METODO DE DISTRIBUCIÓN POR RED RAMIFICADA

The exciting work carried out in this area notwithstanding, it would thus be an in-justice– and a seeming reiteration of the “hermetically sealed” division between film theory and film history that he rejects– if the ongoing value of Comolli’s text were to be limited to its influence on the“new film historians.” Rather, his work has yielded a range of theoretical and practical legacies which are exhausted neither by its take-up by“1970s film theory” nor by its later ramifications for research into the history of early cinema, and one of the most fertile of these legacies has been the impact the text has had on Comolli’s own later work, in both film theory and filmmaking.

Many of the details of Comolli’s activity after leaving Cahiers in 1973 are discussed in greater depth in his recent interview with Senses of Cinema, so only a quick sum-mary need be given here. After an initial foray into documentary filmmaking in 1968, with Les Deux Marseillaises (an exploration of the June 1968 legislative elections, co-directed with André S. Labarthe), Comolli would make his feature debut with La Cecilia, released in 1975 after more than a year of work on the film. Centering on a 19th-century colony of Italian anarchists in Brazil, under the tutelage of Giovanni Rossi, Comolli’s analysis of group dynamics within a utopian collectivist project to-tally detached from the surrounding society was an unmistakable parable for his experience at Cahiers, and was interpreted as such in the journal’s reviews of the film.⁹² Some have criticized La Cecilia for being more formally conservative than would have been suggested by the theories developed by Cahiers,⁹³ but the film works on a more subtle level; its challenge to dominant film practice operates above all in its conditions of production. As Straub/Huillet have also sought to do, Comolli

90. Ibid., pp. 12, 16.

91. Comolli gave a video presentation at this conference, while Gérard Leblanc and Jean-Patrick Lebel were also in attendance. Cf. Daniel Fairfax,“Conference Report: The Impact of Technological Innovations on the Historiography and Theory of Cinema,” Cinema Journal, vol. 52 no. 1 (2012), pp.

127-131.

92. Cf. Serge Toubiana,“Les Arpenteurs,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 264 (1976), pp. 41-43; Serge Da-ney,“Chantez le code!,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 264 (1976), pp. 52-54; Pascal Kané, “Le detour par l’enfance,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 265 (1976), pp. 19-22.

93. Cf., in particular, Alison Smith,“Jean-Louis Comolli and La Cecilia: Theory into Practice,”

French Cultural Studies, vol. 2 no. 4 (1991), pp. 13-33.

attempted to break down the traditional hierarchies prevailing on film shoots, and he concomitantly developed a filming practice based on spontaneity and improvisation among actors and technicians alike.

La Cecilia was notably followed, in 1981, by L’Ombre rouge, a political thriller set during the Spanish Civil War. The increased budget and presence of star actors re-stricted the possibility for a repeat of the shooting style of his earlier film, and the end result duly suffers for it. Comolli himself recognized L’Ombre rouge as something of an aesthetic dead-end, and, while it was not to be his last work of fiction, his filmmaking efforts since then have overwhelmingly been focused on documentary works, for the most part made for French public television. While these projects have tackled a wide range of issues, a particular point of attention has been the quotidian reality of electoral politics in France. With Tous pour un! (1988), Comolli would repeat the gesture of Les Deux Marseillaises by filming grassroots party acti-vists in the Parisian banlieue during the lead-up to a presidential ballot, before his geographical focus shifted to Marseilles with 1989’s Marseille: de père en fils, in colla-boration with journalist Michel Samson. Over the course of the next 13 years, Comolli would return to the port city a further six times, charting each election campaign during a period marked by disorientation on the left and the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front national on the right.

For a time, filmmaking supplanted theorizing about the cinema in Comolli’s praxis. With the exception of a few scattered articles published in Cahiers in the late 1970s,⁹⁴Comolli refrained from writing about the cinema almost entirely. This reti-cence began to change in the late 1980s, when he was led back to a preoccupation with film theory after a period of writing on jazz (which has always been Comolli’s second great passion).⁹⁵Comolli’s various writings since then – whether as journal articles, interviews, seminars or personal notes– have been collected in two major volumes, Voir et pouvoir (2004) and Corps et cadre (2012), and much of this corpus revolves around a theoretical interrogation of documentary filmmaking practice. De-spite totaling approximately 1200 pages of material, only a handful of these pieces have found publication in English.⁹⁶

94. These would include“Le passé filmé” (Cahiers, no. 277 [1977], pp. 5-14), “Un corps en trop,”

(Cahiers, no. 278 [1977], pp. 5-16; translated as“Historical Fiction – A Body Too Much,” trans. Ben Brewster, Screen, vol. 19 no. 2 [1978], pp. 41-54), and a series of articles co-authored with François Géré. All were composed independently of the Cahiers editorial committee, and a footnoted com-ment in“Un corps en trop” received a stinging rebuke from Pascal Bonitzer (“Note sur une note de Comolli et sur un cinéma tordu,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 279-280 [1977], pp. 94-97), the tone of which would have been unthinkable while Comolli was still centrally involved with the journal.

95. Notably, in 1971– contemporaneous with the publication of “Technique and Ideology” – Co-molli co-authored the book Free Jazz/Black Power with Philippe Carles (Paris: Champs Libre, 1971;

repr. Paris: Folio, 2001). He was also integrally involved in the mammoth project Dictionnaire du jazz (Paris: Laffont, 1989).

96. Cf. the bibliography, infra, for more details on Comolli’s writings.

As Comolli himself recognizes, the traces of “Technique and Ideology,” and his time at Cahiers more generally, can be felt throughout his more recent writings.⁹⁷It was not surprising, therefore, that he should elect to revisit the original text in 2009.

He did so in propitious circumstances: the 40th anniversary of May’68 the previous year had unleashed a flurry of retrospective interest in the period’s gauchisme, while the heritage of Althusser– long cast to a state of purgatory within critical theory after the scandals of his later career– has been subject to reevaluation with the increased interest in his former acolytes Rancière, Badiou and Balibar, which itself has led to a revival in the philosophical fortunes of radical militancy.⁹⁸The long period of dis-avowal of the French far left, stretching from the rise of the nouveaux philosophes to the“end of history” discourse after the collapse of the USSR, has, it seems, definitively receded.

Accordingly, the pride with which Comolli looks back on the“technique and ideol-ogy period”⁹⁹is in no way mixed with embarrassment. But this does not mean that he stubbornly persists in seeing matters through the singular prism of his earlier text.

The theoretical framework for his more recent writing has become more pluralist in nature, and has widened to include Debord, Rancière, Nancy, Virilio, Didi-Huberman, Adorno, Deleuze, Bergson and Stiegler among others. Notably, Comolli declares that

“the holy alliance of the spectacle and the commodity, foreseen and analyzed by Guy Debord from 1967 onwards, has now been realized.”¹⁰⁰The combination of mechani-cally reproduced images and sounds is thus, in his view, the“ultimate weapon” for the domination of capital. Moreover, in Comolli’s analysis the structural hierarchy of the capitalist social formation has been reversed: the spectacle, he submits, has be-come the“supreme form of the commodity,” to which the base economic functioning of contemporary capitalism is subordinate.¹⁰¹

The result is, on the one hand, that many of the precepts governing Cahiers’ work in the post-1968 period still obtain– or, if anything, they have even gained in validity.

The struggle against the spectacle takes place, above all, on the level of forms, of the signifier. Theory must still interrogate the place of the viewer, who, in order to be

“emancipated” is in need of being transformed into a “critical spectator.”¹⁰²On the

97. This was further reinforced when, in interviews with his former colleagues, he revisited the period for the 2011 film À voir absolument (si possible). 1963-1973: Dix années aux Cahiers du cinéma, co-directed with Jean Narboni and Ginette Lavigne.

98. In particular, all of these figures have been key participants in a broad project to resuscitate the philosophical validity of the notion of“communism,” which has been reflected in conferences in London, Berlin, Paris and New York since 2009. Cf. The Idea of Communism, ed. Costas Douzinas and SlavojŽižek, 2 vols. (London: Verso, 2010-2013).

99. This is the term Bonitzer used to describe the 1969-1973 period at Cahiers. Cf.“Nos années non-légendaires,” op. cit., p. 148.

100. Cf. infra, p. 49.

101. Cf. infra, p. 50.

102. Comolli here makes a direct reference to Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gre-gory Elliott (London: Verso, 2011).

other hand, while the cinema prepared the way for the later, more pervasive forms of the spectacle (television, advertising, the Internet), its continued existence can only be as“an anti-spectacle, capable of dis-alienating us from the dominant spectacular alienation.”¹⁰³Moreover, the fragmentary montage of Vertov and Godard (the “jump-cut” – Comolli uses the English term) has now become the generalized mode of functioning for the audiovisual wing of the culture industry, such that television, in particular, has become nothing more than a frenzied accumulation of redundant imagery. Whereas during their années rouges the Cahiers writers sought to critique the cinema’s “impression of reality,” and valued those films which deconstructed the system of representation based on cinematic realism (including through the use of montage-based fragmentation), Comolli now demands that the cinema “incite an infiltration of something of the real into the images and sounds of its representa-tions,”¹⁰⁴and he finds examples of this cinema in the distinctly neo-Bazinian work of Abbas Kiarostami, Jia Zhangke and Pedro Costa, as well as in the documentary prac-tice which he has so amply theorized over the last two decades.

These are only some of the contours of a rich text that mingles autobiography with theoretical reflection, ruminations on film history with commentary on contempo-rary media practice, and indefatigable optimism about the future of cinema with unbridled rage at the present global political order.“Technique and Ideology” waited nearly four decades for the promise of its final“to be continued” to be fulfilled, and with“Cinema against Spectacle” Comolli rises to the challenge posed by his earlier text.