Australian Book Review,

December 2013-Janurary 2014, pp. 38-9.

Lessons of Hope from an Impure Art

Hamish Ford

Alain Badiou, Cinema (trans. Susan Spitzer), Cambridge, UK & Malden, MA: Polity, 2013.

Over recent years, the work of French philosopher Alain Badiou has been discussed
with increasing regularity as part of an academic dialogue between cinema studies
and philosophy often known as film-philosophy. His various writing on cinema was
for a long time scattered among many different sources, however, with much
remaining untranslated. Upon its original 2010 French version and now this English
translation three years later, Cinema has finally changed all that. Collecting in one
place both Badious already celebrated work on film and important previously
unpublished writing, with all but 5 of its 31 different pieces now appearing in English
for the first time, this important book offers a unique contemporary philosophers
rich, varied yet always coherent and evolving response to cinema spanning seven
decades.
The diverse pieces making up Cinema are mainly quite short and easy to read.
Encompassing punchy and substantial review-essays of individual films, charged
quasi-manifestos and political critiques of contemporary cinema, wide-ranging
interviews, and some much more elaborated philosophical accounts of cinema per se,
the book ultimately offers a very striking chronologically arranged portrait of
Badious developing response to what he asserts is the most important and
philosophically significant modern form. Of all the arts, we read in the early pages,
this is certainly the one that has the ability to think. (p. 18)
Although he is clearly an admirer of much canonical art cinema, a consistent theme
throughout much of the book for both political and philosophical reasons is the
argument that films real strength is in being what Badiou calls a Saturday night art,
non-elitist and democratic in the proper sense. Frequently citing Charles Chaplins
classic films and F.W. Murnaus Sunrise (1927) as examples of cinema reaching its
proper zenith as a popular form, he is less forthcoming about more recent
accomplishments in this sense. Nearly all the films addressed in these pages both
exemplify art-house releases and are almost without exception Western in origin.
Such historical and cultural focus tends to give Badious otherwise immensely
rewarding writing both a slightly nostalgic and unconsciously Eurocentric tone. This
appears slightly at odds with the authors long, globally engaged political commitment
(in addition to a history of involvement with the radical left, Badiou is a well-known
activist for the basic rights of Frances sans-papier workers).
The books introductory interview with Cinemas editor, Antoine de Baecque,
effectively sets up the different and sometimes even conflicting attitudes Badiou has
held towards the cinema over many years, in which his fascination and frequent love
is palpable but so too is the crucial element of radical critique. He suggests that
considering cinemas unique strength for being associated in an intense, unique way
with the contemporary (p. 6), such a dialectically driven response should be hardly
surprising. If we are necessarily conflicted about the modern world, so too surely will
we be about its primary media form and expression just as we also hope to find
appropriate ambivalence in a particular films own charting of the given reality as
essayed on screen. The interview also sets up a perhaps even more important, and for
a philosopher striking, theme that will colour many of the chapters, with Badiou
arguing that philosophy can get more out of cinema than vice versa.
The earliest piece here, a substantial essay from 1957, features in embryonic form
some key Badiou ideas that will be later taken up with much more precision and
depth, the political dimension for now largely absent. Things then immediately hot up
with a series of short, highly polemical 1970s texts from Badious self-described
Maoist period. Yet if the reader does not share his politics (essentially a non-Party
far-leftism) it arguably matters little. Radical commitment can, in the right hands,
motivate productive questions and critique transcending any perceived need for
shared ideological positions. With its searing indictment of recent would-be radical
narrative films, Revisionist Cinema (1977) is a case in point. The essays account of
such cinema as representing the politics of what Badiou calls a new bourgeoisie
self-righteously opposing the old bourgeoisie mired in post-war nihilism and decay
(Ingmar Bergman is cited as the latters prime film essayist), this self-styled
progressive updating now supposedly on the side of and even presumptuously
speaking for the people yet in complete denial about its own vested interests, still
reads as immensely relevant (just think pious liberal Hollywood) irrespective of
whether we concur with Badious own starting point.
A series of punchy 1980s articles, the highlight of which is a bullet-point 1983
missive on Jean-Luc Godard (whose films provide a regular touchstone for Badiou
throughout the book), suggest something of a midway point between politically
imbued critique and burgeoning philosophical inquiry. It is starting with the 1990s
that the latter dimension really starts to flower, as does Badious more fully integrated
account of film per se. Rather than simply the Seventh Art, we read in The False
Movements of Cinema (1997) that film is an impure art. Indeed, it is the plus-one
of the arts, both parasitic and inconsistent. This, he writes, is its force as a
contemporary art (p. 93). Meanwhile the following essay, Can a Film Be Spoken
About? (1998), should arguably be set on every university film studies course for its
forthright, very clearly enunciated discussion of why saying we like a film doesnt
get us very far at all in trying to understand it.
 Badious particular notion of the event (which has been sometimes elusive for the
first time reader) is here given precise shape in a long 1998 Cahiers du cinma
interview in which he explores what for him is its exemplar: the demonstrations and
upheavals in Paris and elsewhere that became known as May 68. More than his
own revolutionary investments, Badiou sees this famous and forever contested event
as the key example of what is or should be the prime interest of both philosophy
and cinema: seeking to understand, and possibly help forge, a rupture (another
frequently used word), a moment when unpredictable change, creativity and futures
seem palpable. After discussing in the interview how such an event is far from
transformational for the majority culture (the June 1968 French elections saw a
resounding victory for right wing forces) yet has its complex, multiple subterranean
effects, in a later piece from 2005 Badiou goes on to explore with much contextual
detail one of the great filmic reflections on the rather depressing post-68 years,
Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorins 1972 film Tout va bien. (It is interesting to read his
account of the media treatment and subsequent restoration of political and cultural
order in France in light of common criticisms of the recent Occupy movement for not
having specific enough demands or unified aims, such a purported lack being one of
the key strengths of May 68 as event for Badiou.)
For me, Cinemas remarkable centrepiece arrives in the form of a transcribed 2003
lecture given in Buenos Aries, published here for the first time as Cinema as
Philosophical Experimentation. While the subsequent essay, On Cinema as a
Democratic Emblem from 2005, offers a more polished and partial version of its
contents, the lecture (despite some repetition) works like a crystal through which
Badious prime film-philosophy claims are given their most magisterial expression,
enfolding the personal, political and philosophical in a fully integrated way. In this
detailed account of cinemas secret power including a whole section called Tribute
to Gilles Deleuze, appropriately crediting the famous French philosopher for kicking
off the ever escalating recent film-philosophy exchange more than any other single
figure with his seminal 1980s books, Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 Badiou posits that
while the older arts tend to start from what he calls an aristocratic point,
emphasising both cultural knowledge but also the purity of blank page or canvass,
cinema starts from the other end: the messy impurity and excess of the world, trying
to home in on whatever specialness might be gleaned there. In the former scenario,
the artist doesnt have enough things; he [sic] has to create out of nothing. For the
cinema, meanwhile, there are too many things, absolutely and always (p. 227). This
is why, Badiou asserts, even film masterpieces feature much that is banal, frivolous,
and unnecessary. But it is for exactly this reason that cinema both remains the art
most closely engaged with modern reality and, he argues, exhibits what philosophy
itself should be particularly concerned with an emphasis on rupture and the
unforseen event. Hence Badious summary of a good films promise to the viewer:
The sudden appearance of something is always possible Cinema is the miracle of
the visible as an enduring miracle and as an enduring rupture. This is without a doubt
the greatest thing we owe to cinema, and philosophy should try to understand it with
its own devices. (p. 220)
In addition to the above highlights, Cinema features often strikingly original pieces on
a wide range of nonetheless almost entirely Western subjects (peppered with the odd
reference to Japans canonical master-directors, Mizoguchi Kenji and Ozu Yasujiro):
Jacques Demy, F. W. Murnau, Manoel de Oliveira, Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert
Bresson, Volker Schlndorff, Guy Debord, Hugo Santiago, Udi Alondi, Clint
Eastwood, French comedy films, Swiss cinema, filmic treatment of the Israel-
Palestine issue, North American cinema from 1999 such as The Matrix (compared with
ExistenZ and Cube) and Magnolia, as well as multiple admiring but still rigorous
essays on Godard.
Understood through the books finest material, a late essay from 2003 offers effective
concluding remarks when Badiou writes that for all its charting of the worlds
banality, indeed also ethical debasement and horror, cinema offers a lesson of hope
through showing the possibility that something can happen even though the worst
may prevail. (p. 231) Distinct from the facile and nearly always ideologically
complicit hope affirmed at the end of so many bad films, Alain Badiou charts the
cinemas offering of another kind one we might better be able to believe in. It
depends very much on whether the reader shares at least some of the hard earned and
always complicated love for such an impure, thereby inherently modern, politically
and philosophically important form as presented so efficaciously in this book.

Hamish Ford is a lecturer in Film, Media, and Cultural Studies at the University of Newcastle
(Australia). Widely published on the film-philosophy relationship, he is the author of Post-War
Modernist Cinema and Philosophy: Confronting Negativity and Time (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).