CINEMA, THOUGHT, LIFE. Conversations with Fata Morgana

CINEMA, THOUGHT, LIFE

Conversations with Fata Morgana

Edited by

Roberto De Gaetano and Francesco Ceraolo

Frontiere. Oltre il cinema

Series edited by Roberto De Gaetano

Editorial Advisory Board

Gianni Canova, Francesco Casetti, Ruggero Eugeni,

Pietro Montani, Dork Zabunyan

Translation from Italian by:

Francesco Ceraolo: The Territory Is a Phantom; The Feminine or the Creative Potency of the Cinema; Where the Story Begins; The Mask and the Void; From Action to Performance; The Life of the Movie Screen.

Valeria Dani: The Nature of Emotions; The Self Who (With)Draws Itself; The Community Is a Field of Forces; Giving Credit to the Gaze; The Deception of Reality; In the Body of the Device; The Space of Memory.

Simonetta De Rose: Opening Horizons Over What Is Denied; Could It Be that Cinema Itself Is Contemporaneity?; Saving Archives; Hiding Transparency; The Rhythm of Experience; The Limit as Interval; Being Exposed to Nature; The Curved Space of Desire; Temporality and Memory of the Visual; Reasons for Disagreement; Anti-Cinema and the Expression of the Sacred.

Revision by James Ingoldsby

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Preface.

The Outside of Cinema

Journals are composed either of writings or of discourses. In the first case, they are founded on the name of the author, regardless of what their discourse concerns; in the second, they concern the creation of a discourse regardless of its author. In the first case, what truly counts is the name; in the second, what matters is the discursive field, or the relationship between different discourses brought about by the author. Roland Barthes provides a model for a journal made of writings – Michel Foucault for a journal made of discourses.

Whatever the nature of a journal, it always begins with a foundational gesture; one that, should the journal be vital, comes back to life in each issue.

Fata Morgana was established in 2006 and has been publishing for the past ten years. Its ‘0’ issue was dedicated to Bíos. It is now about to publish its 30th issue, dedicated to Italy.

The objective of Fata Morgana is to create new discursive fields related to monographic topics through defining the relationship between cinematic images and concepts. We do not extract these concepts from cinema or aesthetics, but from life and its forms, from the urgency of the present.

Indeed, beginning with Deleuze’s The Movement Image and The Time Image, cinema no longer represents the aesthetic put-into-form of the real, but the sensitive configuration of the real itself – of the world, either directly or by analogy. Cinema is the composition of ‘blocks of movement/duration’ (Deleuze). Hence, in order to take cinema into consideration, we need to be constantly outside of it. But the reverse is also true: we need to be in the world to see the inside of cinema.

When Pier Paolo Pasolini spoke of a ‘written language of reality’, or of a language of ‘praxis’, he did not simply and naively intend to deny cinema its expressive nature. On the contrary, he wanted to strive against coeval debates dominated by semiotics, by arguing that cinema was the expressive realm of reality. A realm in which reality does not preside over its specific form of expression.

Years later, setting off from Bergson’s Matter and Memory, Gilles Deleuze radicalized this position by recognizing a relation of ontological identity between image and matter. Cinema is the all-inclusive expression of reality in both its actuality and virtuality, since reality does not exist outside of its cinematic expression. Concepts (i.e. grammatical codes of the philosophical discourse), on the other hand, are the gateway to ‘blocks of movement/duration’, the way in which film can capture and express the real. The only condition for building up a new discursive field for cinema and the contemporary world is that the concept meets or clashes with images.

Fata Morgana relaunched such an externalization of cinema and opened up to a discursive field marked by concepts such as World and Archive, Transparency and Experience, Limit and Nature, Desire and Visual, Disagreement and Sacred, Territory and Emotion, Potency and Self-Portrait, Origin and Common, Real and Memory, Device and Theory, etc. Starting from these concepts, we reconsidered the universality of cinema and the singularity of films.

Fata Morgana has hence gathered different statements around a single field of investigation, inaugurated in each issue. Free from any disciplinary boundary, the journal has simply been sparked by a desire and will to establish a discourse capable of considering cinema in a different way; placing it where it belongs: outside of itself. Since the outside of films is indeed their own inside.

Fata Morgana hence put an end to the sterile opposition between the specificity and non-specificity of cinema and its theoretical discourse. Cinema can and must be looked into starting with its non-specific specificity, i.e. the specific way in which it speaks of something non-specific (life, the world, everything).

In this context, and keeping all this in mind, every issue of Fata Morgana is introduced by a conversation with a scholar or an artist who discusses the topic at hand. This volume collects and translates some of the conversations published in Fata Morgana over the years, including those with scholars and directors such as Roberto Esposito, Jean-Luc Nancy, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, Jean-Louis Comolli, Julio Bressane, Werner Herzog, Slavoj Žižek, Georges Didi-Huberman, Jacques Rancière, Paul Schrader, Raoul Ruiz, David Freedberg, Marco Bellocchio, Mario Martone, Julia Kristeva, Edgar Reitz, Amos Gitai, Shinya Tsukamoto, Toni Servillo and Francesco Casetti. These conversations establish an ‘ongoing’ discourse on cinema and on our present world, or rather on the way in which films have narrated, have become a part of and have constituted our reality. By doing so, by remaining constantly outside of the cinema, each discourse is able to get back inside of it.

These conversations, however, only make up the introductory part (entitled ‘Incidenze’) of each issue of Fata Morgana. The issues continue with essays addressing the monographic topic from wide-ranging perspectives (‘Focus’) and end with shorter articles on individual films, sequences or images (‘Rifrazioni’). These three parts articulate a single movement that differentiates the topic identified by the concept. Every movement – every issue – has the ambition of being an open, albeit unitary composition, driven by a desire and an idea: conceiving cinema as a form of life, and thus as a practice, a sensitivity, a belief, or a thought.

Rome, July 2016

Roberto De Gaetano

(Editor in Chief of Fata Morgana)

Roberto Esposito

Opening Horizons Over What Is Denied[1]

edited by

Roberto De Gaetano, Daniele Dottorini, Bruno Roberti

How about starting with an introduction on the notion of bíos. Why do you think this concept has become central to current debates and what is its centrality due to?

That of bíos is in itself a very old Aristotelian notion. The culminating moment of the relationship between bíos and knowledge started at the beginning of the 19th century when biology was born. Later, in the 20th century, the connection between the theme of life and new forms of expression became more evident, particularly in political language. Today a strong bio-ethical component has emerged; some of the new terms being used are bio-law and bio-technology. Life, the notion of life and the experience of biological life, now lie in the heart of knowledge and contemporary experience. Why did this happen? Why are we experiencing this phenomenon today? Because the great mediators – institutional, cultural, sectorial – which constituted the structure of modern knowledge and power such as law and political representation, have fallen; at first slowly, then they came crashing down. When all this exploded, thanks to globalization and, therefore, the crisis of sovereign states and sovereign rights, politics and life, as it were, came into contact. The great modern mediators have lost ground, even with regard to technology which is another important theme.

The theme of your book, Bíos, may be intended in relation to the concept of the cinematic apparatus as the machine of knowledge and power of the 20th century. You discuss how the category of immunity and its inversion towards autoimmunity are becoming extreme. The more life is protected the more this protection mechanism – immunity – becomes extreme. It capsizes, it becomes auto-immune. A relationship exists between the work of death and cinema. This notion was first highlighted by Bazin when he said that cinema is an apparatus which cannot film death. It was then summarized by Cocteau when he said that cinema is ‘The work of death twenty-four frames per second’. At the same time, cinema continues to be the apparatus that conserves and preserves life. Cinema makes the appearance of life immortal. It makes a vampire out of it; it sucks life. Thus, cinema is an apparatus that preserves and, at the same time, destroys life. As I read the last two chapters of Bíos, it occurred to me that the cinematic apparatus is analogous to a totalitarian system. I would like to know your opinion on this.

I am very interested in this theme even though I am not an expert on cinema and I was struck by what you said about the twenty-four frames per second. A few things come to mind. We could say, for example, that the museum is another apparatus which renders immortal and vampires at the same time, in the sense that it preserves, but, at the same time, blocks, fixes, and immobilizes. Another thing we could say is that the internal eye of human beings is incapable of seeing death, and even less so its own death. It is a great philosophical theme; although humans, as Heidegger said, are beings-toward-death; they cannot see and cannot even think about their own death. There is a strong connection between subject and death: the subject goes toward death but it also has a screen which blocks its visibility.

Among other things, Bazin insists on the eye which cannot see death when he talks about the ontology of cinema.

The third element, which is probably more external and more of a sociological reference, is the fact that totalitarianism – and I am using this term so that we can understand each other; I do not really like using the word totalitarianism, it assimilates experiences such as Nazism and Communism which are, actually, very different from each other. All totalitarianisms have given particular relevance to cinema within their publicity and propaganda apparatus. There is a link between cinema and totalitarianism, both at an external sociological and at an internal level. The last reference I can think of – to complete this constellation – is the panopticon. After all, the camera is like a panopticon that watches without being watched. It is a control mechanism. A mechanism of death, because it blocks and fixes.

Your statement ‘The way life can protect itself from death is not by preserving the way it is (immunity paradigm) but by being born again in a different guise (generative paradigm)’ reminds me of a 1950s essay by Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, where Morin attributes two capacities to cinema, two ways of challenging death. One way is by creating doubles, just like what we were referring to when we talked about Bazin: cinema duplicates reality. Cinema preserves and, at the same time, immobilizes reality by preserving it; it kills it. The other way, instead, sees cinema not only built on the concept of the double, as the immobilization of a reality given as pre-existing, but rather on the principle of metamorphosis, because images alternate on the screen, they overlap, they follow one another. From this point of view, it is a generative principle: an image dies and another one is born. It is a mechanism of death and rebirth. The cinematic apparatus can impose such model. The immunity paradigm, however, also presents a sort of generative paradigm because of the constant alternation of images on the screen. One dies and another is reborn.

Yes. Going back to the founding categories of my work in the last ten to fifteen years, this reminds me of the idea of immunitas and communitas, which are each other’s reverse side. Probably, if the immunity paradigm is that of division and of overlapping, the paradigm of community is the one of exposure. Community exposes each one to alterity. Therefore, it is a mechanism of externalization because of its capacity to expropriate and remove. We could say that cinema places itself right on the boundary between these two paradigms because, on the one hand, it kills, splits and presupposes, on the other, however, exposes through this continuous movement of metamorphosis. I deduced the theme of birth by capsizing the Nazi killing apparatus which aimed at killing life at its start (sterilization and other actions taken aimed at preventing birth). Nazi law said that it would not allow certain people to be born. Naturally, I am interested in the issue of birth in contrast to the Nazi prohibition also because it is a biological phenomenon. In fact, confirms the protective wall-like character of the immunity paradigm. At birth, the immunity mechanism of the mother opens up to the external presence of the child. This event is an element of complication and of community-opening; it is a unity that splits into two.

Keeping to this subject, in the chapter on thanato-politics you explicitly quote three literary texts written around the same period: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Dracula. I was surprised because these books – and I think we could add a fourth one, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, which you did not include – have been interpreted in film theory as aesthetic figures which are precursors to cinema. You recognize the precursory character of these books with regard to a later political practice which instead developed in the 20th century. Staying within this matter, I think that, for example, the German cinema of the 1920s, the decade preceding Hitler, was full of figures which directly recall the books I mentioned earlier. I would like to ask you if this parallelism of themes and figures could be related to what was later called an aesthetization of politics, using Benjamin’s words. I am wondering whether Nazism drew from a series of images which already existed in order to somehow create a system, or whether a common situation, which at the time was deeply rooted in society and culture, was somehow adopted, transformed and reutilized by Nazism.

Yes, let us say that the aesthetization of politics and the politicization of art have been the two great key words on which the relationship between power and imagery, Nazism on the one hand and Stalinist Communism on the other, were built on. There certainly is a link between despotic, totalitarian power and the image. There is an essay by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe (The Nazi Myth), which interprets Nazism from the point of view of aesthetical politics, looking for its roots in the first Romanticism. Nazism was produced by creating figures; it was a figuration and an auto-figuration. I find all this very important. In my interpretation of the theme of the image, I superimposed the theme of the body because an interpretation only founded on image could lose the element of the body, which was very strong in Nazism. This is what I try to express in chapter four. I see Nazism as the doubling of the body. According to Nazism, the soul is what keeps the body together; the soul is blood. This certainly entails the theme of the image – without neglecting the theme of zoé, meaning the relationship between body, blood and organism.

When Deleuze talks about the body without organs he wants to de-structure and reconstruct this corporeal machine. The reverse of all this is the notion of flesh. I want to reflect on the theme of the image because I really have not reflected enough on it. From this point of view, Dracula is extraordinary, because Dracula is the Jew, meaning he who contaminates; he who allows impure blood to circulate; he who comes from Transylvania to the cities. He is the Jew who is later crucified. It is about an obvious relationship, a powerful one with the cinema you were referring to.

André S. Labarthe said, ‘Reversals, transfusions, editing: cinema will either be vampire-like or it will not be at all’…

And it goes back to what we were saying about doubling and cinema.

The reflection on the three novels is born out of another one on the concept of degeneration. You say that the concept of degeneration can be reversed in its transformative data, becoming, therefore, germinative. You say that degeneration, something Nietzsche had also reflected upon, has a capacity of positive and vital transformation and also of mutation. Degeneration – you say – has an aesthetic nervation, meaning that the process of degeneration is innervated…

So much so, that the typical degenerate, for Nordau, is the artist, the genius.

Somehow, if, on the one hand, cinema can be an apparatus, a concentrative and lethal machine, it can also be the answer to the will of subjugation of life and, even more so, to the specific will of Nazism to graft a sort of bio-spirituality in life. In other words, cinema makes sure that the coincidence of life and death can become a sort of zero degree, that which the Nazi called, in the title of a book you quote, existence without life, Dasein ohne Leben. On the other hand, degeneration as transformation, dissolution as mutation – the idea of undoing, on which Deleuze reflects on with regard to Visconti’s films, and the idea of cinema as a degenerative and transformative process –, can be related to the possibility of a positive reversal. A positive reversal where, today, cinema reveals itself as an area of elaboration of aesthetic and political practices, and where a positive reversal of bio-politics can take place. Do you agree? After all, the relationship between birth and body, and the relationship between body and flesh, are surely two themes which are very present in today’s cinema. I am thinking about Lynch, Cronenberg and Sokurov.

Yes. As soon as you started talking about it, I thought about the relationship between art, degeneration and innovation in a film such as Visconti’s Death in Venice. Degeneration is the disease which, on the one hand, attracts the artist, and, on the other, it cannot be inscribed in only one cycle of death. This is because, inevitably, from that death, life will be reborn. In a double sense, degeneration has an element of re-launching towards the future. The fact is that degeneration is innovation; in other words, it opposes conservation. Thus, such element degenerates that which it does not conserve. But it also innovates (maybe even in a deadly way), because in terms of organic phenomena decomposition is part of the life cycle. Cinema can be another reversal apparatus, aside from the flesh and birth one, which I had not thought about when I wrote the book. At one point in the book, I refer to Bacon as a contemporary artist. However, Cronenberg is also included in my discussion, even though I did not say it specifically, because I think that Cronenberg is Bacon’s equivalent. The flesh comes out from the structure of the bones, and this is one of Cronenberg’s characteristics. From this point of view, I agree with you. However, I am wondering about some other more problematic things. I do not know up to what point we can consider, in this discussion, cinema as a cinematographic machine, as an economic-productive apparatus. We have to think about this; I would hesitate to make an immediate comparison. However, as far as film content is concerned – the content of the film is their form – I do see the relationship, and I would ask you the same question.

I will reply with a phrase which you yourself use in Bíos: ‘the effects of bio-politics, subjectivation or death’. The practice of cinema has influenced the processes of subjectivation; mass-subjectivity has transformed itself in spectatorial subjectivity, in an audience. In his book The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin says that cinema allowed the masses who lived in big cities to crowd theatres and halls instead of staying in the their dark houses. By doing so, they were able to acknowledge themselves, and adopt a sort of spectatorial collective identity. This was a process of subjectivation. After crowding the cinemas, those same people started crowding trenches; they started wars and totalitarianisms, no longer producing subjectivity in a Foucaultian sense but producing death. During the time of totalitarianisms and war, the relationship between cinema and the masses falls apart. The great utopia of cinema capable of representing thought and educating the masses collapses together with totalitarianisms and propaganda cinema. Another cinema is born from the ruins of totalitarianism, and as a result the bond of power, technology and the masses is broken forever.

I would like to start with Foucault, whom you recalled. Foucault’s discourse follows two separate and diverging directions: on the one hand, there is subjectivation, on the other, there is death. Power produces either subjects (care for oneself, technology of the self, conscience of the subjects) or the death of subjectivity, reification. I tried to keep these two elements together whereas Foucault spreads them apart. I tried doing so through the category of immunization, because immunization, by producing and protecting subjectivity, denies it. Beyond a certain limit, when the immune system is too strong, it capsizes and produces death. I think cinema is more similar to this second categorization than to Foucault’s; because cinema is, in fact, an ambivalent apparatus, where these two elements are one within the other and are not separated. You then add a diachronic variable in your question; you say that up to a certain point cinema held these two elements together and then it became something else and the apparatus broke. I do not know, I am doubtful that such a diachronic limit can be established. After all, even propagandist cinema produces subjectivity and death. In a way, in terms of historical evaluation, regimes like Nazism, Fascism or even Stalinism (the latter to a lesser degree) have seen a high subjective participation. It is not true that it was the police that blocked every form of reaction; the forms of reaction were few because people were subjectively involved. Cinema had a fundamental role in the process of subjectivation, just as radio and all the media. I think that subjectivation and death are a structural constant; they may vary in form but, nonetheless, they are part of the history of cinema. Why, I ask you, is there a common element, something unpleasant and excessive, between Riefenstahl’s propagandist cinema and examples of today’s cinema, like Michael Moore, who, rightly so, does propaganda against Bush?

In this sense, in respect to criticism of the American empire, I think that the equivalent is Lars von Trier’s detestable cinema – but not only in my opinion, even according to Godard. The type of reduction, of aesthetization of politics we were talking about earlier…

All political cinema, we could say, has this perspective, in a way.

… All political cinema which entails an aesthetization of politics and not a politicization of life or a vitalization of politics as you intend it. When you identify a reversal in the vitalization of politics where affirmative politicization is implicit, then the political value of Godard’s cinema, for example, just like Sokurov’s, probably lies in the possibility of reversing, within cinema itself, the apparatus which used to produce subjugation; reversing the nature of birth.

I completely agree. In what sense? In the sense that politics and life have an original link. Lethal bio-politics breaks apart life and politics, and then it joins them in an immunity key. What does Godard’s political cinema, or Sokurov’s, actually do? They unveil the original connection of life and politics and, therefore, also of cinema and politics. The two things are connected, there is no implication, no superimposition. Instead, political propagandist cinema presents life and politics separately – and also cinema and life, cinema and politics – but then it forces unification, making it deadly.

Where zero degree is in a sort of aesthetization of politics that does not have residues.

Exactly.

If, from the point of view of content, it is easy enough to identify some directors and some films which deal with the themes and the forms we were talking about earlier, the problem that remains is that of cinema itself as a dispositif, as an apparatus. We have often focused on the ambivalence of cinema and I was thinking about one of your interlocutors, Jean-Luc Nancy. The problem Nancy elaborates through his original partition of being – an original being-with, which opens the road to an ontological perspective – I think, could even be found in an apparently marginal essay by Nancy on the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. In this essay, among the things Nancy emphasizes there is also the existence of a residue (in which lies the connection between the spectator and the gaze of cinema). Evidence of cinema is also intended as evidence of another gaze, which, among other things, deals with bodies and which inevitably produces something that cinema has probably produced since its birth: the idea of socialization, or at least of the connection between gazes – by spectators, directors and actors – which is the aesthetic experience of the filmic fruition. Cinema is seen not so much as a textual composition, and not so much as a compilation of symbolic and thematic elements, but as the aesthetic existence of the fruition of film which existed, in fact, during the period of classical cinema, especially in the movie theatre (meanwhile today the socialization has probably been substituted by different forms of cinematographic fruition, from video cassettes to DVDs, which are always more individualizing, always more homely, always less external). Nancy insists on the power of exposition – a dear term to him – which is also linked to your opposite idea of communitas. Then maybe, by keeping this ambivalence firm, the positive side of cinema lies in the experience of fruition, in the possibility of creating – I dare say – an idea or a practice of communitas.

I would like to add something to the theme of the gaze, something I referred to earlier about the liberating function of cinema for the metropolitan crowds. Benjamin and Kracauer insist on the idea that cinema and entertainment machines exert a liberating function (a sort of transformation of the Aristotelian category of catharsis) on the life of those inhabitants of cities who would otherwise have to face an intolerable reality. Benjamin talks about cinema as something capable of making houses explode as if they were prisons.

It seems to me that in both cases the theme of ambivalence returns. The figure of compensatio lies within the liberating function of cinema: since this type of life is unbearable, cinema somehow creates some space for tolerance. Although we could say that, on the one hand, it is a liberation but, on the other, it is a way to prevent the explosion of true liberation. It is a repressive compensation because it allows you to tolerate the unbearable. Benjamin was very aware of this issue. He also applies it to the field of law, where the same ambivalence unfolds: law prevents conflict but for this very reason it expresses the maximum violence. I see the same theme of ambivalence and of violence in the play of looks and gazes we have been talking about. I am reminded, with regard to this, of an observation Giorgio Agamben made during a debate. Essentially, he was referring to pornographic cinema that in a way expresses the very essence of cinema. Up to a certain point, pornographic cinema is founded on the mechanism of searching for a person that is not aware of being seen, in a house, in a place; pornographic cinema looks through a key hole and watches this unsuspecting person undress, make love and so on. At one point, pornographic cinema changes register and the person who is being filmed looks back at the spectator; the person looks back with an alluring gaze which tells the spectator, ‘I know you are at the cinema; I know you know I am doing this for you and I am talking to you’. The set up is reversed because in the first case there is only one gaze and the actor is not looking at you; in the second case there is a play of gazes where the spectator is looked at. This is similar to other situations where excitement happens by being watched more so than by watching, or together with watching. Now here is the problem: if this is true, is the second step a liberating function or a violent one? There is also a lot of violence in this type of pornographic cinema, in the play of gazes intertwined one another. On the one hand, the reason is that there is an equal structure, a community. It is not just me looking at you, like a panopticon, but it is also you watching me. Thus, I am just as exposed as you are and, therefore, there is an equal, egalitarian element. On the other hand though, it is still an augmented violence.

The idea concerning the possibility of the gaze being returned, the fact that the spectatorial situation somehow makes cinema work, and that cinema looks back because of its spectatorial function being inscribed in it, constitute the vital residue of cinema. At the same time, something similar happens in reality shows. The extremization of this type of mechanism, which is originally vital, becomes lethal and subjugating when there is no residue, meaning the moment when, as Jean-Louis Comolli states, the offscreen of television is nothingness. In the cinematographic flow, there is always a look that possesses and produces a vital offscreen. The more you feel the vital duration in cinema the more a residue exists, a residue in the offscreen, which is the set, life and so forth. This does not happen with TV as an apparatus because there is no communitas. It is a sort of panopticon where the gaze is reset. Where, sure, there is someone who looks at someone else who knows is being watched, but at the same time there is also the death of the gaze, its checkmate. Once again, ambivalence is moved to a different level.

You cannot escape from this dialectic. It is the same one identified by Foucault at the beginning of The Order of Things in the painting by Velázques: the play of gazes, of mirrors, and so on. I do not know how you connect, or how you oppose, cinema and television in your experience. My impression, as a layperson, is that they are two different things.

It is the concept of virtuality, which you refer to at the end of your book, that probably makes the difference. In Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life by Deleuze, we find the idea that immanence is impersonal and made up of singularity. You say that this type of outcome from Deleuzian philosophy is connected to the virtual concept. The virtual concept as intended by Deleuze, distinct from the possible, is also defined by a sort of flux of virtuality and reality. The continuous going back and forth between virtual and real is a cinematographic detail that is absent from television.

There is also a virtuality that does not have a real reference point. When the referent falls completely, you no longer have the concepts of reality and of virtuality; everything is virtual and nothing is real. Lethally, everything becomes real and everything becomes virtual; all that is real is annulled in the virtual. It is a little bit like Lacan’s hole in reality.

But somehow the presumed interactivity of television as an imaginary universe is also the outcome of television. It is the creation of a virtual universe homologous to the subjugating power.

Big Bother is an extremization of the panopticon. It is not the liberating element inside the panopticon, but a double panopticon. The panopticon of the spectator in relation to the actors and, that of the actors in relation to the spectator. It is a double subjugation.

You identify the possibility of an internal reversal of the three internal elements of Nazism: body, birth and rules. How do you think power responds to this possible escape?

Foucault, and in a way even Nietzsche, would say that power is not something concrete. There is not a place of power; power lies in practices and it even lies in elements of resistance. Resistance always incorporates power. What I am saying is not just a formula. For example, let us think about how bio-power changed from the context of Nazism to the dominantly liberal context of Western society. If Nazi bio-politics assumes that every man is potentially a slave, in liberal bio-politics – as codified in liberal texts, from Locke up until liberal bioethics – the element of slavery does not disappear, it is just that each person considers his/her own body a slave. In liberal bio-power being a person means being the owner of one’s own body. The very idea of person, which means mask, implies a division between a self-conscience and body. Potentially, anyone can do anything to their body because the body is a thing compared to the self. Such division is then the dominant mechanism – I am now working on the theme of the impersonal, starting from the last pages of Bíos. A point of attack to the bio-power strategy is a deconstruction of the concept of person. The concept of person is a decisive concept from a legal point of view. It is also a decisive concept from a philosophical point of view, and with regard to cinema, at least in the context of the splitting of image, of the mask.

This is an important point. The last part of Bíos identifies a very stimulating line of thought tracing back to an important author, Simondon and his notion of metastability. We could elaborate the discourse on cinema, starting from the question screen/offscreen, according to the terminology of metastability and the processes of identification. There are some films which tend to drain in the strongest possible way the metastable or the structurable or, in Deleuzian terms, the virtual, thus, closing themselves up around discourse, around history…

Is there a type of cinema which is closely tied to the theme of the virtual impersonal?

Somehow, I think that the idea of the impersonal, of singularity, is very present in Sokurov.

Deleuze takes the idea of haeccity, which is one of Simondon’s notion. You mention the beautiful image of the newborn baby: it is not an individual, it differentiates itself through a gesture, a smile, a cry. There is a strong tradition of theoretical reflection on cinema, Pasolini is an example of this, which focuses on the idea of haeccity, of singular, of an image without looking at what is specific, at what is represented. There are authors who exhibited the potential of cinema by exhibiting the impersonal-singular and authors who have subdued it making cinema a great narrative apparatus.

Who do you think are the authors who have insisted on this?

Well, recently, we can certainly say Godard, Peleshian, Cronenberg.

As far as Cronenberg is concerned, eXistenZ, for example, is a film where the theme of flesh is crucial from the point of view of pure existence. It prefigures a society where virtuality is so incorporated within the body to predispose a series of levels of undecidable virtual reality. Thus, somehow, it is a prefiguration about this impossibility, a sort of prefiguration of Nazism that goes beyond absolute zero, beyond death, beyond life.

In addition, thinking about the short films by Artavazd Peleshian (End, Life, Earth of People) and by Godard (Origins of the 21st Century) that I have seen lately, if I had to say what the theme of those fragments was, I would say the impersonal.

Well, undoubtedly, there is a line of thought that connects Eisenstein, Vertov, and also Epstein which leads to Peleshian. It is a line of thought that deals with the image without a subject matter, that deals with the impersonal image.

In his books on cinema, Deleuze elaborates a theory of the close-up which is particularly connected to what we are talking about, i.e. the centrality of the impersonal image. The last chapter of Bíos reconstructs an important branch of French thought, which I tried to analyze through cinema, namely Bergson, Simondon and Deleuze. Finding them at the end of your book struck me because it means that these lines of thought can be reconstructed in different fields. As far as I am concerned, the idea of the