Lagny - Film History. or History Expropriated (1994)
-
Upload
georgestanley -
Category
Documents
-
view
214 -
download
0
Transcript of Lagny - Film History. or History Expropriated (1994)
8/15/2019 Lagny - Film History. or History Expropriated (1994)
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/lagny-film-history-or-history-expropriated-1994 1/20
Film History: Or History ExpropriatedAuthor(s): Michèle Lagny
Source: Film History , Vol. 6, No. 1, Philosophy of Film History (Spring, 1994), pp. 26-44
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3815006
Accessed: 06-06-2016 21:07 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to FilmHistory
This content downloaded from 132.205.7.55 on Mon, 06 Jun 2016 21:07:53 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
8/15/2019 Lagny - Film History. or History Expropriated (1994)
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/lagny-film-history-or-history-expropriated-1994 2/20
Film History, Volume 6, pp. 26-44, 1994. Copyright John Libbey & Company
ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in Great Britain
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII II I IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIII IIIIIIII IIII I I III IIIII
Film history:
or history
expropri ted
Michele Lagny
Ihave often attacked film history; at least, I
have expressed myself against the way film
history is being made and written. First of all,
because - while pretending to be a 'history of
films' - it seemed to me little more than an incom-
plete and incoherent catalogue of what has been
made. Films don't have a history. What does have
a history is the film as an object, a piece of celluloid
lacquered with secret images, with all its existences
and vicissitudes; it is the notion of what films should
or should not be, the meanings that have been given
to them and are changing according to the time and
place of their being made, viewed, enjoyed and
used; it is that peculiar micro-environment, 'cinema'
as an institutional framework, within which films are
born and evolve, expressing through -their being
'media' their relationships with the external world. I
have also criticized film history because it seemed -
and still often does seem - to be infatuated by its
object, incapable of admitting the need for a certain
distance, necessary to all intellectual enterprise; and
because, for several reasons, film history seemed to
lack - as it still often does nowadays - the discipline
which is crucial to all historical analysis worthy of its
name. So much work has been published in the
meantime, and I certainly feel the need to revise my
standpoint. Still, I'm intrigued by some contradict-
ions I see, so strong that they make me wonder
about the very nature of writing about history.
Let me point out right away that I'm mostly
referring to the place where I live, France. I have
been trained within the school of the nouvelle his-
toire, but I am now teaching in a department called
'Cinema and Audiovisuals' where history (including
film history) plays a role which is secondary to an
aesthetic framework of analysis through which an
attempt is made to overcome the long-time dictator-
ship of semiology in my country. I am not unaware
of English-language literature in film studies as well
as in the so-called 'cultural studies' which have
sprung from cinema as much as from other cultural
activities. Readers of Film History know it better than
I do. What follows, therefore, results from observa-
tions strictly related to my exotic environment.
Although I do care about film as a historian, I
do not believe in film as a document of 'realities'
(whatever they may be, they are inaccessible, as
historians can only rely upon their sources). Political
and social conflicts, economic structures and circum-
stances leave institutional traces which are far more
relevant than film. Within this context, film is nothing
more than circumstantial evidence of what may have
happened in the past. I do not see cinema as a
mirror of society. On the other hand, especially if
one considers the period ranging from the end of the
19th century and the time in the 20th century during
which it has been the most important form of visual
mass entertainment, cinema is an essential tool for
understanding a culture, or the cultures seen as
systems of values, representations and behaviours.
Michele Lagny teaches Cinema and History at
the University of Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle,
where her particular fields of interest are time and
cinema, and cinema and popular culture. Her most
recent books are Methode historique et histoire du
Cinema (Colin) and Senso, A Critical Study (Na-
than). Correspondence to 149 Blvd Magenta,
75010 Paris, France.
This content downloaded from 132.205.7.55 on Mon, 06 Jun 2016 21:07:53 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
8/15/2019 Lagny - Film History. or History Expropriated (1994)
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/lagny-film-history-or-history-expropriated-1994 3/20
Flmhstoiy or hstoryexpropriated 27
On many occasions I have claimed the need
for differentiating two different perspectives and ap-
proaches for research. On one hand there is the
history of cinema, dealing with the phenomenology
of film and with film production as such. On the
other hand there is the social historian, who looks at
films in order to find other things than cinema: in
most cases social and historical variables, or the
tenacious mythology of a shared - if not collective -
imagination, leading towards long-term history or
anthropology. Both conceptions are somehow re-
strictive, as they entail, respectively 'a reductionist
view of the so-called specificity of film and a mis-
leading sociological ideology. Such separation, on
the other hand, is not as radical as it may seem.
From the latter perspective, in order to see films as
indicators of their times without interpreting them
anachronistically (through modern conceptual cat-
egories) or as direct expressions of the culture of
their period (through the analysis of other material or
written sources), the historian must catch them in their
own existential environment, and know how to de-
cipher their language. From the other standpoint,
film history cannot survive in an ivory tower. Films
are not supposed to be treated as separate entities,
as they exist in relation to other cultural objects,
ranging from the most eminent and widely recog-
nized to the most humble and despised, the ordinary
production designed for what we know as 'mass
culture', exploited by the same people who are
watching films, acknowledging or refusing it, and
giving it an ephemeral triumph or a posthumous
reputation.
Film history, in my view, is therefore a part of a
larger ensemble, the socio-cultural history, a new
term meant to replace the fetishist term 'history of
mentalities', too ambitious and too ambiguous at the
same time. If it is true that the definition of 'socio-cul-
tural history' has not been codified yet, it can be
said that there is - at least in France - a lively
debate about its meaning and its objectives, leaning
on reflections based on philosophy (Foucault), socio-
logy (Bourdieu) and history (de Certeau, Chartier)1.
Whatever it may be, such an approach is con-
ceived as an articulation among three types of anal-
ysis, dealing with cultural objects, with the
framework of their creation, making and circulation,
and finally with their consumption, which depends
on social, ethnic and maybe sexual variables.
Film history as mediation
It seems to me, then, that the real interest in film
history, seen as a part of the larger domain of
socio-cultural history, lies in its fulfilment of a media-
ting function, allowing historians to use films as much
as helping film analysts to evaluate them in their own
context, regardless of their own assumptions, while
keeping the right (as I do myself) to study them
following non-historical ideologies or aesthetic postu-
lates within other (non-historical) perspectives. It is
from this articulation of different expertises that film
history claims a specificity which should make it
possible for it to play an active and critical role: first
of all, building the 'archaeological' perspective
which tells the researcher how films may be ap-
proached and what method may be followed in
order to study them, and then proposing a series of
procedures for textual analysis which are coherent to
the chosen method.
Let me take the following example. I am current-
ly co-ordinating a working group in charge of cata-
loguing all French documentaries made between
1945 and 1995. (Indeed, France is not at the
avant-garde in the archival movement. We recently
produced catalogues of fiction feature films, yet we
still don't have any systematic listing of short films or
documentaries.) While watching prints from this
period, we were surprised to see how often African
immigrants - either blacks or from the Maghreb -
were depicted in a positive light, very different from
what we were used to seeing in fiction films (al-
though known mostly through the productions of the
1930s)2. Such a view is also different from what
Pierre Sorlin has disclosed in European Cinemas,
Europeans Societies3, where he stresses how the
European cinema of the 1980s tends to deal with
the novelty (on a spectacular or exotic level) brought
by immigrants to the developed world, while doc-
umentaries - although confined to the medium of
television - insist instead on the difficult conditions of
their life. The dominant representation of immigrants
we have noticed in non-fiction films made almost
half a century ago, on the contrary, insists on the
possibilities of integration of black or Maghreb
people, often shown as not being 'strangers'.
One easily acknowledges that historical condi-
tions are different. In quantitative terms, the phe-
nomenon of immigration was not of massive
dimensions, and therefore could not justify the fear
Film history: or history expropriated
27
This content downloaded from 132.205.7.55 on Mon, 06 Jun 2016 21:07:53 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
8/15/2019 Lagny - Film History. or History Expropriated (1994)
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/lagny-film-history-or-history-expropriated-1994 4/20
8Mche Lgny
Fig. 1. Raoul Coutard filming Hoo Binh (1970). The colonial wars as quasi-documentary subject.
of a loss of would-be national identity. As there's no
unemployment, the 'stranger' can't be someone who
steals bread or other people's jobs. Most of all, it is
clear that during the colonial wars (which France
would have been bound to lose) it is imperative to
justify their objectives, showing the immigrants from
the Union Francaise as nice and sympathetic (al-
though slightly half-witted) people. It is more conveni-
ent, thus, to give them the right to get a job, to live
and die with decency in France: A I'ombre de la
mosquee de Paris (1946), for example, shows
workers and intellectuals, the mosque and the hospi-
tal, but also the Moroccan cemetery in Paris. It is
also right to give immigrants the means to study in
the big town, especially the capital city, where Kalla
(such is the name of the protagonist of a film with the
same title, produced in 1955) - a young student
from Cameroun - spends his time in a coffee shop in
the Latin Quarter - not because he's lazy, but be-
cause the street scenes he sees from the cafe remind
him (with flashback scenes or fictional remem-
brance?) of scenes very close yet at the same time
very different through which he lived in the country of
his childhood4. No mention is made of the difficul-
ties of integration and the possible loss of cultural
roots. Immigrants already feel at home, or they
almost do.
Positive images like this one may be read not
as mirrors of reality, but as manifestations of colonial
hypocrisy and paternalism. Despite its evidence,
such an interpretation is far too simple, a conse-
quence of our vision a posteriori of the evolution in
the relationship between the Maghreb or black Af-
rica and imperialist power. It would be too easy to
reverse its implications, as these two little films would
display a desire (or an illusion) of generosity on
behalf of the Republic, backbone of the Union Fran-
caise. In order to avoid the pitfalls of this ideological
misinterpretation, film history may give some help
with a process of mediation and warning.
28
Michele Lagny
. ..... .''':''::;. , i.; ..' ;
This content downloaded from 132.205.7.55 on Mon, 06 Jun 2016 21:07:53 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
8/15/2019 Lagny - Film History. or History Expropriated (1994)
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/lagny-film-history-or-history-expropriated-1994 5/20
Flmhstory or hstoryexpropriated 29
How can this be done? First of all, providing us
with the evidence necessary to what we may call the
'external critique of the document' and its contextual-
ization in time and space:
- aiding the 'authentication' and the dating of
the prints, finding whenever necessary all lacu-
nae, interpolation and manipulations suffered
by the prints. It seems that non-fiction short films,
because of their loose narrative structure and
their weaker status in terms of legal protection
by comparison to fiction films, are particularly
affected by this phenomenon;
- retrieving information on the rationale for the
production of these documentaries. Were they
made upon commission, as propaganda tools,
or were they conceived as an act of good faith
in the reciprocal recognition of colonialist
values, even at a time when colonialism was
becoming an issue of hot debate?
- knowing more about the audiences which
were seeing these films las far as they could
actually see them), the socio-cultural context
within which they were experiencing them,
whether or not they were immigrants or natives,
and whatever their social status and political
beliefs. How were the films received in Paris, in
neighbourhoods already occupied by large mi-
norities of immigrants in the post-WWII de-
cade? or in Barbes, in a beautiful theatre, the
'Louxor' (now closed and abandoned, despite
the fact that its Egyptian-style facade is con-
sidered an artistic highlight of the town)? or in
the more intellectual art houses of the Latin
Quarter (the caf6 where Kalla had his dream
and the great mosque are located in the 5th
arrondissement)? or finally - and more prob-
ably - elsewhere, far away from the 'package
deals' proposed by distributors and screened
following the individual taste of theatre owners?
and what about educational or militant film
clubs?
Another good reason for adopting these
strategies is that film history should be able to adopt
film analysis as a standard practice, so that films can
be understood not just within their own existence,
but also in relation to other films, in a relatively
autonomous complex of moving images. The people
who made these images, even those who had seen
them (because they work in the film industry or simply
because they are used to going to the movies) have
their own representation of what a film might have
looked like, how motion pictures are made and put
together, of what may be shown and what may not
(for political, ethical or aesthetic reasons), of what
may be done and what may not, for technical and
economic reasons.
Both short films I have taken as examples have
more or less the same theme: they underline the
interest of traditional cultures, all the while develo-
ping the assumption that their value will be en-
hanced thanks to the contribution of French
modernity (economic as well as technological and
cultural), which will eventually bring a true equality
between Maghreb and French people, blacks and
whites. One of them, though - A I'ombre de la
mosqu6e de Paris - is conceived as a series of
juxtaposed clich6s, provided with an off-screen com-
mentary which stresses the good deeds of the French
'help', with references to Lyautey. The film itself is
organized as an album of barely moving photo-
graphs, some of them staged in advance and with a
'slightly official' look (for example those of the hon-
ourable dean of the mosque), others taken in the
realm of real life. The other film, Kalla, employs a
young actor and exploits a semi-fictional construc-
tion, regulated by a clever alternation between
'here' and 'down there', between the African child-
hood and the transition to maturity in Paris. Here,
framing and light are carefully designed, expressing
with further subtlety the role which is being attributed
to the homeland, that is, a land which allows imma-
ture populations to enjoy the full flourishing of wealth
thanks to their initiation to western technology. (Kalla
dreams about becoming an electrical engineer in
order to make his own country benefit by the ac-
quired knowledge.)
This comparison makes clear the need for a
'film analysis' roughly drafted here, yet sufficient to
identify the role of a mode of 'visual representation'
in the constitution of an 'historical reality' which we
will perceive through such representation. The formal
differences between the two short films impose a
careful consideration of the relationship between the
film as document and reality, thus forcing us to raise
the further question of the relationship between
documentary and fiction. I have already mentioned
Film history: or history expropriated
29
This content downloaded from 132.205.7.55 on Mon, 06 Jun 2016 21:07:53 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
8/15/2019 Lagny - Film History. or History Expropriated (1994)
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/lagny-film-history-or-history-expropriated-1994 6/20
Michele Lagny
- perhaps because of an institutional habit - a
difference between 'document' and 'fiction film' but
categories such as these immediately look much less
sharp and certainly less grounded theoretically than
we are accustomed to think. There is, in any event,
a 'filmic filter' linked to the rules of film language
(and, in this respect film history owes much to film
theory) as much as to the attitudes of filmmakers and
audiences at the time when films are made. One
cannot know much about this without a thorough
knowledge of the complex of production, of the
subjects, themes, forms and styles which are seen as
common (or uncommon) at a given time.
Admittedly, I have oversimplified these ques-
tions, and raised them from a very partial perspec-
tive. Still, one point holds true: I'm asking film history
to perform a role of mediating knowledge. It is
through this history that I would be able to measure
the supposed value of my 'documentary' shorts, and
interpret the images they are displaying. It will be my
duty, then, to build a picture, however tentative, of
the evolution of the social attitudes towards immi-
grants and the emancipating colonies through a
contextualization of these films with other images
produced by other media with newspapers, radio,
and - why not? - with the available evidence of the
political debate of that time. In short, what I'm trying
to do is to see films within a socio-cultural history,
which is in turn linked to the general history.
A strategy of this kind should prevent us from
falling into an all too common trap in which both
historians and film specialists often find themselves
caught. As a matter of fact, with few notable excep-
tions, the current situation is characterized by a
phenomenon of reticence and reciprocal borrow-
ings, in a circular relationship coming partly from a
current practice in film criticism, and partly from an
ignorance of what cinema is for historians and what
history is for film analysts. Too often, in order to
draw the 'historical context', historians use film with-
out knowing much about the rules of film language
at the time when a chosen film was made. In doing
so, they fail to consider the link between cinema and
the real world, and they overlook the 'filtering' func-
tion performed by the microcosm of film language.
As for film specialists, they like to use 'context' in
order to explain films and their production, without
thinking of the double transposition with which the
practice of historiography affects the 'contextual
facts' they are referring to. The first is due to the
documents (witnessing facts in their own way, and
according to their degree of preservation), while the
other owes much to the way historians used these
documents from their own perspectives and with
their own working methods.
Such attitudes entail a reductionist, 'historiciz-
ing' misconception, similar to the vicious circle 'text-
context' (where the text looks determined by the
context, while the context seems 'reflected' into the
text), or a cleavage between film analysis and the
study of society, socio-economic variables, the inten-
tions of the filmmakers and the reactions of the
audiences. In order to avoid allegations of partiality,
let me raise an example drawn from my own essay
on Luchino Visconti's Senso5. Some pages of it are
devoted to the political context (the success of Chris-
tian-Democrat right-wing policy in Italy) and the situ-
ation within the film industry both from the point of
view of institutions (the pressure from censorshipl and
aesthetics (the crisis of neorealism); some clues are
given about the cultural milieu within which Visconti
and his collaborators conceived and made the film
(mostly from the novel used as source for its produc-
tion, from Gramsci's writings on the period of the
so-called risorgimento, from the opera - a main
interest throughout the director's career- and the
paintings which appear to inspire several se-
quences). Finally, attention is called to some
examples of press response. Of course I wasn't so
naive as to claim that the shape of the film was
determined by the context (although context had
indeed some kind of influence, especially through
censorship), nor that the film itself was some sort of
mirror of it, although Visconti had said that Senso
could be seen as 'our own history'. Directors can be
so contradictory I never trust what they say. How-
ever, in dealing with my own knowledge as a
historian (knowledge of the data highlighting a pol-
itical and cultural environment) and with film ana-
lysis, I was forced to keep a kind of fracture
between the two. In the absence of a comparison
with other cultural objects (visual and nonvisual) of
the period, I didn't try hard enough in order to reach
an articulation and a mediation towards film history
and socio-cultural history. What I did was to submit
a slightly a-temporal interpretation of the film (which,
in any case, I certainly won't deny now). I did try to
put it in relation to its times, but I couldn't explain
30
This content downloaded from 132.205.7.55 on Mon, 06 Jun 2016 21:07:53 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
8/15/2019 Lagny - Film History. or History Expropriated (1994)
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/lagny-film-history-or-history-expropriated-1994 7/20
Flmhstory or hstoryexpropriated 31
Fig. 2. Luchino Visconti addressing a class at Columbia University, c. 1970, with professors Andrew
Sarris (left) and Arthur Barron (right). 'Directors can be so contradictory '
much of the meaning of such relations (nor its
meanings in the time and place of existence of the
film).
The role of a film historian draws all its relev-
ance - along with the relevance of its mediating role
- if we mean the term 'mediation' as a specific
ability to connect historical knowledge and film ex-
pertise. From the standpoint I have selected (the
socio-historical perspective is only one of many
possible frameworks), this mediation provides the
elements necessary to evaluate the potential relat-
ions between the representations and conceptions
suggested by the films, those which were hege-
monic at the time, and our own (the ideas which
may lead us to interpret a film in a totally different
manner, not necessarily 'bad' or 'wrong', but cer-
tainly not an 'absolute' one), as well as between the
film and the supposed reality of its time. True, a
mediation of this kind involves an awareness of its
constraints, precautions which are bound to make
our task particularly difficult already, and a series of
caveats against abusive appropriation and institu-
tional ideologies perhaps rewarding in the short
term, yet destructive to the discipline.
Plurality of viewpoints and loss of control
With my naive suggestion of questions to film history
through some examples, what I really was thinking
about is the way film history is built from a set of
fundamental needs of historical practice: the choice
of sources; their treatment according to different
perspectives and the scales adopted in order to
examine them; finally, the crucial issue of articulating
viewpoints derived from this treatment. In fact, history
resembles an image, as it requires - as in photo-
graphy or the moving picture - the selection of
Film history: or history expropriated
31
This content downloaded from 132.205.7.55 on Mon, 06 Jun 2016 21:07:53 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
8/15/2019 Lagny - Film History. or History Expropriated (1994)
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/lagny-film-history-or-history-expropriated-1994 8/20
32 Mch~~~~~~~~~Ie Lagny~~~~~
framing and lighting options. As with film, it requires
an editing process.
The material: in praise of the quantitative
The examples of my little documentaries may have
seemed bizarre. After all, fiction film is still the centre
of a film historian's world, and the very fact that no
inventory has been made yet of non-fiction films is a
proof of it. On the other hand, we could think that
their only interest lies in their being 'documents'
instead of 'film'. Looking at them, nevertheless (at
least as far as I can tell from those made in France
during the 1950s), one may realize that they would
certainly help us in understanding the transformations
in the art of filmmaking, as some of these are brilliant
visual exercises. I'm thinking about a rather well-
known film of 1948 by Yannik Bellon, Goemons6.
The depressing conditions of life of seaweed workers
are described here in 23 minutes of screen time
(seaweed was then used as a fertilizer in Brittany).
What we have here is a stunning display of inventive
framing and lighting, vividly portraying a feeling of
overwhelming isolation oppressing these seamen,
and the luminosity of the space in that region. Un-
deniably, films like this one are sometimes studied,
but mostly because they are made by notable auteurs
who became famous thanks to their feature fiction
films; that's why we know the documentaries of
well-known people like Georges Franju, Alain Res-
nais and Agnes Varda. However, who ever cared
about the director of Kalla, Francois Villiers, who
nevertheless made at least two documentaries every
year between 1946 and 1955? Besides, even when
documentaries are made by so-called auteurs, they
are most often seen as minor works, examples of
period of apprenticeship7. In my view, however, films
like Le sang des betes or Nuit et brouillard are as
important to the knowledge of film as Hiroshima mon
amour or Les yeux sans visage from the point of view
of film language and aesthetics.
In order to have a full understanding of the film
phenomenon, and to realize where the future mas-
ters of cinema were growing up, it is necessary to
realize what was the current practice: not just com-
mercial films (the notorious 'poverty row' films of
French cinema, or the American 'B movies', nowa-
days so much appreciated by the most cultivated
film programmers in French broadcast television),
but also what has been considered until now a
peripheral, marginal production: short documen-
taries on science, education, industry, or home
movies. Certainly, some of these films could afford
some audacities because they were inexpensive
and financed without much trouble, sometimes
thanks to the policy of 'quality films' followed by the
Centre National de la Cin6matographie8, some-
times because of the sponsoring zeal of institutions
aiming at publicizing their activities or products (in
France, the colonial administration, the army, the
Ministry of Agriculture, the nationalized companies
like Renault or SNCF).
I'm not trying here to push towards a rehabilita-
tion of documentary and short films. Instead, I would
like to stress the fact that history is a matter of
quantity as much as of quality. It is through mass
production that we may recognize, even in the
realm of art, the deeper movements leading to the
expression of the most brilliant results. It is not necess-
ary, I think, to insist further on this point: the shining
path of the auteurs is still overshadowing the humble
craftsmen who worked for the screen, but many
scholars are now trying - with different means and
unequal fortune - to ensure cataloguing, preserva-
tion and restoration of films and non-visual sources
on film related to these people. As a matter of
principle, the time of 'selective' preservation is over.
Neither will I insist on the need for development of a
'philology' of the document, the evaluation of its
origin, the authentication of prints. With all the
problems it entails (and I am fully aware of them),
this is a preliminary stage of work, often undertaken
by film archivists, sometimes in cooperation with film
historians. Historians, however, must address a fur-
ther question: what to do with the staggering amount
of preserved - and, to some extent, available -
viewing material.
The law of series; or, large scale and its
constraints
If we are talking about large quantities, it's because
historians never work on an isolated source. That's
why it is necessary to draw a distinction between the
activity of a historian and the work of a film analyst,
although (as it is a requirement in film history as much
as in socio-cultural history in general) the same re-
searchers should deal with both aspects of the issue.
No historical question will be solved with a selective
32
Michele Lagny
This content downloaded from 132.205.7.55 on Mon, 06 Jun 2016 21:07:53 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
8/15/2019 Lagny - Film History. or History Expropriated (1994)
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/lagny-film-history-or-history-expropriated-1994 9/20
Flmhstory or hstoryexpropriated 33
Fig. 3. Putyovka v zhizn (The Road to Life, 1931), directed by
Nikolai Ekk. 'Some kind of Great Collective Text, of which
each film is but a variant.
choice of sources: what I have just said about the two
short documentaries on immigrants would make no
sense without systematic research of a large sample
of documentaries in a given period, a homogeneous
'series' large enough to justify or falsify the early
hypotheses suggested by the process of observation.
'Series' of films: it's not something like a series
of prices for cereals, or the names of born, married
or deceased people in some official register (data
through which history has found its basic principles
of serial analysis). We may think instead of a series
of political speeches, or judicial papers. Although
this may seem an iconoclastic statement for the
partisans of films as an art, cinema is a mode of
expression which largely allows - within the terms of
its 'technical reproducibility' - the repetition and
variation of a theme or model. Pierre Sorlin has often
reminded us that films are comparable objects from
the point of view of their modes of expression and
financial and technical constraints. These constraints
are visible in their material evidence: footage, si-
lent/sound, black and white/colour. To such an
extent, cinema helps the activity of the historian:
once the structural elements of a series are identified
through the systematic analysis of samples, it is
possible to treat the series as a whole. Behind all
variations, sometimes so remarkable, that each pol-
itical speech, each law document, each film stands
on its own, there are enough common structures to
allow the interpretation of a global (historical) phe-
nomenon, instead of the mere analysis of a single
(anecdotal) event, whose comprehension is in any
case impossible without relating it to the global
phenomenon.
However, the essential point (and that's where
the role of the historian becomes crucial) is not to
build a theoretical model, a structural scheme which
is supposed to explain a mode of textual (in our
case, visual) functioning. What matters, instead, is
to submit the entire series to the same kind of ques-
Film history: or history expropriated
33
This content downloaded from 132.205.7.55 on Mon, 06 Jun 2016 21:07:53 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
8/15/2019 Lagny - Film History. or History Expropriated (1994)
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/lagny-film-history-or-history-expropriated-1994 10/20
34Mche Lgny
Fig. 4. Toni (1934). Film history: still subject to a certain fetishization of the 'unique source'?
tioning and to the same viewpoints which may lead
us to formulate conclusions on permanence, evol-
utions or ruptures. Such working methods have been
followed, for example, by Myriam Tsikounas in her
study on the origins of Soviet Cinema9: studying all
the available films has been a matter of looking at
many dull movies; treating this corpus as some kind
of Great Collective Text, within which 'each film can
be seen as a variant from the main text', measured
'against the very same series, not from a pre-con-
ceived grading'; questioning the similarities and the
variations of themes, characters (the worker, the
sailor, the bolshevik activist, the peasant) as much as
the styles, taking into account specific visual codes
(such as framing, editing, the organization of space
and time) and partially external models (narrative
patterns, actors' performances).
My insistence on the need to work with a
certain amount of documentary evidence, and to
conceive 'series' based on a working hypothesis,
might look peculiar to historians of economics, so-
ciety and - although perhaps to a lesser extent - of
politics. This need has some reason to exist, I think,
in film history, still subject to a certain fetishization of
the 'unique source' which is supposed to shed light
on a neglected or totally unknown 'fact'. This hasn't
to do only with film sources, but with written docu-
ments as well. I have in mind a fine and captivating
study by Charles Tesson on the production of Jean
Renoir's Tonil0. His precise description of the haz-
ards of financing, casting, shooting, and the many
changes necessary in all stages of the preparation
of this film (even after the first public screenings)
gives us the possibility of sketching some hypotheses
on the production structures surrounding Renoir at the
turn of the 1930s in France, on the working proce-
dures followed by the crew, on the relationship
between production and distribution. Eventually,
Tesson manages to suggest a relatively fresh point of
view (based on economic variables) in the dis-
cussion of the politique des auteurs. It is clear,
though, that these production files, found in the
archives of the Cin6matheque francaise, should also
be confronted with a whole series of other materials
of the same kind. More than uncovering a set of
further details, this method would help in building a
global model, in relation to which each element
would display its full meaning, thus making it
34
Michele Lagny
This content downloaded from 132.205.7.55 on Mon, 06 Jun 2016 21:07:53 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
8/15/2019 Lagny - Film History. or History Expropriated (1994)
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/lagny-film-history-or-history-expropriated-1994 11/20
Fhtoyohstr xrptd3
possible to appreciate the diacronic changes men-
tioned by Tesson at the end of his article.
In other words, a single 'close shot' is less
meaningful to the historian's work than a series of
consecutive shots, taken from different angles in
order to help us shaping a full, more nuanced pic-
ture.
Variable points of view: history by levels
The problem is in the editing: the polymorphism of
cinema is a global phenomenon requiring the expan-
sion of systematic research, with several different
approaches. Traditional history has taken into ac-
count the pluri-dimensional rule. However, as soon
as history was supposed to deal with film, films were
always given the foremost - if not the only - place;
economic, social, political and cultural knowledge
of film has been seen as ancillary evidence, either in
terms of 'factors' (more or less determining the output)
or 'influence' (more or less strong). I have used here
the past tense (although this kind of auxiliary history
is still very much alive), but at least we now know
more about the richness and diversity of these docu-
ments, leading us to explore each aspect in its own
right, thus supporting the development of a 'history
b y levels .
So we are witnessing the surging of a 'strati-
fied' film history, where each layer owes something
to established disciplines (economics, sociology, an-
thropology, aesthetics, semiotics) endorsing a better
knowledge of its organizational models. So, we
either analyse films in themselves, and in their rela-
tionship with each other and with other forms of the
art of representation; or else we study - mostly
through the exploration of written sources - their
financial and economic implications (through the
systematic analysis of the structures of production,
funding, distribution and exhibition), the role of tech-
nique in terms of invention and innovation (that is,
the actual enforcement of technological resources),
the institutions surrounding and shaping film produc-
tion, show business, the evolution of the public.
This multi-layered pattern seems inexorably ac-
celerated by the fact that we are often working on
documents organized on homogeneous series, as
these series are the result of a certain choice of
sources (what has been put in a 'serial' framework?)
and a certain set of points of view (how are we
addressing these sources?). In fact, 'series' exist
simply because we are asking preliminary questions
of a group of comparable documents; yet they can
describe with convincing precision and insight only
some aspects of a social phenomenon. Michel Fou-
cault had stressed this point in Arch6ologie du savoir
(The Archaeology of Knowledge) Documental series
are logically defined by the way they have been
built, that is, by the set of relationships imposed
upon them. As they will provide answers only within
the framework of this logic, it should be admitted
that they 'often lead to a specific kind of history for
each series 1.
In order to gather the meaning of the per-
manences, evolutions and ruptures observed in the
process of research, we must find our way out of the
series we are studying. The structure and the global
evolution of a phenomenon can be interpreted only
if we compare the observed aspects with other
aspects designed through other 'series', yet its articu-
lation remains a random factor. Of course, the point
of view on a given 'series' may be determined by
hypotheses coming from other 'series' of documents,
thus allowing a certain amount of contextualization.
To return to the earlier example, I can question the
representations proposed by the documentary films
on immigrants through a 'series' of official texts
published by the institutions which distributed land
sometimes commissioned) these films, so that I may
evaluate to what extent the films obey a set of
directions given by the institutions. Yet the conclu-
sions one may draw from this procedure are some-
how limited: we may well understand more about
the objectives of the films, but probably nothing
about the way they were made. In order to fulfil this
further task, we will have to study the films from other
'series' of documents (for example, the way do-
cumentary films were conceived at that time). As to
the assessment of their value, we'll have to work on
radically different 'series': some of them coming
from an inventory of the titles of films screened in the
theatres (which will be done using the daily pro-
grammes of the theatres), following a rationale and
a set of constraints depending on the reality of
exhibition practice, instead of from using sources
like the director, the producer, the possible sponsor.
Other 'series' may come from quantitative and quali-
tative data on the spectators entering the theatres.
These 'series' will obey further criteria, both econ-
omic and sociological.
Film history: or history expropriated
35
This content downloaded from 132.205.7.55 on Mon, 06 Jun 2016 21:07:53 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
8/15/2019 Lagny - Film History. or History Expropriated (1994)
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/lagny-film-history-or-history-expropriated-1994 12/20
Michele Lagny
In other words, we will know, at best, in what
perspectives these films as a whole have been pro-
duced, and how it was thought they should be. A
corpus of relatively homogeneous documents (films
and writings on political, technical and stylistic
norms) can be articulated as much as we are able to
distinguish them by their references, even when
these references are implicit. We might be able to
know (although this may be very difficult to ascer-
tain, more so than it would be with feature fiction
films) how often these films have been screened, and
what kind of audience - immigrant, intellectual,
suburban - had seen them. On the other hand, we
will not try to articulate their discourse, their motiva-
tions and their effects unless we will be able to make
these 'series' meet through some documents related
to one or more films, their production and reception.
These crosscuts, however, are likely to give idiosyn-
cratic answers to our questions, If we use these
answers outside the 'series', we will abandon the
field of the historian who wants to think about 'facts',
and we will enter the domain of probabilistic ana-
lysis (which is indeed the most frequent destiny of
historians, and their luck as well, as it gives them the
chance to prove their inventiveness).
The curse: history exploded or
expioptiated?
Should we say that the current development of re-
search is leading us to the era of the history (histories)
of cinema (cinemas)?12 Or, maybe, to a history
which is thinking of itself in terms of 'perspectives',
multiple viewpoints instead of 'factual truth', multi-tem-
porality instead of linear and homogeneous chrono-
logy. That's what Jean-Louis Leutrat suggests when he
presents film history as something 'made of a thou-
sand actions which cannot be reduced to a single
sense and a fully linear time frame; which doesn't
mean that we cannot disclose any sense what-
soev er 13.
To be honest, this idea is hardly new; we have
seen it expressed, for example, in Gian Piero Bru-
netta's monumental Storia del cinema italiano first
published about fifteen years ago. Nor is the idea a
very original one: just a very basic recognition of a
debate held among historians for more than sixty
years The 'nouvelle histoire' is now seen (not with-
out some hesitation and regrets) as a series of
discontinuities, a random game between these
series. In a way, this is an answer to an observation
raised by Jean Greimas in 1970: 'historicity, which
is characterized by an infinite amount of micro-
events occurring everywhere and at every moment
... cannot be described exhaustively and systemati-
cally 14
The truth of the matter is that the practice of
'serialization' of documents is still rare in film history.
The sources are too scattered, too uncertain (espe-
cially in terms of the actual film holdings), with too
many gaps for a serious attempt to work on a truly
massive amount of documents. We should also add
to this the persistence of a certain fetishistic attitude
towards certain films, certain authors, certain prin-
ciples seen as the essence of the 'aesthetics' of
'cinema'. If it is true that so many research projects
of our time are of a fragmentary nature, this happens
mostly because we are finding ourselves prisoners of
the exploitation of all the sources of documentation
recently discovered, where the exploitation is done
following neo-positivist techniques, making cross-ref-
erences of documents considered as 'relevant', and
then insisting on the cause-effect relationships be-
tween the 'facts' thus identified. The fragmentary,
discontinuous aspect of historical research is pass-
ively assumed more than actively pursued, and it is
therefore often misunderstood.
The misunderstanding brings some dangers,
which have already become apparent in general
history: the most frequently denounced is the disart-
iculation of film history; the other is the loss of its
specificity (i.e. identity), leading to some extreme
forms of complaint on behalf of those researchers
who devote themselves to cinema studies. They are
quite worried indeed, as they are wondering where
cinema actually was. Are we going to find it in the
films? in the mind of filmmakers? in the off-screen
work of film crews, or in the actors' performances?
in the secret meetings and the manoeuvres of pro-
ducers, bankers, film moguls? in the theatres where
the nocturnal activity of of obscure audiences was
bound to decide the destiny of the films' survival?
Disarticulation
There is a clear-cut opposition today between a film
history essentially founded on film analysis and an
institutional history of cinema. Evidently, the tendency
36
This content downloaded from 132.205.7.55 on Mon, 06 Jun 2016 21:07:53 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
8/15/2019 Lagny - Film History. or History Expropriated (1994)
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/lagny-film-history-or-history-expropriated-1994 13/20
Flmhstoiy or hstoryexpropriated 37
Fig. 5. Cinematographe Lumiere, Boulevard St. Martin, Paris. The history of film reception overlaps social
histor y .
to have the latter prevail over the other tendency is
stronger than ever. The current fashion of the history
of 'modes of production', of technique, and more
recently of film reception tends to push to the back-
ground the study of films in a historical perspective.
There is, then, a double fracture, between film ana-
lysis and the analysis of cinema, but also between
the different layers of institutional analysis, as Allen
and Gomery have correctly pointed out in 198515.
As much as the study of each layer requires the
adoption of 'series' belonging to different sources
and specific methods of analysis, the economic
history of cinema enters the domain of economic
history: the history of film reception overlaps social
history, and so forth - not without reason, as re-
searchers know very well how to find and treat their
sources. Even when the discrepancy between the
layers is not exaggerated by a specialization pushed
to extremes, these interrelations seem too complex to
suggest the adoption of permanent 'models' built on
the serious grounds of a structural history of cinema
with its own characters, its own rhythms, following
the places where cinema is developing itself (or
where its development has ceased).
In order to take into account some of these
relationships (essentially between means of produc-
tion, technologies, economies, and film production
in itself), one may propose the adoption of the
so-called 'open systems', insofar as this involves the
identification of 'generative mechanisms' in the re-
search field defined by case studies precisely situ-
ated geographically and chronologically. We may
also try to build longer-term models, articulating in a
smooth and flexible chronological framework the
necessities of economic profit, the rationalization of
technological practice, and a stylistic model, as
Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson have done for the
cinema of Hollywood'16. On the other hand, it
seems much less clear how to provide a systematic
account of the relation between production and
Film history: or history expropriated
37
This content downloaded from 132.205.7.55 on Mon, 06 Jun 2016 21:07:53 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
8/15/2019 Lagny - Film History. or History Expropriated (1994)
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/lagny-film-history-or-history-expropriated-1994 14/20
3 I
reception. In analysing the decrease in film theatre
attendance in Europe at the end of the 1950s,
Pierre Sorlin considers these years as 'abnormal' in
terms of market economy, and ends up admitting
that the behaviour of the European filmgoers has
been modified by a broader social evolution, much
more than by problems (of which Sorlin nevertheless
underlines the effects) related to film production,
distribution or exhibition; the articulation between
production and consumption of films can't be re-
solved within cinema alone. More than finding a link
between different layers of film history, the issue at
stake becomes the understanding of the relations
between a socio-economic land socio-cultural) evol-
ution taken as a whole, and the desire to see
movies.
As for the fundamental question for those who
want to deal with cinema in terms of 'images of
society', as in my case - the question of the recep-
tion and the effect, the aesthetic, cultural or ideologi-
cal value of this production - things are even more
clear: we can't evaluate the relevance of films land
their impact on society) without establishing a rela-
tionship between film production and other cultural
productions, and between these productions and
the social habits of those who are absorbing, admir-
ing or rejecting them. Then comes the very tricky
question of knowing what series of data are necess-
ary to approach the 'series' of film productions, in
clearly defined chronological and geographic cir-
cumstances. Films acquire a 'historical' significance
in relation to what Rick Altman calls the 'community
of interpretation'17. This community is partly linked to
the cultural and global consumption of a certain
period: novels (from 'high' to pulp literature; enter-
tainment, from theatre to music hall; painting and
popular imagery, including traditional illustration;
music, from opera to rock and rap: radio, television,
advertisementsl. This consumption is also a function
of spectators affected by their own habits, which are
defined in a complex manner by their ethnic, sexual,
social, familiar and professional affiliations. Every-
thing may seem not only admissible, but vital, up to
the point that reading several works of the 'cultural
studies' trend, where cinema is dealt with, we are
not talking about 'open systems' any more, but of
'waving systems' instead. The first part of the fasci-
nating book by Janet Staiger, Interpreting Film'8,
which presents the field of historical studies of recep-
tion and its different methodological approaches,
give a synthetic view which is at the same time
enthralling and a little scary for a French reader (and
certainly for myself).
Expropriations
This instability of articulations seems to me a sign of
vitality, if not of maturity, but it gives the impression
that film history is crumbling and decomposing, and
that cinema takes the risk of being expropriated by
researchers of all horizons who, while putting film in
relation to too many things make it lose its identity.
On the other hand, the current division of labour,
necessary both from a methodological and humanist
point of view (we can't do everything, as Thomas
Elsaesser has pointed out)19 is enhanced by institu-
tional needs, at least in the academic field, where
everybody has his or her own chair, and therefore
his or her own speciality. Film history, thus, is conti-
nued - and sometimes almost confiscated - by
researchers who make reference to their practice of
a certain method (in fact, methods) of history, or to
their competence in the study which is essential to
cinema, the film itself. Some consider film not as a
'text' in itself, but more as a cultural 'product' among
others, and an 'instrument' of social exchange. They
can't be blamed for this. Others criticize them,
though, because they speak only in terms of content
or function, without considering films in their own
specificity. They can't be blamed, either. It looks,
though, as if the two tendencies are incompatible, as
if film history can't make the two currents find a
meeting point.
The current evolution has the enormous advant-
age of showing that film, as a socio-economic and
socio-cultural structure, follows rules which are com-
mon to other comparable social phenomena in a
given society. The difficult thing is that all the differ-
ent specialists tend to treat film as a product ex-
ploited economically, or consumed sociologically,
overlooking its distinctive characteristics. As the divi-
sion between the layers tends to grow, film history
loses its specificity: it is confiscated because it is
being diluted. Sure, projection equipment has been
sold in the same way and at the same time as soap.
Douglas Gomery's joke of applying the principle of
'industrial analysis' to the economics of cinema is
therefore confirmed: at the national fair of Geneva
in 1896, the Swiss representative of the British soap
38
Michele Laqny
This content downloaded from 132.205.7.55 on Mon, 06 Jun 2016 21:07:53 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
8/15/2019 Lagny - Film History. or History Expropriated (1994)
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/lagny-film-history-or-history-expropriated-1994 15/20
Flmhstory or hstoryexpropriated 39
manufacturers Lever Brothers Ltd. (producer of Sun-
light soap) combines 'popular entertainment', and
publicity in a pseudo-Japanese pavillion introducing
the Cin6matographe Lumiere. One could also men-
tion the example of the Werner company in Paris,
owning a 'society for the storage and sale of type-
writers and reproduction machines' as well as repre-
senting the Edison phonograph and selling
kinetoscopes20. After all, though, film industry has
developed in a different way than the soap or
typewriter industry: the Cin6matographe has created
film, and film has a social role which is different from
the role performed by other products of a more
(typewriters) or less (soap) relevant social function.
This evolution also leads to leaving cinema to
the 'theoreticians' who often work from postulates
which eliminate all historical connection with the
object under scrutiny. We should not exaggerate
our criticism in this respect: the semiology derived
from Christian Metz has been too often accused,
while film analysis has never really been entirely
dependent upon semiology, and it has never com-
pletely eliminated the points of view of criticism
(which often deal with the 'historical' context of film,
as I have recalled earlier when I mentioned my own
work on Visconti). Besides, 'film theory' inspired by
language studies has never shown any contempt of
synchronic (sociological) differentiations, nor of dia-
chronic (historical) evolutions; this theory implies
more and more, with the semio-pragmatic thought
developed by Roger Odin and Francesco Casetti,
the construction of 'partial models', corresponding to
certain judgements of acceptability, involving the
receptive role of the socio-cultural classes of
viewers'21. Film analysis can't be blamed, then for
real incompetence, or for conscious refusal of his-
tory; there is instead, the tendency to give priority to
the study of the process land the distinctive origin-
ality) of making meaning out of visual texts. Another
tendency is visible today, at least in France, involv-
ing a predominant role of 'comparative' analysis, of
which Jean-Luc Godard may be seen as the true
ancestor with his Introduction a une v6ritable histoire
du cin6ma22. This tendency is the result of an ambi-
tion of uncovering the most relevant meanings of the
films through a comparison between them, with the
sometimes audacious refusal of a chronological
framework. Here, again, the cultural and socio-pol-
itical context are not ignored, but they are often
prone to a certain over-simplification through cat-
egories which have become - through their abusive
use - some kind of ideological catch-all terms ('capi-
talist', 'bourgeois', 'phallocratic'). Quite a legitimate
standpoint, certainly, which is nevertheless leading
to another form of expropriation: the true film histo-
rian is someone who interprets film more brilliantly
than others, as much as specialists of cinema as an
institutional category tend to make its specificity fade
away. I would say here that film history is confis-
cated because it withdraws from the discourse of
(and about) film.
Both approaches, in my view, fall short while
trying to look too far away. In the latter case, this is
because the interpretations of film can be indefinitely
extended. From the point of view of the historian,
there are only two legitimate directions of research:
what we may know about the possible meanings of
something at the time when the object was pro-
duced land the fact that the object is incomplete, or
that its meaning could not be perceived by all the
spectators of that period doesn't diminish the relev-
ance of this condition) or knowing about later inter-
pretations, and their meaning in their own context. I
won't insist here on the well-known example of the
differences in perception of Jean Renoir's La Grande
Illusion before and after WWII; let me recall, how-
ever, that the film had been enthusiastically received
in 1937, and that afterwards it raised so many
reservations that Renoir himself felt forced to re-edit
the film in 1958 with an introductory text. That's
what concerns the historian. The rest will be dealt.
with by contemporary philosophers (whose analysis
- who knows? - might one day acquire a further
historical significance).
On another level, concerning the stratification
of the history of cinema as an institutional entity, the
necessary insertion of cinema within the whole of the
economic and sociological structure makes it lose its
specific characteristics. After all, history must be
conceptualized in order to analyse general mechan-
isms of events - and I'm quite convinced of that - but
it is also (perhaps most of all) the study of the
particular. If cinema is a part of economic structures,
social demands and a system of collective repre-
sentations, it has its own specific way of performing
such a role. In order to recognize such specificity,
and in order to analyse in a more systematic way
the relation between the production of film works
Film history: or history expropriated
39
This content downloaded from 132.205.7.55 on Mon, 06 Jun 2016 21:07:53 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
8/15/2019 Lagny - Film History. or History Expropriated (1994)
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/lagny-film-history-or-history-expropriated-1994 16/20
40 Mch~~~~~~~~~~~~Ie Lc~~~~~ Ign
Fig. 6. La Grande Illusion (1937). Re-edited by Renoir in 1958, with an introductory text.
[Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive.]
and the production of their values (within which we
might include the 'micro-analyses' of particular rela-
tionships), we may well imagine a 'cinema field',
conceived as a space of 'objective relationships'
with its constraints, its dynamics, its paradoxes and
its undetermined margins. What we may study,
then, is its 'genesis and structure', as Bourdieu did
for literature and art23. The priority given to cinema
and to the organization of its network of differences
- in a semiotic and intertextual perspective - might
be the best safeguard (not taken enough into ac-
count by Bourdieu) against 'sociologism'.
Film as the core of a semio-history
Would it be possible that a film history prone to a
random method and a weak structure can assure the
mediating function I proposed to attribute to it at the
beginning of this essay, and articulate the 'archaeo-
logical' data - that is, not just an inventory of traces,
but their contextualization, and the competence
necessary to analyse films? In order to do so, should
this history present itself as a repeated analysis of
several films, sometimes grouped under various cat-
egories (author, period, genre, theme, and so forth),
or as a series of case studies corresponding to each
level of study? Or, should it claim to formulate the
principles of organization of the deeper structure of
the cinema phenomenon, in order to solve the
problem generated by stratified history? The first
dimension has a very limited and ephemeral interest,
although I have myself approached the question
40
Michele Lagny
This content downloaded from 132.205.7.55 on Mon, 06 Jun 2016 21:07:53 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
8/15/2019 Lagny - Film History. or History Expropriated (1994)
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/lagny-film-history-or-history-expropriated-1994 17/20
Flmhstory or hstoryexpropriated 41
under this viewpoint, producing some film analyses
or work on some authors and genres. The second
hypothesis seems to me as utopian and dangerous:
one always has to choose a hierarchy of determina-
tions which can't be proved, with the risk of wasting
time and efforts wondering - as professionals often
do - whether or not the production (and quality) of a
given film is determined by the taste of the public
(often defined in too narrow sociological terms), by
the logic of economics or technology or by institu-
tional constraints24.
It would be far better to think that there's no
such thing as one or more histories of cinema con-
ceived as closed fields of analysis and knowledge,
instead of an open field where different forces (econ-
omic, social, political, technical, cultural or aes-
thetic) come into being and confront each other. In
order to build the itineraries of a film history which
accepts its dissemination without fragmenting itself,
there is a crucial condition, whatever the starting
point of view, of the methodological approaches
and the relationships taken into consideration: the
core is the film text, because only the film is the sign
that cinema does exist (or doesn't exist any longer).
Working from the cinema or on the cinema means
starting from the film, and going back to it. Without
doubt, films are not the result of chance, but neither
are they the result of necessity; they never are a
consequence (of economic, social, cultural or politi-
cal determining factors, crossing each other in a
non-systematic way), nor the cause of anything (a
political action, a social reaction, or the production
of other films). They can be, socially and historically,
seen as symptoms.
Film history, then, cannot depend uniquely on
the neo-positive theory founded on a 'realist' basis
claimed by Allen and Gomery (whom I very much
admire, both for the consistency of their analysis of
the historiographic practice and for the concrete
richness of their work). As a matter of fact, their
caution (when they stress that 'the re-description of
the event under examination exposes the range of
possible causal mechanisms responsible for it' (p.
19) and that the generative mechanisms of the open
systems within which several factors combined
among themselves in different ways give new results
every time) gives place once again to reductionist
determinisms. These are visible in their work through
the sheer importance given to mechanisms regulat-
ing the relationship between mass production and
reception in a regime of liberal capitalism, and the
fact that, according to them, the prime motor seems
to them as being the 'search for profit'.
On the contrary, talking about films as symp-
toms, that is, considering them as signs related to
other signs, which make sense only in a network
which is built by them, seems like choosing a semio-
history whose role is to constitute the articulation of
the signs expressed by the films with the signs pro-
duced by other series of discourses, issued by other
social activities. As I imagine this history, it should
be conceived (and hold some interest) from different
viewpoints, producing an effect of fragmentation
while opening possibilities of liaisons with very fer-
tile effects. As in the brilliant text by Georges Perec,
W ou le souvenir de I'enfance, such a history would
become visible only at some crossroads, i.e. near
'an imaginary story made of scattered fragments,
absences, gaps, doubts, hypotheses, thin anec-
dotes' made by sources. This history would put
stories close to each other (or descriptions of systems
re-composed from series of documentary data, from
hypothese) which would be imaginary as well, and
put together by the historians who are interpreting
the sources. It would shed light only 'on what is
never said in one thing, never in the other thing, but
only in the fragile intersection of both'25.
Insisting on the film as the primary axis of film
history doesn't mean that we must treat cinema
through an isolated analysis of a 'series' of films, as
they obviously keep - despite their placement across
time - important relationships (of dependence or
ideological effect) with their milieu, the micro-milieu
of cinema included in a broader, socio-historical
macro-milieu. The analysis of this milieu cannot be
made without looking outside the film. In the case of
the documentaries I have mentioned earlier, it is
clear that their financing, their objectives, their
modes of production are different from those of the
great fiction films, although they are partly linked to
them. In order to evaluate the two films I have made
allusion to earlier, and to identify their objectives, I
will need to know about the colonial milieu as much
as about the institution of cinema and the structures
of film production. In order to ascertain their effec-
tiveness, I will have to put them in relation to the
formal mechanisms of representation (however
simple they may be) to which they are referred, and
Film history: or history expropriated
41
This content downloaded from 132.205.7.55 on Mon, 06 Jun 2016 21:07:53 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
8/15/2019 Lagny - Film History. or History Expropriated (1994)
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/lagny-film-history-or-history-expropriated-1994 18/20
4 Mche Lgny
which will trigger some effect of identification amid
the audience. That's the method used in A I'ombre
de la mosqu6e de Paris, adopting the model of a
family album, or the more elaborated pattern in
Kalla, which adopts a fictional pattern making refer-
ence (for its subjective effects) to the affection and
the partial identification of the audience towards the
protagonist.
Each film, or each 'series' of films, comes into
existence because of some borrowings from the
outside. It may happen that films react directly - as
is probably the case with the documentaries I have
analysed - in relation to some 'rough' ideological
discourses (such as paternalism and technologism)
concerning social (immigration) and political (the
colonial context) realities. Yet, cinema is also in-
scribed into former or parallel cultural traditions
which display themselves through some similar
modes of expression (mass entertainment or im-
agery) or through other forms, sometimes seen as
'examples' to emulate (or to 'adapt', in certain
cases), such as literature, painting, theatre. It is then
necessary to evaluate the relationships between dif-
ferent forms of representation. Marie-Claire Ropars,
for example, asks herself (although without talking
explicitly of history) about 'the points ... where the
imagination of a certain period ... finds its shape',
and on the role of 'cultural exchanger' performed by
cinema in the France of the 1930s. This would
allow, among other things, to judge the use of films
in the 'mass diffusion' of a literary production which
would benefit from (or be the victim of) a rewriting
operated by film. Ropars structures her research
building a 'series' of films which have as a common
feature the fact of being adapted from literary
works, and then using these literary sources (made
comparable by the very fact that they have been
adapted for the cinema) as a literary 'series', al-
though tradition considers these sources as separate
entities because they have been produced in differ-
ent periods and they belong to different genres, from
Zola to Mac Orlan. Thanks to a cogent analysis of
narrative structures and writing forms of the texts and
the films, Ropars finds, instead of the differences
between the stories or their atmospheres, a draft of
a 'recurring configuration' of the 'accents' and the
'discrepancies' between them. Ropars also
measures the 'interval' between what looks like a
'trend of modernity' in books and films which have
the common characteristic of systematically reducing
the dangerous figures visible in both, against which
films constitute a 'powerful protective screen'26.
The references often come from other films as
well: there is a level both on a technical and a
formal viewpoint - where cinema has its own
relative autonomy so that Pierre Sorlin has the im-
pression that films escape their own times as much
as the universe of cinema which is somehow seen as
a universe in itself. Sorlin also remarks that the
representations of Resistance during WWII in the
European cinema work better as references from
one film to another than as references to reality (or to
the historiography of Resistance). Great Britain has
produced its earliest images, at a moment when
action begins (with Secret Mission, 1942), and
these images perform a role of matrix for post-war
films on a thematic level (despite some changes
made in films produced on the continent), while their
precocity is such that - because several scenes were
shot on location - their presence will be kept through
the interpolation of actuality footage within historical
reconstructions. Even after the 1960s, there will be
the tendency to employ non-professional actors, or
people who actually participated in the Resistance
movement, rather than well known actors27.
Using films in order to evaluate their relations
towards other films or other texts does not mean that
one only has to consider the reciprocal 'influences'
between texts, authors and genres. This procedure,
on the contrary, forces one to establish some cross-
reference indexes, relevant series of intertextual refer-
ences, and to admit that the exchange is not made
in terms of determining influences, but instead in
terms of complex interferences, in which some frag-
mented elements are interspersed28. Each film, as a
matter of fact, associates all these elements into a
different system of combination which changes their
status and their meaning; hence the absolute
necessity to study each film in its own organization.
The study of film (or of a series of films) must then go
through the analysis of the film signifier, made ac-
cording to rules already established by film theory
(theories) as much as by history. What matters here
is not replacing film history with a semiological
description of films, nor reducing film history to the
determination of the process of producing the sense
of 'film language'. Instead, we must avoid any direct
evaluation of sense, too often made only through the
Michele Lagny
42
This content downloaded from 132.205.7.55 on Mon, 06 Jun 2016 21:07:53 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
8/15/2019 Lagny - Film History. or History Expropriated (1994)
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/lagny-film-history-or-history-expropriated-1994 19/20
Flmhstory or hstoryexpropriated 43
script, the plot, the relationships between characters,
the direct allusions to exterior events. There are
different conceptions of cinema as a system, each
involving different forms of representation. Although
we are far from having convinced everybody about
this, this is a point upon which I have often insisted,
after Pierre Sorlin and within the editorial group of
the periodical Hors Cadre - too often to make the
point again here without looking obsessed by it.
The references I have chosen here, especially
Foucault and Bourdieu, may look idiosyncratic, al-
though these names have often been put close to
each other. Michel de Certeau, for example, was
referring to them in order to criticize them, true, but
also in order to recognize their influence when he
was trying to clear up the field and the methods of
approach of a cultural history29. It seems to me that
an in-depth analysis of their positions (also about the
construction of coherent 'series' necessary to analyse
discourses and practices, as well as to evaluate the
social space within which these discourses and
practices are articulated) would allow one to tackle
the 'question of cinema' in the evolution of its forms
and social functions.
This conception of film history does not refuse
'facts' which one may draw from documents, nor the
complex of determinations which we may establish
among them. Such a conception, however, is not
'factual' (that is, descriptive) or 'positive', (that is,
determinist). Such a conception does not refuse the
possibility of treating film as a specific field; how-
ever, it deals especially with the value of documents
as symptoms, which cannot be read if not within the
network of transitory and complex relationships link-
ing them to each other. This history builds its relat-
ions from a set of predefined questions, and these
questions are not related only to cinema. The latter
makes sense, as a matter of fact, within a larger set
of phenomena to which cinema is more or less
connected (in a framework of institutional practices
but also in the shifting interplay between individual
practices, more or less determined by their place in
society). In claiming such a conception of film his-
tory, I firmly belong to the community of those histo-
rians who assert their beliefs (and they do have
beliefs ) while keeping a methodological doubt
about their own discourse and their own practice,
as much as about the intrinsic value of the epistemo-
logical choices they are referring to. I'm not alone in
feeling this way. Georges Duby wrote:
'I do not claim to give [the reader] any truth, but
to suggest to him what is probable, and pro-
vide him with the image I have honestly drawn
for myself of what I think is true. A good deal of
this image is made by what I do imagine. I
have to try to make sure, nevertheless, that the
shifting contours of the imagination are firmly
attached to grounds I have always tried to test
as meticulously as I could. They are the docu-
ments. They are my proof'30.
It's not a return to the fetishism of the document;
instead, it's the refusal to accept a determining
epistemological reference, and the claim for the
right to a research which is hesitant and tentative, of
course, but which is sure at least of one thing: the
need to provide a cross-cut between different ap-
proaches, while trying to evaluate their assumptions,
their possibilities and their limits, in order to build
(from concurrences, or sometimes from discrepan-
cies) the occasional relationships, often problemati-
cal and fragmentary31, which films las individual
works and as 'series') have towards aesthetics,
economic constraints, social mechanisms and cultu-
ral conditions.
Notes
1. I'm not developing here two points I have already
dealt with in two works of mine, De I'histoire du
cinema. Methode historique et historique et cinema
(Paris: Colin, 1992) and 'Pour une histoire sociocul-
turelle', Cin6matheque, 1, 1992: 7-16.
2. Several research projects on this corpus are under
way, For the time being, the existing works seem to
suggest that the image of the immigrant is more
'sanitized' than dismissed or praised in fiction films.
3. Pierre Sorlin, European Cinemas, European So-
cieties (London: Routledge, 1991).
4. A I'ombre de la mosquee de Paris (Forces et Voix de
France, 1946, 23 min) by Jean Arroy, on the
mosque of Paris and the life of the Moroccan com-
munity in Paris. Kalla (Les Films de la Caravelle,
1955, 19 min.) by Francois Villiers, on a young
black student from Cameroon, realizing his own
evolution while walking across the Latin Quarter.
5. Senso. Etude critique (Paris: Nathan, 1992).
6. Goemons (Films Etienne Lallier, 1948, 23 min.) by
Film history: or history expropriated
43
This content downloaded from 132.205.7.55 on Mon, 06 Jun 2016 21:07:53 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
8/15/2019 Lagny - Film History. or History Expropriated (1994)
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/lagny-film-history-or-history-expropriated-1994 20/20
MLgny
Yannick Bellon. Report on the work and the alienated
life on the island of Beniguet, in front of the coast of
Brittany. Premiered at the Venice Biennale, 1948.
7. As an opposite example, see G6rard Leblanc,
Georges Franju, une esth6tique de la d6stabilisation
and Georges Franju, cineaste (Paris: Maison de la
Villette, 1992, 2 volumes).
8. Legislation of the years 1948 and 1953 for this
period.
9. Myriam Tsikounas, Les origines du cin6ma sovie-
tique, un regard neuf (Paris: les Editions du Cerf,
1992).
10. Charles Tesson, 'La r6gle et I'esprit: la production de
Toni deJean Renoir' Cin6math6que 1, 2, 3, 1992,
1993: 44 59; 86 97; 46 56.
1 1. Michel Foucault, L'Archeologie du savoir (Paris: Gal-
l imard, 1969).
1 2. Title given to a special issue of Equinoxe (Lausanne),
7, Spring 1992.
13. Jean-Louis Leutrat, Le cinema en perspective: une
histoire (Paris: Nathan, 1992: 7.
14. 'Sur I'histoire 6v6nementielle et I'histoire fondamen-
tale', published in the proceedings of the Constance
symposium, Geschichte und Geschichten in Semio-
tique et sciences sociales (Paris: Seuil, 1976): 163.
15. This has been largely described for the United States
by Robert Allen And Douglas Gomery in Film History,
Theory and Practice (New York: Knopf, 1985).
16. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, Kristin Thompson, The
Classical Hollywood Cinema, Film Style and Mode
of production to 1960 (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1985).
17. Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Blooming-
ton, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1987).
18. Janet Staiger, Interpreting Film, Studies in the Histori-
cal reception of American Cinema (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1992).
19. Thomas Elsaesser, 'The New Film History'. Sight &
Sound, Autumn 1986: 246-251.
20. On the first example, see Roland Cosandey and
Jean-Marie Pastor, 'Lavanchy-Clarke: Sunlight et
Lumi6re, ou les debuts du cinematographe en
Suisse'. Equinoxe, Histoire(s) de cin6ma(s), 7,
1992: 9-27. For the second one, see Laurent
Mannoni, '1894-95: les annees parisiennes du
Kin6toscope Edison', Cin6math6que, 3, 1993: 47-
57.
21. Roger Odin, 'Christian Metz et la linguistique', Iris,
10, special issue on Christian Metz et la th6orie du
cin6ma (Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck, 1990): 95; 'La
s6mio-pragmatique, sans crise ni d6sillusion'. Hors
Cadre, 7: 77-92.
22. Jean-Luc Godard, Introduction 6 une v6ritable histoire
du cinema (Paris: Albatros, 1980).
23. Pierre Bourdieu, Les r6gles de I'art. Gen6se et struc-
ture du champ litteraire (Paris: Seuil, 1992).
24. Thomas Elsaesser, op, cit.
25. Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir de I'enfance (Paris:
Denoel, 1975)
26. Marie-Claire Ropars, 'Entre films et textes: I'intervalle
de I'imaginaire', in Masses et culture de masse dans
les ann6s 30 (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1991).
27.
28.
Pierre Sorlin, op, cit., Chapter 2.
On this point, see Paolo Cherchi Usai, 'Imitation?
paraphrase? plagiat? Influence et jugement esthe-
tique au cinema', Cinematheque, 1, 1992: 38-44.
29. Michel de Certeau, 'Foucault et Bourdieu' and 'Arts
de la theorie', in L'invention du quotidien (Paris:
Folio, 1989: 75-117.
30. Georges Duby, L'histoire continue (Paris: Editions
Odile Jacob, 1991): 81 -82.
31. Carlo Ginzburg, Mythes emblemes traces, Morpho-
logie et histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1989): 153-
154.
44
Michele Lagny