Jacques Rancière's 'La fable cinématographique' Complicates Cinema's Narrative Role

Jacques Rancière's new essay collection, 'La fable cinématographique,' published by Éditions du Seuil, gathers texts and lectures on cinema from the past decade. Rancière argues that cinema's fable is a 'contraried fable,' challenging the notion that cinema simply tells stories. He traces this idea back to Jean Epstein's 1921 text 'Bonjour cinéma,' which attributed to cinema the capacity to express a 'tragedy in suspense' before narrative. Rancière links this to Maeterlinck's 'immobile tragedy' and Joyce's 'Ulysses.' He contends that cinema, originally conceived as an art free from fiction, ironically became the most faithful guardian of storytelling. The book engages with Gilles Deleuze's 'time-image' and Jean-Luc Godard's deconstruction of Hitchcock's narratives, both of which Rancière sees as exemplifying the 'aesthetic regime of art.' The collection includes analyses of Murnau, Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Mann, and Nicholas Ray, with notable pages on Rossellini's 'physics of bodies.' Rancière positions cinema as an art that both disrupts and renews narrative, operating within the aesthetic regime of art.