But First …
Necessarily coexisting human
beings are not thinkable as mere bodies and, like even the cultural
objects which belong with them structurally, are not exhausted in
corporeal being.
– Edmund Husserl,
Origin of Geometry[1]
In cinema we must – as a matter of method – remove those glasses
which Dr Coppelius wore to magically transform Olympia the doll into a
living, desirable woman; we need to radically distinguish the effigy
before us, this dancing silhouette in images, from any real body. Of
course, everything has led us to believe – because of analogy, because
the image retains the trace of the individual who is anchor or extra –
that the body subsists. Because it
was there, it’s
still
there. And right away we have the essential figurative work
accomplished by cinema: this infinite, more or less panicked research
into
resemblance via
semblance, this enterprise
authorised, quite precisely, by the very absence of a real body. By
reinforcing the organic body with the corporeal
aperçus
proposed by cinema, we refuse this body its set of figural powers, its
capacity for abstraction, its propensity for allegory, its figurative
invention, its various aberrations and its prophetic force. Precisely
because the body is
not there, there is no need to conclude
that we have a loss of substance, or a defection: film multiplies its
evidences, and it is exactly because cinema makes something of the body
return that it is a living form.
These corpses are young and active.
Film retains two dimensions of the effective body. First, its movement, trace, passage –
On the Passage of a Few People Through a Short Period of Time
(Guy Debord, 1959), that is an unbeatable title, the title to end all
film titles. Second, the fact that, whether concrete or derealised, the
body is a symbolic elaboration. But not the same elaboration: on the
contrary, when a figure fits hand in glove with contemporary
body-ideology, it consents to obscenity
. With remarkable systematicity, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movies work on the double: inner double (skeleton in
The Terminator [1984]) or projection of the same (reflection in
Last Action Hero [1993], twin in
Twins [1988], hologram in
The Running Man [1987], the schizophrenic fictions of
Total Recall [1990] or
Eraser[1996]
… ) – and we can see today that, for the past fifteen years, his filmic
work has told us what has been secretly developed in science
laboratories: the possibility of human cloning. Ideological obscenity is
all about taking hold of our human anguish over the body and
simplifying it, giving it the most swiftly available, immediate image –
whatever that image is. But, all the same, obscenity sometimes makes the
figure touching, even beautiful, when it treats contradiction and
aporia on their own terms, like in
The Terminator or
Predator (1987), where the functional becoming of anatomy is confronted with its own inanity (
Terminator’s robot has no need for muscles, while
Predator’s
soldier needs a little of that Other whom he has entirely destroyed in
the jungle), and such failure delivers up, ultimately, monsters with a
very human melancholy. Only then does the athlete’s heavy silhouette
find its fullness, and his enormous effigy become important.
Archetypes (Recall)
Four classical figurative models inform our apprehension of the body,
and load the cinematic effigy up with their artistic and cultural
weight:
organic,
logical,
mechanical, and
Fetishistic.
Beware! Your bones are going to be disconnected.
Saviour of the Soul
That the first of these schemas which allow us to think the body is
the organic model may seem obvious, even redundant. However, it suffices
to read (even without any medical training) Aristotle’s
The History of Animals, Ambroise Paré’s
Voyages or Michel Foucault’s
Birth of the Clinic
to grasp the extent to which even the body’s organicity is an infinite
laboratory, elaborated in terms that are every bit as symbolic as they
are objective. (As well, in this scientific history of the body, cinema
is not merely a passive instrument or “recording lady”: “The history of
the cinematic motion study is a crucial part of the history of the human
body”.)
[3]
Beyond its permanent figurative research into movement, anatomy, flesh,
the corpse, the scorched and the skeletal, two traditional
particularisations of the organic model occupy cinema. Firstly, the
animal
model, which contributes to the naturalisation of behaviours and
emotions, whether in a physiognomic mode like in the representation of
the traitors in Eisenstein’s
Strike (1924) or the opening credits of Cukor’s
The Women (1939); or in a figural mode, as in Abel Ferrara’s
The Addiction
(1995), where the final orgy brings back the animal in the human
monster, not to qualify but disqualify it, to return it to the crudity
of its lack and the pure violence of avidity. Then there is the
vegetal model that, at least since Ovid’s
Metamorphoses,
relates to a much vaster circulation than the animal comparison. The
vegetal is man’s Other, this other living creature which does not
resemble him – and through which he must pass in order to attain the
alterity without which he cannot keep his corporeal contour intact (the
beanshoots in all versions of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers: human beings/human beans).
African vampires don’t go for Chinese women.
Armour of God II: Operation Condor
The
logical or ideal model is not based on nature or
naturalness, but rather derives from the sole creativity of the artist
(revindication of classical humanism), or an outer necessity (Plato’s
ideal form), or rules of construction bequeathed by tradition.
[4] In cinema, this is the most powerful model for elaborating creatures, who are not in the first instance
individuals (we need Jean Rouch’s attentiveness, Jonas Mekas’ melancholy or Jean Eustache’s modesty in
Odette Robert [1980] to reach true effects of presence and living singularity), but
cases.
Social cases (as in all Hollywood cinema, a cinema of Individualism
without individuals), emblems, examples, types, sampled and condensed …
Apart from (for example) in Jean Vigo, Jean-Luc Godard, Boris Barnet or
Stan Brakhage, cinema rarely aims at life, more usually presuming to
grasp those phenomena that support or fracture human communities. In
this sense, cinema is fundamentally an abstract art. However, no matter
how obvious this may be, such a property of abstraction is frequently
denied to cinema, in the style of Roland Barthes who retained from this
medium only its analogical heaviness.
[5] To the extent that one can read, “even an abstract idea will be hard to find” in Howard Hawks’ work
[6]
– whereas certain figurative systems in Hawks are entirely conceptual,
much more so than in Straub-Huillet or late Godard. Hence
Viva Villa! (1934), which reproduces with perfect vigour the Hegelian notion of the Great Man; or
Sergeant York (1941), which allegorises the American Individual just as Tocqueville had described him in
Democracy in America.
[7]
Cinema is also logistical, and the most logistical work of all is, logically enough, titled
Film (Samuel Beckett/Alan Schneider, 1965).
I have piles. You won’t be comfortable.
Ghostly Vixen
The third major figurative schema is the
mechanical model, which became machinic at the end of the 19
th century and gave birth to the “literature of metal”,
to
Constructionism and Futurism, to the imaginary of the robot and, for
very different ends, to the cinemas of Eisenstein and Vertov. “Our path
leads through the poetry of machines, from the bungling citizen to the
perfect electric man … The new man, free of unwieldiness and clumsiness,
will have the light, precise movements of machines, and he will be the
gratifying subject of our films”.
[8]
We can clearly see that the figurative heritage of such a conception of
the body is not limited to the Terminator or other robots of lesser
scale, who are effectively old-fashioned 19
th Century
machines, flailing machines whose sole dynamic is to move less and less
well, and whose sole destiny is to no longer walk at all. The “perfect
electric man” is, rather, Katharine Hepburn, whose diction forbids us
from imagining that she has actually thought what she speaks, a diction
so
rapid that it autonomises speech and transforms the body into an
extremely spiritual automaton. Or it is Jet Lee, whose lateral
air-drills and magical leaps sweep away the limits of human movement.
Or, indeed, all those figures who once again put the body in play in
relation to itself, striving for a perfection which sometimes testifies
to the utmost humility, such as Keanu Reeves in
Speed (1994),
who feels no need to either reflect or prove himself, who is pure action
– even a pure operationality of the act – and who, because of that,
resembles nothing so much as an electric cable.
The fourth model is the
Fetish, i.e., everything which
incorporates alterity into the body, whether this Other is absence, an
excess or error in presence, or an elsewhere, an otherwise, a lack …
There are three privileged manifestations of the Fetish. First, the
Eidolon,
which is a category of the image and, more generally, the Double.
Jean-Pierre Vernant has exemplarily gathered the occurrences of this in
Greek culture, for instance in the
Kolossos (“the
Kolossos has the vocation of evoking what is absent, and substituting
for it by giving body to its non-presence”), and in the
phâsma (“produced by a god in the semblance of a living person”).
[9]
Then, beyond strict history, we must add the god, the angel, the
vampire, everything that manifests some beyond within the human form.
With the Figurine, there appears a “within” inside the human form; then
we witness the spectacle of the body deprived of certain of its
faculties, lightened, perhaps reduced, perhaps even clearer. Thus the
marionette, the Doll, the Portrait, anything that relates to the
mock-up, the purification or the sketch – figurines that open up a
vertigo of resemblance, and whose metaphorical aspects are explored with
gusto in Powell and Pressburger’s
Tales of Hoffman (1951). But
the Figurine can also be the body itself, reduced to its plastic
contour, as in Busby Berkeley, for example. A later avatar of the
Figurine results from the geometrisation of bodies: soldiers
as losing pawns in
Alexander Nevsky (1938) or Fritz Lang’s geometric crowds. Finally, the third and most crucial fetish is the
Reference Point,
the Standard, Protagoras’ “man as the measure of all things”, who
establishes the scale of phenomena and the coordinates of space. And
when the Reference Point vacillates, as Godard uses the figure at the
start of
Nouvelle Vague (1990) by assimilating Alain Delon’s silhouette to any old tree trunk, immediately the human figure falls
into the
informe or formless,
[10] now nothing more than an accident, some little thing lost within a Nature now freed from its usual status as landscape.
Prototypes (Hypotheses)
All these bodies – the Emblem, “Everyman” John Doe, the animal
Monster, the Machine, the anatomical study, the Reference Point, and so
many others – belong to the cinema as it shares them with all other
fields, but works them over in its own way. We can propose an even
bolder hypothesis: that cinema is also able to produce
incomparable bodies,
bodies without any model, whether at the level of a figural event at
the heart of a figurative economy, or by elaborating autonomous
economies. Thus, we arrive at four original logics:
plastic circuit;
critical body;
pathological counter-model; and
Phantom.
How can you use my intestines as a gift?
The Beheaded 1000
The plastic circuit must not be confused with Kuleshov’s experiments,
“creative geography”, “ideal woman” or “cinematic ballet”: this
principle of constituting a phenomenon by adding together pre-existing
parts of already distinct bodies has been around at least since Zeuxis,
who chose and assembled pieces from the five most beautiful girls at
Agrigento in order to paint a portrait worthy of Juno’s temple. In a
plastic circuit, the body is not already given, and can never be given;
it results from a visual and aural syntax or parataxis which never
hesitates to leave itself in the state of a perpetual sketch, and to
construct the body as an impossible contradiction – even one that must
be shoved off-screen. There are at least two such circuits. Firstly
dispersive synthesis, the most beautiful instance of which remains the unassignable creature of Jacques Tourneur’s
Cat People
(1942), an unlocatable synthesis of phenomena of resemblance, whose
most definite local manifestation is in the fades-to-black. Thanks to
Tourneur’s chimera, fleeting from
shadow to shadow via
metaphors and analogies, we can best discern what a figurative economy
is capable of: it produces a creature precisely at the point where there
is no longer even a body, and it creates each effective body from a
diffuse dynamic. Cinema is rich
in such monsters purely deduced from the properties of montage: recall the utterly heteroclite creature of Dario Argento’s
Suspiria (1976), or
Predator, a stack of alterities –
this
Predator is an extraterrestrial, nature’s invisibility, a deer, a
marine and vegetal monster, a robot, an electric wave, a woman, a black,
a mirror … to the point that the circuit closes on a synonym. In every
case, it is a matter of a formalisation of appearance exhibited as
distressing strangeness – in the sense that the most monstrous creatures
of all remain, without doubt, the figures of Vittoria (Monica Vitti)
and Pietro (Alain Delon) in Antonioni’s
The Eclipse (1962),
whose disappearance returns all things to their precariousness and
instils an apocalyptic tonality into the entire, ordinary, urban
landscape.
The other major type of plastic circuit approaches the body not in a dispersive, but
intensive way.
Here it is a case of deepening a single image, bringing out its
variations, exhuming its scandal and thus its truth. Abel Ferrara’s
films, for example, are almost all structured this way: we begin with an
everyday situation, and this banal gesture or activity will return, at
film’s end, in its unbearable, catastrophic form.
[11] The
Bad Lieutenant drives his two kids to school through a quiet suburb;
later he will take them, this time in the guise of rapists, through a
completely devastated New York (
Bad Lieutenant, 1992). Or: in
the car which takes her to a new home, Marti shoves the little brother
who annoys her; later, she will hurl him mid-air from a helicopter just
prior to blowing up all she has ever known (
Body Snatchers, 1994). The same happens in
Driller Killer (1979),
China Girl (1987) and
Ms .45
(1981), all built on this anamorphic structure. The best films by Brian
De Palma, Martin Scorsese, Takeshi Kitano, John Woo and (of course)
David Lynch devote themselves to altering an image, producing effects of
deepening, whether by way of anamorphosis, a doubling of the
world, or an Anti-World that allows us, ultimately, to reach our world.
To put this another way, contemporary fabulations occupy the terrain of
figurability, as the films set about translating a referential reality
into a nightmare, or underlining its
anamnesic nature – the
journey must take place in order that a second image can reveal the
truth and suffering hidden in the first. Such an investigation into
human gesture finds its apotheosis in Lynch’s
Lost Highway
(1997): this film about madness shows not the slightest image of the
real, since from the outset we are in a doubled position and can only
deduce the inaugural image – the one translated throughout the entire
scenario – as the basis of its catastrophic versions. We thus imagine a
torture victim dying in the electric chair, whose final spasms give rise
to memories, fantasies and sensations: three regimes of the image that
the film deftly distinguishes. The memory is a confused one of murder – a
brilliant principle: the shots that most approach reality are also the
most plastic, excess-images, filmed on video, fragmentary, blurry, at
the limits of identifiability. The fantasy regime is doubled: firstly
the death scenario (description of the couple’s life, monotonous,
monochrome, ceremonial, almost hieratic, in the style of Egyptian tomb
frescoes: brunette heroine); then, the fantasy version of a death
scenario (regime of narrative cliché, popular imagery, youth, burlesque
vitality: blonde heroine). Finally, the regime of electric sensation
unifying the succession of stroboscopic sequences, corresponding to the
key scene of the narrator’s life: music, abandonment, the “you’ll never
have me” trauma of the desert sex, and the final torture. Despite its
complexity (but only ever utilising cinema’s natural material: image
projection), the second plastic circuit, this syntax of the figurable,
has become the major mode of filmic organisation in contemporary
American cinema.
And what if, inversely, we try to grasp the body’s effectivity? There
is truly such a body, but does it have a truth, and how to communicate
it? These are the
critical bodies, in the face of which speech
gives up, those revelatory bodies proper to documentary cinema and the
documentary dimension of cinema. Take, randomly, these ethnographic
fragments: the Haddon expedition 1898-9, the Baldwin Spencer expedition
in Australia 1901, the Kramer expedition in the South Seas 1908, and the
Pöch expedition of 1908 (with his phonograph roll). When ethnologists
record ceremonies, masks, work, dance, play – this is material for
knowledge, appearances and movements inscribed in scenographies that
provide information and facilitate discourse. But when Kramer or Pöch
simply film people leaping in the waves, bodies doing nothing, no longer
ritualised or occupied, free bodies living life to the fullest – what,
then, do these bodies say? How do we speak of the human community as
familiarity? Once we have confirmed the strangeness of everyone to
everyone else, and of each person to him/herself, we arrive again at the
question of human community, of belonging to a species. It is via an
equally quite terrifying entry point – namely, images of happiness –
that Jean Rouch in 1958 will once again put all this in play, during the
anthological beach scene in
Moi, un Noir where we can hear the
dreaming-out-loud of Oumarou Ganda: “To be a happy man, like all men”.
The principle of the incomparable body asserts itself nowhere better
than here, at this moment where I absolutely recognise my likeness, my
kin – not an individual, but this body that imposes its extreme
familiarity here, where it precisely has no Other. The Other represents
the ensemble of essentially reassuring possibilities that border the
informe
creature; however, in the experience of fusion, of membership shared
within a community, every model is abolished, man is returned to his
species-characteristics, and thus to his body – not at the level of a
“state of nature” but as a dynamic question, a “coming community”.
Cinema ceaselessly reignites this initial dialectic between the ordinary
plasticity of appearances and the indescribable evidence of each body.
This is Jean Epstein’s formula: “Vision staggers in the face of
resemblances”.
The necessity for fiction enters here. For fiction tackles this limit
in a different way, allowing us to find images that can express and
modulate the inexorable nature of anthropological estimation. For
example, Lynch’s invention in
Lost Highway is literally sublime
since, hardly hesitating before the craziness of its hypothesis, it
crosses a threshold: the protagonist is locked into the darkness hidden
at the heart of his home, he disappears into blackness and then returns –
but where has he been, has he changed, is he Same or Other? It doesn’t
matter; the story can pick up with a new character, two creatures who
share the same sickness, communicating via the one unconscious.
Somewhere or other, Merleau-Ponty wrote: “There’s no great animal of
which our bodies would be the organs” – but Lynch films this great
animal, the membrane which connects all men; despite everything, he
films species-belonging. This is an exceptional moment of cinema – but
one that humbly invites us, everyday, to dream together an
undifferentiated dream in the hospitality of its night.
The third prototype is the
pathological counter-model. Proust describes the heuristic value of illness for our apprehension of the body:
It is in sickness that we are compelled to recognise that we do not
live alone but are chained to a being from a different realm, from whom
we are whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is
impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. Were we to meet a
brigand on the road, we might perhaps succeed in making him sensible of
his personal interest if not of our plight. But to ask pity of our body
is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have
no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should
be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.
[12]
In illness, we discover a body marked by terrifying, unworkable strangeness. Nanni Moretti’s wanderings in his
Caro Dario
(1994) describe the kind of dynamic agony into which sickness plunges
us, how it renders everything unfamiliar, how (for example) Italy never
ceases to hide itself wherever we look for it – except, perhaps, at
Pasolini’s memorial at Ostia beach, except that it is even more ruined,
even more deteriorated and pathetic.
Cinema has many ways of making this octopus emerge, thus elaborating
pathological counter-models which detach the body from its appearances
in order to figure, more profoundly, experience itself – its evidence.
Cinema can work the body as a pure wrenching, the complete devouring of
the Self or the creature. The film that best captures this anguish is,
of course, Ferrara’s
Body Snatchers, where the Self is smothered by a dream of the body represented as tentacles, sticky tendrils, unearthly invasions.
Body Snatchers organises
the problematic coexistence of three body types. First, fragile and
fair, the bodies of the human prey: Marti, her father, stepmother and
boyfriend. Then, the clone bodies, treated simultaneously in three
different ways that only poorly match up, thereby creating a
teratological figuration. The cloned body appears as a evil figure
(sinister glances, possessed cries); as anonymous effigy (the soldiers:
lined-up silhouettes, simple bodily outlines, shadows without referent);
and as biological genesis (invention of a fantastic anatomy of vegetal
and aquatic consistency, made up of unimagined linkages, incredible
circulations, frightful proliferations: literally, Proust’s octopus).
Finally, some cutaways show us creatures whose nature cannot be defined:
still human, already moulting – isolated victims or bad reflections?
These are, in fact, the film’s most important shots: indisputable
portraits, undecideable figures, they directly address the lethal nature
of ordinary humanity.
Body Snatchers is a “family romance” dreamt by a teenage girl who would like to get rid of her stepbrother and stepmother.
Body Snatchers is a film about the toxic mutation inflicted upon the world by capitalism post-Hiroshima – but, differently to
Godzilla vs
The Smog Monster (Yoshimitsu Banno, 1972) or the comic book story “The Pollution Monsters” (“the ecologhouls of doom!”)
[13] that describe the same thing, the monster here is found as much in the figurative syntax as within the frame.
Body Snatchersis
an experimental illustration of the physical genesis of material à la
Epicurus: a rain of cosmic atoms bathes the images, streams everywhere
in the background and shines around the figures.
[14] At
the moment of bodily metamorphosis, the original matter described by
Lucretius goes dead in the world in favour of light-events, and this
archaic dusting affirms that all will begin again from the start but in a
worse state, completely absorbed into alteration – the human is no
longer anything but a dream of disappearance.
Another pathological counter-model works inversely to the in-itself
of the body, its autonomy – instead wishing to reduce the body to its
brute material in order to seek closure and aim for finitude. The film
of this anguish is Chantal Akerman’s
Jeanne Dielman (1975),
which offers with exactitude a life absolutely devoured by the everyday:
Jeanne entirely absorbed in her gestures, making the bed, doing the
shopping, making the meals, making love, counting the money and giving
it to her son
– immobile through it all, petrified in
each of these actions with which she ceaselessly identifies herself. The
Self is no more than this succession of cyclical tasks, allowing Jeanne
to create an economy of interiority. Except that, by accident, a client
makes her come and she leaves herself – then the revolt explodes, the
absented mind returns and it is madness … Jeanne must punish the guilty,
so she separates herself by scissor blows from the torturer who has
reminded her of the body’s existence. Jeanne: to be a body. Akerman: no,
to
have a body. (However, upon the phantasm of finitude
incarnated by Jeanne Dielman – exhausted in her appearance and folded
over by the visible – we can dream forever: what do Jeanne and her son
do when they leave the apartment and walk the streets at nightfall? What
does Jeanne do suddenly, on this extraordinary occasion when we no
longer see her? And what if she’s a vampire?)
Same old rules, no eyes, no groin.
Bloody Mary Killer
The Phantom is a fourth prototype. Not that the cinema invented the
spectre, but it is populated with phantoms who are not the shadow of
something other, of one disappeared, a divinity or any old elsewhere …
but rather, phantoms who would be, to themselves, their own phantom. The
apparition of such creatures defies the difference between life and
death; they melt the space surrounding them into a perpetual limbo, and
favour absolutely any narrative extravagance: Cosmo Vitelli in
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Cassavetes, 1978), the extras in
Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980), Clint Eastwood’s
Pale Rider (1985) or his William Munny in
Unforgiven (1992), the protagonist of
Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1996), or even Ace Rothstein in
Casino
(Scorsese, 1996) driven by lost love … They come as souls in torment,
unable to achieve either existence or disappearance, prey to a profane
Destiny which they resist with all their weightlessness. Cinema today
produces such figures
en masse, but they are not all negative
or defective; quite the contrary. Some of them are the strongest figures
of assertion the cinema has ever produced, because they reverse “
the striving from this world to the other into a striving
from another world to this one”
[15] . These ghosts would really like to
be their body, their here and now, they want to become it. The first sequence after the prologue in
Carlito’s Way
gives the most euphoric demonstration to date of this: Carlito Brigante
(Al Pacino) in court describes his reformation, his personal
development, his resolutions, thanking each assistant; he’s applauded
like an actor, he thinks he’s at the Oscars, and we think that he’s
mocking this world … And yet – and this is a significant event in the
cinema of De Palma – we end up understanding that Carlito told (at
length) the truth, that he was truly on the side of life. Thus the
cinema tears the creature away from facticity and attaches this creature
to itself.
An Interesting Story
What you need is a canned woman.
To Hell With the Devil
In a film by James A. Williamson,
An Interesting Story (1905),
a man gets so fascinated by a story that he is no longer aware of
anything but his book. Indifferent to the world, he triggers the worst
accidents all around him, drinks his coffee from his hat, upturns
buckets, tables, cars, mixes up men, women and objects … until finally
himself falling under an enormous steamroller. He is completely
flattened, but two passing cyclists come to his rescue and blow him back
up to size with their bicycle pump. The man goes on his way. He
triumphs over every destruction. He is truly the man of cinema.
First published in
Trafic, no. 22 (Summer 1997); reprinted in Brenez,
De la figure en général et du corps en particulier (Brussels: De Boeck, 1998).
Original French text © Nicole Brenz 1997; English translation © Adrian Martin 2011
Notes
[1] In Jacques Derrida (trans. David Carr),
Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry (University of Nebraska Press, 1999), p. 177.
[2] All sidebar citations are derived from Stefan Hammond and Mike Wilkins,
Sex and Zen & A Bullet in the Head: The Essential Guide to Hong Kong’s Mind-Bending Films (London: Fireside, 1996).