ESTRUCTURA DEL MODELO TRATADO DE LA OCDE

It is here that lurks a question that has already been posed,³²but now it is more forceful, even determinant; since, for Bazin, the reason why depth of field plays such a pivotal role is that– independently even of the “truth” of its nature – he makes it function as an instrument (a grid) for re-reading and re-ordering the “evolution of film language”;³³and since it thus comes to reveal a “meaning” which, subtly

pro-32. “[Bazin’s] theoretical method itself installs contradiction as the driving principal of the his-tory of the cinema. [...] We will therefore, in turn, need to examine the account he gives of the

‘evolution of film language,’ that is, to invert or extend his questions in the direction of the determi-nations of this‘evolution’ – whether technical and aesthetic or ideological/economic – since Bazin attempts to constitute an autonomous history of cinematic forms.”

33. It is in this extremely important text that Bazin attempts to apply his system to the history of the cinema, carrying out an (interpretative and tendentious) reading which insists on producing it as a“progressive” succession – albeit rife with contradictions and deferrals – of technical and stylis-tic acquisitions ineluctably leading to the cinema of the innate presence of the“real” in all its “mys-tery.” And it is this very notion of the “evolution of film language” which, more or less, courses through not only Bazin’s text, but those written by the majority of film historians, as well as Lebel’s work. Such an“evolution” in fact proceeds from a static, non-dialectical point of view, which on the one hand sees historical time as a linear plenitude, and on the other hand only envisages films as

gramming the entire history of the cinema, returns to and insists on the question as to what should be understood by the phrase “history of the cinema,” and what is actually understood by this phrase. Now, this is a question that no film theorist and/

or historian has truly made the effort to pose, as they have all more or less relied on the commonplace,“obvious” (ideological) conception of history as an accumulative succession of facts and works, a chronological list of objects “already there,” which itself does not cease reactivating “the empiricist ideology which, with a few excep-tions, overwhelmingly dominates every variety of history (whether it be history in the wide sense, or specialized economic, social or political history, the history of art, literature, philosophy, the sciences, etc.),”³⁴and which barely consists in anything other than an arrangement and re-arrangement of, or a tinkering with, a datum whose status is never interrogated. For the film historian, as for other historians, the empirical datum is in the position of command: over dates, films,“styles,” countries,

“influences” and ready-made “relations,” as well as historical events in the strict sense, themselves already there, etc. A system of direct causality– one that is overly simplistic, elementary, and, above all, convenient because it confirms the illusion of a homogenous, full, continuous historical temporality, that is to say, one that reduces to the greatest possible extent the complex play of uneven determinations, conden-sing the articulation of manifold temporalities and smoothing out the gradation of deferrals and differences³⁵– is unproblematically put into place as a “historical” and

“concrete” base, which, for example, acts as a point of departure for Bazin to author-ize himself to trace the“evolution of film language,” or for Lebel to also evoke, albeit

“from the point of view of a materialist reading of cinema,” the “history of cinematic forms” and even “the historical progress of forms.”³⁶If, precisely, what separates us from Bazin is the antagonism between materialism and idealism, then it is not only

finished products, as literally transcended by and emptied out (envelopes, shells, sediments, fossils) of the practice which not only made them but outside of the work of which they are not legible. We should thus be wary of the ideological theme of a history of the cinema as an accumulation of films of which the latest to come out (the most recent datum) is by dint of this fact the most“modern” (a theme which we regret to see at work in Lebel).

34. Louis Althusser et al., Lire Le Capital, vol. I (Paris: Maspero, 1965), p. 136 [repr. Presses univer-staires de France, coll.“Quadrige,” 1996. For the English translation, see: Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1977), p. 109].

35. “It is only possible to give a content to the concept of historical time by defining historical time as the specific form of existence of the social totality under consideration, an existence in which different structural levels of temporality interfere, because of the particular relations of corre-spondence, non-correcorre-spondence, articulation, discrepancy and torsion which obtain between the different‘levels’ of the whole in accordance with its general structure.” Lire le Capital, op. cit. p. 136 [p. 108, translation modified].

36. Jean-Patrick Lebel, Cinéma et Idéologie, Éditions sociales, op. cit., p. 199. I cite the following passage as a fine example of conceptual and scriptural indecision:“At a precise stage in the history of cinematic forms, any given form may momentarily crystallize given ideological signifieds within itself, the reaction to which explains the rejection of these forms and the valorization of other procedures or forms, which, once‘utilized’ or in turn invested by ideological signifieds, will be

re-on the aesthetic level, or re-on the level of film theory, that this oppositire-on is marked out, and must be marked out, but primarily on the very question of (film) history, and of the construction of its concept. Assuredly, there would be little scope for the gesture of“rectifying” Bazin’s deviations, if this involved denouncing his presupposi-tions and conclusions, but proceeding, in order to do so, from the same conception of history, and if it thus reaffirmed, if not the modalities, then at least the object of his discourse, unchanged. The cinema-object, the object of the history of cinema, are not the same for Bazin as they are for us, and it also seems that they are not the same for Lebel as they are for us, since, having not made the effort to theoretically estab-lish his object (cinema and ideology: fine, but what is the value of analyzing this relationship if neither of the two terms posed are theoretically constituted?³⁷), Lebel finds himself in the position of having no object apart from that which overtly

pre-jected in favor of new forms, or of a return to forms previously repre-jected and now‘scrubbed clean,’

ideologically speaking, by the passage of history.”

37. Lebel’s book is riddled with the lack of such a theoretical elaboration: what “cinema” is he talking about, and what“ideology,” if not those whose “obviousness” dispenses with a theoretical definition: those of commonsense thinking. To justify this lack, Lebel gives the pretext that Marxist theoretical research on the notion of ideology is far from being completed (but does it need to be completed?): a convenient excuse, which allows him to avoid having to advocate for a particular axis of this research, to put off theoretical work to the future, and to shirk even the slightest amount of conceptual work, which any Marxist approach toward the appropriation of the real through knowledge can not relinquish, without renouncing its Marxist character. As for us, we do not intend to evade this question, given that a major part of this study is devoted to it, treating precisely what is at stake in the title“Technique and Ideology”: technicist ideology, that which speaks the “discourse-of-the-technicians,” and the ideological status of film technique. Let us add that Lebel’s non-defini-tion of the objects whose relanon-defini-tions he claims to account for leads him to describe them– in contra-diction to his own project– as more or less parallel, and not articulated within the same process: on the hand the films, and on the other hand the ideology which“comes to them,” phase by phase, and according to the degree of“mastery” possessed by the filmmaker, a veritable ringleader, perfecting his direction to varying degrees of success. Hence, outside of and previous to the intervention of ideology (which is doubtless waiting in the offing for a propitious moment to show its cards...), there is always a portion of the film that is ready, offering itself up to receive ideology or, by contrast, defending itself from ideology... The film/ideology relationship thus becomes a chronological succes-sivity whose naïve schema irresistibly recalls Marx’s remarks on Proudhon’s schematism: “The pro-duction relations of every society form a whole. M. Proudhon considers economic relations as so many social phases, engendering one another, resulting one from the other like the antithesis from the thesis, and realizing in their logical sequence the impersonal reason of humanity. The only drawback to this method is that when he comes to examine a single one of these phases, M. Proud-hon can not explain it without having recourse to all the other relations of society; which relations, however, has not yet made his dialectic movement engender. When, after that, M. Proudhon, by means of pure reason, proceeds to give birth to these other phrases, he treats them as if they were newborn babes. He forgets that they are of the same age as the first. [...] How, indeed, could the single logical formula of movement, of sequence, of time, explain the structure of society, in which all relations coexist simultaneously and support one another?” Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Vol. VI (New York: International Publish-ers, 1975), pp. 166-167.

sents itself to empiricism, and which is also postulated by the empiricist idealism of Bazin.

The study that we intend to make of the variations and“utilizations” of depth of field in a certain number of films would thus be unable to deconstruct the interpreta-tions that Bazin gives of them without being founded on a conception of film history radically different to both his own views, and to the conception established by all of the“histories of the cinema” dominant at present: causal linearity, a claim for a dual autonomy of the“specificity” of the cinema and of the model of idealist histories of

“art,” a teleological concern, the idea of “progress” or “increasing perfection” not only of technique but of“forms”; in short, the identification, covering over and submer-sion of film practice with and under the mass of films produced, already there, fin-ished, held to be the only concrete objects,“works” which, even if they vary in terms of how“masterful” they are, have an equal right to establish and write this history.

Moreover, they also avoid theoretically constituting the status of depth of field in its complexity: posing the question of the history of what, in the beginning of the analysis, is only given as a “simple technico-stylistic procedure,” which is “present”

and“given” unevenly in the mass of films, and unevenly too in the text of each film, but which analysis may uncover and work on– or transform – on a double level: on the one hand its appearance-disappearance in the history of the cinema, that is, its participation in one or several series of signifying systems and its articulation in the network of determinations constituting them; and, on the other hand, the modalities, conditions and laws of the reinscription effected within films of “non-specifically”

cinematic codes (photographic codes, pictorial codes, theatrical codes) whose sal-ience, however great or small, is itself subjected to a history, and functions like film history. It is in the study of the gaps and closures, discrepancies and recoveries, which thus delineate and dynamize the inscription of depth of field into a history that overflows the specific field of the cinema in order to call forth the entirety of representative practices, thereby constituting the cinema itself as a representative practice (which is the sole basis on which a materialist theory of film, and a history of the cinema which avoids being a mere series of films, can be thought), that some responses can be formed to the questions posed by Norbert Massa^vin Ciné-Forum.³⁸ In order to clearly show how this appeal has become an urgent matter, and not only for us, I choose to cite his article“Note sur l’histoire du cinéma” at length:

There is still no history of the cinema. All the history books (cf. Brasillach, Ford, as well as Sadoul and Mitry) start from the simple idea that history is what has happened, that the cinema has a past and thus a history, and that the historian

38. A magazine published in Poitiers by the organizing committee of the town’s film society (Marc Farina, Jean-Paul François, Norbert Massa, Jean-François Pichard and Jean-Noël Rey), and which has released five issues so far (cf.“Notes, informations, critiques,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 230 [1971]).

who is undoubtedly“of his time” must peer into this past with the utmost objec-tivity.

Objectivity, here, consists in eliminating subjective distortions to the greatest degree possible, and not in constituting an object that would be a genuine object for a science– the history of the cinema.

Now, a scientific history of the cinema is not the rediscovery, the restitution or the reconstitution of a past, even if this is not as a simple description but as an explanation.

To carry out the history of the cinema is to properly constitute its history. His-tories of the cinema lack both history and the cinema, as both the former and the latter are self-evident for their authors. Everything occurs as if the cinema were present, as if its presence were visible in the mass of films, and as if it were simply a matter of going to take a look at it. This ideology of historical time as linear, oriented, teleological time: the time of presence, of the presence in and of itself of the essence of the cinema in its works, must give way to a scientific history which will have first of all determined its object. At the same time, the “cinema”-object and the “cinema”-object of a history of the cinema must be thought out. Only a theory of the cinema as a signifying practice seems to us to be able to respond to the demands of a real history of the cinema.

In other words, the constitution of a history of the cinema requires the deter-mination of the historical moment where the filmic text appears in a reduplica-tion designating it as such: this is the first scansion of history, and, for theory, it is the point of no return from history as science to the ideology of history.

The determination of the filmic text (i.e., its“reading”) in this nodal point of history– in which it is inscribed, necessarily, like every text, like everything, and in which it also writes history– allows us to return to the cinema’s past and to reread it as history, that is, to rewrite it as history.

[...]

A materialist history of the cinema will need to be eminently critical, that is, recursive, and it will need to constitute the past on the basis of the lines of force of the present. It will also be monumental: far from any egalitarian efforts, it will be traced along certain ridgelines, which will also be the lines of greatest tension in its writing.

A materialist history of the cinema, while attentive to the specificity of the cinema, should only consider its object in its relative autonomy, in relation to other practices. It will therefore also need to determine the specificity of this relationship.

The return of the future tense in these lines reaffirms the lack, today, of such a mate-rialist history of the cinema, and the necessity for it. But this history is also unfeasible

without the concept of signifying practice³⁹(hence why it is vain to look for a fore-shadowing, or even a glimpse, of it in Lebel’s work, in spite of the materialist wording in a number of his chapters), or the Althusserian concept of differential historical temporality⁴⁰– that is to say, once more, without a materialist theory of history itself, or the Marxist elaboration of the science of history, historical materialism.

39. “Situated within historical materialism and, at the same time, within dialectical materialism, the concept of the signifying practice sheds light on the fact that every social practice with an ideological function is a signifier, that the conditions of signifiance are within social conditions, and, inversely, that social (ideological) conditions and functions have the production of signifiance as their Other Scene. Historical materialism thus opens up to what it omits when it becomes dogmatic – that is: dialectical logic. In this perspective, to consider ‘the arts,’ for example, as signifying prac-tices is, it seems to me, the only way to allow them to be envisaged as socio-historical formations, at the same time as designating the specificity of the functioning of meaning and of the subject in them, without reducing them to ideology, but also without alienating them as subjective-pathologi-cal experiences (sites of schizophrenization) or aesthetic experiences (sites of the pure imaginary and narcissistic jouissance).‘The arts’-as-signifying-practices means that they are also all that, as well as something else: sites for historical contradiction and participation in social history.” Kristeva,

“Pratique analytique, pratique révolutionnaire,” op. cit. [p. 74].

40. “The model of a continuous and homogenous time which takes the place of immediate exis-tence, which is the place of the immediate existence of this continuing presence, can no longer be regarded as the time of history. [...] We can argue from the specific structure of the Marxist whole that it is no longer possible to think the process of the development of the different levels of the whole in the same historical time. [...] Each of these particular histories (modes of production, rela-tions of production, the political superstructure, aesthetic production, etc.) is punctuated with parti-cular rhythms and can only be known on condition that we have defined the concept of the specifi-city of its historical temporality and its punctuations (continuous development, revolutions, breaks, etc.). [...] The specificity of these times and histories is therefore differential, since it is based on the differential relations between the different levels within the whole. [...] In the capitalist mode of production, therefore, the time of economic production has absolutely nothing to do with the ob-viousness of everyday practice’s ideological time. [...] It is an invisible time, essentially illegible, as invisible and as opaque as the reality of the total capitalist production process itself. [...] [The con-struction of this concept of history] has nothing to do with the visible sequence of events recorded by the chronicler. [...] There is nothing in true history which allows it to be read in the ideological continuum of a linear time that need only be punctuated and divided; on the contrary, it has its

40. “The model of a continuous and homogenous time which takes the place of immediate exis-tence, which is the place of the immediate existence of this continuing presence, can no longer be regarded as the time of history. [...] We can argue from the specific structure of the Marxist whole that it is no longer possible to think the process of the development of the different levels of the whole in the same historical time. [...] Each of these particular histories (modes of production, rela-tions of production, the political superstructure, aesthetic production, etc.) is punctuated with parti-cular rhythms and can only be known on condition that we have defined the concept of the specifi-city of its historical temporality and its punctuations (continuous development, revolutions, breaks, etc.). [...] The specificity of these times and histories is therefore differential, since it is based on the differential relations between the different levels within the whole. [...] In the capitalist mode of production, therefore, the time of economic production has absolutely nothing to do with the ob-viousness of everyday practice’s ideological time. [...] It is an invisible time, essentially illegible, as invisible and as opaque as the reality of the total capitalist production process itself. [...] [The con-struction of this concept of history] has nothing to do with the visible sequence of events recorded by the chronicler. [...] There is nothing in true history which allows it to be read in the ideological continuum of a linear time that need only be punctuated and divided; on the contrary, it has its