21st May 2008

Rancière in London, Godard in Blinks

I wanted to post something in relation to the Rancière conference we attended in London in May, even though some of the things that struck me at the time are not so clear to me now. Rancière’s own talk seemed self-contained, and perhaps worthy of comment on its own, so I’ll stick to a few small things I noted down when listening to the other speakers during the day. What was most interesting, considering that we’d been watching it relatively recently and reading Rancière’s writing about it, were the references to Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma that cropped up in several of the papers, in various different ways. It’s clearly a crucial work, both in general and for Rancière’s thought, for a number of reasons – it seems a kind of focal point for the way he structures his points about image regimes, the distribution of the sensible, representation, etc. that dominant The Future of the Image and other works.

I think it was Emiliano Battista who made reference to a severance of the link between image and narrative in Godard’s series, and how such a connection between those two elements is made untenable by the methods he employs. By rescuing images (as themselves) from their narrative placement, isolating them away from their Hollywood casings, the settings of story lines, etc. Godard succeeds in reintroducing them to their own nature / light – such that they become linked not to another image but to virtual images ‘in the underworld’. I was quite interested in this notion of making these embedded images return to some kind of virtuality, and how this might relate to what Deleuze has written about the virtual in relation to cinema, or in his wider philosophy – perhaps someone can start shedding light on this, or we could take a look at some of the relevant texts at some point?

The reference to this isolation of the images, closing them off so that they might return to a kind of virtual availability, also made me think (perhaps confusedly) to some of the references to the ’sacred’ that came up in relation to Georges Bataille during the Free School event, as well as something I had read in Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Ground of the Image, where mention is made of the ‘image as sacred’ in the sense of being cordoned off or sectioned in a similar way. It might be interesting, at some point, to consider bringing all of these references together to see how they might fit together or fall apart.

During the conference, further references were made to the ‘blacked out’ sections in Histoire(s) du Cinéma – the way the scene fragments, images, sequences were edited together, mixed and separated from one another in different strategies of montage. Again, there is probably something interesting in asking how Histoire(s)… succeeds in not reintroducing another kind of narrative: how it manages to skirt this problem by hovering at the edge of hallucination, or dream, constantly stirred by the ceaseless disruption of the on-screen texts, crossfades, voiceovers and music – all maintaining a kind of novelty of combination that won’t fully disperse or congeal into a single or straightforward linearity or concession to historicity. Not only that, but here’s also something in asking how one might isolate different methods of isolation, so to speak, via both separation and separation – the complex ‘regimes’ in play in the combination and extraction of images from one another, whether embedding them in a black surround or in the material of another shot works in similar manner in not allowing them to settle back into clear function away from their nature as just images….

In any case, these comments about the blacked out sections made me associate it with my experience of watching Mr Death, which I think was mentioned in a previous post about that film. Clearly, the effects of these strange omissions of image in Morris’s film are quite different, but I think there might be some kind of connection. I think we spoke about it working, in Mr Death, as a way of disrupting the inevitability of the events that formed Leuchter’s descent into conviction / delusion, and, as such, functioned as a kind of spanner in the narrative. In contrast to Godard, the result is not a rescuing of images, but somehow a delaying or interruption of Leuchter’s personal logic; making the direction in which he was heading more problematic to follow or difficult to believe.

Such insertions stutter and delay the unfolding of events, make them strange. This seems to me to be strangely echoed in the way Godard handles his own insertions of text and speech – the readings and voiceovers that populate the film. Whether it be the readings he takes from his library shelves, piecemeal and fragmentary, or the odd dislocation involved in his typing out of commentary on an electric typewriter which only proceeds to print what has been committed to it after a significant delay – so that Godard can watch his thoughts be produced on paper as if they came from elsewhere. It’s interesting to note that during the conference I had noted down the observation, perhaps quoting one of the speakers, that there is a desire here to move away from a rupture of language – that Godard rather aims at continuity, and aims to build a ‘flow’ of images rather than establish any breaks. This paradoxical mixture of isolation (which suggests an interruption of sorts) and continuity seems fundamental to what is happening during Histoire(s) du Cinéma, and perhaps relates to the mixture of fact and fiction, past and present, at work in Lanzmann’s Shoah. The creation of fictions seems central to the practice of montage, and one might suggest that another order of montage is being employed in the re-enactments of Lanzmann’s film. There were a number of references the ‘real becoming meaningful through fictions’, or fiction being the ‘machine for the reconfiguration of the distribution of the sensible’ – i.e. establishing new intersections of what can be seen and what can be said about it, throughout the conference, and I’m wondering how the establishment of fictions might relate to the kind of ‘flattening’ that seemed part of what was often brought up as the ‘topography of the sensible’, suggestive of a kind of spreading out which deposes mastery and provides an non-hierarchical ’surface’ for the engagement with what can be seen or said. In his talk later in the afternoon, Rancière himself said (although I’m not entirely sure of the context now), in reference to Godard and Histoire(s)… that the isolation of the ‘icon’ (I have suspicions about aligning this with ‘image’ immediately… what might be going on here?) is then proposed by Godard to be able to be aligned with ‘anything and everything’, which suggests a leveling of the image, even, in its opening out of potentiality (a softening of edges) a kind of neutralisation.