Chapter Four:
Restitution, Recognition, and Reattachment Disorders:
Reversing the Work of Art and the Missing Jewish Corpus:
Deporting “Degenerate” Art in John Frankenheimer’s The Train
Final Extermination?: as Restitution and the Missing Jewish Body in Mr. Klein and The Counterfeiters [1]
When I was very young—and until quite recently—I used to project a film in my mind of someone who, by midnight, plants bombs on the railway: blowing up the enemy structure, planting the delayed-action device and then watching the explosion or least hearing it at a distance. I see very well that this image, which translates a deep phantasmatic compulsion, could be illustrated by deconstructive operations, which consist in planting discreetly, with a delayed-action mechanism, devices that all of a sudden put a transit out of commission, making the enemy’s movements more hazardous. But the friend, too, will have to live and think differently, know where he’s going, tread lightly.
Jacques Derrida, Taste of the Secret Polity, 2001, 51-52
La Regle du Juive
As for written or inscribed language, it appears in Hegel’s text only in the most literal of ways: by means of the parabasis which suddenly confronts us with the actual piece of paper on Hegel, at that very moment and in this very place, has been writing about the impossibility of ever saying the only thing he wants to say, namely the certainty of sense perception . . . unlike the here and now of speech, the here and now of the inscription is neither false nor misleading: because he wrote it down, the existence of a here and now of Hegel’s text of the Phenomenology to the endlessly repeated stutter: this piece of paper, this piece of paper, and so on. We can easily enough learn to care for the other examples Hegel mentions: a house, a tree, night, day—but who cares for his darned piece of paper, the last thing in the world we want to hear about and precisely because it is no longer an example but a fact, the only thing we get. As we would say, in colloquial exasperation with an obscure bore: forget it! Which turns out to be precisely what Hegel sees as the function of writing. . . . Writing is what makes one forget speech . . . the definitive erasure of a forgetting that leaves no trace . . . the determined elimination of determination. (42; 43)
Fingerpointing
In the context of so much free floating blame in de Man’s work and of de Man’s work after he died and his journalism came to light, the discussion of Riffaterre’s finger pointing seems something really important to read in relation to indexicality and reference, perhaps in connection with Holbein’s Jesus in a box.
To write down this piece of paper (contrary to saying it) is no longer deitic, no longer a gesture of pointing rightly or wrongly, no longer an example of a Beispiel, but the definitive erasure of a forgetting that leaves no trace . . . the determined elimination of determination. At any rate, it makes [Riffaterre] misread Hegel (and Derrida) when he summarizes them as stating: the only that (ca) which gives certainty is an abstract that, the fact of pointing ones finger, obtained by negating the multitude of heres and nows that concretize that” (“Trace,” p. 7) “Pointer-du-doigt,” which is indeed the abstraction par excellence, belongs to language as gesture and as voice, to speech (Sprache) and not to writing, which cannot be said, in the last analysis to point at all. (43).
Final Destinerrance, Auschwitz?:
The Box Car as Loco-Motif of History in The Train
and Europa
The Toy Trains of Europa,
Also discuss Frank Zinneman, The Search and Lars von Trier’s Europa.
The Search involves muteness, misunderstanding, and children reunited with mothers.
Happy / sad ending. Confessional booth with Montgomery Clift in I Confess!
La silence de la mer
Derrida’s film metaphor leads to an account of dream, which is then given a response that Derrida terms an unconscious image that turns his dream upside down, reversing he binary.
How do the train and film figure in this dream dialogue, this dream of dialogue, or bad dream of dialogue, or dialogue as a bad dream, dreamt by the Other.?
When I was very young—and until quite recently—I used to project a film in my mind of someone who, by midnight, plants bombs on the railway: blowing up the enemy=y structure, planting the delayed-action device and then watching the explosion or least hearing it at a distance. I see very well that this image, which translates a deep phantasmatic compulsion, could be illustrated by deconstructive operations, which consist in planting discreetly, with a delayed-action mechanism, devices that all of a sudden put a transit out of commission, making the enemy’s movements more hazardous. But the friend, too, will have to live and think differently, know where he’s going, tread lightly.
Taste of the Secret Polity, 2001, 51-52
Ferrais then quotes from Levinas, who compares Derrida to a Nazi.
“This is, beyond the philosophical scope of propositions, a purely literary effect, the few firsson, the poetry of Derrida. When I read him, I always recall the exodus of 1940. A retreating military unit arrives in an as yet unsuspecting locality, where cafes are open, where the ladies visit the ‘ladies fashion store’, where the hairdressers dress hair and bakers bake; where viscounts meet other viscounts and tell each other stories of viscounts, and where, an hour later, everything is deconstructed and devastated, Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, Wholly Otherwise, trans Simon Critchlety, p. 4
A strange kind of dialogue here, where only people like themselves talk to each other, as if stuck in mirror stages. That is the idea of peace here. The real is purely external to this mirroring.
As well as the steps he takes and does not take in Beyond the Pleasure, what Derrida calls paralysis , p. 337.Principle,
Derrida on Freud and Trains in The Post Card, the train of the child’s Fort-da game, his grandson, the suspended train he could not take when his daughter Sophie died.
The title sequence of John Frankenheimer’s The Train follows a prologue in which a Nazi officer visits a closed Paris museum and surveys some its Impressionist paintings before conversation with the French woman curator about saving rather than burning the “degenerate” art by having it shipped by train to Berlin. The title sequence shows the paintings being packed into crates labeled with the names of the artists, as if the crates were caskets; the activation of the latent connection between museum and mausoleum (noted by Theodor Adorno) in the title sequence is made explicit at the end of the film when long and close up shots of dead French civilians are contrasted with matching long shots and close ups of the scattered crates of paintings lying outside the train cars and left there by the retreating German Army. In this essay, I maintain that The Train’s matching of work of art and human life, and casting of American actor Burt Lancaster and French actress Jeanne Moreau as members of the French Resistance drive over and repress the full and dark history played by the train company used to transport the paintings, namely, the SCNF. In 2006, the French train company was sued by for its role in shipping 67,000 French Jews to Nazi concentration camps.[2]
The last painting we see before the film’s title appears is Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s “Woman with Lilacs” (1880s) (see figure 1, upper left and right). The lilacs take on an anticipatory funeral meaning even though the painting is being saved rather than destroyed.
Figure 1
Moreover, Renoir’s name is the first stenciled on a crate of paintings after the Gaughin painting entitled “When Will You Marry?” is packed up and the crate nailed shut (see figure 1, lower left). The shot of the painting’s title with the rolled up packing material being carried across the screen recalls and even perhaps alludes to the record in the first shot of Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1937), which is being played by a Frenchman in the French mess hall. A similar record player appears in the German officer’s mess as well (See figure 2).
Figure 2
In The Train’s opening title sequence and ending, French POW Vallard’s dream of co-operation with the “good German” von Waldheim is being buried with the paintings along with a recording mechanism for memory that operates on automatic pilot.
Why the connection? Because Renoir’s film takes place in a concentration camp and because a Jewish character is a prisoner in the camp. The Train resists, as it were, the myth of the French Resistance.
Why is the train as the film’s central (titular) character? Why is the train the unstoppable engine of the film? Why doesn’t the train stop making smoke or a puffing sound even after Labiche derails it and turns it off? The train is a figure of twi-lightenment in the film. It is supposed to be on the side of progress, but in WWII, under the Nazis, it becomes a vehicle of regression, the agent of a death drive that destroys human beings in the name of perfecting human being. The montage of crates (as coffins) and the unburied corpses at the end of The Train call up the SNCF’s role in the Vichy regime (never mentioned in the film). The opening text calls up this history inadvertently through the word “cooperation” and by modifying “men” with a phrase that syntactically and uncannily equates “the living and dead” as a “spirit” even it means to separate them:
The SCNF logo appears in several shots, but only in one does it appear near the Nazi insignia stamped on the crates.
The train is a shock to the (railyway) system that routes historical meaning (the evil only they, not we, did is over and can be sanitized, the past can become a prophylactic to secure the future). Notice the way the Nazi insignia in sign in the first shot of the film (below) returns in a visually degraded form near the endof the film in the shot of the French train (the wing shapes at the bottom of the shot, near Lancaster).
We see the shot above after a shot of Lancaster from below on the other side of the train, exactly where two boxcars meet, at the end of a relatively long tracking shot that alternates evenly spaced crates with train wheels.
The Nazi enemy is on side opposite of Lancaster, so here the repressed again returns through a partially legible sign. The Resistance is not resistant.
What is being resisted? Consider the sign in this briefly held Expressionistic shot--"danger of death" with the weird "Z" shape scrawled on it.
Like the often partially visible names of the painters in the crates shown at the end of the film, the sign is only partially visible (it too is a symptom), though, if one knows French, one may infer reasonably that it reads: " [Atten]tion aux [c]atenaires” (“Danger: High Voltage”). (The first word we hear in the film is "Achtung," “attention” in English) The “Z” shape unfolds into from a single point on the left into an open track--like a train track—on the right. The train leaves Paris after a switch is thrown open. What may be read as the letter “Z” loosely resembles an “S” in the style of “SS” (shock troops) lightning-like lettering, opening the French track onto a German track. The mortal danger announced as a partially visible warning to avoid being electrocuted is not just to Colonel von Waldheim (whom Labiche murders a few minutes after this shot) but also to the French Jews the SCNF carried to the camps and who are missing from the film but recalled in the shots of the murdered French hostages. (The barbed wire fences of the death camps were electrified at night.)
A similarly fragmented “Z” shape appears on a Nazi map earlier in the film when Schmitt pays for Labiche’s bill at the inn.
Instead of moving from place to place, we move from place to space (the ashes in the ashtray above the swastika being one destination).
Like the closed switch that Labiche has to thrown open to let Papa Boule take the train out of Paris, the Z mark opens a figurative switch that routes Labiche and von Waldheim on the same destination death track.
The Train does not resist the myth of the French Resistance, it does not totally deconstruct it (as if the Resistance were really collaborators with the Nazis, after all). Instead, the film stalls out in the final shot (the train engine is still on as Labiche limps away) in a refusal to settle scores, as that would mean entering a regime of calculation (which is, in the logic of the film, resisted and transcended by the incalculable value of human life and art). The montage of corpses and crates in the final sequence makes both comparable, but not exchangeable; their value cannot properly be recorded by an accountant.
Neither the numbered (seen tattooed on the boxes in the title sequence) coffins of paintings nor the corpses are reducible to cash value or instrumentality: they remain, beyond calculation. The Train redefines the meaning of collaboration as non-cooperation (between dissenting forces on the same track instead of complicity between forces on seemingly opposite sides of the track).
So troping things becomes a carousel of stagings and intervals.
“The inclusion of images changes the status of the text, prompting a reciprocal effect. The interplay of text, documentary images, and image captions was an important element of the publication for Benjamin. This is demonstrated by notes on the Russian toys and the photo captions, found in the bequest. . . More explicitly than in the shortened essay (whose manuscript has not survived), they deal with the physiognomic aspects of the toy world” p. 73
“In the twenties he was apt to offer philosophical reflections as he brought forth a toy for his son.” Scholem, WB, Friendship, p. 47 (cited on p. 73 as an epigraph).