French, Belief in the Body

July 28, 2008 Time: 01:55pm para017.tex

Belief in the Body: Philippe Garrel’sLe Révélateur and Deleuze

PATRICK FFRENCH

Abstract:In Cinema II Deleuze proposes, via early film theorists, that cinema canrealise the potential inherent in art to act directly on the nervous system.Cinema had the ‘sublime’ capacity to shock thought into activity, and awakenthe ‘spiritual automaton’ in us through vibrations and affects, rather thanrepresentations. Deleuze finds a variant of this argument in the writings ofArtaud on cinema, in which film forces the realisation of an impotenceat the heart of thought. Deleuze then proposes that the only response tothis impotence is belief in the connection between man and the world, asexpressed and realised in a corporeal cinema of gestures, the prime example ofwhich, in his view, is the work of Philippe Garrel. I will address Garrel’s filmLe Révélateur in relation to these propositions, focussing also on how the filmworks primarily at the level of sensory and gestural dynamics, rather thannarrative or representation.

Keywords: Gilles Deleuze, Philippe Garrel, Antonin Artaud, automatism,belief, gesture

I first encountered Philippe Garrel’s extraordinary film Le Révélateur inthe lower gallery of the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the CentreGeorges Pompidou in Paris, where it was screened in an enclosed anddarkened space set aside from the ubiquitous white space of the maingallery. Curtained openings at either side of the room allowed thevisitors to wander in and out or simply through the centre of the space,so that any viewing of the film was accompanied by the passage ofbodies and of shadows in front of and across the screen. The film’ssilence doubtless added to the transitory nature of its audience in thisinstance and to the muffled and sepulchral quality of the atmosphereof the room, peculiar to screening spaces in galleries. Like those otherworks of film or video art which occupy a liminal space betweencinema and gallery, the film was screened continuously with littletransition between the end and the beginning of its 67 minute runtime,so unless the spectator were committed or obstinate enough to sit

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or stand through the entire film, he or she would not be drawn toits viewing through the promise of narrative resolution or sequence.The film did not hold the gaze, then, because of the qualities of itsrepresentation or of its narration; its hold on the senses was somethingto do with the emergence of the bodies and fragments of bodies fromthe almost constant black of the screen, which the intermittent passageof other bodies complemented rather than disturbed.

Le Révélateur is a 67 minute black and white silent film shot in theGerman countryside near Munich on 35mm, directed, produced andwritten by Philippe Garrel, lit and shot by Garrel’s collaborator MarcelFournier.1 Its three protagonists, a man and woman and a child, areplayed by Laurent Terzieff, Bernadette Lafont and Stanislas Robiolle,then 4 years old, whose extraordinary performance is unique, to mymind, in the history of cinema. Garrel’s seventh film, after Les Enfantsdésaccordés (1964), Droit de visite (1965), Anémone and Marie pour mémoire(1967), La Concentration and Actua I (both 1968), Le Révélateur was shotin the last days of May 1968, Garrel having filmed the events sur le vifin the now lost film Actua I. In the 1970s Garrel would direct a seriesof experimental, non-narrative films before a ‘return’ to narrative withL’Enfant secret in 1979. He has recently returned to the events of May1968 with Les Amants réguliers, a response in many ways to Bertolucci’sThe Dreamers of 2003. He belongs to the generation of 1968, havingbeen twenty years old at that time, and to the generation of the post-Nouvelle vague, his name coupled with that of Jean Eustache (who wasnevertheless 10 years older) as inheritors of the legacy of the Nouvellevague. The association with Eustache is illuminating, not so muchbecause of the explicit links between the two directors (Les Amantsréguliers is dedicated to Eustache) but because of the formal correlationbetween their films. In a review of Garrel’s L’Enfant secret Serge Daneywrote that the place and role of speech in Eustache and Garrel’s filmswas the same, but inverted:

In Eustache, characters spoke to the point of vomiting, they were always deciding,they died from speech, carving out a zone of mortal silence at the heart of aFrench that was expelled from itself. With Garrel it is the same, but inverted. Thecharacters keep silent too much, every word is clumsy, no-one knows how todecide.2

Le Révélateur is the inverted complement to Eustache’s La Maman etla putain (1973). The inflation and hysterical exhausting of speech inthe latter film finds its exact inverse in the almost total absence ofreference to the human body as a speaking body in Garrel’s silent film,both films in this sense proposing equally powerful responses to the


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prise de parole of May 1968. But both Eustache and Garrel, along withChantal Akerman, Patrice Chéreau and Jacques Doillon, are namedby Gilles Deleuze in Cinéma II: L’Image-temps as the proponents of acinéma du corps, rather than a cinema in which language and speechare the central issue. Deleuze’s proposition that it is Garrel who goesfurthest in this direction, that Garrel is ‘one of the greatest modernauthors’,3 and his particular emphasis on Le Révélateur, fortuitouslyencountered subsequent to the viewing I described above, suggest thatone look to Deleuze for an account of the specific sensory qualitiesof the film, outside any mediation through representational content ornarrative structure.

For Deleuze the cinema of the body responds to a demand specificto the historical and in some sense ethical situation of cinema andof contemporary humanity. If post-war cinema, in Deleuze’s well-known thesis, enables the perception of time ‘in its pure state’ thisis because the connection between the visual field and movement hasbeen interrupted. The individual now finds him or herself confrontedby a vision to which the body no longer has the capacity to react.While on the one hand this paralysis opens the door to the cinema ofthe time-image, with which much of the second volume of Deleuze’sCinema is concerned, on the other hand, it is also a crisis and a blockagefor the cinema of the movement-image, the focus of the first volume.It is overly simplistic to see the two volumes as indicating a purelyhistorical progression; the second volume also returns to the questionof movement and traces other modes of response to the crisis. Thusin the chapter ‘Thought and Cinema’ Deleuze ‘returns’ to the earlytheorists of cinema such as Epstein, Elie Faure and above all Artaud, toelaborate what they saw as the potential of early cinema, establishesthe reasons for the failure of this promise, and poses the challengeto which the contemporary cinema is called upon to respond. Thischallenge situates a cinema of the body and of the senses as a differentline of development from that of the cinema of the time-image,foregrounded in Resnais or Antonioni. It can be expressed in anaporetic formulation: given the interruption of the link between manand the world, the impotence of the thinking body in its world, weneed specific reasons to believe in the world and in the body, andthis belief is engaged precisely by virtue of this interruption and thisimpotence:

Man is not himself a world other than the one in which he experiences theintolerable and feels himself trapped. The spiritual automaton is in the psychicsituation of the seer [voyant], who sees better and further than he can react, that


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is, think. Which, then, is the subtle way out? To believe, not in a different world,but in a link between man and the world, in love or life, to believe in this asthe impossible, the unthinkable, which none the less cannot but be thought (. . . ).It is this belief that makes the unthought the specific power of thought, throughthe absurd, by virtue of the absurd. (Cinema 2, 170)

It is in Artaud that Deleuze finds the most coherent expression ofthe notion of a thought that proceeds from the recognition of itsown impossibility, or of a thought which is incessantly born from aparalysis at the heart of thought. Initially, however, Artaud is linked tothose early theorists of cinema who saw in its revelation of automaticmovement the possibility of provoking the awakening of a ‘spiritualautomaton’; ‘producing a shock to thought, communicating vibrations tothe cortex, touching the nervous and cerebral system directly’; the earlytheorists of film saw in the cinema this capacity to have an immediateeffect on thought and on the brain, produced through the automaticmovement of the image (Cinema 2; 156). The image was no longera representation of something, or, as in choreography or dramaticperformance, its movement the result of an external cause; it movedby and in itself: ‘Because the cinematographic image itself “makes”movement, because it makes what the other arts are restricted todemanding (or to saying), it brings together what is essential in theother arts; it inherits it’ (Cinema 2; 156). The cinematographic imagewas a being of sensation which could have an unmediated effect onthe nervous system, produce a ‘shock’ to the body and to thought, seenas co-extensive; this is a non-representative theory of the cinema whichresonates with what Deleuze will also write on the paintings of FrancisBacon; distinguishing the figural from the figurative, he writes: ‘TheFigure is the sensible form related to the sensation; it acts immediatelyon the nervous system, which is of flesh’.4 Indeed the notion of art asthe creation of sensations, rather than the representation or narrationof something external to the painting, or the sculpture, or the filmitself, is integral to the philosophy of art elaborated by Deleuze andGuattari in Qu’est-ce que la philosophie, where they write: ‘That whichis conserved, the thing or the work of art, is a block of sensations, that isa composite of percepts and affects’.5 The function of art, for Deleuzeand Guattari, is to invent and to conserve sensations independentlyof the individual who experienced them and of the context of theirperception and affection; art is thus non-representative, and the workof art, whether painting, sculpture, music or literature, is a being ofsensation, and nothing else: ‘A work of art is a being of sensation



and nothing other; it exists in itself ’ (Qu’est-ce que la philosophie, 155).Insofar as the artist is thus in the position of giving material form toa sensation that does not relate to something anterior, s/he has therole of a physician or diagnostician, identifying and naming the as yetunidentified symptoms of the body; for Deleuze, in Essays Critical andClinical, the artist is a symptomatologist, the work of art the diagnosisof the physical, sensorial and affectual capacities of the body.6 But thisdiagnostic activity remains non-descriptive and non-representative inthat what is at stake is not the body as it is but what the body can do,according to Spinoza’s Ethics.7 The artist is thus the symptomatologistof the sensation of the body in becoming, in its capacities to affect andto be affected by other blocks of sensation.

Ostensibly, then, Artaud provides an account of cinema assusceptible of producing this immediate sensorial effect and of thusstimulating thought. Artaud’s conception of the cinema or rather ofits potential emphasizes its sensory action, and its ‘direct’ impact inthe brain. He writes: ‘I think the cinema can only admit a certaintype of film: those in which all of the sensory means of action havebeen used’ and ‘The cinema is a remarkable stimulant. It operatesdirectly on the grey matter of the brain’.8 This vision requires thatcinema be rigorously separated from the theatre, from the depiction ofpsychological situations, and that its own language be allowed to cometo the fore without any mediation via language itself, via ‘the languageof words’.9 This is also a radically non-representative conceptionof the cinema:

There is in cinema a kind of physical intoxication which communicates themovement of images directly to the brain. The mind is set into upheaval beyondall representation. This hidden power of images tracks down potential forces inthe depths of the mind that have never before been activated.10

There can be no question of ‘translation’, since the cinema, in Artaud’sestimation, is made with matter itself, and has the capacity to constitutea visual language of the ‘shocks and collisions’ proper to the movementof matter as such:

The cinema possesses a specific element, which is truly magical, trulycinematographic, and which no-one up to that point had thought to isolate.This element is distinct from any kind of representation attached to imagesand participates in the very vibration and deep, unconscious birth of thought.Underground images arise, and flow not according to their logical meaning ororder, but from their mixing, their vibration and their shock. (Oeuvres; 256)


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Artaud thus seems to locate the ‘magical’ quality of cinema in thesuccession of objects or forms, the dynamic relations between them;the ‘transubstantiation’ of forms that is produced visually in the filmcorresponds, through a kind of osmosis, to the movement of thought:

The human skin of things, the epidermis of reality, this is what cinema deals withfirst of all. It exalts matter and makes it appear in its profound spirituality, inits relations with the mind from which it issues. Images are born, are deducedone from the other and as images impose an objective synthesis which is morepenetrating than any abstraction, creating worlds which ask nothing of anyone oranything. But from this play of appearances, this kind of trans-substantiation ofelements is born an inorganic language which moves the mind through osmosisand without any kind of transposition in words. And from the fact that it playswith matter itself, cinema creates situations which derive from the simple collisionof objects, of forms, repulsions, attractions. It is not separate from life but findssomething like the primitive disposition of things. (Oeuvres, 248)

The cinema does not require any form of mediation via language,any explanation through the means of sub-titles or explanatory texts.Accordingly, Artaud takes a stand against the talkie: ‘talking Cinema isa stupidity, an absurdity’.11 He argues for a rigorous separation of imageand sound which he considers as two radically distinct languages,proposing that while the play of images takes us out of the spaceof the cinema itself, that of sounds is tied to it. He imagines thepossibility of technical progress such that the cinema, in colour andwith depth of field, could reproduce the density and perspective of lifeitself, but expresses anxiety about the potential uses of such a medium.He conceives of the cinema to come as a spectacle which few would beable to withstand, since individuals with the tension of mind capable ofsupporting such a hallucination are not yet, in his view, available. Thecinema thus exposes ‘the absence of certain capacities’.12 It wouldbe better, in this situation, Artaud thinks, to return to the strictly silentfilm. Artaud thus conceives of film as a medium for the manipulationof the mass; due to its capacity, through technical means, to givean exact reproduction of the real, it would in turn threaten life andovercome it. In formal terms Artaud’s preference is for film to offerthe exploration of a visual language independent of language and ofsound, and for the language of sound to be explored independentlyitself.

For Deleuze, however, the most telling reason for the importanceof Artaud as concerns the modern cinema is elsewhere. Artaud isnot any different from Eisenstein, for example, in the proposition that



cinema can have an immediate effect on the nervous system. Wherehe differs from someone like Eisenstein is in the constant recurrencein his scenarios of the figure of a man whose thought escapes him,whose body is as if paralysed by the theft or flight of his own thought;as if predicting the contemporary spectator, he writes of the figure of‘Dix-huit secondes’ that he is ‘reduced to seeing nothing come in frontof him but a parade of images, a surfeit of contradictory images withoutobvious relation one to the other’.13 The dilemma, from which Artaudhimself suffered in his body, and which the entirety of his workexpresses, lies in the lack of relation between thought and the body,such that the body suffers from the impotence of thought, is the site ofthe paralysis of thought. But thought, as such, is nothing other than thisconstant confrontation with its own impotence and paralysis; what thecinema might thus have awakened is the spiritual automaton as a figureof inarticulacy, aphasia and atrophy, whence Deleuze’s proposition:‘The spiritual automaton has become the Mummy, this dismantled,paralysed, petrified, frozen instance which testifies to the “impossibilityof thinking that is thought” ’ (Cinema 2; 166). The body that thisconception of cinema encounters is the senseless body, an avatarof Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘body without organs’; in its intermittentfigurations of the sensorily deprived bodies of the somnambulist, thevigilambulist, the Mummy and various automata cinema would thuspropose a double for the spectator to which it had given birth.14

But just as the interruption of the sensory-motor capacity hadenabled the development of the image of time ‘in its pure state’, theparalysed, senseless body which the cinema both figures on screen andrequires as spectator provides, in Deleuze’s terms, the conditions of ahigher birth. In the same way that Francis Bacon must efface the clichéfrom the canvas, in order to create a space for the Figure, Deleuzeconceives of the cinema of the body as relinquishing or effacing therepresentation of the world, or the narration of the world, of what haspassed for thought, in order to create a space for the emergence of anew body.

Deleuze finds in a contemporary essay by Jean-Louis Schefer15 aconception of the cinema close to that of Artaud, which is concernedwith the ways in which the cinema operates a suspension of theworld, thereby addressing: ‘that which does not let itself be thoughtin thought, and equally ( . . . ) that which does not let itself be seenin vision’ (Cinema 2; 168). The world, in Schefer’s conception, is notrepresented in the cinema, but suspended; the visual field is troubledrather than opened, but this suspension paradoxically makes possible


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the emergence of an improbable, unpredictable body. The cinemainterrupts or suspends the world as representation, and the certainty ofthe bond between sensory perception and movement — the sensory-motor link — producing a mummified and inorganic body, does soonly in order to make necessary a faith (croyance) in the possibility ofthe body as the vehicle of an unrecognizeable life; Deleuze writes:

We must believe in the body, but as in the germ of life, the seed which splitsopen the paving-stones, which has been preserved and lives on in the holy shroudor the mummy’s bandages, and which bears witness to life, in this world as it is.We need an ethic or a faith, which makes fools laugh; it is not a need to believein something else, but a need to believe in this world, of which fools are a part.(Cinema 2, 173)

Deleuze proposes that this conception of cinema (that of Schefer, whois ‘close to Artaud’) ‘finds a complete match in the work of Garrel’(Cinema 2; 168). While Schefer’s examples are taken from Dreyer,from Kurosawa and Hollywood B-movies, the emphasis he proposeson filmic images of sensory indistinction, which are nevertheless notabstract but constitute ‘a whole this side of the image’ (tout un en-deçàde l’image)16 — images which Deleuze, paraphrasing Schefer, describesas ‘these dancing grains which are not made to be seen, the luminousdust which is not a prefiguration of bodies, the flakes of snow andblankets of soot’17 — also exactly pertains to the world of Garrel’sfilms, especially Le Révélateur, to which I now turn.

Garrel’s film takes place in a space and time before discourse,not simply through the subtraction of speech and of sound butthrough a corresponding emphasis on the gestural quality of the actors’movements. What it gives us is not bodies whose voices and whoselanguage is lacking, not yet having been given or having been takenaway, but these bodies before speech and discursive action, in whatDeleuze calls pre-hodological space.18 Discourse is subtracted, notfrom the actors who would in some sense be gagged, but historically;if cinema has the technical capacity to offer synchronized sound andthus approximate further its representation of the world, Le Révélateur’sanachronistic silence forces the emergence of the body before theword, in a return to silent cinema which is also futural in its explorationof the as yet unrecognizeable capacities of the moving body. Andinsofar as it is prior to the discursive, the attention of the spectatoris riveted to the gestural level, before these gestures take on the fixityof meanings. This is to say that the film does not communicate asthe gestural illustration of a script the spectator might imagine; the



bodies do not mime an absent script or a silenced verbal commentary.No script, then, which would mediate the spectator’s reception of theimages, such that the spectator is obliged to view the film with his orher body, the gestures and movements of the protagonists on screenas if offering the actual double of those performed by the spectatorvirtually.

Deleuze distinguishes, in the cinéma du corps which describespost-Nouvelle-Vague French cinema, the everyday body from theceremonial body (Cinema 2, 190). The bodies of the man, womanand child of Le Révélateur are best ascribed to the latter, although thegestures they perform — lighting a cigarette, going to sleep . . . —are perhaps more pertinently seen as everyday gestures that arebecoming ceremonial through the purification of context, throughtheir isolation and their repetition. The gestures are those of ritualand ceremony, but before they have attained the rigidity demandedby the ceremony, before it becomes a spectacle and their meaningsare ordained by scripture or allegory. They are everyday gestures, butgestures nevertheless liberated from habit and functionality. It is notonly the fact that the film centres on the child, and that the child is thefigure in relation to which the movements and postures of the manand woman are permuted, which suggests that the gesturality of thefilm be associated with infantile play. In other words the associationwith play is not ascribed uniquely to the visual content of the film, itis also because the space of infantile play exactly corresponds to thisfield between the everyday and the ceremonial.

The ceremonial body is not the figure of myth. For Deleuze, theceremony at stake is an initiation which prepares the body for itstransformation. Thus Bacon’s figures are initiatory bodies in prepara-tion for the ceremony of their dissipation. Indeed, the ceremonymay never arrive; we witness the making sacred of the body beforethe event of sacrifice. Were the sacrifice to take place we wouldhave already entered into the post-ceremonial space of representation,in which the bodies we see would be metaphorical substitutes forthe sacrificed and thus mythic body. Deleuze insists on the ideathat the cinéma du corps, and especially Garrel’s oeuvre, explores thebody before the myth, before the name. Le Révélateur may adopt orcome close to the figuration of the story of Jesus, Mary and Joseph,or Oedipus, Jocasta and Laius, but it resists the pull of narrative andmyth. What we see is the gest, the affections of the body independentof story or plot,19 and thus in Garrel’s Le Révélateur the vanity ofseeking to impose a narrative structure on the silent sequences. The


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apprehension of the film is pregnant, inevitably, with such structures,with hermeneutics; the figurative has a certain pull. But this reflectsmore on the desire or neurosis of the viewer, anxious to fall backon the established channels of meaning which posit an always-lackingdesired resolution and prevent any confrontation with the sensation ofthe affective body. The positing of lack as such is desirable. But in LeRévélateur ‘story’ emerges from the gestures of the bodies, rather thanbeing representative of a pre-established plot structure expressedthrough gesture. In Le Révélateur, ceremonies or small rituals structurethe way the bodies relate to each other. The ceremony also gives themsomething to do, but they are not oriented towards narrative resolutionor its lack. The child moves towards the mother, who adopts theposture of crucifixion. The parents run after the child, who flees them,or is indifferent. The child circles the mother and father asleep, butthe stratification of Oedipus is disturbed: the mother also circles thechild and father asleep, the father the mother and child asleep. Thefinal relations of the three bodies have not yet been found or decided,and it is in this period of rehearsal, of the para-theatrical, that thepossibilities of what a body can do are explored and experimented:what is a mother? what is a father? what is a child? what are the as yetunthought capacities of these bodies? what are the bodily affects andcorresponding gestures that correspond to the relations mother-child,father-mother, child-mother, child-father? Le Révélateur’s ‘characters’do not yet know and have not yet decided. They experiment withdifferent permutations and objects — a cigarette, bootlaces, an aerosol:the child crucifies and decapitates the parents, the father puts the childin a box. The relations of bodies are permutational or combinatorial,sometimes ‘accidentally’ falling into those we may construe accordingto myth — Mary and Joseph, the flight from Egypt, Oedipus,but deforming the myths in the movement of fluid permutation.Nevertheless, the myths, the stories, are not arbitrary or irrelevant,since both relate to that element which Garrel explores, where, asDeleuze writes, ‘The child appears as the undecideable point in termsof which the attitudes of a man and a woman are distributed’ (Cinema2; 199). Le Révélateur concerns as much the perspective and affectionsof the child — for play, sleep and warmth — as that of the parents,their perplexity and their question: what do we do with it? Thechild, absent or not, confirms the absence of sexual relation andprovokes the question: what do we do with each other given thatthe child exists? The child is also the suspension of the (adult) world ofrepresentations, the child inflects the film towards the pre-hodological



space in which the sensory-motor schemata are suspended and thepotential and genesis of what bodies can do is experimented.

Le Révélateur is a film in black and white, but not as subtracted fromcolour. Again the purging of colour as an element of the sensorialeffect of the film is productive rather than negative. Artaud notedthat the possibility of colour along with synchronized sound in filmwould tend towards the representation of the real in its totality, andoffer a hallucinatory spectacle which would threaten to supersede lifeas such.20 Film in colour always has the potential to be confusedfor a straightforward representation of the real. The exploitation ofprimary colours by Godard, for example, would evidently countersuch a tendency. But the answer offered by Le Révélateur is to makeof the absence of colour a productive and generative factor in itself.Paradoxically, for the viewer the absence of the sensation of colourallows the film to play at the level of the senses far more than a filmin colour content to simply represent the perceptual experience of theworld. Black and white, here, are the genetic principles by virtue ofwhich the visible is distributed, the poles of black and white function asthe absent totality out of which the bodies are generated and in relationto which the postures and gestures of the body emerge. Deleuze writes:

In any case, we believe that what Schefer seeks rare examples of in the history ofcinema, in Dreyer and Kurosawa, is what Garrel draws on, not for a systematicrecapitulation, but as a revitalizing inspiration which means that cinema thuscoincides with its own essence, at least with one of its essences: a proceeding,a process of constitution of bodies from the neutral image, white or black, snowyor flashed. (Cinema 2, 201)

Garrel alternates between the black background against which parts ofthe body are shown as contrasted white, and the white background,sometimes a vertical stripe down the canvas or an illuminated patchwithin it (reminiscent of Bacon’s rounds), against which the bodyappears only as silhouette. In the first instance, the face, arms or the legsof the mother or father running are all that appears against the black,against what Schefer calls ‘the experimental night’;21 black is thematrix of the potential of the visible, and of the improbable bodies thatemerge from it. In the second instance, Garrel employs overexposure inorder to white out the background, to strip it of the redundant clichésof the representative, rather in the same manner as Deleuze’s Baconscrubs out the bodies and faces of his bodies in order to prepare for theemergence of the Figure, the ceremony. The doorway, the window, thetrunks of trees, the bed or a wall function as the white space against


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which the posture of the gestural body can be made visible. Black,however, is the fundamental ground in which what becomes visible iseither the body cut out in the isolated patch of overexposed white, oragainst which the reflected white of the body becomes visible. Thelight source either exposes the bodies and its objects from the front, orfissures the black from the back — either way, the background is thetotality.

Is pre-hodological space, is the Figure an exploration of ‘puresensation’, with a temporality ‘in the pure state’? Le Révélateur wasmade during the month of May 1968, at the very time of the eventsin Paris with which Garrel was closely involved, and which his mostrecent film Les Amants réguliers recalls in semi-autobiographical mode.Le Révélateur, as we have noted, ‘returns’ to a time of genesis and birth,as if the protagonists had emerged from the primordial night of theblack screen. Is then a cinema of the sense and of gestures necessarilyahistorical? Perhaps not, if we consider that history is present in thefilm in the very mode of its absence and of its erasure. Without beingrepresentative of their historical moment, Bacon’s painting or Garrel’sfilms propose the sensory effect of history as if in the very weight of thespectacle or the cliché that has been erased from the canvas, coveredby the black screen, or whited out. The camps may be felt in Bacon’spaintings; May 1968 may be felt in Le Révélateur. The weight of theState is felt oppressively in Le Révélateur, not only in a sequence inwhich the child walks past the gates and fences of an army base, but alsoin the other spaces from which that of the film is consistently isolated,the unseen menace from which the protagonists intermittently flee.The potential liberation offered by May 1968 is also felt in the film,rather than represented, in the centrality of the child and the sense thatthe movements of the man and the woman are ordained in relationto the child and not vice versa. The man and the woman are in asituation of unpredictability with relation to the child, they are in thestate of having to ask what do with it, what is made possible by itand what to do with their own bodies given that the child exists.Le Révélateur makes its historicity felt as possibility and event ratherthan as development or evolution through this very unpredictability.

Deleuze’s notion of pre-hodological space pertains exactly to thissituation of unpredictability, in which the paths that bodies can or willtake have not yet been decided nor been mapped out. Hodologicalspace is a mapped space of paths, radiating outward from the childand moving through the parents as part of its trajectory outward andaround. While the child’s movements in Le Révélateur certainly resonate



with this activity of path-forming and mapping, the distinction of thefilm and the space it creates, the impact on the senses it proposes, aremore appropriately within the pre-hodological space before decision,before the distribution of roles. Within the history of cinema, andperhaps in the political context of 1960s France and its legacy, thespace that Le Révélateur carves out for itself, in which is marked ‘aplurality of ways of being present in the world’ (Deleuze, Cinema 2,203), is also one of possibility and chance, the possibility precisely ofdifferent decisions and different bodies. It is also therefore a space ofbelief.

NOTES

1 Le Révélateur, available on VHS (Secam) from Re:voir (www.re-voir.com),with a 30 page booklet including essays by Sally Shafto and Emeric de Lastens.Le Révélateur was financed by Sylvie Boissonnas and Anne Héliat, under theloose rubric of Zanzibar films.

2 Serge Daney, Ciné-journal Volume II: 1983–1986 (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma,1998), 6. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

3 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson andRobert Galeta (London: Athlone, 1989), 201.

4 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: logique de la sensation (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 39.5 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie (Paris: Minuit,

1991), 154 (in italics in the original).6 Cf. Daniel W. Smith, ‘Introduction: “A Life of Pure Immanence”: Deleuze’s

“Critique et clinique” Project’, in Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical,translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London, New York:Verso, 1998), xvi. See also Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy translatedby High Tomlinson (London, New York: Continuum, 1986). Deleuzealso assigns this function to philosophy: ‘The whole of philosophy is asymptomatology, and a semeiology’ (sic.), 3.

7 Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: philosophie pratique (Paris: Minuit, 1981), 28–33,and Cinema 2, 189.

8 Antonin Artaud, ‘Réponse à une enquête’ (1923) in Artaud, Oeuvres (Paris:Gallimard, ‘Quarto’, 2004), 41.

9 Cf. ‘We are in pursuit of a film of purely visual situations whose dramaticforce would flow from a shock made for the eyes, taken if I dare say it fromthe very substance of the look, and not deriving from essentially discursivepsychological circumlocutions which are nothing but visually translated text’‘Cinéma et réalité’ (1927) in Oeuvres, 248.


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10 Artaud, ‘Sorcellerie et cinéma’ (1927), Oeuvres, 257. Translated by StephenBarber in Stephen Barber, The Screaming Body: Antonin Artaud: Film Projects,Drawings and Sound Recordings (London: Creation Books, 1999).

11 Artaud, ‘A Madame Yvonne Allendy’, Oeuvres, 304.12 Artaud, ‘Réponse à une enquête’ (1928), Oeuvres, 307–8.13 ‘Les Dix-huit secondes’ in Oeuvres, 101. Cf. also in Oeuvres, the unrealized

scenarios ‘Description d’un état physique’(110–12), ‘Les 32’ (295–304), ‘LaRévolte du boucher’ (310–13).

14 Cf. Deleuze’s discussion of automota in cinema and cinema as automaton inCinema 2, 263-70.

15 Jean-Louis Schefer, L’Homme ordinaire du cinéma (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma,XX).

16 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 168, quoting Schefer, L’Homme ordinaire, XX.17 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 168–9, quoting Schefer.18 Deleuze discusses ‘pre-hodological’ space in relation to the films of Jacques

Doillon, but in a manner which is very resonant with Le Révélateur.Hodological space, relating to paths and routes, pertains to the cinema ofaction, while the cinema of the body explores a pre-hodological space:‘It may be here that the cinema of the body is fundamentally contrastedwith the cinema of action. The action-image presupposes a space in whichends, obstacles, means, subordinations, the principle and the secondary,predominances and repugnances are distributed: a whole space which canbe called hodological. But the body is initially caught in a quite differentspace, where disparate sets overlap and rival each other, without being able toorganize themselves according to sensory-motor schemata. ( . . . ) This is spacebefore action, always haunted by a child, or by a clown [pitre], or by both atonce. It is a pre-hodological space, like a fluctuatio animi which does not pointto an indecision of the spirit, but to an undecideability of the body.’ Cinema 2,203 (translation modified). Cf. also ‘What Children Say’ in Essays Critical andClinical, 61–7.

19 Cf. Cinema 2, 198.20 Cf. Oeuvres, 307.21 Schefer, cited by Deleuze, Cinema 2, 201.

French, Belief in the Body

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