Cinema Canada (Jun 1983)

sents-a projection into the future of [the] uncanny life before birth.”'® The long take that ends the film provides a bridge for us over the instant of emptiness which removed Christiane from our sight and briefly cancelled the subjectivising work of identification. Dying is often represented in the cinema, but representation and identification belong to libido not to the death instinct. The personification of death as a dark and melancholy figure in such a film as Fritz Lang's 1921 Der Mude Tod (Destiny) is so far from being a representation of the fact of death as to constitute a complete denial of it. The death instinct does not produce an image, it cuts across the imagein a syncopation that voids the objects and process of identification, and to that measure it cuts across the coherence of the ego that the work of representation maintains. Nor does the death instinct picture and yearn for, as has sometimes been asserted, a return to a neo-natal or © even womb-like state, except as these conditions provide images for the unimaginable by a sort of metonymy which places infantile helplessness next to the nothingness, the oblivion of death. This is the method of primary masochism, desire organised according to Daniel Lagache — on the image of “the initial state of the infant, absolutely dependent on the other for satisfaction.”'© As desire pursues the object that cannot be had, only represented, similarly the death instinct pursues the state that cannot be represented, only alluded_to, when “alloyed with eroticism”. The cinema projects a violence upon the screen. It provides in this way the occasion for a turning out ward and a re-engagement of destructive instinct that is aimed primarily at the self. “Masochism,” says Freud, “is older than sadism.” '8 The energetic search of sexuality for an object becomes the locomotive force of the death instinct, particularly insofar as the apparatus of the cinema is itself complicit in the implementation of sadomasochistic fantasy. The analogy between the film-viewer and the dreamer has often been made as the basis of an exploration of the experience of filmfantasy. Jean-Louis Baudry: “The cinematographic apparatus reproduces the psychical apparatus a Seer during sleep: separation from the outside world, inhibition of motricity; in sleep, these conditions causing an overcathexis of representation, can penetrate the system of perception as sensory stimuli; in cinema, the images perceived (very likely reinforced by the set up of the physical apparatus) will be overcathected and thus acquirea status which will be the same as that of the sensory images of dream.” '” Sleep, Freud himself suggests, induces a psychic regression toward the state of the pre-natal, infantin the womb. Christian Metz argues that the use of such analogies takes the state of the filmviewer too far, and remove him too completely from real demands on the perceptions and ego, that the situation of the spectator is much more like that of the daydreamer who remains sensible to the world around him.*! It seems to me that the cinematic apparatus has a much more explicit function, that it does notjust provide the conditions for fantasising, that it is not the outside of fantasy but its very substance, thatit is already fantasy, ready-made and of a particular order. In brief, the apparatus of the cinemais the social equivalent of the contraption — appliance, device, harness, rack—into which the classic masochist inserts himself in quest of gratification. In the restraints of the contraption the spectator finds a simulacrum of the helplessness in which desire was first precipitated out of need and satisfaction. Womb, cradle, mothers arms, it doesn't matter what the cinematic apparatus represents: the important thing is thatit signifies that world against which the infant's energies have no purchase. The anxiety which the situation provokes may perhaps be thought ofin terms of the trepidation with which we enterthe cinemaitself, looking at the faces of those who are released, for the image of the satisfaction which we hope to attain. In his meditation on the fictional film and its spectator, Metz speaks of being “in the grip of the filmic state”,““ of being paralysed. This description, | think, can be extended from the effect of the physical apparatus to that of the psychical via the per spective representation that controls and channels the path of vision. “The ascetic who flagellates himsel does it for another,” says Lacan. To buy a ticket to the cinema is to 37 —_ BAXTER surrender oneself to its clutching embrace, to letit do to us whatit will, to provide it with our joy and pain, and in return to ask it for love. We become the objects of our images. And the images turn their back on us. The “sense of separation” mentioned by Mulvey, or the fact that, in the words of Christian Metz, the cinema “retains something of the forbidden nature of the sight of the primal scene,” are emblematic of the engagement ofdesire andthe death instinct. They offer us an insight into what Laplanche calls “the essentially. taumatic nature of human sexuality,”2° formed in the constant threat of the withdrawal of the attention that for the infant can never be constant enough, the threat of the disconnection from the other that must entail the collapse and extinguishing of self. There are two sorts of death in the cinema of which | think it is impor-. tant for us to take note. The first is exemplified, somewhat paradoxically, by a death we do not see: the death of McTeague in Greed. The end approaches him as he is slumped in the centre of a featureless desert, empty of everything save the corpses around him, toone of which he is chained. The peculiar horror of this death is that it is, in the film, unwitnessed; it is the death of the only being in the world, and for this reason, for what it threatens to the spectator, it is forestalled, left to an inevitability that is not yet. Or, like Jack's death in The Shining, it is elided by a cut, and redressed by the suggestion that life has simply been displaced, not terminated. Or, to take yet other examples, John McCabe surely dies of his wounds and exposure, but that final moment is masked for us by the snow that drifts over his body in the penultimate scene of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, in much the same way that Judith Traherne’s death is both signified and obscured by the going out of focus that marks the end of Dark Victory. As common, more so perhaps, are the executions that bring to an end films as disparate as The Passion of Joan of Arc, King Kong, Rome Open City, and Bonnie and Clyde. Here the fact that the death is seen— or the act of killing is seen— must be allied to the fact that witnesses to the event are included in the film itself, even if that witness is himself —