THE APORETIC AESTHETICS OF ALAIN RESNAIS'S CINEMATIC MODERNISM by John Rhym BA ...

191 Pages·2017·1.75 MB·English

FRAME AND FINITUDE:
THE APORETIC AESTHETICS OF
ALAIN RESNAIS’S CINEMATIC MODERNISM

by
John Rhym
B.A., Wheaton College, 2006
M.A., New York University, 2008

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of
The Kenneth P. Dietrich School of
Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

University of Pittsburgh
2017
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
KENNETH P. DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

This dissertation was presented

by

John Rhym

It was defended on
December 4, 2017
and approved by
Marcia Landy, Distinguished Professor, Department of English
Neepa Majumdar, Associate Professor, Department of English
Dissertation Co-Advisor: Adam Lowenstein, Professor, Department of English
Dissertation Co-Advisor: Daniel Morgan, Associate Professor, Department of Cinema and
Media Studies, University of Chicago

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Copyright © by John Rhym
2017
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FRAME AND FINITUDE:
THE APORETIC AESTHETICS OF
ALAIN RESNAIS’S CINEMATIC MODERNISM

John Rhym, Ph.D.
University of Pittsburgh, 2017

This dissertation argues that the modernist cinema of Alain Resnais and the philosophical
writings of Martin Heidegger share a sustained commitment to aporias, which not only serve as
conceptual sites for investigation but also function as structural forms that shape their respective
projects. In the case of Resnais, I show that specific films address a number of postwar anxieties
through the reflexive staging of the following intrinsically irresolvable tensions: between film’s
technologically disclosive capacity and its limits, between art and instrumentalization, between
the unrepresentability of historical trauma and the material articulations of memory, and between
the political discourse of agency and cinema’s foreclosure of spectatorial intervention. In the
case of Heidegger, from the earlier existential analytic to his later lectures and essays on the
historicity of being, his entire project can be understood as deliberately attending to the diverse
forms of the interplay between revealing and concealing that constitutes, for him, the essentially
aporetic structure of truth. Furthermore, I argue that the different configurations of epistemic
and existential finitude underwrite an approach shared by both filmmaker and philosopher that
preserves the irresolvability of these aporias and manifests their generative possibilities. It is by
drawing on the crucial role ascribed to finitude in the aporetic structures of Heidegger’s thought
and Resnais’s cinema that I map out one form of this generative possibility as an ethics and
aesthetics of acknowledgement.
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Chapter One interweaves Resnais’s Van Gogh with Heidegger’s insights into the aporetic
mode of disclosure that characterizes artworks in order to elucidate Resnais’s distinctive
cinematic constructions of worldhood. Chapter Two places Resnais’s Night and Fog in dialogue
with Heidegger’s account of modern technology to situate the film’s reflexive interrogation of
the aporia between representation and instrumentalization within a broader postwar philosophical
discourse surrounding the question concerning the possibility of art as a site of resistance.
Chapters Three and Four take up anxiety and releasement as affective manifestations of finitude
in Heidegger’s thought in order to read the aporetic configurations of Hiroshima mon amour and
Je t’aime, Je t’aime as organized around the radical disavowals demanded by an ethics of
acknowledgement.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………...vii

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………...…..1

Chapter One
World-Disclosure in Resnais’s Van Gogh……………………………………………………….23

Chapter Two
Cinematic Modernism in the Age of the World Picture………………………………………....56

Chapter Three
The Moving Image of Anxiety………………………………………………………………..…97

Chapter Four
Resnais’s Cinematic Reduction………………………………………………………………...143

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………....167

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Whatever it is that Heidegger might mean when he speaks of the relationship between
thinking (Denken) and thanking (Danken), I can say with certainty that the gratitude I express
here falls entirely short of what is owed. Daniel Morgan was an early mentor and interlocutor
whose distinctive approach to the intersections of cinema and philosophical aesthetics has deeply
shaped the questions and methods that motivate and structure my work here and elsewhere. His
encouragement, constructive criticism, and, at certain crucial moments, friendship have made me
a better scholar and person. Adam Lowenstein has been vital in helping me temper my, at times,
unwieldy theoretical indulgences with close analyses of films. From my weekly journal entries
written for his classes on spectatorship and Surrealism to my many drafts of articles and chapters
produced over the years, his patience and perceptiveness as a reader not only generated critical
insights regarding the stakes underwriting each of my gestures at philosophical discourse or
observations into cinematic form but also manifested the kind of evaluative generosity to which I
aspire. On the other hand, Marcia Landy was always welcoming of discussions concerning the
theoretical thickets that I would often find myself lost in, and I left many of our meetings feeling
both exhilarated and less certain about my own conceptual commitments in the most productive
ways possible. Neepa Majumdar’s support was decisive not only in terms of her illuminating
feedback on my writing but also with respect to the guidance she offered in situating my work
within the discipline, especially in mapping out the possible points of contact that my research
questions have with broader debates and issues in film scholarship.
I owe a fruitful year of writing to the Carol Kay Dissertation Fellowship, which was
awarded to me by the English Department and made possible by the generosity of Jonathan Arac
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and Mr. and Mrs. Jeffrey A. Kay. I also thank the department’s Director of Graduate Studies
Nancy Glazener, who helped me navigate the nuts and bolts of successfully completing each
stage along the graduate trajectory and whose course on the history of criticism is still mentioned
amongst my cohort as one of the best seminar experiences we’ve had.
Outside of my committee, no one has read my writings – in so many iterations and drafts
– as carefully and thoughtfully as Ryan Pierson, and my work has benefited immeasurably from
our conversations. I have been deeply fortunate to share formative experiences over the past
several years with a close group of friends in Pittsburgh, and, in many ways, this dissertation
would not have been possible without them, among whom I especially want to acknowledge
Javier O’Neil-Ortiz, Veronica Fitzpatrick, and Jeff Heinzl. Finally, I wish to thank my parents,
Kwang and Sonye Rhym, and my siblings: Luke, Rebecca, and Priscilla. Their love sustains me.
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INTRODUCTION

I. Heidegger and Cinema
Despite the recent uptick in the theoretical literature on film that makes substantial
reference to the writings of Martin Heidegger, often cited as one of the most important
philosophers of the twentieth century, his work has never quite taken hold in any sustained or
pervasive way in much of the history of film studies. Contextualizing the conditions of this
lacuna within the discipline’s broader reception history of phenomenology more generally only
takes us so far in better understanding why. While Dudley Andrew’s 1978 article “The
Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology in Film Theory” offers historical insight into how the
field’s academic disciplinarization in the mid-1960s coincided with the rising predominance in
French intellectual culture of semiotics and structuralism in a way that ultimately eclipsed the
significant appeals to phenomenology that were made in French postwar film criticism,
phenomenological film theory has since become a burgeoning area of scholarship.1 Most
groundbreaking is Vivian Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye (1992), which not only adopts
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s existential-phenomenological investigations of embodied perception to
account for cinematic spectatorship but also mobilizes the dialectical polemic against idealism
and empiricism that structures the arguments of his magnum opus Phenomenology of Perception
(1945) in order to stage a novel critique of the reductive conceptual strategies prevalently
employed in the Marxist-psychoanalytic film theories of the 1970s and 1980s.2 Whether

1 Dudley Andrew, “The Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology in Film Theory,” Movies and Methods: An
Anthology, Volume II, edited by Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 625-632.
2 Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1992).
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referenced as a source for elaboration and extended application or targeted as a subject for
critique, Sobchack’s analysis has had an ongoing interdisciplinary impact on contemporary
studies in cinematic affect and perception.3 And while this is in large part responsible for why
Merleau-Ponty’s iteration of phenomenology has been privileged, the still expanding area of
phenomenological film theory has produced major studies that place cinema in dialogue with
figures such as Edmund Husserl, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, and Paul Ricoeur.4
Considering how profoundly and inextricably formative his work has been to twentieth-century
French thought – to the extent that his “omnipresence in France,” which Jacques Derrida sums
up as “in the end he is everywhere,” has recently been characterized by Dominique Janicaud in
his claim that apart “from the mathematical sciences and life and earth sciences, there is hardly
any sector of knowledge or intellectual activity that has not been positively or negatively
affected” by it – and especially to those philosophers who have become most prominently

3 See Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2000); Jane Stadler, Pulling Focus: Intersubjective Experience, Narrative Film, and Ethics (New
York: Continuum, 2008); Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2009); Jenny Chamarette, Phenomenology and the Future of Film: Rethinking
Subjectivity beyond French Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Matilda Mroz, Temporality and Film
Analysis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012); Hunter Vaughan, Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard,
Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic Thinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Saige Walton,
Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology, and the Art of Entanglement (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2016); CarrieLynn D. Reinhard and Christopher J. Olson, eds., Making Sense of Cinema: Empirical Studies
into Film Spectators and Spectatorship (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).
4 On Husserl, see Frank P. Tomasulo, “The Text-in-the-Spectator: The Role of Phenomenology in an Eclectic
Theoretical Methodology,” Journal of Film and Video 40.2 (1988): pp. 20-32; Allan Casebier, Film and
Phenomenology: Toward a Realist Theory of Cinematic Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991). On Sartre, see Robert Harvey, “Sartre/Cinema: Spectator/Art That is Not One,” Cinema Journal 30.3 (Spring
1991): pp. 43-59; William Pamerleau, Existentialist Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Jean-Pierre
Boulé and Enda McCaffrey, eds., Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema: A Sartrean Perspective (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2011). On Levinas, see Sarah Cooper, Selfless Cinema?: Ethics and French Documentary
(Oxford: Legenda, 2006); Sam B. Girgus, Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics, and the Feminine
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). On Ricoeur, see Dudley Andrew, “Tracing Ricoeur,” Diacritics 30.2
(2000): pp. 43-69; Malin Wahlberg, Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2008).
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