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SubStance, Issue 110 (Volume 35, Number 2), 2006, pp. 120-139 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/sub.2006.0034

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sub/summary/v035/35.2habib.html

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Andr Habib

120

Ruin, Archive and the Time of Cinema:

Peter Delpeuts Lyrical Nitrate
Andr Habib
It is extraordinary that men have entrusted so
many images, so many affects, so many
constructions, such beauty to a medium so close,
ontologically, to its own ruin.1
Georges Didi-Huberman (Montage, 13)

Cinema, since the early 1930s, has become part of our archive. If
the classical archives principal task was to group and classify for an
ulterior use documents which, together, represent a site of authority and
a locus of origin, early film archives emerge as a rescue operation. Iris
Barry, Henri Langlois, Georges Franju, and Lotte Eisner all attempted,
by their own means and channels, to save the memory of cinema, and in
particular the masterpieces of early cinema, chopped up by theatre
owners, decimated by studios and production societies in order to make
way for the new talk of the town (the talkies) that was very swiftly to
impose itself as the norm for the film-going public in the late 1920s.
When silent cinema lost its commercial vocation, it was taken in charge
by newly created institutions in London, Paris, Berlin, and New York
(all between 1934-1936), thereby displacing cinema from its site of origin
(the commercial theatre) towards the vaults of film libraries and
museums.2 The nitrate film stock proved highly inflammable and prone
to decay, threatening the survival of film. In 1951 the FIAF (Fdration
intermationale des archives du film, founded in 1938) forbade its production
and unauthorized storage, leading to the adoption of a series of measures
of preservation throughout the world, and the transfer from nitrate
celluloid to safety acetate (and more recently, polyester) prints.3 These
eventsto which we could add the losses of film following
bombardments and fires during WWI and WWII and the discovery in
the early 1980s of the so-called vinegar syndrome that attacks acetate
printsare pivotal in understanding the paradoxical process of
patrimonialization of cinema.
This process, via a series of shifts and mutations in the cultural
significance of cinema, was to lead in the 1980s and 1990s to legal
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measures, institutional recognition (copyrights, legal deposits, increased

(though still insufficient) state funding for archives, etc.) and a burgeoning
of discourses in different fields that all presented cinema as the art and
memory of the twentieth century. Coincidentally, but not innocently,
the celebration of cinemas 100th birthday was the same year (1995) as
the 50th anniversary of the end of WWII (with the representation of the
Holocaust being at the intersection of the two). This upgrading of
cinema from a popular entertainment scorned by the elite to a highly
honored member of human patrimonycherished memory and
witness of our timeshas complex ramifications. It can be explained in
part by our obsession with (or hypertrophy of, as Andreas Huyssens
would say) memory, and the extension of the category of patrimony in
the last quarter of the twentieth century. This notion now includes
anything that has been able to lastthat has survived the dictatorship
of the present (technologization, progress, urbanization, modernization),
and includes natural sites, old industrial plants, and 40-year-old diners
(that proudly announce ever since 1965).
Cinema has also gained higher institutional legitimacy since
becoming an object of academic scrutiny, which coincided with a renewed
interest in the study of early cinema, following the decisive 1978 Congress
in Brighton. This early cinema branch has reshaped both the discipline
of film studies and our vision of that period of cinema. Festivals
celebrating rediscovered films during the 1990s (In Italy at Pordenone,
Sacilia, and Bologna; in New York state at Rochester and Syracuse), along
with the distribution of early films on VHS and DVD (most of them
released around the time of cinemas centenary), have accompanied this
new area of study. Film preservation and restoration (now enhanced by
digital technology) has also been the focus of intense discussion, and has
developed as a full-fledged industry, leading to the much-publicized rerelease of restored copies of films, some of them barely 20 years old.
This series of events contains the basic conditions of possibility of a
film such as Peter Delpeuts 1990 Lyrisch Nitraat (Lyrical Nitrate, released on
video in North America by Zeitgeist in 1991). At least, it is within this
constellation of events and problems that I believe Delpeuts film can
become legible and utterable.4 His lyrical montage of early film allows
us to analyze a phenomenon arising out of the valorization of
rediscovered cinema: the melancholy or nostalgia for a cinema that is
forever lost (destroyed copies, incomplete films, anonymous reels). Every
film archive can be defined by its lacks, its losses, and the journeys the
prints in its collection had to make. According to Arlette Farge, this is

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characteristic of all archives: the archive is never a stockpile; it is

constantly a lack (70). However, in the case of cinema, apart from the
fact that what has been lost is easier to evaluate (compared, for instance,
to state archives of the 17th century), the nature of the medium and what
it records now command an immediately passionate, quasi-religious
response, as if it were lives that were in peril. The collusion between life
and cinema, between the memory of the archives and historical presence,
is directly linked to the time that cinema invents and represents. Cinema,
one can argue, is a trace of historical time rendered visible: it invents a
new relationship to time and contingency.5 This time, in our common
encounter with films, can become even more visible if gaps and accidents
fragment and stain the film. The film archive is a strange tomb,
characterized by what it lacks, and slowly decomposing. (Even in the
best possible storage conditions, film, over a period of time, will decay.)
These diverse phenomena have all had their share in the production
of an imaginary of the ruin in cinema, which I will try, in the following
pages, to tie to Delpeuts Lyrisch nitraat. I will argue that the appeal of the
fragment, and the ruinist sensibility that traverse this film, reactivate
certain tropes proper to the aesthetics of ruin, while partaking in (and
producing) their own specific historical horizon.
The films of the Dutch filmmaker, archivist and film historian Peter
Delpeut are all built around the issue of disappearance. In Diva dolorosa
(1999), it is the lost divas of Italian cinema of the 1910s and 1920s who are
honored and resuscitated; in Forbidden Quest (1992), it is the remains of
early Arctic and Antarctic exploration films that retell the semi-fictitious
tale (inspired by Shackletons voyages and the images he brought back)
of lost explorers. Go West ! Young Man (2003, one of his rare films that uses
very little archival material), is a documentary quest that investigates
the Westerns sites of memory. The filmmaker visits old ruined sets
where many films were once shot; he explores the mythical Monument
Valley (monumentalized by cinema), today flooded with tourists; he
interviews the last witnesses of the Westerns Golden Age. Cinema for
Delpeut is always an object of loss, and it is within this horizon of loss
that most of his films are created, enshrining traces that have survived
oblivion. What is lost is the memory of a time, a feeling of the times,
now gone, that passes on the surface of the image, that haunts a landscape.
In particular, his films that are composed of archival material (half
compilation, half found footage) expose, in the mental and material space
between the original nitrate film and the multiple transfers that allow
its viewing today, a historical depth, loaded with an undecidable time.

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They are not only of a timealthough the film does not try to
document the films in the proper sensethey also embody timea
layering of the times those films have traveled, of which they are
documents. They are, in a way, monuments of time.
Since the very first collections of film, whether at the MOMA, the
Cinmathque Franaise or the British Film Institute, film has had the
double value of monument-document:6 losing its exchange value, it
becomes invested with a sort of aesthetic and historical a priori. It thus
became trace, index, testimony. That this newly acquired status for film
had to undergo a delocalization (also true of Delpeuts work) is also
significant for my argument. As with ruins, the film object had to be
taken out of its regular function, so that it could appear as a cultural artifact
(as is the case for any object entering a museum).
One of the major characteristics of a ruined construction is its loss of
function and original destination (what it was destined to do). When an
object loses its physical integrity, its shape and coordinates that permit
it to actualize or accomplish a certain number of actions or tasks, we say
that this thing is in ruins. But it is by falling into ruin that it appears as
image, since its usage has ceased to replace it. Blanchot, in an essay on the
imaginary, writes that an object, a utensil that does not disappear in its
usage, appears: Broken, [it] becomes the image of itself (and at times an
aesthetic object) (352). This could bring us to say, with Eduardo Cadava7
and Jean-Louis Dotte, that the ruin is a pure image of an object, and that
the image in ruins is only the image of itself: the loss of vocation makes it
worthy of an aesthetic appreciation (to our modern sense of art). To use
Dottes expression, we could say that the ruin presents a mode of
appearing of things and of art.8
Before continuing my argument, I wish to return to the pair
monument and document, which, although linked to the first film
archive initiatives, were only widely applied to film in the 1990s (1995
being, again, a pivotal moment).9 As I will explore below, every film
(especially early cinema) appears today as document, witness, trace,
memory (Pani, 26). Because of the indexical nature of film, every film
documents the time of its referent. (The famous a a t can also,
notwithstanding Barthess suggestion, apply to cinema.) Any film, distant
in timeEdison, Lumire, Porter, Mlis, Lang, Murnauis a form of
documentary, since it shows and allows something of its time to speak. It is
a surviving trace, a live ash, as Georges Didi-Huberman would say, of
an absent referentdespite all the historical falsifications films may they

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Andr Habib

have served, and the misreadings they may produce. No image can be a
piece of evidence; it is only an artifact, a trace left at a certain moment in
time by a given culture. For this reason, today we can say that film has
gained a value of remembrance similar to that of a monument.
Film allows a collectivity to remember, and is clearly embedded
within social frames of memory, to use Halbwachs expression. But
unlike what Alos Riegel calls the intentional monument 35-36) or Rgis
Debrays message-monument,10 cinema acquires its monumental
dimension once its document-value has been recognized. A film is not
erected as a commemorative monument,11 nor does it possess a specific
symbolic value; its material does not disappear in favor of a concept it
represents. As document of its time, it appears as a trace-monument, a
non-intentional monument.12
Once the monument value of cinema, in the specific sense I have
argued, has been established, we must recognize films double value
(following Riegls terminology): an objective historical value and a
subjective age value. These two different values depend on the meaning
we give to the term historyeither an objective fact-history, or a timehistory, understood as a natural process that affects matter and gives it
its historical depth. It is nonetheless these two values that make cinema
the paradoxical site of twentieth-century memory.
Cinema is an important factor in the social, political and cultural
mutation of memory in the twentieth century, as analyzed by Pierre
Nora and others in the early 1980s. According to Nora, our societies
have gone from a history-memory (in which those two terms were quasisynonymous), to an archive-memory, where archives and sites of
memory have taken on the task of preserving and remembering,
indirectly institutionalizing forgetting by making the archive
unsurpassable: what we call memory is, in fact, the gigantic and
vertiginous constitution of the material stock of what is impossible to
remember, the endless repertory of what we may need to remember
(xxx).
This progressive and radical externalization of memory, abandoned
by the community and shelved in archives, in part explains the role
bestowed upon cinema, considered as memory-heritage of the twentieth
century. The moment we began saving silent cinema that was slowly
disappearing from the public sphere, we were not only saving cinema as
an art form, but also as a site of memory. This means that memory,
which was understood as something in the present, has now become
represented by the material traces of the past. The recognition of cinemas

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power to preserve memory was thus institutionalized in the gap between

past and present.
Probably what is characteristic of cinemas memory is its object
what it is expected to preserve. Cinema (at least before super-8 cameras
and camcorders) does not preserve our/my memory, but the memory
of a past-present: it was a certain present that was preserved, while
passing into the past. This is how, paradoxically, cinema is an art of the
present (of presence), and at the same time, cinema always films what is
already past: it is a past that it brings back to the present, to visibility.
Cinema, and in particular early cinema, evokesalthough incapable of
reproducingthe lived times of the spectators in contact with these
imaginary captures of time, these illusions of time. It is this relation to
time that a film archive, consciously or unconsciously, has the task of
preserving: the gazes of the past, which must be redeployed in the present.
But isnt there a paradox in considering cinema a monument to
memory, since the fragility of the medium itself (the celluloid strip) is the
opposite of marble or stone, eminently more capable of supporting a
monuments aspiration to immortality? (This aspiration did in fact
accompany cinema in its early years.) Barthes is pertinent here: by
making photography, which is mortal, the general and almost natural
witness of what has been, modern society has renounced the Monument
(146). The same could be said of cinema, if we consider, like Barthes, the
monument as something made to last forever. A little more than 100
years have sufficed to erase 80% of cinemas first thirty years; 50% of all
films produced have now disappeared. Whereas cinema had been
expected to accomplish Mans immemorial aspiration to immortality,
this mummified change (Bazin) presents itself more like a body
submitted to the contingency of time and corruption, not unlike the
course of a human life (a print of film rarely survives more than 100
years). This is perhaps the central ambiguity of cinemas temporality:
since its origins, it has combined the mythic time of eternal preservation
with the ephemeral time of industrialized production. In the end, its
time is measured according to a human life. If cinemas value as memory
began to appear as its losses were acknowledged, then the notion of the
monument has to be redefined. The monument cannot be what lasts
eternally (in a world where nothing lasts); it is more simply a trace, a
survival, at times just as arbitrary, discontinuous and prone to forgetting
as human memory.
But this is perhaps one of the singularities of cinema, when compared
to the traditional archive, although it was revealed only late in the game.

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Film preservation is not only urgent in the wake of certain losses

(destruction of prints, fires, wars, etc.); it is directly tied to the nature of
the medium and the life-span of celluloid film. Film preservation (storage,
analysis, counter-typing), even in ideal conditions, cannot prevent the
decay or degradation of film (either nitrate or acetate); at best it can slow
it down (a nitrate print properly stored could last over 100 years), or
displace it by making new copies every 25 years (but the copies too will
decay, and this operation is extremely costly, and could only be envisioned
for a small proportion of films worth preserving).
The disappearance of films is thus co-substantial to the history of
film (it is an art du passage, Jean-Louis Schefer would say). For Paolo
Cherchi Usai, the destruction and decay of films is actually what makes
the history of cinema thinkable in the first place (18). In his fascinating
book of aphorisms, The Death of Cinema, Cherchi Usai writes: Such images
[that are immune from decay] can have no history (41). Everything that
happens to a film from the moment it is printed and projected (streaks,
scratches, scorias), composes the internal history of that film which is,
for Cherchi Usai, the condition of possibility and the object of film history.
If all films had survived, a history of cinema would be impossible. The
Model Image (the pure film) is a theoretical fiction, as is restoration. The
ontology of films first axiom is founded upon its inherent process of
decomposition: cinema is the art of destroying moving images (Death
of Cinema, 7).
Although Cherchi Usais radical metaphysics of cinema calls for a
certain degree of nuance, it should be seen as a reaction against both the
restoration craze of the 1980s and the irrational leaps of hope invested in
the digital revolution. What is important to retain, is that this archive
fever has led to the most diverse reactions, whether coming from curatorarchivists, film historians or filmmakers: passivity (Cherchi Usai),
selective preservation (Pani, De Kuyper), maximum conservation
(Jacques Ledoux), utopias of digitized cinema archives, re-use and
recycling, romanticized visions, and so on. What is obvious is that for
many years now, in part due to the pressure and influence of new
technology, the issue of film preservation has become part of its history.
The perishable nature of cinema has reshaped its social, artistic and
discursive configuration, and positioned it in terms of memory and
transmission.
What interests me is the signification of this sense of loss (it is very
often not even a film, but cinemas disappearance in general) and the
melancholy of ruins it inspires. Since loss always operates on traces that

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give us the measure of what has been lost, then fragments of rediscovered
films, damaged prints, and anonymous bits of reel are memory traces of
forgetting.
According to Jean Starobinski, the melancholy of ruins, at least in
the eighteenth century, resides in the fact that it has become a
monument to lost signification. To dream among ruins is to feel that our
existence does not belong to us anymore and is already reunited with a
vast oblivion (180). According to him, during the nineteenth century,
historical inquiry erased this free contemplation of lost time by applying
a scientific approach, in an attempt to date what should be experienced
as immemorial (181).
These remarks, anachronistically, seem to correspond to the state of
film archives, which abound with unidentified bits and pieces of film,13
whose significance often gets lost in speculation and conjecture. They
are also in phase with the type of reading to which Lyrisch nitraat can lend
itself, released at a time of unprecedented patrimonialization of early
cinema, numerous restoration projects, the circulation of a great quantity
of silent films on DVD and on the Internet, and so on.
Although the problematic exposed here thus far could be developed
further, I hope to have set in place a certain number of the issues that
inform Delpeuts film, the focus of the second part of this article.
****
Lyrisch nitraat, though at first glance straight-forward, is a complex,
hybrid film, which intelligently intertwines the experimental aesthetic
of found footage and early cinema compilation films (increasingly available
since the late 1980s on VHS, then DVD).
Found footage14 is an open category of avant-garde or experimental
cinema that presents, according to Catherine Russell, all the aspects of
an aesthetic of ruins, often animated by nostalgia (Joseph Cornells
1936 Rose Hobart) or by apocalyptic themes (Craig Baldwins Tribulations
99, 1991), which resonate through their style, based on fragmentation,
elliptic narration, temporal collisions and visual disorientation (Russell,
239). These films should be distinguished from the way documentaries
use archival material (often only to illustrate a commentary). Found footage
films follow an aesthetic, formal, conceptual, critical or polemic endeavor
(ibid., 239-40).
Early forms of film-collage appear in the 1920s, in certain avantgarde practices, and compilation films begin to be put together (in Russia
and in the US) around the same time.15 But the found footage trend will

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only blossom in the late 1950s and 1960s, with the rise of television and
the culture of mass consumption. It is not by chance that it is often
televisual artifacts (ads, information, talk shows, educational programs)
that these filmmakers re-use and subvert. Found footage, in this respect,
appears as a form of cultural recycling, often informed by a social critique,
by discourses concerned with the end of history, and subverting the
material through ironic and violent montage.
Catherine Russell and Bart Testa both analyze how early cinema
(1895-1908)at the time scorned by scholars as pre-narrative, primitive
mumblingoffered a fascinating alternative to the classical codes of
narrative cinema. 16 Experimental filmmakers began formal and
conceptual explorations of cinemas memory, playing with time and
duration, film structure, various forms of rephotography, and optical
printings.17
The other trend with which we could associate Delpeuts film would
be the early cinema compilations, such as Landmarks of early cinema, and
Origins of film. These compilations, often produced for teaching purposes,
are often accompanied by elaborate contextualizations by film historians
(such as Charles Musser), which help date, name, and situate the works
within a specific aesthetic trend or time period.
Lyrisch nitraat, in a way, is born at the crossroads of those two genres.
It borrows heavily from the found footages aesthetic of ruins, while refusing
its more ironic, theoretical or visually radical aspects. From the
compilation films, it retains a documentary dimension, as trace or testimony
of past visual practices, while keeping those films relatively anonymous
(until the end credits). Delpeuts film also seems part of a larger trend
within current cinema, which negotiates a space between avant-garde
practice and archival exploration. This idea of a poetic archaeology, or
an archival poetry, is shared by filmmakers such as Bill Morrison (The
Film of Her, 1997, Trinity, 2000, Decasia, 2002), Angela Ricci-Lucchi and
Yervant Gianikian (Dal polo allequatore, 1987, Su tutte le vette e pace, 1999,
Oh, uomo, 2004), Artavazd Pelechian (We, 1969, The Seasons, 1975, Our
Century, 1983), Gustav Deutsch (Film ist, 1996, 2001) or Jrgen Reble (Stadt
in flammen, 1984, Passion, 1989, Instabile Materie, 1995).
All these films untie the knots of narrative continuity to focus on
gestures, facial expressions, visual tricks (Film ist), producing a poetic
montage of distant fragments (Us), revisiting the damaged remnants
of a damaged history (Su tutte le vette e pace) or the ghastly beauty of
decomposed celluloid (Decasia, Passion). They document a gaze in time,
offer a look at a history of lookingthe multi-faceted visual culture of a

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certain age. These filmmakers, not unlike Benjamins ragpicker, sew

together bits of films that reveal the inner workings of time: something
that breathes between the bodies, the landscapes, the city streets and
the unraveling of the film stripsomething that has been deposited into
the flesh of the film. This surplus is what times passing has added to the
temporality of the film. This excess has as much to do with what is
filmed (the image referent) as with the medium to which the image is
tied (the film strip). All these films set up an intriguing dialectics between
form and content, between the imprint of the film and the material base,
which manifests itself through its accidents, and its imperfections (as
noted earlier, an object appears and says something of itself through its
ruin).
These montageseven if seen on safety prints, and most often on
VHS or DVDall produce the impression that a world is disappearing
before our very eyes, and that the display of this disappearance has something
to do with the very nature of cinema. We can even say that it is the
imminence of this disappearance that makes these images legible. They
appear precisely as apparitions, loaded with memory and history, because
they are on the point of falling into complete oblivion: we are the witnesses
of this passage, this falling. It is this dialectic between memory and
oblivion, preservation and destruction, that all these films tend to
articulate.
Lyrisch nitraat proposes a reflexive overview of the disappearance of
an art (an art of disappearance): the disappearance of early cinema, a
disappearance to which these films themselves are destined, and the
loss of those who have left the traces of their presence on these small
strips of celluloid, as well as the loss of a certain mode of spectatorship,
and so on. This distance between us and the spectators of the time is
reinforced by the fact that these fragments of films had to travel through
the complete history of film technology, from nitrate to acetate prints,
from video to our television sets. All these losses are nonetheless evoked
through what remains. Neither epic nor dramatic, Delpeuts film is lyrical.
Its lyricism stems from the material properties of the film material: the
different coloring processes, often of astonishing brightness, are not only
preserved; they are often accentuated by biochemical degradation.
Lyrisch nitraat is an assemblage of nitrate fragments, extracted from
the distribution catalogue of the Dutch pioneer Jean Desmet. This early
cinema distributor and theater owner had stored his wide collection
(900 films, dating from 1907-1916) in the late 1920s, along with posters,
still photographs, and programs, in a loft on top of the Cinma Parisien

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in Amsterdam, where they were discovered in 1956, after Desmets death.

They were then transferred to the Film Museum of Amsterdam.18 The
fragments Delpeut selects are grouped into six categories (indicated by
intertitles): Looking, Mise en scne, The Body, Passion, Dying,
and Forgetting. This regrouping into categories (systematized by the
German Gustav Deutsch in his Film ist series [1996, 2001;[1 to 12]), offers
us a first reading of the film, which the forgetting of the last chapter
synthesizes: gaze, body, passion, death. These six chapters refer to the
subject matter of the filmed scenes, but also to the cinema they embody
a cinema that no longer exists. The gaze refers to the different ways of
seeing in early cinema (iris, audience reactions, voyeurism, peephole
aesthetics), but it also evokes cinemas visual novelty, the way it
transformed our way of seeing and the fact that this cinema was seen by
spectators now long dead. If the film sequences portray a mise en scne
of bodies, they are also showing a form of mise en scne that is no longer
employed, and bodies that today are absent. Death is both represented
in the films (Passion plays, murder scenes), and evoked metaphorically
via the perishable nature of nitrate celluloid, which appears quite visibly
at different moments in the film. The term passion can refer to the slow
gestures of the Italian Diva Lyda Borelli, but can also be a metaphor for
this cinema that is being consumed. (Burning Passion is, appropriately,
the title of one of Cherchi Usais books on early cinema.) Nevertheless,
this refraction of the films on the categories in which they appear, this
double meaning, does not turn them into symbols of cinema in the
way that Marlene Dietrichs oblique gaze symbolizes the femme fatale
of cinema. What we have here is, more appropriately, an allegorical
subversion.
This subversion is part of the museumification process of this film:
films from a distribution catalogue are turned into an imaginary museum,
their exchange value is now exhibited as a cultural artifact. But this
subversion is also an allegory: Delpeuts film appears as an allegory of
history and of the memory of early cinemaand the allegory, writes
Benjamin, is the object par excellence of melancholic contemplation. This
history is fragmented; its image is one of ruin.
In his famous study on the Trauerspiel, Benjamin portrays allegorical
writing as fragmented, discontinuous, and polysemic, and contrasts it
to the unity and harmony of the symbol. This new stylistic sentiment,
which imposes itself during the baroque age, shows history not as a
totality, but as an incomplete, transient, contingent state: History is not
represented under the guise of eternal life, but as one of inevitable decline

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(Origine, 191). History expresses itself through natures process of decay,

it is inscribed in a faceno, a skull (ibid., 178-79). Is this not, in a way,
what Lyrisch nitraat is portraying: ruins of films, ruins of a certain
experience of cinema, faces that resemble death masks?
Judging from the heterogeneous genres that Delpeut assembles, it
seems that an attempt was made to accurately render the film experience
of the early twentieth century. What was privileged at that time was not
so much a good plot and clear narrative development, but sensations,
spectacles, exotic one-reel scenes. Also, a great diversity of genres
blossomed and coexisted during this short period, in part due to the
rapid development of film languagea film from 1915 does not look or
feel like a film from 1905. It is this plurality of genres that we find projected
in Lyrisch Nitraat: melodramas, adventure films, scientific spectacle, biblical
films, portrayals of children, train travelogues, landscapes, street shots,
film projections within a film, and so on. But the historical accuracy of
the assemblage adds an uncanny dimension to the film, as if we were
visiting a site once inhabited, where the past is constantly tangled in the
web of the present. In fact, doesnt a site in ruins have the privilege,
through its debris, of bringing to the present a past life that time has
dismantled? Here we have an attempt to reconstruct, starting from its
absence, a gaze that, redoubling ours, makes the time of the image more
complex.
Refusing the imperatives of positive history (analyzing, dating,
understanding, informing), but without succumbing to pure, formal play
(looping, abstract or associative montage), Delpeut tries to present an
allegory of cinema, a lyrical art, discontinuous and fragmented. Even
more, he turns the discontinued and fragmented state of the rediscovered
nitrate into the very source of cinemas lyricism. By drawing our attention
to these disjointed fragments, Delpeut is able to make us see anewat
times by slowing down or zooming in on the imagea gesture, the
richness of a landscape, the gravity of a face, preserving its poetic force.
Moreover, beginning with its title, lyrical nitrate, it seems that for Delpeut,
this poetic force is intrinsic to the material itself.
This autonomy of the film material appears on many levels. First,
Delpeut decided to abandon the story behind each fragment (which could
have been included in a voice-over or intertitle), in order to leave them
untouched, as if they were returning specters like the many ghosts
that haunt the history of the moving image, from Robertsons
phantasmagorias and beyond. In other words, Delpeut decided not to
encumber the restored presence of the film by providing context, factual
information, narration.

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There is also a certain voluntary withdrawal of the director-editor,

a certain refusal to produce an intentional, well-structured montage,
and a will to leave the film fragments as if they had been put together as
they were. Delpeuts intention seems to have been to create the impression,
on the level of the montage, that the film was an unearthed mummy
that what you see was not in fact put together following a pre-ordained
plan, but made in this way, which is an obvious fiction.
On the other hand, the film seems to champion a poetic autonomy of
the nitrate stock itselfits natural beauty, its array of tints, its diaphanous glow, the silky warmth that it gives to the bodies it enfolds (as
though nitrate were poetic in itself; one need simply look). This autonomy
of the material is even greater if we consider that each foot of film
possesses an individual life, an internal life (unlike polyester or acetate
celluloid, which are synthetic, nitrate is an organic material). Faded colors,
washed-out tints, dust deposits, blots and stains are the signs of this
life which, according to Alos Riegl, illuminates in a work of art the
necessary cycle of creation and destruction that twentieth-century man
is fond of (67). We could even say that the patina that translates the
passage of time into the film singularizes each image, such that each still
reclaims today a lost aura (an aura which, in Benjamins time, cinema
supposedly liquidated). With Delpeut, cinema has become, like the auratic
work of art, the unique apparition of the distant.19
This impression of a rediscovered aura at the intersection of its
disappearance, plus the fragmentation of sequences, the mismatches,
the construction of uncanny continuities between different styles and
time periods, and the evanescence of the medium, the stains and scorias
on the celluloidall these are part of an aesthetics of ruin that articulates
itself between memory and oblivion, in the gaps of a history that is in
shreds.
As noted earlier, the fragmentary nature of the film provokes a
different way of seeing. We become attracted not by the arrangement of
actions, but by the way forms, bodies, and spaces are inscribed in time.
Instead of looking at a woman walking through a garden (to where? to
whom?), we are asked to contemplate the spectacle of a lost and majestic
bearing. These children giggling at the camera, these young girls standing
before the cinema screen, these men in hats crossing the streets and whose
gaze crosses the frame, are not only filmed doing certain things, they
make visible a vast area of time that separates us from them. These
haunted bodies on the screen, added to an (at times) obscure film grammar
(camera angle, framing, shot duration), create an impression of

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apparition-disappearance: the time of the image is a time of after-life, of

survival.20
Although Lyrisch nitraat may seem at first glance disorganized, we
must recognize a thematic coherence to Delpeuts assemblage, which
does not exclude a sense of voluntary fragmentation. The author has a
keen predilection for scenes of loss, of abandonment, of shipwrecks/
rescues, but also for wandering characters, malady, fatal passions, and
death. This confers a melancholic depth to all the images we see. The
children seen posing in front of the camera seem ghostly and evanescent;
in the street scenes the city dwellers appear as distant apparitions, an
effect enhanced by the grayness or the surreal coloration. Instead of
insisting on an aesthetics of astonishment and enchantment that was at
the center of early cinema (magic, farce, vaudeville, spectacular chases),
Delpeut has chosen to privilege a melancholic atmosphere, which he
emphasizes by using slow motion (in contrast to early cinema, which is
often seen at an accelerated pace), and by fragmenting certain scenes in
order to show only the dead spaces. This effect is reinforced by the
soundtrack, consisting of old opera recordings that emphasize the
materiality of the soundthe grain, the needle on the groove.21
The elegiac tone of the film culminates in a final blaze, which seems
to consume all the film fragments seen up to that point, as if this blaze
represented their inevitable destiny. During the last minutes of the film,
the celluloid strip becomes suddenly unstrung, destroyed by mold, to
the point where the imprinted scene appears shredded by rapid flashes
of colored blots and filaments, bright flares, sumptuous ochre stains.
The scene on this decayed strip of film represented an episode in the
Garden of Eden, a site which, at the time, gave opportunity for a certain
licentiousness. Here we find the most striking alliance between the
medium and its contentthe destroyed celluloid performatively
exemplifies the scene, by ruining it. Amidst the flickering serpentines of
dismantled celluloid, we see Adam and Eve sharing the forbidden fruit,
on the verge of being plunged into a temporality that is no longer exempt
from corruption and contingency and this is precisely what the film
(appropriately entitled Warfare of the Flesh), exposes. Cherchi Usais axiom
(Cinema is the art of destroying moving images) finds here a perfect
illustration: the art of cinema consists in the destruction of what it
preserves. Seeing is burning. Godard, in JLG/JLG (1994), says: Art is like
a fire; it is born out of what it burns. Similarly, we can complete Pasolinis
phrase: cinema, like life, is written on burning paper.
For this reason, I would argue that Lyrisch nitraat is traversed by an
orphic thematic (all the way up to the choice of Glcks Orpheo, which

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ends the film). In Delpeuts film, cinema is substituted for Eurydice, the
object of love to be saved, but whose rescue-operation risks transforming
the silver salts into dust. Jacques Aumont, in his stimulating analysis of
Jean-Luc Godards Histoire(s) du cinma (1987-1997), coins the term orphic
complex, to designate this return to and of the past, which preserves
and petrifies at the same time (44-45). Aumonts orphic network adds an
additional thread to the lyricism of the film, one whereon this point
only, thoughGodard and Delpeuts projects meet: Lyricism is never
revealed in the measured confidence of the author, but in the vivacious
gesture that ends confidence, and allows the resurgence of flashes,
dazzling fragments of cinema (Aumont, 55).
But this orphic complex is rich and ambiguous: we may recall
Godards poetic statement, in Histoire(s) du cinma 2B, that cinema
authorizes Orpheus to turn back without killing Eurydice, referring to
cinemas capacity (and obligation) to look the past in the faceits own
pastwithout provoking its disappearance. But this looking back also
refers to Lots wife, who, looking back one last time on Sodom, was turned
into a pillar of salt (Godard, who retells the biblical tale in episode 2A,
reminds us that silver salts capture the light on film). But this is
obviously reminiscent of Benjamins vision, inspired by Klee, of the Angel
of History, who, while being violently projected forward, looks back,
powerless, to witness the piles of ruins accumulating at its feet (ber den
Begriff, 2). It is the combination of forces of these three figures
preservation, petrifaction, and ruinthat circumscribe the orphic theme
of Lyrisch nitraat. Preservation is what allows us to see the past again,
while both museumifying it and generating its ruin. These three
movements exist simultaneously, just as a plurality of temporalities
coexist in Delpeuts film, only to be unraveled by ruin.
What is the temporality of a decayed, ruined image? Delpeut uses
films made from 1906-1915; they were edited at another moment,
screened at yet another. To those first layers of historical time (the
profilmic time, the time of the images construction, the time of the images
projection), has been added another time: times passage. This time,
eroding the film material, does away with the interval between the (manmade) filming process and the (natural) chemical process that subverts
and transforms the initial imprint. It is this time, made of montage and
dismantling, that overwhelms the present. What overwhelms the
present of the film is its ruin, which adds itself anachronistically to the
image. It adds something to the image that is not locatable precisely in
time, but that denatures while renaturalizing the film object, abolishing
the space between what was filmed and the image support. The ruin

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breaks the spatial depth of the image (everything suddenly appears on

the same planeimage and ruin), while inscribing on the surface of the
film a temporal depth.
The image support is not passive. There is a constant interaction
between the film material (the celluloid) on which the images have been
captured, the profilmic (what was in front of the camera), and time.
Burned film is thus animated simultaneously by movements of death
and survival. The image it produces is a live imprint of exposed time,
which continues to corrode itself following the same time pattern as
human time, precisely because it participates in the same temporality as
human timeone oriented towards finitude.
If anachronism could be considered as the inevitable contemporaneity of the past, we can say that each image is an anachronistic site
of intersection for a plethora of heterogeneous figures of times. The same
is true of ruins which, as argued earlier, reveal a dismembered time, a
time overwhelmed by the different temporal strata exposed: the ruin
shows the passage of time, both present-past and past-present. As DidiHuberman reminds us, the anachronism of ruins appears at the
intersection between the image and history.
This leads us to perceive how the ruinthe lacunacan be seen as
an excess, rather than a lack, by unearthing this damned aspect of
films fatality. It is as if its ruins pre-existed it. We could say that cinema
is born to embody its own ruin,22 or even that, In the beginning was the
ruin (Derrida, 72). This montage of temporalities that flickers before
our eyes dramatizes the history of film, while keeping it from a full,
reassuring visibility. As Jacques Derrida writes, although in a quite
different context, Ruin: rather this memory open like an eye or the hole
of a bony eye-socket that lets you see without showing anything at all/of
the all.23 It is not that we have to complete with our imagination what is
lacking from totality; it is rather the lack itself that makes up the image, its
disappearance sets memory in motion (Didi-Huberman, Gnie). In the
ruin, it is not the totality, the unity out of which the ruin emerges that
moves us. All things considered, the ruin lacks nothing; it supplies its
own aesthetic criteria.
What is perhaps important to add, at this point, is that these images
have come to us through a history that has enabled us to see them, that
has already accustomed us to the aesthetic autonomy of the ruin. Modern
cinemas sensory-motor discontinuitiesthe use of jump-cuts and
loosely tied narrative sequenceshave introduced us to a fragmentation
of filmic languagebut isnt this a return to the fragmentation of early
cinema? Experimental cinema (such as Stan Brakhages superb hand-

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painted films of the 1980s and 1990s, certain visual devices used in video
clips) has paved the way for a number of visual experiments that are not
completely foreign to those Delpeut displays. The utterability of this
film arises from an aesthetic and historical horizon to which we belong,
which makes the fragment or the ruin more than a desecrated version of
the original. The fragment has become a mode of knowledge and of poetic
expression, carrying its own history. I would posit that a fragment of
film is often more poetic and more historically charged than a restored,
pristine copy of the same film.
In cinema, the fragment comes before any unitya film is always a
collection of individual fragments. Often, cinema attempts to homogenize
this fragmentation through the films organic unity (the transparent
montage of Hollywood cinema, the organicity of the Russian schools
of montage). Deleuze has demonstrated that the prevalence of an organic
totality that engulfs the singularity of its parts (the movement-image) is
dominant until after World War II, when the parts become disarticulated,
the linkages irrational. Similarly, in his book Le Detail, Daniel Arasse
analyzes how classical figurative painting has always privileged the
whole rather than its parts, favoring an ideological-perspective apparatus
that the detail, taken by itself, could only suspend, subvert, and threaten
(387). The detail is a visual (plastic) event that escapes the figurative
message or narration of the painting. The detail ruins, from the inside,
the unity of the work: detailing, in truth, is ruining. The detail forces the
part to manifest itself, disjointed from the unity. It is this strippingthis
powerful extraction of the part from its totalitythat is at work in
Delpeuts film.
Lyrisch nitraat is not foreign to the melancholy of ruins that
characterizes many recent works of art, but at the same time it reactivates
certain motifs and tropes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary
and artistic poetics of ruins, from Diderot to Chateaubriand. Much in
the same way that ivy and moss grow on the stones and pillars of ancient
templesas the picturesque vision of ruins has ithere it is the dirt
deposits, scratches and color blots that signal the passage of time, and its
ruinous effect. This new poetry of ruins arises from the history of the
archive and the preservation of films, but operates a major inversion:
what creates the emotion is not the objective history of film, but times
presence, which the archivefragmented, in ruincan re-present.
In conclusion, it would be interesting to investigate the ways in which
works such as Lyrisch nitraat can help us redefine the notion of filmic
time experienced by the spectator. Theoretical debates, in particular
Anglo-Saxon cognitive studies, have tended to reduce this notion to a

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time needed to understand the narrative patterns of a film. But in

Delpeuts film, the multiple temporality of the works disrupts the
absorption one experiences when following the flow of a unified story
line. Instead, these films place us face to face with timedevant le temps,
to borrow Didi-Hubermans title. This is a time not governed by
movement or action, nor ordered by narration, but one that emerges
from its very own difference. Thus ruin in cinema reveals its own time
a time of survivalsummoning multiple subjectivities to a radical
experience of time. Perhaps this could be the source of a new melancholy
of cinema, born of its time, of its archive.
Universit de Montral

Notes
1. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations into English are my own.
2. This is, among others, attested by ric de Kuyper, who writes: The massive destruction of silent films that had become without value brought collectors, who will be the
founders of our cinemathques, to tend to them (20).
3. For the history of film preservation and nitrate film, see Anthony Slide, Nitrate Wont
Wait. Film Preservation in the United States, Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland,
1992, and Roger Smither (ed.), This Film is Dangerous. A Celebration of Nitrate Film,
Brussels: FIAF, 2002.
4. We could have proposed here a description de larchive in the sense that Michel
Foucault understood it, as the system of utterability (nonciabilit) of events-utterances (Archologie, 170). But this path would have demanded a more specific analysis, beyond the scope of this paper. Thus the term archive will be used here in a
more conservative sense.
5. See Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time. Modernity, Contingency, The
Archive, Cambridge, London, Harvard University Press, 2002.
6. This notion of monument-document, is suggested to me by Paul Ricoeur (The
notion of document, under which we find the combined notions of index and testimony, gains in precision if it is coupled with the notion of monument, [ 222 n.1]), but
also, of course, by Michel Foucault, who introduced the relation between those two
terms to designate the archaeological turn within La Nouvelle histoire. According to Foucault, in traditional history, past monuments were transformed into documents, traces that needed to be deciphered, whereas, now, history is what transforms
documents into monuments (Larchologie du savoir, 14-15).
7. Eduardo Cadava, Lapsus imaginis: The Image in Ruins, October 96 (Spring 2001) 3560.
8. Dotte, using Blanchot, discusses the ruination of objects in the museum, through
which they acquire the same status as works of art: Their default, their retreat outside
of religious, political, private, utilitarian destination, magnifies them for what they are.
Reduced to the state of corpses, ruins, they are all similar (Oubliez ! 33).
9. The chronology that Dominique Pani proposes and that I wish to adopt here is as
follows: cinema was originally a curiosity (1850-1908), then a popular entertainment
(1908-1950), and an art form (1950-1968), before becoming part of culture (19681990), and, since 1990, as part of the patrimony of the century (Dominique Pani,
25-26)

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10. Rgis Debray proposed to counter the confusion des monuments, by distinguishing
three types of monuments: the message-monuments (the commemorative statue,
prospective), the form-monument (The Louvre, contemporary) and the trace-monument (the Maginot line, retroactive). See Debray, 27-44.
11. One can argue that coronation films and film celebrations of political reunions are
intentional commemorative monuments. These are rather rare; further, if these bits of
newsreel were in fact supposed to last, greater efforts would have been made in
order to preserve them at the time they were made.
12. An interesting phenomenon is that recent film restorations (Chaplins Modern Times
or Murnaus Sunrise for instance), not unlike certain types of architectural restorations, create an intentional value of remembrance, which the works originally did not
particularly intend.
13. Under the title Bits and Pieces, ric de Kuyper, then director of the Netherlands Film
Museum, inaugurated these programs of abandoned fragments. These short bits of
film, often only a few seconds long, were simply edited together (bout bout)
without any narrative continuity or montage logic.
14. For a more detailed history and analysis of found footage, see William C. Wees,
Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films, New York: Anthology
Film Archives, 1993, and Rob Yeo, Cutting Through History. Found Footage in
Avant-Garde Filmmaking, in Stefan Basilico (ed.), Cut: Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video, Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 2004, 13-27.
15. See Jay Leyda, Films Beget Films, New York: Hill and Wang, 1964.
16. See Russell, 53-54. See also Bart Testa, Back and Forth. Early Cinema and the AvantGarde, Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1992.
17. To name only a few seminal works: Al Razutiss Lumires Train (Arriving at the
Station) (1973), David Rimmers Seashore ( 1971), Bruce Conners A Movie (1958),
Ken Jacobs Tom, Tom, the Pipers Son (1969).
18. On Jean Desmet and early film distribution, see Ivo Bloms invaluable Jean Desmet
and the Early Dutch Film Trade, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003.
19. On the resurgence of cinematic aura, see Dominique Pani, La trace et laura, in Le
cinma un art moderne, Paris: Cahiers du cinma, 1997, 159-168.
20. We could ask ourselves what kind of spectatorial identification takes place in front of
a decayed image. Laura U. Marks, for instance, suggests that we should reconsider
Metzs primary identification in such a case, as being precisely an identification with
dispersion, with loss of unified selfhood. (Loving a Disappearing Image, Cinmas
8-1,2 [Fall 1997] 98). Also, the identification process involved in the contemplation
of ruins could have been discussed at length, but would have exceeded the scope of
this essay.
21. The choice of music is not haphazard, and the list of certain titles suffices to add
another degree of signification to the work: Les pcheurs de perles by Bizet, The Island
of the Dead by Rachmaninov, Glucks Orpheo, etc.
22. Deleuze recalls in Logique du sens, this powerful phrase by Jean Bousquet: my
wound existed before me, I was born to embody it (Logique, 174).
23. Jacques Derrida, Autoportrait et autres ruines, 72. (Ruine : plutt cette mmoire ouverte
comme un il ou la troue dune orbite osseuse qui vous laisse voir sans rien vous montrer du
tout.)

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Works Cited
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Barthes, Roland. La chambre claire. Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1980.
Benjamin, Walter. Origine du drame baroque allemand. Trans. Sybelle Muller. Paris:
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Blanchot, Maurice. Lespace littraire. Paris: Gallimard, coll. NRF, 1955.
Cherchi Usai, Paolo. The Death of cinema. London: BFI, 2001.
Debray, Rgis. Trace, forme ou message ? , Les cahiers de mdiologie 7 (1999).
Deleuze, Gilles. Logique du sens. Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1969.
Dotte, Jean-Louis. Oubliez ! Les ruines, lEurope, le muse. Paris: LHarmattan, 1994.
Derrida, Jacques. Autoportrait et autres ruines. Paris: Runion des muses nationaux, coll.
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Pani, Dominique. Le temps expos. Le cinma de la salle au muse. Paris: Cahiers du cinma,
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philosophique , 2000.
Riegl, Alos. Le culte moderne des monuments, Son essence et sa gense [Der Moderne
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Starobinski, Jean. Linvention de la libert (1700-1789). Geneva: ditions dart Albert Skira,
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