flm,
television, visual or performative artsthrough which it is actualized? In
artistic terms, a somewhat troubling answer to this question can be recalled
from a known passage of the Chapter 3a of Histoire(s) du cinma (La
monnaie de labsolu), in which Jean-Luc Godard places Manet as the true
inventor of the cinmatographe. Not the inventor of the technical apparatus,
of course, but of the images it will produce and of its visual, impressionistic
reversion:
All Manets women seem to say: I know what you are thinking, surely because
before this painter and I understood it from Malraux the inner world was
more subtle than the cosmos. Te celebrated and waning smiles of Da Vinci
and Vermeer say I, I and the world afer me. And even Corots woman with
her pink scarf doesnt think what thinks Olympia, what thinks Berthe Morisot,
what thinks the barmaid of the Folies-Bergre, because fnally the inner world
has rejoined the cosmos and with Edouard Manet the modern painting begins,
i.e., the cinmatographe.
10
Te cue deserves an exploration and a deviation, because, of course, Godards
injunction has nothing to do with a presumed aesthetical proximity between
painting and flm. In fact, Manet appears, to Godard, as much the painter of
modern life as the cinmatographe the technical-material realization of modern
mediality.
11
ExcursusManet (Mme Guillemet attending cinema)
In a paper titled Unbinding Vision,
12
Jonathan Crary wrote a magnifcent
analysis of one of Manets latest painting, Dans la serre (In the Conservatory), of
1879. In the context of our exploration of modern gesturality, and its signif-
cance in Agambens thoughts on cinema, Crarys analysis and Manets painting
appear both as a powerful illustration of the bourgeoisies state of afairs at
the end of the nineteenth century. Trough his analysis of Dans la serre, and
following the paintings strategy, Crary clarifes the protocols of perception and
attention confgured in modernity and the way those protocols helped shape the
ways of life and consumer patterns characteristic of this same modernity.
In his analysis Crary shows how, painting that scene the way he chose
to paint it, Manet gave form to the tensions presented in modern life and
visuality and to the way modernist plasticity was able to capture in the bodies
and in their anachronistic gestures, the signs of a new (paradoxical) pattern of
attention, inattention and afection, dispositions, and actions. Tus, in Crarys
perspective, Manets painting emerges as a powerful statement about moder-
nitys cultural and life forms, through its expression in a complex, but very
precise, arrangement of bodies, gestures and gazes in the enclosed and sufo-
cating atmosphere of a Parisian conservatory.
Crary, by emphasizing the way Manets painting seems to signal a retreat
in the painters characteristic formlessness and supreme indiference towards
its subjects,
13
demonstrates instead how the tableau gives substance to that
particular modern visual threshold. On one side, one feels a strong efort
to sustain the stability of perception and, through it, as Crary sustains, the
viability of a functional real world;
14
on the other, one perceivesfrom within
the paintings chain of detailsthe disturbance of this apparent harmonious
stability in favor of an ever changing visual feld, whose immediate expression
is, precisely, not visual, but gestural and even choreographic.
Te painting seems to present itself as a simple narrative and visual equation
(also because it never disrupts its frst sight impression): the Guillemet couple,
who were close friends of the painter, are here in retreat from everyday life, and
Figure 6.1 douard Manet, Dans la serre, 1879. Oil on canvas, 115 cm 150cm. Alte
Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany. Photographed by Sara Pereira.
they rest suspended in the enclosed space of a conservatory.
15
But a close survey
of some signifcant details helps us to diagnose how the painting is a powerful
statement on the signs of the decisive dialectical movement between binding
and dissociation. Te signals are underlined by Crary: Manets painting is about
a more generalized experience of dissociation even while he maintains a superf-
cially unifed surface, even while he asserts the efcacy of a reality function.
16
Te pattern of attention in the general economy of the painting is, in that
sense, decisive. Te man and the woman seem attentive, but their attention is
not, as one could expect, on one another. Mme Guillemet, in her inert waxwork
quality, overdressed and fxed by a complicated dress, which is a real fashion
apparatus (she was, in fact, proprietary of a fashion boutique), seems medused,
hypnotized, somnambulant. Her body, as Crary states, is a body with eyes open
but ones that do not seethat is, do not arrest, do not fx, do not appropriate
the world around them.
17
Te man, kept physically apart from his spouse by the
green bench (and one cannot but reinforce the segregative signifcance of that
sign, as a sign of a perceptual order), seems also out of what could be a love
scene, his gaze being projected in divergent directions, the eyes focused in two
disparate optical axes, neither of which, envisaging directly the womans face.
Terefore, Crarys conclusion is clear and full of epistemological conse-
quences: within a work depicting two apparently attentive fgures, Manet
discloses an attentiveness that has actually been folded into two diferent states
of distraction within which the stability and unity of the painting begin to
corrode.
18
Finally, it is this statement about modernity visual (and historical
and bodily) dialectics that is unveiled by the gestures that occupy the center
of the painting: the paradoxical choreography of the hands, the wedding ring,
and the cigar. Tis choreography seems to play outside the couples own bodies,
binding and unbinding that catastrophic gestural situation.
If one accepts that this painting is, in its dissociative manner, a perfect
representation of the bourgeoisies dispossession of gestures in everyday life and
the urgent need to recapture this performance through another dispositif, then
one can easily see at what point this analysis rejoins Godards idea of Manets
painting as a precursor of cinema, of the coming logic of the cinmatographe,
of its essential, catastrophic, mobility, where, Agamben states, the mythical
rigidity of the image has been broken, and we should not really speak of images
here, but of gestures.
19
In conclusion: cinema is needed, and expected, but that need is not aesthetical
or simply visual. It appears as a gesture to solve the catastrophic incapacity of a
society to control its frantic and disparate gestures or, to say it in diferent words,
as an opportunity to resolve that schizophrenic dissociation between brain and
muscle, body and history, consciousness and experience. Te power of cinema
and later the power of cinematic montage manifests itself in a promise to free
the image from the paradoxical and unbearable state of Manets conservatory
and develop it into gesture. In this movement, while exposing the potential of
the image and the dynamic element that resides frozen in its interior, cinema
looks to release it through a never ending movement, later expanded by the
performative capacities of montage.
It is that perfect medialitya condition of being-in-language, as a poten-
tiality, a purposiveness without purpose
20
which fndsin Dziga Vertovs
Man With a Movie Camera (1929) a conclusive celebration: the signifcance of
cinema as a way to restore and to give a modernist coherence to the frantic
proliferation of gestures in modern society. A celebration of dynamism and the
way it accords itself with cinema intrinsic and ontological mobility.
21
Figure 6.2 Dans la serre: the gestural catastrophe. Photographed by Sara Pereira, cropped and edited
by the author.
Cinema possessed
Jean Rouch was dispossessed of his tripod, lost in 1947, during the shooting of
the frst of his ethnographic documentaries. He recalled this event several times
as being one powerful and decisive constituent of his position towards flm
technology and, in particular, the movie camera: During the frst flm I made
in 1947, I had the good luck of losing my tripod afer two weeks. It was a flm on
the descent of the Niger River. Afer I made the flm I thought that there wasnt
anything that couldnt be flmed without a tripod.
22
From that loss on, and the
need to reinvent a strategy to continue shooting without the sustainability of
a tripod, Rouchs cinema was always concerned about the intimacy between
cinema and gesture, i.e. the physical and mental experience of the mediality
condition of cinema and the way it can give a cinematic form to a movement
which, in reality, it doesnt possess.
23
Rouch has even designated this movement
as cin-trance, an experience in complete antagonism with the observational
viewing practices manifest in the use of zoom lenses:
For me then, the only way to flm is to walk with the camera, taking it where
it is most efective and improvising another type of ballet with it, trying to
make it as alive as the people it is flming. [] Tus instead of using the zoom,
the cameraman-director can really get into the subject. Leading or following
a dancer, priest, or crafsman, he is no longer himself, but a mechanical eye
accompanied by an electronic ear. It is this strange state of transformation
that takes place in the flmmaker that I have called, analogously to possession
phenomena, cin-trance.
24
As one sees, the concept of cin-trance engages and is engaged by a ritual
practice of cinema as well as by a cinema practice of ritual. For Rouch, cinema
posits itself as a borderline vehicle between diferent worlds, also ofering itself
as an opportunity to pass between them. However, for this passage to occur a
path is needed, which in Rouchs flmic strategy takes the form of the ritual, and
in particular the form of a performative kind of ritual.
For the late religious studies scholar, Catherine Bell, ritual simultaneously
embraces three diferent levels: a frst level, which one can assume as physical,
concerns the eventful nature of the rite, that is, the manner in which each ritual
posits itself as a set of activities, that [] efects changes in peoples percep-
tions and interpretations
25
; a second level, which Bell retrieves from Gregory
Batesons concept of framing, is essentially interpretive, concerning the way
ritual serves to frame acts or messages to make them understandable and
repeatable by the community; fnally, a third level concerns the performative
dimension of the ritual, as the event of the performance itself and the way it is
able to generate a fux of transformations, like the ones involving the transition
from childhood to manhood or from life to death.
26
It is at this performative
level, that rituals have the power to operate a transformation in the fux of life,
producing and bestowing a diferent state of things, even if momentarily.
From our perspective it is this last level of ritual that interests Rouch in the
frst place, because through the medial nature of ritual and the construction
of its pure mediality it can rejoin the mediality of cinema in a common media
whole. Te cameraand through the camera the gestures of the cameraman-
directoris then an alternative media to build the performative efcacy of the
ritual, not already only in the scope of the group or the tribe who practices it but
eventually enlarged to the spectators of the flm:
I now believe that for the people who are flmed, the self of the flmmaker
changes in front of their eyes during the shooting. He no longer speaks, except
to yell out incomprehensible orders Roll!, Cut!). He now looks at them only
through the intermediary of a strange appendage and hears them only through
the intermediary of a shotgun microphone. But paradoxically it is due to this
equipment and this new behavior (which has nothing to do with the observable
behavior of the same person when he is not flming) that the flmmaker can
throw himself into a ritual, integrate himself with it, and follow it step-by-step.
[] For the Songhay-Zarma, who are now quite accustomed to flm, my self
is altered in front of their eyes in the same way as in the self of the possession
dancers: it is the flm-trance (cin-transe) of the one flming the real trance
of the other.
27
Rouch flmed around 40 flms concerning spirit possession rituals among the
Songhay, Zarma and Dogon tribes in western central Africa, on the margins of
the Niger River. In the context of these rituals, possession signifes that somebody,
i.e., some of the bodies present in the ritual event, will be possessed by the gods
(gnies), which means that some of those (humans) will be converted inton
horses for the gods serving so that the gods might appear and reveal their wishes,
orders or impositions to the group who invoked their presence.
28
Te revelation
of the spirit involves the trance of whoever is going to be his/her horse. Te
production of this trance is an extremely delicate moment determined by the
whole of the event and the fux of energies that it is able to generate. It is because
of that fragile ecology, and of its complete involvement and agency, that the
observers presence can never be neutral. As Rouch observes, [w]hether he
wishes it or not, the observer is integral to the general movement of things, and
his most minute reactions are interpreted within the context of the particular
system of thought that surrounds him.
29
In several ways, one is able to see how much this trance collectively acts as
a perfect negative of modern crisis concerning the bourgeoisies dispossession
of gestures. Te collective energy created through the ritual and its protocols
envisages the production of an event, which not only possesses a global sense of
its own, but a sense that is commonly understood by everybody who is involved
in it. Tis includes the cameraman-director, Rouch himself, who then can state
properly, invoking his own gods: With a cin-eye and a cin-ear, I am a cin-
Rouch in a state of cin-trance in the process of cin-flming. So that is the joy
of flming, the cin-pleasure. In order for this to work, the little god Dionysus
must be there. We must have luck; we must have what I call grace.
30
Perhaps no other flm presented more clearly this equation of reciprocities
this ballet, a term used by Rouch several timesthan the small masterpiece
titled Tourou et bitti: Les Tambours dAvant (Tourou and Bitti: Te Drums of the
Past), which Rouch flmed in the late evening of March 15, 1971, in one single
shot.
31
Rouch described, in the following terms, the experience of this absolutely
peculiar flm:
On March 15, 1971, the Sorko fsherman Daouda asked me to come flm at
Simiri, in the Zarmaganda of Niger. Te occasion was a possession dance to ask
the black spirits of the bush to protect the forthcoming crop from the locusts.
Despite the eforts of the zima priest Sido, Daoudas father, and despite the use
of two special old drums, Tourou and Bitti, no one became possessed for three
days. On the fourth day I again went to Simiri with Daouda and my soundman,
Moussa Amidou. Afer several hours passed without possession taking place, I
decided to shoot anyway. Night was about to fall, and I thought I would take
the opportunity to shoot some footage of this beautiful music, which is in
danger of disappearing. I began to flm the exterior of the compound of the
zima priests, then, without turning of and on, passed through the pen of the
sacrifcial goats and then out into the dance area where an old man, Sambou
Albeybu, was dancing without much conviction. Without stopping I walked
up to the musicians and flmed them in detail. Suddenly the drums stopped. I
was about ready to turn of when the godye lute started up again, playing solo.
Te lute player had seen a spirit. Immediately Sambou entered into the state
and became possessed by the spirit kure (the Hausa butcher, the hyena). I kept
flming. Ten old Tusinye Wazi entered the dance area; she was immediately
possessed by the spirit Hadyo. Still without stopping, I flmed the consultation
of spirits by the priests a sacrifce was requested. At this point I began to walk
backward, framing a general establishing view of the compound, now fushed
with the coming of sunset. Te flming was thus one continuous shot, the length
of the camera load.
32
Rouchs description is interesting not only because it ofers a frst person expla-
nation of the flm, but also because it underlines the importance of continuity in
the production of the event that relates the Songhay ritual to its cinematographic
depiction by Rouch and Moussa Amidou, his soundman. Tis continuity, this
powerful and uninterrupted movementwhich in its proper materiality should
be understood as a ballet gestureis conceived to give form to a whole, in
which the life of an African tribe appears indissolubly attached to the mediality
of flm and the work of a French flmmaker invited to portray it on flm and
even, following Rouchs own terms, to engaged in it by (the means of) flm.
33
As
stated by Stoller: Les Tambours dAvant not only portrays a Songhay possession
Figure 6.3 Jean Rouch, Tourou et bitti: Les Tambours dAvant, 1971.
ceremony but is the story of a flmmaker who crosses an ethnographic boundary
in Simiri, Niger, and enters the nether world of the Minotaur, the world of cine-
trance.
34
Outlying the common ethnographic image of the other, Tourou et
bitti: Les Tambours dAvant is a flm about the possibility of encountering the
Other in a sort of a unique community made by cinema. Tat community is,
of course, not what the flm presents or portrays, but what the flm (each flm)
is able to engage in the specifc form of the encounter rendered possible by the
action of cinema with all its specifc diferences, from the use of technology to
the physical behavior of the camera and cameraman.
Surely, the most decisive and revelatory moment in Les Tambours dAvant
happens when the music stops and Rouch decides to continue shooting in
continuity, because, as he suggests in the text (and in his own voice-over during
the flm), something diferent than the playing of the drums is going to happen.
If until then one could say that the gesture of cinema was guided by the presence
and the sound of the drums and by the rhythm of its music, at that particular
momentalmost a moment of suspensionthe cameraman-director is guided
by the perception of an immanent whole, even if, for now, the flm has not
Figure 6.4 Jean Rouch, Tourou et bitti: Les Tambours dAvant, 1971.
actualized it in terms of its efective images. It is a magical moment, a moment
of trance which enables Rouch to organize his movementshis balletas if
in a complete articulation with a superior force, as if he was one of the horses
the gods choose to descend upon for the ritual.
We have lost, you and I, that taste for the thrill, that possibility of escaping
ourselves, of living, with our body, the adventure of another, of being the horse
of a god. Te paradox is that, maybe because I made flms, I have never been
possessed. For those who saw them, and I mean the priests and the people I
showed them to in Africa, my possession was what I call a cin-trance, and
it was from making all those movements that are absolutely abnormal, from
following someone in the middle of a trance arena, from pointing my lens at
someone who was about to be possessed, indeed, at that very moment when a
possession might take over.
35
In-conclusion: Prospects for a gestural cinema (from a
flmmakers point of view)
Being in the process of directing a flm project that will deal with ritual and
possession myself,
36
Agambens and Rouchs ideas about flm movement and
the signifcance of gesture resonate in my head as powerful indicators for
opening up new paths for flm composition and conceptualization. I ask myself:
How important can those ideas be for a flmmaker? How can they improve or
clarify the relationship between a creator and his flm? How can they refresh a
cinematic frame of reference based on visual efectiveness and saturated with
formulas for narrative clairvoyance?
It is clear that Agamben saw very well the dependence of cinema on
bourgeoisie interests and its inscription in the frame of a global biopolitical
regime. It is clear also that, through a diferent path, Rouch saw almost the
same thing, which explains many of his radical shifs (ethnographical but also
cinematographic). He was not, however, the only one: Stroheim, Rossellini,
Renoir, Godard and the Soviets (Eisenstein and Vertov), among (not so many)
others, tried to escape the aesthetical versus entertainment bourgeois trap in
which the potential of flm has been encapsulated for many decades now. As a
flmmaker, I feel that it is this path that has found in Agambens thought new
names and new perspectives of development, and also new ways to approach the
very singular work of displaced cinastes like Jean Rouch or Guy Debord.
A (new) word in film vocabularygesturecomes, then, to the film scene
(which I hope will not be only a scholarly one): gesture, with all its potential
correlates and consequences. As a filmmaker, I am interested, then, in the
following questions: Can we gesture a film instead of visualizing it? If so,
what does that mean, to gesture a film? To both questions, the answer, I
think, must be eminently political and in that respect both Agamben and
Rouch understood very well the full implications of this state of things.
Both of them make use of a common term: possession. For one, cinema
served the bourgeois project to re-possess their lost gestures and recompose
a prosthetic and screenable sense of experience and history; for the other,
prophetically dispossessed of his tripod, cinema appears, exactly, as a mean to
disrupt the bourgeois sense of gesture, making the mobile gesture of cinema
possessable by others. It is as if one made, in retrospect, the theory for the
praxis of the other. For the moment, one can say that the prospects are illumi-
nating, because they open the path for a cinema more radically conscious of
its own politics and more able to seek the freedom of its trance and of its own
loss and dispossession. Even if probably deceived, Mme Guillemet would be,
surely, astonished!
Notes
1 Gilles Deleuze, Cinma 1: Limage-mouvement (Paris: Minuit, 1983) and Gilles
Deleuze, Cinma 2: Limage-temps (Paris: Minuit, 1985).
2 Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Toughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Vivian Sobchack, Te Address of
the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2009); Laura Marks, Te Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment,
and the Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); Sarah Cooper, Te
Occluded Relation: Levinas and Cinema, Film-Philosophy, vol. 11, no. 2 (2007):
i-vii. URL: http://www.flm-philosophy.com/2007v11n2/introduction.pdf
[accessed January 28, 2013.]; Sarah Cooper, Emmanuel Levinas, Film, Teory
and Philosophy, ed. Felicity Colman (Durham: Acumen, 2009), 919; Raymond
Bellour, Le Corps du Cinma: hypnoses, motions, animalits (Paris: P.O.L diteur,
2009); Sam B. Girgus, Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics and
the Feminine (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Tomas Elsaesser
and Malte Hagener, Film Teory: An Introduction Trough the Senses (New York:
Routledge, 2010).
3 Giorgio Agamben, Notes on Gesture, in Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics,
trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000), 60.
4 Deborah Levitt has recently elaborated a pertinent critical explanation of this
Deleuze-Agamben relationship towards cinema position in philosophy and history:
Agamben submits Deleuzes vitalist cinematic image to a critical genealogy of
life as the joint production of modern biopolitics and new media technologies.
[] And if Deleuze has alerted us to the circulation of the pre-individual
singularities, the afects and percepts that create bodies of all kinds (including,
of course, political ones), in Notes on Gestureas well as in related essays on
the work of Guy DebordAgamben points to how these are linked to imbricated
developments in the history of technology, medicine, industry and political
economy. Deborah Levitt, Notes on Media and Biopolitics: Notes on Gesture,
Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life, Justin Clemens, Nicholas Heron
and Alex Murray (eds) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 1934.
5 Christian McCrea, Giorgio Agamben, Film, Teory and Philosophy, ed. Felicity
Colman (Durham: Acumen, 2009), 350.
6 Claire Colebrook, Art, in Te Agamben Dictionary, Alex Murray and Jessica
Whyte (eds) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 289. For an extended
analysis on this topic and, in particular, for a critical exploration of Agambens
book Man Without Content, see also Claire Colebrook, Agamben: Aesthetics,
Potentialities and Life, Te South Atlantic Quarterly vol. 107, no. 1 (2007), 10720.
8 Of the fgures Agamben cites, Marey is perhaps the most persuasively emblematic.
As a number of scholars have noted, social modernity and cultural modernity meet in
the fgure of Marey, in whose work physiological investigations of human movement,
utopian dreams of a pristine and waste-free social hygiene and the impulse to fnd new
imaging technologies converge (Deborah Levitt, Notes on Media and Biopolitics:
Notes on Gesture , 197). For a brilliant and detailed exploration of this context and its
implications on cinema, see Pasi Vliahos Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Tought
and Cinema circa 1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010) and the
classical and remarkable studies of Marey by Franois Dagognet: tienne-Jules Marey:
La passion de la trace (Paris: Hazan, 1987) and Laurent Mannoni: tienne-Jules Marey:
la mmoire de loeil (Paris/Milano: French Cinematheque/Mazzotta, 1999).
10 Jean-Luc Godard, Histoires du Cinma, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 4854.
11 In an appropriate and humorous comment, Tierry de Duve wrote: Godard is the
Manet of flm, unless Manet is the Godard of painting. Tierry de Duve, LOOK:
100 Years of Contemporary Art (Ludion: Brussels, 2000), 227.
12 Jonathan Crary, Unbinding Vision, October 68 (1994), 2144.
13 Manets indiference was supreme, efortless and stinging: it scandalized but never
deigned to take notice of the shock it produces. Georges Bataille, Manet, trans.
Austryn Waynhouse and James Emmons (Cleveland: Skira, 1955).
14 Crary states: I see the painting as a fguration of an essential confict within the
perceptual logic of modernity in which two powerful tendencies are at work. One
is a binding together of vision, an obsessive holding together of perception to
maintain the viability of a functional real world, while the other, barely contained
or sealed over, is a logic of psychic and economic exchange, of equivalence and
substitution, of fux and dissolution that threatens to overwhelm the apparently
stable positions and terms that Manet seems to have efortlessly arranged.
Jonathan Crary, Unbinding Vision, 30.
15 Manet painted Mme Guillemet other times, namely as a model for one of his
Parisiennes. Te conservatory sited at 70, Rue dAmsterdam, in Paris, was the
property of the painter Otto Rosen and Manet used it as a studio, between 1878
and 1879.
16 Jonathan Crary, Unbinding Vision, 35.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., 367.
20 Ibid., 59.
21 And one knows at what point other responses were given to the political
dimension of gesture, this time through their confnement, political arrangement
and rationalization, as it happened, symbolically, with fascist parades, from
military to gymnastics. At this point, one should mention the extremely signifcant
infuence of Foucaults theory of power and biopower on Agambens thought.
For an interesting and comprehensive analysis of this subject, see Anke Snoek,
Agambens Foucault: An overview, Foucault Studies 10 (2010), 4467.
22 Jean Rouch and Enrico Fulchignoni, Cine-Anthropology, in Cine-Ethnography,
ed. and trans. Steven Feld (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003),
148.
23 Very conscious of the strenuous efort implied by this experience, Rouch stated:
I still have the taste of this efort in my mouth, and of the risk taken so as not
to stumble, not to screw up my focus and lens setting, to be drifing as slowly
as possible and then to suddenly fy with my camera as alive as a bird. Without
that, everything had to start over, which is to say everything was lost forever.
And when, exhausted by this tension and this efort, Moussa Amidou put down
his microphone and I my camera, we felt as though the attentive crowd, the
musicians and even those fragile gods who had haunted their trembling dancers
in the interval, all understood the meaning of our research and applauded its
success. And this is probably why I can only explain this type of mise-en-scne
with the mysterious term cin-trance . (Jean Rouch and Enrico Fulchignoni,
Cine-Anthropology, 186).
24 Jean Rouch, Te Camera and Man, in Cine-Ethnography, ed. and trans. Steven
Feld (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 389.
25 Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Revised Edition) (Cary: Oxford
26 For a deeper exploration of Bells appreciation of the performance theory of ritual
cf. Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Revised Edition) (Cary:
Oxford University Press, 2009), 726.
27 Jean Rouch, On the Vicissitudes of the Self: Te Possessed Dancer, the Magician,
the Sorcerer, the Filmmaker and the Ethnographer, Cine-Ethnography, ed. and
trans. Steven Feld (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 99.
28 For a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the possession rituals among the
Songhay, see Paul Stollers Fusion of the Worlds: An Ethnography of Possession
Among the Songhay of Nigeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
Known as one of the most important ethnographers in Central Africa and one of
Rouchs closest friends and a research teammate, Paul Stoller signed a referential
book about the flmmakers work: Te Cinematic Griot: Te Ethnography of Jean
Rouch, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
the Sorcerer, the Filmmaker and the Ethnographer, 97.
30 Jean Rouch and Enrico Fulchignoni, Cine-Anthropology, 150. In the course of
her analysis of one of the most known Rouchs ritual flms: Les Matres fous (Te
Crazy Masters), Elizabeth Cowie remarked on this (ever) permeating nature of
ritual and its global dynamics: Te ritual presents an intermixing of elements
that remain distinct in a drama of their very juxtaposition, a conjoined image
of embodied self and spirit, of power and weakness, where both the abject and
taboo are celebrated and valorized. Te boundary of self and other is permeated as
meaning and identity slip between, for the adept is and is not the spirit, partaking
in the spirits power and disowning it as much as he or she is disowned by it.
(Elizabeth Cowie, Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2011), 149).
31 In reality, the flm is made in two shots, as the long take that constitutes the flm
depiction of the ritual is preceded by a much smaller introductive shot in which
Rouchs voice-over explains the conditions for the shooting.
the Sorcerer, the Filmmaker and the Ethnographer, 101.
33 Looking back at this flm now, I think that the shooting itself was what unlatched
and sped up the possession process. And I would not be surprised if upon showing
the flm to the priests of Simiri, I learned that it was my own cin-trance that
played the role of catalyst that night. Jean Rouch, ibid.
34 Paul Stoller, Te Cinematic Griot, 194.
35 Jean Rouch and Enrico Fulchignoni, Cine-Anthropology, 155.
36 Tis flm, Dun Atlantic, now in pre-production, is supposed to be shot in early
2014, and it will be a documentary about African-Brasilian religion, namely
Candombl, and its dissemination in South-Atlantic geographical and cultural
space.
7
Engaging Hand to Hand with the Moving
Image : Serra, Viola and Grandrieuxs
Radical Gestures
Silvia Casini
But in confdence I am going to tell you a terrible secret:
Ihate cinema except when I shoot,
then you need to know not to be shy with the camera,
using violence, breaking down its defenses,
because the camera is a despicable mechanism. What matters is poetry
Orson Welles interviewed by Andr Bazin
1
Introduction
A hand rhythmically catching a chunk of lead, two female fgures approaching
each other to embrace in an extreme slow motion, a torso twisting and swirling
at the command of someone elses will: this essay examines these and other
gestures in selected contemporary moving image works. Te gesturephysical
and conceptual, theoretical and technicalaccompanies and illuminates old
and new forms of the moving image, from early motion experiments to
analogue cinema and contemporary digital interfaces.
For Agamben, it is thanks to gestures that images themselves might be
rescued to enter the realm of ethics and politics rather than just the one of
aesthetics. When do images become gestures? What kind of cinema can today
release gestures from being frozen by an image? In order to answer these
questions, I shall examine what constitutes gestures in the following examples
from moving images: the short flm Hand Catching Lead (Richard Serra, 1968),
the video installation Te Greeting (Bill Viola, 1995) and sequences from the
experimental flm La Vie nouvelle (Philippe Grandrieux, 2002). In these works
cinema mingles with the other arts (video installation, performance, music and
painting). Te cross-fertilization between diferent art forms here demonstrates
how the medium of flm is only one of the possible applications of cinema and
how these works are governed by forces other than storytelling. Despite the
obvious diferences among the artworks in terms of specifc media, I will seek
to show how in all of them the image frees itself from the normative power
of the cinematic dispositif. Te energy, intensity and potentiality of the image
becoming gesture is what is at stake in those artworks, which open up other
ways of doing cinemaand other ways of thinking about it.
Te essay is structured around three concepts that are fundamental to
Agambens philosophy and, I argue, to any examination of gesture and the
moving image: dispositif, profanation and potentiality.
2
Te frst section intro-
duces the reader to the relationship between gesture and language and the other
sections of the essay are organized around and expand on the three concepts
mentioned above. It is particularly hard to select one single theme in Agambens
oeuvre and attempt to explain it. In Agambens prose all concepts are related
to one another, albeit not necessarily in a systematic way. Tis renders almost
impossible to investigate the notion of gesture in Agamben without referring
to other concepts such as dispositif, profanation and potentiality. I decided
to approach them in this order for the sake of clarity and logical connection:
profanation, for example, implies the reference to dispositifs upon which the
profaning gesture can take place. Potentiality cannot be understood without
engaging frst with the other two aforementioned concepts.
I am not claiming that the artworks I discuss more or less intuitively embody
the Agambian concepts of dispositif, profanation and potentiality. Tis would
not only be disrespectful to the works examined but also discourteous. Rather
I argue that a certain kind of cinema can illuminate the task that Agamben
attributes to cinema: that of being a medium capable of engaging us with ethical
and political questions and scenarios, not because it poses a political thesis or
takes an explicit ethical stance but thanks to its being gesture rather than image-
based. Cinema is neither a machine for creating illusions nor a means to enjoy
our symptoms while seated in the darkness of the theater. Cinema lays bare
rather than nurture its illusionary nature and, by doing so, it can open up the
space for another kind of politics and ethics of the image.
Te relationship between the moving image and gesture has been tackled
by many scholars inside and outside the discipline of flm studies. To use
the expression moving image instead of cinema, as I sometimes do in
Engaging Hand to Hand with the Moving Image 141
this essay, is not a neutral choice. On the contrary, I mean to emphasize the
temporality that inhabits images, their capacity to move from one medium to
another and, thus, be revitalized, an ability that art historian Aby Warburg,
a constant reference point for Giorgio Agamben, highlighted in his atlas
Mnemosyne (1929).
3
Following the line of reasoning adopted by Gilles
Deleuze, who sees cinema as an intrinsic philosophical machine capable
of creating concepts, Agambens oeuvre similarly engages with the moving
image and its relationship with gesture. A number of flms and flmmakers
appear in Agambens refections on cinema, notably Guy Debord and
Jean-Luc Godard, both of whom he discusses at various lengths. However,
it is in Te Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the History of Cinema
4
that
Agamben, with a single example, shows the power of cinema not simply to
describe gestures but to enact them. In the fnal pages of his Profanations,
Agamben refects upon cinema as gesture by discussing a fragment of Orson
Welles flm Don Quixote.
Tis flm, lef unfnished by Welles, who had worked upon it for almost
twenty years (195775), has a sequence which takes place inside a crowded
flm theater with Don Quixote sitting in the frst row. When Sancho Panza
enters the theater looking for his friend, Don Quixote does not notice him:
he is totally engrossed in the images on the screen, almost hypnotized by
the spell created by the cinematic sequence. Afer realizing that the woman
on the screen is threatened by a group of soldiers, Don Quixote springs
forward and rushes towards the screen, slicing it to shreds to defend her from
themto the cheers of the audience in the theater. Te gesture of a fctional
character destroys the materiality of the cinematic screen and, with it, its
illusions.
Already from this short sequence, it appears clear that it is a certain kind
of cinema that allows gesture to be freed from the stillness associated with
image. In this respect, Agamben chooses to discuss authors and examples of
the avant-garde and experimental tradition leaving aside mainstream cinema.
He describes cinema or at least a certain sort of cinema as a prolonged
hesitation between image and meaning, thus identifying cinema as a medium
that dwells in a territory where potentiality, rather than storytelling, reigns.
5
If
mass media merely tell facts that we can only observe or judge as spectators,
cinema gives us the task of expanding our gaze onto the possibilities of the
images we look at.
Inhabiting language through gestures
In everyday talk, gestures are understood as a form of communication used
to convey a message in place of or parallel to speech. In antiquity, from the
Sophists through to Aristotle and then Cicero, the art of discourse (rhetoric)
already went hand in hand with the ability to have the appropriate gestures
accompany the words, as if gestures could be taken as a mere means to illustrate,
highlight or replace words through visible bodily movements. Tese two aspects
of gesturefrst, the capacity to illustrate words and, second, the capacity to
replace words through visible bodily movementssuggest a role played by
images on the one hand (the illustrative power and visibility of gestures) and a
role played by the body on the other.
Philosophical refection upon gestures and their relationship with language
has engaged several modern and contemporary thinkers as diverse as Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Teodor Adorno, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Franois Lyotard and
Agamben, to name just a few. Following Agamben, Pasi Vliaho has focused on
the etymology of the word gesture, for which gestures are not simply actions nor
bodily movements but a manner of carrying the body.
6
Tere is a diference in the
way Agamben uses the singular gesture or the plural gestures, as Murray points
out.
7
Gestures, for Agamben, exhibit an inability to convey something in language.
Nevertheless, gestures already inhabit language, even when they are not accom-
panied by words. Gesture (in the singular), in fact, is the exhibition of a mediality:
it is the process of making a means visible as such, it is our speechless dwelling in
language.
8
In this sense, gestures function as an interruption of language, which
nevertheless is proof of the being-in-language of the non-linguistic.
To sustain his arguments and further deepen his concepts of gesture, profa-
nation or potentiality, Agamben develops a constellation of fgures belonging to
the languages of cultural production (Bartleby the scrivener in literature, Don
Quixote in literature and flm, Glenn Gould in music, to name just a few), or
to the natural world (the cat playing with the mouse). Given the centrality of
language in all his thought, Agambens readers might be surprised to realize how
ofen he returns to visual examples, and to the imaging they conjure. Images,
however, are not used as mere means to illustrate or accompany a critical
refection that is supported through words. Tose images embodied in fctional
and real characters interrupt the fow of words, they are fractures in the narrative,
they oblige the reader to connect distant things and times. Responding to this
peculiar way of proceeding, I attempt to intertwine the theoretical discussion of
an Agambian concept with a close reading of an example from the arts. Te frst
one will be Serras flm and the dispositif.
Gestures and the cinematic dispositif: Richard Serras Hand
Catching Lead
In the previous section we dealt with the concept of gesture and its relationship
to language. Tis section further explores Agambens understanding of gesture
in relation to the dispositif of cinema. His essay Notes on Gesture
9
begins with
Gilles de la Tourettes scientifc studies on the human gait and claims that gestures
disappeared at the end of the nineteenth century, with the fragmentation of
gestures into a series of spasmodic and uncontrolled movements, tics and jerks.
10

Te relationship between cinema and scientifc research is hardly new. Several
scholars have demonstrated that the birth of cinema in the nineteenth century
is not so much linked to the invention and development of cinematic spectacle
as to the need of scientists, naturalists, and doctors to record the dynamism and
movement of bodies for the purpose of analysis and understanding.
11
Moving
bodies and their gestures were the subject of early cinema. Hence, since its very
beginning, the cinematographic machine was entangled with gestures as a form
of life, as the way in which human beings lived their lives.
Agamben shows how, on the one hand, the image can freeze the gesture,
whereas, on the other, it can preserve the dynamism of gesture and thus revitalize
cinema. To tackle this difculty one should analyze the concept of apparatus
orto use the corresponding French termdispositif, which has returned to
prominence in flm studies. Agamben uses the Italian word dispositivo which
is closer to the French word dispositif rather than to the English translation
apparatus.
12
Alongside the more canonical contributions of the seventies, from
Foucault to the semio-psychoanalytic theories of flm, there are, in fact, diferent
contemporary interventions including those by Philippe Alain Michaud and
Agamben. Michaud understands the term dispositif in its strictly material
sense: he suggests the decline of cinema which marked the twentieth century
and considers its crisis to be closely related to the emergence of other forms of
production/exhibition (as alternatives to camera shooting and projection) and
consumption of the image (as an alternative to being a spectator).
13
Agamben borrows the notion of dispositif from Foucault, for whom it is the
range of ideological and actual machineries that surround or defne human
beings. In the short essay called What Is an Apparatus?, Agamben refers to
the dispositif as that something (a technology, a process) that produces its
own subject. All beings can be classifed into two groups: living beings and
apparatuses in which living beings are incessantly captured.
14
Between these
two classes lies a third class: subjects. Agamben understands a subject as that
which results from the relation between living beings and dispositifs: I will call
an apparatus, he writes, literally anything that has in some way the capacity
to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures,
behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.
15
Agamben proceeds on a
double level: frst he identifes the multifaceted forms of dispositifs that hold us
captive, then he seeks ways in which to deactivate them.
Te 16mm black and white flm made by the American artist, Serra, in
1968, Hand Catching Lead, provides a good starting point for an examination
of the relationship between gesture and the cinematic dispositif. A pre-eminent
contemporary sculptor and video artist whose works are preserved in numerous
public and private collections, Serra is interested in bringing materiality, the
viewer, and the location to the foreground, as his widely-known gigantic
open-air steel sculptures prove. Tis attention, however, can also be found in his
video-based works, as Hand Catching Lead, Serras frst flm, demonstrates.
Framed by a fxed frontal camera, a forearm and a hand perform a simple
movement on the screen. We watch the very same gesture repeated many times.
Te image we see coincides with the gesture performed on the camera. Te
flmmakers hand tries to repeatedly catch bits of lead falling from the top of
the frame. When it succeeds, the hand holds the lead for an instant and then
releases it. In this process, the hand gradually blackens. Although one does not
see who or what is dropping the chunks from above, Serra explains it is the
composer-musician Philip Glass who, of screen, tosses the chunks of lead at
regular intervals of time. In this way, not only do we have the impression that
there is a machine of frame dropping the chunks but also that the forearm
and the hand themselves are a mechanical device. Despite this impression of a
mechanized stimulus-response circuit, there is an almost imperceptible instant
when the hand withdraws slightly, the forefnger fexes and makes the gesture of
beckoning as if to ask for another chunk of lead.
In this short flmwhich is closer to a performancethe body is that of
the machine, the dispositif is that of the cinematic apparatus which is both
mechanical and organic (the hand) and capable of performing a gesture (the
catching and release of a piece of lead). Serra performs the flm-device by
exploring notions of weight, impression, fatigue of a body (e.g. the hand,
and the arm), repetition and gravity. It is not the projection that counts here
but rather the sequence of the gestures made by the hand: grabbing, holding,
releasing. Te cinematographic machine is opened up, exteriorized into the
gesture performed by a hand catching a piece of lead. Te gesture visually and
literally afects the cinematographic machine, which is embodied in the hand
turning black as more pieces of material are grabbed and then released.
Hand Catching Lead shows the automatism of the cinematic dispositif
produced, albeit not perfectly, by the repetition of a gesture which interrupts
the falling of a series of pieces of lead. Te concept of repetition, along with
that of stoppage, are the two transcendental conditions that permit montage, to
use a Kantian framework. Te intertwining between stoppage and repetition in
cinema is best exemplifed, for Agamben, by the experimental cinema of Guy
Debord. Rather than using cinema to tell a story, Debord makes the medium of
cinema visible as such by returning to repetition and stoppage. Repetition, like
memory, is not the re-proposal of the same but the restitution of the dimension
of possibility to the image and the possibility that we, as spectators, acquire a
more active role. For Agamben, to repeat something is to render it possible
again. Stoppage is the other condition of possibility of cinema, the power to
interrupt the fow of images and words.
By repeating the gesture of grabbing the piece of lead (and thus interrupting
its fall from above), Serra efectively investigates the possibility of the moving
image as a gesture rather than as an object, a gesture carried out by a dispositif
that is both carnal and mechanical. Here the moving image does not have a
gesture as its object but becomes a gesture itself capable of dismantling the
illusion of the cinematic dispositif.
A gesture of profanation: Bill Violas Te Greeting
In order to grasp the meaning of gesture in Agamben, the concept of profa-
nation should be examined. Agamben dedicates a whole collection of essays to
explore profanation, a concept that is put at work whenever there is a dispositif
that needs to be deactivated. Te understanding of dispositif discussed above is
closely related to the concept of profanation. Just as for Foucault the penitential
subject is constituted through its own negation, for Agamben our formation
as subjects is always a process of separation by which the dispositif sets us
apart from our immediate relation to our environment. In Agamben, religion
performs such a separation. Instead of being understood as a bond between
men and god(s), Agamben understands religion as that which removes things,
places, animals, or people from common use and transfers them to a separate
sphere.
16
Profaning is the gesture of restoring that which was consecrated back to
the freedom of use by people: to profane means not simply to abolish and
erase separations but to learn to put them to a new use, to play with them.
17

According to Agamben humans can profane something either by direct contact
or by opening things up to other uses. In this frst case, Agamben ofers the
example of a rite of sacrifce during which participants touch those parts of the
victim that have been ofered to the gods and, by doing so, profane them. In the
second case, Agamben ofers an example from the natural world, a cat playing
with a ball of yarn as if it were a mouse. Te cat, says Agamben in Profanations,
knowingly uses the characteristic behavior of predatory activity in vain. Tis
behavior is not efaced but deactivated thanks to the substitution of the yarn for
the mouse and, thus, opened up to a new possible use. Te cat frees a behavior
from its genetic inscription within a given sphere (hunting). Te creation of a
new use is possible only by deactivating an old use, rendering it inoperative.
18
In this way, profanation is the counter-apparatus, the only means through
which dispositifs, including that of cinema, can be resisted.
19
Te gesture of profaning can be better illustrated by going back once again to
Agambens pages on Welless Don Quixote which I discussed in the introduction.
Te profaning gesture carried out by Don Quixote opens up the screen to
another possible use (which means profaning), that is, the cutting of the screen
canvas renders it an access point to reality, lifeif it were a mere technological
or material means of projection Don Quixote would fail to slice it. Another
profanation takes places simultaneously: the gesture performed by Welless
cinematographic Don Quixote profanes the gesture of tilting at windmills
carried out by Cervantess literary Don Quixote. Te image on the screen (the
characters) are still visible but the darkness generated by Don Quixotes sword
slowly eats the screen. Te gesture remains, the image disappears. We are lef to
stare at darkness with no image to watch but our imagination.
Te gesture of profaning, of restoring what has been separated to common
use, is at the core of a video work entitled Te Greeting (1995) by the American
artist Bill Viola, whose art deals with the central themes of human experience
(birth, death, emotion) and with several mystical traditions. In the essay
Nymphs (2011) Agamben casts light upon the relationship between time and
the image, briefy mentioning Violas series Te Passions, to which Te Greeting
belongs. Embracing the point of view of the spectator facing Violas videos,
Agamben dwells upon the dialectics between movement and time, pointing
out that the real achievement of Violas images is not their being in movement
(something that the spectator immediately becomes aware of) but their being
charged with time.
20
Viola is commonly regarded as one of the most pre-eminent exponents of the
relatively recent art of video. However, to call Viola a mere video artist does not
do justice to the complexity of his way of working, which owes much to painting
and cinema too, consisting as it does of set design, complex camera techniques,
sound efects and actors. Tis becomes particularly evident in works such as Te
Greeting, in which the scene is carefully arranged before shooting and the work
with the actors is conducted as if it were a fction flm. Te choice of exhibiting
his video works in dark and silent spaces also reveals the attempt to recreate a
cinematographic dimension.
21
Te year 1991 represents a turning point in Violas artistic production: from
then on the human body and face become central in his work as testifed by
the video Te Passing (1991). Te human body as imago dei, as an icon of
the divine, however, is constantly transformed into a more earthly image or,
conversely, mere earthly, carnal bodies open up to a spiritual and universal
dimension thanks to slowed-down movements and almost imperceptible varia-
tions in gestures and facial expressions. Te Greeting (1995) belongs to the
works produced in the second period of Violas career. It is inspired by the Te
Visitation (15289), an artwork by the Italian painter Jacopo Pontormo (1494
1557), which depicts the biblical scene of the Annunciation. Viola breathes new
life into the religious scene depicted by Pontormo, represented and revisited
numerous times in the history of art.
Te video sequence is projected on a screen hanging on the wall of a darkened
room. At frst sight one might think that one is watching a still, as movement is
almost imperceptible. As becomes clear from looking at the sketches made for
Te Greeting, the background is carefully staged and constructed in the artists
atelier. Te architecture of space behind the fgures is formed thanks to a set
of panels designed with a false perspective as seen from a high-speed camera
point of view. Te depth of feld created by the panels is, in fact, much bigger
than it is in reality. Te perspective thus created avoids a collapsing between the
three fgures on the foreground and the background architecture. Te urban
space represented on the background appears isolated, almost abstract, as in De
Chiricos paintings. Te framing is conventional and frontal. Te scene is shot
with a high-speed camera, in a fxed position, providing a super-slowmotion
recording at 300 frames per second. Te original length of the event (the
greeting) lasts 45 seconds, but in the installation the event lasts 12 minutes.
Te female fgures greeting each other are positioned on a raised platform
which visually merges with the background space. Te time of day is uncertain;
the light fuctuates between day and night. Te gesture of the greeting remains
itself ambiguous, open to multiple interpretations and speculations. Two women
are talking together, against the background of a desolate urban landscape. Tey
are interrupted by the arrival of a third woman who is known to only one of
the frst two women. At a certain point the background of the city comes to the
foreground and other fgures, far away, become visible, engaged in unknown
activities. Te newcomer approaches the woman she knows to greet her, ignoring
the other. A gentle breeze and a change of light mark the greeting between the
two as they embrace each other. Te gestures, the way these three women carry
their bodies, are Renaissance-inspired (although in Pontormo there are four
women) but revisited through contemporary sensitivity and experience.
22
Te
newcomer dressed in orange whispers something in her friends ear (the oldest
woman), accentuating the isolation of the other one, who is fnally introduced
and the three seem to exchange words.
Interestingly, the profanation does not destroy Violas reference to religious icons
and motifs. Quite the opposite. Bill Violas videos possess a spiritual dimension of
their own, a quality that deeply moves viewers. But this does not happen because
he explicitly refers to religious topics and icons such as the Annunciation, the
theme of re-birth (not only of the Christian tradition but also of the Buddhist one).
Te mystic and spiritual afatus of Bill Violas videos stems from their terrestrial
quality and from their capacity to profane iconic images through gestures. Te
religious dimension of the scene of the greeting in Pontormos painting is present
at the iconic level, but what Viola profanes is not the evangelical motif of the
Annunciation, but the moment of the greeting. Trough the techniques of slow
motion and looping the true subject of Pontormos representation is revealed: the
movement of the fgures on screen, charged with time, not the Annunciation itself.
Figure 7.1 Bill Viola, Te Greeting (1995). Video/sound installation. Photo: Kira Perov.
Transforming the image of the Annunciation in the gestures of the greeting,
Viola frees the images from their historical reference (the Biblical motif and
the artistic representation of it throughout history) and from their narrative
reference. Tere is no story lef to be told, no words announcing what will
come next. In Te Greeting the three women are worldly, not saints, they
wear ordinary clothing, gathered together by a chance encounter in an urban
landscape, a public space such as a square or a market. Te gestures enacted
by the three women are similar to those inscribed in the religious scene of
the Annunciation, but freed, emancipated from their being a mere means to
an endthat of announcing the coming of the Son of God. Nevertheless, the
aura is re-created precisely because of the terrestrial, mundane feeling of the
scene, slowed down to the point where each single gesture becomes a still
image inhabited by a tension (a movement) that has not yet been performed or
resolved.
Te potential of A New Life
Te third and fnal concept examined in this essay is that of potentiality, which
is a key concept in Agambens philosophical project, underpinning his refec-
tions on politics, ethics and the arts. In Agambens own words: I could state
the subject of my work as an attempt to understand the meaning of the word
can.
23
Agamben refers to Aristotles distinction between potentiality (dynamis)
and actuality (energeia). Te potential maintains itself even once it has passed
(or not) into actuality: what is potential can both be and not be, for the same
is potential both to be and not to be.
24
Te interesting part of the Aristotelian
defnition of potentiality is, for Agamben, the role played by the potential to
not be which is fully preserved in actuality rather than disappearing once the
potential passes into actuality. Tere is a co-existence of potentiality to be and
potentiality to not be rather than a succession between the two.
In order to illustrate this negative side of potentialitythe potential not to
beAgamben refers to Melvilles short story, Bartleby the Scrivener (1853).
Te central point is the scriveners refusal to writeI would prefer not to
25
words which Bartleby utters without any further explanation whenever his
superior orders him to write something: in other words to perform his duty as
scrivener. By refusing to write while being a writer, Agamben argues, Bartleby
fully embodies his potentiality as a scrivener. It is not simply the possibility to
decide between diferent options, it is the freedom to do something or to not do
something else. Terefore, it is the negative side of potentiality, the possibility that
something does not pass into actuality, that makes possible potentiality as such.
26

For Agamben to keep potentiality fully open means to live a life as humans.
Te concept of potentiality is apt for further exploring the relationship
between images and gestures. As a fnal example of moving image works, I would
like to take Grandrieuxs feature flm La Vie nouvelle. In this flm Grandrieux
explores the potentiality of the moving image and, along with it, the potentiality
of human beings.
27
Afer Grandrieuxs frst feature flm Sombre (1998), La Vie
nouvelle continues to explore the thread of the post-confict landscape in the
Balkans. Te setting of La Vie nouvelle is a highly traumatized post-war East
European non-place, a physical, psychic world about which one knows nothing,
which arrives as in a fog.
28
Te flms plot is elliptical, as are the spoken dialogues,
reduced to a few lines: at a brothel-like hotel, a young woman, Mlania, is singled
out from a group by the human trafcker Boyan, stripped and sold into prosti-
tution. Te young American soldier, Seymour, encounters Mlania and becomes
obsessed with her to the point of wanting to rescue her, ofering her the chance
of a new life. Seymour eventually attempts to purchase Mlania outright.
Film theorist and critic Nicole Brenez has been the frst one to recognize
Grandrieuxs flms for the innovations in flm-making and flm-viewing that
they enable.
29
Adopting Agambens framework might open up further ways
of critically engaging with Grandrieuxs flms beyond the reading of them as
belonging to the new extremism.
30
In La Vie nouvelle the key concepts under-
pinning the notion of gesture at the center of this essay (dispositif, profanation
and potentiality) are all at play. Grandrieux captures the body in all its gestures
and paroxysms, contours and spaces, violence and ecstasy: ofering spectators a
cinema of bodily gestures rather than of images. Te coming to the foreground
of gestures, of ways of carrying the body (to recall the etymological defnition
of gesture), renders La Vie nouvelle a material exploration of the potentiality of
the moving image in its relationship to bodies, sound, darkness and light.
It is hard to speak about a sequence of images or of cinematic sequences in
La Vie nouvelle. Rather, one might talk about the dancing sequence, the hair-cut
sequence, and so on, always emphasizing the way humans carry their bodies on
and of screen. For the purpose of analysis I shall discuss three dialogue-less
sequences placed, respectively, at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of
the flm, showing how what remains in the frame is not images but gestures.
In the opening sequence of La Vie nouvelle we are within a darkened space: a
subjective camera shot, trembling in palpitation, rushes toward a group of men
and women gazing into the night. A fickering camera scans the face of a woman.
Her eyes stare at something without batting an eyelid. Te camera zooms out
and withdraws into the hazy night. Ten it zooms in on the face of another
woman, older than the frst. Tears appear in her eyes, slowly flling them. We do
not know exactly what it is that these women and men are looking at. A threat
comes from outside the frame and remains unknown and unknowable. Te
background sound comes in waves. Tere is no shot and counter shot, rather a
repeated camera movement, a zooming-in which concentrates attention on the
faces as if they were under a microscope not always in focus. As viewers we are
always conscious of the presence of the camera, of the particular framing and
deframing techniques through which the camera responds to the surfaces it
encounters, vibrating as if it were a living eye finching or squinting.
Agamben regards the frame as the basic unit of montage, a unit that holds
in itself a confict between what is inside the frame and what lies outside it.
Framing, in this respect, is a gesture capable of restoring the full potentiality
of the image, its potential to be or not to be, that is, its capacity not to be
circumscribed by the frame itself. As potentiality lives on in actuality, there is
something outside the frame (bodies, images, words) that remains even once
the framing gesture has taken place. Framing, then, is the manifestation of the
full potentiality of the image as such.
31
Te concept of potentiality can be taken further by discussing the sequence
where Boyan (the pimp) and Mlania are engaged in a kind of dance.
Before the disco crowd, Boyan pumps his fst into the air to incite people
into dancing. And more than this: he is the marionette master. Mlania is his
puppet. Boyans hands fan, futter, guide, caress, mock Mlania. Ten the camera
is entirely devoted to shots of Boyan, as a techno beat and a fast bass pattern on
a single note appear on the soundtrack. In Adrian Martins words: lighting and
posture [] transform the marionette master momentarily into a Nosferatu,
and images of his face resemble a demon.
32
Ten the camera is on Mlanias
Boyan-driven choreography, her spinning and twirling reaches a frenzy, a
crescendo, during the techno beat which is out of sync with the action.
Te whole dancing sequence is an operation of repetition and stoppage, the
two gestures which, as I have made clear above, are at the heart of cinema for
Agamben. Agamben uses the example of dance to explain how the gesture is
neither a means without an end, nor an end without a means, it is the means itself:
what dance exhibits is not a movement that has an end in itself, but movement
for its own sake.
33
Te sequence reaches its climax with the camera fxed on
Mlania, on her visual de-fguration. Te camera shakes so much in response to
her dance that her face in close-up is fattened, stretched, lost, found again as we
pass from one frame to the next. One can no longer tell exactly which gesture
Mlania is performing, where she is situated in the space of the room, where the
line of her body ends and the surrounding environment begins. If one freezes
these frames of her face, arms, neck and shoulders, other potential images can
be seen or imagined: a torso, a cloud, an insect, a mask, sexual organs. Te music
fades for about fve seconds; it is interrupted. A space of possibility and freedom
opens up between the shots, between the image itself, which becomes discon-
nected from any narrative constraint, from any logical sequence of actions. Te
gestural image becomes potential. Mlania seems faceless, weightless, motionless,
detached from time and space. Mlanias dancing remains suspended, unable to
display anything more than its own potential.
Te last speech-less sequence in La Vie nouvelle I want to examine is the one
shot with a hand-held thermal camera: the dispositif here seems to become a
living organism capable of producing warmth when entering into contact with
human bodies. Interviewed by Brenez, Grandrieux explains his decision to use
a thermal camera in this sequence:
the thermal camera is used by the military, but above all by engineers in order
to gauge the resistance of materials. It records the diferent levels of temperature
Figure 7.2 Philippe Grandrieux, La Vie nouvelle (2002).
in a body. Te principle is that it is no longer light which makes an impression.
Here, there is no light. Te scene was shot in total darkness; no one could see
anything except me through the camera. All the participants were in an absolute
blackout, and they moved around in a deranged way.
34
Tis sequence starts with Seymour descending a staircase to end up in a dark place
where other human bodiesshimmering, formless and fragilecan be glimpsed
among the haziness; scenes of cannibalism are intuitively grasped in between
close-ups of screaming mouths and twirling bodies. Te sequence ends with a
woman crouching on the pavement, in a pose that resembles Francis Bacons twisted
human fgures and images of pathological bodies as those of La Salptrire. Te
particular shooting procedure adopted by Grandrieux thanks to the thermal camera
enacts the gesture of profanation Agamben talks about: a dispositif (the camera) is
no longer used for the purpose of recording images through the impression of light
on the flm. On the contrary, the camera here is hand held and kept close to the body
of the flmmaker, to the point where the camera is used as a sensing organ able to
detect and then touch the bodies it encounters by letting them imprint their warmth
on the celluloid. Te result cannot be an image in the ordinary sense, but rather a
sensation, an emanation. In this sequence the viewer experiences the same kind of
physical images that one experiences without seeing them in reality afer pressing
ones own hands onto the closed eyes or when one fnds oneself in darkness.
Darkness, which is the cipher of the sequence briefy discussed, is also the
color of potentiality. Agamben illustrates this point by making the following
Figure 7.3 Philippe Grandrieux, La Vie nouvelle (2002).
example: when we are deprived of our sense of sight, for instance because we
have our eyes closed or because we are in the darkness, we are nonetheless able
to distinguish darkness from light, we are able to see darkness.
35
Te experience
of darkness is the experience of potentiality-in-itself. So it is not correct to say
that when in darkness we cannot see, as darkness itself becomes the object
of our sight, the actuality of sight becomes the darkness of potentiality. Te
thermal-camera sequence in Grandrieuxs La Vie nouvelle leaves us with a
radical monochrome image, that of darkness. Consequently we cannot establish
our position in space and time any more. It derives an image that cannot
represent any longer, instead it can only be felt.
By embodying an aesthetic of gestures, La Vie nouvelle illuminates several
Agambenian concepts, such as those of profanation, stoppage and repetition
examined throughout this essay, and, ultimately, ofers us the potential not
only of a new (not necessarily better) life (for Mlania, for the Balkans, for us
as human beings) but also of a new kind of cinema. Rather than adopting a
phenomenological perspective focused on concepts such as visibility, invisibility
and the fesh, I have shown how Grandrieuxs flm might be fully grasped by
relating it to Agambens understanding of potentiality.
36
Conclusions
Tis essay has investigated the notions of dispositif, profanation and potentiality
underpinning Agambens understanding of gesture by showing them at play in
selected moving image works. As we have seen, the dispositif in Agamben is an
ensemble of structures of thought and disparate things, both linguistic and non
linguistic (discourses, laws, philosophical propositions, buildings, institutions,
etc.) that inscribes us in a power relation with them. In mainstream cinema
the cinematographic dispositif is mainly used to create images in tune with our
deepest desires and drives, images that respond to our symptoms. Nevertheless,
this power of the dispositif is matched by the potentiality inherent in the gesture, a
gesture which is capable of embodying what the image ofen cannot show or say:
that is, the opening up of the dimension of potentiality. Potentiality in Agamben
is the dimension that accompanies actuality as opposed to anticipating it.
All the works examined in this chapter are contemporary ones. Contemporary
is, for Agamben, not what is happening now (the actual), but what expresses a
potentiality by engaging with the past.
37
Violas Te Greeting deals with the
past both in terms of iconology (the Biblical episode of the Annunciation) and
cultural reference (the Pontormos Visitation in the history of art). Te flm by
Serra is almost a performance of the raw elements of cinema at its beginning:
energy, intensity, mechanism, bodies. Grandrieuxs La Vie nouvelle draws inspi-
ration from the recent past: the afermath of the Balkans confict. It asks the
question of what kind of life and humanity might originate afer that. In this
way, it opens up the potential of a new life. Tis new life is not something that
will happen in the future, that will come next, but a radical openness to what
human beings might be and do.
38
To conclude with Agambens words: the power of cinema is that it leads
images back to the homeland of gestures, a place that coincides with the origins
of cinema.
39
Only in this way can the dynamic force of images be preserved
by a cinema of gestures. An image alone, in contrast, runs the risk of freezing
gestures, as in a photographic snapshot. Ultimately, the creation of images calls
for a responsibility on the part of both the flmmaker and the flm theorist, a
responsibility that crosses over from the realm of aesthetics into politics or,
better, into an aesthetics that is already political. Only artistic gestures can keep
open the potential to be or not to be. To the succession of events linked by a
connection of cause and efect typical of the narrative dispositif of mainstream
cinema, Viola opposes the time of a staged greeting, where the temporal
pregnancy of the image is what we experience as spectators. In Hand Catching
Lead Serra himself performs the cinematic dispositif as a bodily gesture
that sometimes interrupts the monotony of its movement to do something
unexpectedthe hand withdraws and the forefnger beckons.In La Vie nouvelle
Grandrieux ofers the moving image a new life. He endlessly explores the
potential of flmmaking as bodily gesture, thus subverting mainstream cinema.
If gestures are a manner of carrying the body, the artworks by Serra, Viola and
Grandrieux show how bodies engage hand to hand (corpo a corpo, to use the
Italian expression that Agamben himself adopts) with dispositifs, thus resisting
any assaults to their potential to be or to not be, to act or to not act.
40
Notes
1 My translation is based upon the original French text: Mais je vais vous faire une
confdence bien plus terrible: je naime pas le cinma, sauf quand je tourne; alors,
il faut savoir ne pas tre timide avec la camra, lui faire violence, la forcer dans ses
derniers retranchements, parce quelle est une vile mcanique. Ce qui compte, cest
la posie. Andr Bazin, Orson Welles (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1972), 184. Te
English edition which is said to be based upon the original French text does not
contain the Entretiens avec Orson Welles by Andr Bazin, Charles Bitsch and
Jean Domarchi in which Orson Welles makes the quoted statement. See Andr
Bazin, Orson Welles: A Critical View, foreword by Franois Trufaut (Los Angeles:
Acrobat Books, 1991).
2 I adopt the critical framework ofered by Agambens refections on gesture in
a number of his essays: Notes on Gesture contained in Means Without End
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), On Potentiality
Bartleby, or on Contingency in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), the three essays Te Author as
Gesture, In Praise of Profanation and Te Six Most Beautiful Moments in
the History of Cinema, all contained in the collection Profanations (Cambridge,
MA: Zone Books, 2007), and the essay What Is an Apparatus? in What Is an
Apparatus? And Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
3 From the beginning of its history, cinema has been characterized by the tense
relationship between the still image and the (illusion) of movement as discussed
by several authors. See Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in
Motion (New York: Zone Books, 2007) and Still Moving: Between Cinema and
Photography, Karen Beckham and Jean Ma (eds), (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2008).
4 Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2007), 934.
5 Giorgio Agamben, Diference and Repetition: on Guy Debords Films, in Guy
Debord and the Situationist International, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2002), 317.
6 Tis defnition comes from the Oxford English Dictionary and is reported by
Pasi Vliaho, Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Tought and Cinema circa
1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 17. Te etymology of the
word gesture as a manner of carrying the body derives from the Latin gestura
meaning bearing, behavior, and from gestus gesture, carriage, posture. In all
his writings Agamben pays great attention to the etymology of words, for him a
fundamental practice in philosophy.
7 Alex Murray, Giorgio Agamben (London: Routledge, 2010), 87.
8 Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2007), 155.
10 Noys noted that Agamben uses little historical evidence for his claim, mainly
referring to the scientifc segmentation of gestures made by Gilles de la Tourette or
the scientifc analysis of bodily movements pursued, at the same time as Tourette,
by Eadweard Muybridge and then captured on flm by tienne-Jules Marey with
his chronophotographic camera and by the Lumire brothers. See Benjamin
Noys, Gestural Cinema: Giorgio Agamben on Film, Film Philosophy (2004) 8.22.
http://www.flm-philosophy.com/vol82004/n22noys [accessed June 3, 2012]; Pasi
Vliaho, Mapping the Moving Image.
11 On the origins of scientifc cinematography, see Virgilio Tosi, Cinema Before
Cinema (London: British Universities Film & Video Council, 2005). A seminal text
for exploring the link between cinema and the human body is Lisa Cartwright,
Screening the Body (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
12 Relying on Althussers work on ideology and apparatuses, Baudry frst introduced
the concept of dispositif in flm theory in the seventies. See Jean-Louis Baudry,
Ideological Efects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus, in Narrative, Apparatus,
Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Te term
dispositif has broader connotations than the word apparatus, which refers to the
conceptualization of cinema as a psychosocial mechanism, whereas the original
French term, as Bellour highlights, refers to diferent vision machines from the
cinema to installation works and to a wider variety of perceptual efects. See Raymond
Bellour, Concerning the Photographic, in Still Moving, 274, in footnote3.
13 Philippe-Alain Michaud, Sketches: Histoire de lart, cinma (Paris: Editions de
lEclat, 2006).
14 Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford
15 Ibid., 14.
17 Ibid., 87.
18 Ibid., 85.
19 Agamben, What Is an Apparatus?, 19. Te essay What Is an Apparatus? is
a concise programmatic statement of Agambens whole philosophical project,
which has its roots in Foucaults understanding of subjectivity and power. On the
role played by Foucauldian concepts of archaeology, genealogy and biopolitics
in Agambens thought, see Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical
Introduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
20 Giorgio Agamben, Nymphs, Releasing the Image: from Literature to New Media, ed.
Jacques Khalip, Robert Mitchell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 6079.
21 Raymond Bellour, Fra le immagini: Fotografa, cinema, video (Milano: Bruno
Mondadori Editore, 2007), 60.
22 On the relationship between Violas Te Greeting and Pontormos Visitazione, Settis
highlights the fact that in 2011 the video installation was shown in Florence close
to the painting. Settis recalls the eforts made by Renaissance painters, especially
those in Florence, to represent movement in the stillness of the fgures painted on
canvas. Tis problem of giving motion to what was still was solved through the
inclusion of details such as wind, the impression of movement provided by wide
sleeves, hair falling over shoulders, and so on. Salvatore Settis, Bill Viola: i conti
con larte, Bill Viola: Visioni Interiori, ed. Kira Perov (Roma: Giunti, 2009),1535.
23 Agamben, Potentialities, 177.
24 Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1986), 1050 b 10.
25 Bartleby, or on Contingency in Potentialities: Collected Essays on Philosophy,
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
27 Te title has been interpreted either as a reference to the dimension of (new) life in
Eastern Europe (the new Europe) or as a reference to Dante Alighieris Vita Nova
(Te New Life): the two interpretations (geo-biopolitical and literary) can coexist.
Brenez points to La Vie Nouvelle as the contemporary version of Dantes descent
into hell. See Nicole Brenez, ed., La Vie Nouvelle/Nouvelle Vision (Paris: Editions
Leo Scheer, 2005).
28 Raymond Bellour, Bords Marginaux, La Vie Nouvelle/Nouvelle Vision, ed.
N.Brenez (Paris: Editions Leo Scheer, 2005), 16. Te delocalized cinematic space
for La Vie nouvelle (it could be Sarajevo in Bosnia but also Sofa in Bulgaria)
resembles what Aug has called the non-place. See Marc Aug, Non-places:
Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995).
29 Brenez, La Vie Nouvelle.
30 Under the label of new extremism there are flmsmade by authors as diverse as
Breillat, Dumont, Haneke and Grandrieux himselfwhose images are designed
to deliberately shock the onlooker to the point that they leave the flm theater.
Without simply labeling those flms as sensationalistic, scholarly literature has
called for a subtler understanding of the new extremism, highlighting how the
flms of the new extremism and the controversies they engender are indispensable
to the critical task of rethinking the terms of contemporary spectatorship, quoted
in Te New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe, Tanya Horeck and Tina
Kendall (eds) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 8.
31 For an analysis of the aesthetics and poetics of framing, see Des O Rawe,
Towards a poetics of the cinematographic frame, Journal of Aesthetics and
Culture, 3 (2011). http://www.aestheticsandculture.net/index.php/jac/article/
view/5378 [accessed June 7, 2012].
32 Adrian Martin, Dance girl dance. Philippe Grandrieuxs La Vie nouvelle (Te New
Life, 2002), Kinoeye: New Perspectives on European flm 4.3 (2004). http://www.
kinoeye.org/04/03/martin03.php/#* [accessed June 3, 2012].
33 Noys, Gestural Cinema.
34 Nicole Brenez, Te Bodys Night. An Interview with Philippe Grandrieux, Rouge
(2003). http://www.rouge.com.au/1/grandrieux.html [accessed June 1, 2012].
36 Grandrieuxs flm aesthetics has been discussed along with Merleau-Pontys
concepts of fesh, visibility and invisibility in Jenny Chamarette, Phenomenology
and the Future of Film: Rethinking Subjectivity beyond Contemporary French
Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
37 See the essay On Contemporaneity, in Agamben, What Is an Apparatus?, 3956.
38 Murray points out that a better translation of the Italian expression la comunit
che viene is not the coming community but the community that/which comes,
avoiding any future connotations and pointing out that this community is in the
present, here and now, but has not been fully recognized in its potentiality. See
Murray, Agamben, 501.
39 Agamben, Means without End, 55.
8
Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a
Philosophical Cinematics
Garrett Stewart
Agamben and Cinema: a conceptual juncture more broadly productive than
Agamben on cinema. Tis is because Agambens strictly philosophical essays,
ofen concerned with a unique mode of temporal paradox, shed more light not
just on the renowned cinematic time-image (Gilles Deleuzes metahistorical
innovation) but on the texture of cinematic imaging in generalespecially
in the narrative contexts Agamben mostly ignoresthan do his brief and
sometimes cryptic commentaries on flm practice, confned as they are to four
short essays and further transient mentions.
1
When Agamben writes on cinema,
on its revealed constitution as diferential return, his avant-garde preferences
narrow the application of his vocabulary even as they may sharpen his aesthetic
sights. Te infuence of Deleuze, otherwise so frequent in his thinking, seems
slight (or slighted) in Agambens avoidance of narrative flm. But when one
brings his wider philosophical interests to bear on cinema, especially via his
writings on the post-Aristotelian valences of potentiality and the temporalities
it reinfects, the alignment with Deleuzian virtuality as a cinematic touchstone
becomes not just apparent but generative.
Where the transcendentals of flm (in the Kantian sense of essential
preconditions) are for Agamben repetition and stoppage, linked rather indis-
tinctly to enjambment and caesura as the determining features of verse,
2
he
locates these only at the level of montagenot at the material underlay of the
strip or frameline. In this, he is already leagued implicitly with a Deleuzean
suppression of flms celluloid mediality in favor of its sensory-motor realization
on screen. Like Deleuze, Agamben defers all questions of medium-specifcity
to the phenomenological plane of immanence (the touchstone Deleuzian
formulation), where motion is visible as suchdespite the artifce involved in
its discrete serial manifestation, its falsifed dure (Bergsons complaint, and
thus a sticking point in Deleuzes otherwise thorough recourse to that philo-
sophical predecessor).
3
A similar limitation attends Agamabens claims for
caesura and enjambment in poetry, which are specifcally metrical functions
only when thought unique (as he insists) to verseat the level of its immanent
lyric rhythm. Conceived otherwise, pace Agambenwhen considered, that is,
as part of prose as well, and hence as linguistic transcendentals, as it werethe
arrest and the segue of verse patterns derive from the rupture and overlap of
syllabic and lexical juncture itself in the ligatures of any and all enunciation: its
liaisons as well as its elisions, the cut and splice of morphophonemic language
in action, projected one level up into the metrical ingenuities of verse footwork
and its linear overruns.
In this way does the piecemeal essence of alphabetic language, like that of
celluloid flm, return as potential intermittence in the continuities of its aesthetic
impact. I have elsewhere compared the ficker efect of literary writing to the
photogrammar of flmic motion, which would give us another way to think of
repetition-with-a-diference as a stoppage always restarted on the run, twenty-
four times per second.
4
But any such awarenessof machinations mostly
invisible on screenoperates one ocular stratum beneath the sequencing of
found (hence repeated) and truncated (hence stopped) footage that interests
Agamben (without specifc examples) in the flms of Guy Debord: a repetition
and stoppage (la rptition et larrt) of the continuous detritus of image
culture in the fux and refux of its specularized circulation. Te cultural archive
regurgitated by the pastiche of Debords media montage draws Agamben back
to the major philosophies of repetition, from Kierkegaard through Nietzsches
eternal return to Heidegger and Deleuze: repetition as the return not of what
was, but of the enigmatic possibility of what was.
5
Without deploying the more
specifc term potential in this refection on Debords cinema, let alone alluding
to his own powerful essay on the topic in the pluralized eponymous volume
Potentialities, Agambens passing mention of the rediscovered possibility of
diference in the course of repetition (even in satiric iteration like Debords)
should serve to license the application of potentiality to what follows.
6
For
we turn now to that mode of cinema whose analysis he lef entirely to Deleuze:
flms of explicit narrative momentumand, in particular, to the internal disjoin
they sometimes strategically invite between recorded motion and fgured time.
Much in the way that, for Agamben, literary writing makes speech itself
possible again in what it speaks, he also has his fnger on the rudimentary
pulse of the cinematic apparition, which in its most exploratory forms makes
Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a Philosophical Cinematics 163
the very work of imaging visible in process.
7
I want merely to broaden the
diagnosis of this pulse rate, taking it back to the lab (as function of the photo-
grammatic strip) as well as out into the auditorium (as the registered efect of
a given plots technical infection). Te efort of this essay is thus to extract the
rhythm (rather than the content) of Agambens cinematic response (about the
percussive montage of Situationist dtournements) and return it to the track: to
the frame-advance that makes not only such avant-garde disruptions possible
but that allows for some of the most compelling editorial (hence medial) turns
of narrative cinema as well. To put it in the most Agambenesque way for now,
before making good on the provocation entailed, let it be said that repetition
and stoppage are not just the suppressed rudiments but the present potential
of screen narrativeas well as of the Debordian cinessay or cinssai (to give
again, with that coinage, an example along with its precept: a cross-media turn
of caesura and enjambment at the sublexical level of syallabic lap dissolve).
In contrast to Diference and Repetition (the flm essay explicitly alluding
to Deleuzes famous book title), the debt to Walter Benjamin is more immediate
in another of Agambens essays on flm, where he stresses the foregrounding of
those human gestures ordinarily subordinated to action or intention.
8
Cinema
is therefore not for him a movement-image
9
(as it is at base for Deleuze) but,
more fundamentally yet, a gestural image. But here, too, he is disinclined to
burrow down to the micro-gestures that collect on the diferential strip into a
discernible movement. Tough unmentioned by Agamben in this respect, what
interested Benjamin frst of all about photography, rather than flm, was that he
saw it gaining access to the optical unconscious
10
: to the increments of gesture
that make up the arc of movement and that take place too fast for recognition
by ordinary eyesight.
11
Photography freezes an action in the momentary thrust
of a gesture. I would stress insteadand, again, as regards its material underlay
or substratethat flmic cinema (in its genealogical relation to stop-time
chronophotography, as developed by Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules
Marey) depends on this fxity in order to return its fractured particles to
gesture. To gesture, and hence to motion: an imaging of one kind of movement
generated from a real but diferent motor cause, rather than an immanent
or reifed movement-image in its own right. For Deleuze, and Agamben
implicitly, cinema is not sectioned movement but moving sections. Tats as
far back toward the projection booth (or in turn toward the photomechanical
lab) as they wish to go. In fact, though, action on screen is traced, not given: an
animation efect. So that, for me, neither gesture nor montage are primary or
transcendental; rather, they are produced from the invisible discrete constituents
of the speeding cellular strip, turning diference itself to projected action and
cumulative screen event.
Many flms, not just avant-garde experiments but mainstream narratives
as well, revert to this mere (and momentarily withheld) possibility of motion
in the fxed frameline unit. Tey do so by simulating the sustained latency of
gesture in its very stasis, most prominently by a repetition-without-diference in
the freeze frame.
12
(Another way of recruiting Agambens terms to the material
infrastructure he ignores is to see in this device a case of photogrammatic
enjambment absorbing caesura into the continuous running-on of the same
and thus ofering the very image of a motion potential rather than actual.) Te
fact that Agamben is no more interested than Benjamin in extrapolating from
the optical unconscious of vision (as revealed by photography) to the single
photo cell as the analogous ocular preconscious of cinematic projection does
not prevent us from sensing how such a recognition can be marked of within a
given flm: a flm that might well be concerned, at other levels, with issues closer
to the bone in both Agamben and Deleuze. And not just marked of, but tied
directly to the larger units of efect that preoccupy their attention: where, for
instance, in the examples grouped here, something about the inherent virtuality
of the screen image can be thrown into relief by both counterfactual plotting
and by uniquely cerebral variants of the so-called trick ending: an ending in
which the twist may include a medial double helix gaining new torque in the
disclosure of flms serial image base.
Te internal tensions of Potentia
With no reference to flm, Agamben is interested elsewhere not just in potential,
or say present potential, but in the inherent presence of potentialand this in
a way that can illuminate some of the most laconic formulations of his flm
writing. Too ofen, he notes, ones sense of potential is restricted to a past tense
form, a present perfect subjunctive, a perfected negation: what might have
been, except for certain defnitive preventions. But what might yet be lays a
diferent claim on the present tense. In the form of potential, it must exist as
such in the now. It is not actual, not activated, but no less real in its contingent
mode. Agamben comes close here, as I am paraphrasing his claims, to a central
proposition in Deleuze, one which is extensively illustrated as well in the latters
flm work: the cohabitation of the virtual and the real in a zone not exhausted by
the actual.
13
Tat the continuous potentiation of the next from within the now
is an undertextual energy of flm itself, in the (be)coming before our eyes of its
own event(uation)call it the mircosecond by microsecond realization of the
possibleis a fact of flm that Deleuze understands as manipulated, thematized,
ironized, transmuted, what have you, whenever the movement-image is trans-
formed before our eyes into the time-image, as unmistakably, for instance,
though in a formulaic manner, in a fashback.
But how is this form of temporal manifestation to be thought of, in
Agambens terms, as the return of the possibility of what was?
14
What is at
stake in this logical rethinking of iteration? Repetition restores the possibility
of what was, renders it possible anewas if it were (is) happening again, not
remembered but autonomous: To repeat something is to make it possible anew.
[] Memory cannot give us back what was, as such: that would be hell. Instead,
memory restores possibility to the past.
15
Trust again into the midst as we are,
what can still unfold must still be possible, hence still in touch with a quotient
of potential endemic to its becoming. Here is where Agamben again follows
Benjamin, this time in appreciating how memory converts the fulflled into
the unfulflled.
16
Call it the translation of time past into the en-dured again.
Here, too, is where technology models psyche: Doesnt cinema always do just
that, transform the real into the possible and the possible into the real?
17
If so,
Deleuze would be the frst to call this the virtualization of the actual. Hence
the time-image: in the simplifed form of a fashback as well as in its more
specialized form as a secondary rather than a primary potentiation (a subjective
hallucination, for example, rather than just a narrative anachrony).
18
Te fashback is in this manner the most obvious manifestation of cinema
in the mode of the time-image rather than the movement-image: the repetition
of the already stopped (performed gestures tracked as action and traced as
record) taking place as a coming-forth again in the becoming-potential of the
already elapsed. To continue in this Agambenesque vein, fashback enacts the
non-impossibility of recovered duration: absence made present by presen-
tation. Tats the defning line of thought. What such an emphasis, even in its
difculty, makes clearand this all the way from Debords ransacked media
archive in serial deployment to the rule of mainstream montage at largeis
that narrative cinema as well as avant-garde screen practice can avail itself
of the optically estranged. Without remediating every image in the mode of
appropriation and dtournement, of regurgitation and irony, narrative cinema
can still preach what it practices, it can theorize the projection it activates. In
the overtly virtual moments of the counterfactual episode on flm, subset of the
Deleuzian time-image, it is forcefully the case (and at the heart of Agambens
ethic of the aesthetic across media) that the image gives itself to be seen instead
of disappearing in what it makes visible.
19
At such moments we watch imaging
rather than see images. At such moments we are made to see through the
image in its disclosure of the merely virtual. And not just see, but think: think
it through, think through it. Agambens work, so willfully cordoned of from
Deleuzes on cinema, nonetheless contributes to a further contemplation of the
latters infuential paradigm shif across the two flm volumes, which, in trans-
forming movement as a function of time, to time as a function of movement,
converts the virtual life of the screen from an action for viewing, to an image in
the fgural sense: an image to be read. Projection becomes what it always was
anyway, but now insistently: projection becomes text.
It is worth stressing that the virtual in Deleuze, together with my sense of
its links to the possible of potentiality in Agamben, does not come bearing
the lurking sting of critique that accompanies it in simulacrum theory, whether
in the school of Baudrillard or the cooler-toned mediology of Rgis Debray.
For Debray, the virtual defnes the third historical phase in image culture, a
millennial sequence inaugurated by the hieratic image of the idol as an index
of divinity, an incarnate trace, and followed by the rule of representation or
iconicity.
20
Afer the logosphere and the graphosphere, then, the third phase
is neither incarnational nor representational but sheerly perceptual, the regime
of the visual as suchwhere the image that once captured viewers by the
supernatural, holding the believer in its gaze, and then, in the next epoch,
captivated the onlooker by both its image of the natural and the spectators
constructed relation to it, now captures (or recaps) the world in the virtual
mode of sheer information.
21
One might say that in Debord, cinema is
forcibly removed from its status as the fulfllment of the representational epoch
and, once iterated in fractured form, replayed as a satire of the videological
afermath in media culture. In distinguishing the logosphere as the time of
the idol (the gaze without a subject
22
)divine oversight instantiatedfrom
the graphosphere as the era of art (where, for instance, perspective painting
renders a subject behind the gaze), Debrays self-styled mediology identifes
the third epoch, the videosphere, as a regime which again removes the subject
as aesthetic focal point: vision without a gaze.
23
Whereas conventional cinema
can be seen to straddle the transition between graphic and video dispensations
in Debrays sense, it is, for our purposes, the full-scale desubjectivation of the
visual in certain flm sequences by Michael Haneketo which we will shortly
turnthat has pushed them well past the templates of classical editing. In their
impact we see how the order of the possible can erupt into strained face-ofs
with the actual. In Deleuze, the virtual, in its most extreme form as the power
of the false, insists on the coexistence of incompossibles: a recollected past,
for instance, in which true and false are indiscernibleor, as in the case
of an ambiguous fashback or present retinal illusion, in which the spectator
encounters the indecidable coexistence of possibility and its negation.
24
What
follows, then, is an efort to rethink virtuality (Deleuze) and potentiality
(Agamben) in the beam of each others manifestation on screen.
Sight defects
Let me begin with a minor example of the deceptive fashback from a flm in
release as I write, a twist-ending thriller by Steven Soderbergh called Side Efects
(2013). An overmedicated depressive woman is marked out as suicidal by her
fooring her car into a garage wallthis, before a nearly plot-long fashback is
shortly triggered by a salient camera movement that tracks across an ominous
trail of blood in her apartment. Te ensuing fashback (to three months
earlier), about halfway through its unfolding melodrama, reveals the blood to
be that of her victim rather than herself. She has stabbed her husband to death
in a prolonged bout of claimed sleepwalking induced by a risky anti-depressant
drug, afer which she crawls back under the covers, to awake later in horror at
the inexplicable corpse. Until the rapid montage of inset corrective fashbacks at
the flms climax, this is what we have been meant, have been made, to assume.
Instead, she will fnally be smoked out by her duped and betrayed psychiatrist
as a cold-blooded murderer who killed her husband in a byzantine scheme of
greed. So that her remembered (and to us visible) stupor in crawling under the
sheetsthe pivot point of the prolonged fashbackis less a relevant part of
the complot, to bloody them as evidence, let alone some momentary refex of
guilt and anxiety, than a subterfuge staged more for the spectator than for the
subsequent forensic investigations: a narrative cheat as well as a crime, a liter-
alized cover story, making us believe in the use of the sleepwalking side efect
until the plot is ready to unravel it. What is fnally repeated for us, then, when
we reprise the murder scene, is not the same but an incriminating diference
within the same: the possibility, all along, of its being otherwise. By way of
an image chain in no way altered from the frst pass through this scene, what
we see is the image of innocence as the renewed potential (nonetheless) of a
homicidal drive. It is no accident that, in evoking such a barely updated flm
noir plot of the treacherous wife as femme fatale, Soderbergh has returned to
one of the post-war seedbedsin Deleuzes metahistory of flmfor the break
from action into memory via the unreliable fashback: a negative version of the
false, whose powers are squandered in a sheer deceptive sidetrack.
A positive version of the false fashback and its paradoxical compossi-
bility with the real (delusional at worst, not criminal) is yet more central to
another recent flm, where a recovered trauma kept from us until the end may
well deconstruct the movie as we have watched it, so that we see it at lastif
only in retrospectas a fctive rather than remembered instance of the virtual,
sustained compensatory mirage rather than magic. In Ang Lees Te Life of Pi
(2012), an Indian boy embarrassingly named Piscine (for a French swimming
pool) shortens it to the irrational number Pi and lives to tell of having passed
through a months-long and wholly irrational episode at sea, afer an orphaning
shipwreck: an adventure that he profers years later, in retrospect, as actual,
not virtual. As the flm opens in the Montreal present, a foundering Canadian
novelist approaches Pi, now an adult emigr, afer hearing that he has an
amazing story, which the novelist hopes to siphon ofand which he is fnally
given permission to write up. Without us realizing it at the time, the entire plot
is to be held suspended between the pegs of that implicit designation as his
story, the flm governed in this respect by the subjective and objective genitive
alike: the story of his imperiled life, on the one hand; on the other, the story
told (made up) by himand not just orally, in the afermath, but scribbled
in a logbook with blunt pencil stub as the ordeal progresses (as we are asked
to think, having been made to see it this way). Only an hour and a half later,
afer having been continuously smitten with a 3-D digital spectacle of unreal
images rendered somehow possible to high-defnition sight, we get a debunking
rewind of the events in verbal discourse rather than virtual manifestation. We
have all along been marveling at a ravenous Bengal tiger dispatching other
escaped animals on a life raf but kept at bay by the ingenuity of a lone human
boy, have been stunned at the image of sharks dodged along with a battalion of
fying fsh, have been treated to a foating carnivorous island as well as the seas
bioluminescent splendor in the pixel-lumens of CGI simulation, on and on.
Now, all of a sudden, for a long few minutes of evacuated wonder, we must sufer
a defating counternarrative delivered into the audiorecorder of the Japanese
insurance agents who have come to investigate the sinking of the cargo ship.
Te recovering Pi, come ashore fnally in Mexico, is here flmed sitting up in
antiseptic hospital garb against an equally blank white wall behind his bed, his
story registered in gradual closeup. All ambience is excluded from the image
as he looks into the camera to narrate a tale so much at odds with, and worse
than, the one weve seen with our own eyes: the story of his own abandoned
descent into murder (of the vicious fat chef who had refused him vegetarian
food shipboard and had then turned cannibal). One comes to suspect that
this shorn verbal exposition, matter-of-fact and image-free, is the inevitable
stark truth. Te movie weve reveled in and warmed to seems now to have
been one long screen memory for the focal subject of its fashback. If all this
eroded narrative confdence were not kept hovering in the balance of a guarded
ambiguity, the hammered-home shock of the trick ending would be comparable
to the rug-pulling moment in Martin Scorseses Shutter Island (2010) when we
discover that our detective hero and star is in fact the psychotic wife-and-child-
murderer that he himself has been tracking, and that everything weve taken for
plot has been a demented mirage: a virtual world apart in which we have been
shuttered up with him, both energized and soothed by the powers of the false.
In the revelations of all such trick-endings, the same is replayed in the key of
diferencebut a diference so radical, at times, that it all but parodies rather
than exemplifes a normative storyline.
So it is with the counter-narrative of Te Life of Pi when the euphemistic
magic has been stripped bare. Here is a talking-head exposition with images
too awful to show or even to want remembered, but simply to conjure again as
possible: a worst-case scenario at odds with the screen scenes just transpired.
Te tale that would set things straight for the insurance team is still, even now,
held of in sheer potential: just one alternative story, inevitably resisted by us not
just because its events are so terribleso feral, so red in tooth and claw, with the
boy becoming the predatory tiger he has, we thought, half tamed and bonded
withbut because what we have seen before is so much more vivid and, even
as beast fable, humane.
25
Given that it was, idiomatically, a secular miracle
to have survived at all, it might as well be a stirring rather than a gruesome
one. But as to the question of virtual truth versus verisimilitude, wide critical
misapprehension has attached to the flms punch line, when we cut from the
tense and crestfallen inspectors to the blocked novelist hoping to borrow the
narrators earlier story. Pi has promised to tell it in illustration of Gods ways, as
proof of divine intervention, which is why it is possible, no doubt, to read the
capping dialogue as suggesting that God has preferred, and so made good on,
the less awful tale, opting by fat for magic rather than just implausible stamina
and its necessary violence.
Te point is a diferent one. Cornered, Pi has given the investigators a choice of
stories, and, afer his having laid out these alternatives, we return from the fashback
to the opening frame as he asks the novelist: Which story do you prefer? Te one
with the tiger, were not surprised to hear. And Pi in return: So it goes with God.
Te point isnt that God prefers the grandeur of miracles, an uncovenanted ark of
wild beasts rather than a cannibal bloodbath and homicidal revenge, as critics have
tended to assume, but rather, and more simply, that God is a better story, so Pi
believes, than the world without Him: theology an elective narrative, a virtuality
say a still present potentialitymore appealing than brute fact.
To be presentBeyond mediation
A neo-noir conspiracy thriller; a metafctional beast fable and fantasy epic: from
these we turn now to two flms by a very diferent kind of director, flms in which
the relation of the counterfactual to the (Deleuzian) virtualin ways Agamben
can help illuminateare not just processed at the level of narrative but routed
through the flters of overt remediation, videographic in one case, pictographic
in another, so as to delimit the uncanny parameters of these narratives (and,
implicitly, all screen imaging). In an unheimlich assault against the bourgeois
home itself, Cach (2005) opens famously with a node of what we might call
counterfactuality degree zero: representation per se, a virtual counterspace held
to the rectilineation of the image plane itself. We think we are watching a movie
when we are watching an inexplicable video within it.
26
And this is an optical
planarity disclosed, only afer the fact, to be under observation by others than
us, and at one remove from the manifest scenenamely, scanned by a French
couple in voice-over watching a mysterious tape of their apartment exterior,
onto whose street they then emerge (in front of the primary camera) in real
time, only to appear next before the monitor by whose playback the inaugural
image of the same house front has been activated as mysterious purview.
A camera trained upon a space (our launching image) stands hereby revealed
for what it always was, and in another sense could never have been other than:
a space fattened to display, to replay. Te scene, virtualized, has become sheer
data in transmission, but unmotivated so far: data without purposeful infor-
mation. What happens, one might say, is that the image gives itself to be seen
as image, but only in a lamination of the virtual upon the actual, real space
doubled by a rewindable trace, dure turned to archive, redoubling our recog-
nition (in Debrays terms) of the videosphere. And in Agambens terms? How
do repetition and stoppageso obviously reduced here to the mechanics of
rewind and arrest afer fast forward (as the couple scans the tapes for clues not
to its image but to its preceding impetus, its motive)how do these transcen-
dental conditions of flm, laid bare here in video reproduction, take us to the
ethics and the politics of a narrative practice far removed from the countercul-
tural pastiche of Situationist montage?
27
With its past-participial title, Cach may refer as wellby loose French
wordplayto the cultural cachet of the protagonist: a TV talk show host, a
literary impresario, whose self-confdence is eroded by the hidden cameras that
slowly prod him to disclose his own equally hidden past. Georges Laurent is
already in denial when telling friends at a dinner party that the bland tapings of
his home are just meant to show us that were under surveillance, since theyve
already shown him something else as wellthough unadmitted as yet to his
wife: the link of these videos, somehow, back to his childhood and the orphaned
Algerian son of former family servants, about whom Georges made up lies to
get him sent away. Its as if, in reviewing the tapes of his domestic faade, the
axis of registration has gone interior, become that of his own unconsciousas a
disruptive fashback to the victimized boy (triggered by the second of the videos
and a telltale drawing as clue) makes inescapable.
Not being able to imagine where the camera could have been hidden on the
punning Rue des Iris, the street running perpendicular to his townhouse
since the shot is so crisp that it couldnt have been photographed through a
car windowGeorges says of the frst surveillance episode: It will remain a
mystery. On subsequent viewings of the flm, this line of dialogue becomes
more a global caveat than a local bafement. Stand warned: we are never to
learn for sure. Galling, at least nagging, might sum up a certain kind of viewer
frustration at the unsolved mystery. Yet the ambiguities of Cach are not a thicket
of loose ends. Tey are the braided strands of explicitly truncated genre expecta-
tions that are all leading ultimately in the same directionbeyond genre. Cach
is certainly not a standard who-done-it, blatantly not. In mid-detection, the
tracked-down victim (Majid, the Algerian boy now in middle age) kills himself
in front of Georges. Te mystery of agency concerns only that sequence of
videotapes whose long-mounting relevance will now seem to have disappeared
at exactly this apogee of violence, even if the very scene is (as it would appear
from the camera angle) still being internally recorded.
Home video picturing only the fortress of the bourgeois homeas if in the
kind of elective surveillance such a couple might have enlistedis gradually
reversed as a lure to draw Georges outside the circle of his security into the
low-rent purlieus of his former victim. Tis happens in two stages. Te frst tape
picturing something other than the townhouse exterior doubles for the plots
own transition, and answers to its own inducements, simply by picturing, this
time through a windshield afer all, an approach to Georges family farmand
thus triggers a jump-cut into its present space as Georges is drawn back there to
question his mother about Majid. Te surveillant target has gone searching, the
stalked turned stalker. In this way the tapes have fulflled their task in snapping
him out of his complacency, his passivity. He answers the call, follows the lead,
and knocks eventuallypreceded there by another hand held recordingon
the door of 047.
Mission accomplished (even if were still asking whose): that is, confron-
tation achieved, the past met again face to face. Except that, with no shred of
sympathy, Georges faces it down rather than up to it, accusing the Algerian man
of terrorism against his family and thus reinscribing the colonial stereotype
that led, in the frst place, to the police slaughter of the boys parents in a Paris
demonstration. Te last tape we know for sure to have been recorded in the
flm is here taking down (we subsequently realize)and from a vantage at the
far side of Majids kitchenGeorges threats against him, despite the mans
denying all knowledge of the video aggression. But this fact of yet another
flming-within-the-flm is one we are kept from suspecting at the time by the
dynamic crisscross of camera angles before their conversation is later reseen on
monitors (by Anne at home; by Georges boss at the TV studio) in a fxed-frame
medium long shot.
Rounding out this rendezvous with the past, on Georges second and fnal
appearance in Majids kitchen we lock down on the scene of self-murder in one
of the directors signature fxed-frame exposs of human non-communication.
It is a shot we are never to see rescreened in taped form, however. So how
has it been flmed? How else? By narration itself. For this is a narration that
has kept us discomfted and on our toes precisely by toeing a slyly fne line
between the two strata of identifcation in Christian Metzs psychoanalytic
semiology: that diference, so potently equivocated here, between primary and
secondary identifcation.
28
For Metz, respectively and in order, the diference is
this: an identifcation frst with the camera and then with a character, the latter
sometimes through a POV shot that, one might say, borrows back some force
of primary alignment as well. In Hanekes ironically vexed case, however, the
secondary axis is with an always elided cameraman character who (never to be
discovered) simply vanishes into the sightlines of narrative spectation.
All that the actual supplement of the tapes accomplishes, then, in the movie as
we actually have it, is to intervene between media personality and his own worst
fears of fnding his sequestered self on camera; that, plus lend an extra medial irony
to Majids last words, afer which no mention of the taping, even the taping of this
very scene, is ever made again: I just wanted you to be present. Tats the very
motto of the flms ethic of retribution. Georges must be dislodged from his compla-
cency by being made, frst, to see the same picture of his life that we dofrom the
outside looking on, then inand in consequence by being made to face something
wholly other, from which that complacent surface cannot be disassociated. As
media personality, Georges is at the helm of the videosphere, a power-broker of the
apparatus in Agambens generalized terms. Indeed, the one time we are fooled
by a full-screen image that we think is meant to have advanced the plot to a new
diegetic scene on his television shows stage set (and that is not, yet again, a surprise
surveillance tape), what we have entered upon instead is a digital editing session
of the shows pre-recorded taping, the playback flling our screen as it submits to
rewind and ellipsis. We hear Georges voice, of-frame, instructing the technicians
to elide material in the full-frame image before us, a discourse that has gotten too
theoretical for mass consumption. Elsewhere, Georges is himself his own best
censor of the difcult. Typically in command of the image, he can only be shaken
loose from his nervous grip on power by what Agamben designates as a profa-
nation of the apparatuses: the media personality remediatized in his privacy by
the invasive tapes in their function as fgures both for being seenit hardly matters
by whomand (as plot drivers) for his needing to look back.
29
Te bufer zone
between Georges and the world must be converted to a weapon against him, call
it dtournement in a narrative key. Broadcast is turned to exposure, the apparatus
defamed from outside the temples of its power: a media hegemony profaned.
So far, then, the factual is repeatedly doubled by the virtual in the ambiguity
of diegesis versus its replay, in the latter event a strictly mechanical case of
repetition as the return of the possible in the most inert of forms. But what
about the more explicitly counterfactual image when inserted as still potential?
Tere are, in Cach, two such scenes of radical virtuality, each a time-image
in a specialized Deleuzian sense. Interrupting his visit to his mother at the
family farm, a presumed abrupt fashback to Majid killing the family rooster at
Georges behest (when pretending his parents had commanded it) ends with
the boy stalking Georges with his threatening hatchet in a prolonged POV shot
from the back of the barnfrom which a jump cut takes us to the adult Georges,
there in his former home, waking in a cold sweat from just this nightmare. Te
narrative pumps have by this point been fully primed. As if by the unfolding of
an answering chiastic pattern at the end, one half of the two-shot coda will seem
immediately legible in light of this earlier nightmare assault. Tat retroactively
disclosed dream insert in the homestead episodefrst the oneiric mirage, then
his writhing on the pillowis reversed at the end by the transition from bed as
shelter to an undefended onslaught of dream image.
It happens this way. Afer Majids throat-cutting echo of the original barnyard
treachery, Georges takes sleeping pills before crawling naked into bed in broad
daylight, followed bythe cinematographic cues seem inescapableanother
dreamscape from the same childhood POV. Or if this is that actual past in
narrative rather than just subjective replay, the efect of its virtual return is
nonetheless the same: the renewed possibility of what was, the way it (and
the boy) may actually have gone. Tere, in extreme long shot, we see how the
unwanted and betrayed stepbrother is, afer agonized resistance, fnally driven
of from his adopted homeeither as this scene of exile is actually remembered
from Georges former stakeout at the back of the barn or as it is reconstructed
in the unconscious of the drugged sleeper so as to match the traumatic POV
earlier: a nightmare this time, in the flms penultimate shot, of guilty witness
stripped of threat.
Yet the underlying nightmare of true vulnerability may in fact be what comes
next and last with the prolonged closing shot, a diferent threat materialized. In
Georges last words on the phone to Anne, before a routine I love you too, he
asks her to tell their son, quite out of the blue, not to be too hard on his old
man (not to wake him up when he comes home? not to resent him forever?).
Its this seemingly undermotivated (if overdetermined) line of dialogue that we
may remember as the flms last (and notoriously ambiguous) shot displaces the
fashback image of exile withwhat? Another dream scenario? Tis time not of
a separation but of a bond forged. It is a shot notoriously hard to decipher just at
the visual level, though still in the unfinching, fxed-frame geometry associated
with the (now internalized?) surveillance camera.
But there they are in any case, a little hard to spot at frst: Majids nameless
son and Georges own Pierrot, talking together and then separating on the
high school steps. A frst meeting? Afer the fact? Back before it all began? Or a
conspiratorial debriefng? In any case, the patriarchs worst fear, as almost half-
expressed to his wife on the phone moments before, may seem immediately to
have come trueif with the vagueness of dream. Is this indeed a case of the sins
of the father revenged by the sons? Have they been in cahoots all along? Or, that
aside, is this the sure sign that Pierrot will be at least learning by hearsay about
his fathers inglorious pasteven if he doesnt know it yet? Asked otherwise: Is
this meeting of the next generation happening in real time, in parallel montage,
in the same late afernoon in which Georges lies asleep? Or is the interracial
rapport forged or recommitted to here meant, alternately, to represent Georges
entirely subjective nightmare of the future, any day now: where a new hybrid
society, racially leveled, will hold him forever responsible, have him always in
the contemptuous sights of its ethical minds eye?
In Hanekes plottingits mysteries of mediation fnally lifed, if only by
default of all empirical solutionthe guiding design remains clear enough. Te
cinematic act of flming narrative surveillance has come down to no more, and
no less, than flm narrative itself in the present form of its relentless diagnostic
optic. Afer so much dead-pan empirical recordtransfgured only in the eye
of the beholder as incriminating tether to Georges pastone unmediated shot
is pivotal. Tis, as weve seen, is the presumptively counterfactual shot (of Majid
threatening Georges with the axe) that reorients the closing moments toward
a zone of indiscernibility where the virtual (Deleuze) becomes the site of the
ethical, and where repetition and stoppage (Agamben) wont mutually delineate
each other with any satisfying clarity.
So it is that the movement-image is caught halfway in transit to the time-
image, locked into a kind of infernal return. Either Georgesas if drugged by
truth-serum rather than sleeping pillsis remembering the wild plight of Majid
at his connived exile, or hes for the frst time imagining it, his guard down in
sleep, with ethically opened eyes. And either the boys are meeting later (or
earlier) in a broad and fxed-frame daylight, or this, too, is what Georges can
now imagine only when the censor of consciousness is disengaged. Repetition
and/or stoppage? Iteration or telos? Te counterfactual is turned inside out in
this two-ply conclusion: Where the far childhood past returns in the mode of
the still possible (seen for the frst time as if becoming-again in the unabashed
moral outline of a miserable wrong), the nearer present (the schoolyard
coda and/or prequel) is lost somewhere between fashback and premonition,
revelation and paranoia. By an unsourced provocation, the apparatus has
been profaned (reduced from mass-media power to ad hoc provocation) in an
ultimate service to this unmediated ethical apparition, where the powers of the
false, however adjudicated, make immanent a virtual truth.
Image Sub Specie Mortis
Te counterfactual irruptions in Hanekes latest flm, Amour (2012), would seem
to hew even more closely to Agambens combined sense of cinema as an analytic
of gesture (and its arrests) as well as of caesura and its carry-overs. Two of these
moments in Amour are overt fantasies, holes in time quickly bridged over;
another an ambiguous hallucination pitched somewhere between audience and
character; yet another, by contrast, so completely unpsychological that it has
invaded montage itself as an alternate world space, unreal and two-dimensional,
manifest in counterpoint to the narratives present desolation. Each of these
sequences in one way or the other, in the virtuality of its inset, cuts to the
quick of flms own preconditions in a manifestationconcerning the theme of
deathof the always merely potential.
Hanekes abiding topic is still violence, but this time not physical so much
as biological, not the violence exploding at any moment within life, but the
defnitive violence of life: its brutal foreclosure in death. As in his flm from
2010, Te White Ribbon (Das weie Band) the white-on-black main titles have
yielded momentarily, just before a launching shot, to a black screen. Whereas, in
Te White Ribbon, the image then gradually fades in, across a full ten seconds,
to reveal the frst scene of intentional injury (the wire-tripping of a horse and
rider), in Amour the violence is even more immediatebut entirely imper-
sonal. Again the black screenonto which, into which, from which explodes
the frst abrupt, pounding image: of a double residential door, seen from our
side, the inside, battered open by fremen with editings frst splice. A stench
pervades the disclosed space, which in fact we now occupy and examine along
with the moving camera. A corpse is found ceremonially laid out and already
in decay, and the prologueas chronological epilogueis over almost as soon
as it began. Besides spoiling any rudimentary suspense with lifes inevitable
foregone conclusion, what this blunt, battering start has donein something
like the opposite of Cachs opening video regressis to trigger an immediate
incorporation of the audience into the cinematic surround, recognized as such.
When the fat blank of the screen turns out to be the far wall of an actual diegetic
site, we are reminded that projection alone defnes the very parameters of
narrative space. Just sitting in wait, weve accepted that contract, however abrupt
its enforcement this time out.
Afer this the screen slices to black again. Te flm now seems starting over,
with its title spelled out at last, the stripped bare Amour (beref of its requisite
article in French) in immediate association with the fower-strewn body in the
forgoing shot. Next, with our own spectators nerves set on edge, we cut to an
onstage fxed-frame image of a group of spectators in a Paris theater, fdgeting
and chatting, latecomers taking their seats, then all settling down and looking
just of centerscreen right, stage leftoward the frst executed bars of a
piano recital, all except one woman, noticeably called out by her undisciplined
gaze, her roving eyes drifing away from the unseen performer to stare straight,
if ftfully, into the camera. Tis of course lets us select her for our narrative
attention: a fgure otherwise unrecognizable from her own shriveled corpse in
the preceding imagebut returned to life now for a retrospective account of her
decline. Te interdict soon piped over the theaters loudspeakerno photog-
raphy or videotaping allowedseems structurally fulflled at one narrative
remove, since this theater scene, truncated in mid performance, is over before
we in Hanekes audience ever catch a recorded glimpse, in reverse shot, of the
stage or the pianist. All we get is the 35mm flm thus begun: a flm that records
the staring woman herself with steady vigilance once she has returned with
her husband to their apartmentand that pays mounting attention to her own
unpredictable and implicating lines of sight.
Agamben is not out to evoke the feld of cinematic apparatus theorythe
space-constructing nature of the gaze via the cross-cuts and criss-crosses of
narrative suturewhen he speaks of ideological resistance as the profanation
of apparatuses. But Haneke fnds, in a motivated straining of said suture, his
own profane ethics of implicature in our identifcation with the dying woman
and her appeal to mercy and remission, her call for death. In Amour, the marital
protagonists have the same names as in Cach, Anne and Georges Laurent, but
here to fgure not the stereotype of the Bourgeois Couple so much as that of Every
Person, she or he who must die. Afer the mortuary coda (as prologue) and the
concert overture, in their reverse chronology, the plot charts the rapid arc of
Annes decline. But it does so by what can seem like an eerie internalization of
directorial technique itself. In Annes frst few symptomatic minutes of syncope
or blackout at the kitchen table, it is as if she sufers from the principle of narrative
ellipsis that Haneke so resolutely manipulates in his editorial style. Here, instead,
such temporal violence seems internalized as a medical dysfunction: a tiny
stroke and coma, a lacuna, a spell of oblivion. Te ubiquitous ingredient of
montage in the elliptical cut has penetrated into consciousness itself, as if the
technique were sufering its own subjectifcation. So it is that Anne drops away
from self-presence in real time, there under Georges stare and questioning, just
as she doescinematographically rather than physiologicallywhen the scene
changes to his hearing her turning of the faucet, down the hall and beyond the
frame, that he has inadvertently lef on in his rush to call the doctor. Tethered by
that sound bridge to the subsequent shot of him fumbling into his street clothes,
she is out of sight but not out of mindwhile, moments before, she had been out
of her own mind while still in sight. Only suture can retrieve her, as it does when
Georges rushes back to her side to ask what happened, and, as enunciated in a
bafed countershot, she doesnt understand what the what refers to. For her, it
is nothing that has happened: a jump cut in duration itself.
Afer Annes equally elliptical hospitalization and failed operation before
her wheel-chaired return, another caesura in the diurnal tedium of the flms
waiting-for-death doesnt just subtract consciousness from the actual but virtu-
alizes it in the counterfactual. Here in Amour, as with the axe-attack nightmare
in Cach, and with no sign at frst of a shif from actual to virtual time, Georges
is threatened with asphyxiation by the wife he will eventually smother to death.
Distracted by sounds in the apartment hall when he is brushing his teeth, he
wanders out in pjamas to fnd the elevator boarded up in disrepairthe oneiric
impasse of no egressand the hall fooded, the latter recalling (by plausible
dream logic) that faucet lef running early on, but also anticipating (by sheer
narrative premonition) the drenched bed of an incontinence that humiliates her
shortly aferwards. As he wades through the soaked corridor, the shock efect
of trick digital graphics shows him clutched from behindalmost a parody of
slasher gothic, the kind of horror fick this horror flm isntby a detached right
arm (Annes now paralyzed limb, symbol of her burden upon him), its hand
covering his mouth, at which point he wakes panting for breath next to her.
In Cach, as weve seen, the dream image of Majid terrorizing Georges with
a bloody weapon anticipates not Georges death but the other mans suicide. In
Amour, the nightmare trauma also comes true in reverse, with its fnal blockage
of breath at the point of no-exit. Tis happens afer the only waking (rather
than unconscious) violence of the flm: not her hand laid on him, but his on
her, when he almost involuntarily slaps her face afer she spits back at him the
water with which he has tried to hydrate her. If you dont drink this youll die.
Is that what you want? Te question is rhetorical; she has already said that life
in her condition isnt worth enduring. But in silent emphatic answer, we cut
now from his leaning at her bedside, in a kind of half-profle shot, to her all
but direct stare into the cameraher gaze as if passing through him to call on
our own intuitive recognition as well. Te suturing of the space between them,
according to the classic protocols of editing, is pried apart just far enough to
fgure the ethical disjoin he now faceswhether or not to carry the violence
of his afection one step beyond frustration to fnal lenience, when that lamour
their daughter used to hear them making in that bedroom would return with
an irreversible diference. Having later eased her toward sleep with a story of
his own childhood illness, Georges suddenly reaches for a pillow and presses
it down on her passive face: a nonerotic grappling that, in the flms true title
scene, lasts until her fnal spasms abate.
In building toward this moment of ferocity and peace, Haneke draws on the
second of his two most striking formal innovations in Te White Ribbon: not
just the bracketed fades from and to black at the opening and closing of the
plot, its disclosure of image visibility per se (Agamben) from within what it
pictures (as we saw diferently manipulated by the syncopation of black leader
in the disjunctive credits of Amour). Beyond the gapes of black, Haneke also
returns to the previous flms arrest of cinematographic sequence by narratively
unmotivated fxed frame inserts. Under the shadow of pending death in both
plots, these seized-up images intrude a syncopated medial register throwing
the surrounding image system into relief. In Te White Ribbon, indiscriminate
episodes of human cruelty are interrupted by parallel landscape shots in
diferent seasons, with these depopulated framesagainst the drive of cyclical
fruitionserving to refgure the pre-WWI narrative setting within the destiny
of these same spaces, perhaps, as eventual killing felds.
30
Equally salient and even more tactically distributed in Amour, full-frame
paintings rather than freeze frames or inset natural photographsimaginary
landscapes in the romantic mode of salon paintingmark the looming inevita-
bility of subtracted human presence. And they do so, in a parallelism like that
of Te White Ribbon, by echoing an early, clinically-paced montage of empty
rooms before Anne returns from the hospital. Tey do so, moreover, at the very
moment when the eruption of physical violence between the coupleGeorges
slapping Annes facemakes inevitable the approaching yet still unspoken, still
unspeakable, violence of suspended animation, cancelled animation, of which
the pictures so lushly but chillingly speak. Tat early montage of the apartment
as a dossier of cinematographic still lifes involves, in anticipation, fve identically
timed (six-second) shots of deserted rooms from various angles. Ordinarily the
fading, frayed wallpaper and abraded paint of the comfortable but time-worn
surfaces make them look as if they are stroked and shaded by painterly stippling
and hatch-work rather than human wear and tearas in the melancholy vacant
interiors, and receding portals, of Danish artist Willhelm Hammershoi. But
here, in our frst step-through of the apartment in crepuscular half light, the
scenes appear like tableaux mourants.
Answering to and compounding them later, then, are the six screen-
engulfng planes of painting, some landscapes with fgures, some without. But
no real human life anywhere. Only the next time we see Anne in her bed, in
a long-shot once her daughter has insisted on entering the sickroom, is the
camera angle wide enough, and the shot held long enough, to confrm that the
initial canvas in the serieswith two women in a forested pastoral landscape
is in fact hanging over her bed. And one canvas is later disclosed when, for the
frst time, we see the wall oppositeat the very moment Georges crosses in
front of the picture for his last scene with Anne: a somber clif, a tiny pair of
tiny human fgures, and birds in fight. Two more of the six eventually obtruded
paintings can, if one works at it, be made out on far walls or tucked into the
parlor bookcase. Two seem to go entirely missing from the household, at least
as the camera inventories it. And thats only if one is following its tracking shots
with obsessive care in second or third viewing, ignoring the human action
transpiring in front of these painted images. First time through, certainly, these
climactically inset paintings are markedly generic. Tey capture and displace a
middle-class aesthetic ambience, not a private catalogue. Te point isnt to locate
the paintings in the couples rooms, but to see what they orient us toward in
their regrouping, what they themselves evacuate.
Tese landscapes are pictures, now, at which no one looks, the world not just
withdrawn to its representation but removed from all human attention. Afer
Annes slap in the face by Georges, they appear as imagings own recoilas
if, in their fattened interface, they mark the point-of-no-return at which the
couple has arrived (though with no sense of their status as subjective shots;
quite the opposite). Since it is known now for certain (they seem to say in their
muteness) what must soon be done, here is its image: an image of a world
without consciousness, of space without recognition. Tese fush-ft rectangles
thus mark the dead end of screen plot in the rigor mortis of visualization itself.
Passing too fast for immersion or contemplation, long enough only to
register as composition, these images cancel the absorptive power of what
Debray calls the mimetic graphosphere. If, in his formulation of the preceding
logosphere, ancient idols hold us in the eye of the divine, and if sheer visuali-
zation in our current videosphere gives us images with no need of a situated
spectator, in the reign of realist art, by contrastpoised between the super-
natural and the virtualgraphic images install us as subjects by the sight
lines of centric vanishing points (or later, though unmentioned by Debray,
through the interplay of cinematic suture). Instead, here in Amour, painting
is desubjectivized in its contrapuntal break with the realist movement-image
harbored within cinema as a transitional art. Put otherwise, Amour has stepped
back from the foregrounded videosphere of Cach to the missing link between
classic art and screen realism, so that now the irruption of the purely graphic
(as a prescient bridge to nescience) is at once a repetition and a stoppage of
the screen image as suchan image whose situated gaze is removed here in
almost allegorical anticipation of a death ontologically potential (that is, already
present) in the planarity of scenic space itself.
No suture is attempted from here out in Hanekes flmnot afer Annes
defected appeal, past Georges gaze, into our focalized empathy. No suture
feasible, what with its standard reciprocity of the absent one in the mutual
anchoring of exchanged looks.
31
From now on, in two remaining scenes, one
before and one afer her death, Anne is only seen in two-shots with Georges;
frst fading from consciousness on her sickbed, until smothered to death there,
then posthumously materialized as if in a projection from Georges own minds
eye, yet within whose fantastic ambit he too is stationed by our frame. See it this
way: from the violence of the slapped face forward, as if edged out in transition
by those six canvases, Anne is, in regard to the living look of recognition,
already the absent one. And the space that such ocular interchange ordinarily
delimits is, as marked by those serial paintings, no longer actual in its own right
either, however real. Death stands forth as the virtualization of the world.
To this end, that sixfold cascade of paintings, swallowing up the framing
capacity of the camera, are not worlds elsewhere impinging as death draws
near. Tey are the death that is art. Eclipsing the cinematic image entirely for a
moment, in a much retarded frame-advance of sheer quick cuts, the paintings
ofer a parallel not just to the clockwork editing of the empty rooms earlier but
to the personal photographs that Anne has insisted on perusing at one point.
Tose secondary images taken from the life, however, are also reframed for
us by her POV. Farther into her decline, the artifcial landscapes are, instead,
pictures at which no one looks. In their sudden serial punctuation of the flms
dwath drive, their rapid interchange, their very exchangeability, stands not for
some private collection stripped from its dying owner, nor as an image of her
own relics surviving her. Nor are these vistas installed as otherworlds to be
fed to, escapist fantasies, representations of some viable counterspace. Teir
montage, as noted, seems merely to comment on the planar image as such, from
oil to photo emulsion, canvas to print or projected imprintthe image as itself
a metaphor for lifelessness, the world fnalized in its similitude.
As it happens, Agambens essay on Debord mentions paintings as images
lifed from an always unseen (but ever potential) sequence: stills from a flm
that is missing.
32
But the virtual space of these paintings in Amour seems rather
the opposite: constructs of a space beyond time, actionless and unflmable,
Deleuzian time-images only in the mode of arrest rather than alteritythe
virtual as the eviscerated. Further, in Debrays terms, these picturings have
been backed out of the graphospheres constructed gaze to a proleptic irony
of the desubjectivized image under the regime of the sheerly medial: pictures
of a world receded so far into sheer virtuality as to have lef refection itself
behind. Varying the terms of art historian T. J. Clarks great work on the ethical
equipoise of Poussins art in the treatment of mortal fear, what we have here is
not the sight of death so much as the death of sight.
33
Nonetheless, Hanekes decision to interrupt the mostly unappeased rigors of
his realist camerawork, not just with the subjective wrench of nightmare, but
with the rank artifce of painting, has a way (to put it again in Agambens terms)
of making imaging visible in what it images. In so doing, this otherwise jarring
efect prepares us for the fnal counterfactual episode in a flm elegiac right from
the start, retroactive, already fated. What we see in the end, as the end, is the
wish-fulfllment image of Georges own release, perhaps. For afer the surviving
spouse has sealed up the scene of his crime damour with duct tape to contain
the odor and keep Annes body near him for as long as possible, there is another
audial rhyme with the narratives frst point of crisis. Once, so long ago now, he
knew she had come out of her momentary trance when he hears the water in
the sink suddenly silenced. Te comatose moment has snapped; Anne is back
in action. Now, in compensation for the irreversible loss his wanted violence has
sped along, he imagines her domestic presence again from the turning on of the
same ofscreen faucet.
We have been somewhat prepared, though not quite, for such a consuming
subjective vantage on his part. Once before, long afer Anne has become a
bedridden invalid, we have seen her earlier self playing the grand piano in
their parlor. Cut to Georgesacross time and the same roomturning the
recorded music of, leaving us unclear about whether he was summoning her
image, in the mode of illusion, or just remembering her. In that later and fnal
hallucination, however, the mirage is certifed as actively his own, rather than
the narratives alone. Just as she was virtually there at the keyboard, next door
to her bedridden self, so also is she virtually there afer her death. And this time
he recognizes the apparition with full astonishment. Afer the sound cue from
the kitchen sink, Georges drags himself up from his lone bed and limps into the
kitchen with a stunned look, taking his place within a shot that foregrounds his
wife, not dead, just almost donewashing the last of the dishes before joining
him in getting on their coats and street shoes for departure, in the same hallway
where we had seen them return from the concert at the start. Coming full circle,
this answering shot has opened both a closural loophole and a void.
Te counterfactual is the virtual, not the supernatural. For what marks this
vision of the dead as a mental projection rather than an advent of reparative
magican uncanny mitigation rather than a ghostis the fact that the deep-
focus closeup of Anne, with Georges astonished fgure in the background, is
in fact only deeply, not closely, focused. In its forward feld, her face and raised
uncrippled arm appear just slightly out of registration: hazed as if by projected
desire, estranged by its own optic as if to confess it as just a mental represen-
tation with no rounded body actually there, merely an image as such, hence a
fgment. Its the only such sof-focus shot I can remember in all the clinically
crisp cinematography of Hanekes work. It is not, in short, of the same world
as the rest of the flm. As she moves away and into normal focus in the middle
distance and they leave together, there is no reason to take this impossible
episode as either his death-moment fantasy or a posthumous mirage of reunion.
It is just what it is: an image of a separation not entirely fnal. If it raises the
question Does he die? there is only one answer: of course he does.
And afer this enigmatic exit route from his bereaved solitude (Gone to
his rapid death, like so many widowers? Gone to the authorities and under
questioning for manslaughter? Wandered of in confusion? Taken his own
life as well? Forced simply to leave behind a space no longer tolerable when
unshared?), there is only the daughters return to the empty apartmentat
some indeterminate time later, doubly orphaned by now perhaps, certainly
beref, and met there by the same quick-cut shunt between deserted rooms
that has replaced an ofscreen sequence of failed medical intervention with
sheer proleptic emptiness early on. Before Haneke cuts again to black and thus,
answering to the inaugural break-in, robs the apartment of all ambient light,
the daughter is caught seated in a framed recess, a depleted Vermeer, staring
lef toward the windows, unseen now, through which she had previously and
repeatedly looked away from her fathers pain and anger. She has returned,
that is, to the emptied pictorial space of that post-hospital montage, to rooms
already denuded of life. And this last image of a fxed-frame painterly space
succeeds not to actual painted rectangles this time but back to the rectangular
black screen from which plot executed its initial forced entry.
For a long moment, though, her afectless stasis within all this visible absence
gives us some frst reaction time for our own making sense of the preceding
scene. It may well be that Georges leaving with the specter of his mercifully slain
wife performs, by refguring, what must in one sense be true: its being over for
him, too, with her going. Exeunt. Afer the daughters return to the apartment,
the fnal cut to black is now later in time than the one which propelled us across
the title into the opening concert: ofering now the kind of absolute closure
that retrieves (in the form of the same-but-diferent) the no-longer possible of
a past which, as fashback, was once returned to us saturated by its own bleak
potential.
Any idea of remorse, rather than mourning, is excluded early on. About her
illness itself at its onset, rather than her end at his hands, Anne suggests, with
no context or preparation, that he shouldnt feel guiltyand he insists that he
doesnt; and, as far as the flm is concerned, wont. Guilt festered by passive
suppression in Cach, guilt exceeded and erased by necessary action in Amour:
repetition with a diference. Whereas at a narrative scalein the stoppage of
closure impacted in both cases by repetition and its returnsthe one flm
leaves Georges locked in the purgatorial virtuality of potential pasts and/or
potential futures, the other alleviates a diferent Georges as well as a diferent
temporalityboth by virtual fgment and by black-outso as to spare him the
limbo of the unfnished.
In considering that inaugural blackness cracked open to image in Amour,
including the blank to which the planar space soon succeeds (releasing the
delayed title), and this only before raising an unseen curtain on the fashback
theater scene, one recalls not only Agambens citing of Debord on cinema in its
reduction to the antimony of black versus white screens, but also Deleuze on the
power of thought in the negated image, where blackness is one of the moments
when cinema becomes philosophical in default of the optical.
34
Neither Debord
nor Agamben is referring, of course, any more than is Deleuze, to the black
bar between the backlit photograms spooling by the projector lamp, nor to the
ficker efect that results. None takes this on, nor sees it pertinently taken up
into the modular energies of montage itself. Agamben, in particular, evokes
instead a binary alternaton between, in a fgurative more than technical sense, a
total blanching overload of projected images or their total pitch-black absence,
quoting as example the opening of a Debord flm: I have shown that the cinema
can be reduced to this white screen, then this black screen.
35
For Agamben,
speaking rather loosely though he is, this represents precisely his own mantra
of repetition and stoppage.
36
In saying as much, he assumes Debord to mean
the alternate poles of maximized light (all images iterated at once, the sheer
image of imaging even in the eclipse thereof) versus its cancellation; or, in other
words, the ground where the images are so present that they can no longer be
seen, and the void where there is no image.
37
But there are more alternations,
other polarities of a diferent scale, that barely seem dreamt ofand certainly
not consciously formulatedin Agambens philosophy.
Attention has, in all this, drifed very far from celluloid materiality itself
from flmic medialitywhen simply taken up within a Situationist call to stop
the whole commerce in images: experimental cinema operating as its own
scourge of passive vision. With its caesurae a matter of rupture and resistance,
cinema is valorized in that narrow sense, in Agambens view of Debord, mainly
as a machine for bringing to active light the essential unreality at the back of all
crass image. Attending to a productive friction between image generation and
its narrative depictions, however, Deleuze is getting closer to the underlay of
flmic process when he imagines absence per se (black leader) as a node of, or
at least prompt to, philosophical deliberation. Haneke tooespecially when he
shows how, via the absence of the transitional cut itself, mere pictures in a row
dont a gesture, dont a motion, dont a movie, make. Certainly repetition and
stoppage take on their due narrative weight in Amourcapped by fxed-frame
stasis and the plunge to blackassuming their full charge as fgures for (not
pictures of) the double evacuation, diegetic and narrative both, that they so
implacably clock.
No current narrative flmmaker gravitates as demandingly as Haneke to
cinema as a prolonged hesitation between image and meaning.
38
He achieves
in the process one version of Agambens resistant image, the image that refuses
disappearing into what it makes visible.
39
Perhaps nowhere more powerfully
in recent cinema has the full panoply of the virtual image, in particular, been
plumbed to such a depth. In the case of Amour, the pressure this exerts turns
an entire flm, its own ellipses and syncopes included, its own motor paralyzes,
to one encompassing trope. Recalling the ontological premise in Agambens
On Potential, to the efect that being can only be apprehended as harboring
the possibility not-to-be, Hanekes Amour materializes its own images as a
cumulative passing into the having-been.
40
Where narrative cinema is ordinarily the very picture of virtual life, a
becoming-again of recorded duration as time present, Haneke probes instead
to its more unnerving potential: the potential for an absolute absence to
be made manifest, made present, within the screen rectangle. Somewhere
between the imminent and the immanentas marked, for instance, by those
frame-swallowing landscapesthe inevitable, the fatal, if we may phrase it
in Agambens own mode of paradox, arrives in wait. Call it the paradox of a
subjectivity removed in full view. Te whole pattern of Hanekes montage points
in this direction, and hence in on itself. In the flms intricate and overlapping
play between the counterfactual and the virtual, the illusory and the pictorial,
the photographic and the painterly, the static or empty image and the cancelled
one, death makes its unmistakable appearance in plane sight.
Notes
1 I am bringing into comparison here Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: Te TimeImage,
trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1989), with two essays in particular by Agamben, frst Diference and
Repetition: On Guy Debords Films (1995), in Guy Debord and the Situationist
International: Texts and Documents (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 31319,
and then the earlier Notes on Gesture (1992), in Agamben, Infancy and History:
On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso 2007),14956.
Agamben also closes Profanations (Brooklyn, NY: Zone, 2007), trans. Jef
Fort, with a two-page chapter, 934, on a moment of screen-slashing heroic
misrecognition by Don Quixote in Orson Welles Te Chimes at Midnight, which,
though unremarked in this sense, might entail a literalizing in-joke on cutting
(caesura or larrt) as the frequent means of rescue in cinematic crisis. Some of
the material from the essay on Debord, in precisely its emphasis on la rptition
et larrt, appears elsewhere, in the same year, in a short piece for Le Monde
entitled Face au cinma et lHistoire, propos de Jean-Luc Godard, October 16,
1995.
2 Giorgio Agamben, Diference and Repetition: On Guy Debords Films, trans.
Brian Holmes, in Guy Debord and the Situationist International, ed. Tom
McDonough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 315, 31617.
3 Tis lone (and highly dubious) demurral from Bergsons clarity about flm
as a photographic motorization is discussed in my Between Film and Screen:
Modernisms Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 869. I
return to the question, via the work of Mary Ann Doane, in Framed Time: Toward
a Postflmic Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 1314.
4 See above, Between Film and Screen, esp. Ch. 7, Modernism and the Flicker
Efect, 265324.
6 As I will be distilling it, the core of Agambens argument appears under the title
On Potentiality, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 17784.
7 On the literary side of the issue, see especially Te End of the Poem: Studies in
Poetics, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
8 In Gestural Cinema?: Giorgio Agamben on Film, FilmPhilosophy Vol. 8, No. 22
(July 2004), 111, Benjamin Noys ofers a summarizing overview of Agambens two
flm essays.
9 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: Te Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
10 Walter Benjamin, A Short History of Photography, in Classic Essays on Photography,
ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leetes Island Books, 1980), 203.
11 I investigate Benjamins optical unconscious, along with Rosalind Krausss
borrowing of his phrase for the titleand sponsoring logicof her book on the
modernist image, in Between Film and Screen, 11115.
12 On the classic estrangement device of the freeze frame, see Ch. 3, Frames of
Reference, Between Film and Screen, 11750.
13 Tis axiomatic sense of the virtual as being opposed to the actual, but not to the
real, is developed by Deleuze in Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1991), 968, and recurs to explain facets of the
crystal image throughout his second cinema volume.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Te distinction between primary and secondary in this case is derived from
that of Christian Metz in Identifcation with the Camera, Te Imaginary Signifer,
trans. Celia Britton, Annywl Williams (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1982), 4952.
19 Ibid., 318.
20 See Rgis Debray, Te Tree Ages of Looking, trans. Eric Rauth, Critical Inquiry
21 (Spring 1995), esp. 532, 550. Te tripartite division being also rephrasedwith
particular relevance for a Deleuzian approachas the supernatural, the natural,
and the virtual, 538 (Emphasis in the original).
21 Ibid., 536.
22 Ibid., 551.
23 Ibid.
24 See Ch. 6 in Deleuzes Cinema 2: Te TimeImage, Te Powers of the False, where
in passing from a kinetic regime to a chronic regime (126), one reaches a point
where the virtual, for its part, detaches itself from its actualizations, starts to be
valid for itself (127), and where the real and the imaginary [] chase each other,
exchange their roles and become indiscernible (127).
25 My emphasis in thinking about the indiscernibility of this frame structure is
thus based on the Deleuzian virtual in regard to the elapsed narrative function
(in the vocabulary of his flm books) rather than on the becominganimal of its
ambiguous diegesis. Te latter is, of course, a main theme of Deleuzes collaborative
work with Felix Guattari and is given primary stress in an article on the novel Te
Life of Pi that doesnt enlist Deleuzian terms to address the retroactive equivocation
of the main narrative. See Eva Aldea, Yann Martels Life of Pi (2002): Becoming
NonHuman at Sea, in her Magical Realism and Deleuze: Te Indiscernibility of
Diference in Postcolonial Literature (London: Continuum, 2011), 7886. It is worth
noting here that the novel involves only the investigative interview frame, not the
encircling conversation with the fction writer eager to syphon of its narrative
energy.
26 Contributing to the Deleuzian indiscernibility of the video inserts is the fact that
Haneke departed from his typical 35 mm practice to flm the whole narrative in
high-defnition video, thus shrinking the gap between our flm and the mysterious
videotapes embedded by and ofen coterminous with it.
28 On the diference between frst- and second-degree alignments, with narrative
and character respectively, see Christian Metz, Identifcation with the Camera,
Te Imaginary Signifer, trans. Celia Britton, Annywl Williams (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1982), 4952.
29 Giorgio Agamben, What Is An Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik
and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 24, where
this profanation, this restitution to common use, must operate in the face of
acknowledged odds: While a new European norm imposes biometric apparatuses
on all its citizens by developing and perfecting anthropometric technologies
invented in the nineteenth century in order to identify recidivist criminals (from
mug shots to fngerprinting), surveillance by means of video cameras transforms
the public space of the city into the interior of an immense prison (23).
30 See my discussion of these ocular arrests in Prewar Trauma: Hanekes Te White
Ribbon, Film Quarterly 63.4 (Summer 2010), 407. Brought forward at such
moments are serene pastoral images that hold within them, we may say, the terrible
possibility of being otherwise.
31 On the interchange of absent looking across the sightlines of the shot/countershot
pattern see the classic position paper by Jean-Pierre Oudart, Cinema and Suture,
Te Symptom: Online Journal for Lacan. Com; http://www.lacan.com/symptom8_
articles/oudart8.html [unpaginated, accessed August 26, 2013] Tis text was
published in French in Cahiers du Cinma 211 and 212, April and May 1969, its
English version (trans. Kari Hanet) appearing almost a decade later in Screen 18,
Winter 1978.
33 I allude to T. J. Clark, Te Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).
34 According to Deleuze, in his unacknowledged updating of Hugo Mnsterbergs
mentalist thesis about cinema, the overt edit and the marked bridgewhen
detached from the rational montage of a sheer sensory-motor continuumare,
along with the wholly blank screen, the three indices of cinema as thought. It is
thus the point-cut, relinkage and the black or white screen that, comprising the
three purely cerebral components of cinema, form together a whole noosphere.
See Deleuze, Cinema 2: Te Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 215.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid., 318.
40 Given the determination by negative potential of an entire narrative arc, perhaps
the fullest example of Agambens thinkingby which the enacted possibility of not
being, not acting, must be asserted as primary to any idea of doing or becoming
appears in Bartleby, or on Contingency, the closing chapter of Potentialities:
Collected Essays on Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford
9
Montage and the Dark Margin of the Archive
Trond Lundemo
Te witness
Te testimony, and its forensic value in juridical processes as well as its validity
in historiography, depends on its human agent, the witness, and his or her
personal memories of an event in history. Tese memories must be of an event
experienced frst-hand, and not through the most common means for the
constitution of memories, a medium. No testimony can lay claim on the truth of
an event by saying that it was seen on TV or heard on the radio. Te testimony
is instead the material transmitted by flm, TV, books and radio to those who
were not physically present at an event, the non-witnesses. Te testimony thus
functions to distinguish the human witness from technology, the raw and
unmediated experience from the one mediated. In testimony, only human
memory conveys accountability, refection and reason, while technical forms
of memory are understood as static and sterile, only as a form of mechanical
registration without cognition.
Tis dichotomy is widespread in philosophy and replayed in many forms,
from Hegels distinction between static Gedchtnis and dynamic Erninnerung
to the Turing test and issues of Artifcial Intelligence in the computer age.
Te privilege accorded to the human witness over technical mediation could
be traced back through Western culture to the image interdictions of the Old
Testament, at least. Moreover, the issue at stake is the integrity of the human
subject, the in-dividual, that today more than ever requires a separation from
its technical surroundings to be understood in its pure form. If human memory
were subject to mediations, the mediumthe in-betweenwould potentially
corrupt the purity of human experience and memory as it always conveys
selections, noise and limitations of range and temporal duration. Tis position
resembles that of early discourses on cinema as an art form, where any medium
too close to mechanical inscription was excluded from the system of the arts
because it limited, or sometimes was believed to exclude, human agency.
However, as we have learned in very diferent ways from Michel Foucault,
Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Kittler, language is a technology, too. Statements
are made within a system defning what can be said at a certain time, the
techniques of alphabetization and the writing tools are taking part in our
thinking
1
(Nietzsche), and there is always a technical supplement to thinking
and remembering. In theory, this is hardly controversial, but language still
persists as a more im-mediate, transparent and human medium of expression
in culture. Te testimony is qualifed by the very medium that constitutes
the integrity of the witness, as language is commonly received as the primary
medium of memory and expression. From the religious confession to the talking
cure of psychoanalysis and the witness reports of news media, the spoken word
is invested with an authenticity and immediacy that relegates sound recordings
and photography to a secondary status in the description of an event. In very
general terms, in Western culture truth is invested in the word. Te reason for
this is that subjective experience is associated with language, and its function of
saying I. Tis function cannot be distinguished in other media.
Te aporetic point of this question of the role of human memory and
agency in its relation to technology is the Shoah, where the debate on the
role of the testimony versus mechanical inscription and storage keeps stirring
controversies today. Te quintessential witness remains the witness to the mass
exterminations at the camps of the Tird Reich. Te unique position of this
event for the role of the testimony is of course due to the atrocity of the industri-
alization of death, making it a defning moment for European culture as well as
for the question of what a human is. It is also a moment when one asks what art
is, as Adornos famous question of the possibility of art afer Auschwitz shows.
Another reason for the unique position of the Shoah for the testimony is its
media set-up. Tere were no photographs or flms of the extermination camps
transmitted to a wider public during their operation, and even the footage of the
Musulmen and the mass graves shot at the time of the liberation of the camps
was kept from wider distribution until the mid1950s and Alain Resnais Nuit
et brouillard (1955). Tis quasi-invisibility of the camps has contributed to
making it the topos where the question of the role of the testimony in relation
to the function of archival images has been posed most acutely. Te unique
position of the testimony of the extermination camps sets the conditions for
Montage and the Dark Margin of the Archive 193
the testimony of almost any other event, and with it, the confguration between
human and non-human memory, between recollection and the archive. Te role
of the witness of the Shoah defnes the standards for human memorial agency
contrasted with technical agency.
In Remnants of Auschwitz: Te Witness and the Archive, Giorgio Agamben
analyzes the conditions of the testimony and the position of the witness of
the Shoah.
2
Tis is the point of the debate where Agamben intervenes with
an analysis of the testimony as incomplete, something producing a remnant,
which cannot be included in the integrity of the witness. Te true witness is
the one who cannot testify, the one who didnt survive to tell about his experi-
ences. In this sense, the testimony contains a lacuna. Agamben quotes Primo
Levi, the witness who has perhaps most insistently refected upon his own role
in this position: Tere is another lacuna in every testimony: witnesses are by
defnition survivors and so all, to some degree, enjoyed a privilege. [] No one
has told the destiny of the common prisoner, since it was not materially possible
for him to survive. [] We speak in their stead, by proxy.
3
Tis leaves the
position of the testimony as a remnant, and the only true witness of the Shoah
is the one who cannot testify, because the experience of Auschwitz is death itself.
Te integral witness is the one who has experienced the threshold between life
and death, the one who has lef human life, and who consequently is unable
to testify as a human. Te witness cannot simply testify in anothers place, by
delegation, because he testifes to a missing testimony. Whoever assumes the
charge of bearing witness in their name [the Musulmen, the dead] knows that he
or she must bear witness in the name of the impossibility of bearing witness.
4

Tis paradox instigates a lacuna within the position of the witness itself, and
which in the end is a division between the human and the non-human, the
living and the dead. Te lacuna of the testimony is fnally also a remnant of the
subject itself.
5
Agambens intervention approaches the testimony in discursive terms. If the
subjectivity of the witness is constructed and maintained by language, this is
also where the unity and integrity of the subject is undermined in Agambens
philosophy. Te I of the statement of the witness is a pure function of
language, and not the representation of a substance in the world.
6
Departing
from Foucaults theory of the archive, Agamben defnes the archive as the mass
of the non-semantic inscribed in every meaningful discourse as a function of
its enunciation, it is the dark margin encircling and limiting every concrete act
of speech.
7
Foucault identifed the role of discursive and technical conditions
for what is sayable and imaginable, in short doable, at a certain time in history.
Tese conditions also distribute the sensible in Jacques Rancires sense, by
defning who has a voice and who is visible, as opposed to those who remain
silent and invisible.
8
Agamben draws on Foucaults thinking from the outside
(pense du dehors) when he analyzes the possibility of the testimony of an
original event.
9
Te testimony is neither produced by the transcendental interi-
ority of a witnessing subject nor within a pre-established language system, but
by the taking place of language through statements, the outside of language. It
is a result of the system of relations between what is said and what is unsayable,
possible and impossible, in any statement. Te testimony is formed between the
inside and the outside of language.
10
Te dark margin encircling every testimony doesnt render it null and void,
a position that would border on revisionism. On the contrary, besides deriving
the idea of a lacuna in the role of the testimony from Levis writings, Agamben
also devotes the fnal passages of his book to quotes from testimonies of people
who have actually experienced this threshold between life and death, from
surviving Musulmen, who are potentially integral witnesses.
11
Most impor-
tantly, Agamben strongly criticizes the tendency to refer to the Shoah as the
unutterable, that of which one cannot speak because it would always confate
the horrors of the camps, and aligns this position with that of the architects of
the exterminations themselves, who claimed that no one would be able to bring
testimony about the camps.
12
Rather than advocating the negative theology
of silence and invisibility, Agamben challenges the distinction between the
human experience from the inside versus from the outside, and shows that the
testimony opens up an aporetic question concerning the integrity of the human
subject as a witness, in short of processes of subjectivization themselves.
Agamben thus undermines the stable identity of the testifying subject
accounting for frst-hand experiences by analyzing the functions of language
regulating signifying practices and functions. He shows that language is not
a neutral technology conveying subjective experience, and consequently
challenges the primacy of verbal and written testimony. Tis prompts the basic
question if still and moving photographic images can serve as testimonies in
the same way as language. However, such a question risks reintroducing the
absolute and stable notion of the subject that Agamben questions. Te photog-
rapher or the flmmaker would then take the position of the integral witness
who has captured the truth of an event at the right time and place. Even if
flm and art theory has been only too ready to incorporate such concepts of
authenticity and authorial control, in auteur theory for instance, the techno-
logical determinations of the medium have always prohibited the idea of flm
and photography as neutral expressions of human experience. Already the
short history of the media, and the many historical shifs in technology, as the
ones from black and white to color, from silent to sound in cinema, from two
to three dimensions and of course from analog to digital, discards the idea of a
neutral channel of communication. Even if the myth of total cinema
13
(Bazin),
and later computer interfaces as post-symbolic communication
14
(Lanier),
have been pervasive ideas supporting the inception and popular dissemination
of the media, technical recordings of sound and image have never challenged
the primacy of language as the medium of the witness. Tese recordings may
have strong forensic value, and flm was notably given this role in connection
with the Shoah in the Nuremburg trials, but they do not convey the prescribed
subjectivity of the testimony.
Our question should for this reason be more modest, and ask if there is a dark
margin to flm and photography, and if so, how it is constituted. If Agambens
concept of the archive, just as Foucaults theoretical concept on which he builds
his argument, is in this case limited to speech and texts, how would it function
for the photographic media? How does Agambens paradox of the witness relate
to other technologies? Can the image convey the lacuna of the testimony, the
very same lacuna connected to the signature and the author that has forever
prohibited flms position as a witness? Tese questions may probe the media
specifcity of the testimony and its role in the archive. Te dark margin of the
archive could be seen as a potential for resistance against the mnemotechnics
around us. People think and remember according to the governing dispositifs
at any time and context, but if every archive has a dark margin, an alternative to
the archival memory techniques could be derived from there.
15
I will not devote attention to Agambens discussion of the camp as a biopo-
litical regime, spilling into other venues and connecting to the permanent state
of exception of contemporary society. Neither will I address the concepts of bios
and zo informing the Homo Sacer works, of which Remnants of Auschwitz is
part. Rather, the dark margin of the archive, regulating what can be said, and
by extension, seen and heard, at a given time, is a fruitful concept for addressing
the role of the archival image for the understanding of the Shoah. As shown by
Harun Farocki in Bilder der Welt und Inschrif des Krieges (1987), the images of
the camps drawn by the hand of the prisoner Alfred Kantor may border on the
testimony because they are traces of the human, and thus seem to convey the
refection and understanding of the events by a human agent. Images produced
by the technical media of flm and photography do not seem to convey subjec-
tivity, however. So what is the use in looking for a lacuna in the witnessing
subject in media allegedly devoid of subjectivity? Te issue in the case of flm
and photography is no longer to deconstruct the subject behind the image,
but to address the concept of the historical understanding of an event through
images. Te epistemological dimensions of flm and photography are ofen
connected to questions of montage.
Te image
Agambens discursive focus on the testimony and the witness stands in contrast
to the remnants of Auschwitz according to Georges Didi-Huberman.
16
In
Limage malgr tout and in other texts, he argues against an interdiction of
the archival image of the Shoah.
17
Summing up a long debate centered around
flms like Nuit et brouillard and Shoah (Claude Lanzmann 1985) as well as an
exhibition curated by Didi-Huberman, Mmoire des camps (2001), he argues
that the archival images of the camps can add to, rather than detract from, the
understanding of the events. Didi-Huberman refutes the principle that only
the written or oral testimony can account for a comprehensive understanding
of the Shoah. Te testimony is in this perspective contrasted by the archival
image, which is traditionally seen as devoid of epistemological qualities and
only detracts attention from the essence of the experience of the Shoah. As
Didi-Huberman points out, much of this opposition stems from the critique
of the archival image for not rendering all of the event. While the testimony
incorporates a human subjects refection and memory, the image is only seen
as a section of space and time, a static representation of a fragment of the
Shoah. Tis is the background against which Didi-Huberman evokes Agambens
criticism of the notion of the unsayable of the Shoah.
18
However, if he argues
that the idea of Auschwitz as unsayable is aligned with the position of the
perpetrators, Agamben seems to accept that it is invisible.
19
Didi-Huberman
instead argues that photographic images must be seen as testimonies:
We must do with the image, with theoretical rigor, what we already have done
with language, which is easier (Foucault has helped us). Because in every testi-
monial production, in every act of memory, the two language and image are
absolutely solidary, always exchanging their reciprocal lacunas: an image ofen
comes where a word seems to be missing, a word ofen comes where imagi-
nation fails. Te truth of Auschwitz, if the expression makes any sense, is
neither more nor less unimaginable than it is unsayable.
20
Didi-Hubermans discussion centers around four photographs from the crema-
torium IV in Auschwitz, taken by members of the Sonderkommando of the camp
in August 1944. Te Polish resistance movement had succeeded in smuggling in
a camera with some flm in it, which a few members of the Sonderkommando
were able to use for taking photographs of their task, clearing out the gas
chambers and throwing the bodies in mass graves. Te four surviving photos,
taken from inside the crematorium depicting the incineration of the bodies on
the outside as well as the arrival of a new group of victims, were smuggled out of
the camp in a tube of toothpaste. Didi-Huberman argues that these images add
to our historical knowledge of the atrocities of the Shoah, and that they deserve
to be read as testimonies on a par with oral and written ones. Even if the
photographer is unknown (only his forename Alex is rendered) Didi-Huberman
takes care to narrate the situation in which the photos were taken through a
description of the movements of the photographer based on the four photos and
the duration of the undertaking.
21
Tis way Didi-Huberman invests these photos
with a human agent behind them in order to make them pass as a testimony.
Didi-Huberman proceeds to show that any testimony is necessarily
fragmented, a section of the event. Te photos are reproduced together with
the written instructions for their development and where they were taken. Te
photos are thus further validated as testimonials through their investment in
the handwritten message. Te connections made not only between the photos
in time through a reconstructed trajectory of movement, but also through their
embedment in writing, are typical of the process of construction of historical
knowledge, Didi-Huberman claims. In order to construct an understanding
of an event, one needs to make a montage. A montage in this epistemological
sense includes all media of the archive, going from the written testimony to the
image and to other accounts and documents. It is in the juxtaposition between
statements, between images, and between words and images one can show more
than what is said or seen. Tese connections and intersections have always been
at the center of attention of montage in flm theory and practice.
Why does the image only detract from understanding, and why would
many voices of the debate see any existing image of the Shoah as harmful? In
his discussion of this question, Didi-Huberman returns to the debate encir-
cling Lanzmanns Shoah, and the flms abstention from the use of any archival
images. Lanzmann sides with the view of the oral testimony as the exclusive
entrance to the understanding of the Shoah, and sees his flm as the ultimate
work on the event as it only contains the accounts of witnesses of the camps.
Of course, in his embracement of the monotheistic principle of the word as
the only gateway to knowledge, Lanzmann seems to forget that his flm still
consists of images, and at its duration of almost ten hours at twenty-four frames
a second, an excessive number of them (more than 800,000). Lanzmann is not
only interviewing witnesses, he also records their gestures as they speak and
revisit the places of the Shoah. His refusal of the visual concerns only archival
images, and he claims that if he had discovered a flm depicting the activities
of the extermination camps, he would have burned it. He also refused to
have his flm shown at a cinema screening it together with Nuit et brouillard,
because Resnais flm included archival images from the extermination camps.
Interestingly, this also conveys a refusal of the flms commentary written by
the camp survivor Jean Cayrol. According to this view, the image doesnt only
detract from the understanding of an event, it also seems to corrupt the word
of the testimony.
Didi-Huberman is right to point out that montage is the core of the matter.
Lanzmanns Shoah relies on the juxtapositions of images of landscapes at the
sites of the exterminations and witnesses testimonies, just as Cayrols voice-
over in Nuit et brouillard enters into a relationship with the places flmed
in 1955 and with the archival footage from the camps. Yet the position of
Lanzmann only develops the role of the single image or shot when any flm
is a work of montage. Tere are, however, multiple methods of montage.
Didi-Hubermans concept of montage is a very general one, where the histo-
rians navigation between documents in archival research is aligned with the
continuity established between the four photographs from crematorium IV
in Auschwitz. Tis analogy is further strained when he draws on Jean-Luc
Godards epistemology of montage as it is presented in his Histoire(s) du cinma
(198898).
22
While the archival image alone constitutes a document of historical
knowledge in Didi-Hubermans discussion, even if it is always forming a part of
this knowledge through juxtaposition and connections, for Godard the single
image, still or moving, is not yet history.
Montage and history
Godard has recurrently given an example of the contrast between the historical
document and history as montage. Cinemas historical ethical bankruptcy
consisted in failing at its hour of truth: the Shoah.
23
Tere was no image of the
atrocities of the extermination camps at the time of the Second World War,
because there was no montage making them visible. Tis contrasts the shot as a
document of the past with cinema as history, because there were many shots of
the mass graves and the Musulmen of the camps afer the liberation, and Godard
knows this well as he employs them frequently in Histoire(s) du cinma, as well
as in Notre Musique (2005) and De lorigine du XXIe sicle (2006). In Godards
concept of montage, there is always a moment in history, a rupture in time,
at the center. Tis moment is a caesura eluding visibility, like the example of
the Shoah, and needs to be worked out through montage. Montage is for this
reason a dimension cinema never fully attained, at least not at the right time,
and remains a potential that it never reached, a blocked caterpiller that never
turns into a butterfy.
24
Tis unrealized potential of montage is connected to the
major trope of the end of cinema, which is also the end of the arts, in Godards
concept of history. History requires the right montage at the right time, and
cinema has not always been able to provide it. Tis idea indicates that Godard
is concerned with a very specifc concept of montage and history beyond the
photographic document or the pieces of a puzzle.
Te principle of this visual description is presented at the opening of part
2a, Seule le cinma of Histoire(s) du cinma: To make a precise description
of that which has not taken place is the work of the historian. (Faire une
dscription prcise de ce qui na eu lieu est le travail de lhistorien.) It would be
a misunderstanding to interpret this quote as a statement saying that historians
should devote themselves to fction, and with Godards prime example of the
Shoah in mind, it would potentially lead to revisionism. Godard treats history
as an afrmative force, even when it is not produced in an absolute and eternal
way. Cinema is even endowed with specifc properties for producing the past
through its access to montage and projections. Te emphasis in the quote above
should rather be on the lieu, the place. Te point of rupture in history has not
taken place in the sense that it has not been captured visually, or taken place
as an image, so it needs to be described through other visual techniques. Tis
moment can only be elaborated as a montage confguration that is necessarily
in movement, ephemerous and transient. Didi-Huberman is well aware of this
concept of montage in Godards work, subscribing to the principle that what
isnt seen must be shown, but his reading of the photos from the Auschwitz
crematorium as testimonies undermines the specifcity of the principle of
montage. Didi-Huberman relies on Godard to argue that archival images form
montages, showing what cannot be seen. But this task requires more than just
the random navigation between documents in the archive, or between links on
the Internet. A montage, in its epistemological sense, is something rare.
Te dispositifs of cinema, because there are clearly multiple ones, are
epistemic tools for producing the past. Trough its capacity for montage,
cinema may work out the blind spots of historyits points of rupturevisually.
Tese ruptures are not emphasized as the causes of later developments, as in a
traditional historical narrative, but rather constitute the points of interrogation
themselves in Godards work. Tey are not immediately visible, but need to
be excavated through the right form of juxtapositions and superimpositions,
in short through montage. Tis is the sense in which Godard understands
montage as a historiographical means, which far exceeds the simple analogies
or causal chains of events dominating historical enunciations in most texts and
flms. Te historical point of rupture is neither the generator nor explanation for
a development. Agamben identifes very well how Godards montage serves to
work out these ruptures through repetitions and stops:
Apparently, the images Godard shows us are images of images extracted from
other flms. But they acquire the capacity to show themselves qua images. Tey
are no longer images of something about which one must immediately recount
a meaning, narrative or otherwise. Tey exhibit themselves as images. Te true
messianic power is this power to give the image to this imagelessness, which,
as Benjamin said, is the refuge of every image.
25
By subjecting the image to the invisible that encircles it, montage creates a
form that thinks, as Godard claims in Chapter 3A: La Monnaie de labsolu
of Historie(s) du cinma. Godards political project is to make these moments
of rupture visible, to provide them with a countershot. Only in the intervals
between images, in their juxtaposition, does history become visible. Godards
famous iconophilia, criticized by Jacques Rancire and defended by Georges
Didi-Huberman, among many others, depends on making visible what has only
been verbally described or narrated.
26
His use of an excerpt from Lanzmanns
Shoah is perhaps indicative of the technique, as well as of the strongly visual
impact of the almost ten-hour flm. An old witness to the passage of the
deportation trains reenacts the gesture of passing the hand over the throat used
by him and his neighbors to comment on the prisoners imminent death. Tis
shot is arguably the most quoted and remembered shot of Shoah, making it a
kind of archival stock footage of the history of the Second World War. Godard
decomposes the movement of the gesture frame by frame, in accordance with
Agambens account of cinema as the art of the gesture, juxtaposed to other
images related to the Shoah.
27
Te montage of Historie(s) du cinma and other works does not proceed
through a linear account of history, in a causal chain of events where one event
occurs afer, and because of, another. It is exactly in cinemas capacity to make
historical events and evolvements simultaneous that montage plays its historical
role. In superimpositions, resonances and reverberations between flms, events
and movements, history can become visible instead of just narrated and told.
Simultaneity suspends temporal and historical distance. In a famous passage
in the frst part of Histoire(s) du cinma, it stated that it was because George
Stevens had flmed the horror of the extermination camps in color, as he was
part of the US military troops in Europe during the fnal days of the war, that
he could render the moments of happiness between Elizabeth Taylor and
Montgomery Clif in A Place in Te Sun (1946). Tis causality expressed in the
commentary, however, implodes in the montage. Te technique of superimpo-
sition shows the before and afer at the same time, the corpses and the young
lovers in the sun overlap, and the sequential linearity is folded over, rendering
the past and the present simultaneous.
Godards historical concept of montage relies on the technology of the
moving image, and furthermore on its medium-specifc duration which deter-
mines exact encounters and juxtapositions in time. Even if Godard concedes
that montage may also take place in written history or in the other arts,
following Eisensteins history of montage in the arts, it is clear that cinema
holds specifc properties for developing caesurae and constructing simulta-
neities. Tis is a diferent notion of montage than Didi-Hubermans idea of
an open navigation between documents in the archive, or between the photo-
graphs taken at the Auschwitz crematorium. Te associations between archival
documents organized by the historian, or by the user navigating the Internet,
lack a defned temporal duration, and this shifs the emphasis from montage to
the single shot or document.
Didi-Hubermans quest for the acceptance of the photographic image as a
testimony tends to reintroduce a transcendental consciousness on the behalf
of the observerthe photographer, Alex, in the case of the four photos of the
crematoriumbut also in the montage, as it is produced by a human agent
in the reception of the images. Godard doesnt understand cinemas role for
historical articulations as a witness, and there is no need for a deconstruction
of the integrity of a testimony in his concept of montage. Godards principle
of montage clearly also works on a diferent terrain than Agambens identif-
cation of a lacuna in the position of the witness, or of a dark margin at the
level of an archive of statements. As Foucaults work on the theoretical concept
of the archive departed from the age of the Gutenberg Galaxy, when photo-
graphic images and flms were not yet part of the archival media, Agamben
also addresses the discursive dimensions of the archive. However, if the archive
of statements were regulated by structures and functions determining what
could be said at a certain time, the dark margin encircling every speech act,
technologies of inscription and archival indexing also represent selections of
information and what is visible at a given time. Tere is a dark margin encircling
also images of the archive, understood as the system defning what becomes
visible and invisible at a given time. Understood in this sense, Godards practice
of montage is directed at making this dark margin, or perhaps better, dark
matter, visually accessible. Godard approaches the suspensions of visibility in
the historical point of rupture. With the right montage at the right time, what
you cannot see can be shown. Tis is a means to challenge the technical selec-
tions made by archival media and the mnemotechnics surrounding us. If the
function of saying I constitutes the subject as a pure efect of language, and
consequently as a lacuna in the testimony, montage in its epistemological sense
makes the lacunae of visibility stand out.
While the dark margin encircles every concrete speech act and determines
what can be said, and by extension what can be seen, at a given moment,
elsewhere Agamben develops this darkness as a positive feature of the human
visual sensory apparatus.
28
Darkness is not the absence of light, and hence
vision, but the stimulation of so-called of-cells of the retina that produces
blackness. To perceive this darkness is an act of vision outside of the stimuli
of light emanating from the outer world: it is the perception of vision itself.
Agamben goes on to demonstrate how the darkness encircling every star on the
sky at night is the product of luminous celestial bodies and galaxies whose light
never catches up with us, as they are moving away from earth at a greater speed
than that of light.
29
Te light of the stars is perceived in astronomical hindsight,
where the past appears as the present. Te darkness encircling the light of the
stars, on the other hand, is the light that can never connect with the present.
Agamben understands this as the condition of being contemporary: to address
the anachronical dimensions of the present, to actually see the light of the past
or the future that reaches us as darkness.
Dark matter envelops the light of the contemporary and serves as a condition
for seeing the historical and anachronical in the present. Te fashes of light
informing history, according to Walter Benjamins Teses on History, means
that there is an index to every image of the past that makes it visible at a certain
point in time only. Tis connection between images, distant in time as well
as in space, is the key point in Godards concept of montage as history. Tese
connections are encircled and made possible by the dark matter of vision itself.
Addressing the heterochrony of the present is the condition for the contem-
porary, according to Agamben. When Godard refers to the discovery of dark
matter in physics, in Histoire(s) du cinma as well as in earlier flms, it is as the
visual dimension for historiographical connections. Te dark matter is not only
the medium for the perception of movement itself, and in the cinema dispositif
specifcally, but also for the epistemological production of the past through
montage. It is important not to confate the dark matter of montage with the
dark margin of the written archive. Te dark matter of montage is no longer a
lacuna in the subjective interiority of the testimony, but a productive space for
historical connections to emerge. Still, both concepts devote attention to the
darkness encircling and conditioning what can be seen and said at a specifc
moment in time. Te visual presence of darkness invests the present with a
historical, or in Agambens term, contemporary, heterochrony.
In spite of Agambens emphasis on the physically visual dimension of the
historical dark matter informing the contemporary, he does not develop a theory
of montage. On the relatively few pages he devotes to cinema in his writings,
and with the exception of the short text he devoted to Godards Histoire(s) du
cinma quoted above, he approaches the shot rather then the efects produced in
their connections and confrontations. Cinema is an art of the gesture because it
records and reveals gestures, depriving the old bourgeois world of their gestures
as Balzac described them. Te gesture in cinema is a crystal of historical
memory very diferent from the memory produced by the testimony.
30
Te
ethics of cinema lies in its recording apparatus, producing of the actor a star
rather than the persona or the divo of the theater.
31
He notes the look into the
camera by actors in pornographic photographs and movies.
32
Tis focus on the
gesture and the face as an exteriority derives perhaps from his own experience
as an actor in cinema, playing San Filippo in Pasolinis Il Vangelo secondo Matteo
(Te Gospel According to Matthew, 1964). Almost all of these texts are concerned
with processes of subjectivization. Tis is where they connect to his discussion
of the lacuna in the position of the witness and empty function of the I of
language. All of these images and statements are encircled by a dark margin
determining what can be seen and said at a given moment in history.
Notes
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Schreibmaschinentexte, (Weimar: Verlag der Bauhaus
Universitt, 2002), 18.
2 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: Te Witness and the Archive. Homo
Sacer III, trans. Daniel Heller-Rosein (New York: Zone, 1999).
3 Levi quoted by Agamben, ibid., 334.
4 Ibid, 34.
5 Ibid., 1589.
6 Ibid., 1401.
7 Ibid., 144.
8 Jacques Rancire, La partage du sensible; esthtique et politique (Paris: La Fabrique,
2000), 468.
9 Michel Foucault, La pense du dehors [1966] (Paris: fata morgana, 1986).
10 Agamben, Auschwitz, 144.
11 Ibid., 16671.
12 Ibid., 313, 157.
13 Bazin, Le mythe du cinma totale [1946], Quest-ce que le cinma (Paris: Editions
du Cerf, 1985), 1924.
14 Jaron Laniers quote: http://jenkins.duke.edu/courses/isis250ss11/jaron_lanier.htm
15 A dispositive is, frst and foremost, a machine of subjectivization, and
consequently a machine of government. Giorgio Agamben, Quest-ce quun
dispositif? (Paris: Rivages poches 2008), 42.
16 Agambens focus on the testimony as a pure efect of language makes him disregard
the technical dimensions of media even when he makes use of sources explicitly
discussing the potentials for testimony in flms, like the discussion of Lanzmanns
Shoah by S. Felman. Agamben, Auschwitz, 356.
17 Georges Didi-Huberman, Images malgr tout, (Paris: Minuit 2003). He also returns
to the topic in several other texts, most recently in Remontage du temps subi; Lil
de lhistoire 2 (Paris: Minuit 2010) and in Opening the Camps, Closing the Eyes:
Image, History, Readability, Concentrationary Cinema; Aesthetics as Political
Resistance in Alain Resnaiss Night and Fog (1955), Griselda Pollock and Max
Silverman (eds), (New York: Berghahn, 2011), 84125.
18 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 312.
19 Ibid., 12: (this truth [] is unimaginable).
20 Didi-Huberman, Images malgr tout, 39. His criticism of Agambens position: 39n.
40.
21 Ibid., 213.
22 Georges Didi-Huberman has devoted a long discussion to this problem in Godards
work: Ibid. 17287. See also Libby Saxtons discussion of the role of the image
of the Shoah in the cinema of Lanzmann and Godard: Anamnesis and Bearing
Witness: Godard/Lanzmann, For Ever Godard Michael Temple, James S. Williams,
Michael Witt (eds) (London: Black Dog 2004), 36479.
23 Jean-Luc Godard, Introduction une veritable histoire du cinema, (Paris: Albatros
1980), 26970.
24 Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinma; propos de cinma et histoire [1995],
Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, II; 19841998, (Paris: Cahiers du cinma
1998), 403.
25 Giorgio Agamben, Cinema and History: On Jean-Luc Godard [1995] trans. John
V. Garner, Colin Williamson, in the present volume.
26 Jacques Rancire returns to Histoire(s) du cinma in several texts in order to
question the idea of an absolute separation between the word and the image, to
which he argues the composite notion of the phrase-image. Jacques Rancire, La
fable cinmatographique (Paris: Seuil 2001), 21730. Jacques Rancire, Le destin des
images, (Paris: La fabrique, 2003), 4378. Jacques Rancire, Godard, Hitchcock,
and the Cinematographic Image, For Ever Godard, Michael Temple, James S.
Williams and Michael Witt (eds) (London: Black Dog 2004), 21431.
27 Giorgio Agamben, Notes sur le geste, Trafc no. 1, 1992.
28 Giorgio Agamben, What is the Contemporary? in Nudities (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2011), 1019. I am indebted to Henrik Gustafsson for pointing
out this connection to me.
29 Ibid.
30 Giorgio Agamben, Notes sur le geste, Trafc no. 1, 1992.
31 Giorgio Agamben, Pour une thique du cinma, Trafc no. 3, 1993.
32 Giorgio Agamben, Te Face, in Means without End; Notes on Politics
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 91100.
10
Remnants of Palestine, or, Archaeology
afer Auschwitz
Henrik Gustafsson
I feel like an occupied country. Change lies between the images.
Changer dimage Jean-Luc Godard, 1982
Pilgrimage and profanation
In the early summer of 1963 Pier Paolo Pasolini retraced the itinerary of Christ
along the border of Israel and Jordan, scouting locations for a flm based on
the Gospel of Matthew. Like every pilgrim Pasolini was lead principally by his
imagination, to borrow Maurice Halbwachss insight, and in common with so
many of his predecessors, his foray into the Holy Land became one of increasing
disillusion.
1
As documented in the pre-production flm-essay Sopralluoghi in
Palestina (Scouting in Palestine, 19634), Pasolinis Grand Tour unfolds as an
elegiac road movie through a vanishing world, encroached and eradicated by
sprawling Israeli settlements, industrial plants and urban blight. At the end of
his quest, the director laments: Yes, the biblical world appears, but it resurfaces
like wreckage. Tis wreckage, however, led Pasolini to discover what he referred
to as the mechanism of analogy.
2
It is precisely in the remnants of Palestinea
heap of wheat, the gestures of a farmer, and, most prominently, in the pagan,
pre-Christian faces extolled by Pasolini in Druze villages or among tribes of
Bedouins in the desertthat he identifes the archaic element to sustain this
analogical approach. Working by analogy, the abject poverty of the Arab under-
class in the margins of a prosperous Israel society impelled Pasolini to displace
and reimagine the Gospel in the impoverished regions of southern Italy, with
Basilicata doubling for Palestine, Mount Etna for the Judean desert, Calabria
for Galilee, and the ruins of Matera for Jerusalem. With equal pertinence, the
analogy applies to the faces of the sub-proletarian peasantry in these rural
hamlets. Pasolinis quest for the archaic was thus as much a scout for faces as
for places. Of all his flms, renowned for their unique sensitivity to the human
face, none contains so many memorable visages as Il Vangelo secondo Matteo
(Te Gospel According to Matthew, 1964) with its mixed cast of local peasants
and fellow artists and intellectuals in the roles of the disciples. One of these
faces belongs to a young student from Rome cast to portray Philip the Apostle:
Giorgio Agamben.
Tis early collaboration between Agamben and Pasolini invites a closer
consideration of the overlapping vocabularies and genealogies of thinking that
underpin their respective projects. Steeped in theological traditions, amalgam-
ating Marxist and Jewish Messianic traditions, their eclectic output is similar,
frst of all, in its sheer rangeextravagantly interdisciplinary in Pasolinis self-
characterization, scattered in every territory, in the words of Agamben.
3
While
such a comparison lies beyond the purview of the present discussion, Pasolinis
encounter with, and subsequent displacement of, Palestineor what Halbwachs
conceived of as Te Legendary Topography of the Gospelspeaks to a concern
which I propose is at the heart of Agambens writing. As he professed already in
his second book, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1977): We
Figure 10.1 Philip the Apostle (Giorgio Agamben) at the Last Supper in Il Vangelo secondo Matteo
(Te Gospel According to Matthew, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964).
Remnants of Palestine, or, Archaeology afer Auschwitz 209
must still accustom ourselves to think of the place not as something spatial,
but as something more original than space.
4
Exploring the nature of this place,
which is always an inquiry into the void,
5
has remained a lifelong pursuit,
and spreads across all aspects of his writing. Exemplary, in this regard, is the
single refection he has devoted to Pasolinis work that can be found in the
collection Profanations. Beginning with his early linguistic parodies, Friulian
poems, and Roman slang novels, Agamben proposes that Pasolinis operative
modus can be understood as a form of serious parody. Poised between identity
and diference, mimicry and mutation, parody, as understood by Agamben,
facilitates a space suspended between the word and the thing, the thing and
the name. Chronically and constitutively out of place, this mode of speaking
beside-itself,
6
reveals a fundamental truth about language: that language
doesnt take place. It is also for this reason that what Agamben refers to as the
notoriously impracticable terrain
7
of parody has the potential to assuage the
split between world and language. In commemorating, the absence of a proper
place for speech, Agamben suggests, this heart-wrenching atopia becomes,
for a moment, less painful, and is cancelled out into a homeland.
8
Inviting us
to dwell in this lacuna, parody thus seems to harbor another idea of belonging.
Along these lines, the brief introductory remarks below aim to articulate some
of the concomitant ideas and concepts that inform Agambens rethinking of
place through a cross-reading with Pasolinis linguistically informed approach
to location shooting.
When plotting out the premises of a new investigation, Agamben typically
commences by staking out a direction, as if embarking on a survey into some
unchartered territory: what he alternatively refers to as an unknown land, a
no-mans-land, or, most frequently, a homeland. Te nature of this domain is
vigorously stated in the preface to Infancy and History: On the Destruction of
Experience when the author writes that the implications of there is language,
and I speak constitute the terrain toward which all my work is oriented.
9

Hence, the rethinking of place proposed by Agamben is always embroiled in
and refracted through language. It is also in this double-exposure of linguistic
and spatial tropes that we may trace the deepest afnity between Pasolinis and
Agambens projects: in the former case, to disjoint the unity of form and content
through a linguistic pluralism; in the latter, to interrupt and expose language
and communicability as such.
10
It is in this sense that Agambens understanding
of poetry as the taking place of language, exposing its exteriority, pertains to
Pasolinis Cinema of Poetry.
Te rethinking of place undertaken by Agamben and Pasolini may be
circumscribed through a shared methodological impetus: that of archae-
ology. Taking his cue from the archeological methods of Aby Warburg, Walter
Benjamin and Michel Foucault, Agamben states that the object pursued by the
archeologist, the arch, is not the historical site of an original event that can be
traced back through linear time. Tis defnition casts it in marked opposition to
how archaeology commonly is understood and used, most conspicuously when
mobilized as a weapon in national struggles where it is invoked as the supreme
authority to settle issues of ownership and origin. Conversely, philosophical
archaeology seeks to uncover, the non-place of the origin.
11
By regressing
toward the moment when a concept frst became operative, the moment of a
phenomenons arising, archaeology strives to gain access to the arch as, an
operative force within history.
12
Accordingly, the arch is not a given or a
substance, but a feld of bipolar historical currents stretched between anthro-
pogenesis and history, between the moment of arising and becoming, between
the archi-past and the present.
13
Archaeology, then, marks a sustained attempt
to grasp the currents that pass between the past, which is always created by the
present, and the present, which is always founded on the past.
As Noa Steimatsky has shown, the archaic crystalized as the master trope
of Pasolinis flmmaking afer his encounter with Palestine.
14
Like the territory
summoned by Agamben at the outset of a new project, the archaic terrain
sought by Pasolini never designates a proper place. While intimately tied to the
tangible specifcs on location, the arch ultimately resides beyond location, as a
point of fight on the ever-retreating peripheries of the modern world. From his
early flms set on the margins of Rome to his late travelogues from the Arabian
Peninsula, Africa, and India, Pasolinis Tird World itinerary presents an open
target for charges of romantic primitivism, and, more troublingly, for complying
with a colonial cartography that coordinates centers and peripheries along a
temporal axis of present and past. In this context, however, it may more properly
be understood as a technique for attaining a proximity to the arch, which is
summoned through a stretching of historical currents by means of stretching
out geographically, but also, and always, linguistically. Il Vangelo provides a
powerful case in point: willfully exposing its acts of mimicry, the sermons and
parables of the Gospel and the iconography of the early Italian renaissance
coexist with passages shot in the style of cinma vrit, summoning a space
where the heterogeneous visual, textual, and audial sources touch, and ignite,
in Sam Rohdies phrase.
15
Furthermore, this space extends across analogous
historical moments and realities: the Palestinian underclass in the present, the
biblical land in the past, and feudal, southern Italy, all being subjugated to the
power of colonial rule.
Tis brings us to a fnal point of intersection between Agambens work
and Pasolinis cinematic practice: the remnant. In his commentary on Pauls
Letter to the Romans in Te Time Tat Remains (2000), Agamben ponders
the implications of Pauls renouncement of his Jewish identity as Saul and his
subsequent announcement of a non-people (Rom. 9.25). By defning himself
as separated, positioning himself between Jewish and Hellenistic identity, Paul
exposes an internal split in any attempt to defne a people, an irreducible and
unassimilable element inherent in every act of imposing an identity. For this
reason the remnant constitutes, for Agamben, the only real political subject.
16

Te remnant is not a passive residue, however, but exhorts a force that ruptures
the authority founded on such a dividing action, in this case Mosaic Law
which divides all men into Jews and Non-Jews. Te deconstructive force of
the remnant also acts on space, dislodging the distinction between inside and
outside, inclusion and exclusion, which underpins any political project based on
identity and belonging.
From 1968 to the end of his life, Pasolini wrote a series of screenplays for a flm
based on the life and journeys of Paul, emblematically titled San Paolo. While
this flmhis most ambitious attempt at staging an analogy across time and
territoryremains unrealized, the impact of Paul may be construed precisely
in terms of a politics and poetics of the remnant. Pushing steadily toward a
bypassed and impoverished south, Pasolini summoned his non-people from the
subproletariat on the fringes of modernity, what Paul referred to as, the flth of
the world, the ofscouring of all things (First Letter to the Cor. 4.13), or what
Frantz Fanon in an infuential phrase at the time called the wretched of the
earth. Pasolinis incessant thrust away from the centralized power of State and
capital toward abject subjects and settings in order to stir up the scandalous,
revolutionary force of the past,
17
needs to be understood, primarily, within
the context of Italian fascism. Pasolinis scandalous and contaminated poetics
was targeted against the Fascists consolidation of an ethnically and linguisti-
cally unifed nation. Te geographical itinerary of his flms, then, harks back
to his early linguistic experiments and mimicry of vernacular idioms; for it
was precisely this plethora of regional dialects that fascist politics intended
to erase. Pasolinis revolt, however, had broader implications, designating the
homogenizing forces of the modern nation state more generally. Upon return
from Palestine, Pasolini commented on his deeply ambiguous response to
Jewish society, torn between his love of the Jews for having been excluded
and subjected to racial hatred, and a deep resentment of a state, founded on
a basically racist, messianic and religious ideathe idea of a promised land.
Pasolini is quick to add, however, although its basically the same principle on
which all states are based.
18
It is toward this nexus of land, language and people that the archaeological
inquiries addressed in this chapter are oriented. Having provisionally mapped
out, with the help of Pasolini, some of the premises which I suggest underlie
Agambens proposal that we need to rethink place, we have also demarcated
the geographical subject of these inquiries: Palestine, at once the epicentre of
archaeology, the homeland par excellence, and the locus of the worlds most
advanced biopower today.
Primal scenes
At the time Pasolini embarked on his Tird World travelogues, political tourism
had become high vogue among intellectuals associated with the French lef. By
then, however, the border between Jordan and Israel retraced by Pasolini in
1964 had been radically redrawn. In what follows, I will cross-read two political
pilgrimages in the early 1970s which, in turn, marked at once the beginning
of two sustained archaeological inquiries into these contested territories, and
the inaugural moment of a controversy that would erupt in full force more
than two decades later. Te subject matter of this polemical conversation was,
ostensibly, not the confict in the Middle East, but the ethics and politics of
representing the Nazi concentration and extermination camps.
19
In light of the
implicit relation suggested here, the flmographies of the principal adversaries
of this debate, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Lanzmann, follows a remarkably
similar itinerary: from their interventions into the Zionist-Palestine confict in
the early seventies, followed by their monumental work on the Nazi camps in
the ensuing decades, to their late career returns to the Middle East. My claim,
then, is that the stakes of this high-profle dispute can, in fact, be traced back to
the conficted terrain of Israel-Palestine.
At the end of 1969, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, the founders
of the Dziga Vertov Group, were invited to Jordan, Lebanon and Syria to make
Jusqu la victoire (Until Victory), a flm funded by the Arabic League in order
to promote the Palestinian uprising. Godard spent the spring and summer of
1970 flming the preparations in the refugee communities on the West Bank,
then controlled by Jordan, to reclaim the land that had been occupied by Israel
in 1967. A month afer his return to Paris, the Fedayeenthe armed militants
flmed during combat trainingwere killed in the Black September massacres
perpetrated by King Husseins Jordanian troops, and the project was abandoned.
Tree years passed before Godard, together with Anne-Marie Miville, would
return to this footage which was revised and edited together into the video essay
Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere, 19704), to which we will return later.
Lanzmanns flm has an even more convoluted production history, beginning
as a reportage for Les Temps Modernes afer his frst visit to Israel in 1952,
and, encouraged by Jean-Paul Sartre, expanding into a book, neither of which
were completed. Returning twenty years later, the project fnally materialized
as Pourquoi Isral (Why, Israel 1973), a sprawling portrayal of the state in its
twenty-ffh year. Te flm is impelled by two incentives. Firstly, responding
to Sartres essay Anti-Semite and Jew which argued that the Jew exists only
as an image derived from anti-Semitism, and thus, that the Jew is a phantom
summoned and nourished by a passionate hatred which ultimately lacks an
object. Conversely, Who is a Jew? is the question that propels Pourquoi Isral.
Secondly, it is induced by a territorial imperative to cover the land in all its
diversity: with pristine vistas of the desert and the coastline, pastoral imagery of
the forestation programmes and Kibbutzim, and vivid depictions of the pioneer
spirit in the rising cities and settlements. Lanzmann even acts as a tour guide for
an immigrant family, showing them all the major landmarks from the Wailing
Wall to Masada. Tese two incentivesthe inventory of the land and the quest
for identityconverge in the frst law of the parliament, the law of return, the
mandate to build and fll the land.
A primal scene divided between the Shoah and the Nakbaor between the
camps in Poland and the camps in Palestinemight shed new light on the
competing claims on the relationship between cinema and history purported
by Godard and Lanzmann. It may further cause us to reconsider the theological
framework of idolatry and monotheism in which the polemic has ofen been
cast, with Godard as a partisan of the image and Lanzmann as a partisan of
the text, or, in Grard Wajcmans formulation, of Saint Paul Godard versus
Moses Lanzmann.
20
Such a divided primal scene converges in the messianic
concept of the remnant as explored by Agamben. Chronologically, Agambens
investigation of the remnants of Israel in Te Time Tat Remains (2000), had
been preceded by his study of testimony conducted in Remnants of Auschwitz:
Te Witness and the Archive (1999). In both studies, the concept of the remnant is
elaborated in relation to a liminal fgure that calls into question our conceptions
of what constitutes a people, or a human being more generally. In the frst case,
Pauls community of remnants, his non-people; in the second, the Muselmann,
the German word for a Muslim that was used in the camps for a prisoner in
the fnal stage of malnutrition, exhausted to the point of bare life, deprived of
speech and experience. Predating both these publications, however, is a third
paradigm of the remnant presented in a short essay called We Refugees, which
also marks Agambens single direct commentary on the confict in the Middle
East. Te remnants in question are the 425 Palestinians expelled by the state of
Israel onto the border of Lebanon. Displaced from the land and thus also from
the law, Agamben advances the refugee to imagine a form of life beyond the
confation of naked life and national belonging. Triangulated in this manner,
Agambens elaboration of the fgure of the remnant appears as a potent historical
cipher for the confict in the Middle East.
For Godard as well as Lanzmann, the annihilation of Jews in the Nazi camps
marks the genesis of the state of Israel. In a letter to Palestinian historian Elias
Sanbar (who served as a guide and interpreter on the Dziga Vertov Groups
location scout in Jordan) dated somewhere in Palestine July 19, 1977, Godard
writes: Te current war in the Middle East was born in a concentration camp
on the day a great Jewish outcast, besides being brought to the verge of dying,
was called a Musulman by some SS.
21
In similar terms, Lanzmann contends
that, the state of Israel was born of the Shoah.
22
Tere is also a causal relation
between Lanzmanns survey of Israel in the early seventies and the inventory
of the geography of the Nazi death camps in Poland that would engulf him for
the next twelve years. It was afer a screening of Pourquoi Isral that Alouph
Hareven, director-general of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Afairs, invited
Lanzmann to a meeting where he proposed the subject for Lanzmanns next
flm: the extermination of European Jewry during World War II.
23
Te next section will consider the relation between testimony and territory
mapped in Lanzmanns nine-and-a-half-hour flm Shoah (1985)along with
Lanzmanns commentary on the flm as it unfolds in his recent memoir Te
Patagonian Hareand in Agambens Remnants of Auschwitz. Te focal point
of this cross-reading, and in the subsequent discussion on Godard, concerns
how the camp, the inaugural site of the confict in the Middle East, is in turn
imbricated with a speech act, an act of nomination. For Godard, the cipher for
this relation is the German name Musulmann, for Lanzmann, the Hebrew
name Shoah. Tese ciphers, in turn, encrypt competing claims on origins and
homelands.
Testimony and territory
Lanzmann has described Shoah (1985) as a flm from the ground up, a
topographical flm, a geographical flm.
24
In the preface to Remnants of
Auschwitz, Agamben lays out his investigation in similar terms: I will consider
myself content with my work if, in attempting to locate the place and theme of
testimony, I have erected some signposts allowing future cartographers of the
new ethical territory to orient themselves.
25
Both further address the problem
of naming the event, rejecting the term Holocaust due to its religious conno-
tations which associate the crematoria with a sacrifcial altar. Departing from
this common ground, I will argue that a closer examination of the relationship
between nomination and location in fact reveals a decisive rif in the territory
that they set out to chart.
While Remnants of Auschwitz only addresses Lanzmann in passing, his
presence looms heavy when Agamben positions his study in opposition to,
those who would like Auschwitz to remain forever incomprehensible, and
when stating his intention to, clear away almost all the doctrines that, since
Auschwitz, [have] been advanced in the name of ethics.
26
Shoah is only
addressed indirectly in reference to the commentary made by literary critic
Shoshana Felman. Felman proposes that the unique achievement of Lanzmanns
flm is that it resolves the dichotomy between the witnesses who survived the
gas chambers and the victims who perished inside them, eliciting a connection,
between the inside and the outside.
27
Conversely, Agamben insists that this
relation must remain open; the lacuna between death and survival must be
preserved, for it is out of this empty space that testimony may, or may not,
emerge. Tis is the territory that Agamben refers to at the outset of his
studythe taking place of language, the contingency and possibility of speech.
Auschwitz is the negation of this contingency, a machine designed to produce
the fnal biopolitical substance
28
: a man separated from speech, from the event
of language, and thus from the possibility of having an experience. Envisioned
by its engineers as the perfect crime, one which doesnt leave a remnant, the
camp marks an attempt to foreclose the lacuna.
In defning the remnant as a residue between death and survival, Agamben
endows it with agency. It is revealing, then, that Agamben chooses the Muselmann
(unmentioned in Lanzmanns flm), a subject defned by an absolute lack of
agency, as the protagonist of his study. Following Primo Levi, the cartographer
of this new terra ethica, the implacable land-surveyor of Muselmannland,
29
the
complete witness is the one who cant testify. For Agamben, the disjunction
between the living being and the speaking being, constitutes the subjects only
dwelling place.
30
Resuming the territorial metaphor, Agamben relates this to
his principal methodological impulse: archaeology claims as its territory the
pure taking place of these propositions and discourses, that is, the outside of
language, the brute fact of its existence.
31
As we shall see, the taking place of
language is also at the core of Lanzmanns archaeological project. As I aim to
show below, however, the relation between location and language, or between
Site and Speech, to quote the working title for Shoah, holds radically diferent
implications for Agamben and Lanzmann.
32
My flm would have to take up the ultimate challenge; take the place of the
non-existent images of death in the gas chambers.
33
Lanzmanns statement explains
his categorical rejection of any claims made for an image that derives from inside
the gas chambers, whether the Nazi footage hypothesized by Jean-Luc Godard,
or the Sonderkommando photograph that was curated and conceptualized by
Georges Didi-Hubermann. For Lanzmann, the inside is reserved for the oral
testimonies given by the former members of the Sonderkommando who appears
in Shoah: they too were fated to diewhich is why I call them revenants rather
than survivors.
34
Whereas Agambens remnants dwell in the lacuna between the
living and the dead, Lanzmanns revenants posit a bridge between them; the saved
dont speak for the drowned, the dead speaks through them.
Tis, in turn, comprises two competing versions of archaeology: Every time
I discovered someone still alive, I was absolutely stunned, it felt almost like
something unearthed during an archaeological dig, Lanzmann recalls.
35
Along
these lines, the director has consistently drawn on the metaphor of archaeology
to describe his working methodto dig, drill, and excavate.
36
Tis archaeo-
logical impulse also impels the cameras unearthing of train tracks buried in the
mud and debris in the undergrowth, of the weed infested ghetto and the sunken
crematoria. Lanzmanns archaeology thus equally applies to the physical sites of
the genocide and to the voices speaking from them.
In her preface to the published screenplay of Shoah, Simone de Beauvoir
writes that, the greatness of Claude Lanzmanns art is in making places speak.
37

It is also in the revelatory meeting of the name and a place on location in
Poland that Lanzmann, in his own account, suddenly gains full access to the
primal scene.
38
Tis devastating revelation occurs when he frst confronts the
black lettering on an ordinary road sign spelling Treblinka. Te shocking,
unacceptable discrepancy, between the dreary contemporary reality and the
terrifying human memory of it could only be explosive.
39
Upon his arrival in
Poland, Lanzmann ruminates:
I was a bomb, though a harmless bomb the detonator was missing. Treblinka
had been the detonator; that afernoon I exploded with a sudden, devastating
violence. How else can I put it? Treblinka became real, the shif from myth to
reality took place in a blinding fash, the encounter between a name and a place
wiped out everything I had learned.
40
Te meeting of a name and a place precisely conjures what Walter Benjamin
referred to as a dialectical image, igniting a tension through which the past is
blasted out of the continuum of history.
41
More importantly, this shif from
name to place, from myth to reality, delineates the core of Lanzmanns archaeo-
logical project: to reverse the trajectory in which the Jewish people were frst
rendered stateless (by Nazi laws) and then speechless (in the camp). To grasp
the implications of this undertaking, we need to retrace the reversed trajectory
from the place to the name charted by Lanzmann.
To begin with, the reality of place. Lanzmann has stressed the critical impact
of his encounter with the sites, of exposing his mind and senses to the minute
physical presence of each detailevery steel rail and stonein the camps: I
had allowed it to seep into me, to imprint itself on me.
42
Rather than a shif
from icon to index, Lanzmann postulates a shif from one index (archival
footage) to another (material remnants), establishing a causal link between
exterior and interior.
43
While his famous repudiation of images without imagi-
nation
44
obviously imposes a limit on the image, it commands, by the same
token, images with imagination. Tus, it is not a general ban on images, but
on images in the past tense. In fact, Shoahs relentless confrontation with the
here and now of these sites engenders one of the most sustained attempts in the
history of cinema to make imagination work through the power of evocation
and speech.
45
Between the crowded street scenes of Warsaw and the random
passers-by in the Polish countryside, Shoah comments on the invisibility of the
ghettos and camps, then and now. It covers the ground where the crime took
place as a means to relive the event as if it was continually taking place in the
present. Te absence of explanation and the excess of descriptive information
provoke and ignite, in Lanzmanns phrase, a hallucinatory intemporality.
46
Not
an image, then, but a vision.
Tis brings us to the second transition, moving back from the reality of place
to the myth and the name. From the pastoral hymn to the childhood home
sung by Simon Srebnik on the Narew River in the frst scene of the flm, Shoah
continuously evokes the notion of a homeland. Te blind spot encircled in the
flm is at once the gas chamber and the absence of a sovereign Jewish nation. Te
connection transpires in the midst of the rundown ghetto district where a long pan
across the city comes to a temporary halt at a monument to the uprising in the
ghetto. Te camera zooms in close, and then cuts to a replica of this monument in
Jerusalem, from where it zooms out and resumes its lefward trajectory to reveal
the bright, open spaces of Israel. Te journey to Poland was like a journey through
time, Lanzmann comments.
47
Passing through the stony faces of the resistance
fghters, the pan thus completes the flms journey from the past into the present.
48

Tis bridging of time and territory, however, does not merely imply that the spirit
of resistance lives on in Israel; so does the enemy. Tis is the theme addressed in
the concluding part of Lanzmanns trilogy on the Jewish homeland, Tsahal (1994).
To the same extent that Shoah is unremittingly about death, Tsahal is about
survival. Taking its title from the Hebrew acronym for the Israeli defence force,
the flm celebrates the ffieth anniversary of the War of Independence. Te
national arms industry, the air force, and the military combat training zones
in the desert are exhibited in a brazen iconography of power. Near the end of
the flm, a montage of aerial shots circle Jerusalem, Masada, and the hilltop
settlements, while Ehud Barak muses: We carry in our blood the genes of the
Maccabees and of those Zealots who died in Masada. Tis genetic heritage
also applies to the enemies of Israel. Te stories related by Israeli soldiers about
family members who perished in the ghettos, gulags, and camps merge with the
imminent threat of annihilation by the Arabs. Te sovereign borders of Israel
are the only safeguard to keep the past at bay.
Anti-Semitism, Lanzmann establishes in opposition to Sartres view, is the
metaphysical hatred against a people who is the origin and knows it and wills
it.
49
Shoah attempts to grasp this hatred in its full dimension, to encompass
everything, to show everything that had happened from the point of view of the
Jews themselves.
50
Tis all-encompassing view needed a name:
Te word Shoah occurred to me one night as self-evident because, not
speaking Hebrew, I did not understand its meaning, which was another way
of not naming it. [] Shoah was a signifer with no signifed, a brief opaque
utterance, an impenetrable, unbreakable word. [] I fought to impose the title
Shoah, not knowing that in doing so I was performing a radical act of naming,
[] Shoah is now a proper noun, the only one, and hence untranslatable.
51
Te performative force of this speech act returns us to the question of the
arch. Lanzmanns act of nominationof giving a name to the eventis also a
commandment. Shoah does not refer to or describe something; it commands
something. Te name is the thing, the event in its totality, in Lanzmanns words,
my flm is a monument that is part of what it monumentalizes.
52
Te name
Shoaha Hebrew name, the language of origin and the language of Israel
grounds the link between word (speech) and thing (site), rendering this link
unbreakable. Tis is unambiguously stated in the epigraph to Shoah, a quotation
from a passage in Isaiah (Isa. 56.5): I will give them an everlasting Name. Te
commandment of Shoah thus warrants an everlasting commitment to the
future. It is upon this imperative that the Jewish state is built.
Two parallel axes cross in Lanzmanns coordination of site and speech, place
and name, view and interview, land and language: the two thousand years
of exile from the homeland and the destruction of a previous generation in
Europe. Te intervening millennia of Palestinian history are lef vacant, as if
Figure 10.2 Tsahal (Claude Lanzmann, 1994).
the land itself has been exiled, awaiting the return of its rightful owners and its
re-entry into history. Lanzmanns trilogy is about origins and bloodlines, about
Israel as material unity, and of its territory as an absolute embodiment of the
Jewish world. It is a recognition and confrmation of a world according to a
visionof a people who is the origin and knows it and wills it. Answering the
question pursued in Pourquoi Isral, a Jew is not a being of possibility, a being
who can, but a being who will.
Te prophecies of Isaiah are also the source from where Agamben, via the
Letters of Paul, derives his concept of the remnant: For though your people, oh
Israel, were like the sand of the sea, only a remnant will return. (Isa. 10.22)
53

Following Agamben, this remnant is neither a numeric portionthe part of the
people returning from the Diaspora, or surviving the Shoahnor the nucleus
of a new nation, bridging ruin (Shoah) and salvation (Israel). Te remnant,
instead, directs us away from the identitarian politics of the state toward a
nameless community that isnt founded on will, but on potentiality. While
Remnants of Auschwitz repeatedly refers to language as taking place, Agamben
also advises us to be cautious of this fgure of speech. Testimony can never take
place in a territorial sense, for it comes to us from an empty place. It is in this
non-coincidence between site and speech that the remnant resides.
Te urge to rethink the relation between site and speech became a key
concern as Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miville revised the footage
lefover from the Dziga Vertovs sojourn in the Middle East in 1970. In the
concluding section of this chapter, I will pursue the inquiry into this relation as
it unfolds in Ici et ailleurs and in Godards latest work, Film socialisme (2010).
Tis will return us to a fnal consideration of the implications of Agambens
proposal that a more original place, a homeland, remains to be discovered.
Here and elsewhere
Lanzmanns inventory of the land in Pourquoi Isral is bordered by names.
It begins in the Yad Vashem memorial hall where the camera scans the
inscriptions on the stone foorAuschwitz, Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen,
Dachauto the sound of a voice chanting in Hebrew. Ten, it descends
into the depths of the archive, the Hall of Names. Tis is also where the
flm concludes, three hours later, as a clerk at the archive enumerates all the
Lanzmanns who perished in the Shoah. Afer the last name, Lanzmann simply
instructs cut.
Godard and Mivilles video-essay Ici et ailleurs is instead framed by a change
of names: from the prospective until victory to the retrospective here and
elsewhere. Departing from the projected, and abandoned, propaganda flm,
Te Peoples Will, the frst of fve Fatah slogans around which Jusqu la
victoire was to be structured, is followed by a claim on origin: Weve chosen a
Palestinian revolution to prove to the world that this Palestinian soil taken by
the Zionist enemy will be given back to its people, to its frst origin. In voice-
over, Godard refers to these slogans as, fve images and fve sounds that hadnt
been heard or seen on Arab soil. He then extrapolates the didactic setup for the
intended flm: frst the sound, then the image. In order to reclaim the land, the
Fedayeen had frst to conquer a language, hence, the recurring scenes of refugees
delivering speeches, declaiming poetry, rehearsing union texts, and reciting
pamphlets.
Te new title announces a strategy of displacement, suspending the revised
footage between herea French working-class family (flmed in the living
room of William Lubtchansky, Lanzmanns cinematographer on Pourquoi Isral
and Shoah)and elsewhere. Tis elsewhere does not merely designate lost
territory and abandoned ideals: afer the Amman massacre, Godard and
Miville was literally lef with a cast of revenants, thus facing the gravest
implications of speaking for an elsewhere. Probing the politics of giving, or
imposing, voice, and what was lost, or obscured, in translation, it is precisely
the site of speech that warrants articulation. Te project of decolonization thus
refects back onto the political persuasions and manipulative strategies of the
flmmakers and their rhetorical arrangement of sounds and images into a causal
chain of events. Tis chain, in which everyone can fnd his own image, adheres
to a logic of recognition and identifcation: Little by little we are replaced by
chains of uninterrupted images. Te task Godard now formulates for his and
Mivilles newly founded production company, Sonimage, will be to break this
chain of sounds and images. Godard asks: Maybe we should abandon this
system of questions and answers and fnd something else.
In a pragmatic sense, this was achieved through video editing; placing
images side-by-side on two monitors rather than in linear succession. Revising
and refracting his own (then recent) cinematic past through video-montage
and conficting voice-overs, Ici et ailleurs implements in embryotic form the
archaeology of sounds and imagesthe overlapping soundtracks, multilayered
superimpositions, and multicolored inter-titlesof late Godard. Indeed, two
images from Ici et ailleurs, both located inside camps, have become part of this
strata: frst, of a young Fedayeen woman patrolling a border fence in a refugee
camp in Jordan; second, archival footage of bodies dragged and dumped into
mass graves in a Nazi camp afer the liberation. Te latter is always interpo-
lated with two names. In Ici et ailleurs, these names are introduced in Mivilles
neutral commentary played over a ghastly black-and-white newsreel fickering
on a TV-screen: Heres a Jew in such a state the SS called him a Muslim.
Te profanation of the religious misnomerthe SS declaring the Jew to be a
Muslimalso designates the fnal act to seal the destruction of the last remnant
of the Jewish people. Te intertitle that follows: Tinking of that againhere
and elsewhere.
Te connection between the Fedayeen in the camps in Jordan and the
Musulman in the camps in Poland has continued to resurface as a leitmotif,
some would say an obsession, in late Godard. Most recently in Film socialisme,
where the archival footage from the camp, in low-resolution and slow-motion,
are followed by two video clips: frst from Cheyenne Autumn (John Ford, 1964),
showing women and children of the Cheyenne Exodus; then from Lanzmanns
Tsahal, an aerial shot of a fghter jet crossing the coastline as the voice-over
intones: Palestine. Te dispossession of the native population in Fords flm
Figure 10.3 Fedayeen in Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere, Jean-Luc Godard, 19704) from chapter
4b: Les Signes Parmi Nous (Te Signs Among Us, 1998) of Histoire(s) du cinma (198898).
and the patrolling of sovereign borders in Lanzmanns documentary associate
the colonial enterprises in North America and in the Middle East, not only
through the shared myth of a promised land, but also through the rationale
that legitimized the eviction of its former inhabitants: their ignorance of terri-
torial sovereignty and citizenship. Put crudely, since Palestine never existed as a
proper place, Palestinians never existed as a people.
Tis sequence in Film socialisme emulates a montage in the frst episode
of Histoire(s) du cinma (198898). Following a meditation on the Nazi death
camps, the most extensive in the series, and a quote from Lanzmannthe train
pulling into Treblinka in Shoahthere is a color photograph of a Palestinian
boy marching with a burning US fag. Superimposed in the fames are images
from D. W. Grifths Te Birth of a Nation (1915), followed by the tracking-shot
of John Wayne racing through the Indian camp in John Fords Te Searchers
(1956). Te allusion to the Navaho reservation in Fords Monument Valley
pervades Film socialisme in its entirety through the Navaho English subtitles
concocted by Godard. In the guise of a linguistic parody of Indian speech in
Hollywood westerns, the already fragmentary and multi-lingual text of Film
socialisme is chopped up and spaced out into single lines with no punctuation.
More importantly, the Navaho English subtitles also refect back onto the vexed
issue of translation frst raised in Ici et ailleurs. In many ways, Film socialisme
appears as its late companion piece. Furthermore, it meditates on the nexus of
territorial confict and linguistic theory in ways that directly pertain to key ideas
in Agambens work.
Film socialisme contains two brief sequences obliquely addressing the Middle
East confict. Te frst appears toward the end of the frst section of the flm
Des choses comme a (Such things)which is set on a cruise ship touring
the ancient ports of the Mediterranean, a hyperbolic non-place that makes the
hotels and airport terminals analyzed by Fredric Jameson and Marc Agu appear
benign in comparison. Afer a series of passing references to Jafa, Haifa, and
Mandatory Palestine, along with the key date 1948, during the frst half hour, a
new character announces: Te photograph of a land and its people, at last. Te
line paraphrases the title of Les Palestiniens: La photographie dune terre et de son
peuple de 1839 nos jours (2004), a compilation of photographs by the aforemen-
tioned Elias Sanbar, whom Godard befriended in Jordan in 1969. Sanbar appears
on screen to recount how the invention of the Daguerreotype hurled a wave
of photographic campaigns into the Holy Land. A girl holds up a photograph,
identifed as one of the earliest photographs of Haifa Bay. She speaks in Arabic:
Where are you my beloved land? Again, a paraphrase, this time of a familiar
line in late Godard, frst intoned in German in Allemagne 90 neuf zero, later cited
in JLG/JLGautoportrait de dcembre (1994) and Histoire(s). A brief, soundless
sequence follows afer the intertitle PALESTINE in which two landscape
photographs, made a century apart, are shown: frst, a generic postcard view
in black and white with a palm tree in the foreground and a distant village on
the hills across the bay (Flix Bonfls, 1880); then, a full-screen color shot of an
olive tree (Joss Dray, 1989).
54
Te screen goes black, followed by the blindfolded
Christ in Matthias Grnewalds painting Te Mocking of Christ (15035), and the
concluding intertitle ACCESS DENIED. Tis, of course, can mean a number of
things: that Palestine has no access to its territory or its history; or, as for Pasolini
on his failed location scout, that there is no longer an image to conjure of the
people or the place. In light of Sanbars thesis that Palestine was obliterated by
the image of the Holy Land, the century that separates the two photographs also
evokes what hasnt changed between them: the notion of Palestine as a place,
not a people, as neither image evince human beings, only trees, adhering to the
Zionist motto of a land without a people. Maybe, there is also another possible
meaning: that Palestine is what we fail to imagine, belonging without a state.
Te next Palestine sequence appears toward the end of the flms third, and
fnal, section, Nos humanits (Our humanities). Te voice-over begins by
Figure 10.4 Christ blindfolded in Matthias Grnewalds Te Mocking of Christ (15035) in Film
socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010).
repeating Sanbars association of the inception of photography and the subse-
quent colonization and erasure of Palestine. A photograph of a procession
of blindfolded Arab prisoners pulled by a soldier fades into a ground-level
shot tracking along a stretch of barbed wire with the Mediterranean in the
background (taken from Jean-Daniel Pollets 1963 flm Mditerrane). Tis is the
frst instance where the link between land and language is elaborated in terms
that directly intersect with Agambens work. Te voice-over cites from a letter
written by Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem to Franz Rosenzweig in Berlin: Te
country is like a volcano. A day will come when language will turn on those
who speak it. Dated December 1926, Scholems premonition comes a year afer
British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfourauthor of the Balfour Declarationhad
laid the foundation stone at the Hebrew University, an institution committed to
turn Hebrew into the living language of the Zionist homeland.
In Agambian terms, such a confation of language and national identity
means that humans are separated by what unites them.
55
Te trinity of land,
language and people alienates and uproots, all peoples from their vital dwelling
in language.
56
As was noted at the outset of this essay, this dwelling place, in
Agambens own assessment, marks the terrain toward which all his work gravi-
tates. In equally explicit terms, he notes that this terrain constitutes a veritable
terra incognita: We do not have, in fact, the slightest idea of what either a people
or a language is.
57
Nonetheless, all of our political culture is based on the
relation between these two notions.
58
Tis means that our modern nation states
are based on the confation of two culturally contingent categoriespeople and
languageand that this alliance is the source from where it derives its power and
authority. Terefore, a people without a state, whether the Wandering Jew, the
Vanishing American, or the Palestinian refugee, can be oppressed and extermi-
nated without impunity, so as to make clear that the destiny of a people can only
be state identity and that the concept of people makes sense only if recodifed
within the concept of citizenship.
59
Agamben continues by addressing the most
pressing example of such an imaginary
60
summoned through the confation of
a chosen people with a hallowed land by means of a liturgical language:
Te vicious entwining of language, people, and the state appears particularly
evident in the case of Zionism. A movement that wanted to constitute the
people par excellence (Israel) as a state took it upon itself, for this very reason,
to reactualize a purely cult language (Hebrew) that had been replaced in daily
use by other languages and dialects (Ladino, Yiddish). In the eyes of the keepers
of tradition, however, precisely this reactualization of the sacred language
appeared to be a grotesque profanity, upon which language would have taken
revenge one day. (On December 26, 1926, Gershom Scholem writes to Franz
Rosenzweig from Jerusalem: We live in our language like blind men walking
the edge of an abyss. Tis language is laden with future catastrophes. Te
day will come when it will turn against those who speak it.)
61
Te reference to Scholem shared by Agamben and Godard speaks of a mutual
concern: that what remains hidden from us is not something beyond language,
some transcendental referent, but language itself. Scholems letter pertains at
once to the motif of the blindfold that Godard repeatedly has invoked in relation
to the constellation of Musulman and Juif,
62
and to a key tenet of Agamben
expressed in the following aphorism: humans see the world through language
but do not see language.
63
Yet, he insists, it is only in a vision of language
64
that
a true community is imaginable.
It is precisely on a vision of language, not as an avenger but as a prospect of peace,
that we will conclude. Tis vision, which transpires a mere few minutes later in
Film socialisme, directly counterpoints the earlier imagery of the Mediterranean
strewn with wire, as well as Scholems foreboding. Again, the scene is preceded
through a reference to linguistic theory: During his second course at the New
School in New York during the winter of 42-43, Roman Jacobson demonstrated
how it is impossible to separate sound from meaning and that only the notion of
phoneme allows us to resolve this. Ten, shifing from a male to a female voice-
over: Writing for two voices is only successful when dissonance is introduced
by a common note. On the multilayered soundtrack, we frst hear a girls voice
chanting from the Koran, then a second voice chanting from the Talmud. Te
voices blend together over images drawn from Agns Vardas flm Les Plages
dAgns (Te Beaches of Agns, 2008) showing trapeze artists performing against
the brilliant blue screen of the Mediterranean. Te bodies are not only suspended
in air, but also between languages. Godard stop-starts the sequence into a series
of mesmerizing stills. Te act of capture and release performed by the fyer
and the catcher are, in turn, captured and released by the montage. Captured
in image and released into gesture, the cavorting bodies exhibit, if only for a
matter of seconds, what Agamben refers to as, the media character of corporal
movements, that is, the being-in-language of human beings.
65
In interviews, Godard has referred to the trapeze act as an image of peace in
the Middle East. An image of peace, properly speaking, would be an oxymoron
for Agamben, since the realm of images, signs and appearances are always
a site of struggle for recognition. Te sign that seals the deal between two
adversariesthe handshake, the emblematic photo opportunity of a peace
treatiseposits a sign of mutual recognition. Such a peace, Agamben insists,
is only and always a peace amongst states and of the law, a fction of the recog-
nition of an identity in language, which comes from war and will end in war.
66

Peace, on the contrary, is the fact that we cannot recognize ourselves in any
sign or image.
67
Te pilgrimages addressed abovethe failures to conjure an
image of Palestine recounted by Pasolini and Godard, or the unbreakable and
everlasting confation of the place of Israel and the will of its people conjured
by Lanzmannbespeak of this struggle for recognition in diferent ways. Te
preeminent gesture in Agamben is always a gesture beyond images, phantasms,
and appearances, forging a path out of this battlefeld.
Tis leaves us to consider, one last time, the relation between language and
place purported by Agamben. Such a connection is summoned in Godards
reference to Roman Jacobsons phonology, which holds a central position
in Agambens linguistic thinking. Belonging neither to the semiotic order
of national languages, nor to the semantic order of speech, the phoneme is
what enables a passage between these two regions. It is also where all national
languages intersect. Tese ideas are elaborated on numerous occasions, most
Figure 10.5 Trapeze artists from Agns Vardas Les Plages dAgns (Te Beaches of Agns, 2008) in
Film socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010).
emphatically, perhaps, in Infancy and History where Agamben, in a charac-
teristic manner, expounds on the phoneme in spatial terms. Phonemes are
located, in a site which can perhaps best be described only in its topology []
on the boundary between two simultaneously continuous and discontinuous
dimensions.
68
Tis is not the only time Agamben takes recourse to topology.
In fact, topology is precisely what may facilitate a glimpse of the taking place
of language, of its exteriority. Topology is invoked in the frst pages of Stanzas
when Agamben frst announces that we must learn to grasp place as something
more original than space. Te reference to topology appears again in his essay
on the Palestinian refugees. Here he suggests that a transformation of place
is already underway, for the no-mans land on the snowbound border to
Lebanon, to which this community of remnants has been expelled, act[s] back
onto the territory of the state of Israel by perforating it and altering it in such
a way that the image of that snowy mountain has become more internal to it
than any other region of Eretz Israel.
69
Te margin retroacts on the center,
rupturing its imaginary unity. He goes on to propose that this decreation of
territory, where space begins to contract and contort, could be extrapolated
as the template to imagine a new form of extraterritorial coexistence: Tis
space would coincide neither with any of the homogenous national territories
nor with their topographical sum, but would rather act on them by articulating
and perforating them topologically as in the Klein bottle or in the Mbius strip,
where exterior and interior in-determine each other.
70
Te notion of space as
a static container for a people or a language is cast into crisis if we can bring
space itself into visibility. From this vantage point, topology is to topography
what gesture is to the image. It is characteristic of Agambens writing in general
that he locates possibility precisely where such a prospect seems least likely to
transpire. In reality, as we know, the two decades that have passed since he wrote
We Refugees have engendered an unprecedented proliferation of borders
carved through all dimensions of space. Tough, as Agamben himself notes,
topological exploration is constantly oriented in the light of utopia.
71
In the same sense that topology may transform our experience of place,
not as something given but as indeterminate and open to contingency, it may
also bring us to the outside of language. For while language is the original site
of the subject, this origin does not belong to us, as we receive language from
outside ourselves. It is, then, only by pushing toward the boundary of language
and perceiving its limits that we may renounce the idea of origin as an essence
or substance, as something that has taken place in chronological time. A true
community, that is, a community which isnt founded upon the presupposition
of belonging to an identityreligious, ethnic, linguistic, or otherwisecan
only unfurl from the empty space between voice and language.
72
Archaeology
should not seek to uncover a buried link between people, soil, and language,
but between community and communicability. Only then could it prepare the
ground for a community that doesnt stake a claim of belonging in language, but
on its borders.
Notes
1 Maurice Halbwachs, Te Legendary Topography of the Gospel in the Holy Land,
in On Collective Memory (Chicago: Te University of Chicago Press, 1992 [1941]),
193235, 206.
2 Robert S. C. Gordon, Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity (Clarendon Press: Oxford,
1996), 207.
3 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Te Written Language of Reality, in Heretical Empiricism, ed.
Louise K. Barnett (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988),
197222, 197; Giorgio Agamben, What is a Paradigm? Lecture at European
Graduate School, August 2002. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/agamben/agamben-
what-is-a-paradigm2002.html [accessed August 26, 2013].
4 Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Roland
L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993 [1977]), xviii.
5 Ibid., xix.
6 Giorgio Agamben, Parody, Profanations, trans. Jef Fort (Zone Books: New York,
2007 [2005]) 3751, 41, 49.
7 Ibid., 50.
8 Ibid., 51.
9 Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz
Heron (London and New York: Verso, 2007 [1978]), 6.
10 As quoted in Millicent Marcus, Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary
Adaptation (Te Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London, 1993), 117.
11 Giorgio Agamben, Te Signature of All Tings: On Method, trans. Luca DIsanto
and Kevin Attell (New York: Zone Books, 2009 [2008]), 84.
12 Ibid., 110.
13 Ibid.
14 Noa Steimatsky, Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema
(University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2008), 11765.
15 Sam Rohdie, Te Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1995), 6.
16 Giorgio Agamben, Te Time Tat Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the
Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005 [2000]), 57.
17 Tis phrase concludes Pasolinis short documentary Te Walls of Sanaa (1974),
pleading to UNESCO to preserve the ancient South Yemen capital. Pasolini
originally referred to his work as a force from the past in a poem from the
published script of Mama Roma, later recited by Orson Welles in La ricotta (1962).
Here Welles, who had recently narrated Nicholas Rays King of Kings (1961),
appears as Pasolinis alter-ego on the production set of a New Testament epos shot
on the peripheries of Rome. La ricotta, ofen read as a prequel to Il Vangelo, was
prosecuted and condemned for blasphemy.
18 Oswald Stack, Pasolini on Pasolini: Interviews with Oswald Stack (London: Tames
and Hudson, 1969), 76.
19 See Libby Saxtons Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust
(London: Wallfower Press, 2008), 4667.
20 Grard Wajcman, Saint Paul Godard contre Mose Lanzmann, Le Monde,
December 3, 1998: https://sites.google.com/site/dossierjeanlucgodard/2-flmer-
apres-auschwitz/wajcman
21 Cahiers du Cinma (no. 300, May 1979), 17.
22 Claude Lanzmann, Te Patagonian Hare: A Memoir (London: Atlantic Books,
2012), 389.
23 Ibid., 411.
24 Marc Chevrie and Herv Le Roux, Site and Speech: An Interview with Claude
Lanzmann about Shoah, in Shoah: Key Essays, ed. Stuart Liebman (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 39.
25 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: Te Witness and the Archive, trans.
Daniel Heller-Rosein (New York: Zone Books, 2000 [1999]), 13.
26 Ibid., 11, 13.
27 Ibid., 35.
28 Ibid., 85.
29 Ibid., 69.
30 Ibid., 130.
31 Ibid., 139 (Emphasis in the original).
32 Chevrie and Le Roux, 39.
33 Lanzmann, Te Patagonian Hare, 419.
34 Ibid., 424.
35 Ibid., 427.
36 Chevrie and Le Roux, Site and Speech, 424.
37 Simone de Beauvoir, preface to Shoah: Te Complete Text (New York: DaCapo
Press, 1995), iii.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
41 Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings,
Volume 4; Volumes 19381940, Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds)
(Harvard University Press, 2003) 389400, 395.
43 Im referring here to Margaret Olins proposal that Lanzmann replaces the icon
with the index. See Margaret Olin, Lanzmanns Shoah and the Topography of the
Holocaust Film, Representations, no. 57 (Winter 1997): 123, 17.
44 Chevrie and Le Roux, 40.
45 Lanzmann cited by Michael DArcy in Claude Lanzmanns Shoah and the
Intentionality of the Image, Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics,
Memory, David Bathrick, Brad Pager and Michael D. Richardson (eds) (Camden
House: Rochester, New York: 2008), 13861, 141.
46 Lanzmann cited by DArcy. Ibid., 142.
48 Im drawing here from Margaret Olins insight: Te ending of Shoah conforms to
an ofcial Israeli discourse that understands the Holocaust primarily in its role as
the foundation of the Israeli state. See, Olin, Lanzmanns Shoah, 13.
49 Claude Lanzmann, La Tombe Du Divin Plongeur (Gallimard: Paris, 2012), 367. My
translation.
51 Ibid., 5067.
52 Lanzmann cited by Georges Didi-Huberman in Images in Spite of All: Four
Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
2008), 93.
53 Agamben borrows the epigraphs for both his studies of the remnant from the Book
of Isaiah: for Te Time that Remains: Watchman, what is lef of the night? (Isa.
21.11); and for Remnants of Auschwitz: Te remnant shall be saved (Isa. 10.22).
54 For a discussion on these two photographs in the context of Sanbars book,
see Roland-Franois Lacks A Photograph and a Camera: Two Objects in Film
socialisme in Vertigo (no. 30, Spring 2012). Te role of photographic images in
Godards book Film socialisme (2010) is also addressed in James S. Williamss
Entering the Desert: Te Book of Film socialisme in the same issue.
55 Giorgio Agamben, Te Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (University of
Minnesota Press: Minneapolis and London, 1993 [1990]), 82.
56 Ibid., 83.
57 Giorgio Agamben, Languages and People [1995] in Means Without End: Notes
on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (University of Minnesota
Press: Minneapolis, 2000), 6370, 65.
58 Ibid., 66.
59 Ibid., 678.
60 Ibid., 67.
61 Ibid., 68. Scholems letter is also cited in Te Time Tat Remains, 5.
62 Grnewalds painting of the blindfolded Christ has previously appeared in the
frst episode of Histoire(s), framed by the Fedayeen woman patrolling the fence in
Ici et ailleurson the soundtrack, from the same flm, a child reciting Mahmud
Darwishs poem I Will Resistand footage of the corpse being dragged in
a concentration camp, with the superimposed black lettering of JUIF and
MUSULMAN.
63 Giorgio Agamben, Te Idea of Language in Potentialities: Collected Essays in
Philosophy, ed. and trans. Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1999), 3947, 40.
64 Ibid., 47 (Emphasis in the original).
65 Giorgio Agamben, Notes on Gesture, Means Without End, 58, 59.
66 Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1995 [1985]), 812.
67 Ibid., 82.
68 Agamben, Infancy and History, 67.
69 Giorgio Agamben, We Refugees, Symposium, 1995, no. 49 (2) summer, translated
by Michael Rocke. 11419. Te essay also appears in a new translation, and with
the new title, in Means without Ends. For sake of consistency, Im quoting here
from the latter version, Beyond Human Rights, in Means without Ends, 256.
70 Ibid., 25.
71 Agamben, Stanzas, xix.
72 Agamben, Infancy and History, 10.
Notes on Contributors
Silvia Casini is a postdoctoral fellow at Ca Foscari University (Venice,
Italy) Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage. She was awarded an
AHRC-funded PhD in Visual Studies and Film by Queens University, Belfast
(UK). Her research interests include, among others, the cross-fertilization
between cinema and the visual arts, aesthetics and epistemology of scientifc
visualization, and public engagement with science through the arts. Her
essays have appeared in Confgurations, Contemporary Aesthetics, Leonardo,
Museologia Scientifca, Museums ETC, Tecnoscienza. She has recently
published the chapter Te Scan-portrait: Geographies and Geometries of
Perception for the edited book Te Atomized Body: the Cultural Life of Genes,
Stem Cells and Neurons (Nordic Academic Press, 2012) and is currently
completing her frst monograph for Mimesis Edizioni.
Joo Mrio Grilo is a flmmaker and Professor of Film Studies and Film
Directing at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He has written and directed
several features and documentaries, among them Te Kings Trial, Te End of
the World, Eyes of Asia, Te Flying Carpet, Our Home. As a flm researcher, he
wrote the following books (published in Portuguese): Te Order in Cinema,
Te Imagined Man, Te Cinema of Non-Illusion, Cinema Lessons, and Te Book
of Images. At the Philosophy of Language Institute, he directs a research group
on Film and Philosophy and he is currently conducting personal research on
flm, landscape and memory.
Asbjrn Grnstad is Professor of Visual Culture at the University of Bergen.
He is the founding Director of Nomadikon: Te Bergen Center of Visual
Culture. Among his most recent publications is Ethics and Images of Pain
(co-edited with Henrik Gustafsson, Routledge 2012). He is currently at work
on a project tentatively entitled Film and the Ethical Imagination.
Henrik Gustafsson is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Troms and
a member of the Nomadikon Centre of Visual Culture. His book Out of Site:
234 Notes on Contributors
Landscape and Cultural Refexivity in New Hollywood Cinema, 19691974
(VDM, 2008) is an interdisciplinary study on flm, fne arts and cultural
memory. Together with Asbjrn Grnstad, he has edited the volume Ethics
and Images of Pain (Routledge, 2012). Recent publications appear in Journal
of Visual Culture (April 2013), A Companion to Film Noir (Wiley-Blackwell,
2013) and Te Films of Claire Denis: Intimacy on the Border (I.B. Tauris, 2014).
Gustafsson is currently working on a new project entitled Crime Scenery: Te
Art of War and the Aferlife of Landscape.
Janet Harbord writes on flm, philosophy and media archaeology. Her
interests are in the shifing ontology of what we take flm to be and the
various ways in which ideas of flm have been stabilized at diferent historical
moments. She is the author of Film Cultures (2002), Te Evolution of Film
(2007), and Chris Marker: La Jete (2009), and is currently working on a
book-length project, Ex-centric Cinema: Agamben, flm and archaeology.
She is Professor of Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London.
Trond Lundemo is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the Department of
Media Studies at Stockholm University. He has been a visiting Professor and
visiting scholar at the Seijo University of Tokyo on fve occasions between
2002 and 2012, and he is a member of the steering committee of the European
Network of Cinema and Media Studies. He is co-directing the Stockholm
University Graduate School of Aesthetics and is the co-editor of the book
series Film Teory in Media History at Amsterdam University Press. He is
also afliated with the research projects Time, Memory and Representation
at Sdertrns University College, Sweden, and Te Archive in Motion
at Oslo University. His research and publications engage in questions of
technology, aesthetics and intermediality as well as the theory of the archive.
Benjamin Noys is Reader in English at the University of Chichester. He is the
author of Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (2000), Te Culture of Death
(2005), Te Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Teory
(2010), and editor of Communization and Its Discontents (2011).
Libby Saxton is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Queen Mary, University
of London. She is author of Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the
Holocaust (Wallfower, 2008) and co-author, with Lisa Downing, of Film and
Notes on Contributors 235
Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters (Routledge, 2010). She is also co-editor, with
Simon Kemp, of Seeing Tings: Vision, Perception and Interpretation in French
Studies (Peter Lang, 2002) and, with Axel Bangert and Robert S. C. Gordon,
of Holocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium
(Legenda, 2013).
Garrett Stewart, the James O. Freedman Professor of Letters at the University
of Iowa, has had previous teaching appointments at Boston University,
the University of California (Santa Barbara), Stanford, Princeton, and the
University of Fribourg, Switzlerland. He is the author of several books on
Victorian fction, narrative theory, poetics, flm, and art practice, including
most recently Framed Time: Toward a Postflmic Cinema (2007), Novel
Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction (2009; Chinese translation,
2013), winner of the Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study
of Narrative, and Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art (2011). He
was elected in 2010 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Pasi Vliaho teaches and writes on theory and history of flm and screen
media. He has a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Turku, Finland,
and is Senior Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at the Department of
Media & Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London. His 2010
publication, Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Tought and Cinema circa
1900 (Amsterdam University Press) plotted the implication of the medium in
contemporaneous arts, science and philosophy to redefne the cinema as one
of the most important anthropological processes of modernity. His articles
have been published in Teory, Culture & Society, Space & Culture, Parallax,
Teory & Event and Symplok.
James S. Williams is Professor of Modern French Literature and Film at
Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of (among others) Te
Erotics of Passage: Pleasure, Politics, and Form in the Later Work of Marguerite
Duras (1997), Te Cinema of Jean Cocteau (2006), and Jean Cocteau (a
Critical Life) (2008). He is also co-editor of Te Cinema Alone: essays on
the work of Jean-Luc Godard 19852000 (2000), Gender and French Cinema
(2001), For Ever Godard: the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard (2004), Jean-Luc
Godard. Documents (2006) (catalogue of the Godard exhibition held at the
Centre Pompidou, Paris), and May 68: Rethinking Frances Last Revolution
236 Notes on Contributors
(2011). In 2011 he recorded an audio commentary for a new edition of
Orphe by Criterion, and his latest book, Space and Being in Contemporary
French Cinema, was published in 2013 by Manchester University Press. He is
currently working on a new monograph project entitled Reclaiming Beauty:
post-political aesthetics in francophone African cinema.
Index
A page reference in italics denotes a fgure
Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science
(Agamben) 6, 86n. 10, 87n. 20
actors 2034, 208, 208
divo and 22
persona and 201
Adorno, Teodor W. 4, 142, 192
advertising
pornography and 94
stoppage and 93
type and 20
aesthetics 434, 456 see also individual
terms
Agamben, Giorgio 13, 8, 15, 89, 92, 161,
1623
actor 2034, 208, 208
animal and human themes 72, 73
saved night 96
community and 160n. 38
divo and 8, 22, 23
individual and 223
history and 25
location and 2089
persona and 201
praxis and 78
type and 1920
individual and 19, 20
see also individual terms
Allemagne 90 neuf zero (Godard) 224
Amour (Haneke) 176, 181, 186
black screen 177, 179, 1845
death 1767, 179, 1804, 186
guilt 184
montage 17980, 182
narrative 1778, 1823, 1856
profanation 177, 1789
repetition 185
angels 20
anthropological machine 712, 117
apocalyptic themes 25, 50n. 20, 151, 154
capitalism and 30
communication and 30
see also death
apparatus see dispositif
appearance 5, 73, 227
Arcades Project, Te (Benjamin) 86n. 4
archaeology 210, 212, 216, 2212
language and 21011, 212, 216, 217,
229
location and 210, 216
archive 196, 1978, 199
knowledge 198
lacunae 202, 204
vision and non-vision 202
language 2201
memory and 195
montage 197, 198, 199200, 2012, 203
photography 195, 1967
profanation 222
remnants 196
testimony and 192, 193, 195, 196
voice-over 198
witnesses and 1923, 1956, 198, 2001,
216
Arendt, Hannah 120n. 27
Aristotle 812, 150
work and 57
art 3, 12, 47n. 3, 61, 667, 74, 1223, 1246,
147, 181, 182, 184, 224, 232n. 62
death and 17982
love and 60
movement 1589n. 22
neurological body 1045, 106
neurological gaze 104, 1056
phantasms 6
sculpture 144
sex 65
spirituality 656
stillness 59, 601, 62
238 Index
vision
instability and 136n. 14
non-vision and 126
see also montage; photography; video
Auschwitz 215
archive 197
witnesses 14, 21516
Babinski, Joseph 1045, 112
Bachelard, Gaston 46
Blazs, Bla 107
ballet 1301, 1323
bare cinema 122
bare life 90, 111, 116
neurological body 111
Barthes, Roland 745
Bartleby the Scrivener (Melville) 1501
Baudelaire, Charles 20, 23n. 1, 46
Bazin, Andr 38, 1567n. 1, 195
Bell, Catherine 1289
Benjamin, Walter 19, 234n. 1, 845, 91,
93, 163
language 86n. 4
optical unconscious 116, 1634
photography 163
saved night and 96
Bergala, Alain 49, 58, 667
Bilder der Welt und Inschrif des Krieges
(Farocki) 195
biopolitics 111, 116, 119n. 19
gesture and 1034, 112, 118
ethics and 8, 58
bios 111, 11617, 195
Birth of a Nation, Te (Grifth) 223
black screen 176, 177, 179, 184, 185
repetition 184
white screen and 1845, 189n. 34
Boom (Claerbout) 78
Bordeaux Piece (Claerbout) 80
boredom 96
Boulevard du Temple (Daguerre) 76, 77,
84, 85
bourgeois themes 43, 133, 134, 172
repetition 1701
Bresson, Robert 52n. 27
Broch, Hermann 32
Brouillet, Andr 1045, 107
Cach (Haneke) 1712, 174, 175
narrative 174
profanation 1756
repetition 1734
video 1701, 1723, 1745, 188n. 26
capitalism 30, 55, 97
capture and 11, 8990
comedy and 109
Casini, Silvia 1213, 13960
Cavell, Stanley 1, 15n. 4, 121
Cayrol, Jean 198
Charcot, Jean-Martin 1112, 104
neurological body and 12, 105, 107
Cheyenne Autumn (Ford) 2223
children 478n. 3
innocence and 52n. 30
rights 534n. 38
Chimes at Midnight (Welles) 1867n. 1
Christianity 64, 82, 147, 148, 150, 208
instant 82
language 21011
location and 207
remnants and 2078, 211
sex 65
spirituality and 64, 656
work 64
see also messianism
chronophotography 107, 108
Cicero 142
cin-trance 128, 1367n. 23
rituals and 128, 12933, 131, 132,
137n. 33
Cinema and History (Agamben) 89,
256, 47n. 1
Claerbout, David 1011, 745
photography 756, 78
video 80, 85
Clark, T. J. 182
Clinical Lesson at the Salptrire, A
(Brouillet) 104, 1046
close-ups 35, 3940, 59, 107
cognition 51n. 20
Colebrook, Claire 1223
colonialism 21011, 2223
Coma (Michael Crichton) 97
comedy 30, 1089
persona 21
projection and 389
Index 239
silence 38
Coming Community, Te (Agamben) 5,
48n. 4
commedia dellarte 21
communication 112, 120n. 27
explicit and implicit themes 86n. 10
non-communication and 30, 31, 34, 49n.
13, 80, 85
persuasion 120n. 27
see also language; silence
Confdential Report (Welles) 22
continuity 1301, 1323
continuum 81, 82, 834
points 83
counterfactual 164, 166, 170, 1746, 178,
1823, 186
Cowie, Elizabeth 137n. 30
Crary, Jonathan 1245, 126, 136n. 14
cutting 56, 1867n. 1
repetition and 173
Daguerre, Louis 767, 84, 87n. 19
dance 1523, 153
music and 1301, 1323, 152
Daney, Serge 9, 25
Dans la serre (Manet) 1246, 125, 127,
136n. 14
Dante 159n. 27
darkness 152, 154, 176, 177, 179, 184, 185,
195
light and 1845
repetition 184
vision and non-vision 154, 1545, 2023
de la Durantaye, Leland 3, 64
De lorigine du XXIe sicle (Godard) 199
death 312, 1767, 1789, 1801, 1824
darkness and 176, 184
fxed-frame shots 172, 179
fashback 183, 184
light and 334
location and 184
music and 37
neomorts 97
silence and 42
sof focus shot 183
stillness 17980
stoppage and 178
vision and non-vision 1812, 186
see also apocalyptic themes; Shoah
Death of Virgil, Te (Broch) 31, 32, 36, 37,
39, 412
Debord, Guy 29, 11, 13, 259, 45, 723,
89, 938, 133, 141, 145, 1623, 1656,
182, 185
black screen 1845
montage 28
nostalgia and 945
repetition and 145, 162
spectacle; spectacular societies;
spectacularization 3, 7, 11, 27, 89,
945
stoppage and 93
Debray, Rgis 166, 181
video 1667
decreation 45, 26
potentiality and 645
Deleuze, Gilles 14, 13, 26, 28, 89, 90, 92,
1211, 141, 1618, 175, 185
black screen 1845, 189n. 34
movement and 163
movement-image 2, 13, 47n. 3, 92, 163,
165, 175, 181
narrative 188n. 25
time-image 92, 161, 1656, 174, 182
Derrida, Jacques 72, 192
desubjectivation 1314, 167
des Lysses, Chlo 96
dtournement 27, 48n. 4, 94, 166, 173
Didi-Huberman, Georges 14, 104, 1968,
200, 2012, 216
Diference and Repetition (Agamben) 3,
5, 27, 723, 163
disappearance 5
dispositif 13, 112, 1435, 155, 156, 158n. 12
movement 144, 145
profanation and 140, 1456
thermal camera 154
thermal camera 1534
tripod 128
Doane, Mary Ann 556
Don Quixote (Welles) 141
innocence and 52n. 30
projection and 141
profanation 146
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 42
240 Index
dunamis 57, 60, 63
Dziga Vertov Group 21213, 214, 220
El Greco 656
elitism 978
energia 57, 5960, 63, 150
enjoyment 901
Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople,
Te (Delacroix) 61
ergon 579
ethics 5, 78, 29, 140
aesthetics and 434, 456
gesture and 7, 8, 29
biopolitics and 8, 58
ethnicity 172, 175, 21112, 223
language 223
see also Jewish issues
etymology 142, 157n. 6
exclusion 41 see also remnants
Fable and History (Agamben) 88n. 41
fascism 211 see also Shoah
fashion
stoppage and 93
type and 20
Fedayeen 213, 222
language and 221
location and 222
Muselmann and 2223, 232n. 62
Felman, Shoshana 215
flm-of-life 97
flm philosophy 1, 1212 see also
individual terms
Film socialisme (Godard) 223, 224, 224, 227
intertitles 224
language 223, 225, 226
location and 224
montage 226
photography 2235
remnants 2223
rights 534n. 38
voice-over 2245, 226
fxed-frame shots 172, 179
fashback 165, 174, 1778, 183, 184
twist and 167, 168
ficker efect 162
focus pulls 35, 36
footprint roll method 10910
For an Ethics of the Cinema (Agamben)
8, 1924
Foucault, Michel 2, 11, 89, 90, 1056,
11112, 114, 1434, 146, 1926, 202,
210
neurological body and 106, 112
testimony and 1934
framing 59, 152
France/tour/dtour/deux/enfants (Godard)
28, 478n. 3
rights 53n. 38
gait 80, 110, 111, 113
automaticity and 11011
footprint roll method 10910
vision 110
gesture 7, 33, 46, 47n. 3, 58, 90, 109,
122, 123, 1267, 134, 139, 141, 156,
203
biopolitics and 1034, 112, 118
capture and 91
ethics and 7, 8, 29
biopolitics and 8, 58
etymology and 142, 157n. 6
ghosts 67
Gilbreth, Frank B. 556
Gilles de la Tourette, Georges 80, 109,
11011
Glass, Philip 144
glory 3
Godard, Jean-Luc 910, 25, 26, 278, 33,
34, 41, 434, 45, 46, 47n. 1, 478n. 3,
50n. 20, 52n. 27, 61, 67, 124, 198, 199,
21213, 221
communication and 30, 49n. 13
explicit and implicit themes 38
focus pulls 36
language 21415, 220
location and 1415
messianism 29
montage 25, 28, 445, 199200, 201,
202, 203
movement and 589
music and 37
Index 241
optimism and 46, 523n. 30
projection and 53n. 30
poetry and 323, 456
projection and 389, 512n. 25
repetition and 40
rights and 534n. 38
sentimentality and 46, 501n. 20
silence and 9
grace 623
Grandrieux, Philippe 2, 13, 139, 151,
1536, 159n. 30
dispositif 1534, 156
Grandville, J. J. 109
gravity 623
Greeting, Te (Viola) 13, 13940, 147, 149,
156
Grifth, David Wark (Grifth, D. W.) 103,
223
Grilo, Joo Mrio 12, 12138
Grnstad, Asbjrn 117
guilt 184
Gustafsson, Henrik 117, 20732
Halbwachs, Maurice 207, 208, 229n. 1
Hand Catching Lead (Serra) 13940, 156
dispositif 13, 1445
Haneke, Michael 1314, 182, 185, 186
happiness 96
Harbord, Janet 1011, 55, 7188
hatred 93, 94
Heidegger, Martin 4, 5, 90
Histoire(s) du cinma (Godard) 25, 26, 27,
29, 50n. 20, 53n. 34, 124, 198, 199,
201
apocalyptic themes 25, 50n. 20
knowledge 51n. 20
messianism 28
montage 89, 25, 44, 56, 223
sentimentality and 501n. 20
silence and 40
video 50n. 20
Holocaust see Shoah
Homo Sacer (Agamben) 3, 90, 195
hysteria 12, 105
movement 105, 107, 113
neurological gaze 12, 104, 104, 105
threshold 11112
Ici et ailleurs (Godard and Miville) 213,
221, 222
archive 222
language 221
montage 2212
remnants 221
Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (Pasolini) 2034,
208, 208
archaeology 21011
location and 2078
In Girum (Debord)
advertising 93, 94
commentary 93
fashion 93
rapture and 94
In the Conservatory (Manet) 1246, 125,
127, 136n. 14
industry 55, 56, 57
movement 5960, 64, 66
spirituality and 66
parody 64
Infancy and History (Agamben) 3, 71,
86n. 2, 209, 2278
innocence 42
projection and 52n. 30
instant
continuum and 81, 82, 834
points 83
points 83
intertitles 224
Its a Wonderful Life (Capra) 97
Jacobson, Roman 2267
Je vous salue Marie (Godard) 65
Jewish issues 213, 218
homeland and 225 see also Zionist-
Palestine issues
remnants and 211
see also Shoah
JLG/JLGautoportrait de dcembre
(Godard) 224
Judgment Day (Agamben) 76
Jusqu la victoire (Godard and Gorin)
21213
Kafa, Franz 91
adaptations 912
enjoyment and 901
242 Index
kairological time 83, 84, 88n. 41
legibility and 845
movement 76
paradigm and 74
Kantor, Alfred 195
Kember, Sarah 56
Kindergarten Antonio SantElia (Claerbout)
756
King Lear (Godard) 30, 49n. 11
death 42
montage 49n. 11
music 43
poetry 32, 50n. 17
silence 42, 43, 44, 49n. 11
stop-start motion 424
Kingdom and the Glory, Te (Agamben) 3
Kittler, Friedrich 110, 119n. 12, 192
Kjelln, Rudolf 119n. 19
Klossowski, Pierre 97
knowledge 106, 197, 198
cognition 51n. 20
Kommerell (Agamben) 7980
La Condition ouvrire (Weil) 62, 63, 64
La Pesanteur et la grce (Weil) 624, 65
La ricotta (Pasolini) 230n. 17
La Vie nouvelle (Grandrieux) 13, 13940,
151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 159n. 27
apocalyptic themes 151, 154
darkness 152, 154, 155
dispositif 1534
movement 152, 153, 153
profanation 154
zoom shots 152
labor see work
language 23, 32, 71, 72, 86n. 4, 142, 192,
193, 194, 195, 209, 21819, 2201,
223, 226
animal and human 712, 86n. 2
etymology 142, 157n. 6
lacunae 1967
location and 1415, 209, 21011, 212,
21415, 216, 217, 219, 220, 2256,
2289
fascism and 211
remnants 15, 220, 225
memory 192
movement and 142
parody 209, 223
phonemes 2278
remnants 21516, 222
speechless 142
Lanier, Jaron 195
Lanzmann, Claude 212, 213, 214
archaeology and 216, 217
archive and 216
language 217, 220
location and 1415, 217
witnesses 198
Leave Her to Heaven (Stahl) 22
legibility 845
Leutrat, Jean-Louis 66
Les Matres fous (Rouche) 137n. 30
Les petites misres de la vie humaine
(Grandville) 109
Les Plages dAgns (Varda) 227
montage 226
Les Rita Mitsouko 33, 37
Levi, Primo 193, 206
Levitt, Deborah 16n. 5, 135n. 4, 8
Life of Pi, Te (Lee) 16870
Life of Pi, Te (Martel) 188n. 25
light 334
darkness and 1845
repetition and 801
soundtrack and 42
LImage (Reverdy) 32, 50n. 17
Londe, Albert 107
love
innocence and 42, 52n. 30
work and 60, 64
Lumire brothers 109, 1578n. 10
Lundemo, Trond 14, 191205
make-up 20
Malraux, Andr 50n. 15
death and 31, 37
Man With a Movie Camera (Vertov) 127
Man Without Content, Te (Agamben) 3
Manet, douard 12, 1246, 136n. 14
Marey, tienne-Jules 135n. 8
Masculin fminine (Jean-Luc Godard) 60
McCrea, Christian 48n. 4, 122
memory 49n. 11, 191, 192, 195
Index 243
repetition and 4, 26, 165, 171, 172,
1756
fashback 165, 1679, 174
music 183
testimony and 191, 1923
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 121, 142, 160n. 36
messianism 26, 28, 29
salvation and 25, 31, 90, 967, 989
saved night 96
metaphysics 23, 89
points 83
Metz, Christian 1723
Michaud, Philippe Alain 143
Miville, Anne-Marie 47, 58, 213, 2202
Mnemosyne Atlas (Warburg) 6, 89
Mocking of Christ, Te (Grnewald) 224,
224, 232n. 62
Modern Times (Chaplin) 64
montage 89, 25, 41, 45, 49n. 11, 56, 127,
197, 198, 199, 201
archaeology and 2212
capture and 226
death and 17980, 182
framing 152
lacunae 202, 203
memory 49n. 11
messianism 28
photography and 2012
poetry and 323
projection and 41
repetition and 401
racial issues 223
silence 445
stoppage and 199, 200
voice-over 2212
witnesses and 202
Morgan, Daniel 51n. 21
focus pulls 35
Morrey, Douglas 60, 64
Morse, Samuel 77, 87n. 19
movement 5860, 63, 64, 78, 106, 108,
108, 11213, 1401, 143, 1578n. 10,
2001
automaticity and 11314, 114, 115, 116,
117, 11718
dance 1301, 1323, 1523, 153
gait 80, 10911, 113
language and 142
looped 79
neurological gaze 1078
repetition 144, 145
slow motion 148
stillness and 10, 58, 59, 602, 65, 66, 76,
7980, 91, 923, 105, 147, 1589n.
22, 163, 17980
close-ups 59
framing 59
neurological gaze 105
repetition 164
stoppage and 178
multi-format flm 92
Mulvey, Laura 65, 68n. 14, 87n. 23
Mnsterberg, Hugo 189n. 34
Murray, Alex ix, 160n. 38, 165n. 5, 142
Murray, Timothy 49n. 11
Muselmann 14, 214, 216
archive and 199
Fedayeen and 2223, 232n. 62
language and 1415, 21415, 226
witnesses and 193, 194
music 33, 367, 38, 43, 183
dance and 1301, 1323, 152
focus pulls 36
silence and 40
Muybridge, Eadweard 80
Nancy, Jean-Luc 45
narrative 1314, 30, 34, 1656, 175, 1856,
188n. 25
animal and human themes 188n. 25
character and 1723
fashback 167, 168, 1778
religion and 16970
repetition 1679, 174, 1823
stoppage 178
neomorts 97
Neri, Vincenzo 11213
neurological body 11, 106, 111, 113
hysteria 12, 104, 1045, 107, 11112, 113
knowledge 106
244 Index
movement 106, 108, 108, 10911,
11214, 114, 115, 116, 117, 11718
neurological gaze and 1067, 109, 112, 113
psychology and 106
silence 113
neurological gaze 1112, 104, 104, 1057,
108, 109, 11314, 114, 115, 116, 117,
11718
animal and human themes 11617, 118
close-ups 107
communication 112
new extremism 159n. 30
new life 156, 159n. 27
new technology 195
multi-format 92
sofware 11, 98
Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 78, 57
Nietzsche, Friedrich 3, 26, 162, 192
Night Watch, Te (Rembrandt) 59
nostalgia 945
Notes on Gesture (Agamben) ix, 7, 9, 10,
29, 31, 43, 46, 556, 58, 67, 7980,
103, 121, 123, 143
Notes sur les Tableaux parisiens de
Baudelaire (Benjamin) 19, 234n. 1
Notre Musique (Godard) 51, 199
Noys, Benjamin 11, 16n. 5, 89101,
1578n. 10
Nuit et brouillard (Resnais) 198
Nymphs (Agamben) 7, 147
Open, Te (Agamben) 712
Palestine see Zionist-Palestine issues
pan shots 64, 218
paradigm 734
parody 64, 178, 209, 223
lacunae 209
Pasolini, Pier Paolo 23, 14, 208, 230n. 17
archaeology and 210
language 209, 211
location and 14
remnants 2078
racial issues and 21112
remnants 211
Passing, Te (Viola) 147
Passion (Godard) 56, 62, 64, 667
movement 602
pan shots 64
sex 65
spirituality 64, 656
work 10, 56, 578, 5960, 61, 62, 64, 65,
66, 67
Patagonian Hare, Te (Lanzmann) 21415,
216, 217, 21819
pathology see neurological body
Paul, Letters of 15, 87n. 29, 220
peace 2267
persuasion 120n. 27
phantasms 67
phenomenology 4, 5
phonemes 2278
location and 228
photography 1011, 73, 767, 84, 85, 87n.
19, 195, 197
capture and 73
paradigm and 734
instant 81
kairological time 74, 76, 84
knowledge and 197
montage and 2012
movement 77, 78, 7980
remnants 2235
stillness 163, 164
testimony and 14, 194, 1967
video and see video, photography and
vision and 73
non-vision and 77
witnesses and 1945
Place in the Sun, A (Stevens) 201
poetry 32, 33, 37, 456, 50n. 17, 162
death and 312
montage and 323
stoppage 26, 29, 162
points 83
polis 120n. 27
populism 978
pornography 95
advertising and 94
brazenness and 956
rapture and 96
capitalism and 11
stoppage and 96
Index 245
type and 20
possession rituals 12, 130, 133
cin-trance and 12930, 131, 1312,
132, 133, 137n. 33
music and 1301, 1323
potentiality 35, 57, 1234, 140, 141,
1501, 1556, 162, 1645, 166, 167,
188n. 24, 18990n. 40
capture and 166
decreation and 645
Pourquoi Isral (Lanzmann) 21314, 2201
language 2201
Prnom Carmen (Godard) 65
profanation 11, 13, 85, 90, 91, 97, 146, 148,
173, 189n. 29
advertising 93, 94
animal and human themes 146
death 177, 1789
dispositif and 140, 1456, 154
fashion 93
flm-of-life and 97
location and 1478
movement 147, 148
populism and 978
pornography and 956
religion and 148, 150, 222
repetition and 1756
salvation and 967
stillness and 923
stoppage and 98
undecidability 934
psychology 80
neurological body and 106
Purple Rose of Cairo, Te (Woody Allen)
93
racial issues 172, 175, 21112, 223
language 223
see also Jewish issues
Rancire, Jacques 121, 194, 200, 205n. 26
rapture
boredom and 96
hatred and 93, 94
reanimation 67
reappearance 5
redemption 29, 31, 42, 46, 82, 90, 93, 978
religion 146, 148, 150
language 222
narrative and 16970
see also Christianity; Jewish issues;
spirituality
remnants 14, 15, 193, 196, 2078, 211,
21314, 21516, 220, 221, 222, 2235,
228
colonialism and 2223
fascism and 211
see also Fedayeen; Muselmann
Remnants of Auschwitz (Agamben) 14,
193, 195, 21415, 220
repetition 34, 256, 401, 801, 82, 144,
145, 162, 1701, 1734, 1845
cutting and 173
memory and 4, 26, 165, 171, 172, 1756
fashback 165, 1679, 174
music 183
silence 45
soundtrack 37
stoppage and 4, 13, 26, 278, 81, 145,
161, 162, 163, 164, 171, 1823, 185,
200
appearance and 5
cutting and 5
ficker efect 162
revenants see remnants and revenants
Ribot, Todule 106
Ricciardi, Alessia 62, 65
rights 534n. 38
rituals 1289, 137n. 30
cin-trance and 128, 129, 130
spirit possession 12, 12933, 131, 132,
137n. 33
Romero, George 97
Rouch, Jean 121, 133
bourgeois themes and 134
cin-trance 128, 130, 1367n. 23, 137n.
33
rituals and 12, 129
tripod 128
Ruurlo, Borculoscheweg (Claerbout) 789
Salptrire 11, 113, 154
salvation 25, 31, 90, 967, 989
San Paolo (Pasolini) 211
246 Index
Sanbar, Elias 214, 223, 2245
Sartre, Jean-Paul 213
saved night 96
Saxton, Libby 4, 10, 5570, 205n. 22
Scnario du flm Passion (Godard) 33
Scholem, Gershom 225, 226
screen grabs 98
sculpture 144
Searchers, Te (Ford) 223
sentimentality 46, 501n. 20
nostalgia 945
smiling regret and 46
Serra, Richard
dispositif 145, 156
sculpture 144
video 144
Settis, Salvatore 1589n. 22
sex 65 see also neurological gaze;
pornography
Shoah 356, 213, 21415, 217, 218
archaeology 216, 217
archive 1923, 195, 1968, 199, 2002,
216, 222
homeland and 218 see also Zionist-
Palestine issues
language 215, 217, 21819, 2201
remnants and see Muselmann
silence 196
witnesses 14, 21516
Shoah (Lanzmann) 21415, 217, 218
archaeology 216, 217
archive and 198, 2001, 216
homeland and 218
language 217, 21819
pan shots 218
witnesses 215
zoom shots 218
Shutter Island (Scorsese) 169
Side Efects (Soderbergh) 1678
Signature of All Tings, Te (Agamben) 73
silence 9, 31, 38, 39, 43, 445, 49n. 11, 113,
196
close-ups and 40
soundtrack and 40
stop-start motion and 42
Silverman, Kaja 656
Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the History
of Cinema, Te (Agamben) 52n. 30
slavery 63
slow motion 148
smiling
rapture and 93, 94, 96
regret and 46
sof focus shot 183
sofware 11
screen grabs 98
Soigne ta droite (Godard) 910, 2931, 32,
34, 356, 37, 41, 45, 51n. 21
apocalyptic themes 30
close-ups 35
comedy 30, 389
death 334
exclusion and 41
explicit and implicit themes 38
focus pulls 35, 36
innocence 42
language 32
light 42
messianism 29, 31
montage 401
music and 33, 367, 38
narrative 30, 34
poetry 312
projection and 34, 39
close-ups 3940
repetition and 37
sentimentality 46
silence and 9, 39, 40, 44
voice-over 30, 35, 36, 412
Sonderkommando 197, 216
Sopralluoghi in Palestina (Pasolini) 14, 207
spirit possession rituals 12, 130, 133
cin-trance and 12930, 131, 1312,
132, 133, 137n. 33
music and 1301, 1323
spirituality 62, 64, 656
work and 66
Stanzas (Agamben) 6
Steimatsky, Noa 210
Stevens, George 201
Stewart, Garrett 1314, 16190
Index 247
stillness
capture and 79
movement and see movement, stillness and
Stoicism 823
kairological time 83
persona and 21
Stoller, Paul 137n. 28
music and 43
stoppage 26, 29, 93, 94, 96, 98, 162, 178
movement and 178
rapture and 93
repetition and 4, 13, 26, 278, 81, 145, 161,
162, 163, 164, 171, 1823, 185, 200
appearance and 5
cutting and 5
ficker efect 162
screen grabs 98
subjectivization 14, 194, 204
surveillance 8990 see also video
Taylor, Frederick W. 556, 63
Terragni, Giuseppe 75
testimony 14, 192, 1934, 196, 197, 198,
202, 204n. 16, 216
lacunae 14, 194, 1956
language 21516
remnants and 14, 193
language 192, 193, 194, 195, 1967
location and 215
memory and 191, 1923
silence and 194
theater 8
divo and 22
language 23
persona and 201
thermal camera 1534
darkness 154
Tird of May, Te (Goya) 61
time 55, 813, 147, 166 see also individual
terms
Time and History (Agamben) 814
Time Tat Remains, Te (Agamben) 211,
21314
topology 228
Tourou et bitti (Rouch) 130, 132
rituals 1303, 131, 132, 137n. 33
Trafc (journal) 8, 9
Treblinka 217
tripod 128
Tsahal (Lanzmann) 218, 219
remnants 2223
tv 478n. 3
type and 20
Unbinding Vision (Crary) 1245
undecidability 934, 96
Une place sur la terre see Soigne ta droite
(Godard) 9, 29, 34, 38
Vliaho, Pasi 1112, 10320, 142
Varro 58
video 1213, 478n. 3, 50n. 20, 144, 147,
1667, 171, 172
photography and 75, 789, 85
capture and 756
movement 76, 78, 79
profanation and 85
stillness 79
projection 172, 173, 175, 188n. 26
bourgeois themes 1701, 172
death 172
narrative and 1723, 175
profanation 173, 189n. 29
racial issues 172, 175
repetition 172, 173
repetition 801, 171
video-montage see montage
work 69n. 24
Viola, Bill 13, 139, 145, 14750, 146
dispositif 156
profanation 148
Virgil 312
Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, Te
(El Greco) 656
virtuality see potentiality
Visitation, Te (Pontormo) 147
voice-over 30, 35, 36, 412, 69n. 24, 198,
2212, 2245, 226
Wajcman, Grard 213
248 Index
Walls of Sanaa, Te (Pasolini) 230n. 17
Warburg, Aby 3, 67, 9, 58, 123, 141, 210
We Refugees (Agamben) 214, 228
Weber, Eduard 110
Weber, Wilhelm 110
Weil, Simone 10, 62, 645, 66
gravity and 623
spirituality and 62
work and 62, 634, 67
Welles, Orson 22, 91, 139, 141, 146, 156n.
7, 230n. 17
What Is an Apparatus? (Agamben)
158n. 19
White Ribbon, Te (Das weie Band)
(Haneke)
black screen 176
death 179
montage 17980
white screen 1845, 189n. 34
Williams, James S. 9, 2754, 61, 68n. 8,
231n. 54
witnesses 14, 191, 1945
movement and 2001
testimony see testimony
Witt, Michael 478n. 3, 58
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 121, 142
Wittman, Blanche 104, 105, 107, 108, 108
women 20 see also sex
work 10, 556, 578, 60, 62, 634, 67
capitalism 55
industry 55, 56, 57, 5960, 64, 66
love and 60, 64
movement 59, 60, 61, 63, 65
slavery and 63
stillness 59
voice-over 69n. 24
Work of Man, Te (Agamben) 57, 67
Workers Leaving the Factory (Farocki)
69n. 24
Zionist-Palestine issues 21113, 214, 218,
21920, 221, 223, 224, 227, 232n. 62
archaeology 212
language 1415, 219, 221, 2256
montage 2212, 223
photography 2235
remnants and 2078, 21314, 220,
2223, 224, 228 see also Fedayeen
zoe 111, 117
zombies 97
zoom shots 152, 218
Zylinska, Joanna 56

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