Cosmopolitical Spectatorship in Resnais, Kluge, and Sembène
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COSMOPOLITICAL SPECTATORSHIP IN RESNAIS, KLUGE, AND SEMBÈNE By DANIEL NORFORD A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2017 © 2017 DANIEL NORFORD To Krissi, without whom this would not have been possible. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To my parents, Ann and Don, who have been unflaggingly supportive; to my brother, Jesse, for his lifelong friendship; to my partner, Krissi, who has shown patience, support, and love throughout this process; to my dissertation chair, Barbara Mennel, for her indispensable support, guidance, and rigor, and to my dissertation readers, Maureen Turim, Philip Wegner, and Alioune Sow, for their insightful comments and guidance. Thank you also to the students at the UF Application Support Center, who guided me through the process of formatting this document for final submission. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... 6 ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 7 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... 8 2 NIGHT AND FOG, HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR, AND COSMOPOLITICAL SPECTATORSHIP ................................................................................................. 26 3 EXTRATERRESTRIAL BIO-POWER: ALEXANDER KLUGE’S UTOPIAN SPECTATORSHIP ................................................................................................. 77 4 OUSMANE SEMBÈNE’S PEDAGOGICAL FILM PRACTICE AND THE MAKING OF AN AFRICAN MULTITUDE .............................................................. 126 5 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................... 176 LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................. 180 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 185 5 LIST OF FIGURES Figure page 4-1 Dieng gorging himself ....................................................................................... 178 4-2 The moolaadé rope .......................................................................................... 178 4-3 Bird’s eye view of the village compound ........................................................... 179 4-4 An altermodern African space .......................................................................... 179 6 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy COSMOPOLITICAL SPECTATORSHIP IN RESNAIS, KLUGE, AND SEMBÈNE By DANIEL NORFORD May 2017 Chair: Barbara Mennel Major: English This project investigates the role of spectatorship in selected films by Alain Resnais, Alexander Kluge, and Ousmane Sembene. In the postwar era of decolonization, the work of these directors conceptualizes a global viewing subject that I call the cosmopolitical spectator. This viewing position is motivated by the international crises of World War II, decolonization, and global capitalism. Through modernist formal strategies, especially montage, the films under discussion interpellate a radically connected spectator driven by an awareness of how modern capitalism posits human cognition as a privileged value form. As such, the cosmopolitical spectator posited by these films claims an ambivalently universal status by virtue of the common insertion of a global humanity into the mechanisms of capitalist reification. The project will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of Film and Media Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Critical Theory. 7 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION The chapters which follow explore what I call a cosmopolitical spectator: a subject position that I associate especially with the non-classical cinemas of postwar modernist film (Neorealism, the French New Wave, etc.). Although other films—and other directors—might have been chosen, the films and filmmakers which form the object of this project stand out for their sustained concern with montage as both a formal practice and a political strategy. In his Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon Amour (1959), Alain Resnais uses montage to explore the traumas of the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima; this exploration implicates industrial modernity generally and colonialism specifically in crimes against humanity. In Resnais’s films, montage especially invokes the components of film spectatorship—cognition, interpretation, memory, and so on—and thereby implicates the filmic apparatus in the appalling catastrophes of capitalist, industrial modernity. In Alexander Kluge’s Der groβe Verhau (1971) and Willi Tobler und der Untergang der 6. Flotte (1972), montage first indexes a pre-classical cinema capable of challenging classical narrative film’s hegemonic interpellation of spectatorship. More fundamentally, montage is the chief device through which Kluge explores human cognition as a potentially radical historical form of labor, one that might challenge the expropriating mechanisms of global capitalism from within. Lastly, Ousmane Sembène uses montage in Mandabi (1968) and Moolaadé (2004) to invoke a native audience’s capacity to participate in the film text and, by extension, in the transformation of Senegal in particular and Africa in general. Despite their wildly different cultural, social, and historical situations, each of these directors treats montage as an index of the human capacity for reason, and in so doing they also posit 8 spectatorship—one of the privileged cognitive modes of the twentieth-century—as a potentially radical activity; an activity capable of influencing and transforming social reality in the name of a better future for humanity. This impulse forms the basis of the cosmopolitical spectator. My argument builds upon two major frames of reference: the psycho-dynamic subject of narrative cinema developed by 1970s psychoanalytic accounts of film spectatorship, and overlapping Marxist accounts of film spectatorship as a form of alienating labor. The work of Louis Althusser on ideological state apparatuses and their attendant media is crucial here. In Althusser’s ground-clearing account of ideology’s functioning through institutional apparatuses and their encounter with concrete individuals, he makes a crucial distinction between “individual” and “subject.” With this distinction, Althusser insists on the central function of ideology: “ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects.” Althusser sets up this distinction within a narrative scenario, one in which an abstract person is greeted by other persons, and who thus are mutually constituted in the act of recognizing, and being recognized by, one another within the context of a social relationship and its attendant state apparatuses. However, Althusser then insists that “concrete individuals” are “always- already” subjects of ideology, and that this always-already problematizes the temporal structure of the narrative example. In other words, “individuals are ‘abstract’ with respect to the subjects which they always-already are” (84). The temporal sequence of a person’s subjectivization—what Althusser calls his or her interpellation—is a rhetorical figure that does not correspond to the actual phenomenon of being a subject. The 9 always-already indicates that we are always in ideology from the very beginning, and that this beginning is not reducible to a distinct, concrete moment in time. Ideology, in other words, functions in an abstract, instantaneous way, and this accounts for the “obviousness” with which the ideological institution of the subject presents itself to concrete individuals. The challenge for Althusser, then, lies in trying to “outline a discourse which tries to break with ideology, in order to dare to be the beginning of a scientific (i.e. subject-less) discourse on ideology” (85). Althusser’s faith in scientific discourse notwithstanding, his account of ideology and its relationship to media has been one of the fundamental stakes in psychoanalytic analyses of film spectatorship. Scholars such as Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, and Laura Mulvey helped establish ideology—specifically the hegemonic ideology of a given social order—as perhaps the central preoccupation in apparatus theory. Althusser’s account of the subject of ideology was and is a hegemonic element of such accounts. As an ideological apparatus, film is seen as achieving a more or less instantaneous interpellation through its fantasmatic appeal to the deep forces of desire, identification, and projection which accompany the originary development of the subject in Lacan’s abstract mirror stage. As articulated by the major psychoanalytic film theorists of the 1970s, film emerges as a unified institution fully in the service of dominant ideology. Judith Mayne provides a concise summary of this position: “[v]irtually all theorists of the apparatus assume a monolithic quality to the cinema, that is, the cinema works to acculturate individuals to structures of fantasy, desire, dream, and pleasure that are fully of a piece with dominant ideology”