Cahiers du CinemaCahiers du . rT Cinéma Volume 3 1969-1972 The Politics of Representation An anthology from Cahiers du Cinéma nos 210-239, March 1969-June 1972 Edited by Nick Browne2891 Cahiers du Cinema Vol III First published 1990 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Reprinted in 1996 Original French articles © Les Editions de I Etoile 1969-72 English translations and editorial matter © The British Film Institute 1990 Phototypeset in 10/11'/ Linotron Palatino by Input Typesetting Ltd, London Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire Alll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing ‘from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Cahiers du cinéma. Vol. 3: 1969-1972: The politics of representation 1. Cinema films, 1950-1985 — Critical studies L. Brown, Nick 791.4310904 ISBN 0-415-02987-2Contents Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: The Politics of Representation: Cahiers du Cinéma 1969-72 1. Jean Narboni, Sylvie Pierre, Jacques Rivette: ‘Montage’ (March 69) 2. Jean-Pierre Qudart: ‘Cinema and Suture’ (April-May 1969) 3. Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean Narboni: ‘Cinema/ldeology/Criticism’ (October 1969) 4 Pascal Bonitzer, Jean-Louis Comolli, Serge Daney, Jean Narboni, Jean-Pierre Oudart: ‘Le Vie est @ nous: A militant film’, (March 5. Jean-Pierre Oudart, Jean Narboni, Jean-Louis Comolli: ‘Readings of Jancs6: Yesterday and Today’ (April 1970) Editorial: ‘Russia in the 20s (I (May-June 1970) Serge Daney, Jean-Pierre Oudart: ‘Work, Reading, Pleasure’ Guly 1970) 8 Jean-Pierre Oudart: Word Play, Master Play’ (August-September 70) 9 Editorial: ‘Japanese Cinema (1)’ (October 1970) 10 Jean Narboni: ‘Vicarious Power’ (October 1970) 11 Jean-Louis Comolli: ‘Film/Politics (2): L’Aveu: 15 Propositions’ (October 1970) 12 Collective text: ‘Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco’ (November- December 1970) 13. Collective Editorial Statement (Cahiers du Cinéma, Cinéthique, Tel Quel): ‘Cinema, Literature, Politics’ (January-February 1971) 14 Jean-Pierre Oudart: The Reality Effect’ (March-April 1971) 15_ Jean-Pierre Oudart: ‘Notes for a Theory of Representation’ (May- June and July 1971) vii 21 45 58 68 89 112 115 137 146 150 163 174 187 189 203Contents 16 Jean-Louis Comolli: ‘Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspec- tive, Depth of Field’ (May-June and July 1971) 17. Pascal Bonitzer: ’ “Reality” of Denotation’ (May-June 1971) 18 Jacques Aumont, Pascal Bonitzer, Jean Narboni, Jean-Pierre ‘Oudart: ‘The New Babylon: the “Commune” Metaphor’ (July and October 1971) 19. Jean-Pierre Oudart: ‘A Lacking Discourse’ (October 1971) 20 Cahiers du Cinéma: ‘Cinema, Ideology, Politics (for Poretta- Terme)’ (October 1971) 21. Pascal Bonitzer: ‘Off-screen Space’ (December 1971-January-Feb- ruary 1972) 22. Serge Daney, Jean-Pierre Oudart: ‘The Name of the Author (on the “place” of Death in Venice)’ (December 1971-January-February 1972) 23 Pascal Kané: ‘Re-reading Hollywood Cinema: Sylvia Scarlett’ (May-June 1972) 24 Editorial: ‘Politics and Ideological Class Struggle’ (December 1971-January-February 1972) Appendix 1 Guide to Cahiers du Cinéma Nos 210-39, March 1969-June 1972, in English translation Appendix 2 Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s, the 1960s and the later 1970s Index of Names and Film Titles vi 213 248 254 276 287 291 306 325 334 342 345 349Preface The project for an anthology of writing from Cahiers du Cinéma in the immediate post-1968 period arose in response to the changing place of film in American culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and to the transformative effect of French film theory on film study in America. The project came together in 1976, when with the encouragement of Professor Stanley Cavell and the Harvard University Press, an agreement to proceed was reached with Serge Daney, then Editor-in-Chief of Cahiers. Sub- sequently, with the decision of the British Film Institute to undertake a multi-volume anthology covering the history of Cahiers, this volume was incorporated in that series. Volume 3 has been carried out in full agreement with Jim Hillier’s general statement of policy for the series in his Preface to the first two volumes: ‘that each volume should be self-contained and coherent in its own terms, should seek to be representative of the period covered, should contain largely material not readily available before in English translation, should be relevant to contemporary film education and film culture, should be accessible to the non-specialist reader, and should be pleasur- able.’ The materials contained in this volume may be different from Vol- umes 1 and 2 in their accessibility and their conditions of pleasure. In this period Cahiers sought explicitly to integrate the post-structuralist perspec- tives of the wider French cultural and intellectual scene, intermixing narra- tology, grammatology, semiotics, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, Thus a number of these texts are ‘difficult’. The introductory essay undertakes to situate this work within the gen- eral intellectual scene, to analyse the Cahiers project, and thus to make it more available. The material is presented chronologically, Overall, the aims of the volume are: first, to present essential materials for a historical reconstruction of the intellectual dynamic of the period; and second, to gatige Cahiers’ contribution to the formation of contemporary film theory.Preface A note on translations Translation always poses problems about accurate rendition, especially when, as in this case, several different translators are involved and when the original writing is difficult. It would be wrong to pretend that we have not experienced occasionally quite severe problems of translation. There are a number of points where we have had difficulty in grasping the precise sense of the original and others where, despite such a grasp, the right translation has been difficult to find. The French terms auteur and mise en scene have entered critical discussion in English, but auteur in particular did not always have some of the meanings currently attached to it. We have usually retained auteur when, ‘author’ would have been a direct translation and mise en scine where ‘direction’ might have been a suitable rendering, but we have tried to be sensitive to the varying usage of the terms. The same principle has been, applied to such theoretical terms as écriture for which there is no adequate translation. Les Cahiers du Cinéma (literally ‘Cinema Notebooks’) are plural, but we have preferred to refer to Cahiers - the normal abbreviation used — as if in the singular. Notes All notes are the editor’s except where specifically designated as authors’ or translators’ notes. viiiAcknowledgments We are indebted to Cahiers du Cinéma for the agreement to produce these volumes of anthology from their material. In addition, the editor and publishers acknowledge permission to reprint the following material: Chapter 1, translated by Tom Milne, is reprinted from Rivette: Texts and Interviews, edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum (© British Film Institute, 1977) Chapter 2, translated by Kari Hanet (with contributions by Henry Segg- exman), is reprinted from Screen, vol. 18, no. 4 (© The Society for Edu- cation in Film and Television, 1977). Chapter 3, translated by Susan Bennett, is reprinted from Screen, vol. 12, no. 1 © The Society for Education in Film and Television, 1977). Chapter 12, translated by Diana Matias, is reprinted frost’ Sternberg, edited by Peter Baxter (© British Film Institute, 1980). 1 take pleasure in acknowledging the co-operation of Serge Daney of Cahiers du Cinéma, Maud Wilcox of the Harvard University Press, and the editors at the British Film Institute - Angela Martin and David Wilson - who did extraordinarily conscientious work on both the translation and the manuscript. I thank in particular the original group which undertook translation: Henry Seggerman, Lindley Hanlon, Randall Conrad, Leigh Hafrey, Joseph Karmel, Alan Williams, Nancy Kline Piore; and the BFI translators Diana Matias and Annwyl Williams. Routledge and the British Film Institute gratefully acknowledge the help of Cahiers du Cinéma in the compilation of these volumes.Introduction: The Politics of Representation: Cahiers du Cinéma 1969-72 What is dramatized in this collection of texts from the 1969-72 period of Cahiers du Cinéma is the spectacular action of rigorous and politically engaged film criticism. Cahiers’ central project was to elaborate a method of, or a critical perspective on, filmic ‘writing’ considered in its social relations, By means of a form of critical ‘reading’, Cahiers sought to analyse and to transform the relation between film-texts and the ideology of the culture in which they are viewed. In the context of the radically charged social and intellectual movements of post-1968 France, Cahiers du Cinéma was at work transforming both the perception of films and critical writing about cinema. Cahiers set about clarifying its historical and polemical co-ordinates by reference to Bazin and Eisenstein, and self-consciously began the process of shaping the passage from the old to the new socio-filmic order by the force of its critical intervention. Its resolutely Marxist denunciation of the function and effect of bourgeois ideology was projected as the critique and rewriting of film history/theory/criticism. The experience of change in post-1968 France marks these texts in multiple ways. Change is pictured as an opened theoretical space, the space of representation. History assumes the aspect of an ensemble of unevenly developed, stratified and shifting relations enacted in a new social setting. Old connections are broken or displaced; new structures and commitments are in the process of emerging. The sense of uneven, fragmented movement of diverse but associated themes makes the ensem- ble of these texts an unfinished work site. In this context, montage is pictured as an exemplary mode of critical work. Through its procedures of writing it rearranges significant relations, transforms pre-texts (the cul- turally and normally invested fields of fixed senses), interrupts and renegotiates notions of liaison and continuity. Its deconstructive form of, productivity is the result of both action and negation. Cahiers’ intervention within this cultural setting of change and mutation 11969-1972 The Politics of Representation takes the dialectical form of a writing project — arbitrating between old and new, structure and history. It challenges the presuppositions about the relation of film theory to the social order by affirming the centrality of the dialectic between ideology and representation. Cahiers joins the struggle on this front: its principal interlocutor and antagonist is the figure of dominant ideology as instituted by the bourgeois apparatus of cinema. Cahiers undertakes by its writing to disqualify the institution of Classic Representation and to create a new and transformed social space. The discourse of film theory and criticism that effects this passage from old to new is at the same time drama (spectacle), argument (exposition), dialectic (movement, determination, spacing, ultimately history) and action (inter vention for political change). Notwithstanding the sense of a project still in motion, a project collec- tively developed through the organization of several voices, the Cahiers materials assembled here have a structure and an argument. As a monthly review, its theories and positions were elaborated and modified, even deflected, over the course of publication. Its form of cohesion is historical, The unity, such as it is, of the Cahiers project is defined through the question of how social life is represented at the ideological level. The object of the project is the critique and transformation of society's ideological superstructure in so far as it is supported by cinema. The questions that Cahiers puts to cinema and that define film theory/criticism are finally treated as political questions - of power, class struggle, and theoretical practice. As a text, this collection of Cahiers writings is composed by the integration and displacement of key terms, each embedded in a context: ‘writing’, ‘reading’, ‘ideology’, ‘subject’, ‘history’. In so far as its perspec- tive is the transformation of existing structures, the Cahiers project is defined as a politics, not a poetics, of representation, The materials presented here are basically from the period March 1969 to January 1972, This framework registers the force and effect of the political events of May 1968 on the institution of cinema. Though a crisis within Cahiers in November 1969 led to a change in ownership, during the period which this volume principally covers (October 1969 to February 1972) the Editorial Board, directed by Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Nar- boni, remained virtually unchanged. This phase concluded, more or less, in January 1972 with the open break with the French Communist Party, and an alignment with Maoism. Shortly afterwards, the format of the review changed, declaring a reorientation towards its public. Cahiers’ engagement in the central cultural politics of the time, and its commitment to a cultural line founded on dialectical materialism, is reflected in its various relations ~ attack, defence, and affiliation - to the intellectual scene. Reconstruction of the form and significance of its intervention as film theory must in fact take into account Cahiers’ relation to other positions and other texts: historical precedents, rival critical prac tices, contemporary supporters, its guiding texts. The break with the critical past, represented, of course, by the ‘idealist’ tradition of André 2Introduction: The Politics of Representation: Cahiers du Cinéma 1969-72 Bazin, prompts the retrieval of Eisenstein as a guiding reference. Eisenste- in’s framework of dialectical materialism as the basis for aesthetic inquiry serves to link Cahiers’ project with the revolutionary Russian intellectual and artistic culture of the 1920s. The Eisenstein translation project con- sisted of fifteen instalments (from February 1969 to January-February 1971) and culminated in issues devoted to revolutionary Russian film culture (May-June 1970) with texts by and commentary on Vertov, Lenin, Eis- enstein, Mayakovsky, Meyerhold, Kuleshoy, etc., and a special Eisenstein issue (January-February 1971). The Editorial Board’s ‘Russia in the Twent- ies’ indicates the significance and aims of the overall project and shows the way in which Cahiers sought to appropriate Eisenstein, and Russian practice more generally, to the contemporary situation. Within the post-1968 scene, Cahiers sought, by various means, to elabor- ate and extend its position. The differences between Cahiers and Cingthique, for example, were made explicit in its polemical ‘refutation’ of Cinéthique published in November 1969. Cahiers shared with Cinéthique the view that the social function of cinema is the reproduction of bourgeois ideology, that film is disguised work product, that mode of address can constitute a break with bourgeois norms, etc. But Cahiers rejected an aesthetics of transgression, based on the self-reflexive practice of the avant-garde, and developed, through painstaking analysis, its own account of the formal terms of such a break. Positif’s attack (no, 122, December 1970) on Cahiers, structuralism, and the literary/cultural review Tel Quel was a broadside. An article attacked Cahiers’ positive evaluation of Straub-Huillet’s Othon and denounced the review as totalitarian, opportunist, Stalinist, elitist, a pretender to scientific criticism. Cinéthique, Tel Quel, and Cahiers joined in a statement (‘Cinema, literature, politics’, January-February 1971) denouncing Positif for a ‘para- sitism’ that aimed to censor and deform a scientific Marxist-Leninism. ‘What seems to be at stake in these exchanges is the legitimacy and auth- ority of Cahiers’ collective voice to assume and command centre stage, to take a public position, and to speak for the truth of a scientific Marxist- Leninist discourse in the field of film. The overall aim of this volume is to present the material essential to defining the ensemble of themes and positions that compose the history of Cahiers during the 1969-72 period. The volume provides the fundamental materials for a critical appreciation of the Cahiers position in contemporary film theory and criticism. Even though Cahiers drew heavily on many sources and fields which constituted the context of the Cahiers project (including work by Burch, Barthes, Bellour, Metz, etc.), this ‘independent’ material is present only by implication or reference and is in most instances available in translation elsewhere. We are publishing only primary materials from Cahiers which are not readily available. Hence, the widely reprinted text on Young Mr Lincoln (Cahiers 223, August-September 1970) is not included here. We are presenting this material in its scope and diversity, and in its 3