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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:20]
B
Think About It. Deep conversations with Uli Bear on big ideas and great books. Welcome to the Think about it podcast. I'm here today with Eyal Peredz, who is professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University. Eyal, first of all, welcome and thank you for joining me in a conversation today.
- [01:41]
C
Thank you for having me.
- [01:42]
B
Yeah, so Eyal Peredz is Professor of Comparative Literature, and I'll just name a few of the books you've written. You've written on a wide range of authors or thinkers. The first book is called Literature Disaster and the Enigma of Power. A Reading of Moby Dick on Melville's Moby Dick. Then you wrote Becoming Brian De Palma's Cinematic Education of the Census. Then we co edited with our friend Emily sun, who's professor at Barnard College, the Claims of Literature. Then Shoshana Feldman, Reader, which are essays by one of our teachers, Shoshana Feldman. Then he wrote Dramatic Experiments about Diderot. Then the Off Screen An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame, which we'll also probably mention today. Again. And then you just published two books, actually, Messengers of Infinity on Leonardo da Vinci and the book we're talking about today, American A New Film Philosophy. So, first of all, congratulations on writing that many books. And I thought I wanted to talk about this book, American Medium. A new film philosophy. And start by asking. In a general sense. We'll get to the six major films in the American canon. You're discussing Spielberg, Coppola, both Francis Ford Coppola and Sofia Coppola and John Ford. And we'll talk about the films in a minute. But to start, you are trying to think about film in a somewhat new way. Not just as a thematic way of presenting ideas, concepts, images to us, but in a different way. What moved you to write about the movies? Because you went from literature and philosophy, from Diderot and Melville, to really thinking about the movies in a different way.
- [03:31]
C
Thank you for this introduction and for the questions. I think that the general question that has always interested me is to try to articulate what is the function or the task or the place that the work of art has in our existence. Let's say, to speak in the most general terms. And I think it is fairly accepted that something happened in the early modern era, basically starting from the Renaissance or the end of the Christian Middle Ages, wherein the work of art, or at.
- [04:15]
B
Least.
- [04:17]
C
This sacred art within the framework of the sacred, had quite a specific function, mostly in relation to religion, mostly in relation to the divine. The work of art, which, like, in the high sense of the term at least, there are always popular artifacts, et cetera. But I'm not now talking about the high sense of the term. The work of art was seen, or the painting, sacred painting, et cetera, or sacred theater was seen as a way is something that occupies a site. And through this site one communicates. And with the means of the work of art, with the divine, let us say. So the work of art had a place in what we can say a theological or cosmic architecture. Now something happens once this age starting to kind of disappear, in a sense. And life is no longer organized, at least on the political level. And the level of the major institutions, is no longer organized by reference to the divine. Nevertheless, people not only continue to make images, for example, or literary text, but they kind of all of it. It was a new question. What exactly are these things doing now. When they are no longer to be understood as the site where the divine becomes present? Let us say the kind of like most general conceptual term that has been finally accepted as describing the new function of art is like. And was articulated most fully in the works of Immanuel Kat in his third critique, was the an aesthetic. Art was understood aesthetically. What exactly this means? I mean, that's obviously a very large question. But the main character of it was now the beautiful and it was often understood in relation to an experience of pleasure, for example, by a subjectivity or by subject. So that was kind of like the new task of art that was articulated within the context of philosophy towards the end of the 18th century. But one could say that from the early Renaissance, work of art that are no longer sacred, as if called for a new name anesthetic was this new name now, nevertheless, I think immediate in some interesting way, in the period immediately succeeding the formulation of the task of art as aesthetic in the writing of Kant at the end of the 18th century, one could feel a restlessness in artists and in philosophers in a way. So where it seemed like there was a need for art to be more than an aesthetic site of beauty and pleasure, let us say one wanted art to have a larger place in the organization of life as a whole, understood as a whole. The most famous, perhaps early articulation of such desire. Such is like in the writings and works of Wagner, where, under the concept of the Gesamt Kunstwerk, or the total work of art, Wagner aimed or desired for art to have a much larger function in life than simply being an object of beauty, wanted life to be organized around it. And he built a theater that is to some degree, in Bayreuth. He had a villanuel theater that to some degree should spy action in the manner of a sacred site or a temple around which life will be organized.
- [08:09]
B
And so we're going from around 1800. This is sort of. And what you're saying is not a history, but a kind of change in the inner function, which, of course, people still make art and believe it's deeply religious, and people mainly do it. So can you say something a little bit when art moves into this other category of the beautiful or giving us the experience of pleasure or something like that? The other thing I'm thinking about is that art is considered to have a meaning and not just referential. It refers to this situation or these people or this circumstance or this setting. But it has supposed to. It's supposed to be a meaning that's a little bit beyond itself or something. Can you say something about what is the relation, in a very schematic sense, between art and meaning after this? Art moving out of the temple, out of the church, out of the synagogue, out of their space or the sacred grove, into the. The more secular realm of the world.
- [09:09]
C
Yeah. The meaning that art always was supposed to have had in all its ages is like. We can use the general term allegory for it, in a sense, allegory Alos Means the other. And it meant that while art could participate in what we can understand as everyday meanings. Like, let's say if someone is building a house within the context of the work of art, I mean, it has the same meaning as building a house in everyday life. But at the same time, it was thought that art also that this kind of, let us say building a house would point to a higher level meaning perhaps it is to build a temple or kind of the art would reflect, like meaning to build the place for the God to inhabit. So meaning in the context of art was always in some sense, understood under this condition of allegory, meaning pointing to a higher meaning, that you use an everyday meaning to point to a higher meaning. So if you see someone kind of within the church, you see kind of Christ, et cetera. I mean, of course, it's a human being, but precisely it's a human being that points to something else that inhabits in a way or is incarnated in this human being. And the allegorical meaning would be that this man is Christ. As in some sense, all religious artists has this understanding of allegory that it revolves around inside.
- [10:46]
B
Can you say something about the traditions that are more skeptical about depictions of the divine? Is that still the same logic? You mean before and there's a prohibition on images?
- [10:57]
C
Yes. Like, again, I think there is, of course, a huge history and a very important question of the history of the relation to images. I mean, you are referring, of course, to the biblical or the Judaic forbidding of images. And then there is an interesting way in which Christianity actually returned to images of the divine. So the question what has changed? And the Jews, I think, if I understand correctly, I mean, it's of course, like, there's a huge amount of literature around this question. But the biblical interdiction was in relation to the context which, you know, the Jews occupied of their. You know, the contemporary cultures wherein specific artifacts were considered almost like as sites that God literally inhabited. The God was in the object or even was the object. The Jews that were the first to articulate the universal abstract God, let us say, that is not inhabiting, is not part of the world and has no actual, to some degree, presence or actual presence in the world, to a degree, wanted to forbade precisely any type of object or any type of material things that God actually inhabited or were almost gods. So this, I think, something that Christianity accepted, but nevertheless, it said, even though Judaism prohibited, let us say, this type of magnetic artifacts, there is a different way to think of images where the image is not itself actually the site where God is physically present, but a pointer toward God. So there is something within the Christian understanding of the image. There is like some kind of, you can say almost like the image is the site for an emptiness or a void wherein the image is not as. Not literally where the God is physically present, but nevertheless this. As if through this void there's a connection between the earthly realm and another realm which establishes the new type of allegory I was referring to. And of course, this was always even within Christianity. There was so called iconoclastic debates of the 7th and 8th centuries. And where in exactly it was a question whether this kind of images would be allowed not finally they said it was four images one. And then this kind of controversy or debate repeated itself with the rise of Protestantism, wherein also at the beginning, the Protestants did not want it did not accept sacred images, even understood as void, through which there's a communication with the God. And then that will come like the ascetic era, as I said, or at least aesthetic era, in the sense that that was the concept used to understand these new things that we were not sure what they mean. Wherein obviously, since it was no longer in reference to God or to the divine, it's a question, what is it that art shows? On the one hand, you could say it's in clear or realistic, you know, you show something of the world, you represent it, right. But on the other hand, of course it was clear that these objects, I mean, for example, Leonardo's famous St. John that points above, and also Christ in his Last Supper points above. But. And of course this could still be understood as if religious painting, but I think there are no longer religious painting. And the pointing does not no longer indicate a pointing to something above, but there is a pointing somewhere. Then this question, what is the somewhere? And like the question of the meaning of the work in this higher sense that you are for has to do with what is this somewhere more that now let us say becomes present in the work.
- [15:12]
B
So in a schematic way, can we say that if we make this, you know, it's not an accurate historical moment. But if there's art before this moment, it doesn't point to an enigmatic source, it points to transcendent authority, power, divinity or something. And even that's mysterious, but sort of the work knows what it's pointing toward. And then you have work, and then you have the 18th century. And you also have importantly the kind of era of revolutions where there's a kind of process of removing the authority of religion over life that actually stop. People start to think, my life is not governed only by an absolute authority alien to me, but first maybe by inherited leadership. And then the revolutions throw out even that concept. So there's no longer an outside dimension that rules our life. But then we usher into what we live in today. Mostly, I mean, the people, presumably. Mostly people living in a world that is not governed by a mysterious, transcendent outside force. So now you're in the 19th century and you're saying art, has it retained, am I understanding this correctly? Has it retained this kind of sort of dimension that it gives us something, gives us a sense, it's pointing, what you said towards something, but we no longer can say, well, it's divinity or God. And then we're kind of settled it, which doesn't really settle that, art. But let's say there's something left or something. And how would you describe that?
- [16:52]
C
So that's of course, like debate, what there would be. I mean, there would already, as you said, like in the 19th century, there would be various tendencies. For example, one could speak of art for art's sake, meaning if it's no longer in relation to anything less, it's simply for itself. Or one could speak, like Wagner, that said, that art becomes the site, let us say that around which a nation, it starts to gather. So in this sense it can also be understood as political art. So there are various options that open from within this moment, as you say, wherein the governing, transcendent authority is no longer the reference point for art. And I think, and everyone felt that this is like in a famous quote of Hegel, where everyone felt toward the end of the 18th century, at the beginning of 19th century, that there's something unsatisfactory about a contemporary art that no longer seems to be able to, as if, contain this higher dimension. So Hagen thought that the higher dimension would not be contained in philosophy. Philosophy is that for him, replaces art in this sense as the. But of course, this was not necessarily accepted. Wagner, who is after Hegel in a way, does not accept that. But precisely in relation to this theming, where art is now, as if small has become small, kind of just like one of these things that we use for pleasure in everyday life, try to look for something. So it can be, as we said, either like a political dimension, for example, or some other stuff. And there's, of course, we know there's a tradition that. Not necessarily that Wagner is exactly part of the tradition, but certainly he's pointing toward it that we understand as fascistic art or propaganda art, where art becomes almost an organic way, Have the form of an organism that in relation to which a nation needs to coalesce as if it were itself like an organic unit.
- [19:07]
B
You have that in many traditions. There's Wagner, there's verity in Italy, let's say. And let's say if you move to the American context, and I'm thinking the 1850s to the beginning of your book, which is really. And your book is historical. Because film is invented as a technology and then becomes something else, art. And we'll talk about that in a minute. So it's organized around. Can we say maybe art after this moment, when the philosopher Hegel says it's one among other things, and philosophy will be actually superior to it in a certain way. But artists keep on making art with a. They're searching or they're giving us. Or they're giving us artworks that allow us to remember that we are searching for something that not every answer has been given, that the world is not actually sort of ready made for us, available to us. But art becomes more of a work that inserts in us this awareness that we haven't quite found the answer, that this secular world that maybe someone like Hegel or some people believe, well, we now restructure the work politically and socially. And culture is one of those dimensions that art is a kind of. A bit of a stubborn kind of sort of reminder. We're still searching, although we no longer quite know. Or at least we know we're not searching for God, although we may be searching. So can you, like when you move toward the 20th century and then your book sort of starts to take off from there and say that with the invention of film, something interesting happens again?
- [20:45]
C
Absolutely. I think even before film, I mean, something happens and with America, I think what the fact of the birth of America both raised this question of something that insists, as you say, in the work of art, beyond all the answers that have been given. Something new, I think, starts to coalesce around art in relation to the birth of America, wherein America itself is an expression that like all the forms that have governed human life and that were still by and large, even after the French Revolution, were by and large, and even after the separate so called separation of state and church, meaning which as if try to argue that the state itself is an organization that is not by reference to the divine. Nevertheless, life in Europe was still, we can say, by reference or like an easy reference to this old model organization and the new mod organization also was felt unsatisfactory so if you are completely disconnected from the divine, this new political state feels a bit empty and formalistic, let us say. But if it's in relation to the divine, there's like a tension. And I think America, United States, not America in the sense the United States, we can talk about the concept of America a bit later on. But the United States is a new political entity which is born under the imperative of democracy, tries to find, not both, a new way of organizing that is not exactly like the modern European states and is neither, I think in reference to the divine nor as a completely complete separation from the divine. And it's not that the articulators of inanimate of the United States exactly knew what is this place that is neither by reference to divine nor empty from the divine. And of course all the history of the United States and the way we can think in relation to God without that, etc. Is I think, acting out this hesitancy. And I think from within this context, the work of art which came, the modern work of art, which, as if was the embodiment of a restlessness that the European political realm did not manage to solve or resolve, somehow came to speak and to stand within America as a new kind of center around which this organization of life, which is neither, as they call it, religious nor formalistically political. So in this sense, I think United States became a site where the modern work of art came to slowly have a new faction. Robbe Comedy is a center for research for a new faction in a different way than in Europe.
- [24:13]
B
This episode is brought to you by Dead Man's Wire, the new film from roquet entertainment. Dead Man's Wire is the incredible true story of the 1977 kidnapping that turned an aspiring entrepreneur into an outlaw folk hero. Directed by legendary filmmaker Gus Van Sant, Dead Man's Wire stars Bill Skarsgard, Dacre Montgomery, Carrie Elways and My Halla with Colman Domingo and Al Pacino in select theaters January 9th everywhere January 16th. This is pro linebacker TJ Watt and I'm back with YPB by Abercrombie for another activewear drop. My second co design collection has new shorts and tanks that keep up with all my in season workouts. And their new restore collection is a game changer off the field too, because even pro athletes like me need rest days. Shop YPB by Abercrombie in the app, online and in stores because your personal best is greater than anything. So I think there are two assumptions at work which I just want to sort of highlight if they're correct. So just correct me if I'm not quite right. One is, you do assume that art retains a kind of special status among all sorts of other human activities, although you're saying it's not the same anymore as in this, let's say, more overt religious era, where it's the conduit towards some transcendence, but it retains a status that's different from other human activities, which are many, many, countless activities. And then secondly, you're saying America, which, as we know, has always gone through these convulsive kind of questionings of what it is, what is its conceptual frame. And that plays itself out in so many different spheres and ways. And politics is a dominant one, perhaps. And who belongs? What does it mean to be American, all of that, one nation under God, indivisible, et cetera. But you're saying that is all actually a symptom of something that. And you're saying, and I'm making it a little bit more sort of formulating is stronger than you are. Art allows us to see this question or to take this question, which gets by default buried or overwhelmed by politics all the time, because that's how life is lived. So most people think, well, we have to write political books of what America is and these cultural analyses or historical studies. And you're saying, I'm going to look at six movies that are really not. They're not, with all due respect, Ken Burns documentaries of what is America, he just released a revolutionary war. But these are works of art that are both also entertainment and all that. But you're saying they make a claim of posing this question to us from a different place. What is America?
- [27:05]
C
And.
- [27:06]
B
And we're talking here America is. You say that in your book also the United States, which appropriates this name, sort of this excessive name, as if it governs two continents, hemispheres, many nations, cultures, traditions, histories, etc. But you're saying there's something in this project that is still a question, and we know it's still a question because America is undergoing a moment right now where it's sort of a deep moment of self questioning. You want to put this positively, or you could say a crisis. And you're saying, well, art is actually a way to let us look at that when we're constantly drawn into everyday politics and all that, but we can't quite see what's at stake. So your book is between the term America and the medium of film. And in some ways you could say you're asking a more philosophical, rather than political or cultural question of what's the relation between these two projects. Right.
- [28:09]
C
Yeah. Okay, so I have drive that back.
- [28:14]
B
Yes, yes.
- [28:15]
C
So, first of all, I mean, the distinction between United States understood as a political entity and the term that the United States States has always to some degree claimed for itself, Although, as you say, it's like the name for, geographically speaking, a whole continent, the name of America. And I was interested or intrigued by this division between why the United States, unlike most countries, insist on also alternatively calling itself America in France Normal does not call itself Europe, or no other country, as far as I know, calls itself by this larger name. And my claim is that in using this larger name, the United States tried to point or obscure it almost unconsciously, or try to say that its way of organizing life is under the demand of some difference from other places, but a difference which doesn't know exactly what it is like. As I said, for example, it's neither simply the modern European secular state, nor it's still kind of a theocracy or a state that in relation to the divine. And I claim that the term America, precisely as if holds this empty, this slot. It's a name for an idea, if you want to call, or a general organization under which the new type of entities of life together of which the United States purports to be, I think the first, but not necessarily the only one. But it's as if the being together of human beings is now under this demand that is like, to some degree, we don't know what exactly it means, but it's a new demand for organization that does not adhere to any of the old model. But now it can become, in some sense that this is like the. What we can say, like the universalizing demand that the United States, in calling itself America, seems to utter. And often, and I think correctly, the United States in this sense has been criticized for kind of arrogantly saying, like, why we are the model for the entire world. But I think beyond this arrogance, there's also, like, an intuition that something new happens in the United States. This something new is coming under the demand that is called America. And now other collectives of human beings in the world each need to hear this call that is inscribed in America, even though people inhabiting the United States also do not exactly understand what this call means, but they feel there's a new call. This is, I think, what is inscribed in this distinction between United States and America. And so here there's like, the question of the work of art, which I think one of the at Least one of the aspects that fascinated me before even film, because the work of art, unlike, for example, as I said, let us say, sacred paintings that were found in a church or, you know, or even before that, in classical temples, the work of art in the modern condition, on the bond of medicine, is characterized by what you can call decontextualization or precisely not having a place. So any part of the world, in.
- [31:55]
B
A metaphoric way, once you put the picture in a frame and take it out of the church or the synagogue or the temple or the mosque, it's transportable and something else happens and then you.
- [32:07]
C
Yeah, exactly. Work is transportable, books are transportable. Every. The work of art research is characterized by being almost an orphan.
- [32:15]
B
Yeah.
- [32:16]
C
And it's not for nothing that many of the novels, etc. Are about orphans, because it's a reflection of the status or condition of the modern work of art. So already that's why it's different than any other activity, because it's an activity that is not just another activity within the context of human life or each thing. You know, if you are a builder, if you're a professor, whatever, you have a place within an organization. Your work of art does not have a place. And then it's the question, what is the significance of this thing? Where in some sense it is not part of the world or not any.
- [32:52]
B
Yeah, and we're saying two things just to remind our listeners. Yes, of course, people make art to make money and all this and to, you know, all sorts of things to express themselves, to create beauty or something. You're saying those are not. There's something else, what you're calling a call. There's many functions that a work of art or anything can have. But you're saying there's something that you're trying to put your finger on. What is this other. Yeah, and you call it a call or something that speaks from within it. And it's not answerable in these other. All these other ways. It could be paid for, it could be commercialized, it could be, you know, give people identity, all these other things.
- [33:33]
C
So, yeah, I mean, I think the work of art in its highest demand is precisely that which tries to figure out the meaning of its. What I call, like its placelessness, which means that if it is not any concrete part of the world, what is it that comes to show itself as precisely not being a part of the world? And to me, the most significant aspect is that if you are not a part of the world, what is kind of shows itself in it or in your. It's talking, personalizing the work of art. What shows itself in you is the very opening to the world, meaning the world in this sense, not as any concrete thing in the world. And here I'm using the Heideggerian distinction. But the world is the frame in which or in relation to which everything concrete opens. So the world is the frame or kind of. What is the significance of this frame? This is a very big question, but it means an idea. I think was the first in this sense that was trying to. To articulate a new place for the work of art precisely in relation to that which opens the whole, but opens it under a specific logic or modality that he calls world. In this sense, the work of art, Heidegger suggests, and I think I'm trying to explore these pointers, is a site where the question of the whole is at stake, but the whole is no longer understood as, let us call it, the religious whole, where there's like an architecture, organized architecture, or a cosmic architecture, where in everything or in relation to which everything finds its place. But this new hall that is called the world question, what exactly that might mean is not at least. At the very least we can say that it is not this theological, cosmic organization.
- [35:45]
B
And yet there is a whole of what you call the world. And if we go to the movies you look at it doesn't move in the direction which art also does. The kind of modernist tradition where there's no hole, but there's fragmentation, contingency, a kind of extreme self awareness, sort of the world is just this scattering of things and we find our way in it and we organize them in certain ways, or it's just happenstance and some strange connections that are just fortuitous. But you're saying there's something else here. So that will be one model that is the modernist tradition that becomes postmodern, then pastiche and all that. But you're saying American film goes in a somewhat, or at least the films you're looking at goes in a somewhat different direction. Because you could have gone from the, let's say the disappearance or the collapse or the sort of the end of our belief in this transcendental, transcendent unity. We just go into random contingency, sort of this, you know, what people call somewhat incorrectly, but a kind of postmodern meaninglessness, because everything could mean anything. It's not that at all. You're actually sort of saying, with this idea of ideverse world, you're looking toward film as something else. It doesn't open Unto that it opens into something else.
- [37:08]
C
Absolutely. Yeah, you're right to point, and I think I mentioned it, I tried to make a distinction, suggest that there is some kind of distinction within modern art. The one going towards what you call the modernist moment, or in what seems to be expressing the disconnection and decontextualization of the work of art is precisely on some. We can say the disaster or they coming into ruins, or of a unifying mode of organization. And it's not clear what replaces it, but we express in some sense the ruin.
- [37:45]
B
Yeah, I'm thinking of the high modernists. So there's Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Wolf, Hemingway, Mann. They're sort of. All their works are basically bearing witness to the shattering of this.
- [38:01]
C
Exactly.
- [38:01]
B
And they're still unified proofs, they're unified novels and all that. But at the center is a kind of. We are witnessing a loss of the center. The center cannot hold kind of Yates. And I'm saying this is high modernism. There's of course, much more than of that. And it doesn't mean that works are not made anymore who believe in this totality. But you're saying something else is. That's one direction we're not pursuing that. So we're going to American film, which is also an unusual nice combination. You're reading Heidegger and then you're turning to American film. We hope he's spinning in his grave.
- [38:35]
C
He said that he would not have liked that.
- [38:37]
B
No, he would have probably not liked that. And he would have probably been not comprehended. Your question that you're linking this conception of world to this phenomenon called America?
- [38:49]
C
Yes, I think Heidegger definitely, in his searches for something, I think in this.
- [38:55]
B
Direction, thinks Germany gets it quite dramatically wrong in some moments.
- [39:03]
C
But it's clearly what he was looking for. He was looking also for a new type of unity that he thought Germany as an inheritor of classical tradition, in a sense, and of philosophy, would be the site of. And of course, his great profit was elderly, around which also a new form of organization that we don't fully know yet what it is should coalesce. I'm suggesting in some sense, like a better perhaps example. And happens actually in the United States, which Heidegger definitely would be horrified by, because for him it represented all that is probably horrifying in modernity. Whereas suggesting that perhaps it's not that he is obviously fully wrong about the United States, like art and the belong to the general disaster. That is, let us say, modernity understood from a certain perspective, but also Something very different, in my opinion, happens. They tried almost to answer the desire better than Germany and better that he could envision. And it happens actually in precisely in relation in the United States. And in relation to what I call one aspect that is of this call the unstandard America. And once an art becomes, for American art, art created in. And perhaps most importantly film, I'm suggesting, becomes the site wherein the relation to this new demand is established. And as if life is now, it becomes like a new center in which life that is neither fully secularly political, at least in the kind of modern European sense, nor, of course, religious or theocratic, comes to kind of revolve around, I suggest. So in this sense, I think art in the United States, under the term American art, tried precisely in some sense, to bring into visibility the new demand for unity, that is the word. And in this sense, American art, especially film, is understood, often derogatively, as extremely positive or revolving around the question of the happy ending. But I think this positivity is crucial. Because what is essential to the United States is precisely not to the American. United States. And the American army tries to bring about is precisely not simply to express the disaster or that the center does not hold, as you say, but something new, a new kind of way or a positive way of organizing.
- [41:46]
B
Would you call part the positive. And which American art can be sort of indicted for a certain kind of optimism. I would think the language I use for that is a kind of vitality and a certain kind of aliveness that is possibly unique to American art. And it's not really. Well, it does sort of interest me quite a lot what that is, actually, it's sort of in other works as a kind of strain in American poetry where they kind of. It has an insistence that within a very small space, let's say, of a poem, of a work, one can somehow surpass oneself into a space that, as you said, is not organized according to these other models that had been available. Which is some theocratic, autocratic, some governing thing out there. And it is a kind of. That is what you are starting to look at. So there's a call to find our orientation in some other place. And I think in a kind of very schematic way, the European traditions keep on defaulting to the models that have been available. There's something even in the most dynamic European art. Occasionally they resort to some other. Some way of organizing life that had been tried before. And Americans don't quite know. So there's a kind of openness. There's also a Kind of naivete, a kind of enthusiasm, a kind of energy. It's like all the characters that we know from American art. The paradigmatic ones. There's a lot of mobility. Although there are probably other strains as well. But so can you just. Then let's go to sort of. And your book is sort of. This is the conceptual work. And then you look at six films. And can you just talk a little bit about. Because you've thought of and written about film quite a lot. These films to use. What do they do with this call? Or what do they. You know, how could I describe that?
- [43:45]
C
Yes, so I think exactly that American. I mean, American film becomes almost like a laboratory, if you want. For bringing into visibility. The call for new types of organization. Or alternatively, this work as signs of tension. Between the call for a new type of organization. And various organization that don't work or that are in. Try to almost eliminate this new organization. Or to repress it, et cetera. Because it's not fully clear yet what it means. Or alternatively, which is the same. Perhaps the most important figure I talk about. Around which this entire problematics coalesces. Is that John Ford. Who is famously, of course, the most important director of the Western. And the most important figure for the Western is the desert. And John Ford kind of his entire work is. We can, to some degree. We can say. Understanding the moment of the call of America. As a moment on some level. Between the desert and the coming to be of a new organization of life. That is thought in relation to something that happens in the desert. And tries to kind of. As if bring the desert into civilization. But by still having something deserty. Let us say we'll get it in organized life. But also, John Ford is the director, I think. That never managed to. Let us say from. If we talk about generic part of you leave the Western meaning to fully exit from the desert. To a new kind of civilized life. That we can call America or the United States. As adhering to a new code of America. Because it felt that there was something that is still blocking the full arrival into the new to the United States. And the desert is the site. And often, and I claim that in some sense. He understands the cinematic screen as a decontextualized. Also site. As a desert moment. Meaning what is a desert moment? It means, first of all, at least. At very least. It means that all the frames that organize civilization so far. Are precisely breaking. Are no longer. Once we are abandoned to some degree by this framework. We occupy the desert. At the same time, the desert also has A dimension of. Almost like a memory of a humanity before all these failed organization. So the desert is both, let us say, the sign of a ruin, but also, most important, is like as it was in the Bible, to some degree, which obviously John Ford reactivates the kind of biblical desert. There's a place where an ancient call to some degree is heard, which is if other organization of human life have not been able to answer. So the desert is a site of renewal in this sense. But renewal in the sense also of a memory. John 40 is a figure haunted, conceived by memory of something that one cannot fully articulate. And the desert is as an instant site of ruined site of renewal, but also sign of a blockage. Meaning that the call for renewal has not fully been able to be actualized. So in all these films, there's always the attempt to occupy the threshold between the desert and the city. Let us say desert and the new community. But there was somehow, from stagecore to the end, the feeling that one always finally goes back to the desert. Because we have not fully managed to reach this new call of life. On the other, for example, film that I analyzed with Spielberg's west side Story. That is clearly also positioned itself in relation to the Western. I think, even in its name, west side Story, actualize the west in some sense, I think. And he is trying, I think, to open a space between. Generically between the Western, which is the moment of the desert, and the musical, which I think, in some sense is the shadow wherein the happy community is achieved. So as if west side Story is like. As if narrating for us in some sense, through his generic tension between the Western desert and the musical life in common. A moment of possible transition to the new community. Of course, west side Story is also a tragedy. So it is also not fully clear whether this transition, full transition from Western to musical, has been achieved. Nevertheless, I think Spielberg is trying to kind of give us the new community. Perhaps most importantly in one of the scenes is where kind of this new community is at least envisioned as a utopian place. Even if not fully somewhere in the term of one of the song. It's like in the song, I like to be in America. And that's the one song in the movie where really there's an establishment of a new, happy community. Even if the movie ends on a tragic note. Yeah.
- [49:34]
B
And can we stay with the desert for a moment? So in John Ford, it's sort of obvious. It's the background and the setting. But you're saying it's much more and also less Than that it's not the actual location, the desert, but it is the desert plays a role in the imaginary of America. And then west side Story. Spielberg famously starts with the raising of the neighborhood to create Lincoln Center.
- [49:59]
C
Yes.
- [49:59]
B
Whereas the earlier 60s version has a kind of flyover of New York City and sort of shows this built environment.
- [50:06]
C
Yes.
- [50:07]
B
So the desert, you're saying it's not that it has to be located in the desert for the film to work this logic, but America is exploring this new space which is both. You said both a ruin and a promise.
- [50:20]
C
Yes, and the desert. Precisely. A non place like, as I said, the work of art itself. It's a known place in the sense that it doesn't belong to any place that's the desert. It's an abandonment to some degree by every concrete place. At the same time as the possible birth of a new logic of place. And America is clearly haunted by the figure of the desert that always kind of as if calls it because it feels its essence is there in some sense. Both the fact that it's a world that is a witness to some ruin of something that it cannot fully articulate. But also that its demand for newness comes from the desert.
- [51:07]
B
And can you say, go back to John Ford. So this is kind of one of the key chapters. So you're looking at two films, the man who Shot Liberty Valance and Young Mr. Lincoln. And can you say about why those two movies are the whole Jean Ford in some sense?
- [51:23]
C
We can say that they're like the first and the last masterpieces of John Ford. I mean, okay, Young Mr. Lincoln, the film from 1931, which is a film where he made also his other first masterpiece, Stage Coach. So already there is like a split Lincoln. He's like the founder of a new community, in a sense. And Stagecoach is like the first. Often considered the first great Western is kind of like a witness both to the fact of the desert in relation to the new community. And the fact that one never manages to fully leave it. Because at the end of Stagecoach, John Wayne goes back to the desert. Now the men Shot Liberty Parents, which is not the very last western of John Ford, but definitely the very last great film of John Ford. And great Western is a film also about it. And we can consider it as almost like a Neo Western. Or a tiny bit before the age of Neo Western that succeeded it in a sense that it's itself as a genre, a coming back to the Western that as if one never managed to live. And in the plot itself, where there's like the two main characters, one, Jimmy Stewart, that stands for, like the young Mr. Lincoln in some sense the kind of community, political community builder, while John Ford, John Wayne, sorry, is the figure of the desert as he was in a stage court. And the film is about the relation between both of them. And finally, Jimmy Stewart that left for Washington to become a center, comes back at the end of the film also to the desert. So again like. So this entire trajectory of the. So I think through these films like we can see the entire trajectory of. Of John Ford that both literally start with this tension between the founding of a new community with Lincoln and the kind of question of the code of the Desert in Stagecoach and 30 years later to Southernmost. We are still at that moment in some sense, but now in a much more reflective elegiac or nostalgic event sense. So that's, I think, the importance of the relationship precisely between these two movies that encapsulate his career.
- [53:41]
B
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C
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C
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B
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- [54:10]
C
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- [54:11]
B
And on this, in the book, you move between these kind of very close analyses of certain scenes. And then you say, but you're not really interested in just the kind of thematic plot outline. Although in these western movies there is a plot dimension of the sheriff being the embodiment of the law. For land that doesn't have a law, it's lawless. Of course, you said haunted by the sort of extermination of Native Americans. It's always haunted in a certain way. But there's a kind of figure and that sort of allows us maybe to go into. In the book, you pursue this in the analysis of the Godfather a bit in west side Story with the two cops and Marie Antoinette in a certain way that the law is one answer to settle this question of the call, what is America? You just imposed a law. And I had a podcast recently on Political Hope with Loren Goldman and he said, John Dewey reminds us Americans have an undue faith in constitutions. And institutions and in texts and institutions, the law either written down or embodied by an institution instead of actually enacting their democracy on a daily basis. And John Dewey sort of writes in 1910, there's something misguided about believing the law, capital L, this will govern the land and let us all live in usain, this happy community. And the figure of the sheriff Usain in the man who Shot Liberty Valance is kind of an interesting figure. What does he try. Is he the man of the law, trying to impose that on the desert in a simplistic way?
- [55:52]
C
Ginny Stewart is not. Not the sheriff.
- [55:55]
B
Yeah.
- [55:55]
C
There. He's a lawyer.
- [55:57]
B
Yeah.
- [55:57]
C
So he's. Exactly. The tension between the law is not through the fear of the sheriff in this movie, but between two figures in some sense, of John Wayne, James Stewart. One is like the we, and John Wayne is the. The figure for the desert, the outlaw or the. He's not an outlaw. So there's a distinction in the movie. There's another character played by Lee Marvin.
- [56:17]
B
Yeah.
- [56:17]
C
Who is the outlaw.
- [56:19]
B
Yeah.
- [56:19]
C
Meaning. So he's really a. He's outside the law in the literal sense that he really. Etc. John Wayne is. One needs another term because he's not a criminal in this sense. But neither does he belong to an organized formation or to a legal kind of frame. But he's the desert. But again, I think in relation to the law, I think all the films that I analyze, there's a tension between other ones. And we can say simply law understood in the most everyday sense, a series of formal rules that govern life simply how to behave, what's allowed, what's not allowed. But this law is in relation to a higher dimension that it needs to draw its resource from. It's a question of what to name the higher dimension. We can also say that the higher dimension is a higher law, meaning not law understood legally, legal framework, as I said before, melistically, but law simply as what is the fact that one adheres or must adhere to a call, as I call it, that forces, meaning a cause that is not in one's position or not in one's will to control. And in this sense it's a law, but it's like a new law, a new higher law. Or if we. We understand, or we can understand simply law is a formal law. And that there's. This law is intention with something beyond it, which the desert precisely embodies, which is not. So it's not. It's not outside the law, it's something else. I mean, it's not. So it's not criminal. As I said, like, that's why John Wayne is not a criminal as he stands for the desert, for the call of the desert is something else. So either is a figure or like a proto kind of like through him a demand for a new law is uttered in some way, even though nobody manages to adhere to it, or something beyond the formal law that is inscribed itself in the desert, is named there, or is felt through it. And I think to some degree, all the figures I analyze feel like this tension. Sophia Coppola, I think, is less interested in the question of the law in some sense. She has other interests that I, you know, investigate. But the three others, that's Spielberg and Francisco, are interested precisely in something outside what they call like the formal law.
- [59:01]
B
Yeah.
- [59:02]
C
So of course, in Coppola, in the Godfather, it's about a so called crime family America, because kind of, to some degree, as if, as I said, because the United States, as under the code of America, is not fully satisfied with what they call the moderate state, in some sense the European state, not theological state. There's like this excessive dimension in it. And for Copula, for example, this excessive dimension can to be inhabited by some kind of criminals that themselves are very. It's very complex what exactly it is. They're both a nostalgia for an older religious world, but there are also some. They express kind of some restlessness in America that has not been fulfilled by simply the legal state, which in the Godfather is like a very cold surveillance state almost. So it's like the question, what is the site that the Godfather, as outside the law, occupies here? It finally goes in a murderous dimension and in a criminal dimension, even as you feel that it tries to bring into visibility another dimension out of which a new community will emerge. And this is part two of the beginning, I think, of the second of Godfather 2, and in the arrival of the immigrants, wherein you feel something new is being uttered, but it's immediately destroyed by this formalistically legal state and this destruction. The fact that the arrival into America, which means it's like the place where the coin is heard, has not really been adhered to. And the space that occupies this failure is the Mafia family.
- [61:03]
B
Yeah. So can I, maybe I can paraphrase this in a way. And where we are in America is people arrive in America constantly. There's the indigenous population, obviously was here, but in a way they also have to arrive into this new formation which is violently imposed on them. And these arrivals are given this choice, say, become American instantly, which Means behave like that. And then you saying, but something is. And that has been imposed from the beginning. Sort of become American. Lose your native language, lose your customs, forget all that. And you're saying, first of all, everybody's haunted by this. Everybody's haunted by different laws. Everybody comes from somewhere, and there's an expectation to give up something. And you're saying what? These films showcase, but they are initiated into something that they're also supposed to contribute to, and that's supposed to be new. Rather than speak your loyalty out, we've become nationalized citizens. You answer these questions, you do this test, you behave like an American, and you're an American, and you're saying no. Actually, the interesting thing is you initiated into something, yet unformed. That's why these figures are these kind of threshold figures. The Godfather, who is totally criminal and completely coheres to some code that is enigmatic to us, but it's not exactly. He's chaotic. He's actually very formalized. And in these John Ford movies, there are these figures which are sort of saying, to become an American, you must never become grounded in this thing you already know, but you're at this threshold of something becoming.
- [62:40]
C
Exactly. So there's like, to become an American, or in the most profound sense, as he says, is to become almost the witness to what they call a new call that you're not fully sure how to respond to. And then it might be that this threshold moment is precisely immediately suffocated or stifled, and you are forced into something. But I think everyone kind of. And this is what I've said, like, this is what Coppola felt with the immigrants literally coming to America. There is this threshold moment between the sea and the land in the Godfather 2, which is like almost between desert and the city, where something is seen or heard that we call America in the profound sense, as they call, as they say, to organize human life in any way that has never been done. But immediately upon arriving in Elisa, something else takes hold, which kind of the call of America. The call of America remains in tension with. And I think this is very true to some degree of our life here, where everyone feels, like, the desire in some sense, to be American, but we are not fully sure what it means. And sometimes we think there are various bad options that interpret this for us.
- [63:55]
B
If I can go to. It's actually interesting in this life here, and as a kind of. At this moment, which has always been this moment, actually, I think it's not necessarily different. Maybe it's harsher or more Visible. When people say, you're not really an American. And it's funny, we were actually at an event last night and someone said, you're not really an American. And I get very interested in this. People say that. I was like, well, what is really an American? And people know all sorts of. We all know what that really means. And you're not really here. You belong to this group. You could have been here for five generations, but you're not really an American. Those are what you're saying. These films say. These questions are actually, and I want to say this cautiously valid questions. They're important questions. They're not supposed to be dismissed and say, that's an outrageous, racist, or problematic or disclusionary question. It's actually the question. And it's the question that can it open up into something rather than a kind of violent answer. You're not American, meaning you're deprived of something, or you are an American and you're given something. Something. And that's not what you're saying. You're actually saying. Even the people who think they're Americans in these movies, they are haunted by absolutely an openness.
- [65:11]
C
Exactly. In this sense, I think here, when one says, you are not an American is perhaps differently. It has a different logic than in other sites where that's a very common accusation of any you. But here, I think it expresses perhaps to a greater degree, the anxiety of the fact that Americans don't know fully what to be an American meal. And you're like, trying to, as he figure it out through, say, someone is not. Because you're not sure what it means for you to be one. And I'm not sure that would be true of a French saying to a foreigner, you're not French.
- [65:50]
B
I think this song, I Want to be an American, you cannot really transpose it and say, I want to be a Brazilian, I want to be a Japanese, I want to be a Nigerian, to be a German. It's a different veil.
- [66:02]
C
Yeah.
- [66:03]
B
And so. And I want to go to one thing in the. In the book. You do really beautifully. You look at the opening scenes a lot, and you talk quite a bit about the cinematic cut, the editing cut. When you go from one image to another one. And there's no smooth transition where the viewer is sort of told, we're now moving to this new place, new scene, new time, new everything. And I can. If I can read a sentence back to you, sort of to explain a little bit about the cut is because I think it does show you on a formal level what you're talking what we just talked about more philosophically. So you're saying the mystery of the cinematic cut. A cut that opens a decontextualized zone of a new kind. One that is because it is a site of a recorded projection, part of a world assumed to continue beyond it, yet at the same time apart from a world from which it has been separated by the abyss of the cut. This lies at the center of the investigation that you're undertaking here of these directors. So can you say something about the cut, which in some ways you say differs from the way other art, other media operate?
- [67:15]
C
Yes, for me, the cut, finally, is the essence of cinema, and also that in which it inscribed a singularity of cinema. And the way I understand it, what is unique to the cinematic image is, as I said, all modern arts are basically decontextualize, are expressed in not being part of the world. Nevertheless, in Arabic search decontextualization, for example, when we talk about the painting or even a theater play, etc. They if Mark an enclosed realm separated by each to something. Or you can say frame from everything else. What is expressed in the contextualization there is like separation, or what has been called like autonomy. In some sense, it's just like an autonomous object, not really related to the web. We're not sure how film. There is something, I find, that is in relation to this tradition, but also, most mysteriously, which has to do with the fact of the camera and the camera image, that the camera is basically a passive apparatus, that whatever you posit in front of it, it takes. Now, which means that whatever the camera registers and is shown or screened or projected on screen, we always know that it's part of a world that is larger from it. And when we see something on screen, we ask ourselves always the question, how does it continue? What's beyond? Or what's to the left of the screen, to the top of the screen? Don't ask ourselves this in any other. In a sense, I think work of art. And this has to do with what I call with the passivity of the camera. Which means that what we get, as I said, is Chris. And this, I think this is what is expressed in the cinematic cut. We see something that is not. We see something that is, on the one hand, not part of any realm we have full access to, but at the same time, we expect something beyond what we see. So it's like simultaneously a discontinuity from the world, but also as the kind of like one assumes a continuity with the world. And I think There's a power in this. Precisely. It's like, in this sense, it's like so perfect to inscribe the moment that I call the desert, that on the one hand, the world has been lost in it, but you feel still the demand for the word that you expect. And so, in this sense, a new word to emerge out of the cut, almost.
- [69:45]
B
So the cut is a kind of. It ends one thing, it ends, but.
- [69:50]
C
In relation, we do something that is.
- [69:52]
B
Still continuous and we don't know what the type of relation is exactly. Is it a tension? Is it an explanation? Is it causal? Is it an argument, Is it an opposition? Is it an addition, a supplement? So there's a scene you talk about in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, where there's a movie star who travels to Tokyo to shoot a commercial, and then there's a young woman who's married, who happens to be in the same hotel. And can you describe that opening scene? Because there's a cut between these two protagonists that we, as viewers, just. We're not even. I don't know what we're saying. We're not seeing a cut because it's not visible. The cut itself is not visible to us.
- [70:33]
C
It's like, interesting. The cut between the two protagonists were like. Every cut, as I say, the cut always, in some sense, it's a cut between one thing and then we transition to another. But because the cut, to some degree, totally decontextualized, we are never sure what kind of relations are established between these two things. The before the cut and after the kaka in Lost in Translation, there is a. At first we get a sense. We get the view of the woman protagonist, but she is herself, to some degree, cut on the screen, we don't get the full image, we get the cut, which immediately does make us notice the cut, because, as you said, cut, we don't read, but it exists precisely through cutting her. And then we transition to the main protagonist, who we see at the moment between sleep and awakening. And I claim that the moment of sleeping, which is a withdrawal from the world, is itself the moment that Coppola associates with Sophia. Coppola associates, most importantly with the question of cutting kind of to some degree in sleep, we are cut off from the waking life. And then it's the question, what happens in this moment and in this opening scene you refer to. We are as if communicating between two cats. And we are not sure whether it is the woman that we see at first. Also, we don't see fully whether she, for Example, because they cannot understand the full context of her being. We don't know if she's dreaming herself, sleeping, awake, desiring something, etc. So we don't know whether she, for example, calls someone as if through her the call which they can't screen as they call sending me, which is the call interpreters America or of a new life, as if to her call, the man comes to the rescue, for example, or vice versa. It might be that the man who arrives and is himself between sleep and waking, meaning constantly under the power of a cat, meaning that himself is at the moment of having lost his world. Also the transition to a foreign zone is part of it, the effect. So in this sense, Tokyo is also like some kind of transitional zone, which is in some sense in relation to the Americans that occupied some kind of strange desert, through which the problem of the foreignness that is inherent to America, that they call it desert, is activated. So we don't know whether the man is like looking for someone that will save him from his desert moment, let's just say. And in this sense, then finally we know they're like somehow save each other from the desert and they move also they leave. They leave at the end, but we don't know where to. Which is similar to the ending of Marie Antoinette, where she also lives, although we know historically where she's going, which is basically to Le Bastille and then being guilty. But it ends in a kind of like a rut. We don't get there and she just leaves Versailles, which is the old world. And the question where to?
- [73:41]
B
And Marie Antoinette, which is one of Sofia Coppola's earlier movies as well. You're reading the figure of the French queen as not just sort of with historical hindsight. We know she'll be executed, we know the monarchy will be abolished. But as we know, and as you point out in the book, the revolution doesn't bring about instant freedom, liberty, happiness, equality, democracy, but it goes through decades of violent struggle. That's just a few years. But you're saying the Queen, for Sofia Coppola, is the figure that gives another way out of when a new world order is being sort of falls upon us or is being instituted through a revolution. Doesn't matter. Something opens up and then she's the figure who could embody another way of being. Whereas the one that we end up with mostly after revolution, someone else will take over power and replace the old system with a new system of domination, of containing this potential that was unleashed.
- [74:45]
C
Exactly. I claim it Marie Antoinette, that's why it's surprising, perhaps, that I read the film about the French Revolution as being actually about America. But I think that for Coppola, Marie Antoinette precisely is to be understood. She's a revolutionary figure, but is to be understood in distinction from the French Revolutionary figures. And she embodies, I think, a new kind of revolution. You referred earlier also to the revolutions of the 18th century in Europe, et cetera. And I think in Europe, finally, the New World, there was some kind of, like. There has not fully been heard the con that I call America. That had to happen elsewhere. And Marie Antoinette, I think, stands for this other cause in the way that she kind of. She is a witness to the collapse of the old world. She's a witness to also a new call that is inscribed in this collapse that the French Revolution itself did not follow. And I say that to some degree it's directed toward America. And there's like also in the film, she has an affair with a soldier that is going to America and to help in the revolution. So there's like a question she's attracted into size if some options that she does not yet have. And the film is about also the relation, a tiny bit about the question of like the relation between Louis 6th, the court of Louis XVI and helping the American Revolution revolutionaries. And I think Marie Antoinette is precisely introduced in relation to this other revolution that will happen, which is America. And that goes on a different trajectory. That has to do actually for Paula, I think, with the birth of the new woman that America will be the site of. And this is a question, for example, that Stanley Cavell has thought about quite profoundly in his famous book Pursuits of Happiness. And in relation to movies, for example, like the Lady Eve is birth Friday, et cetera, of like the New Woman is one of the central questions of America and which is essential part of what is the new organization of life to be. And Marie Antoinette, I think, stands in relation to this question. She is, if cheesy, points elsewhere toward the marital unit.
- [77:19]
B
In the book you have sort of these really. To me, it was really remarkable ways of looking at many of these directors other films. So you allude a couple times to Priscilla, who's also a figure in Sofia Coppola's work. So Priscilla Presley sort of an important figure that women become the embodiment of this. Of a response to this call that's not but another imposition of controlling this excessive demand and imposing the law. And it's very interesting. I actually liked all these readings. And in Spielberg, you sort of say there's different models. This west side Story is one where he explores it in a sustained way. But many of the other films actually they give you a figure of hope, of redemption. And what you just said, what a new life or America or happiness in Cavell's word, it's not utopia and it's not the better political system. So in some ways, I think that's what we want to distinguish these films are saying what Rorty, I think quoting Emerson, this yet unachieved country. There's always a promise. And they don't mean in the founders had a promise not yet realized or kind of the check hasn't been cashed, kind of Martin Luther King.
- [78:38]
C
But.
- [78:38]
B
But politics is only the manifestation. But you're saying art or film keeps this call, keeps us kind of alert to this call.
- [78:50]
C
Right? Because the call is itself not an organization, of course, which would be politics. Politics is a specific organization. We decide. But art says in some sense art as the place where they call, that they call America finds a place. This is something that is if the political dimension wants to be informed by. But it's always beyond this political and dimension. It is never exhausted in an organization. This is why the whole America can be relevant also beyond the United States, specific to everyone in the world.
- [79:24]
B
And you made that point several. Sorry, you make that point several times. Actually. None of this is actually sort of to be reducible again to say it's a particular US Problem. And you actually say there are other traditions, other filmmakers in other places that investigate exactly that.
- [79:42]
C
Yes.
- [79:43]
B
And can you say something about the dimension when we go to the movies and you have these opening scenes that every time there's a kind of disappearance of the world because the room darkens and then there's the emergence of a world. So what do you think about why do people go to the movies? We go for entertainment. To be thrilled, to be scared, to have our emotions sort of verified or. Or contested and all that. What Stanley Cavell and you, you think about films in a different way from a lot of film critics who really think about it as sort of thematic explorations with high tech dimensions to them.
- [80:17]
C
Yeah. I think as you say, they go to the movies precisely because they feel the movies is a realm that is outside of everyday life and the organization that already rules it or governs it. And there's like this opening when you face the screen, the opening that I call the call of America, that something else is uttered. And through the film one kind of like plays with this and in some sense like comes to inhabit America, in some sense comes to inhabit in this moment, which is a desert moment or kind of. It goes back to the desert on some level. When we go to the movie, always go back to the desert. Both to experience perhaps a ruin that we feel is around us, but also to experience something birthed for a new possibility. And I think this. Yeah, this, I think, is what happens there.
- [81:08]
B
How do you think people could sort of learn to do what you're doing? I mean, you've been doing it for a long time. It takes a lot of watching and reading. And you've read Deleuze, Heidegger, all these complicated cavells. Some people go to the movies just to be a little bit more open to this call rather than. Because the movies are also very overwhelming. Like, I have a. I watch movies and I get very overwhelmed by all of it and the plot and the dimensions. And then you have to step back. How do you have this double vision to see both the movie and be enthralled by it? And in a way, the movies want to overwhelm us and envelop us.
- [81:47]
C
And I think. I don't think you even need this type of vision. And it's not that you need to be like this critic that reflects on this means, but simply being overwhelmed, excited, you know, undergoing an enthusiasm. You're already in the movies. Yes, you are in what they open.
- [82:02]
B
Right.
- [82:03]
C
You know, like there's like the task of the think or the philosopher to kind of elucidate perhaps.
- [82:08]
B
Yeah.
- [82:09]
C
But what everyone is undergoing. So I don't think there's like. It's not that one needs to be philosophically or conceptually educated in order to fully grasp what the movies are, but the grasp is immediate. It just happened. It's experiential, if you want.
- [82:23]
B
And it's interesting. The book is, to me, when I read the book. So it's American media renewal and philosophy. It's a very optimistic book. There's what you're calling a call. I hear that as a kind of call off and for liberation, sort of liberation from yourself into a freedom that you don't know yet. So it's very optimistic and it's interesting because some of these are very tragic works. Right. The tragedy. And you talk about the major genres, the western, the melodrama, the romance, the tragedy, the comedy, all these things. But you're actually reading them as to me, they are optimistic or kind of in a radical way, open ended. Not in a arbitrary way, in a very determined way. Open ended.
- [83:12]
C
Yeah. I think they're optimistic to the degree, as you call it, optimistic to the degree that it is clear that they revolve around something that they insist on keeping alive, even if they show the world to fail in living up to it. But nevertheless, it is clear that the movie itself is the site of the new call. Even if we say, as I say, the call is not fully adhere to, but it is adhered to what? Or it is experience, at least as we are in the movies. So since the movies are a site.
- [83:48]
B
Of happiness, do you think we're going to have movies right now that are going to address. Because this is a kind of point of tension in American life, not just politics, actually, in life, we're going to have movies that will address and keep this call alive. Or movie makers going to feel I have to respond to this crisis and give an answer.
- [84:11]
C
I mean, I think the keeping Quality Life is always there, no matter what the filmmaker think they are responding to or not responding to. It might be that in attempting to define too much what one needs to do, one to some degree misses this inscription of this dimension that is more mysterious. And you want to give actual, concrete, let us say, political responses. But I think no matter what, even if you think you are giving a political response, the fact that it's a movie, hopefully it's again, not all movies, I think, and that is not all works of art managed to finally express. This is why I chose a few films, although I think there are many others. But it's not all films. Many films. And precisely, I think, immediately managed to repress, let us say, this open dimension and transform it into something else. So there's no one answer. But I still believe in this optimism because nevertheless, no matter what the filmmaker's specific project is, there will always be those that continue to revolve around this openness.
- [85:27]
B
I want to thank you I for this great book, all the books. And as you know, I've read all your books. Because we actually went to graduate school together a few years ago at Yale University, which I always thought for me it was a fantastic place. I'm sure it was complicated for other people. I always felt our teachers, including Shoshana Thurman, who we edited a book about, they basically encouraged us to keep. To stay alert to this question posed by art. That's about it. And I don't think they really taught us much what to do with it then. And your work is really remarkable that you went from Brian De Palma to Diderot and now you're working on Joseph Beuys and worked on Leonardo da Vinci and Coppola and these films. So you're sort of staying open to this question. Are there any movies this year that you've seen that you liked or that our listeners, we talked about yesterday, Whether there's anything good this year that you take FF on this? No preferences here at this point. Go back to the canon. So John Ford, Francis Ford Coppola, Sophia Coppola and Steven Spielberg. And I want to thank you for being on the podcast.
- [86:52]
C
Baby.