I wanted to draw comparisons between what Deleuze writes
concerning disjunctions of image and text (or rather between what is
visible and what is articulated), in Allois’ film on Pierre Rivière
(particularly the opening scene of the tree image/courtroom sound which
is mentioned in an endnote in his book on Foucault. Deleuze also
mentions Straubs, Syberberg and Duras – filmmakers I’m going to seek out
– as being exemplary in their treatment of this disjunction), and
similar concerns raised by Jacques Rancière in the opening essay in The Future of the Image. Like Deleuze, Rancière focuses on the opening sequence of a film – in this case the first sequences of Robert Bresson’s Au hazard Balthazar
(1966). Rancière describes how this sequence exposes the play of image
operations – what he sees as “relations between a whole and parts,
between a visibility and a power of signification and affect associated
with it; between expectations and what happens to meet them” (The Future of the Image,
3) – firstly through the juxtaposition of a Schubert sonata with a run
of black leader before the titles, then its replacement with the braying
of a donkey playing against a n image of a plain exterior wall; or
mouths not being visible against words spoken from them – all image
functions that subvert and contradict what has been uttered or written
through them.
All these elements, for Rancière, are where Bresson stages
oppositions and between the various elements and functions of the image,
setting up tensions and interruptions, contrasts and separations. The
materials in play are not images of a donkey and a groups of characters,
nor any deployments of technical modalities, fading and cutting in,
dissolve and exchanging between POVs, etc, but the operations that
couple and uncouple what is seen and what is spoken, constantly working
with and against expectation. This is not a specifically cinematic
technique for Rancière – in fact he traces it to developments in the
19th Century novel (especially Flaubert) and a retrained focus on
heretofore ‘insignificant’ details or on material that would previously
have been considered unsuitable for artistic attention. They both forge
and undo meaning in action – the ability to anticipate and frustrate
expectation, engaging the components of a composite like a series of
differential gears. It is artistic images that produce discrepancy and
dissemblance as well as analogy, that “produce forms of alteration in
relation to the normal – or consensual – forms of sensible presentation,
modes of linkages of events, modes of relations between a sensory given
and a meaning.”
Rancière goes on to specify that the image is not exclusive to the
visible – “there is visibility that doesn’t amount to an image; there
are images which consist wholly in words.” (The Future of the Image,
7) Deleuze and Foucault talk about the webs of relations that stream
between what is visible and what is articulated – and the perpetual
cracks/hinges between them. Between the visible and the articulable
there is no common form, yet at the same time the two spill over into
each other, each being insinuated in whatever gaps occur in the battle
between them. This is possibly where I can refer to the discourse that
features so heavily in Rene Allois’ film I, Pierre Rivière, having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister and My Brother
– that written by Pierre following his capture. Although I’m not so
sure about any comparisons to be drawn between the two films – nor
between the ‘lead’ figures of Pierre and Balthazar – it’s interesting to
have come across these two examples of opening sequences that, for
their respective authors, constitute such prime examples of a parade of
disjunction between what is seen and what is articulated. Nonetheless,
it is worth considering how the production of writing by Pierre –
assigned such power by Foucault, might be considered as functioning,
through its proximity to image (and what is this? The vivid nature of
the young man’s writing, his style, his desperation, the strangeness of
the imagery, its clouded relation to the recorded events or the
testimony of others?), to reconfigure the frameworks of the visible and
the thinkable. Is it possible to think of a writing that can so scramble
the formations of thought that it can begin to dismiss even the
admissions of guilt and wrongdoing it specifically addresses and admits
to. This is a writing that can get you out of anything – not the gift of
gab, but something far more potent. As always, I am reminded of
Burroughs suggesting that there existed a writing that kill, but what
about a writing that redraws the coordinates of meaning, responsibility
and societal practice – a writing that is in some way contaminated by
image, rendered diagrammatic as a demonic combination of saying and
showing.
I just found this – which ties in to something about reenactment I was already thinking about in relation to Allois’ film and Lanzmann’s Shoah (but don’t have time to concentrate on) – one of the directorial assistants on the original film is going back.
