Cinema E-Book

Alain Badiou

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 535

Beschreibung

For Alain Badiou, films think, and it is the task of the philosopher to transcribe that thinking. What is the subject to which the film gives expressive form? This is the question that lies at the heart of Badiou's account of cinema. He contends that cinema is an art form that bears witness to the Other and renders human presence visible, thus testifying to the universal value of human existence and human freedom. Through the experience of viewing, the movement of thought that constitutes the film is passed on to the viewer, who thereby encounters an aspect of the world and its exaltation and vitality as well as its difficulty and complexity. Cinema is an impure art cannibalizing its times, the other arts, and people - a major art precisely because it is the locus of the indiscernibility between art and non-art. It is this, argues Badiou, that makes cinema the social and political art par excellence, the best indicator of our civilization, in the way that Greek tragedy, the coming-of-age novel and the operetta were in their respective eras.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

COVER

DEDICATION

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT PAGE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FOREWORD

1 “CINEMA HAS GIVEN ME SO MUCH”

2 CINEMATIC CULTURE

3 REVISIONIST CINEMA

What does the old bourgeoisie show?

The new bourgeoisie at work

The revisionists’ “people”

What direction of attack?

4 ART AND ITS CRITICISM

The proletariat, a barbaric class

The proletariat, a universal class

The present times

The six criteria of progressivism

The constraints of the subject

The seventh principle: The law of forms

5 THE SUICIDE OF GRACE

6 A MAN WHO NEVER GIVES IN

7 IS THE ORIENT AN OBJECT FOR THE WESTERN CONSCIENCE?

Follow-up addendum

8 REFERENCE POINTS FOR CINEMA’S SECOND MODERNITY

9 THE DEMY AFFAIR

10 SWITZERLAND: CINEMA AS INTERPRETATION

11 INTERRUPTED NOTES ON THE FRENCH COMEDY FILM

12 Y A TELLEMENT DE PAYS POUR ALLER

The Jews in the Arabs’ place

The lovers of the place

Mouths from the South

13 RESTORING MEANING TO DEATH AND CHANCE

14 A PRIVATE INDUSTRY, CINEMA IS ALSO A PRIVATE SPECTACLE

15 THE FALSE MOVEMENTS OF CINEMA

16 CAN A FILM BE SPOKEN ABOUT?

17 NOTES ON THE LAST LAUGH (DER LETZE MANN)

18 “THINKING THE EMERGENCE OF THE EVENT”

19 THE DIVINE COMEDY AND THE CONVENT

20 SURPLUS SEEING

21 CONSIDERATIONS ON THE CURRENT STATE OF CINEMA AND ON THE WAYS OF THINKING THIS STATE WITHOUT HAVING TO CONCLUDE THAT CINEMA IS DEAD OR DYING

On the notion of “the situation of cinema”

Four examples

A thesis and its consequences

Exceptions

Formal operators and dominant motifs

Cinema and the other arts

A general hypothesis

22 THE CINEMATIC CAPTURE OF THE SEXES

23 AN UNQUALIFIED AFFIRMATION OF CINEMA’S ENDURING POWER

24 PASSION, JEAN-LUC GODARD

25 “SAY YES TO LOVE, OR ELSE BE LONELY”

Unity and multiplicity

Father and son

Between neo-classical and baroque

Confession

Humanity is love

26 DIALECTICS OF THE FABLE

27 CINEMA AS PHILOSOPHICAL EXPERIMENTATION

Cinema is a philosophical situation

What is a mass art?

The five ways of thinking cinema

From the question of time to the question of metaphysics: a round trip via love

Cinema and the invention of new syntheses

A Tribute to Gilles Deleuze

Cinema, an absolutely impure art

28 ON CINEMA AS A DEMOCRATIC EMBLEM

29 THE END OF A BEGINNING

Gauchisme

On the wane

Allegory

The new, on what conditions?

30 THE DIMENSIONS OF ART

31 THE PERFECTION OF THE WORLD, IMPROBABLE YET POSSIBLE

To my friends from L’Art du cinéma, and to my son, André Balso-Badiou, in particular.

First published in French as Cinéma © Nova Editions, 2010

This English translation © Polity Press, 2013

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5567-3 (hardback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5568-0 (paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7002-7 (Multi-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7003-4 (Single-user ebook)

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Chapter 14 is an excerpt from Bruno Bosteels’ translation “Rhapsody for the Theatre: A Short Philosophical Treatise,” in Theatre Survey, 49: 2 (2008), pp. 187–238. Copyright American Society for Theatre Research, and reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press.

Chapters 15 and 16, with slight modifications, are from “The False Movements of Cinema,” in Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano, pp. 78–88. Copyright 2005 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University for the translation. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of Stanford University Press.

Chapter 21 was translated as “Philosophy and Cinema,” in Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, eds. and trans. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London and New York: Continuum, 2005), pp. 83–95. The slightly revised translation is reprinted with the kind permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Chapter 26, with minor revisions, is Alberto Toscano’s translation “Dialectics of the Fable,” in Science Fiction Film and Television 1: 1 (2008), pp. 15–23, Liverpool University Press.

FOREWORD

“Cinema is a Thinking Whose Products are the Real”

For Alain Badiou, cinema is an education, an art of living, and a thinking. He has written of his relationship with “the seventh art” in about thirty different texts, dating from the late 1950s to the present. This in itself amounts to a comprehensive vision and interpretation of cinema, even if most of these articles deal with individual films or groups thereof. Such an approach is in fact one of the characteristic features of Badiou’s thought: thinking on a case-by-case basis, deriving a whole system from one particular work of art considered in its specificity. As a result, these texts offer a wide-ranging survey of the cinema of the past fifty years, from filmmakers of modernity (Murnau, Antonioni, Oliveira, Tati, Godard) to a few contemporary American films (The Matrix, Magnolia, A Perfect World), by way of a few unique experiments (Guy Debord, the cinema of ’68, the militant films of the Groupe Foudre, and so on).

Like quite a few thinkers of his generation (Rancière, Genette, and Deleuze, for example), Alain Badiou was brought up from an early age on the cinema as a vector of thought. His cinephilia was boundless, and he turned to writing about it right from his student days, when he contributed to Vin nouveau, the journal of young leftist Catholics at the École Normale Supérieure, in 1957. Beginning with his ambitious, important first text, “Cinematic Culture,” a few specific ideas emerged that would run throughout his subsequent work: cinema does justice to the human figure inscribed in the contemporary world; cinema considered in terms of its “subjugating” relationship with the other arts; cinema as an imaginary voyage and a thinking of the Other. With his turn to militant commitment and a political philosophy, Badiou pursued his critical work, contributing to La Feuille foudre and L’Imparnassien in the 1970s and early 1980s. The latter were militant journals in which a judgment was issued, the judgment of a political tribunal of sorts. The verdict would come down: such-and-such a film was “revisionist,” or such-and-such films merited more respect and consideration. In the line of fire were the French leftist fiction films, while among the few filmmakers admired enough to be spared the sentence were Bresson and Godard.

In 1981, along with Natacha Michel, Badiou founded the biweekly journal Le Perroquet, the intellectual core of anti-Mitterrandism, and for ten years staked out an altogether remarkable critical itinerary in a number of articles he wrote about films of interest to him. Some highly stimulating analyses of the features of the French comedy film, the filmmakers of “the second modernity” (Godard time and again), and Swiss cinema as the emblem of “cinematic neutrality” are also worth noting.

These were followed by more extensive, theoretical texts, published over the past fifteen years in the journal L’Art du cinéma as a rule and written in clear, simple language – one of the hallmarks of Badiou’s philosophical writing style – on “the dialectics of the fable,” film as a “philosophical machine,” and cinema as a “democratic emblem.” In these essays, the philosopher develops the idea of cinema as a “producer of a truth of the contemporary world” and of film as a “sensible configuration of the truth of the world.” Films think, and it is the task of the philosopher to see them and transcribe that thinking: What is the subject to which the film gives expressive form? This is the question at the root of Badiou’s thinking about cinema. In many of these texts, cinema becomes an impure art cannibalizing its times, the other arts, and people – a major art precisely because it is the locus of the indiscernibility between art and non-art. It is all this, explains Alain Badiou in a clear and irrefutable way, that makes cinema the social and political art par excellence, the best indicator of a civilization, as were Greek tragedy, the bildungsroman, and the operetta in their respective eras. Last but not least, included in this book is the text of a seminar given by Alain Badiou in Buenos Aires in 2003, “Cinema as Philosophical Experimentation,” in which he develops his thinking of cinema at length and in great detail, illustrating it with many new examples from Mizoguchi, Ozu, Rossellini, Visconti, Hitchcock, Godard, Lang, Hawks, and Anthony Mann. This text can be read as a veritable manifesto of cinema as conceived by Alain Badiou.

Antoine de Baecque

1

“CINEMA HAS GIVEN ME SO MUCH”

An Interview with Alain Badiou by Antoine de Baecque1

The first thing that struck me when I was assembling all your texts on cinema for this volume is how spread out over time they are, as if the cinema had accompanied you throughout your entire intellectual life. The last text, on Clint Eastwood, dates from 2010; the first, “Cinematic Culture,” was published in June 1957 in the journal Vin nouveau, when you were twenty years old. Cinema would seem to be a very important art in your education.

Cinema has played an essential role in my existence and my apprenticeship of life and ideas. I’m all the more convinced of this because, even though that first published text dates from when I was twenty, I’d already been involved with cinema before then, having participated in and run that organization which was so invaluable back then, the high school cinema club. First in tenth grade and then in eleventh, I frequently took part in commenting on the film being shown. Cinema’s presence in my life goes way back and has been geared for ages toward the idea that it’s something other than mere entertainment. I remember a lecture I gave at age eighteen in Toulouse, when I was in my first year of the preparatory class for entrance into the École Normale Supérieure. It was a lecture on Orson Welles’ Othello and had to do with the relationship between cinema and the other arts. I boldly argued that Welles’ film was on a par with Shakespeare. I was fascinated by Welles’ voice, which I thought was cinematic in and of itself. When I became a student at the École Normale Supérieure, the Cinémathèque française was only a few dozen meters away, on the rue d’Ulm, and I used to go there nearly every night. I had the feeling that, of all the arts, cinema was the one that really guided your entry into the contemporary world, and, basically, something like my own delayed entry into the century. At the Cinémathèque I of course began seeing the films of Stroheim, Griffith, and Chaplin, which Henri Langlois2 projected in abundance. And at the same time as I was going to see those movies I was also going to museums, concerts, and operas.

But these apprenticeship experiences are not all the same: films, even the classics of the silent era, afford an idea of the world that is always contemporary, something that’s no longer provided by a Tintoretto painting or a Beethoven quartet. I still feel this difference: there’s something about cinema’s relationship with the world that educates and instructs in a unique way. Now I can learn about the geography of some countries I know nothing about, some languages I don’t speak, some social situations that are at once very specific and completely universal, simply by watching films. Cinema captures that. Its only possible rival might be the novel, but films have a more intense availability, circulation, ability to capture the imagination. It’s hard to find a Kazakh novel that has been translated only a year after its publication, whereas several times a year you have a chance to see a Kazakh, Armenian, Kurdish, Syrian, or Senegalese film, or a film from Bangladesh or Indonesia, in a Paris movie theater. As a result, since cinema is a profound art form – hybrid but profound nonetheless – we learn quickly and in depth that we’re contemporaries of Kazakhstanis or Bangladeshis. This doesn’t have anything to do with documentary footage; on the contrary, it’s usually fictional films, which are quite complex and remote from us by definition, that are the ones we learn the most from.