Serge Daney: Footlights: Critical Notebook 1970—1982, Translated by Nicholas Elliott. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2023 [1983].
For this letter we return to the French film critic Serge Daney. Last September we covered the first volume of his translated clippings for Cahiers which he edited from 1974 to 1981, as well as Liberation.
Before us is not the next volume but his first published book, newly translated. It binds together a selection of pieces from the 70s that he wrote for Cahiers, all under the odd title Footlights.
Footlights, la rampe, specifically the lights lining the proscenium of a theater stage, indeed, but in Daney it also points to the plane of space between the screen and the audience — which can sometimes be a ramp.
But with the space between the frame and the spectator, there is also the return of the suppressed in the story of film: as cinema loses its relatively dominant position in the media to television and video, the trappings of pre-cinema entertainment are given a new lease on life in this context: “theater, cabaret, puppets, and the circus. The footlights are back.”
The usual suspects of 70s high-brow politically charged auteurs are here, including the Straub-Huillet duo, Godard, Syberberg, Sembene, Bresson, Pasolini. But there’s also Spielberg’s Jaws and Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala.
But the true ideological and theoretical references for Daney’s book are André Bazin the film theorist, Jacques Lacan the speculative psychoanalyst. (The piece on Kurosawa in particular had a surprising amount of references to Lacanian linguistic philosophy….)
Footlights starts with the heady if naiive days of Paris ‘68 and its drives to get out of the dark movie theaters and into the streets, while movie critics contritely attacked their own love of the cinema as a form of obscurantism. Daney and his colleagues at Cahiers began running back through auteur theory with a structuralist lens represented by Althusser, Barthes, and Lacan.
“They tried to convince jeering lecture halls that studying Not Reconciled (Straub) and Wind From the East (Godard) was useful for the revolution.”
Lacan’s most famous psychoanalytic slogan was the unconscious is structured like a language. In one of the opening pieces of the book, on Howard Hawks, we get a picture of a filmmaker’s aesthetic that is based on the horror of writing. Writing here means “traces,” the way scars and environments can tell stories: in Hawks, dripping blood only appears as a way to advance the plot.
There are other dimensions to this business of tracing, indexing, and erasing:
The (radical) impossibility of considering any passage outside of effacement and substitution. The dread that something of the passage will subsist, that a trace (a witness, some writing, a wrinkle) will remain. Effacement: In The Dawn Patrol (1930), the names of the pilots who don’t come back at night are literally erased from the blackboard.
Daney is part of a tradition of gay film critics who have derived great signifiance from Howard Hawks westerns. Maybe it shouldn’t be that surprising that we go into the psycho-sexual resonances of all these scenarios of heroes getting beseiged or taken hostage in trains and buildings: they have to penetrate into the safe room (the womb) and stay there!
Then consider the pattern of broken and dismembered fingers and arms in Hawks’s work.
The “hero’s” assumption of his castration: since he’s already the phallus, there’s no way he can also have it!
Put two and two together, and you have the language of cinema, determining what’s on screen and what’s off, determines “life and death” and is a castration through the act of cutting.
A section reviewing a set of political documentaries from the mid-seventies are framed by Daney’s cringing reminiscence of French Maoism: the wave of politicized cinema feuled a debate that traded on the question of point of view, both that of a given party and its political line, and how the lens captures its subject.
A militant film shoot reproduced on a “small scale” the great fantasmatic scenario of sinking Maoism, with its “people’s camp,” its “somewhat liberated zones,” its “rights to speak,” and its “class enemies.” It was tempting to politicize — or at least moralize — our old acquaintances shot and reverse shot, commentary and voice-over, bare speech and metalanguage, naturalism and typing (i.e., classification into types).
[…]
…the issue of “point of view” survived perfectly well at Cahiers as long as it was treated once again as a moral question. Beyond the ebb of militant activity and the abandoning of any idea of a front, one returned to what the magazine had always fed on: the morality of the shoot, erasing the notion of the actor, the emergence of the auteur.
I had hoped that this section would be a chance to follow up on Daney’s pan of How Yukong Moved the Mountains in the previous volume reviewed for this Sub, Cinema House and the World.
In the context of Footlights, it seems like Daney’s objections are that filmmakers Ives and Loridan both naively “plug into Chinese reality” while also blurring the terms of the dialectic of filmmaker’s presence and subject’s reality.
Daney, and Cahiers broadly, had a horror of naturalism. Fair enough. There is also a consideration of the condemnation of Antonioni’s film about China in the Party organ Renmin Ribao.
Moving into the back half of the 70s, the discourse moves away from the “point of view” question to a particular discourse of the body. Again this area is glossed in Lacanian terms.
“Strobgodar cinema [i.e., the cinema of Straub-Huillet and Godard] doesn’t (only) aim for the viewer’s pleasure, but his or her capacity for joissance. Well, cinema-jouissance doesn’t have much to do with the recipes for pleasure. Lacan, whom everyone was reading at the time, refers to it as a ‘black hole.’”
Cinema-jouissance is a black hole because it can’t be put into the system of signifiers that striate the unconscious. Put another way, these late 70s New Wave films were “enjoyed” not because of the effects the films produce, but because they are enjoyed as films.
The overarching linguistic dimension of Lacanian theory gets elaborated in a piece on Straub and Huillet’s Moses und Aron.
As long as an image is alive, as long as it has impact, is compelling to an audience, and gives pleasure, it means that something in it, around it, lurking inside it, is functioning in the realm of its primitive enunciation (power + event = here is). Perhaps in cinema, enunciation is a little machine hidden somewhere repeating the Lacanian motto: “You want to watch? Well, see this!”
Like the Lacanian unconscious subject that “enunciates” through the ego while staying apart from it, every new shot in a film may as well be saying, “Here is a shovel,” or whatever the shot is picturing.
And the next grouping of articles takes us from speaking and enunciating to consider the whole body that does the speaking. “Here, the body is always an enigma. In terms of what it can do and what it contains. In terms of what moves it and what holds it.
On a lighter note, we’re happy to report that Daney was a Jacques Tati fan. Tati made only good movies through the 60s, and Daney makes a great observation of how closely the arc of his work matches that of France’s national cinema and film history more broadly. “…he takes cinema in the technological state that he finds it. And curiously, though he has so often been accused of being backward-looking, all he thinks about its innovation.”
In Tati’s world, we laugh when things work out in the end, and gaze at pratfalls as if they were beautiful acts (and they are in a film like PlayTime). “Nothing really goes wrong in Playtime, though nothing works. […] Tati would introduce another kind of comedy where it’s the fact of standing up that is funny and the fact of being unsteady (Hulot’s gait) that is human.”
The book ends with an interesting observation, about how in the early 60s, classic filmmakers like Fritz Lang or Nicholas Ray end up making cameos in New Wave films by Godard or Wim Wenders. “For the first time in the history of cinema, a generation born in cinema (unlike the one that came before, the pioneer generation) was no longer working and had lost the right to say, ‘cinema, our trade.’”
The old greats may have stopped working too soon, but this phenomenon has continued with Tsai Ming Liang casting the start of 400 Blows in one of his movies, and there was a variation when Spielberg had age cohort David Lynch play John Ford.