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FILM QUARTERLY 83

but also more recognizable, watchable, and marketable, than Bordwell in his formalism and Kovács [in] his historicalism would allow” (39–40).

Indeed, a key aim of the volume is to expand current understandings of global art cinema as a multifaceted phenomenon. While Betz makes the case for the importance of a “parametric tradition” as a subset of “international style,” David Andrews argues for moving “Towards an Inclusive, Exclusive Approach to Art Cinema.” Instead of formal aspects or exhibition contexts, he favors a multigeneric approach, where the term “art cinema” retains the “aura of exclusiveness” and relative distinction but, nevertheless, expands to include the “art zone” of any genre, including Tom Boka’s 1993 “art porn” film Anthony’s Desire (69). The essay is short on specific examples, but “art horror” would presumably include films such as Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In (2008).

Andrews’s essay raises the question of whether critics can cast the net of global art cinema too widely, rendering it too diffuse to be meaningful. Adam Lowenstein’s essay “Interactive Art Cinema” focuses on the classic Buñuel–Dali short Un Chien Andalou (1929) and David Cronenberg’s science-fiction eXistenZ (1999) and interestingly explores the relationship between “old” and “new” media, namely Surrealist cinema and videogaming. However, although there are brief references to Bordwell and Thomas Elsaesser, the links in his argument to other art films are rather sparse. Other essays more directly suggest that one can rethink traditional conceptions of the category. In part 2 (“The Art Cinema Image”), for example, Brian Price interrelates art cinema and museum installations, while Jihoon Kim perspicaciously reads the “cinematic” video installations of Apichatpong Weerasethakul in relation to the Thai director’s feature-length art films.

Some of the strongest pieces in part 3 (“Art Cinema Histories”) and part 4 (“Geopolitical Intersections”) foreground questions of genre and narrative within larger contexts of production, exhibition, and promotion. Azadeh Farahmand provides a fascinating exploration of Iranian New Wave cinema, noting that festival exposure may paradoxically limit a filmmaker’s ability to deviate from models with previous international success. Examining a similar dynamic in the context of international co-production, Randall Halle’s “Offering Tales They Want to Hear” raises concerns that transnational European funding arrangements may risk shaping narratives congruent with a pernicious European transnationalism or neo-Orientalism. He finds evidence of this influence in the “transcultural approach” of movies such as House of the Spirits (1993), where the actors often do not

match the ethnic backgrounds of the characters and achieve a universality “from their apparent status as Europeans” (306). At the same time, the essentializing “national or cultural types” of films with a “quasi-transnational situation,” such as The Spanish Apartment (2001) are equally problematic. Halle also points to the potential for neo-Orientalism in the “quasi-national” approach of films such as Paradise Now (2005), which tends to mask the conditions of co-production by foregrounding a “nationally homogenous setting” (307–09).

Offering a plethora of approaches on an undertheorized topic, Global Art Cinema productively shows directions for future critical inquiry. The volume moves through auteur-based approaches toward considerations of a larger theoretical landscape that global art cinema can sustain, including questions of affect, sexuality, politics, media forms, postcolonialism, and the ambiguous space that global art cinema holds in relation to both location and genre.

ALBERTO TOSCANO

Béla Tarr, le temps d’après by Jacques Rancière

Les écarts du cinémaby Jacques Rancière

From major works such as Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 1 and 2 (University of Minnesota Press, 1986, 1989) and Stanley Cavell’s The Pursuit of Happiness (Harvard University Press, 1984), to Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytic diagnoses of Hollywood, philosophy has traded its ancestral objections to popular entertainment for an eager embrace of the mov-ing image. Jacques Rancière’s Les écarts du cinéma (loosely translatable as Cinema’s Gaps), his second collection of essays on cinema following Film Fables (Berg, 2006), begins on an autobiographical note. This prominent French radical thinker, known especially for his interweaving of emanci-patory politics and aesthetics in books ranging from The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Stanford University Press, 1991) to Mute Speech (Columbia University Press, 2011), recounts the formative experience of cinephilia he shared with a whole generation of French critics, militants, and filmmak-ers growing up in the 1950s and 60s.

KEVIN CRYDERMAN teaches film studies at Emory University.

BOOK DATA Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (eds), Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. $99.00 cloth; $29.95 paper. 408 pages.

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84 SPRING 2012

Cinephilia is in principle a democratic, egalitarian taste; it breaks with the hierarchical tendencies of aesthetics ever since Plato—involving in particular a suspicion of art’s audi-ence—by finding truth and beauty in mass entertainment. But rejecting elitism does not mean that anything goes. Rancière’s account also emphasizes cinema’s capacity to stimulate political reflection. His conflicted response to the spiritual denouement of Rossellini’s Europa 51 (1952) and aversion to Eisenstein’s The General Line (1929) are recalled as challenges to his Marxist communism. These encounters, then, are examples of the title’s “gaps”—tensions between historical materialism and the materialism of the image, between equality as a political aim and what Rancière under-stands as the equality (or indifference) of images, between the urgency of politics and the patience of art.

Those already familiar with Rancière’s writing will recog-nize one of his characteristic gestures: to indicate rifts where others postulate knowable order and cohesion. Hence his insistence on notions like dissensus and disagreement (gap is analogous) but also his aversion to theory—film theory included—so long as it is understood as an effort to master and oversee differences. Rancière’s spirited defence of the “politics of the amateur” (14) is aimed at defending spectatorship from specialists who want to police interpretation. His aesthetic and political ideal, of which the figure of the cinephile or amateur is the emblem, is to combine an intense practice of discernment with the conviction that this is a practice open to anyone, irrespective of any claim to expertise. This approach is thus at odds with much academic writing about film.

Rancière regards any attempt to purify cinema of its con-tamination by the other arts (through decrying narrative, for example), or to make it a mere illustration of philosophical truths, as indulging nostalgia for outdated “regimes of art,”

and a conservatism with regard to the development of modes of representation. As he writes: “Cinema belongs to this aes-thetic regime of art in which there no longer exists the old criteria of representation that separated the fine arts from the mechanical arts and put each of them in their place” (13). It lives through its entanglement with politics, literature, phi-losophy, criticism, as well as its capacity to distinguish itself from them. In the act of finding cinematic gaps—between visibility and invisibility, bodies and narrative, sound and image, actor and character—Rancière explores the play of identity and difference, and presents the disruption of bound-aries as a spur for creation.

Les écarts is divided into three sections, which respec-tively concern the gap between cinema and literature (“After Literature”); cinema, the other arts and philosophy (“The Borders of Art”); cinema and politics (“The Politics of Films”). In keeping with his bias against attempted theoreti-cal mastery and hard classifications, Rancière provides subtle and patient readings of films ranging from Rossellini’s Blaise Pascal (1972) to Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St Louis (1944). His insights can be acute and illuminating, as when he discusses how Godard turns the images of past filmmakers into “icons” (45) but there is an overarching coherence too, which discloses three main theses or convictions.

The first is that cinema is not (as Bresson proposed) an anti-theatrical art, as much as it is a post-literary one. Literature’s capacity to accord equal value to all objects, expe-riences, and topics (however insignificant) is carried over into cinema’s overturning of traditional prejudices about what are art’s proper topics. Cinema gives aesthetic dignity to the most disparate and least exalted forms of life—whether lingering on the gestures and speech of Cape Verdean migrants in Costa’s Colossal Youth (2006) or turning with the besotted dancers of Tarr’s Sátántangó (1994).

Rancière’s comparative analyses are attentive and often scintillating. He explores the creative incongruence between Bresson’s Mouchette (1967) and Bernanos’s Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette, Straub–Huillet’s Dalla nube alla resistenza (1979) and the source texts of Cesare Pavese; Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Boileau–Narcejac’s The Living and the Dead (D’entre les morts); and—in another new work, Béla Tarr, le temps d’après, an impressively exhaustive essay, com-missioned for a Centre Pompidou retrospective—between the Hungarian director’s films and the novels of László Krasznahorkai. The discussions are remarkable, sometimes revelatory. Refusing any common-sense fit between the cin-ematic and the literary, for example, Rancière explores how Bresson’s supposedly pure “language of images” paradoxi-cally erases the visual descriptions in Bernanos’s novel, and

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FILM QUARTERLY 85

how it generates a “hyperfunctional” narrative that progresses much more implacably than the novel’s (59).

Similarly, Rancière indicates how Hitchcock’s apparent fidelity to the combination of thriller intrigue and psychopa-thology of obsession in The Living and the Dead is undercut by the introduction of out-of-joint temporality (the dou-bling of anticipatory dream and denouement in the famous bell-tower scene; the revelation of Madeleine’s identity via flashback and voiceover before Scottie comes to know any-thing of it). The resulting gap between cinematic and filmic narrative that these time-slips create is for Rancière testament to the fact that while words can go back on themselves and plotlines be recast in the course of a novel, for cinema “the correction of appearances is always a risky exercise” (33).

The second, related thesis is that while cinema is an “impure” art, constantly incorporating other arts and dou-bling as entertainment, it is also novel in specifiable ways. Investigating Rossellini’s struggle with bringing philosophy to the screen in the TV trilogy composed of Socrates (1971), Blaise Pascal, and Cartesius (1974), Rancière details how the customary relation between the moving image and abstract thought (be it illustrating philosophical ideas or documenting their historical context) is partly transcended by Rossellini. This occurs when Rossellini explores film’s specific capacity to give sensory form to bodily experience—though Rancière remains unpersuaded that the depiction of the philosopher’s suffering flesh can escape these films’ concessions to a pedagogic project which he is notoriously suspicious of. In his essay on Minnelli, Rancière riffs on the MGM lion’s-head logo’s incorporation of “Ars gratia artis.” He admiringly divides Minnelli’s films into ones such as The Pirate (1948) that are driven by the joyful depiction of performance (including dance, clowning, ballet), and those where performance is blocked by the pressures of social life, such as Some Came Running (1958). Minnelli’s work is emblematic for Rancière of the belief that “art for art’s sake and entertainment are the same thing, but, if one wants to show that they are, one only obtains the caricature of identity, which recreates the chasm between them” (79–80).

How not to turn a gap into a chasm is perhaps one way of articulating the third thesis: that there is a politics of (or in) film which cannot (and should not) be reduced to the model of avowedly political film. It was The General Line’s propa-gandistic didacticism that repelled Rancière when he first saw the film and he expresses reservation too about Vertov’s com-munist utopianism. Rancière detects a paradox in films like The Man with a Movie Camera (1929): Vertov both deposes the eye for the sake of an impersonal, machinic movement, and reinstates it as a central organizing gaze. Much more con-genial to Rancière’s way of thinking is Straub–Huillet’s Dalla

nube alla resistenza which he takes to be the epitome of a post-Brechtian break with pedagogical Marxism that enables a shift “from the revelation of the mechanisms of domination to the examination of the aporias of emancipation” (113).

Whether in Straub–Huillet’s films, in which a dialecti-cal vision of history is arrested for the sake of tragic words and gestures of resistance, or in the stubborn dignity of Tarr’s and Costa’s characters, adrift in the baleful after-life of an already fraudulent communism or the misery of the capitalist margins, Rancière’s appreciative references evoke the underlying hostility to any project that claims to directly connect knowledge about injustice to a program for political action. If such a link always involves a spuri-ous and ineffective claim to mastery then by contrast with it the aesthetic decision in Costa’s Colossal Youth or Tarr’s Damnation (1988) to linger on immiseration is for Rancière a kind of virtue rather than a symptom of powerlessness or disorientation; it actually has, he claims, greater emancipa-tory potential than didacticism.

But in what ways is this post-Brechtian cinema a cinema of emancipation? It can be noted in this regard that three of the figures of filmic resistance noted by Rancière—Bresson’s Mouchette, the young girl in Tarr’s Sátántangó, and Anju in Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff (1954) are suicides, incarna-tions of defeat. In Rancière’s refusal of cinema that seeks “to show the structures of domination and mobilize energies against it” (148), and his praise of filmmakers like Costa who seek to “make available to everyone the wealth of sensory experience present in the humblest of lives” (149), we can see the temptation of closing the gap between cinema and politics in another way than the one promoted by the likes of Eisenstein or Vertov.

Whether detailing Tarr’s signature panning shots or the role of flames in Minnelli, Rancière is a passionate and acute cinephile. But his account of the relationship between cin-ema and politics is in the end unpersuasive. In order to resist a cinema which treats political analysis or emancipation as its aim, Rancière champions cinematic oeuvres which extract a kind of relentless beauty from poverty and suffering. To speak of this troubling beauty in terms of politics—even if only as the plural “politics of films”—may be a sacrifice the amateur has made to the philosopher Rancière continues to be.

ALBERTO TOSCANO teaches sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London and is an editor of the journal Historical Materialism.

BOOK DATA Jacques Rancière, Béla Tarr, le temps d’après. Paris: Capricci, 2011. €7.95. 88 pages.

Jacques Rancière, Les écarts du cinéma. Paris: La Fabrique, 2011. €13.00. 158 pages.

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