The Intruder and Vivian Sobchack
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L’Intrus: An Interview with Claire Denis by Damon Smith (http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/05/35/claire_denis_interview.html)
9 Responses to “The Intruder and Vivian Sobchack”
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March 30th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
So maybe this is embarrassing to admit, but this is the first proper dive into phenomenology and film that I’ve had, and I think it was a great introduction for me. After reading Sobchack’s chapter I feel like I have a much better grounding in the phenomenological approach versus a psychoanalytic one, with the relative benefits (and limitations) that each can provide. After having read the Denis interview, I’m really excited to see the film, because it sounds like an ideal case study for a phenomenological study, and of course it’s always help to have concrete examples in mind when talking about a theory such as this one.
The only section of the Sobchack that I found slightly troubling was the final section, when she analyzed the female phenomenological experience. In the previous sections, Sobchack explained Merleau-Ponty’s (hypothetical) fourth term in existential and semiotic phenomenology, in which we guess at the ‘psyche’ of the other and the other’s feeling of his own existence based on his visual body and our own experience of embodied being in the world. This makes sense to me – as humans it is possible to generate a hypothetical relation to an other because we are talking about the same type of body, and hypothetically then, the same type of experience. I can buy that – the ontological conditions of embodiment explain the common ground of existential phenomenology to me.
But it’s the epistemological conditions that throw me for a loop – when we are dealing with the essential body as a body qualified or marked by a construct such as race or gender. It seems likely that the embodied experience would be different for people whose bodies are qualified by different labels, and in fact, Sobchack points to Iris M. Young’s work to show how those qualifications affect the physical (and by extension, phenomenological) experience of the female body. But here’s my question – how do we ever actually know this if we can only ever have a hypothetical relation with an other? That dotted line of inferred relations in the person/person relations figure is what troubles me. If we’re on Merleau-Ponty’s level of “we’re all humans”, I can accept it – in that sense, we can understand the other because we’re comparing apples to apples. But when constructed markings and qualifications affect the other’s body, suddenly we’re comparing apples to oranges, and I’m not sure that I understand how we come to, or even if we can, understand the psyche of the other and his or her feeling of existence in the world. Maybe we fall back to the catch-all “we’re all human” level of phenomenology to give us a foundation, and try to build from there – but how successful can we be if, for instance, we are a female trying to understand a male body? Obviously Merleau-Ponty’s approach is problematically wide. Sobchack has convinced me of this, but she hasn’t convinced me that her phenomenological approach to bodily discriminations is an adequate response.
And on a totally separate note, and one actually connected to film…. I’ve never seen Stella Dallas, which Sobchack describes as an excellent example of a film in which the female experience is evidenced: “For women whose lived experience of space is so separated, how much more moving and significant cinematic images of exclusion and longing become when they are articulated as the looking from a constricted ‘here’ into an other ‘yonder space which they can intend but cannot inhabit” (156). With this description I immediately thought of the first Godfather film (and the final shot of the last episode of the first seen of Weeds, which paid homage to it), in which Diane Keaton’s character is so clearly physically separated from the male world that Michael has chosen to enter by taking over as head of the family. She can intend that space, but never truly inhabit it because of her sex. [i can't figure out how to post a picture here, but if you go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lN0hTjIu-94 and check out the shot at around 3:10, you'll see the one I'm referring to].
This also raises interesting questions for me about how feminist films, or even films directed by women, reflect the different female phenomenological experience. Denis seems pretty adamant that her role as a director is as a human, not as a woman. But if women have a different experience of being, will that not come through, whether intentionally or not, in their filmmaking? I guess it depends in part on how much you buy into the auteur theory… alright kids, sorry that this was way too long, high five if you made it this far.
March 30th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
I too felt a bit like a stranger in a strange land when I first started reading this chapter but was quickly seduced by the style and force of Sobchack’s writing. Though various elements of the essay were incredibly consuming and provocative (her analysis of Brakhage and language, Merleau-Ponty and Lacan’s differing takes on the mirror stage and the discourse on the body and perception) I must admit I only feel equipped to repeat most of her suppositions rather than properly interrogate them. Perhaps some intellectual digestion needs to take place. One concept however, I was deeply intrigued with and has been in my thoughts lately, was the idea of mediated vision transforming itself into both experience and I would argue memory. I may be taking some liberties, but I think two concepts, one contemporary theory of memory and one idea from Sobchack’s phenomenological explication on vision can be linked.
Much of the force of Sobchack’s essay relates to exploring how “the act of seeing is entwined intimately with the act of being” not only by defining the body as the place where perception occurs (through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological framework) but also as a form of experience. Though she qualifies this experience by remarking that we are “competent visual performers” who are able to self-reflexively analyze our vision as “subjects of consciousness” and “objects of consciousness” she ultimately argues with that vision helps shape bodily experience and perception. If I could take this a step further and also propose that when we recapitulate that experience, it becomes memory. In the context of film studies, Alison Landsberg has incorporated a phenomenological approach to memory by exploring how cinema can shape ideology not simply with the arsenal of propagandistic techniques discussed ad infinitum in textbooks (from Suture theory on down to the critique of the Griersonian “voice of god” in documentary) but also by becoming an intrinsic part of the spectator’s memory.
Landsberg’s book, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (Columbia University Press, 2004) argues that prosthetic memory occurs “at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as a movie theater or museum.” (2) Landsberg argues that this kind of memory “has the ability to shape that person’s subjectivity and politics.” This idea was intertwined for me with Sobchack’s understanding of vision as a mode of consciousness and experience. Her invocation of Merleau-Ponty’s theory that describes the body as “not an object but as a condition for objectivity, as the point of contact between consciousness and the world” (68, emphasis in original) links an “experiential consciousness” of mediated images with how a subject interacts in the world. This suggests, rather uncontroversially, that mediated images, both in their ability to shape memory, experience and thus consciousness directly impinges or at least colours our interactions with the world. I think the big claim in this theory is that spectators and subjects may not be able to adequately locate these “prosthetic memories” as mediated reality because they have moved from the space of “fictitious narrative” to the space we allocate for memory. In this way, cultural narratives and more importantly, cultural memory, can be perpetuated by a very privileged groups that has the economic resources to control mass media. During the Dana Polan discussion last week Polan continuously returned to the question: “what is film theory for?” This very issue is what interests me in film theory—as a space to revise these forms of mediated reality. See you on Monday…
March 31st, 2008 at 9:09 am
I’m still reeling from the revelation that the blind can “draw”. I’m still not completely sure what this means (despite Sobchack’s summation of Kennedy’s conclusions). I think the piece does a good job with trying to take three or four different fields of knowledge and integrate them into a kind of unified theory of vision/seeing/perception. Christina suggests some possible limitations of the approach. I’m sure there are others (although Elijah elegantly adds adds another thinker to the mix to push Sobchack even further).
Looking forward to the film (and the discussion) today.
April 1st, 2008 at 12:45 am
Similar to Eli and Christina, this is the first time I have actually been confronted with a phenomenological approach to film- and I must say, it was quite refreshing! When I was reading the article, I couldn’t help but think of Derrida (also, because Sobchack mentions him a fair bit) and the notion of differAnce. Upon reading Merleau-Ponty and Derrida’s critique of Husserl’s notions of consciousness, this idea kept emerging in my mind, but I could not find a significant link. What Derrida says about differAnce is that there is a gap in language, and therefore what we attempt to explain can never be fully explained, because there is always a spatial and temporal dissimilarity. Husserl discusses intentionality and characterizes “consciousness as never empty and in itself. Rather, consciousness is invariantly correlational” (Sobchack 57), which establishes a never ending distinction within ‘what is what’ and ‘what perceive as what is.’ So are they both saying the same thing, only Derrida really is taking it a step further? If so, then why does Derrida critique Husserl?
Did I completely mis-read this? I think I confused myself more than when I initially read the article.
I was wondering if someone could shed some light on this, and find the “missing link” in what Sobchack is saying- if there is one.
April 2nd, 2008 at 11:32 pm
See below for Submission call:
Call for Submission:
In-Between Spaces: Canadian Film & Video production by Aboriginal/women of colour.
In-Between Spaces will be the first critical film anthology from a Canadian context, dedicated to a close engagement with diasporic and indigenous film and video production by women of colour and aboriginal women artists in Canada. Works considered can be shorts and/or features that are independent Canadian productions.
Abstracts (300 words): May 19, 2008 / Final Paper (2,500 words): August 15, 2008
Submissions are open and might include:
*Aesthetic/formal approaches in documentary, narrative, experimental or activist works and hybrids of the above.
*History of film/video production by women of colour and aboriginal
women in Canada.
*The use of technology (digital and film) in works by Canadian
diasporic and indigenous women film and video media artists.
*Cultural Identity and diaspora –the merging of artistic practices and politics.
*Representations of Indigenous cultures and history in film and video.
*Theorizing and analyzing the works of Canadian women of colour
film/video artists from a multicultural, post-colonial, and/or
transnational context.
*Thematic or textual analysis of particular film/videos by individual
artists or comparative analysis of various works.
*Festivals, Marketing and Distribution of works produced by Aboriginal/women of
colour film/video artists.
*Reception and audience studies of works produced by Aboriginal/women of colour
in Canada.
*Thematic analysis of representations of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, culture,
nation/home/exile/displacement.
Please direct all inquiries to: thirdeyefilm@sympatico.ca or michelle.mohabeer@sheirdanc.on.ca
Michelle Mohabeer (PhD) Filmmaker and Film Studies Instructor
April 4th, 2008 at 10:17 am
Had to miss this class, so apologies for any redundancy….
L’Intrus is my least favourite of Claire Denis’ films, but no doubt the best example from her of filmmaking with a strong phenomenological bent – to describe human experience in its embodied involvement with the world around it. All of the films of hers that I’ve seen do exhibit this sensibility of the “cinema of the senses” (a phrase applied to her work by Martine Beugnet, I believe), but this one seems to take the exercise the furthest.
I don’t know if my dislike of the film is in the always-risky choice of a disagreeable main character or if it’s the degree of unmooring of the narrative that is most off-putting – I did wonder if it wouldn’t have been more appealing on a large screen where the ability to enter into the dream is easier, the small screen perhaps making it seem only obscure. As she herself says L’Intrus is “a boat lost in the ocean drifting” – a challenge for the viewer to float away from within the perspective of an unpleasant man.
The minimal dialogue in her films is a consistent strategy to forcing the viewer to relate on the level of the visual, forcing the connection via one of the most prominent modes of perception. The focus on details, on enigmatic moments and characters highlight and accentuate the sensory experience.
Undoubtedly she has done a number of interesting experiments in seeking to convey the subjective experience across divides of gender, race, culture – her films consistently seem to try to reproduce experiences from very subjective places – be they from a specifically gendered (Friday Night, perhaps Beau Travail) or racially informed position (Chocolat, No Fear No Die), or from a place focused on the vagaries of the subjective processes – memory, dream, observation – as appears to be the case with L’Intrus. In fact, the intersection between her phenomenological approach to cinema, and her sentience about politics, and identity politics in particular, is probably what makes her so interesting.
She also appears in some ways to fit Naficy’s “accented cinema” category, as her films tend to be about strange lonely people in strange lands. Perhaps her childhood in Africa and subsequent move to France have marked her with that same sensibility of the outsider.
The gender question is also very interesting with regards Denis, as many of her main characters are male – she does not stick only to a female subjectivity – and she has worked repeatedly with issues of desire and the gaze, both male and female. Chocolat and Friday Night are both filled with female longing. On this subject of the gaze, Sobchack quotes Young on pg 157, writing, [Young} says, “an essential part of the situation of being a woman is that of living the ever-present possibility that one will be gazed upon as a mere body, as shape and flesh that presents itself as the potential object of another subject’s intentions and manipulations…”. While I know exactly what she is talking about, I wonder if the female desiring gaze is that much different? Certainly it is one of the fascinating elements in a number of Denis’ films is to be able to ponder this question.
On another note it would be interesting to see an examination of films about heart transplants – L’Intrus, 21 Grams, Jesus de Montreal – are there others? Funny, no one seems to make films about kidney transplants or knee replacements…
April 5th, 2008 at 1:32 am
As I mentioned in class, the idea of phenomenology to theories of spectatorship is a wlcome change from psychoanalysis. Indeed, as I mentioned in Linda Williams’ article, the body can be the direct site of film spectatorship. What phenomenonolgy takes into consieration is the idea of embodiment in that we do not simply experience the world through our minds, but we exist as a physical presence within a physical space.
Indeed when watching a film we watch it from a particular distance depending on where we sit. For me personally, i like to sit up very close, so that i cannot notice the borders of the screen, so i can become immerssed into the filmic world, compared to friends who like to sit further back so that they don’t have to move their head around or bend their neck and are able to see the film as a film because of the recognition of the borders (depending on who i go with i may end up sitting by myself (: but that is how strongly i beleive my embodiment as viewer determines my relationship with the screen).
Indeed phenomenology and Socshack’s idea of spectatorship is very key to my understanding of pornography (probably more so than mainstream cinema as porn is all about body, both seeing the body, and how we internalize and fantasize about those sensations within our own body). Indeed watching pornography within different contexts ditermines how we see it. When atching it with friends (this was common at Western for some reason) the film because less erotic and perhaps more humorous, compared to when watching alone, the same film becomes erotic. This is something I won’t get into details on, but lets just say, it can get very graphic (warming to Professor Hayashi, as my second reader, it gets graphic). But it is undeniable that there is a relationship to the body, and as i discussed nit goes beyond race and gender. Just look at how we cover our eyes rather than shut them ourselves when we watc something scary and react to something we don’t like.
April 7th, 2008 at 10:43 am
Christina stated: I’m not sure that I understand how we come to, or even if we can, understand the psyche of the other and his or her feeling of existence in the world.
My response is that I’m not sure that Sobchack or Merlau-Ponty ever state that perception can fully replicate or embody another subjects perspective entirely but rather suggest that it is through the sensual address of vision that we can experience our own version of someone else’s experience: it is through embodying a form of vision that is not our own that allows for an expanding of one’s consciousness outside of his or her own perceptions.
How that vision is negotiated or rationalized is up to each and every viewer but the potential for dissolving the idea of the viewer as singular subject looking out seeing only as they would normally see is up for question. I think a good point of comparison is for the men in the class to think of the scene in Michael Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher” where Erica cuts into her genitals with a razor or if you have not seen it there is a comparable scene in Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers” where Ingrid Thulin cuts into her vagina with a piece of glass. For the women in the class think, I would ask you to recall the circumcision scene in “The Perfumed Nightmare.”
Both scenes force the opposite sex to confront a sensorial experience of genitals they do not have but do have the capacity to feel for. As we feel the pain of the injuries inflicted upon the screen through our own gendered genitals are we not de-gendering our own genitals in the process? The experience begins to blur the qualifying lines of the construction behind the separating nature of symbolic logic inherent behind male and female biological make ups and pushes towards a universalism of experience or of a being in the world through engaging with a world of being. What I mean is that we have genitals and although they are gendered and the experience of them is thus gendered, we still have the capacity to feel suffering because at one point in our lives we have suffered and we can feel another sex’s mutilation because at one point in our lives we have been cut or physically injured.
The question I posed in my presentation was: how do the ideas of visuality, sensuality, hearts, scars, and embodiment translate in Denis’ film “The Intruder.”
One interesting point of reference is when Michel is bartering with the Russian woman and he says “I want a young man’s heart. Not an old man’s or a woman’s I want to keep my integrity.” Aside from the obvious sexist and ageist aspects of Michel’s statement, how does it reference embodiment from a perspective closer to what Eli was discussing in his comments on bodily intelligence and performance in class. How is having a foreign organ like a heart being compared to seeing with the double vision created through the screen, and what does that suggest in regards to the fixedness and gender binaries of identity?
April 13th, 2008 at 5:08 am
Katherine - no essay about heart transplants in film would be complete without reference to at least one crass 80s comedy, Heart Condition, in which a racist cop is haunted by the ghost of a black lawyer/organ donor after receiving his heart in surgery. (It is probably more telling about the human condition than Jesus of Montreal).
I find it fascinating that, in the Senses of Cinema interview, Denis speaks of her character in terms that suggest more macabre characteristics glimpsed than is ever stated - she addresses Trebor as a representation of her country, and so she can state his selfishness as being on display in the film - but like Antonioni’s films, there is such overwhelming ambiguity, a sense of fragmentation, a warm symbolic iconography that, when it emerges from the film’s detachment, is disruptive - from this, such a character as Louis Trebor must be posed hypothetically. Of Sam’s question, I would say that these elements of L’Intrus’ narrative - the ideas of visuality, sensuality, hearts, scars, and embodiment - are equally invested in the ambiguous and unknown, that Denis is putting that there is an impossibility to understanding the grief or the selfishness of another, that what is seen, what is sensed, what motivates a person, their past, and how they represent it and all other facets of their character, are so personal that even in the most intimate environments as we enter into with this character for the length of the film, it cannot be known. This is something that we see in Antonioni’s The Passenger - Locke’s initial motivation can be read by us because it is not such a foreign desire to want to adopt another person’s identity, but there is no certainty to his motivations, no certainty that we can empathize with him, and ultimately there is no answer given. Perhaps this is a profoundly incorrect parallel for reading Denis’ work - a ‘cinema of the senses’, as Katherine put it, would need to set aside this perhaps cynical view of a world of families, lovers, friends, who are all on some level strangers, to focus instead on commonalities, on shared senses, on unifying aspects of the human experience, though I do not think that these ideas are necessarily in conflict with one another.