Dead and Alive: The Body as a Cinematic Thing 0981191452, 9780981191454

Table of contents :
Front Cover
The Body as Cinematic Thing
Some Kept on Being Dead
The Cinema Is Not Exclusively Human
Things: They Too Do Things
What if . . .
An Excess of Time . . .
The Pressure of Time in the Shot
How to Be Dead
Without Life There Is No Pain
A Body by Chance
I'd Like to Capture Things
Dead and Alive
Notes
Back cover

Citation preview

l e s l e y s t e rn

Dead and Alive The Body as Cinematic Thing

kino - agora

Lesley Stern

Dead and Alive The Body as Cinematic Thing 

caboose

Montreal

published without financial assistance, public or private copyright © 2012, 2020 Lesley Stern ISBN 978-1-927852-19-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the express written permission of the publisher, which holds exclusive publication rights. Dead and Alive is part of the caboose essay series Kino-Agora Published by caboose, www.caboosebooks.net Designed by Marina Uzunova and Timothy Barnard. Set in Cala type, designed by Dieter Hofrichter, by Marina Uzunova.

Dead and Alive The Body as Cinematic Thing 1 In the cinema many were living and many kept on living, and many became dead, as Gertrude Stein might say. Some kept on living and some kept on being dead and some became things. Bodies proliferate in cinema. Living bodies to be sure, but also dead bodies, and transitional bodies, suspended between the being of a subject and objecthood. We tend to use the same word (at least in English and some other languages too) to designate both a living and a dead body. The body is constant, qualified only by an adjective—‘living’ or ‘dead’. We also, of course, use the word ‘corpse’. Dead is dead, no doubt, but if there are degrees of deadness then a corpse is probably deader than a dead body. Though this is more a matter of signification than brute facticity, and not a distinction that can be maintained with assurance. Either way, can we assume that when bodies living in the cine­ ma become dead, they become things? There are major cinematic genres (varieties of horror, zombie movies, ghost films) that pivot on this very question and in the face of infinite ingenuity I am not about to propose an answer. I will, however, suggest that becoming dead in the cinema is not an automatic guarantee of thingness. Moreover, although corporeal concreteness of the dead body is usually a prerequisite for thingness, phenomenal presence alone does not guarantee the allure of a thing. Take Harry, for example. Harry in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry (U.S.A., 1955) is physically present; in narrative terms he possesses considerable

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agency, but what we might call his cinematic thingness is minimal. As his wife says, ‘You can stuff him and put him into a glass case. . . . He looked exactly the same when he was alive, except vertical’. some kept on being dead Innumerable cinematic operations produce the allure of a thing. Because I am more interested in Things than in Death, it follows that it is the liveliness of corpses that lures my attention. But not dead bodies that act as though they were alive, nor live bodies that may really be dead, nor bodies that may in fact be composited, or even digitally constructed bodies. No, what lures my attention are ordinary, run-of-the-mill, old-fashioned bodies, bodies once living and now dead which somehow, in their corporeal materiality, exhibit a performative potential for conjuring a quality of cinematic thingness. They are bodies that are physically present in the films, bodies that insist on existing after they are dead. My attention will be focused on the way, in some films in which dead bodies persist, time is concentrated in the body. And dispersed. When life leaves the body, time—or a particular quality of time—enters into the body, and into the film. The body, then, becomes an index of cinematic temporality. I will venture a generalisation: a dead body or corpse in the cine­ ma usually interrupts the flow of time. If we are to follow Kracauer, we might conceive of it then as antithetical to the medium itself. The contrary, however, is true. Corpses keep the machinery of cinema running smoothly. In their most conventional iterations it is true they are not very Kracauerian; they set things in motion, they provoke and articulate a play of enigmas and investigations, of mystery and knowledge (imperatives and interrogations: ‘find the body!’; ‘who dunnit?’). The kinds of corpses I have my sights on, however,

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impede the usual—narrative inflected—drive of cinema, and correspond more closely to Kracauer’s conception of the flow of life as ‘predominantly a material rather than a mental continuum’.2 Through operations of materialisation they introduce a mode of temporality that evokes his conception of quotidian rhythm. They appear to us, as do things, in a cinema characterised by a democratisation of things and persons. In what follows a number of dead bodies will bob in and out of view, or settle for a while, but my examples will be drawn primarily from three rather different films: Max Ophüls’ The Reckless Moment (U.S.A., 1949); Sue Brooks’ Japanese Story, an independent/art house Australian film (2003); and Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi, France, 1985). All three centre on bodies that insist on existing, on making their presence felt after they are dead. The first two deal with women trying to move a male body, massive in its inertness, its obdurate thingness. Vagabond introduces time into the body (or should we say the body introduces time into the film?) in a different way, but similarly charging the body. Not all bodies, even dead bodies, perform their thingness in the same way. But all corpses exert a disturbing presence, disturbing the equanimity, the knowledge we have of time, of what comes before and what after. They instantiate the blurred line between animate and inanimate things, between persons and things, and therefore are almost always ghosted by the question of what constitutes ‘aliveness’. When Aristotle, ‘the first theorist of film’,3 asks, as he frequently did, ‘is a severed hand still a hand?’ it is in the context of trying to understand what constitutes life. Once a hand is severed from a living body it is no longer possessed of life. This is perhaps why we call a dead body a corpse, because it no longer has life, as it had when it was a body. But in the cinema it is sometimes hard to distinguish these dif-

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ferent kinds of bodies one from another. ‘Objects exist, and if we pay them more attention than we do people, it is because they exist more than those people. Dead objects live on. Living people are often dead already’. The narrator says this in Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know about Her (Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, France, 1967), and the cinema is predisposed to exploit this indistinctness. Witness all the severed hands—hardly attractive but certainly lively—twitching and hacking their way through the history of cinema, from Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou (France, 1929) to the Peter Lorre shocker, The Beast with Five Fingers (Robert Florey, U.S.A., 1947). The most persistent disembodied hand, however, must be the aptly named ‘Thing’ in the Addams Family television series and movies.4 impaled or not by recognition It might be said with some degree of accuracy that in general corpses are not designed to attract the gaze. But this statement doesn’t hold for all movies or all corpses. In horror and zombie movies, for instance, the corpse and dead body parts are designed to exert allure. And in the movies that I focus on the corpse is a supremely photogenic object (in Jean Epstein’s sense of the term). Nevertheless there are films in which it—this great impersonalised, generalised ‘it’—is often absent, or almost absent, from the image regime, yet crucial in performing a narrative function. Detective fiction and crime mysteries are conventionally propelled by the presence of a dead body, by asking who did it, who caused this body to become dead, thus projecting the story into the future, or in asking why, what, who was this body when alive, thus projecting the story into the past. Cinema, partaking of these investigative genres, has developed its own hermeneutical and visual tropes or operations for articulating this nexus between tem-

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porality and the body. Think of John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (U.S.A., 1962), where a funeral furnishes the occasion for an extensive flashback. Think of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (U.S.A., 1941), which begins with a man dying: we watch the life go out of him, the body become inert. His dying becomes, then, the occasion for a flashback which imbues the inanimate and monumental corpse with life. Already we are primed, by the extreme close-up coming after the rhythmic virtuosity of the opening tracking shot, to recognise this as a body-too-much. And a word, an abstraction—‘Rosebud’—is set free, launched on a quest for embodiment and thingness. Words too launch Ophüls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman (U.S.A., 1948): the film begins with a probably dead woman (‘By the time you read this I may be dead’) and proceeds through flashbacks to bring her to life. It is often like this in the beginning. We do not ‘know’ the body. Sometimes we will never know and it does not matter. Other times, we will come to know by the end of the film. Yet other times we will experience the passing of a character from life to death and then, arguably, the corpse is a different sort of a thing, and the knowledge that is brought into play is less hermeneutic and more uncanny. The corpse is at once dead and alive. It is undeniable that the status of a corpse is determined, to some degree at least, by whether we the audience have ‘known’ the dead person as a living person, whether we are impaled or not by recognition.5 We might say the affective potential of the corpse is imbricated in knowledge. Recognition implicates us in the enfolding of life in death. And this is always a matter of time. We do not know the corpse in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s politi­ cal satire Death of a Bureaucrat (La muerte de un burócrata, Cuba, 1966). It scarcely appears, we do not care about it in its former

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guise as a person, yet its presence initiates and drives the plot. The body cannot be buried. Paradoxically it both impedes the flow of time, as one bureaucratic impediment after another prevents the act of getting rid of the body, but also, in its coffin, generates a ­narrative flow. It insists on existing. The body here is a place-holder for an obstructive state. In Hitchcock’s Rope (U.S.A., 1948), we witness the murder in close-up at the beginning of the film, but at this point there is no suspense or affect, no history to the body. But while it is absent as a thing for the rest of the film, it is absolutely present as the idea of a thing. Invisible in the trunk, it gets the story going, initiates and sustains a kind of suspense pivoting not on the question ‘who dunnit?’ but on the question ‘will it be discovered?’ Adapted from a stage play, the film very much revolves around the orchestration of bodies in a single space: living bodies and one dead body. This composition of bodies in space is fluid, but the body in the trunk never moves; as an absently present thing it seems to be at the centre of a magnetic field, attracting both characters and camera, ensuring the illusion of a timespace continuum orchestrated through elaborate and lengthy takes. a row of bottles, a pair of glasses, a musical score, a bunch of keys Let us recall Godard’s list, from the fourth part of Histoire(s) du cinéma (France, 1998) of cinematically ‘charged’ Hitchcockian objects: ‘a purse, a bus in the desert, a glass of milk, the sails of a windmill, a hairbrush’. He says: ‘we remember a row of bottles, a pair of glasses, a musical score, a bunch of keys’. We do not remember, he says, the whys and wherefores, such as ‘why Joan Fontaine leans over the edge of the cliff and what exactly Joel McCrea went to do

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in Holland . . . and why Janet Leigh stops at the Bates Motel and why Teresa Wright is still crazy about her uncle Charlie’. Jacques Rancière argues that Godard here dissociates things that are indissociable: ‘we don’t remember the bottles of Pommard in Notorious because of their pictorial qualities but because of the emotional charge that the narrative situation has invested in them’.6 Well, yes and no. The narrative situation is important in investing the objects with significance, but there are cinematic operations that compete with the narrative in ‘charging’ the objects with an affective force in excess of their dramatic function. Godard does not include in his list any bodies, no Harry for instance, no body in the trunk, no mother in the attic. In fact ‘mother’ in Psycho (U.S.A., 1960) probably could be included in the list, but on the whole Hitchcock’s corpses function metonymically or symptomatically. They are not generally ‘charged’ with cinematic allure. If cinematic corpses thus charged exist, what are the cinematic operations that cause us to remember? the cinema . . . is not exclusively human When Kracauer said that ‘[t]he cinema . . . is not exclusively human’,7 it was in the context of a larger claim about cinema (made particularly by writers and filmmakers in the 1920s) and its capacity—over and above other modes of representation—to bring to the fore the importance of objects, and to render the human actor, according to Louis Delluc, as ‘no more than a detail, a fragment of the matter of the world’.8 But now, it suddenly seems, the importance of objects is everywhere declaimed. Things—all sorts of things—are on the agenda, clamouring and demanding attention. Witness such recent book titles as Evocative Objects, A History of the World in 100 Objects, The Comfort of Things, Paraphernalia and What Objects Mean, an

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introductory textbook to thing theory. What are we to make of this turn-to-the-thing? Is it merely a flurry, or a warning of some seismic intellectual shift? Is there any reason why film studies should pay attention to the cacophony? Many of these new publications are modest in their theoretical purview, though inventively concerned with unhinging the rigidity of conventional disciplinary discourses. We in film studies can surely benefit from attending to this impulse to unsettle. But might there also be things going on in the realm of ideas, epistemological provocations being developed and debated in areas that seem for the most part uninterested in cinema, which might nevertheless impinge on the screen world? It is my sense that there are indeed tendencies within or developing out of a range of approaches—variously named Actor Network Theory (ANT), Assemblage Theory, Speculative Realism, Object-Oriented Philosophy—in which things might not always take centre stage, in which objects are configured variously in relation to larger philosophical, political and polemical agendas, but in which exciting things to do with things are happening. To get there, though, I need to go where I have always managed to avoid going: to make a tripping detour through that deep dark forest called Heidegger. a sonorous spectre When we speak of bodies and things, almost inevitably the sonorous spectre of Heidegger rises up, ponderously pronouncing, grimly ghosting every discussion.9 The body in this essay, in its manifestation as a cinematic thing, is at once too solid and too quotidian to claim Heideggerian affiliation. But the figure of Heidegger reigns over the world of things, of thing-studies if you like, and is

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both an influence and target of attack for the two thinkers I want to turn to now: Bruno Latour (associated with ANT) and Graham Harman (associated with Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Philosophy).10 Latour takes a more drastic distance from Heidegger and is frequently excoriating in his attacks on him: for his attitude towards technology, for expounding a single world view and for sequestering being and beings from one another.11 Harman frequently points out that Heidegger, despite ‘The Thing’ and Being and Time, never pays much attention in fact to individual objects and never develops a theory of time. Despite this, these two thinkers (differently) posit points of departure offered by Heidegger. Harman takes Heidegger’s tool-analysis as the basis of a general theory of things, while Latour identifies an etymological link forged by Heidegger between the word for a gathering and a thing in order to account for the ‘thingness of the thing’.12 things: they too do things, they too make you do things ‘Now, is this not extraordinary’, Latour asks, ‘that the banal term we use for designating what is out there, unquestionably, a thing, what lies out of any dispute, out of language, is also the oldest word we all have used to designate the oldest of the sites in which our ancestors did their dealing and tried to settle their disputes?’13 On the one hand a thing is an object out there in the world and on the other hand it is an issue, a gathering. Although Heidegger develops this etymology at length, he does not develop the latent path that Latour discerns. On the contrary, Latour says, he is always at pains to distinguish between objects, Gegenstände, on the one hand, and the Thing on the other. On the one hand there is the handmade jug

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or pair of wooden clogs, which are allowed to be things, but on the other hand Adidas shoes or a crass industrially-made can of Coke remain objects: Only the former, cradled in the respectful idiom of art, craftsmanship, and poetry, could deploy and gather its rich set of ­connections. . . . And, yet, Heidegger, when he takes the jug seriously, offers a powerful vocabulary to talk also about the object he despises so much [the can of Coke]. What would happen, I wonder, if we tried to talk about the object of science and technology, the Gegenstand, as if it had the rich and complicated qualities of the celebrated Thing?14

And what, I wonder, if we tried to talk about films not so much in Heidegger’s language, but in Latour’s? Even to consider this question seriously we would first have to acknowledge that Latour’s d ­ iscourse is not developed for talking about films or poems or paintings or any such things; second, we would need to draw out the ways in which it could be pertinent to film analysis. ‘[O]bjects and subjects can never associate with one another; humans and nonhumans can’.15 This exuberant sloganistic assertion, from Politics of Nature, condenses the multifarious spirit of Latour’s polemic. In We Have Never Been Modern he argued that modernity failed to deflect from centre stage the agency and centrality of human beings, and as a result knowledge of how society ticks (not just human society) remains as always, since the Copernican revolution, severely circumscribed. Latour has undertaken analyses of (mostly scientific) institutions, following the heterogeneous associations that make up those institutions (undertaken in the name of ANT); his orientation is towards the political and the philosophical and his

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work is not concerned with textual—written or visual—analysis.16 But the great epistemological move he has made—to systematically collapse the modern subject-object and human-nonhuman divide— has opened up possibilities for rethinking analytic strategies in various fields. By focusing on networks, conceived as associations of actors—human and non-human actants—he focuses on hybrid kinds of encounters, alliances and confrontations through which change is effected. The concept of associations is easy enough to grasp, but why does Latour make so much of the etymological association with the word for thing? We can approach an answer to this question by asking another: What is an actor? Although Latour is alert to the ­performative valency of human actors (in The Making of Law he was as interested in looking at every little way in which people speak or sit at the table as he was in understanding the essence of law17) the bottom line is this: an actor is what an actor does. Microbes can be actors, and so can dust, electrons, humans, tigers, armies or the ozone layer. The notion of actant is drawn from semiotics and narrative theory. An actor is anything that produces an effect on other things. There can thus be no distinction between physical and non-physical things. An actor can be an object or a subject or something in-between, a ‘quasi-object’ (a term taken from Michel Serres). Actors do not all carry the same weight and effects are distributed unevenly, but ‘[e]ven so-called weak objects . . . they too act, they too do things, they too make you do things . . .’18 More recently Latour has shifted his emphasis from a theory of networks to a theory of ‘modes of existence’.19 He says the differences—between things—are too big: ‘It’s too different when you are a rock or when you are a creature from fiction or when you are a scientific reference and so on’.20 What is the mode of existence of a microbe or a dust particle, how are those modes of existence

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a­ ffected by the particularities of association, by the larger ecology in which things exist? Latour often repeats the phrase: ‘ecology is not about nature’. Might we think of film as an ecology, in which various things exist, and transform and effect change? there is an upsurge of bulky presence into my environment Whereas Latour disavows metaphysics (though in Politics of Nature he does talk about an experimental metaphysics), Graham Harman describes his own practice or philosophy as a ‘high-rolling metaphysics of the object’21 and situates himself within a phenomeno­ logical tradition (the Husserl–Heidegger–Merleau-Ponty–Lingis lineage), which he sees above all as an object-oriented school.22 This emphasis is not entirely conventional, is perhaps even quirky and arguably has more in common with Latour, but Harman’s engagement with Heidegger is that of a metaphysician, and it is much more intense. Whereas for Latour the etymological link made by Heidegger provided a key to open the door onto a world of things, the question for Harman is Heidegger’s tool-analysis. Harman notes that although Heidegger is not much interested in individual objects, he does delineate a world in which objects only enter our perception when they are broken. At that moment, as Harman puts it in a refreshingly un-Heideggerian idiom, ‘there is an upsurge of bulky presence into my environment’.23 He aims to push Heidegger’s tool-analysis far beyond Heidegger’s own reading of it into a world delineated not by subjects and objects, nor by Dasein and the world, but by objects and relations (hence ObjectOriented Philosophy). But he encounters a problem: if the account of objects is solely in their relations, then ‘there’s nothing hidden in reserve, nothing cryptic, nothing that would later unfold and give

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me the chance to have new relations to things’.24 How to proceed, then, being alert to what Alphonso Lingis calls ‘the imperative in things’? What Harman does is develop a kind of ‘inverted strategy’, an interest in things in themselves, the tool within the system it inhabits. Metaphysics thus framed means something more like ­realism: ‘there is a reality that escapes any of its manifestations. You can never be quite sure what it is, but you can offer some description of what the structures of that reality are’.25 Hence the term Speculative Realism, which conceives of objects as media (they may have some physical reality or not; Donald Duck is no less an object than a pillar of granite) and asks: can an object-oriented philosophy develop a sort of alchemy for describing the transformations of one entity into another?26 Granted, there are asymmetries in the intentional relations between ‘me and the objects that I witness’, but this should not be construed as a contrast between some transcendental human cogito versus a ‘stupid block of inanimate matter’. When I ‘intend’ it is not I who am the active one: ‘On the contrary it is I who am the passive one, since it is I who have been drawn into a new space by the object I encounter’.27 Space, then, is not pre-existent. It emerges in the encounter. Time too. Of space and time Harman asks: are these just empty containers or do they emerge from the structure of objects themselves? 28 what if . . . What then, if anything, can film theory, or more modestly film analysis, gain from rubbing shoulders with Latour and Harman and their fellow travellers? In film studies, questions of time and space are hardly new. Does cinema represent or articulate or actually give

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rise to these categories? These are perennial questions, but the focus on the object or thing, as the origin of time, in its Latourian guise, does pose more novel avenues of inquiry. For Latour things introduce time; time is produced by actors. This is not quite what Gilles Deleuze would say, but there is a resonance, made most explicit in Latour’s frequent echoing of Deleuze’s insistence on the virtual/ actual relation over the potential/real. If cinematic operations are to be thought of not merely as techniques, but also as actors, at once material and virtual, then we might begin to think about films as ecological systems, as organisations of time and space in which ­hybrid alliances occur between all sorts of things and quasi-things. Cinema can evoke both the solidity and ephemeral quality of things: political discourses, wind in the trees, teardrops. A film, any film, is an amalgam of techniques and materials. All kinds of unpredictable ‘things’ happen when ‘things’ come into collision: a zoom and a rabbit, a freeze frame and a dead body, a tracking shot and a bunch of cars, virtuoso editing and a somersaulting cyborg, a living body and a dead body. For me the work of Latour and Harman operates to provide not so much a toolbox as it does inspiration and a radical reorientation, to provoke a what-if approach. What if I were able to let go of all the certainties that guide me and keep me afloat when encountering films and embarking on film analysis? What if I really let the very idea of equality between all things come to the fore (what Vivian Sobchack has called interobjectivity29)? What would familiar films (not just films with cyborgs and hybrid machines) look like? What might films with ordinary old dead bodies that take up a lot of space and time look like? Some of the provocations posed, even indirectly, by the LatourHarman discourse, ripple the surface of what follows. Can a corpse,

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for instance, be considered in terms of its mode of existence? What are the cinematic operations that bring things into association? Bearing in mind that not all bodies, even dead bodies, perform their thingness in the same way, all bodies are nevertheless things and all things partake of the properties of bodies. The dead body is no longer alive but it exists in the film just as much as ‘live’ human characters or telephones or the sound of water lapping the shore. for an instant, before my whole structure of knowledge ­collapses in panic The Reckless Moment was the last of four films Max Ophüls made in Hollywood. It belongs to that hybrid genre which overlays film noir with a type of melodrama inflected towards the woman’s film. Joan Bennett plays Lucia Harper, a mother of teenagers living in a ­bucolic island suburb near Los Angeles. While her husband is away on business she becomes embroiled with characters from the seedy L.A. demi-monde, where shady men deal in art and drugs and blackmail. The film opens with her confronting and warning off the lasciviously menacing older man, Darby, with whom her daughter has been involved while attending art school. The daughter, Bea, is defiant and later that night secretly meets her lover in the Harpers’ boathouse. A struggle ensues and Darby is accidentally killed. Lucia, protecting her daughter, hides the body. But this is not the end of the affair. A blackmailer materialises from the underworld, an intense and charming blackmailer played by James Mason, who has been sent to demand a large and immediate payment from Lucia in order to suppress the love letters Bea wrote to Darby. The body is the most singular and monumental object in The Reckless Moment (and the pivotal event is the exchange between the

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character Lucia and this body), but it is a film studded with objects imbued with an intensely vivid cinematic life. A number of the most cinematically-destined objects figure in The Reckless Moment—telephones, letters, cigarettes, money. These objects have a propensity to attract the camera’s attention; they occur in many films, caressed by the camera, sometimes soliciting gestural engagement and at other times hypostatised, appearing as quasi-magical things imbued with a life and existence beyond the logic of the plot. They are rendered thus through cinematic operations such as the close-up, lengthy lingering shots, descriptive montage sequences. We might question, though, the implicit hierarchy of determinations in that phrase ‘rendered thus’: are these objects ‘rendered thus’ by cinematic operations determined purely by human agency, by filmmakers? Or could it be that these non-human objects, when they enter into the filmic world, exert ‘thing agency’? In The Reckless Moment it is certainly the case that these things appear to enter into relations with one another, to enter into a circuit of exchange, in which value (significance yes, but also affect) emerges in the realm of encounter: the trajectory of the human mediated by the network of actants. In addition to these cinema­ tically-destined objects there is a range of domestic things, mostly broken or needing attention, which orchestrate the daily life of Lucia Harper. In some respects the appearance of the body constitutes an interruption, or an irruption into the daily routines of the Harper household. It is dramatically anomalous, a foreign body. But in another way it is configured so as to take its place as one thing among others in the quotidian realm. It also takes the place, fills up the space as it were, of the absent body: the husband whom we never see. The sequence begins with a signature Ophüls tracking shot. The camera moves laterally, tracking Lucia as she walks in the early morning along the shore, although our view of her is semi-obscured by

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trees. She takes a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and lights up, but before she has a chance to enjoy smoking her attention is caught by something off screen. The body is revealed. It lies face down on the beach near the beach house, impaled on an anchor. Music is suspended. Lucia throws down her unsmoked cigarette and descends the wooden steps to the beach, moving into close range and seeming to pull the camera with her as she kneels by the body. She turns the man’s head and sees who it is. It is the body of Darby (he has fallen after his struggle with Bea, when a rotten wooden railing gave way). She recognises him, and so do we. We know who this corpse was. Knowledge is thus imbricated in the revelation, and inevitably in its narrative reverberations. But we have no investment in regret or grief (in fact, relief is a more likely response). Darby is now a corpse. But not quite yet a thing. Lucia pauses, her hand on his chest, revulsion checked for a moment by some kind of recognition. Perhaps it is the recognition that J.M. Coetzee describes when his character Elizabeth Costello says: ‘What I know is what a corpse cannot know: that it is extinct, that it knows nothing and will never know anything anymore. For an instant, before my whole structure of knowledge collapses in panic, I am alive inside that contradiction, dead and alive at the same time’.30 Within moments, however, the body becomes a thing. But this thingness has been anticipated and prefigured only moments before, at the beginning of this sequence. The appearance of the body, we might say, has been heralded by the cigarette. So let us suspend the ‘discovery’ scene and turn for a moment to other things. of cigarettes and other things For her early morning walk Lucia is wearing a long coat, little boots

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and dark glasses. Why dark glasses at this hour of the morning when no one is around and the sun is not up and shining, even in California? But this is a silly question. We should equally ask: why are dark glasses so attracted to the cinema? There are obvious reasons to do with opacity, hiding, mystery, fashion. But scale is also part of the picture. When a close-up lingers on a face wearing dark glasses there is often something out of proportion in the image that is nevertheless, because of its very incongruity (large glasses, small face) aesthetically gratifying. Audrey Hepburn shows us this over and over again. Sunglasses render the face inscrutable (leaving more to the viewer’s imagination), but they also hide the face, deface, block out one of the prime indices of living beings: the eyes. The eyes are an agent of human and character expressivity. Dark glasses, through mobilising a paradox of disproportion, bring the face and the thing (the glasses) into alignment. The cigarette is a particularly charmed (and charming) cinematic thing. This is partly because of the glorious quality of smoke filtered through the light of black-and-white cinema. It is always solidly a thing, and yet it is also imaginary; as it is smoked and disappears it gestures towards both its own phenomenality and its genealogy: as one of a series, endlessly replaceable and repeatable.31 Smoking (an event where human and non-human actants act together) conjures pleasure in an almost shamanic fashion, particularly considering that cigarettes have been banished from the world. Indeed smoking is perhaps now a primarily cinematic pleasure. Lucia reaches into her pocket and takes out a pack of cigarettes and matches. As she walks she shakes a cigarette loose, puts it in her mouth and lights up. We anticipate the inhalation, the pleasure. And then she sees the body. The body interrupts the pleasure promised by the cigarette. The body and the cigarette: two things in collusion,

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interrupting the flow of time, together conspiring against pleasure. an excess of time . . . The body, however, becomes a much bigger thing than the cigarette in the following scenes, during which Lucia moves it onto a small boat and takes it out to a swampy area where she dumps it overboard. It is the middle scene, however—between the discovery and the boat journey—that is pivotal. This is the section in which Lucia engages physically with the body. After she has recognised the body Lucia runs into the boathouse. We hear only very low ambient sound, water lapping the shore. In a lengthy mobile shot, combining a track and pan tilt, Lucia moves swiftly and furtively from the distance into the foreground and then away from the camera, below the ramp, so that the camera is angled down as she arrives at the body. This stretched temporality of the tracking shot is abruptly suspended by the body, or more accurately by Lucia’s close encounter with the body. The rhythm changes. The sense of scale is almost violently recalibrated. The dominant refrain is now one of alternating and extremely angled close-ups, between views of Lucia overwhelmed by the body and images in which the two bodies are conjoined in some kind of exchange, an exchange situated somewhere between struggle and embrace. Certainly not reciprocity. The one body expends energy and exertion, the other responds with passivity and obdurate resistance. Not reciprocity, no, but an exchange yes. The corpse might be without life, or spirit, but it is cinematically animated. Charged. Imbued with affective powers. It feels larger than life. And this in part is because the tracking shots that precede the moving of the body fill it with time. Thus when we say this is narratively dead time, or redundant time

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(in economic terms time is certainly wasted in this sequence) what we mean is that an excess of time fills this thing, this body-thing, which in its turn fills the rest of the film with a certain kind of deadly temporality. Critics have complained that this sequence is hokey in its staginess and that the substitution of a dummy in place of the live actor renders the scene implausible.32 But I find myself breathing in synch with the laboured rhythm of the sequence and Lucia’s effort to lift, move, roll and drag the body. There is an upsurge of bulky presence into my environment. The extreme awkwardness of the framing registers her bodily discomfort, reminding me of two other marvellous cinematic sequences in which people try and move heavy recalcitrant things, things which, although they are dead weights, in fact seem animated by a vital resistance. In Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (U.S.A., 1977), two men laboriously move a heavy motor down a stairway, a process that is both excruciating and hypnotic.33 In another hilarious sequence, Laurel and Hardy, in The Music Box (James Parrott, U.S.A., 1932), try and move a grand piano up a flight of stairs.34 In these sequences there is continuity between living bodies and things; action is distributed and there is no clear demarcation between the performing and the acted-upon. Maternal melodrama has provided the key for most analytic accounts of The Reckless Moment, with critics seeing the body primarily as a sign standing for repression, and the hiding of the body, followed by blackmail, as signalling the return of the repressed. Michael Walker, in an early piece of psychoanalytic criticism, pointed out that in another film revolving around the return of the repressed, Hitchcock’s Rebecca (U.S.A., 1940), the accidental killing also took place in a boathouse.35 Mary Ann Doane wrote in The Desire to Desire that ‘[a]n inordinate amount of time is spent on a scene in which

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Mrs Harper laboriously and in silence . . . drags Darby’s body down the beach to the boat in order to take it away and conceal it—in what is basically a literalisation of the ‘maternal function’ of hiding (or repressing) the body’.36 Clearly this is a story about the domestic and about repression, but it is not simply about repressed desire. The resistance of the body is material. It exists in the material world of objects, the network of objects that make up the domestic life of women, the daily routines, the relations, the ‘things’ that need to be attended to. In The Reckless Moment, as in its remake The Deep End (Scott McGehee and David Siegel, U.S.A., 2001) and in Almodóvar’s Volver (Spain, 2006), the ‘crime’ of hiding the body arises out of a woman’s relationship to her adolescent child’s coming into sexuality. In Volver Penelope Cruz trusses the body of her abusive husband up in a carpet and has to drag it into her neighbour’s restaurant and manoeuvre it into the freezer. Tilda Swinton in The Deep End re-enacts Joan Bennett’s encounter with the body-thing, although her encounter actually takes longer because we are shown her dragging the body out of the boat. Yet somehow the later film does not seem to me so weighted by time, perhaps because so much is made of the beauty of the setting and the symbolic dimension of water, its deceptively shimmering surface. The network of things, the network in which the body is conjoined to other things in The Reckless Moment, includes the telephone and the letter. These are both forms of communication, but importantly in The Reckless Moment they are both articulated through touch (just as Lucia’s relationship to the body is tactile) and, like the body, they constitute physical impedimenta rather than avenues of communication (Letter from an Unknown Woman, made a year earlier, makes much more of the letter as a dynamic and multi-dimensional thing). We see Lucia hold the pen, her hand conjuring the letter into

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being, then tearing up what she has written to the absent husband; we see her, several times, speaking to him on the phone (although the phone either doesn’t ring or rings at the wrong time, and there are no reverse shots, so we never see him). She holds the receiver, cradles it. Her relation to the objects is physical and the exchange somatic, rhyming with her exchange with the body. Thus although the telephone, the letter and the body are not in direct communication, they are performative within a network. They communicate with one another, we might say, though they fail as conventional instruments of communication. They are communiqués in which there are no reverse shots: there is thus no communication.37 The reverse shot is ironically given to us in the form of Donnelly, whose side of a conversation with Lucia we do see (and in this case we are not given the reverse shot of her). Letters also take a very concrete form as the object of blackmail, interestingly updated in The Deep End to video evidence. The difficulty of moving the body infiltrates the rest of the film as the obdurate insistence of domestic time, resisting both the urgent demand of the blackmailers for money and the increasingly urgent though restrained desire of the James Mason figure. As the body takes its place in a retinue of domestic things, it also serves to reorient scale so that the domestic is rendered just as brutally huge as the world of money, blackmail and public commerce. The body is resistant to the flow of time. But as the body insists, as it fills the screen and takes up screen time, it introduces a different dimension of time. a kernel of curiosity More than in the other two films, the thing-corpse in The Reckless Moment is like other things in the diegetic world; it acts within a

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c­ ircuit of domestic things. The other corpses are decidedly not domestic. But the bodies in all three films have both a considerable thing-like presence—they appear as things-in-themselves, they draw the camera’s gaze—and they enter into a circuit of exchange. We might say that this exchange is between actants, both human and non-human. Or we might put the emphasis on the living and dead, on the gestural exchange. Or we could think of the apparatus, the camera operations, as actants, so that the tracking shot is an actant acting in concert with the body-thing. My tendency is to bring all three emphases to bear, as my curiosity in the first instance is provoked by filmic movements, by movements in which things materialise and insist on being, demanding my attention. But there is something else that insists—all three bodies, as I have said, seem to be filled with time and in turn to introduce a certain temporality into the film. I have been oscillating here, in a way that is theoretically rather dicey, between insinuating the body as origin of time and arguing that time enters the body through cinematic operations that set it up, that set the stage for the corpse to embody time. I want to retain this critical oscillation, for it seems to me that both tendencies pertain in producing the sense of time and sense of the body-as-thing that all three films generate. Nevertheless, it is surely necessary to aim for greater precision regarding the processes of temporalisation. Let me return for a moment to the beginning of this essay, which is to say how it began. There was an image that haunted me for many years. It was that of a body that took up an inordinate amount of space and time: the dead body in The Reckless Moment, Joan Bennett’s hands on the body, pulling it, wrestling with its implacable thingness. What persisted, what grew heavier over time, was precisely the sensation of time as heavy. As the years passed the memory became more insistent. No

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doubt it lived on as a charged recollection because for many years it was impossible to see a print of the film. When it became available on DVD (in Europe, not in North America) and I saw it again I realised that while in part there was a cinephiliac moment of arrest at work here, in fact it turned out to contain a nugget of something: not ­necessarily the truth, but let’s say there was some correspondence between the memory and the film as it now appeared to me. It was this that provided the starting point for a closer scrutiny. Often we find that the detail (when we return to it) has no substance. But in this instance it was the substantiality, the material presence of the body and the sense of it as temporalised, which turned out to contain the kernel. The cinephiliac memory is so often fuelled by that unknown quantity, the not-knowing, the mystery that preserves fascination. And now, with the gift of new recording and playing devices such as DVDs, we can dwell on those moments and begin to see what the initial attraction was, and also to see new things.38 This fragment, centring on the body and thing relation, or body-asthing, and because of the sense of time it insisted upon, opened onto a larger curiosity: how does this image and others like it acquire a kind of force, an affective power, which is different from but also underpins the things in Godard’s list? .

the pressure of time in the shot What I did not remember was the preceding tracking shot, as Lucia approaches the beach, nor did I remember the lengthy shot of her with the body, described above. As I looked more closely it became evident to me that this operation, articulating duration and movement, was key to understanding the temporalisation of the body. This blockage in memory is odd because Ophüls is the master of

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the long take and the sinuous tracking shot. But perhaps not so odd after all, because The Reckless Moment is not the most typical Ophüls film,39 and perhaps it is precisely here—in the tension ­between the lengthy take and moving camera, on the one hand, and the resistance of the body to movement on the other hand— that the operation of temporalisation occurs. Not only in The Reckless Moment but also, though in varying ways, in Japanese Story and Vagabond. Temporalisation is the topic of Cinema 2, Deleuze’s account of the way in which, with the crisis of the action image precipitated after the Second World War, the cinema freed itself of the subordination of the image to time. In primitive and classical cinema, time is subordinated to bodies (the movement-image), but in modernist cinema (the time-image) time becomes what matters. It becomes the matter of cinema. The direct-time image is virtual in opposition to the actuality of the movement-image. This is vividly illustrated in his discussion of how Alain Resnais’ and Luchino Visconti’s tracking shots, and Welles’ depth of field, carry out a temporalisation of the image, or form a direct time-image.40 He speaks of characters in the films of these auteurs as constantly stepping into and out of time, and of us as viewers being plunged into time. In The Reckless Moment, as well as in Japanese Story and Vagabond, as we will see, the sense of elongated time that settles and condenses in the body and spreads out from there is related to unusually lengthy shots which either anticipate the body or conjure its being. It is much easier to talk about the Varda film as located within a paradigm of the time-image and less easy to situate the other two there, particularly Japanese Story, because the cinematic operations appear to disappear into the figures, into a story organised around the movement of figures. There is a drive in these three films towards

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the actual and towards a sense of ‘real time’ or time that is shaped by and issues out of the movement of bodies. The massive presence of the dead bodies, combined with ‘real time’ shots, might seem to unite the present and presence under the rubric of the real. But remember that Deleuze makes clear that there is no present tense in cinema (except in bad films).41 And no ‘real time’, a term usually used to connote an isomorphic relation between screen time and pro-filmic time, understood as real. Deleuze argues that in cinéma vérité, for instance, the aim is ‘not to achieve a real as it would exist independently of the image, but to achieve a before and an after as they coexist with the image, as they are inseparable from the image’.42 The difficult thing is to understand the temporalisation that occurs in the three films discussed in this essay. To come at this I want to take a moment to consider how Deleuze considers a possible qualification to his own distinction between the shot as being on the side of the movement-image (where time would be subordinated to the movement of the diegesis), and montage as being on the side of the time-image (where time is freed). This rethink is provoked by Andrei Tarkovsky: In a text with important implications Tarkovsky says that what is essential is the way time flows in the shot, its tension or rarefaction, ‘the pressure of time in the shot’. He appears to subscribe to the classical alternative, shot or montage, and to opt strongly for the shot (‘the cinematographic figure only exists inside the shot’). But this is only a superficial appearance, because the force or pressure of time goes outside the limits of the shot.43

The dead body stops time. It effects a pressure of time in the shot.

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In all three films discussed here the implacable thing interrupts the flow of narrative time, but this tension generates a different flow, it sets time free. The before and after, past and future are simultaneously present. The body accumulates stillness as it manifests as a thing. This concentrated time then seeps out into the film at large. It brings time, virtual time, cinematic time, to the surface. time out Japanese Story (made by Gekko films, the production trio composed of director Sue Brooks, writer Alison Tilson and producer Sue Maslin), is set in the magnificent Pilbara desert region of Western Australia. Against this landscape an intimate story unfolds between two unlikely fellow travellers. A young female geologist, Sandy (Toni Collette), is assigned—against her will—to show a Japanese man, Mr Tachibana (Gotaro Tsunashima), the outback country. He is the son of an important business partner of the small Australian mining company for which she works. Language and cultural differences impede their communication, friction bristles in the dry air, often discomfiting, sometimes dryly comedic. They each act out what we recognise as national stereotypes: he is overly formal, she is brusque and laconic, more like the typical Aussie male hero; they both are short on emotional warmth. And then, travelling, after having been bogged down in red desert sand and worked together to dig out the SUV, they soften towards one another and slip into another realm, becoming lovers. He becomes Hiromitsu, and then Hiro. Their love making is suggested rather than illustrated. They play language games, she tries on his clothes, watches him as he sleeps, moving her hand delicately just above the surface of his body as though over an expanse of water. They take a side trip, going off-road, having ‘time-

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out’ fun for what we assume is a few days though it is never exactly clear how long—not long enough to fall in love, too long to be strangers. In the desert they find a water hole, an idyllic oasis, the water fringed by eucalypts. She races him in. Running behind her, he dives much closer to the trees, in water that is too shallow for a deep dive. He disappears under water and does not resurface. In the moment that he dives she shouts out: ‘No, no, oh no, no, no’. After the splash: silence, her face registering disbelief and horror. She screeches his name: ‘Hiro, Hiro’. Shots of water, sounds of her swimming, diving under the surface, screaming out his name to the elements. A shot of still water. Still for a moment, and then his body, face-down, arms spread out, rises to the surface of the water. The drowning sequence comes out of the blue, no foreshadowing, no narrative build up. One moment he is alive and the next dead. Actually, not quite; cinematic time between those moments— between the moment when he dives and the moment when his body surfaces—is slightly stretched. Although there is no narrative preparation there is a space of elongated time. Or so it feels. Partly this is because of the suspense (is he dead or not?), but only mini­ mally so, because in fact Sandy’s distressed screaming anticipates what is to come. In Japanese Story we know who the corpse was, but whereas in The Reckless Moment we had no emotional investment, here recognition is grotesquely configured. We are impaled by recognition. The pressure of incommensurate images (of the living body and the dead body, of the past and the future) gives rise to hysteria, to a sobbing which overwhelms the soundtrack. We might call this a somatic materialisation, an expressive acting out of shock and grief; we might be tempted to describe it as histrionic; or we might call it temporal staging. It goes on and on, unrelenting in its intensity.

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But it is not all that goes on. Sandy has to get her dead lover out of the water and into their vehicle. During this long process we witness the gelatinisation of hysteria, and the mutation of a body into a thing. A heavy obdurate resistant thing. The moving of the body does not exactly occur in real time, but it is close, though composed of a number of shots.44 Floating, Hiromitsu’s body seems as light and as pliant as air. Sandy grips him by the armpits in a familiar life-saving posture and swims to the bank. The weight of his body begins to register in the labouring of her body as she tries to drag him ashore. She lets go and the body drops, half in and half out of the water. She begins desperately and clumsily, inexpertly, to pump his chest. His body, when it emerges from the water, is clean, his chest pale and smooth. There are simply a few small gashes, insignificant lines of blood, below his rib cage and on his temple. But the body soon becomes dirty, besmirched by sand and mud as Sandy tries to get him out of the water. His body is as heavy as the earth. Sobbing and wailing, physically struggling, she tries different positions: kneeling over him, behind, crouching, bending. His head keeps falling to one side or the other, she rights it gingerly, withdraws her fluttering hand. His neck is broken. What to do? With his head, with this body, this foreign object. How is she to use her own familiar hands, her own body, in this unfamiliar situation? The camera calmly moves in, following her and her movements. Eventually—shaking, panting, groaning—she assumes an awkward posture, sitting on her haunches, both bodies in and out of the water. The music begins, a four note figure on strings. As the music builds, mixed with the sound of crickets, there is a cut to Sandy crouching at the foot of a tree. Arms hanging between her knees, she rocks slowly back and forth. Hiromitsu’s body is stretched out across the bottom of the frame. He is silent, she is

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silent. This shot represents a decisive break. The hysteria is gone, or perhaps mutated. It is a pause between acts, an entr’acte. And this is so not just for the characters or bodies within the diegesis, it is a pause for the viewer too. Of course it only lasts, this immobility, for a few seconds, but it is like a caesura in a poem. Both spatial and temporal. The space between the two bodies in the frame, the tense calmness after the previous act of discovery, hysteria and frenetic energy. It is as though all the energy, the time it has taken, is concentrated in the stillness. And this concentration is dispersed, opened out, in the following shots, what we might call Act Two. The entr’acte functions not only as a decisive break but as a join, a bridge in this drama of becoming dead. Between the two acts it gathers and disperses energy, elongates times, creates a sense of long duration. The becoming of a dead body. ‘how to be dead’: acting as a thing Elsewhere I have written about a moment of suspension, between life and death and fantasy and reality. In Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (U.K., 1946), David Niven plays a character who is both dead and alive and who, during the course of the film, lives two parallel lives, one in this world and one in heaven. The moment of suspension occurs near the beginning of the film, where time rises to the surface and we experience a sense of dura­ tion, of felt time. Emotional duration exceeds diegetic temporality. Although a similar effect is produced in Japanese Story—the distillation of emotion and dilation of time—it is achieved through very different cinematic means. The break is not between fantasy and the real, but rather between degrees of deadness and modalities of

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energy. There is, however, similarly a tension between the indexical and the fictional. Both films turn on the paradox that while the cinematic body is insubstantial, ephemeral, it is also indexical of the real, and it is in this tension that mimetic engagement is generated.45 By mimetic engagement I mean the circuit of energy, the affect, which circulates between screen performance and viewer (the acting of the actors yes, but acting as articulated within the larger dispositif). Japanese Story aims for a reality effect, and produces its affect through a­ cting, in the drowning sequence particularly, that is documented in something close to real time. The body, the thing that it becomes in Act Two, is no dummy, as in The Reckless Moment. The dead body is played by Gotaro Tsunashima, the same actor who plays the live body. All he has to do is play dead. Play at being a thing. The question is: can a thing act? The answer is yes, obviously, particularly if we think along with Latour or Harman, but the crucial question is: How does a thing act? We can ask this of any thing in any film (and the early theorists of film did precisely this), but perhaps there is something that happens when a live actor performs thingness, particularly when the corpse is strongly imprinted with the history of the living person. When the body rises to the surface and floats it is a body out of which all life has been sucked. It is intransigent, resistant, heavy. Sandy has to pull it out of the water, drag it over land, lift it into the vehicle. And all of this is like a learning process. Who knows how to move a dead body? This is not something we learn culturally or at school. It is not part of our repertoire of gestures. How to hold, lift, turn, support, swivel, manoeuvre. Through the observant lens, through lengthy takes and the articulation of close and medium shots, we too learn and endure.

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Toni Collette also did not know how to do this. She had to figure it out. The realism of her performance, the sense of durational affect, is achieved in part through her enactment of this learning process. Most reviews of the film concentrate on her performance, which is indeed amazing. But what of Gotaro Tsunashima, particularly when he plays dead? Sue Brooks has made a wonderful comment about this: He had to ‘work out how to get energy out of his body and to be dead’.46 He has to work out how to at once impede the flow of time and embody duration. In fact it is through the exchange between the actors, between these two charged, extra-daily bodies, that the energy is generated. The performative exchange of energy happens in the struggle of a living woman with a massive intractable thing, a struggle which is also a reciprocity. Of course it is easier to consider flamboyant and histrionic camera movements or bravura editing as part of the performative machinery of a film. But here the long take, the evocation of real time, opens up the screen for the actors to perform their labour. The dramatic situation is certainly out of the ordinary but the bodies are ordinary, the actions not histrionically gestural. There is a sense in which this accident or tragic event has happened to two ordinary people, but we apprehend this somatically. Their ordinary, quotidian bodies are charged by the event as extra-daily. Time is inflated. When the body floats to the surface, time enters it and flows into the film. In Act Two, Sandy drags the body across land and into the SUV. This is a task entailing immense labour, and also ingenuity, a task performed without weeping. The music continues. Hiromitsu has become dead and the body has become a different sort of a thing. Sandy tries at first to get the body into the back seat of the vehicle, the camera following her movements. She tries manipulating the

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limbs in various ways, tries pulling and lifting and folding. Fails. She sinks down with him to the ground. He is shown sitting, knees drawn up, head lolling forward. She leans against him for ballast, though who is to say who is leaning on whom. For a moment she rests her head on his naked back. Next she drags the body round to the rear of the vehicle where she has opened out both trunk doors, thus allowing more space for movement. This move also registers a shift in the status of the body: no longer an intermediate body, one who might sit on the back seat like a person, now it is a corpse-body, one that will go in the back with the luggage (her rucksack and his suitcase, tossed on the ground to make way, are seen on the right edge of the frame). Kicking up dust, she has to steady and hold this body in place—a matter of balance as well as strength—as though it were a plank of wood. Cut in to a close-up on her bent shoulders. She takes a deep breath, rises with the body, the camera rises with her and as he slumps dragging her down again so the camera slumps, and you feel that slumping feeling, you feel the impossibility of moving the body. It is as though it has a will of its own. Although ‘lifeless’ in terms of human attributions, it is animated by the camera, the mise en scène and the acting. In long shot she pulls the body against her in an attempt to back into the truck. But this move doesn’t work either and we see a close-up of their upper bodies awkwardly entangled. She sighs. Already the body is less floppy; a slight rigidity is entering into it. Another manoeuvre: she is lying bent, back into the vehicle, he lying on top of her, face up, his back on the front of her body. Then she has to edge her way out from under his body, which is half in and half out of the truck. We see her realisation that she can’t pull him up; she hops out and tries another way. Again a close-up of entangled limbs. At last in a distanced long

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shot we see her get him in. She positions the body gently, moving the blanket that she has laid out for him to lie on. Once it was fire, this thing that once was a body Cut from the body in the vehicle to an extreme high angle showing us the huge red craggy cliffs of the gorge and the verdant green of the trees surrounding the still pool of water in this oasis. The tiny white vehicle pulls out onto the dusty dirt track and slowly winds away, lost in the landscape. Japanese Story is not the first film to use the desert as a vehicle for articulating a sense of time, and for fictionalising a discourse on scale. Think of European films such as Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky (U.K. and Italy, 1990), European films about the North American desert such as Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (U.S.A., 1984) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (U.S.A., 1970), John Ford’s westerns and the landscape film so ubiquitous in 1970s Australian cinema. Australian cinema from the beginning has capitalised on the landscape as a signifier of the sublime. As in other cinemas and representational genres, scale is crucial in conveying the sublime, most commonly conceived in terms of the tiny human body situated against the immensity and ineffability of the landscape. In the predominant art-movie genre of the 1970s, the desert was a blueprint for settler mythology, a ‘timeless template of national character’.47 Japanese Story articulates time and space somewhat differently. Even though it does recall tropes of 1970s cinema, it imagines a different relationship between the human figure and the landscape, between the sublimity of nature and human agency. Sandy and Hiromitsu visit the BHP-Bilton iron-ore mine, constructed on traditional Aboriginal

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land, so gigantic that it reminds him of the Aztec ruins—not just a cut in nature, but now a part of the landscape, an imprint of contemporary civilisation. The recalibration of scale, however, occurs most acutely in the drowning sequence. Story time and narrative time cohere fairly closely in the film, but there is a point where this correspondence is brutally sundered. From the moment of the dive the cinematic modality of the film shifts dramatically so that distance shrinks and time is stretched. Everything is reduced to the here and now. The hugeness of the desert landscape, the immense craggy red cliffs: all this is condensed into the moment and into the dead body and its overwhelming massiveness. The operative rhetorical figure is not contrast, but condensation. As duration unfolds outward, scale folds inward. The moment in which a living body becomes a dead body is instantaneous, but the time it takes to register the difference feels like forever. The difference between the monumentality of the landscape and the smallness of the human protagonists is erased, and in the process of rescaling the monumentality of the landscape enters into the body, into intimate gestures and exchanges. I find the exchange between the living and the dead here very poignant. The touch of the live woman animates the dead man. Brings him alive as a very cinematic thing. Her hand retains the gestural inflections partly of a lover, but only as a ghostly remembrance, in so far as gestures of work mimic gestures of love. The time it takes takes time, cinematically, to register both the image of the body, and the image itself, as mutable. It is a slow burn. ‘He said, “Look at this mountain, it was once fire”. And that, that goes for everything that we show: it’s like this but it could be different, it’s magnificent and horrible, man is not the centre of the universe’. The speaker is Jean-Marie Straub, and the ‘he’ to whom

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he refers is Cézanne. Straub also says: ‘He was trying to capture it as a mountain and not something else. It wasn’t abstract painting ­although it already went beyond that, it was already cubism and something that was richer than cubism. He said, “Look at this mountain, it was once fire” ’.48 What Straub suggests here is both the mutational capacity of the image and the idea of scale as related to mutation. He introduces these ideas thus: ‘I believe that what we’ve looked for, consciously since Moses and Aaron [sic], is monumentality. . . . The monumentality of the character in relation to the set, the monumentality of the set in relation to the character’.49 And, he continues: ‘films don’t have anything worthwhile if you don’t manage to find something that burns somewhere in the shot’. Japanese Story is clearly nothing like a Straub-Huillet film, but it does capture the body as a body and also as something huge like a mountain. Without Life There is not Pain It is possible, of course, for a viewer to see the exchange between bodies somewhat differently; rather than being absorbed in the movement, the labour, the encounter of a living body with a dead body, one could be arrested by moments of stillness, or at least of images and bodily dispositions, distilled from the continuum of cinematic movement, from images that appear as familiar iconographic configurations. There is more than one moment in the drowning sequence in which the woman and man take up the postures of the Pietà, the Virgin Mary, holding in her arms the dead Christ. But although Sandy might adopt the posture of Mary she does not quite adopt the attitude. Not all representations of the Pietà are as composed as the familiar classical iconography (such as Michelangelo’s representa-

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tion); there was a pre-Renaissance Mary, referred to in scholarship as the ‘swooning Mary’, who exhibited greater somatic disequilibrium. The Virgin Mary at Calvary, however, is never a figure of desperation, and is rarely shown as overtly weeping. The figure who does weep is Mary Magdalene, and it is she whom the figure of Sandy might evoke, particularly the Medieval and early-Renaissance Mary Magdalene, who is often represented as distraught, anguished and in disarray. She is a figure in pain, of pain. Theologically this pain is a register of her status as a sinner (redeemed) and her ­gesticulatio denotes grief rather than physical pain. But the representations are sometimes charged with considerable somatic affect (dolor, of course, means both grief and pain). This is vividly seen, for instance, in Niccolo Dell’Arca’s life-size terracotta sculpture, ‘Lamentation over the Dead Christ’ (Compianto sul Cristo Morto, completed in 1463).50 Magdalene is caught in mid-movement, her body stepping forward, her headdress and robes flying back, her mouth agape as though shrieking or howling, in any case emitting vocally an expression of tormented grief. The fingers of both hands are tensed, spread out in a familiar gesture of hysteria (familiar from soap operas for instance, as well as from classical physiognomic illustrations)—as though trying to stop, or to grip onto, something, even though that something is only air.51 Mary Magdalene and Christ, Sandy and Hiromitsu: why map these figures out in the same conceptual space? Certainly there are iconographical resonances, but equally certainly Japanese Story does not unfold within a Christian paradigm. So are the imagistic allusions or traces enough to justify attention? For me the iconographical associations position grief centre stage and provoke a meditation upon the repertoires (dramatic, visual, gestural, cultural) that make available possibilities for expressing grief and enable the somatic ex-

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pression and transmission of that grief. For at least the first half of the drowning sequence Toni Collette’s grief seems involuntary, and the pain she expresses registers somehow in my own body (though I am prepared to admit that some might find the transmission less straightforward—‘It made me cringe and cry at the same time’, writes one blogger).52 Of course the body always speaks to us through cultural frames, and expressivity is as much a cultural form as restraint. This we know, but what isn’t so immediately clear is how cinematic choices (camera positioning and movement, length of shots, music, acting) might work to affect our own experience of grief and other emotional registers. Taking my cue from the iconographical resonances, I suspect that it has to do with the way in which Japanese Story concentrates intensity, the way movement and stillness are structured, the way time is configured in relation to the body. Here we might expand the purview of the meditation to focus not simply on how time enters into and moves through bodies in this particular film, but how images, particularly still images (configurations of Christ and the two Marys for instance) move through historical time and through different media (painting, sculpture, film, the Internet). Perhaps the iconographically familiar articulations of the Pietà, and of the grieving Magdalene, persist as images and live on in the popular imaginary of western Judeo-Christian cultures not solely or even primarily because of their theological meanings, but because there is something in the images which distils and concentrates emotional intensity, and has the capacity to ‘speak to’ and to move viewers across cultures and times. This is more or less the argument of Aby Warburg. Warburg was interested in repetition, how certain gestures and bodily configurations are repeated in different epochs, across cultures, across high art and popular culture, in the religious sphere, in political arenas, in the

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quotidian language of the street. His argument is not that the semantic content remains the same in each context; on the contrary, images and gestures do not mean the same thing twice, but by virtue of their intensity they persist, triggering somatic memory and producing pathos. What he calls the pathos formulae (pathosformeln) are figurative formulae which exhibit extraordinary ‘historical tenacity’, capable of surviving because of the way they crystallise a moment of intensity and movement.53 Warburg considers Niccolo Dell’Arca’s Mary Magdalene to be just such a figuration. As Georges Didi-Huberman puts it, for Warburg the ‘unbridled desire of Antique Maenads is repeated in Mary Magdalene’s body’.54 The template for the figuration, then, precedes Christianity, and lives on after the Renaissance, surfacing for instance in magazine images in Warburg’s time and in films in our own. Part of the grief-effect produced by Collette derives from the tension between the sensation of turbulent movement—waves and waves of grief crashing in—concentrated in a relatively still body. But there is also, of course, the tension between the two bodies, one living and one not, one moving and the other still. And there is the actual moving of the body: from the water onto land, over the sand, up the bank and into the SUV. It is here, in the resistance of the thing-like body, in the energy exerted by Sandy to introduce movement into the body, that an intensity is concentrated. The dynamic echoes but is rather different from that described by Warburg. He gives examples of still images which capture and generate a sensation of movement, engendering emotion in the viewer. In Japanese Story the dominant impulse of the film is not to capture movement, but rather to fill stillness (motionlessness) with time. From the moment that Hiromitsu dives (i.e. the last moment/image of him as a living body) to the shot of the SUV driving away it is as though

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time has stopped, and simultaneously that time is being stretched unutterably slowly. In the tension or crystallisation of pathos the dead body, familiar to us iconographically and repetitive in its operations, becomes surprisingly animated. Pain is distributed: through both bodies, through the sequence of images, through a circuit that connects the screen with the viewer. ‘Without life there is not pain, because dead bodies do not ­suffer’, said Saint Augustine in a neo-Platonic twist to Aristotle’s formulation of the severed hand.55 The Neo-Platonists adopted a more rigid division between soul and body than Aristotle, for whom spirit and soul were intricate categories, related to the body in complex ways. In Japanese Story pain does not reside in the dead body, nor is it external to the body; it is distributed in a circuit. But Augustine’s theory of pain is not without relevance to the film, as we shall soon see. then bodies will burn, and souls will be gnawed by the worm of regret The drowning sequence is aesthetically balanced and self-contained. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. Its sensory power is generated from within, through the performance of the actors and through filmic operations. But the story doesn’t end there. Grieving doesn’t stop. The body doesn’t go away. Sandy has to get it back into the world (and she has to live back in the world). She drives through the day and through the night and in the darkness she stops by a river, washes and dresses the body. In a small outback town she finds a part-time undertaker. In Perth the body has to be handed over to Hiromitsu’s family, to his wife Yukiko, who has come from Japan. Sandy, composed now, finds a moment

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to step forward and say she is sorry to Yukiko for her part in his drowning. Yukiko, for her part, draws out of her handbag and gives to Sandy—returns we might say—an envelope of photos developed from Hiro’s camera, all his landscape shots and evidence too of the affair. The persistence of the body, its insistence on existing after it is dead, on existing in other places, registers in the film as an extended temporality. A temporality that is charged by grief (and the time that grieving takes) in its private and public modalities. Considering the drowning sequence within the larger context of the film, and the film within the larger cultural context of its production and reception, particularly in Australia, suggests a connection between affect and history. In Australian Cinema after Mabo Felicity Collins and Therese Davis argue for Japanese Story in the context of its time as a film that has the capacity to enable, within the public sphere, a connection between forms of trauma and grieving: individual and national. Mabo is a shorthand term, familiar to all Australians, for the historic 1992 High Court ruling in Mabo and others vs. The State of Queensland which acknowledged traditional Aboriginal ownership of the land. This was a historic event because it effectively overturned the doctrine of terra nullius (the fiction that the land belonged to no one at the time of settlement). ‘The Mabo decision is at the centre of an unprecedented politicisation of history in Australia’56 because it opened up the nation to debate about past treatment of Aboriginal peoples, the politics of land, and the question of the extent to which the present generation of Euro-Australians should take responsibility for past actions, make reparations and offer a public apology. In 1997 Bringing Them Home was published, a human rights report based on a national inquiry into the Stolen Generations, the thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children forcibly

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taken from their families by Australian state authorities from 1900 to 1970 under the banner of assimilation.57 This document, based on the testimony of more than 500 witnesses, had a profound impact on ‘national identity’—the trauma for so many Indigenous people was made palpable in the public arena, and the shock and shame of colonial history was starkly materialised. These events occurred in the context of an increasingly multi-cultural Australia (formerly bitter national enemies, the Japanese and Australians were busily forging commercial partnerships as in Japanese Story) in contrast to the ­exclusionary White Australia policy that shaped Australian immigration until it was finally abandoned in 1973. But racism and xenophobia had not disappeared, as evidenced in attitudes and policies toward non-European asylum seekers and refugees, in the backlash against Bringing Them Home and against so-called ‘black armband history’ (a reactionary slur against ‘grieving’ history). How does the body, the body as thing, as a material object like a piano that has to be moved from one place to another, figure into an apprehension of Japanese Story as a film framed by the Mabo judgment? I would argue (in a similar vein to Collins and Davis) that just as the drowning sequence dramatises an exchange (in which the distribution of energy and pain and labour cannot easily be distinguished between the animate and inanimate, the living and dead) so too the encounter between the two women, Sandy and Yukiko, is an exchange. It is clear that Sandy is apologising, but it is not clear for what exactly, and when Yukiko returns the photos this cannot be mapped straightforwardly onto the return of land say, in the light of Aboriginal title. Still, what is clear is that the body will not go away. More acutely we can see, by looking at the last act of the film, that the persistence of the body, its introduction of time into the film, is the time of grief unleashed by trauma. The affective power of the

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sequence perhaps affects the viewer in ways that enable her to be receptive, as the film moves out of the ‘idyllic’ space and back into the social world, to the reverberations of trauma. In cultural and political terms the trauma experienced by Indigenous peoples is incomparable to that experienced by colonial subjects. Character and story cannot be mapped in a one-to-one way onto the political landscape. But the affective mimetic response perhaps produced in the drowning sequence is one way in which difference can be ­acknowledged and reconciliation negotiated. The body insists on existing. And indeed, although Saint Augustine says dead bodies do not suffer, he included a caveat that goes like this: on the Day of Judgment the damned will be ‘restored to their body and suffer in it; then bodies will burn, and souls will be gnawed by the worm of regret’.58 Grieving is not automatically or always cathartic. It takes time and often unleashes inhospitable, inimical and demonic impulses. This we see in the iconographical representations of Mary Magdalene. A gnawing by the worm of regret. Let us be melodramatic for a moment and pose the Mabo decision as the Day of Judgment for white Australia. All the dead white ancestors come back, and we, the living, are made to suffer in their bodies, our souls gnawed by the worm of regret. Of course this is the nightmare envisaged by conservative forces: why should we be held accountable for the sins of the fathers—who anyway never sinned—and made to suffer? But the worm of regret does not distinguish between the souls it tunnels into: conservatives, liberals, innocent film viewers are all fair game. Just as the body will not go away and has to move back into the world (and Sandy as well; ‘it happened to me too’, she says about the drowning) so film can bring into the public sphere, can materialise, events and ‘things’ that fester. Although it is Sandy who does the

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‘intending’ in Japanese Story, and who also does the hard work of pulling, pushing and schlepping the body, we can imagine that she might say, like Lucia and the woman who engages with the body in Vagabond, ‘It is I who have been drawn into a new space by the object I encounter’. a body by chance, a chance body Vagabond begins with a dead body, and then proceeds to construct the character of the dead person and the events leading up to her death. The film opens with a very long slow zoom (or dolly, to use Varda’s term) over and through a wintry landscape in southern France, across a frozen field and vineyard. The shot is accompanied by credits and music, described by Philip Brophy as ‘interlocked chamber instruments climbing over each other in serialist fashion’.59 The point of view seems to be of someone walking. It articulates duration, the time it takes: walking, looking, moving through the landscape. But it is not a point-of-view shot, as becomes clear when the camera locates a man gathering firewood (the music cuts out abruptly) and dollies from right to left with him. Bending down, he is suddenly startled by what he sees. Cut from him looking to his point-of-view: a body in the ditch. Then to falling firewood, registering his shock. Then his reaction and action—running to report the discovery. And so the story begins; we are in the realm of narrative fiction, and time is yoked to the movement of bodies. The structure of Vagabond echoes, with sardonic whimsy, Citizen Kane. But where Kane’s opening is portentous and baroque, revealing a body-too-much, here the dolly is simple, registering the landscape as though from a documentary perspective, discovering a body by chance, a chance body. But although the opening

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dolly might be simple, it functions every bit as performatively as the opening shot of Citizen Kane. It is not, as it turns out, a pointof-view shot, which is to say it is not attached to a character. But ­neither will the farm worker turn out to be important; nor will privileged narrative status be accorded to any of the other characters who bear witness. The duration of the opening shot will, however, turn out to be important, as will the sense it conveys of walking and looking. The central character will turn out to be Mona, the dead one. This dead one stops the camera movement, stops time. The corpse is frozen, but paradoxically imbued with time by the movement of the opening shot. The dolly signifies camera ‘seeing’ and links to the ‘seen’ not according to a shot–reverse shot structure but through a different kind of reciprocity: one which figures an exchange between the camera movement (the dolly) and the vagabond, the one who wanders, whose being embodies a kind of time expressed by the transitory, the contingent, the undomesticated. The opening, through enacting a tension between movement and stillness, duration and shock, prepares us for the ‘life’ of this girl. It is this reciprocity between the figure and the camera movement that constitutes the cinematic operation. And music. The only other times that music (composed by Joanna Bruzdowicz) occurs in the film are in interludes where Mona is walking and smoking. We will come to know her gait, her gestures, how she holds her cigarette, how she inhales, how she carries her backpack. The film has gestured towards the documentary in the cinéma-vérité feel of the opening shot, but that shot also suggests other modalities. The film is structured like a poem or a musical composition, punctuated by twelve musical interludes, or twelve walking interludes, each a lateral dolly shot, moving from right to left (and each one rhyming, echoing, repeating and varying a motif ).

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There is indeed a narrative trajectory to the film—Mona is walking towards her death—but the rhythms and sensations are cumulative and echoing. In fact the interludes are not all composed of a single shot, but the illusion of a single take is created in each instance. And a kind of dance is created between the camera and the figure who walks, the walking woman. Sometimes the interlude opens on her, but more commonly the camera moves and ‘finds’ her, moves with her and then she either moves out of frame or the camera moves on in its own trajectory, away from the figure. the shutter click What becomes clear as we move into the film is that it is precisely in the orchestration of still and moving images—or more exactly of movement and stillness, their imbrication—that time enters the film, enters into the diegetic body and into the bodies of we who watch. So let us pause in those places, at those moments, where the flow of time is startlingly interrupted, where there is an irruption of stillness, provoking what Raymond Bellour has called a ‘recoil’ from the fiction.60 In fact it is difficult to find a place to pause and rest; it is not a simple case of elongated temporality interrupted by a still image. There is a doubling in the orchestration of shots in the opening sequence, whose patterning is much closer to musical arrangement than to orthodox narrative. I take the opening sequence to begin at the very beginning with the first shot (which some might call the credits) and to end with the image of Mona walking out of the sea. But we will get there all in good time (and when we get there we will perhaps discover that in fact it is not so easy to designate the end of the beginning). For the moment, a simple account of what happens. The man

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reports his discovery of the body. The police are called. They measure and photograph the body, place it in a body bag and zip it up. Cut from a close-up on the white bag to sand filling the frame and Varda’s voice-over speaking of Mona who we then see in the distance, coming out of the ocean: No one claimed the body. . . . She had died a natural death without leaving a trace. . . . But people she had met recently remembered her. . . . They spoke of her not knowing she had died. I didn’t tell them. Nor that her name was Mona Bergeron.

This beach shot echoes, but reverses, the opening shot. Where the opening shot began with a zoom-in and ended with a lateral shot, moving right to left, here the movement begins by moving left to right, picking up and following footprints, at last tilting up to focus on Mona naked in the distance coming out of the ocean. The movement continues, but now the camera zooms in slowly, though never reaching Mona, who remains in the distance. It is between these two elongated movements that the two shockingly still images occur. First, there is the point-of-view shot (of the firewood gatherer) which shows the dead body, still and frozen, lying in the ditch. Then there is the point-of-view shot (of the police photographer) which similarly shows the body. Although these still shots rhyme there is a difference: in the first the body is frozen but there is imperceptible movement in the image, the grass moving slightly in the cold wind; in the police shot everything is frozen. This is how it is set up: the policeman with the camera stands with his back to us; as he steps forward towards the ditch to take a picture there is an exaggeratedly loud shutter click precisely on the cut to a point-of-view shot of the body. I find it impossible to tell whether this is a freeze frame or a

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filmic re-photographing of a photograph, but either way this second instance draws attention to the camera action (the capacity of the camera—both still and moving—to stop motion, to cut out the body, to designate death). The distinction between the first and the second point-of-view shot would seem to correspond to that described by Garrett Stewart as the difference between ‘imaged motionlessness’ and the ‘motionless image’.61 The first instance is shocking, but the shock is absorbed by the fiction, and indeed is set in motion by the narrative trope of discovery. We understand that this is the body of an unknown woman whose story will likely be unravelled during the course of the film. The second instance is much more arresting, in part because it repeats the discovery shot, but this time the shock derives from the withdrawal of fictional support. This is a police photograph, documentation, the official view. The click of the camera shutter brings us into the purview of the filmmaker herself, and of filmmaking as a cutting out; a cutting out of bits of the real (imbuing them with life) and a cutting off of the dead bits: dead bodies, hands. Of course film systematically divides as well as joins (things, images, bits of film), cuts out and sutures, creating an illusion of continuity and of the real. From a certain perspective we do not need film to do this; our perceptual apparatus does a good enough job in the everyday of existence. Bergson, for instance, holds that things as such do not exist in the real. The thing is a carving out of the real, the (artificial or arbitrary) division of the real into entities. As Elizabeth Grosz puts it: ‘The depositing of movement, its divisibility, and its capacity to be seen statically are the mutual conditions of the thing and space. The thing is positioned or located in space only because time is implicated, only because the thing is the dramatic slowing down of the movements, the atomic and molecular vibra-

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tions, that frame, contextualise, and merge with and as the thing’.62 Bergson ­objected to film because of its division of movement and time. Deleuze takes Bergson’s objections as, in fact, a great insight into the way that film operates, into the fact that film is a medium of time, not just a reflection or representation. Deleuze, propelled by Bergson’s misrecognition, gives us the concepts and language to think about the temporalisation of the thing in cinema—bodies and objects located in a tension between movement and stillness. i’d like to capture things The association between photography and death is a topic that has elicited extensive meditation. The great theorist and poet of the still image as a spectre of death is Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, and the great theorist and poet of the ‘between’ of cinema is Raymond Bellour (what happens between cinematic moments and instants, and what happens in the passage between different kinds of images, different media). He talks about the recoil in the context of an analysis of Max Ophüls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman. In that film, the protagonist Stefan looks at some photographs that Lisa has included in one of her letters. Here in Vagabond, the frozen image is not represented as a photograph in the same way, but what Bellour has to say is pertinent: The presence of a photo on the screen gives rise to very parti­ cular trouble. Without ceasing to advance its own rhythm, the film seems to freeze, to suspend itself, inspiring in the spectator a recoil from the image that goes hand in hand with a growing ­fascination. . . . Creating another distance, another time, the photo permits me to reflect on the cinema.63

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Another distance, another time. The freezing in Vagabond seems to suspend the film’s motion, as though everything were collapsed and concentrated in the present moment, a moment in which life were suspended in the dead body. But it is also a moment which solicits fascination, in which the thing—conjoining past and future—exerts an allure, extends beyond the confines of the shot into the past and into the future. Elsewhere Varda has reflected on the relation of the moving camera to still images. In The Gleaners and I (Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, France, 2000) there are two scenes in particular in which this relation is rendered in a heightened haptic sense, the hand of the filmmaker attempting at once to see and to stop motion. The first is a severed hand scene. Varda films her own hand, effectively cutting it away, cutting it off from her body. Framed thus it is a thing, a thing that provokes a rumination on age and decay: ‘I enter into the horror of it’. The second scene occurs on the road. Varda holds one hand out of the moving car window and encircles the trucks, barrelling past, with her thumb and index finger. Filming with her other hand she says: ‘I’d like to capture things’, her hand closing down on the thing, on the moving point. As though it can be seized and held. This is the illusion of cinema: just as things appear, as we are about grasp them, they disappear. Of course the reverse is possible too. The cinema can makes things appear, it can bring dead things to life: ‘. . . her name was Mona Bergeron’. As the body is named the camera picks up Mona coming out of the sea in the distance. ‘I know little about her myself ’—the camera moves in slightly and Mona moves forward—‘but it seems to me that she came from the sea’. The camera is still. Mona still moves forward in long shot. Thus ends the opening, in which the camera view of the first shot

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of the film is identified with a voice (and so, with a body). Thus ends the opening: or does it? There is a cut from this idyllic view of Mona in long shot to an array of postcards, ‘seaside views’ or soft porn images of naked women, in close-up, on the beach. A man turns the stand on which they are displayed and walks away. We see it is a truck stop. The presence of these photographs on the screen gives rise to a very particular trouble. The dead Mona is abruptly (after the Botticelli instantiation) situated as one in a series of women, ‘captured’ frozen. The body is consigned to a particular kind of thingness. Conversely we may see Varda’s gesture in making Vagabond as one of unfreezing the series, all the women frozen in those seaside postcards, those things. In Vagabond Varda enacts the fantasy that is performed not only by every filmmaker but by every viewer who enters into the compact of cinematic fiction: dead bodies can be brought to life. between grief and nothing . . . What kind of a character is Mona when she is alive? She is resistant to characterisation and to domestication. She is treated like a thing by many of the other characters. She thus enacts the thingness of human beings. Just as the inner life of things is sometimes suggested by cinematic rendering as a quality of aliveness, perhaps of a certain spiritual dimension, conversely Mona is more like a thing in that she resists the expressiveness that indicates a depth, a s­ piritual ­dimension. She is indifferent. She embodies the indifference of things. She provokes nausea. Rippling through the film like the rustle of wind through dry palm fronds is the long influence on Varda of Faulkner’s Wild Palms. Usually this book is cited as a direct influence on Varda’s first film,

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La Pointe-Courte (France, 1956), and it is true that there the structure of the novel (two intercut independent stories, or worlds) is duplicated in the film. At the time Wild Palms was a revered text for the Young Turks of the Nouvelle Vague (perhaps ‘revered’ is the wrong word; Jean-Paul Belmondo, in Godard’s Breathless [À bout de souffle, France, 1960], thought that Faulkner was a guy Jean Seberg had slept with, though she counters him with something serious—a quotation from the novel: ‘Between grief and nothing I will take grief ’). The narrative devices of Wild Palms were surely inspirational for these filmmakers, as was the imprint of Sartre’s Nausée, in which the indifference of things provokes nausea (Sartre began writing the novel while studying with Husserl and Heidegger in Berlin in 1932). But when you read Wild Palms what is so amazing is the sensation of time, how it stretches and condenses, how it is so merciless to the characters, how destiny drives irrevocably unrelentingly towards death; and yet, and yet . . . how the contingent surfaces, interrupts the flow of time, redirects it. It is this aspect that I discern as an influence in all of Varda, particularly here in Vagabond and in Cléo from 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7, France, 1962). Vagabond remakes and inverts the earlier film. Cléo, the pampered coquette immersed in beautiful things which enchant her as much as she enchants them, thinks (for ninety minutes) she will die; she walks the Paris streets feeling destiny closing in, haunted by the spectre of her dead body.64 In the end there is a reprieve: she is not going to die. Not yet. The obverse seems the case with Vagabond: first, there is the body and then there is Mona who walks oblivious to her destiny, as indifferent to things as they are to her. But the structuring of time—time as it moves through things, through bodies, as things and bodies give rise to time—is not so dissimilar. Varda takes ninety minutes to narrate ninety minutes in

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the life of her protagonist (between a cancer scare and reprieve). Yet what the film evokes is not ‘real’ time so much as a kind of cinematic time, as Adrian Martin suggests in discussing the dialectic of real time and passionate time (a term borrowed from Pascal Bonitzer). Common to all fiction films, passionate time is ‘the experience of time that contracts or expands according to how we feel it’. It is ‘a countertime, a time of the heart’.65 dead and alive In The Reckless Moment and Japanese Story women encounter the obdurate implacability of the thing world. Lucia and Sandy, in having to physically engage with a dead body, are called upon to expend labour and exercise ingenuity. That inanimate thing, the corpse, is cinematically animated and, in the exchange, is charged with affective powers. In Vagabond there is no comparable encounter of a character/actor with a dead body, no pushing and pulling and dragging. Yet there is an encounter. It begins with the opening shot of the film. This zoom (leading to the dead body) feels a bit like a point-of-view shot and yet it soon becomes clear that it is not aligned with any character. When we hear the voice-over there is a temptation to pin the voice retrospectively to the opening shot, to align the camera view with the view of the filmmaker. Yet there is something that discourages such a temptation, something in the quality of that shot that unsettles the certainty of the point-of-view structure and the certainty of being a subject (looking at an object). When the ‘I’ does speak the voice is allied with a utopian vision, in contrast to the dominant air of bleakness. Between the two elongated moving shots there is the stasis of the dead body. What is it that brings Mona to life? As in the other two films it is not an actor or a character, but an exchange and

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a cinematic operation. But in Vagabond we are immediately plunged into cinematic time, which is also a phantasmatic time (between the vectors of documentation and fiction). Those opening dollies (and their relation to stasis) function as gestural, and the camera’s sustained movement through the frozen field, across the sandy beach, registers somatically, tenderly. The exchange is between the camera and that which it encounters in its movement on the one hand, and between the camera and the viewer on the other. Mona is a body that moves (‘Je bouge’, she says), a body ghosted by stillness, by the corpse she will become. And the corpse we see at the beginning? It is a body at once dead and alive. It is a person and a thing. It is a cinematic thing.

Notes 1. An earlier and much shorter version of this paper was presented at the ‘Cinematographic Objects 11: Things and Operations’ conference at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, held 11 to 13 July 2012. Many thanks to the IKKM, in particular to Volker Pantenburg, and to the participants for their feedback. For making this essay possible I thank Jeffrey Minson, Katrin Pesch, Chandra Mukerjee, Anthony Burr, Leslie Dick, John Frow, Christian Keathley and Timothy Barnard. 2. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997 [1960]), 71. 3. Peter Wollen makes this claim persuasively in his essay ‘An Alphabet of Cinema’, in Wollen, Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 1. 4. There are many web sites devoted to severed hands in the movies, but for a convincing top-ten list see Steven West, ‘Top Ten Severed

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Hand Movies’, eatmybrains.com., consulted 27 August 2012. 5. My thanks to Temenuga Trifonova for alerting me to this. 6. Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (New York: Berg, 2006 [2001]), 172. 7. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film, 97. 8. Louis Delluc, ‘D’Oreste à Rio Jim’, Cinéa 31 (9 December 1921), 14–15. This passage is rendered by Richard Abel as ‘no more than a detail, a fragment of the material that is the world’. See Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism: 1907–1939, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 256. 9. And perhaps another voice, a voice that whispers more melodiously than Heidegger, but with a seductive sibilance, enchanting all who dance scholastically with death: Julia Kristeva. The bodies in this essay are squeaky clean in comparison to Kristeva’s; they are solid things, not ‘something’—vague, ineffable, elusive (it is in the language of abjection and depression that the influence of Heidegger is most pronounced). But I mention her because she does postulate a type of body that comes alive as a Thing or as Something in the horror movie, where ideas of abjection are animated. And although abjection is decidedly not a structuring principle in the movies that I shall speak about there is always that ‘something’ animated by the body-thing that disturbs the certainty of the subject. 10. Of course these figures never exist alone—one can extend in many directions, but let us simplify and link Latour with Michel Serres, and Harman with Quentin Meillassoux. 11. Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures (Winchester, UK and Washington, D.C.: Zero Books, 2010). 12. Bruno Latour, ‘Why has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry 30 no. 2 (Winter 2004): 233.

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13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004 [1999]), 76. 16. Latour has indeed dealt with the visual, though focusing much more on scientific inscriptions (e.g. maps). See for instance ‘Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands’, Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6 (1986): 1–40. 17. Bruno Latour, ‘Why has Critique Run out of Steam?’, 249. 18. Ibid., 242–43. 19. This work will be published in book form and as an ongoing collaborative digital project. See ‘Summary of the AiME project – An Inquiry into Modes of Existence’ on Latour’s web site: http://www.bruno-latour.fr. 20. Bruno Latour, Graham Harman and Peter Erdélyi, The Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE (Winchester, UK and Washington, D.C.: Zero Books, 2011), 48. 21. Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism, 169. 22. Ibid., 150. 23. Ibid., 97. 24. Bruno Latour, Graham Harman and Peter Erdélyi, The Prince and the Wolf, 37. 25. Ibid., 73. 26. Ibid., 95. 27. Ibid., 133. 28. Ibid., 146. 29. Vivian Sobchack, ‘The Passion of the Material: Toward a Phenomenology of Interobjectivity’, in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment

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and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 328. 30. J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 32. 31. On this topic see Lesley Stern, ‘Paths that Wind through the Thicket of Things’, in Bill Brown, ed., Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 32. Lutz Bacher refers to this dummy as the ‘wretched “Darby dummy”’. See Bacher, Max Ophüls in the Hollywood Studios (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 285. 33. See Lesley Stern, ‘Memories that don’t seem mine’, in Alex Clayton and Andrew Klevan, eds., The Language and Style of Film Criticism (Abingdon, UK and New York: Oxon/Routledge, 2011), 167– 69. 34. See Andrew Klevan, ‘Living Meaning: The Fluency of Film Performance’, in Aaron Taylor, ed., Theorizing Film Acting (New York: Routledge, 2012), 42–44. 35. Michael Walker, ‘Ophüls in Hollywood’, Movie 29/30 (Summer 1982): 39–60. 36. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 92. 37. See Corey Creekmur, ‘Reckless Moment’, La Furia Umana 9 (Summer 2011), consulted 28 June 2012, http://www.lafuriaumana.it. 38. This is an aspect of our changing media environment that Laura Mulvey explores in Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). 39. See Lutz Bacher, Max Ophüls in the Hollywood Studios, for Ophüls’ struggles with the studio. 40. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Athlone, 1989 [1985]), 39.

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41. Ibid. Deleuze says: ‘the postulate of “the image in the present tense” is one of the most destructive for any understanding of cinema’ (p. 39), a reference to a declaration by Godard he has just cited, ‘[t]hat is what cinema is, the present never exists there, except in bad films’ (p. 38). 42. Ibid., 39. 43. Ibid., 42. 44. The U.S. cut of this sequence (moving the body into the car) is 40 seconds shorter than the Australian and international version. The shorter version is found on the U.S. DVD. By going to ‘Deleted Scenes’, however, one may view the sequence in its entirety. My analysis is based on the Australian cut. 45. On this topic see Lesley Stern, ‘From the Other Side of Time’, in Ian Christie and Andrew Moor, eds., Michael Powell (London: British Film Institute, 2005), 45. 46. Sue Brooks talks about this in the ‘Director’s Commentary’ section of the DVD of the film. 47. Felicity Collins and Therese Davis, Australian Cinema after Mabo (Cambridge, U.K. and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 176. 48. Alain Bergala, Alain Philippon and Serge Toubiana, ‘Something that Burns within the Shot: An Interview with Jean-Marie Straub’, trans. Ted Fendt, http://daniel-hui.blogspot.com, posted Friday 14 October 2011 and consulted 9 May 2012. ‘It was once fire’ is how the phrase has been translated by Fendt. The more common translation of this key phrase is ‘once it was fire’, and I use this in the subheading for this section. The interview originally appeared in Cahiers du Cinéma 364 (October 1984). 49. Ibid.

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50. My thanks to Marcus Becker for suggestions about the Pietà, and to Francesco Casetti for alerting me to its resonance with the Magdalene figure, and for putting me in touch with Carla Bino who responded immediately and generously, drawing attention to this image, among others. 51. Another version of the Magdalene and (risen) Christ occurs in Giotto’s Noli me Tangere, a detail of which appears in Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma. See Lesley Stern, ‘“Always Too Small or Too Tall”: Rescaling Film Performance’, in Jorg Sternagel, Deborah Levitt and Dieter Mersch, eds., Acting and Performance in Moving Image Culture: Bodies, Screens, Renderings (Berlin, New Brunswick and London: Transcript and Transaction, 2012). 52. ‘Japanese Story,’ www.OFFOFFOFF.com, posted 24 November 2004, consulted 16 August 2012. 53. Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999). 54. Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Dialektik des Monstrums: Aby Warburg and the Symptom-Paradigm’, Art History 24, no. 5 (November 2001): 625. 55. Esther Cohen, ‘The Animated Pain of the Body’, The American Historical Review 105 no. 1 (February 2000): 42. 56. Felicity Collins and Therese Davis, Australian Cinema after Mabo, 5. 57. Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce, Australia, 2002) is the bestknown cinematic response to Bringing Them Home. Oscar and Lucinda (Gillian Armstrong, Australia, U.S.A., U.K., 1997), a period film made in 1997, ‘asks us to imagine the shock of colonial history, not only as we

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recognize it now, belatedly, but as Indigenous Australians continue to experience it in the present’ (ibid., 80). 58. Esther Cohen, ‘The Animated Pain of the Body’, 43. 59. Philip Brophy, 100 Modern Soundtracks (London: British Film Institute, 2004), 244. 60. Raymond Bellour, ‘The Pensive Spectator’, Wide Angle 9, no. 1 (1987): 7. 61. Garrett Stewart, ‘Death, Photography and Film Narrative’, Wide Angle 9, no. 1 (1987): 17. 62. Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 69. 63. Raymond Bellour, ‘The Pensive Spectator’, 6. 64. Yvette Bíró speaks of the ‘dizzying heterogeneity of things’. Yvette Bíró and Catherine Portuges, ‘Caryatids of Time: Temporality in the Cinema of Agnès Varda’, Performing Arts Journal 19, no. 3 (September 1997): 2. 65. Adrian Martin, ‘Varda on “Cléo from 5 to 7”’, in 4 by Agnès Varda, booklet accompanying the DVD box set edition (New York: Criterion).

KINO-AGORA

The Kinematic Turn André Gaudreault & Philippe Marion Dead and Alive Lesley Stern Montage Jacques Aumont Mise en Jeu and Mise en Geste Sergei Eisenstein The Life of the Author Sarah Kozloff Mise en Scène Frank Kessler Découpage Timothy Barnard The New Cinephilia Girish Shambu The Videographic Essay Christian Keathley, Jason Mittell & Catherine Grant Forthcoming Seeing from Scratch: Fifteen Lessons with Godard, with The Postcard Game Richard Dienst Talking Cinema with Henri Langlois Henri Langlois

film and media studies

kino - agora

In the cinema many were living and many kept on living and many became dead, as Gertrude Stein might say. Some kept on living and some kept on being dead and some became things. Bodies proliferate in cinema. Living bodies to be sure, but also dead bodies, and transitional bodies, suspended between the being of a subject and objecthood. We tend to use the same word to designate both a living and a dead body. We also, of course, use the word ‘corpse’. Dead is dead, no doubt, but if there are degrees of deadness then a corpse is probably deader than a dead body. Lesley Stern is more interested in things than in death. It is thus the liveliness of corpses that lures her. Not dead bodies which act as though they were alive, nor live bodies which may really be dead, nor bodies which may in fact be composited, or even digitally constructed bodies. Rather, ordinary, old-fashioned bodies, bodies once living and now dead which exhibit a performative potential for conjuring a quality of cinematic thing­ness. They are bodies that insist on existing after they are dead. In some films in which dead bodies persist, time is concentrated in the body. And dispersed. When life leaves the body, time – or a particular quality of time – enters into the body, and into the film. The body, then, becomes an index of cinematic temporality. LESLEY STERN is a professor in the Department of

Visual Arts at the University of California at San Diego. She is the author of The Scorsese Connection and The Smoking Book and co-editor of Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance. Her essays have appeared in Screen, M/F, Camera Obscura, Film Reader, Image Forum, Trafic, Emergences and Critical Inquiry.

caboose