Philosophical understandings of cinema - 4

Last week, in this column, I discussed the writings of Gilles Deleuze as representing an innovative body of commentary coming from a theorist and philosopher of cinema. One of the points that I made was the importance of the distinction he sought to make between the movement- image and time- image; movement- image propelled the narrative while the time- image opened a space for critical self-reflection.

Many scholars have found this distinction to be useful and have applied it to varying contexts of cinema and have attempted to expand it in audacious ways. However, there have been others who were less enthusiastic and saw this bifurcation as misplaced categorization. One of the most formidable of these critics is the eminent French philosopher Jacques Ranciere. It is his approach to cinema, and the philosophy that underwrites it, that I wish to explore today.

Jacques Ranciere has emerged as a powerful thinker, inflecting the forward movement of a diversity of disciplines ranging from philosophy and history to art and cinema. (Some weeks ago, I discussed his writings in this column with reference to his privileged concept of the distribution of the visible.)Today, I wish to focus strictly on his understandings of cinema, although in the case of Ranciere, they are inseparable from his vision of society and social action.

The name of Ranciere is yet to make its appearance in books on film study, even the latest ones. However, in my judgment, he is an enlivening presence in modern film thought and will eventually find his way into standard text-books. I wish to discuss the approach of Jacques Ranciere to cinema largely in relation to is works 'Film Fables', (2005) 'The Future of the Image' (2007) and 'The Politics of Aesthetics.' (2004).

They serve to unfold his thought, compact and densely woven as it is, in a graspable fashion. One useful way of gaining entrance to the kingdom of his thought is through his counter-positions to Gilles Deleuze whom I discussed last week. Ranciere thought hat Deleuze's attempt to come up with two distinct types of images - movement image and time image - was misguided. As he observed, 'movement image and time image are by no means two types of images ranged in opposition, but two different points of view on the image.' One of Deleuze's favorite illustrations of time-image was Robert Bresson's work. Ranciere makes the point that even here, it is impossible to isolate any time-images from movement- image on the basis of specific and inherent attributes. It is his conviction that the very same examples can be deployed to illustrate the functioning of both types.

Another point of dissension pertains to the question of narration. Gilles Deleuze leaves one with the uneasy feeling that he inclines towards minimizing narration in film. Such features as narration, representation, movement, action, are de-valorized by Deleuze. It is Ranciere's view that these features are much more complex than Deleuze would have us believe and that narration is primary and every other feature flows from it. Furthermore, Deleuze, in his privileging of the time-image seems to be privileging the irrational cut as opposed to the rational cut. However, Ranciere believes that the so-called irrational cut has now being vulgarized as a consequence of constant use in television commercials, commercial films and that irrational cuts far from undermining narrative, in their own way, support the movement of the sequence of events. Clearly, Ranciere is presenting a view of cinema that is largely at odds with that espoused by Deleuze.

In order to understand Ranciere's approach to cinema it is important to have some idea of his social vision. He has as his declared goal the achievement of democratic equality and the elimination of all forms of oppression. In this regard, two key terms play a central role in his formulations. They are 'police' and 'political.' Ranciere's use of these terms departs significantly from the normal usage of them. The essence of the police, to him, is not repression but rather a certain distribution of the sensible that precludes the emergence of politics.

The term politics, according to him, is the capacity for dissension. What politics does is to challenge the existing restrictive social orders and pave the way for the full participation of citizens; this is achieved through the reconfiguration of the distribution of the sensible.

For Ranciere, the word redistribution carries two meanings - one the idea of separation and exclusion and the other that of participation. The distribution of the visible is intimately related to questions such who can say, who is able to see, whose words carry weight in society. These are as important in art and aesthetics as they are in the flow of action in the larger society. Distribution refers to forms of inclusion and exclusion as well as possibilities of participation. This guiding concept of the distribution of the visible has important ramifications of Rancier'e understanding of cinema.

The watchword for Ranciere is radical egalitarianism. In his view, 'politics exists when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part., and 'political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place's destination.' He maps this vision of the social order on to the aesthetic order. He talks of two types of regimes of art.

Broadly speaking, a regime of art is a way of giving expression to modes of doing, making, and coordinating their corresponding forms of visibility, and the way of conceptualizing them. The two regimes of art that he delineates are representative regimes and aesthetic regimes. The representative regime of art upholds the hierarchy of the distribution of the sensible. The aesthetic regime of art abolishes that hierarchy. These are reflected in the larger organizing concepts of 'police' and 'politics.' Police indexes the existing social hierarchies and exclusions while political refers to the elimination of them.

In discussing Ranciere's approach to cinema, two books that invite closer study are 'Film Fables' and 'The Future of the Image.' In the first book he discusses his concept of film fable and raises interesting issues related to theatre and cinema, television and images, poetics of early Hollywood films and offers perceptive readings of the works of such distinguished directors as Sergei Eisenstein, F.W. Murnau, Godard, Rossellini, Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang. His notion of film as fables is one that should stir a great deal of interest and inquiry among students of cinema. According to him, cinema is a fable because it combines the visual and discursive which, in turns, work with and against each other. Therefore, to regard film narrative in simple, linear terms is to ignore its inherent complexity and many-sidedness. For Ranciere, therefore, film is a site of tension and contradictions; he sees film as a 'thwarted fable.'

The 'Future of Image' is also a book that repays close analysis. In this book, he formulates an interesting new concept of image as it finds articulation in modern art. His central point is that art has always been intermeshed with politics, and one can discuss the former without the shadow of the other looming over the discussion. in 'The Future of the Image', Ranciere examine various art movements, the work of innovative film directors such as Godard and Bressoon and investigates into the theoretical positions of men of mind like Barthes, Foucaut, Deleuze, Adorno, Lyotard. Ranciere argues that there is a stark political choice staring in the face of writers, playwrights, artists and filmmakers. They can either choose to produce works of art that lend support, and galvanize, movements towards radical democracy or they can engage in a form of reactionary mysticism, as many are wont to do.

His concept of the image is inextricably linked to the politics of art, and his discussions of the future of the image is guided by this desideratum.

When reading books such as 'Film Fables' and 'The Future of Images', a number of important thoughts on the experience and analysis of cinema begin to circulate in one's imagination. Owing to limitations of space, I wish to focus on two points. First, the idea of fable as a larger entity than a narrative deserves sustained study. For him, film fables connote a more expanded concept than film script; the art of cinema is concerned with the fabulation of images. These images can often challenge, interrogate, subvert the meaning produced by the narrative. In other words, film images tend to exceed the circles of meaning established by the script. Ranciere points out that in a film like Nicholas Ray's 'Live by Night', a woman's words convey one set of meanings, and her appearance, 'loose and brushed hair' another set of meanings. This potentiality that film images have to transgress the zones of meaning marked out by the script is an important aspect of film fabulation. The reduction to simple narrative linearity that almost always impoverishes the filmic experience is resisted by his multi-layered film fabulation.

Second, the intersection of aesthetics and politics through what he calls the distribution of the visible is important. According to him, both politics and aesthetics address the issues of imagining, envisioning, partitioning, distribution. Ranciere believes that what is central to politics, as indeed to aesthetics, is the distribution of the sensible. The ideas of inclusion and exclusion, the power to speak and the lack of power resulting in the inability to speak are equally relevant to politics and aesthetics. As I stated earlier, in Ranciere's view, the representative regime is a system that facilitates the coordination of the relations between what can be seen and what can be said. The aesthetic regime, in contrast challenges this and allows the voices that are silenced to be hard and the invisible to seen. These have great implications of the understanding and analysis of cinema.

Let me cite a Sri Lankan film as an example. From the very beginning, as a filmmaker Dharmasena Pathiraja was interested in the creation of a critical cinema. He wanted to break out of the constricting formats associated with existing modes of filmmaking in Sri Lanka and explore new and more productive pathways. He was disconcerted by the haze of ossifying orthodoxy, both in terms of film making and film criticism that had begun to settle over local film culture. It was his declared intention to create a new cinema that was able to fashion a counter-discourse to the popular style of filmmaking and the bourgeois artistic cinema. One aspect of this ambition is manifested in his belief that film fables can usefully contradict the basic script.

When one examines some of his early films like 'Bambaru Avith' and Para Dige' and also some of his later works, one observes his proclivity to urge disjunctions between the visual and aural registers that Ranciere saw as a mark of film fabulation. It is Pathiraja's way of promoting critical cinema. Second, the idea of the distribution of the visible - so central to Ranciere's thought - is conspicuously present in a film like 'Soldadu Unnahe.' This film deals with the issue of the dispersal of the visible that Ranciere talked about. The film revolves around four characters that have been distinctly marginalized and rendered invisible - an old soldier, a prostitute, an alcoholic and a pickpocket. The story unfolds over a brief span of three days; the Independence Day, and the day preceding and following it.

The Independence Day is celebrated with the customary pomp and glamour; politicians exult in the joys of freedom. At the same time the director contrapuntally compels us to gaze at the four characters for whom the idea of independence, and the concomitant exultations, have very little meaning, This film, like many of his other works, aims to move towards an understanding of radical equality that Rancier saw as being so vital to the functioning of democracy, and to the plight of the invisible.

As with other film theorists, Rancier has his own share of strengths and weaknesses. Although he does not show a predilection for hair-fine exactitudes of scholasticism, he does not display the same intimate feel for cinema that Bazin and Deleuze do. With intense patience, through nuance and allusion, he advances along steeply inclined path of thought gathering increasing complexity. The life-force of his thinking is imprinted by a desire to eliminate all forms of social oppression. And this pulse of his thinking, with its energizing impact, carries resolute conviction. It is this conviction that can be identified as the thread of authority that runs through his writings on cinema. As a consequence the orders of truth uncovered by politics and art become each others mirror images.