Why not allow television this same supplementary force of creative
preservation? There's nothing in principle to stop it adapting its different
resources to this same end, except that TV'S social functions
(seen in game shows, news) stifle its potential aesthetic function. TV
is, in its present form, the ultimate consensus: it's direct social engineering,
leaving no gap at all between itself and the social sphere, it's
social engineering in its purest form.
For how could professional
training, the professional eye, leave any room for something supplementary
in the way of perceptual exploration? And if I had to choose
among the finest passages of your book I'd pick those where you show that the "replay," the instant replay, is television's substitute for the supplement or self-preservation, of which it is in fact the opposite; I'd pick those where you rule out
any chance of jumping from cinema to communication, or of setting up any "relay" between one and the
other, since a relay could only be set up in a form of television that
had a non-communicative supplement, a supplement called Welles;
I'd pick those where you explain that television's professional eye, the
famous socially engineered eye through which the viewer is himself
invited to look, produces an immediate and complacent perfection
that's instantly controllable and controlled.
For you don't take the
easy path, you don't criticize television for its imperfections, but purely and simply for its perfection.
It has found a wayof producing a technical
perfection that is the very image of its complete aesthetic and
noetic emptiness (which is how a visit to the factory becomes a new
form of entertainment).
And you find Bergman agreeing-with con-siderable mirth, and considerable enthusiasm for
what television
might have contributed to the arts-that Dallas is completely empty,
but a perfect piece of social engineering.
In another area, one might
say the same of Apostrophes:from a literary viewpoint (aesthetically,
noetically) it's empty, but technically it's perfect.To say television has
no soul is to say it has no supplement,
except the one you confer on
it as you describe the weary critic in his hotel room, turning the TV
on once more, and recognizing that all the images are equivalent,
having sacrificed present, past, and future to a flowing time
It's from cinema that there's come the most radical criticism of
information, from Godard for instance, and in a different way from
Syberberg (this not just in things they've said but concretely in their
work); it's from television that there comes the new threat of a death
of cinema. So you've thought it necessary to go and "have a closelook" at this essentially uneven or asymmetric confrontation.
Cinema
met its first death
at the hands of
an authoritarian power culminating
in fascism.
Why does its threatened second death involve television,
just as the first involved radio?
Because television is the form in which
the new powers of "control" become immediate and direct. To get to
control might be reversed, harnessed by the supplementary function
opposed to power: whether one could develop an art of control that
would be a kind of new form of resistance.
Taking the battle to the
heart of cinema, making cinema see it as its problem instead of coming
upon it from outside: that's what Burroughs did in literature, by
substituting the viewpoint of control and controllers for that of
authors and authority.
But isn't this, as you suggest, what Coppola has
in his turn attempted to do in cinema, with all his hesitations and
ambiguities, but really fighting for something nonetheless? And you
give the apt name of mannerism to the tense, convulsive form of cinema
that leans, as it tries to turn round, on the very system that seeksto control or replace it.
You'd already, in La Rampe, characterized
the image's third phase as "mannerism": when there's nothing to see
behind it, not much to see in it or on the surface, but just an image
constantly slipping across preexisting, presupposed images, when"the background in any image is always another image," and so on
endlessly, and that's what we have to see.
This is the stage where art no longer beautifies or spiritualizes
Nature but competes with it: the world is lost, the world itself "turns
to film,"any film at all,
and this is what television amounts to, the
world turning to any film at all, and, as you say here, "nothing happening
to human beings any more, but everything happening only to
images."
One might also say that bodies in Nature or people in a landscape
are replaced by brains in a city: the screen's no longer a window
or door (behind which. . . ) nor a frame or surface (in which. . . ) but
a computer screen on which images as "data" slip around. How,
though, can we still talk of art, if the world itself is turning cinematic,
becoming 'just an act" directly controlled and immediately processed
by a television that excludes any supplementary function?
Cinema
ought to stop "being cinematic," stop playacting, and set up specific
relationships with video, with electronic and digital images, in order
to develop a new form of resistance and combat the televisual function
of surveillance and control. It's not a question of short-circuiting
television-how could that be possible?-but of preventing television
subverting or short-circuiting the extension of cinema into the new
For, as you show, "since television has scorned, marginalized,
repressed the potential of video-its only chance of taking
over from postwar modern cinema. . . taking over its urge to take
images apart and put them back together, its break with theater, its
new way of seeing the human body, bathed in images and soundsone
has to hope the development of video art will itself threaten TV."
Here we see in outline the new art of City and Brain, of competing
with Nature. And one can already see in this mannerism many different
directions or paths, some blocked, others leading tentatively forward,
offering great hopes. A mannerism of video "previsualization"
in Coppola, where images are already assembled without a camera.
And then a completely different mannerism, with its strict, indeed
austere, method in Syberberg, where puppetry and front-projection
produce an image unfolding against a background of images. Is this
the same world we see in pop videos, special effects, and footage from
space?Maybe pop video, up to the point where it lost its dreamlike
quality, might have played some part in the pursuit of "new associations"
proposed by Syberberg, might have traced out the new cerebral
circuits of a cinema of the future, if it hadn't immediately been taken
over by marketing jingles, sterile patterns of men tal deficiency, in tricately
controlled epileptic fits (rather as, in the previous period, cin-ema was taken over by the "then hysterical spectacle" of large-scalepropaganda. . . ).
And maybe space footage might also have played a
part in aesthetic and noetic creation, if it had managed to produce
some last reason for traveling, as Burroughs suggested, if it had managed
to break free from the control of a "regular guy on the Moon
who didn't forget to bring along his prayer book," and better understood
the endlessly rich example of La Region centrale,where Michael
Snow devises a very austere way of making one image turn on another,
and untamed nature on art, pushing cinema to the limit of a pure
Spatium.And how can we tell where the experimentation with images,
sounds, and music that's just beginning in the work of Resnais,
Godard, the Straubs, and Duras will lead?
And what new Comedy
will emerge from the mannerism of bodily postures? Your concept of
mannerism is particularly convincing, once one understands how far
all the various mannerisms are different, heterogeneous, above all
how no common measure can be applied to them, the term indicating
only a battlefield where art and thought launch together with cinemainto a new domain, while the forces of control try to steal this
domain from them, to take it over before they do, and set up a new
clinic for social engineering. Mannerism is, in all these conflicting
ways, the convulsive confrontation of cinema and
_______________
Text Preface to Serge Daney's Cine Journal Gilles Deleuze ~ trans late d by Martin Joughin
_______________________________________________
__________________________________________for more of Daney
_________ Cours De Cinema Serge Daney Journal
A translation excerpt of
Television and its Shadow
'Where nothing is less sure than that there will be one day a "history of television".
During a mass debate about the future of cinema, a clever chap raised the following argument: melancholic cinephiles, you who flatter yourself that you have rehabilitated the popular (especially American) cinema of yesteryear, who is to say that there will not be - in thirty years or more - people who will rehabilitate present-day television, which today we find so difficult not to despise just a little bit? At first glance, the argument seems full of common sense and we begin to imagine the 21st century zapper, sincerely moved by "Maguy," "Rue Carnot" or "Miami Vice." What will these people be like? On second though, however, the argument merely seems clever, and nothing is more misleading than the glib habit of placing cinema and television in total opposition. For it does not help thought, and only produces false symmetries.'
'That is what we say to ourselves as we consume here and there the minor subjects offered by "VIVE LA TELE" (on channel 5). Pre-zapped subjects that we watch with the conspiratorial eye of one who has already seen them in a previous life, who is surprised by his own amnesia (who sang with "Les problemes"? Antoine?) as by his capacity to recall (Ah yes, the painter Fujita, that was his moment of glory, now dead and forgotten.) We identify what we do not recognize and no longer recognize what we know. In this smiling game that we play with ourselves, everything sways towards the déja-vu and the second level. And, since there is no question of allowing these inserts any more weight than the load of their insignificance, the director Gerards Jourd'hui makes it a point to invent the "outdated" (discolored) disguise of what was innocently nude and in vogue twenty or more years ago.
Of course, we realize that, up to the mid sixties, the voices of journalists in the wings were peremptory, nasal tones, with the low humor of the forties or fifties. In black and white the very images that were meant to be pure entertainment assume great dignity (fashion show reports, advance clips of the yé-yé culture, Princess Margaret all smiles, Cocteau, etc.) But these images suddenly swing en bloc into the category (duly filed and classified in the archives of the INA or the Gaumont Cinematheque) of images of the past that are also past images. The recent past remains undecidable as long as it does not definitively fall into the overall phenomenon of belonging to the past.
'
Originally published in LIBERATION November 13, 1987. I've polished the translation slightly.
translator unknown at this time
translator unknown at this time
_________________________________________________________________________'
Cahiers du Cinema
Serge Daney Blog
which is described
as
which is described
as
SERGE DANEY IN ENGLISH
THIS BLOG KEEPS TRACK OF FRENCH FILM CRITIC SERGE DANEY'S TEXTS AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH. HELP ME KEEP IT COMPLETE.
_________the most recent entry was july 31 o f this year _____________
