It is rare that we would celebrate the work of a film actor, not however because we disparage their art, but for the intimacy between the cinematographic art and entertainment which renders this artist’s art suspect. This is perhaps unfair. And if the aesthetic experience, aside from whatever pleasure it brings, changes our perspective on the world, subverting and/or expanding it, then there is no reason to exclude the film actor from our consideration.
In this instance, we mark the passing of Jean-Louis Trintignant for reasons that are undoubtedly personal, for his decidedly remarkable roles in films which were aesthetically formative for us – we are tempted to say “radical” –, that is, for those of us of the collective; in films such as Dino Risi’s Il Sorpasso (1962), Costa-Gavras’ Z (1969), Eric Rohmer’s Ma Nuit Chez Maud (1969), Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours: Red (1994), Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012).
Naivety, some will say, or worse, dilettantism, to think that film – or any other art – can change anything concrete. And what does an actor like Trintignant have to do with “radical politics”, or “anarchism”? Nothing, many will say. But since when do we judge art exclusively – today, one alienated form of expression among others – by the ideological identification of its creators? And does not art change us?
Trintignant was film and theatre actor, film maker, and more recently, he gave himself over to public recitals of poetry.
Originally from the rural french south, he would often describe himself as a peasant, and like all good peasants, someone who carefully cultivates what he plants, tends to its growth and harvests, nurturing what remains behind.
We share below a reading (in french) of Jacques Prévert, Boris Vian and Robert Desnos, by Jean-Louis Trintignant, or what we could call Trintignant among the libertarians.
Je voyais les poètes libertaires comme des anarchistes pacifistes … mais ils sont aussi très violents, amoureux, passionnés. Je suis moi-même un anarchiste.
Jean-Louis Trintignant, Le Devoir (22/09/2012)
Reflections after the Stonewall Riots: Michel Foucault
In my opinion, as important as it may be, tactically speaking, to say at a given moment, ‘I am a homosexual,’ over the long run, in a wider strategy, the question of knowing who we are sexually should no longer be posed. It is not then a question of affirming one’s sexual identity, but of refusing to allow sexuality as well as the different forms of sexuality the right to identify you. The obligation to identify oneself through and by a given type of sexuality must be refused.
Michel Foucault, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice
Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity
Michel Foucault
We share below an interview with Michel Foucault conducted by B. Gallagher and A. Wilson in Toronto in June 1982. It appeared in The Advocate 400 (7 August 1984), pp. 26-30 and 58. The interview is included in the first volume of the english language edition of The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, for The New Press, New York, 1997, pp. 163-173.
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