Mutants We All: Jean-Louis Schefer and our Cinematic Civilization

“On these machines that turn, leap, churn and batter…a curving of the universe has produced itself”

(Schefer 1997: 65)

Atoms and dust, tossed by the churning of wheels; the ticking of clocks and grinding machines, producing movement as the debris issued forth from the recording of time; an ever-changing series of universes appearing and disappearing, in which humanity as a whole and the spectator as an individual become mutated, mutants—monsters we all, split between our memory-laden selves and the memory-free instant of the passing image. This is the cinema, our world with cinema in it, our cinematic experience, according to Jean-Louis Schefer. In the enigmatic tone and unorthodox style of this opening passage, I hope to introduce a thinker of the cinema whose original, insightful, and often difficult writing on film I aim to render more accessible in the following pages. The motivation for this essay lies in the high esteem I hold for Schefer’s ability to offer a badly needed link between cognitive film analysis and metaphysical film-philosophy, shedding light on the connection between the complex details of our specific viewing experiences and the general abstraction of our social use of image-culture. As Dudley Andrew summarizes with apt balance of clarity and paradox: “Schefer evocatively reminds us that film theory will only progress by interrogating concrete instances for their systematic ramifications, and that in turn these ramifications are of interest only insofar as they return us to those aspects of our experience which are particular and unsystematic” (190).

Looking at L’Homme ordinaire du cinéma, (“The Ordinary Man of Cinema” [1980]), Du monde et du movement des images (“On the World and the Movement of Images,” [1997], and Cinématographies (1998), I aim not only to clarify central themes and specific details of Schefer’s work, but also to posit it in the context of larger trends in film theory and philosophy as well as Schefer’s place in French image theory. This article charts the specific movement of Schefer’s larger project as it moves from ruminations on Western uses of image culture to the specifics of the individual interaction with the moving image, which Schefer illustrates through his own autobiographical experience during World War II. As both the larger social use and more specific personal experience of the moving image are based upon cinema’s ability to change its spectators and the world it displays, I will allow these two facets of the argument to lead to a larger argument concerning the moving image and its connection to modern subjectivity.

Why has Schefer failed to be embraced in English-language film criticism and philosophy? Despite early attempts by Andrew and more recent work by Paul Smith and Tom Conley, Schefer’s work—unlike that of Deleuze and Rancière, seemingly ubiquitous in Anglo-American circles today—has yet to make the successful trans-Atlantic voyage.¹ It is true, as Katya Mandoki has written (and repeated), that Schefer is “very hard to read” (1), but D.N. Rodowick has noted that this was a similar reaction to Deleuze’s work, now the most commonly engaged film-philosophy.² As such, Schefer’s eccentricity should not deter us from his offerings but, instead, encourage our engagement for the very reason that it offers us something lacking in Anglo-American paradigms: a link between the ideological critique of apparatus theory and the personal experience attested to in Cultural Studies. Schefer’s L’Homme ordinaire du cinéma—originally published in 1980—has become common reading in French film scholarship but, despite its being in dialogue with other French theorists³ who are themselves widely referenced in Anglo-American writing, has not been fully translated into English.

This may be because, unlike the empirical tone of Anglo-American film studies, Schefer utilizes an experimental prose to describe the personal cinematic experience. His attempt to explore the aspects of spectatorship not tied to narrative rhetoric or representational interpretation situates his work in an intellectual history best demonstrated through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and...