Contrapuntal Close-up: The Cinema of John Cassavetes and the Agitation of Sense

Abstract

It depends on us, so it is said (Heidegger 1996, 128) Jean-Luc Nancy writes that there is no sense outside our being-together, no sense without us. The philosophical import of this argument emerges from the countersignature of a necessary corollary: that our being-together remains an outside to any specific assignation of sense. According to American director John Cassavetes this is the duty of cinema. His cinema testifies with the use of close-up to a modality of making sense that rests entirely on an in-appropriable term: us. What seems to emerge from the work of Cassavetes is that our way of making sense (therefore of having a world, the only one possible) maintains itself, on one side, on our beingtogether and, on the other, on the impossibility to categorize 'us' under a particular form of being-together. The question can be formulated in this way: is it not perhaps the case that for us to keep making sense, us has to escape the very possibility of a definition? These introductory remarks anticipate a description of the method here followed. The philosophical approach to a filmmaker is not taken simply as the possibility to unravel a convergence between concept and image. The task cannot only be that of treating a film as a philosophical example or to use a concept as a comprehensive approach to a particular cinematographic work. It is a matter of investigating how both philosophy and cinema creatively confront a problem: in this case the problem of our being-together in its relation with the question of sense. It is therefore not a matter of providing an entrance into Nancy's philosophy -in terms of powers of existence or absolute realism (Derrida 2005, 46) -or of describing Cassavetes's cinema -often labeled as cinema vérité -but of how cinema reopens the sense of what happens between us. Moving between philosophy and cinema one is always asked to look for their internal alliance and their creative possibilities. It will be thus a matter of exposing the cinematographic idea as it happens in the image and not to impose ideas from the outside. This work will proceed by unraveling three movements. The first part will treat the question of sense as posed by Jean-Luc Nancy; the second will investigate the relation of sense with cinema; the third will approach a