The ultimate journey: remarks on contemporary theory. Nicole Brenez Ultimatum: an introduction to the work of Nicole Brenez Adrian Martin Uploaded 22 December 1997 | 1,670 words
In 1955, Jacques Rivette wrote: "It seems to me impossible to see Voyage to Italy [Rossellini, 1953] without receiving direct evidence of the fact that the film opens a breach, and that all cinema, on pain of death, must pass through it".(1) The history of high level, theoretically-informed film criticism (and perhaps especially French criticism) contains many such ultimata: moments when a writer feels compelled, on the evidence of an unexpected experience at the movies, to declare a decisive sea-change in cinema, an outbreak of modernity, a new 'crest line' of radical achievement, an emergent kind of purity that instantly surpasses everything hitherto seen.	(1) "Letter on Rossellini", trans. Tom Milne, in Jonathan Rosenbaum (ed.), Rivette: texts and interviews (London: British Film Institute, 1977), 54.
Nicole Brenez has written on many kinds of films and filmmakers - from Buster Keaton and horror cinema to "Godard and byzantine philosophies of the image"(2) - but there is something of the urgency of an 'ultimatum' animating her work, also. She is not, in a strict sense, a film theorist - she attends to theory in the following essay "in so far as it informs experience, as it matters to me and as I have need of it" - but then, who is a strict film theorist in these post-Metz years? Like many of the colleagues whose work informs Brenez's - such as Raymond Bellour, Alain Bergala and Charles Tesson - theoretical reflections arise from the work and pleasure of viewing, analysis, comparison, writing: the decisive moments when the cinema itself leads theory, and gives rise though its inventions, innovations and surprises to new thoughts. It is one history of such moments, beginning at the start of the 1980s, which Brenez sketches in "The ultimate journey". Moments that include not only new work (such as the telecast of Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma series, beginning in 1989) but the forcible rediscovery of old work: Tod Browning's Freaks (1932), the weird oeuvre of Sacha Guitry, or - as ever - Rossellini.(3)	(2) "Le film 'abyme'", in Jean-Luc Godard au-delà de l'image, Études Cinématographiques, no. 194/202 (1993). (3) Brenez has written on "Le project télévisuel de Roberto Rossellini", CinémAction, no. 57 (October 1990); "Une économie du geste. Sur les Fioretti de Roberto Rossellini", Cahiers philosophiques, no. 62, CNDP (March 1995); and most recently on India ("Déclasser [hommes, femmes, animaux: les espèces dans India"], forthcoming).
In Brenez's account, 1980 loosely marks the beginning of a new period in this practical activity of French film theorising. She by no means dismisses or discounts the importance of the structuralist and post-structuralist periods of the 1960s and '70s that are marked by Christian Metz and his contemporaries - part of her own academic training was in the literary post-structuralist school. But, in a sense, Brenez's story begins at the point where post-structuralism, having allowed an important way of thinking about cinema to emerge, also reached its limit, even its impasse. The entire semiotic enterprise (across all fields) allowed us to think the autonomy of signifying, textual systems. It allowed us (as Brenez might put it) to grasp the radical degree of the break between aesthetic, formal works and the 'real' to which they refer.
For Brenez, the act of understanding and internalising this 'epistemological rupture' - being able (in a sense) to take it for granted - has enabled a generation of film scholars to embark on a full-scale theory of 'figuration'. In a figural model (Brenez's doctoral thesis was devoted to the 'figural problems' posed by another breach-like work in cinema history - Godard's Le mépris, 1963), the cinema leaves behind its last vestiges of mimesis, copying, or resemblance to the real: the cinema traces, figures, weaves ex nihilo its fully imaginary, endlessly renewed repertoire of spaces, places, movements, gestures, worlds and bodies.(4) This 'going all the way' with figuration is the impulse that Brenez sees inaugurated in the writing of Jean-Louis Schefer - because he "completely reconsidered the question of analogy" in cinema. Zeroing in on the constitutive, fundamental oddness, even monstrosity, of cinematic bodies - these bodies superhumanly large and strong or pitifully tiny and abject in relation to our own, this panorama of truncated limbs, wheezing apparatuses and twitching muscles in search of a coherent expression or identity - Schefer's powerfully eccentric meditation corrodes all of our common-sense, facile assumptions about analogical resemblance in film. And thus a 'breach' is opened in our practical theory of cinema.	(4) It is worth pointing out that Brenez's figurative model is - at least in the first instance - a formal and aesthetic one. Thus, it bears little similarity to the understanding of figurality proposed in English-language film theory by D. N. Rodowick in a series of essays, such as "Reading the Figural", Camera Obscura, no. 24, (September 1990): 10-45. Brenez owes more to Lyotard's work on the plastic arts (for example in Discours, figure, 1971, or in English, the collection Driftworks, Semiotext(e), 1984) than to the more situationally and socially centered model that Rodowick derives from Foucault and Deleuze.
Exploring this breach, Brenez's ongoing examination of filmic figuration - whose action she has traced in auteurs as diverse as Abel Ferrara, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Philippe Garrel and John Cassavetes - is uncommonly dynamic (as well as systematic - the notion of a film-text as an ensemble, a multi-layered whole, is crucial in "The ultimate journey"). She stresses qualities of energy and plasticity, and finds everywhere dramatic points of transference, reversal, renewal or ruination. And her analytic imagination is clearly excited by films that, on some level of their form-content matrix, enact or trigger some auto-reflection on the problems of figuration: films about performance (acting or musical performance, from Shadows [1960], The killing of a Chinese bookie [1976]and Opening night [1977] to Reservoir dogs [1992], Snake eyes [1993] and Les baisers de secours [1989]); about birth and death or creation and destruction; or - at a more buried, abstract but no less powerful level - about the philosophical and anthropological problems of 'classification' or categorisation, that is, how films navigate the treacherous ground of deciding or demarcating what is 'human' from what is variously animal, alien, monstrous or non-human (a fertile drama she has traced in films from King of New York (1990) to India (1958) via the bodily transformations of Lon Chaney). This is slippery figural territory, indeed, and its inherent confusion and dynamism gives a vivid life to the highest works of avant garde cinema and the lowliest, trashiest works of popular, pulp cinema alike.
And yet, the inter-linked, ongoing projects of film theory and critical analysis cannot merely stop at the acknowledgment of the 'figural revolution' and the imaginative freedom it brings. The post-structuralist researches of the 1970s eventually allowed such an insight, but they could not further it. I am reminded of a review in Cahiers du Cinéma by Pascal Kané in 1973. Having scanned the tightly coherent and intricate textual systems of Billy Wilder's Avanti! (1972), Kané tried turning his attention to 'the real', seemingly so far in the distance, and grimly mused,"perhaps we should stop considering the referent as simply a grain of sand" in the textual mechanism.(5) And this is the second movement, the next and greater challenge, that Brenez traces in the writing and teaching of the 1980s after the upset caused by Schefer: how to reconnect figural texts with the tides, factors and calamities of real history? Once we have demolished all those simplistic notions of analogy and resemblance, of film as mere mirror or reflection, where and how do we situate the mutual action of film-forms and historical forces?	(5) Pascal Kané, "Sur Avanti", Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 248 (September 1973): 48.
We should not overlook the importance of the fact that, for all its dazzling, figural brilliance, Brenez's work is also anchored in a profound interest in anthropology and ethnography, in the being and presence of the human body, in everyday movements and gestures and their radical transformation or re-invention within a work of art. Like Serge Daney or many of her contemporaries the world over, she is committed to defining "a type of Bazinian exigency maintained in the heart of a type of non-Bazinian analysis that no longer takes the real as second nature or as the second nature of film".(6) In her introduction to the script of Cassavetes' A woman under the influence (1974), for instance, she begins with a reflection on "the plasticity of creatures" as mobilised by "the figurative powers of the cinematograph": "Certain very simple acts ... remain absolutely incomprehensible". But, at the same time, "inversely, certain very difficult and delicate phenomena, or those among the most ancient in the history of representations, are made the object of a resolutely clear treatment".(7)	(6) See the round-table discussion, "Movie Mutations", featuring Brenez, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Kent Jones, Alex Horwath, Raymond Bellour and myself in Trafic, no. 24, (December 1997). (7) "Die for Mr Jensen", L'Avant-scène Cinéma, no. 411, (April 1992): 1-4. My translation.
This passage hints at something of the ethical drive behind Brenez's investigations into the inscrutable mysteries of identity, history and politics as both complicated and illuminated by the work of film. From the semiotic era, Brenez takes on the irreducible heterogeneity of the film-text, with all its gaps and multiplicities, bits and pieces, levels and interferences, monstrosities and phantasms; but in an age where we look for some clarity, some faith, some dearly-won, fragile article of civilisation, she also looks for a fragment of common ground. "The subject of the cinema", she writes near the end of "The ultimate journey", "prefers to verify that something else is still possible (a body, a friend, a world)". Which is its own kind of ultimatum for today, but a gentle one. Godard's words from the 1980s still hold good, and maybe even true: "There is the goodwill for a meeting: that's the cinema".(8)	(8) Quoted by Berenice Reynaud, Afterimage [USA] (January 1986).

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