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2 45 Cinematic Vision and the Test of “Immediate Certainty” Zone 1: The Urban UNHEIMLICHE The opening moments of the first episode in the Fantômas film series (1913–14) feature a prescient bit of dialogue when the startled crime victim, Princess Danidoff (Jane Faber), inquires of the well-dressed thief suddenly before her: “Who are you?” This question is, in effect, the distillation of the epic battle that is to be played out in the series and throughout the crime films of Feuillade. The thief ’s answer is equally telling: he hands her a blank card (shown in close up) that reveals his name only after the outlaw has made his hasty and courteous exit (he kisses her hand before running out the door). The conflict presented to us is over the boundaries of certainty and uncertainty, the terrain of the fantastic, but more important over the agent of those distinctions —the self. The link between certainty and self—and the contradiction therein—is acutely drawn for us in Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil,” an important philosophical text for turn-of-thecentury culture: “I” is, therefore, not a unified subject, a fixed identity, or that solid mass covered with layers of superficialities one has gradually to peel off before one can see its true face. “I” is, itself, infinite layers. Its complexity can hardly be conveyed through such typographic conventions as I, i, or I/i. Thus, I/i am compelled by the will to say/unsay, to resort to the entire gamut of personal pronouns to stay near this fleeing and static essence of Not-I. Whether I accept it or not, the natures of I, i, you, s/he, We, we, they, and wo/man constantly overlap. They all display a necessary ambivalence, for the line dividing I and Not-I, us and them, or him and her is not (and cannot) always (be) as clear as we would like it to be. Despite our desperate, eternal attempt to separate, contain, and mend, categories always leak. Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Woman Native Other The Fantômas Series There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are “immediate certainties” for example, “I think,” or as the superstition of Schopenauer put it, “I will”; as though knowledge here got hold of its object purely and nakedly as “the thing in itself,” without any falsification on the part of either the subject or the object. But that “immediate certainty,” as well as “absolute knowledge” and the “thing in itself,” invoke a contradictio in adjecto. . . . In place of the “immediate certainty” in which the people may believe in the case at hand, the philosopher thus finds a series of metaphysical questions presented to him, truly searching questions on the intellect; to wit: “From where do I get the concept of thinking? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an ego, and even of an ego as cause, and finally of an ego as the cause of thought?” Whoever ventures to answer these metaphysical questions at once by an appeal to a sort of intuitive perception, like the person who says, “I think, and know that this at least, is true, actual, and certain”— will encounter a smile and two question marks from a philosopher nowadays. “Sir,” the philosopher will perhaps give him to understand, “it is improbable that you are not mistaken; but why insist on the truth?”1 The crime and detective genres, in both their literary and cinematic incarnations, relentlessly pursued questions of certainty and the link between knowledge and identity. As several scholars have noted, a fascination with the crime figure and his or her pursuer was central to early French cinema beginning with Victorin Jasset’s films Exploits de Nick Carter (1908), which were based on a popular weekly series of short (around thirty pages) and inexpensive novels tracing the exploits of an American detective.2 Although Feuillade dabbled in the detective genre with a fourfilm series shaped around a modern sleuth named Jean Dervieux (René Navarre), his most noteworthy exploration of crime reverses perspective by foregrounding the exploits of the lawbreaker Fantômas—a move that as Francis Lacassin notes is more consistent with the heroes of French adventure literature, from Rocambole to Arsène Lupin.3 Moreover, Feuillade’s series of five films4 featuring Fantômas, as Richard Abel notes, are part of a larger trend in French cinema starting around 1911–12...

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