Badiou Alain - Cinema

FOREWORD

Cinema is a Thinking Whose Products are the Real

For Alain Badiou, cinema is an education, an art of living, and a thinking. He has written of his relationship with the seventh art in about thirty different texts, dating from the late 1950s to the present. This in itself amounts to a comprehensive vision and interpretation of cinema, even if most of these articles deal with individual films or groups thereof. Such an approach is in fact one of the characteristic features of Badious thought: thinking on a case-by-case basis, deriving a whole system from one particular work of art considered in its specificity. As a result, these texts offer a wide-ranging survey of the cinema of the past fifty years, from filmmakers of modernity (Murnau, Antonioni, Oliveira, Tati, Godard) to a few contemporary American films ( The Matrix , Magnolia , A Perfect World ), by way of a few unique experiments (Guy Debord, the cinema of 68, the militant films of the Groupe Foudre, and so on).

Like quite a few thinkers of his generation (Rancire, Genette, and Deleuze, for example), Alain Badiou was brought up from an early age on the cinema as a vector of thought. His cinephilia was boundless, and he turned to writing about it right from his student days, when he contributed to Vin nouveau , the journal of young leftist Catholics at the cole Normale Suprieure, in 1957. Beginning with his ambitious, important first text, Cinematic Culture, a few specific ideas emerged that would run throughout his subsequent work: cinema does justice to the human figure inscribed in the contemporary world; cinema considered in terms of its subjugating relationship with the other arts; cinema as an imaginary voyage and a thinking of the Other. With his turn to militant commitment and a political philosophy, Badiou pursued his critical work, contributing to La Feuille foudre and LImparnassien in the 1970s and early 1980s. The latter were militant journals in which a judgment was issued, the judgment of a political tribunal of sorts. The verdict would come down: such-and-such a film was revisionist, or such-and-such films merited more respect and consideration. In the line of fire were the French leftist fiction films, while among the few filmmakers admired enough to be spared the sentence were Bresson and Godard.

In 1981, along with Natacha Michel, Badiou founded the biweekly journal Le Perroquet , the intellectual core of anti-Mitterrandism, and for ten years staked out an altogether remarkable critical itinerary in a number of articles he wrote about films of interest to him. Some highly stimulating analyses of the features of the French comedy film, the filmmakers of the second modernity (Godard time and again), and Swiss cinema as the emblem of cinematic neutrality are also worth noting.

These were followed by more extensive, theoretical texts, published over the past fifteen years in the journal LArt du cinma as a rule and written in clear, simple language one of the hallmarks of Badious philosophical writing style on the dialectics of the fable, film as a philosophical machine, and cinema as a democratic emblem. In these essays, the philosopher develops the idea of cinema as a producer of a truth of the contemporary world and of film as a sensible configuration of the truth of the world. Films think, and it is the task of the philosopher to see them and transcribe that thinking: What is the subject to which the film gives expressive form? This is the question at the root of Badious thinking about cinema. In many of these texts, cinema becomes an impure art cannibalizing its times, the other arts, and people a major art precisely because it is the locus of the indiscernibility between art and non-art. It is all this, explains Alain Badiou in a clear and irrefutable way, that makes cinema the social and political art par excellence, the best indicator of a civilization, as were Greek tragedy, the bildungsroman, and the operetta in their respective eras. Last but not least, included in this book is the text of a seminar given by Alain Badiou in Buenos Aires in 2003, Cinema as Philosophical Experimentation, in which he develops his thinking of cinema at length and in great detail, illustrating it with many new examples from Mizoguchi, Ozu, Rossellini, Visconti, Hitchcock, Godard, Lang, Hawks, and Anthony Mann. This text can be read as a veritable manifesto of cinema as conceived by Alain Badiou.

Antoine de Baecque