BENJAMIN FONDANE, WRITINGS FOR CINEMA: SILENT AND TALKING

Review par Nadja Cohen

A little more than twenty years after the publication by Plasma of Benjamin Fondane's Writings for Cinema, Verdier editions give a second life to these texts, in a lovely small volume prepared jointly by Michel Carassou, Olivier Salazar-Ferrer and Ramona Fotiade. This initiative is all the more praiseworthy since the first edition, already established at the time by Michel Carassou, had only known a meager distribution, following the publisher's bankruptcy.

The Verdier edition reprints Fondane's texts published by Plasma: three scenarios ("Paupières mûres", "Barre fixe" and "Mtasipol") preceded by the preface 2 x 2, as well as articles on cinema: Entr'acte or Autonomous Cinema (1925), Presentation of Pure Films (1929), From Silent to Talking: Grandeur and Decadence of Cinema (1930), Cinema at an Impasse (1931), Cinema 33 and Response to a Survey on Soviet Cinema (1933). To these texts is added an important dossier on Fondane's filmography (film summaries, correspondence, interviews), to which Olivier Salazar-Ferrer adds a photographic booklet including notably shooting photos and unpublished photograms from the film Tararira.

The prefaces by Michel Carassou and Ramona Fotiade place Fondane's texts in the context of the work and career of the Romanian poet, admirer of Dada, exiled in France in 1923.

His desire for cinema is linked to the project of "bringing reason to trial to promote the virtues of the absurd." Why cinema? Because after having believed in the powers of the poem, the poet says he awakened from this "idealistic sleep" and ceased to trust words: "I ate from the fruit of the forbidden tree and immediately knew that I was naked, that Beauty was no less doubtful than Truth, Good, Civilization. Words suddenly got rid of me; in the night, I began to cry without words." (quoted p. 9).

Such an admission illuminates Fondane's interest in silent cinema (and his disenchantment with cinema at the moment of transition to talking films) but also the distance that separates him from Surrealism: if he recognizes himself in the despair that accompanied the birth of the movement, he does not at all share its confidence in the powers of language.

Cinema therefore seems to be the appropriate medium to escape this impasse: because it is liberated from language, therefore from rational discourse (logos), from the norms and limits it engenders, it appears to Fondane as a new mode of knowledge, more authentic than poetry. The Romanian poet sees in it the "only art that has never been classical and by classical art I mean an intimate sense of the real that accepts in exchange for a guarantee of duration that flatters it, to undergo training by reason [...] and that responds to the demands of the most despicable man, the most despicable man I know, I mean the classical man" (2 x 2, p. 22).

From then on, we better understand that at the end of a long period of silence and crisis of language, his first book published in French in 1928 is precisely a collection of "cine-poems," preceded by a preface entitled 2 x 2, where he presents these "unfilmable scenarios" and questions the bastard form thus invented:

Let us open the era of unfilmable scenarios! A little of the astonishing beauty of fetuses will be found there. Let us say immediately that these scenarios written to be read will be drowned in "literature" in the short term (see the traces of this vitriol in my three cine-poems) the true scenario being by nature very difficult to read, impossible to write. But then why deliberately attach myself to this nothingness? to what end? It is that a part of myself that poetry repressed, to be able to pose its own anguishing questions, has just found in cinema, a foolproof loudspeaker. (2 x 2, p. 26)

The reader is challenged to mentally project the films whose scenarios Fondane provides, in poems borrowing the form of technical breakdowns in shots. The project is all the more devious since Fondane, while punctuating his poem with stage directions, signals that "[t]he breakdown as well as the few technical indications given in the text could only be taken as distant allusions to cinematographic realization, [that] they were uniquely intended to collaborate in the creation of a provisional state of mind that memory consumes with the act of reading" (2 x 2, p 26). A performance poem, then?

Regarding the aesthetics of these potential films, Ramona Fotiade highlights the phenomena of acceleration and deceleration of shots, image repetitions and the abstract play of luminous signs that recall the experimental films of Fernand Léger or Man Ray. She also insists on two influences, two unavoidable references for Fondane's vision of cinema: the philosopher Léon Chestov and the poet Antonin Artaud about whom Fondane writes, regarding the essay on the Theater of Cruelty, that he "seeks the lost path of silent cinema" (p. 115).

The articles devoted to cinema are the subject of a small preface by Ramona Fotiade who presents their stakes and relates them to the cinematographic context of the time.

In a first text, dating from 1925, Fondane makes a poetic praise of René Clair's film, Entr'acte, whose formal audacities he salutes by opposing them to those, judged gratuitous and disappointing, of German expressionism. He celebrates the eye of the lens that gives to see reality instead of faking it.

The second article, which reprises a 1929 conference on "pure" cinema, proposes an analysis of the origin and subversive potential of cinema, popular art, transgressing bourgeois logic and ethics and allowing us to deliver ourselves from "a whole childish world violently repressed in us" (p. 70), notably thanks to humor which is "the salt of cinema" and the "touchstone of modern tragedy" (p. 77-78).

Between 1930 and 1933, Fondane then publishes three articles on the advent of talking films and their consequences, judged worrying, on cinematographic language. "To visualize is to make a thing a hundred times more material, it thereby acquires a certain lyricism" (p. 82): such is the real force of cinema for Fondane. The technical limits of early cinema, silent cinema by force of circumstances, would have provided the young medium with a fertile constraint, allowing it to reveal its true nature: to be purely visual. For Fondane, the silence of characters stimulated the spectator's imagination and favored the projection of their desires. This freedom would be threatened by the irruption of speech in cinema. Moreover, the advent of talking films threatens the universal vocation of the cinema image: "as soon as it became talkative, film became national" (p. 107), Fondane summarizes laconically. At least he condemns the theatrical and frozen aspect of the talking pictures of his time. He proposes instead to desynchronize the sound track from the image track in order to recover the movement and rhythm of avant-garde silent film.

Finally, in an article on Soviet cinema in 1933, Fondane defends individual freedom of thought against a "Five-Year Plan of Soviet art." He notably recalls the disastrous consequences of purges and political trials on the creativity of artists he admires: Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Vertov.

As for his activity as a filmmaker, finally, let us note that Fondane was a fervent defender of cinematographic art, denouncing the growing place of money in the film industry, which he knew from having worked on films of little interest at Paramount studios as assistant director then screenwriter.

Valuing the part of dream, illogic, unreasonableness, and poetry of silent films, he nevertheless succeeded in realizing two projects dear to his heart: in 1934, he adapted Ramuz's novel, The Separation of Races for the screen and participated in the filming (entitled Rapt) and, in 1936, he directed, in Argentina, Tararira, the film he had always dreamed of making, "an absurd film about an absurd thing, to satisfy [his] absurd taste for freedom" which scandalized the producer to the point that it was not distributed*.

*. See in addition: Nadja Cohen, "'Paupières mûres', an unfilmable scenario," in "What cinema does to literature (and vice versa)", *Fabula LHT (Literature, history, theory)*, n°2, December 1, 2006, URL: http://www.fabula.org/lht/2/Cohen.html