Television contaminates cinema and does not allow any experience of the world. In his latest texts, Serge Daney points to the birth of a new audiovisual order, which no longer records reality and which only refers to itself.
This fourth collection in the series The Cinema House and the world brings together the texts of Serge Daney published at the end of his life, between the creation of the magazine Traffic (December 1991) and his death at the age of 48 in June 1992. We find there his last writings for Releasehis articles for Traffic and a series of interviews he gives to Spirithas Art pressto InrockuptiblesAt World and to 24 images (as well as some texts published in the 1980s). At the time, having contracted AIDS, the author knew he was doomed: he developed with all the more vigor his criticism of the world of communication and his reflection on what, despite everything, still remains cinema. For him, it is a question of thinking about a mode of resistance, a new way of “living with images” (p. 23): this results in the creation of a magazine where writing shapes the memory of the cinephile and preserves his experience of the world to better question the specificity of the contemporary.
What remains of cinema?
The opposition between cinema and what Daney calls the “visual”, this new type of images introduced by television and advertising, is the central theme of the latest texts. Faithful to the end to André Bazin’s idea that the essence of cinema consists of the recording of reality, he calls any image where artifice tends to erase the recording visual. With a cinephile’s eye, he analyzes television and advertising in order to in turn grasp the depravity of a certain cinema through visuals. On television, the visual is accused of repressing reality in favor of “great signage” where social and political reality is reduced to communication clichés. So regarding the war in Iraq on television:
Strange realization that war would obey the same laws of spectacle and advertising as a video game or a military exhibition. (pg. 147)
The image no longer means anything other than itself, here the military performance of Western technology. In the visual, we strip reality of all otherness: so that the image is without remainder, we even go so far as to write on it. We don’t see anything on television, since speech and writing take precedence. This “new audiovisual order” (p. 90) produces films contaminated by the advertising logic of the image; for Daney, it is the “post-cinema” stage that he diagnoses in some symptomatic films.
Among others, two major commercial successes are the recurring targets of his anger. In The Big Blue (1988) and his image of a sea of laundry advertising, he notes that the hero’s dive expresses the poverty of contemporary individual experience (“He goes up and down: it’s the masturbation of being”, p. 214) while repressing the human world in favor of a “return of mythology” (myth of nature without humans, p. 224). The Lover (1992) is also according to him the height of a cinema thoroughly contaminated by the visual: a series of images independent of each other, a series of clichés that the spectator is invited to validate one by one (like déjà vu, we are in the tautological world of advertising imagery, p. 156 ff.).
What is (was) cinema? Daney wonders throughout these final texts. It was the memory of the century (p. 40), television sees nothing and is without memory: cinema was able to see the extermination camps, television did not give any image worthy of an event such as the collapse of communism (p. 214). Cinema takes the time to see things, television only confirms common imagery, such as the “humanitarian portrayal” it gives of Kurdish refugees (“increasing “folklorization” of the other”, p. 57) . Cinema records the world, allows for distancing and constructs a duration that encourages reflection. With cinema we take the time to see and every great film also develops around what we do not see – this is the theory of the off-camera:
Between what we hallucinate, what we want to see, what we really see and what we don’t see, the “game” is infinite – and here we touch the most intimate part of cinema. (pg. 31)
But what remains of cinema? According to Daney, Godard, the friend, melancholy historian of his art, remains: “since cinema has not redeemed the world, all that remains is to settle the accounts of cinema and show(r) what has been seen, not seen, badly seen” (p. 81). There also remain singular authors, solitary ones, particularly those who, updating the tradition of burlesque cinema, play with their own bodies like “Dubroux, Moretti, Monteiro” (p. 231). By dint of scrutinizing the visual world, Daney sometimes finds there what cinema, according to him is moribund, is no longer capable of doing. So this Michael Jackson clip, Black and Whitein which a singer offers himself to be seen as a continuum “of a human species which has become a hilarious parade of ethnic types self-generating each other” (p. 86), in other words the American dream subsumed under the becoming-world of a narcissist star (where American cinema was capable of offering a collective vision of this myth). Or the Benetton advertisements which create scandal when cinema no longer shocks anyone (Daney remembers the scandals of Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom by Pasolini and Hitler a film from Germany by Syberberg in the 1970s, p. 219).
Cinema as a reservoir of experiences and contemporary individualism
According to Bazin, cinema would be “an impure opening to the world” (an impure art, because it is essentially a recording of reality, p. 10). In other words, cinema is a way of seeing the world, of experiencing it:
It is still in the images that we see most of the world. If we only saw the part of our real experience, we wouldn’t get far. (p.44)
American cinema has been a great provider of experiences of all kinds, which leads to a “ridiculous” situation:
A part of the human experience, rather American, is part of our culture in the strong sense of things and things that happen very close to us have never had the right to be mentioned. (p.42)
Whether it is the suburbs or the declining peasantry, a whole part of French reality is not visible on the screen. At least in cinema, because television is full of clichés about realities that are in fact unknown: worse, it offers the viewer a “typical experience” (p. 18), the artificial experience of reality shows. It is nothing less than the creation of “a real individual market » in which the masses are divided into small units, “this new “hero” of our time: more and more personalized, badged, pinned, that is to say reduced to the garish folklore of his little difference. » (p. 151). Television thus tends to make the human experience disappear, which is first and foremost an experience of the other. To resist, it is then necessary to “put into circulation small blocks of written experience” (p. 18) which constantly draw on this reservoir of experiences that cinema is and has been.
Does criticizing television make sense?
Indeed, to resist the influence of the visual, we must rethink critical activity. After a career as a day-to-day critic in ReleaseDaney wants a review disconnected from the news feed; a review faithful to his lifelong passion, cinephilia, this “talkative conservatory of cinema” specific to France and of which we must be proud (p. 27). In the project of Traffic and his first texts written for the magazine, Daney constantly returns to the state of film criticism and his own journey. It’s about taking the time to write, not letting yourself be overwhelmed by the increasingly rapid pace of film releases; on the other hand, we should also not contribute to the museification of cinema (a celebration of “cultural” cinema without taking a personal position).
A question torments Daney: the relevance of the television criticism he has practiced until then; bitter, he notes that television is a “black hole” (p. 105), that his writings on it interest no one, that there is no return. “Watching television is like going through the trash, while also finding treasures” (p. 31); television is the unconscious of society, it is a “permanent and materialized survey” (p. 106). The object is interesting in itself, but what’s the point? he asks himself. Retrospectively, Daney links his attempt at television criticism to two postures towards the mass culture of the 1970s, those of Barthes and Godard, two types of perversion, “perversion of the semiologist, perversion of the moralist” (p. 104). Why a perversion? Here is the somewhat hasty and disillusioned response: “It’s not good to play smart with objects made to be thrown away” (p. 197). But unless we resign ourselves to excepting the order of the world as it is, can we say that criticism of such objects is vain?
Despite everything, although he has decided that criticism of television is meaningless, the latest texts are full of analyzes of the visual. Their interest is largely due to this thought in action which doubts what it does, launches its ukases against a certain cinema and constantly returns to its journey. Daney knows he is going to die and that a certain type of criticism dies with him. He portrays himself as the last of the “cinephiles”, with his passion, his humor and his sense of formula, his bad faith and his moralist insight. At a time of a certain standardization of the academic field of cinematographic studies, reading this other thought of cinema reminds us of all the vigor of a practice engaged of film criticism. And offers us a profound testimony of the last lights of an intellectual adventure begun after the war following André Bazin and around the Cinema notebooks.