Ruin, Archive and the Time of Cinema: Peter Delpeut's Lyrical Nitrate

7/17/2019 Ruin, Archive and the Time of Cinema: Peter Delpeut's Lyrical Nitrate

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/ruin-archive-and-the-time-of-cinema-peter-delpeuts-lyrical-nitrate 1/21

SubStance, Issue 110 (Volume 35, Number 2), 2006, pp. 120-139 (Article)

DOI: 10.1353/sub.2006.0034

For additional information about this article

Access provided by Amsterdam Universiteit (24 Aug 2015 10:34 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sub/summary/v035/35.2habib.html





André Habib

SubStance #110, Vol. 35, no. 2, 2006

120

.

Ruin, Archive and the Time of Cinema:

Peter Delpeut’s Lyrical NitrateAndré Habib

“It is extraordinary that men have entrusted somany images, so many affects, so manyconstructions, such beauty to a medium so close,ontologically, to its own ruin.”1

—Georges Didi-Huberman (Montage, 13)

Cinema, since the early 1930s, has become part of “our archive.” Ifthe classical archive’s principal task was to group and classify for anulterior use documents which, together, represent a site of authority anda locus of origin, early film archives emerge as a rescue operation. IrisBarry, Henri Langlois, Georges Franju, and Lotte Eisner all attempted,by their own means and channels, to save the memory of cinema, and in

particular the masterpieces of early cinema, chopped up by theatreowners, decimated by studios and production societies in order to makeway for the new “talk of the town” (the talkies) that was very swiftly toimpose itself as the norm for the film-going public in the late 1920s.When silent cinema lost its commercial vocation, it was taken in chargeby newly created institutions in London, Paris, Berlin, and New York(all between 1934-1936), thereby displacing cinema from its site of origin(the commercial theatre) towards the vaults of film libraries andmuseums.2 The nitrate film stock proved highly inflammable and prone

to decay, threatening the survival of film. In 1951 the FIAF ( Fédérationintermationale des archives du film, founded in 1938) forbade its productionand unauthorized storage, leading to the adoption of a series of measuresof preservation throughout the world, and the transfer from nitratecelluloid to safety acetate (and more recently, polyester) prints.3 Theseevents—to which we could add the losses of film followingbombardments and fires during WWI and WWII and the discovery inthe early 1980s of the so-called vinegar syndrome that attacks acetate

prints—are pivotal in understanding the paradoxical process of“patrimonialization” of cinema.This process, via a series of shifts and mutations in the cultural

significance of cinema, was to lead in the 1980s and 1990s to legal

© Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2006

120



SubStance #110, Vol. 35, no. 2, 2006

121 Lyrical Nitrate

measures, institutional recognition (copyrights, legal deposits, increased(though still insufficient) state funding for archives, etc.) and a burgeoning

of discourses in different fields that all presented cinema as the art andmemory of the twentieth century. Coincidentally, but not innocently,the celebration of cinema’s 100th birthday was the same year (1995) asthe 50th anniversary of the end of WWII (with the “representation” of theHolocaust being at the intersection of the two). This “upgrading” ofcinema from a popular entertainment scorned by the elite to a highlyhonored member of human “patrimony”—cherished memory andwitness of our times—has complex ramifications. It can be explained inpart by our obsession with (or “hypertrophy of,” as Andreas Huyssens

would say) memory, and the extension of the category of “patrimony” inthe last quarter of the twentieth century. This notion now includesanything that has been able to last—that has survived the dictatorshipof the present (technologization, progress, urbanization, modernization),and includes natural sites, “old” industrial plants, and 40-year-old diners(that proudly announce “ever since 1965”).

Cinema has also gained higher institutional legitimacy sincebecoming an object of academic scrutiny, which coincided with a renewedinterest in the study of early cinema, following the decisive 1978 Congress

in Brighton. This “early cinema” branch has reshaped both the disciplineof film studies and our vision of that period of cinema. Festivalscelebrating “rediscovered films” during the 1990s (In Italy at Pordenone,Sacilia, and Bologna; in New York state at Rochester and Syracuse), alongwith the distribution of early films on VHS and DVD (most of themreleased around the time of cinema’s centenary), have accompanied thisnew area of study. Film preservation and restoration (now enhanced bydigital technology) has also been the focus of intense discussion, and has

developed as a full-fledged industry, leading to the much-publicized re-release of “restored copies” of films, some of them barely 20 years old.

This series of events contains the basic conditions of possibility of afilm such as Peter Delpeut’s 1990 Lyrisch Nitraat ( Lyrical Nitrate, released onvideo in North America by Zeitgeist in 1991). At least, it is within thisconstellation of events and problems that I believe Delpeut’s film canbecome legible and utterable.4 His “lyrical” montage of early film allowsus to analyze a phenomenon arising out of the valorization of

“rediscovered cinema:” the melancholy or nostalgia for a cinema that isforever lost (destroyed copies, incomplete films, anonymous reels). Everyfilm archive can be defined by its lacks, its losses, and the journeys theprints in its collection had to make. According to Arlette Farge, this is



André Habib

SubStance #110, Vol. 35, no. 2, 2006

122

characteristic of all archives: “the archive is never a stockpile; it isconstantly a lack” (70). However, in the case of cinema, apart from the

fact that what has been lost is easier to evaluate (compared, for instance,to state archives of the 17th century), the nature of the medium and whatit records now command an immediately passionate, quasi-religiousresponse, as if it were lives that were in peril. The collusion between lifeand cinema, between the memory of the archives and historical presence,is directly linked to the time that cinema invents and represents. Cinema,one can argue, is a trace of historical time rendered visible: it invents anew relationship to time and contingency.5 This “time,” in our commonencounter with films, can become even more visible if gaps and accidents

fragment and stain the film. The film archive is a strange tomb,characterized by what it lacks, and slowly decomposing. (Even in thebest possible storage conditions, film, over a period of time, will decay.)

These diverse phenomena have all had their share in the productionof an “imaginary of the ruin” in cinema, which I will try, in the followingpages, to tie to Delpeut’s Lyrisch nitraat. I will argue that the “appeal of thefragment,” and the “ruinist sensibility” that traverse this film, reactivatecertain tropes proper to the aesthetics of ruin, while partaking in (andproducing) their own specific historical horizon.

The films of the Dutch filmmaker, archivist and film historian PeterDelpeut are all built around the issue of disappearance. In Diva dolorosa(1999), it is the lost divas of Italian cinema of the 1910s and 1920s who arehonored and resuscitated; in Forbidden Quest (1992), it is the remains ofearly Arctic and Antarctic exploration films that retell the semi-fictitioustale (inspired by Shackleton’s voyages and the images he brought back)of lost explorers. Go West ! Young Man (2003, one of his rare films that usesvery little archival material), is a documentary quest that investigates

the Western’s “sites of memory.” The filmmaker visits old ruined setswhere many films were once shot; he explores the mythical MonumentValley (monumentalized by cinema), today flooded with tourists; heinterviews the last witnesses of the Western’s “Golden Age.” Cinema forDelpeut is always an object of loss, and it is within this horizon of lossthat most of his films are created, enshrining traces that have survivedoblivion. What is lost is the memory of a time, a “feeling of the times,”now gone, that passes on the surface of the image, that haunts a landscape.In particular, his films that are composed of archival material (half

compilation, half found footage) expose, in the mental and material spacebetween the original nitrate film and the multiple transfers that allow its viewing today, a historical depth, loaded with an undecidable time.



SubStance #110, Vol. 35, no. 2, 2006

123 Lyrical Nitrate

They are not only of “a time”—although the film does not try to“document” the films in the proper sense—they also embody “time”—a

layering of the times those films have traveled, of which they aredocuments. They are, in a way, monuments of time.Since the very first collections of film, whether at the MOMA, the

Cinémathèque Française or the British Film Institute, film has had thedouble value of monument-document:6 losing its exchange value, itbecomes invested with a sort of aesthetic and historical a priori. It thusbecame trace, index, testimony. That this newly acquired status for filmhad to undergo a delocalization (also true of Delpeut’s work) is alsosignificant for my argument. As with ruins, the film object had to be

taken out of its regular function, so that it could appear as a cultural artifact(as is the case for any object entering a museum).

One of the major characteristics of a ruined construction is its loss offunction and original destination (what it was destined to do). When anobject loses its physical integrity, its shape and coordinates that permitit to actualize or accomplish a certain number of actions or tasks, we saythat this thing is in ruins. But it is by falling into ruin that it appears asimage, since its usage has ceased to replace it. Blanchot, in an essay on theimaginary, writes that an object, “a utensil that does not disappear in its

usage, appears”: “Broken, [it] becomes the image of itself (and at times anaesthetic object)” (352). This could bring us to say, with Eduardo Cadava7

and Jean-Louis Déotte, that the ruin is a pure image of an object, and thatthe image in ruins is only the image of itself: the loss of vocation makes itworthy of an aesthetic appreciation (to our modern sense of art). To useDéotte’s expression, we could say that the ruin presents a mode of“appearing of things and of art.”8

Before continuing my argument, I wish to return to the pair“monument” and “document,” which, although linked to the first filmarchive initiatives, were only widely applied to film in the 1990s (1995being, again, a pivotal moment).9 As I will explore below, every film(especially early cinema) appears today as “document, witness, trace,memory” (Païni, 26). Because of the indexical nature of film, every filmdocuments the time of its referent. (The famous “Ça a été ” can also,notwithstanding Barthes’s suggestion, apply to cinema.) Any film, distantin time—Edison, Lumière, Porter, Méliès, Lang, Murnau—is a form of

documentary, since it shows and allows something of its time to speak. It isa surviving trace, a “live ash,” as Georges Didi-Huberman would say, ofan absent referent—despite all the historical falsifications films may they



André Habib

SubStance #110, Vol. 35, no. 2, 2006

124

have served, and the misreadings they may produce. No image can be apiece of evidence; it is only an artifact, a trace left at a certain moment in

time by a given culture. For this reason, today we can say that film hasgained a value of remembrance similar to that of a monument.Film allows a collectivity to remember, and is clearly embedded

within “social frames of memory,” to use Halbwach’s expression. Butunlike what Aloïs Riegel calls “the intentional monument” 35-36) or RégisDebray’s “message-monument,”10 cinema acquires its “monumental”dimension once its document-value has been recognized. A film is noterected as a commemorative monument,11 nor does it possess a specificsymbolic value; its material does not disappear in favor of a concept it

represents. As document of its time, it appears as a trace-monument, anon-intentional monument.12

Once the “monument” value of cinema, in the specific sense I haveargued, has been established, we must recognize film’s double value(following Riegl’s terminology): an “objective historical value” and a“subjective age value.” These two different values depend on the meaningwe give to the term “history”—either an objective fact-history, or a time-history, understood as a natural process that affects matter and gives itits historical depth. It is nonetheless these two values that make cinema

the paradoxical “site” of twentieth-century memory.Cinema is an important factor in the social, political and cultural

mutation of memory in the twentieth century, as analyzed by PierreNora and others in the early 1980s. According to Nora, our societieshave gone from a history-memory (in which those two terms were quasi-synonymous), to an archive-memory, where archives and “sites ofmemory” have taken on the task of preserving and remembering,indirectly institutionalizing forgetting by making the archive

unsurpassable: “what we call memory is, in fact, the gigantic andvertiginous constitution of the material stock of what is impossible toremember, the endless repertory of what we may need to remember”(xxx).

This progressive and radical externalization of memory, abandonedby the community and shelved in archives, in part explains the rolebestowed upon cinema, considered as memory-heritage of the twentiethcentury. The moment we began saving silent cinema that was slowlydisappearing from the public sphere, we were not only saving cinema as

an art form, but also as a “site of memory.” This means that memory,which was understood as something in the present, has now becomerepresented by the material traces of the past. The recognition of cinema’s



SubStance #110, Vol. 35, no. 2, 2006

125 Lyrical Nitrate

power to preserve memory was thus institutionalized in the gap betweenpast and present.

Probably what is characteristic of cinema’s memory is its object—what it is expected to preserve. Cinema (at least before super-8 camerasand camcorders) does not preserve “our/my memory,” but the memoryof a past-present: it was a certain present that was preserved, whilepassing into the past. This is how, paradoxically, cinema is an art of thepresent (of presence), and at the same time, cinema always films what isalready past: it is a past that it brings back to the present, to visibility.Cinema, and in particular early cinema, evokes—although incapable ofreproducing—the lived times of the spectators in contact with these

imaginary captures of time, these illusions of time. It is this relation totime that a film archive, consciously or unconsciously, has the task ofpreserving: the gazes of the past, which must be redeployed in the present.

But isn’t there a paradox in considering cinema a monument tomemory, since the fragility of the medium itself (the celluloid strip) is theopposite of marble or stone, eminently more capable of supporting amonument’s aspiration to immortality? (This aspiration did in factaccompany cinema in its early years.) Barthes is pertinent here: “bymaking photography, which is mortal, the general and almost natural

witness of ‘what has been,’ modern society has renounced the Monument”(146). The same could be said of cinema, if we consider, like Barthes, themonument as something made to last “forever.” A little more than 100years have sufficed to erase 80% of cinema’s first thirty years; 50% of allfilms produced have now disappeared. Whereas cinema had beenexpected to accomplish Man’s immemorial aspiration to immortality,this “mummified change” (Bazin) presents itself more like a bodysubmitted to the contingency of time and corruption, not unlike the

course of a human life (a print of film rarely survives more than 100years). This is perhaps the central ambiguity of cinema’s temporality:since its origins, it has combined the mythic time of eternal preservationwith the ephemeral time of industrialized production. In the end, itstime is measured according to a human life. If cinema’s value as memorybegan to appear as its losses were acknowledged, then the notion of themonument has to be redefined. The monument cannot be what lastseternally (in a world where nothing lasts); it is more simply a trace, asurvival, at times just as arbitrary, discontinuous and prone to forgetting

as human memory.But this is perhaps one of the singularities of cinema, when compared

to the traditional archive, although it was revealed only late in the game.



André Habib

SubStance #110, Vol. 35, no. 2, 2006

126

Film preservation is not only urgent in the wake of certain losses(destruction of prints, fires, wars, etc.); it is directly tied to the nature of

the medium and the life-span of celluloid film. Film preservation (storage,analysis, counter-typing), even in ideal conditions, cannot prevent thedecay or degradation of film (either nitrate or acetate); at best it can slow it down (a nitrate print properly stored could last over 100 years), ordisplace it by making new copies every 25 years (but the copies too willdecay, and this operation is extremely costly, and could only be envisionedfor a small proportion of films “worth” preserving).

The disappearance of films is thus co-substantial to the history offilm (it is an “art du passage,” Jean-Louis Schefer would say). For Paolo

Cherchi Usai, the destruction and decay of films is actually what makesthe history of cinema thinkable in the first place (18). In his fascinatingbook of aphorisms, The Death of Cinema, Cherchi Usai writes: “Such images[that are immune from decay] can have no history” (41). Everything thathappens to a film from the moment it is printed and projected (streaks,scratches, scorias), composes the internal history of that film which is,for Cherchi Usai, the condition of possibility and the object of film history.If all films had survived, a history of cinema would be impossible. TheModel Image (the pure film) is a theoretical fiction, as is restoration. The

ontology of film’s first axiom is founded upon its inherent process ofdecomposition: “cinema is the art of destroying moving images” ( Deathof Cinema, 7).

Although Cherchi Usai’s radical metaphysics of cinema calls for acertain degree of nuance, it should be seen as a reaction against both therestoration craze of the 1980s and the irrational leaps of hope invested inthe “digital revolution.” What is important to retain, is that this “archivefever” has led to the most diverse reactions, whether coming from curator-

archivists, film historians or filmmakers: passivity (Cherchi Usai),selective preservation (Païni, De Kuyper), maximum conservation(Jacques Ledoux), utopias of digitized cinema archives, re-use andrecycling, romanticized visions, and so on. What is obvious is that formany years now, in part due to the pressure and influence of new technology, the issue of film preservation has become part of its history.The perishable nature of cinema has reshaped its social, artistic anddiscursive configuration, and positioned it in terms of memory andtransmission.

What interests me is the signification of this sense of loss (it is veryoften not even a film, but cinema’s disappearance in general) and themelancholy of ruins it inspires. Since loss always operates on traces that



SubStance #110, Vol. 35, no. 2, 2006

127 Lyrical Nitrate

give us the measure of what has been lost, then fragments of rediscoveredfilms, damaged prints, and anonymous bits of reel are memory traces of

forgetting.According to Jean Starobinski, the melancholy of ruins, at least inthe eighteenth century, “resides in the fact that it has become amonument to lost signification. To dream among ruins is to feel that ourexistence does not belong to us anymore and is already reunited with avast oblivion” (180). According to him, during the nineteenth century,historical inquiry erased this free contemplation of lost time by applyinga scientific approach, in an attempt to “date what should be experiencedas immemorial” (181).

These remarks, anachronistically, seem to correspond to the state offilm archives, which abound with unidentified “bits and pieces” of film,13

whose significance often gets lost in speculation and conjecture. Theyare also in phase with the type of reading to which Lyrisch nitraat can lenditself, released at a time of unprecedented patrimonialization of earlycinema, numerous restoration projects, the circulation of a great quantityof silent films on DVD and on the Internet, and so on.

Although the problematic exposed here thus far could be developedfurther, I hope to have set in place a certain number of the issues that

inform Delpeut’s film, the focus of the second part of this article.

****

Lyrisch nitraat, though at first glance straight-forward, is a complex,hybrid film, which intelligently intertwines the experimental aestheticof found footage and early cinema compilation films (increasingly availablesince the late 1980s on VHS, then DVD).

Found footage14 is an open category of avant-garde or experimental

cinema that presents, according to Catherine Russell, all the aspects ofan “aesthetic of ruins,” often animated by nostalgia (Joseph Cornell’s1936 Rose Hobart) or by apocalyptic themes (Craig Baldwin’s Tribulations99, 1991), which resonate through their style, based on fragmentation,elliptic narration, temporal collisions and visual disorientation (Russell,239). These films should be distinguished from the way documentariesuse archival material (often only to illustrate a commentary). Found footagefilms follow an aesthetic, formal, conceptual, critical or polemic endeavor

(ibid., 239-40).Early forms of film-collage appear in the 1920s, in certain avant-garde practices, and compilation films begin to be put together (in Russiaand in the US) around the same time.15 But the found footage trend will



André Habib

SubStance #110, Vol. 35, no. 2, 2006

128

only blossom in the late 1950s and 1960s, with the rise of television andthe culture of mass consumption. It is not by chance that it is often

televisual artifacts (ads, information, talk shows, educational programs)that these filmmakers re-use and subvert. Found footage, in this respect,appears as a form of cultural recycling, often informed by a social critique,by discourses concerned with the end of history, and subverting thematerial through ironic and violent montage.

Catherine Russell and Bart Testa both analyze how early cinema(1895-1908)—at the time scorned by scholars as pre-narrative, primitivemumbling—offered a fascinating alternative to the classical codes ofnarrative cinema.16 Experimental filmmakers began formal and

conceptual explorations of cinema’s memory, playing with time andduration, film structure, various forms of rephotography, and opticalprintings.17

The other trend with which we could associate Delpeut’s film wouldbe the “early cinema” compilations, such as Landmarks of early cinema, andOrigins of film. These compilations, often produced for teaching purposes,are often accompanied by elaborate contextualizations by film historians(such as Charles Musser), which help date, name, and situate the workswithin a specific aesthetic trend or time period.

Lyrisch nitraat, in a way, is born at the crossroads of those two genres.It borrows heavily from the found footage’s aesthetic of ruins, while refusingits more ironic, theoretical or visually radical aspects. From thecompilation films, it retains a documentary dimension, as trace or testimonyof past visual practices, while keeping those films relatively anonymous(until the end credits). Delpeut’s film also seems part of a larger trendwithin current cinema, which negotiates a space between avant-gardepractice and archival exploration. This idea of a “poetic archaeology,” or

an archival poetry, is shared by filmmakers such as Bill Morrison (The Film of Her, 1997, Trinity, 2000, Decasia, 2002), Angela Ricci-Lucchi andYervant Gianikian (Dal polo all’equatore, 1987, Su tutte le vette e pace, 1999,Oh, uomo, 2004), Artavazd Pelechian (We, 1969, The Seasons, 1975, OurCentury, 1983), Gustav Deutsch ( Film ist, 1996, 2001) or Jürgen Reble (Stadtin flammen, 1984, Passion, 1989, Instabile Materie, 1995).

All these films untie the knots of narrative continuity to focus ongestures, facial expressions, visual tricks ( Film ist), producing a poeticmontage of “distant fragments” (Us), revisiting the damaged remnants

of a damaged history (Su tutte le vette e pace) or the ghastly beauty ofdecomposed celluloid ( Decasia, Passion). They document a gaze in time,offer a look at a history of looking—the multi-faceted visual culture of a



SubStance #110, Vol. 35, no. 2, 2006

129 Lyrical Nitrate

certain age. These filmmakers, not unlike Benjamin’s ragpicker, sew together bits of films that reveal the inner workings of time: something

that breathes between the bodies, the landscapes, the city streets andthe unraveling of the film strip—something that has been deposited intothe flesh of the film. This surplus is what time’s passing has added to thetemporality of the film. This excess has as much to do with what isfilmed (the image referent) as with the medium to which the image istied (the film strip). All these films set up an intriguing dialectics betweenform and content, between the imprint of the film and the material base,which manifests itself through its accidents, and its imperfections (asnoted earlier, an object appears and says something of itself through its

ruin).These montages—even if seen on safety prints, and most often on

VHS or DVD—all produce the impression that a world is disappearingbefore our very eyes, and that the display of this disappearance has somethingto do with the very nature of cinema. We can even say that it is theimminence of this disappearance that makes these images legible. Theyappear precisely as apparitions, loaded with memory and history, becausethey are on the point of falling into complete oblivion: we are the witnessesof this passage, this falling. It is this dialectic between memory and

oblivion, preservation and destruction, that all these films tend toarticulate.

Lyrisch nitraat proposes a reflexive overview of the disappearance ofan art (an art of disappearance): the disappearance of early cinema, adisappearance to which these films themselves are destined, and theloss of those who have left the traces of their presence on these smallstrips of celluloid, as well as the loss of a certain mode of spectatorship,and so on. This distance between us and the spectators of the time is

reinforced by the fact that these fragments of films had to travel throughthe complete history of film technology, from nitrate to acetate prints,from video to our television sets. All these losses are nonetheless evokedthrough what remains. Neither epic nor dramatic, Delpeut’s film is lyrical.Its lyricism stems from the material properties of the film material: thedifferent coloring processes, often of astonishing brightness, are not onlypreserved; they are often accentuated by biochemical degradation.

Lyrisch nitraat is an assemblage of nitrate fragments, extracted fromthe distribution catalogue of the Dutch pioneer Jean Desmet. This early

cinema distributor and theater owner had stored his wide collection(900 films, dating from 1907-1916) in the late 1920s, along with posters,still photographs, and programs, in a loft on top of the Cinéma Parisien



André Habib

SubStance #110, Vol. 35, no. 2, 2006

130

in Amsterdam, where they were discovered in 1956, after Desmet’s death.They were then transferred to the Film Museum of Amsterdam.18 The

fragments Delpeut selects are grouped into six categories (indicated byintertitles): “Looking,” “Mise en scène,” “The Body,” “Passion,” “Dying,”and “Forgetting.” This regrouping into categories (systematized by theGerman Gustav Deutsch in his Film ist series [1996, 2001;[1 to 12]), offersus a first reading of the film, which the “forgetting” of the last chaptersynthesizes: gaze, body, passion, death. These six chapters refer to thesubject matter of the filmed scenes, but also to the cinema they embody—a cinema that no longer exists. The “gaze” refers to the different “ways ofseeing” in early cinema (iris, audience reactions, voyeurism, peephole

aesthetics), but it also evokes cinema’s visual novelty, the way ittransformed our way of seeing and the fact that this cinema was seen byspectators now long dead. If the film sequences portray a “mise en scène”of bodies, they are also showing a form of mise en scène that is no longeremployed, and bodies that today are absent. “Death” is both representedin the films (Passion plays, murder scenes), and evoked metaphoricallyvia the perishable nature of nitrate celluloid, which appears quite visiblyat different moments in the film. The term “passion” can refer to the slow gestures of the Italian Diva Lyda Borelli, but can also be a metaphor for

this cinema that is being consumed. ( Burning Passion is, appropriately,the title of one of Cherchi Usai’s books on early cinema.) Nevertheless,this refraction of the films on the categories in which they appear, thisdouble meaning, does not turn them into “symbols of cinema” in theway that Marlene Dietrich’s oblique gaze “symbolizes” the “femme fatale”of cinema. What we have here is, more appropriately, an allegoricalsubversion.

This subversion is part of the “museumification” process of this film:

films from a distribution catalogue are turned into an imaginary museum,their exchange value is now exhibited as a cultural artifact. But thissubversion is also an allegory: Delpeut’s film appears as an allegory ofhistory and of the memory of early cinema—and the allegory, writesBenjamin, is the object par excellence of melancholic contemplation. Thishistory is fragmented; its image is one of ruin.

In his famous study on the Trauerspiel, Benjamin portrays allegoricalwriting as fragmented, discontinuous, and polysemic, and contrasts itto the unity and harmony of the symbol. This new “stylistic sentiment,”

which imposes itself during the baroque age, shows history not as atotality, but as an incomplete, transient, contingent state: “History is notrepresented under the guise of eternal life, but as one of inevitable decline”



SubStance #110, Vol. 35, no. 2, 2006

131 Lyrical Nitrate

(Origine, 191). History expresses itself through nature’s process of decay,it is inscribed in “a face—no, a skull” (ibid., 178-79). Is this not, in a way,

what Lyrisch nitraat is portraying: ruins of films, ruins of a certainexperience of cinema, faces that resemble death masks?Judging from the heterogeneous genres that Delpeut assembles, it

seems that an attempt was made to accurately render the film experienceof the early twentieth century. What was privileged at that time was notso much a good plot and clear narrative development, but sensations,spectacles, exotic one-reel scenes. Also, a great diversity of genresblossomed and coexisted during this short period, in part due to therapid development of film language—a film from 1915 does not look or

feel like a film from 1905. It is this plurality of genres that we find projectedin Lyrisch Nitraat: melodramas, adventure films, scientific spectacle, biblicalfilms, portrayals of children, train travelogues, landscapes, street shots,film projections within a film, and so on. But the historical accuracy ofthe assemblage adds an uncanny dimension to the film, as if we werevisiting a site once inhabited, where the past is constantly tangled in theweb of the present. In fact, doesn’t a site in ruins have the privilege,through its debris, of bringing to the present a past life that time hasdismantled? Here we have an attempt to reconstruct, starting from its

absence, a gaze that, redoubling ours, makes the time of the image morecomplex.

Refusing the imperatives of positive history (analyzing, dating,understanding, informing), but without succumbing to pure, formal play(looping, abstract or associative montage), Delpeut tries to present anallegory of cinema, a lyrical art, discontinuous and fragmented. Evenmore, he turns the discontinued and fragmented state of the rediscoverednitrate into the very source of cinema’s lyricism. By drawing our attention

to these disjointed fragments, Delpeut is able to make us see anew—attimes by slowing down or zooming in on the image—a gesture, therichness of a landscape, the gravity of a face, preserving its poetic force.Moreover, beginning with its title, lyrical nitrate, it seems that for Delpeut,this poetic force is intrinsic to the material itself.

This autonomy of the film material appears on many levels. First,Delpeut decided to abandon the story behind each fragment (which couldhave been included in a voice-over or intertitle), in order to leave them“untouched,” as if they were returning specters —like the many ghosts

that haunt the history of the moving image, from Robertson’sphantasmagorias and beyond. In other words, Delpeut decided not toencumber the “restored presence” of the film by providing context, factualinformation, narration.



André Habib

SubStance #110, Vol. 35, no. 2, 2006

132

There is also a certain voluntary withdrawal of the director-editor,a certain refusal to produce an intentional, well-structured montage,

and a will to leave the film fragments as if they had been put together asthey were. Delpeut’s intention seems to have been to create the impression,on the level of the montage, that the film was an unearthed mummy—that what you see was not in fact put together following a pre-ordainedplan, but made in this way, which is an obvious fiction.

On the other hand, the film seems to champion a poetic autonomy ofthe nitrate stock itself—its natural beauty, its array of tints, its diaph-anous glow, the silky warmth that it gives to the bodies it enfolds (asthough nitrate were poetic in itself; one need simply look). This autonomy

of the material is even greater if we consider that each foot of filmpossesses an individual life, an “internal life” (unlike polyester or acetatecelluloid, which are synthetic, nitrate is an organic material). Faded colors,washed-out tints, dust deposits, blots and stains are the signs of this“life” which, according to Aloïs Riegl, illuminates in a work of art the“necessary cycle of creation and destruction that twentieth-century manis fond of” (67). We could even say that the patina that translates thepassage of time into the film singularizes each image, such that each stillreclaims today a lost aura (an aura which, in Benjamin’s time, cinema

supposedly liquidated). With Delpeut, cinema has become, like the auraticwork of art, the “unique apparition of the distant.”19

This impression of a rediscovered aura at the intersection of itsdisappearance, plus the fragmentation of sequences, the mismatches,the construction of uncanny continuities between different styles andtime periods, and the evanescence of the medium, the stains and scoriason the celluloid—all these are part of an aesthetics of ruin that articulatesitself between memory and oblivion, in the gaps of a history that is in

shreds.As noted earlier, the fragmentary nature of the film provokes adifferent way of seeing. We become attracted not by the arrangement ofactions, but by the way forms, bodies, and spaces are inscribed in time.Instead of looking at a woman walking through a garden (to where? towhom?), we are asked to contemplate the spectacle of a lost and majesticbearing. These children giggling at the camera, these young girls standingbefore the cinema screen, these men in hats crossing the streets and whosegaze crosses the frame, are not only filmed doing certain things, they

make visible a vast area of time that separates us from them. Thesehaunted bodies on the screen, added to an (at times) obscure film grammar(camera angle, framing, shot duration), create an impression of



SubStance #110, Vol. 35, no. 2, 2006

133 Lyrical Nitrate

apparition-disappearance: the time of the image is a time of after-life, of“survival”.20

Although Lyrisch nitraat may seem at first glance disorganized, wemust recognize a thematic coherence to Delpeut’s assemblage, whichdoes not exclude a sense of voluntary fragmentation. The author has akeen predilection for scenes of loss, of abandonment, of shipwrecks/rescues, but also for wandering characters, malady, fatal passions, anddeath. This confers a melancholic depth to all the images we see. Thechildren seen posing in front of the camera seem ghostly and evanescent;in the street scenes the city dwellers appear as distant apparitions, aneffect enhanced by the grayness or the surreal coloration. Instead of

insisting on an aesthetics of astonishment and enchantment that was atthe center of early cinema (magic, farce, vaudeville, spectacular chases),Delpeut has chosen to privilege a melancholic atmosphere, which heemphasizes by using slow motion (in contrast to early cinema, which isoften seen at an accelerated pace), and by fragmenting certain scenes inorder to show only the “dead spaces.” This effect is reinforced by thesoundtrack, consisting of old opera recordings that emphasize themateriality of the sound—the grain, the needle on the groove.21

The elegiac tone of the film culminates in a final blaze, which seems

to consume all the film fragments seen up to that point, as if this blazerepresented their inevitable destiny. During the last minutes of the film,the celluloid strip becomes suddenly unstrung, destroyed by mold, tothe point where the imprinted scene appears shredded by rapid flashesof colored blots and filaments, bright flares, sumptuous ochre stains.

The scene on this decayed strip of film represented an episode in theGarden of Eden, a site which, at the time, gave opportunity for a certainlicentiousness. Here we find the most striking alliance between the

medium and its “content”—the destroyed celluloid performativelyexemplifies the scene, by ruining it. Amidst the flickering serpentines ofdismantled celluloid, we see Adam and Eve sharing the forbidden fruit,on the verge of being plunged into a temporality that is no longer exemptfrom corruption and contingency… and this is precisely what the film(appropriately entitled Warfare of the Flesh), exposes. Cherchi Usai’s axiom(“Cinema is the art of destroying moving images”) finds here a perfectillustration: the art of cinema consists in the destruction of what itpreserves. Seeing is burning. Godard, in JLG/JLG (1994), says: “Art is like

a fire; it is born out of what it burns.” Similarly, we can complete Pasolini’sphrase: cinema, like life, “is written on burning paper.”

For this reason, I would argue that Lyrisch nitraat is traversed by anorphic thematic (all the way up to the choice of Glück’s Orpheo, which



André Habib

SubStance #110, Vol. 35, no. 2, 2006

134

ends the film). In Delpeut’s film, cinema is substituted for Eurydice, theobject of love to be saved, but whose rescue-operation risks transforming

the silver salts into dust. Jacques Aumont, in his stimulating analysis ofJean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1987-1997), coins the term “orphiccomplex,” to designate this return to and of the past, which preservesand petrifies at the same time (44-45). Aumont’s orphic network adds anadditional thread to the lyricism of the film, one where—on this pointonly, though—Godard and Delpeut’s projects meet: “Lyricism is neverrevealed in the measured confidence of the author, but in the vivaciousgesture that ends confidence, and allows the resurgence of flashes,dazzling fragments of cinema” (Aumont, 55).

But this orphic complex is rich and ambiguous: we may recallGodard’s poetic statement, in Histoire(s) du cinéma 2B, that “cinemaauthorizes Orpheus to turn back without killing Eurydice,” referring tocinema’s capacity (and obligation) to look the past in the face—its ownpast—without provoking its disappearance. But this “looking back” alsorefers to Lot’s wife, who, looking back one last time on Sodom, was turnedinto a pillar of salt (Godard, who retells the biblical tale in episode 2A,reminds us that “silver salts capture the light on film”). But this isobviously reminiscent of Benjamin’s vision, inspired by Klee, of the Angel

of History, who, while being violently projected forward, looks back,powerless, to witness the piles of ruins accumulating at its feet (Über den

Begriff , 2). It is the combination of forces of these three figures—preservation, petrifaction, and ruin—that circumscribe the orphic themeof Lyrisch nitraat. Preservation is what allows us to see the past again,while both “museumifying” it and generating its ruin. These threemovements exist simultaneously, just as a plurality of temporalitiescoexist in Delpeut’s film, only to be unraveled by ruin.

What is the temporality of a decayed, ruined image? Delpeut usesfilms made from 1906-1915; they were edited at another moment,screened at yet another. To those first layers of historical time (theprofilmic time, the time of the image’s construction, the time of the image’sprojection), has been added another time: time’s passage. This time,eroding the film material, does away with the interval between the (man-made) filming process and the (natural) chemical process that subvertsand transforms the initial imprint. It is this time, made of montage anddismantling, that overwhelms the present. What overwhelms the

“present” of the film is its ruin, which adds itself anachronistically to theimage. It adds something to the image that is not locatable precisely intime, but that denatures while renaturalizing the film object, abolishingthe space between what was filmed and the image support. The ruin



SubStance #110, Vol. 35, no. 2, 2006

135 Lyrical Nitrate

breaks the spatial depth of the image (everything suddenly appears onthe same plane—image and ruin), while inscribing on the surface of the

film a temporal depth.The image support is not passive. There is a constant interactionbetween the film material (the celluloid) on which the images have beencaptured, the profilmic (what was in front of the camera), and time.Burned film is thus animated simultaneously by movements of deathand survival. The image it produces is a live imprint of exposed time,which continues to corrode itself following the same time pattern ashuman time, precisely because it participates in the same temporality ashuman time—one oriented towards finitude.

If anachronism could be considered as the inevitable contemp-oraneity of the past, we can say that each image is an anachronistic siteof intersection for a plethora of heterogeneous figures of times. The sameis true of ruins which, as argued earlier, reveal a dismembered time, atime overwhelmed by the different temporal strata exposed: the ruinshows the passage of time, both present-past and past-present. As Didi-Huberman reminds us, the anachronism of ruins appears at theintersection between the image and history.

This leads us to perceive how the ruin—the lacuna—can be seen as

an excess, rather than a lack, by unearthing this “damned” aspect offilm’s fatality. It is as if its ruins pre-existed it. We could say that cinemais born to embody its own ruin,22 or even that, “In the beginning was theruin” (Derrida, 72). This “montage of temporalities” that flickers beforeour eyes dramatizes the history of film, while keeping it from a full,reassuring visibility. As Jacques Derrida writes, although in a quitedifferent context, “Ruin: rather this memory open like an eye or the holeof a bony eye-socket that lets you see without showing anything at all/of

the all.”23

It is not that we have to complete with our imagination what islacking from totality; it is rather the lack itself that makes up the image, its“disappearance sets memory in motion” (Didi-Huberman, Génie). In theruin, it is not the totality, the unity out of which the ruin emerges thatmoves us. All things considered, the ruin lacks nothing; it supplies itsown aesthetic criteria.

What is perhaps important to add, at this point, is that these imageshave come to us through a history that has enabled us to see them, thathas already accustomed us to the aesthetic autonomy of the ruin. Modern

cinema’s “sensory-motor discontinuities”—the use of jump-cuts andloosely tied narrative sequences—have introduced us to a fragmentationof filmic language—but isn’t this a return to the fragmentation of earlycinema? Experimental cinema (such as Stan Brakhage’s superb hand-



André Habib

SubStance #110, Vol. 35, no. 2, 2006

136

painted films of the 1980s and 1990s, certain visual devices used in videoclips) has paved the way for a number of visual experiments that are not

completely foreign to those Delpeut displays. The “utterability” of thisfilm arises from an aesthetic and historical horizon to which we belong,which makes the fragment or the ruin more than a desecrated version ofthe original. The fragment has become a mode of knowledge and of poeticexpression, carrying its own history. I would posit that a fragment offilm is often more poetic and more historically charged than a restored,pristine copy of the same film.

In cinema, the fragment comes before any unity—a film is always acollection of individual fragments. Often, cinema attempts to homogenize

this fragmentation through the film’s organic unity (the “transparentmontage” of Hollywood cinema, the “organicity” of the Russian schoolsof montage). Deleuze has demonstrated that the prevalence of an organictotality that engulfs the singularity of its parts (the movement-image) isdominant until after World War II, when the parts become disarticulated,the linkages irrational. Similarly, in his book Le Detail, Daniel Arasseanalyzes how classical figurative painting has always privileged thewhole rather than its parts, favoring an ideological-perspective apparatusthat the detail, taken by itself, could only suspend, subvert, and threaten

(387). The detail is a visual (plastic) event that escapes the figurativemessage or narration of the painting. The detail ruins, from the inside,the unity of the work: detailing, in truth, is ruining. The detail forces thepart to manifest itself, disjointed from the unity. It is this stripping—thispowerful extraction of the part from its totality—that is at work inDelpeut’s film.

Lyrisch nitraat is not foreign to the “melancholy of ruins” thatcharacterizes many recent works of art, but at the same time it reactivates

certain motifs and tropes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literaryand artistic “poetics of ruins,” from Diderot to Chateaubriand. Much inthe same way that ivy and moss grow on the stones and pillars of ancienttemples—as the picturesque vision of ruins has it—here it is the dirtdeposits, scratches and color blots that signal the passage of time, and itsruinous effect. This new poetry of ruins arises from the history of thearchive and the preservation of films, but operates a major inversion:what creates the emotion is not the objective history of film, but time’spresence, which the archive—fragmented, in ruin—can re-present.

In conclusion, it would be interesting to investigate the ways in whichworks such as Lyrisch nitraat can help us redefine the notion of “filmictime” experienced by the spectator. Theoretical debates, in particularAnglo-Saxon cognitive studies, have tended to reduce this notion to a



SubStance #110, Vol. 35, no. 2, 2006

137 Lyrical Nitrate

“time needed to understand” the narrative patterns of a film. But inDelpeut’s film, the multiple temporality of the works disrupts the

absorption one experiences when following the flow of a unified storyline. Instead, these films place us “face to face with time”—devant le temps,to borrow Didi-Huberman’s title. This is a time not governed bymovement or action, nor ordered by narration, but one that emergesfrom its very own difference. Thus ruin in cinema reveals its own time—a time of survival—summoning multiple subjectivities to a radicalexperience of time. Perhaps this could be the source of a new melancholyof cinema, born of its time, of its archive.

Université de Montréal

Notes

1. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations into English are my own.2. This is, among others, attested by Éric de Kuyper, who writes: “The massive destruc-

tion of silent films that had become without value brought collectors, who will be thefounders of our cinemathèques, to tend to them” (20).

3. For the history of film preservation and nitrate film, see Anthony Slide, Nitrate Won’tWait. Film Preservation in the United States, Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland,

1992, and Roger Smither (ed.), This Film is Dangerous. A Celebration of Nitrate Film,Brussels: FIAF, 2002. 4. We could have proposed here a “description de l’archive” in the sense that Michel

Foucault understood it, “as the system of utterability (énonciabilité) of events-utter-ances” ( Archéologie, 170). But this path would have demanded a more specific analy-sis, beyond the scope of this paper. Thus the term “archive” will be used here in amore “conservative” sense.

5. See Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time. Modernity, Contingency, The Archive, Cambridge, London, Harvard University Press, 2002.

6. This notion of “monument-document,” is suggested to me by Paul Ricoeur (“Thenotion of document, under which we find the combined notions of index and testi-mony, gains in precision if it is coupled with the notion of monument,” [ 222 n.1]), butalso, of course, by Michel Foucault, who introduced the relation between those twoterms to designate the “archaeological turn” within “La Nouvelle histoire.” Accord-ing to Foucault, in traditional history, past monuments were transformed into docu-ments, traces that needed to be deciphered, whereas, now, history “is what transformsdocuments into monuments” ( L’archéologie du savoir, 14-15).

7. Eduardo Cadava, “ Lapsus imaginis: The Image in Ruins,” October 96 (Spring 2001) 35-60.

8. Déotte, using Blanchot, discusses the “ruination” of objects in the museum, throughwhich they acquire the same status as works of art: “Their default, their retreat outsideof religious, political, private, utilitarian destination, magnifies them for what they are.Reduced to the state of corpses, ruins, they are all similar” ( Oubliez ! 33).

9. The chronology that Dominique Païni proposes and that I wish to adopt here is asfollows: cinema was originally a curiosity (1850-1908), then a popular entertainment(1908-1950), and an art form (1950-1968), before becoming part of culture (1968-1990), and, since 1990, as part of the “patrimony of the century” (Dominique Païni,25-26)



André Habib

SubStance #110, Vol. 35, no. 2, 2006

138

10. Régis Debray proposed to counter the “confusion des monuments,” by distinguishingthree types of monuments: the message-monuments (the commemorative statue,prospective), the form-monument (The Louvre, contemporary) and the trace-monu-

ment (the Maginot line, retroactive). See Debray, 27-44.11. One can argue that coronation films and film celebrations of political reunions areintentional commemorative monuments. These are rather rare; further, if these bits ofnewsreel were in fact supposed to last, greater efforts would have been made inorder to preserve them at the time they were made.

12. An interesting phenomenon is that recent film restorations (Chaplin’s Modern Timesor Murnau’s Sunrise for instance), not unlike certain types of architectural restora-tions, create an intentional value of remembrance, which the works originally did notparticularly intend.

13. Under the title Bits and Pieces, Éric de Kuyper, then director of the Netherlands FilmMuseum, inaugurated these programs of abandoned fragments. These short bits offilm, often only a few seconds long, were simply edited together (“bout à bout”)without any narrative continuity or montage logic.

14. For a more detailed history and analysis of found footage, see William C. Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films, New York: AnthologyFilm Archives, 1993, and Rob Yeo, “Cutting Through History. Found Footage inAvant-Garde Filmmaking,” in Stefan Basilico (ed.), Cut: Film as Found Object in Con-temporary Video, Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 2004, 13-27.

15. See Jay Leyda, Films Beget Films, New York: Hill and Wang, 1964.16. See Russell, 53-54. See also Bart Testa, Back and Forth. Early Cinema and the Avant-

Garde, Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1992.17. To name only a few seminal works: Al Razutis’s Lumière’s Train (Arriving at the

Station) (1973), David Rimmer’s Seashore ( 1971), Bruce Conner’s A Movie (1958),

Ken Jacobs’ Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969).18. On Jean Desmet and early film distribution, see Ivo Blom’s invaluable Jean Desmet

and the Early Dutch Film Trade, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003.19. On the resurgence of cinematic aura, see Dominique Païni, “La trace et l’aura,” in Le

cinéma un art moderne, Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1997, 159-168.20. We could ask ourselves what kind of spectatorial identification takes place in front of

a decayed image. Laura U. Marks, for instance, suggests that we should reconsiderMetz’s primary identification in such a case, as being precisely an “identification withdispersion, with loss of unified selfhood.” (“Loving a Disappearing Image,” Cinémas8-1,2 [Fall 1997] 98). Also, the identification process involved in the contemplationof ruins could have been discussed at length, but would have exceeded the scope of

this essay.21. The choice of music is not haphazard, and the list of certain titles suffices to addanother degree of signification to the work: Les pêcheurs de perles by Bizet, The Islandof the Dead by Rachmaninov, Gluck’s Orpheo, etc.

22. Deleuze recalls in Logique du sens, this powerful phrase by Jean Bousquet: “mywound existed before me, I was born to embody it” ( Logique, 174).

23. Jacques Derrida, Autoportrait et autres ruines, 72. (“ Ruine : plutôt cette mémoire ouvertecomme un œil ou la trouée d’une orbite osseuse qui vous laisse voir sans rien vous montrer dutout.”)



139 Lyrical Nitrate

Works Cited

Arasse, Daniel. Le détail. Paris: Garnier/Flammarion, 1996.Aumont, Jacques. Amnésies. Fictions du cinéma d’après Jean-Luc Godard. Paris: P.O.L.,

1999.Barthes, Roland. La chambre claire. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980.Benjamin, Walter. Origine du drame baroque allemand. Trans. Sybelle Muller. Paris:

Flammarion, 1985 [1925].——. “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” in Gesammelte Schriften, t. IBlanchot, Maurice. L’espace littéraire. Paris: Gallimard, coll. “NRF,” 1955.Cherchi Usai, Paolo. The Death of cinema. London: BFI, 2001.Debray, Régis. « Trace, forme ou message ? », Les cahiers de médiologie 7 (1999).Deleuze, Gilles. Logique du sens. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969.Déotte, Jean-Louis. Oubliez ! Les ruines, l’Europe, le musée. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994.Derrida, Jacques. Autoportrait et autres ruines. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, coll.

“Parti Pris,” 1990Didi-Huberman, Georges. Génie du non-lieu. Air, poussière, empreinte, hantise. Paris: Éditions

de Minuit, 2001.——-. “Montage des ruines. Conversation avec Georges Didi-Huberman,” by Guy

Astic and Christian Tarting. Simulacres 5 (September-December 2001).Foucault, Michel. Archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1968.Farge, Arlette. Le goût de l’archive. Paris : Seuil, 1997 [1989].de Kuyper, Éric. “La mémoire des archives,” Journal of Film Preservation 58-59 (October

1999).Nora, Pierre, ed. “Entre mémoire et histoire,” in Les lieux de la mémoire. Paris : Éditions

Gallimard, 1984.

Païni, Dominique. Le temps exposé. Le cinéma de la salle au musée. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma,2002.Ricoeur, Paul. La mémoire, l’h istoire, l’oubli. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, coll. « L’ordre

philosophique », 2000.Riegl, Aloïs. Le culte moderne des monuments, Son essence et sa genèse [ Der Moderne

Denkmalkultus]. Trans. Daniel Wieczorek. Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 1984 [1903].Russell, Catherine. Experimental Ethnography : The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham

and London: Duke University Press, 1999.Starobinski, Jean. L’invention de la liberté (1700-1789). Geneva: Éditions d’art Albert Skira,

1964.

Documents

Ruin, Archive and the Time of Cinema: Peter Delpeut's Lyrical Nitrate