Heart Instinct Principles (Materials for Marcel Hanoun)

The man in the bird
rests on an axis slightly higher than his centre of gravity.
– Leonardo da Vinci, Flying Machine

The present from which I write strikes me as being so doomed to oblivion that, purely from a spirit of contradiction, one must preserve a trace of its obsolescence: it is a time in which Marcel Hanoun’s œuvre lies scattered, his celluloid films partly lost, inaccessible or in a poor state, his video essays rarely screened and seldom talked about. In 1991, François Barat wrote: “Alongside Godard, Hanoun is the most innovative filmmaker in France. And yet, for twenty years now, he has never had any support. He makes films with nothing. But if you carry on like that, you get to a point where you can no longer do anything at all.’’1 However, like certain other national treasures of his generation (René Vautier, Maurice Lemaître), or the next one (Lionel Soukaz), or the one after that (Sothean Nhieim), Hanoun has in fact never stopped filming – each of these creators, in their own way, putting Barat’s authoritative statement into practice: “I believe that the filmmaker is banned from public screening rooms. This unspoken prohibition compels him to film.” What inner spring causes this invariably dynamic body of work to ceaselessly rebound? In what name does Marcel Hanoun film, does he write? What extraordinary faith allows him to continue creating under the scandalous conditions afforded to him by France’s so-called cultural policy – a policy that his work, and that of other de-socialised artists (like him), and even socially unassimilable ones (like Lemaître), reveals to be short-sighted and timid in nature?

Is it a matter of critical thinking? A conception of humanity? An incurable historical earthquake, his films serving as so many aftershocks? I would like to briefly indicate three of the obvious sources that supply the energy displayed in Marcel Hanoun’s works, all the while knowing that it is somewhat laughable to still be at this stage, when film studies today ought to be diving deeper into the forms of his fervent materialism, describing the way in which the latter absorbs iconography and the mystical imagination, comparing the vocal craft developed, respectively, by Bresson, Hanoun and the Straubs, indexing everything that Hanoun pioneered in terms of visual and auditory transitions, questioning his intensive treatment of the female body, defining his spirituality, observing his major influence on other cinematic greats such as Jean Eustache, who was his assistant…But today, there is not a single monograph on the work of Marcel Hanoun (seventy-two years of age, sixty-odd films and hundreds of pages of published texts to his name): “the most important French filmmaker since Bresson”, the originator of “the most ecstatic moments in the art of cinema”, to reprise Jonas Mekas’ famous words.

1. The Physical Experience of Flying
Marcel Hanoun first learnt to fly, his aesthetic of angles, verticality, tilts and axis shifts – which grant access to other visions of the world – stemming from a high-altitude physiology. When, at the beginning of the Procès de Carl Emmanuel Jung, the camera tips upside down on the motorway so that the car carrying Jung to trial finds itself on the ceiling of the image, or when in Je meurs de vivre the perspective on the characters rotates on the vertical axis beyond 180°, it is not about stepping back or suddenly rendering the motif strange. This type of crossing, which finds another outlet in the passage through mirrors (in La nuit claire, for instance), represents the first of the critical tools of common mimesis. “In mainstream cinema, one places the camera on a tripod as though one were placing it on an easel; one’s only liberty is to rotate it around the axis and to attempt to reproduce a pseudo-reality. It’s this pseudo-reality that one has to transgress – otherwise, I see no interest in filming.”2

But what lies beyond the axis, beyond anthropocentrism, beyond the looking glass? Our universe inverted? Or the possibility of another world? There is nothing utopian about Marcel Hanoun’s œuvre; above all, it offers the possibility of understanding the negative, of situating it and retaliating against it. For instance, Jung’s opening reversal permits, at the end of the trial, this hypothetical shot, this dizzyingly black and brief shot of the executioner finally crying, “Yes, I killed!” None of the participants in the Holocaust will ever admit as much, as Marcel Hanoun at once recalls in a voice-over: “I desperately imagine that Jung might break down and avow his crimes. One must recognise that this is impossible.” But the conditional image of the impossible event cries out the truth that reality will always silence; beyond the axis lie the resources of critical thinking, the world of the optative, of the gerund, of the future perfect or the imperative: in other words, these modes which are not opposed to the indicative literality of the cinematic shot but give it its volume, depth and true place.

2. Hell on Earth
One could argue that Marcel Hanoun’s work is built upon the question that concludes Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: “But what would become of art, as the writing of history, if it were to shrug off the memory of accumulated suffering?” Like Adorno, Marcel Hanoun has formulated a radical critique of realism in the name of the real in his films and writing; as for Adorno and Fassbinder, Auschwitz represents for him not a pause in history but the ideal model of capitalism, whose true face – beneath its most deceptively appealing guises – must be revealed; unlike Adorno but like Benjamin, he believes that certain kinds of mystical experience can nurture critical rationality. Aesthetically, these hastily sketched positions underpin the cinematic forms developed by Marcel Hanoun. Amongst other things: the intensive exploration of description, which unsettles the flatness of the recording; the use of narration and non-synchronous techniques, which trouble point of view and the “point of sound”; a recourse to mythology as much as to human interest stories (Hanoun finds many of his scenarios on the radio or in newspapers) which allows him to explore the limits of humanity by way of the super- or all-too human, so avoiding Pascal’s “hateful self” each time. And his most consistent and characteristic trait: the ever-more exacting development of cinematic minimalism. As Hanoun has put it: “If I have the chance to make more films, I’ll cut even more.”

3. The Morality of Minimalism
The demand for simplicity involves multiple dimensions and developments in Hanoun’s work, and tracing its evolution is essential to show how no model is lost – neither Bach, nor Mallarmé, nor Dreyer – and how the structures that they developed are continually reinterpreted, renewed, shifted and rearticulated in their formal realisation. Here are several of the classic or unorthodox features common to Hanounian minimalism: visual sparseness; reflexivity as a philosophy of the sketch; an openness to disaster; an ethical appeal to the viewer; a love of concise forms; and the endless invention of new cutting techniques. We know that the Inuits have at least twenty words for “snow”, and Marcel Hanoun possesses at least as many to describe the phenomena of suppression: in terms of shots, stripping away, subtraction, removal, lack, abstraction, counter-presence…; for cuts, breaking, caesura, ellipsis, hiatus, rupture, separation, interstice, interval…This science of editing, which draws heavily on the musical model of the fugue, according to the director, offers a unified solution for accessing the real and Marcel Hanoun has given it a name: “I would like to circumvent the image, to revisit it, to circumvent words, to revisit them, to find out what isn’t immediately apparent. There is at least a desire to get closer to the real. The Spanish word acercamiento seems the most fitting to me; it’s like the expression, the extension of a tracking shot which becomes a prehensile tongue.” It remains, then, to analyse the formal diversity permitted by such a serial art of understatement and to compare the work of Marcel Hanoun with that of his true contemporaries: Ad Reinhardt, John Cage and Donald Judd. Faced with the scale of the task, for my part I will draw support from this sentence which appeared in an editorial in Cinéthique, a journal founded by Marcel Hanoun in January 1969: “Let cinema at last become a convergence, a sublime encounter between people in motion.”

Paris, 12/10/2001

• 1

  François Barat, Le cinéma existe-t-il?, Presses de la Renaissance, 1991, p. 85.

• 2

  Marcel Hanoun, master class at Paris 1, 26 February, 2001. Ibid. the following quotations.