If truths exist, they are certainly indifferent to
differences.
Alain Badiou
CWC-WUN seminar - 19 October 2011
Lúcia Nagib
Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner (Zacharias Kunuk, 2001),
the first Inuit feature film
Yaaba (Idrissa Ouédraogo, 1989), the Mossi people of
the Sahel
Black God, White Devil (Deus e o diabo na terra do sol,
Glauber Rocha, 1964), Brazil’s Cinema Novo milestone
The 400 Blows (Les Quatre cents coups, François
Truffaut, 1959), the first Nouvelle Vague feature film
Focus on modes of production and address:
bodily enactment.
Body theories: modes of reception and
spectatorship: reviving spectatorial pleasure
and the embodied spectator.
Sobchack: ‘cinesthetic subject’, ‘embodied
knowledge’, ‘interobjectivity’.
Marks: blurring the boundaries between
subject and object: ‘haptic criticism’.
Kracauer: cinema, as a photographic medium, is
‘uniquely equipped to record and reveal physical
reality’.
Bazin: film, more than any other plastic arts, is
destined to realism from birth as it enables a transfer
of ‘the reality from the thing to its reproduction’.
Kracauer’s redemptive realism, Bazin’s ontology, and
the latter’s semiotic translation, ‘indexicality’, relate
to processes of recording, leaving open the ways in
which the profilmic event is produced and dealt with
by crew and cast.
Elsaesser: ‘ontological turn mark two’, which
emerges from a ‘post-epistemological’ time and
‘breaks with the Cartesian subject-object split,
abandoning or redefining notions of subjectivity,
consciousness, identity in the way these have
hitherto been used and understood’.
Rosen: realism, for Bazin, is of value only insofar
as it makes sense to a ‘phenomenological
cinematic subject’: ‘It is … the activity and desire
of the subject – “our obsession with realism”.’
Kunuk:
This digital technology is always there. You
shoot it and then you watch it. You improve it
right on the set. That [camerawork] is Norman
Cohn’s style. That’s how he shoots, and it’s
better – it looks more real. When we have
white-out – when the snow is white, the sky is
white – that’s going to be visually too ‘hot’, so
you have to get close, and Norman knows all
about that.
The shooting of the climactic race was carried out with
a camera mounted on an oversize sledge, pulled and
pushed by crew members on foot on an ice surface
where no motor vehicles would have had access, while
Ungalaaq enacts his naked run.
Luc Moullet: ‘Morality is a question of tracking
shots’ (‘La morale est affaire de travellings’).
Godard: ‘Le travelling est une question de morale’.
The spectacle of the physical world, the spectacle
of the earth is his [Fuller’s] best terrain of
inspiration, and if he is attached to the human
being, it is only insofar as this human being is
attached to the earth (Moullet).
Stanislavski:
‘Of significance to us is: the reality of the inner
life of a human spirit in a part and a belief in
that reality. We are not concerned with the
actual naturalistic existence of what surrounds
us on the stage, the reality of the material
world ‘.
Bodily commitment starts with the belief in the reality of
the material world, which goes in hand with a belief in
cinema’s unlimited power to convey this reality.
Crews and casts feel not only enabled, but morally obliged
to express the truth about the land and the people the film
is focusing on through a fictional plot.
Rather than symbiosis with fictional characters, the actors’
physical engagement with performance is thus as much an
engagement with a real context as it is with a film about it.
As a film event, physical acting relates to contingency,
rather than narrative mimesis, with presentation of reality
as it happens, rather than representation, and this is
where commitment translates into an ethics.
Marks:
‘What the work of art, the writing, and the
world in which they exist have in common is
not as valuable as the differences among
them are. The world would cease to exist if
this common language were found’.
‘A look that acknowledges both the
physicality and the unknowability of the
other is an ethical look’.
Badiou:
‘There is no God. Which also means: the One is not. The
multiple “without-one” – every multiple being in its turn
nothing other than a multiple of multiples – is the law of
being. The only stopping point is the void. …Infinite
alterity is quite simply what there is. Any experience at all
is the infinite deployment of infinite differences. Even the
apparently reflexive experience of myself is by no means
the intuition of a unity but a labyrinth of differentiations,
and Rimbaud was certainly not wrong when he said: “I am
another.” There are as many differences, say, between a
Chinese peasant and a young Norwegian professional as
between myself and anybody at all, including myself. As
many, but also, then, neither more nor less’.
Atanarjuat holds the primacy of the insider’s
point of view with relation to the Inuit
culture.
The Sahel landscape, its Mossi people and
Moré language have been similarly
established by Yaaba.
The same with Rocha’s sertão (backlands), its
cangaceiros (outlaws) and messianic leaders,
which, in a time of consolidation of national
cinemas, became the real image of Brazil.
The commitment to the truth of the
unpredictable event.
A basic faithfulness to the profilmic
phenomenon, combined with the inherent
‘honesty of the film medium’ (Rancière), was the
main requirement of Bazin’s realism.
Badiou’s ethics is not averse to universals, but
recognizes the universality produced by a ‘truth-
procedure’.
The ethical subject is characterized by ‘an active
fidelity to the event of truth’.