Monthly Archives: May 2013

Cinema and Contact: The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras and Denis

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By Laura McMahon, Legenda, 2012.

Reviewed by Kathleen Scott

Cinema and Contact: The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras and Denis is the latest work to put the philosophy of contemporary French thinker Jean-Luc Nancy into productive dialogue with French cinema.  Through her in-depth textual analyses of the films of Robert Bresson, Marguerite Duras and Claire Denis, McMahon successfully employs Nancy’s deconstruction of touch as a device of pure immediacy and fusion to reconceptualize the act of cinematic spectatorship as a mutual approach and withdrawal of human and filmic bodies.  In doing so, McMahon convincingly reconfigures spectatorship as an activity structured by ‘a logic of exposure rather than one of representation’ (20).

The introduction of Cinema and Contact provides succinct and compelling summaries of Nancy’s philosophical deconstructions of touch, vision and subjectivity.  Drawing on both her own analyses of Nancy’s thinking of touch, as well as that elaborated by Jacques Derrida in On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, McMahon argues that Nancy’s deconstruction of touch as both a contact and withdrawal from the object to be touched distinguishes it from the fusive models of touch offered by phenomenological film theorists such as Laura U. Marks and Vivian Sobchack.  The sense of touch offered by the cinema is never characterised by a pure immediacy.  Rather, it is a mode of touch in which the screen is always removed or withdrawn from the grasp of spectators, simultaneously proximate and distanced.

McMahon argues that the films of Bresson, Duras and Denis share an ‘aesthetics of withdrawal’ (10) that distance touch from the concept of immediacy, propitiously enacting Nancy’s model of touch as a contact-in-separation.  The following three chapters are organized by filmmaker in chronological order of their work, beginning with Bresson.  McMahon puts a Nancean deconstruction of touch in productive dialogue with Bresson’s own writings on cinema, in order to argue that Bresson’s depictions of the body in films such as Pickpocket (1959), Au hazard Balthazar (1966) and Mouchette (1967) deconstruct Christological ideas of the body and touch as pure presence (36-7).

In the chapter on Duras, McMahon explores films such as Détruire dit-elle (1969), India Song (1975), Le navire Night (1979) and Agatha et les lectures illimitées (1981) through the Nancean theoretical lens of co-existence, as articulated by the philosopher in works such as The Inoperative Community (1991).  McMahon successfully employs Nancy’s thinking of touch as distance and spacing to read Duras’s portrayals of romantic couples as unworkable, failed fusions of bodies.

McMahon’s discussions of the work of Denis in relation to Nancean philosophy are perhaps the most interesting and fruitful, as they take into account the collaborations and affinities between the director and philosopher.  McMahon reads Beau Travail (1999) as an exploration of touch as the means through which the political community of the French Legion in Djibouti is both bonded and fractured.  McMahon situates her readings of Denis’s controversial horror film Trouble Every Day (2001) in relation to Nancy’s meditations on the figure of the bite in the film as an agent of ontological dismemberment and destruction in his article ‘Claire Denis: Icon of Ferocity.’  Lastly, McMahon’s insightful explication of Nancy’s original text ‘L’intrus’ clearly articulates its relationship to the style and themes of Denis’s 2004 film of the same name, taking into account Nancy’s written responses to the film adaptation, as well as exploring intrusion as a method of encountering geopolitical and ontological otherness.

An important topic that McMahon does not touch upon in great depth is the implication(s) of Nancean deconstructions of touch and subjectivity in relation to the construction of gender and sexual difference in film.   Nancy himself has faced criticism from feminist scholars for his insistence that the body exists as essentially intruded upon and fragmented, without adequately considering the potential impact that this may have for feminist projects seeking to realize women’s right to control their own bodies.  For example, Diane Perpich notes that:

Nancy’s ontology is seemingly at odds with a host of feminist discourses for which bodily integrity is an almost unquestioned good…it is legitimate to wonder whether Nancy’s conception of bodies as subject to a law of inevitable, multiple intrusion is not in some ways a very white, masculine move, attached to a horizon and history of privilege that should give feminists and others pause. 1

McMahon’s Nancean analysis of Bresson is instructive in this regard.  She notes in her analysis of Mouchette, ‘Just as mud sticks to the clog, so it clings to Mouchette, signaling a disturbing dissolution of the self, foregrounding the vulnerability of the body which will be pushed to its extreme conclusion in the rape scene’ (63).  The female body in this film thus experiences contact and withdrawal via experiences of suffering and violation.  We can contrast this female pain with the embodied experiences of a Nancean techné, or technicity, undergone by the male protagonist of Pickpocket.  He is not raped; rather, his subjective dissolution takes place through technical implements of pickpocketing such as clothing.  This technical expansion of the self through clothing constitutes a far less painful and destructive exposure to and contact with the world than that experienced by the raped female protagonist of Mouchette.

McMahon does point out that the punishments that Mouchette receives (rape and beatings) are ‘deeply troubling’ and ‘politically and ethically problematic’ (65), ‘exert[ing] a certain pressure upon Nancy’s model of touch as spacing and being-in-common’ (66).  However, in McMahon’s discussions of Bresson and Duras especially, the impact of gender and sexual difference on characters’ experiences of contact is briefly mentioned, instead of explored in a sustained manner.  Further attention deserves to be paid to the gendered dimensions of exposure, bodily vulnerability and being-with in both film spectatorship and in our engagements with Nancean philosophy, as so often the cinematic textures and surfaces of co-existence and engagement with the world are ‘threats’ (63) that lead to pain and death for women.

Cinema and Contact contributes productively to a growing field of film-philosophy exploring the intersections between Nancean philosophy and cinematic aesthetics.  McMahon’s work should be of great interest to film scholars looking to introduce themselves to the philosophy of Nancy and the multiplicity of ways that it touches upon and diverges from the embodied and tactile aesthetics of French cinema.

 

Bibliography

Derrida, Jacques. On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy. Translated by Christine Irizarry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community. Translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland and Simona Sawhney. Edited by Peter Connor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

__. “Claire Denis: Icon of Ferocity.” Translated by Peter Enright. In Cinematic Thinking: Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema, edited by James Phillips, 160-68. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.

__. “L’Intrus.” Translated by Susan Hanson. The New Centennial Review 2, no. 3 (2002): 1-14.

Perpich, Diane. “Corpus Meum: Disintegrating Bodes and the Ideal of Integrity.” Hypatia 20, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 75-91.

Filmography

Agatha et les lectures illimitées. Directed by Marguerite Duras (Benoit Jacob Vidéo, 2009).

Au hazard Balthazar. Directed by Robert Bresson (Criterion, 2005).

Beau Travail. Directed by Claire Denis (Artificial Eye, 2000).

Détruire dit-elle. Directed by Marguerite Duras (Benoit Jacob Vidéo, 2008).

India Song. Directed by Marguerite Duras (Roissy Film, 2009).

L’Intrus. Directed by Claire Denis (Tartan Video, 2005).

Mouchette. Directed by Robert Bresson (Nouveaux Pictures, 2004).

Le navire Night. Directed by Marguerite Duras (Les Films du Lonsange).

Pickpocket. Directed by Robert Bresson (Artificial Eye, 2005).

Trouble Every Day. Directed by Claire Denis (Tartan Video, 2003).

Notes:

  1. Diane Perpich, “Corpus Meum: Disintegrating Bodes and the Ideal of Integrity,” Hypatia 20, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 85-6. ↩

A Companion to Michael Haneke

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Edited by Roy Grundmann, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010

Review by Fredrik Gustafsson

A Companion to Michael Haneke is a somewhat intimidating book. It is black, heavy and on the cover Haneke himself is staring at the reader, his face floating in darkness, apparently disconnected from the rest of his body. The book is also intimidating in its scope, as the 600+ pages cover more or less every aspect of Haneke’s career to date. It consists of 33 different essays, each looking at either a particular film or a particular theme, written by well-established scholars such as Michel Chion and Thomas Elsaesser, as well as PhD candidates. The book is the first volume of Wiley-Blackwell’s series ‘Companion to Film Directors’ and two more have been released so far (on Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog). Considering the dedication and depth of the series, the more directors that are covered the better.

A concern whenever a particular filmmaker is singled out in this way is that claims will be made on his or her behalf that are hard to substantiate. For example, Haneke is called the last remaining European auteur or, even more bafflingly, the last ‘avant-gardist’ (p. 169). The implications are that not only is Haneke the only auteur (and avant-gardist) working today, but also that there will be no more, and both of these statements are dubious, as well as unnecessary. But even without such claims there are a lot of interesting things to be said about Haneke, and this book is a testament to the richness of his work.

A Companion to Michael Haneke is not the sort of book you read from cover to cover, but is best read one essay at a time. Not only because of its impressive size but also because there is a sense of repetition and déjà vu, with the same films and the same thinkers, such as Freud, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno, Barthes and Deleuze, mentioned again and again. But that is only to be expected in such an exhaustive collection. Perhaps the best essay is the introduction by Roy Grundmann. It is a comprehensive presentation of Haneke’s entire oeuvre, together with commentary on its reception, and will be particularly beneficial for those who are not familiar with all aspects of Haneke’s work, such as his early work for Austrian TV. The rest of the essays are more specific and the ones that I felt were particularly good are by Thomas Elsaesser, Vinzenz Hediger, Alex Lykidis and Charles Warren.

Elsaesser’s contribution ‘Performative Self-Contradictions’ discusses a few key themes (isolation, the sudden invasion of outside forces on private lives, media critique) in Haneke’s films and how they are related to “mind-games movies”, a concept Elsaesser has developed in earlier writings. Here Elsaesser describes it as films ‘where a number of assumptions about how we understand what we see and hear in a film, as well as what comprises agency, are tested and renegotiated’ (p. 58). Hediger’s piece ‘Infectious Images’ analyses Haneke’s use of video images, as opposed to film images, as a sort of meta-criticism, and compares it to the ways in which James Cameron and Atom Egoyan also use video imagery in their films. In an essay titled ‘Multicultural Encounters,’ Lykidis looks at the films Haneke has made in France, from the perspective of France’s fraught relationship with immigration and non-whites. And finally, in an essay titled ‘The Unknown Piano Teacher,’ Charles Warren looks at one of Haneke’s films in particular, La pianiste/The Piano Teacher (2001), and puts it in a film history context using Stanley Cavell’s writings on the ‘unknown woman’ and melodrama.

The book ends with two older pieces written by Haneke himself. The first is about his first experiences as a young boy of the power and allure of cinema, and his own views on, and tastes in, films. Most specifically he writes about the work of Robert Bresson. The other piece is less personal, and less interesting, and is about Haneke’s views on violence in media. These two pieces by him are then followed, fittingly, with two interviews with Haneke. In a way this last part of the book is reminiscent of the extra material that usually accompanies films on DVDs, and it is a nice touch.

There is for me one big problem with the book, and that is its conservatism and ‘high culture’ emphasis. The films of Haneke can often feel like sermons from an angry priest who is appalled by the wickedness of the world, and the tone in many of the essays feels similar. It is taken as a fact that we are living in a world where, to quote one example: ‘passivity is the dominant state of today’s subject who, conditioned to consume images, confuses them with reality’ (p. 125). The ‘cultural and psycho-social impoverishment of modern civilization’ (p. 38) is mentioned, and it is stated that our culture is based on ‘repressiveness and mediocrity’ (p. 491). My problem with this is two-fold. First, it is an elitist assumption and implicit is that if only the common man would stop watching Hollywood film and read Kant and Thomas Mann instead the world would be a much better place, something that is very hard to argue and is probably not true at all. Second, it is a very euro-centric assumption. There is nothing progressive or helpful in looking at the world in this way, and Haneke is also partly guilty of this elitist conservatism. Nevertheless, this can be seen as a particular aspect central to European intellectual history and consequently, to call Haneke a radical is to my mind unhelpful. It could have been appropriate if there had been attempts in the book to problematise Haneke’s views and ideas, but there is very little of that. At the same time I feel that Haneke is actually more complex than some of his interpreters give him credit for, even those celebrating his work.

Part of this European intellectual tradition is to use America as the other against which Europe is portrayed as superior and European cinema as the antithesis of Hollywood, a view that Haneke and many of the contributors apparently share. This too is problematic, as well as self-congratulatory. It is easy to agree with Hediger when he suggests that ‘Haneke’s understanding of American cinema is somewhat deficient’ (p. 100). European cinema can be just as bad as the worst of Hollywood, and the best of Hollywood is equal to the best of Europe, and nothing is gained by this othering.

However, this criticism should not discourage the potential reader. Leaving politics aside the discussions about Haneke’s narrative and stylistic achievements are more often than not good and insightful.  Haneke scholars as well as general film students have a lot to gain by reading A Companion to Michael Haneke and Wiley-Blackwell is to be applauded for having initiated the project.

Interrogating Trauma: Collective Suffering in Global Arts and Media

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Edited by Mick Broderick and Antonio Traverso, Routledge, 2011.

Reviewed by John Trafton

In Interrogating Trauma: Collective Suffering in Global Arts and Media, Broderick and Traverso acknowledge the contributions that the field of trauma studies has provided to inter-disciplinary fields over the last two decades, and, through this collection of essays from media scholars across the globe, highlights the many ways that trauma studies has contributed to cinema and media studies from a twenty-first century vantage point. Covering a wide array of topics and approaches, from Iraq War narratives to the plight of indigenous Australians, this work offers up a broad range of discourse on representing and working-through trauma that is useful not only to film and media scholars, but also to those working in a broad range of disciplines (History, Sociology, Psychology, Terrorism Studies, and many others).

Central to this work is an examination of both how the various modes used to represent trauma, directly or indirectly, are employed, and how the concept of trauma may be altered by these different approaches. The phrase ‘interrogating trauma,’ therefore, means that the authors contained in this work are focused on interrogating not the traumatic events themselves, but rather the effectiveness of the means used to project this trauma on screen. In the wake of one such traumatic event, the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, mass, digital media has become more ubiquitous and liberalised, and as such, this evolving technology has brought its own strengths and weaknesses to trauma representation, one such approach under ‘interrogation’ in this book.  This book documents how the dynamics of trauma studies have shifted in a world dominated by digital video cameras, mobile phone cameras, and a multitude of screens through which to mediate the resulting images.

The strengths of this book lie in the questions posed rather than the answers given. What does it mean to be an ethical witness? How is the psychology of the perpetrators and victims of state violence effectively rendered? How can trauma from a localized event be dispersed worldwide? The range of questions raised in this book testifies to its application across a broad range of fields and its usefulness to scholars working on a variety of topics pertaining to historical and recent events. If trauma theory holds that traumatized individuals take a self-preserving distance from the source of trauma, then characters contained in films analyzed in this book (fiction or non-fiction) are agents of this theory, and, as such, can be provide a useful analytical focal point for scholars wishing to further explore these or related film texts. My own work has been influenced by some of the ideas and questions raised in this book, and it is for this reason that I recommend it.

 

Directory of World Cinema: Japan (Volume One)

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Edited by John Berra, Intellect, 2010

Reviewed by Andrew Dorman

The first offering in Intellect’s Directory of World Cinema series selects Japan as its subject, a worthy starting-point given the ongoing scholarly and popular interest in Japanese national film and its status as one of the most widely-discussed ‘world cinemas’. Taking into consideration the diversity of the subject, the text is a useful addition to the deluge of existing material, providing readers with an overview of a rich cinematic history and a reassessment of the current state of the industry in the wake of anime and J-Horror’s absorption into the popular culture.

Directory of World Cinema: Japan offers a revision of contemporary Japanese film at a time when attention has shifted onto other East Asian territories and prominent filmmakers like Takeshi Kitano, Takashi Miike, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa are transitioning away from the genres that established them internationally. Featuring contributions from numerous scholars, including William M. Tsutsui, Mark Schilling and Colette Balmain, this volume seeks to move beyond the standard anime-J-Horror image of modern Japanese cinema, without neglecting these areas outright. Readers are duly provided with a culturally-specific insight into over 150 films and their attendant ‘Japaneseness’, with brief reviews of both obscure and canonised works arranged into convenient genre sections, ranging from chambara eiga/samurai films and yakuza cinema to Nuberu Bagu/the Japanese New Wave and Pinku eiga/pink films. Each film is covered by a short synopsis followed by some criticism and analysis. Although rather brief for those familiar with Japanese cinema, these sections should prove accessible for newcomers to the subject.

In addition, specially-featured sections highlight the oeuvres of prominent directors like Akira Kurosawa, Kitano and Satoshi Kon, as well as spotlighting specific sectors of the industry such as the Nippon Connection film festival and the Arts Theatre Guild. A quiz and useful guides to further reading and online resources are also included. The work featured here culminates in a comprehensive and insightful guide that does justice to the diversity of cinema Japan, both past and present. Many will be pleasantly surprised to discover some lesser-known works such as the films of Sion Sono, Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), and Fist of the North Star (1986) lining up alongside the usual suspects of Kurosawa, Ozu, and Mizoguchi. Equal coverage is given to each film and genre, while the text largely avoids the generalisations and paper-thin surface analysis that mars so many national cinema guides. The individual contributions do well to heed the book’s mandate to present a culturally-specific cinema; Marc Saint-Cyr’s allegorical reading of Lady Snowblood (1973) and Tsutsui’s introduction to kaiju eiga/monster movies are worthy of mention for the way they clearly situate the films within well-defined, albeit evolving socio-political and cultural contexts.

There are of course certain hazards in providing anything in the form of a comprehensive guidebook, namely the films that are not included. Inevitably there are some glaring omissions here: The Human Condition (1959-1961), Shohei Imamura’s The Ballad of Narayama (1983) and Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) being just a few major works that fail to feature. There is also scant mention of ‘Generation X’ filmmaking in the 1990s, meaning that important figures like Shinji Aoyama and Naomi Kawase are only mentioned in passing. Furthermore, no coverage is given to pre-war and silent cinema, with the exception of Ozu’s I Was Born, But…(1932) and Mizoguchi’s Osaka Elegy (1936). This is a shame considering the growth of scholarship in this area, such as the work of Aaron Gerow, and the existence of interesting works A Page of Madness (1926) and Dragnet Girl (1933).

In terms of a Japanese-Western dichotomy, the book’s invocation of Hollywood films as reference points becomes repetitive and is hardly helpful towards an understanding of Japanese genres as culturally-specific entities. However, the ever-presence of the West and specifically Hollywood throughout the text does at least provide the authors with ample opportunity to touch upon Japan’s role as a global cinema affected by transcultural flows. Although seeking to understand Japanese cinema first and foremost as nation-specific, the book benefits greatly from the writers’ consistent awareness of the tensions brought about by globalisation and its impact upon notions of Japanese locality. In this regard, Brian Ruh views Japanese animation as ‘globalization in action’ (59) as he traces the transnational dimensions of anime’s origins and current production. Elsewhere, Jelena Stojkovic, taking into account recent US remakes of Japanese horror films, remarks sagely that the popularisation of J-Horror created the ‘contra-effect of becoming not only the Japanese mainstream but also the Hollywood mainstream’. (36). Thus, while it pinpoints expressions of Japaneseness, this volume brings to life Japanese film as a profoundly global cinema subject to non-national as much as national concerns.

Aside from an overall stylistic unevenness between academic and journalistic analysis, the one major drawback overshadowing the work as a whole is the way it reinforces the standard images and interpretations of contemporary Japanese cinema it wishes to move beyond. While it is suggested by John Berra that the success and notoriety of horror and extreme cinema have obscured the legacy of other sectors and belies Japan’s cinematic diversity (7), the choice of films throughout often negates any attempt to provide a truly alternative view. For example, Brian Ruh’s introduction to anime points out the general misconception that Japanese animation is either ‘light fare for little kids or contains ultraviolence and sadistic sex’ (61). With only a few exceptions, the proceeding chapter on animation lends some weight to the misconception by presenting films that mostly fall into one of these two categories.

Much of the text seeks to sidestep persistent notions of a violent, excessive and eccentric cinema popular outside Japan, all the while selecting films that derive from genres predominantly featuring extreme violence, sadist rituals, and sexual depravity. Such images are hardly dispelled as the book falls somewhat short of some of its primary objectives. That being said, Directory of World Cinema: Japan remains a welcome addition to a large field of research, offering one of the most detailed and comprehensive reviews available. It provides novices with an accessible guide to over sixty years of film material and for those familiar with Japanese film a resource for further critical reflection. On this evidence future editions in the series will be worth savouring.