A Fábula Cinematográfica

by Jacques Rancière

Jacques Rancière analisa neste livro o conflito de poéticas que atravessa a história do cinema. Pensada no início do século XX como a nova linguagem das ideias tornadas sensíveis, a arte do cinema veio também restaurar as intrigas e os géneros que a literatura e a pintura tinham estilhaçado.

Entre o sonho de Jean Epstein e a enciclopédia desencantada de Jean-Luc Godard, entre o adeus ao teatro e o encontro com a televisão, a fábula cinematográfica é sempre uma fábula contrariada.

Genres: Film, Philosophy, History, Cultural Studies

316 pages, Paperback

First published October 9, 2001

About the author

Jacques Rancière (born Algiers, 1940) is a French philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St. Denis) who came to prominence when he co-authored Reading Capital (1968), with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.

Rancière contributed to the influential volume Reading "Capital" (though his contribution is not contained in the partial English translation) before publicly breaking with Althusser over his attitude toward the May 1968 student uprising in Paris.
Since then, Rancière has departed from the path set by his teacher and published a series of works probing the concepts that make up our understanding of political discourse. What is ideology? What is the proletariat? Is there a working class? And how do these masses of workers that thinkers like Althusser referred to continuously enter into a relationship with knowledge? We talk about them but what do we know? An example of this line of thinking is Rancière's book entitled Le philosophe et ses pauvres (The Philosopher and His Poor, 1983), a book about the role of the poor in the intellectual lives of philosophers.

Most recently Rancière has written on the topic of human rights and specifically the role of international human rights organizations in asserting the authority to determine which groups of people — again the problem of masses — justify human rights interventions, and even war.

In 2006, it was reported that Rancière's aesthetic theory had become a point of reference in the visual arts, and Rancière has lectured at such art world events as the Freize Art Fair. Former French presidential candidate Ségolène Royal has cited Rancière as her favourite philosopher.

Reviews

[Richard Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not an easy read but worthwhile. The film criticism chapters are the most dense but the more philosophical chapters are quite illuminating. For instance, he writes the best summary of Deleuze's cinema books despite relentlessly attacking them. He seems to feel that one should not use art to do philosophy but analyse art in its own terms. For him the poetics of cinema is the effort to combine "the gaze of the artist who decides and the mechanical gaze that records". Although an artist might appreciate ideas that help them decide and combine and Deleuze's cinema study can supply plenty of such ideas, whether strictly faithful to artistic practice or not.

[Nuno R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Orfeu Negro tem uma selecção maravilhosa de autores e este ensaio é excelente.

[Miguel Alves]

This is the second Rancière I’ve read, and even though I’m still not that intimate with his work, this time at least I had a few more tools to grapple with his philosophy.  Since so much film writing is based on psychology of character and craft of narrative, it’s always very elastic to read someone focused on signs and figurations, on the image itself. And Rancière always ties this to politics and the wider social context. Aesthetics and politics are always holding hands.

He starts off fighting in the classic cinema battlefield: the immediate sensorial potency of the raw image vs. the widespread trend to fit your images into narratives and sequenced actions. To purists across the ages, the latter is cinema borrowing from literature and theater against its own nature and to its own detriment, but Rancière doesn’t take a side so much as he complicates the issue. The paradox of the aesthetic vs. the representative (to use the Rancière terms) is part of the wider mix of contradictions that lie at the core of cinema and make it the best medium to explore these basic tensions. Its technical basis lies in the camera, a machine that does nothing but capture images with its mindless eye. If images are inherently expressive, here this expressiveness comes from a process that is completely passive. But then the filmmaker commands and orders these images to an intentional purpose. So the filmmaker builds their fable. And because their roots are in contrarieties and paradoxes, says Rancière, film fables are always frustrated fables.

The framework that I’ve oversimplified above is applied to plenty of great critiques of individual films, and they usually branch out into something bigger and more interesting than an individual review. His treatment of image is especially great in the Nicholas Ray essay, which does a pretty good job at putting into words the director’s unique sensitivity, and in a way that is not too devoid of emotion for what is generally a dry, clinical book. His essay on Deleuze serves as a primer if you don’t care to read the 500 or so pages of his twin Cinema volumes so soon, and offers a few smart rebuttals to boot. And his essay on Histoire(s) du Cinéma might be the best essay I’ve read on that film, expressing Godard’s “denouncement and redemption” of the medium. Of course it’s the last in the bunch, because if you’re going to tie your essays together into a book that aspires even vaguely to cohesion, then you better make Histoire(s) du Cinéma the closing act.

[ligia maciel ferraz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muito bom para pensar as imagens que vemos através do figural, da forma, da presença. A leitura que ele faz nos permite perceber aquilo que estava submerso pela narrativa e pela representação.
Uma dica simples e até um pouco óbvia: veja os filmes antes de ler os textos, assim a conversa com Rancière fica mais palpável.

[kp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difficult but interesting.

[Esther · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es denso de leer, tocará dejarlo reposar y en unos años releerlo.

[Fatima Chuya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ranciere nos lleva a dar un vistazo a algunas películas no conocidas en su gran mayoría y a observarlas más allá.