La fable cinématographique

by Jacques Rancière

Une fillette et son tueur devant une vitrine, une silhouette noire descendant un escalier, la jupe arrachée d'une kolkhozienne, une femme qui court au-devant des balles : ces images signées Lang ou Murnau, Eisenstein ou Rossellini, iconisent le cinéma et cachent ses paradoxes. Un art est toujours aussi une idée et un rêve de l'art. L'identité de la volonté artiste et du regard impassible des choses, la philosophie déjà l'avait conçue, le roman et le théâtre l'avaient tentée à leur manière. Le cinéma ne remplit pourtant leur attente qu'au prix de la contredire. Dans les années 1920, on vit en lui le langage nouveau des idées devenues sensibles qui révoquait le vieil art des histoires et des personnages. Mais il allait aussi restaurer les intrigues, les types et les genres que la littérature et la peinture avaient fait voler en éclats.

Jacques Rancière analyse les formes de ce conflit entre deux poétiques qui fait l'âme du cinéma. Entre le rêve de Jean Epstein et l'encyclopédie désenchantée de Jean-Luc Godard, entre l'adieu au théâtre et la rencontre de la télévision, en suivant James Stewart dans l'Ouest ou Gilles Deleuze au pays des concepts, il montre comment la fable cinématographique est toujours une fable contrariée. Par là aussi, elle brouille les frontières du document et de la fiction. Rêve du XIXe siècle, elle nous raconte l'histoire du XXe siècle.

Genres: Film, Philosophy, History, Cultural Studies

245 pages, Paperback

First published October 9, 2001

About the author

Jacques Rancière (born Algiers, 1940) is a French philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St. Denis) who came to prominence when he co-authored Reading Capital (1968), with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.

Rancière contributed to the influential volume Reading "Capital" (though his contribution is not contained in the partial English translation) before publicly breaking with Althusser over his attitude toward the May 1968 student uprising in Paris.
Since then, Rancière has departed from the path set by his teacher and published a series of works probing the concepts that make up our understanding of political discourse. What is ideology? What is the proletariat? Is there a working class? And how do these masses of workers that thinkers like Althusser referred to continuously enter into a relationship with knowledge? We talk about them but what do we know? An example of this line of thinking is Rancière's book entitled Le philosophe et ses pauvres (The Philosopher and His Poor, 1983), a book about the role of the poor in the intellectual lives of philosophers.

Most recently Rancière has written on the topic of human rights and specifically the role of international human rights organizations in asserting the authority to determine which groups of people — again the problem of masses — justify human rights interventions, and even war.

In 2006, it was reported that Rancière's aesthetic theory had become a point of reference in the visual arts, and Rancière has lectured at such art world events as the Freize Art Fair. Former French presidential candidate Ségolène Royal has cited Rancière as her favourite philosopher.

Reviews

[Richard Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not an easy read but worthwhile. The film criticism chapters are the most dense but the more philosophical chapters are quite illuminating. For instance, he writes the best summary of Deleuze's cinema books despite relentlessly attacking them. He seems to feel that one should not use art to do philosophy but analyse art in its own terms. For him the poetics of cinema is the effort to combine "the gaze of the artist who decides and the mechanical gaze that records". Although an artist might appreciate ideas that help them decide and combine and Deleuze's cinema study can supply plenty of such ideas, whether strictly faithful to artistic practice or not.

[Nuno R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Orfeu Negro tem uma selecção maravilhosa de autores e este ensaio é excelente.

[ligia maciel ferraz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muito bom para pensar as imagens que vemos através do figural, da forma, da presença. A leitura que ele faz nos permite perceber aquilo que estava submerso pela narrativa e pela representação.
Uma dica simples e até um pouco óbvia: veja os filmes antes de ler os textos, assim a conversa com Rancière fica mais palpável.

[kp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difficult but interesting.

[Esther · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es denso de leer, tocará dejarlo reposar y en unos años releerlo.

[Fatima Chuya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ranciere nos lleva a dar un vistazo a algunas películas no conocidas en su gran mayoría y a observarlas más allá.