The Invisible Armada

The other Kafka - for a minor cinema

Joachim Daniel Dupuis 1

17/09/2023

“There is no great, no revolutionary, except the minor.

Hate all literature by masters 2” (Deleuze and Guattari)

Deleuze gives two meanings to the term minority: 1°) "minority first designated a state of affairs, i.e. the situation of a group (for example, women, blacks, Jews, gays) who, whatever their number, is excluded from the majority, or included, but as a subordinate faction in relation to a standard of measurement which makes the law and fixes the majority" ; 2°) "minority will no longer designate a de facto state, but a becoming in which on to commit" 3.

Applied to cinema, the concept of minority opens the way to two approaches: A/a decolonial, anthropocene, androcene history of cinema where minorities would be described more or less invisible, more or less stigmatized. For example, the place on the screen of Black, Indian, Jewish, Women or LGBT community4. B/ Or a story out of time (in french : « une histoire intempestive »), that of the “becomings” that snatch films from the domination of the studios, from their law and their storytelling. The first approach is already well explored by cinematographic research, the second is yet to be done.

I — Kafka and cinema

To begin, I would like to come back to the origin of the concept of minority. The concept of minority — or minor — is forever associated with Kafka's literature since Deleuze and Guattari wrote Kafka for a minor Litterature [1975]. It is therefore legitimate to ask if we can really apply this concept to the cinema. Considering all of his writings, we can isolate two or three specific traits to the minor associated with the cinema.

1/ The first sentence of Kafka's Diary (dated May 24, 1909) is interesting:“The spectators freeze when the train passes”5. This sentence refers directly to the cinema. It is, everyone will have recognized it, The arrival of a train at La Ciotat station, 1895, from the Louis Lumière.

I will make two initial remarks. First, it's not about the whole film, but of a precise point, the critical point (the most intense), which is in the middle of the movie. This idea of « middle » seems to be a criterion of the minor for Kafka. I quote Kafka again : “All things that come to my mind come to me not by their root, but by any point situated towards the middle”6. To write a diary is to capture the events of a day and keep just the quintessence, the trace of a desire; the same way: go to see a film is to keep only stolen moments, impressions, atmospheres. To write a newspaper is the same as watching a movie: everything is always done in the middle. We do not follow an order. Memory does not restore all events in their order of appearance.

The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (Louis Lumière, 1895)

My second remark is that this moment is also a moment of tension. Kafka retains neither the staging nor the position of the camera (human scale and general plan) nor the gaze of the travelers who look at the camera, but only the effect produced at a given moment on the viewer of the film, moment which is the middle of the film. This is also what the first the first spectators of the film. Clément-Maurice, in charge of organizing the screenings of the brothers Lumière, says: “Those who decided to enter came out a little bewildered”7.The important thing, here, I believe, it is that we are not dealing with an emotion, but with an affect8. An affect engages the body and the spirit, the first spectators did not know how to identify what they saw, what emotion to feel, because there was no precedent, there was no benchmark, the grammar of the cinema was still, in 1895, to be invented.What is interesting is that Kafka, despite a greater experience of cinema, had the same reaction to this film.

2/ A film in particular struck Kafka, it is The White Slave Trade or The White Slave by Blom9 (1911). It is the second remake of a Danish film, which had considerable success in Europe. We can sum up the story in one sentence: a small advertisement attracts far from its country a young woman in poverty who sees herself forced into prostitution, she will be finally saved by her lover. The structure of the film is linear and some "title cards" allow you to follow the plot well. It's a single plot, there is no unity of place nor action. The editing is relatively simple: a succession of general shots, which are in so many scenes filmed at eye level — as are all the movies at the time. Danish industry has developed since 1908, and produces large productions that do not yet have the density of Griffith's films (from 1915 : The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance). What strikes, first, in this film, this is what Kafka retains. He expresses it in these terms: "The innocent is attacked in the dark by strangers as soon as she leaves the station, thrown into an automobile and abducted”10.

a) This sentence is at first glance a simple memory of the film. As for the movie of the Lumière brothers, the film is captured “in the middle”. The scene is indeed not placed at the beginning of the film nor at the end of the film, but is an amalgamation of two moments of the film. The scene where the girl gets out of the train is in the 2nd minute of the film. And the actual kidnapping scene is actually at the 35th minute, for a film with a duration of 47 minutes. In this second moment of the film, the police car is attacked by the pimp who kidnaps the young woman again. Kafka therefore operates a seizure of the film by fragments and "condenses" two distinct cinematic moments. The fact that his mind combines two pieces of scene suggests that he is not interested in filmic continuity, in other words, story.

b) This scene, even reconstructed, is an abduction scene that mixes "eroticism"and “violence”. And we could conclude that Kafka, like any spectator, is sensitive to the processes of major cinema, such as those which will be developed later in the American studios. The cinema of this time forged a large number of films around this fantasy of the physical possession of a man for a woman. Besides, the film Blom is a remake. The pinnacle of this film genre will be reached with the amazing and awesome Italian film: Cabiria, a few years later. Yet Kafka does not succumb to this major process, precisely because the scene is not phantasmatic, for him, she upsets him. “Everything appears to me as construction” (Nov 19, 1913), “(…) the slightest sight seen upsets everything in me”11. Be upset, it is to be seized by the strangeness of the film. What strikes him, it is the case to say it, this is the stunning effect. He is stunned by this kidnapping which contravenes the customs bourgeois. It is possible that the scene of the arrest at the end of the novel The Trial, in custody the trace.We remember: two men take Josef K. to kill him “like a dog” (wie ein hund). The cinema appears to Kafka as a strange and foreign matter. The cinema is this « Archimedean point »12 of which Kafka speaks, which comes to thwart his education, his bourgeois values, but whose storytelling he does not follow, defined by the studios and their language major.

At this stage, Kafka already gives us an idea of the minor relationship that can be maintained with a film and that it carries within itself, which is no stranger to literature. But that doesn't tell us how the film itself can carry the minor. What are the criteria for a minor film?

The white slave trade(August Blom, 1911)

II— Criteria for a minor film

To differentiate a minor film from major films, it is still necessary to be sensitive to the differences and know their reciprocal criteria.

A- What is a major film ?

The Birth of a Nation, perhaps the most controversial film in the history of the cinema, presents all the major components of cinema: it is a master cinema, in all senses of the word. It is a film made by a master who forges by his audacity the Hollywood machine since 1915, it is also a master cinema, in that it transpires the supremacist domination of the K.K.K. It is a film which refuses by all its pores the minor. This film is based on a major narrative construction. It can be considered as a diagram. There is a vertical axis and a horizontal axis. The vertical axis of bloodlines, lineages (a) and the horizontal axis, most often chronological, of story (b).

(a) Every major film imposes a system of kinship, of domination between characters, according to pre-established rules (identical to those of society) and a framework, which defines the genre of the film. It is blood, money, honor that unites or disunites the characters. In terms of lines, the film is inhabited by the opposition Whites / Blacks, but white is the fundamental value. The actors are not Black, but made up, it is a White, Lilian Gish who is the star. We have here the bases of the phantasmagoria of american cinema.

(b) And then there is the story which is articulated in a chronology with a beginning, a middle and an end, and between the beginning and the end, there must be an imbalance and a return to order or law, or as Judith Wright would say, a status quo13.In terms of the story, Griffith imagines a sort of rewriting history, based on white supremacist fear of Black people. After the Civil War, Whites in South Carolina would have lost power to to African-Americans and these would have imposed their law. And at the end of the film, the arrival of the KKK cavalry comes to save the Whites, from a "band of savage anarchists". This cavalry process will be taken up in many westerns or detective films.

The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915)

The cinema until the 70s will seek to amplify all these elements to a industrial scale. For example, Star Wars takes this topology to the next level: it is a story of honors and submission, combined with extravagant lines (Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader are first enemies then they discover themselves son and father) and ends apocalyptic (threat of the end of the Republic).All this narrative construction is of course carried by a technical building. In a major film, we seek harmony and homogeneity in the colors, the lighting, the staging of the space, the connections between shots. It is calibration.

B- Minor criteria

The criteria of a minor film prevents the installation of this Hollywood machine. We saw two of them, but it didn't really belong to the movie. This film was major, but Kafka had given it a perception that was meant to be minor. We can find these two criteria in the film, but we have to think about them differently.

First criterion : “Go through the middle”.

As we have seen, going through the middle to Kafka is not going through the beginning or the end. It is to capture a piece of film, a scene.But a minor film necessarily has a beginning and an end, going through the middle, it will mean at the level of a minor film that the major coordinates may not apply. We do not enter a minor film as in a major film. In Le Procès of Orson Welles, an adaptation of Kafka's novel, relationships between the characters are relations of domination, but they are doubtful, they have no foundation. The police officers who come to arrest Josef K do not even know why they have to stop it and won't (Josef K remains free). The lawyer — played by Orson Welles — who is supposed to defend him does not defend him, moreover he does not defend anyone. The judge who is supposed to judge him has an empty file: instead of the "trial documents", Josef K discovers pages of erotic books. The lines in a minor film are there, but they are blurred. If we now take the other axis, that of the development of story, we realizes that the "conflict" itself supposed to be the engine of a story — aimed at the transformation of the main character as much as the development of the story — no only makes no sense, but is never resolved. Josef K is condemned without reason, and even killed, but there are hundreds of other Josef K who await their turn, their judgments. Resolution is always deferred. Death itself is absurd : a simple stick of dynamite spawns nuclear explosion.

Second criterion :“ affect”

The affect also exists at the heart of the film, it is not only in the singular capacity of an individual to relate to things and to the world (Kafka). The minor film allows spectators to enter into processes of subjectivation which “designate the operation by which individuals or communities constitute themselves as subjects, on the margins of constituted knowledge and established powers, even if it means giving rise to new knowledge and powers”14. Affect is the name of these processes of minor subjectification. Deleuze and Guattari have a very beautiful definition of affect: “Affect is not a personal feeling, it is not no longer a character, it is the effectuation of a pack power, which raises and makes vacillate the self” (Mille Plateaux). In this sense, Affect keeps the film “open” —as we say of a wound that it is “open”. Affect comes to tear our belonging to social norms, norms that shape us.

Affect has “emotional potential" to use Saul Bass’s expression regarding montages of Eisenstein15, it is not contaminated by social discourses, it tears us away from an environment, our space-time. The construction of the montage is based on the exaggeration of the processes of editing, for example extreme depth of field, or on a composition of shots dynamics involving body fragments, in the form of cuts, from angles unusual, like Slavko Vorkapić16 or Gyorgy Kepes17.

There are three kinds of affects in a film. I will give three examples :

a) When in Psycho [Hitchcock, 1960] the heroine, Marion Crane, is savagely attacked and killed in his shower, Hitchcock does the unthinkable: fracture the film, cut it in two, like with an ax, he creates an affect of "surprise", the effect of which is comparable, according to his own words, to the effects of a V2 rocket18. It's a real shock : all the cinema of the 70s will be marked by the stab of Norman Bates, which tears the political membrane. Spectators will never again feel safe at home in the domestic space. He will give a layer of it with The Birds [Hitchcock, 1963].

Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

b) Most of the time, Affect is a “disturbance” that does not dissipate. When we watch Antonioni's films, we are disturbed: in L'Avventura, it is the disappearance of a young woman who is like a heartbreak; in Profession: reporter, we are disturbed by the change of identity of the main character; in Zabriskie Point, one is disturbed by permanent silence and the final explosion of a house as a metaphor for the end of the consumerism. With affect, we do not enter into feeling (including the three pillars of American cinema : dread, comedy and melodrama), but in something that disturbs, makes us waver.

L’Avventura (Michel-Angelo Antonioni, 1960)

i) With the arrival of blockbusters (a lot of resources, a lot of stars, a lot visual and sound effects and a lot of money), in the mid-70s, the spirit is constantly subjected to permanent shocks, a sonic bath and a narrative logic whose lines are exponential and the ends apocalyptic. To cope with this, the cinema miner sets up astonishment. Psychoanalysts defines it as "an event that shatters everything we have built to protect us from what threatens us”.

ii) In the minor cinema, stunning stops the runaway movement of images and sound unique to blockbusters. Stunning is the inability to articulate a discourse of an event: we are gripped as much as the characters. The storytelling of adult cinema needs to make the event understandable; it should not remain enigmatic. What happens must be associated with an origin; it comes from a distant planet, it is a curse, it's a lab experiment gone wrong. From there, these are emotions of fear, of joy which play their part… Minor cinema, meanwhile, wants to keep us in awe. The explanation of the event must never take place. There Stunning is rubbing shoulders with the implausible, the impossible. We find it perfectly implemented by Jordan Peele.

Nope (Jordan Peele, 2022)

Nope [Jordan Peele, 2022] begins with a very long sequence (taken up later for longer in a flashback), where we see a television set with actors who play comedy, among them a chimpanzee to whom you are asked to do stupid tricks. And then the impossible takes place, the animal can no longer bear what is asked of him, this human domination: he says "no" to all this masquerade, and smashes the heads of those who make fun of it. A young child will be spared; he is the only one stunned witness to the event. During the massacre, a shoe of one of the actors finds itself perpendicular to the ground, and does not fall, a sign of the improbability that has taken place.The event provokes in us as much as in the child a dumbness, a stupefaction. The animal will be slaughtered.

It is the same configuration that works the rest of the film. Otis Haywood and his sister work together, as trainers of horses for the cinema. One day, Otis witnesses the death of his father, killed inexplicably by an object fallen from the sky. Stunning is engendered by an unlikely entity, hidden in a cloud, which is as beautiful as it is fierce, similar to a animal that does not want to be seen, tamed.

Third criterion : “make the film flee from all sides”.

A minor film lets the meaning of the film slip away, makes it flee everywhere. In this way, the construction like the meaning of the film escapes us and we are disoriented. The film leads us on unknown paths: the relationship between spaces, between people is "disarticulated", to speak like Luca Salza19.

In Le Procès [Orson Welles, 1962] striking above all is the use of depth of field. Orson Welles makes permanent use, but here the depth of field is pushed to the extreme like in the office scene, where you are taken by a dizzy spell. The depth of field even affects objects, like this oversized "Law Gate" in relation to the character. What is also striking is the permanent variation of atmospheres, which refer to different genres without being affirmed. We pass from one atmosphere to another, from one light to another : of an atmosphere melodramatic (discussion between the nurse and Josef K.), we can very quickly slip into fear (scene of the punishment of the two police officers). The brightness also varies constantly. The scale ofplans emphasizes spatial, temporal and generic indeterminacy.

Fourth criterion :“ becomings”.

The minor brings into becomings. With those "becomings", we are no longer in the normative regime imposed by the devices of cinema which assigns defined roles. Certain characters enter into "animal-becomings" (G.Deleuze et F.Guattari)," machine-becomings", others are deserters whose actions we do not fully understand. Among the most notable Asian minor films are these two films by Hiroshi Teshigahara, Japanese filmmaker : Otoshiana [おとし穴]and Suna no onna[砂の女].

The knife killer in Otoshiana[おとし穴], we do not know if he is responsible for killing a man by contract or if he is only the hand of fate, that is to say a symbol of the absurdity of relationships between men. But after the murder, the victims return to the living. This "becoming Living-dead " of the victims allows spectators to adopt a minor point of view on the events of the film.

Otoshiana / おとし穴 (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1962)

In Suna no onna[砂の女], an entomologist goes in search of insects rare in a desert region, is trapped in a house surrounded by sandbanks impassable and forced to fill sandbags to the point of death to stay alive. His life ends up resembling that of the insects he captured.

Suna no onna / 砂の女 (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)

Fifth criterion :“make-up removal”.

Minor cinema is also what "removes make-up". It is a concept invented by Alain Brossat20. The minor cinema refuses the aping of the major cinema. The current French comedies of French cinema echo the prejudices and clichés of society ; in this, they are only imitating it. Nor is minor cinema in the exploitation of a phantasmal franchise (James Bond…).

III — Towards a minor ecology

Minor films depend on one last criterion, the most important: a "conceptual character". What is a "conceptual character"? It is an object, a living or an undead. In Kafka's literature, they are legion: the silent sirens, the bullets that follow Blumfeld, Samsa the cockroach, Gracchus the undead, etc. The conceptual character , it is what carries, guides and gives its power to affect, to becomings. The set of miner criteria defines what can be called "an ecological niche ", an "ecosystem", a "section in a plane of immanence". Cinema is not flat, it is a kind of burrow with several tunnels. He weaves labyrinths that open singular bifurcations. There are three types of ecological niches in minor American cinema.

A - The first ecological niche

This niche offers an "experience of change". I will take two examples.

In 2001, A Space Odyssey [Kubrick, 1968], change happens through an object unidentified, whose shape is perfectly geometric and whose purpose is unknown. It's a "monolith" which does not refer to any signifier (neither God nor extraterrestrial master). The film let us follow the adventures of its appearances, in the past, at the time of the great apes, and in the future (2001). Deleuze described it as a "black stone", whereas it is a crystal, a giant black mica. The monolith is a conceptual character that transforms man, it is an "incubator" that makes man pass into a cosmic-becoming, Zarathustra.

2001, A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

In Night of the Living Dead [George Romero, 1968], the conceptual character is the zombie that we know. He comes out of his grave and bites, dismembers and swallows the bodies of living. Major cinema assigns him an identity (he is the underclass, the horde of migrants, the monster). For Romero, on the contrary, “the zombie embodies change”. The zombie is an event, a disaster that disrupts the androcene ecosystem, anthropocene of man. The zombie is a "disrupter". Facing him, the people react in different ways. This allows a revolutionary mapping of the country. The zombie is the stigma of a lack, that of the absence of a real community. Romero also says we are not yet "ripe for true community."21

Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968)

B- Second ecological niche

Minor cinema can aim at the "decomposition" of the major cinema. He has two ways of doing it. The hard way is that of Marco Candore's Mecanoscope, a "pirate" filmmaker. His cinematographic gesture has something of the giallo: approaching the machine of American cinema, the Griffith machine, and killing it. Marco Candore has directed around ten films: and in each film, he dismantles one by one the mechanisms of the Hollywood machine, with its devices, its phantasmagoria, its stars, its scenes, its stories. He dislocates the scenario, he dislocates the star system, he stretches the sound and image until extinction, to extract the "pure matter". What counts for him is to achieve a rain of affects. Here the conceptual character is major cinema,but as he enters into a living-dead becoming. Cinema is now a new machine, the Shelley-machine (named after the author of Frankenstein).

Ophtophoniac (Marco Candore, 2017)

The soft way, Bruno Dumont lets the camera slip away, and tries to capture, as he says, Grace. Gravity is what major cinema imposes on us with its stars, its way to create a scenario, a story. To find grace, Dumont proposes to attack the cinema on two levels. He takes non-professional actors who do not know in advance what they are going to say in a scene22. And he works on landscapes. But Dumont is also sensitive to becoming-animals. This is the third plan of his work In Twentynine Palms, a road movie, Dumont puts on stage a couple unable to understand each other: David is troubled by his sexuality and Katia is troubled in her soul. A third character plays a considerable role, it is the "desert", it increases the feeling of incommunicability between beings, but also contributes to David's metamorphosis: David is raped by another man. The film ends in effect by the murder of Katia which is reminiscent of the shower scene. As in Psycho, the murderer is disguised as a woman, but David is here in a "half-queer, half-animal becoming".

Twentynine Palms (Bruno Dumont, 2003)

C- Third ecological niche

It is the strangest form. The one that most reminds Kafka. Is it not he who affirms that one can find "in the small nations" enough to supplement an "often inactive and always on the way to national consciousness of disintegration”. In Phase IV [Saul Bass, 1974], the ant is the real conceptual film character. The ant is a tiny being, which is usually crushed with the foot, but in this film, she no longer has a master. A cosmic ray makes a "biological" jump possible. From antagonistic species, ants come to constitute themselves as a people. The whole challenge of the film is to incorporate men into a cosmic-becoming. Through the ants, nature reverses the domination of men from the anthropocene, androcene, capitalocene. Ants are the image of the community we hope for, an open and minor community.

Phase IV (1974, Bass)

Conclusion

These categories are by no means exhaustive and definitive. They nevertheless distinguish what makes a film pull from the major or minor side. The films are taken in maps. Some films are more minor than others, are taken by lines of escape which takes them further than the aims of an industrial cinema focused on profit. The question arises of the conditions of distribution and projection of minor films23.

No minor cinema exists without an operation of mutilation of major categories, without a pickaxe. The most beautiful metaphor of minor cinema is perhaps still in Kafka that we will find it: it is that of Odradek24, the reel of thread that we cannot catch, the reel that unwinds like film.

Note:

1. Independent researcher, teacher of philosophy and cinema, film critic (email : joachimdanieldupuis@gmail.com)

2. DELEUZE (G.) et GUATTARI (F.), Kafka, pour une littérature mineure, Paris, Les Éditions de minuit, 1975, p.48.

3. BENE (C.) et DELEUZE (G.), Superpositions, Paris, Les Éditions de minuit, 1979, pp. 128-129.

4. What a gap, for example, between The Birth of a Nation [David Wark Griffith], where the black man is presented as a madman, a savage on screen (“crazies Negroes”), and does not exist as an actor (it is white actors who are made up) and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song [Melvin Van Peebles, 1971], where we find the theme of running away, the flight specific to maroonage? What a difference between Arabian Jewish Dance [Edison, 1903] which takes up a anti-Semitic imagery and A serious Man [the Coen brothers, 2009] which expresses the questions of a father Jew in the face of the disasters that befall him? What difference between The Broadway Melody [Harry Beaumont, 1929] or Ours Betters [George Cukor, 1932] in which the character of the homosexual is caricatured and Brokeback Mountain [Ang Lee, 2005] or, by the same director, Xi Yan [Ang Lee, 1993]?

5. KAFKA (F.), Journal, traduction Marthe Robert, Paris, Grasset, 1954, p.1.

6. KAFKA (F.), Œuvres complètes, Paris, Gallimard, coll. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade , t. III, 2022, pp.6-7 : ≪ ≫

≪Toutes les choses, en effet, qui me viennent a l’esprit ne viennent pas de la racine, mais seulement d’un vague

endroit situe à peu près en son milieu. (my traduction ≫ : "All the things, in fact, that come to my mind do not come

from the root, but only from a vague place located approximately in the middle").

7. TOULET (E.), Cinématographe, invention du siècle, Découvertes Gallimard, 1988, pp.16-17.

8. Affect, when it comes to cinema, can take place during a film or in front of a poster. In the process of creation/reception, the poster is also “in the middle”: it is neither a beginning nor an end, but a taste of the film, which - in terms of production - nevertheless predates it. In the case of Kafka, interest in a poster can sometimes be stronger than the film itself. cf. KAFKA (F.), Œuvres complètes, Paris, Gallimard, coll. ≪ Bibliothèque de la Pléiade ≫, t. III, 2022, p.979. I translate directly, ndl : "my distraction, my need for entertainment is satisfied in front of the posters; my usual inner uneasiness, this sensation of an eternal provisional, I rest in front of the posters ; […]." (Letter to Felice, 13-88).

9. Den Hvide Slavehandels Sidste Offer (en danish).

10. KAFKA (F.), Œuvres complètes, Paris, Gallimard, coll. ≪ Bibliothèque de la Pléiade ≫, sous la direction de Claude David t. II, 1980, pp. 160-161 ; Œuvres complètes, Paris, Gallimard, coll. ≪ Bibliothèque de la Pléiade ≫, sous la direction de Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, t. I, 2018, p. 275 : ≪ […] ça me rappelle exactement le film L’Esclave blanche, dans lequel l’héroïne innocente est poussée, dès la sortie de la gare, à l’intérieur d’une automobile par des hommes inconnus, et enlevée.» (my traduction : "[...] it reminds me exactly of the film The White Slave, in which the innocent heroine is pushed, as soon as she leaves the station, into a car by unknown men, and kidnapped.")

11. KAFKA (F.), Oeuvres complètes, Paris, Gallimard, coll. ≪ Bibliothèque de la Pléiade ≫, t. III, 2022, p.363.

12. KAFKA (F.), Oeuvres complètes, Paris, Gallimard, coll. ≪ Bibliothèque de la Pléiade ≫, t. IV, 2022, p. 111.

13. HESS WRIGHT (J.), 'Genre Films and the Status Quo' in Film Genre Reader IV, University of Texas, 2012.

14. DELEUZE (G.), ≪ sur la philosophie ≫, in Pourparlers, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1990.

15. BASS (S.), ≪ Propos d’un graphiste sur la bande animée ≫, Le Courrier graphique, n° 113, 1961, pp.38-41.

16. VORKAPIĆ (S.), O pravom filmu, Beograd, Fakultet Dramskih Umetnosti, 1998.

17. KEPES (G.), Language of vision, New York, Dover publications, Inc., 1995.

18. On the difference between suspense and surprise associated with Nazi rockets (V1,V2), read : DUPUIS (J.D.), Derrière le rideau, Alfred Hitchcock, Saul Bass et la scène de la douche, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2019 pp. 62-66.

19. SALZA (L.), Kafka out of joint, Paris, Mimesis, 2023. Luca Salza perfectly develops this category in his work.

20. BROSSAT (A.), Maquiller ou démaquiller le réel ? Le cinéma en première ligne, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2022.

21. FERRARI (J.-C.) et VALENS (G.), ≪ Entretien avec George A. Romero. Parler de notre monde ≫, Revue Positif,n° 568, juin 2008, p. 25.

22. « The real, says Dumont, is not put into fiction, because it is already there ».

23. I thank Philippe Roy for raising this question during the discussions following the conference.

24. KAFKA (F.), Oeuvres complètes, Paris, Gallimard, coll. ≪ Bibliothèque de la Pléiade ≫, t. I, 2018, p. 183-184 (texte) et pp.1073-1075 (notes).

Bibliography

(In French) :

BASS (S.), « Propos d’un graphiste sur la bande animée », in Le Courrier graphique, n° 113, 1961, pp.38-41.

BENE (C.) et DELEUZE (G.), Superpositions, Paris, Les Éditions de minuit, 1979, pp.128-129.

BROSSAT (A.), Comparer l'incomparable, Naissance d'une nation et Le Juif Süss, Paris, De l'incidence éditeur, 2021.

— Maquiller ou démaquiller le réel ? Le cinéma en première ligne, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2022.

BROSSAT (A.) et DUPUIS (J. D.), Bruno Dumont ou le cinéma des Z’humains, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2021.

DELEUZE (G.), « sur la philosophie », in Pourparlers, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1990.

DELEUZE (G.) et GUATTARI (F.), Kafka, pour une littérature mineure, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1975. — Mille plateaux, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980. — Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ?, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991.

DELEUZE (G.) et PARNET (C.), Dialogues, Paris, Champs Flammarion, 1996.

DUPUIS (J.D.), George Romero et les zombies, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2014. — Derrière le rideau, Alfred Hitchcock, Saul Bass et la scène de la douche, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2019. — Saul Bass. Cinéma et écologie. Des fourmis et des hommes, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2020.

— Marco Candore, Mécanoscope,un cinéma pirate, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2022.

FERRARI (J.-C.) et VALENS (G.), « Entretien avec George A. Romero. Parler de notre monde », Revue Positif, n° 568, juin 2008, p. 25.

KAFKA (F.), Journal, traduction Marthe Robert, Paris, Grasset, 1954. — Œuvres complètes, Paris, Gallimard, coll. « Bibliothèque de la Pléiade », t. I-IV, 2018-2022.

KÔBÔ (A.), La Femme des sables, Paris, Livre de poche, 1990.

SALZA (L.), Kafka out of joint, Paris, Mimesis, 2023.

TOULET (E.), Cinématographe, invention du siècle, Paris, Découvertes Gallimard, 1988.

(in English or other languages) :

EISENSTEIN (S.M.), Film Sense, New York, Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1942. — Film Form, Harcourt, New York, Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1949.

HESS WRIGHT (J.), 'Genre Films and the Status Quo' in Film Genre Reader IV, University of Texas, 2012.

KEPES (G.), Language of vision, New York, Dover publications, Inc, 1995.

VORKAPIĆ (S.), O pravom filmu, Beograd, Fakultet dramskih umetnosti, 1998.

Filmography

Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914)

L’Avventura (Michel-Angelo Antonioni, 1960)

Le Procès (Orson Welles, 1962)

Mécanoscope (Marco Candore, 2013-2017, 11 films) :

URL : https://www.mecanoscope.com)

Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968)

Nope (Jordan Peele, 2022)

Otoshiana [おとし穴] (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1962)

Phase IV (Saul Bass, 1974)

Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)

Suna no onna [砂の女 ] (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)

Twentynine Palms (Bruno Dumont, 2003)

The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (Louis Lumière, 1895)

The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)

The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915)

The white slave trade /Den Hvide Slavehandels Sidste Offer (August Blom, 1911)

2001, A space odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Credits

August BLOM, Den Hvide Slavehandels Sidste Offer, 1911, 47 mn, format 1,33:1, film muet, Nordisk Film, public domain.

Louis LUMIÈRE, The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, 1895, 50 secondes, 35 mm, N.&B., Société Lumière,public domain.

George ROMERO, Night of the Living Dead, 1968, 96 min, 35 mm, Laurel Productions et Image, public domain (upon its cinema release).

Hiroshi TESHIGAHARA, Otoshiana [おとし穴], 1962, 97 min, 35 mm, Toho Company©.  — Suna no onna [砂の女], 1964,123 min/147 min, Toho Company©, Teshigahara Productions©.

 I am grateful to Lisbeth Richter Larsen of the Det Danske Filminstitut/Danish Film Institute for allowing me to use footage from the film Den Hvide Slavehandels Sidste Offer (August Blom, 1911).