Gaps, Breaks and Separations
Jacques Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema
Verso, 160pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781781686065
reviewed by Calum Watt
The Intervals of Cinema is the latest in a series of translations published by Verso of works by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière. The book was originally published in French in 2011 and can be seen as a companion volume to Rancière’s previous book, Film Fables (2001), which discusses various aspects of contradiction surrounding the notion of narrative in film. Contradiction is again the name of the game in The Intervals of Cinema as Rancière examines, across six essays, cinema’s relations to literature, to other arts, and to politics.
Rancière understands cinema as being defined by its ‘impurity’, by which he means both that it is constituted in relation to the other arts (it contains elements of painting, pantomime, music and so on) and that it is conceptually multiplicitous. Cinema is the darkened space where we go to watch films, but it can also function as an ideological apparatus by which social stereotypes are propagated, or even as a utopian project, as in early Soviet cinema.
This is the context in which to understand the book’s title, which in the original reads Les écarts du cinéma. Translator John Howe uses ‘intervals’ for the écarts of the title, but throughout the text he renders the same word variously as ‘gaps’, ‘breaks’ and ‘separations’, which masks the frequency of Rancière’s referring back to his own title. Following the notion of cinema as a multiplicity (as place, apparatus, concept, etc.), Rancière ponders ‘whether cinema exists only as a set of irreducible gaps [systeme d’écarts irréductibles] between things that have the same name without being members of a single body.’ These écarts, therefore, refer to the logical gaps which appear and proliferate when one presses theories of cinema and finds them to be inadequate to their multiplicitous, impure object.
In the opening essay of the collection, Rancière sets the Aristotelian model of plotting he finds in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) against the rejection of story-telling in Dziga Vertov’s 1929 avant-garde documentary about life in Soviet Russia, Man with a Movie Camera. Vertigo constantly toys with the viewer’s expectations, with revelation and plot twist following each other in quick succession. In Man with a Movie Camera, by contrast, there are no dramatic peaks of excitement that raise some images above others; instead the documentary style forms a ‘cinematic communism’ in which all images are equal. Yet Rancière finds this putative non-hierarchical relation of images to be subject to a manipulative central intelligence: ‘[w]hat Vertov’s camera suppresses is the delay or interval that makes it possible for the gaze to put a story to a face. It is that interval that provokes Scottie’s obsession with the false Madeleine [in Vertigo]. And that interval is also the one behind the obsession of the narrator in Proust for Albertine’. This offhand reference to Proust is indicative of the way Rancière often gestures both to film’s relation to the other arts and to the continuity of aesthetic problems across the arts.
Through this incorporation of other art forms, the notion of the écart or gap often comes back to a much more familiar and fundamental division between the signifying potential of an image (or word, gesture, sound, etc.) and what there is in an image that exceeds signification. This division finds its corollary in the tension between what Rancière calls the aesthetic and representative ‘regimes of art’, terms which he develops fully in the major work of his career, Aisthesis (2001). In Vertigo, for example, the aesthetic regime is broadly equivalent to the ‘visual story’, which Rancière sees as the film’s dreamy fascination with Madeleine’s shifting appearances. Any formal analysis should examine to what extent this visual story compromises or overloads the movement of the plot, a function of the representative regime. For Rancière, the tension created by this opposition is inevitable given cinema’s status as an impure art – and is the reason Vertigo continues to be held in such high regard. An unrepentant cinephile, Rancière believes that cinema’s impurity is something to be celebrated, and he engages critically and productively with the failure of such mythologies of cinema as Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma and Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema volumes to overcome this paradox.
Rancière comes from a tradition in French philosophy sometimes referred to as structuralist Marxism, and the most valuable contribution of The Intervals of Cinema lies in the essays on politics and film. Particularly useful is his identification of the ‘post-Brechtian’ mode in contemporary filmmaking. Rancière argues that political filmmakers have moved on from a modernist mode which sought to expose social contradictions by fragmenting classical narrative structures and undermining empathic identification with characters. In his essay on the directors Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, he writes that ‘cinema, whatever the effort made to intellectualise it, is bound to the visibility of speaking bodies and the things they speak of. From that are deduced two contradictory effects: one is intensification of the visual aspect, of the bodies that carry it and the things they speak of; the other is intensification of the visible as something that disclaims the word or shows the absence of what it speaks of.’ Politics in film today does not reside so much in explicit statements made onscreen as in the gap between the word and the image, and the capacity of the image to negate what it shows or says. In this way, depicted injustices can be absorbed by the image to become merely ‘a surface ripple’.
Rancière’s essay on the political aesthetics of Pedro Costa, the contemporary Portuguese director noted for his austere films shot in the slums of Lisbon, is particularly astute. Costa’s films use documentary-style images of real degradation and social marginalisation, but do not seek to explain the economic situation or to mobilise action about it. Instead, the images form often-beautiful compositions and the static shots resemble painterly still lifes. This raises questions about the aestheticisation of misery, but Rancière suggests that the effect for the onscreen subjects is one of a deliverance from the dialectic. The various condensations into image of ‘the infinite variety of light and colour’ of these slums ‘function as substitutes on the surface of the screen for a great lost art, perhaps the art of life itself, the art of sharing palpable wealth and forms of experience.’ This might sound like Rancière is succumbing to the very aestheticisation he disavows, yet he seems to be working towards the limit of the possibility of politics in film, suggesting that we are at a point where we can ‘no longer [imagine] an art adapted to serve political ends, but political forms reinvented by reference to the multiple ways the visual arts invent gazes, arrange bodies in particular locations and make them transform the spaces they cross.’
Rancière’s range of filmic references is wide, although he does have a marked preference for Hollywood classics and the high European arthouse tradition. Some readers may find this a little recherché, given that several of the films he references are commercially unavailable in this country – and some of them are import-only even in France. On the whole, however, this is a welcome addition to the growing body of work by Rancière in translation, and will be essential and enjoyable reading for students of the theory of cinema.
Rancière understands cinema as being defined by its ‘impurity’, by which he means both that it is constituted in relation to the other arts (it contains elements of painting, pantomime, music and so on) and that it is conceptually multiplicitous. Cinema is the darkened space where we go to watch films, but it can also function as an ideological apparatus by which social stereotypes are propagated, or even as a utopian project, as in early Soviet cinema.
This is the context in which to understand the book’s title, which in the original reads Les écarts du cinéma. Translator John Howe uses ‘intervals’ for the écarts of the title, but throughout the text he renders the same word variously as ‘gaps’, ‘breaks’ and ‘separations’, which masks the frequency of Rancière’s referring back to his own title. Following the notion of cinema as a multiplicity (as place, apparatus, concept, etc.), Rancière ponders ‘whether cinema exists only as a set of irreducible gaps [systeme d’écarts irréductibles] between things that have the same name without being members of a single body.’ These écarts, therefore, refer to the logical gaps which appear and proliferate when one presses theories of cinema and finds them to be inadequate to their multiplicitous, impure object.
In the opening essay of the collection, Rancière sets the Aristotelian model of plotting he finds in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) against the rejection of story-telling in Dziga Vertov’s 1929 avant-garde documentary about life in Soviet Russia, Man with a Movie Camera. Vertigo constantly toys with the viewer’s expectations, with revelation and plot twist following each other in quick succession. In Man with a Movie Camera, by contrast, there are no dramatic peaks of excitement that raise some images above others; instead the documentary style forms a ‘cinematic communism’ in which all images are equal. Yet Rancière finds this putative non-hierarchical relation of images to be subject to a manipulative central intelligence: ‘[w]hat Vertov’s camera suppresses is the delay or interval that makes it possible for the gaze to put a story to a face. It is that interval that provokes Scottie’s obsession with the false Madeleine [in Vertigo]. And that interval is also the one behind the obsession of the narrator in Proust for Albertine’. This offhand reference to Proust is indicative of the way Rancière often gestures both to film’s relation to the other arts and to the continuity of aesthetic problems across the arts.
Through this incorporation of other art forms, the notion of the écart or gap often comes back to a much more familiar and fundamental division between the signifying potential of an image (or word, gesture, sound, etc.) and what there is in an image that exceeds signification. This division finds its corollary in the tension between what Rancière calls the aesthetic and representative ‘regimes of art’, terms which he develops fully in the major work of his career, Aisthesis (2001). In Vertigo, for example, the aesthetic regime is broadly equivalent to the ‘visual story’, which Rancière sees as the film’s dreamy fascination with Madeleine’s shifting appearances. Any formal analysis should examine to what extent this visual story compromises or overloads the movement of the plot, a function of the representative regime. For Rancière, the tension created by this opposition is inevitable given cinema’s status as an impure art – and is the reason Vertigo continues to be held in such high regard. An unrepentant cinephile, Rancière believes that cinema’s impurity is something to be celebrated, and he engages critically and productively with the failure of such mythologies of cinema as Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma and Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema volumes to overcome this paradox.
Rancière comes from a tradition in French philosophy sometimes referred to as structuralist Marxism, and the most valuable contribution of The Intervals of Cinema lies in the essays on politics and film. Particularly useful is his identification of the ‘post-Brechtian’ mode in contemporary filmmaking. Rancière argues that political filmmakers have moved on from a modernist mode which sought to expose social contradictions by fragmenting classical narrative structures and undermining empathic identification with characters. In his essay on the directors Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, he writes that ‘cinema, whatever the effort made to intellectualise it, is bound to the visibility of speaking bodies and the things they speak of. From that are deduced two contradictory effects: one is intensification of the visual aspect, of the bodies that carry it and the things they speak of; the other is intensification of the visible as something that disclaims the word or shows the absence of what it speaks of.’ Politics in film today does not reside so much in explicit statements made onscreen as in the gap between the word and the image, and the capacity of the image to negate what it shows or says. In this way, depicted injustices can be absorbed by the image to become merely ‘a surface ripple’.
Rancière’s essay on the political aesthetics of Pedro Costa, the contemporary Portuguese director noted for his austere films shot in the slums of Lisbon, is particularly astute. Costa’s films use documentary-style images of real degradation and social marginalisation, but do not seek to explain the economic situation or to mobilise action about it. Instead, the images form often-beautiful compositions and the static shots resemble painterly still lifes. This raises questions about the aestheticisation of misery, but Rancière suggests that the effect for the onscreen subjects is one of a deliverance from the dialectic. The various condensations into image of ‘the infinite variety of light and colour’ of these slums ‘function as substitutes on the surface of the screen for a great lost art, perhaps the art of life itself, the art of sharing palpable wealth and forms of experience.’ This might sound like Rancière is succumbing to the very aestheticisation he disavows, yet he seems to be working towards the limit of the possibility of politics in film, suggesting that we are at a point where we can ‘no longer [imagine] an art adapted to serve political ends, but political forms reinvented by reference to the multiple ways the visual arts invent gazes, arrange bodies in particular locations and make them transform the spaces they cross.’
Rancière’s range of filmic references is wide, although he does have a marked preference for Hollywood classics and the high European arthouse tradition. Some readers may find this a little recherché, given that several of the films he references are commercially unavailable in this country – and some of them are import-only even in France. On the whole, however, this is a welcome addition to the growing body of work by Rancière in translation, and will be essential and enjoyable reading for students of the theory of cinema.