L'Authentique Procès de Carl-Emmanuel Jung (66', France 1966) by Marcel Hanoun
On Saturday, March 27, Festival du cinéma réel devoted a day to L'Atelier du cinéaste: Marcel Hanoun à l'improviste, with the participation of the film maker.
It is perhaps not a coincidence that, while the first part of my festival notes was devoted to the very last film I saw before leaving Paris, Susana de Sousa Dias's 48, the second part is going to evoke Marcel Hanoun's Authentique Procès de Carl-Emmanuel Jung. Made more than forty years apart, one as a document of experiences of political prisoners during the 48-year-long fascist dictatorship in Portugal, the other as a fictional record of an "authentic" trial of a Nazi criminal, the two films bear more than superficial resemblance. As Marcel Hanoun remarked after the screening, his intention -- already in 1966 -- was to forestall voyeurism. Both film makers are aware of the pleasure inherent in viewing images and, in creating what might be called the cinema of ethics, deliberately evacuate their film of images to give primacy to the spoken word.
The last statement is not, of course, entirely true. . . .
Both 48 and L'Authentique procès... are, after all, pictures. However, images do here more than show; and unseen images, as well as verbal and auditory images (because such, too, do exist), are as important as the images visible on the screen. What does it mean to see? Is anyone who has seen, a witness?
Witnesses testify to "ce que leurs yeux ont vu, ce que leurs oreilles ont entendu, ce que leur coeur a subi" / "what their eyes have seen, what their ears have heard, and what their heart has suffered." Seeing, then, or yet, being an "eye witness," encompasses the entire spectrum of experience. Witness testimony in a court of law is raised to the status of "material evidence" in so far as those present in court believe their words. To believe the testimony means to become, in turn, a witness. "I have seen..." becomes "I have seen a witness speak..." L'Authentique procès... doubles the remove: it explicitly deploys the resources of fiction to transmit truth; it renounces the use of archival footage that would support witness statements (not in order to disavow those images but to present them, in words, alongside experience that visual images cannot capture); it resorts to the fiction of a foreign language and introduces translation, with its flaws and inaccuracies, with its time delay, with its stumbling corrections, and with the gender discrepancy between the speaking voice and the visible witness.
Witness account does not lose any of its force by this distancing. "J'ai vu." "J'ai vu," repeats a translator, as if an aside, as if to say, "I, translator, too, have seen." "J'ai vu," the voice says again, speaking in the place of the witness whose lips are moving asynchronously.
J'AI VU. J'ai vu abattre un détenu devenu fou en s'aperçevant que son propre père faisait partie du groupe de prisonniers qu'on lui avait ordonné de noyer dans une cuve.
J'AI VU des hommes devenus bêtes ramper, remplis de poux, s'entre-déchirer pour la moindre nourriture, la plus immonde.
J'AI VU un couple partir ensemble à la mort, transfiguré, lui avait suivi sa femme volontairement au camp. Elle était étrangère. Il n'avait pas voulu la quitter.
J'AI VU. Et j'ai entendu. Et je n'ai pas pu tout voir.
I HAVE SEEN. I have seen a detainee being shot because he had become mad when he noticed his own father among the group of prisoners whom he was ordered to drown in a tank.
I HAVE SEEN men, turned into animals, crawl, and, covered with lice, ear at each other for the slightest, filthiest morsel of food.
I HAVE SEEN a couple go together to death, transfigured. He had voluntarily followed his wife to the camp. She was a foreigner; he didn't want to abandon her.
I HAVE SEEN. And I have heard. And I could not see everything."Et je n'ai pas pu tout voir," echoes the translator. To see everything is to go mad. It is not that the images from the camps are "impossible" (as Georges Didi-Huberman emphasized in Images malgré tout, those images not only do not belong to the realm of the "unimaginable", but represent what had precisely been imagined); nor is it that such images are "unbearable" (for one is capable of withstanding the image of any kind of violence, and there are some who, perversely, do it with pleasure). Not showing certain images in the film is to give them back their original power. Hanoun not only precludes voyeurism, but disarms the viewer's defenses built up to disassociate him from the images and render them ineffective. Seeing everything is experiencing what is before one's eyes as a lived reality.
Je me tourne vers Jung, et je lui dis: "Avez-vous pris depuis conscience... prenez conscience?"
I turn to Jung and ask him: "Have you since then acknowledged... do you acknowledge?"More than court-rendered justice, what each witness brought to testify hopes for, is that the criminal, too, become in his turn a witness. This an impossible wish, and can only be satisfied within the limits of fiction: "Oui, j'ai tué!" / "Yes, I have killed!" In reality, with his cold not-guilty plea, the accused continues to kill.
In the preface to Marcel Hanoun's Cinéma cinéaste, Nicole Brenez connects this sequence of avowal, of fiction within fiction, with another, seemingly gratuitous shot at the beginning of the film. We see Jung driving on a highway. The car approaches the camera, and as it passes, the camera turns upside down, and the car drives away in this inversed perspective. Brenez explains: "Marcel Hanoun a d'abord appris à voler, sa plastique de l'angle, de la verticale, du basculement et des traversées d'axe qui permettent d'accéder à d'autres visions du monde provient d'une physiologie de la haute altitude" / "Marcel Hanoun has first learned to fly; his art of the angle, of the vertical, of reversal and rotations of the axis which offer him access to other world views derive from the physiology of high altitudes." The metaphor of flight is very pertinent here, and I would add that it also implies artistic freedom that, with each frame, Hanoun claims as his own. Brenez goes on to link this upside-down sequence with Jung's imagined exclamation:
... le basculement inaugural de Jung autorise à la fin du procès ce plan hypothétique, ce plan vertigineusement noir et bref du bourreau hurlant enfin, "Oui, j'ai tué!" Aucun de protagonistes de la Shoah n'avouera jamais, comme assitôt la voix de Marcel Hanoun rapelle en off: "J'imagine désespérément que Jung pourrait s'effondrer et reconnaître ses crimes. Il faut reconnaître que c'est impossible." Mais l'image conditionnelle de l'événement impossible crie la vérité que le réel taira toujours, au-delà de l'axe on trouvera les ressources de la pensée critique, le monde de l'optatif, du gérondif, du futur antérieur ou de l'impératif, autrement dit, ces modes qui ne sont pas l'autre de la littéralité indicative du plan cinématographique mais lui donnent son volume, sa profondeur et sa vraie place.
The opening reversal in Jung authorizes, towards the end of the trial, the hypothetical, vertiginously dark and brief shot of the executioner finally shouting: "Yes, I have killed!" None of the protagonists in the Shoah will ever admit their guilt, as Marcel Hanoun quickly reminds us off-screen: "I desperately imagine that Jung might break down and acknowledge his crimes. We must realize that it is impossible." However, the conditional image of the impossible even cries out the truth that the reality will never utter. On the other side of the axis, we find the resources of critical thought, the world of the optative, of the gerund, of future perfect, and of the imperative, in other words, those modes which are not the contrary of the indicative literality of the cinematographic shot, but which give it its volume, its depth, and its true place.(to be continued... check back Wednesday morning)
RELATED LINKS:
Marcel Hanoun's website, Ma Cinémathèque, with many of his films viewable online
Festival du cinéma réel: L'Authentique procès de Carl-Emmanuel Jung page
Marcel Hanoun retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française, April 28 - May 31, 2010
Marcel Hanoun's Cinéma cinéaste, notes sur l'image écrite (Yellow Now, 2001)
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