"Paths that wind through the thicket of things"

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 28, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 317-351

  Stern, Lesley ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34547218105     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/449043     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, N.J., 1997), p. 309; hereafter abbreviated TF
2. See Arjun Appadurai, "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value," in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Appadurai (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 3-63
3. Jean Epstein, "Ciné-Mystique," trans. Stuart Liebman, Millennium Film Journal 10-11 (1984): 192
4. A line apparently contributed by Huston, not the hard-boiled Hammet. See James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Berkeley, 1998), p. 61
5. One could say that it is a marker of the "irreducible gap between the I of apperception and the noumenal Thing-that-thinks" (Slavoj Žižek, "'The Thing That Thinks': The Kantian Background of the Noir Subject," in Shades of Noir: A Reader, ed. Joan Copjec [London, 1993], p. 210). It is like the Thing-in-itself of the real, a fragment of the real that presents/materializes as a fantasmatic character
6. See Appadurai, "Introduction," p. 38
7. See also Igor Kopytoff, "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process," in The Social Life of Things, pp. 64-91, and Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
8. Appadurai and Kopytoff both draw on the work of Paul Bohannan, "Some Principles of Exchange and Investment Among the Tiv," American Anthropologist 57 (1955): 60-70
9. and "The Impact of Money on an African Subsistence Economy," Journal of Economic History 19 [1959]: 491-503. There are limitations in borrowing from the language of anthropology. Clearly you can't simply map questions of, say, social and cultural exchange onto films (nor is it very productive to treat films as though they were straightforwardly ethnographic texts). Nevertheless, while it may be unwise to treat films straightforwardly as ethnographic texts, it might be surprisingly illuminating to treat them on occasion as deviously intricate ethnographic instantiations. Some recent moves in anthropology are suggestive from a methodological and theoretical aspect because they enable a move, in film studies, away from the constraints of a purely formalist or cognitive approach by, on the one hand, importing into the discussion questions about contexts and relations (among people, mediated by things, and among things themselves, mediated by a social dimension) and, on the other hand, by supplanting questions of representation by attending to notions of mimesis and performativity (and concomitantly looking at the life of things as mutating)
10. Béla Balázs: "one feels the weight of objects and facts.. . . It is easier to photograph things than emotions" (quoted in Gertrud Koch, "Béla Balázs: The Physiognomy of Things," New German Critique 40 [Winter 1987]: 175)
11. Stanley Cavell, "What Becomes of Things on Film?" Themes out of School: Effects and Causes (Chicago, 1984), pp. 174, 183
12. See also Cavell, "The Uncanniness of the Ordinary," In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago, 1988), pp. 153-78
13. See Andrew Klevan, Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film (Trowbridge, 2000)
14. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modem World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London, 1971), p. 17. Lefebvre does not in fact dismiss philosophy, but he is rather engaged in a struggle to "reform" philosophical methodologies. His argument is that philosophy, in encountering everyday life, has to invent new methods and approaches. Particularly suggestive for film study is his recasting of the philosophical concept of recurrence within the everyday, involving as it does a turn towards questions of temporality and attention to gesturality and things (gestures of labor, gestures of leisure)
15. For further elaborations, see my The Scorsese Connection (London, 1995), particularly chap. 6; "Acting out of Character: The King of Comedy as a Histrionic Text," in Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance, ed. Stern and George Kouvaros (Sydney, 1999), pp. 277-305
16. and "The Tales of Hoffmann: An Instance of Operality," in Between Opera and Cinema, ed. Jeongwon Joe and Rose Theresa (New York, 2001)
17. Jean-Louis Comolli, "Documentary Journey to the Land of the Head Shrinkers," trans. Annette Michelson, October, no. 90 (Fall 1999): 42. Comolli's idea is that "the force of things" captures cinematic representation, not that the cinema, as a representational medium, perforce captures the world
18. Kracauer uses this phrase in the context of discussing the way in which the cinema, in dealing with sensational events, involving excesses of cruelty and suffering (whether fictional or actual) does more than simply imitate and depict: "it insists on rendering visible what is commonly drowned in inner agitation." He goes on: "The cinema, then, aims at transforming the agitated witness into a conscious observer. . .. Thus it keeps us from shutting our eyes to the 'blind drive of things'" (TF, p. 58). The phrase is taken from Laffay, "Les Grands Thèmes de l'écran," La Revue du cinéma 2 (Apr. 1948): 13
19. Gilles Deleuze uses this phrase, elaborating it as "the 'excess of theatricality' that Bazin spoke of" (Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta [London, 1989], p. 84; hereafter abbreviated C)
20. For the most comprehensive study of Akerman's cinema, one that engages with these questions, see Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's Hyperrealist Everyday (Durham, N.C., 1996)
21. André Bazin, "Umberto D: A Great Work," What Is Cinema? trans. and ed. Hugh Gray, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1972), 2:81-82
22. Klevan, in a section on Umberto D, connects this invocation of "ontological equality" to Cavell (Klevan, Disclosure of the Everyday, p. 49)
23. This phrase is used by Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson when they compare Gustav Leonhardt playing an entire harpsichord piece within one diagonal camera set-up in Jean-Marie Straub's Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach to Delphine Seyrig making a meat loaf in Jeanne Dielman (Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson, "Kitchen without Kitsch" [1977], Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies [New York, 1998], p. 347)
24. Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, trans. Jonathan Griffin (London, 1986), p. 59
25. see Margulies, Nothing Happens, p. 8
26. Kent Jones argues that "this scene serves as an excellent refutation of the lazy, commonly-held idea that Bresson is all about somnambulant, uninflected action. Every detail here is so specific, and every aspect of the film-making is devoted to rendering that specificity" (Kent Jones, L'Argent [London, 1999], p. 79)
27. Rachel Moore, in the context of discussing L'Argent, provides an insightful analysis of "the brilliant objectness of things often found in films whose characters have a dulled or muted subjectivity. Things," she writes, "have the vibrance that characters do not possess" (Rachel O. Moore, Savage Theory: Cinema as Modem Magic [Durham, N.C., 2000], p. 82). Margulies makes a similar observation, but sees this tendency as a displacement: "The intensity produced by the cumulative actions of an initially affectless protagonist, is, in Jeanne Dielman, displaced onto the objects and domestic scene" (Margulies, Nothing Happens, p. 230 n. 45). I would stress, rather, a circuitry, in these films, of things and gestures
28. Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, p. 101
29. Jeanne's movements are "naturalized by the fiction, denaturalized by the duration" (Janet Bergstrom, "'Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by Chantal Akerman," Camera Obscura 2 [1977]: 117)
30. Laleen Jayamanne notes that 'Jeanne/Delphine's performance has an energy which is derived from the concentrated doing of tasks rather than from any attempt to convey feeling," and she also notes that "it is interesting that Babette Mangolte, the cinematographer for Jeanne Dielman, was also Yvonne Rainer's in Lives of Performers. The way in which objects like chairs and tables are photographed in both films, within the overall structure, makes one attentive to these mundane objects which are usually devoured by the realist text" (Laleen Jayamanne, "Modes of Performance in Chantal Akermaris Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles," Australian Journal of Screen Theory 8 [1980]: 101, 110)
31. See Ricciotto Canudo, "Reflections on the Seventh Art," trans. Claudia Gorbman, in Richard Abel, French Film Criticism and Theory: A History/Anthology, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1988), 1:300
32. Quoted by Richard Roud, Jean-Luc Godard (London, 1967), p. 120
33. Roger Cardinal, "Pausing Over Peripheral Detail," Framework, nos. 30-31 (1986): 126; hereafter abbreviated "PO."
34. Bill Brown, "How to Do Things with Things (A Toy Story)," Critical Inquiry 24 (Summer 1998): 954
35. Jean-Luc Godard, "Godard Makes [Hi]stories: Interview with Serge Daney," trans. Georgia Gurrieri, in Jean-Luc Godard: Son+Image, 1974-1991, trans Gurrieri, Rachel Bowlby, and Lynne Kirby, ed. Raymond Bellour and Mary Lea Bandy (exhibition catalog, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 30 Oct.-30 Nov. 1992), p. 164
36. See Francis Ponge, The Voice of Things, trans. and ed. Belh Archer (New York, 1972)
37. Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, pp. 7-8
38. His use of the term "obtusely" alludes to Roland Barthes's use of the term in his "The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills," Image-Music-Text, trans. and ed. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), pp. 52-68
39. Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone (New York, 1970), p. 77
40. Jean-Louis Comolli, "Documentary Journey to the Land of the Head Shrinkers," pp. 41-42
41. Maxim Gorky, "The Lumière Cinematograph (Extracts)," in The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, trans. Richard Taylor, ed. Taylor and Ian Christie (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), p. 25
42. Cavell, quoting Susan Sontag who is quoting Elliot Rubenstein, quotes this passage in order to argue against it. The Godard voice, he suggests, as we know it through the narrator of Two or Three Things I Know about Her, is unreliable. He points to the "extraordinariness" of the filmed objects, particularly coffee and beer (Cavell, "What Becomes of Things on Film?" pp. 181-82)
43. Alain Robbe-Grillet, "Towards a New Novel," "Snapshots" and "Towards a New Novel," trans. Barbara Wright (London, 1965), pp. 89, 90
44. Sergei Eisenstein, "Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today," Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. and ed. Jay Leyda (New York, 1949), p. 195; hereafter abbreviated "DG."
45. Yuri Tsivian, "Homeless Images: D. W. Griffith in the Eye of Soviet Filmmakers," Griffithiana 60-61 (Oct. 1997): 53; hereafter abbreviated "HI."
46. See Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament," The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), pp. 75-86
47. Marcel Mauss, "Techniques of the Body," trans. Ben Brewster, Economy and Society 2 (Feb. 1973): 72
48. See also Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, trans. Robert Brain (New York, 1972)
49. and The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (London, 1990).
50. Kristin Ross, in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1995)
51. Bruno Latour, "Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts," in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies i?ι Sociotechnical Change, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), p. 246. In this paper humorously revolving around a door hinge (or automatic groom as it is called in French) that goes on strike in a sociology department Latour argues against easy distinctions (between the human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, figurative and nonfigurative actors). People and things (in practicing techniques), he suggests, may, and do, exchange properties all the time
52. The other figure quoted by Belmondo is Jean Gabin. As Dudley Andrew points out, "Belmondo's gestures may come from Jean Gabin, in Marcel Carné's Daybreak (Le Jour se léve, 1939), for both men measure out their final hours chain smoking, often lighting one cigarette from the butt of another and playing with the teddy bears of their winsome girlfriends" (Dudley Andrew, "Breathless: Old as New," in Breathless, ed. Andrew [New Brunswick, N.J., 1990], p. 15)
53. Hal Hartley, "Simple Men" and "Trust" (London, 1992), p. 139
54. See also Sophie Wise, "What I Like about Hal Hartley, or Rather, What Hal Hartley Likes about Me," in Falling for You, pp. 259-61; I have borrowed Wise's visual descriptions
55. Hartley, "Finding the Essential," interview with Graham Fuller, in "Simple Men" and "Trust," p. xli
56. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London, 1962), p. 184
57. As in, for instance, Bertholt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, trans. and ed. John Willet (New York, 1964)