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Poubelle, ma belle

William D. Routt

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1. No one asked me to do this, so I am not grateful to anyone for that. But, of course, I am keenly aware of the debt I owe to the editors of Rouge for putting these fuzzy notions into their magazine. This piece, such as it is, is for Alan, since without him it would not exist in its current form at all. But it is also, and always, for Diane, since without her I would not exist in my current form either.  

I agree with almost none of Luc Moullet’s criticisms of Gilles Deleuze in the previous article, but then, you know, I agree with almost all of them. And I agree with everything Gilles Deleuze says in the Cinema books but, on the other hand, I disagree with virtually everything in those books as well. (1)

I’ll try to explain why this peculiar situation should be so; and I am going to do my best to make my explanation in the kind of direct, concrete language that Moullet himself uses - in the hope that direct language will help me to clarify some of the fuzzy and abstract notions that I know I will encounter along the way. I will do my best, but you know that inevitably I will fail.

 

 

  In a sense you aren’t supposed to take anything that Moullet says very seriously. It is a polemic, a rant, not a scholar’s formal refutation. You can tell this from the little fib right at the beginning about this name that crops up in student papers ... what was it again? ... and making a trip to the library and so on. You need to be on your guard as you read through what Moullet has to say, just as if you were reading an interview with that well-known Jesuit schoolboy, Alfred Hitchcock.

I waited and waited, and I think I finally found what I was looking for close to the end of the piece: when Moullet starts to soften his stance and to praise Deleuze for his taste. What Moullet admires is Deleuze, the man of our cinema. What he criticises is Deleuze, the philosopher of our century.

Now this is strange, because Moullet is a man of the cinema, not a philosopher. You would think he would keep to what he knew. But, of course, that is precisely what Deleuze does not do. Or, at least, Moullet thinks that Deleuze is not writing about philosophy, but about the cinema; so I guess that Moullet figures he can write about philosophy if he wants to. He never mentions that Deleuze is writing about the cinema as though it were philosophy (thinking) and, of course, he doesn’t try at all to write about philosophy as though it were the cinema.

 

 

 

 

2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 310-350.

3. Perhaps it is not fair to mention the absence of such films as The New Babylon (1929) or Third Meshchanskaia Street (1927), as well as the movies of Douglas Sirk and of at least three directors whose names begin with M … Marker, Medvedkin and Melville. That is, a lot of pinkos and fellow travellers. After all, no one ought to be judged by what has been left out.

 

And yet there is this matter of shared taste. Taste is where Moullet imagines himself in the same set, the same ensemble as Deleuze. Moullet says that, unlike a lot of others who write about the cinema, Deleuze doesn’t rely on turkeys for his examples, but uses only good movies. I like the challenge to the reader here. Moullet has used DeMille’s Ten Commandments (1956) and Annaud’s Quest for Fire (1981) for examples (neither of which appears in Deleuze’s text, by the way). He is staking a claim to a territory, walking around and squawking loudly, like one of the birds in Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘1837: Of the Refrain’. (2) And he seems to be telling us that he agrees with Deleuze’s extensive use of the films of Ingmar Bergman and Sidney Lumet - as well as the citation of such prize gobblers as The Big Sky (1952), The Land of the Pharoahs (1955), Ball of Fire (1941), Easy Rider (1969), Hombre (1967) and The Long, Long Trailer (1954). (3)

But wait! We don’t agree about what is a turkey, do we, mon semblable? And, by the same token, I don’t think that there is quite the neat fit between Deleuze’s taste and his own that Moullet claims there is either. Instead, it is a generational thing. I (mostly) liked Deleuze’s citations too - because they corresponded to a French-derived canon that I had seen for myself and read a lot about. (I think I even understand why Deleuze and Moullet might find things to admire in the work I have implicitly bagged in the previous paragraph). I trusted Deleuze’s taste so that even when he was writing about movies that I hadn’t seen, I believed what he cited warranted my interest - just as I trust Moullet’s taste when I read what he writes.

 

 

 

It does surprise me that Moullet doesn’t take this shared taste as evidence of shared thinking (which might even follow from Deleuze’s proposition that the movies think). It seems to me that if Deleuze finds so many movies that I like worthy of his attention, it is probable that we are on the same wavelength - or, at least, that he is going to be saying some interesting things about the way movies think, things I ought to think over.

You will realise that I have had to say this upfront - that my first impression of the Cinema books was strongly influenced by a confluence of taste, a shared experience. Moullet wants to suggest something else. He leaves any strong admission of alliance or complicity until the end, as a means of redeeming or redressing what he has been saying to that point. He distances himself at first because if he were not to do that he would have to explain his lack of affinity: how common taste can lead to different thinking.

Probably this does not matter to Moullet. After all, we live in an era in which one’s most venomous enemies share all one’s beliefs, where the revolution is most likely to be betrayed by the infighting of its strongest partisans. If you and I both like Lubitsch, that doesn’t mean that we both like him for the right reasons, does it? Reality always lies under the surface, where your sight alone cannot recover it, and taste is just a surface phenomenon.

But I wonder how else we are to recognise the people we would like to live with and the world(s) we hold in common? Taste makes community - if only because some people are not going to sit through Lubitsch’s Eternal Love (1929) no matter how much they may seem to agree with you about the need for world peace. Moreover, I would say that the articulation of taste (like the movies) is thinking. Lubitsch films think, are thought. If you and I like them, we are thinking alike at least to some extent. To deny this, as has been the practice for so long, is to deny one of the few concrete intimations of the possibility of living (not-necessarily-working) together in common, of talking, of discussing, conversing, rather than silencing dissent with noise.

I think it is instructive that Moullet seems to be conversing as he writes rather than trying to occupy all the speaking and listening positions in the manner of a conventional academic essayist. He goes to great lengths to convince us that he is just a writer, not the Author - and, as I have suggested in my remarks about taste, he makes a point of suggesting that those who read what he writes may not share all his opinions either. Moreover, it is one of the positive aspects of polemic that in overstating or exaggerating its argument it opens up contrary positions. No matter how much I loathe Theodor Adorno’s arguments about popular music, for example, I have to recognise that his invective welcomes my loathing and invites a more tempered refutation, whereas a more dispassionate way of arguing pretends that there is no reasonable answer to the claims it is advancing.

For me, the writing of Deleuze is ‘polemical’ in the same way, and I am surprised that Moullet does not see it or, if he does, that he does not acknowledge it. Of course Deleuze is not obviously polemicising, nor does he write in a conversational way, like Moullet. But it seems to me that, like other contemporary philosophers, he tries to write thinking - that is, to write as if he were thinking, to write so that we can follow (his) thinking, not so that he can convince us of something or make a point beyond a reasonable doubt. When I read Deleuze I feel as though I am in a thought experiment, or a game. What if things were the way he says, what then? Would I like it?

The result is that the compulsion of reading what has been written is in a sense set aside. The writing’s importance as argument is diminished, and instead what is important is what I accept and the consequences of my accepting. This kind of reading is very like the way traditional logic is supposed to work: first you accept certain premises and certain rules of combination and then you find out the consequences of what you have done. But in the writing in which traditional logic is usually deployed the emphasis tends to be placed on the indisputable truth of the premises and the rules - and from that indisputable truth a certain kind of inexorable, fateful quality is derived. Logic is no game: you must accept the consequences.

In the writing of Deleuze (and of others like Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jean Louis Schefer), there is not the same certainty about the absoluteness of premises and rules - the premises and rules are not true in the same way, to the same degree. The result is a kind of inevitable abstraction, even a fiction - not the distancing which observes things from above, but an abstraction that arises out of the confusion of being in the middle of things: there is so much here that I am not sure I have got it all. What matters is whether the writing carries conviction - that is, whether I can accept it - not how it has done that (the argument), and particularly not whether what it says corresponds in an easy or obvious manner with the way things seem to be Really. If I am in the middle of things, then I too am an unreliable observer and what I think I know may not be the case when I turn around. The writing can change my viewpoint: it intends to shift the horizon - but it does not pretend to create 360 degrees of vision, much less a sphere. Instead there are what the French sometimes call aperçus, insights, points at which the world as written this way this time can touch me and I can make sense.

This is why I like to sit too close to the screen. There I am in the middle of the movie, and precisely because I am in the middle of the movie, I am not caught up, not directed by the frame. Turning my head or rolling my eyes, I can look at another place on the screen. What I look at is in the movie, but it may not be what I am being directed to see. And, you will have noticed, this is not seeing better, but it is seeing differently: the same thing from a different angle.

‘Where does the game stop? Where does the art begin?’, asks Agnès Varda in Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (2000), but when I heard her on the soundtrack, too close to the screen, I understood: ‘Where does playing stop? Where does thinking begin?’. Mishearing, misreading. Not what she intended, perhaps? Certainly. Always.

As it happens, the games Varda is talking about involve garbage bins, just like the title of Moullet’s piece - blue, yellow, white and green. Kids are putting stuff in the proper bins, learning about which bin to use. But they are also playing; and (under direction) they are learning how to make pretty, not-necessarily-working things from what society has discarded, gleaning art in trash, playing thinking with their hands. The government-sponsored program that taught these things in France is called Poubelle, ma belle, which sort of translates as ‘My Beautiful Garbage Bin’, but not really (just like Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse sort of translates as The Gleaners and I, but not really). Moullet thinks that Deleuze is dumping everything that is left over into the green bin of time, but I think he is playing thinking - gleaning. And he wants me to play too.

And of course that is the case, just as it is the case that the green bins of the time-image are, as Moullet says, for everything that is left. Moullet thinks that because the bins are for what is left, everything that is left ought to go into them, ought to be the time-image (Moullet is logical). But in his writing Deleuze is quite explicitly taking only some films out of the green bins and turning them over for us to look at again and to think with (Deleuze is poetical). He gleans. And Moullet even approves of that gleaning, praising (at the end) the philosopher’s taste in films.

There is a parallel here that Moullet ought to know better than Deleuze. André Bazin asked ‘What is cinema?’ only in the title for the ensemble of his collected essays and never answered it explicitly - because, I think, he knew that cinema is everything which appears and is given the name. But it is also the case that cinema is only the set that Bazin selected, gleanings offered in his writing. Put in another way, the cinema is what Bazin sees when he looks at the screen. If Deleuze’s actual time-image consists of ‘films of ambition and films of high quality ... which make up only a tiny fraction of the interesting films produced and an even tinier fraction of all the films produced’, as Moullet asserts, this is because these are the films that Deleuze sees (and wants us to see) as distinct from all those in the green bin for us to look at.

But Moullet, the critic and cineaste, does not seem to understand Deleuze’s philosophic adherence to critical vision. For Moullet, agreement arises when what one asserts in language corresponds with what is actually there (truth corresponds to the world). For Deleuze, agreement arises when what one asserts in language persuades one’s audience that this is the way things may be in the world (language can make sense). There are opposing schools of philosophical thinking represented in these two views, and I think they may roughly correspond to what Richard Rorty calls realist and pragmatist traditions respectively.

 

 

 

 

 

4. Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 232-309.

  Let me take as an example something that seems to annoy Moullet quite a bit – ‘naturalism’. He is really contemptuous of Deleuze’s ideas about naturalism. Moullet wants naturalism to be what most of us would think of as ‘realism’, but that is quite clearly not what Deleuze thinks it is. Instead, for Deleuze naturalism seems to be, at least partly, a set of rules for motivating the elements of a fiction, characters in particular. These rules replace the commonsense human psychology we usually encounter in stories with a psychology based on ‘natural’ impulses, or instincts. People may act like animals in ‘naturalist’ stories because (for example) they share the same motivations as animals. Deleuze and Guattari wrote about a related idea in slightly different way in ‘1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible ... ’, a piece that is also about art. (4)  

 

  Remember that naturalism is brought into the picture as part of a discussion of ‘the impulse-image’. That is, it would seem that the intention of Deleuze’s discussion is to suggest how some cinema images seem to articulate imperceptible impulses (motivations, forces) so intensely. His horizon is the impulse that is driving what we observe, not the apparently realistic surface of that observation. I think he is suggesting that one way this kind of impulse is articulated (at a certain period in the history of the cinema) is through the use of the conventions of literary naturalism. Far from being just a ‘documentary realist’ tradition of meticulous surface observations, which is what Moullet seems to think it is, Deleuze claims that cinematic naturalism links surface observation with an invisible system of underlying natural forces which impel characters to act in certain ways. Moreover, some films which are not realistic on the surface are still motivated by ‘naturalist’ impulses. The visible surface and invisible impulse of a movie are interconnected just like a natural organism appears, to our sight, determined by a specific ‘natural’ physiology and psychology that we cannot see or hear.  

 

 

5. Joel Finler, Stroheim (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 23.

  Now this is, pace Moullet, not such a weird way of thinking about naturalism. Remember that parable about the scorpion and the frog that opens Mr Arkadin (1955)? Why does the scorpion sting the frog and condemn them both to die? ‘It is my nature.’ The scorpion’s impulse, the scorpion’s motivation, is so easily, so naturally, understood that we forget what word is applied to it, even in French. I first read about naturalism’s being tied to a quasi-biological system of motivation in Joel Finler’s monograph Stroheim (‘a determinism which viewed [a human] as a primitive brute governed by instincts and limited by heredity and environment’). (5) I could easily see this in Stroheim’s movies, and in a great number of other films - La bête humaine (1938), of course, but also some you would not expect to adhere to such a motivational system, like Strike (1924) for instance. If Deleuze explicitly extends the idea of ‘instincts’ to animal natures, surely he is not being flaky, but voicing a common line of literary criticism.  

 

 

I am sure that Moullet knows as well as Deleuze that Zola himself, following Hippolyte Taine, wrote that naturalist artists were Naturalists in the nineteenth century ‘scientific’ sense and that Zola also wrote that he wanted to show his readers that the motivations of his characters were fundamentally those of brutes or beasts. What Deleuze does with these ideas of natural impulse is to extend them to cover films Moullet considers unrealistic, like Nick Ray’s Wind Across the Everglades and Buñuel’s later work.

So it seems to me that this disagreement about naturalism is a pretty trivial one, a matter of emphasis, not nearly the inflated pink elephant Moullet wants to make it. I think the main reason that Moullet considers it important is because he thinks he knows the truth of what naturalism Really Is (scientific observation) and he doesn’t like the idea that maybe it is only what we (Deleuze and Zola and Finler and you and me) make it.

This means that Moullet doesn’t think the disagreement is trivial at all, and it also means that he misses the point of what happens when Deleuze begins to write about the time-image.

Because in Deleuze’s books, the time-image only occurs after the second world war - that is, after a set of shattering, disastrous events that tend to be exemplified in our imagination by the establishment of European totalitarian states in the Soviet Union and Italy and Germany, the Holocaust, the atom bomb. This is, for most of us anyway, our era, the one to which we belong (she said ours is the first generation to hear the ticking).

I think that for Deleuze, the sort of thinking that Moullet re-enacts in his reaction to the Cinema books would belong to the era of the movement-image - the one before ours and the one the French have called l’âge du cinéma. Moullet’s ideas of time, which seem to be tied to a certain experience of duration (not to say montage) - and, thus, of movement - are a good example.

But quantum mechanics, much less the physics which has followed quantum mechanics, cannot understand time in that way. A great deal of Deleuze’s writing is concerned with how (and if) time can be rethought to take the apparent paradoxes and impossibilities of contemporary physics into account, and I believe that the time-image belongs to that strand of Deleuze’s writing. At any rate, in the Cinema books the phrase signals something new in the world, a type of image that does not seem to have existed before the war.

Moullet wants to give us the impression that Deleuze never really says what the time-image is, but moufletant, mouvant Moullet is misleading us. At the end of the first chapter of The Movement-Image Deleuze writes:

 

6. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 11.   (1) there are not only instantaneous images, that is, immobile sections of movement; (2) there are movement-images which are mobile sections of duration; (3) there are, finally, time-images, that is, duration-images, change-images, relation-images, volume-images which are beyond movement itself.... (6)  

 

 

It seems to me that these must be images of duration and/or change and/or relation and/or volume in which duration, change, relation and volume are independent from any movement that might occur in the image. Now, there are a couple of pretty obvious instances of these kinds of images - mostly, as Moullet points out, in a small number of avant-garde and non-Western films (Warhol, Ozu, et al). But Deleuze wants to argue that their occurrence is more widespread, and more diverse - and that is what The Time-Image book is about. Or, he wants to assert that the sense of the time-image permeates a great number of more or less contemporary (at least postwar) films. As I understand it, this would mean that the sense one gets of time is different in those films from what we get in (most) prewar films. For me (but not for either Deleuze or Moullet), this difference is nicely illustrated by Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (1967), a film that is almost aggressively about time in a sense that seems independent of movement within the frame or of narrative movement. But in Le Samourai’s inspiration, This Gun For Hire (1942), time ticks (slowly), characters act, the plot clicks into place, and that is pretty much all there is to it - a movement-image movie if there ever was one.

Moussant Moullet is distracted from what I think is properly read as an exercise in criticism (or seeing) by Deleuze’s philosophical reputation. And as a result he bulldozes us towards an obviously doomed game of classification based on how the whole is articulated by montage while apparently ignoring a certain rather important clue that Deleuze dangles in front of him.

That clue is found in the word ‘montage’ itself. Moullet takes issue with Deleuze’s citation of Sergei Eisenstein’s remark that montage is the whole of the film (a remark which I think must be the foundation for Moullet’s own classification game) and even says, ‘Maybe Montage identified as the Whole is just a youthful idea of Eisenstein’s which he abandoned at the end of his life’.

But surely, just as in the case of Zola’s notions of naturalism, Moullet knows that although Eisenstein’s ideas about montage changed during his life, it is now generally accepted that they reached some kind of culmination in the (unpublished) book known as Montage (1937), where the notion of montage as the whole of the film is still quite alive. And, far from being a film ‘where there is not all that much montage work’, Ivan the Terrible (1943/46) is the Eisenstein film where those new ideas of montage receive their most sustained treatment. Moreover, what Eisenstein identifies in ‘Montage (1937)’ as the final phase ‘in the history of montage … breaking down a phenomenon "as such" and recombining it into something qualitatively new’ bears a certain striking resemblance to the time-image:

 

 

  Third Phase. The picture does not move. The generalisation proceeds rhythmically in the melody and harmony of the sound component that simultaneously runs through it. (7)  

7. Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Montage (1937)’, in Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor (eds), Selected Works Volume II: Towards a Theory of Montage (London: British Film Institute, 1991), p. 247. My understanding of what Eisenstein says has been influenced by Jacques Aumont’s Montage Eisenstein (London: British Film Institute, 1987), first published in France in 1979 - that is, way before Moullet’s article.

 

 

 

There was a time when I would have argued that this passage demonstrates that Eisenstein, through some uncanny psychic link, was channelling Deleuze before Deleuze (well, not quite: Deleuze was born in 1925, but you get what I mean). Of course that is not the case. Delusive Deleuze has simply misread, adopted, deformed and refined Eisenstein’s understanding in a productive way, just as he did with Vachel Lindsay’s work on the moving image. Let us try to join him and do what bratty, shifty, bubbly Moufette did not do - understand.

It is always easy to misread Eisenstein in a way that Deleuze does not: to make what he says into something simplistic and naive. In that case Eisenstein’s ‘third phase’ would be yet another call for the contrapuntal use of sound in sound film. The third phase is that, but it is also something far broader and more mysterious.
 

 

 

You miss a lot of what makes Eisenstein interesting and fun if you only take him literally.

‘The picture does not move’.

Does he mean that nothing moves on the screen?

What do you think?

 

8. Ibid, p. 244.   I think he means what he says in very much the same way that Deleuze means time-images are ‘beyond movement itself’. Somewhat earlier in that essay Eisenstein writes about this third stage that ‘The actual movement has been transferred to a higher phase, into the realm of vibration’ (8).  

 

  And in the same way, Eisenstein’s ideas of rhythm, melody and harmony are intended to be stretched beyond sound into the cinema as a whole. Finally, this third phase of montage contains and completes two previous phases, in which rhythm figures strongly. It is, in other words, a dialectical synthesis (like Roland Barthes’ ‘myth’). Remember, what is at issue is what Eisenstein calls the film’s ‘generalisation’, its power to go beyond what is depicted directly and become abstract: the thought, feeling, sense of the film.  

9. My understanding of ‘outside’ is indebted to Alan Thomas, whose work on that idea as it is deployed in Deleuze’s second Cinema book explained a great deal that might otherwise have remained murky to me.

 

  If my exposition still fails to make concrete what Eisenstein is getting at, I think it is at least partly because he, like Deleuze dealing with time after quantum mechanics, is impelled outside (9) commonsense to account for the (potential) effects of the multiple lines which cross a film. With the third phase of montage he is trying to describe something complex and heretofore impossible - an effect of the film perhaps - that sound film has now made possible, and he is finding it impossible to think what happens using the tools of thought he has been given. So he moves outside, just as Deleuze does, using the imagistic, metaphoric power of language to make sense.  

 

 

Of course Eisenstein’s third phase and Deleuze’s time-image are not the same thing, but it is intriguing how similar they are - and that they seem to overlap most closely in their understanding of an experience (of time, of ‘vibration’) for which commonsense realist thinking and language have not prepared us.

Isn’t it interesting that Deleuze places himself in an unacknowledged conversation with Eisenstein? But rather than pose as a film theorist, he sticks to philosophy, making his own thinking a homage to Eisenstein. He takes from Eisenstein something of his vision and leaves behind everything that cannot help him to see differently. Why is it that Moullet does not perceive this? Why is it that he cannot do the same with Deleuze’s Cinema books?

Instead Moullet makes a phoney claim about green garbage bins intended to contain whatever there is in heaven and earth that is not in Deleuze’s philosophy - a claim he refutes later by claiming that Deleuze has included only films of ambition and high quality in the category of the time-image. I would say that the truth is that time-images act like termites or viruses or drugs, quickly spreading through a film, invading everything else, ‘subordinating’ the movement-image. I think this is what happens in Le Samourai, where so much of the film rehearses traditional crime film conventions: it is recast into a meditation on duration by the termites of the time-image.

Now if the time-image is that kind of invader or re-territorialiser, one could argue that indeed, the films of the time-image are a vast, vague category of what is left over and transformed, the contents of the green garbage bin. But the time-image itself would perhaps be better thought of as belonging in a bin Moullet does not think of (and not even Agnès Varda invokes): the one reserved for materials that might contaminate us - toxic waste.

I am sure you realise that almost everything I have written here is specious in a way that nothing that Deleuze and Moullet has written is specious. My arguments are opportunistic, poorly structured, riddled with faulty reasoning and misreading. Moullet, whose piece is frankly polemical, is far fairer and more responsible than I. He engages with Deleuze, whereas, after the first couple of paragraphs, I have generally disengaged from Moullet.

If I were to re-engage, it would be to point out those many moments in Moullet’s critique where he suggests that Deleuze has failed to recognise the time-image when it appears in the era of the movement-image. I would say that Deleuze does not seem to want to look back at the prewar years with eyes and ears that have experienced the ticking - but what other eyes and ears do we have now? And I would say that, in the first place, his setting aside of what some have called the ‘prehistory’ of cinema (Edison, the Lumières, Paul, Perry, etc) amounts also to a setting aside of what was historically a new experience: time framed, duration at one remove from its dasein, time abstracted from the space-time of its taking place (the cinema conserves time while annihilating space). This is, I think, the foundation of the experience which re-emerges after the war as the time-image, summoned by disaster perhaps, but (as Eisenstein suggests) only after having been co-opted and assimilated all those years by the movement-image (by ‘montage’), requiring now that the gates be opened so that these dead may enter a new life.

And I would say that Moullet is right to oppose his own slangy, ordinary Joe attitude to Deleuze’s allusive, superior intensity - but that he doesn’t go far enough. Here I think Moullet may be betrayed by his own anxious taste. Instead of congratulating Deleuze for selecting latter-day films of ambition and high quality, surely he ought to have followed the inclination of his own stylistic posture and condemned the philosopher’s effete discrimination. He ought to have championed the movies that everyone knows are no good: the cheap, the stupid, the boring, the inane. For in those movies time turns on us as a toxic avenger, as waste. In those films we experience the feeble agony of time, its dissonance, its implacability, flaccidity. In those films, and in them alone, we can know a time that has no place for us.

 

 

 

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A Little Glossary of French Words You May Not Know Right Away Appearing in This Text

moufette - skunk
mouflet - brat (by extension, moufletant - bratty)
moussant - foamy, bubbly
mouvant - shifting, in motion

 

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