Saturday, August 09, 2003
79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Minh (Alvarez, 1969)
This film was comprised of an abundance of newsreel footage of or relating to the life of Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. It also featured a number of still photographs. Some interesting footage/images was of anti-Vietnam protests in the U.S., of people burning draft cards, etc. This, among other things, gave the film an international edge. (My point of reference is limited, I know little of the era other than my father who was a conscientious objector, and “draft counselor”).
Renov said this film worked as a eulogy for Ho Chi Minh. Well, I am too uninformed about all the details of the history and historical figures this film references to speak to that or much else about it, unfortunately. We watched it in reference to Gaines’ chapter about “political mimesis.” She argues that certain (documentary) films present calls to political action on the part of the viewer through a realist depiction of struggle—to bring a bodily consciousness that seeks relief in action. Yet, while this presents brutal and visceral images, and appears as an ideological appeal to global communist resistance/revolution, it does so in a remarkable formalist way. The film breaks apart, split-screens, still frames, etc. This seems to align it directly with the “imperfect cinema” tradition, which uses formalist tactics to appeal to the viewer’s analytical capacities. How do we reconcile Gaines’ notion of realism with this? Can formalism command the same call to action? Well, it seems possible, but in a very different way, as would be acknowledged by both Gaines’ as well as Espinoza. The primary difference would be in the appeal to the audience’s intellect. Gaines says that the immediacy of realist aesthetics circumvents the intellect, and Espinoza seems to say something similar. The difference lies in the motivation to action—Espinoza thinks this must happen through appeals to the intellect, via disruptions in the formal structure of the film. Thus, the disruptions in 79 Springtimes should be read as mirroring its revolutionary intentions. I cannot say who is correct here, only that there is here, in a simplistic understanding, the traditional realist/formalist debate made anew.
Prisoner of the Iron Bars (Sacramento, 2003)
This was a tremendous, and tremendously long, film about a prison in San Paolo. It was shot on video, and the footage was filmed by both the directors as well as a great number of inmates of the prison who were provided video cameras with which to document themselves and their surroundings. In this, the film serves as a particular example of indigenous filmmaking, and its potentialities. The film began easily enough, mainly documenting the ingenuity and creative abilities of the prisoners. Over the course of the film it got steadily more and more brutal, detailing the violence and general misery these people live with daily.
One of the first things that I find interesting about this work is the way that it really conforms to more standard documentary forms, despite the fact that the inmates shot a good deal of the footage. In this, it becomes difficult to discuss the formal aspects of the film or their implications because it works so diligently to present information in a fairly clear fashion. This clarity of information obstructs the consideration of its form, for me; I am hung up on what I see more than how I see it. This seems remarkable, because one would think that it might reveal something about the (political) potentialities of “indigenous filmmaking.” Along these lines, what it reveals is that these inmates have been conditioned to present themselves to the camera in fairly traditional ways. (I think of the way that early amateur photography imitated the stylistics of professional studio photography, itself already a derivation of conventions in painting).
The information this film presents is of course completely fascinating. The film totally immerses you in a completely different universe. The sequencing of the film of course plays on audience expectations-building up a safe portrait of the fraternity of the inmates, then defying this with all the brutality and cramped conditions. But in both respects, I wonder what I am supposed to do with such information. Am I supposed to feel that community will always rise out of terrible conditions, thus the human spirit is revealed and I have nothing to do but feel good, OR, do I feel outrage at these men’s conditions and take some action to relieve them? (Setting aside both the knowledge that these men are criminals and in some way infringed upon the rights of others, as well as the fact that all of this is mute in retrospection, the prison reconstructed by video reversal and now no longer exists). In its realist approach, at least, it testifies to Gaines’ “political mimesis.”
Susan Mogul Video Sampler (Susan Mogul, 1983-1990??)
This video featured short clips of and/or by the performance artist Susan Mogul. It seemed to span about ten or so years in the development of her career and her approach. It began with simple recordings of her stage performance pieces, which looked to be some kind of combo stand-up comedy with a slideshow. The material she performed had to do with her mother, and I remember that her being Jewish was also an issue. Then, there were clips of some video diaries she began doing, including one she shot while away in Poland. She surprises a date who arrives by taping him as he enters. Finally, there is a section where her mode has become more interactive, as she hands the camera over to a bunch of kids in a hospital, to tape her too, as she converses with them about their lives. All of it is obviously shot on consumer-grade video tape, and it makes no formal pretensions; it is a total amateur, home movie aesthetic throughout the various phases in her career.
This was viewed, it seems, in light of Bill Nichols’ notion of the “performative" mode of documentary, which he defines first in Blurred Boundaries, then refines in Introduction to Documentary. I will generally refer to the latter, as his thinking in the former appears still nascent, not to mention a little freewheeling. The performative mode, it seems, presents serious challenges to the traditional epistemological claims of realist aesthetics, because it largely situates knowledge within the realm of the manifestly subjective. One of the claims Nichols makes for the performative is that it invites us to experience other subjective, social positions, occupy them in fact. Performative documentaries are often formally adventurous or even experimental. Additionally, the mode generally emphasizes the local and specific over the global and the general, the “embodied” knowledges over the “disembodied,” (in an attempt, according to Nichols, to evade the problems in Western, logocentric, claims to “objective” knowledge.)
Temporarily setting aside the possibly huge problems in this mode, or Nichols characterization thereof, I am still unsure that this Video Sampler has much to do with the performative mode. It seems that Mogul is much more interested mobilizing cheap, amateur aesthetics in order to record and investigate her own identity than in really challenging audience “positioning.” And while she investigates her identity, I would not say that she externalizes a subjectivity in the way that Nichols seems to require. I find it more worthwhile to not categorize her film, but to look at its transformation, from simple recording of a performance work (maybe this makes this a “performative documentary,” who knows), to investigation of her social identity in a plain-as-day diaristic form, to interactive investigation of other people. What this suggests is a growing desire to explore a broader view of her immediate world, while not abandoning a very simple and visibly cheap mode of production. I know, I know, all of these things sound a lot like Nichols’ definition, but this film is too simply preservational for his definition. This indicates how contemporarily-pressing issues may manifest in formally distinct ways.
Wittgenstein Tractacus (Forgacs, 1992)
This film takes an abundance of found footage and sequences it together in suggestive patterns based on graphic qualities, conceptual linkages, and enigmatic repetitions. The soundtrack is occupied by a male narrator who recites various passages from Wittgenstein’s piece of writing Tractacus Logico-Philisophicus. In fact, the film is divided into seven chapters, which roughly correspond with the seven central tenets of Tractacus. These quotes from that text are regularly printed upon the screen. However, Forgacs does not neatly run down Wittgenstein’s work, he borrows from it in an “as needed” fashion, however much this maintains a linear progression through the writing. Additionally, there are some passages printed and spoken that I do not believe come from Tractacus, and I’m not even sure they come from Wittgenstein, though I cannot say for sure. Also, the images of the text sometimes occur so quickly that one cannot read them, and they always occur out of synch with their narration, creating a playful movement of insinuation and recognition. Finally, the images from the home movies tear away from the screen like shredded paper, while other images re-form out of shreds, in a video editing effect.
We watched this in reference to Bill Nichols’ idea of the “performative mode” of documentary as well. In the discussion in the class, Bobby asked what people made of the film. Many, if not most, in the class had no concrete or distinct reading of it; it had little meaning. It was then argued by some that such impenetrability is one of the threats of the performative mode. It was argued that the filmmaker purposefully sought to confound interpretation in order to make the piece about the viewer’s desire for meaning itself; that in watching the piece we have to come face to face with the way we desire meaning.
I disagree, in a way. While I think it is a nice idea that this piece challenges viewers’ expectations and interpretive abilities, and in some fashion is in fact about these things, I also believe that it is not just some hodgepodge, random assemblage of textual feints and dead-end hermeneutics. I feel there is a distinct guiding principle to this work that can be discovered; I expect the film would reward dedicated consideration. (You could say this is my desire for meaning coming out). The use of Wittgenstein as the organizing motif certainly implicates how the desire for meaning, and the way it is constructed, is a central concern. Indeed, I think it is my thorough knowledge of Wittgenstein’s writings that makes this piece immediately valuable to me, and worthy of review and further consideration. The way the film extracts little snippets of Tractacus and suspends them relates in a profound way to Wittgenstein’s aims with that book; it toys with Wittgenstein’s aim of locking down and describing the interaction between self and world, and language’s bridging the two. Later, Wittgenstein would retract this goal, preferring instead to show how language builds upon a (self-)referential system of slight differences and “family resemblences.” So, for Forgacs, Tractacus Logico-Philisophicus seems an easy text to simultaneously use and disrupt, due to its failed attempt at concreteness. But it would provide, in the end, some knowledge about the world and Wittgenstein.
History and Memory (Tajiri, 1991)
This work is ultimately about the filmmaker’s forgiveness of her mother’s silence (forgetting) about her experience in the Poston internment camp during W.W.II. BUT, it is about many other things along the way, in order to get there. It is amazingly textually dense, combining (and often overlapping): video images she shot herself, found footage from Hollywood and government films, still photographs, printed text that regularly scrolls across the screen, Tajiri’s own narration, and narration by various members of her family.
THIS seems a paradigmatic example of the performative mode as explained by Bill Nichols. But just as much, the film reveals the ways in which Nichols’ definition of the performative overlaps with Renov’s “domestic ethnography.” I think there is no clearer point of convergence as when Nichols' says (at the end of “Embodied Knowledge…”) issues of “magnitude which characterizes lived experience” “involves the power of those contingent subjectivities affiliated with a self that makes meaning in the company of others.” Maybe I am misunderstanding one of the two writers, but this seems to be central to the domestic ethnography as well.
In this work, the embodied is as disembodied as any other knowledge, and this fact is dramatized in the various references to ghosts and ghostly viewing positions. (One might say it embodies the disembodied embodied). While the personal is absolutely intertwined with the familial, the familial nevertheless intertwines with a legacy of institutions and dominant forms of representation. Memory serves to counter, or inflect, these damned systems. Memory itself is not the memory most commonly agree upon; it envelops all manner of immaterial fancies and creative propositions. For Tajiri, there is no way to recover the hole in history the internment represents.
In regards to Nichols’ most problematic assertion for the performative more, that by it a viewer might occupy another subjectivity, this film offers one possible illumination of that. As the work is so incredibly textually dense, one always has the feeling of letting information slip by, it creates the sense of the limitations of your perceptual powers. This kind of “adrift” feeling might be argues to replicate the ever-shifting and overwhelmed sensation Tajiri has about her history and her mother. I would not argue this strongly.
Also, this seems to me a kind of Oedipal movement. It is about the search for origins, and the crazy psycho-dynamics involved. In this, Tajiri literally constructs her mother as a site of presence, and lays upon her the text we call the film. The body of the woman inscribed and inscribed upon.
This film was comprised of an abundance of newsreel footage of or relating to the life of Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. It also featured a number of still photographs. Some interesting footage/images was of anti-Vietnam protests in the U.S., of people burning draft cards, etc. This, among other things, gave the film an international edge. (My point of reference is limited, I know little of the era other than my father who was a conscientious objector, and “draft counselor”).
Renov said this film worked as a eulogy for Ho Chi Minh. Well, I am too uninformed about all the details of the history and historical figures this film references to speak to that or much else about it, unfortunately. We watched it in reference to Gaines’ chapter about “political mimesis.” She argues that certain (documentary) films present calls to political action on the part of the viewer through a realist depiction of struggle—to bring a bodily consciousness that seeks relief in action. Yet, while this presents brutal and visceral images, and appears as an ideological appeal to global communist resistance/revolution, it does so in a remarkable formalist way. The film breaks apart, split-screens, still frames, etc. This seems to align it directly with the “imperfect cinema” tradition, which uses formalist tactics to appeal to the viewer’s analytical capacities. How do we reconcile Gaines’ notion of realism with this? Can formalism command the same call to action? Well, it seems possible, but in a very different way, as would be acknowledged by both Gaines’ as well as Espinoza. The primary difference would be in the appeal to the audience’s intellect. Gaines says that the immediacy of realist aesthetics circumvents the intellect, and Espinoza seems to say something similar. The difference lies in the motivation to action—Espinoza thinks this must happen through appeals to the intellect, via disruptions in the formal structure of the film. Thus, the disruptions in 79 Springtimes should be read as mirroring its revolutionary intentions. I cannot say who is correct here, only that there is here, in a simplistic understanding, the traditional realist/formalist debate made anew.
Prisoner of the Iron Bars (Sacramento, 2003)
This was a tremendous, and tremendously long, film about a prison in San Paolo. It was shot on video, and the footage was filmed by both the directors as well as a great number of inmates of the prison who were provided video cameras with which to document themselves and their surroundings. In this, the film serves as a particular example of indigenous filmmaking, and its potentialities. The film began easily enough, mainly documenting the ingenuity and creative abilities of the prisoners. Over the course of the film it got steadily more and more brutal, detailing the violence and general misery these people live with daily.
One of the first things that I find interesting about this work is the way that it really conforms to more standard documentary forms, despite the fact that the inmates shot a good deal of the footage. In this, it becomes difficult to discuss the formal aspects of the film or their implications because it works so diligently to present information in a fairly clear fashion. This clarity of information obstructs the consideration of its form, for me; I am hung up on what I see more than how I see it. This seems remarkable, because one would think that it might reveal something about the (political) potentialities of “indigenous filmmaking.” Along these lines, what it reveals is that these inmates have been conditioned to present themselves to the camera in fairly traditional ways. (I think of the way that early amateur photography imitated the stylistics of professional studio photography, itself already a derivation of conventions in painting).
The information this film presents is of course completely fascinating. The film totally immerses you in a completely different universe. The sequencing of the film of course plays on audience expectations-building up a safe portrait of the fraternity of the inmates, then defying this with all the brutality and cramped conditions. But in both respects, I wonder what I am supposed to do with such information. Am I supposed to feel that community will always rise out of terrible conditions, thus the human spirit is revealed and I have nothing to do but feel good, OR, do I feel outrage at these men’s conditions and take some action to relieve them? (Setting aside both the knowledge that these men are criminals and in some way infringed upon the rights of others, as well as the fact that all of this is mute in retrospection, the prison reconstructed by video reversal and now no longer exists). In its realist approach, at least, it testifies to Gaines’ “political mimesis.”
Susan Mogul Video Sampler (Susan Mogul, 1983-1990??)
This video featured short clips of and/or by the performance artist Susan Mogul. It seemed to span about ten or so years in the development of her career and her approach. It began with simple recordings of her stage performance pieces, which looked to be some kind of combo stand-up comedy with a slideshow. The material she performed had to do with her mother, and I remember that her being Jewish was also an issue. Then, there were clips of some video diaries she began doing, including one she shot while away in Poland. She surprises a date who arrives by taping him as he enters. Finally, there is a section where her mode has become more interactive, as she hands the camera over to a bunch of kids in a hospital, to tape her too, as she converses with them about their lives. All of it is obviously shot on consumer-grade video tape, and it makes no formal pretensions; it is a total amateur, home movie aesthetic throughout the various phases in her career.
This was viewed, it seems, in light of Bill Nichols’ notion of the “performative" mode of documentary, which he defines first in Blurred Boundaries, then refines in Introduction to Documentary. I will generally refer to the latter, as his thinking in the former appears still nascent, not to mention a little freewheeling. The performative mode, it seems, presents serious challenges to the traditional epistemological claims of realist aesthetics, because it largely situates knowledge within the realm of the manifestly subjective. One of the claims Nichols makes for the performative is that it invites us to experience other subjective, social positions, occupy them in fact. Performative documentaries are often formally adventurous or even experimental. Additionally, the mode generally emphasizes the local and specific over the global and the general, the “embodied” knowledges over the “disembodied,” (in an attempt, according to Nichols, to evade the problems in Western, logocentric, claims to “objective” knowledge.)
Temporarily setting aside the possibly huge problems in this mode, or Nichols characterization thereof, I am still unsure that this Video Sampler has much to do with the performative mode. It seems that Mogul is much more interested mobilizing cheap, amateur aesthetics in order to record and investigate her own identity than in really challenging audience “positioning.” And while she investigates her identity, I would not say that she externalizes a subjectivity in the way that Nichols seems to require. I find it more worthwhile to not categorize her film, but to look at its transformation, from simple recording of a performance work (maybe this makes this a “performative documentary,” who knows), to investigation of her social identity in a plain-as-day diaristic form, to interactive investigation of other people. What this suggests is a growing desire to explore a broader view of her immediate world, while not abandoning a very simple and visibly cheap mode of production. I know, I know, all of these things sound a lot like Nichols’ definition, but this film is too simply preservational for his definition. This indicates how contemporarily-pressing issues may manifest in formally distinct ways.
Wittgenstein Tractacus (Forgacs, 1992)
This film takes an abundance of found footage and sequences it together in suggestive patterns based on graphic qualities, conceptual linkages, and enigmatic repetitions. The soundtrack is occupied by a male narrator who recites various passages from Wittgenstein’s piece of writing Tractacus Logico-Philisophicus. In fact, the film is divided into seven chapters, which roughly correspond with the seven central tenets of Tractacus. These quotes from that text are regularly printed upon the screen. However, Forgacs does not neatly run down Wittgenstein’s work, he borrows from it in an “as needed” fashion, however much this maintains a linear progression through the writing. Additionally, there are some passages printed and spoken that I do not believe come from Tractacus, and I’m not even sure they come from Wittgenstein, though I cannot say for sure. Also, the images of the text sometimes occur so quickly that one cannot read them, and they always occur out of synch with their narration, creating a playful movement of insinuation and recognition. Finally, the images from the home movies tear away from the screen like shredded paper, while other images re-form out of shreds, in a video editing effect.
We watched this in reference to Bill Nichols’ idea of the “performative mode” of documentary as well. In the discussion in the class, Bobby asked what people made of the film. Many, if not most, in the class had no concrete or distinct reading of it; it had little meaning. It was then argued by some that such impenetrability is one of the threats of the performative mode. It was argued that the filmmaker purposefully sought to confound interpretation in order to make the piece about the viewer’s desire for meaning itself; that in watching the piece we have to come face to face with the way we desire meaning.
I disagree, in a way. While I think it is a nice idea that this piece challenges viewers’ expectations and interpretive abilities, and in some fashion is in fact about these things, I also believe that it is not just some hodgepodge, random assemblage of textual feints and dead-end hermeneutics. I feel there is a distinct guiding principle to this work that can be discovered; I expect the film would reward dedicated consideration. (You could say this is my desire for meaning coming out). The use of Wittgenstein as the organizing motif certainly implicates how the desire for meaning, and the way it is constructed, is a central concern. Indeed, I think it is my thorough knowledge of Wittgenstein’s writings that makes this piece immediately valuable to me, and worthy of review and further consideration. The way the film extracts little snippets of Tractacus and suspends them relates in a profound way to Wittgenstein’s aims with that book; it toys with Wittgenstein’s aim of locking down and describing the interaction between self and world, and language’s bridging the two. Later, Wittgenstein would retract this goal, preferring instead to show how language builds upon a (self-)referential system of slight differences and “family resemblences.” So, for Forgacs, Tractacus Logico-Philisophicus seems an easy text to simultaneously use and disrupt, due to its failed attempt at concreteness. But it would provide, in the end, some knowledge about the world and Wittgenstein.
History and Memory (Tajiri, 1991)
This work is ultimately about the filmmaker’s forgiveness of her mother’s silence (forgetting) about her experience in the Poston internment camp during W.W.II. BUT, it is about many other things along the way, in order to get there. It is amazingly textually dense, combining (and often overlapping): video images she shot herself, found footage from Hollywood and government films, still photographs, printed text that regularly scrolls across the screen, Tajiri’s own narration, and narration by various members of her family.
THIS seems a paradigmatic example of the performative mode as explained by Bill Nichols. But just as much, the film reveals the ways in which Nichols’ definition of the performative overlaps with Renov’s “domestic ethnography.” I think there is no clearer point of convergence as when Nichols' says (at the end of “Embodied Knowledge…”) issues of “magnitude which characterizes lived experience” “involves the power of those contingent subjectivities affiliated with a self that makes meaning in the company of others.” Maybe I am misunderstanding one of the two writers, but this seems to be central to the domestic ethnography as well.
In this work, the embodied is as disembodied as any other knowledge, and this fact is dramatized in the various references to ghosts and ghostly viewing positions. (One might say it embodies the disembodied embodied). While the personal is absolutely intertwined with the familial, the familial nevertheless intertwines with a legacy of institutions and dominant forms of representation. Memory serves to counter, or inflect, these damned systems. Memory itself is not the memory most commonly agree upon; it envelops all manner of immaterial fancies and creative propositions. For Tajiri, there is no way to recover the hole in history the internment represents.
In regards to Nichols’ most problematic assertion for the performative more, that by it a viewer might occupy another subjectivity, this film offers one possible illumination of that. As the work is so incredibly textually dense, one always has the feeling of letting information slip by, it creates the sense of the limitations of your perceptual powers. This kind of “adrift” feeling might be argues to replicate the ever-shifting and overwhelmed sensation Tajiri has about her history and her mother. I would not argue this strongly.
Also, this seems to me a kind of Oedipal movement. It is about the search for origins, and the crazy psycho-dynamics involved. In this, Tajiri literally constructs her mother as a site of presence, and lays upon her the text we call the film. The body of the woman inscribed and inscribed upon.
Thursday, July 31, 2003
Trick or Drink (Vanalyne Green, 1984?)
This is a short video work, wherein a woman traces her various mental problems through her experience with her dysfunctional family. Her mother was a bad alcoholic; she was a bulimic/binge eater, etc. All of this is managed through a video composition of ever-increasing complexity. It uses still photographs, childhood drawings, silhouette, and direct address, among a great number of different textual strategies. Green narrates multiple stories and anecdotes that all speak to the effects of her dysfunctional family, and her attempts to exorcise them.
This work, like all the films we watched for this class meeting, bears directly on Renov’s notion of the “domestic ethnography,” and some of the issues of this form. In this, the filmmaker seeks knowledge of the self through an exploration of the other; however, this other, through blood or other familial ties, is interlaced with the identity of the self, thus making traditional distinctions between subject/object extremely complex. The knowledge sought of the other inherently requires an exploration of the self’s relation to the other. (I think, briefly, of McPherson’s notion of lenticular logics versus relationality. One sees the possibility in domestic ethnography, and certainly in Trick or Drink, that representations of relationality are required.) In any case, one sees this film is about how a woman’s relationship to those around her defines her sense of self, of her identity, for better or for worse. The whole piece appears to seek out specific moments and measure how well they constitute the whole. One gets the impression that there is really no escaping one’s family, at least there are few alternatives presented in this film. In the end, when green speaks of her feeling at home among the strangers at the al-anon meeting, one gets the impression that what she feels at home with is her blood family once again. If this is the case, then the meetings and the video itself are really mechanism for the filmmaker to re-inhabit those relationships that seem so very poisonous. No escape.
This is a short video work, wherein a woman traces her various mental problems through her experience with her dysfunctional family. Her mother was a bad alcoholic; she was a bulimic/binge eater, etc. All of this is managed through a video composition of ever-increasing complexity. It uses still photographs, childhood drawings, silhouette, and direct address, among a great number of different textual strategies. Green narrates multiple stories and anecdotes that all speak to the effects of her dysfunctional family, and her attempts to exorcise them.
This work, like all the films we watched for this class meeting, bears directly on Renov’s notion of the “domestic ethnography,” and some of the issues of this form. In this, the filmmaker seeks knowledge of the self through an exploration of the other; however, this other, through blood or other familial ties, is interlaced with the identity of the self, thus making traditional distinctions between subject/object extremely complex. The knowledge sought of the other inherently requires an exploration of the self’s relation to the other. (I think, briefly, of McPherson’s notion of lenticular logics versus relationality. One sees the possibility in domestic ethnography, and certainly in Trick or Drink, that representations of relationality are required.) In any case, one sees this film is about how a woman’s relationship to those around her defines her sense of self, of her identity, for better or for worse. The whole piece appears to seek out specific moments and measure how well they constitute the whole. One gets the impression that there is really no escaping one’s family, at least there are few alternatives presented in this film. In the end, when green speaks of her feeling at home among the strangers at the al-anon meeting, one gets the impression that what she feels at home with is her blood family once again. If this is the case, then the meetings and the video itself are really mechanism for the filmmaker to re-inhabit those relationships that seem so very poisonous. No escape.
Wednesday, July 30, 2003
Nobody's Business (Berliner, 1996)
This is a wonderful film about the filmmaker and his father. Most of the film is oriented around interviews between these two people, with the stated purpose of providing a portrait of the father. However, much more is going on here, not the least of which is the filmmaker's exploration of himself through tracing the genealogy of his extended family. Central to this is finding the places in history where the family line converges as well as those moments which are indeterminate, both in personal accounts as well as geography.
This example of domestic ethnography takes a much more "interactive" approach, and so differs greatly in effect from Trick or Drink. In that film, one always has the lingering sense that the filmmaker is strictly the filter by which information is given. The participation between Berliner and his father, as well as his distant relatives, creates a greater sense of their inter-relation; they are textually and genetically interrelated. Although Berliner never actually hands the camera over to his father, as per Renov's discussion of "indigenous filmmaking," and "Sharing Textual Authority," the dialogue between the two appears spontaneous and mutually involved. The film appears to present a discourse, a conversation, wherein the participants mutually constitute one another. (Seems to me this is largely one of the basic functions of language, to temporarily fix locations of subjectivity through their relations). Although one could argue that it is Alan Berliner who is ultimately responsible for representing this relationship in this way, and so really the film is not a dialogue at all, but a monologue (Like Trick or Drink), the historical contingency implied by the photography of the father and the recorded sound of the conversation attests to the dialogic power of the film.
It seemed to me that this film reveals the attempt to resolve Oedipal issues by Berliner as well, and in so doing, revealed the entanglements in real relationships and real language that can occur in such pursuits. Really, Berliner is looking for an explanation of his origins-his parents marriage and their subsequent divorce. It is interesting in this process Berliner asks too many questions; his father is always getting upset by them, dismissing them, or asking why the question needs to be asked in the first place. This kind of questioning, in Lacan, would seem to provide the kind of absences which, in the Other responding, locate the subjectivity of the questioner. Berliner's father's responses remind me of a section in Lacan, where he says something like the following--One of the responses the child will have to questions from their parents will be "What do you want from me?" This seems to exactly match the way the father responds to Berliner's questions verbatim, and so reverses the typical positions Lacan identifies in this dialectic.
A Hungarian Passport (Kogut, 2001)
This is a video work by a woman who is trying to get a Hungarian passport, and all of the difficulties she encounters in this endeavor. She is a Brazilian whose parents emigrated to brazil on the eve of WWII. This pursuit of the passport seems to be her way of linking herself to a historical/regional identity. In some ways, the difficulties she experiences seem to invoke the (more more pressing) difficulties experienced by her parents as the emigrated from Hungary; in this, the subtext of international anti-semitism comes to the fore.
One of the notable features of this film involve its mode of production, namely, it is a one-person production, funded by a number of different regional and international agencies. In this respect, the very aesthetics and formal strategies of the film speak to this mode of production. Certainly, the use of low-end video equipment made the production economically feasible. However, unless the woman is independently wealthy, she must have required substantial help in funding her many international voyages, all in the name of the film (well, in the name of getting the passport, but one can not distinguish the filmmaking process from the bureaucratic, Kafka-esque nightmare that she engages). But these things seems of secondary importance to the kind of first-person perspective this work adheres to. This is not to say that it works through typical formal strategies which invoke the subjectivity of the artist, such as in Feeling My Way, or even Trick or Drink. Instead, this work remains "objective" and preservational in its account of its maker's life experience. (Now that I think of it however, the film did not lack in expressive formal flourishes, such as the many shots from the view of a train. Additionally, many of these shots looked to be recorded with either 8mm or 16mm film, and the color value of these changes certainly inflected the nature of the images. In fact, the entire color scheme of this film, whatever the source of the image, appeared highly expressive and formally interesting. It was as if each of the cities she visited had its own color scheme. This help render the different locations in purely formal terms). In any case, this does not preclude the work from being an exploration of subjectivity, it is just not overtly a piece that locate subjectivity in psychic terms. instead, this autobiographical work locates the subject in relation to a number of different institutions and their interrelated power relations. All of this does seem to come back to an institutionalized anti-semitism during the 1930s, and lingering today.
This is a wonderful film about the filmmaker and his father. Most of the film is oriented around interviews between these two people, with the stated purpose of providing a portrait of the father. However, much more is going on here, not the least of which is the filmmaker's exploration of himself through tracing the genealogy of his extended family. Central to this is finding the places in history where the family line converges as well as those moments which are indeterminate, both in personal accounts as well as geography.
This example of domestic ethnography takes a much more "interactive" approach, and so differs greatly in effect from Trick or Drink. In that film, one always has the lingering sense that the filmmaker is strictly the filter by which information is given. The participation between Berliner and his father, as well as his distant relatives, creates a greater sense of their inter-relation; they are textually and genetically interrelated. Although Berliner never actually hands the camera over to his father, as per Renov's discussion of "indigenous filmmaking," and "Sharing Textual Authority," the dialogue between the two appears spontaneous and mutually involved. The film appears to present a discourse, a conversation, wherein the participants mutually constitute one another. (Seems to me this is largely one of the basic functions of language, to temporarily fix locations of subjectivity through their relations). Although one could argue that it is Alan Berliner who is ultimately responsible for representing this relationship in this way, and so really the film is not a dialogue at all, but a monologue (Like Trick or Drink), the historical contingency implied by the photography of the father and the recorded sound of the conversation attests to the dialogic power of the film.
It seemed to me that this film reveals the attempt to resolve Oedipal issues by Berliner as well, and in so doing, revealed the entanglements in real relationships and real language that can occur in such pursuits. Really, Berliner is looking for an explanation of his origins-his parents marriage and their subsequent divorce. It is interesting in this process Berliner asks too many questions; his father is always getting upset by them, dismissing them, or asking why the question needs to be asked in the first place. This kind of questioning, in Lacan, would seem to provide the kind of absences which, in the Other responding, locate the subjectivity of the questioner. Berliner's father's responses remind me of a section in Lacan, where he says something like the following--One of the responses the child will have to questions from their parents will be "What do you want from me?" This seems to exactly match the way the father responds to Berliner's questions verbatim, and so reverses the typical positions Lacan identifies in this dialectic.
A Hungarian Passport (Kogut, 2001)
This is a video work by a woman who is trying to get a Hungarian passport, and all of the difficulties she encounters in this endeavor. She is a Brazilian whose parents emigrated to brazil on the eve of WWII. This pursuit of the passport seems to be her way of linking herself to a historical/regional identity. In some ways, the difficulties she experiences seem to invoke the (more more pressing) difficulties experienced by her parents as the emigrated from Hungary; in this, the subtext of international anti-semitism comes to the fore.
One of the notable features of this film involve its mode of production, namely, it is a one-person production, funded by a number of different regional and international agencies. In this respect, the very aesthetics and formal strategies of the film speak to this mode of production. Certainly, the use of low-end video equipment made the production economically feasible. However, unless the woman is independently wealthy, she must have required substantial help in funding her many international voyages, all in the name of the film (well, in the name of getting the passport, but one can not distinguish the filmmaking process from the bureaucratic, Kafka-esque nightmare that she engages). But these things seems of secondary importance to the kind of first-person perspective this work adheres to. This is not to say that it works through typical formal strategies which invoke the subjectivity of the artist, such as in Feeling My Way, or even Trick or Drink. Instead, this work remains "objective" and preservational in its account of its maker's life experience. (Now that I think of it however, the film did not lack in expressive formal flourishes, such as the many shots from the view of a train. Additionally, many of these shots looked to be recorded with either 8mm or 16mm film, and the color value of these changes certainly inflected the nature of the images. In fact, the entire color scheme of this film, whatever the source of the image, appeared highly expressive and formally interesting. It was as if each of the cities she visited had its own color scheme. This help render the different locations in purely formal terms). In any case, this does not preclude the work from being an exploration of subjectivity, it is just not overtly a piece that locate subjectivity in psychic terms. instead, this autobiographical work locates the subject in relation to a number of different institutions and their interrelated power relations. All of this does seem to come back to an institutionalized anti-semitism during the 1930s, and lingering today.
Saturday, July 26, 2003
nothing
Everything's For You (Ravett, 1989)
This film is comprised of mostly black and white 16mm images of the narrator's father. The narrator/filmmaker constantly asks questions of him, or otherwise addresses him, regarding the father's experience of the Holocaust. His father does not give any information about it.
What is this about, and what is my access point to this film? It seems to be about the silences that occur within families, specifically in the face of unspeakable tragedies; in this case, the unspeakable tragedy is that which Renov has argued is the unspeakable. The holes in history and knowledge and reason that is the Holocaust, that is the subject. But it is through the impasses in familial communication that this hole gets dramatized in this film. How does this work, to a viewer like me who has little connection to the Holocaust, except in the most broad way, as a human, as an inheritor of moral and ethical responsibility, as someone married to a woman whose family was destroyed there. But, what then of this film, to those outside the family within it, outside the defining circuit of father-son, self-other, upon which the ethical dialectic of this film revolves? Beyond these issues, raised by Renov, it seems to me this film confronts my understandings of filmic identification. It all seems so personal, rubbing against my knowledge of the...what? The bigger, the social, the cultural, the historical formulations. Perhaps the Levinasian ethics circumvents this dilemma, or perhaps it encompasses it; if either case is true, it would seem that I am not understanding the ideas well enough.
The responsibility for the other precedes the formulation of self? How, then, does this relate to the viewer's connection, or ethical obligation, say, to the film, much less its subject?
The Maelstrom Forgacs, 1997)
This film takes a tremendous amount of home-movie, amateur footage from a Jewish family in Amsterdam, from about 1932 until their deportation to Auschwitz in September 1942. (Interesting that the dates seem so important to me. I mean, the date of their deportation is burned in my mind, as if I had been waiting for this singular event. Certainly, the film plays my historical knowledge against the ignorance of the family on-screen, but in this case, my remembering the month and date seems more an issue of desiring a singular, locatable moment for horror. This film alternatively plays this family as generalizable and as specific, but in this instance I fixate on the particular). Anyway, the flow of the images is regularly punctuated by reversals in the flow of the frames, via optical printing, as well as freeze-frames, by the same process. Not only does this overtly declare the kind of secondary revision that these images have been subjected to, but further, the very formal features of the film become an argument about the processes by which historical knowledge is inscribed, sustained, retrieved, and directionally applied. The freeze-frames within the film implicate their importance, and general function, as photographic portraits. In fact, isn't the subtitle of this film "a family album"? Must be. But this kind of freezing connects these images to the mummification/death shroud/death-fetish power of photography itself. They are moments of holding on, of locking the viewers gaze in order to, among other things, 1. testify to these people's very existence, 2. to implicate their past-ness, their removal from the forward flow of time. But of course, the film stops the frames only for a moment, long enough to note a detail, a gesture, a look--long enough to transform the nature of our desires, the nature of our interest in these images. It freezes their movement long enough, perhaps, to provoke the smack of punctum, who knows. In any case, It also seems, similarly to Human Remains, the sputters and reversals in the flow of frames speak to an inconsistent and perhaps damaged recollective process. The films of Martin Arnold, and Akira Lippit's analysis of them, would be highly instructive here. It is as if, but not only as if, the sputters and reversals in the film form testify to the interjection of unconscious desires and perhaps neuroses in the very process of memory, which these films seem to align themselves with.
Also, the film raises the issue of the intimacy of its images, of both the Jewish family, as well as the Nazi family.
Hard Metals Disease (Alpert 1984-86)
This is a video documentary about Hard Metals Disease, which occurs in the lungs of its victims as a result of their inhaling cobalt dust. The film follows several victims as they search for justice from the company that they worked for, and who owned the factories where they contracted the disease.
This film is typical interactive filmmaking, with a political edge and objective. The "interactivity" of the film comes about mainly through the voice of the man behind the video camera--this film attests to the new possibilities made available to documentary film by the advent of inexpensive, potable video equipment. One can see the "mode of production" inscribed in the very deficiencies in the formal properties of this work--made by an individual with little resources. Alpert's connection with the group he advocates is, in a very basic way, rendered through the camera's physical proximity with the diseased people. To have access to their bodies is also to argue for and with them. But the filmmaker never declares his own investment in this advocacy; if he has the disease too, we do not know it (I doubt it).
The film gains much political weight due to the fact that it aligns itself, decidedly, with a community of people in the process of political activities. But not just political activities; the film in some ways traces the links between the body of the subject and the dynamics of various institutions, including medical, industrial-manufacturing, and government. I don't know, there seems an important connection this film makes between these three sectors. Like, the damaged human body becomes the means by which all three institutions are connected in a chain of injustice. And what then of the film? This formal strategy puts a tremendous strain on the audience in two immediately observable forms. 1. What should or can the audience do, following this screening? 2. The audience has the tremendous hermeneutic opened up for them that only the knowledge of the distribution of the film can easily close. We ask, "Who saw this? What did THEY do?"
Human Remains (Rosenblatt, 1997)
This is a strange film, mainly comprised of stock footage of the greatest fascists/dictators/tyrants of the Twentieth Century, including Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco, Mao--that might be all. Each tyrant is given his own discrete section of the film, and these are bracketed by original footage of a person burying something in a lot of dirt with a shovel. Narration occurs. At first, this narration is in the native language of the particular tyrant. Then, this quiets slightly and an English voice speaks. These narrations are, supposedly, first person accounts or musings from within the very mind of these tyrants. The content of this narration is usually extremely mundane.
This film raises all kinds of questions about the legitimacy of documentary as historical apparatus. Or, more accurately, the mutual historiographic problems of both history and documentary. Can this film attest to history, when so fictional in form and so narrativized in content? OF COURSE. All of history is narrativized. As Barthes pointed out, there is nothing linguistically different between historical and fictional forms. What Renov has called the "tropic" seems related, if not identical, to what he has called the "fictive," and both of these seem to implicate the process by which the world gets placed into a textual system. From this position, and Renov is not the only person to hold it, all representation is poesis. (I do wonder at this point how Baudrillard plays into all of this).
Anyway, the first really questionable thing for me in this film is the alignment of the audience with the worst people on earth. In humanizing Hitler, etc., do we identify with them? Well, yes. In this film, we are in a constant flux between alignment, based on basic human similarities, and difference, based upon very specific yet nonetheless comprehensible foibles.
Another issue is the way the film slows and reverses the flow of frames. In this, one must understand that a certain process of selection is at work over these images; again, history is not evident, it is narrated. Certainly, these images appear to aim at the mundane, nearly the intimate. (Maybe the soundtrack situates them this way, who can say). However, the acknowledgment of this selection process also implicates the subjectivity of the filmmaker.
It seems easiest to say it this way. If all history is narrated, then one should be able to understand the documents of history in a fashion similar to the way other narratives are understood. In this assessment, one understands that all (claims to) knowledge are ensnarled by unconscious desires. More specifically, in relation to narrative, one might look to Peter Brooks, who argues that desire is exactly the mechanism that pushes narratives forward through proairetic and hermeneutic procedures (the "plot"). Further, he says that the reader of the text decodes the text in a manner similar to that of psychoanalytic transference. First, can one decode the writing of history the way one would a plot? Can we see our reliance upon strict causality in historical accounts a function of narrative desire, or is the reverse true, that the shape of narrative desire reflects the causality of history? Finally, who are we when we are situated, as in Human Remains, as the analyst of Hitler and Mao, meant to give meaning to their thoughts outside the shape of their histories?
Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg's "Accompaniment for a cinematographic Scene" (Straub and Huillet, 1976)
I did not understand this film at all. Not at all. It begins with an image of a stone wall with a head-fountain-sculpture that is quite ugly and spitting water. This shot is held for an uncomfortable amount of time. Then, there is a man in a recording studio who reads a letter of Schoenberg's, address it seems to the painter Kandinsky. It is about Schoenberg being Jewish, and Kandinsky somehow anti-Semitic, but I was not quite able to follow the intricacies of what he was saying. then, there were some images of carpet-bombings in Vietnam, from the plane's pov. Then, there was an image of a newspaper article about the men who designed the Nazi gas chambers, and how they had been released from prison, or maybe it was that they weren't convicted. Then the film ended.
I know several things. First, these guys are regarded (by some at least, I don't know if this is common knowledge) as part of the New German Cinema. I cannot think of any way that these guys relate to Fassbinder or Herzog. Well, wait. What if there connection was in a conceptual disavowal of history and the traditional means by which it is formulated? Certainly Fassbinder and Herzog take different formal approaches in their films, but one could argue this basic level of conceptual similarity. In this, Straub and Huillet take formal discontinuity as a necessary approach to the unbroachable horrors of fascism and war. Second, I know that these are the guys who directed "Not Reconciled." This is that crazy movie that Renov always references and which pops up in reading from time to time. It seems that this film takes discontinuity as its aim, its subject, and its form. Having not seen the film, I cannot say whether or not this relates to a greater project involving the disavowal of rational accounts of history. Third, Renov said that Godard said that "Straub was our God." One can certainly see a certain formal and conceptual line that runs through Godard's work, following May 1968, and this film. It is semiotically-informed, politically-aimed, filmic conceptualism. Text, image, sound. No linkage but in the mind. Sol Lewitt said, defining conceptual art before it was conceptual art, "the concept is the machine that produces the work." Indeed, and this works on both ends, production as well as reception. As the audience decodes the relationship between the jagged and unreconciled elements of the work, they will discover, perceive, and comprehend the work's formative concept. The concept is the work.
At this point, I could begin to take stabs at what the concept of this film is, likely geared toward the human inability to comprehend, or properly represent trauma and violence and human injustice. However, this would only be so much guess work, as my knowledge of the particular elements of this film is limited. Which raises the problem I've always had with conceptualism, as an endeavor. It supposes that the work will induce a uniform experience in every viewer, thus proposing that every viewer is the same. This could be the same critique leveled at hardcore structuralist-semiotics.
Paper Tiger TV program (With Brain Winston, 1983)
This is one episode of a program that ran, I think in NYC, where various academics and other intellectuals would provide critiques of the media on public access television. It was a point of pride to use the cheapest means available, and to revel in this cheapness (part of the whole "democratizing of media" mentality). The subject of Winston's critique on this episode was network broadcast news.
This was shown in class to demonstrate how the advent and proliferation of cheap, portable video equipment changed the nature and potentialities of non-fiction work. Certainly one sees that the material basis of the video medium made this kind of politically-aimed media critique a feasible endeavor, both in production and distribution. The cheapness of the material, and the ease with which it can be distributed and exhibited across a large geographic area, It's interesting that such a program ever got aired anywhere. It really goes to show how little mass support or even awareness public access television had. I mean, the real question this program raises is, "Who was watching this?" Renov implied that few if any people actually watched this program. This really raises the issue about media exhibition and reception, and how fundamental these are in the formation of the relative meaning and importance of media and texts. If no one is watching your hard-core political critique, except maybe a few of your friends who already share your views, then what good is your critique? (Some good, as it has survived long enough, with enough reverence that it is shown in classes as paradigmatic "guerilla video.")
The content of this program was really interesting, because it mocked the lack of images in network news broadcast, showing how they rely instead on talking heads who verbally narrate stories. Something like, "It's like having the newspaper read aloud to you." Occasionally, the news commentator would refer to another screen, where little to no action would occur. But, in precisely these formalities, Paper Tiger imitated the network news. This surprises no one. However, the two things could not look more different. It's really strange, the way we read the economics of a production in its basic formal features. How did we learn such codes, when, and who taught them? Just as important-to what degree do certain audiences dismiss the message of certain texts simply because they do not look expensive? Perhaps it is boring to say that the aesthetics of wealth have legitimate themselves. BUT! Not for every audience. Some audiences look for cheapness as a sign of authority and authenticity. Even the "mass audience" reads cheap as authoritative in certain cases, with certain messages.
Also, it is interesting that William Boddy worked on this stuff. It's too bad he did not get hired by USC.
This film is comprised of mostly black and white 16mm images of the narrator's father. The narrator/filmmaker constantly asks questions of him, or otherwise addresses him, regarding the father's experience of the Holocaust. His father does not give any information about it.
What is this about, and what is my access point to this film? It seems to be about the silences that occur within families, specifically in the face of unspeakable tragedies; in this case, the unspeakable tragedy is that which Renov has argued is the unspeakable. The holes in history and knowledge and reason that is the Holocaust, that is the subject. But it is through the impasses in familial communication that this hole gets dramatized in this film. How does this work, to a viewer like me who has little connection to the Holocaust, except in the most broad way, as a human, as an inheritor of moral and ethical responsibility, as someone married to a woman whose family was destroyed there. But, what then of this film, to those outside the family within it, outside the defining circuit of father-son, self-other, upon which the ethical dialectic of this film revolves? Beyond these issues, raised by Renov, it seems to me this film confronts my understandings of filmic identification. It all seems so personal, rubbing against my knowledge of the...what? The bigger, the social, the cultural, the historical formulations. Perhaps the Levinasian ethics circumvents this dilemma, or perhaps it encompasses it; if either case is true, it would seem that I am not understanding the ideas well enough.
The responsibility for the other precedes the formulation of self? How, then, does this relate to the viewer's connection, or ethical obligation, say, to the film, much less its subject?
The Maelstrom Forgacs, 1997)
This film takes a tremendous amount of home-movie, amateur footage from a Jewish family in Amsterdam, from about 1932 until their deportation to Auschwitz in September 1942. (Interesting that the dates seem so important to me. I mean, the date of their deportation is burned in my mind, as if I had been waiting for this singular event. Certainly, the film plays my historical knowledge against the ignorance of the family on-screen, but in this case, my remembering the month and date seems more an issue of desiring a singular, locatable moment for horror. This film alternatively plays this family as generalizable and as specific, but in this instance I fixate on the particular). Anyway, the flow of the images is regularly punctuated by reversals in the flow of the frames, via optical printing, as well as freeze-frames, by the same process. Not only does this overtly declare the kind of secondary revision that these images have been subjected to, but further, the very formal features of the film become an argument about the processes by which historical knowledge is inscribed, sustained, retrieved, and directionally applied. The freeze-frames within the film implicate their importance, and general function, as photographic portraits. In fact, isn't the subtitle of this film "a family album"? Must be. But this kind of freezing connects these images to the mummification/death shroud/death-fetish power of photography itself. They are moments of holding on, of locking the viewers gaze in order to, among other things, 1. testify to these people's very existence, 2. to implicate their past-ness, their removal from the forward flow of time. But of course, the film stops the frames only for a moment, long enough to note a detail, a gesture, a look--long enough to transform the nature of our desires, the nature of our interest in these images. It freezes their movement long enough, perhaps, to provoke the smack of punctum, who knows. In any case, It also seems, similarly to Human Remains, the sputters and reversals in the flow of frames speak to an inconsistent and perhaps damaged recollective process. The films of Martin Arnold, and Akira Lippit's analysis of them, would be highly instructive here. It is as if, but not only as if, the sputters and reversals in the film form testify to the interjection of unconscious desires and perhaps neuroses in the very process of memory, which these films seem to align themselves with.
Also, the film raises the issue of the intimacy of its images, of both the Jewish family, as well as the Nazi family.
Hard Metals Disease (Alpert 1984-86)
This is a video documentary about Hard Metals Disease, which occurs in the lungs of its victims as a result of their inhaling cobalt dust. The film follows several victims as they search for justice from the company that they worked for, and who owned the factories where they contracted the disease.
This film is typical interactive filmmaking, with a political edge and objective. The "interactivity" of the film comes about mainly through the voice of the man behind the video camera--this film attests to the new possibilities made available to documentary film by the advent of inexpensive, potable video equipment. One can see the "mode of production" inscribed in the very deficiencies in the formal properties of this work--made by an individual with little resources. Alpert's connection with the group he advocates is, in a very basic way, rendered through the camera's physical proximity with the diseased people. To have access to their bodies is also to argue for and with them. But the filmmaker never declares his own investment in this advocacy; if he has the disease too, we do not know it (I doubt it).
The film gains much political weight due to the fact that it aligns itself, decidedly, with a community of people in the process of political activities. But not just political activities; the film in some ways traces the links between the body of the subject and the dynamics of various institutions, including medical, industrial-manufacturing, and government. I don't know, there seems an important connection this film makes between these three sectors. Like, the damaged human body becomes the means by which all three institutions are connected in a chain of injustice. And what then of the film? This formal strategy puts a tremendous strain on the audience in two immediately observable forms. 1. What should or can the audience do, following this screening? 2. The audience has the tremendous hermeneutic opened up for them that only the knowledge of the distribution of the film can easily close. We ask, "Who saw this? What did THEY do?"
Human Remains (Rosenblatt, 1997)
This is a strange film, mainly comprised of stock footage of the greatest fascists/dictators/tyrants of the Twentieth Century, including Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco, Mao--that might be all. Each tyrant is given his own discrete section of the film, and these are bracketed by original footage of a person burying something in a lot of dirt with a shovel. Narration occurs. At first, this narration is in the native language of the particular tyrant. Then, this quiets slightly and an English voice speaks. These narrations are, supposedly, first person accounts or musings from within the very mind of these tyrants. The content of this narration is usually extremely mundane.
This film raises all kinds of questions about the legitimacy of documentary as historical apparatus. Or, more accurately, the mutual historiographic problems of both history and documentary. Can this film attest to history, when so fictional in form and so narrativized in content? OF COURSE. All of history is narrativized. As Barthes pointed out, there is nothing linguistically different between historical and fictional forms. What Renov has called the "tropic" seems related, if not identical, to what he has called the "fictive," and both of these seem to implicate the process by which the world gets placed into a textual system. From this position, and Renov is not the only person to hold it, all representation is poesis. (I do wonder at this point how Baudrillard plays into all of this).
Anyway, the first really questionable thing for me in this film is the alignment of the audience with the worst people on earth. In humanizing Hitler, etc., do we identify with them? Well, yes. In this film, we are in a constant flux between alignment, based on basic human similarities, and difference, based upon very specific yet nonetheless comprehensible foibles.
Another issue is the way the film slows and reverses the flow of frames. In this, one must understand that a certain process of selection is at work over these images; again, history is not evident, it is narrated. Certainly, these images appear to aim at the mundane, nearly the intimate. (Maybe the soundtrack situates them this way, who can say). However, the acknowledgment of this selection process also implicates the subjectivity of the filmmaker.
It seems easiest to say it this way. If all history is narrated, then one should be able to understand the documents of history in a fashion similar to the way other narratives are understood. In this assessment, one understands that all (claims to) knowledge are ensnarled by unconscious desires. More specifically, in relation to narrative, one might look to Peter Brooks, who argues that desire is exactly the mechanism that pushes narratives forward through proairetic and hermeneutic procedures (the "plot"). Further, he says that the reader of the text decodes the text in a manner similar to that of psychoanalytic transference. First, can one decode the writing of history the way one would a plot? Can we see our reliance upon strict causality in historical accounts a function of narrative desire, or is the reverse true, that the shape of narrative desire reflects the causality of history? Finally, who are we when we are situated, as in Human Remains, as the analyst of Hitler and Mao, meant to give meaning to their thoughts outside the shape of their histories?
Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg's "Accompaniment for a cinematographic Scene" (Straub and Huillet, 1976)
I did not understand this film at all. Not at all. It begins with an image of a stone wall with a head-fountain-sculpture that is quite ugly and spitting water. This shot is held for an uncomfortable amount of time. Then, there is a man in a recording studio who reads a letter of Schoenberg's, address it seems to the painter Kandinsky. It is about Schoenberg being Jewish, and Kandinsky somehow anti-Semitic, but I was not quite able to follow the intricacies of what he was saying. then, there were some images of carpet-bombings in Vietnam, from the plane's pov. Then, there was an image of a newspaper article about the men who designed the Nazi gas chambers, and how they had been released from prison, or maybe it was that they weren't convicted. Then the film ended.
I know several things. First, these guys are regarded (by some at least, I don't know if this is common knowledge) as part of the New German Cinema. I cannot think of any way that these guys relate to Fassbinder or Herzog. Well, wait. What if there connection was in a conceptual disavowal of history and the traditional means by which it is formulated? Certainly Fassbinder and Herzog take different formal approaches in their films, but one could argue this basic level of conceptual similarity. In this, Straub and Huillet take formal discontinuity as a necessary approach to the unbroachable horrors of fascism and war. Second, I know that these are the guys who directed "Not Reconciled." This is that crazy movie that Renov always references and which pops up in reading from time to time. It seems that this film takes discontinuity as its aim, its subject, and its form. Having not seen the film, I cannot say whether or not this relates to a greater project involving the disavowal of rational accounts of history. Third, Renov said that Godard said that "Straub was our God." One can certainly see a certain formal and conceptual line that runs through Godard's work, following May 1968, and this film. It is semiotically-informed, politically-aimed, filmic conceptualism. Text, image, sound. No linkage but in the mind. Sol Lewitt said, defining conceptual art before it was conceptual art, "the concept is the machine that produces the work." Indeed, and this works on both ends, production as well as reception. As the audience decodes the relationship between the jagged and unreconciled elements of the work, they will discover, perceive, and comprehend the work's formative concept. The concept is the work.
At this point, I could begin to take stabs at what the concept of this film is, likely geared toward the human inability to comprehend, or properly represent trauma and violence and human injustice. However, this would only be so much guess work, as my knowledge of the particular elements of this film is limited. Which raises the problem I've always had with conceptualism, as an endeavor. It supposes that the work will induce a uniform experience in every viewer, thus proposing that every viewer is the same. This could be the same critique leveled at hardcore structuralist-semiotics.
Paper Tiger TV program (With Brain Winston, 1983)
This is one episode of a program that ran, I think in NYC, where various academics and other intellectuals would provide critiques of the media on public access television. It was a point of pride to use the cheapest means available, and to revel in this cheapness (part of the whole "democratizing of media" mentality). The subject of Winston's critique on this episode was network broadcast news.
This was shown in class to demonstrate how the advent and proliferation of cheap, portable video equipment changed the nature and potentialities of non-fiction work. Certainly one sees that the material basis of the video medium made this kind of politically-aimed media critique a feasible endeavor, both in production and distribution. The cheapness of the material, and the ease with which it can be distributed and exhibited across a large geographic area, It's interesting that such a program ever got aired anywhere. It really goes to show how little mass support or even awareness public access television had. I mean, the real question this program raises is, "Who was watching this?" Renov implied that few if any people actually watched this program. This really raises the issue about media exhibition and reception, and how fundamental these are in the formation of the relative meaning and importance of media and texts. If no one is watching your hard-core political critique, except maybe a few of your friends who already share your views, then what good is your critique? (Some good, as it has survived long enough, with enough reverence that it is shown in classes as paradigmatic "guerilla video.")
The content of this program was really interesting, because it mocked the lack of images in network news broadcast, showing how they rely instead on talking heads who verbally narrate stories. Something like, "It's like having the newspaper read aloud to you." Occasionally, the news commentator would refer to another screen, where little to no action would occur. But, in precisely these formalities, Paper Tiger imitated the network news. This surprises no one. However, the two things could not look more different. It's really strange, the way we read the economics of a production in its basic formal features. How did we learn such codes, when, and who taught them? Just as important-to what degree do certain audiences dismiss the message of certain texts simply because they do not look expensive? Perhaps it is boring to say that the aesthetics of wealth have legitimate themselves. BUT! Not for every audience. Some audiences look for cheapness as a sign of authority and authenticity. Even the "mass audience" reads cheap as authoritative in certain cases, with certain messages.
Also, it is interesting that William Boddy worked on this stuff. It's too bad he did not get hired by USC.
Friday, July 18, 2003
Sight Unseen (Robinson, 1990)
This is a (CalArts?) MFA thesis film (Video), about a guy who goes to India and immerses himself in the culture there. It is comprised of MANY different texts/forms, including postcards, still photographs, Baliwood films, etc., as well as a first-person voice over, though this is performed by multiple voices and the credits inform us that it too is made up of other writers’ text, including Paul Bowles and Walter Benjamin.
The film deconstructs the travelogue. It places American culture, from the start, as the exotic other which ethnographic-type discourse can explain. One can see, this is the first among many strategies aimed at conflating strict divisions between self and other, by alienating the “self,” by othering the self. This moment is strong, in its simple implication, or plain depiction, that typical ethnographic discourse alienates, it always marks difference, thus some kind of hierarchy. In fact, one might say that the ethnographic enterprise (as well as I know it from few films and writings on the subject) deals in the creation of “others” by whom the self might know itself. While in Lacanian theory, the other is not only 1. the field wherein the subject (self) is constituted, but also, paradoxically, 2. constituted equally by an absence. The subject of Sight Unseen seeks to explore his own subjectivity by immersing himself in the Other, by producing himself as the un-knowable absence that is no longer produced in the field of the other, he is the other.
The mutual establishment of subject and other comes about through the dialectic of discourse, where in the desires of subject and other intersect. The slippage and friction that is produced in this movement can produce something of a delirious discourse (Kristeva). One can say that Sight Unseen is a delirious work, merely on the basis that it makes little claim to objective knowledge; it is a work imbued with desire.
Sight Unseen reveals the desires that operate in the ethnographic enterprise. How is this managed? The subject takes himself as the other. In so doing, he produces himself as a site of absence to himself. In this way, he may know himself. This may seem delirious, but it is possibly more honest than the “sober” discourses that otherwise establish knowledge of the ethnographic other.
Nailed
Just when I thought I was done using Lacanian theory, comes a film that clearly mobilizes notions of self, other, desire, ritual, discourse, and God. The intersection of these seems to me the domain of psychoanalytic theory. This film is about a Filipino-American woman who goes to the Philippines to understand her connection to the people/culture there. It uses mainly “immediate” video footage, as well as some staged material (of her reading) at the location, as well as wacky, mythopoeic-performace-art-type stuff. It features a woman in the Philippines who gets crucified at the end, this is the film’s great climax.
OK. So, first there is the issue of the filmmaker taking herself as part Other; she identifies with them at the beginning of the film. (Interesting that the beginning of the film makes two promises 1. that we will see how she discovered in the Filipinos her own struggles, and 2. see a woman get crucified. At this point, these things seem to be one and the same textual promise). Anyway, like in Sight Unseen, we see the potential for a delirious exposure of the desires that propel the ethnographic enterprise. (She recreates the ethnographic situation anew and differently, through going there and recording footage, to understand “them,” as well as herself).
In fact, the crucifixion scene seems a clear depiction of jouissance, not unrelated to Kristeva’s “delirium.” The argument of the film thus seems to be that the colonial subject (the Filipinos’ adoption/adaptation of Catholicism) is induced into a dialectic of desire that produces ecstatic transcendences of the self/other split. This process and its effects are not unlike those of the ethnographer (especially when this subject already embodies something of a self/other split). Now, to know the subject requires the Other, however, the knowledge of the Other can only arrive in the form of an un-knowing, an acknowledgment of the limits of knowledge. This upper limit situates the knowable Other in a position not unlike the knowledge of God—it is transcendent, it is beyond. Thus, the representation of the crucifixion is the only way to know the other in Nailed.
What seems just as interesting is how the body becomes a site for self-inscription and performative identity. In this case, the woman who channels Jesus is Jesus. Of course, one can never know that this is true, similarly to the way one can never know if the jouissance of the other is real.
I have done nothing here, really, other than mis-use psychoanalytic theory to describe the film.
Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch and Morin, 1956)
This is a paradigmatic example of an interactive film, according to those divisions established by Nichols. In deals with the life, and happiness, of a bunch of different people in Paris. These people are portrayed in their everyday existence, in interviews with the filmmaker (who remains a textual presence), and in discussions about the subject and form of the film itself. In this way, it is as much about these people as it is about the demands they make of their representations.
This is certainly a tricky textual strategy, the incorporation of the filmmaker in the text AND the participation of the subjects in the shaping of the text. One can see that, while this may have been born of needs of ethnographic filmmaking, the effects go well beyond this limited area. The approach certainly helps ameliorate the hierarchical division between scientist and specimen.
It seems to me the interactive mode places more weight on the practice of documentary than on….what? The resultant film? Not really, because one can see for themselves the forces which give shape to the text, (we think). But, it does seem as though the interactive mode is more about the moment of filming than the moment of reception. All one can do is hope that the filmmaker has appropriately represented the “present-tenseness” and “contingency” that occurred in the moment of filming. In other words, the crisis of the interactive mode is not on how to represent people, but on how to represent the representation of people. Does the film truthfully represent the nature and degree of the participants’ participation? The simplistic question would be, does the “subject matter” of the film get lost amidst the representation of the treatment of that subject matter? (In this way, doesn’t the interactive film anticipate the kind of “subjective” documentary practices of the 80s and 90s?)
Nichols and Rouch himself attribute the development of the interactive mode to technological advances in film equipment, (light and portable cameras and synch-sound recording devices). This points to, among MANY other things, how interactivity demands a spontaneous, temporally contingent (even synchronous), “immediacy,” of sorts. The greatest moment in the film fulfills this promise.
Also, doesn’t Rouch’s written account of the entire process of the film undermine its intent and effect, by situating the entire process into a narrative which he has authored, authoritatively, “objectively,” and solely?
This is a (CalArts?) MFA thesis film (Video), about a guy who goes to India and immerses himself in the culture there. It is comprised of MANY different texts/forms, including postcards, still photographs, Baliwood films, etc., as well as a first-person voice over, though this is performed by multiple voices and the credits inform us that it too is made up of other writers’ text, including Paul Bowles and Walter Benjamin.
The film deconstructs the travelogue. It places American culture, from the start, as the exotic other which ethnographic-type discourse can explain. One can see, this is the first among many strategies aimed at conflating strict divisions between self and other, by alienating the “self,” by othering the self. This moment is strong, in its simple implication, or plain depiction, that typical ethnographic discourse alienates, it always marks difference, thus some kind of hierarchy. In fact, one might say that the ethnographic enterprise (as well as I know it from few films and writings on the subject) deals in the creation of “others” by whom the self might know itself. While in Lacanian theory, the other is not only 1. the field wherein the subject (self) is constituted, but also, paradoxically, 2. constituted equally by an absence. The subject of Sight Unseen seeks to explore his own subjectivity by immersing himself in the Other, by producing himself as the un-knowable absence that is no longer produced in the field of the other, he is the other.
The mutual establishment of subject and other comes about through the dialectic of discourse, where in the desires of subject and other intersect. The slippage and friction that is produced in this movement can produce something of a delirious discourse (Kristeva). One can say that Sight Unseen is a delirious work, merely on the basis that it makes little claim to objective knowledge; it is a work imbued with desire.
Sight Unseen reveals the desires that operate in the ethnographic enterprise. How is this managed? The subject takes himself as the other. In so doing, he produces himself as a site of absence to himself. In this way, he may know himself. This may seem delirious, but it is possibly more honest than the “sober” discourses that otherwise establish knowledge of the ethnographic other.
Nailed
Just when I thought I was done using Lacanian theory, comes a film that clearly mobilizes notions of self, other, desire, ritual, discourse, and God. The intersection of these seems to me the domain of psychoanalytic theory. This film is about a Filipino-American woman who goes to the Philippines to understand her connection to the people/culture there. It uses mainly “immediate” video footage, as well as some staged material (of her reading) at the location, as well as wacky, mythopoeic-performace-art-type stuff. It features a woman in the Philippines who gets crucified at the end, this is the film’s great climax.
OK. So, first there is the issue of the filmmaker taking herself as part Other; she identifies with them at the beginning of the film. (Interesting that the beginning of the film makes two promises 1. that we will see how she discovered in the Filipinos her own struggles, and 2. see a woman get crucified. At this point, these things seem to be one and the same textual promise). Anyway, like in Sight Unseen, we see the potential for a delirious exposure of the desires that propel the ethnographic enterprise. (She recreates the ethnographic situation anew and differently, through going there and recording footage, to understand “them,” as well as herself).
In fact, the crucifixion scene seems a clear depiction of jouissance, not unrelated to Kristeva’s “delirium.” The argument of the film thus seems to be that the colonial subject (the Filipinos’ adoption/adaptation of Catholicism) is induced into a dialectic of desire that produces ecstatic transcendences of the self/other split. This process and its effects are not unlike those of the ethnographer (especially when this subject already embodies something of a self/other split). Now, to know the subject requires the Other, however, the knowledge of the Other can only arrive in the form of an un-knowing, an acknowledgment of the limits of knowledge. This upper limit situates the knowable Other in a position not unlike the knowledge of God—it is transcendent, it is beyond. Thus, the representation of the crucifixion is the only way to know the other in Nailed.
What seems just as interesting is how the body becomes a site for self-inscription and performative identity. In this case, the woman who channels Jesus is Jesus. Of course, one can never know that this is true, similarly to the way one can never know if the jouissance of the other is real.
I have done nothing here, really, other than mis-use psychoanalytic theory to describe the film.
Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch and Morin, 1956)
This is a paradigmatic example of an interactive film, according to those divisions established by Nichols. In deals with the life, and happiness, of a bunch of different people in Paris. These people are portrayed in their everyday existence, in interviews with the filmmaker (who remains a textual presence), and in discussions about the subject and form of the film itself. In this way, it is as much about these people as it is about the demands they make of their representations.
This is certainly a tricky textual strategy, the incorporation of the filmmaker in the text AND the participation of the subjects in the shaping of the text. One can see that, while this may have been born of needs of ethnographic filmmaking, the effects go well beyond this limited area. The approach certainly helps ameliorate the hierarchical division between scientist and specimen.
It seems to me the interactive mode places more weight on the practice of documentary than on….what? The resultant film? Not really, because one can see for themselves the forces which give shape to the text, (we think). But, it does seem as though the interactive mode is more about the moment of filming than the moment of reception. All one can do is hope that the filmmaker has appropriately represented the “present-tenseness” and “contingency” that occurred in the moment of filming. In other words, the crisis of the interactive mode is not on how to represent people, but on how to represent the representation of people. Does the film truthfully represent the nature and degree of the participants’ participation? The simplistic question would be, does the “subject matter” of the film get lost amidst the representation of the treatment of that subject matter? (In this way, doesn’t the interactive film anticipate the kind of “subjective” documentary practices of the 80s and 90s?)
Nichols and Rouch himself attribute the development of the interactive mode to technological advances in film equipment, (light and portable cameras and synch-sound recording devices). This points to, among MANY other things, how interactivity demands a spontaneous, temporally contingent (even synchronous), “immediacy,” of sorts. The greatest moment in the film fulfills this promise.
Also, doesn’t Rouch’s written account of the entire process of the film undermine its intent and effect, by situating the entire process into a narrative which he has authored, authoritatively, “objectively,” and solely?
Wednesday, July 16, 2003
Ballet (excerpt from beginning, Wiseman, 1995)
This film is a paradigmatic “observational” documentary detailing the behind-the-scenes world of a ballet troupe. No interaction is perceived between the film subjects and the film crew, it is as if the film crew merely recorded actions, interactions, and events as they would have occurred had they not been recording at all.
We talked about this in relation to, among other things, “the ontological status of the photographic image.” In this respect, Bazin’s idea that film, as an extension of photography, is as close to an objective view of the world as is possible, because of its automatic, chemical relationship with the photographed world. The only space for the inscription of subjectivity is in the photographer’s choice about what to photograph, from what angle. Contrast this with Barthes’ idea in Camera Lucida, where he says that the photographer records nothing other than a picture of his/her own subjectivity. (Which to me sounds quite a bit like the basis, or lingering effect, of a general auteur theory).
How to use these ideas in relation to the long take of the choreographer and dancer that we watched in class? Certainly, some level of authorial selection, thus prioritizing, was occurring as the camera pans from one thing to another, zooms and widens. However, the unity of the pro-filmic space/time is maintained through the lack of any cuts, and so, the pro-filmic event takes on some palpable (ontological) weight. We believe in it, it seems valid and its importance is tangible.
Do we read through Wiseman? (Well, even more importantly here, his cameraman). Do we read Wiseman, or do we read the event? It would be a simple enough compromise between these two poles to say that Wiseman’s subjective view aims at objectivity. Foucault would be the first to ask, “What (power) do you (think you) gain by this claim to objectivity, which seems fall within the realm of science?”
Mama Don’t Allow (Reisz and Richardson, 1956)
This film is not really a documentary in any traditional sense. It features mainly staged actions, with a broad narrative arc and several mini-narratives within this arc. It depicts several young, working-class men as women, working their jobs, preparing to go out, then dancing the night away at a club. It features non-synchronous sound, the track devoted to the live performance of a jazz band, like the one we see playing at the club. (It could be that these people play on the soundtrack, but we cannot be sure).
How to think of this in terms of documentary when it seems so obviously a dramatic film? Well, despite the fact that events seem to have been generally coordinated and promoted by the demands of the film narrative, an abundance of spontaneous and improvised action occurs in the film. While the foreground of the screen is devoted to representing the significant actions of the narrative, all the background action seems non-directed (or, only loosely so). Further, there are moments where the film shows certain background people,/events that seem to be unaware of their being filmed. In both these cases, there seems to be some documentary value, showing how people danced, dressed, and behaved at a certain time I a certain place. Certainly, the topic of the film, as well as its treatment, appears to reveal the filmmakers’ attempt to take a slice of contemporary culture, represent it faithfully, and in so doing, associate themselves with it. Thus, there is some advocacy of the working class at work in this film, and aligning the film as a cultural product of this culture similar to that of the dance itself. In this way, it seems better to say that, instead of taking a slice of life, the filmmakers here try to embed themselves in life. It is an approach to the world, that has serious relations to/consequences for documentary film.
The Natural History of the Chicken (Lewis, 2000)
This is a film about chickens by the guy who did Cane Toads and Rat. It has a similar approach, in presenting both hard facts and figures about the animal, while also presenting people who have strong and notable relationships with the kind of animal. Formally, the film is mainly comprised of talking-head testimonials with lots of insert shots, all recreations. It also features text to convey information. It is largely guided by narrative force, and the image corresponds to the narratives of the subjects.
With this amount of narrative and recreation at play, one must wonder how it works in terms of documentary. I mean, it is not as if any of the subjects’ accounts are fictional, so the film has some basis in reality. Further, it does seem to organize itself around an argument, which satisfies Nichols’ demands of documentary film. However, narrative and recreation seem to undermine so much of what documentary otherwise claims power over.
First thing—the film challenges the classification schemes that documentary theorists normally set in place, by walking the line between fiction/nonfiction, narrative/non-narrative, etc. Yet, somehow this film is unquestioningly a documentary (I suppose there might be others for whom this is not the case). So, instead of prompting me to work diligently to find the appropriate “type” of documentary this is, OR to try to modify/broaden the classifications currently set in place, the film inclines me to question the objectives and goals of classifying at all. I suppose such an impulse derives from two things. 1. Documentary theorists, in order to maintain documentary as a viable object of study, are already in the business of classification, merely to segment off and so augment documentary film against narrative, dramatic film. 2. Because documentary film has been, until relatively recently, non-theorized, a certain amount of basic research must lay the groundwork for further thought, expansion, and complication. (This is Renov’s stated purpose). Yet, in the case of The Natural History of the Chicken, one sees a film that mobilizes traditional documentary formal strategies, thus traditional viewing practices. In this way, it plays upon the viewers’ previous experience of documentary even while it confounds their expectations. (Talking head testimonials, photographic evidence of textually-presented facts). Our general inclination toward categorizing is exactly what this film deconstructs.
Second thing—this film seems to play on and confound the traditional alignment that occurs between documentary veracity and the basis in reality claimed by the photographic image. While we cannot doubt that the people speaking were there, somewhere, speaking, the histories they recount are not available to us photographically, and thus are as suspect as a painting or a CG re-creation. There is little of Barthes’ “This has been” in this film, except the telling of stories. Is photography any more valid than oral history? Both Barthes and Bazin would say yes, though with different qualifications and additions. The real question seems to be, can a story ever be evidence of its subject?
This film is a paradigmatic “observational” documentary detailing the behind-the-scenes world of a ballet troupe. No interaction is perceived between the film subjects and the film crew, it is as if the film crew merely recorded actions, interactions, and events as they would have occurred had they not been recording at all.
We talked about this in relation to, among other things, “the ontological status of the photographic image.” In this respect, Bazin’s idea that film, as an extension of photography, is as close to an objective view of the world as is possible, because of its automatic, chemical relationship with the photographed world. The only space for the inscription of subjectivity is in the photographer’s choice about what to photograph, from what angle. Contrast this with Barthes’ idea in Camera Lucida, where he says that the photographer records nothing other than a picture of his/her own subjectivity. (Which to me sounds quite a bit like the basis, or lingering effect, of a general auteur theory).
How to use these ideas in relation to the long take of the choreographer and dancer that we watched in class? Certainly, some level of authorial selection, thus prioritizing, was occurring as the camera pans from one thing to another, zooms and widens. However, the unity of the pro-filmic space/time is maintained through the lack of any cuts, and so, the pro-filmic event takes on some palpable (ontological) weight. We believe in it, it seems valid and its importance is tangible.
Do we read through Wiseman? (Well, even more importantly here, his cameraman). Do we read Wiseman, or do we read the event? It would be a simple enough compromise between these two poles to say that Wiseman’s subjective view aims at objectivity. Foucault would be the first to ask, “What (power) do you (think you) gain by this claim to objectivity, which seems fall within the realm of science?”
Mama Don’t Allow (Reisz and Richardson, 1956)
This film is not really a documentary in any traditional sense. It features mainly staged actions, with a broad narrative arc and several mini-narratives within this arc. It depicts several young, working-class men as women, working their jobs, preparing to go out, then dancing the night away at a club. It features non-synchronous sound, the track devoted to the live performance of a jazz band, like the one we see playing at the club. (It could be that these people play on the soundtrack, but we cannot be sure).
How to think of this in terms of documentary when it seems so obviously a dramatic film? Well, despite the fact that events seem to have been generally coordinated and promoted by the demands of the film narrative, an abundance of spontaneous and improvised action occurs in the film. While the foreground of the screen is devoted to representing the significant actions of the narrative, all the background action seems non-directed (or, only loosely so). Further, there are moments where the film shows certain background people,/events that seem to be unaware of their being filmed. In both these cases, there seems to be some documentary value, showing how people danced, dressed, and behaved at a certain time I a certain place. Certainly, the topic of the film, as well as its treatment, appears to reveal the filmmakers’ attempt to take a slice of contemporary culture, represent it faithfully, and in so doing, associate themselves with it. Thus, there is some advocacy of the working class at work in this film, and aligning the film as a cultural product of this culture similar to that of the dance itself. In this way, it seems better to say that, instead of taking a slice of life, the filmmakers here try to embed themselves in life. It is an approach to the world, that has serious relations to/consequences for documentary film.
The Natural History of the Chicken (Lewis, 2000)
This is a film about chickens by the guy who did Cane Toads and Rat. It has a similar approach, in presenting both hard facts and figures about the animal, while also presenting people who have strong and notable relationships with the kind of animal. Formally, the film is mainly comprised of talking-head testimonials with lots of insert shots, all recreations. It also features text to convey information. It is largely guided by narrative force, and the image corresponds to the narratives of the subjects.
With this amount of narrative and recreation at play, one must wonder how it works in terms of documentary. I mean, it is not as if any of the subjects’ accounts are fictional, so the film has some basis in reality. Further, it does seem to organize itself around an argument, which satisfies Nichols’ demands of documentary film. However, narrative and recreation seem to undermine so much of what documentary otherwise claims power over.
First thing—the film challenges the classification schemes that documentary theorists normally set in place, by walking the line between fiction/nonfiction, narrative/non-narrative, etc. Yet, somehow this film is unquestioningly a documentary (I suppose there might be others for whom this is not the case). So, instead of prompting me to work diligently to find the appropriate “type” of documentary this is, OR to try to modify/broaden the classifications currently set in place, the film inclines me to question the objectives and goals of classifying at all. I suppose such an impulse derives from two things. 1. Documentary theorists, in order to maintain documentary as a viable object of study, are already in the business of classification, merely to segment off and so augment documentary film against narrative, dramatic film. 2. Because documentary film has been, until relatively recently, non-theorized, a certain amount of basic research must lay the groundwork for further thought, expansion, and complication. (This is Renov’s stated purpose). Yet, in the case of The Natural History of the Chicken, one sees a film that mobilizes traditional documentary formal strategies, thus traditional viewing practices. In this way, it plays upon the viewers’ previous experience of documentary even while it confounds their expectations. (Talking head testimonials, photographic evidence of textually-presented facts). Our general inclination toward categorizing is exactly what this film deconstructs.
Second thing—this film seems to play on and confound the traditional alignment that occurs between documentary veracity and the basis in reality claimed by the photographic image. While we cannot doubt that the people speaking were there, somewhere, speaking, the histories they recount are not available to us photographically, and thus are as suspect as a painting or a CG re-creation. There is little of Barthes’ “This has been” in this film, except the telling of stories. Is photography any more valid than oral history? Both Barthes and Bazin would say yes, though with different qualifications and additions. The real question seems to be, can a story ever be evidence of its subject?
Friday, July 11, 2003
Film And PhotoLeague, several films, including Detroit (Dearborn) Ford Protest/Massacre
These short films show bread-lines, protests, and confrontations between striking workers and police. The are silent and black and white, although inter-titles tell you what the images are and how to read them.
These films were shown as examples of an approach to politically/socially aimed documentary that took an opposite approach to the Griersonian model. Mainly this means avoiding all of the criticisms of this approach that Winston levels in Claiming the Real. They present real conflict and real attempts at posing solutions to social problems, through being directly and physically aligned with the protesting workers. The ethical issues “inherent” in documentary, of what to do with people (pro-filmic subjects), gets reversed. The ethical consideration here is “What to do with the filmmaker?” These films look all too familiar, in terms of having a camera(man) positioned among a group in physical conflict with another group of people, at least in the Dearborn confrontation footage. The camera jitters, shakes, etc., as the two groups physically collide. One could either assume that these films set a precedent for how such footage should appear, or it just happens that when you place a cameraman in physical danger he will react in a certain way. In this respect, such footage documents the physicality and physical response of the cameraman.
It should also be noted that these aren’t precisely documentaries, but more newsreels.
Also, it seems to me that notions of “immediacy” come into play here. Immediacy has been widely discussed in terms of new digital media, but when one sees such footage as this, it seems that immediacy needs to be discussed in terms of documentary film. I suppose Nichols accounts for such differentiations in his four modes, between re-staged footage and “immediate” footage, in regarding the “observational” documentary, say. It seems that immediacy, in documentary or newsreel footage, has its own set of aesthetic codes and effects, and makes certain claims to historical veracity. That might be its power.
Night Mail (Grierson team)
This film documents the process by which the postal service functions in Britain. It details how the men and the trains work together to pick up, sort, and distribute mail across a vast geographical area. All or most of the action is contextualized by voice-over, and the film has several different narrators at different points. It also features a poem by WH Auden, all about the train and the mail and the men. It is a great poem, and as it progresses, Auden recites it faster and faster, creating a homophone for the sound of the train he describes.
One interesting fact about this documentary is that all of the interior shots were re-staged, while none of the exteriors are real, and the two have been seamlessly intercut. It is exactly like a really sophisticated narrative drama.
Really interesting—to think of this film as formulating a British national identity. Really, that is the aim of the film, and that is one of its ideological effects. One can see that such an effort would be pressing in 1932, when it was made, as fascism is on the rise in Germany and Italy, and liberals in England are feeling the related anxieties. Following Anderson, one can say that 1.the formulation of a nation is determined by standardized modes of communication, and 2. the nation is an imagined community, incorporating individuals into a greater community via conceptual (fictional) portrayals of similarity, geographic boundary, and shared traditions. As Hayward indicates, community such as this, i.e. nationalism, seeks to efface difference in the face of the alienation instituted by the mechanisms of modernism. (However, new forms of alienation arise when the individual is incorporated into the homogenous community of the nation).
One can see these things operating in Night Mail. The train and the mail (and the film itself) transcend time and space to connect a vast geographical area, thus delimiting the physical boundaries of the nation. The narrator names all the individual places, but these are subsumed in their being connected via transportation and communication technologies. Thus, the nation is formulated through the human mastery of time and space via technologies of modernism. The notion of teamwork plays throughout the film, as the men are shown to jovially work in perfect unison. Social/class differences are effaced by the sense of amiable comraderie the men portray. Finally, there is the issue raised at the end that all the labor the film portrays occurs all the time, even while normal citizens are asleep. This shows the kind of ever-presentness of the efficient functions of the nation. It also conflates the labor of the postal workers with the dream-state of the nation; this unified, ingenious work that connects the citizens is born of their unconscious desires.
Housing Problems (Grierson team)
This film documents the slum problem in England and the attempt to eradicate the slums. It features a number of interviews with people who live in the slums, who testify to the conditions there. It also has a narrator who describes what we see, in terms of both dilapidated, filthy housing, as well as the models for new housing developments.
The film was financed through the gas company, which raises issues of political economy. In what way was the financing of the film a determining factor in the form/content? Certainly, Winston’s criticism that this film does not present an appropriate treatment of the situation is influenced by this factor. Indeed, the rosy picture the film portrays for these people’s future, as being resolved in the form of large, tenament-style apartment buildings, seems directly determined by the fact that this housing was designed by the gas company that financed the film. Winston’s notion that this is a “problem moment film,” and thus presents no viable intervention into a problematic economic/political system, seems appropriate, although there are other ways it succeeds.
The treatment of the inhabitants seems almost OK, to use a serious theoretical term. They are allowed to speak for themselves, a novel idea at the time, and one that has since become so standardized as to seem invisible. But letting people talk for themselves is a large leap, in terms of empowering the historical subject. They can become authors of their own stories, to whatever extent is allowed by the greater shape of the film. Of course, this is problematic in Housing Problems, because their treatment makes them appear, at times, like specimens being catalogued alongside their “typical” shabby dwellings. The film has a clinical, categorical gaze, that seeks to mark difference and weigh value.
Listen to Britain (1941, synchronous with the Battle of Britain)
This film shows a number of things that all are oriented toward rousing an enduring and hopeful British nationalism. There are shots of people playing music, wheat fields, school children, soldiers riding tanks through city streets, etc.
This film takes a very different approach to “documentary” than we have seen thus far, it seems. At first glance, it seems to fall under Nichols’ category of the “expository” film, despite the fact that it has neither inter-titles nor narrational commentary. (Actually, the Canadiam guy at the beginning functions to give commentary before the fact. I suppose there could have been other similar additions to the film to directly address local audiences in a similar fashion). In terms of Renov’s categories, it seems to fulfill 2. to persuade or promote and 4. to express. It does not seems so much aimed at recording, nor to interrogate, however much we may appreciate what it records and we may interrogate the film’s images. The film seems to very overtly try to persuade the viewer of Britain’s cultural worth, and that this cultural heritage is a source of strength in the face of immediate danger. Cultural heritage conjoins people from all classes and genders. The film expresses a hopeful faith in this proposal.
All of the footage appears staged, re-staged. In this respect, it could not be further from something like the Film and Photo League footage. In is strange to think that one may read through the formal organization of a film to understand the way it was constructed. Or maybe just that we have become accostomed to such reading, through our abundant immersion in moving images. That is to say, immediacy and staging have become semiotic codes, it seems. It seems that it is precisely in this arena that things like mock-docs operate, playing on our reading the formal properties of the work into historical reality. Postmodern theory (Baudrillard) would dismiss such a distinction as irrelevant, if not wholly incorrect.
These short films show bread-lines, protests, and confrontations between striking workers and police. The are silent and black and white, although inter-titles tell you what the images are and how to read them.
These films were shown as examples of an approach to politically/socially aimed documentary that took an opposite approach to the Griersonian model. Mainly this means avoiding all of the criticisms of this approach that Winston levels in Claiming the Real. They present real conflict and real attempts at posing solutions to social problems, through being directly and physically aligned with the protesting workers. The ethical issues “inherent” in documentary, of what to do with people (pro-filmic subjects), gets reversed. The ethical consideration here is “What to do with the filmmaker?” These films look all too familiar, in terms of having a camera(man) positioned among a group in physical conflict with another group of people, at least in the Dearborn confrontation footage. The camera jitters, shakes, etc., as the two groups physically collide. One could either assume that these films set a precedent for how such footage should appear, or it just happens that when you place a cameraman in physical danger he will react in a certain way. In this respect, such footage documents the physicality and physical response of the cameraman.
It should also be noted that these aren’t precisely documentaries, but more newsreels.
Also, it seems to me that notions of “immediacy” come into play here. Immediacy has been widely discussed in terms of new digital media, but when one sees such footage as this, it seems that immediacy needs to be discussed in terms of documentary film. I suppose Nichols accounts for such differentiations in his four modes, between re-staged footage and “immediate” footage, in regarding the “observational” documentary, say. It seems that immediacy, in documentary or newsreel footage, has its own set of aesthetic codes and effects, and makes certain claims to historical veracity. That might be its power.
Night Mail (Grierson team)
This film documents the process by which the postal service functions in Britain. It details how the men and the trains work together to pick up, sort, and distribute mail across a vast geographical area. All or most of the action is contextualized by voice-over, and the film has several different narrators at different points. It also features a poem by WH Auden, all about the train and the mail and the men. It is a great poem, and as it progresses, Auden recites it faster and faster, creating a homophone for the sound of the train he describes.
One interesting fact about this documentary is that all of the interior shots were re-staged, while none of the exteriors are real, and the two have been seamlessly intercut. It is exactly like a really sophisticated narrative drama.
Really interesting—to think of this film as formulating a British national identity. Really, that is the aim of the film, and that is one of its ideological effects. One can see that such an effort would be pressing in 1932, when it was made, as fascism is on the rise in Germany and Italy, and liberals in England are feeling the related anxieties. Following Anderson, one can say that 1.the formulation of a nation is determined by standardized modes of communication, and 2. the nation is an imagined community, incorporating individuals into a greater community via conceptual (fictional) portrayals of similarity, geographic boundary, and shared traditions. As Hayward indicates, community such as this, i.e. nationalism, seeks to efface difference in the face of the alienation instituted by the mechanisms of modernism. (However, new forms of alienation arise when the individual is incorporated into the homogenous community of the nation).
One can see these things operating in Night Mail. The train and the mail (and the film itself) transcend time and space to connect a vast geographical area, thus delimiting the physical boundaries of the nation. The narrator names all the individual places, but these are subsumed in their being connected via transportation and communication technologies. Thus, the nation is formulated through the human mastery of time and space via technologies of modernism. The notion of teamwork plays throughout the film, as the men are shown to jovially work in perfect unison. Social/class differences are effaced by the sense of amiable comraderie the men portray. Finally, there is the issue raised at the end that all the labor the film portrays occurs all the time, even while normal citizens are asleep. This shows the kind of ever-presentness of the efficient functions of the nation. It also conflates the labor of the postal workers with the dream-state of the nation; this unified, ingenious work that connects the citizens is born of their unconscious desires.
Housing Problems (Grierson team)
This film documents the slum problem in England and the attempt to eradicate the slums. It features a number of interviews with people who live in the slums, who testify to the conditions there. It also has a narrator who describes what we see, in terms of both dilapidated, filthy housing, as well as the models for new housing developments.
The film was financed through the gas company, which raises issues of political economy. In what way was the financing of the film a determining factor in the form/content? Certainly, Winston’s criticism that this film does not present an appropriate treatment of the situation is influenced by this factor. Indeed, the rosy picture the film portrays for these people’s future, as being resolved in the form of large, tenament-style apartment buildings, seems directly determined by the fact that this housing was designed by the gas company that financed the film. Winston’s notion that this is a “problem moment film,” and thus presents no viable intervention into a problematic economic/political system, seems appropriate, although there are other ways it succeeds.
The treatment of the inhabitants seems almost OK, to use a serious theoretical term. They are allowed to speak for themselves, a novel idea at the time, and one that has since become so standardized as to seem invisible. But letting people talk for themselves is a large leap, in terms of empowering the historical subject. They can become authors of their own stories, to whatever extent is allowed by the greater shape of the film. Of course, this is problematic in Housing Problems, because their treatment makes them appear, at times, like specimens being catalogued alongside their “typical” shabby dwellings. The film has a clinical, categorical gaze, that seeks to mark difference and weigh value.
Listen to Britain (1941, synchronous with the Battle of Britain)
This film shows a number of things that all are oriented toward rousing an enduring and hopeful British nationalism. There are shots of people playing music, wheat fields, school children, soldiers riding tanks through city streets, etc.
This film takes a very different approach to “documentary” than we have seen thus far, it seems. At first glance, it seems to fall under Nichols’ category of the “expository” film, despite the fact that it has neither inter-titles nor narrational commentary. (Actually, the Canadiam guy at the beginning functions to give commentary before the fact. I suppose there could have been other similar additions to the film to directly address local audiences in a similar fashion). In terms of Renov’s categories, it seems to fulfill 2. to persuade or promote and 4. to express. It does not seems so much aimed at recording, nor to interrogate, however much we may appreciate what it records and we may interrogate the film’s images. The film seems to very overtly try to persuade the viewer of Britain’s cultural worth, and that this cultural heritage is a source of strength in the face of immediate danger. Cultural heritage conjoins people from all classes and genders. The film expresses a hopeful faith in this proposal.
All of the footage appears staged, re-staged. In this respect, it could not be further from something like the Film and Photo League footage. In is strange to think that one may read through the formal organization of a film to understand the way it was constructed. Or maybe just that we have become accostomed to such reading, through our abundant immersion in moving images. That is to say, immediacy and staging have become semiotic codes, it seems. It seems that it is precisely in this arena that things like mock-docs operate, playing on our reading the formal properties of the work into historical reality. Postmodern theory (Baudrillard) would dismiss such a distinction as irrelevant, if not wholly incorrect.
