Contents of spoon-archives/film-theory.archive/papers/Bresson_thesis
Adrian Miles.
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amiles@insane.apana.org.au
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APPROACHING THE IMPOSSIBLE IMAGE: DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST AS A SACRED NARRATIVE.
Submitted for the degree of Master of Arts, Centre for General and Comparative Literature, Monash University, Melbourne Australia. September 1992.
Contents
Summary
Chapter One
Introduction
Chapter Two
Diary of a Country Priest and its critics
I. A film that insists upon its novel
II. Bernanoss found diary and Bressons literal film
III. Religious interpretations
Chapter Three
Schrader and transcendental art
I. Schraders transcendentalism
II. The need for a rule book of sacred representation
III. The rules of iconographic representation
Chapter Four
Temporal economies of the sacred
I. Ritual requirements
II. Ritual articulation
III. Diary and ritual performance
IV. Diary, ritual time, and epiphany
Chapter Five
An impossible economy Bresson, Diary, God
I. Performative seriousness
II. Iterability, grammar, discourse
III. Grammar
IV. Austins performative and textual felicity
V. Naming the Other
Works Cited
Bibliography
.c.Summary
Robert Bressons Diary of a Country Priest is a film that has fascinated critics for a number of reasons. Through its literal transcription of Georges Bernanoss novel it is regarded as an exemplar of the problematic relationship of literature to film. Its formalism has been championed by early critics as proof of cinemas artistic legitimacy and later by structuralists for its textual specificity. The films avowedly religious nature has been studied, marginalised, and ignored, always resisting any easy assimilation to particular critical discourses.
In the experience of watching Diary of a Country Priest the religious nature of the text is manifested in what I have problematically called its textual effect. This textual effect is produced through the films formal strategies which make concrete the phenomenally transcendental nature of time. This phenomenality is the subject of sacred performance, suggesting a specific textual practice that is able to address the phenomenological nature of the subjects relation to their experience of the world.
Through its explicit claims of textual privilege Diary of a Country Priest problematises several of the key issues in contemporary critical theory. It endeavours to be a site of secure discursive intent that is manifested in its ability to show and name, ultimately validated negatively. It is through this negativity that Diary achieves an approach to the sacred, claims textual authority, and offers the possibility of an examination of theories of textual sense and reference. This allows a critique of the general theory of film and grammar, textual performance, and iteration in the light of the work of Derrida and Austin, and produces a reading of Diary that emphasises its positive relation to issues of absence, closure and Otherness.
Chapter One 1
.c.Chapter One
.c.Introduction
Robert Bressons 1950 film, Diary of a Country Priest (hereafter Diary), has been historically regarded as a paradigmatic art text of the European cinema. It has been critically interrogated in terms of its apparently self-conscious formalism and through humanist claims that lead to interpretations of a depth psychology of represented characters, director, and story. Alternatively, it has been regarded first and foremost as a religious text that endeavours to represent a vision of the divine and the operation of Grace in which its diegetic and cinematic specificity is seconded to this soteriology. However, each of these approaches has emphasised Diary as a discrete and completed event, displacing its eventfulness, the time of its telling and its temporal sophistication, into the margin of their readings. It is fundamental to the claims made in this essay that Diary its project and the possibility of its success relies upon the time of its narrative realisation to achieve its aims and that it is as a movement through time, rather than merely an already completed textual object, that Diary offers itself for interpretation. In hand with this, this essay proposes to return Diarys explicit content to the fore, not as a strategy of a return to the sacred but as a struggle to account for its formal structures in the light of a specific notion of what sacred experience may be. To this end it is suggested that a certain type of reading, a preferred reading, is attempted to be enforced by Diarys formal structures and that such a reading endeavours to be a demonstration, a proof, of the existence of the sacred. I believe that from such a demonstration Bresson regards it as a small step to declare that the texts efficacy offers itself as a proof of Divine presence. However this proof, what this essay will label Diarys textual effect, is recovered here to become a poetisation of the phenomenology of experience that is the general mode of the performance of ritual and is the site of the authority of ritual and the sacred.
This textual effect is intended to be, and remain, a problematic term. It is understood to be available through a felicitous reading, a reading that, if you prefer, is hermeneutically respectful of the text and so a reading that gives itself to the text, granting the text a legitimacy and an authority to utter which is the precondition to understanding what may be at stake, at what it is that Bresson is trying to suggest. That this is, to a significant extent, synonymous with a hermeneutic position is freely acknowledged as this essay is first of all a product of a regard for the text that is prior to its amenability to any particular theoretical stratagem. It is furthermore an implicit argument of this essay, as should become clear, that any legitimate and I use this word with full regard of its force reading of a text requires, at least as a minimum, such an approach, and that indeed such an approach is the signature of what may be understood as a properly deconstructive practice. The reader first of all needs to try to understand, as much as one is able, what a particular text appears to wish to claim before they can demonstrate the impossibility of achieving this wish, of guaranteeing the arrival of this specified intention.1
Diarys textual effect is a specific effect that is more than the production of a meaning, an interpretation: it is greater than the explication of its content. Personally this effect is manifested by a physiological response, a shiver that I experience as the films most famous lines are read at its end, a shiver that, even with repeated viewings, retains its sensual excess. This physiological response I in no way claim as a usual or general response to the text, nor as a reasonable critical basis on which to mount any argument, but an acceptance of the text, an entry into the text that accepts its terms, does require a response to what is most simply the epiphany of its conclusion. It is this response, one that I believe the film works towards and constructs, that is Diarys textual effect. It is produced through a felicitous reading of the text where such a reading requires a commitment to the text that to some extent, at least, requires an acquiescence of the reader to the demands of the text a readerly surrender. As will become clear, without such readerly acquiescence the film and its project fails and all discussion of a textual effect appears as a mystification, a confusion of the text that appears to depend on a suspension of criticism. However, and I repeat this as often as is necessary, the text requires such a readerly performance as one of its conditions, and the failure of such a performance is, for Diary, its failure as a text. It is within its specificity as a religious text that I believe this condition resides; however, it is a condition of all texts, as I will suggest, and though declaring itself a religious text such a condition of subjection is central to all textual practice.
That this essay is explicitly inter-disciplinary has led to problems of content. Decisions have had to be made as to what must be explained and what can more simply be named. Such an approach exhibits an anxiousness of the re-contextualising of its theoretical strategies from their usual domains and their application to cinema and religious representation. As a consequence, this essay bears the anxiety of this approach and holds before it the possibility of a properly inter-textual critical agenda, an agenda that is not constituted by the critically glib recognition that the world may be text, or that everything is discourse, but is enacted through the use of theoretical discourses from different disciplines in pursuit of a single text. Such a strategy involves a threat of mis-reading where the effort of appropriation and redeployment of original sources produces deviations from what may be understood as the original intention of this critical discourse. Hence in its re-contextualisation there may, on occasion, be what could be understood as erroneous readings. In all such cases I insist not upon the veracity of my reading but on the felicity of the context that these discourses now find themselves within in this text. Therefore, it is not so much the case of a mis-reading as the forced movement of discourses to new contexts where an error in interpretation is, I believe, recovered by the logic of my thesis.
This essay follows a traditional path of introducing previous criticism, principally by locating it within three broad modes of interpretation: as literary adaptation, as formalist text, and as a religious work. Though any individual critic generally uses aspects of each of these strategies they also privilege the film around one of these terms and use the other general modes to reinforce their argument. What is of note in all such critical endeavour is the recognition of the peculiarity of Diarys textual effect, where their respective projects become an effort at reclaiming this textual effect into a critical vocabulary where the effort of the work of the text is displaced to become an illustration of their position. To this extent any critical reading must acknowledge that it is the labour of the text, the work and its reading, that is critical, not its illustrative status as an exemplar for a particular theoretical paradigm.
The third chapter examines in relative detail the work of Paul Schrader (1972) who has written what continues to be the most ambitious attempt to examine Bresson. Schraders work moves towards a specific theological reading but has as its major weakness a complacency in being able to identify the transcendental as a religious condition. It is satisfied with being able to place Bresson within a recognisable historical context of religious representation and believing that this accounts for the textual effect of his texts. Schraders work is approached through the use of a text dealing with Catholic iconography and examining the possible relation between this dogmatic tradition and the strategies of Diary. This suggests that not only does Diary participate in a conservative tradition of sacred representation but through its willingness to subscribe to such a tradition an act of deference is performed that is structurally similar to the act that the reader is required to perform towards Diary, and that such acts in themselves constitute the authority of such a tradition. Such an approach introduces the beginning of a reading of Diary in terms of the relations it establishes in its realisation, and the status of these relations to the textual effect that it produces. Schrader, rather than attempting to account for the possible reasons of such an effect, appears satisfied with being able to name it as sacred, a theoretical stratagem that is as problematic as the film.
It is with this in mind that the fourth chapter is addressed firmly to issues of temporality and the liminal as Diary is examined in the light of an anthropological model of ritual and ritual performance. Such an examination provides a movement from the religious to the epistemological through an analysis of phenomenal structure that begins to approach the specificity of Diarys discursive strategies without relying upon naming such strategies with terms that are as problematic as its textual effect. As a liminal event, in structure and performance, Diary is able to occupy a position from which it can address issues of the sacred, and it is primarily in the relation of the temporal to liminality that Diary discovers a discursive practice that proves effective in the usually secular world of the cinema. Through its formal redundancies, a strategy that most critics have commented on, Diary is able to participate in a liminal economy. Such liminality is seen to be predicated upon the production of boundaries that demarcate discursive (and here discourse is intended in its full range of meaningful articulation) realms where the liminal is the enforcement of relations between privileged sets of such discursive realms.
Diarys participation within such a process allows it to be identified with traditional religious strategies, however, it seeks to achieve more than just membership. Diary seeks an epiphany within the reader that is intended to illustrate the presence of the sacred, offering itself, its textual effect, as demonstration of the existence of a sacred discourse. Diary in its rhetoric names this effect God, so in one moment, one word, states its cause and effect. However Diary offers a particular version of God, a God that is accessible only negatively, and it is through this that Diary participates in an economy which exceeds it. For Bresson this excess is merely a condition of its theology, but by its nature it displaces the discursive containment of its naming, and its specifically textual nature suggests a general economy where the conditions of textual articulation are rendered apparent. Such an economy appears to be one where a radical notion of Otherness is operative, where God is simply the term applied to such Otherness and in this exteriority any attempt to reclaim Diary into referential or thematic solidity fails.2
Chapter Five argues that for such a strategy to operate, for Diary to be able to identify, name, or attempt to locate such Otherness, a position of identity is first required. All designation operates from a position of apparent identity, however contingent or marginal this may be, and it is in terms of establishing such identity that a dialectic of image and word, of redundancy and juxtaposition, is used by Bresson.
This possibility of identity is established through ritual strategies so that Diary not only describes a sacred event, but attempts to become one, to be prayer, and in this manner to become identical with itself. It is in this light that Diary appears to become performative in Austins (1990) sense of the term. As performative, Diarys textual effect is dependent on a readerly performance that is subject to a surrendering to the text, a surrendering that is enacted through all facets of Diary and that is the prerequisite for its textual success. This surrendering can be understood in terms of a readerly felicity and suggests an ethics of the text where Diarys communicative legitimacy must be accepted, on trust, for its textual effect to be possible.
Diarys performance as a discursive event makes it equivalent to what it wishes to describe, but as cinema it also has the possibility of showing that which it advocates. That it does not is the act that produces and guarantees its negative economy. The introduction of Austin and performative felicity, and claims for a possibility of presence produce an obligation to comment on Derridas Signature event context (1977), an obligation that bears witness to the anxiety of re-contextualisation and to the recognition of the risk in current critical dialogue of making any claim to, or for, presence. However, I believe that Diary relies upon such a possibility, that its textual effect is only available through this possibility, and that the negative relation to presence it eventually establishes can only operate, can only offer itself, through the active positing and deferral of its own ability not only to name, but to show, not only to narrate, but to state.
It is with this in mind that Derrida is engaged with, not to dismiss the claims of his text but to problematise it in relation to cinema and Diary. I argue for the retention of a model of process that Derrida appears to endorse but then forgets, offers then withholds, for our conclusion, eventually, endorses a deconstructive reading that offers itself as an act of textual affirmation rather than loss, of a playfulness that is the joyful recognition of a necessary structure that informs all relations between subjects and objects.
Throughout this essay few explicit examples are given from Diary. This is because the reading and argument offered here addresses the entire text and offers a mode of reading of the film that is general in its nature. It proposes claims that can only be properly established through the viewing of the text in its entirety. Furthermore, it is a reading that relies upon those textual elements already identified by other critics: I have nothing novel to add, rather I propose an argument where such elements are re-contextualised in the light of a model of readerly performance and textual nomination that wishes to open onto its own phenomenal possibilities of being. Diary is a religious text, but through its explicit procedures it allows us to witness the moment of an approach to a negativity that is profound in its implications for subjectivity, textuality, and their productive relation.
1. To the extent that much critical theory, particularly post-structuralist, examines texts in terms of meta-discursive categories it fails as a specifically textual criticism. It is a legitimate critical practice in its own right, but it involves the application of such a meta-discourse, like an epistemological grid, upon any text to illustrate the grid, not the text. This is not Derridas strategy, nor that practised within this essay.
2. Throughout this essay Other and Otherness is used to nominate that object, or consciousness, that is constitutive of the subject through its radical exteriority. Unfortunately, this loses the distinction between Other as object and Other as an Other subject but to discriminate these degrees of Otherness would have led to problems of naming and too great a possibility of critical confusion. Furthermore I am not certain if it is reasonable to discriminate between degrees of Otherness. Within this essay Otherness contains a more Hegelian than Lacanian inflection where it contains a force of indifference and asymmetrical inequality that is an essential condition of its exteriority.
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Chapter Two 1
.c.Chapter Two
.c.Diary of a Country Priest and its critics
In the body of work that constitutes the writing on Diary of a Country Priest three broad strategies, representing three broad themes, emerge. These strategies of reading, while of course comprising theoretical approaches to the text, can be understood as efforts to account for what I have identified as the textual effect of the film. (That is, the peculiarity of its experience where I can reasonably say that the film has achieved its textual work for any particular reader.) These strategies become efforts of reclamation and recovery that wish to positively determine the nature of this effect, and locate Diary within a logos that returns this effect to the already given terms of their critical discourse. These strategies can most simply and usefully be labelled as the literary, the formalist, and the religious.1
As an approach that appraises the film in the light of the scholarly tradition and theory of literary-screen adaptation the literary orientates us and the film towards the text from which it originates, Georges Bernanoss Diary of a Country Priest (1936), and argues in terms (eventually at least) of the specificity of each medium and what is preserved or lost in translation from one to the other. Alternatively it is an argument that privileges Diary in relation to other screen adaptations by virtue of its apparent faithfulness to Bernanoss text. In either case the film text is understood in relation to the literary text and in its weak form the literary reading is used to argue about the nature and risk of adaptation. In its strong form such criticism seeks to determine the formal specificity of each medium. Here issues of narrative specificity are necessarily privileged and it is the language of narratology that best allows such comparisons to be drawn.
Formalist readings divide themselves comfortably between those that desire the text to be another link in a grand auteurist chain, and those that recognise the film as a modernist essay about cinematic modes of narration.
For the former the text is approached via Bressons statements about cinema and in the context of his other films, as well as the production history of Diary of a Country Priest. For such readings the creative integrity that Bresson brings to his work his definitive stamp of authorial control at all levels of production makes the film a pure vehicle of auteurist cinema. The apparently direct realisation of his vision within the text is sufficient to guarantee it a place in the canon.
For the latter view, the apparent radical nature of Bressons narrative and visual style, the formal nature of his texts, make of them privileged examples of a cinema that seeks to bask in its own self-reflexivity, a concretisation of narrative realisation.
In a religious reading many critical strategies are possible. Clearly, given the nature of the story and its connotations, critics can take it as the literal story of a religious figure in a fallen world, or, in a more figurative reading, as an allegory of the life of Christ. However, the general nature of the religious interpretation sees the film, particularly with the evidence of the Bressonian uvre, as about the mechanics of Grace and of representing a Jansenist vision of the world. Such readings regard the presence of God as given, and the text becomes a theological document oriented towards specific regions of Catholic theodicy. Within the ambit of the religious reading of the text we have those critics that understand Diary to be seeking or articulating an aesthetic which provides a theological epistemology which demonstrates God as its own condition of possibility, rather than grounding itself upon an already manifest or present absolute being.
.c.I. A film that insists upon its novel
Andr Bazin in his seminal essay (Bazin 1967) provides the first, and possibly the most articulate, discussion of the film in terms of its relation to its source text. (Indeed, the authority of Bazins writing is such that all other critics that address the question of the novel and its film adaptation constellate around his central claims.) Bazin wishes to establish the literal nature of Bressons adaptation and use this to launch into an analysis of the relationship of the literary and the cinematic, eventually to suggest that Diary through its formal devices lays bare this apparent divide. Hence he writes:
He [Bresson] prunes even the very essentials, giving an impression as he does so of a fidelity unable to sacrifice one single word without a pucker of concern and a thousand preliminary twinges of remorse . . . this pruning is always in the interest of simplification, never of addition
(p. 126).
Bazin goes on to suggest, It is no exaggeration to say that if Bernanos had written the screenplay he would have taken greater liberties with his novel (p.126).
In a similar vein, though reflected through a strongly auteurist window, Armes (1970) writes of Bressons ability to remain faithful to a literary source and yet produce a work that is wholly his own (p. 138). Likewise Reader (1990) wishes to emphasise:
The paring-away of many elements of Bernanoss text, the scrupulous religious fidelity to what remains, the austerity of the filming and the avoidance of star actors, even of actors tout court these have been commented upon by virtually every writer on the film . . . (p. 137).
And he repeats an observation of Bazins that Bernanoss novel abounds in sensory and social detail, excised or minimized in Bressons film (p. 138).
To the extent that the film differs from the French (and clearly too the American) tradition of the quality adaptation, Diary is seen to be the exceptional text.2 This bestows on the film a certain radical patina that necessarily makes the film notable.3 Hence these authors seek to distance the film from the novel through Diarys difference to other film adaptations, but such an argument also suggests in the margins the basic landscape of the literature-to-film argument. The novel and its models of characterisation, narrativisation and temporalisation are retained as the defining parameters for discussion of film texts.
Within the imagined space between the inaugural authority to tell (the novel) and the usurpation of such authority by the potentially parasitic Other text (the film) these critics site and conduct a rhetorical battle that reclaims the film text from its merely dependent condition. Claims are made for the wholeness of the film text Diary, an integrity which exists in counter-relation to its literary parent. This is seen to guarantee the film its own right, its own independent textual status.
Hence Bazin (1967), on Bresson and adaptation in general, writes:
it was a matter of getting to the heart of a story or of a drama, of achieving the most rigorous form of aesthetic abstraction while avoiding expressionism by way of an interplay of literature and realism, which added to its cinematic potential while seeming to negate it (pp. 1312).
And later, specifically dealing with Diary:
The novel is a cold, hard fact, a reality to be accepted as it stands. One must not attempt to adapt it to the situation in hand, or manipulate it to fit some passing need for any explanation; on the contrary it is something to be taken absolutely as it stands (p. 136).
Similarly Reader (1990) comfortably proclaims how little Bressons film owes to canonical concepts of filmic adaptation, which it did much to challenge but which are still overwhelmingly dominant . . . (p. 137).
We can see that each of these writers seeks to retrieve Bressons text for the practice of cinema through the films ability to reflect back upon its narrative preconditions it is seen to declare its own origin. In this manner the strategy of reclamation becomes a simple act of reading the film as rendering this relationship transparent (of foregrounding its own inter-textuality4) in terms of adaptation per se, or of formalising a textual realism that renders the novel a concrete object (the films referent) that the film text circulates around and within. Durgnat (1969) takes this view when he writes:
Bresson treated the novel as his reality, which he re-edited, concentrated, simplified, but to which he added nothing. Every phase in the film is taken from the novel although often shifted from one context to another (p. 45).
However, what becomes central to such criticism is the requirement that the film text be privileged over its written antecedent. Bressons writing on the film, his obvious dedication to the apparent intention and spirit of Bernanoss text, make such a move difficult. Its achievement requires a displacement of the film away from the novel, so that their distance becomes the aesthetic space of the film. It is the construction of this space that is seen to provide the room the film and Bresson require to allow it to turn upon itself and its original textual source. It is within this textual distance that those writers who privilege Diary as a formalist text locate the effect of the film.
.c.II. Bernanoss found diary and Bressons literal film
Within film criticism the most common approach to Diary is in the ambit of formalist notions of the cinema. Here the text is seen as an essay on the nature of cinema, and not limited merely to its dominant narrative form. This of course can feed simply and directly into an auteurist argument, and so be used to admit Bresson to the canon of great cinematic authors. This interpretation can also, while still under the auteurist umbrella, be used in a reverse manner to demonstrate that the film is good precisely because of Bressons clear status as its author. His well documented insistence on complete creative control (Roud 1959; Durgnat 1969; Armes 1970; Andrew 1984b), combined with the small number of texts he has produced, indicate a director with a strength of vision that resolutely refuses all compromise.5 Furthermore, in terms of an auteurist enterprise, we have the evidence of Bressons later films, which do, in an unusually direct manner, support the auteurist contention of the director as being equivalent to the author of the text. In this sense one can see that in any auteurist canon Bresson must be at least acknowledged. However, the film is also amenable to a narratological reading where its strategies are seen to foreground the nature of cinematic narration, particularly through the already noted relation of Diary to its novelistic source.
Bresson helps us understand the ease with which writers locate his work within a modernist and structural schema when he asks in his Notes on the Cinematographer (1986): How hide from oneself the fact that it all ends up on a rectangle of white fabric hung on a wall? (See your films as a surface to cover.) (p. 24). And later:
Leonardo recommends (Notebooks) thinking hard of the end, thinking first and foremost of the end. The end is the screen, which is only a surface. Submit your film to the reality of the screen, as a painter submits his picture to the reality of the canvas itself and of the colours applied on it, the sculptor his figures to the reality of the marble or the bronze (pp. 1067).
Such statements suggest a director who approaches film not as an apparently transparent medium that allows us to narrate apparently real stories but as a formal structure in its own right with its own necessary formal properties. Such properties are to be taken into account in all aspects of textual production, and indeed such a structure is understood to become the ground of the text. For Diarys authenticity to be guaranteed it must form the basis of the text. To this extent it is understood that Bressons films are a reflection upon their own nature as filmic representation and narration.
Indeed, it is not an unreasonable contention to consider the Bressonian uvre, particularly from Diary onwards, as being a continuous and increasingly severe study of a small number of structural narrative themes and associated formal principles. There is a reduction in the use of non-diegetic music, a prohibition on the use of trained actors, the gradual effacement of character psychology, realist plot motivation and an increasing use of ellipsis that all suggest a minimalist concentration on the films own formal predicates.6
It is in these terms that P. Adams Sitney (1975) approaches Bresson, arguing, When we look over his career, there emerges a pattern of continual attempts to pose and master new formal problems in the schema of each new film (pp. 1901). And that For the passions of his characters Bresson substitutes his obsession with form and formalization . . . (p. 191). Indeed for a modernist such as Sitney:
A Bresson film devolves with as much formal rhetoric as that of the most radical avant-gardists. Yet he concentrates on those figures of cinematography which produce a sense of fluidity and condensation and avoid strong ruptures and interjections . . . [so that] the most extreme formal devices coincide with, are, the essential developments of the narrative (p. 186).
This produces a theory that could be regarded as an endorsement of a modernist realism where the text is required to self-consciously acknowledge itself, to participate in a certain self-referentiality, but also maintaining some degree of worldly referentiality.7 Bressons work becomes notable then for its ability to encompass formalist elements while remaining narrational, an emphasis on the concrete processes of narrative and textual construction rather than an effacement, through conservative realist codes, of its telling.
This is akin to Sontags (1986) view where for reflective art, the form of the work of art is present in an emphatic way . . . (p. 179) and that:
the form of Bressons films is designed (like Ozus) to discipline the emotions at the same time that it arouses them: to induce a certain tranquillity in the spectator, a state of spiritual balance that is itself the subject of the film (p. 180).
In these terms Sontag sees Diary as not only being a reflexive text (in the first and strongly formalist sense of addressing itself) but also as being a reflective text in that it invites the reader to reflect upon the experience and content of the work itself. The very structure of the work, in its realisation, implicates the reader and enacts, tautologically, that which it simultaneously describes. For Sontag, it is this double articulation of the Bressonian text that moves it into, and allows the possibility of, the sacred.
Recent structuralist critics of Diary identify a major distinction between the novel and the film in terms of the written text of the novel and the written text as it is represented in the film.8 For example, Feldman (1980) identifies a dual representation for the Diary entry, one written, the other dramatized which creates a fragmented and heterogeneous narrative structure, artificially separating the act of writing from the events witnessed (p. 39). Browne (1980), in an essay that directly tackles and locates itself within this issue, argues that:
By clarifying the structural role of the voice-over in the narration of Diary of a Country Priest, we may see on what terms film continues its affinities with, and proclaims its discontinuity from literature, and beyond that, we may appreciate more exactly the mode by which cinema both maintains and limits its commitment to the assumptions of psychological realism (p. 233).
From this, Browne is then able to suggest that Diary is specifically about the problematic of the narrative presentation of character by means of scene (character, dialogue, camera) conjoined with speech (the voice-over) . . . (p. 234) and so
Bressons innovation in narrative technique is linked neither to the foregrounding of authorial intervention . . . nor to the scrutiny or acknowledgment of the process of adaptation as an aim in itself, but is addressed rather to the problem of characterizing the subjectivity of the Priest. The films form is linked essentially to representation of character (p. 235).
For critics such as Browne, Diary is, if nothing else, a privileged text for its very ability to fracture the usually concealed, or at least unacknowledged, relation between narration, psychological realism and representation. Browne then seeks to read the film as a sustained effort to recover the point of view of the priest from that of the literary narrator and the filmic director, so returning, in a de facto manner, to a question of psychological motivation:
While seeming to acknowledge that the handwritten manuscript refers to the fiction of a typographically printed novel as the source, the film declares in both formal and narrative terms that it is derived finally from the authenticity and uniqueness of lived thought (p. 238).
This is close to Feldmans view that The disjunction of text and visual enactment creates a situation in which the limitations of the film medium, as well as the Diary form, are transcended (p. 40). Or Rhodes (1967) when he writes, It is as though human activity could be shown not in terms of motives, but of processes of causes and effects, every one of which is demarcated (p. 37). Finally Sitney (1975) claims, He [Bresson] replaces the conventional outline of events with a sense of the process by which events are arranged on the screen. That substitution indicates the modernist approach to fiction . . . (p. 184).
Each of these commentators, just as we saw with those that emphasise a literary mode of criticism, identifies a gap within the film and it is the recognition of this gap that produces the films textual effect.9 In Diary this gap is located within the text at the level of the representation of written text (the journal), spoken text (voice-over), and visual text (the film image). Each critic in turn, particularly Sitney and Browne, seeks to ground the film and its significance within these parameters, if for no other reason than that their theoretical privileging of the structural as a material condition of textual experience makes this privileging a critical prerequisite.
However, these critics, in their attempt to account for this textual gap, feel obliged not only to identify but to fill its apparent vacuum. Browne (1980) for example, describes the films effort at controlling two narrative points of view (the curs narration and the film image) which provides the underlying formal and compositional issue of the film, and the basis of its power (p. 239). This is realised textually through the disjunction and conflict between that said and that shown, and Such scenes are constructed, paradigmatically, on the difference between the opaqueness of visual appearances and the report of the depth of feeling of the interior world (p. 239). The very move where Browne explains this disjunction (Diarys textual gap), though couched in narratological terms, apart from revealing the extent to which the film requires its readers to account for its operations, requires the introduction of a difference that his theory cannot actually account for. Earlier in his essay Browne argues that The pastness of the voice-over narration is qualified, to the advantage of the fiction of presentness of action, by including, in the level of the narrated story, the act of writing the Diary (p. 235). However, he later points out that:
The film presents the pair written text/performance by voice, with voice-over as an independent entity, as authorized not primarily by the written text, but by the lived experience of the character represented by the text (p. 236).
The narrative gap is seen to be enacted and then recovered by the narrative strategy of the film as it foregrounds its own narration (voice-over pastness) yet is carried by the curs presentness within the text. And yet for Browne to be able to recover the gap he identifies within the text he needs to locate the utterance of the text within a presentness that is defined in its apparent capacity to act, to be realised in its moment of utterance Diary is understood to be present in each instance of its enunciation. This is clearly a displacement of what we can, for now, label as an absence (his gap between verbal narration and a visual narration of action) by the enacted presence of the enunciative situation.10 The placing of lived within quotation marks, though a mark of irony and an effort at a distancing figuration, is not enough to separate his argument from its dependency on a presence contained somewhere within the realm of the text.
Sitney (1975), using a different terminology, ends up in a similar position when he argues of the film:
All the elements are abstracted and sublimated to the whole. There are no pivotal scenes, no suspense as I have noted, no climax. The divorce of the plot from the rhetoric of the process sequence makes for a reflective viewing of the most intense passages of the film, and that reflectiveness in turn encourages a formalistic approach to the rest of the work (p. 198).
Therefore, Like the other tropes we have catalogued here, histeron proteron redeems narration from the somnolent logic of story-telling by forcing the viewer to engage his active intelligence in the devolving of the plot . . . (p. 204).
If we understand the somnolent logic of story-telling to be applicable to narrative cinema in general, as Sitney would seem to intend, then Diary appears to be a text that opens its own quite specific hermeneutic space for the reader to enter. This space, created by the reflective structure (and reflective in requiring consideration as well as foregrounding its discursive apparatus) of the text, is one that, to the extent that the film can be said to work, the reader is not free to negotiate. For the film to succeed, on Sitneys terms, its questions and foregrounded strategies must impose themselves upon its reader and it is indeed this enforcement that makes it a significant text for Sitney. This is a necessary result of his advocacy of a modernist reading which offers a celebration of a self-conscious textual practice that requires the critical engagement of the reader to complete the work. Just as Browne disavows an absence through surreptitiously relying on enunciative presence, Sitney has placed the film text in a position of authority in relation to the viewer. Readers, in this sense, become subsumed under the work of the text and to this extent we can begin to map the play of absence and presence that Sitneys reading relies upon. Through the texts negation (absence) of an already (institutionally and psychically) constituted space of reading for its reader unlike those somnolent texts we can imagine Sitney has in mind a new space founded on a readerly active intelligence (presence) is produced.
This, perhaps surprisingly, is close to the position that Bazin (1967) has adopted when he states:
Furthermore, this respect for the letter [of the novel, by the film] is, in the last analysis, far more than an exquisite embarrassment, it is a dialectical moment in the creation of a style (p. 132).
The embarrassment that Bazin mentions is the films respect for the integrity of the novel, an integrity that is manifested, dialectically, through the films treatment of the novel as its source text. (This is a point that will be returned to later in the essay, for it is the films deference to the novel that produces the illusion of the integrity of the novel.) Bazins identification of this as a dialectical moment suggests, at least by way of a beginning, that we may understand the relation of novelistic to filmic text as one of a contradiction that can only be resolved by the production of a third, incorporating, term.11
We can see, if perhaps still in schematic terms, that, even within narratological extrapolations from the film there remains the recognition and maintenance of a textual gap that the reader/critic seeks to fill through readerly/critical practice. This gap though, as should be evident, evades such bridging in a very real sense, for this gap is what we have identified as Diarys textual effect. Its authority, within the film and in terms of the possibilities of the cinema, resides eventually in its refusal of critical closure.
As such this effect appears to be an inevitable product of Diary, at least to the extent, I repeat, that we can say that the film has worked. The fact that this gap is able to be identified through various reading strategies, and that it apparently almost calls to readers to be dissolved, suggests that Diary enacts a strategy (or game) of marginalisation and centring that is realised in and through its own enunciative tone. This game is enacted in the experience of reading (watching) the film. When stated in such a manner this appears to be either tautological or even simply a truism, but it is Diarys enunciation films essential material temporality that formalist critics have disregarded in their interpretative strategies. These critics make the error of attempting to recuperate the text after the event of its enaction, as a complete and necessarily finite textual object. I do not wish to argue that the films textual effect operates only during the actual time of realising the text (though there is something to be said for this view) but I do argue that in the work of these critics the experiential nature of the text is relegated to a point behind its formal mechanics, yet it is within the time of its viewing, its enaction, that the text actually opens this gap. The effect that these critics all explore is dependent on Diarys temporality yet these critics limit, in their discussions, any mention of Diarys temporal structure to issues of narrative redundancy. The time of its telling, its enunciative materiality, is elided through their return to questions of causality and narrative logic. This is of course the basis of Brownes argument, for it is precisely the presentness of the image in its telling that he wishes to recognise, just as stylistic disjunctions form the basis of Sitneys thorough reading. Diary fully realises itself only during the time of its enaction, to a greater extent perhaps than other film texts. This claim will be returned to in later chapters of this essay.
.c.III. Religious interpretations
Nearly all writers on Diary have acknowledged the place of religion in their reading of the text. For some this acknowledgment occupies the surface of the essay and the film; a famous and severely Catholic author with an avowedly Catholic director producing a film about a Catholic priests death. For such critics the true work conducted by the film, and their interpretive strategies, provides a deep reading that may not need to acknowledge Diarys religious surface. This is, we can see, Sitney and Brownes approach to the film, where Diary is used to illustrate issues of modernism and narrative point of view respectively. In this mode of writing the film is incidentally about a religious theme, and is valued for its ability to ask the hard question of an already given (extra-textual) thesis.
However, there is a large body of criticism that wishes to accept the film as primarily a religious text and it is to this body of writing that I now turn. Within such writing the film is seen to open upon a range of theological and secular issues, but, as with the previous two modes of critical inquiry (the literary adaptation and the formalist), all identify and seek to disclose the films textual effect, and to this extent can be understood as offering a positive theology that is not supported by Diary. Such religious readings of the film also begin with a discussion that concentrates on the formal nature of the text, seeing this as the site where Bresson makes manifest his religious concerns, and then locating such formal elements within a general economy of the sacred. Hence Bird (1982), establishing what he sees to be the requirements of a properly religious cinema, writes:
Genuinely religious films, by no means restricted to explicitly religious subjects, are those in which the cinematographic recording of reality does not exhaust reality but rather evokes in the viewer the sense of its ineffable mystery (p. 14).
He goes on to say that the inherent realism of cinema is the recognition of a spiritual orientation necessitated by the medium itself. This is cinemas openness to the cosmos which it seeks to represent . . . (p. 16).
What is of note in this religious criticism however, and marks it as structurally distinct from the other modes, is its willingness to endorse Diarys textual effect and critically to locate the film around and, to the extent that it is deemed possible, within it. Hence these critics wish to suggest that Diary not only describes a religious event but indeed participates in some manner in that which it represents. This is very simply because for such critics there is already a tradition and epistemology that willingly endorses such a problematic effect, and they are comfortable in recognising it as the sacred, and on occasion name it God.
The religious approach to Diary can be literal and in such cases forms of allegory, a traditional religious trope, are invoked. Perhaps the establishing essay for allegorical readings is once again Bazins (1967), where he writes, The pattern of the films unfolding is not that of tragedy in the usual sense, rather in the sense of the medieval Passion Play, or better still, of the Way of the Cross, each sequence being a station along that road (pp. 1345).12
Feldman (1980) likewise bases her reading on allegory, claiming that the physical contamination finalizes the identification of the priest with the worldliness of his village, and his acceptance of his disease in the last scenes marks the acknowledgment of his own humanity (p. 37). She concludes that In Bressons film there is a similar progression from material corporeality to the realm of spirituality designated by pure light . . . (p. 42).
An alternative allegorical reading is introduced by Sontag (1986), in which a Christian dualism is seen to be figured into an equation of the spirits bodily entrapment: All of Bressons films have a common theme: the meaning of confinement and liberty. The imagery of the religious vocation and of crime are used jointly. Both lead to the cell (p. 186).
Polhemus (1974) endorses such a reading when she writes:
The familiar dichotomy of body and spirit is not simply a metaphysical distinction but an issue of survival for the priest . . . It is not just corporeal existence that imprisons them but the world itself as an extension of these individual cells (p. 12).
However, such readings of the film rapidly seek to extend themselves beyond the play of allegory. This is again a project that Bazin initiated, for after laying claim to the allegorical reading, he states:
Now let us immediately put aside these comparisons [with the Stations of the Cross], the very enumeration of which is necessarily deceptive. Their aesthetic weight derives from their theological value, but both defy explanation. Bresson like Bernanos avoids any sort of symbolic allusion and so none of the situations, despite their obvious parallel to the Gospel, is created precisely because of that parallel (p. 135).
These writers recognise, or at least wish to recognise, that the text offers more than simple allegory, and its formal properties suggest to these critics that the films apparent strength needs to be accounted for in other fields. As Milne (1987) simply argues, Le Journal dun cur de campagne, [is] not so much a film about religion (like Les Anges du pch) as a religious film (p. 285). For Bazin it becomes a text about grace,13 as Sontag also points out: In the quest for spiritual lightness (grace), attachments are a spiritual encumbrance (p. 189). While Gerlach (1976) makes the presence or otherwise of grace (now become Grace) the centre of the film:
The terms that the priest uses to describe the secret of his ability to understand Chantal and comfort her are most appropriately the terms which describe Grace itself. It is, he says, a lost secret. You will find it again, to lose it in your turn, and others will transmit it after you. It is only partially known, but never totally lost; it is a chain only a few links of which we see in the film (p. 42).
The theme of Grace appears to be central to Bresson, for the notion of Grace that is employed is one where the revelation of God to individuals is essentially arbitrary.14 Affron (1985) points out Bressons Jansenist understanding of this when he says that in Bressons work:
. . . grace is a gratuitous gift of the hidden God who reveals himself only to those who seek Him with all their being; the good are not necessarily chosen, for without effective grace they are impotent to accomplish the commandments they practice; nor are the wicked necessarily lost; on Gods charity alone depend salvation and damnation (p. 118).
This thematic concern is endorsed by Ayfre (1969) when, after arguing for Bressons bleak view of the world, he writes, Why seek grace? Because, if you look more closely, grace is there, powerful even while invisible. In fact there is nothing but grace its sovereign omnipotence obscures everything else . . . (p. 23).
While deferring a theological discussion about the nature, or otherwise, of grace (Grace) we can, for the purposes of this essay, see that the operation of Grace within Diary is characterised by Sontags spiritual encumbrance (p. 189), Gerlachs lost secret (p. 42), Affrons gratuitous gift of the hidden God (p. 118), and Ayfres sovereign omnipotence (p. 23). In all cases it has become the mark of an absent instance that is unable to be reasonably resolved, at least contextually within or materially upon the text. For these religious critics Diary bears the mark of a religious discourse that they see as exceeding any individual text. Of course this is a discourse, for those critics that accept such a theology, that contains already within it the possibility of the film text.
In a similar manner these critics freely advocate divine mystery as being the subject and centre of the text. Mystery in this case is figured, like Grace, within the text, so that it becomes a dichotomy of inner and outer (the diegetic and the worldly) that plays within and without the text. Affron quotes the films opening, and then counterpoints it with the operation of mystery:
I do not think that there can be any harm in noting down, day by day, with complete frankness, the very humble, the insignificant secrets of a life which is in any case without mystery. Secrets are opposed to mystery (understood in profane or narrative terms); that mystery is distinct from the sacred mystery frozen in the films final image and present, with greater or lesser ambiguity, in all but Bressons latest narratives, irrespective of genre (pp. 1212).
Ayfre regards mystery as present in a similar manner, as an undetermined relation between text and spirit, where there is a playing between a mode of realism and an ineffableness which denies this realism:...through the precision of directing and acting, everything is turned inwards and takes on a different meaning. Beyond the surface, which is still as sordid as ever, one can glimpse another dimension: that of the soul . . . (p. 11). And later:
But if this strange tone seems to give it an extra dimension to the character who uses it - and, taken in context, it is in fact the aesthetic equivalent of the mystery in the person - it also apparently makes communication, to which speech is normally devoted, not just problematical, but improbable (p. 16).
Similarly, Gerlach argues that Each scene is characterized by either perfect restraint or strong, clear emotion, by an efficiency and precision that continually stimulate both perception and participation. The film treats mystery as just that neither clarifying, nor confusing only demonstrating (p. 45).
For these critics it is evident that mystery, whether sacred or contextual, enjoys an economy of difference. Each of the writers, in introducing mystery, sees such a move as an empowering of the text and their reading of it. This can only occur, outside of an explicit reliance upon a sacred exegetical tradition, by the determining of such mystery as a condition of the text itself (materially and contextually), and not merely a product of its being a plainly religious story. Diarys mystery is not only due to its participation in a religious tradition that acknowledges divine mystery but is enacted by, or within, the text itself. Hence each of the writers cited identifies this mystery as some disjunction operating within the text, whether materially or contextually, and in this way opens the text onto (or into) an arena where adequate closure can only be sought from without in this case the invocation of sacred mystery.
The other major term of a religious reading is revelation. Those critics offering a religious representation see Diary as proposing a sacred domain: this has as its consequence the active production of knowledge of the sacred where Diary is understood to be the vehicle of such revelation. The privileged moment of revelation in the film is its justly famous concluding image, the shadow of the cross, and all commentators eventually locate their arguments around this paradigm. The simplest statement of this position occurs in Polhemus where she writes rather obviously that the films basic movement is cumulative and progressive, building to a conclusive climax. Only at that point can the meaning of any one action be inferred (p. 13). Avoiding such a simple statement of basic narrative teleology, Bazin (1967) points out that:
At first sight the film seems to be somehow made up on the one hand of the abbreviated text of the novel and illustrated, on the other hand, by images that never pretend to replace it. All that is spoken is not seen, yet nothing that is seen but [sic] is also spoken (p. 138).
To conclude:
. . . the image-text relationship moves towards its climax, the latter having the advantage. Thus it is that, quite naturally, at the command of an imperious logic, there is nothing more that the image has to communicate except by disappearing. The spectator has been led, step by step, toward that night of the senses the only expression of which is a light on a blank screen (p. 140).
Sontag repeats this formula, in modified form, when she writes of Bresson, in general, that there is a subliminal revelation: a face which at first seems plain reveals itself to be beautiful; a character which at first seems opaque becomes oddly and inexplicably transparent (p. 193). And Affron provides perhaps its most extreme formulation when he claims, Unlike sound in Bresson (whose meaning emerges through its superimposition on the image at chosen moments), the image carries in itself the potential of revelation (p. 123).
In each case we can see that the religious critic invokes an economy of difference, unlike the closure offered by the formalist writers which is offered as a solution to Diarys textual gap. Whether as Grace, mystery or revelation this difference is maintained, almost endorsed, as it is interpreted as the space of the sacred. In this manner each of these religious critics has found a term for what is a readerly space readerly in that it is produced in the audiences relation to the text and in that there is an indeterminacy courted that once consummated cannot be recovered. The terms themselves do not allow us to retreat into any sort of solidity since they are already discursively located within a field that freely, almost willingly, admits of indeterminacy. For such critics, being able to name or locate this textual effect is not to reduce it to a play limited to the text, nor does it involve the irony of claiming (advocating) a textual presentness that overcomes embedded claims of pastness (for example Brownes position). The degree to which such critics appear to be comfortable with what must almost be regarded as an encouraged textual duplicity suggests that it is in, or around, this strategy that a properly adequate reading of the film can be provided. This duplicity is not just the recognition of an indeterminate textual meaning but is one that understands Diary to be not determined by a generic strategy of identification as a diegetic text, nor to be accounted for by a theoretical paradigm that acknowledges the impossibility of closure while offering, in its terms, that very possibility. (This is not to suggest that a final or complete reading of the text is or can be offered through this or any other strategy: indeed at this stage Diarys very encouragement of the indeterminate makes this an impossible task, but a critical practice that is willing to participate in a plenitude that exceeds material theoretical closure does seem to reflect the nature of the films textual effect.)
Given that these religious critics name this effect God, and so identify the textual effect as already sacred is, as it stands, clearly problematic and is a discursive device that we must, necessarily, return to. That a textual effect can be given a proper name is a difficult enough proposition,15 but that it should then be identified with a religious presence could be viewed as a failure to adequately explore the nature of Diary as a film text . If one, in the experience of the text, recognises its gap, then surely to label it with such an amorphous title is a retreat from the films problematic nature, or at least to retreat from the position of lack that the film establishes. It becomes a partial acknowledgment of the text that admits lack while constraining its implications.
At this stage the problem will be bracketed, held at bay to be addressed at a later point. That it requires attention is apparent since what I have termed the religious reading of the film endorses what could be understood to be the films avowed project and so becomes susceptible to being no more than a literal reading (though no should not be taken as a privative as all readings must start from the literal). This is, at minimum, the enactment of a contradiction, a dialectic, which opens onto a field of discourse which must necessarily exceed all efforts at containment: a dialectic whose recovery would appear to lead to Otherness rather than Sameness. This dialectic is not reducible to the usual notion of textual polyvalency inherent in any discursive utterance, for in such cases this indeterminacy is contextual and is formularised in the absence of the utterer from the scene of utterance. This is a condition that is inscribed in all textual situations, whereas Diary appears to articulate such indeterminacy as a condition of its very self; it is constitutive of the text rather than being merely an inevitable (and perhaps necessary) product of it. Its contextual indeterminacy is in fact textually determined.
It is in the religious critics willingness to participate in the films problematic that we need to seek answers to the issues of Diary and to this extent such readings will be endorsed. Furthermore, as any reading of these critical texts reveals, each of these authors locates the texts operations within specific formal strategies, seeking to demonstrate the manner in which Diary opens itself to provoke or enact its own epistemological conditions. Clearly for Bresson and those who endorse, to some extent at least, his cosmology, it is adequate that the primary condition be God. In the manner in which the text can be understood as offering a proof of the sacred rather than an endorsement or repetition of its possible claims, Diary is not only participating in a tradition of the illustration of sacred texts but is seen to enter the province of the sacred in its material enaction. It is upon this premise that Paul Schrader bases his reading, and it is to his criticism that I now turn.
1. Clearly the typology proposed is of itself arbitrary as the best examples of writing on Diary avail themselves of all three major approaches.
2. The relation of Diary to other literary adaptations is catalogued by Bazin (1967) and Reader (1990). Its most extensive coverage can be found in Andrew (1984b). The tradition of the French quality cinema as it is posited and attacked in Bazin (1967) and Truffaut (1976) was understood to revolve around the screen adaptation of established literary classics.
3. If only for the basic assumptions that the literary-film adaptation school of criticism founds itself on the simple assumption that story is understood to be able to be translated between mediums: Starting with story, rather than with the text from which it is abstracted, the former may be grasped as transferable from medium to medium, from language to language, and within the same language (Rimmon-Kenan 1983, p. 8).
4. Inter-textuality being used in its soft sense, referring to the relation of novel to film adaptation in general, a relation of diegetic text to diegetic text.
5. From Les Anges du pch in 1943 to LArgent in 1983 Bresson has directed only thirteen feature films.
6. That this is a truism of Bressonian criticism is apparent from any of the critical writings listed in the bibliographies.
7. That is, the filmic discourse is still understood to have reference in the Fregean sense and not to be only the enaction of its own structural features.
8. Structuralist is used here loosely. It is intended to refer to recent critics who understand and interrogate texts in terms of a privileging of narrative structure and so, broadly speaking, address issues of a narratological nature.
9. Such a gap I believe operates like the lack of psychoanalytic theory but I wish to retain gap so that a critical distance from a general condition of absence is preserved. As all texts are understood to be subject to lack the specific nature of the absence that Diary produces would be lost in using such a term.
10. This is not a position that I may necessarily disagree with. At this point we are simply interested in a preliminary mapping of the strategies of interpretation used in reading Diary and identifying those moments where an unacknowledged addition is introduced.
11. This recognises that Bazins use of dialectic has a Hegelian rather than an Aristotlean inflection. This is evidenced throughout Bazins work, and it is the confusion of such terms that has led much contemporary film criticism to mis-read Bazin.
12. Bazin continues, For example, the two fainting fits during the night; the fall in the mud; the vomitings of wine and blood a remarkable synthesis of powerful comparisons with the falls of Jesus, the Blood of the Passion, the sponge with vinegar on it, and the defiling spittle (p. 135).
13. . . . it also offers us a new dramatic form, that is specifically religious or better still, specifically theological; a phenomenology of salvation and grace (Bazin 1967, p. 36).
14. The New Westminster Dictionary of the Bible (1970) defines Grace as the unmerited and freely given redeeming action of God through Christ by which sin is forgiven and its power broken, and believers are upheld and strengthened in their Christian life (p. 350).
15. But one that we are familiar with: witness our willingness to identify a Hitchcockian theme, a Joycean text or even Spoonerisms. These are all examples of the attributing of a proper name to textual figures.
Chapter Three 1
.c.Chapter Three
.c.Schrader and transcendental art
In this chapter I wish to examine Paul Schraders major work on transcendental film, Transcendental Style in Film (1972), and critically isolate his key points in relation to Bresson. These will be seen to be of major assistance in my study of Diary but, as with those critics reviewed in Chapter Two, Schrader identifies the textual effect of the film but then fills it through a critically loose understanding of the transcendental, and has recourse to a simple identification of an iconographic tradition in sacred art. Therefore I wish to extend Schraders argument, particularly emphasising the extent to which Bresson has subscribed to a traditional and dogmatic view of religious visual representation.
.c. I. Schraders transcendentalism
Schraders book is generally regarded as the most comprehensive effort, to date, to account theoretically for the stylistic structures of film texts that appear to be avowedly sacred or religious in their content and in their manner of narration.1 For Schrader, the properly religious film is one that does not have to have an overtly or explicitly religious content, but it does have a specific manner, or style, that emphasises (or realises) what he terms the transcendental.
He first defines the term by acknowledging its difficulty and recognising three possible manners of understanding it:
(1) the Transcendent, the Holy or Ideal itself, or what Rudolf Otto called the Wholly Other, (2) the transcendental, human acts or artefacts which express something of the Transcendent, or what Mircea Eliade in his anthropological study of comparative religions call hierophanies, (3) transcendent, the human religious experience which may be motivated by either a deep psychological need or neurosis (Freud), or by an external, Other force (Jung) (pp. 56).
Works on the first level are seen to issue literally from the Holy since no man can know about the Holy (p. 6), the second level participates in the economy of the sacred by being expressive of the Wholly Other (p. 6), while the third is based only on the human who experiences the Transcendent . . . (p. 6). Schrader goes on to state that sacred art in its effort to approach the Transcendent, conditions (1) and (2), can be divided into a tripartite structure where such works either inform the reader of, or express, or express the experience of the Transcendent. Finally, Schrader makes the distinction that The terms Transcendent, transcendental, and transcendence represent a hierarchy of the spiritual from the Other-orientated to the human-orientated (p. 6).
At this point there are two substantial caveats that I wish to make about Schraders definitions before I more fully study his work. These will allow us to separate the unstated but assumed horizon that informs this work from his relatively clear and valuable arguments.
An unacknowledged assumption of Schraders is a Catholic division of the transcendental into a tripartite series of ternary structures. Such a division, in its mirroring and endorsement of a sacred trilogy, already accepts the transcendental as a given. However, this terminology and division allow us to map the nature of the texts that Schrader identifies as transcendental, and that these will be those that are of the second level; they refer to something other than the personal, psychological, and historical, and are those texts that, (by virtue of this structure) make a claim to mediate between sensual experience and an unknowable Holy.
Within this hierological model, which claims an impossible representational Trinity, the transcendental text is in the position of mediation between virtually contrary realms. This suggests that its role may be understood as dialectical, a vehicle of incorporation of two contraries, but it is unclear whether such an incorporation seeks to retain these contraries, or to dissolve them in the mediating synthesis. This suggests that the religious text may be isomorphically in the position of Christ as a mediating term between the fallen secular world and the pure spirit of God.
The second caveat is the use of the terms Transcendental and transcendent. Philosophically speaking, transcendental refers to that which must be already assumed for experience to be possible, an a priori condition. As Lacey (1986) writes: Roughly, [the transcendental is] an argument which shows of some proposition, not that it is true, but that it must be assumed to be true if some sphere of thought or discourse, especially an indispensable sphere, is to be possible (p. 244). For example, our dependency on time as the basis of ratiocination is found in our apparently simple recognition of cause and effect, but for effect to follow cause necessarily requires the experience of time, a time that is linear, consecutive and not simultaneous. Otherwise, of course, we could not posit a relationship of cause to effect. This experience of time, the time involved in perception, the passing moment of cognition (if only an instant), can never be empirically determined. The time of perception, in itself, can never be identified. Now it could be, philosophically speaking, that the world is not one in which effect follows cause, but this can never be decided, in an absolute sense, because our modes of experience are in an a priori manner already dependent on this time.
The manner in which Schrader wishes to use the term transcendental, to name the sacred in its three possible modes of expression, regards it as already Holy. To the extent that Schrader may believe in such a view of the sacred the term transcendental may be relevant, however to understand the term to mean that which is an a priori requirement of experience, and then to wish to ascribe this to what Schrader has also called the Holy, is already to equate a priori epistemological conditions with, to use the most convenient term, God. It becomes, in effect, an argument that posits God as the basis of the conditions of knowing because we have the a priori knowledge of the idea of God. Now this may or may not be the case,
I suppose, but it does not reasonably provide a basis for understanding the transcendental in Schraders sense, as it has already been conflated with an origin, with the very possibility of Before briefly elucidating the specifics of Schraders argument I should point out that this methodology, whereby the conditions of transcendental film are established and then films are examined in this light is the reverse, as I see it, of this essays strategy. I believe it is the film in its enaction, the time of its reading, that is required to be privileged, and various interpretative devices are then bought to bear to describe that participation in the films enunciation. That is, I wish to use the film text to produce a possible understanding of the sacred, and am positing the sacred as being enacted in and by the text, and to this extent I feel comfortable with labelling the films textual effect as belonging to the sacred. It is a methodology that wishes to use the material experience and fact of the film, Diary of a Country Priest, to produce a possible epistemology of sacred time and representation, rather than using Schraders model of establishing the principles of transcendental representation prior to their discursive enaction, and then determining which films meet these criteria. positing the sacred as being enacted in and by the text, and to this extent I feel comfortable with labelling the films textual effect as belonging to the sacred. It is a methodology that wishes to use the material experience and fact of the film, Diary of a Country Priest, to produce a possible epistemology of sacred time and representation, rather than using Schraders model of establishing the principles of transcendental representation prior to their discursive enaction, and then determining which films meet these criteria.
.c.II. The need for a rule book of sacred representation
Given Schraders premise that the Transcendent is Other, it may be seen to be beyond or literally unavailable to representation.3 It cannot be made manifest through any material whatsoever. Most simply, this is because, theologically speaking, it participates in God, the divine ground of being. According to Schrader this sacred source, being infinite, is ineffable, invisible and unknowable (p. 8), hence The proper function of transcendental art is, therefore, to express the Holy itself (the Transcendent), and not to express or illustrate holy feelings (p. 7).
Human creation cannot tell us about this absolute sacredness, it can only express a relation, always partial, to it. That this is a traditional view of religious representation is demonstrated by Ouspenskys (1978) advocacy of the role of an iconographic tradition in Catholicism. He writes, the Seventh Ecumenical Council speaks of the absence of the image of God the Father, who is not incarnate and consequently is invisible and non-representable (p. 183). He later claims that It can be said that the icon is painted according to nature but with the help of symbols, because the nature which it represents is not directly representable (p. 228).4
However, the production of sacred images is justified, theologically, through the model of Christ: the Image of God, manifested by the God-Man . . . the image is based on the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity (p. 50). Furthermore, Since the Word became flesh and lived among us, the image must directly show that which happened in time and became visible, representable and describable (pp. 1178). That is, the sacred image is located within a temporal schema that is understood to have been produced, authorised, in and by the event of Christs material presence. The text is the mediating object between the sacred and the profane, a liminal object, and because of this liminality strict rules of representation must be applied.5
This is why Schrader must introduce his book by establishing such rules. For what is argued, and the rhetorical product or operation of such an argument, is that it is only through these rules that representation of the sacred can occur. The artist-producer is understood to become a servant to the dogma of a tradition, that re-enacts the images relation to that which it seeks to represent. Just as God cannot be shown for He is unrepresentable, so the individual artist-producer effaces themself in these laws of representation (established virtually by ecumenical fiat) regarding the absolutely sacred. The authority of these rules, when recognised and endorsed as rules, allows access to the sacred. The individuals relation to these laws is structurally equivalent to the images relation to the sacred, and of course both are subsumed within their relation to God.
In Diary this is first of all manifested in the films relation to Bernanoss novel. As demonstrated in Chapter Two, the literal interpretation of its source text has been the basis of considerable criticism, primarily regarding the nature of adaptation and the relative narrative specificity of novel and film. However, what has generally gone unnoticed is that Bressons dedication to the novel is exactly the deference to another, or perhaps Other, discourse that we can see operating in the iconographers deference to the rules of religious representation. By maintaining, even insisting upon, a fidelity to a text that is its own founding condition Bressons film re-enacts the position of deference to, a veneration of, that founding thing, God, which religious representation adopts.6
This obedience to the rules of representation is essential to sacred art as such deference to another discourse creates the conditions of empowering that Other discourse, of casting its empowering authority upon the subservient text. This may appear obvious in literally religious representation: the iconographer follows the rules because they are rules, and they can only be constituted as rules by their being followed.7 But when we examine Diary we see that this economy of authority resides within the relationship between the abiding texts and the discourse that states the rules. It is Diarys deference to its literary parent which confers upon Bernanos and his novel the solidity that the scholars of Chapter Two have granted it, whether as a canonic literary text or as a source for the question of adaptation. It is, in retrospect as it were, that Bernanoss text gains its authority yet this retrospective production, Diarys authoring of the relation that produces Bernanoss authority, is displaced, forgotten, so that this authority is understood to be located in the prior text, as origin. Bresson has literally accepted the literary text, therefore critics who discuss the issues of adaptation and specificity take the literary text as the model that poses the problems that the film has to solve. Hence, for example, we get discussions of how the film needs to deal with the conceit of the found journal, and of how to transpose first person narrative.
However, the site at which these problems are raised is not the literary text. Indeed, since it is an already constituted text we can presume that it has already solved such problems. They only gain status a critical currency for film critics courtesy of the later text, the film text, the work of Bresson.
It is in this manner that we can also understand that Bresson, in this avowed act of fidelity, has incorporated the structure of this unequal relation to another discourse within the very fabric of his text.8 This act of fidelity is also, and simultaneously, an act of apparent deference which, by its very action, elevates the novel to a position of authority. This is of course what those critics who examined the issue of Diarys adaptation have all uncritically assumed. This authority does not reside in the novel; it is located only in the relationship that has been established between the novel and the film, and it is dependent on the latter text. It is only the historically later text, the film, and its recognised deference to the novel which grants the novel its supposed privileged status. It should be clear that this argument is of a kind with Derridas economy of the supplement, a point that will be returned to with some force in Chapter Five.
It is in this manner that the deference to the rules of religious representation in icon painting produces an authority which does not already reside in the body of rules deferred to. It is a product of a structural relation between two texts where one text clearly acknowledges itself to be produced in the light, and by virtue, of another. It is the absolute manner in which Bresson has done this, just as absolute as the claims and requirements of a religious iconography, that marks Diary.
Bernanoss novel attempts to enact a similar relationship through its construction of itself as a discovered Diary; however, it cannot succeed. Unlike Diary, Bernanoss novel finds itself in an impossible position in relation to the text that it wishes to defer to, as this text, the journal, is only produced internally as a condition of its own existence. The novel can only ever persuade and seduce in this rhetorical conceit, as enjoyable as it may be. Diary, on the other hand, engages in a relationship with a text that is clearly and unambiguously external to it, and to this extent it is able to participate in a relation of difference where a condition of itself is this relation to an exteriority that is Other. In Bernanoss novel this move is always restrained by the manufacture of this relation internally, its exteriority can only ever be feigned.
Religious authority is similarly located in such a relationship to an exteriority, and it is the displacement achieved by this deference that gives such authority the appearance of already existing in the discourse. In Diarys case it is to Bernanoss novel; in religious representation, to the extent that it is a part of an avowedly religious iconographic tradition, to the sacred, Schraders Holy. The product of this relationship is the illusion of a solidity, a concreteness that would otherwise be unavailable, and it is this solidity that Schrader and others emphasise. Certainly the Holy may remain unrepresentable, but the authority of its excess appears to lie in the relation of deference and not within the Holy.
.c.III. The rules of iconographic representation
Rules that have been produced for representing what is understood to be unrepresentable, and their strict observance, result in the production of discursive authority and textual solidity. These rules involve not only formal prohibitions on the content, and style of the content, of representation, but also inform what such images are to induce, or provide, for their readers. The function of such images is to make available to their audience the possibility of a position that acknowledges the sacred by an act of deference, and to this extent such images carefully locate themselves between the pleasures of sensual representation and the recognition of a corporeally absent authority. In this manner such images regard themselves as mediating a position between the material presence of the image and the absent ground of God.
Eliade argues in The Sacred and the Profane (1961) that By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu (p. 12). Schrader points out that such works disavow the personal for they seek a spiritual truth that can be achieved by objectively setting objects and pictures side by side that cannot be obtained through a subjective personal or cultural approach to those objects (p. 9).
Engaging and believing in what we have termed the rules, religious representation seeks to distance itself from the merely human by participation in the tradition of sacred obedience that such representation embodies. This tradition, dependent on a relation to another discourse, another discourse that claims and is granted meta-discursive priority, gains credence from its continuing survival and practice through time. It becomes an almost static form and its solidity contributes to the authority of those texts that constitute it and the modes of representation they employ.
To understand the theological basis of this tradition, and its encouragement of stasis, Ouspensky claims it is necessary to recognise that representation is deemed to be required precisely because man is both fallen and seeking redemption, and in this its prescripts lie:
To save man from the imprisonment of original sin, it was therefore necessary to have a man such as God had created in the beginning, that is, a sinless man, because sin is an external thing, super-imposed on human nature. It is a contrivance of the created will . . . a voluntary denial of the fullness of life by creation (p. 186).
Or, as Hart (1989) has described it:
. . . the Adamic myth is a story of proliferating dualisms or, more precisely, proliferating hierarchies. The Fall from innocence to experience not only divides the world but also introduces a definite structure of value: we fall from an undifferentiated knowledge of good to a differentiated and fatal knowledge of good and evil. From Gods presence we pass to His absence; from immediacy to mediation; from the perfect congruence of sign and referent to the gap between word and object; from fullness of being to a lack of being; from ease and play to strain and labour; from purity to impurity; and from life to death (p. 5).
Hence, to be the mediating image between the ineffable and the carnal, the unrepresentable and the reality of the world, iconic representation has a set of rules that delimit what can be represented and the manner in which it is to be represented. These revolve around, and necessarily require, the positing of the formal limitations that produce genre, a genre where the individual artist-producer voluntarily surrenders him or herself to the laws of its production rather than a creative playing amongst its generic borders.9 These laws are also directed towards the use of the icon it is seen to be dedicated to its role in prayer so that for Ouspensky the sacred image integrates itself into a harmonious synthesis, into an organic whole, which creates Orthodox worship, outside of which its contents and meaning cannot . . . be understood (p. 39). The icon is defined by its place within an explicit context of production and reading where this context, what theologians would regard as a dogmatic tradition, operates as deference to an authority where such authority can only be constituted in this act of deference.
Therefore, as Ouspensky argues, the teaching of the Church not only expresses what the subject of the image must be, but also the way in which this subject is represented (p. 119). This produces what Ouspensky calls the iconographic canon which conveys the dogmatic teaching and expresses the life of the Church in its Tradition (p. 167).10 The requirements of the icon, in the specificity of its representational practice, prescribe rules of how the corporeal body is to be acknowledged and circumscribe rules of posture, expression, framing, and realism.
The corporeal body in religious representation is subordinated to the life of the spirit, which such an orthodoxy regards as participating more properly in the sacred economy.11 Indeed, Ouspensky claims that flesh, bearing witness to human mortality, is disavowed in iconic representation in order to foreground the place of spirit (or the soul) in such discourse, and it is this that is seen to be the source of the icons beauty:
The icon is the image of the man in whom the grace which consumes passions and which sanctifies everything is truly present. This is why his flesh is represented completely differently from ordinary corruptible flesh. The icon is a peaceful transmission, absolutely devoid of all emotional exaltation, of a certain spiritual reality (p. 195).
Icons also seek an attitude of prayer where the made image, its represented subject, and the reader, are understood to be offering themselves to the possibility of Grace. To represent this visually the posture of represented subjects is limited by strict convention. Icons offer themselves as a form of prayer so the subject represented can only be presented as an open and direct visage one cannot hide, obscure or produce a profile of the iconic face. That the face is as open to us as it is open to God, is, for Ouspensky, is the attitude we take in prayer:
The inner order of the man represented in the icon is naturally reflected in his posture and his movements. The saints do not gesticulate. They are in prayer before the face of God, and each of their movements and the very posture of their bodies take on a hieratic, sacramental aspect . . . A profile does not allow direct contact; persons who have not yet attained holiness are represented in profile, such as the wise men and the shepherds in the icon of the nativity, for example (p. 219).
However, while the face may be revealed to the viewer, there is a disavowal of any explicit display of emotion: within this dogmatic tradition emotion is of the bodily and carnal world. Furthermore, any display of emotion in the icon would move the image away from the isomorphic relationship between the icon and the sacred and onto issues of the personal, of a subjectivity that is not of Schraders Other worldly.12 Emotion would become an invitation to interpret the image as an individuals negotiated relation to the sacred yet in this vision of the sacred no negotiation is brooked. It is, in this sense, literally an act of effacement.
The arrangement of the space of the icon is also subject to the iconographic canon where there is an emphasis on what might be called visual simplicity and symmetry. Pattern may be present and images are direct, complete and easily readable. This is also assisted by the conservativeness of the tradition where specific religious figures are realised in certain postures or colours.13 For the theologian of the icon this is an embodiment of sacred order. Where the disorder of the world is a direct product of the fallen condition of being human, a product of original sin, the portrayal of order in the icon is understood to be a further manifestation of the effort to approach the properly sacred. Ouspensky writes:
Thus the universe which is represented in an icon does not reflect the disorder of our world corrupted by sin, but divine order and perfect peace re-established in the universe. Divine grace, and not the rational categories of the earth, not human morality, reigns in the icon. From this arises the hieratism of the icon, its simplicity, its majesty, its calm. From this arises the rhythm of its lines and the joy of its colors (p. 221).
With this requirement of a divinely ordered space the images relation to the world hesitates between realism and formalism. The representational icon is understood to be a privileged zone of interaction between the secular and the sacred; secular because it is an object and offers images of people; sacred because it revolves around the incarnation of Christ, represents a movement towards religious recovery, and is another mode of the Word made flesh.14
Defined in these terms the icon is understood to be both a part of but also separate from traditional modes of realist representation. Icons privilege an inverse perspective where that represented expands towards the picture plane ignoring the use of mathematical models of linear receding perspective. Ouspensky claims this as another expression of the holy bodys sacredness: It is as if man were standing before a path which, instead of losing itself in space, opens on to infinite fullness (p. 225). The iconographic canon then wishes to argue that iconic realism is not seeking an illusion of the world but is to make manifest its place between a fallen material world and the unrepresentably sacred. To this extent the lack of realism is interpreted as a recognition of this unrepresentability we are only before its image so the icon is firmly understood to be an invitation to consider, to wonder upon this condition and the state, or statelessness, of the sacred.15
Schrader (1972) recognises Bressons indebtedness to this iconographic tradition and uses this to locate the formal elements of his films:
. . . there are technical as well as theoretical similarities between Bressons films and Byzantine iconography.
Frontality, nonexpressive faces, hieratic postures, symmetric compositions, and two-dimensionality are common to both. The Byzantine mosaicist constructed the nonexpressive face because God himself was beyond all expression; similarly, Bresson uses the nonexpressive face to deprejudice the viewers attitudes toward the Transcendent (p. 99).
In regard to composition Schrader writes, Bressons static camera work nullifies the cameras editorial prerogatives. When each action is handled in essentially the same nonexpressive manner, the viewer no longer looks to the angle and composition for clues to the action (p. 67). They are edited for neither emotional climax nor editorial information . . . editing does not pose any artificial comparisons; each shot reflects its own surface (p. 68). Bresson used repeated rehearsals to wear down any ingrained or intractable self-expression, gradually transforming fresh movement into rote action, expressive intonation into bland monotone (p. 66). Finally, the sound track consists primarily of natural sounds . . . they establish a great concern for the minutiae of life (p. 69).
Schraders reading revolves around two major axes: the first is that of the image and its status, the second the temporal nature of the text, at least as it operates as film narrative and so able to produce a teleological and temporal logic of its own.
It appears that Diary seeks to participate in a similar economy to that of the production and reception of icons. However, Schrader, though indicating this possibility, fails to adequately understand the implications of such a reading. This is particularly evident where he seeks to emphasise the place of Bresson as an auteurist master and to locate the images of the film within a formalism that owes its allegiances to a critical modernism rather than a continuing and conservative religious tradition.
However, to enumerate Diarys formal features produces a checklist of those elements that Ouspensky has identified: the use of black and white; the hidden, internal nature of the curs illness; acting style; the reservation of displayed emotions; ellipsis of major narrative elements (we never witness a death); the regular movement of the camera towards the cur, particularly towards his face but also, on occasion, his hands; the repetition of narrative information through the sound and image tracks; the literal transcription of the novel; the extra-textual knowledge the audience has where, because of the novel, the end is already known; and its emphasis on a mode of almost carnal realism that lays stress upon the events and actions between major dramatic episodes, suggesting that these episodes, such as the doctors death, cannot be submitted to, or exceed, a realist (and so empirical) aesthetic. All are aspects of that play between the carnal and the sacred, the fallen and the divine, that Ouspensky defines as an iconographic canon, a canon that dates to the Quinisext Council of 692 (Ouspensky 1978, p. 113).
Therefore Bressons style, in terms of any participation within the iconographic canon, needs to be understood as a deference to a tradition and an authority that is an attempt at forfeiting individual will. This is Bressons relation to his own text and that which informs his mode, or modes, of representational practice.
The non-expressiveness of the films protagonists, almost a non-acting, becomes not only a formalist conceit to render problematic the relationship of character and psychology to narrative cause, nor is it only the denial of the sensual and fallen body as required in Christian theodicy.16 It is also the performance of the actors deference of themselves, as subjects, to the text of the film as word and as discourse and to the demands of Bresson as producer of that text. An act of deference that is structurally identical to that performed by Bresson to the rules of the iconographic canon, to Bernanos, and to the world of the text.
In the same manner we can see that Bressons use of off-screen sound, while suggesting a corporeal world that envelopes the passion of the priest, also indicates what in iconic representation is known as double point perspective. Such perspective can be understood as another material practice to represent the sacred, for the sacred, as unrepresentable, exceeds the prescription of a single, vanishing point perspective.17 The optical basis of cinematography, with its single lens focussing an image onto the film plane, makes such representation difficult.18 Bresson is able to produce a perspective effect through this use of sound. It is heard but its source is rarely seen, it appeals to and suggests what is absent, there is always something else, the image of the sounds source, absolutely named by virtue of its identifying sound, but always outside the literal image the shown.19 This suggests that the image can never be complete, the frame never claims an adequacy of itself, a sufficiency of revelation, for that which it addresses is understood to exceed such simple determination. Indeed the frame becomes manifestly a boundary between image and world, between an articulation and a determination where the images assertiveness is questioned, where the sacred world is not addressed by simple revelation.
The films formalism becomes complete in itself for it is not articulated towards an external discourse of artistic specificity. Where critics claim to identify such modernist forms in acting, visual style, and as literal literary adaptation Diary as a religious utterance disavows such status through its wilful inscription within a traditional and conservative theological dogma. The dynamics of this economy will be investigated in detail in the last chapter of this essay.
The second major axis that Schrader identifies in Bresson is that of the texts temporal nature. This temporal structure, in terms of its context as narrative, revolves around an apparently radical stylisation that prevents the reader from identifying with the world in the text, suspending the usual relations of reader and text: The viewer is conditioned to expect new information from narration; instead, he gets only a cold reinforcement of the everyday (p. 72).
Schrader identifies this suggested refusal of narrative novelty as disparity. This is produced through the texts emphasis on the everyday where the ordinary almost banal actions of the individual are emphasised, while retaining a formalisation which produces what we might regard as defamiliarisation:
By drawing attention to itself, the everyday stylization annuls the viewers natural desire to participate vicariously in the action on screen. Everyday is not a case of making a viewer see life in a certain way, but rather preventing him from seeing it as he is accustomed to (p. 69).
However, such a formularisation of the text is inadequate. It does not prevent participation, nor does it seek a readerly distance through the audiences identification with a diegetic world that is problematised by an emphasis on the banal, or through an extreme aestheticism. Rather, Diary relies upon a specific strategy of presenting new narrative information but rendering it, through repetition, almost redundant.
However, this is not, strictly speaking, the case. The exception is the episode between the cur and the Countess where the arrogance of her vanity in choosing to continue to mourn her son is demonstrated she cannot choose to forfeit her life to his memory. The theological nature of this relation is, I think, clear, involving issues of will and choice, and a requirement that the relationship to God is not one that is to be questioned, in fact is unavailable to questioning. One must freely choose, wish to choose, this inequitable power relationship, as her letter to him makes clear.20 However, this episode with its revelation of the ability of the cur, through his innocence, to redeem the fallen, can be understood as another example of temporal suspension as it produces what is almost an epiphany, only to retreat dramatically and logically from its implications. The cur refuses to reveal the nature of his conversation with the Countess, he accepts, though fails to appreciate, the rumours and political danger that this act produces, and after such an intense struggle, a struggle which ends in what we are given to understand is the Countesss salvation, withdraws and almost shields himself from any further explicit dramatic displays. In other words, a dramatic climax, of sorts, is provided within the first half of the film, forcing what follows, the rest of Diary, to pale in its dramatic intensity, exacerbating the sense of redundancy that imbues the film.
Schrader argues that these techniques of disparity make the reader suspect the everyday and that this suggest[s] a need, although not a place, for emotion (p. 71). Through its concentration on the apparently insignificant, on the moments between events, attention is deflected from the status of narrative event (narratologys narrative kernels) towards the manner of their recording and narration, if indeed they can be distinguished. This provokes an absence that beckons the reader:
. . . [the] next step of disparity goes farther: it tries to evoke a sense of something Wholly Other within the cold environment, a sense which gradually alienates the main character from his solid position within the everyday . . . But the conflict is more complicated than it at first seems. The source of this alienation does not seem to be intrinsic to the priest
. . . or to his environment . . . but seems to originate from a greater, external source (pp. 723).
This disparity is understood as a space that the film seeks to open during its reading, an epistemological hollow that eventually demands explanation from an exterior authority. Such an explanation is deferred until the films climax a climax that coincides with the end of the film the curs recognition, receiving, of Grace, narrated to us by his friend and visually identified by the shadow of the cross. For Schrader:
The decisive action is an incredible event . . . The prescript rules of the everyday fall away; there is a blast of music, an overt symbol, and an open call for emotion. The act demands commitment by the viewer (the central character has already committed himself), and without commitment there can be no stasis (p. 79).
Schrader understands this to be a confrontation between the reader and the Wholly Other he would normally avoid (p. 81). Stasis is understood to be the reconciliation of the texts disparity where The decisive action does not resolve disparity, but freezes it into stasis. To the transcending mind, man and nature may be perpetually locked in conflict, but they are paradoxically one and the same(p. 49).
Schrader then sees the transcendent as being made manifest through the texts refusal of secular explanation for its represented events and its open admission, and advocacy of, a religious logic. Such transcendence is understood to have been demonstrated within the text it has been produced by the text in its very enunciative apparatus.
On the other hand, through the teleological nature of narrative causation, Diary attempts to prohibit, through its own textual strategies of denial, any recourse to readings that are based on psychology (whether of the director or of character), ideology, or formalism on exterior and Other discourses separate from that Other discourse it names.21
Hence, for Schrader, the suspension of an orthodox narrative causality, a logic dependent and motivated by diegetically signalled events, leads to a condition of stasis which is realised in the films climax. He argues:
This transformation does not resolve disparity, it accepts it. Disparity is the paradox of the spiritual existing within the physical, and it cannot be resolved by any earthly logic or human emotions. It must, as the decisive action makes inescapably clear, be accepted or rejected (p. 82).
That Bressons static view represents the new world in which the spiritual and the physical can coexist, still in tension and unresolved, but as part of a larger scheme (p. 83) suggests to Schrader that the reader and film are suspended within a realm where the usual modes of textual understanding are foregrounded as ineffectual:
The emotions are active; in a desire to comprehend the disparity they continually attempt to outflank the everyday. The decisive action is a carefully planned cul-de-sac for this emotional activity. It simultane ously appeals to the emotions and makes the viewer aware of their futility. This necessitates a conscious, aesthetic solution to an emotionally irresolvable dilemma (p. 85).
This leads to a position which claims that the readers desire for comprehension and closure is directed by the film toward the requirement that the reader accept the films thesis. By Diarys suspension of pragmatic cause and effect the reader is directed to negotiate Diary on its terms, and this is understood as a revelation of the transcendental. Schraders claim becomes one that requires the Bressonian text to enforce its own hermeneutic realisation, determining its context of reading, in order to have a determinate context of reading.
This choice to accept the revelation of the transcendental controlled as it is by the determined nature of the text, is understood by Schrader to be a part of the religious vocation of Diary whereby grace and predestination are offered, freely, within the text. In its refusal to accommodate the reader, in terms of a traditional narrative model of character and causation, the text repeats Bressons deference to Other discourses. The authority this provokes has been seen to proscribe the style of the text, and in the embracing of this authoritative determination Bresson reproduces the relationship, the only possible relationship, that makes such authority viable. Diary performs the same relation to authority that I have identified above an authority that can only be legitimated by the very act that produces it, that is enacted in an unequal relation of deference.
The choice, or acceptance, of this structural inequality is offered by the logic of the text to the extent that the audience submits to its teleological account. For those readers who refuse or are unwilling to do this then, of course, the noted textual effect cannot possibly occur, for this effect is located in the films mode of address to us. As Schrader points out, Man becomes free by choosing the predetermined will of God. God is Truth, the Truth makes you free, and freedom is choosing God (p. 90). Therefore, from a rather uncritical theological point of view, the film enacts those conditions or that state that it is ostensibly exploring. For Schrader, of course, this becomes a mark of the texts success.
However Schrader fails, eventually, to argue beyond his identification of the structures and apparent processes of traditional religious representation. In his discussion of religious iconography he limits himself to the recognition of the unrepresentability of God and the development of codes of representation that revolve around solving this ontological problem. He goes on to equate these codes with the production of symbols and this is equated with the transcendental, as he understands it. There is no account of why, or how, these images or texts can participate in this economy beyond the fact that they share common codes. To this extent we can see Schraders argument as ultimately no more than a genre study, albeit a careful one, in that it fails to identify the nature of the sacred and its effect.
Surely it is not enough, finally, to point out that sacred representation involves the problem of revealing the invisible, that codes of representation have been developed to achieve this, and that the free and proper use of such codes makes any such work transcendental. We need to question, at such a moment, the nature of these codes as they are realised in narrative texts to understand the absence that they seek to address, that they desire. Schraders argument collapses into its own tautology as it identifies the sacred and identifies sacred art as that which is able to name the sacred. However, it has already, and unproblematically, taken the sacred as a given. His argument retains God as its positive term, as a presence that is to be recovered in transcendental art, and follows what Hart (1989), following Derrida (1982), has termed God as the transcendental signified:
If the Fall introduced a gap between man and God, words and objects, thereby making signs the indispensable and imperfect vehicle for any knowledge, religious or otherwise, the economy of salvation was also worked out according to signs, specifically verbal signs. Thus Christ was held to be the Word of God, the mediator between man and God, the one perfect Sign in an imperfect world of signs. Like other signs, Christ is both signifier and signified, body and soul. But Christ is also unlike other signs, for here the signified God is perfectly expressed in the signifier. He is at once inside and outside the sign system; since Christ is God, what He signifies is signified in and of itself: He is what Derrida calls a transcendental signifier (pp. 78).
In other words, Schrader argues for a dialectical resolution of Otherness, God, into the Same, producing a transcendental presence that is the hallmark of a positive theology a theology that I believe is contrary to the theology that Bresson employs. It is with this in mind that we turn to ritual to offer a phenomenological account of Diary, recovering the transcendental, allowing the final chapter to address this contrary theology in relation to the text that is its material ground.
1. This is not to exclude the work of others, for example Bordwells books on Dreyer (1988a) and Ozu (1988b), and May and Birds anthology, Religion in Film (1982). However Bordwell has argued strongly for a formalist reading of these texts, reclaiming them from the excesses of critics such as Schrader through his particular brand of narratological empiricism. May and Bird, on the other hand, offer a broad collection of essays using a contemporary critical vocabulary to return various directors to what is eventually a basic Judaeo-Christian narrative schema of the quest. Schrader, while advocating a formalist reading of these texts, sees such formalism as the mechanism that the films use to address issues of a religious nature. Such issues for Schrader are seen to exceed the questions or problems of formalism, problems that, at least for a critic like Bordwell, never address more than the problematic question of the texts own structure.
2. The three directors, Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl-Theodor Dreyer, have been traditionally regarded in film studies as having distinctive styles which, though apparently formalist, appear to be more concerned with metaphysical or religious issues. For Schrader this use of a formalist style is understood to be advantageous in elucidating their metaphysics, and so not limited to what we could regard as a modernist, critical artistic project. This makes Bordwells writing on Ozu and Dreyer particularly interesting, as he privileges formalist readings of these texts in terms of what we might regard as a cognitive narratology (Bordwell 1988a, 1988b). However throughout this work the implications of meaning that these directors court is reduced by Bordwell to the positing and suspension of cognitive processes of recognition and comprehension with specific regard to film. Such cognitive schemata may be present but their referential status, as structures of discourse, is elliptically avoided by Bordwell, yet these are precisely those texts which, because of their specifically signalled narrative strategies, plainly declare themselves to offer meaning.
3. In the sense of Transcendence used by Schrader in the quote on page 29.
4. We will rely upon Ouspensky here not only for his discussion of religious icons but also because his Catholicism provides a point of contact with Bressons possible iconographic practice. It should be noted that Ouspenskys book is a theological discussion that, like Schraders but more avowedly, takes for granted the mystery of the divine and the presence of an absolute God.
5. The importance of this position will be made clear below.
6. This would be more accurately described as God as embodied in the Church. To the extent that deferral to the authority of the Church is understood to be equivalent to a deferral to God we shall regard them as synonymous.
7. Of course rules are also reinforced through their being broken. This is the basic model, for example, that a lot of genre criticism, particularly in cinema, adopts. However there must be a certain point, as genre criticism makes clear, where to break a rule excludes the rule-breaker from the set or group. At what point is a western no longer a western? Therefore it is the texts obedience to certain tenets of a genre that allow it entry to the conventions, status and operations of this genre and not in the breaking of these rules. It is its accord with and acknowledgment of its own generic tradition that produces the texts generic authority and also establishes the authority to play with these rules.
8. This felicitousness is made much of by Bazin (1967), Andrew (1984b), and Reader (1990) who all wish to use it as a basis for an argument against what has become colloquially known (courtesy of Bazin and Truffaut) as the French quality cinema. This traditional quality film is a quality literary adaptation (and for recent examples we have the Ismail Merchant-James Ivory production team working their way through Henry James) that is seen to be merely theatrical and to emphasise translation, whereas Bresson is proposed as an agent of transformation who, through a literal rendition, elevates the task of adaptation to an equality of texts.
9. For the Church, therefore, the icon is not an art illustrating Holy Scripture; it is a language which corresponds to Scripture, to the very contents of Scripture, to its meaning, just as do the liturgical texts. This is why the icon plays the same role as Scripture in the Church; it has the same liturgical, dogmatic, educational meaning (Ouspensky 1978, p. 166).
10. It establishes the conformity of the icon with Holy Scripture and defines what this conformity consists in: the authenticity of the transmission of the divine revelation in historical reality, by means of what we call symbolic realism, and in a way that truly reflects the Kingdom of God (p. 121).
11. We never find in Orthodox iconography this savouring of the flesh that we find in secular art on religious subjects, be it a savouring of healthy and prosperous flesh or, on the contrary, that of a suffering, bruised body. Indeed, as we know, even the ordinary physical quality is contrary to the meaning of the sacred image (Ouspensky 1978, p. 212).
12. Isomorphic because the same relationship of inequality is sought between God and sacred tradition; the sacred and the icon; the icon and the reader; and the sacred and the reader.
13. The iconographer can limit himself to a few characteristic traits. In the majority of cases, however, the faithfulness to the original is such that a faithful Orthodox can easily recognize the icons of his most revered saints, not to mention Christ and the Virgin (Ouspensky 1978, p. 197).
14. In other words, the Church brings the image of Christ to the world, the image of man and of the world revived through the incarnation, the saving image. The world, in turn, tries to introduce its own image into the Church, the image of the fallen world, the image of sin, corruption and death (Ouspensky 1978, p. 126).
15. Ouspensky argues that The sacred image has always expressed the revelation of the Church, bearing it in a visible form to the faithful, placing it before their eyes as a task to accomplish, as a prefiguration and the first-fruits of the Kingdom of God . . . (1978, p. 227).
16. cf. The reading that Bordwell (1985) offers of Bressons Pickpocket where he writes: Bressons famous tactic of expressionless performance, [in] Pickpocket deprives the shot of much informational content. When each character wears a bland face and stands motionless or walks without idiosyncrasy, the repetitions of camera setup come forward to a greater degree. It is not just that 36 per cent of the shots in Pickpocket repeat the earlier setups in the scene . . .(p. 300).
17. This is similar to the already discussed reversed perspective of icons where the image is not seen to disappear into a distant space but in fact opens out as an infinite space in front of the image. Multiple point perspective involves a similar mode of representation where a single point is understood to be inadequate to the representation of an infinite being, hence its multiple perspectives prevent and refuse any determinate centre to the image.
18. But not impossible, as Bordwell (1985) has easily demonstrated. See the collection of film stills
(pp. 1089) which demonstrate a variety of alternative perspectives, all achieved without optical interference in the production of the image.
19. If the eye is entirely won, give nothing or almost nothing to the ear. One cannot be at the same time all eye and all ear (Bresson 1986, p. 51). And If a sound is the obligatory complement of an image, give preponderance either to the sound, or to the image. If equal, they damage or kill each other, as we say of colours (Bresson 1986, pp. 512). Such off-screen sound in Diary is rarely ambiguous, it is clearly a car, a dog barking, or even a gun shot. The most ambiguous sound is the gardeners rake at the chateau but, unlike the other sounds, its source is shown to us.
20. Again I feel obliged to point out that I do not believe the film requires a religious position, as I hope the final two chapters will demonstrate. The free acceptance of, a surrendering to, an inequality, though evident in much religious practice, is also no more than the sacramentalisation of the relation to any formulation of absolute otherness that, by its absoluteness, cannot be negotiated with.
21. Which is not to suggest that symptomatic or deconstructive readings are unavailable but even in such cases the literal concern with the sacred becomes the point at which such readings begin. Diarys dependence on the sacred operates, as we have seen, as a tautology.
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Chapter Four 1
.c.Chapter Four
.c.Temporal economies of the sacred
Chapter Three introduced a reading of Diary that identified the films participation in a traditional mode of religious visual representation that is marked by its conservative nature, and its deference to what it understands to be a sacred authority. This is a tradition that Schrader partly identifies in his criticism and it is around this that his notion of transcendental art, specifically in regard to cinema, revolves. As I have shown, however, the textual or religious authority that could be understood to be a product of this process does not reside, cannot reside, within these authoritative texts, nor in the work itself, nor in its ability to participate in the sacred that the work wishes to represent. It is in fact constituted in the latter texts respectful acceptance of an apparently prior authority that is exterior to the film text, but an authority that is paradoxically only realised through the films obedience to this authority as evidenced through its own enunciative strategies of deference.
However, when examined as a mode of discourse defined by its phenomeno logical properties, the sacred is a practice of temporal organisation that is not determined by this deference or obedience to an exterior discourse of authority. In this phenomenological sense the sacred, and perhaps what Schrader understands by transcendental, is a mode of discourse that is understood to centre itself upon the two principal axes of cognitive experience, time and space. Given that film deals with representations of space (as profound and complex as this may be), but concretely and materially in time, we shall examine the sacred as it is inscribed in temporal experience and interpret Diary in specific relation to this.1
In this light, Bressons particular use of narrative redundancy, at all levels of enunciation, can be understood as subscribing to those processes of ritual identified by Eliade (1961) and the temporal and discursive structure of ritual as elaborated by Turner (1969), and Leach (1986).
By examining structures of ritual it is hoped to demonstrate that the textual effect of Diary is not limited to its participation in the traditional mode of visual representation identified in Chapter Three, but is further enacted through its specific temporal nature as a film text.2 As we shall see, it is Diarys familiarity with such temporality that becomes central to the consideration of this text as ritual.
.c.I. Ritual requirements
Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane (1961) coins the term hierophany to describe the act of manifestation of the sacred (p. 11) and says that in performing such acts any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself . . . (p. 12). For Eliade such acts produce what he regards as a break in the secular world, they reveal or even provoke a fracture of the everyday that allows the sacred, and the hierophanic, to exist within but as separate from the secular. In such cases the everyday is understood to be the pragmatic world of the day-to-day, marked by its temporal linearity (time passes) and temporal causality (actions have worldly effects) what can be conveniently regarded as profane time. The hierophanic is understood to disregard such linearity and causality to enact what is best described as a sacred duration that disregards the everyday.
Ritual, as a specific event within a religious calendar that is appended to the secular calendar, is understood to achieve and participate in such a fracturing. The sacred that it participates within, by virtue of its suspense of a usual pragmatic causality, offers a point of orientation towards what the sacred is understood to represent and a position from which to gaze back upon the apparent chaos of the secular. It is in this sense that Eliade claims:
One essential difference between these two qualities of times [profane and sacred] strikes us immediately: by its very nature sacred time is reversible in the sense that, properly speaking, it is a primordial mythical time made present. Every religious festival, any liturgical time, represents the reactualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past, in the beginning (pp. 689).
The legitimate repeatability of ritual, which allows the reproduction of the sacred event, is a mode of practice that offers a phenomenological orientation towards the secular through its refusal to recognise and participate in the superseding of the everyday which is the inevitable passage of time. Ritual, in its repetition and logical redundancy, seeks to disown, or surrender, such a pragmatic relation to the secular. However, ritual event does subscribe to a temporal structure, it is discursive, and in this manner it regards itself as participating in a sacred economy where discursive reference is not to the everyday. Ritual event, understood by its participants to be outside of secular time, returns the participant to the sacred simply by its refusal to participate in the secular temporal order of logical or pragmatic cause and effect. Of course for Eliade, who already appears to firmly believe in the legitimacy of the sacred on theological grounds, the privileging of the sacred in this manner is simply a description of its temporal economy. However, for those who may not believe in the ritual, or the religion therein contained, the hierophanic moment may not be so readily available.
To this end Turners use of the theory of liminality is a useful method for separating ritual from the sacred as it provides for the specificity of ritual structure (Turner 1969).
As Figure One illustrates, the schematic mapping of liminal structure provides a model of boundary construction that accounts for the production of liminal meaning and can identify the privileged zone that ritual, in the sense we use here, occupies. The demarcation of A from not-A entails an ambiguous zone where the discursive identity of one or the other becomes fluid, indeterminate, where their differences are debated and made manifest. In a similar manner the everyday, through the practice of recognising and assigning meaning, provides a mode of definition of the world that establishes cognitive and social limits to what is otherwise the chaotic experience of the world.3 As structuralism, semiotics and their associated critical disciplines tell us, the referential nature of these boundaries, what they are taken to mean, is more or less arbitrary. That such boundaries are necessary, outside of their referential arbitrariness, needs to be acknowledged with all force as it is this that is critical to my reading of Diary. This necessity is in the cognitive and social production of structure that enables the production of meaning an uncomplicated thesis. Without a provision of structure meaning is not available, and the production of meaning of course operates within the network of differences that such structure provides.
As Turner points out, the middle of the liminal process the marginal or threshold position, is that which organised religion in the west has adopted as the site of its rites and theistic strategies. Such religions produce a cosmology where the everyday world is a secular arena between a lost paradise and an ideal heaven. According to Turner such religions are, strictly speaking, liminal by nature:
What appears to have happened is that with the increasing specialization of society and culture, with progressive complexity in the social division of labor, what was in tribal society principally a set of transitional qualities betwixt and between defined states of culture and society has become itself an institutionalized state (p. 107).
Ambiguity in social, political, familial and institutional position is the mark of, and produced by, the place of the liminal, this ambiguous zone between clearly demarcated realms. As Turner argues:
. . . this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions. Thus, liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon (p. 95).
He goes on to describe how a characteristic attribute of liminality is the requiring of an extreme submission to authority:
. . . neophytes in many rites de passage have to submit to an authority that is nothing less than that of the total community. This community is the repository of the whole gamut of the cultures values, norms, attitudes, sentiments, and relationships (p. 103).
The necessity of this authority shall be examined in due course, but this submission to authority is of course very close, if not identical, to those modes of deference that we have identified in Diary. Broadly, it encompasses the relationship of Bresson to Bernanos, the films formalism to its religious purpose, the actors to the director, the cur to disease, the cur to God, and the film to its audience. This suggests that not only has Diary enacted an ecclesiastical tradition of iconography but that it is also situated within the boundaries of sacred practice, per se, to the extent that we consider the sacred to be at least partially defined by the presence of liminal form. The film not only subscribes to traditional iconographic practice, not only does it represent religious events, but it is sacred in its attitude.
This attitude, offering a liminal position, is evident in the films insistence on its status as a religious text. The properties identified and ascribed to Diary by the critics in Chapter Two, and the practice of religious representation described in Chapter Three, suggest that the film does not seek to persuade or seduce us of its vision merely demonstrate it. It is not a question of spectacle or of narrative seduction through strategies of a hermeneutic (in a Barthesian sense) displacement,4 but instead it insists on its status as a thing separate from the reader. Its formal strategies, those very strategies that critics have been so articulate in describing, are utilised to maintain such separateness through their constant declaration of textual construction and a deferral of seduction by the diegesis the film keeps its audience at arms length. In this manner it can be argued that Diary is a film that wishes to maintain a phenomenological gap between its diegetic space and readerly consciousness. By the films end the texts rhetorical task is transparent that the critical project generally becomes an effort that examines the status of Diarys metanarrational properties; whether of image, voice-over, acting, or diegesis is not, here, to the point, and marginalises Diarys avowed content.
That the cur of Ambricourt receives Grace is not suggested, implied or sketched, but is offered with all the force of the propositional. In the face of this proposition the reader is required to submit to the theological claim of the text, a claim that simply and directly takes its authority from an assumption of the presence of Grace, courtesy of the divine Being. This, I hasten to add, does not demand the accord of the reader, but the reasonable reader cannot choose to argue that the text is ambiguous in the claims it makes in its concluding moments.
Those identified modes of deference, of submission to authority, operating in Diary can be understood to be of a kind with the attitude of humility that is a part of liminal ritual. Bressons refusal to take a position of narrational authority in regard to Bernanoss novel, and his willing subscription to a dogmatic visual aesthetic, can be understood as an abdication of any position of authorial power towards that text being articulated. As Diary endorses and articulates its sacred proposition, Bresson, through a range of stylistic and enunciative strategies, appears to defer any claim to personal narrative voice. Though Bresson exerts a high degree of control over his work, the product of this control is an effort at the effacement of personal narrative voice, a submission to the authority of other discourses, an authority that is of course realised and constituted in this act of submission.
The difficulty of this distinction, between personal effacement in the light of discourses that are recognised as authoritative, and the distinctive stylistic traits that mark Bressons uvre, has historically produced a critical confusion where one has been equated with the other. The effacement of personal authorial intention, producing Bressons famously ascetic manner, is taken to be identical with Bressons religious or thematic project, when in fact one is the product of the other. The style, as such, is the articulation of Bressons already performed act of deference and does not enact, lead to, a retrospective reading, after the event, that is to be reclaimed through an auteurist, or thematic, contextualisation. It may certainly represent Bressons vision of the world, but this vision contains a literal proposition regarding the Holy that is not ambiguous. It is rendered as the thesis of the film, and as such the style of Diary, paradoxically, is not to demonstrate the Holy in a positivist sense but to constitute and demonstrate it by the texts strategies of submission. As Turner has argued in relation to liminal process:
Abasement and humility are regarded not as the final goal of these religions but simply as attributes of the liminal phase through which believers must pass on their way to the final and absolute states of heaven, nirvana, or utopia (p. 195).
Diary, in its submission and narrative distance, is then directed to a context outside of its diegetic delimitation, to a claim of sacred intervention, and explicitly uses narrative closure to produce a rhetorical moment that declares the inadequacy of its own pragmatic explanations, of disease, loneliness and social indifference. Diary forcibly introduces an exterior term that allows narrative completion. Its own material closure, the death of its central character, paradoxically redounds to produce a causal excess (God becomes the central character, if you like) that prevents thematic closure, for at the very least the status of the curs cancer, his loneliness and the communitys indifference, become allegorical and begin to recede into a hermeneutic distance. Such a non-closure means that Diary becomes a process and a moment through which we are intended to pass and does not claim any greater status than this for itself. The thematic naming of an infinite condition cancels, negates, the finitude of the text and its temporal explanations. Diary becomes an act of effacement as it wishes to dissolve itself in its own epiphany, and to the extent that this occurs Diary could be understood to have achieved its project.
However, in considering Diary as a liminal text, we not only identify internal liminal strategies but are presented with the possibility that the film has a specific relation to the temporal economy of sacred performance.
To demonstrate Diarys participation in such an economy I turn to a more explicit anthropological source, and through this demonstrate that the repetition and structural redundancy of ritual process is a sophisticated device for the suspension of profane time. Here I shall rely on the structural anthropology of Edmund Leach (1986).
.c.II. Ritual articulation
In ritual we see that a rite de passage (see Figure Two) requires the demarcation of a space, to use a necessary physical metaphor, that articulates a boundary, or more specifically the border of a boundary. This is the region between two determined states that becomes empowered through its being the site of transition from one to the other (see Figure Three). Such passage is liminal in structure where, most simply, and usefully, a region is recognised between conditions, in the margins, where issues of cultural status, life events, or simply discursive practice are marked by this marginality.5 This is synonymous with what Eliade (1961) has described:
The threshold that separates . . . two spaces also indicates the distance between two modes of being, the profane and the religious. The threshold is the limit, the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds and at the same time the paradoxical place where those worlds communicate, where passage from the profane to the sacred world becomes possible (p. 25).
For Eliade this place is already sacred, while for Leach this sacredness is understood to be the product of its temporal location. Its marginality, in relation to the more concrete states or structures that surround it, produces an uncertainty that leads to its privileging. Its indeterminacy attracts discursive activity that is an over-determined and anxious response to the liminals potential dissolution of boundary, between realms as it is.6 The intermediate nature of the liminal, its status as between, becomes privileged not only because here the crossing of the boundary occurs, but it is within this space, within the very boundary, that the value and relative stability of what lies on either side is determined. Identity, the stability in Sameness, can only be enacted at the edges where its Other is held at bay, where its difference is asserted. If meaning is produced through the provision of a differentiating structure, and if such structure constitutes discursive regions that are by definition bounded, then those spaces where boundaries intersect define the relation of discursive structures to one another. Clearly such a potentially undetermined region requires territorialisation, an enforcement of boundedness that produces its occupation, an activity and meaning that anxiously seeks solidity through its strict prescription of behaviour. What falls outside of these boundaries escapes, or exceeds, structure and cannot be articulated, threatening the security of identity, of Sameness, becoming an Other that is always delegated a position of externality, indicated but unable to be named.
Despite attempts to allay the anxiety of the marginal, the liminal site retains an inevitable ambiguity that is produced from being within and without the discursive territories concerned. It is without in relation to the discursive arenas that it arbitrates, being neither wholly of one nor the other, yet it is within, since its domain is the product of this discursive mediation. The liminal site becomes one that is enclosed and enveloped by its surrounding discursive fields yet it is of a different logical order than that which it is enclosed by as it contains the potential to exceed the boundedness of these discursive fields. It is greater than the sum of its parts and is not able to be reduced to the relation between these fields. It is not merely dusk, to use the simple example of night and day a bit of day and a bit of night but a loss of one to the other, a moment of possibility that contains the potential of the loss of distinction, of difference, of a point where there is the identity of beginning, or end, of identity. As a region of discursive movement it is a realm marked by possibility, a potential that threatens the constructed and arbitrary solidity of the everyday, pragmatic, and orthodox discourses that it produces and is produced by.
As a consequence, like the production of authority we saw earlier, the liminals marginality determines the value of its surrounding bounded fields, its own indeterminacy forcing their occupation and settlement to produce the image of a solidity of structure that guarantees these territories relation to a world, making such a world articulate and subject to human process.7 This is not a model of simple opposition, of A/not-A, nor one of mere difference, but one where such opposition or difference can only be determined through discursive use, i.e. its enactment or performance. The opposition, the relation between terms, can only gain currency and normative value through discourse and upon the point of separation between the two respective poles; around the threshold where one dissolves into the other, where A becomes not-A. This frontier is not the moment or discrete point represented by the dividing / but is an ambiguous zone where the opposition is subject to discursive battle of ideology, of desire, of rhetoric, of all forms of investment, in short by the institutions of discourse meaning becomes fluid, undetermined. Therefore meaning as a discursive activity can be understood to be determined by a set of relations, oppositions, that are validated in the relation of these relations, liminality, in the arbitration of their value at their points of contact, which is ontologically simultaneous with their points of difference. This is why the liminal is of a different order to those structures it is surrounded by it is within these margins that a centre, Sameness and identity, is determined.8
As a consequence the liminal site is an ambiguous position as it is constructed by its relation to that which surrounds it, yet that which surrounds it is defined by the provision of this boundary. On the one hand it is a product of that which is outside, and its only value, status, and meaning is derived from the nature of the relationship to its external terms. These external terms operate as the privileged but excluded elements that the liminal state is predicated upon. On the other hand the meaning and solidity of these external terms are predicated on the assumed and attempted resolution of the liminals ambiguity.
As Leach (1986) writes:
In principle, a boundary has no dimension. My garden abuts directly on that of my neighbour; the frontier of France abuts directly on that of Switzerland, and so on. But if the boundary is to be marked on the ground the marker itself will take up space. Neighbouring gardens tend to be separated by fences and ditches; national frontiers by strips of no mans land. It is the nature of such markers of boundaries that they are ambiguous in implication and a source of conflict and anxiety.
The principle that all boundaries are artificial interruptions to what is naturally continuous, and that the ambiguity, which is implicit inarenas that would, otherwise, as more or less arbitrary divisions, be ambiguous but whose ambiguity is displaced onto the site of their construction, their points of indeterminate determination.either side of the liminal event. Importantly, the liminal site is marked with the anxiety and ambiguity that comes from being between conditions, between arenas that would, otherwise, as more or less arbitrary divisions, be ambiguous but whose ambiguity is displaced onto the site of their construction, their points of indeterminate determination.
The anxiety that is the product of liminal ambiguity requires a separateness of space and a deliberateness of its performance that is distinct from the everyday. This is achieved through a reliance on traditional manners of practice. The ritual event is seen to be part of a larger tradition within which the individual event is implicated and subsumed. It is its participation in this tradition that grants ritual the authority that it is understood to have, for without this the marginal and ambiguous status of the ritual event would flood any specific liminal episode. Liminal events have meaning through the relations of an explicit outside, the before and after, and the internally implicit possibilities of discursive excess and exteriority. The dependence on the maintenance of a traditional and conservative mode of conduct becomes a concretisation of structure and process that abets the disavowal of the anxiety of the marginal.
The dependence on traditional performance constrains the potential excess, even loss, of meaning through a delimited permanency of practice. It is within this that a movement away from, or outside of, secular time occurs. The ability to repeat the ritual performance when it is required, without apparent or significant change, is to remove the event from what could be regarded romantically as the ravages of time. The movement of the individual through a temporal world that can never be recovered, the loss of our presents, is suspended through the individuals participation in events that are cyclical, ritualistic and liminal. For its participants the economy of the event is determined by recurring demands that are distinct from the pragmatic direction of the everyday.
Furthermore, the repetition of ritual involves the implicit preservation of discursive context in the face of significant external alterations to ritual performance. It becomes a preservation of context which negates the passage of the world it is located within, a denial of the re-contextualisation that is inherent in discursive repetition, and so a reinforcement, an assertion of stability and solidity, of intention and understanding within discourse and its repetition the very fabric of difference.
That ritual performance does change, and of course may change radically from performance to performance, does not alter this temporal economy. At all times it is reliant on a recognition of a traditional practice that has its authority through the prescription, however simply, of the proper manner in which such occasions are conducted. One may marry barefoot in the park with a civil celebrant, pop music and barbecue, but the major element of the tradition of the ritual event is preserved in the maintenance of the institution of marriage and the performance of the event in a separate sphere to the everyday. Such an event will always, by definition, be liminal in structure.
In relation to this economy we have the possibility of understanding film as a liminal event in terms of an anthropological reading of its institutional position. Our willing exchange of money to enter a darkening auditorium is an act that sets aside, brackets off, the everyday. For the duration of the filmic event the everyday is suspended as we participate in a discursive region that literally plays along the borders of the real and the fantastic, the actual and the possible, the probable and the impossible.9 This does not require that the content, or experience of cinema, per se, is liminal or sacred though interesting possibilities are raised by this proposition but that its institutional structure does appear to exist in a homological relation to sacred structure.
Such an argument addresses general issues of the historical and material practice of cinema and suggests an anthropological point of entry to their explication. However, as I will demonstrate, Diary, in its specific temporal processes, takes place within the province of sacred and ritual performance.
The central element of this is evident in the commonplace reading of the film which centres on the narrative redundancy that is produced by Diarys repeated vocalisation of the revealed written text, and its verbal description of pro-filmic action. This redundancy produces a suspension of the usual pragmatic order, and a directedness of narrative where a linear temporal logic is dedicated to the provision of new information which propels, is the motor of, forward narrative movement. Though all narratives use redundancy, devices of repetition, to ensure readerly comprehension, Diary foregrounds such repetition to the extent where it is a feature, formally speaking, of the text. This repetition, in the specificity of its use in Diary of a Country Priest, I believe opens onto the economy of ritual as I have begun to explain it.
.c.III. Diary and ritual performance
A literal reading of Diary suggests a story about a priest who occupies a liminal position both in relation to his everyday world and to the religious world of faith.
A second possibilitature of sacred experience. In this reading Diary is recognised as not only describing the marginal nature of religious experience but as also seeking to represent it, to and for its readers. A third reading, one that is an extension of the implications of the former, suggests that all aspects of the text, its formal and material nature, its enactment, and its effect, open onto or participate in what we can regard as the temporal economy of the sacred. ts formal and material nature, its enactment, and its effect, open onto or participate in what we can regard as the temporal economy of the sacred.
The redundancy of Diary is structurally akin to that evidenced in religious practice, specifically the repetition that is exercised in prayer and meditative chants, and the requirement that ritual involves repetition a repetition borne of the need for the ritual event to be defined, delimited and constrained, by its displaced definition as a traditional event.10 Such redundancy provides a suspension of the everyday an everyday understood as a practical logic of cause and effect, a logic dedicated to the pragmatic comprehension and articulation of corporeal experience a suspension that seeks to ignore the irretrievable passage of time.
Diary, in its unfolding, participates in an inevitable forward movement of story, but its emphasised redundancies force it to fall back upon itself, its narrative strategies returning to itself, reflexively enfolding its own discourse and, in so doing, forcing a separation between worldly and textual reference. Diary uses a mode of visual representation, cinema, that lays stress on its verisimilitude, its veridical nature, yet its specific strategies, while maintaining this worldliness, emphasise its own materiality in terms of a temporal economy that rebounds, redundantly, off its necessary linear flow. As film, a moving image that absolutely determines its time of reading, Diary is of an inevitable temporality. Yet, and because of this, its redundancy allows it to move towards a sacred economy as its repetitions deflate temporal succession, suspend directed movement, and surrender the cinemas a priori relation to causality and event, a relation that is guaranteed through the presence of movement in a phenomenally real time that is adjacent to the temporality experienced in the everyday. Diary attempts to disallow readings of the film that do not admit a religious element, it seeks to suspend a direct and simple indexical relation to the everyday world, and so tries to demand readings that recognise the intervention of Grace. The text seeks to make material this intervention through its deferral of secular explanation and suspension of usual temporal succession explanation is displaced onto the epiphanic ending, producing a concentrated moment of narrative illumination for which the previously created logical vacuum has prepared the viewer. Meaning and explanation, sense and reference, are provided in the famous shadow of the cross and the reading of the line tout est grce, declaring an explanation that is intended to overwhelm through its absolute determination of narrative and referential meaning.
Diarys tautology, then, is its construction of a text and experience that interrogates, through its suspension, everyday temporal explanation and then, through its own determined processes, provides a metaphysical account for the possibility of temporal understanding as a product of divine Grace it proposes, and answers, the conditions for its own terms. Diary, as it repeats its visual, aural, and structural narrative elements, produces an inevitable forward movement of story, but its redundancy, which by its very definition means it must be emphasised, forces it to fall back upon itself.
.c.IV. Diary, ritual time, and epiphany
The liminals position within the marginal and potentially sacred edges of boundary show that ritual redundancy is a deferral of times necessarily linear logic. The movement between realms, across the boundaries, a movement forward through time, is countered (of course never absolutely), held in abeyance. Cause and effect are understood to rely on the necessary recognition of the passage of time, and the cyclic and repetitive nature of ritual time struggles to remove itself from the temporality of the secular world by its refusal to recognise or participate in the passing that is the subjects relation to the secular world, or by marking such passage as a part of a returning cycle that exceeds any subject. This is achieved through a reliance on, and free acceptance of, a traditional form of enaction. Its status and meaning are derived from tradition which provides a formal structure for the text and its performance and, as with all other relations that are constituted by their acceptance of a tradition, authority is understood to be bestowed in and via this deference to tradition.
Within the processes of ritualisation the reliance on redundancy in all of its aspects is an active refusal of change, change that is understood, reasonably, to be the signature of the seculars transitory passage, of difference, progression, and a passing that projects itself ahead in the acknowledgment of the loss of the moment. Ritual participates in an economy that deems itself to be outside of, or perhaps even irrelevant to, the secular. Its status and authority are determined in a relation of apparent indifference to the secular, but the sacred becomes a process of validation for the everyday as it is through the concretisation of such events, their demarcation as different, that such acts are allowed to bear the anxiety and threat of the border. Boundaries are a necessary condition for the determination of meaning: to make them secure they need to be naturalised, given some sort of referential solidity which disavows their arbitrary carving of reference from the continuing world. This arbitrariness, their status as constituted rather than found, artificial rather than natural, is denied and its threat displaced onto events that are, in these terms, celebrations of the determination and operation of borders, of the arbitrary and of structure. Liminal marginality, in relation to the secular, a relation that determines each, has placed upon it the anxiousness of the loss and recovery of discursive authority: it grants the possibility of referential solidity for the secular through this vindication of its Other. It carries as its condition the despair that comes of the discursive risk where the contextual malleability of context of repetition and arbitrary demarcation contains the possibility of reference and communication. As Smith (1988) has commented:
A sacred place is a place of clarification (a focusing lens) where men and gods are held to be transparent to one another. It is a place where, as in all forms of communication, static and noise (i.e., the accidental) are decreased so that the exchange of information can be increased. In communication, the device by which this is accomplished is redundancy; in our examples, through ritual repetition and routinization (p. 54).
Diarys textual effect is located in this epiphany, but it is an epiphany that is produced from the textual suspension of the usual logical action of narrative and the usual processes that are an a priori condition of filmic narration with its dedicated recording and replaying of the process of time.
It is through its reliance on time that Diary seeks this epiphany and this is achieved through a process, as in ritual, that renders the phenomenological possibilities of time concrete. It metaphorically makes manifest that which is an
a priori condition of meaning and structure but which of itself, as an a priori condition, is unavailable to cognitive experience or articulation. Time, in and of itself, is unavailable to us, for as Harris (1988) has pointed out: Any spatial motion takes time, occurs in time, as well as in space; but the passage of time itself cannot take time. There is no other time in which it could occur (p. 21). Furthermore time as it is recognised in experience is spatial motion takes time, occurs in time, as well as in space; but the passage of time itself cannot take time. There is no other time in which it could occur (p. 21). Furthermore time as it is recognised in experience is, or can only be, the present moment. Harris, paraphrasing Augustine, rhetorically asks: re the future, for it does not yet exist to be measured. The present, because of times continuous passage, has no duration, so how can we measure that? Yet we do measure time, and, therefore, this question should be answerable (p. 22).
This suggests that time can only be recognised through its movement, that is, via a passage through space. Space, being divisible, can be determined or comprehended in units, in parts, and in this manner it is empirically available. Time, on the other hand, allows no such division for it is constituted by, and comprehended as, a series of present moments. It is against this experience of presentness that the past is determined as what once was, and that the future is anticipated as what will be. The present moment though, of itself, is empirically unavailable, it is always already gone yet about to be, it is caught between past and future, but is the moment from which we define past and future. Unlike space, whose units are discrete, presentness in its passing poses the problem of the possible moments between itself and the past that was and future that will be: a metre of land can always be divided, a present moment cannot.
Time, unlike space, has only one dimension and an irreversible direction, we cannot traverse it as we can space. To this extent we can claim that the sensible experience of time is transcendental, in the philosophical sense, as it requires the
a priori synthesis of its moments, demonstrating that the present can never be self-identical for us or to itself.
Through its subscription to a ritual temporal economy Diary makes this transcendental feature of time concrete. Its use of redundancy, and the deferral of causal attribution until its conclusion, is a negotiation, a playing, with the phenomenological conditions that make explanation possible the dependence of cause on the directedness of time. It is this activity that Schrader equates with the sacred and it is rituals ability to render this temporal precondition of meaning concrete that separates it from the everyday. Its structured redundancies make manifest the processes that operate between discursive realms, in Diarys case a privileged realm of the comprehension of time and our consciousness of a temporal and meaningful world.
To turn to another meta-discourse, the second law of thermodynamics demonstrates that closed systems exhibit an increase in entropy through time. It is this condition that gives time its single and uniform direction, and its irreversibility. Diary in its strict use of repetition struggles against this condition by its insistence on order, on narrative regularity and redundancy. It thumbs its nose at the disorder of the world, the necessarily increasing disorder that is the evidence, the proof, of the passage of time, by the provision of increasing order, increased redundancy that is a loss of entropy. Diary produces and claims an ordered cosmology through a sacred fiat that is directly and explicitly counter to the physical condition of that cosmos. It plays with order and repetition as these are the markers that produce a literal and irreversible direction to time, that offer the possibility of a logos.
In this sense Diary is, quite literally, a meta-physical text as it produces a discourse that delimits and describes the conditions that accomplish discourse. It is this that Diary successfully manifests and it is this that renders ritual effective and necessary. To negotiate these amorphous bounds, to play with them, is to make tangible the intangible.
1. Film, when used as a recording device, always produces a representation of space, a representation that does appear to use the same cognitive cues as natural perception (Andrew 1984a, Chs. 23). However the screen always remains two-dimensional, whereas one minute of action filmed remains one minute of action projected. The time of events is of course able to be elided in film, though it does not have to be, whereas space is always a representation.
2. It needs to be recognised that the temporal nature of narrative, though immanent to its logical realisation, is explicit in the cinemas fixed duration of enunciation and so is a literal precondition of cinema.
3. The requirement and relation of boundary production and recognition to the physical nature of cognition and how this relates to social structure is explored by Bateson (1988, passim).
4. Displacement is intended to retain its Freudian inflection.
5. That such a region, as in a rite of passage, is given its own status, does not affect this. The movement from the everyday to the sacred via ritual is structurally synonymous with the rite of passage, where the movement is from the everyday to the everyday via the sacred. In each the middle term is liminal though there is a difference in, or between, the terms or conditions between which the liminal is situated.
6. My use of discourse here is broad and refers to all modes of inter-personal activity, that is wherever communication, of any nature, is operative.
7. Or vice versa, I suppose.
8. Furthermore it can be seen that these demarcated realms do not exist in the simple economy as shown in Figure One, that is of one region adjoining another, but that each realm is constituted by its relation to a multitude of such boundary relations, and that each region in fact is only constituted in and through these relations. The meaning of any particular region is determined by all the sets of relations to other regions that determine it, its meaning does not inhere to those elements that we might identify as being constitutive of the bounded realm.
9. Of course this is not limited to the cinema but is evident in other events such as theatre, music and sport where participants go to performances where the everyday is suspended and other, or alternative, conditions are enacted.
10. Whether repetition within the specific event or in the reproduction of the event in later episodes.
Chapter Five 1
Chapter Five
An impossible economy Bresson, Diary, God
Diary through its use of time becomes a ritual performance and it is as this performance that Diarys textual effect becomes possible. Such an effect is conditional on the readers felicitous performance where the individual reader accepts the conditions of the text and this, in turn, is utilised in Diary to produce the possibility of a discursive presence that is eventually denied. It is central to the claim that Diary makes that as cinema it contains the possibility of revelation, of revealing and making manifest, through the film image, a sacred presence. Diarys failure to do so is not a recanting of its promise but is a manifestation of the Otherness of God, an Otherness that Diary can only metaphorically address through death. To manage this argument I argue for the possibility of presence in the text and a need for readerly seriousness so that, to use J.L. Austins term, Diary can have perlocutionary effect.
.c.I. Performative seriousness
In How To Do Things With Words (1990) Austin quite carefully, and specifically, separates what he calls the serious performative from the non-serious. The latter, he insists, are further matters which we are not trenching upon. For example, there are insinuating (and other non-literal uses of language), joking (and other non-serious uses of language) (p. 122). For Austin such matters are believed to be marginal, at best only parasitic on the proper performative, and are cases of an unhappy performative as that uttered is not accepted by all concerned parties: If somebody issues a performative utterance, and the utterance is classed as a misfire because the procedure invoked is not accepted, it is presumably persons other than the speaker who do not accept it (at least if the speaker is speaking seriously) (p. 27).
Derrida, in Signature event context (1977), subjects Austin to several substantial criticisms. The first revolves around Austins understanding of speech-acts as being restricted to issues of communicational intent, whereas Derrida argues that such a theory would be tantamount to communicating a force through the impetus of a mark (p. 186), as context and convention, the associates of force, cannot be maintained due to the rule of iterability. The conflation of the constative into the performative fails for the same reason as it cannot be maintained that that [the constative actually doing something] constitutes its internal structure, its manifest function or destination, as in the case of the performative . . . hence the question of the performatives truth value is suspended to be replaced by the value of force, of difference of force (illocutionary or perlocutionary force) (p. 187). For Derrida such claims are understood to be reliant on the recognition of the present intention of the speaker; because Austin brackets the issue of locution (of the word as determined in and by diffrance) his claims fall prey to the very conditions of locution where presence can never be properly available to the participants of the communicative event.
However, as Petrey (1990) argues:
For Austin, the conventions that matter those that allow speech to act are always socially specific and historically constituted. For Derrida, the conventions that matter apply to the units of every signifying form and thus inhere in the nature of the mark. Since conventions inherent in the mark are obviously trans-historical and universal, Derridas conventions are independent of context whereas Austins are coterminous with it (pp. 1389).
As the rules Austin has applied suggest, the performative and the emphasis of speech-act theory fall on the contextual nature of the utterance, where the felicity or otherwise of the discursive event is based on its recognition and participation within a socially recognised context.
Derrida, nevertheless, insists that:
Austin does not ponder the consequences issuing from the fact that a possibility a possible risk is always possible, and is in some sense a necessary possibility. Nor whether once such a necessary possibility of infelicity is recognized infelicity still constitutes an accident. What is a success when the possibility of infelicity continues to constitute its structure? (p. 189).
That there is always the possibility of infelicity, of misunderstanding, does not affect the status of the conventional, nor does it suggest, as the implication appears to be, that there is a discrete or uniform meaning or intention that is necessary for a felicitous performance. Indeed, because misunderstanding, infelicity, is already a condition of the world we can regard communication as a response to this a response that in no way removes or alters the basis of communication in the possibility of its misunderstanding. This is a reversal of Derridas position where he argues that because context cannot be determined infelicity is always possible, however it is because there is already misunderstanding between potential communicants, already the presence of multiple contexts, that there is a demand for communication.1
However, it is Derridas specific criticism of Austins parasitism that I need to address for my claim is that Diarys textual effect is a product of a necessarily felicitous reading.
Derrida claims that Austin excludes:
the possibility for every performative utterance (and a priori every other utterance) to be quoted. Now Austin excludes this possibility (and the general theory which would account for it) with a kind of lateral insistence, all the more significant in its off-handedness. He insists on the fact that this possibility remains abnormal, parasitic, that it constitutes a kind of extenuation or agonized succumbing of language that we should strenuously distance ourselves from and resolutely ignore (pp. 18990).
As a consequence Derrida goes on to ask:
For, ultimately, isnt it true that what Austin excludes as anomaly, exception, non-serious, citation (on stage, in a poem, or a soliloquy) is the determined modification of a general citationality or rather, a general iterability without which there would not even be a successful performative? (p. 191).
Well, yes. But what Austin, in his own examples, and Derrida following suit, has overlooked, indeed ignored, is that the performative, such as the promise of the stage actor, occurs in a specific and conventional context that must be recognised by all members of the communicative community for it to succeed to be felicitous. The context of performance, in both the manner of the performance of the play and the performance of its performatives, must be taken in its seriousness, so meeting Austins conditions, for it to be successful. Indeed, if we were to take the actors promise literally, to believe this promise, then this infelicity would be our confusion of what and where the speech situation is, its context would be infelicitous, we would have taken the literal performance of the play seriously and confused it with the normal speech situation. The issue of felicity and infelicity then resides within the essential seriousness of the discursive situation, its context of uttering, and the readers granting of such seriousness. Parasitic conditions, in Derridas sense, do not exist, they are parasitic to the extent that they are mimetic of usual (conventional) discursive conditions and practice but they still meet Austins conditions of performative utterance the play must be taken seriously for the actors promise to be taken non-seriously.
That a discursive performance is first of all this invitation to hermeneutic performance also suggests that such an endeavour, to be felicitous, requires the seriousness of the discursive performance to be acknowledged. This seriousness is subject to a readerly intention that is performative and that in this serious regard of the text already constitutes a perlocutionary effect. The text may be mocked in retrospect, but only in retrospect. This seriousness is in opposition to two modes of non-seriousness. The first is marked by a disregard of, or even indifference to, the textual event, and in such cases the discursive event is plainly infelicitous. This is not the realm of those readings that we could be ambitious enough to call wrong, for the true/false distinction is inapplicable. It is, rather, an issue of infelicity. They are readings that have failed because the rudiments of the readerly-textual contract have not been maintained to the point where the texts project has been able to be completed (whether from boredom, dislike, distrust, mechanical failure, or any number of possible reasons), dependent as it is on readerly performance, which, I repeat, is a condition of felicity linked to the recognition of the texts legitimacy its seriousness.
The other form of non-seriousness is more properly a veiled mode of seriousness and involves play. Here the discursive event must be taken in all its seriousness for it is only in recognition of this seriousness, of the legitimacy of the discursive event, (and its legitimacy can only be based on the recognition of the text as a thing that seeks to do or be something, that is to communicate) that it can be played with. The latter is probably Derridas general mode of reading, interpreting and re-contextualising, and it can only be performed from a position that already recognises the seriousness of the text, for in this seriousness the text, as ephemeral as it is, is solidified as an object. Playing can only be performed from a position of seriousness, the rules of the game constituting arbitrary but absolute boundaries which, even in cheating, are respected, and playing becomes a negotiation and celebration, through explicit declaration, of such borders. It is only in the first form of non-seriousness that communication collapses as the refusal to take it as serious removes the only legitimacy it can claim.2
.c.II. Iterability, grammar, discourse
For Derrida the possibility of the sign, in the semiotic sense, is founded on the principle of iterability the sign is able to be repeated by virtue of its being recognised as a sign. This possibility of repetition suggests that any given sign is founded not on representing the intention of its utterer, an economy of presence, nor on any mechanical and technological ability to substitute for the position of the speaker in their absence, but is in fact the marking of the absence of that which is referred to both as a discursive event between communicants, and as reference having an object and meaning. The sign is inscribed by this absence, whereas historically the sign has been considered to be an unproblematic accessory, a supplement, to the presence of thought in utterance.3 Such a supplement is understood to be an adjunct and not an integral or establishing condition of the sign in its dependence on absence. The status and operation of such absence becomes central to Derridas essay as he seeks to demonstrate that such absence is the condition for all discourse, and is not merely the representation of the absent sender by proxy, as it were.
Derrida argues that this absence is constitutive of writing as sign, as it is the iterability of the sign, its ability to be able to be repeated in an indefinite sense (an infinite sense as far as language and its use can be deemed infinite) outside of specific contextualisation, that produces writing. The marks that make writing must first of all (as far as we can speak of origin) contain no presence, in any particular sense, as this is what allows the possibility of their use in their repetition. Derrida, in this regard, makes three basic claims:
1) A written sign, in the current meaning of the word, is a mark that subsists, one which does not exhaust itself in the moment of its inscription and which can give rise to an iteration in the absence and beyond the presence of the empirically determined subject . . . 2) At the same time, a written sign carries with it a force that breaks with its context, that is, with the collectivity of presences organizing the moment of its inscription. This breaking force is not an accidental predicate but the very structure of the written text . . . a written syntagma can always be detached from the chain in which it is inserted or given without causing it to lose all possibility of functioning . . . 3) This force of rupture is tied to the spacing that constitutes the written sign: spacing which separates it from other elements of the internal contextual chain (the always open possibility of its disengagement and graft), but also from all forms of present reference . . . objective or subjective (pp. 1812).
The sign as mark is seen to emerge from absence, not to supersede it but to reside, dialectically, alongside, and as a consequence the sign, all signs, come under the general banner of the grapheme in general; which is to say . . . the non-present remainder of a differential mark cut off from its putative production or origin
(p. 183). However, the cinematic signifier, per se, and specifically as it is called upon to operate in Diary, offers the rudimentary beginnings of a critique of the status of iterability.
(Immediately to bracket a possible objection, that of the move from a Saussurean to a Peircean semiotics, from the arbitrary to the motivated sign, is not to prevent such an objection but to suspend it. Strategically to claim a position for cinema in regard to Derrida is performed through two possibilities: 1) that Derrida assumes to include it in his definition of communication; and 2) that if he does not then as a communicational system it has the possibility of being an unnamed supplement to his argument. That there may be a difference between the cinematic signifier and language as Derrida uses the term does not appear to be entertained by Derrida in Signature event context (1977). He states:
I offer here the following two propositions or hypotheses:
1) since every sign, whether in the language of action or in articulated language (before even the intervention of writing in the classical sense), presupposes a certain absence (to be determined), the absence within the particular field of writing will have to be of an original type if one intends to grant any specificity whatsoever to the written sign;
2) if perchance the predicate thus introduced to characterize the absence peculip of meaning and of idea, the concept of communication, of the sign, etc.) would appear to be non-critical, ill-formed, or destined, rather, to insure the authority and the force of a certain historical discourse (p. 179). concepts to whose generality writing had been subordinated (including the concept itself qua meaning, idea or grasp of meaning and of idea, the concept of communication, of the sign, etc.) would appear to be non-critical, ill-formed, or destined, rather, to insure the authority and the force of a certain historical discourse (p. 179).
He later declares:
. . . I would like to demonstrate that the traits that can be recognized in the classical, narrowly defined concept of writing, are generalizable. They are valid not only for all orders of signs and for all languages in general but moreover, beyond semio-linguistic communication, for the entire field of what philosophy would call experience, even the experience of being: the above-mentioned presence (p. 181).
In other words he grants his argument the province of all communication, of all discursive systems.4 Indeed, it is from such a position that Brunette and Wills (1989) produce their coffee shop application of Derrida to film theory, explicitly claiming:
. . . spoken language is constituted by the possibility of repeatable units, phonemes, words, syntaxes, and therefore the spoken must be defined as written.
The same can be said of film: to the extent that it is a language, it is to be considered as a type of writing (p. 61).
It is not Derrida per se that our argument contests but Derrida and film theory, and this is not so much to remove the possibility of a Derridean approach to cinema as an effort towards rewriting the possibility of the relation.)
Though the film image participates in an economy of absence, where it maintains the trace of that which is absent, the object of which it is the trace allows direct referential status: the thing was there. In an uncomplicated example we only need to compare the linguistic sign gate with any film image of a gate, say the gates to the chateau in Diary. Unlike the linguistic sign, which has no particular attribute apart from the web of differences which suspends it, the film image is of a particular gate,
a specific gate, it bears the mark of the individual, not the general. In terms of an iterability this produces a specific and limiting sense of repetition where even were we to re-contextualise the image, say insert it into a different film, it is still an image of that gate, it alure of its original object. In an identical manner the proper name, say my own Adrian is subject to the iterable, to repetition and alterity. It produces and serves the deconstructive paradox that Derrida (1977, pp. 1936) demonstrates in relation to the signature, the contradiction where on the one hand the signature operates contractually as my individual and specific mark, yet, on the other, to achieve this very purpose it must approach, as near as possible, identicalness in each of its performative instances. The film image of me operates as the reverse of this: it always and forever records a specific moment, and myself as a specific object. This representation, when re-enacted discursively, can freely operate and maintain its status in my absence, even the radical absence that is my death, however the referential status of the signifier remains constant in its specific relation to the thing that I happen to be. Iterability in the cinema becomes the repetition and re-contextualising of a specific discursive mark that always offers its privileged referentiality as a constraint upon such re-contextualisation. Our hypothetical gate can be described, in practical terms, in an infinite number of ways, our filmed gate, while also able to be filmed in an infinite number of ways, is not even able to carry the qualification of being hypothetical.hetical gate can be described, in practical terms, in an infinite number of ways, our filmed gate, while also able to be filmed in an infinite number of ways, is not even able to carry the qualification of being hypothetical.
Again I must hesitate and address, as an aside, a possible objection. A possible deconstructive move could be available regarding my argument. This would point out that my claims, contra-Derrida, are based on reference whereas Derridas argument is in fact based on discursive sense. As Derrida claims:
Every sign, linguistic or non-linguistic, spoken or written (in the current sense of the opposition), in a small or a large unit, can be cited, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with any given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. This does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchoring (pp. 1856).
To address this possible criticism, most bluntly, I suggest that quotation marks occupy a position of supplementarity in Derridas argument. Citation is only available through the use of, can only be recognised by, those marks that indicate prior utterance, previous authorship (ownership) of these signs. Without quotation marks the attribution of a previous authority to utter, of a history and a place already in the world the text is only ever an instance of a new utterance, not the re-contextualising of a previous discursive event. Quotation marks are necessary to indicate previous ownership, allow re-contextualisation, to produce new meanings, but always in the light of a history that preserves an identity as a realised event, as an intention to have said. As a supplement, quotation marks are the signs of a discursive event, they indicate an act of communication: their reference is to an intention to mean, an intention that is prior to what is meant. This is the case in cinema where quotation needs to be signalled to be guaranteed, otherwise it is only ever an issue of readerly felicity and if unrecognised the image will bear the import of being a new utterance. For the filmed gate to be re-contextualised, in Derridas sense, requires marks of quotation, otherwise it is a new utterance.
Prior to, or outside of, discourse any sign offers itself only as a potential sign for a discursive event, but outside of this discursive event it cannot be said to be anything. It is a condition of iterability that a sign be subject to this indeterminacy as this allows its repetition, and so the possibility of its recognition. The name Adrian precedes me, just as there are other Adrians in the world. However, unlike words, cinema does not need a langue, to film the gate does not require the immanent rules of a grammar, conceptual difference, or rules of material utterance, it does not require the sign that is the image of the gate to be already a part of a language of representation, to be immanent within langue and awaiting its moments in parole. To film myself, an Adrian, does not require that there have been other myselfs, unlike the condition of naming, for film does not name, is not a condition of words. To this extent Derridas argument for speech and writing and its extension to other representational systems is maintaining the logocentrism that he seeks to displace, placing such systems in a position of Otherness.
Cinema makes this argument concrete as, at the level of the sign (recognising the impossible difficulty (see Metz 1974 passim) of producing an adequate typology of the cinematic sign), it is ontologically different from its linguistic neighbour. Minimal units in cinema have a specificity that is already discursive and can be directly referential. Any given image in cinema, even removed from its usual syntagmatic flow, offers more than the discrete signifier of the linguistic model. The opening image in Diary the cur standing by his bicycle looking toward us, the camera observing from behind the closed iron gates of the chateau, a pale and almost humble figure standing in the mud under the plain and undistinguished sky, while we hear cars rumble past obviously exceeds the almost simple prescriptions and operations of difference that produce the linguistic signifier. This is what Barthes (1977) has described as the analogous nature of photographic representation (as opposed to the digital codes of linguistic signification), where the film image is always and already discursive.
.c.III. Grammar
For the operation of grammar and the possibility of an agrammaticality this is of significant consequence. If the minimal graphematic marks in the cinema are already discursive and not subject to iterability then the role, operation, and necessity of grammar has been superseded, or at best rendered irrelevant. Grammar is the law that devolves upon the vacant sounds or marks, that fills and prescribes the spaces between words, that combines with readerly context to produce and enable discourse. But the cinematic sign, already discursively replete, has no need for such laws of internal combination or articulation, it is already there, already meaningful.6 It is not possible, in cinematic enunciation, to be un- or a- grammatical: any images, any two shots, can be joined to produce a cinematic text. This is not to suggest that relations between shots are necessarily transparent in their intelligibility the classic example from fictional film making is probably the enigmatic status and significance of Ozus images of buildings, washing lines and railway stations that punctuate, apparently indifferently, the episodes in his films; or perhaps the early work of the surrealists.7 But the relation of shots within sequences, or of sequences to each other, is not predicated on the presence of any formal grammatical structure.8
This suggests that Derridas argument requires a separation between the iterable sign as it awaits the determination of its possibilities in discourse, and the iterable sign after it has received the mark of such inscription. The former is vacant for until it becomes discursive it has no status, it is only a possibility, a potential that is maintained in its immanence (langue) that is prior to, but dependent upon, its use (parole). The sign can only ever exist, that is be, in discourse. The mark, the word, before being inscribed within a discourse has no status beyond its possibility or availability as an attempt to designate, but once so inscribed it cannot help but designate, have reference, even if such reference is to its own communicative failure. This is of course the use to which Derrida (1977) puts Husserls discussion of grammar, and establishes the category of the agrammatical:
even the green is either itself still signifies an example of agrammaticality. And this is the possibility on which I want to insist: the possibility of disengagement and citational graft which belongs to the structure of every mark, spoken or written, and which constitutes every mark in writing before and outside of every horizon of semio-linguistic communication . . . (p. 185).
Any of the terms the, green, is, either, prior to their being realised in the discursive event that is their use, cannot be discussed as examples of agrammaticality because the grammatical does not apply outside of the discursive event. Prior to utterance the iterable sign offers only the possibility of its realisation, grammar appears to be alien to it it is in the achievement of its own sensual and referential domain as a discursive event that grammar becomes necessary and integral. That grammar becomes the ordering that allows and enables the movement of empty signs into discursive things moves grammar itself from a position of exteriority, vis vis the awaiting word, to one of supplementarity. It is only through the signs performance within discourse that Derridas argument can apply the possibility of re-contextualisation can only occur after the event of contextualisation, it does not exist outside of every horizon of semio-linguistic communication for it is in fact only applicable within semio-linguistic communication.
This is possible because grammar is not merely an immanent law of combination but articulates words, its signs, across time. Grammar is the provision of a system that is synchronic. It is an ordering through time that is dependent on the passage of time, on the retention of meaning, of sense, of the sign, and strategically provides order upon and through its movement. Discourse and time are inseparably bound and in cinema time is already present, already operating in its showing. It does not need a law to allow, to legislate, its entry into the world, as the operation of the law of grammar, of its marking of a relation through and in time, is already inscribed as the condition for its existence. If grammar is the allowing of signs into discourse, into passage and loss, into the single direction of time, the cinematic image, I think rather obviously, is already grammatical.
It is as this movement in time, a dynamic which always introduces process and requires the retention of a trace, of the past as a sign, that sees time as an unobserved supplement to agrammaticality and iterability. Derrida in his application of agrammaticality and iterability as textual conditions moves from the possible instance, the word prior to discursive enactment and grammar as immanent to discourse to their enaction without acknowledging this difference between them. It is in the boundary between each, like the boundary that separates langue from parole, that the reliance on passage is evidenced, and it is against the anxiety of these very margins that Derrida has struggled to articulate the position(s) I understand to be deconstruction. As movement and as boundary, as margin and as relation, this condition produces locations of discursive identity that are simultaneously constituted by boundary and which constitute boundaries. It is within this very temporality that the relation of subject to object, of Same to Other, is produced, yet, paradoxically, it is upon this very relation that temporality is dependent. Its temporality is constituted not in the apparent moment of its occurrence but by the trace, memory, that must be retained for the recognition and possibility of its movement.
Such borders and their temporal condition are recognised by Derrida in his capacity to play, skilfully and lovingly, with his and others texts. Such play is dependent upon the provision of a border and the entering, willingly and with elan, into the space of the border, a border between self and Other, a border that always carries a before and after, a relation between conditions, even where such conditions may be considered undetermined. Indeed, Derrida (1978) has written:
Play is always play of absence and presence, but if it is to be thought radically, play must be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence. Being must be conceived as presence or absence on the basis of the possibility of play and not the other way around (p. 292).
This is a recognition that it is in a process, a system that incorporates movement, that presence and absence become possibilities: they need to be realised, and that play is the privileged mode of realisation as its boundary production is endemic to the participation in a world.9 Nor is it accidental that play is always the negotiation of boundaries, or that often this process is institutionalised art as liminal object, sport as a liminal activity, object relations psychology with its transitional objects or that it is always conducted with the utmost seriousness.10 Such seriousness is simply an attitude that makes the bordered relations of subjects to objects solid and provides a possibility of presence, of the identity that also allows a position from which to play. This solidity and its identity is not to be hypostatised as a permanent condition but one that is actively enacted in the movement across boundaries (borders) that play inaugurates, in the reciprocal movement that constitutes subject and object. This necessary temporality has been recognised by Derrida (1982) when, discussing grammatology, he says:
The gram as diffrance, then, is a structure and a movement [my emphasis] no longer conceivable on the basis of the op position presence/absence. Diffrance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are re lated to each other. This spacing is simultaneously active and passive . . . (p. 27).
Furthermore, he develops this to claim that:
This economic aspect of diffrance, which brings into play a certain not conscious calculation in its field of forces, is inseparable from the more narrowly semiotic aspect of diffrance. It confirms that the subject, and first of all the conscious and speaking subject, depends upon the system of differences and the movement of diffrance, that the subject is constituted only in being divided from itself, in becoming space, in temporizing, [my emphasis] in deferral . . . (p. 29).
Hence we see that the temporal is a condition of diffrance that is integral to the subject, and so to any possibility of discourse, and our prior criticisms of iterability, agrammaticality and the evidence of cinema become not an overthrow of Derridas position but an argument for the recognition of diffrance that is at the base of our experience of temporality, a diffrance that is displaced onto other terms and possibilities in Derridas own argument as he moves from kinesis to stasis, from discourse to words.11
This is the realm of the liminal and the ambiguity of this region is exploited by Diary in its claims of determination while rendering such claims impossible. However such a textual strategy is predicated on a felicitous reader who, in recognising the text as an authoritative utterance, grants its discourse a legitimacy which empowers its strategies of prayer.
.c.IV. Austins performative and textual felicity
As we indicated in the previous chapter Diarys utilisation of the modes of a traditional ritual performance allows the text to participate in a realm that opens upon the transcendental grounds of experience. In its poetisation of this condition the material nature of such experience is concretised through its deflection (displacement) onto discursive forms that make claims of presence, in effect naming its possibly indeterminate textual effect as sacred experience.12 In achieving these aims Diarys participation in a sacred economy through its carefully structured redundancies leads it to no longer only describe a religious experience or event but to seek to become such an experience or event. Diary does not only describe prayer but becomes prayer, and in this performance of itself the film becomes that which it ostensibly claims to describe. In this, Diary produces a moment of self-identity that it then fractures through the exhibition of its own conditions of boundedness. To produce this possibility of self-identity, to become and be prayer, Diary requires the felicitousness of its performance to be recognised, so guaranteeing the texts perlocutionary effect Diarys textual effect.
Austins division of the status of utterances into the constative and performative is well known. His argument, an acknowledged forebear of deconstructive methodology, declares the validity of the distinction between performative and constative utterances, only to erode this distinction and to demonstrate the performative valency of all discourse (Petrey 1990, Ch. 8).
The performative is defined as those statements that, in and by their very utterance, perform that which they are uttering, the classic examples being of course to promise (I promise), to bet (I bet), and to marry (I now pronounce you man and wife). To use Austins formulation: to utter the sentence (in, of course, the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it (p. 6).
The constative is the realm of statements that seek to describe the world truthfully, that make referential claims about the world that are available for verification through the simple testing of the validity of these claims. For Austin this province is the usual and self-proclaimed sanctuary of philosophy and it is directed towards, and at least predicated upon, the pursuit of a determinable truth.
The distinction of the performative from the constative is defined by Austin on two major points:
A. they do not describe or report or constate anything at all, are not true or false; and
B. the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which again would not normally be desain would not normally be described as, or as just, saying something (p. 5).ect to truth claims, or tests, unlike the constative, and Austins list of minimum requirements for the performative revolve around the issue of felicity in determining performative success:
(A.1) There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances, and further, (A.2) the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked. (B.1) The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and (B.2) completely (pp. 1415).
Applying these minimum and necessary conditions through the course of his argument, Austin demonstrates that the distinction between the constative and performative is invalid, that it was a difference of degree rather than of kind. All utterances are shown to be performative as . . . we find that statements are liable to every kind of infelicity to which performatives are liable . . . (p.136), and,
Once we realize that what we have to study is not the sentence but the issuing of an utterance in a speech-situation, there can hardly be any longer a possibility of not seeing that stating is performing an act (p. 139).
As Petrey (1990) points out: That France is hexagonal may be broadly repeated, but is it true? Austin says that we cant answer this question without defining the conditions under which the answer is to circulate (p. 33).
It is the dissolving of any substantive difference between the constative and performative that allows the later emphasis on the illocutionary in Austins text. The locutionary, the use of words in utterance per se, will always involve an illocutionary act, an issue of force, and such illocutionary acts, as Austin argues, have perlocutionary effects:
We first distinguished a group of things we do in saying something, which together we summed up by saying we perform a locutionary act, which is roughly equivalent to uttering a certain sentence with a certain sense and reference, which again is roughly equivalent to meaning in the traditional sense. Second, we said that we also perform illocutionary acts such as informing, ordering, warning, undertaking, &c., i.e. utterances which have a certain (conventional) force. Thirdly, we may also perform perlocutionary acts: what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring, and even, say, surprising or misleading (p. 109).
Within Austins scheme, though, the emphasis falls on the act of a meaningful utterance producing and requiring a socially determined convention and context that allows the utterance to mean by actually doing something to speak is to perform. As Petrey argues, the death of the constative/performative opposition is the birth of the opposition between language in itself and language in the world, between locutions and illocutions (p. 33).13 Furthermore, all utterance is not conditional on constative accuracy but rather on its performative felicity.
Austins refusal to limit the performative to verbal utterances14, in conjunction with the performatives minimal conditions, allow us to examine whether Diary meets the conditions of the performative, and what are the conditions of performative felicity, in regard to its readers.
It could be considered that to show the illocutionary force of the performative in Diary we need to demonstrate performative felicity within Diary. However, in terms of its status as ritual, this has already been done in the previous chapters. The critical issue for any analysis of Diary in fact centres upon the reading of Diary, upon the issue of its illocutionary force as having perlocutionary effect that is dependent on readerly felicity. As Austin makes clear, the reader is essential to the success of the performative and to this extent a felicitous reading of some nature, accepting the legitimacy of the text, is the site of any reading that suggests Diary is performative, is prayer. Indeed, the textual effect we have nominated is a question of perlocutionary effect, and is subject to the same conditions of felicity that apply to the performative where this perlocutionary force is subject to the readers performance of the text in their reading. This is particularly evident if we examine conditions (B.1) and (B.2) where the performative must be executed by all participants both correctly and . . . completely (pp. 1415). This is the simple description of any readerly contract where a texts readers are understood to complete the work or project of the text. Hermeneutically speaking, it is to accept the invitation that the text, as an opaque diegetic utterance, offers us. Structurally, this performance is the recognition of the role of the reader where the work is not out there, an already constituted thing, but requires readerly performance as its only avenue of textual realisation.15
Such felicitousness emphasises that the issue of veracity, of the true or the veridical, is not a determining requirement in the films textual effect, hence it is not only produced by a reader who is already amenable, or willing, to accept the films theological demands. Nor is this felicitousness an issue of a right, determinate or absolute reading, the requirement of felicity in fact has no need of an approach to questions of a content based, or exegetical, hermeneutics. It is rather the issue of the participation in the project of the film to the extent that the reader, by accepting its seriousness, engages with the film and participates in a not indifferent relation to the text. Unless one chooses to ignore, that is, to be indifferent to Diary, then by dint of its mechanics one participates in its economy, the reader is subjected to its demands which must be met to successfully read the film; demands of causative deferral, redundancy, and sacred nomination.
This approaches an ethics of reading where the authority of the text is only enacted by the reader through their acceptance of the textual object as serious. That it is taken seriously confers upon the text an authority that is simultaneous with the readers serious intent and this offers the only possibility for a felicitous reading. If this relation is not enacted then the text will never appear as legitimate, its performative conditions have not been met as deserving of the effort of felicitous performance, of readerly care and though still available to a critical territorialisation it is a criticism that is always subject to the texts re-territorialisation of any claims. Such criticism is based on rhetorical occupation rather than the legitimacy of its seriousness. To confer this seriousness is, however, to perform an act of readerly trust, of faith, a trust that contains the risk that it may not be reciprocated, and it is upon this investment of faith that the felicitous reading is founded. With an attitude of faith, of trust, the reader, to use a regal analogy, is a subject of the text, is subjected to the text. It is this subjection that Diary requires for its textual effect and it is a subjection that is akin to what Diary understands as our subjection to God.
This is evidenced in Diarys failure to participate in what Chambers (1984, 1991) has described as a readerly seduction, where a diegesis is produced that calls to the reader through innumerable strategies of desire.16 In Diary the reader is not so much led into the text but required to accept it, on faith. In effect Diary declares an indifference towards its audience where it requires readerly submission, on trust, rather than offering a seductive promise of what may or may not occur. This indifference can also be characterised as an asymmetric relation of text to reader as Diary appears to make no concessions to readerly comfort. Diary demands that it be accepted as is, on trust, and this asymmetry, its indifference regarding its need to explain itself, to justify itself to an audience if only to allow the reader to relax into the world of the text, places Diary in a position of Otherness that is never overcome. However, for such a strategy to succeed, to successfully approach an Other that lords its exteriority over us, identity must first be established.
.c.V. Naming the Other
Diary achieves such identity, a Sameness or similitude, through its use of those redundancies that allow the text to become not only descriptive of a religious event but to be one in its performative condition its operation as prayer. These same redundancies are then foregrounded to problematise the very conditions of its own possibility as a text and to displace the thesis of identity that the first strategy claims, producing a crisis in its own modes of representation. This is an active movement within Diary from the Same toward Otherness.
Given the relation we have established between Diary and the general modes of ritual performance we may see that the reliance on a structured economy of redundancy, a redundancy engendered through a specific practice of repetition that displaces causal/logical understanding away from itself, produces a crisis of and within the referential and discursive claims of the text. To introduce the outline of this argument we shall rely on Louis Marins (1990) articulate discussion of Philippe de Champaignes Ex-voto of 1662, where he writes:
Its method is the placing of painting in a double situation of crisis, one in which a heterogeneous element is introduced into the picture: written words, which belong to another semiotic substance. They are an interrogation of the same through the other, an interrogation that is all the more intense as the reader is not conscious of the written characters when he reads them but only grasps the ideas sign-ified by these letters organised into words; and yet the reader has access to such ideas only through the mediation of the signs (p. 192).
Marin then goes on to argue that as an ex-voto it is:
. . . a demonstration of the way in which a painting as picture, as representation, shies away from itself in order to become a spiritual instrument for adoring God and becomes a practical means toward accomplishing spiritual exercises. It is a demonstration of the way in which mimetic representation deconstructs itself into the sacred narrativity of an image which transforms itself into a text (p. 193).
In an elegant conclusion he suggests that the written text declaring the images purpose inscribed on the ground of a literal realist image, produces a crisis in the respective claims of word and image:
It is this crisis that produced a form of space which belonged to neither the order of the picture nor the order of the textual. This space testified to the existence of an other reality which was read by Port Royal as the manifestation of the radically other, of the God who, like his Grace, is permanently absentpresent (p. 200).
From Marins position I believe it is not unreasonable, or forced, to suggest that a similar operation occurs in Diary through its careful use of written and narrated words, exemplified on the occasions of their being narrated as they are being written, with an image that emphasises the ordinary, commonplace exercises of the everyday. This leads to a manifestation of the radically other, realised in the absentpresent, that, through the ascription of a title, names the transcendental conditions that such textual strategies embody for Ex-voto of 1662, the impossibility of an equivalent relation between the iconic (representational) and the symbolic (written), while for Diary an economy of the indexical (film) and the symbolic which relies upon its own eventfulness in time to provide a sacred analogy.
This determining, the texts willingness to name an arena of the visual and the verbal, formalises and concurrently makes concrete these contextual sets that are the visual and the verbal/written and, by bringing such sets into proximity, allows the possibility of their mutation, corruption, or contagion. As these sets are not structural opposites, of A / not-A, but are relations put into play by their contiguity, their contact between their borders, the boundaries between these realms, their nature as bounded and constituted sets, is made apparent and actively suggested. In this manner the contingent and processual nature of the world, its phenomenological constitution as a thing, is foregrounded, and in this action we find that the impossible paradox of the boundary is approached. To reach this crisis is no more than to demonstrate the impossibility of identity that resides within bounded realms, the appearance and security of an identity, but a security only available through the disavowal of its margins. It necessitates the establishment of this identity, of Sameness, and the active risking of this identity by that which provides, makes, and in so doing marks this Sameness. It is then a movement from the Same towards an Other, and Diarys crisis is that of the fluidity of this nether sphere between provisionally secure regions.
This crisis revolves around a negative theology that Bresson and Diary appear to endorse a simple prescription that the sacred, God, can be named, but not shown. As a negative theology, the place, role, action, activity, thought and manner of God can only be approached negatively, that is by the demarcating of negative boundaries that claim what the sacred source is not. This, very basically, is contrary to a positive theology of presence, whether in or through scripture or other evidence of His work, for the negative theologian does not believe that God can be determined in, or by, the designation of any quality whatsoever. No title, adjective, or predication can be ascribed regarding God because to do so presumes to make of God a something, it becomes an attribution that separates God as a condition.17 However, if God is claimed to be an infinite condition, then clearly such predication cannot be applied for these very reasons, God becoming, in effect, radically Other. As Other, God can be given a proper name, a title, for words operate on an economy of absence that refuses the possibility of determination. By the attributing of the proper name God, God as Other is preserved. To choose to show God, or less ambitiously merely the presence of God, is prohibited to Bresson because to do so in film, with its specific relationship to discourse, presence, and time, would be to make claims of boundedness that are excluded from a negative theology, an economy of absence. Therefore in Diary we never witness death, nor even the image of a dead body, nor funerals; of the parishioners wife at the beginning, of Doctor Delbende, or of the Countess or the cur, as he dies and utters his famous last words.18 To show these moments, moments of a privileged relation to issues of the sacred, would be to render visible that which is invisible.
This crisis of representation, though, does not limit itself to the dilemma of how to film something that is understood to be invisible, but more importantly provokes a crisis in the self-identity of the film as performative that turns back upon its own ability to name its source for Bresson, the absent precondition that is God. This is the absence that is realised in all temporal movement as the loss of presentness and its retention as trace, a sign, privileged and manifest in the displaced concrete procedures of liminal activity.19
And this, finally, is where Diary leads us: its textual effect is the product of a readerly seriousness that leads to the performance of a crisis in the texts own claim to identity. This enacts a dialectical move, the dialectic that we saw Bazin so perspicaciously nominate in Chapter Two, that announces the impossibility of the incorporation of the Other into the Same. Diarys naming of God cannot produce Gods presence: the possibility of showing, with its privileged referential status, is thrown back upon the word to maintain God as absence that can only be defined through the struggle of an approach. This approach reaches its apogee in the curs death and is the delineation, in the most absolute form available to temporal beings, of the boundary of Same to Other. This is the cost of its crossing, the toll that the breaching of this boundary exacts.
That death is equated with Grace should not be understood as some sort of argument for a sacred suicide. It is more properly the manifesting of absolute Otherness that does not need to be nominated as religious, it is a condition of exteriority to which we are all subject that we are all subjects of. Death is a relation that is non-negotiable, that brooks no argument, and is the literal condition of our finitude and boundedness. Death, if we were to characterise it, is marked by its indifference, it maintains a literally asymmetric power relation that surrounds and exceeds us. As Jackson (1984) reminds us, Death cannot be portrayed directly: it appears in literature either as figura (emblem) . . . or as mere space (p. 68) like God. It is the condition that gives value to life those moments in time of a given individual as the passage of time, the direction of life, is a movement towards an end that confers finite definition on its passage. Death as represented is also a site of the liminal, as Bronfen (1990) has argued:
Death must . . . be seen as a double boundary transgression the first into the realm of decomposition, where the human body loses all traces of individuality, where the vulnerability of existence to death is enacted in a way that is unremittingly threatening to any sense of the human subject as whole, stabilized and centered. The second boundary transgression takes on the form of recuperation and restoration, in the move that excludes all traces of the cadaver, puts decomposition, as signifier, if you will, for the lack of [sic] split fundamental to human existence under erasure (Derrida) (p. 592).
Diary, in its textual strategies, enacts the first condition, it dissolves its own solidity, its concrete provincial universe, into the death of its protagonist and refuses the restoration or recovery that is a funeral. Diary is a text that preserves its liminality, refuses a return to the secular and the pragmatic, resolves its own determined condition by its endorsement of the Other. It surrenders the possibility of showing, of revelation, and accedes to a sacred economy of an absolute absence.
As with all boundaries there is risk and threat, the anxiety of the contingent and the dissolution of the apparent certitude of those designations; of subject to object, of word to thing, of discourse to meaning, that produces the solidity of referential accord. It is Diarys specific naming of its own origin as literary source, journal, revelation, and finally, God, that produces a self-identity where Otherness is comfortably distanced, a location of security where borders have been firmly drawn, and a security that is reinforced through Diarys performative success as it becomes prayer. From within this discursive comfort its own arbitrary boundaries are made transparent as Diary names its own final condition, but in this very act of naming, of ascribing its authority to God, the text escapes once again for God is only named not revealed. Only the narrated action of Grace, an indirect process of God, is finally named, and Grace is only a trace and mark of the activity of the Other, the point where such Otherness, which can only be articulated through metaphor, enters the temporal world.
As shadow, the final film image of the cross bears witness to this absence. This shadow, in itself nothing, of no place or substance, depends upon the solidity of an object and its illumination. It is, as in Platos cave, the ephemeral which indicates an absent ideality. Its transience is Other to it, in itself it has no constitution, the only quality peculiar or specific to it is its pure relation. As a non-thing it cannot just dissolve, it is dependent on and subject to a relationship that is external to it. The shadow of the cross becomes the perfect image of the impossibility of the economy that Bresson constructs, a textual economy that seeks to expand into the infinite of the sacred, yet contracts into the success of its own textual performance, into a specificity of temporal process that illuminates its boundedness. This movement of identity and difference is never able to be completed, for access to the Other only occurs through death while identity preserves forever its distance from what is sought, the Otherness that sustains it.
Diary is a discourse that celebrates the very possibilities of the potential of discourse as it makes manifest its own conditions of discursive production. That it seeks to ascribe these conditions, seminal relations of identity/Sameness, and difference/Otherness, to a sacred event or being reflects the dialectical nature of the activity and the impossibility of its collapse. In its struggle to identify and name Otherness it necessarily refuses to recover this Otherness, becoming not a move of incorporation, an act of recovery and appropriation, but a movement from identity into Otherness, an approach to an absolute formulation of Otherness that will consume in its absence and negativity those terms, those practices, that strive for its incorporation into Sameness.
This is the beauty of Diary, and this is the seriousness of Diary, a seriousness that does not preclude or exclude play, but is made possible by the seriousness of its play. The film makes material its own phenomenal conditions of possibility and celebrates its achievement in the recognition and acknowledgment of the impossibility of approaching the a priori terms of its own constitution. It is the strength of the film that it can name its own activity of identity and difference, maintaining the movement that preserves its quality of Same and Other. Its shadow, finally, is not the declaration of a stasis and quietude that exhausts the secular into the holy, but is the beatitude of an excess that can only be reached in the poesis of the processes that make that world possible.
1. If there was no misunderstanding, if meaning was already available transparently to subjects, then communication would be unnecessary. It would not be that intention and meaning were unproblematically present in language, it would be that language itself were unnecessary. In this sense we cannot avoid misunderstanding, but communicative structure arises out of the need to overcome the fact of misunderstanding.
2. Just as in play, where it is the person who refuses to play, rather than the cheat, who most radically disrupts the event. To refuse to treat the game seriously, to question its authority (to stand to one side and say thats silly), absolutely destroys its authority.
3. It is recognised that this is a simplification of Derridas position. It is also recognised that this position does not need to be so much established here as constructed in a specific light for my argument to adhere to Derridas usual slippery borders.
4. However, it should be evident that my reading of Diary is of a kind with a Derridean mode of textual analysis, and that my argument is less with Derrida, (indeed I rely on Derrida), than with the loose and ill-judged application of such a methodology to cinema.
5. Even to discuss the linguistic sign gate as opposed to a film image of a gate requires the separation of the terms by particular marks of quotation, to suspend its reference in discourse and indicate its status as just a word.
6. The anxiety that the absence of, and apparent indifference to, the principles of a grammatical order within film probably accounts for the displacement of the grammatical onto film criticisms normative model of the dominant Hollywood diegetic film style. Throughout Bordwells work, for example, this notion of a normative style produces a theory which claims the existence of a formal procedure for the articulation (framing and editing) of pro-filmic space and event. However this requires the quiet removal of two significant and major Hollywood genres, the musical and the comedy, for these genres throughout their history have easily and playfully produced a plethora of texts that flout the dominant Hollywood paradigm. Such a paradigm may assist in the formation of genres or modes of cinematic texts but is inadequate to account for cinemas ability to sensibly signify.
7. Regarding Ozu see, for example, Bordwell (1988b); on film grammar in general see Metz (1974), Andrew (1984a) and Chatman (1990).
8. Indeed, in the pedagogical situation, students generally have to be trained to recognise a so-called ungrammatical film. Breaking the 180 rule, jump cuts, and a deliberate loss of continuity are easily comprehended and incorporated by untrained readers. In fact, if it is a film that appears to conform to the conservative standards of the theoretical Hollywood paradigm, disruptions of the paradigm such as crossing the line generally have to be pointed out for their difference and significance to be noted. They certainly, of themselves, do not operate as points of rupture in the sense that much film theory wishes.
9. As argued, for example, by Winnicott (1985). Playing is predicated on a subject-object relation that actively renders the world. This activity is temporal and foregrounds the requirement of movement that alternative accounts of subjectivity and meaning production ignore or dismiss.
10. Indeed this seriousness in performing the apparently pointless (a rather apt definition of art) is regularly offered as a definition mark of play, for example Huizinga (1970).
11. What I wish to retain in this argument is the production of identity that play, in all its movement, and its location as movement, produces, and that such an identity provides the point of orientation from which a subject addresses its objects. What I refuse to claim in this argument is the possibility of any solidity, in terms of meaning or authorial intent, from such bounded relations of subject to object: indeed that this relation is one of subject to object emphasises its phenomenally intentional nature.
12. This naming could be understood as an effort at containment but it generally avoids or escapes any easy domestication.
13. What I described earlier as the difference between langue and parole, between signs awaiting application and their attachment to meaning in discourse.
14. Among Austins examples we find the following: Strictly speaking, there cannot be an illocutionary act unless the means employed are conventional, and so the means for achieving it non-verbally must be conventional (p. 119).
15. This argument does not rely on a confusion of terms, where we may appear to be treating reading performance as synonymous with Austins performative, but it does extend Austins terms to a recognition of the receiver of the message, to the understanding that readers participate in the constitution of texts no matter what textual theory we ascribe such constituting to. That is, reading is also performative, in Austins sense, and so subject, as we shall see, to issues of felicity.
16. A seduction that could have been achieved by the use of colour, using known stars, or by reducing the use of ellipsis and redundancy. The lack of strong character psychology, the refusal to witness the deaths of several principal characters and the lack of an editing style that is based on character action also maintain diegetic distance.
17. For example, the predicate that God is all things good provokes the simple question of how to account for, or locate, whatever is understood to be bad. If God is all that is good, then all that is bad falls outside of the domain of God, and if this is so then the domain of God is bounded, is determinable, and so subject to the inevitable problems of interpretation where issues of hermeneutic verisimilitude become critical.
18. I include the death of the Countess as the most we see of her body, rather significantly, is the veil covering her face.
19. Displaced because liminal activity, the activity of the border, denies its supplementary necessity by always nominating the liminal event as subject to an exterior economy, as being performed for reasons that are external to the event: that the Gods require it to be done, or that non-observance will adversely affect other aspects of life, for example.
works cited 1
Works Cited
Affron, M.J. 1985, Bresson and Pascal: Rhetorical affinities, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 11834.
Andrew, Dudley 1984a, Concepts in Film Theory, Oxford University Press, New York.
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