Filmer, to film, seems to me an odd verb. When it's a matter of writing a book, un livre, one doesn't say booking, or livrer. And the verb peindre, to paint, is used and not tableauter, from un tableau, a painting. Here one sees that when it comes to cinema, the final product prevails and becomes a verb. One says raboter, to plane a wooden plank, and not planchelisser, une planche being the noun for that plank.

Since it's a matter of using an instrument called a camera, why doesn't one say camering? It's true that working with a microscope is not called microscoping. But the microscope doesn't produce anything other than a certain way of seeing, while the camera is an image mill; however, contrary to the windmill, the images don't make it go round, or tourner. The camera rolls on its own, and what's said is: ‘On tourne’—‘We’re rolling’.

On? One, in English. Indefinite personal pronoun, third person, fixed, in French always functions as the subject. Could one not have put this any better? It would appear that on is pronounced ‘om’, which comes from homo. ‘Silence, l’homme tourne’—‘Quiet, man's rolling’. That has an altogether different feel to it.

In the word camera, the chamber is visible. The word that follows in the dictionary is camérier, or chamberlain: ‘an officer in the pope's chambers.’ Most cineastes would be very surprised to be called a chamberlain, or worse, a camériste, or chambermaid: ‘a woman who attended to a princess.’ Might that princess be the reigning ideology?

If I hang these remarks on the nail of a surprising infinitive, it's perhaps to indicate that the camera can make something quite different from a film, just as writing can be done without the direct object that is called a book. But then what's the point of activating that mechanism responsible for subterfuge, subterfuge made possible by a fault in our seeing apparatus: retinal persistence? Our gaze slides over the jerks and we’re gone with the movement reproduced. And then the sound joins in, and the colour, which gets to be a bit much.

Cinema on the Margins and in the Centre of Deligny's Experiments

Cinema occupies an ambiguous position in the work of Fernand Deligny: it is both central and marginal. For Deligny, cinema constitutes a space of practice as well as one of conceptual speculation. Present to a greater or lesser degree in different periods of his life, it is nonetheless a common thread that runs through more than fifty years of clinical, pedagogical, and socio-political experimentation.

If Deligny's work has for decades been associated with pedagogy and the so-called social ‘maladjustment’ of children and adolescents; if as a result of the renewed interest in his work from the late 2000s his writing has come to be associated with a style both conceptual and poetical, the crucial relationship it maintained with cinema and the image continues to be a blind spot. In the French clinical and cinematographic context, there has been renewed interest in certain of ‘his’ films, including Le Moindre geste (The Slightest Gesture, 1971) and Ce Gamin, là (That Kid, There, 1975). Yet very little has been written about the ways in which the cinematographic practice was essentially interwoven in Deligny's experiments or how speculative reflection on the image constituted a vital line of his thought.

This blind spot in the reception of Deligny's work is due first to the fact that the majority of his texts on cinema and the image have remained unpublished until now. Many were discovered only recently during the organisation of his archives. Camering: Fernand Deligny on Cinema and the Image is a first step towards filling this gap. Its title is taken from a series of texts and notes that date from the late 1970s, which Deligny called camérer. Three of them, the most important and polished pieces, are published in Camering.

This volume reunites, in chronological order, pieces written in different styles between 1934 and 1996. They offer an overview of Deligny's involvement with cinema, beginning with a short review he wrote about three films screened at a cineclub for the journal Lille Université. There is a large gap between this piece and the two that follow: ‘The Camera, a Pedagogical Tool’ concerns Deligny's first practical experiment with the camera, while ‘He's Still One of Us’ is a reflection on The Slightest Gesture.

1.

I just learnt, on the radio, that when Arthur Rimbaud, the brilliant rascal from Charleville, wrote ‘le bateau ivre’ (‘The Drunken Boat’), he had never seen the sea.

What to make then of all he described in those verses that left their mark on the poetic art?

We need to tell ourselves that there is décrire, describing, and d’écrire, writing.

Is the latter writing from somewhere—from somewhere and about something?

I say this because the dictionary, which includes two written lines on the meaning of the word cinematography, cites, in italics, a bit of Jean Cocteau: cinematography is an art.

With Rimbaud, one sees what the art of writing can be.

There thus remains camering, and I have deliberately evaded filming, instead hanging ‘to camer’, the infinitive of a verb that—Still?—doesn't mean anything, as the banner over these pages.

I’m not a cameror.

I write; I live close to children said to be autistic. From where do I write? From there.

2.

From there, where I live, I see the world—like everyone else. It's not human.

From the sea, we have come. There was nothing, nothing but the sea, and then the bustle of it, and the algae and all the rest.

From the human, we have come. At first, there was nothing, nothing but a species that was completely unique, and now here we are, in both the here and now, certain of us equipped with a camera slung over our shoulders.

Chamberlains? The thing is that there would be a pope in the chamber.

Chambermaids? Then they would be waiting hand and foot on the princess.

Where Rimbaud had vocabulary, they have film. They have blank rolls and they have seen films; what they might connect is the earth to the moon.

3.

‘To camer’ is an infinitive, like ‘to see’. For seeing to take place, it remains necessary for someone to look, so to speak. To go about camering, one needs a cameror of sorts.

If, having taken up the habit of writing, I can call myself a writor, that other person is a cameror.

Thus begins a change in direction.

As a writor, my culture is much older than that of the cameror, which appeared after 1900. It hasn't even been a century? What can there be to an art that is barely fifty-odd years old?

The project of realising a documentary film that would be the collective work of the members of La Grande Cordée, regardless of their age, was born of the fact that cinema is a ‘language’ that is all the more important to us educators dealing with adolescents who, for the most part, hardly use written language—or don't at all—for lack of sufficient education, and whose spoken language is limited, not in terms of abundance, but in terms of the exchange value of the words and sentences used. They’re talkative for the sake of talking, and language stupefies or fails them when it comes to making themselves understood.

They thus don't belong to a special category: over the course of their fifteen or seventeen years of existence, they have quite simply drained themselves of a rather cumbersome portion of the most common habits and customs of their time and milieu of life.

Images—photographs from newspapers and magazines, cinema, television— invade the world and deliver a permanent assault on written language. Spoken language doesn't elude the omnipresence of modern techniques of dissemination. I’ll give just one example, that of Christian T., a brave and frail boy of fifteen, who becomes agitated and mute at the slightest question asked of him, and for whom elation is unleashed on hearing a word that allows him to recite a radio slogan. If he hears ‘blanc’, he sings ‘blancheur Persil’ or ‘dents blanches, haleine fraîche’, as happy as a duck in its pond to find himself once again on the commercial radio waves. As for the rest of the slogan, he has his own approach, his thoughts stumbling as he misses rhythms and words.

Let's leave Radio-Luxembourg behind and return to images. Magazine-photos, comic strips, cinema are just the facts. What would be the point of heroically defending the time of the first periodicals, when sentence and word , as specifically human, were queen and king and reigned supreme over title and text? It's likely that the image, the comic, the photo, are also specifically human, and so it's difficult to imagine people losing—little by little—use of the word, and thus thought, due to the abundance of images directly reproduced.

The film, Le Moindre geste (The Slightest Gesture), which I’m told ‘was chosen by the Semaine de la Critique's selection committee and will thus be shown at Cannes’, came very close to remaining rolled up in large tin cans that might have contained preserves, as so often happens to those ‘abnormal’ children for whom fate is rolled up in the places intended for them. And what can be done about this?

The fate common to the being I’m going to talk about and the kilometres of film that carry his image will perhaps clarify a little what I mean when I talk about attempt.

A film can be a masterpiece or a dud; a small celebration or an adhesive strip that captures ideas in the spirit of the times like sticky paper did flies, back when it was used and bicycles filled the streets.

That Yves, who's ‘severely retarded’, escaped his fate, which was to live in a home for halfwits—demeurer dans une demeure à demeurés—and that this strange film did not remain eternally autistic—as is the case with abandoned objects—entail two events that merge into one.

Yves and his father étaient là—they were here—earlier. The father spoke to me. Yves had picked up a pencil sharpener on my desk and was handling it with three fingers and that air of his that involves seeing a lot more in an object than its common use—of which he's suspicious. In 1957, ils étaient là, but at the time, là was there, in the Allier, and his father had said to me that we ought to destroy the wall he saw, an adobe wall four or five metres high that was the surviving part of a destroyed barn. Yves didn't say anything, caught up as he was in the habit of never addressing his speech to anyone; he was clumsy, ruddy, black-haired, bumbling, and placed a wall of silence between ‘the rest of us’ and himself; and though there could not have been any more human there, nor more of all that which life entails, it took us years, walking side by side, day after day, and from place to place, from the Allier to the Cévennes, to make the film that ‘would thus be shown at Cannes’.

The Era Of The Image. We don't live in the age of the image, regardless of what they say.

The era of the image! Even though we have never been further from the image. We’re in the century of language, of chitchat, of verbalised reproduction, of unbridled speech. One has no choice but to talk. The image is what Janmari, the autistic child in Ce Gamin, là (That Kid, There), understands; it's his mode of thinking, he for whom there is no language… .In my life, I’m constantly grappling with this absence, this vacancy, this mode of thinking apart.

It's evident that these children, who have no use of language, think. They need to be left in peace, but the Institution can't handle that. It can't handle the absence of language, and nothing can be done about this. We need there to be language somewhere or we’re lost.

People cling to the characteristic of language that preserves their singularity in relation to the animal… .An old fear …

The Image, The Animal. Now, it may be that the image is part of the animal kingdom… .This is no doubt very much the case: The image lies deep within the purview of the memory of the species, and the memory of the species is something that all species have in common, including the human species… .People can't handle that. I don't know why we can't handle the human species being taken, in the literal sense of the term, why we regard it as a species unlike the others that …

The image is the means by which the species persists despite everything… .It's a trace … a trace that awaits, on the lookout….

This is part of what cinema entails; that is, an immediate enthusiasm. And we don't know why, but we’re moved by what we end up calling images, which are not the effect of language; images move us in a way that goes well beyond language… .There are some who have managed this—whether they realise it or not… .The Tramp is one of them, of that there is no doubt: his images move us immediately, and very deeply; they overtake everyone.

Pierre HIRSCH is at it once again. On the 29th, he presented us with a careful selection of ‘avant-garde’ films. Man Ray's L’Étoile de mer (The Starfish): images pass without logical connection, without ‘history’. In it, cinema is no longer photography. There is something else (perhaps only a frosted glass) that makes this short film into a moving painting with stock tricks; a masterpiece. Each gesture borrows symbolic value from the vaudeville ditty. Man Ray seeks: some people laugh and yet their ears hear a melody and they don't try to understand; they enjoy themselves. Why don't their eyes enjoy the melodies?

Ruttmann set images to Schumann's music. And since Schumann had composed his piece with simple notes, Ruttmann composed his film with simple elements, with water, wind; he shows us lakes and boats, and the evening, and leaves rattling, and waterfalls and streams; the splashing of water after an outpouring of notes. The audience understands and doesn't complain that dreams have been imposed on them; and yet?

The third film, The Trunks of Mr. O.F., has been reviewed. I no longer know what the critics said. To me, it's a full-length film about a simple idea. The beginning is perfect, and then the effects become heavy-handed—nothing fails, nothing is silly, it's just that Granowsky is rather logical in his fantasising. I missed L’Étoile de mer.

If you would like to see different films, if you would like to see the curious results obtained by those who seek to photograph or recreate nature, those who, tired of words, compose poems of images, help your mate Hirsch out.

Join the Cine-Club, because Paris is faraway, the Rue de Béthune is full of duds, and ‘films’ are expensive.

One can think of the camera as a tool, an instrument, a machine that enables images to be recorded. These images can then be projected.

Words have a history. What the dictionary told us—in times past—of projeter, to project, was ‘jeter dehors’, the image evoked being that of rejecting something, throwing it out, while the word projet, a project, which has the same origin, evokes ‘all that by which people tend to modify the world or themselves in a given way’.

One is well aware that what's rejected is not worth much, is detritus. It's not particularly surprising that so many projections do indeed cause one to think of a rubbish dump on the outskirts of a village. Society takes out its rubbish and contemplates, and is moved by, the result of its effort. Society sees itself in the household rubbish that is projected in various formats. But what then is the Itself in question? Do people see themselves as they are? They see the leftovers, the packaging, the rejections, and are prompted to contemplate what they don't want, or no longer want, from their own customary. Nothing is lost. Projections are consumer goods. Thus functions a recovery circuit in which household rubbish holds on tight to what's imagined, projected.

One sees the S’ functioning as a dominant instrument on a detour by way of the camera, that small chamber ruled, reigned over, by a camérier, or chamberlain, ‘an officer in the pope or cardinal's chambers’, or by a camériste, or chambermaid, ‘a woman who attended to a princess’. On occasion, it's the camerlingue, or camerlengo: ‘a cardinal of the papal court who administers justice and the treasury, presides over the apostolic chamber, and governs when the Holy See is vacant.’

This is the case in the Petit Robert dictionary, which makes no mention of the cameraman. Though it is true that he who shoots a film occasionally takes himself to be the pope.

1 - To begin by saying that images are not seen (by the self ).

Image takers visit me here, on a regular detour in their paths.

They leave their contraptions someplace else—I’m not entirely sure where—such that their hands are to be found at the ends of their arms, their hands, and there you have it.

They’re not very old; I am.

I tell them stories, stories full of images. They can't take the images; it's not that I prevent them from doing so, but that the images are illuminations. They have a camera. They need images that move.

What I say to them is that the images they seek are on the screen, just like a painter's work is on the canvas. There is the canvas; that's where the painting is. It's not seen. It waits, and always will. Painters have said this. No one believes them.

This is what I say to the image takers:

– ‘Images are not seen (by the self ).’

This hardly helps them make progress; how can they take what is not seen (by the self)? They’re not out of the woods yet.

I tell them the story of a mate of mine.

He and I were the same age. In 1937, I found him sitting on the floor of the small flat

I lived in, its window opening onto the Place d’A., the square in a small town in the Nord of France where there was an asylum and I was the teacher at this asylum. There was a class of children who were slow. I told them stories.

I had lived with the mate who was sitting there, right under the window, his back against the wall, for months and months among the dunes by the North Sea. He had enlisted in the Brigades and gone to Spain. And as for myself, I taught children who were slow.

There was a jocular air about him, as always, which didn't hide the fact that he appeared a bit weighed down. He said to me:

– ‘It's nearly finished over there… .’

I thought he had come to stay. He told me he was an officer and that he had been wounded three times.

The image is distinct in being an image.

In the place of language, there is only language, in whatever form it may take.

The image does not become language.

Language is not transformed into image.

There may be symbiosis between language and image.

But symbiosis is association, not confusion, and one that is lasting and mutually beneficial.

The Man that we are is lichen, alga and fungus, that is, in this case, image and language.

That said, what becomes of the image, if we admit that the image eludes being language?

It's a question of language approaching what it might be like to be an image, of language believing that it grasps the image, understands it, assimilates it.

This having been done—and it's a decoy—there remains the image, still just as enduring; the fungus didn't appropriate the alga; the Man—that we are—is lichen.

If I write that Man is lichen, lichen in this case is not image.

It's a plant or, to put it better, an organism made from an alga and a fungus; perhaps a promising monster, as they say in biology.

Likewise human beings, who are promising—if they happen to persist instead of destroying themselves?

It can also happen that language flows into the image; it's thus that the being—human that we are—becomes a tree.

Believing is enough.

I have sometimes said:

– ‘Image is what is not seen (by the self ).’

This comment didn't make the task any easier for the image taker who happened to be here.

That said, I suggested he regard his camera as not being able to take movement, movement being what is seen.

I had gone to tell him that image and movement were of the same nature, movement— in cinema—being caused by what is called retinal persistence.

Who knows what ‘persistence’ the image—that everyone sees even though it is not there—develops from.

What I say to the image taker:

– ‘If the image is not there in—in or on—the film, there is no point looking to take—so to speak—images, since it's understood that images will capture themselves, as it were, just like flies on pre-war sticky paper.’ You just need to find the glue.

1.

There are two of us, one writing and the other realising (a film).

It's said that there is a literary art and a cinematographic art.

Between us, the question here is to find a way for the two arts to work together— with the utmost sympathy for one another, of course, but above all, in symbiosis. Lichen is a very hardy organism that has always endured, or nearly so; this little species of moss is quite obstinate and exists as a result of the meeting between an alga and a fungus.

I believe that algae was the first to emerge from nature's breast; an alga is what I am, since writing had long existed when cinematography appeared; all of a sudden, along came fungi.

Between us, working together over the years will be a question of respecting the phenomenon of symbiosis, which is frequent in nature.

It will not in any way be a question of a union, or a designation, or something else that is overly conventional; an understanding is necessary; that we get on well.

What remains is to invent, between us, the workbench, which is not the oeuvre itself, but what the oeuvre will be placed on—between us; placed there, the oeuvre will be easy to handle.

2.

You happened to ask me for a screenplay. I evaded your request. You had shot the images in Ce Gamin, là (That Kid, There) … always without a screenplay. A series of images had been realised and these were in need of a binding; I thus not only wrote but said out loud what I preferred to call a legend rather than a commentary.

The years passed, and now here we are again, not with our backs up against the wall, but on either side of a workbench, or rather on either side of a space that is still vacant—a space where the workbench should be placed. It's clear that what we’re missing could come from what existed during the shooting of That Kid, There… .: the living areas that existed for years; those in which the children said to be autistic resided.

We spoke of resuscitating a flock of kids who had emerged from the darkest depths of a cave.

To discuss the infinitive that is the banner over this work

A belief in god has always—and now more than ever—seemed the convention. It may be a better alloy than a belief in people for those who believe themselves to be nonbelievers. As for people who do believe, they’re the direct heir of those who came to be in times past, when a belief in god was unanimous, or nearly so.

For people who don't believe—in the supernatural—it's a matter of not taking over, in good faith, from the person who projects themself, who's immutable, or nearly so. But it's to be expected that this rupture is just barely repaired, endlessly—people holding on to their image just as they did that of god. It's the same thing.

The space of an attempt is, for me, the space of a rupture. It's not that I myself need to break away from some belief, having never inherited a belief—in the supernatural. Instead, it's a matter of breaking away from the image acquired of the person, of myself, of others—but rather than acquired, incorporated: I want to talk about the inveterate image in which the thousand and one ways people have regarded themselves, and regard themselves, are focused, reiterated, and condensed; the ‘self’ supplanting, substituting, the human that everyone, in good conscience, can't help but be unaware of, people's consciousness eclipsing, in good faith, the human that is not its responsibility, and which it must expel in order to further its influence.

Put otherwise, consciousness is totalitarian, and the human always/already liminal.

MisCreating, which is the banner over the connected texts gathered here, doesn't evoke a different way for people to imagine themselves. The beliefs derived from believing are varied; they may appear disparate and contradictory; they may boast of materialist good sense. They inevitably share a point of coherence, an inevitable focal point; put otherwise, they share the one in every that is to the human what a reflection on the ceiling or beneath the arch of a bridge is to the water that does the reflecting.

The architectural motif of the labyrinth appears at decisive junctures in Fernand Deligny's long essay The Arachnean, a text itself composed of detours, repetitions and associations of a heterogeneous nature—he draws on the fields of mythology, anthropology, philosophy and milieu theory, as well as on personal memories. It is a metaphor for endless complications followed by endless solutions: the path of Icarus on his way through the labyrinth, culminating in his tragic flight to the sun. Crucially, Deligny introduces the labyrinth as an analogy to the main figure of the text—the Arachnean, a spider's web, a network of trajectories of autistic children.

According to the Greek myth, Icarus and his father Daedalus, the labyrinth's architect, are both imprisoned in the confusing structure on the island of Crete. In order to escape the labyrinth, Daedalus finds a solution—he fashions two pairs of wings out of wax and feathers for Icarus and himself. However, despite his father's warnings, Icarus cannot resist the pleasure of elevation and approaches the sun. The wax of his wings melts and he drowns in what is today the Icarian Sea.

Interestingly, the myth serves Deligny as a paradigmatic image of the mode of human behaviour, the action put in parallel with a labyrinth and Icarus's flight as a properly humanist project. In other words, Icarus's tragic fate implicitly reflects upon the condition of the ‘Man-that-we-are’, its finality and its teleology.

The labyrinth appears in this parallel as an obstacle, a challenge to be overcome in order to transition to the new level of the thrilling adventure where the hero once again faces his fate.