Making the Popular Popular Again: A Conversation with Richard Hamon

Richard Hamon has made two documentaries that should be of particular interest to anyone who, like myself, has a passion for American culture: 2004 Howard Fast, Histoire d’un Rouge (Howard Fast, the Story of a Red) and 2011 Jim Thompson, le Polar Dans la Peau (Jim Thomson, Pulp Fiction in the Skin). Neither is available in the States which is unfortunate and should be remedied. For me in particular, Hamon is the cinematographer with whom I made my first 16 mm short film, ANIMALS, in 1987. The film marked my return to filmmaking at the age of 31 from my first experiences since...

“In comparison to poetry one thing that pulled me towards film was the dimension of a crew, people working together…”

the super 8 films I made when I was not even a teenager. In the interview, Richard and I reflect on the different ways each of us conceived of cinema when we were starting out in the 7th art. Richard Hamon goes on to mention the Paris commune of 1871, out of which for him a dynamic and active conception of the popular emerged.  I contrast this with how today a popular film would likely mean one that has a global audience in its opening week–arguably not a sign of its alliance with the anti-capitalism of the communards but with contemporary capitalism.

I think contrast in the meanings of popular points up an important juxtaposition in our own time, when many feel called upon to make a revolution in order to counter the quickening entropic destruction of the planet, whose cause is variously ascribed to human activity or capitalism. What does“revolutionary” mean in our time, how does it relate back to the Paris commune and the meaning of “popular” today?

Roland Barthes, the French semiotician with whom Richard Hamon studied, made a distinction between writerly texts and readerly texts. Readerly texts were ones you consume without being aware of the act of authorship implied by the text; for example, you read an article about what is happening in the Ukraine without stopping to think about how the article is written or who wrote it. As an example of writerly,  at the extreme other end from readerly, there is Finnegans Wake of James Joyce. Unless you actively engage with Joyce’s novel and wrestle sense from it, well, it remains only a surface of words that are impenetrable. Hollywood has been the master of readerly texts, of roller coaster rides during which we are expected to be passive, not thinking, just consuming the “text.”

I once served on a committee at a major cultural institution assigned the task of choosing new chairs for a series of screening rooms that were under construction. These ranged from chairs that leaned all the way back–and would also be great for getting an IV–and seating that required the viewer to remain seated upright, as you imagine people would want if they were being asked to use their minds actively on important matters. The French philosopher and theorist Guy Debord argued that spectatorship had become the basis of a society of consumption.

More recently, the French theorist of democracy and aesthetics, Jacques Rancière, in his book The Emancipated Spectator, has questioned this opposition, finding that, on the one hand, that active engagement persists within spectatorship and, on the other hand, today many forms of passivity are masked as activism. Regarding the latter,  the Slovenian writer Renata Salecl has argued in her book, The Tyranny of Choice, that in modern societies today, we  are encouraged to become so preoccupied with making personal choices -- even ethical ones regarding the environment, sexism and racism -- that we lose sight of the possibility of acting together and making collective choices on an institutional or economic level that would be much more significant in affecting profound changes in these same areas. In other words we are solicited to take private individual action as a new way of keeping us unaware of our collective passivity and how we could address it if we were not so busy making personal choices.

Bernard Stiegler, the important French philosopher of technology who died just before the arrival of the pandemic, wrote about the entropic process of the anthropocene and the need to combat this with with what he called “negentropy”--the capacity of living beings, especially humans, to counter the tendency of matter to disintegrate. We need, Stiegler argued, not to reject technology but to change our relationship to it. Cinema, as Walter Benjamin famously wrote about in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility is a technology that marks an epochal change for modernity at the end of the 19th century.

I have been screening my film ADIEU LACAN online for groups that have requested to watch the film. In most cases I am also engaging in a discussion with each of these groups about the film. Most of these are pre-existing groups organized around psychoanalysis, most often Lacanian psychoanalysis. Our discussions have been very stimulating for me in part because they break with a negentropic path prophesied for cinema by Jean-Luc Godard. According to Godard, we were once in the world of cinema as imagined by the Frères Lumières, that is to say, sitting with strangers in a dark room together watching the same screen and afterwards able to visit a café and discuss the film, whereas now we have moved to the peep-show experience imagined by Thomas Edison as the future of cinema. The online screenings for ADIEU LACAN have made me aware of a negentropic third possibility. One evening I am discussing my film by zoom with a group in Mexico and the next in Scotland, California or Brazil… Technology has not only acted to atomize the audience but to create new forms of collectivity that might form a bridge between what popular meant to the communards in Paris in 1871 and what popular means today.