On The Figure In General And The Body In Particular:: Figurative Invention In Cinema

By Ted Fendt and Nicole Brenez

Films fill our imagination with figures, figurines, and talismans. They ceaselessly rework the same archetypes and invent troubling prototypes – especially when they establish a deeper relationship to reality. How do we understand these presences that are both so characteristic and so diverse in cinema? How does film deal with bodies, movements, and gestures? Why are we so drawn to these shadows, silhouettes, and hypothetical beings? What organizes the figurative values at work in a film? How do cinematic creatures circulate from film to film and image to image? How does film articulate the links between the abstract and figurative? Is it possible to write a history of figurative forms? Starting from films themselves and works that are both classical (Sergei Eisenstein, Roberto Rossellini, Orson Welles) and contemporary (Abel Ferrara, Brian DePalma, Patricia Mazuy), celebrated (Robert Bresson, John Cassavetes, Ken Jacobs, Paul Sharits) and overlooked (Al Razutis, Jean Genet, Monte Hellman, and John Travolta), from auteurs as well as aesthetic questions (representations of dance, the naked body, character development…), the essays in this volume, most available for the first in English, aim to open a field that has been neglected by analysis, while also suggesting the tools necessary to understanding figurative phenomena specific to cinema.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jul 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781839987816

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INTRODUCTION

Paris, July 17, 1998

Dear Tag,

You wanted a better understanding of what is involved in figurative analysis of cinema and I’m challenging myself to explain it to you in just a few words because, as you write threateningly in your e-mail with the subject line Moving Medici: If you can’t define it briefly in two or three words (and not two or three words in a figurative sense), you’d be better off considering another approach. Although I do not see why an analytic desire should be summed up in a formula (partly watering it down), I will still force myself to do so because you and I like arguing and because we both agree on the basics: The attention given to the films is what matters most. Here is a possible abridgment, but you will see that at first glance it isn’t necessarily going to illuminate you or satisfy you much: To consider cinema from a figural angle. So that the John Ford specialist does not jump on his high horse and the Rossellini biographer does not cover his face murmuring, O Dio, grande Dio, let me develop this a little.¹

First of all, figurative analysis is not a dogmatic method and it is not destined to become one. Its sole aim is to consider aspects and problems in films that have, paradoxically, been neglected. To this end, it relies on the application of several practical principles that do not form precepts. It is about analytic openness starting with the films themselves rather than terminological rules. (At most, its only irrevocable formula would be Gilles Deleuze’s warning: Experiment, never interpret.²) By means of introduction, here are four of its principles.

1. Figural Analysis. To consider, at least provisionally, that a film takes precedence over its context. This is a mere parenthetical in the infinite circulation that every image maintains with that which it is the image—but without it, we will never know what the image is telling us. Despite the great diversity of disciplinary approaches and ideological options, a powerful methodological doxa currently exists in the analysis of representations, a common adhesion to certain procedures stemming from a particular history of ideas. This history came into full swing in the eighteenth century with Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie, a text sanctioning the defeat of erudition (to borrow the title of a book by Blandine Barret-Kriegel)³ and thereby announcing the victory of conceptual reason over scholarly authority, a universal method over the treatment of detail, a systematic approach over technical examination. The practical foundations of this methodological constellation rest on a principle that Jean Mabillon established in the seventeenth century in De re diplomatica (1681): the principle of testing, that is, the scientific establishment of a source (archive, diploma and then fact) via physical and formal evaluations. Without retracing their complex genesis—which is also interesting because of the speculative resources they abandon and forget—let me remind you of the major methodological formulas commonly admitted in the social sciences and, more specifically, in the history of art and mentalities. Procedures that helped form the technical tools of systematic analysis include: the historical establishment of facts; semiotic characterization (is a work a trace, imprint, analogon?); recourse to the broadest context (studying economic, political, cultural, etc. determinants); intertextual investigation (modular inscription in a history of forms); the establishment of (referential and functional) relationships between a work and the historical field from which it originates; and openness to interdisciplinary studies. The critical and reflective apparatus of systematic analysis places the parameters of representation within a historical context and uses analytic categories and descriptors (histories of the gaze, visual thinking, interpretation or the method itself), declares analysis incomplete both in terms of the future of the parent discipline and an always possible recourse to all other disciplines, questions the observer’s role, and reflects on the mode of writing employed (the nature of the ekphrasis).

To borrow Hans Tietze’s term in an exemplary book, these principles result in a work’s perception as a monument (Denkmal).⁴ Established, identified and determined by its historical, spatial and subjective boundaries, inscribed within the tendencies of style and taste, seen as a source of other stories (including that of its own reception), in a sense, a work is inspected, made transparent and traversed by what authorizes it and what it triggers, dampened and simultaneously rendered absent by the processes examining it. Nevertheless, although indispensable and often fertile, this investigative work—which is admittedly almost the only occupation of hermeneutics today—seems insufficient. How can a work rediscover its solidity, its fruitfulness, its fragility, its own density or possible opacity, in short, its problematic virtues? How can one consider its aspects which refuse the logic of affiliation, identity and confirmation? For the analyst, this means admitting a difficult question, one that is not obvious because it aims at its Other: In what way is a work a subject? The conclusion of Otto Pächt’s The Practice of Art History: Reflections on Method raises this question: "it is possible for works of visual art to give concrete expression to things, contents, experiences, that find no utterance or formal expression in any other cultural manifestation. Art therefore has to be seen and assessed as a means of expression sui generis [… and] the sphere of visual art must therefore be accorded total autonomy."⁵ Without forgetting or neglecting deterministic discourses, this is the starting point, insofar that it is different, of aesthetic analysis: It does not reduce a work to its determinants or collapse artistic work into that idea of historical efficiency secretly haunting so-called objective investigative approaches. In a very different way, it involves considering images as critical acts and thus aims to deploy their powers. Does that mean taking them out of context, out of history or out of the world such as we believe it exists before them? Not at all. At the heart of this inquiry is Theodor W. Adorno’s affirmation: The forms of art register the history of humanity with more justice than do historical documents.⁶ This is why it is important to truly analyze them, for themselves and especially from the perspective of the questions they pose, from the perspective of the questions they create.

With regards to painting, Hubert Damisch has shed light on this kind of method. The image "should be considered in its relationship to reality—a relationship of understanding rather than expression, of analogy rather than duplication, of working rather than substitution."⁷ The art of reproduction par excellence, this exercise proves particularly difficult with film since cinema favors a kind of mimetic reduction where one immediately connects an image to its source—as if for a single instant, phenomena could be tantamount to their recording. (An instant that Walter Benjamin accorded to photography with the name of aura.) Instead, by not collapsing cinema immediately into reality, one can question and deploy the properties of resemblance (an undertaking that occupied an essential film and literary oeuvre: that of Jean Epstein), consider the diverse dimensions of abstraction (plastic, logistic, conceptual) that inform figurative representation and contemplate how a film projects itself onto the world at least as much as the world enters it. To this end, this method considers the figurative from a figural perspective. It acknowledges the genius of cinema which—insofar as it releases things from their normal divisions—is invested with a spontaneous figural power, as Siegfried Kracauer, for example, described in 1927: The disorder of the detritus reflected in photography cannot be elucidated more clearly than through the suspension of every habitual relationship between the elements of nature. The capacity to stir up the elements of nature is one of the possibilities of film.⁸ Therefore, the most difficult ambition—often considered the highest—would precisely be to reach an inevitably critical exactitude wherein cinema does not reflect things according to our typical conventions of what is visible and reality: Not only new relationships, but a new manner of re-articulating and adjusting.⁹

2. Figurative Economy. To consider a film’s components as forming elements, not entities. Such a suggestion, dear Tag, is based on an assumption that is not particularly audacious and that every analysis verifies: Cinema is a generalized inquiry into linkages, connections and relations. In cinema, everything circulates:

•The morphology of the image, connecting materiality and immateriality, that is, a circuit between the concrete plasticity of the frame, the projection itself and the general translation of different kinds of unspooling (the film print, the motifs, the sequences, the reception). In cinema, an image is not an object, it is an architecture.

•The formal qualities of the shot, which a film can present as transparent to reality or purely mental, a simulacra, net, filter, screen or wall. And more generally, as unequivocal and volumetric.

•The treatment of motifs, which a film can process in terms of continuity (a thing’s faithfulness to itself even when deformed); dispersion, intervals or repetition (discontinuities, injections of the heterogeneous, logics of defiguration); complexity (i.e., when the motif integrates its own critical poverty as in the Straubs’ work or two thousand years of representation as Pasolini said about his Il vangelo secondo Matteo [The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 1964], or the inaccessibility working at the source of the motif’s literality, of which Andy Warhol’s Eat [1964] is a perfect example: the viewer is forced to hallucinate the images that haunt the basic shot of Robert Indiana chewing psychedelic mushrooms).

What does this mean in terms of figuration? Simply that elements such as silhouettes, characters, effigies, bodies and background-figure relationships begin to circulate as well. If body, individual and person have become an increasingly tighter network of identities in the real world, there is no reason this must be brought into film. In a movie, a silhouette does not produce a body. There can be person-less characters and immaterial bodies (as Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People [1942] demonstrates); a figure that only exists to be distributed among several characters (Howard Hawks’ Viva Villa! [1934]); and a character who does not come from the same figural regime as the others (to cite a more common example, a character who is the hypostasis of the linkage between two individuals). The forms of their treatment vary greatly within a film, where sketch, study, completion and exhaustion can coexist (this is often the case in Godard’s late period, like Tintoretto placing his marginal figures in the foreground without this altering the classical narrative partitions between protagonist, deuteragonist and extra). Cinema can redirect but also reopen all of the notions and divisions with which we perceive the phenomena of presence, identity and difference. Figuration involves a movement of displacement within a film between plastic elements and common categories of experience: Sometimes, but much less often than we think, this movement is simple (one effigy/one character/one subject-effect); sometimes it is infinitely complex, even returning to our own experiences and implicating, for example, our reflexes concerning singularity, presence and sovereignty. Therefore, films are necessarily (and this does not mean deliberately) organized in a figurative economy that presides over all of these relations (the morphology of the image, its formal properties, the treatment of motifs). The task of analysis is to discern them. You can see that this kind of approach de-hierarchizes the connections between figure and narrative (the narrative is merely a component and no longer an end), considers the figures in terms of their internal elaboration and refrains from presuming coherence. Hence the third principle.

3. Figurative Logic. To consider a film’s elements as questions. Figural analysis does not hesitate to repeat the primitive questions. For example, about the body: How does a film seize upon, imagine, elaborate, present or eliminate the body? What is the texture of a filmic body (flesh, shadow, proposal, affect, doxa)? What frame holds it up (skeleton, resemblance, transformation, plastiques of the shapeless)? To which regime of the visible is it subjected (appearance, epiphany, extinction, terror, lacuna)? What are its modes of plastic manifestation (sharp contours, opacity, tactility, transparency, intermittency, a mixture of techniques)? What events defeat it (otherness, history, distorting contours)? What kind of community can be glimpsed in its gestures (people, collection, alignment of the Same)? What is the true nature of its story (adventure, description, panoply)? What kind of creature is it at heart (subject, organism, case, ideologeme, hypothesis)? In short, this involves looking for how a film invents a figurative logic.

In broad strokes, I’ll give you one American and two French examples from fiction cinema. Like the oeuvres of Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Val Lewton, Godard and De Palma, John Carpenter’s belongs to a systematic figurative project that, in his case, concerns the representation of the Antagonist. Initially, adversity is treated in the mode of the infra or ultra-figural form of shapelessness: anonymous shadows in Assault on Precinct 13 (1976),¹⁰ fog in The Fog (1979) and the general plasticity of an adversary that takes on the shape of everything it devours in The Thing (1982).¹¹ Following this plastic extension, which is still inscribed within a logic of local effigies, in the second phase the antagonist propagates itself, becoming a double of the world: approaching, future threat in Prince of Darkness (1987), capitalist alienation in They Live (1992) and figurative synthesis in In the Mouth of Madness (1994), which recaps the forms of foreignness, concluding more or less in a line of dialogue that clarifies the source of anxiety: Every species can smell its own extinction. It is as if all the fantastical sketches inventoried by Carpenter expressed preparations for anthropological mourning. Coming to the wonderful Body Snatchers trilogy, Other becomes Same with the little kids in Village of the Damned (1995). Following this ultimate solution via homonymy, adversity is displaced and given a fourth form: the antagonist is no longer a local and universal entity but a linkage between phenomena—in this case, the terror reigning between men and women is the Vampire in Carpenter’s latest film to date (Vampires, 1998).

Let us look at how, symmetrically, in the work of Godard and Éric Rohmer, the figural principle behind the representation of one and the same motif can evolve. Godard and Rohmer both find their chosen body in the category of the Young Woman. Although they were initially able to agree on the same catalogue of traits,¹² the young woman nevertheless acquires different meanings in the two oeuvres. In Godard’s films, a young woman’s presence is, first and foremost, a source for ethical reflections: Can one transcend appearances, can one caress a soul (Vivre sa vie [My Life to Live], 1962), how can a gesture be described and qualified, how can the everyday mystery emblematicized by a young woman be understood? From Jean Seberg/Patricia Franchini (À bout de souffle [Breathless], 1960) to Anna Karina/Marianne Renoir (Pierrot le fou, 1965), the same figure revives the irreconcilable division between appearance and essence that characterizes the femme fatale, disorienting Jean-Paul Belmondo in both films even though he is fully informed (better than the women themselves) about feminine duplicity. In Rohmer’s Contes moraux (Moral Tales), the irreconcilability concerns a young woman’s freedom (from Haydée in La collectionneuse [1967] to Chloé in L’amour l’après-midi [Love in the Afternoon], 1972). But since the series Comédies et proverbes (Comedies and Proverbs) and Rohmer’s return to younger and even very young women, the figure has been charged with a problem that had previously concerned men, husbands and fiancés (since La boulangère de Monceau [The Bakery Girl of Monceau], 1962). I believe it was Jean Douchet who showed how, borrowing the schematics of F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), Rohmer tirelessly told the story of the detour a young man must take before seeing the obvious: his love for the betrothed. In the Comedies and Proverbs and especially since Le rayon vert (The Green Ray, 1986), the young woman represents a model that helps Rohmer observe the emergence of a feeling of certainty (generally in favor of questions like who can I love? and who loves me?). A (masculine) dialectic of reason and evidence is substituted by a (feminine) dialectic of hesitation and decision—even if that means turning back to signs (i.e., the appearance of a green ray) to attain certainty. Only certain secondary figures are immediately endowed with this absolute intuition that affiliates Rohmer with German Romanticism, such as the little girl on the rainy bus ride in Un conte d’hiver (A Winter’s Tale, 1992) who recognizes her father without the slightest hesitation even though she has never seen him before.¹³ Thus, Rohmer’s theme has always been the behavior of the conscience (masculine reticence in the Moral Tales, feminine hesitation in the Comedies and the Contes des quatre saisons [Tales of Four Seasons]), but the Comedies and the Tales are an experimental extension of the moment of absolute intuition with which the Moral Tales conclude.

Even if they are very different, it is clear that the factors motivating the representation of the young woman in Godard and Rohmer’s work evolve along the same lines. Like Godard, after extensively treating the young woman, Rohmer’s oeuvre concentrates on one aspect of the initial description. In Rohmer’s case, there is a shift from unconditional freedom to the observation of what determines a choice, freely or not. In Godard’s case, the young woman—subject of ethical questions (essence), object of plastic celebration (appearance) and, in this regard, often compared to paintings—is now presented as a purely iconographic motif. A young woman comes from painting (Marie in Je vous salue, Marie [Hail Mary, 1985], the young women in Détective [1985]) or from music (Prénom: Carmen [First Name: Carmen, 1983]), she goes toward or surrenders herself to music (Passion, 1982), she abandons any and all pretensions toward epiphany and the Second Coming (in Masculin féminin [Masculine Feminine, 1966] even when caught in the snares of allegory, Chantal Goya and Jean-Pierre Léaud have to reveal something of their incomparable singularity and Miss 19 her wretched universality) and she becomes a dispositif, a protocol for establishing aesthetic questions: Where do images come from? What can they do? Under what conditions do images still maintain a relationship with the tangible world? No longer an artistic effect or possible impression of presence, a young woman becomes a plastic phenomenon: The body through which the modern problems posed by the existence of classical art erupt in cinema. Thus in both cases, the oeuvres evolve according to a convergent structure whose dynamics are devoted to seeking their own home: in Rohmer, the representation of decisions as a graphic mark of the mind; in Godard, the powers of the image.

Next, it is necessary to consider figurative logic not only as the treatment of a motif, theme or singular form, but also in terms of grouping figures in a plastic sense (corporeal contours, effigies) and in a rhetorical sense (chaining and unchaining, the syntax and parataxis of the linkages themselves). Starting from the simplest aspect: the study of a catalogue of traits or a filmic population. The representation of a collection of individuals refers to one or more compositional units: the staging of ensembles (groups, crowds, hordes), the kind of body mobilized by description (jobs, masks, model), the homogenous and heterogenous linkages of figures among themselves and of figures with their references and projections. Within the dominant framework in writing on this topic, the homogeneity and heterogeneity of a filmic population can be considered from four angles. First, the reliability or unreliability of the figurative principle animating the assembly of individuals. Reciprocally, to what extent does a singularity prove significant, and can an individual acquire its own existence or is an individual limited to appearing as part of a whole? Is the individual a limb, cell, electron or a unicum? In short, what is the status of individuation in a figurative economy? Second, what is the relationship between the overall filmic population and the populace outside the frame, the inferred population (off-screen space, beyond the frame)? Do filmic figures appear as samples, specimens, prototypes, reverse shots or counter models? Third, what is the relationship of this whole to the sociological surroundings, the outside world? Model relationship, reflection, counterproposal? Or is there no relationship? Fourth, what are the general rules organizing these different spheres? Rarity or profusion (of individuals or types; rules in and of themselves), stability, mobility (elements among themselves and with their ensembles)? In short, considering the function of a filmic population also requires considering the relationship of the figures to themselves (more or less detailed individuation), to the whole (more or less affirmed independence), to others (a more or less fertile distinction) and to reality (more or less critical difference). But these elaborations must also be seen in light of figurative styles that do not make individuation the motor of their writing. The movement in John Woo’s work from Lat sau san taam [Hard Boiled, 1992] to Face/Off (1997) constitutes a model full of lessons. You see, dear Tag, there is no lack of questions and that is really what counts. For the moment, I’ll spare you those concerning figurative syntax, but we can come back to them whenever you’d like.

4. Why the body? To see how cinema problematizes what it treats. There is no end, writes Hegel, to the haphazardness of human shapes.¹⁴ He was describing forms of natural beauty, but the same applies to the figurative in cinema: No matter how you look at it (plastic state, syntax, symbolic values), cinema is a field whose only limits are cinema itself. So where to begin? One way is to start by making an inventory of the meanings of the term figure, as you did spontaneously in your e-mail with the subject line Figgy, by verifying the term’s polysemy in a dictionary—which moved me, because at the beginning of my research, I proceeded in the same way, starting with the Latin word figura, not realizing at the time that Erich Auerbach had long ago done so magisterially.¹⁵ These meanings can be applied to a corpus to observe if and how cinema enriches them, displaces them or is summed up in them. It is also possible to derive analytic instruments from films themselves (undoubtedly the best solution because doing so simultaneously proves cinema’s speculative richness). A motif or a form can be elected as a hermeneutic object. Today in France, research in this field is increasing and intensifying. For example, next year, there will be seminars pursuing abstraction, defiguration, the cadaver, the body in contemporary physical comedy, superimposition as a paradigm of the cinematic image… All undertakings that promise to renew our tools and questions.

Of course, one of the major problems related to considerations of the human figure concerns the body, which figurative analysis privileges expressly but not implicitly for at least three reasons. First, it is a motif with which cinema will always be concerned. Cinema was, in part, invented to observe the movement of human figures. Furthermore, in a somewhat mythological manner, I see the primal scene of cinema’s treatment of the human body in the early conflict between Etienne-Jules Marey and his assistant Georges Demenÿ. Not knowing if Demenÿ’s oeuvre is well-known in the United States, I will refresh you on the circumstances around the disagreement: Marey and Demenÿ organized the physiological station together, the first major movie set; they made hundreds of images using chronophotography and published a book in 1892, Etude de physiologie artistique (Study of Artistic Physiology).¹⁶ Then they parted ways, seemingly over three issues: the recognition of Demenÿ’s film and literary work, signed by Marey without any mention of his assistant; the use of images—because following the success of his phonoscope at the 1892 International Photography Exhibition, Demenÿ saw a commercial future for his undertaking; and the treatment of the human figure itself. Marey studied movement and how to separate it from appearance: He invented the figural forms for treating the recorded body, as well as abstraction, geometrization, schematization, grid patterning and classification via experimental devices whose formal and iconographic fruitfulness, alongside the case of the Futurists and Marcel Duchamp, remains to be discovered. For example, is it possible not to think of Henri Michaux when looking at Demenÿ’s Graphique par pression du stylet sur papier noirci, mesure de la réponse musculaire après un empoisonnement au curare (Drawing via Stylus Pressed on Black Paper, Measurement of Muscular Response after Curare Poisoning)? But having made so many images under Marey’s direction, what did Demenÿ do when he began working for himself and built the second French movie studio in his home in 1892?¹⁷ He filmed people on his block, including a young woman walking away from the camera that inevitably evokes Baudelaire’s passerby, a baby’s first steps, a man smoking and boxers sparring. He filmed a young woman at a mirror, dancers and a woman blowing kisses to the camera. He transformed the ordinary and insignificant of life into visual events: A man is hot and wipes away his sweat, a child bursts into laughter, smoke rings billow out of a pipe… His work involved presence, communication (his famous I love you), emotion and illusion (it wasn’t long before he was filming magicians¹⁸). In short, while Marey created sublime ghosts and populated the world with its own abstractions, Demenÿ explored the powers of invocation, appearance and seduction, he introduced into cinema chance, off-screen space, close-ups and direct addresses to the camera. Part of the same exciting project to systematically describe physiological phenomena (Demenÿ wanted to index human emotions and see the images of his phonoscope replace the engravings in Charles Le Brun’s 1688 Expressions des passions de l’âme [The Expressions of the Passions]),¹⁹ each of their oeuvres introduce and establish all of the figurative problems and solutions contained within the very existence of the cinematic apparatus. In consideration of their shared and respective oeuvres, it sometimes seems as if cinema, forgetting certain forms and ideals, has basically trailed behind the inventiveness of these two men.

The second reason, dear Tag, goes well over my head and has to do with the state of the question of the body today: It is easy to see that the body is now the object of scientific and industrial initiatives and it is impossible to determine the degree to which these are progresses or assaults. Cut piece by piece into digital images (the current state of that glorious emblem of humanism, the skinned anatomical body) and cloneable images, and patented all the way down to its genetic constituents, the body seems to be deployed on itself, exteriorized and reproducible at will: the classical attributes of modern images suddenly entered the body; modern images will serve as the laboratory for the body’s future. Having been rendered by war to the status of cannon fodder and by the economy to the status of labor force, the body has become the prime industrial material in a movement of expropriation injecting the inhuman into the deepest depths of the species’ characteristics. In many films since Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (1962), humanity has simultaneously dreamt of its disappearance and, in some films, its total replacement by a double that is better adapted to biological perfection. Taking as a reference point Freud’s line that "a person who is physically ill