Towards a Genealogy of Cinema: An Amplification

Refreshingly, Jacques Rancière’s Film Fables does not repeat a conventional history of film; rather, it politicizes cinema in such a way as to gain a better sense of the tensions and contradictions of contemporary life. The text successfully abandons the story line familiar to representational projects and instead takes up the problem of distribution particular to the politics of an aesthetic age. Rancière re-partitions films by Sergi Eisenstein, Friedrich Murnau, Fritz Lang, Anthony Mann, Nicholas Ray, Roberto Rossellini, Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard and Alfred Hitchcock. The result is an important exploration of the tensions, ruptures and continuities that complicate the twists and folds of the history of cinema (i.e., the move from theatrical devices to cinematic devices).

In this pedagogical light, Film Fables can be read for at least three purposes: 1) a desire to understand the art of cinema as an embodiment of the aesthetic distribution of the sensible; 2) a desire to engage in novel readings of classic yet elusive films; 3) a desire to see Rancière enact cinematic art by embodying cinematic thought (first purpose) in and against the endless passive surface of the film archive (second purpose). Via the first and the third desires, the book constitutes a movement towards a genealogy of cinema that is organized around the continuities/discontinuities of what Rancière calls “film fables.”

“The film fable is a thwarted fable (11).”A film fable is always thwarted because it uses genres, devices and stories from regimes of art that are antithetical to cinema’s open, fluid, and passive character. Rancière calls this a “positive contradiction.” More fully explored in his The Politics of Aesthetics (PA), this positive contradiction is a key characteristic of an aesthetic distribution of the sensible. The distribution of the sensible is “a delimitation of spaces and times of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience (PA 13).” In other words, it “reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed (PA 12).” An aesthetic distribution of the sensible, consequently, is only one of many general distributions that Rancière identifies. It occurs in a positive contradiction between an ethical distribution of the sensible that appreciates the truth, purpose and end of an image insofar as it is synchronistic with the ethos or unity of the community (art as a pedagogical practice) and a representative distribution of the sensible that operates as a mimetic art form that, in doing and making art, makes imitations (art as a signifying practice).

An aesthetic distribution of the sensible breaks from those ethical and representative regimes by distinguishing a “sensible mode of being particular to artistic products (PA 22).” Instead of identifying the purpose of art and/or what makes something good art, an aesthetic distribution embraces the impossibility of isolating any essential singularity and placing it in a hierarchy of ART (PA 23). Nevertheless, instead of treating an aesthetic distribution of the sensible as opposed to the representative regime of art, for example, Rancière argues that it borrows and samples from other regimes of art. As such, the aesthetic regime of art does not oppose the “old” with the “new” since that sensible mode of being is particular to the representative regime of art. Instead, in “the aesthetic regime of art, the future of art, its separation from the present of non-art, incessantly restages the past (PA 23).” As such, cinema, which has no interest in telling “old” linear representative stories, uses past dramatic tensions in order to record new images “as the human eye cannot see them, as they come into being, in a state of waves and vibrations, before they can be qualified as intelligible objects, people, or events due to their descriptive and narrative properties (2).”

The aesthetic...