10 - The Trouble with Fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2020
Summary
Abstract
This essay explores the theme of the palpable but fascinating difficulty that many filmmakers, especially those of the Post Nouvelle Vague generations, experience in relation to the duty of storytelling or fiction in cinema. Since the work of Jean-Luc Godard, filmmakers have often sought to avoid the conventional tropes and clichés of narrative, to de-dramatise their sensationalist aspects, and yet still make feature-length films within a storytelling framework. Examples from across European cinema since the 1970s are discussed, with particular emphasis on the film J’entends plus la guitare (1991) by Philippe Garrel. The theory of a generative “trouble with fiction” is developed in relation to the literary work of Maurice Blanchot, and the practical reflections on screenwriting by Jean-Claude Carrière.
Keywords: Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Claude Carrière, Philippe Garrel, narrative, fiction
The Madness of the Day, written in 1973 by Maurice Blanchot, is a short, compacted novel in the tradition of Samuel Beckett. It is less a fiction than a voice, a monologue, a mysterious, elliptical narration. The ghostly narrator, hovering between life and death, evokes states of anonymity, poverty, sickness and blindness. He testifies: “As nobody, I was sovereign”. Yet, in this haze, there are sudden, indistinct flashes of drama: abstract moments of violence and intensity happening somewhere, somehow, to someone. At one point, the narrator gets particularly excited when he witnesses a banal yet strangely magical incident on the street involving a woman and her pram. The narrator exclaims:
I was sure of it, that I had seized the moment when the day, having stumbled against a real event, would begin hurtling to its end. Here it comes, I said to myself, the end is coming; something is happening, the end is beginning.
By the conclusion of his monologue, however, the narrator has collapsed back into morbidity and aimlessness. He retreats from these affects and states that gather in a poetic cluster: the day, light, madness, things happening and rushing to their end. Everyone around his sickbed pressures him to tell his story – but stories, too, are part of the madness of the day. The final words of the narrator, and the final line of Blanchot's text: “A story? No. No stories, never again”.
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- Information
- Mysteries of CinemaReflections on Film Theory, History and Culture 1982–2016, pp. 157 - 172Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018