di Angela Dalle Vacche

ABSTRACT: In her essay Dalle Vacche reads Olivier Assayas' Summer Hours in the light of Andre Bazin's ontological view of photography as a form of parthenogenesis based on contingency. While dwelling on Assayas' use of the long take at the beginning and at the end of the film, Dalle Vacche points out that contingency is at the heart of the integrity of space and natural temporality. The transition from one generation to the next involves not only life and death, but also the dispersion of art objects from a private art collection to the museum and to new and unpredictable owners. This dispersal matches Bazin's understanding that painting is a centripetal, inward-bound medium, whereas the cinema works like a centrifugal force that reaches out not only to the masses, but also to intercepts level of experience which pierce through the most rooted visual cliches. In this sense, cinema is an anti-anthropocentric medium where the director can express a personal vision within a dialectical relationship of understanding for whatever is not controllable or predictable in the ways of the world. Dalle Vacche's major concern has to do with how digital imaging is based on human design. Such a human origin makes new media anthropocentric and much closer to painting and the plastic arts in general.  Dalle Vacche argues that  the malleability of the digital image raises ethical issues, while the anthropocentric nature of new media risks perpetuating old cliches, rejecting moments of spontaneous insight into reality, and replacing ambiguity and imperfections with control and self-empowerment at the expenses of a more balanced and less contrived relationship between self and other.

In Change Mummified (2001)[i], Phil Rosen discusses André Bazin’s definition of the cinema as the embalming of duration. However, besides the past and temporality, Bazin’s theory is keen on the future. Set in motion by the cinematic apparatus, the photographic record becomes a singular collective experience that customizes natural human perception to the illusion of presence and life. At the same time, this irrational suspension of disbelief is a leap of faith into both the new and the unknown[ii]. To expand on Rosen’s work, there are also major differences between the cinema and the museum. In a museum, the level of control is much higher than the one achievable during the shooting process.

 In filmmaking, timing and events prevail over objects, while infinitesimal variables, even inside a studio, speak to contingency. Whereas the art museum stands for the past, Olivier Assayas in L'heure d'été (Summer Hours, 2008) explores the artistic legacy of a family whose children are moving into the future and new media. Summer Hours stresses the ambiguities of display in the museum and the possibilities of encounter with the new in daily life.

Briefly, the plot: an elderly mother, Hélène Berthier (Edith Scob), asks Frédéric (Charles Berling), her eldest son, to supervise the transmission of her art collection to the Musée d’Orsay. There are two sets of children living side-by-side in Summer Hours: the object-children and the human children. As long as Hélène is alive, the acquired collection of her former lover—the painter Paul Berthier—is all in the same place: the family country home; yet Paul’s own work is scattered among collectors all over the world. Likewise Edith’s three adult children live in different continents: America, Asia, and Europe. In Summer Hours, the dispersal of art objects comments, on one hand, on the cinema as a way of keeping memories alive, and, on the other, on the new media which permeate our daily life. In contrast to digital imaging which is based on design, access, and display, for Assayas, the cinema is indeed a sort of invisible mapping or a lifelike masking made of “heures d'été”. The English translation does not do justice to the original French title, L'heure d'été, an idiomatic way of referring to the lengthening of the day during the summer season, when there is more daylight. And the death-bound nature of people and things seems to disappear for a bit longer. Like a climate-controlled green-house, the museum becomes the surrogate home for Paul Berthier’s art pieces. Yet, the museum’s artificial temporality and planned displays are disconnected from the live and unpredictable contingencies of time and space.

Assayas’ Summer Hours investigates the generational tension between old and new media, so that its real topic is the photographic ontology of twentieth-century cinema, with a special emphasis on how its past-bound recording can also be accidental, heuristic, and futuristic.

According to Bazin’s film theory, the camera is a lens that perceives but does not know[iii]. Furthermore, in cinema and in photography, there is a cooperative authorship shared by technology, human beings, and the world of appearances. Like in an Alexander Calder mobile[iv], all these variables constantly change, from one moment to the next. Thus, in contrast to man-made art and new media, the cinema is the exception, because it retains on its surface the traces of how objects and people intersect. Besides recording and preserving, the cinema can also reveal, disclose, glimpse, suggest newborn tissues of relational experiences between Self and Other, new and intuitive ways of being in the world. By contrast, the museum celebrates knowledge over perception, while it preserves the traces of human creativity, by going so far as to change the utilitarian function of objects into aesthetic statements[v].

More specifically, for Bazin and Assayas, cinema’s fundamental project is a realist form of anti-anthropocentrism, in order to make us see the world not according to our own self-centered point of view, but in such a way that the human element is only one among several[vi]. This means that the cinema reveals neither stable truth nor definitive knowledge whatsoever, but simply calls attention to and de-centers the limits of subjective perception; and it does so in a heuristic way that is always time-bound and open-ended or relativistic. This glimpsing or intuitive grasp happens when the cinema surprises us and makes us attentive to people and things in a new way, by piercing through our rigid stereotypes. By privileging space over time, both digital imaging and the museum strive for clarity of information and access to knowledge. Yet Assayas holds on to a certain idea of the cinema rooted in the Cahier du Cinéma tradition and the legacy of Bazin[vii]. Thus, we need to ask how does the event of photographic tracing relate to contingency in time and space, especially in comparison to intentional or recursive design digital imaging? As Lev Manovich explains in The Language of New Media[viii] digital images are spatial, haptic[ix], which means malleable. This is the case because they are based on binary codes made of ones and zeros in computers programmed with algorithms inside these images’ pixels. This means that the digital image is an artificial, synthetic product of numbers whose visual appearance is referential whenever it looks like its origin, but it does not spontaneously constitute itself through a living source.

By contrast, photographs are not made of numbers; rather, in DNA-like fashion, they involve molecules subject to decay. Photographs are non-controllable, automatic, physiochemical phenomena. Neither digital images nor photographs tell the truth, but with photography, regardless of how we subjectively interpret what we see, we can be sure of at least of one thing: something staged or random ought to have been there at a particular moment in time and space. Highly changeable and controllable, digital images raise ethical issues in regard to whom or what was there, and this issue, in and of itself, is crucial in relation to history, memory, and, of course, the museum. Because digital images are changeable to the point of being unreliable, today photographic evidence has been replaced by DNA-testing, but this shift reminds us of Bazin’s comparison between the photographic trace and the fingerprint. In fact, the fingerprint is genetically unique and DNA-testing verifies precisely this strictly individual component of someone’s genetic code to establish identity in a court of law[x].

In his famous essay, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”, written between 1943 and 1945, André Bazin remarks: “photography actually contributes something to the order of natural creation instead of providing a substitute for it”[xi] (emphasis added). With this sentence, Bazin is telling us that the earliest experiments in photographic tracing were about an anti-anthropocentric, nonhuman form of creativity characterized by the time of the object and the absence of the human hand; in short, a space-time continuum situation. Light involves chance, so that its photo-writing can contour a few dead leaves or some seeds scattered on the ground. Molded on these staged or accidental objects, a photographic impression is born as something new each time, in the moment, because every moment is different. By bearing witness to something that was indeed there in the past, photography is also about a self-birthing process into the new, and as such it is a natural image that exists inside a sort of future anterior.

Were we to look for a comparison in nonhuman biology, photography comes close to a form of self-reproduction in water fleas called parthenogenesis. This topic was repeatedly explored by the animal documentarian Jean Painlevé whose work Bazin discussed in his famous essay “The Beauty of Accident” (1947)[xii]. The word parthenogenesis comes from the Greek Parthenon or “virgin”, because no male is involved. In Roland Barthes’ words, photography is a message without a code, namely an automatic fleshing out of invisible time[xiii]. This is in clear antithesis to the digital image, which is all about measuring space, design, control, and display. However, photographic parthenogenesis alone is not enough to account for the cinema as a medium. The reproductive cycle leading to the public, mass institution of the cinema is not over yet, because it requires the development and circulation of photographic shots as identical copies; it is only at this later stage that all the different photographic shots as copies are equal among themselves. This final stage of mechanical reproduction corresponds to the mummy-like statuettes mentioned by Bazin in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (p. 9), when he discusses the possibility of thieves accessing the pyramid and stealing the real mummy or original negative.

Before the fixation of the image and the invention of the camera, photographic parthenogenesis was a sort of natural self-birthing of an image of the world in the image of itself. Photography is a virginal incarnation of an unprecedented trace out of the energy of light encountering matter. The absence of the human hand[xiv] is in clear contrast with what happens during the human execution of a painting, a drawing, or digital animation. In the anthropocentric manual, installation-based, and computational media, the artist/designer incorporates or matches the mental image of a previous sign. As such, this kind of incorporation, rather than incarnation^[xv], is closer to the processes involved in the traditional arts before and after cinema. New media, after all, are not that new. Finally, were we to translate Bazin’s biological subtext from Painlevé using the critic’s own words, photography is, by definition, pointing to “the natural image of a world that we neither know nor can see”[xvi] . This unknowable world is the Real, the flow of natural time, or the spatiotemporal continuum that we are made of, namely death. To compensate for this awareness of finitude, the continuous camera movement of the long take can tune us in to an illusory duration, a “being-in-time”[xvii]. Through this particular way of filming, we are free to try out different webs of relationships among all the elements contained in a mobile frame with penetrable borders. Furthermore, with the long take, corrosive time vivifies itself into a moving and volumetric cross-section of uncharted experience whose facets in space are as rich as our own sense of living interiority. In Summer Hours, I would argue that the long take is an open-ended stylistic choice meant to suggest intricate webs of self-delusion, free choices, and chance occurrences in the viewers’ lives and in the lives of Assayas’ characters.

With Summer Hours, in the footsteps of Bazin’s legacy, Assayas proposes an anti-anthropocentric kind of multimedia, multigenerational post-humanism where nonhuman objects and marginal beings such as children, servants, cabdrivers, anonymous tourists, and professionals acquire an unexpected of level of influence on the dissemination of Berthier’s art objects. This is why Summer Hours begins with young people on a treasure hunt and a reference to photography:after the rolling credits, we see the Berthier kids running among the trees. Most importantly, their map leading to the riches looks like a white page, because the outlining of the secret path has been done with invisible ink. Just like the traces of a photographic negative, this chemical substance needs the heat of a flame to surface on the page, in order to become a visible positive image. Assayas’ film is a quasi-documentary essay about legal, financial, fiscal, and funeral arrangements, and a fiction that involves the actual specialists and administrators of the Musée d’Orsay. In Summer Hours, the museum appears only at the end, when Frédéric and his wife Lisa (Dominique Reymond) look at their family’s art collection in a new context, next to unknown museum objects which are gazed upon by anonymous tourists. The result is an uncanny sense of de-centering. By now, their old family country house has become a body-without-organs. On the contrary, the museum has all its restored objects in place, but there is no living flame to warm up its highly regimented public space. Frédéric feels that Hélène’s objects sit inside an invisible cage, but it is also true that the museum restoration specialists have repaired the precious Degas statuette^[xviii] he and his brother used as a toy and damaged during their childhood.

It would be too one-sided to say that Assayas proposes a negative view of the museum, but it is also true that in his film, art restoration is comparable to plastic surgery over an already dead patient. In short, something vital is missing in Assayas’ Musée d’Orsay, so that Frédéric does indulge in some nostalgia and longs for the family reunions in the now abandoned and empty country house. However, his wife, Lisa, reminds him of the weekend party that their children, Sylvie and Pierre, have organized in their old country home which is now on sale. If the museum represents the first public scene in contrast to a second private family scenario, Sylvie’s and Pierre’s generation of iPods, laptops, multicultural ties, and freewheeling experimentation is a third scene, which is well outside the constraints of personal history and official culture, family duties, and museum rules alike. Sylvie and Pierre are the future, one that neither goes to the cinema nor to the museum, because their access to everything is totally digital, anywhere anytime.

The break with the previous media, however, is not so extreme that amnesia or indifference has settled in. There are still powerful linking memories across relationships and technologies which Assayas unravels through his final long take, by following Sylvie and Pierre into the open countryside. Together with her boyfriend, the young woman jumps over a brick wall, so that the two leave the past behind and disappear into a thick forest nearby. Meanwhile their two figures look microscopic, inside an enveloping countryside shown from above through an aerial shot. This way of seeing has a contemplative quality reminiscent of Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi’s sense of the ephemeral[xix]. Why do Sylvie and Pierre disappear into nature? Is Assayas’ film in favor of art-historical tradition or of the digital future? The digital thrives next to the pictorial and the museological in Summer Hours: because painting, man-made art objects in general, and the museum as a whole are anthropocentric media and spaces in opposition to the anti-anthropocentric recording at the heart—without the direct intervention of the human hand—of the film experience. The latter is steeped in the nonhuman realm of contingency and in an outward-bound force that has to do with the constant and uncontrollable changes going on outside the museum, namely in the street, in nature and in time. During the final museum sequence of Assayas’ film, one anonymous young character answers his cell phone: he plans to go to the movies after the guided tour around Hélène’s and Paul’s art objects. The intimate links between these objects and their former owners are lost, while a new centrifugal spin begins by taking one person inside the museum away from the history of art back to the cinema. In the end, the museum saves objects, but erases all the relational tissues between Self and Other. By contrast, the cinema is always about beginnings and outward-bound spins of energy originating from absent objects, but these spins, to be sure, can form new emotional bonds across time and space.

Why is Assayas’ Summer Hours an important film, even if everything unfolds in a quiet and polite way, despite family tensions, generational struggles, and disciplinary standards upheld by art specialists and lawyers? With references to Impressionist painting, Art Nouveau, and contemporary issues, Summer Hours implicitly suggests that the twentieth century is the only period in history that we have ever had, and shall ever have, with its own photographic film history based on a recording medium for posterity. No century before the twentieth century and no century after digital imaging can point to a photographic streaming of faces and bodies belonging to people whom we may not know, but who at least were really there, in front of the camera, when these pictures were taken. It is in this respect that the cinematic apparatus as a whole or through its separate components—as the one and only anti-anthropocentric exception in the history of humankind—can become a new model for the art museum of the future. But this art museum of the future, it seems to me, is also rethinking itself from the inside out and placing itself under discussion in dialogue with installation art and mew media. Due to the fact that the anti-anthropocentric origins of photography are rooted in the living sciences, especially biology and chemistry, the museum of the future is likely to engage more and more the history of science.