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Abstract
Narrative identity transactions predicated on acts of seeing and telling take place everyday: we hand someone a photograph and observe casually as we pass it over ‘That's me!’ However, occasionally we find ourselves unable to participate in such exchanges: ‘That's me?’ we ask incredulously, as a photograph is shown us on which we apparently appear. Distanced from both the image and the person who smilingly hands it over, we suddenly understand that our sense of self is bound up with acts of seeing, and that the negotiation of the relationship between the two is necessarily social in nature.
This essay will investigate the complexity of such acts of show and tell by focussing on a short film by Jean Eustache in which the photographer Alix Roubaud shows 19 of her photographs to Boris, the young son of the filmmaker. Alix specialised in self-portraiture. In the course of the film, Boris is called upon to perform acts of identification four times. However, it is not merely Alix's identity that is up for grabs here. The age difference between Roubaud and Boris, Alix's flirtatious glances and assured gestures, cast this as a scene of seduction: the boy is being turned into a man through an apparent initiation into the arts of seeing and looking. As she points and poses, Alix recounts stories about each of the photographs: technical details here, anecdotes concerning the mise en scène there. The making of the man is mediated by stories of the making of the photographs and vice versa: sexual identity and photographic meaning are being simultaneously negotiated. However, as the film progresses, what we see and what we hear bear an increasingly erratic relationship to each other. Distanced from the narrative relationship formed by Alix and the hapless Boris, we come to focus on the film itself as another expository instance.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
[1] I am deeply indebted to the work of Mieke Bal, and in particular, to her essay ‘On grouping: the Caravaggio corner’ (Looking 161-190). The term ‘expository act’ is Bal's. The rigour, finesse and nuanced subtlety of Bal's analysis assisted me greatly in teasing out the two situations of showing at stake here and the interplay between them.
[2] Ah ça il ne faut pas poser des questions comme ça. C'est moi ou ça n'est pas moi enfin … toutes les photographies sont moi … en l'occurrence c'est moi oui.’ All translations, unless indicated otherwise, are mine. From this point on, all English translations will be given in the body of the essay, and the original French dialogue of the film in the notes.
[3] ‘toutes les photographies sont moi’
[4] ‘un multiple autoportrait’
[5] In English in original. Alix Roubaud was bilingual from birth. She wrote her diary in both French and English.
[6] For information on Alix's private exhibitions while she was still alive, see pages 141–143 of Hélène Giannecchini's excellent book, Une Image peut-être vraie: Alix Cléo Roubaud.
[7] Indeed, one might say that by showing individual photographs one after the other, as a commented sequence, the film turns a collection of semi-private visual artifacts into a body of work.
[8] George Perec (1936–1982) was a novelist who also engaged in fragmentary forms of autobiographical writing. W ou le souvenir d'enfance (1975) is constructed through a complex interplay of fictional and autobiographical narratives. Like Jacques Roubaud, Perec was a member of the Oulipo group. The two were good friends. Perec was present at Alix's marriage to Jacques Roubaud, and composed the epithalamium. To read the latter, see pages 181–184 of Hélène Giannecchini's text.
[9] Translation mine.
[10] As defined by Lejeune in Le Pacte autobiographique (1975).
[11] Language enables the same individual to be at once speaker of an énoncé and the subject matter of that énoncé.
[12] More recently, Susanna Egan, Linda Haverty Rugg and Rachel Gabara have all carried this debate in new directions. Bruss contends that whereas ‘the rules of language designate a single source’, film is constituted through ‘a disparate group of distinct roles and separate stages of production’ and that, as such, it disrupts what she calls the ‘act-value’ of autobiography (304). Egan argues convincingly that autobiography is an interactive genre: ‘interactive among subjects, among genres, and among autobiographers and their readers’ (594). Film, she points out, is well equipped to ‘dramatize the [ … ] interactive qualities of experience’ (599). Rugg builds further on Egan's argument. Film is a collaborative effort; as such, when it functions as an act of self-representation, the self is dispersed and ‘takes up residence in the bodies and senses of others’. This dispersal, Rugg contends, ‘offers an alternative model for thinking about selfhood and self-representation’ (Self-Projection 8). Rachel Gabara, in an excellent reading of Bruss's essay, questions Bruss's argument that the identité de nom, upon which the autobiographical pact depends, can have no equivalent in film. As Gabara points out, the subject in language is always already split. Gabara makes it clear that Bruss, as a scholar of Benveniste, was well aware of this. The weak point in Bruss's argument lies, for Gabara, in the fact that she maintains that ‘the trick comes off in language’ (Bruss 307) but cannot be performed in film. Drawing on Kaja Silverman, Gabara maintains that ‘film merely shows us what has always already been the case in writing’ (69).
[13] ‘Ces photographies tu les as faites récemment?’
[14] ‘Cela ne ressemble pas à ce que tu fais d'habitude’
[15] ‘C'est moi là. Tu ne me reconnais pas.’
[16] His voice has broken but he doesn't appear to have started shaving yet.
[17] ‘C'est moi là. Tu ne me reconnais pas’ .
[18] The title of the film, ‘Les Photos d'Alix’, is scrawled on the second of the sheets that the hand turns over. The handwritten nature of the title and the fact that it is framed in the same manner as the photographs that follow turns this particular sheet of credits into the title page of a personal photograph album. ‘Alix's Photos’ is the kind of thing one might well find scrawled on the front cover of an album by its owner, just as ownership of other books of a personal nature might be designated by the words ‘Alix's scrapbook’ or ‘Alix's diary’.
[19] It is worth pointing out here that looking at photograph albums was a common form of flirtation in the nineteenth century. See chapter five, ‘Photograph, Fun and Flirtations’, of Patrizia Di Bello's rich and insightful study of women's albums in nineteenth-century England.
[20] I am indebted here to W.J.T. Mitchell's insistence on the importance of the eye ‘as an expressive as well as receptive organ’ (354).
[21] ‘L'histoire de [la] prise de [cette] photographie est assez .. assez particulière … .’
[22] ‘Tu veux bien me la raconter?’
[23] ‘Elle est fort obscène. J’étais … euuhhm en posture embarrassante hm avec un ami’. ‘Friend’ is in the masculine in French.
[24] ‘Comme quoi une photographie peut être personnellement pornographique tout en étant publiquement décente.’
[25] ‘C'est ma montre. Celle que j'ai autour du cou actuellement. La même.’
[26] For a discussion of the different ways in which films have been and are now consumed and the effects of this see Laura Mulvey Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (20–32).
[27] The face of a watch shows the hours and the minutes, hence etymologically its name in French.
[28] By 1980, in addition to working on the editing of his own films, Eustache had already worked for three years as Jacques Rivette's editor.
[29] ‘C'est moi là.’
[30] Again, I owe a great deal to Bal's work here. The term ‘first person narrator’ with respect to acts of showing is hers.
[31] ‘Ces photographies tu les as faites récemment?’
[32] ‘C'est ma montre’
[33] ‘Celle que j'ai autour du cou maintenant.’
[34] ‘Celle que j'ai autour du cou maintenant.’
[35] There is a growing and rich body of critical literature on the intersections of photography and film. In addition to Laura Mulvey, see Karen Beckman and Jean Ma's edited volume Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (2008) and Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms edited by Eivind Røssaak (2011).
[36] Here I am drawing on, and transposing to film, Marianne Hirsch's comments on family photography. Hirsch notes that the family photo ‘both displays the cohesion of the family and is an instrument of its togetherness’ (7).
[37] Jean Eustache s'est tué la nuit dernière.j'avais reçu un coup de fil de lui. comme une mort naturelle;comme s'il portait en lui depuis si longtemps qu'il fallait qu'il en meure.
Mais fallait-il vraiment la morgue,l'autopsie - et fallait-il vraiment
In French in Alix's diary. Alix's diary entries have very particular punctuation. I have sought to reproduce this insofar as possible in my translation. The last sentence cuts off abruptly after the word ‘vraiment’.
[38] Visage de Jean à la morgue,la bouche entrouverte,les dents que je ne reconnaissais pas.pourtant,sur les photos où il dormait,la bouche était aussi ouverte de cette manière;qu'est-ce donc que je n'ai pas reconnu,sinon cela même.