Seeing For Others?
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One of the lessons Robert Bresson
teaches the spectator is that if the artist, especially the filmmaker, is to
see for others, in their place, he must break with representation and instead
fragment and flatten the image without depriving it of intensity. He must cease
to reproduce the ‘terrible habit of theatre’ (1), and must leave behind its
mimics, its gestures and words.
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1. Robert Bresson, Notes sur le cinématographe (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), p. 12.
2. Hans Urs von
Balthasar, Kleiner Diskurs über die Hölle (Freiburg: Johannes Verlag, 2007), p. 38.
3. Ibid., p. 49. 4. Ibid., p. 64. |
But how, exactly, does Bresson
break with representation, once he has recognised the need for cinema to
renounce the ‘terrible habit of theatre’? He does so by advocating a certain
blindness, a certain ‘automatism’ that belongs to the camera and the moving
image. This automatism triggers two distinct effects. While the camera, lacking
intentionality and betraying the ‘scrupulous indifference of a machine’, can
capture what no ‘human eye’ (5) is capable of attaining and what ‘no pencil, no
brush, no feather’ can make fast, namely reality and the ‘unknown’, it is the
very exteriority of the filmic procedure that allows for an inward movement, a
movement which is also twofold. Bresson states that the mechanical aspect of
automatism points towards an ‘untouched’ interior (6), as if the camera
preserved an inwardness that has not been informed by the intention of seeing
and perhaps even of representing something. At the same time, Bresson makes it
clear that the mechanical aspect of automatism permits, whenever possible,
images to be replaced by sounds, eyes by ears, that is, an outward movement by
a deeper, inward one (7), as if the camera were itself a necessary substitute,
necessary to the extent that its outwardness keeps disclosing reality and the
unknown. As a filmmaker, Bresson seems to suggest, I must entrust myself to the
camera, to its outside, to its blindness, rather than using it to place myself
outside of what I see and objectify the world seen. In theatrical
representation, a blindness invisible to the one who sees results from a set-up
that depends on an outside, from the creation of a stage filled with objects
that keeps the subject on the margins: reality and the ‘unknown’ stay beyond
the representing subject. In cinematic presentation, however, a blindness
sought and affirmed results in a seeing that can but does not have to be
achieved by the eyes alone: the presenting subject is embedded in the midst of
things.
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5. Bresson, Notes sur le cinématographe, p. 35.
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Is automatism not the ‘diabolical
principle’ (8) that, according to Bresson, threatens to undo art yet proves
‘favourable’ to cinema? Automatism is spiritual, it has a value and cannot be
reduced to the fact of exteriority. It has a divine value, or force, because
the camera lets me see what I cannot see. Automatism is a seeing for others: for
me as other. But automatism is blinding, too, and has a diabolical force
because it forms a ‘habit’ that can be the ‘terrible habit of theatre’ and
representation: I cannot see what I see. Thus representation reveals that
automatism, the suspension of intentionality, is an ambiguous phenomenon. It
can be the absent-mindedness of a habit that prevents me from seeing the very
instant I believe that I see something. In fact, representation is all the more
revealing, it advertises the ambiguous blindness of habit all the more clearly,
as it comes with a claim to objectivity and, in a way, installs an automatism
designed to accomplish visibility, the unfolding of a plot on a stage. It thus
appears that the dividing line between the diabolical and the divine, between
theatre and cinema, between representation and presentation, between not seeing
what I can see and seeing what I cannot see, is extremely tenuous. Or, to put
it differently, automatism is a ‘diabolical principle’ because it cannot be
attributed a definite and clear value. All one can say about automatism in art
is: the Devil, probably.
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8. Ibid., p. 38.
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2 |
At one point, the young man at the
centre of Bresson’s film The Devil,
Probably (1977) sits in a Parisian bus and talks to a friend. Does he have
a sense of the meaninglessness that haunts all active involvement in the
contemporary world, as Rainer Werner Fassbinder claims (9), who was an admirer
of the film and inserted extracts from it in his mischievous satire on
terrorism and capital in
Germany?
The two friends have attended a discussion about the usage of nuclear power and
are on their way home. In a lecture hall a specialist has answered questions
from the audience, justifying the usage of such power. Bresson introduces this
scene by showing a television screen and an atom bomb exploding with a loud
bang. In the bus the young men engage in a peculiar conversation about
politics. Other passengers join in and continue the conversation, though the spectator
is not always able to tell who is actually speaking and attribute the voice he
hears to a particular character. The two friends talk about political
deception, and the protagonist maintains that in order to reassure people it is
enough to simply negate the obvious facts. His friend replies that obvious
facts no longer exist since nothing is visible anymore and we have entered the
domain of the invisible. The spectator can take this remark literally, as if it
referred to the dissolution of recognisable objects caused by scientific and
technological progress. But it is more likely to be an ironic remark. The
protagonist retorts by saying ‘You are unbelievable!’, an exclamation that no
doubt has an edge of irony. It
signals the difficulty of believing someone who exaggerates. Yet if the domain
of the invisible does indeed encompass all of reality, then the friend himself
is an unlikely character, someone in whose existence one cannot believe easily.
After the vehicle has come to a halt, passengers alight while others get on the
bus. The conversation is interrupted when the stop sign is illuminated. In
French, this sign reads ‘arrêt demandé’, which means ‘stop requested’; it is as
if, by lighting up, the sign’s red letters had an immediate effect on the ongoing
conversation: here the bus must come to a stop, here the conversation must end
for a moment. When it resumes, the protagonist observes that governments tend
to be short-sighted. A passenger sitting in one of the front rows overhears
this remark, turns around to face the two young men and warns them: ‘Do not
incriminate the governments!’ For in the present, he explains, no government
can profess a knowledge of the art of governing – there is no one in the world
left who would be able to see for others, as it were. Events are determined by
the masses, or by ‘dark forces’ obeying an unknown law. As the conversation
unfolds and the two young men become its witnesses, the camera focuses on the
vehicle’s rear-view mirror and films the traffic on the streets as it appears
in this mirror, next to the driver’s seat. Bresson’s refusal to employ
naturalistic means of representation in his film and fall back into the
‘terrible habit of theatre’ is a refusal to see for others, for the spectator
and for the fictional characters that he calls ‘models’. The fact that The Devil, Probably is an extremely
elaborate film, or that Bresson does not simply leave the camera alone for it
to capture whatever it will capture, should not detract from the link between
automatism and the ‘model’.
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A female voice butts in and speaks
in the same unaffected and matter-of-fact manner as all the other voices. The
unseen woman confirms that we are driven by something that turns us against
ourselves; yet another voice remarks ‘We must go along with it, participate’.
Finally a passenger who remains invisible, too, and exists only as a voice,
asks who it is that amuses himself in this way, mocking humanity; someone else
in the bus concurs with him and wonders who influences and controls human
beings. The man sitting in the front responds: ‘The Devil, probably’.
When, in the late ‘70s, Le diable, probablement was screened at
the Berlinale in Fassbinder’s presence and then distributed throughout
Germany, the
film’s title was translated as ‘Der Teufel, möglicherweise’, which means ‘The
Devil, Possibly’. If the adverb that follows the noun is supposed to emphasise
it, one could even translate the same title as ‘The Devil, Most Likely’.
‘Le diable, probablement’ – shall
the spectator, shall the passengers in the bus, shall the two young men who no
longer contribute to the conversation they have started, take this phrase
seriously or should they understand it ironically? Does the juxtaposed adverb
remove some of the weight attached to the noun, does it make light of it, or
does it add even more urgency to what is at stake, does it add seriousness to
it? Is it not enough to acknowledge the possibility of the Devil having a hand
in what is happening in the world to awaken the suspicion that, in truth, the
mere acknowledgment of such a possibility already denotes a high probability?
In his War Primer, Brecht pastes a
cutting from a newspaper, a photograph that shows a house in Berlin destroyed
by British bombs, on top of an epigram addressed to a woman wandering around
the ruins: ‘Stop searching, woman: you will not find them anymore! / But do not
blame fate, woman! / The dark forces, woman, who keep treating you so badly /
They have a name, an address, and a face’. (10)
The blond young man who is the protagonist
of Bresson’s film reacts to the naming of the Devil by touching his friend with
his arm, a gesture as ambiguous as the film’s title. It can mean: ‘Have you
heard the nonsense they are talking?’ But it can also mean: ‘Do you hear? Now
they are onto something’. Is irony the Devil’s refuge or does it protect
against him? And what about raising such questions, speaking of the possibility
or the probability of a diabolical intervention? Does this talk concede
something to enlightenment or does enlightenment concede the impossible, the
improbable, because it has nothing to fear? When reflecting upon truth and
miracles in his Pensées, Pascal
quotes from the Gospel of John: the Devil cannot open a blind man’s eyes. (11)
Can the sudden naming of the Devil open the eyes of a blind man? Almost in the
middle of Bresson’s film, a crash occurs. The bus driver, distracted by the
naming of the Devil, provokes an accident that gives rise to a cacophonic
chorus of hooting.
3
It is not evil that exaggerates,
that pushes toward exaggeration, that entangles humanity in a deadly
contradiction and brings it to the brink of suicide, on the contrary: it is the
promise of the good that does so. As is well known, this is the objection that,
in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers
Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor levels against the silent Redeemer who has
returned on Earth.
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10. Bertolt Brecht, Kriegsfibel (Eulenspiegel Verlag:
Berlin
, 2008), p.
11. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. M. Le Guern (Paris:
Gallimard, 1977), p.
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The Christ has returned too soon,
before the time, and his unexpected reappearance may have fatal consequences
for the institution to which he gave ‘everything’ after his death on the cross
and his ascent to heaven. In the eyes of the Grand Inquisitor, it is ‘for
good’, for all times, that the church has appropriated the promise of freedom
that lies in Christian faith, for as the administrator of this promise, it has
been able to subjugate the rebellious spirit in human nature. It has rendered a
tolerable and even happy life possible for the first time. Having thus
inherited the Christ’s legacy in accordance with his own wishes, having
exercised the right of binding and unbinding transmitted to it, the church has
actually managed to turn the legacy into a true legacy and religion into a true
religion: ‘Thou didst reject the only way by which men might be made happy’
(15), the Grand Inquisitor says to his prisoner, the trouble-maker, alluding to
the submission of human beings the church has so successfully achieved over the
centuries.
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12. Fyodor
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 275.
13. Ibid., p. 277.
14. Ibid., p. 278.
15. Ibid., p. 279.
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But if the Christ did indeed
reject the ‘only way’, if he scattered the flock and ‘sent it astray on unknown
paths’ (16), then, as the Grand Inquisitor claims, this is because he did not
heed the ‘admonitions and warnings’ which the Devil gave him, the ‘wise and
dread Spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and non-existence’. (17) In fact,
it is as if with his ‘admonitions and warnings’, which the Bible presents as
temptations, the Devil had performed something he could not perform. He
performed a ‘miracle’, and the Christian who in matters to do with humanity
endorses a pragmatist institutional politics must consider it a true, a
‘stupendous miracle’, a miracle that was the miracle of all miracles. Hence one
could claim that the Grand Inquisitor is a heretic of orthodoxy inasmuch as the
Christ represents an unreasonable demand for humanity, siding with a few chosen
ones and remaining indifferent toward a majority confused by his promise of
freedom. It is precisely in the name of the weak that the church is willing to
endure the ‘freedom’ that it withholds from them. It is in the name of the weak
that it concludes a pact with the Devil. As an institution, the church cannot
tolerate exclusion if it is not to endanger its own existence. Thus, to protect
the legacy of the Christian promise, which is itself inseparable from the human
‘craving for a community of worship’ (18), it needs to hold fast to the ‘rigid ancient
law’. (19)
The rationale of the institution,
the purpose of the Grand Inquisitor, coincide with the Devil’s design to the
extent that the evil spirit seeks to accomplish a normalisation of the good, a
taming of the excessive and the exaggerated, a disciplining of folly and
enthusiasm. Such a normalisation, such a taming, such a disciplining produces
the glory and the misery of the institution, the misery of the institution and
the misery provoked by an institution that substitutes the mystery of miracles
and authority, the mystery of power, for the mystery of freedom. If we stick to
the correcting logic of the Grand Inquisitor, it is the Redeemer, not the
Devil, who tempts man into suicide, into self-destruction: ‘We are not working
with Thee but with him – that is our
mystery’, the Grand Inquisitor admits. (20)
As can be gathered from the
conversation between Ivan and Aljosha that follows the telling of the story of
the Grand Inquisitor, his mystery consists in that he no longer believes in
God. Yet this lack of belief results from belief. The institution, a machine of
organised self-preservation, functions on the basis of such a contradiction. It
must abolish the belief, the faith on which it feeds and that it is meant to
keep alive. It must get involved with the Devil, who uses the contradiction and
the petrifaction without which there would be no self-preservation to pursue
his own interests. This is the reason why, sensing his own petrifaction, the
Grand Inquisitor feels nervous when, in the coda that Ivan adds to his story,
the Christ remains silent; and this is also the reason why the Christ does not
respond to the long monologue with words but with a loving gesture that
triggers the old man’s hatred.
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16. Ibid., p. 287.
17. Ibid., p. 279.
18. Ibid., p. 282.
19. Ibid., p. 283.
20. Ibid., p. 285.
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from Issue 2: Devils |
© Alexander García Düttmann 2012. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors. |