An article I wrote was published last week in The Brooklyn Rail, entitled ” ‘We Are All Scabs’: Some Contradictions in US Independent Film Culture “ and inspired by the IFP’s Independent Film Week and Filmmaker Conference. You can read it at the first link.
As The Brooklyn Rail website does not allow for comments, I thought I would open this post for anyone who would like to comment on, critique or respond to what I wrote.
It’s all yours.
There is a strain of cinema that is often overlooked – or misunderstood – by the mainstream and experimental film worlds alike. If the mainstream view can be summed up as a belief in the equivalence of cinema and storytelling, then the experimental view is an opposing belief in the openness and plasticity of the medium, and a commitment to critically exploring this, taking nothing for granted.
“Experimental narrative” filmmakers – such as Philippe Garrel, Tonino di Bernardi or José Luis Guérin – can seem to fall short of both these standards. They rarely tell stories – favouring figurative cinema’s ability to capture nuances of light, texture and behaviour over its capacities of illustration – but they do appear to take certain things for granted: characters played by actors, representational imagery, etc. And so one side sees in these films incompetence (as if they just didn’t know how to tell a story), while the other (admittedly smaller) side sees conservatism, a failure to rigorously investigate the medium’s properties in the way that experimental film (eg, the cinema of Sharits and Brakhage) is expected to.
But I believe Garrel and company explore a set of principles entirely distinct from the cinema of storytelling, and ones which I also see implicit in my own filmmaking (and that of my colleagues in (An)Other Irish Cinema):
1. The distinction between fiction and documentary is meaningless.
2. Each image is a singular event.
3. The camera is always part of the scene.
4. Cinema is a dialogue between will and reality.
5. Be, don’t illustrate.
6. “In narrative cinema – and all cinema is narrative to some degree – it is the type of image produced that determines the narrative, not the reverse.” –Raul Ruiz
I propose these six principles as the foundations of a different way of making and thinking about those films that seem to straddle the fence.
[Originally published in the February edition of Nisi Masa's Mas y Mas Newsletter. Still from my short film, Repeat.]
It didn’t matter to me whether or not Shadows would be any good; it just became a way of life where you got close to people and where you could hear ideas that weren’t full of shit. We had no intention of offering it for commercial distribution. It was an experiment all the way, and our main objective was just to learn. Not one actor was paid for his services, nor were the technicians given anything. What kept us going was enthusiasm. We were working for the fun of doing something we wanted to do. It is more important to work creatively than to make money. We would never have been able to finish if all the people who participated in the film hadn’t discovered one absolutely fundamental thing: that being an artist is nothing other than the desire, the insane wish, to express yourself completely, absolutely.
–John Cassavetes, Cassavetes on Cassavetes (ed. Ray Carney), p56.
[The following are ten re-arranged excerpts from Jacques Ranciere's essay, "The Paradoxes of Political Art" from his book Dissensus (ed. and trans. Steve Corcoran, Continuum, 2010).]
1. ‘Aesthetic’ designates the suspension of every determinate relation correllating the production of art forms and a specific social function.
2. This means that the aesthetic rupture arranges a paradoxical form of efficacy, one that relates to a disconnection between the production of artistic savoir-faire and social destination, between sensory forms, the significations that can be read on them and their possible effects. Let us call it the efficacy of dissensus, which is not a designation of a conflict as such, but is a specific type thereof, a conflict between sense and sense. Dissensus is a conflict between a sensory presentation and a way of making sense of it, or between several sensory regimes and/or ‘bodies’. This is the way in which dissensus can be said to reside at the heart of politics, since at bottom the latter itself consists in an acitivity that redraws the frame within which common objects are determined.
3. Politics is commonly viewed as the practice of power or the embodiment of collective wills and interests and the enactment of collective ideas. Now, such enactments or embodiments imply that you are taken into account as subjects sharing in a common world, making statements and not simply noise, discussing things lcoated in a common world and not in your own fantasy. What really deserves the name of politics is the cluster of perceptions and practices that shape this common world. Politics is first of all a way of framing, among sensory data, a specific sphere of experience. It is a partition of the sensible, of the visible and the sayable, which allows (or does not allow) some specific data to appear; which allows or does not allow some specific subjects to designate them and speak about them. It is a specific intertwining of ways of being, ways of doing and ways of speaking.
4. Politics breaks with the sensory self-evidence of the ‘natural’ order that destines specific individuals and groups to occupy positions of rule or of being ruled, assigning them to prviate or public lives, pinning them down to a certain time and space, to specific ‘bodies’, that is to specific ways of being, seeing and saying. This ‘natural’ logic, a distribution of the invisible and visible, of speech and noise, pins bodies to ‘their’ places and allocates the private and the public to distinct ‘parts’ – this is the order of the police. Police can therefore be defined by way of contrast as the activity that breaks with the order of the police by inventing new subjects. Politics invents new forms of collective enunciation; it re-frames the given by inventing new ways of making sense of the sensible, new configurations between the visible and the invisible, and between the audible and the inaudible, new distributions of space and time – in short, new bodily capacities. As Plato tells – a contrario – politics begins when those who were destined to remain in the domestic and invisible territory of work and reproduction, and prevented from doing ‘anything else’, take the time that they ‘have not’ in order to affirm that they belong to a common world. It begins when they make the invisible visible, and make what was deemed to be the mere noise of suffering bodies heard as a discourse concerning the ‘common’ of the community. Politics creates a new form, as it were, of dissensual ‘commonsense’.
5. Art and politics each define a form of dissensus, a dissensual re-configuration of the common experience of the sensible. If there is such a thing as an ‘aesthetics of politics’, it lies in a re-configuration of the distribution of the common through political processes of subjectivation. Correspondingly, if there is a politics of aesthetics, it lies in the practices and modes of visibility of art that re-configure the fabric of sensory experience.
6. Similar to political action, [art] effectuates a change in the distribution of the sensible. The difference might be said to lie in the fact that the re-configuration of the sensible carried out by politics is an effect of forms of subjectivation. In other words, such re-configurations are brought about by collectives of enunciation and demonstration (manifestation). The ‘aesthetics of politics’ consists above all in the framing of a we, a subject, a collective demonstration whose emergence is the element that disrupts the distribution of social parts, an element that I call the part of those who have no part – not the wretched, but the anonymous. The ‘politics of aesthetics’, as for it, frames new forms of individuality and new haeccities. It does not give a collective voice to the anonymous. Instead, it re-frames the world of common experience as the world of a shared impersonal experience in which new modes of constructing common objects and new possibilities of subjective enunciation may be developed that are characteristic of the ‘aesthetics of politics’. This politics of aesthetics, however, operates under the conditions prescribed by an original disjunction. It produces effects, but it does so on the basis of an original effect that implies the suspension of any direct cause-effect relationship.
7. Within any given framework, artists are those whose strategies aim to change the frames, speeds and scales according to which we perceive the visible, and combine it with a specific invisible element and a specific meaning. Such strategies are intended to make the invisible visible or to question the self-evidence of the visible; to rupture given relations between things and meaning and, inversely, to invent novel relationships between things and meanings which were previously unrelated. This might be called the labour of fiction, which, in my view, is a word that we need to re-conceive. ‘Fiction’, as re-framed by the aesthetic regime of art, means far more than the constructing of an imaginary world, and even far more than its Aristotelian sense of ‘arrangement of actions’. It is not a term that designates the imaginary as opposed to the real; it involves the re-framing of the ‘real’, or the framing of a dissensus. Fiction is a way of changing existing modes of sensory presentations and forms of enunciation; of varying frames, scales and ryhthms; and of building new relationships between reality and appearance, the individual and the collective.
8. It thus appears that art does not become critical or political by ‘moving beyond itself’, or ‘departing from itself’, and intervening in the ‘real world’. There is no ‘real world’ that functions as the outside of art. Instead, there is a multiplicity of folds in the sensory fabric of the common, folds in which outside and inside take on a multiplicity of shifting forms, in which the topography of what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’ are continually criss-crossed and displaced by the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics. There is no ‘real world’. Instead, there are definite configurations of what is given as our real, as the object of our perceptions and the field of our interventions. The real always is a matter of construction, a matter of ‘fiction’, in the sense that I tried to define it above. What characterises the mainstream fiction of the police order is that it passes itself off as the real, that it feigns to draw a clear-cut line between what belongs to the self-evidence of the real and what belongs to the field of appearances, representations, opinions and utopias. Consensus means precisely that the sensory is given as univocal. Political and artistic fictions introduce dissensus by hollowing out that ‘real’ and mulitplying it in a polemical way. The practice of fiction undoes, and then re-articulates, connections between signs and images, images and times, and signs tand spaces, framing a given sense of reality, a given ‘commonsense’. It is a practice that invents new trajectories between what can be seen, what can be said and what can be done.
9. However, no direct cause-effect relationship is determinable between the intention realised in an art performance and a capacity for political subjectivation. …. The effect [of critical art] thereby produced is not a kind of calculable transmission between artistic shock, intellectual awareness and political mobilisation. There is no reason why the production of a shock produced by two heterogenous forms of the sensible ought to yield an understanding of the state of the world, and none why understanding the latter ought to produce a decision to change it. There is no straight path from the viewing of a spectacle to an understanding of the state of the world, and none from intellectual awareness to political action. Instead, this kind of shift implies a move from one given world to another in which capacities and incapacities, forms of tolerance and intolerance, are differently defined. What comes to pass is a process of dissociation: a rupture in the relationship between sense and sense, between what is seen and what is thought, and between what is thought and what is felt. What comes to pass is a rupture in the specific configuration that allows us to stay in ‘our’ assigned places in a given state of things.These sorts of ruptures can happen anywhere and at any time, but they can never be calculated.
10. …This way of addressing the ‘truly political’, however, does not manage to sidestep the incalculable tension between political dissensuality and aesthetic indifference. It cannot sidestep the fact that a film remains a film and a spectator remains a spectator. Film, video art, photography and installation art rework the frame of our perceptions and the dynamism of our affects. As such, they may open up new passages for political subjectivation, but they cannot avoid the aesthetic cut that separates consequences from intentions and prevents their from being any direct passage to an ‘other side’ of words and images.
[Still from Frownland (Ronald Bronstein, 2007).]
An explosive burst of laughter would be the proper response to all the serious “issues” that the present era likes to bring up so much. To start with the most brutally suppressed of them: there is no “immigration issue.” Who still grows up where s/he was born? Who lives where s/he grew up anymore? Who works where s/he lives? Who lives where his or her ancestors lived? And whose kids are these, the kids of our era; the children of their parents, or of television? The truth is that we’ve been torn wholesale from all belonging, that we aren’t from anywhere anymore, and that as a result we have at the same time an unusual penchant for tourism, an undeniable suffering. Our history is one of colonization, migration, wars, exile, the destruction of all roots. It is the history of everything that’s made us foreign to this world, guests in our own families. We’ve had our language expropriated by teaching, our songs by variety, our flesh by mass pornography, our cities by the police, our friends by wage labor. Add to that, in France, the ferocious and secular work of individualization done by a State power structure that notes, compares, disciplines, and separates its subjects from the youngest age, that instinctively sniffs out any solidarity it might have missed so that there’s nothing left but citizenship, the pure, fantasy state of belonging to the Republic. A Frenchman is more than anything a dispossessed, miserable man. His hatred for foreigners melts together with his hatred for himself as a foreigner. The jealousy mixed with dread he has towards the “cities” only proves his resentment for everything he’s lost. He can’t stop envying the so-called “ghetto” neighborhoods where there’s at least a little community life left, a few links between people, a bit of non-state solidarity, an informal economy, an organization that’s still not totally detached from those who organize it. We have come to such a deprived point that the only way we can go on feeling like Frenchmen is to curse the immigrants, and those who are in a more visible way foreigners like me. The immigrants are in a strange position of sovereignty in this country; if they weren’t there, the French would perhaps not exist either.
—From The Coming Insurrection.
[Still from The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch, 2009).]
I will usually attend at least one screening in the beginning, for various reasons. Then I will never watch my movie again.
… The film becomes an annoying child that I wished my wife would have aborted, but it’s too late – it already breathes and it has a name and it will survive past my own physical death and I will be judged on the merits of its afterlife. So my only option is to continue to plant my seed again and again, continuing to procreate, all the while never being the parent a proper director is supposed to be, neglecting all post-birth glory, hating those who languish in pride at how well their child has held up, how sturdy, how smart, and how cute it looks. While in all actuality the child for the most part has become just another piece of shit, a whore whose patrons are those bored suckers who select your box at the video store brothel, stagger home with your child under their arm, then return her. Maybe a late fee is in order. I am an abusive father who has no need for his children once the umbilical cord is severed. It’s just the fuck I’m concerned with. Copping the nut. I don’t even know why I bother in this age when one can just adopt and then return it if you don’t like it.
—Harmony Korine, interviewed by Tod Lippy.
[Promotional still for Korine's Trash Humpers (2009).]
Are we idiots, perhaps? Maybe so, but it is not up to us to say it, still less to believe it. However, we should have finished with our migraines and our failures of nerve. One thing is our ruin, one stupid thing shackles us: “taste” — good taste. We have too much of it — or rather, we worry about it more than we should. Fear of bad taste engulfs us like a fog (a dirty December fog that suddenly appears, freezes your guts, stinks, and stings your eyes), to such a point that we stand still, not daring to advance. Don’t you realise how captious we are becoming, that we have our own poetics, our own ready-made ideas, our own rules? …
What we lack is daring. … With our scruples we resemble those poor believers who daren’t live for fear of hell and who wake their confessor early in the morning to unburden their consciences of having had a miscarriage in a dream. Let’s worry less about results. The thing is to keep fucking, keep fucking: who cares what child the muse will give birth to? Isn’t the purest pleasure in her embraces?
—Gustave Flaubert, letter to Louis Bouilhet, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830-1855, p125.
[Still from Vincente Minnelli's Madame Bovary (1949).]
You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you – no one.
There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. Don’t write love poems; avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary: they are the hardest to work with, and it takes great, fully ripened power to create something individual where good, even glorious, traditions exist in abundance. So rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty – describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. …
And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it. So, dear Sir, I can’t give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without trying to interpret it. Perhaps you will discover that you are called to be an artist. Then take the destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.
But after this descent into yourself and into your solitude, perhaps you will have to renounce becoming a poet (if, as I have said, one feels one could live without writing, then one shouldn’t write at all). Nevertheless, even then, this self-searching that I ask of you will not have been for nothing. Your life will still find its own paths from there, and that they may be good, rich, and wide is what I wish for you, more than I can say.
What else can I tell you? It seems to me that everything has its proper emphasis; and finally I want to add just one more bit of advice: to keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your whole development; you couldn’t disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to question that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer.
—Rainer Maria Rilke in a Letter to a Young Poet.
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