Serge Daney, Zapper: Cinema, Television, and the Persistence of Media
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Serge Daney, Zapper: Cinema, Television, and the Persistence of Media JAMES TWEEDIE The Rearview Mirror Just a few weeks before his death in 1992, Serge Daney granted a lengthy inter- view to Serge Toubiana, his co-editor at Cahiers du cinéma for much of the 1970s. Referring several times to his emaciated appearance and exhaustion during the last stages of his struggle with AIDS, Daney framed this conversation as a farewell to a longtime friend and a summation of his philosophy of media. He began the inter- view with these words: “There’s an image I really like; it’s the rear-view mirror. There’s a moment—let’s call it aging or dying—when it’s better to look in the rear- view mirror.”1 The rearview mirror, he suggested, is where “phantoms” come to meet you (PC, p. 39). Over a three-decade career, Daney continually invoked this rhetoric of mortality and phantoms, especially when he alluded to the aging, death, and ghostly afterlife of cinema. In a 1977 interview at the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York, he described cinephilia as a “mourning work” made necessary because “something is dead,” because only “traces, shadows remain.”2 And he praised a cohort of “filmmakers for whom an image is closer to an inscription on a tombstone than to an advertising poster,” an “epitaph” rather than a flashy exhibition of its own vitality. While his work resonates with the spectral language in critical theory at the end of the twentieth century, most notably in Derrida’s Specters of Marx, the image of the rearview mirror and its retrospective gaze clashes with established accounts of the history of cinema and the theory of media technology that developed alongside it.3 Emerging film genres from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries 1. Serge Daney, Postcards from the Cinema, trans. Paul Douglas Grant (New York: Berg, 2007), p. 39. Hereafter cited as PC. Daney’s suggestion that looking at film in the “rear-view mirror” is “better” than many other viewing positions distinguishes his use of that phrase from Marshall McLuhan’s more famous lament about the sluggish dissemination of new media technology: “The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (Berkeley: Gingko Press, 1967), pp. 74–75. 2. T. L. French [Bill Krohn], “Les Cahiers du Cinéma 1968–1977: Interview with Serge Daney,” trans. Steve Erickson. See http://home.earthlink.net/~steevee/Daney_1977.html. 3. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). OCTOBER 157, Summer 2016, pp. 107–127. © 2016 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00261 by guest on 29 September 2021 108 OCTOBER often metaphorically and literally situated their cameras at the front of rapidly mov- ing vehicles, and through phantom rides and other images linked to locomotion, filmmakers expressed their affinity with motorized movement rather than the natur- al landscapes and human settlements they rushed past. As Tom Gunning points out, pictures that featured onrushing trains and trams were among the most popular early films, and they have remained influential in film theory through the oft-repeat- ed but apocryphal tale of audiences racing out of a Lumière brothers screening for fear of being annihilated by a steel monster bellowing smoke.4 In actuality, Gunning argues, the audience likely stood its ground, experiencing the twin thrills of modern technology: a mobile machine chugging toward them on-screen and a contraption capable of projecting movement from a box at the center of the theater or café. This foundational myth attests to a desire on the part of film critics to situate cinema at the forefront of the artistic and technological avant-gardes, even when its status was much more ambiguous and the medium could be conscripted into conservative cul- tural and political causes. This account continued to influence cinema and theory for decades, as in Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), when the man and camera ride together on a speeding motorcycle, the operator cranking away furious- ly, or straddle streetcar and train tracks. In the first half-century of cinema, trains, streetcars, and movie cameras often hurtled forward on “parallel tracks,” creating phantoms without being haunted by them.5 Daney displayed his own fascination with what he called “our reflexes of an automobilo-cinephilic kind,” especially in a series of Libération pieces published in 1984 and dedicated to “Fifty Years of Star Turns for Automobiles in Cinema.”6 In these vignettes he outlines a historical progression in the relationship between cars and movies, beginning with the “visual exaltation of movement” still promi- nent in the late silent era. In the Harold Lloyd vehicle Hot Water (1924), for exam- ple, the car provides “an open observatory from which it is possible to view the world anew” (MC2, p. 465), and it complements the “burlesque world” of 1920s film comedy, a genre that regularly departs from the strictures of narrative econo- my, just as the zigzagging automobiles on the burlesque screen “are not yet con- demned to the single-file line of a regulated highway” (p. 466). In the classical Hollywood studio picture—Grand Hotel (1932) is Daney’s example—the star sys- tem and the auto industry burnish their images together, participating at once in a “rivalry” and a “duet”: “The star and the car, impeccable, gleam in unison. The chrome is makeup, the eyes are headlights, the fur coat is an intimation of leather: the identification runs deep” (p. 466). The car no longer drags the comedian 4. Tom Gunning, “An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film,” in Film Before Griffith, ed. John L. Fell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 355–66. 5. Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997). 6. Serge Daney, La Maison cinéma et le monde, 2: Les Années Libé 1981–1985 (Paris: P.O.L, 2002), pp. 91, 463. (Translations mine.) Hereafter cited as MC2. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00261 by guest on 29 September 2021 Top: William K. L. Dickson. Panorama of Ealing from a Moving Tram. 1901. Bottom: Dziga Vertov. The Man with a Movie Camera. 1929. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00261 by guest on 29 September 2021 110 OCTOBER down anarchic roads: “It is not made to run on asphalt but to turn on a pedestal” (p. 467). In Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly from 1955, the flashy sports car has transitioned from an object of veneration to an extension of the cinematic appara- tus itself: “The camera draws closer, glues itself to the glass, coils itself up on the back seat, films at the height of the windshield wipers. The camera and the car are accomplices” (p. 469). With the actors shouting over the howling engine, the soundtrack a mix of human voices and mechanical noise, the camera be comes the automobile’s alter ego and a collaborator in the violence about to ensue. In this “new scenography,” Daney writes, “the windshield acts as a second screen, isolating the head of the protagonists from the background that flows by, pointing them out like targets” (p. 469). The series concludes with two reflections on the age of Europe’s economic miracles, the period when “Italian cinema dreams also of white cars that fit in with the architecture of service stations, sunlight, brand new housing projects and all this boom urbanism, Antonionian, showing off amidst pockets of misery” (p. 471).7 Before continuing to write the dual history of cars and modernity, we “must first see that our time is that of Hertz and Avis. More like rental cars than possessions, more utilitarian than fetishized, they would have a hard time becoming actresses. Just extras” (p. 473). If cars enjoyed a privileged sta- tus in Daney’s writing and in cinema, if they served as barometers of the evolving relationship between images and industrial modernity, between the emblematic media and machines of the twentieth century, then his late-career shift to the pre- siding metaphor of the rearview mirror is all the more significant. Once a harbin- ger of the future, cinema for most of the twentieth century belonged with cars and trains at the forefront of the drive into modernity. In the proliferation of screens and platforms that forms the contemporary image environment, however, cinema, once the star of stars, is now a member of an ensemble cast, if not yet an extra. For Daney, writing in the era of ubiquitous television in the home and traffic jams out- side, the promise of modernity that energized early filmmakers and theorists seemed like a quaint anachronism, and the cinema an archive of those antiquated visions of the future. Daney’s awareness of his belated position in the history of cinema became increasingly acute toward the end of his career, as the waves of new cinemas from the 1950s to the ’80s yielded to a fundamentally changed artistic and economic landscape, with television and video at the vanguard of an emerging visual field.