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Border Times And Geopolitical Frames The Martin Walsh Memorial Lecture 2006

Resume: Cet article associe l'idee de la frontiere a l'operation du bornage de l'espace au cinema. Il propose une genealogie du bornage de l'espace par le cadrage cinematographique qui demontre que les codes du montage narratif classique traduisent un desir de dematerialiser l'espace et ses frontieres. Un processus semblable s'applique aux notions de communication et de media, meme dans les commentaires politiques critiques de Hardt et Negri, qui risquent toujours de dematerialiser l'espace geopolitique concret par l'adoption irreflechie des concepts de « media », « communication » et « spectacle ». Dans ce contexte, From the Other Side (De l'autre cote) de Chantai Akerman represente une intervention au coeur de cette genealogie du cadrage qui vise a re-imaginer la materialisation de l'espace et des frontieres au sein de notre comprehension du present. CONTEXTS In this essay, I will discuss borders in relation to the bounding of space in film, in order to illustrate some broad points about our conception of the present. In one way, I am playing upon an analogy between geopolitical bounded space and the framing of space in film, but with the suspicion that there may be something more than analogy at work. And so, I will eventually take the license to compare elements of film narrative to certain elements of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's book Empire, a theoretically and politically important account of our supposedly globalized and postmodern present. I will conclude with remarks on Chantai Akerman's From the Other Side (De l'autre cote, USA, 2002) which seems to me to be an important probe into our notions of the present and its conception of space, both geopolitical and filmic. I begin not with film and its framings, postmodernity, or the global, but with a certain genealogy of modern narrative imaginings of the border. In Atlas of the European Novel, Franco Moretti asserts that geographies of bounded space were fundamental to the emergence and wide success of modern novelistic narrative in the nineteenth century. With a nod to Benedict Anderson, he aligns the novel with the formation of European nation-states, but emphasizes how borders generate narrative content and form: Borders, then. Of which there are two kinds: external ones, between state and state; and internal ones, within a given state. In the first case, the border is the site of adventure; one crosses the line, and is face to face with the unknown, often the enemy; the story enters a space of danger, surprises, suspense.... External frontiers, in other words, easily generate narrative-but in an elementary way: they take two opposite fields and make them collide. Internal borders work differently, and focus on a theme which is far less flamboyant than adventure, but much more disturbing: treason.... A struggle between national and local loyalties.1 For Moretti, the crossing of internal borders was foundational for the most aesthetically significant line of the Western novel. Although he discusses spatiality in the bildungsroman, the picaresque, and the colonial novel, for him, as for Lukacs, the historical novel and especially Walter Scott's work is the fountainhead of the novelistic.2 This leads Moretti to the following idea: The complex spatiality of internal borders involves a complex temporality. In the historical novel, internal borders mark distinctions between different stages of social development (and, we might add, ethnicities associated with those stages); when Waverly travels through certain areas of the Scottish Highlands, he encounters earlier ways of life, in effect moving backwards in historical time. As the historical novel allows its readers to experience a prior historical era, it also represents the movement backward in time to the historical past, as characters' movement through geopolitical space. I want to make three points about Moretti's conception. First, in this kind of narrative, the nation-state is internally divided, a spatial complexity or composite rather than a unity. …