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Fiction and the ‘Unrepresentable’:

All Movies are but Variants on the Silent Film  

Shigehiko Hasumi
Translated by David Buist    

I    

After more than fifty years of experience as a film critic, a certain hypothesis about the    
basic ontology of the cinematic medium has gradually taken shape in my mind. Although
I have already made some allusions to this hypothesis in previous publications, I have yet
to make a full statement of it. Now would seem to be the time to do so.
 
Stated briefly, my hypothesis is that the medium of film has not yet truly incorporated
sound as an essential component of its composition. This statement applies generally to
all types of film, whether produced for entertainment or for artistic ends, irrespective of
the form in which they have been consumed throughout the history of the medium
stretching back over one hundred years. Another way of expressing this hypothesis is to
say that the so-called talkie is in fact no more than a variant of the silent film. The
transition from the silent film to films with sound has to be understood not only from the
perspective of technological progress. At least until the end of the 20th Century, no
attempt was made to have the camera function as a device for the recording of sound.
The camera continued to function exclusively as a device for the reproduction of moving
images. Meanwhile, sound was captured by an entirely separate recording device. As I
will explain in more detail below, the development of the talkie was predicated on the
artificial synchronisation of the separately recorded elements of sound and image. To this
extent, it has remained a highly unstable medium of expression.
 
There are at least two senses in which the synchronisation of sound and image in film can
be described as ‘artificial’. First, this synchronisation is achieved by the very ‘unmodern’
device of striking clapsticks in front of the camera, and therefore cannot be regarded as
‘natural’ in any sense. Second, even in the absence of such artificial synchronisation, it is
still perfectly possible to produce a convincing movie simply from a sequence of silent
images. Film scenes to which sound has been added after the event are accepted by
viewers as normal. For example, hardly anyone would seriously believe that the sound of
car horns accompanying an indoor scene of a Hitchcock film was actually produced by
cars driving around on the streets outside. The sound world of cinema, with its emphasis
on artificial effects, created a kind of ‘virtual reality’ long before the advent of digital
technology.
 
The camera and sound recorder developed as two entirely separate technologies, with no
consideration of how image and sound might be synchronised. Indeed, synchronisation
only became readily achievable in the 1950s following the development of the Nagra tape
recorder. The Nagra, which means ‘it will record’ in Polish, was produced in Switzerland by
a company founded by a Polish émigré. It is highly significant that such a technology was
not first created in Hollywood.
 
It was well beyond the middle of the 20th Century before the recording of sound on site
became a general practice in movie production. An illustrative case is that of Jean-Luc
Godard’s À bout de souffle (1959). No sound engineers were present during the shooting
of this film. The sound that now accompanies all showings of this film was created in the
studio by dubbing. It is said that during filming Godard would shout instructions to the
actors in a manner no different from the days of silent film. The soundtrack of Kiju
Yoshida’s Good for Nothing (1960) was likewise studio dubbed, a practice which Yoshida
continued well into the 1970s. Another striking example is Noriaki Tsuchimoto’s vivid
documentary film Minamata (1972) about the devastating health effects of mercury
poisoning in a southern Japanese city. This was shot using a 16 mm camera that did not
have the capacity to record sound simultaneously. The film nevertheless succeeded in
bringing this now notorious case of industrial pollution to public attention through its
portrayal of the horrific effects of mercury poisoning on the bodily movements and facial
expressions of people living in the vicinity of the Chisso factory. Sound was added in the
studio after the completion of filming, but this created no sense of incongruity for
viewers. It is interesting to note that the Nouvelle Vague, which transformed
cinematography both in France and Japan in the 1960s and 1970s, occurred on the back
of a set of techniques fundamentally unchanged since the days of silent film.
 
In some film cultures, notably that of Italy, it took a long time before synchronous
recording of sound and image became generally accepted. In such cases, filming meant
above all the capture of a visual subject, while sound belonged entirely to the domain of
post-production. Almost all the masterpieces of Italian neo-realism, including those by
Roberto Rossellini, had their sound added afterwards through a process of post-
synchronisation. The reverse situation can be observed in the case of Indian musical
films, where actors mime in synch to a pre-recorded soundtrack recorded by specialist
playback singers, thus obviating any need to record the actors’ own voices. Even great
masterpieces, such as Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa (1957), were filmed in this way, as indeed were
almost all the Hollywood musicals. This illustrates the fact that cinema has yet to make
any decisive break with its earliest manifestation as the silent film.
 
Before pursuing my argument any further, it is necessary to emphasise that my
hypothesis that all movies are but variants of the silent film is entirely unrelated to any
nostalgic desire to return to the idyllic days before sound. For the record, however, I have
to admit a personal predilection for silent movies. I enjoy nothing more than watching
films by David Wark Griffith, Louis Feuillade, Eric von Stroheim and F.W. Murnau, most of
whose work was produced before the advent of talkies. I also like to watch – preferably
projected on a screen, and in many cases even without any obtrusive piano
accompaniment – films featuring the likes of Buster Keaton, Harry Carey and Janet
Gaynor, all of whom were masters of facial expression and bodily movement. My
hypothesis is nevertheless based strictly on an analysis of historical conditions
irrespective of any such personal predilections. It is founded not only on the facts of film
history but also makes reference to the more general distribution of knowledge in society
since the 19th Century. In order to appreciate this hypothesis, it is not necessary to know
the history of film in detail, but it does require some understanding of the conditions
under which film came into being and how it developed. This I will now briefly describe.
 
As everyone knows, cinema was born in 1895 as a result of the combination of various
technologies already existing in the 19th Century. Opinion is divided as regards the
precise details, but for the purposes of this article I begin with the invention of the
cinematograph by the brothers Lumière. The earliest films were of course without sound,
including Sortie d’usine and the other nine short films premiered at the Grand Café in
Paris in 1895. Cinema remained for a long time an essentially silent medium, even as it
was developed and commercialised by people other than the Lumières. The basic
technology underlying cinematography was photography, which had developed and
gained popularity since the mid 19th Century. The main innovation of the cinematograph
was to mechanically reproduce the movements of subjects that had previously been
captured only instantaneously, thus adding a temporal dimension to photography. The
resulting medium of film provided a means to create fictional narratives visually by
cutting, pasting and rearranging images of real scenes. To the extent that it did this
without reference to the traditional Western aesthetic norms developed through epic
poetry and drama since ancient Greece, film came to be known by some as a ‘bastard of
representation’.
 
The mid 1920s can be regarded as the heyday of cinema. Many of the leading directors of
that time made films that brought to light unseen tensions in everyday life through
minute observation. I refer here not only to the avant-garde works of Sergei Eisenstein,
but also to other representatives of pre-Stalinist Soviet cinema, including Abram Room
and Boris Barnet. Another feature of this age was the abundant exploration of suspense,
exemplified above all by Fritz Lang’s 1928 Spione (even more so than his more famous
Metropolis, 1927). Film creators active during this period achieved very high levels of
creativity in the treatment of their chosen material, as is illustrated by John Ford’s
westerns, Raoul Walsh’s historical dramas, Ernst Lubitsch’s erotic comedies, Buster
Keaton’s comedies, Daisuke Ito’s sword-fight dramas and Frank Borzage’s melodramas,
among many other equally worthy names I cannot mention here. It was during this
period that film emerged as a new art form offering forms of expression unavailable
through literature.
 
Talkies arrived on the scene not long after the heyday of the silent movies described
above. Nowadays we automatically associate the word ‘film’ with a medium that combines
both image and sound, and silent films tend to be viewed as no more than a transitional
stage toward the contemporary cinema. We tend to think that narrative necessarily
implies sound and therefore see silent films as somehow incomplete and inferior.
However, it is my opinion that the era of the silent movie, lasting three decades, should
be viewed as a decisive phase in human history, no less significant than those tragic
events that simultaneously marked the 20th Century as an age of mass slaughter. My
hypothesis is an attempt to address the pervasive failure of humanity to recognise the full
significance of these facts.

II    

Despite the fact that we have come to automatically assume that films naturally include    
sound, I still maintain that all films are but variants of the silent movie. In effect, I want
to banish the concept of the ‘audiovisual’ from discourse about film. As far as film is
concerned, the ‘audiovisual’ is a pure fiction with no foundation in reality. Cinema differs
in this respect from television, which, never having had a silent period, was predicated
from its inception on the fiction of the audiovisual. To this extent, the situation of
television as a medium is extremely perilous.
 
As already noted, the camera and sound recorder developed separately as devices for
recording signs in their own respective domains. Besides never achieving a state of
natural synchronicity, they can also be said to exist in a relation of mutual exclusivity. The
history of film is the history of this mutual exclusivity. It was in the 20th Century that the
unending struggle between image and sound became manifest on the technological level.
Humanity has yet to find a way to finally resolve this struggle. This technological struggle
between image and sound can be observed on a number of different levels. In
Gramophone, Film, Typewriter Friedrich Kittler (1986) recounts the story of how Edison,
on completing the first mass producible sound recording/playback device, immediately
brought in a photographer. This famous anecdote illustrates how the moment of the
gramophone’s invention could only be recorded visually. This imbalance between the
technology of visual reproduction and the technology of aural reproduction remained
throughout the 20th Century.
 
Further insight into the struggle between sound and image can be gained by considering
the case of Stéphane Mallarmé. We in the 21st Century have a clear visual image of this
French poet thanks to several portrait photographs taken of him by the photographer
Félix Nadar. On the other hand, no aural record remains that would even suggest to us
what qualities his voice might have had. Both film and sound recording had come into
existence by the later years of Mallarmé’s life, but the chance to record the sound of his
voice was forever lost. We will never actually hear him reciting ‘Un coup de dés’. All we
have is the second-hand account by Paul Valéry who described the poet’s voice as ‘low,
monotonous, seeking no affectation, almost as if he were talking to himself’.
 
This is a direct reflection of the historical fact that the technology of image reproduction
became ‘democratised’ far earlier than the technology of sound recording. Writers such as
Maxime Du Camp and Émile Zola were able to access the technology of photography a
mere ten years after its invention. Likewise, in the world of moving pictures, someone as
young and inexperienced as Sacha Guitry was able to shoot an amateur movie (Ceaux de
chez nous, 1914/5) featuring such famous people as Anatole France, Sarah Bernhardt and
Auguste Rodin only twenty years after the invention of film.
 
Around the time of the outbreak of the First World War, Hollywood was little more than a
colony dominated by what was then the main centre of the American film industry on the
east coast. Amateur moviemaking has a long history stretching back at least to the same
time period. In contrast, the technology of sound recording remained the exclusive
preserve of specialist technicians for much longer. Indeed, it could be said that sound
engineers carefully defended their monopoly over the reproduction of sound from
encroachment by amateurs. This monopoly remained intact until the popularisation of the
tape recorder in the 1960s. Democratisation of sound recording thus took an inordinately
long time to be realised. The reason for this is not so much technological as ideological.
The aforementioned case of Mallarmé clearly illustrates how the voice continued to have a
quality of irreproducible transience. One can even say that reproducing the voice was
seen as a taboo to be contravened only with the uttermost care and sensitivity. This
‘prohibition of the voice’ was a legacy of the era of the silent film. Those thirty years from
the end of the 19th Century to the mid 1920s had a lasting impact on human history and
cannot be dismissed as merely a transition to what followed.
 
The taboo against reproducing the voice was nothing other than a reflection of the
supremacy still granted to the voice in the structure of human knowledge. Unlike images,
which were themselves already reproductions, the voice was identified with the body
itself. Reproducing the voice therefore implied the loss of corporality. As if to pre-empt
any such risk of disembodiment, the voice remained hidden in the realm of the intangible.
This, more than anything, was the reason why amateurs were barred from access to the
technology of sound reproduction for so long.
 
I cannot say with absolute certainty that this was why the voice of Mallarmé reciting his
own verse was never recorded. There is no doubt, however, about the existence of a
certain force obstructing the democratisation of sound recording. In his early critique of
the ‘metaphysics of presence’, Jacques Derrida (1976) maintained that the voice could
only exist as such in its ‘presence to itself’. In view of this, one should not assume that
the democratisation of sound recording was achieved simply through the popularisation of
the gramophone. It is true that factory workers in the Fordist production system acquired
the ability to listen to records in their own homes, but this was only possible after the art
of recording had been entrusted to an exclusive group of professionals. The popularisation
of music through inexpensively reproduced records reduced even further the chance of
amateurs to access the technology of sound recording.
 
It is therefore possible that the centrality granted to the spoken word under the
‘metaphysics of presence’ acted in concert with the early recording industry to impose a
severe prohibition of the voice. While amateurs and professionals were granted almost
equal opportunities to engage in photography or filming, no such equality pertained in the
domain of sound reproduction. Thus, the era of the silent film left its lasting mark on the
whole of the 20th Century.

III    

Talkies would not have eclipsed silent films had it not been for the organised management    
of sound reproduction by professional audio technicians. However, the position occupied
by such specialists in the world of cinema was different from that which they enjoyed in
the record industry. In the process of film production, the demands of cameramen always
took precedence over those of sound engineers. This points towards the conclusion that
talkies simply perpetuated the prohibition of the voice that had begun in the era of silent
film.
 
This dominance of specialists in image reproduction over specialists in sound recording is
reflected in a number of ways. Let us consider first the issue of camera noise. The early
film sound engineers were engaged in a constant battle with the loud noise produced by
camera motors. Sound shields attached to cameras in an attempt to counteract this
problem were known as ‘blimps’, after the airships of the same name that were popular in
the 1930s. Although they did eliminate camera noise, these devices had the disadvantage
of being so cumbersome and heavy that they restricted camera movement. As a result,
even in the present day, it has become accepted that camera noise in films will only be
reduced in relative terms, not eliminated entirely. In a photograph showing the scene
during the filming of an early talkie by Yasujiro Ozu, the camera can be seen rather
comically wrapped in a thick cotton futon. This vividly illustrates the difficulty involved in
the simultaneous use of two fundamentally incompatible technologies.
 
Meanwhile, in instances where the technology of sound recording interfered with the
taking of images, it was the latter that took precedence. Cameramen were always allowed
to shoot from the best possible position, while sound engineers often had to
accommodate by placing their microphones in less than ideal positions. The booms on
which microphones were suspended were never allowed to be visible in the film. This
severely limited where sound engineers could place their microphones and often
compromised the quality of the sound. The sound engineer was thus treated as a
subordinate to the cameraman and was forced to operate under severely constrained
circumstances. Even the lighting specialist took precedence over the sound engineer,
since the slightest shadow of a microphone on a filmed subject or background was not
allowed. One only has to read the memoirs of Fumio Hashimoto (Hashimoto and Ueno,
1996), who was sound engineer for Kenji Mizoguchi, to appreciate the difficulties of
recording sound for film.
 
Another humiliation suffered by the sound engineer was that his work, however
outstanding, could be entirely ignored should the film ever find its way into the export
market. In many countries, foreign films would be dubbed in the local language, thus
displacing the original soundtrack. Indeed, such restrictions on sound still pertain to the
present day. The camera continues to dominate in a manner hardly changed since the
days of silent film. This is as true of the mass-produced Hollywood blockbusters as it is of
high-quality small-scale productions by such directors as Frederick Wiseman and Eric
Rohmer. This is the reality addressed by my hypothesis that all movies are but variants on
the silent film.
 
One cannot claim that there was no attempt at all to truly integrate image and sound
recording. However, the only camera to enable simultaneous recording was the 8
millimetre Kodak camera produced for the amateur market. This appeared in 1973, when
the traditional Hollywood film production system was nearing its end. Occurring by some
uncanny coincidence in the very same year as John Ford’s death, its invention can be
interpreted as an omen heralding the rise of talk about the ‘death of film’. The optical
soundtracks used in other film formats, including 16 mm and 35 mm, had to be imprinted
after filming. Any sound recorded at the same time as filming had to be captured
separately on a Nagra tape recorder before being transferred to the film at a later stage.
To this extent, one can say that the medium of film itself suppressed sound.

IV    

Now is the time to give serious consideration to the hypothesis that all movies have been    
merely variants on the silent film, since it is only now, in the digital age of the 21st
Century, that we are beginning to witness a real integration of image and sound
reproduction. As far as the history of film in the 20th Century is concerned, my
hypothesis seems quite plausible. The prohibition of the voice placed a long-term ban on
the development of technologies for the synchronous reproduction of image and sound.
The development of the digital video camera and its popular adoption in the 21st Century
suggest that this prohibition may be coming to an end. It is perhaps only now that the
medium of film is beginning to break free from the long dominant paradigm of the silent
film.
 
Video cameras containing digital magnetic tape make it possible for the first time to
record sound and image synchronously on the same medium. Without necessarily
invoking the idea that digital technology brings about a total synthesis of the auditory and
visual, one can still appreciate how the digital video camera frees sound recording for film
from many of the constraints it suffered in the past. It enables the real voice of actors to
be recorded without suspending directional microphones on a boom above their heads.
The sound engineer can now pursue his task without having to worry constantly about the
demands of the cameraman or lighting engineer. These new circumstances are leading to
the gradual formation of different habits of filmmaking quite unlike those inherited from
the age of silent film.
 
Since the beginning of the 21st Century, several outstanding film directors have begun
producing their work on digital video. Having used analogue video in the 1990s for the
filming of his multi-part series Histoire(s) du cinéma, Jean-Luc Godard went on to film the
second half of his Éloge de l’amour (2001) on digital video. Other notable examples of
films shot on digital video are Pedro Costa’s In Vanda’s Room (2000), Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s
Bright Future (2003), Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten (2002), Wim Wenders’ Land of Plenty
(2004), Alexandre Sokourov’s The Sun (2005) and Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (2006). Shinji
Aoyama’s documentary AA (2006) was also shot entirely on digital video. From these
examples it should be clear that digital technology has captured the imagination of
directors at the leading edge of contemporary cinema.
 
It is significant that many of the contemporary film directors adopting digital video are
what one might call ‘film fundamentalists’, steeped in the history of cinema since the
silent days. This can certainly be said of Godard, Costa, Kurosawa, Wenders and Aoyama.
Whilst they may not necessarily agree with my hypothesis, there is no doubt that they
have an acute awareness of the historical reality that synchronous reproduction of sound
and image has only now become possible since we entered the 21st Century.
 
However, the question still remains as to whether the recent work of these directors has
succeeded in abolishing the prohibition of the voice and liberating film from the paradigm
of the silent movie. We need to ask ourselves whether the optimism associated with
digital technology is really compatible with the hundred years of the history of film. How
far has humanity in the 21st Century succeeded in distancing itself from the history of the
20th Century? Are our lives in general still not bound by many of the events and
circumstances of the 20th Century? Just as films in the past were only variants of the
silent movie, is not the 21st Century simply a variant of the 20th Century?
 
Such questions bear some relation to the recent fierce debate between Jean-Luc Godard
and Claude Lanzmann about whether the gas chambers of the Holocaust should be
represented in film. I would like now to examine this debate in some detail. The Holocaust
and the gas chambers can be considered symbolic of the 20th Century. Lanzmann is of
course famous as the director of the film Shoah (1985), in which there is notably no
direct visual representation of the gas chambers. Reacting to Lanzmann’s insistence that
the gas chambers should not be represented on screen, Godard maintained to the
contrary that they should, and indeed must, be represented if film is to have any claim to
historical fidelity.
 
Although the original protagonists later withdrew from active combat, the debate was
continued by Gérard Wajcman (1999) and Georges Didi-Huberman (2008). Before
considering the latter, it is worth taking note of the statement by Godard that initiated the
debate:
 Although I cannot prove it, I believe that I would be able to find images of the gas
chambers after about twenty years of searching, with the help of a good
investigative journalist. One would be able to see the inmates entering the
chambers and what state they were in when they came out. This is no place for
  the declaration of prohibitions in the manner of Lanzmann or Adorno. They vastly
   
overstate their case. Once people start debating about what is ‘unfilmable’ there is
no end. You simply cannot stop people filming, just as you should not burn books.
Otherwise you will not know what you are criticising. (Godard, 1998a: 28)

The object of Godard’s characteristically provocative satire is the secular religiosity of

those who speak too easily of the ‘unrepresentable’. One could also call this a
metaphysics without truth. He is suggesting that Lanzmann is guilty, although perhaps
only indirectly, of repressing debate about the Holocaust by not representing the gas
chambers and therefore rendering the Holocaust itself somehow unrepresentable. The
fact that Adorno’s name is cited together with Lanzmann’s is a reference to Adorno’s
famous statement that poetry is no longer possible after the Holocaust.
 
Adorno’s remark was clearly intended to apply to Western art as a whole, of which poetry
is a representative part. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer (1969)
had railed against the ‘fusion of Beethoven with the Casino de Paris’ as a manifestation of
the self-destruction of the Enlightenment through the technology of reproduction in 1940s
America. Having thus dismissed film as no more than a ‘bastard of representation’, it
would not have occurred to Adorno that Auschwitz could be represented in film. Godard    
maintained, to the contrary, that only film could represent Auschwitz. He had already said
as much in the speech he gave on receiving the Adorno prize (Godard 1996), where he
stated that the role of film was to stimulate thought. By failing to represent the gas
chambers, film was failing to fulfill its proper role.
 
In his defence of Lanzmann, Wajcman (1999) criticises Godard’s position as no more than
a nostalgic confession of faith by a worshipper of images. He takes great exception to
Godard’s likening of Lanzmann to a book-burning dictator. On the other hand, Didi-
Huberman (2004) criticises the concept of ‘unimaginability’ underlying Wajcman’s
argument as ‘theoretical arrogance’. Didi-Huberman bases his argument on his own
intensive analysis of four photographs secretly taken by concentration camp inmates in
1944. He raises serious doubts about whether the memory of Auschwitz can be
maintained if we continue to circle around the issue of unrepresentability.

V    

I am naturally suspicious of any discourse that feels it has to resort to the notions of the    
unimaginable or unrepresentable. I find myself in sympathy with the sentiments of Didi-
Huberman (2008) when he makes statements such as the following: ‘It is no longer
possible to speak of Auschwitz in terms of absolutes such as the “unimaginable” or the
“unrepresentable”. Even though often well intentioned, such superficially philosophical
words are just careless’. However, it is not my purpose here to add my own intervention
to the debate. Instead, I want to point out the way in which the debate unwittingly
perpetuates the representational form founded on the paradigm of the silent movie.
 
When the issue of unimaginability or unrepresentability is discussed, the debate focuses
entirely on the matter of visual representation. Aural representation is somehow excluded
from consideration. It is strange that it never occurred to anyone to question the absence
of sound recordings from Auschwitz. While we can listen to the verbal testimony of
survivors, we have no direct record of the voices of those who did not survive. Nor can we
hear the sounds of the concentration camp, such as the horrible roar of the incinerators
where the bodies of the victims were burned. The debate seems to be conducted in
silence amid a scene devoid of all sound. This uncanny parallel with the world of the silent
film is striking.
 
The most surprising aspect of the debate is the failure by all the protagonists to bring to
awareness the prohibition of the voice on which the debate is predicated. Didi-Huberman
points out that there was a photographic processing laboratory at Auschwitz. What he
does not mention, however, is whether there existed any facility for the recording of
sound. One need only mention names such as UFA and Tobis to realise that Germany was
in the forefront of the talkie film industry in Europe by the 1930s. It is therefore entirely
conceivable that sound recording technology had been used at Auschwitz as part of a
general archiving process. Nevertheless, it does not occur to Didi-Huberman even to
consider the possibility that sound recording had taken place at the concentration camp.
Likewise, Godard cites the Nazis’ ‘obsession with recording everything’ as a reason for the
probable existence of photographs of Auschwitz. Even so, he does not show the slightest
interest in whether they might have recorded the hellish noise of the incinerators.
 
In the first instalment of Histoire(s) du cinéma, which has the title ‘Toutes les histories’
(‘All the [Hi]stories’), there is a scene close to the end where Godard himself appears and
makes the following curious remark linking George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (1951)
with Auschwitz:

And if George Stevens

hadn't used the first 16mm
film in colour
at Auschwitz
  and Ravensbrück
   
Elizabeth Taylor would
no doubt never have
found her place in the sun

These words are accompanied by a slow motion scene of Elizabeth Taylor rising up in her    
swimsuit while frolicking with her lover on the lakeshore. This is overlaid with the image
of Mary Magdalene holding out her hands before Jesus from Giotto’s Jesus Appears before
Mary Magdalene. This particular scene lends some credibility to Wajcman’s criticism of
Godard as a worshipper of images. The point, however, is that Stevens, like many other
Hollywood film directors, had accompanied the US army in Europe and filmed the ruins of
the German military invasions during the Second World War. By making this point, Godard
is also hinting at the existence of films of the concentration camps. Significantly, he omits
to mention whether or not those colour films had sound.
 
Wajcman expresses skepticism toward Godard’s assertion about the existence of
photographic images of Auschwitz. He supports his critique by insisting that his own
knowledge of the existence of the gas chambers was not gained from any such images,
but from the ‘profusion of verbal testimony from both public and private sources and from
both victims and perpetrators’ (1999). However, what this critique lacks is any recognition
of the possibility that the voices of the victims had been recorded. Rather than invoking
the dubious notion of unrepresentability, he should have pointed out Godard’s failure to
recognise the possibility of representation through sound. This is where the real weakness
of Godard’s worshipping of images lies. In supporting Lanzmann, Wajcman does no more
than negate the possibility of visual representations of Auschwitz.
 
The scene revealed by this debate is none other than that of a silent film. It is as if the
sound recorder was erased from Auschwitz by the prohibition of the voice. The whole
issue is pursued as if visual representation were all that mattered. The techniques of
montage demonstrated in Didi-Huberman’s analysis of the four photographs from
Auschwitz, and in Godard’s films, are techniques inherited from the silent film. They are
the very foundation on which cinematographic fiction is based. The debate between
Godard and Lanzmann, and between Didi-Huberman and Wajcman, occurs in a discursive
space predicated on the silent film. This reflects the fact that almost all the footage of the
Second World War is essentially silent.
 
Indeed, this leads to the observation that the silent film was the typical mode of
representation of the 20th Century. This may ultimately be the most important lesson to
be learned from the debate. The following quotation is from the second instalment of
Histoire(s) du cinéma, called ‘Une seule histoire’ (‘A Solitary History’):

  From the train arriving    

at the station or Nursing
the Baby to Rio Bravo
the camera has never
fundamentally changed
The Panflex Platinum is
less developed than the
Debrie 7
which Gide’s nephew
 took on his journey
to the Congo

The first two films mentioned here were shot by the Lumière brothers using the
cinématographe that they had invented. Rio Bravo is the famous 1959 western directed
by Howard Hawks. It was shot using the Panavision Platinum. Gide’s nephew is Marc
Allégret, who went to the Congo in 1925. The Debrie 7 he took with him was of course a
silent camera. Godard is therefore maintaining that the cameras used in the production of
movies hardly changed at all in the first hundred years of the history of film. This
suggests that Godard would find nothing new in my hypothesis.
 
Finally, I would like to mention the unintended significance of the fact that most of the
texts forming Didi-Huberman’s Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz
were written in the year 2001. The tragic events of 11 September 2001 were also
represented to us in a manner reminiscent of a silent film. While we all saw the two jets
flying into the World Trade Center towers, these images were not accompanied by any
sound. Television was unable to capture the horrific sound of the impacts. Likewise, we
are able to see the mushroom clouds rising above Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the
dropping of the nuclear bombs, but we cannot hear the distinctive and horrible sound
they must have made. Although the images of 11 September were captured by digital
video cameras, which should have been able to synchronise image with sound, in the    
event all we have are the images. Without the presence of microphones on site at the
moment of the impact, the possibility of synchronisation is even now denied. One could
say, therefore, that the events of 11 September 2001 still belong in the 20th Century, the
age of the silent film. At that critical moment, there was no synchronisation of visual and
aural representation.
 
In his film Femmes en miroir (2002) about the memory of Hiroshima, Kiju Yoshida chose
not to recreate the sounds or images of the nuclear explosion. Instead, the film cuts to
silent archive photos taken at the actual time. The unimaginable is thus incorporated into
the film in a manner far removed from any hint of ‘theoretical arrogance’. The director’s
stance is a principled one, reflecting a conviction that the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima
was a 20th-Century tragedy that can only be approached through the silent medium of
that age.
 
On the basis of these reflections, it can be maintained with no uncertainty that the
concept of ‘audiovisual’ representation in film is nothing more than a fiction. The medium
known to us as ‘film’ is indeed no more than a continuation of the silent movie.

Originally published in Theory, Culture and Society vol 26 no 3 (March 2009). Reprinted
with permission of the author.
   

References    
 Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer (1969) Dialectic of Enlightenment. Continuum.
Derrida, Jacques (1976) Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Didi-Huberman, Georges (2008) Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz.
University of Chicago Press.
Godard, Jean-Luc (1996) ‘A propos de cinéma et d’histoire’, Trafic 18: 28–32.
Godard, Jean-Luc (1998) ‘La Légende du siècle’, Les Inrockuptibles 170.
Hashimoto, Fumio and Koshi Ueno (1996) Ee Oto ya nai ka [Isn’t That a Nice
Sound]. Tokyo: Ritoru Moa.
Kittler, Friedrich (1986) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose
Verlag.
Wajcman, Gérard (1999) ‘“Saint Paul” Godard contre “Moïse” Lanzmann, le
match’, L’infini 65: 121–7.

from Issue 1: Histories    

© Shigehiko Hasumi 2009.

Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors.

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