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Most of Truffaut’s films feature romances of one sort or another, but it is very rare for his films to feature a successful romance. This chapter therefore takes up themes relating to the couple as approached in the preceding chapter, mostly in relation to the final three films of Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel cycle (Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970) and Love on the Run (1979)). These films trace a remarkable period of French history from the perspective of the couple: from courtship, through marriage, infidelity and divorce, all in the context of social, moral and legal changes. The guiding thread of the cycle – and of Truffaut’s films more generally – is that any couple, and therefore any ‘love’ per se, is, at best, temporary. But this is no bad thing, for Truffaut’s films shed a remarkably positive light on the temporary nature of love. Building on some of the reflections of Leo Bersani from the previous chapter, this chapter makes a stronger claim for the relevance of Bersani’s notion of connectedness. From Bersani’s perspective, connectedness features connections between human beings that eschew notions of possession or control. Any notion of an ‘exclusive’ couple is therefore, from Bersani’s perspective, merely a relationship of control. Connectedness, on the contrary, requires an openness and expansiveness – what Bersani calls a ‘new mode of relation’ – that makes for a very different understanding of love. Truffaut’s films demonstrate, to a large extent, what such a new mode of relation would look like.
Fellini’s most important films make tales of love central – in I vitelloni (1953) or La strada (1954), all the way up to Ginger and Fred (1984). Fellini’s most remarkable disquisitions on love and marriage occur in the pair of films from the mid-1960s: 8½ (1963) and Juliet of the Spirits (1965). 8½ concludes, the chapter argues, on a note of reconciliation as the husband, Guido, appeals to his wife, Luisa, for forgiveness, and this married couple looks to the future with hope and positivity. The key concept that emerges in this chapter pertains to narcissism. Fellini’s male characters are typically narcissistic and controlling, especially when it comes to the women they (supposedly) love. The contours of narcissism are investigated in some detail with the conclusion that Fellini depicts the narcissism of men in love, but also that his films are critical of that narcissism. Typically, the path beyond narcissism can be found only if women are prepared to forgive men for their narcissism, as occurs most evidently, the chapter argues, in 8½.
While discussing Godard’s works in general, this chapter focuses most closely on four films: A Married Woman (1963), Passion (1982), Hail Mary (1984) and In Praise of Love (2000), while also offering some reflections on Prenom Carmen (1983). The guiding argument of the chapter is provided by the number two: love, for Godard, is a matter of ‘seeing the world as two’ rather than one. (Philosophically this idea of love comes from Alain Badiou, noting that Badiou’s reflections were to a large extent inspired by Godard’s In Praise of Love.) The chapter engages extensively with Leo Bersani’s (with Ulysse Dutoit) writings on Godard, especially on Passion. Bersani argues that Godard’s films offer what he calls a ‘new mode of relation’ based on connectedness and correspondences between humans and the world. The chapter turns Bersani’s observations in the direction of two key statements from Godard’s films of the early 1980s: ‘If I love you, that’s the end of you’ (from Prenom Carmen) and ‘One’s better as a pair’ (from Hail Mary). Ultimately, the chapter argues that Godard’s films show us a version of love that is always ‘over there’, elsewhere, just out of reach.
This chapter focuses on the films of Eric Rohmer while also staging a discussion between theories proposed by Leo Bersani, on the one hand, and Stanley Cavell, on the other. While Bersani (writing with Ulysse Dutoit) has characterised Rohmer’s films as offering modes of ‘non-discursive contact’ – what has been called, throughout this book, ‘connectedness’ – Cavell has, by contrast, offered an account of Rohmer’s A Tale of Winter (1992) from the perspective of what he calls ‘comedies of remarriage’. Cavell’s arguments demonstrate that Rohmer’s key characters pass through phases of ‘Cartesian madness’: they doubt their own existence, as well as the existence of the world and other people. These characters, also, for the most part, pass through madness and are then transformed or fulfilled in various ways; certainly this is the case for A Tale of Winter. Therefore, the chapter provides a final criticism of Bersani’s theories of ‘connectedness’ in which Bersani’s negative account of Cartesian ‘mastery’ in instead seen, from Cavell’s perspective, as a potential mode of self-fulfilment.
This introductory chapter argues that films are part of reality. It tries to see films as part of the reality people typically inhabit, as part of the world they live in, as parts of their lives. This is an attempt to acknowledge the reality of film that can be called filmic reality. Film scholars and students are invariably drawn towards trying to determine what a film represents by looking at films as at best a secondary mode of being, so that any claim for the reality of films is most often met with either the blank stare of bafflement or outright repudiation. Only by opening oneself up to the experimentation, hypothesizing, reverie and imagination that are presented by films can one hope to accept the realities that films provide. It has to be accepted that films are part of reality, not things which have to live up to an already-conceived reality, or which have to mirror reality, represent or reflect reality or, conversely, ‘criticize’ reality. Only if people give up on the understanding that films are somehow severed from reality can they begin to account for the realities that films themselves are.
This chapter fleshes out the predominant strand and the current state of film theory and film studies. The strand is traced back to the notion of ‘political modernism’, a term denoting a particular period of film studies examined by D. N. Rodowick. Instead of criticizing political modernism, the chapter points out that much of what passes for film studies today has failed to go beyond the debates of political modernism. The logic of political modernism is based on a fundamental distinction between illusion and reality in the cinema. Film studies have predominantly been guided by a desire to forge clear distinctions between what can be considered real in the cinema and what can be considered illusory or non-real. The strategies of political modernism, which tried to dismantle the representational allure of orthodox cinema, were and are still clinging to a theory of representation. As Kibbey argues, the iconoclastic theory of the image is one predicated on a distinction between false and true images.
Filmic reality is dependent on the attitude of an individual to see the film as a part of reality instead of its representations. This chapter focuses on the works of André Bazin who goes beyond political modernism and its logic of illusion versus reality in the cinema. His writings on the ‘Ontology of the photographic image’ and the ‘Myth of total cinema’ appear fundamentally to cement his approach to cinema as one that is unflinchingly representational. For him, cinema has the capacity to create reality in a specific way, one that conceives of modes of life in an ‘authentic’ manner. The kind of authenticity Bazin envisages is explicitly non-representational—it has nothing to do with reflecting, representing or capturing reality, and instead is about creating modes of life that are to be considered ‘real’.
This chapter brings forth Christian Metz's conception of cinema. On the one hand, he has been discredited with trying to reduce cinematic expression to linguistic terms while on the other hand he has been further criticised for being an advocate of ‘apparatus theory’. Metz's notion of the ‘imaginary signifier’ has been criticized because critics argue that his theorization of the imaginariness of the cinema signifier places an emphasis on cinematic illusion instead of endorsing cinematic reality. The chapter argues that imaginary signifier in no way signals the failure of cinema but instead accurately characterizes its triumph. The cinema signifier is not symbolic and nor does it evoke the real world directly. Rather, the cinema signifier is imaginary as it offers a reverie that gives people the possibility of re-imagining their relationship to the world. Filmic reality, by passing through the imaginary, allows imagining new orders of reality.
This chapter provides a general survey of Stanley Cavell's most important contributions to theorizing cinema. A study of his approach to the ontology of film, The World Viewed, proves that for him films are real rather than realistic. For him, experiences of films cannot simply be seen as some kind of lesser version of the so-called real world. Instead, films provide something akin to a more intense or ‘truer’ experience of reality. Films cannot be said to offer representations of the world or of some purportedly ‘real’ or ‘true’ world. Instead, films are exhibitions of the world; they offer experiences that are as much a part of reality as any other experience. While at the movies, people are less on guard, more receptive, more vulnerable and less fearful of the possibilities the world is capable of offering to them. Stanley Cavell; The World Viewed; films; experiences; reality
This chapter examines Gilles Deleuze's understanding of cinema, which is fleshed out in relation to his extraordinary claim that ‘cinema produces reality’. He argues that films offer orders of experience that are normally hidden or unavailable in everyday life. Cinema presents new modes of perceiving and experiencing, modes which are not derivative of experiences in the ‘real’ world, and not modes that insist upon an adherence or faithfulness to the ‘real’ world. Rather, cinema produces modes of perceiving and experiencing that offer the possibility of another kind of world. Perhaps most challenging about his claim is that, in making it, Deleuze signals his intention to refrain from all forms of judgement. His discussions of films and types of films do not revolve around questions of which films are better or more valuable than others, they refuse to draw up tables of judgement which determine that some types of films are bad while others are good. Instead, he tries to uncover the significance of the system of reality that is proposed by Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach (1952).