My Back PagesAdventures in Pure Cinema

Last year I found myself at Lingnan University in Hong Kong to speak at a conference on action cinema. What better place to reflect on the work of cinematic editing in all its forms, from the blazing guns and flying fists of blockbuster movies to the stridently flickering visual assaults of the avant-garde? The kinetic kick of the clips I had minutely studied obviously possessed me: in the course of my improvised remarks, I dared use the words pure cinema in an effort to capture and name what was so unique and exciting about these dizzy highlights of screen action.

It was an unwise move. Everyone – even my best friends – felt compelled to tell me, publicly on the spot or privately afterwards, that there is no such thing as pure cinema! The cinema is gloriously impure, as theorists from André Bazin to Alain Badiou have proved. It offers the amalgamation and the transformation of all the other arts and media. More dramatically still, there is nothing in any film worth describing as specifically cinematographic. The search for cinematic specificity – so goes the critical lecture – is a dangerous dream, a delusion, dragging us back to the reassuring fancies of art-for-art’s-sake. Retreating into the pleasure of pure cinema is a way of avoiding the messy impurity of the world, of culture, of history and ideology.

Bazin gently mocked those purists who nostalgically looked backwards to the good old days of silent cinema, or ‘Cinema with a capital C’ as he called it. And now, according to the modern academic wisdom of Anglo-American ‘cultural studies’, cinema is merely a mobile audio-visual assemblage in the flux of the society of the spec­tacle. Like Raymond Chandler said of marriage, it gets broken down and put together again every damn day.

I know all of this, I know. I recognise the truth of the arguments in favour of an impure, multiple, contaminated, promiscuous cinema. And yet…Eisenstein believed in defining the specifically cinematographic, and Hitchcock eulogised what he called pure film. Were they wrong or deluded to do this, if it drove their own cinematic imagination and creativity?

For myself, on that suddenly very lonely day at the microphone in Hong Kong, I could take recourse only to an impulsive cri de cœur: Cinema is not just any old piece of cultural machinery, interchangeable with all the others, I asserted. If it were, why would any of us be here talking about it, studying it? If there isn’t something cinema can do that no other art can do, and if we didn’t feel that force that it wields, why would we even bother with it?

There was mostly silence in the room after that, with some grim and disapproving looks from my colleagues. Some gazed upon me with a nervous, parental concern, as if I had just revealed myself to be disturbed or maladapted. But a couple of fresh-faced young film students standing modestly at the back of the room seemed to enjoy my outburst. And their eager smiles instantly took me back about twenty-five years…

Young people, especially, love the language of passion, of sensation, of intensity. The instant that cinema can be connected to something vibrant in their lives – like music or dance or militant politics – it comes alive as an artistic cause and an experiential mystery. Most cinephiles and cineastes live this youthful moment when cinema is foremost the matter of a feeling, a passionate conviction – within a state of urgency, emergency even, where assertion replaces rational, logical, patient argumentation.

The youthful cinephile asserts in the face of all the soul-dead elders: Can’t you see the intensity, the novelty, the richness of this film-object in front of your eyes? Can’t you feel what I’m feeling? This is exactly what Jacques Rivette said about Howard Hawks, in one of criticism’s great credos: the evidence is on the screen, if you can’t see it then I can’t persuade you… And Bazin, too, was aware of this moment when passion wins the day over logical demonstration. It is never with arguments that one wins over a person, he once wrote. The conviction one puts into them often counts for more.

In a flash, the young, inflamed cinephile sees the totality – the totality of the cinema, of life, of the world. All relationships between the pieces become suddenly clear. There is no gap between what the individual subject feels and what the object (all objects, including film-objects) offers up. Existence occurs, without breaks, on an immanent plane of intensity. And no gap, either, between form and content: films communicate directly to alert bodies, in rhythms and pulsations and shock waves, through breathtaking apparitions – this is the kingdom of sensual thought, instant illumination pouring from the screen. This is possibly the only thing Bertolucci gets right in his botched May ’68 cinephile memoir The Dreamers: his young heroes sit in the front rows, they say, to receive the screen’s images fresh, undiluted, immediate…

And yet the effort to put that moment of revelation or illumination into concrete words might take an entire lifetime – by which time the biological strength and support of youth has long abandoned the mind. I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now, sang Bob Dylan in ‘My Back Pages’, when he was hardly twenty-three years old himself. This paradox speaks the truth: the youthful moment of absolute certainty, righteousness and self-confidence seems, in retrospect, like the originary moment of maturity and wisdom – and also like the precarious, fleeting Eden from which we all subsequently fall.

The question then becomes: how do you live with this memory of youth? How do you stay true to those intuitions, how do you develop them to their point of fullest expression? It is because so many of us lose heart and lose grip of this initiatory moment of illumination that intellectual and cultural history is full of stark reversals and disavowals: political commentators who switch from left to right (but rarely the other way around), musicians who trade anarchy for a middle-of-the-road sound, filmmakers who abandon the path of transgression…But it is equally pathetic to strain to stay ‘Forever Young’ (another Dylan title), frozen in the posture of aggressive youthfulness – like a forty-year-old punk past his prime still spitting and cursing on stage, or an ageing libertine novelist still trying to shock the bourgeois, middlebrow public like a naughty adolescent (I have just seen Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell)…

Young cinephiles are easily, almost naturally Deleuzian – not the Deleuze of the cinema books (too dure et pure for many eighteen year olds), but the Deleuze of Anti Oedipus. They are Deleuzian before they read Deleuze, and indeed even after hearing about him they may not bother to read very much of him, or read it very closely. But no matter: the connection takes place, it ignites. The language of desire, assemblage, multiplicity, line of flight, rhizome, etc., is irresistible to youth. They scavenge Deleuze for the pop philosophy he both dreamed of and feared, once it had become a scary, mangled reality on nightly TV.

I was seventeen when I started reading Deleuze and Guattari in English translation, in a now very hard-to-find Australian publication with the great title of Language, Sexuality and Subversion – and I was twenty-one when I wrote and sang a song dedicated to Deleuze called ‘Pop Philosophy’ in a music band that was part of Melbourne’s ‘New Wave’ movement (yes, that’s what is was called, a Nouvelle Vague!) in the early 1980s. All during those years I wondered, as did others, about how to translate the feeling I had for Deleuze’s work, and the sense I had of its all-purpose significance, into the languages of film reviewing, film criticism, and film theory. I am still wondering about it today.

Back in those days of the eighties, a particular desire was born inside me and inside some others of my acquaintance: a desire to speak of cinema in terms of forms, shapes, rhythms, intensities, effects in all senses, both technical and emotional. But never meanings. ‘Meaning’ was the bad residue of an old-fashioned literary and theatrical criticism, an approach which, when turned to film, only spoke of abstract themes – and characters, always this useless speculation on what fictional characters were feeling and thinking. In Australia during the seventies, this old school made itself look new by adopting, in a mechanical way, the tools of French structuralism – suddenly essays on film were full of lists of binary ‘structural oppositions’ arranged in tables. But the inspiration of Roland Barthes, and the suppleness of the post-structuralist movement, was rarely to be found in my homeland in those years: it was ‘business as usual’.

Everything was missing from the reductive snapshot of cinema produced by these dry, literary analyses: movement, colour, the flesh of the actors, sound and music, atmosphere, mood…and not just everything on the material surface of the film, but everything hovering underneath and around it, invisibly: reveries, phantasms, other suggested films…

In my youth, I dashed to the movies, in the company of my friends, after a pleasant meal that included several bottles of wine. We arrived after the projection had started, and settled down in our state of heightened intoxication to watch an American teen movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It was a pretty good film when re-viewed in a sober condition, but as far as I was concerned, that night, it was the greatest of all cinematic masterpieces, a perfect pretext for the Deleuzian method of reception I had been eagerly cultivating. In this state that the Surrealists of the 1950s called irrational enlargement I plunged into this big-screen movie as if it were an entire world. Every detail, every corner of the frame came alive. I could enter the space of the screen and explore it at will. The film lost its fixed duration: it became an infinite, virtual zone. Every zigzag of the characters, every travelling past décor, every crystal-clear blast of pop music became the forward projections of my own imaginary voyage in and through the screen.

In an eerie but very beautiful way, the film even seemed to be reading the minds of we happy few liberated spectators, answering our prayers and giving form to our desires: when a sad boy named Cameron is trapped at home, suddenly a choir on the soundtrack whispers let my Cameron go!; when the film seemed to have ended we wanted it to go on forever, but then the young hero flew back into the frame to ask into the camera are you still there?; and, in an unlikely, impromptu scene at an art gallery, the teenager’s gaze at Impressionist paintings jump-cuts in deeper and deeper until there are only purely abstract dots and colour-fields…

A sequel to Language, Sexuality and Subversion was announced in 1980 – called Deleuze: Philosophy of Desire – and I started sketching out a contribution for it, called ‘Machines, Desires, Cinemas’. But I never completed it; my aim exceeded my grasp. I have also never finished my text ‘Inside Ferris Bueller’, my homage to that evening of inner expanded cinema and what it taught me. Perhaps some texts are meant never to be written in one’s lifetime. The haunting question is always: can they be written? Somewhere, sometime, we all reach the limit of our sweet delirium; if we don’t, maybe we go over the edge, we die, or evaporate.

Writing brings you back to the deferred problem of meaning – you cannot write film criticism only in rhythms and colours and shapes, even if you long to. And then, faced with the vertigo of the blank page, other considerations crowd in on your mind: history, context, what Barthes called the doxa of grubby, received opinions, the whole social machinery of ideology that you hoped to flee through immersion in the screen…A critical program based on sheer intensity (up with intensity, down with meaning!) is doomed to failure, or muteness – I suffered a crippling writer’s block for eighteen months in my early 20s – because it crashes on the ineffable shores of inarticulate, passionate assertion.

In every critic’s life, there are so many texts unwritten; we all have our own little Arcades Project somewhere tucked away in a drawer or in our minds – a mountain of notes waiting to take form as a book, or a super-course, or an ultimate curated program. And maybe it is not so tragic that we leave behind a trail of such unfinished works – as Raymond Bellour once suggested, only the imaginary realm of science believes that one always insists on finishing – in a limited period – what one has begun.

We outgrow some of our youthful intuitions because we become different people, conscious of a different kind of multi-levelled reality. Passing time sometimes brings merciful change, and perhaps the only thing worse than the feeling that you never completed your ‘grand project’ is the realisation, looking back, that you only ever wrote and published the same thing over and over anyhow. Better to let your identity drift and dissolve and mutate with the years, and for your projects to arise from that shifting mist of interests, intuitions and desires…

Still, there is the memory of that flaming creature you once were in your youth – that image which dares you to live in its name and honour its spirit – which dares you not to disappoint it. In his text ‘The Journey is Done’ the poet René Char wrote: The marriage between the mind of a twenty year old and a violent phantom turns out to be disappointing as we ourselves are disappointing. It is no more than the deed created by a natural revolt and carried along by an accompanying fire or rather by a collective mirror. Only too soon is it burnt out by the divorce of its elements. But is a ‘remarriage’ possible? So now I set off again to search for this intensity of pure cinema that started my voyage as a critic…

Paul Willemen once made the startling claim that the most famous keywords of cinema studies – like montage or mise en scène – do not mean in fact what they are conventionally taken to mean. Rather, they hide a secret, unfathomably complex meaning, something too hard to speak or define. We use such standard words to help us gesture towards something – some force of cinema – that we do not yet understand. And I suspect that the meaningless concept of pure film is – at least for me – one of these terms that marks or ‘divines’ a churning ocean of drives far beneath the surface of the cinema-earth.

Just recently, I stumbled upon an intriguing philosophical justification of this concept of pure film à la Hitchcock: pure film designates not an ensemble of edits, camera movements, acting gestures and point-of-view shots, but (according to this argument) something which forces its way through the total film-object and coheres it – something like the Will as Schopenhauer formulated that concept, a cosmic version of the élan vital. Will as unspeakable intensity, as the spark that unites the imaginations of the artist and the critic…

Looking at those students up the back of the room in Hong Kong last year – my secret comrades across the adult lifetime of a quarter-century and the space of our global film community – I remembered a particular, very keen student who came up to me at the end of the last day of a cinema course I taught in 1983 – when I was as old as the Dylan who wrote ‘My Back Pages’. I’ve figured out what cinema is all about for you, this young man said. What it means, what it gives you. I was impatient to hear this student’s savage psychoanalysis of his teacher! And then he uttered one simple word: energy.

This essay originally appeared in French in the special 50th issue of Trafic.