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A new method for reading films through the concept of 'figural eddies.' The author applies this method to the art-film Out 1: Noli me tangere (1970) and its connection to the play Prometheus Bound. The essay delves into the influences of Roland Barthes, D.N. Rodowick, and Thierry Kuntzel on this reading approach. The thesis aims to demonstrate that this method can enrich the viewing experience and reveal the complexity of the film, which is often criticized for its length and difficulty.
Typology: Summaries
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Department of Geography, Media and Communication Film studies III Basic level / 15hp Supervisor: Andreas Jacobsson Examinator: John Sundholm 01/
Abstract
The thesis combines D.N. Rodowick’s concept of the figural , denoting the complex nature of filmic signification; Roland Barthes’ distinctions between the readerly and the writerly , which are different methods of engaging with a text; and Thierry Kuntzel’s concept of semiotic constellations, the reading of recurring yet fragmented motifs that occur throughout the film. Here reintroduced through the concept of eddies —discursive fields within the film which displace the connection between the signifier and signified (the flow of signification), instead distinguished by signifiers engendering new signifiers (the swirl of signification)—to unlock a new method of reading a film. This method focuses on interpreting the latent meanings of the plural of the text; the residual signs in the film which hold little to no bearing on its narrative, but through their deconstruction and later reassembly they may guide to viewer to new meanings. By first delineating the method proposed for this type of reading, the thesis then applies this method to the reading of one such eddy in the art-film Out 1: Noli me tangere from 1970 , which is connected to the discursive field of Prometheus Bound , a play rehearsed within the film by a group of six actors who engage in various exercises, which at first glance seem to be entirely unconnected to the play. In this case, the method reveals through the figural activity of the film that the exercises of the group are engaged in dialogue with themes touched upon in the play.
The Textual Analysis / 36 An Elegy For…: Concluding Discussion of the Essay / 36
1 Introduction
[L]et us not undervalue small signs; perhaps by means of them we will succeed in getting on the track of greater things. —Sigmund Freud, “The Psychology of Errors”, p. 14
First a confession: this work began with what could be called my gradual ‘falling out of love with watching films’. This can be traced in my method of viewing, which takes place far more ‘outside’ of the films, than ‘in’ them, and also in that my readings of films are, invariably, conditioned largely by other texts. As such, the essay stems from an attempt to create a method for reading a film which conjoins the act of remembering the film, ‘outside of viewing’, with the discursive field opened up when these memories clash with other texts, thereby engendering new meanings which are latent in the film itself. And it is here that I must pay tribute to the copulation of several inter-mixed readings and encounters, without which this work could never have been done and which I fear will not receive the prevalence in the forthcoming text which they deserve. First, in having provided aid in my understanding of the viewer's relationship to the image: Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments ( Fragments d’un discours amoreux, 1977) and Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color ( La vie d’Ádele , 2013); secondly, in setting the course for my own journey: James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) , Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time ( À la recherche du temps perdu , 1913-27) , Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy ( Divina Commedia 1308-21) and Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I ( Les Glaneurs et Glaneuse, 2000), all suffused with a love for knowledge of which I can but hope that I’ve been impressioned; and lastly, conjoint readings of The Iliad (Homer), Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus) , The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe, 1774), S/Z (Roland Barthes, 1970) , From Up on Poppy Hill (Goro Miyazaki, 2011) , The Old- and The New Testament, Ulysses (James Joyce, 1922), and Speak, Memory (Vladimir Nabokov, 1966) , whose impressions upon me can be found throughout the text, and which have proved to be ample sources of inspiration.
the method of figural eddies is another plane of discourse. Discourse here is not thought of as Bruce Kawin presents it when he says that it is “the narrative line, the vehicle and manner in which the story is told or presented to the audience,”^5 but discourse as a plane of dialogue with sources anterior to Out 1, which the “figural,” or “figural activity”^6 opens up; a discourse that is associated with the film, but not ‘contained’ by it. This discourse doesn’t exist in the film , so to speak, but is constructed by the viewer/reader in the reading of the film, often connecting the discourse with the discourse of other texts, thereby engaging in a kind of dialogue with them. The essay, in this respect, owes a lot to Roland Barthes’ concepts of the “work” and the “text,” as he put them forth in his essay “From Work to Text” (1970), denoting a change from a material text that exists on paper and which is consumed by the reader, to a text which is constructed by the reader, in reading ; but more on this further on.
Out 1 and Prometheus Bound: a problematic reading This method of reading is then applied to several fragmented sequences in Out 1: Noli me tangere , a film of nefarious reputation for its length (over twelve hours) and difficulty in reading, in the hopes of displaying that the experience of viewing this film may be enriching and pleasurable if viewed in a way that is adapted to the film, and that this method of viewing may prove to reveal some of the complexity of the film. And whilst this method of viewing may invigorate the viewing of other films, it is still largely modeled on some problems of viewing connected specifically to Out 1 , due to its fragmented and coded nature, and its reliance on intertext, bearing little heed to narrative concerns. The sequences chosen are those connected to the rehearsal of a play by Aeschylus (525-426 BC), a famed Greek dramatist who “made Athenian tragedy one of the world’s great art forms,”^7 by the title of Prometheus Bound. In the play, the character Prometheus, one of the Titans (the old gods cast out of Olympus by Zeus as he seized control from his father, Cronus), has been bound to a rock at the ends of the earth by Zeus because he gave mankind fire; thus granting them knowledge, which was before
(^5) B. Kawin, How Movies Work , 1992, p. 59 (^6) D.N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or Philosophy After the New Media , 2001. Two terms that will be explained later on, but which can be thought of as a combination of movement, image, sound, and text as a replacement for the sign in the process of signification. (^7) Introduction to The Persians and Other Plays , 2009.
only available to the gods. As a god, he is associated with granting mankind the gifts of intellect (writing, mathematics, etc.) and for standing up for humanity when Zeus wished to annihilate the human race. For this, he was punished: abandoned by both gods and men. Some myths also regard Prometheus as the creator of mankind, where he is to have molded them from clay or fashioned them from rocks.^8 The play is one of the more popular that has been left behind by Aeschylus, and it has influenced writers such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe^9 , writers alluded to in passing during Out 1 when some members of the group rehearsing Prometheus Bound are reciting poetry. Shelley has written an expansion of the play in the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820), and the influence of Prometheus upon Goethe can be found in, for instance, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), where the title character in the latter part of the novel comes to identify himself with the suffering of Christ as he was nailed to the cross, a similar situation to what Prometheus found himself in, where all three characters are forced to grapple with the abandonment of a higher power. He has also written a poem by the title of Prometheus (1773). The reasons why these sequences connected to the play have been chosen are because they heavily rely on active decoding, up to the point where without the guidance of Prometheus Bound in the reading of the sequences they appear to be entirely unconnected to it and simply absurd deviations from the narrative of the film, without any logic. But it is also because of this that they amply suit the method here proposed, as they offer next to nothing in terms of narrative, but open up a rich field of what has been previously labeled the discourse of the film; connecting with the themes of the play, in particular on the salient theme of abandonment and the relationship between father and son, which is why these two themes have found themselves as pillars in the later analysis.
Questions to be answered Therefore the questions posed at the outset of this thesis are: how is a film read through the logic and method of these figural eddies, and what discourse is opened up through this method when applied to the sequences in Out 1: Noli me tangere that are connected to the play Prometheus Bound?
(^8) March, Jenny. The Penguin Book of Classical Myths, p. 127- 133 (^9) Preface to Prometheus Bound , in Persians and Other Plays, p. 159
2 Background
dicit ei Iesus noli me tangere… Jesus saith to her, Touch me not… —John , 20:17, King James Version
Out 1: Noli me tangere is a film which has been bypassed and neglected by audiences for over forty years. Made in 1970 during the course of six spring weeks by director Jacques Rivette and a troupe of over a dozen actors following a vague outline of a script grafted onto Balzac’s History of the Thirteen , with a material that is largely improvised (and it is large). 11 The resulting footage defies the description of ‘film’ in the regular sense, being divided into eight episodes and boasting a runtime of over twelve hours. Rather than the earlier denomination, it belongs to that motley crew known as ‘film-serials’: the audiovisual dinosaurs of film history, now virtually extinct. 12 Other notable productions in this largely abandoned form are serials such as Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas (1913-14) and Les Vampires (1915- 1916 ). Some of the reasons why it has been problematic for viewing and thus not enjoyed widespread circulation is that, first of all, it is directed by one of the most esoteric and neglected auteurs of the French new wave, Jacques Rivette, thus situating it within a context of highly personal and artistically oriented films. (Explicitly linked by Jonathan Rosenbaum to films such as Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961) and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) for its disregard for narrative clarity).^13 Yet this mark of personality is subverted by the fact that much of the material gathered for editing was improvised by the actors themselves, and not scripted or controlled in a general sense by Rivette, thereby situating the film uncomfortably right between two camps of viewers; not quite fitting in with either those who watch films
(^11) It is also reported that “each actor was invited to invent his or her own character and dialogue,” one of the reasons why this study generally abstains from the auteurist model. J. Rosenbaum, Movies as Politics , 1991, in On the Nonreception of Two French Serials. p. 307 (^12) Out 1, having enjoyed only one public screening in Le Havre in 1971, was also intended to be shown in a serial form, akin to how TV-series are now aired, on a state-owned TV-channel, yet this never happened. J. Rosenbaum, ibid., p. 303 (^13) J. Rosenbaum. Placing Movies , 1995, in Work and Play in the House of Fiction. p. 142
unbeknownst of who has directed it, nor those who could be said to subscribe to auterism. What marks the film the most, however, is its length; twelve hours and sixteen minutes (Rivette’s productions generally being nefariously lengthy) coupled with the lack of an easy-to-follow plotline (it begins with four plotlines which are unconnected, and which dissipate into a myriad of somehow-connected plotlines during the course of the serial), and its obscurantism when it comes to intertextual practice, which ranges from Aeschylus to Renoir to Balzac to Lewis Carroll, among others. All these things combined sets it apart from most other films, which is why, if adopted to a more general type of viewing, the film might seem obtuse, abrasive and generally unstimulating if compared and measures with other films, which is precisely why another manner of engagement in viewing may be considered more suitable for this particular film. As the film also reveals by its subtitle, Noli me tangere , it quite markedly knows that it is abrasive.
Synopsis A vague synopsis of the serial would yield something of the following: Paris in the 1970’s. Colin (Jean-Pierre Lèaud), a twenty-something faux deaf-mute who frequents cafés in order to solicit money by disturbing the customers with his harmonica (once they pay him, he leaves them alone), is one day handed a letter from an unknown person. The letter contains two texts which Colin frantically attempts to identify. Meanwhile, a woman of similar age by the name of Frédérique (Juliet Berto) spends her days luring men she encounters at bars or cafés to hotels, where she steals their money. At a later date, she stumbles upon some ‘incriminating’ letters hidden in the cupboard of a man she happens upon in his home, whence she tries to blackmail every person who seems to have been in contact with these (at first, with little success). Meanwhile, a rehearsal of the play Seven Against Thebes (written by Aeschylus) by a collective of five young actors is taking place. Meanwhile, a rehearsal of the play Prometheus Bound (also by Aeschylus) by a group of five different actors under the tutelage of director Thomas (Michael Lonsdale), is taking place in another part of Paris. None of these four narrative strands seem connected to each other.
The plays The serial is decidedly marked by a sense of languor: several scenes carry on without halt for over thirty minutes^14 , wherein little of narrative import seems to happen. There’s a general tendency that these scenes are connected to either theater group, and it is the activities of the second of these, the one rehearsing Prometheus Bound which has the least connection to an over-arching narrative. The sequences are heavily coded (as Thomas himself says of the play: “it’s a fairly coded work”) and lacking in stimulation unless the exercises carried out are read as so many metaphors dispersed throughout the serial connected to themes of the play itself. Because rather than focusing on dramatic development, the gamut of the serial seeks simply to expand the possible connections between characters, or display various exercises carried out by either theater group, and these serve rather to confound than elucidate anything which has any bearing on narrative momentum.
Earlier writings on the film and its structure Rosenbaum likens this structure of the film to “The successive building and shattering of utopian dreams,” thus charting a course which brings it into context of the time it was shot, as being “the idealistic legacy of May ‘68”.^15 Notably, the last time the thirteen of the serial seem to have gathered was around this time. In this manner, Out 1 quite markedly sets out to subvert classical narration, deploying extreme logical gaps to confound the viewer, where a majority of the sequences are, at first, either unconnected, or simply functioning as ploys to divert attention away from what is, in a sense, an illogical narration. Instead, it follows more closely to the logic of metaphor and symbolism, and quite often supplies allegories of its own existence, and how it is read. Mary W. Wiles, in her study of Rivette^16 also brings up the suggestion, originally made by Jean-André Fieschi, that Rivette in the structuring of the film was influenced
(^14) This aesthetic is referred to by Rosenbaum as being “Bazinian”, in that the serials general strategy includes the deployment of long takes and deep staging. Yet, as he also mentions, the serial then subverts this ontological realism by dipping into fantasy at several junctures, thereby “undermining” the realist notion of the use of long takes, much as in the aforementioned Les Vampires. Movies as Politics. p. 306. This is another example of how the serial consistently subverts general models, or “ schemata,” bordering closer to deliberate nonsense than a logical narrative, in support of the somewhat aleatory reading I set forth upon in this thesis. 15 J. Rosenbaum. ibid., p. 307 (^16) Mary M. Wiles, Contemporary Film Directors: Jacques Rivette, 2011. Edited by James Naremore.
not only by Jean Renoir^17 , but also Pierre Boulez’s then concurrent thoughts on serial music, requesting works marked by a ‘maze-like’ quality, thus opposing the “classical conception of the work” of art within Western thought as a single wholeness, instead privileging such works that were fragmented, “aleatory” and in request of an active listener.^18 Interesting to note is that an American expatriate, Noël Burch, living in France at the time and writing on film, was also influenced by serial music in his writings, most notably in the chapter “Chance and its functions” in his Theory of Film Practice ( Praxis du cinema , 1969, translated into English in 1981) similarly interested in the effects of chance upon the work of art, and of the artist to “let go of the reins”.^19 It is because of these affinities of Out 1 , and especially its sequences with the group rehearsing Prometheus Bound, that it has been chosen for this study, as a reading focused on the narrative implications of these sequences would unlock very little of its potential, whereas a method paying heed to pluralities, fragmentation, intertextual references and metaphorical practice may provide a better understanding of it, and a better understanding of the processes underlying such a reading.
(^17) When Rivette helped Labarthes shoot a documentary on Renoir for the series Cinéastes de notre temps in 1966 , he embraced a new aesthetic, marked by a sense of openness and improvisation. M. Wiles, ibid., p. (^4118) M. Wiles, ibid., p. 54 (^19) N. Burch. Theory of Film Practice, p. 106
whatever just so happens to pass by, fixed around a certain point, which is what will later be termed the reverberation of the text. Posited to reading this metaphor entails a halt of narrative succession, where the viewer instead finds him/herself focused on the reading of a connective motif, a figure, which ‘spins’ around because it doesn’t lead forward to anything but itself, and which quite forcibly distances itself from narrative signification, even though it quite literally exists within the narrative. To read according to the logic of such ‘eddies’ subverts the nuclear force of narrative signification in reading, and makes possible an activity which refuses to follow these priorities. But, as Barthes also says, a writer “cannot choose to write what will not be read,”^23 that is, to force upon all readers the experience of this eddy, and the same would go for the director of a film: therefore it must befall on the reader, or viewer, to decide whether to follow the flow of narrative, or swirl in its eddies. It is up to the viewer to construct the order, and even duration, of reading. But applying this form of reading to the watching of a film poses one fundamental difficulty, which Rodowick has pointed out: that film has a built in rhythm (24 frames per second)^24 , unlike the novel, which depends solely on the internal reading of the subject. This is because its ‘object’ is an entirely static material and one which the reader literally holds, thus enabling the reader to skip the reading of certain passages; which means, in short, that the reader of a novel is theoretically capable of controlling the order of reading, whereas the viewer of a film is not in control of viewing. Since the days of Kuntzel, however, there has been a shift in how films are seen, where a new arena of viewing has opened up: home-viewing. In the home, it is now possible for viewers to pause, fast-forward, track back the movements of the film and rewatch sequences, scenes, single images out of order. To latch on to, in the moment of viewing, these eddies. It is now possible through technology to fragment the experience and abstain from following the controlled flow of reading; to open up new pathways of signification by which to follow: in short, to deconstruct the machinations of the film at one’s own leisure and to step from what Roland Barthes has called the “ readerly,” to the “ writerly,” introduced shortly, but which can be said to denote a difference in activity on the behalf of the reader, where the former is passive (a consumer), the latter active (a producer).
(^23) R. Barthes. ibid., p. 11 (^24) D.N. Rodowick, ibid., p. 80
The concepts of viewing and reading are in this essay used to denote this difference in activity, where the former speaks of an engagement that is focused on ‘following the story’ of a film, taking place during the actual viewing of the film, whereas the latter is marked by an engagement through decoding and deconstructing the “figural” of the film, which carries on after one has finished watching the film. Another reason for why the concept of ‘reading’ a film is still pervasive in the context of this essay is because Barthes’ concepts of the “readerly” and the “writerly,” are used (there existing no manageable concepts when transposed to viewing that correspond to these), even though the way in which the reader of a novel makes sense of signs in a text is invariably dissimilar from how the viewer makes sense of the signs of a film.
The sign in film As Barthes himself said on this subject: “of a man walking in the snow, even before he signifies, everything is given to me; in writing, on the contrary, I am not obliged to see how the hero wears his nails — but if it wants to, the Text describes, and with what force, Hölderlin’s filthy talons.”^25 As such, the difference between these two modes of signification can be regarded, if they are seen as languages and thus problems of a linguistic nature, as a difference between the “unmotivated” and the “motivated” in the “contract” that exists between the signifier and the signified, where the signifier in a text is “unmotivated” because the written line is not analogical to what it signifies, whereas the signifier in film is “motivated” because it figuratively is analogical to what it signifies.^26 For instance: the word “lemon” in the English language is less contractually bound to the physical manifestation of a lemon than is the representation of a lemon on film. However, as Hollis Frampton has aptly displayed in his film Lemon (1969), a virtually static seven minute shot of a lemon that is lighted from different angles to make it assume the form of other things (among them: breasts and the sun; in short, it is transformed into a mutable sign in constant flux), “lemon” as a signifier in film can signify a whole lot more than just “lemon”, thus problematizing the notion of filmic signification as being purely analogical. And it is for this reason that the essay uses
(^25) R. Barthes, Roland Barthes , 1977. Cited from J. Rosenbaum, Barthes & Film in Placing Movies, 1995. p. 46 (^26) R. Barthes, “Signifier and Signified” in Elements of Semiology , 1964, p. 50- 54
Rather, each reading is to be thought of as another addition to a complex of readings, all of them connected. Thus the text is not thought of as a singularity, but a plurality.
But what is it that is being read, or viewed? The foundation for how this essay regards the properties of a text, or a film, comes mainly from three essays by Roland Barthes (but also insistent, clashing and commingling readings of his other works): S/Z, “ From Work to Text” and The Pleasures of the Text , where he charts the transformation of what he calls the “ readerly” and the “ writerly” ; attributes connected to how a text is read, and thus what a text is.^28 Transposed to this study, the “ readerly” is to be seen as the method underlying an habitual reading, which focuses on the construction of a story and following the flow of the narrative, whereas the “ writerly” method rather focuses on breaking this habit; getting caught up in the eddies of the film, later re-writing the film through disremembrance. This difference is used to mark a variation in the activity of the subject who watches the film_._ The shift from work to text was described by Barthes as being connected to several currents during the late sixties and early seventies, among them the increased awareness and methodological use of “linguistics, anthropology, Marxism and psychoanalysis,” in particular the “ interdisciplinarity ” that arose from the commingling of these when used in literary theory.^29 In linguistic and semiotic studies of texts (novels, etc.) the rise of “Marxism, Freudianism and structuralism” issued forth a “relativisation of the relations of writer, reader and observer”, which then came to demand “a new object,” in place of the “ work” (now deemed a thing of the past)—namely the “ Text, ”^30 not to be confused with a written line of language. His seven “propositions”^31 for what a “Text” is can be summed up as a “displacement”^32 of the material singularity of a given work (film, novel, etc.), into an immaterial plurality. If one were to be asked the question of, “where is the text” in relation to film, the answer would not point toward either the
(^28) The differing neologisms used in all three texts pursue the same line of thought. Put very simply, the work is something that is consumed in reading, the Text something which is produced by the reader. Barthes pursues this line of thought in, among others: A Lover’s Discourse, “The Death of the Author” , and is perhaps epitomized in 29 S/Z and The Pleasure of the Text. R. Barthes , “From Work to Text” , 1971. In Image Music Text , 1977, p. 155 (^30) R. Barthes, ibid., p. 156- 157 (^31) “The word ‘proposition’ is to be understood more in a grammatical than logical sense: the following are not argumentations, but enunciations, ‘touches’, approaches that consent to remain metaphorical.” R. Barthes, ibid. 32 , p. 156 D.N. Rodowick. ibid., p. 76
screen, where it has been or is being projected, nor to the strip of celluloid; the text is not a mass of impressions or signs: images, sound, noise, movement, etc., but the connections, meanings and connotations which those impressions take the form of when they encounter a viewer: that is, the text only exists as an internal object made manifest by its viewer or reader, whom thereby is its creator.^33 In short, the shift from “work” to “text” can be seen as a political change, where the power-relations between author, text, and reader have shifted to be in favor of the reader. But it is also a change which challenges the independence, or even identity of single texts, where a text can be seen as a mutable existence in the reader made up of several “works”, rather than a single material object. It is because of these properties that the shift is important in relation to this essay, thus enabling a view of a film as something which exists outside of its own celluloid, or digital housing; rather something within the viewer, something created in the engagement with the film.
But what is it in a film that is being ‘read’? In Reading the Figural, or Philosophy After the New Media (2001), D.N. Rodowick proposes a new concept related to how we make sense of, among other things, films; this concept being that of “ the figural”. Summarized, “the figural”, “a new logic of sense,” can be thought of as that which we read in new media; films, television, etc.; and denotes a break with the thought that the semiotic regimes of these new media’s belong either to text or image, which the figural can be seen as a combination of. 34 This concept he sends off to commingle with seven earlier philosophers, of which I’ve chosen to focus on how the figural can be read in relation to Thierry Kuntzel, notable for having written semiotically inflected studies of films, highly indebted to the work of Barthes^35 , on films such as M (Fritz Lang, 1931) and The Most Dangerous Game (Irving Pichel & Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1932)^36 , studies that can be “understood as
(^33) The seven propositions can be found through pages 156 to 164. ibid. (^34) D.N. Rodowick, ibid. , p. x, Preface. (^35) D.N. Rodowick, ibid., p. 80 (^36) These analyses are made in the “The Film Work” (1978), and “The Film-Work, 2” (1980), respectively.
