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Cinema and Its Discontents: Jacques Rancire and Film TheoryAuthor(s): Tom ConleySource: SubStance, Vol. 34, No. 3, Issue 108: French Cinema Studies 1920s to the Present(2005), pp. 96-106Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3685734

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Cinema and its Discontents:JacquesRanciereand FilmTheoryTom Conley

Jacques Ranciere may have entered a French pantheon of film theoryin 2001 after his publication of an array of essays on classical andcontemporary films in Lafable cinematographique.In that book Ranciereposited cinema to be to the storytelling art what truth is to falsehood. 'Cinema rejects the Aristotelian poetics of fables and fabulation byreconfiguring the Greek philosopher's hierarchy that favored muthos,therationale of a plot, over opsis, the sentient effect of the spectacle. Thecamera records its stories via linked actions, headed toward variousresolutions by way of often unforeseen twists and turns. The dramaticprogression of the Aristotelian scheme is betrayed, however, when thecamera records information and evokes sensations that go both againstthe grain of dramatic progress and in myriad directions, many of whichare beyond the director's or editor's control and have little to do with thenarrative. Citing an early essay by Jean Epstein, Ranciere notes that theintelligence of the playwright submits to that of the camera, a machinethat records this infinity of movements that create a drama of anintensity a hundred times greater than any change of fortune. Thecamera, Ranciere continues (along a Benjaminian line reminiscent of thelast pages of the Workof Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility )hardly reproduces things such as they are gazed upon. It records themsuch as the naked eye does not see them, such as they happened to be.He then adds a flourish, recalling Gilles Deleuze's words on sentience inthe first pages of his Cinema2:L'Image-temps,when he describes things intheir state as waves and vibrations, before their qualification as objects,persons, or identifiable events by their descriptive or narrativeproperties (8). Ranciere shows that Epstein intuited the power of filmeven before the onset of sound (said to have since attenuated the expressiveforce of its silent images [we have only to recall images that Epsteinmight have known, such as Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks]),linking film's power to the American industrialization of the seventhart, and anticipating a good deal of film theory.Yet Epstein's reflections, adds Ranciere, are based on pre-Romanticaesthetic theory in Kant, the Schlegels, Schiller, Herder, and even Hegel.

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The German school inaugurated, as Deleuze and Godard also force us torecall, an aesthetic age (16) that follows and undoes the order ofinherited mimetic arts. The passive register of the camera, which indeeddoubles the intensity of the spectator's intellective and sentimental gaze,causes conscious and unconscious elements of the work to be of a sametexture. It dislocates the artistic privilege that a creator had ownedwhen he or she was said to impose a vision upon a form. Ranciere thencomplicates the point when he notes that the machinic mechanism[dispositifmachinique]of cinema in fact suppresses the active labor of thisbecoming-passive (17) because it is in all events already and alwayspassive in nature. Ithinders [contrarie] he aims of modernist aestheticsin which it is found, by opposing the aesthetic autonomy of art to itsformer submission to arepresentational mission (17). In the new aestheticage, art can be found anywhere and everywhere, and so too can aestheticvalues, all over and about the frame. Yetcinema works against-hinders,thwarts, even runs contrary to-its own tendency to follow the newaesthetic principles it heralds. That is why Ranciere defines acinematographic fable as a fable running contrary to itself. The fable ornarration belonging to Aristotelian poetics is undone by the art of thecamera, but the camera cannot fail to let its gaze concatenate the manysensations and impressions it brings forward, thus also belonging to thenarrative arts.

Unlike Andre Bazin or Gilles Deleuze, Ranciere cannot countenancea purecinema of the kind that the former championed in Charlie Chaplin'sburlesque gestures, if only because the clownish tramp already belongedto an established aesthetics predating cinema and outside of its purview,an issue that Chaplin makes especially clear when he is the lovesickclown in the pre-cinematic space par excellence represented in a film likeThe Circus. Nor can Ranciere find in Deleuze's immense debt to Bazin,made manifest in the pages about the time-image that inaugurate Cinema2 concerning the image-fact (coined in Bazin's chapters of Qu-est-cequelecinema?on Rossellini's Paisan) those pure optical and aural situationsproper to film and film alone. Ranciere dismisses Bazin's idea that in his

great fables of errancy an auteur like Rossellini shows the ways thatthe camera discerns infinitesimal signs that would allow us to glimpsethe spiritual secret of things (20-21).Rather, a dialectics inheres in these images that inform so much ofcanonical film theory. Great films, notably those he studies in Lafablecine'matographique,ary on what he calls a fablesplit and divided againstitself. The cinematic fable plays with and against its literary, painterly,and theatrical correlates. The theory that percolates through the eleven

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analyses in Lafable returns time and again to the principle that cinemaworks within and contrary to the aesthetic eye that Romanticphilosophers had so brilliantly conceived and described exactly twocenturies ago. Ranciere's study anticipates the more attentive anddetailed scrutiny of aesthetics in his more recent Malaise dans l'esthetique(2004), a book of essays in which he makes clear the dilemmas-if not thecontrarities -in which contemporary cinema and the arts now findthemselves.2 The task of the paragraphs that follow is not to assess theanalytical geography of the two works, but, rather, to consider how hisaesthetic theory inflects cinema at the moment his Malaise was written.The guiding principles of Malaise are spelled out in an introductionwritten no doubt after Ranciere had assembled and reviewed a series ofseminars and lectures delivered at the University of Paris-VIII and at theCollege International de Philosophie. They build on the paradoxes ofcinematic contrariety informing Lafable cinematographique. Aestheticcanons that prevailed prior to 1789 separated art-objects from those ofeveryday life. The division loses ground when artis theorized as a writingof both conscious and unconscious processes. Kant was symptomaticwhen he speculated that the new status of art inspired works not asthose ofnaturebut of a non-humannaturethat does not submit to the will ofa creator. Herein, concludes the critic, aesthetics is born as a discourse.Insofar as narration or fabulation in general distinguished art-objectsfrom the experience of everyday life, in an earlier regime a law of mimesisrequired the artist to be distinguished from the artisan or the entertainer.The arts of representation dictated that:an ordered regulation be keptbetween a way of doing things (poiesis)and a way of being (aisthesis). Anew order of art, and of mimesis as we know it, called for the end ofaesthetic regulation, a rupture of what had guaranteed the hierarchiesof the fine arts. Such is the aesthetic regime born at the beginning of theRomantic Age- a regime, Ranciere claims, that includes cinema prior toits invention in a technical sense.

The ascendancy of the new arts can be seen in the way Chardin'sstill-lives gained precedence over history painting, previously presumedsuperior to the representations of objects, or in Gericault's unfinishedand nervously wrought drawings that eclipse David's staged tableaus,or even in de Vigny's La maison du berger, where the uneasiness of hissense of nature, felt in the abstract setting, seems more veracious andconvincing than Lamartine's controlled dispensations of tears along theshores of the Lac d'Annecy. These new arts grasped and conceptualizedthe fracture of the regime of identification in which the products of art

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had been perceived and thought, the rupture of the model of adequation(Malaise, 20) that former norms of mimesis developed in their relation topoiesis and aisthesis. Aesthetics are attenuated or even abandoned in thename of aesthetics. Suddenly a fragment of the title of Ranciere's bookfalls into the text: Lemalaise esthetique est aussi vieux que l'esthetique(ibid.) [Aesthetic discontent is as old as aesthetics itself].3 Aestheticshereafter (presumably after 1800) is the thought of the paradoxicalsensorium that Ranciere situates in a lost human nature that hespecifies as a norm of adequation lost between an active faculty and areceptive faculty, that hereafter allows objects [choses] of art to bedefined (ibid.)as they are. This is followed by a rich reflection, based onone of Stendhal's recollections in La Vie d'Henri Brulard, in which thenarrator recalls childhood impressions of church bells pealing, the soundof a water pump, and the notes of a neighbor's flute that marked him forlife. It contains a messianic promise of an aesthetic shift, promising aradical change in the conditions of life:

Esthetics is the word that states the unique crux that resists beingthought [malaise a penser], formed two centuries ago between thesublimities of art and the noise of a water pump, between a veiledtimbre of chords and the promise of a new humanity. The discontent[malaise] and resentment to which it gives rise today are alwaysturning around these two relations; the scandal of an art that gathersin its forms and in its place the flotsam [n'importe quoi] of everydayobjects and the images of profane life; the exorbitant and mendaciouspromises of an aesthetic revolution that had sought to transform theforms of art into the forms of a new life. Aesthetics are accused ofbeing responsible for the flotsam of art; it is accused of having led artastray in the fallacious promises of the philosophical absolute and ofsocial revolution. (25)Aesthetics of the turn of the nineteenth century persists here and now. Itis seen in the way cinema is displaced into installation spaces in

contemporary museums (35). Film and video become confused whendigital processing replaces the material remainders of celluloid andacetate. At stake is what Ranciere calls a politics of aesthetic distribution,a distribution by which different roles and new social identities areexchanged both in civic arenas and in museums and theaters. Much likeStendhal's water pump, what was invisible or inaudible prior to theFrench Revolution, then suddenly perceived, continues to bear affect inthe aesthetic regime of today. Similarly, it can be said that in a formerpolitical and aesthetic situation, the form that an artist imposed onmatter was analogous to the power the state exerted on its masses-the

power of the intelligent class over that of sensation, of people of cultureover those of nature (46). The shift of these categories redistributes

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power in ways that define the new regime,where malaise is found inequal measurein both aestheticsand politics.Rancierecomplicatesthe model when he addresses contemporaryarts,which,unlike those fallingunder the rubricof post-modernoranti-aestheticaesthetics,delegitimizeformermodes of delegitimization-thatis, they reconsiderand revise the shock hat had been a patenteffect ofvanguard creations. Cinema comes forward as that which no longershocks,but mystifiesin its reconstitutionsorredistributionsof everydayobjectsand worksof artsuch astheyarefoundin given spaces. FollowingMallarme'sconstructionof mystery that tied together disparate things(thepoet'ssublimethoughts,the steps of a dancer,anunfolding fan,thefoam of a wave or a curtainflutteringin the wind), in Prenom:Carmen,Jean-Luc Godard melds the rose of the eponymous opera, one ofBeethoven'sstring quartets,the foam of waves gently slapping a stonybeach along Lake Geneva (which Ranciere attributes to a fleetingconnection he seeks with VirginiaWoolf's TheWaves)and the gruntingthrustof an amorousbody (Malaise 0). Godardredistributessensationin such a way that the opera'sAndalusian mountain becomes a week-end beach; the romantic smugglers, a gang of crazed terrorists;thediscarded rose serenadedby Don Jose,a plasticvariant;and Beethoven,a sheet of music that Michaela botches instead of singing Bizet's arias(80-81). The aestheticand politicalforcesof Prenom:Carmen,which forRanciere ake theshapeof a redistributionof sensations,becomeevidentin that the film exerts no political critiqueof greatart,as had Godard'scinemain the 1960s. To he contrary,t erases the picturesque magerywith which acritiquehad been affiliatedn order o haveBizet'scharactersreborn romthepurecontradictionof oneof Beethoven's tringquartets(Malaise 1). No moreshock,no moreantagonism: hepost-Mallarmeanmystery lays stress,he adds, on the kinshipof heterogeneous things.4At thispointinthetreatment,dissensus a termthatacquirespoliticalresonance later in Malaise-conveys aesthetic valence. The logic of aprovocativedissensus ofGodard'sNew Waveyears,Ranciere uggests,attests to a praiseof themysteriesandmysticalco-presenceof all things,as Nerval and Baudelairehad shown in theirpoetries of synaesthesia.But Ranciere suggests the point: at the outset of the chapter titledProblemsand Transformations f CriticalArt, he notes an undecidablecharacter n the politics of the contemporaryarts-Godard included-that he subjectsto criticalscrutiny. Everything s left in aestheticandpolitical imbo. Ifapoliticsis engaged,thesingularity(ifnot the counter-culturalforce)of cinemais sacrificed,and vice-versa when an aestheticsis favored. Under this scrutiny, Godard would be a melancholic

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regretting the loss of the common world formerly constituting all art,now crafted for commercial ends and rife with compromise. Orhe wouldbe a reclusive, self-effacing and self-absorbed creator, severely aware ofthe limits of his labor and the very incertitude of its effects (84). On theone hand, the present is evaded when the artist takes a melancholic turn,and on the other, a sense of the shrinkage of public space and thedisappearance of political inventivity (ibid.)comes at a moment-andno one is more aware of that moment than Godard-when artists groupthemselves into a consensualbody within the world of galleries and movie-houses featuring artfilms and early classical cinema. The sense of politicaldeficit, witnessed now in our distance from the former dissensual arena,attests to a malaise in aesthetics.

Cinematic questions take center stage in the last and concluding essayof Malaise, The EthicalTurnof Aesthetics and Politics, originally writtenfor the Forum of Caixa (Barcelona) under the theme of Geographies ofContemporary Thought. Ethics, he argues in the wake of the War onTerror and the American-led invasion of Iraq, has acquired a self-authenticating or auto-legislating force where politics are concerned. Itis a general instance of normativity allowing consideration of thevalidity of practices and discourses at work in particular spheres ofjudgment and action (145). Thus politics or art must yield to moraljudgment bearing on the validity of their principles and the consequencesof their practices (ibid.). In other words, if the train of thought is brutallysimplified or transposed onto another plane, art and politics must bearthe signs of ethical values in the battles fought against the Axis of Evil.Ranciere quickly redresses this kind of misperception by recalling thatthe role of ethics is in no way one of moral judgment to be exerted uponart or politics. More perniciously, in light of a creeping consensus in theintellectual world, ethics become a sphere where specific practices andactions common to both art and politics, however separate they mightbe, are dissolved. As are also the distinctions between fact and law orthe state of things and the way the state ought to be: in a geographicalsense, ethics is an intellectual process establishing an identity betweenan environment, a way of being and a principle of action (146), buttoday judgment follows the lead of the power of law that imposes itself,but the radicality of the latter leaves no room for choice or creativeaberration. It gives way to a perpetual state of constraint and to atotally new dramaturgy of evil, justice, and infinite reparation (ibid.).Once again cinema plays a crucial role in the design of Ranciere'sargument. Two films, neither of which has much to say for itself, illustratethe ethical turn and its dilemmas. The one, Lars von Trier's Dogville


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(2002), tells a tale based on Brecht's fable of Saint Joan of the Stockyards.The protagonist wanted to bring Christian morals to the capitalist jungle.Where Brecht had shown the uselessness of Christian morality in viewof the reigning economic order, Von Trier does not. Brecht's politicalfable made clear the risks and pitfalls of mediating between each of thecamps and their ideologies, while Dogville prefers not to refer to a causeoutside of itself. The heroine is excluded from the community she hasserved selflessly; despite all her efforts, she has not been able to gainentry. But her pathos and disillusionment apply to no system ofdomination to be understood and destroyed (147). Rather,the emotionsthe film elicits depend upon an evil that is the cause and effect of its ownreproduction (ibid.). A lord and a father who happens to be the King ofTruants cleanses the community, proving that violence assists whereviolence rules -in other words, in consensual and humanitarian timesthat we now know under the presidency of George W.Bush, only infinitejustice is appropriate in the struggle against the axis of evil (147-48).Justice is obtained when the opposition of the just and unjust issuppressed or dissolved.Such is the effect of the other feature, Clint Eastwood's Mystic River(2002). An impulsive hothead, Jimmy, kills his boyhood friend Dave,whom he mistakenly believes guilty of having murdered his daughter.He is not punished, for the reason that another childhood friend, Sean, apoliceman, is aware of the traumatic past that the threesome had known.Sean lets things stand as they stand. The resolution of the film, if aresolution there is, comes only with an aesthetic flourish, a sweepingaerial shot of the mouth of the Mystic River flowing into the harbor ofeast Boston. Dogvillealtered a political and theatrical fable while, arguesRanciere,MysticRiver rewrites a novel and cinematographic fable (148).He tells of the falsely accused and his or her retribution as unfolded inscenarios by Hitchcock and Fritz Lang (and, it might be added, the filmsof Budd Boetticher, Henry King, Raoul Walsh, and Sidney Lumet). In theclassical mold, truth ultimately wins over the faulty process of justiceand public opinion. ForEastwood, evil, like good sense, is the most evenlydistributed thing in the world. It has become trauma, where categoriesof innocence and guilt not longer hold, and where a fuzzy line is drawnbetween mental illness and social confusion. In Eastwood's scenario,wrongly executed judgment is not suppressed. Instead, it is justice itselfthat disappears. Social consensus and order must be maintained (werecall the penultimate shots of the traditional Saint Patrick'sDay paradecelebrating community in the streets of east Boston) at the cost of guiltleft unpunished.


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Von Trier's Grace (Nicole Kidman) and Eastwood's Dave (TimRobbins) personify what Ranciere calls the ethical turn of contem-porary experience. It is not a corrective agency but, to the contrary, thesuppression of the division that the very word moral used to imply(152), the staunch separation of law from fact, along with the formerdivision that had opposed rights to facts. The new suppression of thatdivision is consensus, a word that mistakenly implies internationalagreement about how to solve thorny political issues, but which ingreater likelihood is the essence of politics. All political communities areby nature divided in respect to themselves and their plural constituencies,while a consensual community amounts to the reduction of differentpeoples to one alone, identical to the population and its parts, the interestof the global community and the interests of parties (152-53).Consensus is what turns a political community into an ethicalcommunity. It is a world of one, in which everyone counts. For von Trier,Grace is not the agent of conflict; she never becomes an Ibsenian enemy ofthe people who rights the wrongs of customary justice. She lives in thebland confines of an ethically correct community, in which the excludedfigure is neither here nor there. Dogville is aneutral depoliticized naturalcommunity that gets along as it does and must while excluding thosewho would wish to be its willing constituents. It does not take a blindinginsight to link von Trier's politics to those reigning here and now, inwhich infinite justice is exercised against the axis of evil (154). Withconsensus come pre-emptive actions, legitimized assassinations,calculatedly uneven distribution of goods, humanitarian war againstthose suppressing the rights of man, and so forth. Toenable these actions,as Dogville and Mystic River make manifest, the only requirement is thatabsolute right be identified with the security of a given community.These two films inform Ranciere's description of the pertinent traitsof what he calls the ethical turn in contemporary art and politics. Themessianic vision of progressist aesthetics, in which the advent of a morejust society would result from the good work of dissensus, is invertedinto a return of former catastrophe, a return that (under the benevolentand soporific force of consensus) flattens the shape of the catastropheitself. Such a phenomenon is seen in certain films dealing with theHolocaust, in which little distinction is made between victims andcriminals, in which a redistribution of emotions is spread between avision of art that devotes [consensus and infinite justice] to the service ofsocial bonding and another that devotes them to endless testimony tothe catastrophe (159). It suffices to compare Godard's recent films tothose of the 1960s, when the shock of contraries in his collages belonged



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to the division essential to dissensus: Fritz Lang versus Jerry Prokosch(Jack Palance) in Lemepris;Elie Faure'schapter on Velasquez in L'Espritdesformes that Pierrot (Jean-Paul Belmondo) reads in a bathtub adjacent to aclose-up of a Maidenform girdle in Pierrotlefou; or Nana writing in a cafenot far from where she cries over Maria Falconetti in Dreyer's LapassiondeJeanned'Arc. Godard is still faithful to the art of collage, but now, addsRanciere, the shock of oppositions is replaced by a fusion. Images belongto a world unto itself, in which human beings find themselves in a global(albeit indistinct) community that is renewed and restored by cavalcadesof images (161-62).Godard now obsesses over what cannot be represented in universalcatastrophe, such as in the Hell sequence of Notremusique.The unrepre-sentable becomes a hinge on which turn ethical questions in the newaesthetic age; in the political world, the analogue is terror. Both confuseimpossibility with interdiction. As a result, the proscription of imagesfrom the Camps (in Shoah or in their highly mediated and evenpornographic form as tableaux vivants of photographic documents inSchindler'sList) makes the catastrophe unsettling and, at the same time,something resembling an aesthetic experience. The events are drawnout of the past, duly edulcorated, but so also is the art that conveysthem, and that would have put the past into a conflictual state (much asdo, Ranciere does not note, the opening sequences of Jean Cayrol's wordsand Alain Resnais's images in the collage of Nuit et brouillard).In Lafable cinematographiqueRanciere had shown how Godard goesagainst the grain of Celan and Adorno, for whom no art was possibleafter Auschwitz, by asserting that the distribution of images in view ofthe events calls nonetheless for a rebirth and a resurrection of images: arebirth, in Malaise, that fuses representation and abstraction. Thus inthe recent study, Ranciere shows that Claude Lanzmann's Shoah filmresembles contemporary installation art in which, in an abstract space,ordinary objects, merchandise and images are exposed under a differentlight, with emphasis now placed on a redistribution of perception andsensation.5 Along the way, the deficit or impossibility of representationfinds its cause and raisond'etre n modern aesthetics dedicated to bearingwitness to what cannot be materialized. There results on the part of thespectator an uneasy feeling of guiltless guilt. It is a pathos, to be sure, butalso a consensus found in the relation of the art of memory, basic toHolocaust cinema, to the affirmation of a community that needs pastcatastrophe (those of the present, wryly infers the author, do not qualifyas adequate correlatives) to assure a unity of ethics, politics, andaesthetics.


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In a broad and sweeping move that takes leave of the close readingsin Lafablecinematographiquef the founding paradoxes of auteur cinemas(Murnau, Ray, Rossellini, Lang, Mann, Marker, Godard) and film theory(Bazin and Deleuze) and their shifts and redistributions of ways of seeing,Ranciere writes in Malaise of what happened to the politics and aestheticsof cinema in the context of the unsettling turns of events that the worldhas witnessed over the last two decades: first, in the factual sphere, thedemise of the Soviet Union, the demolition of the Berlin wall, theresurgence of the rights of victims on all sides in the messy wars in theBalkans, and the impact of the destruction of the World Trade Center on9/11/01; and second, in a sphere of discontent over the politics ofglobalization, the state of the European Union, the aftereffects of theinvasion and occupation of Iraq, and the rapid meltdown of the Arcticand Antarctic poles. The cinematic register of Malaise and its analysis offilms, brief and cursory as they may be, address these dilemmas. WhatRanciere remarks unsettles. Dissensus, essential to any labor withinand about conflict and paradox-two vital elements of politics andaesthetics-has all but disappeared.Closer to film studies in a strict sense, Ranciere helps to show why intheory and history two lines of inquiry have been drawn more boldlyover the past two decades. One, parallel to the return to formercatastrophes seen in Malaise,engages study of classical film, great auteurs,and the origins of the medium as an object of history. With the return tothe past comes a tacit refusal to buy into contemporary spectacle. Thereturn has an impact on students who have been weaned on televisualand digital spectacles, and for whom a silent film would be equivalent toan incunabulum, just as a black-and-white image would be like a stripof papyrus. It equally signals a malaise about the aesthetics and politicsof film pedagogy. To return to great auteurs as Ranciere had done in 2001is to awaken a politics from the popcorn-scented consensus we smell inmalls and cineplexes all over the world. The historical malaise becomespervasive when it is felt that past cinemas are to be stabilized and writtenoff in the name of statistics (etymologically related to the modern state),or in the name of historical sociology, or by other moves that attempt touse idiolects of the past, especially in professional spheres, where usersprefer not to redistribute their force into the present moment. Rancieretells us why the past carries dissensus that has been elided from thepresent.Dashed and jagged, the other line of inquiry traces the state of thingsin the unnamed realm in contemporary film, in a world saturated withcelluloid, where the classical canons of film theory no longer have



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currency. (Deep focus, at the heart of Bazinian theory, does not applywell to digital cinema; nor does Eisenstein's work on montage in filmsedited to mix narrative and publicity.) A sense of the condition of themedium needs to be articulated in a broader field; this cannot be obtainedthrough pure cinephilia, but by careful and selective-often dissensual-analysis that comes through and about cinemas that today the criticssee as belonging to a general malaise. Ranciere's work counts among thefew that follow this line and bring us to the quick of the political aestheticsof cinema.

HarvardUniversity

Notes1. Lafable cinematographiqueParis: Seuil, 2001), p. 8. Here and elsewhere all translationsfrom the French are mine.2. Malaise dans l'esthetique (Paris: Galilee, 2004).3. Here and elsewhere malaise is translated as discontent in order to engage Freud's

Civilizationand its Discontents, which in French is Malaise dans la civilisation. As it willbe shown, Ranciere writes of a global malaise that extends to our civilization ingeneral.4. Ranciere makes a similar point in Lafable (190) when he asserts that the common laborof art and politics is one of interruption of continuity, the incessant substitution ofwords that cause one to see and images that speak, that impose belief as the music ofthe world. For Godard it is necessary to divide the One of representative magmainto two: separate words and images, have words be heard in their uncanniness, haveimages be seen in their stupidity. In Malaise it seems that the equivalence of art andpolitics that he ascribes to Godard's brilliant perversity is somewhat attenuated.5. His pages in another chapter of Malaise (77-78) on Christian Boltanski recoup to adegree the remarks on Lanzmann.

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