Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz - Essay Example

Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz Using the concept of suture, film theory explains narrative closure not just in terms of the film and its formal construction, but rather as a process of drawing in and enclosing the viewing subject in the film's textual system. The filmic concept stems from Lacan's account of how in the individual psyche a coherent, unified subject is "sutured" within a symbolic order structured by desire and governed by language. By applying this basic operation of identity formation to the cinematic apparatus, psychoanalytical approaches to cinema have provided insight into the emotional and psychological processes that motivate the spectator's investment in a narrative. Beginning with Jean-Pierre Oudart's article "La suture," (Oudart 1969, 35-47) the writers associated with Cahiers du Cinema first introduced suture into film theory. In the mid-'70s, the concept began to play a major role in the theoretical discussions in Britain and North America, with the result that psychoanalytical studies of the viewing subject have proliferated. In my reading of Wings of Desire, I borrow from several theoreticians of suture, including some who have been at odds with each other concerning the scope and consequence of this concept. Although my reading of Wings of Desire certainly owes much to the French scholars, claims I make concerning Wenders' film run counter to the original polemical thrust of their work. For them, suture denotes the operation by which cinema encloses the subject in ideology. Their analysis bears primarily on dominant Hollywood cinema, and they restrict the scope of suture to the ideological effacement of the cinematic code. They are reductive as well with respect to the semiotic system of suturing, positing at times the shot/reverseshot system or point-of-view cutting as the fundamental cinematic articulation of suture. Other French film theoreticians who complement a general semiotics of cinema with Lacanian notions of the subject and signification, such as Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry, have avoided such a rigid application of suture to the cinematic apparatus and, nevertheless, have arrived at the even more pessimistic conclusion that cinema itself functions as a support and instrument of ideology. (Metz 1974, 39-47) Anglo-American film scholars have expanded on these psychoanalytical theories of cinema without sharing their negative assessment of the basic cinematic apparatus. (MacCabe 1977, 48-76) However, such challenges to the original French position on cinema and ideology have pertained for the most part only to films that resist closure and foreground lack and alienation. Thomas Elsaesser's 1980 article on Fassbinder is an important example of such criticism in the area of German cinema. Focusing on Fassbinder, but also claiming relevance for New German Cinema in general (mentioning by name Herzog, Wenders, Syberberg, and Kluge), Elsaesser responds to the more radical conclusions drawn by Baudry and Metz. He rejects their implication that "the cinema is indeed an `invention without a future' because it systematically ties the spectator to a regressive state, in an endless circuit of substitution and fetishization." (Elsaesser 1986, 537) Nevertheless, suture as well as narrative closure of any kind has remained ideologically suspect. Wings of Desire provides, I think, an excellent opportunity to re-examine this bias that, in the wake of Oudart and his successors, persists against identification and narrative (closure). In the discussion of suture, the emphasis has been on processes of identification that position the viewing subject within the filmic discourse so as to conceal enunciation. For this reason, theoreticians of suture have focused heavily on classical editing strategies. The term itself is particularly well suited to dominant cinematic narrative because the filmmaker, at least in most productions of dominant cinema, stitches together a series of partial disclosures with the intention of concealing their discontinuity and disjuncture. On one hand, the camera is unable to disclose the desired perspectives on the story without cutting and splicing, but the cuts also intentionally limit the camera's potential to "see." The constant breaks in the camera's vision produce subliminal anxiety and stir a longing in the spectator to see more, to have more disclosed. The subject, made aware of its inadequacy, seeks a secure position in the filmic discourse that conceals the lack. (Silverman 1983, 201-06) As the basic operation of subject formation in the individual, suture is always occurring in the viewing subject and thus within the cinematic apparatus that envelops the spectator. [1] However, I propose to show that the textual system in Wings of Desire sets the conditions for suture differently than do narrative films of dominant cinema. Not only is the investment of desire motivated less by lack and anxiety, but when narrative closure occurs, the sutured subject maintains more autonomy from any invisible, transcendental Other that controls the powers of enunciation. As is usually the case in Wenders' films, in Wings of Desire the camera follows, at least during the black-and white part of the film, the protagonist, and in this case both the main figure Damiel and, to a lesser extent, his companion angel Cassiel. Because the protagonists are angels, Wenders had to establish a radically new point of view for the camera, one unique not only to his own work but to cinematic narrative in general. Locating the camera as the eye of an angel presented constant challenges during the shooting and resulted in innovative solutions, particularly in terms of the camera movement, which was to give the illusion of unlimited movement through space and time. [2] It also altered dramatically the emotional interaction between the spectator and the film. Instead of intentionally arousing anxiety, the film put the spectator at ease. In part, the camera's consistent look from the point of view of the angels created this effect, but Wenders has maintained that even more important than all the camera movement was the effort to create a benevolent look ("einen liebevollen Thick") for the eye of the camera. [3] On another level, the angels' point of view limits the system of interdiegetic looks in a way that enhances the viewing subject's sense of security. The initial shot/ reverse-shot sequence occurs with Damiel, complete with wings, standing on the tower of the Gedachtniskirche. From his perspective, we see a young girl below who has stopped in the middle of the crowded crosswalk and is looking up at him, while the adults go about their business without seeing him. This shot and the subsequent ones of the two girls on the bus and the child on the airplane establish that the protagonist is invisible except to children and angels. The unthreatened and unthreatening looks that the children direct at the angels, many of them straight into the camera, mirror the benevolence in the look of the angels. The limited visibility of the angels exposes the viewing subject, which has assumed Damiel's point of view, only to such harmless looks, sheltering it from the often critical or even malicious looks of mature humans. Moreover, after this first shot/ reverse-shot that establishes the visibility of the observer angels, Wenders avoids point-of-view cutting for the black-and-white part of the film in which Damiel remains an angel. The technical measures needed to establish the camera as the eye of the angels contribute to the spectator's feeling of security but also create a unique relationship between the viewing subject and the transcendental point of view that unifies the images into a "film." Baudry argues that the relationship between the camera and the subject determines the nature of the transcendental self, [4] that illusory unity in a filmic discourse that constitutes the spectator as a coherent "subject" in its own image. In dominant cinema, the cuts between different points of view are pieced together so as to generate an "ideal picture" [5] of the film as reality. In Wings of Desire, Wenders shot predominantly from a single point of view, employing long takes and extensive camera movement to establish the narrative space normally achieved by editing together different point-of-view shots. Although the beginning scenes clearly align the spectator with Damiel's point of view, the film offers at the same time a degree of freedom to go along with this identification. With the aid of Henri Alekan, the octogenarian cinematographer who cut his teeth in the '20s working with Eugene Schufftan, Wenders produces a free-floating camera, a modern version of "the unchained camera" ("die entfesselte Kamera") introduced by F. W. Murnau. (Murnau 1973, 62-67) In the sequence that begins in the airplane, Wenders utilizes the mobile camera to establish the angelic point of view of the protagonist. From the aisle of the airplane approaching Berlin, the camera assumes Damiel's point of view as he turns away from the passengers to look out the window of the plane. After an aerial shot of Berlin, the camera frees itself from the confines of the plane, moves through the clouds, passes the radio tower looming over Berlin, picking up a few seconds of the broadcast as it passes, and descends across the freeway toward the adjoining apartment buildings. The illusion of no physical limitations clearly identifies the camera lens with the vision of angels. As the camera moves freely through the walls of the apartments, the motion remains fluid and seamless, even when the rooms are obviously not next to each other. Throughout the film, the camera moves with the spatial--both vertical and horizontal--and temporal freedom of the ethereal angels. It ascends effortlessly onto Victoria's winged shoulder atop the Siegessaule and on into the skies above Berlin; it travels back into time with Damiel and Cassiel to view the prehistoric Berlin landscape; and it traverses the physical but also psychic barrier that splits apart the divided Hauptstadt of the German nation. The very nature of the angelic point of view already implies in itself the transcendental position that in dominant cinematic discourse must be sutured out of the successive moments of shot/reverse-shot sequencing in point-of-view cutting. From the beginning, the spectator identifies "primarily" [6] with the transcendental point of view secured for it, assuming at times a perspective identical to Damiel's, at other times one similarly defined but independent of his. The moment of lack, the knowledge that the camera perspective implies an "Absent One" that must appear in the frame (e.g., in the reverse-shot) in order to suture over the absence, is thus minimalized in Wings of Desire. The conscious assumption of the angels' point of view reduces the need for successive, complementary shots. In fact, the elated feeling gained in the most fluid moments of the unchained camera recall Oudart's equation of the initial shot, prior to the awareness of the restricting frame-lines, with "the field of jouissance." [7] Particularly the initial sequences of the angels' movements give the sense that such framing lines do not exist or are continually receding away from the look of the spectator. Yet, even if the Absent One loses its power over the viewing subject, other dominant forms of secondary identification take hold and provide positions of representational unity. British and American theoreticians, building on the work of the French, have analyzed how film narrative sutures over the lack and inadequacies that surface in the viewing subject. [8] Kaja Silverman describes how the gaze of the spectator tends to link itself to the look of a fictional character that promises more control over the fragmented series of images. Typically, one or more fictional characters within the diegesis are endowed with the controlling and enunciating powers of the Other outside the fiction, so as to provide an anchor for the spectator's point of view and, also potentially, to conceal the enunciating moment outside the film. Usually when the spectator seeks out a figure in the diegesis with enunciatory, controlling powers for a "stand-in" relationship, he/she relinquishes to some extent the authority to organize and structure the film images into a story. [9] In Wings of Desire, the viewing subject clearly situates itself parallel to Damiel and Cassiel. The angels lack, however, precisely that power of authorship and enunciation that characterizes the typical "stand-in" point of view. In the first dialogue between Damiel and Cassiel, they pull out their notebooks and exchange recent observations on out-of-the-ordinary, yet uneventful occurrences in Berlin: "An der U-Bahn-Station Zoo rief der Beamte stats des Stationsnamens plotzlich das `Feuerland' aus! . . . Eine Passantin, die mitten im Regen den Schirm zusammenklappte und sich naBeta werden lieBeta . . . Ein Schuler, der seinem Lehrer beschrieb, wie ein Farn aus der Erde wachst, und der staunende Lehrer ...." (Wenders 1987, 19) Because these simple events are defamiliarized and are made to stand alone outside of their normal context in everyday existence, each points to a whole life story of epic proportions that lies behind it. But the angels can only observe and record them as isolated incidents and are unable to place them in a larger narrative context in which they would gain a particular significance. As angels, they are endowed with a universal vision of human existence in the present and back into the past, but they lack a past of their own and thus any individual investment in the future. They can neither write history nor tell stories. While Damiel, who is beginning to feel the pull of existence, bemoans this, Cassiel accepts it as their place in the world: Damiel: Es ist herrlich, nur geistig zu leben und Tag fur Tag fur die Ewigkeit von den Leuten rein, was geistig ist, zu bezeugen--aber manchmal wird mir meine ewige Existenz zuviel. ( 19) . . . Cassiel: Allein bleiben! Geschehen lessen! Ernst bleiben! Wild konnen wir nur in dem MaBeta sein, wie wir unbedingt ernst bleiben. Nichts weiter tun als anschauen, sammeln, bezeugen, beglaubigen, wahren! Geist bleiben! Im Abstand bleiben! Im Wort bleiben! ( 21) They exist detached from mankind without any stake in what happens ("unbedingt"). Nor can they influence human life ("Geschehen lessen!"), except for their ability to offer a modicum of consolation. Fixed in this form of existence, they lack in every sense the controlling voice and power of the author. As long as the camera maintains strictly the angels' point of view, the viewing subject retains a certain amount of autonomy from the narrativization process. Wings of Desire fosters this sense of autonomy in the spectator by delaying narrative closure until the viewing subject has learned to relish its maneuverability and depend on its own faculty for creating stories. Because the primary forms of identification discussed above quell the anxious urgency to be sutured within a closed narrative, the spectator can revel in the fragmentary open scenes as the camera moves through Berlin, picking up seemingly arbitrary moments of everyday life as well as snippets of interior monologue. Nevertheless, the spectator tends to become irritated as this free-floating position, without anchor in a controlling narrative, persists. This does indeed occur, I think, in the first third of the film. The spectator conditioned by dominant cinema becomes restless, impatient for the narrative control to assert itself. In this way, the film arouses in the viewing subject a desire for narrative, which it then foregrounds in the story of Damiel's entry into human existence. Thus, with respect to the spectator's expectations and desires, the sense of autonomy from narrative is an illusion from the beginning. Notes [1.] In his comments on Oudart and Jacques-Main Miller in Screen, Stephen Heath made this point as well: "To say that the system of suture is a particular logic, a writing, is not, however, to say that cinema could be articulated as discourse outside of any suture," "Notes," p. 68. One should add to Heath's statement that to say that the system of suture (in cinema) is "a particular logic, a writing," does not say that it includes only one form of writing. That is, it would be a mistake, one I think that Oudart makes, to place the "logic" of suture in cinema on the same plane with the general logic of the signifier described by Miller. For the system of suture in cinema includes numerous variable factors that structure and alter the "sutured" discourse. [2.] Wenders talks about the camera movement in the interview with Paneth, 5. [3.] Kunzel, Wim Wenders, pp. 214-15. [4.] Baudry, "Ideological," pp. 45-46. [5.] Stephen Heath, "Narrative Space," Screen 17.3 (1976): 95. [6.] The distinction between "primary" and "secondary" identification alluded to here stems from Lacan's account of subject formation in the infant. Baudry applies the distinction to the way that the viewing subject identifies with the image in cinema ("Ideological," p. 46) and Metz discusses it in more detail (pp. 54-56). In their theories, primary identification refers to an identification attached to the image itself, whereas in the secondary phase identification shifts to the transcendental subject that stages the succession of film images. Neither they nor subsequent critics who speak of "primary" processes of identification would apply this term to the identification with a specific point of view created by the camera or the narrative space of the film. But because of the close correspondence of the angels' point of view with the camera in Wings of Desire, it is, I think, appropriate to make the correspondence between the two stages of subject formation and the points of view assumed by the viewing subject. [7.] Oudart, "Cinema," p. 41. [8.] Heath, "Narrative Space"; MacCabe, "Theory and Film"; and Kaja Silverman in her chapter "Suture" in The Subject of Semiotics. [9.] Silverman, Subject, pp. 204 06 and 231-32. References Elsaesser, Thomas, "Primary Identification and the Historical Subject: Fassbinder and Germany," Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 537. MacCabe, Colin, "Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure," Screen 17.3 (1976): 7-27; Heath, "Notes on Suture," Screen 18.4 (1977-78): 48-76. Later writings that have influenced my use of the concept of suture will be documented later in context. Metz, Christian, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). Two important works by Baudry in translation are Jean-Louis Baudry, "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus," Film Quarterly 28.2 (Winter 1974-75): 39-47 Murnau, Lotte H. Eisner., The Last Laugh. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 62-67. Oudart, Jean Pierre, "La Suture," Cahiers du Cinema 211 and 212 (April and May 1969); Oudart's article appeared in English translation as "Cinema and Suture," Screen 18.4 (1977-78): 35-47 Silverman, Kaja., The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 201 06. Wenders, Wim and Peter Handke Der Himmel uber Berlin. Ein Filmbuch (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987) p. 19. Hereafter cited in the text. Read More