All Films Are Political Author(s): Christian Zimmer and Lee Leggett

All Films Are PoliticalAuthor(s): Christian Zimmer and Lee LeggettSource: SubStance, Vol. 3, No. 9, Film (Spring, 1974), pp. 123-136Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3684517Accessed: 15/12/2009 11:33

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ALL FILMS ARE POLITICAL

Christian Zimmer

"...The man in government who fears the street, because the man in the street is always on the verge of becoming political, delights in being only a producer of spectacle, clever at lulling to sleep the citizen in us in order to keep awake, in the half-darkness of semi- somnolence, merely the inde- fatigable watcher of pictures."

Maurice Blanchot, (THE ENDLESS CONVERSATION)

The polemic initiated between Cinethique and Les Cahiers du Cinema involves, like most polemics, a few ridiculous and

paltry aspects that we won't even mention. Its very origins, from what the arguments of the two reviews allow us to guess about them, seem too obscure and ignoble (fear of competition at Les Cahiers? Ill humor on the part of Cinethique faced with

publication by Les Cahiers of Eisenstein's theoretical writings; and the adoption by the latter of the theses of Change, the rival review to Tel Quel whose ties with Cinethique seem close?) for us to dwell on them at any length. What is inter-

esting is that this polemic has induced both publications to

state, each from its own side, the bases of a true theory of cinema criticism. And, curiously, while one would expect to see violently antagonistic positions facing off, we find on the

contrary, confirmation of the proximity, often extreme, even the coincidence of the points of view that are expressed. This

naturally leads each of the editorial staffs to congradulate itself on these convergences, as if it were a question of a rally- ing to its own assertions. Yet it is right under the circumstances to point out the prior appearance of Cinethique's first

*Reprinted from Les Temps Modernes, October 1970, No. 291.

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statements in relation to those of Cahiers which, let us admit, hardly prepared us for what the first of these reviews chose to qualify rather ironically as "red tinting." But since, in any case, Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, the editors in chief, present us, whether spurred by the polemic or not, an ensemble of reflections whose tone and content deal decisively with those things to which Cahiers has accustomed us, why suspect their sincerity? Let us instead question the substance of their proposals and the conclusions they draw from them. And since in the essentials, or more exactly in the precise bases of their research, the two magazines show an almost perfect identity of views, let us examine at the same time, inclusively, the theses they submit.

The first awareness that apparently produced the efforts of Cinethique as well as those of Cahiers, is a milestone in the history of criticism: in effect it questions what until now has been almost universally considered as the very foundations of the latter. That this questioning is inspired by Marxist philosophy is not par- ticularly surprising: in their haste to have cinema gain cultural status, its commentators have in effect completely failed until now to recognize the economic process that is at the origins of a film production. Here is the fundamental new awareness: in equating the director with the creator in other aesthetic disciplines, critics have never ceased arguing as though this director maintained the creative initiative under a capitalist regime. Moreover, as Cine- thique has been emphasizing since the beginning with its issue number 4, devoted not to an auteur but, significantly, to the "notion of production," it is possible to "make the universe of cinema gravitate around the sole person of the director." And Les Cahiers du Cinema realize on their side that a film is determined by the "important economic forces" that intervene "at the very level of its construction, and not only of its distribution." If someone, or rather something therefore maintains the initiative, it is money. And not merely any money: we are in a capitalist system. Therefore Cinethique can write, with hardly a trace of paradox, that "what this system (of which the producer makes himself the agent) buys from the director is his non-work, his inertia, his idleness." (It might be more exact -- but this is another question that we will examine further on -- to say that he buys his name, if he has a certain notoriety,at very least his status of creator, artist, therefore free man, and not of simple worker-producer -- finding there the mask for his enterprises that is required by all capitalist and lib- eral systems.)

A film is therefore first a product, a merchandise embellished according to the exact laws of industrial production. But a product of idealogic nature; there we are at the heart of the problem. There is no innocent film, we would say, no film without some political incidence. Why? Because there is for the system, for the class in power, but asingle way to veil, to completely disguise from the masses what is really at the origin of film creation, that is to say the productive work and the class rapports that it implies: ideology (and first, of course, because at the mass culture level all "entertainment" generates collective conduct). Gerard Leblanc writes in Cinethique, "The cinematographic industry produces objects (more or less 'beautiful') whose function consists of masking the class

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character of the production rapports (and the opposition of technician/director-producer must be considered at this level) while at the same time deducting the increment of meaning for the film. In the impossible situation thrust on it of working to trace its reality on the screen, cinema is reduced to giving a presentation through intervening actors (and the opposition actor/spectator must be considered at this level), of the thou- sand and one spectacles that assure its viewing."

If, as we see it, the pair economy/ideology therefore constitutes something indissoluble -- the two faces of a same reality -- then ideology itself, we shall see, can cloak the most diverse faces.

It would be naive and after all,very mistaken to believe that financial gain alone counts in a capitalist economy under the pretext that the producer is first of all a man who handles money, invests it and looks to regain it. This view, simplis- tic and unjust toward the producer, derives from a grave lack of knowledge: the producer belongs to the system, is no more than its instrument; it is the system that, at last resort, conducts the whole operation (one would almost be tempted to say, along with Cinethique, that after all a film never has as auteur anything but the system in person). As for this last, the ideological gain is still more important than the financial gain. It is here, in another light, that the in- dissolubility of the economic/ideologic tie can be verified: production, at the service of the system, finds itself thereby at the service of its ideology. But this is not an isolated case: all those who contribute toward ideologically merchan- dising films, so to speak, share the same complicity; and on this point the critics, by their commentaries, join the producers.

With the responsibilities set forth in this way, we can give a rough outline of these "images" of official ideology in the cinematographic universe.

First let us observe, causing no surprise, that these "images" practically all assume the form of myths. And the first of these myths is quite simply cinema. Cinema with a big C. "This is cinema!" "This is not cinema!" "Is this really cinema?" What precisely do similar assertions, similar interrogation mask? Better: to what mysterious ideal, to what universally recognized standard do such proposals refer? On this subject Cinethique offers several observations that we will adopt as our own. While no one would consider on hearing the word "literature" that it had to do exclusively with the novel, when anyone says "cinema," we fatally presume spectacZe-cinema, even though there exist an amateur cinema, a scientific cinema, a pornographic cinema, a militant cinema, a military cinema, a publicity cinema... -- all, or almost all, structured like the spectacle-cinema, sometimes numerically important in the production scheme, sometimes even of a quality superior to films called "entertainment." Cinethique under the pen of Jean-Paul Fargier, concludes, "Spectacle-cinema becomes the general equivalent to which the other films of cinema must be compared to judge their value, and it is true that those forms in actual

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fact do submit to it: they all ape spectacle." What then is spectacle? Obviously it is not the philosophic definition of this notion that interests us: what we would like to know is what it represents sociologically. But, there again, Cinethi- que helps us. "Isn't the ideology that underlies the notion of spectacle the very same one that causes the work of the prole- tariat to disappear in the consumption of the product that he has made?" we read in the issue devoted to "production." Two ideas consequently meet here: the one of consumption, and the other -- totally negative -- of absence of work. Let us draw conclusions from them: spectacle is that magic object, marvel- ous, free of all trace of effort, of labor, that offers itself wholly to the appetite of the consumer; which means that it totally dissolves in enjoyment without the least of its parti- cles escaping the gluttony of the senses (to provide, for ex- ample, nourishment for the intelligence). Whence the pseudo- egality of everyone facing the screen, under the effects of the common denominator of pleasure. Whence also the belief in a mysterious secret of manufacture held by certain cineasts, by certain schools (Hollywood, before the war), more or less in a power analogous to that of the alchemists, that permits creation of the spectacle-cinema by instinct, as if by a sort of grace, in the same way that some, in other times, made gold. This last myth, complacently upheld by a certain critic, clearly shows to what degree this spectacle-cinema is irrational and unanalyzable.

From one myth flows another: this illusory egality in front of spectacle has given birth to that notion, just as hazy, just as ungraspable, of a public. No one knows what the public is for cinema. Beginning with the producers who claim to be powerless in forseeing its requirements, and disarmed before its reactions. But there is a very simple reason for this: the public -- since no one speaks of any but the public -- a global entity, a totality hermetically sealed on itself -- does not exist. Far from being an opaque mass, and without flaws, that one cannot see where to penetrate, it is nothing but a perpe- tual mutation, an amoebic organism ceaselessly seeking itself, its stability, its structure. If it disconcerts by its sudden infatuations or by disaffections that are just as unforseeable, that is because these infatuations are not true tastes, true needs, and that the disaffections are nothing but caprice, without profound significance. Everything happens on the surface and this is perfectly logical, since the film-product, the spectacle, speaks only to the superficial individual, to the consumer. The cinema spectator doesn't really have the requisite speech. One is quite willing to make him think that the ticket he buys at the door represents an opinion; but that ticket makes him above all play precisely the role that is expected of him... The production-consumption act is not a dialogue.

Cinethique and Les Cahiers du Cinema will not hold it against us if, unsatisfied with simply repeating their theses on this precise topic of the public, we expand them somewhat. We do so because in our opinion the notion of "public" holds an important place in the ideologic language of the system on cinema. Once again it is a question of an alibi, of a false pretext. We

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pretend to treat this "public" with all the respect that it deserves, since its needs are not of a material order at all, but of an order that is cultural, spiritual. We deify it, we make a sacred person of it. It was in the era when American cinema was most closely dominated by the mastery of the trusts, in the era when Hollywood producers flaunted their capitalistic designs most cynically, that the famous formula was put out, "The public is always right." The truth is that it is apparently much harder to launch an ideological product than a soap powder or a shaving cream, because the etiquette of absolute novelty is not, in these circumstances, a guarantee of success; quite the contrary, there is a risk of going against an ideologic currant that is still subterranean but on the way to becoming a dominant tendency of opinion.

It is therefore safest to hold to a certain number of rules, of principles, of conventions. Convention, indeed, holds an important place in all art. But in cinema it is, if you will, double: to a conscious and accepted convention, imposed by the codes of a commercial order or a natural order, is added an unconscious and spontaneous convention, a direct issue of the social conditioning of those who make the films. In an inter- esting study on Cinema and Politics, Philippe Esnault observes, "Accustomed to certain forms of cinematographic speech, we accept them as the norm when it is a question of contestably dominant traits: our films are made by men... and this counts when one defines the screen image of Woman; by adults... who often speak of youth and appeal to them; by whites, imbued with a superiority that is only technical... but who haven't lost their annoying tendency to raise private dogmas to absolute values -- a logic of Aristotelian tradition, a morality derived, even on the left, from Christianity; by the bourgeois in short, who appeal to a public that is essentially of the common people, and who are induced, whatever their intentions, to give a false vision of social life."l But these remarks, however true, perhaps miss the essential: cinema secretes an ideology of its own that is called -- to take up Cinethique's terms again -- the "impression of reality." It is a primary point on which we will expand at some length, for all problems meet and culminate here: the economic, ideologic, technical, and aesthetic.

Cinethique discusses the thing perhaps a bit rapidly: on the screen, they say, there are only reflections and shadows. Nevertheless, the spectator perceives reality itself. "The screen is denied; it opens like a window, it is transparent." This "impression of reality" thereby strengthens, reinforces the manifestation of the ideology conveyed by the picture. Whence the public's recognition of that ideology, and beyond the recognition, the identification. But the ideology reflected by the film being no more than dominant, and not universally admissible the spectator can identify with it unawares. So he is mystified .

Such an analysis immediately gives rise to a question: where does this spontaneous identification come from and how can one explain it? "It is involuntary," says Cinethique. Let

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us interpret: identification is the direct product of the impres- tion of reality. What is there in it, then, of that "recognition?" This is no more than a false problem: Cinethique singles out two phenomena where there is but one. Recognition and identification are blended. (Besides, we will see further on that there is already a confusion between the ideology expressed by the film and all the ideologic apparatus that expresses it, in other terms, between the said and the saying, this first confusion perhaps explaining the second.) For the general public, one can if one likes, speak of a "false recognition." At least if one sees things in the economic aspect. Not if one sees them in the psychological. Confronted with the ideology diffused by the screen, the working class is doubly alienated, while the bourgeois class is so only to a single degree: if both are in effect prisoners of the same production/consumption cycle, the bourgeoisie at least rediscovers on the screen the ideology that it brings with itself into the theater. A sort of osmosis operates between the imaginary of the film and the reality of the public, ("There is no difference at all between the ideology present in the audi- torium and that of the film," notes Les Cahiers du Cinema regarding certain spectacles), while the working masses partici- pate economically, with the same efficiency as the exploiting class, in a process from which they are totally absent in terms of reality.

Cinethique, intentionally or not, takes no account of the psychological and cultural mutations brought about by the coming of the industrial era; that is why, finally, its analysis doesn't satisfy us. It is the new "salaried stratus," as Edgar Morin would say, created by industrialization, that has dictated its laws and moulded the public mentality. It has imposed an average and uniform type of participation. "Its needs," dixit Morin, "have to do with the fundamental problems of man's pursuit of happiness. Therefore they call not only for simple entertain- 2 ment, but also for content that addresses the inner human being." "The pursuit of happiness": there are the words to remember. The ideology that the bourgeois cinema dispenses is quite simply happiness. That is to say, an ideology that is the most individualistic; what better concept could be dreamed up to decisively Stifle class feelings? But isn't spectacle in itself already a negation of the class struggle? Isn't cinema, art of the masses, at the same time a pre-eminently personal matter? What does the screen suggest to me, if not ersatz solutions to my intimate problems (you have only to think of the role played by the young leading lady, the star, alter ego of superior species, whose conduct I more or less force myself to imitate)? All of this well justifies the verdict pronounced by Edgar Morin: cinema has "bourgeoisied" itself. And in bourgeoisieing itself it has bourgeoisied popular psychology. One reads in Les Stars,3 that "Originally a plebeian spectacle, cinema had helped itself to terms from pulp serials and melodrama where prime archetypes of the imaginary in almost fantastic state are found: providential chances, the magic of doubles (look-alikes, twins), extraordinary adventures, Oedipal conflicts with paternal and maternal figures,

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orphans, secrets of birth, persecuted innocence, sacrificial death of the hero. The hero, the psychologism, the happy end- ing, the humor, all reveal precisely the bourgeois transforma- tion of that imaginary."

We are not through with the "impression of reality," and it is quite significant that a semiologist like Christian Metz joins the sociologist Edgar Morin in this contention of the "bourgeoisation" of the cinema. He does it apparently merely by introducing a new motion, that of "probability." But the probable is quite simply the form of "impression of reality" that is most ideologic, most systematized, codified. It is its prolongation, exploitation, duplication, that takes place in an inverse direction from the one indicated by Cinethique: the ideologic grafts itself onto the psychologic, not at all the psychologic coming to the aid of the ideologic. This grafting seems natural, and there is something like a logical thread between the spectator's psychic captivity ("impression of reality") and his intellectual captivity ("probability"). Indeed things would undoubtedly have turned out differently if -- admitting this hypothesis is hardly plausible -- cinema had not acceded to the industrial phase; at any rate, the technical perfecting of the seventh art was inevitable, and this perfecting, intentionally or not, took the direction of a simultaneous reinforcement of the impression of reality and of the dictatorship of probability. And our wonder today on seeing certain silent films springs just as much from the primitiveness, from the imperfection of the technique, as from the twists, the sometimes astonishing defiance of the law of "probability." The two things seem to go together: the regret that a more elaborate technique didn't allow the ideas of the cineast to acquire a greater authority never occurs to us. A cultural "vision," perhaps one would say; none the less, for the public of that epoch, the "impression of reality" was less strong and "probability" less felt as an absolute law.

To put it another way, the instrument was not yet ripe. What shall we make of that? Allow us, in order to explicate clearly, a return to that notion of "happiness." How shall we define it exactly? Edgar Morin, in Les Stars suggests a formula that seems as judicious as it is simple: "To dream one's life and live one's dreams." Contradictory desires? Not at all, precisely because cinema fulfills them both at the same time. Thanks -- one might have guessed it -- to this "impression of reality" that belongs most characteristically to cinema, of all the spectacle arts. We refer here to the opening chapter of Essais sur la Signification au Cinema of Christian Metz: it is shown there how the injection of reality of movement in the unreality of the screen image "realizes the imaginary to a point never before attained."5 Cinema is therefore the imaginary realized, which is to say that it remains an unreal spectacle, takes place in a space incommensurable with ours, and that it is nevertheless provided with enough indications of reality for our perceptions to identify it as "concrete life" and "objective reality."6 It is this ambivalence which permits it to

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answer fully the needs of the modern individual: the "imaginary" produced the dream, its "realization" produces the illusion of living. Let us repeat, cinema is absolutely alone in its ability to satisfy exigencies that are so opposite. But so fundamental as well; everything happens therefore as if cinema were the very invention that industrial society awaited and clamored for. Its political role was outlined in advance: it consisted of sticking exactly to the new demands of the individual, thereby consoli- dating the structure of the order that was also newly established. The bourgeoisation of the seventh art is nothing else, consequently, than the perfecting of a political tool. And this perfecting is the progressive establishment of the reign of the "probable," over the base, the foundation, of the "impression of reality."

Let's not delude outselves, then, about that "probability" which has nothing to do with any realism whatever (it can even turn its back on it, as in certain historic films where the ana- chronism of the language or behavior is on the contrary required by credibility). "Probability" would appear, rather, as Christian Metz believes, under the aspect of a triple censure (official, commercial, moral and personal). And Les Cahiers du Cinema are not wrong, concerning discussion stirred up by the release granted to La BataiZZe d'Alger, to recognize the existence of that "diffuse censure" which, kindled by the official censure, is infin- itely more effective and active than the latter.8 A diffuse censure, but also working on the cineasts themselves, secretive, instinctive, become almost reflexive. Christian Metz directly connects the question of "probability" with that of censure in general, which therefore appears as one of the principal deter- mining elements of the cinematographic universe, beside the economic and ideologic ones. It is that which gives birth to the genres, to conventions of all sorts and, contrary to what one might think or insist, those are not positive phenomena. For "the probable is from the start a reduction of the possible. It represents a cultural and arbitrary restriction among the possible realities."9 Let us conclude with Metz, "It is an 'unac- knowledged mutilation of the saying and of the said.'"10

The mention of that double notion of genre and of convention leads us directly to the critical discourse where it holds a high place. Through that discourse a new form of the dominant ideology appears: the myth of cinema as perfectly free artistic activity, as pure language, comparable to music, to painting, to literature. Indeed cinema can be used as a language, that is now certain. But the history of cinema is not that of an aesthetic language: it is that of an art which has never been able to free itself from its ties with industry, that of an industrial art. Because its vocation is narrative, because the pulp or literary origins of its scenarios no doubt predisposed them, the historians and aestheticians of cinema have over a long period, without perhaps being very conscious of it, traced its evolution in a curve that strangely resembles the evolution of the arts of writing. As if these evolutions were independent of the form of society, of political and economic structures, of the duration

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of historic periods. As if each art were free from obedience not only to general laws of aesthetic creation, but also to specific laws that can in turn be modified by the whole context in which they operate... Therefore it is surely from having failed to discover the real -- and complex -- bases of the changes and transformations of spectacle, that historians and aestheticians have up to now resorted to categories that in their termi- nology admit their debt to literature: epic and tragic, clas- sicism and romanticism, lyric style and linear style, etc. Was this because they were actually literary people by training and not scientific? The fact remains that cinematographic culture, even today, seems monopolized by an intellectual class in which men of letters and university people make up the vast majority. The cinephile, who is rather the product of new ideas, virgin of all culture other than cinematographic, is more recently ar- rived and in conflict with that literary-university tradition. Which doesn't prevent him from wielding the same system of concepts while disguising it under technical terms, or from con- cealing his purpose under a language that is willingly esoteric. A fact well worth noting is that these two concepts of cinema rest on the same idealistic postulates, postulates that are questioned by the most recent critical approaches: those of the linguists, the seminologists, sociologists such as Morin, or historians such as Mitry.

No one, without a doubt, has formulated these idealistic postulates better than Andre Bazin. In general, they rest on a very simple idea whose fallacy Jean Mitry has demonstrated: the transparence of the cinematographic spectacle. This idea has generated an entire critical system, an entire vocabulary that one sees endlessly reappearing in theoretical writings (the screen is "a mirror," "a reflection," "a window" open on the world), indeed it has produced several schools of thought that, while sometimes violently opposed, forget that they have a common origin: the illusion of the spiritualists for whom cinema borders on a manifestation of the "invisible" (Dryer, Bresson), that of the "Hitchcock-Hawksiens" with their cult of "evidence," that of the "unconditionals" of Hollywood who -- like Jean Domarchi for instance -- maintain that the more cinema is a financial affair, the more it frees itself from money, and that it is in submission to the dictates of production and to the conventions of spectacle 1tat the director finds a way to ex- press himself truly, etc. Domarchi's positions, based on a profession of faith, can be reduced to the double equation "cinema-spectacle" and"spectacle-dream" (because Hollywood itself, an entirely artificial city created by gold, is a city- spectacle, city of dreams, and everything that comes out of it therefore works toward true cinema. Which points, in short, to the posing of the final equation "cinema-money." These posits support an enormous ideologic mystification: the fabulous in- vestments of American cinema have no other aim than to bring to the whole world -- for Domarchi insists on the universality of the Hollywood myths -- that evasiveness, that poetry which it requires... Moreover, how could it fail to be obvious that what

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is happening here on a global scale is exactly what happens on a national scale, for all the movies of capitalistic structure? How can we ignore the powerful aid that film has always and every- where provided to American imperialism?

But let us return to Bazin: on reading his most important works, one gets the impression that he had a veritable phobia about montage. This montage that imposes a meaning on the screen images, therefore on reality. As he sees it, one doesn't tamper with reality. This last presents itself to the spectator as is, in its natural ambiguity. Is it from his Christian convictions that such an attitude developed for Bazin? This quasi-idolatrous respect for reality -- sacred because it is the work of the Creator? But, Bazin said, this respect is not an end in itself: it is conditioned by a will to respect the spectator, for his most noble, his most respectable quality, that is to say, his liberty. It is up to him to discover the meaning of the film that is suggested to him. If the meaning is dictated to him by the artifice of art, his consciousness is violated just as reality itself was. Apparently praiseworthy principles. But this idealism supposes an innocent cineast without personal opinions or leanings, a camera gifted with power that is magical much more than technical, finally a spectator who arrives before the screen with his liberty unmarred... Indeed Bazin, no doubt with some reason, feared that cinema would bit by bit become distanced from life, be reduced to a completely dry algebra of images. On the other hand, there are incontestably cases where the montage in fact does totally disqualify the vision of the cineast, for ex- ample -- as Bazin brilliantly demonstrated -- in films on painting that are made up of fragments arbitrarily cut from canvases without connecting links between them. It is also true that the rejection of montage is sometimes an exigency that gives a surfeit of truth to what is represented (truth at the level of expression, not in the sense of "objective truth," of course. This is striking in Stroheim's films, although with the auteur unable to edit his own works, one cannot tell whether he would have increased or diminished the part played by montage...). Nonetheless, Bazin's theories rest on a gross error: the confusion between the portrayed and the portrayal. The screen image is not a fragment of concrete reality; it is already a product of work, of action performed on reality. The presentation is a utilisation of reality, an operation that departs from it, that does not return it to its original pristine state. One might ask oneself the source of such illusions. What we can say is that on one hand Bazin's thought ran with all that current of contemporary aesthetic that, if you will, tries to recreate a virginity for art (this obsession with the concrete, with raw reality, is striking enough in music and in sculpture), and that on the other hand it was a party to that great tradition of bourgeois humanism that sees an ideal for the artist in a realism that is painstaking and without foregone conclusions, a photo- graphic sort of prowess achieved apparently for its own sake. That tradition did not originate yesterday, and indeed it took a long while before painting succeeded in escaping it. But this

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is undoubtedly because it was tied to the domination of the bourgeoisie and because it faithfully expressed that ideology. In Un Realisme sans rivages Roger Garaudy writes, "Since the 14th century, let us say since Giotto, painting had been delib- eratly oriented toward the conquest of reality, taking reality as that which the bourgeoisie, then in full stride, held as such -- that is to say the occasion of its business dealings and enterprises, and the mathematical and mechanical definition that the sciences gave it."14 We see then that this double respect for reality and for the spectator can be seen from a very different angle: quite simply as a manifestation of conserva- tive thought as it is reflected in the aesthetic. Is it mere chance that the morality of the films of Hawks -- cineast of "evidence," who is so often reactionary, so Hitchcock, present- ed by his apologists as a metaphysician in the guise of an amuser -- has always displayed a frenzied anti-communism? Is it by chance, finally, that John Ford, so admired for his total absence of staging research, remained faithful throughout his life to a traditionalist ethic?

Somewhat in spite of ourselves, we come to speak of what are generally called auteurs of films. It is far from our intentions, however, to plead in favor of the "politics of auteurs." If, at the outset, this was possibly a way to rationalize, however slightly, the criticism of cinema, to introduce a semblance of method into the anarchy that characterized it, to release it from relativism and integral empiricism, that idea in fact rapidly disintegrated, and today the "auteurs" are for the cinephile no more than the equivalent of the stars for the public. That is to say, a marketable value and a factor of alienation.

This question of the auteur of cinema introduces the last part of our remarks. To date criticism has been no more than a dialogue with the auteurs; from now on it must be an examina- tion of the cinematographic phenomenon in its entirety. But what does this mean? It means the forsaking of a criticism of values. That is, first of all, a denial of the notion of per- fection of form as top criterion, of accomplishment within the chosen limits, as this success can be none other than that of the system. Film is a product, and in appraising it as a finished product, I am a party to the power game. I play the exact role expected of the critic, whether his verdict is positive or negative: by indicating the imperfections of the merchandise, I help the manufacturer to improve it.

The first product for the critic to resolve, and perhaps the only one, is therefore this one: how to place oneself out- side the system. Or, rather, how to work against it. It seems to us that two major principles must be observed: first to pay no attention to the "impression of reality," to treat spectacle as a system of signs having a surface for support, or to put it otherwise, to adopt a strictly materialistic point of view (that is Cinethique's position). Next, refuse to appeal to the public, a myth upheld by capitalism that completely screens the notion of class, and to maintain on the contrary a language very

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precisely aimed at one social stratum, a class language, in the strict sense of the expression. To take up, if you will, the interests of a specific category of spectators. It is easy to understand that these interests could be only those of the workers, since bourgeois criticism, deprived of its natural inter- locutor -- that is to say, the public -- would be thereby deprived of an echo. For that dialogue is in fact a monologue, and the public is, to a large degree, no more than a creation of criticism, a justification of its activity -- an activity that is actually no more than a reinforcement of that of publicity.

This second principle of criticism causes no difficulties. The first, on the contrary, requires a few considerations. Con- fronted with films, one can conceive of criticism's role as con- sisting of the discernment of the " increment of meaning" re- sulting from the productive work. Two views are possible here for the critic. Either he actually attributes this "increment of meaning" to the whole process of production, combing out the converging bundle of elements that gave birth to the film: ideologic, economic, personal. Or he extracts this "increment of meaning" in its entirety from the genius characteristic of an auteur, from the talent of an individual. In the second case, the film's ties with the economic and the ideologic are completely obscured; we are dealing with a deceitful criticism (and one perfectly adapted to the system). In the first case, if the critic accomplishes his task in a thorough and painstaking way, we reach a veritable deconstruction of the film. A value judgement is no longer possible. The description aims at the portrayal, not the portrayed. That is to say the effort, not the oeuvre. Because signs present on a canvas are not merely those that define a personal universe, but also traces left as much by the effort, strictly speaking, as by the tendencies, either secretly or openly ideological, that were operating throughout the creation of the piece. Bunuel's Milky Way and Robert Bresson's Une Femme Douce provide Cinethique with a double occasion to make us appreciate the fruits of such a critical method.

Having stated this, we will not follow that review to its conclusion. If, in fact, it is legitimate to judge the whole production -- or almost all -- of capitalistic cinema as sub- survient to the official ideology, one cannot be satisfied to contrast it with the few rare films that, albeit realized within the system, manage to escape it through their final meaning. We are certainly not trying to minimize the merits of Marcel Hanoun's Octobre a Madrid, Jean-Pierre Lajournade's Jouer de quiZZes, and of Jean-Pierre Pollit's Mediterranee. But isn't it profoundly utopian to hope that one day will see the establishment of a parallel distribution circuit well enough nour- ished to enjoy a certain influence? Isn't it fitting, on the contrary, to direct the most sustained attention, the most opinionated, at capitalist film production in order to disclose the contradictions of the system and expose them to the light of day? In addition, to take the first of the films elected by

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Cinethique as examples of authentic revolutionary work -- we refer to Octobre a Madrid -- it seems to us that such a choice can be disputed. Indeed, Hanoun's work, that offers us the story of a film in the making, the failure of a film, does not adhere at all, as Cinethique believes, to the level of simple revelation of a process of production, since from the moment that it is filmed, that it becomes an object to be filmed, this production deals in fiction like any other scenarist's invention. On the other hand, Hanoun's film in no way avoids the " increment of meaning" that characterizes traditional cinema; for the spectator, the failure of the film is that of a cineast, of a man. Only for Hanoun could the experience have this character that is profoundly negating, subversive, anti- commercial.

In short, the impression of reality still plays a part in Octobre a Madrid: the cineast named Marcel Hanoun whom we see on the screen is not the auteur of the film, because he cannot be present there, only portrayed, taken by himself as subject. Once more, therefore the portrayal here hides the reality of the production process.

We must admit that not even the critic manages to escape the effects of that impression of reality. It is the source of all the errors of interpretation committed recently on films that are purportedly progressive, critical, contestatious. Ex- amples abound: Des Fraises et du Sang, M.A.S.H., They Shoot Horses Don't They, L'Aveu... (without mentioning the case of Z, which is older.) In all these films the impression of reality neutralizes the charge of subversion or deflects it from its objective. A sentimental identification with the charac- ters in Les Fraises, a psychological identification with the climate of the film in M.A.S.H. (necessary adaptation to war, inevitable evil), an absence of reference to the collective dimension and to real responsibilities in They Shoot Horses Don't They ("society" reduced to a few types, and the heroine a victim of fate especially). As for L'Aveu, it will suffice to recall with what intimate satisfaction the leftist critics cited, in order to justify their warm approval, Gramsci's famous phrase about truth "that is always revolutionary," to measure the degree of alienation that those who make a profession of judging films can attain... As if a reconstruction of the truth, furthermore unfaithful to a testimony that is no doubt impossible to really transpose to the screen, could con- stitute an equivalent of the truth that Gramsci talks of... One can, it seems, hold to this very simple principle: a film that plays on identification will never be revolutionary. All identification goes against awareness. Whence the inanity of that "reversal" which a reading of Marx suggests to Cinethique that "Since bourgeois cinema shows some bourgeois and their view of the world well then, let us show workers and their view of the world."1l Such films are as consumable as the others. At the very most the bourgeousie assimilates them with an un- easy conscience.

A play, a novel, a painting are recuperable by the system; but a film, if it doesn't transgress the essential law of

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impression of reality and of identification, we would qualify instead as always assimilatabte. American cinema is certainly past master at this art of digesting food that appears the most insupportable to the organism. In France we are still leaning heavily on auto-censure, on intimidation. Which is a very bad tactic, since auto-censure has the effect of preserving in certain subjects, certain themes, a seductive halo of scandal, of the forbidden, of the clandestine. To take up these subjects, these themes, with a feigned frankness is to erase that halo, to destroy that dangerous prestige. To name the forbidden is a way to make it banal. Alan Didier, in Les Temps Modernes, analyzed this mechanism exceedingly well.16 This undoubtedly applies to horror; but moral comfort knows only a single category of the forbidden.

Didactic cinema has a bad press. However, it is now well established that there is but one way to oppose an anesthetizing identification: inform. Two films seem to us to fill that pro- gram exactly: Fernanco-Ezequiel Solanas' L'Heure des Brasiers, and Le Peuple et ses FusiZs of Joris Ivens, Jean-Pierre Sergent and Marceline Loridan. These films do not involve heros. They bring communities to the screen. That too is a trait of revolutionary cinema: it doesn't tell us about individual destin- ies, but collective ones. And the creation of a film itself being a collective adventure, it is already revolutionary to evoke it on the screen. That is how we interpret, in Bergman's last film, Une Passion, the intervention of the comedians who interrupt the action to speak to us of their character. This is certainly rupture, deconstruction of the facticity of the cinematographic universe. Les Cahiers du Cinema are right: the questioning of the language can transform a film without real political content into a work of political significance. But -- it must have been clear long since -- all films are political, aren't they?

Translated by Lee Leggett

1. L'Avant-Scene Cinema, #96, October 1969. 2. L'Esprit du Temps, Grasset edit., pp. 60-61. 3. Editions du Seuil, p. 16. 4. See Essais sur la Signification au Cinema, Klincksieck

edit. 5. Op. Cit., p. 24. 6. Op. Cit., chapter I, passim. 7. Op. Cit., p. 230. 8. Cahiers du Cinema, #222, July 1970. 9. Christian Metz, op. cit., p. 232.

10. Op. Cit., p. 244. 11. See George Cukor by Jean Domarchi, coll. "Cinema

d'Aujourd'hui," #33, Seghers, edit. 12. See Qu'est-ce que Ze Cinema?, vol. II: Le Cinema et les

autres arts (Peinture et Cinema), ed. du Cerf. 13. See Jean Mitry, Esthetique et Psychologie du Cinema,

ed. Universitaires. 14. Plon, ed., p. 37. 15. "La Parenthese et le Detour," by Jean-Paul Fargier, in

Cinethique, #5, September-October 1969. 16. "Ou est l'horreur?" in Temps Modernes, #288, July 1970.

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Documents

All Films Are Political Author(s): Christian Zimmer and Lee Leggett