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Film-Philosophy16.1 (2012)

Film-PhilosophyISSN 1466-4615 183

Contrapuntal Close-up: The Cinema of John Cassavetesand the Agitation of Sense

Daniele Rugo1

It depends on us, so it is said(Heidegger 1996, 128)

Jean-Luc Nancy writes that there is no sense outside our being-together, nosense without us. The philosophical import of this argument emerges fromthe countersignature of a necessary corollary: that our being-togetherremains an outside to any specific assignation of sense. According to

American director John Cassavetes this is the duty of cinema. His cinematestifies with the use of close-up to a modality of making sense that restsentirely on an in-appropriable term: us. What seems to emerge from thework of Cassavetes is that our way of making sense (therefore of having aworld, the only one possible) maintains itself, on one side, on our being-together and, on the other, on the impossibility to categorize us under a

particular form of being-together. The question can be formulated in thisway: is it not perhaps the case that for us to keep making sense, us has toescape the very possibility of a definition?

These introductory remarks anticipate a description of the method

here followed. The philosophical approach to a filmmaker is not takensimply as the possibility to unravel a convergence between concept andimage. The task cannot only be that of treating a film as a philosophicalexample or to use a concept as a comprehensive approach to a particularcinematographic work. It is a matter of investigating how both philosophyand cinema creatively confront a problem: in this case the problem of our

being-together in its relation with the question of sense. It is therefore not amatter of providing an entrance into Nancys philosophy in terms of

powers of existence or absolute realism (Derrida 2005, 46) or of

describing Cassavetess cinema often labeled as cinema vrit but ofhow cinema reopens the sense of what happens between us. Moving

between philosophy and cinema one is always asked to look for theirinternal alliance and their creative possibilities. It will be thus a matter ofexposing the cinematographic idea as it happens in the image and not toimpose ideas from the outside.

This work will proceed by unraveling three movements. The first part willtreat the question of sense as posed by Jean-Luc Nancy; the second willinvestigate the relation of sense with cinema; the third will approach a

1Goldsmiths, University of London: [email protected]


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specific strategy at work in Cassavetess films. These three moments cannotbe seen as completely separated. This is an attempt to respond to Nancysfragmentary style, where each concept works on an incessant movement of

presentation and withdrawal. What becomes apparent through these

negotiations is the struggle by which argumentation seems always to leadthinking to moments of incommensurability that revitalize discourse withoutbeing resolved. Each concept therefore is articulated as intensification or anadjustment of the others.

We Are the World

There is no sense without us. There is no sense without our being-together.There is a distance or otherness at the heart of sense. This otherness is notconstituted as a reference to a Universal, an Absolute or a Transcendental,

but in the event of our encountering one another. Sense is other than itselfbecause it keeps circulating between us.

Jean-Luc Nancys proposition demands that one understands what ishere meant by sense. 2 To an extent Nancys understanding of theconstitution of sense develops from a reading of Heidegger, in particularfrom Heideggers emphasis on the necessary crossing of the question of theworld and that of Being-with-others (Heidegger 2006, 183). As inHeidegger, the question of sense for Nancy always proceeds from aframework of pre-understanding (what Heidegger names fore-having, fore-

seeing, fore-conceiving). Sense responds to a primordial familiarity with theworld: it thus rests on a secondary affirmation and articulation of what wehave encountered in our originary assignation (Angewiesenheit) to the

world (Heidegger 2001, 120). According to this primordial disclosure ofthe world, sense is there always to be articulated. Because sense receives a

pre-understanding, immediacy and givenness, its work is to be found in howwe reopen the obvious: that which we receive. What is in the thing mustalways be articulated in the world and with Others. Only Dasein ismeaningful or meaningless, because the world and others make up Daseinsexistence. Sense develops then from a primordial familiarity with the world.This primordial familiarity must be entered by Dasein and articulated; it isin this articulation that sense begins. Paraphrasing Heidegger one couldargue that sense is such as long as we maintain a relation to it (2001, 120).Sense is the opening of the possibility of assigning things some sense oranother, according to the relation into which they enter. If the primordialunderstanding the Heideggerian Vorhabe, Vorsicht, Vorgriff (Heidegger2006, 191) must be reopened in terms of concerns and circulation, thenthe world has to be understood as a set of relationships. The world involves

2

Nancy asks the question of sense in a number of texts, more explicitly inA FiniteThinking: What is sense? What is the sense of the word sense and what is the reality ofthis thing sense? (Nancy 2003, 5).


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primarily a relational interpretation. This, however, also means that anyenquiry as to the sense of something is an enquiry into sense itself, into thevery structure of sense. That an un-grounding and upheaval of sense

provides senses framework becomes clear from Heideggers remark that a

ground becomes accessible only as meaning, even if it is itself the abyss ofmeaninglessness (2006, 194). Every time an assignation of sense isperformed one is moving right into the structure of sense itself. Accordingto the relational model, understanding the world thus making sense ofsense means always to situate oneself at the heart of a sharing. Everyattempt at accounting for the singular must necessarily understand theresonances that this singularity has on the circulation of sense (which isquite different from handing the singular over to a universal). Theconclusion at this point could be that the creation of sense happens primarilyas circulation. One could say that the articulation of the givenness of the

world (familiarity) starts with an articulation with and of others. If the logicof sense is the ex-scription always at work in the movement of itscirculation, then the only property of sense is its continuous reopening (orexposure to its own differing). It is for this reason that sense can never beclosed or assigned once and for all; for its referentiality to work, this must

be open again. This, however, means that something shows itself asincommensurable to any specific assignation of sense.

Sense is that from which something becomes understandable as thatwhich it is. Something becomes understandable only from its circulation

within a world of human existence. Sense is therefore always performed inthe circulation enacted by our being-together.

Understood in this way, then, sense addresses the world directly,dismissing any absolute or ultimate connotation. This is what Nancy meanswhen he says the world is without reason and that this very lack opens ourway to the sense of the world (2007, 11):

If the world essentially is not the representation of a universe, northat of a here below, but the excess beyond any representation of

an ethos or of a habitus, of a stance by which the world stands byitself, configures itself, and exposes itself in itself, relates to itselfwithout referring to any given principle or to any determined end,then one must address the principle of such an absence of principledirectly (Nancy 2007, 47).

To this effect Nancy traces a deconstructive analysis of the onto-theologicaltradition in terms of the gradual subtraction of the world as the subject of arepresentation.3The more God enters the world and comes to coincide with

3Of particular relevance to Nancys analysis are the questions Heideggers asks in TheOnto-theological Constitution of Metaphysics(Heidegger 2002, 42 76).


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an organizing principle, the more its divinity is relegated to a completedeparture from the world itself. Furthermore, to say that a world is withoutreason also points critically to the search for an encompassing rationality.As already analyzed by Heidegger in his lectures on Leibniz, the search for

a Rational Ground ends in the paradoxical situation of a ground that noreason can account for, leaving every grounding ultimately ungrounded.The world cannot be accounted for, neither by an external principle, nor byan ultimate Being; every account is negotiated in the transimmanentcirculation of sense.4This implies that the world has no ground beyond itsown taking place: its sense residing only in our way of in-habiting it.

Nancy speaks at times of the end of the world; however, this end

cannot mean that we are confronted merely with the end of a certainconception of the world []. It means that there is no longer any

assignable signification of world or that the world is subtractingitself from the entire regime of signification available to us (1997,5).

A world without reason is a world whose sense has cleared the horizon andmust be continuously reopened. Nancys analysis culminates in anunderstanding of the world as that which responds to the question of whathappens between us. To this effect Nancy writes that the world is a factwithout reason or end, and it is our fact (2007, 45). Us can be pronouncedonly insofar as it is pronounced within the limits of this world here, whilstthe sense of the world is always given in the way of the Heideggerianfamiliarity only insofar as it given to us: given to be given again. Such amanner of thinking permits sense to be grasped in a perpetual form ofdisplacement where the world is both what it is and also what separatesitself from immediate givenness.

Cinema and the Sense of the World

Does not cinema take up precisely this double demand of sense constant

opening of an immanence and fix our gaze on this world here, by givingus a look upon a world of which it is itself part and parcel? (Nancy 2001c,16). Following Deleuzes argument, one can read modern cinema asreestablishing our belief in the world. As Deleuze puts it: what is certain isthat believing is no longer believing in another world, or in a transformedworld (2005, 167). This belief for non-believers demands that one thinks ofa world moving of its own motion, without a heaven or a wrapping,without fixed moorings or suspensions (Nancy 2001c, 44). This is the

belief that modern cinema gives us: a belief not falling from the sky

cinema speaks also of the silence of God but arising as it were from the4See (Nancy 2004).


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bottom of our bodies. 5 This belief, outside any restoration, must bediscovered in the diction of the word world.

Instead of an assured, established and permanent sense, moderncinema opens inside itself a world whose sense is withdrawn and must be

recreated: as Nancy puts it, neither a realist nor a fictional phantasm,but life presented or offered in its evidence (2001c, 58). Cinema detachesitself from the problem of truth, carrying its work towards what one couldcall an existence, a discontinuity of the two poles true/false. Nancy writes tothis effect: this existence relates to a world: set down, felt, received as asingular point of passage in the circulation of meaning (2001c, 44).Between cinema and the world does not subsist a relation of analogyanymore. Cinema does not represent the world; it does not mirror it. Realityis not simply registered in its immediacy; in cinema, experience is notreduced and incorporated. Instead the impossibility of capturing it under the

regime of truth liberates once more the togetherness and the sharing ofexperiences evidence as undecidability.

Once cinema has entered the mode of existence as opposed to that oftruth, then the question is posed to our gaze. It is a matter not of receivingthe world and its senses, but of deciding over the real as given to us bycinema. This decision passes through our way of looking as a way ofarticulating the evidence of the world. The image under the regime ofexistence cannot simply be accepted; it must be done again, recreated in itsevidences. These evidences set in front of us by cinema correspond to a

disclosure of the world. The world is delivered and therefore separated fromits character of mere given. Evidence would stand for the fact that theindeterminate totality of the world is presented to us as a sparkle thatextinguishes itself. That the world is given, and given as a whole, makessense only due to the singular evidences that on one side expose it and onthe other discharge both its wholeness (the worlds grip on itself) and itsgivenness (the worlds eternal resemblance to itself, or what one could callrepresentation). The absolute referentiality of the world is interrupted so thatreferentiality can keep happening. Understood in these terms, the sense ofthe world is thus the discontinuity of what keeps happening (Nancy 2001c,44): wholeness gathered only in indefinite evidences.

Deleuze seems to reach a similar conclusion when he writes thatfalsifying narrations free themselves from the system of actual, localizedand chronological relations. The elements are constantly changing accordingto the relations of time into which they enter and the terms of theirconnections. Narration is constantly being completely modified. We witnessthe emergence of purely cinematographic powers. There is something of adoing in my looking: a mobilizing of the world, an agitating and an

5See in particular the pages devoted to Rossellini and Bresson in (Revault dAllonnes1994,21 23).


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organizing. In a truly Heideggerian way, Nancy remarks that presence isnot a mere matter of vision: it offers itself in encounters, worries, concerns(2001c, 30). What this means is that our gazes disclose the real withouttrying to master it. Looking just amounts to thinking the real, to test oneself

with regard to a meaning one is not mastering (Nancy 2001c, 38); one findscinema in a completely new situation, responding to a radically differentdefinition. Cinema becomes the art of looking made possible and required

by a world that refers only to itself and to what is real in it (Nancy 2001c,18). In this way the evidence of cinema is that of the existence of a lookthrough which a world can give back to itself its own real and the truth of itsenigma (Nancy 2001c, 18). The relation between cinema and the world

becomes the sharing of an intimacy crossed by a distance that is neverabsorbed. This distance is exactly what allows not just the relation betweencinema and the world to rest entirely on the real (which is therefore not

alienated but confirmed and reopened in images), but also the relationswithin the cinematographic image to take the real into account as itsultimate horizon. It is not just about images and the laws of theiraccordance. It is about images opening onto the real and carrying thisirruption all the way into the givenness of the world. As Nancy puts it:

Cinema stretches and hangs between a world in which representationwas in charge of the signs of truth or of the warrant of a presence tocome and another world that opens onto its own presence through a

voiding where its thoughtful evidence realizes itself (2001c, 56).

What this implies is engagement with other gazes, a becoming intimate withotherness at a distance.

Contrapuntal Close-up

John Cassavetes was one of those directors walking within the distance thatbrings the cinematographic image to the point where what is at stake is notfiction or reality, but rather their continuous crossing (a sort of double-

crossing). In their analysis of Faces (John Cassavetes, 1968), Pierre andComolli write that Cassavetes does not use cinema as a way of reproducingactions, faces or ideas, but as a way ofproducingthem []: the film is whatcauses each event to happen (Pierre and Comolli 1986, 326).

The occasion for a film for Cassavetes always springs in themidst of the everyday, in the turbulence of the ordinary, when things gowrong, when you get detoured, when you cant find your way home(Carney 2001, 161). These formulas all point in one direction: to makemovies about people. This is the main duty Cassavetes saw for himself as a

filmmaker: to liberate something in our being-together, to let the sense ofour being-together undertake a continuous negotiation. What Cassavetes


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strove for was a cinema that took the chance to approach the image not as agiven, but as the outcome of the interruption of lives and contacts. Deleuzecaptures this when he writes,

this is what Cassavetes was already saying in Shadows [(1959)] andthenFaces; what constitutes part of the film is interesting oneself inpeople rather than in the film [] so that people do not pass over tothe side of the camera without the camera having passed to the sideof the people (Deleuze 2005, 149).

What does it mean to interest oneself in people? For Cassavetes it means tofind a model that allows people to come to the side of the camera, withoutthe camera deciding on their ways of being-together once and for all. Inshort, it means letting our being-together articulate and simultaneously

withdraw itself. At the same time this means exposing cinemas deficiencyto draw a properly spontaneous picture of life, an immediate one. ForCassavetes this deficiency is the very power of cinema, not a negative

power, but the very occasion of cinema. Cinema should not keep away fromits incapacity to picture reality immediately, but should enter the sense ofthe world from this very incapacity.

What model of being-together emerges from Cassavetess films?The point to be made relates to how the presences on the screen trigger a

particular kind of relation. An answer emerges from Cassavetess use of the

close-up and the contrapuntal structure this propels. By way of thecontrapuntal use of the close-up Cassavetes is able to elaborate a model ofdistance, a sociality understood in terms of distinction rather thanabsorption, one in which cinema is shown to collaborate to the articulationof the sense of the world.

Facesin particularis a film where the close-up is used to the point

of violence: that is to say, to the point where it blocks the smooth flowing of

the film. In fact there is nothing smooth about Faces; the film is constantlyconsumed into a series of impediments, from which the film has to start

again.The apparent simplicity of the plot is continuously interrupted andproceeds only in the interruptions themselves. One is always called tomobilize what has crumbled from the image, recollecting a series ofleftovers and missed chances. This strategy is conveyed mainly thanks tothe use of close-ups or extreme close-ups. By interrupting the plot, bydisturbing the organic linkages of the narration, close-ups establish aregister that exceeds the story and seems almost to precede it. While thefilm depicts a stiff social situation characterized by individualism,embedded in the idea of marriage as a constraint whose outcome is a well-known collection of middle-class repressive norms and betrayals what is

liberated in the series of successive close-ups is a distance that calls for adifferent model of being-together.


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To put it succinctly, Cassavetess use of the close-up can be distinguishedon a number of points:

1.

Cassavetes operates what Deleuze calls an erasure of the face (2005,102). He does so in that he places the face there where it should notbe: there where everything else is expected. The face testifies for thedispersion of the evidence. Faces is a film of dispersed (andagitated) presences: this dispersion reaches its peak in the play ofclose-ups. The close-up is constantly trapped in this leap towards anoutside of itself as if it were there to declare its impossibility: theimpossibility of recollecting in its frozen gesture any meaningfulstatement.

2. The faces inFacesdo not just suspend individuation, but allow thissuspension to trigger the circulation of sense within the film: thesense of the film as situations rendered by a sending toward, ratherthan by a meaningful closure; the sense of the film as materiality onand through which looks encounter one another. In other wordsconditions, locations and positions open into absences and at thesame time these absences make the happening of relations mostevident. Close-ups link one presence to another and in so doing theyunderline the importance of what the spectators cannot see: thedistance required by relation. Close-ups show what is beyond their

reach; they push this beyond inside the frame and displace whatfalls inside the frame.

3. Cassavetes managed to put in the close-up the openness of a longshot by accumulating one close-up after the other. Once the faceappears, it appears as the excluded and the intruder at the same time.Close-ups serve to allow the characters to stay together and to

prevent one character from standing out, from being singled out.4. Through the close-up what is established is a mode of relation

without relation; what is at stake is a coming of the relation withoutthis having to be announced. Relation is realized in the action and isnot then the substratum that motivates and directs the action. In thisalso resides the great vulnerability of the faces of the film. Themeasure of this relation the face is itself non-presentable.

Pan-orama

At the very beginning of The Evidence of Film Nancy writes: capturingimages is clearly an ethos, a disposition and a conduct with regard to theworld (2001c, 16). What Nancy is expressing here is that the capturing of

images exposes the worlds standing on itself and opens our standing in it.


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Capturing images is an exposing of the world and a way in which the worldexposes itself.

For Cassavetes the close-up is not just a device thanks to which thedirector arranges the internal structure of his work; rather, it becomes a

particular way of happening in the world and of the worlds passing throughthe image. The close-up becomes the way to capture and make remarkablethe evidence of our being-together. Cassavetess ethos revolves around anattempt to unsettle our gaze. What the director demands on our part is toabandon both an all-encompassing gaze (objects of the film are signifiedregardless of their singularity) and an absorbed one (the objects of the filmreplace reality by providing a vision of it): not apanoramicperspective, butour distance to the film and the distances within the film.

As the word indicates, panorama, from the Greek !"#$%&"%, meansto see everything or, better said, to strive for everything to become visible,

to act so that everything surfaces and occupies a place in front of us. Theconcept of panorama works here on two levels. On one side the panorama iswhat allows us to gain an overview, a general gathering in front of our eyes:a gathering where presence melts into a plurality that forecloses anysingularity from appearing and anything from appearing as singularity. Thisis the panorama as whole, submitted to a gaze that remains, as it were,outside. One the other side, the panorama also gives to the eye theopportunity of seeing not the whole, but each and every thing, every tinydetail. In this scenario things come from an infinite distance and we descend

into them apprehending their porosity, grasping their granular, corpusculartexture; our gaze becomes permeated by things.

One should notice that in Faces no character is granted enoughspace so as to be alone, so as to become thecharacter. The shot-reverse shotcomposition, which would wrench the individual out of the context, isalmost never employed. At the same time one never has the impression ofreceiving a general overview despite the choral nature of the film.Cassavetes aims to play in between the uprising of the main character adetail that one is forced to take as everything and the presentation of the

whole, where every presence is present inside the frame. His gesture issomething like a play with distances. To this effect Pascal Bonitzer notesthat the camera in Cassavetes accompanies a system of crises (Bonitzer1985, 8).

As Raymond Carney writes, Cassavetes works to resist theindividual effort to isolate himself (Carney 1985, 98), so to prevent theindividual performer from elevating himself above the in-common intowhich he is plunged. The character is everywhere put back into a series ofrelationships (Carney 1985, 98). If one were to fix all this in a formula, onecould say:Faces starts with us. This beginning though is never a given one;

one never starts by resigning to reified social procedures. On the contrary,Cassavetess films open precisely with a smashing through of common


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measures (thus friendship proceeds from the loss of the friend, couples liveoff impossible ruins, the individual undertakes a complete expenditure forexample, Cosmo or Myrtle or dissipates by chasing him or herself in anoutside: Gloria and the kid, Sara and the animals). In Cassavetes being-

together, our being us, is never a crystallized constellation; the tidiness of itshorizon and the prudence of its functions are explored in view of anexplosion. Characters do not put themselves to work to reach, as it were, akind of communality; quite the opposite, the picture is almost always aboutdisintegration.

Being-together takes place in this world here as that which holdsitself together through the constant reframing of its given senses. In order toachieve this restless taking place of us, Cassavetes orchestrates the close-ups in a contrapuntal way. This means that close-ups are independent butharmonically related. They are independent in that they appear not as

intimately chained to the series to which they contribute; they areinterdependent in that they are not there to underline ones role, gestures,words,face, but to introduce one more close-up, which will revolve aroundsomething different, putting the film back into the open. Carney notes thatCassavetes intercuts and edits together close-ups of over forty interrelatedglances, responses and adjustments of position (Carney 1985, 101). Whatemerges from this circulation is the constant pulse of simultaneous

presences. In this way us becomes almost a white noise; never falling intocomplete silence and at the same time creating itself outside absorption into

a specific set of significations. Cassavetes seems to try to reply to thedemand to say us otherwise than as one and otherwise than as I(Nancy 2001b, 116).

By means of contrapuntal close-ups, Cassavetes is able to oppose aplay of distance to the double signification of the pan-orama. He neverallows us to see the whole, or every detail, of a given situation. He plays in

between these two categories. Distance should be thought here as the takingplace which is also a habitus, an ethos towards the world of a differencethat is constitutive of ones own place. This would be defined as aqualitative distance at the heart of our being-together, but also with regardto every possible association of being-together with one particular reifiedversion of its happening. Distance names on one side the impossibility ofclosing oneself from others by pushing them at an irreducible distance andthe impossibility of understanding being-together without distinction,separation, withdrawal from unity. What happens between us is exposedthus according to a contrapuntal logic whereby the singular is called aneach-one each time it exposes itself to the many. In this process the each-one is not constructed and then absorbed, rather it is exposed to its own

being-together; it finds itself as the singular as long as it is plural. The

singular happens to be together, and this happening is the very essence ofits singularity.


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Discussing the work of Cassavetes, Deleuze points out that,

linkages, connections, or liaisons are deliberately weak [],

sometimes the event delays and is lost in idles periods, sometimes itis there too quickly but it does not belong to the one to whom ithappens (2005, 211).

Deleuze proceeds to say that: the characters can act, perceive, experience,but they cannot testify to the relations which determine them (2005, 271).The close-up identifies an element in order to let the identified play with the

plurality that its identification exposes. Identifying the singular in this casewould also be opening up, gaining access to the plurality. Cassavetes makesclear that the regime of identification is inseparable from a regime of

distancing, of even minimal spacing, sharing and circulation. Something inthis regime remains incommensurable: in the attempt to name our being-together a distance surfaces again, which keeps it outside both theidentification of the singular as individual identity and from the higher orderof a plural unity. The movement in the close-up is not directed from one tomany, but passes both types and rests in this passing, therefore never reallyresting on anything. It takes place between us, between the each-one and themany.

The attention paid in every close-up to the singular and the repetition

of this gesture for other singulars, without ever letting one be the only One,are not just cinematic gestures responding to an effort to achieve a choralcomposition. Rather than producing a common ground, they function as anattempt to reach the eventual trait of our being-together. Being-together,then: an explosion of singularities exposing, each in its own way, an accessto the plurality that they also are. This is nothing other than usand nothingless than the circulation of sense. By using the close-up in a contrapuntalway, by cutting several close-ups one next to the other, Cassavetes(dis)organizes the composition: the close-up exposes sociality being-here-together as a happening that is sustained only by the fact that it ishappening as the displaced appearance of each one. Sociality is not reduced

but exploded in these situations; what makes it solid, what prevents it fromdissolving, is that each one poses a distance that can not be reduced in viewof a transcendental or autarchic unity. Many authors have identified a senseof destruction at work in Cassavetess images. Kouvaros speaks of atension between composition and annihilation at work in the veryconstruction of the image (2004, 149), and of a filming technique that tendsto eat away the characters, showering them in too much light or losingthem in a deliberate underexposure (2004, 149). Jousse puts it in terms of

elusiveness when he says that, the aim of Cassavetess cinema is to showthe streams which surround a person, a constantly moving rhythm between


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beings and things which is beyond the self, elusive (quoted in Kouvaros2004, 117). Locations can abruptly change coordinates while at the sametime empty spaces can be suddenly saturated. Events become bigger thanlife, but in those it is still existence itself, our being-together, that becomes

bigger than its acquired meanings.Sociality in Cassavetes and all his films are in this way utterlysocial never rests on an obligation, a principle: it always takes anadverbial form. This is what contrapuntal indicates: the simultaneity is notsimply an appearing of singularities into a higher mode, but the appearing ofdistinct singularities. This co-appearance is for them neither reception of anextrinsic property the coming of an accident nor giving of intimacy theunleashing of an a priori. Contrapuntal is the distance of one from the otherwhen those ones are together. This sociality responds to the very logic ofsense exposed at the beginning: sense is always directed to the world and is

always caught in a circulation. This circulation is the very possibility ofsense; that there is circulation maintains sense in that openness which

provides it with the possibility of further articulating our primordialfamiliarity with the world. For this to be possible though, the sense of our

being-together must constantly remain in the open; the very openness ofsense is assured only here, once the instant where circulation is enactedkeeps itself, as it were, in the future.

This situation of our being-together is barely presentable, if not asthe time it takes from one cut to the next, from one close-up to the next, the

non-consequential appearance of one face after another. Not presentablebecause it cannot be reduced to one single vision, this is what makes thewith appear and withdraw at the same time. To some extent one could saythat those are not images, or barely so, if the image is what detaches itselfcompletely and lies in a temporary isolation. These images nevercompletely disentangle themselves from the series, from other images; the

process of extraction that the image necessarily propels is not completelyaccomplished. This is why Pierre and Comolli can speak of Cassavetessfilms as having an alcoholic form (Pierre and Comolli 1986, 325). Filmingis never simply the attempt to render a narrative or a silent act of witnessing;rather, the camera flings the mundanities of day-to-day life towards aconstant crisis whereby we are no longer sure how things come together orwhat the proper order of things is (one could say that the everyday is takenas a portion of a mobile eternity). Our being-together sustains itself only onthe openness of sense, only in presenting itself anew, thus also veering awayfrom reality as the state of things, from the marking of sense.

The feverish nature of many Cassavetess films, the feeling ofexhaustion and authentic discomfort they convey to the audience, the factthat the action is followed almost in real time, spanning across a short

period of time (a few days or even hours): all these factors depend on anattempt to make any reference external to the film itself unnecessary.


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Talking aboutFacesthe director often said that it had become a way of life.6Rather than delivering the film to the real, the film sucks the real in. Thingsare left without the time to corrupt themselves nor the origin to findthemselves (Blanchot 1999b, 258). Realism here does not try to facilitate

forgetfulness of the apparatus, so to capture an immediate presence or tocraft the image in so much detail as to look real. Following Cassavetessaffirmative acceptance of the deficiency of cinema, the real is takenaccording to what suggests,

that with which our relationship is always alive and which alwaysleaves us the initiative, addressing that power we have to begin, thatfree communication with the beginning that is ourselves. (Blanchot1999a, 418)

The birth of the film has no other resource than what is happening in frontof our eyes, and what is happening is the impossibility of a presence that isnot also making itself present and is therefore always on the verge of

becoming the instinctual flow of time. The film maintains itself in ourpower to begin. Cassavetes seems to say: we are always there and this isgiven not as a condition or agreement, but as the affirmation of somethingthat only lives off this affirmation. Pushing a colloquial formula to paradox,what these films say is: there is no reason for being-here-together, thereforewe are here-together. This area of a being-together without reason brings to

the fore the very possibility of openness that sense demands as the graspingand veering away from senses immediate presence. In his discussion of themultiplicity of the arts Nancy writes to this effect:

the sense of the world is only given by dis-locating at the origin itsunique and unitary sense of sense in the general zoning that issought in each of the many differential distributions of the senses[]. There would be no world if there were no discreteness. (1996,19)

Conclusions

In this light the with in the expression being-with (being-together is anothername for it) remains non-appropriable and its logic comes into sight as oneof separation. Without being a thing, the with is that which commands alogic of relation based on the distinction of the terms that engage in therelation. In other words, the separation of the terms imposed by the with is

6It is interesting to quote the entire of passage of the interview: We decided that if it ended

up being ten hours, then thats the film that we're going to make. It became more than just afilm; it became a way of life. It became a feeling against the authority that stood in the wayof people expressing themselves as they wanted (Carney 2001, 149).


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that which allows the terms to keep relating to each other. With designatesrelation in terms of that which happens and withdraws between us. With isnothing, meaning that it is not some thing, which could then fall under aspecific signification. As Nancy puts it, the law of the with is that of the

distinct that distinguishes itself in entering the relation [] coming to theother and separating itself from it (2001b, 22).Such a manner of thinking permits one to grasp sense in a perpetual

form of displacement where the world is both what it is and also whatseparates itself from immediate givenness. The with is not a simple device,

but this very logic of unsettlement and distance: a logic that prevents thebecoming absolute of sense in a principle beyond its circulation in theworld. That the with of our being-together remains incommensurable to anyattempt at making sense of it guarantees circulation. Only a socialityunderstood in this way reconciles sense with its openness; only

understanding our being-together as the resistance to an inscription into oneparticular sense (destination or fate) maintains sense in the articulation ofthe obvious contact with the world. The incommensurability of our being-together to any specific reference allows us to see sense as the ongoingcirculation between immediacy and mediation.

Within a cinema that works under the mode of existence, everybeing and the world itself has to be judged with regard to the life that it

involves, and only with regard to this. If Nancy can say that cinemabecomes the taking-place of a relation (2001c, 44), this is because perhaps a

certain cinema is able to expose what one could call a power of existence:the fact that existences decision is a persisting-in-decision. But in existenceit is always us that is at stake, nothing other than the circulation of sense

between us. In existence it is always a matter of us undeciding ourselves byresponding to a common task, a task imposed on usall together [] to sayus exactly there where this possibility seems to vanish sometimes into aone, sometimes into an I (Nancy 2001b, 116).

Perhaps this is the opportunity of a cinema that despite the

constraints and impediments of production (and these can never beconsidered simply external factors) still tries to orient itself according to

its own inability to grasp life immediately, and remains therefore in a stateof agitation. One could thus ask if perhaps in a film exposing this agitation which echoes the deficiency as to the definition of us a crack can be seento open, which enables us to start dissolving the semblance of the obvious(Adorno 2005, 12).


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Bibliography

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Blanchot, Maurice. (1999a) Two Versions of the Imaginary in The StationHill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays. Lydia Davis,trans. George Quasha, ed. New York: Station Hill, 417 427.

Bonitzer, Pascal (1985) Decadrages. Peinture et Cinema. Paris: LEditionsde lEtoile

Carney, Ray (1985)American Dreaming: The Films of John Cassavetes andthe American Experience.London: University of California Press.

Carney, Ray (2001) Cassavetes on Cassavetes. London: Faber & Faber.

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Reevaluating Hollywood. Annwyl Williams, trans. Jim Hillier, ed.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp.324-327.

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Nancy, Jean-Luc (2001b)La Pense Drobe. Paris: Galile.

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Filmography

Cassavetes, John (1959) Shadows. USA.

Cassavetes, John (1968) Faces. USA.

Documents

casavetes.pdf