Subjectivity The Key Debates Mutations and Appropriations in European Film Studies Series Editors Ian Christie, Dominique Chateau, Annie van den Oever Subjectivity Filmic Representation and the Spectator’s Experience Edited by Dominique Chateau Amsterdam University Press The publication of this book is made possible by a grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Cover illustration: Ingmar Bergman, Persona, 1966 Cover design: Neon, design and communications / Sabine Mannel Lay-out: JAPES, Amsterdam isbn 978 90 8964 317 9 e-isbn 978 90 4851 420 5 nur 670 © D. Chateau / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2011 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustra- tions reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. Contents Editorial 7 Acknowledgments 9 Introduction: Rethinking Subjectivity in Film 11 Dominique Chateau Part I From Mind to Film, from Film to Mind The Cinema as Art of the Mind: Hugo Münsterberg, First Theorist of Subjectivity in Film 23 José Moure The Representation of Experience in Cinema 41 Gregory Currie Beyond Subjectivity: The Film Experience 53 Francesco Casetti Part II Ways of Expressing Subjectivity The Man Who Wasn’t There: The Production of Subjectivity in Delmer Daves’ Dark Passage 69 Vivian Sobchack From Aesthetic Experience to the Loss of Identity, in Three Steps 85 Pere Salabert Robert Bresson and the Voices of an Inner World: “I” Can Never Be “You,” or the Impossible Identification 99 Céline Scemama The Silence of the Lenses: Blow Up and the Subject of Photography 119 Pierre Taminiaux 5 Part III Subjectivity and the Epistemology of Film Studies Beyond Subjectivity. Bakhtin’s Dialogism and the Moving Image 135 Karl Sierek Imaginary Subject 147 Jacinto Lageira A Philosophical Approach to Subjectivity in Film Form 161 Dominique Chateau Part IV Conversation Subjectivity in Artistic Coupling Conversation with Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki 189 By Marina Gržinić Notes 207 General Bibliography 235 Notes on Contributors 249 Index of Names 253 Index of Film Titles 259 Index of Subjects 261 6 index of subjects Editorial Thinking and theorizing about film is almost as old as the medium itself. Within a few years of the earliest film shows in the 1890s, manifestos and reflections began to appear which sought to analyze the seemingly vast potential of film. Writers in France, Russia, and Britain were among the first to enter this field, and their texts have become cornerstones of the literature of cinema. Few nations, however, failed to produce their own statements and dialogues about the nature of cinema, often interacting with proponents of Modernism in the traditional arts and crafts. Film thus found itself embedded in the discourses of modernity, espe- cially in Europe and Soviet Russia. “Film theory,” as it became known in the 1970s, has always had an historical dimension, acknowledging its debts to the pioneers of analyzing film texts and film experience, even while pressing these into service in the present. But as scho- larship in the history of film theory develops, there is an urgent need to revisit many long-standing assumptions and clarify lines of transmission and interpreta- tion. The Key Debates is a series of books from Amsterdam University Press which focuses on the central issues that continue to animate thinking about film and audiovisual media as the “century of celluloid” gives way to a field of interrelated digital media. Initiated by Annie van den Oever (the Netherlands), the direction of the series has been elaborated by an international group of film scholars, including Domin- ique Chateau (France), Ian Christie (UK), Laurent Creton (France), Laura Mulvey (UK), Roger Odin (France), Eric de Kuyper (Belgium), and Emile Poppe (Bel- gium). The intention is to draw on the widest possible range of expertise to pro- vide authoritative accounts of how debates around film originated, and to trace how concepts that are commonly used today have been modified in the process of appropriation. The book series may contribute to both the invention as well as the abduction of concepts. London / Paris / Amsterdam Ian Christie, Dominique Chateau, Annie van den Oever 7 Acknowledgments This book is the second volume in the book series The Key Debates. After Ostrannenie (edited by Annie van den Oever), the first in the series, it is once again a testament to the relevance of the project Mutations and Appropriations in European Film Studies. For this reason, first of all, I am very grateful to Annie van den Oever, who in- itiated the project and who remains by and large responsible for its continuing richness and productiveness. It is always a great pleasure to discuss and work with both her and Ian Christie as part of the editorial board. I sincerely thank those who participated in laying the groundwork for Subjectivity during meetings in Amsterdam, Groningen, London, and Paris: Laura Marcus, Pere Salabert, and Viola ten Hoorn, as well as my colleagues at the University Paris I, Panthéon-Sor- bonne: Jacinto Lageira, José Moure, and Céline Scemama. I wish also to express my gratitude to the other authors of the book, Francesco Casetti, Gregory Currie, Marina Gržinić, Maria Klonaris, Karl Sierek, Vivian Sobchack, Pierre Taminiaux, and Katerina Thomadaki for their insightful contributions. With the rich and va- luable contributions of all these distinguished film scholars and artists, I hope that the book will provide an account of the most important recent thinking on the topic of subjectivity in film. As with Ostrannenie, this project again proved an inspiring yet challenging undertaking of uniting an international group of scho- lars from different academic traditions, and stemming from countries as diverse as America, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, and Spain. With my above-named colleagues at Paris 1, I formed a research team within the Sorbonne’s Laboratory of Theoretical and Applied Aesthetics (LETA, Labora- toire d’esthétique théorique et appliquée), directed by Marc Jimenez. I would especially like to thank him for giving a warm welcome to the research team and for contributing to the financing of the book. Thanks also to the Doctoral School of Plastic Arts, Aesthetics and Sciences of Arts, its former Director Jean Da Silva, and its present one Bernard Darras. I sincerely thank Jeroen Sondervan, Chantal Nicolaes, and their teams at Amsterdam University Press, who have once again been very patient, supportive, and a pleasure to work with. For their support to this international research project, I am also grateful to the Netherlands Organi- sation for Scientific Research (NWO), whose funds make the publication of this book possible. Finally, this book would not have been possible without Viola ten Hoorn. I owe a great debt to her. Not only for her assistance in producing the 9 volume concerning its revision and editing, but also its conception from the whole to the details. Many thanks to her. Dominique Chateau Paris, May 2011 10 acknowledgments Introduction: Rethinking Subjectivity in Film Dominique Chateau André Bazin’s objectivist postulate is well-known: cinema is a production of ob- jective moving images because, as a temporal achievement of photography, it is automatic or mechanic. However, from this standpoint, what are we to think of an assertion such as “Godard’s comeback to subjectivity occurred only in the mid to late 1970s through his video work with Miéville”?1 Does it mean that Godard lost touch with cinema when he came back to subjectivity? In other words, can we consider that some films are more cinematographic than others? This reminds me of Eleanor Rosch’s brilliant expression about retrievers being “more doggy” than other dogs.2 As a sociologist, she empirically analyzes American representa- tions of dogs in an anti-essentialist theoretical context (under the protection of Wittgenstein), while Bazin’s postulate is deliberately essentialist. Strictly defining cinema by the objective power of the “impassible lens,”3 Bazin follows the over- simplified definition of objectivity as the lack of subjectivity (which matches the equally oversimplified definition of subjectivity as the lack of objectivity): “All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence.”4 We do not need a retrospective study throughout film history to convince us that it is a procession of productions where man – that is, an identified subject, an author – is sometimes absent, sometimes present, and that the films where man is supposed to be present are no less cinematographic than others. Further- more, Bazin was in fact a mentor to a lot of young filmmakers, who made films where we recognize the distinctive and somewhat conspicuous stamp of subjec- tivity; as a matter of fact, these filmmakers have played a larger part in defining cinema as subjective than those who, at the same time, were absent from their films. Nevertheless, the topic of this present book does not amount to a discus- sion about the Nouvelle Vague and the credit of its members. Some signs of sub- jectivity occur in films (even in some Nouvelle Vague ones) that do not refer to an identified author, and these signs lead us to the idea that the question, if indeed there is one, involves whether film in general is able to express a wide range of subjective aspects with its own means. Some of these aspects concern the repre- sentation of a character’s subjective relation to the real (more specifically, to something represented in the film that is taken as real), like in the famous PoV 11 shot.