Baudelaire: “The sacrifice is complete only with the sponte sua of the victim.”⁵⁸⁴

“[Baudelaire] was also proud of these words by a great poet: ‘You have endowed the sky of art with a sort of macabre ray: you create un frisson nouveau.’ ”⁵⁸⁵ Baudelaire was proud of these words not only because they were written by Victor Hugo (about whom he harbored no illusions: “he woos everyone and treats as a poet the first and the last to arrive”), but because they were those words: the “frisson nouveau” was the New, which, “au fond de l’Inconnu” (in the depth of the Unknown), encountered the shudder, the most ancient, the too familiar (and hence effaced) memory of the sacrifice.⁵⁸⁶ From that time, the encounter is repeated every day, like the sudden irruption of leopards into the temple: “in the end it can be foreseen and becomes a part of the ceremony.”⁵⁸⁷

Behind the Glass

Max Ophüls had tried to convey it in his films through many devices: an iron grating, a windowpane, a half-open blind, a piece of lace, a curtain that the camera lens has to brush past. Or perhaps just a bundle of objects that distance and frame the characters. Or perhaps the vast fringe of darkness that shrouds them. Then, finally, he referred in a radio interview to this text, which, in just a few words, describes the film image: “Anyone who looks through an open window from outside never sees all the things that are seen by someone looking through a closed window.⁵⁸⁸ No object is more profound, more mysterious, more fertile, more somber, more dazzling than a window illuminated by a candle. What you see in sunlight is always less interesting than what is going on behind a windowpane.” This is the voice of Baudelaire, but also of Ophüls, his cinematographic heir. The screen image appears in an age in which mental images tend to invade the streets and become transformed into raw perceptions, acceptable to any empiricist. During this invasion some images are captured on the screen—and there they continue to lead a double life. Their esotericism, which is at the heart of great cinema, wants them to remain in contact both with their mental origin as well as with their ultimate release into the streets. This result is represented by Baudelaire’s “open window,” by the illusion of a continuity between inside and outside, of a life that remains intact on two dimensions. But the other path, which is directed to the origin, takes the image back onto the screen of the mental image, therefore to the image “behind the glass,” which appears to “someone looking through a closed window.” The window of the mind can be the surface of the mirror, or the transparency of the lace curtain, or the frame provided by objects and by darkness: all signals of an imperceptible and unbridgeable distance between the world and its reflection, between the two perpetual sources of the image. “Behind the glass,” the light emanating from beings and objects is no longer a light of nature, but the radiance of the surface itself: the radiance of Psyche.