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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/08/21, SPi
OX F O R D E N G L I SH M O N O G R A P H S
General Editors
R O S BA L L A ST E R
PAU L I NA K EW E S
L AU R A M A R C U S
H E AT H E R O’ D O N O G H U E
M AT T H EW R EY N O L D S
F IO NA S TA F F O R D
Complicating
Articulation in
Art Cinema
B E N E D IC T M O R R I S O N
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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© Benedict Morrison 2021
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of Figures ix
Introduction: Articulating Art Cinema 1

The Many Faces of Film Articulation 1
Cinema’s Forms of Articulation 2
The Critical State of Art Cinema 8
Eccentric Inarticulacy 20
Critical Eccentricity 25
The Articulated Structure of this Book 28
1. Articulation in Ruins: Complicating Style in Germania anno zero 31
At Point Zero: Mise en Scène and the Ruins of Meaning 31
Ironic Causation: Manifold Explanation in Eccentric Play 36
Between Styles: The Synthesis of Realism and Formativism? 42
In Place of Meaning: The Ethics of Inarticulacy 52
2. Telling Tales: Complicating Narration in Journal d’un curé
de campagne 56
The Diary’s Order Established 56
The Diary’s Order Challenged 63
The Diary’s Withdrawal from Time and Place 70
The Diary as Consolation 73
3. Untidying the Image: Complicating Editing in Belle de Jour 79
Cuts in the Film 79
Cuts in the Mind 82
A Surfeit of Significance 90
A Polluted Logic 93
An Irruption of Order 96
The Box Bursts Open 100
4. Queering Articulation: Complicating Bricolage in The Long
Day Closes 105
Post-traumatic Articulation 105
Bricolaged Echoes in the Silence 108
Cultural Articulations 111
Radical Recontextualizations in The Long Day Closes 113
Inarticulate Character 116
Queering Inarticulacy 119
Silent Characters without Beginning and End 124
vi Contents
5. The Technology of Articulation: Complicating Intermedia in

The Pillow Book 128
Losing Your Voice: Revenge in Place of Character 128
Dismembered Forms and the Inarticulate Body 131
Piles of Old Bones 134
Spinning Axes 139
Flattening Positions 143
Skin Deep 146
6. Indecipherable Lostness: Complicating Genre in Meek’s Cutoff 153
Articulating Genre 153
Meaning Cut Off 158
Getting Lost in the Western 162
Unstable Signifiers 164
The Threat of the Meaningless 168
Cultural Exchange 171
The Unknowing of Genre 174
Conclusion 180
The Haunted Cinema 180
Rhizomatic Structures 181
The Mythic Critic 183
Filmography 187
Bibliography 191
Index 201
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Andrew Klevan for his dedicated and generous supervision
of the DPhil thesis of which this is a revised version. Without his constant sup-
port and inspirational friendship, this book would certainly not have been pos
sible. I am grateful to the members of the Faculty of English at the University of
Oxford for their encouragement and advice. I am especially appreciative of the
kindness shown to me by Laura Marcus, who was always willing to discuss my
ideas; she and Ian Garwood, who together examined my thesis, offered sugges-
tions for improvement which have made a tremendous contribution to the subse-
quent revisions. Members of Merton College at the University of Oxford, and
Richard McCabe and Simon Jones in particular, provided friendship and encour-
agement while I completed my DPhil studies. I would also like to extend my
thanks to the AHRC, whose financial assistance made this research possible. I am
thankful to Eleanor Collins at Oxford University Press for her support in prepar-
ing this monograph for publication, and the anonymous readers of the draft
manuscripts, whose advice has helped me greatly.
My colleagues at the University of Exeter have been unstinting with their time,
expertise, and affection while I have been working on this book. I can think of no
finer place to work and no more exhilarating a group of academics to work
amongst. Angelique Richardson, Peter Riley, Debra Ramsay, and Ranita Chatterjee
have been especially generous in their support. I would also like to thank my
undergraduate and postgraduate students for the stimulating discussions that
have significantly contributed to my developing ideas.
Part of Chapter 4 appeared as ‘Inarticulate Lives: A Reading of the Opening to
Terence Davies’ The Long Day Closes’, in Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism 8 (2019),
7–13. Part of Chapter 5 appeared as ‘Dismembered Frames: Dialectic Intermedia
in Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book’ in Open Screens 3(1):6 (2020), 1–31. I am
grateful to the editors of both journals for allowing me to reproduce the material
in revised form.
I offer my love and gratitude, as always, to my mother and father, my sister
Emily, and my friends Marco Alessi, Hannah Croft, Nathan Ellis, Victor Fedyashov,
Jorge Gonzalo, Derek Hollman, Alexander Karlberg, Anne Kelly, Kate Leadbetter,
Harrison Pearce, Miranda Pountney, Benji Walters, Sebastian Wedler, Harriet
Wragg, Jordy, Oscar, Princess, and Teddy. They have all helped to transform my
analysis and argument for the better. I owe an especial debt to my partner Andrzej
whose brilliance has shaped and sharpened my work and to whom I dedicate this
book with much love.
List of Figures
1.1 The cinema of impoverishment in Germania anno zero48

1.2 Pietà amongst ruins in Germania anno zero51
2.1 The disordered world of Journal d’un curé de campagne60
2.2 Inarticulate transitions in Journal d’un curé de campagne74
3.1 Symbolic surfeit in Belle de Jour86
3.2 Shades of surrealism in Belle de Jour99
4.1 Bricolaged silence in The Long Day Closes107
4.2 Staged homoeroticism in The Long Day Closes125
5.1 Fluid distinctions in The Pillow Book137
5.2 Montage as collage in The Pillow Book140
6.1 The illegible landscape of Meek’s Cutoff166
6.2 Unreadable glyphs in Meek’s Cutoff171
Introduction
Articulating Art Cinema
The Many Faces of Film Articulation
Film articulation is a delicate balancing act between the two everyday senses of
the word: clear expression and the multi-partedness of a jointed structure. As an
articulated medium, film follows the structural linguistics model of articulation
as the operation of several, separable parts of an utterance working together to
create a text’s meanings. Classical narrative cinema has responded to the demands
of this balancing act by privileging clear expression over multi-partedness; multi-
jointed form—comprising multiple signifiers recorded in multiple shots and
sounds on multiple linked pieces of filmstrip—is disavowed as the celluloid frag-
ments are seamlessly stitched together in a cinema which denies its own discon
tinuities. Critics and viewers are more likely to note (and celebrate) a film’s clear
expression of character, theme, or story than the disjunctions of its transitions.
The seamless formal continuity of classical cinema is often matched by a fluency
of spoken dialogue, which largely abandons the banalities of small talk and fillers
and devotes itself to the revelation of character. In both form and character-
content, such a cinema privileges clear expression over the intimation of multi-
parted form.
Such cooperation, however, is not guaranteed, and clearly expressed meaning
can be complicated if the joints of cinematic structure are allowed to creak. Some
films do not smooth their transitions, and instead make them visible and audible
as the stuttering convulsions of an articulation that sets the expression of its own
multi-partedness above clear meaning. This book is particularly interested in
films that combine this self-reflexive foregrounding of formal discontinuity with
characters who struggle to speak. Such a combination is often a feature of the
cinematic mode referred to critically as art cinema. Film criticism has been keen
to find a way to account for these formal and character complications, and it has
often done so by justifying disjunctive form and inarticulate character as sympa-
thetic expressions of one another. According to this approach, form explains
character and character explains form in a kind of critical Mobius strip that
reduces two sides to one. Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema argues that this
Mobius strip has, in fact, all the illogic of an Escher drawing, and that criticism
has been over-hasty in identifying a sympathetic balance between complicated
form and inarticulate character. This is a study of the productive breakdown in
sympathy between form and character and criticism.
Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema. Benedict Morrison, Oxford University Press. © Benedict Morrison 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894069.003.0001
2 Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema
Cinema’s Forms of Articulation
As Gilberto Perez suggests, ‘[f]ilm is an art of fragments, but of fragments pieced

together, parts put together to make a whole.’1 The articulated relationship
between the multiple ‘fragments’ and the meaningful (‘whole’) text has been of
central concern in the historic development of both film practice and film theory.
In classical narrative cinema, in order to discipline these parts into wholes, the
joints (or transitions) between the elements, each of which could be an interrup-
tion of linear meaning, is controlled; Stephen Heath describes a series of ‘compos
itional rules for spatial clarity and continuity’, in which ‘continuity as smoothness
in transitions . . . [is] fully continuous, reconstitutive.’2 Continuity of meaning is
made possible by seamlessness of articulation. However, as every film is articu-
lated—that is, made up of connected fragments—every film faces the constant
danger of dissolving into its constitutive parts. The transitions—albeit smoothed
and conventionalized in much narrative cinema—stubbornly remain transitions;
a cut, even allowing for careful temporal and spatial matching, remains an inter-
ruption in the linear movement of the film image.3 As with any material, a well-
stitched film might still rip at the seams. Noël Burch outlines the history of the
rules of continuity:
As the techniques for breaking down an action into shots and sequences were
developed and refined, these continuity rules became more and more firmly fixed,
methods ensuring that they would be respected were perfected, and their
underlying aim, to make any transition between two shots that were spatially con-
tinuous or in close proximity imperceptible, became increasingly apparent . . . [This]
soon resulted in what we might call the zero point of cinematic style.4
Cinema, in its dominant narrative mode has sought to make its own articulations
‘imperceptible’ by adopting rules designed to ensure that the medium succeeds in
creating (narrative, perceptual, ideological) coherence despite its multi-
partedness. Continuity editing is an articulated form that arranges contiguous
fragments in a linear sequence in which progress from one fragment to the next is
1 Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and the Medium (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1998), 303.
2 Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1981),
16 and 17.
3 A further foundational discontinuity is disavowed at the level of the film image’s illusion of
motion. This discontinuity arises in the black space between the filmstrip’s static images. Jean-Louis
Baudry argues that ‘the mechanical apparatus both selects the minimal difference and represses it in
projection, so that meaning can be constituted: it is at once direction, continuity, movement’ (Jean-
Louis Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, in Film Quarterly 28, no. 2
[Winter 1974–5]: 43). While offering significant opportunities for further reflection, this disavowal is
not the focus of this present study.
4 Noël Burch, Theory of Film Practice (London: Secker and Warburg, 1973), 11.
Introduction 3
defined by a smooth seamlessness and meaning appears immanent. Roland

Barthes suggests that this veiling over of discontinuity by seeming-continuity is
fundamental to all articulation; while ‘meaning can arise only from an articula
tion’ of contiguous signs, it must, nevertheless, also be ‘at the same time continu-
ous’, compensating for the fact that continuous phenomena (such as the ‘spectrum
of the colours’) are ‘verbally reduced to a series of discontinuous terms’.5
Expression, then, is the disavowal of linguistic discontinuities in an attempt to
reclaim the perceived continuities of the real world. Trevor Whittock argues that
this process responds to a fundamental need:
Art aims to satisfy this need by offering us symbolic works in which comprehen-
sive design reigns. For the artist the achievement of that comprehensive design
is everything. This credo will often incorporate the view that art celebrates af
fi n
ities and synchronicities, chords and correspondences beyond the grasp of logic,
and in so doing answers to our deepest yearnings for and intimations of
wholeness.6
The seamless articulation of classical film form may be contrasted with the dia
lectic articulation of Soviet montage (which David Bordwell discriminates as a
‘historical materialist’ mode).7 Marie-Claire Ropars considers Eisenstein’s Soviet
montage to be an example of film écriture, in which meaning is set in play by the
aporia of disjunctive form:
[C]inematographic making, without which cinema is merely technology, can

only subscribe to the combinatory method by a choice of editing: there can be
no film without an investment in one mode of articulation that will bind the
becoming-filmic of this heterogeneous plurality, from shot to shot, track to
track. If continuity in the sequence of movements and convergence in the rela-
tion of sight and speech support narrative unification in hybrid cinema, another
current, inverse and recurrent, has speculated on the power of temporal and
spatial disjunction inherent in the initiation of a free montage: the clash between
shots lacking the links that reduce discontinuity, the divergent simultaneity of
visual and verbal sequences are at the heart of experimentation from Eisenstein
to Resnais.8
5 Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London: Jonathan
Cape, 1967), 64.
6 Trevor Whittock, Metaphor and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 107.
7 David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press,
1985), 234–73.
8 Marie-Claire Ropars, ‘On Filmic Rewriting: Contamination of the Arts or Destruction of Art’s
Identity,’ in Porous Boundaries: Texts and Images in Twentieth-Century French Culture, ed. Jerôme
Game, trans. Malcolm Philips (Pieterlen: Peter Lang Publishing Group, 2007), 5.
In her discussion of aesthetic synthesis, Ropars employs a post-structuralist

vocabulary to discuss this destabilizing effect, in which ‘totalisation disappears in
the originary attraction of a shifting and multiple relation which replaces syn-
cretic unification with an explosive différance.’9 Eisenstein’s experimentation,
however, was not dedicated to the différance of discontinuous form. His dialectic
articulation makes the articulated joints of its form visible, even uncomfortable,
in order to produce intellectual syntheses. Sergei Eisenstein’s 1929 essay
‘A Dialectic Approach to Film Form’ developed the idea that film, both formally
and diegetically, operates according to a dialectic model. The objective of any
film, the essay suggests, is to communicate meaning through the violent synthesis
of conceptual units by:
the conflict of two pieces in opposition to each other. By conflict . . . A view that
from the collision of two given factors arises a concept.10
Both ‘the collision of individual shots’ and ‘conflict’ within cause-and-effect nar-
rative establish abstracts in opposition with succeeding negatives, resolved ultim
ately in conclusive conceptual concretes.11 This dialectic structure—operating at
the level of both form and narrative—has a teleological goal: meaningful articula
tion. This putting together of fragments into a totality characterizes the utopian
dialectic hermeneutic act. Intellectual montage is the preeminent form of dia
lectic articulation, theorized by Pudovkin as ‘the combination of those pieces’ of
cut celluloid into meaning through editing.12 The sequence of successive shots,
described by Christian Metz as ‘the filmic chain’, forms ‘a sort of articulation of
the reality shown on the screen . . . It is well known that the nature of cinema is to
transform the world into discourse.’13
Dialectic articulation does not observe the classical rules of continuity which
are designed to efface the possible and dangerous tensions of partedness. Despite
this, the idea of immanent meaning remains in place; each montage sequence
promises to produce ‘an organic embodiment of a single idea conception, embra
cing all elements, parts, details of the film-work’.14 Burch discusses this process as
a kind of linear simultaneity, like a dismembered cubist painting played through
time. He argues that meaning:
9 Ropars (2007), 5.
10 Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. Jay Leda (New York: Harcourt, Brace
& World, 1949), 37.
11 Eisenstein (1949), 49 and 46. Georg Hegel prefers this terminology, rather than
thesis—synthesis—antithesis.
12 Quoted in Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 103.
13 Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1974), 106 and 115.
14 Eisenstein (1949), 254.
Introduction 5
exists only in terms of the totality of shots included in the sequence; we no

longer have any sense of the surrounding space endowed with independent
existence from which a sequence of shots has somehow been excerpted. Rather
we see a space that exists in the same many-faceted, complex way that Braque’s
billiard table exists; we see a setting that is the sum total of all the perspectives of
it embodied in the successive shots.15
Bordwell summarizes Eisenstein’s position as the attempt to rediscover ‘unity

from a basis of fragmentation, but without concealing the fragmentation in doing
so’.16 Despite different attitudes to the question of whether or not to make articu
lation visible in their contrasting editing practices, seamless articulation and dia
lectic articulation are equally determined to produce meaningful unity from the
relationship between the film’s formal parts. Both seamless and dialectic articula
tion are centred forms, and their stable meanings rest upon notions of auteur,
narrative, and character.
Like dialectically articulated montage, art cinema often complicates seamless-
ness, and foregrounds disruptive formal gestures such as alinear narrative, pro-
lepsis and analepsis, jump cuts, and shifts in genre or mode. I argue that art
cinema’s distinct achievement is to engage a different strategy of foregrounding
these (narrative, formal, and ideological) discontinuities without necessarily
committing to a teleological notion of clear meaning. This eccentric form does not
structure itself around a stable and meaning-producing centre, and represents
more effectively Ropars’ notion of film écriture. Norman J. Holland, in one of the
earliest critical accounts of art cinema, suggests that this fragmentation and the
reality it (re)constructs are different from those of dialectic articulation; he con-
trasts the ways in which Eisenstein ‘aims to communicate his socialist and Marxist
message’ using ‘symbols [that] serve that end’ with the art filmmaker whose ‘sym-
bols serve not so much to communicate as to suggest or even to mystify.’17 This
mystification stems from the art cinematic rejection of Soviet dialectic, and a use,
instead, of a negative dialectic form, in which colliding elements continue to
interact intellectually but refuse to produce a synthesis. This complicated articula
tion produces narratives in which coincidence, combination, and correlation
dominate, and causation is denied or at least queried; as Bert Cardullo says, ‘one
event follows another but is not caused by it.’18
Formally, the joints of an art film’s articulated structure become more than
transitional points between fragments. They become conceptual spaces in which
15 Burch (1973), 39.

16 David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 88.
17 Norman J. Holland, ‘The Puzzling Movies: Their Appeal’, in The Journal of the Society of
Cinematologists 3 (1963): 18.
18 Bert Cardullo, ‘Art-House Cinema, Avant-Garde Film, and Dramatic Modernism’, The Journal of
Aesthetic Education 45, no. 2 (2011): 5.
meaning is suspended in a state of might- be-

madeness. Quoting Giorgio
Agamben, Laura Mulvey points out that ‘[c]inema . . . is a prolonged hesitation
between image and meaning.’19 These art films become networks of such small-
scale incoherencies, each of which at least potentially interrupts meaning in the
unnavigable transitions between shots, narrative strands, modes, styles, genres. In
Ropars’ terms these are ‘[w]eak times, dead times; the important thing is “between
acts”, what is drawn out right across time and remains incomplete.’20 These transi-
tions defy meaning by both foregrounding their own existence (unlike the transi-
tions of seamless articulation, which are self-effacing) and resisting any attempt
to draw a definitive interpretation of them. Such transitions, operating outside
the hermeneutic conventions of classical cinema, may look ‘untidy’.21 Critical
accusations of untidiness are often a marker for the eccentricities of complicated
articulation.
It is tempting to respond by composing lists of formal features that contribute
to art cinema’s complicated articulation. András Bálint Kovács, expanding on
earlier critical work, includes ‘episodic structure’, ‘permanent gaps in narrative
motivation and chronology’, ‘frequent use of symbolic rather than realist linkage
of images’, ‘open-ended narratives’, ‘use of collage principle’, and ‘serial construc-
tion’ among the eccentric features of the mode.22 This book, however, does not
offer an inventory of techniques that result in complicated articulation. Such
inventories can too easily become dogmatic checklists, and the attentive close
readings of Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema make no claims to be defini-
tive. They do not even try to suggest that the techniques discussed complicate
articulation whenever and wherever they occur. I position art cinema as a trans-
gressive, anti-normative category of cinematic art which will not adhere to any set
of rules or conventions that I could possibly come up with. Nor do I suggest that
the critical term ‘art cinema’ signifies a stable genre of films that are or do any one
thing in particular. The book’s aim might more accurately be said to be a compli-
cation of the idea of art cinema. The category was discussed alongside classical
and historical-materialist cinemas by David Bordwell in his monumental 1985
study of Narration in the Fiction Film. I would like to supplement these categories
with the more openly unstable, flexible interpretative frameworks of seamless,
dialectic, and complicated articulation. Rather than categorizing whole films, this
alternative critical vocabulary allows for the more fine- tuned discussion of
unfolding sequences and moments; this is less about whole meanings or
19 Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity: Cinema and the Mind’s Eye. 2nd ed. (London: BFI,
2013), xvii.
20 Marie- Claire Ropars, ‘A Cinematic Language’, trans. Adrian Mitchell, Esprit (June 1960):
accessed 28 June 2020, http://rouge.com.au/11/cinematic_language.html, 2.
21 Michael Wood, Belle de Jour (London: BFI, 2000), 12.
22 András Bálint Kovács, Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950–1980 (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2007), 61–2.
Introduction 7
identities, and more about the observation of specific local achievements. A clas
sical Hollywood production may well employ sequences of dialectic or compli-
cated articulation. Resisting essentialist taxonomies, this alternative demands
attentive close reading and the bringing into visibility of the formal practices that
are at the root of a film’s meaning-(un)making.
Complicated formal practices produce proliferating, rather than concentrat-
ing, meanings, which cannot be herded into neatly rhyming arrangements. The
complicated articulation of art cinema (unlike seamless articulation) makes vis
ible the fragmented plurality of its formal elements: multiple shots strung together
in the syntagmatic arrangements of montage, and the vertical arrangements of
multiple simultaneous expressions across the image- and soundtrack. The twin
concepts of seamlessness (that one image smoothly develops into the next) and
redundancy (that ‘sound and image should complete each other by dealing differ-
ently with the same subject, thereby expressing something not possible by one of
the media alone’) will not discipline this proliferation satisfactorily.23 Both are
disrupted by counterpoint, in which the isolated semiotic systems of plotting,
cinematography, editing, mise en scène, and sound speak across and over each
other, both complementary and contradictory.
Complicated articulation—which deconstructs the myths of seamlessness and
redundancy—generates multiple meanings out of excessive formal gestures. The
close readings of this book propose an eccentricity in which discontinuity replaces
seamlessness, and iterability replaces redundancy. Most importantly, close read-
ing of art cinema’s complicated articulation frustrates any utopian attempt to
resolve a film critically into a singular meaning. Eleftheria Thanouli argues that ‘a
minute analysis of the formal elements’ of a film allows a critical redefinition that
can better recognize ‘the rich nuances of the cinematic language . . . even if it
convinces us in the end to abandon the idea of “art cinema” as a grand narrative
paradigm once and for all.’24 This demands the careful notation of a film’s net-
works of (potentially contradictory) formal achievements.
The opposite of close reading is what Franco Moretti has referred to as distant
reading. While Moretti calls attention productively to the ways in which certain
close reading regimes can reinforce canons, he does not allow for the fact that
close reading may do the very opposite. Close reading is urgently needed in order
to show how canons—and systems more generally—are never nuanced enough to
allow for the radical instability of texts. Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema
challenges Moretti’s argument that ‘[i]f we want to understand the system in its
entirety, we must accept losing something’ when that something is ‘the text’.25
23 Jennifer O’Meara, Engaging Dialogue: Cinematic Verbalism in American Independent Cinema

(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 42.
24 Eleftheria Thanouli, ‘ “Art Cinema” ’ Narration Today: Breaking down a Wayward Paradigm’,
Scope 14, (June 2009): 11.
25 Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review 1 (Jan/Feb 2000): 54.
This book is a defence of text over system, and momentary formal achievement
over whole text. I suggest that systems are often critic-led tidyings-up of complex-
ity and, like all tidyings-up, are ideological. They impose samenesses which over-
look the destabilizing differences on screens and soundtracks. What occurs on
screen is refracted through interpretation in order to produce meaning. Tom
Conley suggests that, in fact, ‘the heterogeneity of film thresholds an activity—a
pleasure—of analysis allowing spectators to rewrite and rework discourses of film
into configurations that need not be determined by what is immediately before the
eyes’ (my italics).26 This is a book that attempts to embrace the complexities
before the eyes (and ears).
The six films which are analysed in detail in this book are Germania anno zero
(Roberto Rossellini, 1948), Journal d’un curé de campagne (Robert Bresson, 1951)
Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967), The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, 1992),
The Pillow Book (Peter Greenaway, 1996), and Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt,
2010). They represent a small portion of the geographical and historical range
associated with art cinema. More importantly, they represent texts which have
been both privileged and constrained by their canonical status as art cinema texts.
Burch suggests that ‘the conscious perception of form is a liberating activity.’27
This liberation is, in part, the liberation of films from these critical constraints.
The Critical State of Art Cinema
One of the advantages of escaping Bordwell’s taxonomy—classical, historical-

materialist, and art cinema—is that the last of these categories has remained
troublesomely contentious. Recognizing the term’s widespread use despite its
semantic slipperiness, Thanouli has recently described ‘art cinema’ as ‘one of the
fuzziest and yet least controversial concepts in film studies’.28 Fuzziness is central
to Miklós Kiss and Steven Willemsen’s suggestion that, despite ‘certain overlaps
and similarities’, art films ‘lack a single essence in the form of a unifying trait’.29
Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover seize on the flexibility of the term in their
memorable description of the mode’s ‘mongrel identity’ which conceals ‘vast dis-
parities in form, style, and historical and economic context that make taxonomy
so difficult’.30 The critical consensus, if there is one, seems to be that art cinema, as
a term, is both unavoidable and extremely vague. Criticism has wrestled with the
26 Tom Conley, Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1991), xxxi.
27 Burch (1973), xix. 28 Thanouli (2009), 1.
29 Miklós Kiss and Steven Willemsen, Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to
Contemporary Complex Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 145.
30 Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (eds), Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3 and 6.
Introduction 9
term, at least since Bordwell’s seminal essay on the subject in 1979. Two broad
critical lineages developed in the 1970s and 1980s, emerging from Bordwell’s for-
malist approach and Steve Neale’s 1981 notion of ‘Art Cinema as Institution’.31
What has followed, both between and within these two lines of descent, has been
a proliferation of critical arguments concerning the loose canon of films that has
come to be called art cinema. This book seeks to offer neither a definition nor a
defence of such categorization (or its resultant canon-building). It hopes, rather,
to complicate the ways in which the mode is discussed critically.
Common to both critical lineages has been an interest in the non-normative
elements of art cinema films. The norm is defined by both Bordwell and Neale as
Hollywood, seen by the former as the producer of ‘the most historically influen-
tial classicism’ and by the latter as the epicentre of ‘American domination of
[European] indigenous markets’.32 For both theorists, though more emphasized
in Bordwell’s account, significant elements of art films’ non-normativity lie in
their formal arrangements and their treatments of character. If classical form is
defined primarily by its commitment to (narrative, formal, and ideological) con-
tinuity, art cinema has come to be associated more with ideas of discontinuity.
Kovács describes continuity and discontinuity as ‘the two basic alternatives of
stylistic forms in the cinema’.33 While the two poles of continuity and discontinu
ity are fundamental to art cinema (and to this book), the suggestion of simple
choice between them is misleading. All film is discontinuous, and the distinction
is between those films (or sequences within them) that foreground this discon
tinuity and those that do not. Kovács acknowledges this in his description of ‘the
temporal and fragmented nature of film technique’ as ‘a film is put together with
independent fragments of time sequences.’34 Complicated articulation, which I
associate especially with films traditionally classified as art cinema, consists pre-
cisely of this discontinuous formal fragmentation.
Art cinema’s discontinuities are most readily understandable in contrast to the
predominantly seamless articulations of classical film. In relation to Hollywood
continuity, Heath argues that:
one of the narrative acts of a film is the creation of space, but what gives the
moving space its coherence in time, decides the metonymy as a ‘taking place’, is
here ‘the narrative itself ’, and above all as it crystallizes round character as look
and point of view.35
31 See David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, Film Criticism 4, no. 1 (1979):
56–64 and Steve Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’, Screen 22, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 11–39.
32 Bordwell (1985), 156 and Neale (1981), 11. 33 Kovács (2007), 124.
34 Kovács (2007), 124. 35 Heath (1981), 19.
Heath suggests that the illusion of seamless continuity—in which joint- like
transitions between shots, narrative units, generic or modal elements and so on
are effaced—is generated by character. Seamless character rhymes with seamless
form, each supporting the other in their mutual denial of inconsistency and
dis
continu
ity. Unlike the action- defined, conventionally drawn characters of
classical cinema, art cinema produces characters about whom ‘there will be
something . . . that will challenge both Hollywood norms and the expectations of a
mainstream audience’ and who could not ‘be defined as a hero fulfilling the clas-
sical narrative trajectory’.36 In effect, this means that ‘art cinema presents charac-
ters without clearly defined goals or desires.’37 These evasive, enigmatic characters
often have wandering points of view, not firm enough for the film’s meanings to
crystallize around. Without a core around which to crystallize, art cinema
becomes eccentric.
Nevertheless, critics have devised a strategy for centring art cinema’s eccentric
forms, which I shall refer to as focalizing criticism. Bordwell’s work on art cinema
has been uniquely influential in this regard and has consisted principally of a set
of reading frames, which instruct viewers on how best to generate meanings out
of complicated articulation. He suggests that art cinema ‘plays a game of gaps
with the viewer’, gaps which can be filled in through the careful application of a
set of three schemata.38 These schemata—objective realism, expressive realism,
and narrational commentary—are designed precisely to diminish the effect of the
complex formal articulations that are so important to art cinema. Bordwell argues
for ‘the relative stability and coherence’ of the norms of art cinema, which allow
‘viewers to learn and apply various schemata of narrative comprehension’.39 This
emphasis on comprehension is key, and asserts that the mark of a successful crit
ical reading is not the appreciation of the achievements of complication—which
may include intimation, indeterminacy, illegibility—but their resolution.
Bordwell’s schemata become interpretative alibis, displacing art cinema’s com-
plexity of form and character into the elsewheres of meaning and order.
I am particularly interested in Bordwell’s notion of expressive realism, which
explains away the episodic, fragmented, redundant formal gestures of art cinema
as ‘representing a character’s mental state’.40 This focalizing theory is predicated
on a conviction that the preeminent ambition of art cinema is ‘to “exhibit
character” ’.41 Much of this work is performed by the mise en scène and other
formal elements of the film, which offer ‘cues for expressing character mood’ and
use ‘film techniques to dramatize private mental processes’ and give ‘mental
36 John White, European Art Cinema (London: Routledge, 2017), 11.

37 Mark Betz, Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 2009), 11.
38 Bordwell (1985), 219. 39 Bordwell (1985), 150. 40 Bordwell (1985), 149.
41 Bordwell (1985), 207.
Introduction 11
activities . . . embodiment in the image or on the soundtrack’.42 Character and

form—both complicated, fragmented, unteleological, unmotivated—are said to
mirror each other and, while they might individually have disorientated, together
they reach a kind of symmetry and a clarity of expression. Character, according to
Bordwell’s schemata, is meaning, in the sense that it is the explanation for the
complicated mass and mess of the form. At precisely the same time, form is said
to articulate the non-articulable complexities of the character. This alibi reduces
the heres of proliferating film form and complex character into elsewheres of more
stable meaning. It risks banality (something which Bordwell elsewhere warns
against), allowing summary statements such as ‘the jump cuts of A bout de souffle
[signal] a jittery lifestyle’, which may be convincing to an extent but cannot be
sufficient to tame the disorientating strangeness of the film’s precise formal
achievements.43 Focalizing readings securely position character as the meaning-
ful, anchoring centre of the film.
This focalization has dominated discussion of art cinema. Robert Self, whose
‘Systems of Ambiguity in the Art Cinema’ appeared in the same 1979 edition of
Film Criticism as Bordwell’s seminal article, agrees that form is ‘subordinated to
the perplexing aberrations of character psychology’ and that this ‘psychological
verisimilitude’ brings the disorder of events ‘into cause-effect focus, and the text
reaches toward the narrative rhetoric of explanation.’44 While, he argues, ‘the art
film text is consciously indeterminate, refusing to give its materials secure mean-
ing or to establish the viewer in the position of interpreter’, he also insists that its
‘ambiguity . . . at last must be recuperated within the narrative’, as though ambigu-
ity and unstable meanings are sicknesses to be recovered from.45 Nearly forty
years later, Kiss and Willemsen developed their own attempts to find an ‘alterna-
tive viewing stance to solve the film’s internal narrative conflicts’ in part from Jan
Alber’s work on subjectification, in which viewers may ‘ascribe [narrative or per-
ceptual] impossibilities to the subjective experience and interiority of a narrator
or character’ and ‘invest these subjective events with meaningfulness’.46 Maria San
Filippo’s reading of contemporary art films such as Mulholland Drive (David
Lynch, 2001) privileges a ‘highly subjective perspective as the surest route to
accessing narrative meaning’.47 Cardullo cites Antonioni as an example of an art
cinema director who developed a form ‘in which every aspect of style . . . reflects
the interior state of the characters.’48
42 Bordwell (1985), 208–9. 43 Bordwell (1979), 59.

44 Robert Self, ‘Systems of Ambiguity in the Art Cinema’, Film Criticism 4, no. 1 (1979): 75 and 79.
45 Self (1979), 76–7 and 80. 46 Kiss and Willemsen (2017), 132 and 112–13.
47 Maria San Filippo, The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 2013), 75.
48 Bert Cardullo, Screen Writings: Genres, Classics, and Aesthetics (London: Anthem Press,
2010), 166.
In the most detailed reworking of Bordwell’s theory, Kovács maintains this

emphasis on expressive realism. Although Thanouli recognizes that his work is in
part ‘an oblique answer to [Bordwell’s] oversimplified categorization of the formal
qualities of art films’, Kovács adds sophistication only by broadening the number
of schemata and formal strategies, rather than by fundamentally altering the
method of reading. His three fundamental narrative structures, for example,
remain defined by questions of meaning, resolution, and character. The linear
trajectory privileges ‘chronological, causal, and conceptual continuity leading
towards a closed set of relevant narrative information’ concerning the conclusion
to the character’s story.49 The circular trajectory returns to its starting point
because ‘the character cannot reach his initial goal or because there is simply no
goal to reach.’50 And the spiral trajectory (which Kovács rashly associates with
Germania anno zero) returns again and again to the original, insoluble problem
and ends ‘not [with] the elimination of the conflict but the elimination of the
characters who cannot solve the conflict’.51 Kovács sees the shape and form of the
film as subordinated to (critical understanding of) character. His history of art
cinema from its earliest days chronicles how ‘mental states and processes appeared
as a visual reality’ and that the ‘lack of deadlines in the plot, episodic structure,
and representation of different mental states are all consequences of the concen-
tration on the character.’52 His claims, however, that Germania anno zero’s
Edmund kills himself because ‘he finds that he has been cheated and abused by all
the people from whom he expected help’ take no account of the film’s ambiguity
on the subject of the boy’s motivations (as I explore in Chapter 1).53
This body of criticism depends upon a fundamental translation of enigmatic
character into a series of questions which contain the utopian promise of their
own answering. Criticism has often chosen not to regard these questions as evi-
dence of a limitless instability of meaning, but—quite the contrary—as a cohering
effect. To use Noël Carroll’s term, characters create an erotetic structure, in which
a series of questions demand to be answered: what are the characters’ goals and
motivations and how are they manifested in the form of the film?54 Why is the
priest so weak in Journal d’un curé de campagne? And why does Séverine become
a prostitute in Belle de Jour? And how are weakness and desire expressed formally
in the films? The function of this erotetic interest is, according to Carroll, to make
the story and character ‘coherent’ by connecting them with ‘a skein of questions
and answers’.55 This explicitly asserts that characters are the centres that justify
complicated formal articulation. Narratives, according to Carroll, may be unified
when ‘each part leads smoothly to the next’ as a result of a ‘logic of questions and
49 Kovács (2007), 78. 50 Kovács (2007), 80. 51 Kovács (2007), 80.

52 Kovács (2007), 19 and 63. 53 Kovács (2007), 80.
54 Noël Carroll, ‘Narrative Closure,’ in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (London:
Routledge, 2009), 211.
55 Carroll (2009), 211.
Introduction 13
answers’ which will ‘eventually [be] answered by . . . the characters’.56 An erotetic

analysis of film narration can imbue a text with an aura of completeness, even if
this completeness is not an inherent part of the text itself and is achieved through
external acts of reading. In this model, criticism is not simply an added extra to a
text, or even an act of discovery. It is, instead, a creative act that completes the
text. This creative act may or may not be in sympathy with the complicated articu
lation of the film.
My principal hesitation over this kind of reading—despite the fact that it is
commonplace in film analysis—is that it constructs the critic as a theological fig-
ure who knows the right questions to ask and, crucially, knows how to answer
them. Bordwell, in a mythologizing account of cultural history, insists that art
cinema was ‘a cinema of ambiguity [which] required machinery to interpret it’.57
This machinery, with all the efficiency that self-respecting machines should have,
arrived in the form of the ‘critic [who] was expected to explain what a film
meant—to fill in the gaps, explicate the symbols, paraphrase the filmmaker’s
statement.’58 Any art film without a critic was—and remains—only half-done. He
explicitly invokes—and seeks to justify—this divine critical figure:
What of ordinary criticism, the application and extension of existing semantic

fields, schemata, and heuristics? . . . [It is responsible for] domestication, the
taming of the new. The critic who finds a recent film to be a contradictory text is
pulling that film into the field of the known. Domestication subsumes the
unfamiliar to the familiar. Though avant-gardists may disparage this side of
interpretation, it remains an institutionally necessary function. The unschema-
tized film is the uninterpretable film.59
The bias in this description is apparent: this ‘ordinary’ criticism is focalizing; the
uninterpreted film of complicated articulation is wild and dangerous, requiring
‘taming’; even though there is violence in the process of conventional meaning-
making (‘pulling’), this is an ‘institutionally necessary function’. Not only does
this dismantle the uncanny possibilities of a text (‘subsumes the unfamiliar to the
familiar’), it also takes as axiomatic that the ‘uninterpretable film’ is a problematic
film, presumably because any text that is not interpretable must be chaotically
meaningless.
This tendency to a totalizing, focalizing method, far from being rarer is, in fact,
particularly apparent in critical responses to complicated art films. This appears
at odds with art cinema’s shared heritage with modernism, whose approach to
character in the early twentieth century was informed by the cataclysm of World
56 Carroll (2009), 208. 57 Bordwell (1985), 231. 58 Bordwell (1985), 231.

59 David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 256.
War I, Freud’s psychoanalysis, Bergson’s philosophy, and Einstein’s revisionist

physics, and continued to be influenced by the aftershocks of nineteenth-century
works by Darwin, Nietzsche, and Marx. Modernist film shared many of the
(political, theoretical, formal) concerns of its literary and theatrical counterparts.
No longer vehicles for the reproduction of stable cultural ideas, the complicated
figures of modernism were in flux. Stream of consciousness, unreliable narration,
shifting points of view, interior monologue, and unanimistic group consciousness
collectively exposed the fragmentary and fluid psychic realities of the twentieth-
century subject and the irrationality of the age. The concept of realism was made
uncertain by this complication. The modernist novelist Virginia Woolf main-
tained that ‘men and women write novels because they are lured on to create
some character’, but also claimed that the forms in which those characters were
appearing were changing as ‘grammar is violated; syntax disintegrated.’60 Woolf ’s
essays on modernist fiction detail the ways in which the new forms must ‘record
the atoms [that comprise character consciousness] as they fall upon the mind in
the order in which they fall, [in] the pattern, however disconnected and incoher-
ent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness’.61
Similar social and intellectual concerns manifested themselves in modernist
cinema’s comparably atomistic approach to character. Woolf, in her essay on ‘The
Cinema’, describes how film is like a ‘cauldron in which fragments seem to
simmer’.62 Kovács’s book—whose title registers a dynamic relationship between
modernism and European art cinema—acknowledges and explains the complex
characterization in modernist film, placing it within the intellectual context of
Jungian theory and the destabilized political contexts of twentieth-century con-
flicts and the Cold War. The ‘abstract individual’ of modernism lacks ‘psycho
logical characterization’ and is alienated from their environment.63 While Kovács
argues that this individual is ‘a mystery or a black box from the interior that will
never be revealed, and a totally random specimen of his species from the point of
view of the outside world’, he nevertheless also suggests that with this ‘different
way to represent the psychological, the center . . . was not the external acts of the
character but his/her inner visions.’64 Ultimately, Kovács continues to argue for
character as a centring force in modernist film. Bordwell goes further and differ-
entiates between modernist and art cinemas partly on the grounds of character
intelligibility. For Bordwell:
60 Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth
Press, 1988), 421 and 434.
61 Woolf (1988), 33–4.
62 Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume 4, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth
Press, 1994), 348.
63 Kovács (2007), 65. 64 Kovács (2007), 66 and 18.
Introduction 15
the art cinema represents the domestication of modernist filmmaking. The art
cinema softened modernism’s attack on narrative causality by creating mediat-
ing structures—‘reality’, character subjectivity, authorial vision—that allowed a
fresh coherence of meaning.65
The contribution of art cinema—as a critical category—is, in Bordwell’s sense, to

reinstate pre-modernist ideas of character coherence. Modernist incoherence is
dissolved and resolved by art cinema’s expressive realism. Bordwell suggests that,
although art cinema’s characters may be complicated, they remain susceptible to
critical attempts to transform them into alibis for complicated formal articula
tion. In the light of this rejection of modernist complication, art cinema’s complex
deviations from the conventions of classical cinema’s seamless articulations ‘jar
our expectations’, transforming each film into an ‘object of interpretation’.66
Bordwell’s argument that we must find ‘the key to the film’s narrational method’
and that this key ‘will not unlock anything unless the spectator is prepared to
apply the art cinema’s conventional schemata’, worryingly identifies only one key
and champions schemata which have been designed by critics (and not by
films).67 The phrase ‘the key to the film’ suggests that univocal meaning resides
immanently in the film, but this is a sleight of hand in which the organizing work
of the critic is concealed. It is not that art cinema is the domestication of modern-
ism; rather, character-centric focalizing criticism is the domestication of art cin-
ema/modernist film. Given Bordwell’s metaphor of the key, it is appropriate that
David Andrews describes critics as the ‘traditional gatekeepers’ to art films’
meanings.68 Galt and Schoonover’s seemingly banal comment that ‘[i]n many
cases, art films are simply those films shown in art-house theaters, or at film festi-
vals, so that their very existence is dependent on certain critics’ actually points to
a significant reality: art cinema not only delights and stimulates the critics and
festival programmers who enjoy it, it also defines the need for them.’69 The myth
of discoverable and univocal meaning in eccentric art films originates in the crit
ical responses that tame their complexities into a singular, often character-focused
meaning.
These reading frames, which risk constraining both texts and viewers, partici-
pate in an ideological structure. Kiss and Willemsen describe this structure as
‘naturalisation,’ part of a wider ‘tendency to attribute interpretations to texts in
which every single element can ultimately be considered to contribute to the
meaning as a whole’.70 They suggest that ‘viewers [can use naturalizing strategies
in order to] reconcile local textual inconsistencies by fitting them into

68 David Andrews, ‘Toward an Inclusive, Exclusive Approach to Art Cinema’, in Global Art Cinema:
New Theories and Histories, ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010), 72.
69 Galt and Schoonover (2010), 7. 70 Kiss and Willemsen (2017), 156.
overarching sense-making patterns.’71 These strategies operate through ‘conven-

tion or habituation’ and provide a viewer with ‘coping strategies’.72 The idea that
art cinema is something to be coped with resists the disturbance which the
making-visible of articulated form engenders. Detailing the extent of the encul-
turation which has normalized these critical frameworks, Kiss and Willemsen
argue that ‘[t]he expectation of a singularly meaningful point is a fundamental
aspect of our culture’s view of art.’73 Art cinema as a familiar (albeit fuzzy) cat
egory operates as a quasi-genre. As Rick Altman argues, ‘[p]articipation in the
genre film experience . . . reinforces spectator expectations and desires.’74 Kiss and
Willemsen see art cinema as a generic frame for interpretative judgement ‘in the
sense that (re)cognising (on whatever textual or contextual grounds) that a given
film would be an “art film” relates to the activation of a considerable set of know
ledge involving expectations, conventions and norms’ substantially established by
the cultural (that is, critical) context in which the film is viewed.75
At the heart of these viewer-disciplining, generically managed expectations
stands the myth of meaning, and once again Bordwell brings this back to charac-
ter. He insists that in art cinema ‘ “inquiry into character” becomes not only the
prime thematic material but a central source of expectation, curiosity, suspense,
and surprise.’76 The quasi-genre, as set out by Bordwell, revolves around the cen-
tral and centring figure of the character, who both stimulates and satisfies expect
ations and, in doing so, defines art cinema’s credentials as a taxonomically discrete
category, as a genre. Some recent critics have sought to extend and expand this
genre, incorporating texts which might previously have been critically excluded.
Galt and Schoonover have sought to extend it to include a broader range of global
cinema, while Jeffrey Sconce has applied strategies of interpretation usually
reserved for art cinema to what he describes as ‘trash’ films.77 While these expan-
sions allow for admirably inclusive new canons, they nevertheless maintain the
privilege of the critic whose work allows audiences ‘to process these new films,
assimilating them to already proven means of engaging unfamiliar texts’.78 These
proven means include Bordwell’s influential, even dogmatic character-centred
expressive realism.
This critical approach to art cinema, then, has a twofold ideological achieve-
ment: the disciplining-into-meaning of a form that would otherwise complicate
anthropocentrism by showing character as an inadequate centre, and the discip
lining into meaning-production of viewers who might otherwise come to critique
71 Kiss and Willemsen (2017), 110. 72 Kiss and Willemsen (2017), 154 and 156.
73 Kiss and Willemsen (2017), 109.
74 Rick Altman, ‘A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre’, in Film Genre Reader IV, ed. Barry
Keith Grant (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2012), 29.
75 Kiss and Willemsen (2017), 155. 76 Bordwell (1985), 226 and 209.
77 See Galt and Schoonover (2010) and Jeffrey Sconce,‘ “Trashing” the Academy’, Screen 36, no. 4
(Winter 1995): 371–93.
78 Galt and Schoonover (2010), 13.
Introduction 17
an inexplicable and disordered world in which politics and identity are figured as
contingencies. Kiss and Willemsen’s account implies this disciplinary critical
function in a conception of ‘a mode of “framing” ’ in the form of:
top-down schemas, scripts and information held in one’s memory. They involve
expectations, steer attention, determine salience and serve to govern appropriate
interpretive and evaluative routines.79
These schemas reinforce the idea that art’s achievement lies in its straightforwar-
dification of life according to myths of power, identity, and legitimate voice.
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith argues that narrative films have ‘an enduring appeal
because they give order to a life which is not ordered, which is entropic, made up
of bits and pieces, and offers few endings of any kind, let alone happy ones.’80 Kiss
and Willemsen, who offer a substantial array of techniques for reducing disson
ance in complex texts, place this ordering within a specifically ideological context
as they argue that ‘making elements cohere and establishing meaningfulness can
be claimed to be the core task of narrative as a cognitive instrument (and, conse-
quently, one of its key functions as a social tool).’81 Expressive realism reproduces
the anthropocentric ideology that human character both discovers meaning and is
meaning. In a kind of extended pathetic fallacy, the world becomes only a means
of discovering a mythologized version of the human subject. Meek’s Cutoff, for
example, may be read as a restaging of the familiar origin myth of US exception-
alism, as frontiersman and settlers read the landscape as the manifestation of
their own destiny. But a more important, and more radical, social purpose may be
served by allowing such texts to retain their complexity. Not only does this mean
that art cinema ‘undermines and frustrates the Cartesian ideal of rational self-
knowledge’, as San Filippo suggests, but it also works to liberate viewers from the
education and enculturation which have introduced a seeming-naturalness to the
interpretative labour of meaning-making.82
And yet, despite Adrian Martin’s warnings against critical speculation ‘on what
fictional characters are “really” thinking, feeling or remembering at any given
moment of their screen story’, critical readings of art cinema have repeatedly
speculated in precisely this way.83 They argue, in the words of Jennifer O’Meara,
that ‘projecting psychological depth onto characters is common and largely auto-
matic, [so] theories of characterisation that attempt to understand this
79 Kiss and Willemsen (2017), 155.

80 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s (London: Bloomsbury,
2013), 107.
81 Kiss and Willemsen (2017), 108. 82 San Filippo (2013), 48.
83 Adrian Martin, ‘Secret Agents: Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation (Andrew
Klevan),’ Undercurrent 4 (October 2008): accessed 28 June 2020. http://fipresci.hegenauer.co.uk/
undercurrent/issue_0407/martin_secret.htm.
process . . . are more valuable than declarations that we should disregard projections
of psychological depth on the basis that characters are not real.’84 This claim to
critical legitimacy in the name of frequency and naturalness marks the effects of
the normalizing ideological operation of focalizing criticism. The contention of
this book is that this process of ‘projecting psychological depth onto characters’ is
often, in fact, quite the opposite: it is the production of a reductive series of epi-
thets which cannot hope to reflect enigmatic art cinema character or complicated
art cinema form. Criticism has cast Bud in The Long Day Closes as a melancholic
gay adolescent growing up in the stifling environment of 1950s Liverpool, finding
pleasure in the emotional relief of film and popular music. As a result, the film’s
formal play with quotation from cinema and music has been insistently said to be
celebratory and enchanting. It is not that this reading is inaccurate or disprovable,
but it is a reduction of the network of inconsistencies and contradictions, the
half-glimpses of unspoken complexities, that the film offers. Liberated from this
character-centric reading, the formal play is allowed to occupy a more unsettled
and unsettling range of significances, as explored in Chapter 4.
Despite this focalizing tendency in criticism, it would be an outrageous irony if
I celebrated the multiform structure of art cinema films by reductively insisting
that criticism itself is uniform. Bordwell points out that ‘[i]t would be wrong to
settle on one interpretation’ when films use formal strategies to complicate such
an attempt.85 He develops the point through his notion of ambiguity in art cin-
ema, in which films invite up to three simultaneous explanations for non-classical
form. Along with expressive realism, Bordwell identifies objective realism and
narrational commentary as reading frames. The former explains the discontinu
ities of narrative and form as representations of life as it really is: chance, coinci-
dence, and a lack of sustaining order mirrored in a form that does not privilege
causation or neat resolution. The latter privileges the auteur as dynamic meaning-
making figure, ‘an intermittently present but highly noticeable external authority’,
through whose perspective the film may be understood.86 James Tweedie sum-
marizes Bordwell’s auteur as a ‘unifying figure whose long-term preoccupations
serve as the ultimate source of clarity and meaning.’87 Individually, these sche-
mata have problems. Objective realism risks encouraging banal explanations
which argue simply that life’s like that. Narrational commentary overlooks critical
and theoretical reservations about employing the auteur as a stabilizing theo
logical figure, too numerous to go into in depth here but summarized by David
Andrews in his account of the ‘mythology of the auteur’:
84 O’Meara (2018), 99. 85 Bordwell (1985), 228. 86 Bordwell (1985), 209.

87 James Tweedie, The Age of New Waves: Art Cinema and the Staging of Globalization (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013), 29.
Introduction 19
Film scholars . . . argued that auteurism was untrue to the communal nature of
film production and the industrial necessities of film promotion. They also
argued that it was untrue to the realities of language, discourse, and conscious-
ness; that it was untrue to the racist and patriarchal ‘apparatus’ of cinema; and
that it was untrue to the nature of auteur status, which derived not from intrin-
sic talent or from intrinsic value but from the sociological processes of art, soci-
ety, and the film industry.88
Individual problems with the schemata, however, are de- emphasized when
Bordwell argues that their real importance lies in their combination. For Bordwell,
ambiguity in art cinema arises from simultaneous interpretation according to all
three schemata, including expressive realism. He posits these schematic reading
frames’ incompatibility as a virtue of the art cinema; ‘the puzzling passages of the
film will be explained equally well by alternative conventions . . . That these sche-
mata are mutually exclusive creates the ambiguity.’89 His image of a film ‘hovering
between realistic and authorial rationales’, in which ‘[u]ncertainties persist’, may
seem to advocate the kind of response that I do.90 However, Bordwell argues that
ambiguity is, first and foremost, ‘the dominant principle of intelligibility’.91
Thanouli recognizes this ‘handy tool’ for uniting ‘under the same umbrella term,
the art cinema, a very wide range of narrational possibilities that would otherwise
seem endless and chaotic’.92 This ultimately represents a sophisticated critical
sleight of hand, another alibi: three possible explanations are still explanation.
According to Kiss and Willemsen, the sense of intention that underpins this
restricted range of interpretative possibilities ‘can all help to render narrative
dissonances meaningful.’93 This remains the discovery of meaning through
the discovery of a centre to the film: reality, character, and/or author. This is not
the ambiguity which I argue stems from eccentric articulation, which revels in the
endlessness that Bordwell’s theory of ambiguity curtails.
More radically, Bordwell proposes an entirely separate mode of film which has
similarities with but nevertheless sits outside the category of art cinema. This
mode ‘refuses conventional schemata for producing narrative meaning’ and ‘tan-
talizes’ viewers with its ‘order without meaning’.94 He calls this parametric, bor-
rowing the term from Noël Burch. In some films (represented for Burch by Alain
Resnais’ 1961 film L’Année dernière à Marienbad), articulation is complicated to
such a degree that the chain consists exclusively of disjointed fragments; in such
cases, the films ‘would have this very ambiguity as their basis’, paradoxically mak-
ing unmeaning their meaning and eschewing any focalizing, totalizing
88 David Andrews, ‘Art Cinema as Institution, Redux: Art Houses, Film Festivals, and Film Studies’,
Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies 18 (October 2010): 13.
92 Thanouli (2009), 5. 93 Kiss and Willemsen (2017), 158.
94 Bordwell (1985), 305.
possibility.95 Bordwell discusses the parametric’s privileging of style over charac-

ter and narrative and the de-emphasis of immanent sense. Parametric films’ ‘rich-
ness of texture that resists interpretation’ seems to share many of the characteristics
of complicated articulation: ‘abnormal ellipticality [in which] causes and effects
may be disjoined, major scenes may be omitted, duration may be skipped
over . . . [in an] episodic construction that yields only glimpses of character
psychology.’96 However, Bordwell argues that the disparate formal elements of a
parametric film cohere according to a singular ‘intrinsic stylistic norm’, ‘cueing
and channeling the spectator’s construction of the fabula’.97 He insists that ‘stylis-
tic structure can become as thoroughly organized as narrative structure’, offering
critics a comparable invitation to that which he claims is offered by art cinema;
rather than character-centred meaning this time, the critic seeks to centre the film
with an equivalent notion of style-centred order.98 The parametric film—exempli-
fied by Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket—has an independently understandable
mosaic form; it is a ‘string of efforts to articulate the features characterising the
medium’.99 While this marks a significant promotion of form from the ‘decorative
function of style’ to ‘become part of the whole film’s organizing principles’, it
asserts an alternative centre for the film, and retains the figures of theological
critic and enculturated viewer.100
Eccentric Inarticulacy
In seeking to disturb the trinity of (character-centred) meaning, (dogmatic) critic,

and (enculturated) viewer, this book takes as its principal question what happens
to this schematic criticism when the focalizing character is not only complicated
but also inarticulate. O’Meara, in her recent work on dialogue in American inde-
pendent and art cinema, argues that dialogue ‘cues audience members to infer a
variety of things about characters’ personalities’ and has a ‘role as a binding
device’.101 With characters whose verbal expression is complicated, this binding
together is compromised and the articulated structure of the film begins to strain
and pull apart. O’Meara also argues that dialogue contributes significantly to ‘the
impression that certain characters are more complex and “realistic” than others’
and ‘hint[s] at an inner life’.102 Expressive voice—typically represented in
voiceover, monologue, and especially dialogue—allows characters to articulate
their desires, thoughts, and emotions. In many instances, these character-centred
95 Burch (1973), 14. 96 Bordwell (1985), 289 and 288.

97 Bordwell (1985), 285 and 53. 98 Bordwell (1985), 279. 99 Bordwell (1997), 86.
100 Jakob Isak Nielson, ‘Bordwell on Bordwell: Part IV—Levels of Engagement,’ 16:9 in English 3,
no. 10 (February 2005): 8.
101 O’Meara (2018), 77 and 8.
102 O’Meara (2018), 7–8 and 76.
Introduction 21
features are critically held to be equivalent to the film’s message or meaning and
to align viewers with those meanings. The absence of clear dialogue, however,
means the absence of such clearly definable desires, thoughts, and emotions, and
a more complicated structure of sympathy.
The inarticulate character recurs throughout art cinema, and the six films
which I analyse in detail feature prominent characters who struggle, often for
indeterminate reason, to express themselves. I am taking this idea of inarticulacy
to include both the most common everyday application of the word, which
implies a stuttering difficulty in speaking fluently, and a more general expressive
failure in articulation, which can include a character’s silence or ambiguous ges-
ture within its definition. Words are lost in stuttering struggles to speak, in mute
silence, in confused irony, in mistranslation, and gestures do not communicate
clearly. Inarticulacy signifies struggle and the resistance of expressed parts to
cohere. For this reason, a character’s silence which is naturalized by the narrative
(as with a character who is silent simply because they are alone) does not suggest
inarticulacy. When the silence is, as it were, a stuttering-silence, one which marks
the failure of smooth articulation, it is transformed into an expression which is
complex and elusive. In Paul de Man’s terms, at this point silence becomes mute-
ness. For de Man, silence ‘implies the possible manifestation of sound at our will’;
muteness, on the other hand, is something to which we are ‘condemned’ because
‘we are dependent on this language’ over which we have limited control and
which must be inadequate to the job of expressing the extent of our experience.103
Stanley Cavell, in discussing the source of comedy and tragicomedy in film,
describes ‘the mismatch . . . [of] the distance between the depth to which an ordin
ary human life requires expression, and the surface of ordinary means through
which that life must, if it will, express itself.’104 A character’s inarticulacy remains
the expression of something—a something that ‘requires expression’. However, as
a consequence of inadequate means, it remains un(fully)expressed.
Criticism has been greatly interested in art cinema’s use of non-normative,
non-classical (re)presentation of character. Bordwell differentiates between the
Hollywood protagonist who ‘speeds directly toward the target’ and the art film
character who, ‘lacking a goal, . . . slides passively from one situation to another’.105
This impression of complex, wandering, alienated character transitioning pas-
sively between indeterminate states is developed by Kovács in a compelling pro-
file of the art film protagonist which considers art films by Antonioni, Bergman,
Bertolucci, Fellini, Godard, Malle, Pasolini, Resnais, Russell, Tarkovsky, Tarr,
Varda, Wajda, and Wenders. Kovács suggests that the ‘most typical character
103 Paul de Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: University of Colombia Press, 1984), 80.
104 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Enlarged edition
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 180.
105 Bordwell (1979), 58.
types’ include the ‘urban upper- or lower-middle-class person’ with a particular

‘way of speaking’ and an ‘interest in culture’.106 Many of these individuals are art-
ists and must be ‘free of material concerns’ in order to allow them to wander aim-
lessly without the pressure of labour. Above all, Kovács argues that the character
is lonely and concerned ‘with his inner universe’.107 This introverted fixation
results in a ‘[l]ack or extreme looseness of the individual’s connections to the
world [and] makes his persona a manifestation of mental freedom . . . [leading to]
a certain passivity or inaction . . . [and] the unpredictability of his actions and
reactions’.108 The lives depicted in art cinema are often fragmented, unmotivated,
random, articulated in a way that is far more complicated, far more discontinu-
ous, than those of the characters of classical cinema.
However, both Bordwell and Kovács argue emphatically that this meandering
passivity does not diminish the characters’ ability to articulate their complex
emotional and intellectual states. There has been little critical challenge to the
assertion that art cinema characters are, in the end, eloquent. Bordwell sees the
non-classical form as allowing ‘characters to express and explain their psycho
logical states’ and that ‘[s]low to act, these characters tell all.’109 The selves that tell
themselves are more invested in their inner lives than in the external realities that
surround them; there is often an emphasis on dream and fantasy in art cinema.
What, though, of inarticulate characters, who do not communicate their reflec-
tions with the eloquence of Isak (Victor Sjöström) in Wild Strawberries (Ingmar
Bergman, 1957), whose final voiceover declares a sense of ‘remarkable causality
in this hopelessly confused chain of events’ of his life? This attempt to make sense
is not so transparent nor so teleological a process for inarticulate characters. Such
characters, ‘lack clear-cut traits, motives, and goals’, and their ‘character psych
ology often fluctuates from one scene to the next’, loosening ‘the cause-and-effect
relationship between story events’.110 They do not provide a focalizing centre—a
means of taming—the discontinuous articulations of the film’s form. When criti-
cism has insisted that formal complication is a signifier for an inarticulate charac-
ter’s emotional instability, the claim has been made without the possibility of
articulate evidence of that mental state. Complicated form has been made to
rhyme with an unknown quantity.
Bordwell’s schema denies this unknownness and stipulates that ‘[e]ven if a
character remains unaware of or inarticulate about his or her mental state, the
viewer must be prepared to notice how behavior and setting can give the charac-
ter away.’111 Bordwell’s phrasing suggests the hierarchy in place, in which criti-
cism tames an unruly film and insists on a viewer’s behaviour: a viewer must act
106 Kovács (2007), 67–8.

107 Kovács (2007), 69. 108 Kovács (2007), 70. 109 Bordwell (1979), 58.
110 Todd Berliner, Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema (Austin, TX: University of
Texas Press, 2010), 7.
111 Bordwell (1985), 208.
Introduction 23
according to the schema, and form betrays diffident character to the discerning
critic. I argue, instead, that mute characters remain at least partly illegible, and
that their inarticulacy—the complication of their articulacy—foregrounds this
illegibility. A focalizing critical model argues that films make available a simple
answer to the question of what prevents a character from speaking; inarticulacy is
diagnosed as a symptom or consequence of, for example, disempowerment due to
age, social status, class, gender, sexuality, race. The inarticulacy may be attributed
to a character’s fear of the consequences of articulation: punishment or loss of
status. In turn, these qualities of character rub off on the film’s form, and that too
starts to stutter. But these readings, in the absence of articulated explanation from
within the film, cannot be substantiated, and exist only as (often dogmatically
expressed) speculations. Even when these speculations are compelling, they do
not address the more hermeneutically pressing question of what is unsaid, that is,
what is meant beyond what is articulable.
Disputing this opacity, focalizing criticism speaks over characters’ silence. The
unspeaking (and even unspeakable) do not get to speak through this criticism.
Criticism becomes an extra-filmic ideological pressure as it asserts speculative
centres and silences most of the cacophonous voices of these complex characters.
Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit address the dangers of just such responses, when
they comment that unfounded speculation should be avoided, as the answers we
find are ‘not on the screen; the characters’ motivations, unarticulated by them and
invented by us, are a substitute for our only legitimate activity: the activity of looking
and of registering what we see.’112 Critics are, they suggest, wrong to assume ‘always
that some degree of knowledge might be possible’.113 The interpretative labour
presented in Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema articulates the disorder of an
articulated world, in which contiguous parts cannot be metonymically yoked
together but can be explored in their unresolvable, insoluble, negatively dialectic
relationships. Any answer-based understanding, predicted by Carroll’s theory of
erotetic structures, is denied to viewers. The eccentric swing between inarticulate
characters and complicated formal articulation marks a hermeneutic impasse, which
is both a film’s suggestion of meaning and its ultimate lack of meaning.
The failure of the erotetic frame is often most felt in a film’s concluding
moments. The inarticulate, contradictory, inconsistent characters of the six films
explored in this book resist the possibility of definitive resolution. The openness
of the films’ meanings is, in each case, a function of a delicate tension between
narrative closure and openness. In Germania anno zero, the child Edmund dies in
a recognizably tragic structure, but his silence reverberates through the ruins of a
Berlin which is yet to find an ideology to replace the haunting voices of Nazism.
112 Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (London: BFI,
2004), 51.
113 Bersani and Dutoit (2004), 58.
In Journal d’un curé de campagne, the priest also dies, but his voice is both enduring
and silenced as his words are quoted out of context, by someone else, and from
an impersonally typed telegram, before the silent closing image of the cross. In
Belle de Jour, Séverine is reunited with Pierre, who has been restored to health,
but the degree to which this sequence is to be believed is indeterminable. In The
Long Day Closes, Bud is disciplined by the patriarchal world around him but,
ultimately, is left ambiguously silent beneath the night sky. In The Pillow Book,
Nagiko avenges her lover in a spectacular revenge narrative, but cannot perman
ently bury the past. In Meek’s Cutoff, Emily arrives at the tree, symbol of (still
inaccessible) water, but the Native American walks inscrutably into the distance.
Each film resolves its character inarticulacy in a mute silence which speaks of the
defeat of expression. These residual scenes of complicated articulation do not
offer the answers which the erotetic structure demands, and will not assist the
character to cohere the film’s disparate parts into meaning.
This is not to suggest that eccentric films are shapeless, or to deny the charac-
ters’ insistent claims to interpretative significance. Despite their muteness, they
are not absent within the films. Inarticulate characters still demand attention;
they dominate the films spatially and temporally and their unconventionalities
are often intriguing. They are a constant invitation (or provocation) to focalize
the film. They act as one of the centripetal forces that holds the fragmented form
of eccentric art cinema texts together through the irresistible sense of an organ-
ized artwork with a recognizable (albeit non-causal) narrative and identifiable
(albeit mute) characters. It is no wonder that the parallel organization of stutter-
ing, complicated formal articulations and a character struggling to speak is taken
to consolidate the possibility of meaning by suggesting an underlying pattern to
the film’s fragmented structures. However, their inarticulacy simultaneously dis-
qualifies them as a focalizing point. The excess of meanings generated by inarticu
late characters who do not or cannot clarify, confirm, or qualify meaning resist
interpretation and pull outwards from any critically inferred centre in the film.
This indeterminacy is uncannily twinned with—and not straightforwardly the
cause of—the equally centrifugal non-seamless, non-redundant, multi-parted
film form. Any clear avenue of possible meaning turns out to be infinitely forked,
twisting away in the innumerable directions of a complicated, discontinuous, iter-
able form, beyond the scope of any critic or critical reading. Even as these articu
lations locally disrupt continuity and set up points of inertia which deaden or
frustrate interpretative progress, there remains a sense of interpretative potential
in the global resonance between form and character. The tension of this counter-
point is decisive; the character may seem to offer the secret to a film’s enigmatic
form, but he or she ultimately compounds and does not resolve that enigma; nei-
ther form nor character can explain, or undo, the other’s difficulty in expression.
Art cinema eccentricity is the tension between simultaneous centrifugal and
Introduction 25
centripetal forces, which allow films to escape both meaningfulness and

meaninglessness.
Holland describes a type of critic who ‘will tell you scene by scene and scowl by
scowl what each of the characters is thinking at every given moment’, resulting in
a ‘satisfying’ critical approach that leaves ‘nothing to be puzzled—or frightened—
by’.114 The ambition of Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema is to critique the
satisfactions offered by totalizing, taming criticism, to dislocate character and
form, and to celebrate—and even enjoy—the fear that art cinema can engender.
When a film utters itself in the fragments of a complicated articulation it should
not be coerced into simple meaning. Criticism should be a notation of a film’s
formal achievements, and not a reduction of those achievements to assertions
about characters who do not, and perhaps cannot, speak for themselves. The
theological critic is a mythmaker whose mythmaking, in Barthes’ words:
abolishes the complexity of human acts, [and] gives them the simplicity of
essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back on what is imme-
diately visible, it organises a world which is without contradiction because it is
without depth, a world which is open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes
a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves.115
Art cinema’s blissful clarity has been imposed from without, by critics who dis-
cern univocality and sacrifice the enjoyable discomforts of complexity and
contradiction. The complicated articulations of art cinema suggest an alternative
logic, in which self-identical character is shown to be a myth.
Critical Eccentricity
The six films analysed in detail in this book frustrate attempts by character-
centric, meaning-focused criticism to tame them into stable interpretative posi-
tions. It would, however, be inconceivable for my interpretative labour to dispense
with notions of meaning, although my readings do not characterize character as
the explanation for formal complexity but rather as a complexity in its own right.
This resonates with Self ’s view that ‘[i]ndividual interpretations as to whether the
ghosts are real or not, whether the narrator is mentally unbalanced or not,
whether the frame tale is central or not are incapable of subsuming the complex
ities of the text.’116 An eccentric reading (as opposed to a focalizing reading) is
114 Holland (1963), 25.

115 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Cape, 1972), 143.
116 Self (1979), 74.
one that is sensitive to the disorientating features of complicated articulation

without insisting on a film’s meaninglessness.
These six films do not establish a dichotomy between the opposite notions of a
cinema of incoherence and a classical cinema of coherence.117 Confusions in their
structures may upset their stories’ momentum and illusion of natural order, but
their forms do not dispense with narrative. Meaning is not immanent in the syn-
tagmatic or vertical articulations, as Eisenstein’s dialectic model insists it should
be, and yet meanings proliferate and do not dissipate. The relational dynamic
between elements is neither coherent nor incoherent; it declares differences, but
does not demand a polarizing exile into meaninglessness. The films explored in
this book represent a further possibility for the character–form relationship.
Encountering these films eccentrically requires the juggling of two hermeneutic
processes—the interpretation of character and the interpretation of form—as dis-
crete activities. Character psychology is decentred as both an interpretative aid
and goal, and the figures in the films remain stubbornly oblique. Form reveals
such a range of complexities that it confuses rather than settles character. This
interminable process creates a crisis for interpretation, in which there is no expli-
cating articulation, but rather a resonance established between two complicating
articulations. Many of the critical responses considered in this book are scarred
by a decisive and damaging dedication to focalizing, totalizing reading. Indifferent
to Theodor Adorno’s conviction that art should ‘negatively express the false unity
of the whole’, much film criticism has sought to reinstate myths of wholeness into
the films, even as the works themselves undermine such myths.118
Eccentric criticism seeks instead to recognize what Ropars describes as a ‘para-
doxical movement of attraction without synthesis which establishes at once the
principle of an aesthetic idea perpetuated solely by alteration and the principle of
its disruption’.119 This provocative instability is the restlessness of eccentric form.
It inhabits the space at which, as Adorno describes it, ‘meaning and nonmeaning
become identical’.120 In this space, meaning endures, but must be encountered as
a potential rather than a reachable telos. The films become inexhaustible because
of their intimations of a presently denied significance, which, in the case of
Journal d’un curé de campagne, finds a significant parallel in spiritual faith, as both
the hope for salvation and the hope for meaning are seen always in a glass darkly.
The story of a spiritual, intellectual, or emotional quest is a recurring element in
films which foreground eccentric articulation, an narrative equivalent for the
117 It should be noted that neither ‘incoherent’ nor ‘coherent’ are intended here as value judge-
ments; they are merely observations concerning form.
118 J. M. Bernstein, ‘Introduction’ in The Culture Industry, by Theodor Adorno (London: Routledge,
1991), 10.
119 Ropars (2007), 3.
120 Theodor Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 385.
Introduction 27
eccentricities of the films’ hermeneutic activity that revolves around a never-

quite-arrived-at centre. (This quest metaphor is literalized in Meek’s Cutoff in
which the characters are in search of water and a new home.) Ultimately, this
complicated articulation is an epistemological complication; the fact that charac-
ter remains both so demandingly prominent (speaking) and yet unclear (not
speaking) questions what is knowable. The possibility of knowledge is necessarily
present, but necessarily unrealized. But it is also potentially an ontological com-
plication. If characters are unknowable, to what extent are they merely ciphers,
initially seeming to be esoteric codes in need of solution, but ultimately figures
without meaning? Hans-Georg Gadamer engages with the epistemological and
ontological concerns of literary hermeneutics when he writes:
But—can we really assume that the reading of such texts is a reading exclusively
concentrated on meaning? Do we not sing these texts? Should the process in
which a poem speaks only be carried by a meaning intention? Is there not, at the
same time, a truth that lies in its performance? This, I think, is the task with
which the poem confronts us.121
Eccentric criticism is a singing criticism which liberates its readings into a series
of alternative and undefined responses. It attends to films and does not aim to
catch them in the act of meaning. Eccentricity represents a particular structure of
concealed, eclipsed, uncentred meaning. This concealment allows for the con
tinued discussion of issues of politics, ethics, and faith; the simultaneous intimation
of and concealment of meaning can, in particular films, effect an impression of
implied and withheld sense that resonates with experience of exploitation,
deception, and doubt. Monolithic notions of gender, sexuality, race, age, and
social status can be called into question, these interrogations often not voiced
explicitly, lying instead in the complicated expressions of articulated forms. The
inarticulate cipher-characters in these films help to erode the anthropocentric
myths of human exceptionalism and to expose the forces which routinely speak
for and at and over individual subjects. These are not apolitical films, but films
with liquid politics whose indeterminacies implicitly—and silently—query the
possibility of hegemonic structures. One of these hegemonic structures is criticism
itself; eccentric criticism proposes an ethics of criticism which acknowledges its
responsibility in not determining what a film is permitted to mean.
121 Translated and quoted in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning
Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 64.
The Articulated Structure of this Book
The six chapters that follow are each concerned predominantly with the close
reading of a particular type of complicated formal articulation in a single film.
(These achievements are not unique to the films selected, and parallels may be
drawn with other works.) The articulated forms at work include the relationship
between styles of expression, between levels of narration, between shots in an
edited sequence, between quoted utterances in a complex bricolage, between
intermedial frames, and between genre signifiers. The films are arranged in chrono-
logical order, not because I perceive some evolutionary model at work, but simply
because they must be arranged in some order. Readers are actively encouraged to
read chapters out of sequence, in order to allow the films to speak to each other in
unexpected ways. Each of the films has received substantial critical attention, and
part of the work of my analysis is to interrogate critical assumptions which have
been routinely made in the past and have striven for neat, totalizing interpretations.
I consider criticism from a broad range of traditions, considering how very differ-
ent responses have shared in the attempt to tame articulated form through charac-
ter. These new readings do not answer for formal complexity or character
inarticulacy with explanation, but celebrate this semantic, expressive vulnerability
as a space outside of explanation and examination. There is a discussion to be had
about the ethics of a criticism that neatly outs Bud in The Long Day Closes as gay, a
reduction of complex selfhood to an articulable identity on behalf of a mute(d)
individual. There is also a discussion to be had about the ethics of a criticism that
outs characters and films into a meaning according to the rules and conventions of
a (film) culture that rejects unstable identities and insists, instead, on classification.
Chapter 1 explores the horizontal articulation of conflicting styles in Roberto
Rossellini’s Germania anno zero. The film has often been read as centring around
Edmund, a little boy unable to express himself in a post-war moment of uncertain
and incomplete meanings. However, his inarticulacy makes him a far less
adequate source of meaning than much criticism has acknowledged. The charac-
ters exist in a world of circumscribed movement through loosely expressive,
ruined landscapes. These landscapes (exterior city spaces, interior domestic
spaces) are realized through the articulation of realism and expressionism, their
self-reflexive signifiers gesturing back to their own inexpressiveness in an effect of
stuttered reiterations caught in flux. Chapter 2, which focuses on Robert Bresson’s
Journal d’un curé de campagne, explores the ways in which the film’s presentation
of its protagonist’s utterances (in the titular diary) are, themselves, articulated so
as to undermine definitive sense. Criticism’s insistence that the diary offers
privileged access to the priest’s univocal thoughts and relieves his difficulty in
speaking is not attentive enough to the film’s form. Capitalizing on the medium’s
Introduction 29
potential for vertical (simultaneous) articulations, the diary is manifested as a

series of competing levels of narration: a written document, a voiceover, and an
enacted drama. The content and significance of these three forms are often in
contention with one another, foregrounding a proliferating form of expression
that exceeds its fictional writer’s apparent intention.
Chapter 3’s analysis of Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour returns to a consideration of
horizontal articulation, this time through a discussion of editing. This close read-
ing considers how the opaque psychology of the inexpressive central character is
not explained by the image and sound chains formed through montage and
decoupage. Instead, the film’s juxtaposition of irreconcilable images, in sympathy
with surrealist dépaysement, opens up gaps in meaning which remain provoca-
tively unfilled, corroding the cultural myths at play in the film’s network of
images. Chapter 4 focuses this discussion of horizontal articulation through edit-
ing on the post-structuralist bricolage in The Long Day Closes by Terence Davies.
In this bricolage, characters are spoken for by a proliferating series of cultural
references. The complicated formal articulation, in which the elements—haunted
by the almost-meanings of their original contexts—are recontextualized and
juxtaposed, highlights the contingent constructedness of the significances at the
root of much character analysis. Through the prism of queer theory, this discus-
sion is given a particular ideological focus. The chapter rejects the notion that this
is a queer film because Bud has been dubbed gay by criticism on the film, and
seeks ways in which its queerness may be defined through its articulated
structures.
Chapter 5 returns to a consideration of vertical articulation, this time in Peter
Greenaway’s The Pillow Book. Recalling Journal d’un curé de campagne, the film is
an account of a writer’s attempt at self-expression. Baring the device of its innova-
tive digital technologies, the film represents film’s expanding potential for inter-
medial articulation, using frames within frames in order to condense the
syntagmatic dynamic of montage into a single moment, literalizing the critical
metaphor of the mosaic in a frame which consists of concurrent and contrapuntal
images and sounds. The simultaneity of superpositioning proliferates expression,
rhizome- like, to an extent which resists any hermeneutically tidy criticism.
Chapter 6 steps back from the digital pyrotechnics of Greenaway’s film, and ana
lyses the minimalist form of Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff. This film shares an
interest in the horizontal operation of signifiers across a landscape with Germania
anno zero. In this instance, the signifiers of the western genre are juxtaposed in
innovative patterns, the conventional meanings of each thrown into confusion by
this recontextualization. Genre—including the quasi-genre of art cinema—is
revealed as an epistemological structure, a means of cohering cultural thoughts
and impressions into meaningful chains. Meek’s Cutoff establishes an effective
resonance between the mute characters of the emerging culture (settlers at the
frontier) and the breakdown in significance of the film’s genre.
The six close readings are eccentric, which is to say that they are not in search
of ways to centre the films around the figures of their inarticulate protagonists,
who find expression neither in speech nor through expressionist form. The com-
plex texts exceed the possibilities of analysis through a proliferation of open
meanings. Fine-grained close readings expose the limitations—rather than the
capacity—of critical interpretation. I see art cinema’s insistent invitation to inter-
pret as an ironic one; any interpretation is bound to be ultimately frustrated by
films that will always exceed the possibilities of anything as stabilizing as a read-
ing. The model which emerges is of a dysfunctional articulation, a model in which
the parts stutter their way into a semblance of meaning, but a meaning which is
contingent and prone to change and which always leaves a remainder. This
remainder is emphatically foregrounded in the films in which this book is espe-
cially interested, in which characters are muted, silenced, inarticulate. These acts
of close reading, through the decentring of a teleological hermeneutic agenda,
consider how criticism might respond differently to art cinema. Rather than as a
puzzle seeking solution, we can see it as an empowered and empowering play
which shakes the ideological seat of meaning and those who have traditionally
pronounced it. It seeks to describe a form of ambiguity, very different from and
more unstable than that proposed by Bordwell, which arises in the mutually com-
plicating eccentric relationship between form and character.
1
Articulation in Ruins
Complicating Style in Germania anno zero
At Point Zero: Mise en Scène and the Ruins of Meaning
Histories of art cinema do not provide convenient year zeros. The extent to which
the early cinemas of German Expressionism, French Impressionism, Soviet
Constructivism, and other forms of avant-garde filmmaking belong to the cat
egory of art cinema is debated. All histories, however, agree on the seminal status
of the neo-realist cinema that emerged from the rubble of Italian cities and cul-
ture in the wake of the Second World War. The body of art cinema from the 1960s
and 1970s, according to Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ‘can be seen as bringing to fru
ition a film culture that came into being . . . in the years immediately after the
Second World War’ and that the ‘first stirring of the new [film] culture was in
Italy.’1 The new emphasis on location shooting documented the urban ruination
that characterized this post-war moment, recording characters walking through
the rubble of once-buildings. These buildings were caught in a state of neither
hereness nor goneness. Instead, their articulated structures had been turned inside
out; the joints were now visible, as walls had become piles of bricks and fragments
of mortar. And cities were no longer coherent structures of continuous flow; they
were divided into zones, with disrupting checkpoints and unsettling mountains
of detritus. In his writing on neorealism, Gilles Deleuze discusses the key import
ance of these urban spaces and the means of recording them. Film becomes the
‘ “inventory” of a setting’.2 Deleuze argues that, unlike films which interest them-
selves in sensory-motor situations, neorealism presents action which ‘floats in the
situation, rather than bringing it to a conclusion or strengthening it’, linked by a
‘dreamlike connection through the intermediary of the liberated sense organs’.3
These ruins, as well as being an evocative subject for contemporary documentary,
provide a setting in which the film’s action floats in chains of discontinuous nar-
rative events.
1 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s (London: Bloomsbury, 2013),
30 and 31.
2 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (London: Continuum, 2005), 4.
3 Deleuze (2005), Cinema 2, 4.
Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema. Benedict Morrison, Oxford University Press. © Benedict Morrison 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894069.003.0002
One of the key figures of the era is Roberto Rossellini, who repeatedly explores
this post-war landscape. Giuliana Muscio, commenting on Paisà (1946), writes
that ‘the film depicts familiar places in un-familiar ways, with a common, recur-
ring element: ruins.’4 Rossellini’s next film Germania anno zero (1948) uses the
disturbed spaces of its mise en scène to interrupt smooth communication as one
of the film’s several commitments to formal disjuncture. André Bazin writes that
Rossellini’s cinema is one of ‘enormous ellipses—or rather, great holes’.5 Bazin
suggests that Rossellini is a director who is not primarily concerned with conven-
tional narrative arcs, but rather with creating strings of ‘image-facts’; ‘the unit of
[his] cinematic narrative . . . is not the “shot” . . . but the “fact” [which is a] fragment
of concrete reality.’6 In his most famous metaphorical formulation for Rossellini’s
storytelling technique, Bazin likens the structural quality of the film to stepping
stones, where ‘the mind has to leap from one event to the other as one leaps from
stone to stone in crossing a river’ without clear causality; this is a narrative broken
down, in ruins, reinforcing the sense of art cinema articulation as a string of dis-
cordant signs.7 Consistent with Rossellini’s earlier Roma città aperta and Paisà,
these ellipses, as Peter Brunette expresses it, foreground what lies ‘between
shots . . . (if such a space can be conceived)’.8
This inconceivable in-betweenness is also the space of post-war Berlin. Made
after the director’s trip to Germany in March 1947, Rossellini’s film documents
the devastation of Berlin and its people after the fall of the Third Reich. In the
film’s story, life—made up of exhausting work parties, an endless struggle to find
food, the hopeless endurance of illness and hunger—is shown as static and repeti-
tive. The young boy Edmund (Edmund Meschke) lives in a small apartment in
the shell of a building with his father (Ernst Pittschau), sister (Ingetraud Hinze),
and brother (Franz-Otto Krüger), along with a number of other families. The nar-
rative is one of frustrated opportunity and restricted space. Edmund’s father is on
the verge of starvation. His brother, Karl-Heinz, has been a Nazi sympathizer and
is now scared to report to the police for fear of arrest; without reporting to them
he is unable to acquire an identity card, essential in order to obtain work and food
rations. The atmosphere in the apartment is conditioned by the presence of these
weak figures, emasculated respectively by physical sickness and unemployment.
The architectural and narrative ruins make visible the temporal and intellectual
in-betweenness of year zero. Berlin is both dynamic and static: the piled bricks
are both promise of a new city and ideology that will rise and evidence of hope-
less devastation. Just six years after Germania anno zero, Ivan Chtcheglov wrote
4 Giuliana Muscio, ‘Paisà/Paisan,’ in The Cinema of Italy, ed. Giorgio Bertellini (London: Wallflower
Press, 2004), 38.
5 André Bazin, What Is Cinema?: Volume 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1971), 35.
6 Bazin (1971), 37. 7 Bazin (1971), 35.
8 Peter Brunette, ‘Rossellini and Cinematic Realism,’ Cinema Journal 25, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 44.
Articulation in Ruins 33
that ‘architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating
reality, of engineering dreams’; Fascism had transformed city architecture into an
index for an ideology which was redundant by 1947.9 Neorealism’s reality is one
of radical fragmentation and dissolution, in which the dreams engineered under
Fascism, the buildings which housed institutions erected in their honour, and
even seamlessly articulated film form have fallen apart. Seemingly inspired in
some way by this decline, Edmund ultimately kills his father before throwing
himself from the top of a building.
Much of the criticism on Germania anno zero has focalized the film’s frag-
mented form through the central character, the child Edmund. This critical
manoeuvre often begins from an assertion that the film’s mise en scène clearly
articulates on Edmund’s behalf. However, while the ruins are expressive, they
ultimately express only ruination, one of a series of signs in the film which do
signify, often emphatically, but only offer meanings approximate with their own
semiotic inadequacy. Rather than a coherent syntax of linearly arranged signs, the
film establishes a string of disconnected signs—objects, gestures, figures. This
syntactic and semantic ruination becomes oppressive, the presence of each sign
in need of a supplement to complete it, the trace of ‘its “incomplete” opposite’
required to give it any meaning.10 The ruined buildings are the site of the ruination
of their absent opposites (the still-standing buildings, institutions, and ideas
destroyed by war and the film). Now, the ruins—and communication more
widely—are stuck, endlessly and unprofitably self-reflexive and ironic, unable to
progress beyond reference to their own incompleteness in the unmeaningful
moment of year zero.
The mise en scène of ruins and decaying interiors consists of strings of signs of
collapsing significance. This unproductive signification, in which only the ruined
absence of an opposite is gestured to, is inexhaustibly circular, a circularity imme-
diately suggested by the form of the film’s opening credits, in which an unnerving
sense of déjà vu is created through the repeated use of the same tracking shot
more than once, conjuring the image of monotonously repetitive cycles of relent-
lessly unchanging piles of rubble, each pile both the remnant of a unique building
and interchangeable with every other pile. The film’s complicated articulation
presents a stuttering form that moves forward by moving round and round. The
Germany which the film claims at its outset it can document impartially does not
exist; it is ended and not yet begun, caught in a loop of repeated footage and the
echoes of outmoded ideas. Sandro Bernardi, discussing Rossellini’s earlier Paisà,
9 Quoted in Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 69.
10 Brunette (1985), 36.
sees precisely this ‘lack of meaning [as] the film’s meaning,’ a paradoxical
eccentricity.11
This communication in ruins operates diegetically at the level of the
Establishment, which has become a set of processes without an eloquent, founda-
tional attitude. Karl-Heinz ultimately hands himself over to the police, and he is,
according to appropriate procedure, taken in. However, he is released without
charge, as there is no framework against which his past behaviour may be judged.
Judgement, in the absence of conviction, proves to be impossible. Identity—
according to which certain prohibitions concerning employment and status are
meted out—is a matter of bureaucratic structure without underlying points of
principle. Rossellini’s Berlin is the echo of Kafka’s earlier nightmarish dystopias,
in which characters are only afforded identity by the documentation of a State so
nebulous that it cannot be defined. Berlin in year zero is a city of ruins, and these
ruins include the specious communication at the heart of the city’s contemporary
life. And in this year zero—between the ideological dogma of the years under
Nazi rule and the as-yet uncertain political era to come—the communication of
individuals also becomes complicated, reduced to inarticulate strings of sound
and silence. The general and discomforting quiet is interrupted by characters’
unfocused outbursts and their parroting of now-outmoded statements, spoken in
place of spontaneous utterance and without conviction. The Catholicism of
Edmund’s father, the Nazi attitudes of his former teacher (Erich Gühne), and the
pragmatism of his brother and sister become a cacophony of slogans uttered in a
moment after and before the possibility of full ideological articulacy, delivered
with automatic weariness.
It has been argued that, in this moment of political indeterminacy, Edmund’s
killing of his father represents the attempt to realize some sort of ideological pos
ition. However, within this landscape of rhetorical contingency, the possibility of
individual conviction and motivation comes into question. As Bernardi suggests,
the ruins mark not only the fact that ‘desolation rules uncontested and absolute’,
but are also the evidence of ‘inner ruins’, the crumbled remains and beginnings of
human beliefs.12 Individuals are no longer defined by clear positions; a necessary
pragmatism has rendered consistency almost impossible. Truth ceases to be a rec-
ognizable or stable value. Edmund is unfairly accused by Mr Rademacher (Hans
Sangen) of stealing 300 Marks when he returns from trying to sell a set of scales;
later, his father accuses him of lying when he has been out all night. When Eva
casually tells her father to lie to the doctors in order to stay in the hospital, she
says that it is for his own good, but it is impossible to evaluate whether or not her
concerns are more self-serving. The world in which Edmund wanders does not
11 Sandro Bernardi, ‘Rossellini’s Landscapes: Nature, Myth, History,’ in Roberto Rossellini: Magician
of the Real, ed. David Forgacs, Sarah Lutton, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: BFI, 2000), 54.
12 Bernardi (2000), 55.
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But to return to my own personal narrative. After the adventure of the
tea, nothing particular occurred so long as I continued in charge of
the post. As soon as darkness set fairly in, I proposed, in obedience
to my orders, to withdraw; and I carried the design into effect without
any molestation on the part of the enemy. It was, however, their
custom to take possession of the hill as soon as the British troops
abandoned it; and hence I had not proceeded above half-way across
the ravine when I heard the voices of a French detachment, which
must have marched into the courtyard of the house almost at the
moment that I and my men marched out of it. But they made no
attempt to annoy us, and we rejoined the corps from which we had
been detached in perfect safety.
The next day was spent in a state of rest in the chateau of
Arcanques. It is a fine old pile, and stands at the foot of the little
eminence on which the church is built. Like many mansions in
England of the date of Queen Elizabeth or Henry VIII., it is
surrounded by a high wall, within which is a paved court leading up
to the main entrance. But it too, like all the buildings near, bore
ample testimony to the merciless operation of war in its crumbling
masonry and blackened timbers. There was a grove of venerable old
firs round it, from which all the late firing had not entirely expelled the
rooks.
Of the church I have a less perfect recollection. I remember, indeed,
that its situation was highly striking, and that the view from the
churchyard was of no ordinary beauty. I recollect, likewise, several
statues of knights and ladies reposing in niches round the walls—
some with the cross upon their shields, and their legs laid athwart, to
show that they had served in Palestine; others in the more ancient
costume of chain armour; but whether they were worthy of
admiration as specimens of the art of sculpture, I cannot now take it
upon me to say. I remarked, however, that the devices on the shields
of most of these warriors, and the crests upon their helmets,
resembled the coat and crest which were emblazoned over the
gateway of the chateau; and hence I concluded that they were the
effigies of the former lords of the castle, and that the family which
owned it must have been at one period of some consequence.
It was not, however, exclusively in examining these buildings that I
found amusement for my hours of idleness. From the churchyard, as
I have already stated, the view is at all times magnificent, and it was
rendered doubly so to-day by the movements of our army. The tide
of war seemed to have taken a sudden turn; and the numerous
corps which had so lately defiled towards the right could now be
seen retracing their steps, and filing towards the left. It was a
magnificent spectacle. From the high ground on which I stood, I
could see very nearly to the two extreme points of the position; and
the effect produced by the marching of nearly 120,000 men may be
more easily imagined than described. The roads of communication
ran, for the most part, in the rear of Arcanques. They were all
crowded—cavalry, infantry, and artillery were moving; some columns
marched in echelon; others paused from time to time as if to watch
some object in their front; whilst a grove or wood would now and
again receive an armed mass into its bosom, and then seem to be
on fire, from the flashing of the sun against the bayonets. Happily for
me, it was a day of bright sunshine, consequently every object
appeared to great advantage; nor, I suspect, have many of our
oldest soldiers beheld a more striking panorama than the
combination of the objects around me this day produced.
I stood and watched with intense interest the shifting scene, till it
gradually settled down into one of quiet. The various brigades, as I
afterwards learned, were only returning from the point towards which
the appearance of danger had hurried them, and now proceeded to
establish themselves once more in their cantonments. The French
general, either awed by the state of preparedness in which he found
us, or satisfied with having called us for a few days into the field at
this inclement season, laid aside the threatening attitude which he
had assumed. It suited not the policy of our gallant leader to expose
his troops wantonly to the miseries of a winter campaign; and hence
rest and shelter were again the order of the day. But in these the
corps to which I was attached had as yet no participation, our march
being directed, on the following morning, to the vicinity of Fort
Charlotte, where the charge of the pickets was once more assigned
to us.
CHAPTER XVII.
The transactions of the three days from the 8th to the 11th of
January, resembled so completely in all particulars the transactions
of other days during which it fell to our lot to keep guard beside the
mayor's house, that I will not try the patience of my reader by
narrating them at length. He will accordingly take it for granted that
the ordinary routine of watching and labour was gone through, that
no attempt was made on the part of the enemy to surprise or harass
us, and that, with the exception of a little suffering from extreme cold,
and the want of a moderate proportion of sleep, we had no cause to
complain of our destiny. When we first came to our ground we found
the redoubt in a state of considerable forwardness—quite defensible,
indeed, in a case of emergency; and we left it even more perfect,
and capable of containing at least a thousand men. It was not,
however, with any feeling of regret that we beheld a brigade of
Guards approaching our encampment about two hours after noon on
the 11th; nor did we experience the slightest humiliation in
surrendering to them our tents, our working tools, and the post of
honour.
Now, then, we looked forward, not only with resignation, but with real
satisfaction, to a peaceable sojourn of a few weeks at Gauthory. We
had never, it is true, greatly admired these cantonments; but the
events of the last eight or ten days had taught us to set its true value
upon a settled habitation of any description, and we accordingly
made up our minds to grumble no more. But just as the line of march
was beginning to form, intelligence reached us that the place of our
abode was changed. Other troops, it appeared, had been introduced
into our former apartments; and we were in consequence
commanded to house ourselves in the village of Bidart. I mean not to
assert that the order was received with any degree of dissatisfaction;
but feeling as at that moment we did, it was, in truth, a matter of
perfect indifference where we were stationed, provided only we had
a roof over our heads and an opportunity was granted of resting from
our labours.
The village of Bidart is built upon an eminence, immediately in rear
of the large common on which the advanced brigade lay encamped.
It consists of about thirty houses, some of them of a tolerable size,
but the majority cottages. Into one of the largest my friend and
myself were fortunate enough to be ushered; and as we found
chimneys and windows already formed, the former permitting us to
keep fires alight without the attendant misery of smoke, and the latter
proof against the weather, we sincerely congratulated ourselves on
our change of abode. Nor was it only on account of the superiority of
these over our former quarters that we rejoiced in this migration. The
country round proved to be better stocked with game, especially with
hares, than any which we had yet inhabited: and hence we
continued, by the help of our guns and greyhounds, not only to
spend the mornings very agreeably, but to keep our own and our
friends' tables well supplied.
I have mentioned, in a former chapter, that the little town of Biaritz
stands upon the sea-shore, and that it was, at the period of which I
now write, regarded as a sort of neutral ground by the French and
British armies. Patrols from both did indeed occasionally reconnoitre
it; the French, in particular, seldom permitting a day to pass without a
party of their light cavalry riding through it. Yet to visit Biaritz became
now the favourite amusement amongst us, and the greater the risk
run of being sabred or taken, the more eager were we to incur and to
escape it. But there was a cause for this, good reader, and I will tell
thee what it was.
In peaceable times Biaritz constituted, as we learned from its
inhabitants, a fashionable watering-place to the wealthy people of
Bayonne and its vicinity. It was, and no doubt is now, a remarkably
pretty village, about as large perhaps as Sandgate, and built upon
the margin of the water. The town itself lies in a sort of hollow,
between two green hills, which, towards the sea, end in broken cliffs.
Its houses were neatly whitewashed, and above all it was, and I trust
still is, distinguished as the residence of two or three handsome
women. These ladies had about them all the gaiety and liveliness of
Frenchwomen, with a good deal of the sentimentality of our own fair
countrywomen. To us they were particularly pleasant, professing, I
know not how truly, to prefer our society to that of any persons
besides; and we, of course, were far too gallant to deny them that
gratification, because we risked our lives or our freedom at each
visit. By no means. Two or three times in each week the favoured
few mounted their horses and took the road to Biaritz, from which, on
more than one occasion, they with difficulty returned.
With the circumstances attending one of these escapes I may as
well make my reader acquainted. We were for the most part prudent
enough to cast lots previously to setting out, in order to decide on
whom, among the party, the odious task should devolve of watching
outside to prevent a surprise by the enemy's cavalry, whilst his
companions were more agreeably employed within. So many visits
had, however, been paid, without any alarm being given, that one
morning, having quitted Bidart fewer in number than usual, we rashly
determined to run all risks rather than that one of the three should
spend an hour cheerlessly by himself. The only precaution which we
took was to picket our horses, ready saddled and bridled, at the
garden gate, instead of putting them up, as we were in the habit of
doing, in the stable.
It was well for us that even this slender precaution had been taken.
We had sat about half an hour with our fair friends, and had just
ceased to joke on the probability of our suffering the fate of
Sampson, and being caught by the Philistines, when on a pause in
the conversation taking place, our ears were saluted with the sound
of horses' hoofs trampling upon the paved street. We sprang to the
window, and our consternation may be guessed at when we beheld
eight or ten French hussars riding slowly from the lower end of the
town. Whilst we were hesitating how to proceed, whether to remain
quiet, in the hope that the party might retire without searching any of
the houses, or expose ourselves to certain pursuit by flying, we
observed a rascal, in the garb of a seaman, run up to the leader of
the patrol and lay hold of his bridle, enter into conversation with him,
and point to the abode of our new acquaintances. This was hint
enough. Without pausing to say farewell to our fair friends, who
screamed, as if they, and not we, had been in danger, we ran with all
haste to the spot where our horses stood, and, springing into the
saddle, applied the spur, with very little mercy, to their flanks. We
were none of us particularly well mounted; but either our pursuers
had alighted to search the house, or they took at first a wrong
direction, for we got so much the start of them before the chase fairly
began, that possibly we might have escaped had we been obliged to
trust to our own steeds as far as the pickets. Of this, however, I am
by no means certain, for they were unquestionably gaining upon us,
as a sailor would say, hand over hand, when, by great good fortune,
a patrol of our own cavalry made its appearance. Then, indeed, the
tables were turned. The enemy pulled up, paused for an instant, and
took to their heels; whereupon our troopers, who had trotted forward
as soon as they saw what was the matter, put their horses to the
speed and followed. Whether they overtook their adversaries, and
what was the issue of the skirmish, if indeed any skirmish took place,
I cannot tell; for though we made an attempt to revenge ourselves
upon our late pursuers, we soon found that we were distanced by
both parties, and were, perforce, contented to ride quietly home,
congratulating each other by the way on our hairbreadth deliverance.
From that time forward we were more prudent. Our visits were
indeed resumed, and with their usual frequency; but we took care
not again to dispense with the watchfulness of a sentinel, who, on
the contrary, took his station henceforth on the top of one of the
heights, from which he commanded a view of the surrounding
country to the distance of several miles. Though, therefore, we were
more than once summoned to horse because the enemy's dragoons
were in sight, we generally contrived to mount in such time as to
preclude the necessity of riding, as we had before done, for life or
liberty.
By spending my mornings thus, or in a determined pursuit of game,
and my evenings in such society as a corps of gentlemanly young
men furnished, nearly a fortnight passed over my head before I was
aware that time could have made so much progress. It seldom
happens, however, that any period of human existence, whether
extensive or contracted, passes by without some circumstance
occurring calculated to awaken painful emotions. I recollect, in the
course of this fortnight, an event which, though I was no farther
concerned in it than as a spectator, made a deep and melancholy
impression on my mind. I allude to the loss of a large vessel, during
a tremendous storm, on the rocks which run out into the sea off
Bidart.
The precise day of the month on which this sad shipwreck occurred I
have forgotten; but I recollect being sent for by my friend, during the
progress of one of the heaviest gales which we had witnessed, to
come and watch with him the fate of a brig, which was in evident
distress, about a couple of miles from the land. The wind blew a
perfect hurricane on shore; and hence the question was—would the
ship succeed in weathering the cape, or would she strike? If she got
once round the headland, then her course to the harbour of Secoa
was direct; if otherwise, nothing could save her. We turned our
glasses towards her in a state of feverish anxiety, and beheld her
bending under a single close-reefed topsail, and making lee-way at a
fearful rate every moment. Presently a sort of attempt was made to
luff up or tack; it was a desperate one. I cannot even now think
without shuddering of the consequence. The sail, caught by a
sudden squall, was torn into a hundred shreds: down, down she
went before the surge; in five seconds she struck against a reef, and
in ten minutes more split into a thousand fragments. One gun only
was fired as a signal of distress; but who could regard it? We
possessed no boats; and had the contrary been the case, this was a
sea in which no boat could live. Powerless, therefore, of aid, we
could only stand and gaze upon the wreck, till, piece by piece, it
disappeared amid the raging waters. Not a soul survived to tell to
what country she belonged, or with what she was freighted; and only
one body was drifted to land. It was that of a woman apparently
about thirty years of age, genteelly dressed, and rather elegantly
formed; to whom we gave such sepulture as soldiers can give, and
such as they are themselves taught to expect.
The impression which that shipwreck made upon me was not only
far more distressing, but far more permanent, than the impression
made by any other spectacle of which, during the course of a
somewhat eventful life, I have been the spectator. For several days I
could think of hardly anything besides, and at night my dreams were
constantly of drowning men and vessels beating upon rocks; so
great is the effect of desuetude, even in painful subjects, and so
appalling is death when he comes in a form to which we are
unaccustomed. Of slaughtered men I have of course seen
multitudes, as well when life had just departed from them as when
corruption had set its seal upon their forms; but such sights never
affected me—no, not even at the commencement of my military
career—as I was affected by the loss of that ship, though she went
to pieces at too great a distance from the beach to permit more than
a very indistinct view of her perishing inmates. Yet there is nothing in
reality more terrible in drowning than in any other kind of death; and
a sailor will look upon it, I daresay, with precisely the same degree of
indifference which a soldier experiences when he contemplates the
prospect of his own dissolution by fire or steel.
In the course of my narrative I have not made any regular attempt to
convey to the mind of the reader a distinct notion of the peculiar
customs and language which distinguish the natives of this country.
Two motives have guided me to this. In the first place, it is nowadays
known to all who are likely to peruse what I write, that the inhabitants
of those provinces which lie at the immediate base of the Pyrenees,
are a race totally distinct, and essentially different in almost all
respects, from either the Spaniards or the French. They speak a
language of their own—namely, Basque—which is said by those who
profess to be acquainted with it to resemble the Celtic more than any
other known tongue. The dress of the men consists usually of a blue
or brown jacket of coarse woollen cloth, of breeches or trousers of
the same, with a waistcoat frequently of scarlet, grey worsted
stockings, and wooden shoes. On their heads they wear a large flat
bonnet, similar to the Lowland bonnet, or scone, of Scotland. They
are generally tall, but thin; and they present altogether an
appearance as uncouth as need be fancied. The women equip
themselves in many respects as the fishwomen of the good town of
Newhaven are accustomed to do, with this difference, that they
seldom cover their heads at all—and, like the men, wear wooden
clogs. They are a singular race, and appear to take a pride in those
peculiarities which keep them from coalescing with either of the
nations among whom they dwell. But all this, as I said before, is too
generally known to render it imperative upon me minutely to repeat
it.
My second motive for keeping, in a great degree, silent on the head
of manners and customs is one the efficiency of which the reader will
not, I daresay, call in question—namely, the want of opportunity to
make myself sufficiently master of the subject to enter, con amore,
upon it. No man who journeys through a country in the train of an
invading army ought to pretend to an intimate acquaintance with the
manners and customs of its inhabitants. Wherever foreign troops
swarm, the aborigines necessarily appear in false colours. The
greater part of them, indeed, abandon their homes; while such of
them as remain are servile and submissive through terror; nor do
they ever display their real characters, at least in the presence of a
stranger. Hence it is that nine-tenths of my brethren in arms who
write at all commit the most egregious blunders in those very
portions of their books where they particularly aim at enlightening the
reading public; and that the most matter-of-fact story, spun out by the
most matter-of-fact man or woman who has visited the seat of the
late war since the cessation of hostilities, contains, and must contain,
more certain information touching the fire-side occupations of the
people than all the 'Journals' or 'Letters to Friends at Home' which
this age of book-making has produced. Frankly confessing,
therefore, that any account which I could give of the manners and
habits of the Basques would deserve as little respect as the
accounts already given by other military tourists, I am content to
keep my reader's attention riveted—if, indeed, that be practicable—
upon my own little personal adventures, rather than amuse him with
details which might be true as far as I know to the contrary, but
which, in all probability, would be false.
Proceed we, then, in our own way. From the day of the shipwreck up
to the 23d of the month, I have no recollection of any occurrence
worthy to be recorded. Advantage was taken, it is true, of that period
of rest to lay in a fresh stock of tea and other luxuries, with the
means of accomplishing which an opportune disbursement of one
month's pay supplied us. These we purchased in a market which
certain speculating traders had established, and which followed the
movements of the army from post to post. The grand depot of all
was, however, Secoa, between which port and England
communication was regularly kept up; and thither I and my comrades
resorted for such more curious articles as habit or caprice prompted
us to purchase. Moreover, by coursing, shooting, and riding,—
sometimes to Biaritz, and the house of our pretty French women;
sometimes to St Jean de Luz, where, by the way, races were
regularly established; and occasionally to the cantonments of a
friend in another division—we found our days steal insensibly, and
therefore agreeably, away; nor was it without a feeling somewhat
akin to discontent that we saw ourselves again setting forth to take
our turn of outpost duty at the old station beside Fort Charlotte.
CHAPTER XVIII.
As the circumstances attending our present tour of duty had in them
more to interest and excite than usual, I shall describe them at
greater length.
The air was cold and bracing; it was a fine clear wintry day, when the
corps to which I was attached, strengthened by the half of another
battalion, began its march to the front. Instead of employing eighteen
hundred men at the outposts, nine hundred were now esteemed
capable of providing for the safety of the left column of the army; and
such was accordingly the extent of the force which, under the
command of a lieutenant-colonel, took the direction of the mayor's
house. On arriving there we found matters in a somewhat different
order from that in which we used to find them. The enemy, it
appeared, had abandoned the ground which their pickets formerly
occupied. Our advanced parties were, in consequence, pushed
forward; and the stations of the extreme sentinels were now in front
of that ground upon which so much fighting had taken place in the
beginning of last month. The guards themselves, instead of being
hutted in and about the chateau, were disposed among a range of
cottages in the very centre of the field of battle; and the objects
which were by this means kept constantly before their eyes were
certainly not of the most cheering or encouraging description.
It was not my lot to take charge of a picket-guard on the immediate
day of our advance. My business, on the contrary, was to
superintend the erection of works, which appeared to me to be
thrown up as much for the purpose of giving the soldiers
employment, and keeping their blood in circulation, as to oppose an
obstacle to the advance of Marshal Soult, from whom no serious
attack was now apprehended. On the following morning, however, I
led my party to the front; nor have I frequently spent twenty-four
hours in a state of higher excitement than I experienced during the
progress of the day and the night which succeeded this movement.
In the first place, the weather had changed greatly for the worse. The
frost continued, indeed, as intense—perhaps it was more intense
than ever; but the snow came down in huge flakes, which a cold
north-east wind drove into our faces. The hut into which the main
body of the guard was ushered presented the same ruinous
appearance with almost every other house similarly situated; it
furnished no shelter against the blast, and very little against the
shower. Intelligence had, moreover, been conveyed to us by a
deserter, that Soult, irritated at the surprisal of his post upon the
Nive, was determined to retaliate whenever an opportunity might
occur; and it was more than hinted, that one object of the late
retrogression from our front was to draw us beyond our regular line,
and so place us in an exposed situation. The utmost caution and
circumspection were accordingly enjoined, as the only means of
frustrating his designs; and of these the necessity naturally
increased as daylight departed.
That I might not be taken by surprise, in case any attack was made
upon me after dark, I devoted a good proportion of the day to a
minute examination of the country in front and on each flank of my
post. For this purpose I strolled over the fields, and found them
strewed with the decaying bodies of what had once been soldiers.
The enemy, it was evident, had not taken the trouble to bury even
their own dead; for, of the carcasses around me, as many, indeed
more, were arrayed in French than in British uniforms. No doubt they
had furnished food for the wolves, kites, and wild dogs from the
thickets—for the flesh of the most of them was torn, and the eyes of
almost all were dug out; yet there was one body, the body of a
French soldier, quite untouched; and how it chanced to be so, the
reader may judge for himself, as soon as he has perused the
following little story.
About the middle of the line covered by my chain of sentries was a
small straggling village, containing a single street, about twenty
cottages, and as many gardens. In the street of that village lay about
half-a-dozen carcasses more than half devoured by birds and beasts
of prey, and in several of the gardens were other little clusters
similarly circumstanced. At the bottom of one of these gardens a
Frenchman lay upon his face, perfectly entire, and close beside the
body sat a dog. The poor brute, seeing us approach, began to howl
piteously, at the same time resisting every effort, not on my part only,
but on the part of another officer who accompanied me, to draw him
from the spot. We succeeded, indeed, in coaxing him as far as the
upper part of the garden—for, though large and lank, he was quite
gentle; but he left us there, returned to his post beside the body, and,
lifting up his nose into the air, howled again. There are few things in
my life that I regret more than not having secured that dog; for it
cannot I think be doubted that he was watching beside his dead
master, and that he defended him from the teeth and talons which
made a prey of all the rest. But I had at the time other thoughts in my
mind, and circumstances prevented my paying a second visit to the
place where I had found him.
Among other happy results, the more forward position in which the
pickets were now placed, furnished me with an opportunity of
obtaining a less imperfect view of the city and defences of Bayonne
than any which I had yet obtained. I say less imperfect; for even from
the tops of the houses no very accurate survey could be taken of a
place situated upon a sandy flat, and still five or six miles distant. But
I saw enough to confirm me in the idea which I had already formed,
that the moment of attack upon these intrenchments, come when it
might, could not fail to be a bloody one.
Daylight was by this time rapidly departing; and it became incumbent
upon me to contract the chain of my vedettes, and to establish my
party a little in the rear of the cottage where we had been hitherto
stationed. By acting thus I contrived to render myself as secure as a
detachment numerically so small can ever hope to be. There were
two lakes, or rather large ponds, in the line of my position—one on
the left of the main road, the other on the right; indeed, it was near
the opposite extremity of the last-mentioned lake that we
unexpectedly found ourselves exposed to a charge of cavalry during
the late battle. Of these lakes I gladly took advantage. Planting my
people in a large house about a hundred yards in rear, I formed my
sentinels into a curved line, causing the extremities to rest each
upon its own pond, and pushing forward the centre in the shape of a
bow. "Now, then," thought I, "everything must depend upon the
vigilance of the watchmen;" and, to render that as perfect as
possible, I resolved to spend the whole night in passing from the one
to the other. Nor did I break that resolution. I may safely say that I did
not sit down for five minutes at a time from sunset on the 24th till
sunrise on the 25th.
The snow, which during an hour or two in the afternoon had ceased,
began again to fall in increased quantities after dark. The wind, too,
grew more and more boisterous every moment; it roared in the
woods, and whistled fearfully through the ruined houses; and at
every pause I could distinctly hear the wolf's long howl, and the
growl and short bark of the wild dogs, as they quarrelled over the
mangled carcasses scattered round me. Near the margin of the
right-hand lake, in particular, this horrible din was constantly audible.
There lay there, apart from each other, about ten bodies, of whom
seven wore the fragments of a British uniform; and on these a whole
troop of animals, from the thickets beyond, gorged themselves.
Close beside one of these bodies I had been under the necessity of
planting a sentinel; and the weakness of my party would not permit
me to allow him a companion. He was rather a young man, and had
selected the post for himself, in order to show that superstitious
terrors had no power over him; but he bitterly lamented his temerity,
as the situation in which I found him showed.
I visited his post about half an hour after he had assumed it—that is
to say, a little before midnight: he was neither standing nor sitting,
but leaning against a tree, and was fairly covered with a coat of
frozen snow. His firelock had dropped from his hand, and lay across
the chest of the dead man beside whom he had chosen to place
himself. When I spoke to the sentry, and desired to know why he had
not challenged as I approached, he made no answer; and on
examining more closely, I found that he was in a swoon. Of course I
despatched my orderly for a relief, and kept watch myself till he
returned, when, with the assistance of my comrades, I first dragged
the dead body to the lake, into which it was thrown, and then
removed the insensible but living man to the picket-house. There
several minutes were spent in chafing and rubbing him before he
opened his eyes; but being at length restored to the use of speech,
he gave the following account of his adventure:—
He said that the corporal had hardly quitted him when his ears were
assailed with the most dreadful sounds, such as, he was very
certain, no earthly creature could produce; that he saw through the
gloom a whole troop of devils dancing beside the water's edge; and
that a creature in white came creeping towards his post, groaning
heavily all the way. He endeavoured to call out to it, but the words
stuck in his throat, nor could he utter so much as a cry. Just then he
swore that the dead man sat up and stared him in the face; after
which he had no recollection of anything, till he found himself in the
picket-house. I have no reason to suspect that man of cowardice;
neither, as my reader will easily believe, did I treat his story with any
other notice than a hearty laugh; but in the absolute truth of it he
uniformly persisted, and, if he be alive, persists I daresay to this
hour.
After this adventure with my foolhardy and at the same time
superstitious follower, nothing occurred during the night which seems
to deserve special notice. As I have already mentioned, I took care
to visit the sentinels so often that danger of surprisal was effectually
averted. That these constant perambulations would have been
undertaken as a matter of choice I by no means pretend to say, for it
was a night of storm and intense cold: but I felt my situation to be a
critical one; and feeling so, I should have been less at ease by the
side of a comfortable fire than I was while forcing my way against the
wind and snow. Nor had I any reason to find fault with the conduct of
my men. Being warned of their danger in good time, they were
thoroughly on the alert to guard against it. I found each sentry more
watchful than his neighbour—in other words, one and all of them
completely on the qui vive.
I recollect, indeed, on one occasion being put a little upon my mettle.
It was about two in the morning when I was informed by a soldier,
who kept watch at the extremity of the hamlet, that he had heard
within the last ten minutes a more than usual noise in a large house
about a hundred and fifty yards in front of his post. He described it to
me as if people were tearing up boards, or thumping down heavy
weights upon the floor; and he himself seemed to think that a body of
infantry had arrived and established themselves within the building. I
listened attentively in order to catch any sound which might proceed
from that quarter, but none reached me. He persisted, however, in
his story; and added, that if the noise which he had heard proceeded
not from men, it must come from spirits. "And why not from dogs or
wolves?" said I. "Because dogs and wolves cannot split wood," said
he; "and I will swear, that if ever I heard planks torn asunder, I heard
it now." Being little inclined to leave the matter in doubt, I remained
with the sentinel, and despatched my orderly to bring up half-a-
dozen men for the purpose of making a reconnaissance.
The reader has probably anticipated that I found the house empty. It
was so; for, after stealing through the street with the utmost caution
—stopping every two minutes and applying my ear to the ground, in
order to catch the slightest noise—after peeping over the garden
wall, listening at the entrance, and creeping up the front steps with
the pace of a burglar, I found that the chateau was wholly tenantless;
and what was more, that not a trace of its having been recently
visited, at least by human beings, could be discovered. Nevertheless
I commended the soldier for his watchfulness, advised him to
continue equally vigilant as long as he should remain on duty, and
leaving it to himself to decide whether the sounds which he had
reported proceeded from ghosts or more tangible creatures, I quitted
him.
It may not be amiss if I state here, what I have already more than
hinted, that on all these occasions I was accompanied by a spaniel
bitch. I had brought the creature with me from England when she
was a puppy of only nine months old; and she became attached to
me in a degree such as would not in all probability have been the
case had my mode of life being more settled, and she in
consequence less my companion. Nor was it only because I was
fond of the animal that I taught her to follow my fortunes thus closely.
A well-trained dog is no bad helpmate to an officer who has charge
of an outpost; indeed I was never greatly alarmed, notwithstanding
the communications of my vedettes, unless my four-footed patrol
confirmed their statements. If she barked or growled, then I felt
assured that something dangerous was near; if she continued quiet,
I was comparatively easy. To that dog, indeed, I owe my life; but the
circumstance under which she preserved it occurred in a different
quarter of the world, and has no right to be introduced into my
present narrative.
In this manner was the night of the 24th of January spent. About an
hour before daybreak on the 25th I mustered my picket, according to
custom, and kept them standing under arms in front of the house till
dawn appeared. This measure was necessary, not only because it is
a standing order in the British army for advanced corps to get under
arms thus early, but because experience has proved that the first of
the morning is the favourite moment of attack, inasmuch as, by
commencing hostilities at that young hour of the day, good hopes are
held out of effecting something decisive before the day shall have
ended. On the present occasion, however, no attack was made; and
hence, after waiting the usual time, I prepared again to shift my
ground, and to take post at the more advanced station which I held
yesterday, and which I had evacuated solely for the purpose of
making myself less insecure during the hours of darkness.
We had returned to our daylight position about a quarter of an hour,
when a patrol of light cavalry arrived, and proposed to plant a
vedette upon the top of an eminence about a mile in our front. The
person who commanded the party, however, appeared to be a little
in doubt as to the practicability of performing the orders which he
had received. He said that the enemy were not willing to allow that
height to be occupied by us; that the last relief which had attempted
to establish itself there was driven off; and that he was not without
apprehension of an ambuscade, and of being taken with his whole
party;—in a word, he begged that I would allow a portion of my men
to follow him, and that I would support him in case he should be
attacked either by infantry or cavalry.
To say the truth, I was a good deal puzzled how to act, for nothing
had been communicated to me on the subject; nevertheless I
determined to lend as much assistance as I could spare, and
accordingly directed about a dozen men to follow the dragoons. Not
deeming it right, however, to intrust a detachment of my own people
entirely to the charge of a stranger, I resolved to accompany them;
and perhaps it was well that I did.
We were yet a half musket-shot from the hill which the cavalry were
desired to occupy when we observed a superior force of French
dragoons advancing from the lines towards the same point. The
push now was for the high ground. We foot-soldiers could not of
course keep pace with our mounted comrades, but we followed them
at the double, and arrived at the base just as they had crowned the
height. They were hardly there, however, when a discordant shout,
or rather yell, told us that the French were ascending by the opposite
side. Our dragoons, I observed, instantly formed line; they
discharged their pistols, and made a show of charging: but whether it
was that the enemy's numbers overawed them, or that their horses
took fright at the report, I cannot tell, but before the caps of their
opponents were visible to our eyes their order was lost, and
themselves in full retreat. Down they came, both parties at full
speed; and now it was our turn to act. I had already placed my men
behind a turf fence, with strict orders not to fire till I should command
them. It was in vain that I stood upon the top of the wall and shouted
and waved to the fugitives to take a direction to the right or left. They
rode directly towards the ditch, as if their object had been to trample
us under foot; and, what was still more alarming, the enemy were
close behind them. In self-defence, I was therefore obliged to give
the preconcerted signal. My people fired. One of our own, and three
of the French dragoons dropped. The latter, apparently astonished at
the unlooked-for discharge, pulled up. "Now, now," cried we, "charge,
charge, and redeem your honour!" The dragoons did so; and we,
rising at the same instant with loud shouts, the enemy were
completely routed. Two of their troopers were taken; and of all who
escaped, hardly one escaped without a wound.
After this trifling skirmish, the French no longer disputed with us the
possession of the hill. Leaving the cavalry, therefore, to maintain it, I
fell back with my men to the picket-house; and, about an hour after
my return, was by no means displeased to find another party arrive
to relieve us. Having given to the officer in charge as much
information as I myself possessed, I called in my sentries and
marched to the rear.
CHAPTER XIX.
From the 26th of January up to the 20th of the following month
nothing occurred, either to myself individually or to the portion of the
army of which I was a member, particularly deserving of notice.
During that interval, indeed, a fresh supply of wearing apparel, of
flannels, stockings, and shoes, reached me, being a present from
kind friends at home; and seldom has any gift proved more
acceptable, or arrived more opportunely: but the reader is not, I
daresay, over-anxious to know whether the articles in question were
too large or too small, or whether they fitted to a hair's-breadth.
Neither would it greatly amuse him were I to detail at length how
ships freighted with corn reached Secoa; how fatigue parties were
ordered out to unload them; and how the loads, being justly divided,
were issued as forage for the horses, which stood much in need of it.
It may, however, be worth while to state that, previous to the arrival
of these corn-ships, even the cavalry and artillery were under the
necessity of feeding their horses chiefly upon chopped furze; and
hence that disease had begun to make rapid progress among them,
many dying almost every day; and all, even the most healthy, falling
fast out of condition. But for this providential supply of wholesome
oats and barley, I question whether we should have been able to
take the field, at least effectively, till later in the season.
On the 16th of February 1814, the Allied troops may be said to have
fairly broken up from their winter quarters. The corps to which I
belonged continued, indeed, under cover till the morning of the 21st;
but we were already in a great measure at our posts, seeing that our
cantonments lay immediately in rear of the pickets. Such divisions as
had been quartered in and about St Jean de Luz began to move to
the front on the 16th; and pitching their tents on the crest of the
position, they waited quietly till their leader should see fit to
command a farther advance. On these occasions, no part of the
spectacle is more imposing than the march of the artillery. Of this

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Introduction: Articulating Art Cinema 1

5. The Technology of Articulation: Complicating Intermedia in

1.1 The cinema of impoverishment in Germania anno zero48

The Many Faces of Film Articulation

2 Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema

Cinema’s Forms of Articulation

As Gilberto Perez suggests, ‘[f]ilm is an art of fragments, but of fragments pieced

defined by a smooth seamlessness and meaning appears immanent. Roland

[C]inematographic making, without which cinema is merely technology, can

4 Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema

In her discussion of aesthetic synthesis, Ropars employs a post-­structuralist

exists only in terms of the totality of shots included in the sequence; we no

Bordwell summarizes Eisenstein’s position as the attempt to rediscover ‘unity

15 Burch (1973), 39.

6 Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema

meaning is suspended in a state of might-­ be-­

23 Jennifer O’Meara, Engaging Dialogue: Cinematic Verbalism in American Independent Cinema

8 Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema

The Critical State of Art Cinema

One of the advantages of escaping Bordwell’s taxonomy—classical, historical-­

10 Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema

36 John White, European Art Cinema (London: Routledge, 2017), 11.

activities . . . embodiment in the image or on the soundtrack’.42 Character and

42 Bordwell (1985), 208–9. 43 Bordwell (1979), 59.

12 Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema

In the most detailed reworking of Bordwell’s theory, Kovács maintains this

49 Kovács (2007), 78. 50 Kovács (2007), 80. 51 Kovács (2007), 80.

answers’ which will ‘eventually [be] answered by . . . the characters’.56 An erotetic

What of ordinary criticism, the application and extension of existing semantic

56 Carroll (2009), 208. 57 Bordwell (1985), 231. 58 Bordwell (1985), 231.

14 Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema

War I, Freud’s psychoanalysis, Bergson’s philosophy, and Einstein’s revisionist

The contribution of art cinema—as a critical category—is, in Bordwell’s sense, to

65 Bordwell (1979), 62. 66 Bordwell (1985), 226. 67 Bordwell (1985), 221.

16 Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema

overarching sense-­making patterns.’71 These strategies operate through ‘conven-

79 Kiss and Willemsen (2017), 155.

18 Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema

84 O’Meara (2018), 99. 85 Bordwell (1985), 228. 86 Bordwell (1985), 209.

20 Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema

possibility.95 Bordwell discusses the parametric’s privileging of style over charac-

In seeking to disturb the trinity of (character-­centred) meaning, (dogmatic) critic,

95 Burch (1973), 14. 96 Bordwell (1985), 289 and 288.

22 Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema

types’ include the ‘urban upper- or lower-­middle-­class person’ with a particular

106 Kovács (2007), 67–8.

24 Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema

centripetal forces, which allow films to escape both meaningfulness and

114 Holland (1963), 25.

26 Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema

one that is sensitive to the disorientating features of complicated articulation

eccentricities of the films’ hermeneutic activity that revolves around a never-­

28 Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema

The Articulated Structure of this Book

1.1 The cinema of impoverishment in Germania anno zero48

In her discussion of aesthetic synthesis, Ropars employs a post-structuralist

meaning is suspended in a state of might- be-

One of the advantages of escaping Bordwell’s taxonomy—classical, historical-

overarching sense-making patterns.’71 These strategies operate through ‘conven-

In seeking to disturb the trinity of (character-centred) meaning, (dogmatic) critic,

types’ include the ‘urban upper- or lower-middle-class person’ with a particular

eccentricities of the films’ hermeneutic activity that revolves around a never-