A Thwarted Fable

Jacques Rancière

1. Jean Epstein, Bonjour cinéma, in Écrits sur le cinéma (Paris: Seghers, 1974), p. 86. A previous translation of this text, by Tom Milne, originally published in Afterimage, no. 10 (Autumn 1981), pp. 9-16, can be found in: Richard Abel (ed.), French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907-1939, Volume 1: 1907-1929 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 242.

Cinema, by and large, doesn’t do justice to the story. And ‘dramatic action’ here is a mistake. The drama we’re watching is already half-resolved and unfolding on the curative slope to the crisis. The real tragedy is in suspense. It looms over all the faces; it is in the curtain and in the door-latch. Each drop of ink can make it blossom at the tip of the pen. It dissolves itself in the glass of water. At every moment, the entire room is saturated with the drama. The cigar burns on the lip of the ashtray like a threat. The dust of betrayal. Poisonous arabesques stretch across the rug and the arm of the seat trembles. For now, suffering is in surfusion. Expectation. We can’t see a thing yet, but the tragic crystal that will turn out to be at the center of the plot has fallen down somewhere. Its wave advances. Concentric circles. It keeps on expanding, from relay to relay. Seconds.

The telephone rings. All is lost.

Is whether they get married in the end really all you want to know? Look, really, THERE IS NO film that ends badly, and the audience enters into happiness at the hour appointed on the program.

Cinema is true. A story is a lie. (1)

2. Epstein, Bonjour cinéma, p. 91; Abel, French Film Theory, p. 244.

This is why the art of moving images can overthrow the old Aristotelian hierarchy that privileged muthos—the coherence of the plot—and devalued opsis—the spectacle’s sensible effect. It isn’t that the art of moving images is an art of the visible that managed to annex, thanks to movement, the capacity for narrative, or that it is a technique of visibility that replaces the art of imitating visible forms. It is just that the art of moving images provides access to an inner truth of the sensible that settles the quarrels for priority among the arts and among the senses because it settles, first and foremost, the great quarrel between thought and sensibility. Cinema revokes the old mimetic order because it resolves the question of mimesis at its root—the Platonic denunciation of images, the opposition between sensible copy and intelligible model. The matter seen and transcribed by the mechanic eye, says Epstein, is equivalent to mind: a sensible immaterial matter composed of waves and corpuscles that abolishes all opposition between deceitful appearance and substantial reality. The eye and hand that struggled to reproduce the spectacle of the world, as well as the play that explored the most secret reaches of the soul, belong to the old art because they belong to the old science. In the writing of movement with light, fictional matter and sensible matter coincide: the darkness of betrayal, the poison of crimes, and the anguish of melodrama come into contact with the suspension of specks of dust, the smoke of a cigar and the arabesques of a rug. And this same writing reduces all of this to the intimate movements of an immaterial matter. That is the new drama to have found its artist in the cinema. Thoughts and things, exterior and interior, are captured in the same texture, in which the sensible and the intelligible remain undistinguished. Thought impresses itself on the brow of the spectator in ‘bursts of amperes,’ while love on the screen ‘contains what no love had contained till now: its fair share of ultra-violet.’ (2)

Admittedly, this is a way of looking at things that belongs to another time than our own, but there are many ways to measure the distance. One such way is nostalgia. It notes that, outside the faithful fortress of experimental cinema, the reality of cinema long ago relinquished the beautiful hope of becoming a writing with light that confronted the fables and characters of other ages with the intimate presence of things. The young art of cinema did more than just restore ties with the old art of telling stories: it became that art’s most faithful champion. Cinema wasn’t content just to use its visual power and experimental means to illustrate old stories of conflicting interests and romantic ordeals, it went further and put those at the service of restoring the entire representative order that literature, painting, and the theater had so deeply damaged. It reinstated plots and typical characters, expressive codes and the old motivations of pathos, and even the strict division of genres. Nostalgia indicts cinema’s involution, which it attributes to two phenomena: the breakthrough of the talkies [la coupure du parlant], which dealt a severe blow to the attempts to create a language of images; the Hollywood industry, which reduced directors to the role of illustrators of scripts based, for commercial reasons, on the standardisation of plots and on the audience’s identification with the characters.

At the other end of nostalgia is condescension. It tells us that if that dream is remote today, as it no doubt is, it is simply because it had never amounted to more than an inconsistent utopia. It just happened to synchronise with the great utopia of the times—with the aesthetic, scientific, and political dream of a new world where all material and historical burdens would find themselves dissolved in a reign of luminous energy. From the 1890s to the 1920s, this para-scientific utopia of matter dissolving itself in energy inspired both the symbolist reveries of the immaterial poem and the Soviet project of building a new social world. Under the guise of defining an art through its technical apparatus, Jean Epstein would have given us nothing more than his own particular version of the great ode to energy that his epoch sung and illustrated in myriad ways: in symbolist manifestoes à la Canudo and in futurist manifestoes à la Marinetti; in the simultaneist poems of Appolinaire and Cendrars to the glory of neon lighting and wireless communication, and in Khlebnikov’s poems of transmental language; in the dynamism of dances à la Severini and in the dynamism of chromatic à la Delaunay; in Vertov’s kino-eye, in Appia’s stage lighting and designs, and in Loïe Fuller’s luminous dances ... Epstein wrote his poem about thought captured in bursts of amperes and love endowed with its fair share of ultra-violet under the spell of this utopia of a new electric world. He welcomed an art that no longer exists, for the simple reason that it never did. It is not our art, but it was not Epstein’s either. It was not what filled the movie-theaters of his day, nor was it the art he himself made, in which he, too, told stories of ill-starred lovers and other old-fashioned heartbreaks. He hailed an art that existed only in his head, an art that was just an idea in people’s heads.

It is by no means certain that condescension instructs us better than nostalgia. After all, what is this simple reality of the cinematographic art that condescension refers us to? How is this link between a technical apparatus for the production of visible images and a manner of telling stories forged? There is no shortage of theoreticians who have attempted to ground the art of moving images on the solid base of the means specific to it. But the means specific to yesterday’s analogical machine and to today’s digital machine have shown themselves equally suitable for filming both love stories and abstract dances and forms. It is only in the name of an idea of art that we can establish the relationship between a technical apparatus and this or that type of fable. Cinema, like painting and literature, is not just the name of an art whose processes can be deduced from the specificity of its material and technical apparatuses. Like painting and literature, cinema is the name of an art whose meaning cuts across the borders between the arts. Perhaps, in order to understand it, we should take another look at the lines from Bonjour cinéma and at the idea of art implied in them. Epstein pits the ‘real tragedy,’ that is, the ‘tragedy in suspense,’ against the old ‘dramatic action.’ Now, this notion of the tragedy in suspense is not reducible to the idea of the automatic machine inscribing the intimate face of things onto celluloid. It is something else altogether that Epstein identifies with the peculiar power of mechanical automatism: an active dialectic in which one tragedy takes form at the expense of another—the threat of the cigar, the dust of betrayal, or the poisonous power of the rug at the expense of the traditional narrative and expressive arrangements of expectation, violence, and fear. Epstein’s text, in other words, undertakes a work of de-figuration. He composes one film with the elements of another. He is not describing an experimental film—real or imaginary—made expressly to attest to the power of cinema.

We learn later that he has extracted this film from another film, from a melodrama by Thomas Harper Ince entitled The Honour of His House, with Sessue Hayakawa, a fetish-actor of the period, in the lead role. Epstein extracts the theoretical and poetical fable that describes the original power of the cinema from the body of another fable, from which he erased the traditional narrative aspect in order to create another dramaturgy, another system of expectations, actions, and states of being.

The cinema-unity thus undergoes an exemplary split. Jean Epstein welcomes an art that restores the duality of life and fictions, of art and science, of the sensible and the intelligible, to their original unity. And yet, Epstein only arrives at this pure essence of the cinema by extracting a work of ‘pure’ cinema from the filmed melodrama. This particular penchant for making a fable with another is not a fad of the period, but a constitutive fact of the cinema as experience, art, and idea of art. It is also a fact that puts cinema in a contradictory continuity with a whole regime of art. From Jean Epstein to today, making a fi lm on the body of another is exactly what the three main figures spawned by the cinema have been doing all along—directors, who ‘film’ scripts they themselves have nothing to do with, the audience, for whom cinema is a potpourri of mixed memories, and critics and cinephiles, who extract a work of pure plastic forms from the body of a commercial fiction. The same is true of those two encyclopedic works that attempt to sum up the power of cinema: Deleuze’s Cinema 1 and 2, and Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma, in eight episodes. These two works constitute an ontology of the cinema argued for with bits and pieces gleaned from the entire corpus of the cinematographic art. Godard offers as evidence for his theory of the image-icon the pure plastic shots he extracts from the functional images Hitchcock had used to convey the enigmas and affects of his fables. Deleuze builds his ontology on the claim that cinematographic images are two things in one: they are the things themselves, the intimate events of universal becoming, and they are the operations of an art that restores to the events of the world the power they had been deprived of by the opaque screen of the human brain. Deleuze’s dramaturgy of ontological restitution, like Epstein’s or Godard’s dramaturgy of origin, depends on the same process of extracting from the details in the fiction. For Deleuze, Jeff’s broken leg in Rear Window and Scottie’s vertigo in Vertigo are embodiments of the ‘rupture of the sensory-motor schema’ through which the time-image splits itself off from the movement-image. Deleuze and Godard both repeat Jean Epstein’s dramaturgy, they both extract, after the fact, the original essence of the cinematographic art from the plots the art of cinema shares with the old art of telling stories [l’art des histoires]. Cinema’s enthusiastic pioneer, its disenchanted historiographer, its sophisticated philosopher, and its amateur theoreticians all share this dramaturgy because it is consubstantial with cinema as an art and an object of thought. The fable that tells the truth of cinema is extracted from the stories narrated on its screens.