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.
[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.
My own belief is that we need to produce both concrete projects and a vastly multiplied vision, if we want to make our lives count beyond ourselves and if we want to return some kind of future to the pasts of the Left with which we may identify. A radically democratic ecological critique of progress can yield a new understanding of modernization, one that includes cultural difference and self-determination along with a practical understanding of the cycles of the earth, far beyond the old narratives of an industrial proletariat in a national frame.
I think that all the great productive blocs now have their edges, their exploited or abandoned peripheries whose populations are leaving to become the laboring mainstays of the very center that helps destroy their homelands. Liberal fascism — a name for the present social order when it gets ugly — tries to divide into a hierarchy the people who could oppose its projects of destruction. It sets up a gradated system of inclusion and exclusion to divide classes of people from each and to set them against each other, with police, borders, barbed wire and militaries marking off ever more extreme gradations. Crucially, it tries to divide the precarious classes who have had some access to official education from the excluded classes who have had none, who have had to learn everything as they could, the hard way.
What the Left needs, in order to offer anything at all to huge numbers of people who no longer see it or hear it, is to envision something like ecodevelopment on a continental or regional scale, a political process for improving life and movement across the territory, through methods that are both collaborative and ecological, and therefore span the divides between classes and also transform the very linearity of the rationalized production systems. What the Left needs, what the world needs, is to be able to give both the precarious classes and the migrants an active role in building a better world, in a system where the most educated and capable can also participate on the basis of something other than a pure quest for personal profit. We need to envision a chance for the potentials of technological change to be redistributed by their root producers, beyond national borders and racism, in an economy of embodied and responsible flows that organizes itself in a productive relation to critique and to radically democratic debate. A modernization that carves out the places for localized decision-making, for the affirmation of communities of value, but also for artistic experiments with the process of becoming. It’s clear that nothing like this exists in reality and that many promises have come to nothing, so there is no use to be naive, for sure. But is it clear, in a unifying world society, that movements of political resistance can do without this kind of constructive proposal?
[Picture of Nam June Paik with his Zen for Film (1964).]
[What follows was written in response to the issues raised in my previous post, "Cinema as Crime".]
The British Situationist-influenced blogger Wayne Spencer has written lucidly about his disillusionment with the radical potential of art. Immersing himself in the improvised jazz scene, Spencer had
became intrigued by the notion … that the relations within freely improvising music ensembles and between such ensembles and the audience constituted a radical prefiguration of liberated, non-capitalist social relations. I also became convinced that reductionism’s refusal of the arbitrary conventions of tonal music and the loud and frenetic activity characteristic of certain sectors of contemporary society were subversive in nature.
However, in the end, he “found it impossible to escape the conclusion that the political significance I imputed to the music existed only in my imagination.” He extends the analysis to cinema, expressing an interest in the work of Béla Tarr among others, but concluding that
the films themselves offer no remedy for this evisceration of life, and neither do the practices of those involved in making and making available the film, consisting as they do of raising large amounts of state or private institutional money; constructing over time an aesthetic object under the hierarchical control of the director and various specialists; engaging in sustained conventional publicity for the benefit of capitalists, institutional managers and the passive public in order to secure and promote the release of the film; placing the film to be viewed in isolation by strangers who disperse afterwards; and then finally returning to the beginning of the cycle simply to repeat the process once again. It was necessary, I concluded, to step beyond the world of film. In order to negate the life the films portray, it is necessary to negate the world of which the making, showing and viewing of such films is an ordinary and supportive part.
There is a severity to Spencer’s logic that can easily be seen leading to nothing but a joyless inertia; as Situationist scholar Ken Knabb debated with Spencer, there is a danger of painting yourself into a corner in which you ”hesitate to engage in anything whatsoever because virtually any sort of activity could be seen as representing some sort of compromise or cooption”. But the extremity of his conclusions nonetheless pinpoint some of the contradictions in most conceptions of radical cinema, and also some of the potential criteria for a new formulation. It’s also only really a hair’s breadth away from the restless and passionate dissatisfaction that inspires some of the greatest cinema, the kind of stubborn refusal to settle that has Peter Whitehead talking about his work as “acts of agression against film”, or John Cassavetes saying sometimes he wants to “take the camera and break it for no reason except that it’s just an interference”.
Cassavetes is a good place to start in addressing some of the inaccuracies in Spencer’s dismissal of the cinematic processs, since his approach was one of the earliest and most influential models of a “prefigurative” method of film production (see my piece on Ici et Ailleurs for an earlier discussion of this idea). Cassavetes did not, for the most part, spend time “raising large amounts of state or private institutional money”. His best films were paid for out of his own pocket (something much more viable today than it was then), with nobody to answer to but his own collaborators. Which leads to the second point: Cassavetes was not focused on “constructing over time an aesthetic object under the hierarchical control of the director and various specialists”. As Ray Carney put it in relation to Faces (1969), Cassavetes’ work
represented a critique of business values in its methods of production as much as in its subject. How it was made was Cassavetes’ reply to the bureacratic forms of interaction that he had clashed with in the previous years. The mutually supportive relationships of the family replaced the compartmentaliseation of the bureacracy as the model for interaction. Cooperation replaced competitiveness. Responsiveness was more important than starring. Enjoying the processs was far more important than being concerned with the financial viability of the product.
Likewise, specialisation was not a word Cassavetes understood, as attested to by his consistent use of friends and amateurs for key roles both behind and in front of the camera—and his effusive encouragement of his collaborators’ input and autonomy, no matter what their position. In his own words:
What’s basically wrong with Hollywood is that you cannot really have teamwork. I couldn’t make a good film without it. Once you set up an employer-employee relationship, you divide people. It’s only when there’s nothing or everything to gain that each gives completely with faith in the film.
This is not to paint the Cassavetes set as some kind of anarchist utopia, or to deny that power dynamics were in play. Cassavetes could be a tyrant on set when he wanted to be, and even at his gentlest, his presence was obviously a determinant factor in many ways. But the distinction is that these tumultuous relations took place in a consensual context based on trust and mutual respect rather than economic coercion; the distinction between working for a boss you hate because you need the money and working with a teacher because you want to learn. Commenting on the development of a child actor in his late film, Love Streams (1985), Cassavetes gave one of his highest compliments: “He’s starting to think for himself”. Provoking this kind of autonomy in his collaborators wasn’t always done in a politically correct manner. On working with Lynn Carlin on Faces, he recalled:
I took her once, I was going to kill her, had my hands around her throat. The crew had me like this. I said, “Where is the kitchen knife?” I mean, there isn’t anything you shouldn’t be able to do to get people to do the kind of work that they need to do. They know if it comes from kindness or sweetness. Lynn probably feels that I helped her a great deal. I really didn’t. I was very tough with her, but not about acting. I was tought because I knew she was dependent upon me. So I was tough not to give her a damn thing, so that she had to think for herself.
The kitchen knife notwithstanding, perhaps a good vocabulary to frame Cassavetes’ practice within is American social worker Mary Parker Follet’s theory of power-over vs. power-with:
It seems to me that whereas power usually means power-over, the power of some person or group over some other person or group, it is possible to develop the conception of power-with, a jointly developed power, a co-active, not a coercive power. … Every demand for power should be analysed to see if the object is ‘independent’ power or joining power.
The “aesthetic object” that resulted was often the last thing on Cassavetes’ mind: the emphasis instead was on the pleasures and growth that could be gotten out of the process itself and one of the reasons Cassavetes was so beloved by his collaborators was that he never hoarded these benefits for himself. While Cassavetes may have virulently rejected politics in the conventional sense, the implications of his approach are clear, and occasionally self-professed:
I hate leaders. We should all lead ourselves. The leaders tell us these are the facts and the facts are horseshit. They’re not facts. Whose facts? Whose truths? You have to use your own truth.
The contemporary kin of the Cassavetes approach are multiple. From more direct heirs such as the prolific and tireless Rob Nilsson to the recent spate of young American filmmakers including Frank V Ross and Joe Swanberg (let’s give the M word a rest), notions of a more family- or community-orientated production process have taken roots in independent filmmaking. Filmmakers such as Wong Kar-Wai, Terence Malick and David Lynch (the three most experimental filmmakers working in Hollywood today) have balanced large budgets with a style of filmmaking that prioritises improvisation, endless script revisions and an overall approach that is exploratory and emergent in nature. On the other end of the scale, avant-garde cinema has developed various models parallel to Cassavetes’ more theatre-influenced ensemble. Jonas Mekas integrates filming as an organic part of daily life, as natural and potentially social an activity as having lunch, with an equivalently modest but grounded ability to enrich our vision and engagement with the world. Jack Smith and Vivienne Dick, as I’ve written on before, turned film shoots into festive spaces for play, in which individuals are allowed to hide, reveal and reinvent themselves at will.
Arin Crumley and Susan Buice, the duo behind Four Eyed Monsters (2005), are examples of an excessively contemporary reworking of Mekas’ everyday model. Their film, a re-enactment of the heavily mediated means with which they began to date each other (they met on MySpace), is less interesting than the rawer series of video podcasts they created to chart the impact of the film and its promotion on their relationship. Drawing on exhaustive documentation of their affairs, fights and traumas, these pieces seem to effortlessly jut back and forth from one person’s point of view to the other, sometimes hovering in a strange virtual (intersubjective?) space inbetween. To talk of filmmaking as an alienating or objectifying process in the context of something like this seems inappropriate, or at least too simplistic. As I argued for my “TVs & Bodies” programme, in a highly alienated and technologically-entrapped social context, cinema can perversely, be a way of re-engaging with the material world. Crumley and Buice seem to reach a level of communication in their relationship that may not have been possible without cinema. If the FEM podcasts are occasionally overwrought or navel-gazing in their affects, they are still at heart an earnest and interrogative attempt to find an “authentic encounter” through cinema.
Spencer’s critique of cinema’s public position is harder to argue with. While many filmmakers eschew the process of ”engaging in sustained conventional publicity for the benefit of capitalists, institutional managers and the passive public”, the end result of “placing the film to be viewed in isolation by strangers who disperse afterwards” is rarely questioned on any level.
Jon Jost’s point about conventional political cinema—that, upon leaving such a film, viewers will do nothing but “ponder a bit, adjust their clothes [and] feel a bit good about themselves for having sat through this serious and difficult-to-take … film”—is, for the most part, just as true for any kind of film, no matter how formally radical. It’s true to the extent that this kind of inertia is determined much more by the context in which these films are seen than the properties of the films themselves. In an echo of Situationist critiques, The Newsreel collective dismissed the use of the new Lincoln Centre venue in 1960s New York because it was
a museum of static objects; its performances are designed, like its buildings and its decor, to inspire reverence for showpieces, rather than to seek an organic relationship to audience.
A comparable critique could be levelled at our arthouse cinemas, while multiplexes obviously situate whatever “content” they exhibit in a deeply consumption-oriented form. To paraphrase Ray Carney: if you play Bach in supermarkets, you only succeed in turning Bach into supermarket music.
Whitehead claimed that “Obviously the artist helps to create a climate in which some kinds of ideas develop into action.” Or at least they should. It seems to me that the real failure of all of the filmmakers discussed in the previous post, was that they didn’t really try to find—or create—social contexts to put their works into.
The Newsreel was somewhat innovative in these terms, developing an alternative distribution network through activist networks across the country and emphasising the importance of discussion surrounding the screenings, led by the filmmakers themselves when possible. Simply throwing the films out into the world, without concern for the context in which they were received, was considered “a liberal lapse, trusting aesthetic power to do what only political organizing could actually achieve”. Before the group became institutionalised in the mid-1970s, there were even more ambitious context-creating plans proposed. In an undated document recently released by a few original ex-Newsreelers, a proposal for a new kind of film festival is outlined:
Festivals, in the days before they were transformed into merchandising gimmicks, were community enterprises, periodical celebrations of events of common interest. We would like to see these values experimentally restored, because by these means we might be able to discover new audiences, new forms for film, new relationships between filmmakers and their audiences, and new social uses for films. Yes, we believe New York should have a film festival, in fact we insist that a festival is essential for the growth of films and the formulation of film ideas. To be a true festival, however, the New York Film Festival should:
- Show all films free
- Conduct screenings all over the city… in theaters, churches, schools, community centers, in parks and in the streets
- Selection of progams by filmmakers, modulated as time progresses by expressions of needs and interests from within the local communities
- Continue year-long, creating a regular relationship between people and the films they see rather than the engulfing confusion of a two-week “season”
- Create forums where films, filmmakers and audiences can interact either through discussions or by other means that might be defined within the forums themselves
It’s hard to say to what extent a statement like this (signed solely by “Newsreel”), was widely supported among Newsreel’s members, Robert Kramer included. Either way, by the end of his life, Kramer’s outlook had shifted to the other end of the spectrum. He still believed, á la Cassavetes, that filmmaking itself could be a radical endeavour, but getting the work seen was not a concern. As Kramer put it:
For me, every movie was in itself the creation of a community. … But I had no idea what the possible repercussions on the spectator would be. I didn’t know who would see my films. In the end, my strategy was of a message in a bottle. A cry whose echo would no doubt never be heard. In my relationship with the world and with others and in my idea of society, I have always been profoundly alone.
When indie filmmaker Caveh Zahedi accepted an award for “Best Film Not Playing at a Theatre Near You” for his I Am a Sex Addict (2005), he discussed the fatigue that sets in among many filmmakers after the completion of a film and how this weakened independent cinema.
We don’t need to wait for permission to get our films into the world. If we have the resourcefulness to make a film … we have the resourcefulness to get it out into the world. And I think we need to make that part of our sense of what it is to be an independent filmmaker.
There are two arguments for this expansion of the role of the filmmaker: 1) because getting “our films into the world” is an economic imperative which can enable us to make more films, and 2) because getting “our films into the world” is in some way part of the filmmaking process for us; that is, getting these films to connect with an audience is actually part of why we do this.
That may not sound like such a radical notion, but for those of us concerned with film-as-art first and foremost, any mention of the audience can cause serious trepidation. For anyone who has been to film school or pitched an idea to producers and financiers, this should be understandable: talk of “the audience” is one of the primary rhetorical justifications for the censorship—and encouragement of self-censorship—of aspirant filmmakers. After four years at Ireland’s National Film School, I’ve been trying to exorcise myself from the whole debate on this blog through the “Dear Audience” series, building up an arsenal of historical figures on my side of the argument. The main point is that any artist who tries to cater to an audience’s supposed tastes even if it contradicts his owns sensibility is betraying the very thing that makes him an artist in the first place. The Irish filmmaker Maximilian le Cain has put it this way: it’s “not about rejecting the idea of communicating with people through the films but, rather, not falling into the trap of becoming a slave to trying to please an inevitably faceless and intimidating idea of The Audience”. But one can fully respect this sense of autonomy and still argue the importance of finding ways to facilitate this communication. The artist Claire Pentecost has some interesting things to say about this state of affairs:
Once at a party in New York I asked a very successful painter what his day was like. He flashed a big smile, “I get up in the morning and I do exactly what I want.” It’s understood that painting is exactly what he wants to do and he paints exactly how and what he wants to paint. He has a loft in the city and a house in the country near where his friends, other successful artists, have houses in the country. Autonomy achieved.
And what if this understanding of autonomy is deeply unsatisfying to us? What if we are not interested in the typically individual location of freedom and material well-being, but would rather forge and foster a shared autonomy?
This observation of the insularity of many artists from social concerns is echoed by Wayne Spencer’s descriptions of the jazz world:
While many of the musicians were very pleasant individuals, almost none seriously regarded the music as having a substantial element of political praxis. Their perspectives were aesthetic, and their goal was the production of merely artistic performances and objects. Far from challenging the wider socio-political order, they sought only to find ways of operating within a framework of commodification, hierarchical social relations and cultural institutions that was largely taken for granted or viewed as unchangeable. … In short, I recognised that the individuals involved in improvised music may in some instances have disdained the dominant society but their musical practices did not challenge that society. Moreover, neither musicians nor audience felt any great concern about the accommodation they had reached with the society.
Le Cain identifies with French filmmaker Leos Carax’s adage, ”I make films for ghosts and dead people”. He calls it “an image to address myself to, the sense of an ideal- the history of cinema that came before us and continues to unfold”. As one of Ireland’s most gifted and prolific filmmakers, and in a country where there is almost no receptive outlet for his work, one can hardly begrudge him this. As Pentecost acknowledges, ”For most people who become artists the encounters that decided their fate were with the process itself,” not an audience. Additionally, in the absence of fertile ground, the idea of creating a “shared autonomy” may sound like a Quixotic goal that could do nothing but compromise the individual autonomy one already possesses. You can’t “challenge society” by yourself and in the absence of that possibility, you might as well make art. Spencer’s insistence on negating “the world of which the making, showing and viewing of such films is an ordinary and supportive part” strikes me as potentially nothing but inertia-inducing hot air. The ever-sensible Knabb provides the clearest rebuttal:
A total critique means that everything is called into question, not that everything must be totally opposed. Radicals often forget this and get caught up in outbidding each other with increasingly extremist assertions, implying that any compromise amounts to selling out or even that any enjoyment amounts to complicity with the system.
There is a lot going on these days that can be seen as the roots of a “shared autonomy” in cinema. One of the causes of this is the rapidly shifting economic bases of filmmaking, something producer Ted Hope has been perceptively blogging about. Hope seconds Zahedi’s proposal for an expanded sense of the filmmaker’s practice and suggests learning from the more advanced models that have been developed in music:
Music is different from film because musical artists seldom ever bet it all on each new album. Musicians expect the fans that they developed with one effort to come back for more, but here in the film world, we are reinventing the wheel each time. Today musicians work to engage their audience for the long term, for the long tail, but the film business remains a series of one-offs. If a diverse film culture is going to flourish in this country, we have to move to a new model where filmmaking is a process, an ongoing conversation between the filmmakers and their various audiences.
This is manifesting in different ways, from the anachronistic to the futurist. The uncanny actor-director Crispin Glover refuses to allow digital copies of his films to be made and ensures that they are only screened in his presence, often paired with his spoken-word performances and followed by exhaustive Q&As. Glover’s point of reference for this practice is not post-Web 2.0 economics but 19th century Vaudeville, coupled with an evident sense of responsibility towards his collaborators, the film itself and the context in which it is shown. While Glover’s approach is socially engaged, it still ensures that the focus is always squarely on Glover. But there are more reciprocal and decentralised practices worth considering too.
Perhaps the most creative and accomplished use of the internet to create contexts for a film has been Crumley and Buice. Self-distributing Four Eyed Monsters, they managed to book screenings of the film across the US based on audience interest that had built up through the online release of their podcasts. The whole endeavour generated a level of engagement and interaction between viewers and makers that, as a model, has the potential to be either radical or lucrative depending on where you go with it. Arin Crumley has said they built “a relationship with our audience the same way we built a relationship with each other”, and considering their relationship began on MySpace and progressed through host of other digital and analogue intermediates, this may be true. The question is to what extent this form of relationship offers a genuine intersubjectivity—Debord’s “authentic encounter”—and to what extent it is merely a DIY recapitulation of the Orwellian rhetoric of mobile phone ads (”connecting people”, etc.) But, at the very least, it certainly seems these practices can feed into the creation of real spaces and situations.
My own colleague, Esperanza Collado, has done important work inspired by the Lettrist and Expanded Cinema practices of performative exhibition contexts, most recently in her Cinema… Corpus vs. Cerebrum event which took place in Thisisnotashop in Dublin last year as part of her Márgenes festival. This kind of spatial set-up—much more prevalent in the dance and performance art worlds than film—questions the physical and social implications of the way we usually watch films. In her own description:
The idea was to destroy, or at least raise questions around, the loss of corporeal awareness conventional screenings impose on the audience by breaking the double-sided point of view in cinema generated in its elemental bifurcation: projector and screen, which occur simultaneously before and behind our eyes, our heads. Ultimately, by producing a tactile experience of cinema in which the image becomes flexible and nomadic, the gallery space was literalized (as opposed to a cinema space where one is encouraged to forget the space one is in during projection) through the use of its different planes as projective surfaces, while the attention was equally drawn to the different activities that took place around the projection and the resulting projected material.
The nature of the films suitable for such a context are essentially limited, and the logic of such an endeavour seems inexorably to lead (and Collado would no doubt approve) to the destruction of cinema itself, a moving beyond it altogether into something new. Sometimes a film just needs you to sit down and see it, but experimental projects like this still represent an all-too-neglected model of how cinema can be used to create a social space.
Straying outside of the world of film, the Continental Drift project, initiated by Brian Holmes, strikes me as a unique non-institutional attempt to facilitate dialogue between art, activism and academia. While the somewhat specialised vocabulary and complexity of their dialogues strikes me as an unfortunate barrier to entry for many, it still looks very promising, and it seems to me such creatively focused forums of discussion (which explicitly non-commercial festivals such as Márgenes and the Lucca Film Festival can also be seen as providing) are the most viable starting point for any kind of ambitious progression of these ideas.
In effect, what I’m fumbling around for here is an approach to the exhibition of films equivalent to the Cassavetean method of making them. In one of my last mammoth posts, I talked about making connections as being the most important cultural activity. Now I’m beginning to think that creating spaces in which connections can be made is the most important thing.
If there’s an anxiety that has motivated all of these musings, it is undoubtedly, in common with Whitehead, the niggling suspicion of film’s inherent limitations. As Pentecost wrote, “Spectatorship may cultivate an infinite spectrum of desires, but under any regime offers only limited forms of participation.” On this point, the Situationist critiques must be addressed head-on:
Revolution is not “showing” life to people, but bringing them to life. A revolutionary organisation must always remember that its aim is not getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation. The cinematic spectacle is one of the forms of pseudocommunication … in which this aim is radically unfeasible.
Of course, for me, the abandonment of cinema, or art in general, is simply untenable. I’m just not going to do it. And if I need to make an argument for that, I can always defend myself with Ken Knabb’s common sense wisdom once more:
“The spectacle” is not some totally evil entity, it is simply a social-historical process that happens to have gotten out of hand in recent centuries (or more precisely, it is a symptom of the extreme development of another such process: capitalism). There’s nothing inherently wrong with people passively looking at things (as if “active” was always good and “looking” and “passive” were always bad).
The bottom line is, as Godard said, “the camera makes possible certain things,” and no ethics valuing a diversity and multiplicity of subjectivities can disregard that. But the reinvention of cinema, the interrogation of everything about how it is made, how it is used and presented, the contexts into which it is put….this is all important and necessary, and to that end I like putting all these things up for grabs, to discuss and negate and remake.
It should be acknowledged that art should always embrace a diversity of visions and experiences, some of which will inevitably exceed any practical application or justification and even sometimes lack any context adequate to their powers—visions and experiences that are valid and valuable in and of themselves, without needing any defense on social or political terms. But such intricacies are not irreconcilable with the social possibilities the Situationists imply when they say:
Art can cease being a report about sensations and become a direct organization of more advanced sensations. The point is to produce ourselves rather than things that enslave us.
This does not seem impossible. To love art is to love reality but also be dissatisfied with it; it is “a passion for reality” in the sense of “passion” that Daney applied to cinema. To love art is to love subjectivity, diversity, difference and dialogue…. to love art is to love the expansion of all these things in and between ourselves.
As Whitehead put it in one of his optimistic moments:
… Film can be the medium by which we could regain contact with the world. It can, if used properly, not alienate us from the world, but bring us back to it.
And for me it seems vital to make people look for a real world again. Otherwise they are in danger of being engulfed by a world of prefabrication, a world that has as its blue print for construction, the control and development of our needs, not only to survive, but permanently to compete, to have more than everyone else. In other words, to possess more of that prefabricated world. And this total loss of any inner life will mean the total loss of humanity as we would still like to think it might become.
At the moment, I have no specific proposals for where to go with any of this. In fact, for the next while, I think the most important thing for me to do is work on refining my own filmmaking practice, to try to create something worthwhile enough to start thinking about finding spaces for it. But I am drawn to the notion of the “expanded filmmaker” that Ted Hope advocates, and feel like I’ve already been impulsively drifting in that direction for a while now.
In Knabb’s opinion,
The best projects are those that are worthwhile for their own sake while simultaneously containing an implicit challenge to some fundamental aspect of the system; projects that enable people to participate in significant issues according to their own degree of interest, while tending to open the way to more radical possibilities.
The best projects have yet to be dreamed of.
[Stills from Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies, Cassavetes' Husbands, Godard's Ici et Ailleurs, Crumley and Buice's Four Eyed Monsters and a photo of the Situationist International in 1957.]
This blog has been fairly quiet this year largely because I started another one. For “Films Politically”, a series of four screenings I curated and presented at the autonomous social centre Seomra Spraoi, four essays were written, building on some of themes that have emerged on this blog over the past few months as well as the research and the ideas I developed for my degree thesis a year ago. The essays, originally intended to be context-setting programme notes, ended up mutating into a thing all their own. However, I touched on many issues in each essay that I didn’t get to delve into fully; some other points I had to sacrifice completely to the (in retrospect) lost cause of brevity; and then there were some things I just left out because they softened the more polemical edge of my argument. They’re inroads along a line of thought that I intend to pursue further, so to that end I wanted to follow them up with an appendix which will, hopefully, also become a thing of its own; maybe even the foundation for something new.
With Peter Whitehead’s The Fall, one key dynamic cropped up again and again on both a cinematic and socio-political level, and my essay only really scratched the surface of it. This was the relationship between the objective and the subjective and, emerging from that, the experience of intersubjectivity against that of objectification. The starting point is Whitehead’s focus on his own position in the film, and the nature of the act of filming itself. These themes are expanded and developed through everything he sees around himself in 1960s New York, and linked to an understanding of modern alienation that seems very much in keeping with Debord’s contemporaneous The Society of the Spectacle. In Debord’s theory of the spectacle-commodity society, ”Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each other.” Within this set-up of alienation and powerlessness, an array of solutions are offered that themselves reinforce the problem:
The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender “lonely crowds.” With ever-increasing concreteness the spectacle recreates its own presuppositions.
Whitehead’s film is a portrait of the contradictory and confused forms that resistance to this state of affairs took in the late ’60s—forms that Whitehead acknowledged as “young and immature” while at the same absolute necessities. Indeed, Whitehead’s decision to film these things was his own emergent attempt at resistance: “My problem was to make my film an act itself, if possible.” What was at stake in this struggle against alienation was the achievement of its opposite; some kind of deep connection, communion even, with the world, and a sense of agency over one’s own existence.
There must be a return quickly to an education, a cultural education, that leads people into the revolution and beyond it, beyond simply destroying the outside world of THEM, to creating OUR world, outside, in which there will be far, far more we can identify with and with which we can happily and proudly communicate.
However, there is an implication in Whitehead, or at least a palpable fear, that there is something inherently regressive about the cinematic medium, that an exploitative and dehumanising subject-object dynamic may be inevitable, no matter how noble or radical a filmmaker’s intentions are. It’s certainly clear to Whitehead that this is the tendency of most moving image culture, and part of a wider social problem. It’s no accident that Debord’s metaphor of the spectacle finds its closest parallel in the cinema. Echoing Debord’s “vicious cycle of isolation”, Whitehead wrote:
In the culture we live in, images are used to alienate us, not to invite us to participate. The only participation is to go and buy it. … They are alienating us in every possible way… from everything, including ourselves, our own feelings, and our own natural selves. … They are not just persuading us, they are trapping us into a situation where we simply feel anxious if we do not respond to this barrage of seductive images and go out and spend.
These images alienate (make the world “other”), precipitating a crisis of subjectivity (corrupting our sense of identity) and leading to mass objectification (making everything things)—all of which, in a capitalist context, is basically an economic necessity (as a photographer comments in The Fall, you must objectify something in order to sell it). The result is a world in which the practice of intersubjectivity—authentic encounters between unique individuals—is threatened from all angles. Debord:
Society has become what ideology already was. The repression of practice and the antidialectical false consciousness that results from that repression are imposed at every moment of everyday life subjected to the spectacle — a subjection that systematically destroys the “faculty of encounter” and replaces it with a social hallucination: a false consciousness of encounter, an “illusion of encounter.” In a society where no one can any longer be recognized by others, each individual becomes incapable of recognizing his own reality. … The triumph of this separation-based economic system proletarianizes the whole world.
How might all of this be inherent to cinema? The argument is two-fold. Firstly, there is an unavoidably one-way, hierarchical aspect to the relationship between those who are filmed and those who film: as Miéville says in Ici et Ailleurs, “It’s always the one who is directed that is seen, never the one directing”. Secondly, the relationship between the spectator and the completed film is also one of subjugation: “linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each other”. I recall a conversation with a filmmaker friend of mine who argued vampirism was the most apt metaphor for the filmmaking process, and there is something undeniably extractive about the cinematic process. As filmmakers, we mine people for their powers and affects, then distort and reproduce these for others, divorced from their original owners. While some films foster a sense of identification or empathy with these “owners”, they are always essentially absorbed into an aesthetic whole; moreover, an objectified whole. There is no intersubjectivity possible with light on a wall, or pixels on a screen. As I quoted Serge Daney saying in relation to Ici et Ailleurs:
The cinema [is] the place of a crime and a kind of magic. The crime: that images and sounds are taken from … living beings. The magic: that they are exhibited in another place (the movie theatre) to give pleasure to those who see them. The beneficiary of the transfer: the filmmaker. This is true pornography, this change of scene; it is, appropriately, the ob-scene.
Whitehead was well aware of these issues, but was not convinced (yet) that they were insurmountable. He once called his films “acts of aggression against film, against limits put on me by the nature of film itself”:
My confusion and conflict, which I do admit to, comes from using a debased language. But I refuse to let it win! My problem therefore is to create a language to confront this fragmentation and aggression in culture, which does not itself suffer from the same faults. Perhaps it’s impossible, or may take a long time.
Whitehead’s acknowledgement of this “debased language” reminds me of Alan Watts’ assertion that some of the limits of Western philosophy were attributable to the structures of our languages; our wholly artificial distinction between verbs and objects, for example. Watts, of course, never suggested we should stop speaking. The climactic middle section of The Fall is Whitehead’s attempt to reinvent his debased language, employing an experimental tour de force of abstract and kinetic montage that highlights the important kinship between Whitehead’s work and avant-garde cinema, a tradition in which many have attempted to reinvent the terms of the cinematic relationship. The third and final section, documenting the occupation of Columbia University, is a figurative exploration of this kind of freeform, non-hierarchical intersubjectivity, an embodiment of Debord and company’s aspiration “to be recognized and to recognize themselves in a world of their own making”.
But this project is quickly seen to be short-lived and unsustainable, and Whitehead’s depiction of it is…well, just a depiction. In the end Whitehead is left in his editing suite, haunted by his own images, with the sounds of ”I Am Goya“, a Russian poem of embodied suffering by Andrey Voznesensky, playing untranslated on the soundtrack.
In The Fall, my protagonist is trapped by images, by his conflict with what he sees. It is hard to have to fight against the whole structure of seeing in order to re-assert one’s identity. In the end he destroys reality, which means he abandons his effort to make sense of the outside world, and gives himself to images, to disintegration.
The end result for Whitehead was one of profound discouragement. The film’s formal innovation is undeniable but as Whitehead would later comment (in response to an analysis of the film by critic Raymond Durgnat):
I had been trying to change the world not the language of cinema, confront the fascist tyranny of objectification of everything and everyone. I felt defeated, betrayed by film, my own film most of all. Vicarious avoidance of participation; a preoccupation which was its own predicament.
The film played at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1969, but would be screened only a handful of times over the next forty years, receiving its first New York screening in 2007. By 1977, Whitehead had given up filmmaking completely (he made two more films following The Fall, but considered them “afterthoughts”).
The other two filmmakers in the “Films Politically” programme, Robert Kramer and Jean-Luc Godard, never stopped making films (Godard is still at it). But they both nonetheless withdrew from both the social and political concerns that their work had been intimately intwined with, and any concerted attempt to find or create contexts for their work to be seen. Part of this may be the understandable weariness that comes with age (a weariness that in their cases thankfully never diminished the desire to make the work itself). Godard’s fatalism and reclusive nature is well known, but Kramer was perhaps a more complex situation. Deeply concerned in his final years with the legacy of his ’60s experience, Kramer wrote movingly about the potential for communication and exchange with younger generations. But, in an interview with Cahiers du Cinema in 1998, he struggled to see hope in contemporary society: “your generation accepts the discourse of the powers that be … which states that life cannot progress in any other way.” (He died two weeks before the Seattle protests of 1999 that defined the burgeoning anti-corporate activist movement.) Perhaps the deeper reasons for their withdrawal, however, is the effective failure of both the films and the Movement they were made in response to and, consequently, the sheer unsustainability of their political engagements: as Kramer (whose Ice is all about the exhaustion of political energy) said in the mid-’70s, “We didn’t have the stamina. We didn’t have even a perspective that could carry us through.”
Another filmmaker of this generation, who could have fit into the programme just as well and may help expound some of these issues, is Jon Jost. The great American independent has, in recent years, made the unusual decision to publicise his unashamedly jaded outlook via two personal blogs. Still admirably prolific in his filmmaking, Jost (who is fond of saying that his films are now made for “an audience of (n)one“) is completely free of any expectations or ambitions regarding the visibility or viability of his work. As Jon sees it, he continues
making films as an extremely bad habit, making them for a world in which, for some time, there has been absolutely no ‘market’ for what I do, and frankly I don’t give a damn.
It’s a sober outlook that Jost—who, like Kramer, was a member of Newsreel in the ’60s—extends to his take on global politics (a topic which he nonetheless researches and blogs about obsessively). While Kramer saw ’60s activism as a stunted but still-potent example, Jost avers no illusions:
…. Unlike many of my friends, I do not look back on the 60’s or Chicago 68 with any nostalgia. It was, bluntly, a failure. We (all of us) were young and more or less stupid regarding the larger world. Idealistic maybe, but ignorant and easily taken by romantic notions.
These two perspectives converge in Jost’s assertion of the uselessness of making “films politically”, something he outlined in an excellent essay which primarily critiques conventional “political” cinema:
…. For 40 years, I have wrestled with this, trying to (not always, but most of the time) in some manner make things that are politically/socially/morally charged. In very differing manners, but always with the underlying intention that this is not just “entertainment” but something to provoke the viewer into thinking/feeling outside the norms which our society sets up, with the hope that this will lead to some consideration/improvement, some social and self-awareness. For some time I have considered this a delusion, both personal and social, as if culturally artists are in a sense encouraged to think that what they do matters, when in truth they are little more than playing chips in a larger financial poker game: “art” – be it paintings or novels or whatever – that “succeeds” makes lots of money; the artists, like anyone else would also do, is usually in effect corrupted by the money, and all involved succumb to this mutual self-delusion… And those who are not in this manner “successful” – among whom I would include myself – are reduced to miniscule blips on the social radar, allowed (if lucky) a handful of screenings in festivals (a most inappropriate setting for the absorption of serious work), are patted on the back, given a modest round of applause and then kicked out the door to fend for the rent.
And the brutal fact is that, in social-political terms, never mind the cruder matter of film world career/professional ones, my attempt is in my own mind a total failure. … And perhaps an inherent, necessary and required failure, having to do with how society is structured and how it speaks to itself. In plain, crude terms, it boils down to a simple equation: to have a “mass audience” – which is to say in reality a “political” audience – one must speak within a certain range, and in that certain range are limits in æsthetics, form and, as if they were actually separate, “content”.
… In the face of such a circular system, I guess, reluctantly, I prefer to fail. And, while I think one should “try”, I frankly at my age, and after my experience, don’t really think that this (or any such) system can be really changed: it is how humans are, a fundamental evolutionary error which I think is rapidly drawing our particular show to a close. Each passing day seems only to confirm this grim prognosis, as the spectacles of Hollywood and the broader media pervade the world as Himalayan glaciers melt, and disaster – real disaster – lurks just around the corner.
And that’s not even the worst of it.
While I have never really given any serious consideration to having an audience, and have always accepted my place far on the margins not only of the larger culture, but even the “arts world” one, I must admit it rankles a bit to find oneself in a near empty cinema, screening to a fistful of people, while outside the door the hurly-burly of life swarms on, with inane “entertainments” serving to distract and warp the soul. Not so long ago, while scarcely competitive with the commercial business of film, there was a little pocket of interest, sustained by art houses and museums, and supported academically and in the critics notices in the papers, and back then I might have had 100 or 150 at the Walter Reade. But no more.
In appraising these films and filmmakers, one needs to take into account this bitter taste of “total failure” that Jost is not alone in feeling (something I admit I largely avoided in my series of essays). If one objects to the disengaged (and sometimes arguably self-defeating) outlook of these filmmakers in their later years—or even agrees with their assessment—it need not diminish the importance of the work they’ve created. The films still stand, if not as “successes” in any real world sense, than as still-potent vehicles for thought and practice. These films didn’t change anything, but they could, if only by influencing a new generation of filmmakers (and critics and programmers and viewers) who could take the implications of their work further. But to do so, the limits and misconceptions of these artists also needs to be confronted. It has to be recognised that it’s not enough to get, as Jost wistfully recalls, “100 or 150 at the Walter Reade”, or even to think of success in such terms. Perhaps Jost’s biggest misstep is his false framing of a choice between between obscurity and “selling out”; between making films for no one and making films for the market. Or perhaps there’s a bigger, deeper one: the implication that this is all just about watching films.
As Whitehead asked in one of his characteristic moments of doubt:
How could my film be really revolutionary? Revolution is action. I’m for Mayakovsky in this. Poetry is the only art for revolution. You can sing it and shout it; you don’t have to sit down to do it!
Which is, for me, a roundabout way of saying:
The film is not the most important thing. It’s what you do with it.
[Stills from Ici et Ailleurs, The Fall and Godard's Notre Musique.]
The Masschusets-based artist Eric Malone was recently kind enough to send me a catalogue from the 2001 Yamagata International Film Festival 2001 dedicated to Robert Kramer. The catalogue features some amazing pieces written by Kramer, his family, collaborators and critics—some of which are not available anywhere else, and many originally written in French which have not, to my knowledge, been translated into English anywhere else. One such piece is presented below, written by Kramer’s former cameraman Richard Copans and originally published in Vincent Vatrican and Cédric Venail’s Trajets á travers le cinéma de Robert Kramer (Institut de l’image, 2001). Since it’s not available anywhere else on the net, and fits in with some of the issues I’ve been exploring on this blog (and would have been an invaluable reference for my thesis), I thought it was worth putting up. If Mr. Copans is out there and objects, I will remove it at his request.
It is night.
In a printing plant in Montreuil, occupied by workers who refuse to let the plant be closed, it is also night. A cool night in April 1974. Pompidou has died. The electoral campaigns are beginning. There is a wave of strikes and sit-ins. The Cinelutte collective to which I belong has decided to film them against the background of the electoral campaign: we will film the strikes from the bottom up (the-only-politically-correct-way-to-advance-class-consciousness-and-to-transform-society) by opposing them to the electoral lies (to-the-lies-of-bourgeois-democracy-and-to-the-betrayals-of-reformists-and-revisionists). I have already been filming the Darboy printers for one month. It is night, and I am filiming in this printing plant where the workers sleep.
Later, much later, I will learn that I changed cinema in that night. Unknowingly, I left militant cinema.
Recall
At the time (1974), there are fifteen militant cinema groups in France. All see themselves as “small vises in the large machine of the revolution.” Employed and defined first of all by their political line, their relation to the strikes and the organisations and working within hazardous modes of production (the re-use of footage from other productions, working at night in editing suites, small budgets, plundering, circuits of materials stolen from the ORTF, work for free) these groups are also intolerant of each other. We shun deviations and mistaken political lines. We speak rarely of cinema, even though we make it. We are part of a planetary movement. We are not alone. Everwhere people are picking up arms and filmmakers picking up cameras. Even in the belly of the most deserted form of Imperialism, americanimperialism, collectives are filming with blacks in the ghettos, with the antiwar movement, with Mexican agricultural laborers, with, with, with … On a national scale, we make dozens of copies for, for for … Every shot they film is a nail in Hollywood’s coffin. Like us, they are collective, anonymous, political. They are called Newsreel. They are our brothers in film.
That night, filming in the cool night of the Parisian suburbs, I was not thinking at all of Newsreel. It’s highly likely I wasn’t thinking of anything. Mostly of all, I was preoccupied with what I must film. In the occupied factory, workers sleep in the armchairs of the management’s offices. They have not even brought duvets or covers. What’s more, the printing plant is not heated; they content themselves with their shirts. They are curled up, twisted, ungainly. They slumber. Some really look as though they are sleeping. There is even one who snores. No political debates. No activities necessary for the fight, no clashes of lines; rather, still bodies, closed eyes, the sound of breathing and the murky neon light.
How to film sleeping workers? How to film when nothing is said?
Luckily Thérése is not asleep. She is an offset printing technician. She wears a white blouse, clear sign of the printing press workers. She is also a bit older. She is very soft. She draws: one of the young people asleep, one who continues to snore, a huge mouth, semi-long hair, a short, tight belted leather jacket. Later, we will imagine adventures. But for now, the only activity in these offices is Thérése’s gaze, her pencil, her sketchbook and her softly-moving hand.
And it is without a doubt because she is watching that I can film. My gaze is possible, behind hers. Like an open door, I can film. As they say, I can enter into the scene. I press myself onto her to film those who sleep. A gaze, the direction of a look, an activity, a connection possible between the drawing and the real sleeper, a tenderness, a feeling. I let myself be overcome by the true feelings of this moment of life: my own fatigue, my own tenderness (for Thérése?). There is none of the exultation of great moments of the fight, none of the desperate waiting for the “right” word in the discourse of the militant, none of the “legitimate” fundamentals of Cinélutte.
As for the sentiment of the moment, it is not nothing; a marvellous depth to the moment. given rhythm by the breath of those asleep, without a doubt touched by this sudden intimacy with still bodies, this somewhat surprising intimacy which the power which it has given me and the confidence it has granted me do not allow.
Today I will talk of the Present (as the present moment) and of Grace (as a moment of shared greace).
Recall
One night in December of 1975, I saw Robert Kramer’s Milestones in a theatre.
I cried as I rarely cry at the theatre. It touched too many buttons at once. Was this film? Was it life? A moment in life when film touches you and it hurts. I thought it was real, a documentary (but no! it was staged for the camera, and the blind man was also operating the camera). I made myself blind with this portrait of utopia—without seeing in it any critical distance.
Someone was speaking to me. Political had become sensitive, a series of images, a unique medium in which reason and feeling became confused.Hollywood and the Newsreels gave birth to a new cinema. Les Cahiers du Cinema will include Milestones as one of the best films of the year.
I dare approach the worker who snores, “covered” by his snorts. Another, dozing, smiles at me softly. Thérése looks at me. I film.
I film with a Coutant, an Éclair 16, no doubt “borrowed” from IDHEC for a student project. A marvelous camera, but one whose weight pulls the arm down intolerably—it does not balance on the shoulder (as would an Aaton), it leans on the front. You have to hold it well, solidly, when you are looking down over someone asleep. The physical sense of risk and of physical effort give a sharpness to my activity. They sleep. Concentrated, I think.
And yet there is no feeling of distance. We are together. I am not “stealing” these shots. We have been together for several weeks. With bonds of friendship, sharing meals, pinball at neighhbouring restaurant, discussions, demonstrations, sharing the occupation. We speak of solidarity. We have it. But that is not all. There is also interaction: they are flattered by our presence, by our mundane, affectionate presence, even if our political motives are a bit obscure. Ourselves, we’re proud to have been accepted by these workers day after day.
I do not steal these shots. I film my comrades in the fight. In a certain way, I have become a “Darboy.” It’s illusory, of course, and I know it. But it is more than political solidarity, even if we are not family.
We are sharing a community of life.
I am living a greater experience; I feel the world in a richer way: there is concern, laughter, anger, desire bodies, things that mean nothing, silence and feeling in what I live at Darboy. And the differences and antagonisms can live together in a community of life that surpasses groups, groupings, unions, professional memberships and social classes.
Be careful! Bleating humanism? No, and not at all.
It is more the discovery of the community created by cinema, the community that renders it possible and of which it is only a trace. An idea much more vast and fundamental than “it is good to talk together, we are all human beings” or “the more the merrier.” No, direct cinema rests on the very idea of shared grace itself.
Recall
In december 1979, a producer friend, Héléne Vager, introduced me to Robert, recently arrived from Portugal, and to his images of class struggle. Bathed in the aureole of Newsreel and Milestones, he could say anything—I love him already. The technician in search of work who meets a director is often in this state of generous availability, ready to love his master immediately at the time of a film. The search for work, the mutual need for recognition, the desire for images to share, the want to find one’s place in a power relationship, all of these come together to create scenes with a strong potential for seduction. Yes, seduction.
I think there was a drama underwau there, in the middle of the Atlantic more precisely: Robert, half-exiled, in refusal and searching, and me, half-American, curious about this America (my natal land, even if only halfway) that I refused so obstinately, and half- already departed for another country. Reunited in what we wanted to escape and love at the same time. Since then, we have become friends. It is community like any other.
Filming that night, it was not voyeurism, even the contrary—it was filming at that moment when theere is nothing to see. I am to make a film (not vague residue with a political image).
It is night. Not a work: mystery, magic, the shadows of bodies. It’s hard to be “antirevisionist” at a moment like this. Even if this tactic of occupation breaks with the CGT official party line, I am not filming the illustration of a tactic. I am trying to seize the full feeling of this common moment of a common experience. I am trying to be in it entirely. With my desires for images, my ideas too well formed and the depth of life that I wish to taste. Deleuze would surely speak of the arrangement of my desire. The community is even stronger because this moment is made of my filmmaker’s desire and of the workers’ fatigue, the one adding to the other. Community is founded in difference, in singularity and identity, not in repression and the “collective”.
In other words, today I think that I left militant cinema for the cinema, abandoned a cloak of certainties for the indetermination of time lived in the present, and tried to live this experience of the occupied factory in all its depth. Prettying it up a bit, of course, but I have an excuse: it was only the beginning of a long road not yet travelled, a road which seems to become longer (stretch) as I travel it.
A small moment of life whose lessons I have been able to gasp twenty years later.
An English word, pronounced “expirientz,” an excellent example of a word that cannot be translated, so close and yet so far, a false friend. Far indeed from the white mice of the laboratory. It is neither accumulated knowledge nor a mode of discovery. In English, in Robert’s mouth, it is a strong word. It is a brute block of life, speech, action, the self, others, the feeling of the moment, the gaze, the physical perception of the body in the world, all of this together. It is a way of being in the world, a way of being in the world in more than words, with cold biting at one’s feet, the wind howling and a body in pain.
But there is nothing passive about the moment. There is no experience without a project, without desire.
And the project is cinema, all cinema, nothing but the cinema.
How to place oneself in the whole world so that it leaves a trace on the film?
Without Robert ever having made his films.
To test, to feel out the world? But who is at the test of the other in this experience?
To be completely in this experience, the feeling of the present, of time in the process of passing, this is the level on which experience unfolds.
In which lie the accumulated dawns and successive dusks, all the signs of time that pass in shared risk when living with the actors and the crew. Sharing experience.
This music to which I have been listening all day ever since I was born, not because I am a Black American but because my father broadcast jazz on the radio (Jazz in Liberty, Deep River) and prepared his shows at home.
A music lightly improvised (in part or in entirety) by a collective of musiicans within a framework set partly in advance. There is Africa, the slaves, the fanfares, the rhythms, the improvisations, the responses and, when it is good, the ineffable feeling of being there together. We often filmed this way, a small group of actors and technical staff: Robert at the camera, Olivier doing the sound, Katell adjusting it all and me, my eyes glued to the sky, the lens and that which is out of range: the glance between us, synchronised movements, the feeling of filming catastrophe, inaudible sound, a face that is too dark, at each moment.
And when we stop! Ah! When we make cuts, this impression of happiness like jazz musicians after a particularly good session.
The feeling of danger.
The absolute feeling of the present that lasts.
And the joy of having lived together in that moment. And maybe that danger, that moment of a small community, has even transferred to the film. At no other time do we ever live so intensely this feeling of being with others. Like being up to mischief. Finally infringing on this unbearable break between ourselves and the world.
Being with others.
Being in the world.
Tasting life.
A vocabulary word of those who play jazz on Robert’s films. A word that was introduced. A word that is re-used (“To move through space from one point to another” The Petit Larousse), invented with great difficulty in Lisbon during Doc’s Kingdom: how to understand the Doctor’s trajectory between his house at the edge of the Tage and the hospital downtown: the containers, the small street with the bar, the shantytowns, the slaughterhouses, the azulejos of the hospital. How to avoid description, imagery, topography? How to feel this whole accumulation of the world without having to use the actor as a relay or a mirror? How to put this experience, this trajectory—not just space, the feeling of experiencing the world and time passing—in the film?
Worries. Troubles. Blockages. We had to stop filming one day, we have to do many scenes over again, redefine moments, make a considerable effort to succeed.
The world is codified: in Route One/USA, it is an imposing figure.
In Walk the Walk, it begins to fall into disuse.
Between haiku and action painting, a cinematographic form which lives and dies.
To go from one place to another while time passes, for light to transform itself to transmit a feeling: we do without words, without the bodies of actors. Visual poetry for sure, but energetic enough to not interfere with the narration. The fiction continues even when one is looking at the world without the classic crutches of comedians and dialogue. We must look and move ahead at the same time.
To place the gaze in the same way as we speak of placing a photograph, long enough to see, but never long enough to rest. There is danger, experience, jazz, a frantic search to inscribe on the film how we are in the world: between fusion and divergence, orphan and actor, gaze and mirror.
Experience is in the present. All the signs of time passing are accumulated: the weather report, the path of the sun, real gtraces of the physical test of filming.
The paradox is that in order to seize this time, we need to delay the gaze. Oh, not much—the time that separates two photograms, the time it takes to blink the eyes, the time that separates looking and seeing. Most of all, the time that separates a camera which follows the event of a gaze which imposes its own rhythm.
The time of a gaze that shows that someone is fimling. Affirming this discrepancy is not as simple for me: the cameraperson’s training pushes rather to see everything, or maybe it is but a sign of my impatience, of the rapidity of my desire. I have had to learn over the years to reinstall the immanence of the Present in the delay.
Aside: I have no taste for complicated words or academicisms. But how to make one see the magic of certain moments, certain, of our belief in cinema? How?
For Robert, who has been holding the camera since Route One/USA, this time is also a particular physical engagement. Between tai-chi, brushings, slidings, an extreme concentration and the slowness of a body dancing with the world.
As if the gaze (this aside of time) is accompanied by an aside of space: not in the axis but transversal, sliding, resounding with what is filmed. These are not the notes of the melody, only the harmonics.
It is most certainly larger than political engagement. It is the engagement of a poetic relation with the world: a fusion of the body, the gaze, the spirit and the world. But it is also certainly the opposite of passive absorption, of an ideal fusion.
It is a project, a movement, a desire, with only the feeling that so many others are in this engagement and ready for dialogue. To be, to be complete (in the world) but to make a film which speaks to others: in this movement, this engagement, the world will move.
It is also the engagement of the body. Putting it to the test. The way in which the body reacts (fatigue, heat and cold, illness, tension or relaxation), it is proof of engagement, of dialogue and of combat. This proof can leave its traces on the film, in the shot, in the frame.
Engagement is closer to Rimbaud than to Ché.
For a long time I believed that Robert had abandoned politics to become an auteur-filmmaker. I saw an insurmountable contradiction; I was incapable of thinking about anything but the virtues of collective action. I had an old Leninist foundation; and I had always loved to “make things with many.” This reserve did not at all keep me from abandoning all once a film with Robert appeared.
It took me a long time to accept that politics is more than a way of being in the world than it is a flag. More a way of living in the present than an end to waiting. I learned very late that Robert, one of the founders of Newsreel, had left it so early because he was being suffocated in the collective.
It took me a long time to understand that grave lives in many and that spending one’s life making these moments means winning one’s life, not losing it. It took me a long time to articulate desire and politics, the singular and the communal.
I have been searching for the title for a long time.
“Testing the world” (Épouver le monde) imposes a test on the world as it does on the filmmaker.
The Larousse says that it is “trying something in order to verify its value or quality.”
“To prove oneself” (Se prouver) is not so far away. There are also “Test” (Épreuve) and “Proofs” (Preuves). There is feeling something in one’s body, having a sensation, an emotion.
There is “Experience.”
There is “Appreciation” and “To Verify.”
Who puts the other to the test?
December 1997
Translated from the French by Sarah Teasley
[Handwritten note above taken from a letter written by Kramer, accessible here.]
The singular achievements of Steve McQueen’s Hunger have been well sketched by Michael Sicinski already—but one important issue that’s yet to be adequately addressed is its relation to Irish film culture. Two of the big questions that came to my mind after seeing the film were: why has it taken so long for a film like this to emerge, and why did it take a British, Turner Prize-winning fine artist to do so?
The crux of McQueen’s achievement has been the realisation of the complexities of a political struggle in almost purely material and experiential terms, in the tangible subjectivities of body, time and space. This has been labelled by some as a depoliticisation of the subject matter, a reduction of complex historical interactions to their existential phenomena that strips them of their significance. But this notion has it backwards: surely its the poverty of most political discourse to fail to take into account this materiality, rather than the other way around. In one of the most cogent critiques against the film, Caroline McKenzie faults the film for a “privileging of the emotional over the political”: as if McQueen’s centering on sensuality and bodily experience is somehow less real or valid—or political—than the ideological schemas laid out (and employed with much more calculated sentimentality) in the films of Leftists such as Ken Loach. In fact, it’s just what Irish cinema needs.
Sicinski hits the nail on the head in pointing out:
Films about the “Troubles” in Ireland are virtually a dime a dozen, territory nearly as well-trod as the Holocaust. Is there anything left to say, and if so, is there a manner in which to say it that doesn’t just turn unspeakable suffering into comforting bourgeois narrative at best, or cheap spectacle at worst?
I’ve speculated before that the proliferation of Irish Troubles cinema could be as often motivated by its convenience as a pretext for cinematic excitement (it’s the closest thing we have to a Vietnam) as by a genuine desire to explore our history—but in either case, spectacle or comforting narrative have invariably been the end results. There are notable exceptions: Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s last interesting film, Nothing Personal (1995), operates successfully as both thriller and social critique, giving us a vision of urban sectarianism that’s movingly tragic while unabashedly exploiting the gangsterism of both sides’ paramilitaries for dramatic effect. Interestingly, few more earnestly politicised efforts have failed to escape (or at least, like O’Sullivan, harness) the perceived demands of the commercial market, instead giving into either genre conventions or a moralistic fetishisation of atrocity, grief and victimhood. With Bloody Sunday (2002), Paul Greengrass managed to avoid all these representational pitfalls with a gripping faux-verité style that emphasised the lived experience of an historical moment over its wider context—although somewhat dubiously, Greengrass would find those same stylistic premises to be just as handy for re-jigging the action genre with Matt Damon. Prior to McQueen, the most interesting Northern Irish films were probably the works of two other Englishman: Alan Clarke’s Elephant (1989) is the greatest anti-violence film ever made, and Mike Leigh’s neglected Four Days in July (1985) sees his meticulously built characterisation paying grand dividends in an ’80s Belfast trapped in its own conflicting histories.
But Hunger is something new. It offers a way of looking at this situation that suddenly seems to have been so absent, something we’ve been in need of without perhaps realising it. How often do we conceive of political oppression or liberation as playing out in the intimacy of our own body? In limiting his narrative’s scope to largely silent scenes of characters engaged in physical activities, and in filming these events in an austere but intimate way that emphasises subjective experience, McQueen does not reject the political significances of the events depicted so much as plumb the depths of those politics.
The fact is, in deaing with the H Block and the hunger strikes, there is no avoiding the political questions. At this epicentre of the conflict, there is no need for narration, explanatory titles, even words to point out what is already immanent. Allegiances and ideologies are inscribed on each body (in the forms of tattoos or, more often, scars and wounds), divisions are made of metal and concrete, and forms of resistance and subversion are reduced to their most fundamental—centred only around what is allowed to enter and exit one’s body. To say that McQueen depoliticises this situation is to fool oneself that such a feat is even possible.
McKenzie criticises McQueen for “eschewing all political dialogue surrounding the strike”, but she seems to momentarily forget that the centrepiece of the film—and its most acclaimed scene—consists of twenty minutes of concentrated political dialogue. It’s interesting that this scene has been so universally lauded for its virtuosity and audacity, considering that, in technical terms, it is so exceedingly simple: a conversation across a visiting room table between two people (hunger striker Bobby Sands and a Catholic priest), filmed in an uninterrupted static wide shot. But apart from the daring bravado of its simplicity, perhaps what has drawn critics to this scene so overwhelmingly is the wealth of cultural and political context it provides in an otherwise discrete and taciturn narrative. Some have explicitly criticised the film for not continuing in the articulate vein of this scene, but it’s the dialectic the film creates between it and the rest of the film that makes Hunger so interesting (and distinguishes it from more wholly materialist works like Gus Van Sant’s “Death Trilogy”).
The film’s first act, concerning the 4-year “dirty protests” that preceded the hunger strikes, depicts an environment in which words have been exhausted and hollowed out, and dialogue is impossible. Unlike so many films of injustice and oppression (one could take The Counterfeiters [2007], which I’ve written about before, to stand for all), Hunger does not fabricate any political or philosophical debates between the opposing sides of its conflict. Words in this world are only able to function as ritual and as gestures of solidarity or hate. They are means of standing one’s ground rather than shifting it or redefining it, and this is as true as much for the howls and screams as it is for the rehearsed spiel of a new prisoner refusing his prison uniform as an assertion of his political status.
Emerging out of this, the Sands-priest scene takes on particular significance. The scene’s austere single take and the stillness of its characters is carved in stark relief against the sensuality and kinesis of the film’s first part, overwhelmed as it was with shit, piss, skin and violence. After a long absence, words are shown as having the potential to embody more than ritual and gesture. The seemingly incidental chit-chat that takes up the scene’s first few minutes is in fact an essential scene-setter for the political debate to ensue. The jovial banter about the outside world infuse the scene with a sense of connection, community, history that has been completely absence from the film so far, where the spatial and social abstractions of prison are omniprescent. Even the exchange about the bad habit of smoking, and its presence throughout the scene, suggests the notion of bodily self-determination that is central to the prisoners’ cause. These details are important because the interaction that follows, in which Sands and the priest debate his decision to go on hunger strike, is essentially about a struggle for control of body and space, and the sense of identity that both of these connotate.
The two are starkly opposed, the priest questioning both Sands’ motivations and the strategic efficacy of his plan—but the way in which this disagreement is explored is a model of nuance and respect, and, unlike every other conflict of perspective we have seen so far, neither side requires violence (on itself or on the other) in order to stake its ground. But, lest this scene be viewed as positing a model for reconciliation, it is clear that this civilised exchange of views is possible only because the two share common ground, and this question of territory—in psychological, intellectual and social terms, but extending into the purely spatial—is integral, and intwined with the question of bodily integrity, bodily agency. A debate like this cannot happen in the rest of the prison because there is no space in which it could take place. And, of course, utlimately, there is no real possibility of either person convincing the other here, because the space in which each is required to act is not the visiting room.
The Sands-priest scene serves as a fulcrum from which to understand the rest of the film; retrospectively we can see the strategic underpinnings of what we have witnessed so far, and we are now primed to see the starvation of Sands that will occupy the remainder of the film as a strategic choice also. In short, it allows us to see the larger issues that are infusing all this embattled physicality—yet, inversely, it also suggests the extent to which this is a two-way relationship and that just as the “dirty protests” had political motivations which evolve through the hunger strike, the material experience of the former is a psychological and emotional spur to the latter.
Sicinski hints at this dialectic:
… Every fragment represents some larger social whole — the prisoner, the guard. and more than this, the Republicans, the Loyalists, the Catholic Church, the Crown — that is everpresent but can never exactly be seen as a totality. At the end of Act One, when the guard suddenly becomes a stand-in for his social position, sum and total, it is shocking, because McQueen’s radical materialist humanism displays in concrete terms the cold rationality, the madness but also the logic, of a battle in which men must embody forces larger than themselves.
The film is so effective because it stylistically resists these forces of abstraction and dehumanisation even as it inevitably represents them. If there is an ethical distinction between a film and the structures it represents, it is nevertheless a precarious one, and in the depiction of an environment as starkly delineated as a prison—probably humanity’s most inhuman invention—it’s all the easier to allow the environment’s contours to become the film’s. The roles are so defined, the ideologies so hardened and the issues so transcendent, it’s easy to neglect the minutae; to disregard the intimacies of suffering for the greater ideal of sacrifice, to dismiss the adrenaline run of dominating another person’s body for the larger questions of punishment, retribution or “evil”.
McKenzie suggests that McQueen, by telling
the story of the hunger strike almost entirely through strong, evocative visuals, but in doing so, he continues to deny these Irish historical figures access to language, favoring extradiegetic archival sound bites of British politicians to the voices of his characters. As a result, his depiction of the strike identifies with Loyalist and British views by strongly affecting viewers’ emotions without allowing for any political dialogue. … McQueen duplicates state censorship by denying the viewer any way to interpret these images except through emotional response.
Actually, many Republicans and even former hunger strikers have praised the film, particularly for its stark depiction of the long-denied extremes of prison guard brutality—but even notwithstanding that, from the perspective of Irish culture, it’s hard to agree that what Troubles cinema needs more of is talking. When Sicinski talks about Hunger as “a radical approach to the problem of representation and its deadening effects”, I’m reminded of how films that address political issues on their own terms tend to have the regressive effect of reducing its players to those terms, even as it attempts to critique their damaging effects or posit their possible re-definition. They can’t see the forest for the trees. But the possibility of resolution only comes out of seeing the potential dissolution of these boundaries, not in taking them as given. Even films like Nothing Personal, while offering stirring images, never really come to grips with the heart of the problem because of these conventional trappings.
One of the greatest powers of McQueen’s approach is that it is implicitly opposed to the repression and deprivation of the individual, but not sectarian in its direction. While Loyalists may inevitably come off worse because of the positions of power they occupy, the film is careful to show that their bodies and minds, too, are terrorised and reduced by this situation—and at the same time leaves hints that the Republican’s risk losing agency to their own leadership and allegiances as much as their enemies do. McKenzie adds that “without the political context, the strikes are just a horrific series of photos of ten men wasting away in prison cots—exactly as Thatcher claimed.” But the hunger strikes will always be both: the deep, complex political context and its layers of history do not somehow negate or replace the brutal and absurd horror of the physical events. The fact is, this uneasy dissonance between the politics and the physical is something exploited by both sides. The cold brutal facts are as dangerous to the Republican cause as to the British one, in the way that reality is always a threat to ideology. Both sides wanted control of the images and their meanings—and because of the way the media translates evenets into words and clips and soundbites, both sides potentially could—but McQueen concedes it to neither.
Considering this, the final section’s painstakingly intimate and gradual evocation of Sands’ death is crucial; as Sicinski puts it, McQueen “needs the so-called ‘conventional’ final act of Hunger to put the whole question of the strike, and political representation itself, to the test.”
After all, what Sands undergoes is an irreducibly particular death, the extinguishing of a wholly unique and forever irreplaceable light in the world. For Sands’ sacrifice to obtain value as protest, it must function synecdochically. His particular body, and those who starved in his wake, must achieve generality. They must be soldiers, Irishmen, not just singular human beings with grieving Mums and Dads and wives and children. And yet, the necessary power of the sacrifice also requires that that full individual dissolution, with all the will and waste it entails, must somehow be retained.
Although in the film’s central conversation, Sand’s inevitable transformation into an icon and martyr of the cause is addressed, the film carefully avoids the iconography of Sands itself (even going so far as to cast an actor who looks nothing like him)—in particular one boyish, smiling image that has monopolised his memory since his death. Bothered by this, McKenzie wonders “why McQueen even bothers bringing Bobby Sands into the film: if he has denied Sands both his political stance and his persona, what is left of the man?” The answer is simple, and irresolvable: a man.
Hunger is more fruitfully understood as an interrogation and expansion of political discourse rather than a dismissal or abdication of it. It re-orientates rather than rejects the political question. The fact few have even begun to consider the implications of this re-orientation is further evidence that most journalists lack a vocabulary for talking about film form, and instead are forced to describe films like Hunger in precisely the terms it itself avoid (in her review, all of McKenzie’s objections, intelligent and well-written though they are, are essentially journalistic ones, while the film’s style is reduced to generic labels such as “strong” and “evocative”.)
The answers to my two initial questions are probably multiple, but the failure of critics to actually recognise a breakthrough like this when it happens certainly doesn’t help. Perhaps it isn’t Hunger that lacks political awareness, but its critics.
More than anything, I wanted Harold [Washington, the first black mayor of Chicago] to succeed; like my real father, the mayor and his achievements seemed to mark out what was possible; his gifts, his power, measured my own hopes. And in listening to him speak to us that day, full of grace and good humour, all I had been able to think about was the constraints on that power. … Harold’s presence consoled … But beneath the radiance of Harold’s victory, in Altgeld and elsewhere, nothing seemed to change.
I wondered whether, away from the spotlight, Harold thought about those constraints. Whether … he felt as trapped as those he served, an inheritor of a sad history, part of a closed system with few moving parts, a system that was losing heat every day, dropping into low-level stasis.
I wondered whether he, too, felt a prisoner of fate.
—Barack Obama, Dreams from my Father (Crown, 1995), p231.
[Photo of "Abraham Obama" by Ron English.]
I want to view my personal, private beliefs and experiences as parallel and simultaneous to my social, public policies and actions. This is the difference between morality (metaphysics: what we think and feel in private) and ethics (politics: how we act in public society). Therefore, politics should be founded on the principle of not imposing a specific metaphysics, but rather to encourage and legislate policies that allow for as many metaphysics as there are people.
Aesthetics is the private choice and experience of a maker(s) expressed to an audience. Using a particular aesthetic can be a radical political act, but the actual aesthetic itself remains uniquely private (thus there is no absolutely right aesthetic).
Art is not valuable because of what it gives to you, it is valuable because of the process of giving meaning as a viewer/listener/reader. A particular aesthetic can be a radical political act by being in opposition to a conventional, commodified aesthetic, which pressures society toward passively accepting fascism. What is radical about Reinhardt’s aesthetic is its opposition to the deadening of people’s minds (one could make a similar argument against popular, conventional television, music, and Hollywood) and the way his paintings challenges their viewers’ to be active participants in the art-experience. If we learn that we can give (create) some meaning as audience, not just receive it obediently. We might become more intelligent, informed, and active citizens, as well. There is nothing in the aesthetic itself that produces this, though. It is in our confrontation with aesthetics where revolution lies.
This also continues an old theme in Farocki’s work: namely, the literal dehumanisation of the world and the consequent evacuation of the possibility of human agency, an ongoing event which often appears as the result of the spread of industrial and market processes to larger realms of the social. … Yet in each of these films … there is a sense of the possibility of actual human resistance to this process. It is precisely the sense of this possibility that gives Farocki’s films their (lasting) political urgency, and justifies Farocki’s art as itself just such an act of resistance.
His recent videos, however, give the sense that this process of dehumanisation has intensified. These works revolve around a void present in the social as it is now coming into being: paradoxically, that void consists of the absence of effective human beings, social agents, political actors, and workers producing, organising and resisting and more. His earlier work still sustained a sense that such subjects once existed and that some might emerge anew; in the recent work, such agents do not seem to exist and none seem about to enter the picture.
… This is a statement about the condition of the world, a world which Farocki is at pains to document. But it is not clear how his work can differentiate itself from the images of the world that surround us every day, apparently immune to any resistance, yet capable of being resampled in endlessly new arrays, seamlessly integrated into the white-walled, arid spaces of the contemporary museum. Farocki’s work, and with it the world, has come a long way from its agit-prop beginnings; one wonders, does it now suggest to us that there is no collective subject to agitate? And if that is the case, then the question begs itself: what distinguishes this new video art from propaganda for the merely existent?
In its collective dimension, the whole of cinema appears like a vast formal inquiry into the nature of presence. As something that is simultaneously a trace, a reconstitution and a flickering, the figurative material appears in the state of a fetish, it is a sample, offering or not a hypothesis on being. As Philippe Garrel put it: “There is a solidarity between real artists and revolutionaries, because they both refuse ordinary identifications.” Cinema could have the almost anthropological function of reminding us of what is possible for the body, of sending us image constructions which make it impossible to limit the organism to its determining factors.
Brenez is brilliant in the way she forms relations of translation and contamination between the seemingly incongruous terms and series she posits, for example the manner in which the “new figures of hypermorality” metamorphoses into the concept of “life as political passion” and in her way of provoking inspired encounters between the most sublime concepts: “composition by anamorphosis” and “the forms of the incomplete,” “the exigencies of infinity” and “the genesis of emotion.” There are incredible passages too on the manner in which an ecstatic epistemology of acknowledgement in Ferrara, his way of “letting infinity’s forms emerge,” can serve as a counter to contemporary forms of power/knowledge. Fundamentally for Brenez, it is the twin forces of anger and love that drive Ferrara’s films. They are “symbolic bombs that dynamite the shadows in an effort to hollow out a space for love.”
[Still from John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence, 1974.]
—Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1940).
—Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995).
————————————————————————————————————
I mentioned in the second part of my recent mammoth 21-point post that recent American cinema has frequently been more politicised in its larger scale, commercially financed incarnations. This includes television, thanks largely to HBO, which has supported some of the most progressive TV drama since the BBC gave Mike Leigh and Alan Clarke free reigns back in the ’80s.
I don’t mean to suggest that shows such as Oz (1997-2003), The Sopranos (1999-2007) or The Wire (2002-2008) match the formal innovation or brilliance of cinema’s high points. There are no TV Bressons or Cassavetes—Leigh and Clarke being the eternal and inexplicable exceptions (about which the BBC have apparently been trying to cover their tracks ever since—when was the last time any of their remarkable BBC features were broadcast?). But, working well within the confines of American narrative cinema, these shows have nevertheless pushed the boat of serialised drama out about as far as it’s ever gone. Eschewing mood music, heavy-handed exposition, conventionally sympathetic characters or a clearly delineated moral code, they create worlds of doubt and uncertainty where characters’ actions, plotted and arced though they may be, are limited, misguided and often futile. Most of all, these shows transgress the long-held belief of American TV in American institutions. They do not take for granted, unlike all of their predecessors, that society’s institutions (from the police to justice to the medical establishment) are inherently worthy, respectable and effective (not to mention manned by likeable, well-meaning and attractive individuals). Apart from all this, of course, the scope offered by 60-plus hours of screen time allows for narrative possibilities that feature filmmaking simply can’t broach, and contains an inherently humanist tendency; spending so much time with characters facilitates the viewer’s involvement and sympathy, no matter how imperfect or compromised they are.
The West Wing (1999-2006) is not one of these exceptions. Following the experiences of a White House staff through two presidential terms and presidential campaigns, the NBC-broadcast show trades liberally in the institutional grandeur and nobility of the “greatest office in the land” for its dramatic pull and weight. The lead characters (all Democrats, of course), while flawed, are fiercely intelligent, compassionate and extraordinarily decent: they are, in other words, presumably working in a White House in a galaxy far, far away. Episode’s plot-lines are usually rephrased after each ad break, and the character’s fundamental beliefs and assumptions are rarely undermined or questioned. Obstacles are usually personalised (the bad egg politician) or treated as inevitable as the weather (the huge PR and marketing aspects of governing), and our heroes’ weekly catharses are always accompanied by the swell of synthetic strings.
The reason TWW is still worth writing about, and interesting to consider in contrast to the more obviously “good” TV of the HBO school, is that it has on occasion, despite all its limitations, managed to intelligently dramatise and tease out certain paradoxes and challenges of trying to effect change within the political system. Part of this may be because the advances of HBO have begun to sink in further afield in other ways. Across the board, American television is typically more nuanced and attentive to real world relationships and politics than it was ten or twenty years ago, even if the underlying ideologies haven’t budged significantly. Another reason may be the way in which the dramatic form is inherently more open to a dialectical and multi-faceted (and humanised) discourse than “objective” journalistic practices and therefore, pointed at complex issues in an intelligent and well-researched way, it can easily open up an engaged dialogue even if it’s at the hands of apolitical Hollywood TV writers.
Aaron Sorkin, TWW’s creator and (unusually for TV) the solo author of the first few seasons, has always denied an interest in politics per se, justifying the show’s chosen subject matter as simply being ripe dramatic material; and judging from his subsequent series, Studio 60 on Sunset Strip (2006-2007), the primary thread running through Sorkin’s work seems to be a sub-Hawksian obsession with wisecracking, witty workaholics—in particular those who’s occupations are defined and made or broken on the back of their skillful manipulation of words. Like Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday (1940), Sorkin’s characters may try to use their talents for ethical ends, but their raison d’etre is the sheer pleasure of the work itself. Consequently, characters are valued and judged in TWW universe not on whether they are “good”, ethical or compassionate (because some may have these traits and yet, like Ralph Bellamy, be portrayed as gullible and buffoonish) but because they can argue anything, hold 100 pieces of information in their head at the same time and negotiate and manipulate complex systems of information and power. Notwithstanding its occasionally confused slips into editorialising (sometimes hawkish, sometimes liberal), these are TWW’s fundamental politics.
Within this value system, where characters are always trying to convince somebody about something, whether they be a co-worker, congressman or the media, some key, deep-seated conflicts emerge and re-emerge. They include: the conflict between doing good and looking good (ie, trying to enact progressive measures while still maintaining an attractive public media image, the credibility of which will often effect the viability of said measures), between noble ends and dirty means (ie, the inevitable bargaining, trading and blackmailing that achieving political goals entails), and between the needs of the job and the individual’s personal, emotional and romantic needs. These demanding and ultimately irreconcilable forces create characters who are masters of compromise and strategic sacrifice, but the show is distinct from a lot of modernist cinema dealing with similar themes in that it views this negotiation of systemic limitations as generally benevolent rather than a process of loss or trauma.
These conflicts are endlessly resurrected as sources of drama, but positioned in such a way that, while character’s actions cover the spectrum from defiant subversion of institutional needs to dutiful acquiescence to them, the resolution always reinforces the nobility of the political game. Nobody has to give up their ideals (the few characters without them never seem to have had any in the first place), because the very heart of their ideal is the political process, not the aims (equality, justice, etc) the political process supposedly exists to serve. If the show’s idealism somehow never seems to truly clash with the manipulative world of political wheeling and dealing, it’s because these things are actually one and the same. The show’s ultimate ideal is pragmatism.
Some of the implications of The West Wing, taken at face value, are clearly regressive. In pushing us to identify with these characters in positions of power, we come to prioritise as they do, the skills and pleasures of the political game, and begin to cheer for our side’s prominence in this game. We forgive their inability to reform the education system because they are likeable and funny and we’re really more concerned that the two that keep flirting with each other will eventually make out and get married. We are implicated in their endless compromises, in their manipulation of the media and their strategic, occasionally callous power plays, because we want our guys to win.
A lot has changed in Hollywood, evidently, since the times when Frank Capra made his best political films, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1940) and State of the Union (1948). In his treatment of individuals attempting to work within powerful institutions and systems, Capra operated under a markedly different set of philosophical and dramatic principles.
In the above clip from Capra’s Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Jean Arthur tells Jimmy Stewart that not everybody in Washington is like Taylor and Paine, the businessman and politician that are the film’s key figures of corruption: “that kind just throw big shadows, that’s all”. But the rest of the film shows that the problem runs much deeper than that: their actions are endemic of a political culture where public representatives are bought and paid for by private elites, and the idea of a free press is just more PR. Rather than the characters of TWW, working within a neutral bureaucracy that is alternately pliable and stubborn, in Capra’s Washington, the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against anything or anybody decent, and within this environment, the nuances of TWW’s much-loved negotiatory procedures are less tenable.
The difference in the visions of Capra and Sorkin et al is somewhat analogous to the process of co-optation that saw radical opposition and resistance in the US largely pacified and neutralised in the past few decades. Although Capra’s outlook has been thoroughly sanitised in American culture (as Ray Carney as argued), his films consistently depict social and political systems as debased and dehumanising and never suggest that they could be easily reformed (even his characteristic, clipped happy endings are only ever based on momentary triumphs and the promise of further struggle). In Capra’s films, the best of which were produced during the Great Depression, the key issue is not how to manipulate the system but simply how to avoid having one’s identity crushed and negated by it. Considering this, perhaps Stewart’s impassioned, climactic speech as Mr. Smith find its real-world parallels not in any realm or era of electoral politics but in the tortured and incendiary performances of the ’60s New Left.
The West Wing—which, in its final two seasons, uncannily dramatised Obama’s rise to victory two years before it happened—is a product of a very different age. A character like Mr. Smith could never exist in its world for many reasons, but the fundamental one is that he wouldn’t be able to negotiate its values. His ideals would mean nothing without the verbal and negotiatory prowess to enact them, and while Smith’s central achievement at the end of the film does involve both his powers of speechifying and his ability (coached by Jean Arthur) to harness institutional rules—this achievement is treated as Herculean, unsustainable, and harrowing. What the occupants of the West Wing do over lunch, nearly kills Mr. Smith. Although perhaps that parallel is too neat, since the physical strain of Smith’s performance, its intensity and its precariousness, seem much closer in tenor to an act of resistance—an attempt to put one’s body “upon the gears and upon the wheels” of power—than any kind of political manipulation. It’s more about finding his own language than learning an institutional one.
The other reason that Mr. Smith could no longer go to Washington, and perhaps the reason the radical aspects of Capra’s work are so buried nowadays, is that the values Stewart’s performance embody have been widely discredited, or at least drastically marginalised. This is the case for its formal qualities as well as its political implications.
Formally, Capra’s films are emblematic of an era of Hollywood cinema that has long past. The flexibility with which Capra utilised Hollywood conventions, the liberties he gave his actors, the ways in which he stretched scenes beyond their expected narrative functions (there are no standard scene lengths in his films)…all these qualities are now solely the domain of arthouse cinema—and certainly not possible in the streamlined world of TV production. Additionally, the mismatched cuts and discontinuities that Capra’s films are riddled with—like his admirer, Cassavetes, he cut for the performance, not for synchronised movement—are no longer acceptable now that the notion of “production value” has become sacrosanct.
But above all, the performative potentials that Capra explored in the ’30s and ’40s are not possible in the context of TWW. Working on a fast-paced schedule, and portraying the same characters for some 7 years (with a total running time of over 150 hours), the show’s regular actors inevitably become more rote and systematic in their performances—the same tics, the same reactive glances and concerned tones. But the performative style is tied in with the show’s formal philosophy as well: while Capra frequently employs narrative archetypes (the man against the system, the greedy businessman vs. the innocent small-towner), TWW is archetypal in a much more fundamental way. Its characters may be more conventionally realistic, but their emotional lives are simply conventional—they feel Pride, Admiration, Regret and Sympathy and we know they do because the actors (with some help from the music) are telling us. This is what ultimately separates and weakens the show in comparison to Hawks, who’s characters’ verbose pathologies were rarely tempered by having accessible, nougat-filled emotional insides.
Capra’s heroes are filled with desires, aspirations and ideals, the expression and enaction of which are arduous and imperfect endeavours. There is a pragmatism to his vision that may anticipate Sorkin’s show in some respects, but what’s missing is the sense of great conflict and inner struggle that that pragmatism creates. The most striking thing about TWW is not just that all of this seems to be no longer imaginable—but that even its former possibility has been forgotten. The characters have nothing inside they can’t get out, or perhaps, they just don’t have insides in the way Capra’s characters did. The corollary of this is that they don’t have radical aspirations.
After the ultimate collapse, failure and disillusionment of the ’60s New Left project and, most recently, after 8 years of Bush, what remains of the Left in America is battered and disempowered, faced with a resurgent, regressive system within which, as Greil Marcus put it, one can only make meaningless choices and against which one can seemingly not intervene. Even cultural forms of resistance seem Quixotic in the face of Debord’s “spectacle-commodity society” in full flight. Of course, activism was a common practice throughout the Bush nadir, but there was a never sense of revolutionary possibility involved. In Revolt Video’s unique activist documentary, Route Irish (2007), covering the protests against US war planes landing in Ireland, the point is brilliantly made that much modern activism serves more as a form of exorcism and disassociation (”not in my name”) than a project aimed at actually changing anything. (TWW’s one portrayal of anti-capitalist activists is also telling: given a meeting with a White House staffer, they are so disorganised and inarticulate that he just sits down and reads the newspaper while they argue amongst themselves. He later calls their protests “activist vacation”.)
So, in the absence of any viable form of opposition, there are two options: apathy or a renewed belief in systemic reform. Faced with the boredom of inertia, optimistic visions of working within the system can have an irresistible appeal, and TWW could be said to have cultivated this belief, offering a two-term fantasy presidency running almost exactly parallel to Bush’s 8 eight years. Barack Obama (who has often situated himself as a product of the progressive struggles of the ’60s), then, took it to its logical conclusion. But, while many have argued convincingly that Obama’s victory (and his remarkable use of decentralised organising) is yet another tremendous absorption and nullification of the Left, its merits can’t be easily dismissed.
The moderate, diplomatic and balanced approach that TWW and Obama both represent, while not ideal, is arguably the most effective approach given our current circumstances. Of course, much of Obama’s discourse has been bland, empty and rhetorical, but in his finest moments, such as his remarkable speech, “A More Perfect Union“, he’s created a skillfully modulated and nuanced discourse that manages to employ the narrow, rhetorical vocabulary of American politics (freedom, the American dream, etc) and embue it with progressive meaning by connecting it with an array of ordinary struggles. He’s managed to do this while also pragmatically playing the political game, and “A More Perfect Union” is a perfect summation of this, being at once an expression of his political style and a defusion of a damaging media controversy.
Central to Obama’s approach is the belief that divisiveness retards political change. In other words, in order to get anything done, you need to be careful what you say: understanding everybody’s point of view, and prioritising sensitivity over truth-telling. This is the political reasoning underlying the innocuous rhetoric of “unity” and it explains both why Obama condemned Reverend Wright’s comments and why he refused to disown the pastor. It doesn’t matter that everything that Wright said is true; the problem is one of form: it’s how he said it. He said it like a Capra character—honest, uncompromising, and performatively intense and loose. He did not mediate, did not temper himself so that more people would consider his message. Obama’s response to Wright is neither black and white nor vague: he acknowledges the validity and justification for African-American anger; but he objects to it because “it prevents the African American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change”. He doesn’t disagree with the content of their sentiments—he just thinks their form is “counterproductive”.
For Capra, forms were not so interchangeable. In State of the Union, millionaire businessman Grant Matthews (Spencer Tracy) is groomed as a presidential candidate by a host of political, media and business elites. Matthews is pushed to restrain his iconoclastic oratory style and controversial policy positions (which his minders condemn as “antagonistic”) for the sake of satisfying as many special interest groups as possible. He pragmatically relents at first, but is eventually persuaded by his wife (Katherine Hepburn) that there’s no such thing as compromising a little; such external acts of public submission have internal consequences: you lose your identity. You lose what you had to say in the first place.
If there’s a counterargument to be made, three of TWW’s best episodes embody it:
• “The Birnam Wood”, written by John Wells, focuses on an American-hosted summit between Palestinian and Israeli authorities, depicted as a somewhat Quixotic attempt by US President Bartlett (Martin Sheen) to resolve the Middle East crisis, against the weary cynicism of almost everyone else involved (his Chief of Staff insists it’s a waste of time and the Israelis and Palestinians aren’t that much more enthusiastic). Apart from the obviously fanciful earnestness and impartiality of the US administration’s position as mediators, a surprisingly balanced and vivid political reading of the conflict is drawn and, for the uninitiated, it offers a pretty decent overview of why the Israeli-Palestinian situation is so entrenched. But moreso, it uses the opportunity of this most unresolvable of disputes to tease out a style of tactful and compromising discourse. The Palestinians and Israelis come to an agreement.
• “Opposition Research”, written by Eli Attie, looks at the beginnings of Obama-surrogate Matt Santos’ (Jimmy Smit) campaign for the presidency, centring on the conflict between Santos and his campaign manager. Santos is the most Capraesque of TWW’s characters, and, echoing State of the Union, the episode focuses on his campaign manager’s attempts to button down his controversial policy plans and focus on “honing his narrative” and image as a politician, while of course, avoiding saying anything that will antagonise certain interests. But, if TWW can solve the Middle East crisis, it may not come as a surprise that this conflict between ideals and pragmatism is also overcome. The campaign manager acknowledges and respects Santos’ earnest aspirations, while Santos consents to play the image-politics game for the sake of having a shot at the presidency. His identity is not destroyed in the process.
• In “Internal Displacement”, written by Bradley Whitford (one of the show’s main actors and one of only two things he’s ever written), the White House Chief of Staff, CJ Cregg (Allison Janney), attempts to intervene in the Sudanese genocide using diplomatic means. With military intervention considered a political impossibility, she tries to enact a UN resolution sanctioning the oil revenues of those responsible, but first has to overcome the opposition of China, which has vested interests in Sudan, and then has to seek the help of France and Germany, who want permission to sell arms to China…and so on. Later in the episode, over dinner, Janney gives one of the most frank appraisals of TWW’s philosophy of compromise in the whole series:
DANNY: Just get something done.
CJ: Well that’ll come down to what it always comes down to.
DANNY: What’s that?
CJ: How dirty do my feet have to get without disappearing into the mud in order to get an inch of what I really want done.
DANNY: Doesn’t sound very heroic.
CJ: It’s not.
In fact, TWW endlessly plays up the heroism of this kind of practice (not least in its deafeningly pompous stars-and-stripes title sequence), but in this moment, at least, it acknowledges that there is an ever-present danger of “disappearing into the mud”.
The genocide in Sudan, by the way, is still going on.
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