Phenomenology and the Future of Film

Phenomenology and the Future of Film

Also by Jenny Chamarette GUILT AND SHAME: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Visual Culture (co-edited with Jennifer Higgins)

Phenomenology and the Future of Film Rethinking Subjectivity beyond French Cinema Jenny Chamarette Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK

Jenny Chamarette 2012 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-29953-5 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-33522-0 ISBN 978-1-137-28374-0 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9781137283740 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Preface vi vii viii Introduction 1 1 Time and Matter: Temporality, Embodied Subjectivity and Film Phenomenology 21 2 Knowing and Nothing: Chris Marker, Subjective Temporalities and Vocalic Bodies in the Future Tense 68 3 Agnès Varda s Trinket Box: Subjective Relationality, Affect and Temporalised Space 107 4 Burlesque Gestures and Bodily Attention: Phenomenologies of the Ephemeral in Chantal Akerman 143 5 Threatened Corporealities: Thinking with the Films of Philippe Grandrieux 187 Conclusion: Rethinking Cinematic Subjectivity and Beyond 231 Installations Cited 245 Filmography 247 Notes 249 Bibliography 252 Index 263 v

Illustrations 2.1 Face of the past (Hélène Chatelain), La Jetée 81 2.2 Face of the present (Jacques Ledoux), La Jetée 81 2.3 Faces of the future (from left: Janine Klein, William Klein, Ligia Borowczyk), La Jetée 82 2.4 M. Chat, Chats perchés 101 2.5 Brute digital technologies, Chats perchés 102 3.1 Still photograph from Zgougou s Grave (Le Tombeau de Zgougou, 2006) 134 3.2 Installation view, The Widows of Noirmoutier (Les Veuves de Noirmoutier, 2005) 138 4.1 To Walk beside One s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge (Chantal Akerman, 2004), installation view 1 171 4.2 To Walk beside One s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge (Chantal Akerman, 2004), installation view 2 173 4.3 Sylvie Testud (Charlotte) and Aurore Clément (Catherine), Tomorrow We Move (Chantal Akerman, 2004) 174 4.4 To Walk beside One s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge (Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans un frigidaire vide; Chantal Akerman, 2004). Second part of the installation: One video projection (double image) on the wall and one video projection on a hung tulle netting fabric screen; variable dimensions 175 5.1 Hair cutting Scene: Zsolt Nagy and Anna Mouglalis, La Vie Nouvelle 198 5.2 Thermic camera scene, La Vie nouvelle 209 5.3 Three final scenes: Claire (Elina Löwensohn), Sombre 226 5.4 Three final scenes: Jean (Marc Barbé), Sombre 227 5.5 Three final scenes: Tour de France scene, Sombre 227 vi

Acknowledgements Parts of chapters 2 and 5 emerged in early forms in Rhythms: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Culture (eds Laura McMahon and Elizabeth Lindley 2008) and Threat: Essays in French Thought and Culture (eds Georgina Evans and Adam Kay 2010). Segments of Chapter 1 also found an early outlet in Anamnesia: Private and Public Memory in Modern French Culture (eds Peter Collier, Anna Magdalena Elsner and Olga Smith 2009). Many thanks to the editors and to Peter Lang for allowing me to develop and expand these chapters into their current form in this book. I am grateful to Tina Kendall, Tanya Horeck and Edinburgh University Press for allowing me to reproduce parts of Shadows of Being in Sombre: Archétypes, Wolf-Men and Bare Life in The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe (eds Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall 2011). Parts of Chapter 3 were first published in the article Spectral Bodies, Temporalised Spaces: Agnès Varda s Motile Gestures of Mourning and Memorial in the online, open-source journal Image (&) Narrative (2011), and portions of Chapter 4 were expanded from the article The Disappearing Work: Chantal Akerman s Installations and Pheomenologies of the Ephemeral in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES (forthcoming). The author and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: Ciné Tamaris and Agnès Varda for the images Le Tombeau de Zgougou (2006) and Les Veuves de Noirmoutier (2005); Marian Goodman Gallery and Chantal Akerman for the installation still Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans un frigidaire vide (2004); Camden Arts Centre, Chantal Akerman and Andy Keate for the installation views of To Walk Next to One s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge (2004); and Philippe Grandrieux and Corinne Thévenon Grandrieux for the front cover image, Anna Mouglalis et Zsolt Nagy dans La Vie nouvelle de Philippe Grandrieux. Every effort has been made to trace rights holders but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. vii

Preface The emerging fields of sense theory and embodiment in film studies have moved with extraordinary speed since the turn of the millennium. Since this research first began to take shape in my doctoral thesis, two key works have been published that now form vital contributions to the field. Alongside the eminent works of Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks, one cannot think of sensory cinema without also referring to the more recent work of Martine Beugnet and Jennifer M. Barker. In this rapidly developing field, inevitably, this book shares resonances with Beugnet and Barker s theorisations of embodiment, corporeality and materiality, not least because of a shared preoccupation with the legacies of phenomenological thought. I am indebted to the pathways that these works have forged, even if their words were not in print at the time when the bulk of the research for this book was undertaken, and I have attempted to make reference to these more recent works where appropriate. This book could not have begun its transformation, from the first seeds of enquiry into the printed page, without the AHRC studentship that funded my doctoral research, from which this project first emerged. I owe immense gratitude to the Department of French at the University of Cambridge, UK, and to King s College, Murray Edwards College and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, all of which provided an intellectual home and financial support for my research, in turn, as a doctoral student, college lecturer and research fellow. I will look upon those years with fondness and gratitude. My deepest and most unreserved thanks go to Emma Wilson, whose intellectual generosity, inestimable kindness and penetrating insight have helped to shape this book at every stage. Her generosity is a gift so great that I can only ever hope to be able to reciprocate it by giving forward to the future. I would also like to thank Patrick ffrench, Isabelle McNeill, Greg Tuck and an anonymous reader for their brilliant guidance and readership of early versions of this book. I am hugely grateful to Bill Burgwinkle, Martin Crowley, Ian James, Keith Reader and David Trotter for their time, wisdom, encouragement and gently probing questions, as well as to the fruitful and generous contacts I have had with Martine Beugnet and Laura U. Marks. For their kindness I am also viii

Preface ix indebted to colleagues, friends and supporters who have read extracts or discussed my work with me: Hugo Azérad, Kate Elswit, Georgina Evans, Lizzy Al-Haboubi, Ewan Jones, Steve Joy, Susan Larsen, Abigail Loxham, Laura McMahon, Leo Mellor, Matilda Mroz, Davina Quinlivan, Elsa Strietman and Luke Sunderland. Many thanks are in order to Felicity Plester and Catherine Mitchell at Palgrave Macmillan for their patience, guidance and extraordinary efficiency. Thanks are also due to the production team at Palgrave Macmillan for their speed and accuracy with the fiddly bits. My tender thanks go to my family: Gill, Mike and Andrew Chamarette, David Chamarette and Sandra Smith, for giving me the freedom to be just as I will be. This book is dedicated to Darren, who knows what it is to share silence.