The little tramp has remained on the pavement, still looking into the shop where the girl is once again to be seen talking and laughing with her friend. His presence is clearly an embarrassment to the girls, for they keep glancing out in his direction and now are obviously arguing about what to do about him. Finally the girl turns to the till, opens it and takes out some coins. She steps out into the street once more, and once more approaches the little tramp. Now she is trying to get him to accept the money, but he keeps refusing: No no, I wouldn't dream of it. Please. No no. Please, you must. No I couldn't, really.
Think how such a scene would be in a talkie. How embarrassing the dialogue. How soon it would be over. But scenes such as this are the stuff of the silent cinema, as he mimes dignified refusal and she mimes passionate entreaty. Finally, as we had prayed and hoped — but would it ever happen? — she takes his hand and thrusts the coins into it.
In my memory the camera has settled on her face, and what follows is seen as he sees it, close to. She does not need to be a particularly good actress. Indeed, it would be a mistake to try and get her to register in detail on her face what is happening to her. For, in a strange way, it is now we who are doing all the work. It is we who hold his hand in ours. It is we who suddenly become aware of that hand as somehow familiar. It is we who, in a long instant, make the amazing, the impossible connection.
That instant is not just one of the most powerful filmic experiences I have ever had, it seems to transcend art altogether. It is what Barthes, trying to understand why certain photos had the power to move him while others left him cold, however much he might admire them, called a punctum. Barthes had to elaborate a complex theory about photographs to account for this, suggesting that the essence of photography is the message: X was there (and where is he/she now?). The explanation of why an improbable and sentimental recognition scene such as this one seems to tear itself right out of the fabric of the film in which it is embedded and strike at the very core of my being seems even more puzzling. For what have the flower-girl and the little tramp to do with me? An hour and a half ago I did not even know of their existence. Since then I have watched their antics on the screen, laughed occasionally, been occasionally moved, but nothing had led me to expect this feeling of being opened up, simultaneously destroyed and reconstituted, which I am now experiencing. What is going on?
We think (when we stop to think about it at all) of other people as occupying an objective space in front of us, and of our knowledge of them as being derived from our ability to see. But this is not in fact how we apprehend others. At least part of what enters into an apprehension of them is our common bodily and kinaesthetic reaction to a physical world which we both inhabit. For we are embodied, and it is our bodies which give us common access to the physical world; in other words we are participators, not spectators, and it is through embodiment that we participate. Merleau-Ponty, who has done more than anyone else to draw this fact to our attention and to draw the consequences from it, illustrates this with the following anecdote:
I am watching this man who is motionless in sleep and suddenly he wakes. He opens his eyes. He makes a move toward his hat, which has fallen beside him, and picks it up to protect himself from the sun. What finally convinces me that my sun is the same as his, that he sees and feels it as I do, and that after all there are two of us perceiving the world, is precisely that which, at first, prevented me from conceiving the other — namely that his body belongs among my objects, that it is one of them, that it appears in my world. When the man asleep in the midst of my objects begins to make gestures toward them, to make use of them, I cannot doubt for a moment that the world to which he is orientated [que le monde auquel il s'adresse] is truly the same world that I perceive.
Why do I immediately and intuitively understand what is going on? The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is because the man is neither an object in my visual field nor myself. If he were merely an object in my visual field I would have to try and grasp the meaning of his gestures by an elaborate system of interpretation that would remain for ever incomplete. This is the situation of the protagonist in the novels of Kafka and Robbe-Grillet, but we feel that it is unusual, counter-intuitive. The protagonists of those novels seem to bear the burden of having to understand rather than simply living, and the novels show that this is an unnatural state to be in, even if it is one the protagonists seem condemned to endure. But even if the man was, somehow, me (if, without my having realised it, I was, for example, seeing myself in the mirror), then exactly the same thing would occur, as I ran round my subjective labyrinth seeking an explanation. This is what happens, for example, in Beckett's Molloy, where Molloy, looking at his own hand or leg, cannot make much sense of it but comes to the tentative conclusion that it must be his since it is hardly likely to belong to anyone else. But again, while we have no difficulty in understanding this (it is the kind of thing that happens to us from time to time), we feel that Molloy's relation to his own body is unnatural (and are compelled to laugh at it). But, as Merleau-Ponty notes, the man in his example is there ‘in a certain place in my [visual] field, but that place at least was ready for him ever since I began to perceive’. It is ‘the experience that I make out of my hold on the world’ which ‘makes me capable of perceiving another myself, provided that in the interior of my world there opens up a gesture resembling his own’.
It is because I move in the same world as other people that I can respond to them as to myself. It is because the man I see is asleep under the same sun as I who see him live under, because he is asleep amid objects I am myself familiar with, in a landscape I too have rested in, with a hat such as I too might have worn, and making a gesture I myself have often made, that I have no doubts at all about what it is he is doing and why he is doing it. No particular empathy is required, merely the innate knowledge of my own body as existing in the world.
But if that is the case then the phenomenon of film is profoundly paradoxical. The world appears to us on a screen in a darkened room and with no effort at all we enter it. We inhabit that world as we inhabit our own, but there is one crucial difference: we have left our bodies behind. The advantage of this is that we can live out vicariously all sorts of adventures, knowing in the core of our being that we will always be safe. The disadvantage is that, having left our bodies behind on the seat of the cinema, nothing that happens on the screen can truly affect us.
Film thus allows us to come alive for a time, to act and suffer in ways far more decisive and meaningful than we can ever experience in ordinary life, and to repeat that whenever we want (if we have the means to satisfy that want). But though it feeds a genuine human hunger, its food is of poor nutritional value. For the sky under which the man is waking up, on film, is not the same as the one under which I am watching him. He exists so palpably there before me that I can wake up with him, shield myself from the sun with him, but I cannot cross over to where he is lying. I know that, but the paradox is that I can only experience him if I deny that knowledge, and yet my experience seems to be predicated on that ability to cross over and nudge him. There is thus a profound contradiction in my experience of him, and the repression of that contradiction from my consciousness, allied to my hunger for his presence, contains, as we will see, all the ingredients necessary to addiction.