Film-Philosophy 16.

1 (2012)

Contrapuntal Close-up: The Cinema of John Cassavetes

and the Agitation of Sense

Daniele Rugo1

It depends on us, so it is said

(Heidegger 1996, 128)

Jean-Luc Nancy writes that there is no sense outside our being-together, no

sense without us. The philosophical import of this argument emerges from
the countersignature of a necessary corollary: that our being-together
remains an outside to any specific assignation of sense. According to
American director John Cassavetes this is the duty of cinema. His cinema
testifies with the use of close-up to a modality of making sense that rests
entirely on an in-appropriable term: us. What seems to emerge from the
work of Cassavetes is that our way of making sense (therefore of having a
world, the only one possible) maintains itself, on one side, on our being-
together and, on the other, on the impossibility to categorize us under a
particular form of being-together. The question can be formulated in this
way: is it not perhaps the case that for us to keep making sense, us has to
escape the very possibility of a definition?
These introductory remarks anticipate a description of the method
here followed. The philosophical approach to a filmmaker is not taken
simply as the possibility to unravel a convergence between concept and
image. The task cannot only be that of treating a film as a philosophical
example or to use a concept as a comprehensive approach to a particular
cinematographic work. It is a matter of investigating how both philosophy
and cinema creatively confront a problem: in this case the problem of our
being-together in its relation with the question of sense. It is therefore not a
matter of providing an entrance into Nancys philosophy in terms of
powers of existence or absolute realism (Derrida 2005, 46) or of
describing Cassavetess cinema often labeled as cinema vrit but of
how cinema reopens the sense of what happens between us. Moving
between philosophy and cinema one is always asked to look for their
internal alliance and their creative possibilities. It will be thus a matter of
exposing the cinematographic idea as it happens in the image and not to
impose ideas from the outside.

This work will proceed by unraveling three movements. The first part will
treat the question of sense as posed by Jean-Luc Nancy; the second will
investigate the relation of sense with cinema; the third will approach a
1
Goldsmiths, University of London: dan.rugo@gmail.com

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specific strategy at work in Cassavetess films. These three moments cannot

be seen as completely separated. This is an attempt to respond to Nancys
fragmentary style, where each concept works on an incessant movement of
presentation and withdrawal. What becomes apparent through these
negotiations is the struggle by which argumentation seems always to lead
thinking to moments of incommensurability that revitalize discourse without
being resolved. Each concept therefore is articulated as intensification or an
adjustment of the others.

We Are the World

There is no sense without us. There is no sense without our being-together.

There is a distance or otherness at the heart of sense. This otherness is not
constituted as a reference to a Universal, an Absolute or a Transcendental,
but in the event of our encountering one another. Sense is other than itself
because it keeps circulating between us.
Jean-Luc Nancys proposition demands that one understands what is
here meant by sense. 2 To an extent Nancys understanding of the
constitution of sense develops from a reading of Heidegger, in particular
from Heideggers emphasis on the necessary crossing of the question of the
world and that of Being-with-others (Heidegger 2006, 183). As in
Heidegger, the question of sense for Nancy always proceeds from a
framework of pre-understanding (what Heidegger names fore-having, fore-
seeing, fore-conceiving). Sense responds to a primordial familiarity with the
world: it thus rests on a secondary affirmation and articulation of what we
have encountered in our originary assignation (Angewiesenheit) to the
world (Heidegger 2001, 120). According to this primordial disclosure of
the world, sense is there always to be articulated. Because sense receives a
pre-understanding, immediacy and givenness, its work is to be found in how
we reopen the obvious: that which we receive. What is in the thing must
always be articulated in the world and with Others. Only Dasein is
meaningful or meaningless, because the world and others make up Daseins
existence. Sense develops then from a primordial familiarity with the world.
This primordial familiarity must be entered by Dasein and articulated; it is
in this articulation that sense begins. Paraphrasing Heidegger one could
argue that sense is such as long as we maintain a relation to it (2001, 120).
Sense is the opening of the possibility of assigning things some sense or
another, according to the relation into which they enter. If the primordial
understanding the Heideggerian Vorhabe, Vorsicht, Vorgriff (Heidegger
2006, 191) must be reopened in terms of concerns and circulation, then
the world has to be understood as a set of relationships. The world involves
2
Nancy asks the question of sense in a number of texts, more explicitly in A Finite
Thinking: What is sense? What is the sense of the word sense and what is the reality of
this thing sense? (Nancy 2003, 5).

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primarily a relational interpretation. This, however, also means that any

enquiry as to the sense of something is an enquiry into sense itself, into the
very structure of sense. That an un-grounding and upheaval of sense
provides senses framework becomes clear from Heideggers remark that a
ground becomes accessible only as meaning, even if it is itself the abyss of
meaninglessness (2006, 194). Every time an assignation of sense is
performed one is moving right into the structure of sense itself. According
to the relational model, understanding the world thus making sense of
sense means always to situate oneself at the heart of a sharing. Every
attempt at accounting for the singular must necessarily understand the
resonances that this singularity has on the circulation of sense (which is
quite different from handing the singular over to a universal). The
conclusion at this point could be that the creation of sense happens primarily
as circulation. One could say that the articulation of the givenness of the
world (familiarity) starts with an articulation with and of others. If the logic
of sense is the ex-scription always at work in the movement of its
circulation, then the only property of sense is its continuous reopening (or
exposure to its own differing). It is for this reason that sense can never be
closed or assigned once and for all; for its referentiality to work, this must
be open again. This, however, means that something shows itself as
incommensurable to any specific assignation of sense.
Sense is that from which something becomes understandable as that
which it is. Something becomes understandable only from its circulation
within a world of human existence. Sense is therefore always performed in
the circulation enacted by our being-together.
Understood in this way, then, sense addresses the world directly,
dismissing any absolute or ultimate connotation. This is what Nancy means
when he says the world is without reason and that this very lack opens our
way to the sense of the world (2007, 11):

If the world essentially is not the representation of a universe, nor

that of a here below, but the excess beyond any representation of
an ethos or of a habitus, of a stance by which the world stands by
itself, configures itself, and exposes itself in itself, relates to itself
without referring to any given principle or to any determined end,
then one must address the principle of such an absence of principle
directly (Nancy 2007, 47).

To this effect Nancy traces a deconstructive analysis of the onto-theological

tradition in terms of the gradual subtraction of the world as the subject of a
representation.3 The more God enters the world and comes to coincide with

3
Of particular relevance to Nancys analysis are the questions Heideggers asks in The
Onto-theological Constitution of Metaphysics (Heidegger 2002, 42 76).

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an organizing principle, the more its divinity is relegated to a complete

departure from the world itself. Furthermore, to say that a world is without
reason also points critically to the search for an encompassing rationality.
As already analyzed by Heidegger in his lectures on Leibniz, the search for
a Rational Ground ends in the paradoxical situation of a ground that no
reason can account for, leaving every grounding ultimately ungrounded.
The world cannot be accounted for, neither by an external principle, nor by
an ultimate Being; every account is negotiated in the transimmanent
circulation of sense.4 This implies that the world has no ground beyond its
own taking place: its sense residing only in our way of in-habiting it.
Nancy speaks at times of the end of the world; however, this end

cannot mean that we are confronted merely with the end of a certain
conception of the world []. It means that there is no longer any
assignable signification of world or that the world is subtracting
itself from the entire regime of signification available to us (1997,
5).

A world without reason is a world whose sense has cleared the horizon and
must be continuously reopened. Nancys analysis culminates in an
understanding of the world as that which responds to the question of what
happens between us. To this effect Nancy writes that the world is a fact
without reason or end, and it is our fact (2007, 45). Us can be pronounced
only insofar as it is pronounced within the limits of this world here, whilst
the sense of the world is always given in the way of the Heideggerian
familiarity only insofar as it given to us: given to be given again. Such a
manner of thinking permits sense to be grasped in a perpetual form of
displacement where the world is both what it is and also what separates
itself from immediate givenness.

Cinema and the Sense of the World

Does not cinema take up precisely this double demand of sense constant
opening of an immanence and fix our gaze on this world here, by giving
us a look upon a world of which it is itself part and parcel? (Nancy 2001c,
16). Following Deleuzes argument, one can read modern cinema as
reestablishing our belief in the world. As Deleuze puts it: what is certain is
that believing is no longer believing in another world, or in a transformed
world (2005, 167). This belief for non-believers demands that one thinks of
a world moving of its own motion, without a heaven or a wrapping,
without fixed moorings or suspensions (Nancy 2001c, 44). This is the
belief that modern cinema gives us: a belief not falling from the sky
cinema speaks also of the silence of God but arising as it were from the
4
See (Nancy 2004).

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bottom of our bodies. 5 This belief, outside any restoration, must be

discovered in the diction of the word world.
Instead of an assured, established and permanent sense, modern
cinema opens inside itself a world whose sense is withdrawn and must be
recreated: as Nancy puts it, neither a realist nor a fictional phantasm,
but life presented or offered in its evidence (2001c, 58). Cinema detaches
itself from the problem of truth, carrying its work towards what one could
call an existence, a discontinuity of the two poles true/false. Nancy writes to
this effect: this existence relates to a world: set down, felt, received as a
singular point of passage in the circulation of meaning (2001c, 44).
Between cinema and the world does not subsist a relation of analogy
anymore. Cinema does not represent the world; it does not mirror it. Reality
is not simply registered in its immediacy; in cinema, experience is not
reduced and incorporated. Instead the impossibility of capturing it under the
regime of truth liberates once more the togetherness and the sharing of
experiences evidence as undecidability.
Once cinema has entered the mode of existence as opposed to that of
truth, then the question is posed to our gaze. It is a matter not of receiving
the world and its senses, but of deciding over the real as given to us by
cinema. This decision passes through our way of looking as a way of
articulating the evidence of the world. The image under the regime of
existence cannot simply be accepted; it must be done again, recreated in its
evidences. These evidences set in front of us by cinema correspond to a
disclosure of the world. The world is delivered and therefore separated from
its character of mere given. Evidence would stand for the fact that the
indeterminate totality of the world is presented to us as a sparkle that
extinguishes itself. That the world is given, and given as a whole, makes
sense only due to the singular evidences that on one side expose it and on
the other discharge both its wholeness (the worlds grip on itself) and its
givenness (the worlds eternal resemblance to itself, or what one could call
representation). The absolute referentiality of the world is interrupted so that
referentiality can keep happening. Understood in these terms, the sense of
the world is thus the discontinuity of what keeps happening (Nancy 2001c,
44): wholeness gathered only in indefinite evidences.
Deleuze seems to reach a similar conclusion when he writes that
falsifying narrations free themselves from the system of actual, localized
and chronological relations. The elements are constantly changing according
to the relations of time into which they enter and the terms of their
connections. Narration is constantly being completely modified. We witness
the emergence of purely cinematographic powers. There is something of a
doing in my looking: a mobilizing of the world, an agitating and an

5
See in particular the pages devoted to Rossellini and Bresson in (Revault dAllonnes 1994,
21 23).

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organizing. In a truly Heideggerian way, Nancy remarks that presence is

not a mere matter of vision: it offers itself in encounters, worries, concerns
(2001c, 30). What this means is that our gazes disclose the real without
trying to master it. Looking just amounts to thinking the real, to test oneself
with regard to a meaning one is not mastering (Nancy 2001c, 38); one finds
cinema in a completely new situation, responding to a radically different
definition. Cinema becomes the art of looking made possible and required
by a world that refers only to itself and to what is real in it (Nancy 2001c,
18). In this way the evidence of cinema is that of the existence of a look
through which a world can give back to itself its own real and the truth of its
enigma (Nancy 2001c, 18). The relation between cinema and the world
becomes the sharing of an intimacy crossed by a distance that is never
absorbed. This distance is exactly what allows not just the relation between
cinema and the world to rest entirely on the real (which is therefore not
alienated but confirmed and reopened in images), but also the relations
within the cinematographic image to take the real into account as its
ultimate horizon. It is not just about images and the laws of their
accordance. It is about images opening onto the real and carrying this
irruption all the way into the givenness of the world. As Nancy puts it:

Cinema stretches and hangs between a world in which representation

was in charge of the signs of truth or of the warrant of a presence to
come and another world that opens onto its own presence through a
voiding where its thoughtful evidence realizes itself (2001c, 56).

What this implies is engagement with other gazes, a becoming intimate with
otherness at a distance.

Contrapuntal Close-up

John Cassavetes was one of those directors walking within the distance that
brings the cinematographic image to the point where what is at stake is not
fiction or reality, but rather their continuous crossing (a sort of double-
crossing). In their analysis of Faces (John Cassavetes, 1968), Pierre and
Comolli write that Cassavetes does not use cinema as a way of reproducing
actions, faces or ideas, but as a way of producing them []: the film is what
causes each event to happen (Pierre and Comolli 1986, 326).
The occasion for a film for Cassavetes always springs in the
midst of the everyday, in the turbulence of the ordinary, when things go
wrong, when you get detoured, when you cant find your way home
(Carney 2001, 161). These formulas all point in one direction: to make
movies about people. This is the main duty Cassavetes saw for himself as a
filmmaker: to liberate something in our being-together, to let the sense of
our being-together undertake a continuous negotiation. What Cassavetes

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strove for was a cinema that took the chance to approach the image not as a
given, but as the outcome of the interruption of lives and contacts. Deleuze
captures this when he writes,

this is what Cassavetes was already saying in Shadows [(1959)] and

then Faces; what constitutes part of the film is interesting oneself in
people rather than in the film [] so that people do not pass over to
the side of the camera without the camera having passed to the side
of the people (Deleuze 2005, 149).

What does it mean to interest oneself in people? For Cassavetes it means to

find a model that allows people to come to the side of the camera, without
the camera deciding on their ways of being-together once and for all. In
short, it means letting our being-together articulate and simultaneously
withdraw itself. At the same time this means exposing cinemas deficiency
to draw a properly spontaneous picture of life, an immediate one. For
Cassavetes this deficiency is the very power of cinema, not a negative
power, but the very occasion of cinema. Cinema should not keep away from
its incapacity to picture reality immediately, but should enter the sense of
the world from this very incapacity.
What model of being-together emerges from Cassavetess films?
The point to be made relates to how the presences on the screen trigger a
particular kind of relation. An answer emerges from Cassavetess use of the
close-up and the contrapuntal structure this propels. By way of the
contrapuntal use of the close-up Cassavetes is able to elaborate a model of
distance, a sociality understood in terms of distinction rather than
absorption, one in which cinema is shown to collaborate to the articulation
of the sense of the world.
Faces in particular is a film where the close-up is used to the point
of violence: that is to say, to the point where it blocks the smooth flowing of
the film. In fact there is nothing smooth about Faces; the film is constantly
consumed into a series of impediments, from which the film has to start
again. The apparent simplicity of the plot is continuously interrupted and
proceeds only in the interruptions themselves. One is always called to
mobilize what has crumbled from the image, recollecting a series of
leftovers and missed chances. This strategy is conveyed mainly thanks to
the use of close-ups or extreme close-ups. By interrupting the plot, by
disturbing the organic linkages of the narration, close-ups establish a
register that exceeds the story and seems almost to precede it. While the
film depicts a stiff social situation characterized by individualism,
embedded in the idea of marriage as a constraint whose outcome is a well-
known collection of middle-class repressive norms and betrayals what is
liberated in the series of successive close-ups is a distance that calls for a
different model of being-together.

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To put it succinctly, Cassavetess use of the close-up can be distinguished

on a number of points:

1. Cassavetes operates what Deleuze calls an erasure of the face (2005,

102). He does so in that he places the face there where it should not
be: there where everything else is expected. The face testifies for the
dispersion of the evidence. Faces is a film of dispersed (and
agitated) presences: this dispersion reaches its peak in the play of
close-ups. The close-up is constantly trapped in this leap towards an
outside of itself as if it were there to declare its impossibility: the
impossibility of recollecting in its frozen gesture any meaningful
statement.
2. The faces in Faces do not just suspend individuation, but allow this
suspension to trigger the circulation of sense within the film: the
sense of the film as situations rendered by a sending toward, rather
than by a meaningful closure; the sense of the film as materiality on
and through which looks encounter one another. In other words
conditions, locations and positions open into absences and at the
same time these absences make the happening of relations most
evident. Close-ups link one presence to another and in so doing they
underline the importance of what the spectators cannot see: the
distance required by relation. Close-ups show what is beyond their
reach; they push this beyond inside the frame and displace what
falls inside the frame.
3. Cassavetes managed to put in the close-up the openness of a long
shot by accumulating one close-up after the other. Once the face
appears, it appears as the excluded and the intruder at the same time.
Close-ups serve to allow the characters to stay together and to
prevent one character from standing out, from being singled out.
4. Through the close-up what is established is a mode of relation
without relation; what is at stake is a coming of the relation without
this having to be announced. Relation is realized in the action and is
not then the substratum that motivates and directs the action. In this
also resides the great vulnerability of the faces of the film. The
measure of this relation the face is itself non-presentable.

Pan-orama

At the very beginning of The Evidence of Film Nancy writes: capturing

images is clearly an ethos, a disposition and a conduct with regard to the
world (2001c, 16). What Nancy is expressing here is that the capturing of
images exposes the worlds standing on itself and opens our standing in it.

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Capturing images is an exposing of the world and a way in which the world
exposes itself.
For Cassavetes the close-up is not just a device thanks to which the
director arranges the internal structure of his work; rather, it becomes a
particular way of happening in the world and of the worlds passing through
the image. The close-up becomes the way to capture and make remarkable
the evidence of our being-together. Cassavetess ethos revolves around an
attempt to unsettle our gaze. What the director demands on our part is to
abandon both an all-encompassing gaze (objects of the film are signified
regardless of their singularity) and an absorbed one (the objects of the film
replace reality by providing a vision of it): not a panoramic perspective, but
our distance to the film and the distances within the film.
As the word indicates, panorama, from the Greek , means
to see everything or, better said, to strive for everything to become visible,
to act so that everything surfaces and occupies a place in front of us. The
concept of panorama works here on two levels. On one side the panorama is
what allows us to gain an overview, a general gathering in front of our eyes:
a gathering where presence melts into a plurality that forecloses any
singularity from appearing and anything from appearing as singularity. This
is the panorama as whole, submitted to a gaze that remains, as it were,
outside. One the other side, the panorama also gives to the eye the
opportunity of seeing not the whole, but each and every thing, every tiny
detail. In this scenario things come from an infinite distance and we descend
into them apprehending their porosity, grasping their granular, corpuscular
texture; our gaze becomes permeated by things.
One should notice that in Faces no character is granted enough
space so as to be alone, so as to become the character. The shot-reverse shot
composition, which would wrench the individual out of the context, is
almost never employed. At the same time one never has the impression of
receiving a general overview despite the choral nature of the film.
Cassavetes aims to play in between the uprising of the main character a
detail that one is forced to take as everything and the presentation of the
whole, where every presence is present inside the frame. His gesture is
something like a play with distances. To this effect Pascal Bonitzer notes
that the camera in Cassavetes accompanies a system of crises (Bonitzer
1985, 8).
As Raymond Carney writes, Cassavetes works to resist the
individual effort to isolate himself (Carney 1985, 98), so to prevent the
individual performer from elevating himself above the in-common into
which he is plunged. The character is everywhere put back into a series of
relationships (Carney 1985, 98). If one were to fix all this in a formula, one
could say: Faces starts with us. This beginning though is never a given one;
one never starts by resigning to reified social procedures. On the contrary,
Cassavetess films open precisely with a smashing through of common

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measures (thus friendship proceeds from the loss of the friend, couples live
off impossible ruins, the individual undertakes a complete expenditure for
example, Cosmo or Myrtle or dissipates by chasing him or herself in an
outside: Gloria and the kid, Sara and the animals). In Cassavetes being-
together, our being us, is never a crystallized constellation; the tidiness of its
horizon and the prudence of its functions are explored in view of an
explosion. Characters do not put themselves to work to reach, as it were, a
kind of communality; quite the opposite, the picture is almost always about
disintegration.
Being-together takes place in this world here as that which holds
itself together through the constant reframing of its given senses. In order to
achieve this restless taking place of us, Cassavetes orchestrates the close-
ups in a contrapuntal way. This means that close-ups are independent but
harmonically related. They are independent in that they appear not as
intimately chained to the series to which they contribute; they are
interdependent in that they are not there to underline ones role, gestures,
words, face, but to introduce one more close-up, which will revolve around
something different, putting the film back into the open. Carney notes that
Cassavetes intercuts and edits together close-ups of over forty interrelated
glances, responses and adjustments of position (Carney 1985, 101). What
emerges from this circulation is the constant pulse of simultaneous
presences. In this way us becomes almost a white noise; never falling into
complete silence and at the same time creating itself outside absorption into
a specific set of significations. Cassavetes seems to try to reply to the
demand to say us otherwise than as one and otherwise than as I
(Nancy 2001b, 116).
By means of contrapuntal close-ups, Cassavetes is able to oppose a
play of distance to the double signification of the pan-orama. He never
allows us to see the whole, or every detail, of a given situation. He plays in
between these two categories. Distance should be thought here as the taking
place which is also a habitus, an ethos towards the world of a difference
that is constitutive of ones own place. This would be defined as a
qualitative distance at the heart of our being-together, but also with regard
to every possible association of being-together with one particular reified
version of its happening. Distance names on one side the impossibility of
closing oneself from others by pushing them at an irreducible distance and
the impossibility of understanding being-together without distinction,
separation, withdrawal from unity. What happens between us is exposed
thus according to a contrapuntal logic whereby the singular is called an
each-one each time it exposes itself to the many. In this process the each-
one is not constructed and then absorbed, rather it is exposed to its own
being-together; it finds itself as the singular as long as it is plural. The
singular happens to be together, and this happening is the very essence of
its singularity.

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Discussing the work of Cassavetes, Deleuze points out that,

linkages, connections, or liaisons are deliberately weak [],

sometimes the event delays and is lost in idles periods, sometimes it
is there too quickly but it does not belong to the one to whom it
happens (2005, 211).

Deleuze proceeds to say that: the characters can act, perceive, experience,
but they cannot testify to the relations which determine them (2005, 271).
The close-up identifies an element in order to let the identified play with the
plurality that its identification exposes. Identifying the singular in this case
would also be opening up, gaining access to the plurality. Cassavetes makes
clear that the regime of identification is inseparable from a regime of
distancing, of even minimal spacing, sharing and circulation. Something in
this regime remains incommensurable: in the attempt to name our being-
together a distance surfaces again, which keeps it outside both the
identification of the singular as individual identity and from the higher order
of a plural unity. The movement in the close-up is not directed from one to
many, but passes both types and rests in this passing, therefore never really
resting on anything. It takes place between us, between the each-one and the
many.
The attention paid in every close-up to the singular and the repetition
of this gesture for other singulars, without ever letting one be the only One,
are not just cinematic gestures responding to an effort to achieve a choral
composition. Rather than producing a common ground, they function as an
attempt to reach the eventual trait of our being-together. Being-together,
then: an explosion of singularities exposing, each in its own way, an access
to the plurality that they also are. This is nothing other than us and nothing
less than the circulation of sense. By using the close-up in a contrapuntal
way, by cutting several close-ups one next to the other, Cassavetes
(dis)organizes the composition: the close-up exposes sociality being-here-
together as a happening that is sustained only by the fact that it is
happening as the displaced appearance of each one. Sociality is not reduced
but exploded in these situations; what makes it solid, what prevents it from
dissolving, is that each one poses a distance that can not be reduced in view
of a transcendental or autarchic unity. Many authors have identified a sense
of destruction at work in Cassavetess images. Kouvaros speaks of a
tension between composition and annihilation at work in the very
construction of the image (2004, 149), and of a filming technique that tends
to eat away the characters, showering them in too much light or losing
them in a deliberate underexposure (2004, 149). Jousse puts it in terms of
elusiveness when he says that, the aim of Cassavetess cinema is to show
the streams which surround a person, a constantly moving rhythm between

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beings and things which is beyond the self, elusive (quoted in Kouvaros
2004, 117). Locations can abruptly change coordinates while at the same
time empty spaces can be suddenly saturated. Events become bigger than
life, but in those it is still existence itself, our being-together, that becomes
bigger than its acquired meanings.
Sociality in Cassavetes and all his films are in this way utterly
social never rests on an obligation, a principle: it always takes an
adverbial form. This is what contrapuntal indicates: the simultaneity is not
simply an appearing of singularities into a higher mode, but the appearing of
distinct singularities. This co-appearance is for them neither reception of an
extrinsic property the coming of an accident nor giving of intimacy the
unleashing of an a priori. Contrapuntal is the distance of one from the other
when those ones are together. This sociality responds to the very logic of
sense exposed at the beginning: sense is always directed to the world and is
always caught in a circulation. This circulation is the very possibility of
sense; that there is circulation maintains sense in that openness which
provides it with the possibility of further articulating our primordial
familiarity with the world. For this to be possible though, the sense of our
being-together must constantly remain in the open; the very openness of
sense is assured only here, once the instant where circulation is enacted
keeps itself, as it were, in the future.
This situation of our being-together is barely presentable, if not as
the time it takes from one cut to the next, from one close-up to the next, the
non-consequential appearance of one face after another. Not presentable
because it cannot be reduced to one single vision, this is what makes the
with appear and withdraw at the same time. To some extent one could say
that those are not images, or barely so, if the image is what detaches itself
completely and lies in a temporary isolation. These images never
completely disentangle themselves from the series, from other images; the
process of extraction that the image necessarily propels is not completely
accomplished. This is why Pierre and Comolli can speak of Cassavetess
films as having an alcoholic form (Pierre and Comolli 1986, 325). Filming
is never simply the attempt to render a narrative or a silent act of witnessing;
rather, the camera flings the mundanities of day-to-day life towards a
constant crisis whereby we are no longer sure how things come together or
what the proper order of things is (one could say that the everyday is taken
as a portion of a mobile eternity). Our being-together sustains itself only on
the openness of sense, only in presenting itself anew, thus also veering away
from reality as the state of things, from the marking of sense.
The feverish nature of many Cassavetess films, the feeling of
exhaustion and authentic discomfort they convey to the audience, the fact
that the action is followed almost in real time, spanning across a short
period of time (a few days or even hours): all these factors depend on an
attempt to make any reference external to the film itself unnecessary.

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Talking about Faces the director often said that it had become a way of life.6
Rather than delivering the film to the real, the film sucks the real in. Things
are left without the time to corrupt themselves nor the origin to find
themselves (Blanchot 1999b, 258). Realism here does not try to facilitate
forgetfulness of the apparatus, so to capture an immediate presence or to
craft the image in so much detail as to look real. Following Cassavetess
affirmative acceptance of the deficiency of cinema, the real is taken
according to what suggests,

that with which our relationship is always alive and which always
leaves us the initiative, addressing that power we have to begin, that
free communication with the beginning that is ourselves. (Blanchot
1999a, 418)

The birth of the film has no other resource than what is happening in front
of our eyes, and what is happening is the impossibility of a presence that is
not also making itself present and is therefore always on the verge of
becoming the instinctual flow of time. The film maintains itself in our
power to begin. Cassavetes seems to say: we are always there and this is
given not as a condition or agreement, but as the affirmation of something
that only lives off this affirmation. Pushing a colloquial formula to paradox,
what these films say is: there is no reason for being-here-together, therefore
we are here-together. This area of a being-together without reason brings to
the fore the very possibility of openness that sense demands as the grasping
and veering away from senses immediate presence. In his discussion of the
multiplicity of the arts Nancy writes to this effect:

the sense of the world is only given by dis-locating at the origin its
unique and unitary sense of sense in the general zoning that is
sought in each of the many differential distributions of the senses
[]. There would be no world if there were no discreteness. (1996,
19)

Conclusions

In this light the with in the expression being-with (being-together is another

name for it) remains non-appropriable and its logic comes into sight as one
of separation. Without being a thing, the with is that which commands a
logic of relation based on the distinction of the terms that engage in the
relation. In other words, the separation of the terms imposed by the with is

6
It is interesting to quote the entire of passage of the interview: We decided that if it ended
up being ten hours, then thats the film that we're going to make. It became more than just a
film; it became a way of life. It became a feeling against the authority that stood in the way
of people expressing themselves as they wanted (Carney 2001, 149).

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that which allows the terms to keep relating to each other. With designates
relation in terms of that which happens and withdraws between us. With is
nothing, meaning that it is not some thing, which could then fall under a
specific signification. As Nancy puts it, the law of the with is that of the
distinct that distinguishes itself in entering the relation [] coming to the
other and separating itself from it (2001b, 22).
Such a manner of thinking permits one to grasp sense in a perpetual
form of displacement where the world is both what it is and also what
separates itself from immediate givenness. The with is not a simple device,
but this very logic of unsettlement and distance: a logic that prevents the
becoming absolute of sense in a principle beyond its circulation in the
world. That the with of our being-together remains incommensurable to any
attempt at making sense of it guarantees circulation. Only a sociality
understood in this way reconciles sense with its openness; only
understanding our being-together as the resistance to an inscription into one
particular sense (destination or fate) maintains sense in the articulation of
the obvious contact with the world. The incommensurability of our being-
together to any specific reference allows us to see sense as the ongoing
circulation between immediacy and mediation.
Within a cinema that works under the mode of existence, every
being and the world itself has to be judged with regard to the life that it
involves, and only with regard to this. If Nancy can say that cinema
becomes the taking-place of a relation (2001c, 44), this is because perhaps a
certain cinema is able to expose what one could call a power of existence:
the fact that existences decision is a persisting-in-decision. But in existence
it is always us that is at stake, nothing other than the circulation of sense
between us. In existence it is always a matter of us undeciding ourselves by
responding to a common task, a task imposed on us all together [] to say
us exactly there where this possibility seems to vanish sometimes into a
one, sometimes into an I (Nancy 2001b, 116).
Perhaps this is the opportunity of a cinema that despite the
constraints and impediments of production (and these can never be
considered simply external factors) still tries to orient itself according to
its own inability to grasp life immediately, and remains therefore in a state
of agitation. One could thus ask if perhaps in a film exposing this agitation
which echoes the deficiency as to the definition of us a crack can be seen
to open, which enables us to start dissolving the semblance of the obvious
(Adorno 2005, 12).

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Filmography
Cassavetes, John (1959) Shadows. USA.
Cassavetes, John (1968) Faces. USA.

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