Circuits of Fascination and Inspiration:Blanchot, Bellour, Grandrieux

Calum Watt (bio)

Abstract

This essay offers a commentary on the French experimental director Philippe Grandrieux’s shooting diary for his film Malgré la nuit (2016). Grandrieux’s quotations from Maurice Blanchot and the diary’s appearance in the journals Trafic and Mettray activate intertextual references relating to Blanchot’s ideas about fascination and inspiration. The essay argues that Grandrieux and film theorist Raymond Bellour are contemporary inheritors of these notions, which they develop in relation to filmmaking practice, cinema spectatorship, and film analysis. Through their work, fascination, often associated with passivity, can be seen to actively inspire new works.

Introduction: Blanchot, Fascination and Malgré la nuit

French experimental film director Philippe Grandrieux opens the shooting diary for his film Malgré la nuit (Despite the Night; completed in 2015 and released in 2016) with an epigraph from Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003): “Every art draws its origin from an exceptional fault” (“Tout art tire son origine d’un défaut exceptionnel”; Blanchot, Livre 148, Book 107). The diary was published in 2016 in two parts in the French journals Trafic and Mettray. It describes the difficulties experienced by Grandrieux while filming and reflects on the process by which the film came into existence. Why cite Blanchot here? What does Blanchot’s literary criticism from the 1950s have to do with a contemporary arthouse film?

In this essay I theorize the Blanchotian concepts of fascination and inspiration through a commentary on Grandrieux’s diary. I discuss the significance of Blanchot’s ideas about what is at stake in the creative work of the literary writer. While his work in general has been an inspiration for Grandrieux, Blanchot’s collection of essays Le Livre à venir (The Book to Come) and L’Espace littéraire (The Space of Literature) emerge as key intertexts for the diary.¹ Most of the topoi on which Grandrieux expounds or to which he alludes are treated in these texts by Blanchot: dream, night, sleep, fatigue, light. Blanchot’s theoretical lens is crucial for understanding the significance of the diary in Trafic and Mettray.²

In the context of Trafic and Mettray, the quotations from Blanchot activate a set of intertextual references that I explore in the second part of the essay. Despite Blanchot’s apparent lack of interest in film, he is an important reference for the film critics and theorists Raymond Bellour (1939-) and Serge Daney (1944-1992), the two most influential figures associated with the film journal Trafic.³ I discuss the allusions to Blanchot in Le Corps du cinéma (The Body of Cinema), in which Bellour extends Blanchot’s account of fascination by conceptualizing the fascination of cinema in terms of hypnosis and the reopening of primordial childhood experience. Childhood also provides Grandrieux with a central figure for thinking about his practice. Like Blanchot’s “literary space,” Bellour’s “body of cinema” refers to a virtual space of fascination that links the creative work and its audience. Given the clear influence that Blanchot has on Bellour and Grandrieux, and their close friendship with one another,⁴ I suggest that they can be thought together as the contemporary inheritors of Blanchot’s concept of fascination, which they redefine in relation to cinema.

Blanchot’s concept of fascination names an experience of profound passivity that occurs when things seem to a viewer to give way to their “image” (Espace 267; Space 255). Blanchot conceives this experience of the image primarily in relation to literary language (when words take on this imaginary quality), but it can also take place in lived events or in relation to artworks.⁵ This experience in which things sink into a fascinating image of themselves plays a role in the genesis of new artworks. What Blanchot calls inspiration is the process by which fascination starts to yield a work. Grandrieux refers indirectly to Blanchot’s account of inspiration to think about how an experience of passivity lies at the heart of his filmmaking practice, while for Bellour, Blanchot’s account of fascination accurately describes the condition of cinema spectatorship, which I will call cinematic fascination. Bellour tries to evoke cinematic fascination through film analysis that blurs the boundary between the theoretical and the literary. One can never recreate an experience of fascination, but it can be rekindled and perpetuated in writing. Taking these modalities of fascination together—fascination as part of the process by which an art work comes about, which then engenders fascination among viewers, which then gives way to new writing—we can see how fascination tends to multiply itself in circuits.⁶ The powerful attraction that Blanchot exerts for certain French film theorists and filmmakers demonstrates how Blanchotian fascination, characterized by radical worklessness or inoperativeness, has been productive for cinema.

Malgré la nuit is set in Paris and is loosely structured around the young man Lenz’s (Kristian Marr) search for an elusive woman, Madeleine.⁷ At the same time, he is romantically involved with Hélène (Ariane Labed), a nurse with masochistic tendencies; Léna (Roxane Mesquida), a nightclub singer; and Léna’s father, Vitali (Johan Leysen), who appears to run a snuff movie ring. The film’s protagonists all seek extreme experiences (through drugs, sex, encounters with death). Malgré la nuit is, at two-and-a-half hours, the longest of Grandrieux’s films and is, as Bellour notes, “a bit mad” (“un peu déjanté”; Pensées 230). The film’s plot (such as it is) is not easy to follow due to Grandrieux’s use of blurring and a tendency to let the narrative give way to a pure aesthetic of the image, issues to which I return below. The film is Grandrieux’s fourth feature and is contemporaneous with a trilogy of installation works (the Unrest trilogy, 2012-2017) that takes his formal experimentation to an even further extreme. While I will discuss selected moments in the film, this essay takes as its primarily object Grandrieux’s account of his experience of filming and its relation to the notion of fascination as conceptualized in the work of Bellour and Blanchot, rather than the film itself.

An “Exceptional Fault”: Grandrieux’s “Journal de tournage”

Grandrieux’s “Journal de tournage” or “shooting diary” was published in 2016 in two parts: the first in Trafic and the second in Mettray.⁸ The first part runs from 6 to 18 October 2014 and the second from 15 October to the last day of shooting on 14 November (there is a little overlap, but the entry for 18 October is significantly longer in the Mettray extract), with a few additional entries through 20 December that describe Grandrieux’s trip to Montreal to edit the film (a trip that he cuts short due to difficulty with the editing process). The shoot takes place largely in Paris with a few excursions outside the city. In addition to this diary, a second, unconnected document, written by Romain Baudéan, a young camera assistant or focus-puller (pointeur) who was brought in to work on the film at the last minute, also describes the shoot. While this document is less poetic, it offers useful technical details about the shoot and an outside perspective on Grandrieux’s somewhat eccentric filming practices, highlighting the difference and relation between his psychological approach and the details of where and how the scenes were shot.

The night before he starts shooting, Grandrieux describes feeling “suddenness” inside him, an intimation of something coming (“Journal 1” 16). Immediately before shooting begins the following night, he feels intense weakness, as if he knows nothing; he feels, and will repeatedly feel, “annihilated” (anéanti) (16). This sense of fatigue becomes more intense and he writes about it in almost every entry. During the first night, Grandrieux evokes how involved he feels as he begins the shoot: “I am in the image, in the light, in the frame, in the faces, in the rhythm that it demands, in the face of things” (17). At the end of the entry recounting the first night’s shoot, Grandrieux quotes from L’Espace littéraire, specifically the very last lines of the short appendix “Sommeil, nuit” (“Sleep, Night”): “The dream touches the region where pure resemblance reigns. Everything there is similar; each figure is another one, is similar to another and to yet another, and this last to still another. One seeks the original model, wanting to be referred to a point of departure, an initial revelation, but there is none. The dream is the likeness that refers eternally to likeness” (L’Espace 362; Space 268). Although attributed to Blanchot, the quotation is simply given in italics, set out from the main text without a gloss. In the film, resemblance is suggested by the way the characters’ names resemble each other in their liquid “l” sounds: Lenz, Léna, Hélène, Lola, Madeleine, Vitali, Louis, Paul.⁹ More explicitly, resemblance is thematized during a scene about forty-five minutes into the film, following Léna’s performance of a musical number in a nightclub. She meets her father Vitali afterwards, who is flanked by another young woman carrying a small dog. Léna introduces Vitali to Lenz. The scene takes place in a dark, reddish light and the camera, trained on Vitali’s ridged facial profile in close-up, moves in and out of focus and thus prevents any clear identification of the scene’s location (perhaps in a basement room of the nightclub). The walls are covered in what looks like graffiti, while the rumbling of distant music can be heard as well as a rattling sound, like that of a malfunctioning fan. Vitali and the woman talk about a synthetic amphetamine called “cannibal,” which is said to throw users into a primitive state. Switching between French and English, the woman whispers, “I think it’s fascinating,” and Vitali immediately echoes her, “we think it’s fascinating, don’t we?” Vitali then shifts from the topic of the fascinating substance and its effects to note that he is sure he has already met Lenz or someone who very much resembles him. “That happens in life, resemblance,” he says in a gravelly, somewhat sinister voice. The idea of resemblance, present in the quotation from Blanchot, is echoed thematically in the film, suggesting the effect of L’Espace littéraire on Grandrieux as he films.

In the second part of the diary, Grandrieux develops a connection between his film and dreaming:

To make the film with what is there, that’s what I wanted, that’s what I want intensely, it’s what I’m doing. To let the film come into my hand, against my closed eyelids. It’s for this reason that I don’t want to see anything during the shooting, no rushes, no images. I want to be able to sink into the film, into the memory that I have of it, in its memory. Day after day I go further into it. I lose myself in it when I shoot. It is this nocturnal meandering that I desire and which guides me. The scene from yesterday ends each time by a slow fade to black, by the disappearance of forms, the disappearance of light. It’s this effacement, these slow fades to black which must lead the editing of the sequence.… I would like to slow down these endings, more and more, in a long ending which never ends, an end in tatters, an end which is a collapse of the light and of the figures, in the breath of their sleep, in their exhaustion. To construct the sequence in this fatigue, in this movement which goes towards the night of the body, its burial.… It’s the curve [courbe] of the film, effacement. The scenes come with nothing preparing them. A dream. (3)

Indicating a passive dimension to the act of filming, this notion of “sinking” into the film (s’enfoncer)—”I want to be able to sink into the film”—is used repeatedly in the diary. As Grandrieux says, the use of fades is indeed typical of the way the film’s sequences connect to each other, as if the film were the reverie of someone drifting in and out of consciousness. Immediately following this passage, Grandrieux cites one of the first notes he made about the film, in 2009: “One enters into the film by fear and as if fainting [l’évanouissement], like in a dream. Receptive [Disponible]” (4). The term “one” leaves it unclear whether Grandrieux is referring to the viewer or to himself. In these quotations, Grandrieux evokes both his relation to making the film and the effect it should have on the viewer. The experience of creating and viewing are strikingly blurred: in both cases the film should be hypnotic and have the structure of a dream. It is through this approach—of “losing himself” in a “nocturnal meandering”—that the film’s material or matter becomes a “dreamed matter” or “dream material” (12).

Blanchot’s lines about dreams come from an appendix that refers back to the section of L’Espace littéraire on inspiration and “the night” (L’Espace 215, Space 164), which are motifs strongly resonant with Grandrieux’s evocation of the creative process as a dreamlike, fascinated state. When Blanchot writes that inspiration is fundamentally “nocturnal,” he invokes the concept of the “other night” (L’Espace 213, Space 163): while the “first night” is the obverse of the day’s action, the night in which one rests after the work of the day (L’Espace 219, Space 167), the “other night” is “the long night of insomnia” (L’Espace 244, Space 184), a non-dialectical, paralysed passivity. The experience of inspiration, then, is like being in a sleepless, fascinated state. Grandrieux says elsewhere that he does not want to see the rushes during shooting because he wants the film to “deposit itself in [him], to become a nocturnal movement, my sleep in some way” (“Journal 2” 12). In other words, he wants to enter into a blind relation with the film as it is being made. The effect of this approach is evident in the first few sequences of the film, where silence, slow motion, and fades in and out establish the oneiric aspect. The first thirty seconds of the film depict a young woman spinning and throwing her arms in the air. Seemingly illuminated by a bright spotlight, her hair is bleached white hair and she wears a short silver dress. The brief, unnerving sequence is silent and has been sped up, rendering the woman a white silhouette against a black night. It is presented apropos of nothing and sets the film’s tone. About seven minutes into the film, after another somewhat elliptical sequence, the camera fades in slowly from black to Hélène’s head, framed almost horizontally across the screen in extreme close-up. The camera drifts close by, gently moving slightly up and down, and goes lightly in and out of soft focus. The muffled sound of tracks and the passing lights in the background make clear that she is sleeping on a train, her mouth bobbing open with the train’s rolling movement. The film cuts to Lenz, standing over her; the shot has a slowed, slightly blurred effect of long exposure. In the third shot Lenz sits down beside Hélène and the film fades slowly to black.

On 10 October, Grandrieux’s sixtieth birthday, he writes that he begins shooting at three in the morning and already feels “exhausted” (exténué), noting that the film is a “struggle” (combat) with “fatigue”: “everything seems threatened to me, leading to ruin, to a ruined film, to a ruined beauty” (“Journal 1” 17). While there are certainly trials (notably the departure two days prior of his principal actor, the musician Pete Doherty, which throws the schedule off-course), the fatigue seems disproportionate. This seems to be an unavoidable consequence of responding to the exigency of the work. In the entry for 18 October in the second part of the diary, the shoot increasingly becomes a physical and moral ordeal. Again, Grandrieux is suffering from “a nameless fatigue”; he is “drunk with fatigue” (2), “totally worn out” (exsangue) (9); it is an “ordeal” (épreuve) (9). He writes: “The fatigue is indescribable. I’ve never been so exhausted in my life. A fatigue that rest cannot diminish, a profound fatigue of the body” (6). To be sure, the shoot is physically gruelling for all concerned: not only Grandrieux, but also his focus-puller and director of production will develop lumbago during the shoot (Baudéan 21). However, for Grandrieux this fatigue sometimes takes the form of “a sort of asphyxia,” of feeling “literally asphyxiated” (“Journal 2” 6), as he is “carried away by [the film’s] power, its strength, that which it imposes, the rhythm of the shooting” (“Journal 1” 21). This asphyxia becomes another recurring motif in the diary: “the film is that enigma in which I move, blinded, too close, too asphyxiated by the force of the shoot, its rapidity, such that I am in a deep obscurity” (“Journal 1” 21). When filming, Grandrieux is taken over or hypnotized by the film; his assistant writes that he is “as if possessed, in a trance. Excited, supercharged, in heat” (Baudéan 3). Grandrieux constantly talks of trying to “access” the scene he films; it is as if he is rejected by the film. In other words, he is caught in the struggle between inspired passivity and the actual realization of the work. While Grandrieux has previously described the exhaustion and strange physical symptoms that result from filming (“La Vie nouvelle” 31), these seem particularly intense with Malgré la nuit. He often needs days of convalescence after shooting.

These physical ailments are the symptoms of a powerlessness, a loss of knowledge and of self that takes place during the conception and execution of the work. The experience Grandrieux describes in his diary resonates strongly with Blanchot’s descriptions of some of the “risks of artistic activity” (L’Espace 57, Space 52):

Every writer, every artist is acquainted with the moment at which he is cast out and apparently excluded by the work in progress. The work holds him off, the circle in which he no longer has access to himself has closed, yet he is enclosed therein because the work, unfinished, will not let him go. Strength does not fail him; this is not a moment of sterility or fatigue, unless, as may well be the case, fatigue itself is simply the form this exclusion takes. This ordeal is awesome. What the author sees is a cold immobility from which he cannot turn away, but near which he cannot linger. It is like an enclave, a preserve within space, airless and without light, where a part of himself, and, more than that, his truth, his solitary truth, suffocates in an incomprehensible separation. (L’Espace 59, Space 53-54)

Note that while Blanchot’s work is normally closely or even exclusively associated with literature, he makes it clear that his discussion appertains to artists in general (albeit always gendered as male). These remarks come in the section that prepares and immediately precedes his discussion of Kafka’s diary. Juxtaposing this section with Grandrieux’s diary, we can see how the fatigue and asphyxia (echoed in Blanchot’s use of the terms “airless” and “suffocation”) are the symptoms of being in the “space” of the work. Blanchot’s “literary space” is a paradoxical space that is not strictly anywhere. It is a metaphorical space of profound solitude that the artist enters when producing a work. While Grandrieux is not literally “solitary”—he is working with a small crew—he is the one making the decisions and he reports feeling lost and alone. These themes have been present for some time in Grandrieux’s writing. In a short text for Trafic about the process of conceiving and writing another film, Grandrieux describes this experience of inspiration, of being engaged in a struggle with something enigmatic that makes him write, as “more than an obsession”: it is like being an occupied country (“Troisième film” 122). In an earlier document published in Trafic on the preparation of his second film, La Vie nouvelle (2002), Grandrieux uses a formulation very similar to those in the Malgré la nuit text: he feels that he can no longer act, that the film is destined for ruin and disaster (“La Vie nouvelle” 25). Like Grandrieux’s intuition that his film is headed for “ruin,” Blanchot writes that the work is tied to its ruin and unworking; as if pure inspiration would be not to produce anything, would consist of pure worklessness, even as it demands a work be produced (L’Espace 240, Space 182). This is why, for Blanchot, inspiration is a trap (L’Espace 219, Space 167).

Grandrieux writes his journal because he fears losing himself in this condition. A subsection of L’Espace littéraire explicitly theorizes this relation. This subsection, “Recours au Journal” (“Recourse to the ‘Journal'”), comes immediately before the subsections “La fascination de l’absence du temps” (“The Fascination of Time’s Absence”) and “L’image” (“The Image”), two of the crucial sections on fascination. When the writer starts a work he starts to lose himself, and the journal is how he maintains “a relation to himself” (L’Espace 24, Space 28). Thus

the truth of the journal lies not in the interesting literary remarks to be found there, but in the insignificant details which attach it to daily reality. The journal represents the series of reference points which a writer establishes in order to keep track of himself when he begins to suspect the dangerous metamorphosis to which he is exposed. … The journal indicates that already the writer is no longer capable of belonging to time through the ordinary certainty of action, through the shared concerns of common tasks, of an occupation, through the simplicity of intimate speech, the force of unreflecting habit. He is no longer truly historical; but he doesn’t want to waste time either, and since he doesn’t know anymore how to do anything but write, at least he writes in response to his everyday history and in accord with the preoccupations of daily life. It happens that writers who keep a journal are the most literary of all, but perhaps this is precisely because they avoid, thus, the extreme of literature, if literature is ultimately the fascinating realm of time’s absence. (L’Espace 24-25, Space 29-30)

Later in L’Espace littéraire, Blanchot discusses Kafka’s diary in detail, a paradigmatic document recounting the experience of inspiration and the struggle of writing (L’Espace 63-101, Space 57-83).¹⁰ Like Kafka, Grandrieux simultaneously complains of an oppressive imperative to realize his work and of the unfavorable conditions in which he must do it: he repeatedly laments a lack of time, a lack of permission to film in certain locations (sometimes he resorts to trespassing), a lack of money (the film was made for a mere 480,000 euros), and generally “atrocious conditions.” He films in spaces borrowed from friends or friends of friends; told to hurry up, he feels like a beggar. While Blanchot describes the danger for the writer of losing track of everyday life and of one’s occupation in the 1950s, Grandrieux’s diary shows that the contemporary economy of efficiency does not give a cent for fascination.

Grandrieux gives precise details about his filming practice at a shoot in the Bois de Vincennes, a large park in east Paris, where he films an orgy in a harsh bright light. The scene takes place about nineteen minutes into the film; directly before, we see Hélène leaving her sleeping partner and putting on makeup. The scene begins with a long shot of figures walking slowly through the woods at night. We hear twigs snapping underfoot. The film moves seamlessly to these figures undressing and making love directly on the wet fallen leaves and undergrowth, which gleams in light that seems to come from the camera. Individual hairs on the heads of the actors, like branches of the bare autumn trees, stand out in fine detail in the foreground of the shots. The illuminated skin is unnaturally pale, as if extraterrestrial. Close-ups of the faces of three onlookers offer indifferent expressions. Meanwhile, Hélène is approached by a man (Sam Louwyck) identified in the credits only as “the man with the metallic voice”.¹¹ She seemingly submits, with a vacant look, to a sadomasochistic ritual in which she is choked and has her hair pulled and her clothes torn before having violent sex with him.. In this otherworldly scene, Hélène is pressed against the leaves and twigs near the orgy, which is silent and oblivious to Hélène and this man. In the next scene, Hélène wakes in a clearing in the morning and walks home. Grandrieux reflects on the shoot:

When I think again about the material that was shot, I say to myself that there is there an exhausting beauty, but also the feeling of a lack. I say to myself also that the speed with which we shoot gives access to things in a strong way, strong and full of holes [forte et trouée], a dazzled way [une manière éblouie] of being in the images, in the violence of the film, in its savagery.(“Journal 1” 18)¹²

The film’s principal actors come from the world of dance (with the exception of Marr), and the other “extras” are his friends. Grandrieux continues about the scene:

That which was written in the script as a particularly sordid situation transforms into a strange purity, unattainable, an absolute strangeness. Everything is in this excessively white light, strong and white, this light which never stops varying and which gives me so much desire. The material we shot stays in my memory, shards of sensation that go well together, deep movements, a sort of rising tide which comes into me, the feeling of having achieved something well beyond that which was written or wished-for; yet also the feeling that something is missing and that in this lack a greater truth has been kept, an intimate truth which drives my gestures, my rhythm. (18)

Generally, Grandrieux makes shooting decisions on the set quickly. In a repeated formulation, he writes that the shots are “torn” (arracher) from reality: “Everything goes quickly, everything is torn from the night, from fatigue, from the despondency that we feel shooting in this deaf violence, this instinctive brutality” (18).¹³

The shooting diary shows how the filmmaker turns abstract ideas into images. For Grandrieux, the execution violently transforms the initial conception of the work: “The shooting tears from the script its unconscious material” (“Journal 2” 9). Reflecting on the scene again later, he notes what is missing: a shot of Hélène’s face, which would somehow, perhaps impossibly, simultaneously express pleasure, suffering, fatigue, fragility, and weakness. Grandrieux has stated that Hélène wills and seeks out this extreme experience of passive exposure (even though she spits and provokes the man to continue) (“Dossier”; Grandrieux and Jefferson Selve). The passivity that he figures through Hélène is like the experience of passivity that he tries to reach himself in inspiration and which Blanchot considers the work’s origin. That this is always “lacking” expresses Grandrieux’s constant search for an impossible limit; it is “that by which my film constitutes itself. In a way, a film full of holes” (“Journal 1” 19).

In Trafic, the shooting diary appears alongside an essay on the film by Bellour, who has admired Grandrieux’s work since his first feature, Sombre (1998). Bellour focuses on light in Grandrieux’s film: “Light—its lack, its retreat just as much as its excess—has always been the torment of Philippe Grandrieux” (Pensées 227). This has been clear since Sombre, which, as its title suggests, plunges us into the nocturnal, obscure world of its violent, wretched protagonist. The film’s dominant motif of darkness is thrown into relief by well-lit scenes that represent the “ordinary dream of the anonymous social order” (227). What is new in Malgré la nuit, says Bellour, is that there are not two but three distinct lights. The first is the “extraordinary night,” typical of Sombre, in which the filmmaker plunges his “creatures” in order to extend and distend their “states of body and soul.” The second light is that of ordinariness, the light of the day: for example, the scenes in Malgré la nuit of Lenz and his friends cavorting by the Seine. There is more of this in Malgré la nuit than in Grandrieux’s previous films. The third light is “the dazzling light of cinema,” which pierces the “experimental night” in which the scenes in the Bois de Vincennes are shot, where bodies are illuminated to the point of abstraction (228). To create these moments, Grandrieux attaches a strong ring light around the camera’s lens (Grandrieux and Jefferson Selve 89). Bellour associates this excess of light with a principle of delicacy taken close to the point of unreality (Pensées 230). In other words, Grandrieux undercuts the violence in the scene with a sensual focus on the caresses and foliage under an unreal light. The term “experimental night” refers to Jean Louis Schefer’s L’Homme ordinaire du cinéma (The Ordinary Man of Cinema), a crucial text of for Bellour, Daney, and Gilles Deleuze.¹⁴ The “experimental night” is one of Schefer’s poetic characterizations of the cinematic situation: an artificial night (the darkness of the cinema hall) in which the viewer watches a screen illuminated by an unseen beam of light. In this sense, Bellour hints at the idea that the formal properties of the scene in the Bois de Vincennes figure the cinematic situation. This accords with his argument in Le Corps du cinéma that fascinating scenes in cinema tend to figure or redouble the cinematic dispositif (82). Bellour does not refer to Grandrieux’s diary in this essay, but reading his essay together with the diary helps us to see how scenes in Malgré la nuit can be interpreted as staging Grandrieux’s instinctive and animating fascination with the “experimental night.”

The extract of the shooting diary in Trafic ends with a few remarks on the epigraph taken from Blanchot. Grandrieux writes that the film finds its strength in the same place as its greatest weakness: “This is what Blanchot says: ‘Every art draws its origin from an exceptional fault’. And what is it, this exceptional fault? Precisely of not being able to ‘represent'” (22). Grandrieux explains that his producer told him that during the shoot, the image became so blurred that it was no longer possible to follow the scene’s narrative and emotion: one was lost in the pure sensation of an image. He writes: “It is very precisely in this place that my exceptional fault is situated. This line which opposes emotion and sensation is also that by which passes the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of the film. It is between these two shores, these two irreconcilable tensions, opposing plasticity and narration, that cinema must pass” (22).¹⁵ As several scholars have demonstrated, Grandrieux’s cinema is indeed marked by this privileging of sensation over narration.¹⁶ Grandrieux goes so far as to refer to narrative as a kind of “nuisance” getting in the way (encombrement): he suggests that the dialogues and the narrative structure are conditions that he had to “accept” during the various rewritings of the script in order to obtain sufficient financing for the film (“Journal 2” 4). The fiction or representation is a kind of “weight” on the scenes, on their pure sensation (9), and the scenes must be “undone” (défaire) to find their truth (10). Grandrieux chooses relatively long focal length lenses (often 85mm or 100mm) precisely to lose himself in the pure sensation of the close-up image (Baudéan 5). Holding the camera himself, Grandrieux films extremely close to his actors, between one and five feet away from them, closely orbited by five assistants, such as the focus-puller (“Journal 2” 3, 5). The underexposed, blurry close-up effects that typify his films are already present in Sombre. As Martine Beugnet writes, the experimental use of blurring in contemporary auteur cinema evokes a sense of chaos or Bataillean formlessness beneath the visible world (L’Attrait 103-104). While this excess of sensation over narrative and the slippage of things into a formless imaginary are clearly on the side of fascination, it does perhaps explain why some critics found Malgré la nuit overwrought and the story difficult to take seriously.¹⁷

However, there is more at stake in this reference to Blanchot. This is the third reference to Blanchot in the text and thus places the reflection under the sign of Blanchot. Again: why cite Blanchot? What place does Blanchot have in the shooting diary of a contemporary film? The full sentence of the quotation in the original context—in the essay “A toute extrêmité” (“At every extreme”)—reads: “Every art draws its origin from an exceptional fault, every work is the implementation [la mise en œuvre] of this original fault, from which come to us a new light and a risky conception of plenitude [l’approche menacée de la plénitude]” (Livre 148, Book 107). For Blanchot, every artist is in an intimate relation with a particular “mistake,” and Grandrieux identifies his as the temptation to lose himself in a pure sensation of the image. Blanchot tells us that this error is not some superficial failing but rather what animates the process. In a formulation that resembles Grandrieux’s in his diary, Blanchot writes: “an artist cannot be too mistaken or link himself too much to his mistake, in a serious, solitary, perilous, irreplaceable embrace in which he hurls himself, with terror, with delight, at the excess that, in himself, leads him outside himself and perhaps outside of everything” (Livre 148, Book 108). Crucially, “this link with error” is described as a “relationship so difficult to attain, more difficult to sustain, which clashes with a doubt, with a disavowal in the very one whom the mistake holds under its fascination, this passion, this paradoxical progress” (Livre 148, Book 108; my emphasis). To be inspired and to execute the work is to labor under the fascination of error. Being inspired to make a work is a mistake in the sense that it is to be drawn by fascination outside of oneself at great risk to oneself and the work. Grandrieux’s diary thus develops Blanchot’s concept of fascination by describing it in detail in the first person and from the point of view of a filmmaker. This experience of error is what Grandrieux describes in the shoot at the Bois de Vincennes as the “lack”—the missing image of Hélène’s expression—that draws him on like a mirage in the desert. At the core of the error that animates Grandrieux’s film is a species of fascination, the fascination at the heart of inspiration. If the finished work turns out to be fascinating for the viewer (as Bellour’s essay suggests), then it reproduces something of its condition of possibility and perpetuates this meandering, fascinating error.

Bellour, Childhood, and Cinematic Fascination

To date, Grandrieux has produced ten texts for Trafic and six for Mettray. Founded by Serge Daney in Paris in 1992, Trafic is the home of a particular form of cinephilic fascination in France, offering a space for reflections that “cannot be published anywhere else” (that is, texts which are too speculative or personal for academic, journalistic or other film publications).¹⁸ The inclusion of texts by filmmakers (including documents relating to filming and reflections on practice or literary texts) has been a hallmark of Trafic from the beginning.¹⁹ As the title suggests, Trafic is a space of passage and a circuit between different forms of cinematic fascination. Trafic is about images in a broad sense and is not restricted to cinema, even if that is the primary focus. In conceiving Trafic, Daney was inspired by literary revues such as La Nouvelle Revue Française and Jean Louis Schefer’s Café (Maison 235). Named after the penal colony for delinquents where Jean Genet resided during the 1920s, Mettray was created in 2001 in Marseille by the photographer and filmmaker Didier Morin and usually publishes works-in-progress, archival materials, and reflections by writers, photographers, and filmmakers. Bellour and Bertrand Schefer (one of the writers of Malgré la nuit) have contributed texts, and other regular contributors include the photographer Bernard Plossu.²⁰ Grandrieux’s texts for these revues include reflections on his film practice (“Troisième film”); interviews (“Un lac,” “Unrest: Entretien”); commentaries on other films (“Sous le ciel“); extracts from his films’ “scripts” (“Meurtrière,” “Unrest”), including as-yet unfinished films (“Congo”); correspondence to do with the films or shooting diaries (“La Vie Nouvelle“); and short, oneiric fictional texts and other occasional writings (“La voie sombre”, “L’emprise”, “Incendie”). In one brief paragraph-long text that reads like the account of a nightmare, Grandrieux describes the experience of someone trapped underneath a huge putrefying beast (“Untitled [1]”). Another work features simply a pair of drawings of birdlike creatures (“Untitled [2]”). While we do not have the script for Malgré la nuit, Baudéan notes that it is poetic, like a novel with chapters rather than scenes and, in that respect, we can speculate that it is very much like the fictional texts and the scenarios for the other films (2). Baudéan compares Grandrieux’s script to those of Bruno Dumont, for whom he has also worked. This is significant because it means that Grandrieux’s film practice stems from a practice of literary writing. Grandrieux states that he could not make a film that did not start life as a text that he had written (with or without others in collaboration) (Grandrieux and Jefferson Selve 93).

Grandrieux’s references to Blanchot in the shooting diary take on added resonance by appearing in Trafic. Both Bellour and Daney have said that Blanchot was for them an ideal critic: Daney refers to Blanchot as “his master” (Pensées 310), while Bellour writes that Blanchot permitted the republication of his essay “La Condition critique” in the second edition of Trafic, a text that Bellour cut out from a newspaper when he was a young boy in 1950 (Dans la compagnie 13). This is not to say that Blanchot was a model, says Bellour, because he is “inimitable” (21). Grandrieux’s affinity with Blanchot’s account of the work of the artist enters into intertextual play with the estimation in which Blanchot is held by key figures at Trafic. Blanchot’s critical insights into the creative process in L’Espace littéraire—surely among the most profound studies of the psychology of the literary writer—come no doubt in part from his own practice as an experimental writer. Bellour’s own literary writings (simply referred to as “texts”) have strong echoes of Blanchot’s récits, novels, and fragmentary texts: the enigmatic and often elliptical collection of texts Oubli (1992), for example, cannot but evoke Blanchot’s L’Attente, l’oubli. Bellour’s Partages de l’ombre (2002) similarly features key themes of childhood, the nature of the image, and other topics. A strong Blanchotian literary sensibility infuses Bellour’s understanding of the critical task of writing about film. In other words, critical work would here seem to demand the supplement of experience of literary practice. Bellour notes that for him film analysis is “an art of evocation” rather than a task of description: that is, it is about using written “style” to capture “an active shadow of the unfolding of the film in the movement of the phrase” (Pensées 12). This kind of film “analysis” is about capturing something of cinematic fascination through a practice of writing. What exactly happens in this “capture”? One is inspired to respond to a moment of spectatorial fascination by putting to work the memory of that moment in a literary practice (a practice that for Blanchot starts with fascination). Creative work stemming from fascination is always a work of memory, a renewed inspiration working from traces of an irrecuperable instant in the past (even if that past is a very recent past, for example, as one reflects on a film one has just seen while leaving the cinema). As Bellour hints at and as Elsa Boyer makes explicit, Bellour’s film analysis is “indissociable from fiction” (Boyer 110).²¹ Writing that begins with fascination is always partly fictive. The film analysis associated with Bellour is a hybrid form of writing inspired by an experience of cinematic fascination, a movement of writing that reanimates, transforms, and necessarily fictionalizes the memory. Underscoring the importance of writing in the revue, Trafic contains no images or illustrations.²² Even if it is an “error,” as we saw in the previous section, fascination can be seen as productive because it has the potential to activate a circuit and inspire new works. If cinema opens an interior world, then writing is a way of prolonging the fascination of cinema. As Jean Louis Schefer puts it: “Writing on cinema would here be nothing else but going further into this darkness lit by changing points, and reaching the moment where this [“experimental”] night is made in us” (95).

Bellour’s Le Corps du cinéma, which remains untranslated, is one of the great books on the fascination of cinema. The book’s subtitle offers three core conceptual terms: hypnoses, emotions, and animalities. Fascination is a crucial additional term, along with infant and child, whose significance I sketch below. The importance of the term fascination for Bellour is clear: it “commonly serves in general terms to express most vividly the experience induced by cinema. Let us reserve for the moment this word, so full, which asks to be clarified itself, and of which this book is also in a sense the unfolding” (114). Bellour approaches fascination through a discussion of hypnosis. For Bellour, film induces a hypnotic state through the rhythms of time and movement in individual films and also through the cinematic apparatus (dispositif) itself (82). The filmic state is about maintaining a passage between two stages of hypnosis: induction and the state of hypnosis itself, in which the spectator falls into a pre-sleep state (63). The film makes “suggestions” and the spectators respond with their emotions. The dispositif is set up in such a way as to ensure this capture and “force of persuasion.” The darkness of the cinema hall individualizes the relation between spectator and screen. (Like Blanchot’s and Grandrieux’s accounts of fascination, Bellour’s cinematic fascination is essentially nocturnal.) Hypnosis as a paradigm has, of course, a long history in cinema, psychoanalysis, and film theory, and throughout the book Bellour connects these to pre-cinematic forms of hypnosis and magnetism, such as the work of Mesmer and the fascination of the guillotine during the French Revolution.

Fascination does not seem to refer to a stage or aspect of hypnosis; rather, Bellour says, it refers to the work of art and its effects. He continues: “At most one could say, in order to distinguish the two terms while associating them, like an echo of the duality of the process of induction and the hypnotic state, that if hypnosis, in the cinema, is that which sends the spectator to sleep, fascination is that which wakes him up” (294).²³ At a crucial moment in the text, Bellour turns to Blanchot, noting that the subsection of L’Espace littéraire titled “L’image” (L’Espace 28-31, Space 32-33) “seems to describe the cinema situation” (294).²⁴ Bellour then quotes key lines on hypnosis:

Hypnosis, however, consists not in putting to sleep, but in preventing sleep. It maintains within concentrated night a passive, obedient light, the point of light which is unable to go out: paralyzed lucidity. The power that fascinates has come into contact with this point, which it touches in the separated place where everything becomes image. Inspiration pushes us gently or impetuously out of the world, and in this outside there is no sleep, any more than there is rest. Perhaps it must be called night, but night—the essence of night—does not, precisely, let us sleep. (L’Espace 244, Space 185)

Like Grandrieux’s evocation of his film as a dream, fascination is figured as being captured by a light in the midst of darkness. Bellour notes that while Blanchot’s discussion pertains to the notion of inspiration, that is, to the work of the artist, it also provides a way of thinking about spectatorship: “These words, beyond the solitude of the creative experience which suggests them, touch also with a strange exactitude the situation of the dark cinema hall and projection and the freely captured spectator in this apparatus” (Corps 295). Inspiration links both creation and reception in an underlying experience of fascination.

Bellour goes on to note that for Blanchot childhood is “the moment of fascination, is itself fascinated” (295; L’Espace 30, Space 33), which is why childhood and our own childhood fascinate us: “It is because the child is fascinated that the mother is fascinating” (L’Espace 30, Space 33). Bellour draws on Blanchot’s revision of psychoanalytic doctrine in order to conceptualize cinematic fascination. Ten years after the publication of his book, Bellour returned to this idea in a seminar, noting that he is still “fascinated” by these lines.²⁵ Bellour also develops his theory of cinema spectatorship in relation to the developmental theories of Daniel Stern, writing that “the child [infant] of Stern is the cinema spectator” (Corps 151; see 151-177). Bellour argues that when we are fascinated by cinema, we reawaken the fascination that typified our earliest childhood: the child is the “originary infra-spectator” (121-122). While Bellour develops this most extensively in relation to Stern, ideas connecting childhood to cinema are also associated with Daney and Schefer.²⁶ The important point is that there is a bridge between “the spectator’s current state and a state of childhood that the film reanimates by conjugating occasional and renewed fascination with a primordial fascination” (en conjuguant à une fascination primordiale des fascinations ponctuelles et renouvelées) (297). Here, as throughout Le Corps du cinéma, film form is said to hypnotize and fascinate the viewer and this experience is supposed to reopen a “primal scene” characterized by fascination. Bellour’s text sometimes dramatizes this fascination through fragments that seem partly autobiographical and partly fictive (Corps 116-117)—as if to reach the deepest levels of spectatorship it would be necessary to move from an analytic approach to cinema to a speculative or fictional form. These fragments echo Blanchot’s “primal scenes” in L’Écriture du désastre (The Writing of the Disaster), which can be interpreted as representing “infant figures” (Fynsk), that is, immemorial moments of childhood exposure to nothingness.²⁷ These “primal scene” sections are doubtless an influence on Bellour’s L’Enfant (2013), a collection of enigmatic poetic fragments, written between 1994 and 2009, that imaginatively describe the early experiences of a child.²⁸ In one of the fragments, Bellour evokes a “child of cinema” enveloped by the screen image (74). Bellour’s work suggests that closely watching the child (one supposes it is his grandchild), perhaps like the practice of child observation in psychoanalytic training, is a form of research into fascination. Bellour thus extends Blanchot’s concept of fascination by theorizing it in relation to cinema, prolonging Blanchot’s insight that it is related to childhood, and developing forms of writing appropriate to it.

Bellour caps his long discussion of hypnosis with a brief reading of two early moments featuring children in Grandrieux’s Sombre (Corps 122-123). Sombre begins with a series of shots that follow a car driving through the French Alps at sunset. The next sequence begins abruptly with screams of children. We see children sit on red seats in the dark, possibly in a theatre or cinema, watching a show. The camera faces them and does not show what they are watching. The children are highly animated by what they are watching, shrieking and shouting. Their eyes are wide and rapt. As this short sequence goes on, an eerie ambient music gets louder and the children’s cries are muted. Shortly before the end of the sequence, the children’s agitated and excitable movements are accelerated. About four minutes after this, after a scene in which the film’s protagonist is seen for the first time in a hotel room with an individual we might surmise is a prostitute, another elliptical sequence shows a young blindfolded boy in a field with his arms outstretched before him. As he advances in small steps, the image goes in and out of focus. A crane shot shows that he is walking away from a large barn. Together, these two sequences function somewhat ambiguously as prefatory matter for the main story. Bellour sees these “real-conceptual children” (123) as figurations of the fascinated cinema viewer.

Bellour returns to this theme in his essay on Malgré la nuit, describing the film as “an attempt to bring to an obscure clarity, despite the night, images which would be images of childhood” (Pensées 229). As with Sombre, childhood is more a conceptual motif than a primary plot feature in Malgré la nuit, one deployed only a couple of times. At the very end of the film, as Lenz lies dying, we see two superimposed images: one of Lenz walking through a field and another of a woman cradling a young child. This echoes an earlier moment in which Lenz explores a house by candlelight and finds a polaroid of the same woman and child, which he claims is a picture of himself and his mother. In a film that follows the logic of a dream more than the logic of a story, Grandrieux thus inscribes a vanishing point. Grandrieux has elsewhere suggested this motif of childhood figures of fascination: “I’ve always thought that one accesses images more with our hands than our eyes. The images that I’m talking about are those which constitute for each of us the dream in which we live. […] It’s a world of images without light that we hold in ourselves and which we traverse like a sleepwalker who cannot escape its vision. This world is childhood, early childhood, when things are linked in us without us ever being able to know anything of them” (Grandrieux and Jefferson Selve 87). The figure of the sleepwalker resonates with the blindfolded child in Sombre. Both echo Grandrieux’s practice of carrying the camera with his own hands, advancing blindly within the “enigma” of the film (“Journal 1” 21). In this way, the circuit of fascination linking Blanchot, Bellour, and Grandrieux, each in his singular way, ultimately tends to resolve itself in the image of a fascinated child.

Conclusion: What Remains of Fascination?

Filming is in Grandrieux’s account firstly an active relation: it is always “I film” (je filme). And yet, this filming is a search for a way of letting oneself “be taken” (se laisser prendre) by the film. Grandrieux wants to become the void where, in Blanchot’s terms, the impersonal affirmation of the work asserts itself (L’Espace 61, Space 55). By holding the camera himself Grandrieux has a direct relation through the viewfinder to the image at the moment of its inception. It is partly for this reason that he refers to himself as the film’s “first spectator” (Grandrieux and Jefferson Selve 90). For Blanchot, the genesis of a work of art is a struggle between power and impossibility, which, in the case of literature, finally resolves itself in physical form through the figures of the reader and writer (L’Espace 263-264, Space 198); it is thus that the spectator is in some sense already in the artist (L’Espace 265-266, Space 199-200). The violence of this combat is suggested by Grandrieux’s use of arracher, discussed above, and the various physical ailments he suffers in the course of the project. Yet Grandrieux’s diary also demonstrates how fatigue and a feeling of suffocation become the substance and movement of the work, even if they are also at the same time symptoms militating against its realization. The diary thus suggests the possible political stakes of fascination’s irreducible passivity in a contemporary economy of incessant activity. As Josh Cohen has recently noted, afflictions such as burnout, which typify the Western world of work today, testify to how the creative act often consists precisely in sustaining an inactive state such as exhaustion (xxxvii).

Just as Bellour’s filmic fascination requires passage through its own kind of writing (which elicits a second fascination), Grandrieux’s affinity with a book about the “space of literature” gestures towards the common indissociability of the literary and the cinematic today, having a common source in an experience of fascination. Theorizing the passages between these forms, Bellour and Grandrieux are two of the principal inheritors or guardians of Blanchotian fascination working today. Circuits of fascination are thus often at the same time circuits of artistic influence. As we have seen, Trafic has historically thought of fascination in Blanchotian terms. As a literary space without images, Trafic responds to what already in the 1990s was perceived to be a saturation of the world by images brought about by a marketized postmodern screen culture. While this condition has developed enormously over the last thirty years, Trafic may still be seen as a space that protects and circulates the pure fascination of cinema, away from an ambient absorption in forms of spectacle and what Daney called “the visual.”²⁹ If Bellour and Grandrieux point to worldly forces militating against the “error” of fascination, they both nonetheless draw primal scenes testifying to it as a vital temptation of the human.

Footnotes

1. See for example Greg Hainge’s discussion of a 1994 documentary by Grandrieux on the Normandy landings, in which Grandrieux reads an extract from Blanchot’s L’Attente, l’oubli (Awaiting Oblivion; 1962) (Hainge 52-53).

2. For example, Adrian Martin reads Malgré la nuit via Antonin Artaud. In his study of Grandrieux, Hainge draws notably on Deleuze and is somewhat critical of the concept of fascination (264). My account of fascination, however, is not that far from Hainge’s reference to the Levinasian il y a and his argument that Grandrieux’s cinema is about returning us to “our own ontological base condition as sensory beings receptive to sensations that traverse us in their raw immediacy” (261).

3. On Blanchot’s relation to cinema, see Watt 1-9.

4. Bellour mentions his “profound” friendship with Grandrieux in Dans la compagnie 129.

5. For a discussion of fascination and the image in Blanchot, particularly as they pertain to cinema, see Watt 23-53.

6. For different perspectives on fascination within a broader historical French context, see Declerq and Spriet. Although beyond the scope of this article, one could trace the literary sensibility associated with fascination and Blanchot back to German Romanticism; see McKeane and Opelz.

7. The name Madeleine of course recalls Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), a film that could be read as a study in fascination. The name Lenz is a reference to Georg Büchner’s fragment “Lenz” (1836). Kristian Marr was explicitly chosen by Grandrieux for his ghostly, Romantic pallor (“Dossier de presse”). Grandrieux also evokes Dostoyevksy’s The Idiot (1868-69) and the question of evil as inspiration for the film. The film’s title is a reference to a poem by Saint John of the Cross. On allusions to Rilke in the film (also the subject of a significant part of Blanchot’s L’Espace littéraire), see Bellour, Pensées; Leroy.

8. As of 2009, when the second series was launched, Mettray has no pagination; page numbers given for the Mettray “Journal de tournage” (1-14) are hence my own. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from this and other French texts are my own.

10. Grandrieux quotes Kafka’s diary in “Sur l’horizon.”

11. This appears a Scheferian touch—compare the phrase “voix métallique” in B. Schefer 24.

12. When asked why his films involve so much sexualized violence, Grandrieux states that he does not know, but that his desire to make films depends on such imagery (Bellour, Pensées 229).

13. Baudéan confirms Grandrieux’s regular use of this word arracher on set in his instructions to actors and assistants (18).

14. Bellour describes it as “the book of a generation” (Corps 16). For the “experimental night,” see J. L. Schefer 6, 92. For a discussion of this book and its context, see Ffrench. Schefer has contributed to Trafic throughout the life of the revue and currently serves on its advisory committee.

15. In the Mettray extract, Grandrieux writes that it is between these two shores that “the film” must pass (3).

16. Discussed in Hainge 75. On the broad body of contemporary French cinema in which Grandrieux’s work fits, see Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation.

17. See for example Maillard.

18. Remark made by Patrice Rollet at the Trafic roundtable, conference “Changer, échanger: Serge Daney au milieu du gué,” Institut national de l’histoire de l’art, Paris, 28 Sept. 2018. On Trafic‘s genesis, see Daney, Maison 23-49 and Pageau. Bellour has stated that he is the only academic on the board of Trafic—remark made at the conference “Penser les revues de cinéma et audiovisuel aujourd’hui,” Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, 16 Dec. 2019.

19. On this topic, see Fiant.

20. Malgré la nuit was written by Grandrieux in collaboration with Bertrand Schefer, Rebecca Zlotowski, and John-Henry Butterworth.

21. For a discussion of the French tradition of film analysis as a kind of “writing” (écriture) and Bellour and Daney’s place within this, see Costa and Maury. For a recent discussion of Bellour’s career see Radner and Fox, which contains an extract in translation of the long recent interview with Bellour, Dans la compagnie.

22. Daney refers to a writerly eschewing of images as the “Blanchot effect” (99).

23. For a recent reading of the connection between cinema and sleep, which we could compare with Bellour’s, see Gorfinkel.

24. See Bellour’s discussion of Blanchot, 291-97. Bellour also discusses this text in “L’Image.”

25. “Fragments d’une archéologie du regard romantique,” Université Paris Diderot, 3 Apr. 2019.

26. See Jean Louis Schefer’s line “the films which watched our childhood” and Daney’s repeated formula “cinema is childhood,” both discussed in Bellour, Corps 296.

27. Compare Grandrieux’s reference to the “infans” in “Sur l’horizon” 88.

28. An extract was published in Mettray, vol. 10, Spring 2006, 6-9.

29. See Bellour’s article on the history of the cinema spectator in Pensées, 353-366.

Works Cited

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