Against Interpretation

by Susan Sontag

  This is exactly the point of many new novels coming out of France today—to suppress the story, in its traditional psychological or social meaning, in favor of a formal exploration of the structure of an emotion or event. Thus, the real concern of Michel Butor in his novel La Modification is not to show whether the hero will or will not leave his wife to live with his mistress, and even less to base some theory of love on his decision. What interests Butor is the “modification” itself, the formal structure of the man’s behavior. It’s exactly in this spirit that Resnais handles the story of Muriel.

  The typical formula of the new formalists of the novel and film is a mixture of coldness and pathos: coldness enclosing and subduing an immense pathos. Resnais’ great discovery is the application of this formula to “documentary” material, to true events locked in the historical past. Here—in Resnais’ short films, particularly Guernica, Van Gogh, and above all, Night and Fog—the formula works brilliantly, educating and liberating the viewer’s feelings. Night and Fog shows us Dachau, ten years later. The camera moves about (the film is in color), nosing out the grass growing up between the cracks in the masonry of the crematoria. The ghastly serenity of Dachau—now a hollow, silent, evacuated shell—is posed against the unimaginable reality of what went on there in the past; this past is represented by a quiet voice describing life in the camps and reciting the statistics of extermination (text by Jean Cayrol), and some interpolated black-and-white newsreel footage of the camp when it was liberated. (This is the parent of the scene in Muriel when Bernard recites the story of the torture and murder of Muriel, while running off a home-movie type film of his smiling uniformed comrades in Algeria. Muriel herself is never shown.) The triumph of Night and Fog is its absolute control, its supreme refinement in dealing with a subject that incarnates the purest, most agonizing pathos. For the danger of such a subject is that it can numb, instead of stir, our feelings. Resnais has overcome this danger by adopting a distance from his subject which is not sentimental, and which yet does not cheat the horror of its horrifyingness. Night and Fog is overwhelming in its directness, yet full of tact about the unimaginable.

  But in Resnais’ three feature films, the same strategy is not so apt or satisfying. It would be too simple to say that it is because the lucid and brilliantly compassionate documentarist has been superseded by the aesthete, the formalist. (After all, films are an art.) But there is an undeniable loss of power, since Resnais wants very much to have it both ways—as “homme de gauche” and as formalist. The aim of formalism is to break up content, to question content. The questionable reality of the past is the subject of all Resnais’ films. More exactly, for Resnais, the past is that reality which is both unassimilable and dubious. (The new formalism of the French novels and films is thus a dedicated agnosticism about reality itself.) But at the same time, Resnais does believe in, and want us to share in a certain attitude toward, the past insofar as it has the signature of history. This does not create a problem in Night and Fog, where the memory of the past is situated objectively, outside the film, so to speak, in an impersonal narrator. But when Resnais decided to take as his subject, not “a memory,” but “remembering,” and to situate memories in characters within the film, a muted collision between the aims of formalism and the ethic of engagement occurred. The result of using admirable sentiments—like guilt for the bomb (in Hiroshima) and for the French atrocities in Algeria (Muriel)—as subjects for aesthetic demonstration is a palpable strain and diffuseness in the structure, as if Resnais did not know where the center of his film really was. Thus, the disturbing anomaly of Hiroshima is the implicit equating of the grandiose horror of the Japanese hero’s memory, the bombing and its mutilated victims, with the comparatively insignificant horror from the past that plagues the French heroine, an affair with a German soldier during the war for which, after the liberation, she was humiliated by having her head shaved.

  I have said that not a memory but remembering is Resnais’ subject: nostalgia itself becomes an object of nostalgia, the memory of an unrecapturable feeling becomes the subject of feeling. The only one of Resnais’ feature films which does not reveal this confusion about its center is Marienbad. Here, a strong emotion—the pathos of erotic frustration and longing—is raised to the level of a meta-emotion by being set in a place that has the character of an abstraction, a vast palace peopled with haute couture mannequins. This method is plausible because it is a totally ahistorical, apolitical memory which Resnais has located in what is a kind of generalized Past. But abstraction through generality, at least in this film, seems to produce a certain deflection of energy. The mood is stylized reticence, but one does not feel, sufficiently, the pressure of what the characters are being reticent about. Marienbad has its center, but the center seems frozen. It has an insistent, sometimes sluggish stateliness in which visual beauty and exquisiteness of composition are continually undermined by a lack of emotional tension.

  There is greater energy in Muriel, which is a far more ambitious film. For Resnais has come back to the problem which, given his sensibility and the themes he wishes to pursue, he cannot evade: the reconciliation of formalism and the ethic of engagement. He cannot be said to have solved the problem, and in an ultimate sense Muriel must be judged a noble failure, but he has shown a good deal more about the problem and the complexities of any solution to it. He does not make the mistake of implicitly coordinating historical atrocity with a private grief (as in Hiroshima). Both simply exist, in an extended network of relationships whose psychological “insides” we never know. For Resnais has sought to represent his materials, the burden of an anguishing memory of participation in a real historical event (Bernard in Algeria) and the inexplicit anguish of a purely private past (Hélène and her affair with Alphonse) in a manner which is both abstract and concrete. It is neither the understated documentary realism of his rendering of the city of Hiroshima, nor the sensuous realism of the photography of Nevers; nor is it the abstract museum stillness, embodied in the exotic locale of Marienbad. Abstraction in Muriel is subtler and more complex, because it is discovered in the real everyday world rather than by departing from it in time (the flashbacks in Hiroshima) or in space (the château of Marienbad). It is conveyed in the rigor of its compositional sense, first of all, but this is to be found in all Resnais’ films. And it is in the rapid cutting-away-from-scenes which I have already mentioned, a rhythm new in Resnais’ films; and in the use of color. About the last, much could be said. Sacha Vierny’s color photography in Muriel stuns and delights, giving one that sense of having never before appreciated the resources of color in the cinema that such films as Gate of Hell and Visconti’s Senso once also did. But the impact of the colors in Resnais’ film is not just that they are beautiful. It is the aggressive inhuman intensity they possess, which gives to quotidian objects, up-to-date kitchenware, modern apartment buildings and stores, a peculiar abstractness and distance.

  Another resource for intensification through abstractness is the music of Hans Werner Henze for voice and orchestra, one of those rare film scores that stands as a musical composition by itself. Sometimes the music is used for conventional dramatic purposes: to confirm or comment on what is happening. Thus, in the scene when Bernard shows the crude film he made of his ex-comrades in Algeria, cavorting and smiling, the music becomes harsh and jolting—contradicting the innocence of the image. (We know these are the soldiers who share with Bernard the guilt of Muriel’s death.) But the more interesting use which Resnais makes of the music is as a structural element in the narration. The atonal vocal line sung by Rita Streich is sometimes used, like the dialogue, to soar over the action. It is through the music that we know when Hélène is most tormented by her barely named emotions. And, in its most powerful use, the music constitutes a kind of purified dialogue, displacing speech altogether. In the brief wordless final scene, when Simone comes looking for her husband in Hélène’s apartment and finds no one, the music becomes her speech; voice and orchestra rise to a
crescendo of lament.

  But, for all the beauty and effectiveness of the resources I have mentioned (and those I have not mentioned, which include acting performances of great clarity, restraint, and intelligence17), the problem of Muriel—and of Resnais’ work—remains. A cleavage of intention, which Resnais has thus far failed to transcend, has given rise to a multiplicity of devices, each one justifiable and largely successful, but the whole giving an unpleasant feeling of clutteredness. Perhaps this is why Muriel, however admirable, is not a very likable film. The trouble, let me repeat, is not formalism. Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne and Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie—to mention only two great films in the formalist tradition—are emotionally exalting, even when they are being most dead-pan and cerebral. But Muriel is somehow depressing, weighty. Its virtues, such as its intelligence and its extraordinary rewards on a purely visual level, still retain something (though a good deal less) of that preciousness, that studied air, that artiness that infests Hiroshima and Marienbad. Resnais knows all about beauty. But his films lack tonicity and vigor, directness of address. They are cautious, somehow, overburdened and synthetic. They do not go to the end, either of the idea or of the emotion which inspires them, which all great art must do.

  [1963]

  A note on novels and films

  THE fifty years of the cinema present us with a scrambled recapitulation of the more than two hundred year history of the novel. In D. W. Griffith, the cinema had its Samuel Richardson; the director of Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), One Exciting Night (1922), and hundreds of other films voiced many of the same moral conceptions and occupied an approximately similar position with respect to the development of the film art as the author of Pamela and Clarissa did with respect to the development of the novel. Both Griffith and Richardson were innovators of genius; both had intellects of supreme vulgarity and even inanity; and the work of both men reeks of a fervid moralizing about sexuality and violence whose energy comes from suppressed voluptuousness. The central figure in Richardson’s two novels, the pure young virgin assailed by the brute-seducer, finds its exact counterpart—stylistically and conceptually—in the Pure Young Girl, the Perfect Victim, of Griffith’s many films, played often either by Lillian Gish (who is famous for these roles) or by the now-forgotten but much better actress, Mae Marsh. Like Richardson, Griffith’s moral drivel (expressed in his inimitable and lengthy titles written in a brand of English all his own, replete with capital letters for the names of all the virtues and sins) concealed an essential lasciviousness; and, like Richardson, what is best in Griffith is his extraordinary capacity for representing the most tremulous feminine sentiments in all their longueurs, which the banality of his “ideas” does not obscure. Like Richardson, too, the world of Griffith seems cloying and slightly mad to modern taste. Yet it was these two who discovered “psychology” for the respective genres in which they are the pioneers.

  Of course, not every great film director can be matched with a great novelist. The comparisons cannot be pressed too literally. Nevertheless, the cinema has had not only its Richardson, but its Dickens, its Tolstoy, its Balzac, its Proust, its Nathanael West. And then there are the curious marriages of style and conception in the cinema. The masterpieces that Erich Von Stroheim directed in Hollywood in the 1920s (Blind Husbands, Foolish Wives, Greed, The Merry Widow, Wedding March, Queen Kelly) might be described as an improbable and brilliant synthesis of Anthony Hope and Balzac.

  This is not to assimilate the cinema to the novel, or even to claim that the cinema can be analyzed in the same terms as a novel. The cinema has its own methods and logic of representation, which one does not exhaust by saying that they are primarily visual. The cinema presents us with a new language, a way of talking about emotion through the direct experience of the language of faces and gestures. Nevertheless, there are useful analogies which may be drawn between the cinema and the novel—far more, it seems to me, than between the cinema and the theater. Like the novel, the cinema presents us with a view of an action which is absolutely under the control of the director (writer) at every moment. Our eye cannot wander about the screen, as it does about the stage. The camera is an absolute dictator. It shows us a face when we are to see a face, and nothing else; a pair of clenched hands, a landscape, a speeding train, the façade of a building in the middle of a tête-à-tête, when and only when it wants us to see these things. When the camera moves we move, when it remains still we are still. In a similar way the novel presents a selection of the thoughts and descriptions which are relevant to the writer’s conception, and we must follow these serially, as the author leads us; they are not spread out, as a background, for us to contemplate in the order we choose, as in painting or the theater.

  A further caveat. Traditions exist within the cinema—less frequently exploited than that tradition which plausibly can be compared with the novel—which are analogous to literary forms other than the novel. Eisenstein’s Strike, Potemkin, Ten Days That Shook the World, The Old and the New; Pudovkin’s The Mother, The End of St. Petersburg, Storm Over Asia; Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, The Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress; Inagaki’s Chushingura; Okamoto’s Samurai Assassin; most films of John Ford (The Searchers, etc.) belong rather to a conception of the cinema as epic. There is also a tradition of the cinema as poetry; many of the “avant-garde” short films which were made in France in the 1920s (Buñuel’s Le Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or; Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un Poète; Jean Renoir’s La Petite Marchande d’Allumettes; Antonin Artaud’s La Coquille et le Clergyman) are best compared with the work of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Lautréamont. Nevertheless, the dominant tradition in the film has centered upon the more or less novelistic unfolding of plot and idea, employing highly individuated characters located in a precise social setting.

  Of course, the cinema does not obey the same schedule of contemporaneity as the novel; thus, it would appear anachronistic to us if someone wrote a novel like Jane Austen, but it would be very “advanced” if someone makes a film which is the cinematic equivalent of Jane Austen. This is no doubt because the history of films is so much shorter than the history of narrative fiction; and has emerged under the peculiarly accelerated tempo at which the arts move in our century. Thus its various possibilities overlap and double back on each other. Another reason is the fact that cinema, as a late-comer to the serious arts, is in a position to raid the other arts and can deploy even relatively stale elements in innumerable fresh combinations. Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotion. All the trappings of melodrama and high emotion may be found in the most recent and sophisticated cinema (for example, Visconti’s Senso and Rocco and His Brothers), while these have been banished from most recent sophisticated novels.

  One link between novels and films that is frequently made, however, does not seem very useful. That is the old saw about dividing directors into those who are primarily “literary” and those who are primarily “visual.” Actually, there are few directors whose work can be so simply characterized. A distinction at least as useful is that between films which are “analytic” and those which are “descriptive” and “expository.” Examples of the first would be the films of Carné, Bergman (especially Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence), Fellini, and Visconti; examples of the second would be the films of Antonioni, Godard, and Bresson. The first kind could be described as psychological films, those concerned with the revelation of the characters’ motives. The second kind is anti-psychological, and deals with the transaction between feeling and things; the persons are opaque, “in situation.” The same contrast could be carried through in the novel. Dickens and Dostoevsky are examples of the first; Stendhal of the second.

/>   [1961]

  V

  Piety without content

  AS WE may learn from such disparate sources as the Oresteia and Psycho, matricide is of all possible individual crimes the most insupportable psychologically. And, of all possible crimes which an entire culture can commit, the one most difficult to bear, psychologically, is deicide. We live in a society whose entire way of life testifies to the thoroughness with which the deity has been dispatched, but philosophers, writers, men of conscience everywhere squirm under the burden. For it is a far simpler matter to plot and commit a crime than it is to live with it afterwards.

  While the act of killing the Judeo-Christian God was still under way, antagonists on both sides took up their positions with a great deal of sureness and self-righteousness. But once it was clear that the deed had been done, the battle lines began to blur. In the 19th century, melancholy attempts at promoting a revived pagan religion to replace the vanquished Biblical tradition (Goethe, Hölderlin) and tremulous hopes that something humane could be saved (George Eliot, Matthew Arnold) are heard amidst the loud and somewhat shrill voices of the victors proclaiming the triumph of reason and maturity over faith and childishness, and the inevitable advance of humanity under the banner of science. In the 20th century, the sturdy Voltairean optimism of the rationalist attack on religion is even less convincing and less attractive, though we still find it in conscientiously emancipated Jews like Freud and, among American philosophers, in Morris Cohen and Sidney Hook. It seems that such optimism is possible only to those whom the “bad tidings,” the dysangel of which Nietzsche speaks, that God is dead, have not reached.

  More common in our own generation, particularly in America in the backwash of broken radical political enthusiasms, is a stance that can only be called religious fellow-travelling. This is a piety without content, a religiosity without either faith or observance. It includes in differing measures both nostalgia and relief: nostalgia over the loss of the sense of sacredness and relief that an intolerable burden has been lifted. (The conviction that what befell the old faiths could not be avoided was held with a nagging sense of impoverishment.) Unlike political fellow-travelling, religious fellow-travelling does not proceed from the attraction which a massive and increasingly successful idealism exercises, an attraction which is powerfully felt at the same time that one cannot completely identify with the movement. Rather, religious fellow-travelling proceeds from a sense of the weakness of religion: knowing the good old cause is down, it seems superfluous to kick it. Modern religious fellow-travelling is nourished on the awareness that the contemporary religious communities are on the defensive; thus to be anti-religious (like being a feminist) is old hat. Now one can afford to look on sympathetically and derive nourishment from whatever one can find to admire. Religions are converted into “religion,” as painting and sculpture of different periods and motives are converted into “art.” For the modern post-religious man the religious museum, like the world of the modern spectator of art, is without walls; he can pick and choose as he likes, and be committed to nothing except his own reverent spectatorship.