Georges Didi-Huberman and Film: The Politics of the Image

175 Pages·2020·4.307 MB·English

by  Alison Smith

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Liverpool University for providing me with a
period of research leave and with general support in preparing and
completing this manuscript. In particular, thanks are due to Lisa Shaw
and Eve Rosenhaft for their careful reading of draft versions of the
diff erent chapters and helpful suggestions for improvements. I would
also like to thank the series editors, Lúcia Nagib and Tiago de Luca,
who also read the fi nished draft and provided support and suggestions,
and the publishing administration at Bloomsbury, Camilla Erskine
and Veidehi Hans, who have been most helpful in navigating the
manuscript through its fi nal stages in the very diffi cult circumstances
of Spring 2020.
vi
Introduction
Georges Didi-Huberman is a philosopher of images. In his early
writings, these were photographs and paintings, in keeping with the
discipline of art history to which he nominally owed allegiance; but
over the course of an extremely prolifi c and rapidly-developing career,
that initial disciplinary identifi cation has blurred as his subjects of
study have widened and ramifi ed. Notably, to an ever-accelerating
extent, the images with which he is concerned have taken on motion.
Film has been an essential presence in Didi-Huberman’s writing for
many years now; and although his early work on the subject was
largely – although not exclusively – concerned with montage, from
the start it went beyond an art-historical interest in fi lmic use of still
images, recognising and refl ecting upon the importance and specifi city
of fi lm footage in which movement, rhythm and gesture are an integral
part of the image-phenomenon. Since 2008 (the period which will be
of most interest to us in the following pages), fi lm has been central to
an increasing politicisation of Didi-Huberman’s preoccupations.
Th is book seeks to off er an introduction for English-speaking readers
to the wealth of theoretical potential contained in Didi-Huberman’s
writings on fi lm, which are as yet largely unknown to English fi lm
scholars due to the continued lack of accessible translations of the
author’s later work. In European scholarship Didi-Huberman’s place as
a fi lm theorist is becoming more assured, and his role in bringing fi lm
fi rmly to the forefront of debate on representation, political responsibility
and the uses of the image is recognised. As Irene Valle Corpas put it in
2018, he has been instrumental in bringing cinema into the orbit of art
history as a moving medium, rather than allowing the discipline to
1
2 Georges Didi-Huberman and Film
‘reconvert’ it into a mere study of ‘the images of History . . . dead and
eternal’.1 He has also engaged in lively debate, notably with Jacques
Ranci è re, over the understanding of political cinema notably in the
context of its potential for infl uence on an audience, and he is a frequent
interlocutor of contemporary fi lmmakers such as Vincent Dieutre,
Laura Waddington, Alfredo Jaar or Sylvain George.2 His direction of
thought fi nds parallels in some of the most dynamic theoretical currents
in French (and international) fi lm thinking, for example Nicole Brenez’s
work on montage, or (and increasingly) the area of fi lm-phenomenology
pioneered in French scholarship by Raymond Bellour and in
Anglophone studies by Vivien Sobchack and Laura Marks.3
In this study our primary focus will be on the work Didi-Huberman
has produced on the formulation of a political philosophy of image
practice – practice being understood as at once production, reception,
and the organisation of reception, for example through curation. We
will look at the foundations of this strand of Didi-Huberman’s work
from his fi rst sustained theses on the importance of montage, through
his writings on cinema and history in the context of a well-known
exchange with the journal L es Temps modernes concerning the role of
images in transmitting the memory of the Holocaust. Th rough a
1 Valle Corpas, Irene (2018), ‘Un cine impuro para salvar la Historia del Arte: algunas
notas sobre el pensamiento de la im á genes del cine en Jacques Ranci è re y Didi-
Huberman’, B olet í n de Arte , 39, 245–254. p. 249.
2 A recorded public discussion between Didi-Huberman and George (one of several
which have taken place) can be viewed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=pHHaoa7tJrc . An exchange with Jaar related to their mutual interest in fi lm
and in Pasolini is available on DailyMotion here: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/
xro1dw . Most recently Didi-Huberman’s closest fi lm contacts have been with Alexander
Kluge, whose memoir Chronique des sentiments he reviewed in Le Monde des images in
2016 (the review was republished in Aper ç ues as ‘Cent mille millards d’images’, op. cit. ,
28–31). A dialogue between these two can be viewed here: https://www.lesauterhin.eu/
alexander-kluge-georges-didi-huberman-machtlos-impuissant-ou-sans-pouvoir/.
3 See Bellour, Raymond (2009), Le Corps du cin é ma: Hypnoses, Emotions, Animalit é s ,
Paris, P.O.L.; Sobchack, Vivian (1992), Th e Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film
Experience , Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press; Marks, Laura (2000), Th e Skin of
the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses , Durham NC and London:
Duke University Press
Introduction 3
sustained focus on the series of volumes collectively titled L ’Oeil de
l’histoire (Th e Eye of History), published between 2009 and 2015, we will
examine how his engagement with cinema has developed concurrently
with a strongly marked turn towards political analyses of image-making;
this important re-direction is, we will argue, in part traceable to the
exceptional infl uence achieved by the philosophical essay S urvivance
des lucioles (Survival of the Firefl ies) published independently of the
L’Oeil de l’histoire series in 2009. Over the last decade Didi-Huberman
has become an infl uential voice at the interface between visual culture,
politics and philosophy, with his work an important reference for
younger writers such as Marielle Mac é . Th e recent polemic with his
long-standing friend and interlocutor Jacques Ranci è re over the
audience reception of images clearly indicates the potential which Didi-
Huberman’s contemporary production may have for contributing to the
fi eld of fi lm-studies. As the most signifi cant parts of this body of work
begin to appear in translation, 4 Anglophone students should increasingly
become aware of the paths he is opening in the study of our medium.
* * *
Th e proliferation of Didi-Huberman’s interests derives from a writing
practice which he has variously described as ‘papillonnement’
[fl uttering], 5 as a ‘travail aux travers,’ 6 or as a Borgesian project. 7 All
4 To date two volumes of the L ’Oeil de l’histoire series, on which this study is most focused,
have appeared in English: Volume 1 as Th e Eye of History: When Images Take Positions
(tr. Shane B. Lillis, Th ierry Gervais, Boston: MIT Press 2018); Volume 3 as A tlas, or the
Anxious Gay Science (tr. Shane B. Lillis, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2018).
Unfortunately for fi lm students, these are the two volumes of the series least concerned
with cinema; the publishers’ choices seem to refl ect the general Anglophone perception
of Didi-Huberman as a writer of interest primarily to art historians.
5 ‘Apparaissant, disparaissant, papillonnant’ (2006), fi rst published in Spanish in 2007 (L a
imagen mariposa , Barcelona: Edici ó n Mudito, tr. J. J. Lahuerta). Full French publication
as introduction to P hal è nes , Minuit, 2013, pp. 9–78. Quote p. 12. Th is essay recuperates
a criticism which he had apparently attracted from certain academic colleagues.
6 ‘Travailler aux travers’, Aper ç ues , Minuit 2018, pp. 21– 24.
7 ‘Par marges et raccourcis’, A per ç ues , Minuit 2018, pp. 15–17.
4 Georges Didi-Huberman and Film
three descriptions refl ect a willingness to welcome new lines of
enquiry as soon as they appear, and to follow his objects of study in
whatever direction they may lead:
To work by diversions [t ravailler aux travers ] [. . .] consists not in
opening great straight swathes through the virgin forest of the
unknown [. . .] It implies walking through the damp jungle of the
immanent, accepting the persistence of obstacles, stumbling over
roots and feeling creepers stroke our faces. It means respecting the
complexity, and even the disorder of the world. It means starting by
declining to disentangle, or to cut through problems too brutally. 8
Th e vast range of his work has been compared9 to one of the atlases,
or visual compendia, to which he has dedicated several studies.
Published most accessibly in major volumes – since 1990 in general
by the famous Parisian publishing-house Minuit – his thought usually
takes form over a period, developing through the publication of
shorter essays, catalogue entries, articles, lectures and exchanges,
which are then collected into thematically coherent volumes which
act as milestones or direction-posts permitting a reader to follow
chosen routes through the rich jungle of his writing. Between these
major volumes, Didi-Huberman also publishes short monographs
and essays in book form, dedicated to single artists or even occasionally
single works, again oft en with Minuit.
Th is exuberant ramifi cation led Didi-Huberman to observe
ruefully in 2011 (at the age of 58) that ‘the unreasonable accumulation
of my writing “projects” – whose fi les are taking up more and more
space on my bookshelves – far outstrips, if I was going to dedicate
myself methodically to them, the time which I logically have left to
live’.1 0 Th e range of subject-matter is matched by an equally vast range
8 ‘Travailler aux travers’, p. 22.
9 De Cauwer, Stijn, and Laura Katherine Smith (2018), ‘Critical Image Confi gurations: Th e
Work of Georges Didi-Huberman’, Editorial Introduction to Angelaki 23:4, pp. 3–10: 4.
10 ‘Par marges et raccourcis’, 16.
Introduction 5
of references; 11 to read any one of Didi-Huberman’s major volumes is
to undertake an exhilarating, and oft en challenging, tour within the
forest of European artistic and philosophical thought.
Th is is not to say, however, that there are not continuities, and
indeed detectable patterns of development, in his output and interests.
Among his intellectual references certain thinkers fi gure as constant
guides and companions: Aby Warburg, for example, whose A tlas
Mnemosyne is a model for Didi-Huberman in its treatment of images
and its superfi cially anarchic, but profoundly refl ective, way of
organising visual knowledge. In his later work, as we shall see, Sergei
Eisenstein becomes a similarly exemplary fi gure for refl ection on the
organisation of the political image. But perhaps the closest and most
fruitful intellectual dialogue maintained by Didi-Huberman is that
with Walter Benjamin, to whose multiple, varied philosophical fi gures
he turns as constant support for his own explorations. It can be no
coincidence that Benjamin too was a ‘butterfl y’, producing work
characterised by ramifi cation and variation, constant curiosity and a
slightly mischievous temptation to the encyclopaedic. He is also, of
course, a strongly image-centred philosopher, not only when dealing
directly with art, photography and cinema, but equally in his approach
to matters of history and memory, and even in his style of writing,
regularly elucidated by metaphors in which Didi-Huberman fi nds
scintillating refl ections of his own mode of thought. Any discussion
of Didi-Huberman’s philosophy should start from this exchange: his
approach to cinema is more than anything else Benjaminian.

11 De Cauwer and Smith (‘Critical Image Confi gurations’, p. 4) off er the following list
related to just one volume, L ’Oeil de l’histoire III: Atlas ou le Gai Savoir Inquiet (2011):
Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, Th eodor Adorno, Gilles Deleuze, F é lix Guattari, Georges Bataille, Charles
Baudelaire, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Bloch, Plato, Marcel
Mauss, Andr é Leroi-Gourhan, Marcel Broodthaers, Gerhard Richter, Jorge Luis Borges,
Katsushika Hokusai, Francisco Goya, Fernand Deligny, August Sander, Eugè n e Atget,
Ernst Cassirer, Karl Kraus, Auguste Le Bon, Emile Benveniste, Ludwig Binswanger,
Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Heartfi eld. Th ey note that the list is not exhaustive!
6 Georges Didi-Huberman and Film
From the beginning of his career, Didi-Huberman’s approach was
innovative in the context of traditional art history. His fi rst monograph,
adapted from his doctoral thesis, took as its subject the photographs
of hysterical patients taken by Dr Jean-Martin Charcot at the
Salp êt ri èr e hospital in Paris, for purposes of medical research and
pedagogy. Didi-Huberman’s study of these photographs developed
a thesis of the image-symptom which brought him his fi rst
celebrity in art-historical scholarship; his analysis developed the
language of Freudian theory in the context of constructed visibility.
No less signifi cant in considering the development of his work,
however, was his divergence from an art-history focused on the
singular, prestigious masterpiece; from his earliest writings images for
Didi-Huberman have always been plural, and their signifi cance lies in
what they make visible, irrespective of the formal intent which
governed their production. More signifi cant, to Didi-Huberman, was
to understand the production and reception of images in their
historical context and, crucially, their material form, which when
brought into contact and contrast with the material form of other
images creates the sparks of association which give visual culture its
meaning to audience and analyst alike.
Th is founding belief that the study of images depends upon the
plural was an insight which would lead him, in the mid-1990s, to
put forward a theoretical re-framing of the idea of montage in an
art-historical context; and, in dealing with montage, of necessity he
was led to confront the processes of the moving image. Didi-
Huberman’s earliest sustained theoretical engagement with the
cinema was thus concerned with the fi lms and writings of Sergei
Eisenstein which off ered him a frame of reference to understand
the dynamics of contacts between a multiplicity of images.
Modernist fi lm theory fi rst enters triumphantly into his history of
art in his 1995 work on Georges Bataille’s visual texts, La
Ressemblance informe, ou Le Gai Savoir visuel selon Georges
Introduction 7
Bataille.1 2 Eisenstein’s direct infl uence on Bataille’s work led Didi-
Huberman to extended research on the connections between the two
very diff erent thinkers, and from that association developed the vital
theory of ‘rascally dialectic’ applied to images, which will be discussed
in detail in Chapter 2. Eisenstein has remained a fundamental referent
to Didi-Huberman, perhaps the Ur-referent for all his subsequent
very varied engagement with fi lmmakers of both past and present; the
fi nal and most substantial volume of L ’Oeil de l’histoire returns to this
canonical theorist once more, crystallising in the process a diff erence
with Jacques Ranci è re which led to a sharp and very signifi cant
exchange around the possibility  – and desirability  – of visually
evoking political emotion (see Chapter 4).
Didi-Huberman’s obsessive urge to write, however, was leading
him in other directions even as he was developing his theories of
montage and organisation, and some of those directions drew him
again towards the cinema. In 1999, for example, he found an image of
his own ‘fl uttering’ appropriation of knowledge in a small videofi lm
by Alain Fleischer, L ’Homme du Pincio , in which the camera follows
an eccentric individual’s movements through his habitual haunts in
Rome.1 3 Apart from its analysis of movement and concentration, this
essay contains the fi rst traces of Didi-Huberman’s concern with fi lm’s
ability, and responsibility, to make visible and signifi cant the
anonymous lives which may speak for the ‘peoples’ ignored by
mainstream image-making. But perhaps the most high-profi le strand
of his work in the late 1990s centred on the possible, or impossible,
imaging of the Holocaust. His fi rst published piece devoted entirely to
cinema, predating even his early writings on Eisensteinian montage,
was in fact an article dedicated to Claude Lanzmann’s S hoah.1 4 A
12 Paris, Macula, 1995.
13 ‘L’ ê tre qui papillonne’, Cin é math è que , no. 15, 1999, pp. 7–14. Republished in Phal è nes ,
op. cit., pp. 152–164.
14 ‘Le Lieu malgr é tout’, Vingti è me si è cle, revue d’histoire , no. 46, April–June 1995, pp. 36–44.
Reprinted in Phasmes , Editions de Minuit, 1998, pp. 228–242, quote p. 232.
8 Georges Didi-Huberman and Film
spontaneous response to the power of the fi lm, this article centres on
the cinematic representation of place and time, or rather place in time.
Th e theme of montage quickly makes its appearance, in a Benjaminian
context; specifi cally it is associated with the evocative – and already
tendentially political – power of anachronism , ‘a collision of the Now
and the past’.
Th ese two strands of Didi-Huberman’s research of the mid-1990s –
the dynamics of image-montage and the political potential of temporal
dissonance read through the lens of Benjamin’s writing on the dialectical
image – would come together in a vital work of 2001, D evant le temps:
Histoire de l’art et anachronisme de l’image. 15 Although D evant le temps
acknowledges the role of fi lm theory – specifi cally, of Gilles Deleuze –
in formulating refl ections on the visual representation of time, its
philosophical centre is in art history. Apart from Benjamin, its
exemplary authors are Aby Warburg and Carl Einstein, all – at least in
Didi-Huberman’s presentation – maverick thinkers who off er Didi-
Huberman a way to develop his long-term mission of redirecting his
primary discipline of art history. None the less, the concept of dialectical
anachronism developed particularly in the section of the book devoted
to Benjamin proves a maelstrom of ideas and possibilities which spread
irresistibly through L ’Oeil de l’histoire .
In the meantime the cinema forced its way once more into Didi-
Huberman’s focus, this time through a possibly unexpected polemic
with none other than Claude Lanzmann, and other writers in the
infl uential journal edited by Lanzmann, L es Temps modernes. Th e
exchange arose out of a curatorial essay written by Didi-Huberman
on four still photographs taken in Auschwitz and displayed in an
exhibition on the photographic memory of the camps. L es Temps
modernes violently contested this essay; and the polemic soon
developed into a much vaster exchange about the role of the visual in
15 Paris, Minuit, 2001.
Introduction 9
this most extreme sphere of contested memory. Lanzmann’s own fi lm
became, once again, a centre of debate; and, in investigating his own
reluctance to accept S hoah as the ultimate and exclusive form of
imaging this memory, Didi-Huberman was led for the fi rst time to
engage systematically with the work of Jean-Luc Godard and to
explore the many ways in which Godard’s image-practice intersected
with his own philosophical concerns. Th e resulting book, Images
malgr é tout 16 (2003), which collects Didi-Huberman’s texts from each
stage of the developing debate, is still perhaps the most widely-known
of all his volumes. It was quickly translated into Spanish (2004), Italian
(2005), German (2006) and English (2008), and established Didi-
Huberman’s name in the fi eld of Holocaust studies. It also allowed
Didi-Huberman to test his ideas regarding the political imperatives of
image-construction in an extraordinarily sensitive fi eld, one which
would remain a valuable gauge in assessing other montage-practice in
the light of its potential to unlock history to contemporary memory.
It seemed that, aft er the publication of Images malgr é tout , Didi-
Huberman’s output might turn in other directions. He returned to an
earlier theme of his art-historical work, incarnation and tactility, for
two major works, L ’Image ouverte (2007) and La Ressemblance par
contact (2008); he published three relatively short books concerned
with the representation of movement in art (including one, unique in
his oeuvre to the best of my knowledge, on dance: L e Danseur des
solitudes, 2006). He was, however, still pursuing the questions opened
by the essays of the turn of the millennium: for example, in his
contribution to an exhibition catalogue about the Chilean artist
and fi lmmaker Alfredo Jaar,1 7 he develops the idea of ‘documentary
poetics’ in a context highly charged with the need for political
resistance. Although the subject of this essay was Jaar’s photographic
16 Paris, Minuit, 2003.
17 ‘L’ ém otion ne dit pas “je”. Dix fragments sur la libert é esth é tique’, in catalogue A lfredo
Jaar: La politique des images , Musé e cantonal des beaux-arts, Lausanne, Suisse, 2007.