The Avant-Garde and Its ImaginaryConstance Penley

Recent metapsychological approaches to film and cinema permit usefulprecisions in thinking the relation of avant-garde strategies to a feministfilmmaking practice. Any juxtaposition of an avant-garde practice and anavowedly political practice is, and has been historically, problematic. Wewould like to look at some of the presuppositions of a contemporary avant-garde from the point of view of these recent metapsychological studiesbecause we think they can illuminate some of the difficulties often foundin the juxtaposition of political and avant-garde practice. We have a con-temporary example of a provocative attempt to bring these two practicestogether in the English Co-op filmmaking movement, often described byits theoretician-filmmakers as a 'structural I materialist' cinema aimingtowards a 'politics of perception'. This movement sees its political efficacyin offering a cinematic experience completely outside of and against thestrategies and effects of dominant classical cinema, i.e., an identificationwith the characters and diegesis capable of manipulating the spectator inways which leave the spectator unconscious of her or his own experiencesin watching the film.

Christian Metz offers the hypothesis that the cinematic signifier is byits very nature linked to the imaginary and also argues that the cinematicinstitution describes a fetishistic structuration at every level-from theframe of the image to its socio-historical functioning. Taking the Freud-ian notion of 'dream-work' to an analysis of the progressive engender-rnent of the filmic text, Thierry Kuntzel has shown the operations ofdream processes like condensation and displacement at work in the spec-tator's unconscious reading of the film-the 'other film' which takesplace in the mind of the spectator. Jean-Louis Baudry proposes that theentire cinematographic apparatus is taken in a wish inherent to the humanpsyche whose roots can already be seen in the time of Plato, a wish for areturn to that 'other scene', a movement which creates 'a fantasrnatiza-tion of the subject' by simulating a subject-effect which is an artificialstate of regression. The recent work of Raymond Bellour on cinema andhypnosis is an attempt to circumscribe filmic fascination I identificationby analyzing the ways in which the film and the apparatus work together

•this isan expanded version of a paper presented during the Avant-Garde Event at the EdinburghFilm Festival, August 1976.

4 to organize stimuli of a hypnotic nature. Bellour also uses the concept ofhypnosis as historical predecessor of both cinema and psychoanalysis toopen a discussion of their collusion on a particularly 20th century con-cern: the relation of subject to image, of the subject as a function ofimage. 1

Given these recent theses on the psychical roots of the cinematic insti-tution, the degree of 'imaginariness' of the cinematic signifier, and thelevels of regression and identification involved in the spectator / screen re-lation, what is the place of this modernist practice which explicitly andmilitantly disavows any relation to 'illusionism', the imaginary, identifi-cation and even to fiction? In what ways does it offer solutions to thoseproblems basic to any attempt to formulate a filmmaking practice whichdo not re-enact the illusions and manipulations of dominant film?

We will focus our discussion, for several reasons, around the theoreticalwritings which have come out of the English Co-op movement, mainlythose of Malcolm LeGrice and Peter Gidal.> The first reason is that, as wehave mentioned, this movement brings together more explicitly andmore extremely than any other the problematic of a simultaneous politi-cal and formal avant-garde practice.s Many of these questions exist impli-citly in the work and writings of other experimental filmmakers, even inthe United States where the two practices are almost unthinkable to-gether, but for now we will take the most evident and articulated exam-ple. Also, as theoretical writings, the work of LeGrice and Gidal offers analready secondarized and rationalized version of their own activity, thusmaking it even more accessible to a discussion of the premises of thismanner of thinking film.! LeGrice's writings, moreover, offer an accountof his own and his contemporaries' filmmaking practice across a history ofthe abstract, formal avant-garde, thus opening up the possibility of adiscussion ofthe historical placement ofthis avant-garde, and the historicalimaginary ofthis avant-garde, that is, their conception of their origins andinfluences, of their relation to the other arts and to the history of an.

The theoretical writings of Malcolm LeGrice and Peter Gidal are highlycomplementary, often citing each other's film-work for examples and val-idation ofargument, yet differ in that LeGrice speaks from within a con-cerned historical reconstruction of the same movement for which Gidalpolemically agitates with wide-ranging references to much recent Frenchtheoretical work including Derrida, Althusser and Kristeva. They are twoof the most active filmmakers in the very movement which they are at-tempting to describe in terms of its historical, political, aesthetic andphilosophical premises. In order not to collapse the particularities of thetwo arguments into one another, we will take them separately; hopefullythe similarities will become evident, the differences will remain distinct.

Abstract Film and Beyond (Malcolm Le Grice)*

Malcolm LeGrice locates the roots of the filmic evolution he traces in thepre-cinematic painting of the Impressionist era, comparing the singlebrushmark style of the Impressionists to the grain of the photographicimage and seeing the most significant philosophical parallels between

'Painting's mistake is the subject.Cinema's mistake is the scenario.Freedfrom this negative weight, the cinemacan become a gigantic microscope ofthingsnever before seen andfelt. '(Fernand Leger, L'art du cinema, 1923)

painting and photography in their shared movement away from a reli-gious view of the world to a scientific materialism: 'observation, experi-ment and technological determination.' (9) In citing Cezanne for creat-ing an awareness of the relativistic nature of perception, he establishes thebeginning of an historical line of artists who 'make us aware of the flux ofperception through process.' (10) He traces also an evolution from onemedium into another: 'Problems of modern art lead directly into film ...Cubism, Expressionism, Dadaism, abstract art, Surrealism found not onlytheir expression in films, but a new fulfillment on a new level' (HansRichter, 20), and describes its simultaneous emergence across the differ-ent arts: Dadaist poetry, Finnegan's Wake, Schoenberg, Cubist and Fu-turist painting. Thus from the very beginning of the book, LeGrice estab-lishes a cinematic essence prior even to the debut of film as a medium anddescribes the movement of its progressive refinement through the abstractexperiments of the 20's up to the present minimalist-influenced 'struc-turalist' avant-garde. LeGrice stays very much within his own definition,often eliminating films, filmmakers and movements which do not fit intothe framework of 'abstract' cinema; as he readily states, this is for him apolitical decision. He sees the first work on abstraction (Cubists, Impres-sionists) as 'opening up two significant possibilities: the first stems fromconsidering painterly form as diagrammatic rather than pictorial repre-sentation, the second from direct perceptual response to the material andform of the work as an object itself.' (15) And the result of this: 'Art,instead of representing the world, could now be a model for it, function-ing as analogy rather than imitation.' (16) Among the many artistic ex-periments described in this reconstruction of the abstract movement isViking Eggeling's attempt to arrive at a universal language of visual com-

"The numbers in parenthesis in this and subsequent sections refer to pages from the text discussedin that section.

5

6 position, a complete syntax of form-relationships. Eggeling called for a'strict discipline of the elements' (21), and said 'An is not the subjectiveexplosion of the individual, but becomes the organic language of man-kind, which must be basically free of misconceptions, clear-cut, so that itcan become a vehicle for communication.' (21) But accompanying thissystematic, almost 'scientific' abstraction is a tendency which paradoxi-cally haunts the entire history of the abstract avant-garde movement, atendency towards a strong metaphysical component. LeGrice notes theprofound influence ofKandinsky and his Concerning the Spiritual in Art(1910) on the early formal filmmakers but has no answers for the collu-sion of scienceand mysticism in the first formal avant-gardists to use themost technologially advanced equipment ever available to filmmakers:John Whitney used computers to generate meditative mandala imageryand Jordan Belson uses his sophisticated optical printing machinery tocreate cosmicimages ofhis inner religious experiences. For LeGrice it wascrucial that the abstract movement broke from the dominance of Kan-dinskyand moved towards an aesthetic of the 'finite and physical'. (84)While charting the history of this 'intrinsic' movement towards abstrac-tion, LeGrice offers simultaneously a normative definition of what newform cinema should seek-one that is 'essentially "cinematic" -notdominated by literature or theater, nor for that matter by painting ormusic.' (32) Both in trying to note this movement inherent in the med-ium and in arguing for cinematic specificity he must eliminate as notproperly within the definition some of those films which have even beenconsidered the avant-garde of cinema (Un Chien Andalou, L 'Age D'or,La Coquille et le Clergyman, etc.) They are eliminated (partially orwholly) from this evolution because of their use of 'associative', 'symbo-lic' imagery and narrative-elements always susceptible to being recu-perated and becoming no different from dominant cinema's use of thesestrategies for construction and manipulation of a passive spectator. It isonly the films or pans of the films which use 'procedure as the basis ofcontent', that is, films which 'draw attention to the material nature ofthe film itself and the images on it as a photochemical reality' (35) thatLeGricewill include in this progressive movement. LeGricespeaks severaltimes of the filmmakers' lack of awareness of their own evolutionary di-rection, and also of their techniques as being 'beyond the full grasp of theartists at that time' (48), 'a kind of path of the early filmmakers whichcan only be known to us now.' (48)

Providing some of the most crucial articulations of LeGrice's argumentis Dziga Venov whose work he seesas an exemplary solution to the ques-tion of how 'radicalism in the formal aspect of cinema can be related toradical politics ... the link between politics and the mode of perception

engendered in the film audience.' (52) Since one of the aims of the book 7is to demonstrate the intrinsic political thrust of formal cinema, the 'poli-tics of perception' (135), he insistently refers to Vertov's strategies, com-paring them to those of the formal avant-garde. Vertov is cited for pro-viding a revolutionary critique of dominant cinema and for rejecting nar-rative and fiction in his attempt to portray revolutionary daily life. ForLeGrice, all of Vertov's work focused on the relation of perception andconsciousness, i.e. the attempt to create a new revolutionary conscious-ness through extending the possibilities of perception. The entire thrustis toward creating the conscious spectator: 'the conscious alone can fightagainst magical suggestions of every kind.' ('Consciousness or Sub-Con-sciousness', Dziga Vertov, 56) The Kino-Eye can accomplish this becauseit is not a substitute for the human eye but 'a machine in its own terms

'Consciousness or Sub-Consciousness' :

'We rise against the collusion between the"director-enchanter" andthe public which issubmittedto the enchantment.The conscious alone can fight against magicalsuggestions ofevery kind.The conscious alone can form a man offirmconvictions andopinions.We needa conscious people, not an uncon-scious mass ready to yield to any suggestion. '(Dziga Vertov, quotedby Malcolm Letlrice, 56)

capable of extending or creating a new perception.' (58) Vertov's editingmakes impossible the 'passive, cathartic, emotionally manipulated modewhich is normal in the popular cinema culture.' And, 'this is further rein-forced by the direct reference to the machinery.' (60) Man with a MovieCamera is seen as a forerunner of recent films which explore self-referen-tial structures: seeing the camera, the projector, the screen, the roll offilm itself in the film can recall to the spectator the fact that s I he iswatching a film and thus of his or her own perceptual processes. Vertov'smaterialism is seen taken up by the post-war European avant-garde-'strongly anti-romantic and clearly based in the psycho-physical as mater-ial phenomena' (87), and then, since 1966, 'the formal aspect of avant-garde film has exploded to become its mainstream' (105), culminating in'an implicit search for a film which can function essentially on the pscyho-physical rather than the psycho-interpretative level.' (106) The aim ofthese films is to create an experience in which 'Action on the autonomicnervous system seeks to create a nervous response which is largely precon-

8 scious, the psychological reactions sought being a direct consequence ofphysical function.' (106) In these films, which LeGrice refers to as 'per-ception training films' , the single sort of information is that which con-cerns filmic processes, but the concern is not with an intellection of theseprocesses, a mental act involving a semantic dimension, but a direct ap-prehension: 'the primacy of current experience over the illusory or retro-spective.' As one of the most effective strategies in this attempt, LeGricecites information theory-by reducing the information within the film toan extreme degree the spectator's awareness can be focused solely ontoher or his perceptual response. Finally, LeGrice states the aim of all thisdeliberate and didactic reflexivity, this attention to the material processesof film and the changing perceptual responses of the spectator: 'to givethe spectator an affirmation of his own reality' ; and it is thus this attempt,seen as completely counteractive to the mode of popular cinema, thatrepresents 'the most advanced and radical state of cinematic languageand convention.' (153)

'Theory and Definition of Structural MaterialistFilm' (Peter Gidal)

The polemicism of Peter Gidal at the same time narrows into more precisedefinitions and expands into a set of philosophical presuppositions thehistorical descriptions and conclusions of Malcolm LeGrice. The argu-ment of Gidal resolves itself into a series of dichotomies which can beschernatized asfollows:

idealism / materialism 5

ideology/ knowledgereproduction / productionnarrative / non-narrativeillusionist time / real-timesignified / signifier

Each step of the argument pits one half of the dichotomy against theother as a polar opposite, both philosophically and politically. Just as forLeGrice, Gidal's argument turns around an analysis of the workings ofclassical film in order to posit certain avant-garde strategies as completelycounter to the classical model. Here, too, the political efficacy of thesefilms is in the construction of a self-conscious, perceptually aware specta-tor as the result of self-reflexive strategies. The first tactic of the structural /materialist film is the emptying from the cinematic signifier all semantic,associative, symbolic, representational significance. Gidal argues that anysort of representation is always susceptible to becoming naturalized bythe dominant ideology and used to manipulate the spectator. The onlyimages not susceptible to this recuperation are images of actual filimic

processes; Gidal emphasizes not representations, reproductions of these 9processes but the actual experience of the production process inscribedin the film. The viewing activity of the spectator is the deciphering, an-

'All I want anyone to get out ofmy paintings,andall I ever get out ofthem, is the fact thatyou can see the whole idea without any con-fusion . . . what you see is what you see. '(Frank Stella quoted by Peter Gtdal, 19)

ticipation, correction, clarification and analysis of this material process:'Thus viewing such a film is at once viewing a film and viewing the 'com-ing into presence" of the film, i.e. the system of consciousness that pro-duces the work, that is produced by and in it.' (2) The spectator is com-pletely prevented from any sort of identification with these films becausethey are non-narrative: 'Narrative is authoritarian, manipulative and mys-tificatory' (4) because it represses the reality of material space and timeand therefore illusionism is its only function. Instead of the illusionistictime of the narrative, Gidal offers the solution of 'real-time', in whichthe duration of the processes depicted and the time of watching the filmare absolutely homogenous. The basic unit of film will then be duration:'Point "a" to point "b" in duration as opposed to narrative.'6

Structural! materialist film is then at once object and procedure, a di-dactic aesthetic using reflexive strategies to insure a conscious spectator:'A filmic practice in which one watches oneself watching ... Filmic reflex-iveness is the presentation of consciousness to the self ... ' (10)

The Imaginary Signifier (Christian Metz)

At the center of Christian Metz's discussion of the psychoanalytic consti-tution of the cinematic signifier? he warns that the film which would aimto be a film of intervention must take into consideration the higher de-gree of imaginariness of the cinematic signifier (in comparison to thetheater, for example). Since the main thrust of LeGrice's and Gidal's argu-ments is that the structural/materialist film is constructed to eliminatethe spectator's imaginary relation to the film and to prevent identifica-tion largely through a disavowal of narrative and fiction, let us look at

'Thus as a beginning it is absolutely essentialto tear the symbolic from its own imaginaryandreturn to it as a look. To tear it from it, butnot completely, or at least not in the sense ofignon'ng it andfleeing from it (fearing it) : the

10 imaginary is also what has to be rediscoveredprecisely in order to avoidbeing swallowedupby it: a never ending task. "(Chnstian Metz, 'The Imaginary Signifier', 16)

these specificclaims in the light of the metapsychological points raised inthe article of Christian Metz' s which most directly addresses itself to theseproblems.

LeGrice and Gidal note that both the represented content and thesequential organization of film have an effect on the viewer; if one cansuccessfully eliminate a certain kind of imagery ('symbolic', 'associative'images, images which are 'representations' or 'reproductions') and a cer-tain kind ofordering ofthe images (editing which suppresses material spaceand time) then the spectator would be confronted with an image, a filmwhich would call forth a direct and conscious response, a response focusedon the subject's own act of perception. In 'The Imaginary Signifier'Metz emphasizes that what is 'characteristic ofthe cinema is not the ima-ginary that it may happen to represent, it is the imaginary that it is fromthe stan.' (48) Basicto the constitution of the cinematic signifier is that itis absent: unlike the theater in which real persons share the time andspace of the spectator, the cinema screen isalwaysthe 'other scene' , it is arecording and what it records is not there at the moment of its projection.The most basic characteristic of the cinematic signifier is that it combinespresence and absence-it is more 'there' than almost any other medium(because of its density of perceptual registers) and less 'there' at the sametime (because it is always only a replica of what is no longer there). Thiscombination of presence and absence also describes the characteristicfunctioning of the Imaginary:" according to Lacan the ego is constitutedby an image-that is, something that is a reflection (which is there) ofthe body (which is not really there 'in' the mirror). Is presenting animage of a filmic process, even the process of the 'coming into presence'

'The image is the strict reflection ofreality, itsobjectivity is contradictory to imaginary extra-uagence. But at the very same time, tbis reflec-tion is a "double". The image is already im-bibedwith subjective powers which are goingto dzsplace it, deform it, project it into fantasyanddream. The imaginary enchants the imagebecause the image is already apotentialsor-cerer. The imaginary proliferates on the imagelike its own natural cancer. It is going to crys-

tal/ize anddeploy human needs, but always in 11images. The image is the common place oftheimage andimagination. '(Edgar Morin, 'Le cinema au I'hommeimaginaire', 1956)

of the veryfilm we are watching, a wayof making that process; the imageof that process, more 'there', less imaginary (because- truly 'present'),more directly apprehendable by perception? If the cinematic signifiershares the characteristic structuration of the Imaginary, then to insist onthe presence, the 'materiality' of the image, would that not be to simul-taneously (unconsciously) insist on its absence, would it not risk movingthe imaginary quotient up yet another notch? To show the film in itsmateriality-for example to film a strip of film, or to emphasize thescreen as surface through projecting not images, but clear light onto thescreen- is to show the fum in its 'materiality' at the very moment that itis no longer film. The piece of film footage that we see is not the film, thefilm existsonly when it is projected; the empty, white screen is also notthe film, the film existsin a dialectic of image and screen-when we see ascreen, even in all its 'materiality', we are just seeing a screen. And thesame for the structural/materialist approach to demonstrating film pro-cesses-to show film in its stages of becoming a film, or disintegrating asfilm is a little like the fon-da game as described by Lacan in which thechild playsout obsessively, repetitively the concept of separation, of loss.(Another reading of this could be that of Melanie Klein's in relation tothe handling of the fetish-object: it is sometimes quasi-venerated, some-times destroyed in a constant alternation of destruction and reparation).Material 'possession' of the film is always at the price of losing the in-stance in which it is film as such. This is not to say that these strategiesinvolving the demonstration of the material processes of film are not val-uable; it is just to say that no matter how 'scientific' these experimentsmay be, they have psychoanalytic roots in a play of possession and loss.These 'materialization' strategies comprise a non-acceptance of the ima-ginary inherent to the cinematic signifier itself. The imaginary can onlybe endlessly played out, its infinite metonymy can only be stopped intofictions of materiality, never materiality itself.

Thus the cinematic signifier is imaginary in terms of its very constitu-tion as signifier. It is also imaginary, Metz argues, because the screen re-activates the mirror stage as described by Jacques Lacan (or at least theimages have their power of fascination because the subject has alreadyundergone the mirror stage). Any relation to image is imaginary, that is,since the ego itself is constituted by images (the first being the image of

12 the subject in the mirror) and all the rest of the images being doubles ofthis double, then there is no way to detach images from this fundamentalimaginary operation. (We will see later that this operation is also a rela-tion of desire. )

In specifying the imaginariness of the cinematic signifier Metz shiftsthe grounds of all previous discussionsof the processesof identification infilm, maintaining that the primary identification (primary in terms ofimportance in relation to the subject-effect, that is) is not with the char-acters on the screen but with the subject's own activity of looking. Thespectator is the constitutive instance of the film, of the cinematic signi-fier; the film would not exist without the sight (and hearing) of the spec-tator. 'In other words, the spectator identifies with himself, with himselfas a pure act of perception: as condition of possibility of the perceivedand hence as a kind of transcendental subject, anterior to every there is. '(51) If the primary identification iswith the subject's own act of perceiving,then the primary identification in film is with the camera and not withthe characters or the depicted events. It also follows from Metz's deter-mination of the act of seeing itself as the primary cinematic identificationthat the images themselves, that is, what the images depict (even whatfilmic processes they present) do not have that much to do with the fun-damental form of cinematic identification, the identification which estab-lishes the spectator as transcendental subject. Thus the avant-gardists'program of eliminating 'associative', 'symbolic', extra-referential signif-icance from filmic images (we will take up later the question of whetherthis is even possible)-Peter Gidal's example of an image-moment of aleaf which is only a leaf and nothing more-would have relatively littleeffect in terms of subverting this most fundamental identification.

As for LeGrice and Gidal's argument that it is narrative which con-structs and controls spectator identification, it is not completely sure thateven the least 'rnontaged' avant-garde films escape some of the funda-mental structures of narrative. In another text ('Metaphore / Metomyrnieou le referent imaginaire' ),9 Metz has noted that even though avant-gardefilms don't use the usual metonymic discursiveoperation of classical film,they don't completely escape this regime because they have (among otherthings) apoint-ofview in relation to a contiguous organization of images.(see also Stephen Heath's 'Narrative Space' on the primary narrative func-tion of cinema relying on the looksutured into a metonymy of images.) 10

LeGrice and Gidal also maintain that identification is eliminated intheir films because, correlatively with eliminating narrative, fiction too iseliminated, 'fiction' here meaning images, series of images which referthe spectator to an illusory elsewhere, an imaginary space rather than thematerial reality of the spectator's own space and time. When Metz says

that 'Every film is a fiction film' (47) he is not trying to say that every 13film, no matter how abstract, has the functional equivalent of a 'charac-ter' or that all films, at bottom, have a 'story'. Once again we are beingreferred back to the constitution of the cinematic signifier itself in which,as has been shown, it is always an imaginary referent since what it repre-sents is not there, thus fictive. Is it even possible to avoid the constructionof an 'elsewhere'? Isn't any art object, an process, exactly that, no matterhow minimal, no matter how little the conceptualizations structured tohappen in that space resemble a story? Even when the metonymic conti-guity of the images is designed to construct a 'specifically cinematic'space as opposed to a three-dimensional scene of classical representation,this space is never 'there' in any material way, and as soon as it is 'else-where', there is no way of controlling the interactions of the film with theprocessesof memory and fantasy (always fictional) of the perceiving sub-ject.The work of Thierry Kuntzel (especially 'Savoir, Pouvoir, Voir' and'Le travail du film, 2')11 marks out the structuring function of certainbasic fantasies in the vision of the spectator, most importantly perversion(esp. fetishism) and the primal scene. Fetishism and the primal scene arenotable for their particular imbrication of vision and fiction since boththe perversion and the primal fantasy function across the scopophilicdrive. Both the fetishistic ritual and the primal scene serve the subjectexactlyas fictions, fictions which are fabricated in order for the subject towork through / defend itself against questions at the level of sexual signi-ficance. Although these two articles address themselves to the effect ofthese fantasies on the vision of the specatator of classical film, we will seelater how these psychical structures which fictionalize the subject to him-self may be inherent in the act of vision. Thus, several times over, atseveral levels, 'Everyfilm is a fiction film.' (47)

At the level of cinema as a social institution Metz speaks of the role ofthe cinema spectator as essentially voyeuristic: participating in a form ofscopophilia not normally sanctioned by society, we sit in the theater indarkness and solitude looking towards the aperture of the screen asthrough a keyhole. This is one of the reasons why it is so startling when acharacter looks at us from the screen, catching us in our own voyeuristicactivity. As Metz points out, the cinema asan institution functions to sanc-tion this activity and film-viewing becomes authorized scopophilia, legal-ized voyeurism, desire within the limits of the law. The social situation ofthe spectator of, say, Malcolm LeGrice's Little Dog for Roger or PeterGidal's Room HIm, 1973 would be different from that of the spectator ina commercial cinema. The films are presented as near-scientific investi-gations of perceptual processes. We come to them in a more active man-ner, knowing they will be difficult, challenging, and that we are coming

14 to learn something, to be productive not passive spectators (Peter Gidalwould say for knowledge and not for ideology). Here it is not just amatter of being temporarily authorized to exercize our scopophilic plea-sure (legally yet still furtively, in the manner of classical cinema), we areasked by the films and the viewing situation to investigate and we arepromised the sanction of science. As valuable as these strategies might beon one level, they also tend to suppress a knowledge of the imaginary ofthe image by asserting the objectivity of the images and the rationality ofour relation to them.

'The Apparatus' (jean-Louis Baudry)

The previous discussion concerned recent work on the imaginary status ofthe cinematic signifier. Jean-Louis Baudry's work'? considers the imagin-arystatus of the entire apparatus, that is the cinema 'machine' which in-cludes not only the instrumental base (camera, lens, projector, etc.) butalso the subject, most importantly the subject of the unconscious, thesubject as a desiring machine without which the cinematic institutioncould not (would have no reason to) function. Baudry's article gives thesketch for an historical reconsideration of the cinema not as a machine

' ... Andherethe painting becomesthis enormousthing whichmovesThe wheelLifeThe machineThe human soul. . . . '(Blaise Cendrars, 'Constructions',1919, dedicated to FerdinandLeger)

which came into existence because 0/the state of technology at the end ofthe 19th century but as the most perfected material realization of anunconscious goal perhaps basic to the psychicalfunctioning of the humanmind-the wish to return, by simulation, to that 'other scene'. And, it isespecially through artistic practice that the unconscious proposes to haveitself represented. For Baudry all the other ans were 'dry runs' in this

'We need Cinema in order to create the total

art towards which all the others, since the be- 15ginning, have tended. '(Ricciotto Canudo, 'La tbeone des septs arts')

unconscious historical experiment to devise an apparatus which couldsimulate not 'reality' but a subject-effect or state. This state would be anartificial state of regression that would return the subject to an earlierstate of development, with its own forms of satisfaction, a state of rela-tive narcissism in which desire could be 'satisfied' through confusing realperceptions (filmic images) with representations (the subject's own endo-genous images) and then taking them for perceptions (something existing'in reality'). In dream, there are no real perceptions coming from theexterior, only the subject's own representations hallucinated as percep-tions. The impression of reality particular to this state, then, would beclosest to that of the dream-effect and would thus have the same possi-bilities for figuration and refiguration of the form of desire inherent to it.This impression of reality that the spectator has in the cinema, and theconsequent form of identification, has less to do with a successful render-ing of the real than with the reproduction and repetition of a particularcondition. a 'fantasmatization of the subject' .

Metz, then, displaces the primary cinematic identification from anidentification with the signified contents appearing on the screen to theact of perception itself; Baudry displaces the question of identificationfrom the degree of reality of the images on the screen to a more funda-mental identification with the entire apparatus. (A basic difference be-tween these positions is the more Lacanian emphasis of Metz on identifi-cation across the specular regime as opposed to Baudry's more Freudianemphasis on satisfaction through regression providing the base for theprimary identification. However, as Baudry points out in his article, theform of archaic regression that he isolates 'does not exclude other pro-cesses of identification which derive from the specular regime of the ego,from its constitution as imaginary.' (112)

LeGrice's book offers some necessary historical precisions which couldsupport Baudry's thesis in tracing the evolution of an urge to cinematicrepresentation which pre-existed cinema and found its greatest perfectionin cinema. Both authors would be able to say' ... there was never anyfirst invention of cinema.' (Baudry, 113) LeGrice documents both theecstasy of visual artists at the time, the Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealistsin discovering a medium that offered possibilities beyond what they hadbeen able to achieve in painting, and also charts this 'natural evolution'from the concerns of modern painting to film. (However it must be re-membered that although LeGricedocuments this movement, he is also a

16 part of it and has a tendency to force the idea of a natural evolution; his isa strategic reconstruction of art history according to the need to justify acertain kind offilmmaking practice as the'natural' culmination ofan evo-lution intrinsic and inevitable to the medium itself.) Therefore, bothBaudry and LeGrice would trace an evolutionary movement from paint-ing to film and within film itself: LeGrice's logic would be a formalistand idealist notion of inevitable aesthetic progress in the resolution of aseries of formal problems posed by the medium itself (see ClementGreenberg); Baudry's logic would be that of the unconscious in its suc-cessiveattempts to represent itself.

Our questions then on avant-garde strategies in relation to the func-tioning ofthe apparatus asoutlined by Baudry :

1. If the entire cinematic institution is taken in this grand historicalwish-fulfilling fantasy, if the apparatus is always already a function of thearchaic mode of identification which 'created' it and permits its function-ing, then what is the particular aspect of this wish which is fulfilled bystructural/materialist film?

2. In what ways, to what degree do the experiments of the structural/materialist filmmakers subvert this archaic form of identification?

Further on in this paper we will present a thesis in answer to the firstquestion of the particular psychical option filled by structural/materialistfilm, i.e. what son of 'fantasmatization of the subject' it creates. We willargue that rather than fulfilling a role of giving cinematic pleasure orsatisfaction (the argument of most metapsychological studies of film,however they might differ in defining this), this sort of filmmaking repre-sents an extreme form of cinema's possibilities for serving a defensivefunction for the spectator / subject. For the moment we would like to

undertake a discussion of the second question, the degree to which thetheoretical presuppositions of these filmmakers could provide strategiesfor subverting the overall functioning of the apparatus.

In The Interpretation ofDreams Freud offers an answer to the enigmaof critical feelings in dreams, that is when the thought 'this is only adream' occurs in a dream.v This moment of critical judgment, this in-stant of 'reality' in the dream, Freud claims is only a strategy to insurethat the anxiety arising in the dream is sufficiently suppressed to be ableto continue sleeping and dreaming. Baudry has made the equation ap-paratus= dream-state. Therefore like the 'rational' and 'critical' thoughtswhich occur in dreams, anything that occurs within the apparatus, forexample the images and sounds of the film, is susceptible to being 'de-secondarized', 'derationalized' and even used to contribute to maintain-ing the state of dream. And the most perfect strategy to maintain this

state: that moment of the most extreme selfreflexivity-that moment of 17insistence on the material and rational. The use of self-reflexive aestheticstrategies is almost the definition of avant-garde practice. LeGrice citesVertov's exemplary practice of showing every stage of the production of afilm, of demystifying the machinery and process, in order to reinforce theconsciousness of the spectator (59). Throughout Abstract Ftlm andBeyond, films are included or excluded to the degree to which they areproperly materialist and self-reflexive, i.e. whether or not the images showthe functioning of the camera, projector, editing equipment or use'filmic material processes' as subject matter: celluloid scratches, splicingtape marks, processing stains, finger prints, image slip, etc. Both writersrepeatedly emphasize that this sort of imagery must not be used for ex-pressive ends but must allow solely 'an awareness of the implications ofchanging forms of visual/kinetic information.' (LeGrice, 115) If we takeMetzs thesis that the primary identification is with the camera, then wemust immediately question the 'objectivity' of the strategy of showingthe spectator these 'protheses' of his own body, of his own vision: it isquite likely that this could reinforce the primary identification, which asMetz argues, is the base of the construction of a transcendental subject.At a more sociological level, we can look back into cinema history (and itspre-history) and trace our fascination with machines to record and projectimages. Beaumont Newhall's The History ofPbotograpby'» describes thefrenzy surrounding the first public presentations of photographic equip-ment and the first demonstrations of 'how-it-works'. This high pitch ofexcitement was seen again at each innovation in film technology: theinvention of sound, color, 3-D, cinemascope, etc. Films which demon-strate the possibilities of perception, in no matter how 'scientific' a frame-work, cannot help but play on this fascination. The following sectionwill suggest, following Jean-Louis Baudry, some theses on the psychicalroots of this exuberance.

Correlative with the axiom of self-reflexivity is the emphasis on thesefilms as epistemological enterprise. 'Knowledge' and 'investigation' arethe positive terms opposed to the negative ones 'ideology' and 'passivity'.However, the desire to know and to investigate are not entirely unprob-lematic: when an intellectual process is shown and examined it entersimmediately into the sexual fantasy of infantile investigation. (From amore Lacanian perspective, one could say, as P. Aulagnier-Spairani does,'Knowledge has the narrowest relation to desire and to the unveiling ofthat which is the cause of it' )15 and in their extreme form slide from epis-temology into epistemophilia (the concept denoting the perversion of thedesire to know). This perversion comprises the attempted mastery of

18 knowledge and the demonstration of the all-powerfulness of the subject.Attempted mastery of knowledge (or of desire) traps the subject in animaginary relation, an endless circle of trying to know, and since theobject of all knowing is a knowledge of desire, there is no end and no wayout: especially if the subject's aim is full knowledge. It is only in accept-ing the limits, the loss of the possibility of total mastery, that some sym-bolizing advances through this imaginary web are possible. 16

The strategies of this avant-garde cannot hope to offer means of sub-verting the apparatus if they ignore these levelsof unconscious functioning,choosing instead to work on the codes of 'conscious' reception of thefilm. The 'expanded cinema' experiments of LeGrice, Annabel Nicolson,William Raban and others could appear to be a re-thinking of the prob-lem of the place of the subject in (of) the apparatus. The entire space ofthe viewing situation is altered: multi-screen, multi-projection; often theartists place themselves between the space of the screen and the projector,interacting with both. But once again all of this effort is towards construct-ing a subject 'affirmed in his own reality', a situation in which 'onewatches oneself watching' : a construction of a conscious subject, unifiedand affirmed as the place of synthesis of all perceptions (a 'materialist'transcendental subject?). Given the level of address in these expandedcinema experiments it could be asked if they offer nothing but a multipli-cation ofeffects, all striving towards a new recentering of the subject, thistime not centered in a transcendental elsewhere but in the body of thesubject himself.

In both Baudry's earlier essay, 'Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinema-tographic Apparatus' and in 'The Apparatus' , he argues the profound linkof cinema and idealism. Both construct a subject whose function as per-ceiver and synthesizer makes him the center of a universe (because he isthe place through which all signification must pass) which he then be-lieves to have created himself and over which he believes he has ultimatecontrol. (Too, it is a philosophy of consciousness: if the subject is theorigin of all vision and knowledge then there is nothing hidden from thesubject, no possibility for a part of him which functions unknown andinaccessible to him-see Thierry Kuntzel's 'Savoir, Pouvoir, Voir' on therelations of seeing and knowing in the idealist version of vision re-enactedby the classicalfilm). In both essays, but especially in 'The Apparatus',idealism is presented as a psychoanalytic as well as philosophical pheno-menon, idealism having agreat deal to do with the desire of the subject. As aresponse to the shortcomings of reality, the subject wants to be able tochange it according to his desire. The cinematic apparatus structures for(with) the spectator a sensation of full vision ('Ideological Effects of theBasic Cinematographic Apparatus': Renaissance perspective inscribed in

the instrumental base itself) and enables a confounding of the order of 19satisfaction of desire with the order of reality ('The Apparatus': simula-tion of dream-effect where representation can no longer be distinguishedfrom perception). Much of the historical material cited in Abstract FIlmand Beyond gives support to Baudry's thesis of the inherent idealism ofthe cinematographic apparatus. What is the most important for our inter-ests is that the formal film movement in its own self-description appearsas the most extreme expression ofthis inherent idealism. Jacques Lacan'sessay 'Du regard comme object petit a'17 (wewill look more closelyat thisessay in the next section) stands as one of the most important psychoana-lytic critiques of the idealist (specifically phenomenological) notion ofvision. Lacan describes the world as 'omnivoyeuristic': 'we are looked-atbeings in the spectacle of the world.' ('Nous sommes des etres regardes,dans Ie spectacle du monde' -71) We can see only from one place,through our own eyes: we can never see ourselves from the place whereothers see us and our vision is thus always affected by the field of theother, the imagined look. The fantasy that we find in the Platonic per-spective inverts this relation: here we find an absolute being to whom istransferred the quality of all-seeing. The ability to reshape space and timein the 'cineplasties' of Elie Faure, the Kino-Eye of Dziga Vertov which ismore perfect than the human eye because it can go everywhere and seeeverything, the cinema philosophy of the Futurists: 'This is how we de-compose and recompose the universe according to our marvelous whims' ;to document the avant-garde film movement, even the most 'abstract'strains of it, is to cite the exuberance of artists who had at last found aperfect supplement to their vision, a machine-eye capable of 'remakingthe very figuration of life.' (Ricciotto Canudo)18 Popular cinema onlychained vision into outworn theatrical and novelistic forms but 'pure cin-ema', 'abstract cinema' was to be the liberation and joyful education ofvision in order to create the 'new man' of the 20th century. The rhetoricof the inheritors of this enterprise, the structural/ materialist filmmakers,is quite different from this romantic idealism. LeGrice documents amovement awayfrom the idealism of the early avant-gardists to the pres-ent 'cool' experiments and didactic exercises on human perception. Butsome striking similarities remain: the attempt to expand the capacities ofvision and knowledge of a spectator 'affirmed in his own reality', a spec-tator completely conscious of his own activities in 'producing' the film.The subject constituted by the early avant-gardists and the structural/materialists is essentially the same even if one constructs its subject in thename of a romantic humanism and the other in the name of science and'materialism'. Both play on an infantile wish to shape the real to themeasure of the subject's own boundless desire.

20 Like almost all the other writers on experimental film (David Curtis,Standish Lawder, Gene Youngblood, etc.) LeGrice emphasizes the closedependence of the avant-garde aesthetic on technological development.More so than with popular cinema, all the advances in avant-garde 'filmthought' have depended on the refinement and expansion of the techno-logical possibilities: color processing, optical printers, quality of filmstock, computers. The idealist tendency of the avant-garde could be inpart determined by this close dependency on technology for many of its

,Using war surplus anti-aircraft gun directors . . .began the construction ofan animation table,which allowedsections to rotate according to pre-programmedpatterns, transforming very sim-ple forms into complex movements similar tooscilloscope orpendulum-pantograph figures. '(John Whitney, cited by Malcolm LeGrice, 80)

advances. In 'Ideological Effectsof the BasicCinematographic Apparatus'Baudry opens the questioning of 'the privileged position which opticalinstruments seem to occupy on the line of intersection of science andideological products.' That is, the cinema, based as it is on optical equip-ment derived from science tends to treat its own technology as neutraland free from ideological inscription. Baudry argues that the idealist spec-tator is partly a construction of the Renaissance perspective of the lensitself. It is true that the majority of the structural/materialist films workagainst the centering of the spectator by the Renaissance perspective in-scribed in the physical construction of the lens. However, after makingthis (by now, automatic) critique of Renaissance representational space,the machine is often unquestioningly reabsorbed into the project to 'ex-pand' vision. LeGrice rejects vitriolically the mystical tendency in film-makers likeJordan Belson and Scott Bartlett who use highly sophisticatedtechnology to create the blend of spiritualism and science particular to

their work. He criticizes them for being regressive elements in the largertendency towards non-psychological abstraction. It could be however thatthis mystical tendency is only the logical extreme of the 'materialist'avant-garde's own unconscious direction; it is for this reason that theyreject them so violently.

The recent work of Raymond Bellour on cinema and hypnosis'?includes an investigation of the place of the camera in the imaginary andsymbolic of the late 19th and 20th centuries. He argues that machines(and particularly image-making machines) came to have the function ofan ideal ego (moi ideal), that is, an extended and perfected model of our

own capacities, which we then introject as an ego ideal (ideal du moi). In 21cinema, as in hypnosis, the introjection of the ego ideal takes over thefunction of reality testing, permitting external stimuli to be perceived asoriginating in the subject, Cinematic identification becomes a rhythm ofprojection, introjection, a constant dialectic of ideal ego / ego ideal. ForBellour, as well as for Metz, it is an unconscious identification withthe camera which creates the primary subject-effect and filmic 'fascina-tion' in general. No matter how 'aware' we are, then, of the functioningof the camera / projector in our perceptual functioning this aids us verylittle in thinking our unconscious relation to images, to the technologicalapparatus, and to the fundamental relation of the two. The structural /materialist movement seems to have taken up and synthesized both anidealism embedded in photographic and cinematographic technology it-

'We have marriedScience andArt, I mean thediscoveriesand not the givens ofScience, andthe Ideal ofArt, applying them to each otherin order to capture and fIXthe rhythms oflight, ,(Ricciotto Canudo, 'L 'usine aux images ')

self and an idealism inherited from its art-historical tradition, this lastseen in their continuation of the rhetoric of 'expanding consciousnessthrough expanding vision' of the earlier abstract filmmakers and in theirGreenbergian notion of progress-in-art as a series of solutions to formalproblems logicallyintrinsic to the medium.

,The look assmallobjecta' 0acquesLacan)

One of the most important theoretical bases for the recent metapsycho-logicalstudies of film is the work ofJacques Lacan on the imaginary con-stitution of the subjectj'The Mirror Phase as formative of the function ofthe 1'),20 and his more recent work on the specular regime (Du regardcomme objet petit a')21 : in what ways are the structures of subjectivityworked at the levelof the scopic drive? The four seminars grouped underthe heading 'The look as small object a' offer a critique of the idealistnotion of vision and project onto the act of vision itself the same dialecticof desireand lackat work in the unconscious.

For the structural/materialist filmmakers perception operates at a con-scious or perhaps 'pre-conscious' level; Malcolm LeGrice states that theaim of these films is to create an experience in which'Action on the auto-nomic nervous system seeks to create a nervous response which is largely

22 preconscious, the psychological reactions sought being a direct conse-quence of physical function.' (106)22 Except for the complicated physio-logical exigencies, they think of perception as a fairly unproblematic actand their aim is its knowledge and mastery. For Lacan the scopic drive isvery different from the other drives and the most problematic. First,Lacan makes a distinction between the eye and the look: the eye refers tothe organ and its physical functioning, and the look is a matter of thatwhich is 'always to some degree eluded' in vision. (70) The look is exactlythat which eludes us from philosophy's notion of the plenitude met bythe contemplative subject, the unified and all-seeing subject; the look is

'The function ofthe blot and the look is, atone and the same time, that which commandsthe most secretly, andthat which alwaysescapesthe grip of, that form ofvision which finds itscontentment in imagining itselfas conscious-ness. '(Jacques Lacan, Le quatre concepts fondamen-taux de la psychanalyse, 71)

,... my body simultaneously sees andis seen.That which looks at all things can also look atitselfandrecognize, in what it sees, the "otherside" ofits power oflooking. It sees itselfsee-ing; it touches itselftouching; it is visible andsensitive for itself. . . a selfthat is caught up inthings, that has afront anda back, apast andafuture .... '(Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The EssentialWritings of Merleau-Ponty)

the very inverse of consciousness. When Lacan says that "in the domainofvision small object a is the look' (97), he is attempting to describe thefunctioning of lack at the level of the scopic drive. 'Small object a' in theLacanian algebra stands for, not the object of desire itself, but the exper-ience of separation, separation from all the things that have been lostfrom the body (for example, the mother's breast which was once exper-ienced as part of the infant's body) .23 The imaginary relation itself,through which the subject becomes a subject for himself, occurs only atthe price of the subject envisaging his own body as other in the mirror;that is, the moment of the constitution of the ego is also a moment ofseparation.s' Thus Lacan can say, in relation to the domain of vision inte-grated into the field of desire: 'In the dialectic of the eye and the look,

there is no point of coincidence, only basic lure.' (94) The look is not at 23all a look that can be seen, it is a look imagined by the subject in the fieldof the other: the look concerned here is very much the presence of theother as such. That is, the determinant look is not our own (the phenom-enological notion of the intentionality of perception and the subject asmaster of the visual field) but the one from outside; this look pre-existsthe subject in the same way that the symbolic and the 'real' pre-exist thesubject's constitution through the imaginary. We think of ourselvesas thesubject of representation but within the always reciprocal (yet not sym-metrical) structure of the look we are, virtually, the object of representa-tion also. Lacan even speaks of the subject being 'photo-graphed' by theincarnated and returned light of its own look. (98) There is, then, some-thing in vision nowhere mastered by the subject: the look of the otherpre-exists the subject's look; the subject's visual field is alwaysorganizedin relation to the other's look that it is not (what Lacan calls the 'blot' (/atache» ; the relation of the look to what one wants to see is alwaysa rela-tion oflure. Certainly the subject here is not an objective subject, nor theone of reflecting consciousness, but the subject of desire.

One could say that it is not correct to criticize the structural/materialistfilmmakers for not considering the unconscious level of vision, it is not,say, the area they are 'interested in.' However one of the most empha-sized claims of these theoretician-filmmakers is that their films offer arelation to vision completely counter to that of dominant cinema; this isthe very base of their argument that their films can be politically effectivein a struggle against bourgeois ideology. Christian Metz has discussed theclose links of phenomenology and cinema (that is why, he says, up to apoint, a phenomenological description of cinema can be useful. )25 Bothphenomenology and cinema posit the subject as a pure instance of per-ception, a subject with full mastery of vision, a subject of consciousness.The premises of LeGrice and Gidal, based as they are on a denial ofunconscious processesat the level of vision, image and the apparatus, ex-tend, reinforce and finally erect into a set of theoretical presuppositionsthe idealist and phenomenological bases of dominant cinema.

The two dangers lying in wait for the subject-in-process of poetic lan-guage are psychosis and fetishism. {Julia Kristeva)26

In taking up again our question of what son of fantasmatization of thesubject the minimalist work constructs, let us first look at what fetishismin the work of an represents in this statement of Kristeva's. She sees it as'the constant screening, concealment (/a derobade) of the symbolic,paternal, sacrificial function, producing an objectification of the pure sig-nifier, more and more empty of meaning, insipid formalism. '27 Here

24 'fetishism' is not being used in the commonly accepted sense of thesexual overvaluation of an object separated from the body, but in thesense of it as a psychical mechanism for transforming signification, thereworking of the fact of castration, that is, the attempt to fantasize awhole and unified body (a basic narcissistic wish). 28 Thus, the fetish is notrelated to a thing, but involves a process, a refusal of signification oper-ated through a constant oscillation of meaning. The fetishistic disavowalrephallizes the mother in order to insure the subject of the integrity of hisown body: if the mother has the phallus, then she has alwayshad it andthe question of castration 'disappears'. These minimalist efforts, in theirattempt to strip awayall problematic significations and replace them witha hyper-rational and consciousknowledge, identify this enterprise as thecinema of the lack par excellence: it constructs emptiness and insuffi-ciency only in order to fill it. Other writers have discussed the fetishisticstructuration of classical film (Metz , Rose, Kuntzel) and others have goneso far as to equate the basic processes of aesthetic elaboration with fetish-istic operations like disavowal, doubling, condensation, displacement,metaphorical and metonymical movements (Kristeva, Heath, Rosolato).Guy Rosolato says that the work of art fascinates by keeping in play oscil-lations of signification (simultaneously establishing and effacing mean-ing), generating for us a self-representation that would be a totality of-fered as inexhaustible.e But even if fetishism is basic to an-making, thereare still degress of it and the minimalist enterprise seems to offer a partic-ularly pure and extreme example of the quest for an unproblematic cen-ter of significance, a unified and coherent subject, a position of puremastery, a phallus which is not decomposable. And, it is through thelook, that is, across the specular regime, that the subject assures himselfof the integrity of the object and thus of his own body. The minimalistfilm-work, then, serves a defensive function for the spectator, assuringthe subject control over his own body across an identification with thecamera (as carrier of his look) which then reorganizes space, time andsignification according to the needs of his own narcissism.w

A metapsychology of film must be able to account for the subject'srelation to the film in terms of both the activity and the passivity of thesexual drives. The defenses against the drives are as important as theactivity of the drives themselves and the notion of cinematic 'pleasure'will have to be complicated through an analysisof the possibilities of de-fense offered by cinema. Cinema, like perversion, offers an eroticizationof the mechanisms of defense against the drives, the object of desire andthe means of attaining it.

To say that minimalist film is the extreme example of .the fetishisminherent in cinema is to recall at the same time the ambivalent position of

fetishism in relation to the Law. (Christian Metz has said that the Law, at 25the level of cinematic signifier, is the codes.)!' The fetishist attempts tosubstitute the rules of his own desire for the culturally predominant ones;the minimalist artist wants an easily manipulable abstract set of rulescompletely void of cultural signification. The totality of the denial ofsignification tends to affirm the potency of the paternal function, thusexhibiting a very strong identification with the Law. This is the risk withany aesthetic of transgression.

In terms of a political filmmaking practice, a practice whose emphasisis on transformation rather than transgression, is there any way to elimin-ate the imaginary relation between spectator and screen? Is there any wayto systematicallysubvert this relation without ending up in the fetishisticimpasse described above? Barthes (who, like Brecht, has always been sus-picious of cinema) believes that the only solution is in 'complicating arelation with a situation' .32 There is perhaps only one way to complicatethis particular (imaginary) relation: language can offer us an obliqueroute through the image; it can 'unstick' us a little from the screen asBarthes would say. The films of Godard have systematically taken intoaccount this work of language on image, as have those of Straub andHuillet and Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen. Images have very little ana-lytical power in themselves; their power of fascination and identificationis too strong. This is why there must always be a commentary on theimage simultaneously with the commentary ofand with them.

Stephen Heath has argued that' deconstruction is clearly the impass ofthe formal device' and that a socio-historically more urgent practicewould be a work not on 'codes' but on the operations of narrativizationwhich for him means 'the constructions and relations of meaning andsubject in a specific signifying practice' We have one example of a politi-cally motivated avant-garde practice which addresses itself exactly to thisarea-the recent work of several women filmmakers focusing on feministconcerns is less a work on 'codes' and 'perceptual processes' than it is onnarrative, fiction and the construction of another subject-relation to thescreen. It is not the Modernist pressure towards finding the most 'ad-vanced' solution to formal problems which motivates filmmakers likeChantal Akerman, Marguerite Duras, Yvonne Rainer, Babette Mangolte,Jackie Raynal and others, to make films involving 'an action at the limitsof narrative within the narrative film, at the limits of its fictions of unity.'(Stephen Heath)» It is the pressure of a specific socio-historical situationwhich demands this response, a situation in which narrative and the sub-ject placement it involves is dominant; that is, narrative which reunifiesand rephallizes a spectator posed by the film as coherent and all-power-ful. The strategies of these feminist filmmakers point to a manner of re-

26 working subjectivity within an analysis of social/ sexual relations whichavoid the sorts of transgressions of the symbolic paternal function whichrisk ending in an identification with patriarchy. If filmic practice, like thefetishistic ritual, is an inscription of the look on the body of the mother,we must now begin to consider the possibilities and consequences of themother returning the look.

NOTES

1. See the bibliography following the article for the citations of thesearticles and other important contributions, especially those of JacquelineRoseand Stephen Heath.

2. Deke Dusinberre's article 'St. George in the Forest' (Aften'mage, no.6, Summer 1976) offers a good overview of the different strains of theEnglish avant-garde. According to this article, the writings of Gidal andLeGrice would not be representative of the whole English avant-gardeand Dusinberre even states that 'the theoretical ambitions of those film-makers who write about film (Gidal, LeGrice) lead to contributionswhich tend to complicate and I or obfuscate the immediate issues.' (p.17).However many of their premises are taken up throughout the English Co-op movement. For example see the new English review Readings, no.l,February 1977, edited by Annabel Nicolson and Paul Burwell.

3. Throughout Abstract Film and Beyond 'abstract' and 'formal' areused somewhat interchangeably. In the first part of the book LeGrice usesthe term 'abstract' 'very much as it has come to be generally applied tothe visual arts, implying "non-representational." , But in Chapter III hegives it a more general meaning: 'Abstract implies the separation of qual-ities, aspects or generalizations from particular interests', that is abstractart as analytic work which 'seeks to avoid representation in favor of non-referential elements.' (32)Thus a representational film (in the photogra-phic sense) could contain some 'abstract' tendencies. LeGrice says that ifit were not for the common use of 'abstract', 'concrete' would be better.

4. We realize that there is often a discrepancy between the theoreticalwritings of the filmmaker and the actual effects of the film-work. Thesefilmmakers, however, consider their theoretical writings and their theo-retical film-work to be homologous (but not identical) and the films aregenerated from their theoretical presuppositions. Our interest here is ananalysis of the limits and the possibilities of those presuppositions foroffering a theoretical matrix for a radical film practice.

5. Anne Cottringer's 'On Peter Gidal's Theory and Definition of Struc-turall Materialist Film' discusses Gidal' s use of the concept 'materialism' .

Afterimage no. 6, Summer 1976, 86-95. See also Ben Brewster's reviewof 27Structural Film Anthology, Screen, Winter 1976-77, vol.17, no.4, 117-120.

6. 'Interview with Hollis Frampton' , Structural Film Anthology, 71.

7. 'Lesignifiantimaginaire', Communications, no. 23, May 1975, 3-55;translated by Ben Brewsteras 'The Imaginary Signifier', Screen, Summer1975, 14-76.

8. Catherine Clement has given a very concise overview of the imaginaryand symbolic in Lacan's system:

'The imaginary, the symbolic and the real constitute the structure ofthe subject in Lacari's system. We will give two formulations of it, bothrepresenting what Lacan callsdiagram 1. The diagram in question dividesthe subject (S) up into four points which figure the instances which deter-mine it: 0, the Other; 0' or I, the Ego; 0, the other of the other, butunder the irreducible form of the partial object of desire (object a). Thusthe diagram in its simplified form ("D'une question prealable a touttraitement possible de la psychose" in Ecrits, 1966):

,s~ a(Mother)

Egoa~(child)I A(Father)

This structure, which allows us to disintricate the axes of the real, thesymbolic and the imaginary, must be placed in relation to the Oedipuscomplex, such as Freud extricated it, as a triangle: the father, the motherand the infant-subject between the two, for whom all the difficulty ofbeing consists in situating himself between the two parental figures. Thewhole history of the Oedipus complex occurs in this see-sawing betweenthe figures of the mother and the father; the' liquidation' of the Oedipuscomplex signifies, in a symbolic fashion, the entry into life, the end ofinfancy, the stabilization of identification. The structure of the subject asdescribed by Lacan takes up these three terms, but transforms them inadding a fourth term: the subject himself, neither father, nor infant, normother, but the structure made up of these three terms. The Other is theplace of Law, of cultural order. It is the place of the father which gives thislaw its particular figure; the partial object, called 'little a', is the place ofimpossible unsatisfying desire, of the giant body of the mother before theseparation, of her body, then, forbidden by the Law; it is very much theplace of the mother, total and partial at the same time, impossible to at-tain; finally, the 0', the place of the infant, which depends on the othertwo places. There remains the subject. It is on the side of the real, whoseentry into play appears as being excluded from the structure, or ratherforeclosed: present and determinent, but unapparent and repressed, no

28 longer there. The play of signifiers is the meeting of the two axes, imagin-ary and symbolic: the imaginary, between the place of the Ego and theplace of the object of desire; the symbolic, between the Other and theabsent subject of the combination. Thus is made precise the respectivesituations of the two instances; the symbolic is the order which establishesthe subject in language, in its language, that of its father, of his father;the imaginary is that which reflects desire in the image that the subjecthas of himself. On the side of the imaginary is variety, diversity, the mul-tiplicity of objects of desire in one's life; on the side of the symbolic isunicity, determination, the structuration of time. The imaginary, whichcomes to be hooked onto the panoply of the symbolic, lets itself be repre-sented through the metaphor of accessories: objects of disguises, 'the setof imaginary figures' , figures of theater; meanwhile the symbolic, in thepanoply, represents the support where the variables of the subject attachthemselves.' (La Psychanalyse, p.50)

The imaginary is the order of perception, whereas the symbolic is thediscursiveorder. Serge Leclaire explains the relation of the Imaginary tothe Symbolic and the Real in this way:

The experience of the Real presupposes the simultaneous use of twocorrelative functions, the Imaginary function and the Symbolic func-tion. That is Imaginary which, like shadows, has no existence of itsown, and yet whose absence, in the light of life, cannot be conceived;that which, without power of distinction inundates singularity andthus escapes any truly rational grasp. That is Imaginary which is irre-mediablyopposed or which is indistinctly confused, without any dia-lectical movement; the dream is Imaginary ... just as long as it is notinterpreted. . .. 0 symbol can do without Imaginary support. (An-thony Wilde's translation from Serge Leclaire's 'A la recherche desprincipes d'une psychotherapie des psychoses', L 'Evolution Psycbia-trique (1958) 377-411.)

Wilden adds:

The topographical regression of 'dream thoughts' to images in thedream might be described as a process of the Symbolic becoming Ima-ginary. (Anthony Wilden, The Language ofthe Self: The Function ofLanguage in Psychoanalysis, translations fromJacques Lacan with notesand commentary by Wilden (Dell: 1968) 92.)

9. In Le signifiant imaginaire : Psychanalyse et cinema, Christian Metz,1977,177-371 (10/18).

10. 'Narrative Space' , Stephen Heath, Screen, Autumn 1976.

11. 'Savoir, Pouvoir, Voir', Thierry Kuntzel, Ca Cinema, no. 7-8, May

1975,85-97; 'Le travail du film, 2', Communications, no.23, May 1975, 29136-189.

12. Baudry,Jean-Louis, 'Cinema: effects ideologiques produits par I'ap-pareil de base,' Cinethique, no. 7-8, 1970, 1-8. Published in an Englishtranslation by Alan Williams in Film Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 2, Winter1974-75, 39-47.----------, 'Le dispostif: approches metapsychologiquesde l'impression de realite,' Communications, No. 23, 1975, 56-72. Pub-lished in an English translation by Bertrand Augst as 'The Apparatus' inCamera Obscura, No.1, December 1976.

13. The Interpretation ofDreams, Sigmund Freud. (Avon Books, NewYork: 1965),526.

14. The History ofPhotography, Beaumont Newhall. (Museum of Mo-dern Art Press. New York: 1965).

15. 'Le "desir de savoir' dans ses rapports a la transgression,' Piera Au-lagnier-Spairani, L'inconscient, no. 1, January 1967, 109-125, (PresseUniversitaire de France).

16. There are also ideological reasons for this emphasis in LeGrice andGidal. Gidal takes the Althusserian dichotomy between ideology andscience even further than Althusser himself with the belief in the possi-bility of a pure (i.e. beyond ideology) scientific theory and pure practiceof that theory. LeGrice's problematic notion of "knowledge" arises froman idealist notion of history as a progressive evolution (his book charts aninevitable 'tendency' with its achievements, regressions, successes in thedirection of a greater abstraction and rationality) and a belief in techno-logy (science) as a nuetral and objective tool in helping to move from anoutmoded form ofconsciousness to a more radical (more 'aware') form ofconsciousness.

17. Le seminaire, [IX]: Les quartreconcepts fondame ntaux de la psycho-analyse,Jacques Lacan, Seuil, 1973,65-109.

18. Ricciotto Canudo, 'L'usine aux images', cited in L 'art du cinema, ed.Pierre Lherminier, (Editions Segher) 1960.

19. This work was presented in his seminar at the Centre UniversitaireArnericain du Cinema a Paris. Spring 1977.

20. 'Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je', JacquesLacan, Ecrits (Seuil) Paris, 1966, 93-100. Translated in English as 'TheMirror-Phase as Formative of the Function of the 1', New Left Review,no. 51, Sept.-Oct. 1968,71-77.

21. 'Du regard comme objet petit a,' Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire, IX:

30 Les quatres concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, (Seuil) Paris,1973,65-109.

22. There is a tendency toward a kind of pseudo-scientism in much recentavant-garde work, the artists making references to various areas of experi-mental research to legitimate their work. This tactic is a false solution tothe minimalist problem of attempting to go beyond an author-orientedaesthetic by replacing subjectivity with the 'objectivity' of science. One ofthe problems with this tendency is that it is not at all sure that the presentstate of psychophysiological research could even permit distinguishingneatly between these different levels (conscious, preconscious, uncon-scious) or be able to determine if a certain 'psychological reaction' was adirect consequence of certain 'physical actions'.

23. Lacan's explication of 'object small a' with the example of the fort-dagame:

'This spool is not the mother reduced to a little ball ...-it is a littlesomething of the subject which is detached from him while still beingvery much a part of him. This is the place to say, with Aristotle's imi-tation, that man thinks with his object. It is with his object that the in-fant leaps the boundaries of his domain transformed into holes, shaftsand with which he commences his incantation. If it is true that thesignifier is the first mark of the subject, how not to recognize here-from the single fact that this game is accompanied by one of the firstoppositions to appear-that the object to which this opposition is ap-plied in the act, the spool, is what we designate as the subject. To thisobject, we will give to it, ulteriorally, its name in the Lacanian algebra-little a.'Le Seminaire IX, 60.

24. Of course, for Lacan, if the look is taken in the same dialectic as theunconscious, then vision too is organized in relation to the insufficiencywhich is the castration complex. In this article we will not go into the (forus) problematic status of castration as the lack which retrospectively givessymbolic significance to all the other experiencesof loss.

25. 'The Imaginary Signifier', section III. 4, 'On the idealist theory ofthe cinema', 54-56.

26. 'Le sujet en proces: Ie language poetique' ,Julia Kristeva, in L'iden-tiM, (Editions Grasset & Fasquelle), 1977,238.

27. Ibid. 238.

28. The background for this discussionof fetishism in relation to film wasfirst formulated in a paper by Sandy Flitterman and myself presented inThierry Kuntzel's 'Travail du film' seminar at the Centre Universitaire

Americain du Cinema a Paris, November, 1976. 31

29. 'Difficultes a surrnonter pour une esthetique psychoanalytique', GuyRosolato, Essais sur le Symbolique, 1965, 121-128.

30. However precarious the subject's control of that experience mightactually be, asJackie Rose points out in 'The Imaginary-the InsufficientSignifier' (Seminar paper, British Film Institute Education Advisory Ser-vice, Nov. 1975). She cites Lacan for his discussion of the potential rever-sability of this situation: the subject can always be seized by the object ofhis own look, he can become the object of representation.

31. 'The Imaginary Signifier', op.cit. 15.

32. 'En sortant du cinema', Roland Barthes, Communications no.23,May 1975, 107.

33. 'Narrative Space', Stephen Heath, 109.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Augst, Bertrand, ' "The Apparatus" : An Introduction', Camera Ob-scuta, no. I, December 1976,97-101.

2. Auglagnier-Spariani, Piera, ' "Le Desir de Savoir" dans ses rapports ala transgression', L'inconscient, no 1,January 1967, 109-125 (Presse Uni-versitaire de France).

3. Barthes, Roland, 'En sonant du cinema', Communications, no. 23,May 1975, 104-108 (Seuil ).

4. Baudry,Jean-Louis, 'Cinema: effets ideologiques produits par l'appa-reil de base', Cinetbique, no. 7-8, 1970, 1-8. Published in an Englishtranslation by Alan Williams in HIm Quarterly, vol.27, no.2, Winter1974-75, 39-47.----------'Le dispositif: approches rnetapsychologiques del'impression de realite", Communications, no.23, May 1975,56-72. Pub-lished in an English translation by Bertrand Augst and Jean Andrews inandJean Andrews in Camera Obscura, no. I, Dec., 1976, 104-126.

5. Bellour, Raymond, 'Le cinema et l'hypnose', unpublished work pre-sented his seminar at the Centre Universitaire Americain du Cinema,Paris, Spring 1977.

6. Brewster, Ben, review of Structural Film Anthology, Screen, winter1976-77, vol. 17, no.4, 117-120.

7. Canudo, Ricciotto, 'L'usine aux images', L 'art du cinema, Pierre Lher-

32 minier, 1960 (Editions Seghers).

8. Clement, Catherine, 'L'imaginaire, Iesymbolique et le reel', La Psych-analyse, Catherine Clement, Francois Gantheret, Bernard Merigot, 1976(Larousse).

9. Cottringer, Anne, 'On Peter Gidal' s "Theory and Definition of Struc-tural/ Materialist Film" ',Afterimage, no.6, Summer 1976, 86-95.

10. Dusinberre, Deke , 'St. George in the Forest', Afterimage, no.6, Sum-mer 1976.

11. Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation ofDreams, 1965 (Avon).

12. Gidal, Peter, Structural Film Anthology, 1976 (British Film Insti-tute ).

13. Heath, Stephen, 'Lessons from Brecht', Screen, vol. 15, no. 2, Sum-mer 1974, 103-129.---------- 'Film and System, Terms of Analysis, Part 1',Screen, vol. 16, no. 1, Spring 1975, 7-78. 'Film and System, Terms ofAnalysis, Part II', Screen, vol. 16, no. 2, Summer 1975, 91-114.----------'Narrative Space', Screen, vol. 17, no. 3, Au-tumn 1976,68-112.

14. Kristeva, Julia, 'Le sujet en proces: le langage poetique', in L'iden-tite, 1977, 225-255 (Editions Grasset & Fasquelle)

15. Kuntzel, Thierry, 'Savoir, Pouvoir, Voir', ya Cinema, no. 7-8, May1975, 85-97,----------'Le travail du film, 2', Communications, no 23,May 1975, 136-189.

16. Lacan, Jacques, 'Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonctiondeJe', Ecnts, 1966,93-100 (Seuil). Translated in English as 'The MirrorPhase as Formative of the Function of the "I" " New Left Review, no. 51,Sept. -Oct. 1968.----------'Du regard comme objet petit a', Le seminaire(IX) : Les quatres concepts fondamenteaux de la psychanalyse, 1973, 65-109 (Seuil).

17. Le Grice, Malcolm, Abstract Film and Beyond, 1977, (Studio Vista,England). Simultaneously published in the United States at M.LT. Press.

18. McCabe, Colin, 'Realism and the Cinema: Notes on some Brechtiantheses', Screen, vol. 15, no.2, Summer 1974.

19. Metz, Christian, 'Le signifiant imaginaire', Communications, no. 23,May 1975, 3-55. Translated in English by Ben Brewster as 'The ImaginarySignifier' in Screen, vol. 16, no.2, Summer 1975,14-76.---------- 'Le film de fiction et son spectateur', Commun-

ications, no. 23, May 1975, 108-135. Translated in English by Alfred 33Guzzetti as 'The Fiction Film and it's Spectator' in New Literary History,Autumn, 1976,75-105.---------- 'Le sigmfzant imaginaire: Psychanalyse et cin-ema, 1977, (10/ 18)

20. Newhall, Beaumont, The History ofPhotography, 1964, (Museumof Modern Art).

21. Rose, Jacqueline, 'The Imaginary-The Insufficient Signifier', Bri-tish Film Institute Educational Advisory Service Seminar Paper, Novem-ber 1975.---------- 'Paranoia and Film System' , Screen, vol. 17, no.4, Winter 1977,85-105.

22. Rosolato, Guy, 'Difficultes asurmonter pour une esthetique psychan-alytique ', Essais sur le symbolique, 1965, 121-128 (Editions Gallimard).---------- 'Perversions sexuelles', Encyclopedie Medico-Chirurgicale, 37392 Alo-37392 ClO (Paris).

23. Wollen, Peter, 'The Two Avant-Gardes', Studio International, Nov.-Dec. 1975,77-85.