Cinematic Bodies

The blind spot in Contemporary French Theory on Corporeal Cinema

Jrme Game
Abstract
The article interrogates the signicance of the conjunction which has been taking place in the last few years between French cinematographic practice and French lm studies around the topos of the body. The article looks at the extent to which such a correspondence between practice and theory casts the body as a critical paradigm. Connecting this new status of the body to the one already put forward by several philosophical discourses (mainly that of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze) in their attempt to entangle cinema and the body in one and only theoretical framework, the article assesses the need for todays cinematographic critical discourse to contextualise further its conceptual productions. In the midst of a recent series of French lms dealing (implicitly or explicitly) with the body and gural representation1, two important books were published in France in 1998, presenting the body as movement and construction rather than as teleological and nalised representation: Nicole Brenezs De la gure en gnral et du corps en particulier and Vincent Amiels Le Corps au cinma: Keaton, Bresson, Cassavetes. This synchrony between theory (on cinema) and (cinematographic) practice is obviously not fortuitous, and the present article examines this contemporary French critical discourse on the cinematic body to assess a certain uneasiness of such discourse with respect to its own philosophical presuppositions in a postmodern context. Such uneasiness is symptomatic of a general difculty of contemporary criticism (be it literary or art criticism) in dening its own epistemological position, intervening as it does after a series of philosophical discourses which have ventured into aesthetics as never before, so constituting the postmodern paradigm: namely, the works of Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, and several others. Moreover, in this theoretical corpus, the body has itself become a paradigm around which most of the postmodern tropes have been problematised: subjectivity, power, discourse, to name but a few. All these issues are indeed read from the perspective of their consequences and traces on the body. In this respect, the fact that the philosophical context of a cinematographic theory of the body remains unassessed is particularly telling about such theory and calls for investigation. The article concludes by arguing how a reection on cinematic bodies is a perfect way to think of the problems facing todays cinematographic critical discourse as disciplinary practice within the postmodern paradigm. But before contextualising such territorial issues, I shall present the arguments put forward by the two studies. Brenezs and Amiels books share an unusual concern in cinematographic theory that of the body which could be phrased as follows: What is a body in cinema? And, consequently, to what extent can cinema be that which will save the body from its contemporary destiny of industrial raw material as Brenez puts it (Brenez 1998: 19)? From the outset of her study, Brenez takes care to specify her object the gure as well as the ambition of her project to offer a conception of cinema as a guring machine, that is a machine which receives, treats, and produces a gure. Her programme has no essentialist aims. It does not aim to establish a global theory, nor to
1 These lms are, amongst others: A vendre (Masson, 1998), Les Corps ouverts (Lifshitz, 1998), LEcole de la chair (Jacquot, 1998), LEnnui (Kahn, 1998), Julie est amoureuse (Dietschy, 1998), Si je taime, prends garde toi (Labrune, 1998), Fin dt (JeanMarie and Arnaud Larrieu, 1999), LHumanit (Dumont, 1999), La Nouvelle Eve (Corsini, 1999), La Puce (Bercot, 1999), La Rvolution sexuelle na pas eu lieu (Cahen, 1999), Romance (Breillat, 1999), Sombre (Gandrieux, 1999), Une Liaison pornographique (Fonteyne, 1999), Baisemoi! (Despentes and Trinh Thi, 2000), Presque rien (Lifshitz, 2000).

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overthrow semiotic or psychoanalytic systems of interpretation; rather, it wishes to ll the conceptual gaps left unexplored by previous cinematographic theories. Such an attempt nevertheless remains, whatever the claims of its author, a substantial and quite ambitious conceptual production which aims to offer a coherent method for interpreting lms. This method is organised around four principles, which Brenez presents as empirical, and which are only relatively new in that they import into cinematographic discourse critical practices already at work in philosophy and literary criticism since the end of the 1960s: 1) The rst of these principles is that any lm must be envisaged, be it temporarily, as prevailing over its context, that is to say as being something other than a reality whose essence would be accessible through deciphering. 2) The second principle argues that, consequently, a lm can be conceived as an always lively and undetermined economy between elements rather than entities: cinema, says Brenez, is essentially a circulation, a mobile architecture, not an inert object. 3) Hence, the study of a lm is that of the particular gurative economy which this lm happens to be. 4) Finally, it is only in this context that cinema can become a meta-discourse addressing itself, that is to say succeeding in problematising what it deals with into how it deals with it. Brenez then attempts to constitute the category of the cinematographic gure as consisting of the body, yet overcoming it, for instance under the form of characters without persons (personnages sans personnes) or body without support, for, she says, by reducing the organic body to the corporeal glimpses proposed by cinema, one denies the latters whole range of guring powers along with its capacity of abstraction, tendencies to allegory, gurative inventions, diverse aberrations and its power of precision (Brenez 1998: 32). In other words, the gure is an imagistic concentration of the constructivist power that a body is, and such a gure is constituted by the movement interior to the lm between plastic elements and several categories of common experience (Brenez 1998: 13). The gure would then be able to grasp a corporeal reality in its various dimensions: the plastic dimension (cinema produces dispersion, invention, intensication, variation...), critical dimension (cinema produces discourses), and pathological dimension (cinema produces and expresses corporeal experience via a symptomatology). The main question concerning the gure would then become: how does a gure inhabit its body while remaining autonomous, exempt from any narrative predetermination whatsoever? Brenezs answer is: by always remaining to be grasped, by always escaping territorialisation. This escapist program, as it were, can be achieved in a plurality of ways: within the shot, in the contingent unfurling of a gesture, or as pure montage (from Dziga Vertov to Quentin Tarantino), or as a vibration of the shot around the body (as in Cassavetess lms), or as monster, as in science ction, etc. An interesting point here, is that Brenezs grid of analysis replaces traditional critical dichotomies between genres, or between ction cinema and experimental cinema, by a much more uid and pertinent set of criteria which allows her to cover a much wider range of lms, and whose key element could be phrased thus: an interesting lm is a lm that makes us think, that unsettles us, that puzzles us. Such a lm is in fact already critical, self-critical even. In the realm of gurative economies, cinema, by virtue of being the practice which takes on such questions, reveals itself as the creation enabling us to disregard all

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traditional models of bodies (animal model, vegetable model, logical model, mechanical model, etc.) in order to think a corporeity without materiality. In this sense, cinema would be an original way to fulll Merleau-Pontys famous programme, cited by Brenez: man is not the end of the body, which means one fundamental thing: the body is not given, it is to be built. Deleuze as well as Foucault are cited here by Brenez. But Brenezs specic strategy is to promote alongside such a philosophical corpus a lmic corpus, particularly wide: Ferrara, Tarantino, Cassavetes, Woo, De Palma, etc.2 In a limpid chapter devoted to Philippe Garrel, she succeeds in synthesising in a few pages the purpose of her whole book: to show how the image is not an a priori given of representation (no more than the frame or the lighting), but a structure elaborated by the lmic economy itself (Brenez 1998: 362), which is to say that the image re-forms itself ceaselessly with gures which are also always re-inventing themselves. In cinema, meaning, far from deriving from a narrative, can therefore only proceed from the becoming of forms, and never determine such becoming. This general paradigm of corporeity and gure of/in cinema is most clearly dened by Brenez as she discusses the experimental cinema and ocular adventures (Brenez 1998: 406) of Paul Sharits and Stan Brakhage, both artists who recast cinema as generalised vibrating dynamic. In Brakhages and Sharitss works, the image is indeed no longer conceived as the recording or the restitution of a world, as is traditionally the case; for them, the image is a lived experience, that is to say not only an original lmic gure attesting for life-as-indetermination, but also an experience of the watching bodies themselves, an experience of all the senses. To put it bluntly, it is on both sides of the screen, as an epistemological window, that the concept of image is redened here: the gurative image is alive and undetermined as a piece of lm and as the piece of reality through which a watching body is becoming. In other words, it is not the eye, as pure sensitive window of the mind, which is watching a lm by Brakhage or Sharits; rather, it is a whole body which is physically affected and redetermined in a corporalised interaction with a gural economy. Brenez thus shows us how the concept of the cinematographic gure opens up to an interrogation of the lm not as reection or illustration in fact re-presentation, mimesis but rather as a concrete sensitive presence. Vincent Amiels book, for its part, is organised in shots/counter-shots, as it were, insofar as the study of each of the three chosen auteurs Keaton, Bresson, Cassavetes is followed by a shorter discussion of the works of Chaplin, Guitry, and Woody Allen. This major/minor coupling enhances the didactic nature of Amiels study, as if nothing could produce a better analysis of a lm than another lm. This approach is also instrumental in showing how cinema is the last locus in contemporary culture where corporeity is likely to be entirely given in a movement freed from the tyrannical preconstructed forms imposed by the standardisation of the real. In cinema as conceived by Amiel, the grain does not vanish in favour of speed of action, nor does matter in favour of the narrative (Amiel 1998: 2). On the contrary, the body autonomises itself by undoing itself, dematerialising itself: from function and means of narrativity, it becomes the stake at once acted by and acting the lm. Cinema embodies itself in this double meaning: it literally takes shape by virtue of being a corporeity tackling itself. According to Amiel, Keaton, Bresson, and Cassavetes are amongst the rare lm-makers who have grasped the specic aptitude of the cinematographic image to unite esh and gure, (hi)story and image, signication and sensation.3 And thus to allow for a another truth of the human to appear (Amiel 1998: 6) more embodied, be it in a esh and a

2 In clear opposition to an elitist cinematographic critique which would perpetuate a politique des auteurs, Brenezs work is exemplary for its absence of prejudice in the choice of lms to study and for its resistance to any scholarly standardisation of the discipline. This fundamental opening, ultimately granted by an impressive cinematographic culture, gives Brenez a very wide critical surface in a mix ranging from popular cinema to the most demanding experimental attempts. 3 Most lm-makers most directors, have missed, or never sought to grasp [these dimensions] (Amiel 1998: 5)

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4 Amiel recalls here Gurin (1995), in which Gurin denes the gesture as the fusion of the act and the sign. See also Mac (1999), on, amongst other things, the gestural proper to Buster Keatons silent cinema.

body perpetually unstable, ceaselessly mobile, the most important point being here to break free from the de-realisation imposed on us by contemporary cultural economy. In order to fulll this programme, Amiel interrogates the capacity of certain lms to extract a body that is to say, in cinema, to extract the corporeity of an image: its singularity, the several presences simultaneously at play in it, the relations determining its space, etc. from the alienating representation which any instrumentalising narrative is bound to be. And the answer he puts forward echoes the one proposed by Nicole Brenez: the idea is for cinema to dis-organ-ize the body, to destroy the notion/destiny of a coherent and unitary organism imposed onto the body, by means of revealing its fragmented nature, by extracting it from the yoke of unity and consciousness, by giving it back the complexity of its own determinations (Amiel 1998: 7). Here again then, cinema is about inventing bodies under the form of brand new arrangements, as Deleuze terms it, as well as unfamiliar proportions and unexpected energies. More precisely, such a programme amounts to letting the gestures, the limbs, get out of the plot, get out of the frame. To manifest the irreducible nature of a body as autonomous movement rather than substance, as desire and effect freed from the causal and moral links of a tale or even a narrative; to precipitate a body out of a character conceived as more or less dynamic and a conscious sum of determinations to make of this embodied indetermination the real source of the lm, which would then be experienced as active lmic matter rather than as mere lmed action this is what is at stake in corporeal cinema according to Amiel: The body reveals, more than any other subject, the possibilities proper to cinema (Amiel 1998: 113). I would add and vice versa to this sentence: it is also cinema which reveals the undetermined and disorganised power which a body is. According to Amiel, the fulllment of such a programme is ensured in a diversity of ways. Bresson, for instance, puts forward a body as assemblage of insignicant, immediate and unconscious gestures in a cinema which, as Amiel clearly puts it, reaches abstraction by dint of concrete matter (Amiel 1998: 40), and which thence unveils a world from before the word, a ction from before the invention of language. This also describes perfectly the beginning of Philippe Garrels most recent lm, Le Vent de la nuit (1999). We see Catherine Deneuve climbing a staircase to her lovers room. We then cut to her naked in the bed, after having made love, in a scene that stretches itself out of time, but which time is rendered spatially through pure gesture (the act of putting her hair up). In Cassavetes cinema, Amiel sees a whole system of representation which swings over to the movement of the bodies (Amiel 1998: 70), to such an extent that it is their rhythm as desire, anxiety or aphasia, which determines the angles of the shots and the pace of the scenes, while not being intrinsically narrative in itself: if [the body] manifests and experiences desire, exhaustion, suffering, it can express neither the duration of nor the reasons for it (...). Each moment of the body is lived for itself rather than in the mechanical articulation of a succession (Amiel 1998: 7273). And indeed, as early as Shadows (1959), but also in A Woman Under the Inuence (1974) and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), Cassavetess stories are supplanted by acts hypostatised in gestures;4 the links between cause and effect are rendered null and void, and the characters are no longer chunks of plot lying against bodies conceived as mere supports. Rather than being encapsulated inside a narrative unfolding itself as a at surface, it is the body, as incoherent and tridimensional sum of gestures and erratic movements, which drives the lm. In Amiels view, the cinematographic body is no longer an object of lm or

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knowledge; rather, it is a model of knowledge via the editing. The latter is no longer conceived as the restitution of a world, but as its invention, the composition of an identity. Editing which Amiel classically opposes to cutting is indeed what allows the unveiling of the body as fragmentation, in direct opposition to the Platonic body implicit in any linear script-based editing. Thus promoted as a unit of perception, the body nevertheless remains everything but unitary; on the contrary, it precipitates a diffracted perception. The lm thus becomes a concrete chunk of life, material rather than symbolic, simultaneously a source and a product of contemplation. The body, says Amiel, is the ideal place for this subtle denition, for it is simultaneously object and vector. What is meant by this is that the body is simultaneously that which is lmed and that which (re)organises the lm in the mind/body of the spectator. In this way, the spectators body receives the lm (and is affected by it), and the lmed body, when screened, reappropriates its own destiny, it becomes source rather than object of cinema; it is no longer just lmed, it is reconguring the already-lmed. This is the power of the image of the body, of the body-as-image of cinema. Hence it is the whole question of re-presentation which is stressed in the body-as-movement. There is an equivalence, here, between image and body: the body and the image are the same thing, their stakes are the same. A cinema which fails to tackle the body, that is to say which fails to be an opening to that which, in it, is corporeity, is a cinema that doesnt lm anything at all. The very act of lming and editing is to enter in contact and intensity with the corporeal dimension of the world. The main criticism which one could level at Brenezs and Amiels arguments taken together is that they leave largely unspoken a whole philosophical context (provided by Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Foucault) which had rendered most of contemporary lm theories possible by conceptualising being as time, chiasm as becoming, the ontological use of the notion of constructivism (that is, that being itself is unessential but perpetually reconstructed), the idea of subjectivity as perpetual process rather than as essence (immanence against transcendence), and the subsequent radical calling into question of the notion of representation in all creative practices. Cinematic bodies and corporeal cinema reveal what both cinema and the body are equally the active sign of: fundamental ontological constructivism and materialism, that is to say pure immanence. I say active sign because rather than being signiers, these lmic corporeal constructions participate in their own right in the universal corporeal intensication and material vibration constitutive of immanence. It seems that for Brenez as for Amiel, the body and its gural becomings are the perfect occasion to dene cinema as the source of a reconciled being, and as the experience of a double movement of distanciation and physical becoming. But such an intuition needs to be discussed within a claried philosophical context. When Brenez, for instance, presents the capacity of any shot whatsoever to alter, refuse, stop, start again a lm (Brenez 1998: 362), or to be instant by instant an adventure which is happening to the lm (Brenez 1998: 362), she is indeed speaking of an absence of ontological hierarchy. In other words, in cinema, as in literature or in philosophy, when one dares to render inapt all notions of successivity and chronology, one then ends up not only suppressing classic conceptions of narrative, narrator or story; more fundamentally, one is dismantling the supposedly sealed frontier between the different essences of things. Saying, then, as Brenez does, that cinema will never end. All that is required is a body (Brenez 1998: 363), or, as Amiel does, that what is needed in the present theoretical situation is to recover the coherence of the image by that of the body (Amiel 1998: 103), is to reduce the thing, its agent, its re-

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5 For a synthetic presentation of the latest state of Deleuzian studies, see During (1999). 6 This quote comes from Deleuzes lecture on Bergson issued verbatim on the following website: http://www.imaginet.fr /deleuze/accueil.html. 7 Ibid.

presentation, its image, etc., in/to one and only material, one and only atemporal plasticity. And this reduction, as we have seen, is precisely the programme of immanence. There is then in De la Figure en gnral et du corps en particulier, as well as in Le Corps au cinma, a philosophical radicality which seems to elude its own authors, inasmuch as they do not formulate completely what their intuition on the body/image identication tells them. If this identication holds true and all indicates that it can then what is also true is the fact that, in the realm of immanence, one manufactures a body like one produces images and edits lms. Thus, these operations are of the same nature rather than corresponding or symmetric, as Amiel puts it (Amiel 1998: 101 and 103). Both Amiel and Brenez obviously have the vanishing of frontiers (referred to above) in mind when they mention, for the former, a cinematographic being-to-theworld and for the latter, the impossibility of a cinematographic in-itself. Nevertheless, neither of these two authors formulates clearly this fundamental subversion of frontiers, nor do they pursue it further. In this respect, it is not only Deleuzes Cinema whose study is required here, but also and foremost Anti-dipus (Deleuze and Guattari, 1985), A Thousand Trails (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) The Fold (Deleuze, 1993), Foucault (Deleuze, 1988), in order to use the concepts of Body without Organs, surfaces, lines, becomings, arrangements, etc.5 When Brenez, for instance, mentions characters without bodies or bodies without support, she is using a concept familiar to readers of Deleuze. For implied in the subversion of traditional bodies and gures is that of the traditional subject; the latter is constantly shattered and reconstructed in the relapses of postures, movements and proliferating faces perpetually decentering the image. In this destabilisation of the body, it is the subject-as-image which is constantly becoming. It is this subjectivity-as-constructivism which is emphatically shown in cinema. And this is precisely what stands at the centre of the whole Deleuzian and Foucaldian for that matter philosophical project. One should recall here the radical deconstruction of the traditional concept of body as eshy extension of some inner self proposed in Antidipus. In this drastic redenition of the human as one becoming amongst so many, Deleuze and Guattari track the notion of the essential subject and draw on Antonin Artaud to put forward the concept of a Body without Organs as free matter deprived of any teleologically predetermined form. As for the cinematographically edited body, the Body without Organs is pure matter constantly rearranged with organic and nonorganic entities according to desiring lines. For Deleuze, as for Bergson indeed, the eye is in the things6; any dualism being rejected, there is no possible ontological exteriority. That is to say, in the case of cinema, there is no difference in nature between the spectator and the spectacle, the seeing and the seen; what is on the screen, as well as what is looking at the screen, are ontologically the same thing: a living image. As Deleuze says, Each movement-image is perception of all movements acting on it and of all movements by which it acts on other images. In other words, I would say of each thing that it is a total perception (...). Each thing is a movement-image which, as such, seizes/grasps all the movements which it receives and all the movements which it executes.7 These live images then function exactly like photography: they are the black screens on which light reects itself and on which the real takes shape. In other words, if the human being is by far the most complex as well as the most developed of such images, it nevertheless remains one amongst them. Brenezs and Amiels identication of a fragmented, contingent, constructivist corporeity as the fundamental cinematographic issue should thus have allowed them to dene lmic art itself as the composition which,

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instead of showing the world, is the world showing itself. In this perspective, the body becomes a way of lming, and as such, entails the mixing of form and matter. In a collective book dedicated to Deleuzes philosophy of cinema, Maurizio Grande grasped this issue very well: the image does not proceed from a perceiving body nor from a brain that would be the archive of perceptive data, that is to say from a sleeping or memorizing subject. The cinematographic image no longer represents the play between body-images and images of bodies; at most, such image leads the subject adrift by sucking it up into its world (Grande 1998: 284). This frightening and postmodern world into which the subject is being sucked up is no less than the fundamental physicality, the primary materiality of the world, of which cinema is but a manifestation: pure immanence. This is the reason why lm studies and all the more when their goal is to assess the status of lmic corporeity are at the very core of postmodern theory, even if they do not always know it...

References
Amiel, V. (1998), Le Corps au cinma: Keaton, Bresson, Cassavetes , Paris, Presses Universitaires de France. Brenez, N. (1998), De la Figure en gnral et du corps en particulier , Brussels: De Bk Universit. Deleuze, G. (1986-89) Cinema: Tome I The Movement-Image, Tome II The TimeImage , Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. (1988), Foucault , Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. (1993), The Fold , Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1985), Anti-dipus , Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. (1987), A Thousand Trails , Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. During, E. (1999), Deleuze, et aprs?, Critique , 623, pp. 291310. Grande, M. (1998), Les Images non-drives, Le Cinma selon Gilles Deleuze (ed. O. Fahle), Paris, Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, pp. 284302. Gurin, M. (1995), Philosophie du geste , Paris, Actes Sud. Mac, G. (1999), LArt sans paroles , Paris, Le Promeneur-Le Cabinet des Lettrs.

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