Table Of ContentCamering: Fernand Deligny on Cinema and the Image
Media / Art / Politics
The series in Media / Art / Politics stimulates cutting-edge research in the fields
of media, arts and politics, focusing on transformations in technology,
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in our everyday, increasingly media-saturated and globalised world. We
welcome publications that address the myriad ways in which media-
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theory-driven. However diverse the cases addressed, the studies in this
series converge, in that they all take a specific set of cultural phenomena
as a focal point to broach the larger socio-cultural and political issues
from the perspective of a critical (media) theory in development. Art
probes the implications of such changes, offering an excellent starting
point for critical reflections that seek to untangle the pivotal role of media
in our world today.
Series editors
Pepita Hesselberth (Centre for the Arts in Society, Leiden University)
Yasco Horsman (Centre for the Arts in Society, Leiden University)
Editorial Board
Herschel Farbman (French and Comparative Literature,
School of Humanities, UC Irvine)
Cissie Fu (Emily Carr University of Art & Design, Vancouver)
David Gaultier (Netherlands School of Cultural Analysis,
University of Amsterdam)
Frederik Tygstrup (Department of Arts and Cultural Studies,
University of Copenhagen)
Pasi Väliaho (Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas,
University of Oslo)
Kristin Veel (Department of Arts and Cultural Studies,
University of Copenhagen)
Other titles in this series
Inge van de Ven, Big Books in Times of Big Data, 2019
Ali Shobeiri, Place; Towards a Geophilosophy of Photography, 2021
Camering:
Fernand Deligny on
Cinema and the Image
Introduced and edited by Marlon Miguel
Translated by Sarah Moses
Postface by Elena Vogman
LEIDEN UNIVERSITY PRESS
The publication of this volume was made possible by
EUR ArTeC (Cet ouvrage a beneficie d’une aide de l’ANR au titre du programme
lnvestissement d’avenir (ANR-17-EURE-0008))
Centre National du Livre (CNL)
BREAK !!! invoegen
Project “Madness, Media, Milieus. Reconfiguring the Humanities in
-> command-enter <-
Postwar Europe”, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar/ VolkswagenStiftung
All images were digitalized, edited, and granted by L’Arachnéen publishing
house – all rights reserved. The images were provided by the private archives of
Gisèle Durand (the archives of Deligny’s Network), as well as those of Any Durand,
stored in Monoblet. Images/sequence of images from pages 34, 35, 36, 37, 54, 76,
102, 112, 164, 172, 234, and cover previously appeared in Camérer. À Propos
d’images, edited by Sandra Alvarez de Toledo, Anaïs Masson, Marlon Miguel,
Marina Vidal-Naquet, Paris, L’Arachnéen, 2021.
Media / Art / Politics, volume 3
Translation: Sarah Moses
Cover image: Le Serret living area, end of 1970s.
Cover design: Andre Klijsen
Lay-out: Friedemann Vervoort
ISBN 978 90 8728 384 1
e-ISBN 978 94 0060 430 8
NUR 652
© present edition / Leiden University Press, 2022
© original texts by Fernand Deligny / L’Arachnéen, Paris
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no
part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the publisher and
the author of the book.
Contents
Epigraph [1996] 7
Translator’s Note 9
Sarah Moses
General Introduction 15
Marlon Miguel
Cinema. Cine-Club [1934] 55
The Camera, a Pedagogical Tool [1955] 57
He’s Still One of Us [1971] 63
Camering [1977] 69
Miscreating [1979] 77
Camering [1982] 103
The Alga and the Fungus [1982] 113
Fossils Have a Hard Life:
Apropos of the Image [1982] 123
Camering [1978-1983] 165
The Distinctiveness of the IMAGEs [1988] 173
What Is Not Seen (by the Self) [1990] 235
Postface. Minor Gestures, Minor Media 239
Elena Vogman
Notes 252
5
Epigraph [1996]
What I can say, now that I’m in my eighty-third year, is that the images in the darkest
depths of my being behave like swamp beasts; they kill and then devour each other, or
rather, they devour each other alive, or copulate when they come across another of their
kind. Hence the fact that I have never been able to accept the unconscious as Freud sees
it; the space was taken. I’m moved when I find these images alive and moving inside me
again—moved to tears that never flow. I have never heard the images that haunt us spoken
of; they seize me when I lend myself to their proliferating presence; I’m then very far from
others and ready to write. Sometimes, I get down to it, as I have just now, my hand as
strange as everything I can see, and animated by convulsive movements that lead it down
familiar paths; at the heart of these movements, the vivid image that flows like lava at
the heart of a volcano. But when I set out on these paths, I lose whomever it is that reads
me. I have to return to the universe that is customary to them, even if it means setting out
towards the image once again, if the story presents me with a fissure in which to do so.1
1 The epigraph is excerpted from a text stored at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC)
and was partially published in French as ‘Un prof’ in Camérer. À propos d’images, Paris, L’Arachnéen, 2021.
Likely written in 1996, the text concerns Deligny’s secondary school philosophy teacher, who was shot in
the courtyard of the Citadel de Lille in 1942.
7
Translator’s Note
Sarah Moses
In the epigraph to this volume, Fernand Deligny tells of being ‘moved to tears that
never flow’ by the images alive inside him, images that haunt him and seize him
when he sits down to write. This image of the pedagogue, writer, storyteller, cineaste,
his hand convulsing across the page—the last I translated and the first to appear in
Camering—moved me deeply in turn; I knew I could sharpen it no further when
reading his words in my English had the same effect as they did in French.
This is what I was after. As I rendered into English the images and texts that
make up Camering, I sought a reading experience that came as close as possible to
that in French. If Deligny moved the Francophone reader in one direction and not
another—to laughter rather than tears, to wonder and not indifference, to insight
instead of bafflement; if his words stirred or stilled them, invited them to linger or
urged them along, helped them get their bearings or get lost—my hope is that he will
similarly affect the Anglophone reader.
In a volume that gathers his ideas on the image and cinema, capturing with English
words what he depicts so vividly and viscerally was key to reproducing the reading
experience. Deligny’s images were among the most poetic passages in Camering, and
perhaps as such my favourite to translate. When I sit down to write this note, and
consider the approach I took, I see certain of them in sharp detail again. I see, for
example, the Pentecost procession in the streets of Lille when Deligny was a child,
which he describes in ‘Miscreating’:
the parade of floats, small troupes of jolly fellows and giants, veritable
monuments, and ambulant scaffolding cloaked in multicoloured fabrics atop
which sat masques that were smiling and fuming, of characters legendary and
familiar.
I treated passages such as this as I would poetry, looking for the rhythms and patterns
of sound that give it its texture, and then seeking to reproduce them in translation.
Thus the sentence, itself a parade—of images—contains many of the same sounds
and stresses as the French: troupes de joyeux drilles et des géants became ‘troupes of
jolly fellows and giants’ and un masque souriant et furibard became ‘masques that were
smiling and fuming’.
It was also key to reproduce Deligny’s idiosyncratic style: he can be both serious
and playful, formal and colloquial, conceptual and poetical; he tends towards idiom,
9
Camering: Fernand Deligny on Cinema and the Image
wordplay, irony, and humour. In translating him, I was guided by a principle of
sorts—not to normalise in English what in French was anything but. This meant
embracing unexpected and at times unwieldy, circuitous, and fragmentary sentences
to mirror Deligny’s syntactical choices. Lexically, it meant opting for unfamiliar words
and rare or anachronistic uses to mirror his often uncommon choices in French. It
also entailed coming up with new words for neologisms such as the verb camérer,
which gives this volume its title. Though his choice of the infinitive form here and
elsewhere, such as with mécréer, ‘miscreating’, is intentional and important—precisely
because the form is tenseless—in English the gerund was necessary grammatically
when the French infinitive functioned as a noun. Conversely, when Deligny used
the gerund as a neologism for an individual who carried out a particular activity—
camérant is both the present participle of ‘to camer’ and the person who camers—this
verb form did not work in English and I opted for ‘cameror’, and elsewhere ‘writor’
and ‘realisor’, swapping the expected ‘er’ ending with an ‘or’.
Deligny pays close attention to the workings of the French language throughout
his writings. Often, this is a means of highlighting the ways language is used—
and inviting the reader to question them along with him. English is, of course,
not always used in similar or parallel ways to French, and certain linguistic puzzles
were among the most challenging to work out as a translator. Such was the case
with Deligny’s treatment of the reflexive pronoun se—in English, ‘oneself’, ‘itself’,
‘ourselves’, ‘themselves’, etc. He frequently places se in italics or uppercase letters,
thereby emphasising his notion that the idea one forms of the self limits what one can
see, such as the human, or the image as he regards it. Whereas in French se is often
necessary, the English equivalent is often not—unless, of course, it’s fundamental to
the notion being put forth. In ‘Fossils Have a Hard Life: Apropos of the Image’, for
instance, Deligny writes of striking images that stir us because they’re human, ‘not as
a result of what’s seen (by the self), for it’s here that the paradox lies; the human is not
seen (by the self)’. The passive reflexive construction, ce qui se voit means ‘what’s seen’,
but key here is the se, the self that in French also functions as the subject of the active
construction ‘what the self sees’, hence my decision to render it as ‘what’s seen (by the
self)’, and l’humain ne se voit pas as ‘the human is not seen (by the self)’.
Deligny’s interest in language is also evident in the ways he considers and plays
with the etymology of words in his writing. He begins the first ‘Camering’ text in this
volume with an examination of the verb projeter:
Words have a history. What the dictionary told us—in times past—of
projeter, to project, was ‘jeter dehors’, the image evoked being that of rejecting
something, throwing it out, while the word projet, a project, which has the
same origin, evokes ‘all that by which people tend to modify the world or
themselves in a given way’.
10
