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For criticism, part two

For criticism
part two
William D. Routt Return to For criticism part one. Uploaded 1 March 2000 | 11824 words Nicole Brenez. De la figure en gnral et du corps en particulier: l'invention figurative au cinma. Paris, Brussels: De Boeck Universit. 1998. ISBN 2-80412999-3. 466pp.
[Note: I am grateful to the editors and to those who will have invested so much time in marking up this review for allowing me to go on at such length. In addition I am particularly grateful to Diane, Adrian Martin, Anna Dzenis, Tim Groves and Deane Williams for things they have said and done during the time I have been writing. Readers should know that I helped to translate Nicole Brenez's article, " Le voyage absolu ", for this journal. Partly as a result of that translation a desultory, but warm, email correspondence between the author and myself developed. She cites a piece of mine (incorrectly, as it happens) in the book under review. In other words, it would be disingenuous to think this review entirely disinterested.]

Figure and film criticism: an instance

Early in the book, two mentions of Howard Hawks caught my imagination. The first I have already mentioned: a suggestion of some difference of opinion with Tag Gallagher involving Hawks. The second was more intriguing: something about Viva Villa! "reproducing the Hegelian notion of the Great Man with a perfect rigour" (34). (In English translations of Hegel, what Brenez has as the "Grand Homme" comes out as "the world-historical individual", but I suspect that gender and greatness are important to Brenez's argument so I have mostly left her phrase as it appears in French.) The first professional academic paper I ever delivered was a long www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/shorts/rev iews/rev 0300/wr2br9a.htm

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it appears in French.) The first professional academic paper I ever delivered was a long comparison between aspects of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy and the westerns of Anthony Mann, so I was captured right away by the idea that somebody else had seen a nexus between Hard European Philosophy and Crass Hollywood Commercialism. What she does in the portion of the chapter devoted to the Hegelian thesis is to rely on textual evidence and analysis to demonstrate an uncanny connection between the figure of Pancho Villa in the film and what the philosopher wrote about "the Great Man" in Lectures on the philosophy of history. This sort of thing does put some people off - the ones who believe that Hollywood movies do not think - but obviously I am not among them. She does not attempt to explain why this particular film should make use of these particular ideas - and that is the responsible thing to do. You show the connection, but in the absence of hard evidence you do not speculate about the mechanism by which it may have been achieved. We do know that some screenwriters actually did think they were serving the cause of international communism by putting scenes about slavery and such into certain movies, but they surely were as crazy as the men who later accused them of doing exactly that - and how much crazier would you (the screenwriter, director, spy) have to be to spend so much effort in putting big chunks of Hegel or Nietzsche on the screen? Would you please just answer the question for the Committee: have you now, or have you ever, read Hegel on history? I believe that there is something very interesting and probably quite complex going on in such coincidences of thought (which I also think are quite common). Whatever it is has to do with how culture works, specifically with the inefficient, amorphous and screwy ways in which cultural transmission actually takes place. The commonsense direct-injection models of "influence" which place one painter in the studio of another or have Thomas Edison stealing the idea of flexible film from tienne-Jules Marey are very crude and almost surely inadequate to explain most instances where two or more people find themselves thinking or doing the same thing. I don't have to know anything about Nietzsche to do something "Nietzschean" or anything about Hegel to reproduce some of his ideas about The Great Man with perfect fidelity. Some ideas, some figures, enter the culture under a cloak of anonymity, abstracted from their creators. Who knows what bizarre mechanisms of transmission move such things from one time and place to another? Conversation, popularisation, novelisation ... Carlyle, Wagner, Teddy Roosevelt? And if one wants to make a film about a Great Man, in certain circumstances (for example, in Hollywood in the thirties to a Chicago writer with a certain intellectual bent) a Hegelian figure will offer itself, pretending to be just a set of reasonably connected notions around the topic, what anybody might think, what is in the air. But failing some convincing account, or some theory, of how specifically such things are done, there remains the indisputable fact that a film like Viva Villa! can perfectly illustrate philosophical concepts (or, in this case, figures). Of that I am in no doubt whatever. Philosophy, particularly philosophy about greatness, is neither so obscure nor so precious that it cannot be perfectly reproduced in a simple, mass-market film. Nor am I put off by the circumstance of Brenez's having to discern this figure through a structural analysis of relations (figurative economy) distributed across several characters and along several axes in Viva Villa!. In about 12 full pages of main text, we are gifted with six tables of triadic structures: historical actors, spouses, lovers, "right hand men", infidelity, climaxing in a grand tabular synthesis where the triad is doubled into six opposing character slots. You gotta love "em all. This is the sort of structural thing that figural criticism ought to do,
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and it is done here, as elsewhere in the book, very well indeed. What concerns me is not what has been done here, but what has not - what has been excluded in the process. The essay begins with a sentence which denies that the people are the subject ("or even subject") in this film. This is the kind of statement that can be made only by those to whom Apollo has granted the ability to manifest the blessed shadow imprinted on their brains. For surely Pancho Villa might be a figure of the people-as-a-great-man, a populist hero. And he might be that at the same time, in addition to, his being perfectly Hegelian (if, indeed, there is a conflict between the two). Indeed, there is historical evidence that knowledgeable folks at the time read the character in that way. The film was shown at the first Moscow Film Festival at least partly because it could be seen as presenting the kind of hero that would not give offence to the citizens of the Soviet Union in 1935. And there is certainly some textual evidence that the film is actively soliciting such a reading. Brenez contrasts the film's figure of Villa with the people as figured in Sergei Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico!, a film which certainly appears to have had some visual influence on Viva Villa!. But it is obvious that the two films bear only a superficial relation, even though Eisenstein is reported to have liked Viva Villa! quite well. More to the point surely would be a comparison with a film made by two of Eisenstein's students and also shown at the Moscow Film Festival in 1935: Chapayev (1934). Like Villa, Chapayev is a peasant who has become a revolutionary hero. Like Villa, he conforms perfectly to what Brenez represents as Hegel's idea of the Great Man. Like Viva Villa!, Chapayev is a film noticeably deficient in images of the people-ascollective. But unlike Viva Villa!, Chapayev occupies a crucial place in film history, signalling the end of the Soviet avant-garde and the beginning of the regime of socialist realism, a style explicitly dedicated to figuring the people as "world-historical individuals". In fact, if I had been a movie-literate member of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951, I would have had the crew of Viva Villa! on the stand, so much like Chapayev 's socialist realism does it seem today. Consider also the figure of Wallace Beery, who plays Pancho Villa in the film. Stars are, in some sense, concrete historical figures in the way Cato, Virgil and Beatrice are in The divine comedy. Beery is very much a populist star: messy, overweight, eminently crude and vulgar. He is not handsome, and in 1937 he was in a movie called The good old soak . He played bad guys and mushy lovable types. In the course of his films Beery's heroes usually died or had to be redeemed: there was some stain, some incapacity, some lack within that had to be redressed. He was The champ (1931), Barnacle Bill (1941) and Bad Bascomb (1946). Yet he held a long term contract with MGM (1930-1949) and acted in a total of as many as 252 films from 1912 to 1949. In 1934 he was among the top ten Hollywood box office stars, where he had been before and would be again as late as 1940. In the context of Beery's career, the role of Pancho Villa stands out as the only time, I think, that he ever played a "world-historical individual", a leader. Instead his gross body and his sentimental acting were taken as a typos of The Common Man. Over and over, he was cast as an ordinary man rendered extraordinary by circumstances (even as you or I or Arthur Tauchert, Harry Baur, Dennis Franz, Sammo Hung). In the movie, Beery's screen presence, and especially the obscenity of his obesity, works against the good intentions of History and Revolution, mandating scenes of lumpish comedy and ethnically-stereotyped menace. The only production story anyone ever tells about this movie is about Lee Tracy drunkenly pissing off a balcony onto the heads of passers by - which got him
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fired from the production. And of course, that story is told because it so precisely fits the film that it might have happened in it - in a scene in which Beery would have taken the leading part. The anecdote is not a story about a Great Man, but a satyr play that undercuts the pretense of greatness with the kind of slobbishness in which wholeness leaks away, like the muddy edges of Beery's corpulence, like his wet-gravel voice, his blurring eyes - in short, in the way this star's all-too human failing undercuts the putative classicism of the film's portrait of a revolutionary hero. This is not at all in accord with Brenez's interpretation. Her chapter is entitled "L'homme entier", the whole man, and Brenez's analysis shows how such an entire being is disarticulated and dispersed through the film by means of a strategy of delegation. For example, and crucially, Villa's sidekick, Sierra, is the one who kills without thought and without remorse, not Villa. She argues that in this manner Villa's innocence is preserved, responsibility is taken from him, and the radical political potential of the figure destroyed. Villa is a Hegelian "Great Man" because he is a man of action, not reflection. He acts unconsciously, innocently, as a tool of History. Almost all of Brenez's argument seems perfectly acceptable to me. The only places I would balk are, first, where she denies any radical political potential to the figure of Villa in the film; and, second (a related point), where she generalises at the end that "Viva Villa! seems exemplary of a classicism whose major trait would be the homogeneous organisation of figurative economy" and which is also designed to suppress ideas inimical to bourgeois capitalism (204). I hope that what I have written about Chapayev and about the figure of Wallace Beery suggests some ways in which audiences might have taken at least a little radical political inspiration from the film. But in addition to these points, there is the question of how the innocence of the figure as Brenez has analysed it functions in relation to the bourgeois values that classicism is presumed to uphold. Such a figure lacks both the insight and the foresight of leadership as bourgeois culture understands it; and it is precisely to the extent that Villa is shown to be incomplete in himself, and not a psychologically whole man, that the tragedy which the film might be recounting is called into question. Hegel directly refutes psychological explanations for the actions of worldhistorical individuals: "This so-called psychological approach contrives to trace all actions to the heart and to interpret them subjectively, with the result that their authors appear to have done everything because of some greater or lesser passion or lust" (87) - or, as we would say, "desire ". As I understand it, classical narration is absolutely bound to psychological motivations and/or desire for narrative actions; and thus Hegel's or Brenez's "Great Man" could not, by definition, act convincingly within a classical narrative film, and could only subvert the intentions of the text. Like other cultural products of the thirties, including The informer (1935), Viva Villa! ultimately juxtaposes politics and humanistic values in the form of a dilemma that has no right answer. Moreover, as I recall the film, Beery actually plays Villa rather badly. It is precisely wholeness and greatness that his performance lacks. What we are given instead is a two-dimensional caricature of a Mexican gangster, a being led by physical appetite and an opportunistic notion of freedom - no matter how hard Ben Hecht's script tries to tell us something different. Here the mythic hero - and the heroic myth - interrupts his pose and his epic. He tells the truth: that he is not a hero, not even, or especially not, the hero of writing or literature, and that there is no hero, there is no figure who alone assumes and presents the heroism of the life and death of commonly singular beings. He tells the truth of the interruption of his myth, the truth of the interruption of all founding
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speeches, of all creative and poietic speech, of speech that schematizes a world and that fictions an origin and an end. He says, therefore, that foundation, poiesis and scheme are always offered, endlessly, to each and all, to the community, to the absence of communion through which we communicate and through which we communicate to each other not the meaning of community, but an infinite reserve of common and singular meanings. (Jean-Luc Nancy, The inoperable community, 79). I think it is clear that "the whole man" and "classicism" are related ideas in Brenez's chapter. Their relation is, however, an allegorical, not a figurative, one; and the interpretation the chapter gives us belongs much more certainly within the tradition of the hidden text than of the revealed figure. Classicism, as "the homogeneous organisation of figurative economy", underpins and authorises the reading Brenez gives the film. Indeed, the Hegelian figure of the Great Man surely has been selected as the master figure for this film at least partly because it conforms to the tenets of Hollywood classicism as Brenez understands them. At the same time, this chapter's reliance on the commonly-accepted political interpretation of the bourgeois capitalist ideology promulgated by "classical" Hollywood films sits uneasily in the context of the rest of the book. Since 1989 we have been witnessing a triumphal wave of global capitalist expansion, spearheaded by the United States. By comparison with the thirties, where capitalism seemed everywhere under threat, today nothing appears more secure than the global capitalist order. Yet Brenez's most compelling and interesting political analyses are based upon recent cinematic products of that global capitalist order, especially films produced in those most capitalist of economies, Europe, the United States and Hong Kong. In discussing those films, she does not discuss their "classicism" nor demonstrate the ways in which they reflect bourgeois hegemony. How can this be? How can the Hollywood films of the thirties be more purely capitalist and bourgeois than the films of our own culture, which is more capitalist and bourgeois than the culture of the thirties? Strangely enough, I think the fundamental reasons for what is surely a deliberate misreading on Brenez's part have something to do with figurative understanding and the fulfilment of the figure. But I shall need another section to deal with this.

Figure and fulfilment

I think in contemporary writing on film, not just film criticism, there is a tendency to treat ideas like classicism, contemporary cinema, postmodernism, the avant-garde and so forth, like fulfilled figures. This is by no means a terrible thing. As I have said, it can hardly be avoided; and I think it is far more accurate to understand such terms as figures rather than "concepts". Although almost all such ideas are nebulous and can mean quite different things in different contexts, a common strategy is to do what Brenez does with classicism in the chapter I have just discussed. She invokes it wholecloth, not simply as a formal model or as a set of rules, to warrant a connection between formal and political aspects of the film with which she is concerned. Rhetorically, this strategy is itself so economical as to be classical. It saves having to rehash dubious and unsettled arguments by creating an area of commonality: the capacious, tolerant space of a fulfilled figure rather than the crabbed, hostile area obsessively worked over by a

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space of a fulfilled figure rather than the crabbed, hostile area obsessively worked over by a theoretical concept. Such fulfilled figures allow one to read backwards, locating and identifying other figures in the light of the master figure, which functions the way the divine kingdom did for mediaeval biblical exegetes. This way of writing and thinking is not uncommon, and, to some at least, not unexpected. One of the most pointed and potentially productive criticisms of the way we usually write and think asserts that, far from being a tradition that had its last hurrah sometime in the eighteenth century, the fulfilled figure, which this critique locates as an inheritance from Platonism, still founds and guides occidental culture. Much of our thinking aims towards fulfilled figures and by so doing is formed by them. Thomas Kuhn's once famous "scientific paradigms" are good examples here, as is "the free market economy" - but then, so are ideas like "justice" and "truth", or at least, so they tend to be. Simon Sparks claims that this radical critique of figural thinking is central to the political work of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, contemporary French philosophers whose writing often focusses on what Sparks calls "a lexicon" of cultural and political terms, including "identification", "mimesis" and "myth", that ultimately have to do with the fulfilled figure. What remains constant throughout this mutation of terms (which, in truth, is nothing of the sort) is the following: an understanding of the political as the will - and that is also to say, the imperative - to realise an essence-in-common (a community even) on the basis of a figure of that in-common. It is this realisation that identifies a community as and with itself, in which case the figure would be seen as the identity principle of community. And this whether it be a matter of a "we", "the people", "spiritual or religious type", "the nation", "humanity", "project", "destiny", etc. (Sparks xxiv) This is not the way that a figure like classicism, for example, might be made to work within another understanding of figurative thinking. Here classicism would only exist as it was exscribed in specific instances ("exscribed" rather than "inscribed" because this is a question of its being "written out of" rather than "into" what one is examining). No classicism but Viva Villa!'s classicism or Chapayev 's classicism and so on. Such a way of approaching a work would not deny the figure of classicism itself, but would understand that the specificity of specific classical instances mandates understanding Viva Villa!'s classicism as difference, not as something entirely predetermined. This approach is related to one kind of "inductive" method of typological classification which derives the typos from a description of instances rather than hypothesising it as a paradigm first, but it differs from that method in hesitating to discern the typos. Classicism would remain in flux, never to find completion until entropy claims us all. Put in another way, this kind of writing would always be political because it would never settle into a signified - that is, into meaning in the usual understanding of the word, into the fullness and security of meaning. Rather, its signification would resemble the constantly transforming "figure" which Auerbach attributes to the pre-Christian tradition (and which later practice never wholly succeeded in stilling). In the terms of contemporary French philosophy, it would produce "sense" rather than "meaning", and it would do this to the measure that the writing itself figured relations rather than "reasoning from effect to cause" as more scientific thinking is presumed to do. I think that Brenez's criticism mostly adheres to this mode of writing. Its very existence questions most current practice, thus demanding that it be read as a shifting, opportunistic, set of
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responses rather than as something sprung fully formed from the writer's brow. And each interpretative piece in the book tacitly demands comparison with what has - or, more pointedly, has not - been written by others on that topic before, while at the same time setting itself in series with other pieces in the book. The Viva Villa! piece, for example, ends with a playfully instructive section on the film's possible "authors" (Hecht, Conway, Hawks, Eisenstein, Mayer, et al.) and can be sited in a series of chapters dealing with quasi-political leaders in such other films as Francesco giullare di Dio, Citizen Kane and The king of New York (1989). But perhaps the most political aspect of Brenez's writing has to do with the "body" that her book examines and re-examines so obsessively. For it is not "the" body at all, but male bodies figured. Yet at the same time, this is not a book about "masculinity" nor yet about "the male body". It is about figuration, about how male bodies are figured, about the infinite degrees of that figuration, about the impossibility of definition and the inescapability of understanding. In a way any criticism, because of its specificity, its acknowledged finitude, always belongs to this unfinished, frankly provocative, way of dealing with works. Criticism is usually written about finite numbers of instances (one text or several examples). It may be explicitly tied to the time and place of its writing. Its ambitions are often very modest: to explain one aspect of its object, to attempt "a" reading or "my" reading, to enter into dialogue with other critics. The section of Auerbach's "Figura" which deals with The divine comedy is an example of such finite criticism - and the same can be said of most, perhaps all, of the interpretative analyses in Brenez's book. Moreover, in "Figura" the mediaeval tradition of figural interpretation occupies something like the place that classicism occupies in Brenez's "L'homme entier": a fulfilled figure is implied as the grounds for Auerbach's interpretation of Dante, just as a fulfilled figure is implied as the grounds of Brenez's interpretation of Viva Villa!. In both cases some kind of authorial intention has been figured by the critic: an intention to put figural or classical principles into practice on the part of an individual (Dante) or an institution (Hollywood). Even unfigured intentions are notoriously full in any case; and all intentions are notoriously betrayed or limited in the specificity of actual action. What happens in these instances of criticism is that a coincidence of critical and authorial vision is postulated precisely in the nebulous, mutating space of the figure. The critic sees, sees fully, the full intention of the text. But if that is so, then these fulfilled critical figures do not, in point of strict construction, occupy the same place that the kingdom of God does in traditional mediaeval figural thinking. They are, if anything, convenient masks for another figure fulfilled in the activity of criticism, in much the same way that Dante's particular version of the afterlife must be seen ultimately as a mask, a figure, for the true afterlife to come. It seems to me that for Auerbach the figure fulfilled in the activity of criticism is likely to have had a perfectly recognisable name: the community of scholars. Brenez might not use such a dated, not to say naive, formulation, but surely her intention is to commune with a group not unrelated to the one that used to be identified by that label. If Auerbach's criticism consciously reinvests the figural project into the linaments of modernity, as I believe it does, then it does so partly by redefining the starting point of criticism as the historically specific work instead of the historically specific figure, and by redefining the historically specific but not-yet-realised kingdom of God, which rules the figure, as what was, is and will be fulfilled in criticism: the historically specific but not-yet-realised community of scholars. Today we can go further than this. The same Jean-Luc Nancy who has been cited overtly twice before in this review has written extensively on what one translator has called the "inoperable
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community" (la communaut dsoeuvre) summoned into being by writing - most obviously in the book translated into English as The inoperative community, but also especially in The sense of the world. This is a somewhat different (unworking) group than the group of scholars, but not too far removed from it. Moreover, such a community, Nancy argues, is the only proper political community, the only unfulfilling political community. Not wishing to prolong what has become an extremely long review, nor yet to deny readers the very real pleasure of engaging with Nancy's work themselves, that impossible community seems to me to fit perfectly today where God's utopia was sited in mediaeval figural thinking - and where contemporary figural analysis desperately needs some analog of the kingdom of God in order to avoid writing predicated on a fullness to come. Indeed, those aspects of Nancy's writing dealing with figuration and with community bear a more than passing structural resemblance to Auerbach's account of those aspects of figural thought, refigured for a world in which, as Nancy says, the fulfilment of myth has been "interrupted".

Contra figure

Figural criticism does not - and, according to my account of it, cannot - pretend to provide those dissatisfied with the current smorgasbord of orthodoxies with an answer for every eventuality. Of the things it does not do, I want to close this review by mentioning only one, but one which is I think crucial. Figural criticism is, by its nature, static. It is concerned with "figures" - bounded, bundled entities of relations at best. Its notions of time extend only to an idea of duration internal to the figure and an idea of linearity (history) external to it. For example, nowhere in Brenez's book is there an attempt to deal in detail with the temporal presentation of a specific figure through the film in which it is articulated - what might be called its continuing transformation. Thus in her discussion of Frank White in The king of New York ("Frankly White", 225-238), the linear narrative presentation of White from his release from prison to his death is treated as an accumulation of figural traits which result in a (complete) figure, rather than as a changing, always incomplete, essay between past and future that never can say all that it might because bits keep falling off and getting added, exposed and obscured, and maybe not logically at that. Of course, no one writes criticism like that, but that does not mean that no one should. The as yet unmet challenge for film to thinking and writing is the challenge of dealing adequately with experiences of time. Figural criticism is simply not interested in, and not equipped for, fully meeting this challenge. I don't know what is. That species of impossible objection aside, it seems to me that De la figure en gnral et du corps en particulier, and Erich Auerbach's essay "Figura" are works that anyone interested in the criticism and analysis of films should read and think about. I hope that Brenez's book - all of it - will soon be translated into English so that her insightful and provocative work can annoy and intrigue an even wider audience than it has until now.

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References

Andrew, Dudley. "Figuration". [1983]. Concepts in film theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. 157-171. Auerbach, Erich. "Figura". [1938, 1939, 1944]. Translated by Ralph Manheim. [1959]. Scenes from the drama of European literature. Theory and history of literature, vol. 9. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. 11-76. Deleuze, Gilles. "The simulacrum and ancient philosophy". [1961, 1967, 1969]. Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. The logic of sense. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. 253-279. Heath, Stephen. "Body, Voice". [1979]. Questions of cinema. London: Macmillan, 1981. 172-193. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Lectures on the philosophy of world history. Introduction: reason in history. Translated by H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Metz, Christian. "Metaphor/Metonymy, or the imaginary referent". [1977]. Translated by Celia Britton and Annwyl Williams. Psychoanalysis and cinema: the imaginary signifier. London: Macmillan, 1982. 151-297. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The inoperative community. Translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland and Simona Sawhney. Theory and history of literature, vol. 76. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. -----. The sense of the world. Translated by Jeffrey S. Librett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Rodowick, D. N. "Reading the figural". Camera Obscura 24. 11-46. Sparks, Simon. "Editor's introduction: politica ficta". Retreating the political by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. London: Routledge, 1997. xiv-xxviii.

William D. Routt's For criticism part one

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