Towards a Feminist Cinematic Ethics

Front matter

Claire Denis, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy

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Kristin Lene Hole

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements

Encounters, Intrusions: Denis, Levinas, Nancy

2 Film Interrupted: Denis, Nancy and an Ethics of Sense

CHAPTER I Encounters, Intrusions: Denis, Levinas, Nancy

... for me, cinema is not made to give a psychological explanation, for me cinema is montage, is editing. To make blocks of impressions or emotion meet with another block of impression or emotion and put in between pieces of explanation, to me it’s boring ... [A]s a spectator, when I see a movie one block leads me to another block of inner emotion, I think that’s cinema. That’s an encounter . . . I think that making films for me is to get rid of explanation . . . you get explanation by getting rid of explanation. I am sure of that.

Claire Denis!

The issue of intrusion has resonances for so much in life — phobia, rejection, desire. Intrusion is always brutal. There’s no such thing as a gentle intrusion.

Claire Denis”

INTRUSIONS: ENCOUNTERING ETHICS IN THE FILMS OF CLAIRE DENIS his book is about encounters: between philosophy and cinema, specta-

tor and film, characters on screen, sound and image, body and text. The encounter is always also an intrusion, undermining the supposed discreteness of any body and offering us an ethical way to position ourselves towards one another. In what follows, intrusions generate a feminist cinematic ethics through the encounters staged amongst the work of Claire Denis and of two philosophers, Jean-Luc Nancy and Emmanuel Levinas, although other voices interrupt throughout. Denis is one of the most challenging and distinctive filmmakers working in France today. Despite the significant amount of scholarly attention that her filmmaking has received, the contribution that she makes to a cinematic ethics has not received any sustained analysis. Yet, my argument in what follows is that the ethical facet of her work is one of her main contributions to a cinema of ideas. I title the two permutations of a feminist cinematic ethics an ‘ethics of sense’ and an ‘aesthetic of alterity’, the former the result of an encounter between Denis and Nancean ethics and the latter between Denis and Levinas (these are dealt with in Chapters 2 and 3, respectively). Both an ethics of sense and an aesthetic of alterity are intimately connected to spectatorship as a bodily encounter that challenges dominant Western conceptions of subjectivity. I elaborate on the affective and visceral valences of this encounter in Chapter 4.

It is significant that the two books in English focusing exclusively on Denis (by Martine Beugnet and Judith Mayne, both titled Claire Denis) identify her filmmaking as ‘ethical’, yet never unpack the term ‘ethics’ itself to explore the sense in which this complex category is deployed.’ Referring to Denis’s resistance to discussing her films in terms of political motivations, Mayne writes, “This suggests that she is less interested in making films with a particular political perspective than in making films that explore the very possibility of a range of (cinematic) perspectives ... A scene that Denis decided not to shoot in Beau travail suggests that perhaps it is more appropriate to think of the political dimensions of her work in terms of ethics.’* Mayne is referring to a scene where a local woman would have been depicted in a way that could have consequences for her safety once filming was over.’ Here it is implied that ethics is located at the level of the director’s relationship to the practice of filmmaking and the content of her work. Near the end of Beugnet’s monograph she writes of Denis that ‘her work reveals a strong sense of ethics’.° What ethics means in the context of her films and whether it refers to the relationship between spectator and film, between director and characters or subject matter, or is situated at the level of form or narrative content, is never put under close scrutiny or generalised to a theme in Beugnet’s book. Yet her classification of Denis’s work through the themes of transgression, exile and difference suggests a fruitful direction for thinking about the ethical dimension. So does her comment that ‘Each time, the primacy of the suggested over the stated allows for the characters not to be trapped into categories and stereotypes, even if this means abandoning certitudes and conclusions’.’ Moving away from the certainties of identity and focusing on difference is entailed in the ethics I elaborate. Unlike the books by Beugnet and Mayne, however, this monograph is not an overview of Denis as an auteur. I select specific films in her oeuvre to examine various facets of the ethics I see at work in her unique visual and narrative style.

Putting philosophy in contact with cinema gives flesh — both metaphorically and also literally, in the sense of centring the material body — to the concept of ethics. This is not an ethics that is conveyed didactically or in a straightforward narrative manner, since Denis’s films persistently avoid a moralising tone. There is no ‘moral of the story’ in a Denis film. For example, as I discuss in Chapter 3, in the film J Can’t Sleep (1994), which deals elliptically with the story of a serial killer, we are not brought to an easy conclusion about who is a bad person or a good person within the narrative, nor how we ought to view life or the world as represented in the diegesis. Instead, we are made aware of complexity, ambiguity and disjunctive connection. We are given a window into a world coloured in shades of grey and left to sit with otherness, as opposed to feeling able to clearly distance ourselves from the characters and images on screen via moral judgements.

Ethics is a slippery term, in that it is used so commonly in everyday speech that we all have some sense that we know what the word means. Like many terms used in philosophical or theoretical discourse, the term ‘ethics’ as I employ it must be first emptied of its conventional semantic associations and then re-semanticised through the concepts expounded in this book. Unlike deontological, consequentialist or virtue-based systems, what I elaborate in this project is a less normative understanding of ethics.’ By less normative I mean that it does not enumerate fixed principles for action (i.e. ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’) and that it is based in a nonfoundational, non-autonomous subject. It requires a practice of sensitivity, unlearning and encountering that guides our ways of being with others, in modes that work against systems of dominance, stereotyping and violence. It is also an ethics that is material and embodied — felt in the encounters between bodies, privileging a level of experience prior to the cognitive or apprehensive. As I will show, Denis’s work stages these types of open and visceral encounters between film and spectator.

The ethics are feminist in their commitment to seeking a more inclusive and relational conception of existence and their basis in a non-identitarian body. As Victoria Hesford argues in her archaeology of the ‘second wave’ of feminism, the radicality of the women’s liberation movement was precisely due to the ways in which it challenged normative identity categories.” This includes a dedication to practices of unlearning expectations and questioning received knowledge about the world and those who populate it in order to open us up to new and unforeseen futures that are more equitable for all. In her writing on Levinas and postcoloniality Sarah Ahmed links an ethical mode of encounter to the possibility of future transnational feminist collective building. She asks us to consider ‘how feminism involves strange encounters — ways of encountering what is already encountered — in order to engender ways of being and acting in the world that open the possibility of the distant in the near, the unassimilable in the already assimilated, and the surprising in the ordinary’." Denis’s films sensitise us to the limits of identity, offering us a series of strange encounters. Key to this is an ethical disposition towards the world, a sensibility that resonates both on screen and off.

The bigger claim that is implied here is that we desperately need new forms of attachment, new dispositions and new ways of seeing to meet the challenges of our contemporary moment. For this reason an account of ethics that challenges the meaningfulness of any claims to identity and sensitises us to what remains other in each of us may cultivate a heightened awareness of the facility with which the past repeats itself, or, put differently, of our own capacity to commit a myriad of micro-oppressions on a daily basis. The respect for an unmasterable alterity, combined with a commitment to the difficulty of revealing sense outside of fixed semantic signification, is key to Denis’s cinematic ethics.

Alongside Denis, Nancy and Levinas offer a way to conceptualise an ethics that is less normative and works against violence, dominance and totalitarianism. In a Levinasian framework, the other is absolutely so, meaning that I cannot understand the other or relate her back to myself in any way that would result in systems of labelling or prejudice. Furthermore, my encounter with the other is formative of any selfhood and happens in an ethical realm that is prior to the ontological. What this means in practical terms is that I cannot represent the other or my encounter with her in a way that will ever capture or do justice to her. The necessarily failing attempt at representation, along with a deeply unknowable other, is central to Denis’s complex, oblique and non-psychologised screen worlds. Nancy also prioritises a sense that both precedes and exceeds signification. The attempt to remain faithful to an origin that is always plural and that resists an integrated subject, people or world and instead insists on the differential and the fleeting is present in both Nancy’s and Denis’s work. For all three there is a movement of the other’s singularity that always eludes our grasp and it is through becoming aware of and attentive to this that I argue Denis’s work can teach us about this off-centred ethics. Although Levinas and Nancy may seem odd bedfellows, I am interested in the generativity and new possibilities that are opened by staging encounters between the three idea-makers in this project — the two philosophers and Denis herself. The thematic of ‘intrusion’ given in the chapter’s title can apply to the ways in which the ideas of each interlocutor intrude upon or interrupt one another, preventing this account from providing a totalising or closed description of what ethics might mean or do in cinematic practice. In this way, my methodology mirrors the very practice of the ethical that I articulate in this work. I am staging an encounter, then, not only between two quite different philosophers and a filmmaker, but also more broadly between philosophy and cinema.

Intrusion is a major trope in Denis’s body of work. One can find it in her films from the colonial presence in Cameroon in her debut film Chocolat

(1988), to her acclaimed Beau travail (1999) in which the disruptive intrusion of a young legionnaire called Sentain proves unacceptable to his superior Galoup’s existence; from Katja’s arrival in Paris from Lithuania at the beginning of I Can’t Sleep to the unwanted child inside Neénette’s body in Nénette and Boni (1996). The multiple others who come and go in Denis’s films offer encounters with alterity that centre on the body and sensation, and that refuse any easy knowledge of psychological motivation or character interiority. Her films display a persistent interest in difference and in bodies and the connections amongst them. Likewise, Nancy has stressed in his own writing that the body is always other to itself and that our birth into the world is always preceded and exceeded by any timeline of our existence. We are profoundly with others; we are singular plural at each moment and each time differently. Intrusion, then, is a human condition. For Levinas it is by virtue of the ethical relation — our responsibility to and for the other — that we come into being as a subject. The other constitutes us and Levinas constantly emphasises the bodily ways that this responsibility is felt — even to the point that being pregnant with the other becomes a major metaphor of the ethical condition. Denis introduces intrusion narratively and thematically, as suggested in the examples above, but also through strategies of parallel editing, through her exploration of bodily boundaries in films such as 7 Can’t Sleep and The Intruder (2004), through her use of marginal and interruptive scenes that refuse to close or fix the meaning of the film, through her inclusion of sensuous dream sequences and through her eschewal of dialogue in favour of music, sound, touch, smell and taste, which intrude upon the viewer’s own body and allow the body to intrude upon the cognisable meaning of the film in favour of an unthematisable encounter.

Although there are other filmmakers in whose work can be found strains of what I define as the ethical, I contend that Denis is a primary exemplar of it, and her work shapes my understanding of a feminist cinematic ethics.'' The unique visual language and elliptical narrative structure that she develops challenge a notion of film as a medium of narrative comprehension and closure and open us up to encounters with difference that refuse full thematisation. In her work, ethics becomes that which reveals our interconnectedness in a visceral way and works against any notion of a self-sufficient and immunised subject. Denis’s concern with intruders, with the body and with the connections between us suggests a feminist and ethical filmmaking that provides a counter to dominant Hollywood film language.

Within this framework, I do not mean to designate Denis as an ethical filmmaker over and against other ‘unethical’ filmmakers, such that the latter would be a negative value judgement. Ethical is meant in a descriptive sense, although it can be taken prescriptively in that there is definite value to films that operate in a counter-Hollywood manner akin to Denis’s.'? This however is not to say that all films ought to (normatively) espouse the strategies I discuss. Additionally, films can be morally driven rather than concerned with the ethical as I define it. A moralising filmmaker, in contradistinction to an ethical one, would focus narratively (and formally their work would support these narrative conclusions) to establish a maxim or moral principle(s) within the film. For example, a character has a profound realisation about how her life choices have been wrong, or we are made to see the evils of an issue, such as child labour.! There is undoubtedly a time and a place for these movies, but they are not what I am concerned with here. Instead, I look at an ethical attitude or disposition that film can help cultivate or develop in us. This is not the result of didactic storytelling but has to do with the film’s formal strategies and how it approaches its subject or the kinds of encounters it fosters between viewer and film. It is possible that the kind of ethics I am proposing here could result in a way of acting in the world that is perhaps more just or sustainable and less selfish — that is, it could lead to more normative claims — but my work is not focused on developing normative principles.

What I am concerned with is an ethical awareness that stems from a particular understanding of our own subjectivity and inter-relationality and that challenges an autonomous intentional knowing subject who enacts, for example, moral imperatives. The subject, in my account, starts at a place that is much more in question, and more passive, as opposed to willing or intentional, before she moves into the capacity to act from the spaces of ethical awareness. I am inspired by Levinas’s commitment to thinking difference in such a way that the sense of the ethical relation sets a foundation for action such that it would be almost impossible to oppress the other if we were acting from that sensibility.!* If we challenge a sense of ourselves as immune from and able to recognise the other, if we learn to privilege other ways of knowing than seeing as knowledge, we act from a place that is much less likely to dismiss or dehumanise the other based on ontological categories of difference (such as sexuality or ethnicity, for example). My emphasis on otherness resonates with an explicitly feminist attention to difference and the ways in which systems of knowledge and categorisation contribute to the marginalisation and oppression of peoples.'> Denis’s films share feminism’s investment in keeping foundational categories such as ‘the human’ fluid and open."° Part of their radicality is that they depict bodies in such a way that our stereotypes or labels no longer hold and we are asked to be vulnerable to these images.

Consequently, we must explore the bodies on screen without the interpretative ‘safety net’ that categories such as race and gender provide. In contrast with the dominant Hollywood mode of telling stories, which I elaborate on below, Denis’s films explore difference without trying to master it or make it a known quantity. For example, in Chapter 4 I discuss her filming of love scenes. Instead of a more conventional style of filming, the body is shot in fragments, emphasising textures and senses, tactility and exploration. The viewer cannot find her bearings in images that become increasingly difficult to discern, which emphasise the sharing of flesh over gendered sexual norms or fetishised shots of breasts, muscles or thighs. The montages of bodily fragments in films such as Trouble Every Day (2001) and Friday Night (2002) privilege an exploration of otherness that refuses a position of visual supremacy. This staging of bodies has feminist overtones in its refusal to objectify, its offering of new and badly needed images of sexual intimacy that do not reduce women and men to conventional sexual scripts, and its critique of ‘able-ist’ notions of the body as a space of unity and autonomy from others and from technology. Denis’s insistence on opacity as opposed to psychological disclosure further adds to the sense of curiosity and blind probing that we participate in with her love scenes.!” The exploration of difference also occurs through Denis’s interest in characters who are not white (in contrast to the vast majority of European and North American cinema), in teenagers with little hope for the future, in criminals, in underdogs and in those whose desires render them deviant, all of which resonates with feminism’s interest in opening up the category of the human to make it more inclusive to those who are subject to the violence of marginality, invisibility, or stereotypical and stock representations.

Given Denis’s ongoing engagement, however elliptical, with France’s colonial history, it would be remiss not to think intrusion also in relation to the violence and instability of borders in a postcolonial and global capitalist context.!% Denis’s preoccupation with borders and the refusal of clearly demarcated identities is a product of her interest in the legacy of colonialism as it shapes her characters. This concern has autobiographical dimensions: Denis spent the greater part of her childhood in various African countries, as the daughter of colonial administrators who themselves were highly ambivalent about their role in Africa. Not belonging in Africa but neither feeling at home in France, Denis’s interest in displacement and intrusion is resolutely influenced by her materially and historically located experiences of colonialism.'? Postcolonial theory shares common ground with feminism in its interest in thinking about otherness and representation. However, historically postcolonial theory has been limited in addressing issues related to gender and sexuality, even at times committing to notions of nation and culture that occlude feminist or queer positions.” In her work, Denis troubles the borders of gender, age, language and nation in the aftermath of colonialism.

Neénette and Boni, discussed in Chapter 2, centres on racially ambiguous characters living in Marseille, an ethnically mixed and classed city, and subtly points to the geopolitical past of France as well as to contemporary immigration- -based (often xenophobic) discourses. The subplot of stolen phone cards and clandestine international communication further emphasises the network of interruptions and transnational border crossings that produce our world. J Can’t Sleep, the focus of the third chapter, introduces diasporic brothers who relate to their homeland in different ways. Théo creates an imaginary utopia out of Martinique, to which he longs to return. Camille rejects this fantasy, but his marginalisation and isolation, racially and also sexually, cannot be viewed in exclusion from the violence he commits. Existing alongside these brothers is the well-networked Lithuanian community in Paris that we encounter through Daiga, extending the film’s concern with borders to contemporary patterns of immigration that may be unlinked from colonial histories. Finally, in Trouble Every Day, the focus of the final chapter, Paris is haunted and victimised by her own history of economic and epistemological colonisation. A disease, originating in the former colonies, undoes the European fantasy of immunity and autonomy. Western science and religion are impotent in the face of what cannot be assimilated within available discursive frameworks. Whereas Nancy and Levinas do not adequately address that theorising the subject as open, porous and vulnerable speaks to a Western construction of the subject, Denis makes this dimension visible and gives it weight. She brings a historical, material specificity to the ideas she communicates through her films and this makes her better able to address contemporary ethical and political issues than Levinas or Nancy. As I argue, the ideas she shares through her time-images reveal the power of film to speak back to and with philosophy, giving a greater role to the medium than a mere example of certain philosophical concepts.

Denis’s films undermine a hegemony — cinematic and otherwise — that privileges white European bodies and subjects, without attempting to speak for or from the position of the ‘other’. In her film Reassemblage (1982), feminist filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha repeats the phrase ‘Don’t speak about. Speak nearby’. Trinh is critiquing the ethnographic film and its collusion with a patriarchal and racist history of attempting to know, categorise and master (to ‘speak about’) the other. Denis tends to ‘speak nearby’ her subjects, in fact hardly speaking at all — preferring image and sound to propositional language — yet she does so while offering a model of cinema that is more accessible than something like Trinh’s work, which is more avant-garde in its strategies of alienation. The visual pleasure of Denis’s films brings them to a larger audience and engages the spectator’s body, rather than distancing it from the image. Though her films are visually stunning and often pleasurable objects (contra Laura Mulvey’s now infamous statement that feminist filmmaking should destroy pleasure), they nonetheless encourage a mode of seeing that is sympathetic to feminist aims.”! In this way Denis carries on an important tradition of critiquing dominant representational systems, while maintaining a broader appeal through her desire-fuelled images. Her work, then, gestures towards an ethical feminist filmmaking practice that is both sensual and challenging.

Many commentators have noted the sensuality and tactility of Denis’s films.” A turn to the body, emotion and affective sensation has been a feminist strategy for correcting a Cartesian tendency to denigrate the (feminised) corporeal in favour of the (masculinised) mind, both to revalorise the body as a source of knowledge and meaning and also to undermine a mind/body dualism. Affect and haptics (or a focus on tactility and touch) have been influential in recent feminist film theorising.” I connect the affective and haptic element of Denis’s films to thinking about ethics, as one valence of the meaning of ethics as it unfolds in this project. The body is a necessary concern of ethical theory and is central to the films under consideration. From Béatrice Dalle’s erotic mutilation of her would-be seducers in Trouble Every Day, to the unwanted child living in Nénette’s adolescent body in Nénette and Boni, to the foreign heart that Louis Trebor needs to survive in The Intruder, Denis’s output has both represented bodily intrusions on screen and has potentially, through an emphasis on extravisual sensation, intruded haptically and affectively into the bodies of its spectators.

Cinema has the power to take the account of the body and the bodily intimation of the ethical that can be found in both Levinas and Nancy and give it colour and flesh. In this respect, it illustrates in material terms the reality of bodies as they are situated according to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age, even while it undermines these categories’ explanatory power. These categories are easily flattened in the abstract language of philosophy but are really fe/t in the encounter with the image. This is further reinforced by film’s synaesthetic nature — it communicates so much to the viewer that is extravisual and the use of music adds a bodily and non-cognisable affective layer of ‘sense’.*+ Denis furthers Levinas’s and Nancy’s discussions of the body by staging an encounter with difference through which we can feel the reality of our bodily openness and vulnerability and that makes the tension between identity categories and their denotative insufficiency more evident.

A feminist approach need not explicitly be concerned with gender. In its sometimes uneasy overlap with queer theory, feminist theory has always negotiated the difficult necessity of claiming shared experiences of oppression and understanding that the same practices of oppression are in many ways reinforced by the very identity categories that must be claimed in resisting them. Put differently, feminism has always been invested in the deconstruction of categories and in challenges to oppressively normalising systems of representation, while realising the political need for claiming these categories (what theorists such as Gayatri Spivak have called ‘strategic essentialism’).?> While approaches that analyse how representations of women operate in culture are undoubtedly useful, at the level of theory and visual culture it is equally important to further deconstruct these identity categories whether or not we need them in a political and pragmatic sense. The tension between identity and its deconstruction and the creativity this tension engenders is part of what makes feminist theory so groundbreaking and generative. While reiterating identity categories can be a feminist approach, in Denis’s films they are made strange. Thus her work both visually registers ‘difference’ or the classifications of gender and race that we use to understand the world, while also emptying them of their assumed or expected content. This process of unworking categories is another kind of feminist practice. Although this book does not constantly invoke gender or ‘women’, it reflects a feminist commitment to new ways of thinking about bodies and the images that populate our daily lives in a way that is less limiting for all. This would be a world where we are resensitised to the surprise that the other should be for us, where we operate less on identity-based assumptions and search for the unknown in others. It would be a future where we ask new questions that get closer to the heart of our shared existence.

Just as Denis’s own work challenges identity-based ways of understanding character and plot, I resist positioning her cinema exclusively under the rubric of women’s films. She herself refuses any tidy categorisation as a ‘woman director’, or any approach that would read her work always in relation to other female directors.”° In interviews where gender is explicitly discussed, Denis problematises the reduction of women’s creative work to a unique and essential female perspective, maintaining the broader artistic integrity of her and her fellow female cineastes’ output. In this way her position with respect to her craft parallels that which she cultivates in her films, whose characters refuse to be limited by our expectations, even as they may be constrained by the larger social structures/cultural contexts in which they act. This, however, does not preclude us from treating Denis as a feminist filmmaker, as feminist projects are not defined by a creator’s self-identifications but rather in the meanings the work produces or the kinds of encounters it facilitates. Judith Mayne reads Denis as a feminist auteur. However, she notes the ways in which the French tradition of auteurism has enabled French women to be directors to a unique degree, with its ‘vision of the cinema as personal, intimate, and more open to the concrete experience of everyday life’. This may contribute to Denis’s reluctance to explicitly identify as a ‘woman director’.”8

One of the effects of not overtly thematising gender is to gesture towards a future where gender will no longer be a category for controlling bodies and their possibilities. This is not to say that gender has not also been a productive category for feminism, but rather that other futurities are opened up when we attempt to think with alternative frameworks. As Wendy Brown cautions, we must be aware of the ways in which the very categories we use to claim inclusion commit us to certain paradigms — in the case of identity politics those paradigms include particular constructions of the sovereign subject and notions of equality that occlude singularity.” In her sophisticated treatment of the historical and material particularities of the encounter combined with the more general ungraspability of the encountered, Denis’s work gestures

ENCOUNTERS, INTRUSIONS II towards the ways in which the categories that we rely on in the present shape the futures possible to us. Bodies still act in excess of the categories of race, gender, ability and age in which we place them, despite the continued prescriptive and material power of these categories at our historical moment. The performative non-identitarian body is one place where feminism and queer theory share concerns with one another. The gaze in Denis’s films cannot be read through dominant identificatory models. As Geetha Ramanathan argues with respect to Chocolat, ‘The unsettling of the male colonial gaze is no longer the issue in Denis’s work, the politics of post-coloniality being accepted. Denis seeks to map out an aesthetic that would not depend entirely on looking power for specifying its politics.” Mayne concurs, stating, ‘Women don’t have to be central characters to have an impact on the stories that Denis tells. Watching those characters, they quietly mark the charged boundaries of politics and gender, and subtly undermine the paradigm of the man who looks and the woman who is looked at.”!