The Blue and the Red

It was by inviting us to compare Le grand bleu [The Big Blue] and Palombella rossa [Red Wood Pigeon] that Serge Daney concluded his 1980s — a decade lived between cinema and television, between the “image” and the “visual”. The article in question was published in Libération on 29 December 1989, under the title “The Cinema and the Memory of Water”. In it, Daney presents the films of Luc Besson and Nanni Moretti, released in 1988 and 1989, respectively, as forming a pair of contrasting propositions stemming from the decade in question — a decade which he dubs “aquatic” in that it generalised the “floating” in every domain of human life: “from fluctuating exchange rates to the flux of televisual images […], from the comeback of Olympic synchronised swimming to the promotion of ‘glide culture’”,1 and, above all, from the “liquefaction (in the West) of the subject” to the “liquidation (in the East) of communism”. Everything rises to and floats on the “surface”, which Besson’s “apolitical free diver” escapes “through the depths”, while the “communist water-polo player” in Moretti’s film “squats” in it by accepting — without submitting to it — the historic fact that the surface now constitutes the “natural habitat” of human beings.2  

“Even if we know that water polo also takes place underwater, M’s camera refuses to go below the surface. A refusal of depth — which makes this film cinema’s riposte to the audiovisual (The Big Blue). The water is surface, often filmed from above, like a game of Go, but a special surface that must be ceaselessly crossed, and ploughed by the body (boustrophedon)”,3 Daney notes of Red Wood Pigeon in his preparatory notebooks, which we can read today in the posthumous work L’Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur.4 Besson plunges his camera underwater barely a few minutes after the beginning of the film, as if to save himself from History in crisis, or to plunge the latter into oblivion — even into epochē5 — by abandoning oneself, in an “individual”, or perhaps “individualistic” manner, to an audiovisual “spectacle” in an underwater world. As for Moretti, he keeps his camera on the surface throughout the film, which takes place entirely around a swimming pool, and he transforms this surface into a metaphysical “interface” which puts body and language, world and mind — or again the clinical and the critical — into communication, and on which the talking-athlete hero, played by the filmmaker himself, continually multiplies connections with other parlêtres (speaking-beings), in order to unite them around a historically determined question with no predefined answer: “Cosa significa oggi essere comunista?” (“What does it mean to be communist today?”). In short, while aphasic, “self-legitimatising” individuals retreat into Bessonian depth, a people “sick with language” forms on the Morettian surface. (In his next film — a documentary shot during the last two months of 1989 and broadcast on Rai Tre in early March 1990 under the title La Cosa [The Thing] — Moretti returns to the theme of the collective malady of language faced with the “thawing of the East”, filming a series of debates between grassroots militants of the Italian Communist Party; during these debates, much like the characters in John Carpenter’s eponymous film [1982], the militants can come up with nothing but the floating signifier “la cosa” [“the thing”] to speak of their party, whose proposed dissolution had been announced on 12 November 1989, three days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, by the then secretary general of the PCI, Achille Occhetto.)

“The image in cinema is a surface without depth. This is what modern cinema reminds us of, by breaking the pact”, Daney remarks in the concluding chapter of La Rampe, a book dedicated to the periodisation of the history of cinema. One recalls, for instance, Jean-Luc Godard’s Les carabiniers [The Carabineers] (1963) and its famous scene showing the projection of the fictive short film Le bain de la femme du monde [The Worldly Woman’s Bath], a scene in which the Godardian idiot literally “breaks” the screen, attempting to plunge his gaze into the “desired depth” of the bath — in reality nothing but a projected image. The Big Blue marks a reactionary, “advertising-like” return to what Daney calls the “simulated depth of the flat image”. “Diving, breaking records, diving deeper, going ‘to see’, following a dolphin, etc.”: such is, according to Daney, the “only movement” that the Bessonian “Mayol-Tintin” is “programmed” to carry out, confronted with a world itself become flat or superficial. Red Wood Pigeon, by contrast, embraces the irrevocable “observation” effected by the films of Roberto Rossellini and his disciples, settling directly in the “unbearable” flatitude of the contemporary world, and “ploughing” it so as to transmute it into a double-sided plane of composition, where the clamour of the partial drives of the liquified self, and the tumult of the partial objects of the fluidified world, enter into immediate contact with one another, weaving a strange, flat people at the clinical-critical intersection. For Daney, “Red Wood Pigeon is a great film and Nanni Moretti the most precious of filmmakers.” At the end of the aquatic years, Moretti’s film embodies all of “cinema”, which he affirms is simultaneously “our only guiding thread and our only memory in this postmodern bath”.6

• 1In 1980s France, “la glisse” (the French term Daney uses) denoted not only the then ascendancy of “gliding” sports (snowboarding, surfing, skateboarding, etc.) but also a related youth subculture. —Trans.
• 2Text reprinted in Serge Daney, Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à mains, cinéma, télévision, information: 1988–1991, Aléas, 1999, pp. 137–140.
• 3Namely, the writing of alternate lines in opposite directions (right to left and left to right, and sometimes also mirror-style reversed letters). From the Ancient Greek, lit. “turning like oxen while ploughing”. —Trans.
• 4Serge Daney, L’Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur, P.O.L., 1993, p. 168.
• 5Another Ancient Greek reference (later adopted by Husserl), this time denoting a suspension or withholding of judgment. —Trans
• 6Daney, Devant la recrudescence, pp. 137–140.