Notes On Avoiding Fate

Alain Badiou, Cinema

Polity, 320pp, £17.99, ISBN 9780745655680

reviewed by Stuart Walton

When Alain Badiou asks, in a previously unpublished text of 2002, collected in this chronologically arranged compilation of his writings on film, 'May I be permitted to say, simply, lamely, that cinema combines stories, performances, places, sounds, and colours?', one hopes the question is rhetorical. If not, the temptation is to respond by saying, simply, bluntly, 'No, you'll have to do better than that'.

Badiou's late thought has been characterised by its retreat towards an increasingly hesitant provisionality. The most extravagantly gauchiste of all France's postwar left intellectuals, arrested – as he reminds us in one of the items here – no fewer than 20 times in his younger days for actions against the state, his own version of post-1968 disillusionment was more like visceral disgust, a time of licking one's wounds and waiting for Godard. Hatred of the pragmatic accommodations to which the workers' movement acceded following les évènements carried him initially into tiny Maoist splinter groups, after which, discovering that futility was no more commodious an ambience than defeat, he co-founded in the 1980s an activist group, Organisation Politique, an interesting hybrid of Poland's Solidarity movement and the Citizens' Advice Bureau, which refused participation in electoral politics. The last few years have been marked by the Olympian abstentionism of venerability, a mood in which fond reminiscences of China's Cultural Revolution have been leavened with strikingly ordinary reflections on art and love. Like many of his generation, Badiou was drawn to an intimate engagement with cinema. These essays and interviews reveal him to have been a confirmed cinephile since before the term gained traction in French intellectual culture, and he has been a contributor since its inception to L'Art du Cinéma, as well as various other smaller publications of his own devising.

Badiou's foundational thinking of cinema as an artform is evident throughout. Film for him combines elements of most of the other arts (painting, music, the novel, theatre), as well as leaving space for the incorporation of non-art elements, which it manages to 'purify' by their assimilation to its procedures. In a century that began with the explosion of modernist experiments in all other media, cinema – the twentieth-century art form par excellence – quickly established itself as a mass art in which avant-gardism has been little more than an occasionally fascinating byway. The unmistakable mark of its truly democratic character for Badiou is that its greatest productions are widely recognised as great as soon as they are seen.

Cinema's unique facility as an art, thinks Badiou, is that it manages to simplify the truth without necessarily doing damage to it. 'Ideally, cinema involves creating nothing out of complexity,' he remarks, contrasting its formal procedures with those of the novel or theatre, which begin with simple propositions that are then rendered progressively complex. This makes it fertile ground for the philosopher. Just as systematic western philosophy began in a dialogue with the theatre, in the ruminations and prescriptions of Plato, it is fitting that today it should be a dialogue with the hegemonic dramatic form of our own time. What it offers is a 'spiritual subjugation of the visible', the project of both the classical tragic theatre and the longer hegemony of institutional religion. Like these earlier enterprises, it 'has the power to render the certainty of the visible visibly uncertain'. As such, it can be the antidote to post-political despair.

These thoughts come from the longest and best essay in the collection, 'Cinema as Philosophical Experimentation', a transcription of a contribution to a film seminar in Buenos Aires in 2003, the momentousness and density of which are acknowledged by its immediately being followed in this volume by a condensed but otherwise identical version published in Critique in 2005. Badiou's project of situating cinema within the tradition of political aesthetics marks a more resonantly important moment than any number of the more localised film-studies treatments of the Cahiers du Cinéma generation, with their obsessive animadversions to Chaplin, Murnau, Hitchcock and the nouvelle vague.

Indeed, it's precisely when Badiou does attempt more focused examinations of particular films that his methodology too often comes unstuck. He isn't at all interested in technical analysis, which he sees as 'bogus formalism', the equivalent of analysing a written text into nothing more than its rhetorical figures and grammatical constructions. That seems a typically fastidious and lazy thought. To suggest that aesthetics can safely dispense with any consideration of the formal means by which artworks achieve their impact is frankly preposterous, and speaks more of the rationalisation of one's own inadequacy than of any conceptual principle. In any case, he twice sins against this precept with a perspicuous analysis of the opening sequence of Visconti's Death in Venice (1971), which he rightly holds to be emblematic of cinematic art at its purest, its melange of painterly tones, the cultural-historical significance of Venice, the psychological scrutiny of a single character's face, and the premonitory instrumental expressiveness of Mahler's music, all indicative of the unfolding events to come, working together to produce the aesthetic synthesis of which no other artform is capable.

If Badiou is receptive to the deep structures of the social, and by extension of the political, that cinema comports, he is disappointingly tin-eared as to the more fine-grained cultural, stylistic and romantic responses that it both mirrors and provokes. Film happens on a screen, a surface that reflects idealised and degraded, sublime and squalid, images back at its viewers, and it both enjoys and recoils from its own undiminished power to envelop its recipients in the discursive world it creates. The film critic's boilerplate, that a scene or an image 'works on so many levels', to which Badiou and his interlocutors find themselves readily resorting in the transcribed dialogues included here, is such a cliché because it is virtually always true, and it seems more than a little odd to want to forgo as a self-denying ordinance any analysis of the formal means by which these dynamics work.

There are many better writers on film than Badiou. The little essays in David Thomson's compendium volumes, and his larger historical reflections in works such as The Whole Equation (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004) and his recent The Big Screen (Allen Lane, 2012), are more richly suggestive of the ways in which cinema works. There is greater acuity in the prolific reflections on film dispersed throughout Slavoj Zizek's philosophical work, and I suspect the reason is that Zizek is extremely proficient at confronting works of cinema on their own terms, rather than as emblematic phenomena in a carefully worked, but ultimately over-systematised, theory of the contemporary Real.

That said, at his best, even in translation, there is an aphoristic concision to Badiou's thinking that is capable of producing moments of true enlightenment. Cinema is a mass art, he claims, by virtue of its ability to transform the passage of time into the means of perception, which is beyond the ability of other durational artforms such as theatre and even music. 'It is this representative gap [ie. the distinction between time and perception] that enables cinema to be addressed to the immense audience of those who want to suspend time in space in order to avoid fate.' Badiou has lately cheapened with the name of 'affirmationism' the tendency of artworks to point to a transfigured future that lies latent within the corrupt present, his own arrival at an insight the Frankfurt School inherited and elaborated from the cultural criticism of Marx.

It will be necessary, Badiou declared in 1999, to pursue our analysis of the significations of film by what he calls '“consumerist” visits to the cinema (to a certain degree we should share in the innocent fairground mass aspect of “seeing films”)', and you've got to love that 'to a certain degree'. One doesn't want to mingle too often with the masses. But as long as he turns his mobile phone off, and doesn't scoff popcorn throughout, I'd be happy to go and see the new Woody Allen with him.
Stuart Walton is the author of An Excursion through Chaos; In the Realm of the Senses; A Natural History of Human Emotions; Introducing Theodor Adorno; Intoxicology; and a novel, The First Day in Paradise.