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FRAME AND FINITUDE: THE APORETIC AESTHETICS OF ALAIN RESNAIS’S CINEMATIC MODERNISM by John Rhym B.A., Wheaton College, 2006 M.A., New York University, 2008 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2017 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH KENNETH P. DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by John Rhym It was defended on December 4, 2017 and approved by Marcia Landy, Distinguished Professor, Department of English Neepa Majumdar, Associate Professor, Department of English Dissertation Co-Advisor: Adam Lowenstein, Professor, Department of English Dissertation Co-Advisor: Daniel Morgan, Associate Professor, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago ii Copyright © by John Rhym 2017 iii FRAME AND FINITUDE: THE APORETIC AESTHETICS OF ALAIN RESNAIS’S CINEMATIC MODERNISM John Rhym, Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh, 2017 This dissertation argues that the modernist cinema of Alain Resnais and the philosophical writings of Martin Heidegger share a sustained commitment to aporias, which not only serve as conceptual sites for investigation but also function as structural forms that shape their respective projects. In the case of Resnais, I show that specific films address a number of postwar anxieties through the reflexive staging of the following intrinsically irresolvable tensions: between film’s technologically disclosive capacity and its limits, between art and instrumentalization, between the unrepresentability of historical trauma and the material articulations of memory, and between the political discourse of agency and cinema’s foreclosure of spectatorial intervention. In the case of Heidegger, from the earlier existential analytic to his later lectures and essays on the historicity of being, his entire project can be understood as deliberately attending to the diverse forms of the interplay between revealing and concealing that constitutes, for him, the essentially aporetic structure of truth. Furthermore, I argue that the different configurations of epistemic and existential finitude underwrite an approach shared by both filmmaker and philosopher that preserves the irresolvability of these aporias and manifests their generative possibilities. It is by drawing on the crucial role ascribed to finitude in the aporetic structures of Heidegger’s thought and Resnais’s cinema that I map out one form of this generative possibility as an ethics and aesthetics of acknowledgement. iv Chapter One interweaves Resnais’s Van Gogh with Heidegger’s insights into the aporetic mode of disclosure that characterizes artworks in order to elucidate Resnais’s distinctive cinematic constructions of worldhood. Chapter Two places Resnais’s Night and Fog in dialogue with Heidegger’s account of modern technology to situate the film’s reflexive interrogation of the aporia between representation and instrumentalization within a broader postwar philosophical discourse surrounding the question concerning the possibility of art as a site of resistance. Chapters Three and Four take up anxiety and releasement as affective manifestations of finitude in Heidegger’s thought in order to read the aporetic configurations of Hiroshima mon amour and Je t’aime, Je t’aime as organized around the radical disavowals demanded by an ethics of acknowledgement. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………...vii Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………...…..1 Chapter One World-Disclosure in Resnais’s Van Gogh……………………………………………………….23 Chapter Two Cinematic Modernism in the Age of the World Picture………………………………………....56 Chapter Three The Moving Image of Anxiety………………………………………………………………..…97 Chapter Four Resnais’s Cinematic Reduction………………………………………………………………...143 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………....167 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Whatever it is that Heidegger might mean when he speaks of the relationship between thinking (Denken) and thanking (Danken), I can say with certainty that the gratitude I express here falls entirely short of what is owed. Daniel Morgan was an early mentor and interlocutor whose distinctive approach to the intersections of cinema and philosophical aesthetics has deeply shaped the questions and methods that motivate and structure my work here and elsewhere. His encouragement, constructive criticism, and, at certain crucial moments, friendship have made me a better scholar and person. Adam Lowenstein has been vital in helping me temper my, at times, unwieldy theoretical indulgences with close analyses of films. From my weekly journal entries written for his classes on spectatorship and Surrealism to my many drafts of articles and chapters produced over the years, his patience and perceptiveness as a reader not only generated critical insights regarding the stakes underwriting each of my gestures at philosophical discourse or observations into cinematic form but also manifested the kind of evaluative generosity to which I aspire. On the other hand, Marcia Landy was always welcoming of discussions concerning the theoretical thickets that I would often find myself lost in, and I left many of our meetings feeling both exhilarated and less certain about my own conceptual commitments in the most productive ways possible. Neepa Majumdar’s support was decisive not only in terms of her illuminating feedback on my writing but also with respect to the guidance she offered in situating my work within the discipline, especially in mapping out the possible points of contact that my research questions have with broader debates and issues in film scholarship. I owe a fruitful year of writing to the Carol Kay Dissertation Fellowship, which was awarded to me by the English Department and made possible by the generosity of Jonathan Arac vii and Mr. and Mrs. Jeffrey A. Kay. I also thank the department’s Director of Graduate Studies Nancy Glazener, who helped me navigate the nuts and bolts of successfully completing each stage along the graduate trajectory and whose course on the history of criticism is still mentioned amongst my cohort as one of the best seminar experiences we’ve had. Outside of my committee, no one has read my writings – in so many iterations and drafts – as carefully and thoughtfully as Ryan Pierson, and my work has benefited immeasurably from our conversations. I have been deeply fortunate to share formative experiences over the past several years with a close group of friends in Pittsburgh, and, in many ways, this dissertation would not have been possible without them, among whom I especially want to acknowledge Javier O’Neil-Ortiz, Veronica Fitzpatrick, and Jeff Heinzl. Finally, I wish to thank my parents, Kwang and Sonye Rhym, and my siblings: Luke, Rebecca, and Priscilla. Their love sustains me. viii INTRODUCTION I. Heidegger and Cinema Despite the recent uptick in the theoretical literature on film that makes substantial reference to the writings of Martin Heidegger, often cited as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, his work has never quite taken hold in any sustained or pervasive way in much of the history of film studies. Contextualizing the conditions of this lacuna within the discipline’s broader reception history of phenomenology more generally only takes us so far in better understanding why. While Dudley Andrew’s 1978 article “The Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology in Film Theory” offers historical insight into how the field’s academic disciplinarization in the mid-1960s coincided with the rising predominance in French intellectual culture of semiotics and structuralism in a way that ultimately eclipsed the significant appeals to phenomenology that were made in French postwar film criticism, phenomenological film theory has since become a burgeoning area of scholarship.1 Most groundbreaking is Vivian Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye (1992), which not only adopts Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s existential-phenomenological investigations of embodied perception to account for cinematic spectatorship but also mobilizes the dialectical polemic against idealism and empiricism that structures the arguments of his magnum opus Phenomenology of Perception (1945) in order to stage a novel critique of the reductive conceptual strategies prevalently employed in the Marxist-psychoanalytic film theories of the 1970s and 1980s.2 Whether 1 Dudley Andrew, “The Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology in Film Theory,” Movies and Methods: An Anthology, Volume II, edited by Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 625-632. 2 Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 1 referenced as a source for elaboration and extended application or targeted as a subject for critique, Sobchack’s analysis has had an ongoing interdisciplinary impact on contemporary studies in cinematic affect and perception.3 And while this is in large part responsible for why Merleau-Ponty’s iteration of phenomenology has been privileged, the still expanding area of phenomenological film theory has produced major studies that place cinema in dialogue with figures such as Edmund Husserl, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, and Paul Ricoeur.4 Considering how profoundly and inextricably formative his work has been to twentieth-century French thought – to the extent that his “omnipresence in France,” which Jacques Derrida sums up as “in the end he is everywhere,”

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