Cinema and its Discontents: Jacques Ranciere and Film Theory

Jacques Rancière may have entered a French pantheon of film theory in 2001 after his publication of an array of essays on classical and contemporary films in La fable cinématographique. In that book Rancière posited cinema to be "to the storytelling art what truth is to falsehood."¹ Cinema rejects the Aristotelian poetics of fables and fabulation by reconfiguring the Greek philosopher's hierarchy that favored muthos, the rationale of a plot, over opsis, the "sentient effect of the spectacle." The camera records its stories via linked actions, headed toward various resolutions by way of often unforeseen twists and turns. The dramatic progression of the Aristotelian scheme is betrayed, however, when the camera records information and evokes sensations that go both against the grain of dramatic progress and in myriad directions, many of which are beyond the director's or editor's control and have little to do with the narrative. Citing an early essay by Jean Epstein, Rancière notes that the intelligence of the playwright submits to that of the camera, a machine that "records this infinity of movements that create a drama of an intensity a hundred times greater than any change of fortune." The camera, Rancière continues (along a Benjaminian line reminiscent of the last pages of the "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility") hardly reproduces things "such as they are gazed upon. It records them such as the naked eye does not see them, such as they happened to be." He then adds a flourish, recalling Gilles Deleuze's words on sentience in the first pages of his Cinéma 2: L'Image-temps, when he describes things "in their state as waves and vibrations, before their qualification as objects, persons, or identifiable events by their descriptive or narrative properties" (8). Rancière shows that Epstein intuited the power of film even before the onset of sound (said to have since attenuated the expressive force of its silent images [we have only to recall images that Epstein might have known, such as Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks]), linking film's power to the American industrialization of the seventh art, and anticipating a good deal of film theory.

Yet Epstein's reflections, adds Rancière, are based on pre-Romantic aesthetic theory in Kant, the Schlegels, Schiller, Herder, and even Hegel. The German school inaugurated, as Deleuze and Godard also force us to recall, an "aesthetic age" (16) that follows and undoes the order of inherited mimetic arts. The passive register of the camera, which indeed doubles the intensity of the spectator's intellective and sentimental gaze, causes conscious and unconscious elements of the work to be of a same texture. It dislocates the artistic privilege that a creator had owned when he or she was said to "impose a vision" upon a form. Rancière then complicates the point when he notes that the "machinic mechanism" [dispositif machinique] of cinema in fact suppresses the "active labor of this becoming-passive" (17) because it is in all events already and always passive in nature. It hinders [contrarie] the aims of "modernist" aesthetics in which it is found, by opposing the aesthetic autonomy of art to its former submission to a representational mission (17). In the new aesthetic age, art can be found anywhere and everywhere, and so too can aesthetic values, all over and about the frame. Yet cinema works against—hinders, thwarts, even runs contrary to—its own tendency to follow the new aesthetic principles it heralds. That is why Rancière defines a cinematographic fable as a fable running contrary to itself. The fable or narration belonging to Aristotelian poetics is undone by the art of the camera, but the camera cannot fail to let its gaze concatenate the many sensations and impressions it brings forward, thus also belonging to the narrative arts.

Unlike André Bazin or Gilles Deleuze, Rancière cannot countenance a pure cinema of the kind that the former championed in Charlie Chaplin's burlesque gestures, if only because the clownish tramp already belonged to an established aesthetics...