Narrating for-the-Other: French and Francophone Cinema as Testimony of the Extreme

Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Jones, Andrew
- Graduate Program:
- French and Francophone Studies
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 08, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Monique Yaari, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Monique Yaari, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Jennifer Boittin, Committee Member
Willa Zahava Silverman, Committee Member
Robert Lambert Bernasconi, Outside Member
Steven Ungar, Outside Member - Keywords:
- Cinema
Holocaust
Gulag
Colonialism
French and Francophone Studies
Film Studies
film-philosophy
Emmanuel Levinas - Abstract:
- The dehumanizing brutality plaguing the twentieth century peaked in World War Two and the postwar years with the convergence of the perverse ideologies of Nazism, Stalinism, and colonialism. The memory of these three extreme historical configurations haunts the French-speaking world. They have impacted territory, language, and nationality, in multiple ways: the Nazi occupation of France and the criminal treatment of Jews and others, including by French nationals; the forcible imposition of French rule and language in the colonies, and obstacles to postwar immigrants from former colonies, even those who had fought alongside French troops during the war; conversely, the embrace of the French language by dissidents in the USSR and its sphere of influence even prior to seeking asylum in France, and the scholarly, literary, and filmic works they created in the adopted language—as did also, from a different perspective, postcolonial authors and filmmakers. Beyond the marked specificity of each of these historical frameworks stands a crucial universal question of ethical nature, globally pertinent today: how to represent the memory of human hatred in ways that should discourage its reoccurrence. Grounded first and foremost in the profound ethical implications underlying the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas in dialogue with historically informed postcolonial theorists, and, secondly, inspired by the poetics of Paul Celan, I probe the ethical role that art, here film, may play in representing such extreme suffering. Starting from Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (1974), where Levinas argues that responsibility for the other is constitutive of subjectivity, which in turn can find expression in testimony, I test the hypothesis that cinema can form such a testimony. Investigating the relationship between testimony and cinematography including the act of filmic narration, I establish a dialogue between Levinas’s conception of subjectivity as being for-the-other and the aesthetics, history, and philosophy of each film. Through this exchange, the films of my corpus—as philosophy—engage in theorizing testimony, subjectivity, and the notion of “the other.” I argue that they conceptualize a new type of testimony, namely narrating for-the-other. This implies not that one speaks for the other, but that the subject (or precisely I) by definition bears, at least philosophically, an irreducible responsibility for the hatred, suffering, and injustice inflicted upon the other. In his “Meridian” speech (1960), Celan alludes to Ossip Mandelstam’s vision of a poem as a message in a bottle, constantly traveling toward an unknown recipient and longing for a response. I demonstrate that each of the films of my corpus conceptualizes a call to responsibility on the part of the spectators by using the film form, specifically voice-over narration, the look-to-camera, close-ups, and point of view shots. Bridging poetics with recent theories of testimony and Antoine de Baecque’s conceptualization of the camera as historiographic tool, I argue that cinema—as history—brings new insights to the contemporary understanding of the past. Each film has its own way of situating its spectators within history, as actors and witnesses, not merely of the past but of the implications of the past in the present. My approach to testimony is three-pronged: historical, philosophical, and aesthetic. Working with the artistic medium of cinema, I engage in two relatively new subfields of film studies, namely l’histoire-caméra (Antoine de Baecque) and film-philosophy (David Sorfa), both of which propose that the aesthetics of the film form is particularly suited to constitute a new mode of history and of philosophy, respectively. Through the close reading of individual films, including fiction films as well as documentaries, I distill the precise cinematic means by which these films act both as history and as philosophy. I argue that a new form of testimony emerges at this intersection between art, history, and philosophy. I claim that the films of my corpus conceptualize being for-the-other through narration and cinematography so as to stand against historical instances of totalitarianism of the Left and of the Right, colonialism, and by extension all dehumanizing violence. By engaging the memory of these events’ and systems’ catastrophic physical and psychological toll through a form of testimony, these films disarm human hatred without desensitizing us to human suffering. They intensify our sensitivity through poetic means, thus complicating the binary dichotomy of the victim/perpetrator paradigm and appealing to each individual’s responsibility for manifestations of extreme hatred, including, by implication, those still present throughout the world.