Mothers & Moving-Images: Excerpt from The Years of Theory (2024) by Frederic Jameson
You can buy this book from Verso directly. It’s a transcription of Jameson’s Magisterial lecture series on the History of the French Philosophical period. It’s really superb.
pp.304–311
“With that, we must leave Kristeva and move on to cinema—although, God knows, Kristeva has something to say about that, as with everything else. She does work on painting, in particular on Bellini’s use of blue in her work on the maternal, so she certainly knows something about the visual. In any case, we move into something else, which is the realm of visuality. Comolli gives you an idea of what these critics are trying to do, especially with this desperate attempt to pin down what political or revolutionary art is. And, yes, these people are filmmakers too, unlike in the United States, where you have filmmakers who were only filmmakers. But the French all started as theorists, the earliest of whom—the disciples of André Bazin, the great origin-figure of cinema theory during the war and a little later—are named François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, and Jean-Luc Godard. Out of their film criticism comes a whole cinematographic movement.
This is the moment of the Nouvelle Vague. Its first films appear in the late ’50s; Godard’s Breathless or Truffaut’s Les quatre cents coups are the kick-off films. There are others, and I would particularly refer you to Last Year at Marienbad, written by a novelist, Alain Robbe-Grillet, because that film makes the connection between filmic language and the experiments of the so-called New Novel, of which Barthes was an apologist. That is the moment when this intellectual and creative impulse is turned toward language as a medium. The point that it arrives at is not that language is a medium in the sense that it “means,” but rather in the sense that it is matter. Sartre described language as a rug. It has a surface, which is decorated with all kinds of patterns, its meanings. Then you turn it over and you have all the loose ends of the material that the rug is made from. Poetry, he says, is like this rug: it directs our attention to the materiality of language. We can also find this play with language in Robbe-Grillet’s novels, the most famous of which is called La Jalousie, ‘jealousy’ being both a state of mind and, in French, the slats of a blind; when you talk about film noir in English or French, it always brings to mind the shadows of blinds on somebody’s face. But I would refer you either to his novel Le voyeur, or, later on, Project for a Revolution in New York. Robbe-Grillet, however, is not supposed to be read, because his work is profoundly sexist. It’s nothing but women’s naked bodies, torture, and all the rest of it. In my own opinion, it isn’t that this is morally evil; it’s just that it’s stupid. One gets very tired of it. Robbe-Grillet finally was attacked for the content of these novels, but these are the pieces, the raw material that makes up the operation of his novels.
Look at it this way. The narrator describes a torture, obviously of a woman, because that’s what he always does. Then you begin to see that, no, the words have not told you enough, because this is visual description. In fact, you realize you’re looking at this whole scene through a keyhole. So, suddenly, it is a different matter than what you had imagined. Finally, at the end, you discover that it isn’t an act of torture at all; it’s the cover of a pornographic magazine. So you see how the limits of the words that we use to describe things are being cunningly exploited. We’re being made to think that we’re looking at one referent, but, owing to the material defects of language and its abstractions, it turns into something else, such that the novel has turned on itself and made you look at its process of representation, rather than its content.
So this becomes, in a way, analogous to what the filmmakers of the New Wave are doing. This work is making you think you’re following a representation, but then it gradually reveals the structure of the representation and the materiality of the process whereby the representation is made. Last Year at Marienbad is an example of that, because it is a film in which you never know where you are, the representations taking you one direction, the flashback taking you another; nobody knows exactly what’s happened. You could say that it is a rather mechanical product. Yes, but it has a real mystery and beauty to it, and I think one can’t deny its success.
So this is what is going on in literature and in cinema. Godard is certainly one of the great figures of the age. Whatever you think of his films, he has produced a prodigious oeuvre, and it is certainly as great as any of the writers or poets of the period. If you’ve never seen any Godard, I would recommend first the political film about May ’68, Tout Va Bien, starring Jane Fonda and Yves Montand in the middle of the strikes and crises of the ’60s. An early work, one that I really like, is called Weekend, in which the world ends in a traffic jam. Then there is the political period of the Dziga Vertov Group, whose films are overtly political and exploratory, dealing especially with the wars of national liberation. After that, later films like Passion and Carmen, and, finally, a return to politics, where the struggles of the Palestinian people are transferred to the Balkans and the horrors of civil war. So Godard spans all these periods and becomes the filmmaker of History itself, which predictably he identifies with the history of cinema (the four parts of Histoire(s) du Cinéma).
All of the theoretical work of these filmmakers and groups like Tel Quel is being produced against the background of the great explosion of May ’68 and the reaction against it in the ’70s, when the parties have broken down into groupuscules, small tendency groups; meanwhile, in Germany and Italy, these small groups will become—I don’t like this word, but it is the word people use—so-called terrorist groups, one of which will end in the kidnapping and death of Aldo Moro. A little more short lived here was The Weathermen, and in Canada the Front de libération du Québec. All over the world, there are sequels to the failure of May ’68.
Film has a special presence in this moment. I would put the problem of revolutionary film this way: If you represent your oppressed population as being too weak, then what the film projects is that they’re incapable of making revolution. If they are shown as the victim, in the long run, the more you succeed, the more you fail, because the more you succeed in showing how miserable and oppressed they are, the less capable they seem of making any kind of revolution. On the other hand, if you try to show the political possibilities, the heroism of these classes, then, of course, that is false as well, because why would they have to revolt if they were that powerful? So, in between, you get the temptation of the leader, of political heroism, which also becomes a kind of fairy tale. It is a very delicate balance that one must find to show revolution in the content. Here, I would be very old-fashioned and insist on a distinction between form and content, which you’re getting in Comolli in his various categorizations, because he understands that you don’t want to throw out the window all the old films that show revolutionary activity in a style of traditional filmmaking, because why should you abandon those to the enemy? Even if the enemy is traditional, realistic representation, Hollywood, nonetheless these are films with tremendous power. And I would say the greatest of those is called Burn! by the filmmaker, Pontecorvo, who made The Battle of Algiers. It is in English, and the star is Marlon Brando; I think it is also his greatest movie. It is about the liberation of a colonial island called Queimada (“burnt”). I highly recommend it to you.
On the other hand, these theorists have talked themselves into a system where the great activity is not to be found in the content of the works but in the revolution of filmic language itself. So which is more revolutionary: a film about revolution or a film in which the very forms of narrative are revolutionized and in which the attention is given to the cinematographic revolution in the forms, like Eisenstein, maybe (although the cultural hero of all this is Dziga Vertov)? On the other hand, if you’re a political militant and you’re working with workers and radical groups, these esoteric films about the making of film are not likely to arouse much interest in their self-conscious revolutionary technique. So you have a problem. I think Comolli is here trying to respect these various categories and to recognize them all in their various ways of doing things. But, of course, that is not really a solution.
Jean-Louis Baudry is doing something else, and here we’re coming back to visuality with a vengeance. You will see when we get to Foucault next time that this problematic of the visual doesn’t go away if we leave behind the explicit concern with film. It is this nagging problem that begins with Sartre’s notion of the look, goes through Lacan and the object gaze, and then comes back in these filmmakers. In Baudry, the interesting thing is the emergence of a different kind of theme, one that we’ve also insisted on here. So far, we have called it “humanism.” We don’t have to keep that word, but it is the same that Foucault is attacking when talks about the death of the author. We’ll look at that next time.
But, with Baudry, film itself is enlisted in this campaign for the death of the subject. Of course, the subject doesn’t die; it’s only decentered. We’re to see with Sartre personal identity as an object of consciousness and not the constitution of consciousness. With Lacan, we are to see how, in the mirror stage, the subject produces itself as a visual unity. But we are also to understand how the very idea of unity is itself an ideological theme, because you don’t have a centered bourgeois subject without an entire society being unified around it. Now, suddenly, in this new and tremendously influential cinematographic theory, we have the notion of an object as ideology, and that object is the apparatus, or, in other words, the camera. Suddenly, something has happened to the bourgeois subject. It goes into the theater. It is no longer bodily active. Another one of the great cinema theorists of this period, Christian Metz, has been very interested in analyzing the attraction of film, the desire called film. (I say “film” despite the whole shift to digital because it’s just the word we’ve come to use.) What is it that we find in the theater in this abandonment of self? A phenomenological epoché, a bracketing of the world? Or something psychoanalytic? Is the screen not like the mother’s breast? Is this not a regression to some passivity of the child, where you can somehow simply take all this in? You can see how many paths this thinking could pursue. One of the most interesting—and the great American book on this is Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed—is that cinema is our chance to see the world without ourselves. Cinema would have us think we’re not in this picture. Of course, we really are. That’s its ideology. Ideology means that our presence is masked and that we are made to think that what we see is the Ding-an-sich, that we’re seeing the world without our categories, without our own personal subjectivity. Film is proving to us that the world exists, and it’s doing so at a very slight price: the cost of the ticket and the cost of sitting still for two hours. You’re abandoning your body. You’re abandoning action, so to speak, and allowing everything to pass through this profoundly ideological realm, which is the visual.
How is this done, according to Baudry? Here, we go back to the ideology of Western painting, of perspective, which is discovered in the Quattrocento, in the fifteenth century, when oil paint is imported into Italy from the Netherlands. Of course, perspective is ideological; perspective assumes one eye which is going to organize the world around itself in this fan-like map of space, of which the final line is a slight curvature of the horizon. Perspective will then make the world our own and make us the center of it. And remember that this is the basis of Ptolemaic centrality, against which the Copernican revolution and Freud and all modern theory is directed. We are not the center of our world, they say. The unconscious is the center of our world. We are a satellite to our own unconscious, or, with the linguists, we are not the center of our language, because we are spoken by our language. Our intentionality, our freedom, is not the source of everything. So, here again, film, like perspectival painting, is persuading us—literally in action—that we are the center of our world, and this unity that’s given to us in painting, and then on the film screen, is the unity of the world itself. It has ratified us as its center and the vanishing point as our symptom, so to speak. So you see why the young Sartre, coming out of the movie theater, would rediscover the medieval idea of contingency: When you’re watching a movie, you’re at the center of everything, but, when you come out into the street, there isn’t a center anymore. The world is not centered around you, but film is so enticing because it persuades you that you are.
Someone had the genius to mention Rear Window—they were crazy about Hitchcock in those days—which is the great dramatization of this whole process. Jimmy Stewart is the center of the world, and suddenly, in a kind of Foucauldian turn, when the world looks back at him, he is immobilized, paralyzed, just the same way we are in the movie theater. So, if you’re a film critic like them, you might like to say that this is the film making an ideological analysis of itself. This is film reflecting on itself. Now you see the revolutionary, political problem here, because you’re not going to take Rear Window around and show it to revolutionary groups as your energizing work of art, and, yet, it does many of the things that a revolutionary art might like to do. In general, Hitchcock was fascinating to all these people, despite what they thought of Hollywood, because he shows you all the hidden traps of visuality. Hitchcock was like the god of the era, and if you’re interested, Truffaut had a week-long conversation with Hitchcock, which is quite fascinating and gives you a sense of his importance.
So that is the great discovery of Baudry: It is the very materiality of the operation of film which is ideological. One might even like to say that visuality itself is somehow profoundly ideological. What do we do with that? In one of your papers, someone discussed the relationship of all this to science and scientific visuality, because, of course, visuality comes to us in experiment. Now, if you want an almost Kristevan turn on this relationship, you should look ahead—we’ll mention him much later on—to Bruno Latour’s first work, which proves that scientific truth is an effect of writing. He says that something isn’t accepted as truth unless it’s been mentioned in an increasing plurality of published scientific papers. Verification in science is not really an action or operation in the real world; it’s just the number of papers written to prove something. So here, in Latour, scientific truth and its mode of visuality are suddenly turned back into the great obsession of the period, which is writing. But, so far, this is still wrapped up in questions of sight and visibility. In Rear Window, Jimmy Stewart suddenly gets his comeuppance because he is visible. He is the object of the gaze, not only the source of the gaze. Film, too, shows that the look is a double-edged sword, as it was in Sartre and Lacan.
So these things all inscribe themselves in the anti-humanist struggle, so to speak, the struggle against the centrality of the subject and of consciousness, which, of course, begins way back with Freud and Marx, to the degree that it is the bourgeois subject that is at stake here, since it is the bourgeoisie whose very triumph is the construction of this notion of individualism. Individualism is the centered subject, the idea that our lives have a biographical unity, that we have selves, that we have identities. All of this is the rich, civilized heritage of the bourgeois revolution as it affirms our individual freedoms against the hierarchies of earlier kinds of societies. So, in that sense, yes, they are inscribing themselves in a revolutionary tradition, but it’s easy after the fact to turn that into a kind of mocking reflection on the powerlessness of the intellectuals. In light of all this, I think you can begin to sense the reaction that follows this great intellectual ferment and this revolutionary moment. In film theory, it’s followed in this country by Bordwell and Thompson, their versions of Hollywood normality and their affirmation that, finally, the only real kind of film is Hollywood’s, that Hollywood realistic representation has finally reabsorbed all the movements around the world that affirmed the possibility of a different kind of experimental film, and that it is the destiny of all of these countries, not just France. One of you mentioned Third Cinema, but Bordwell and Thompson say—it’s a very depressing and dramatic moment of their work—no, Hollywood is sufficiently elastic to draw back into itself all those experiments and to absorb them into the essential practices of bourgeois representation. So Hollywood film and realism, the enemy, so to speak, the very center of this whole process, has finished by assimilating not only its competitors but also its critics and its transgressors or revolutionaries. And that process provides an allegory of the disappearance of politics from the globalized world. But we must take account of an interesting irony, because this is happening at the very moment that all of these theorists are telling us that Hollywood is over and film is over. These people were working before several revolutions. One is the digital revolution. What does that do to the notion of the cinematic apparatus, when you don’t really have an apparatus of the analog or “filmic” type? Several of you mentioned television, and I would add video games, a whole different set of representations that begin to take the place of films and maybe of filmic stories. Do we want filmic stories, narrative, anymore? Don’t we want, even in the blockbusters, just a series of thrills? We don’t really want a story anymore. But don’t these replacements undermine traditional narratives and the idea of the destiny of the centered subject? A story is about the destiny of the centered subject, of the personality, but if there is no personality, identity, or center, what can a story be about? If it’s a schizophrenic flux, as in Deleuze, then there’s nothing to tell anymore, maybe just the flood of images. There is no narrative. So all these institutions begin to collapse, and as some of these film critics have said, you can only tell this story at the moment when its central object is dying or has disappeared, but that’s a later matter, and it certainly doesn’t concern us at this stage where filmmaking is still going “on and there is still somebody like Godard constantly innovating and transforming the very material of film.
Next time, we will trace this business of visuality into Foucault and take a closer look at his place within this moment.”
Frederic Jameson
March 23, 2021
March 23, 2021
Footnotes
1 Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” in Movies and Methods, Vol. I, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 22–30.
2 See François Truffaut with Helen G. Scott, Hitchcock (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984).
3 Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” trans. Alan Williams, Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1974), 39–47.