Towards another state of perception liquid perception
This solution, however, only relates to a nominal definition of 'subjective' and 'objective'. It implies that the cinema has reached an evolved state, having learned to mistrust the movement-image. But what happens if we take as our starting-point a real definition of the two poles, or of the double system? Bergsonianism suggested the following definition: a subjective perception is one in which the images vary in relation to a central and privileged image; an objective perception is one where, as in things, all the images vary in relation to one another, on all their facets and in all their parts. These definitions affirm not only the difference between two poles of perception, but also the possibility of passing from the subjective to the objective pole. For the more the privileged centre is itself put into movement, the more it will tend towards an acentred system where the images vary in relation to one another and tend to Ix-come like the reciprocal actions and vibrations of a pure matter. What can be more subjective than a delirium, a dream, a hallucination? But what can be closer to a materiality made
up of luminous wave and molecular interaction? The French school and Cierman Expressionism discovered the subjective image, but at the same time they took it to the limits of the universe. By putting the centre of reference itself into movement, the movement of the parts was raised to the set [ensemble]-, that of the relative to the absolute; that of succession to simultaneism. In Dupont's Vaudeville it was the music-hall scene where the swaying trapeze-artiste sees the crowd and the cciling, one in the other, as a shower of sparks and a whirlpool of floating spots.7 And in Epstein's Coeur fidèle, it was the travelling fair, where everything tends towards the simultaneity of the movement of the one who sees and the movement seen, in the dizzy disappearance of fixed points. Here the perception-image had already undoubtedly been transformed by an aesthetic consciousness (cf. the French school's famous 'photogeny'). But this aesthetic consciousness was not yet formal and reflected consciousness which went beyond movement - it was a naive, or rather non-thetic consciousness, as the phenomenologists would say, a consciousness in act [en acte], which amplified movement and introduced it into matter, with all the delight of discovering the activity of montage and of the camera. It was something different, neither better nor worse.
Jean Renoir's predilection for running water has often been discussed. But this predilection was common to all the members of the French school (although Renoir gave it a very special dimension). In the French school, it is sometimes the river and its course, sometimes the canal, its locks and its barges, sometimes the sea, its frontier with the land, the port, the lighthouse as luminous quality. If the idea of a passive camera had occurred to them, they would have set it up beside running water. L'Herbier had started off with a plan, Le Torrent, in which water was to be the main character. And L'Homme du large treated the sea not merely as an object of particular perception, but as a perceptive system distinct from earthly perceptions, a 'language' different from earthly language.8 A considerable part of Epstein's and Grémillon's work forms a sort of Breton school, which realises the cinematographic dream of a drama without characters, or at least which would move from Nature to man. Why does water seem to correspond to all the requirements of this French school: abstract aesthetic requirement, social documentary requirement, narrative dramatic requirement? It is firstly because water is the most perfect environment in which movement can be extracted from the thing moved, or mobility from movement itself.
I his is the origin of the visual and auditory importance of water in research on rhythm. The liquid element was to prolong, transmit and diffuse in all directions what Gance had started with iron, with the railway. Jean Mitry, in his experimental attempts, began with the railway, and then moved on to water as the image which could give us the real as vibration in its deepest sense: from Pacific 231 to Images pour Debussy.9 And Grcmillon's documentary work passes through this movement, from the mechanics of solids to a mechanics of fluids, from industry to its marine background.
The liquid abstract is also the concrete environment of a type of men, of a race of men who do not live in quite the same way as those of the earth, do not perceive and feel like them: Ouessant and then Scin gave Epstein the perfect documentary, where the inhabitants alone can play their own role (Finis Terrae, The Sea of Ravens). Finally, the limit of the earth and the waters becomes the scene of a drama where there is a confrontation between, on one hand, the land moorings and, on the other, the mooring - ropes, the two-ropes and free floating cords. Epstein's La belle S'ivemaise already opposed in relation to the barge the solidity of the earth to the fluidity of the sky and the water, Grcmillon's Maldone opposed the organisation of roots, land and household to the assemblage of the canal: 'man ship horse'. The drama was that it was necessary to break the links with the earth, of father with son, husband with wife and mistress, woman with lover, children with parents; to retreat into solitude to achieve human solidarity, class solidarity. And although a final reconciliation is not ruled out, the lighthouse or the dam were the scene of a deadly confrontation between the madness of the earth and the superior justice of the water; the lunacy of the furious son in Gardiens de la phare; the great fall of the lord in fancy dress in Lumière d'été. Of course not every occupation is related to the sea: but Grcmillon's idea is that the proletarian or the worker reconstitutes everywhere even on land and in the aerial clement of The Woman Who Dared the conditions of a floating population, of a sea people, capable of revealing and transforming the nature of the economic and commercial interests at play in a society, on the condition that, following the Marxist formula, it 'cuts the umbilical cord which attaches it to the earth'.10 It is in this sensethat occupations connected with the sea arc not a relic or an insular type of folklore: they are the horizon of all occupations, even that of the woman doctor in L'Amour d'une femme. They extract the relationship with the Element and with Man, which is present in any occupation; and even mechanics, industry, proletarianisation find their truth in an empire of the seas (or of the air). Grémillon vigorously opposed the family and peasant |terrien| ideal of Vichy. Pew directors have filmed man's work so well, even discovering in it the equivalent of a sea: even the avalanches of stones like waves.
I hese are the two opposed systems: the perceptions, affections and actions of men on land, and the perceptions, affections and actions of men of the sea. T his comes across clearly in Gremillon's Stormy Waters, where the captain on land is drawn back to fixed centres, images of the wife or lover, image of the villa facing the sea, which art-all so many points of egoistical subjcctivation, whilst the sea presents him with an objectivity as universal variation, solidarity of all the parts, justice beyond men, where the fixed point of the tow-ropes, always called into question, no longer has validity except between two movements. But it is Vigo's L'Atalatite which was to bring this opposition to its peak. As J. P. Baml>erger shows, on land there is not the same regime of movement, not the same 'grace' as on the sea, in the sea: terrestrial movement is in perpetual disequilibrium because the motive force is always outside the centre of gravity (the newsvendor's bicycle); while aquatic movement is like the displacement of the centre of gravity, according to a simple objective law, straight or elliptical. ( This accounts for the apparent clumsiness of this movement when it takes place on land or even on the barge a crab-like walk, snaking or twirling but this is like an other-worldly grace.) And on land, movement always takes place from one point to another, always between two points, while on water the point is always between two movements: it thus marks the conversion or the inversion of movement, as in the hydraulic relationship of a dive and counter-dive, which is found in the movement of the camera itself (the final fall of the entwined bodies of the two lovers has no end, but is converted into an ascending movement). Nor is it the same regime of passion, of affection: in one ease dominated by commodities, the fetish, the article of clothing, the partial object and the memory-object: in the other case, attaining what has been called the 'objectivity' of l)odics, which may reveal hideousness under clothing, but also grace under a coarse appearance. I f there is any reconciliation between land and sea, this takes place in father Jules, but only because he knows how to impose spontaneously on the land the same law as the sea: his cabin contains the most extraordinary fetishes, partial objects, souvenirs and scrap; however, he docs not make them a memory, but a pure mosaic of present states, down to the old record which works again." Finally, a clairvoyant function is developed in water, in opposition to earthly vision: it is in the water that the loved one who has disappeared is revealed, as if perception enjoyed a scope and interaction, a truth which it did not have on land. Even in Nice, it was the very presence of water which allowed the bourgeoisie to be described as a monstrous organic body.12 It is the water which revealed the hidcousness of bourgeois bodies l>eneath their clothes, just as it now reveals the softness and strength of the loved one's body. The bourgeoisie is reduced to the objectivity of a fetish-body, a scrap-body, to which childhood, love, navigation oppose their integral bodies. 'Objectivity', equilibrium, justice arc not of the earth: they arc the preserve of water.
Finally, what the French school found in water was the promise or implication of another state of perception: a more than human perception, a perception not tailored to solids, which no longer had the solid as object, as condition, as milieu. A more dclicate and vaster perception, a molecular perception, peculiar to a 'cine-eye'. This was the result of starting from a real definition of the two poles of perception: the perception-image was not to be reflected in a formal consciousncss, but was to be split into two states, one molecular and the other molar, one liquid and the other solid, one drawing along and effacing the other. The sign of perception would not therefore be a 'dicisign', but a reume.13 While the dicisign set up a frame which isolated and solidified the image, the reume referred to an image in the process of becoming liquid, which passed through or under the frame. The camera-consciousness became a reume since it was actualised in a flowing perception and thus arrived at a material determination, at a flowing-matter. ITie French school, however, pointed towards this other state, this other perception, this clairvoyant function, rather than assuming full responsibility for it. Other than in its abstract attempts (among which Vigo's Tarts, roidel'eau features), it created from it not the new image, but the limit or ultimate point of convergence of the movement-images, of the average-images in the context of a story that retained its solidity. This story was so deeply imbued with rhythm that this was certainly no defect.
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