Reading Comments Week 5 Histoires du cinema
Please post reading comments and questions here for the Ranciere and Godard readings.
14 Responses to “Reading Comments Week 5 Histoires du cinema”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Please post reading comments and questions here for the Ranciere and Godard readings.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
February 2nd, 2008 at 1:07 am
Just Wanted to say Holy Shit!!!! with respect to the book we have to read for Monday. That is all.
February 3rd, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Ranciere says that the power of the sentence-image, which keeps the paratactic image from vanishing into its poles of schizophrenia or consensus, can be encapsulated by the concept of montage (48). He goes on to say that there is a current move away from Dialectical montage (in which the violent clash of heterogeneous images reveals an unknown world behind it) toward the Symbolic montage (in which the clash of heterogeneous elements assembles them into an analogy or mystery, demonstrating their fundamental relationship of co-belonging) (64). Ranciere also asserts that Histoire(s) marked the end of the Great Parataxis, in which artists discarded the formal boundaries of art and the common factor and power of art became dis-measure or chaos. He says that the film symbolizes the shift toward the neo-symbolist, neo-humanist tendency of contemporary art (67).
At the end of “Sentence, Image, History” Ranciere touches on contemporary art, but only briefly. So here’s a question for all of you kids in Future Cinema Lab: given the alleged end (or major reducution) of this post-modern Great Parataxis, and the shift towards a symbolist approach, how might one fit the concept of the “fluid screen” into Ranciere’s theory? It seems to me that the proliferation of networked, digital screens (which have become more prominent in the ten years or so since Histoire(s)), fits in with the concept of Symbolic montage (more so that dialectical), in that those screens have the potential to bring together a huge variety of images and elements, and create new analogies with them (‘create’ being the key term, as opposed to the Division that reveals in the dialectical montage). So that works with Ranciere. But it also seems that fluid screens offer great potential for the sentence-image, in that they can offer access to both the schizophrenic and consensus poles of parataxis – art has the ability to tap into both, and the sentence-image can continue its task of making sure art doesn’t fall too far into either. How does this fit in with Ranciere’s description of the reduction of the great parataxis and the consequent move of the sentence-image toward its zero degree? I would argue that the fluid screen shows that Ranciere declared the decline of the parataxis and the sentence-image’s power too soon.
February 3rd, 2008 at 7:07 pm
The Future of the image:
(For a good definition of Alterity): http://www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas/vocabindx.htm
Interview with JLG:
Though I’ve only seen parts one and two, I see Histoire(s) as a found footage film punctuated with scenes of Godard typing and talking. The use of footage to explore a history of the cinema is unique in its employment of a kind of anti-cataloguing (i.e. no text to indicate what films we are seeing). I was interested in an idea or issue often associated with found footage films – that of the appropriated image placed over a text written by the filmmaker. Found footage films like Histoire(s) including (among many others) films by Craig Baldwin, Farocki and Mike Hoolboom use found footage with some kind of original text. I’ve always been interested in what came first, the text or the image. The two exist in a reciprocal relationship—either the image is found in an archival way—by finding footage that corresponds to a text, or else the text is created from the image. Sometimes both approaches are employed. On p. 111 Godard suggests that the text and image needn’t have a stable relationship. He writes “You take a poem or a text and you simply put photos or images on it then you see either that what you’ve done is banal, that it’s worthless, or that the image you add enters into the text and eventually, the text, when the time comes, springs from the images, so there’s no longer this simple relationship of illustration, and that makes it possible to exercise your capacity to think and reflect and imagine, to create.”
Is this a new concept of montage? Traditionally we think of montage in the Eisensteinian sense, as a juxtaposition of images—however JLG suggests that a single image can be a montage through its relationship to the text. Though this kind of image could be seen as paradoxical, which any film is capable of creating, the tension that extant images create with original text seems dramatically different. In what situations in films do we hear non-illustrative texts over images? It seems like a rare occurrence—however it is common in found footage films. In Mike Hoolboom’s film Mexico we are told of a journey made by two people from Toronto to Mexico City to make a film; however once there, the filmmakers seem to only be able to talk about Mexico City through the prism of Toronto. We are shown images of Toronto and read anecdotes about a journey through Mexico. Conversely, we see Mexico and are given accounts of Toronto. The film uses these paradoxical images to point to the idea that we can only understand cultures, nations, ethnicities or difference through the prism of what is familiar. Godard is using images and texts as metaphors rather than for their literal illustrative properties. When we see a compilation documentary we are given evidence, supporting data and some form of relevant commentary. In this case, we are given metaphors, metonyms, synecdoche, similie and other forms of language as opposed to evidence and support. I apologize if this post is oblique or too specifically relevant to my own research. You could say I’m in a bubble right now.
February 3rd, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Concerning the Dialectical montage and the Symbolic montage, I think it is all in the eye of the beholder. I don’t think we can say that Vertov’s montage was either dialectical or symbolic; what really determines whether montage reveals ‘an unknown world behind it’ or ‘a relationship of co-belonging’ is the viewer. The fascinating thing about montage (although known for its use as objective propaganda) is the unlimited meanings that can emerge between images, creating a ‘third image’ (or meaning) in the cut or ‘gap.’ It seems like an arbitrary division to me (unless, of course, he is referring to the superimposing of images in “Histoire(s),” then I could see (perhaps) calling two superimposed images Symbolic Montage because they are both visible (literally belonging to each other—as far as the director chose to assemble two specific images), resulting in (a highly subjective) analogy. Fluid Screens are dialectic, but who is to decide which images clash violently or which clash into a relationship? I don’t see how meaning is constructed any differently between the two types of montage. Perhaps Cameron will tell me tomorrow!
Personally, I like what Godard says in Chapter 17 (Image and Montage), when he advocates for a “fullness before interpretation” (107), and Youssef points out that Godard “think[s], feel[s] and see[s] [an?] image, while others pay more attention to what you call meaning, text or ideas or concepts” (106). Wouldn’t forcing a meaning onto a montage, or even dividing our idea of what is known as montage, reduce the significance of the two or more images creating this said montage?
February 3rd, 2008 at 8:41 pm
I personally found this weeks reading particularly difficult because I haven’t seen Godard Histoire du CInema and a lot of the literature and art being referenced remains unknown to me. Never the less, I enjoyed Rencair’s notion of the naked, ostensive and metaphorical image. I like that rencaire discusses that not images are the same and that different images have different functions. The naked image is more political and designed to expose and raise debates. The ostentsive image according to Rencairn has a similar function but also critiques our notions of art and so its politics are mixed where it questions not only how is show, but how its shown. The metaphorical image coversely is like what Godard is doing in his Histoire (from what I can tell). He’s taking these image and playing with their ephemeral notions in order to reconstitute and reorganize them as a set of constructions which expose frequencies of abstractness. The metaphorical may take place with the realm of the real but its capturing goes beyond expose and critique, it questions the system of looking and semiology of the framed mediation whereby meaning becomes transposed from the loked at to the looker.
February 3rd, 2008 at 10:26 pm
“Concerning the Dialectical montage and the Symbolic montage, I think it is all in the eye of the beholder.”
Ranciere does kinda say that, that it’s affected as much by the currency of images as it is by the images themselves. (It’s why, he argues, that the recent attempts to mimic the art of the 60s and 70s ultimately fail to replicate it.)
February 3rd, 2008 at 10:29 pm
I’m holding off all judgement about the Ishaghpour/Godard interview until I’ve actually seen any of Histoires du Cinema. I’ll simply observe that Ishaghpour seemed to be doing the lion’s share of the talking and often barely letting Godard get a word in edgewise. How many of us would be that bold upon getting the chance to speak to a living legend?
February 3rd, 2008 at 11:35 pm
“The Future of the Image” by Jacques Ranciere
Firstly, I’d like to point everybody towards the face of genius here…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Jacques_Ranciere.jpg
I did some quick broader research about Ranciere. Apparently he’s a Marxist/aesthetician, and was an ardent supporter of the May 1968 student uprisings. This would explain his record since of writing books with titles like The Ignorant Schoolmaster, about how professors can teach subjects they don’t actually know; The Nights of Labour, discussing the surprising political sophistication of nominally uneducated people; and of course our reading this week, which I’ll get to later…
I’d like to say first that Ranciere’s ideas about the gradual losing out of dialectical montage to symbolic montage illustrates what I was talking about in Stam back in Week 3. The neo-liberal economic revolution has, by this late stage, taken us to place where national institutions and icons no longer have any inherent value outside of market systems. Thus, using dialectical montage to critique, criticize, excoriate, lambast or abominate either aspects of nationhood or the market systems – the way the great firebrand militant films of the late 60s and early 70s did – does not pack the same punch any more. Films like The War Game (1965) and In the Hour of the Furnaces (1968) used Ranciere’s dialectical montage with absolute sincerity, juxtaposing the facile-sounding self-justifications of businessmen and priests with images of the depths of misery and horror to create a supposedly unanswerable discrediting of the society they represented. By 1989, barely a decade or so into the neo-liberal revolutionary period, this sort of thing had turned into the sort of impish satire used by Michael Moore.
By now, if you perform the same sort of Kuleshov-ian experiment – say juxtaposing footage of a billionaire reclining after a good dinner and reflecting on how benevolent the modern world is, with a homeless guy shivering on the street outside – most people would of course squirm uncomfortably, but a majority would probably claim that the modern economy is fundamentally sound, and that only reformist solutions are necessary. The most fire-and-brimstone revolutionary film against the modern neo-liberal order of things I’ve ever seen was The Corporation (2003), and even it would, I think, belong much closer on Ranciere’s spectrum to symbolic montage than dialectic. In essence, “the mystery” that Ranciere postulates also has great potential to be a handy bit of obfuscation.
But all that only deals with the last few pages of his second chapter, and for someone who’s never seen Histoires du Cinema, the first chapter and early segments of the second were more interesting. It was the chance – in effect – to see glacial, abstract French theory used against itself. I’m sure all of us, just coming out of Scott’s course, were thrilled at Ranciere’s brilliant gloss on Barthes’s studium/punctum dialectic, and many of us less thrilled to see Ranciere brush off Foucault as irrelevant to film studies.
Ranciere avoids by a wide berth what’s always irritated me about contemporary post-whatever academia: the tendency to release a deluge of abstract ideas and cutting-edge terminology, while apparently regarding the providing of any actual examples or demonstrative instances as unbearably unimaginative and absolutist. Ranciere, on the other hand, seems to write with the voice of somebody who still has genuine affection for the art he’s theorizing about. His numerous segues back through history certainly legitimate his nearly-Orwellian ideas about the fundamentally different artistic implications of poetry and the novel, and his assertion that “the end of the image” is an idea whose time has passed. His loving summaries of sequences from Emile Zola immeasurably help the coherence and credibility of his arguments about the sentence-image, and he does more rigorous textual analysis of the film sequences Godard is playing with than any contemporary film theorist I’ve yet been exposed to.
February 4th, 2008 at 12:55 am
Malcolm—
I wouldn’t be that harsh on poor Barthes or Foucault (and he gets in some jabs at Deleuze, too), but Ranciere really does seem to be digesting their work in ways to which we aren’t often exposed as undergrads and grads.
I agree it’s really impressive.
February 4th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
I seem to have exhausted everything I had to say from class today. I was wondering about a post-structuralist reading of Histoire and how that doesn’t seem very possible since much of the film refers to “auteurs” and Goddard himself is such a big part of the film, showing himself in the process of being the author. I think this question is important because it gives us an opportunity to consider/ identify Goddard’s perspective/assumptions when making this film - of course, a post-structuralist would say that doesn’t matter, but Goddard won’t let us get away with that.
February 6th, 2008 at 6:51 am
*Warning: long post. Save it for Reading Week. Or I won’t be offended if you skim.*
Sorry I’m entering the blog arena a little late, but I hope people are still willing to keep the discussion about this week’s material going. I would appreciate hearing from any of you about the issues I’m having with the readings (specifically the Godard interview) and the film (or is it a video? Do we think there is a difference?). I’ve imbedded these issues in some excerpts from my Monday presentation on the JLG/YI interview:
-The main question I took up with respect to the interview was, “What kind of history is Histoire(s) du cinema?”
-JLG/YI refer to Histoire(s) as a “thinking form”: “a form that thinks and makes us think” (119). I have taken the latter function to mean that the form invites us to “think through” cinema in history/history in cinema, in at least a double sense: 1) It invites us to think through or ABOUT (wish I could use italics on this thing) the text/images, juxtapositions as they stream and flash before our eyes: we consider, we critique, we interpret, we ask questions about them, about how they clash and/or complement each other. Thinking through in this sense is a process aimed at an arrival, an answer of some sort about the image, cinema and history (though we don’t limit ourselves to just one answer). 2) Godard’s form encourages us to think through or WITH images: considering and critiquing cinema/history, we think in images—the form spurs “the creation of image thoughts” (129). This seems more in line with Godard’s intention, for he himself sees, feels, thinks in images (160). Thinking with images is—at least in part—a matter of montage. The third image, as it arises out of Godard’s juxtapositions, superimpositions, etc., imparts “the metaphorical and affective resonances, harmonics and counterpoint that create the Idea rather than just communicating facts” (160). The form helps us think in third images.
(This is what I had to say on Monday, but looking at it now, I wonder if there is any major difference between the two senses. If they are different, they almost certainly work simultaneously. I think about the third image at the same moment I think with the third image, no?)
-The concept of “a form that thinks” is still a bit out of my range. I believe we talked on Monday about how the form thinks in the film by presenting the third image in superimpositions, and that sort of made sense to me. The form has thought the image already (?). But I’m getting confused again as Monday fades. Some of you probably answered the question already on Monday, but perhaps I didn’t really grasp what you were saying. How can a “form that thinks” exist independently of the thinking Godard? Isn’t the form just Godard thinking? I’m sure this has something to do with Ananya’s question about structuralism and the problem of auteurism.
-YI says the film is a history as re-memorization. This invokes, on some level, the idea of seeing the unseen, the invisible in the visible that we’ve been talking about in weeks past. As YI says, Godard’s film “uses a structure that accentuates fissures and jumps to liberate the unrealized forces of the past” (117). We remember images differently after seeing the film, or remember something new (for Jarett: Gilda = Dreyer [or was it Gilda + Dreyer, or Gilda – Dreyer?]). We are meant to live the images again as if a memory (we get inside the images, as memory is vertical, not horizontal like history), and bear witness to what has been forgotten—fissures, jumps, the unrealized. My question: What is the unrealized or the fissured component of the re-memorization of Gilda = Dreyer? I feel like I need to see Gilda again—or even a frame of Day of Wrath—before the “unrealized” Godard’s montage drives at can come clear. I know we disputed the importance of context to these images, but I would argue that considering the context makes the images and juxtapositions all the more complex, and Godard’s choice of them even more interesting. He does, after all, flash the name Rita Cansino, Hayworth’s real name, on the screen at one point, and recognizing this probably adds a layer of meaning to the juxtaposition—with stardom comes sacrifice (of one’s ethnicity in Cansino’s case), perhaps? Hollywood’s history is littered with buried sacrifices. (As to the Dreyer image: can the burning at the stake be properly called a sacrifice? Again, haven’t caught the film.) There’s obviously more to this juxtaposition that I’m not seeing.
-We really took issue with the seeming claim by YI/JLG that a special kind of cinema is dead, and that Histoire(s) is a last hurrah for this cinema, or maybe an elegy. This is the cinema that “created forms and was a major force in history” (161). Histoire(s) is at once the history of this idea of cinema, the idea in practice, and its bookend. Why is this particular kind of cinema dead? In one sense, it seems dead because its practitioners are dead (Godard remains, but apparently will not continue this idea of cinema). But why can’t its forms continue on, or its spirit? Is it that there are no forms left to create? The spirit of creation has died? As the interviewer says, “nothing left but the repetition and liquidizing of what has been” (120). To be fair, by the end of the interview Godard does say the future will play host to a new kind of cinema, one he cannot foresee. But why is there this condescending business about HIS idea of cinema being dead? I sense we are growing restless with this notion that it is impossible in our age to arrive at new images and new forms. Really, why can’t we depend on current artists to step forward to fashion new forms that think, and create all new images? Can’t we still affect history through cinema, and allow history to permeate cinema, for the two to spring from each other as we juxtapose them? Have cinema/history been closed off from each other? How has this happened?
-Jonathan Rosenbaum, in the other article/interview I read (Michael, do you mind posting a link to it?), argues that Histoire(s) raises some interesting and important questions: namely, To whom does the cinema belong? Further to this, to whom does the telling of history belong? How can cinema and history be reclaimed in light of Histoire(s)? With this film, Godard has created a history that is finally his own, with his own autobiographical details, but, to his credit, the film also endorses a certain form of thinking about and critiquing history that practically anyone can do on limited resources. Rather than shooting an entirely new film to make a critique of history and cinema, cinema-history (as Godard did for much of his career), the filmmaker-critic-historian with video can reassemble a variety of existing texts and images to draw out contradictions, correspondences in history, to re-tell or, more importantly, to tell what hasn’t been told. Video forms like Histoire(s) can uncover the hidden layers of the past—make visible what was invisible—and also add layers, create brand new connections between images across cinema/history in light of the present. This form is a borrowing of another’s cinematic tongue; the language through which a specific filmmaker first articulated an image is appropriated, re-voiced, put to whatever use the video filmmaker wishes. But the idea of Histoire(s), says Rosenbaum, is that the language of cinema belongs to us all. We should be allowed to converse through the language of cinema in the same way we are granted freedom of oral speech. Question for Eli, or anybody who knows: What program do I need to make my own Histoire(s)?
-Other questions/difficulties I had with regards to Histoire(s):
What’s missing?
Is there a danger in being persuaded that Godard has “said it all”? For whom has he said it all?
Is it only Godard’s history? Can we only think through Godard’s brain with this film? Is this simply history as Godard’s memories? How is that illuminating?
Do we feel we know history better through the film?
Do we feel we understand Ranciere’s functions of the image better for having seen (part of) the film?
February 8th, 2008 at 11:08 am
I wonder if the idea of a “form that thinks” ties into the idea of montage, and the clash (or co-presence) of images that are there in the film but we need to decode.
February 21st, 2008 at 11:44 pm
Hi everyone. Sorry, this is really late. It literally took me two weeks to think through this post…I hope it makes sense!
I was struck by how Ranciere seems to suggest that Foucault’s method and its focus on the order and archeologies of knowlege, which he classified into a very text-based and language focuses order of discourses, forced a consideration of how the visible speaks to us in its own particular way.
Ranciere’s discussion uses the concept of the ‘sentence-image’ to present a critique of how we conceive of the image and text and their respective artistic and social functions. Starting from this, and since he references Foucault, I wonder if we can try to think of a type of ‘visual discourse’? This sort of plays into the ideas posted already re: thinking in images, using images to do what text and words cannot. The duality of the relationship between the sayable and the visible allows us to explore the concept of visual discourse as a combination of these two functions, which are not easily separated, but what about the pure visual? Does it lose something if it can’t be interpreted? Can the ‘presence’ of the image as pure affect, or I guess Barthes’ punctum, ever avoid the studium of subjectivity? Should it?
I think that I would ilke to find a way to think in images or to have visual discourse, but I don’t want to put too much emphasis on the values of non-interpretive presence, because it feels a little like an attempt to be totally objective or something, an idealization of the visual for how it doesn’t get weighed down with subjective interpretation. This seems like an unrealistic and outdated method of approaching history, as well as theory.
Ranciere posits that the status of the image has moved into new territory, and presents us with new conceptions of what montage can do when pushed beyond the traditional disciplines or schools of thought that control its significance. However, where Ranciere posits that today’s image seeks to “increase a new sensitivity to the signs and traces that testify to a common history and a common world,” and though I agree, I think I would push it further. Instead of ‘common history’ what about a multiplicity of different histories, of disparate narraatives, and subjective interpreations of histoyr? I guess I want to see the potential of the image to stress a common drive for subjective and heterogeneous experience, the privileging of that which is disparate and different rather than a benign commonality.
Am I being a bit too harsh here? Cameron, your questions about Godard’s history bring to mind the larger issue i’m touching on here, a ‘whose history’ type of thing.
March 19th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
This week a director promised to deliver me some rushes that would “cut like butter” – a delight to hear. At the same time he was searching for a point of contrast to his material, an outside element, something that would provide an edge (to the soft butter). Something about his words reminded me to revisit Ranciere on the subject of montage – his two categories of dialectical and symbolic – and try again to get my brain around it.
He clearly states that he is using “these two terms in a conceptual sense that goes beyond the boundaries of some particular school or doctrine” (56), apparently asking us to put aside Kuleshov and Eisenstein and Pudovkin for the moment, though clearly their influence is felt.
In Ranciere’s world, dialectical montage is unsurprisingly a “clash”, but a clash that reveals something, “which reveals the secret of a world” (57). Symbolic montage “works to establish a familiarity, an occasional analogy, attesting to a more fundamental relationship of co-belonging”(57). I keep thinking of the Sesame Street song, One of These Things is Not Like the Other, though of course this is inadequate to comprehending the distinction, but as stated, his categories do seem straight-forward enough, if not necessarily always clean-cut and mutually exclusive.
If we imagine one sequence, perhaps a landscape at sunrise, a bird in a tree, a dog stretching, we have an easy sense of co-belonging. If we imagine another, say a sequence from Michael Moore’s Farenheit 9/11, where we meet some ridiculously young American soldiers singing a tune they like to listen to in their tank, then hear the produced song itself and see the roving of the tanks, the excessive power imbalance, etc, their does seem to a revelation of the secret of a world. And it is not actually that the combined elements are so incongruous, that these elements are really more heterogenous than in the first sequence, it is more to be seen in the effect produced.
Where these terms can invite confusion, is in the substantial amount of grey area between them, but especially as he is using these terms to talk about Histoire(s) du Cinema, and specifically about the way in which he sees this film as able to play both notes at the same time more than most others: “Godard’s montage doubtless offers the best example of the extreme proximity of contrasting logics. It shows how the same forms of junction of heterogeneous elements can abruptly switch from the dialectical pole to the symbolist pole.”(60)
Anyway, back to the butter….