Nicole Brenez’s On the Figure in General and the Body in Particular: An Introduction to Figurative Analysis in Cinema

Figure, Body, Figurative Invention, Cinema: As a young researcher, theorist, film critic, and associate professor (maître de conférences), Nicole Brenez spent ten years developing an original and innovative approach to film studies that is as rich as it is challenging, speculative, and disruptive. Drawing from a wide range of philosophical, literary, and artistic sources, Brenez’s groundbreaking work sought to renew film criticism and reimagine the possibilities of cinema analysis. This approach, now accessible to English-speaking audiences through Ted Fendt’s recent translation, has garnered the attention of Anthem Press, a publisher specializing in academic research and positioning itself as an alternative to leading global university presses.

Today, Brenez is widely recognized as a professor at Sorbonne University and La Fémis, as well as for her role as a programmer of experimental cinema at the Cinémathèque Française. She is particularly celebrated for her passionate advocacy of experimental films. More recently, she has drawn attention for her collaboration with Jean-Luc Godard on his later works and her efforts to shape his cinematic legacy following his death.¹ The essays in this newly translated collection offer a rare opportunity for serious English-speaking cinephiles – i.e. readers of Senses of Cinema – to delve into the full breadth and depth of Brenez’s contributions to film studies, extending beyond her more recent, well-known engagements.

Book cover for Nicole Brenez’s latest book on Jean-Luc Godard (2023)

Decoding the Title: Philosophical Roots and Cinematic Vision

A close examination of the book’s title already reveals much about its form and objectives. In French, On the Figure is rendered as De la figure, immediately evoking connections with titles from Antiquity, such as De rerum natura (Lucretius), De anima (Aristotle, in its Latin version), and De civitate Dei (Augustine). This connection reflects the key role of ancient thinkers such as Lucretius, Heraclitus, and Aristotle in Nicole Brenez’s theoretical framework. In a recent exchange, Nicole Brenez remarked: “I cannot superimpose ‘contemporary’ and ‘current’: the fragments of Heraclitus will always be more relevant to me than most contemporary writers.”²

This title also echoes key works from the French classical period of the 16th to 18th centuries, such as De l’esprit des lois (The Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu), De la servitude volontaire (Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, Étienne de La Boétie), and De la recherche de la vérité (The Search After Truth, Nicolas Malebranche).³ On the Figure thus inherits not only the philosophical traditions of Antiquity but also the spirit of the European Enlightenment, a legacy that, as the 20th century was drawing to a close at the time of publication, had been under significant threat for decades.

The distinction between Figure and Body in the title, with the Body serving as a particular within the larger category of Figure, lies at the heart of the articles assembled in this volume. Brenez’s focus on what bodies can do on film, and what film can do to bodies, distinguishes and elevates her thought, anchoring it in a tradition that is probably lesser known to non-French readers: that of French artists, poets, critics, and filmmakers from the first half of the 20th century, including Antonin Artaud, Louis Delluc, and Jean Epstein. Artaud’s work, particularly his Theater of Cruelty⁴ and his reflections on cinema,⁵ explored the body as a site of raw, visceral experience. Artaud emphasized the physical presence and expressive power of the body, focusing on its ability to evoke deeper, often unconscious emotional responses. In this sense, the body becomes both a figurative and literal “figure” through which essential, primal aspects of human existence are visually communicated, rather than intellectually – a theme Brenez explores and expands upon in her own writings. Louis Delluc contributed to this discourse by introducing the concept of photogénie as applied to cinema, suggesting that the body, when framed by the camera, possesses an intrinsic power to convey more than words or conventional storytelling ever could.⁶ Jean Epstein further developed this concept of photogénie, particularly emphasizing the body as central to understanding the nature of cinematic images.⁷ For Epstein, a close-up of a human face or body could reveal hidden truths, emotions, and states of being otherwise inaccessible in everyday life. His notion that cinema captures the “spirit” of things – especially human bodies – resonates with the idea of the image as a medium for unveiling deeper, intrinsic aspects of existence, an idea that Brenez’s analysis continues to engage with and illuminate.

Finally, by choosing figurative invention in her subtitle, Brenez emphasizes what lies at the heart of the filmmaker’s craft and makes cinema, a relatively young art form, such a fertile and exciting field: invention. In Brenez’s work, figurative invention refers to the creative and interpretive processes through which cinema invents and reinvents ways of representing figures – particularly bodies – on screen. It encompasses, but goes beyond, mere technical or formal innovation. In this context, invention is a dynamic process in which cinema doesn’t simply depict or reproduce the body, but actively reconfigures it, opening up new ways to understand the human condition, identity, and existence through visual and figurative means. 

This is evident, for example, in the text “Unusual Bodies: Robert Bresson with Jean Eustache, Philippe Garrel, and Monte Hellman” (pp. 23-32), where the reappearance of Bresson’s Mouchette (1967) in the figure of Françoise in Eustache’s Ms petites amoureuses (My Little Loves, 1974) serves as a form of healing and resolution for the emotional wounds left by the young girl’s death in Bresson’s film. “Imitation is therefore no longer a reiteration but a resurrection” (p. 26).

An image drawn from the author’s personal copy of De la figure. The visuals help support the argument connecting Bresson and Eustache

Exploring the Stylistic Tapestry of On the Figure

At first, On the Figure may present itself as a challenging read due to its wide variety of text structures. The transitions between sections can be disorienting, and the overall paratactic arrangement of the book might leave readers initially struggling to grasp the coherence of figurative analysis. However, the book ultimately achieves perhaps the most vital aim of critical writing: it ignites the reader’s desire to engage further, both with books and with films.

As the reader progresses through On the Figure, the structural diversity of the articles becomes immediately striking. The book contains developed theoretical explorations that engage deeply with multiple authors and works, drawing from a wide range of philosophical and critical sources, alongside shorter, incisive pieces that deliver a swift, guerrilla-style impact. There are also Benjaminian collections of quotes, personal essays, and reflective passages. Clearly, On the Figure showcases a critic actively experimenting with and refining her stylistic approaches. As Nicole Brenez herself notes: “Working with literary forms is an integral part of critical work, and I wanted to experiment with all kinds of forms: lapidary, pamphlet, poetic, ready-made.”⁸ Despite this stylistic variety, the shifts in form never feel arbitrary or gratuitous. Instead, each text’s structure emerges as a necessary reflection of its subject matter and position within the broader narrative arc of the collection.

For example, while we cannot know how Tag Gallagher reacted upon receiving Brenez’s dense opening letter, the choice to begin the book in an epistolary style immediately forges a connection with the reader. It is as though Brenez is addressing them directly. Later in the book, different styles are woven together within individual essays. For instance, in “Anti-Bodies: Examples of the Classical Body in the Work of Jean Genet, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Gus Van Sant,” Brenez incorporates free-standing quotes in italics into the third section of her typically dialectical analysis of the classical body in modern cinema, imbuing the text with a distinctly poetic resonance.⁹ The book’s stylistic exploration and its reflection on the literary structure of critical writing make On the Figure essential and inspiring reading for any aspiring critic or writer.

Figurative Analysis: A New Lens

Figurative analysis, figural analysis: The choice to focus on the concept of figure, drawn from Eric Auerbach’s seminal work Figura,¹⁰ should not surprise when one takes into account Nicole Brenez’s status as “Professeur agrégée de Lettres Modernes,” a prestigious academic training that attests to her grounding in literature and literary criticism. The above-mentioned letter to American critic Tag Gallagher serves as a prelude with definitions and axioms on which the articles that follow will draw and will test. Challenged to define what “figurative analysis” in cinema entails, Brenez responds with what may seem like a pirouette but actually proves powerfully simple: “To consider cinema from a figural angle” (p. ix). Brenez claims her only goal is to take into account problems that are paradoxically often neglected in films. She then goes on to provide four principles: (1) to consider that a film takes precedence over its context; (2) to consider a film’s components as forming elements, not entities; (3) to consider a film elements as questions; and (4) to see how cinema problematizes what it treats.

This ambitious program functions as both a guiding statement and a methodology for the entire collection. The attentive reader will appreciate seeing it applied across a vast spectrum of film genres, ranging from silent films (Heinrich Hauser) to classics (Eisenstein, Welles, Rossellini), from masters of horror (Argento, De Palma) to contemporary action cinema (John Woo), and from independent filmmakers (Fassbinder, Cassavetes, Ferrara) to experimental auteurs (Brakhage, Jack Smith). As Nicole Brenez herself puts it: “It was essential to work on the broadest possible range of films to demonstrate the overall effectiveness of figurative analysis, proving in practice that it could be enlightening for fiction as well as documentary, for experimental cinema as well as industrial cinema, for early cinema as well as contemporary films, and for films circulating in traditional cinema as well as those produced by television.”¹¹

Bullet in the Head

Nicole Brenez takes care to assert early in the book that “figurative method is not a dogmatic method and it is not destined to become one” (p. ix). When asked whether figurative analysis has led to fruitful research over the past twenty-five years, she reiterates: 

Personally, I avoid anything related to dogma, doctrine, or even obligation beyond the moral realm, for political reasons. Perhaps also, in the field of cinema, because I began my studies during the late phase of semiology, where discussions were often focused on concepts rather than on the films themselves. I have never sought to create a school or impose this method. In any case, a technique gains legitimacy because it is useful and effective in its concrete applications, not through its terminological apparatus – the paradigm of such abstract functioning being theology.¹² 

To some extent, the composite nature of On the Figure discourages readers from seeking a doctrinal framework that could be simply applied to their own research. Nevertheless, terms such as figurative logic and figurative economy have become increasingly common in film studies, which, according to Brenez, “is fine as long as they are used with precision.”¹³

Mapping the Collection

From this point, the collection is divided into six parts, followed by an epilogue. After briefly describing each section, I will provide a carefully selected quote that captures Nicole Brenez’s distinctive style, depth, and incisive analysis. My hope is that these examples will further inspire readers to explore and refer back to On the Figure.

Part I: Figurative Economies

In texts on John Woo (with long developments on Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes, 1976), a favorite of Brenez), Jack Smith, Bresson and his influence on Eustache, Garrel and Monte Hellman, and a text which reunites Tourneur, Argento, and John McTiernan, Nicole Brenez applies the tools of figurative analysis to explore, in widely different cinemas, the inventiveness of these authors. 

Excerpt 1 (On the use of dissolves in Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)): “But these are dissolves and thus not phenomena emerging with the narrative space but on the film print itself and, if the monster is to be found anywhere, it is here in the optical economy, in these unjustifiable fade-outs, as though the film stock itself were breathing” (p. 37).

Comment: For Nicole Brenez, the film itself is a body, and she goes as far as interpreting its breathing.

Part II: Adventures of the Classical Body in Modern Cinema

This relatively shorter part encompasses two long texts: one on Eisenstein, one on Genet, Fassbinder and Gus Van Sant. It concludes on a short personal perspective on Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980).

Excerpt 2: “Night. Born of electrical currents, a naked and athletic body suddenly surges onto the sinister asphalt of an unkempt street in Los Angeles.¹⁴ Crouching and bent inwards, the body is shown in profile, its ovoidal pose evoking both a gymnast on an Attic amphora and Leonardo’s geometric studies of the fetus or even the crouching adolescent that Michelangelo planned to place on the upper molding of Lorenzo de Medici’s Florentine tomb. It comes from the future but returns from the depths of iconographic history. Everyone recognizes it: It is the Terminator, that beautiful, customized form. It is also inhabited, but by a machine to the detriment of affects” (pp. 68-69).

Comment: The influence of Erwin Panofsky is palpable here, where Nicole Brenez recognizes Antique and Renaissance sculpture in James Cameron’s films.

Part III: New Abstractions in Figurative Invention

Abel Ferrara and Hong Kong cinema again in a first text on the contemporary film character (especially through The Blackout (Abel Ferrara, 1996) and Dou (The Blade, Tsui Hark, 1995)), followed by three separate texts on Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), Police (Maurice Pialat, 1985), and Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959).

Excerpt 3: “In fact, I would suggest that Welles is more interested in figure than in space. Narrative construction, editing, depth and complex, luminous plastics are just a means to an end: the impossibility of combining these diverse figures and attributing them a stable state that would define the character. Figurative mutability tears characters out of space and submits them to time. For me, the depth of field in Citizen Kane does not look like an end in itself but Welles’s preferred method – because it’s the most paradoxical – to affirm the indeterminacy of existence” (p. 86).

Comment: Where Nicole Brenez applies figurative analysis to Welles’s use of depth of field, providing a fresh perspective on the topic after Sartre, Bazin, and Deleuze, nothing less.

Part IV: Summonses: Figures of the Actor

Two evolved texts on Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte (Beware of a Holy Whore, R.W. Fassbinder, 1971) and A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavettes, 1974), and a short glimpse at Lassie Come Home (Fred M. Wilcox, 1943).

Excerpt 4 (On the character of Mabel, played by Gena Rowlands, in A Woman Under the Influence): “One of Mabel’s inventions, maybe the most extraordinary, leads her to bend over a body. One of the guests, a black worker Nick brings to breakfast, starts to sing. He sings Verdi’s Celeste Aïda. Mabel approaches and bends down far too close to his face, far too close to his mouth, far too close to his song. She is looking for the secret of his voice, she is looking for the secret of his beauty. She approaches this man as if she were redefining the other person’s body, seeing in it something other than what we see before her intervention: She sees the sensation of the song and offers us its intuition” (p. 121).

Comment: Here, Nicole Brenez’s ability to extract a sample from the film and elevate its meaning for us shines through: the power of the actress to redefine someone else’s body.

Part V: Image Circuits

One of the longer parts: A focus on the actor as a dancer with a whole piece on dance in cinema, including a revelatory section on John Travolta; a rare occurrence in the corpus: a woman filmmaker with Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970); a text on the power of visual study with Al Razutis, Ken Jacobs, and Brian De Palma; an analysis of Liberté, la nuit (Freedom at Night, Philippe Garrel, 1984); and a return to Hong Kong with Ying huhng mouh leuih (Heroes Shed No Tears, John Woo, 1984).

Excerpt 5 (On the shower scene in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)): “In a more subterranean and problematic manner, the sequence allows us to consider the performative properties of the moving images, that is, their nature as acts and not only as reflections. Here, shot changes serve as knife slashes much more so than the blows by the shadow, which are objectively consecrated to tearing the shower curtain, that is, the void. This time, a journey takes us from a self-actualizing mental image to an affirmation of the image as the most violent act possible via the violence done to the image by the figurative taboo weighing over it” (p. 160).

Stills from the shower scene in Psycho

Comment: Marion Crane killed by Psycho’s editor rather than by the character of Anthony Perkins: pure speculative genius.

Part VI: Theoretical Invention

A study of terminology in Barthes, Eisenstein, Benjamin, and Epstein, followed by two texts on two important experimental filmmakers: Paul Sharits and Kirk Tougas.

Excerpt 6: “What is it in cinema that cuts up? What organizes the relations between part and whole, fragment and other, unity and punctuation, principle and secondary? What drives a filmmaker to confront two systems of proportion in one and the same film or to invent a discordant economy to show something about the body, time or the human community? Roland Barthes’ response: ‘the knife of value’” (p. 179).

Comment: This opening of the text on Barthes, Eisenstein, Benjamin, and Epstein illustrates perfectly Nicole Brenez’s incisive style and the cutting power of figurative analysis.

Epilogue: The Accident

A two-page verbatim quote from the work of French archaeologist, prehistorian, and ethnologist André Leroi-Gourhan that highlights Brenez’s ability to draw value from a wide range of sources in the human and social sciences, just as she finds equal worth in various types of films – whether commercial, experimental, industrial, or pedagogical.

On the Figure draws its critical apparatus from a wide array of philosophers, theoreticians, filmmakers, writers, poets, painters, sculptors, and critics. In the French edition of the book, I counted nearly 190 unique author names referenced in the margin notes throughout.¹⁵ This constitutes a parallel corpus to that of the films, equally rich, if not richer. The top six include two philosophers (Walter Benjamin and Hegel), two filmmakers (Jean-Luc Godard and Sergei Eisenstein), one literary critic (Roland Barthes), and one church patriarch (John of Damascus). Theodor Adorno, Guy Debord, and Roberto Rossellini are close behind. This exercise both overlaps with and complements the synthetic bibliography provided, while the extensive index offers a broader view of Nicole Brenez’s influences and areas of interest. The index covers not only the authors cited but also the films themselves. Translator Ted Fendt deserves praise for tackling the formidable task of identifying the English equivalents of Brenez’s French references.¹⁶

The Timeless Relevance of On the Figure in Particular and the Body in Particular

Why now then? What makes this particular collection still relevant twenty-five years after its initial publication, justifying its translation into English for what will likely be a niche audience of academics and film enthusiasts? The questions raised by images have only grown more urgent as they proliferate and saturate our everyday lives. As Nicole Brenez recently observed to me: “In the 21st century, we’ve seen generations emerge who live entirely in, through, and by images, sometimes pathologically, but in a way that is socially and economically integrated. All of this without ever questioning what an image is or can be, except in sociological or psychoanalytical terms. Cinema allows us, among other things, to delve into these questions through concrete cases.”¹⁷ 

As mentioned earlier, Brenez herself has, since the publication of this book, focused much of her attention on films that receive less recognition in traditional film studies and cinematic histories. She explains: “The objective is to defend the least studied, analysed, and historiographed sectors of cinema. If I had more time, I would ideally watch and study many more industrial films, but time is always lacking, and it is more urgent to deal with works that the usual circuits of visibility neglect. The overall project is to demonstrate that a true history of cinema has little to do with those histories founded on commercialization and media coverage.”¹⁸

Armed with a rich collection of concepts and examples of figurative analysis, readers leave On the Figure equipped to apply these techniques to decipher and evaluate past and current cinema of any kind within a 21st century context. Nicole Brenez’s focus on the body and its figurative potential offers new ways of interpreting not only films but the myriad of images that shape our everyday reality. As I write this review, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (2024) is receiving a national release in France. With particular attention to Adam Driver’s character of Cesar Catilina and his embodiment on screen, one observes a figurative economy centred on equilibrium, contrasting with that of several opposing characters, including Shia LaBeouf’s Clodio, Jon Voight’s Crassus, and Aubrey Plaza’s Wow Platinum. Here is not the place to expand on that analysis. Suffice it to say, the pleasure of watching the film is significantly enhanced by the ability to form one’s own perspective from the film’s material itself.

In conclusion and in a very personal analogy with Dante’s Divine Comedy, On the Figure is relevant today because in the middle of life’s journey, if one is to venture into the Hell, Purgatory, or (too rarely) Paradise of contemporary cinema, they would do well to choose Nicole Brenez as their Virgil, guiding them and helping to decipher the allegorical meanings of works too often understood only in their literal sense.

On Editorial Choices

Anthem Press must be unequivocally lauded for the impetus to publish the 1990s writings of Nicole Brenez. Nonetheless, some editorial choices should be highlighted, especially as they remain unexplained in a preface by the translator or the publisher.

The newly published English edition contains 24 of the original 44 texts, totalling 260 pages compared to 466 in the French edition. Although abridged, it nevertheless provides a comprehensive introduction to Brenez’s key ideas. Ted Fendt’s thoughtful translation presents these essays as a new “montage” of Brenez’s work, offering English-speaking readers a carefully curated glimpse into her intellectual world. While the title remains the same, the significant omissions in the English edition might leave some readers unaware of the full scope of Brenez’s original work. On a personal note, some of the texts that had the greatest impact on me as a reader twenty years ago (“Bodies Without Models,” “Frankly White”) are missing from this version. More objectively, the French edition included three key essays on Roberto Rossellini, all of which have been omitted, depriving the English-speaking public of Brenez’s insights on the father of neo-realism. Hopefully, this welcome publication will inspire other readers to gradually provide online translations of the missing texts, as I have done at the conclusion of this article.

The original 1998 edition,¹⁹ published by DeBoeck Université, pioneered a distinctive format: a large, perfectly square book – thick and unwieldy – making it as challenging to fit on a bookshelf as Brenez’s theories are to fully grasp. Inside, the texts were generously illustrated with black-and-white film stills embedded in the wide margins, creating a carefully orchestrated dialogue between Brenez’s writing and her selected images. This format aligned perfectly with the author’s ambition to craft a film criticism that engages directly with the film and its visual content. In contrast, this critical interplay between text and image is absent in the Anthem Press edition. However, this omission does not seem to concern Brenez herself. As she recently shared: “The illustrations are not essential to understanding the text. Besides, unlike the context of the original edition, where neither the internet nor mobile phones existed, now you can immediately find the films and passages being studied with a simple gesture. So, in the end, it’s better if the book omits the images and encourages its readers to seek and verify them. Nothing would be more desirable than for the analysis to lead back to the film, hopefully enriched.”²⁰

Original French edition of On the Figure in General and the Body in Particular

Finally, one must question the book’s retail price: at 120 USD, it is likely targeted at specialized academic libraries in film departments in the US or UK. Many of my cinephile peers will not be able to afford such an investment. While the book’s price may limit its reach, its value as a resource for serious students and lovers of cinema cannot be overstated.

Epilogue: Reflections on a Missing Piece: Cannibal Holocaust and the Humanism of Nicole Brenez

Toward the end of the original collection of texts, in what constitutes a surprisingly personal hapax, Nicole Brenez writes a brief text that, by virtue of its title, connects the figurative economy of entertainment TV with the goriest fringe of horror movies and, behind it, the history of evil in the 20th century. This deeply moving exploration of her own self faced with the lack of self-respect of her fellow human beings, as well as the tenderness and love for humanity it exhibits, exemplarily underpins Nicole Brenez’s humanism, her attention to the body, its representations, and the importance of their ethical implications. One can read the profound influence of Theodor Adorno on a young Nicole Brenez, as Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980) feels as if it were excerpted from a contemporary update of Minima Moralia. As such, it is sorely missing from the Anthem Press selection, and I offer it in English translation for the reader, as a complement to this review and to the book.

Cannibal Holocaust 

by Nicole Brenez²¹

Television game shows fascinate me; they immediately achieve the figurative ideal that the best films aspire to. Here, simultaneously intersected by the collective – through a form of denial, where the familiarity of first names confirms anonymity – the marvel of the singular body, of the absolutely unique and irreplaceable body, manifests itself every time. This marvel never ceases, each time, whenever any body drawn from any crowd appears on screen.

More than TV reports or documentaries, which depict social agents caught in the forces of history – often in the role of victims – television game shows offer me a glimpse of some of my innumerable contemporaries, in their most exposed state.

Yet, I recoil at this simplistic figuration, the political precision of this parade of faces devoid of morality, this procession that forms not a collective but instead exhibits a shapeless mass of individuals – the opposite of a People. These beings, beneath destiny, beneath volition, beneath the ability to either reject or accept themselves, embody in their every appearance the irrefutable real, the unavoidable truth that alone can set the image ablaze.

Barely glimpsing these frequent images, I am unsettled by the position into which these people plunge me. As others, they demand respect, and yet, suffocating, I am forced to share in the terrifying figurative humiliation to which they daily consent and which entertains them above all else. My fellow humans, in their freely chosen indignity, assault my fragile conception of humanity. Their lack of respect for themselves, for their wives, for their sons whom they bring along to play, prevents me each day from becoming fully human.

Nicole Brenez, On the Figure in General and the Body in Particular: Figurative Invention in Cinema (London and New York: Anthem Press, 2023).

Endnotes