Images between Images: Cinematic Inventions of the Everyday By Linda Ai-Yun Liu B.A., Amherst College, 2000 M.A., Brown University, 2003 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Providence, Rhode Island 2011 © Linda Ai-Yun Liu 2011 All rights reserved This dissertation by Linda Liu is accepted in its present form by the Department of Modern Culture and Media as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date Philip Rosen, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date Mary Ann Doane, Reader Date Lynne Joyrich, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii Vita Linda Ai-Yun Liu (b. 1977, Taipei, Taiwan) received her B.A. in English from Amherst College in 2000 and her M.A. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University in 2003. She has taught at Brown University. iv Acknowledgments I am first of all grateful to my committee, Philip Rosen, Mary Ann Doane, and Lynne Joyrich, whose guidance, support, and constructive criticism helped to make this dissertation possible. I give special thanks to my advisor, Philip Rosen, whose intellectual rigor, close readings, and considerate feedback have assisted substantially in every step of the writing process. This dissertation would also not have been possible without the generous support of Amherst College’s Edward Poole Lay Fellowship. Thanks are due as well to the Film and Media Studies concentration in Amherst College’s English Department, where my interest in cinema studies began, and to Helen von Schmidt, whose courses helped to plant the seeds of my cinephilia. I am additionally indebted to my fellow graduate students at Brown whose collegiality has created an inimitable sense of community. Portions of this dissertation have been presented at the Modern Culture Workshop, where participants provided thoughtful feedback that helped to hone ideas and provide food for thought: Stephen Groening, Josh Guilford, Hunter Hargraves, Maggie Hennefeld, Pooja Rangan, Anita Starosta, and Matt Tierney. From the beginning, Keri Holt and Lelia Menendez have been invaluable sources of moral support, friendship, and remarkably fun grocery trips. The staff of my department, Liza Hebert, Richard Manning, and Susan McNeil, has also helped me every step of the way with their encouragement, knowledge, humor, and tremendous kindness. I cannot thank my family enough for their love and unwavering support, which has sustained me through the years. Mention should also be made of Annalivia, Charlie, v and Patio Cat, the nature of whose assistance cannot be measured in human language. And, finally, I thank Ted Robitaille, whose love, companionship, advice, patience, and support have given me the gifts of time and well-being—gifts for which I will be eternally grateful. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………..v Introduction……………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 1: Leaves Trembling in the Wind: Wonder, Cinema, and the Everyday…….9 Chapter 2: Archive of the Everyday: Imagining Contemporaneity through the Local Actuality Film……………………………………………………..56 Chapter 3: Routine Representations: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, and Women’s “Domestic” Cinema in the 1970s………105 Chapter 4: Open Images and Undiscovered Worlds: Re-inventing the Everyday in Le Quattro Volte and Syndromes and a Century…………..142 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………....187 vii 1 INTRODUCTION The temporality of everyday life is marked by an irony which is its own creation, for this temporality is held to be ongoing and nonreversible and, at the same time, characterized by repetition and predictability. The pages falling off the calendar, the notches marked in a tree that no longer stands—these are the signs of the everyday, the effort to articulate difference through counting. Yet it is precisely this counting that reduces differences to similarities, that is designed to be ‘lost track of.’ Such ‘counting,’ such signifying, is drowned out by the silence of the ordinary. —Stewart 14 This dissertation is motivated by a fascination with the ambiguous notion of the “everyday,” its contradictory temporality, and why it is that some people can be said to belong more to the everyday than others. Its overarching argument is that the everyday was and continues to be an “invention” of modernity and modern technologies of representation, and that cinema is one of the key technologies involved in the invention of a modern sense of the everyday. This dissertation’s use of the phrase, “invention of the everyday,” is borrowed from Rita Felski, who recently noted the growing number of recent intellectual inquiries interested in the subject of the everyday. A central term for cultural studies and feminism, the term “everyday” or “everyday life” is frequently invoked by scholars interested in what Felski calls “micro-analysis” and “history from below,” but rarely is it ever explicitly defined (75). Similarly, the everyday is invoked frequently in cinema studies, but rarely is it the focus of sustained theoretical exegeses. It is as if this reticence on the part of scholars echoes the vernacular or commonsensical understanding of the everyday as a level of experience so mundane and commonsensical 2 that it goes without explanation. Felski, on the other hand, argues that the everyday can indeed be defined as a concept invented by twentieth-century intellectual discourse, in addition to being a distinct phenomenon of capitalist modernity. Building on the notion that the everyday became increasingly visible as an object of representation under modernity, my own argument will delineate the ways in which cinema contributed to and helped to define this process. While the “inventedness” of the everyday is a major assumption of this dissertation, it is not for the sake of proving that the concept is solely a product of discursive determinations. Rather, my thesis makes recourse to an intellectual tradition (which is discussed in more detail in Chapter One) that looks upon the everyday as both a category of the social imaginary and as that which exceeds or is not entirely attributable to cultural codification. The proponents of this tradition can be said to favor a negative definition of the everyday, aligning it with phenomena that are customarily overlooked or considered unworthy of representation.1 Maurice Blanchot typifies this critical approach in his characterization of the everyday as “what is most difficult to discover.” For him, the everyday should not be located in the statistical “average” of a given society, but rather in its “hidden present”—its more oblique and less self-evident movements (13). Thus, in a culture ruled by the desire to keep “abreast of everything that takes place at the very instant that it passes and comes to pass” and represents the everyday to itself as a constant stream of things that “happen,” the everyday also resides in what “escapes” such representations and “belongs to insignificance” (Blanchot 14). Even more so than the 1 Key critics in this largely Francophone tradition include Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Michel de Certeau, and Henri Lefebvre. Michael Sheringham traces this history to the sixties and discusses how it evolved into the eighties in his book, Everyday Life: Theories and Histories from Surrealism to the Present. I engage with this critical work in more detail in Chapters One and Two. 3 continuous stream of events offered up by our ever prolix media culture, as Blanchot argued, it is “platitude,” encompassing “what lags and falls back, the residual life with which our trash cans and cemeteries are filled: scrap and refuse,” that contains the hidden significance of the everyday (13). This characterization of the everyday as the “hidden present” is particularly germane to cinema’s double nature as both a contingent and a synthetic mode of representation. My thesis argues that this double nature gives cinema a special “affinity” for what Blanchot called platitude and residual life, which is different from saying that film has a transparent relationship to a preexisting reality. Rather, I argue that cinema’s affinity to the everyday is tied to its ability to record and reveal portions of the referential world2; that is, cinema does not so much function as a window onto a preordained world as it facilitates unfamiliar configurations of and new ways of perceiving that world. This dissertation engages centrally with an under-examined and much misunderstood idea: Siegfried Kracauer’s theory of everyday life as an “inherent affinity” of cinema. In dialogue with recent reevaluations of Kracauer’s writings, as well as debates in cinema studies on indexicality, my thesis shows the pivotal importance of indexical contingency in his conception of cinema’s affinity with the everyday. Instead of reading indexical contingency in terms of a fixed relation between photochemical image and external referent, I consider its status as an agent for aesthetic and epistemological discovery. In this regard, cinema discloses the everyday, not in a realist or positivist sense, but in a radically non-anthropocentric guise comprised of habitually unheeded and culturally 2 I am indebted to Miriam Hansen for this insight into cinema’s dual recording and revelatory capacity, which she argued is crucial to Kracauer’s theory of film’s distinct identity (“Introduction” xxv). 4 marginalized phenomena. Such images of the everyday insist on the intractable materiality of things and promote subjective reorientations to familiar objects, actions, and environments. Akin to the mute testimony of fossils, the photographic image retains the trace of a prior existence that confronts human intentionality with what Miriam Hansen called an “alien physis” (“Introduction” xxix), the prospect of encountering the material world without the habitual veneer of anthropocentrism. Part of my aim, therefore, is to examine how the cinematic invention of the everyday involved a mixture of continuity and rupture, new and old.