Daniel Eschkötter The Dis/rupture of Film as Skin
Jean-Luc Nancy,ClaireDenis, and Trouble EveryDay
It’sonthe inside of me So don’ttry to understand Iget on the inside of you. (Tindersticks,Trouble Every Day)
1Prologue: the skin of film (Abbas Kiarostami/Jean-Luc Nancy)
Film and skin, film as skin. In two of Jean-Luc Nancy’sfilm-theoretical texts – his little book about the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, TheEvidence of Film (Nancy 2001), and “Icon of Fury” (Nancy 2008a), an essayabout Claire De- nis’sfilm Trouble EveryDay (2001) – the French philosopher recalls this double meaning and etymologyofpellicule,film. In French (and English) it can mean skin, asensitive membrane that:
is thinness and nothingelse. This thinness defines asupport that is unlikethe support of paintingand drawing:film is not amatter that easilytakes on another material (paste,pen- cil, varnish), but rather amaterial that is sensitive to the singular material that light is, and this sensitivity is made up of thin, diaphanous substances (Nancy2001:46).
Abbas Kiarostami’sfilm Zendegi va digar hich (Iran 1992, English title, in aliteral translation: Life, and Nothing More…;French title: Et la vie continue)contains a scene thatbecomes,atleast for Nancy,amise en abyme for this precarious but persevering materiality of film. It is ascene in which the film’sprotagonist,adi- rector,regards apainting that has been ruptured, torn by acrack in the wall caused by the big earthquake in Northern Iran in 1990 (see Fig. 1). Kiarostami’sfilm, which depicts how life goes on, takes place three days after the catastrophe. Nancy identifiesthe traditionalrural portrait thathas been torn in a physicallyimpossible wayasanemblematic image, an “imageofanimage” (Nancy 2001:62).Itisemblematic of the film’sform and subject, of its configu- ration of continuation and rupture – the rupture that pervades the various layers of images into the country’sreality;the continuation of film that asserts itself against the destruction:
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110580082-012 212 Daniel Eschkötter
Fig. 1: An “image of an image,” of continuation and rupture: Abbas Kiarostami, Zendegi va digar hich
From one world to the next,the images work in continuity and discontinuity,just as the films [byKiarostami] work with movements and interruptions […]. In Life and Nothing More the tornpictureisnot just split by acrack: it is, in itself, both acrack or afissure and acontinuous tie between the past […]and the present […]. (Nancy2001:40)
ForNancy,the fissure of the imageisnot onlyanallegory of the filmic “paradox of what continues” (Nancy 2001:58; emphasis in the original text); the doubling of fissure and continuation, the continuation that prevails against the catastro- phe, express the “perseverance of being” (Nancy 2001:60) in Kiarostami’srecast- ing of neorealist cinema, acontinuation beyond the mere continuity of images. The director’sgaze confronting the image, and the subsequent mobilization of the gaze that detaches itself from the protagonist follow,according to Nancy, “the axiomatics of away of looking” (Nancy 2001:12),one that “is respectful of the real that it beholds, thatistosay it is attentive and openlyattending to the very power of the real and its absolute exteriority” (Nancy 2001:38).¹ And just like Kiarostami’scinema, for Nancy,embodies and operationalizesanethics of looking where “looking justamountstothinkingthe real, to test oneself with re- gardtoameaning one is not mastering” (Nancy 2001:38), Nancy’sphilosophical project often returns to figures of asense one is not mastering,atruth without depths:
This mobilization of the gaze manifests itself paradigmaticallyinthe sequencecontainingthe image(of the image): with the gaze of the director within the film, preceded by the imageand the subsequent camera operation that “leaves” its diegetic source,the director, and the imageof the peasant,directing itself towards and through adoor next to the picture, eventuallyshowing the landscape deframed. The Dis/rupture of Film as Skin 213
Somethingtrue right at the skin, skin as truth: neither the beyond-the-skin soughtbyde- sire,nor the underside that scienceaims for,nor the spiritual secretofflesh revealed. For us,the nude is neither erotic nor anatomical nor authentic. It remains on the edge of or beyond these threepostulations.The truth right at the skin is onlytrue in beingexposed, in beingofferedwithout reservebut also without revelation. (Nancyand Ferrari 2014:2)
This trope resonates in Nancy’sphilosophicalproject of the “exscription” of the body(Nancy 2008b), as well as in his deconstruction of Christianity,and it man- ifests itself in his work on dance,² on the iconographyofnakedness and of noli me tangere. It alsomarks apoint of convergencewith the cinematographic aes- theticsofFrench director Claire Denis, whose films Nancy frequentlycomments upon.³ The question of ameaning beyond, or of atruth right at the skin or the surface alsostructuresClaire Denis’sfilms. ⁴ But an emblematic rupture that is framed by alargercontinuation and contained by an ethics of looking,asin Kiarostami’s Life And Nothing More, is impossibletobefound in Denis’sbody of work. And life goes on?Trouble everyday. Denis’sfilms open up to areal of adifferent order,they open up “icons of fury,” the fissuresofand in the sensitive membrane of film. It is this opening-up, the ruptures and their operations, that will be the subject of the following remarks. My essaywill track these operations in and with Claire Denis’spara- or meta-horror film Trouble EveryDay, and willconnect them first to a(film‐)theo- retical discussion of the structures of continuity and of what film and psycho- analytic theory call suture. In asecond step, the essaywill reevaluatethe film’sruptures of suture,skin, and imageasdisruptions that not onlyinstall a discourse of non-normalization beyond afilmic archeology and analysis of the societies of control,⁵ but eventuallyevenaffect the discursive formationGiorgio
See Monnier,Nancyand Denis 2005. Apart from several essays by Nancydealingwith Denis’sfilms,their correspondenceand col- laboration includes one featurefilm, L’intrus,which takes up motivesfromNancy’sautobio- graphical essaywith the same name, two appearances by Nancyinthe essayistic films Vers Nancy and Vers Mathilde, as well as several radio and stageconversations.Italso has provoked averitable Nancy-Denis scholarship, see for example the essays in Morrey 2012. The bodyand skin of film have been aprominent motif and motor of film theory over the last 20 years,especiallyincontemporary phenomenological theory.See especiallyMarks 2000.The limitations and fallacies of aphenomenological conceptualization of touch have often been the subject of Jean-Luc Nancy’swork (See Nancy2008b). As opposed to control society horrorapproaches that,fromDavid Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975) to BenWheatley’s High-Rise (2015), link the topic of (sexual) devianceand destructive desire to a class struggle both contained and configuredbythe audiovisual as well as architectural control- spaces. Forthe configuration of Deleuze’sconcept of the “societies of control” and contempo- rary horror cinema see Robnik 2015. 214 Daniel Eschkötter
Agamben describes as the “anthropological machine.” To try to getanother glimpse beyond the paradigm of the bond of skin, (photochemical) film, and an- thropogenesis the essaywill conclude by brieflytracing it to and through are- cent filmic reconceptualization of this relation: Jonathan Glazer’s(in the context of this essayaptlytitled) Under the Skin.
2Skin, rupture, suture
Along, in the dark of night (especiallygiven digital film compression and image capture; in the movie theatre, with a35mmprint,wewould see more) almost indistinguishable kissofananonymous couple marks the beginning of Claire Denis’s2001 film Trouble EveryDay (seeFig.2).
Fig. 2: The kiss preceding all ruptures and differentiations: ClaireDenis, Trouble EveryDay
This prologueorinverse motto receivesits logos from the title song,com- posed by the Tindersticks and Stuart Staples,like manyofDenis’sfilm scores: “It’sonthe inside of me /Sodon’ttry to understand /Igetonthe inside of you.” Adouble motto:akiss on the surface that is isolated from the film that fol- lows, and which does not infect its tale of infection and infestation; asong and theme that at the same time evoke and neglect the desire to understand and to go inside. This kiss will not imprint itself onto the film that follows, the passion- ate kiss that does not seem to be in danger of turning into something violent,an act of carnivorous consumption, biting,devouring.Itprecedes the trouble of dif- ferentiating, of distinguishing between sexual desire and bloodlust,for example. After the credits,establishing textures, images of fluidity and Paris, we hear the lastbeatsofthe title song and we seeawoman, Béatrice Dalle, at the sideof the street,waiting,presentingherself alongsideavan (see Fig. 3). The Dis/rupture of Film as Skin 215
Fig. 3: The predatorily Coré
This woman, who willnot speak, who willonlyuttersounds that indicate lust or pain, will laterbecalled Coré. It is an archetypical name, which not onlyrefers to the myth and mystery of the “divinemaiden” Persephone or Kore – the “Urkind” of C.G. Jung’sand Karoj Kerényi’sworks,which Giorgio Agamben alsodiscusses in an essay(Agamben and Ferrando 2014); it also al- ludes to the coreofher sickness, which the films’ scientists are looking for and do not find, since, as with Vampires,thereisnocure. German director Christian Petzold described the opening scene as follows (in ashortweblog entry and memory protocol afterseeing the first half hour of Trou- ble EveryDay at afilm festival, see Fig. 4–11):
Fig. 4–11: Crisscrossings: From inter-subjectiverelations towards astructural desire of the film- form.
BéatriceDalle stands next to atransformer station at the side of aroad.Atruck passes by. She brieflylooks up. The driverhas noticed her.And her gaze.Hestops his truck. This stop- ping of the vehicle is shown in acomplicated camera operation. The shots beforewerestat- ic. Simple. But now the camera is moving. Trackingthe stoppingtruck for amoment.A 216 Daniel Eschkötter
Fig. 5.
Fig. 6.
Fig. 7.
crane movement is crisscrossingthe rear.The movement comes to ahaltwhen the driver opens his door.Somewhat peculiar and strangeisthis whole operation, this shot.It does not seem to be caused by anything, to narrate anything. Adecoupageand montage The Dis/rupture of Film as Skin 217
Fig. 8.
Fig. 9.
Fig. 10.
with two, three shots would have told the stoppingofthe truck and the woman that caused it in amuch simpler and clearer way. The sequenceshot however stands out. 218 Daniel Eschkötter
Fig. 11.
Later we see aman on amotorcycle. The irritation that seems to affect the cyclist while passingthe truck, this irritation is immediatelyunderstandable for us,because it originated in the complicated camera operation, the sequenceshot.(Petzold 2005:143;mytranslation)
In aprecise manner Petzold maps out an operation that is, albeit seemingly un- economical and isolated, nevertheless almostparadigmatic for Claire Denis’s films. An economical and simple shot pattern is crisscrossed by acomplex cam- eraoperation. The almost infectious irritation that Petzold notices is not only caused or prepared by the waythe stoppingtruck is shot,but by the waythe meeting of the driverand Dalle is arranged. It could alsobedescribed as being the result of asmall structural puzzle that is part of the samesequence: the film seems to wait for the direct address,the gaze of the driver, right there in the middle of the road. This gaze is then matched by the counter shot of Béa- trice Dalle, with her eye-line in aseemingly regular shot-counter-shot pattern, but it is onlyfor an instant,because then Dalleseems to enter her own point of view,onlytobeestablished and positioned as the waiting,craving,fixating, desiring female presenceonce again. The subsequent backing-up of the red truck that takes over imageand soundtrackalike not onlyprefiguresthe monstrosity of this desire; it also points towards aparadigmatic shift within and of the film: from inter-subjective relations towardsastructural desire of the film-form. The sequenceand its puzzling cameraoperation evokeagaze and object that we could describe, almostwith an oxymoron, as atrans-subjective point of view,asthe “uncannydetachment of an object-gaze without adiegetic source” (Lie 2012: 131;mytranslation). But what are the implications of this gaze, this operation in and for Trouble EveryDay? Fornow we could saythat the subsequent backing-up of the red truck that then fills imageand audio track alike prefigures the monstrosity of the desire that is directed towards its surface and then the inside. It also marks ashifting between intradiegetic inter- The Dis/rupture of Film as Skin 219 personal relations to something that would need to be described as astructural filmic desire evoked by an automatic, detached object-gaze or gaze-object. Claire Denis’scinema is composed of erotic and political body-image-tex- tures thatgobeyond aestheticaldualities of abstraction and concretion,ordis- cursive polarities like politics and the sensual. In glidingand slipping motions between organic and inorganic surfaces and textures,between automatic and human gazes,itproduces narrative and formal dissociations; it follows adouble poeticsoftouch and dis/rupture. Alreadywith her first long feature film Chocolat, from 1988, it has been her concern to show French colonial history and its geopolitical effects as an affair of gazes and touches.Especiallysince her arguablymost famous feature film to date, her French legionBillyBudd-variation Beau travail from 1999,manyof her films add up to aproject that tracks bodies in filmic and political spaces or zones in atension of singular desire and political collectivization. Beau trav- ail, Trouble EveryDay, Vendredi soir (2002), L’Intrus (2004) and White Material (2009) could all be considered as filmic reflections of what Michel Foucault called the complex “investment of the body” (Foucault 1995:25), and at the same time they de-vest,or“exscribe” the body. In particular, Trouble Every Day, Vendredi soir (2002),and L’Intrus (2004) could all be described as forming atrilogyofembodied spatiality.The three films follow,toradicallycondense and paraphrase them, atopological movement starting with the gory opening of the bodysurface in Trouble EveryDay,continuingwith the magical creation of an intimate space in acar duringatraffic jam in Paris, in Vendredi Soir (that is fore- shadowed in Trouble EveryDay’sprologue), and, eventually, culminating in movements that crisscross and dissolve the borders of the bodyand its surface and global geopolitical borders in L’Intrus,which, taking up Jean-Luc Nancy’s essayofthe samename,short-circuits movementsofillegal migration, globali- zation, and an illegal heart transplant. Trouble EveryDay is just as invested in mixing and blending these different connotations of filmed and filmic transplantations and invasions of the body. It relates the rupturing and violating of the skinofhuman bodies to the skin and stitches of filmic materiality and grammar,tothe skin of film itself, to film as skin and to what is called “suture” in film theory. Trouble EveryDay is ahorror film paraphrase that reassembles motivesfrom the vampireand cannibalism genres and takes up generic approximations of the logics of desire with the dis- course of infection. But it is not the kiss of the vampire,but rather the “kiss as vampire” that is at the coreofits gore (Nancy 2008a; my emphasis). This configuration leads the film’sfour protagonists through Paris, the new- lywed Americancouple Shane and June Brown, and scientistLéo Sémeneau and his wife Coré. They – and the film itself – are drivenbysearches,marked by 220 Daniel Eschkötter search images: searchingfor acureagainst the desire for sexthat turns into carnage(Shaneand Léo), for objects and victims of their desire (Coré and Shane), for reasons for the husband’smysterious behavior (June), for the wife before she kills again (Léo). Thesearches do not form anarrative in anyconven- tional sense, but lose themselvesintextures, patterns,intensities. The crane operation, the irritation and re-stabilization of ahuman point of view at the beginning of the film structure and infect the entire film. However, they do not set off ashift towardsthe totality of an automated gaze (as in some of Stanley Kubrick’sfilms),orthe totalextimization of asubjective gaze (as in the somewhat related films by Philippe Grandrieux). The move and meth- od of Denis’scinema follow alogic of indifferencewhereitdoes not seem to make astructural difference whether organic and inorganic textures, acts of loveand acts of violence, caressed or ruptured skinare filmed. The precarious- ness and double meaning of “film” resonateinthis logic of indifference. Agnès Godard’scameragives this and most of Denis’sfilms their singular visual signature; its tactile gaze hovers over the film’sbodies and textures, turns them into surfaces without clear borders and subjectmarkers.Among their collaborations Trouble EveryDay maybethe film thatplays on the double meaning of pellicule the most,pushing alsophenomenological paradigms of the skin of film and the tactility and synaestheticism of film experience towardsa territory of the uncanny, the untouchable, beyond the paradigm of touch.⁶ The skin that is desired and torn open by Coré and Shane, the film’stwo pro- tagonists that are sick and infected in away that is never really specified or re- ceivesaname, the skin thatisripped within and, to acertain (metaphorical) ex- tent,bythe film itself, is always photographed in atender,fluid, but nevertheless precarious mode. In the scene of Shane’sand June’sarrival in their hotel in Paris the operation and irritation of the beginning is recast and radicalized. The sequence,again, takes up the trope of asubjective gaze becom- ing trans-subjective,detached from the human subject of the gaze, and creating an uncannygaze-object/object-gaze thatcontaminates film and characters alike (see Fig. 12–14). The shot-reverse shot with Shane’s/Vincent Gallo’screepy stare and the neck of achamber maid that will eventuallybekilled,bitten to death by Gallo’s Shane,this operation, filmed and followed by aSteadicam, establishes apattern and perspective that shortlyafterwards is repeatedwithoutthe subject of the ap- petent gaze (see Fig. 14). It generates what Slavoj Žižek, in his book on Krzysztof
That film theoretical paradigmsoftouch arecalled into question by Denis’scinema has also been pointedout,with regards to L’Intrus,byLaura McMahon (McMahon2008). The Dis/rupture of Film as Skin 221
Fig. 12–14: The detachment of the gaze.
Fig. 13.
Fig. 14.
Kieślowski and film theory,calls “the spectre of afree-floatingGaze without a determinatesubject to whom it belongs”: 222 Daniel Eschkötter
The ultimatethreat [to the elementary matrix of classical Hollywood narrative cinema] is not that of an objective shot which will not be “subjectivised,” allocated to some protago- nist within the spaceofdiegetic fiction, but that of a point-of-view shot which will not be clearlyallocated as the point of view of some protagonist,and which will thus evoke the spectreofafree-floating Gaze without adeterminatesubject to whom it belongs.(Žižek 2001:33)
Such agaze is an irritation or exhibition of what film theory since the 1970s, fol- lowing Jacques Lacanand Jacques-Alain Miller, calls “suture,” the mechanism and grammar of stitchingtogether the film via montage, and stitching-in the ab- sent cause of the filmic imagevia asubstituteorrepresentation of the structur- allyabsent forceofsignification (the camera,the enunciator, etc.). It is especially (if not exclusively) the convention of shot-reverse shot thatinterpellates the spec- tator,folds or sutures the off-screen into the onscreen, or what Jean-Pierre Ou- dart called “L’Absent,” the Absent One, the absent sourceofthe gaze into the diegesis by (re‐)attributingthe (automatic) gaze to ahuman source(Oudart 1977). Trouble EveryDay’shotel hallwaytrackingssuture and de-sutureatthe same time, they let us feel and see the sutureinanoperation that inserts the “Absent One” into the diegesis with atrans-subjective uncannyproxy gaze. The paradigm of continuity editing is not destroyed by an operation likethis; it rather becomesasourceofdisruption, trouble, contamination, and transfer- ence itself. The chambermaid and her passages through the hotel’shallways and ground floor become the object of these free-floatinggazes.From now on she is frequentlyshown and shot in perspectivesthat distinctly mimic point of view shots, that reframe,push and creep in on her,when she is undressing and washing herself in the hotel’semployee rooms for example (see Fig. 15–18).
Fig. 15–18: The haunting “placeofimpossible subjectivity.” The Dis/rupture of Film as Skin 223
Fig. 16
Fig. 17
Fig. 18
What she seems affected or haunted by is an impossiblesubjectivity or trans-subjective filmic presence; one that is, of course, alsothe presenceof the film itself: “So we are not dealing here with the simple reversal of asubjec- 224 Daniel Eschkötter tive into an objectiveshot,but in constructingaplace of impossible subjectivity, asubjectivity which taints the very objectivity with aflavour of unspeakable, monstrous evil.” (Žižek 2001:36) Žižek’sBig Other,the impossiblesubjectivity, is aconstant presencethat haunts Trouble EveryDay’sspaces,just like the pos- sibility of becomingabite haunts its kisses. But it is essentialfor its poetics of indifference that,inaseemingly seamless manner(often even in one fluid shot and accentuated or triggered by the Tindersticks’ score), the film introduces micrologicaldifferences, switches between potential crime scenes and scenes of (everyday) life and labor and their materialities. The title’severydaytrouble is thus recast or spelled out cinematographically as aconsistent disruption within the configuration of gaze and its relation to the world. Since it cannot be containedbythe metricsofmontage, the rules of con- tinuityand stable subject-object relations on screen, this trouble producesa structural horror of precarity in the entirefilm wheremonstrous desire, screen sensuality,and social observation turn out to be indistinguishable, mutable, part of the samerealm of ruptured representation and their operations.
3Disruptionsofthe “anthropologicalmachine”
Trouble EveryDay is not,however,altogether swept away by the frenzy of blood- lust and the filmic eroticism of tactility and textures. But whereevengrammar and structure provetoproduce aprecarious filmic bodyitmight be safe to as- sume that the narrative structure and content cannot contain and account for the structural horror.The protagonists search for the roots of and acure for the blood lust,the urge to understand and the desire to go inside will remain unfulfilled, unsuccessful, mere motivations of movements. Nevertheless,they re- ceive fragments of acontext:Allusions to laboratory scenes and afailed experi- ment with plants in the colonies of French Guyana haunt the film as screen memoriesofadifferent materiality;dissected brains and botanicalexperiments open up alargerframework of horror motifs that include mad scientists, experi- ments gone awry,and the outbreak of an infection that might eventuallylead to an apocalypse of flesh-craving creatures. All this does not amounttoany sufficient intradiegeticexplanation of the blood feasts. But not onlydothe references implant amaterial and genre histor- icity into the flow of surface images, they contributetothe installation of adis- course, ahybrid universal knowledge of biological life: UniversalPharmakon is the name of the companyShaneBrown usedtowork for and for which he appa- rentlystole LéoSémenau’sresearch; and universal is also the field of Seme- neau’sbioprospections and his pharmaceutical, neurobiological, and botanical The Dis/rupture of Film as Skin 225 research that was aimedatresearching and curing “nervous diseases, pain, men- tal diseases, and problems of libido…” This speculative universality of life aside, Trouble EveryDay is, on adiegetic level, not interested in anysocial pathologyand pathogenesis, or anydangers that would affect apopulation; and it remains unclear if Shane,who can still medicate and masturbate, sublimate and sedate himself, and Coré are the onlyoftheirtype, or indeed one of akind. Although alludingtoits universality these discursive traces obviously fail to lead to anypositive concept of life, to its inside, its core, they rather remain aspeculative,consistentlyimplausible frame- work for the desire that turns into bloodlust.Inthat regard they are connected to the entire seeking system of the film, its aesthetics of indifference, its style of fluid search images, its characters who even in theirgory excesses seem to search for something within the bodyand the blood. Following Jean-Luc Nancy,wemight relate this mode of searching, even the general aesthetics of indifference and permanent oscillation to the twoLatin words for blood: sanguis and cruor,the blood that circulates internallyand the blood that spraysand splatters out,the principle of life and the principle of pain and cruelty.Looking for the core, the principle and universality of life, in Trouble EveryDay,leadstomore cruelty,more blood spray, to images of gore that do not lead to anything,donot represent,but rather point to an inher- ent monstrosity of monstration itself.⁷ Thedesire in and of Trouble EveryDay is the mislead and ultimatelyfailing desire to lookfor and show the inner principle of life (sanguis)inthe splatter (of cruor)that affects the foundation of the filmic imagery:
The screenistorn intoawound streamingwith blood. The imagebecomes an image of a torn image: no longer an image,orafigure, but an icon of access to the invisible. The in- visible, that is sanguis, the blood nourishingthe body, life itself, pulsatingbeneath the skin. (Nancy2008a: 6)
This inside is the secret,the sealingoflife in death by the fragility of the skin, the sealingof sense in blood. The fury wants this secretthat is nothingother and that contains nothing other than the tearingapart of the integrity of life. (Nancy2008a: 7)
This “tearing apart of the integrity of life” is adifferent formulation for what Giorgio Agamben frequentlyaddresses as “the caesurabetween animal and human [that] first of all passes within man” (Agamben 2005:16), within the knowledge and categorizationofman:
See Nancy2005,17, 25. 226 Daniel Eschkötter
The division of life intovegetal and relational, organic and animal, animal and human, therefore passes first of all as amobile border within livingman, and without this intimate caesura the very decision of what is human and what is not would probablynot be possi- ble. (Agamben 2005:15)
Not onlydoes Trouble EveryDay,afilm that oscillates between mapping the qualified livesoflovers and laborers and the factum brutum of biological life, ad- dress this caesura, this division thematically. It structures and divides its charac- ters and affects the film’sunstable border regime of cinematographic imagery, always marked by the impossibility of aclear distinction between man and mon- ster,monstrous and tender images. It manifests itself as the rupturing of the skin by the kissand bite of the protagonists as well as the cameraand even affects the material bodyofthe film itself, radicalized in ascene whereCoré burns to death, but it seems to be the material of film itself that goes up in flames. Rupture and tender touch pose as uncannydoubles, not onlyfor the two ‘sick’ characters but also for the film and its camerawork, and it is this doubling whereDenis’sfilm opensupits very own zone(s) of indeterminacy.Its blood- thirsty protagonists and, on adifferent level, the film’svery own operations cor- respond with what Giorgio Agamben prominentlydescribed as forms of life, which escape or challengethe concepts of bíos and zoë and raise the concept of abare, unmarked life – in Homo Sacer the “werewolf,” which existsina zone of indeterminacybetween human and animal,features as an example among manyothers (Agamben 1998:105–108). In Agamben’stexts and other related culturaltheories monsters and other hybrid beingsare markers of the zone of the political: “Political hybrid beings haunt the bodypolitic with disfigured mirror images of its abject social self” (Matala de Mazza and Vogl 2002:212; my translation). With an ingenious phrase Agamben referred to the cultural institution of the “production of man through the opposition man/animal, human/inhuman” as the “anthropological ma- chine.” This machine of anthropogenesis:
necessarilyfunctionsbymeans of an exclusion (which is also always alreadyacapturing) and an inclusion (which is also always alreadyanexclusion). Indeed, preciselybecause the human is alreadypresupposed every time, the machine actuallyproduces akind of stateof exception, azone of indeterminacyinwhich the outside is nothingbut the exclusion of an inside and the inside is in turn onlythe inclusion of an outside. (Agamben 2004:37)
This double bind alsohaunts cinema in general as one of the keyanthropolog- ical machinesofthe twentieth century, which continues to reproduce and pro- duceand present and represent the production of distinctions as an inner cae- sura, “the place of aceaselesslyupdated decision in which the caesurae and The Dis/rupture of Film as Skin 227 their rearticulation are always dislocated and displaced anew” (Agamben 2004: 38). Trouble EveryDay: the peculiar and euphemistic phrase of the title is almost aformula for the abjection and the ordinariness of exception thatthe film stages in extremis. “Life – in its state of exception thathas now become the norm – is the naked life that in every context separates the formsoflife from their cohering into aform-of-life” (Agamben 1996:152), this is how Agamben prominently(and enigmatically) described this everydaytrouble. With the term ‘form-of-life’ (forma-di-vita), Agamben refers to:
alife that can never be separated from its form, alife in which it is never possible to isolate somethingsuch as naked life. Alife that cannot be separated from its form is alife for which what is at stake in its wayoflivingislivingitself. […]Itdefines alife – human life – in which the single ways,acts,and processesoflivingare never simply facts but al- ways and aboveall possibilities of life, always and aboveall potentiality (potenza). (Agam- ben 1996:150;translation modified)
Perhaps we could speak, in astructural analogy, of film-form, the form-of-film of Trouble EveryDay: the caesuraasthe limes and inseparability of life and its form, which marks the potenza of the filmic, is its condition and effect at the same time. The opening of the suture, this structural disruption inscribes this caesurainto the filmic body, “always dislocated and displaced anew.” Not onlydoes this haunt Trouble EveryDay’scharacters,but determines its opera- tions, its filmic grammar,its tropes,asaprocess of disruption and de-figuration. By being affected or contaminated through ahypnotic gaze that is detached from its subjective source, the structure of the entire film is drawninto amaelstrom of inner distinctions and azone of indeterminacy. It is through this process, where rupturedskinultimatelyevokes the disruption of the continuity of images in Trouble EveryDay, that the anthropological machine that produces film/life starts to stutter and falter.
4Epilogue: beyond (under) the skin of film⁸
Beyond the human form, beyond the anthropogenesis of film lies the void of im- ages as merelyconventional or provisional effects of data, lie black boxand whitecube as the spaces of contemporary imageprojections.Under the skin
Thanks to Tanja Prokic for suggestingthe idea to address Under the Skin as atheoretical se- quel to Trouble EveryDay here. 228 Daniel Eschkötter lies another blank/black surface, not the spectacle of blood,not the principle of life or mystery of humanity. Jonathan Glazer’sexperimental alienpredator ethnography Under the Skin (2013) takes up the hyper-sensoryexploration of surfaces and textures of Denis’s cinema, along with its often quasi-anthropological drive,and radicalizesit, nar- rativelyand aesthetically.The film not onlycontains several pointsofreference to Denis’s Trouble EveryDay – apredatory woman (or alieninthe bodyofa woman, playedbyScarlett Johansson) in acoat and avan who eventually goes up in flames, aman on amotorcycle who looks and cleans up after her – ;its stalker and bodyhorror alsosets out to be astarting point to question or lead, ambiguously, beyond the caesuraand the bond of film and human form once again, marked by aregime of imageproduction and projection that con- fronts the dispositif of cinema with the spatial abstractions of installations. Among the manyissues and theoretical questions raised by Glazer’sfilm (its quasi-anthropological method,its politics of color,its reflexive investigation of a Scarlett Johansson’sstarbody, its doublingofalienness and absolute alterity with the exploration and evocation of femininity),⁹ the de- and recentralization of the human forminconfrontation with itself as other leads to the coreofthe title’s “under.” Beforethis confrontation plays out (rather generically) as aliter- ary self-reflexion of the femalesex and, in acomplicated move, therefore as “a non-human differencemasquerading fatefullyasasexual difference” (Gorfinkel 2016) – it is, once again, installed and mobilized by agaze that is itself mediated in multiple ways (especiallyinthe guerilla style direct surveillance cinema-se- quences,where Glazer turned the van into amulti-HD-camerastalking arrange- ment for male citizens of Glasgow, and Scarlett Johansson incognito into an alien actress). In its opening (or rather: origin) sequence the film’salien predator seems to be born directlyout of aconfiguration of the beam of the cinematic pro- jector,aconstellation of stars, ablack lens in awhiteiris, and the cinema-eye that belongstoScarlett Johansson,the film’sand alien’svessel. Becoming – fe- male, human; film – means receiving askin that reflects and absorbs the light, means receiving abodywith adistinct form and borders,means beingdifferen- tiated, experiencing difference. Johansson’salien commands over the formless, abstract spaces without coordinates and spatial markers:the whitecube of her becomingand the black space of her manhunts, wherethe men she lures into her van, wheretheir bodies are absorbed and ultimatelydrainedbyan amorphous black matter.The violent drama of the alien’sfailed becoming(fe- male /human) is, in consequence, performed as afilm effectively split in half,
See the essays in the dossier “Under the Skin /Scarlett Johansson” 2016. The Dis/rupture of Film as Skin 229 and depicted as acollapse in processing the sensory overload of the world(i.e. Scotland), afailuretoengagewith the real of the own body. It is alsothe rupture between two spatial and cinematic modes (one moreexperimental and installa- tive,the other more documentaryand sensory) that renders the zones of indis- tinctionencountered in Denis’scinema and Trouble EveryDay into afight zone, aconfrontation of different regimesofrepresentation. Whatbothfilms show,however,isthattoengagewith the distinctionsbetween man and mon- ster,human and non-human, does not onlymean to trace, following Agamben, the inner caesurawithin the human form, but to engagewith its mediations and transferences, with the media of anthropogenesis and theirform, with the rup- tures and disruptions of film as skin – wherethe distinctions and forms are “al- ways dislocated and displaced anew.”
WorksCited
Agamben, Giorgio (1996) “Form-of-Life,” in Radical Politics in Italy: APotential Politics,ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis:UniversityofMinnesotaPress), 150–155. Agamben, Giorgio (1998) Homo Sacer: SovereignPower and Bare Life (Stanford:Stanford UP). Agamben, Giorgio (2005) The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford: StanfordUP). Agamben, Giorgio and MonicaFerrando (2014) The Unspeakable Girl:The Mythand Mystery of Kore (London: Seagull Books). Ferrari, Federicoand Jean-Luc Nancy (2014) Being Nude: The Skin of Images (New York: FordhamUniversity Press). Film-Philosophy 12 (2008), H. 1, Special IssueClaireDenis and Jean-Luc Nancy,ed. Douglas Morrey.
Nancy,Jean-Luc (2001) The EvidenceofFilm: Abbas Kiarostami (Brussels: Yves Gevaert Publisher). Nancy,Jean-Luc (2005) The Ground of the Image (New York: Fordham UniversityPress). Nancy,Jean-Luc (2008a) “IconofFury. Claire Denis’ Trouble EveryDay,” Film-Philosophy 12.1, Special IssueClaireDenis and Jean-Luc Nancy,ed. DouglasMorrey.
Films
Beau travail (1999) Dir.ClaireDenis. Chocolat (1988) Dir.ClaireDenis. L’Intrus (2004) Dir.ClaireDenis. Trouble Every Day (2001) Dir.ClaireDenis. Under the Skin (2013) Dir.Jonathan Glazer. Vendredi soir (2002) Dir.ClaireDenis. Vers Mathilde (2005) Dir.ClaireDenis. White Material (2008) Dir.ClaireDenis. Zendegi va digar hich (1991) Dir.AbbasKiarostami.
TableofFigures
Fig. 1An“image of an image,” of continuation and rupture: Abbas Kiarostami, Zendegi va digar hich (Iran, 2007,DVD IranianMovies, Dir.Abbas Kiarostami). Fig. 2The kiss preceding all rupturesand differentiations: ClaireDenis, Trouble Every Day (France, 2003, Tartan Video, Claire Denis). Fig. 3The predatorily Coré (France, 2003, Tartan Video, ClaireDenis). Fig. 4–11 Crisscrossings:Frominter-subjectiverelations towards astructural desire of the film-form. (France,2003, Tartan Video, ClaireDenis). Fig. 12–14 The detachment of the gaze (France, 2003, Tartan Video, Claire Denis). Fig. 15–18 The haunting “placeofimpossible subjectivity” (France,2003, Tartan Video, Claire Denis).