Georges Didi-Huberman and Film

The Politics of the Image

Alison Smith

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350160415
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

Georges Didi-Huberman is a philosopher of images whose work is overdue for attention from English-language readers. Since the publication of his first book in 1982, he has published 46 essays, mostly with the prestigious Editions de Minuit, on topics ranging from monographs on individual artists to critical excursions into political philosophy. He is recognised in France and elsewhere in Europe as one of the foremost philosophers of the image writing today. In Georges Didi-Huberman and Film, Alison Smith concentrates on how Didi-Huberman's work has been informed by cinema, especially in his major (and ongoing) recent work L'Oeil de l'Histoire (The Eye of History). The book traces the development of Didi-Huberman's visual thought towards a cinematic sensibility already inherent in his early work on images in relationship to each other. After exploring his increasingly political understanding of the vital role of cinematic montage, it traces his growing understanding of cinema as a medium for expressing a dynamic representation of peoples' memory and experience, and documents his engagement with contemporary filmmakers such as Laura Waddington and Vincent Dieutre.

1

Images of the Holocaust

In 1995, Didi-Huberman wrote an article for a special cinema-centred issue of the historical journal Vingtième Siècle. ‘Le lieu malgré tout’ (The Place In Spite of Everything), devoted to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, is his first published piece entirely devoted to cinema; and also one of the first pieces in which he directly addresses the representation of the Holocaust. The two go together. Lanzmann was identified at the time – at least so says Didi-Huberman – more as a philosopher and journal editor than as a filmmaker, but the article recounts how cinema presented itself to him as ‘indispensable’ and by implication inevitable, the only medium with which to ‘take visual account [prendre acte visuellement] of real places impossible – humanly impossible, ethically impossible – to treat as or to transform into sets.’¹ It is this inevitability of the image – the moving image, the edited image – which draws Didi-Huberman into further investigation of the impact which Shoah had on him.

The structure of the essay enhances this paradox of the possible/impossible representation. Didi-Huberman opens with a paean to cinema as a purveyor of imaginary spaces, in which description he includes certain classic transpositions of real places (for example Mount Rushmore as used by Hitchcock in North by Northwest). Cinematic space as described here – in Didi-Huberman’s first sustained piece on the medium – is ‘open to all the apparently limitless, fascinating, exuberant power of what we call the imaginary’ (228). Lanzmann, in his account of the making of Shoah, had described how he had first experienced Poland as ‘the place of the imaginary par excellence’,² but this is not an imaginary which calls forth enthusiasm for any ‘perpetual feast of the possible’ such as Didi-Huberman has just described. The essay thus presents Shoah as a film in which the cinema is used against itself, and it is precisely because the medium is constrained to such a drastic self-denial that it appears, counter-intuitively, so appropriate as to be inevitable.

What follows represents Didi-Huberman’s attempts to reach an understanding of what, exactly, Lanzmann’s encounter with this real place has revealed, not only about the place but, just as importantly, about the potentially revelatory possibilities of cinema. Very quickly the essay focuses on a theme which will later unfold as a fundamental structuring principle of all the arguments in L’Oeil de l’histoire: the presence of the past in the present and the ability of images to reveal that explosive anachronism. ‘No one or almost no one is there any more, nothing or almost nothing is there any more, and yet the film shows us in subtle moments of dizziness how much everything, here, remains, in front of us’ (232, D-H’s emphasis). It is in Shoah’s ability to seize and transmit the survivance of the camps that Didi-Huberman locates the film’s greatest achievement. It fulfils cinematically Walter Benjamin’s idea of the ‘dialectical image’, in a montage of past and present which ‘produces a collision of the Now and the past, without turning the past into myth or the Now into reassurance’ (240–241). Fascinated by this revelation, Didi-Huberman seeks eagerly to identify the cinematic strategies which have made this feat possible. He cites, for example, the importance of silence, ‘this silence shown [montré] – and just as importantly monté, that is formed, constructed’ which ‘gives […] the place the power to look at us, and somehow to “tell” us the essential things’ (236). Alongside the silence, and structured by it, is carefully selected sound; for example the song which is almost the first thing which the audience hears, juxtaposed with a long shot of the green, unchanged banks of the river Ner. Contextualised by a text given us to read but not to hear, the voice comes as if out of the past, an authentic survivance. The past also survives into the present, sometimes cruelly, in the unthinking gestures which the camera captures. That gesture may reproduce itself, for good or ill, across the vicissitudes of history is an idea which Didi-Huberman was already developing in relation to photography and painting, under the particular influence of Aby Warburg’s iconographic collages. Here for the first time he sees the potential significance of gestures captured in movement, in the process of their making; a revelation which only cinema can provide. And, of course, there is the importance of the long, slow camera movements across ‘desperately empty’ landscapes, with which Lanzmann at once assures the audience of the real, undramatised presence of these spaces and, by interrogating them with an exploratory frame, turns their inexpressive dullness into a statement of witness.

In ‘Le lieu malgré tout’, a historian of the still image lucidly confronts the specificity of cinema. It was born of the strong impression left by an individual work; the pointers which it provides towards an approach to cinematic analysis seemed to be left in abeyance as the writer – as was his habit – moved on to other priorities. Six years later, however, Lanzmann’s influence on Didi-Huberman’s thought was destined to take an unexpected and much more decisive form with the launch in Les Temps modernes, the journal edited by Lanzmann, of a violent polemic against a text contributed by Didi-Huberman to the catalogue of a photographic exhibition, Mémoires des camps. Photographies de camps de concentration.³ The subject of this debate, recounted in detail in Didi-Huberman’s seminal 2003 book Images malgré tout, was four tiny photographic images, taken clandestinely in Auschwitz by a member of a Sonderkommando. Didi-Huberman’s analysis of these images assumed – and discussed – their immense significance, despite and indeed because of their indistinctness and their imperfections: he sought in their awkward framing and blurry figures, as well as in the relationship between the two images, the evidence for the terrible context in which they were taken. His conclusion was that these images were both ‘infinitely precious’ and ‘demanding’ to a contemporary audience, precisely because they ‘demand an effort of archaeology’⁴ in the viewer which forces engagement with the reality of the camp and its terrible dangers. They are thus proposed as a response to the contention that the Holocaust is, and should remain, ‘unimaginable’ (‘Let us not protect ourselves by saying that imagining it is in any event – and it’s true – something we cannot do, and will never fully be able to do. But we have to deal with the great weight of this imaginable’ (IMT, 11)).

The essay attracted a furious response from Les Temps modernes, in the form of two articles by Gérard Wajcman and Elisabeth Pagnoux.⁵ The two writers refuse all value to these images, either as witness statement or as transmission; in Pagnoux’s words (Pagnoux 106, quoted IMT, 73), ‘To make us witness to this scene, besides being an invention (because one cannot reanimate the past) is to distort the reality of Auschwitz which was an event without a witness’. They also adopted a startlingly personal approach, attacking Didi-Huberman himself as a fetishist of the image and accusing him of trying to ‘Christianise’ the debate and by implication to marginalise his own Judaism; and suggested that the purpose (or at least the effect) of the exhibition might have been to ‘sweep aside the eleven years of work during which Claude Lanzmann made the film Shoah’ (Pagnoux 87, quoted IMT, 116). The writers of Les Temps modernes framed Shoah as the unanswerable – and only – approach to a witness statement of the Holocaust, describing it as ‘the absolute degree of the word […] countering the absolute silence of horror with an absolute word’ (Pagnoux 95–6, quoted IMT, 117).

Didi-Huberman’s response to these articles went far beyond the original catalogue essay and the polemical provocation which followed. Wajcman’s and Pagnoux’s attacks led him to delve deeply into the reasoning and philosophical underpinning of his position. Following a frequent pattern in his work, this defence and elaboration of the importance of images in Holocaust studies started life as a series of seminars at the Free University of Berlin, before publication – along with the original catalogue essay – in book form in 2003. Images malgré tout, the book, had an immense influence on Holocaust studies worldwide; described as ‘the most consequential study of the question of the image after Auschwitz’,⁶ it contributed significantly to the attribution of the Adorno prize to Didi-Huberman in 2015. It is not our remit here to follow all the ramifications of the book’s arguments, and we will focus our attention on those parts of it which relate specifically to the filmic medium, since Didi-Huberman found that the wider question of imaging the Holocaust (or not) drew him inexorably from photographic evidence to film; specifically, to film as a means of deployment, rather than one of production, of images – in other words, to montage.

Certainly, Didi-Huberman had never imagined that in contributing to the photographic exhibition catalogue he was casting any shadow over the reputation of Shoah; his admiration for the film remains undimmed. However, as he points out, ‘Shoah is a film: nine and a half hours of images – at the rate of twenty-four frames a second – and of sounds, faces and words’ (IMT, 117). He thus takes issue with Pagnoux’s and Wajcman’s apparent wish to withdraw Lanzmann’s film from the category of imaged artefact – making it in Pagnoux’s phrasing a matter of words only. In an earlier article which Didi-Huberman returns to in his response, Wajcman for his part had claimed that Shoah ‘showed that there is Nothing to see’ and thus proved the non-existence of images of the subject.⁷ Didi-Huberman also finds reason for disquiet in some of Lanzmann’s own declarations, particularly his sweeping dismissals of archive images (an ‘absurd cult’⁸): he is even led to suggest that ‘there are two Claude Lanzmanns: on the one hand, the director of Shoah, a great journalist determined to probe unremittingly […] into the specific, concrete, precise, unbearable details of the extermination; on the other, once these questions are in the can, the ‘peremptory’ who takes over and wants to be sole provider of universal and absolute answers […]’ (IMT, 119).⁹ Thus, the filmic practice which most interests Didi-Huberman in this book is not that of Shoah, and certainly not the big fictional reconstructions of Spielberg and Benigni for which he shares Les Temps Modernes’ disdain, but the elliptical, montage-based approach of Lanzmann’s great rival Jean-Luc Godard, which at this point he finds both challenging and inspiring. Although, as we will see in Chapter 2, he subsequently became more wary of Godardian montage – not least through his discovery of Harun Farocki – at this point, still relatively early in his explorations of the cinematic image, he finds Godard’s practice refreshingly open, ‘centrifugal’ as he terms it: ‘making documents, quotations and extracts of films tumble together towards an always open space (‘une étendue jamais couverte’) (IMT, 157).

The start of the polemical exchange with Les Temps Modernes coincided with the publication of Devant le temps¹⁰ and the return of montage to the forefront of Didi-Huberman’s thoughts about the image: he now reads Shoah too in that context. It too is a montage, but a ‘centripetal’ one, and although he retains his admiration for it, he insists that it must be seen in context. Inasmuch as it is a montage, it is necessarily both tributary to the image and itself a representation: not only does it collect an ‘archive’ of witness statements which, despite Lanzmann’s distrust of the inadequacy of images, are none the less images as well as words, but it presents these statements in the form of ‘a work in the fullest sense’ (IMT, 127). And inasmuch as it is a work of cinema, it ‘owes a debt to th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Images of the Holocaust
• 2 The Meaning of Montage
• 3 People, Passion and Politics
• 4 Anachronism, Survival and Filmic Fireflies
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright