Ill TFie Blink «f ci SpectRíng^lf VÎSÎ919 ciifd Lctif^tfcige inPivutg Beli aird the

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1997) established Jean-Dominique Bauby, one-timeeditor-in-chief at French File, as a critically acclaimed author, hut it was not the bookthat he once thought would serve as his ticket into the pantheon of more durahleletters. Before suffering the stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome—a conditionentailing total paralysis except for his lefi: eyelid by which he arduously "spoke" toothers and "dictated" his prose—Bauby had been, as he relates in the memoir he cameto produce in place of the initially planned work, "toying with the idea of writing amodern, no douht iconoclastic, version of the Dumas novel [ The Count of Monte Cristo].Vengeance, of course, remained the driving force of the action, but the plot took placein our era, and Monte-Cristo was a woman" (56). As the existence of such a reflectiondemonstrates, the Monte Cristo project did not merely vanish into the universe's ever-expanding dustbin of unfinished novels, but continued to exert a haunting influenceover its proxy, and, according to Bauby, over the course of his life as a whole.

In a wryly anguished speculation on the inexplicable why of his disastrous fate, Bauhysuspected that he might he serving out a kind of preemptive sentence for plotting tocommit "this crime of lèse majesté" (56), for disobeying some unspoken commandmentthat a writer ought never to "tamper with masterpieces" (56). Indeed, it was as if the"gods of literature and neurology" (56) were out to prove their craftiness in the real-life application of poetic justice by selecting a model for his punishment straight fromthe pages of the would-he aggrieved novel. Whereas in readings oí Monte Cristo priorto the stroke Bauhy never paid much attention to the wheelchair-hound Noirtier deVillefort—an elderly man suffering from neat universal paralysis who "speaks" throughthe blinking of his eyes—afterwards the minor character in the massive tome refocusedin his imagination and took on positively protagonistic proportions. Describedby Bauby as "literature's first—and so far only—case of locked-in syndrome" (55),Noirtier appears in the words of Dumas as follows:

Sight and hearing were the only senses remaining to him, and they appeared left, like twosolitary sparks, to animate the wretched body which seemed fit for nothing but the grave;it was, however, by means of one of these senses that he could reveal the thoughts andfeelings which still worked in his mind, and the look by which he gave expression to thisinner life resembled one of those distant lights which are sometimes seen in perspective bythe benighted traveler whilst crossing some cheerless desert, telling him that there is stiilone human being who, like himself, is keeping watch amidst the silence and obscurityof night. (588)

If ever an ideal reader for such a passage existed, "one human heing [...] like himself[Noirtier]," motionlessly traveling alone amidst a dim and depleted existentiallandscape, Bauhy certainly was it, however much it pained him to acknowledge himself

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218/On Vision and Language in The Diiing Bell and tbe Butterfly

in a "somewhat sinister character" (55) responsible for inspiring far more revulsionthan empathy with respect to locked-in syndrome.

Although he never explicitly announced the connection, the significance of theNoirtier "coincidence" for Bauby extended far beyond the aesthetic sphere—and thefinger-wagging moral not to mess with the classics—to the much more urgent linguisticchallenges that he faced on a day-to-day basis in his altered body. Endlessly prone tobeing misunderstood by people uninitiated into his alternative communication system,and even by the initiates themselves as a result of the woeful inability of the system(functionally hinging on the blink yet without any of the blink's proverbial quickness)to keep pace with his racing thoughts, Bauby came to understand well what it waslike to be the butt of other people's wildly wayward interpretations. Indeed, it wasas if Bauby uncannily came to embody not only the mangled Noirtier, but Dumas'snovel in the drastically mangled state in which he planned to render it. Grappling withiconoclastic rewriting, that is to say, became one of the foremost facts of his life, albeitfrom the opposite end of the communicative spectrum.

Itself an interpretation of Bauby's intimate dispatches, Julian Schnabel's The DivingBell and the Butterfly (2007) dwells upon such a fact with understandable sensitivity.In an illustrative scene, bypassing the staff at the hospital check-in and proceedingunannounced and unattended, two servicemen enter Bauby's room to install atelephone. Encountering a silent and inert mass lying on the bed underneath thicktiers of blankets, the two men begin tochatter away about Bauby in decidedlyunhushed tones, assuming that "it" (asthey refer to him) exists in a vegetativestate. Failing to detect Bauby's hyperactivesense of alertness, the pair go on toquestion whether "it" might be a woman.Lacking a literal precedent in the sourcematerial, the line is one of the script'smost ingenious touches, further deepening the Monte Cristo coincidence by subjectingBauby to the same unauthorized sex reversal to which he planned to subject to Dumas'smain character, while remaining a completely plausible extension of the servicemen'sexchange.

Moments of communicative breakdown in the film repeatedly, and with pointedirony, involve that loaded signifier of communicative extension and efficiency, thetelephone. After the servicemen finish the installation, and Bauby has a good-sported,inward chuckle about the mix-up, the apparatus serves as the crtix for two of themost heart-wrenching scenes in the entire film, both of which expose the limits ofthe communicable interestingly not only for Bauby, but also for those close to himas they struggle with expressing themselves to him in his catastrophically changedcircumstances. In the first scene, Bauby's father pays his son a birthday phone call, onlyto be reduced to an arrhythmic sputtering of sobs and whimpers, his words locked-inby the emotional condition known in Yiddish as being verklempt. In the other scene,while on one of her several under-appreciated visits to his bedside, Bauby's devotedex and mother of his children jealously hangs up on Ines, Bauby's on-again-off-again

On Vision and Language in The Diving Be/land the Buttetflj/2\9

^ girlfriend at the time of the stroke, asI she (Ines) delivers a flailing, tearfully

intermittent monologue explaining theknowingly selfish reasons why she hasfoiled ro visit Bauby a single time in the

I hospital.Dilemmas of transmission, in short,

saturate the material of The Diving Bell,from Bauby's relationship to Dumas,to Bauhy's relationship to the people

in his lik, to the relationship of his autobiography to the film. Taking stock of all ofthese sets of relations, and ranging over several topics (including subjective perspective,embodied vision, the hlink, and "pure cinema"), the essay that follows argues thatSchnabels film exposes the vast stakes of transmission by staging a novel fiision betweenwords and images.

One of the most profiisely and justifiably celebrated features of Schnabel's adaptationof the Diving Bell is its use of sustained—marathonic is perhaps a more fittingadjective—first-person point-of-view cinematography. Aside from a short flashhacksequence chronicling his glitzy life prior to the stroke, and a smattering of intercutimages representing the incipient churnings of his memory and imagination, andcoming and going as rapidly as the flutterings of a butterfly's wing, the viewer seesexclusively through Bauby's eye(s)' for roughly the first forty minutes of the film's runtime. Given Bauby's remark in the memoir that at one time he "thought of calling it[a possihle theatrical version of his life story] The Fye" (63)—a title that in the filmhecomes a discarded choice for the name of the memoir itself—it is as if Schnabelmakes an implicit yet vigorous bid to reclaim the less overtly lyrical, ocularcentric titlewhile working within the medium to which it would seem to be most naturally suited.

One would not necessarily be wrong to say that this hyper-intensive use of perspectivalshooting works to estahlish the spectator's identification with Bauby as he struggleswith a condition that few can imagine themselves experiencing directly. However, thisprocess of identification is also vastly complicated by the fact that Bauby, too, is tryingto forge an identification with an entity that he can with some modicum of stahilityand assurance call "himself" Like many films about trauma or life-threatening injury.The Diving Bell hegins simultaneously with the subject in question foggily coming to atsome point in the aftermath of the calamitous event, gropingly posing questions aboutwhere he is and how he got there. As the stroke radically shakes the foundations ofBauhy's self, the earliest glimpses that he catches of himself as a speech therapist lowersa mirror in front of his face in the hopes that visualizing his tongue may aid in restoringsome control, or as he is wheeled past a reflective glass case in the hospital corridor, takeon the status of episodes in a kind of second, infinitely hesitant and resistance-ladenmirror stage.

With Bauby's new "I" held in aheyance, all that he and by extension we can beassured of is a morass of phenomenological experience anchored in a body that is

220/On Vision and Language in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

at once dead and engulfingly present,a remainder from which nothing hasbeen abjected. By contrast with the all-seeing Eye that many world religionsemploy as a symbol for the divine,or the transparent eyeball into whichEmerson is transfigured in a momentof transcendental ecstasy while outwalking in the Massachusetts woods,or the surrealistic eye as hot air balloonthat mounts toward infinity in one of Odilon Redon's most famous charcoal drawings,Bauby's reduction to a single eye is anything but devoid of ordinary corporealconstraints.

The film's approach to subjective point of view everywhere drives home thiscondition of embodiment. Of course, it is hardly unprecedented for movies that makeuse of first-person perspective to mimic certain aspects of the physicality of seeing.Almost de rigueur in such films, the hand-held camera strives to reproduce what it islike for an eye to move through space on an unevenly swiveling neck or with bipedaljerkiness. An out-of-focus lens suggests the adjusting eye of a subject on the cusp ofawakening, or the failing eye of a subject sinking into sleep or dying. Canted anglesemphasize the delimited, personalness of vision. The Diving Belts prodigiously giftedcinematographer Janusz Kaminski goes far beyond these often recycled visual tropes,however, in approaching the mimesis of human vision with something like the zeal ofan early ophthalmological researcher. Indeed, the source material for the film might justas plausibly be traced to a text such as Goethe's 1810 Theory of Colours, that "amateur"study in optics that, according to Jonathan Crary's well-known argument, signalsthe crux moment in the history of Western vision when "the visible escapes from thetimeless order of the camera obscura and becomes lodged in another apparatus, withinthe unstable physiology and temporality of the human body" (70).

Goethe's groundbreaking concern for what he calls "images [that] appear withoutcorresponding external objects" (28), images derived purely from the subject's ownbody, finds its most illustrious example in the retinal afterimage. However, his studycollects information on a panoply of related phenomena, including "fiery flashesand sparks" (27) resulting from rubbing the eyes, and "dark objects, such as threads,hairs, spiders, flies, wasps" (28), which he attributes to hypochondria and early-stagecataracts, and which appear to refer to what we now call floaters. It is in the spiritof such a catalogue of unruly, kaleidoscopic sights that Kaminski constructs Bauby'sfield of vision, doing so impressively without the aid of post-production digital effects,but rather through a series of inspired, lo-fi, in-camera techniques. As explained ininterviews included in the bonus material on the DVD, Kaminski created the swirlingafterimages that Bauby sees as he nears death by manually cranking and back-crankinga continuously running camera, allowing the film to double-expose both forwards andbackwards, while he arrived at the vital blink effect by clasping and unclasping hisindex finger and thumb over the lens in a rapid disruptive swoop, like an improvisedfinger-slate. , •• ' i.

1

On Vision and Language in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly/21\

This attentiveness to the blink constitutes what I hold to be the most distinctiveand innovative feature of the film's mimicry of the physiology of vision. AdmittedlyI have taken only a provisional survey based on a ransacking of personal cinematicmemories, but I have been hard pressed to think of other instances of first-personnarrative cinema that make so strenuous an effort to reproduce this most habitual—and perhaps for that very reason most neglected—facet of the (un)seeing process.' Itis as if for all tricks by which the standard arsenal of point-of-view shooting aspires toemulate the fragmentariness of embodied vision, a certain underlying and formalizedcontinuity persists. Such efforts, as it were, blink right over the blink. Where one mightexpect to see a spate of ruptures— and here a connection with the illusion of cinematicmovement emerges—one instead encounters all smoothness and flow.

Indeed, it is largely in considerations of the mechanics of the cinematic apparatusitself, rather than of first-person point of view, that the blink retains a key role, andeven then only on a metaphorical or analogical plane. As is well known if never actuallyperceived, during the projection of celluloid film the audience spends a great deal of thetime sitting in total darkness, since the projector requires an instant of time in order toslide each frame, one after another, into position. Such interstices between the framescan be regarded as a species of blinks intrinsic to the make-up of the traditional filmapparatus. Relatedly, there is an obvious connection to be drawn between blinking andthe legendary "flicker-effect" of early cinema, which resulted from the use of projectorsnot fast enough to produce the illusion of critical flicker-fusion; that appearanceof a seamless jointure of individual light pulses that we now take for granted withprojectors whose shutters "double-flash" each frame, thereby creating a quantity ofpulses exceeding the threshold of human perception.

If the emergence of new technologies such as faster projectors and digital mediasever the relationship between the blink and the cinematic apparatus, however, a moreenduring connection presents itself vis-à-vis editing. In In the Blink of an Eye, theacclaimed editor Walter Murch puts forward a fascinating theory of his craft basedupon a homology between the blink and the cut. Murch hypothesizes that the cuttingrhythm of a well-edited film is roughly equivalent to the actual blinking rhythms ofboth the actors in the film and the audience of the film. This three-way optical synthesisamong film, actor, and spectator hinges on Murch's understanding of the blink asno mere motor response in thrall to the eye's need for moisture, but correlative withcomplex cognitive processes, with how we go about making sense, communicating oursense, and understanding other people's sense, of the world. Giving the example oftwo people engaged in conversation, Murch writes: "We entertain an idea, or a linkedsequence of ideas, and we blink to separate and punctuate that idea from what follows.Similarly—in film—a shot presents us with an idea, or a sequence of ideas, and the cutis a 'blink' that separates and punctuates those ideas" (62-63). Hence a good actor willtend to blink once he or she has completed conveying the idea of the shot, marking a"potential blink point" (69) for the editor to make a splice upon, and anticipating themoment when the spectator will grasp the idea, and mark that apprehension with ablink of his or her own.

Although Murch nowhere broaches the topic of subjective point-of-view shooting,his theory can read as a sort of crypto-nomination of editing to the status of the

222/On Vision and Language in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

practice. For as "the audience is made to participate emotionally" (68) in the filmby sharing the blinking patterns of the actors (and of the film itselO, that emotionalparticipation effectively mirrors the actors' own. The audience sees, if not through then"tight with" (69), the blinking eyes of the actors. Whereas this projective identificationmight appear to rectify the lacuna I have been addressing, Murch's theory ironicallywidens it. Since for him the cut doubles as a blink, serving as a wholesale proxy for theshuttering action of the eye, the blink in itself is once more replaced by a structuralfeature of the apparatus, and denied basic ontological rights.

To return to The Diving Bell, then, we are now in a better position to grasp howthe film's treatment of the blink significantly departs from what well-edited films, ona Murchian standpoint, might be said to be doing all the time. Bauby's subjectivelyrendered blinks transpire within rather than in between shots. As reinforced byKaminski's manual simulation of the blink as the camera keeps running, though inno way dependent upon that supplemental knowledge of technique, we can longerconfidently align the momentary rupture of the visual field with editing. Witnessing adarkness, we encounter the blink as blink. Deprived of a purely metaphorical relationto the apparatus, the blink acquires an ontological status as such.

In its relentless pursuit of the physiological "real" of vision. The Diving Bell engages(and, as I will argue, profoundly revises) what throughout film history has heenknown as the drive for "pure cinema," an ideal that has indeed frequently relied uponarticulations of the relationship between eye and camera. In one of the most influentialof these articulations, Dziga Vertov proposes the notion of the "kino-eye," which whileborrowing the word for the human eye {glaz) in fact encodes a desire to transcendthe limitations of the human through the superior seeing capacities afforded by themachine. As Vertov writes in "The Resolution of the Council of Three, April 10, 1923,"

Until now, we have violated the movie camera and forced it to copy the work of our eye.And the bettet the copy, the better the shooting was thought to be. Starting today we areliberating the camera and making it work in the opposite direction—away from copying.The weakness of the human eye is manifest. We affirm the kino-eye, discovering withinthe chaos of movement the result of the kino-eye's own movement; we affirm the kino-eyewith its own dimensions of time and space, growing in strength and potential to the pointof self-affirmation. (15-16)

In his ecstatic meditations on "the camera eye," Stan Brakhage argues, on the contrary,that it is precisely those eccentric weaknesses of human vision, long rejected by theperspectlval and compositional logics of Western art, that comprise an unexploredterritory into which the filmmaker ought to venture in a spirit of adventure anddiscovery. In short, whereas Vertov bases his model of the eye/camera relationship onsupersession, Brakhage bases his on equation.

Despite this major difference, however, hoth models converge in what they see ascinema's ultimate goal: the estahlishment of the medium's claim to uniqueness andautonomy, achieved through radical separation from the pre-existing arts, in particularthe verhal art of literature. In a text on The Man with a Movie Camera that echoes theotherwise proudly intertitleless film's only intertitle, the statement of purpose prefacingthe film, Vertov writes: "This complex experiment, whose success is admitted hy the

On Vision and Language in Tbe Diving Bell and the Butterfly/llTt

i •majority of those comrades who have expressed any opinion, frees us, in the firstplace, from the tutelage of literature and the theater and brings us face to face with100 percent cinematography" (84). Similarly, in an assertion backed by an oeuvre offilms the overwhelming majority of which are monastically soundtrackless, Brakhageproposes that "there is a pursuit of knowledge foreign to language and founded uponvisual communication, demanding a development of the optical mind, and dependentupon perception in the original and deepest sense of the word" (12).

The legacy of kino-eyes and camera-eyes bears a deep antipathy to the Word, whichThe Diving Belts transposition of Bauby's speaking eye to the screen radically troubles.The film's challenge to the drive for pure cinema, that is to say, inheres neither in theverbal dimension of the film represented by Bauby's copious voice-over, which remainsthe exclusive privilege of the audience, and to a certain extent provides a counterpointto the anarchy of the visual impressions, nor in the sense to which Merleau-Pontyrefers when he writes of the "disclosure of an immanent or incipient significance in theliving body" (230), arguing that "it is the body which points out, and which speaks"(230). It is true that we often conceptualize eyes as transmitters rather than merelyreceivers of information, as when we imagine a look to convey an emotional state ofbeing, or to provide clues about the character of its owner However, transmissions ofthe sort borne by an anguished or jealous look, benevolent ot beady eyes, are distinctlynonverbal, properly belonging to the category of body language. In contrast, whenwe see through Bauby's flickering perspective, through the blinks by which he selects

the letters his interlocutors recite froma special sequence organized accordingto frequency of use, we encounterthe spectacle of words in the act oftheir laborious, gestural enunciation.A differently bodied version offingerspelling, that technique by whichthe deaf communicate those wordsfor which no sign equivalents exist,Bauby's blinks hook directly back intothe circuit of linguistic signification.

i K iu c, .iiid this is loi me ilic rub ot tin.' matter: Bauby's blinks ground and underminethe film's status as pure cinema in the very same stroke. Indeed, since the blinksextend from Bauby's everyday language acts to the writing of his memoir, the upheavalpartakes of pure cinema's greatest antagonist: the literary itself

Image and word fuse in the space of Bauby's blink, setting in motion a dialectic notonly between the two media, but between Bauby's self and the world at-large. Thissecond, more broadly implicated dialectic returns us once more to the question ofsubjective point of view—and more specifically, to the question of what limits the filmplaces on the technique. Easily overlooked in the face of the virtuosic display of the firstforty minutes, the film eventually modulates into a rhythm that shifts back and forthbetween first and third person, or subjective and objective perspective, in a mannerirreducible to a simple parceling out between the subsequent flashback sequences andthe present tense. In other words, while the film exclusively draws upon a relatively

224/On Vision and Language in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Stahle and lucid, third-person visual scheme to represent the flashbacks, such a schemedoes not exclusively belong to the pre-traumatic past. Rather, as if to suggest that thesense of in-the-worldness associated with it were on some level provisionally retrievable,the scheme surfaces gradually within the post-traumatic present, finely calibrated toBauhy's progress in relearning how to "speak."

The claim that language grants Bauby an entryway back into the world, however,should not he overstated. His blinking system of communication remains hamperedby several difficulties, as I have already mentioned, slowness and vulnerability tomisunderstanding being only two. Moreover, one can hardly ignore the devastatingimport of Bauby's first non-yes/no, blinking utterance in the film. "I want to die," he spellsout with an unnerving lack of hesitation, as if (re-)acquiring language affords him, likeCalihan, only a means of cursing his oppression. And yet the claim cannot he dismissedoutright, finding pithy expression in the irresistibly allegorical game of hangman thatBauby plays with his kids one afternoon on the windswept heach nearby the hospitalin Berck-sur-Mer. In hangman, each wrong guess for the encrypted word is tallied hyadding a hody part to the man on the gibbet. Whereas a player wins hy successfiillydecrypting the word hefore the condemned man is fully drawn, thus commutingthe sentence, the failure to decrypt ^ ~ ~ " " — ^ ^ — ^ ^ ^ ^ ^is tantamount to the sudden, lethal |dropping out of the hatch. Hangmanreveals philosophical kinship withMarlowe's famous line in Conrad'sHeart of Darkness—"There is a taintof death, a flavor of mortality, in lies[...]"—with the difference that themortal flavor infiises communicativehreakdown in general. As in hangman, matters of life and death urgently depend uponBauby's careful spellings. When such attempts hit their mark, Bauby, of course, is notmagically released from locked-in syndrome and its bleak prospects for life expectancy,but his condition of death-in-lifeness undergoes a kind of mitigation in heing ahle tomove toward either life or death. In light of Bauhy's inability to carry out the act ofsuicide himself, both movements in fact emerge as modes of estahlishing contact withthe world.

Surprisingly if never shyly, the film insists that Bauhy's reattachment to the worldthrough language gathers substantial motivation from erotic desire, which stirs in himless as a faint left-over than as a fiery, importunate demand discharged without regardfor considerations of actahility. As editor of French Elle, Bauhy spent much of his timeenjoying the company of gorgeous women (the actress playing Ines looks distinctlymodel-esque), and this fascination seems on some level to have informed his plan torewrite Monte-Cristo with a woman at the center. Ironically, after the stroke, Bauby findshimself in a world populated with not terribly fewer beauties than at a typical fashionphotoshoot. When first meeting his speech therapists, Henriette and Marie, Bauhygazes dumbstruck into their angelic faces and looming cleavages, and asks himselfwhether he has not awoken in some heavenly afterlife. Later, during a therapy sessionin which she encourages him to "practice blowing me a kiss," and demonstrates with

On Vision and Language in The Diving Bell and the Bntlerfly/llS

a delicate pursing of her lips, rolling of her tongue, and gentle swallowing motions,Marie inadvertently conjures for Bauby the image of fellatio, and he inwardly gasps

"no fair" at the exquisitely torturousperformance. In a dream sequencestarring an able-bodied version ofhimself and Claude, the dictationistwho patiently transcribes his memoir,Bauby indulges in a full-fledged fantasyof unrestrained, polymorphous orality.All activity centering on the mouth, thetwo mmm and aah rapturously as theydevour lobster and slurp mussels from

lavishly decked out banquet tables, ceasing the feasting only to make out with room-thrashing enthusiasm. Such scenes suggest an intriguing, real-life, late-century versionof what media theorist FriedrichKittler, in his work on discoursenetworks around 1900, calls the

"typewriter romance" (221). Aswomen became increasinglyprofessionalized as typists withthe rise of the new personalprint technology, Kittler writes,the cultural imaginary responded with a spate of representations in which "deskcouples[...] replaced literary love pairs" (220), and intimacy flowed through the verycircuits of dictation between secretaries and their bosses.'

The romance of dictation plays a key role in preparing the film's first major breakwith Bauby's point of view, which arrives directly following Bauby's first expressionof "thanks" to Henriette, the therapist responsible for introducing him to the blinkmethod of speech and training him in its use. In part a peace offering to atone for thehurt he has caused Henriette with his death wish, his initial language act into whichshe had poured so much effort to make possible, the thanks also doubles as a vehicle offlirtation. After Henriette reacts to the compliment with a few bashful smiles, Baubyremarks to himself like a smug, veteran Don Juan gloating in the powers of his owncharisma: "Women aren't complicated." Resisting a moral idealization of Bauby, theflipside of the demonization approach to representing the disabled, the film makesno apologies for such stains of misogyny, indeed parades them openly in order toexpose Bauby as flawed, human, not one-dimensionally likable; and perhaps to show,on an arguably positive note, that the stroke has not destroyed at least one other thingbesides his memory and imagination. And yet the remark fails to resonate with thesame condescension that it once would have prior to the stroke, given both Bauby'sknowingness that he is no longer the "man" he once was, and the fact that much sinceritycolors his feelings toward Henriette. Indeed, in the absence of reciprocity from Ines,and of interest in getting back together with his ex, it is the professional, language-cultivating women in his life with whom Bauby establishes his most consequentialpost-stroke affairs. ;

226/On Vision and Language in The Diving Be// and the Butterfij ,

As if preconditioned by his acknowledgment of Henriette's gift of language, the filmfinally breaks with Bauby's point of view. At last, the viewer comes face to face withthe subject in the world rather than the world through the subject. For the first timewe see Bauby sraunchly in his surroundings rather than desperately struggling to makesense of their barrage of stimuli. He is granted a world outside of himself, and somesolid bearings within that larger domain. In a long shot framed by the tattered butperduring, red-ochre bricks of the hospital complex, and set against a flawless azuresky, the couple sit outside on a spacious balcony, Bauby in a wheelchair and Henrietteon a bench, she equipped with the pen and notepad signaling their immersion inthe communicative act. In the next shot, of longer duration than any before it, thecamera recedes further back to provide a wider vantage of the same tableau, markingan outward progression that sharply contrasts with the previously relentless onslaughtof interiority. Consequently, the sky is permitted to extend its breadth, and the hospitalclock tower, like a Proustian needle of •"orientation in the small provincialtown, to rise in crisp outline.What in another film would bean unremarkable, even bland, pairof establishing shots acquires thesignificance of an infinitely fragile,hard-won accomplishment: just this 'ordinary assurance that persons andthings and nature all exist in a larger matrix of relationality. Meanwhile, Bauby's innerand outer voices achieve a crucial degree of parity as he begins to blink-sayto Henriette, and then completes for us in voice-over, "I've decided to stop pityingmyself" Although Bauby will have his share of sinking relapses into self-pity for whichone would be hard pressed to claim he lacks the soundest justification, at this momenthe attains a measure of detachment from his otherwise overwhelming condition.

For all the emphasis on subjectivefirst-person point of view, the filmcreates a modest field of possibilitiesfor intersubjectivity, even (and moreelusively) for nonsubjectivity. Oneof the film's recurrent images—the Arctic ice-shelves that appearmidway through the film, collapsingand falling into the ocean, and

then reappear during the end credits, knitting themselves back together through thecinematic trick of reverse motion—offers some assistance in navigating this latterterritory. The far-flung images of the natural sublime spliced into the fabric of thehuman narrative occupy an uncertain diegetic position. Do they belong to the sphereof Bauby's fantasy, intelligible in the same terms as the montage of found footage (acaravan to the pyramids, a daredevil downhill skier, glam-era Bowie) that representthe work of his bustling, yearning imagination? Or do they belong to the imaginaryof the film itself, serving as a kind of meta-commentary on the film's themes of

On Vision and Language in The Diving Bell and the Butterfff/221

catastrophe and attempted self-reconstitution?^ Unaccompanied by any explanatoryvoice-over, only tentative, melancholy notes of Satie-esque piano, they can be read ina variety of ways. For me, however, their chief significance lies in their generic status aslandscape, that is, as pictures without people; and further, as peopleless pictures thatgive the impression—this being the Arctic, inaccessible, forbidding, where so few haveventured—of impossihle sights, sights as seen hy no one. Temporal negatives of eachother, the images together form a negative "pole" to the vast, clamoring hackgroundof radical subjective embodiment against which they appear, holding out a scarce andontologically uncertain elsewhere.

Of course, one might also argue that, while nowhere visihle, Bauby—and in particular,his speaking eye—inhahits the images everywhere, since it is that which has made thetransmission of his story possihle in the first place. Indeed, atmospheric effects redolentof optical anatomy constantly turn up in both the book and the movie. "Through thefrayed curtain at my window a wan glow announces the break of day" (11): so runsthe opening line of Bauhy's memoir. Adorned by a "frayed curtain," like a lid weariedfrom excessive use, and transmitting an "announce[ment]" (a word with specificallylinguistic connotations), the window suggests an unmistakable metaphor for Bauby'sspeaking eye. It is as if Bauby's memoir begins by describing the crucial conditionof its own possibility. Attuned to thetrope, the film returns again and againto Bauhy's hospital room window,hung with hillowing curtains diffusingand refracting sunlight. It has heen myargument, however, that the film doesnot merely translate Bauby's wordsinto corresponding visual images, butoffers a unique fusion between thetwo media, spectacularizing those verywords in the making. If by doing so the film radically remaps the conceptual (in)distinction hetween words and images, it is one of the several achievements of the filmthat we are never permitted to forget that upon this theoretical point hangs the way inwhich a life, virtually robbed of life, so indispensably enlarges the moves of its dauntingendgame.

Jonah CorneUniversity of Manitoba, Canada

228/On Vision and Language in Tbe Diving Bell and tbe Buttetflj

: Notes • ' I

' Inidally, Bauby retains partial use of his right eye, though it is sickly and rapidly drying out Worriedabout lnfecdon, a doctor sews it up in a grisly scene, and from diat point on any discrepancy about whicheye (or both) we are seeing dirough is resolved: die monocularit)- of the camera accords precisely uidiBauby's own.

^ Gaspar Noé's recent film. Enter the Void (2009), which I have unfortunately only been able to read

re\iews of radier dian see for myself, apparendy includes a long, hyper-mimedc, first-person segment

replete uith blinks. VCTiatever his differences in approach, it would be hard to imagine Noé being unaware

of die precedent set by Schnabel's film. I should also mendon that I use the term "narrative cinema" since

one has better luck finding attention to the blink widiin die realm of non-narradve, experimental cinema,

as in die work of Brakhage, whom I discuss below. Indeed, it is Brakhage's films radier than the seminal

"flicker" films (Peter Kubelka's Amiilf Rainer, Tony Conrad's The Flicker, Paul Sharits's N:O:T:H:l:N.-q of

the structural cinema that are most relevant here, though I also discuss the "flicker-effect" in more general

terms below. As P. Adams Simey writes, structural cinema attempts to "divorce the cinemadc metaphor

of consciousness from diat of eyesight and body movement, or at least to diminish these categories

from die predominance diey have in Brakhage's films and dieory. In Brakhage's art, perception is a

special condition of vision, most often represented as an interruption of the retinal continuity (e.g., the

white flashes of the early hiic films, the conclusion of D(g Star Man). In the structural cinema, however,

apperceptive strategies come to die fore. It is die cinema of die mind radier dian of the eye" (.'548).

' It is bodi interesting and relevant to note that Kitder's discussion of the typewriter intersects thicklywith the history of disability. "Blindness and deafness, precisely when they affect eidier speech orwriting, )ield what would otherwise be beyond reach: informadon on the human information machine.Whereupon its replacement by mechanics can begin. Knie, Beach, Thurber, Mailing Hansen, Ravizza:diey all constructed their early typewriters for the blind and/or deaf" (189).

' If this metacommentary possibility is the case, it should be pointed out that the use of reverse modondoes not automatically signal a vision of ultimate restored wholeness for Bauby In a provocadve essay onreverse motion, Ian Christie desctibes die experience of watching "die demolished wall diat miraculouslyrebuilds itself, die diver who rises from the water to regain precisely the end of die diving board" (168),and goes on to remark: "At a simple perceptual level, filmic reverse motion produces a paradoxicalsense of inevitability: die wall and the diver bodi rise, defying gravity, because they have already falkri' (174,emphasis Chrisde's). In odier words, die reconstituting power of reverse motion is indissociable from theirreducible fact of de-constitudon. The former doesn't stricdy negate or undo—but rather relies uponand reminds us of—the latter.

Worb Cited ¡

Bauby, Jean-Dominique. Tbe Diving Bell and tbe Butterfly. London: Harper Perennial, 2008. Print.

Brakhage, Stan. Essential Brakbage: Selected Writings on Filmmaking. Kingston: McPherson, 2001. Print.

Christie, Ian. "Time Regained: The Complex Magic of Reverse Motion." Gabbard 168-81.

Crary, Jonathan. Tecbniques of tbe Observer: On Vision and Modernity in tbe Nineteentb Century.Cambridge: MIT, 1990. Print.

On Vision and Language in The Diving Bell and the Butterflj 1229

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Dir. Julian Schnabel. Perf Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner,Marie-Josée Croze, and Anne Cosigny. Pathé Renn Productions, 2007. Film.

Dumas, Alexandre. The Count of Monte Cristo. Trans. David Coward. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

Gabbard, Glen O., ed. Projected Shadows: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Representation of Loss inEuropean Cinema. London: Routledge, 2007. Print.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Theory of Colours. Trans. Charles Lock Eastlake. Mineóla: Dover, 2006.Pdnt.

Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and MichaelWutz. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Print.

Medeau-Ponty, Maudce. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 2002.Print.

Murch, Walter. In the Blink of An Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing, 2nded. Los Angeles: Silman-James,2001. Prim. I

Sitney, P Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, arded Oxford: Oxford UP,2002. Print.

Vertov, Dziga. Kino-Eye: The Writings ofDziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Trans. Kevin O'Brien.Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Print.

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