Narrative, Apparatus,

Ideology
A Fihn Theory Reader

Edited by Philip Rosen

Columbia University Press

New York
Columbia University Press
New York Oxford
Copyright 1986 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved

Printed 111 the United States of America

Tills book is Smyth-sewn.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Narrative, apparatus, ideology.

Includes bibliographies.
1. Moving-pictures-Philosophy-Addresses, essays,
lectures. I. Rosen, Philip.
PN 1995. N34 1986 791.43'01 86-2619
ISBN 0-231-05880-2
ISBN 0-231-05881-0 (pbk.)

P [0 9 8 7 6

Book design by Ken Venezio

[20]

Jean-Franois Lyotard

Acinell1a

The Nihilism of Convened, Conventional Movements

Cinematography is the inscription of movement, a writing with 1110vements

all kinds of movements: for example, in the film shot, those of the actors and
other moving objects, those of lights, colors, frame, and lens; in the fum
sequence, all these again plus the cuts and splices of editing; for the ftlm as a
whole, movements of the fmal script and the spatiotemporal synthesis of the
narration (decoupage). And over or through all these movements are those of the
sound and words coming together with them.
Thus there is a crowd (nonetheless, a countable crowd) of elements in motion,
a throng of possible moving bodies which are candidates for inscription on film.
Learning the techniques of filmmaking involves knowing how to eliminate a
large number of these possible movements. It seems that image, sequence, and
ftlm must be constituted at the price of these exclusions.
Here arise two questions that are really quite naive considering the delibera
tions of contemporary cine-critics: which movements and moving bodies are
these? Why is it necessary to select, sort out, and exclude them?
If no movements are picked out we will accept what is fortuitous, dirty,
confused, unsteady, unclear, poorly framed, overexposed. For example,
suppose you are working on a shot in video, a shot, say, of a gorgeous head of
hair a la RenOIr; upon viewing it you flI1d that somethlI1g has come undone: all
of a sudden swamps, outlines of incongruoLls Islands, and cliff edges appear,

Publtshed as "L'Acinema" in Cinelli'" TllcMic, Icctllres (Paris: Ed Klillcksieck. 1973) and trans
lated in Wide Angle (1978), 2(3): 53- 59. Reprinted by permission of the author, and translation
used by permission of The Johns Hopkllls University Press.
350 Jean-Franfois Lyotard

lurching forth before your startled eyes. A scene from elsewhere, representing
nothing identifiable, has been added, a scene not related to the logic of your
shot, an undecidable scene, worthless even as an insertion because it will not be
repeated and taken up again later. So you cut it out.
We are not demanding a raw cinema, as Dubuffet demanded an art brut. We
are hardly about to form a club dedicated to the saving of rushes and the
rehabilitation of clipped footage. And yet . . . We observe that if the mistake is
eliminated it is because of its incongruity, and to protect the order of the whole
(shot and/or sequence and/or film) while banning the intensity it carries. And
the order of the whole has its sole object in the functioning of the cinema: that
there be order in the movements, that the movements be made in order, that
they make order. Writing with movements-cinematography-is thus con
ceived and practiced as an incessant organizing of movements following the
rules of representation for spatial localization, those of narration for the instan
tiation of language, and those of the form "film music" for the sound track .
The so-called impression of reality is a real oppression of orders.
This oppression consists of the enforcement of a nihilism of movements. No
movement, arising from any field, is given to the eye/ear of the spectator for
what it is: a simple
sterile difference in an audiovisual field. Instead, every move
ment put forward sends back to something else, is inscribed as a plus or minus
on the ledger book which is the film, is valuable because it returns to something
else, because it is thus potential return and profit. The only genuine movement
with which the cinema is written is that of value. The law of value (in so-called
"political" economy) states that the object, in this case the movement, is valuable
only insofar as it is exchangeable for other objects and in terms of equal quantities
of a definable unity (for example, quantities of money). Therefore, to be valuable
the object must move: proceed from other objects ("production" in the narrow
sense) and disappear, but on the condition that its disappearance makes room jor
still other objects (consumption). Such a process is not sterile, but productive; it
is production in the widest sense.

Pyrotechnics

Let us be certain to distinguish this process from sterile motion. A match once
struck is conslJlTIed. If you use the match to light the gas that heats the water
for the coffee which keeps you alert on your way to work, the consumption is
not sterile, for it is a movement belonging to the circuit of capital: merchandise/
match -> merchandise/labor power -> money/wages -> merchandise/match. But
when a child strikes the matchhead to see what happens-just for the fun of it
he el"Uoys the movement itself, the changing colors, the lIght flashing at the height
of the blaze, the death of the tiny pIece of wood, the hissing of the tmy flame.
 Acil1el1Ja 351

He enjoys these sterile differences leading nowhere, these uncompensated losses;

what the physicist calls the dissipation of energy.
Intense enjoyment and sexual pleasure (fa jOl<issance), insofar as they give rise
to perversion and not solely to propagation, are distinguished by this sterility.
At the end of Beyond the Pleasure PrinCIple Freud cites them as an example of the
combination of the life and death instincts. But he is thinking of pleasure
obtained through the channels of "normal" genital sexuality: all jOl<issan[e, in
cluding that giving rise to a hysterical attack, or contrariwise, to a perverse
scenario, contains the lethal component, but normal pleasure hides it in a
movement of return, genital sexuality. Normal genital sexuality leads to child
birth, and the child is the return of, or on, its movement. But the motion of
pleasure as such, split from the motion of the propagation of the species, would
be (whether genital or sexual or neither) that motion which in going beyond
the point of no return spills the libidinal forces outside the whole, at the expense
of the whole (at the price of the ruin and disintegration of this whole).
In lighting the match the child eIoys this diversion (detournement, a word
dear to Klossowski) that misspends energy. He produces, in his own movement,
a simulacrum of pleasure in its so-called "death instinct" component. Thus if he
is assuredly an artist by producing a simulacrum, he is one most of all because
this simulacrum is not an object or worth valued for another object. It is not
composed with these other objects, compensated for by them, enclosed in a
whole ordered by constitutive laws (in a structured group, for example). On the
contrary, it is essential that the entire erotic force invested in the simulacrum be
promoted, raised, displayed, and burned in vain. It is thus that Adorno said the
only truly great art is the making of fIreworks: pyrotechnics would simulate
perfectly the sterile consumption of energies in jouissance. Joyce grants tllis
privileged position to fireworks in the beach sequence in Ulysses. A simulacrum,
understood in the sense Klossowski gives it, should not be conceived primarily
as belonging to the category of representation, like the representations which
imitate pleasure; rather, it is to be conceived as a kinetic problematic, as the
paradoxical product of t h e d i sorder of the drives, as a composite of
decompositions.
The discussion of cinema and representational-narrative art in general begins
at tllis point. Two directions are open to the conception (and production) of an
object, and in particular, a cinematographic object, conforming to the pyro
technical imperative. These two seemingly contradictory currents appear to be
those attracting whatever is intense in painting today. It is possible that they are
also at work in the truly active forms of experimental and underground cinema.
These two poles are immobility and excessive movement. In letting itself be
drawn toward these antipodes the cinema insensibly ceases to be an ordering
force; it produces true, that is, vain, simulacrums, blissful intensities, instead of
productive/ COI1SUl1lable objects.
352 Jean-Franois Lyotard

The Movement of Return

Let us back up a bit. What do these movements of return or returned movements

have to do with the representational and narrative form of the commercial
cinema? We emphasize just how wretched it is to answer this question in terms
of a simple superstructural function of an industry, the cinema, the products of
which, films, would lull the public consciousness by means of doses of ideology.
If film direction is a directing and ordering of movements it is not so by being
propaganda (benefiting the bourgeoisie some would say, and the bureaucracy,
others would add), but by being a propagation. Just as the libido must renounce
its perverse overflow to propagate the species through a normal genital sexuality
allowing the constitution of a "sexual bod y " having that sole end, so the film
produced by an artist working in capitalist industry (and all known industry is
now capitalist) springs from the effort to eliminate aberrant movements, useless
expenditures, differences of pure consumption. This ftIm is composed like a
unified and propagating body, a fecund and assembled whole transmitting
instead of losing what it carries. The diegesis locks together the synthesis of
movements in the temporal order; perspectivist representation does so in the
spatial order.
Now, what are these syntheses but the arranging of the cinematographic
material following the figure of return? We are speaking not only of the require
ment of profitability imposed upon the artist by the producer but also of the
formal requirements that the artist weighs upon his material . All so-called good
form implies the return of sameness, the folding back of diversity upon an
identical unity. In painting this may be a plastic rhyme or an equilibrium of
colors; in music, the resolution of dissonance by the dominant chord; in archi
tecture, a proportion. Repetition, the principle not only of the metric but even
of the rhythmic, if taken in the narrow sense as the repetition of the same (same
color, line, angle, chord), is the work of Eros and Apollo disciplining the
movements, limiting them to the norms of tolerance characteristic of the system
or whole under consideration.
It was an error to accredit Freud with the discovery of the very motion of the
drives. Because Freud, in Beyo'1d the Pleasure Principle, takes great care to disso
ciate the repetition of the same, which signals the regime of the life instincts,
from the repetition of the other, which can only be other to the first-named
repetition. These death drives are just outside the regime delimited by the body
or whole considered, and therefore it is impossible to discern whal is returning,
when retu rni ng with these drives is the intensity of extreme jouissance and
danger that they carry. To the point that it must be asked if indeed any repetition
is involved at all, if on the contrary something different returns at each lI1stance,
if the ctcrnal return of these sterile explosions of libidinal discharge should not
be conceived in a wholly different time-space than that of the repetition of the
same. as their impossible copresence. Assuredly we fll1d here the insufficiency
 Aejllcl11l1 353

of thOiAghf, which must necessarily pass through that sameness which IS the
concept.
Cinematic movements generally follow the fi gure of return, that is, of the
repetition and propagation of sameness. The scenario or plot, an intrigue and
its solution, achieves the same resolution of dissonance as the sonata form in
music; its movement of return organizes the affective charges linked to the tilmic
"signifleds," both connotative and denotative, as Metz would say. In this regard
all endings are happy endings, just by being endings, for even if a fum fmishes
with a murder, this too can serve as a fmal resolution of dissonance. The affective
charges carried by every type of cinematographic and filmic "signifier" (lens,
framing, cuts, lighting, shooting, etc.) are submitted to the same rule absorbing
diversity into unity, the same law of a return of the same after a semblance of
difference; a difference that is nothing, in fact, but a detour.

The Instance of Identification

This rule, where it applies, operates principally, we have said, in the form of
exclusions and effacements. The exclusion of certain movements is such that the
professional filmmakers are not even aware of them; effacements, on the other
hand, cannot fail to be noticed by them because a large part of their activity
consists of them. Now these effacements and exclusions form the very operation
of fum directing. In eliminating, before and/or after the shooting, any extreme
glare, for example, the director and cameram.an condemn the image of film to
the sacred task of making itself recognizable to the eye. The image must cast
the object or set of objects as the double of a situation that from then on will be
supposed real. The image is representational because recognizable, because it
addresses itself to the eye's memory, to fixed references or identification, references
known, but in the sense of "well known," that is, familiar and established. These
references are identity measuring the returning and return of movements. They
form the instance or group of instances connecting and making them take the
form of cy cles. Thus all sorts of gaps, jolts, postponements, losses, and confu
sions can occur, but they no longer act as real diversions or wasteful drifts;
when the fmal count is made they turn out to be nothing but beneficial detours.
It IS precisely through the return to the ends of identification that cinemato
graphic form, understood as the s y ntheSIS of good movement, is articulated
following the cyclical organization of capital .

One example chosen from among thousands: inJoc (a ftlm built entirely upon
the impression of reality) the movement is drastically altered twice: the first
time when the father beats to death the hippie who lives with his daughter; the
second, when in "mopping up" a hippie commune he u nwittingly guns down
his own daughter. This last sequence ends with a freeze-frame shot of the bust
and face of the daughter who is struck down 111 full movement. In the fmc
354 Jean-Fral1(ois Lyotard

murder we see a hail of fists falling upon the face of the defenseless hippie who
quickly loses consciousness. These two e ffe ct s, the one an immobilization, the
other an excess of mobility, are obtained by waiving the rules of representation
which demand real motion recorded and projected at 24 frames per second. As
a result we could expect a s trong affective charge to accompany them, since tills
greater or lesser perversion of the realistic rhythm responds to the organic
rhythm of the intense emotions evoked. And it is indeed produced, but to the
benefit, nevertheless, of the filmic totality, and thus, all told, to the benefit of
order; both arrhy thmias are produced not in some aberrant fashion but at the
culminating points in the tragedy of the impossible father/daughter incest
underlying the scenario. So while they may upset the representational order,
clouding for a few seconds the celluloid's necessary transparency (which is that
order's condition), these two affective charges do not fail to suit the narrative
order. On the contrary, they mark it with a beautiful melodic curve, the first
accelerated murder fmding its resolution in the second immobilized murder.
Thus the memory to which films address themselves is nothing in itself, just
as capital is nothing but an instance of capitalization; it is an instance, a set of
empty instances, which in no way operate through their content; good form,
good lighting, good editing good sound mixing are not good because they conform
to perceptual or social reality, but because they are a priori scenographic operators
which on the contrary determine the objects to be recorded on the screen and
in "reality."

Directing: Putting In, and Out, of Scene

Film direction is not an artistic activity; it is a general process touching all fields
of activity, a profoundly unconscious process of separation, exclusion, and
effacement. [n other words, direction is simultaneously executed on two planes,
with this being its most enigmatic aspect. On the one hand, this task consists
of separating reality on one side and a play space on the other (a "real" or an
"unreal"-that which is in the camera's lens): to direct is to institute this limit,
this frame, to circumscribe the region of de-responsibility at the heart of a whole
which ideo facto is posed as responsible (we will call it nature, for example, or
society or fin al il1sta/1ce). Thus between the two regions is established a relation
of representation or doubling accompanied necessarily by a relative devaluation
of the scene's realities, now only representative of the realities of reality. But on
the other hand, and inseparably, in order for the function of representation to
be fulfdled, the activity of directing (a placing in and out of scene, as we have
just said) must also be an activity which unifies all the movements, those on
both sides of the frame's limit, imposing here and there, in "reality" just as in the
real (reel), thesame nor ms, the same ordering of all drives, excluding, obliterating,
effacing them no less off the scene than on. The references imposed on the fdmic
 Acil1clI1a 355

object are imposed just as necessarily on all objects outside the ftlm. Direction
[mt divides-along the axis of representation, and due to the theatrical Iimit
a reality and its double, and this disjunction constitutes an obvious repression.
But also, beyond this representational disjunction and in a "pretheatrical" eco
nomic order, it eliminates all impulsional 1110vemwI, real or Imyea!, which II'ill 1101
lend itself to reduplication, all movement which would escape identification, rec
ognition, and the mnemic fixation. Considered from the angle of this primordial
function of an exclusion spreading to the exterior as well as to the interior of
the cinematographic playground, ftlm direction acts al ways as a factor of libidinal
normalizatiol1, and does so independently of all "content," be it as a "violent" as
might seem. This normalization consists of the exclusion from the scene of
whatever cannot be folded back upon the body of the film, and outside the
scene, upon the social body.
The Jilm, strange formation reputed to be normal , is no more normal than
the society or the organism. All these so-called objects are the result of the
imposition and hope for an accomplished totality. They are supposed to realize
the reasonable goal par excellence, the subordination of all partial drives, all
sterile and divergent movements, to the unity of an organic body. The ftlm is
the organic body of cinematographic movements. It is the ecclesia of images:
just as politics is that of the partial social organs. This is why direction, a
technique of exclusions and effacements, a political activity par excellence, and
political activity, which is direction par excellence, are the religion of the modern
irreligion, the ecclesiastic of the secular. The central problem for both is not the
representational arrangement and its accompanying question, that of knowing
how and what to represent and the defmition of good or true representation;
the fundamental problem is the exclusion and foreclosure of all that is judged
unrepresentable because nonrecurrent.
Thus ftlm acts as the orthopedic mirror analyzed by Lacan in 1949 as consti
tutive of the imaginary subject or object a; that we are dealing with the social
body in no way alters its function. But the real problem, missed by Lacan due
to his Hegelianism, is to know why the drives spread about the polymorphous
body must hQlJC an object where they can unite. That the imperative of unification
is given as hypothesis in a philosophy of "consciousness" is betrayed by the very
term "consciousness," but for a "thought" of the unconscious (of which the form
related most to pyrotechnics would be the economy sketched here and there ill
Freud's writings), the question of the production of unity, even an imaginary
unity, can no longer fail to be posed in all its opacity. We will no longer have to
pretend to understand how the subject's unity is constituted from his Image in
the mirror. We will have to ask ourselves how and why the specular wall in
general, and thus the cinema screen in particular, can become a privileged place
for the libidinal cathexis; why and how the drives come to take their place 011

the [tim (pelliClile, or petile peau), opposing it to themselves as the pl a c e of thei r

inscription, and what is more, as the support that the ftllme operation in all its
356 Jean-Fral1fois Lyotard

aspects will efface. A libidinal economy of the cinema should theoretically

construct the operators which exclude aberrations from the social and organic
bodies and channel the drives into tlus apparatus. It is not clear that narcissism
or masoclusm are the proper operators: they carry a tone of subjectivity (of the
theory of Self) that is probably still much too strong.

The Tableau Vivant

The acinema, we have said, would be situated at the two poles of the cinema
taken as a writing of movements: thus, extreme immobilization and extreme
mobilization. It is only for thought that these two modes are incompatible. In a
libidinal economy they are, on the contrary, necessarily associated; stupefaction,
terror, anger, hate, pleasure-all the intensities-are always displacements in
place. We should read the term emotiol1 as a motion moving toward its own
exhaustion, an immobilizing motion, an immobilized mobilization. The rep
resentational arts offer two symmetrical examples of these intensities, one where
immobility appears: the tableau vivant; another where agitation appears: lyric
abstraction.
Presently there exists in Sweden an institution called the posering, a name
derived from the pose solicited by portrait photographers: young girls rent their
services to these special houses, services which consist of assuming, clothed or
unclothed, the poses desired by the client. It is against the rules of these houses
(which are not houses of prostitution) for the clients to touch the models in any
way. We would say that tlus institution is made to order for the phantasmatic of
Klossowski, knowing as we do the importance he accords to the tableau vivant
as the near perfect simulacrum of fantasy in all its paradoxical intensity. But it
must be seen how the paradox is distributed in this case: the immobilization
seems to touch only the erotic object, while the subject is found overtaken by
the liveliest agitation.
But things are probably not as simple as they might seem. Rather, we must
understand this arrangement as a demarcation on both bodies, that of model
and client, of the regions of extreme erotic intensification, a demarcation per
formed by one of them, the client, whose integrity reputedly remains intact.
We see the proximity such a formulation has to the Sadean problematic of
jOUlssance. We must note, given what concerns us here, that the tableau vivant
in general, if it holds a certalll libidinal potential, does so because it brings the
theatrical and economic orders into communication; because it uses "whole
persons" as detached erotic regions to which the spectator's impulses are con
nected. (We must be suspicious of sumn1.ing this up too quickly as a simple
voyeurism). We must sense the pnce, beyond price, as Klossowski admlrably
 AcillCllla 357

explains, that the organic body, the pretended unity of the pretended subject,
must pay so that the pleasure will burst forth in its irreversible sterility. This is
the same price that the cinema should pay if it goes to the first of its extremes,
immobilization: because this latter (which is not simply immobility) means that
it would be necessary to endlessly undo the conventional synthesis that normally
all cinematographic movements proliferate. Instead of good, unifying, and
reasonable forms proposed for identification, the image would give rise to the
most intense agitation through its fascinating paralysis. We could already fmd
many underground and experimental films illustrating this direction of im
mobilization. Here we should begin the discussion of a matter of singular
importance: if you read Sade or Klossowski, the paradox of immobilization is
seen to be clearly distributed along the representational axis. The object, the
victim, the prostitute, takes the pose, offering his or her self as a detached region,
but at the same time giving way and humiliating this whole person. The allusion to
this latter is an indispensable factor in the intensification, since it indicates the
inestimable price of diverting the drives in order to achieve perverse pleasure.
Thus representation is essential to this phantasmatic; that is, it is essential that
the spectator be offered instances of identification, recognizable forms, all in all,
matter for the memory: for it is at the price, we repeat, of going beyond this
and disfiguring the order of propagation that the intense emotion is felt. It
follows that the simulacrum's support, be it the writer's descriptive syntax, the
film of Pierre Zucca whose photographs illustrate(?) Klossowski'sLa MOl1naie
Vival1te, the paper on which Klossowski himself sketches-it follows that the
support itself must not submit to any noticeable perversion in order that the
perversion attack only what is supported, the representation of the victim: the
support is held in insensibility or unconsciousness. From here springs Klos
sowski's active militancy in favor of representational plastics and his anathema
for abstract painting.

Abstraction

But what occurs if, on the contrary, it is the support itself that is touched by
perverse hands Then the ftlm, movements, lightings, and focus refuse to
produce the recognizJble image of a victim or immobile model, taking on
themselves the price of agitation and libidinal expense and leaving it no longer
to the fantasized body. All lyric abstraction in painting maintains such a shift.
It implies a polarization no longer toward the immobility of the model but
toward the mobility of the support. This mobility is quite the contrary of
cinematographic movement; it arises from any process which undoes the beau
tiful forms suggested by this latter, from any process which to a greater or lesser
358 jcal1-Fra/1(ois Lyotard

degree works on and distorts these forms. It blocks the synthesis of identification
and thwarts the mnemic instances. It can thus go far toward achieving an atarxy
of the iconic constituents, but this is still to be understood as a mobilization of
the support. This way of frustrating the beautiful movement by mea/1S of the
support must not be confused with that working through a paralyzing attack on
the victim who serves as motif The model is no longer needed, for the relation
to the body of the client/spectator is completely displaced .
How is jouissance instantiated by a large canvas by Polloc Rothko or by
a study by Richter, Baruchello, or Eggeling? If there is no longer a reference to
the loss of the unified body due to the model's immobilization and its diversion
to the ends of partial discharge, just how inestimable must be the disposition
the client/spectator can have; the represented ceases to be the libidinal object
while the screen itself, in all its most formal aspects, takes its place. The film
strip is no longer abolished (made transparent) for the benefit of this or that
flesh, for it offers itself as the flesh posing itself. But from what unified body is it
torn so that the spectator may enjoy, so that it seems to him to be beyond all
price? Before the minute thrills which hem the contact regions adjoining the
chromatic sands of a Rothko canvas, or before the almost imperceptible move
ments of the little objects or organs of Pol Bury, it is at the price of renouncing
his own bodily totality and sy nthesis of movements making it exist that the
spectator experiences intense pleasure: these objects demand the paralysis not of
the object/model but of the "subject" client, the decomposition of his own
organism. The channels of passage and libidinal discharge are restricted to very
small partial regions (eye-cortex), and almost the whole body is neutralized in
a tension blocking all escape of drives from passages other than those necessary
to the detection of very fine differences. It is the same, though following other
modalities, with the effects of the excess of movement in Pollock's paintings or
with Thompson's manipulation of the lens. Abstract cinema, like abstract paint
ing, in rendering the support opaque reverses the arrangement, making the
client a victim. It is the same again though differently in the almost imperceptible
movements of the No theater.
The question, which must be recognized as being crucial to our time because
it is that of the staging of scene and society, follows: is it necessary for the victim
to be in the scene for the pleasure to be intense? If the victim is the client, if in
the scene is.only fum screen, canvas, the support, do we lose to this arrangement
all the intensity of the sterile discharge? And if so, must we then renounce the
hope of finishing with the illusion, not only the cinematographic illusion but
also the social and political illusions? Are they not really illusions then Or is
believing so the illusion? Must the return of extreme intensities be founded on
at least this empty permanence, on the phantom of the organic body or subject
which is the proper noun, and at the same time that they cannot really accomplish
this unity? This foundation, this love, how does it differ from that anchorage in
nothing which founds capital'
 Acil1cl11a 359

Note

These reAections would not have been possible without the practical and theoretical work
accomplished for several years by and with Dominique Avron, Claudine Eizykman, and Guy
Fihman.

-translated by Paisley N. Livingston,

in collaboration with the author