New Rose Hotel (Abel Ferrara, 1998).
A figure is lodged in the depth of our speech, operating like the matrix of these effects, attacking our words to make forms and images out of them.
—Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure
The body is never in the present, it contains the before and the after, tiredness and waiting. Tiredness and waiting, even despair are the attitudes of the body.
—Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image
“There are three essential propositions underlying Ferrara’s work,” writes Nicole Brenez in her book on Abel Ferrara’s films, first published in English in 2007. The first proposition, Brenez theorizes, is as follows: “Modern cinema exists to come to grips with contemporary evil.” In many ways, this statement—one of many piercing axioms and assertions that populate her writing—crystallizes not only Ferrara’s cinema but also Brenez’s film-critical and curatorial project since the late 1980s. She approaches cinema as a singular art and films as single-minded, each possessed by a driving concern or agenda. For instance, John Carpenter’s cinema, Brenez proposes, “belongs to a systematic figurative project that . . . concerns the representation of the Antagonist.” Brenez’s work, rife with dizzying, almost microscopic close-readings of images, is also a sweeping historiographic undertaking that takes as its chief task a reckoning with a century of images of violence.
That is not to say that Brenez’s objects of analysis are invariably morose or hopeless. Evil, for Brenez, is “historical,” a force of oppression and injustice, but it vivifies as much as it mortifies—an energetic system animating body and mind. The second proposition she diagnoses in Ferrara’s work gives a sense of these possibilities, however tenuous or imperfect:
In contrast to other filmmakers who are drawn to the same conception of history—that the only story is the story of evil—Ferrara follows an optimistic conception, thus preserving a sense of tragedy. This gives rise to the elaboration of characters who are in revolt, whether political (revolutionaries) or psychic (the great tormented).
It is these characters that Brenez’s oeuvre has meticulously attended to over the years, tracing their gestures of lethargy and disquiet, hostility and passion. On the Figure in General and the Body in Particular, originally published in French in 1998 and now available for the first time in English in a stunning translation by filmmaker Ted Fendt, is the most wide-ranging and representative of her endeavors to catalog the panoply of bodies that form the corpus of cinema.
Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942).
On the Figure in General and the Body in Particular is composed of 22 essays, written between 1989 and 1998, enclosed by an introduction and an epilogue. Each piece deploys different strategies to analyze an astonishing range of films. In Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942), Brenez finds the promise of cinema as a form of reprieve from or reversion of a historical progression toward ever-increasing conformity. “If body, individual and person have become an increasingly tighter network of identities in the real world,” she writes, “there is no reason this must be brought into film. In a movie, a silhouette does not produce a body.” Like Tourneur’s bestiaries, Brenez’s writing shapeshifts, donning different forms of classification and address. First, it compresses and densifies to diagnose the historical and sociological confluence that Cat People conjures:
Cat People also presents itself as the conflict of two dreams: that of the Old Country in the grip of its demons (war, genocide, folklore), which mobilizes suspect sciences (Freudianism, namely) and seeks to infect the dream of health demanded by America, its entrepreneurial architects (Oliver, the husband) and enterprising secretaries (Alice, the rival).
Then, the writing dilates. Brenez starts producing lists and tables, as when she charts, side by side, the “interlaced signs” in the film. In one column, labeled “latticework,” we find “circuit of emotions” and “circuits of plastic forms.” In the second column, labeled “origins of evil”: “jealousy,” “Cinema (visible, invisible, etc.)”
The attention Brenez pays to the horror film—the work of Tourneur, Ferrara, John Carpenter, John McTiernan, Dario Argento, and others—recalls the writings of Jean Louis Schefer, whose work on figuration in painting and cinema she acknowledges in this book. Schefer’s The Ordinary Man of Cinema , first published in French in 1980, similarly traces the monstrous and the haunted in cinema, the “force of action latent in things”: a shroud, a mummy, a shadow, a man-monster, a phonograph. Brenez, like Schefer, is drawn to a world/cinema of hypertrophy in which disproportion, doppelgangers, and the monstrous reign. In the work of both writers, especially their analyses of horror and film noir, a figure is a cipher to be decoded, a remnant of a historical evil that would, except for its genre treatment, be “inadmissible.” Take the discussion, in her book on Ferrara, of a shot from Body Snatchers (1993) where the shadows cast by a group of soldiers/“snatchers'' are strikingly misshaped and out of proportion, like figurines belonging to a different film: “… these shadows inscribed in the toxic dirt—recalling the outlines of bodies imprinted onto Hiroshima’s walls—anchor the figurative treatment of the snatchers as sketches, obscure silhouettes and undecidable effigies within a specific historical abomination.”
Bullet in the Head (John Woo, 1990).
Another genre Brenez deems rich and generative vis-à-vis the figural is the action film. John Woo’s films in particular aid Brenez in stressing one of the key aspects of a figure: its relationality. Referencing German philologist Erich Auerbach, whose essay “Figura” (1938) explored the etymology of the word in patristic literature, Brenez writes: “A figure, Auerbach explains, is not primarily an entity, but the establishment of a connection: Something’s movement toward its Other.”1 The action film makes for an ideal object of figural analysis, with its mechanics of movement, speed, and collision connecting bodies both animate and inanimate. But it is the angle Brenez takes, especially when writing about John Woo’s Bullet in the Head (1990), that makes for a singular analysis of an action film variant: the vengeance plot. Discussing a character who avenges the murder of his friend, Brenez proposes a conception of vengeance as ruinous, insurmountable debt—vengeance as haunting:
. . . Woo develops a horrifying conception of friendship. Friendship might seem like a joyous, euphoric resource for fiction, but to the contrary: It is simultaneously “pure” hospitableness to death and a hospitalization of the Self haunted by absence. To summarize: In the eyes of John Woo, a character can be defined as the catastrophic actions of a dead person.
This staggering formulation of friendship as simultaneously sacrificial and self-preserving is one of Brenez’s most elegant passages. It is followed by an equally enthralling analysis that triangulates feeling, action, and an editing technique in order to distill a poignantly irrational cinematic moment: “Ben has no bullet to fire at Frank but Frank still falls after a hug that is simultaneously affective and fatal. What kills Frank, an Evil character, is cross-cutting.” The cross-cutting in question alternates between a flashback to a fatal shooting and the fatal embrace set in the present. Writing about Woo’s work has mostly attended to the iconography in his films—their pyromaniacal, hyperviolent, ballistic images and movements. Brenez’s analysis communicates another kind of intensity at work in Woo’s films: the horror of association, through editing and death.
Brenez’s analysis of the labor of friendship and mourning that galvanizes the characters of Woo’s films makes clear her careful approach to figuration as work: the work of the filmmaker, but also that of the critic working through a figural system via writing. The third main producer of figural work, for Brenez, is the actor, whom she conceives both as the vessel for and the subject of figuration. Brenez devotes three essays to the “figures of the actor,” each focusing on one film: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence (1974), and Fred M. Wilcox’s Lassie Come Home (1943). If films like Cat People, Body Snatchers, and A Bullet in the Head allow Brenez to articulate the affordances of perpetual figural morphosis and gestural violence, Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore finds the figure exhausted, almost immobile. “The figure has no history, wants or appetite,” writes Brenez of Fassbinder’s idle bodies, suspended between the film they are waiting to make and the film in which they appear.
Lassie Come Home (Fred M. Wilcox, 1943).
Of the three texts in Brenez’s section on the actor, “Lassie, Unfaithful to Dogs: Fred M. Wilcox’s Lassie Come Home” is the most peculiar, for two reasons: the first is that the actor under discussion is not a person but the titular canine, and the second is the length of the chapter, which is around ten lines, filling less than half a page. It is one of six single-page texts in the book, which feature some of Brenez’s most lapidary and personal writing. The essays in the book, overall, are not academic in style, and have no pretense to or interest in academic film criticism and theory; these short texts even less so. “Lassie, Unfaithful to Dogs” exemplifies multiple tendencies in Brenez’s writing. Take the title, striking in the way it taints the image of “man’s best friend” by suggesting that the beloved dog is “unfaithful,” treacherous to her own species.2 The text itself, brief as it is, accomplishes two seemingly irreconcilable things. First, it communicates a sense of bewilderment and innocence, like that of a child illuminated by a cinema screen for the first time. Second, it recognizes a trick and fixates on it: even the dog is acting. But the exposing of the illusion does not bring disillusionment. Instead, it strengthens the faith:
. . . a male dog named Pal plays the female dog Lassie, who represents all at once a saint, a free spirit, a daughter, her mother, an angel and a goddess . . .When Pal bounds forward, he carries with him the elegance of nature. When Lassie looks at a landscape, Wilcox transforms it into an image. Lassie is lacking in animality, but the unimaginable finesse of Pal’s muzzle helps us believe in the world.
Note the switching between Pal and Lassie, actor and character, mediated by the filmmaker (Wilcox). This almost miraculous power attributed to the profilmic event—the world in front of the camera—echoes the words of philosopher Gilles Deleuze who, in the second volume of his treatise on cinema, declares: “Only belief in the world can reconnect man to what he sees and hears. The cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only link.” Like Deleuze, Brenez saw in cinema not only a record of history and the present, but also schemas for a world to come.
- For a detailed discussion of the concept and genealogy of the figure and figuration and the ways those inform Brenez’s study, see Adrian Martin’s Last Day, Every Day: Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez (Punctum Books, 2012) and William D. Rout’s English-language, eponymous review of the French edition of Brenez’s book, published on screeninthepast.com on March 1, 2000. ↩
- In a correspondence with Brenez, she adds: “Lassie is a very political story: the elegant dog who doesn't want to stay with the aristocracy that buys her, but wants to return to the poor worker's house where she is loved. The French title, for the original book and for the movie, that was shown each year on TV so that as kids we watched many times, is: Lassie, chien fidèle, ‘Lassie, faithful dog.’ Hence my title, an analytical pun.” ↩