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University of Bath PHD A 'Post-Historical' Cinema of Suspense: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Limits of Redemption Callow, James Award date: 2010 Awarding institution: University of Bath Link to publication Alternative formats If you require this document in an alternative format, please contact: [email protected] General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 24. Sep. 2021 A „Post-Historical‟ Cinema of Suspense Jean-Luc Nancy and the Limits of Redemption James Callow A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Bath Department of European Studies and Modern Languages November 2010 COPYRIGHT Attention is drawn to the fact that copyright of this thesis rests with the author. This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with its author and that no quotation from the thesis and no information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author. This thesis is made available for consultation within the University Library and may be photocopied or lent to other libraries for the purposes of consultation. ABSTRACT This thesis theorises an approach to cinematic suspense derived from a set of films that challenge the teleological and redemptive principles of traditional narrative. It is argued that such a challenge is drawn from the need to account for conditions of violence and suffering without recourse to the traditional grounds of redemption. They set out to question the symbols that underpin a faith in its possibilities. Such films counter these grounds with a form of perpetuated suspense that continually withholds resolution, stressing and destabilising both the terms of redemption and the affect of its aesthetic representations. Significantly, this thesis examines films from the years following 1989 that confront this central theme within conditions of historical hiatus and the disintegration of ideological certainties occurring in the wake of European communism. These films, by Kira Muratova, Béla Tarr, Artur Aristakisyan, Alexander Sokurov, Bruno Dumont, Roy Andersson, Ulrich Seidl and Gus Van Sant, present a world in which human beings are always already turned against themselves, placing them in the context of contemporary philosophical aporias that identify the human condition as enigmatic and resisting of itself. They suspend the symbolic structures associated with redemption in order to reconfigure contemporary film as a „realist‟ cinema at the threshold of the interpretative and reconciliatory economies implicit in the soteriological mythology of Western thought. Tracing Paul Ricoeur‟s schematic account of the symbols and myths of a „fallen‟ world, the thesis turns on Jean-Luc Nancy‟s subsequent critique of the insufficiency of myths to properly account for existence. In place of an hermeneutic recovery of the real and its meaning, Nancy‟s „realist‟ philosophy of „sense‟ and its application to the cinema offer an account that speaks less of conflicting narratives of redemption than a radical stripping away of its terms, suggesting that it is redemption from the normative terms of redemption that ultimately constitutes the proper question at the heart of these films. 1 CONTENTS Abstract 1 Contents 2 Acknowledgements 3 Preface: The Elephant in the Room 4 Introduction: Cinema and the Search for Salvation 8 Part One: History, Context, Style Chapter 1: Films of Fallibility: the „Symbols of Evil‟ and the Interruption of „Sin‟ 31 Chapter 2: The „Post-Historical‟ Context: Redemption‟s Hiatus 47 Chapter 3: Redemption as an Aesthetic or Conceptual Practice 73 Chapter 4: Cinematic Realism and the Mystery of Redemption 97 (i) Wim Wenders, André Bazin, Seigfried Kracauer: the lost real 98 (ii) Werner Herzog, Paul Schrader, Gilles Deleuze: the mysterious real 108 (iii) Jean-Luc Nancy: the exposed real 117 Part Two: Films Chapter 5: A-religious Confession: Elephant 124 Chapter 6: Defilement: Flanders 143 Chapter 7: Defilement: The Asthenic Syndrome; Palms; Russian Ark 162 Chapter 8: Sin: Sátántangó; Songs from the Second Floor 179 Chapter 9: Sin: Werckmeister Harmonies 193 Chapter 10: Guilt: Dog Days; You the Living; Import Export 205 Conclusion: Interrupted Myths and Necessary Negativity 218 Bibliography 226 Filmography 234 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My gratitude goes to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their generous award of a Doctoral Research Grant under their Doctoral Awards Scheme, without which it would not have been possible for me to undertake this thesis. My heartfelt thanks go to my supervisors, Dr. David Clarke and Ms. Wendy Everett, for their unstinting support. Special mention should also go to Dr. Fabio Vighi who graciously gave his time and expertise as an additional reader. I am indebted to my parents for their continued and unquestioning support. Finally, and most importantly, to Ming-Jung Kuo, whose patience, encouragement and enquiry kept me going throughout. 3 PREFACE The Elephant in the Room This thesis originates in two encounters. One of these was my first viewing of Gus Van Sant‟s Elephant (2003), a film that I find, having now seen it many times, still retains the ability to unnerve, to disturb and, more particularly, to move and to touch with a sense of disquiet that is hard to qualify. The other was an earlier occasion in which I was involved, as an aspiring screenwriter, in the development process of a script. The industry-appointed script editors and development executives, always decent and encouraging, nevertheless could not accept the terms of the story‟s outcome, a story drawn from personal experience and one that involved considerable violence. After much consternation and a general sense of impasse, I was told with resignation, that, „it may be real life but it‟s not drama‟. What was missing, I was informed, was a sense of hope, of redemption or the lesson to be learned. Cinema and violence is an emotionally charged couplet that underwrites the entire history of the medium. It is a combination that can both denigrate the medium, when necessary, and elevate it. The cinema is often accused of relishing the spectacle of violence, leading to its alleged effects on impressionable audiences. At other times, through the ability of film technique to do violence to perceptual experience, it has been charged with a revolutionary impetus, to shatter the complacent world and reconfigure it. At stake, in each version of cinema‟s „truth‟ – if we can call it that – is redemption: in the first, of the values of its narrative, mythic and symbolic traditions; in the second, as the potential of its aesthetic, formal, and conceptual possibilities. Then there is Elephant. The film reruns a recognisable incident from actuality without making any claims to be that incident. It avoids all narrative and symbolic qualifications for the event or any terms of understanding it. It overwhelms with the imminence of violence and death but withdraws from the spectacle of it, its mourning, or the provision of any psychological insight into victims or protagonists. It replays time without revealing any mystery and it introduces sounds that have no „naturalistically‟ or „psychologically‟ motivated right to be there. In short, when trying to „read‟ Elephant according to traditional modes of interpretation it appears to 4 continually escape. Its elements seem to be those that are left remaining after so many attempts to interpret it have been found wanting. What is more, this elusive aspect to Elephant chimed with several other films I had seen around the same time – films such as Ulrich Seidl‟s Dog Days (2002), Roy Andersson‟s Songs from the Second Floor (2000) and Béla Tarr‟s Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) – each of which, despite their markedly different styles, forms and subject matter, generated the same sentiments in response: a need to account for the overwhelming sense of unease left by their seemingly unconditioned expressions of violence, disintegration and suffering. When I initially embarked on this thesis as a means to explore this unease more thoroughly it was in traditional terms. I sought out paradigms and archetypes, genres and signifying terms of meaning behind the film‟s images of destruction. In particular, it was with regard to the variable uses of the term „apocalypse‟ – a word that dogged these films in many critical analyses, purely on the grounds of their destructive or catastrophic content. Yet such an archetypal formula never felt fully applicable or appropriate: something in the films was always lacking, incomplete, or else escaped the neat confines of such term or exhausted it. Nevertheless, a detour through apocalypses led me to Kira Muratova‟s film, The Asthenic Syndrome (1990), and the Russian critic Boris Vladimirsky‟s response to it – the conundrum that finally motivates what follows. This thesis, then, is my belated attempt to put forward a response to the challenge laid down by the script editors, although I am fully aware of the Quixotic irrelevance of this, since theirs is a world of production and funding in which the archetype rules for reasons of commercial necessity and the systematic calculation of box office receipts.

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