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<em>Inter</em>pretation: Do You Dig This Crypt?

2020; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.13110/discourse.42.3.0397

1522-5321

Wu,

Cinema and Media Studies

Interpretation: Do You Dig This Crypt? Fan Wu (bio) Cinematic Cryptonomies: The Absent Body in Postwar Cinema. By Ofer Eliaz. Wayne State University Press, 2018. 224 pages. $31.99 paperback, $85.99 hardcover. “Thus, throughout this book, it will be crucial for us to listen to the hesitations, the twists and turns, the sudden reversal of the critical literature so that we can reconstruct the shared silences and discover what remains unseen” (26). I take this passage at the close of Ofer Eliaz’s introduction to Cinematic Cryptonomies: The Absent Body in Postwar Cinema as a provocation. I want to allow this method, this mode of listening, to fold back into my own method for writing this book review in order to interrogate the potentialities latent in academic writing, which is a form traditionally anchored not in hesitation or reversal but instead in assertion and opinion. Eliaz, our careful crypt keeper, pauses where both cinema and psychoanalysis has rushed past: at the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, whose concept of the crypt is the drive of Cinematic Cryptonomies’ major intervention into cinema studies: “Unlike melancholia in which the refusal to mourn a lost object leads a subject to mourn the loss of the self, the crypt is an attempt to undo loss by preserving the object whole” (6). The subject (of trauma) builds a crypt for the lost object and buries them alive through this intrapsychic mechanism. Abraham and Torok pull a classically psychoanalytic move in elucidating the crypt, which is to begin with a [End Page 397] seemingly psychopathological example, then show how the pathology is in fact a universal so that the crypt becomes a structure of the psyche as such. Eliaz examines how the universal mechanism of the crypt is manifest in history, and the central problem of Cinematic Cryptonomies is how a broadly postwar cinema deals with the missing bodies of the war. His analysis of auteurist case studies of Georges Franju, Godard, Mario Bava, and Naomi Uman that constitute the bulk of the book. For example, in his analysis of Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, Eliaz deftly shows us how absence becomes the hallucinated into the very fabric of its filmic reality: Franju makes use of a taboo image characterized by its foreignness within the filmic system. This image may appear to enter as if from another movie or another scene to interrupt the flow of images, or it inserts a gap of quietude that cannot be assimilated into this film. I call this the foreign taboo to indicate that it marks the eruption of “elsewhere” into the film’s topography. (31) Eliaz is finely attuned to film form and how its displacements, interruptions, and irruptions signify absence without symbolizing it. The foreign taboo is one of a series of cryptonomic formal operations, alongside the unwatchable taboo (the audience member turning away from the screen) and the figural taboo (where the body becomes a screen for the taboo body) that cinema uses to invisibly incorporate the missing bodies of the victims of history. Yet I am plagued by this question in which I admit that my personal investments bubble up to the surface. What is the critic’s role when approaching the missing, the disappeared? Eliaz, finally himself as detective par excellence and through his reading of Abraham and Torok, turns them into searchers for an origin. Take these two pieces of evidence, from the beginning, middle, and end of his book: Instead, suggest Abraham and Torok, a “properly” psychoanalytic approach demands that we first listen to the conflictual process of textual becoming present in every work and then uncover, working back from there, the original situation that brought it about. (7) The analytic task is precarious: to discover, invent, or produce a missing body that completes the film, fills the gaps in the image. (40) Or, as Abraham and Torok’s work suggests, the critic or spectator must supply the complementary image that, absent in the film, would return it from the dead-end of symbolic loss to the dynamics of speech. (179) [End Page 398] Eliaz’s directives converge around unity, represencing, and relocation of the origin. His version...