This post was partly written in preparation for a (storm-affected) contribution to the ERC funded project ‘Film and Death‘ led by Susana Viegas at IFILNOVA.
J’ai moi-même souvent vécu ces temps d’intersection entre la vie et la mort. [I too have often lived through such times of intersection between life and death.]
Jean-Marc Rochette, Au cœur de l’hiver, Saint Christophe en Oisans: Les Etages Editions: 2024, p117
Il y a une matière inconsciente chez un artiste. J’ai connu assez bien Boltanski, il disait qu’il répétait toujours la même chose, basée sur le même trauma. Il a dû se cacher durant la guerre, un traumatisme. Moi de mon côté, je répète en quelque sorte aussi toujours la même chose. Effectivement, on peut voir, déceler des résonances. Et pour moi c’est le sentiment de la mort et la beauté. [There’s an unconscious matter for an artist. I knew Boltanski fairly well, he said that he was always repeating the same thing, based on the same trauma. He had to hide during the war, a trauma. For my part, I am somehow also repeating the same thing. Effectively, one can see, one can detect resonances. And for me it is a feeling of death and beauty.]
https://artinterview.com/interviews/jean-marc-rochette/
My argument defends two theses. The first is abstract but with concrete consequences. The second considers those consequences for art. Abstractly, a radical version of process philosophy has deep implications for thinking about death as multiple continuations. Concretely, forms and approaches to art practice and reception have different challenges and potential flaws when aligning with that conception of death.
There are three linked research projects in the background of this work on process and death: a timed logic after Deleuze; a critique of the concept of autopoiesis; and work suggesting a new definition of the ninth art, or bande dessinée through the concept of démontage (connecting to death through the work of Jean-Marc Rochette in this post).
The timed logic follows from the process philosophy such that time is no longer linear and unique, but rather any event is multidirectional and irreducibly multiple. Time not only flows back and forward as processes change things, but also in many cuts jumps and reconfigurations – depending on perspectives, acts and novel creations. Here, my thesis is that this multiplicity applies to death as process.
Against the autonomous individuals and boundaries of autopoiesis, my critique depends on ideas of continuity and interconnectedness. In my last post on autopoiesis and death this led to a rejection of death defined as the end of a well-defined individual in favour of a definition of death as a curtailing of some processes but continuously with ongoing transformations of all others.
Death doesn’t happen solely within the confines of a particular body, as something observed and felt. It occurs continuously with all other processes, as a direct interaction. Death isn’t the extinction of a cell within its boundaries, due to the breakdown of an essential internal circuit. It is a shockwave of transformations across time and space – an exploding star.
I define bande dessinée as the art of démontage. It is an art where configurations and flows are undone and reworked within each artwork and its reception. More than any other art, it invites a remake on behalf of the reader and viewer, within each frame and across them.
This necessary reworking is matter of degree and all other arts are subject both to montage and démontage as they are received, but it is bande dessinée (BD) that holds these processes deepest within its structure, through combinations of text, dialogue, speech bubbles, images and splash pages, panels, panel transitions and page layouts, gutters (panel spacing and shaping), colour and text-based sound effects (Screech!) All of these are occasions for démontage at the point of live reception. In that sense, every BD is a storyboard, where the reader and viewer are not only free to make their own film, but have to.
The inevitability of reception-led démontage and montage can be seen, for instance, in Edmond Baudoin’s intricate and inventive drawings, text and compositions, where gutters and panels give way to his extraordinary drawing skills, portraiture, and senses of atmosphere and place. Readers make their own ways around the girl with the ballon, around corners of a (now lost) Nice and surrounding villages, and between their feelings and ideas about characters and text.
The reference to storyboards and film raises an objection to the idea of the necessity of démontage. Aren’t storyboards designed to prepare the narrative and production of a film? If so aren’t they carefully directed sets of panels that fix the movement and story of the film rather than allowing for looseness and disruptive play?
The objection is based on a misunderstanding of bande dessinées and of storyboards. For the former, composition serves the construction of the work, but it also undoes it because of the flexibility and openness of the form. This openness forces each reception to remake the work, when compared to the projection of film or the flow of (traditional) prose. Storyboards only seem to fix narrative and flow in retrospect. It is only once the film has been finished that the series of panels appears to have a single outcome. This uniqueness is illusory. Each storyboard could be made into very different films, just like each different reading of a BD.
In the following page from Jean-Marc Rochette’s autobiographical Ailefroide, altitude 3954, the montage is loose in the manner typical of BD. We could say that the eye is free to work up and down, left to right, inwards and outwards, but that would not be accurate with respect to the creative work done by the reader. Like a hydra-headed camera, colourist, screen writer, director, critic and interpreter, the BD reader remakes images and stories. This is true of any art, but BD does so with greatest immediacy and freedom.
On the page, we can home into the faint outline of Jean-Marc’s mother, in the third and fourth frames, and cross reference it to earlier images and other external ones, by skipping back and forward in thought, vision, sensation and reading, flicking through textured and coloured pages and across them, deep into the image, or making syntheses of disparate frames, figures and themes. We can tack together the many images of the forbidding Ailefroide mountain, a recurring symbol of desire, challenge, deathliness and beauty in Rochette’s work.
We can let his use of blue against white jar against the other dominant – but rare – colour combination of his artworks: blood reds hashed and bordered by thick blacks. These are lightly suggested around his young body covered by a red cape, as he takes unconscious risks, watched by his mother, who has already lost his father, a doctor killed in the Algerian war, when Jean-Marc was a baby. Those early perils presage much angrier, destructive and rebellious later acts.
Danger simmers in Rochette’s bandes dessinées. We must tease out the senses, sources, implications and sensual repercussions of this threat of death and destruction for ourselves.
In his latest book, a novel, Rochette has spoken about the constant return to the ‘intersection of life and death’ in his works. The emblem for this is life in the lee and menace of mountains, where avalanches, extreme cold, snow storms and predators can bring a chance death at any time, yet provide solitude (alone or as a couple), protection, life-affirming thrills, meaning, sustenance, and the company of wild and domesticated animals.
The novel has a harrowing account of such accidental deaths, cutting love short, among the beauty of winter mountains: ‘At that precise moment, paradise has just transformed itself into hell.’ (Au cœur de l’hiver, p 92 [my translation]) We can take this event as the centre-point of a new démontage, showing how novels offer similar opportunities to bande dessinée, but BD and graphic novels gift a more immediate and richer ground for this work by readers, due to the combination of text and images floating more freely on the page and across books.
The structured nature of montage in cinema restricts viewers’ opportunities for démontage, since pathways and timing are pre-set prior to any reception. For film, démontage comes after; it can only be a live creation in more limited ways.
This isn’t the case for sculpture, an art form similar to architecture, BD and some forms of poetry in inviting – forcing – its reception to make its own way, set its own time, experiment with its own focus, texts, stories, sounds, connections, angles and lighting; for instance, in and around Louise Bourgeois’ ‘Maman’, taking the sculpture as a counterpoint to phobias, as an ode to love, celebrating her mother whose death and, more significantly, life are given many new existences in Bourgeois’ artworks.
If life and death are multiplicities dependent on perspective, every intersection of processes of life and death is singular. Death depends on where, how and to whom it occurs. It depends on how it is followed, by whom and along which paths. We know this from the effects of distance and kinship on our reactions to deaths; for example in different reactions and presentations of deaths in the media. How close to us did it come this time?
In his work on death, Rochette has always given priority to environmental change (climate, geology, geography, topography), artistic lineages (debts, homages), places and people (love in a particular home or homeland) and shared life and death with animals (wolves, bears, deer, sheep, cats and goats).
Aged 18 Rochette was disfigured by a rock fall, ending his dream of becoming a mountain guide and top climber. Disfiguration is an ambiguous theme around art, life and death in his last and greatest BD, La dernière reine. The book is the ninth art at its most eloquent and powerful, notably for its creation of the sculptor, Jeanne Sauvage.
Sculpture as life-giving and life-continuing is a moving emblem in the book. Taking up the fact of disfigurement, it shows how a new life can be shaped after it. Care and testimony for wild animals – their plight and our kinship with them – are expressed in Jeanne Sauvage’s sculpture of the last queen bear in the French alps, the ‘dernière reine‘ of the title.
Rochette sculpted the characters of La dernière reine prior to drawing them; he speaks edifyingly of the role sculpture has played in BD: ‘For this book, I sculpted all the characters. It allowed me to capture the striking effect of light on their faces and bodies… Bodies and faces move and sculpture ensures that we never tire of them and experience incredible effects.’ The quote is from Art Interview. Just below the reference to Richard Corben and sculpture, there are wonderful reproductions of Rochette’s drawings of Sauvage sculpting.
One of the many lessons of La dernière reine, though, isn’t about the risk of death, but rather that it’s the risk of death that makes life. This is not in the hackneyed sense of ‘we have to make the best of life because we die’ but rather that it is life that makes sense of any death. The former idea implies that death is the final end of life – its absolute contradiction. The latter views them as intersecting continuously, not as line and full stop, but as ongoing and changeable pathways – relative degrees of diminishment and amplification.
When processes of life and death intersect, the problem isn’t how to avoid death as a final end, but rather how to live well with that intersection. This living well through love and against suffering is at the heart of the story. It is also at the heart of the idea of a continuous multiplicity, since if death only makes sense in relation to life, death as the end of an individual must be understood through its multiple connections and continuations.
The crossing of life and death in a frozen landscape is also the setting for Rochette’s earlier BD, Transperceneige (Snowpiercer, written and drawn with Bocquet, Lob and Legrand). His best known work internationally, it was made into a film only superficially close to the BD by Bong Jun-ho and a TV series created by Josh Friedman and Graeme Manson. Transperceneige is a nihilistic creation, typical of the mid-period of Rochette’s output following his earliest BD, the cynical and punkish Edmond le cochon.
The contrast between Bong Jung-ho’s film and Transperceneige, gives us some clues as to the difference between an art that major’s on montage and one subjected to démontage. Though the BD has a much stronger narrative direction than Rochette’s later works, it still leaves greater leeway to undo words and images and reconstitute them such that each frame, phrase and line is a starting point for a different unfolding.
Even for the most experimental and creative films, death is an event ready-made for the viewer. This does not mean that death is given as uncomplicated and linear. On the contrary, film is one of the arts most able to express and convey the multiplicity of time. Particularly after Deleuze, many theorists have shown how standard conceptions of time are undone in film. This also holds true for death:
Thus, films not only make us think about death in a traditional philosophical sense (through narrative representation and visual imagination), but they themselves think about death, for example when the
Susana Viegas (2023) ‘Death as Film-Philosophy’s Muse: Deleuzian Observations on Moving Images
cinematic experience is in itself equal to the viewer’s awareness of his or her mortality, as a memento mori (in Latin, “remember that you must die”).
and the Nature of Time’, p 225, Film-Philosophy 27.2
So what do I mean by ‘ready-made’? Film always has a dominant vector, a directional impulse independent of content and meaning that, at least initially, holds sway over any other direction, though these can come to the fore subsequently. Each image and sound is directed to the next, taking any viewer along a nascent series – even if this series is of the same image and sound (waiting for something to happen…)
If this vector is snapped or redirected, it is the film doing it first. There’s a power of precedence to vectorial directions. It can be resisted, but always as a counter-move, always afterwards and always by breaking away from the film itself; for instance, through later critical assessments and interpretations, or through remakes, quotation, new combinations of scenes, hommage or pastiche.
Suspense is an indicator of the force and presence of dominant vectors. In film, it depends upon and amplifies the dominant vector by holding the viewer on the edge of a next event that fails to arrive while its anticipation grows. All suspense depends on delay, anticipation and withheld events, but the difference with other media is in the nature of the grip of film: a physical way of carrying the viewer due to the impulse of the sound and vision vectors, added to meaning and sense. I look up… I look down:
There are dominant vectors in other arts, from word to word, image to image, space to space, feeling to feeling, or along a narrative line or a logical implication. For BD, sculpture and poetry this dominance isn’t formal, because each image, word, object, colour and event depends on detachment amidst and against an indistinct background. BD stutters. Each of its events (images, word bubbles) implies a hiatus: the frames, lines, pages and surrounds break before reception, forcing the reader to reinstate a continuous series in a remake.
This formal shattering of continuity of frames and their content comes before any vector and sets up a multiplicity of vectors for the reader to make rather than follow. Even in a BD with a strong narrative thread such as Cyril Pedrosa’s Portugal we can halt and divert, not only at each frame, but within each frame, in ways impossible for a film version where the frames would follow seamlessly, or skip, but not at our behest:
Portugal has been translated into English. In other works, Pedrosa experiments with the BD form to break it up and explode narratives, more than in the ‘vignettes’ of his earlier books. This is particularly true of his Equinoxes mixing media, styles, stories, colours and words to liberate the reader even further:
Instead of the dominance of a vector towards the subsequent image, BD has a formal potential for multiple paths. I insist on formal here to emphasise that in practical terms many bandes dessinées will be far more directed than many films. On individual practical terms, art works will vary according to the freedom of their content and style from direction, narrative or otherwise. Nonetheless, there is a formal limit to these variations dependent on the art-form, such that film will always be countering an in-built dominant direction for sound and image in ways that BD and architecture will not.
Vectorial dominance and démontage therefore have modest implications for differences between arts and between art-works, once meaning, styles, content, materials, authors and audiences are taken into account. Nonetheless, where death is concerned these implications are significant because any vectorial dominance has consequences for ideas and feelings about death and time.
On a level prior to any sense or ideology, film has a necessary formal directedness forward. Even it is taking us back in time or across times, it has to do so with impulse taking us from frame to frame – even digitally, since the forward motion is a drive for the ‘to come’ held within each moving image. This is significant since it reinforces our sense of death as something to come in the future, just as it can reinforce our feelings of suspense.
Against this formal micro level and dominant vector, my contention is that death is primarily a multiplicity of times demanding a remake for each life. To do justice to this multiplicity, the problem for film is how to counter its vectorial tendency. This could explain the inventiveness of cinema with respect to time: it is working against its deepest form. Equally, though BD is closest to an art of multiple vectors inviting a creative reception, only very few creators exploit its full potential, perhaps because their emphasis on narrative flow is necessary to maintain a work’s cohesion and approachability.
To conclude, I will consider an objection to my thesis about vectors. Is the dominant vector for film necessary? Might there be techniques bringing frames and spacings into film such that multiple vectors come first? In his study of spatial montage and what I would call types of creative démontage such as windowing, Michael Betancour draws attention to the problem of a dominant vector. He calls it the linearity of time in cinema:
The temporal element remains fundamental to all those structures encountered in a motion picture because the time of cinema remains linear, whether the materials are structured in a simultaneous composition of distinct individuated elements or composited as a singular unitary image on screen. The spatial arrangement of elements is always a component of the image’s meaning, whether as a relationship existing across multiple images composited together or between elements contained within an apparently singular image.
Betancour, Michael (2016) Beyond Spatial Montage : Windowing, or the Cinematic Displacement of Time, Motion, and Space. Berlin: Taylor and Francis, p 4
His proposal is that cinema, following types of video art and commercial creativity, can change the space of the screen into an audience-led multiplicity by changing the number of screens and divisions within them. Film becomes a multi-frame experience, closer to lived multiple time, with a critical interaction of spectator and shattered, divided, screen space and hence times:
The language or discourse of cinema is fundamentally altered—philosophically and in the social/cultural arena—by emerging forms which first establish the screen as surface then reverse the symbolic space from behind to before the screen. Even more fundamentally, the relationship of the spectator to the work is transformed when the time of the action is reversed from being the “once upon a time” of the mythic past to the critical arena of the present. This becomes the time in which the spectators individually live—it is their time, their present based on a material experience of the presentation.
Betancour, 2016
This multiplication of spaces and times for film counters its intrinsic vectorial dominance and points to possibilities for creativity in film and about death free of any underlying unconscious movement to the ‘to come’. Yet each image in these divided and dislocated spaces and screens will also have to resist the drive forward for the moving image.
The deepest problem is this movement of the image towards an event, in particular when this event is death. Our focus remains on the anxious ambiguity of an imminence that cannot arrive as sensed and thought in the moments before. This dominant trait misleads us. The deepest movement isn’t towards death, but away from it, in many directions made by living beings and their environments, as shown by Rochette in his evocation of Jeanne Sauvages’ death, not as a forward line through the time of the work, but as multiple beginnings, leading where we take them:
