La fábula cinematográfica

by Jacques Rancière

Una niña y su asesino frente a un escaparate, una silueta negra descendiendo las escaleras, la falda arrancada de una campesina soviética, una mujer que corre ante las estas imágenes --firmadas por Lang, Murnau, Eisenstein o Rossellini-- singularizan el cine y esconden sus paradojas. Un arte es siempre, al mismo tiem po, una idea y un sueño del arte. La identidad entre voluntad artística y mirada impasible ya había sido concebida por la filosofía y ensayada, a su modo, por la novela y el teatro. El cine viene a colmar esa espera, a costa, sin embargo, de contradecirla. En los años veinte fue considerado como un nuevo lenguaje de las ideas, finalmente sensibles, que abolía el viejo arte de las historias y los personajes. Pero también iba a restaurar las intrigas, los tipos y los géneros que la literatura y la pintura habían hecho saltar por los aires. Jacques Rancire analiza las formas de ese conflicto entre dos poéticas que es el alma del cine. Entre el sueño de Jean Epstein y la enciclopedia desencantada de Jean-Luc Godard, entre el adiós al teatro y el encuentro con la televisión, adentrándose en el Oeste tras el rastro de James Stewart o en el país de los conceptos en pos de Gilles Deleuze, el autor muestra cómo la fábula cinematográfica es siempre una fábula contrariada. Por eso disuelve las fronteras entre el documento y la ficción. Sueño del siglo XIX, esa fábula nos explica la historia del siglo XX.

Genres: Film, Philosophy, History, Cultural Studies

224 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.