The nomadic subject as a cinematographic hero by Alain Resnais

Seleznev Evgenii Kirillovich Postgraduate Student, Department of Cultural History, Institute of Cinema and Television (GITR) 123007, Russia, Moscow region, Moscow, 32a, 32a, Horoshovskoye Sh. street selezneuve@gmail.com Other publications by this author

The cinematography of Alain Rene — especially his early works — has been of interest to researchers for more than half a century. Non-linear narrative structures, wavering signs and flickering characters became the subject of attention of philosophers, cultural scientists and art historians. In our study, we once again step into the territory of Rene's cinema in order to address the phenomenon of nomadism and present it as an actual philosophical and art-historical concept. The works of Alain Rene were not considered in the key of nomadism, although in their own way they foreshadowed the emergence of such a worldview, as well as the emergence of poststructuralist and postmodern strategies, both in philosophy and in art.

It is important for us to present nomadism not only as a social or cultural phenomenon, but also as a way of thinking and perceiving the world, as well as a strategy in the field of creativity. Following the logic of Gilles Deleuze, one of the authors of the concept of nomadism, we will turn to cinema, through which we will come closer to understanding both nomadism in general and related phenomena such as rhizomes, Bodies without organs, deterritorialization, eluding, flickering, and so on. Gilles Deleuze in his work "Cinema" argued that with the help of the attributes of cinematic discourse, one can think. In our study, using the prism of nomadism, we will turn to the form of cinema of Alain Rene, the characters of his films, narrative structures and the viewer's position in the communicative act.

I

The nomadism project was proposed by two philosophers — Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Nomadism in their reading appears as the idea of nomadism — that is, the principle of constant movement without a fixed point of reference and a predetermined path. Nomads are not tied to any particular territory and do not limit themselves to unambiguous self-identification. Instead, nomads move freely through various spaces and constantly encounter new forms of existence ^[1]. The nomadism of Deleuze and Guattari is less connected with geographical movements, presenting nomads as nomads in the sphere of thinking, where the key attitude is the devaluation of "all forms of fascism, starting with those monstrous forms that surround and destroy us, and ending with the smallest forms that form the mournful tyranny of our daily lives" ^{[2, p. 10]}. Under "all forms of fascism", Deleuze and Guattari do not represent specific political and social components, such as Umberto Eco's 14 points from "Eternal Fascism" ^[3], but suppression in general. Thus, fascism acts as a metaphor that gathers forms of both external social unfreedom and internal unfreedom — internalized power, the destructive attitudes of which are perceived by the individual as his own and appear to him as an objective norm.

The reason for the emergence of nomadism is largely connected with the feeling of losing the "core in the world". 18 years after the release of "Last Year in Marienbad", F. Lyotard will write that "we are witnessing the fragmentation, splitting of "great stories" and the emergence of many simpler, smaller, local "stories-stories"." ^{[4, page 213?]}. All these stories no longer add up to a single project, they multiply, contradict and mutually exclude each other, which means that the individual has to admit that a new form of existence is needed, for which "inaccurate expressions are absolutely necessary in order to designate something accurately" ^{[5, p. 36]}. The traditional form, which tends to concrete statements, completed projects, binary oppositions and cause-and-effect relationships, can no longer provide communication between the addressee, the text and the addressee. The new subject of postmodern thinking "can no longer create a dichotomy, but it achieves a higher unity – the unity of ambivalence and overdetermination" ^{[5, p. 6]}.

The characters of Alain Rene anticipate this logic — they are subjects who feel irreversible changes in both the surrounding space and themselves. The answer, and a new way of their existence, is the process of deterritorialization or escape — the destruction of fixed boundaries and structures that limit the possibilities of becoming ^[6]. Getting involved in this process, Rene's characters find themselves in a state of endless movement through various spaces and forms of existence: in dreams, disparate time periods, each other's memories. Such transformation and the formation of the subject are fundamentally incomplete, since it is not a transition from point to point, but a constant dynamic without the opposition of start and finish. Deleuze and Guattari write that the goal of the nomadic subject is to see any thing in "the relations of becoming, and does not make binary distributions between "states"" ^[5]. Therefore, the nomad lifestyle implies the rejection of the concept of a stable "I" or essential identity. The nomadic subject is constantly in the process of becoming, always changing and developing. This idea challenges the traditional view of identity as something fixed and unchangeable, instead offering a more dynamic understanding of oneself, taken beyond the spheres of influence of society and government institutions. Rosie Braidotti in her work "Writing as a nomadic subject" writes that the concept of subjectivity in general should be separated from the terms individual and individualism, since subjectivity is a socially mediated process of contract with forms of power. Following this logic, subjectivity appears as a collective enterprise, external to the individual "I" ^[7]. The nomadic subject rejects fixed identity and socially structured subjectivity, perceiving them as categories imposed by forms of power, and accepts the fluidity of the self.

In the next part of our research, we will present nomadism as a strategy for working with audiovisual works of art — creating nonlinear narrative structures, flickering characters, camerawork techniques, editing features, as well as opportunities for active spectator viewing and analyzing the film as an open structure.

II. Nonlinear structures

One of the defining features of nomadic subjectivity is its refusal to be tied to any fixed structure or identity. The same can be said about Alain Rene's films, which avoid linear narrative plots in favor of flickering narratives, that is, fragmentary and nonlinear narrative structures. In the films "Hiroshima, My Love", "Last Year in Marienbad" and "I Love You, I Love You", Rene turns to human self-awareness and uses false memories, dream logic and time travel to legitimize the use of nonlinear structures and flickering characters at a formal level.

"Last Year in Marienbad" by Alain Rene appears to the viewer as an "impossible film", where every detail resists unambiguous interpretation and fitting into a linear narrative. The plot of the picture is built around a certain "forgotten event":  At a social event, an unnamed Man approaches an unnamed Woman and claims that they met a year ago in Marienbad, while the Woman insists that they have never seen each other.  The missing boundaries between dream and reality, memory and fiction offer the viewer a deterritorialized space where it is impossible not only to establish where and when certain events occur, but also to whom memories belong. Y. Regev writes: "location in memory is, in fact, location in eluding, non—remembering and oblivion: multidirectional realities are crushed and they break down, they are sucked into the whirlpool of the indefinite and elusive" ^{[8, p. 184]}.

Such a strategy of deconstruction of the traditional narrative in Rene's films can be understood through the phenomenon of the rhizome, since "the rhizome has no disjoint boundaries, and in the space of the rhizomatic discursive environment, the facets of reality multiply, non-standard associative connections arise, multiplicative effects are formed, generating new meanings ^{[9, p. 805]}. The characters of the film "Last Year in Marienbad" find themselves in the maze of a hotel, each turn of which leads not to an exit, but to a new turn, forcing the characters to doubt both their identity and the reality around them. Almost every action of screen heroes does not form the plot, but on the contrary, destroys it even more. Such plot twists as flashbacks imposed on the heroine, through which memories are formed, break the narrative and create new entry and exit points for interpreting new information, branching the plot structure.

In the film I Love You, I Love You, memories reflect the ever-changing nature of the nomadic subject's identity. The main character of the film — Claude — agrees to participate in an experiment to explore time, where he needs to return to certain moments of his past. From the fragmented and mixed memories in front of the viewer, a mosaic of the plot about the story of Claude's acquaintance with his beloved is arbitrarily formed. The nonlinear structure that provokes jumps between fragments of time-memory, and repeating fragments of the narrative do not line up in a hierarchically consistent story, but form improvised horizontal connections. In his work "Cinema" Deleuze wrote that "in cinema there are three films showing our being in time and moving along its flow, taking us with them, contributing at the same time to the concentration of our personality and the extension of its framework: this is Dovzhenko's “Zvenigora”, “Vertigo” Hitchcock and "I love you, I love ..." Renee" ^[10]. Penelope Houston also noted that one of Rene's key tasks as the author of "I Love You, I Love You" is not to tell a story, but to study the phenomenon of time through the montage comparison of frames and their intra—frame duration ^[11].

The main character of the film "I love you, I love you", according to the scientists' idea, must move through time following the logic of the traditional narrative, that is, in one direction: forward or backward. However, Rene breaks this attitude and turns Claude's path into a rhizomatic journey, where the hero is multiplied and placed in several parallel discourses: the discourse of the present, life after a failed suicide attempt, and multiple discourses of the past, arbitrarily linking disparate events. This splitting of the character and the discovery of a flickering potential in him to change his own "I" force scientists to recognize the experiment as unsuccessful. At the same time, Claude himself manages to use his potential not only to overcome time and memory, but also space. Thus, the hero's path within the framework of the work becomes the personification of a new model for creating rhizomatic narrative structures and the way they are interpreted by the viewer or researcher.

"Hiroshima, my love" exists in three dimensions at once: 1) Linear actual time, where nameless characters — He (Japanese) and She (French) — spend time with each other; 2) The dimension of memories, which contains the trauma of each of the characters; 2) The Chronicle dimension, which presents the viewer with a reliable document of the events of the past. Flashbacks of the second dimension create a fracture in the first, turning the narrative structure of the entire film into a moving narrative. You can see this by the example of three scenes where the heroine's story about traumatic events of the past merges with the present: in one of the scenes, the heroine sees a Japanese architect in bed and the position of his body reminds her of the death of her beloved German, in another scene, the Japanese ask the heroine: "am I already dead?", in the third scene the profile of the German from the basement looks like the profile of a Japanese, as if the main character has moved from the present to the past through the heroine's memories.

The use of complex narratives allows Alain Rene to expand the potential of the work and demonstrate to the viewer the boundlessness of interpretive practices. This approach to the creation of the narrative structure of the film becomes the foundation for the appearance in it of other forms of nomadism — space and body.

III. Space

The second half of the twentieth century radically changes the approach to creating stories. In the 1960s, complex techniques of combining "real" and "conditional" screen time and space began to be increasingly used in cinema. At the Venice Film Festival "Last year in Marienbad" receives the Golden Lion with the wording: "For his contribution to the language of cinema and stylistic brilliance in showing a world where the real and the imaginary coexist in a new spatial and temporal dimension" ^{[12, p. 318]}.

In addition to using non-linear narrative structures at the script level, Rene also resorts to the use of moving cameras to create a sense of movement and fluidity in the cinematic space. In "Hiroshima, My Love," Rene uses panoramic shots to follow the characters as they move around the city. Camerawork serves as a way of illustrating the characters' reflections on loss, dissolving them in space and hiding them outside the frame. In the scene with a walk in Hiroshima, a man lags behind a girl who is immersed in her thoughts about the imminent parting of the characters. And this lag transforms into disappearance, leaving the heroine alone. The space of the city itself is deconstructed at this moment for further merging with another. Japanese Hiroshima merges into a single metropolis with the French Never, where the streets are viewed by the viewer as neighboring, despite the distance of several thousand kilometers. Alain Rene performs the same editing technique that Soviet avant-gardists used at the beginning of the 20th century: Kuleshov in "artificial topography" and Dziga Vertov in his unification of cities in order to create a universal demonstration of the proletariat. The use of such montage transitions and the asynchrony of sound and image emphasize the sense of temporal and spatial synthesis. The voice of the heroes crosses times, cities and countries. The characters are constantly moving, but the main movement is carried out through the halls of memory — it is not by chance that in one of the final flashbacks of the heroine, the viewer sees a Japanese man in the basement of occupied Nevers, where he has never been.

The space in Rene's films corresponds to the characters present in it: it is fragmented and fragmented and appears as a mirror in which the disorientation of the nomad is reflected. Space can reject itself and be in constant motion, like a hotel from the movie "Last Year in Marienbad", the descriptive characteristics of which are in a state of flickering and contradiction — A man describes to a Girl their last meeting at a hotel near an antique statue by the park, but the statues are by the lake; the characters recall last year's hotel in the rays of summer the sun, but visitors keep saying that last summer the lake was covered with ice. The hotel takes a position of power in an act of repression over the heroine, in the course of the plot transforming into an ideologized prison — an outwardly open comfortable space, which is characterized by variability, but which refuses the heroine to exit. Speaking about relations with the institutions of power, Deleuze and Guattari write: "the schizophrenic is kept at the limit of capitalism: he is its developed tendency, surplus product, proletarian and fighter angel" ^{[2, p. 61]}. That is, the schizophrenic is called upon to destroy the capitalist system, being its own product. A girl who has a certain social status and relationships with other authorities suddenly denies guests their power over her. The same role is played by Claude, the hero of the film "I Love you, I love you", whose body turns out to be in the hands of science, which wants to take control of the body, space and time, and what Claude refuses her. So space brings us to the phenomenon of physicality in the cinema of Alain Rene. 

IV. Body

The problem of physicality is one of the key problems of the 20th century. The identity of a person and his bodily behavior in the postmodern paradigm are presented not as the result of free individual choice, but as a set of social and cultural prescriptions ^[13]. M. Foucault made a great contribution to the problems of corporeality, which is inextricably linked with the functioning of power, who presented the body as an eternal formation subordinate to the institutions of power ^{[14, p. 11]}. The body in Foucault's paradigm is a disciplined mechanism that is assigned a certain hierarchical positioning and a predetermined connection with other machines.

The intellectual reaction to the infinite body in the hands of power becomes the "Body without organs" by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari — a semantic structure devoid of a center, and therefore possessing unlimited internal possibilities for generating meaning ^{[15, p. 102]}. A body without organs — hereinafter MSW — is not a conceptually limited concept or a complete concept, but is a set of liberation practices, the result of which is the rejection of any forms of submission. The body-organism is presented by the authors as a hierarchically organized structure, while MSW is a hollow body where organs are distributed rhizomatically, that is, without any hierarchy and system. Thus, MSW is an extremely free anti—structure that is constantly in the process of self-configuration and self-generation of meaning. This body is a stream, eternally changeable and eternally new. MSW — through its characteristics of freedom, chaos, non-hierarchical and decentering is opposed to the body as a stable but repressive structure. MSW is "a space of complete freedom of self—realization without predestinations and prescriptions" ^{[15, p. 103]}.

The desire of the Body-organism for solid waste can be seen in the film "Last year in Marienbad", the main character of which unconsciously seeks to completely break ties with the reality surrounding her. Her Body falls out of the general paradigm and comes into conflict with the power — a Man who is trying to return her to the structure and put her in a hierarchically oppressed position. The man constantly repeats: "You were here", "We met before", this is how a Man denies a Woman her intention to MSW, trying to create false memories to form a new identity. Why does he need it? According to J. Baudrillard, "The body becomes a true fetish and capital, maintained in perfect condition for symbolic exchange and consumption. It is subjected to ambivalent care, which, creating the illusion of personal participation and appeal to a particular person, turns into repressive care, suppressing personal aspirations for transformation, imposing only "correct" practices of physicality" ^[16].  The author of the screenplay Alain Rob-Grillet also wrote about the importance of power and persuasion in the context of the film: "The film as a whole, in fact, is a story of persuasion: it talks about the reality that the hero creates from his own vision, from his own words" ^{[17, p. 12]}.

Throughout the entire action of the film, the girl's body is trying to be returned to the binary system and docked with a Man. The Woman's body turns out to be a doll body that is not perceived in its ontological uniqueness and integrity. According to J. According to Deleuze, a person becomes dependent on his own body, which, in turn, is subject to external forces. In his concept, the subject is a "desire machine", where desire is a productive force, an impulse, an incentive to action. Such machines are a connection of two objects – a continuous stream and its slice, i.e. "these are binary machines with a binary rule or associative mode; one machine is always docked with the other" ^{[2, p. 18]}. A Woman's body, returned to a temporary structure, begins to obey the rules of power — fragments of the past that were never there appear in her memory. However, she resists it. A woman refuses to be recognized, she denies a Man in her own face — in the face that he supposedly remembers. Deleuze and Guattari write: "If a person has any destiny, it is ... to escape from the face, to destroy the face and personification, to become unrecognizable, to become an underground worker ... not to allow himself to be summed up by the face" ^{[5, p. 282]}.

Such an escape from one's face, non-remembering of the past and traumatic comprehension of one's own memory on the part of a Woman can be perceived by the viewer through the prism of schizophrenic disorder. It is not by chance that Deleuze connects MSW with schizophrenic experience. A man in a communicative act with a Woman appears as a carrier of a rational idea, who really remembers what once was. At the same time, it is important to note that schizophrenia in the text of Deleuze and Guattari mainly refers not to mental illness, but to methods of combating various ways of suppressing desire and the assertion of direct free — schizophrenic desire as such, which should lead to the formation of solid waste ^[6]. According to J. Deleuze and F. Guattari, metaphorical MSW and a head devoid of a face "act as the basis for the birth of a nomadic subject, its liberation, which causes close attention to the body in postmodern culture, the desire for its transformation, transformation, constant search for optimal bodily form" ^{[13, p. 17]}.

The nomadic Body, as well as space and nonlinear structures are designed to present a new reality to the viewer of the work, in which the established mechanisms of previous eras do not work. We will talk about how the viewer's gaze is transformed under the influence of nomadic forms in a communicative act with a text in the next paragraph of our study.

V. The viewer's view

The viewer's view cannot but undergo changes in the act of communication with the work, whose characters do not have a single identity, narratives multiply, following rhizomatic logic, and the form itself serves as an instrument of the author's reflection on the phenomena of time and memory, and not an illustration of the plot. All this forces the viewer to change his position in the act of watching and move from the status of passive perception to active deciphering — reassembling the work in a variety of variations, correlating some storylines with others and interpreting them in the absence of an obvious logical connection between them. In the article "The Way for the Future Novel" (1956), Alain Rob-Grillet — writer and screenwriter of the film "Last Year in Marienbad" — criticizes the Balzac tradition of the traditional novel and calls for the renewal of communication between the viewer and the text. Following Shklovsky's logic, Rob-Grillet says that things in a traditional novel have turned into signs that the viewer reads automatically: an unoccupied chair indicates the absence of someone, a hand on his shoulder indicates sympathy, and window covers indicate the impossibility of escape. A new novel, a new text and new forms of art should destroy the conventions of signs and free things from additional meanings, "because it is in the presence that reality resides" ^[18].

The desire to present the film as a series of conventional signs and chronologically alternating events is an a priori desire of the viewer, who, according to D. Bordwell, always strives to construct a purposeful story in his imagination ^{[19, p. 31]}. In classical cinema, this approach, according to V. Shklovsky, helps the viewer to perceive the work in automatic mode ^[20]. To remove a work from the automatism of perception, it is necessary to violate genre, plot, stylistic and other conventions. Such destruction for Rene is the deconstruction of the narrative and the transformation of the film's characters into nomadic subjects. Fredrik Jamieson describes such an experience as "schizophrenic", since the viewer has to experience not a single stream of time, but the experience of isolated, disconnected, discrete material signifiers that cannot be connected in a sequential series ^[21]. Such an experience differs from the viewer's position in Art Nouveau, where he is forced to "consider art in reverent silence, placing it against the background of a neutral white gallery wall and completely detached from the social environment and even from his body and gender" ^{[22, p. 10]}

In the postmodern paradigm, the viewer is connected to the work both through identification and through participation in its interpretation. In identification, the viewer also turns out to be more free and able to strive to merge with the characters of the picture without regard to their social status, age and even gender. Ultimately, as I. Gradinari writes, this can lead to the formation of a "queer vision" - communication with the work, which implies "transcending the framework of one's identity" and getting pleasure from a strange text, pleasure that is born from "an unprotected, unstable reception, from the look produced in the cinema, from which all confidence in understanding the film" ^{[23, p. 74]}.

Thus, the viewer adopts the strategies of both screen characters and the form of the work itself, trying on nomadic subjectivity.

VI

In conclusion, we say that Alain Rene's films offer an expression of nomadic subjectivity through the use of nonlinear narrative structures, shimmering characters and elusive spaces. Rene creates a cinema that brings to the fore not the plot, but movement, fluidity and diversity, and also offers a critique of fixed structures and identities traditionally dominant in the modern era. Ren?'s use of cinematic techniques, such as panning, audiovisual counterpoint and editing, also contributes to the depiction of nomadic subjectivity in his films. These techniques disrupt the linear flow of time and emphasize the nonlinearity and multiplicity of the individual.

Nomadism in Rene's films anticipates the positive chaos of the postmodern, resisting the repressive order. Nomadic subjectivity challenges the dominant power structures and criticizes the ideas of identity and belonging. Accepting the nomadic aspects of their "I" and freeing themselves from traditional social structures, Rene's characters are able to create new forms of belonging and identity — and, at least at the time of watching the film, involve the viewer in this process.