On Figural Analysis in Fim Studies

Video essay about У самого синего моря/U samogo sinyego morya/By the Bluest of Seas (Boris Barnet, 1936). Featuring commentary by Nicole Brenez, author of Abel Ferrara (University of Illinois Press, 2007) and De la figure en général et du corps en particulier (De Boeck, 1998), professor of cinema studies at Université Paris I and programmer at the Cinémathèque Française. Video essay produced by Kevin B. Lee.

At the very least, I believe this is a good, poetic way of grasping part of the art of cinema: as an art of constantly shifting figuration. Not just on the level of bringing bodies and people into being, but also animals, objects, imaginary apparitions - in fact an entire material and virtual world. […]
     For [Nicole] Brenez as for [Gilles] Deleuze, a critical and theoretical approach of this sort marks a significant departure from classical mise en scène analysis. The venerable tool of découpage - shot-by-shot breakdown - depends upon the theatrical and dramatic unity of the filmic scene, which in turn rests upon the most cherished principle of mise en scène analysis: "bodies in space", the pro-filmic reality of bodies dwelling and moving within a space defined by a set or a landscape. Deleuze asserts, to the contrary, that "the cinema is not a theatre", and that its bodies are composed "from granules, which are granules of time". This is, in a sense, analysis in two dimensions rather than the usual three; and if there is still "depth" to a movie, it will need to be a new, differently defined kind of depth.
     Figural analysis, thus, is granular or atomic, a true "frame by frame" analysis which takes its model and inspiration from the fine-grain materiality and action of experimental cinema; it is less concerned with lenses and depth of field than with the mobile arrangment, displacement and pulsation of screen particles. Shot divisions, even scenes or sequences are less pertinent for this work than analytic "ensembles", slices of text and texture that demonstrate the economy and logic of a film's ceaseless transformation of its elements. And everything to do with character, performance and actorly presence in cinema will have to be rethought from the vantage point of this ghostly, mobile flickering of the celluloid grain as it helps to form and deform the figure of the human being on screen. [Adrian Martin, 'The body has no head: corporeal figuration in Aldrich', Screening the Past, June 30, 2000]

As Bill Routt reminds us in his admirable article on the figural in film, figural analysis is a form of hermeneutics involving the historical relation between signs and events, between the text's present condition of meaning and its capacity to draw on and summon forth the past through the power of signs. The figural opens up the historicity of the film text so that the event's past is also its 'coming to presence'. Reading the figural is to read the past in the present; to read with the 'pastness' of the text as a prefiguring of something beyond what the text says in its normative, denotative mode of signification. All texts have figures, since all texts have a past, or at least point to a past as the very materiality of their signification.

     The task of figural analysis is not limited to describing figures in film texts. Rather, it concerns the mapping of an abstract machine: a machine for writing in images, composed of various historically defined elements drawn synthetically into particular arrangements and assemblages that make film happen in the way that it does. Here I am not referring to 'context', but to a genealogical tracing of the lineages and interconnectivities between older and more recent image technologies, and their hybrid formations through time. Any given film or media text will exhibit interconnections with pre-existing modes (even if those modes have been pronounced obsolete), which define and control the potential that the film undertakes to make happen. In silent film we might trace the transformation from a theatrical to a film mode of appearance, where the former is prefigured in the latter and vice versa, for instance in the coincidence of stage and film gestures in Lillian Gish's performance in Way Down East. Here we see the emergence of a new kind of film sense vibrating in the uneasy conjunction of different techniques.

     At stake here is the proliferation of a technological apparatus for the production of images, and the power arrangements that make them appear historically. The technological apparatus is not all of a piece, but is constantly riven with the effects of an outside that produces transformational change. The image machine lives on, not because of any over-riding structure that it possesses, but through the contingent interconnections that are activated in particular image-productions. This is why it is necessary to attend carefully to films themselves, to the detailing of their mode of appearance and its relation to ideational content as a particular moment in the image machine's transformational history. [Warwick Mules, 'The Figural as Interface in Film and the New Media: D. N. Rodowick's Reading the Figural', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7, December 2003 Hyperlinks added by FSFF]

Today, Film Studies For Free presents a luscious list of links to online explorations or examples of figural analysis deployed in the service of film studies. It is an eclectic, but almost certainly not yet an exhaustive list. So, if you know of further good items, please leave a comment below.

It particularly figures, if you will forgive FSFF's characteristically lame pun, the online work of French film scholar and cinephile activist Nicole Brenez, alongside that of Adrian Martin, the latter an anglophone champion of Brenez's many, increasingly influential, contributions to our international field. But there are lots of other inflections of the figural represented below, too, as per FSFF's usual pluralist linkage-leanings.

• Richard Armstrong, Modernity and the Maniac: The Fall of Janet Leigh, Images: A Journal of Film and Popular Culture, 2005
• Raymond Bellour, 'The Film We Accompany', Rouge, 3, 2004
  
• Briana Berg, 'Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, and Figuration, on Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories, edited by Janet Bergstrom', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7, 2003
• [Lauren Bliss, 'Ten Fingers and Nine Toes: Embodied Representations of Pregnancy in Avant-garde Cinema', Screening the Past, forthcoming 2011]
• Nicole Brenez, 'The ultimate journey: remarks on contemporary theory', Screening the Past, December 22, 1997
• Nicole Brenez, '"Jeune, dure et pure!" A history of avant-garde and experimental film in France', Senses of Cinema, 6, 2000
• Nicole Brenez, 'À propos de Nice and the Extremely Necessary, Permanent Invention of the Cinematic Pamphlet', Rouge, 7, 2005
• Nicole Brenez, 'Come Into My Sleep', Rouge, 13, 2007
• Nicole Brenez, 'T. W. Adorno: cinema in spite of itself—but cinema all the same', Cultural Studies Review, Vol. 13, No. 1, March 2007
• Nicole Brenez, 'Peter Whitehead: The Exigency of Joy', Rouge, 10, 2006 
• Nicole Brenez, 'The grand style of the epoch: Baise-moi - girls better than maenads, darker than furies', Screening the Past, April 2003 (originally published in Trafic n°39 (Fall 2001)
• Nicole Brenez and Adrian Martin, 'Serious Mothlight: For Stan Brakhage (1933-2003)', Rouge, 13, 2007
• Nicole Brenez, 'Symptôme, exhibition, angoisse: représentation de la terreur dans l’œuvre allemande de Fritz Lang (1919-1933 / 1959-1960)', Editions Papiers, June 2009 (in French)
• Fergus Daly, 'Powers of Anamorphosis', Undercurrent Issue 4, 2008
• Thomas Elsaesser, 'Around Painting and the "End of Cinema"', Theory Kit, 2007
• Michael Grant, 'Jean-Louis Schefer and Carl-Theodor Dreyer', Michael Grant, October 28, 2008
• Paul Douglas Grant, 'Introduction: The History of an Absence', in Serge Daney, Postcards from the Cinema, March 2007
• Karl Hansson, 'Screening the Figural in Film and New Art Media', The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Vol 16, No 29-30 (2004)
• Mikhail Iampolski. The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1998 1998
• Katya Mandoki, 'An enigmatic Text: Schefer's Quest upon a Thing Unknown', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 2, 1998
  
• Adrian Martin, 'Ultimatum: an introduction to the work of Nicole Brenez', Screening the Past, December 22, 1997
• Adrian Martin, 'The undertaker: Gilberto Perez's The material ghost: films and their medium', Screening the Past, November 12, 1999
• Adrian Martin, 'The body has no head: corporeal figuration in Aldrich', Screening the Past, June 30, 2000
• Adrian Martin, 'Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking in Auerbach, Kracauer, Benjamin and Some Others',  Provisional Insight Colloquium series, Monash University, July 18 2008 (PODCAST: ca 1hr +) [Abstract: 'In “A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud”, Paul Ricoeur (drawing upon Hegel) remarks: “The appropriation of a meaning constituted prior to me presupposes the movement of a subject drawn ahead of itself by a succession of ‘figures’, each of which finds its meaning in the ones which follow it.” The notion of the figural has recently become popular in European film theory and analysis, especially due to the work of Nicole Brenez – in which the figure stands for “the force … of everything that remains to be constituted” in a character, object, social relation or idea. Her use of the term refers back to magisterial work of German literary philologist Erich Auerbach (Mimesis), who decoded the religious interpretive system wherein all persons and events are grasped as significant only insofar as they prefigure their fulfilment on the ‘last day’ of divine judgement. Auerbach’s 1920s work on figuration in Dante was an important influence on his friend Walter Benjamin; and it was this ‘theological’ aspect of Benjamin’s thought that caught Kracauer’s attention, leading to the problematic of the redemption of worldly things. In this lecture I will trace the notion of figural thinking from Weimar then to Paris (and beyond) today, taking in writings by William Routt and Giorgio Agamben, as well as two filmmakers also touched by figural thinking: Josef von Sternberg and Douglas Sirk.'] 
• Adrian Martin, 'Ticket to ride: Claire Denis and the cinema of the body', Screening the Past, Issue 20, 2006
• Judith Mayne, 'Picturing Spectatorship', in James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, Understanding Narrative (Ohio State University Press, 1994) 
• Daniel Morgan, ‘No Trickery with Montage’: On Reading a Sequence in Godard’s Pierrot le fou', Film Studies, Issue 5, Winter 2004
• Warwick Mules, 'The Figural as Interface in Film and the New Media: D. N. Rodowick's Reading the Figural', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7, December 2003
• Benjamin Noys, 'Gestural Cinema?: Giorgio Agamben on Film', Film-Philosophy,  Vol. 8, 2004
• Laura Rascaroli, 'Like a Dream: A Critical History of the Oneiric Metaphor in Film Theory', Kinema, 2008 
• William D. Routt, 'For Criticism, Part One', Screening the Past, March 2000 and Part Two, March 2000
• Bill Schaffer, 'Cutting The Flow: Thinking Psycho', Senses of Cinema, Issue 6, 2000
• Girish Shambu, 'Nicole Brenez: Ten Levels', Girish, February 4, 2007 
• Belén Vidal, 'Labyrinths of loss: The letter as figure of desire and deferral in the literary film',  Journal of European Studies, 36, 2006