New Review of Film and Television Studies Vol. 8, No.

1, March 2010, 5772

RESEARCH ARTICLE ` re and the ctional capacity of documentary Jacques Rancie

Nico Baumbach*
Film Division, Columbia University, 513 Dodge Hall, 2960 Broadway, New York, NY 10027, USA This paper works through the implications of French philosopher Jacques ` res conception of documentary cinema. For Rancie ` re, documentary Rancie and ction are not opposed, but this does not mean that documentary lms are no different from lms normally termed ction. Rather, documentary can be seen as a type of ction lm that, by taking the real as a point of contestation rather than an effect to be produced, opens up new possibilities ` re reframes questions of for ctional invention. This paper shows how Rancie documentary cinema in relation to political equality in a way that challenges dominant conceptions of the difference between documentary and ction lm within the history of lm studies. ` re; documentary cinema; lm studies; the politics Keywords: Jacques Rancie of aesthetics

The new art of narrative, lm . . . brought to its highest potential the double resource of the silent imprint that speaks and the montage that calculates the values of truth and the potential for producing meaning. Documentary lm, lm devoted to the real, is in this sense capable of greater ctional invention that than ction lm, readily devoted to a certain stereotype of actions and characters. ` re, 2006c, 38) (Jacques Rancie

` re, I would If, as Bergson maintained, all philosophers have only one idea, for Rancie suggest that it is contained in the following axiom: equality without conditions. His writing on cinema can be grasped as part of the intractable pursuit of this impossible idea. It is what has led him to propose what I take to be a profound claim about the political importance of documentary cinema as an arena for aesthetic experimentation. The claim that documentary is a politically important medium is, of course, as old as the concept of documentary itself. John Grierson, who is often said to have coined the term but more likely only played a large role in codifying it, saw documentary lm as the most important modern vehicle for educating and informing the public in a democratic civil society. Subsequent champions of documentary have tended to follow Griersons lead by assuming that documentary

*Email: nb2428@columbia.edu
ISSN 1740-0309 print/ISSN 1740-7923 online q 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17400300903529356 http://www.informaworld.com

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was not basically a lm idea at all but a tool or vehicle for civic education because of its capacity to make socially signicant information accessible to the masses ` res intervention lies in locating documentarys (1971, 250). The novelty of Rancie political signicance in a lm idea or rather more broadly in its capacity for exploiting the aesthetic potential of modern art. The purpose of this paper is to trace the logic behind this claim and to show how clarifying the potential of documentary ` res aesthetics may be part of the project of thinking political equality.Rancie vigilance regarding equality without conditions means always questioning the conditions of possibility of discourses on politics.1 As he demonstrates, positions that promote what goes by the names equality, democracy or emancipation are again and again conditioned by a framework of consensus and inclusion that attempts to neutralize the radical dimension of political equality.2 We are familiar with this insistence on the radical to ensure the theorists political capital, but it has a precise meaning here as a root equality, an equality that grounds politics and is not an ostensible end that is dispensed with in the political process, as it is for many ` re then is not only interested in liberal theorists and even many radicals. Rancie analyzing conservative critics who denounce equality outright because it is a threat to a well ordered society, but also in critics and theorists who take up progressive or radical banners to delimit what counts as the common at the cost of the anonymous capacity of anyone to upset the logic that determines the limits of the seeable, sayable and doable. ` res writings on Marxism, pedagogy and This pursuit extends from Rancie democratic theory to his work on literature, visual art and cinema. But what is the precise relationship between political equality and the experience of art or lm? ` res method is to understand that this question cannot be One of the keys to Rancie answered with a simple formula because, for him, it should remain a question or rather, a site of struggle and disagreement. The encounter with art, cinema and ` res documentary lm in particular, can be understood in the context of Rancie larger project by rst appreciating the paradox posed by thinking equality. Equality without conditions annuls itself if it remains a mere regulative principle; rather, ` res equality acquires meaning when it is instantiated or inscribed.3 Rancie conception of political equality is as a situated, localized intervention. But how is it possible that equality can be without conditions and situated, rooted in the concrete material world of political struggle? We could clarify by suggesting that equality without conditions, is in fact conditioned, but only by the very conditions it breaks from. This anonymous capacity of anyone, an equality without conditions, always means inscribing something that cannot be accounted for, that both exists and does ` res terms, the part of those who have no part not exist, that is, in Rancie (1999, 77). This logic of the immanent break can only be thought or imagined through a paradoxical or paratactical logic. It is in this sense that it is an impossible idea that is not thinkable without some recourse to the question of aesthetics. The politics of axiomatic equality is a question of aesthetics because it always ` ne involves staging, making ctions, reframing, constructing a new mise-en-sce ` re calls la partage du sensible, and montage4 as an intervention into what Rancie

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the sharing and dividing of sensory and sensible experience, what was once known ` re to investigate as the symbolic order or ideology.5 This is what has led Rancie regimes of images, textual and artistic production as arenas where equality gets inscribed and thwarted. A painting, novel or lm, he has made clear, to many of his interlocutors disappointment, should not be identied as a political act in itself, its very identication as art or entertainment precludes just that, but like a theoretical essay or philosophical treatise, it constructs ways of thinking what politics might mean through new arrangements of common images and ideas. This project has led him to claim a special privilege for documentary cinema as a locus for experimenting with and creating contestation over the common. ` re calls the aesthetic regime of art in which Cinema emerges within what Rancie art is no longer subject to the logic of representation but rather is grasped as merging two contrary conceptions of art: (1) arts pure power lies on the surface of the external world especially at its most ordinary and indifferent; (2) art is grasped only in the pure autonomous creative act or formal gesture (2006a, 8). According to ` re, the cinematic apparatus realizes the rst pole of the aesthetic regime of Rancie art, but in effect, it does it too well. Anonymous automatic speech is intrinsic to the technical apparatus of cinema, but this does not ensure an ontological grounding for its artistic possibilities. Since the automatic recording machine is itself passive, the artistic gesture of becoming passive in the face of the world is no longer readily ` re brothers earliest lms. legible (op. cit., 9). Think, for example, of the Lumie At the time few people viewed them as art, but they can be defended as art by citing ` res method of framing or even the choice of subject matter. But the Louis Lumie wind in the trees in the background of Babys Meal (1896) that fascinated so many early viewers: is it art? And if not, what is it? Its fascination is tied to the nineteenth-century dream of arts self-effacement to yield to the expressive power of nature, but it is the new apparatus itself and not any single artist that makes this image visible. And once the novelty of the apparatus wore off, without the intervention of some legible form of framing, an image such as this would remain, as Mary Ann Doane aptly puts it, semiotically insufcient (2002, 178). This may explain why, historically, so many lmmakers have turned to the ` re, if there is representative regime to thwart cinemas powers. For Rancie something new about the art of cinema as it developed in the twentieth century, it is found in this new function for the logic of representation. Rather than countering representational logic by surrendering to the pure play of light and color that comprises the optical impression of water lilies oating on the surface of a pond, or inverting and signing a urinal and hanging it on a gallery wall, cinema tends to reverse the operation of thwarting representation shared by so-called romantic, modernist and avant-garde aesthetics. It does not use the aesthetic gesture to undermine the logic of active form on passive material, but it returns to the representational logic of the conventional dramatic story or myth to thwart the ` res words: aesthetic power of the pure becoming of movement-images. In Rancie

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the mechanic eye lends itself . . . not least to the illustration of old-fashioned stories of heartbreak and death. . . . In the age of Joyce and Virginia Woolf, of Malevich and Schoneberg, cinema arrives as if expressly designed to thwart a simple teleology of artistic modernity, to counter arts aesthetic autonomy with its old submission to the representative regime. (2006a, 10)

Or, in an essay on the madness of Eisensteins The General Line (1929), he asks rhetorically, what century we ourselves live in derives so much pleasure our Deleuzes in our pockets from the love affair upon a sinking ship between a young woman in rst class and a young man in third (op. cit., 31). But as the parenthetical insertion of Deleuze indicates, this is not the end of the story. The dream of cinema as the realization of the aesthetic regime of art is found not only in polemicists and critics from the heyday of aesthetic modernity (such as ` res relative Benjamin, Epstein, Vertov and Eisenstein), but also in Rancie contemporaries, postmodern gures like Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Luc Godard. If one of the interventions of his essays on cinema is to show the inconsistency of a logic that imagines that cinema can become a pure writing of sensations and affects indistinguishable from ideas, it is not to insist on the classical Hollywood model of the scripted feature lm with its three act structure and typically happy ending as the inevitable destiny of cinematic production. The inconsistencies revealed by the great theorists and practitioners of so-called pure cinema do not limit cinemas ` re states most succinctly, The art potential but are the very basis for it. As Rancie and the thought of images have always been nourished by all that thwarts them (op. cit., 19).

Documentary cinema The documentary cinema brings the aesthetic regime to its highest potential because of its capacity for mobilizing this thwarting logic for ctional invention. Documentary is the very pinnacle of the aesthetic regime of art not because it resolves the paradoxes of the aesthetic regime but because it is capable of exploiting the resources of these paradoxes without restoring the old hierarchies of the representative regime. It can take the automatic silent speech of the recording device as the grounds for aesthetic operations that calculate, withhold or construct meanings by playing with combinations of text and image, bodies and voices, ction and fact, to offer reality and the very relation between cinema and reality, as an arena of contestation. But, one might object, common sense and experience tells us otherwise. Isnt documentary cinema generally excluded from the category of art through the ` re, Aristotelian separation of the idea of ctions and that of lies (Rancie l 2006c, 35). Documentary, we are told even today by lm theorists such Noe Carroll, cannot be conceived of as ction. Using an intention-response model of communication, Carroll denes the documentary as the lm of presumptive assertion. In other words, the type of lm we call a documentary is one that we presume is intended to be assertoric (i.e. asserting something to be the case).6

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On the other hand, we identify a lm to be ction if we are watching the lm of presumptive imagination or a lm in which the propositional content is not taken to be asserted. According to Carroll, everybody knows7 that for ordinary viewers these two types of lm are mutually exclusive. Indeed, it is fair to say that Carrolls denition does seem to correspond with the conventions of what is normally associated with documentary in relation to ction lm. As Bill Nichols has suggested, documentary might be included among the discourses of sobriety such as science, religion, economics and other discourses that regard their relation to the real as direct, immediate and transparent (1991, 3 4). Isnt documentary then, as much or even more so than so-called ction lm, subservient to the ` re, since hierarchies of the Aristotelian logic of representation described by Rancie its subject matter dictates the appropriate form and the visible is dependent on speech for its legibility? (2007, 113). ` res denition, it would seem that in typical In contrast to Rancie documentaries, the real is taken to be asserted or self-evident rather than a problem or question. Secondly, images serve the function of illustration providing the visible evidence for what we are told. And thirdly, documentary is taken to be a genre that even at its most shocking or spectacular tends to owe its pleasures to its content, that is, something other than art. Many of the major gures in lm theory have had little to say about documentary except to repeat one or more of these limitations concerning its artistic potential. If the politics of cinema are often sought in documentary because of its link to the real and its typically explicit social and pedagogical goals, lm theory and lm art have historically retreated from documentary for the same reasons. An example of this position can be found in Jean Mitrys pioneering semiotics of cinema:
The teaching lm and didactic documentary (which has no other purpose than to present a reality whose power derives from itself, attempting meanwhile to present that reality as objectively as possible) cannot be described as language or work of art even though certain craft skills are required to conceive and produce them. When what is represented is incapable by itself of conveying sufcient information, a commentary linked to the images takes on the task of explaining them. If there is a signier here, then it is in the text, not the images. Conversely, when documentary presents an original and personal vision of the world and its objects, that is, when it becomes an eye, it also becomes a poem. And as a poem it is organized, dialectically composed; in other words, it becomes language. (1999, 59)

` res reections on documentary were occasioned by Chris Markers Rancie Le Tombeau dAlexandre (1993, known in English as The Last Bolshevik) and it will, no doubt, be proposed that the documentary ction he is celebrating is an interesting anomaly, not a synonym for documentary tout court but part of a hybrid genre that might better be conceived of as a particular category of the experimental lm, the poetic documentary, that lumps together lms as diverse as those as Land Without Bread (Bunuel, 1933), Man With a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929) and Sans Soleil (Marker, 1983).

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Documentary, we are told by its historians and theorists alike, should be ` res actualite s but dened by its own history starting with its ur-form in the Lumie only emerging properly in 1922 with Robert Flahertys Nanook of the North. Griersons denition of the documentary as the creative treatment of actuality, expanding on a term he rst used in 1926 in his review of Flahertys Moana, tends to be taken as the point of departure in attempts to conceptualize the form. What follows in standard accounts of documentary are the particular modes and codes and conventions that can be delineated through a taxonomy of typical examples. Following from this, critical writing on documentary gets structured around questions of veracity and the legitimation of truth claims.8 The aesthetics of documentary are conceived extrinsically as the methods of either serving and yielding to or obscuring the real, unless we are talking about certain poetic documentaries that are closer to the avant-garde than to the documentary proper.9 With the exception of certain documentarists themselves, most signicantly Vertov, no canonical gure in the history of lm theory has aligned documentary Bazins cinema with the potential of the medium itself. As is well known, Andre criticism was always guided by the idea that lm has an ontological link to the real,10 but the aesthetic realism he prescribed always meant transcending the conventions of verisimilitude, which rst needed to be evoked to be subverted. We might say that for Bazin, as Jean-Louis Comolli has put it, all lm falls within ` re might argue, the documentary condition (1999, 36),11 but this is why, as Rancie he needs the logic of representation to thwart that condition and make art visible. As Bazin argues, Art aims to go beyond reality, not to reproduce it. And this is even truer of lm because of its technical realism, its ability to reproduce reality so easily (1997, 181). Despite his many sensitive articles on documentaries such as Letter from Siberia (Marker, 1958), Ferrabique (Rouquier, 1946) and The Mystery of Picasso (Clouzot, 1956), among others, this is why Bazin latched on to the sequence shot in Welles and Renoir and especially the fact-images of the Italian Neo-realists, not documentary itself as the essential examples of the aesthetic he endorsed. In these examples, a dialectic is at work: the documentary condition of cinema could be wrested from the residual traces of melodramatic narrative or a story of universal importance could emerge from an investigation of a specic time and place. To take but one example, writing about the largely forgotten neo-realist lm Two Cents Worth of Hope (Castellani, 1952), Bazin says that:
it perfectly realizes the paradox giving us one of the most beautiful, most pure love stories in the history of lm, evoking Marivaux and Shakespeare in the process, while at the same time he gives is the most exact account, the most ruthless indictment of Italian rural poverty in 1951. (1997, 183)

For Siegfried Kracauer, the other great lm theorist of an aesthetic of reality,12 the same logic persists, in which the real provides the very essence of lm but the story is needed if only to be effaced in operations that make the real visible. Cinema, for him, is dened by its capacity to reveal and nally redeem physical reality, and while documentary would seem like the natural mode for

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this, it is, for him, surprisingly limited. Despite his insistence that the narrative lm borrowing from the tradition of the novel and theater will always compromise the materialist dimension of lm, he argues that the pure realism of the lm of fact will in turn undermine the intrigue. So the documentary is rendered as problematic as conventional cinema in the theatrical tradition for the opposite reason. Unlike conventional narrative cinema, which abandons physical reality, the documentary is too dependent on physical reality and therefore unable to capture the internal life of individuals. The lm of fact takes up only a small section of his Theory of Film, despite the denition of cinema as a medium whose role is to redeem physical reality.13 He explains that facts are not enough:
Yet in the case of the lm of fact it opens on only part of the world. Newsreels as well as documentaries feature not so much an individual and his inner conicts as the world he lives in. . . . factual lms do not explore all aspects of physical reality; they omit for instance, those contingent on private passions, as related by an intrigue. (Kracauer, 1997, 194)

According to Kracauer, cinemas inherent afnity with the unstaged, chance and the endlessness of the heterogeneous ow-of-life as opposed to the closed structure of a nite ordered cosmos, is what makes it modern and this leads to an interest in the found story such as certain patterns in the water produced by the breeze or some eddy (246). But the very things that make the found story cinematic are also its limitations for art. Since the found story is part and parcel of the raw material in which it lies dormant, it cannot possibly develop into a self contained whole. Describing the documentary In The Street (Agee, Levitt, Howard, 1948), Kracauer says that it is
nothing but reportage pure and simple; . . . As a notebook like assemblage of onthe-spot observations, the lm is also expressive of an outspoken, very cinematic susceptibility to street incidents. These assets, however, are not without a drawback; the lack of structure that results is at variance with and weakens the lms emotional intensity. (203)

Too much susceptibility to nature in the raw, which for Kracauer is precisely the cinematic itself, means a loss of structure and emotion. Like Bazin, Kracauer prizes the loose composition in Renoir and the street world in Italian Neo-realism because lms should be permeable to camera-reality or the ow of life, but some tie to the literary or theatrical mode of narrative is needed to give this permeability its legibility even if only through contrast. According to Kracauer,
The true lm artist may be imagined as a man who sets out to tell a story but, in shooting it is so overwhelmed by his innate desire to cover all of physical reality and also the feeling that he must cover it in order to tell the story, any story, in cinematic terms that he ventures ever deeper into the jungle of material phenomena in which he risks becoming irretrievably lost if he does not by great efforts, get back to the highway he has left. (1997, 255)

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Note that the true lm artist rst sets out to tell a story. Kracauer, like Bazin, sees physical reality as the materialist basis of cinema and yet physical reality must be held together by a story that it always threatens to undo. When lm theory turned against realist aesthetics with the emergence of structuralist, semiotic, Marxist and psychoanalytic approaches, documentary tended to be folded into the critique of realism and faced no serious reconsideration. Christian Metzs Film Language largely repeats Mitrys reading, aligning documentary with lms in which the signier, as Mitry put it, is not in ` res lms, the images themselves. According to Metz, cinema began, in the Lumie for example, as merely a means of reproduction but it was only with the development of narrative procedures that it became a language.
In the realm of the cinema, all nonnarrative genres the documentary, the technical lm etc. have become marginal provinces, border regions so to speak, while the feature-length lm of novelistic ction, which is simply called a lm, the usage is signicant has traced more and more clearly the kings highway of expression. (1974, 94)

In Comolli and Jean Narbonis 1969 essay Cinema/Ideology/Criticism, the ma in the aftermath of May 1968, seminal statement of purpose for Cahiers du cine they announce the goal of a scientic criticism (2009, 686) to show how lms correspond to or disrupt cinemas ideological function by exposing and subverting the traditional way of depicting reality (689). Yet they make no mention of the term documentary as a distinct mode. In their critique of direct cinema (category f in their schema), they write: Reality holds within it no kernel of self-understanding, or theory of truth, like a stone inside a fruit. We have to manufacture those (692). ` re would agree that reality needs to be manufactured or ctionalized Rancie before it can be thought, but Comolli and Narboni make no distinction between the imaginary production of verisimilitude in what they call bourgeois realism (of category a) and the real, the documentary condition of cinema that Comolli would dene years later. They correctly point out that the discourse of direct cinema that champions the capturing of unscripted immediacy is by no means an escape from ideology, but by treating it as just another variation of bourgeois realism they fail to point out that the documentary begins with a different set of aesthetic problems regarding the relationship between reality and ideology than the cinema of novelistic verisimilitude. Deleuze breaks from the focus on representation and language in Mitry, Metz, Comolli and Narboni, but preserves their assumptions about the artlessness of early cinema claiming that it only mimicked natural perception (1986, 3). The question of lm art for him is no longer about signifying procedures in terms of codes and conventions but, rather, the creative production of new signs composed of movement and time. In this he is closer to Bazin, but his problem with Bazin is that even though he does not mark these new kinds of signs through an analogy to verbal language, he does it with reference to reality (1989, 1). For Deleuze, the movement-images that compose cinema are immanent potentiating elds that

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do not need to be grasped with reference to anything external to the images themselves. Indeed, the very word documentary is of little interest to Deleuze because for him so-called ction lms are not engaged in creating the effect of the real any more than documentaries are recording a prolmic reality or referencing an almic tienne Souriaus terms). Like Rancie ` re he is interested in the reality (to use E ctional capacity of documentaries, but only when it comes to the live cinema of Jean Rouch and Pierre Perrault. In this form of live cinema the lm does not purport to observe an already existing real, but participates with the subjects of the lm in the creation of an immanent virtual real. Deleuzes Bergsonian view of cinema means an indifference to questions of how images circulate and the problems opened up by remediation; that is, how certain images can have a history both lmic and almic, how the same images can appear in different media and acquire new meanings through different contexts, arrangements and aesthetic operations. Deleuze recasts his anti-representational philosophy as a natural history of cinematic image-types and in the process sweeps aside hoary debates about realism, modernism, art and entertainment, but the cost is that he restricts cinema to lms in which new images are created and ignores the circulation of common images as a possible grounds for cinemas will to art. Symptomatic of this is the absence of either Chris Marker or Guy Debord14 from the indexes of Cinema 1 and Cinema 2. The cinematic potentialities of putting a stop on the image, in Serge Daneys terms,15 or replaying the image, in Markers terms,16 have no part in Deleuzes natural history. ` re: rethinking the concept of documentary Rancie It is with this background of documentarys marginality, that we should understand ` res intervention. Rancie ` re makes no claim regarding specic genres of Rancie documentary, but rather proposes rethinking the concept of documentary itself in terms of the capacity for a cinematic form that stages contestation over the real, the common or rather, the distribution of the sensible. Traditional histories, common-sense conceptions and the dominant forms of documentary no more refute this concept of documentary than what counts as democracy for heads of ` res conception of democracy. He is not state and political pundits refute Rancie dening the empirical reality of what counts as documentary but rather its potential as an aesthetic form. Documentary, perhaps more than any other art form, can explore the capability of ction to play on the intertwining of art and forms of life. ` re, documentary does have a different relationship to the real than For Rancie lms normally termed ction, but this is an enabling difference because, unlike novelistic ction, the very question of what constitutes the real grounds ` res denition we do presume a common real documentary practice. In Rancie when watching a documentary but not one predetermined or necessarily restricted ` re has by the propositional content we take to be intended by the author. Rancie proposed that:

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We cannot think of documentary lm as the polar opposite of ction lm simply because the former works with images from real daily life and archive documents about events that obviously happened, and the latter with actors who act out an invented story. The real difference isnt that the documentary sides with the real against the inventions of ction, its just that documentary instead of treating the real as an effect to be produced, treats it as a fact to be understood. (2006a, 158)

In other words, we need not think of the documentary as constrained by the logic of the real but rather as a mode of ction freed from the logic that demands the imaginary production of verisimilitude, the real as effect. For the documentary, the real is not an effect, but an aesthetic problem. Facts, which is to say both what counts as a fact, but also how facts can be assembled to both construct or interrupt meanings, is the terrain of a kind of lm ction, which we can call documentary. Facts or documents, as Jean Marie-Straub has reportedly ` re has argued, is that which declared, are the tools of the police. Politics, as Rancie interrupts the police. The documentary might be understood as a type of ctional lm that is centrally engaged in the gap between police and politics, which is to say, sensory logic with its hierarchical divisions and ways of disrupting that logic. ` re calls documentary a form of We must be clear then, that when Rancie ction, he is neither opposing ction to the real nor is he suggesting that there is no difference between documentary and those lms normally termed ction. To highlight the potential of ctional invention of the documentary lm does not mean that documentary lms are ction lms like any other in which the real is nothing other than what counts as real, which is to say, just another ction or ` re: narrative. According to Rancie
It is not a matter of claiming that everything is ction. The ction of the aesthetic age dened models for connecting the presentation of facts and forms of intelligibility that blurred the border between the logic of facts and the logic of ction. (2006c, 38)

` re, are not opposed to facts that make up Fictions, in the sense adopted by Rancie knowledge but are ways of constructing the arena in which facts and knowledge are given meaning. The root of the word ction, ngere, he stresses, means not ` re, 2006a, 158). Fictions, for Rancie ` re, are not to feign but to forge (Rancie lies, dissimulations or more neutrally, language games or narratives, but they are rather the ground for modes of expression. Politics and art, like forms of knowledge, construct ctions, that is to say material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is ` re, this is not another statement about the done and can be done (39). For Rancie age of spectacle, the digital or the loss of the real. To say then that documentary lm is a form of ction just like written historiography is a form of ction is not to say that there is no distinction between a novel and a written historiography or a documentary lm and what is normally called a ction lm, but just that these very distinctions are a question of aesthetics, which is to say, a regime of constructing meanings out of common sensory experience.

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` re has argued, cinema and documentary cinema in particular can As Rancie play directly on the paradoxical development of modern art in which its autonomy, its separation from the interests and struggles of daily life was tied to its heteronomy, the belief that anything could be art and art could fuse with life itself. In documentary, montage can play on two inverse functions: the real becoming art and art becoming the real. Documentary lm is then a more radical starting point for the aesthetic regime of art than so-called ction lm because it starts with non-art as its raw material and can play directly with the capacity of heterogeneous signs to be linked or delinked, to construct or withhold meaning. It can take artistic work back to its essence, to a way of cutting a story [une histoire ] into sequences, of assembling shots into a story [une histoire ], of joining and disjoining voices and bodies, sounds and images, of lengthening and tightening time (2006a, 158).17 It has the capacity to generate contestation over common images and meanings and interpretations of the real by highlighting the very work of montage without relying on the identication with the plight of familiar individuals that tend to be buttressed by the rigid unstated laws of spatial and temporal continuity and the causal logic that ensures the suspension of disbelief. ` re calls an aesthetics of knowledge Documentary constructs what Rancie which is a redescription and reconguration of a common world of experience through which knowledge and facts acquire their meaning (2000, 115). The question concerning the politics of documentary should not be about its explanatory power, its efcacy as a delivery machine for facts and information, but rather the forms of community that are implied by the regimes of identication through which art, facts and politics are perceived and recognized. ` re, is also a new regime of The aesthetic regime of art, according to Rancie historicity in which the future is dened by restaging the past. The traces of reality become poetic signs because they are wrested from the empirical ` re, 2006c, 37). Cinema as documentary by succession of events (Rancie combining automatic silent speech with the resources of montage broadly construed to include not only editing in a conventional sense, but sound, text and manipulations within images is perhaps the richest terrain for experimenting with an aesthetics of knowledge to reveal the contingency of the distribution of the sensory. ` re uses for the link between ction and fact is memory. The word Rancie Documentary is not about information but rather memory, which according to ` re, is not the subjective experience of the past by an individual, but poetic Rancie arrangements of knowledge and sensibility that belie the storehouse of static information (2006a, 157). To align memory with ction is not to relativize fact, but rather to suggest that production of meaning from fact is a capacity that belongs to anyone and the very province of documentary. Referencing Godards ironic claim, in Ici et Ailleurs, that [t]he epic is for the Israelis and the ` res gesture is to reverse this logic documentary is for the Palestinians, Rancie and offer the documentary as a ction for those who are denied ction, a ction for the part who have no part. As he puts it: The artistic work of memory is that

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` re, 2008, 10). The potential which accords everyone the dignity of ction (Rancie of documentary is not to challenge lies and distortions with sober facts, but to allow for new kinds of histories to be told that create new common worlds heterogeneous to ofcial narratives marked by inequality. To conclude, Id like to suggest that the debates about so-called French theory in American and British lm studies were debates about whether lm theory should be tied to a radical political project. The backlash against Theory rejected this proposition and scored points by insisting on what many theorists had already theorized how often the politics of theory was merely conned to repetitive reexive gestures that signaled commitment and theoretical know-how to other academics but had no direct link to emancipatory political projects. For the laziest form of lm theory and cultural studies, radical politics signals that the work of the theorist matters while theoretical jargon signals its sophistication. But pointing this out, as the Post-Theory turn spearheaded by David Bordwell and l Carroll has demonstrated, does nothing to help us think the relation between Noe cinema and political equality.18 Rather, dismissing the attempt to think the politics of the aesthetics of cinema as well as the paradoxes of an aesthetics of knowledge can be an equally lazy way of signaling that the work of the scholar is responsible by restricting the discipline to an easily denable object of study. ` re might be attributable to the fact that The recent currency of Jacques Rancie he has offered a new vocabulary for posing the link between aesthetics and politics in a moment when the old models are felt to be saturated, but not everyone is equally inspired by the sober scholars that seek a more normative ground for lm studies by turning to the social sciences, analytic philosophy or ` re is then a new signier for a French cognitive psychology. The name Rancie theorist who can once again authorize the political reading of a work of art or ` re has repeatedly insisted, his work like the lms that he culture. But as Rancie nds in some way emancipatory do not authorize anything. The link between aesthetics and politics, he tells us, is never determined in advance but must be constructed. His work does not teach us to apply a politics of aesthetics but stages ways of thwarting the politics of aesthetics that already frame the images and theoretical positions we encounter. Whats needed are new ctions or new memories, which is to say, montages that through associations and disassociations allow us to rethink the conceptual networks that determine our impressions of what constitutes the real. And when we put it this way, we might recognize that documentary cinema is not merely an important object of study for ` re, but another way of essays on lm theory and history in the spirit of Rancie pursuing the same project. It is the virtue of documentary lm and video to participate in thinking the politics of cinematic aesthetics, to construct combinations of image and text, sensations and ideas, and to create contestation over shared sensory experience through the always renewable resources of the impure medium called cinema.

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` res ethics. Whereas for Jacques 1. We might be tempted to think of this as Rancie Lacan, ethics is the injunction not to give ground relative to ones desire, for ` re, we might say that one should not give ground on equality. But this analogy Rancie ` re avoids injunctions and would not use the poses several problems. First, Rancie ` re is not individual; it is not a word should. Second, political equality for Rancie question of ones equality but an equality of the uncounted. Thirdly, ethics for him is understood as a way of supplanting politics by replacing dissensus with consensus. He prefers the term metapolitics to ethics to refer to the rethinking of the political in an essay or an artwork. For Lacans denition of the ethics of psychoanalysis, see ` res conception of ethics as a way of erasing politics, see, in 1978, 311. For Rancie particular, 2004, 143 73. 2. See, in particular, The Philosopher and His Poor (2003) and Hatred of Democracy (2006b). ` re, 1999, 32. What makes an action political is . . . the form in which 3. See Rancie conrmation of equality is inscribed in the setting up of a dispute. ` res Theatocracy (2006) 4. Peter Hallward in his essay Staging Equality: On Rancie ` res political notes and critiques the importance of the theatrical metaphor in Rancie thought. Leaving aside Hallwards broader concerns, I just want to note here that ` re accords a privileged place to theater in I think it is a mistake to think that Rancie particular and that the metaphor of staging is only one of the metaphors from ` re uses to think the aesthetics of politics. various artistic realms that Rancie ` res concept of distribution of the 5. I have written elsewhere about how Rancie sensible relates to the Althusserian concepts of his youth and their uptake in the lm ` re and the theory of Christian Metz and Peter Wollen, among others. See my Rancie Persistence of Film Theory, in Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice, ed. Clive Myer (2010). l Carroll, Fiction, Non-ction and the Film of Presumptive Assertion: 6. See Noe A Conceptual Analysis, in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures (2006). 7. Everyone, that is, except mixed-up creatures Carroll calls deconstructionists. Though Carroll would tell me that I am confused, I would suggest that these unnamed deconstructionists are ctions, while at the same time presuming that Carroll is asserting their existence. Indeed, all rhetorical gures are ctional in ` res sense whether or not they correspond to an empirical reality, but in this Rancie case its hard to imagine actual authors in any way faithful to Jacques Derridas work whose theoretical arguments would t Carrolls description. Deconstructionists, if we further entertain this ction, must of course presume a distinction between the two terms in a binary opposition if they are to be deconstructed. To say that the distinction between two terms in a binary opposition is unstable is not the same as conating them. Carroll similarly misreads Christian Metz whose claim that Every lm is a ction lm is taken to mean that he believes that there is no meaningful distinction to be made between documentary and lms usually called ction. See Metzs rather limited conception of documentary below as evidence that ` res denition of ction that I am using he believed no such thing. Of course, Rancie is not the one Carroll is working with and so Carroll might claim that there is no real disagreement here, only a distinction between a clear and confused concept of ction. Carroll is operating under the Aristotelian logic that places ction in ` re suggests was overthrown by opposition to fact. This is the very logic that Rancie the aesthetic regime of art. If Carroll is right that the lm of presumptive assertion captures what is typically meant by the term documentary this may help clarify the limiting way that documentary tends to get implicitly codied, but it does not help

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us think of the potential of documentary to create contestation over what counts as reality. See also footnote 18 below. See, for example, David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson 2008, 33855 or John Izod and Richard Kilborn 1998, 426 33. This is often just as true of contemporary critics who are skeptical about truth claims or a transparent access to reality and endorse reexivity and poetic gestures. For example, Brian Winston, in his critique of truth claims in documentary tends to focus his analysis of documentary aesthetics on whether lms are or are not claiming the real and not the regimes of sensory experience that make up the real that the lms are constructing. See, for example, Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Griersonian Documentary and its Legitimations (1995). Bazin, What is Cinema? See The Ontology of the Photographic Image, in Andre Volume 1 (1967). Comolli denes the documentary condition as the lmed encounter of body and machine in a given time and place. According to Comolli, all but animated lms are under this condition not only the lms of Flaherty and Vertov but those of the Marx Brothers, and The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) as well. I use this term of Bazins rather than realism only because realism is often associated with the Aristotelian principles of the classical Hollywood model rather than lms that are grounded in the documentary condition of cinema, which is what denes the cinematic for Kracauer as well as Bazin. The full title of the book is Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. We could add Alexander Kluge, Johan Van Der Keuken, Ester Shub, Joseph Cornell or any maker of compilation or found footage lms, but Marker and Debord stand out as two lmmakers whose absence seems especially conspicuous considering that Deleuze surely had some familiarity with their work. Of course, Deleuze does have rich discussions of Godard, Eustache, Resnais, Duras and Ackerman, not to mention Flaherty and, of course, Vertov, among others whose work has engaged with documentary though he tends to skirt consideration of how the real, history or remediation operate in these lms. See Serge Daney, The Tracking Shot in Kapo. See Chris Marker, A Free Replay: Notes on Vertigo, from Immemory (1997): CD-ROM. ` re means history as well as story as in a ctional (in By story or histoire, Rancie his sense) construct but not in the sense of an imaginary world that takes the real as an effect to be reproduced. l Carroll See Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noe (1996). The claim that the rejection by certain lm studies scholars of a broad range of inuential French theorists (among other thinkers in the tradition of Marx, Nietzsche or Freud), should be understood in terms of debates about the relation between lm theory and politics is my own claim not that of Bordwell, Carroll or many of the other contributors to Post-Theory. On the contrary, according to Bordwell and Carroll, their primary goal is emphasizing alternatives to psychoanalysis in the work of lm studies and the question of politics, as they see it, is a smoke screen. As Carroll puts it, Proponents of the Theory let on that the Theory grew out of the student movement and out of a resistance to oppression everywhere. Consequently, from their point of view, criticism of the Theory virtually represents a clear and present danger to the Revolution itself. Anyone who opposes the Theory, for whatever reason, is politically suspect probably a ruling class, neoconservative, homophobic misogynist (Carroll 1996, 45). Leaving aside that this monolithic, sarcastic description of the proponents of Theory appears in an essay that claims to oppose monolithic conceptions of theory in favor of robust, modest,

8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

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dialectical debate; what I want to point out here is that the attempt to think the politics of the aesthetics of cinema is itself seen as suspect by a denition of true theory (the kind Carroll and Bordwell endorse) as the production of generalizations or general explanations or general taxonomies and concepts about lm practice ` re (Carroll 1996, 39). Carrolls conception of doing theory falls under what Rancie calls policing, a neutral (not derogatory) term understood as the precise opposite of politics. Policing is dened as the set of procedures in which the rules governing ` re, 1999, 28 9) As I hope I appearances are established and legitimated (Rancie have made clear, I also think that some of the work that Carroll is targeting did and does serve a policing function as well.

References
. What is cinema? Volume 1. Trans. Hugo Gray 1967. Berkeley and Bazin, Andre Los Angeles: University of California Press. . 1997. Bazin at work. Trans. Bert Cardullo and Alain Piette. New York: Routledge. l Carroll, eds. 1996. Post-theory: Reconstructing lm studies. Bordwell, David, and Noe Madison: University of Wisconsin. Bordwell, David, and Kristen Thompson. 2008. Film art: An introduction. 8th ed., 338 55. New York: McGraw-Hill. l. 1996. Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment. In Post-theory: Carroll, Noe l Carroll. Madison: Reconstructing lm studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noe University of Wisconsin. . 2006. Fiction, non-ction and the lm of presumptive assertion: A conceptual analysis. In Philosophy of lm and motion pictures, ed. Noel Carroll and Jinhee Choi, 154 71. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Comolli, Jean-Louis. 1999. Documentary journey to the land of the head shrinkers. Trans. Annette Michelson. October 90: 36 49. Comolli, Jean-Louis, and Jean Narboni. 2009. Cinema/ideology/criticism. In Film theory and criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 7th ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The movement image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habbberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. . 1989. Cinema 2: The time-image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Doane, Mary Ann. 2002. The emergence of cinematic time: Modernity, contingency, the archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Grierson, John. 1971. Grierson on documentary, ed. Forsyth Hardy. New York: Praeger. ` res theatocracy. New Left Review, Hallward, Peter. 2006. Staging equality: On Rancie no. 37: 109 29. Izod, John, and Richard Kilborn. 1998. The documentary. In The Oxford guide to lm studies, ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, 426 33. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1997. Theory of lm: The redemption of physical reality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1978. The seminar of Jacques Lacan (Book VII): The ethics of psychoanalysis. Trans. Dennis Porter. New York: W.W. Norton. Metz, Christian. 1974. Film language: A semiotics of the cinema. Trans. Michael Taylor. New York: Oxford University Press. Mitry, Jean. 1999. The aesthetics and psychology of the cinema. Trans. Christopher King. Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press.

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Nichols, Bill. 1991. Representing reality: Issues and concepts in documentary. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ` re, Jacques. 1999. Disagreement. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: Minnesota Rancie University Press. . 2000. Dissenting words: A conversation with Jacques Ranciere. Diacritics 30, no. 2: 113 26. . 2003. The philosopher and his poor. Trans. Andrew Parker, Corinne Oster and John Drury. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. e. tique. Paris: Galile . 2004. Malaise dans lesthe . 2006a. Film fables. Trans. Emiliano Battista. New York: Berg. . 2006b. Hatred of democracy. Trans. Steve Corcoran. London: Verso. . 2006c. The politics of aesthetics: The distribution of the sensible. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. New York: Continuum. . 2007. The future of the image. Trans. Gregory Elliot. London: Verso. ` re and interdisciplinarity. Trans. Gregory Elliot. In Art & . 2008. Jacques Rancie research 2, no. 1: 1 10. Winston, Brian. 1995. Claiming the real: The Griersonian documentary and its legitimations. London: British Film Institute.

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