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The Dis/Rupture of Film As Skin

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The Dis/Rupture of Film As Skin 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
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