‘Tracking shots are a question of morality’: Ethics, aesthetics, documentary

Probably the best-known critical statement about film and ethics is Jean-Luc Godard’s quip in 1959 that ‘le travelling est affaire de morale’ (‘tracking shots are a question of morality’). Asked during a round-table discussion of Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) whether the unease generated by the film was moral or aesthetic, Godard provocatively reformulated a remark made by Luc Moullet in defence of the films of Samuel Fuller: ‘la morale est affaire de travellings’ (‘morality is a question of tracking shots’).1 Both these claims posit a connection between ethics and aesthetics; more specifically, they suggest that moral significance is generated by the formal organization of pro-filmic reality through mise-en-scène, rather than intrinsic to that reality. While Moullet’s comment carries the reactionary implication that morality is only a question of tracking shots, Godard’s version implies that an ethical hermeneutics might destabilize traditional distinctions between form and content. In Godard’s account, the tracking shot functions as a synecdoche for

cinematic form and mise-en-scène. Such affirmations of the moral and, by implication, political significance of mise-en-scène may be seen as strategic at a time when cinema’s status as a serious art form was still contested, and underpinned the mise-en-scène criticism pioneered in the 1950s in the French journal Cahiers du cinéma. Yet although Godard’s provocation retains little of its original polemical force today – ironically, it has been reduced to a cliché – much contemporary film criticism remains indebted to his insight. ‘To write about cinema, today, is to inherit … [an] idée fixe: tracking shots are a question of morality’, observed one French critic in 1998 of a formulation which has also found resonance in contexts outside France.2 For Godard’s remark raises a question of continuing pertinence in film studies: to what extent does aesthetic form, or style, determine ethical meaning? While this question has been addressed from a variety of perspectives in

film theory and criticism, it needs to be understood within the context of a Western tradition of aesthetic inquiry which predates the invention of cinema. Moullet and Godard were heirs to a legacy of philosophical conjecture about the relation between aesthetics and ethics, or the beautiful and the good, which stretches back to the ancient Greeks. In dialogues such as the Phaedrus, the Philebus and the Symposium, Plato suggested that our appreciation of beauty can lead to knowledge of moral goodness, even though he had misgivings about mimesis and famously excluded poets and painters from his ideal republic. Aristotle responded in the Nicomachean Ethics by defending imitation and art as conducive to moral formation. These connections were reconsidered by Enlightenment philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, whose views on the moral value of aesthetic experience retain an influence today and occupy a prominent, if embattled, position in Continental thought. Implicitly, in asserting that tracking shots were constitutive of morality, Moullet and Godard were simultaneously reclaiming and contesting this legacy. On the one hand, they were staking out a place for cinema and cinephilia in the history of Western aesthetics; on the other, they were proposing that we require a new account of the alliance between beauty and goodness to understand the affective and cognitive experiences offered by film. This chapter begins with a brief look back at theories of aesthetics which

emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It then turns to two attempts to rethink the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in the light of the specific properties of cinematic technology, one in French cinephilic criticism and the other in North American documentary theory. The rest of the chapter aims to elucidate a particular conjunction of aesthetic concerns and ethical vision though analysis of a documentary at the centre of recent debates about filmmakers’ responsibilities toward their subjects. It is important to emphasize at the outset that this chapter deals with only two of many approaches to film form that are explicitly ethical in their orientation and to acknowledge the limitations of those considered. Despite its declared interest in questions of morality, the mise-en-scène criticism promoted by Moullet and Godard in the

mid-twentieth century has been condemned for its romantic, pre-structuralist view of art and politically reactionary formalism. Such approaches provide at best suggestive points of departure for ethical criticism, rather than fully developed interpretative frameworks. Moreover, the models of ethics discussed in this chapter either predate poststructuralism, or, in the case of one documentary theorist, reject it as having minimal regard for ethical experience (an allegation which is refuted throughout this book).3 Poststructuralist critics have challenged some of the fundamental beliefs of the Enlightenment philosophers alluded to here: their faith in universal humanity, a transcendental, unified subject and emancipatory grand narratives of science and reason. Subsequent chapters of this book highlight the problems with a Kantian view of the moral agent as rational, autonomous and universal and examine alternative models of ethical subjectivity.

In Critique of Judgement (1790) Kant argues that ‘the beautiful is a symbol of the morally good’.4 Kant does not mean that beautiful objects are of intrinsic moral worth. On the contrary, he insists that aesthetics and ethics are entirely separate domains, but explains that there is an ‘analogy’ between the ways in which we judge aesthetic and moral value.5 The four moments of the beautiful described in this text bear a structural resemblance to the theory of moral action he had previously outlined in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). Kant maintains that judgements of what is beautiful, just like judgements of what is good, are disinterested, even if they coincide with personal inclination, and universally valid or normative in status. Furthermore, both are autonomous, or freely made, rather than dictated by external laws. Just as a moral act is the result of a free individual choice made in accordance with duty, so an experience of beauty is the consequence of the ‘free-play’ of the imagination and understanding which organize the sensuous components of an object into a ‘purposive’ form.6 In Kant’s account, these structural similarities mean that aesthetic experience can act as a ‘propaedeutic’ for morality; beauty can prepare us for moral action by revealing its structure symbolically through sensible form.7