A Fish in the Aquarium

Thierry Jousse

For some years now, the DVD format has succeeded in its mission to excite a myriad of discourses around its fascinating possibilities. These discourses are multiple, heterogenous and – for the most part – pre-emptory; that is, they cannot stand to be contradicted. Many of these discourses are of a technical or consumerist nature, covering topics from the quality of prints to the state of the market – often confining themselves to a kind of digital ecstasy. Other discourses, quantitatively in the minority but qualitatively more influential, aim, on the contrary, to bestow an aura upon the DVD object, whether by turning it into the site of a new discourse of cinephilia (the eternal nobility of which here finds a new field of extension), by theorising its fresh pedagogical possibilities, or by crowning it as the occasion for the reappropriation of cinema by a finally modern spectator via a medium that promises numerous benefits. As for the DVD bonus, it is itself most often conceived as an ‘extra bit of soul’ whose goal is either to set the film free from its casing so it can attain its true status as an object, or to create an apparatus of footnotes that give the user the illusion of having access to superior knowledge.

DVD is thus on the side of fetishism and reification, but also – perhaps above all – on the side of knowledge and materialism (which is not entirely free of idealism). That is, a kind of cinephile praxis whose destiny is forcibly to end up in the University, in the sense that DVD resuscitates an entire deconstruction of cinema which rests upon on a series of ironclad operations: freeze frame, ceaseless return to a shot or scene, inexhaustible consultation of the movie – creating a fantasy object stuffed with meaning, and thus particularly propitious to ‘infinite conversation’ and eternal reassessment ...

So, compared to DVD – this new cinephile El Dorado that some do not hesitate to compare with a Pléiade edition – the numerous films programmed on specialised cable channels inevitably seem pale. As one of the nocturnal users of these channels, I feel a little daggy, discredited, the member of a minority – a secret traveller on a journey whose story will become impossible to recount, since it lacks an identifiable community. On cable, films are ever-cruising phantoms; one sometimes encounters them while seeking refuge from insomnia, or in the course of some vagabond channel-surfing. Unless one scientifically consults the program guide, the pleasure of these encounters is intimately linked to chance. Fortuitously, right bang in the middle of such a flux, I was lucky enough to bump into some familiar (sometimes rare) films, including Claude Chabrol’s Violette Nozière (1978), George Romero’s Monkey Shines (1988) and Pascal Thomas’ Celles qu’on n’a pas eues (1981) – to name only three examples of recent encounters ... With these numerous films floating in the televisual ether, co-existing like fish in the same aquarium, cable is on the side of the aleatory and interpolation. That is, the simultaneity and succession of these films is in the service of montage, a kind of perpetual motion of thought – as opposed to the culture of the freeze-frame and the appropriation, even the making-sacred, of the object, which is the domain of DVD. Moreover, the availability of movies within the televisual context offers a way of reinscribing them within a mundane space that is close to the space of real life. To put it another way: to see and re-see films (or fragments of films) under the conditions of live TV is, essentially, closer to the concrete experience of cinema than the ‘pre-recorded’ culture that is dear to DVD.

It might be objected that it is not really necessary to oppose these two modes of cinema consumption, and that one can perfectly well practice both with the same enthusiasm. Of course. But, in reality, it is a matter of aesthetics, a matter of style – virtually a philosophical option. DVD is all about stockpiling, accumulation, inertia. Cable is all about circulation, passage, ephemera. Thus, our memory works upon it in a completely opposite fashion. With DVD, memory shores up the givens, counts the points, stocktakes the information. With cable, it creates lines of flight, plays with montage effects, mentally fills the gaps. That is to say, memory never stops, is in perpetual motion, operating on a mixture of recollection and forgetting that is propitious to its own development and expansion. While DVD is allied with finitude, cable is allied with possibility.

Relating all of this, from a more pragmatic viewpoint, to the question of what each format offers, the superiority of cable seems to me clearly obvious. In the course of a single evening (25 July 2005, as it happens), it was possible to see, at the same time or some minutes apart: Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (2002), Youssef Chahine’s Alexandria ... New York (2004), Francis Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), José Bénazeraf’s Le Désirable et le sublime (1970), Howard Hawks’ Sergeant York (1941), Paul Schrader’s Cat People (1982), Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion (1984), Dusan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie (1975) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965). Then, two days later (the evening of 27 July), one could intermingle Ricardo Freda’s The Horrible Dr Hitchcock (1962), Domink Moll’s Harry – He’s Here to Help (2000), Dario Argento’s Deep Red (1975) and Sleepless (2001), João César Monteiro’s Vai-e-vem (2003) and À Flor do Mar (1986), W.S. Van Dyke’s Manhattan Melodrama (1934), Tsui Hark’s Double Team (1997), the Coens’ Raising Arizona (1987), Terence Fisher’s The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), John Cromwell & Nicholas Ray’s The Racket (1951) and Jacques Becker’s Falbalas (1945). Who could do better? Certainly not the DVD market which, even if it has made excellent progress in recent years, is very far from offering this absolute diversity in what they try to sell us. And, beyond this quantitative, consumerist aspect, it is, once again, the friction produced between films which is so striking here.

But there remain, all the same, some tantalising questions: concerning, for example, cinema history, or the unlocatable community of spectators.

Obviously, cable gives us access to a cinema history which is completely disordered. Films are presented without any real attention to chronology or pedagogy, and only some desultory introductions try at all to fill the gaps. From this angle the DVD market, despite its holes, clearly enables us to constitute a portable cinema history. All the same, cinema history – especially modern and mannerist cinema – remains to be written. It is a task which has at once become both practically impossible in its traditional form, and thus even more indispensable – on the condition of finding other modes of thought. In fact, here too, the short-circuits produced by cable truly allow us to take paths less trodden, less scholarly, freeing us to glimpse those horizons which make up a good part of the transversality and unexpected relations betweens films and eras, genres and auteurs, forms and styles.

As to the community of spectators, this is without doubt the most problematic question of contemporary cinema – whether we are speaking of theatres, DVD, television (live-to-air or pay channels) or the internet. The cinema as a common space, as collective horizon, is today more or less ghostly. The speeds, levels, trajectories are so different that it has become practically impossible to connect them. Most often, the cinema experience is reduced to an individual matter, hardly shareable with anybody else – or, if so, only in a cult-like fashion, a ‘gang’ effect which has very little to do with the question of community.

There can be no doubt that cable pushes this abstraction of the collective to its farthest point. It neither aims to repair the tatters of a community that can no longer find its place, nor pretends that such a thing still exists. On the contrary, it seizes upon the disappearance of this community for the sake of producing something else. Cable creates a space of individual ‘drift’, and forms a mental and electronic field that transforms the film-spectator’s solitude into a kind of dreamlike experience. This obliges us to rethink the place of the spectator, who has been definitively transformed, in the image of the films that he watches: a fish swimming in the aquarium amidst other fish, creatures whom he does not always see but nonetheless sometimes encounters, and with whom he might end up exchanging some glances, maybe a few words, perhaps even some entire sentences.

Is this the birth of a new community? Absolutely.