A Fable of Film: Ranciere's Anthony Mann

Enterprising editors in sixteenth-century France often launched translations of Aesop's fables to endow a classical genre with a new power of illustration. Wearing a deceptively childish appearance, a fable was a text coordinated with a picture. The combination was aimed to convey a lesson or to impose, often obliquely or through visual strategies, a reassuring mode of conduct.¹ But in the play of image and text, as in cinema, enigmas, contradictory readings, and perplexities abounded. These books verified what early modern lexicographers noted about the meanings of fable. Henri Estienne's Dictionnaire françois-latin (1549) cites and translates Varro to register "Devis, et propos, ou conte, soit vray ou faulx," and Terence "une farce, une comédie, that includes "menterie... bourdes et mensonges." Nicot's Trésor de la langue française (1605) associates the telling of fabulous tales with an art of directing action: "raconter une fable, Apologum facere, vel agere." Nicot's analogue, Randle Cotgrave, in A Dictionarie of the French & English Tongues (1611) underscores deceit and contrariety at its basis. "Fable: f. A fable, tale, lie, leasing, false tale, unlikely thing repeated; also, a Comedie, or Enterlude." The Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (1694) posts two definitions. One, a "chose feinte, & inventée pour instruire, ou pour divertir," leads to "le sujet, l'argument d'un poëme épique, d'un poëme dramatique, d'un roman," held in a collective sense of "[t]outes les fables de l'Antiquité Payenne" before the definition is inverted as "[f]ausseté, chose contournée. Vous nous comptez des fables." The reversible nature of the form fit the designs of authors wishing to produce enigmas and perplexity, if not counter-meanings, within the frame of clearly drawn parables and moral tales.

In tandem with the classical heritage of the genre, Jacques Rancière writes of cinema as a fable, but not before offering a definition in an Aristotelian clarity that seems deceptive or even unsettling. The cinematic fable would begin as a story well told. It entails the arrangement of necessary or likely actions through the construction of a dilemma and an itinerary that leads to a resolution. Characters move from good fortune to misfortune or from misfortune to good fortune. But, as Jean Epstein intuited in the great years of silent cinema, Aristotle is not a seal of approval that will guarantee a good movie. Life is not fabulous; it is guided to ends neither good nor bad, merely to "situations opened in every direction."² The camera in no way records things "as they are," but only as they happen to be, in a state of waves and vibrations before any object, character, or event can be identified in a descriptive or narrative fashion. For Rancière, the cinematic fable inverts Aristotle's hierarchy of the grounding rationale of a plot, muthos, over the "sensitive effect of the spectacle" (8), or opsis. Yet in film the latter nonetheless draws on the craft of the former. Implied is that in order to qualify as a fable cinema depends on what is not inherent to its medium, while its two primary attributes, visuality and movement, are its essence. In Rancière's model visuality brings forward a new conflict in the greater order of creation. In the paradigm that Aristotle bequeathed to artists and poets, an active force was applied to the matter of a medium. Form was said to fashion matter. The artist or auteur was to sign the work with the imprint of a "representative" model of concatenated actions and expressive codes proper to subjects and situations. Classical art and its makers are defined by the pure activity of creation.

But cinema also introduces a pure passivity that bears on "expressive power insinuated directly in things," independent of any conscious will. The new aesthetic "opposes to the old principle of form that marks matter according to the identity of the power of...