ADDED ATTRACTION ————————— ACINEMA Jean- anes Lyotard translated, in collaboration with the author, by Paisley N. LivingstonThe nihilism of movements Cinematography is the inscription of ‘movement, a writing with movements all kinds of movements; for example, in the film shot, those of the actors and other moving objects, those of lights, colors, frame and lens: in the film se quence, all of these again plus the cuts snd splices of editing: for the film asa whole, those of the final script and the spatio-temporal synthesis of the narra- tion (découpage). And over or through all these movements are those of the sound and words coming together with them, Thus there is a crowd (nonetheless a sountable crowd) of elements in motion, & throng of possible moving bodies Which are candidates for inscription on film. Learning the techniques of film ssaking involves knowing how to elim- nate a large number of these possible Jovements. It seems that image, se iience and film must be constituted at the price of these exclusions Here arise two questions that are really quite nsive considering the deliberations ‘of contemporary cine-crities: whicit ‘ovements and moring bodies are these? Why is it necessary to select, sort out snd exclude them? FH no movements are picked out we will xcept what is fortuitous, dirty, con- ised, unsteady, unclear, poorly framed, Ererexposed . .: For example, suppose jou are working on a shot in Video, a i, Say, of a gorgeous head of hait & Renoir;upon viewing it you find that thing has come undone: all of a convened, conventional sudden swamps, outlines of incongruous islands and cliff edges appear, lurching forth before your startled eyes. A scene from elsewhere, representing nothing identifiable, has been added, a scene not related to the logic of your shot, an un- decidable scene, worthless even as an in- sertion because it will not be repeated and taken up again later. So you cut itout, We are not demanding a raw cinema, like Dubuffet demanded an art brur. We ate hardly about to form a club dedicated to the saving of rushes and the rehuabilita- tion of clipped footage. And yet... We observe that if the mistake is eliminated itis because of its incongruity. and in order to protect the order of the whole (Shot and/or sequence and/or film) ‘while banning the intensity it carves And the order of the whole has its sole object in the functioning of the cinema: that there be order in the movements, that the movements be made in order, that they make order, Weiting with movements-cinematography-is thus conceived and practiced as an incessant ‘organizing of movements following the rules of representation for spatial local- ization, those of narration for the in- stantiation of language, and those of the form “film music” for the soundtrack. ‘The so-called impression of reality is a real oppression of orders. This oppression consists of the enforce ment ofa nihilism of movements. No ‘movement, arising from any fel, is given to the eye-ear of the spectator for what itis: a simple sterile difference in an audio-visual field. Instead, every movement put forward sends back to something else, is inscribed as a plus or minus on the ledger book which is the film, is valuable because it resuams to something else, because itis thus poten- ‘tial retum and profit. The only genuine movement with which the cinemas written is that of value. The law of value (in so-called “political” economy) states that the objecr, in this case the move- ‘ment, is valuable only insofar as itis ex- changeable against other objects and in terms of equal quantities of a definable unity (for example, in quantities of money). Therefore, to be valuable the Object must move: proceed from ather objects (“production in the narrow sense) and disappear, but on the con: dition that its disappeerance makes room for still other objects (consump. tion). ‘Such a process is not sterile, but productive: itis production in the Widest sense, Pyrotechnics Let us be certain to distinguish this pro- cess from sterile motion. A match once struck is consumed. If you use the match to light the gas that heats the water for the coffee which keeps you alert on your way towork, the consumption is hot stele, for it is amovement belong. ing to the cireuit of capital: merchandise- match» merchandise-labor power -» Money.vages -» merchandise-match, But when a child strikes the match-head 0 see what happens-just for the fun of it-he enjoys the movement itself, the changing colors, the light lashing at the height of the blaze, the death of the Liny piece of wood, the hissing of the tiny flame. He enjoys these sterile differ. ences leading nowhere, these uncompen-sated losses; what the physicist calls the dissipation of energy. Intense enjoyment and sexual pleasure a jouissance), insofar as they give rise to perversion and not solely to propaga- tion, are distinguished by this sterlity At the end of Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud cites them as an example of the combination of the life and death instincts. But he is thinking of pleasure obtained through the channels of “nar mal” genital sexuality: all jouissance, in: cluding that giving rise to a hysterical attack or contrariwise, to a perverse scenario, contains the lethal component, but normal pleasure hides it in a move ment of return, genital sexuality. Normal genital sexuality leads to childbirth, and the child is the rerum of, or on, its movement, But the motion of pleasure as sach, split from the motion of the propagation of the species, would be (whether genital or sexual or neither) that motion which in going beyond the point of no return spills the libidinal forces outside the whole, at the expense of the whole (at the price of the main and disintegration of this whole) In lighting the match the child enjoys this diversion (détournement, a word dear to Klossowski) that misspends energy. He produces, in his own move- ment, a simulacrum of pleasure in its so called “‘death-instinet” component. Thus if he is assaredly an artist by pro- ducing a simulacrum, heis one most of all because this simulacrum is not an ob- ject of worth valued for another object. Itis not composed with these other ob- jects, compensated for by them, enclosed in awhole ordered by constitutive laws (ina structured group, for example). On the contrary, itis essential that the en- tire erotic force invested in the simula- crum be promoted, raised, displayed and burned in vain. It is thus that Adorno said the only truly great art is the making of fireworks: pyrotechnics would simulate perfectly the sterile consumption of energies in jouissance. Jackson Pollack Seven (1950) Joyce grants this privileged position to fireworks in the beach sequence in Ulysses. A simuslacrum, understood in the sense Klossowski gives it, should not bbe conceived primarily as beionging to the category of representation, like the representations which imitate pleasure; rather, it is to be conceived asa kinetic problematic, as the paradoxical product Of the disorder of the drives, as a com- posite of decompositions. ‘The discussion of cinema and represen tational narrative art in general begins at this point. Two directions are open to the conception (and production) of an object, and in particular, a cinemato- sraphic object, conforming to the pyro- {echnical imperative, These two seem- ingly contradictory currents appear to be those attracting whatever is intense in painting today. It is possible that. they are also at work in the truly active forms of experimental and underground ‘These two poles are immobility and ex- cessive movement. In letting itself be Grawn towards these antipodes the cine- ‘ma insensibly ceases to be an ordering force; it produces true, that is, vain, simulacrums, blissful intensities, instead of productive/consumable objects.The movement of return Let us back up a bit. What do these movements of return or retumed move ments have to do with the representa: tional and narrative form of the com mercial cinema? We emphasize just how wretched it is to answer this question in terms of a simple superstructural func: tion of an industry, the cinema, the pro- ducts of which, films, would lull the public consciousness by means of doses of ideology. If film ditection isa direc ingand ordering of movements it is not so by being propaganda (benefiting the bourgeoisie some would say, and the bureaucracy, others would add), but by being 2 propagation. Just as the libido must renounce its perverse overflow to propagate the species through a normal genital sexuality allowing the constitu- tion of a “sexual body” having that sole end, so the film produced by an artist working in capitalist industry (and all Known industry is now capitalist) springs from the effort to eliminate aberrant movements, useless expenct- tures, differences of pure consumption This fim is composed like a unified and. propagating body, a fecund and assem- bled whole transmitting instead of Josing what it carries. The diegesis locks together the synthesis of movements in the temporal order; perspectivist repre- sentation does so in the spatial order. Now, what are these syntheses but the arranging of the cinematographic faterial following the figure of retum? We are not only speaking of the require- ‘ment of profitability imposed upon the artist by the producer, but also of the fotmal requitements that the artist ‘weighs upon his material. All so-called good form implies the retumn of same- ness, the folding back of diversity upon an identical unity. In painting this may be a plastic shyme or an equilibrium of colors; in music, the reset tion of disso- nance by the dominant chord; in archi- tecture, a proportion. Repeiition, the principle of not only the metrie but even ofthe thythmic, if caken in the Marrow sense as the repetition of the same (same color, line, angle, chord), is the work of Fros and Apollo disciplin- ing the movements, limiting them to the norms of tolerance characteristic of the system or whole in consideration. It-was an error to accredit Freud with the discovery of the very motion of the drives. Because Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle takes great care 10 dis. sociate the repetition of the same, which signals the regime of the life in Stincts, from the repetition of the other, which ean only be other to the first ‘named repetition. These death drives are just outside the regime delimited by the body or whole considered, and therefore it is impossible to discem what is rtum- ing, when returning with these drives is the intensity of extreme jouissance and danger that they carry. To the point that it must be asked if indeed any repetition is involved at all, if on the contrary some- thing different returns at each instance, if the eternal rerum of these sterile explo- sions of libidinal discharge should not be conceived in a wholly different time-space than that of the repetition of the same, as their impossible copresence. Assuredly wwe find here the insufficience of though, which must necessarily pass through that sameness which isthe concept. Cinematic movements generally follow the figure of return, that is, of the repe- tition and propagation of sameness, The scenario or plot, an intrigne and its solu tion, achieves the same resolution of dissonance as the sonata form in music: its movement of return organizes the affective charges linked to the filmic “signifieds,” both connotative and denotative, as Metz would say. In this regard all endings are happy endings, just by being endings, for even ifa film finishes with a murder, this (00 ean serve as a final resolution of dissonance. ‘The affective charges carried by every type of cinematographic and filmic “signifier” (lens, framing, cuts, lighting, shooting, etc.) ate submitted to the same rule absorbing diversity into unity, the same law of a retum of the same after a semblance of difference; a differ- ence that is nothing, in fact, bul a detour, The instance of identification This nule, where it applies, operates principally, we have said, in the form of exclusions and effacemenis, The exclu- sion of certain movements is such that the professional filmmakers are not even awate of them; effacements, on the other hand, cannot fail to be noticed by them because a large part of their activity consists of them. Now these effacements and exclusions form the very operation of film directing. In eliminating, before and/or after the shooting, any extreme slare, for example, the director and cameraman condemn the image of film to the sacred task of making itself recog- nizable to the eye. The image must cast the object or set of objects as the double of a situation that from then on will be supposed real. The image is re- presentational because recognizable, ‘because it addresses itself to the eye's memory, to fixed references ot iden-tification, references known, but in the sense of “well-known,” that is, familiar and established. These references are ‘identity measuring the retuming and retum of movements. They form the instance or group of instances connect- ing and making them take the form of cycles. Thus all sorts of gaps, jolts, post- ponemenis, losses and confusions can ‘occur, but they nolonger act as real diversions or wasteful drifts; when the final count is made they tum out to be nothing but beneficial detours. Iis pre~ cisely through the return to the ends of identification that cinematographic form, understood as the synthesis of good movement, is articulated following the cyclical organization of capital ‘One example chosen from among thou- sands: in Joe (a film built entirely upon the impression of reality) the movement is drastically altered twice: the fist time when the father beats to death the hippie who lives with his daughter; the second, ‘when “mopping up” 2 hippie commune he unwittingly guns down his own daughter. This last sequence ends with a freeze-frame shot of the bust and face of the daughter who is struck down in full movement. In the first murder we see ‘thal of fists falling upon the face of the defenseless hippie who quickly loses consciousness. These two effects, the ‘one an immobilization, the other an ex cess of mobility, are obtained by waiving the rules of representation which demand real motion recorded and projected al 24 frames per second. As a result we could expecta strong affective charge to accompany them, since this greater or lesser perversion of the realistic shy thm. responds to the organic rythm of the intense emotions evoked. And itis in- deed produced, but to the benefit, never- theless, of the filmic totality, and thus, all told, to the benefit of order; both arthy hmies are produced not in some aberrant fashion but at the culminating points in the tragedy of the impossible father/daughter incest underlying the scenario. So while they may ipset the representational order, clouding for a few seconds the celluloid’s necessary ‘transparency (Which is that order's condition), these two affective charges do not fail to suit the narrative order. n the contrary, they mark it with a beautiful melodic curve, the first ac- celerated murder finding its resolution in the second immobilized murder. Thus the memory to which films ad- dress themselves is norhing in itself, just as capital is nothing but an instance of capitalization; it isan instance, a set of empty instances which in no way operate through their content; good form, good lighting, good editing, good sound mixing are not good be- Cause they conform to perceptual or social reality, but because they are a priori scenographie operators which on the contrary determine the objects to be recorded on the screen and in “reality.” Jean Dubusffet Collage (1955) Directing: putting in, and out, of scene Film direction is not an artistic activity it isa general process touching all fields of activity, a profoundly unconscious process of separation, exclusion and ef facement. In other words, direction is simultaneously executed on two planes, ‘with this being its most enigmatic aspect. On the one hand, this task consists of separating reality on one side and a play space on the other (a “real” or an “unzeal”- that which is in the camera’s Jens): to direct is to institute this limit, this frame, to circumscribe the region of de-tesponsibility at the heart ofa whole ‘which ideo facto is posed as responsible (we will eall it nature, for example, or society or final instance). Thus is esta- blished between the two regions a re- lation of representation or doubling ac- companied necessarily by a relative de. valuation of the scene’s realities, now only representative of the realities of reality. But on the other hand, and in- separably, in order for the function of representation to be fulfilled, the acti Vity of ditecting (a placing in’and out of scene, as we have just said) must also be ‘an activity which unifies all the move- ‘ments, those on both sides of the frame's limit, imposing here and there, in “reality just asin the real (reel), the same norms, the same ordering of all drives, excluding, obliterating, effacing them no less off the scene than on. The references im posed on the filmic object are imposed just as necessarily on all objects outside the film. Direction frst divides-along the axis of representation~and due tothe theatrical limit-a reality and its double, and this disjunction constitutes an obvious repression. But also, beyond this representational disjunction and in 4 “pre-theatrical” economic order, it sliminates all impulsional movement, zeal or unreal, which will not lend itself ‘0 reduplication, all movement which would escape identification, recognition and the mnesic fixation. Considered from the ange of this primordial function of an exclusion spreading to the exterior & well as to the interior of the cinema- tographic playground, film direction acts always as a factor of libidinal normal. zation and does so independently of all “content” be it as “violent” as might seem. This normalization consists of the exclusion from the scene of whatever cannot be folded back upon the body of the film, and outside the scene, upon the social body. The fim, strange formation reputed to be normal, is no more normal than the society or the organism. All of these so- called objects are the result of the impo- sition and hope for an accomplished fotality. They are supposed to realize the reasonable goal par excellence, the subordination ofall partial drives, all sterile and divergent movements to the Unity of an organic body. The film is she organic body of cinematographic ‘movements. Its the ecclesia of images just as politics is that of the partial Social organs. This is why direction, a ‘echnique of exclusions and effacements, 8 political activity par excellence, and political activity, which is direction par excellence, are the religion of the mod: em irteligion, the ecclesiastic of the secular. The central problem for both is fot the representational arrangement anil its accompanying question, that of Knowing how and what to represent and she definition of good or true represen- sation; the fundamental problem fs the exclusion and forclusion of all that is judged unrepresentable because non- recurrent. Thus film acts a5 the orthopedic mirror analyzed by Lacan in 1949 as constitu- tive of the imaginary subject or object a; that we are dealing with the social body in no way alters its function. But the zeal problem, missed by Lacen due to his Hegetianism, is to know why the drives spread about the polymorphous body must have an object where they can unite, That the imperative of unifi- cation is given as hypothesis in a philo- sophy of “consciousness” is betrayed by the very term “consciousness,” but for a “thought” of the unconscious (of which the form related most to pyro: technics would be the economy sketched here and there in Preud’s writings), the question of the production of unity, even an imaginary unity, can no longer fail to be posed in all its opacity. We will no longer have to pretend to under- stand how the subject's unity is consti- tuted from his image in the mirror. We will have to ask ourselves how and why the specular wail in general, and thus the cinema screen in particular, can be- come a privileged place for the libidinal cathexis; why and how the drives come to take their place on the film (peilicwle, or petite pem), opposing it to them: selves a the place of their inscription, and what is more, as the support that the filmic operation in all its aspects will efface. A libidinal economy of the cinema should theoretically construct the operators which exclude aberrations from the social and organic bodies and. channel the drives into this apparatus, It is not clear that narcissism or masoch- ism are the proper operators: they carry a tone of subjectivity (of the theory of Self) that is probably still much too strong. The tableau vivant ‘The acinema, we have said, would be situated at the two poles of the cinema taken as a writing of movements: thus, extreme immobilization and extreme mobilization. Itis only for thought that these two modes are incompatible. In a libidinal economy they are, on the contrary, necessarily associated; stupe- faction, terror, anger, hate, pleasure~all the intensities-are always displacements in place. We should read the term emo- tion 2s 4 motion moving towards its own exhaustion, an immobilizing mo- | tion, an immobilized mobilization. The representational arts offer two symmetri- cal examples of these intensities, one where immobility appears: the tableau vivant; another where agitation appears: lyric abstraction. Presently there exists in Sweden an institution called the posering, a name derived from the pose solicited by por- trait photographers: young girs rent their services to these special houses, services which consist of assuming, clothed or unclothed, the poses desired by the client. Its against the niles of these houses (which are not houses of prostitution) for the clients to touch the models in any way. We would say that this institution is made to order for the fantasmatic of Klossow ski, knowing 3s wwe do the importance he accords t0 the tableau vivant as the near perfect simu lacrum of fantasy in all ts paradoxical intensity. But it must be seen how the paradax is distributed in this case: the immobilization seems to touch only the erotic object while the subject is found overtaken by the liveliest agitation But things are probably not as simple as they might seem. Rather, we must understand this arrangement asa demar- 57Jackson Pollack #12 (1952) cation on both bodies, that of model and client, of the regions of extreme erotic intensification, a demarcation performed by one of them, the client, whose inteprity reputedly remains in- tact. We see the proximity such a for. mulation has to the Sadean problematic of jouistance. We mist note, given what concems us here, that the tableau vivant in general, if it holds a certain libidinal potential, does so because it brings the theatrical and economic orders into communication; because it uses “whole persons” as detached erotic regions to which the spectator’s impulses are con- nected. (We must be suspicious of surn- ming this up too quickly as a simple voyeurism). We must sense the price, be- ‘yond price, as Klossowski admirably ex- plains, that the organic body, the pre- tended unity of the pretended subject, ‘must pay so that the pleasure will burst forth in its irreversible sterility. This is the same price that the cinema should pay if it goes to the frst of its extremes, immobilization: because this latter (hich is not simple immobility) means that it would be necessary to endlessly undo the conventional synthesis that normally all cinematographic move- menis proliferate. Instead of good, unifying and reasonable forms proposed for identification, the image would give rise to the most intense agitation through its fascinating paralysis. We could al- ready find many underground and experimental films illustrating this diree- tion of immobilization. Here we should begin the discussion of a matter of sin- gular importance: if you read Sade or Klossowski, the paradox of immobilize- tion is seen to be clearly distributed along the representational axis. The ob- ject, the victim, the prostitute, takes the pose, offering his or her self as a detached region, but at the same time giving way and humiliating this whole person. The allusion to this latter is an indispensable factor in the intensification since it indi- cates the inestimable price of diverting the drives in order to achieve perverse pleasure. Thus representation is essential to this fantasmatic; that is, itis esential that the spectator be offered instances of identification, recognizable forms, all in all, matter for the memory: forit is at the price, we repeat, of going beyond this and disfiguring the order of propa- gation that the intense emotion is felt. Tr follows that the simulacrum’s sup- port, be it the writer’s descriptive sym tax, the film of Pierre Zucca whose photographs illustrate(?) Klossowski's La Monnaie Vivante, the paper on which Klossowski himself sketches-it follows that the support itself must not submit to any noticeable perversion in order that the perversion attack only What is supported, the representation of the vietim: the support is held in insensi bility or unconsciousness. From here springs Klossowski’s active militaney in favor of representational plastics and his anathema for abstract painting, A RG semen yf sm NR sang PoeAbstraction But what occurs if, on the contrary, itis the support itself that is touched by per verse hands? Then the film, movements, lightings, and focus refuse fo produce the recognizable image ofa vietim or immobile model, taking on themselves the price of agitation and libidinal ex. pense and leaving it no longer to the fantasized body. All lyric abstraction in painting maintains such a shift It im- plies a polarization no longer towards the immobility of the model but to- wards the mobility of the support. This, mobility is quite the contrary of cine: miatographic movement; it arises from any process which undoes the beautiful forms suggested by this latter, from any Process Which to a greater or lesser de- ree works on and distorts these forms. It blocks the synthesis of idea ttiestion and thwarts the mnesic instances. It can thus go far towards achieving an ararxy of the iconic constituents, but this is Still 19 be understood 2s a mobilization of the suppott, This way of frustrating the beautiful movement by means of the support must not be confused with that working through a paralyzing at- tack on the victim who serves as motif The model is no longer needed, for the relation to the body of the clientspecta- toris completely displaced. How is jouissance instantiated by a large esnvas by Pollock or Rothko or by a study by Richter, Baruchello or Eggeling? If there is no longer a refer ence to the loss of the unified body due {o the model’s immobilization and its diversion to the ends of partial dis charge, just how inestimable must be the disposition the client-spectator can Fave: the represented ceases to be the li- bidinal object while the sozeen itsel, in all ts most formal aspects, takes it Place, The flm stip snolonger abo 'Shed (made transparent for the benefit Of this or that flesh, for it offers itself as the flesh posing seit. But ftom what unified body is: torn so thatthe spec tetor may enjoy, so that it seems to him to be beyond al pre? Before the min- Ute this which hem the contact gions adjoining the chromatic sands ofa Rothko canves, or before the almost im perceptible mavements ofthe litle ob {ects or organs of Pol Bay, it is atthe Price of renouncinghis ov bodily to tality and the synthesis of movements making it exist that the spectator ex- Perlences intense pleasure: these objects demand the paraljss not ofthe object model but ofthe “subject-client, the decomposition of his own organism ‘The channels of passage and libiginal discharge are restrited to very small partial regions (eye-corex), and almost the whole body is neutralized ina ten sion blocking al escape of tives from passages other than those necessary to the detection of very fine differences, T is the same, though following other mo Galities, withthe effects of the excess of movement in Pollock's paintings ox with ‘Thompson's man:polation ofthe lens, Abstract cinema, like abstract painting, inrendeting the sipport opaque reverses the arrangement, making the sient 2 victim. Teis the seme agsin though di ferenty inthe most imperceptible movements of the No Theate, ‘The question, which must be recognized as being crucial to our time because itis that of the staging of scene and society, follows: is it necessary for the vietim to be in the scene for the pleasure to be in- tense? If the victim is the client, if in the scene is only film screen, canvas, the Support, do we lose to this arrangement all the intensty of the sterile discherge? ‘Andifso, must we then renounce the hope of finishing with the illusion, not | only the cinematographic illusion but also the social and political illusions? ‘Are they not really illusions then? Or is believing so the illusion? Must the re- ‘tum of extreme intensities be founded ‘on at least this empty permanence, on the phantom of the organic body or subject which is the proper noun, and at the same time that they cannot really accomplish this unity? This foundation, this love, how does it differ from that an- chorage in nothing which founds capital? Note ‘Thew reflections would not hwe been possible without the practical and theoretical ‘Work sccomplished for several years by and with Dominique Avion, Claudine Eizyknian and Guy Fihman. Jean-Frangois Lyotard teaches at the Univer sity of Pans VIII (Vincennes). He is known, for hispsychoanalytical and Maralst teat ments of Iiterary, pictorial, soil and politcal Phenomena, including Aiguresdiscours Paisley N. Livingston is doing gadaate work in cinema studies. theater and literature at The Johns Hopkins University whese Ns as Studied under Professor Lyossrd. His ans tions of two articles by Reng Girard are forch- coming from The Johns Hopkins Press This translation was partially funded by a want from the Ohio Unwverity Graduate Student Councit 2