Revisiting Cahiers Du Cinema

In “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism” (one of the most cited texts in film politics), Jean-Luc Comolli and Paul Narboni describe seven categories of films according to the political nature of the cinematic engagement that a film can have with its own status as an agent of ideology. The authors then regroup the categories to lay out the films’ levels of critical functions by the ways in which the films tend to criticise their own commodification through form. Briefly, the first grouping refers to films completely integrated into the dominant ideology, hence oblivious to their status as a commercial product. The groups that interest Comolli and Narboni are the rest of the categories.

The authors differentiate films involving a political meaning directly or indirectly, or on the level of form and subject. These films seem to be the ones that offer a potentially radical practice to work within the doomed status of cinema as a hegemonic industry. For example, the second “political cinema” group is comprised of films that point to their political status both on the level of their film form and their subject matter—the former level is referred as “signifier” and the latter as “signified” (Comolli and Narboni 26). [open references and endnotes in new window] The third group involves films “that should be the chief subject of the magazine [Cahiers du Cinema]” due to their subtle politics that eschew the notion of realism. According to Comolli and Narboni, films in the third category don’t necessarily attack the dominant ideology by striving to represent ideological struggle directly on screen; they do it by their politically-clinched aesthetic choices on the level of form—Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) being one example. This group thus constitutes “the essential of cinema” without a commitment to depict reality. The fourth group categorizes films that convey political content on the narrative level but still remain within the regulated territory of dominant ideology that designates the limits of political expression. The fifth marks the films with certain powerful aesthetics—like genre films—in which ideology becomes “subordinate to the text” (Comolli and Narboni 27). While the films in the sixth category document the real-life events of struggle (i.e. documentaries on working class, political protests and social movements) but don’t point back to their own role in ideology as documentaries, the films in the seventh (and last) category are about, again “live action,” but this time they underline the film’s position as the documenting agent. These films, similar to the films in the second and third categories, are “not satisfied with the idea of the camera ‘seeing through appearances’” (Comolli and Narboni 28).
 
Comolli and Narboni’s categorization has been formative in terms of contextualizing the discussions around how to understand and create political cinema, perhaps due to the importance of realism in this formulation. This can be also due to the explicitly-defined-ness of these categories and the pronounced differentiation between the political and non-political in their theories. However, these categories also seem to run the risk of reducing radicalism to rejection of realism when this discussion comes to the more blurred contexts of avant-garde cinema, such as collage, ironic symbolism, citationality and parody. But such concepts can both work as a tool to obscure the “ideologically-conditioned method of ‘depiction’” (Comolli and Narboni 28) and as a self-aware method of providing alienation and discomfort in the consumption process.

Chuck Kleinhans detects this reading ideology in Cahiers based on a concept called “structuring absence” in cinema—a concept that “opens up analysis to not just mimicking or mirroring what a film says overtly, but to looking for that which it cannot address” (2). Even though Kleinhans’ project is to reveal the contradictions in Cahiers Du Cinema’s “reading ideology” regarding Young Mr Lincoln (1939), his critical re-evaluation nonetheless traces some of Cahiers’ theoretical contributions that can still be useful for us. According to Kleinhans, the concept of “structuring absence” (“something that signifies although it is not present”) is one of the most influential ideas they produced. Comolli and Narboni’s text, based on Cahiers’ conceptualizations that Kleinhans dissected, laid the foundations of the discourse around counter cinema. On the other hand, it revealed possible contradictions in believing the tangibility of classification methods. Thus, according to Barbara Klinger:

“the strong critical investment in designating and elucidating counter- or progressive cinema is financed through a staunch conception of classic textuality, against which progressive practice relies for its very definition” (Klinger 33).

Klinger’s standpoint, in this regard, works towards recognizing progressive art not only in terms of a text’s singularity but also in a more collective sense, such as can be found in the trajectory of genre films. She further points out that this classification influenced questions of authorship. Drawing from Klinger, we can find a similar collective sense in Sally Potter’s cinema in terms of playing with the tools of identity representations. The distinctive filmmaking choices in YES particularly use language and self-reflexivity to offer an intervention into the methods of realistic representation on screen, which then responds to the discussion around political cinema associated with the counter cinema discourse. Re-constructing reality was one of the criteria in differentiating counter cinema in Film Studies in the 1960s and 1970s (as can be seen in Comolli and Narboni’s work that followed André Bazin’s legacy). The critical positions towards the concept of realism within postmodernist thought went one step forward and questioned the singularity of reality, especially in “the age of digital media” where “the real me” is perpetually getting lost and refurbished (McRobbie 434, Poster 445). This paradigmatic move away from singularity in terms of the concept of reality made it hard to stick with “the essentialist notions of the self that suggest there is a natural, unified and hidden essence to the self.” This perspective has also mobilized art-house filmmaking into using deconstructionist approaches to representing identity, derived from the limitations of mainstream representation, for which Potter’s YES can be given as an example. In Potter’s filmmaking, representation comes across as a self-reflexively “emptying” method that emphasizes the constructed-ness of identity traits and societal pressures. I argue that this filmmaking constitutes a problem for realism-oriented perspectives and displaces the role of realism in political position-taking in cinema. Instead, it uses a type of cinematic scaffolding that surrounds the narrative to highlight fantastical connections between its fragments.

YES and structuring absences

Catherine Fowler detects how camera movements create “distortions of perspective” in YES and the film has a certain symbolism carried through the adoption of a specific poetic language (98-100). The narrative structure of YES revolves around the generic arc of a love affair (meeting, falling in love, conflict and/or separation, resolution and/or getting back together) between an Irish-American microbiologist (Joan Allen) who unhappily leads a bourgeois married life and a Lebanese chef (Simon Abkarian) who worked as a surgeon in Beirut before he migrated to London where he cannot practice his profession due to his immigrant status. However, this structure’s linearity is constantly fractured by self-reflexive compositions, such as double exposure and slow motion (among other features). Fowler delves into how the cinematic implementation of Potter’s love story constructs “artificial” representations of cultural and political dichotomies—including the gender binary, the rich and the poor, and the cultural war between “the West” and “the East.” Even though Fowler doesn’t directly compare the film with the politics of counter cinema, her focus is still on how politically-defined the protagonists are in the film; their dialogues mostly directly express political positions.

Slanted angels of YES.

In addition to Fowler, Giuliana Bruno reflectively writes about the film in a very unusual form: a personal letter to Sally Potter, which can be found in Journal of Visual Culture; Bruno discusses YES in relation to her own personal engagement with the film blended into her critical reading. The reviewer’s choice of leaving the practice of textual analysis out of her personal-critical account is a sign of film’s resistance against textuality-focused approaches that try to pinpoint any realism in cinematic construction. Based on these writers’ accounts, we see that the film invites thinking about cultural dichotomies beyond issues of how to represent reality through the so-called integrity of textuality. Rather, the film engages with disintegration of textuality by its way of articulating the methods of surveillance, language, formatting, restriction and formula—which can be easily associated with Wollen’s “cardinal virtues” of counter cinema.

Cleaner’s first appearance.

From the beginning of the film, we find a congruence between counter cinema discourse and YES. Counter cinema insisted on looking at the ways in which hegemonic structures at work are rendered invisible by the film industry, and the cinematographic choices in YES seek to expose what would be hidden elsewhere. The first instance of this is the film’s opening: a microscopic image of dust particles move across the image when the film title appears on screen. Then we see someone who is not necessarily the protagonist of the film, Cleaner (Shirley Handerson), who is the maid of the house where the female protagonist lives with her family. Cleaner’s poetic monologue on the role of dust and dirt with regards to their signifying function in terms of how a life is lived starts the film with the idea of accumulated knowledge through residues; this signals the organizing function of Cleaner in the narrative structure. Then, in turn, the role of Cleaner signals the invisible organizational role of social class. This invisible role can be associated with what Kleinhans called “the structuring absences” within the methods of narrativizing life which is at the core of the system of mainstream representation: what cannot be visible on screen is ultimately what organizes what can be visible there. In contrast to this system, Cleaner’s positionality in the film lays bare this structuration—what I call the outer scaffolding of the narrative. We can think about all the cinematic aspects that are touched upon in the rest of this article as the features of this structure in YES. As the definition of “scaffolding” signifies,[7]this visible structure presumably is temporally located, yet integral to the narrative’s grounded-ness and maintenance by completely enclosing it. The analogy for the relationship between “the West” and “the East” in the form of a heterosexual love affair arc then relies upon the support from this cinematic scaffolding that includes Cleaner’s unveiling function in the film in terms of “structuring absences.” She holds the position of the Greek chorus in tragedy who tells the audience the context within which the whole story should be understood (Fischer).[8]

First encounter.

Some of the other features of this structure are

• the use of iambic parameter (to underline the role of language in representation),
• CCTV surveillance footage (to provide an added suspicion to the protagonists’ relationship),
• skewed camera angles and blurred visuals that trivialize the central subjects and
• the presence of the other cleaners who don’t speak, unlike Cleaner, but only are inserted into the foreground of the frames between narratively-motivated scene changes to disrupt a potential seamlessness in the film’s temporality.

These features actually resonate closely with Wollen’s counter cinema virtues, such as narrative intransitivity, estrangement, foregrounding, multiple diegesis, aperture, displeasure and reality (74). YES has a complex structure bringing together distorted camera movements and speeds, involvement of CCTV footage of certain moments, and the protagonists’ status as bearers of cultural binaries. In this way, it answers to what Wollen necessitated for revolutionary cinema that operates “at different levels—fantasy, ideology, science” (531). The revolutionary effect in cinema for Wollen relied on revealing subjection processes and how subjects constructed on screen are mobilized through signifiers. As he stated,

“the articulation of these levels, which involves different modes of discourse and different positions of the subject, is a complicated matter” (531).

I argue that the image of scaffolding here helps to explain this “complicated matter.” It gives the spectators access to demystifing how the levels of fantasy, science and cinema rely upon “structuring absences” by way of a heightened self-reflexivity. As such, Potter’s YES both constructs the fantasy of the love affair between “the East” and “the West” and displays the tools of such fantasizing activity. It does so first and foremost by way of starting the film with a moving image that is only viewable through a scientific tool (microscope) that displays the fragments of any so-called uniformity. Hence, the illusion of uniformity in terms of the coupling of “the East” and “the West” is dispelled from the start by the reminders of this cinematic scaffolding around the narrative that also includes this microscoping effect.

SHE is looking through her microscope.
SHE at her work place on the phone with HE.	HE at his work place from the CCTV footage.
HE is performing his traditional Labanese dancing for SHE before and the moment of transition through the feet match cut to HER daughter’s shoes.

The signifiers of “the East” and “the West,” as well as the relationship between them (“the love affair”) can be found in the film, but that is all there is since, without the scaffolding, there is no structure to the “signified.” In that sense, YES can also be taken as what happened to the significance of postmodernism that used to serve as the potential melting pot of identities, offering a hopeful paradigm for marginalized identities to be integrated into society on an equal ground shared with the ruling classes. This is why Jackie Stacey discussed the film as an articulation of a paradoxical cosmopolitanism that both wishes for and fails at realizing the cosmopolitan match of “the Eastern immigrant” and “the Western feminist.” This paradoxicality was welcomed within the paradigm of postmodernism, and in that sense, Stacey’ article can be taken as another sign of the communication between YES and this paradigm through a cinematic exploration of its loss.

Another element that constitutes the backbone of this communication is the lack of character development in the construction of protagonists. This congruence between the loss of character significance in YES and the loss of significance of postmodernism might be better understood once we look at the use of language in the film as this is the tool it uses to rule out characterization, hence realistic representation. In all this, I don’t mean to say the acting is not realistic, on the contrary the realistic acting through language becomes conceptualized as an agent of fantasy about a realism that is actually not there.

HE outside of his work place by the trash on the phone with SHE (another “background” space being emphasized and associated with his residual status as an immigrant).	HE in public transportation is a moment in the film that marks the identity-related differences between HE and SHE.