CINEMA, SCENES, AESTHETICS: AN INTERVIEW WITH JACQUES RANCIÈRE

Author(s): JACQUES RANCIÈRE, MOZELLE FOREMAN and BÉCQUER SEGUÍN

Source: Diacritics , 2014, Vol. 42, No. 3 (2014), pp. 22-35
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/24810091

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 CINEMA, SCENES,
AESTHETICS
AN INTERVIEW WITH
JACQUESRANCIERE
JACQUES RANCIÈRE

MOZELLE FOREMAN

BÉCQUERSEGUIN

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Mozelle Foreman: You claim that the time after of the films of Béla Tarr is a time of "pure, mate Mozelle Foreman is a PhD candidate in
Romance Studies at Cornell University.
rial events, against which belief will be measured for as long as life will sustain it."' This claim would
almost seem to be a celebration of Béla Tarr's realism as one that disallows a fear of disillusionment.
Bécquer Seguin is a Mellon Sawyer
That is, we should not fear to be disillusioned if what we hope for is in fact to survive to prove our Seminar fellow and PhD candidate in

beliefs against the material world. Did you choose to write about Béla Tarr from a place of opti Romance Studies at Cornell University.

mism? Is your celebration of realism here also a celebration of the real?

Jacques Rancière: Writing on Béla Tarr was not my own decision. It was the commission
of the publisher, because there was a retrospective, Béla Tarr at the Centre Pompidou
in Paris.2 And so they wanted to have available a short book on Béla Tarr and even the
length of the text was decided by them. But, of course, I decided to write it, meaning I was
interested. My first intention was not at all to look at Béla Tarr from an optimistic point
of view. That was not my point. My point was only to try to spell out the reason for the
emotion that I could feel in front of a film by Béla Tarr. So my first intention was not really
to make any judgment but just to tell what happened on the screen from my point of view.
For me this only means that the very quality of Béla Tarr's images was linked to his refusal
to follow a certain mood, a certain mood about the end of communism, the end of illu
sions, the end of history. But I think that part of the beauty of the shots was linked to his
attitude toward his characters, which means, for instance, that, for me, also it's a choice.
I have some kind of revulsion toward a certain form of post-communist art as irony,
parody, disenchantment. Of course, I tend to value the post-communist artists who don't
follow this mood. But the point is, if there is a choice it is my choice and it is true that
my choice was to try to distinguish what happened on the screen from the mood of the
stories that the film tells. This is why much of my book was about the relation between
Krasznahorkai's books and Béla Tarr's films. Well, perhaps we will go back over this
point later. So what about the real? Well, it means that what Béla Tarr does for me is
turn issues of illusion and disillusion into issues of expectation, repetition, and change.
And this is in a sense what realism is about. Realism is also about the fact of refusing to
distinguish reality from illusion. I think there is a very false idea of realism as precisely
sticking to the real and putting illusions aside.
I think that's not at all the case and I think that in this respect Béla Tarr's work reminds
me of the work of a novelist, namely, Joseph Conrad. And Joseph Conrad will insist on
the fact that illusions and reverie—all this is real.3 So from a philosophical point of view
you can say that the attempts of those people are always only illusions and swindle etc.
etc. But that's not interesting for a realist artist. For a realist artist, there is no opposition
between the real and the imagination. The imagination of the characters, their fancies,
are part of the real. And from the point of view of the filmmaker, what is on the screen is
a kind of conflict between temporalities: the temporality of expectation—the rain pen
etrating the bodies and the soul—and the possibility of a sort of deviation from a circular,
repetitive time to a time when you draw a straight line to move forward. So this is what
realism means for me. And of course this means that realism is opposed to any kind of
disenchantment and resentment.

DIACRITICS Volume 42.3 (2014) 22-37 ©2015 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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24 DIACRITICS >> 2014 » 42.3

MF: In your discussion of B

characters' actions consist
ject for you, as is the cha
and to transform these in
the home in Almanac of F
could interrupt this intrig
justifies Béla Tarr's decisio
possibility of change."4 Ho
of finding event in dome
centered (his)stories that s

J R: Well, it was not my

no exit in general. But t
sphere that is at issue in
as the no-exit place: th
of course a certain stag
determined from the ve
of Jean-Paul Sartre's H
akin to the dramaturgy
react to the other person
this impossibility to mo
it's not at all a kind of n
I said that in the itiner
domestic stories that a
nism and its problems, t
disjunction between th
and the domestic there i
also meant a confineme
ity: trying to fit this st
certain tradition of the
through Sartre.51 don't
this anymore." But I thi
a new kind of intertwin
way in Sâtântangô the
at the same time there
of change, of illusion, of
idea about the possibilit
think that is how it ha
tance of women's figure
and also if I think of Th
In a way the domestic
is realism. The power o

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Cinema, Scenes, Aesthetics >> Mozelle Foreman and Bécquer Seguin, with Jacques Rancière 25

female figure at the end of The Man from London, Mrs. Brown, who embodies a kind of
figure of refusal. So I would say that from the inside of the domestic scene there is also
a power of refusal, a power of refusing a certain law, which is of course the law of male
authority but also the law of general corruption. So she is facing a world where corrup
tion has become the law and she decides not to agree and the film ends with her refusal.
She disappears from the screen into the white. I think there is this kind of displacement,
as I've tried to say, after Almanac of Fall and, more specifically of course, after Damna
tion. There is this shift toward this plot, which is a plot of conflicting times and a plot
also of conflicts between figures of swindlers and figures of idiots. And the idiot is the
one who refuses. In a way, he/she is a victim of the swindler but at the same time he/she
refuses the law of the swindler as the law of society, as the law of the rule. And the idiot
can be embodied as well by a man or a woman and also the swindler can be embodied
either by a man or a woman. I think that the sexual division has in a way been substituted
by this division between two kinds of person and the possibility of exchange between
positions and the sexes.

MF: Writing on Damnation, you describe Béla Tarr's "successful sequence shot. "6 This is a shot that
prefers to represent the penetration of the film's characters by the material world. I say "prefers,"
because you make it very clear that this is not the only kind of shot that the film might have con
structed. The consequence of this penetration, as you've heralded it, is that it might incite action,
but only where characters' actions are supplied with an "end." Do you believe that the corrupt ends
that you allude to in your discussion of Damnation, for instance, "winning," pollute or in any way
transform this sensible experience of penetration? And if so, how should we refer to it? Is a word like
trauma useful in this instance?

JR: I did not only, you know, connect the success of the sequence shot with mere penetra
tion. Look at the case when I analyze the sequence shot with the young Estike under the
rain. So the sequence shot is not only a story of penetration, it's always the story of the girl
moving forward in spite of the rain. The sequence shot is successful to the extent that at
the same time it shows penetration and it shows the escape from penetration. It is quite
obvious if you look at one sequence shot with the girl tired in the morning with all those
clothes strapped on her body; at the same time she wears the weight of misery, the weight
of the rain, etc. and she embodies a determination to move forward even with all this on
her shoulders. This is to say that the success of the sequence shot is not only linked to the
representation of the penetration of the rain into the body. This is the first point.
And the second point: in the case of Damnation, I think that the corruption, the
extreme corruption in the case of Karrer, is the fact that he doesn't even pursue this end
because there is this deviation that is proposed in going to pick up all of those unidenti
fied goods, drugs or alcohol, we don't know exactly. The point is that he doesn't even
want to seize this occasion or opportunity of deviating from the circle of the rain. And
so, of course, it's the old story of ethical corruption, but at the end of the film I would

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26 DIACRITICS >> 2014 >> 42.3

say that he, Karrer, is the

is a corrupt man who goe
confesses his own inability
end he joins the dogs. He
rupt ends. The point is abo
one thing, but it is not the
is not so much the end its
Sàtântangô is the way in w
course they move for a ver
goes with their walk that g
In this sense they struggle
you see this does not happ

MF: Your discussion of Béla

non-relation of the operations
these films, both of which ar
and madmen) to organizing or
camera to produce a fantastic
illusion. It is a matter of insert
This is one of the only instan
the fantastic, which is interest
understand this allusion as par
tion studies"? That is, the stud
study that you would formally

JR.- Well I think there are

have some distance from t
in many American progra
tion and very often the gap
I've always been interested
narration, and the visual plo
to look at the book or the n
time, such as in the case of
minimal. But at the same
There is a way in which H
of fascination, for instance
Tarr follows often very st
Sâtântangô really he is ver
meister Harmonies.
But at the same time I try to show how there is always this kind of deviation from
the logic of a Krasznahorkai novel, which is a very nihilistic, pessimistic view about the

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Cinema, Scenes, Aesthetics >> Mozelle Foreman and Bécquer Seguin, with Jacques Rancière

idiocies or the idiocy of people. And this is why I insisted on the figure of the idiot.
Because the idiot is described by Krasznahorkai as an idiot in the ordinary sense of
the word: first as a person that you can manipulate just as you like and, second, as also
the person who thinks that there is some kind of reason in the story itself. And there is
always this kind of irony on the part of Krasznahorkai toward the character. That is not
the case with Béla Tarr. So I insisted on the figure of the idiot really as a kind of force
going against the law of corruption, manipulation, swindling, etc.
But this means that also of course I tried to escape the schema of reality versus illu
sion. And it is within this context that I speak about fantastic elements in Werckmeister
Harmonies. But the fantastic is not produced by the film. It is not produced by the cam
era. The fantastic is a given of the story. So in the case of Werckmeister Harmonies, it
is not a fantastic film. It is a film where there is an element of phantasmagoria that is
introduced by the novel itself. But Béla Tarr seizes this precisely as a means of creating
a distance between the idiots and the law of corruption, which at the same time crushes
the idiots against that which they, at the same, rebel. The fantastic element in this case,
the whale, is connected with Valuska's attempt to create a world of harmony. But he
doesn't take into account the reality of corruption and so, for him, there is this world of
celestial harmony. This is what interests him. And what interests him even in the case
of the whale is not the whale as a symbol of evil. It's not something like in Melville at
all.9 It's something fantastic, something prodigious. Valuska makes this remark about the
wonder of nature, a new form of attestation of the cosmos as the wonderful universe,
which denies the reality in which all those swindlers organize the life in the town. What
is important is not so much the fantastic in and of itself as the fantastic as a tool to draw a
kind of line. There are people who take the measure of the fantastic of the unknown and
there are people who don't want to take it into account or who use the unknown just as a
means for manipulating people. This is, for me, the importance of the fantastic elements.
This is why I said that you must not think of it as if we are defining a kind of genre, but
as an element that allows Béla Tarr to construct the plot of conflicting worlds.

Bécquer Seguin: Speaking of the figures of the idiot and the swindler, I wanted to ask you about
those idle and useless parts of society in which you're so interested. From your very early work on
the nineteenth-century French working classes in Proletarian Nights through your contemporary
work on the aesthetic regime of art in Aisthesis, you have remained very attentive to the place
of leisure and idleness within society. One might attribute this emphasis to your antipathy toward
certain strains of Marxism, which value labor and work-time as the only spaces for emancipation.
But, beyond this, what do you find particularly important about the logic of leisure and idleness for
questions of emancipatory practice?

JR: My point of departure was not a kind of antipathy toward Marxism. My point of
departure was really the place of the issue of labor in emancipatory practice. I remem
ber my book Proletarian Nights, for instance. I started doing research on workers'

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 DIACRITICS >> 2014 >> 42.3

emancipation with the idea that I would deal with workers' struggles. Wha
was important was something different, not a kind of energy that would
to work and struggle. On the contrary, what was important was an attemp
ing a certain order of action with a certain order of time. I have often com
some texts by the joiner Gabriel Gauny and the moment when there is a kind o
He's still doing his work, but his gaze is outside and his mind is elsewhere.
strongly by the importance of the moments of interruption, which, for me, do
tify with some themes like Paul Lafargue's The Right to Be Lazy (1883). Th
point. My point is not laziness, but leisure. Leisure is a very strong concept,
of the division of time. I very often refer to Aristotle, to the opposition
and leisure.11 Rest is a moment of inactivity, the separation between two
the expenditure of energy in work. But leisure is the time of the free people, t
the people who have no need to work to earn a living. So leisure is not ent
Leisure is a strong category in the distribution of the sensible, in opposing
inhabiting and living in time. This is why I was so interested in this kind of ne
of workers trying to introduce leisure in their life (high culture, literature, ve
etc.) not only as a kind of education, but also as a construction of another t
was important for me.
I incidentally came upon Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man (
bookshop. I bought it. I read it. And I was struck by this kind of strong relation
what was theorized by Schiller after Kant under the issue of free play—a way o
the hierarchical distribution of the sensible—and the lived experience of th
search of emancipation. I thought there was something very important in t
has been more or less brushed aside by the Marxist tradition and the entire trad
thinks in terms of activity versus passivity. As I was working on Aisthesis, I m
problem. Very often modernity is described as a shift from representation
tion or to direct action. I said no: if modernity means something, it is to t
The old logic of action is more or less invaded by a logic of inaction, of rev
why, of course, I insisted on the role of reverie in Rousseau and how it was
Stendhal.121 always insisted on the fact that in all the transformations of
regime, there was very often this topic: novelty in art being really associat
inclusion of a certain form of inaction.

BS: You've organized Aisthesis into a series of fourteen scenes, which span from the mi
century to the mid-twentieth century. Each scene, you write, "is a little optical machin
us thought busy weaving together perceptions, affects, names and ideas, constituting
community that these links create, and the intellectual community that makes such w
able."'3 But these scenes are intentionally non-canonical from the perspective of art
can imagine the same book, like Auerbachs Mimesis, dealing with the most canonica
history and still reaching the same conclusion you do. What do you think would have b
such a book? Put differently, what do you think Aisthesis gains from treating non-can

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Cinema, Scenes, Aesthetics >> Mozelle Foreman and Bécquer Seguin, with Jacques Rancière 29

JR: The very notion of the canonical is an ambiguous one. Some moments have become
canonical in a certain interpretative framework. Think, for instance, of Duchamp. It is
obvious that Duchamp's gesture in 1913 did not matter much in art history. It became a
rupture only in the '60s. It became a point of discussion between modernism and post
modernism. So, you think that some of the scenes I describe are peripheral, but they
were crucial at that moment. For instance, Loïe Fuller was an icon of modern art, of new
art, and Chaplin too. So, in fact, being canonical may mean different things. I insisted on
some scenes that in a way were crucial or canonical at the moment, but have more or
less been brushed aside because they don't fit some interpretations of either modernity
or postmodernity.
It was not my intention to focus on scenes as canonical or non-canonical, but my
interest was rather to focus on scenes where you could see an object or performance
shift from the sphere of non-art, low art, popular art, to a paradigm of high art. This is the
case with the Hanlon-Lees. You can think that it's very peripheral, but at the same time
in France, the two poets, Théophile Gautier and Théodore de Banville, who made the
theoretical fortune of pantomime and those kinds of spectacles, were canonical poets.
And, they were more or less embodiments of art for art's sake. So, what interests me is
this moment when so-called popular art became a model for art for art's sake, precisely
because it was performance for the sake of performance. So it's important to choose
some scenes that at the same time illustrate this shift from low art to high art. And, of
course, I chose scenes that question the modernist doxa.

BS: Because you've selected such peripheral moments for present art history—and, I think it's
important that you make this distinction between what art history would have included as canonical
in the past from what is canonical for the present—I can imagine that many art historians today will
not take your book seriously enough or might challenge it on the grounds that your analysis does
not work for canonical scenes of the present. What if you were to rewrite Aisthesis with scenes that
are considered canonical today? Would these canonical moments, like, say, the summer of 1911 when
Picasso and Braque developed cubism in Céret, lead to similar conclusions? Or, would this have
altered the entire project of Aisthesis?

JR: Well, first, I'm not an art historian. Let's say that I'm an archeologist of the aes
thetic regime of art. What interests me is the constitution of a certain regime of experi
ence. I'm not concerned with the transformation of painting techniques or things like
that. I'm interested in the relation between some works of art as artistic performance
and the whole network of perceptions, of judgments, that make them high art and artis
tic performances at all. I'm interested really in the relation of the work to an observer,
to a commenter. Which also means that the structure of the scene is determined by
the possibility of having a text from which it would be possible for me to unfold this
whole system of transformations in forms of perception, affect, and other interpretative
schémas. This is why I focused on some scenes that provided me with a significant

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 DIACRITICS >> 2014 >> 42.3

textual network. Other scenes happened quite incidentally. For instance, I ca

Hanlon-Lees very late and through a bizarre detour. But when I found this t
ville, I thought it epitomized all kinds of modes of perception that transformed
idea of art, the relation between popular art and high art.141 wanted to disc
that I love so much, Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jat
but there exist no interesting texts. There are some texts by Félix Fénéon, which
bad, but it was impossible for me to construct the event of the Grande Jatte fro
I had to give up the idea of the Grande Jatte and take Rodin as a substitute becau
was this extraordinary text by Rilke about Rodin.15 So, in a way, Rodin was subs
impressionism because there was the possibility for constructing a set of possibil
rethinking art through Rilke's text.
What happens is that painting is an art that has been drawn into such a
comments, and comments, and comments that I cannot really deal with th
thing. If you think of Cézanne, for instance, the strange thing is that peop
him as the painter of the flesh of things. At the same time, most of the things
said about Cézanne come from the so-called interview of Cézanne by Joachim
which was mostly pure imagination by Gasquet himself.16 At the same time
Ponty, Deleuze, etc. construct the figure of Cézanne from the text by Gasquet.17
that precisely because painting was supposed to be the canonical art, it was s
be the art upon which you could identify the change, the rupture, the revo
huge amount of commenters makes the picture, in a sense, unintelligible for me.

BS: Throughout Aisthesis you develop your idea of the aesthetic regime against the b
the previous representative regime. But this doesn't mean, of course, that the aesthet
without certain logics of representation, that we find ourselves today in a world of
objects, affects, and ideas. How would you characterize the reformulation of previous id
resentation in the aesthetic regime? And, how have ideas of representation, characte
philosophical slippage between the German terms Darstellung and Vorstellung, chang
course of the aesthetic regime?

JR: I think that at a certain point in history there was this opposition, Darstellu
Vorstellung. And, I remember of course when I was a young student in char
venting Marxism, reading Capital, and reinventing the true meaning of Capital, o
I insisted on Darstellung. The idea was that the young Marx is ideological. It's
stellung. But, of course, the old Marx is the scientific Marx because he uses D
I'm not sure the opposition is so strong in the German language between D
and Vorstellung. It has become a kind of canonical opposition because it can
idea of modernity, where we get away from representation, mimesis, figuration,
move toward performance of the body as the core of art. I think that this is a ra
description of the aesthetic revolution.

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Cinema, Scenes, Aesthetics >> Mozelle Foreman and Bécquer Seguin, with Jacques Rancière 31

It is true, at the same time, there is this attempt in the so-called artistic revolution to
substitute a kind of direct performance for representation alluding to something out
side. But I would say that representation, in the sense of a relation to an outside, always
comes back. Think, for instance, in the description of the dance of Loïe Fuller by Mal
larmé.18 This dance is a pure performance, there's no story. But, at the same time, this
performance is something like writing, corporeal writing, but it must be read. In a way,
the part of mimesis has been transferred to the spectator. The spectator must constitute
the mimesis. I've always tried to show that in the aesthetic regime there was always
this kind of balance of opposite logics. This is what I tried to say in the case of film, for
instance, in Film Fables (2001). I started from this will, in this case, spelled out by Jean
Epstein, this pretension to substitute a kind of direct writing of light and movement for
the old stories. But at the same time, what Epstein does is look at a film and tell a story,
transforming film into a kind of pure sequence of moments and movement.
I think that if representation means translation then it is still the art of the aesthetic
regime. In a sense, what the aesthetic regime invented is a multiplicity of forms of transla
tion in the case of cinema or in the case of the dance of Loïe Fuller. I think it is a reason for
the importance of some arts like film. In the end, film becomes the most representative of
the arts. In the beginning, it was supposed to be a new aesthetic art, doing away with plot,
psychology of characters, etc. It happened exactly to the contrary. For me, what's inter
esting is that film always witnesses these kinds of confrontations between two logics:
when you have two shots that, at the same time, are part of a story. The spectator remem
bers just some shorts and reconstructs the film. Think, for instance, in what Godard did
in Histoire(s) du cinema: reconstructing the history of film through some shots extracted
from their context and from the story. I'm not at all saying that he's wrong in doing this.
In a way, this is the activity of the spectator. I think what's interesting is that the logic
of the aesthetic regime is this logic that invents new forms of translation, transposition,
but it also gives to the spectator and the reader the task of taking the part of the mimesis.
The idea of the mimesis was that there was some kind of natural harmony between the
artistic work and the sensibility of the persons to whom the work was destined. What is
interesting in aesthetic art is the kind of indétermination of the performance that asks
the spectator to construct his or her own mimetic relation to the work.

BS: Though you said you're not an art historian, one might characterize your book as a philosophy
of aesthetics. Indeed, in the second chapter of Aisthesis you identify Hegel's reading of Murillo's
Beggar Boys as a pivotal moment in the aesthetic regime of art. Yet, throughout the book, you only
briefly treat the discipline of the philosophy of aesthetics. Between the first chapter on Winckel
mann and the second on Hegel, for example, there exists a gap of more than half a century during
which Lessing, Kant, and Schiller published their major treatises on aesthetics. Why doesn't the
philosophy of aesthetics feature more prominently in Aisthesis? What has that discipline remained
blind to? And, what kind of challenge do you hope to present to it?

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32 DIACRITICS » 2014 » 42.3

JR: I'm aware that many of

I'm not a philosopher of ae
not interested in starting fr
I've read all these authors.
be impossible had I not rea
was not about aesthetic the
new paradigm of art as I'v
This is why, for instance, H
a whole system of aestheti
he describes the Beggar Bo
is how Hegel puts to the f
and history painting, high a
tion it is possible to constr
French Revolution and the
been ransacked by the Frenc
of a scene of painting as p
ing was no longer judged wi
genre of painting. In this c
In another case, the same
Rilke. In other cases, it may
exhibition or Dziga Vertov's
something or some perfor
though I've read a lot of th
the scene, as I said, like a
have nothing against aesth
a regime of experience? I d
pher can answer. Sometimes
it may be Schiller, it may b
as a theory of art with th
exist at all.

BS: Though you're not an art h

ential in the art world. Hal Fos
tion of the sensible," calling it
things into signs,' little more th
of what you may think of Fos
critics and practitioners. You h
elude in your work. How do you
institutional art historian peer
to artists, practitioners, and art

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Cinema, Scenes, Aesthetics >> Mozelle Foreman and Bécquer Seguin, with Jacques Rancière 33

JR: First, I must confess that I have not read this article by Hal Foster. I'm very often
asked about what I think about Hal Foster's text. Someday, I shall read it, but I have not
yet done so. But, if I can just comment on your quotation, which has been commented
by many people, by saying that the redistribution of the sensible is not at all a panacea
because it is not a medicine. I don't propose a kind of future saying for the politics of art.
It is not a motto for a kind of flag for the political struggle of artists. So, it's not wish
ful thinking. It's just something I try to analyze in artistic practice, in interpretations of
artistic practice. It is no more.
I tried to think about the notions of modern and postmodern art and to construct a
view of art today. And, of course, it is why I think some people like Hal Foster or people
that have been art historians for a long time are angry to see an intruder come into the
middle of the field. I'm perfectly aware at the same time that some words, "the redis
tribution of the sensible," have become mere phrases. When curators invite me, they
say, "I'm preparing this or that biennale and it is entirely influenced by your view of the
redistribution of the sensible." Most of the time, I know that it's only a phrase. Very often
it's the same for artists who want a text for their catalogue and they say how far and
deeply they've been influenced by the revolutionary practice of the redistribution of the
sensible. I try to take it without illusion, but at the same time without shame. I just see
how it circulates.

It's true that if my work gained a certain celebrity at the beginning of this century, it
was done by curators and people of the art milieu and not by philosophers. So, I'm obliged
to take the whole situation into account. When I was writing Aisthesis, my whole prob
lem was with my sources and how to interpret my sources. At this moment, I'm very far
from the artistic scene. At no moment in writing Aisthesis did I have a concern with what
they would think of it. I think that probably they're not so much at ease with Aisthesis
because it doesn't confirm the superficial idea they can have of the meaning of my work.

BS: Have there been any particular artists or practitioners that you've exchanged with or dialogued
with who have influenced you?

JR: Well, I would say that there are a lot of artists who ask me to write texts for their
exhibition or for their catalogue. I've written, for example, for James Coleman and sev
eral others. It's true that I've had some dialogues with artists. I don't think that these
dialogues were very influential for me because most of the artists I was in touch with
were coming very widely from the scene of conceptual art. This is not at all, of course,
the scene from which Aisthesis comes. Which means that perhaps each time I have to
discuss their art, I try to make a shift, like we discussed with Béla Tarr and Kraszna
horkai. When you write about an author, a filmmaker, an artist, for me, the point is not to
try to give reasons for why they did what they did, but rather what it means to me, which
means that I feel free to give to the work of an artist another meaning than the one given
by the artist him/herself.

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34 DIACRITICS » 2014 » 42.3

Notes

This interview12 See Rousseau, Reveries

took of the Solitary April
place Walker; 8
New York. and Stendhal, The Red and the Black and The Charter
house of Parma.
1 Rancière, Béla Tarr, the Time After, 9.
13 Rancière, Aisthesis, xi.
2 "Béla Tarr: Retrospective intégrale," November
29, 2011-January 2, 2012, http://www.festival-automne. 14 See Banville, preface to Mémoires et panto
com/edition-2011/be-tarr-retrospective-integrale. mimes des frères Hanlon Lees; and Rancière, Aisthesis,
75-91.
3 See Rancière, The Politics of Literature, 136-37.
15 Rilke, Auguste Rodin (1903).
4 Rancière, Béla Tarr, the Time After, 24.
16 See Gasquet, Joachim Gasquet's Cézanne: A
5 See Rancière, The Aesthetic Unconscious, 78.
Memoir with Conversations (1921).

6 Rancière, Béla Tarr, the Time After, 35.

17 See Merleau-Ponty, "Cézanne's Doubt" (1945)
7 Ibid., 54. and "Eye and Mind" (i960), in The Merleau-Ponty
Aesthetics Reader, 59-75 and 121-49; and Deleuze,
8 See Rancière, Film Fables, 113-16. Francis Bacon.

9 See Rancière, Béla Tarr, the Time After, 53. 18 Mallarmé, Divagations, 135-37.

10 See, for example, Rancière, Proletarian Nights,

19 Foster, "Post-Critical," 6.
76-91.

11 See Aristotle, Physics, 192b2-23.

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Cinema, Scenes, Aesthetics >> Mozelle Foreman and Bécquer Seguin, with Jacques Rancière 35

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