“Yet the death of this friend inexplicably relieves something, like the threat of his death.”
—Jean Louis Schefer, in his eulogy for Roland Barthes1
For Jean Louis Schefer, the distinctive writer and nonpareil theorist of art who died in early June of this year, the interaction between oneself and the image is a fraught site of self-definition. Perhaps no other thinker was as dedicated to exploring the interlocking of interior self-consciousness and external perception that the experience of images provides. It is an event that occurs across cultures, across eras.
The singularity of his thought stems in part from the uncommonness of his childhood. He was born in 1938 into an aristocratic and well-connected family. And like something out of Proust, his childhood was filled with the household visits of famous artists and writers. The most memorable for Schefer, and the person who would exhibit great influence on his thinking, was the poet and philosopher Paul Valéry. Later, at the École des hautes études en sciences sociale, Schefer studied with the Lithuanian semiotician Algirdas Julien Greimas and became Roland Barthes’ apprentice.
Following his education, he began his long career as a writer. Due to his familial wealth, Schefer was able to continue idiosyncratic lines of thought and theory independent of any academic trends. Not having to work or teach to make money, he was maybe the last of a dying breed: the flâneur, the aesthetic gadabout, the gentleman theorist. This made him something of a mutant (the word he often applied to a human race that understood itself through the images it created); not an academic, artist, nor author, but an essayist, which is to say, “an indolent historian, a novelist beset by doubts about the material of fiction, a philosopher without a system.”2
Schefer began his career as a semiotician and a structuralist. His first book, a supposedly impenetrable work of semiology titled Scénographie d’un tableau (“Scenography of a Painting”), was published in 1969. The air in France then was rife with semiotics, with Lacan, with Saussure. Yet, against the prevailing winds, Schefer turned away from this type of theoretical work, which meant turning away from much of Barthes’ writings. In his eulogy (which was seen by many as being chambré on the work and life of a dignitary), Schefer professes his love for one of his last works, Camera Lucida, a book about images and Barthes’ relation to them. This admiration is tied to his spurning of high theory. Schefer felt that semiotics and structuralism could not account for the spectator’s experience.3 The interweaving of image and viewer is the site of meaning, rather than some linguistic or aesthetic code inherent to the image itself. “It is not a matter of knowing what the picture is,” he wrote, “but what the duration of looking implies.”4
In light of his dedication to the image, Schefer was asked to write for Cahiers du cinéma in the 1970s. This relationship led to a book: The Ordinary Man of Cinema (1980), likely his most known work and one of only three of his translated into English (the other two are a book of essays on the arts, The Enigmatic Body, and a book on Florentine painter Paolo Uccello’s images, The Deluge, The Plague). Ordinary Man has been hailed in many corners as an essential work of film and visual theory and had a great influence on two seminal thinkers, Serge Daney and Gilles Deleuze, with the latter relating that it was “a book in which the theory forms a kind of great poem.” Poetry, theory, essay, or novel, the book suggests that cinema enlivens the enigmatic, paradoxical slippage between a viewer's internal and external worlds, that is to say, the world of the objects in the image—their affects, their gestures, their memories, their time—become my own.
Schefer (right) in Danses Macabres, Skeletons, and Other Fantasies (2019).
Schefer wrote over twenty-five books in his life, many about visual art. What makes him such an original and dazzling thinker is his lack of demarcation between mediums. The history and social meaning of cinema is not divorceable from the history and social meaning of painting. Both mark their relationship with the viewer through images. The history of the image—from painting to photography to cinema—is the history of the spectator’s experience of the image. His untranslated book Du monde et du mouvement des images (“Of the World and the Movement of Images”) takes this historical progression as its subject in order to advance a lambent thesis: the image now covers the surface of the world.
Schefer’s writing is both dense and poetic, complicated and full of sterling prose. He was prone to long sentences containing cascading lists, multiple colons and parenthetical asides, and a staggering vocabulary. Take this striking passage, which uses painting and cinema to articulate how fundamental images are to our perception of reality: “This ancient criteria of evaluation of truth in painting signifies at least this: fiction keeps us at a distance from reality, and however empty, flat, without moral force any film image is (an enlarged ant, a robocop, a hand grabbing an object...) it has a spectacular prestige over us: it interprets reality for us, it evacuates us. Fiction machines reality in our absence and we believe in it out of pleasure, out of lightness, out of boredom because we don't know what reality is.”5
The importance of the spectator-image experience led Schefer to be antagonistic about the supposed death of cinema. The “degradation” of the image—the quick-cutting, the constant CG effects, the visual overstimulation—is an expression of human reality. As he wrote, “Neither the novel nor the cinema are therefore dying or in crisis. We perceive for a moment a return effect in a kind of universe consciousness: and this return effect due to the multiplication of images of all kinds is of this order: we perceive as a thing our quality of historical mutants, our quality of species. The image showed us that we are a mutant species. We are, from the first projected image, the real impossibility of human-images; since then they have multiplied, they occupy the surface of the world.”6 The narratives that appear in the image (the seeping of history into the present, the romanticism of monsters, of horror, of comedy, of love) are only qualities of our human progression, from the cave paintings to the newest offerings at the cinematheque.
His difficulty and lack of translation makes his work largely unknown to the English-speaking world. Hopefully that will change. In the meantime, the curious can see him in Danses Macabres, Skeletons, and Other Fantasies (2019), a documentary he starred in and co-directed with Rita Azevedo Gomes and Pierre Léon. Here, only three years ago, he can be seen talking energetically about painting, about cinema, about images. At one point, Schefer poses a vital question: “Is the function of the image to resemble or replace?” When looking at a photograph of a deceased loved one, as Barthes does of his mother in Camera Lucida, it is difficult not to experience the weight of this question. When someone dies, the burden of replacement is thrust onto their images. It is a fitting idea for someone who spent their life trying to explore the importance of images to human perception, to memory, and to himself. “For all of this,” he wrote in The Ordinary Man of Cinema, “I will die so far from images, so far from touching them, so far from their light: I am certainly all of their reality.”7
1. Schefer, Jean Louis.The Enigmatic Body: Essays on the Arts. Translated by Paul Smith, Cambridge University Press, 1995, 63.
2. Ibid., XIX.
3. Schefer, Jean Louis. “Critical Reflections.” Artforum, translated by Paul Smith, vol. 35, no. 7, Mar. 1997, https://www.artforum.com/print/199703/critical-reflections-32863. These remarks about Schefer’s career progression are made in Paul Smith’s brief introduction to Schefer’s essay.
4. Schefer, The Enigmatic Body, 70.
5. Schefer, Jean Louis. Du monde et du mouvement des images. Éditions de l’Êtoile, Cahiers du cinéma, 1997, 21. Translation is my own. If anyone has a better translation, please reach out.
6. Ibid., 46.
7. Schefer, Jean Louis.The Ordinary Man of Cinema. Translated by Max Cavitch, Paul Grant, Noura Wedell, Semiotext(e), 2016, 129.