Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
words which Bartleby utters without any further explanation whenever his
superior orders him to write something: in other words to perform his duty as
scrivener. By refusing to write while being a writer, Agamben argues, Bartleby
Engaging Hand to Hand with the Moving Image 151
fully embodies his potentiality as a scrivener. It is not simply the possibility to
decide between diferent options, it is the freedom to do something or to not do
something else. Terefore, it is the negative side of potentiality, the possibility that
something does not pass into actuality, that makes possible potentiality as such.
26
For Agamben to keep potentiality fully open means to live a life as humans.
Te concept of potentiality is apt for further exploring the relationship
between images and gestures. As a fnal example of moving image works, I would
like to take Grandrieuxs feature flm La Vie nouvelle. In this flm Grandrieux
explores the potentiality of the moving image and, along with it, the potentiality
of human beings.
27
Afer Grandrieuxs frst feature flm Sombre (1998), La Vie
nouvelle continues to explore the thread of the post-confict landscape in the
Balkans. Te setting of La Vie nouvelle is a highly traumatized post-war East
European non-place, a physical, psychic world about which one knows nothing,
which arrives as in a fog.
28
Te flms plot is elliptical, as are the spoken dialogues,
reduced to a few lines: at a brothel-like hotel, a young woman, Mlania, is singled
out from a group by the human trafcker Boyan, stripped and sold into prosti-
tution. Te young American soldier, Seymour, encounters Mlania and becomes
obsessed with her to the point of wanting to rescue her, ofering her the chance
of a new life. Seymour eventually attempts to purchase Mlania outright.
Film theorist and critic Nicole Brenez has been the frst one to recognize
Grandrieuxs flms for the innovations in flm-making and flm-viewing that
they enable.
29
Adopting Agambens framework might open up further ways
of critically engaging with Grandrieuxs flms beyond the reading of them as
belonging to the new extremism.
30
In La Vie nouvelle the key concepts under-
pinning the notion of gesture at the center of this essay (dispositif, profanation
and potentiality) are all at play. Grandrieux captures the body in all its gestures
and paroxysms, contours and spaces, violence and ecstasy: ofering spectators a
cinema of bodily gestures rather than of images. Te coming to the foreground
of gestures, of ways of carrying the body (to recall the etymological defnition
of gesture), renders La Vie nouvelle a material exploration of the potentiality of
the moving image in its relationship to bodies, sound, darkness and light.
It is hard to speak about a sequence of images or of cinematic sequences in
La Vie nouvelle. Rather, one might talk about the dancing sequence, the hair-cut
sequence, and so on, always emphasizing the way humans carry their bodies on
and of screen. For the purpose of analysis I shall discuss three dialogue-less
sequences placed, respectively, at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of
the flm, showing how what remains in the frame is not images but gestures.
152 Cinema and Agamben
In the opening sequence of La Vie nouvelle we are within a darkened space: a
subjective camera shot, trembling in palpitation, rushes toward a group of men
and women gazing into the night. A fickering camera scans the face of a woman.
Her eyes stare at something without batting an eyelid. Te camera zooms out
and withdraws into the hazy night. Ten it zooms in on the face of another
woman, older than the frst. Tears appear in her eyes, slowly flling them. We do
not know exactly what it is that these women and men are looking at. A threat
comes from outside the frame and remains unknown and unknowable. Te
background sound comes in waves. Tere is no shot and counter shot, rather a
repeated camera movement, a zooming-in which concentrates attention on the
faces as if they were under a microscope not always in focus. As viewers we are
always conscious of the presence of the camera, of the particular framing and
deframing techniques through which the camera responds to the surfaces it
encounters, vibrating as if it were a living eye finching or squinting.
Agamben regards the frame as the basic unit of montage, a unit that holds
in itself a confict between what is inside the frame and what lies outside it.
Framing, in this respect, is a gesture capable of restoring the full potentiality
of the image, its potential to be or not to be, that is, its capacity not to be
circumscribed by the frame itself. As potentiality lives on in actuality, there is
something outside the frame (bodies, images, words) that remains even once
the framing gesture has taken place. Framing, then, is the manifestation of the
full potentiality of the image as such.
31
Te concept of potentiality can be taken further by discussing the sequence
where Boyan (the pimp) and Mlania are engaged in a kind of dance.
Before the disco crowd, Boyan pumps his fst into the air to incite people
into dancing. And more than this: he is the marionette master. Mlania is his
puppet. Boyans hands fan, futter, guide, caress, mock Mlania. Ten the camera
is entirely devoted to shots of Boyan, as a techno beat and a fast bass pattern on
a single note appear on the soundtrack. In Adrian Martins words: lighting and
posture [] transform the marionette master momentarily into a Nosferatu,
and images of his face resemble a demon.
32
Ten the camera is on Mlanias
Boyan-driven choreography, her spinning and twirling reaches a frenzy, a
crescendo, during the techno beat which is out of sync with the action.
Te whole dancing sequence is an operation of repetition and stoppage, the
two gestures which, as I have made clear above, are at the heart of cinema for
Agamben. Agamben uses the example of dance to explain how the gesture is
neither a means without an end, nor an end without a means, it is the means itself:
Engaging Hand to Hand with the Moving Image 153
what dance exhibits is not a movement that has an end in itself, but movement
for its own sake.
33
Te sequence reaches its climax with the camera fxed on
Mlania, on her visual de-fguration. Te camera shakes so much in response to
her dance that her face in close-up is fattened, stretched, lost, found again as we
pass from one frame to the next. One can no longer tell exactly which gesture
Mlania is performing, where she is situated in the space of the room, where the
line of her body ends and the surrounding environment begins. If one freezes
these frames of her face, arms, neck and shoulders, other potential images can
be seen or imagined: a torso, a cloud, an insect, a mask, sexual organs. Te music
fades for about fve seconds; it is interrupted. A space of possibility and freedom
opens up between the shots, between the image itself, which becomes discon-
nected from any narrative constraint, from any logical sequence of actions. Te
gestural image becomes potential. Mlania seems faceless, weightless, motionless,
detached from time and space. Mlanias dancing remains suspended, unable to
display anything more than its own potential.
Te last speech-less sequence in La Vie nouvelle I want to examine is the one
shot with a hand-held thermal camera: the dispositif here seems to become a
living organism capable of producing warmth when entering into contact with
human bodies. Interviewed by Brenez, Grandrieux explains his decision to use
a thermal camera in this sequence:
the thermal camera is used by the military, but above all by engineers in order
to gauge the resistance of materials. It records the diferent levels of temperature
Figure 7.2 Philippe Grandrieux, La Vie nouvelle (2002).
154 Cinema and Agamben
in a body. Te principle is that it is no longer light which makes an impression.
Here, there is no light. Te scene was shot in total darkness; no one could see
anything except me through the camera. All the participants were in an absolute
blackout, and they moved around in a deranged way.
34
Tis sequence starts with Seymour descending a staircase to end up in a dark place
where other human bodiesshimmering, formless and fragilecan be glimpsed
among the haziness; scenes of cannibalism are intuitively grasped in between
close-ups of screaming mouths and twirling bodies. Te sequence ends with a
woman crouching on the pavement, in a pose that resembles Francis Bacons twisted
human fgures and images of pathological bodies as those of La Salptrire. Te
particular shooting procedure adopted by Grandrieux thanks to the thermal camera
enacts the gesture of profanation Agamben talks about: a dispositif (the camera) is
no longer used for the purpose of recording images through the impression of light
on the flm. On the contrary, the camera here is hand held and kept close to the body
of the flmmaker, to the point where the camera is used as a sensing organ able to
detect and then touch the bodies it encounters by letting them imprint their warmth
on the celluloid. Te result cannot be an image in the ordinary sense, but rather a
sensation, an emanation. In this sequence the viewer experiences the same kind of
physical images that one experiences without seeing them in reality afer pressing
ones own hands onto the closed eyes or when one fnds oneself in darkness.
Darkness, which is the cipher of the sequence briefy discussed, is also the
color of potentiality. Agamben illustrates this point by making the following
Figure 7.3 Philippe Grandrieux, La Vie nouvelle (2002).
Engaging Hand to Hand with the Moving Image 155
example: when we are deprived of our sense of sight, for instance because we
have our eyes closed or because we are in the darkness, we are nonetheless able
to distinguish darkness from light, we are able to see darkness.
35
Te experience
of darkness is the experience of potentiality-in-itself. So it is not correct to say
that when in darkness we cannot see, as darkness itself becomes the object
of our sight, the actuality of sight becomes the darkness of potentiality. Te
thermal-camera sequence in Grandrieuxs La Vie nouvelle leaves us with a
radical monochrome image, that of darkness. Consequently we cannot establish
our position in space and time any more. It derives an image that cannot
represent any longer, instead it can only be felt.
By embodying an aesthetic of gestures, La Vie nouvelle illuminates several
Agambenian concepts, such as those of profanation, stoppage and repetition
examined throughout this essay, and, ultimately, ofers us the potential not
only of a new (not necessarily better) life (for Mlania, for the Balkans, for us
as human beings) but also of a new kind of cinema. Rather than adopting a
phenomenological perspective focused on concepts such as visibility, invisibility
and the fesh, I have shown how Grandrieuxs flm might be fully grasped by
relating it to Agambens understanding of potentiality.
36
Conclusions
Tis essay has investigated the notions of dispositif, profanation and potentiality
underpinning Agambens understanding of gesture by showing them at play in
selected moving image works. As we have seen, the dispositif in Agamben is an
ensemble of structures of thought and disparate things, both linguistic and non
linguistic (discourses, laws, philosophical propositions, buildings, institutions,
etc.) that inscribes us in a power relation with them. In mainstream cinema
the cinematographic dispositif is mainly used to create images in tune with our
deepest desires and drives, images that respond to our symptoms. Nevertheless,
this power of the dispositif is matched by the potentiality inherent in the gesture, a
gesture which is capable of embodying what the image ofen cannot show or say:
that is, the opening up of the dimension of potentiality. Potentiality in Agamben
is the dimension that accompanies actuality as opposed to anticipating it.
All the works examined in this chapter are contemporary ones. Contemporary
is, for Agamben, not what is happening now (the actual), but what expresses a
156 Cinema and Agamben
potentiality by engaging with the past.
37
Violas Te Greeting deals with the
past both in terms of iconology (the Biblical episode of the Annunciation) and
cultural reference (the Pontormos Visitation in the history of art). Te flm by
Serra is almost a performance of the raw elements of cinema at its beginning:
energy, intensity, mechanism, bodies. Grandrieuxs La Vie nouvelle draws inspi-
ration from the recent past: the afermath of the Balkans confict. It asks the
question of what kind of life and humanity might originate afer that. In this
way, it opens up the potential of a new life. Tis new life is not something that
will happen in the future, that will come next, but a radical openness to what
human beings might be and do.
38
To conclude with Agambens words: the power of cinema is that it leads
images back to the homeland of gestures, a place that coincides with the origins
of cinema.
39
Only in this way can the dynamic force of images be preserved
by a cinema of gestures. An image alone, in contrast, runs the risk of freezing
gestures, as in a photographic snapshot. Ultimately, the creation of images calls
for a responsibility on the part of both the flmmaker and the flm theorist, a
responsibility that crosses over from the realm of aesthetics into politics or,
better, into an aesthetics that is already political. Only artistic gestures can keep
open the potential to be or not to be. To the succession of events linked by a
connection of cause and efect typical of the narrative dispositif of mainstream
cinema, Viola opposes the time of a staged greeting, where the temporal
pregnancy of the image is what we experience as spectators. In Hand Catching
Lead Serra himself performs the cinematic dispositif as a bodily gesture
that sometimes interrupts the monotony of its movement to do something
unexpectedthe hand withdraws and the forefnger beckons.In La Vie nouvelle
Grandrieux ofers the moving image a new life. He endlessly explores the
potential of flmmaking as bodily gesture, thus subverting mainstream cinema.
If gestures are a manner of carrying the body, the artworks by Serra, Viola and
Grandrieux show how bodies engage hand to hand (corpo a corpo, to use the
Italian expression that Agamben himself adopts) with dispositifs, thus resisting
any assaults to their potential to be or to not be, to act or to not act.
40
Notes
1 My translation is based upon the original French text: Mais je vais vous faire une
confdence bien plus terrible: je naime pas le cinma, sauf quand je tourne; alors,
Engaging Hand to Hand with the Moving Image 157
il faut savoir ne pas tre timide avec la camra, lui faire violence, la forcer dans ses
derniers retranchements, parce quelle est une vile mcanique. Ce qui compte, cest
la posie. Andr Bazin, Orson Welles (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1972), 184. Te
English edition which is said to be based upon the original French text does not
contain the Entretiens avec Orson Welles by Andr Bazin, Charles Bitsch and
Jean Domarchi in which Orson Welles makes the quoted statement. See Andr
Bazin, Orson Welles: A Critical View, foreword by Franois Trufaut (Los Angeles:
Acrobat Books, 1991).
2 I adopt the critical framework ofered by Agambens refections on gesture in
a number of his essays: Notes on Gesture contained in Means Without End
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), On Potentiality
Bartleby, or on Contingency in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), the three essays Te Author as
Gesture, In Praise of Profanation and Te Six Most Beautiful Moments in
the History of Cinema, all contained in the collection Profanations (Cambridge,
MA: Zone Books, 2007), and the essay What Is an Apparatus? in What Is an
Apparatus? And Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
3 From the beginning of its history, cinema has been characterized by the tense
relationship between the still image and the (illusion) of movement as discussed
by several authors. See Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in
Motion (New York: Zone Books, 2007) and Still Moving: Between Cinema and
Photography, Karen Beckham and Jean Ma (eds), (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2008).
4 Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2007), 934.
5 Giorgio Agamben, Diference and Repetition: on Guy Debords Films, in Guy
Debord and the Situationist International, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2002), 317.
6 Tis defnition comes from the Oxford English Dictionary and is reported by
Pasi Vliaho, Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Tought and Cinema circa
1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 17. Te etymology of the
word gesture as a manner of carrying the body derives from the Latin gestura
meaning bearing, behavior, and from gestus gesture, carriage, posture. In all
his writings Agamben pays great attention to the etymology of words, for him a
fundamental practice in philosophy.
7 Alex Murray, Giorgio Agamben (London: Routledge, 2010), 87.
8 Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2007), 155.
9 Agamben, Notes on Gesture, 4852.
10 Noys noted that Agamben uses little historical evidence for his claim, mainly
referring to the scientifc segmentation of gestures made by Gilles de la Tourette or
158 Cinema and Agamben
the scientifc analysis of bodily movements pursued, at the same time as Tourette,
by Eadweard Muybridge and then captured on flm by tienne-Jules Marey with
his chronophotographic camera and by the Lumire brothers. See Benjamin
Noys, Gestural Cinema: Giorgio Agamben on Film, Film Philosophy (2004) 8.22.
http://www.flm-philosophy.com/vol82004/n22noys [accessed June 3, 2012]; Pasi
Vliaho, Mapping the Moving Image.
11 On the origins of scientifc cinematography, see Virgilio Tosi, Cinema Before
Cinema (London: British Universities Film & Video Council, 2005). A seminal text
for exploring the link between cinema and the human body is Lisa Cartwright,
Screening the Body (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
12 Relying on Althussers work on ideology and apparatuses, Baudry frst introduced
the concept of dispositif in flm theory in the seventies. See Jean-Louis Baudry,
Ideological Efects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus, in Narrative, Apparatus,
Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Te term
dispositif has broader connotations than the word apparatus, which refers to the
conceptualization of cinema as a psychosocial mechanism, whereas the original
French term, as Bellour highlights, refers to diferent vision machines from the
cinema to installation works and to a wider variety of perceptual efects. See Raymond
Bellour, Concerning the Photographic, in Still Moving, 274, in footnote3.
13 Philippe-Alain Michaud, Sketches: Histoire de lart, cinma (Paris: Editions de
lEclat, 2006).
14 Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2009), 13.
15 Ibid., 14.
16 Agamben, Profanations, 74.
17 Ibid., 87.
18 Ibid., 85.
19 Agamben, What Is an Apparatus?, 19. Te essay What Is an Apparatus? is
a concise programmatic statement of Agambens whole philosophical project,
which has its roots in Foucaults understanding of subjectivity and power. On the
role played by Foucauldian concepts of archaeology, genealogy and biopolitics
in Agambens thought, see Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical
Introduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
20 Giorgio Agamben, Nymphs, Releasing the Image: from Literature to New Media, ed.
Jacques Khalip, Robert Mitchell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 6079.
21 Raymond Bellour, Fra le immagini: Fotografa, cinema, video (Milano: Bruno
Mondadori Editore, 2007), 60.
22 On the relationship between Violas Te Greeting and Pontormos Visitazione, Settis
highlights the fact that in 2011 the video installation was shown in Florence close
to the painting. Settis recalls the eforts made by Renaissance painters, especially
Engaging Hand to Hand with the Moving Image 159
those in Florence, to represent movement in the stillness of the fgures painted on
canvas. Tis problem of giving motion to what was still was solved through the
inclusion of details such as wind, the impression of movement provided by wide
sleeves, hair falling over shoulders, and so on. Salvatore Settis, Bill Viola: i conti
con larte, Bill Viola: Visioni Interiori, ed. Kira Perov (Roma: Giunti, 2009),1535.
23 Agamben, Potentialities, 177.
24 Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1986), 1050 b 10.
25 Bartleby, or on Contingency in Potentialities: Collected Essays on Philosophy,
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
26 Agamben, Potentialities, 180.
27 Te title has been interpreted either as a reference to the dimension of (new) life in
Eastern Europe (the new Europe) or as a reference to Dante Alighieris Vita Nova
(Te New Life): the two interpretations (geo-biopolitical and literary) can coexist.
Brenez points to La Vie Nouvelle as the contemporary version of Dantes descent
into hell. See Nicole Brenez, ed., La Vie Nouvelle/Nouvelle Vision (Paris: Editions
Leo Scheer, 2005).
28 Raymond Bellour, Bords Marginaux, La Vie Nouvelle/Nouvelle Vision, ed.
N.Brenez (Paris: Editions Leo Scheer, 2005), 16. Te delocalized cinematic space
for La Vie nouvelle (it could be Sarajevo in Bosnia but also Sofa in Bulgaria)
resembles what Aug has called the non-place. See Marc Aug, Non-places:
Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995).
29 Brenez, La Vie Nouvelle.
30 Under the label of new extremism there are flmsmade by authors as diverse as
Breillat, Dumont, Haneke and Grandrieux himselfwhose images are designed
to deliberately shock the onlooker to the point that they leave the flm theater.
Without simply labeling those flms as sensationalistic, scholarly literature has
called for a subtler understanding of the new extremism, highlighting how the
flms of the new extremism and the controversies they engender are indispensable
to the critical task of rethinking the terms of contemporary spectatorship, quoted
in Te New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe, Tanya Horeck and Tina
Kendall (eds) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 8.
31 For an analysis of the aesthetics and poetics of framing, see Des O Rawe,
Towards a poetics of the cinematographic frame, Journal of Aesthetics and
Culture, 3 (2011). http://www.aestheticsandculture.net/index.php/jac/article/
view/5378 [accessed June 7, 2012].
32 Adrian Martin, Dance girl dance. Philippe Grandrieuxs La Vie nouvelle (Te New
Life, 2002), Kinoeye: New Perspectives on European flm 4.3 (2004). http://www.
kinoeye.org/04/03/martin03.php/#* [accessed June 3, 2012].
33 Noys, Gestural Cinema.
160 Cinema and Agamben
34 Nicole Brenez, Te Bodys Night. An Interview with Philippe Grandrieux, Rouge
(2003). http://www.rouge.com.au/1/grandrieux.html [accessed June 1, 2012].
35 Agamben, Potentialities, 1801.
36 Grandrieuxs flm aesthetics has been discussed along with Merleau-Pontys
concepts of fesh, visibility and invisibility in Jenny Chamarette, Phenomenology
and the Future of Film: Rethinking Subjectivity beyond Contemporary French
Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
37 See the essay On Contemporaneity, in Agamben, What Is an Apparatus?, 3956.
38 Murray points out that a better translation of the Italian expression la comunit
che viene is not the coming community but the community that/which comes,
avoiding any future connotations and pointing out that this community is in the
present, here and now, but has not been fully recognized in its potentiality. See
Murray, Agamben, 501.
39 Agamben, Means without End, 55.
40 Agamben, Profanations, 72.
8
Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a
Philosophical Cinematics
Garrett Stewart
Agamben and Cinema: a conceptual juncture more broadly productive than
Agamben on cinema. Tis is because Agambens strictly philosophical essays,
ofen concerned with a unique mode of temporal paradox, shed more light not
just on the renowned cinematic time-image (Gilles Deleuzes metahistorical
innovation) but on the texture of cinematic imaging in generalespecially
in the narrative contexts Agamben mostly ignoresthan do his brief and
sometimes cryptic commentaries on flm practice, confned as they are to four
short essays and further transient mentions.
1
When Agamben writes on cinema,
on its revealed constitution as diferential return, his avant-garde preferences
narrow the application of his vocabulary even as they may sharpen his aesthetic
sights. Te infuence of Deleuze, otherwise so frequent in his thinking, seems
slight (or slighted) in Agambens avoidance of narrative flm. But when one
brings his wider philosophical interests to bear on cinema, especially via his
writings on the post-Aristotelian valences of potentiality and the temporalities
it reinfects, the alignment with Deleuzian virtuality as a cinematic touchstone
becomes not just apparent but generative.
Where the transcendentals of flm (in the Kantian sense of essential
preconditions) are for Agamben repetition and stoppage, linked rather indis-
tinctly to enjambment and caesura as the determining features of verse,
2
he
locates these only at the level of montagenot at the material underlay of the
strip or frameline. In this, he is already leagued implicitly with a Deleuzean
suppression of flms celluloid mediality in favor of its sensory-motor realization
on screen. Like Deleuze, Agamben defers all questions of medium-specifcity
to the phenomenological plane of immanence (the touchstone Deleuzian
formulation), where motion is visible as suchdespite the artifce involved in
its discrete serial manifestation, its falsifed dure (Bergsons complaint, and
162 Cinema and Agamben
thus a sticking point in Deleuzes otherwise thorough recourse to that philo-
sophical predecessor).
3
A similar limitation attends Agamabens claims for
caesura and enjambment in poetry, which are specifcally metrical functions
only when thought unique (as he insists) to verseat the level of its immanent
lyric rhythm. Conceived otherwise, pace Agambenwhen considered, that is,
as part of prose as well, and hence as linguistic transcendentals, as it werethe
arrest and the segue of verse patterns derive from the rupture and overlap of
syllabic and lexical juncture itself in the ligatures of any and all enunciation: its
liaisons as well as its elisions, the cut and splice of morphophonemic language
in action, projected one level up into the metrical ingenuities of verse footwork
and its linear overruns.
In this way does the piecemeal essence of alphabetic language, like that of
celluloid flm, return as potential intermittence in the continuities of its aesthetic
impact. I have elsewhere compared the ficker efect of literary writing to the
photogrammar of flmic motion, which would give us another way to think of
repetition-with-a-diference as a stoppage always restarted on the run, twenty-
four times per second.
4
But any such awarenessof machinations mostly
invisible on screenoperates one ocular stratum beneath the sequencing of
found (hence repeated) and truncated (hence stopped) footage that interests
Agamben (without specifc examples) in the flms of Guy Debord: a repetition
and stoppage (la rptition et larrt) of the continuous detritus of image
culture in the fux and refux of its specularized circulation. Te cultural archive
regurgitated by the pastiche of Debords media montage draws Agamben back
to the major philosophies of repetition, from Kierkegaard through Nietzsches
eternal return to Heidegger and Deleuze: repetition as the return not of what
was, but of the enigmatic possibility of what was.
5
Without deploying the more
specifc term potential in this refection on Debords cinema, let alone alluding
to his own powerful essay on the topic in the pluralized eponymous volume
Potentialities, Agambens passing mention of the rediscovered possibility of
diference in the course of repetition (even in satiric iteration like Debords)
should serve to license the application of potentiality to what follows.
6
For
we turn now to that mode of cinema whose analysis he lef entirely to Deleuze:
flms of explicit narrative momentumand, in particular, to the internal disjoin
they sometimes strategically invite between recorded motion and fgured time.
Much in the way that, for Agamben, literary writing makes speech itself
possible again in what it speaks, he also has his fnger on the rudimentary
pulse of the cinematic apparition, which in its most exploratory forms makes
Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a Philosophical Cinematics 163
the very work of imaging visible in process.
7
I want merely to broaden the
diagnosis of this pulse rate, taking it back to the lab (as function of the photo-
grammatic strip) as well as out into the auditorium (as the registered efect of
a given plots technical infection). Te efort of this essay is thus to extract the
rhythm (rather than the content) of Agambens cinematic response (about the
percussive montage of Situationist dtournements) and return it to the track: to
the frame-advance that makes not only such avant-garde disruptions possible
but that allows for some of the most compelling editorial (hence medial) turns
of narrative cinema as well. To put it in the most Agambenesque way for now,
before making good on the provocation entailed, let it be said that repetition
and stoppage are not just the suppressed rudiments but the present potential
of screen narrativeas well as of the Debordian cinessay or cinssai (to give
again, with that coinage, an example along with its precept: a cross-media turn
of caesura and enjambment at the sublexical level of syallabic lap dissolve).
In contrast to Diference and Repetition (the flm essay explicitly alluding
to Deleuzes famous book title), the debt to Walter Benjamin is more immediate
in another of Agambens essays on flm, where he stresses the foregrounding of
those human gestures ordinarily subordinated to action or intention.
8
Cinema
is therefore not for him a movement-image
9
(as it is at base for Deleuze) but,
more fundamentally yet, a gestural image. But here, too, he is disinclined to
burrow down to the micro-gestures that collect on the diferential strip into a
discernible movement. Tough unmentioned by Agamben in this respect, what
interested Benjamin frst of all about photography, rather than flm, was that he
saw it gaining access to the optical unconscious
10
: to the increments of gesture
that make up the arc of movement and that take place too fast for recognition
by ordinary eyesight.
11
Photography freezes an action in the momentary thrust
of a gesture. I would stress insteadand, again, as regards its material underlay
or substratethat flmic cinema (in its genealogical relation to stop-time
chronophotography, as developed by Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules
Marey) depends on this fxity in order to return its fractured particles to
gesture. To gesture, and hence to motion: an imaging of one kind of movement
generated from a real but diferent motor cause, rather than an immanent
or reifed movement-image in its own right. For Deleuze, and Agamben
implicitly, cinema is not sectioned movement but moving sections. Tats as
far back toward the projection booth (or in turn toward the photomechanical
lab) as they wish to go. In fact, though, action on screen is traced, not given: an
animation efect. So that, for me, neither gesture nor montage are primary or
164 Cinema and Agamben
transcendental; rather, they are produced from the invisible discrete constituents
of the speeding cellular strip, turning diference itself to projected action and
cumulative screen event.
Many flms, not just avant-garde experiments but mainstream narratives
as well, revert to this mere (and momentarily withheld) possibility of motion
in the fxed frameline unit. Tey do so by simulating the sustained latency of
gesture in its very stasis, most prominently by a repetition-without-diference in
the freeze frame.
12
(Another way of recruiting Agambens terms to the material
infrastructure he ignores is to see in this device a case of photogrammatic
enjambment absorbing caesura into the continuous running-on of the same
and thus ofering the very image of a motion potential rather than actual.) Te
fact that Agamben is no more interested than Benjamin in extrapolating from
the optical unconscious of vision (as revealed by photography) to the single
photo cell as the analogous ocular preconscious of cinematic projection does
not prevent us from sensing how such a recognition can be marked of within a
given flm: a flm that might well be concerned, at other levels, with issues closer
to the bone in both Agamben and Deleuze. And not just marked of, but tied
directly to the larger units of efect that preoccupy their attention: where, for
instance, in the examples grouped here, something about the inherent virtuality
of the screen image can be thrown into relief by both counterfactual plotting
and by uniquely cerebral variants of the so-called trick ending: an ending in
which the twist may include a medial double helix gaining new torque in the
disclosure of flms serial image base.
Te internal tensions of Potentia
With no reference to flm, Agamben is interested elsewhere not just in potential,
or say present potential, but in the inherent presence of potentialand this in
a way that can illuminate some of the most laconic formulations of his flm
writing. Too ofen, he notes, ones sense of potential is restricted to a past tense
form, a present perfect subjunctive, a perfected negation: what might have
been, except for certain defnitive preventions. But what might yet be lays a
diferent claim on the present tense. In the form of potential, it must exist as
such in the now. It is not actual, not activated, but no less real in its contingent
mode. Agamben comes close here, as I am paraphrasing his claims, to a central
Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a Philosophical Cinematics 165
proposition in Deleuze, one which is extensively illustrated as well in the latters
flm work: the cohabitation of the virtual and the real in a zone not exhausted by
the actual.
13
Tat the continuous potentiation of the next from within the now
is an undertextual energy of flm itself, in the (be)coming before our eyes of its
own event(uation)call it the mircosecond by microsecond realization of the
possibleis a fact of flm that Deleuze understands as manipulated, thematized,
ironized, transmuted, what have you, whenever the movement-image is trans-
formed before our eyes into the time-image, as unmistakably, for instance,
though in a formulaic manner, in a fashback.
But how is this form of temporal manifestation to be thought of, in
Agambens terms, as the return of the possibility of what was?
14
What is at
stake in this logical rethinking of iteration? Repetition restores the possibility
of what was, renders it possible anewas if it were (is) happening again, not
remembered but autonomous: To repeat something is to make it possible anew.
[] Memory cannot give us back what was, as such: that would be hell. Instead,
memory restores possibility to the past.
15
Trust again into the midst as we are,
what can still unfold must still be possible, hence still in touch with a quotient
of potential endemic to its becoming. Here is where Agamben again follows
Benjamin, this time in appreciating how memory converts the fulflled into
the unfulflled.
16
Call it the translation of time past into the en-dured again.
Here, too, is where technology models psyche: Doesnt cinema always do just
that, transform the real into the possible and the possible into the real?
17
If so,
Deleuze would be the frst to call this the virtualization of the actual. Hence
the time-image: in the simplifed form of a fashback as well as in its more
specialized form as a secondary rather than a primary potentiation (a subjective
hallucination, for example, rather than just a narrative anachrony).
18
Te fashback is in this manner the most obvious manifestation of cinema
in the mode of the time-image rather than the movement-image: the repetition
of the already stopped (performed gestures tracked as action and traced as
record) taking place as a coming-forth again in the becoming-potential of the
already elapsed. To continue in this Agambenesque vein, fashback enacts the
non-impossibility of recovered duration: absence made present by presen-
tation. Tats the defning line of thought. What such an emphasis, even in its
difculty, makes clearand this all the way from Debords ransacked media
archive in serial deployment to the rule of mainstream montage at largeis
that narrative cinema as well as avant-garde screen practice can avail itself
of the optically estranged. Without remediating every image in the mode of
166 Cinema and Agamben
appropriation and dtournement, of regurgitation and irony, narrative cinema
can still preach what it practices, it can theorize the projection it activates. In
the overtly virtual moments of the counterfactual episode on flm, subset of the
Deleuzian time-image, it is forcefully the case (and at the heart of Agambens
ethic of the aesthetic across media) that the image gives itself to be seen instead
of disappearing in what it makes visible.
19
At such moments we watch imaging
rather than see images. At such moments we are made to see through the
image in its disclosure of the merely virtual. And not just see, but think: think
it through, think through it. Agambens work, so willfully cordoned of from
Deleuzes on cinema, nonetheless contributes to a further contemplation of the
latters infuential paradigm shif across the two flm volumes, which, in trans-
forming movement as a function of time, to time as a function of movement,
converts the virtual life of the screen from an action for viewing, to an image in
the fgural sense: an image to be read. Projection becomes what it always was
anyway, but now insistently: projection becomes text.
It is worth stressing that the virtual in Deleuze, together with my sense of
its links to the possible of potentiality in Agamben, does not come bearing
the lurking sting of critique that accompanies it in simulacrum theory, whether
in the school of Baudrillard or the cooler-toned mediology of Rgis Debray.
For Debray, the virtual defnes the third historical phase in image culture, a
millennial sequence inaugurated by the hieratic image of the idol as an index
of divinity, an incarnate trace, and followed by the rule of representation or
iconicity.
20
Afer the logosphere and the graphosphere, then, the third phase
is neither incarnational nor representational but sheerly perceptual, the regime
of the visual as suchwhere the image that once captured viewers by the
supernatural, holding the believer in its gaze, and then, in the next epoch,
captivated the onlooker by both its image of the natural and the spectators
constructed relation to it, now captures (or recaps) the world in the virtual
mode of sheer information.
21
One might say that in Debord, cinema is
forcibly removed from its status as the fulfllment of the representational epoch
and, once iterated in fractured form, replayed as a satire of the videological
afermath in media culture. In distinguishing the logosphere as the time of
the idol (the gaze without a subject
22
)divine oversight instantiatedfrom
the graphosphere as the era of art (where, for instance, perspective painting
renders a subject behind the gaze), Debrays self-styled mediology identifes
the third epoch, the videosphere, as a regime which again removes the subject
as aesthetic focal point: vision without a gaze.
23
Whereas conventional cinema
Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a Philosophical Cinematics 167
can be seen to straddle the transition between graphic and video dispensations
in Debrays sense, it is, for our purposes, the full-scale desubjectivation of the
visual in certain flm sequences by Michael Haneketo which we will shortly
turnthat has pushed them well past the templates of classical editing. In their
impact we see how the order of the possible can erupt into strained face-ofs
with the actual. In Deleuze, the virtual, in its most extreme form as the power
of the false, insists on the coexistence of incompossibles: a recollected past,
for instance, in which true and false are indiscernibleor, as in the case
of an ambiguous fashback or present retinal illusion, in which the spectator
encounters the indecidable coexistence of possibility and its negation.
24
What
follows, then, is an efort to rethink virtuality (Deleuze) and potentiality
(Agamben) in the beam of each others manifestation on screen.
Sight defects
Let me begin with a minor example of the deceptive fashback from a flm in
release as I write, a twist-ending thriller by Steven Soderbergh called Side Efects
(2013). An overmedicated depressive woman is marked out as suicidal by her
fooring her car into a garage wallthis, before a nearly plot-long fashback is
shortly triggered by a salient camera movement that tracks across an ominous
trail of blood in her apartment. Te ensuing fashback (to three months
earlier), about halfway through its unfolding melodrama, reveals the blood to
be that of her victim rather than herself. She has stabbed her husband to death
in a prolonged bout of claimed sleepwalking induced by a risky anti-depressant
drug, afer which she crawls back under the covers, to awake later in horror at
the inexplicable corpse. Until the rapid montage of inset corrective fashbacks at
the flms climax, this is what we have been meant, have been made, to assume.
Instead, she will fnally be smoked out by her duped and betrayed psychiatrist
as a cold-blooded murderer who killed her husband in a byzantine scheme of
greed. So that her remembered (and to us visible) stupor in crawling under the
sheetsthe pivot point of the prolonged fashbackis less a relevant part of
the complot, to bloody them as evidence, let alone some momentary refex of
guilt and anxiety, than a subterfuge staged more for the spectator than for the
subsequent forensic investigations: a narrative cheat as well as a crime, a liter-
alized cover story, making us believe in the use of the sleepwalking side efect
168 Cinema and Agamben
until the plot is ready to unravel it. What is fnally repeated for us, then, when
we reprise the murder scene, is not the same but an incriminating diference
within the same: the possibility, all along, of its being otherwise. By way of
an image chain in no way altered from the frst pass through this scene, what
we see is the image of innocence as the renewed potential (nonetheless) of a
homicidal drive. It is no accident that, in evoking such a barely updated flm
noir plot of the treacherous wife as femme fatale, Soderbergh has returned to
one of the post-war seedbedsin Deleuzes metahistory of flmfor the break
from action into memory via the unreliable fashback: a negative version of the
false, whose powers are squandered in a sheer deceptive sidetrack.
A positive version of the false fashback and its paradoxical compossi-
bility with the real (delusional at worst, not criminal) is yet more central to
another recent flm, where a recovered trauma kept from us until the end may
well deconstruct the movie as we have watched it, so that we see it at lastif
only in retrospectas a fctive rather than remembered instance of the virtual,
sustained compensatory mirage rather than magic. In Ang Lees Te Life of Pi
(2012), an Indian boy embarrassingly named Piscine (for a French swimming
pool) shortens it to the irrational number Pi and lives to tell of having passed
through a months-long and wholly irrational episode at sea, afer an orphaning
shipwreck: an adventure that he profers years later, in retrospect, as actual,
not virtual. As the flm opens in the Montreal present, a foundering Canadian
novelist approaches Pi, now an adult emigr, afer hearing that he has an
amazing story, which the novelist hopes to siphon ofand which he is fnally
given permission to write up. Without us realizing it at the time, the entire plot
is to be held suspended between the pegs of that implicit designation as his
story, the flm governed in this respect by the subjective and objective genitive
alike: the story of his imperiled life, on the one hand; on the other, the story
told (made up) by himand not just orally, in the afermath, but scribbled
in a logbook with blunt pencil stub as the ordeal progresses (as we are asked
to think, having been made to see it this way). Only an hour and a half later,
afer having been continuously smitten with a 3-D digital spectacle of unreal
images rendered somehow possible to high-defnition sight, we get a debunking
rewind of the events in verbal discourse rather than virtual manifestation. We
have all along been marveling at a ravenous Bengal tiger dispatching other
escaped animals on a life raf but kept at bay by the ingenuity of a lone human
boy, have been stunned at the image of sharks dodged along with a battalion of
fying fsh, have been treated to a foating carnivorous island as well as the seas
Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a Philosophical Cinematics 169
bioluminescent splendor in the pixel-lumens of CGI simulation, on and on.
Now, all of a sudden, for a long few minutes of evacuated wonder, we must sufer
a defating counternarrative delivered into the audiorecorder of the Japanese
insurance agents who have come to investigate the sinking of the cargo ship.
Te recovering Pi, come ashore fnally in Mexico, is here flmed sitting up in
antiseptic hospital garb against an equally blank white wall behind his bed, his
story registered in gradual closeup. All ambience is excluded from the image
as he looks into the camera to narrate a tale so much at odds with, and worse
than, the one weve seen with our own eyes: the story of his own abandoned
descent into murder (of the vicious fat chef who had refused him vegetarian
food shipboard and had then turned cannibal). One comes to suspect that
this shorn verbal exposition, matter-of-fact and image-free, is the inevitable
stark truth. Te movie weve reveled in and warmed to seems now to have
been one long screen memory for the focal subject of its fashback. If all this
eroded narrative confdence were not kept hovering in the balance of a guarded
ambiguity, the hammered-home shock of the trick ending would be comparable
to the rug-pulling moment in Martin Scorseses Shutter Island (2010) when we
discover that our detective hero and star is in fact the psychotic wife-and-child-
murderer that he himself has been tracking, and that everything weve taken for
plot has been a demented mirage: a virtual world apart in which we have been
shuttered up with him, both energized and soothed by the powers of the false.
In the revelations of all such trick-endings, the same is replayed in the key of
diferencebut a diference so radical, at times, that it all but parodies rather
than exemplifes a normative storyline.
So it is with the counter-narrative of Te Life of Pi when the euphemistic
magic has been stripped bare. Here is a talking-head exposition with images
too awful to show or even to want remembered, but simply to conjure again as
possible: a worst-case scenario at odds with the screen scenes just transpired.
Te tale that would set things straight for the insurance team is still, even now,
held of in sheer potential: just one alternative story, inevitably resisted by us not
just because its events are so terribleso feral, so red in tooth and claw, with the
boy becoming the predatory tiger he has, we thought, half tamed and bonded
withbut because what we have seen before is so much more vivid and, even
as beast fable, humane.
25
Given that it was, idiomatically, a secular miracle
to have survived at all, it might as well be a stirring rather than a gruesome
one. But as to the question of virtual truth versus verisimilitude, wide critical
misapprehension has attached to the flms punch line, when we cut from the
170 Cinema and Agamben
tense and crestfallen inspectors to the blocked novelist hoping to borrow the
narrators earlier story. Pi has promised to tell it in illustration of Gods ways, as
proof of divine intervention, which is why it is possible, no doubt, to read the
capping dialogue as suggesting that God has preferred, and so made good on,
the less awful tale, opting by fat for magic rather than just implausible stamina
and its necessary violence.
Te point is a diferent one. Cornered, Pi has given the investigators a choice of
stories, and, afer his having laid out these alternatives, we return from the fashback
to the opening frame as he asks the novelist: Which story do you prefer? Te one
with the tiger, were not surprised to hear. And Pi in return: So it goes with God.
Te point isnt that God prefers the grandeur of miracles, an uncovenanted ark of
wild beasts rather than a cannibal bloodbath and homicidal revenge, as critics have
tended to assume, but rather, and more simply, that God is a better story, so Pi
believes, than the world without Him: theology an elective narrative, a virtuality
say a still present potentialitymore appealing than brute fact.
To be presentBeyond mediation
A neo-noir conspiracy thriller; a metafctional beast fable and fantasy epic: from
these we turn now to two flms by a very diferent kind of director, flms in which
the relation of the counterfactual to the (Deleuzian) virtualin ways Agamben
can help illuminateare not just processed at the level of narrative but routed
through the flters of overt remediation, videographic in one case, pictographic
in another, so as to delimit the uncanny parameters of these narratives (and,
implicitly, all screen imaging). In an unheimlich assault against the bourgeois
home itself, Cach (2005) opens famously with a node of what we might call
counterfactuality degree zero: representation per se, a virtual counterspace held
to the rectilineation of the image plane itself. We think we are watching a movie
when we are watching an inexplicable video within it.
26
And this is an optical
planarity disclosed, only afer the fact, to be under observation by others than
us, and at one remove from the manifest scenenamely, scanned by a French
couple in voice-over watching a mysterious tape of their apartment exterior,
onto whose street they then emerge (in front of the primary camera) in real
time, only to appear next before the monitor by whose playback the inaugural
image of the same house front has been activated as mysterious purview.
Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a Philosophical Cinematics 171
A camera trained upon a space (our launching image) stands hereby revealed
for what it always was, and in another sense could never have been other than:
a space fattened to display, to replay. Te scene, virtualized, has become sheer
data in transmission, but unmotivated so far: data without purposeful infor-
mation. What happens, one might say, is that the image gives itself to be seen
as image, but only in a lamination of the virtual upon the actual, real space
doubled by a rewindable trace, dure turned to archive, redoubling our recog-
nition (in Debrays terms) of the videosphere. And in Agambens terms? How
do repetition and stoppageso obviously reduced here to the mechanics of
rewind and arrest afer fast forward (as the couple scans the tapes for clues not
to its image but to its preceding impetus, its motive)how do these transcen-
dental conditions of flm, laid bare here in video reproduction, take us to the
ethics and the politics of a narrative practice far removed from the countercul-
tural pastiche of Situationist montage?
27
With its past-participial title, Cach may refer as wellby loose French
wordplayto the cultural cachet of the protagonist: a TV talk show host, a
literary impresario, whose self-confdence is eroded by the hidden cameras that
slowly prod him to disclose his own equally hidden past. Georges Laurent is
already in denial when telling friends at a dinner party that the bland tapings of
his home are just meant to show us that were under surveillance, since theyve
already shown him something else as wellthough unadmitted as yet to his
wife: the link of these videos, somehow, back to his childhood and the orphaned
Algerian son of former family servants, about whom Georges made up lies to
get him sent away. Its as if, in reviewing the tapes of his domestic faade, the
axis of registration has gone interior, become that of his own unconsciousas a
disruptive fashback to the victimized boy (triggered by the second of the videos
and a telltale drawing as clue) makes inescapable.
Not being able to imagine where the camera could have been hidden on the
punning Rue des Iris, the street running perpendicular to his townhouse
since the shot is so crisp that it couldnt have been photographed through a
car windowGeorges says of the frst surveillance episode: It will remain a
mystery. On subsequent viewings of the flm, this line of dialogue becomes
more a global caveat than a local bafement. Stand warned: we are never to
learn for sure. Galling, at least nagging, might sum up a certain kind of viewer
frustration at the unsolved mystery. Yet the ambiguities of Cach are not a thicket
of loose ends. Tey are the braided strands of explicitly truncated genre expecta-
tions that are all leading ultimately in the same directionbeyond genre. Cach
172 Cinema and Agamben
is certainly not a standard who-done-it, blatantly not. In mid-detection, the
tracked-down victim (Majid, the Algerian boy now in middle age) kills himself
in front of Georges. Te mystery of agency concerns only that sequence of
videotapes whose long-mounting relevance will now seem to have disappeared
at exactly this apogee of violence, even if the very scene is (as it would appear
from the camera angle) still being internally recorded.
Home video picturing only the fortress of the bourgeois homeas if in the
kind of elective surveillance such a couple might have enlistedis gradually
reversed as a lure to draw Georges outside the circle of his security into the
low-rent purlieus of his former victim. Tis happens in two stages. Te frst tape
picturing something other than the townhouse exterior doubles for the plots
own transition, and answers to its own inducements, simply by picturing, this
time through a windshield afer all, an approach to Georges family farmand
thus triggers a jump-cut into its present space as Georges is drawn back there to
question his mother about Majid. Te surveillant target has gone searching, the
stalked turned stalker. In this way the tapes have fulflled their task in snapping
him out of his complacency, his passivity. He answers the call, follows the lead,
and knocks eventuallypreceded there by another hand held recordingon
the door of 047.
Mission accomplished (even if were still asking whose): that is, confron-
tation achieved, the past met again face to face. Except that, with no shred of
sympathy, Georges faces it down rather than up to it, accusing the Algerian man
of terrorism against his family and thus reinscribing the colonial stereotype
that led, in the frst place, to the police slaughter of the boys parents in a Paris
demonstration. Te last tape we know for sure to have been recorded in the
flm is here taking down (we subsequently realize)and from a vantage at the
far side of Majids kitchenGeorges threats against him, despite the mans
denying all knowledge of the video aggression. But this fact of yet another
flming-within-the-flm is one we are kept from suspecting at the time by the
dynamic crisscross of camera angles before their conversation is later reseen on
monitors (by Anne at home; by Georges boss at the TV studio) in a fxed-frame
medium long shot.
Rounding out this rendezvous with the past, on Georges second and fnal
appearance in Majids kitchen we lock down on the scene of self-murder in one
of the directors signature fxed-frame exposs of human non-communication.
It is a shot we are never to see rescreened in taped form, however. So how
has it been flmed? How else? By narration itself. For this is a narration that
Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a Philosophical Cinematics 173
has kept us discomfted and on our toes precisely by toeing a slyly fne line
between the two strata of identifcation in Christian Metzs psychoanalytic
semiology: that diference, so potently equivocated here, between primary and
secondary identifcation.
28
For Metz, respectively and in order, the diference is
this: an identifcation frst with the camera and then with a character, the latter
sometimes through a POV shot that, one might say, borrows back some force
of primary alignment as well. In Hanekes ironically vexed case, however, the
secondary axis is with an always elided cameraman character who (never to be
discovered) simply vanishes into the sightlines of narrative spectation.
All that the actual supplement of the tapes accomplishes, then, in the movie as
we actually have it, is to intervene between media personality and his own worst
fears of fnding his sequestered self on camera; that, plus lend an extra medial irony
to Majids last words, afer which no mention of the taping, even the taping of this
very scene, is ever made again: I just wanted you to be present. Tats the very
motto of the flms ethic of retribution. Georges must be dislodged from his compla-
cency by being made, frst, to see the same picture of his life that we dofrom the
outside looking on, then inand in consequence by being made to face something
wholly other, from which that complacent surface cannot be disassociated. As
media personality, Georges is at the helm of the videosphere, a power-broker of the
apparatus in Agambens generalized terms. Indeed, the one time we are fooled
by a full-screen image that we think is meant to have advanced the plot to a new
diegetic scene on his television shows stage set (and that is not, yet again, a surprise
surveillance tape), what we have entered upon instead is a digital editing session
of the shows pre-recorded taping, the playback flling our screen as it submits to
rewind and ellipsis. We hear Georges voice, of-frame, instructing the technicians
to elide material in the full-frame image before us, a discourse that has gotten too
theoretical for mass consumption. Elsewhere, Georges is himself his own best
censor of the difcult. Typically in command of the image, he can only be shaken
loose from his nervous grip on power by what Agamben designates as a profa-
nation of the apparatuses: the media personality remediatized in his privacy by
the invasive tapes in their function as fgures both for being seenit hardly matters
by whomand (as plot drivers) for his needing to look back.
29
Te bufer zone
between Georges and the world must be converted to a weapon against him, call
it dtournement in a narrative key. Broadcast is turned to exposure, the apparatus
defamed from outside the temples of its power: a media hegemony profaned.
So far, then, the factual is repeatedly doubled by the virtual in the ambiguity
of diegesis versus its replay, in the latter event a strictly mechanical case of
174 Cinema and Agamben
repetition as the return of the possible in the most inert of forms. But what
about the more explicitly counterfactual image when inserted as still potential?
Tere are, in Cach, two such scenes of radical virtuality, each a time-image
in a specialized Deleuzian sense. Interrupting his visit to his mother at the
family farm, a presumed abrupt fashback to Majid killing the family rooster at
Georges behest (when pretending his parents had commanded it) ends with
the boy stalking Georges with his threatening hatchet in a prolonged POV shot
from the back of the barnfrom which a jump cut takes us to the adult Georges,
there in his former home, waking in a cold sweat from just this nightmare. Te
narrative pumps have by this point been fully primed. As if by the unfolding of
an answering chiastic pattern at the end, one half of the two-shot coda will seem
immediately legible in light of this earlier nightmare assault. Tat retroactively
disclosed dream insert in the homestead episodefrst the oneiric mirage, then
his writhing on the pillowis reversed at the end by the transition from bed as
shelter to an undefended onslaught of dream image.
It happens this way. Afer Majids throat-cutting echo of the original barnyard
treachery, Georges takes sleeping pills before crawling naked into bed in broad
daylight, followed bythe cinematographic cues seem inescapableanother
dreamscape from the same childhood POV. Or if this is that actual past in
narrative rather than just subjective replay, the efect of its virtual return is
nonetheless the same: the renewed possibility of what was, the way it (and
the boy) may actually have gone. Tere, in extreme long shot, we see how the
unwanted and betrayed stepbrother is, afer agonized resistance, fnally driven
of from his adopted homeeither as this scene of exile is actually remembered
from Georges former stakeout at the back of the barn or as it is reconstructed
in the unconscious of the drugged sleeper so as to match the traumatic POV
earlier: a nightmare this time, in the flms penultimate shot, of guilty witness
stripped of threat.
Yet the underlying nightmare of true vulnerability may in fact be what comes
next and last with the prolonged closing shot, a diferent threat materialized. In
Georges last words on the phone to Anne, before a routine I love you too, he
asks her to tell their son, quite out of the blue, not to be too hard on his old
man (not to wake him up when he comes home? not to resent him forever?).
Its this seemingly undermotivated (if overdetermined) line of dialogue that we
may remember as the flms last (and notoriously ambiguous) shot displaces the
fashback image of exile withwhat? Another dream scenario? Tis time not of
a separation but of a bond forged. It is a shot notoriously hard to decipher just at
Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a Philosophical Cinematics 175
the visual level, though still in the unfinching, fxed-frame geometry associated
with the (now internalized?) surveillance camera.
But there they are in any case, a little hard to spot at frst: Majids nameless
son and Georges own Pierrot, talking together and then separating on the
high school steps. A frst meeting? Afer the fact? Back before it all began? Or a
conspiratorial debriefng? In any case, the patriarchs worst fear, as almost half-
expressed to his wife on the phone moments before, may seem immediately to
have come trueif with the vagueness of dream. Is this indeed a case of the sins
of the father revenged by the sons? Have they been in cahoots all along? Or, that
aside, is this the sure sign that Pierrot will be at least learning by hearsay about
his fathers inglorious pasteven if he doesnt know it yet? Asked otherwise: Is
this meeting of the next generation happening in real time, in parallel montage,
in the same late afernoon in which Georges lies asleep? Or is the interracial
rapport forged or recommitted to here meant, alternately, to represent Georges
entirely subjective nightmare of the future, any day now: where a new hybrid
society, racially leveled, will hold him forever responsible, have him always in
the contemptuous sights of its ethical minds eye?
In Hanekes plottingits mysteries of mediation fnally lifed, if only by
default of all empirical solutionthe guiding design remains clear enough. Te
cinematic act of flming narrative surveillance has come down to no more, and
no less, than flm narrative itself in the present form of its relentless diagnostic
optic. Afer so much dead-pan empirical recordtransfgured only in the eye
of the beholder as incriminating tether to Georges pastone unmediated shot
is pivotal. Tis, as weve seen, is the presumptively counterfactual shot (of Majid
threatening Georges with the axe) that reorients the closing moments toward
a zone of indiscernibility where the virtual (Deleuze) becomes the site of the
ethical, and where repetition and stoppage (Agamben) wont mutually delineate
each other with any satisfying clarity.
So it is that the movement-image is caught halfway in transit to the time-
image, locked into a kind of infernal return. Either Georgesas if drugged by
truth-serum rather than sleeping pillsis remembering the wild plight of Majid
at his connived exile, or hes for the frst time imagining it, his guard down in
sleep, with ethically opened eyes. And either the boys are meeting later (or
earlier) in a broad and fxed-frame daylight, or this, too, is what Georges can
now imagine only when the censor of consciousness is disengaged. Repetition
and/or stoppage? Iteration or telos? Te counterfactual is turned inside out in
this two-ply conclusion: Where the far childhood past returns in the mode of
176 Cinema and Agamben
the still possible (seen for the frst time as if becoming-again in the unabashed
moral outline of a miserable wrong), the nearer present (the schoolyard
coda and/or prequel) is lost somewhere between fashback and premonition,
revelation and paranoia. By an unsourced provocation, the apparatus has
been profaned (reduced from mass-media power to ad hoc provocation) in an
ultimate service to this unmediated ethical apparition, where the powers of the
false, however adjudicated, make immanent a virtual truth.
Image Sub Specie Mortis
Te counterfactual irruptions in Hanekes latest flm, Amour (2012), would seem
to hew even more closely to Agambens combined sense of cinema as an analytic
of gesture (and its arrests) as well as of caesura and its carry-overs. Two of these
moments in Amour are overt fantasies, holes in time quickly bridged over;
another an ambiguous hallucination pitched somewhere between audience and
character; yet another, by contrast, so completely unpsychological that it has
invaded montage itself as an alternate world space, unreal and two-dimensional,
manifest in counterpoint to the narratives present desolation. Each of these
sequences in one way or the other, in the virtuality of its inset, cuts to the
quick of flms own preconditions in a manifestationconcerning the theme of
deathof the always merely potential.
Hanekes abiding topic is still violence, but this time not physical so much
as biological, not the violence exploding at any moment within life, but the
defnitive violence of life: its brutal foreclosure in death. As in his flm from
2010, Te White Ribbon (Das weie Band) the white-on-black main titles have
yielded momentarily, just before a launching shot, to a black screen. Whereas, in
Te White Ribbon, the image then gradually fades in, across a full ten seconds,
to reveal the frst scene of intentional injury (the wire-tripping of a horse and
rider), in Amour the violence is even more immediatebut entirely imper-
sonal. Again the black screenonto which, into which, from which explodes
the frst abrupt, pounding image: of a double residential door, seen from our
side, the inside, battered open by fremen with editings frst splice. A stench
pervades the disclosed space, which in fact we now occupy and examine along
with the moving camera. A corpse is found ceremonially laid out and already
in decay, and the prologueas chronological epilogueis over almost as soon
Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a Philosophical Cinematics 177
as it began. Besides spoiling any rudimentary suspense with lifes inevitable
foregone conclusion, what this blunt, battering start has donein something
like the opposite of Cachs opening video regressis to trigger an immediate
incorporation of the audience into the cinematic surround, recognized as such.
When the fat blank of the screen turns out to be the far wall of an actual diegetic
site, we are reminded that projection alone defnes the very parameters of
narrative space. Just sitting in wait, weve accepted that contract, however abrupt
its enforcement this time out.
Afer this the screen slices to black again. Te flm now seems starting over,
with its title spelled out at last, the stripped bare Amour (beref of its requisite
article in French) in immediate association with the fower-strewn body in the
forgoing shot. Next, with our own spectators nerves set on edge, we cut to an
onstage fxed-frame image of a group of spectators in a Paris theater, fdgeting
and chatting, latecomers taking their seats, then all settling down and looking
just of centerscreen right, stage leftoward the frst executed bars of a
piano recital, all except one woman, noticeably called out by her undisciplined
gaze, her roving eyes drifing away from the unseen performer to stare straight,
if ftfully, into the camera. Tis of course lets us select her for our narrative
attention: a fgure otherwise unrecognizable from her own shriveled corpse in
the preceding imagebut returned to life now for a retrospective account of her
decline. Te interdict soon piped over the theaters loudspeakerno photog-
raphy or videotaping allowedseems structurally fulflled at one narrative
remove, since this theater scene, truncated in mid performance, is over before
we in Hanekes audience ever catch a recorded glimpse, in reverse shot, of the
stage or the pianist. All we get is the 35mm flm thus begun: a flm that records
the staring woman herself with steady vigilance once she has returned with
her husband to their apartmentand that pays mounting attention to her own
unpredictable and implicating lines of sight.
Agamben is not out to evoke the feld of cinematic apparatus theorythe
space-constructing nature of the gaze via the cross-cuts and criss-crosses of
narrative suturewhen he speaks of ideological resistance as the profanation
of apparatuses. But Haneke fnds, in a motivated straining of said suture, his
own profane ethics of implicature in our identifcation with the dying woman
and her appeal to mercy and remission, her call for death. In Amour, the marital
protagonists have the same names as in Cach, Anne and Georges Laurent, but
here to fgure not the stereotype of the Bourgeois Couple so much as that of Every
Person, she or he who must die. Afer the mortuary coda (as prologue) and the
178 Cinema and Agamben
concert overture, in their reverse chronology, the plot charts the rapid arc of
Annes decline. But it does so by what can seem like an eerie internalization of
directorial technique itself. In Annes frst few symptomatic minutes of syncope
or blackout at the kitchen table, it is as if she sufers from the principle of narrative
ellipsis that Haneke so resolutely manipulates in his editorial style. Here, instead,
such temporal violence seems internalized as a medical dysfunction: a tiny
stroke and coma, a lacuna, a spell of oblivion. Te ubiquitous ingredient of
montage in the elliptical cut has penetrated into consciousness itself, as if the
technique were sufering its own subjectifcation. So it is that Anne drops away
from self-presence in real time, there under Georges stare and questioning, just
as she doescinematographically rather than physiologicallywhen the scene
changes to his hearing her turning of the faucet, down the hall and beyond the
frame, that he has inadvertently lef on in his rush to call the doctor. Tethered by
that sound bridge to the subsequent shot of him fumbling into his street clothes,
she is out of sight but not out of mindwhile, moments before, she had been out
of her own mind while still in sight. Only suture can retrieve her, as it does when
Georges rushes back to her side to ask what happened, and, as enunciated in a
bafed countershot, she doesnt understand what the what refers to. For her, it
is nothing that has happened: a jump cut in duration itself.
Afer Annes equally elliptical hospitalization and failed operation before
her wheel-chaired return, another caesura in the diurnal tedium of the flms
waiting-for-death doesnt just subtract consciousness from the actual but virtu-
alizes it in the counterfactual. Here in Amour, as with the axe-attack nightmare
in Cach, and with no sign at frst of a shif from actual to virtual time, Georges
is threatened with asphyxiation by the wife he will eventually smother to death.
Distracted by sounds in the apartment hall when he is brushing his teeth, he
wanders out in pjamas to fnd the elevator boarded up in disrepairthe oneiric
impasse of no egressand the hall fooded, the latter recalling (by plausible
dream logic) that faucet lef running early on, but also anticipating (by sheer
narrative premonition) the drenched bed of an incontinence that humiliates her
shortly aferwards. As he wades through the soaked corridor, the shock efect
of trick digital graphics shows him clutched from behindalmost a parody of
slasher gothic, the kind of horror fick this horror flm isntby a detached right
arm (Annes now paralyzed limb, symbol of her burden upon him), its hand
covering his mouth, at which point he wakes panting for breath next to her.
In Cach, as weve seen, the dream image of Majid terrorizing Georges with
a bloody weapon anticipates not Georges death but the other mans suicide. In
Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a Philosophical Cinematics 179
Amour, the nightmare trauma also comes true in reverse, with its fnal blockage
of breath at the point of no-exit. Tis happens afer the only waking (rather
than unconscious) violence of the flm: not her hand laid on him, but his on
her, when he almost involuntarily slaps her face afer she spits back at him the
water with which he has tried to hydrate her. If you dont drink this youll die.
Is that what you want? Te question is rhetorical; she has already said that life
in her condition isnt worth enduring. But in silent emphatic answer, we cut
now from his leaning at her bedside, in a kind of half-profle shot, to her all
but direct stare into the cameraher gaze as if passing through him to call on
our own intuitive recognition as well. Te suturing of the space between them,
according to the classic protocols of editing, is pried apart just far enough to
fgure the ethical disjoin he now faceswhether or not to carry the violence
of his afection one step beyond frustration to fnal lenience, when that lamour
their daughter used to hear them making in that bedroom would return with
an irreversible diference. Having later eased her toward sleep with a story of
his own childhood illness, Georges suddenly reaches for a pillow and presses
it down on her passive face: a nonerotic grappling that, in the flms true title
scene, lasts until her fnal spasms abate.
In building toward this moment of ferocity and peace, Haneke draws on the
second of his two most striking formal innovations in Te White Ribbon: not
just the bracketed fades from and to black at the opening and closing of the
plot, its disclosure of image visibility per se (Agamben) from within what it
pictures (as we saw diferently manipulated by the syncopation of black leader
in the disjunctive credits of Amour). Beyond the gapes of black, Haneke also
returns to the previous flms arrest of cinematographic sequence by narratively
unmotivated fxed frame inserts. Under the shadow of pending death in both
plots, these seized-up images intrude a syncopated medial register throwing
the surrounding image system into relief. In Te White Ribbon, indiscriminate
episodes of human cruelty are interrupted by parallel landscape shots in
diferent seasons, with these depopulated framesagainst the drive of cyclical
fruitionserving to refgure the pre-WWI narrative setting within the destiny
of these same spaces, perhaps, as eventual killing felds.
30
Equally salient and even more tactically distributed in Amour, full-frame
paintings rather than freeze frames or inset natural photographsimaginary
landscapes in the romantic mode of salon paintingmark the looming inevita-
bility of subtracted human presence. And they do so, in a parallelism like that
of Te White Ribbon, by echoing an early, clinically-paced montage of empty
180 Cinema and Agamben
rooms before Anne returns from the hospital. Tey do so, moreover, at the very
moment when the eruption of physical violence between the coupleGeorges
slapping Annes facemakes inevitable the approaching yet still unspoken, still
unspeakable, violence of suspended animation, cancelled animation, of which
the pictures so lushly but chillingly speak. Tat early montage of the apartment
as a dossier of cinematographic still lifes involves, in anticipation, fve identically
timed (six-second) shots of deserted rooms from various angles. Ordinarily the
fading, frayed wallpaper and abraded paint of the comfortable but time-worn
surfaces make them look as if they are stroked and shaded by painterly stippling
and hatch-work rather than human wear and tearas in the melancholy vacant
interiors, and receding portals, of Danish artist Willhelm Hammershoi. But
here, in our frst step-through of the apartment in crepuscular half light, the
scenes appear like tableaux mourants.
Answering to and compounding them later, then, are the six screen-
engulfng planes of painting, some landscapes with fgures, some without. But
no real human life anywhere. Only the next time we see Anne in her bed, in
a long-shot once her daughter has insisted on entering the sickroom, is the
camera angle wide enough, and the shot held long enough, to confrm that the
initial canvas in the serieswith two women in a forested pastoral landscape
is in fact hanging over her bed. And one canvas is later disclosed when, for the
frst time, we see the wall oppositeat the very moment Georges crosses in
front of the picture for his last scene with Anne: a somber clif, a tiny pair of
tiny human fgures, and birds in fight. Two more of the six eventually obtruded
paintings can, if one works at it, be made out on far walls or tucked into the
parlor bookcase. Two seem to go entirely missing from the household, at least
as the camera inventories it. And thats only if one is following its tracking shots
with obsessive care in second or third viewing, ignoring the human action
transpiring in front of these painted images. First time through, certainly, these
climactically inset paintings are markedly generic. Tey capture and displace a
middle-class aesthetic ambience, not a private catalogue. Te point isnt to locate
the paintings in the couples rooms, but to see what they orient us toward in
their regrouping, what they themselves evacuate.
Tese landscapes are pictures, now, at which no one looks, the world not just
withdrawn to its representation but removed from all human attention. Afer
Annes slap in the face by Georges, they appear as imagings own recoilas
if, in their fattened interface, they mark the point-of-no-return at which the
couple has arrived (though with no sense of their status as subjective shots;
Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a Philosophical Cinematics 181
quite the opposite). Since it is known now for certain (they seem to say in their
muteness) what must soon be done, here is its image: an image of a world
without consciousness, of space without recognition. Tese fush-ft rectangles
thus mark the dead end of screen plot in the rigor mortis of visualization itself.
Passing too fast for immersion or contemplation, long enough only to
register as composition, these images cancel the absorptive power of what
Debray calls the mimetic graphosphere. If, in his formulation of the preceding
logosphere, ancient idols hold us in the eye of the divine, and if sheer visuali-
zation in our current videosphere gives us images with no need of a situated
spectator, in the reign of realist art, by contrastpoised between the super-
natural and the virtualgraphic images install us as subjects by the sight
lines of centric vanishing points (or later, though unmentioned by Debray,
through the interplay of cinematic suture). Instead, here in Amour, painting
is desubjectivized in its contrapuntal break with the realist movement-image
harbored within cinema as a transitional art. Put otherwise, Amour has stepped
back from the foregrounded videosphere of Cach to the missing link between
classic art and screen realism, so that now the irruption of the purely graphic
(as a prescient bridge to nescience) is at once a repetition and a stoppage of
the screen image as suchan image whose situated gaze is removed here in
almost allegorical anticipation of a death ontologically potential (that is, already
present) in the planarity of scenic space itself.
No suture is attempted from here out in Hanekes flmnot afer Annes
defected appeal, past Georges gaze, into our focalized empathy. No suture
feasible, what with its standard reciprocity of the absent one in the mutual
anchoring of exchanged looks.
31
From now on, in two remaining scenes, one
before and one afer her death, Anne is only seen in two-shots with Georges;
frst fading from consciousness on her sickbed, until smothered to death there,
then posthumously materialized as if in a projection from Georges own minds
eye, yet within whose fantastic ambit he too is stationed by our frame. See it this
way: from the violence of the slapped face forward, as if edged out in transition
by those six canvases, Anne is, in regard to the living look of recognition,
already the absent one. And the space that such ocular interchange ordinarily
delimits is, as marked by those serial paintings, no longer actual in its own right
either, however real. Death stands forth as the virtualization of the world.
To this end, that sixfold cascade of paintings, swallowing up the framing
capacity of the camera, are not worlds elsewhere impinging as death draws
near. Tey are the death that is art. Eclipsing the cinematic image entirely for a
182 Cinema and Agamben
moment, in a much retarded frame-advance of sheer quick cuts, the paintings
ofer a parallel not just to the clockwork editing of the empty rooms earlier but
to the personal photographs that Anne has insisted on perusing at one point.
Tose secondary images taken from the life, however, are also reframed for
us by her POV. Farther into her decline, the artifcial landscapes are, instead,
pictures at which no one looks. In their sudden serial punctuation of the flms
dwath drive, their rapid interchange, their very exchangeability, stands not for
some private collection stripped from its dying owner, nor as an image of her
own relics surviving her. Nor are these vistas installed as otherworlds to be
fed to, escapist fantasies, representations of some viable counterspace. Teir
montage, as noted, seems merely to comment on the planar image as such, from
oil to photo emulsion, canvas to print or projected imprintthe image as itself
a metaphor for lifelessness, the world fnalized in its similitude.
As it happens, Agambens essay on Debord mentions paintings as images
lifed from an always unseen (but ever potential) sequence: stills from a flm
that is missing.
32
But the virtual space of these paintings in Amour seems rather
the opposite: constructs of a space beyond time, actionless and unflmable,
Deleuzian time-images only in the mode of arrest rather than alteritythe
virtual as the eviscerated. Further, in Debrays terms, these picturings have
been backed out of the graphospheres constructed gaze to a proleptic irony
of the desubjectivized image under the regime of the sheerly medial: pictures
of a world receded so far into sheer virtuality as to have lef refection itself
behind. Varying the terms of art historian T. J. Clarks great work on the ethical
equipoise of Poussins art in the treatment of mortal fear, what we have here is
not the sight of death so much as the death of sight.
33
Nonetheless, Hanekes decision to interrupt the mostly unappeased rigors of
his realist camerawork, not just with the subjective wrench of nightmare, but
with the rank artifce of painting, has a way (to put it again in Agambens terms)
of making imaging visible in what it images. In so doing, this otherwise jarring
efect prepares us for the fnal counterfactual episode in a flm elegiac right from
the start, retroactive, already fated. What we see in the end, as the end, is the
wish-fulfllment image of Georges own release, perhaps. For afer the surviving
spouse has sealed up the scene of his crime damour with duct tape to contain
the odor and keep Annes body near him for as long as possible, there is another
audial rhyme with the narratives frst point of crisis. Once, so long ago now, he
knew she had come out of her momentary trance when he hears the water in
the sink suddenly silenced. Te comatose moment has snapped; Anne is back
Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a Philosophical Cinematics 183
in action. Now, in compensation for the irreversible loss his wanted violence has
sped along, he imagines her domestic presence again from the turning on of the
same ofscreen faucet.
We have been somewhat prepared, though not quite, for such a consuming
subjective vantage on his part. Once before, long afer Anne has become a
bedridden invalid, we have seen her earlier self playing the grand piano in
their parlor. Cut to Georgesacross time and the same roomturning the
recorded music of, leaving us unclear about whether he was summoning her
image, in the mode of illusion, or just remembering her. In that later and fnal
hallucination, however, the mirage is certifed as actively his own, rather than
the narratives alone. Just as she was virtually there at the keyboard, next door
to her bedridden self, so also is she virtually there afer her death. And this time
he recognizes the apparition with full astonishment. Afer the sound cue from
the kitchen sink, Georges drags himself up from his lone bed and limps into the
kitchen with a stunned look, taking his place within a shot that foregrounds his
wife, not dead, just almost donewashing the last of the dishes before joining
him in getting on their coats and street shoes for departure, in the same hallway
where we had seen them return from the concert at the start. Coming full circle,
this answering shot has opened both a closural loophole and a void.
Te counterfactual is the virtual, not the supernatural. For what marks this
vision of the dead as a mental projection rather than an advent of reparative
magican uncanny mitigation rather than a ghostis the fact that the deep-
focus closeup of Anne, with Georges astonished fgure in the background, is
in fact only deeply, not closely, focused. In its forward feld, her face and raised
uncrippled arm appear just slightly out of registration: hazed as if by projected
desire, estranged by its own optic as if to confess it as just a mental represen-
tation with no rounded body actually there, merely an image as such, hence a
fgment. Its the only such sof-focus shot I can remember in all the clinically
crisp cinematography of Hanekes work. It is not, in short, of the same world
as the rest of the flm. As she moves away and into normal focus in the middle
distance and they leave together, there is no reason to take this impossible
episode as either his death-moment fantasy or a posthumous mirage of reunion.
It is just what it is: an image of a separation not entirely fnal. If it raises the
question Does he die? there is only one answer: of course he does.
And afer this enigmatic exit route from his bereaved solitude (Gone to
his rapid death, like so many widowers? Gone to the authorities and under
questioning for manslaughter? Wandered of in confusion? Taken his own
184 Cinema and Agamben
life as well? Forced simply to leave behind a space no longer tolerable when
unshared?), there is only the daughters return to the empty apartmentat
some indeterminate time later, doubly orphaned by now perhaps, certainly
beref, and met there by the same quick-cut shunt between deserted rooms
that has replaced an ofscreen sequence of failed medical intervention with
sheer proleptic emptiness early on. Before Haneke cuts again to black and thus,
answering to the inaugural break-in, robs the apartment of all ambient light,
the daughter is caught seated in a framed recess, a depleted Vermeer, staring
lef toward the windows, unseen now, through which she had previously and
repeatedly looked away from her fathers pain and anger. She has returned,
that is, to the emptied pictorial space of that post-hospital montage, to rooms
already denuded of life. And this last image of a fxed-frame painterly space
succeeds not to actual painted rectangles this time but back to the rectangular
black screen from which plot executed its initial forced entry.
For a long moment, though, her afectless stasis within all this visible absence
gives us some frst reaction time for our own making sense of the preceding
scene. It may well be that Georges leaving with the specter of his mercifully slain
wife performs, by refguring, what must in one sense be true: its being over for
him, too, with her going. Exeunt. Afer the daughters return to the apartment,
the fnal cut to black is now later in time than the one which propelled us across
the title into the opening concert: ofering now the kind of absolute closure
that retrieves (in the form of the same-but-diferent) the no-longer possible of
a past which, as fashback, was once returned to us saturated by its own bleak
potential.
Any idea of remorse, rather than mourning, is excluded early on. About her
illness itself at its onset, rather than her end at his hands, Anne suggests, with
no context or preparation, that he shouldnt feel guiltyand he insists that he
doesnt; and, as far as the flm is concerned, wont. Guilt festered by passive
suppression in Cach, guilt exceeded and erased by necessary action in Amour:
repetition with a diference. Whereas at a narrative scalein the stoppage of
closure impacted in both cases by repetition and its returnsthe one flm
leaves Georges locked in the purgatorial virtuality of potential pasts and/or
potential futures, the other alleviates a diferent Georges as well as a diferent
temporalityboth by virtual fgment and by black-outso as to spare him the
limbo of the unfnished.
In considering that inaugural blackness cracked open to image in Amour,
including the blank to which the planar space soon succeeds (releasing the
Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a Philosophical Cinematics 185
delayed title), and this only before raising an unseen curtain on the fashback
theater scene, one recalls not only Agambens citing of Debord on cinema in its
reduction to the antimony of black versus white screens, but also Deleuze on the
power of thought in the negated image, where blackness is one of the moments
when cinema becomes philosophical in default of the optical.
34
Neither Debord
nor Agamben is referring, of course, any more than is Deleuze, to the black
bar between the backlit photograms spooling by the projector lamp, nor to the
ficker efect that results. None takes this on, nor sees it pertinently taken up
into the modular energies of montage itself. Agamben, in particular, evokes
instead a binary alternaton between, in a fgurative more than technical sense, a
total blanching overload of projected images or their total pitch-black absence,
quoting as example the opening of a Debord flm: I have shown that the cinema
can be reduced to this white screen, then this black screen.
35
For Agamben,
speaking rather loosely though he is, this represents precisely his own mantra
of repetition and stoppage.
36
In saying as much, he assumes Debord to mean
the alternate poles of maximized light (all images iterated at once, the sheer
image of imaging even in the eclipse thereof) versus its cancellation; or, in other
words, the ground where the images are so present that they can no longer be
seen, and the void where there is no image.
37
But there are more alternations,
other polarities of a diferent scale, that barely seem dreamt ofand certainly
not consciously formulatedin Agambens philosophy.
Attention has, in all this, drifed very far from celluloid materiality itself
from flmic medialitywhen simply taken up within a Situationist call to stop
the whole commerce in images: experimental cinema operating as its own
scourge of passive vision. With its caesurae a matter of rupture and resistance,
cinema is valorized in that narrow sense, in Agambens view of Debord, mainly
as a machine for bringing to active light the essential unreality at the back of all
crass image. Attending to a productive friction between image generation and
its narrative depictions, however, Deleuze is getting closer to the underlay of
flmic process when he imagines absence per se (black leader) as a node of, or
at least prompt to, philosophical deliberation. Haneke tooespecially when he
shows how, via the absence of the transitional cut itself, mere pictures in a row
dont a gesture, dont a motion, dont a movie, make. Certainly repetition and
stoppage take on their due narrative weight in Amourcapped by fxed-frame
stasis and the plunge to blackassuming their full charge as fgures for (not
pictures of) the double evacuation, diegetic and narrative both, that they so
implacably clock.
186 Cinema and Agamben
No current narrative flmmaker gravitates as demandingly as Haneke to
cinema as a prolonged hesitation between image and meaning.
38
He achieves
in the process one version of Agambens resistant image, the image that refuses
disappearing into what it makes visible.
39
Perhaps nowhere more powerfully
in recent cinema has the full panoply of the virtual image, in particular, been
plumbed to such a depth. In the case of Amour, the pressure this exerts turns
an entire flm, its own ellipses and syncopes included, its own motor paralyzes,
to one encompassing trope. Recalling the ontological premise in Agambens
On Potential, to the efect that being can only be apprehended as harboring
the possibility not-to-be, Hanekes Amour materializes its own images as a
cumulative passing into the having-been.
40
Where narrative cinema is ordinarily the very picture of virtual life, a
becoming-again of recorded duration as time present, Haneke probes instead
to its more unnerving potential: the potential for an absolute absence to
be made manifest, made present, within the screen rectangle. Somewhere
between the imminent and the immanentas marked, for instance, by those
frame-swallowing landscapesthe inevitable, the fatal, if we may phrase it
in Agambens own mode of paradox, arrives in wait. Call it the paradox of a
subjectivity removed in full view. Te whole pattern of Hanekes montage points
in this direction, and hence in on itself. In the flms intricate and overlapping
play between the counterfactual and the virtual, the illusory and the pictorial,
the photographic and the painterly, the static or empty image and the cancelled
one, death makes its unmistakable appearance in plane sight.
Notes
1 I am bringing into comparison here Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: Te TimeImage,
trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1989), with two essays in particular by Agamben, frst Diference and
Repetition: On Guy Debords Films (1995), in Guy Debord and the Situationist
International: Texts and Documents (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 31319,
and then the earlier Notes on Gesture (1992), in Agamben, Infancy and History:
On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso 2007),14956.
Agamben also closes Profanations (Brooklyn, NY: Zone, 2007), trans. Jef
Fort, with a two-page chapter, 934, on a moment of screen-slashing heroic
misrecognition by Don Quixote in Orson Welles Te Chimes at Midnight, which,
Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a Philosophical Cinematics 187
though unremarked in this sense, might entail a literalizing in-joke on cutting
(caesura or larrt) as the frequent means of rescue in cinematic crisis. Some of
the material from the essay on Debord, in precisely its emphasis on la rptition
et larrt, appears elsewhere, in the same year, in a short piece for Le Monde
entitled Face au cinma et lHistoire, propos de Jean-Luc Godard, October 16,
1995.
2 Giorgio Agamben, Diference and Repetition: On Guy Debords Films, trans.
Brian Holmes, in Guy Debord and the Situationist International, ed. Tom
McDonough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 315, 31617.
3 Tis lone (and highly dubious) demurral from Bergsons clarity about flm
as a photographic motorization is discussed in my Between Film and Screen:
Modernisms Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 869. I
return to the question, via the work of Mary Ann Doane, in Framed Time: Toward
a Postflmic Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 1314.
4 See above, Between Film and Screen, esp. Ch. 7, Modernism and the Flicker
Efect, 265324.
5 Agamben, Diference, 316.
6 As I will be distilling it, the core of Agambens argument appears under the title
On Potentiality, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 17784.
7 On the literary side of the issue, see especially Te End of the Poem: Studies in
Poetics, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
8 In Gestural Cinema?: Giorgio Agamben on Film, FilmPhilosophy Vol. 8, No. 22
(July 2004), 111, Benjamin Noys ofers a summarizing overview of Agambens two
flm essays.
9 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: Te Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
10 Walter Benjamin, A Short History of Photography, in Classic Essays on Photography,
ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leetes Island Books, 1980), 203.
11 I investigate Benjamins optical unconscious, along with Rosalind Krausss
borrowing of his phrase for the titleand sponsoring logicof her book on the
modernist image, in Between Film and Screen, 11115.
12 On the classic estrangement device of the freeze frame, see Ch. 3, Frames of
Reference, Between Film and Screen, 11750.
13 Tis axiomatic sense of the virtual as being opposed to the actual, but not to the
real, is developed by Deleuze in Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1991), 968, and recurs to explain facets of the
crystal image throughout his second cinema volume.
14 Agamben, Diference, 316.
188 Cinema and Agamben
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Te distinction between primary and secondary in this case is derived from
that of Christian Metz in Identifcation with the Camera, Te Imaginary Signifer,
trans. Celia Britton, Annywl Williams (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1982), 4952.
19 Ibid., 318.
20 See Rgis Debray, Te Tree Ages of Looking, trans. Eric Rauth, Critical Inquiry
21 (Spring 1995), esp. 532, 550. Te tripartite division being also rephrasedwith
particular relevance for a Deleuzian approachas the supernatural, the natural,
and the virtual, 538 (Emphasis in the original).
21 Ibid., 536.
22 Ibid., 551.
23 Ibid.
24 See Ch. 6 in Deleuzes Cinema 2: Te TimeImage, Te Powers of the False, where
in passing from a kinetic regime to a chronic regime (126), one reaches a point
where the virtual, for its part, detaches itself from its actualizations, starts to be
valid for itself (127), and where the real and the imaginary [] chase each other,
exchange their roles and become indiscernible (127).
25 My emphasis in thinking about the indiscernibility of this frame structure is
thus based on the Deleuzian virtual in regard to the elapsed narrative function
(in the vocabulary of his flm books) rather than on the becominganimal of its
ambiguous diegesis. Te latter is, of course, a main theme of Deleuzes collaborative
work with Felix Guattari and is given primary stress in an article on the novel Te
Life of Pi that doesnt enlist Deleuzian terms to address the retroactive equivocation
of the main narrative. See Eva Aldea, Yann Martels Life of Pi (2002): Becoming
NonHuman at Sea, in her Magical Realism and Deleuze: Te Indiscernibility of
Diference in Postcolonial Literature (London: Continuum, 2011), 7886. It is worth
noting here that the novel involves only the investigative interview frame, not the
encircling conversation with the fction writer eager to syphon of its narrative
energy.
26 Contributing to the Deleuzian indiscernibility of the video inserts is the fact that
Haneke departed from his typical 35 mm practice to flm the whole narrative in
high-defnition video, thus shrinking the gap between our flm and the mysterious
videotapes embedded by and ofen coterminous with it.
27 Agamben, Diference, 319.
28 On the diference between frst- and second-degree alignments, with narrative
and character respectively, see Christian Metz, Identifcation with the Camera,
Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a Philosophical Cinematics 189
Te Imaginary Signifer, trans. Celia Britton, Annywl Williams (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1982), 4952.
29 Giorgio Agamben, What Is An Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik
and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 24, where
this profanation, this restitution to common use, must operate in the face of
acknowledged odds: While a new European norm imposes biometric apparatuses
on all its citizens by developing and perfecting anthropometric technologies
invented in the nineteenth century in order to identify recidivist criminals (from
mug shots to fngerprinting), surveillance by means of video cameras transforms
the public space of the city into the interior of an immense prison (23).
30 See my discussion of these ocular arrests in Prewar Trauma: Hanekes Te White
Ribbon, Film Quarterly 63.4 (Summer 2010), 407. Brought forward at such
moments are serene pastoral images that hold within them, we may say, the terrible
possibility of being otherwise.
31 On the interchange of absent looking across the sightlines of the shot/countershot
pattern see the classic position paper by Jean-Pierre Oudart, Cinema and Suture,
Te Symptom: Online Journal for Lacan. Com; http://www.lacan.com/symptom8_
articles/oudart8.html [unpaginated, accessed August 26, 2013] Tis text was
published in French in Cahiers du Cinma 211 and 212, April and May 1969, its
English version (trans. Kari Hanet) appearing almost a decade later in Screen 18,
Winter 1978.
32 Agamben, Diference, 314.
33 I allude to T. J. Clark, Te Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).
34 According to Deleuze, in his unacknowledged updating of Hugo Mnsterbergs
mentalist thesis about cinema, the overt edit and the marked bridgewhen
detached from the rational montage of a sheer sensory-motor continuumare,
along with the wholly blank screen, the three indices of cinema as thought. It is
thus the point-cut, relinkage and the black or white screen that, comprising the
three purely cerebral components of cinema, form together a whole noosphere.
See Deleuze, Cinema 2: Te Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 215.
35 Agamben, Diference, 317.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid., 318.
40 Given the determination by negative potential of an entire narrative arc, perhaps
the fullest example of Agambens thinkingby which the enacted possibility of not
190 Cinema and Agamben
being, not acting, must be asserted as primary to any idea of doing or becoming
appears in Bartleby, or on Contingency, the closing chapter of Potentialities:
Collected Essays on Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1999), 24374.
9
Montage and the Dark Margin of the Archive
Trond Lundemo
Te witness
Te testimony, and its forensic value in juridical processes as well as its validity
in historiography, depends on its human agent, the witness, and his or her
personal memories of an event in history. Tese memories must be of an event
experienced frst-hand, and not through the most common means for the
constitution of memories, a medium. No testimony can lay claim on the truth of
an event by saying that it was seen on TV or heard on the radio. Te testimony
is instead the material transmitted by flm, TV, books and radio to those who
were not physically present at an event, the non-witnesses. Te testimony thus
functions to distinguish the human witness from technology, the raw and
unmediated experience from the one mediated. In testimony, only human
memory conveys accountability, refection and reason, while technical forms
of memory are understood as static and sterile, only as a form of mechanical
registration without cognition.
Tis dichotomy is widespread in philosophy and replayed in many forms,
from Hegels distinction between static Gedchtnis and dynamic Erninnerung
to the Turing test and issues of Artifcial Intelligence in the computer age.
Te privilege accorded to the human witness over technical mediation could
be traced back through Western culture to the image interdictions of the Old
Testament, at least. Moreover, the issue at stake is the integrity of the human
subject, the in-dividual, that today more than ever requires a separation from
its technical surroundings to be understood in its pure form. If human memory
were subject to mediations, the mediumthe in-betweenwould potentially
corrupt the purity of human experience and memory as it always conveys
selections, noise and limitations of range and temporal duration. Tis position
192 Cinema and Agamben
resembles that of early discourses on cinema as an art form, where any medium
too close to mechanical inscription was excluded from the system of the arts
because it limited, or sometimes was believed to exclude, human agency.
However, as we have learned in very diferent ways from Michel Foucault,
Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Kittler, language is a technology, too. Statements
are made within a system defning what can be said at a certain time, the
techniques of alphabetization and the writing tools are taking part in our
thinking
1
(Nietzsche), and there is always a technical supplement to thinking
and remembering. In theory, this is hardly controversial, but language still
persists as a more im-mediate, transparent and human medium of expression
in culture. Te testimony is qualifed by the very medium that constitutes
the integrity of the witness, as language is commonly received as the primary
medium of memory and expression. From the religious confession to the talking
cure of psychoanalysis and the witness reports of news media, the spoken word
is invested with an authenticity and immediacy that relegates sound recordings
and photography to a secondary status in the description of an event. In very
general terms, in Western culture truth is invested in the word. Te reason for
this is that subjective experience is associated with language, and its function of
saying I. Tis function cannot be distinguished in other media.
Te aporetic point of this question of the role of human memory and
agency in its relation to technology is the Shoah, where the debate on the
role of the testimony versus mechanical inscription and storage keeps stirring
controversies today. Te quintessential witness remains the witness to the mass
exterminations at the camps of the Tird Reich. Te unique position of this
event for the role of the testimony is of course due to the atrocity of the industri-
alization of death, making it a defning moment for European culture as well as
for the question of what a human is. It is also a moment when one asks what art
is, as Adornos famous question of the possibility of art afer Auschwitz shows.
Another reason for the unique position of the Shoah for the testimony is its
media set-up. Tere were no photographs or flms of the extermination camps
transmitted to a wider public during their operation, and even the footage of the
Musulmen and the mass graves shot at the time of the liberation of the camps
was kept from wider distribution until the mid1950s and Alain Resnais Nuit
et brouillard (1955). Tis quasi-invisibility of the camps has contributed to
making it the topos where the question of the role of the testimony in relation
to the function of archival images has been posed most acutely. Te unique
position of the testimony of the extermination camps sets the conditions for
Montage and the Dark Margin of the Archive 193
the testimony of almost any other event, and with it, the confguration between
human and non-human memory, between recollection and the archive. Te role
of the witness of the Shoah defnes the standards for human memorial agency
contrasted with technical agency.
In Remnants of Auschwitz: Te Witness and the Archive, Giorgio Agamben
analyzes the conditions of the testimony and the position of the witness of
the Shoah.
2
Tis is the point of the debate where Agamben intervenes with
an analysis of the testimony as incomplete, something producing a remnant,
which cannot be included in the integrity of the witness. Te true witness is
the one who cannot testify, the one who didnt survive to tell about his experi-
ences. In this sense, the testimony contains a lacuna. Agamben quotes Primo
Levi, the witness who has perhaps most insistently refected upon his own role
in this position: Tere is another lacuna in every testimony: witnesses are by
defnition survivors and so all, to some degree, enjoyed a privilege. [] No one
has told the destiny of the common prisoner, since it was not materially possible
for him to survive. [] We speak in their stead, by proxy.
3
Tis leaves the
position of the testimony as a remnant, and the only true witness of the Shoah
is the one who cannot testify, because the experience of Auschwitz is death itself.
Te integral witness is the one who has experienced the threshold between life
and death, the one who has lef human life, and who consequently is unable
to testify as a human. Te witness cannot simply testify in anothers place, by
delegation, because he testifes to a missing testimony. Whoever assumes the
charge of bearing witness in their name [the Musulmen, the dead] knows that he
or she must bear witness in the name of the impossibility of bearing witness.
4
Tis paradox instigates a lacuna within the position of the witness itself, and
which in the end is a division between the human and the non-human, the
living and the dead. Te lacuna of the testimony is fnally also a remnant of the
subject itself.
5
Agambens intervention approaches the testimony in discursive terms. If the
subjectivity of the witness is constructed and maintained by language, this is
also where the unity and integrity of the subject is undermined in Agambens
philosophy. Te I of the statement of the witness is a pure function of
language, and not the representation of a substance in the world.
6
Departing
from Foucaults theory of the archive, Agamben defnes the archive as the mass
of the non-semantic inscribed in every meaningful discourse as a function of
its enunciation, it is the dark margin encircling and limiting every concrete act
of speech.
7
Foucault identifed the role of discursive and technical conditions
194 Cinema and Agamben
for what is sayable and imaginable, in short doable, at a certain time in history.
Tese conditions also distribute the sensible in Jacques Rancires sense, by
defning who has a voice and who is visible, as opposed to those who remain
silent and invisible.
8
Agamben draws on Foucaults thinking from the outside
(pense du dehors) when he analyzes the possibility of the testimony of an
original event.
9
Te testimony is neither produced by the transcendental interi-
ority of a witnessing subject nor within a pre-established language system, but
by the taking place of language through statements, the outside of language. It
is a result of the system of relations between what is said and what is unsayable,
possible and impossible, in any statement. Te testimony is formed between the
inside and the outside of language.
10
Te dark margin encircling every testimony doesnt render it null and void,
a position that would border on revisionism. On the contrary, besides deriving
the idea of a lacuna in the role of the testimony from Levis writings, Agamben
also devotes the fnal passages of his book to quotes from testimonies of people
who have actually experienced this threshold between life and death, from
surviving Musulmen, who are potentially integral witnesses.
11
Most impor-
tantly, Agamben strongly criticizes the tendency to refer to the Shoah as the
unutterable, that of which one cannot speak because it would always confate
the horrors of the camps, and aligns this position with that of the architects of
the exterminations themselves, who claimed that no one would be able to bring
testimony about the camps.
12
Rather than advocating the negative theology
of silence and invisibility, Agamben challenges the distinction between the
human experience from the inside versus from the outside, and shows that the
testimony opens up an aporetic question concerning the integrity of the human
subject as a witness, in short of processes of subjectivization themselves.
Agamben thus undermines the stable identity of the testifying subject
accounting for frst-hand experiences by analyzing the functions of language
regulating signifying practices and functions. He shows that language is not
a neutral technology conveying subjective experience, and consequently
challenges the primacy of verbal and written testimony. Tis prompts the basic
question if still and moving photographic images can serve as testimonies in
the same way as language. However, such a question risks reintroducing the
absolute and stable notion of the subject that Agamben questions. Te photog-
rapher or the flmmaker would then take the position of the integral witness
who has captured the truth of an event at the right time and place. Even if
flm and art theory has been only too ready to incorporate such concepts of
Montage and the Dark Margin of the Archive 195
authenticity and authorial control, in auteur theory for instance, the techno-
logical determinations of the medium have always prohibited the idea of flm
and photography as neutral expressions of human experience. Already the
short history of the media, and the many historical shifs in technology, as the
ones from black and white to color, from silent to sound in cinema, from two
to three dimensions and of course from analog to digital, discards the idea of a
neutral channel of communication. Even if the myth of total cinema
13
(Bazin),
and later computer interfaces as post-symbolic communication
14
(Lanier),
have been pervasive ideas supporting the inception and popular dissemination
of the media, technical recordings of sound and image have never challenged
the primacy of language as the medium of the witness. Tese recordings may
have strong forensic value, and flm was notably given this role in connection
with the Shoah in the Nuremburg trials, but they do not convey the prescribed
subjectivity of the testimony.
Our question should for this reason be more modest, and ask if there is a dark
margin to flm and photography, and if so, how it is constituted. If Agambens
concept of the archive, just as Foucaults theoretical concept on which he builds
his argument, is in this case limited to speech and texts, how would it function
for the photographic media? How does Agambens paradox of the witness relate
to other technologies? Can the image convey the lacuna of the testimony, the
very same lacuna connected to the signature and the author that has forever
prohibited flms position as a witness? Tese questions may probe the media
specifcity of the testimony and its role in the archive. Te dark margin of the
archive could be seen as a potential for resistance against the mnemotechnics
around us. People think and remember according to the governing dispositifs
at any time and context, but if every archive has a dark margin, an alternative to
the archival memory techniques could be derived from there.
15
I will not devote attention to Agambens discussion of the camp as a biopo-
litical regime, spilling into other venues and connecting to the permanent state
of exception of contemporary society. Neither will I address the concepts of bios
and zo informing the Homo Sacer works, of which Remnants of Auschwitz is
part. Rather, the dark margin of the archive, regulating what can be said, and
by extension, seen and heard, at a given time, is a fruitful concept for addressing
the role of the archival image for the understanding of the Shoah. As shown by
Harun Farocki in Bilder der Welt und Inschrif des Krieges (1987), the images of
the camps drawn by the hand of the prisoner Alfred Kantor may border on the
testimony because they are traces of the human, and thus seem to convey the
196 Cinema and Agamben
refection and understanding of the events by a human agent. Images produced
by the technical media of flm and photography do not seem to convey subjec-
tivity, however. So what is the use in looking for a lacuna in the witnessing
subject in media allegedly devoid of subjectivity? Te issue in the case of flm
and photography is no longer to deconstruct the subject behind the image,
but to address the concept of the historical understanding of an event through
images. Te epistemological dimensions of flm and photography are ofen
connected to questions of montage.
Te image
Agambens discursive focus on the testimony and the witness stands in contrast
to the remnants of Auschwitz according to Georges Didi-Huberman.
16
In
Limage malgr tout and in other texts, he argues against an interdiction of
the archival image of the Shoah.
17
Summing up a long debate centered around
flms like Nuit et brouillard and Shoah (Claude Lanzmann 1985) as well as an
exhibition curated by Didi-Huberman, Mmoire des camps (2001), he argues
that the archival images of the camps can add to, rather than detract from, the
understanding of the events. Didi-Huberman refutes the principle that only
the written or oral testimony can account for a comprehensive understanding
of the Shoah. Te testimony is in this perspective contrasted by the archival
image, which is traditionally seen as devoid of epistemological qualities and
only detracts attention from the essence of the experience of the Shoah. As
Didi-Huberman points out, much of this opposition stems from the critique
of the archival image for not rendering all of the event. While the testimony
incorporates a human subjects refection and memory, the image is only seen
as a section of space and time, a static representation of a fragment of the
Shoah. Tis is the background against which Didi-Huberman evokes Agambens
criticism of the notion of the unsayable of the Shoah.
18
However, if he argues
that the idea of Auschwitz as unsayable is aligned with the position of the
perpetrators, Agamben seems to accept that it is invisible.
19
Didi-Huberman
instead argues that photographic images must be seen as testimonies:
We must do with the image, with theoretical rigor, what we already have done
with language, which is easier (Foucault has helped us). Because in every testi-
monial production, in every act of memory, the two language and image are
Montage and the Dark Margin of the Archive 197
absolutely solidary, always exchanging their reciprocal lacunas: an image ofen
comes where a word seems to be missing, a word ofen comes where imagi-
nation fails. Te truth of Auschwitz, if the expression makes any sense, is
neither more nor less unimaginable than it is unsayable.
20
Didi-Hubermans discussion centers around four photographs from the crema-
torium IV in Auschwitz, taken by members of the Sonderkommando of the camp
in August 1944. Te Polish resistance movement had succeeded in smuggling in
a camera with some flm in it, which a few members of the Sonderkommando
were able to use for taking photographs of their task, clearing out the gas
chambers and throwing the bodies in mass graves. Te four surviving photos,
taken from inside the crematorium depicting the incineration of the bodies on
the outside as well as the arrival of a new group of victims, were smuggled out of
the camp in a tube of toothpaste. Didi-Huberman argues that these images add
to our historical knowledge of the atrocities of the Shoah, and that they deserve
to be read as testimonies on a par with oral and written ones. Even if the
photographer is unknown (only his forename Alex is rendered) Didi-Huberman
takes care to narrate the situation in which the photos were taken through a
description of the movements of the photographer based on the four photos and
the duration of the undertaking.
21
Tis way Didi-Huberman invests these photos
with a human agent behind them in order to make them pass as a testimony.
Didi-Huberman proceeds to show that any testimony is necessarily
fragmented, a section of the event. Te photos are reproduced together with
the written instructions for their development and where they were taken. Te
photos are thus further validated as testimonials through their investment in
the handwritten message. Te connections made not only between the photos
in time through a reconstructed trajectory of movement, but also through their
embedment in writing, are typical of the process of construction of historical
knowledge, Didi-Huberman claims. In order to construct an understanding
of an event, one needs to make a montage. A montage in this epistemological
sense includes all media of the archive, going from the written testimony to the
image and to other accounts and documents. It is in the juxtaposition between
statements, between images, and between words and images one can show more
than what is said or seen. Tese connections and intersections have always been
at the center of attention of montage in flm theory and practice.
Why does the image only detract from understanding, and why would
many voices of the debate see any existing image of the Shoah as harmful? In
198 Cinema and Agamben
his discussion of this question, Didi-Huberman returns to the debate encir-
cling Lanzmanns Shoah, and the flms abstention from the use of any archival
images. Lanzmann sides with the view of the oral testimony as the exclusive
entrance to the understanding of the Shoah, and sees his flm as the ultimate
work on the event as it only contains the accounts of witnesses of the camps.
Of course, in his embracement of the monotheistic principle of the word as
the only gateway to knowledge, Lanzmann seems to forget that his flm still
consists of images, and at its duration of almost ten hours at twenty-four frames
a second, an excessive number of them (more than 800,000). Lanzmann is not
only interviewing witnesses, he also records their gestures as they speak and
revisit the places of the Shoah. His refusal of the visual concerns only archival
images, and he claims that if he had discovered a flm depicting the activities
of the extermination camps, he would have burned it. He also refused to
have his flm shown at a cinema screening it together with Nuit et brouillard,
because Resnais flm included archival images from the extermination camps.
Interestingly, this also conveys a refusal of the flms commentary written by
the camp survivor Jean Cayrol. According to this view, the image doesnt only
detract from the understanding of an event, it also seems to corrupt the word
of the testimony.
Didi-Huberman is right to point out that montage is the core of the matter.
Lanzmanns Shoah relies on the juxtapositions of images of landscapes at the
sites of the exterminations and witnesses testimonies, just as Cayrols voice-
over in Nuit et brouillard enters into a relationship with the places flmed
in 1955 and with the archival footage from the camps. Yet the position of
Lanzmann only develops the role of the single image or shot when any flm
is a work of montage. Tere are, however, multiple methods of montage.
Didi-Hubermans concept of montage is a very general one, where the histo-
rians navigation between documents in archival research is aligned with the
continuity established between the four photographs from crematorium IV
in Auschwitz. Tis analogy is further strained when he draws on Jean-Luc
Godards epistemology of montage as it is presented in his Histoire(s) du cinma
(198898).
22
While the archival image alone constitutes a document of historical
knowledge in Didi-Hubermans discussion, even if it is always forming a part of
this knowledge through juxtaposition and connections, for Godard the single
image, still or moving, is not yet history.
Montage and the Dark Margin of the Archive 199
Montage and history
Godard has recurrently given an example of the contrast between the historical
document and history as montage. Cinemas historical ethical bankruptcy
consisted in failing at its hour of truth: the Shoah.
23
Tere was no image of the
atrocities of the extermination camps at the time of the Second World War,
because there was no montage making them visible. Tis contrasts the shot as a
document of the past with cinema as history, because there were many shots of
the mass graves and the Musulmen of the camps afer the liberation, and Godard
knows this well as he employs them frequently in Histoire(s) du cinma, as well
as in Notre Musique (2005) and De lorigine du XXIe sicle (2006). In Godards
concept of montage, there is always a moment in history, a rupture in time,
at the center. Tis moment is a caesura eluding visibility, like the example of
the Shoah, and needs to be worked out through montage. Montage is for this
reason a dimension cinema never fully attained, at least not at the right time,
and remains a potential that it never reached, a blocked caterpiller that never
turns into a butterfy.
24
Tis unrealized potential of montage is connected to the
major trope of the end of cinema, which is also the end of the arts, in Godards
concept of history. History requires the right montage at the right time, and
cinema has not always been able to provide it. Tis idea indicates that Godard
is concerned with a very specifc concept of montage and history beyond the
photographic document or the pieces of a puzzle.
Te principle of this visual description is presented at the opening of part
2a, Seule le cinma of Histoire(s) du cinma: To make a precise description
of that which has not taken place is the work of the historian. (Faire une
dscription prcise de ce qui na eu lieu est le travail de lhistorien.) It would be
a misunderstanding to interpret this quote as a statement saying that historians
should devote themselves to fction, and with Godards prime example of the
Shoah in mind, it would potentially lead to revisionism. Godard treats history
as an afrmative force, even when it is not produced in an absolute and eternal
way. Cinema is even endowed with specifc properties for producing the past
through its access to montage and projections. Te emphasis in the quote above
should rather be on the lieu, the place. Te point of rupture in history has not
taken place in the sense that it has not been captured visually, or taken place
as an image, so it needs to be described through other visual techniques. Tis
moment can only be elaborated as a montage confguration that is necessarily
in movement, ephemerous and transient. Didi-Huberman is well aware of this
200 Cinema and Agamben
concept of montage in Godards work, subscribing to the principle that what
isnt seen must be shown, but his reading of the photos from the Auschwitz
crematorium as testimonies undermines the specifcity of the principle of
montage. Didi-Huberman relies on Godard to argue that archival images form
montages, showing what cannot be seen. But this task requires more than just
the random navigation between documents in the archive, or between links on
the Internet. A montage, in its epistemological sense, is something rare.
Te dispositifs of cinema, because there are clearly multiple ones, are
epistemic tools for producing the past. Trough its capacity for montage,
cinema may work out the blind spots of historyits points of rupturevisually.
Tese ruptures are not emphasized as the causes of later developments, as in a
traditional historical narrative, but rather constitute the points of interrogation
themselves in Godards work. Tey are not immediately visible, but need to
be excavated through the right form of juxtapositions and superimpositions,
in short through montage. Tis is the sense in which Godard understands
montage as a historiographical means, which far exceeds the simple analogies
or causal chains of events dominating historical enunciations in most texts and
flms. Te historical point of rupture is neither the generator nor explanation for
a development. Agamben identifes very well how Godards montage serves to
work out these ruptures through repetitions and stops:
Apparently, the images Godard shows us are images of images extracted from
other flms. But they acquire the capacity to show themselves qua images. Tey
are no longer images of something about which one must immediately recount
a meaning, narrative or otherwise. Tey exhibit themselves as images. Te true
messianic power is this power to give the image to this imagelessness, which,
as Benjamin said, is the refuge of every image.
25
By subjecting the image to the invisible that encircles it, montage creates a
form that thinks, as Godard claims in Chapter 3A: La Monnaie de labsolu
of Historie(s) du cinma. Godards political project is to make these moments
of rupture visible, to provide them with a countershot. Only in the intervals
between images, in their juxtaposition, does history become visible. Godards
famous iconophilia, criticized by Jacques Rancire and defended by Georges
Didi-Huberman, among many others, depends on making visible what has only
been verbally described or narrated.
26
His use of an excerpt from Lanzmanns
Shoah is perhaps indicative of the technique, as well as of the strongly visual
impact of the almost ten-hour flm. An old witness to the passage of the
Montage and the Dark Margin of the Archive 201
deportation trains reenacts the gesture of passing the hand over the throat used
by him and his neighbors to comment on the prisoners imminent death. Tis
shot is arguably the most quoted and remembered shot of Shoah, making it a
kind of archival stock footage of the history of the Second World War. Godard
decomposes the movement of the gesture frame by frame, in accordance with
Agambens account of cinema as the art of the gesture, juxtaposed to other
images related to the Shoah.
27
Te montage of Historie(s) du cinma and other works does not proceed
through a linear account of history, in a causal chain of events where one event
occurs afer, and because of, another. It is exactly in cinemas capacity to make
historical events and evolvements simultaneous that montage plays its historical
role. In superimpositions, resonances and reverberations between flms, events
and movements, history can become visible instead of just narrated and told.
Simultaneity suspends temporal and historical distance. In a famous passage
in the frst part of Histoire(s) du cinma, it stated that it was because George
Stevens had flmed the horror of the extermination camps in color, as he was
part of the US military troops in Europe during the fnal days of the war, that
he could render the moments of happiness between Elizabeth Taylor and
Montgomery Clif in A Place in Te Sun (1946). Tis causality expressed in the
commentary, however, implodes in the montage. Te technique of superimpo-
sition shows the before and afer at the same time, the corpses and the young
lovers in the sun overlap, and the sequential linearity is folded over, rendering
the past and the present simultaneous.
Godards historical concept of montage relies on the technology of the
moving image, and furthermore on its medium-specifc duration which deter-
mines exact encounters and juxtapositions in time. Even if Godard concedes
that montage may also take place in written history or in the other arts,
following Eisensteins history of montage in the arts, it is clear that cinema
holds specifc properties for developing caesurae and constructing simulta-
neities. Tis is a diferent notion of montage than Didi-Hubermans idea of
an open navigation between documents in the archive, or between the photo-
graphs taken at the Auschwitz crematorium. Te associations between archival
documents organized by the historian, or by the user navigating the Internet,
lack a defned temporal duration, and this shifs the emphasis from montage to
the single shot or document.
Didi-Hubermans quest for the acceptance of the photographic image as a
testimony tends to reintroduce a transcendental consciousness on the behalf
202 Cinema and Agamben
of the observerthe photographer, Alex, in the case of the four photos of the
crematoriumbut also in the montage, as it is produced by a human agent
in the reception of the images. Godard doesnt understand cinemas role for
historical articulations as a witness, and there is no need for a deconstruction
of the integrity of a testimony in his concept of montage. Godards principle
of montage clearly also works on a diferent terrain than Agambens identif-
cation of a lacuna in the position of the witness, or of a dark margin at the
level of an archive of statements. As Foucaults work on the theoretical concept
of the archive departed from the age of the Gutenberg Galaxy, when photo-
graphic images and flms were not yet part of the archival media, Agamben
also addresses the discursive dimensions of the archive. However, if the archive
of statements were regulated by structures and functions determining what
could be said at a certain time, the dark margin encircling every speech act,
technologies of inscription and archival indexing also represent selections of
information and what is visible at a given time. Tere is a dark margin encircling
also images of the archive, understood as the system defning what becomes
visible and invisible at a given time. Understood in this sense, Godards practice
of montage is directed at making this dark margin, or perhaps better, dark
matter, visually accessible. Godard approaches the suspensions of visibility in
the historical point of rupture. With the right montage at the right time, what
you cannot see can be shown. Tis is a means to challenge the technical selec-
tions made by archival media and the mnemotechnics surrounding us. If the
function of saying I constitutes the subject as a pure efect of language, and
consequently as a lacuna in the testimony, montage in its epistemological sense
makes the lacunae of visibility stand out.
While the dark margin encircles every concrete speech act and determines
what can be said, and by extension what can be seen, at a given moment,
elsewhere Agamben develops this darkness as a positive feature of the human
visual sensory apparatus.
28
Darkness is not the absence of light, and hence
vision, but the stimulation of so-called of-cells of the retina that produces
blackness. To perceive this darkness is an act of vision outside of the stimuli
of light emanating from the outer world: it is the perception of vision itself.
Agamben goes on to demonstrate how the darkness encircling every star on the
sky at night is the product of luminous celestial bodies and galaxies whose light
never catches up with us, as they are moving away from earth at a greater speed
than that of light.
29
Te light of the stars is perceived in astronomical hindsight,
where the past appears as the present. Te darkness encircling the light of the
Montage and the Dark Margin of the Archive 203
stars, on the other hand, is the light that can never connect with the present.
Agamben understands this as the condition of being contemporary: to address
the anachronical dimensions of the present, to actually see the light of the past
or the future that reaches us as darkness.
Dark matter envelops the light of the contemporary and serves as a condition
for seeing the historical and anachronical in the present. Te fashes of light
informing history, according to Walter Benjamins Teses on History, means
that there is an index to every image of the past that makes it visible at a certain
point in time only. Tis connection between images, distant in time as well
as in space, is the key point in Godards concept of montage as history. Tese
connections are encircled and made possible by the dark matter of vision itself.
Addressing the heterochrony of the present is the condition for the contem-
porary, according to Agamben. When Godard refers to the discovery of dark
matter in physics, in Histoire(s) du cinma as well as in earlier flms, it is as the
visual dimension for historiographical connections. Te dark matter is not only
the medium for the perception of movement itself, and in the cinema dispositif
specifcally, but also for the epistemological production of the past through
montage. It is important not to confate the dark matter of montage with the
dark margin of the written archive. Te dark matter of montage is no longer a
lacuna in the subjective interiority of the testimony, but a productive space for
historical connections to emerge. Still, both concepts devote attention to the
darkness encircling and conditioning what can be seen and said at a specifc
moment in time. Te visual presence of darkness invests the present with a
historical, or in Agambens term, contemporary, heterochrony.
In spite of Agambens emphasis on the physically visual dimension of the
historical dark matter informing the contemporary, he does not develop a theory
of montage. On the relatively few pages he devotes to cinema in his writings,
and with the exception of the short text he devoted to Godards Histoire(s) du
cinma quoted above, he approaches the shot rather then the efects produced in
their connections and confrontations. Cinema is an art of the gesture because it
records and reveals gestures, depriving the old bourgeois world of their gestures
as Balzac described them. Te gesture in cinema is a crystal of historical
memory very diferent from the memory produced by the testimony.
30
Te
ethics of cinema lies in its recording apparatus, producing of the actor a star
rather than the persona or the divo of the theater.
31
He notes the look into the
camera by actors in pornographic photographs and movies.
32
Tis focus on the
gesture and the face as an exteriority derives perhaps from his own experience
204 Cinema and Agamben
as an actor in cinema, playing San Filippo in Pasolinis Il Vangelo secondo Matteo
(Te Gospel According to Matthew, 1964). Almost all of these texts are concerned
with processes of subjectivization. Tis is where they connect to his discussion
of the lacuna in the position of the witness and empty function of the I of
language. All of these images and statements are encircled by a dark margin
determining what can be seen and said at a given moment in history.
Notes
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Schreibmaschinentexte, (Weimar: Verlag der Bauhaus
Universitt, 2002), 18.
2 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: Te Witness and the Archive. Homo
Sacer III, trans. Daniel Heller-Rosein (New York: Zone, 1999).
3 Levi quoted by Agamben, ibid., 334.
4 Ibid, 34.
5 Ibid., 1589.
6 Ibid., 1401.
7 Ibid., 144.
8 Jacques Rancire, La partage du sensible; esthtique et politique (Paris: La Fabrique,
2000), 468.
9 Michel Foucault, La pense du dehors [1966] (Paris: fata morgana, 1986).
10 Agamben, Auschwitz, 144.
11 Ibid., 16671.
12 Ibid., 313, 157.
13 Bazin, Le mythe du cinma totale [1946], Quest-ce que le cinma (Paris: Editions
du Cerf, 1985), 1924.
14 Jaron Laniers quote: http://jenkins.duke.edu/courses/isis250ss11/jaron_lanier.htm
15 A dispositive is, frst and foremost, a machine of subjectivization, and
consequently a machine of government. Giorgio Agamben, Quest-ce quun
dispositif? (Paris: Rivages poches 2008), 42.
16 Agambens focus on the testimony as a pure efect of language makes him disregard
the technical dimensions of media even when he makes use of sources explicitly
discussing the potentials for testimony in flms, like the discussion of Lanzmanns
Shoah by S. Felman. Agamben, Auschwitz, 356.
17 Georges Didi-Huberman, Images malgr tout, (Paris: Minuit 2003). He also returns
to the topic in several other texts, most recently in Remontage du temps subi; Lil
de lhistoire 2 (Paris: Minuit 2010) and in Opening the Camps, Closing the Eyes:
Montage and the Dark Margin of the Archive 205
Image, History, Readability, Concentrationary Cinema; Aesthetics as Political
Resistance in Alain Resnaiss Night and Fog (1955), Griselda Pollock and Max
Silverman (eds), (New York: Berghahn, 2011), 84125.
18 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 312.
19 Ibid., 12: (this truth [] is unimaginable).
20 Didi-Huberman, Images malgr tout, 39. His criticism of Agambens position: 39n.
40.
21 Ibid., 213.
22 Georges Didi-Huberman has devoted a long discussion to this problem in Godards
work: Ibid. 17287. See also Libby Saxtons discussion of the role of the image
of the Shoah in the cinema of Lanzmann and Godard: Anamnesis and Bearing
Witness: Godard/Lanzmann, For Ever Godard Michael Temple, James S. Williams,
Michael Witt (eds) (London: Black Dog 2004), 36479.
23 Jean-Luc Godard, Introduction une veritable histoire du cinema, (Paris: Albatros
1980), 26970.
24 Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinma; propos de cinma et histoire [1995],
Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, II; 19841998, (Paris: Cahiers du cinma
1998), 403.
25 Giorgio Agamben, Cinema and History: On Jean-Luc Godard [1995] trans. John
V. Garner, Colin Williamson, in the present volume.
26 Jacques Rancire returns to Histoire(s) du cinma in several texts in order to
question the idea of an absolute separation between the word and the image, to
which he argues the composite notion of the phrase-image. Jacques Rancire, La
fable cinmatographique (Paris: Seuil 2001), 21730. Jacques Rancire, Le destin des
images, (Paris: La fabrique, 2003), 4378. Jacques Rancire, Godard, Hitchcock,
and the Cinematographic Image, For Ever Godard, Michael Temple, James S.
Williams and Michael Witt (eds) (London: Black Dog 2004), 21431.
27 Giorgio Agamben, Notes sur le geste, Trafc no. 1, 1992.
28 Giorgio Agamben, What is the Contemporary? in Nudities (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2011), 1019. I am indebted to Henrik Gustafsson for pointing
out this connection to me.
29 Ibid.
30 Giorgio Agamben, Notes sur le geste, Trafc no. 1, 1992.
31 Giorgio Agamben, Pour une thique du cinma, Trafc no. 3, 1993.
32 Giorgio Agamben, Te Face, in Means without End; Notes on Politics
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 91100.
10
Remnants of Palestine, or, Archaeology
afer Auschwitz
Henrik Gustafsson
I feel like an occupied country. Change lies between the images.
Changer dimage Jean-Luc Godard, 1982
Pilgrimage and profanation
In the early summer of 1963 Pier Paolo Pasolini retraced the itinerary of Christ
along the border of Israel and Jordan, scouting locations for a flm based on
the Gospel of Matthew. Like every pilgrim Pasolini was lead principally by his
imagination, to borrow Maurice Halbwachss insight, and in common with so
many of his predecessors, his foray into the Holy Land became one of increasing
disillusion.
1
As documented in the pre-production flm-essay Sopralluoghi in
Palestina (Scouting in Palestine, 19634), Pasolinis Grand Tour unfolds as an
elegiac road movie through a vanishing world, encroached and eradicated by
sprawling Israeli settlements, industrial plants and urban blight. At the end of
his quest, the director laments: Yes, the biblical world appears, but it resurfaces
like wreckage. Tis wreckage, however, led Pasolini to discover what he referred
to as the mechanism of analogy.
2
It is precisely in the remnants of Palestinea
heap of wheat, the gestures of a farmer, and, most prominently, in the pagan,
pre-Christian faces extolled by Pasolini in Druze villages or among tribes of
Bedouins in the desertthat he identifes the archaic element to sustain this
analogical approach. Working by analogy, the abject poverty of the Arab under-
class in the margins of a prosperous Israel society impelled Pasolini to displace
and reimagine the Gospel in the impoverished regions of southern Italy, with
Basilicata doubling for Palestine, Mount Etna for the Judean desert, Calabria
208 Cinema and Agamben
for Galilee, and the ruins of Matera for Jerusalem. With equal pertinence, the
analogy applies to the faces of the sub-proletarian peasantry in these rural
hamlets. Pasolinis quest for the archaic was thus as much a scout for faces as
for places. Of all his flms, renowned for their unique sensitivity to the human
face, none contains so many memorable visages as Il Vangelo secondo Matteo
(Te Gospel According to Matthew, 1964) with its mixed cast of local peasants
and fellow artists and intellectuals in the roles of the disciples. One of these
faces belongs to a young student from Rome cast to portray Philip the Apostle:
Giorgio Agamben.
Tis early collaboration between Agamben and Pasolini invites a closer
consideration of the overlapping vocabularies and genealogies of thinking that
underpin their respective projects. Steeped in theological traditions, amalgam-
ating Marxist and Jewish Messianic traditions, their eclectic output is similar,
frst of all, in its sheer rangeextravagantly interdisciplinary in Pasolinis self-
characterization, scattered in every territory, in the words of Agamben.
3
While
such a comparison lies beyond the purview of the present discussion, Pasolinis
encounter with, and subsequent displacement of, Palestineor what Halbwachs
conceived of as Te Legendary Topography of the Gospelspeaks to a concern
which I propose is at the heart of Agambens writing. As he professed already in
his second book, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1977): We
Figure 10.1 Philip the Apostle (Giorgio Agamben) at the Last Supper in Il Vangelo secondo Matteo
(Te Gospel According to Matthew, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964).
Remnants of Palestine, or, Archaeology afer Auschwitz 209
must still accustom ourselves to think of the place not as something spatial,
but as something more original than space.
4
Exploring the nature of this place,
which is always an inquiry into the void,
5
has remained a lifelong pursuit,
and spreads across all aspects of his writing. Exemplary, in this regard, is the
single refection he has devoted to Pasolinis work that can be found in the
collection Profanations. Beginning with his early linguistic parodies, Friulian
poems, and Roman slang novels, Agamben proposes that Pasolinis operative
modus can be understood as a form of serious parody. Poised between identity
and diference, mimicry and mutation, parody, as understood by Agamben,
facilitates a space suspended between the word and the thing, the thing and
the name. Chronically and constitutively out of place, this mode of speaking
beside-itself,
6
reveals a fundamental truth about language: that language
doesnt take place. It is also for this reason that what Agamben refers to as the
notoriously impracticable terrain
7
of parody has the potential to assuage the
split between world and language. In commemorating, the absence of a proper
place for speech, Agamben suggests, this heart-wrenching atopia becomes,
for a moment, less painful, and is cancelled out into a homeland.
8
Inviting us
to dwell in this lacuna, parody thus seems to harbor another idea of belonging.
Along these lines, the brief introductory remarks below aim to articulate some
of the concomitant ideas and concepts that inform Agambens rethinking of
place through a cross-reading with Pasolinis linguistically informed approach
to location shooting.
When plotting out the premises of a new investigation, Agamben typically
commences by staking out a direction, as if embarking on a survey into some
unchartered territory: what he alternatively refers to as an unknown land, a
no-mans-land, or, most frequently, a homeland. Te nature of this domain is
vigorously stated in the preface to Infancy and History: On the Destruction of
Experience when the author writes that the implications of there is language,
and I speak constitute the terrain toward which all my work is oriented.
9
Hence, the rethinking of place proposed by Agamben is always embroiled in
and refracted through language. It is also in this double-exposure of linguistic
and spatial tropes that we may trace the deepest afnity between Pasolinis and
Agambens projects: in the former case, to disjoint the unity of form and content
through a linguistic pluralism; in the latter, to interrupt and expose language
and communicability as such.
10
It is in this sense that Agambens understanding
of poetry as the taking place of language, exposing its exteriority, pertains to
Pasolinis Cinema of Poetry.
210 Cinema and Agamben
Te rethinking of place undertaken by Agamben and Pasolini may be
circumscribed through a shared methodological impetus: that of archae-
ology. Taking his cue from the archeological methods of Aby Warburg, Walter
Benjamin and Michel Foucault, Agamben states that the object pursued by the
archeologist, the arch, is not the historical site of an original event that can be
traced back through linear time. Tis defnition casts it in marked opposition to
how archaeology commonly is understood and used, most conspicuously when
mobilized as a weapon in national struggles where it is invoked as the supreme
authority to settle issues of ownership and origin. Conversely, philosophical
archaeology seeks to uncover, the non-place of the origin.
11
By regressing
toward the moment when a concept frst became operative, the moment of a
phenomenons arising, archaeology strives to gain access to the arch as, an
operative force within history.
12
Accordingly, the arch is not a given or a
substance, but a feld of bipolar historical currents stretched between anthro-
pogenesis and history, between the moment of arising and becoming, between
the archi-past and the present.
13
Archaeology, then, marks a sustained attempt
to grasp the currents that pass between the past, which is always created by the
present, and the present, which is always founded on the past.
As Noa Steimatsky has shown, the archaic crystalized as the master trope
of Pasolinis flmmaking afer his encounter with Palestine.
14
Like the territory
summoned by Agamben at the outset of a new project, the archaic terrain
sought by Pasolini never designates a proper place. While intimately tied to the
tangible specifcs on location, the arch ultimately resides beyond location, as a
point of fight on the ever-retreating peripheries of the modern world. From his
early flms set on the margins of Rome to his late travelogues from the Arabian
Peninsula, Africa, and India, Pasolinis Tird World itinerary presents an open
target for charges of romantic primitivism, and, more troublingly, for complying
with a colonial cartography that coordinates centers and peripheries along a
temporal axis of present and past. In this context, however, it may more properly
be understood as a technique for attaining a proximity to the arch, which is
summoned through a stretching of historical currents by means of stretching
out geographically, but also, and always, linguistically. Il Vangelo provides a
powerful case in point: willfully exposing its acts of mimicry, the sermons and
parables of the Gospel and the iconography of the early Italian renaissance
coexist with passages shot in the style of cinma vrit, summoning a space
where the heterogeneous visual, textual, and audial sources touch, and ignite,
in Sam Rohdies phrase.
15
Furthermore, this space extends across analogous
Remnants of Palestine, or, Archaeology afer Auschwitz 211
historical moments and realities: the Palestinian underclass in the present, the
biblical land in the past, and feudal, southern Italy, all being subjugated to the
power of colonial rule.
Tis brings us to a fnal point of intersection between Agambens work
and Pasolinis cinematic practice: the remnant. In his commentary on Pauls
Letter to the Romans in Te Time Tat Remains (2000), Agamben ponders
the implications of Pauls renouncement of his Jewish identity as Saul and his
subsequent announcement of a non-people (Rom. 9.25). By defning himself
as separated, positioning himself between Jewish and Hellenistic identity, Paul
exposes an internal split in any attempt to defne a people, an irreducible and
unassimilable element inherent in every act of imposing an identity. For this
reason the remnant constitutes, for Agamben, the only real political subject.
16
Te remnant is not a passive residue, however, but exhorts a force that ruptures
the authority founded on such a dividing action, in this case Mosaic Law
which divides all men into Jews and Non-Jews. Te deconstructive force of
the remnant also acts on space, dislodging the distinction between inside and
outside, inclusion and exclusion, which underpins any political project based on
identity and belonging.
From 1968 to the end of his life, Pasolini wrote a series of screenplays for a flm
based on the life and journeys of Paul, emblematically titled San Paolo. While
this flmhis most ambitious attempt at staging an analogy across time and
territoryremains unrealized, the impact of Paul may be construed precisely
in terms of a politics and poetics of the remnant. Pushing steadily toward a
bypassed and impoverished south, Pasolini summoned his non-people from the
subproletariat on the fringes of modernity, what Paul referred to as, the flth of
the world, the ofscouring of all things (First Letter to the Cor. 4.13), or what
Frantz Fanon in an infuential phrase at the time called the wretched of the
earth. Pasolinis incessant thrust away from the centralized power of State and
capital toward abject subjects and settings in order to stir up the scandalous,
revolutionary force of the past,
17
needs to be understood, primarily, within
the context of Italian fascism. Pasolinis scandalous and contaminated poetics
was targeted against the Fascists consolidation of an ethnically and linguisti-
cally unifed nation. Te geographical itinerary of his flms, then, harks back
to his early linguistic experiments and mimicry of vernacular idioms; for it
was precisely this plethora of regional dialects that fascist politics intended
to erase. Pasolinis revolt, however, had broader implications, designating the
homogenizing forces of the modern nation state more generally. Upon return
212 Cinema and Agamben
from Palestine, Pasolini commented on his deeply ambiguous response to
Jewish society, torn between his love of the Jews for having been excluded
and subjected to racial hatred, and a deep resentment of a state, founded on
a basically racist, messianic and religious ideathe idea of a promised land.
Pasolini is quick to add, however, although its basically the same principle on
which all states are based.
18
It is toward this nexus of land, language and people that the archaeological
inquiries addressed in this chapter are oriented. Having provisionally mapped
out, with the help of Pasolini, some of the premises which I suggest underlie
Agambens proposal that we need to rethink place, we have also demarcated
the geographical subject of these inquiries: Palestine, at once the epicentre of
archaeology, the homeland par excellence, and the locus of the worlds most
advanced biopower today.
Primal scenes
At the time Pasolini embarked on his Tird World travelogues, political tourism
had become high vogue among intellectuals associated with the French lef. By
then, however, the border between Jordan and Israel retraced by Pasolini in
1964 had been radically redrawn. In what follows, I will cross-read two political
pilgrimages in the early 1970s which, in turn, marked at once the beginning
of two sustained archaeological inquiries into these contested territories, and
the inaugural moment of a controversy that would erupt in full force more
than two decades later. Te subject matter of this polemical conversation was,
ostensibly, not the confict in the Middle East, but the ethics and politics of
representing the Nazi concentration and extermination camps.
19
In light of the
implicit relation suggested here, the flmographies of the principal adversaries
of this debate, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Lanzmann, follows a remarkably
similar itinerary: from their interventions into the Zionist-Palestine confict in
the early seventies, followed by their monumental work on the Nazi camps in
the ensuing decades, to their late career returns to the Middle East. My claim,
then, is that the stakes of this high-profle dispute can, in fact, be traced back to
the conficted terrain of Israel-Palestine.
At the end of 1969, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, the founders
of the Dziga Vertov Group, were invited to Jordan, Lebanon and Syria to make
Remnants of Palestine, or, Archaeology afer Auschwitz 213
Jusqu la victoire (Until Victory), a flm funded by the Arabic League in order
to promote the Palestinian uprising. Godard spent the spring and summer of
1970 flming the preparations in the refugee communities on the West Bank,
then controlled by Jordan, to reclaim the land that had been occupied by Israel
in 1967. A month afer his return to Paris, the Fedayeenthe armed militants
flmed during combat trainingwere killed in the Black September massacres
perpetrated by King Husseins Jordanian troops, and the project was abandoned.
Tree years passed before Godard, together with Anne-Marie Miville, would
return to this footage which was revised and edited together into the video essay
Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere, 19704), to which we will return later.
Lanzmanns flm has an even more convoluted production history, beginning
as a reportage for Les Temps Modernes afer his frst visit to Israel in 1952,
and, encouraged by Jean-Paul Sartre, expanding into a book, neither of which
were completed. Returning twenty years later, the project fnally materialized
as Pourquoi Isral (Why, Israel 1973), a sprawling portrayal of the state in its
twenty-ffh year. Te flm is impelled by two incentives. Firstly, responding
to Sartres essay Anti-Semite and Jew which argued that the Jew exists only
as an image derived from anti-Semitism, and thus, that the Jew is a phantom
summoned and nourished by a passionate hatred which ultimately lacks an
object. Conversely, Who is a Jew? is the question that propels Pourquoi Isral.
Secondly, it is induced by a territorial imperative to cover the land in all its
diversity: with pristine vistas of the desert and the coastline, pastoral imagery of
the forestation programmes and Kibbutzim, and vivid depictions of the pioneer
spirit in the rising cities and settlements. Lanzmann even acts as a tour guide for
an immigrant family, showing them all the major landmarks from the Wailing
Wall to Masada. Tese two incentivesthe inventory of the land and the quest
for identityconverge in the frst law of the parliament, the law of return, the
mandate to build and fll the land.
A primal scene divided between the Shoah and the Nakbaor between the
camps in Poland and the camps in Palestinemight shed new light on the
competing claims on the relationship between cinema and history purported
by Godard and Lanzmann. It may further cause us to reconsider the theological
framework of idolatry and monotheism in which the polemic has ofen been
cast, with Godard as a partisan of the image and Lanzmann as a partisan of
the text, or, in Grard Wajcmans formulation, of Saint Paul Godard versus
Moses Lanzmann.
20
Such a divided primal scene converges in the messianic
concept of the remnant as explored by Agamben. Chronologically, Agambens
214 Cinema and Agamben
investigation of the remnants of Israel in Te Time Tat Remains (2000), had
been preceded by his study of testimony conducted in Remnants of Auschwitz:
Te Witness and the Archive (1999). In both studies, the concept of the remnant is
elaborated in relation to a liminal fgure that calls into question our conceptions
of what constitutes a people, or a human being more generally. In the frst case,
Pauls community of remnants, his non-people; in the second, the Muselmann,
the German word for a Muslim that was used in the camps for a prisoner in
the fnal stage of malnutrition, exhausted to the point of bare life, deprived of
speech and experience. Predating both these publications, however, is a third
paradigm of the remnant presented in a short essay called We Refugees, which
also marks Agambens single direct commentary on the confict in the Middle
East. Te remnants in question are the 425 Palestinians expelled by the state of
Israel onto the border of Lebanon. Displaced from the land and thus also from
the law, Agamben advances the refugee to imagine a form of life beyond the
confation of naked life and national belonging. Triangulated in this manner,
Agambens elaboration of the fgure of the remnant appears as a potent historical
cipher for the confict in the Middle East.
For Godard as well as Lanzmann, the annihilation of Jews in the Nazi camps
marks the genesis of the state of Israel. In a letter to Palestinian historian Elias
Sanbar (who served as a guide and interpreter on the Dziga Vertov Groups
location scout in Jordan) dated somewhere in Palestine July 19, 1977, Godard
writes: Te current war in the Middle East was born in a concentration camp
on the day a great Jewish outcast, besides being brought to the verge of dying,
was called a Musulman by some SS.
21
In similar terms, Lanzmann contends
that, the state of Israel was born of the Shoah.
22
Tere is also a causal relation
between Lanzmanns survey of Israel in the early seventies and the inventory
of the geography of the Nazi death camps in Poland that would engulf him for
the next twelve years. It was afer a screening of Pourquoi Isral that Alouph
Hareven, director-general of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Afairs, invited
Lanzmann to a meeting where he proposed the subject for Lanzmanns next
flm: the extermination of European Jewry during World War II.
23
Te next section will consider the relation between testimony and territory
mapped in Lanzmanns nine-and-a-half-hour flm Shoah (1985)along with
Lanzmanns commentary on the flm as it unfolds in his recent memoir Te
Patagonian Hareand in Agambens Remnants of Auschwitz. Te focal point
of this cross-reading, and in the subsequent discussion on Godard, concerns
how the camp, the inaugural site of the confict in the Middle East, is in turn
Remnants of Palestine, or, Archaeology afer Auschwitz 215
imbricated with a speech act, an act of nomination. For Godard, the cipher for
this relation is the German name Musulmann, for Lanzmann, the Hebrew
name Shoah. Tese ciphers, in turn, encrypt competing claims on origins and
homelands.
Testimony and territory
Lanzmann has described Shoah (1985) as a flm from the ground up, a
topographical flm, a geographical flm.
24
In the preface to Remnants of
Auschwitz, Agamben lays out his investigation in similar terms: I will consider
myself content with my work if, in attempting to locate the place and theme of
testimony, I have erected some signposts allowing future cartographers of the
new ethical territory to orient themselves.
25
Both further address the problem
of naming the event, rejecting the term Holocaust due to its religious conno-
tations which associate the crematoria with a sacrifcial altar. Departing from
this common ground, I will argue that a closer examination of the relationship
between nomination and location in fact reveals a decisive rif in the territory
that they set out to chart.
While Remnants of Auschwitz only addresses Lanzmann in passing, his
presence looms heavy when Agamben positions his study in opposition to,
those who would like Auschwitz to remain forever incomprehensible, and
when stating his intention to, clear away almost all the doctrines that, since
Auschwitz, [have] been advanced in the name of ethics.
26
Shoah is only
addressed indirectly in reference to the commentary made by literary critic
Shoshana Felman. Felman proposes that the unique achievement of Lanzmanns
flm is that it resolves the dichotomy between the witnesses who survived the
gas chambers and the victims who perished inside them, eliciting a connection,
between the inside and the outside.
27
Conversely, Agamben insists that this
relation must remain open; the lacuna between death and survival must be
preserved, for it is out of this empty space that testimony may, or may not,
emerge. Tis is the territory that Agamben refers to at the outset of his
studythe taking place of language, the contingency and possibility of speech.
Auschwitz is the negation of this contingency, a machine designed to produce
the fnal biopolitical substance
28
: a man separated from speech, from the event
of language, and thus from the possibility of having an experience. Envisioned
216 Cinema and Agamben
by its engineers as the perfect crime, one which doesnt leave a remnant, the
camp marks an attempt to foreclose the lacuna.
In defning the remnant as a residue between death and survival, Agamben
endows it with agency. It is revealing, then, that Agamben chooses the Muselmann
(unmentioned in Lanzmanns flm), a subject defned by an absolute lack of
agency, as the protagonist of his study. Following Primo Levi, the cartographer
of this new terra ethica, the implacable land-surveyor of Muselmannland,
29
the
complete witness is the one who cant testify. For Agamben, the disjunction
between the living being and the speaking being, constitutes the subjects only
dwelling place.
30
Resuming the territorial metaphor, Agamben relates this to
his principal methodological impulse: archaeology claims as its territory the
pure taking place of these propositions and discourses, that is, the outside of
language, the brute fact of its existence.
31
As we shall see, the taking place of
language is also at the core of Lanzmanns archaeological project. As I aim to
show below, however, the relation between location and language, or between
Site and Speech, to quote the working title for Shoah, holds radically diferent
implications for Agamben and Lanzmann.
32
My flm would have to take up the ultimate challenge; take the place of the
non-existent images of death in the gas chambers.
33
Lanzmanns statement explains
his categorical rejection of any claims made for an image that derives from inside
the gas chambers, whether the Nazi footage hypothesized by Jean-Luc Godard,
or the Sonderkommando photograph that was curated and conceptualized by
Georges Didi-Hubermann. For Lanzmann, the inside is reserved for the oral
testimonies given by the former members of the Sonderkommando who appears
in Shoah: they too were fated to diewhich is why I call them revenants rather
than survivors.
34
Whereas Agambens remnants dwell in the lacuna between the
living and the dead, Lanzmanns revenants posit a bridge between them; the saved
dont speak for the drowned, the dead speaks through them.
Tis, in turn, comprises two competing versions of archaeology: Every time
I discovered someone still alive, I was absolutely stunned, it felt almost like
something unearthed during an archaeological dig, Lanzmann recalls.
35
Along
these lines, the director has consistently drawn on the metaphor of archaeology
to describe his working methodto dig, drill, and excavate.
36
Tis archaeo-
logical impulse also impels the cameras unearthing of train tracks buried in the
mud and debris in the undergrowth, of the weed infested ghetto and the sunken
crematoria. Lanzmanns archaeology thus equally applies to the physical sites of
the genocide and to the voices speaking from them.
Remnants of Palestine, or, Archaeology afer Auschwitz 217
In her preface to the published screenplay of Shoah, Simone de Beauvoir
writes that, the greatness of Claude Lanzmanns art is in making places speak.
37
It is also in the revelatory meeting of the name and a place on location in
Poland that Lanzmann, in his own account, suddenly gains full access to the
primal scene.
38
Tis devastating revelation occurs when he frst confronts the
black lettering on an ordinary road sign spelling Treblinka. Te shocking,
unacceptable discrepancy, between the dreary contemporary reality and the
terrifying human memory of it could only be explosive.
39
Upon his arrival in
Poland, Lanzmann ruminates:
I was a bomb, though a harmless bomb the detonator was missing. Treblinka
had been the detonator; that afernoon I exploded with a sudden, devastating
violence. How else can I put it? Treblinka became real, the shif from myth to
reality took place in a blinding fash, the encounter between a name and a place
wiped out everything I had learned.
40
Te meeting of a name and a place precisely conjures what Walter Benjamin
referred to as a dialectical image, igniting a tension through which the past is
blasted out of the continuum of history.
41
More importantly, this shif from
name to place, from myth to reality, delineates the core of Lanzmanns archaeo-
logical project: to reverse the trajectory in which the Jewish people were frst
rendered stateless (by Nazi laws) and then speechless (in the camp). To grasp
the implications of this undertaking, we need to retrace the reversed trajectory
from the place to the name charted by Lanzmann.
To begin with, the reality of place. Lanzmann has stressed the critical impact
of his encounter with the sites, of exposing his mind and senses to the minute
physical presence of each detailevery steel rail and stonein the camps: I
had allowed it to seep into me, to imprint itself on me.
42
Rather than a shif
from icon to index, Lanzmann postulates a shif from one index (archival
footage) to another (material remnants), establishing a causal link between
exterior and interior.
43
While his famous repudiation of images without imagi-
nation
44
obviously imposes a limit on the image, it commands, by the same
token, images with imagination. Tus, it is not a general ban on images, but
on images in the past tense. In fact, Shoahs relentless confrontation with the
here and now of these sites engenders one of the most sustained attempts in the
history of cinema to make imagination work through the power of evocation
and speech.
45
Between the crowded street scenes of Warsaw and the random
passers-by in the Polish countryside, Shoah comments on the invisibility of the
218 Cinema and Agamben
ghettos and camps, then and now. It covers the ground where the crime took
place as a means to relive the event as if it was continually taking place in the
present. Te absence of explanation and the excess of descriptive information
provoke and ignite, in Lanzmanns phrase, a hallucinatory intemporality.
46
Not
an image, then, but a vision.
Tis brings us to the second transition, moving back from the reality of place
to the myth and the name. From the pastoral hymn to the childhood home
sung by Simon Srebnik on the Narew River in the frst scene of the flm, Shoah
continuously evokes the notion of a homeland. Te blind spot encircled in the
flm is at once the gas chamber and the absence of a sovereign Jewish nation. Te
connection transpires in the midst of the rundown ghetto district where a long pan
across the city comes to a temporary halt at a monument to the uprising in the
ghetto. Te camera zooms in close, and then cuts to a replica of this monument in
Jerusalem, from where it zooms out and resumes its lefward trajectory to reveal
the bright, open spaces of Israel. Te journey to Poland was like a journey through
time, Lanzmann comments.
47
Passing through the stony faces of the resistance
fghters, the pan thus completes the flms journey from the past into the present.
48
Tis bridging of time and territory, however, does not merely imply that the spirit
of resistance lives on in Israel; so does the enemy. Tis is the theme addressed in
the concluding part of Lanzmanns trilogy on the Jewish homeland, Tsahal (1994).
To the same extent that Shoah is unremittingly about death, Tsahal is about
survival. Taking its title from the Hebrew acronym for the Israeli defence force,
the flm celebrates the ffieth anniversary of the War of Independence. Te
national arms industry, the air force, and the military combat training zones
in the desert are exhibited in a brazen iconography of power. Near the end of
the flm, a montage of aerial shots circle Jerusalem, Masada, and the hilltop
settlements, while Ehud Barak muses: We carry in our blood the genes of the
Maccabees and of those Zealots who died in Masada. Tis genetic heritage
also applies to the enemies of Israel. Te stories related by Israeli soldiers about
family members who perished in the ghettos, gulags, and camps merge with the
imminent threat of annihilation by the Arabs. Te sovereign borders of Israel
are the only safeguard to keep the past at bay.
Anti-Semitism, Lanzmann establishes in opposition to Sartres view, is the
metaphysical hatred against a people who is the origin and knows it and wills
it.
49
Shoah attempts to grasp this hatred in its full dimension, to encompass
everything, to show everything that had happened from the point of view of the
Jews themselves.
50
Tis all-encompassing view needed a name:
Remnants of Palestine, or, Archaeology afer Auschwitz 219
Te word Shoah occurred to me one night as self-evident because, not
speaking Hebrew, I did not understand its meaning, which was another way
of not naming it. [] Shoah was a signifer with no signifed, a brief opaque
utterance, an impenetrable, unbreakable word. [] I fought to impose the title
Shoah, not knowing that in doing so I was performing a radical act of naming,
[] Shoah is now a proper noun, the only one, and hence untranslatable.
51
Te performative force of this speech act returns us to the question of the
arch. Lanzmanns act of nominationof giving a name to the eventis also a
commandment. Shoah does not refer to or describe something; it commands
something. Te name is the thing, the event in its totality, in Lanzmanns words,
my flm is a monument that is part of what it monumentalizes.
52
Te name
Shoaha Hebrew name, the language of origin and the language of Israel
grounds the link between word (speech) and thing (site), rendering this link
unbreakable. Tis is unambiguously stated in the epigraph to Shoah, a quotation
from a passage in Isaiah (Isa. 56.5): I will give them an everlasting Name. Te
commandment of Shoah thus warrants an everlasting commitment to the
future. It is upon this imperative that the Jewish state is built.
Two parallel axes cross in Lanzmanns coordination of site and speech, place
and name, view and interview, land and language: the two thousand years
of exile from the homeland and the destruction of a previous generation in
Europe. Te intervening millennia of Palestinian history are lef vacant, as if
Figure 10.2 Tsahal (Claude Lanzmann, 1994).
220 Cinema and Agamben
the land itself has been exiled, awaiting the return of its rightful owners and its
re-entry into history. Lanzmanns trilogy is about origins and bloodlines, about
Israel as material unity, and of its territory as an absolute embodiment of the
Jewish world. It is a recognition and confrmation of a world according to a
visionof a people who is the origin and knows it and wills it. Answering the
question pursued in Pourquoi Isral, a Jew is not a being of possibility, a being
who can, but a being who will.
Te prophecies of Isaiah are also the source from where Agamben, via the
Letters of Paul, derives his concept of the remnant: For though your people, oh
Israel, were like the sand of the sea, only a remnant will return. (Isa. 10.22)
53
Following Agamben, this remnant is neither a numeric portionthe part of the
people returning from the Diaspora, or surviving the Shoahnor the nucleus
of a new nation, bridging ruin (Shoah) and salvation (Israel). Te remnant,
instead, directs us away from the identitarian politics of the state toward a
nameless community that isnt founded on will, but on potentiality. While
Remnants of Auschwitz repeatedly refers to language as taking place, Agamben
also advises us to be cautious of this fgure of speech. Testimony can never take
place in a territorial sense, for it comes to us from an empty place. It is in this
non-coincidence between site and speech that the remnant resides.
Te urge to rethink the relation between site and speech became a key
concern as Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miville revised the footage
lefover from the Dziga Vertovs sojourn in the Middle East in 1970. In the
concluding section of this chapter, I will pursue the inquiry into this relation as
it unfolds in Ici et ailleurs and in Godards latest work, Film socialisme (2010).
Tis will return us to a fnal consideration of the implications of Agambens
proposal that a more original place, a homeland, remains to be discovered.
Here and elsewhere
Lanzmanns inventory of the land in Pourquoi Isral is bordered by names.
It begins in the Yad Vashem memorial hall where the camera scans the
inscriptions on the stone foorAuschwitz, Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen,
Dachauto the sound of a voice chanting in Hebrew. Ten, it descends
into the depths of the archive, the Hall of Names. Tis is also where the
flm concludes, three hours later, as a clerk at the archive enumerates all the
Remnants of Palestine, or, Archaeology afer Auschwitz 221
Lanzmanns who perished in the Shoah. Afer the last name, Lanzmann simply
instructs cut.
Godard and Mivilles video-essay Ici et ailleurs is instead framed by a change
of names: from the prospective until victory to the retrospective here and
elsewhere. Departing from the projected, and abandoned, propaganda flm,
Te Peoples Will, the frst of fve Fatah slogans around which Jusqu la
victoire was to be structured, is followed by a claim on origin: Weve chosen a
Palestinian revolution to prove to the world that this Palestinian soil taken by
the Zionist enemy will be given back to its people, to its frst origin. In voice-
over, Godard refers to these slogans as, fve images and fve sounds that hadnt
been heard or seen on Arab soil. He then extrapolates the didactic setup for the
intended flm: frst the sound, then the image. In order to reclaim the land, the
Fedayeen had frst to conquer a language, hence, the recurring scenes of refugees
delivering speeches, declaiming poetry, rehearsing union texts, and reciting
pamphlets.
Te new title announces a strategy of displacement, suspending the revised
footage between herea French working-class family (flmed in the living
room of William Lubtchansky, Lanzmanns cinematographer on Pourquoi Isral
and Shoah)and elsewhere. Tis elsewhere does not merely designate lost
territory and abandoned ideals: afer the Amman massacre, Godard and
Miville was literally lef with a cast of revenants, thus facing the gravest
implications of speaking for an elsewhere. Probing the politics of giving, or
imposing, voice, and what was lost, or obscured, in translation, it is precisely
the site of speech that warrants articulation. Te project of decolonization thus
refects back onto the political persuasions and manipulative strategies of the
flmmakers and their rhetorical arrangement of sounds and images into a causal
chain of events. Tis chain, in which everyone can fnd his own image, adheres
to a logic of recognition and identifcation: Little by little we are replaced by
chains of uninterrupted images. Te task Godard now formulates for his and
Mivilles newly founded production company, Sonimage, will be to break this
chain of sounds and images. Godard asks: Maybe we should abandon this
system of questions and answers and fnd something else.
In a pragmatic sense, this was achieved through video editing; placing
images side-by-side on two monitors rather than in linear succession. Revising
and refracting his own (then recent) cinematic past through video-montage
and conficting voice-overs, Ici et ailleurs implements in embryotic form the
archaeology of sounds and imagesthe overlapping soundtracks, multilayered
222 Cinema and Agamben
superimpositions, and multicolored inter-titlesof late Godard. Indeed, two
images from Ici et ailleurs, both located inside camps, have become part of this
strata: frst, of a young Fedayeen woman patrolling a border fence in a refugee
camp in Jordan; second, archival footage of bodies dragged and dumped into
mass graves in a Nazi camp afer the liberation. Te latter is always interpo-
lated with two names. In Ici et ailleurs, these names are introduced in Mivilles
neutral commentary played over a ghastly black-and-white newsreel fickering
on a TV-screen: Heres a Jew in such a state the SS called him a Muslim.
Te profanation of the religious misnomerthe SS declaring the Jew to be a
Muslimalso designates the fnal act to seal the destruction of the last remnant
of the Jewish people. Te intertitle that follows: Tinking of that againhere
and elsewhere.
Te connection between the Fedayeen in the camps in Jordan and the
Musulman in the camps in Poland has continued to resurface as a leitmotif,
some would say an obsession, in late Godard. Most recently in Film socialisme,
where the archival footage from the camp, in low-resolution and slow-motion,
are followed by two video clips: frst from Cheyenne Autumn (John Ford, 1964),
showing women and children of the Cheyenne Exodus; then from Lanzmanns
Tsahal, an aerial shot of a fghter jet crossing the coastline as the voice-over
intones: Palestine. Te dispossession of the native population in Fords flm
Figure 10.3 Fedayeen in Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere, Jean-Luc Godard, 19704) from chapter
4b: Les Signes Parmi Nous (Te Signs Among Us, 1998) of Histoire(s) du cinma (198898).
Remnants of Palestine, or, Archaeology afer Auschwitz 223
and the patrolling of sovereign borders in Lanzmanns documentary associate
the colonial enterprises in North America and in the Middle East, not only
through the shared myth of a promised land, but also through the rationale
that legitimized the eviction of its former inhabitants: their ignorance of terri-
torial sovereignty and citizenship. Put crudely, since Palestine never existed as a
proper place, Palestinians never existed as a people.
Tis sequence in Film socialisme emulates a montage in the frst episode
of Histoire(s) du cinma (198898). Following a meditation on the Nazi death
camps, the most extensive in the series, and a quote from Lanzmannthe train
pulling into Treblinka in Shoahthere is a color photograph of a Palestinian
boy marching with a burning US fag. Superimposed in the fames are images
from D. W. Grifths Te Birth of a Nation (1915), followed by the tracking-shot
of John Wayne racing through the Indian camp in John Fords Te Searchers
(1956). Te allusion to the Navaho reservation in Fords Monument Valley
pervades Film socialisme in its entirety through the Navaho English subtitles
concocted by Godard. In the guise of a linguistic parody of Indian speech in
Hollywood westerns, the already fragmentary and multi-lingual text of Film
socialisme is chopped up and spaced out into single lines with no punctuation.
More importantly, the Navaho English subtitles also refect back onto the vexed
issue of translation frst raised in Ici et ailleurs. In many ways, Film socialisme
appears as its late companion piece. Furthermore, it meditates on the nexus of
territorial confict and linguistic theory in ways that directly pertain to key ideas
in Agambens work.
Film socialisme contains two brief sequences obliquely addressing the Middle
East confict. Te frst appears toward the end of the frst section of the flm
Des choses comme a (Such things)which is set on a cruise ship touring
the ancient ports of the Mediterranean, a hyperbolic non-place that makes the
hotels and airport terminals analyzed by Fredric Jameson and Marc Agu appear
benign in comparison. Afer a series of passing references to Jafa, Haifa, and
Mandatory Palestine, along with the key date 1948, during the frst half hour, a
new character announces: Te photograph of a land and its people, at last. Te
line paraphrases the title of Les Palestiniens: La photographie dune terre et de son
peuple de 1839 nos jours (2004), a compilation of photographs by the aforemen-
tioned Elias Sanbar, whom Godard befriended in Jordan in 1969. Sanbar appears
on screen to recount how the invention of the Daguerreotype hurled a wave
of photographic campaigns into the Holy Land. A girl holds up a photograph,
identifed as one of the earliest photographs of Haifa Bay. She speaks in Arabic:
224 Cinema and Agamben
Where are you my beloved land? Again, a paraphrase, this time of a familiar
line in late Godard, frst intoned in German in Allemagne 90 neuf zero, later cited
in JLG/JLGautoportrait de dcembre (1994) and Histoire(s). A brief, soundless
sequence follows afer the intertitle PALESTINE in which two landscape
photographs, made a century apart, are shown: frst, a generic postcard view
in black and white with a palm tree in the foreground and a distant village on
the hills across the bay (Flix Bonfls, 1880); then, a full-screen color shot of an
olive tree (Joss Dray, 1989).
54
Te screen goes black, followed by the blindfolded
Christ in Matthias Grnewalds painting Te Mocking of Christ (15035), and the
concluding intertitle ACCESS DENIED. Tis, of course, can mean a number of
things: that Palestine has no access to its territory or its history; or, as for Pasolini
on his failed location scout, that there is no longer an image to conjure of the
people or the place. In light of Sanbars thesis that Palestine was obliterated by
the image of the Holy Land, the century that separates the two photographs also
evokes what hasnt changed between them: the notion of Palestine as a place,
not a people, as neither image evince human beings, only trees, adhering to the
Zionist motto of a land without a people. Maybe, there is also another possible
meaning: that Palestine is what we fail to imagine, belonging without a state.
Te next Palestine sequence appears toward the end of the flms third, and
fnal, section, Nos humanits (Our humanities). Te voice-over begins by
Figure 10.4 Christ blindfolded in Matthias Grnewalds Te Mocking of Christ (15035) in Film
socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010).
Remnants of Palestine, or, Archaeology afer Auschwitz 225
repeating Sanbars association of the inception of photography and the subse-
quent colonization and erasure of Palestine. A photograph of a procession
of blindfolded Arab prisoners pulled by a soldier fades into a ground-level
shot tracking along a stretch of barbed wire with the Mediterranean in the
background (taken from Jean-Daniel Pollets 1963 flm Mditerrane). Tis is the
frst instance where the link between land and language is elaborated in terms
that directly intersect with Agambens work. Te voice-over cites from a letter
written by Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem to Franz Rosenzweig in Berlin: Te
country is like a volcano. A day will come when language will turn on those
who speak it. Dated December 1926, Scholems premonition comes a year afer
British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfourauthor of the Balfour Declarationhad
laid the foundation stone at the Hebrew University, an institution committed to
turn Hebrew into the living language of the Zionist homeland.
In Agambian terms, such a confation of language and national identity
means that humans are separated by what unites them.
55
Te trinity of land,
language and people alienates and uproots, all peoples from their vital dwelling
in language.
56
As was noted at the outset of this essay, this dwelling place, in
Agambens own assessment, marks the terrain toward which all his work gravi-
tates. In equally explicit terms, he notes that this terrain constitutes a veritable
terra incognita: We do not have, in fact, the slightest idea of what either a people
or a language is.
57
Nonetheless, all of our political culture is based on the
relation between these two notions.
58
Tis means that our modern nation states
are based on the confation of two culturally contingent categoriespeople and
languageand that this alliance is the source from where it derives its power and
authority. Terefore, a people without a state, whether the Wandering Jew, the
Vanishing American, or the Palestinian refugee, can be oppressed and extermi-
nated without impunity, so as to make clear that the destiny of a people can only
be state identity and that the concept of people makes sense only if recodifed
within the concept of citizenship.
59
Agamben continues by addressing the most
pressing example of such an imaginary
60
summoned through the confation of
a chosen people with a hallowed land by means of a liturgical language:
Te vicious entwining of language, people, and the state appears particularly
evident in the case of Zionism. A movement that wanted to constitute the
people par excellence (Israel) as a state took it upon itself, for this very reason,
to reactualize a purely cult language (Hebrew) that had been replaced in daily
use by other languages and dialects (Ladino, Yiddish). In the eyes of the keepers
226 Cinema and Agamben
of tradition, however, precisely this reactualization of the sacred language
appeared to be a grotesque profanity, upon which language would have taken
revenge one day. (On December 26, 1926, Gershom Scholem writes to Franz
Rosenzweig from Jerusalem: We live in our language like blind men walking
the edge of an abyss. Tis language is laden with future catastrophes. Te
day will come when it will turn against those who speak it.)
61
Te reference to Scholem shared by Agamben and Godard speaks of a mutual
concern: that what remains hidden from us is not something beyond language,
some transcendental referent, but language itself. Scholems letter pertains at
once to the motif of the blindfold that Godard repeatedly has invoked in relation
to the constellation of Musulman and Juif,
62
and to a key tenet of Agamben
expressed in the following aphorism: humans see the world through language
but do not see language.
63
Yet, he insists, it is only in a vision of language
64
that
a true community is imaginable.
It is precisely on a vision of language, not as an avenger but as a prospect of peace,
that we will conclude. Tis vision, which transpires a mere few minutes later in
Film socialisme, directly counterpoints the earlier imagery of the Mediterranean
strewn with wire, as well as Scholems foreboding. Again, the scene is preceded
through a reference to linguistic theory: During his second course at the New
School in New York during the winter of 42-43, Roman Jacobson demonstrated
how it is impossible to separate sound from meaning and that only the notion of
phoneme allows us to resolve this. Ten, shifing from a male to a female voice-
over: Writing for two voices is only successful when dissonance is introduced
by a common note. On the multilayered soundtrack, we frst hear a girls voice
chanting from the Koran, then a second voice chanting from the Talmud. Te
voices blend together over images drawn from Agns Vardas flm Les Plages
dAgns (Te Beaches of Agns, 2008) showing trapeze artists performing against
the brilliant blue screen of the Mediterranean. Te bodies are not only suspended
in air, but also between languages. Godard stop-starts the sequence into a series
of mesmerizing stills. Te act of capture and release performed by the fyer
and the catcher are, in turn, captured and released by the montage. Captured
in image and released into gesture, the cavorting bodies exhibit, if only for a
matter of seconds, what Agamben refers to as, the media character of corporal
movements, that is, the being-in-language of human beings.
65
In interviews, Godard has referred to the trapeze act as an image of peace in
the Middle East. An image of peace, properly speaking, would be an oxymoron
Remnants of Palestine, or, Archaeology afer Auschwitz 227
for Agamben, since the realm of images, signs and appearances are always
a site of struggle for recognition. Te sign that seals the deal between two
adversariesthe handshake, the emblematic photo opportunity of a peace
treatiseposits a sign of mutual recognition. Such a peace, Agamben insists,
is only and always a peace amongst states and of the law, a fction of the recog-
nition of an identity in language, which comes from war and will end in war.
66
Peace, on the contrary, is the fact that we cannot recognize ourselves in any
sign or image.
67
Te pilgrimages addressed abovethe failures to conjure an
image of Palestine recounted by Pasolini and Godard, or the unbreakable and
everlasting confation of the place of Israel and the will of its people conjured
by Lanzmannbespeak of this struggle for recognition in diferent ways. Te
preeminent gesture in Agamben is always a gesture beyond images, phantasms,
and appearances, forging a path out of this battlefeld.
Tis leaves us to consider, one last time, the relation between language and
place purported by Agamben. Such a connection is summoned in Godards
reference to Roman Jacobsons phonology, which holds a central position
in Agambens linguistic thinking. Belonging neither to the semiotic order
of national languages, nor to the semantic order of speech, the phoneme is
what enables a passage between these two regions. It is also where all national
languages intersect. Tese ideas are elaborated on numerous occasions, most
Figure 10.5 Trapeze artists from Agns Vardas Les Plages dAgns (Te Beaches of Agns, 2008) in
Film socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010).
228 Cinema and Agamben
emphatically, perhaps, in Infancy and History where Agamben, in a charac-
teristic manner, expounds on the phoneme in spatial terms. Phonemes are
located, in a site which can perhaps best be described only in its topology []
on the boundary between two simultaneously continuous and discontinuous
dimensions.
68
Tis is not the only time Agamben takes recourse to topology.
In fact, topology is precisely what may facilitate a glimpse of the taking place
of language, of its exteriority. Topology is invoked in the frst pages of Stanzas
when Agamben frst announces that we must learn to grasp place as something
more original than space. Te reference to topology appears again in his essay
on the Palestinian refugees. Here he suggests that a transformation of place
is already underway, for the no-mans land on the snowbound border to
Lebanon, to which this community of remnants has been expelled, act[s] back
onto the territory of the state of Israel by perforating it and altering it in such
a way that the image of that snowy mountain has become more internal to it
than any other region of Eretz Israel.
69
Te margin retroacts on the center,
rupturing its imaginary unity. He goes on to propose that this decreation of
territory, where space begins to contract and contort, could be extrapolated
as the template to imagine a new form of extraterritorial coexistence: Tis
space would coincide neither with any of the homogenous national territories
nor with their topographical sum, but would rather act on them by articulating
and perforating them topologically as in the Klein bottle or in the Mbius strip,
where exterior and interior in-determine each other.
70
Te notion of space as
a static container for a people or a language is cast into crisis if we can bring
space itself into visibility. From this vantage point, topology is to topography
what gesture is to the image. It is characteristic of Agambens writing in general
that he locates possibility precisely where such a prospect seems least likely to
transpire. In reality, as we know, the two decades that have passed since he wrote
We Refugees have engendered an unprecedented proliferation of borders
carved through all dimensions of space. Tough, as Agamben himself notes,
topological exploration is constantly oriented in the light of utopia.
71
In the same sense that topology may transform our experience of place,
not as something given but as indeterminate and open to contingency, it may
also bring us to the outside of language. For while language is the original site
of the subject, this origin does not belong to us, as we receive language from
outside ourselves. It is, then, only by pushing toward the boundary of language
and perceiving its limits that we may renounce the idea of origin as an essence
or substance, as something that has taken place in chronological time. A true
Remnants of Palestine, or, Archaeology afer Auschwitz 229
community, that is, a community which isnt founded upon the presupposition
of belonging to an identityreligious, ethnic, linguistic, or otherwisecan
only unfurl from the empty space between voice and language.
72
Archaeology
should not seek to uncover a buried link between people, soil, and language,
but between community and communicability. Only then could it prepare the
ground for a community that doesnt stake a claim of belonging in language, but
on its borders.
Notes
1 Maurice Halbwachs, Te Legendary Topography of the Gospel in the Holy Land,
in On Collective Memory (Chicago: Te University of Chicago Press, 1992 [1941]),
193235, 206.
2 Robert S. C. Gordon, Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity (Clarendon Press: Oxford,
1996), 207.
3 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Te Written Language of Reality, in Heretical Empiricism, ed.
Louise K. Barnett (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988),
197222, 197; Giorgio Agamben, What is a Paradigm? Lecture at European
Graduate School, August 2002. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/agamben/agamben-
what-is-a-paradigm2002.html [accessed August 26, 2013].
4 Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Roland
L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993 [1977]), xviii.
5 Ibid., xix.
6 Giorgio Agamben, Parody, Profanations, trans. Jef Fort (Zone Books: New York,
2007 [2005]) 3751, 41, 49.
7 Ibid., 50.
8 Ibid., 51.
9 Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz
Heron (London and New York: Verso, 2007 [1978]), 6.
10 As quoted in Millicent Marcus, Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary
Adaptation (Te Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London, 1993), 117.
11 Giorgio Agamben, Te Signature of All Tings: On Method, trans. Luca DIsanto
and Kevin Attell (New York: Zone Books, 2009 [2008]), 84.
12 Ibid., 110.
13 Ibid.
14 Noa Steimatsky, Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema
(University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2008), 11765.
230 Cinema and Agamben
15 Sam Rohdie, Te Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1995), 6.
16 Giorgio Agamben, Te Time Tat Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the
Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005 [2000]), 57.
17 Tis phrase concludes Pasolinis short documentary Te Walls of Sanaa (1974),
pleading to UNESCO to preserve the ancient South Yemen capital. Pasolini
originally referred to his work as a force from the past in a poem from the
published script of Mama Roma, later recited by Orson Welles in La ricotta (1962).
Here Welles, who had recently narrated Nicholas Rays King of Kings (1961),
appears as Pasolinis alter-ego on the production set of a New Testament epos shot
on the peripheries of Rome. La ricotta, ofen read as a prequel to Il Vangelo, was
prosecuted and condemned for blasphemy.
18 Oswald Stack, Pasolini on Pasolini: Interviews with Oswald Stack (London: Tames
and Hudson, 1969), 76.
19 See Libby Saxtons Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust
(London: Wallfower Press, 2008), 4667.
20 Grard Wajcman, Saint Paul Godard contre Mose Lanzmann, Le Monde,
December 3, 1998: https://sites.google.com/site/dossierjeanlucgodard/2-flmer-
apres-auschwitz/wajcman
21 Cahiers du Cinma (no. 300, May 1979), 17.
22 Claude Lanzmann, Te Patagonian Hare: A Memoir (London: Atlantic Books,
2012), 389.
23 Ibid., 411.
24 Marc Chevrie and Herv Le Roux, Site and Speech: An Interview with Claude
Lanzmann about Shoah, in Shoah: Key Essays, ed. Stuart Liebman (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 39.
25 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: Te Witness and the Archive, trans.
Daniel Heller-Rosein (New York: Zone Books, 2000 [1999]), 13.
26 Ibid., 11, 13.
27 Ibid., 35.
28 Ibid., 85.
29 Ibid., 69.
30 Ibid., 130.
31 Ibid., 139 (Emphasis in the original).
32 Chevrie and Le Roux, 39.
33 Lanzmann, Te Patagonian Hare, 419.
34 Ibid., 424.
35 Ibid., 427.
36 Chevrie and Le Roux, Site and Speech, 424.
Remnants of Palestine, or, Archaeology afer Auschwitz 231
37 Simone de Beauvoir, preface to Shoah: Te Complete Text (New York: DaCapo
Press, 1995), iii.
38 Lanzmann, Te Patagonian Hare, 473.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
41 Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings,
Volume 4; Volumes 19381940, Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds)
(Harvard University Press, 2003) 389400, 395.
42 Lanzmann, Te Patagonian Hare, 489.
43 Im referring here to Margaret Olins proposal that Lanzmann replaces the icon
with the index. See Margaret Olin, Lanzmanns Shoah and the Topography of the
Holocaust Film, Representations, no. 57 (Winter 1997): 123, 17.
44 Chevrie and Le Roux, 40.
45 Lanzmann cited by Michael DArcy in Claude Lanzmanns Shoah and the
Intentionality of the Image, Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics,
Memory, David Bathrick, Brad Pager and Michael D. Richardson (eds) (Camden
House: Rochester, New York: 2008), 13861, 141.
46 Lanzmann cited by DArcy. Ibid., 142.
47 Lanzmann, Te Patagonian Hare, 475.
48 Im drawing here from Margaret Olins insight: Te ending of Shoah conforms to
an ofcial Israeli discourse that understands the Holocaust primarily in its role as
the foundation of the Israeli state. See, Olin, Lanzmanns Shoah, 13.
49 Claude Lanzmann, La Tombe Du Divin Plongeur (Gallimard: Paris, 2012), 367. My
translation.
50 Lanzmann, Te Patagonian Hare, 492.
51 Ibid., 5067.
52 Lanzmann cited by Georges Didi-Huberman in Images in Spite of All: Four
Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
2008), 93.
53 Agamben borrows the epigraphs for both his studies of the remnant from the Book
of Isaiah: for Te Time that Remains: Watchman, what is lef of the night? (Isa.
21.11); and for Remnants of Auschwitz: Te remnant shall be saved (Isa. 10.22).
54 For a discussion on these two photographs in the context of Sanbars book,
see Roland-Franois Lacks A Photograph and a Camera: Two Objects in Film
socialisme in Vertigo (no. 30, Spring 2012). Te role of photographic images in
Godards book Film socialisme (2010) is also addressed in James S. Williamss
Entering the Desert: Te Book of Film socialisme in the same issue.
55 Giorgio Agamben, Te Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (University of
Minnesota Press: Minneapolis and London, 1993 [1990]), 82.
232 Cinema and Agamben
56 Ibid., 83.
57 Giorgio Agamben, Languages and People [1995] in Means Without End: Notes
on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (University of Minnesota
Press: Minneapolis, 2000), 6370, 65.
58 Ibid., 66.
59 Ibid., 678.
60 Ibid., 67.
61 Ibid., 68. Scholems letter is also cited in Te Time Tat Remains, 5.
62 Grnewalds painting of the blindfolded Christ has previously appeared in the
frst episode of Histoire(s), framed by the Fedayeen woman patrolling the fence in
Ici et ailleurson the soundtrack, from the same flm, a child reciting Mahmud
Darwishs poem I Will Resistand footage of the corpse being dragged in
a concentration camp, with the superimposed black lettering of JUIF and
MUSULMAN.
63 Giorgio Agamben, Te Idea of Language in Potentialities: Collected Essays in
Philosophy, ed. and trans. Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1999), 3947, 40.
64 Ibid., 47 (Emphasis in the original).
65 Giorgio Agamben, Notes on Gesture, Means Without End, 58, 59.
66 Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1995 [1985]), 812.
67 Ibid., 82.
68 Agamben, Infancy and History, 67.
69 Giorgio Agamben, We Refugees, Symposium, 1995, no. 49 (2) summer, translated
by Michael Rocke. 11419. Te essay also appears in a new translation, and with
the new title, in Means without Ends. For sake of consistency, Im quoting here
from the latter version, Beyond Human Rights, in Means without Ends, 256.
70 Ibid., 25.
71 Agamben, Stanzas, xix.
72 Agamben, Infancy and History, 10.
Notes on Contributors
Silvia Casini is a postdoctoral fellow at Ca Foscari University (Venice,
Italy) Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage. She was awarded an
AHRC-funded PhD in Visual Studies and Film by Queens University, Belfast
(UK). Her research interests include, among others, the cross-fertilization
between cinema and the visual arts, aesthetics and epistemology of scientifc
visualization, and public engagement with science through the arts. Her
essays have appeared in Confgurations, Contemporary Aesthetics, Leonardo,
Museologia Scientifca, Museums ETC, Tecnoscienza. She has recently
published the chapter Te Scan-portrait: Geographies and Geometries of
Perception for the edited book Te Atomized Body: the Cultural Life of Genes,
Stem Cells and Neurons (Nordic Academic Press, 2012) and is currently
completing her frst monograph for Mimesis Edizioni.
Joo Mrio Grilo is a flmmaker and Professor of Film Studies and Film
Directing at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He has written and directed
several features and documentaries, among them Te Kings Trial, Te End of
the World, Eyes of Asia, Te Flying Carpet, Our Home. As a flm researcher, he
wrote the following books (published in Portuguese): Te Order in Cinema,
Te Imagined Man, Te Cinema of Non-Illusion, Cinema Lessons, and Te Book
of Images. At the Philosophy of Language Institute, he directs a research group
on Film and Philosophy and he is currently conducting personal research on
flm, landscape and memory.
Asbjrn Grnstad is Professor of Visual Culture at the University of Bergen.
He is the founding Director of Nomadikon: Te Bergen Center of Visual
Culture. Among his most recent publications is Ethics and Images of Pain
(co-edited with Henrik Gustafsson, Routledge 2012). He is currently at work
on a project tentatively entitled Film and the Ethical Imagination.
Henrik Gustafsson is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Troms and
a member of the Nomadikon Centre of Visual Culture. His book Out of Site:
234 Notes on Contributors
Landscape and Cultural Refexivity in New Hollywood Cinema, 19691974
(VDM, 2008) is an interdisciplinary study on flm, fne arts and cultural
memory. Together with Asbjrn Grnstad, he has edited the volume Ethics
and Images of Pain (Routledge, 2012). Recent publications appear in Journal
of Visual Culture (April 2013), A Companion to Film Noir (Wiley-Blackwell,
2013) and Te Films of Claire Denis: Intimacy on the Border (I.B. Tauris, 2014).
Gustafsson is currently working on a new project entitled Crime Scenery: Te
Art of War and the Aferlife of Landscape.
Janet Harbord writes on flm, philosophy and media archaeology. Her
interests are in the shifing ontology of what we take flm to be and the
various ways in which ideas of flm have been stabilized at diferent historical
moments. She is the author of Film Cultures (2002), Te Evolution of Film
(2007), and Chris Marker: La Jete (2009), and is currently working on a
book-length project, Ex-centric Cinema: Agamben, flm and archaeology.
She is Professor of Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London.
Trond Lundemo is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the Department of
Media Studies at Stockholm University. He has been a visiting Professor and
visiting scholar at the Seijo University of Tokyo on fve occasions between
2002 and 2012, and he is a member of the steering committee of the European
Network of Cinema and Media Studies. He is co-directing the Stockholm
University Graduate School of Aesthetics and is the co-editor of the book
series Film Teory in Media History at Amsterdam University Press. He is
also afliated with the research projects Time, Memory and Representation
at Sdertrns University College, Sweden, and Te Archive in Motion
at Oslo University. His research and publications engage in questions of
technology, aesthetics and intermediality as well as the theory of the archive.
Benjamin Noys is Reader in English at the University of Chichester. He is the
author of Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (2000), Te Culture of Death
(2005), Te Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Teory
(2010), and editor of Communization and Its Discontents (2011).
Libby Saxton is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Queen Mary, University
of London. She is author of Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the
Holocaust (Wallfower, 2008) and co-author, with Lisa Downing, of Film and
Notes on Contributors 235
Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters (Routledge, 2010). She is also co-editor, with
Simon Kemp, of Seeing Tings: Vision, Perception and Interpretation in French
Studies (Peter Lang, 2002) and, with Axel Bangert and Robert S. C. Gordon,
of Holocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium
(Legenda, 2013).
Garrett Stewart, the James O. Freedman Professor of Letters at the University
of Iowa, has had previous teaching appointments at Boston University,
the University of California (Santa Barbara), Stanford, Princeton, and the
University of Fribourg, Switzlerland. He is the author of several books on
Victorian fction, narrative theory, poetics, flm, and art practice, including
most recently Framed Time: Toward a Postflmic Cinema (2007), Novel
Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction (2009; Chinese translation,
2013), winner of the Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study
of Narrative, and Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art (2011). He
was elected in 2010 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Pasi Vliaho teaches and writes on theory and history of flm and screen
media. He has a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Turku, Finland,
and is Senior Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at the Department of
Media & Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London. His 2010
publication, Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Tought and Cinema circa
1900 (Amsterdam University Press) plotted the implication of the medium in
contemporaneous arts, science and philosophy to redefne the cinema as one
of the most important anthropological processes of modernity. His articles
have been published in Teory, Culture & Society, Space & Culture, Parallax,
Teory & Event and Symplok.
James S. Williams is Professor of Modern French Literature and Film at
Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of (among others) Te
Erotics of Passage: Pleasure, Politics, and Form in the Later Work of Marguerite
Duras (1997), Te Cinema of Jean Cocteau (2006), and Jean Cocteau (a
Critical Life) (2008). He is also co-editor of Te Cinema Alone: essays on
the work of Jean-Luc Godard 19852000 (2000), Gender and French Cinema
(2001), For Ever Godard: the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard (2004), Jean-Luc
Godard. Documents (2006) (catalogue of the Godard exhibition held at the
Centre Pompidou, Paris), and May 68: Rethinking Frances Last Revolution
236 Notes on Contributors
(2011). In 2011 he recorded an audio commentary for a new edition of
Orphe by Criterion, and his latest book, Space and Being in Contemporary
French Cinema, was published in 2013 by Manchester University Press. He is
currently working on a new monograph project entitled Reclaiming Beauty:
post-political aesthetics in francophone African cinema.
Index
A page reference in italics denotes a fgure
Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science
(Agamben) 6, 86n. 10, 87n. 20
actors 2034, 208, 208
divo and 22
persona and 201
Adorno, Teodor W. 4, 142, 192
advertising
pornography and 94
stoppage and 93
type and 20
aesthetics 434, 456 see also individual
terms
Agamben, Giorgio 13, 8, 15, 89, 92, 161,
1623
actor 2034, 208, 208
animal and human themes 72, 73
saved night 96
community and 160n. 38
divo and 8, 22, 23
individual and 223
history and 25
location and 2089
persona and 201
praxis and 78
type and 1920
individual and 19, 20
see also individual terms
Allemagne 90 neuf zero (Godard) 224
Amour (Haneke) 176, 181, 186
black screen 177, 179, 1845
death 1767, 179, 1804, 186
guilt 184
montage 17980, 182
narrative 1778, 1823, 1856
profanation 177, 1789
repetition 185
angels 20
anthropological machine 712, 117
apocalyptic themes 25, 50n. 20, 151, 154
capitalism and 30
communication and 30
see also death
apparatus see dispositif
appearance 5, 73, 227
Arcades Project, Te (Benjamin) 86n. 4
archaeology 210, 212, 216, 2212
language and 21011, 212, 216, 217,
229
location and 210, 216
archive 196, 1978, 199
knowledge 198
lacunae 202, 204
vision and non-vision 202
language 2201
memory and 195
montage 197, 198, 199200, 2012, 203
photography 195, 1967
profanation 222
remnants 196
testimony and 192, 193, 195, 196
voice-over 198
witnesses and 1923, 1956, 198, 2001,
216
Arendt, Hannah 120n. 27
Aristotle 812, 150
work and 57
art 3, 12, 47n. 3, 61, 667, 74, 1223, 1246,
147, 181, 182, 184, 224, 232n. 62
death and 17982
love and 60
movement 1589n. 22
neurological body 1045, 106
neurological gaze 104, 1056
phantasms 6
sculpture 144
sex 65
spirituality 656
stillness 59, 601, 62
238 Index
vision
instability and 136n. 14
non-vision and 126
see also montage; photography; video
Auschwitz 215
archive 197
witnesses 14, 21516
Babinski, Joseph 1045, 112
Bachelard, Gaston 46
Blazs, Bla 107
ballet 1301, 1323
bare cinema 122
bare life 90, 111, 116
neurological body 111
Barthes, Roland 745
Bartleby the Scrivener (Melville) 1501
Baudelaire, Charles 20, 23n. 1, 46
Bazin, Andr 38, 1567n. 1, 195
Bell, Catherine 1289
Benjamin, Walter 19, 234n. 1, 845, 91,
93, 163
language 86n. 4
optical unconscious 116, 1634
photography 163
saved night and 96
Bergala, Alain 49, 58, 667
Bilder der Welt und Inschrif des Krieges
(Farocki) 195
biopolitics 111, 116, 119n. 19
gesture and 1034, 112, 118
ethics and 8, 58
see also individual terms
bios 111, 11617, 195
Birth of a Nation, Te (Grifth) 223
black screen 176, 177, 179, 184, 185
repetition 184
white screen and 1845, 189n. 34
Boom (Claerbout) 78
Bordeaux Piece (Claerbout) 80
boredom 96
Boulevard du Temple (Daguerre) 76, 77,
84, 85
bourgeois themes 43, 133, 134, 172
repetition 1701
Bresson, Robert 52n. 27
Broch, Hermann 32
Brouillet, Andr 1045, 107
Cach (Haneke) 1712, 174, 175
narrative 174
profanation 1756
repetition 1734
video 1701, 1723, 1745, 188n. 26
capitalism 30, 55, 97
capture and 11, 8990
comedy and 109
Casini, Silvia 1213, 13960
Cavell, Stanley 1, 15n. 4, 121
Cayrol, Jean 198
Charcot, Jean-Martin 1112, 104
neurological body and 12, 105, 107
Cheyenne Autumn (Ford) 2223
children 478n. 3
innocence and 52n. 30
rights 534n. 38
Chimes at Midnight (Welles) 1867n. 1
Christianity 64, 82, 147, 148, 150, 208
instant 82
language 21011
location and 207
remnants and 2078, 211
sex 65
spirituality and 64, 656
work 64
see also messianism
chronophotography 107, 108
Cicero 142
cin-trance 128, 1367n. 23
rituals and 128, 12933, 131, 132,
137n. 33
Cinema and History (Agamben) 89,
256, 47n. 1
Claerbout, David 1011, 745
photography 756, 78
video 80, 85
Clark, T. J. 182
Clinical Lesson at the Salptrire, A
(Brouillet) 104, 1046
close-ups 35, 3940, 59, 107
cognition 51n. 20
Colebrook, Claire 1223
colonialism 21011, 2223
Coma (Michael Crichton) 97
comedy 30, 1089
persona 21
projection and 389
Index 239
silence 38
Coming Community, Te (Agamben) 5,
48n. 4
commedia dellarte 21
communication 112, 120n. 27
explicit and implicit themes 86n. 10
non-communication and 30, 31, 34, 49n.
13, 80, 85
persuasion 120n. 27
see also language; silence
Confdential Report (Welles) 22
continuity 1301, 1323
continuum 81, 82, 834
points 83
counterfactual 164, 166, 170, 1746, 178,
1823, 186
Cowie, Elizabeth 137n. 30
Crary, Jonathan 1245, 126, 136n. 14
cutting 56, 1867n. 1
repetition and 173
Daguerre, Louis 767, 84, 87n. 19
dance 1523, 153
music and 1301, 1323, 152
Daney, Serge 9, 25
Dans la serre (Manet) 1246, 125, 127,
136n. 14
Dante 159n. 27
darkness 152, 154, 176, 177, 179, 184, 185,
195
light and 1845
repetition 184
vision and non-vision 154, 1545, 2023
de la Durantaye, Leland 3, 64
De lorigine du XXIe sicle (Godard) 199
death 312, 1767, 1789, 1801, 1824
darkness and 176, 184
fxed-frame shots 172, 179
fashback 183, 184
light and 334
location and 184
music and 37
neomorts 97
silence and 42
sof focus shot 183
stillness 17980
stoppage and 178
vision and non-vision 1812, 186
see also apocalyptic themes; Shoah
Death of Virgil, Te (Broch) 31, 32, 36, 37,
39, 412
Debord, Guy 29, 11, 13, 259, 45, 723,
89, 938, 133, 141, 145, 1623, 1656,
182, 185
black screen 1845
montage 28
nostalgia and 945
repetition and 145, 162
spectacle; spectacular societies;
spectacularization 3, 7, 11, 27, 89,
945
stoppage and 93
Debray, Rgis 166, 181
video 1667
decreation 45, 26
potentiality and 645
see also individual terms
Deleuze, Gilles 14, 13, 26, 28, 89, 90, 92,
1211, 141, 1618, 175, 185
black screen 1845, 189n. 34
movement and 163
movement-image 2, 13, 47n. 3, 92, 163,
165, 175, 181
narrative 188n. 25
time-image 92, 161, 1656, 174, 182
Derrida, Jacques 72, 192
desubjectivation 1314, 167
des Lysses, Chlo 96
dtournement 27, 48n. 4, 94, 166, 173
Didi-Huberman, Georges 14, 104, 1968,
200, 2012, 216
Diference and Repetition (Agamben) 3,
5, 27, 723, 163
disappearance 5
dispositif 13, 112, 1435, 155, 156, 158n. 12
movement 144, 145
profanation and 140, 1456
thermal camera 154
thermal camera 1534
tripod 128
Doane, Mary Ann 556
Don Quixote (Welles) 141
innocence and 52n. 30
projection and 141
profanation 146
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 42
240 Index
dunamis 57, 60, 63
Dziga Vertov Group 21213, 214, 220
El Greco 656
elitism 978
energia 57, 5960, 63, 150
enjoyment 901
Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople,
Te (Delacroix) 61
ergon 579
ethics 5, 78, 29, 140
aesthetics and 434, 456
gesture and 7, 8, 29
biopolitics and 8, 58
see also individual terms
ethnicity 172, 175, 21112, 223
language 223
see also Jewish issues
etymology 142, 157n. 6
exclusion 41 see also remnants
Fable and History (Agamben) 88n. 41
fascism 211 see also Shoah
fashion
stoppage and 93
type and 20
Fedayeen 213, 222
language and 221
location and 222
Muselmann and 2223, 232n. 62
Felman, Shoshana 215
flm-of-life 97
flm philosophy 1, 1212 see also
individual terms
Film socialisme (Godard) 223, 224, 224, 227
intertitles 224
language 223, 225, 226
location and 224
montage 226
photography 2235
remnants 2223
rights 534n. 38
voice-over 2245, 226
fxed-frame shots 172, 179
fashback 165, 174, 1778, 183, 184
twist and 167, 168
vision and non-vision 1679
vision and non-vision 177
ficker efect 162
focus pulls 35, 36
footprint roll method 10910
For an Ethics of the Cinema (Agamben)
8, 1924
Foucault, Michel 2, 11, 89, 90, 1056,
11112, 114, 1434, 146, 1926, 202,
210
neurological body and 106, 112
testimony and 1934
framing 59, 152
France/tour/dtour/deux/enfants (Godard)
28, 478n. 3
rights 53n. 38
gait 80, 110, 111, 113
automaticity and 11011
footprint roll method 10910
vision 110
gesture 7, 33, 46, 47n. 3, 58, 90, 109,
122, 123, 1267, 134, 139, 141, 156,
203
biopolitics and 1034, 112, 118
capture and 91
ethics and 7, 8, 29
biopolitics and 8, 58
etymology and 142, 157n. 6
see also individual terms
ghosts 67
Gilbreth, Frank B. 556
Gilles de la Tourette, Georges 80, 109,
11011
Glass, Philip 144
glory 3
Godard, Jean-Luc 910, 25, 26, 278, 33,
34, 41, 434, 45, 46, 47n. 1, 478n. 3,
50n. 20, 52n. 27, 61, 67, 124, 198, 199,
21213, 221
communication and 30, 49n. 13
explicit and implicit themes 38
focus pulls 36
language 21415, 220
location and 1415
messianism 29
montage 25, 28, 445, 199200, 201,
202, 203
movement and 589
music and 37
Index 241
optimism and 46, 523n. 30
projection and 53n. 30
poetry and 323, 456
projection and 389, 512n. 25
repetition and 40
rights and 534n. 38
sentimentality and 46, 501n. 20
silence and 9
grace 623
Grandrieux, Philippe 2, 13, 139, 151,
1536, 159n. 30
dispositif 1534, 156
Grandville, J. J. 109
gravity 623
Greeting, Te (Viola) 13, 13940, 147, 149,
156
profanation 1478, 150
Grifth, David Wark (Grifth, D. W.) 103,
223
Grilo, Joo Mrio 12, 12138
Grnstad, Asbjrn 117
guilt 184
Gustafsson, Henrik 117, 20732
Halbwachs, Maurice 207, 208, 229n. 1
Hand Catching Lead (Serra) 13940, 156
dispositif 13, 1445
Haneke, Michael 1314, 182, 185, 186
happiness 96
Harbord, Janet 1011, 55, 7188
hatred 93, 94
Heidegger, Martin 4, 5, 90
Histoire(s) du cinma (Godard) 25, 26, 27,
29, 50n. 20, 53n. 34, 124, 198, 199,
201
apocalyptic themes 25, 50n. 20
knowledge 51n. 20
messianism 28
montage 89, 25, 44, 56, 223
sentimentality and 501n. 20
silence and 40
video 50n. 20
Holocaust see Shoah
Homo Sacer (Agamben) 3, 90, 195
hysteria 12, 105
movement 105, 107, 113
neurological gaze 12, 104, 104, 105
threshold 11112
Ici et ailleurs (Godard and Miville) 213,
221, 222
archive 222
language 221
montage 2212
remnants 221
Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (Pasolini) 2034,
208, 208
archaeology 21011
location and 2078
In Girum (Debord)
advertising 93, 94
commentary 93
fashion 93
rapture and 94
In the Conservatory (Manet) 1246, 125,
127, 136n. 14
industry 55, 56, 57
movement 5960, 64, 66
spirituality and 66
parody 64
Infancy and History (Agamben) 3, 71,
86n. 2, 209, 2278
innocence 42
projection and 52n. 30
instant
continuum and 81, 82, 834
points 83
points 83
intertitles 224
Its a Wonderful Life (Capra) 97
Jacobson, Roman 2267
Je vous salue Marie (Godard) 65
Jewish issues 213, 218
homeland and 225 see also Zionist-
Palestine issues
remnants and 211
see also Shoah
JLG/JLGautoportrait de dcembre
(Godard) 224
Judgment Day (Agamben) 76
Jusqu la victoire (Godard and Gorin)
21213
Kafa, Franz 91
adaptations 912
enjoyment and 901
242 Index
kairological time 83, 84, 88n. 41
legibility and 845
movement 76
paradigm and 74
Kantor, Alfred 195
Kember, Sarah 56
Kindergarten Antonio SantElia (Claerbout)
756
King Lear (Godard) 30, 49n. 11
death 42
montage 49n. 11
music 43
poetry 32, 50n. 17
silence 42, 43, 44, 49n. 11
stop-start motion 424
Kingdom and the Glory, Te (Agamben) 3
Kittler, Friedrich 110, 119n. 12, 192
Kjelln, Rudolf 119n. 19
Klossowski, Pierre 97
knowledge 106, 197, 198
cognition 51n. 20
Kommerell (Agamben) 7980
La Condition ouvrire (Weil) 62, 63, 64
La Pesanteur et la grce (Weil) 624, 65
La ricotta (Pasolini) 230n. 17
La Vie nouvelle (Grandrieux) 13, 13940,
151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 159n. 27
apocalyptic themes 151, 154
darkness 152, 154, 155
dispositif 1534
movement 152, 153, 153
profanation 154
zoom shots 152
labor see work
language 23, 32, 71, 72, 86n. 4, 142, 192,
193, 194, 195, 209, 21819, 2201,
223, 226
animal and human 712, 86n. 2
etymology 142, 157n. 6
lacunae 1967
location and 1415, 209, 21011, 212,
21415, 216, 217, 219, 220, 2256,
2289
fascism and 211
remnants 15, 220, 225
memory 192
movement and 142
parody 209, 223
phonemes 2278
remnants 21516, 222
speechless 142
vision and non-vision 226
Lanier, Jaron 195
Lanzmann, Claude 212, 213, 214
archaeology and 216, 217
archive and 216
language 217, 220
location and 1415, 217
witnesses 198
Leave Her to Heaven (Stahl) 22
legibility 845
Leutrat, Jean-Louis 66
Les Matres fous (Rouche) 137n. 30
Les petites misres de la vie humaine
(Grandville) 109
Les Plages dAgns (Varda) 227
montage 226
Les Rita Mitsouko 33, 37
Levi, Primo 193, 206
Levitt, Deborah 16n. 5, 135n. 4, 8
Life of Pi, Te (Lee) 16870
Life of Pi, Te (Martel) 188n. 25
light 334
darkness and 1845
vision and non-vision 2023
repetition and 801
soundtrack and 42
LImage (Reverdy) 32, 50n. 17
Londe, Albert 107
love
innocence and 42, 52n. 30
work and 60, 64
Lumire brothers 109, 1578n. 10
Lundemo, Trond 14, 191205
make-up 20
Malraux, Andr 50n. 15
death and 31, 37
Man With a Movie Camera (Vertov) 127
Man Without Content, Te (Agamben) 3
Manet, douard 12, 1246, 136n. 14
Marey, tienne-Jules 135n. 8
Masculin fminine (Jean-Luc Godard) 60
McCrea, Christian 48n. 4, 122
memory 49n. 11, 191, 192, 195
Index 243
repetition and 4, 26, 165, 171, 172,
1756
fashback 165, 1679, 174
music 183
testimony and 191, 1923
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 121, 142, 160n. 36
messianism 26, 28, 29
salvation and 25, 31, 90, 967, 989
saved night 96
metaphysics 23, 89
points 83
Metz, Christian 1723
Michaud, Philippe Alain 143
Miville, Anne-Marie 47, 58, 213, 2202
Mnemosyne Atlas (Warburg) 6, 89
Mocking of Christ, Te (Grnewald) 224,
224, 232n. 62
Modern Times (Chaplin) 64
montage 89, 25, 41, 45, 49n. 11, 56, 127,
197, 198, 199, 201
archaeology and 2212
capture and 226
death and 17980, 182
framing 152
lacunae 202, 203
memory 49n. 11
messianism 28
photography and 2012
poetry and 323
projection and 41
repetition and 401
racial issues 223
silence 445
stoppage and 199, 200
vision and non-vision 199200
voice-over 2212
witnesses and 202
Morgan, Daniel 51n. 21
focus pulls 35
Morrey, Douglas 60, 64
Morse, Samuel 77, 87n. 19
movement 5860, 63, 64, 78, 106, 108,
108, 11213, 1401, 143, 1578n. 10,
2001
automaticity and 11314, 114, 115, 116,
117, 11718
dance 1301, 1323, 1523, 153
gait 80, 10911, 113
language and 142
looped 79
neurological gaze 1078
repetition 144, 145
slow motion 148
stillness and 10, 58, 59, 602, 65, 66, 76,
7980, 91, 923, 105, 147, 1589n.
22, 163, 17980
close-ups 59
framing 59
neurological gaze 105
repetition 164
vision and non-vision 77, 1634
stoppage and 178
stop-start motion 424
vision and non-vision 78, 153
multi-format flm 92
Mulvey, Laura 65, 68n. 14, 87n. 23
Mnsterberg, Hugo 189n. 34
Murray, Alex ix, 160n. 38, 165n. 5, 142
Murray, Timothy 49n. 11
Muselmann 14, 214, 216
archive and 199
Fedayeen and 2223, 232n. 62
language and 1415, 21415, 226
vision and non-vision 192
witnesses and 193, 194
music 33, 367, 38, 43, 183
dance and 1301, 1323, 152
focus pulls 36
silence and 40
Muybridge, Eadweard 80
Nancy, Jean-Luc 45
narrative 1314, 30, 34, 1656, 175, 1856,
188n. 25
animal and human themes 188n. 25
character and 1723
fashback 167, 168, 1778
religion and 16970
repetition 1679, 174, 1823
stoppage 178
neomorts 97
Neri, Vincenzo 11213
neurological body 11, 106, 111, 113
chronophotography 107, 108
hysteria 12, 104, 1045, 107, 11112, 113
knowledge 106
244 Index
movement 106, 108, 108, 10911,
11214, 114, 115, 116, 117, 11718
neurological gaze and 1067, 109, 112, 113
psychology and 106
silence 113
neurological gaze 1112, 104, 104, 1057,
108, 109, 11314, 114, 115, 116, 117,
11718
animal and human themes 11617, 118
close-ups 107
communication 112
vision and non-vision 107
new extremism 159n. 30
new life 156, 159n. 27
new technology 195
multi-format 92
sofware 11, 98
Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 78, 57
Nietzsche, Friedrich 3, 26, 162, 192
Night Watch, Te (Rembrandt) 59
nostalgia 945
Notes on Gesture (Agamben) ix, 7, 9, 10,
29, 31, 43, 46, 556, 58, 67, 7980,
103, 121, 123, 143
Notes sur les Tableaux parisiens de
Baudelaire (Benjamin) 19, 234n. 1
Notre Musique (Godard) 51, 199
Noys, Benjamin 11, 16n. 5, 89101,
1578n. 10
Nuit et brouillard (Resnais) 198
Nymphs (Agamben) 7, 147
Open, Te (Agamben) 712
Palestine see Zionist-Palestine issues
pan shots 64, 218
paradigm 734
parody 64, 178, 209, 223
lacunae 209
Pasolini, Pier Paolo 23, 14, 208, 230n. 17
archaeology and 210
language 209, 211
location and 14
remnants 2078
racial issues and 21112
remnants 211
Passing, Te (Viola) 147
Passion (Godard) 56, 62, 64, 667
movement 602
pan shots 64
sex 65
spirituality 64, 656
work 10, 56, 578, 5960, 61, 62, 64, 65,
66, 67
Patagonian Hare, Te (Lanzmann) 21415,
216, 217, 21819
pathology see neurological body
Paul, Letters of 15, 87n. 29, 220
peace 2267
persuasion 120n. 27
phantasms 67
phenomenology 4, 5
phonemes 2278
location and 228
photography 1011, 73, 767, 84, 85, 87n.
19, 195, 197
capture and 73
paradigm and 734
chronophotography 107, 108
communication and 85
instant 81
kairological time 74, 76, 84
knowledge and 197
montage and 2012
movement 77, 78, 7980
remnants 2235
stillness 163, 164
testimony and 14, 194, 1967
video and see video, photography and
vision and 73
non-vision and 77
witnesses and 1945
Place in the Sun, A (Stevens) 201
poetry 32, 33, 37, 456, 50n. 17, 162
death and 312
montage and 323
stoppage 26, 29, 162
points 83
polis 120n. 27
populism 978
pornography 95
advertising and 94
brazenness and 956
rapture and 96
capitalism and 11
stoppage and 96
Index 245
type and 20
possession rituals 12, 130, 133
cin-trance and 12930, 131, 1312,
132, 133, 137n. 33
continuity 1301, 1323
music and 1301, 1323
potentiality 35, 57, 1234, 140, 141,
1501, 1556, 162, 1645, 166, 167,
188n. 24, 18990n. 40
capture and 166
decreation and 645
see also individual terms
Pourquoi Isral (Lanzmann) 21314, 2201
language 2201
Prnom Carmen (Godard) 65
profanation 11, 13, 85, 90, 91, 97, 146, 148,
173, 189n. 29
advertising 93, 94
animal and human themes 146
death 177, 1789
dispositif and 140, 1456, 154
fashion 93
flm-of-life and 97
location and 1478
movement 147, 148
populism and 978
pornography and 956
religion and 148, 150, 222
repetition and 1756
salvation and 967
stillness and 923
stoppage and 98
undecidability 934
psychology 80
neurological body and 106
Purple Rose of Cairo, Te (Woody Allen)
93
racial issues 172, 175, 21112, 223
language 223
see also Jewish issues
Rancire, Jacques 121, 194, 200, 205n. 26
rapture
boredom and 96
hatred and 93, 94
reanimation 67
reappearance 5
redemption 29, 31, 42, 46, 82, 90, 93, 978
religion 146, 148, 150
language 222
narrative and 16970
see also Christianity; Jewish issues;
spirituality
remnants 14, 15, 193, 196, 2078, 211,
21314, 21516, 220, 221, 222, 2235,
228
colonialism and 2223
fascism and 211
vision and non-vision 224
see also Fedayeen; Muselmann
Remnants of Auschwitz (Agamben) 14,
193, 195, 21415, 220
repetition 34, 256, 401, 801, 82, 144,
145, 162, 1701, 1734, 1845
cutting and 173
memory and 4, 26, 165, 171, 172, 1756
fashback 165, 1679, 174
music 183
silence 45
soundtrack 37
stoppage and 4, 13, 26, 278, 81, 145,
161, 162, 163, 164, 171, 1823, 185,
200
appearance and 5
cutting and 5
ficker efect 162
revenants see remnants and revenants
Ribot, Todule 106
Ricciardi, Alessia 62, 65
rights 534n. 38
rituals 1289, 137n. 30
cin-trance and 128, 129, 130
spirit possession 12, 12933, 131, 132,
137n. 33
Romero, George 97
Rouch, Jean 121, 133
bourgeois themes and 134
cin-trance 128, 130, 1367n. 23, 137n.
33
rituals and 12, 129
tripod 128
Ruurlo, Borculoscheweg (Claerbout) 789
Salptrire 11, 113, 154
salvation 25, 31, 90, 967, 989
San Paolo (Pasolini) 211
246 Index
Sanbar, Elias 214, 223, 2245
Sartre, Jean-Paul 213
saved night 96
Saxton, Libby 4, 10, 5570, 205n. 22
Scnario du flm Passion (Godard) 33
Scholem, Gershom 225, 226
screen grabs 98
sculpture 144
Searchers, Te (Ford) 223
sentimentality 46, 501n. 20
nostalgia 945
smiling regret and 46
Serra, Richard
dispositif 145, 156
sculpture 144
video 144
Settis, Salvatore 1589n. 22
sex 65 see also neurological gaze;
pornography
Shoah 356, 213, 21415, 217, 218
archaeology 216, 217
archive 1923, 195, 1968, 199, 2002,
216, 222
homeland and 218 see also Zionist-
Palestine issues
language 215, 217, 21819, 2201
remnants and see Muselmann
silence 196
vision and non-vision 192, 21718
witnesses 14, 21516
Shoah (Lanzmann) 21415, 217, 218
archaeology 216, 217
archive and 198, 2001, 216
homeland and 218
language 217, 21819
pan shots 218
vision and non-vision 21718
witnesses 215
zoom shots 218
Shutter Island (Scorsese) 169
Side Efects (Soderbergh) 1678
Signature of All Tings, Te (Agamben) 73
silence 9, 31, 38, 39, 43, 445, 49n. 11, 113,
196
close-ups and 40
soundtrack and 40
stop-start motion and 42
vision and non-vision 39, 194
Silverman, Kaja 656
Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the History
of Cinema, Te (Agamben) 52n. 30
slavery 63
slow motion 148
smiling
rapture and 93, 94, 96
regret and 46
sof focus shot 183
sofware 11
screen grabs 98
Soigne ta droite (Godard) 910, 2931, 32,
34, 356, 37, 41, 45, 51n. 21
apocalyptic themes 30
close-ups 35
comedy 30, 389
communication and 34
death 334
exclusion and 41
explicit and implicit themes 38
focus pulls 35, 36
innocence 42
language 32
light 42
messianism 29, 31
montage 401
music and 33, 367, 38
narrative 30, 34
poetry 312
projection and 34, 39
close-ups 3940
repetition and 37
sentimentality 46
silence and 9, 39, 40, 44
voice-over 30, 35, 36, 412
Sonderkommando 197, 216
Sopralluoghi in Palestina (Pasolini) 14, 207
spirit possession rituals 12, 130, 133
cin-trance and 12930, 131, 1312,
132, 133, 137n. 33
continuity 1301, 1323
music and 1301, 1323
spirituality 62, 64, 656
work and 66
Stanzas (Agamben) 6
Steimatsky, Noa 210
Stevens, George 201
Stewart, Garrett 1314, 16190
Index 247
stillness
capture and 79
movement and see movement, stillness and
Stoicism 823
kairological time 83
persona and 21
Stoller, Paul 137n. 28
stop-start motion 424
music and 43
stoppage 26, 29, 93, 94, 96, 98, 162, 178
movement and 178
stop-start motion 424
rapture and 93
repetition and 4, 13, 26, 278, 81, 145, 161,
162, 163, 164, 171, 1823, 185, 200
appearance and 5
cutting and 5
ficker efect 162
screen grabs 98
vision and non-vision 199, 200
subjectivization 14, 194, 204
surveillance 8990 see also video
Taylor, Frederick W. 556, 63
Terragni, Giuseppe 75
testimony 14, 192, 1934, 196, 197, 198,
202, 204n. 16, 216
lacunae 14, 194, 1956
language 21516
remnants and 14, 193
language 192, 193, 194, 195, 1967
location and 215
memory and 191, 1923
silence and 194
theater 8
divo and 22
language 23
persona and 201
thermal camera 1534
darkness 154
Tird of May, Te (Goya) 61
time 55, 813, 147, 166 see also individual
terms
Time and History (Agamben) 814
Time Tat Remains, Te (Agamben) 211,
21314
topology 228
Tourou et bitti (Rouch) 130, 132
rituals 1303, 131, 132, 137n. 33
Trafc (journal) 8, 9
Treblinka 217
tripod 128
Tsahal (Lanzmann) 218, 219
remnants 2223
tv 478n. 3
type and 20
Unbinding Vision (Crary) 1245
undecidability 934, 96
Une place sur la terre see Soigne ta droite
(Godard) 9, 29, 34, 38
Vliaho, Pasi 1112, 10320, 142
Varro 58
video 1213, 478n. 3, 50n. 20, 144, 147,
1667, 171, 172
photography and 75, 789, 85
capture and 756
movement 76, 78, 79
profanation and 85
stillness 79
vision and non-vision 756
profanation 1478, 150
projection 172, 173, 175, 188n. 26
bourgeois themes 1701, 172
death 172
narrative and 1723, 175
profanation 173, 189n. 29
racial issues 172, 175
repetition 172, 173
vision and non-vision 1745
repetition 801, 171
video-montage see montage
work 69n. 24
Viola, Bill 13, 139, 145, 14750, 146
dispositif 156
profanation 148
Virgil 312
Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, Te
(El Greco) 656
virtuality see potentiality
Visitation, Te (Pontormo) 147
voice-over 30, 35, 36, 412, 69n. 24, 198,
2212, 2245, 226
Wajcman, Grard 213
248 Index
Walls of Sanaa, Te (Pasolini) 230n. 17
Warburg, Aby 3, 67, 9, 58, 123, 141, 210
We Refugees (Agamben) 214, 228
Weber, Eduard 110
Weber, Wilhelm 110
Weil, Simone 10, 62, 645, 66
gravity and 623
spirituality and 62
work and 62, 634, 67
Welles, Orson 22, 91, 139, 141, 146, 156n.
7, 230n. 17
What Is an Apparatus? (Agamben)
158n. 19
White Ribbon, Te (Das weie Band)
(Haneke)
black screen 176
death 179
montage 17980
white screen 1845, 189n. 34
Williams, James S. 9, 2754, 61, 68n. 8,
231n. 54
witnesses 14, 191, 1945
movement and 2001
testimony see testimony
Witt, Michael 478n. 3, 58
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 121, 142
Wittman, Blanche 104, 105, 107, 108, 108
women 20 see also sex
work 10, 556, 578, 60, 62, 634, 67
capitalism 55
industry 55, 56, 57, 5960, 64, 66
love and 60, 64
movement 59, 60, 61, 63, 65
slavery and 63
stillness 59
voice-over 69n. 24
Work of Man, Te (Agamben) 57, 67
Workers Leaving the Factory (Farocki)
69n. 24
Zionist-Palestine issues 21113, 214, 218,
21920, 221, 223, 224, 227, 232n. 62
archaeology 212
language 1415, 219, 221, 2256
montage 2212, 223
photography 2235
remnants and 2078, 21314, 220,
2223, 224, 228 see also Fedayeen
zoe 111, 117
zombies 97
zoom shots 152, 218
Zylinska, Joanna 56