Seminar 5
As I already mentioned it, this is a seminar on cinema taken into account as an
industry, a manufacture for narratives, a machine used for generating discourses or, in
Marxist terms, an ideological apparatus – rather than as an art.
But this doesn't mean that aesthetic stakes don't matter for our subject, just the
opposite. We don't have only to spot out, analyze, decipher subliminal or explicit
messages, to deconstruct situations and characters, we also have to be very watchful
on the way a film is addressed to us and is intended to affect us – the film as a
perceptible or tangible object, part, for us, of the tangible world, as Jacques Rancière
would say.
I would like (in order to make this issue quite clear) to mention briefly a discussion
on a film which, in France, has become paradigmatic. In 1961, a film shot by the
Italian director Gilo Pontecorvo, Kapo, was released. Pontecorvo was, at that time,
well-known as a “leftist” filmmaker, communist, anti-colonialist, etc. He shot some
years later a film on the war lead by the Algerians for their independence against
France, a film called La bataille d'Alger - The Battle of Algiers. Kapo is a film about
German concentration camps, it is the story of a woman from Jewish origin who has
been sent to a camp and there she falls in love with a Russian prisoner. The actress
who plays that woman's role is the French actress Emmanuelle Riva also known for
having performed in the famous film Hiroshima mon amour by Alain Resnais, a film
which belongs to our corpus and which we will have to comment some of these days...
At the end of the film, Kapo, this woman commits suicide by rushing up to the
electrified barbed wire which surround the camp. After the film was released, a
French filmmaker, a protagonist of the Nouvelle Vague, who was also a film critic,
Jacques Rivette (he is famous today for films like Céline et Julie vont en bateau, La
belle noiseuse, Jeanne la Pucelle...) wrote a devastating article on Kapo in the journal
Les cahiers du cinéma (n°120, 1961). One sentence of this article has become famous
and is often mentioned, in all kinds of contexts. It is about a short sequence, at the
end of the film, as Emmanuelle Riva throws herself on the barbed wire. Rivette
writes (I do my best, it is not easy to translate because of the accumulation of
technical terms): “The man who decides at that moment to track in (that is: make
what we call in French (!) a “travelling”) before he frames the dead body in lowangle shot by taking good care of inscribing (entering) the raised hand [of the dead
woman's body] in his final framing (centering) – this man just deserves our deepest
contempt ( I emphasize)”.
This sentence has stuck to Pontecorvo's carreer and reputation till his recent death.
I really don't know if Rivette was right in uttering this anathema, I submit or leave
this question to your own judgment, but what I'm sure of is that Rivette is 100% right
on this point: very often, in films, aesthetic stakes also are ethical and political stakes.
It is true that under certain circumstances, in a special context, a track-in or track-out
shot, a close up, a slow motion or, as well, an accelerated motion, a special effect or
an accumulation of special effects, an ellipsis... all this is liable to be a moral fault or
the vector of a political manipulation – a misdemeanor.
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Why? Just because it shows that the filmmaker and his team don't respect their public
and violates the implicit contract he has with the spectators – for he takes unfair
advantage of the technical means and devices he has at his disposal to manipulate this
public and treat it as a bunch of half-witted children. So, in such a case, our task, as
vigilant, alert and trained public, is to catch this swindler in the act, red-handed, like a
thief, and to expose his imposture.
I insist on this issue for very obvious reasons: in the kind of films we have to deal
with, this question of the “moral failing” or lapse, going through aesthetic tricks and
devices, is very topical. If you take a film like Flowers of war, you will have the
opportunity to follow in Jacques Rivette's footsteps not just once but dozens of times.
So, please, pay attention to this: if you are attached to cinema, as an art, be intolerant
and inflexible when you notice that a film doesn't respect you, as a rational subject
and a moral person, as a major and enlightened spectator too, be intolerant to the
intolerable. And in many of the films we have to deal with here, the intolerable is
everywhere. Don't let a greedy industry and a cynical ideological apparatus take you
hostages.
II- I would like now to explore some tracks on the question of cinema and (on)
Hiroshima/Nagasaki. As for the Rape of Nanjing, we saw that the problem, for the
Chinese filmmakers, but as well, for the German director Florian Gallenberger, was
to bring out this event (a disaster and a crime) as a stake for collective memory. To
make out of it a filmic narrative, for this event's memory has to be kept in the present.
Each of theses films has a commemorative value, even if it also is, on its reverse
(back), a matter of business. All these films are, to some extent and from different
angles, shot from the viewpoint of the victim(s), and this is the reason why (to my
knowledge), no Japanese fiction film or drama on this issue exists...
In Above and Beyond, a film shot by two American directors, Frank Panama and
Melvin Frank in 1952 and produce by the Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Robert Taylor
playing the role of colonel Paul Tibbets, commander of the Air Force group which
conducted the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Eleanor Parker performing
as his wife, the directors' project or purpose is exactly the opposite: it is to dissolve
the problem in a very banal family drama – the problem being an unmistakable crime
against humanity which always was denied and evaded as such by his authors and for
which his victims, direct and indirect, never had an opportunity to call the
perpetrators to account or to seek redress; this for the reasons you know (nobody can
ask a victor for an explanation about the crimes he has committed in the course of a
war or a conquest).
How to achieve this feat of skill? It is, in terms of narration, both very simple and
very crude, as you will see: first, you dodge the issue by putting the problem into
words which make it unrecognizable: instead of asking: can we consider dropping the
bomb on Japan, knowing that this action would usher in a completely now era, this
completely new epoch in which mankind is endowed with the capacity to destroy
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itself as a whole (as, for example, the German philosopher does in his book The
Atomic Bomb and the Future of Man (1958)? So, instead of asking this elementary
and basic question, you just ask: do we (Americans) have the right to kill 100 000
persons in order to save 1 millions persons (500 000 American soldiers + 500 000
Japanese soldiers and citizens)?
As you can easily imagine, from the moment on you have accepted the terms of this
biased question, it will not take long to find the correct answer – a few seconds in the
film, as you will see. After the problem has been solved in such an elegant and hasty
way, you can pass to other questions which are supposed to be, for the (American)
public of the film of much greater significance. First of all this: To what extent can or
may a professional soldier who is committed to a secret mission (preparations for the
nuclear bombing of some Japanese cities) sacrifice his family life on the altar of
discipline, obedience and, of course, of the superior (higher) interests of war?
So, we switch from questions like: do we really know what we are doing by
developing this nuclear program and dropping these bombs on Japan, do we really
get the measure of what this decision means for mankind and human condition, can
our historical and ethical imagination be equal to our techno/scientific capacities on
such en issue (see on this the writings of Günther Anders, The Outdatedness of
Human Beings, among others)? - so, by scaling abruptly down and displacing from a
“dilemma” to another, we erase a matter of life and death (the inaugural use of the
atomic weapon) and replace it with trivial questions the ordinary man (woman) is
very familiar with: how can a married man who has been entrusted with a very
important mission by his superiors and who cannot share anything of it with his wife,
for it is an ultra-secret mission, how can such a family man do his duty without
ruining his family life?
Do not believe that I caricature or exaggerate: this is really the “level” of the rhetoric
trick this film is implementing. It is always a gripping question one can ask himself:
how do perpetrators relate, narrate the crimes they have committed? It has often been
pointed out, in the West, that no Nazi narrative about the Holocaust exists, neither at
the time of its perpetration, nor after. The Nazis, at least a part of them, have had to
answer for their crimes – but this without ever setting up such a narrative – for the
good reason that their criminal undertaking was constantly based on the stubborn
denial of the existence of such a project (the so-called Final Solution).
What is at work here, in narrative terms, is completely different: the culprits never
had to answer for a crime which has changed the course of human History and
transformed our condition (“From now on, and as long as we [=mankind] will live,
we will live as a mortal species” – Günther Anders, The Time of the End), for they
have won the war and have committed this crime in the name (for the sake of?)
freedom and democracy.
So, they feel free to stick to the propagandist version they worked out at the time they
prepared the raid on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To be sure, they don't like so much to
dwell on this issue which has never become a goose that lays golden eggs for
Hollywood, for example, by contrast with the war in the Pacific in general. There are
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actually very few fiction films, dramas which have been produced by the American
film industry and which explicitly deal with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I mean not just
by passing but as their main subject. This is why I dwell on this mediocre film shot
by two second rate directors, with actors on fatigue duty, “doing the job”, the same
way colonel Paul Tibbets did his, as he dropped the bomb on Hiroshima...
The denial of the crime doesn't go through silence, here, but through its defacement
(more than distortion or pure lie). The working out of a version of this criminal action
which would be presentable to the American (Western) public of that time is not that
easy. It goes through a series of displacements and substitutions which are meant for
“coding” it in such a way that it cannot be recognized and identified a what it is – a
crime against the Japanese people, of course, but, against mankind as a whole before
all. This form of displacement has certainly something in common with what Freud
describes as the “work” of the dream, in his famous book on the interpretation of the
dreams (Die Traumdeutung) – it is some kind of industrial/commercial use of it.
What has to be eluded is before all, of course, the problem of responsibility – more
than issues which could be presented in terms of shame and (or) guilt. In the key
scene of the bomb-dropping on Hiroshima, Tibbets appears to be imperceptibly
disturbed, as he utters “mission accomplished” after having dropped the bomb. But
he questions at no moment the institutional device or the “rationality” of the system
according to which obedience, as a duty, as a norm, converts an unprecedented crime
into a moral imperative. The defacement of the crime goes over the metamorphosis of
the “innocent” culprit (he “does the job” without been aware of the criminal
dimension of what he is doing) into an energetic man torn between two imperative
“obligation systems” - professional duty and family obligations.
As Hannah Arendt or, as well, Günther Anders would say, what Tibbets is short of is
the imagination and the autonomy of the (personal) judgment that only could make it
possible for him to grasp with the criminal dimension of the unprecedented crime he
is about to be an active agent of.
What replaces imagination, as a critical faculty (ability) is his fanatic way to stick to
the rules, to be a small wheel in the machine, his perfect professional ability. From
this angle, he is not very different from the sort of obedient bureaucrat and criminal
civil servant Hannah Arendt describes in her book on Eichmann – and this is where
the film makes sense by running over the intentions of its promoters and sponsors.
The colonel Tibbets of Above and Beyond is loyal to his superiors as he his to his
wife, he loves his children, but all this in a rather rigid, automatic way, as if he
suffered from a deficit or deficiency in terms of sentiments and emotions.
The actor, Robert Taylor – , lends a rather marmoreal face to this rigid character.
Tibbets has to play a part which is much too vast, too big for him -and this is why he
is just at his place, just doing what he has been told to.
He pays his tribute to his family spirit by nicknaming the B29 he pilots over
Hiroshima with his mother's name - Enola Gay - , he never forgets to bring back
home a perfume bottle for his wife as he comes back home from one of his frequent
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secret missions... So, we can remember here that kitsch always had narrow relations
(deep affinities) with this kind of modern (contemporary) political criminality or
delinquency which are an exception to any norm or standard: kitsch is everywhere in
Nazi or Stalinist “cultures”.
In the credits of the film, the Army is, as is usual in this kind of movie, thanked for its
support and collaboration; but if we look a bit more carefully at the process of
manufacturing the film, we notice that the scenarist was, at the time of the war, a
colonel in the Air Force Reserve, that several technical advisers have been directly
involved in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki operations, and even that the subject of the
film would have been inspired by the “high rate of divorce among flight crews” of the
kind Tibbets was part of... So, you can see that in such a case, the Army is an integral
part of the production of the film, it is not a simple matter of support of a film project
by the Army - it is something like a co-production Hollywood-Army.
The film being a docudrama (a film about the life and deeds of valor of colonel Paul
Tibbets), the real Tibbets and his alias for the film, go touring together for the
promotion of the film...
So, as a conclusion, two points which are, I think, food for thought:
–
Such a film can be defined as a device whose effect (if not intention...) is
preventive: its function is to hinder of block our understanding of what it (the film) is
about: not only a situation or a war event, but the birth of a new form of power over
life in general, and not only on peoples, nations, empires, etc. The syntagm or
neologism Hiroshima/Nagasaki designs the radical novelty of what Günther Anders
calls “the nuclear (or atomic) situation”. Hiroshima/Nagasaki is the name of the event
whose definition is that it is what never ends or “passes”. This film, among many
other devices, is meant for repelling critical thought from the surroundings of this
event.
–
As a professional soldier who dedicates himself to the fight against Japanese
militarism and fascism, as a husband and father who loves his family, as an ordinary
man who does his best to reduce the tensions between his professional commitments
and his family life, Tibbets (I mean the Tibbets of the film) is a typical, almost
exemplary democratic subject, very close to any spectator of the film, in this respect,
at the time it was released. The problem is that the distinctive feature of
Horoshima/Nagasaki, as an event, is that it bursts into pieces the strict opposition
between “democratic” and “totalitarian”, as Hannah Arendt puts it in The Origins of
Totalitarianism. The disconcerting psychic affinities Tibbets displays, even in the
film, with figures which obviously belong to the totalitarian “side” of the
contemporary history (Eichmann) show how the strict distinction set up by Arendt
doesn't pass the “Hiroshima/Nagasaki test”.
What I mean by “psychic affinities” here is all what is related to the issue
“insensibility” or “insensitivity”- the inability of the perpetrator to “imagine”, that is
to “get the picture” of what he is doing and of the consequences of it.
In this issue, Anders goes much farther than Arendt.
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III- On Akira Kurosawa's film I live in fear , 1955
It is the story of an old man who, living under the terrifying influence of the memory
of what cannot pass (Hiroshima/Nagasaki as “trauma”), becomes a nuisance for his
family, that is all those who want to “forget” and see to their business (rebuild Japan,
make money...). Hiroshima/Nagasaki having become his obsession, his “idée fixe”,
he is considered as a sick person, his children think that he has gone insane, and this
suits them for many reasons – not very avowable reasons, indeed...
This old man is the cinematographic double of the philosopher Günther Anders who,
having stated after WWII that Hiroshima/Nagasaki is the event philosophy has to
deal with in the new era, always was ostracized in his milieu, being the perfect
outsider of the academic institution after his emigration to the United States (he was
an Austrian Jew) where he worked for years as a blue collar - this at a time as his
former wife's (Hannah Arendt) star was rising in the sky of American philosophy...
Anders is the philosophical equivalent of Kurosawa's old man, for he his this
“madman” who cries and shouts in the wilderness of contemporary philosophy
“Hiroshima ist überall!”, Hiroshima is everywhere!” - this is the title of one of the
many books he wrote on the “atomic situation”.
The narrative device Kurosawa appeals to is familiar to the readers of the work of
Henry James (The Turn of the Screw, The Liar): we can call it the indecidable. What
does that mean? It means that, as we see the film, we constantly shift or swing from
an interpretation to another: does the old man really suffer from nerves, has he really
gone mad? Or is he the only one who is clear-headed in this post-Hiroshima/Nagasaki
era, the last one who sees what the real situation is, in a world peopled with blind and
unconscious automatons?
Very probably, he is both, and this is what makes things complicated: his madness is
the other “name” of his clear-sightedness: he has understood, (this in contrast with the
voluntary blindness of all the others) that Hiroshima/Nagasaki has “changed
everything” and that mankind from this event on live under the sign of this
inconceivable collective death threat.
(Just by passing: the same narrative device (“the indecidable”) is at work in an
another film from our corpus: The Caine Mutiny, a wonderful film by Edward
Dmytryck, with a wonderful Humphrey Bogart – yes, the same Dmytryck who shot
the horrible Behind the Rising Sun we talked about – things are never so simple in
Hollywood culture...).
Of course, this man, Nakajima is crazy, in the very ordinary sense of the term: what
makes it so urgent for him and his family to sell of his properties and goods and flee
to Brazil, immediately? Why should it be safer there than in Japan, in case of an
atomic apocalypse? His madness consists in seeing the new situation in terms of
imminent, immediate danger, not of persistent threat. “Hiroshima is everywhere”
doesn't mean that the nuclear war is going to break out and that a radioactive cloud
will hang over Tokyo tomorrow. He overreacts to this threat – but this overreaction is
just the matching piece to all the others refusal to take this mortal danger into
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consideration. His “madness” is a reversed out reflection of his society's madness, of
the way his contemporaries bury their head in the sand (post-war Japan, in
Kurosawa's mind, the reconstruction as a blind rush forward).
The old man sees in advance what the next developments of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki
motto (theme) will be: the nuclear weapons' race, Tchernobyl, Fukushima... For the
time as it was shot, a decade after the two nuclear bombs were dropped, we should
keep in mind that this film was the artist's “answer” to an “incident” which had been
in the news two years before: the irradiation of Japanese fishermen close to the atoll
Bikini, on the occasion of a nuclear test carried out by the US Army.
This old man is some sort of prophet, he sees things the others don't see far ahead, but
his restlessness makes the others feel insecure and, as we know, the border between
madness and prophecy or the condition of a prophet is very often slight, slim. What
makes things even more complicated, is that the old man's “madness” is political – its
object or material is human History and the historical texture of the present. And this
is why it is so dangerous for the other “living(s)”, those who shut their ears, eyes and
mouths as the issue Hiroshima/Nagasaki is raised, those who prefer to ignore in what
kind of brave new world they live. This is the reason why the old man has to be
locked up in a madhouse.
This is a film which addresses and questions the public directly, calling it to witness:
who is mad? This disarmed prophet who challenges all the social norms and collides
so openly with the consensus which has been set up in Japan at the time of
reconstruction? Or his contemporaries who don't want to see that (nuclear) Sword of
Damocles that hangs over their heads?
According to Günther Anders, the lack of attention and the absentmindedness of
those who live in the post-Hiroshima/Nagasaki era is part of the system, it is a side
effect or a direct consequence of the radical novelty of this kind of massive
destruction (extermination) device. He says, in The Time of the End
(it's not a quote, for I re-translate from French): because it is so tremendous, the threat
[of a nuclear war] requires too much from our limited capacity of understanding (in
terms of perception as well as in terms of imagination). In other terms, the fact that
the possible disaster which hangs over us after Hiroshima and Nagasaki lies so much
beyond our capacities (in terms of imagination) has the paradoxical effect that we
become indifferent to the apocalypse. We go about to our business as if nothing had
changed. In the countries that belong to the very exclusive nuclear “club”, the ruling
elite puts in a lot of efforts in order to anesthetize the public's fear by calling the
nuclear weapon a “deterrent”, that is, on the whole, a way to keep peace – this is what
Anders calls the “minimization business”.
So, what Nakajima, the old man, feels very intensely is that the catastrophe, the
disaster is “already here”, for the destruction of our world can take place at any
moment. This is why he lives “in fear”. But it is not only that: his fear transforms
itself into anguish and distress because he cannot share it with anybody. This is
typically the linguistic situation (blind alley, dead end) Jean-François Lyotard
describes in the first pages of his book, Le Différend (The Differend) : that of the
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“plaintiff” who doesn't succeed in having his complaint (action) taken into
consideration. More specifically, in that case, it is the typical situation at (in) which a
subject shouts to the public in order to draw his attention to a vital and immediate
issue - “don't you see that...?” - and nobody listens, passer-by walk along. Moviemakers are very fond of this kind of situation: Michael Hanecke, Time of the Wolf,
John Schlesinger, Marathon Man, René Allio, Histoire de Paul, etc.
The “Don't you see...?” issue is very trying for the subject who knows that he knows
and sees something he has urgently to share with the others – and that no other is
willing to share with him – a situation which can drive him on the verge of despair,
hysteria, madness. In Marathon Man, an old man,a survivor of the Holocaust,
recognizes a Nazi war criminal in the crowd, on a busy street of New York, in a
Jewish neighborhood. He shouts: “Stop him, he is a Nazi, a criminal!” but nobody
moves and, while the old Nazi makes off, some people gesture – poor old man, he's
crazy... In Hanecke's film which describes very grim civil war or post-catastrophic
conditions, a woman recognizes her husband's killers, as she seeks refuge with her
children in some sort of a Red Cross camp. She exhorts and begs the people around
her to stop these men, but they keep calm and cool and say: we never saw this women,
we never were at the place she mentions – so that woman is confusing us with other
people... The people who attend the scene hesitate, as we spectators do, and nothing
happens...
What is extremely impressive and special in Kurosawa's film is this: the pathetic and
desperate “Don't you see...?!” uttered by Nakajima has no relation with a personal
issue, but with the situation in general , with the historical fate not only of Japan after
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but of mankind as a whole. Nakajima is the hallucinated or maybe clairvoyant? - witness of this new history.
Finally, what Kurosawa is asking is a very stimulating question: can fear be a good
guide, a good adviser, as we have to be equal to this task: understand what our epoch,
our historical era is substantially made of? Does fear and anguish always cloud our
judgment? Very obviously, the film leaves the question open.
One thing is sure: Kurasawa is very critical of the “post-historical” attitude of his
contemporaries in post-war Japan – of their acceptation of the general conditions of a
very materialistic reconstruction – money, family, business...
One last point.
It is much more difficult for an institution and in particular for a State than for a
human person to acknowledge its faults, to admit that it has done wrong to a
community, a group of persons, an nation, etc. and to face up its responsibilities for
this wrong, for crimes committed in the past. It seems to be a matter of principle for
some states, something deeply rooted in their ruler's mentality, something which is
part and parcel of the Raison d'Etat in these countries, a national point of honor:
never to feel responsible and to take upon itself the responsibility for crimes which
have been perpetrated in the past by a public authority those in power today are the
successors of. This inclination to denial is very distinct in countries which have a
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colonial or an imperial past, which are or have been great powers.
A country like France whose rulers always had, in modern history, a very marked
imperial mentality is quite exemplary (if I may say so) on this issue – since the end of
the independence war of the Algerians (1962), none of the people in charge for the
public affairs, at the top of the State, ever, issued a simple and clear statement about
the mass crimes and the horrors (torture...) which have been perpetrated through-out
this conflict. For this reason, the relations between France and Algeria are still
continuously poisoned by this denial.
As the counter-example of post-Nazi Germany shows, it is not a question of formal
“apology”, of assumed repentance; what matters is the way people who have the
authority to speak in the name of the nation and the state do accept or not to lift up or
raise the burden of a common criminal past, this in front of the victims, facing other
nations. What matters is the way a German Kanzler (chancellor), whatever his
political “color” is, delivers a speech in Warsaw and describes openly the Nazi
regime as “criminal”. This way of taking the bull by the horns is the only way to open
a new chapter, on a sound base, in the relations between two states and nations whose
common past has been devastated by massive crimes.
This German “model” in terms of governing (ruling) the memory of one's criminal
past is what I would like to contrast with the politics of denial as “empires”, former
imperial/imperialist states like France or Britain, or an “hegemon”, like the United
States today, stick to. The denial of Hiroshima/Nagasaki as a crime against humanity,
the refusal to take into consideration one's own criminal past – this is what this film,
Above and Beyond is a perfect “illustration” of. But even more odious evasive
actions can be taken in the domain we are interested in – cinema, television, media...
This is what we will see right now: White Light, Black Rain, 1h 05',45''...
(It never happened that a President of the United States in office went to Hiroshima
or Nagasaki in order to say “something” about what happened in August 1945. Only
Jimmy Carter went to Hiroshima, years after he was discharged – if I'm not mistaken).
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