Talking Movies, Thinking Films — Bruno Surace

A film scholar and a philosopher: Tell us briefly about yourself and your work.

I am not sure how many people would call me a “philosopher”; still, I think I feel like one, at least a little. In fact, if I look at the trajectory of my research - but even more at the way I tend to think about the world - quite a few things seem to point in that direction. By training, I am a semiotician and a scholar of film and media; today I work in Film Studies at the University of Turin, where I teach mainly courses related to cinema, audiovisual culture, and media.

Over the years I have worked on rather different objects: cinema, faces and bodies, horror, digital cultures, AI-generated images, marginal phenomena, or things that might at first appear relatively minor. But I am increasingly convinced that, if the humanities are still to mean something today — at least the kind of humanities I try to practise — their value lies precisely in crossing boundaries: in creating connections between things, getting one’s hands into different kinds of dough and, every now and then, taking the trouble to knead them together. It means trying to escape the sheer verticality of specialised knowledge and looking at objects from an angle that had previously remained hidden; or perhaps did not exist at all.

In this sense, cinema is not so much an object for me to think about as a machine to think with. Films do not merely represent the world: they cut it up, edit it, push some of its possibilities to their limits, and make others visible that, without cinema, we might never even have imagined. Cinema is one of the laboratories in which I practise this activity; at some point, however, it ceases to be merely research and becomes an everyday way of inhabiting the world. In short: when I am not watching films, I quite often have the feeling that they are watching me.

What is your understanding of "humour" proper; or, at least, of those features thereof to which you have paid the keenest attention? And how does your work merge with, or is influenced by, your quotidian encounters with a potentially ubiquitous and ambiguous phenomenon such as humour?

For me, humour is first and foremost an oblique stance towards the world. It always involves a kind of meta-reading, even in its apparently most immediate and bodily forms, such as slapstick. Someone slips on a banana peel and falls: if all we saw were a body losing its balance, there would probably be nothing particularly funny about it. We might be witnessing an accident, a humiliation, or simply somebody’s pain. For that fall to become comic, we need a frame that allows us to read it otherwise. Without this interpretive doubling, slapstick would risk being little more than a form of sadism.

This is why I regard humour as a hermeneutic activity of a very high order, even though, of course, it can express itself through the lowest, most trivial, childish, or downright idiotic forms. When we laugh, willingly or otherwise, we momentarily unfold and expose our habitual ways of making sense of things. From this point of view, humour is very close to play, another activity I take extremely seriously: both create a space in which rules continue to exist, while at the same time being exposed, bent, and temporarily suspended.

I therefore do not believe that anything is intrinsically comic. The comic is instead a certain configuration of the gaze, a relationship between something that happens, a frame, a set of expectations, and someone looking. The very same fall can be funny, tragic, embarrassing, or cruel; the same gesture can become a gag, a meme, an insult, or a catastrophe. The thing itself does not necessarily change. What changes is the way in which it is framed, shaped, and interpreted.

When we make jokes, whether to make others laugh or simply to amuse ourselves, we are therefore playing with the rules of our linguistic and cultural world. We move sideways just far enough to see that those rules are, precisely, rules, rather than the world itself. It is a controlled loss of balance, something like the movement of a stunt performer: for a moment, the ordinary arrangement of things is disrupted so that another one can become visible.

Of course, this displacement can also open onto something rather less reassuring. Quite often, behind whatever makes us laugh, the abyss is perfectly visible. And perhaps that is why I am less interested in the familiar idea of laughing at the possible than in the rather more vertiginous prospect of laughing at the impossible.

Thinkers as different as Nietzsche, Judith Shklar, and Derrida have argued that cruelty is baffling because, even if we want to eliminate it from human life, it always finds a way to re-emerge therein, almost as if it were part and parcel of the same human life. Has cruelty ever played a significant role in your work's purview, and/or your understanding of social and cultural phenomena?

In my work, cruelty and humour are constantly in conversation with one another, perhaps because both are ways of positioning ourselves in relation to others - and sometimes in relation to ourselves. In a certain sense, there is something complementary about them: both require distance.

In order to laugh, I have to shift my position, however slightly and however briefly, in relation to what I am seeing. Cruelty also involves a displacement: the possibility of turning somebody else’s pain into something I can contemplate, manipulate, represent, or even enjoy. This is precisely where things become interesting, because that distance is never neutral. Humour can reveal it, destabilise it, denounce it; but humour can also produce and reinforce it. It can allow us to laugh with someone, or it can establish that someone as the person being laughed at.

From this perspective, cruelty is also a question of the gaze and, speaking as a semiotician, of enunciation: who is looking at whom? From what position? Who has the privilege of establishing the frame within which something counts as funny rather than atrocious?

Cinema, of course, is an extraordinary laboratory for this kind of problem. Its history is full of bodies falling, being beaten, humiliated, mutilated, transformed, chased, devoured - and very often we laugh while watching them. One only has to consider the surprisingly intimate relationship between slapstick and violence. But the same ambiguity is everywhere in contemporary digital culture: in cringe, memes, accident videos, the spectacularisation of humiliation, the aestheticisation of gore. The same question keeps returning: when somebody’s suffering becomes an image, and that image becomes shareable, amusing, or even desirable, what exactly has happened?

Because I often work on objects situated at margins and thresholds, I inevitably find myself in this territory where the comic and the cruel can no longer be clearly separated. And perhaps it is precisely this indeterminacy that interests me. Humour is not necessarily the opposite of cruelty. Sometimes it is cruelty’s disguise; sometimes its antidote; and sometimes it is the critical instrument through which cruelty finally becomes visible as such.

Are there two or three works that, when it comes to addressing any of the themes fuelling my own philosophical and literary production, you would describe as true "classics" and, therefore, advise the reader of this blog to familiarise themselves with — the way, say, Plato's Republic or Machiavelli's Prince can be said to be "classics" in politics? And are there any works from the past ten years that you would equally recommend?

As I said earlier, I think that being a humanist today means not merely getting one’s hands into different kinds of dough, but occasionally taking the trouble to knead them together. Moving from field to field, one therefore has to cultivate something of the saltapicchio (an Italian word for a restless creature forever hopping from one place to another) while hopefully retaining the seriousness of the scholar.

If I had to name a few books that taught me something about this way of proceeding, I would begin with Roland Barthes’s Mythologies. It continues to show me how one can take terribly seriously what a culture regards as insignificant, ordinary, or even stupid, and how apparently minor objects can provide a way of reading an entire society. It is probably one of the books that did most to legitimise my pleasure in studying things that, at first glance, seem to deserve no legitimisation whatsoever.

I would then choose Umberto Eco’s Lector in fabula, published in English, in expanded form, as The Role of the Reader, because it teaches something that remains fundamental to me: texts are not containers from which ready-made meanings can simply be extracted. They are machines that anticipate, provoke, and at the same time resist our interpretations. Meaning therefore emerges within a space of negotiation, and this seems to me equally true of a novel, a film, a joke, and probably a great deal of social life.

The third would be Jacques Aumont’s À quoi pensent les films? - literally, What Do Films Think About? The title already contains a small provocation that I feel very close to: what if films were not merely things that we interpret, but forms that, in their own way, actually think? This idea runs through much of my relationship with cinema. I am not particularly interested in using a film simply to illustrate a theory formulated elsewhere; I want to understand what theory the film itself might produce through images, editing, bodies, durations, and spaces.

Slavoj Žižek should probably appear somewhere here too. He has been important to me precisely because of his ability to use cinema as a space for thought, and, naturally, because of the almost structural role played in his thinking by jokes, obscene anecdotes, and paradoxes. But I confess that choosing one Žižek book is almost impossible for me. Perhaps because I tend to think of him less as the author of individual books than as a kind of device: a theoretical machine fuelled by Hegel, Lacan, Hitchcock, dirty jokes, and sudden appearances of They Live. And perhaps that is exactly as it should be.

Among more recent works, I would unhesitatingly recommend Alessandro Gori’s Vendo tiroide causa doppio regalo, by the writer also known as Lo Sgargabonzi. Gori is not an academic philosopher, and that is precisely one of the reasons I would include him here. His writing combines an almost surgical command of comic mechanisms with something much darker: illness, death, failure, humiliation, tenderness. The result is a literature permanently suspended between the comic and the tragic, in which laughter does not make the abyss disappear; if anything, it hangs a small lightbulb over it.

He is also a writer who works intensely through images, montage, collisions, and sudden shifts of register. Reading him, I sometimes have the impression that I am confronted with a peculiar form of written cinema. Which perhaps brings us back to where we began: to things that manage to think precisely because they refuse to remain obediently in their allotted place.

Perhaps it is time someone translated Gori. Or perhaps it is impossible.

Bruno Surace's website: www.brunosurace.it