Death and the Meanwhile: Levinas and Freud Go to the Movies (original) (raw)

In his essay, ‘Reality and its Shadow’, Emmanuel Levinas describes every artwork as “ a statue – a stoppage of time”. It exists in an interval – the meantime or l’entre-temps – that is not so much the absence of time, but a “quasi-eternal duration” that does not, in Levinas’ terms, approach the Other. For Levinas, this means that aesthetics must be excluded from his ethical philosophy but, for an approach to film, it does suggest interesting possibilities for the conceptualisation of cinematic time. Levinas’ analysis certainly evokes, for instance, André Bazin’s famous characterisation of the cinema as “change mummified” and this paper will begin by exploring Levinas’ recourse to the statue of Laocoön and His Sons, forever caught in a “tragic,” timeless striving from stasis towards motion and the ways in which this image – the “shadow of reality” – could be used to understand the particular temporality of the cinematograph. Moreover, I will endeavour to relate the horror that Levinas finds in the “nightmare” of the statue (and, by extension, the cinema) – as an image of fixity and mobility – to Freud’s notion of the uncanny, or the dread feeling that the dead will return to haunt the world. I will argue that, the status of the moving image as a series of instants suggests, in this context, that film, like the interval, occupies an unsettling place between life and death. This will bring my investigation into contact with Laura Mulvey’s recent work, her theorisation of the cinema as “death twenty-four times a second”, and the potential to relate this idea of cinematic time to the Freudian death drive through the phenomenon of the freeze frame: where cinema’s pulsive force becomes fixed in a timeless loop.