Nonrelation

In the history of film studies, the question of the relationship between cinema and politics has generated a wide array of critical discourses, testifying not only to the rich complexity of the topic of political cinema but also to the volatility of a term like “political cinema” in the first place. Whether made explicit or not, the shared assumption of most of these discourses on political cinema is that there exists a certain correspondence between the domains of cinema and politics. Notwithstanding the occasional noise or interference, the two terms are assumed to communicate, and political cinema is the name of this communication. Political cinema therefore signals above all the existence of a relationship between cinema and politics, which in some cases is conceived as a simple mirroring and in others as a more complex and mediated interaction.

This book begins from a contrary assumption, setting out from the idea that the term “political cinema” points not to a relation but rather to a nonrelation between politics and cinema. Political cinema designates not a positive presence but its opposite: the negativity of an obstacle that prevents us from simply assuming the existence of a transitivity between politics and cinema. To borrow a term coined by Jacques Derrida, political cinema refers us to an aporetology, or a study of the way in which political cinema comes into existence as an aporia. Etymologically, aporia is a site of nonpassage between two domains (from the Greek word aporos, “without passage,” “impassable”).1 At its most basic level, starting a discussion of political cinema from this nonpassage means positing that political cinema names first and foremost a problem, a difficulty or resistance, that cuts through the aura of apparent self-evidence that has historically enshrouded the designation.

As we outline the contours of the aporetic aspect of political cinema, it is important to bear in mind that the obstacle presented by the aporia cannot simply be ignored or bypassed; nor can it be likened to a definitive dead end. If the latter were the case, we would be forced to postulate an absolute reciprocal autonomy between cinema and politics.2 But what if political cinema is neither the proper name of an entity grounded in the relation between cinema and politics nor a mere sophism that muddies the waters, obscuring the fact that cinema and politics are completely independent from each other? I propose to look at political cinema as a problem that neither a theory of transitivity nor one of autonomy can fully solve. In fact, what political cinema names is an aporia, a lack of a passageway between its two domains that must nevertheless be traversed.

The existence of a nonrelation does not automatically translate into the fact that no link whatsoever can be constructed between cinema and politics. Rather, it means that the nonrelation is the condition that makes possible and structures any improvised attempt at a linkage. In her discussion of the concept of aporia in Plato’s dialogues, Sarah Kofman argues that any aporia must be understood dialectically, for although it certainly marks a nonpassage, it also elicits a desire to overcome its impassability. Irreducible as it is to a simple paralysis, the aporia for Kofman (and Plato) is configured as a productive negativity: there is no way around this obstacle (so it cannot be ignored), but the disorientation the aporia generates becomes the spur to find a way—a passage, a poros—through it. In Greek mythology, Poros is the son of Metis, and Kofman observes that this kinship connects the idea of passage (poros) to a certain guileful wisdom, flexible and effective (metis, of which Odysseus’s cunning would be the prime example). Specifically, poros in Greek refers to a sea route, a passage opened by the sailors’ metis across the tumultuous vastness of the sea: “In this infernal, chaotic confusion, the poros is the way out, the last resort of sailors and navigators, the stratagem which allows them to escape the impasse and the attendant anxiety.”3 This anxiety is the dialectical pivot of the aporia. It denotes a state of suffering (aporia is anxiety producing), but because this situation is untenable, it incites one to devise a way out. However, any attempt to cross the “infernal, chaotic confusion” is necessarily tentative and singular. Nothing guarantees in advance the viability of a certain poros, which “has to be found anew each time, in each case. It has to be traced, woven, in some new way, and that involves an element of risk.”4 Improvisation is of the essence: to figure out a way across the sea, one sets sail and invents the route as one goes. Charting a passage through an aporia thus always involves a wager that exceeds any assurance of success that the general objective coordinates of the situation might provide. It is only at the end of the journey, on the other side of the wager, that the correctness of the poros can be adjudicated.

In this sense, the films that constitute political cinema are a multitude of poroi. Each finds a singular way to traverse the nonrelation between cinema and politics—a nonrelation that, however, is never solved once and for all. Yet this does not translate into a pure plurality either. The films do not experience the luxury of unimpeded becoming, forever anchored as they are in the aporia that made them possible in the first place. Because the nonrelation between cinema and politics cannot be ignored or finally solved, individual films can only experiment and improvise with this nonrelation. Political cinema thus comprises a nontotalizable set of attempts at crossing the aporia.

In the history of film studies, this aspect has often been overlooked. Italian film scholar and critic Alberto Farassino appropriately called political cinema a fetish category (categoria-feticcio).5 True to the nature of the fetish, it presents itself as an object on which desire fixates while it dissimulates its own inadequacy to satisfy that very desire. This fetish category has always enjoyed a distinct fortune in the critical discourse, thanks not only to its halo of obviousness but also its flexibility. Yet fetishes are also defense mechanisms, diversions. The fetish has a pacifying function; it crystallizes desire and stops its endless shifting from one object to the other by making lack, the negative cause of desire, disappear. As a fetish category, political cinema operates on a similar logic. It purports to dissimulate the deadlock of a fundamental nonrelation into the reassuring consistency of a self-identical category. In the scholarly discourses about the place of politics in the field of cinema, the fetish of political cinema has often functioned as a sort of critical blockage, positing the relation between politics and cinema as a given and thus preventing the possibility of actually interrogating it. As a result, the nonrelation between politics and cinema has often been erased, and with it the possibility of thinking the two terms together, but not as one. It is in this sense that the question of political cinema needs to be posed anew, mobilized as a problem rather than fixated, or fetishized, as a solution.

Similarly, the nonrelation between cinema and politics that defines political cinema should not itself be fetishized or reified into a positive given that exists before the individual films. If there is a transcendental condition of political cinema, then it must be located in the negativity of the nonrelation. This negativity exists solely in the multiplicity of individual filmic attempts to devise a path through it. The universal nonrelation between cinema and politics can only be inferred from the singularities of the films—or, more precisely, from the singular linkage between politics and cinema that each film invents in place of the nonrelation. As a way to work through the aporia, each individual political film is structured by the nonrelation that is constitutive of political cinema as such. This, however, is not a simple reflection, as political films bring the nonrelation into existence only by way of the poroi that they open up to traverse it. These passages, like the seafarer’s poros in Kofman, are never given; they must be invented, then invented again with each new film. For all intents and purposes, then, this means that the condition of political cinema itself is reconceived anew with each political film. Every singular attempt at linking politics and cinema frames, displaces, and mobilizes the nonrelation in new ways.

This leaves us with a curious paradox. The potentially infinite set of political films does not amount to a systematic and coherent solution for the problem of the nonrelation of political cinema; nor does the category of political cinema endow political films with an a priori guarantee for the success of their attempts at tying together cinema and politics. Instead, as films put their metis to the test and improvise their way through the nonrelation, each singular poros intervenes on the nonrelation itself and redesigns its contours. This dialectical tension never coalesces into a proper synthesis; the sort of parallax view between political cinema and political films is precisely the split that keeps the nonrelation alive. Once a crossing has been attempted, the aporia changes its complexion only to remain as daunting as before, calling for a new path to be charted through its impassable expanse.

The constitutive nonrelation between politics and cinema is precisely what other theories of political cinema foreclose. Let us now consider one such theory in detail: ideology critique. Arguably the most comprehensive and sophisticated attempt in the history of film studies at thinking the relation between cinema and politics, ideology critique puts many questions that are central to our argument under meticulous scrutiny.

“A Noticeable Gap”

Among the most potent analytical tools for investigating political cinema, ideology critique stands towering. Serving broadly as the conceptual link between economic structure and cultural production, ideology offers the ideal terrain for testing one possible way of thinking cinema and politics together. In what arguably constitutes the conceptual manifesto for this intellectual project—the programmatic 1969 essay “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism”—Cahiers du cinéma editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni posit not merely a relation but rather a correspondence between cinema and ideology in which the former is construed and analyzed as an expression of the latter. “The film,” they write, “is ideology presenting itself to itself, talking to itself, learning about itself.”6 The essay, which is essentially a translation of Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology into the domain of film, set the intellectual course of Cahiers for the following decade, with a strong emphasis on the militant imperative that should inform any critical endeavor.7

Among the many far-reaching consequences of the critical stance defended by Comolli and Narboni was the drastic expansion of what constitutes the political in cinema—a veritable Copernican revolution summarized in their famous formulation that “every film is political”: “Every film is political inasmuch as it is determined by the ideology which produces it.”8 This is because a film registers the ideological conditions of existence of the mode of production that creates it, namely capitalism. But if it is true that from the standpoint of ideology every film is political, it does not automatically follow that all films are political in the same way—or, to put it differently, that the dimension of the political that emerges in cinema is the same for every film. To be sure, Comolli and Narboni are fully cognizant of this aspect. They posit a fundamental difference between films that acknowledge and expose cinema as a branch of ideology, and films that merely propagate ideological discourses, including the “eminently reactionary” idea that cinema objectively registers reality in its neutral existence: “‘Reality’ is nothing but the expression of the prevailing ideology,” they note.9 This “vital distinction” spawns yet more distinctions that assume the form of a taxonomy of the possible relationships between cinema and ideology.10 Because the primary militant concern here is demystification, the essay largely focuses on the different ways films do or do not recognize and make visible their nature as ideological artifacts according to various degrees of thematic and/or formal departure from dominant forms of filmmaking.

Comolli and Narboni’s argument postulates the omnipresence of politics in the fabric of cultural production (every film is political); it has a clear prescriptive aim in defining what true political cinema should be, as well as in discerning that which is political cinema from that which is not; and finally, it provides a taxonomy that establishes the fundamental features of their object. At the cost of oversimplification, in this tripartite framework may be glimpsed a mapping of the much vaster field of the historical debates about politics and cinema, organized along three main axes, as follows. First is a militant preoccupation with criteria to assess the degree of revolutionary consciousness attained by individual films or filmmakers in form, content, or both. Here political cinema assumes the form of a quasi-Platonic idea, the horizon toward which films should bend. Second is the attention to the disseminated presence of politics as symptoms or traces in the texture of culture at large. In this scenario, every film is political because every film, being part of culture, bears the mark of ideology.11 Third and last is the understanding of political cinema through the taxonomic lens of genre as a grouping of films that share certain formal and thematic features, with the common denominator of a conscious or unconscious concern with politics.

This is precisely from where the ideological critique of cinema derives its keen analytical power. The concept of ideology ties together these varied strands into one coherent method, de facto offering itself as the culmination of—and possible solution to—the theoretical debate around the relation between cinema and politics. Furthermore, ideology critique reinforces the thesis that a relation between cinema and politics does in fact exist: this relationship hinges precisely on ideology, which neatly functions as the missing link between the two domains. No more aporia: the problem of the link between cinema and politics seems to have been solved in (film) theory as much as in (militant) practice.

Yet Comolli and Narboni’s taxonomy, however exhaustive, produces a remainder—what we might call a residual category of films that do not quite fit in the other typologies. We can briefly summarize their taxonomy as follows: (1) films that are imbued with the dominant ideology and show no signs of being aware of it; (2) films that deal with a directly political subject and combat their ideological substratum at the level of form or content; (3) films that have no explicit political content but become political by virtue of the formal treatment of their subject; (4) films with an explicit political content that fail to criticize the ideological system the informs them; (5) films of live cinema (cinéma direct), prey to the illusion that their avowed realism is in itself not ideological; and (6) films of other kinds of live cinema, where the films question their own modality of depiction of reality. The seventh category, the ill-fitting one, is defined by Comolli and Narboni in negative terms: the films that belong to this typology are characterized by “a noticeable gap, a dislocation” in their representation of ideology.12 This gap is made visible by the films, whose textual functioning is split in two: a moment of acknowledgment, in which ideology is assumed as a limit of representation; and a moment of transgression in which limits are trespassed, and as an effect, ideology’s normative essence is made visible. The presence of ideology in these films is therefore ambiguous. At first, it seems to pervade every aspect of the filmic text, but then the films confront us with the unexpected emergence of a critical gesture. Consider the following passage, in which Comolli and Narboni attempt to describe the category in question, to which they assign works by the likes of Ford, Dreyer, and Rossellini: “An internal criticism is taking place, which cracks the films apart at the seams. If one reads the film obliquely, looking for symptoms; if one looks beyond its apparent formal coherence, one can see that it is riddled with cracks: it is splitting under an internal tension which is simply not there in an ideologically innocuous film.”13 The gap is here qualified in terms of “cracks” or splits caused by an “internal tension” to which the films succumb. This tension is between the ideology that these films seem to mindlessly embrace and the same films’ critical gesture of making this ideology visible. Ideology here does not emerge as a positive entity conjured by the films but rather as subject to an operation of “dislocation.” For this reason, although the authors go to great lengths to accommodate this category in their taxonomy as just one cinematic genus among others, one should find in it a particular symptomatic significance. It is clear the films in this category pose a conceptual problem for the Cahiers editors, to the point where they literally do not know what to do with them. The authors refuse to join the “witch-hunt against them,” but they also don’t see them as the main subject of the journal’s militant project. These films “criticize themselves . . . and it is irrelevant and impertinent to do so for them.” In other words, it is better to just leave them be: the Cahiers will simply engage in revealing “how they work.”14 It is not surprising that feigned indifference could be the most suitable response to these films’ unresolved relationship to ideology, uneasily located as it is between complicity and resistance.

For us, this residual category reveals something about the logic of ideology critique itself—something qualitatively different from the spectrum of ideological self-consciousness covered by Comolli and Narboni’s other categories. The formalization of a relationship between politics and cinema by way of ideology leaves behind a remainder that must be read as itself symptomatic of a limit of formalization. The films situated in this residual category are characterized by a paradoxical relationship to ideology (they are both inside and outside it), thus contradicting Comolli and Narboni’s fundamental thesis, noted above, that films are “ideology presenting itself to itself, talking about itself, learning about itself.” These films in which ideology does not relate to itself prove that ideology cannot function in all cases as the ultimate relational ground for the interaction between cinema and politics.

The improperness of these films (they do not belong with the rest) undoes the militant mirage of a “proper” political cinema. Any idea of political purity is done away with by the utter impurity of the films that belong to this category, compromised as they are with the capitalist-industrial mode of production and the seeming adherence to the bourgeois idea of art, as is the case of several of the films to be analyzed in the following chapters. At the same time, belief in the omnipresence of ideology is contradicted by the fact that these films need a specific category to account for their irreducibly singular way—internal and external to ideology—of bringing together politics and cinema. When met with this irreducible singularity, the taxonomic drive that underpins Comolli and Narboni’s argument becomes the reason the taxonomy itself unravels: a desire for completeness prompts the emergence of a residual category, the very existence of which threatens to undo the taxonomy as a whole. Certainly I do not mean to argue that all films by Ford, Dreyer, and Rossellini are to be regarded as political cinema; nor, for that matter, that an auteurist approach is the best to adopt in this case. I want to highlight that a certain logic is at work here. Regardless of the auteurs’ names and films associated with them, this logic points to a problem in the definition of political cinema articulated by ideology critique.

Here, where Comolli and Narboni’s line of reasoning unwittingly falters, we glimpse the outline of a different paradigm through which to think political cinema. This slip in their argument has a double valence, negative and positive—negative insofar as the residual category is the symptom of a limitation in the taxonomy proposed by the authors, but also, and more importantly, positive because this fundamental inconsistency in the ideological critique of cinema points to a way to think political cinema in terms of an aporia. Instead of thinking cinema and politics together by starting from their nonrelation, ideology critique does the reverse. The relation between cinema and politics is secured by ideology as the object of mirroring, self-conscious problematization, or outright criticism on the part of the films. However, the residual category described by Comolli and Narboni speaks to the insistence of a nonrelation that their theoretical system cannot account for: a little Hegelian bone stuck in the throat of ideology critique. The transitivity between cinema and politics that was all but guaranteed by the deployment of the concept of ideology finds here its own limitation: these films pose a problem for Comolli and Narboni because the axiom of a relation between cinema and politics via ideology does not seem quite capable of explaining what it is that they do. The “noticeable gap” that characterizes the work of the Fords, the Dreyers, and the Rossellinis names precisely the nonrelation between cinema and politics that the Cahiers editors registered and then hastily repressed, for it was the one gap that the concept of ideology could not bridge.

The Figure

After registering the limitations of ideology critique, we must ask what kind of critical reading of political cinema can follow from the constitutive nonrelation between cinema and politics. How is this linkage between the two terms concretely invented by individual films, and what is this tie supposed to look like on the screen? The answer proposed in this book hinges on the concept of the figure, and more specifically on an argument for a recentering of its significance in the conceptualization of political cinema.

In the tradition of art history, the figure has been largely understood as a distinguishable aspect of the image that detaches itself from the background and that refers to a real, recognizable object (the Panofskyian concept of motif). This definition bestows a certain trait of exactness onto the figure, both in the visual sense of a clear shape with definite contours and in the semiotic sense of its iconicity—that is, with Peirce, its resemblance to the object it wishes to represent. In this sense, the figure, as well as figuration as the act of generating figures, fulfills a function of identification. As the centerpiece of the picture, the figure constitutes its signifying anchor, guiding the reader through the maelstrom of ambiguities naturally built into the image toward the safe shore of a stable, legible meaning. To be sure, nothing in the etymology or historical usage of “figure” contradicts this reading in the slightest; if anything, “copy,” “simulacrum,” and the like are among the primary meanings attributed to the term. In a way, this is precisely the issue. Given the vastness of the semantic galaxy attached to the term, no simplistic criterion of “correctness” of such-and-such a meaning can solve the unique conceptual and aesthetic problem the figure poses.

A proper historicotheoretical account of the concept lies beyond the scope of the present work, and one wonders whether such a feat is even achievable. Thus, relinquishing any claim to encyclopedic exhaustiveness, I wish to navigate our own route here—our own poros—across this immense semantic territory, with the fundamental question of this book, the question of political cinema, as our makeshift compass. (Perhaps it is not too self-serving to surmise that the field of the various theorizations of the figure is so vast that it does not just encourage a decision on what route to take to traverse it, but actually sanctions and even imposes it.)

In his landmark essay “Figura,” Erich Auerbach embraces the essential complexity of the concept of the figure and paints a vivid picture of its etymological spectrum, which, at its most elementary level, references the plasticity of form (from the Latin fingere, fictor, effigies), but in a way that emphasizes aspects of change and becoming (“something living and dynamic, incomplete and playful”)—a plastic form subject to endless transformation.15 Auerbach identifies this dynamism as the function of a certain duality, an idea that has strong echoes in the work of later commentators such as Nicole Brenez and Georges Didi-Huberman.16 “The figure,” Brenez explains in her discussion of Auerbach, “is not primarily an entity, but the establishing of a relation: the movement of a thing toward its other.”17 “The movement” points to the dynamicity of a figure that is, in its very essence, always a figure of the Two: order and chaos, form and formless, figuration and disfiguration. The relation between the two terms, however, is not of inoperative externality but of dialectical coimplication: “not simply disorder,” the figure stands “within a logic of identity” as its “intimate contestation.”18 The figure does not give up on form altogether; rather, it comes into existence as a disturbance of identity, an operation of disruption of self-sameness whereby the other emerges from within the same. There is a durative, labor-like dimension to the action of the figure. It carves into figuration, molds it, shapes it from within, to the point where figuration is barely recognizable yet not irretrievably lost.19 Running counter to the traditional art-historic idea of the figure as illustrative support for the meaning of an artwork, the figure is thus best described as an aesthetic operation in which a relation is established between figuration and disfiguration wherein the two are not in a reciprocal position of externality, but one participates in and presupposes the other and vice versa.

It is important to bear in mind that for us, the figure is neither a transitory stage in a teleological movement of becoming nor a simple pastiche of two heterogeneous elements. Rather, it determines the point of articulation of a dialectic whose defining operation is neither that of illustration nor of mere signification but, I wish to suggest, of thought. In the words of Jacques Aumont, “The image can transmit ideas, and original ideas at that.”20 The passage of these ideas is made possible by the figure as a principle of formal organization of this thought: “the image thinks by way of figures” (l’image pense par figures).21 Can we not recognize in this figural thought of the cinematic image precisely a form of metis in action? The “original ideas” that films think “by way of figures” are the passageways across the nonrelation between cinema and politics that are improvised anew with each political film. The figure thus indexes both the insistence of the nonrelation in any given political film and the invention of a way to cross it. On the one hand, it registers the nonrelation because the figure rejects the transitivity of simple representation (politics is not a reified content that can simply be illustrated). On the other, it invents a way to cross it in the dialectical unfolding of the figure as thought.22 It is therefore in the form of the figure itself—the figure as the aesthetic support of a dynamic dialectical articulation—that the insistence of the nonrelation appears as the productive condition of negativity described by Kofman in her discussion of the aporia: the recognition of the unavoidability of the nonrelation and the inception of a desire to experiment with a singular way to bridge it. The concept of the figure thus offers first a general principle of formalization of the way in which the nonrelation and its traversal inscribe themselves in the films, and second the possibility to analyze the concrete iterations of the linkage between cinema and politics in the form of a multiplicity of figures, with each film inventing its own singular way of being political.

The refusal to let representation dictate the terms of artistic creation and the dramatization of the dialectical movement of thought constitute the figure’s fundamental gesture. Referencing Giotto’s frescoes in the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, Brenez and Deleuze seize on this detachment from the realism of representation in favor of what they call, respectively, a “realism of figures” and “a liberation of Figures” that are equally oblivious to any sense of proportion and verisimilitude.23 In the realm of political cinema, consider for instance the figure of the worker, discussed in chapter 2. If we were to suggest a possible genealogy of the representations of the worker in cinema, we would probably be looking at two different lineages. One aims for accuracy in its depiction of the existent, with authenticity as its ultimate horizon. Broadly, this lineage follows the traditional equation between social realism and militant engagement, which, at best, has produced poignant, if at times nostalgic or moralistic, portrayals of the condition ouvrière. The other lineage, whose instances are somewhat more sporadic, follows what Deleuze calls “the way of the Figure”: the patient, meticulous rejection of the temptation of a purely realistic representation.24 In this case, the figure of the worker remains unconcerned with verisimilitude and instead explores the limits of figuration in an attempt to dramatize the dialectics of openings and deadlocks of a given historical sequence. It would register, for instance, the disfiguring pressure that the demands for productivity put on the factory worker, bending his body and psyche out of shape and yet opening up the possibility of radical militant engagement, as is the case in Petri’s The Working Class Goes to Heaven; or it would signal a blockage of that dialectics, evoking the claustrophobic condition of the migrant worker, exploited not only at the assembly line but also in a society that increasingly resembles an immense factory, as in Scola’s Trevico-Turin.

The figure in political cinema, then, does not aim to approximate reality but to dramatize the subjective possibilities of a historical situation. The actual verification of these possibilities exceeds the purview of cinema, of course; only politics can confirm the existence and viability of collective political subjects. But what cinema can offer to politics is precisely this distance—namely, the nonrelation inscribed in the figure that allows films to stage their own autonomous historical diagnosis as the performance of a multiplicity of moving figures. This figural experimentation is proper to cinema and does not translate directly to politics, for a figure cannot be reduced to any one political subject; nor does the figure prescribe strategies for the creation of one. Instead, it is precisely by virtue of the nonrelation that cinema can think by way of figures the historicity of a sequence—its events, crises, and transitions—as a con-figuration in the fictional dimension of “as if.”

The Holes and Hollow Spaces of History

In medieval Christian theology, the figure was interpreted as a link between two events in which the first prefigures the second, and the second fulfills the promise of the first. The transcendental guarantee of this teleological movement is divine providence itself, which resides in a timeless time, one without history. By keeping the historicity of an event intact, the medieval figure stands as a historically rooted index of this ahistorical time. While the past and the future are linked to one another in the figure, they evoke a time that transcends them both. As Kaja Silverman notes, “A figural view of history usually implies a redemptive eschatology,” one that finds its guarantee in a transcendent principle.25

In secular modernity, the guarantee of an ultimate synthesis of historical time can be found in all ideologies of progress. But the modern situation of a history without God also opens up another possibility: that of a historicity devoid of the transcendent guarantee of a harmonic resolution. Instead, this historicity is animated by a totally immanent tension that generates a deadlock. As witness to this dialectic without synthesis, the figure here comes into existence as the form of a tension—Ernst Bloch calls it a “tension-figure”—that permits mediation between experience and historical time, making the latter legible.26

Bloch distinguishes two forms of such mediation. One is the “broad-calm” mediation, which is possible only when the world is perceived as a meaningful totality, as the (prehistorical) world that was or the (socialist) world to come. It is a world without conflict or divisions, identical to itself, that produces harmonious and static figures. The other, “abrupt” mediation, only emerges in times of crisis and transition, when history reveals its fundamental inconsistency: “An essential relationship behaves in an abruptly mediated way above all in those times when as a consequence of unsecured conditions holes and hollow spaces open up in the previously smooth context; about this and about that which appears in them the—one might say—irregular artists give information in their own way.”27 Neither the anticipation for Kingdom Come nor the rational unfolding of interconnected occurrences of progressivist mythologies of history, these “holes and hollow spaces” designate an alternative idea of history characterized by divisions and discontinuities that art seizes by way of tension-figures—that is, indexes of a historical “time of crisis.”28

For Bloch, these figures are not beholden to an invariant, eternal form but are instead defined by a certain precariousness, subjected as they are to the contrasting forces that always animate times of transition: “Shapes in history exist only as figures of tension, as tendency-shapes, as experiments of the unknown life-shape, which so little exists that precisely for this reason shapes crack again and again and history continues.”29 Figures are tentative experiments of legibility of a given historical sequence. Because no overarching meaning or orientation is guaranteed by a transcendent principle, the figure must open itself up to the holes and hollow spaces that make up history in times of crisis. At the same time, figures provide a legible image of this disjointed historical time. Their distinctive dialectic of figuration and disfiguration is the aesthetic result of this fundamental disaggregation of historical reality. By registering the gaps in the historical continuum, tension-figures give shape to the fundamental fault lines that run under its visible surface.

We are now in a position to further specify the dialectic of the figure in political cinema by advancing the following hypothesis: the fault lines of a given historical sequence as a time of crisis can be mapped along two fundamental and dialectically intertwined coordinates. On one coordinate is an irruption of a force into an existing structural situation—a force that is born out of the structure itself and that aims at the structure’s wholesale destruction. On the other coordinate, and in response to the intervention of the force, the ravaged structure recomposes into a new consistency.30 These two coordinates—the action of an antagonistic force onto the structure, and the structure’s response as crisis and recomposition—delimit the field of historical possibilities (and impossibilities) to which the dialectics of the figure gives body.

Because the cracks and crevices of a time of crisis remain impervious to any realism of representation, the task of making them visible can solely be accomplished by the tension-figure as the cinematic thought that gives form to the crisis. It is in this sense that we should understand Didi-Huberman’s claim that figure is always “critical,” for it is “the introduction of a crisis in every semblance.”31 Precarious and fragmented, the figural form of historical crisis presents itself as a crisis of semblance, a tension-figure that thinks the many instantiations of the dialectic between force and structure.32 By giving body to this dialectic, the figure does not indicate the presence or offer a representation of a political subject. It may, for instance, point to a possibility that never materialized, like a failed attempt, an opportunity that remained unseized, or a structural difficulty that proved insurmountable. For this reason, alongside more readily recognizable political figures of the long ’68 (worker, housewife, youth), I discuss other figures (saint, specter) that do not belong to the collective imaginary of the long ’68. As such, these figures make it clear that cinema thinks the historical crisis in ways that are not reducible to those of politics. The aporia between cinema and politics means that the films think political subjectivity at a distance only by way of their own reconnoitering of the conditions, possibilities, and pitfalls of a given historical situation.33

It is only in this sense that these figures are realistic, for “reality in time of crisis is itself a largely split one.”34 The figure dramatizes the possibilities of a historical situation organized around a split or an impasse. In this sense, each figure I discuss here refers to some fundamental division that traversed the historical sequence of the long ’68. The figure of the worker gives body to the impasse between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie—the impasse of class—that reveals the radical antagonism of capitalist social relations, indicating the militant thesis of the refusal of work as both the possibility of a condition beyond exploitation and an impossibility dictated by the authoritarian nature of capital. The figure of the housewife identifies an impasse internal to labor itself: the gendered division of labor between production and reproduction that the socialist feminist movements of the 1970s indicated as a point of leverage for anticapitalist struggle, to which capital responds by making the boundaries of reproductive labor ever more elusive. The figure of youth is anchored in the split between the liberation of one’s own singular desires and the universalistic claims of radical politics. In the films, the impasse between these two projects provides the impetus for spectacular acts of rebellion while opening up the possibility of the violent subsumption of that same rebellion by the structure. The figure of the saint can be understood as a radicalization of the same impasse, whereby the uncompromising autonomy of the saint’s desire threatens the consistency of the status quo, prompting the structure’s adoption of extreme measures to neutralize and absorb this recalcitrant desire. The figure of the specter, for its part, reveals an impasse internal to the structure itself. As the remnant that haunts any conception of totality, the specter highlights the illusion of the self-identity of the sovereign power of the state, revealing it as inevitably split between excess (authoritarianism) and lack (powerlessness). This impasse of sovereign power is further dramatized by the figures of the tyrant, the intriguer, and the martyr as figures of the collapse of the postwar bourgeoisie, torn between its historical role as the ruling class and its own incipient obsolescence.

These impasses identify the fault lines that traverse the historical sequence of the Italian long ’68. As a series of possible shapes of the tension between force and structure, the figures discussed in this book are attempts to name and map these fault lines. A figural reading of political cinema, then, is not a chronicle of the many political subjects that have been consigned to the archive of history but a choreography of some of the potentialities that could—and could not—have existed in the impasses of a time of crisis and transition. From the standpoint of politics, the historical sequence that is the focus of this book no doubt qualifies as such a time. Between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s, a series of interconnected occurrences (the rise of new forms of antagonism, a shift in the forms of labor, a drastic restructuring of capital and a renewing of its alliance with the state, a variety of momentous cultural and social shifts, and so forth) waved off the revolutionary politics of modernity and ushered in the beginning of a new era characterized by a certain disenchantment with radical political engagement.35

To better understand how politics have thought this time of crisis, consider the trajectory of what is arguably the dominant political subject of the twentieth century: the industrial proletariat. The transformations in the organization of labor that took place in Italy after the economic miracle (1958–63) jump-started a process of radical recomposition of the working class that changed its role and reach in the dynamics of struggle—a process that began in earnest in the early 1960s and reached its conclusion by the beginning of the following decade. Hard-pressed by worsening economic stagnation, the rise of forms of immaterial labor, and the repressive measures adopted by capital and the state, the factory worker lost political centrality.36 The political thought of the time tried to diagnose and respond to this momentous vanishing. Radical theorists and militants tried to fill that subjective void, either by redefining the ontology of the worker (consider Antonio Negri’s theory of the operaio sociale, “social worker”) or by looking for new political subjectivities elsewhere altogether (consider the Autonomia archipelago, with the centrality it afforded to figures left at the fringes of the productive process: students, the unemployed, sex workers, prisoners, the mentally ill).37 This is what Paolo Virno calls the “carnival of subjectivities” of the long ’68, marching through the streets and squares of the country from the late 1960s to the end of the 1970s.38

Cinema, for its part, engaged with the same historical moment of crisis and transition but gave it body in its own way. While politics thought the crisis by theorizing new political subjects and forms of militant organization, cinema did so by inventing new figures as experiments of historical legibility. These figures never posit the existence of a political subjectivity; nor do they advocate for it from a militant standpoint, as politics did. Rather, they dramatize a situation of crisis and transition in which possibilities and impossibilities alike coalesce around impasses—a “dance of figures.”39 In this sense, the image of the long ’68 projected by cinema’s figural choreography is different from the one that emerges from the political thought of the time, as the former made visible aspects of the historical sequence that the latter did not register, and vice versa. This difference, this gap between cinema and politics, today appears all the more essential for understanding the complexity of the long ’68. While the resonances between the two remain evident, it is perhaps in the distance that separates a “dance of figures” from a “carnival of subjectivities” that we can find a more revelatory conception of this time of crisis.