The Intervals of Cinema by Jacques Ranciere

Author:Jacques Ranciere [Ranciere, Jacques]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781781686065
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-10-07T04:00:00+00:00

Meet Me in St Louis, Vincente Minnelli, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1945

That advantage of fiction is often given by Minnelli to the naïve ingénu(e) who can shuffle the cards of playfulness and seriousness to his or her profit. The licence at Halloween which suspends the normal relation between parents and children is stronger than the tricks of mountebanks or rakes. And more effective than the training aunt Alicia gives Gigi to become a cheap tart is the girl’s own ‘cinema’, or unashamed swindling. She is more worried about increasing the advantages from an established system of gratifications – chocolates, champagne, donkey rides – than she is of throwing herself into the arms of one of Paris society’s ‘lions’. Neither for Gigi nor for Gaston is there any available choice between dream and reality. In the negotiation of social arrangements – what is at stake – there are always possibilities and levels of excitement: Gigi’s drunkenness, Gaston’s recovery from boredom and depression. It is always a question of preserving, acquiring or modifying a system of situations, conventions, relations and attitudes with the chances of excitement it carries. It is through the term ‘excitement’ that at the dawn of the nineteenth century Coleridge and Wordsworth were defining the power of the new poetry; and through the same word that half a century later, balanced minds were denouncing Emma Bovary’s illness, the new sickness of democratic societies which gave the novel its subject. From this point of view there would hardly be much sense in contrasting the adventuress who wants to run away and be a pirate’s mistress with the homebody who wants to stay in St Louis and marry the boy next door. What counts is the mise en scène, which can be created with a bust dropped on the floor or a chandelier being extinguished. The flames of the children’s Halloween torches are worth as much as those of the pirate’s fire. But at times it is also necessary to keep the game going, to tip over into another system. And here too there is no deliberation: Gigi must suddenly exchange her tartan cloak and girlish mischievousness for the worldly courtesan’s dress – so suddenly that the lesson learned too well produces a predictable counter-effect: the exasperation of the young lion bored by situations and mannerisms that seem too obvious and familiar.

The game of parades and metamorphoses ends well. Gigi will marry Gaston, Manuela will accompany Serafin in his theatrical adventures. That happy ending is the utopia of musical comedy, the utopia of fiction reduced to the sole pursuit of a good performance regime. That requires the fictional basis itself to be located in an entirely artificial universe. That is the meaning of the famous number ‘Be a Clown!’ at the end of The Pirate. Misfortune – melodrama begins with the taking up of a social position, with a relationship to a father. The advice to be a clown, as far as I remember, is attributed by Serafin to his uncle. Manuela for her part has no father or mother, only an aunt.

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